a sense of joy and then a panic

I almost could not find this song on YouTube - then I realized I was searching for the wrong artist.  I always thought it was by the Postal Service (it's by one member of the band on a solo project, Dntel).  It was not I who mislabeled the file. 

Ugh, I assigned this song to a character once.  This song has scared me from the first time I heard it, because I'm terrified that it applies to me, and now I'm pretty sure it does - so I may as well just admit it.  And the video scares/depresses me even more. 


Oh jesus, Bones is using "A Pain That I'm Used To" in their crappy episode, spare me.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate the television show Bones?  I had to watch it in Surabaya because it was my boss's favorite show (I think she wanted to be the main character).  It is seriously the worst police procedural I've ever seen.  Yes, worse than CSI: Miami, because at least with CSI: Miami you can tell they don't take themselves seriously.  Bones, on the other hand, seems entirely devoted to congratulating its own characters by making every other segment of society live up to its worst stereotypes.  The most horrendous episode I've seen is "Player Under Pressure", about a dead college basketball star. 

Now we all know that I am not a jock.  I can't play any sports.  I can (sort of) run, and that's it.  I mildly enjoyed roller hockey and lacrosse in P.E., but basketball and I, let me tell you, do not agree.  Basketballs have a tendency to zero in on my head (even from half a gym away!), and I don't even watch it for entertainment.  I did not associate with jocks in high school, and there are no jocks worth mentioning at my college.  The ones that exist look disturbingly like skinheads, I'm not sure what's up with that.  I know that from time to time terrible scandals break out about student athletes.  Duke lacrosse, Lawrence Philllips, the University of Colorado and their strip-recruiting.  As a sports fan I know about them all, and as a sports fan I do hold everyone involved in college athletics to a high standard (as is horrifically obvious from my football posts).  And yes, we all hate how the jocks got all the attention in school, and no one cared about the collective us.  I was on a state-championship-caliber speech team that never got recognition within our own building (but we were a bunch of snobs, so I don't really blame the rest of the school), so I know.  Oh, the temptation to tar and feather those jocks now that we're all grown up and "over it"!  Except, you know, you're not over it if you do that, just like Indonesia isn't "over" colonialism if it's still accusing the U.S., a country that never actually colonized them but who sure did look like a colonizer otherwise, of trying to usurp its national sovereignty by having a naval research center in Jakarta, sixty years later. 
The point of this episode was basically trying to make college athletics look as bad as humanly possible.  Not just via the main female character's snippety remarks.  The dead player's cheerleader girlfriend didn't care who he slept with ("he can have anybody he wants"), as long as he came back to her, made the NBA, and set her up in a mansion.  She actually said this.  All the basketball players were unapologetic manwhores who slept with their (female) T.A.s to pass classes, even the ugly ones, and they all had STDs.  So did all their cheerleader girlfriends, who were all whores too.  It ends up that the cheerleader who was giving him a blow job minutes before his death was engaged to the player that eventually replaced him on the starting line-up (they were the only committed-looking couple in the whole episode, up till then - it was not a ruse on her part, she just "couldn't resist R.J.").  The star was killed by this chick's father.  Why?  The father, now a campus security guard or something, was a failed basketball star himself, and he always "used women like that, under the bleachers".  Now that he sees his own little girl being used that way, well, he just lost it.  

Of course, this is all hysterically preposterous and comes off as nothing more than the producers' sad attempt at Revenge of the Nerds - pushed over the edge with the main character, the "nerdy" female doctor, being considered "hot" by the basketball players and being able to shoot a basket on her one and only try.  Very, you know, cannibalizing the source of power.  It's not the Societeit Concordia, it's the Freedom Building, and it's mine!  Ja ja, Soekarno, sure it is.  So it was funny in a pathetic sense, but also painful to watch.  That sort of sums up Bones.  Let's not get into the time they mocked Chinese arranged marriages and ancestor worship and used it as an opportunity to show that their heroine can speak Chinese on top of everything else (but the Chinese are still a backwards people). 

There is no power, my pretty power.

