ch(ari)smatica

REDIRECTION TIME!

2008-09-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

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

wane on, wane off.

2008-08-31T22:45:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

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"

2008-07-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-23T10:26:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-06-16T21:05:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-12T09:55:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T21:59:00.000-07:00

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+.

GRAIN: cut copy and stormy weather.

2008-05-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

storm's a-comin'.

stop eating. or top eating, if the mailing sticker is to be believed.

hey! cut copy @ paradise.

cut copy @ paradise in different colors.

ominous.

not well executed photo of ominousness.

decordova sculture garden. these are sharks.

phatty over-exposures on the phone digicam.

rusty underbelly, which, coincidentally is the name of my new delta blues band.

the over-exposure gives it a sense of looking up from the depths of the sea. see? i could've been an art historian.

ACADEMAGIC: what do blog commenters miss most about old new york?

2008-05-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

The problem began with the following question: what do you miss most about old New York? The New York Times City Room blog asked the provocative question on its blog last week, resulting in a flurry of nostalgic answers (478 comments as of May 27th). The question is near and dear to many a New Yorker's heart, but ultimately I didn't have the patience to sift through a lot of the ramblings because ultimately I have about as much attention span for blog comments as I do for The Jerry Springer Show, which is to say not much (or so I thought).

So, I approached Tyler about an idea I had, which was a website that would be able to create tag clouds from any source text. Tag clouds, if you are unfamiliar with them, are aggregations of word counts in a given text, where each word is resized according to its frequency. They are commonly found on blogs to denote word frequency, or on social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us (coincidentally, isn't it weird that del.icio.us doesn't own the domain http://www.icio.us/?). Tyler, being the guru that he is, promptly replied with tagcrowd.com, which is effectively the concept I had envisioned, albeit with much better execution.

Promptly, I took this new found information and plugged in my source text, and below was the result:

(Click on the image for a larger view)

Initially, I was totally befuddled by the apparent fondness that people had held for the old 23rd Street, until I realized that the blog posting was originally dated May 23rd, thus illuminating one of the limitations of using unfiltered tag clouds. Nevertheless, I'm intrigued by tag clouds as an analytical tool, albeit one that has to be used with a grain of salt.

As I learn more about the semantic web from Tyler, it's easy to see the difficulties and challenges we face in harnessing this information in a way that is useful and meaningful. It still takes a human mind to connect the fact that New Yorkers miss the West Village about as much as they miss the graffiti-filled subways of yore and old Times Square, but then again, there's no way of determining whether people were mentioning these examples as things that had gotten better or over time without reading through each of the entries.

-----

On a personal note, I have to say that I was a little disappointed by the lack of real surprises in this tag cloud, but maybe that is an argument in favor of finding the devil in the details. After all, I'd be more than a little shocked to find that people miss the old children's museum in the 50's on the West Side as much as I do, to say nothing of the days when Patsy Grimaldi still played Sinatra records at Grimaldi's Pizzeria and the wait was less than 45 minutes, or the fact that my parents and I were able to live on 37th Street and 8th avenue for less than it would cost to live in the South Bronx today. "Affordability" was a general term bandied about quite a bit, but it's vague enough that it's hard to fully grasp what it means. Then there were the trips to Fire Island as a kid...

Another issue is people's definitions of "old New York" seem to vary enough that there is no real concrete understanding of what it means. I find myself missing things about New York that I wasn't even alive to see, like Ebbets Field, the jazz age or the Harlem Renaissance, modernism, Woody Allen's upper east side, Coltrane or Bill Evans at the Vanguard (for God's sake you can hear the clinking of glasses in the background on those recordings), and I could go on and on. But these span the entire 20th century in New York, without even mentioning the days of the elevated train or horse-drawn carriages and farmland in Queens and uptown Manhattan.

I guess there is a lot to miss, but there is just as much to cherish now. New York is still the same cavernous mess I grew up in, constricted by a grid system it is just waiting to bust out of, to paraphrase Timothy "Speed" Levitch. I can't wait to spend my evenings cruising Broadway in the village at 1am, long past the hours when the tourists have bought their trinkets and the beautiful have retired their lofts to look up from the bottom of our little grand canyon and remember that nothing has really changed.

-----

UPDATE: Here's the actual text from the tag cloud:

-the (14) 23rd (422) 24th (23) 25th (22) 2nd (14) 8th (21) affordable (43) altman (16) art (16) artists (18) automat (24) ave (49) avenue (59) bar (35) became (16) born (20) broadway (38) bronx (18) brooklyn (35) business (15) cabs (26) cafe (14) canal (22) cars (24) center (14) central (28) cents (17) checker (23) club (29) coffee (23) corner (31) crazy (15) cream (26) deli (16) diner (18) east (45) egg (20) floor (14) food (21) free (15) guy (23) hall (14) hotel (18) ice (17) island (21) jeans (18) john (16) kids (16) life (25) lived (36) love (24) manhattan (32) mark (22) memories (19) moved (15) movie (26) music (17) native (30) neighborhood (40) newspaper (16) ny (40) nyc (47) nyu (13) ones (14) original (23) park (64) penn (14) pizza (27) places (16) plaza (23) queens (14) remember (28) restaurant (28) ride (16) room (26) school (22) shops (32) slice (18) soho (19) square (60) station (32) stores (33) street (142) subway (54) summer (16) theater (25) times (56) tokens (15) tourist (13) town (18) train (21) union (14) village (55) walking (33) washington (14) west (37) wonderful (17) world (39) years (29) yorkers (35)

created at TagCrowd.com

atmospheric confluence in popular music

2008-05-18T22:50:00.001-07:00

Bossa nova was a self-fulfilling prophecy; it was the new wave before there was new wave. It was, by definition, the in sound from way out, to paraphrase the Beastie Boys. Without irony, the French band Nouvelle Vague appropriated its formal theory without really understanding what it was all about, which is why nylon string guitars covering "Love Will Tear Us Apart" will only really be a temporary novelty and not a lasting testament to a time and place.

