belated "fuck my iPod" edition, random shuffle playlist

The Sugar Hill Gang. "Rapper's Delight"
Guided By Voices. "Burning Flag Birthday Suit"
Hole "Asking For It"
The Clash "Silicone on Sapphire"
Shellac, "House Full of Garbage"
Nick Drake, "Pink Moon"
The Coup, "Breathing Apparatus"
A.C. Newman "Miracle Drug"
The Wowz "when i die"
Madvillain, "Operation Lifesaver AKA Mint Test"

Hole? I still have that album? And i burned it on to my computer? Wow.

I'm changing my aya email address so that it's now my first name dot my first last name hyphen my second last name @aya.yale.edu. While i think my gmail address is easier to both type and remember, i'm hoping this will make contacting me a little less of a guessing game for people who have reason to do so.

I've been sick all weekend,and trying to get over this ill timed and fairly severe cold, as colds go, by sitting around and not doing too much. Back to work tomorrow -- and this weekend is my mother's 60th birthday party (twenty three days early,) combined with a minor clusterfuck of family obligations and houseguests I just found out about yesterday. So i'm hoping i'm feeling better by then.

I was trying to listen to Doolittle on my Ipod saturady night and it kept skipping tracks - from "I bleed" straight to "Mr. Grieves." Then I made it go back to "Here Comes Your Man" and after two unsuccesful tries, it obliged me and played the song in its entirety, only to then skip for no apparent reason to "La La Love You." No "Dead." No " Monkey's Gone To Heaven". No "Mr. Grieves" No "Crackity Jones." And try as i might, i couldn't get the Ipod to play any of these songs, which have all worked fine in the past. All of which, combined with the poor sound quality of a 128kbps file compared with CD Audio, is making me really frustrated with iPods, iTunes, and I, gevalt.

In LA, students at a private high school are moving their prom rather than hold it in the Biltmore, which workers have been boycotting since November.

The Oakwood prom will now be held Saturday at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood, a union-recommended hotel that has agreed to negotiate its union contract next year.

"I believe that the success of this boycott is a huge step toward raising the standard of living for workers across the country, a chance to improve greatly the plight of working class people in Los Angeles," said senior student Elizabeth Landesberg.

The students are encouraging other schools to pull their proms from the hotels involved in the labor dispute. The other hotels are the Westin Century Plaza, Sheraton Universal, Hyatt Regency Los Angeles, Hyatt Regency West Hollywood, Regent Beverly Wilshire, Westin Bonaventure and Wilshire Grand.

Last night after the jazz concert that i went to with Jia Lynn and a friend of hers from college we bumped into these two other Yale kids i'd never met before, and we wound up all going to the Empire Diner, which i hadn't been to since like 6th grade or something when i still felt semi-comfortable speaking to my dad's sister on a regular basis. One of these guys started talking shit about New Haven and how he lived on Chapel and Dwight and heard gun shots all the time and wants to "live in Yale not New Haven" and was tal;king about the new luxury apartment building on Church and Wall that he's going to live in next year. I was extraordinarily restrained given the circumstances.

The other guy, who seemed like a much more decent human being, and i got in to a conversation about graduate student/employee unionization, which is really the first time I've had to "defend" transient teacher and researcher unionization in well over a year. I'm not sure how effective i was, but i realized how awkward it feels trying to speak from a perspective other than that of an undergraduate, which means i've got a lot to work on.

In the space of nine days in June, i'm going to see The Pixies AND Sleater-Kinney. I'm excited.

I've made it through The Woods quite a few times now, and read all the reviews I can find on the subject, and i have something i want to say to music critics everywhere: If i hear one more person reference Led Zeppelin when talking about Sleater-Kinney, i may go crazy.

Yes, Carrie Brownstein's tone on The Woods is muddier and dirtier than on the six previous albums (or at least the four back to and including Dig Me Out. Yes, there are guitar freakouts. Yes, there's an 11 minute song. But The Woods are to "Classic Rock" as The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady was to Scott Fucking Joplin. Deal with it. And then instead of lazily invoking John Bonham so you don't have to talk about the awesomeness of Janet Weiss as Janet Weiss, listen to the actual CD you are supposed to be reviewing and engage it directly, cause there's a hell of a lot more going on "Let's Call It Love" than in "Misty Mountain Hop."

The Woods is about the failure of language and about finding new sites of and paths to articulation, it's about the complete collapse of reason in the post-reality-based-community era ("reality is the new fiction they say/truth is truer these days/truth is man made") it's about the transformative powers of rage and despair, among other things. Write about that, you lazy ossified self-satisfied commodity fetishizers!


Blog's been getting a lot of search hits lately for my name. Which begs the question, who is googling/yahooing me? And what do they want? Show yourself!!!

And don't I know it!