REDIRECTION TIME!

New link to the ol' blog: http://www.arijoseph.com/blog

wane on, wane off.

It's hard to admit that blogging should really be relegated to responsible professionals with consummate skill. Especially with graduate school starting up, my realistic ability to keep up with this medium will be greatly diminished. But luckily for you, loyal readers, my posts will be better even as my wit begins to dull.

What's been up lately? Oh, you know, E V E R Y T H I N G. Well, for one, I made it back from Canadia in tact:



We saw one moose, one plastic snow leopard, and one ATV. Pretty good for wildlife.



Speaking of wildlife, besides hanging out with Simon, Todd, Chil and Steph over the course of a week, we hung out with Dave Marshall, my old camp counselor and former lead guitarist of Staggered Crossing. Yeah, that's Warner Canada, bitches. Here's Dave doing a dry run of a song he would later perform with his band the Buffalo Builders:



As you will recall from my last post, Marisa gave me 88 reasons why she is still the most awesome person ever for getting me a ticket to 88 Boadrums:



From New York and Toronto, it was off to Columbus, OH, home to Tyler, Jo, Lula (see below), the Fightin' Buckeyes, Skreened, Matt Earley, and all sorts of other goodies. We vegged out, ate well, and caught Tropic Thunder and Vicki Cristina Barcelona. And oh yeah, Doug Benson who you may peep below:



And the following is known as Lula:



What a nice way to sign off...

a quick one while she's away

Well, $hit is crazy right now, to be blunt. Tomorrow I'm off to the great white north, and not just kinda' white but really white:


*I have no idea who these people are, just to be clear.

Speaking of white, I just got back from Nantucket, where, to paraphrase Tyler, I was the "hairiest person around." Here's what Nantucket kind of looks like:



Mike Birbiglia was there, and so was I, along with Kai and Susan. We had been discussing Birbigs' fantastic class clown joke, which goes something like "I was never the class clown. The class clown was the guy who would say 'you're fat, you're gay, I'm outta here!' I was always a little bit fat and a little bit gay." Suddenly, from a mysterious tent by the beach, we heard the magical words "you're fat, you're gay, I'm outta here!" only to realize that we had stumbled upon true comedic genius by accident (make sure you read Mike's account here):


*crappy iPhone photography courtesy of me and Steve Jobs. Seriously, is exposure control too much to ask for?

Then I moved to Park Slope, home to me and other A-list-in-my-book celebrities such as Donny, Jesus and the hot chick from Inventing the Abbotts. Seriously, can anyone else boast of having two stars of The Big Lebowski living in their neighborhood? It was sad to leave Somerville behind, but I didn't get into MIT because I'm not enough of a dork. More importantly, I really wanted to go here, and that's where I'll be in September.

I've been struggling to explain exactly what I will be doing, but I can tell you about some cool things that have come out of the program. There's GRL, there's Dodgeball, there's Clay Shirky, and many others. I think the website puts it best when they say that ITP is "a Center for the Recently Possible."

Speaking of graffiti, I just saw an excellent exhibit at Deitch by Os Gemeos which I would recommend seeing, except that it closes today. Here's some of their stuff:



Tonight, it's off to see 88 Boadrums at Brooklyn Bridge Park:


Tomorrow morning, Toronto, to see old camp friends, then Monday off on a four-day canoe excursion, then off to Columbus, OH on Friday to see what's-his-name. Ok, I'm off to go buy the Gemeos book. See you in a couple of weeks!

me: sigh... so true: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1125.html
the voice of reason (vor): jesus
but of course, that assumes that our financial/economic system will still be intact by the time that young man retires
he made the right choice.
me: haha, what a silly assumption!
haha i say, haha!
but how will we pay for our data plans...
sigh.
vor: palms up, shoulders up
me: PUSU
i like that
vor: sneezing or cursing

VOR is busy. You may be interrupting.

FILM MINER: the meaning behind Justice's video for "Stress"

Sorry it's been a while since I last posted. I've been dealing with tying up loose ends here in Boston before moving back to New York in August to attend school. That, in addition to some dear old friends visiting and some pleasant nights out, all of which is a recipe for decreased blog chatter.

---



I was reminded of writing a piece on Justice's new video for their single, Stressed, after reading a quick blurb on Arktip about it (peep the link for the video). The video is, at the very least, provocative in the very strictest sense of the word. It's hard to walk away from watching the video without being affected by its apparent senselessness; it is rendered in a style that one hopes is just cinéma vérité and not merely documentary footage of a turbulent group of youth.

