oh, and i’d nearly forgotten to plug myself half-heartedly. if you want to hear me and some music on the radio tonight, go to the kscr webpage between 7 and 9 pm pacific time tonight or any monday night this semester. and you can send instant message requests easily through AIM to “kscrlive”, if you want to get all interactive.
if you have ever seen the old mtv show “the state” and liked it (possibly loved it), or generally enjoy random and ridiculous humor, you should seek out and make sure to see this movie. i finally caught it yesterday as part of a lovely afternoon in good company, and it was hilarious and great. many of the minor roles are played by members of the state as well as one of the major characters (who also co-produced the film). and janeane garafalo is great it in as well. i recommend this film highly for anyone with a offbeat sense of humor. if you’re not ready for some slightly inappropriate sexual humor though in a few instances, don’t blame me if you can’t handle it.
i heard from secret sources that the big birthday box arrived safely in australia for josh, which means i can tell you what the secret plan was from a couple weeks ago. i didn’t want to leak it beforehand so that it would be a good birthday surprise. what we (dom and i) did was, since we got to see the impossibles twice in one weekend, the second time, on campus, we videotaped it for our pal josh who’s stranded in australia with insufficient rock and roll. the tape turned out great and the show was good and it’s cool that we have it recorded (if you happen to want a copy, you could let me know). but on top of that, once we got there, dom had the great idea that we get something signed by all the band guys. we took down a flyer for the show (not a bad looking flyer, either) and after they finished, got all four band members to sign it “happy birthday josh”. it was a pretty excellent birthday present, we thought, and i’m sure josh thought so too.
today will be a weird day i bet, but since i’m in class right now (multimedia authoring in a computer lab, hence the blogging) i should probably not say anything more right now.
a few things this morning…
i forgot to include rival schools, who opened on friday, in my concert review. i hadn’t heard them before, and they were great. if i were you, i’d check them out. and if you were me, you’d be listening to them right now, having already done so.
also, apparently release dates are never as permanent as you’d like them to be. if it gets moved back any more from october 23rd, i may just crack. i’ve been waiting for this cd since last winter and it’ll be the best album of this fall i don’t doubt, once i finally get my hands on it.
i had this great idea for how to resolve international conflicts today. just go up to the leaders of these terrorist groups with a plate of homemade brownies and ask them to please be nice. how could you possibly hate someone that did that?
last night’s concert was fantastic. burning airlines gets all the credit i have to give. they sounded amazing and obviously had a lot of musical talent and skill, and j. robbins had a lot of personality on stage — he kept making these strange faces while he was singing, it was kind of funny and intense at the same time. the whole band was pretty energetic and it was a damn enjoyable evening. they made my week, for sure. it was great. they ran out of shirts though before i got to go buy one, and i was upset because i really like this band, but i think a small sick part of me also wanted to wear it next week and get a lot of “where did you get that shirt?” or “what’s that all about?” questions. i’m a bad person.
in-n-out afterwards tasted good, and i picked up mission control in place of a shirt, which is an exceptional album. today has drifted by so far like it’s being sucked away from me without my knowledge. it’s after five o’clock and all i can remember really doing today is watching run lola run, which is only about 70 minutes long or something. strange.
i hope to finish american psycho tonight or tomorrow, but the campus bookstore didn’t have good omens so i’m going to have to hit up my good friends barnes and noble. they’re pretty likely to be able to help me out i imagine.
and tomorrow: wet hot american summer finally. outstanding.
i started my job today, and man oh man, it’s so much cooler than i thought it would be!
i walk in and the office i have to work in has the radio blaring, and half of the people aren’t even really doing anything, just hanging out and laughing. so they show me how to shelve things or get things from shelves, but apparently there’s very little demand for government documents around here (surprise surprise!), so most of the time we spend just hanging around listening to the radio and playing on the internet and talking. not only that, there are more than a few pretty attractive girls who work there with me, which doesn’t hurt. oh, and on top of all that, we get ICE CREAM SUNDAES every afternoon! and balloons! and i heard that next week they’re putting in a pinball machine in one room, and ping pong tables in another!
so i’m sitting there playing games on cartoonnetwork.com and who walks in but MEL GIBSON! (his son goes to this school you know). and he asks us for the department of agriculture’s forest preserve department report from 1987, and i get to personally escort him to go find it on the shelves (government documents aren’t available for retrieval by just anyone, only through request. then we get to get them for whoever needs them). it was so exciting! and he’s a really nice guy too, just like you’d expect. i can see why he’s so popular with the ladies.
umm . . .
well i told you i’d make something up if it wasn’t exciting, and it wasn’t. my job is to put things in numerical order on shelves or, in the case of microfiche (outdated, you say? well, not so outdated that i don’t get to file it!), in file cabinets. right.
more on that exciting world next week when i go back, if you’re lucky. but now i must get ready to go to burning airlines for some genuine excitement.
rock.
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?