xu xu

This just in: Uhhh WTF? Apparently walruses can learn dance routines to "Smooth Criminal."

I don't know about your sense of humor, but mine is pretty tickled by this interview with rapper DMX by XXLmag. His indifference to everything the interviewer is asking him is pretty exceptional. The best comes at about the middle, when DMX is asked whether he's following the presidential race:

XXLmag: Are you following the presidential race?
DMX: Not at all.

You're not? You know there's a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there's Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain't no fuckin' name, yo. That ain't that nigga's name. You can't be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

It gets even better, I swear. I don't know what's funnier: the interviewer's lack of knowing how to discuss politics beyond a superficial level, or his unease at probing DMX for actual answers to his questions...or DMX just blatantly not giving a fuck about anything. This whole thing kind of seems too out there to be for real. But who cares, it's on the intarnetsource and it's funny.

Let's take a break from concert reviews, shall we?

The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle's website looks like it was designed by someone who made a Geocities site back in the day when everyone wanted their own homepage but didn't know what exactly that entailed. This person apparently then decided this qualified him or her to design a professional website. He or she glanced over a few popular Web 2.0 sites (Facebook, Vox, Last.fm perhaps) and figured out that the internet means rollover buttons, top menubar navigation, and drop-down lists. Also, diagonal stripes and the color blue. Of course!

Ohh I just love Hel Looks, a street fashion blog for Helsinki. I've been following the site for over a year now and they consistently catch the best-dressed of all current subcultures, as well as those who just stand out. But god I can't express enough love for this girl's furry legwarmers!!! She's 16 and she says, "I mix cyber punk and Japanese style. Colourful style brings me joy."

How fun to be young and growing up in a big city.

(A quick piece I sketched out a couple weeks ago. Polished it up under the influence of painkillers and listening to Beirut. I hope it's coherent enough. Enjoy!)

A saudade é arrumar o quarto
Do filho que já morreu.
- Chico Buarque, "Pedaço de mim"

"Saudade" is to arrange the bedroom
Of a son who has died.
-Chico Buarque, "Piece of me"

There was a woman whose hand would cease to be her hand when she heard music from the pampas. Songs from a gaúcho with nothing but horse, cattle, campfire. Sometimes a row of palm trees would interrupt the endless green. It was beautiful, wild land, but who to share it with? He longed for citrus-scented hair, lace skirts swishing around honey-dripping legs, but had only guitars to fondle like old lovers who try to keep warm when there's no feeling left. Saudade. His music poured through Rita's ears like liquid gold and she'd shiver, reminded of the feeling she had leftover from the one who'd left her.

Poof. A breath, an explosion inside her, to golden tingling dust. It filled Rita with a smile that spilled across her face, like cool spring dawn drawn across the sky. The tingling always settled in her left hand. She'd look down at it and it would be thicker, heavier somehow. She'd blink and her knuckles would have hair creeping over the back of her hand, poking up out of her pores, curious new sprouts over the wider wrist. Fingers thickened and lengthened, the nails much shorter now and with the familiar cracked cuticles she now realized she'd forgotten. Resting on her knee. It was Renato's hand. He reached for her skin through dark Levi's.

"No," she'd think. "Don't do that, it isn't possible." Her right hand would move to shove it away and the left hand, Renato's hand, would clasp onto hers. Warm, like being wrapped up in his tangy green sheets and watching the tension coiled in between his shoulders as he jumped from cyberspace to cyberspace, searching for meaning in the virtual threads connecting Rita to comics about robots to flying spaghetti monsters to Renato to articles on the evolution of digital surveilance to that old gaúcho and his namorada, long gone. She'd rise and kiss him right there, in between his shoulder blades, and know they'd never feel the isolation of the pampas because they'd always have wifi.

Looking down at the hand now fondly stroking her right arm, Rita wonders if that gaúcho who'd sung about saudade to his cattle so he could sleep at night would ever look down at his hands and wonder if he brought her to life again by missing her so.

So, I made this yesterday because I like to use the internet to ruin people's sexdrives. Keeps people away from internet porn and all. It got posted on lolgrims by Diesel Sweeties creator rstevens. Hurray! cyb3rw3b famez0r.

