Surfing today, I stumbled across Thanatos.net which sports a gallery of death masks. Sounds creepy, isn't really. It's kind of cool to see what, say, Julius Caesar or Frederic Chopin looked like. Gives a bit of concreteness to the history, you know? I mean, we all know on some level that these historical figures were actually people, but not generally on the level of actually having faces. These images are admittedly not created when their subjects were looking their best, but still.
Orientation for my program at Columbia was today. Culture shock doesn't begin to describe it.
Covenant students, now hear this: the place is pretty unprofessional. Some of that's to be expected, as Covenant's budget would probably be insufficient to cover one department in the undergraduate college at Columbia. That's not what I'm getting at. Though a certain amount of nepotism is to be expected at any institution of high er learning, at Covenant it felt like a rather small group of pretty metaphorically (but sometimes less metaphorically) inbred people were kind of making things up as they went along. The people running Student Development were spouses to people in Records and Physical Plant. One of the registrars used to be an athletic coach. An RD is the son of one of the profs. And the protocols for doing things seem almost prototypical, like it isn't something they've had much practice with.
At Columbia, the opposite is true. Sure it's still political and rather ruthless in its politics, but it doesn't feel inbred. The staff isn't mostly Columbia grads who are there so their kids get a discount. It's very business-like, as efficient as an institution of higher learning is likely to get, and every procedure has the feel of being well practiced. I never got the impression that I ever asked anyone a question they hadn't heard before. In fact, if you simply read all the literature they hand out, you pretty much know everything you need to know to be at school. I'm not worried about whether or not they processed a payment. I'm not worried about whether or not transfer credits would be accurately allocated. I'm not worried about whether or not they're going to charge me a late fee for missing a payment because they didn't process my loan in time (they didn't, but they understand that as long as I've done everything I'm supposed to do, it's their responsibility to certify my loan). At Covenant, all of these were an issue. Columbia has been around for over five times as long as Covenant, and it shows.
That being said, I really miss Covenant. For one thing, as pretentious as it tries to be (anyone who tells you that classes at Covenant are harder than the Ivy Leagues is smoking some pretty sweet goods, let me tell you), it's kind of sweet. They're obviously trying to be something they're not, but everyone can have a dream you know? It's hard to dislike someone for being arrogant about something they're obviously more embarrassed than proud of. But up here, people actually can look down on others, so it's a lot less pleasant when they do it.
For starters, I've heard a significant chunk of my entering class - about 180 people - tell where they earned their BA/BS. We're talking Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, Brown, Wellesley, Berkeley, Yale, NYU, Michigan, Columbia, etc. A lot if Ivy League schools, plus a smattering of high-powered research institutions. The one of the least impressive schools I heard was University of Wisconsin, Madison. I ran into one person from Wheaton, a girl who majored in philosophy (and didn't really want to talk to me). So immediately I feel like the least qualified person in the room. I didn't always say where I went to school, because I got blank stares most of the time.
I've never really associated with people from this walk of life before. We're talking upper-crust blue-blooded WASPs here. I have been accused by various people of being an elitist, classist, and cultural snob. Today I felt downright plebian. Not that this was entirely a bad thing. The Premedical Association (PMA) held a reception at The West End (a pub across from campus on Broadway), and I wound up sitting at a table with a bunch of girls who had gone to school at either Wellesley, Brown, Smith, or some combination of those three places. They spent a while reminiscing about various "traditions" at their school. Umm. "Men behaving badly" does not begin to describe it. There is apparently a bus route that on certain evenings is known as the "F--- Bus" after hours. It basically dumps loads of drunken guys from area co-ed colleges (Harvard, Amherst, MIT, etc.) off at places like Brown and Wellesley where they proceed to puke, screw co-eds, and generally make a nuiscence of themselves, though not necessarily in that order.
I don't feel indimidated by these people. I certainly don't feel like I've missed out on anything (though I do feel that given the kind of thing that goes on at the Ivys that President Nielson urgently needs to reconsider his priorities). I do, however, feel kind of out of place and somewhat discouraged. I do not want to be like these people, even though I want what their school has to offer.