The irony of this could not be greater, since bossa nova was, at the time, the latest movement in the eternal history of love songs: love of place, history, culture, and most of all, love in all of its swooning yet lustful glory. That being said, bossa nova's crowning achievement isn't so much lyrical prowess, advanced harmonic usage (for popular music, at least), or successful stylistic synthesis (jazz + traditional Brazilian songwriting). Bossa nova's legacy is the palpable and visceral feeling one gets of a beach, a girl, grainy film, modernist apartment buildings on the waterfront, and fluttering hearts. Even the most cited criticisms of bossa nova as a movement acknowledge this power of image conjuring as fact, only to dismiss it as an incomplete view of Brazilian culture of the period at the hands of cultural imperialists, who took the saccharine aspects of samba and combined it with smooth sounds of Chet Baker or Gerry Mulligan.

It would be conjecture for me to try and understand why bossa nova is so palatably visceral. Maybe it was Black Orpheus, though I hadn't watched it until last year and didn't find it nearly as evocative as I would've hoped. Maybe it was old photographs of linen pants and aviator glasses, but again, I wouldn't make the connection until much later. As far as I can tell, the sound of Stan Getz's saxophone against the backdrop of João Gilberto's guitar is as ingrained an image as there can possibly be. It feels, almost objectively speaking, to be the voice of its time and place, a time and place I would have loved to have been a part of. Even if I understand, intellectually or even intuitively, that bossa nova was an incomplete rendering of Brazil in the 1950's and 1960's, I cannot help but be drawn into its cosmic romanticism, into a world devoid of conscious contrivances and comprised of organic bliss. When I listen to Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa's Domingo, the images are so clear that I can smell the sea salt. This must be what heaven is like.

It got me thinking of other perfect confluences of music and time that I have experienced. There is something to be said for the image of the Palace of Versailles that pops up anytime I listen to Mozart or even Bach. Whether it is historically accurate is a moot point; what I know to be true is decadent waltzes and a world still unperturbed by the annoyances of industrialism. Of course, what is hidden behind that is the oppression of early colonialism and the arrogance that comes with such blatant, forceful conquering, but again, that is a story for another day.

Acid jazz, eletronica, lounge and trip-hop all conjure up images of the contemporary urban landscape. As absent as these genres are from the American mainstream, their ubiquity in commercials has left a lasting impression on my imagination. It is impossible for me to hear Groove Armada, The Cinematic Orchestra, Portishead, Thievery Corporation and the like without thinking of being in a pretty nice sports car, traversing the almost post-apocalyptic empty urban landscape with four people that are presumably my friends. Maybe this is a bit commercially whorish of me, but frankly, I think it is more important to acknowledge these images than try to repress them as unrealistic, capitalist-induced fantasies that are the result of early indoctrination. At the very least, if I can articulate these images then maybe I can be more aware of the behind-the-scenes manipulations that created them in the first place. The soundtrack to a walk through my cavernous old stomping grounds of Greenwich Village late at night are usually accompanied by one or more of these groups.

Another genre that really manipulates emotionally is alt-country. When I listen to Wilco, Ryan Adams, Cat Power and even Calexico to a certain degree, it isn't hard to imagine a summer porch scene replete with mosquito tape, a neighborhood bar or a desert ranch alone in solidarity. Whether the imagery or the music came first is beyond me, but these are the images I have attached to them.

Strangely enough, while I was in Tucson for my friends' wedding a couple of years ago, I thought not only of Calexico, a hometown band whose soundscapes are as influenced by their surroundings as is possible, but Aaron Copeland, with whom I associate images of canyons, "wild west" frontier land and general Americana. That Americana is both used in reference to turn of the century landscape painting and bluegrass-influenced music is both strangely divergent and completely coherent. I suppose they differ only in the periods of time they depict.

One cultural artifact that synthesized the auditory and visual cues succinctly and coherently was the film Amelie. The film so perfectly illustrates the romanticized view of Paris so often conjured up by tourists and foreigners that the city is almost bound to be a letdown upon arrival. But like any great city, Paris deserves its reputation for being a city of romance and the line between cinematic perfection and urban landscape reality quickly erodes on a beautiful night walking around the Eiffel Tower while hearing the faint sounds of an accordion player.

To examine the genres that do not elicit such strong imagery for me is almost to show a history of genres I have fallen out of love with. Though I still carry a deep affection for jazz, the kind of jazz that moves me is drastically different than the music I used to (and still occasionally do) perform. It may speak to my lack of mastery of the saxophone, or it may speak to the development of my emotional maturity, but regardless, it took me several years after I stopped playing regularly to appreciate the beauty and thoughfulness of Nat "King" Cole, early Miles Davis and many others. To me, the idea that jazz could be not only emotional but evocative was foreign until after I put down the saxophone for some time. Now, when I listen to "Kind of Blue", I am awash with emotion and find myself sitting in an Eames chair next to a fireplace, wearing thick-rimmed beat glasses and a khaki jacket, an image so sublime it makes me want to re-enact it without pause.

It says something to me that a lot of indie rock fails to elicit this kind of emotional response. For me, indie rock is an exploration of energy levels and vicarious technical virtuosity (otherwise known as "air drumming/guitaring"). It is rare for an indie rock song or album to elicit this kind of emotional response for me. I think of indie rock as a focused channeling of energy more than an exploration of mood creation. But there are, of course, exceptions, even if I can't currently remember what they are.

Sorry if the post rambles quite a bit, but this exercise actually proved to be extremely cathartic. Music is such a powerful force that it can be easy to forget how it affects our day-to-day reality as well as our dream universe, but once in a while it's nice to stop and take stock.