DR. FELL
Dante's first sonnet from La Vita Nuova. He saw Beatrice Portinari across a chapel and he loved her at that instant and for the rest of his life. But then had a disturbing dream -

ALLEGRA (reading from text)
Joyous Love seemed to me, the while he held my heart in his hands, and in his arms, My lady lay asleep wrapped in a veil -

DR. FELL (continuing from memory)
He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me.

ALLEGRA
He saw her eat his heart!
I was just thinking about Stevie Nicks.  Some girl on American Idol was named after her - I look at my mom, I'm like, "how come I'm not named after a musician?" and she says, "Like who?" and I say, "I don't know" and she says, "Well, that's probably why.  You come from a family that does not worship famous musicians."  "Who do you worship?"  She thinks about it.  "Nothing."  Anyway, then "Silver Springs" comes on the internet radio.  I'd forgotten about this song.  I own it on an old CD (1998 Grammy Nominees) but I deleted it at some point, evidently after I had forgotten how awesome it is.  Well, it's back in my music library now!

I don't know how to explain myself anymore.  When she sings "time cast a spell on you..."

I've taken to spending my mornings watching the crisis shows on NatGeo - Seconds From Disaster, Critical Situation, Final Report, and of course, Air Emergency (which is what the Brits call Air Crash Investigation).  By the time the lame-o historical shows come on in the afternoon, there's Law & Order on TNT.  I have to say, I've learned a lot.  I think they're genuinely useful programs.  The Air France Hijack episode has a lot to say about counter-terrorism - what works (negotiation, concession), and what doesn't (refusal to compromise, refusal to accept international help) - and the avalanche in Galteur, well, changed conceptions about the existence of safe zones.  I can't say there's much to learn from the Columbia disaster, sadly - I think the lesson the U.S. has taken home from that disaster is "abandon the space program, the deaths are too dramatic". 

I bought the soundtrack to Sunshine.  It's good, but very creepy - creepier than I remember the movie being.  I also bought "Ku Ku Ku," "This Golden Wedding of Sorrow," and "Bring In The Night."    God I love Death in June.  

New layout inspired by both Death in June and Air Crash Investigation is now complete! 

Holla.  Day after Thanksgiving, I'm back at school after spending the holiday with Kim's family in Queens.  We saw Twilight.  Twilight was pretty special.  It was like a TV movie with really bad make-up and acting.  In addition to, of course, being a vampire movie that completely lacked in scares (except the bad relationship kind) - but I've already written about how much it bothers me when vampires or whatever are romanticized (here they're virtually invulnerable) and humans are depicted as being stupid and weak and only attractive because they're so fragile.  Also, I don't think I was previously aware of how classist Twilight is.  Get this: she gets to choose between a) the vampire, who drives a fancy sports car, lives in a glass mansion, listens to classical music, whose vampire!father is a doctor, and is obviously very white, and b) the werewolf, who doesn't seem to have his own car but whose disabled father drives an old pick-up, lives on a reservation, and is Native American.  Guess who she chooses.  By the last book she has her own sports car.  And is a vampire.  WHAT IS THIS. 

This song has been my obsession lately. I heard it at the end of an AMV and it's like... been the last twenty songs I've listened to.


"Children of the Korn" - Korn (feat. Ice Cube)

Pretty crazy, right?  But for one, I associate it with Nebraska, and for two... I don't know.  I'm really into Korn right now?  It's so strange, because I first became aware of them in middle school, but only as a favorite band of a certain guy someone on my friends' list was into... he got so uncool later, dating the head cheerleader and all.  I always thought Korn was too "heavy metal" for me.  

Actually, the other thing is that Ilium is turning into a very anti-elders manifesto.  Ironically my own parents were amazing parents.

I am all kinds of crazy in love with the song "Hunted by a Freak" by Mogwai. Such that if I ever publish a short-story collection, I want that to be the title.

