Warning! Sparse Posting Ahead (Not REAL News really…)

Man…being at yet another new school with yet another fresh start, I wanted to give this blog a fresh and thorough reboot.

I had plans to not only post at least a few times a week but also to expand my subject matter and go for more of the lengthy, in-depth posts that I used to write on here (e.g., Sigur Ros post, film reviews, posts on new and upcoming bands, ebook post, etc.).

But alas, I will be extremely busy this semester.

FORTUNATELY, it’ll be a different kind of busy from last semester at Berkeley (meaning: no coke addict roommates, no police, no safehouses, and no financial aid nightmares), but it’s the same sort of result for this poor blog.

I have 16 units of classes, a poetry workshop, AND I also just became a staff writer for 3 different sections of the Daily Trojan (school paper at USC…I plan on cutting down to only 1 or 2 sections.). Not to mention, I’m also pledging this semester for Gamma Epsilon Omega. (Basically the coolest fraternity ever invented in the history of the universe. Basically.)

On top of all that, I’m planning to hit on at least one USC Song Girl this semester.

Needless to say…I’ll be stretched to the MAX within the next few months. So I thought I’d give the 9 or so people subscribed to me in their Google feeds fair and advance warning…

I’ll try to drop by as much as possible. And Kristiane and Essaytch…I’m so sorry for being M.I.A. from your blogs…I PROMISE I’ll stop by more frequently, even if I won’t be updating much here.

Oh, and Albert, I don’t know which new Ting Tings song you were talking about, but I think this is their new single.

Song of the Day:

The Ting Tings – “That’s Not My Name”

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Heima, a film by Sigur Ros

“I sometimes get this strange and sort of uncontrollable urge to want to go home.“

-Georg Hólm, member of the band Sigur Rós

Majestic, grand, expansive, surreal, breath-taking, stunning, arresting, inspiring, beautiful, staggering, personal…and I’m already out of words to describe the fairly recently released film by the Icelandic band, Sigur Rós. (Okay, it was released back in December of ’07. I just hadn’t gotten around to checking it out until a couple weeks ago.)

Sigur Rós is a band that has been making their other-worldly, alien, and powerfully intimate music for close to a decade. They sing in Icelandic and a lyrical non-language that is roughly translated from the Icelandic name for it as “Hopelandic.” It is not a Tolkien-like “language” per se, as its “words” mean nothing in a literal sense but, in many ways, it serves some of the same purposes as language. I don’t happen to be fluent in Icelandic, so I can’t tell the difference between the two anyway — and it doesn’t matter. Each album they’ve released has found them making music that breaks beyond the barriers of language to get as close to communicating feelings and emotions that language can only hope to convey, or struggle to give an idea of.

Yet for most of their careers, the band members themselves have remained enigmatic and closed-off, buffered from the world by their ethereal music. Heima, which means “at home” or “homeland,” takes us beyond that barrier and uses the music to immerse us in the things that make them who they are, where they come from, what their “home” is.

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Sigur Ros’ “Heima” on Youtube

“Having toured the world over, Sigur Ros return home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland.”

A beautiful semi-music documentary on the amazing band, Sigur Ros, and their homeland, Iceland, premiered full and un-cut on youtube yesterday. It’s old news, I know, but I own a copy so I wasn’t really looking out for it and I stumbled on the video like 5 minutes ago. I’m posting it because I’ve been meaning to write a post about the DVD for a while. Trust me, it is worth your time. The youtube quality will not come close to doing it justice but it will have to do:

After you watch it, I think you’ll want to buy it. Thoughts and a review of it will be posted shortly.

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Poetry and Music

 

To J.B.

I think of the day you were born.
So small, you quivered in this cold new world.
I remember those first couple of years,
as you struggled to come to terms with
this land of giants with high-pitched voices and
exaggerated expressions

I’ve heard your gibberish chatter
form foreign words and phrases.
I wonder if your language of ga-ga’s and goo-goo’s
held more meaning than any language I know now.
What secrets from the womb and the world before
were you trying so desperately to convey?
No one understands.
Maybe it is beyond our comprehension.
It has become everyone’s dead language,
and now it has already become one for you too.

I’ve seen your innocence,
and the moments that gave a glimpse
into the inevitable loss of it:
Oh why do you cry so, when your mother must attend to your brother?
And stick out your tongue and make that nasty face,
when all I try to do is nourish your body?

But the purity of your smile,
and your heart-filled laugh,
make all amends for me.
Who says you need perfect teeth to have the perfect smile?
You seemed to be able to pull it off just fine without a single pearly white.
No doubt, a picture of you (placed in the right magazines and ads, of course)
can render all orthodontists unemployed.

Soon enough, your day will come.
After these current obstacles of monkey bars and swings,
after school, friends, jobs, maybe a bit of rebellion, and more jobs,
someone else will come into your world,
speaking a language vaguely familiar but foreign,
smiling a beautiful smile that,
if pasted onto your own “grown-up” face, would be ugly.
And you’ll wonder as I do today,
“Was I really once just like you?”





Sigur Ros – “Hoppipolla” (follow link)

I hate when people immediately assume that whatever you write (especially when you write fiction) is directly about you, the writer/author. We’re in the freakin’ 21st century people. What with all this post-modernist/modernist writing floating around for damn near a hundred years, with all its quirky meta-fictional tricks and inverted/reversed/weird narrative voices and styles,

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