arun in brooklyn

one of life’s greatest pleasures is undoubtedly the arrival of the pleasant surprise…sometimes a pleasant surprise stretches across an entire day and its often vary rare that we have near-prefect days…which is, i suppose, as it should be…

ajeet and i woke up late today, and after a serious of unfortunate circumstances, we were unable to make it to staples’ teacher appreciation day…which was really no big deal because in my 3rd year of teaching, i seem to have a large amount of leftover supplies from the last couple of years…still, the disappointment wasn’t the best way to kick of a day…

after the staples mishap, we met up with block, kumi, parsons, rob, and kline for our weekly education discussion group…i wasn’t all that impressed with this week’s reading, but we ended up having a pretty salient discussion about social justice in education and exactly what we’re all trying to do in the classroom…the latter led to some important debates about the role of programs like teach for america and how it needs to be altered if its going to make anything that resembles a poignant social impact on our kids…

i also had a really great conversation about with rob about the wire, which is probably my favorite show on television at this point…we both agreed that the best parts of the show were its focus on the development of characters over the development of the plot…although the large season-long plot developments are done skillfully, they’re not really surprising or unexpected…but the complexity and the development of the characters themselves are what makes the show socially/culturally/politically significant while still being an endearing drama about the institutions present in any large metropolitan city…

later, we had dinner at a lovely vegetarian restaurant in fort greene called red bamboo where we continued much of our discussion on education, social justice, important tv shows, and india…one of the more interesting things we talked about was based on a bit of information i picked up recently…namely, that queens is the only county in america that has an equal distribution of wealth across all races…i find this fact to be incredibly important and intriguing, and i’m amazed that there hasn’t been further studies of the way in which this phenomenon occurred…

i wish i could delineate here all the things we talked about today, but there’s just not enough time or space…nor would it necessarily be all that meaningful without the debate component…regardless, i’m really happy and blessed to have so many friends that i can engage in this kind of discourse with because it’s far and way my favorite activity…i’d rather sit and discuss education policy on a saturday night than be in any bar or club in the city…

on a final note, i rarely see movies and tend to be uninspired most of the ones i do see…but today i say blame it on fidel and it was just a wonderful movie about a family of french revolutionaries aiding in the revolution of chile and the way they’re children respond to the cause therein…i think teaching kids definitely made this movie more endearing, but it was refreshingly accurate in the way it develops the minds of the young children…it was truly wonderful…

the gloria record’s ep a lull in traffic is sounding really beautiful right now…and its completeness is reminding me of how concise and complete the ep format can be…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

one the most beautiful records you’ve never heard and that you can likely find in 99 cent bins in various record stores throughout the country is jr corduroy’s i don’t want to be around when you’re gone for good…in the ongoing process of digitizing my music collection, i stumbled on this pretty little thing today…some years ago, when i was still music director at kscr, i found this album in a pile of old cds that previous music directors were unable or unwilling to go through…it’s probably one of those right-time right-place type of things that are so valuable in life, but i remember being sold about 20 seconds into the first track…there’s nothing astonishingly new about this music really, it’s just lush, gentle, beautiful, and (my favorite) entirely melancholy love-pop…and perhaps the real stand-out here are how well the words are constructed and woven into the melodies…they’re lulling, sad and entirely saccharine in a way that’s just clever enough to be memorable…the title of this post are the opening words…and to this day, i don’t know if i’ve there was a better opening line on a record about love or lovelessness…

i don’t want to be around when you’re gone for good was almost universally a flop in terms of record sales…i don’t know if the band even had a chance to tour behind the album before they disappeared…a few months back, chris turned me on to mark kraus’ new songwriting project…it’s called tsui and it’s very good…but just doesn’t hold me the way jr Corduroy does…still, he seems to be an all around great guy with a lot of good sense about the way he promotes his art…you can in fact download his entire debut album for free from his website…and if you love it, you can also buy it, or go to one of his shows…or tell yr friends etc…oh, he also lives in brooklyn, which just feels really nice for some reason…

i woke up much later than i’m used to or should have today…after some lunch, and listening to some music, i made my way up to greenpoint to pick up my bike…i’d left it there after i had my crash, and didn’t have a chance to pick it up because of the rain yesterday…luckily it’s safe and sound, and i now have it right at home where it’s supposed to be…if you’re a bike commuter, not having one for a couple of days can be incredibly crippling…