I just tried explaining the concept of internet memes to a roomful of people who'd never heard of a lolcat (perish the thought!) and it is really better to just say, "you don't want to know."

Last night I went out for Thai food with a friend and when we came back to where we'd parked his mom's Cadillac, it wasn't there. We called the police and waited in helpless disbelief for over 2 hours. I mean, what do you do when your car isn't there and it's not registering at any of the impound lots? You can't look to see if maybe you left it under that car up there instead of where you actually parked it...you can't look to see if maybe it had rolled away a little bit. I looked up at the big tree we'd parked under, but it just doesn't work that way. And of course we couldn't even get wasted while we're waiting 'cuz we don't know when the cops are going to show up...all we could do was just wait there, on the corner of Park Ave and Edgerton.

The cop finally gets there and runs the plate through the system twice for us, though we'd called multiple times while waiting, checking the impound lots. He says, "There is no way your car got stolen here." Even if we weren't in the particular neighborhood we were in - the street was well-lit, there were people out walking dogs at 11 PM - no one would get very far in a stolen Cadillac. The alarm would've gone off and we were all of 2 blocks away! So no, it just didn't make any sense.

Our cop goes, "Not that I don't believe you, but I'm just gonna check the streets around the area to make sure you're on the right one."

And wouldn't you know. His mom's shiny purple '06 Cadillac was one street West of us the whole time.

I can't say I've ever felt like that much of a dumbass, nor that I've ever been so happy to have been such a dumbass.

What: A gathering of photographers and photo-enthusiasts. Bring a 4x6 framed photo to trade if you wish!
Where: in my shoes' place (check out the discussion for directions, or just ask moi)
When: Wed 17 October @ 7 PM
So? Celebrate one year of Rochestarians getting together via flickr. All are welcome, not just members of the site. BYOB. Snacks will be provided!

(hey flickr people, i don't mean any malicious intent by remixing your logo. if i'm infringing on a copyright, please tell me to take it down and I'll gladly comply. geez I'm paranoid about copyright laws ever since the LeGuin/Doctorow feud.)

Er, does anyone else see the subliminal message here? Perhaps it's me running on a few hours' sleep, or the lingering effects of staring at pre-calc formulas for too long. All I can tell you is that I glanced down at my mom's bills on the table this morning, and this one was upside-down and telling me, "Shop & Feel."

Whoaaaa, my mind-grapes are totally blown!

Doing my part for the environment today because I love her dearly.

So, kids, unicorns, and others. Don't use plastic bags anymore when you go shopping. Seriously. They plug up our landfills, suffocate small children and animals, and use up precious petroleum. Plus it's sooooo easy to use your own bag. Have you ever supported PBS or your local library? If so, perhaps they gave you a tote bag! This tote bag can be carried along with you to the supermarket, mall, sex shop, etc., and used to carry whatever goodies you picked up that day.

One bag not enough? Don't like PBS or your library? Easily solved! You can buy tote bags year-round at H&M in the US for $7.90 - they're stylish and nicely priced! Envirosax is also a good option for you eco-savvy fashionistas out there. If you find it ridiculous to spend money on a bag you're carrying groceries in, you can find things to reuse around your home. For example, take a smallish rice woven bag and a larger woven rice bag. Cut the handles off the large one and sew them onto the smallish one. Voila! Cheap, very sturdy, reusable bag! It might even have a picture of an elephant on it, which would be really cool. Elephants rock.

The She's A Betty blog has a very comprehensive post on how to cut out plastic bag consumption from your life. I highly recommend it for extra reading. Reusablebags.com unsurprisingly offers a lot of insight into this issue, and the wikipedia post on plastic shopping bags is also worth a glance.

My post is coming a little late in the day, but it's a good promo for MCC's Sustainability Day on October 24. From 12-2 PM that day, tables offering ways students can live a little greener will be set up in (I'm guessing right now) Building 3. Providing no one else's table is talking about this, Cabbages + Kings (literary/arts magazine) will have a table talking about reusable bags! And if this topic is taken, Kris will do some quick research to come up with a different table!

P.S. Native Rochester business Wegmans sells reusable bags for $1 each! Tell your friends! Save the Earth. :)

I am so torn up about the recent clash between Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin. The former being a newly-discovered favourite author of mine; the latter being a staple in my inundated-by-scifi upbringing. A few months ago, Doctorow posted a paragraph Le Guin had written to the fanzine Ansible, operating under the Creative Commons assumption that

reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.