The incredibly depressing video - the best interpretation of it seems to be that the man dropping animals is God, and the fall of the animals is our life, "good to the last drop, doesn't get any better than this", so to speak.  That's sort of my perspective on God, when I'm in the moods where I believe there is a God.  I've always thought that if God's real, God's a bastard.  Ironically, reading Memnoch (Anne Rice's attempt to convert her readers to Christianity) actually convinced me of this even more.  I think I believe in "the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things", "who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space" more than I believe in some sweet-cheeked Jesus. 

"Enjoy the Silence" and Its Covers*:

1.  Depeche Mode - unlike "Running Up That Hill", the original is the best.
2.  Linkin Park - unquestionably #2.  Linkin Park knows how to mix and mash other people's music, and it sounds true to the original but modernized - digitalized and urbanized.  In certain moods I even like it better than the original. 
3.  Lacuna Coil - I only recently discovered their cover, and while it is goth, it's a good, sensible goth: moody and at once not too heavy, in no small part thanks to the contralto vocalist. 
4.  Tori Amos - not her best effort, but you can't call Tori's barebones and depressed version of the song "going wrong". 
5.  John Digweed - there's a couple lengths of this one out there, but long or short, it's quite a powerful/psychedelic trance rendition. 
6.  Caater - a hypersonic, seizure-warning club remix, but the best of this type I've heard, with some original placement of beats.  I could actually listen to this for a while, because I'm one of those people.
7.  Tanghetto - world music (flutes? bagpipes?) "Enjoy the Silence" proves surprisingly interesting and endearing.  I may be biased by the video. 
8.  Wrecked Machines - for a club remix, not that bad - at least it builds and sounds at least somewhat dark. 
9.  Janita (Nuspirit Helsinki Mix) - cool jazz "Enjoy the Silence".  So you know, listen to accordingly.  Really, the only interesting part is the beginning.
10.  It Dies Today - basically, they're just redoing the song, with emo haircuts and a more "emotional" chorus.  Plays it safe - and the vocalist  doesn't seem engaged with the lyrics.
11.  Yvan & Dan Daniel - "Enjoy the Silence" on tropical speed.  Or, "Enjoy the Silence": the ring tone.
12.  Cluster - it does, in the words of one YouTube user, sound like "cats getting skinned whilst being simultaneously raped".  But I feel like with more talent it could actually be a good cover, and they get points for originality. 
13.  Breaking Benjamin - this cover begins with "Raaaaahr!"  That's really all I have to say. 
14.  HIM - I didn't think it would be possible to do a bad version of this song, but... the excessive guitar riffs and the rock-opera voice doing gymnastics do not a good "Enjoy the Silence" make. 
15.  Keane - this fails even more than HIM's version because the singer sounds like Bon Jovi and there seem to be tambourines involved. 

*: I'm sure there's a lot more.  This is some of what I could dig through on YouTube.  

Uh?  Do not get the hate for Viva La Vida at all.  What a great album.  Also, "Lost!" and "Yes" and "Death and All His Friends" are the only Coldplay songs that I've been able to add to my Ilium playlist.  Ugh, I had no idea Coldplay could make such good instrumental shit. 

I have this theory about Coldplay's albums (it's a personal interpretation, okay) - and it has to do with the Zen theory of water drops and expanding circles of influence (at the center is the family; the outermost is the world, etc).  I mean this both in terms of the sound and the lyrics:

* Parachutes is the individual album: as evidenced by "Trouble" and "We Never Change", the lyrics are about people caught up in their own heads, obsessing over their own fears and mistakes; there's a thread of loneliness and destitution in Parachutes - and of course you can only parachute yourself, and you parachute down into an unpopulated wilderness or enemy territory. 

* A Rush of Blood to the Head is the small-group album: most of the songs are very relationship-oriented - "In My Place", "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face", "Green Eyes", "A Warning Sign", "A Rush of Blood to the Head", "Amsterdam" - and sound like a hopeful but bittersweet conversation with another person.  Probably because Chris Martin was all in love with Gwyneth Paltrow around now. 