(One thing I won't miss about Covenant is its utter lack of prestige. This isn't me being a snob, this is me understanding that if I want a decent shot at getting into a decent med school, a good-but-not-stellar GPA from an obscure, Southern, Christian liberal arts college ain't cutting any mustard. Columbia does not suffer this particular problem.)
Then there's InterVarsity. I haven't had much opportunity to get involved. Actually, all I've done so far is stop by their table near St. Paul's Chapel, pick up a flyer, and say hi to a few people. But frankly, ice cream socials and giving away lemonade doesn't somehow strike me as being massively fun for extended periods of time. Granted, the table was targeted to freshmen, who I will be avoiding as much as I can, but I'm not getting the impression that InterVarsity does much more than that level of engagement.
In short, the people I've met and talked with so far - not huge amounts of them, but more than a dozen - here are massively impressive and unbelievably uninterested/ing in any kind of significant personal interaction. They're also almost entirely pagans, which may have something to do with that. As much as I'm going to enjoy living in the city with all of its cultural opporunities, I can see myself getting sick of these people really fast. I don't like their values, I don't like their attitudes, and I don't like their morals. The concept of a "F--- Bus" isn't funny, it's disgusting. And as much as people who know me will recongize that I appreciate being cultured and enjoying a few of life's finer pleasures, there's a time and place for meat and potatoes, you know? Especially when simple fare is made rich by the company of good friends. Obviously I'd prefer fine food and good friends, but if I have to pick one, the choice is easy.
I'm exhausted. This has far more to do with the fact that I didn't get home until 1:00 AM last night than with being discouraged or worn out, but either way, I'm tired. I'm still excited, though. I did meet a few people today which will at least give me someone to say hi to on campus, but I'm not predicting much more than that from my current acquaintences. The way people relate to each other up here (speaking both geographically and academically) is dramatically different from what I'm used to. As much as I want to get to know people and make new friends, I'm not willing to give up real interaction for partying.
So for all you Covenanters reading this, or friends I've made elsewhere along the line (you know who you are), I miss you. I need to be where I am, and I'm glad I'm here, and I'm excited about what I'm doing, but this isn't just costing me money. Keep in touch. I'm gonna need that.
That's the title of an essay in today's Wall Street Journal by Niall Ferguson. It's pretty good.
Rob Long has a piece on Slate about the entertainment offerings at this weekend's RNC convention in New York. We're mostly talking pop country singers and Christian "rockers". Mr. Long puts it this way:
"There are two kinds of people in the world, famous people, and people you have to Google. Republicans have a lot of the latter and only a few of the former."
He also has hilarious things to say about the idea of "Christian rock", and applies it generally to the celebrities supporting the GOP:
"It's not so much that Republican celebrities are all Christian rockers, it's that they all pretty much adhere to the Christian Rock Principle—it sounds like rock, for about one second you think it's rock, but it isn't quite. Something's off."
There is, of course, a point to this, and it isn't just that famous rich people with nothing better to do than sit on their asses and spout garbage about things they don't understand. It's this:
"This may be why you rarely, if ever, see George Bush in a celebrity photo op. True, he probably has no idea who most of the beautiful people at the DNC were anyway, but there's also a political strategy to it, a certain faded-European-royalty logic at work: Always be the most powerful and famous person in the room, and if you're not going to be, get another room."
This week the Department of Justice raided the homes of several hub admins of The ÜndèrGrøund® Ñètwø®k, a hub network that mainly uses variants of Neo-Modus's Direct Connect. I was wondering exactly how long this would take to happen, as Direct Connect is the most functional P2P network in existence, and tends to be pretty secretive if not downright exclusive. Until this week, DC has received little to no media coverage.