with marwan out of town, ron and i are taking care of a lot of loose ends at the studio and trying to wrap our heads around ableton live a little better…this is a program we use to do live sequencing when we’re playing songs and so far it’s been wonderful, but we’re definitely stumbling through its operation idiot-savant style…which is usually not a good thing when it comes to maintaining consistency or reliability during a live show…

i’ve been on and off a lot with solo music, but i sat down today and put together skeletal structures of 3 new songs and some basics for a few more…i’d like to demo the music soon, but i’m still debating whether to do that at the studio or at home on the old four track…i also don’t know if i want to do this acoustic or not…so hopefully i’ll get that together and have some stuff to share sooner rather than later…given that teaching resumes in about a week, that’ll no doubt slow down, but i just can’t sit still when it comes to music stuff…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

tonight, i spent the evening at barnes and noble with ajeet, block, rob and kumi watching jonathon kozol read from/about his new book letters to a young teacher…his talk was quite remarkable because his delivery and content were both exceptional…for the most part, he touched upon all the real major issues that are truly plaguing the education problem in this country…but his most interesting and perhaps provocative points revolved around standardized tests and the movement away from public school education…he argued that standardized tests were created by no child left behind activists in order to ensure the failing of public schools and in turn promote the voucher system…he also criticized the military style of education that is often found at charter schools that succeed on standardized tests for not being progressive in their methods of education…i hadn’t thought much about the latter, but i’m definitely thinking more about it now…

it’s certainly a little frightening that educators and administrators in low-income areas are comfortable teaching in a way that would never be accepted in affluent communities…the argument that these types of students are different and need an alternative approach to education is poor at best…and results accross the board have shown that “alternative” curriculum (ahem, impact math) have failed too be successful…i’m not a fan of pure military teaching or the drill and kill model…having been working with my kids and developing a mostly socratic/discussion/question based appraoch to education, i’ve dismissed drill and kill because it prioritizes memorization, following orders, and process over critical/free thinking…the latter of which is the key in terms of ultimate educational success as well as anything educators can come close to calling as closing the “achievement gap”…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

as adult life rapidly consumes every waking moment of your life, unexpected sparks of youth become more and more welcome…even if they’re not the most health/safety conscious of events…fall seems to have decided to take a week long hold of brooklyn, and it’s been raining pretty consistently for the last two days or so…on monday night, i (perhaps foolishly) decided to ride my bike home from band practice…a trip that would have taken me from greenpoint down to prospect heights…i should have known better considering it was raining and seemingly only getting worse, but there’s always that childhood voice recklessly pushing you on…you know, the same one that said you could hop that fence and get away after throwing those green berries from the trees at the local bully…but eventually he catches up to you and you get nothing short of a pretty rough treatment…i got caught on the bad end of that stick when my bike hit a crushed poland springs water bottle on ground at wythe and north 6th street…my front wheel spun out, and i scraped the ground for a minute before i got everything under control…luckily i was wearing my helmet and as a bonus, i didn’t get run over…i’ve got a few scrapes on my arms and sides and bruised up my knee a bit…all of which made me feel like i was twelve or so…right down to finally getting home and wishing my mom was around to freak out and worry and bandage me up…

as a final note on the incident, i officially no longer sanction riding your bike while its raining…and i also demand that you wear a helmet when you ride…you know who you are…

oh the better side of things, band rehearsals have been going wonderfully…we’re taking a break while marwan goes out of town to visit some family for the next week or so…but we did finish demoing all the songs for our debut record and also threw around some good video ideas for about half of them…all things good…

i’ve also started eating healthier and more consistently…i decided in early august to start working out, eating better, and to cut out all the outrageous desserts that my sweet tooth constantly nudges me to indulge in…so far it’s been a really good experiment…i already feel much better during the days, have more energy, and don’t have as many late night cravings for ice cream and cookies…i’m going through some pretty routine exercises in the morning, but am looking into something a little more rigorous as well…

i’ve only been an adult for a couple of years now (i’m marking this as post-undergraduate-collegiate life)…but i’m starting to realize that happiness is more and more about gradual growth…every year i feel like i’ve made small, but significant changes to my lifestyle that i’ve been actually able to follow through on…i was always missing the follow through in years prior, so it’s good to have things in order…it always seems as though my list of friends who are confused and concerned about what to do with their lives is continuously growing…i guess this is the vex of being twenty-something…but i’m thankful that i seem to have things pretty well in hand, which is something i wouldn’t have bet on even a few years ago…