------

Postscript:
The wonderful irony of the photos I have posted to accompany this piece is that not a single one of them really encapsulates the emotion or mood I discuss. Maybe it is innately impossible to capture this universe, but each one of the examples I mention above corresponds to such a visceral image that I find it impossible to believe that the image doesn't exist somewhere in non-imagined form.

------

Second Postscript:
What are some songs, artists, albums or genres that give you that real palpable, visceral sensation? There are plenty that I left out: Celtic and Acadian music, classical guitar, Cuban trova, afro-pop, etc. I'm curious to see what makes you guys tick.

The ever-flowing streams of the Internet

2008-05-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

So the great thing about the internet is that no matter how many links you click on, items you scroll through on Google Reader, pages you bookmark on delicious, videos you Digg, etc., you will always miss something that other people have known about for seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years or beyond. The latest find from my old friend Kevin is The Perry Bible Fellowship, a hilariously dark collection of animated observations that I wholly consumed in one enterprising afternoon. I can't recommend it enough.

a post in three acts

2008-05-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

"Hey! Long time no shit!" she said. Had she known the depths of my food poisoning the week before, she would've understood why I bit my tongue before saying, "You don't know the half of it!" Then again, she isn't psychic.

- - - - - - - - - -

I love the Batman movies. I don't love all of them unapologetically like some rampant comic dork that can somehow justify Uma Thurman's sexy librarian plant lady shtick or George Clooney's amplified nipples; I hate the bad ones just like everyone else. But the thing that I always loved the most about them was the way they depict Batman's drive home. Once he got to that magic point in Westchester/Princeton/Brooklyn(?!), public roads would give way to a gauntlet of trees and leaves as it is always Autumn in Gotham, literally and figuratively.

Something about that drive home must really define who Batman and/or Bruce Wayne is, since almost every big-screen iteration of Batman has made a point of spending a few minutes depicting what would otherwise be a benign event for any other person: the commute home.

I always enjoy the last bit of my ride home late at night, when I roll up the last hill while the trees are still and the traffic is nil. It's my return-to-Wayne-Manor moment.

- - - - - - - - - -

DEAF JAM/GRAIN:

Cut Copy tonight was great. That is all. I was going to go on some rant about how I don't really understand cocaine usage, but sleep is more interesting at this point.

Currently falling asleep to: Loose Fur.

HOLLOWPOINT: why you should get to know tyler kremberg

2008-05-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

So, my online life partner and web guru (guru in the jazzmatazz/hip-hop way, not the lame monkish enlightenment way) has taken up the cause of why so many of us who are so intimately connected to the best of what the world wide web has to offer are so often dissatisfied with its intended or unintended effects. Actually, no he didn't; I just projected that onto his writing. But it's something that we grapple with all the time, and something that has yet to be meaningfully or substantially addressed.

We are still in the infant stages of fully grappling with the internet's sociological impacts. In spite of the great strides we have made with regards to communication (IM, blogging, RSS, media access, YouTube etc.), collaboration (wikis, shared documents, the symantic web, etc.) and information generation, dissemination, and retrieval (Google, JStor, etc.), sociological analysis of the web remains, paradigmatically-speaking, static. We discuss, with great regularity, the dangers of MySpace (which used to be the perils of the chatroom), the oxymoronic nature of technology in the workplace (not always a boon to efficiency), privacy and civil liberties, and the implications of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. But there are very few discussions of how the
web really seems to be affecting the vast majority of us for which the web provides some vital service that sits uncomfortably between over-occupied diversion and full-blown escape, and worse still, we have even fewer discussions on how to cope with this.

All we really know how to do is laugh at the codification of arbitrary interactions without really understanding how they affect our psyche: poor blog etiquette, the difference between facebook wall posts and private messages (to say nothing of pokes, superpokes, scrabulous games and instant messages), craigslist and ebay postings, among many more. But these interactions do not happen in an emotional vacuum. How do we really make sense of the impact that these interactions have on our real, physical day-to-day lives? And what do we do about it?

I think Tyler's point on the lack of anything that will ever supplant physical interaction is both self-evident and profoundly forgotten. While the internet, cellphones, voip and other services allow us to be more interconnected to our previous-life social circles than ever before, these devices only provide a rendering or sampling of what many of these relationships actually mean to us. Not only that, it can be almost damaging to devote too much time to maintaining these relationships at the cost of cultivating the relationships in our current physical lives. But more and more, services like facebook and gmail seek to monopolize more of our time while providing a narrower spectrum brand of social relationship maintenance in their current form. Is the answer more technology, or less?

My gut says less but recent historical anecdotes seem to prove otherwise. Has DVR really made me watch less TV or more? It's hard to say. On the one hand, I don't channel surf as much as I used to, but then again, without DVR maybe I'd be more discouraged from watching TV at all. Does having perpetual access to e-mail improve my ability to communicate with friends? To a degree, but maybe I'd be more inclined to be making those plans to fly out to visit them if it weren't so "easy" to keep in touch.

Well, all of this doesn't really change the fact that I've been promising Tyler a trip to Columbus for over a year now. He's been the most incredibly generous friend you could ask for, and if all he asks for in return is a trip to come visit, then it would be almost Spartan of me to decline. I could enumerate the reasons why Tyler has been so great, but maybe you should just actually get to know him. And if you already know Tyler, maybe you should call me up so we can figure out a weekend in the near future to hop on a plane and spend the weekend wandering Columbus, seeing the sites, and staying the fuck away from our little digital friends.

i was home sick from work today...

2008-05-08T15:35:00.001-07:00

So I worked on another poster. I was sort of inspired by watching helvetica, and though I slept through the middle part of the movie (thereby missing its most important lessons), I woke up toward the end and started thinking more about expressive design. This was a first crack at a more emotive flyer for my DJ night at Boston's savant project. I think it better reflects the vibe I'm doing for, and isn't quite so "designy" for design's sake. Instead, it's a bit more vintage, and does a better job of advertising the kind of event it is. Then again, it could just be my fever and nausea kicking in... excuse me...