What is interesting about this situation is that neither the government nor the media seem to have any idea of what's going on here. "The Answer Man", one of the admins whose property was raided, posted this on a p2pnet forum. He correctly points out that the hub system does not actually distribute any files. Though users must connect to the hub to trade files, the hub itself has no knowledge of and provides no direct assistance in the transmission of said files. It would seem that this makes it protected under the recent precedents that ruled that P2P networks are not legally liable for the activities of their users.
Furthermore, Ashcroft is flat out wrong when he said in a DoJ press conference that DC requires its users to share copyrighted information. While most people do this, there is no DC reg that says you can't fill your share with Linux ISOs, home movies, and other public domain/uncopyrighted info.
It gets better. Ashcroft implied the existence of an exclusive membership in which users and shares are verified by hub admins before admittance is allowed. In certain members-only hubs this may be true, but the vast majority of the DC network really doesn't care who you are, or where you come from, provided you meet the unpoliced minshare requirements. User info is not checked, verified, or even collected. It wouldn't surprise me if the hub admins don't keep logs of activity either. In short, neither Ashcroft, the FBI agents involved, nor the judge who swore out the warrant have any idea what they're doing.
So immediately, the DoJ's case seems a bit weak, as the only correct information they've got does not seem to be actionable in court, as numerous decisions by the Judicial branch have confirmed the idea that networks and their admins are not responsible for the activities of their users. But here's what I think is going to happen. Just like the RIAA is doing to individuals across the country, if the DoJ sues these poor schmoes, they'll probably capitulate, even though they could win if the case went to trial. Justice. Right. About that...
Well, I got the class schedule I wanted. It is as follows:
Monday:
9:10-10:25 AM - Calculus I
10:35-11:50 AM - Chemistry Lecture
1:00-5:50 PM - Chem lab
Tuesday:
2:10-3:00 PM - Chem recitative
Wednesday:
9:10-10:25 AM - Calc I
10:35-11:50 AM - Chem lecture
Yes, that is a fiendishly long, 6 hour chemistry lab on Monday afternoon. But I'm done with class for the week by noon on Friday, which is kind of nice. Four-day weekends all the time, pretty much, especially if I can get my volunteer work in on Wednesday afternoons.
The bad news is that I ran a pen through the washer and wasted two pairs of pants and a bunch of socks. Damnation.
The good news is that according to Pitchfork, Crooked Fingers will be playing the Bowery Ballroom on Nov. 16. Woot.
Let's just say that the former is most certainly not the latter. Right.
I went to Redeemer Pres. yesterday. So that happened. I made it to church about ten minutes late, which I thought was a Bad Thing. I needn't have worried. As I got off the subway, I realized I didn't know exactly where I was going, only that Redeemer meets somewhere at Hunter College. Then I realized that the two dozen nicely dressed people leaving the subway with me were almost certainly headed the same place, so I just followed them. Up to 25% of the congregation arrived after I did, some of them up to 20 minutes late. Now granted, exerting rigid control over commute duration is almost impossible on the subway, but that's a bit much, I thought. I couldn't tell if people were okay with it because it's New York, and getting around is tough, or because they were so casual about the whole thing that they didn't care. That's the adjective I'd use to describe the whole service: casual.
Tim Keller, the senior pastor, wasn't there. Apparently he's on sabbatical or something for the summer. The sermon was delivered by one John Lin, a young, Chinese-American pastor whose association with Redeemer was not immediately discernable to me (I still don't know the specifics of the relationship). As he is fairly obviously new to the preaching thing, I was willing to overlook the fact that he took about 10 minutes of introduction before touching on the text. But the fact that he only alluded one other passage of Scripture (without references, I might add) but quoted The New York Times, The Shawshank Redemption, The Silmarillion, and academic psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen of Swarthmore College was a little harder to swallow. I want to hear about Bread, Water, Light, and Blood, not the "social saturation of the self". Oh, and for the record, having people who are obviously wannabe professional actors read your Scripture selection does not, I repeat, does not win you any points. Refined and mellow is not the vibe we're looking for here.
