Category: Uncategorized

top 10 reasons geoff has a new stupid haircut

10. he wanted to show his flatmates that you can make an ass out of yourself without drinking.

9. he thought that having hair (or lack thereof) like ronaldo would make him play football better

8. he’s going to be cast as “hing the merciless” in an off-broadway musical version of flash gordon

7. he thought that if he could find a bright orange sheet, he could get the beastie boys to hang out with him

6. he loves it when rob strokes his scalp for hours

5. he’s taking the final step in a diabolical plan, started months ago with the aquisition of thick rimmed black glasses, to take over hosting duties of an mtv music quiz show.

4. he decided he didn’t really want to make it through customs after all

3. he decided to become a white supremicist

2. he’s moved back to the us to start a krishna-core band with ray cappo

1. he had a “peanut butter incident”*

* : if you don’t get this reference, you’re lucky. if you’re a massochist, go rent a movie by the same title, watch it, be thoroughly confused, and then imagine being subjected to it as one of those “reward” movies they show you in grade school. some reward. figures it’s canadian.

06.01.2002 – drinking urine, denmark v. uruguay

rob drank his own urine.

went to the pub with a rather haggard looking rob to catch the denmark v. uruguay game. it was quite a good game with denmark coming out just on top with a 2-1 victory. the uruguay side was talented and agressive, but the danish side just played some beautiful football. someone once said that football is like art, and i’m inclined to agree. if you think art is about perspective and space, you’ll see the parallel when you watch a team like denmark play. sharp, crisp passes, a well-structured defense, all the players with a great knowledge of where their teamates were, and overall wonderful movement off the ball. that combination made it difficult for the uruguay defenders to provide coverage in the box. i’m so excited about the world cup! tomorrow is sweden v. england. should be rad.

05.30.2002 – songs, e-mail, emo, tysonbrow, weakerthans

originally written 05.30.2002

song ideas for my still ephemeral project with tim: “special interest” a song about special interest class in elementary school. the most optimistic time of my life. also, want to write a song about the library. about bibliophilia. more tim’s department than mine, really, but sometimes i think i can feel what he and peter talk about. like when i checked out the collector, i found the hardback more than a little satisfying. substantial. tangible. old pages. spilled-on, yellowed, penciled notes in the margins. nice. but yeah. when i think about it libraries have been a really big part of my existence. some of my earliest memories are going to the library with my mom. my dad has been, basically, a librarian for a large part of the time that i’ve known him. they’re such a cool institution. seditionary in a way. what? anybody can get information? for free? i wonder if there was the current copyright debate when public libraries first became common. but yeah. if i wrote a song about libraries, i would make a play on words with “patron” and “patronize”. some kind of word pun. i know it’s there. there aren’t enough puns in songs these days.

speaking of songs … rewrote the intro to e-mail from mallory, so it sounds a little less like the main hook in laid, that now-ancient single by james. that song’s ancient by my standards. wrote ages ago, but i still like it. simplistic as all hell, but the most honest song i’ve ever wrote. a song that wrote itself the summer i was bummed out in austin and got the nondescript e-mail from an admirer of this website. the more and more that i think about that titular e-mail, i’m convinced that it was one of my friends who wrote it to me instead of the mysterious 16 year old girl from pa. at first the idea of that made me really angry. i fealt fscked with, my feelings violated. but, now i’m completely at-ease with the e-mail. whoever the source was. either way it’s a win. if the letter was genuine, it means that two summers ago, there was some kid out there who fealt what i was feeling in life and our mutual knowledge, of just the existance of each other, was enough to make us both feel a little better. if the e-mail was fabricated, it means that one of my friends knew me well enough and cared about me enough to know, precisely, what needed to be said to help me through that period in my life. like i said. a win, win situation. maybe that’s why i thought the idea of a fake letter was so cruel at first. it takes the same thing to be very, very kind as it does to be very, very cruel – an intimate, naked, knowledge of someone.

rock action is such a cool album. good study music for sure. yon sucks because she got to see the mogwai show. figures that they tour the us while i’m in scotland.

peter said this would make me explode. he was right. it’s awful, but seems to be the norm these days. at least they didn’t mention any bands that haven’t already blown up. i still like dashboard and jew, but in a different way than i used to. it’s hard for music to be “emotional” when it’s played in a stadium and you’re surrounded by post-fratboys. if i hear one more person call weezer an emo band i’m going to slit my wrists.

rob and i shaved lines in our eyebrows like the people in the big brother house. sort of like the tyson-line that “iron mike” (shit-talking boxer and rapist) tyson has in his hair except in your eyebrow. totally stupid and horrible looking but good kicks. i think doing crazy stunts cold sober helps redefine people’s notion of antics. also tried to shave a line in hair elsewhere with less success. uhhehe. hopefully the videotape won’t make it across the atlantic.

tim hooked me up with weakerthans mp3s. awesome. emo? maybe, well, not really. weaker than punk rock actually. singer is ex-propaghandi, so the music is like the more melodic propaghandi songs, but moreso. really good. as long as this stuff isn’t mentioned in time articles, the world is safe. letter of resignation is one of my favorite songs ever.