The paragraph by Ms. Le Guin is a deliciously snarky short story in her own lyrical voice, and was written in response to this particular comment from a review posted on Ansible in May 2007:

'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

I won't post the paragraph here, obviously, but here's a little taste:

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.

Basically, Doctorow posted the whole paragraph and felt he had the right to do so under fair use. I'm with him. Le Guin posted the paragraph to her blog and she doesn't appear to charge her online readership for access to her posts. The letter of the law states "single paragraph," which happened to be the entirety of that particular work. At least Doctorow wasn't an ass about it. He could have posted everything but the last sentence or something along those lines.

From what I understand, this became an issue after the San Francisco Chronicle printed the entire work without permission from Le Guin, possibly because Doctorow's post on BoingBoing skewed the intent of the copyright on Le Guin's site. You can read Le Guin's recount of the conflict here, and Doctorow's apology to her here. Doctorow's been criticized for being self-serving even in his apology, but to me, Le Guin comes off the worst. I understand she feels cheated out of $200 or whatever, much less by some upstart young blogger-activist-SF hack with a penchant for Disney World and Digital Rights. So I won't criticize her for her condescending online rebuke of Doctorow. But I will ask, was it entirely necessary for her to turn into a 13-year-old with that last sentence there? "This letter is not copyrighted and may be excerpted or copied entire."

Really?

I dunno, I'm just a disappointed fan here.

(Photo of Cory by Scott Beale; Photo of Ursula by Marion Wood Kolisch.)

Hey, who wants to go to Ft Worth with me? October 19? We can go to this awesome thing at the Modern Art Museum - "Modern til Midnight". It features the hyperrealist sculptures of Ron Mueck, and abstract paintings of four post-WWII artists who really expanded the world of abstract art. Also, St Vincent is playing a show there! Right at the museum. I saw her open for Arcade Fire in May, and she's something else. There was a birdcage onstage for her performance, and I'm pretty sure that's where the chirping noises were coming from for one of her songs. It was delightful. If that's not enough of a draw, current indie dear Peter and the Wolf (and his "junk orchestra") will be opening.

Cooooome on! Texas, guys! Art! Music! Wonderfulness!

Photo courtesy of Haddhar on flickr.

I know, I know, I know. I just posted a music video. But this was just too bizarre not to post about. I reccommend fullscreen even though it's bad quality.

And I shall say no more other than glub blub blub...blub blub!

via [fabulist]

This music video from Bat For Lashes is deliciously creepy. Reminds me a bit of that part in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and her brother are walking out at night and you think someone unseen is watching them....I think it's when Scout's in the ham costume, or she's playing with a tire or something. Anyway, it's the same feeling of watching someone young and carefree all alone on a deserted street, just knowing something's going to jump out at them...or is it? Ha, maybe it's because the girl's riding her bike and wearing a sparkly sweatshirt like a 6-year-old.

The timing and transitions work really well in this little vid. The beginning is entrancing almost to the point of boredom - but it gets spine-tingly awesome less than a heartbeat later. If David Lynch had to direct a photoshoot for Teen Vogue, it might go something like this.

(There is a car accident scene at the end of this video...Just a warning in case you are sensitive to that kind of stuff. It's a dark blue car and it's flipped over. You don't see it happen, but you see the car.)

The other day, this post about shot-up polos from Attus Apparel made me think of a great book called Feed, by M.T. Anderson. It's a YA sci-fi novel, but don't let its genre deter you. Feed is smartly written and an entertaining read, even if you're an old-ish adult or don't typically enjoy sci-fi. Told through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy who thinks visiting the moon "completely sucks" and would rather watch the show Oh? Wow! Thing!, Anderson's narrative paints the internet (the feed) as the ultimate marketing tool for corporations. Cultures and subcultures are easily profiled and sculpted to consumerist perfection due to constant interaction with and observation by the feed. For a more in-depth review, follow this link.

A common motif in Feed is the constantly changing trends that get more and more ridiculous every week. One of the fads is remarkably prescient of this concept by Attus Apparel:

When we got there, Calista and Loga were getting out of Calista's car, and it was like, Whoa, because they were wearing all torn-up clothes. They were walking normal, but they looked like they'd been burned up and hit with stuff...

