The Onion has been penning a streak of hilarious and surprisingly humane articles (rather than the puerile/bullying/intensely mean-spirited snark that they sometimes indulged in). Recent headlines: "Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain," "Wealthy Teen Nearly Experiences Consequence", and "Report: 60 Million People You'd Never Talk To Voting For Other Guy". A quote from the latest article:
"The report maintained that, during your purely hypothetical discussion, both of you would come off as smug, narrow-minded, or downright ignorant if you tried to criticize the other candidate's positions on key issues such as abortion and gay rights. The ensuing argument would only further cement both of your feelings of disgust toward the other candidate.
[SUPER WALLACEIAN STATEMENT ALERT] And yet incredibly, sources said, neither one of you would technically be wrong.
Because—and this is reportedly the most maddening part—even though these people's unwavering support for their candidate completely dumbfounds you, you cannot even get angry at them, since they are not voting for him because they are idiots or because they want to spite you, but rather because they actually believe that he is the better choice to run our nation."
[Sorry to plug this in yet again but for the love of god do read DFW's speech -- okay I'm done talking about him I swear.]
----------------------------------------------------------
Among those Onion stories, the last one is not very ha-ha funny, but it's quote-unquote "interesting to consider." I just had a bar conversation about how New Yorkers always make fun of the supposed Red State Proletariats who "believe everything Fox News reports" and yet the funny thing is we personally do not know a single person for whom this is true. So this seems like a pretty lame supposed-person to rant about. The RSP, at least as an abstract object of conversation in New York, is more effigy than valid opponent.
Of course, statistically speaking, there are many people out there who believe Fox New to a tee, as there are those who hold The New York Times and Village Voice as their bible, but this is not theoretically interesting to talk about. Most of the time, talking about an exaggerated extreme just generates conditional and vacuous statements. Like the last sentence I just typed out.
I guess a reason why I could never take seriously a rant about effigized Evil/Ignorant/Dumb Opponents, even when penned by myself for cathartic effect, is because it's absolutely calcified and narrow and rife with id-driven emotional disgust rather than superego-checked acknowledgment of fallibility. It's an opinion that is felt first, then rationalized, rather than vice-versa. There's a reason Sherwood Anderson called people who led their lives according to narrow absolute opinions 'Grotesques'. There's also a reason why Ralph Waldo Emerson said "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Or consider John Gardener: "One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one's argument, never understands that the argument is an old one, never understands the dignity and worth of people one has cast as enemies." And finally, for the same reason, it's no coincidence that young people are called 'impressionable,' for their often unconditional endorsement of single worldviews, rather than remixing many at once.
My mom's opinions on the moral failings of Taiwan's Kuomingtang colonizers are mostly spot-on, but her dogma is in assuming that every Nationalist is culpable or brainwashed until proven otherwise.
At a literary seminar in Berkeley, some students wanted the professor to just goddamn give his final conclusion on what Pynchon's novels meant and why they're important. To the prof's credit, he replied: "if you want tidy conclusions about everything, ask religious fundamentalists or liberal extremists -- they have all the answers in the world."
I think one of the most admirable things about *good* scientific thinking is that it constantly criticizes, modifies and improves its thesis. It does not jump to conclusions without doubting itself a million times.
The good scientist -- and thinker, and writer -- should be mouth-foamingly eager to know if it's wrong, how it can correct itself, etc.
Pretty cliched stuff, I know. And the funny thing about cliches is that you can understand them when you're 15 and you'll understand it into your 40s too, but the older you get the more nuanced your understanding. We have all been taught in middle school (or earlier) that there are "two sides to every argument and both sides are kinda valid." We sorta agree to that at an early age, but it's easy to forget, and it's actually very difficult to understand fully.
I certainly don't understand it yet. See, my dogma is in believing that entrenched opinions are automatically in danger of being terribly flawed, and thus in danger of committing terrible wrong.
So sue me, I have a love affair with not taking absolutist stances. Call me a soft-minded fence-sitter and accuse me of Postmodernity if you please. But I hope this not just a lazy garden variety of relativism, but rather a sincere effort at explaining my general aversion to taking sides on any given issue. For me, as well as for many writers, observations are far more interesting than conclusions.