05.31.2002 – baldness, world cup, weakerthans, making a fist

so … last night i shaved my head. not with the plastic electric razor length gaurd. not even with the bare metal clippers. i’m talking bic razor, to the skin, mr. clean shaved head. why? you might ask. well, the first reason is for my personal amuseument. that’s actually a big motivator. second, i talk a lot of shit around the flat. i figured it was time that i put my money where my mouth is. finally, i wanted to make the point that one can make bad decisions while completely sober. to be honest, it didn’t turn out all that bad. i wouldn’t say i like it, but i now realize that at the very least, i have a very symmetric head.

the world cup starts today. france v. senegal. was watching the opening ceremony a bit this morning. was talking about how odd it was that the world cup was shared between s. korea and japan. i thought there would be some huge cultural tensions because i think that japan fscked up quite a bit of asia rather badly during ww2. rob made the point that the us fscked over japan rather signifcantly with the a-bomb. quite true. really odd to get a perspective like that from someone who i see as having somewhat conservative political leanings. that kind of thing gets you into trouble when you say it in america. it’s refreshing to have that different perespective.

love the two weakerthans records that tim hooked me up with (fallow and left and leaving). great music. it’s the new folk music. well, not really folk music, but folk music in the sense that bob dylan used to be folk music. more like fringe-pop. melodically accessible music grounded in the modern human experience. downtempo laments and speedy rockers fit nicely next to each other on this record. sturdy music. appropriately canadian, whatever that means. as i said yesterday, this is the other half of propaghandi. it’s what made them so amazing. the technical mastery of the metal influence but also that great melodic intelligence. billy bragg can move you to action just as easily as anti-flag.

wanted to get into an argument about middle-class apathy with erin on the phone last night. she wouldn’t oblige me. it’s hard to communicate with her over the wires. i wish i could have phone conversations with her like i do with my dad, or e-mail/im dialogues like i do with tim or patrick. i don’t know what it is that’s different. i’m almost convinced that the best way to make it trhough a long-distance relationship is to procede as if nothing’s changed. maybe it’s just easier to do that with friends and family than it is with a girlfriend. anyway … she’s kind of critical about kids who are spouting the violent “take the streets” rhethoric, and we have this mutual friend who’s particularly inclined to that and she always sees it as foolish if not a little dangerous. i’m not about the throw a brick through a starbucks window, and i’m not always sure how effective direct action is, but i was thinking the other day that it is important. the important thing, and also the thing that many, many people criticize, is that the kids who do the whole black-block thing, at least in the us tend to be middle-class white kids who, directly, have very little to complain about. but, in the end, these are the kids who need to be spurred to violent action the most. i see the middle class as the group of people who are always along for the ride in the world, but who never shape it. we always want something more, but are afraid to risk what we’ve got. and to me, that makes us slow and frightened. afraid of conflict. i feel that whenever i try to rationalize to myself why i don’t get in the face of someone who makes a racist or sexist joke or comment. and maybe letting it go is the right call. maybe working within the system when it comes to fighting the war agaisnt the plague of homogenous corporate culture is worlds better than smashing the starbucks window. maybe inflamatory crticism of our government, however warranted it may be, is counterproductive at this point. but there could be a point where those things are no longer the case. there comes a point when those in power abuse it to the point where there is no choice but to react. perhaps not violently, but certainly not passively. i just sort of wonder about middle class germans leading up to the rise of nazi power. i don’t want to believe that they all supported the regime, but if i don’t believe that, i’m forced to believe that they closed their eyes, put their hands over their ears, and went along for the ride. i could very easily see myself in their position. i certainly can’t condemn them for that, but i’d like to be better than that. but, i fear, i may be too much of a coward. i may be willing to wait and see how things work out. to have faith in a better tomorrow, but not willing to sacrifice for that tomorrow. so i think that every angry protest, every attack on the police, every brick through the starbucks window is not just middle class kids playing a game, but the kids trying to convince themselves that if it ever came down to it, they’d be able to do what needed to be done. i hope i would.

saw a father and his daughter having lunch in the cafe today. they looked pleasant. natural. unpatronizing. always makes me happy to see that. my ex-girlfriend and her dad had such a shit relationship, not just in the way that people who are close can hurt/annoy each other, but in the sense that there was no enagement whatsoever. erin gets along with her parents well (in many ways, better than i get on with mine). that’s really good.