"Yuh," said Loga. "It's Riot Gear. It's retro. It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It's been big since earlier this week."
- Feed, pp 158-9

Maybe those Attus Apparel guys read Anderson's novel? NOTCOT speculates all this violent pre-distressing of clothing is a response to society's obsession with crime dramas like Law & Order or CSI. I'm thinking it has more to do with conditioning our youth to get used to war, especially since this little vid by the company mentions that one guy's dad used to be a marine...Either way, this fashion statement's straddling some yellow cautionary tape between amusingly ironic and blatantly distasteful. They're not charging a hundred bucks for bullet-holes. I found it interesting that the little logos flashed at the end seem to call out to a number of different youth subsets - the jock, the frat boy, the punk, the xtreme sports lover...it's all a bit too clever.

Before the reign of the almighty Google commenced, when someone stole something from you, you'd file a police report.

Now of course, you bitch about it on your blog.

Chris H. has gone one step further into the sea of asshattery and has started a blog just to defame Win Butler of Arcade Fire for allegedly stealing his basketball. The blog's address is http://arcadefirestolemybasketball.blogspot.com/ . It has just two posts. First, Chris H.'s surly account of what he claims happened at the Cal Berkely gym, and the second asking Win to make restitution for the $40 basketball and the 10 bucks he had to pay to get into the gym that day.

Arcade Fire pointed out on their blog that it's incredibly easy to make something up these days if you've got a computer hooked up to the internet. Without video documentation or a police report, I'm inclined to agree. Something else is also telling me that this is so.

What really irks me about this is that for the next 6 months at least, the band is going to get asked why they steal basketballs by everyone they do an interview with. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at MTV2 paid that dude to start that blog?

Edit: The blog's offline now, as is "Arcade Fire Didn't Steal Dude's Basketball." Bummer. Anyone get any screenshots? It's kinda disappointing this didn't go on for longer since most people won't understand why I made this post at all, but I'm glad 'cuz Arcade Fire will probably be spared a lot of annoying questions at interviews this year.

In what is perhaps the most embarrassing story of this year, last night some friends and I decided to go to Tilt nightclub in Rochester. It really burns me to say that the whole thing was my idea. I wanted to go dancing though and someone told me they had an indie rock night there on Saturdays. Unfortunately, that someone told me about this 8 months ago, and now I'm starting to wonder if I even remembered that information correctly. I usually have a hard time remembering what was the last thing I ate.

I'll definitely remember for all eternity now that Tilt does not have an indie rock night. Tilt probably never had indie rock night. I should've been clued in when I checked the website to get directions and heard the undulating um-chk um-chk um-chk beat with funky soul singer overlay. Perhaps, thinking back, alcohol was a factor in failure to assess this. In any case, I didn't know then what I know now, and I had to pay dearly for that knowledge.

See, I have a previously undiscovered allergy to house music. We arrived at the club and I was feeling great. Once we started up those steps, though, I felt my stomach screaming to be emptied. Having a tantrum, even. It was really not happy about the strange combination of 60s funk and eurodance beats bursting in the air. I told my stomach to shut up though, because I felt we had a 70% chance at least that the next song would be better.

The next song was worse. The same beats with whinier vocals. After a quick discussion we decided to try one of the club's other bars, 'cuz surely they'd be playing other tunes. My stomach angrily leading the way, we wandered off to what should've been a different bar. Here I learned the painful truth that Tilt plays all house music, all the time. Also, all house music sounds more or less the same. Or maybe it just all sounds bad. So, one minute mes amis and I were standing around having a nice little chat, the next I'm running off to the washroom to give my stomach what it demanded. The attendant there greeted me with a blasé, "Somethin' you ate, honey?"

I have never seen someone look that cool about watching a total stranger spew spinach and beer all over the place, so I bolted before she started asking to compare bulimia notes with me. I told everyone that we had to leave, NOW. So we booked it. Distasteful rhythms followed us down those steps we'd ascended not 15 minutes before. Humid night air's never felt so amazing.

To review: Tilt nightclub has no Indie Rock Night. House music makes Kris physically ill. Kris still wants to find a good place in Rochester to go dancing.

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