rites of spring

springtime in davis welcomes a celebration of life, pollen and hot girls.  moments of springtime abound and i am here to capture them for you.  so here we go:

- at once, in a study lounge, a barbie doll punishes her laptop with index-finger typing and annoys everyone with her loud clickity-clacks.  students curl up on tiny couches like kittens, basking under sunlight pouring through the windows.  

- orangutans on bikes make their way through campus.  i call them that because they do not grip the handles, but to balance themselves they stiffen their arms and hold them straight down like an orangutan.  there's no need to bike handle-less except to look cool, and towards this end they fail miserably.  

- a particular religious fanatic wears a harness to support his massive "God hates sinners" sign.  though his evocation of curses aren't necessary given the extensive list of sinners on the sign (witches, lazy christians, fags, effeminate academics(?)), he curses on-lookers nonetheless.  a few brave and equally annoying individuals defend themselves against his accusations, but he is louder and more shameless than the rest.  

- remnants of the annual hippie-fest persist, long after the aroma of marijuana and hemp-wearing vendors has past.  a woman's long-flowing skirt flails in the air as she twirls a hula-hoop over her head.  smelly homeless guys ask for change before tooting their alpenhorn (the long instrument from the ricola commercials).  the weekly farmers market attracts the hippie crowd as they sway to the mellow bluegrass band.

- pages of the california aggie, the newspaper to which i am employed, strew about like tumbleweed, especially in the narrow tunnels between buildings.  the wind picks them up, and a more artistic person would find beauty in their mid-air suspension (a la the paper bag in American Beauty).  it makes me sad though, because usually the pages left strewn about are from the arts section for which i write.

i have a meeting with my professor now so the moments of springtime will be cut short for now.  and thus ends the lamest post in the world.

meowymix 3.0

for those of you not in the know, muxtape is all the rave as the best new-music-finding site... better than pandora, lastfm and imeem...  it's clean, simple and best of all it plays high quality tunes.  

anyway, i'm going to try to update my meowymix  consistently, and when i do i'm going to write a little blurb about the songs i chose and why.  since i'm still like a teenage boy who overthinks each song, song placement, song transitions, etc., these meowymixes mean a lot more to me than they should.  and since they matter to me they should mean a lot to you too.

aside:  this is my third mix i've made on muxtape.  maybe i'll resurrect the first and second mixes in weeks to come.

meowymix 3.0: when folk and electronic music meet, sometimes they have illegitimate children.

this mix is a half-hearted attempt to marry folk and electronic music.  it starts the way most failed relationships start - with a third party.  the mutual friend invites the unlikely pair to the bars and conveniently leaves to watch the awkward conversations and forced laughter.  or, like gilbert arenas, the he'll round up some homeless people and invite himself over to his buddy's house, where his family is having dinner.  then in the middle of dinner, he'll get up and go, leaving the homeless guys at his friend's house.

here, the third party is the first two tracks, and they initiate a cascade of experimental folk and electronic music with an incredible track from The Books.  this might be my new favorite band of the moment.  they're a duo from new york that combines voice clips, natural sounds and acoustic rhythms to create a disjointed, primitive sound.  enjoy your worries, the track is titled. you may never have them again.  an atlas sound track slips in next.  the natural transition into this song, titled "Cold as Ice" contradicts the warmth of of the previous three.  the idea of cold separation pervades in the electro-pop song "take it easy (love nothing)" by bright eyes.

the next song was a problem.  i really wanted to put in "ms jackson" by outkast, but for some reason i chickened out.  instead i put in some filler song that sounds nice but really makes no sense - shift by grizzly bizzle.  the next track, 2 sisters drunk on each other by califone, reminds me of the books i've been reading.  in 100 years in solitude, incest is repeated after each generation forgets the mistakes (and incest) of the previous generation.  this chance meeting of folk and electronica is in the same vein...  something's just a little off in their meeting, and it's as awkward and taboo as incest.  ok maybe it's not that awkward.  anyway...

 the two have an illegitimate child that they leave in a train to be cared for by a scary man, which is all taken as a bad dream by the folkster who, of course, is the one to sit back and recount her tales in song.  and so the story ends.  enjoy!

the man crush

i'm pretty comfortable with my sexuality... some may say too comfortable. especially after this post. but i think it's time for me to reveal to the world certain individuals who i find admirable in one way or another. it's not even that i'd crush on these guys if i was a girl.... i don't take my mancrushes that far. i just think these guys are cool. so back off.

Mike Mussina aka The Moose

there's just something about the moose that makes me think, this is one good looking dude. maybe it's his intense stare-down right before he launches a devastating knuckle curve. or maybe it's the fact that he looks like jack from lost (though i've had my platonic eye on mussina since he pitched for the orioles). whatever it is, he has it. i am not gay.