*SUGGESTED WAYS TO CRITICIZE ME*
For Yuppies: point out that only an unworldly slacker with a sheltered upbringing can ever afford to scorn the Real Life necessity to make conclusions & take action. Ad hominem criticism for the win!
For Marxists: point out that only a well-off bourgeois with a pampered upbringing can ever afford to scorn the Real Life necessity to make conclusions & take action. Because oppression is everywhere and you need to fight the good fight and don't ever extend sympathy to the Devil. Ad hominem DOUBLE KILL!
For Republicans: call me a flip-flop. An Obama-like elitist. Call me not man enough to defend an absolute position.
For Artists: Pomo group hug! Want a toke of that J?
For Scientists: "As a matter of fact, you misunderstood the scientific principal and the humanities are for dumb inferior people anyway!"
2008年9月29日 星期一
Gallery of Self-Call
Just sorted through my hard-drive and organized some of my graphic design stuff from college.
Hello, employers-
Hello, employers-
2008年9月28日 星期日
The
I vetoed the hell out of it (LIKE THE HOUSE DID TO THE PAULSON BAILOUT PLAN -- zing??) since the noise level around here is already high enough to require earplugs during sleep.
In other news, I was hanging out with Danker + Waldron on Saturday night and we accidentally ran into a hidden bar. We were in East Village, literally a block south of where I live, snacking at some hot dog stand when we noticed that people kept on disappearing into a tiny phone booth in the diner.
"So uh... I hear there's a secret bar around this area where you have to ring a phone in a hot dog diner to go in," Danker said.
"So I heard too."
"This might be it, then."
Then a line started to form in front of the phone booth. Obviously we had to give it a try. We went into the phone booth, dialed the phone, and some snooty waitress opened a crack at the door.
"Name?" she asked.
"The Baron," Danker said.
She arched an annoyed eyebrow, obviously not amused. "And reservation number?"
"None."
"Let's see... that will be an hour wait."
"Oh, screw that," my older bro said.
"Have a good night," she said and slammed the door.
2008年9月14日 星期日
Franzen @ BK Book Fest
I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival to say hi to my former editors. The atmosphere among the writers was (to quote an NYT obit) like a wake. After my editor introduced Jonathan Franzen to the audience, Franzen got onstage and said "I really don't want to be here right now; one of my best friends passed this Friday."
The director of Helvetica walked out later and said Franzen was being a primadonna.
On the subway towards Brooklyn, I was reading DFW's essays. A couple came up beside me and said quietly "what happened this weekend was really sad," and I nodded. They asked me if I was reading in tribute.
(I'm still trying to understand, in a weirdly Wallaceian way, why this hits me so hard and I think it's because DFW reminds me of Ms. McDowell, my high school mentor, who passed away after I went off to college. Both of them had an intense and often un-hip humanist moral seriousness that made you feel distinctly that someone very compassionate, thoughtful and incredibly smart wants to see you become the best damn human being you can be, and what drives you is knowing that someone out there would rather you be a decent, thoughtful, meaningful person rather than a rich/powerful/famous one.)
Franzen is an amazingly witty author as expected. He later apologized for saying that he didn't want to be here. It was just... fuck.
After Franzen, Russel Banks read like Colonel Sanders narrating the intro of Transformers or Planet Earth. "In the beginning, there was a cube....
The director of Helvetica walked out later and said Franzen was being a primadonna.
On the subway towards Brooklyn, I was reading DFW's essays. A couple came up beside me and said quietly "what happened this weekend was really sad," and I nodded. They asked me if I was reading in tribute.
(I'm still trying to understand, in a weirdly Wallaceian way, why this hits me so hard and I think it's because DFW reminds me of Ms. McDowell, my high school mentor, who passed away after I went off to college. Both of them had an intense and often un-hip humanist moral seriousness that made you feel distinctly that someone very compassionate, thoughtful and incredibly smart wants to see you become the best damn human being you can be, and what drives you is knowing that someone out there would rather you be a decent, thoughtful, meaningful person rather than a rich/powerful/famous one.)
