asocial studies

speaking of emo…

sucking down my 4th or 5th Liquid Consciousness (triple-shot iced-mocha) over the last 30+ hours spent in this diseased computer lab, and hearing my palpitating heart booming in my ears, i got to thinking: if i had a heart attack during a final, i’m sure the student body would benefit from the at least one departmental meeting on the matter of student stress that would result from such an unusual way to go.

we need more dead students.

a repeat of a classic for a certain emo i know who–GASP!!–has never seen this.

!!!!!!

“whyyyyyy did you haaaaave to dooooo this to meeee…we could haaaaave been haaappy together…!”

“we make sure they update their livejournal daily.”

“my girlfriend dumped me for the fifth time today.”

“my rifle, my pony, and me.”–awesome background country music

i’m no fan of gratuitous “revolutionary” iconography, but i like the jazzy azn way these are kitsched up, intentionally or not:

http://www.asian-t.com

…and with Google’s own “Engrish This Page” machine-translation goodness:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Aasian-t.com

it’s kind of psychedelic in its own way, don’t you think?

(both the Ts and the translation)

my faves:
http://www.asian-latino.com/tm50203.htm
http://www.asian-latino.com/tm50101.htm

and by O.R. we mean overrun also known as overflow, of the integer variety. spent a while wondering why my java program was producing negative numbers via multiplication and division of strictly positive numbers. as far as i can tell, java simply does not check for integer overflow. had to convert everything into BigDecimal and BigInteger then back to .doubleValue() for it all to work without throwing up exceptions or error messages. JUST WORK, DAMMIT!!!

this looks cool. due to school, i might have to skip out on the schmoozefests with the apostrophe’d “DJ’s” (not DJs). they’re bound to be full of converse upon converse of hipsters, anyway. but once finals are done and on a morning when the pitter-patter of chucks is gone off to sleep off the katzenjammers, i think it’ll be high time to take in some of what looks to be a promising show. check it, folks.

(and i didn’t even use the word OBEY anywhere in the write-up above. how about that.)

i don’t know much about ithaca. i’ve lived there for all of august 2006 and it seems in some ways progressive and in many ways sleepy. most indie bands know better than to ignore this not-quite-post-hippie place, and it has a world-class university with a lot of money to bring from the outside what can’t be had locally. but otherwise… Bring Your Own Happiness.

i’m moving there in january, which i’m told is a bleak month in the middle of nowhere upstate new york. i’m also told that people lose their minds due to the isolation just like jack nicholson in the shining, or at least they turn to alcoholism to drown out the boredom.

but i don’t care. i never drink to get wasted, and i never get bored. i always slip in a flask of my own happiness wherever i go. and there are no better reasons in the world for me to move there than the reasons i have. in fact, not only am i looking forward to it, the thought of making ithaca a home puts a grin on my face so wide that it makes my ears tickle. call me an optimist. call me a fool on east hill.

in tune with this delusional elation, CBC Radio 1 Vancouver plied me with sonic heaven today while i walked down Commercial Drive bundled up in a thick fuzzy blanket of unorthodox snow. i had to stop in my tracks, all breathless with anticipation of the quiet, intense warmth of the happiness i am about to nestle into in the centrally isolated city of Ithaca, NY.

clearly this video is set in a small marine town (prob. italian, note a street sign with the word “calle” on it), so it fit both the future nostalgia i feel about vancouver-by-the-ocean as well as the pre-emptive glee i feel about me and mi querida in ithaca-soporifica-on-the-lake.

