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I hate lots of things. One of them is my new(ish) fake, synthetic tooth.

The feeling is way off. Whoever molded it clearly does not know what a tooth really feels like. It instead feels like a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant by whole, and while I’m all for literary allusions, I would prefer a more nonfiction approach to dentistry.

photo credit jaims.org

It also tastes like chemicals. I hate that.

I wish I had opted for it’s cheaper, more durable silver counter part instead. I have one of those on the other side of my mouth, because it was in an area where you can’t get the real looking ones and it never bothers me. Over the past 7 years, I have been to the detist about a dozen times and all of those times took place between the past December-February. It’s also notable that the evil one took longer to install.

It looks pretty convincing though. I’ll give it that.

“My ambition is handicapped by my laziness.”- Charles Bukowski

It’s 3 A.M. I can shut my eyes and keep them closed without exerting any effort; No coffee was a good plan. I’ve also just finished what should have been only around an hour and a half of homework had I cut out the “breaks” that sum up to be greater than the “non-breaks”. In fact, as I am writing this, I’m taking pauses to give Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad my undivided attention. It could have easily been 8 P.M.

It happens whenever I have a very doable amount of homework. I suddenly get interested in looking up all my favorite people on Wikiquote, and the Flight of the Conchords starts to get funny for no apparent reason. I start my routine of looking through pointless news and taking 3 minute breaks to do my homework. A U.S tour and album scheduled for Byrne & Eno. How delightful.

Wait, why am I writing this? This isn’t homework, I could be sleeping!

Sometime during my freshman year, I started to purchase one or two CD’s everyweek.

I would visit Noize Music on the UC Irvine campus whenever I got the chance, and I considered any weekend that included a trip to Amoeba Music in Hollywood to be an excellent weekend. I love cheap CD’s and since they were only about 7 dollars on average apiece, it was a very affordable hobby.

One thing I really liked about the two stores was the price sticker they put on all of their CD’s. I thought it added character to the package, and it even drove me to prefer used CD’s over new ones because used CD’s meant that I didn’t have to peel off the tag from the plastic coating and transfer it on to the actual jewel case. Now I look back at the 6.99 tag on my Another Green World jewel case and wish I could buy music like that still. But with ridiculous prices and limited selection, moving to Korea has seriously hurt my record buying habits, and I have probably purchased less than a CD per month.

And it’s not even that I am opposed to downloading music. We all know the artists don’t get the money anyways (and if that’s what they want, what bussiness do they have being artists?) and I do use it to download some singles from bands I am not too familiar with. But to get a copy of Tom Verlaine’s Dream Time? Nothing replaces a mom and pop record store there, or when it comes to finding things you didn’t know you wanted.

photo credit therisingstorm.net

That’s what this cover reminds me of.

Maybe I just don’t like writing essays in one night, but since that’s the only way I have written them during my entire high school career thus far, I can only assume that I just don’t like writing essays in general.

For whatever reason, I want this particular essay that I am writing on Huck Finn to be a little special. The actual writing is pretty far from it, so I turned to Wikipedia and clicked on Random Article to find something that would make it so. I figured that a random article that could have been written by rapists and/or incestuous junkies has a greater chance of being interesting than my essay at it’s current state. I got an article about Cuba at the 1928 Olympics, which after a short ponder, I decided I can’t use. I then clicked again for an article and what that came up was an article on Gabriele Ferzetti, who is apparently an Italian actor born in 1925.

I will do my best to make a somewhat relevant reference to him in my essay.

EDIT

Actually, I’m not. Why would I do that?

Photocredit: Wikipedia

He’s got a girly name and a really short Wikipedia article, but Gabriele is a pretty good looking dude.

I can’t remember if it was Time or Newsweek but I read on one of those magazines a couple of years ago that people are a lot less happier today than we used to be in the past because mass media feeds us so much information on people who are better off. Today, I experienced this empirically.

I was watching Arcade Fire videos on Youtube just for background noise (a classic case of watching a movie on TV when you have the same movie on DVD- I just didn’t feel like popping in a CD) and I saw in the related videos section a video of a guy who beats an old arcade game with one quarter. I think that watching this, coupled with the “How to Catch Mew on Poke’mon Red/Blue” video I watched a while back, revealed some kind of a deep unconscious desire to confront my lifetime enemy: The Lion King on SNES.