05.30.2002 – collectors, old people and animals, desaperecidos

orignially written 05.30.2002

soundtrack: butterfly, the last track on what is still weezer’s best record. well, the book i’m reading now isn’t exactly like the song, but it is about a working-class guy who collects butterflies and who comes into a fortune and kidnaps a young art student with whom he becomes obsessed. the first half of the book is his account of the kidnapping and his obsession. the second half is the victim’s diary. i’m talking about the collector by j. fowles which i picked up last night on recommendation from tim. it’s a good book. interesting and engaging at least. i’m more than half way through it and i’ve only had it for one evening. as i said, the book is interesting, it doesn’t really blow me away, but i like it. the cool thing, and also the thing that keeps it from wowing you, is that the kidnapper is, well, boring. he’s maniacal, but without the cold intelligence to be evil. he’s clinical. the closest thing i can think of to describe how i perceive the character is billy bob thorton’s performance in the man who wasn’t there. you can’t like the character, and you can’t loath him either. you just sort of observe him. perplexed, intrigued. the second half of the book is perhaps more interesting, because you get a more human perspective on the affair, and perhaps one that i can identify more with. what’s interesting though, is how often the girl’s account diverges from her captivity and focusses on her outside life. her art, her relationships. it’s good stuff actually. makes her more of a character. the author seems to use her to make some comments on british art, and british class, which i find intriguing. i’ve read a lot of british lit. recently. from harding to d.h. lawrence to rushdie, and the thing that strikes me is how they cannot escape reflecting or offering some commentary on britishness in their writing. i don’t think i’ve ever read any american author who has been so influenced or tormented by his americanness. sure, authors like twain or faulkner are distinclty american and they capture an american experience, but it’s just that – an america, not the america. it seems like there’s some essential essence to being british that the british cannot cast aside. if they rebel or denounce, it is always within the context of their britishness. despite their class, they are aware of the british class heirarchy, be it in contempt or in yearning. similarly with their nationalism. it seems to permeate everything. i just don’t have that feeling as an american. i don’t know if that’s good or bad.

passed an old man today on my street. he was looking through a window smiling and gesticulating towards the cat that always sleeps in the window of that flat. oblivious to the passing world. just him and someone else’s cat.

was accosted by a little dog today, though it was quite cute. i think it might even have been the same breed that my ex-girlfriend’s parents used to have, but without the stupid haircut that made me think of those dogs as hell-beasts. i was most worried about tripping over the little white dog (it could have been snowy from the tin-tin books) and crushing it as it jumped and weaved, fearless, between my legs. the old lady who was the owner of the dog tried to call it off – half embarrased, mostly amused. i think that if i was rob, i would have probably kicked the dog. that kid hates dogs. i have no idea why, but it’s a pretty deep loathing. it’s really funny. the best thing ever was when this dog tried to steal our football in the park and rob confused it by putting the ball in the bag. he then did this rad impression that was in like a scooby-doo voice and he was just like “where did it go? where did it go? i’m just a stupid dog. i can’t find the ball”. hirarious.

listening to desaparecidos, i remember my time in omaha. don’t remember much of it actually. been there twice – debate tournaments both times. good pizza restaurants where i played quarter basketball against debate-coach dave and where varu made a pizza frankenstein, bad bar and grilles, boyer talking rap icons, and adam from creighton’s cool card cutting web site. icy and cold as fsck. can’t imagine a show scene there. well, i guess the kids must do something when they’re waiting out those long winter months. the record is good. i really like it. is it a new record? if so, it fills the void left in the plain-state rock scene left by the get up kids with their new record. this is a stupid thing to write about rock records, but i don’t know how else to put it. i don’t think of there being adults in places like kansas or nebraska. i think of there as being kids waiting to get out, and old people who will never leave until they die. old get up kids records sound like the former, and the new stuff sounds like music that is made by people who live in big exciting cities and only go back to their old hometowns for remeniscence sake. the music lacks that urgency, that discontentment. also perhaps the naievity, the hyperbole, but that’s part of the charm. at least for me being 21 years old and knowing that i shouldn’t be feeling comfortable in some place. that i should still want to escape away from the columbuses and omahas of the world. or, bitch and moan or fsck stuff up while i’m still there. without even really listening to the lyrics of the desaparecidos record, that’s the impression that i get. when i read the lyrics to tracks like greater omaha, mall of america, and $$$$ i think my initial suspicions are pretty spot-on. this whole record seems to rail against corporate culture, but not in the black-block way, that’s too urban. this is in the way that only someone who has seen the rural landscape stripped down even further and replaced by flat, dull, steel and glass can be angry. to see development, to see the birth of a metropolis and then see it slowly mature into an ugly, bratty, dull child. as a youth, you paint pictures in the small towns and you take photos in the city. in the small towns and country there’s nothing there. you build up your visions on a virtually blank canvas. in the city there’s too much. it’s too hard to have some kind of niche, some mastery of your place in the world. but what happens when the golden arches start springing up next to the walmart in the corn field is that your canvas has been slashed and burned. it’s not the same angst as in the city where all you realize is that someone has already staked their claim to your vision and designed it in a manner more masterful than you. what it is, is a feeling that you’ve been cheated. that you can’t even create. that what little you’ve been given hasn’t just been stolen – it’s been destroyed. i’m rambling. i really don’t want to study comptuer architecture right now. i like the desaparecidos record.

