This has been a lazy day (I haven't left the house once) but not an entirely unproductive one. I retroactively felt slightly less guilty about having slept through classes this morning, not because I figured out that the snooze must have been stuck down for days now, like it was that one time, but because I decided I'm pretty sick. So I've just been taking it easy here today, staying in bed for a while - I went back to sleep between 2 and 3:30 - and eating and drinking gingerly. I've had three or four mugs of lemon-ginger tea, which combined with time i guess have helped to make my throat much less painful than it was this morning. And a bowl of Annie's white cheddar macaroni, and cereal, and just now for dinner a tasty pumpernickel-mango-spinach-cheddar-mustard-feta sandwich and an ear of corn. I haven't done much to clean my room, or anything resembling schoolwork, or written record reviews or even laundry until a few hours ago, when I had to go to the basement to change a fuse. And I still haven't practiced; I really need to do that, and will as soon as I finish writing this.

But I did do a fair amount of catch-up here, as the astute among you may notice (although I still need to write about Saturday, the day of the concert), and I wrote scores of e-mails about Worthstock (this debate back and forth with Marié and Corey that's been going on for like a week now; Jenny Yim sent out a reserved-mail, though she took off the part about Crunkadelia for some reason) and other things, and I finished calculating EC album times (it will take me 15 hours to play all 18 albums - who's with me?), and I did the Times Mag's "Puns and Anagrams" Crossword, and listened to some stuff. Mighty Like a Rose is terrific, and The Charm of the Highway Strip is pretty good too. Tomorrow, I guess, I'll be up and active. Hopefully I'll feel better. This sickness is so almost perfunctory. I don't know what brought it on, although I fear it may have to do with the three pieces of greasy pizza I ate at SAC last night.

Alyssa writes: "we are all delinquent, and we will all survive."

practicing now…

hell on 18 wells
at 100 per
we went crashing through
the jersey barrier

GODDAMMIT! why does this keep happening? my alarm didn't go off again, which means I missed Philosophy for the third time in four classes, and then I missed French, and I didn't go to Syntax either, since I woke up ten minutes before it and I figure what the hell, I haven't missed it once all semester. But I can't figure out what's going on with all this. I mean, besides the fact that my alarm keeps not going off, I seem to be falling into a general academic apathy that's really pretty new for me. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm so busy with other stuff and my classes aren't all that stimulating right now anyway, and that I'll regain my enthusiasm or desire to put in energy when I come back next year. Anyway. I was up late last night (3:00) talking to Joel as he tried to write a paper on Blake; discussing Judaism (again, but more conclusively) and Inflight. I guess I should write about yesterday (Monday) now, and then I'll go back and write about Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday in the space provided for them.

There was class in the morning, and then I came back here to find cool stuff from my bands that are gonna be coming: ten huge glossy posters and two CDs from Infectious, a CD from Sister Blue (ten poster and 2 CDs from JBE came on Friday), as well as the Califone record and a DVD of the Sting, from Half. I ate a good deal - leftover lasagna and a tasty toasted-cheddar w/ mango chutney openface, and I decided to go to the last Culture class. It turned out to be not so exciting as I had hoped; Bruce basically just talked for the whole time, did some summarizing and gave some advice for the future, but on the whole wasn't particularly funny. At halftime Jocelyn bought me a tasty coconut-banana smoothie, and then we came back to watch 15 minutes of a video about Bourdieu, "sociologie est un sport de combat." Then I met Kate Duffy downstairs, to be interviewed for a Phoenix article about Worthstock. We wandered over here and I let her borrow the CDs of the bands that will be playing. I made a copy of the Sister Blue album, and then marked that and the extra IO and JBE discs for WSRN - using yellow paint pen! - and wrote track-by-track commentary for JBE and general guidelines for Infectious. And I took a full sheet of newsprint (ads from the real estate section) and turned it into a poster exhorting DJs to announce Worthstock. Took those up to the station to kick off the Worthstock publicity frenzy. Rachel is contributing mailbox stuffers and three pieces of chalk. I made a point of getting to African to drum, since it was the last time for that, and it was pretty fun. Class wasn't bad either. SAC meeting was very businesslike - we had an agenda all printed out and everything, and discussed policy changes for next year. I tried to practice but didn't have the energy for it, so I came home and dealt with Worthstock e-mail stuff. And then stayed up talking to Joel. And listening to WSRN - Christy played Quasi and S-K and Le Tigre announced Worthstock ("Food! Live Music! Ross's Uncle!"), Jonah had his famed pirate show (I listened, I listened, arrrr!) and then Nicole, who followed my set at the parlour sessions, played contempo R&B and gave a hilarious PSA for Worthstock, trying to read my newspaper ("let's see…Infectious Organisms, they play hip-hop…Jim's Big Ego, they'll play rock, pop, folk, and… funny, okay i don't know what that is, i'm sorry… sister blue plays the blues, inflight rock band, let's see, art…rock, and, oh, synthesized pop, i think is what that means … and then Mayfly, that's jazz, funk, soul, bluegrass, and jamming … i'm sorry, i don't know what jamming is…") That was the day; not a terribly exciting one. I'm going to write about some earlier ones now.

her transistor offers no salvation or regret
no pool, no pets, no cigarettes
just non-stop Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes

there's no name
no name for the place
or pain we'll cause you
again and again
if you do not cooperate

I didn't get up to go birding - I didn't even bother to set my alarm for eight to go to Pea Patch because first of all it would have meant less than five hours of sleep and second of all (mostly) the forecast was for thunderstorms all day. Just my luck then that it turned out to be quite an agreeable day; lushly humid but not particularly cold or precipitative. I gather they didn't stay out birding very long even. It would have been nice to go. Instead, I woke up at maybe 10 or 11 to find myself next to Alyssa. And that made me really happy. Of course then she left to do more Spike work, and I tried to write stuff here. Rae suggested that we listen to When I Was Cruel in her room while she worked on her library model, so I brought my computer down and typed up the bit about Friday and the Travis Morrison quote. After four songs she insisted we leave and go to an art supply store, so I pulled her her pearly pink purly sweater on over my tiger-print Hawaiian and Sunday pants. The outfit garnered me some funny looks in Michaels, as we picked packs of ivory modelling clay, but the Produce Guy, whose newly opened store across the street we decided on a whim to visit afterwards, said he really liked my look. We bought kiwis, corn, brocolli rabe, and french bread from him, and then came home and ate the latter with olive oil and Rebecca, as we discussed little New England towns.

Then back to work - I counted up the minutes of old Elvis Costello records and listened to the new one. "Every Elvis has an army" he said. On first listen: it's good. I like the album. But it sort of sounds too much like Elvis Costello. I feel like almost all of his records stand out from the others in some way; each has its own peculiar flavor. And this one runs the risk of being "just another EC album" in the way that I feel like Bob Dylan and Neil Young and so on just keeping putting out albums, many of which aren't that distinctive from each other (as opposed to David Bowie and Elvis Costello and to some extent Tom Waits, where each album really is unique.) I'll have to listen to it more, but some of the songs don't seem quite as strong as others. I like "45" and "Tart" and the title track (although we were disappointed to hear that she says "Om" instead of "Um.")

That album ended and then we listened to Emergency & I, which I think Rae was disappointed by since it wasn't as "understated" as she had anticipated, and then I came upstairs to help with dinner. Joel and Rebecca had already prepared three lasagnas (two vegan, one non-), so I put together a carrot cake and oil-vinegar-oregano for the bread while Rebecca dealt with corn and salad. It was quite a feast, very summery and very tasty. Enjoyed by the flat, Rae, and Alyssa. Everyone took off afterwards, Alyssa and I did some dishes and then played jacks, struggling a bit for subjects. A spot of practicing, and a tense conference with Marié and Valé and Joelé in Oldé Club, and then I went over to Suzanne Wu's flat in the ville for Scrabble. When I got there she and Micah were playing a sort of violent tetris video game that they had declared an IQ test. They cleared off the table and we (Strapless Suzanne, Androgynous Andrew, Rambunctious Ross) began to play. Su got three bingos (premiums) in the first game - including "carrots" and "boilery" (totally a made-up word, but I challenged its crossword "dishy" instead, and that was good) - and I got "refoiled" (as in "Curses! Refoiled!"), which put me at a respectable 250-something (in between Su's 330-something and Andrew's 180-something or so.) We played another game, where the finishing order was the same (su, me, and), but a lot closer. The playing was pretty intense - they play with a 3rd edition dictionary, and use the challenging rule much more seriously. I played a bunch of two-letter words that I wasn't sure on but, they didn't mention it so I felt I was good. My big mistake in the second game was trying for a premium with "abrasing" even though I knew it wasn't a word, rather than just putting "apings" on a triple word. I also had to fend off Su's cigarette smoke and attacks from their misleadingly sweet-looking kitty Cassidy, who turned out to be quite a vicious little beast, leaping triumphantly onto the table from a sill several feet away, biting and scratching her would-be petters. So that was their home court advantage. It was definitely a fun time - my first time playing this semester - and we agreed to play again, probably here. And maybe anagrams or boggle too. Cool

and the flavor is…
tart

"Put your hands together for Inflight and the Detachment Kit! Hey, so what's up with the Detachment Kit and the Dismemberment Plan finally playing a show together. And this is Priti's last show - so, what does this mean; Priti's last gesture is some sort of bizarre 'band name joke.' And then there was Insight with that 'Save the Homosexuals' song" (one of the band members corrected him about our name). "Inflight. Did I say Insight? Insight sounds like the newsletter for the 7th Day Adventists or something. You know, they should have called themselves Insight. It would give them the biblical weight they so clearly have on stage. Especially that guy with the feathers in his hair. He definitely had a sort of "I, Claudius" look going on… So, we know where they're going tonight [affects British accent]- 'so, Julius, how was the forum tonight.' But wait, what am I saying, why would the Romans speak with a British accent. What the fuck am I thinking."

-Travis Morrison

you'll always be my hero - even if i never see you again

Well, it turns out that this weekend should be pretty easy to write about, because it was just a series of big long chunks of time, with no space between - which is also why I haven't had time to write. The idea, maybe, was to spend as much time as possible wearing earplugs. And the weekend effectively started Thursday night, which was the beginning of the turnaround from what had been my worst week in recent memory (I'll finish writing about that later too.) So, starting thursday night:

Earplugs In or close at hand (times approximate):
Superfurryanimals/Cex: 9:00-12:30 Thursday Night
Rehearsal 2:00-8:00 Friday (well, I didn't actually wear them, but I should have done)
Motion: 12:00-3:30am Friday night/Saturday Morning
Rehearsal 10:00-5:00 Saturday
Concert 10:00-2:00 Saturday night.

total: 24 hours out of 53, so definitely more than half of my waking hours.

oh yeah, sleep:

Thursday night: 2:00-11:00
Friday night: 4:00-9:00
Saturday night: 3:30-8:00, 8:00-10:00

so you can figure out the gaps for yourself, but there aren't very many. Good thing I don't have much schoolwork these days.