Still, I'm not going to make any decisions until I hear Keller preach. That seems only fair. But as I was sitting there, I was thinking that if this is what passes for solid teaching in New York City, all of a sudden the Cathedral of St. John the Divine isn't looking all that bad. Sure, the preaching will be awful, but they've got liturgy and architecture, which I understand even if they don't. This will take some thinking through.
I do have other options. Redeemer has a daughter church on Riverside Drive which is a lot more conveniently located than Redeemer proper. They also have a West Side worship service here. So we'll spend some time looking around. And if I do decide to stick with the PCA, I can still attend Vespers at the Cathedral, plus Eucharist every morning.
Still, as big a city as New York is, you'd think that there would not only be solid preaching but options to choose from. As it is, I'm making the best of a bad situation, not moving from strength to strength. So it goes, I guess.
So I'm back in PA. I realized that even though my orientation is on August 30, a week from today, classes don't start until September 7, two weeks from tomorrow. As I'm not going to secure a volunteer position and can't really commit to a job until I know what my class load is going to require of me, there's not a whole lot for me to do in New York. It's not like I can hang out with people, because I don't know anybody, and those people who I will be getting to know aren't in town yet. So last night I hopped on a Greyhound bus and made it to Harrisburg by 9:45. Yay.
No, really, you do. See? The link goes to a list of "two cow jokes", parodies of the "Economics 101" example "You have two cows. Your neighbor has chickens..." etc. used to demonstrate the limits of the barter system. It turns how, however, that just about anything can be explained under this model. Some of my personal favorites:
Pacifism:
You have two cows. They stampede you.
Surrealism:
You have two cows. The government paints one of them green and forces you to take harmonica lessons.
Capitalism - Canadian:
You have two cows. The bank takes both of them, shoots one, and throws away the milk. You shoot yourself.
Capitalism - Hong Kong:
You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because the feng shui is bad.
Simpsonism:
You have two cows. Mmmm.... cows.
New Zealandism:
You have two sheep.
So I made it into the Sufjan show last night. They were sold out, but I made it to the Mercury Lounge early enough to snag one of the ten tickets they had at the door. The opening bands were both from Toronto, The Sea Snakes and Jim Guthrie and the Bad Lieutenants, and were both pretty good. The Sea Snakes were a pretty typical four-odd piece setup, but Jim Guthrie had a violin and cello on top of the more standard rock instruments. I was struck by how much both of them reminded me of Death Cab: same kind of indie-rock sound, high tenor lead vocals, etc. The lyrics weren't as good in either case, but hey. Apparently I wasn't the only one who noticed the similarities, because the person responsible for music between sets put on Transatlanticism after Jim Guthrie finished his set. Guthrie played a set that outlasted the patience of the crowd by about three or four songs, but other than that I've no real complaints.
Then, at about 11:45, Sufjan (apparently pronounced "suf-yan") took the stage with his backing band, the Michigan Militia. They had come out to do their sound check and everything, and when they came back on stage they were in uniform: dark navy button-down t-shirts sporting a Michigan seal on the right breast, and American flag neckerchiefs. The drummer wore an American flag shirt. Sufjan himself wore a Michigan cap. He then busts out this oversized, hand-drawn map of Michigan designed to show the places his album Greetings From Michigan the Great Lake State highlights: Flint, Detroit, the 45th parallel, Paradise, the Upper Penninsula, etc. And they launch into it. And they're awesome. Kind of weird, but really great.
Sufjan said about "He Woke Me Up Again" that it was about the time his father woke him up with some good news. I'm almost certain this is about his conversion experience. One thing about Stevens that makes him hard to figure out is that he makes stuff up. Like this. The title track to the new album, Seven Swans is about weird things happening at the 45th parallel. He told a pretty outrageous story, then said something like "You guys have to figure out how much of that is true." I'm going to go with the idea that he had some kind of religious experience while fighting a fire in the family yard. Any way you cut it, it's pretty loaded with theological themes and imagery.