* X & Y is the global album: the social consciousness thread begun in the previous album by "Clocks" gets picked up in a major way in "Square One", "White Shadows", and "Twisted Logic".  It's like the Human Instrumentality Project except more spiritual and positive and less literal and bad.  Even when the lyrics seem to address another person they sound less emotional and more therapeutic or guiding, like a religious guide-to-life.  Grand generalizations applicable the planet over abound. 

* Viva La Vida is the universal album: I'm not sure how I can describe this, but it's like when Shinji rejects Instrumentality after all (I don't know why NGE is so involved in my metaphor).  We are definitely looking outward in this album, and this might be in part because of the slicker sound - but it just feels like another level (that cannot be understood?) has been transcended in songs like "Yes" and "Lost!" and "Death and All His Friends".  Interestingly, the individual has been revived, but if you're heading off into space, loneliness is inevitable.  Maybe it's the "only God knows" in "Yes" that makes me think this: instead of doling out advice for a ready world, it's laying down your arms and admitting your smallness before the universe.  

So really, I don't know where they can go next. 

Totally unrelated:  WTF wikipedia?  The xenomorphs do not have a hive mind!  Just because they have a Queen does not mean they all share a consciousness, dumbasses.  Also, why am I obsessed with xenomorphs?  They're a scary fictional alien species that bleeds acid, engages in "alien interspecies rape", and chestbursts out of unlucky hosts.  I mean, I would definitely kill myself if I met one.  I have a feeling, though, that my fascination lies in this: "the alien's combination of sexually evocative physical and behavioral characteristics creates [according to Ximena Gallardo], 'a nightmare vision of sex and death. It subdues and opens the male body to make it pregnant, and then explodes it in birth. In its adult form, the alien strikes its victims with a rigid phallic tongue that breaks through skin and bone. More than a phallus, however, the retractable tongue has its own set of snapping metallic teeth that connects it to the castrating vagina dentata.'"  Oh yeah.  Sigmund Freud, analyze this shit!  Also, if they really are "planet purgers", as some critics theorize them to be (used by the Space Jockeys and/or the Predators)... well, that's another point of interest, isn't it?  As Lindsey says, I'm so predictable.

I've decided that "Waltz for Eva and Che", the best political song in the world, is really "Waltz for Modern Neo-Cons and Wilsonian Liberals".  I think the chorus - that evil in politics is fundamental and the particular system of government is incidental - is especially apropos - as is, of course, the final verse's lament because of coming death (in this case, the end of America's hegemony). 

Of course this jibes with the original musical's Eva (Peron) and Che (Guevara) too, so that's probably why the politics fit so well.  In any case I think it's a pretty apt description of the two camps in American politics today, especially as they deal with third world countries - which is, really, the only reason I even care about their petty love/hate relationship.  I am bad at domestic politics.  Keep abortion legal, help poor people, keep church away from state is pretty much all I've got in that department.

Behold:

[Wilsonian Liberals:]
Tell me before I waltz out of your life, before turning my back on the past
Forgive my impertinent behavior - but how long do you think this pantomime can last?
Tell me before I ride off in the sunset, there's one thing I never got clear:
How can you claim you're our savior,
when those who oppose you are stepped on, or cut up, or simply disappear?

[Modern Neo-Cons:]
Tell me before you get onto your bus, before joining the forgotten brigade
How can one person like me, say, alter the time-honored way the game is played?
Tell me before you get onto your high horse just what you expect me to do
I don't care what the bourgeoisie say -
I'm not in business for them, but to give all my descamisados a magical moment or two

[America in General:]
There is evil, ever around, fundamental
System of government quite incidental

[Neo-Cons:]
So what are my chances of honest advances?
I'd say low -
Better to win by admitting my sin than to lose with a halo

[Liberals:]
Tell me before I seek worthier pastures and thereby restore self-esteem
How can you be so short-sighted to look never further than this week or next week,
To have no impossible dream?

[Neo-Cons:]
Allow me to help you slink off to the sidelines and mark your adieu with three cheers
But first tell me who'd be delighted if I said I'd take on the world's greatest problems
From war to pollution, no hope of solution, even if I lived for one hundred years?