Franzen is an amazingly witty author as expected. He later apologized for saying that he didn't want to be here. It was just... fuck.
After Franzen, Russel Banks read like Colonel Sanders narrating the intro of Transformers or Planet Earth. "In the beginning, there was a cube....
Farewell David Foster Wallace
One of my favorite essayists
David Foster Wallace passed tonight.
He was found dead in his home by his wife. Hanged himself. I really don't know what to say.
His own words:
"[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
Flashy postmodern smartass writers are dime a dozen, but he's a rare contemporary author with heart to temper sophistication. The world lost a beautiful mind.
David Foster Wallace passed tonight.
He was found dead in his home by his wife. Hanged himself. I really don't know what to say.
His own words:
"[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
Flashy postmodern smartass writers are dime a dozen, but he's a rare contemporary author with heart to temper sophistication. The world lost a beautiful mind.
2008年8月11日 星期一
Radiohead @ APW Festival
Thom Yorke, after inheriting the Blue Comet stage from Kings of Leon: "the next song is for Kings of Leon. We'd be friends with them if we were that good looking."
Clau remarked that Yorke was "surprisingly douchey," as befitting Scott Tenorman's favorite band. No Surprises there -- this is the original '90s British sick cats, masters of aestheticized ressentiment who said bitterly that "no one likes a smartass but we all like stars" (incidentally this was also my high school yearbook quote because I was -- I'm not proud to admit -- one of those abhorrently, pathologically sarky kids). He also fronts a band that every magazine has conspired to make canonical beyond reproach. Though I think Yorke himself realizes the absurdity of there being a Rock Music Canon agreed upon by smarmy pedantic white music nerds.
(To be honest I think a certain English prof at my alma mater looks like a pudgy suburban version of Thomas Yorke; same accent, same facial expressions, same acidic sense of humor.)
The concert was all In Rainbows alright. The stage setup was a citadel of acid-electric phantasmagoria, a vertible crystal castle of refracting glass spikes. They played most of the songs I was looking to hear (15 Step, Reckoner, There There, No Surprises, Bodysnatchers). Everyone juggled instruments, Jonny on guitar, Thom Yorke on drums, etc. and every once in a while Yorke broke out into his best writhing dance interpretation of a headless chicken. Truly bizarre.
By all means this is the most high-profile act I've seen. The festival itself was poorly organized and manned by the most anal retentive staff ever, but all the same. I think this will be one of those bands that when our children romanticize about the super retro-cool era of the 2000's, they'd wonder what Radiohead was like live and I could say oh they were pretty mindblowing alright.
Close up video of The Bends.
Next was Bodysnatchers I think. They basically played the entire songlist of In Rainbows. The red bar above the stage worried me a little. It looked like the eye of the disco ray monster machines from War of the Worlds come to vaporize us all. I was not in a mood to be harvested.
As to expected at a major festival, the whole crowd was pretty much bubbling with geysers of smoke. From afar, it looks geothermic.
Also, Animal Collective was MINDBLOWINGLY WEIRD. I think I would need Martian logic to process what I heard from them yesterday. I'm just gonna go ahead and pretend I didn't hear anything.
2008年8月3日 星期日
Kingda Ka
Beware when tigers try to sell you anything.
Sometimes they sell you cereal.
Other times they sell oil.
And on rare occasions they even sell you overpriced colleges.
We were at the NJ Six Flags for Du's birthday and a tiger sold me a ride on the Kingda Ka, the world's tallest and fastest rollercoaster. It stands at 456 feet (45 stories -- tall enough to be an aviation safety concern) and accelerates from 0-128 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Du and I were at the front row seat. Here's what it looks like:
Amusement parks and rollercoasters are pretty bizarre ideas when you think about them. They package our fear of injury/death and sell it back to us as happyfunptime joy rides. You know we as a species have evolved to be a pretty fucked up breed of monkeys when we build huge town-sized settlements in New Jersey devoted to making the fear of dying a fun experience.