CASSETTENOVA: friday, may 9 at the savant project, 10pm on

2008-05-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

the savant project: 1625 tremont st, boston, ma

IRREFUTABLE RANT: Why car-driving America is cyborg-fascism realized

2008-05-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Twice I was almost fucking hit today on my bicycle. TWICE. I have a 10-minute, 2.5 mile commute, and in those 600 seconds and 13,000 feet traversed, two FUCKING pricks almost ended my life. The first fucko ran a red light while accelerating, thereby forgoing his opportunity to pass "GO" and pick up $200, of course, and the second shitrag thought that yielding could take a backseat to the text message he was sending to a woman who was almost definitely his whorish mistress. The guy did manage to see me for a split second, but slowing down was too complicated of a process for him to understand, whereas "blowjob at the local Best Western from a transvestite named Tammi" was like adding and subtracting. To shitrag's credit, it is a terrible intersection replete with a three-way entrance, two of which are fairly blind. But that's generally why people SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

So, it inspired me to lay down a theory of why these cyborg dickbots are going to kill us all. In no particular order of dystopian anger, here are my central tenets:

1| You're killing us all in this gas chamber of a crisis called "The Greenhouse Effect."

You know what? I'm not a rampant environmentalist. Sometimes I forgo bringing my ceramic plate down to the cafeteria and end up eating off of styrofoam. I question the value of recycling because I have read more than enough studies about the fact that it may do more harm than good. I eat meat, dairy, pork, and other planet-hating items as well, and I cannot afford to buy grass-fed items across the board. I think carbon neutrality is the only marketing gimmick solely created by the left, and that real climate change won't be prevented by buying offsets for my new H2.

But you know what? Fuck it. I bike to work EVERY DAY. In Boston?! Really?! Yup. And you know what? It's cold as balls in the winter, hot as fuck in the summer and somewhat rainy in between. I've earned my fair share of hamburgers and carbon off-sets by acknowledging that bicycles are a beautiful thing.

Of course, the benefits of biking are pretty well-publicized by now, but ultimately I didn't even start doing it for environmental benefit. I started because every single minute that I stood on the T platform, waiting for the next red line to appear was 10 minutes I would never get back. The greatest irony is that the T sucks for the same reason that biking is dangerous: too many people drive and thus no one wants to spend money on improving the infrastructure.

To veer back on track for a moment, this point was supposed to be about the exhaust pumping out of the noxious-fume outtake on your four-wheeled friend. So, uh, you know, stop killing me and you by putting all of this shit in the air. Thanks.

2| Cyborgs are here, and have been here since the Ford Model T

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Philip K. Dick made it seem like cyborgs were some far-off, distant, inherently-destructive pseudo-humanoids that lacked morality while maintaining a perfect figure. But having been a driver, and having been biking around drivers all the time, I would argue that the cyborg age is already here.

Many people already see their cars as an extension of their anima. They can accelerate themselves at incredible speeds over vast distances by doing little more than depressing their right foot (yet somehow parallel parking is cumbersome). They can listen to the music of their lives, catch up with old friends and transport the kids to and from soccer practice all at the same time, often exercising all options at the same time.

But when you witness the glazed look of a human being who has succumbed to a cell phone conversation and lazy afternoon drive, you catch a small glimmer of a future where everyones' eyes are a beady red and powered by a battery pack in your left ass pocket.

I'd be getting extreme if I started discussing how enslaved people who rely on their cars are, but fuck it, I was almost hit twice today and you only live once. What are you going to do when gas hits $10 a gallon and you have to choose between your last car and your first-born? Uh, don't answer that.

3| I don't have a #3, but things look better in threes. So, er, don't be a dick

That's all I've got. You know, I usually hate being angry and bitter because I think it is usually counter-productive, but those assholes had it coming. I just want to be able to ride my bike in peace. I just want to relegate my hostile experiences on a bicycle to the snarky looks I get from fixies and bike mechanics. Driving isn't wholly unreasonable. But you'd be surprised what the human body can withstand. Biking in the cold? Not that bad! Biking in the rain? Surprisingly refreshing. Biking long distances? Piece of cake! This isn't Colorado! The only hills are in Beacon Hill and JP, and JP has their fair share of bikers.

All of this being said, if anyone wants to drive up to Vermont anytime soon, let me know. I'm free, and I've got a bike ;)

IS IT MY BIRTHDAY: outlandish craigslist request #1

2008-05-07T13:51:00.001-07:00

I'm published! http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/wan/671930227.html

UPDATE: Some humorless ass-clown flagged my post for removal twice. So here it is in all of its glory...

To be honest, I would like a free macbook or macbook pro. (Somerville)

Reply to: xxxxxxxx
Date: 2008-05-07, 8:37PM EDT

I'll admit it: I've always liked Apple products, even though I've only ever owned two iPods, one of which died two years to the day that I bought it. The first iPod was fickle, constantly reacting to hot and cold like a glass of water, and only granting me access to my music when it deemed me worthy of a listen.

When people see my current computer, they invariably say, "Gee, I thought you were an Apple guy," which either means that I am a smug [REDACTED] or a visionary creative, or most likely both. However, I am neither of these things. I am a cheap [REDACTED to maintain your favorable opinion] and could not justify the extra $1000 to buy a mac.

I've only ever owned a PC. They're sluggish and ugly but they get the job done. But you know what? I like coffee, and I like coffee shops, and although Improv Everywhere would have you believe otherwise, I think that lugging around an ugly desktop will not be fun/result in me getting a date with the cute, geek-chic girls that frequent said coffee shops.