The crew for the Super Furries show was Kate Duffy, Benjamin, and myself, plus Amy Meek and her friend Eve, who luckily enough had been planning to drive anyway. Ben and I talked about Rolling Stone reviews on the way over (Elvis and Wilco both got four stars) and we also listened to Cex, the opening act. This record was pretty standard A-Twin-style IDM, and we compared it to the unusually engaging sitar music playing in Samosas, where we stopped for dinner. But his live set, which started not long after we got inside the TLA, after a run over to Tower to redeem my coupon for EC's "First LOUD album since 199?," was something completely else: smart, funky hip-hop beats programmed on his iBook to accompany spastic antics with a drill and whip-smart, punchy raps, about "real" subject - bikes ("thumbs shift - gears click…down hill - one wheel"), himself (the greatest entertainer in the world, a cocky 20-year-old kid with blond bangs over his headband?), and whatever topics the audience came up with: Nintendo, bloody kunts, and Mr. Peanut (enthusiastically supplied by Ben and Kate - he spun an incredible rhyme about monocles and capitalism and how the legume-about-town is a greedy CEO bent on domination.) Check out his website too. Two screens showed the same image, one a mirror reverse of the other - what turned out to be a live shot of the superfurryanimals turntables, spinning records between acts, and paperplates with writing on them during Cex's set. Then they switched to the blue/red "pornographic" outline cartoons of the video for "[A] Touch Sensitive" as the music came through the speakers and the lights dimmed. The Furries took the stage and banged out a live-rock version of it for a few minutes, and then crashed their way through a few short and noisy pop-rock bursts, including a stripped-down "Rings Around the World" and a song about a golden retriever (all with appropriate video footage, excerpts from the groundbreaking DVD - I have to say I wasn't terribly impressed by most of them - they're all animated, and most pretty cheap-looking.) For a minute I was confused that the whole show would be such straight, simple rock, but soon they broadened out into the eclectic, lush textures of the album, bringing in the electronics on "Sidewalk Serfer Girl," pedal steel and harmonica (truncated) on "Run Christian Run," vocoder/not-vocoder duet "Juxtapose." I didn't realize they had such a clearly defined frontman, who sang lead on all songs and did all the talking (not much of that, just thanks and we're Welsh), but they do and he's awfully cute and lanky. They're all pretty cute, except for the drummer. But he sang a lot of harmonies, which was cool. They played for a long time, and a lot of songs - everything from Disc 1 of Rings except the slower first and last tracks and "Shoot Doris Day," plus about as many or more that I didn't recognize - so maybe 25? One or two in Welsh, and their hit that sampled Steely Dan's "Show Biz Kids" and "Receptacle" ("this one has four or five sections and features a friend and some veg" - a guy in a John Lennon mask came and threw carrots and celery into the audience.) Fun fun fun. They didn't play an encore, which I liked (better to have a long set and no encore unless it's really appropriate), but instead yet another version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" came over the loudspeakers. Scattered comments over Cex on the ride home, and then Ben and I hung out in Amy's (spacious, stylishly messy Worth L) room, listening to Gorky's and Avalanches, and talking about music, academia, and dancing.

Friday My alarm didn't go off, that's what it was: for the second morning of at least four in a row now, I didn't get up on time, and missed bird walk for effectively the third week running. And French again. I don't care about caring about it. I had a banana or something (oh, cereal) before bird class, second to last week, last presentations, I haven't really got the ending thing in my head. And then to Olde Club for rehearsal, pausing to say hi to Claire and next-year-roomies on the beach; got a party invite from my mom for me and Alyssa. It was a useful rehearsal, once we got power for it. Corey says we use our rehearsal time more productively than any band he's worked with, and I think it's true. Rae and Rebecca had prepared a lovely meal of hummus and pasta and lemony lentils, that was good to eat. Joel and I talked about the band and then I played him some XTC - "Smarteft Monkeys," "Vgly Vnderneath," "1000 Umbrellas" - and tried to decide whether or not it made any sense to go out dancing. Ben was having second thoughts, but honors-paper-procastinating Amy was still down, so I showered and put in my contacts and on my blue rave shirt (where's the red one? Matt?) and headed over to Worth.

"It's good to be on the road back home again" was playing in Ben's room, Amy in a white muscle shirt, Ben convinced and changed into "cheer-up" tee and cargo pants. Radio on to SRN, where Murrik and Petar were playing "One More Time" and "Cassius 99" and a happy hardcore version of "Sunny," good pre-clubbing tunes, and we got reception all the way into the city, then flipped on the Handcream, as we discussed ways the Swat partyscene could be bettered and I struggled to get down a can of Jolt for energy. It turned out not to do a whole lot of good for me; by the end of the evening I was practically falling asleep on my feet. Motion, which is in a cleared-out building just south of Spring Garden, is a decent space, but not all that impressive, even compared to, say, Piranha/Water St. (which is where I went to my last rave probably three years ago now). One big room downstairs, where they were banging the hard house "Chicago-style," and a small drum+bass room upstairs, with little bar and lounge area. Cover turned out to be $25, a lot even for a fairly big-name headliner (and at least I'd heard of him), also because I always thought he was pretty inane. But we weren't going to turn back at that point. For the first hour or so the music was just ridiculously hard - no basslines, no melodies, pretty much no notes at all, just beats - which made it hard to dance to, but I tried to get into it anyway, and we had some fun, especially when we found a sweet spot under a high-powered fan. Later on there were two DJs switching off, and their stuff was more eclectic and interesting. We were mostly dancing in a loose group of three, unable to communicate because of the noise, just misinterpreting gestures, and Ben going off to refill his water bottle and offer it to us about every five minutes. He was pretty beat too, and at one point went and sat down for about half an hour; but then was revived enough to dance. I was on my feet the whole time (we were there for over three hours), and just got progressively more tired - by quarter of 3, when Bad Boy Bill came on and started flipping diva-disco, Fatboy vocal-samples, synth-bleeps and Danny Tenaglia's "cameras ready, prepare to flash," I would pretty much just stand there for about five minutes, and then have enough energy to jump around for thirty seconds. At one point I started doing the Kenanga arm series, which somehow gave me more energy for a while. Meanwhile Amy, who has a fantastically distinctive dancing style, dips and shifts and subtly grooves, flashes a great sweet, sympathetic smile and tilts her head to shrug. Yeah, maybe going dancing that night wasn't the best idea, but it was fun anyway, even as we drove him unable to hear the D-Plan on the freeway because of residual ear-mutedness, despite earplugs. Why does this stuff have to be so freaking loud? Crawled into bed exhausted once more. You have to live it up while you have the chance, right?

don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else
you know they

I think I smell. Rae mentioned the other day that my room smelled bad, and I think it's probably true even though I can't really pick up on it much myself. I have to do laundry pretty soon, but that's not a new thing - it happens, you know, every two weeks. There's been sweat lately - because of heat, stress, and dance - and it doesn't all go away. But something else. I'm not in the best physical health right now; I'm not specifically sick or anything, I've just been feeling kind of odd. My stomach has been somewhat uneasy for much of this week - related to diet and to stress, i think, but i can't tell exactly how. There will be some mention of those things in my entries for Tuesday and yesterday.

As for emotional health, something has come up that I do want to write about, but I'm not sure how best to approach it, either here or elsewhere. Again, it's not something pinpointable, or problematic enough to be a major interference, its just uncertainty and malaise. Kate Duffy, with whom I'm going to see the Superfurryanimals tonight, sent me an e-mail with the sign-off greeting "rock and roll is here to stay." And for some reason that made me feel a whole lot better.

I had a funny kind of phantasmagoric dream last night (I'm not quite sure what that word means, but it seems to fit) with a huge cast of characters - mostly folks from here at Swat, in a dizzying series of circumstances. I can't remember a lot of the details now as well as I could when I woke up (darn, should have written then), but there were a lot of emotions involved. One specific thing that I remember clearly, because it was right before I woke up, was that I splashed a bottle of water in the face of Gerrit Ash, a freshman who's in my philosophy class; he seems like a pretty likable guy, even though he says "like" something awful. I was frustrated and lashing out, but right after I splashed him, I said "that was mean. i really didn't mean to do that" and I tried to apologize to him and I wanted to apologie so much that I started crying. I was walking around with different people, but much of the time was with one female companion. Except sometimes it was Rae, sometimes it was Alyssa, sometimes Brigid, and probably others too - I realized after I woke up that it hadn't been clear always which was which and when it changed between them. I do remember being really excited about Brigid at one point. There was a lot more too; Rebecca was in it, and Joel, and also a lot of folks that I don't know very well.

Besides smelling and ailing, other things that I've been doing a lot: listening to Elvis Costello, and getting his songs stuck in my head; checking e-mail (worthstock and assassins fill up my box like crazy); wondering about my hair; wearing long-sleeve shirts that aren't sweaters or button-downs (it's cold again - raining today - but I can't bring myself to go back to sweaters.)

here lie the records that she scratched
and on the sleeve I find a note attached
and it's so like candy

my darling dear it's such a waste
she couldn't say goodbye, but "i admire (despise) your taste"

Tom Jones was fun, although sometimes a weird dynamic when I noticed that Matt, Joel, and I, each with a woman on either side of us, formed this noticeably louder male faction, verging on dominating the conversation between the three of us. Noticably quiet - Nori (according to Alyssa, always quiet in a large group including nobody she's sexually interested in), and Alyssa, who I realized had been specifically wanting to spend time alone, and hence was perhaps frustrated when dinner on Tuesday turned into a larger thing. Matt chatted up the waitress and got her to make a substitution of meat for juice, despite the explicit policy against it. Somebody, I'm pretty sure, said something about "vampire blood." It couldn't have been the waitress, and I don't think it was Nori. Maybe Michelle? I ate a jobo (cheeseburger) but didn't have time to order the carrot cake that Nori and I had agreed to share (or rather, she backed out when they decided there wasn't enough time left) so I just got a milkshake to take home.