When you walk out on stage wearing uniforms that contain the American flag, you'd better be up to something political. He was, kind of. He encouraged the audience to talk to the people in the back from Music for America who were registering people to vote. MfA is a self-consciously partisan organization dedicated to defeating the incumbent, and I kind of figured as much considering where we were - the East Village is not exactly a bastion of conservatism. But Stevens didn't make any overtly political comments except for his last song, which was a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner". He added a few lines between "the bombs in the air" and "gave proof through the night" that talked about the significance of the flag and bemoaning the fact that it seems to be more divisive than otherwise. The song itself was quite lovely (the official tune to the anthem is just about unsingable, so anything would be an improvement), but I got the impression he wants to go a direction with that that I'm not particularly thrilled about. Which is his prerogative.
All in all, a great show. And I noticed on my way in that The Decemberists are playing a show at Webster Hall in conjunction with The Bowery Ballroom. Sweet.
So I kicked off my experience with art and culture in New York by going to see Garden State at Loews on Broadway near Lincoln Square. It's kind of a wankfest (written, directed, and starring one guy), but enjoyable for all that. It turns out Portman can actually act pretty well when you let her. Braff is obviously trying for a fairly grandiose comment about life in general, and fails to convincingly pull this off, but he does manage to pull off quite a few Hornby-esque sparks. It's always the little things in life that we remember and that make us who we are, and Braff gets some of these rather well, though I can't tell whether or not he meant to. So go see the movie when you get a chance.
Tomorrow, I go to see this guy here. I may try to squeeze in a showing of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (which, for the record, was originally going to be ...Go to Krispy Kreme, but KK wasn't thrilled about their brand being associated with the munchies on screens nationwide) on Saturday. Anything else I need to hit while I'm at it, Mesh?
I ran across this while surfing. The author is kidding, but damn, that's funny/scary.
I am currently sitting in my apartment on Manhattan Ave. and W. 115th St. in New York, NY. I am using someone else's bandwidth (someone in my immediate vicinity has an unsecured AirPort, so I'm leeching), but I'm okay with that. I've got all my stuff moved in, and the vast majority of it put away. I am now officially a full-time resident of New York City. Awesome.
I've got all new contact info. Leave a comment with your email and I'll send it on when I get my email working. As this network is unsecured, I'm going to wait until I get my own connection with New York Connect.
Tomorrow I go biking through Central Park, and then do a bunch of logistical stuff like open a bank account, buy some random apartment crap that I don't have (shower curtain, bookends, silverware trays, etc.), get online for real, and get on the financial aid office's case about approving my loan so I can actually pay for all of this.
This is gonna be fun.
So I followed a link to an album review on Salon this morning, and immediately hit the link for the Ultramercial so I could read the whole thing. And you know who was advertising there? The Wall Street Journal Online. Never thought I'd see that happen.
Slate is currently running an essay by Debra Dickerson called "Racist Like Me - Why am I the only honest bigot?" What makes that a little more interesting is that Ms. Dickerson happens to be black, as well as a retired Air Force Intelligence officer and a successful author. She left Harvard Law because she decided it wasn't for her. And yet she admits to being nervous around poor black people and baffled by her completely irrational identification with blue-collar blacks with whom she has nothing in common.
She makes an argument I have been making for years: class is a far more important distinction between demographic groups than race has ever been or will ever be. But her main thesis is that the reason that our cultures embedded racism refuses to dissipate is that we aren't allowed to talk about it. As soon as something sounds even remotely racist, the source of the offending comment is immediately considered guilty and thus not a source of legitimate dialog.
Quite an interesting read.
Burning DVDs, that's what. Thus far I've burned my collection alphabetically through Soul Coughing. That took 7 DVDs. That's about 30GB of music. It takes about an hour a pop, and I don't have a slow burner or computer either. So I put in a disc to burn and go find something else with which to amuse myself.