I have limited background information on the culture of suburban Parisian youth. To be completely forthright, most of my understanding of the cultural strife that exists between mainstream French culture and the mostly Arab, North African and Jewish residents of the suburbs of Paris comes from Mathieu Kassovitz's excellent film, La Haine (Hate), which I highly recommend. Beyond that, most of what I know about it comes from anecdotal evidence from French friends, and news coverage of the riots that broke out a few years back. That being said, I think La Haine provides fascinating insight into an oft-overlooked subculture, both within France and especially beyond it. Much like City of God or Paradise Now, these movies serve as powerful introductions to tense regional conflicts that remain mostly unknown outside of the players directly involved.



Having seen La Haine before watching the Justice video, I wasn't quite as viscerally shocked as many of my friends I forwarded the video to. There is a fair bit of violent antagonism practiced by the film's main characters, and the film suggests that these outbursts are the result of a feeling of alienation and despair amongst the youth who feel like they are presumed guilty by any and all authorities they encounter. Of course, many of them are amidst the perpetration of crimes even when the film commences, so perhaps the viewpoint that they are guilty isn't completely unfounded. But the crimes are portrayed as crimes of necessity, of survival and maybe lastly of opportunity.

The film, though mildly on the side of the disenfranchised youth, does an excellent job of portraying the impetuses behind their actions. In and of itself, this can be seen as a defense of these acts, but they are portrayed so ruthlessly that in fact I think the movie ends up being a pretty fair rendering of reality. The result is a film that creates a feeling of total hopelessness concerning how to resolve these situations, a feeling that I have to admit having felt in both Brazil and Israel with regards to their regional conflicts. So in many ways, it was as realistic as it possibly could have been to me.

So why add fuel to this fire in a music video? Why would a band like Justice, a band whose lyrics (when they are present) remain mostly innocuous references to dancing, choose to portray these youth in such a seemingly negative light? To a certain degree, the Stress video is merely the most violent parts of La Haine strung together without explanation for the actions, without remorse, without reflection and without reasoning.

Ultimately, I think Justice created the first great protest song/video of 2008 and possibly of this generation. Though nothing in the song Stress really correlates to the images in the videos, it serves as an intense soundtrack for the images they filmed and is never distractingly out of place. In other words, I don't know if that's what they had in mind when they wrote the song, but it certainly works well in the video.

Having just seen Brit-Folk-Revivalist Richard Thompson live, the idea of protest songs was fresh in my head the last month or so. Thompson gave a concert as part of the Lowell Folk Festival, and performed many protest songs about current wars, past wars, society and other usual topics of discussion when a guitar and vox populi are present. I greatly enjoyed the concert, but frankly, the songs seemed, well... antiquated. I think our generation doesn't get the same visceral sensation from a Bob Dylan song that our parents did; for us, Rage Against the Machine is the sound of anger and rebellion, and hip-hop is the poetry of the streets. Dylan is appreciated in a literary sense, for his beauty of structure and his nuanced perspectives, but not as a force to incite change, and certainly not as a societal voice who "tells it like it is." I'm not sure Dylan ever acted in that capacity, but he seems to be revered as a reverend of all peoples who brought attention to issues that seemed altogether ignored, which is an excellent jumping-off point for my defense of the power of the Justice video.

Had you not seen La Haine, this video may have been your first introduction to the suburban youth of Paris. They are young, precocious, "colored", deliberate and angry, if the video is to be believed. But the video really succeeds in making you ask the question "why?" And if it succeeded in getting you to be even somewhat curious about the motives of these youth, then I think it has performed its duty.

Some of the answers to this question can be found in La Haine. Though it is a rendering of this reality, it is nonetheless a valuable tool for understanding why these youth act the way they act. Call me naive or a knee-jerk liberal, but I think that a better and more complete understanding of their world is a good first step to solving a very complicated problem.

RAMPANT HABERDASHERY/DEAF JAM: discoveries

1) thanks to hans and fras for the new T! i LOVE it. just came in.
2) new friendlymixtape! hey! june!

KINDRED: r.i.p. george carlin

Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

(via NYtimes.com)

GRAIN: the bikes, the bikes!

futureperfect: the dutch

nick and i hit blue ribbon in arlington.

whoever this is knows how to bike/party

does it count as steampunk if it's human-powered...

rampant haberdashery

So, I've finally taken my still-developing design skills to the marketplace, and decided to start selling some t-shirts. Some are inspired by random tomfoolery, some are influenced by my current activities, some are requested and some are for causes (and some are both!). Below are some designs that are now available for purchase from the excellent one-off screener, skreened.com:

the shape of things to come



A somewhat new friend asked me whether I had any Obama T's. As of 10pm last night, I did not. But after taking some inspiration from Blue Note covers of the past (via Scott Hansen), I thought that an album-cover-inspired look was perfect for the patented Obama elegance and cool. Portions of (my cut) of the proceeds will go toward supporting Obama's run for/to/by the White House. Available here.