And it comes as no surprise to me that I find a three part movie of an accomplished gamer flawlessly strolling past the game. But I had absolutely no interest in seeing parts one and three; I just wanted to see him do something I could never do: manage to climb up the waterfall of floating logs.

photo credit lionking.org

He makes it look like child’s play. This is a game I probably got around 1995, gave up on probably a couple of years later, and revisited last year when my friend and I decided to beat Donkey Kong Country over the non-denominational holiday season. I have never come close to achieving that kind of success. This is extra frustrating being that the particular level, “Hakuna Matata” is the last in the game as baby Simba, and so I have never in the dozen years since I first played this game nurtured Simba into adulthood (I did however know all about the cheat code to skip levels. That obviously doesn’t count).

Contrary to the beautiful 16 bit landscapes and characters from the movie of the same name may suggest to the untrained eye, The Lion King is not a children’s game. It to me marked a transitional phase in my life when I realized that everyone that said I could do anything if I put my mind to it was lying.

Up to that point in my life I had survived a hanging on to the side of a bridge for my life, and successfully told my first lie on that same trip to Canada. Life seemed absolutely worry-less and there was nothing that could taint my self confidence. With The Lion King, I learned that I am ultimately and underwhelming human. I now understand that looking at the internet and seeing people who are not as imperfect just adds insult to injury.

I don’t care what anybody says; Neil Young is bad ass.

Rock & Roll doesn’t get more passionate and sincere then Rust Never Sleeps, and I always thought he pulled off the hippy singer-songwriter deal better then anyone not named Joni Mitchell. Some of his wilder experiments (particularly in the 80’s) aren’t too appealing to me but I find his loyalty to his own artistic pursuit, rather than an audience very admirable. (Also, without Young there may not be a Sonic Youth. Without Sonic Youth, there is no Daydream Nation. Is that a world anyone wants to live in?)

So when I found out that there is to be a Woodstock-esque event held in front of the DMZ, I knew I was going. However, I think this concert will fail to achieve the Woodstock spirit for two resons:

1. Rod Stewart

2.Location .

Sure, the most appropriate way to bring attention to the divided peninsula is in Seoul but these accomplished musicians in the concert (Donovan and Young, rest I either have never heard of, or don’t care about) have not a clue about Korean culture.

http://www.rjkoehler.com/2008/03/27/neil-young-rod-stewart-don-mclean-donovan-it-cant-be/

And Korea might not be the absolute worst place in the world to have a Woodstock (after all, there is fascist China - who would think about holding a worldly event there?), but I think it’s definitely top 5.

From my perspective, Korea is way ahead of America in it’s consumerism. Here, trends happen as fast as Firefox can refresh, and the education system takes unhealthy, senseless conformity to a whole new level. A walk on the street makes George Carlin’s metaphor of America-as-a-strip-mall look like the farmer’s market. Hell, even the churches shamelessly advertise themselves in Korea.

Give a Korean kid a Genie and he’ll name you colleges; ask him “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” and he just might give you a list (bonus points if you catch the Nick Lowe/Elvis Costello reference). Play for him Joni Mitchell’s “In France They Kiss On Main Street” and it’ll spark no interest - but some Nike sneakers with 5% charity benefit might.

Passionate art doesn’t work in Korea, products do. Woodstock bands like Ten Years After and Jefferson Airplane wouldn’t have been given a chance at this point- these guys weren’t good looking television personalities, and that’s really the only kind of people that matter here.

Businessmen are much better marketers than musicians, and they train us to be moved by them a lot more. The worst part is that really works.

I hope that Neil Young doesn’t get involved in an embarrassing Rod Stewart led pop fest or a sincere performance on deaf ears (although I would definitely prefer the latter) but I think I’ll manage to sit through a Stewart set (especially if he for some reason decides to sing his Jeff Beck era stuff) to get to the good stuff; there are worse ways to get a glimpse of a “Heart of Gold”.

photo credit hubarts.com