Al and I curled up here sideways on the bed, which is the way we have most of our serious talks it seems, and she started talking. Couple or not couple thoughts, she said, which is such a clever and evil phrase. I didn't know how to react or what to say except that I didn't know what she was talking about. Which was true, and she clearly didn't either, but we tried to make sense of it and I think got somewhere. I can't help really feeling though that it's all circumstantial stuff - that time mangles emotions so that we equate temporal or spatial distance with emotional distance. And there's obviously this thing of fluctuation, and the breakdown of our society's one-for-one ideal. That's all stuff I'm ready to deal with. But at some point logic doesn't work, you can't reason with it, and I am powerless. I start to cry and ask her for a favor. And when the Kings of Convenience come on to break the tension, even the song titles begin resonate, and i hope i'm not "winning a battle, losing a war."

So that was an unpleasant preamble for Thursday, which became one of hideous lows before turning around a bit with a breath of fresh air that became my equally draining but exhilarating weekend. My alarm once again failed to go off (the snooze button sticking again?) and so I missed Philosophy - but made French and Syntax, and that was all fine. Ready for a lazy afternoon, sans radio, just e-mailness, and one engagement - a trip to campus to snag Susan Roth. You see, Stefanie and Elizabeth (and maybe Brigid, but who knows) called an emergency meeting of "Local High School Outreach" (a community service program they had invented specifically for this situation) as a way to catch my target Susan unawares. It did seem strange that they were so enthusiastic about plotting this (a spate of twenty or so e-mails from Zabby making sure it would happen at the right time), but I figured it was trustworthy, since they had reasonable and previously tested allegiances to me, and presumably good reasons for wanting to get Susan out (doesn't everybody? I don't know who would want her to stay in the game). But after ridiculous rigamarole of stuffing me away in the IC bathroom (best part of overheard dialogue while they were shuffling around outside: "we should probably have something to talk about at the meeting, shouldn't we" -eliz), when I looked up and saw this deliciously menacing voice "there's a few ways we can go about this…" it was Chas, of course, it was a goddamn setup. Immediately, almost, I was sick of the whole thing. I was ready to be out of it. I slithered out and sat in the corner for a while, and I think I probably had a decent shot of making a break and sliding away on my butt past the gals "barricade" and getting away, but I didn't really care enough. After a few minutes I just stood up and surrended, to preserve my pride or whatever, but I don't know, it just seemed like the best thing to do. Of course then the girls were fawning, pleased with themselves and trying earnestly to console me at the same time. As I told Charles right away - I didn't have a problem with him. And when I thought about for a minute, I couldn't blame the girls either - they had been playing the game perfectly, and it was a well-laid plot and I would have wanted to do the same thing in their position. So if I was going to be upset about this it would have to be at myself. I could have done that, I guess, gotten mad at myself for walking into this so blindly, being trusting. But somehow, despite Zab's accurate assertion that we were alike in our "game above the person," it had become about the people for me - spending some real time with Elizabeth that I never had much before. So I think that's partly why I had lost my edge - the meaning of the game had shifted for me. Also, rather than throw myself back in as an undead conspirator, just trying to get other folks out (they claimed that they were still in the game, playing to win "Best Conspiracy" - which for me is not even remotely the point; it's a singly-focused game and I had lost) I decided I'd just drop the whole thing. Maybe a question of moral high ground, as Stef suggested, but it all gets so complex, and it's not about assuming a "moral" position, because that is immediately transparent as a self-consciously altruistic gesture. The other part of it is that I felt good being betrayed by them, because it was clearly the sort of thing that you only do to your friends. And it's good to have them for friends. Much of this I related to Stef, rather more cogently I think, as I walked with her back to the lodge to change, then back across campus again to Tarble for some dinner.

But what hit me right after that, as I walked back home alone, was a real despondency and uncertainty. It came only partly from residual annoyance at the game - the stress it had caused me, the unsatisfactory nature of my removal from it - and at my betrayers; but that was more the perfectness of the betrayal as a metaphor: it seems to be the story of my life, to place too much faith in what I can expect from people, and end up being hurt when they let me down. In the context of the game, of course, this is completely mitigated by the circumstances; it's the way things are supposed to happen. Perhaps we enjoy and revel in the viciousness and inhumanity of interactions in the game only as a contrast to how we presume real life interactions take place, almost as a way of assuring ourselves that this kind of thing can only happen in a game. But, clearly, it resonates. A related, more specific note, is the growing sadness I've been feeling about Brigid, watching this friendship threaten to sour in similar ways to others before it (Denise, Amy, Katie, Julian) as we drift apart and she doesn't seem willing to put in the effort any more (and as always I question whether it was just me from the start.) And then this wretchedness with Alyssa, which I still can't comprehend. So that all swamped me, and the weather was perfect for melancholy. But, luckily, it had a time limit. A phone call or two from Ben, and I was on my way again. True Blue Ben, along with new friends (Amy! Kate! Superfurries!) and there was no time to be morose anymore. The best cure for sadness is to do stuff.

even though I'm not her minder
even thought she doesn't want me around…

but, but, but. okay. Wednesday - it probably doesn't need emboldening for a day removed. I was up early to check e-mail again again - but no help still from Stef, Zab, Sarah K., instead, I thought to check Nori's schedule and see that they share Math 9 mornings, so a quick e-mail exchange to her gave me all the info i needed. After French, I took an ambush spot in a darkened, deserted classroom in Dupont, across the hall from theirs, so that I could listen to Steve Maurer's comfortingly familiar speech cadence, and for most of the hour, so I got some Rizzi reading done - well, ten pages, which is nothing to scoff at. The actual kill was stupidly anticlimactic - i just came out and got her; no need to scuffle or chase, and she was so completely nonplussed as to barely even acknowledge me. And, man, that's frustrating because it just follows suit for her, and I'm frankly getting sick of it. I followed her home and to the Registrar's for a pin, and we planned to have dinner later.

Three-egg spinach/feta omelet (messy but yummy) and then piano lesson - he called my scales (at 132) the best he'd ever heard, and my arpeggios even surprised me, given that I hadn't focused on them that week. Bach and Bartók are inching towards the finish line - I'm really going to try to have them beyond comfortable when jury time comes (though it's close) - and I still can't play the parts of the Chopin that I haven't tried. Something happened between three and five to sap my energy, take away my desire to cook, or do anything. Part of it maybe that Brigid called and called dinner off. So I went to African without having eaten, but I wasn't too hungry. Class was good - we had two alumni visitors (male; Kemal's vintage, not former students) who were really good - with another challenging atf sequence and patakato at the end. Kemal actually said "good dancing, ross" to me at the end; a step up from Monday, when he'd said "you're hanging in there." Stefanie came home with me after class, to talk about the game the game, but also Brigid and summer and life in general - it's been too long for us, and we agreed, cuddly, to spend more time together. In the meantime Matt and Aaron were over (the latter, especially, is so infectiously exuberant about this band, it's really great) to talk - we put together a five or six song list for the D-Plan show, and tried to figure out which of our fourteen or so "finished" tunes to work up for Worthstock. It's really just a matter of how much we can get done in rehearsal, and I have faith that we can do a lot. This stuff really is exciting. Rock and roll is here to stay. And if I want it to, it can matter more than people.

This was Joel's birthday, 20 years old on the 24th, and we celebrated with a trip to Tom Jones: Matt, Michelle, Rebecca, Nori in one car; Rae, Joel, me, and Alyssa in the other. Nori had made a pot of Mac+cheese spirals right before we left, and I partook of half, even though I'd been planning to sate my hungry at TJs (she hadn't realized we could do dinner there as well as dessert.) Wait, there's more, I'll write about it later. Oh, this song was on in the car (along with Sexy MF and some Folk Implosion):

this bed is on fire with passionate love
the neighbors complain about the noise from above

i'll flesh out tuesday briefly:
morning classes were kind of bad. i scarfed a banana and made myself a pb-swiss-must bagel to take with me, but after two or three bites i couldn't take it anymore and it just sat on my swing-arm chair-desk, untouched and if anything making it worse. and i don't know, i just couldn't get into the discussion, or really follow it. Dewey seems perhaps okay, but i can't tell. he's upped the reading for it a lot. French was better - just Petit Prince exposition, and I could get my mind on it, and it's even kind of a fun routine: a short quiz first, then groups of three take turns explaining each chapter. I haven't even bought the workbook that we're supposed to be doing selected pages from along with the text. things like that make me curious - i'm taking it pass/fail, but i won't, like, actually fail will i? presumably attendance and participation count for something. oh, but Syntax was bad. I hadn't been able to do the Rizzi reading, as i mentioned, because Susan from Haverford had the book. But I couldn't even focus - the game, the game - and although I made valiant, decent i think efforts when called on to explain how the analyses worked, it tied into the general uncertainty of a lot of people in the class, and Kari finally got understandably frustrated (funny, cause i've never seen that from her) and ended class early.

there were lots of trips to the triple, which i guess made whatshername suspect me more; except apparently she already knew. i ate lunch at home, something, and i was late to my music 48 conference - since i thought it was at 2:10 when it was actually at 1:10. But that was okay. I got in some decent practicing anyway, with Joel nextdoor, laughing about a kiddie-b-day card from grandfolks, playing Inventio 8 and talking about "Sonatas and Interludes". Alyssa came over for dinner, which was a much needed opportunity for me to destress, except that I wasn't much help in preparing it, because of countless e-mail and phone call interactions that took precedence. And she hadn't realized it would be more than just the two of us, so that made tiny tensions. But it was good - the food i mean - risotto orts, simple broccoli and spinach with ginger/garlic/soy. And it was better seeing her even that way than not seeing her at all - it certainly didn't feel like enough though.

We headed to campus together, to go to the Budget Office, except she wisely gave up on it halfway there. Walking through Parrish, I heard a ruckus halfway down - turned out to be Zabby yelling and shouting and making a fuss, and amused folks gathered around her: Rebecca had finally gotten to her, successfully made her kill through a combination of dumb luck and Eliz's ineptitude. Very amusing story - I heard Rebecca's version not five minutes later in UTACS. Then budget hours - where in addition to realizing we had overspent for the Spring-Loaded party (I could only recoup $3 from my $47 flowershop receipt), I received the best news of the week: $865 from WSRN!! They were able to transfer it from various SRN subcodes right into SAC, and then to SAC them designate it as Worthstock. Back to the triple to console Zabby (who wasn't nearly as upset about her death as I was) and to plot about Brigid. Except that Zab just wasn't that helpful - but she promised to call/e-mail later that night with info and a plan, involving a setup with Tiffany (about whom I contacted Amelia, thanks there).