Why would you give me a free macbook or macbook pro? Maybe you're sick of a wired/wireless existence where information is bountiful but overwhelming, and you're ready to tour the high seas in your kayak with your dog and copy of Walden, only to reach the coast of Senegal and realize that you don't actually speak French that well. But maybe you will meet some gorgeous woman (well, you are guaranteed to meet a gorgeous woman) who wins you over with her charms and makes the whole trip worthwhile. And then you can think back on that poor sap with his pitiful wifi, his bootlegged copies of the Adobe CS3 Creative suite and his somewhat pointless (but cool) accelerometer, and say, "Ha! Who's the real winner?" And the answer is you, friend.

So, get in touch with me. Let me know what you think. I'd be happy to come pick it up on my bike, and swiftly take it from your beautiful "Design Within Reach" desk and stuff it into my messenger bag. Maybe I'll write the next great novel on it. Maybe I'll be the next Edward Tuftee. Maybe I'll garageband myself into the next Radiohead or Tom Waits. But one thing's for sure: I will install firefox and gchat with my friends on it, thereby delaying my end date for achieving any of the other stated goals. But your selfless, material-free existence will be better for it, and my pseudo-artistic, materialistic bondsman existence will be slightly better for it, and we can all be happy.

Location: Somerville
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
PostingID: xxxxxxxxxxx

GRAIN: madison & chicagoland

2008-05-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

mackin' cheese 'za from ian's for jamie. not as heavy as one would think.

mariachis on campus. naturally.

again.

old blue eyes. down by the loop.

rooftop of the overture center and modern art museum.

for buck.

more stuff for buck.

sums up madison nicely.

again for buck.

a bit of brutalism that i actually dig. rachel's music school.

essen haus. because i'm asian, i got really sick and almost booted after drinking out of a boot.

frank lloyd wright monona pavilion.

state st. in madison

old and new JUXTAPOSED (i hate that word).

not actually from the midwest. but fits in nicely.

dojo where midnight circus (john's circus company) rehearses.

preparing for looptopia 2008

and that's a wrap.

IS IT MY BIRTHDAY: Fame t-shirt

2008-05-06T21:46:00.001-07:00

From the turntable lab description: "This design is actually a reclamation of the NYC's Fame school logo (yes, it's a real high school, Blu Jemz went there)."

ARMCHAIR CONSULTANT: What Obama really has to overcome in order to win the election

2008-04-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Xenophobia is a funny thing. In theory, it describes a "fear and hatred" of anything foreign but in practice, it is generally a charge levied upon groups who reject others on the basis of race or gender. The term has been copiously applied to American protectionists, namely those who oppose widespread immigration, or most recently by Barack Obama in relation to rural, white voters in Pennsylvania whom he considered to be "bitter" in comments that have been batted around quite a bit as of late. Granted, he didn't use the word itself but the idea was inferred by his detractors who turned the phrase back on him and ironically dubbed his statements "xenophobic."

The term has been coupled with elitism, racism, sexism and almost every other possible form of prejudice this election season, but it doesn't really hit at the heart of what seems to be going wrong with the Obama campaign, and for that matter what has gone wrong with the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Accusations of racism, sexism and all-around xenophobic behavior seem to be obfuscating the real problem that plagues these campaigns, which is elitism.

Much has been written about elitism since Obama's comments hit the press in the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary, so I apologize if you are sick of reading about the role of elitism in campaigning. However, I think it is important to point out the distinction between elitism and xenophobia because they are usually applied in diametric opposition to each other. That is to say, elitists (under one definition meaning those who are "conscious of being or belonging to an elite") often suffer due to xenophobic assumptions that paint them as inherently prejudicial of non-elites. In contrast, many members of the elite think of themselves as reasoned to the point of being devoid of xenophobia or prejudice, or at least consciously aware of their biases to the point of rendering them benign. Of course, in the end, everyone is equally guilty of not only being aware of these biases, but acting on them as well.

So, although elitists can be xenophobic, and harping on elitists can be seen as xenophobic, where does that leave the campaign?

George W. Bush, epitome of the layman's president (the "guy I'd grab a beer with" or "whiffle ball Tony") was once himself a victim of the brand of xenophobia targeted towards elitists. While running against Kent Hance in a 1978 congressional race, Bush was "successfully portrayed... as an elitist carpetbagger with suspicious connections, via his father, to the Trilateral Commission."
(For more information, check this out.)

Bush not only nearly staved off defeat in that race, but was able to channel his folksy charm into a hallmark of two successful presidential campaigns, repeatedly branding his opponents as "out-of-touch" with the average American. If ever there were an underrated talent that George W. Bush possesses, it is his uncanny ability to shapeshift into whatever community he faces (well, almost any community). This is not unlike another two-term president with ties to the current race, whose greatest attribute may have been a similar ability to relate to the common man.

Obama, for all of his lofty, prosaic charm, has yet to learn this lesson. What makes Obama an elitist isn't a disdain for the poor or his mischaracterizations of rural and working class whites (neither of which really pertain to him); no, instead it is his steadfast belief in the value of the elite to solve the problems of the non-elite and, well, everybody. Of course, Clinton and McCain suffer from this problem as well, and it is almost inherent to any national campaign (with the exception of Mike Huckabee who saw limited success by eschewing this altogether but was marginalized by the Republican elite). The real problem is that when you get caught making a statement that could be interpreted as xenophobic toward the non-elites, you start to sound disingenuous with regards to wanting to help them.

So, Obama has two options at this point:
1) He can embrace the "I-feel-your-pain" approach of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and try to convince rural white voters that he is one of them (which, by definition, he is not). This is a tempting strategy since simple math would dictate that nearly 200 million Americans did not vote in 2004, and presumably a great many of them are eligible, rural and white.

orrrr...

2) He can stop running from the fact that he is essentially a middle class urbanite who understands urban plight better than anyone else running, and who instead inspires members of non-elite and elite to come to an understanding that we need to be working together in order to get anything accomplished.