05.29.2002 – day

originally written 05.29.2002

bright yellow cups of coffee. i’ll find you by hundred reasons playing in my headphones (and beach boys on the cafe sound system – a million times better than brennan’s muzak). the guy with his girlfriend in the corner booth with the thick glasses, dress shirt, and good haircut that makes asia look cool. young parents smiling at their kids in strollers parked beneath the square of bright afternoon sunlight pouring in through thr windows. spiky haired coffee jock behind the counter. girl in the corner chomping on biscotti and reading harry potter. cafe metropol in newington. right around my corner from my flat and i never noticed it before. this city has more little cafes than anywhere i’ve ever lived. and that was honestly, more than anything else, what made me the most jealous when i last visited cambridge, ma. now, my fantasies about college life, and the reality collide for a little while as i pour over computer architecture notes. a seemingly endless string of cafes that makes the few starbucks in the touristy areas almost unnoticeable – this is worlds away from columbus.

speaking of columbus … now i know the problem with campus partners. the problem with osu as a whole. i heard a few weeks ago that the buck-i-mart was shutting down. a real shame. this place was great. basically an on-campus shop-and-rob with cheap, high-quality, bagels and coffee and juice to take the edge off before your first class. but it’s gone. one of the few university-related stores that i frequented, it was right in the heart of the engineering campus, which was great for me (especially during the bliss/hell of cis560). did i mention is was cheap? but it’s gone. i e-mailed someone about it and they said that it was a project that was financially independent (i.e. no university funding), and that it just didn’t turn a profit. fair enough, but it was always busy. it might not have made money, but it was useful to students. all students, from the people who wanted cheap soda, to the students who worked long hours there part-time. now lets talk about a project that isn’t financially independent (i.e. gets boatloads of money from the university). campus partners. read gentrification, read a yuppification, read making the campus area into one gian suv-infested bar and grill strip mall. and the thing about that project, is that it’s not even useful for students. it’s going to clear away housing and raise property values making the shitty housing in the area even more expensive. consider this a further tuition increase that you didn’t expect. and the high-end boutiques and bar and grills that are going to populate the area aren’t going to do me, or a great deal of the student body (not to mention the non-students who live in the area) a bit of good. so, my tuition is going to go to finance something that i neither want, nor agree with, nor will ever use, while the one thing that i do use, doesn’t get any of my money (other than the nearly daily few bucks i spent on bagels and juice) and get shut down.one more nail in the coffin that is osu. one more year … enjoy the kids and the high-level classes and then get the hell out before i end up walking down high street in tears.

watched ghost world last night. amazing movie. i think i liked it even better the second time i saw it. i stopped trying to find symbolism in enid’s departure and ignored the occasional discontinuity of the plot and realized that more than anything that this is a movie about enid and rebecca. two teenage girls that, to me, are more real than any others in modern cinema. watching the dvd extras and reading the comic book, i get the impression that after a point, enid and rebecca started writing ghost world for themselves, with clowes just going along for the ride, sketching the background from scenes from his neighborhood while the girls set the plot in the foreground. i think enid is such an amazing and endearing character. this is perhaps because i’ve known so many girls like her. complex, akward, bouncing between moments of sincere kindness and absolute cruelty, but never really fitting into either role. completely uncomfortable even in their own skins, not really weak or vulnerable in the traditional sense of the word, but completely unable to play the role in which they were cast in life. amazing stuff. the movie is really sad in a way, but it makes me happy in the way that i am every time i see something in the media that reflects my reality. oh yeah. clowes totally looks like george clooney.

for the first time in my life, i’m wearing name-brand socks. i’ve got these sweet vans numbers that i had to borrow from iain since the dryer downstairs was broken. admitedly i had my eyes set on the volcom ones, but i’ll take what i can get.

iain seems set on making my bedroom door look totally whack. first it was the jonathan davis poster where he looks half satanist/half child molester, and then it was a poster of the strokes just looking stupid. note to anyone reading this who likes the strokes. i have a great pair of blue jeans with lots of holes in them that i would be willing to sell you for a couple of hundred bucks. they look exactly like the ones in the poserster. they’re real cool. iain did give me a very rad arto saari poster to grace my walls however. cheers.