Got home and started to realize that I was just ridiculously stressed about this whole thing, so I tried to figure out a way to keep playing smartly without letting it mess with me so much. My planned Scrabble game with Suzanne would be a nice release, I thought - but then she called it off on account of too much work. Instead, Rae agreed to hang out for a while, so we played some Trivial Pursuit, listened to the Super Furries and Cibo Matto, and ate the vegan jell(n)o that I had whipped together during dinner prep - cherry flavored and refreshingly natural-colored; not bad. And I drank a ginger beer. Mm. Rebecca came in and had a bedside chat, and then I got up again to hear her read to Joel from her journal.

moonshine
distilled within my heart

(rae's brilliant mishearing)

monday
i like the fact that kohlberg has so many alternative entrances; i've been using them. also, i've been checking e-mail even more often than usual, hoping for game updates. this was a great day for gathering information. after class, i ran into Danielle in the library, and got some from her; meanwhile there were attempts to set up a double-assassination conspiracy wherein Brigid and Zabby would both meet their makers on the way to CPR class in the evening - I wasn't so hot on the idea of betraying E, but it seemed like a decent setup. Stef was in on it too, hope it's okay to reveal that now - and Elizabeth was still trusting enough to let her take her out to dinner in the ville; which became the setup instead. I was home for much of the day; listening to Warren Zevon and wondering whether to write record reviews for the week, and reading Dewey and Saint-Exupéry and peoples weblogs. Lunch was a bagel with all that good stuff.

I left the house at about six-thirty, first to Pearson to see if Rizzi was available (nope - Susan Lipsett from Haverford had taken it, just my luck), and then back off campus and down Chester to the train station. I saw Stef and Zab approaching, and figured I'd better get out of the way - but the ambush didn't happen, because they were late and because Adrienne had been at the train station when she was there. I moved along, headed towards the tunnel, where Brigid was scheduled to emerge around seven. I scoped it out, but it just felt too risky - she would find me out, and I might or might not take her out in the process. So I skittered away from there too. Quite worked up by this time, I came around past Olde Club and checked to see if the other side of the tunnel seemed any more promising. But no, I decided, hiding behind some evergreens, it was even worse. So I just went to LPAC early; checked in all the shower stalls and then changed at ease, sat in the hallway reading lpp and waiting for class. But there was hardly a class - only eight people showed up, due to the housing lottery (Brigid was there, too, as it turned out - so my ambush would have been futile anyway). Among them were Claudia and Jessica, both of whom had fallen earlier in the day, and had plenty of useful information for me - deaths and assignments, and the possibility that B was already on to me. It was, actually, a great class. Really short - we started late and ended early, so it was less than an hour in total - and mostly spent on a fun across-the-floor sequence that other people were having just as much trouble with as I was (Chomsky?).

We were out of class at 8:30, but rather than go to the lottery to see if Brig was there (and if I had I would have witnessed some spirit chasings, or some I'm told) I just went to SAC. The meeting, which Cookie had promised would be little more than an hour, was 1:20. We heard four proposals, some very extravagant and last minute, and then realized we didn't have any money to fund them anyway - assuming we're footing the bill for movies on the beach since StuCo blew their money on that silly carnival or something. Back home, where Rebecca had assembled a remarkable compendium of knowledge about the game. Together with the bits I had gleaned from Danielle, Claudia, Jessica, and others, we were able to figure out all kinds of things - we had the "loop" figured out down to nine subsections (several of which were individuals), and we knew the ten people of whom nine comprised the death squad. (I don't know if this was obvious to anyone else, but Jen sent an e-mail saying that at one point there were "24 dead, 27 living" - leaving nine out of the original sixty who aren't part of the cycle, hence must be the death squad.) And by the next morning (Tuesday), thanks to Rabi's unexpected message on this site (she hasn't mentioned it once on her own site, for whatever reason) we knew exactly who was on the squad. I'm not sure quite how that information is helpful. I also narrowed down a list of who might be after me to eight names. All of this was conducted nervously and tensely, since Becca was anxious about the impending doom of the death squad. Apparently, 14 people were marked, so it's not surprising that the squad never came for her - there was some intense and prolonged banging on the double-locked door, but it turned out just to be Joel, who finds this all highly highly amusing.

tears on your blackmail
written to ransom
a point of the fingernail
says he's so hansome

The game is now occupying about 80% of my thoughts at any given moment. I'm going to write now about Sunday, and then maybe about Monday (yesterday), but I will have to heavily censor the entries before I publish them (don't worry, I'll save the uncensored versions, and replace them when the game is over.) I don't know if this will mean eliminating 80% of the content, but it will be significant.

The beginning part of Sunday, at least, was fairly removed from thoughts of the game. I was sufficiently attentive on my way to campus, but as it was around 8:30 on a Sunday morning (I'd woken up at 8:00, and the decision to get out of bed was remarkably easy) I wasn't too worried. Kate Baker, the only other player who was going on the field trip with me, was apparently not thinking of it at all, as she left herself exposed until I mentioned it, and then we agreed that if one of us had the other they were as good as dead anyway (it's hard to think of a position more vulnerable than birdwatching.) Others tumbled in - Gabe, Robbie, sleepyhair Edith, Emily, Abram and his mom (who look so much alike it's kind of scary), and Janet of course - and we started in on the bagels, bananas, and juice in the trunk. A twenty-minute van ride took us to Ridley Creek State Park, where the schedule of events for that morning included not one but two cause walks - an MS walk, which comprised an endless string of people on foot, bikes, scooters, tricycles, in strollers, wagons, carriages, and piggyback, and even some cheaters on car, and an "earth walk," which didn't seem to have as many participants, although they did get free oranges and water (and we couldn't have any.) All those people made it rather difficult to hear bird songs for much of the times, but even without them a lot of us were rather distracted in other conversations. We did get some decent birding in: call and song IDs at the beginning, then some nice views of red-winged blackbirds, blue-grey gnat-catchers (cute little buggers) and some ruby-crowned kinglets (although, again, I didn't really see those) towards the beginning, but then it fractured into side conversations and plant identification tips (a lot of those, some of which I may remember.) I talked with Edith a lot, about living off-campus (she's done every year since freshman year - which was when exactly? I still can't figure it out), about cats and dogs, about auditing (she's a devotee as well). and what's this about her and Gabe? little brother? what? She is a mystery still in many ways. I think maybe I'll just have to arrange a chat with her sometime and get to the bottom of all this. It was a fun way to interact with people - on a field trip/nature walk like that, most of us not knowing the others all that well, just taking it easy and having fun. kind of different. we took about two hours making perhaps three-quarters of a mile's progress down a paved road along the creek, in between the causewalkers and the fishermen (one of whom "what are you doing, birdwatching? seen any birds?" made some confusing out-of-place comment about Cuchinella - "what are you doing, fishcatchin? caught any fish?") Gabe was the hyperactive, snappy wit jokester, drawing attention in a much less subdued way than he does during morning walks. I can't tell how seriously to take him. As the hordes of people (Richard Scarry-esque, we declared them) passed, we came upon a bench in a clearing; sat for a while, then decided to continue on over a little bridge, up a steep hill, into the woods in earnest, where dogwoods and yellowthroats lurk and towhees cry out. really, a jokey sort of outing. we ended up at the top of a steep section of path, in a grassy meadow that had been partially paved for a parking lot, lying among the dandelions and pointing binocs at the trees overhead, talking about the religion department. Lovely. The way back was quicker - hillsprints and poohsticks and dog-poop debate. And towards the very end we saw a great blue heron, standing in the creek, spearing fish after fish. We watched them slide down his ess-curve gullet (I hope some of them are still alive when they take that final plunge; it would be a fun slipslide way to go I think) and waited for Janet. Then the heron took off, marvelous. And so did we - a pb+j on raisin bagel and a banana for my lunch.

My first thought on arriving home was to check in at the Parrish triple, one of whose inhabitants had come up to me breathless at the Parlor radio hour the previous day, hoping to strike a deal. My victim was coming down the stairs as I came up, in precious brown cowboy hat, but I figured it would be too risky to take after right then. But I didn't stay long in the triple either (and didn't strike that deal yet); went to McCabe - encountered Edith again about R+me, e-mail biz, and then impulsive phone call for assistance. It was the right thing to do - I loitered in Parrish hallway for what must have been about a half hour, having been promised that the target would return, while folks set up for the spec activities fair (relocated from outside because of weather - oh, i didn't mention; it was perfectly fine, if not exactly warm, for our morning birdwalk, but by this time it was looking a little more like rain, or at least windycold), and eventually she did indeed show up, flitting back and forth between a few different booths, seemingly unsuspicious. I tried to disguise/distract myself by reading Dewey and by chatting with a specmom, and as the area filled up with more and more people, setting up booths (some of whom had news about the game status), I gained confidence. One problem though: she had on "armor" consisting of cardboard somehow affixed around her bum, and masked with a shirt-tied-round-waist, making it difficult to plan a strategy for circumventing it. Several hurried exchanges (some nonverbal) with Z - one of which was just me pointing out that her target (Joel) had just arrived - and then we both made successful kills: her first, easily enough, and as he was about to complete his, and then me. I came up to the living wage booth as Sarah, Cathy, and Kim were singing one of the Radical Cheers, and I joined in and sang along (the RCs had been scheduled to perform, and it's a shame they didn't, because that would have been a good opportunity). Chatted with Sarah briefly, gauging when to make my move; I mentioned her armor, and she beamed: "yeah, try it out!" And so, of course, the sad tale goes: she turned around to offer her posterior, not even realizing her mistake until after I had already gotten in at least one legitimate hit (I'm pretty sure that I got in a fair squeeze even through the mid-stock cardboard), but I held on so as to make it incontestable; we ended up on the floor tussling for a good thirty seconds, flailing and knocking over some nearby boxes and stands, but the outcome was pretty clear. You should read her hilarious account of it. (It should perhaps be noted that I hit my knee in the process, somewhat painfully.) She was incredulous - "wait, you're not my person. are you really my person?" - but she took it well, and readily agreed to help with my next victim - if only to salvage some dignity for herself by ensuring that I was in fact a formidable adversary. She gave me the armor too as a trophy, and I gave her some hugs and apologies - perhaps this will be the earnest beginning of a friendship that didn't exist between us before. After that, although I stopped at the SoundMachine table to chat with Dan and condole Joel, I got out of there and high-tailed it home, to regroup.