[UPDATE: as per Music Snobbery‘s interview with the artist, it’s Valencia, Spain, roughly the size of Vancouver, with some clearly bucholic Dundarave- or Steveston- or White Rock-like nooks and crannies, and centrally located twixt Madrid, Barcelona and Eivissa]

in any case, this is my new quiet ithaca anthem.

it’s on Nettwerk, it’s called Quiet Town, and it’s by Josh Rouse. if you’re at all into Nick Drake, Seu Jorge, Elliott Smith, Fredo Viola, The Carrie Birds, or even tangentially Salt/Po’ Girl/The Be Good Tanyas…

to elaborate for those of you freshly arrived here from the Ithaca Missed Connections

i have adored L for almost two years now, ever since we met in a discussion course. at the time, i decided to follow someone’s excellent advice from the future—post hoc ergo propter hoc–and i fired up the appropriate neuron(e)s to a dreamy, delirious, feverish pitch (or did my inner Valentino Braitenberg do it for me?), and worked up the never-nerve to breach the all-too-familiar stranger barrier of the familar-stranger phenomenon.

“you! who are you and why are we not friends?”

here’s to many more years of being stuck with each other, love.

for various reasons, it seems appropriate for me to post at this moment in my life one of my favourite evocative and inspirational videos of all time. it’s the video for Being Boring by the Pet Shop Boys.

some call this melancholy–i call this “realtime nostalgia”, or just deep longing. the totally signature-Bruce Weber video is dreamy and longing and hopeful for the future while reminiscing about carefree and eternally-young past frolics. also, combined with the imagery of the video, the lyrics evoke a timeless snapshot of something some people experience as a single, formative period in their life, some experience so regularly that they fail to notice it, and, similarly, some never experience it at all. but the deliriously beautiful dream is there. for me. for you. and for those you share your love with.

…

(verse #3–and some are missing–is the most emotive for me)

I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
“Dress in white” one said, with quotations
From someone’s wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When you’re young you find inspiration
In anyone who’s ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: “We were never feeling bored”

‘Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: “Make amends”
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end

When I went I left from the station
With a haversack and some trepidation
Someone said: “If you’re not careful
You’ll have nothing left and nothing to care for
In the nineteen-seventies”
But I sat back and looking forward
My shoes were high and I had scored
I’d bolted through a closing door
I would never find myself feeling bored

‘Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: “Make amends”
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You’d be sitting somewhere here with me

‘Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: “Make amends”
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

And we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: “Make amends”
And we were never being boring
We were never being bored
‘Cause we were never being boring
We were never being bored

sounds interesting:

http://vancouver.craigslist.org/stp/236068896.html

vancouver craigslist > strictly platonic > For FRIDAY night – w4mw

For FRIDAY night – w4mw – 21

I’m thinking of going to the Cellar or maybe Blarney Stones? Anything but a club :P. Anyone interested? Hopefully someone my age and umm.. how can I put this nicely. Ahhhh fuvk it, screw being nice. Hopefully someone white!! bahahha Well do pic for pic once we send an email :)

• It’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

236068896

I went to the Da S.O.Veeee!!! show last night (Friday) at the Commodore, and it was CATHARTIC like all get out. Hundreds of hotties, lots of crazy lesbians, tons of the kind of “attitude” (in mode of dress or motion) which I so much miss about downtown, the crowd going NUTS, tons of amazing beats and melodies and in-your-face on-stage attitude.

I wore my hoodie to represent, and it was treating me well in that incognito bandito sort of way. I even wanted to take it off, roll it up, and toss it up onto the stage ’cause she seemed to be missing One Baggy Hoodie. The music was AWESOME. The cover of Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols didn’t hurt. And neither did the fact that her DJ preceded her entrance with some mid-90s breakbeat mayhem from SL2 and The Prodigy (the old stuff influential in the jungle scene which then begat drum & bass which then begat lots of other breakbeaty mongrels, not the least of which is the grime subsubsubgenre which da Sov represents). I went embarassingly nuts. The crowd went fashionably nuts. Everyone lost their voice. It was wicked mayhem. Such a fucking good time.

(biggie ups to Kia Kadiri and the rest of the preceding local acts for being so damn world-class… but what the heck was that rock band doing on stage at the begginning of the night? what a weird mismatch of genres, not thematic at all.)

and on a meta note, check out the WARNING: VANDALISM, LOCKDOWN IN EFFECT notice on the wikipedia page about the term CHAV: