Category: Uncategorized

on journal writing

Originally written 04.21.2002.

when i am gone, in my arrogance, part of me wants the notariety to receive a public response such as that of the queen mother’s that i witnessed whilst in london. but all of me, even the arrogent part, does not want mourning by strangers, or by anyone for that matter. what i want is examination, the kind of examination that i think everyone wants in their life. i want someone to seek out the meaning behind my “rosebuds”, but not with the voyeurism of this modern age, but instead with the quiet inquisition of childhood. i want someone to break the lock on my old rooms and imagine where i would have hung the posters and photographs. to sit at my desk and dust off the titles stacked on the bookshelves. to page gently through their pages and try to imagine what i ever saw in them. to boot up my computer and scan through the directories, forming a connected graph of all the seemingly independent nodes. i want people to read what i read. to read what i write. i want people to hear what i heard. to listen to the cds neatly organized in their pockets or the tapes, ancient relics of my evolution, less neatly organized, strewn in boxes long forgotten in closets. i want people to trace the steps i might have taken through my cities. i want people to live the small, quiet moments of my life so that they might for a second feel all the contentment and the pleasure, the disgust and the pain. in my absence, they are the ghost, possessing for an instance the vacancy left by my escape instead of the other way around. i am a great collector of things as i think many people are. but why do i and my good company keep these artifacts of existence, these physical memoirs, these forget-me-nots? some would say it is so that they do not forget, but i say they are like the smith’s branding iron, a cold, meaningless hunk of metal whose indellible mark was made somewhere else. these artifacts are not for me. they are for those on the periphery — to examine, to speculate, to steal and to covet. to add substance to my assertions, to make clear what a lifetime of overt expressions could not clarify.

football, crypto, mtp

Originally written 04.17.2002.

rob brought home a football today, so rob, marco, and i headed over to the meadows to kick the old football around. we played a bit of heads and volleys which is a game where one person plays keeper and the rest try to score, but only from balls in the air. i realized that i was a bit out of shape, and that my football skills totally suck at this point. my fitness was at least better than my flatmate’s, but i just couldn’t finish and put the ball between the posts. oh well, it was a good study break.

i’m watching this show on channel 4 in the uk called the mark thomas project. iain says that mark thomas has been doing this thing for quite a while now, and i would describe him as a uk version of michael moore. but better. the show is part highly political activist stand-up comedy and video of michael moore-esque antics against corporations. it’s like tv nation, but arguably better because it seems like thomas has has more money with which to pull his antics, and as an individual he’s very angry and confrontational, but in the way that most stand-up comics appear to be. so on tonight’s show he’s talking about going after multi-nationals who plan to build dams in turkey which, besides having devistating environmental implications, will also displace thousands of kurish people living in the region. before marco switched the station to watch football, it looked like thomas was posing as an artist and building a giant ice-sculpture version of a dam in front of the headquarters of a french company involved in the dam construction. rad! this show is entertaining and empowering in a way that just makes you feel good. it makes me feel like i do when i watch the truth anti-tobacco tutorials. it’s a amazing. i wonder if i can get it back in the states.

miscelleny from wed. 04.16.2002

Originally written 04.16.2002.

So I’ve decided to start writing my dreams down because I noticed that Patrick keeps track of his dreams on his web journal and I realized that if I find my waking life relevent enough to document, I might as well document my dream life as well, since the two are no doubt more closely intertwined than may seem apparent. My dream accounts are by no means as cool as the dream journals described by one of the characters in Michael Chabon’s excellent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, but I hope they’re worthwhile nonetheless.

I’ve found myself dreaming a great deal more since my excursion to London. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been exhausted ever since and have just been crashing harder. I don’t remember my dream from last night, so I’ll just recount some recent dreams.

A few nights ago, I dreamt that I went home and that I ran into Kerry Tingle, a girl who I went to elementary school and jr. high with. I haven’t seen her in ages, and probably won’t, and I don’t even know if I’ve spelled her name correctly. But in my dream, we just hung out. Really random.

Two nights ago, I had another back home in PA dream. I dreamt that I was driving around Mt. Holly Springs, PA with my mother and brother. I think there was some argument or other point of convention, but I don’t really remember all that part. All that I remember is that Mt. Holly Springs, PA was, as is only possible in dreams, distinctly Mt. Holly, and at the same time, completely not. The dream town was laid out on the reverse axis of it’s real-life counterpart, and the architecture of the town was distincltly similar to Edinburgh. Not only that, but the dream town had somehow gained an archway that was formed by a toppled over, minature, version of the Eifel Tower. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that imagery. Again, random.

other stuff:
difficulty concentrating in class after long hiatus

sudanese coffee and revision

political discussion with agatha

a&f update

so it seems that a&f, in response to pressure from many groups, in particular one called 80-20, a&f has pulled the shirts from the market. awesome. the turn-around on this whole issue is pretty impressive.

i think that there is also a protest in columbus today at some point which is cool

the whole debaucle was written up in the sf gate as well as on cnn. one of the best lines is from hampton carney a PR guy with Paul Wilmot Communications (which is somehow related to a&f) who said “we personally thought Asians would love this t-shirt”.

one final note. this is yet another line of apparrel from a company, that at least in terms of the values they purvey, is the most evil company in the garment industry. it is important not to forget their “drinking 101” adverts that were slammed by MADD. i don’t find this surprising as i would argue that a&f is largely worn by white, upper-middle-class american college students who, statistically, lead other groups in terms of dangerous drinking behavior (see report cited in salon article previously mentioned in this web log). also note a&f’s shameless exploitation of teen sexuality in its marketing. it’s not that i have a problem with teen sexuality (see yesterdays interesting salon article), i just think that sexuality, teen or otherwise, should be defined personally and not be culture or cleverly crafted mass media. i think we can all think of examples of what happens when sexuality is defined culturally *cough* female genital mutilation *cough*, *cough* taliban *cough*. so, racial insensitivity comes as no surprise to me. it’s not so much the insensitivity that bothers me. people fuck up. it’s the blatant attempt to profit off of it (and at $25 a pop, no less).

oh, here’s one of the shirts in question:

quote of the day

“excessive
control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property
may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and
embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a
whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.”

– from the majority oppinion of the Canadian Supreme Court in ThÈberge v. Galerie d’Art du Petit Champlain inc.

a&f on the run?

so i tried to go back and check out the a&f links again, and i was met with:

The Mall/Store is currently experiencing problems.

Please try again later.

Command Execution Failure

(CMN0961E)

Unable to complete command or a command could not execute.

i’m hoping that maybe they decided to stop selling such crap, but it could be that they’re just taking the pages off the web to prevent people from seeing the shirts in all their ghastly, racist, horror and raising a stir.

as if i needed another reason to hate abercrombie & fitch

i came across an e-mail describing a new line of t-shirts by a&f:

…

You might all find it interesting to take a look at these links, and see
the new line of shirts Abercrombie and Fitch has come out with– all four
are extremely offensive to Asian Americans and continue to propagate
stereotypes of Asians. I am shocked that a “brand name” company would
produce such racist products, and I think it’s important that, as
politically and culturally conscious people, we speak out on things like
to think about how small things like this make you feel, whether you are
Asian or not

…

the shirts can be viewed here:

shirt #1 – wong brothers laundry

shirt #2 – budda bash

shirt #3 – pizza dojo

shirt #4 – wok-n-bowl

I took a look
at these shirts on the website, and they are pretty fucking offensive (think
breakfast at tiffany’s micky rooney offensive). You have the slanty-eyed
asian charicature that is always offensive, and the perpetuation of the
asian-laundry stereotype which is in itself a nasty little bit of history.

i really can’t imagine why abercrombie would even think to put these shirts
out. of course this is the same company that charges $24.50 for a t-shirt
(the act of paying $24.50 for a t-shirt being, in my eyes, being every bit as evil
as wearing a garment with so little consideration for racial sensitivity).

as the high school punk band i saw in allentown a few years ago suggested,
AF should really stand for “all fucked-up”.

binge drinking

so salon has an article on college binge drinking which i found interesting
it’s at:

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/04/12/binge_drink/index.html

what i found particularly pointed was the author’s categorization of
campus drinking as either “heavy of none”. when the heavy leads to
increased levels of violence, death, and rape, as the cited study seems to
suggest, i’ll choose none every time. at least more people seem to be with me.
while the rate of binge drinkers has remained steady over the last 10 years,
the article indicates that the rate of abstainers has risen slightly. i’m
still of the oppinion that if one person in a group can’t drink responsibly,
then no one can.

messing with the record industry

i don’t know if anyone else has seen this, but at OSU, the security group has been getting notifications of music piracy from record companies like sony who are basically asking (read threatening, though with unknown consequences) us to remove offending material (i.e. mp3s) from the network. i think it would be funny if people mistagged mp3s of something inane (e.g. iain and marco singing flower of scotland, richard stallman singing the free free software song, pimp daddy wellfare, etc.) that is the same length as a copyrighted song, and see if the record industry’s cronies come knocking. “actually, anti-piracy@sonymusic.com, that’s not really korn’s new single, it’s a seminal central ohio rap “artist” (calling pdw an artist is sort of like calling that lady who photographs the babies in flower costumes an artist) called pimp daddy wellfare”. i suggest doing this with artists like korn because the nu-metal kids who will download the file will double the amusement by receiving something that is even (marginally) worse than their favorite addidas, no wait, puma, no wait pony-clad so-cal pretty boys.

so reading about DCOM sucks, but distributed time coordination will be a bit more interesting. if only i could get vegan, gmo-free, and cheap sandwich pockets from the cafeteria at osu, sigh. vegan pockets and irn-bru. even though irn-bru tastes like liquid bubblegum, i will learn to like it. next to whiskey, it’s got to be the national beverage of scotland. i think kids are weened on this stuff.