UPDATE: The shirt is being featured on the front page of skreened.com!

metaphor/simile

I can't quite remember what spawned this idea. I guess I have always loved the idea of taking a stand on totally inane issues. This was more of a typographic exercise, but I think it fits the text well. Available here.

cassettenova




This design was based on a poster I made for recent gigs at The Savant Project. Though the gigs will not be happening anymore unfortunately, you can keep the spirit alive by broadcasting your support for your favorite DJ (who, by the way, will probably be spinning for these guys in July). Available here.

TWO MORE THINGS

1) I'd way rather have my friends modeling these things than headless, cool guy up here. If you get a shirt and love it, send me a picture of you rocking it and I will post it!

2) More shirts coming soon! Plus a new mix coming soon!

WARM GLOW: i'm not there

One could approach Todd Haynes' impressionistic biopic of Bob Dylan from several disparate and individually profound angles, which is one of the oft-cited successes of the film. The divergence from the traditional biopic formula, the reverence for French New Wave and avant guard cinema, the use of six different characters in order to render a whole Dylan greater than the sum of its parts, one that simultaneously deifies him while giving us a clearer vision of his humanity: these elements give the film the kind of depth that make it easy to come back to immediately, with time or again and again.

But what I'm Not There really succeeded in doing was giving the pop culture icon (in the sense of notoriety, not infamy) a portrayal that probably most closely mirrors his own sentiments, which I envision as being the constant struggle to challenge the very forces that try to enlist him as a sin-absolving voice for their own complacency. Ultimately, it seems the people that always felt as though they owned a piece of Dylan were the very people that misunderstood him the most.

It seems perpexling that the two other analogous stories I think of on this point are Sex and the City and Dave Chappelle, but allow me to explain.

As much as I would rather not expend valuable blogspace discussing the Sex and the City movie that came out last week, I have devoted a surprisingly large resource allocation of brainRAM to badmouthing the show, the film and its effect on my beloved New York in the last couple of weeks, all of which was an excessively long way of saying that I just didn't think it was funny. And don't worry, I will explain the relation to Dylan and I'm Not There in due time.

Essentially, my argument against SatC is that the show/movie is anything but banal fluff; that the show has had a visibly detrimental effect on the social fabric of New York. That every two months, the New York Times feels the need to profile yet another magazine editor on her perpetual journey to virtually re-enact all four women's superficiality in the span of a couple hours each day even though the show has been off the air for 2, 3, 4 years now (they have to keep changing the number each time they write it). And that yes, there is something wrong with that.

A friend of mine last night countered that I was missing the real triumph of SatC, which is the celebration of post-feminism. Not only was SatC a dramatic paradigm-shift in the way women were portrayed on TV domestically, but its reach across the globe has radically redefined women's self-perceptions around the world: you could wear heels and fight for equality, you could wear pink and go to Harvard Law, etc. Point well, well taken.

The argument against this I was unable to articulate in our limited time last night was that many of these sources of feminine beauty seem to have developed from a male-dominated media perspective. It wasn't too long ago that collectively, as a society, we complained about unfair expectations of women and double standards that let boys be boys and forced women into wonderbras. But if our solution to that problem was keeping the wonderbras and forcing boys into becoming the Mr. Bigs of the world, then I think we went about this all wrong.

Ultimately, the point was moot because she thought that the movie had undermined many of her points about the show's poignance. SPOILER ALERT: in the end, the girls did have to get married, were cheated on, and eventually caved into familial pressures.

It is here where we begin to see parallels between SatC and I'm Not There. I told my friend that I believed that many of the women profiled in those Times articles (however big or small a minority/majority they may be) failed to see beyond the blatant superficial absolution (there's that word again) of materialism, and took the show at its word, which justified the purchase of $500 pumps. This kind of rampant materialism affects both women and men, but it was such a integral part of marketing the show that it was hard not to pick on it for that very reason. Therefore, much like Bob Dylan, I feel like there are two camps of people who come away with vastly different views of the show that lead to fundamentally different schools of thought: the ladies who believe that the show's rampant materialism is grounds for justifying even the most lavish extravagance regardless of costs both financial or social, and the ladies who see the show's frank discussions of sexuality as the latest boon for women's lib by insinuating that being promiscuous or slutty and sleeping with a lot of men are not analogous. Basically, sin absolution versus greater profundity at the cost of simplicity.