watched oz for the first time last night. it’s this show all about prison life. the prison bitches, and gangsters seem sort of cliched, but it was still pretty good. the thing i like about a good prison drama, is that it forces you to identify with characters who are all, to some degree, bad people (they’re in the clink). there’s no pure hero or villain, so the whole anti-hero thing works considerably better than in other settings. between that and the sopranos, it makes me want hbo something fierce. the show was good because you could just get into it from the start, even without knowing all the characters or plotlines. also, what i found interesting, is that every once and a while, you have this mumia-esque guy quoting prison statistics. surprisingly anti-prison-industrial complex.

flatmate marco is so fscked. he was supposed to do his folder which represents his organization for his teaching placement today at noon. he didn’t hand it in. the thing is, it was already late. this could be bad for him. i told him he should just go in and give a big speech about how educating teachers has gotten far away from what’s important, etc, etc. but, in all seriousness, i think that it’s slightly scary that marco’s going to be teaching kids. a good guy, but needs to get the whole grin-and-bear-it responsibility thing down. then again, it’s sort of surprising that they have 1st year students student-teaching. i’ll agree that so much of teachers’ education seems to be crap. what i think it is, is that they have a bit of chip on their shoulder because of the general perception of teaching being an easy profession in society. so the university people have to compensate by adding a bunch of superfluous stuff to the curriculum.

the university main library is so beautiful. lots of windows overlooking the meadows on one side and underlooking (is that a word?) the salisburry crags framed by rows of stone-faced tenements.

oh my god. bright eyes is crazy. almost a farce of emo-ness:

“we trade liquor for blood, in an attempt to tip the scales. i think you lost what you loved, in that mess of details. they seem so important at the time, now you can’t even recall any names, faces, or lines. it’s more the feeling of it all. winter’s going to end i’m going to clean these veins again, so close to dying that i finally can start living …”

maybe i’d be this tortured if i grew up in nebraska too. actually, i’d probably be happy if timothy’s (study abroad kid, not brother) post-industrial city = awesome independent music scene theory holds true. at least i read somewhere that he makes up most of his characters. the calendar hung itself … is another seething, messy, emotional track that i still really like. it reminds me of fellow nebraskans the faint, or maybe the faint reminds me of this. kicks it up a notch over carrabba even. when does catharsis become self-indulgence or vanity? the (mock?) radio interview at the end of an attempt to tip the scales is a great contextualization for the record that is completely missing on a lot of recordings of this nature. cheers to tim for hooking me up with the record. he also hooked me up with a record by a band called the natural history who sound like a basic garagey rock band. not too bad. i think he said that they opened for enon when he saw them in columbus. the record’s not bad.

tim also hooked me up with education for death, a disney cartoon which is some interesting cartoon anti-nazi propaganda (perhaps most interesting given some of walt’s political inclinations). it basically tells the story of a young german youth raised and brainwashed into a nazi monstrosity. the best imagery in the film is the image of a goofball hitler pressing his head between the breasts of a freakishly rotund frauline. crazy. also interesting is the amount of dialogue in this film that is actually in german (or at least i think it is – i’m not a german speaker). i imagine that they use the untransalted dialogue to make the antagonists seem even more foreign and frightening.

05.29.2002 – day

originally written 05.29.2002

bright yellow cups of coffee. i’ll find you by hundred reasons playing in my headphones (and beach boys on the cafe sound system – a million times better than brennan’s muzak). the guy with his girlfriend in the corner booth with the thick glasses, dress shirt, and good haircut that makes asia look cool. young parents smiling at their kids in strollers parked beneath the square of bright afternoon sunlight pouring in through thr windows. spiky haired coffee jock behind the counter. girl in the corner chomping on biscotti and reading harry potter. cafe metropol in newington. right around my corner from my flat and i never noticed it before. this city has more little cafes than anywhere i’ve ever lived. and that was honestly, more than anything else, what made me the most jealous when i last visited cambridge, ma. now, my fantasies about college life, and the reality collide for a little while as i pour over computer architecture notes. a seemingly endless string of cafes that makes the few starbucks in the touristy areas almost unnoticeable – this is worlds away from columbus.

speaking of columbus … now i know the problem with campus partners. the problem with osu as a whole. i heard a few weeks ago that the buck-i-mart was shutting down. a real shame. this place was great. basically an on-campus shop-and-rob with cheap, high-quality, bagels and coffee and juice to take the edge off before your first class. but it’s gone. one of the few university-related stores that i frequented, it was right in the heart of the engineering campus, which was great for me (especially during the bliss/hell of cis560). did i mention is was cheap? but it’s gone. i e-mailed someone about it and they said that it was a project that was financially independent (i.e. no university funding), and that it just didn’t turn a profit. fair enough, but it was always busy. it might not have made money, but it was useful to students. all students, from the people who wanted cheap soda, to the students who worked long hours there part-time. now lets talk about a project that isn’t financially independent (i.e. gets boatloads of money from the university). campus partners. read gentrification, read a yuppification, read making the campus area into one gian suv-infested bar and grill strip mall. and the thing about that project, is that it’s not even useful for students. it’s going to clear away housing and raise property values making the shitty housing in the area even more expensive. consider this a further tuition increase that you didn’t expect. and the high-end boutiques and bar and grills that are going to populate the area aren’t going to do me, or a great deal of the student body (not to mention the non-students who live in the area) a bit of good. so, my tuition is going to go to finance something that i neither want, nor agree with, nor will ever use, while the one thing that i do use, doesn’t get any of my money (other than the nearly daily few bucks i spent on bagels and juice) and get shut down.one more nail in the coffin that is osu. one more year … enjoy the kids and the high-level classes and then get the hell out before i end up walking down high street in tears.