I made some lemonade, using the Joy of Cooking recipe (which includes boiling), except that we didn't have any white sugar, so i used brown. I even skimped on it, but it still came out too sweet and strong. So I added more water and lemon juice. It doesn't taste a lot like lemonade, but I rather like it anyway. Actually, sometimes it tastes good and sometimes it just tastes weird. I guess I wrote stuff and read stuff, and Rae came up I remember. There was dinner and then I went to the Orchestra 2001 concert, late so I missed the opening Dvorak nocturne. Went in with Matt and met Elena's siblings, who look incredibly like her. Seeing the three of them together was like seeing some representatives of some alien race who look basically human, but have certain features distinguished in some ways. The orchestra played a Mozart symphony which Maestro Schuller (yes, that Günther) said had only been recorded twice, and poorly. It was nice and enjoyable. Then they did his new composition, "Concerto de Camara," which was unfortunately not an ode to photography. It was, similarly, nice and enjoyable. Some decent drumming. Matt was tempted to boo but he thought that would be giving it too much credit. They threatened to play the piece again, so we left and went to Olde Club looking for hip-hop. Found only cold pizza. Back to Lang (with my back to Lang) to practice - interrupted at one point by sonata-breaking Dostal - and then to pub office "hi" to gal; WSRN meeting - even fewer people than last time, less conclusive. Triplet bookending, Ali an awkward fixture. Then: back to Olde Club, where a sizable (all-black) crowd had gathered despite spotty publicity (at least, I hadn't heard about it), and a solid mod Jill Scott-style R&B outfit was on the stage: drums, bass, jazzy guitarist, and two female singers, one of whom played cello on several numbers. Natural Selection. A guy nobody seemed to know got on the mic to thank them and plug records by groups that had played earlier, then kept talking since that's what you do when you have a mic. He did a spoken word piece of his own, about something, manhood, and that turned into a freestyle session with one of the guys from the next band. This was Subtle Ground, a crowd-pleaser, Roots-style live hip-hop group (guitar more prominent.) They had the obligatory "whatever happened to good music" song, closed with "rap/rock fusing thing" that was actually decent. Kind of cool. The headliner (or rather, only advertised act) was finally up (they were scheduled for 11; I'd arrived at 10:45 and stood through two other groups, not that they were bad). This was the Mountain Brothers, a trio of asian MCs and an awesome DJ, who started the set off with an extended show-off solo, including the intro to "Next Movement." Their rapping, with interplay and everything, was obviously leaps and bounds ahead of the decent efforts of the earlier groups, but unfortunately the sound system wasn't really able to handle their subtlety: they were just using the SoundMachine PA run through Rattech speakers, which had been fine for the noisy, busy earlier bands, but was distorting something awful on their mics. So they passed them back and forth to try to minimize distortion, which was amusing to watch. Oh man. Maybe something else happened that night too, but you know what, I'm not going to write about it now.

still dreaming of that perfect place in the sun

posted by K. Ross Hoffman at 4:43 PM 0 comments

So this turned out to be quite an interesting little weekend after all. I'm back on my one-day-delay cycle (posting one day after the events I'm describing - and usually, as now, only writing about the day after that), which is fine, and as it happens, potetially practical. Assassins, which has been filling in the cracks of my time, providing interest and excitement in the interstices between activities if not actually disrupting very many of the activities themselves, is similarly infiltrating the blogworld; and I am not blind to the thought that some intrepid assassin may be using this site as an information-gathering tool. Fortunately, in that regard, I tend to be somewhat obscure about the generalities of my routine, as detailed as I can get about their specifics, and I rarely mention plans for the future. Still, it can't hurt to have my movements removed from their print time by an extra day or so. But blogging does add an interesting little dimension to the game, which in some way encompasses nearly every aspect of life while it's going on. A number of the sixty-some folks playing have blogs, including Zabby, whose extreme paranoia (just read her last few entries) is both adorable and smart (and working), Sarah Kelly, whose updates are further along than mine - check that for an amusing account of the intersection of our trajectories, and Rabi, whose most recent post is an absolutely fantastic account of a hospital visit that no doubt relegated any thoughts of the game to the deep recesses of her mind, at least for the time being. Speaking of Rabi…

Yesterday morning started with a trip down Chester Rd a block to see the womens rugby game. I've never been to a rugby game, or indeed any sporting event at Swarthmore, but after encountering their impressively numerous and exhortative chalkings the other day, I figured that they really wanted people to show up for this game, and that it would be just an all-around good and fun thing to do. Rebecca came too, though she feared for her ass, and we had a cute little parry as we left the porch, where each gestured for the other to proceed, and then I took both her hands and we sashed along, facing each other. The opressive heat of the previous few days had subsided, and the sky was now grey, but it was a light grey, and bright enough that I wished I had worn my sunglasses. We skirted the rail fence and faked wide-open Amy Robinson ("you take one cheek i'll take one cheek"), keeping vigilant and finding a nice grassy seat a couple yards back from the center line. Several other players were in the vicinity, not to mention a number on the field (Aja, who's not playing this time but was in Anna's video, made a series of really impressive tackles and scored a few goals; Rabi, who left herself vulnerable as she was talking to a medical guy about her pained face, but we didn't have the heart to fake her); Brett, who sat with us and explained the basics of the game, and Susie Ansell, Aisha, and Adrienne Fowler, several yards away, with whom we exchanged a few meaningful glances. After watching the game for a half hour or more, we got distracted by Misha and her cut-out pictures of climbers; the game ended not much later, and Rebecca said she was ready to go, rather than stay to watch the mens game. As we headed for the fence, Aisha and Adrienne got up and started following us; we all four broke into a run, made difficult by the fact that we were all in sandals (I nearly lost one on the way; if they had been after me I might have been toast). It quickly became clear that the pair involved was Rebecca, who was safe for the moment, lying in the grass beside the sidewalk, and Adrienne, pondering the best way to go about things. I royally embarrassed myself by not being able to remember whether it had been her, Susie, or Mara who had been assmaster last semester, thus appearing not to know the difference between the three. Ad tried to flip her, a little less than wholeheartedly I think, and then lost her patience and started to walk away. Becca made a dash and gained a few yards (I seem to be using that measure a lot today) towards the barn before A changed her mind and leapt back over the fence. This sequence repeated a few times (at one point Pablo came over to see what was going on, used the opportunity to nab Aisha), and Adrienne finally let Rebecca walk free, with the distinct advantage of now knowing her enemy.

So we were back home and safe, and I stayed here for most of the afternoon, playing with my CDs and puzzles (completed the Times acrostic for the third time running, albeit with a bit of help from google - "Narghile" and "Inkberry"? come on now), until my 5:00-5:30 slot in the special SRN beach broadcast schedule. Except it turned out, when I made my wide-eyed way to campus, that there were few people on the beach, and they could barely hear the music that was being blasted out a first floor window on a dinky boombox. They had set up the two CD players, two mics and a little portable board on a table in Parlors, which made for an amusing DJing environment, but not a very, well, outside one (why exactly couldn't this have been on the porch?). I took over from (my erstwhile killer) Christine as her G. Love and Cibo wound down, and took the chance to play through some new and old favorites - "Welcome to Tokio" "Drop" "Anything You Want" "Bleeps and the Blips" "Wound that Never Heals" "Tear Off Your Own Head" "Immortal Billionaires" "The Bird that You Can't See" and "Dr. Pepper" - as Sproul, Shargel, Kluchin, Alvarez, and others cycled through, some with protective buttgear or at least vigilant hands, and at one point formed quite a crowd of an armchair circle. That was fun but no great shakes.

Upon returning, encountered Rae and her folks, and a shorn spiffed-up suspendered Joelly, headed out to Kabul. They agreed to return for me before the EgoShow, and I proceeded back upstairs to figure out dinner. From a guestlist of four (Becca, Petar, Nori, Gabe) we doubled (Mark, Alyssa, Claire, myself) in a matter of minutes, and made many trips back and forth to the porch, carrying parmesan, water, wine, plates laden with pasta, pesto, yummy asparagus, and salty-tofu-crumble, "clean" plates, and plates reladen with other things - Claire had to make another batch of pasta for her first serving and our severalth; there was fun with the phone, fragmented discussion, party sign, WSRN pot-rap 4/20 tributes, and failure to make headway on cryptic crosswords (Harpers carries one that is just ridiculously complex.) And dishes, as I picked out some house and house alternatives to stuff in my new binder. All set to take the 8:30 Bryn Mawr shuttle to the point, since Rae and folks hadn't called, they did at quarter after, and said they'd be back to get me. Of course, Joel called again at something like quarter to nine, saying they hadn't even left the city.

They were here a half hour later, and we high-tailed it to BM (Oh Mercy on the tape deck, and artfrathazing drug ritual discussion), but (at least after we secured parking two long blocks away) we were too late for the short JBE set (they had been kept strictly to 40 minutes despite substantial reaction from the crowd.) But we did catch up with [self-styled] yerinkledan out back, and he snuck/guestlisted two of us in (Rae let her parents pay) for the first couple tunes of the headliner, Vancouverian Celtic-folksters Paperboys (not half bad.) He suggested we head somewhere to talk, so Rae led us (sans cute parents, who shook my hand again as they left) what must have been ten blocks to a Barnes and Noble for to buy a Philly map. It was now considerably colder, and I was still in birks and t-shirt, not having anticipated something like this, but I was okay. He gave us updates on his various projects, and we talked for a bit about Worthstock and IFRB, and then Joel started asking him about "the industry" - leading to a long lecture/discussion on the walk back (the booksellers were closing about fifteen minutes after we arrived) about how different groups have "made it (big)" - Danny pulling out his usual trove of examples - Morphine, MP+EJ, Tracy - Joel unable to supply many besides Aspera. This continued for a while on the stoop of the point, Rae and I having little to contribute to the discussion, and then Jim came out and shook my hand and gave me a CD and I told him I hoped we could have him play, which I really do, since I wanted to see them and didn't get to that night; he's my uncle, it's my show darnit, since nobody else is stepping up to help (they're offering, but nobody's done much yet), and who knows, maybe we can pull off Infectious as well. So that wasn't a total bust, we had a nice chat anyway. And rupture-dynamics made it to Boston, or at least 35 minutes in that direction.

