To nefunguje, dammit.

The internet in my bleeding office is broken, again. Last time this happened, it took a month for the tech guy to get around to it. I guess it's to be expected, given my position on the uni totem pole (somewhere around last), but it's still annoying as fuck.

Umm, speaking of which... I was out in west Bohemia this weekend, chillin' with Jedno. We went to a Christmas party that her Protestant friends had, and it was a lot of fun. It brought back a lot of memories from my Protestant youth, when I used to go to various fundamentalist Bible camps in the summertime...more on that later, probably, but for now, I'll just mention this personal triumph: I got through the entire evening without dropping the F-bomb once. Those of you who know me in real life are shaking your heads all Not even, girl. And indeed, this is an amazing feat for me, considering it's pretty much my favoritest word in the English language. But it's true: I represented, I maintained, and I kept my speech so fresh and so clean, clean for Jedno's sweet friends.

This has been a comparatively F-bomb free post. Don't expect it to last, though.

Reasons I love the Mountain Goats...

...and why you should too.

1. I drove up to Harvey Mudd and I played pinball
'till I didn't want to kill anyone

2. and I dreamt of a factory
where they manufactured what I needed
using shiny new machines....

3. I've got a great big secret written down somewhere
I've got a rosary to protect us both from harm
I've got a storage locker full of cow figurines
and a laundry list of grievances longer than my arm
AND I AM NEVER GOING BACK TO CINCINNATI!
ALL THOSE BRIDGES HAVE BURNED DOWN TO THE GROUND!

And one more, one that I've been playing umpteen times a day and I'm still not sick of it: it's called The Triumph of the Pigs That Ran Straightaway Into the Water, which is the first cool thing about it. The second is that the lyrics are about someone who doesn't want to go to Claremont, but deep down he knows he'll have to go anyway. Which totally remind me of all those times last year that we made that long-ass drive down to the Pasadena/Claremont area. I mean, we had some good times, but still, so much drama. But you're gonna do...what you wanna do/No matter what I ask of you

So yeah, I've been listening to the Mountain Goats a lot lately, and damn they're good...it's as if Ben Kweller got a little more acoustic, a lot angrier, and went through an agonizingly bitter divorce. I'm telling you, it's my kind of music. Also there's a ton of songs by them available for free, legal download in a bunch of places, like here, and here. So go. Go now. Seek them out, especially the above songs.

1. you're in maya. 2. palmcorder yajna. 3. commandante.

Lessons I Have Learned: Part 2

Smoked tofu: No. No, donkey.

Also, I spent eighteen continuous years in a household where we had some form of rice at least once a week, and I still can't cook rice worth shit. Seriously, it's both gummy and undercooked. Fucking uncooperative grain product.

Hey proFESSor!

So I survived the Culture Talk. In fact, it was awesome--I actually found myself kind of having fun. It did help that I held it in one of the smaller classrooms, and it turned out that only about 10 students came. Plus these were my favorite students, the bright eager sweet ones that I love so much I want to put them in my pockets and take them home with me because they're so damn cute. Yeah. I'm gradually figuring out, not just from this experience but from the whole semester of teaching huge classes, that I'm actually pretty damn good at standing up in front of a bunch of people and telling them what's up, in a fairly coherent and organized way. This is a very good feeling.

Not much else has happened this week, since I spent most of it frantically prepping for the Culture Talk (ok, this mostly consisted of stealing vast quantities of music off of Soulseek), and grading fucking thousands of tests and essays and so on. That's the sucky thing about this job: I come up with great lesson plans that have them working their little butts off writing shit, and then they actually want to, y'know, get feedback on the reams of stuff they've produced. And I'm all, LAAAME!

Last night was cool. Went into town with Depressed M and Frat M, two American guys who work in the Economics Department. They're sweet guys, and it turns out Depressed M is a fellow music snob, so that's awesome. We ended up at the pub across from the place we live. It's dark and smoky and the jukebox has Nick Cave songs, how fucking cool is that? Plus we've gotten fairly friendly with the people that work and hang out there. Towards closing time last night, and me and Dep were chatting with the woman that runs the place, using our common vocabulary of about fifty words in four different languages (English, German, Czech, and Polish) and she indicated that, yeah, they were closing, but we could sit around for a while if we wanted. At that point, this guy who'd been sitting there peacefully drinking beer all evening suddenly stood up and started chucking chairs across the room. It was fucking surreal--he didn't even look mad, just like "Ok, here's the point in the evening where we bust shit up." The bar lady got all up in his biznass, understandably enough, and a couple of other people had to physically separate them. So then we helped her pick up some of the broken glass, and that was the night. I love that bar.

So here's what I'm thinking...

...for the dreaded Culture Talk.

The theme is going to be how independent music has its greatest effect as an influence on bands in later generations, and how eventually the indie sound bleeds into the mainstream. I'll illustrate this with sort of a geneology chart of X influenced Y influenced Z, culminating (er...if that's the way to put it) in Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins. So basically it's Six Degrees of Indie to Mainstream.

