It’s the first day of the semester, and things are a little chaotic but mostly fine. The students in my Monday morning 9:00 am class seemed to get most of the jokes, or at least laugh in the right places — humor is a great test of comprehension, you see. The office is still a little frantic in getting the disorganization reorganized into, um, a semblance of organization, but things are going. I haven’t been posting because I’m working on several things at once (a rewrite, a draft, an article, course preparations, website template stuff, and domestic stuff), and haven’t …
Tag: MUSIC
Bananagirl Wins the Prize
Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …
Wanna CD?
See that new block in the sidebar? Yep, I’m flogging CDs for a now long-disbanded rock group. I figure, what the hell, someone might actually want a copy. Better than all that plastic and paper and time and music gone to waste. Not that anyone in the band has seen a red cent for it — though to be fair I don’t know if it ever earned back the studio costs, but then again we’ve never seen numbers either to the best of my knowledge — but there are still CDs of Dabang Band’s Product album available through YesAsia.com. (For …
Dia-Gnosis
I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …
Torke
Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …
Back to Life…
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …
Recent Readings & Stuff, Late August, September & October ’07
Books The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker may not blow away people with some real familiarity with the sorry state of affairs in the human sciences — like a friend who shall remain nameless (unless she wishes to comment here) and who said that the criticisms made in the book were not uncommon among grad students in her department. But in that it encapsulates the argument in a way really easily parsed by nonspecialists, frames it in terms of the harmful effects of Blank Slate-ist denial of inherent human nature, and movingly retaliates against the scummiest of Blank Slate-ists who, …
Pipi Band and Po-keu Song
Yay! Lime got me a few of the CDs I asked her to order for me. Among them, 불가능한작전 by 삐삐밴드 (Pipi Band). Often referred to as “punk,” I find them more a kind of mixture of freakiness, electronic, and rock. Apparently they spat onto a camera or the ground or something while they were on TV once, and people thought they were bizarre and rude as a result. They’re not really around anymore, but that CD was still available. Bizarre stuff, moreoso if you’ve had the lyrics explained. As I have had, though I may sit down and try …
Woman Got Pipes
I am probably the absolutely worst person to be introducing Lime to Aretha Franklin, since I really only know a couple of her songs, but when I got home tonight, for some reason, a little chunk of the backing vocals on “Respect” had suddenly bloomed into an earworm, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I think the word “respect” summoned it up, but in any case, it’s the bit in some versions where the backing singers start chanting “Sockittomesockittome…” [Sock it to me, but really fast] over and over. In my head it comes at a major …
Threes
My netfriend and fellow writer Stephanie recently wrote: I recently read in a book that stories and life happen in three acts: wake up, do some work, go to bed; you’re born, you live, you die; etc. This is what my life has been feeling like lately, like I’m just going through the motions… I really hear her. I’ve been there before myself. It’s funny… the three stages or “acts” in the drama of my life tend to be: 1. Really believe in (or wish to believe in) some model of the world: an ideology, a system, an explanation for …