Author: briancollapsing

for kai: that picture of me is on the concrete ledge on top of the edge of the 8th and top floor of a parking structure on camups here at USC, facing the measley downtown of los angeles. i don’t know how i would have got to the roof of a ralphs, but it would have been a better story if i had maybe.

actually, this picture was taken about a week after someone (not a student here) had committed suicide from the same structure. security guards came while my girlfriend/camera operator and i were about to take the picture, prior to me getting up on the ledge, and asked what we were doing up there and made sure we weren’t going to “try anything funny”. once they left i climbed up there, had her snap enough shots to have some to choose from, then got the heck down.

it was scary and i didn’t want to get down the wrong way. i like being alive no matter what bad things might be going on in the world.

entropy has had the best collection of quotes from various subjects on the current national situation that i’ve seen anywhere, from the best assortment of sources. this guy is really smart and i salute him. this on in particular caught my eye. check out his site for more, and for the link to the article this is from. but this one just made me smile about human beings, which almost never happens:

I wish that this could be published on the front page of every newspaper in America. An Arab-American’s account of his escape from the disaster:

“I was on my back, facing this massive cloud that was approaching, it must have been 600 feet off, everything was already dark. I normally wear a pendant around my neck, inscribed with an Arabic prayer for safety; similar to the cross. A hesidic Jewish man came up to me and held the pendant in his hand, and looked at it. He read the Arabic out loud for a second. What he said next, I will never forget. With a deep Brooklyn accent he said “Brother, if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us, grab my hand, lets get the hell out of here”. He helped me stand up, and we ran for what seemed like forever without looking back. He was the last person I would ever have thought, who would help me. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.”

i can’t say anything to stand up to that and i have to go to class now anyway.

ooooooh, this is exciting. i forgot to say… i found this amazing poster by dave mckean — my very favorite artist (see sidebar for link to a page of his works), and the creator of all the covers to my favorite series of books, the sandman — which is not only cool enough on it’s own, but gains even more in cool points because it’s a batman/arkham asylum poster, and i’m a huge fan of batman: the animated series as well. said poster is now on it’s way to me. oh my, it’s so wonderful, i can’t wait to see it hanging on my wall.

in other batman-related news, there’s also a game called batman: vengeance coming out in mid-october for playstation 2 based on the animated series, which even features all the same voice actors from the original cartoons. that means you get the exceptional tim conroy as batman, and the imcomparable mark hammill as the joker, again! i may not be able to resist this one for very long… luckily i’m starting a job tomorrow.

also: please forgive and try not to lose all your respect for me now that i’ve divulged what a massive dork i am. thanks.

an uneventful school day, for the most part. i’m glad it’s over though. visual culture and marketing seemed awfully low on content, and painfully irrelevant to me today. i did have a nice lunch in the park with my buddy pat, and get to do a little reading. american psycho continues to be a great book, but i’m getting closer to finished which means i have to go buy myself a copy of good omens at the bookstore sometime in the next week. mmm, more neil gaiman, at least in part. i’m sure he would only co-write with someone of equally high caliber, and my two favorite book buddies both said they liked this one, so of course i can’t ignore that kind of recommendation.

i also have a quick story for you. today in class my friend asked what i’d be doing this weekend. i said, “concert tomorrow night, otherwise i’m not sure yet.” and he asked, naturally, “oh, who are you going to see?” i, naturally, went ahead and told him: burning airlines. the way he turned and looked at me silently for a few beats was pretty priceless. then he said, “that’s pretty darn inappropriate, don’t you think?”, but he said this laughing — not in a reprimanding way that suggests it’s a bad band name. more in the way that he’s appreciating the bizarre coincidence, which come to think of it, i hadn’t even though of yet. so we laughed at that for a minute. then i thought, i really hope the show isn’t cancelled because of that, or for any other reason, because i really want to see this band.

i know, i’m just so selfish.

but i’m also wearing blue dress socks because all of my regular ones are in the laundry bag, so i had better get to that. time to pump my quarters away in exchange for clothes that smell like springtime.

more later if something thrilling happens.

hey look at that, i’m back, and it’s only 7 o’ clock. why, you ask? well, they cancelled the screening. apparently we might have drawn the wrath of terrorists for getting to see this movie before them, maybe? i don’t know. all four of us were pretty angry and disappointed with paramount for caving like that. the world still turns, i’ve heard. i can’t believe i didn’t think of this before, since it’s probably one of the only literary references i make somewhat frequently (from slaughterhouse five), but something bad happened. so it goes.

if even the entertainment industry is shaken by this, what will americans have left to keep them going? i don’t know what was more shocking, seeing the film footage, or turning to MTV yesterday and seeing CBS news instead of the real world.

my real concern: is carson okay?

going to see zoolander in a little while. that’s good.

in my finance class today, predictably, the teacher felt it was a good idea to take a few minutes (about 20) at the beginning of class and offer his thoughts and opinions on recent events. this is bad. as soon as i left for my first class yesterday, i told my roommates, “you know, i bet all my professors are going to use this as a chance to get up on their soapboxes and make me listen to what they think about all of this, which frankly i don’t care about a single tiny bit.” and naturally, it happened today in finance, the class where i don’t care even when he’s teaching the class, much less how he thinks “we need to be sure not to blame any group for the actions of a few men”. yeah, thanks prof. you’re a very wise person.