No exaggeration. It was like simulated death. I opened my mouth during the coaster and swallowed gallons of air, couldn't even hear myself scream. My heart considered abandoning my ribcage and eloping with my lungs. At one point over the ride's peak, the view was just me, the curved horizon and the dirt below. Then the whole giant angry apparatus slammed us towards the ground.
There were stages of recovery from the ride. We played it cool immediately after the ride (1st Stage: Denial), but I think at some point later in the afternoon we all gradually acknowledged that it was what we'd categorize as a traumatic experience (2nd Stage: Recognition). We were violated and I will have nightmares about rollercoasters forever. And then of course the whole experience gets recuperated as a funny story the next day (3rd Stage: Denial again). But serious, I'd actually recommend an hour-long repeated ride session as a sort of lite alternative to Guantanamo.
Afterward I was pretty much depleted of a week's worth of adrenaline, so we moved on to gentler slopes. Namely Du's favorite rollercoaster -- Nitro, which (when viewed in profile) resembles the hospitable curves of the A/C/E subway map. I think I was too drained to enjoy it properly.
Sometimes they sell you cereal.
Other times they sell oil.
And on rare occasions they even sell you overpriced colleges.
We were at the NJ Six Flags for Du's birthday and a tiger sold me a ride on the Kingda Ka, the world's tallest and fastest rollercoaster. It stands at 456 feet (45 stories -- tall enough to be an aviation safety concern) and accelerates from 0-128 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Du and I were at the front row seat. Here's what it looks like:
Amusement parks and rollercoasters are pretty bizarre ideas when you think about them. They package our fear of injury/death and sell it back to us as happyfunptime joy rides. You know we as a species have evolved to be a pretty fucked up breed of monkeys when we build huge town-sized settlements in New Jersey devoted to making the fear of dying a fun experience.
No exaggeration. It was like simulated death. I opened my mouth during the coaster and swallowed gallons of air, couldn't even hear myself scream. My heart considered abandoning my ribcage and eloping with my lungs. At one point over the ride's peak, the view was just me, the curved horizon and the dirt below. Then the whole giant angry apparatus slammed us towards the ground.
There were stages of recovery from the ride. We played it cool immediately after the ride (1st Stage: Denial), but I think at some point later in the afternoon we all gradually acknowledged that it was what we'd categorize as a traumatic experience (2nd Stage: Recognition). We were violated and I will have nightmares about rollercoasters forever. And then of course the whole experience gets recuperated as a funny story the next day (3rd Stage: Denial again). But serious, I'd actually recommend an hour-long repeated ride session as a sort of lite alternative to Guantanamo.
Afterward I was pretty much depleted of a week's worth of adrenaline, so we moved on to gentler slopes. Namely Du's favorite rollercoaster -- Nitro, which (when viewed in profile) resembles the hospitable curves of the A/C/E subway map. I think I was too drained to enjoy it properly.
2008年7月26日 星期六
Regime Change
This year will mark the last Formoz Music Festival as well as the last Campo Art Party in Taipei, both due to the pulling of government funding and "new zoning regulations" at Yuanshan. I wonder what the new government has to do with this.
2008年7月21日 星期一
"Whiny Guitar Music"
No credits to Danker for summing up everything I ever listen to in three words.
Went to a $8 open bar + Ninjasonik concert in South Williamsburg on Friday night. Travis started a mosh pit in front of the stage. Couple that with a malfunctioning AC, temperature in the 90's and you get the idea. For one night, I was a swamp beast.
All in all, these were not the best ways to prep for a huge music festival.
Travis and his roomies were planning to barbecue on his roof around noon and head to the Village Voice Siren Music Festival together. When I called them at 5PM they had just woken up. As with many things I do in the city, I went alone.
The crowds were not too bad. I've seen much were at the Hohaiyan festival in Taiwan. I went in time to see Helio Sequence, who's a better live act than I'd expected, especially for a two-piece band.
Then Broken Social Scene took the stage. Highlights:
-I was at the pisser when they played Fire Eye'd Boy. Tremendously mistimed.
-Stephen Malkmus' performance was scheduled for the same hour at another stage. Kevin Drew was pissed off too.
