why we can't hold up!

File me as a crazy spender, but I just went on a journey to one of the finer things in life--a used record shop.

Now, some of you less in the know readers may wonder why I said record shop, instead of music store. Let me tell you, vinyl is still alive, still kicking, and the best sound in the universe. I can, and have, waxed poetic (no pun intended) over the virtue of vinyl sound, and let me suffice to say, at this time, that it is the extra tones that come from the record meeting the stylus; the sensation of the music being played, that makes it the best. Aside from a long list of everything else.

So I went to the record store with the vinyl companions--EBoy and the real OC, and we prepared to submerge ourselves. Going to a record store is a combination of deep sea dive and anthropological study--you reach for, and feel, all sorts of crazy musics you would never have anticipated wanting to listen to; and you do it all in silence, methodologically cataloguing what everyone else in the store is doing/looking at/bopping to. It's a great chance to try and find rare titles by bands you love, and an equally wonderful moment to take a risk on a ridiculously cheap album based off of name and flashy album art.

While there, I stumbled across, what for me, may be the best (new) album of instrumental/world music I've heard in a long time. I'm the kid who listens to music to be carried away to the plane where I can read and absorb, or write, or draw, etc. I usually don't listen to music for the thrill of the listening, though I do get sucked in to particularly good bits. I'm also the listener who needs lyrics to understand music most of the time. Instrumental music goes (sorry Josh!) over my head in some ways, because I'm a strongly verbal person, and I'm more directly effected by vocals. That said, "guitars from agadez: volume 2" is supreme. Go on, give it a listen. I'm pissed I bought on vinyl only because I can't carry it around and listen to it everywhere.



I admit, I was drawn initially by the album art, but who isn't drawn to unheard of bands based of art? Then, I was commenting on it, and a man walking by said:

That is the best album of the year in my opinion.

Now, I did some research, and the vinyl pressing was limited to 1500 (and the label is apparently from Seattle?! Go Team!). So the fact that he knew and recognized them, is, after the fact, quite impressive.

Needless to say, I took his statement as something of a dare. So I got it.

And I've never been happier with a spur of the moment musical choice.

What else did I get? Bon Iver's EP "Blood Bank" on 12" vinyl; 35 years of Sesame Street music; and ...

this has been a stick up of your internet usage

(what we) hold up (for)

For the past three or four weeks, 3 classmates and myself have been engaged in the project of exploring a block in the Chicago neighborhood of Uptown.



We had to write a paper on it for the class, and I was purposed with capturing the feel of the block--a more literary endeavor, rather than the traditional research style of the rest of the paper.




I don't think we notice as much of our surroundings anymore as I think we could.

To begin with, you have to take the El to get there. Don't forget that you'll have to append a solid 25¢ to your $2 fare—there was a CTA hike recently. Get on at Foster, or Davis—you have to go to Howard and transfer: the express doesn't stop at Lawrence.
At Howard, stand on the platform till your Red Line comes in. Watch the competing skylines fly by—Jarvis, Morse, Loyola, Granville, Thorndale, Bryn Mawr, Berwyn, Argyle, until the Aragon hoves into view and you're there.
At Lawrence, turn left. While the northern side of the street looks fair, the southern side seems to have fallen into some sort of disrepute. Record all the things that you notice: Chase Bank, abandoned lot, dilapidated housing, Heatland Alliance, public clinic, public clinic, public clinic.
The neighborhood is clean-swept but suffers from too many populants: the streets are filled with people going nowhere, doing nothing—permanently waiting. The northern end of the block is dominated by an obsidian edifice—The Institute of Cultural Affairs; while the southern end is home to a shining glass and steel apartment complex. In the middle, sits a glittering mosaic—created by local youth—that serves as a hope of a middle ground.
There are so many people, but at the same time, the street is empty—the men and women on the block are standing in large clumps in only two or three locations. These clumps expand and contract like jellyfish, darting out tendrils and collapsing in again.
The block seems more a service center, and less a living place: the projects conspiring against you with their bleak neo-brutalist prison style drawing permanent bars through the air.
Everyone is citified, in the ways that you've always been taught by Hollywood to fear: people roaring at one another across the street; a zillion colors (of skin, or clothes, or nail polish, or hair); mock battles occurring all around you—this is vibrancy, this is the diversity that your university pays lip-service to.
This block, for all the problems you immediately notice, for all the needs that Uptown Ministry, Alternatives, Inspiration Café, Sarah's Circle, Heartland Alliance point out to your eye, is alive.

please don't plagiarize--i share my thoughts to the marketplace of ideas because i hope that other people will be inspired to do so as well (well, mostly because i hope people will be inspired to think). plagiarizing is completely antithetical to that. and i'll cry.

this has been a stick up of your internet usage

hold up.

So one thing that I think college students miss out on, as part of their endeavors to create and reify their new burgeoning communities, is the family dinner. While I recall a great many tense and uncomfortable family dinners, I also recall dinner as a time (much like Shabbat) to set aside the hustle and bustle of the day, and listen to what the community had to say. It was a space out of time, and a time in which we could be with one another, and be with great food.

It was in the spirit of that belief that today I had the first in what I hope will be a series of 'family dinners' in CRC. Well, that and I wanted to prove that kosher food isn't all bad.

But a brief aside: members of CRC. If you weren't "invited" to dinner, it doesn't mean that you're despised, or less than. It means that someone of limited means cooked dinner for a few people s/he wanted to get to know, where the seeds were planted for a more complex community. And somehow, I feel strongly that castigating said chef is not going to help you to succeed in being invited to participate in the next such event.

So this is what dinner looked like:


It was teriyaki steak, broccoli, carrots, rolls, and quite a lot of rootbeers. And fun conversation.

It was really all about the root beer (I'm a lover of the drink, and I'm on a quest for the best tasting one).

What I think is the most important thing to be taken from this experiment (which morphed into a semi-commitment from 6 people to make a weekly dinner) is that ResLife might find a more "coalesced" campus (which seems to be something they're working towards) by encouraging more small groups to make dinner at home instead of eating in a dining hall (at least once a week). Of course, by encourage I mean subsidize.

After all, that steak was expensive.

this has been a stick up of your internet usage.