starting to get things together to kick off the new school year…more on that soon…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

some days ago i began feverishly scouring youtube for footage of bands that i love but had never gotten to see live…at the top of this relatively short list was at the drive-in…i became fixated with them years ago at a time when digital downloading was still in its infancy and my parents were still rocking a 28kbps modem…needless to say, previewing music before you bought it was a much harder task than it is now…still, i can’t help but feel a little nostalgia for whatever was lost when i stopped buying records based on buzz from a friend, or that the name of the band was just fucking cool…both of the latter applied when i purchased atdi’s brilliant swansong, relationship of command…

i drove home, put my headphones on, and for a minute, i was assaulted with a barrage of intense guitar hooks and tribal drumming, which was, initially, rather off-putting…cedric bixler’s piercing wail lifting into a chorus of “have you ever tasted skin, sink your teeth in it!” didn’t help the band’s cause…luckily, i was 17 and i had nothing else to do but keep listening, and i’d already forked over the cash for the album, so i might as well get another 10 tracks out of the deal…luckily, it didn’t take long, because the next ten tracks were a 40 minute surge of angular, wiry, semi-hardcore that was surprisingly, and inexplicably, accessible…

i’ve never been much into hardcore music or screaming vocalists normally don’t do it for me, but atdi nailed this genre perfectly…i miss the message with most intense vocalists because i can’t understand what the fuck they’re singing about…people often compared at the drive-in to rage against the machine, especially in the wanning years of their career…and although i can’t do much but support rage’s message, their songs weren’t catchy and their lyrics were just too upfront politically for me to internalize…cedric managed to weave complicated lyrics into an already musically developed sound scape that were subtly political, but left enough space for the listener to make up their own decisions about what was going on…and to top it off his vocal “melodies” or whatever you want to call them are ridiculously infectious…i often find myself singing them to myself without even realizing it…

in terms of live footage, at the drive-in’s just destroyed any other bands i’ve ever seen…this was easy to do, because the band’s live shows are so incredibly wild and beautifully intense…regardless of their often erratic behavior on stage, i was seriously impressed with the accuracy of their performances…and quite frankly, if every band was this into their music live, i’d be a much happier person at concerts…i’ve gotten more enjoyment from watching these videos on line than i have from many live shows i’ve seen in concert…i forked over a little over 50 bucks to see radiohead perform after amnesiac came out some years ago…i’d be lying if i said it wasn’t amazing, but for my money, i can promise you i’d have gotten a better bang for my buck if i was watching at the drive-in instead…with that in mind, here’s a few videos that i hope you enjoy:

this is the band’s own video for “one armed scissor”, the first single off of relationship…it features no lip-syncing, and pure stock footage of live performances:

below is the video for “invalid litter dept”, which i believe was the band’s second single off the same record…more importantly, the video is a pretty chilling abbreviated version of a documentary called on the edge which tries to inform people about the senseless, irresponsible femicide occuringing in juarez mexico…

finally, this is a live video of their performance of “pattern against user”, which probably has the best and most agressive guitar and vocal hook in a rock song i’ve ever heard…as insane as their live sets get, i’m still constantly blown away by their live musicianship and the accuracy at which they perform their songs…if nothing else, their performances are completely inspired and inspiring…

hope you enjoyed the ride.

peace etc.

ooxx aa

i don’t know how long i’ll be able to maintain all this, but my lack of writing here is more than unfortunate for a number of reasons…living in the city of new york provides (at least) daily a notable if not fascinating event…and although i’ve oft felt the need to document these things, i’ve failed to do so on countless occasions…today is not that day…thankfully…

yutaka, ajeet and i took a trip down to the moma this afternoon to indulge our utmost nerdy predilections to see a viewing of 8bit, a documentary that ventures into the various ways in which 8-bit video games have been mangled into various and strikingly compelling pieces of art…i recommend you check out the website whether yr a video game freak or not…the documentary, unexpectedly, didn’t dive into the nerdiness of the video games themselves, but rather the counter-culture, post-modernist, whatever you want to call it, artists that use them to create music, conceptual video game stories, and in one case a real talk show that uses only video game characters as its thespians…i found the film relatively balanced…it mostly provided an insight into a culture that few people are probably aware even exist, but is fair in its assessment of the importance or the artistic credibility therein…being that this is still a highly specialized artistic field, it’s difficult to say whether the attention its receiving is due to the actual conceptual pieces that are being made, or whether the latter is due to the “no one’s done this before” factor…the movie is pretty diverse in the various different forms of art that this field has thus far provided, and i’ve found some to be much more meaningful and significant than others…either way, this is a good watch for anyone who’s into artistic counter-culture…and if you’re a video game nerd, well, call it a bonus…