-They didn't play Superconnected, Swimmer, Almost Crime or Lover's Spit, which were the songs I looked forward to the most... does this count as a highlight? I guess I'm not entitled to complaints since it was a free concert.
-Some random girl in the audience went onstage and sang Feist's part in 7/4 (Shoreline) because those she was (as usual) absent from the tour lineup. The girl did a dece rendition, though she sounded way nervous.
-Kevin Drew hearts Obama, of course.
-Someone rocked a little too hard and had to be ambulanced away.
Went to a $8 open bar + Ninjasonik concert in South Williamsburg on Friday night. Travis started a mosh pit in front of the stage. Couple that with a malfunctioning AC, temperature in the 90's and you get the idea. For one night, I was a swamp beast.
All in all, these were not the best ways to prep for a huge music festival.
Travis and his roomies were planning to barbecue on his roof around noon and head to the Village Voice Siren Music Festival together. When I called them at 5PM they had just woken up. As with many things I do in the city, I went alone.
The crowds were not too bad. I've seen much were at the Hohaiyan festival in Taiwan. I went in time to see Helio Sequence, who's a better live act than I'd expected, especially for a two-piece band.
Then Broken Social Scene took the stage. Highlights:
-I was at the pisser when they played Fire Eye'd Boy. Tremendously mistimed.
-Stephen Malkmus' performance was scheduled for the same hour at another stage. Kevin Drew was pissed off too.
-They didn't play Superconnected, Swimmer, Almost Crime or Lover's Spit, which were the songs I looked forward to the most... does this count as a highlight? I guess I'm not entitled to complaints since it was a free concert.
-Some random girl in the audience went onstage and sang Feist's part in 7/4 (Shoreline) because those she was (as usual) absent from the tour lineup. The girl did a dece rendition, though she sounded way nervous.
-Kevin Drew hearts Obama, of course.
-Someone rocked a little too hard and had to be ambulanced away.
2008年7月13日 星期日
The Brackish Atlantic
I was talking to some buddies about why all of us agreed to move to New York City instead of, say, somewhere clean, friendly and beautiful. Like an island in the Pacific where we can all be marine biologists, doing field research in the day and hanging out at a beach-side bar at night. But of course we all know that English majors don't live near beaches. That's what southern Californians do, duuude.
One favorite adages from elementary school in Taiwan was 仁者樂山，智者樂水 -- which roughly translates into "the virtuous enjoy the mountains; the wise delight in the water/sea." I'm not sure if that makes any sense, but I always preferred the sea when growing up, so that's as good of an excuse for self-flattery as any. It helped that we were a stone's throw away from South East Asian beach countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Palau, etc.
So after spending a lot of Friday night floundering in Midtown and blowing serious cash, I needed some sunshine to clear my mind. So I brought along The Savage Detective and my sketchbook and hopped the A train to the Rockaway beaches. It did me immense good, I think.
Solitude is easy to find in even the most crowded places of New York, but true privacy is miles away. Even at the beach, I had to walk a solid couple of miles to get away from the volleyball crowds, hot dog grills, boom boxes and neon plastic toys. I was looking for a windswept dune where I can lie in the sand, read and nap alone. Should've known that beaches during summertime were garish places. Anyway, the above view is the closest I got to that. I think I'm gonna check out Robert Moses island/state park next time.
I also listened to a lot of beach-appropriate music (Oasis, 929樂團), which made me unreasonably happy.
Yeah, anyway, I miss the sea. Maybe I should go live in Australia or something.
AWWWSTRAYLIAH! Dingows ayte mai baybeees!
2008年7月7日 星期一
David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech
“This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally lower you into your grave. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. . .”
-This is what we needed to hear for commencement (entire speech).
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship –- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally lower you into your grave. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. . .”
-This is what we needed to hear for commencement (entire speech).
2008年6月25日 星期三
Entitled Mediocrity
"There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics."
I know you've all read variants of this article before (at least if you regularly read stuff from Arts & Letters Daily) but read it anyway, especially if you're wondering why college was just easier, more careerist, more socially confirmist and self-congratulatory and less of a mindtrip than your high school self expected it to be. After all, aren't superb college educations supposed to be nothing short of worldview-shattering?