I wasn't really feeling up to partying when I got home, but I dutifully packed up my CD case, borrowed a funky brown hat from Rae, and headed over to "the vicinity of Kohlberg," of course keeping an eye out behind all the lilacs, just in case. Mark was in something of a pickle when I arrived, and was eager for me to throw some music on - so I slipped in "Good Beat," which is certainly house, if you think about it, and then two tracks from Playboy Mansion ("All that Jazz" and the one before it) which got one of the best receptions it has yet. For the next two hours or whatever Mark and I traded off, with me picking maybe at most 2/3rds of the material: "Harder Faster Stronger Better," "Hyperballad" mix, "Hey You What's that Sound," "My Beatbox" LRD mix, "Freakin' You" mix, "Liquidation Totale," "Busy Child." I danced as I wished, always with a thought or two for my ass; more confident as the evening went on in my chances of surviving a dancefloor attack, and eventually I was able to spend more time on the grassfloor, in a circle with boppin' Alyssa, grinnin' Claire, and so forth, or just milling daintily in between Gabe, Adrienne, Abby, Rob, Petar (and Rebecca, who dahsed out frantically when her would-be assassin arrived on the scene), Chloë, Camilla/Nicole goofiness, the dapper bootyduo of Sad Sam and Dam Laura, and other such revellers. Despite the slight chill (which was no problem for the dancers) it was a lovely scene - lights and island-injun-masks strung loosely between the "ruin" pillars around the courtyard, tiki torches and fake plastic trees dotting the area, and three mega drink-dispensers with fruited-up Hawaiian punch. And the faithful cyclotron, on the ground next to Rattech (which featured brandspankinew CD players, which frustratingly made one or two of my discs skip a bit.) As it got later, we got more adventurous - Mark popped in the Av's' "Radio" (prompting Kluchin to squeal "you're a babe and a half"), and I followed with C-shop's "Music Plus One." His "Da Funk" gave way to "Those Gamma Rays…" which might have scared off some of the less hardyhardy remainders, into "Rock Higher." Then Cassius' "Super Jungle Mix" of "Music Sounds Better," and a bit of "At The River" for clean-up music (followed by choice cuts from Prince's "Hits 2.") I stayed to clean-up, along with Aly and Claire, and when all the tikitorch bits were in the trunk and the lights uncrunk, toddled home, pushed the cd cases off my offset bed, and dozed. Again, I say, ngggghhhhh.

TOUCH MY ASS IF YOU'RE QUALIFIED!

Yesterday, also, I woke up later than planned. I guess the alarm didn't go off? Anyway, it was like 9:19 or something and I took off down the road, through the woods, met the gang coming the other way down, due apparently to the arrival of yellow-rumped warblers. We saw some, er, mallards, and heard ruby-crowned kinglets or maybe blue-grey gnat-catchers, and some people saw the latter, but I couldn't. In French we had that amusing tall dark curly guy as a substitute, and he had us talking about marriage and then debating its merits one-on-one; I used Elizabeth's parents to argue with her about it. Came back to eat something and scrounge around trinity, but there wasn't much there, then bird class, where Edith was smiling again. I signed up to go on a field trip Sunday, which will be a nice way to make up the last two walks. Finally got a minute with Jenny Yim; she reluctantly agreed to give me $250, which is better than nothing I suppose. And I did some more nothing.

Practiced and then went to the dance concert: first some impressive (and well-lit) Taiko that still wasn't quite dance, then Liza bopping about and twirling and jerking to Beethoven in a white dress and red "second-prize" ribbon (it's funny to see her now, or actually not funny come to think of it; those heady days seem so far in the past), and then the African troupe dressed as trees (very good.) Unfortunately I had to take off before the second half, to keep my appointments. The weather was extremely dramatic at this point - the heat had started to break, and rain was imminent, but there was just a darkening and wind, everyone out on the beach and blowing. Mark drove me here with Erick Morrilo blasting "lift your hands and scream and shout" or something, picked up lights and music. And eventually Rae and co. returned from Jess's birthday party, which had been interrupted by the rain just as it was finishing up. I put on pants.

Despite a bit of traffic, we made it into the city and found a parking garage before 6:30, listening to Ben's "Pynched/Promised" tape on the way (highlights: the Cornelius "Bizness" mix; Bowie's "Andy Warhol" - what album is that from?). Dinner at samosas - yummy and cheap and very filling; we were too full to eat the little sugar candy so we just threw it up in the air on the sidewalk. Talking about the best concerts we've ever seen (mine: David Byrne @ Water Street 1997, hers: Thurston Moore, Yoko Ono, and DJ Spooky [simultaneously] in NY somewhere obviously) and groups that we would want to see live. Rather than brave parking again, we walked the several blocks over to Tower, where a substantial number of people were hanging out outside. There were probably more inside though; theoretically 400, mostly (much) older and probably ex-hip. Rae and I squeezed into the side right in front of the clear space through which El was to walk to the stage. A woman with a lanyard and a card asked us to step back a little, and there he was.

Walked over to the little platform stage ("we had to leave the band up in new york, there wasn't enough space on stage") in his bulky black jacket and those silly yellow sunglasses he's wearing everywhere these days, with short short hair. He only played six tunes, switching guitars between each of them (only one on an electracoustic) and all of them (i think) accompanied by interestingly varied beats from his dual drum-machine setup. They were all from the forthcoming album, and thanks to the liner booklet that we were handed before the signing, I can tell you the titles: "Spooky Girlfriend" (with "Let Him Dangle"-like dumb doot-doot-doot line that he tried to get us all to sing along), "Tart" (the catchiest, I think, with high cracked vocals on the title), "Alibi," "When I Was Cruel (#2)" (which has an interesting cut-off sample of a woman's voice "um--" - the spin review described this as "Portishead" without the self-pity) and of course "Tear Off Your Own Head" (the only one the whole crowd new, but they weren't even singing along that much.) We tried to move around the crowd to get closer in line for the signing, but ended up being herded all the way to the back of the store, to stand motionless for fifteen minutes, looking at all the videocassettes, and then slowly moving forward, past the DVDs and CD box-sets and so on; when we were about halfway to the stairs Sydney Bev came up and said hi - she had managed to get into the show despite only having a "blue voucher," and had already gotten her signature. Eventually, they let us up into the jazz/blues area upstairs, the antechamber to the king's throne room. We were handed copies of the CD booklet. I opened mine to the page I had seen some others' signed on, thinking to save time. And then it was my turn - I complimented him on his hat, thanked him "for everything," shook his hand and called him friend. He asked Rae about her book (the form of the city) and she asked him if he knew DeLillo (she said the whole instore experience was DeLillan), he was confused for a while, then said oh, yeah. I realized right after that I should have asked him about that lyric in "Home Truth" that sounds like a cop from "Television Man" even though it hadn't come out yet. Oh well. So how did it feel meeting "would you call him your idol?" "maybe in some kind of workshop"? Pretty much how I expected. He seemed very much like I expected - funny fashion sense and all (he had on a sort of goofy black knit hat at the signing table; also a woman in front of us gave him an ugly hat she had been knitting in line.) Cool enough but not frustrating the way it might have been as a let down. Syd joined us for the walk back the car and drive back through the busy streets and open freeway - blasting "Just a Friend" and bazouki and "Traffic Lights" at the sidewalk cafés and passing trucks.

Arrived back to Danawell trailer just in time for the start of the famed Assassins video, done by Anna Stratton, which was I thought excellently in the b&w/silent physical comedy mode, with star turns by Gerrit and Sam (of course) especially, and some good Alison and John Fort as well. Then the massive assembly (nearly 70, is the rumor) went through names, almost all of which I fortunately knew - just a ridiculous number of players, and as many asses. Among what I had missed was the introduction of the new rule (the death squad which comes after you after three days of inactivity) and a reading of an e-mail poem by Christine Couture about my kill (which she then read for me again.) And the folks dispersed, to plot and so on. I was satisfied with my assignment, and already began to consider possible avenues of approach. The bummer was that Brigid, who had agreed at least a day before that we could hang out that night, announced that she "had to do math that night because her math buddy's parents would be there the next day," which I realized a few minutes later was a completely absurd excuse, and actually somewhat infuriating, given that I've been trying to see her for several weeks now (as she knows full well), and that math busyness has always been her difficulty.

So that was annoying. Also, I had missed the beginning of Red, which movie committee was showing. I stopped by Mark's room for a while, to check some of his/my house. Then, headed for Willets for various reasons, ran into Elena and a somewhat gone Matt on the way, walked with them up to McCabe and back, and to E's room, where "Photo Jenny" was blasting before we even got there. I knocked thrice on Nick's room across the hall, not sure if he was in, and eventually he answered, clearly having emerged from sleep. But despite wild hair and (of course) barefeet, he pulled out a file of checks and forms and tried to figure out SRN budgeting stuff. What he had to say was promising, also suggestions for other sources which I hadn't heard before. But who knows if it will come to anything. Then I came home, chatted with roomies for a while, and watched Roger and Me with Rebecca. It was late (after 1:00 when we started it), and I was drifting off something awful, but I enjoyed the film nevertheless, especially the 50's-isms (Pat Boone, Miss America) and the funny but tragic rabbit-vendress. As Edith stresses, it is I suppose "dated," but I didn't feel like the satire was overly forced. I would like to see the sequel. And that sleeping thing. Nggghhhhh.

House Music
(sure it's real music)

Thursday sort of felt like a wasted day, at least the afternoon. Morning was fine, excepting I missed Philosophy (which is a shame, because it's not like it makes my morning of classes feel any shorter to not have that one) because I dozed off again after one early alarm. I probably needed the sleep; although I was surprisingly not too tired after the New York adventure (well, a rough five hours crashed at Jesses plus maybe a scant three on the trains back home), I had been up marginalate again Wednesday, reading Dewey on the porch after watching the Guided by Voices documentary "Watch Me Jumpstart" with Joel and Damon (that movie is clearly a big influence on Joel, he's always referring to it and singing the songs that are in it. excellent videos for "Bulldog Skin," "Official Ironman Rally" (also on Wednesday, since I might as well go over it now - there was SC craziness in Sharples, featuring DJ Mark on the Aphex and Tobin; I slipped in a little "Star Guitar" and "Demons" to get the big beat laid-back, while he was getting food; then Inflight rehearsal, which was decent but a little frustratingly low-energy, also Matt was in a pretty bad mood.) Then (Thursday again) French, where I was apparently supposed to "present" chapters two and three of LPP, and Syntax, which was somewhat more manageable than it has been.