watched ghost world last night. amazing movie. i think i liked it even better the second time i saw it. i stopped trying to find symbolism in enid’s departure and ignored the occasional discontinuity of the plot and realized that more than anything that this is a movie about enid and rebecca. two teenage girls that, to me, are more real than any others in modern cinema. watching the dvd extras and reading the comic book, i get the impression that after a point, enid and rebecca started writing ghost world for themselves, with clowes just going along for the ride, sketching the background from scenes from his neighborhood while the girls set the plot in the foreground. i think enid is such an amazing and endearing character. this is perhaps because i’ve known so many girls like her. complex, akward, bouncing between moments of sincere kindness and absolute cruelty, but never really fitting into either role. completely uncomfortable even in their own skins, not really weak or vulnerable in the traditional sense of the word, but completely unable to play the role in which they were cast in life. amazing stuff. the movie is really sad in a way, but it makes me happy in the way that i am every time i see something in the media that reflects my reality. oh yeah. clowes totally looks like george clooney.

for the first time in my life, i’m wearing name-brand socks. i’ve got these sweet vans numbers that i had to borrow from iain since the dryer downstairs was broken. admitedly i had my eyes set on the volcom ones, but i’ll take what i can get.

iain seems set on making my bedroom door look totally whack. first it was the jonathan davis poster where he looks half satanist/half child molester, and then it was a poster of the strokes just looking stupid. note to anyone reading this who likes the strokes. i have a great pair of blue jeans with lots of holes in them that i would be willing to sell you for a couple of hundred bucks. they look exactly like the ones in the poserster. they’re real cool. iain did give me a very rad arto saari poster to grace my walls however. cheers.

watched oz for the first time last night. it’s this show all about prison life. the prison bitches, and gangsters seem sort of cliched, but it was still pretty good. the thing i like about a good prison drama, is that it forces you to identify with characters who are all, to some degree, bad people (they’re in the clink). there’s no pure hero or villain, so the whole anti-hero thing works considerably better than in other settings. between that and the sopranos, it makes me want hbo something fierce. the show was good because you could just get into it from the start, even without knowing all the characters or plotlines. also, what i found interesting, is that every once and a while, you have this mumia-esque guy quoting prison statistics. surprisingly anti-prison-industrial complex.

flatmate marco is so fscked. he was supposed to do his folder which represents his organization for his teaching placement today at noon. he didn’t hand it in. the thing is, it was already late. this could be bad for him. i told him he should just go in and give a big speech about how educating teachers has gotten far away from what’s important, etc, etc. but, in all seriousness, i think that it’s slightly scary that marco’s going to be teaching kids. a good guy, but needs to get the whole grin-and-bear-it responsibility thing down. then again, it’s sort of surprising that they have 1st year students student-teaching. i’ll agree that so much of teachers’ education seems to be crap. what i think it is, is that they have a bit of chip on their shoulder because of the general perception of teaching being an easy profession in society. so the university people have to compensate by adding a bunch of superfluous stuff to the curriculum.

the university main library is so beautiful. lots of windows overlooking the meadows on one side and underlooking (is that a word?) the salisburry crags framed by rows of stone-faced tenements.

oh my god. bright eyes is crazy. almost a farce of emo-ness:

“we trade liquor for blood, in an attempt to tip the scales. i think you lost what you loved, in that mess of details. they seem so important at the time, now you can’t even recall any names, faces, or lines. it’s more the feeling of it all. winter’s going to end i’m going to clean these veins again, so close to dying that i finally can start living …”

maybe i’d be this tortured if i grew up in nebraska too. actually, i’d probably be happy if timothy’s (study abroad kid, not brother) post-industrial city = awesome independent music scene theory holds true. at least i read somewhere that he makes up most of his characters. the calendar hung itself … is another seething, messy, emotional track that i still really like. it reminds me of fellow nebraskans the faint, or maybe the faint reminds me of this. kicks it up a notch over carrabba even. when does catharsis become self-indulgence or vanity? the (mock?) radio interview at the end of an attempt to tip the scales is a great contextualization for the record that is completely missing on a lot of recordings of this nature. cheers to tim for hooking me up with the record. he also hooked me up with a record by a band called the natural history who sound like a basic garagey rock band. not too bad. i think he said that they opened for enon when he saw them in columbus. the record’s not bad.