The best article of its kind I've read so far: The Disadvantanges of an Elite Education.
I mean sure, if your college's alumni magazine shoved a microphone in your face, you're gonna do your best to be pro-social and summon up a quotable laundry list of ways in which your college taught you how to think. Which might be very true, but less true than we're willing to admit publicly. We're all very good at rationalizing. And obsessing over the distinction between mediocrity and true excellence is for only for unsexy and freakish people like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, right?
Sometimes it seems like the Ivy League definition of excellence is this: desire what every normal/average/mediocre person desires (money/power/fame/social clout), only be faster and more efficient at acquiring them. Be excellent and efficacious sheep.
I've always told my friends that as happy as I was on campus, and as much as college has patched me up socially to become a more presentable, "real world"-savvy person, I feel like I've abandoned some spark of raw talent/intellectual thirst/solitary thought/creative weirdness in high school. Instead, I've traded them for resume-ready "skill sets" like networking skills and enhanced ability for small talk.
Hadn't Ms. McDowell warned us about this all along?
Thanks to Aimee Moon for bringing this link to my attention.
I know you've all read variants of this article before (at least if you regularly read stuff from Arts & Letters Daily) but read it anyway, especially if you're wondering why college was just easier, more careerist, more socially confirmist and self-congratulatory and less of a mindtrip than your high school self expected it to be. After all, aren't superb college educations supposed to be nothing short of worldview-shattering?
The best article of its kind I've read so far: The Disadvantanges of an Elite Education.
I mean sure, if your college's alumni magazine shoved a microphone in your face, you're gonna do your best to be pro-social and summon up a quotable laundry list of ways in which your college taught you how to think. Which might be very true, but less true than we're willing to admit publicly. We're all very good at rationalizing. And obsessing over the distinction between mediocrity and true excellence is for only for unsexy and freakish people like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, right?
Sometimes it seems like the Ivy League definition of excellence is this: desire what every normal/average/mediocre person desires (money/power/fame/social clout), only be faster and more efficient at acquiring them. Be excellent and efficacious sheep.
I've always told my friends that as happy as I was on campus, and as much as college has patched me up socially to become a more presentable, "real world"-savvy person, I feel like I've abandoned some spark of raw talent/intellectual thirst/solitary thought/creative weirdness in high school. Instead, I've traded them for resume-ready "skill sets" like networking skills and enhanced ability for small talk.
Hadn't Ms. McDowell warned us about this all along?
Thanks to Aimee Moon for bringing this link to my attention.
2008年6月17日 星期二
KGB
Had my first meeting with Suzanne at KGB Bar Lit in the Lower East Side on Sunday. Monica Powell read excerpts from her debut novel, The Answer is Always Yes, while Andrew Foster Altschul read from Lady Lazarus. They're both young urban "rockstar" writers who display just the right degree of pomo to be hilarious and entertaining to the twentysomething crowd. I dig the vibe. There seems to be a set of regulars who go in for readings. A lot of the people there are authors on the cusp of their first published novels. Some serious Savage Detectives sense of literary camaraderie, sans prostitutes. I feel kinda like Garcia Madero, the young naive guy hanging at its periphery.
To the Dartmouth CW folks: Joshua Furst was among the audience. He's the author that read Sabotage Cafe and then argued with the poetry folks afterwards, if you remember. I said hi to him and told him that people at Dartmouth either hated his guts or thought he was 12 types of awesome, and he seemed massively pleased to have such a polarizing effect on our department and cracked up in remembering "some playwright girl" who looked like she wanted to stab him in his sleep.
So it looks like I'll be doing web design and writing book reviews for them during the week and reporting into KGB on the weekends. Part-time work, basically. My other internship with A Public Space lit mag doesn't start until Thurs, but I picked up their latest issue at St. Mark's Bookstore and almost crapped my pants from sheer overdose of awesome. They ran a series of photographs of graffiti written in U.S. marine barrack bathroom stalls in Afghanistan.