Of course, much like Bob Dylan, the show takes money from both sides equally, so we will never have much of a definitive answer on what its true intentions were: feminism or shoes (or is it feminism and shoes). But maybe were can learn from old Mr. Zimmerman.

Dylan spent much of his time and money trying to avoid, subversively undermine or actively sabotage the very church of "right on" he founded in the first-place, mostly because he realized that his protest songs were doing little to lull people out of the very complacency they claimed to abhor. It is, perhaps, the only succinct theme in I'm Not There, and the point that is most fervently defended without question. They loved him but hated humanity, he hated them but loved humanity, eventually humanity lost. Dylan got into the game in order to question the rules, and found himself the beneficiary of some serious rule-bending, which is where Dave Chappelle enters the story.

Chappelle and Neal Brennan created Chappelle's Show with the expressed intent of making entertaining television, but there is no doubt concerning the broader social message it was broadcasting. Since Chris Rock's simmering on the comedy scene, there had been a large void of a black comic voice in the mainstream comedic circuits, and Chappelle was in the right time at the right place to assume the mantle.

Chappelle's Show was always way smarter than it had to be (as evidenced by its crude, Hispanic hell incarnate, Mind of Mencia which set Hispanic people back 516 years as of this writing). Even little shticks like Rick James and John Mayer and ?uestlove jamming in a black barber shop were somehow statements of sociopolitical importance. But as the popularity began to heat up, Chappelle started to notice the strange twinkle in the typical white frat boy's eye as he quoted the "Niggar family" sketch with a little too much emphasis on the word that isn't "family." He realized that maybe people were laughing for the wrong reasons, and he decided to pull the plug much to the chagrin of the corporate higher-ups. Chappelle retreated to his private life, and has since only reluctantly re-entered the public live mostly to poke fun at the whole thing and try to illuminate the truth. Ultimately, I find it sad how many people bought into the story of his "institutionalization" in South Africa, but I guess I'll never be able to conclusively disprove them.

I can only hope that Dave Chappelle or Sex and the City get a tome as morally justifying and complete as I'm Not There. The film almost serves as a press release for the more challenging Dylan years, when he often provided the only challenge to his knee-jerk supporters or joined in the chorus of those who were skeptical of his successes. Long ago, Dylan, much like Carrie or Dave Chappelle, realized that he could most help others by helping himself, which didn't necessarily mean making ungodly amounts of money and then hoping to do right by it. Hopefully we can eventually all understand Dylan as this kind of figure, but for those of us that didn't major in English just to write a thesis on "Subterranean Homesick Blues", I'm Not There is as good of a proxy of these struggles as any Dylan could have hoped for.

GRAIN: somerville to portsmouth, trip (the light) fantastic

it's kind of a bummer that these are backwards, but oh well...


the romain lo mein.

crochet rocking out to my nano.

gump wondering where the party's at. seriously.

trees in portsmouth. they're so green!

arrival in portsmouth. our primary objective was achieved. actually, the primary goal was sustenance from the friendly toast.

nire's ready for 100 more.

alcatraz, new hampshire style.

crochet can't take ANYMORE of gump's "suggestions"

stealing the scene yet again at the portsmouth park & ride.



arrival in hampton. goofy gump grin #1.

cat eye. because leds are useless during the day.

cruising through the hampton beach traffic.

hampton friggin' beach.

route 1a continues.

the cape? no. hampton friggin' beach.

arrival in seabrook, nh. seabrook did not go for dean in 2004.

crossing the hampton bridge.

missing the party.

i nearly killed gump in the name of great typography.

uh, salem? no.

another town.

there i am, woefully unprepared for the adventure.

we had a guardian on our trip. thy name was gump.

i didn't quite have the hang of this cameraphone self-portrait thing yet.

almost getting lost in lynn. "i wouldn't trust 'i think i saw a sign.'"-gump. we did see a sign.

salem.


clif bars consumed: 7
nut & berry trail mix bags consumed: 1
commuter rail and/or T stops passed: 5? maybe 6?
nostalgic moments: 9
gumpisms heeded: 14
gumpisms ignored: 16
cost of normally relieving oneself in the unsubsidized state park bathrooms of new hampshire: $4
cost to us of relieving ourselves in the unsubsidized state park bathrooms of new hampshire: nothing.
technique: talking sweet nothings and solving their gnat problem.
total miles covered in the weekend: by me personally? 100+.