my asian religions professor, god bless him, first said, “in news of a topical nature, you should give blood…” and wrote on the board the times and location of the campus blood drive. and then he said something like, “but our job right now is to talk about Buddhism,” which he went right into doing. i seriously love that guy.

this was odd though; with about 15 minutes still to go in class, in a lecture room that seats about 300 and which has no windows or open doors, all the lights suddenly go out. it’s pitch black, and the professor stops in mid sentence and everyone’s quiet for a second. but that’s not the worst. some obviously ingenious person toward the back of the room says, to the dark room, “i smell smoke…”. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT! so everyone gets freaked and is about to leave in a scrambled panic, and the lights come back on, on a crowd of peole half-standing and nervous. the teacher says, “okay okay, everybody sit down”, one of the TA’s goes out to insure there’s no smoke or fire or anything going on out in the hall (which there isn’t at all… yeah, that guy was brilliant), and we finish class.

okay that’s my story for now. ben stiller, don’t let me down.

if you’re lucky, you’ve seen this amazing new video by a band called kenna playing on mtv 2 recently. the song is called “hell bent”. it’s a pretty decent song with a sort of synth-pop sound, but the video is unbelievably cool. it breaks my heart every time i see it. if you haven’t seen it you should try to track it down somewhere. it’s so beautiful. and every time i think about the slogan “have bliss product” i laugh.

hey look, the mail just came and i got a couple cd’s and a state and main production crew t shirt (ten bucks on ebay, shipping included. cha ching). so now i gotta give a listen to the new end original single at least before i head to class — which excites me because this band is extremely promising to my tastes — and probably save the owls’ cd for after i get back from school a few hours from now. but i’m glad they finally came.

check that out, my computer couldn’t find the track listing for this cd on the cd database. i’m too cutting edge indie for my own good (not true).

hopefully no one took my blogging silence as an indication of tragedy. the only effects that today’s utterly insane world events have had on me so far are 1) a phone call waking me up early to watch the news (thanks to my girlfriend) and therefore an hour and a half less sleep, 2) watching more tv in one day than i have in the last 15 days probably (i sat in front of cnn for at least six hours today, easily, in blocks of up to two hours at once), 3) having one of my two classes cancelled, and 4) a phone call from my mother in the middle of the week (we usually only talk on sundays).

well, those and some complete disbelief that this actually happened in the world i live in. the first time i saw the footage i could have sworn i was just watching a movie like true lies or something. the bad guys were supposed to have been found, delivered with witty one-liner retorts, and then either killed or captured by a hero in a ripped shirt with bulging muscles. and this within an hour and a half of the initial misdeeds. the real side of terrorism is way scarier, because this leaves the possibility that things aren’t over, that we won’t find out who did what, that our response won’t make things all better in the end, etc.

and to top it off (and not with any intention of belittling the tragic number of lost lives), i never got to see the new york skyline. i’m sure it’s completely different now. can you believe that? one day, a few crazy (but dedicated) individuals, and the world is a different place now. mind-boggling.

in all honesty though, i have to admit that since i’m not really affected by this so far, personally, i feel bad talking about it at all. bad things happened today to a lot of people that probably didn’t deserve them. out of respect i think i should just hope for the best in the coming days and be grateful for my luck in not losing anyone i loved. it may be the corny, trite thing to say here; but what else is there to say?

i heard another report from a highly respected film buff friend that the musketeer was an awful awful movie. actually, he said, “it wasn’t even awful, it was downright painful to watch,” or something along those lines. so i’m glad still that i didn’t go see it. poor tim roth, two utterly disappointing film choices in one short summer. and he has such a cool accent too.

how about this though, some of us get to go see a free pre-screening of zoolander on wednesday night. i’m excited. i know it looks awful, and it may well be a strong example of murray’s law (see archives), but i have to say all the same that i love ben stiller and there’s at least a chance that it’s not as dumb as television would make it seem. come on ben, you can do it. think reality bites. think zero effect. think your small part in happy gilmore or your promising upcoming role in the royal tenenbaums. i believe in you.

i was looking for some examples of propaganda for my visual culture class, and one of the war posters that i found said “when you ride alone, you ride with hitler“… “join a car-sharing group today!” i thought, what a fun poster that would be to have for the apartment. show my patriotic and anti-hitler sentiments (which both need constant declaring), and spruce the place up, because it’s a colorful poster too! i only wish i had a car so i could help out the country by joining a car-sharing group.

that’s right, i’ll say it again. a car-sharing group!

the trick to feeling better is to forget why you were feeling bad, pretty much. right? there’s really no other way, unless you can go back and change whatever it is that made you start feeling bad. that’s the only reason i felt better today, because i kept forgetting to think about why i was down last night.

otherwise i don’t think anything good happened to me today. the only thing that made me go “oh boy!” today was finding out that october 16th will be a happy happy day. and it’s about time, too.

my classes all run together on mondays, so i didn’t get lunch. i found though — being a busy college student — that if you’re hungry and busy and just don’t eat, the hunger sort of fades away and only comes back in mild waves over time. usually once i stop being preoccupied it comes raging back though. so as soon as i finish typing i’m gonna need to go hit the kitchen.

oh, and i start my new job on friday. maybe it will give me all sorts of exciting stories about shelving government documents in a library to share with you. if it doesn’t, perhaps i’ll make some up to keep you from thinking i’m a complete bore.

and another thing…rock concert friday. outstanding.