Systemically, the odds are not in Obama's favor. For now, the following is an anecdotal theory, but I hope to flush it out with more concrete evidence down the line. Essentially, being a member of the elite means having gone to college (and beyond) and therefore being able to tap into greater earning potential and thus more elite networks that include politics, finance and corporate business. I try to say this without the implication that the elite are superior in any way, but I understand that it may be intrinsically impossible to overcome that idea.

Most of us suffer from complete and total removal from the parts of the country that now dictate presidential outcomes. And, in our defense, it is not entirely our fault. When you graduate from Middlebury College (as I did), or Columbia University and Harvard Law School (as Obama did), you rack up a fair amount of financial obligations before even starting your first job, and unfortunately, the only parts of the country that can afford to pay us the wages required to meet these obligations happen to be "blue" pockets in all 50 states and across larger parts of the east coast, the west coast, the Pacific northwest, and the midwest. Thus, the dialogue gap between the college-educated and the non-college-educated grows more and more wide, and we remain conceptually alienated from one another. Sounds like the perfect xenophobic vitriol for our melting pot.

Obama's original campaign message was one of unity, but has veered off-topic under the heat of scrutiny about his ties to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and racism finger-pointing. Another fundamental problem is that Obama's notion of unity was far too narrow and underdeveloped: essentially he was re-branding the notions of bi-partisanship that permeated every single local, state and federal campaign before George W. Bush took office, and which has since taken a back seat to bitter fighting. Obama would benefit from renewing his call for unity, not between Republicans and Democrats and whites and blacks and other cliché polarities, but instead between the elites and the non-elites where the real dialogue has broken down. A Republican and Democrat in Boston have far more in common with each other than do a Bostonian and a rural Kansan, and for the life of me I wouldn't even know how to open these lines of communication. But Obama has a real opportunity to show us both the way, so that hunting and traditional values seem more understandable to me, and urban decay and multi-culturalism might seem more understandable to them. If Obama is really committed to engendering change, then maybe this is where the real challenge lies, and thus the real opportunity for success.

I would venture to say that Obama didn't really know what he was getting into until after he started his campaign. Perhaps when people think of Obama as being inexperienced for the job, they mean that he really just hasn't been to a lot of the places he is campaigning in before having started his campaign. And that's understandable. He's only 46, he has been committed to working for Chicago's underrepresented, and spent a great deal of time in school. Not to mention the fact that he probably racked up a fair deal of money in loans and needed to start working to pay them off. So, Obama not only knows where the rift lies, but is himself on one side of the divide. Obama's true chance to shine will be when he throws the rope across to the other side, and asks us both to start pulling ourselves together.

Are you gonna get mad if I post a bunch of videos I like? More importantly, are you gonna watch them?

2008-04-28T21:37:00.000-07:00

FRIENDLYMIXTAPE

2008-04-27T14:49:00.000-07:00

APRIL MIX UP.

SHARON!

2008-04-25T18:53:00.000-07:00

GRAIN: Friends & Family, Passover 2008

2008-04-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

the fifth question: "oh my god, so many matzoh balls. why? why?"

aunt elyse: "two girls at passover? you're living the dream."

the asia room at casa joseph

jamie, grandma and erica. i'm trying to figure out how this photo was taken.

discussing obama, i believe.

bunny thought something was shilarious.

sam is HUGE.

the incomparable jessica.

prima teresita and me at that brunch place in dumbo.

DEAF JAM/GRAIN: Tokyo Police Club

2008-04-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Police Club, Paradise Rock Club

Gump with the new frame

The Charles

Caught Tokyo Police Club and Smoosh with Nick, newest blog roll member Joe and Trish. Though TPC commendably contributed to my worsening tinnitus, the real focus of our attention was the born-post-1990 sounds of Smoosh. They covered This Modern Love by Bloc Party, which I'm pretty sure is about being high on cocaine. Even if it isn't, other Bloc Party songs are, and ultimately that makes the Smoosh rendition uncomfortable to listen to. But what the hell, they could play, even if I sensed that some overbearing parents in the wings were to blame.

Tokyo Police Club got me thinking... what other notable musical entities were comprised solely of the membership of exclusive clubs?

New Young Pony Club - a vibrant British dance/rock band
Culture Club - English new romantic pop group in the 1980s (thanks, WP)
Mickey Mouse Club - no link or explanation needed
Club music - everyone knows what it is, but no one can concisely describe it
Sam's Club - where one can buy Celine Dion records retail or in bulk
Buena Vista Social Club - the only club I've ever really wanted to be a member of

Shout out to fellow mixologists

2008-04-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

I very much enjoyed the last one. Currently downloading the Spring 2008 mix and looking forward to it.

I HATE the Knicks... but I love The Onion

2008-04-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

Isiah Thomas: 'My Time With The Knicks Was Actually A Large-Scale Psychological Study Of New York Residents'

I was a Bulls fan growing up. Fairweather? Maybe. But I was 10, so, cut me some slack for having some appreciation for the greatest athlete of my lifetime.

WARM GLOW: Danny Deckchair/Kicking and Screaming

2008-04-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

Escapism is an implicit theme in any movie we watch. Fundamentally, the very act of watching a movie requires us to submit to this escapism to the fullest degree. In fact, to drill down even further is to uncover an even more complex arrangement that leads us to not only forget about the red velvet curtains, art deco detailing and the rapidly flickering image, but to fully embrace a world that is not our own for the sake of being entertained by the possibilities of this new paradigm.

Thus, when escapism becomes the explicit theme within this implicit framework, the result is total euphoria. I know this seems like an overly academic introduction to a review about two relatively inane movies, but ultimately this is what makes movies such an awesome force. That, in spite of knowing it, sensing it, and being acutely aware of it (especially when the movie is shitty and our eyes begin to wander), we can willfully sit down, pop in a DVD and always succumb to this alternate reality.

Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming is a subversive form of escapist moviemaking because it heavily channels realism. And not just any realism: my realism, and, since you most likely found this blog through me or someone like me, your realism. We've just graduated from college, we're mulling around our not-so-former stomping grounds, and trying to prolong the inevitable submission of our soul to the rigid machinations of the real world that we can only just begin to envision.

