May 2012
2 posts
BIG TIME GOOD
durgapolashi:
CH-CHECK IT OUT’
One Goat, on Account
To the Editor:
I had the great pleasure of reading your unsolicited critique of the “Ch-Check It Out” music video [“Licensed to Stand Still” by Stephanie Zacharek, May 16]. It took some time to get to me, as it had to be curried (sp?) on goatback through the fjords of my homeland, the Oppenzell. And in the process the goat died, and then I...
April 2012
1 post
Haiku
Thirty gigabytes Of music from five years, lost! God, I’m a jackass.
March 2012
1 post
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
2 posts
WatchHello Internet,
I have a photo of my flustered self trying to pretend as if being clamped between two-fifths of The National and their fantastic Kyle Resnick is the most normal thing in the world, but there’s something about sharing the same axes in space and time as the Dessner twins that turns me into Thomas Harris’ Jame Gumb. Instead, enjoy this video of Matt Berninger winning the...
September 2011
4 posts
Compliment or put-down?
“You have a bright future in corporate.”
I am related to this winner
ps! figured out my halloween costume! …. knight rider! going to cover my bike in black tape and make those lights on the front, add a turbo boost button and mount my iphone so when riding, the theme song plays and have kitt’s voice loaded on as well!
The Lion City
There is hope for everybody’s favourite South East Asian city-state: for a country that allegedly has no sense of humour, one of Singapore’s mainstream radio stations played Flight of the Conchords’ Most Beautiful Girl in the Room on a Sunday afternoon show. The DJs were two women who spoke English with transpacific twangs that you expect out of people who spent idyllic childhood...
August 2011
3 posts
Sejarah
Despite insulting the twenty thousand year-long tradition of human imagination, ingenuity, and invention, the History Channel’s insufferable show Ancient Aliens is a pleasure to watch, thanks to the efforts of their fantastic art people. Have you seen a television show that does a better job of of decorating background sets to best mimic the natural working environments of their experts?
...
I thought there was a sniper by the window but...
In this week’s episode of LIFE IMITATING ART:
I meant to give my colleague a friendly wink that roughly corresponds to “Hey ‘sup”, but unfortunately for the both of us, I was in the middle of finishing off some chocolate cake and licking residual frosting off my upper lip, which basically left me licking my lip and winking at the same time, meaning that I had forced myself...
Great weekend, bro
Your homework this weekend: contract your first tropical disease despite spending three-quarters of your life in the tropics. Contract a career-high fever. Down the most prescription drugs since college, develop most questionable tastes in film and television since middle school. Watch Mortal Kombat and convince yourself that this penetrating piece of cinema is Stanley Kubrick’s second last...
July 2011
5 posts
Pop quiz
When I misread the slogan of some energy drink that promises it
LETS YOU DO MORE
as
LET’S DO YOU MORE
This is symptomatic of:
a. Old age (I need my lenses corrected) b. Sauciness (I need a boyfriend)
Bandara
The charm of speaking to strangers at airports mostly lies in the comfort of knowing we will probably never see them again, which is why we become either brutally honest (“Let me tell you all about my stunted emotional state/unattractive medical condition”) or brutally imaginative (“Yes, I am married/play concertina in a pirate metal band”).
Do not squander this...
Ibu kota
This city is asking for it.
A gaggle of housewives with all the tired markers of middle-upper affluence—botched nose jobs, comically impractical coiffed hair, more makeup than a circus clown—congregate in an inconveniently large circle obstructing the only open checkout counter at the store.
“No, don’t send your kids there,” one of them screeches. “When Lita...
June 2011
5 posts
Prioritas
I almost died/got seriously hurt in an almost-traffic collision on the drive home from work tonight. Long story short, regard for human life will never be of any importance to Jakarta bus drivers, but more startling than the shock of nearly losing my life is remembering that the last thought I had as my body stiffened up in preparation for impact was “Oh shit, my spinach is going to go bad...
May 2011
2 posts
April 2011
2 posts
Colliding plates
“Jesus. We just evacuated the building. Earthquake.”
“What?! Are you okay my love?”
“Everybody is gold. It was only a 5.4.”
“Did you save anybody? I hope so.”
“Nothing that heroic, I fear!”
“Well at least everyone is okay. Are you going back to work tomorrow or do you get a day off?”
“This is Jakarta. We’ll...
Just kidding!
I have a friend whose idea of an April Fool’s joke was to tell me her brother died in a freak accident. Later in the day she informs her boyfriend—who was sitting behind the steering wheel of a moving vehicle—that she is pregnant. The muscles in his arms go limp and the hulking tonnage of steel swerves violently into another lane, nearly killing them both.
Tomorrow I am going to...
March 2011
1 post
Arrested development
Preparing for this new eight-to-five desk job feels like wearing a culturally outdated (ergo unfunny) and ill-fitting Halloween costume. The mandatory Woe, I have betrayed my anti-corporate lib-arts roots! diatribe has already been unleashed upon several unfortunate friends, and this note—the first string of words scrawled on the creamy, elegant pages of my Big Girl planner—is a...