after the film, we poked around the museum for a bit and explored the moma’s cafe, which was surprisingly inexpensive for an eatery in such a swanky museum…it was also maintained incredibly well and the service (and the food) was solid…what bothered me about the cafe, and in some ways the museum in general is the shiny steel and glass nature of its modern architecture…ajeet and i both agreed that there was an eerie 1984 feel to the whole thing…this reflects on the museum, certainly, but in a larger context, i’ve become ever more concerned about the growing nature of what i refer to as “fascist architecture”…specifically, i’m referring to the rapidly growing tendency of city planners and architects to create glass buildings that all use varied patterns of the sqaure/rectangular pattern…i’ll admit that there is a cool/sleek look that accompanies these types of designs, but they level at which they’re being reproduced over and over again in cities around the country is a little alarming…i refer to this trend as fascist mostly because of my (favorite) college professor’s history class about the neo-nazi movement in germany and the fascist movement in italy…both increasingly limited the amount of artistic freedom associated within the context of city development and growth, primarily to create a sense of oneness or unity with the controlling powers…what bothers me more and more as i see our cities turned into armies of glass towers that lack any sense of independence or individuality is that we exist in a world that’s far from those old regimes, but we still allow this type of anti-artistic development to occur…i can’t help but wonder what it means that we would actually choose fascism over personality and distinction…it’s a little more than disconcerting…

speaking of glass mansions, we stopped by the apple store in soho on our way back to the train station…this was mostly uneventful, and highly claustrophobic…however, i ran into a nice, new friend there, which was a pleasant surprise…we lead small lives in big streets…and it’s nice when they intersect when you don’t expect, but really want them to…

peace etc.

ooxx aa

i’ve spent the last week working (i should say volunteering) at teach for america’s orientation…mostly unraveling a series of understandable questions from incoming 6th grade math taechers…all in all i think they’re genuinely much better prepared to enter the classroom than i was two years ago…which is certainly the point of all of this anyway…

i’ve started to notice unfortunate lapses of judgment in my writing lately…finding myself using “your” and “you’re” incorrectly on more than a few occasions has me a bit worried…given that i’m incredibly anal about the way i wrote and about correct grammar usage (thanks mom)…as a result, i’ve started to write more, which is good practice for the coming year as i get ready for my 7th graders…

last summer i purchased my first camera…it’s a canon powershot model that i can’t quite remember the number of right now…regardless, it’s taken be about a year to get into the flow of taking photographs, something i’ve rarely down and never out of my own choice in the last 23 years or so…so far the results are relatively poor, but the process is incredibly soothing…learning to work the intricacies of a camera (even a cheap one like mine) is a lot like learning how to play an instrument…i guess this would be the epiphone les paul special version of cameras…i don’t know if i’ll ever be upgrading cameras the way i have with my guitars, but it’s probably more than a likely possibility if this continues to be as enjoyable as it has…

photography is a beautiful art, not merely for the great results, but more so for the independence of it…it’s nice to be able to get away from everything, step back, and just take snapshots of life as it criss crosses around these meandering streets…it’s also nice because it seems to be best done on your lonesome, and i desperately need my fix of alone time in order to function…

probably the best pictures i’ve been able to snag so far are from my unexpected trip to brighton beach (which could easily double as a russian outpost here in the states)…i’m not one for beaches per say, but there was something eerily charming about the whole thing…after tossing frisbees and footballs around for a couple of hours, the sun began taking its leave…the result was a onset of a remarkable melange of colors in the sky…i captured them poorly, but i tried my best…

you can take a peak at those along with a number of shots of the new city breathing recording studio here…enjoy…

more to come.

peace etc.

ooxx aa

the star and crescent of the soviets boldly decorates the tiny pin that azita sent me for my birthday this year…a vintage relic from decades past…few people in life know me this well…it’s wonderful that way…really…