if you want to know about my weekend life here at school, this is the one post you should read. it is the reason that i am not spending enough time on the phone with my friends in other cities, the reason im not writing emails as much as i should, and the reason i am not wanting to leave this place on the weekend. i am having an amazing time here….

friday i woke up early to get to a seminar class that seems like it isnt going to be that great. it’s being taught by a former editor of artforum magazine and while i think he is very well-read and intelligent, i dont think he seems like a great teacher (but we’ve only had one class, so time will tell). i get to school and discover class was cancelled. so instead, i work on my project due that afternoon. then i have class, and my project basically completely bombs. i would argue it is the worst critique i have had thus far. and bad critiques kind of ruin my day. mainly because i feel like i just get told that something isnt working (which i generally know going in) but i dont get as much feedback as i want on how to fix it (but this is really just me – i mean, grad school isnt here to say ‘make this green, move this here’… im here to figure it out myself with guidance and challenging assignments). so friday afternoon was kind of icky. however, we were screening outfoxed downstairs at 6p (thanks to ian) and a keg was on its way, so all didnt seem wrong with the world. i stayed for the movie, ate pizza, drank pbr (although, no keg due to no tap at the store). then, i went to something that made my day come to a wonderful end –

there are three guys here hang out together and with whom i hang out some, too. their names are geoff, forest, and dylan (i have no idea if anyone here reads this, which makes me feel weird introducing them in such a distanced way…but anyhow…). for one of their projects, geoff decided he needed to go to gowanda, new york to meet someone named ronald chang. he conned forest and dylan into going on the trip, and they ended up have a nice weekend full of random experiences as they tried to catch up with dr. chang. so to conclude the project, they decided (again, likely geoff decided and conned dylan and forest into this, but that’s just speculation) to tell the story to everyone at geoff’s apartment. storyteller-style. so a bunch of us went, along with the departing visiting critic and another professor who i’ll have next semester. we drank and sat around talking and telling stories for hours. finally, i went home around 3am and got in bed.

saturday i woke up around 10 30 and was exhausted, so i went back to sleep until around 1p. alex came into town for halloween and arrived around 1 30p. we got him settled and then went walking around new haven and decided that the two of us would go as ‘we are the world’ for halloween. alex was stevie wonder and i was cyndi lauper. we got our outfits together, stopped by the library so he could see how lovely it is, came by the studio, picked up some groceries, got popeye’s for dinner, ate, talked, started drinking, got dressed, went out.

and boy did we go out. the art school and the architecture school threw a gigantic party in the sculpture building. and when i say gigantic, i mean a $3000 budget, hundreds of people, 10 kegs, lots of jungle juice, a fucking amazing dj from detroit, and a haunted house to boot. i cannot tell you how incredible it was. when we got there, ‘in da club’ was playing (i will never tire of that song) and it kicked the night off for us to singalong to biggie’s hypnotize, missy’s work it, tears for fears’ head over heels and other fun songs. the costumes were so fun – s and m boys, todd solondz movies, a ’single parent,’ murdered bush supporters, and on and on. it was such a wonderful night. alex and i danced and danced and danced until about 3am and then we went home. so, so good.

today we woke up around 11a but i was exhausted so i slept in again until around 1 and then got up. al made us cranberry pancakes and i made some eggs and we recovered from the evening. we went for another walk around new haven and then he headed back to new york. now im at the studio trying to think about my icons. i think i am, instead, going to take my computer home and work from there. im tired and want to get a good night’s sleep. for now i’ll just reiterate how much i adore my life here. the fall has just been beautiful in connecticut and the town (at least near campus) is the epitomy of a college town and i am just soaking up every bit of it. i love, love, love it here. all is right in my world.

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Well, let’s open with the known fact that i am a sucker, a mark. Carnies can smell my fear and my money. So i avoid the carnival and the state fair. One thing that i cannot avoid though is women, and they too can smell my fear. To make a pretty girl smile I will do almost anything. For red head I might lay down my life. Unfortunately I met a red head a couple of weeks ago. She’s pretty awesome. And of course she has a boy friend.
I was working on designing a cildrens show this week as well as working on my internship. I spent way too much time working racking up a grand total of under twenty hours of sleep in the past five days. i am still sort of recovering, hopefully I will be back one my game in a few days. Of course I did not have a whole lot of time to eat this week, but I was doing quite a bit of hard work and though I punished my fleshy prison by ingesting less than one meal a deal, and replacing nutrition with numerous cigarettes, I actually feel much fitter I wouldn’t be surprised if I dropped ten pounds. Oh well. I am going to the halloween parade in the hopes of hanging out with the red head. mut be off.

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About a year ago I wrote a post on here about Jay-Z. It wasn’t kind and my opinion has since changed as the avalanches of hits have poured out and I’ve gained some more exposure to his back catalogue. I still think “Hard Knock Life” is exceedingly lame, but overall I’ve really started to like his music. So when my brother and his girlfriend Colleen asked me if I was interested in seeing Jay-Z in concert at the Garden I jumped at the chance.

My enthusiasm dampened a bit when I learned that the tour was a joint outing with R Kelly. I’m not too into modern R&B and I’m seriously concerned about giving money to child molesters. So when I learned that R Kelly had cancelled I was one of the few people at the Garden on Saturday Night that wasn’t heartbroken. In fact I was pretty damn glad. Apparently there was some big dustup at the Friday night show where he thought he saw someone waving a gun in the crowd or just got jealous of the crowd’s love for Jigga depending upon whose account you believe.