2008年6月15日 星期日
Pal-pi-ta-TIONSSS
I'm sitting in a cramped Holiday Express room in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NYC, trying to figure out how the fuck I'm gonna find my way in this city. My parents are packing up stuff around me. They're returning to Taiwan tomorrow.
So I've handled the past week or so with more poise than I ever remember myself having. About time I got my shit together. I don't even have the right to call myself a college kid anymore, which has been my main identifier for the past four years. What am I now?
The above featured room has been gutted and packed by my own hands, which (as is true in all move-outs) was a downer process.
Not gonna get too sentimental here -- the time has passed for that -- but here are some highlights from the past week:
-Saw the sunrise on commencement day with a bunch of buddies. Smoked cigars and swigged scotch as the sun rose over the green. Hemingway would be proud.
-Clau is a Shiesty Cum Laude in the style of Tomi Jun, except more drunk. Congrats, man.
-When people really started to leave, I was too tired to muster anything more than a "Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ this is not happening." Again, I don't want to be sloppy sentimental here, though get a drink or two in me and I'll be just that.
-Brought my parents hiking in New Hampshire. We climbed a fire tower, which offered a view of the campus from afar. It really hit me to see it from that distance.
-Listened to DOC music/frosh year favs on the drive down to NYC: The Darkness, Sublime, Modest Mouse, The Strokes, The Killers, Weezer, Ben Folds 5, etc., which found me irrationally happy and hopeful for the move down. Then I checked into my dorm in Brooklyn, which seems like another college orientation all over again. To preserve my dignity, I considered lying about being a high school grad/college frosh to people just for kicks ("Omigawd I'm like soooo psyched for college!"), but I couldn't keep a straight face, so I gave up on the charade pretty early on. While I was getting my dorm key, I ran into Ayla, who's apparently living 7 floors below me for the summer. Then we went to check out my room with Ayla and the most awkward roomie intro took place. See, I forgot to knock on the door before unlocking and moving in. My roomie (a UMichigan film major/aspiring filmmaker) happened to be lying in bed and watching Fast Food Nation on one TV screen, and really hardcore porn on the other. He was in no particular hurry in shutting off the porn either.
Been hanging out in the room and he seems like a chill dude though. We had our post-awk walk-in chat about how annoyingly young and giddily drunk most of our dorm neighbors are. "I'm not here to do that," he said. Amen.
-Spent a few days walking around NYC with my family and eating nice (Zagat rating 25+) food while they're here to finance it. Kanoyama turned out to be awesome. This photo was taken at SoHo.
-Went to see The Airborne Toxic Event with Adam. Not only does ATE's name reference Don DeLillo's White Noise pretty hardcore, but they're also highly danceable new band that I've reading about on blogs for a while. I'm convinced they're gonna make it pretty big, since they're literate enough to be "indie," but their sound is mainstream enough for radio play... sometimes a little too normal/SoCal/90's alt rock, in fact, but I can forgive these flaws because they don't taken themselves too seriously either. They also have an Asian guitarist (major points for that), and I absolutely love the lyrics to the song I recorded above. It's has a very night-out-in-the-city kinda vibe, which I'm always a sucker for.
I was walking down Fifth Avenue with my parents when I saw my college's crest on a random building. Apparently it's an invite-only club for alums. I didn't even try to get in because one peek into its mahogany-lined halls told me it was a den of snooty white-haired ibankery.
Whew.
That's it for now folks. Thank you all for waiting so patiently for me to grow up for the past four years. I can't say I'm a completely put-together person just yet, nor do I think I ever will be, but I think I'm a different person than I was coming to the States. Who knows what this city will bring for me--
2008年4月8日 星期二
NYT in Taipei
I'm both heartened and ashamed to say that Douglas McGray's New York Times travel article on Taipei is more beautiful, accurate, expansive and observant about the city than anything I've written for my summer magazine. Though he tends to drum up the doom-and-gloom of Chinese competition a bit too much.
2008年2月3日 星期日
2008年1月6日 星期日
I learned from last year's camera battery failure and went to this year's Taipei 101 fireworks well-prepared.