1960s: The Kinks, aka the indie version of the Beatles. Clip: All Day and All of the Night. (Suggestions for a better song example?)

Early '70s: The Velvet Underground. What people say about them is that only about a thousand people heard their early records, but every one of those people went out and started a band. Clip: Sweet Jane. (Again, suggestions?)

Mid-seventies: Punk happens. Brief explanation of punk. The Ramones. Clip: Sedated. Judy Is A Punk.

Early '80s: Post-punk: more acoustic and melodic, but with the anger and immediacy of punk. Violent Femmes. Clip: Kiss Off or I Held Her In My Arms.

Mid-'80s: Post-punk starts developing into what people call "alternative". The Replacements, who never got much past playing shows for the beer tab. Clip: Unsatisfied or Bastards of Young or Can't Hardly Wait.

Late '80s: The motherfucking Pixies, whom I refuse to classify. Clip: Debaser, Digging For Fire.

Early '90s: "Alternative" breaks into the mainstream. Nirvana. Clip: a live version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" where the Pixies influence is really clear--it sounds a lot like "Debaser".

Slightly later '90s, a parallel track of indie-influenced mainstream: The Smashing Pumpkins. Clip: Cherub Rock, something else too (what??)

Later '90s: Even though "alternative" became mainstream, spawning a host of cheap imitators, independent music kept on developing on its own track, which started being referred to as "indie" or "indie rock". Two bands that kept on truckin': Guided by Voices (clip: Atom Eyes), and Modest Mouse (clip: Doin' the Cockroach).

So yeah. That's about it. I might do a parallel chain on mainstream influence on indie bands, such as Beach Boys -->the Shins, but I think I might have enough with the above, expanded of course. Maybe also a little featurette on the Modern Lovers, who were the quintessential indie band in that they never even recorded an album during their lifetime, and who are famous basically for being incredibly obscure. Hey, I like them too, but come on, it's true. Song clip: Roadrunner.

Suggestions are welcomed, indeed begged for. Especially about the song clips: I'm having trouble finding songs where the influences I'm trying to show are really clear.


Also, I know some of these bands aren't really Indie in the strictest sense. I'm going more for the spirit of indie here: much like the spirit of punk rock, it's not so much a genre as a State of Mind.

Note: If you do have any brilliant insights, please share them asap, because the shit goes down tomorrow night (Thursday).

Drop everything and join me...

...no, for reals. Spend the next month wrapping up your happy little life, fly to Prague for New Year's, take a TEFL course starting January 2nd (this is the one I took; I highly recommend it), finish the course February 3rd....if you do all that, you can be an English teacher at my university starting February 7th. You can share an office with me, people. And I don't know if I've made it clear just how much I fucking love living here and working this job, but trust me, I'm in a near-constant state of euphoria.

I'm actually serious about this, people. There's a job opening, and they seem to be terrible at actually searching for employees like normal people, so...pretty much they'll hire anyone I tell them too. Which is very scary. So come on. If you have something around two grand sitting around (sell your guitar, and your gold tooth fillings), and if your student loan payments are under 150 a month, then this is totally doable for you. If you weren't such a pussy.

Then again, if you read this blog the odds are that it's a good month when you have two grand in pennies around, and Lord knows I know how that is. But I live on hope. Email me.

Help me please

Ok, so I work at this university. And I really really love working here, not least because I don't have to work very hard pretty much ever. Not working hard is my favorite way to be, which is yet another reason I didn't do my homework for four years at the college (other reasons included being depressed, being distracted, and being drunk, or sometimes a three-fer: drunkenly distracting myself from being depressed).

But. Next week I have to give a lecture. A Culture Talk, to be specific. These are supposed to voluntary contributions to enrich the life of the English Department, given out of the goodness of our native-speaker hearts. Nonetheless, when I tried to gently explain to my Czech colleague that I, for one, would rather not give an hour-long lecture on Some Aspect of British or American Culture, I was given to understand that continuing to have a job was voluntary, too, when it came to that. So, after establishing that my thesis on Goethe's Faust failed to meet the requirements, I decided to do mine on...get ready for it..."Independent Music In America". I have no idea why I picked this topic, but at least I can play clips of music, and that'll take up some time. Anyway, if you have any brilliant ideas about what the fuck I can talk about, please please please let me know. Because I have to deliver this lecture a week from today. Gulp.

I've just got to ask...

Is English the ONLY FUCKING LANGUAGE ON THE PLANET that uses the semicolon? I mean, for fuck's sake, I've dealt with Czechs writing English, and French people writing English, and NOT ONCE have I even SEEN a semicolon, let alone a properly used one. And the thing is, the semicolon is my favorite. It's so cool...why no love for the semicolon? And now it's official, the cool kids are never going to let me sit at their table...