In place of Kelly came a veritable army of rap and R&B talent: Busta Rhymes, Method Man and Redman, Mariah Carey, Mary J Blige, Memphis Bleek, Foxy Brown, Puffy and Mase all made wild entrances to the arena. The quality of the performances were all over the map with Puffy and Mase being predictably underwhelming and Method and Red surprising underwhelming. The most surprising performance came from the crowd. I expect an arena full of fans to know all the lyrics to the headliners songs, but what was amzing was that the 25,000 odd people in the place sang along to damn near every line of every performers songs. I pride myself on knowing more hip hop lyrics than the average fan, but these people put me to shame. I’m not just talking about singing along to the hooks, these people knew the second and third verses to every song and the music would sometimes drop and the crowd would carry the song for astonishing stretches of time – line after line spitting out of thousands of mouths. With all the call and response and simultaneous arm movements it felt at times like a Nuremberg rally.

But all that having been said, the show really sucked ass. There’s a term used to describe dozens of performers rapping and singing over a DAT and it isn’t hip-hop. The word is karaoke. Hip-hop uses DJ’s. Period.

My other big beef was that the sound really sucked. It was easily the worst mix of music and vocals I ever heard. I love Method and Red, but I didn’t even know who they were until they had finished a song and a half. It was that muddled and the problem that was repeated all night long. We kept turning to each other as artists came out to wild applause and asked each other, “Who is that?” Part of it might be explained by the fact that my seat sucked and was on the wings and in the rafters, but I think it was really a lot more than that. My brother thought that “it wasn’t big room music,” but I don’t buy that. I’ve heard both the Beasties, Outkast, and Tribe called Quest rock arenas before. It works. It’s no coincidence that all three of those had quality DJs on hand rocking the crowd.

I think there’s just a general laziness in the hip-hop community when it comes to live shows. Or maybe it’s just a misconception about what makes a hot show. The lighting and pyro effects were great, but ultimately that stuff amounts to little more than window dressing. It was also clear that they worked really hard in a short amount of time to line up world class talent. And the talent came out and poured everything they had into their performance and listening to it you got the sense that there was a great rap show happening on the other side of the terrible echoes and washed out melodies, and hollow kick drums, but who could be sure? Is it that hard to find a quality hip-hop DJ and sound engineer to join the tour?

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maybe he is worth it.

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how is it that tears and anger seem to always concide for me? this is so typical. i got so angry this evening and ended up calling a dozen old friends wanting to cry. i feel so weak and i hate that.

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oh, this was me being worried about the abc tape. but now we have trumped that one with a new bin laden tape.

from a transcript from cnn:

“Although we are ushering the fourth year after 9/11, Bush is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated,” bin Laden said.

um. wow. hello people who think bush has been a good president. who think his foriegn policy is good. isnt what bin laden said basically what a lot of americans have been saying for years? he doesnt hate freedom, kids. he hates the way america the superpower acts in regards to his part of the world. i cant blame him for not liking that. i can blame him for the actions he takes in regards to it. obviously, im not giving him a thumbs up. but its just so frustrating. to see crap like this, realize bush has a chance to be re-elected and we might just be back to the same old shit. least with kerry there is a chance the policy will change.

oi.

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i watched battle royale last night. mostly cuz chrispy mentioned it in his top ten list(an honorable mention or something). seeing as i’d watched a ton of random korean and japanese movies last year in french once i bought a tv, i figured i’d like it even if it was bad. i loved the movies when they were in french and i was clueless, something about the crazy characterizations and amazing sci-fi nerdiness even in non sci-fi movies. as well as the use of the oftentimes absurd to more clearly expose the issues at heart.

it took me a while to sync the subtitles, which i downloaded separately, to the movie. i can’t wait to buy the dvd, this thing is a must have. the whole movie my jaw must have been hanging open, and not from the blood — i was actually surprised at how low the gore level was, although i read somewhere that the special edition released abroad was toned down somewhat. despite that, they said it would never be played in an american theater cuz it couldn’t get past our censors; i dunno about that after having seen kill bill vol. 1.

anyhow, this movie… one word. poignant. the social, psychological, and political issues it was addressing just floored me. thanks, pags, for droppin this one on us.

a day or two before that i watched natural city. this i think is a year or two old, a korean movie as opposed to battle royale which is japanese. the korean films i saw back in morocco were insane, and this one was pretty good too. it was a lot of fun, mostly. i almost got a sense of the feeling i got when i first saw bladerunner — i love it when a sci-fi flick can do this for me.

so tonight, continuing my crazy eastern movie week, i’m gonna watch battle royale 2. i have no idea what to expect. and after that, casshern, another japanese sci-fi flick. should be fun. oh, and i can drive again. if there were more of me in the room i’d start a holy shit chant for me. since there aren’t, i’ll settle for teens being forced to kill each other by the government in an effort to reinstill a sense of morals in society.

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ok, so a couple hours or so later and battle royale 2 is done. it was interesting, but i felt like it went on a completely different tangent from the first film. it seemed to sacrifice a lot of the emotional tension for action; it was trying to be inspirational at the same time, but the nobility issue pushed in the second wasn’t really a key feature of the first film, and i feel like there wasn’t enough steam behind it in the second one to hold its weight. i feel like the first one was incredible, the second just fun.

peace

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