On this point, I always find these movies the most difficult to watch. After all, the idea of trying to escape my own reality only to find myself in a similar psyche locale with a better looking protagonist and a few extra G's in the bank doesn't really seem to create much of an incentive to watch any further than the first minute, since every other scenario could've been extrapolated pretty simply from my own life experience. But the promise of a subversive escapist movie like this isn't so much to present a world that might be unfamiliar to certain audiences that do not identify with these dilemmas (after all, who outside of the gold coasts is even netflixing this right now?), but instead to provide some perspective for those of us entrenched in its reality as the minutes tick by. And, in a weird way, I'm going to draw a somewhat extreme conclusion by calling this an activist film, meant to lull us out of our daily complacencies by reminding us what seminal life moments look like and feel like, just in case we've forgotten.

In college, these moments seem almost scheduled: the professor that inspires you to give German philosophy another shot (or, let's face it, a first shot), the courting of a girlfriend, the study abroad culture shock. These moments happen so often that we begin to take them for granted, and we expect them as frequently beyond our four+ years of higher education. Of course, reality sets in and we find ourselves deeply entrenched in the day-to-day struggles of finding gainful food, shelter and labor which some may find tragic in and of itself, but the real tragedy is that we almost stop believing that these watersheds can even happen. We submit so wholly to the concept that our life paths are being paved faster than we can redirect them, that all we can do is hope for a nice car to enjoy the ride in.

It is for this reason that I am relieved to say that I loved Danny Deckchair. The movie is definitely more along the lines of a surrealist escapism, but the lesson remains the same. We all run the risk of complacency, which is all too human, because comfort is our natural point of homeostasis. We all struggle to balance some semblance of stability with enough excitement to make life truly worth living. And yet, we often fail to find solidarity in these concepts. Maybe we should focus on how to help each other through these not-so-trivial moments that end up encompassing great swaths of our lives and find strength in the successful examples that certain lucky individuals have managed to accomplish. This would be true optimism.

Strapping 100 weather balloons to a deckchair is certainly an extreme solution to the problem of complacency. The problem is, solutions to this complacency are relative because they are completely dependent upon how entrenched we ourselves feel in our own routines. It may not take much to break the monotony, and it is all too important to do so because these are the moments that provide us with the best stories, the most fulfilling moments and the highest levels of happiness. And besides, when you reach a new level of contentment, it's time to do it all over again.

Escapism seems like an ugly word because it reminds us that we are slavishly fatalistic with regards to our own lives, all too willing to give up control and escape through the remote control. But what about applied escapism? Why don't we start taking the lessons that these movies have to offer more seriously and go try something new? In fact, I'd like to start doing this tomorrow, and I hope you all would join me, support me, guide me and listen to me, and I would be more than happy to do the same for you.

GRAIN: images from a mobile phone

2008-04-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

Political Science Fiction - Part I

2008-04-22T21:16:00.000-07:00

So, anyone that knows me knows that I am a political being, albeit reluctantly so in more recent times. I tend now to focus more on issues than candidates or parties, which is hopefully an indicator of some greater political awakening that happened when I graduated from college and realized what the wisest of us learned without the degree: that the world is complicated and binary systems do a poor job of accurately portraying the spectrum of opinions. Then again, it could be like the old audiophile argument between mono, stereo or surround sound: maybe two speakers correspond to two ears.

Ultimately, this leads me to take empathetic, relativistic positions on candidates in politics. I will admit to a fair amount of knee-jerk liberal stuff (empathy for the disenfranchised, an uneasiness with conflict, an inability to find Larry the Cable Guy charming), but more so than anything I want results that reduce suffering and misery in ways that are preventable. This truth may seem self-evident, until you sit down and watch or read political coverage in this country for long enough for someone to stick a very large foot in an correspondingly large mouth.

Tonight, I sat down with some friends to watch the last of the results of the Pennsylvania primary, otherwise known as the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. Like much of the Democratic primary process, it was confusing, incoherent, infuriating, emotionally manipulative, and generally lacking vision. And that was just Chris Matthews! Zing!

We mocked and ridiculed Hillary's, uh, subtle invocation of Rocky Balboa, confused by which Rocky movie she was referencing. Was it the first one where he loses gracefully and in doing so truly appears as a winner? Was it the one where he fixated on anachronistic Cold War rivalries that no longer reflected the contemporary political landscape? Was it the one where his brain damage caused his dialogue to sound over-rehearsed, leaving the audience begging for a break? Was it the one that was billed was a publicly-mandated comeback that nobody actually seemed to want? Or was it the one that seemed vaguely racist because he was kicking the crap out of a black guy? Regardless, these are the kind of shenanigans that make you wonder who exactly these politicians intend to reach when they deliver platitudes as vetted reality.

I do not spare Obama in this respect either. Besides the fact that his "concession" speech made me wonder how much Abercrombie and Fitch had to pay to reach their ideal demographic--college student-targeted product placements in "reality tv"--Obama has routinely made me question this experiment in campaigning where he answers every question the way we (being educated, affluent, elitist college graduates) wish someone running for president would answer it, while not necessarily having the teeth to back it up. At least when Toby snarked at the press on The West Wing, he was meeting with Republicans to broker a deal on the farm bill or explaining to the Religious Right that they did not have a monopoly on spirituality in this country. Instead, Obama has backed himself into a corner where bipartisanship is a proxy for likability and hope stands in for truly audacious positioning. Frankly, if Obama were as talented as everyone on both sides seems to think he is, he would have sold all of us on much more ambitious changes for the future, rather than repackaging Kerry/Edwards '04 for the Subaru/Ivy/Pitchfork crowd of 2008. Thus, Obama's largest liability moving forward, similarly to Eliot Spitzer's tumble in some respects, is the constant worry that his audacity is disingenuous and, much much worse, hypocritical.