I followed radiant black-clad Brigid (you get it - black body radiation she's studying in astro) to her assembly/talent show observation at SRS and then came back here for lunch (oh i don't know, some bagel with cheese and junk), which got frustrating because I was waiting for things to happen (specifically for Mark to come over and listen to house, and ) and I felt like I couldn't go on campus and do other things (like move my drums from LPAC with help from Ulla and her car, or get advised by Brian Meunier, who is now my advisor rather than Cothren - didn't see that one coming,) or even clean my room or make dinner or anything. But then Mark did come over, and we flipped some good stuff - Bob Sinclar, FPM, Keoki, Arling and Cameron, Cassius. He has something like $275 to throw this party, combining funds from SAC and admissions, and he's going all out with a huge hanging palm tree decoration, multiple tiki torches, goofy "islander" lights, and so forth. And this stuff's all going to belong to SAC afterwards, theoretically. Nice. Then I went to campus to see if Ulla was still around, but no, instead practiced for a while and went to dinner with Alyssa (who has been devoured by the Spike office this week - I've only seen her briefly and rarely, and it's crazy how much I miss her.) I've been eating in Sharples way too much; I feel like we never shop or cook dinner around here anymore. I'm going to try to do my part to change that for the next couple of weeks. Back here, la di da, picked out music, for the radio, radio. An extended GbV section inspired by "Jumpstart." We did a fair amount of talking too. Here's a list:

Welcome to Tokio already!

Supergrass : Cheapskate
Stereolab : Noise of Carpet
Tortoise : A Simple Way to Go Faster than Light that Does Not work
Joe Strummer : At the Border, guy
Yuka Honda : Single Silver Bullet

Clinic : Welcome (P)
AMFM : The Death they Claim (P)
Princeton Reverbs Colonial : Our Separate Way (P)
The Extra Glenns : The River Song (P)

Guided by Voices : As we go Up, we Go down
Guided by Voices : Back to Saturn X Radio Report
Guided by Voices : I Am a Tree
Robert Pollard and his Soft Rock Renegades : I Drove a Tank (P)
Chemical Brothahs : Galaxy Bounce

Shins : Past and Pending (P)
Jim White : Still Waters
Portastatic : Teenage Kicks (R)
Super Furry Animals : No Sympathy
Elvis Costello : ID Drop
Elvis Costello : Tear off Your own Head (it's A Doll revolution)

American Analog Set : Aaron and Maria (with peremptory censoring)
Spinanes : Rummy
Roots : Silent Treatment
Corey Harris : Downhome Sophisticate
Led Zeppelin : Your Time is Gonna Come (not really) (just the organ bit at the beginning)
Firewater : Get Outta My Head
UB40 : Cos it Isn't true
[a reading from Walter Benjamin]

Enon : Rubber Car
Enon : Conjugate the Verbs
Jonathan Richman : Me and Her Got a Good Thing Goin' Baby
K.D. Lang : Big Boned Gal

that seems short, doesn't it? maybe not. it's still hot.

oftentimes i'm reminded of my younger days
when i poured punch for the franchise
and thus was knighted
got so excited.

Hooooboy. I'm going to write about yesterday and our little adventure that carried on over to this morning. Ben says that nobody likes to read my block paragraph catchup entries; i will try to avoid making the paragraphs so monolithic this time. But hey, it's my thang. Ignore the incompletes below, and they'll probably go away.

It was a Tuesday morning on less than six hours of sleep, wrapping up with Hume, writing a few pages in un petit livre bleu before checking out of class early, and syntax syntax. Sharples lunch with DJ Mark Angelillo ("only if you're willing to sit outside") enjoying the frustratingly good Sharples menu (too much good stuff - I didn't even get to the pierogies) of chef salad, chicken bbq sandwich, and lattice fries (unfortunately they weren't the usual kind, they were "savory," which apparently means "deep-fried.") Not great, you know, but good summer food, and talking about party. Jenny Yim was not in her office, which frusts, nor did I talk with Goundie about this new outdoor party stipulation (!?), but picked up a valentines red course catalog, paged through for ideas. Not much stuck out as appealing (what is Discourse Analysis again and do I want to take it?) except the things I already had my eye on - culture stuff: Dada & Surrealism, Bach, ModAmerComposers, Film Studies (conflicts with the Arth Seminar - please someone else take the seminar with me.) Vague options - stuff I may want to take sooner or later: Foundations, CompSci 21, P+P, Intro to Spanish Lit, French 3 (?), nah.

Thinking I was going to have a nice long afternoon to write here and stuff like that, I set to work on music 48-ness, googling for Bartók and so on. I got about four sentences down when Ben called and gave the go ahead. The previous night he had been pretty pessimistic about wanting to make the seven-hour roundtrip for a concert that would be no boon to his flagging health, so I had resigned myself to not going. But now he was up for it, he decided. The right choice. For him especially. "There's a train in three hours." So my mission was clear - I typed up the two record reviews you see below (not my finest work, but hopefully they're hyperbolic enough to get the point across that these albums freaking rule) and sent them off to Duffy-Greenburg-land, changed my clothes (adidas, loonshirt, scruffy stuff), stuffed a pack (throw pillow, lightweight longsleeve, toothbrush, earplugs, cloudsplitter, and headed to meet him at Sharples. Couldn't find him, so I sat with Louisa and octet splinter group, which made for hysterics as usual, esp. latest developments in the Fiona saga ("usually I would have said no, but since I fell in love with someone I hated, then maybe"). But it was too hot to eat - just picked at Caribbean bar (I thought it said "Canadian") and a lemon-meringue pie. Many trips back to the water-cooler to fill up for the train ride, and I grabbed some bagels and fruit. And then we took off, leaving Kate and pal, en route to Paul "celery-cruncher" McCartney concert, at 30th street.

Just missed a train that left a few minutes after we arrived, so we scrounged the Amtrak gallery FYE music store for accessory bargains. Bits of reading (Petit Prince-okay, can I just say? should this be underlined and italicized?) but mostly talk, as we missed the 7:40 from Trenton because of slow ticket machines, caught the 8:20 instead, and walked a few blocks from Penn to our destination: about Worthstock, SAC, and WSRN. Frustration and hope.

The line outside the Hammerstein Ballroom seemed ridiculously long, with multiple gaps allowing access to the lobbies of buildings further down the block, but they herded us through quite quickly, gave a cursive glance through Ben and my bags, clicked their clickers, and we were inside. What an awesome venue. A huge open floor, and several layers of spacious seated balconies. A lighting setup in the center of the room projected swirling patterns on a flying-saucer shaped holographic disc hanging vertically above the stage. Following Ben's footsteps, I made our way to the front of the venue, about five feet behind the metal railing that created a five-foot gap between crowd and stage; for a while I was standing right at the railing, with our backpacks stashed at its foot. Then a big one-time frat guy barged in to me with his mini-handbag girlfriend, they complained about driving seven hours to find themselves not on the guest list after all. They shared space pretty well - actually, considering it was a sold out show, it didn't feel terribly crowded at all. I would have expected more rabid Chems fans pushing up towards the front, but things were pretty chill. It was an older crowd - probably fans from '97 - not surprising given the ticket price. Opener was DJ Pete Tong, who had presumably been spinning for a while when we showed up (start time 9:00, our arrival about 10:15), and I was enjoying it, particularly a fuzzed out "I Would Die 4 U" and later on the vocoder track from "Harder Faster Better Stronger" over some straighter funky stuff. In general his choices were nice and varied and danceable, although his transitions were pretty standard, and he pulled some cringe-moments like a Martin Luther King speech over some blase trance. Towards the end of his set (last half hour?) his equipment started screwing up, which was especially weird because he didn't even seem to care. He kept doing the same things over, and it seemed like everything he touched screwed something up. It definitely wasn't intentional. He slipped on something which Ben first recognized and then I confirmed as David Byrne - then I remembered hearing about a house single he collaborated on. It's called "Wicked and Lazy," and it's awesome, I'm trying to figure out how to get a copy. Then he had some weird rock guitar house a la Apollo 440 with "God Save the Queen" lyrics over it, which went on for way too long, then he cut it off abruptly. Weird.

A synth-washed version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" flooded the arena, as smoke machines started blasting away and spotlights scanned all over the place. The tune looped the line "surrender to the void," and the mob of techies on stage left to reveal a gleaming white platform for the brothers with high sloping walls that looked like a bathtub or the prow of a ship. The disc-shaped thing flew up to be perpendicular and over top of it. Both of those turned out to be the fields for visual projections. They got on stage and screwed around a bit, headed towards what I had predicted would by "Come With Us." It was much more interesting live, after the first few minutes when they started changing things up, and the projections showed cutout figures of businessmen, dancers, and gunmen. A spoken loop announced the next number - "Block Rockin' Beats" (pictures of buildings) and of course everyone went crazy with it. Ben and I had a great little space for ourselves - enough room to dance a bit, and a dynamite unblocked view of the stage - although we had to defend a few times, when the crazy dancers (and later a belligerent drunk or two) came barging through. The next song was, I guess, "Music:Response," but the next one I recognized was "It Began in Afrika," for which the visual was just the scrawled title. It was far better live - they stuck with the hip-hop section for longer, although they did hang on to the spoken bit perhaps too much. Some more stuff, and eventually - I think I guessed it before most people, because there was a very distorted version of the "darude" riff without the correct pitches - Star Guitar. By this time curtains at the back of stage had drawn aside to reveal another huge screen for projections - and this time they had kalaidescopic images of stars, with the two-faced woman silhouette from the single cover. This was great, very high energy, although they never really kicked the opening "dee-dee-dee-dee-dee" riff, just looped the other sections and played with them. They made good use of the handclap rhythm, fitting a bassline to it and adding a whole other groove to the song. And then the vocals came in, and we were charmed. They didn't do my dream cut-off, instead one more like the record, and then things kind of died down for a while. Was that it? I wondered briefly, as they did some lackluster noodling with the dials. But no, they kept on going, for what amounted to a second set. Starting with Ben's fave (which I have to admit is incredibly seductive) "Sunshine Underground," with lovely red sunrises in the background, and then when the beat kicked in big and they went crazy for what must have been ten minutes - faces of children and adults with bizarre color patterns and designs - kind of creepy. There was a lot of stuff I didn't really know, including "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" and more from Surrender, and they played short riffs on, I think, "Setting Sun" and "Denmark." "Electrobank" was good and went on for a while. All of these were brilliantly mixed together - the transitions were long and flawless and tons of fun, as they kept you guessing what would come next. Somehow all of this faded into a pepped up "The Test" (not as good as they think it is) with cool visuals that looked like a girl swimming through Orbitz. Some more noodling, and they left the stage. Of course, in this day and age, the encore wasn't far behind. And since they left all their sequencers and drum machines running, the noise didn't even stop while they were offstage. But they returned and launched into "My Elastic Eye" from the new one, with cool glockenspiel stuff, which was fun and goofy. Nice beat. That kind of faded out too, before what I had been expecting as the encore: "Private Psychedelic Reel," maybe their best tune ever. Started out with a round stained-glass panel picture of Christ on the saucer thing, and then a kaleidescope of religious stained-glass images, then rows and rows of eyes, then greasepainted clown mouths. The tune went on forever, it felt like, and I just flung myself around, clinging to the railing which by this point we had regained. Awesome awesome. They never did the stuttering breakdown, just kept pausing and then kicking back in with the full fill and beat. Then some more noodling that didn't lead anywhere, although Ben thought it was going to. And that was it. Ben stood around to shake the lighting guy's hand, and we followed the hordes along 34th, picking up LP-sized posters of the album cover: one from the ground and one begged from a guy who had four of them. We sat in the metro station chatting with a sexy Bucknell grad and his English girlfriend, who it turned out were friends with one of Ben's acquaintances. That meant we were on the wrong train, but it was okay - as we got out to walk a bit further than necessary, Ben stopped a guy that he recognized from somewhere, and he turned out to be an artist from something-or-other. Mostly ignoring "Tony Macaroni"'s request for ticket money back to Buffalo, we made it to 3rd and 11th, called Jesse from the phone downstairs. He came to sign us in, and led us to his charming if disgustingly messy little suite, with artist-roomate, canvases around the walls and tables, dishes piled up in the sink, ashtray on the couch, sticky floor. We were able to filter some water through a Brita, which I was in dire need of. Jesse played us a few cuts from "Hasidic New Wave," and we dozed off.