I didn't really feel up to elbowing people for breathing space this year, so I watched the T101 fireworks from the Living Mall. A separate firework was going on above me while I was watching the Taipei 101 countdown, which pretty much resulted in a walnut-sized chunk of ash meteoring onto my forehead while my friend and I were trying to evacuate from the park.
It was a good time even though only Eric could meet me (Sherry was trapped in traffic when the countdown went off (!)). Evacuating was even more fun since we were climbing over walls to cut through foot traffic, and the weird comments/attention we got for doing that was hilarious ("What are these high schoolers doing? Are they doing that Russian wall-jump thing?").
2008
never thought this year would come-
Happy new year!
I didn't really feel up to elbowing people for breathing space this year, so I watched the T101 fireworks from the Living Mall. A separate firework was going on above me while I was watching the Taipei 101 countdown, which pretty much resulted in a walnut-sized chunk of ash meteoring onto my forehead while my friend and I were trying to evacuate from the park.
It was a good time even though only Eric could meet me (Sherry was trapped in traffic when the countdown went off (!)). Evacuating was even more fun since we were climbing over walls to cut through foot traffic, and the weird comments/attention we got for doing that was hilarious ("What are these high schoolers doing? Are they doing that Russian wall-jump thing?").
2008
never thought this year would come-
Happy new year!
Norwegian Woods
One of my goals for my brief winter homecoming is to stock up on existing literature on Taipei street culture. My thesis project will be a Winesburg Ohio/Dubliners/台北人-esque "novel" of urban short stories set in Taipei, so I thought it wise to read up on (and interact with) what other Taiwanese writers have already written about the city.
I'm reading 黃凡 now and he's absolutely amazing. One of the problems I saw in Chinese literature in general is that, up till the '80s, it was almost an exclusively rural, political and/or diasporic genre. In other words, "serious" Chinese writers seem to distinguish themselves by rejecting urban modernity as bourgeois, petty. There are notable exceptions of course (圍城/Fortress Besieged and pre-communist Shanghai lit) but this was my damaging and slightly ignorant impression of Chinese lit in high school, that Chinese-language lit had nothing to say about the "petty bourgeois" daily realities of urban life in modern Asia. It did not help that my high school had a dated reading curriculum that included irrelevant texts like Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth.
Anyway, 黃凡 pretty much pioneered the urban/pomo novel in Taiwan. Instead of writing about 民族性 ("Chinese ethnic temperament"), the angst of East-meets-West hybridity, etc. (all those hallowed and laughably self-serious metanarratives of old school Chinese writers) he writes about Taipei's DIY craze in the '80s, architects with Napoleon complexes, the History of Sewage Pipes, etc. Petty shit, but written in hilarious prose.
What the hell, I didn't set out to write some ode to 黃凡. Where was I?
---------------------(back on topic)
The picture you see above is the (in)famous Norwegian Woods cafe in the Gongguan/ NTUniversity district of South Taipei. I've read it mentioned in Pots Weekly and 舒國治's "Taipei Wanderer" essays (among many other places) as a sort of cornerstone in Taipei's arts scene, so I decided to pay it a visit yesterday afternoon. It was easily the most intimidating cafe I've ever been to.
The cafe owner's a renown town personality. He's a book/music critic and huge coffee nerd, and if he doesn't like you he'll pretty much tell you that they "don't serve the kind of coffee you're looking for" and he'll show you the door.
When I walked in, the clients stared and pretty much decided immediately that I was not a familiar customer. The barista took her time serving me coffee (though the coffee was really good). The people in there were kind of absurd, cigarettes dangling between their fingers and piles of philosophy text/translated novels sitting next to their laptops. Most importantly, they were all typing furiously on their laptop computers. When I surveyed the room, everyone was writing on their blogs (!). I knew the blogging and online 散文/prose writing culture was huge in Taipei, but what the hell.
Also, this is what I deduced about the man who sat behind me:
Jokes aside, people there seem to be seriously working rather than trying to be hip/charming. So it was more a case of artists in hipster's clothes rather than vice versa?
I don't know. I'll have to check again next year to decide.
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