[America in General:]
There is evil, ever around, fundamental
System of government quite incidental

[Neo-Cons:]
So go if you're able to somewhere unstable and stay there
Whip up your hate in some tottering state
But not here, dear, is that clear, dear?

Oh what I'd give for a hundred years
But the physical interferes
Every day more, O my Creator
What is the good of the strongest heart
In a body that's falling apart?
A serious flaw, I hope You know that

I don't actually like Virtue & Moir (the skaters).  I am biased against Canadian skaters.  Ever since that boo-hoo at the 2002 Olympics.  Canadians and their boring costumes and sentimental modern elegance, blah.  It's like Gilmore Girls overdose.  I have a favorite Russian ice dancing pair (Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin) who were out of the ISU championships because of an injury. 

Other songs I feel "raw emotion" from:
- "Wild Horses": the Sundays [no sweeping exits, or offstage lines, could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind]
- "This is Everything": Tegan and Sara [maybe this is the last honest love that I'll ever give]
- "Exit": U2 [beating, beating, beating, beating, oh my love, oh my love, oh my love, oh my love]
- "Alexander the Burn Victim": Scarling [and when he drinks he hits on you]
- "Running Up That Hill": Placebo [and if I only could make a deal with God, and get him to swap our places, be running up that road, be running up that hill, be running up that building]
- "Is This Desire": PJ Harvey [is this desire enough, enough]
- "Hyper Chondriac Music": Muse [you wanted more than I was worth, you think I was scared yeah, and you needed proof]
- "Leif Erikson": Interpol [you come here to me]
- "Rock Star": Hole [well what do you do with a revolution?]
- "Pretty on the Inside": Hole [is she pretty from the back?]
- "Jennifer's Body": Hole [he said I'm your lover, I'm your friend, I'm purity, hit me again]

I'm reading about what happened to student protesters and other political activists in Indonesia during the '90s.  It's eerie, because it's what my father was trying to avoid when he stopped criticizing the government, and while student leaders were being electrocuted and iced and beaten in early 1998, he was dying regardless.  The irony is that they ended up surviving.  In the past two days I've had to tell my life story to two complete strangers.  The taxi driver gave me advice: don't move to Indonesia, baby, it would break your mother's heart, and don't marry an Indonesian guy, sweetie, marry an American guy.  The woman from the State Department said she didn't know if anyone can ever move on from the death of a loved one, then she put her sunglasses back on. 

blue hair aside, this video basically makes my life. I mean, it has everything I like in life! [only kidding]


"Be A Man" - Hole


The only boy I understand: the one ashamed to be a man
Just rape the world because you can, that's what it takes to be a man
Knock her up, slap her hand, prove it to me, just be a man
I think I can, I think I can, I'm big enough to be a man
Tell you the truth, I'm jealous yeah, give anything to be a man...
Be a man, so impotent, be a man
Take off your dress, your master plan, give anything, just be a man
Oh cut it off, of course you can, got what it takes to be a man
Oh rape us all just 'cause you can, well give it up, just be a man
Your fucking war, the carnage yeah, give anything to be a man
Cut it off, I know you can, 'cause no one cares if you're a man
Be a man, so impotent, be a man
Can't get it up? I understand... under the gun to be a man...
I think I can, I think I can, I'm big enough to be a man!
I fuck the world, because I can, I'm everything, oh be a man
I fuck the world, because I can, give anything, be a man
I'm potent yeah!!!

$#$#$#

WTF DO NOT WANT - "Hello there :D I just watched The Hills Have Eyes for the first time a few days ago, and now I'm really into it... I'm a typical fangirl who yanks innocent characters out of movies/series and plops them into pairings, and as I was watching the end of the movie the pairing Lizard/Doug popped into my head."

$#$#$#

[01] -- Look up FIVE of your favorite movies on IMDB.
[02] -- Click the "trivia" link in the sidebar.
[03] -- Post a fun and random bit of trivia from each film.

( whee! )

yeah, first lines of 15 songs on shuffle, blah blah blah.

( tell me what's the word )

last lines of next 15 songs on shuffle!

( word up! )