February 2011
3 posts
Vacuum
My mother drinks this vitamin C supplement that turns a rather impertinent shade of neon purple when it is dissolved in some water, which is FANTASTIC because I’ve come to believe that if a potable solution deliberately impersonates distilled highlighter ink in appearance, then it must have also been engineered to taste like a fruit that corresponds to the colour of that drink (i.e. a...
I feel you, bro
“…I live in Minsk, Belarus and I saw Solomon fucking Kane and when I check to see that it made mroe money than Avatar movie I see that is not even in the USA. What the fucking shit ball fuck shit? So I think maybe God is having me write this to give to you so that you can make it explode in America because it is the very best movie I have ever seen in a long time and other people...
January 2011
7 posts
Mystery
What is going on? I’m not drunk, it’s not three in the morning, and I’m not in college, so why am I ordering pizza for dinner?
Rorschach
Is it possible to walk up to an actor of, say, James Purefoy’s sexual magnetism and earnestly confess that you “enjoy his body of work” without being mistaken for meaning that you “enjoy his body of work”?
For a million dollars
Here’s a challenge! Try to see the potential in someone/something without first realising their shortcomings.
Deity
Here is a great interview that the Paris Review conducted with Ray Bradbury! It is full of paragraphs that you read once or twice or thrice before cautiously but feverishly copying it verbatim on a Post-It that you slap somewhere in your field of vision for everyday veneration, like a creed or a chant or a prayer.
INTERVIEWER
What about Proust, Joyce, Flaubert, Nabokov—writers who tend to think...
Triptych
i. When the proverbial Abrahamic god shuts one door, he opens a floodgate: the Kindle will forestall your efforts to amass a library, but cultivate an expensive graphic novel habit, and you may as well have never bought the thing.
ii. It’s endearing when an item teetering on the verge of the archaic—in the case above, paper—makes an effort to remain in your life, but when you...
December 2010
5 posts
Rorschach
I can’t vocalise a thought that contains the verb “fritter” without imagining a battered and deep friend banana, but now I can’t think of a “battered banana” without imagining a piece of fruit being in an abusive relationship.
The same stream of thought applies to the verbs in exciting molecules (Jeff Goldblum) and agitating water (James Cameron’s The...
Commute
The 190 that takes me home is almost always packed to its glassy brim with warm, tired bodies after six in the evening. For forty minutes you will awkwardly squeeze shoulder to shoulder with several strangers not of your choosing, all of them equally unhappy at the thought of spending forty minutes chanelling what little is left of their energy reserves to minimise physical contact in this...
Mijn zus
You know what’s really funny? I was doing some reading and research for my paper and it led me back to the bruises. DSP in action. So good.
It made me happy and I had to tell somebody who cared about astronomy and cosmology!
ENERGIZE
At the mall, a professional team of salespeople peddle something called “placenta extract,” and I immediately become subject to the entire spectrum of human emotion: disgust (“PLACENTA EXTRACT?”), curiosity (“Placenta extract?”), anger (“Y u sell shit we no need?”), acceptance (“Ehh, caveat emptor.”), and mild amusement (“LOL...
November 2010
6 posts
Five south of the equator
The current Visit Indonesia campaign is dull, uninspiring, and full of potentially awkward and troublesome sentences (“Your coming is our happiness” heh heh get it). If my passport country wants to bring in tourists, what we need to exploit is our exceptional sense of humour, like this blip I found in a glossy brochure by the Kepri tourism board:
The Phallus and Pupendum Stone (stone...
Meanwhile at Kitchen Stadium
In the last two weeks, my father has managed to let toast catch fire, my mother has burnt boiled tofu, and my sister has microwaved two steel forks on separate occasions. As far as my family’s clout in the culinary domain is concerned, I am Ferran Adrià.
Really? I prefer to swab myself.
They are going to exhume Brahe to determine whether or not there is any truth to the whispered rumor of Kepler poisoning him with heavy metals. This is science and history, but sexier because it sounds like the pilot episode of a new CSI franchise.
(Whoooooo art thou. Who who. Who who.)
Isotope
During my brief stint in Jakarta (where I hope future stints will involve less brevity and fewer wedding-related functions) I was reunited with my good friend, succinctly nicknamed The Nuclear Configurations of the Interjection Oh: watching my sixteen year-old cousin and her dance troupe sashay towards center stage at their high school festival, I thought Oh! How exciting! Several unanticipated...
This emotion is a month overdue
This is what we have in common: a restaurant in a Ukranian suburb west of Chicago, where everything looks like a movie script about guys who look like Wayne Knight and Viggo Mortensen speaking about “the family business” in hushed tones.
“Has it hit you yet?” one of my cohorts ask.
Has what hit me?
“Baby, you are leaving a country where you spent the past four...
You know me better than I know myself
“Given the volatility of the land on which they live, Indonesians are remarkably good-humoured and phlegmatic when disaster strikes.”
- Mourning Mount Merapi’s ‘spiritual keeper’
Oh, okay then.