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.

"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.

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!

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).