Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
Ha, i’m eating my words even as i speak. I’ll retract that entire entry by tomorrow morning, rest assured :p … fortunately, it’s not as if Tori’s going to berate me at length via email for not liking her album like some other artists have been known to do.
by krisis
Hi, Tori.
I realize that you want to make music and that you want to be at home with your family and that you want to use up your contract, but in the future please refrain from recording such an obviously momentumless album with such obviously momentumless songs on it after you just released a rather underdeveloped disc with an equally underdeveloped (and, frankly, boring) live album. I swear, it’s getting so that i can smell this stuff from months in advance… You have albums worth of unreleased material, an archive of an entire plugged tour of songs, and probably the best ear for piano arrangements in all of music business. So, why this?
The anonymous “Strange Little Girl” shines while the timeless “Heart of Gold” seeths with garage-rock stomp, but “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is indelibly stamped with impenetrable Toriness and “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” is the sort of clumsy lark that you’re supposed to finish and then promptly shove onto a beeside or soundtrack. In the middle are the mostly solo “Enjoy the Silence,” “Time,” and “Real Men,” all of which are as arresting as their riginals while still somehow missing something integral. Album opener “New Age” is somber but entrancing, and the surprising “I’m Not In Love” is familiar and yet completely not. However, not even Tori’s eccentricity can save “Rattlesnakes,” “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and “Raining Blood,” which could have all been left in the bargain bin where they were found.
Of course i have a history of hating about half of my favourite albums for at least a week each; however, if a dedicated fan thinks a disc falls flat upon his or her first listen you should definitely take that into consideration (even if you take it with a requisite few grains of salt).
by krisis
Those poor Freshmen don’t even have a clue.
For the last two years i’ve been involved in move in, first as a student in the middle of hurricane floyd carting my stuff trip by trip up to the fifth floor of Kelly and then in that same building the next year trying to keep things orderly through pouring rain and hard beating sun. Here in my third year, i am finally disconnected from the class slowly seeping into the precious cracks of my campus that have been so dry and empty all summer. I would rather not caulk them in with this endless stream of fresh faces. I do not want lines in the book store. I do not want people milling around in the lobby of the theatre. I do not want to bob and weave through a crowd on their way to the cafeteria because they only know how to travel in herds.
Ironic that i work in admissions, isn’t it? Today i was in the bookstore pricing my textbooks and all around me parents were gasping at prices and tellings their students what’s what as they silently looked over their shoulders and stewed. It all seemed crude to me, pudgy pushy parents edging past me in the aisles trying to take control of a situation that they could hardly hope to dent, while their student idly followed with shopping baskets dangling behind them. Do you know that parents often fill out applications for their students here in the office? I might be a momma’s boy by some standards, but she never touched the interiour of an app, and you had better believe that i picked up all of my books myself with my own money.
I suppose i just don’t really understand it… the crash of over two thousand new students swamping my campus with questions and with too-wide eyes and with their domineering parents, secretly scoping for attractive people or where they might go to hang out tonight. Why i am i working for this perpetually in-motion machine that greedily sucks in student after student and pumps out cookie cut graduates every year? Because, i suppose, somewhere in the middle the push of getting in and the pull of getting out (or perhaps the opposite) – everything balances out perfectly and all you do is float until the gravity of the situation takes over for you again.
I am not there yet; i’m just about to be $435 closer to getting my feet off the ground.