tim also hooked me up with education for death, a disney cartoon which is some interesting cartoon anti-nazi propaganda (perhaps most interesting given some of walt’s political inclinations). it basically tells the story of a young german youth raised and brainwashed into a nazi monstrosity. the best imagery in the film is the image of a goofball hitler pressing his head between the breasts of a freakishly rotund frauline. crazy. also interesting is the amount of dialogue in this film that is actually in german (or at least i think it is – i’m not a german speaker). i imagine that they use the untransalted dialogue to make the antagonists seem even more foreign and frightening.

free trade?

from a salon article describing ethiopia’s prime minister’s diss on the us over agricultural protectionism:

Removing subsidies and tariffs is far more important to Africa’s development than aid, Meles said. The problem, he said, is that wealthy nations extend “enormous subsidies” to their own agribusinesses while placing taxes on the very products Africans have the comparative advantage in, such as grain and cotton.

activism software

some guy posted about some interesting software for activists. posting it here so i don’t forget about it

1)Mailman hacked to work encrypted mailist lists.

I wrote a patch for mailman to work with encrypted mailing lists.
I’ve seen a number of attempts at this but all use the model of creating a key pair for the list and having lists members encrypt emails to the list and the server decrypts and recrypts them to each list member. The problem with this is that as a list user you have to trust you the sys-admin of the box hosting your list and the more lists a box hosts the bigger the target the box becomes as a tar get for intrusion, both legal and technical.

The patch makes it so when a list is created it can be defined as encrypted mailing list, and then the list’s administrator creates the PGP key pair and distrubutes both the public AND private keys off list to all the list member. An encrypted list can be configured to to accept or reject unincoming mails that are unen crypted and add rejection and reminder messages can be set through the mailman w eb UI. Also list members can configure if they want to receive the PGP messages with in the body of the message or as an attachment.

Patchs for mailman 2.0.8 and 2.0.9 can be downloaded from shaft.bitmine.net/~joshuae/mm-2.0.8-0.5.5.gz and mm-2.0.9-0.5.5.gz.

2)Linux Network Toolbox

The Linux Network Toolbox is a credit card sized cd that holds a complete set of networking tools and X windows. This is important because during a office occuption you can put this disk in a CD drive and it can start emailing documents on the hard drive to be picked up from an email account later on.
Link: http://lbt.linuxcare.com/index.epl

3)Boy in the bubble and Localhost encrypted mail proxy

Boy in the Bubble is an attempted to create a secure install of Windows, by installing Windows on top of VMWare on top of an debian installation with an encrypted file system.
With Network Associates stopping development on PGP and the general quality of plugs-in for mail clients on windows, there needs to be a simpler and standard way to use PGP. The localhost proxy does this by sitting between the client and mail proxy and automatic encrypting and decrypting mail as it comes in by reading commands in the Subject line.

05.27.2002 – dream

Originally written .

the normal exam-time anxiety dream. did really poorly on a distributed systems examination and got upset about it. woke up all nervous until logic kicked in and told me that i had already taken the distributed systems exam and didn’t do too shabilly (at least by my recollection).

05.27.2002 – day

Originally written .

woke up really sore from playing football yesterday.

i upset erin yesterday when we were talking on the phone, which sucks, not so much because i care about upsetting her – i know i didn’t intend to, she knows i didn’t intend to, and i know that everyone can sometimes get upset by things that aren’t intented to be upsetting, but because it’s just hard to have a conversation with someone who you care about, and haven’t seen in ages, dominated by that upset ackwardness. upset is a weird emotion, because it’s something that, at least I, always feel sort of weak and ashamed about, so, it hangs about in the air, present, real, but never completely taken form, as though unconfident about it’s own existent. in the end, i’m far more comfortable with anger or grief or something less ephemeral when it comes to communicating with my friends.

my apparent reluctance to introduce erin into other parts of my life has always been a point of contention in our relationship. i’ll grant that i have a tendency to compartmentalize my life and my friends, but i’d say that’s more of a self-anxiety-imposed act on my own part rather than some edict about how my friends should interact with each other. the thing is, i hate akwardness. i even hate watching it. like i cringe in movies at the akward moments that are supposed to be comical. for me, they’re just painful. and for me, one of the most akward things, is trying to interact with people with whom you don’t have anything in common. now i have lots of good friends who don’t outwardly have something in common with me, but those friendships were able to be built because we spent a lot of time together, either in classes, the dorms, or through debate. if i had only met them at a party, or in a class that didn’t require any interaction, i probably wouldn’t be friends with them. it’s easy enough for me to hit it off with someone who skates, or who listens to similar music as i do, but beyond that, i find it difficult as hell.