Yesterday I watched Blue, the first installment in the Trois Couleurs trilogy by Krzysztof Kieslowski. It was, as might be expected, pretty damned good. I also reread How To Be Good by Nick Hornby. That book is just amazing. I went back and read the post I wrote last year. I was going to watch Wings of Desire yesterday, but the disc was stratched, so I watched Kurosawa's Throne of Blood instead. I started The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension but didn't finish it. Maybe I will today. Then again, maybe I won't. It depends on how stir crazy I get.
Okay, here comes disc 8. Not going anywhere for a while...?
This being the referent for the aforementioned that, which as it turns out describes a worse experience than I had finding an apartment in New York.
I was going to head up there with a U-Haul today to move most of my crap into the place, but kind of needed someone to go with me to schlep things like my dresser and bed. You know, stuff that isn't necessarily all that heavy, but stuff that has a center of gravity that makes it almost impossible to move without two sets of hands. The first guy I was going to have come couldn't make it, and the second guy - my sister's boyfriend as a matter of fact - got clocked with a frisbee last night and is currently nursing a possible retinal detatchment, so he's not going much of anywhere, let alone a road trip. I may yet make a run to pick up the keys and whatnot, but we'll see.
In other news, I'm going to enroll in this, which I think looks amazingly cool. The best part about it is even if you don't make the grade to join the Agency proper (dang, that sounds cool) you're still licensed to work elsewhere. And I need a part-time job anyway.
Anyone who has read this blog or known me for a while will know that I'm pretty ambivalent about mood-altering substances taken as a regular part of one's diet. I mean, it's okay to go and get smashed occasionally, and a whiskey on the rocks is a great way of taking the edge off, but any substance, prescribed or otherwise, that is used to semi-permenantly alter one's emotional state is bad in my book.
Which makes this article really creepy. Apparently Prozac is now in British drinking water. This is just bad.
So I took the Find Your Spot quiz (hat-tip to Josiah), and was pretty amused by the results. See, I grew up in Hershey, PA. 25% of the spots produced by the quiz were in central PA, including the number 4 spot, Harrisburg, which is about 15 minutes away. Number 1 was Carlisle, about 45 minutes west, and Lancaster, 25 minutes east, made the cut too.
The other thing that I found pretty cool is that I've been saying for a while that I'd love to live in either western Virginia or North Carolina, in the Appalachians or Smokies. Both Roanoke, VA, and Asheville, NC made the cut.
Other than that, medium sized cities in New York made a strong showing (Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, etc.). Then there were some screwballs: Anchorage, two places in Utah, and Fort Collins, CO. Whatever.
So basically, I'm pretty much cut out for the Appalachians or Northeast. Cool.
Yeah, so I bagged switching to Linux. Not because I wanted to, but because I'm moving to New York in about a week and realized about a week before that that I wasn't going to have Gentoo working by the time I needed it to work. So I popped my old hard drive with XP installed on it and I'm back up. Pretty painless in one sense, absolutely excruciating in another. Oh well.
The unexpected side affect of all of this is that I had to format the disk on which my music collection resided. I wound up losing about 10GB of good stuff, most of it recently added, as my last backup was at the end of last summer. Most of my Dylan, Sufjan Stevens, Sun Kil Moon, Death Cab, Iron and Wine, Tom Waits, some really amazing stuff. So that was bad. I also found while copying from my backup CDs to my new setup that they don't necessarily hold up all that well. We're looking at a 2-3% failure rate in under two years. I'm underwhelmed. Granted, I did have these discs in my car for use in a mp3 player, but some of the discs that failed had probably never been read until today. Bummer.
But there is an upside. First, the reason I formatted my drive is that I configured it into a new SATA RAID array with another disk, meaning I've not got 240GB of really, really fast storage. The other thing is that P2P still works, and I've managed to leech about 7GB in the last 36 hours, and copy most of my backups onto the new drive, so I'm almost back to where I was. Once I am, I'll ditch the 250-300 CDs that the backup took (one artist per disc) and drop down to about 12 DVDs. Yay.