Less than five hours later, at 7:00, the alarm rang, and we dragged ourselves up and out, bid Jesse goodbye, sorry to crash and run, and made it back to Penn with enough time to grab some breakfast at a croissant shop - egg and cheese roll, mango sweet snapple. The 8:10 to Trenton fed directly into the 9:something to Philly, and Ben and I both slept almost the entire way, me resting on my throw pillow and he on my shirt. There was a gap at 30th street, where we waited about half an hour, so I went back to the FYE and bought another 200-CD organizer (I'm going to need at least that to handle all the new acquisitions this year), which was on sale for $12.99 (marked down from $40 - not bad at all, thanks for the tip Ben.) The 11:11 got us back on campus before 11:45, immediately behind Lela and Rebecca (coming back from Ed obs), and well-rested enough (in my case at least) to get on with the day. I showered (aah), changed, churned out a decent Music 48 paper in under an hour, e-mailed stuff, and headed out again. Printed in Beardsley (mine is a fool), picked up the Dewey from Ali, Yim still not in, and waited in Whittier 3+5 for Kari. Admired the Math dept. kitchen, complete with "observations" sheet on the microwave ("minute * n = n minutes on high," "2 *beverage = really hot cup of coffee.") Sweltery. Magic Eye books in her office; and she referred me to a paper about VP-deletion that promises is fun and lucid. Sounds good. Then to Lang, handed in paper ("a step in the right direction, sweetie") and a somewhat frustrating (for me - although he's still on his happy-with-me kick) lesson; this not practicing is causing technique and progress to suffer, although I pulled off a halfway decent memorized Allegro. I will get there. Must practice for real this week - I should hopefully have the time for it. Back here, sitting and sweating, listening to Led Zep I and Come with Us and now Rings - the Superfurries are coming the TLA next week!! Ohkay, well some real catchup later, maybe, after dinner and rehearsal, and Dewey in there somewhere. Mark is a sweetie-pie. I was in New York last night and I barely noticed it, although I did enjoy the late night/early morning walks around. This weather is novel for now, but I'd like something else soon, if you don't mind.

you've got to tolerate
some of those people that you hate

i'm not in love with you
but i won't hold that against you

The "Hot for May" Sound

Every summer needs its summer albums – sun-drenched discs that just beg to be played incessantly and become a soundtrack for your backyard barbecues, beach-bound traffic jams, and late-August-night outdoor pontification sessions. It’s been feeling a lot like summer lately, in case you haven’t noticed, and I’ve been listening an awful lot to these two records. Like any reasonable summer album, they are both very accessible, incredibly catchy, more or less danceable, upbeat, and an insane amount of fun. Coming soon to a pool party near you…

Super Furry Animals Rings Around the World (Beggars/XL 2002)

I used to think that the Beastie Boys probably had more fun than anyone else in the world. Now I'm not so sure. The Super Furry Animals are a Welsh quintet known for such antics as riding around in blue tanks, landing a song with over fifty utterances of the word "fuck" in the UK top 25, and releasing the highest-selling Welsh-language album in history; they seem like they probably enjoy themselves pretty well. More importantly than that, as we all know, is the ability to share that fun with the rest of us. And, without a doubt, the Animals have learned how to share. Like the Beastie Boys, the SFAs are excellent bricoleurs. In the way that some music geeks like to sit down with a copy of Paul's Boutique and play name-that-sample, Rings Around the World, the Superfurries' latest opus, would make for a lovely afternoon of reference-spotting and influence-citing. Start with a glance at some of the track titles - "Sidewalk Serfer Girl," "Happiness is a Worn Pun," "All the Shit U Do," for instance, clearly point to a few influences, and the lyrics contain many more (a reference to "the midnight train to Jordan.") The music is similarly referential and eclectic: "Juxtapozed with U" is tropicalia-cheeze, replete with vocoders; "Receptacle for the Respectable," which features Sir Paul McCartney on carrot-crunching duties, is classic pop fare ending in a surprise self-described "pantomime death metal" chant, "No Sympathy" starts as a spare, folky plaint, chugs ahead and layers on the chorus harmonies (which manage to make the line "you deserve to die" sound utterly beautiful), and then switches gears without warning to become a Squarepusher-style bleeps-and-the-blips freakout; the instrumental "[A] Touch Sensitive" is Portishead-ish spy-movie hip-hop with strings and Stooges samples. But this is not to suggest that the album is merely a pastiche of pop-culture allusions and genre exercises. Despite plenty of experimenting with technology - and a couple instances of just plain rocking out (check the title track) - the predominant style of lush, melodic pop, usually with tight vocal harmonies à la the Beach Boys (they invented the male pop vocal group, er, right?) prevent the record from feeling disjointed. As for issues of originality, there is no question that there is an incredible amount of creativity here. Unlike other groups who draw heavily on the music of the 60's and 70's - Spacehog, the London Suede (both of whose lead singers share with the Superfurries' Gruff Rhys an often uncanny similarity to David Bowie), and the Apples in Stereo, to name a few that resonate here - the SFAs could never be written off as simple retro-revivalists; as much for their sheer inventiveness as for their obvious commitment to the present day. This comes through in their politics - the album's title is a reference to cell-phone noise-pollution, and various tracks here take on the death penalty, global warming, and televangelists (not to mention "Presidential Suite," which is scores of times more subtle than the countless Bill'n'Monica anthems circulated on Napster) - as well as their modern production values and their interest in technology. Rings Around the World, which in its delayed US comes with a bonus disc of seven more terrific tunes, is also available in a 5.1 Surround Sound track and videos for the entire album (some of which hopefully echo the adorable videogame album artwork.) For all their conscious artsyness, though, the Super Furry Animals - like all of the bands I've mentioned in this review, excepting probably Portishead - put the premium on fun. And I haven't had this much fun in ages.

rating: 10/10

Cornershop Handcream for a Generation (Wiija/Beggars 2002)

For a while there it looked like Cornershop had arrived on the scene for good. Not only was their indelible pop anthem "Brimful of Asha" (a tribute Bollywood rather than to bosoms, though nobody seemed to know that) in heavy rotation on MTV and, thanks to a pitch-perfect remix by Fatboy Slim, the dance clubs, but the critics seemed hep to it too. Spin (no longer the arbiter of cool it once was, at least in my neck of the woods) ranked 1997’s When I Was Born for the Seventh Time somewhere in the mid-30s on their best of the 90’s list, and it seemed like funky days were back again. I, for one, was somewhat miffed when Disco and the Halfway to Discontent, the incredibly infectious, definitely deserving 2000 release by head ‘shopper Tjinder Singh’s side project Clinton, met with critical apathy. I understood that the beat-heavy direction of that release was probably not calculated to appeal to critics who had applauded When I Was Born’s amalgamation of South Asian sounds, political consciousness, and summery pop. And I fear that the latest release from the crew (back under the Cornershop moniker this time, although I can’t tell exactly how much of this is more Tjinder’s baby – and the plethora of guest appearances and genre-shifting make this feel like less of a "band" effort anyway) won’t be doing them any favors in that department. But, to be honest, who cares. The boys seem to know what they want to do, critical acclaim be damned, and, like some other bands I could mention, they have a ton of fun doing it. Handcream for a Generation trades in the marginally more comprehensible political rallying of When I Was Born for a plethora of nonsense catchphrases about "making the dope dope and the dope dope" and "the overgrown supershit." Those are quotes from two of the records most immediately catchy (and ridiculously titled) numbers: respectively, "Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform" (whose refrain features a housy synth-line and a children’s chorus, making for a kind of Daft Punk-meets-Langley Schools effect) and "Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III" (the first single, with an irresistable guitar riff in the vein of "Brown Sugar.") They also do that thing of repeating their song titles in other songs, as in the techno-stomp "Music Plus 1" and the dub reggae "Motion the 11," which reference one another so much that it’s hard to remember which is which, and also in the red-hot Memphis soul of the album-opening "Heavy Soup," which includes a showtime-at-the-Apollo spoken welcome by Otis Clay (who, astute observers will remember, was himself welcomed to Tokio on the Clinton record a few years back.) The most lyrically coherent track is probably a rather uninspiring reworking of the Clinton ode to social-equality-through-dancing anthem "People Power in the Disco Hour." Basically, these aren’t the most serious lyrics ever committed to record, and the music is nearly as silly as the words. But, you know, that’s okay. For one thing, it’s danceable – the 80’s-pop and techno-cheese of Disco and the Halfway have left their mark, and this disc includes collaborations with DJ Rob Swift of the X-Men for some hip-hop fun as well. And at least they keep things interesting – even the 14-minute sitar-drenched epic "Spectral Mornings," one of the few tracks to feature the South Asian instrumentation and Hindi lyrics that have been a key component of past Cornershop albums, never gets too boring. Handcream for a Generation is not the most consistent album imaginable – the latter half sometimes sinks to mere novelty and retreads of past achievements ("Slip the Drummer One" resurrects the computerized voice of "Disco"’s "Hip Hop Bricks") – nor the most revelatory. But it’s got plenty to make me happy. Why can’t those critics just lighten up?

rating: 8/10