so, i think in my attempt to avoid akwardness, i tend to keep aspects of my life that are rigidly defined seperate from each other. i perceived my girlfriend as not having a lot in common, on face, with my housemates, and didn’t make a whole lot of effort to make the two aspects of my life interact.

i think erin interpretted me saying that i didn’t think that she had a lot in common with my housemates as an indication that i found her somewhat boring or inadequate which isn’t the case at all. it’s just that my housemates and her are different. i’d say my housemates defined themselves, like myself, far more by easily encapsulated lifestyles – skater, punk-rocker, scenester, activist, whereas my girlfriend’s self-definition is much more subtle. she owns a skateboard and rides it, but she’s not a skater, she owns punk-rock records and goes to shows, but i wouldn’t say that she’s a punk or a scenester. she cares strongly about social issues, but she doesn’t talk about “consensus” or “afinity gorups” or talk about dates using the first letter of the month followed by date format (e.g. “a12” or “j13”), etc, etc. it’s not that there’s no substance, it’s just that the substance isn’t defined by some cliche.

so after a point, erin get’s sick of discussing things like this. but i really like it, because even though i feel bad about hurting someones feelings, sometimes that can open up one’s eyes to some new perspective. for instance, in thinking of the way i define myself, i realized that all the activities that i like tend to entail some sort of lifestyle – skateboarding, punk/hxc, even computers. now that’s not to say that there’s a single, homogenous lifestyle that is associated with any of these things – mark gonzales is not chad muska, g.g. allen wasn’t ian mckay, and the carbon defense league is not bill gates, but i guess what the whole lifestyle thing means, is that it allows me to be aware that there are people, somewhere, who share a great many things in common with me. more importantly, i think, it lets me affiliate with a social group that is more constant than your everyday social groups, such as my college friends, or my friends from high school, which, as one comes to realize, are tragically fleeting. there are individuals that i haven’t seen in years, and probably will never see again. but in every new city, i can find people who are familiar to me. skaters, punks, scenesters, computer jocks. the faces are different, but in many ways, they are the same people who i have always known.

Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting, up and down on its empty chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed; they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open alternate mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cties of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, for whome the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.

factoid – new vegetarian friendly restaurant in harrisburgh

Aangan Restaurant, 3500 Walnut St., Harrisburg

05.26.2002 – day

Originally written 05.26.2002.

media check. peter told me to check out if on a winter’s night a traveler by italo calvino. the library didn’t have it in translation, but it did have invisible cities, so i’m reading that instead. the framework of the book is that marco polo is describing cities that he has encountered during his explorations to kublai kahn. the book is a series of descriptions of these cities. it’s a really interesting read, and unlike anything i have read before. it’s refreshing to read something which has innovations of form. after reading a collection of generally unsatisfying d.h. lawrence short stories, i just wanted to read something that provided some sort of interesting narrative. but, as much as i like storytelling, it’s not everything in literature, and sometimes the manner in which ideas are communicated is every bit as important as the ideas themselves. it’s not that calvino’s ideas are uninteresting though. in describing the cities, he doesn’t so much describe physical places, but how man creates and destroys memory, dreams, hopes, desires, etc. this summer, i think my literary project might be to write about columbus’ skateparks in the style and context that calvino writes about cities in the book. additionally, for one who’s seen my fair share of cities in the last few years, i find the writer’s unique perspective on the concept of ‘city’ to be an interesting way to contextualize my travels.

media check 2. watched hedwig and the angry inch for my second time. watched it with iain who hadn’t seen it before. he liked it, and i found it every bit as satisfying the second time as i did the first. gives me hope that i might actually like musical theatre. the film is just so impressive in execution in so many ways. the costumes, the art-direction, the flow of scenes (which are sometimes so disparate that one could imagine that this on-screen interpretation could have gone horribly wrong), and of course the amazing score. to be honest, thematically, i can’t really get that much out of such stories about sexual identity, but as a total product, the film is such a tidal wave of creativity and expressiveness that one can’t help but be empowered. my brother mentioned to me that he wanted to work on some mixed media music projects (music + literature reading + original spoken word), and i’d like to combine those things to provide some sort of narrative. if i could come up with something one tenth as good as hedwig, i think i’d be happy.

our flat played a football match against the flat below ours today. well, it was only a real match for about 20 minutes or so. we were down a man, but i think we were the better team. the reason the game degenerated was because the other team had brought champaign to the park, and by the time the game was over, they were starting to get pretty drunk. i was a little annoyed, as i tend to take games pretty seriously. my mom can probably tell some choice stories about me wailing on tim when i was younger and trying to get him to play street hockey with me. anyway, i still got some energy out of my system, and it was pretty funny to see me running around with my bssxe t-shirt amidst kids trying to play football while holding a bottle of “buck-fizz”.