Martin Keamy from Lost

Keamy is a renegade mercenary who wants nothing more than to blow up lots of stuff on the island in Lost.  he looks a quarter asian, which qualifies him as one of the few cool asians in television.  but as badass as he is, keamy had me when he delivered that fateful but overlooked line, the imperative phrase that sums up his cool and dangerous demeanor:

"gas up the chopper, frank"

fans of lost know how cool he sounded when he said it.  this is the equivalent of saying "get off my back" or "you're not important enough to even argue with."  and this is how i'm going to talk from now on.

Marty Sampson

back when i was melting congregational faces with my cherry red fender strat, i had what one could perceive as a man crush on a certain worship leader.  my faux-affection (often mistaken for real affection) wasn't as strong as other korean american worship band members, i'm sure... but what college christian can resist marty sampson's spiritual crooning and rock-star outfits?  not me.

Ernie Johnson

is he black?  is he white?  i'm not the only one wondering.  as the smooth host of TNT's inside the NBA, ernie doesn't get overshadowed by barkley's big personality or kenny's insight.  when things get out of hand, ernie brings it back.  when barkley doesn't feel like talking, ernie fills in the void.  the guy's got a brother's swagger.  what can i say?

Nicholas Kristof

you may think you've met a kristof sometime in your life.  maybe that guy in high school who everyone liked, who quietly got straight As while founding a new volunteer organization.  maybe the girl that raised half a million dollars in relief aid in darfur by selling ridiculously adorned paperclips.  but lets make things clear - you haven't met a kristof.  

magna cum laude graduate from harvard, law degree from oxford, fluent in mandarin and arabic.  kristof is a journalist for the new york times.  he isn't some do-gooder liberal who preaches the evils of the world from a soap box.  he travels the world, gets on the ground and tells us what's going on.  whether its in china, darfur or even our own back yard, kristof gives a fair and balanced opinion when discussing nuanced issues.  and he's got a cute asian wife.  

anyway. each of these guys is admirable in his own right.  i know some will inevitably question my sexual preference but to them all i gotta say is.... gas up the chopper, frank.  

space cowboys

space cowboys - no, not the clint eastwood movie.  instead... my millionth attempt at trying to convey this theory i have about music.  (dont worry.. there will be a 1,000,001 attempt coming)

two american frontiers occupied our imaginations since our inception.  one, the west, was the promised land, promised to us by God in some manifest destiny that entitled white americans to keep pushing west and claiming land.  the west was california, a land of milk and honey, of gold even, and vast lands warmed by constant sunshine.  that's the gist of that.

space came a bit later, after the west was won of course.  the idea was the same though, at least at the time.  the russians launched their satellite, not to stake claim to space itself, but to be pioneers in science and ingenuity.  we put a man on the moon.  that was a milestone, but the frontiers were found to be expanding, accelerating out far beyond human scope.  and likewise, our ingenuity and imagination have chased those frontiers out, beyond the gravity of deductive reasoning and finite equations, through black holes that stretch and rip light and sound and spit us out through worm holes that maybe a few have imagined traveling...

well anyway.  there is music that reflects the values and stories of those two frontiers.  both frontiers achieve a certain destiny, but they are ultimately empty.  it's as if there was some unforeseen leak that let that destiny drip out, leaving the music incomplete.  the western commemorated the stories of people and places, they ascribed meaning to values and value to meaning...  but they were insular, circular, incested and eventually marketed to become crappy country music that makes mere reference to the "good old days".  once they hit the coast and settled their lands, they began to leak imagination from their heartfelt honesty, and they leaked it until they were dry like the riverbeds in late summer, or dry like their repetitive, cursory conversations they had with their neighbors.  dry like the promise of the western frontier, leaving a thirst for imagination and expansiveness.

with that thirst, they launched themselves into space.  they looked back on our small blue earth and saw things in a different light.  they asked questions that challenged meaning and values and stories in our music, deconstructing that which they did not themselves build.  sound became waveforms, words were just sounds, music was sound on sound.  as for light, it became waves and particles, scientifically proven, but methodically detached from previous connotations of good, and dark stripped of evil.  and with just waveforms and sounds and particles and waves, we achieved something primal and raw, more real than any story, universal as the consciousness of the living, and empty as the vastness of space.  even as we breathe, space is become more vast and more empty.  galaxies are just too few and far between for this space experiment to gather the beauty of light and sound in a way that can be appreciated in a song.

so where the west failed in that we reached its end, space failed in reaching no end.  so somewhere in between is where we are, but not where we will be.  like folding two ends of a string, music will bring together the western frontier to converge with the expansion of space, and in their joining will make something perfect, i believe.  

in other words:  folk music + experimental music = omg

the grime of bananas

sometimes, doing the right thing hurts

like peeling a banana

the right way -

you're left with grime under your nail

and still a peel left over.