Sadly, this isn't the man's fault. He is an exceptional human being that has, in retrospect, made some commendable choices that have unfortunately tied his hands. One can only wonder what kind of campaign Obama would have run with Michael Bloomberg's war chest, gall, and propensity to reference his mother. But that would have meant that the years as a community organizer and legal scholar being sacrificed in favor of the seemingly less utilitarian pursuit of riches in the business world. He isn't the only one to struggle with this problem; every day I and many of my contemporaries wonder whether we are even coming close to helping the vulnerable communities we have committed ourselves to while costing us in financial and communicative resources. Every arcane little regulation that Bloomberg manages to shelf makes me question my choice.

Normally, in any other election year, we manage to convince ourselves that what is at stake is generally trivial or benign enough that the formulaic appeals of politicians running for higher office are not only entertaining, but charming in their lack of sophistication. After all, we need something to talk about before baseball season kicks into high gear. But given the global climate that we live in at this very moment, this kind of systematic jerking off
is no longer adorable or tolerable. If anyone of these campaigns were in tune with anything, they would've changed their slogans to "McCain: Just try to spell 'China' with those letters; you can't" or "Hillary: Because maybe menopause is exactly what we need to stop fucking all of this up so much" or "BHO: damnit, go buy an iPhone already so I can spam you and be a good American." Instead it's the same old shit, except with the new-found injection of process reporting where substance take a back seat to the metaverse of polling strategies, touchscreens and cable network inter-office banter.

I could spell out for you what the challenges are but I would run the risk of sounding pretentious and possibly a little bit over-urgent. And that is what Part II is for....

I have a point, I swear.

2008-04-22T17:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I suppose every blog begins with a whimper, not a bang, since most blogs join a show already in progress (unless it involves the finer points of white consumerism or Errol Morris' discussion of a photograph). The impetus for starting this blog was to assert more control over my online identity, because I decided that I had had enough of losing out to an increasingly popular IMDB page when searching my name on Google.

Philip Hersch, I'm rooting for you and your career, I really am, but I'd like to get to the point in my life where prospective employers aren't sketched out by my past life as a "former-Israeli commando, now the Head of Security for a Southern California Jewish high school." On a tangential point, I'm not sure whether I am supposed to interpret going from a Mossad commando to Beverly Hills (High) Cop as a step up, but alas I am not willing to spend the $4.95 on shipping and handling to find out for sure.

That being said, it's not exactly an exciting platform for robust virtual broadcasting to the outside world. Surely I stand for something besides shameless self-promotion, or rather, defensive ego management.

Now, if you happen to be a potential employer, friend or vindictive blackmailer, let me explain a couple of things you will find in my googly-past.

1) Saxophonist Ari Joseph Pushes the Limits of Campus Music Scene

Yes, I am a saxophonist. For a while, this was the #1 Google result for my name, and I was quite content because it belied a certain creativity and risk-taking that I like to project to the outside world, but apparently the four hits it was getting was not enough to sustain its top-ranked position, soon replaced by Philip Hersch and his burgeoning acting career. But hopefully this explanation will also provide a nice segue into explaining...

2) Fuck you Saxophonist Ari Joseph

...which was an entry written by powerfriend Tyler Kremberg (coincidentally, the same Tyler Kremberg who coded www.arijoseph.com) in an effort to show his search optimization prowess over the laymen. Now, with full understanding of the vulgarity of such a statement, I would hope that we can all agree upon its relative inanity and move on. And if not, well, then I pre-emptively apologize if I have crossed you in some way that would inspire you to use my saxophone powers against me.

Tyler Kremberg and Ari Joseph circa New Year's Eve 2007.

3) WHDH - Special Report - Rush to Romance

The year was 2008, and the date of airing was February 14th. Two nights earlier, I had accompanied a young woman on a date set up by CrazyBlindDate which ended up being aired on the local news. After its obligatory airing among all of my friends who proceeded to microcritique my game skeellz, business cards were eventually made to commemorate my newly-dubbed title of "Dater."

There are plenty of other fun little tidbits you can find out about me from surfing these here interwebs, but I will let you get to that and leave it in the comments section. Perhaps I will devote a bit of a running commentary to such trivial pieces of information, but more than likely I will focus on things that tend not to embarrass me quite so much. In the meantime, enjoy.

Currently wearing: golf shorts, a Threadless T, a Brooklyn Industries hoodie and a smile.
Currently listening to: a mix of songs that are exactly 2:42, based on Joshua Allen's ingenious essay on the magical length for the perfect pop song. Some standouts in my library include:

1. Blackbird by Doves
2. I Shall Not Be Moved by Johnny Cash
3. Inoculated City by The Clash
4. Jealousy by Natalie Merchant
5. You Could Have It So Much Better by Franz Ferdinand
6. Now At Last by Feist
7. Seen This Mexico by Shrimp Boat
8. Emily Kane by Art Brut
9. Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain
by Cul de Sac
10. London Halflife by Metric
11. St Augustine by Band of Horses
12. K by The Clientele
13. Providence by Sonic Youth
14. Dia de Graca by Elza Soares
15. Magic Step by Sam Prekop
16. Will Gravity Win Tonight? by Matthew Dear
17. Busy Signal by Prefuse 73
18. Sherbert Head by Boards of Canada
19. By the Cathedral by Keren Ann
20. Nada Sera Como Antes by Elis Regina

...and many others!

Thanks, and good night.
-Ari

p.s. look to friendlymixtape for new mixes coming soon.

The beginnings of the all-purpose blog.

2008-04-21T22:52:00.000-07:00

For too long, I have been committed to the idea of a narrowly-focused blog, to not much avail. Starting with the launch of arijoseph.com, this will be the home of my running commentary as often as I can possibly update it. Look for book reviews, music reviews, movies, activities, commentary and anything else I can dream up.