Following in the indie tradition of bands like MGMT and Milosh, Portland natives Starfucker combine plunky Casio riffs with slow, barely varied backbeats on their new self-titled album. Though the baseline may be monotonous and traditional song structure nonexistent, there’s something soothing about the constant repetition; combined with the breathy, incomprehensible vocals, it lulls the listener into a kind of synthetic pleasure-coma. The album does have its clever moments: the opening song, “Florida,” ends with a clip of what sounds like Hugh Laurie inquiring about metric measurements, and the clap-beats on “Mike Ptyson” will stick in one’s head for hours.

Imagine it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. You’re still drunk from last night, you’ve got work and laundry piling up and it’s not even light out. Yet here you are at Barton Hall, chugging coffee and assembling steel trusses, heavy-duty rigging for light fixtures and scaffolds into a stage. You’re making signs that say: ‘Backstage Band Area’ or ‘Bathrooms Here,’ or running errands to Wegmans to buy your guests of honor their organic bottled water of choice. A truck breaks down on its way to Ithaca, so the stage you need to have assembled by 3 p.m. won’t be ready for a few more hours. But the show must go on — will go on, at 6 p.m. Screw how early it is, it’s time to get to work.

CCC

You’ve got to have a sense of humor to get by at Cornell. With the fluctuating weather, the sometimes near-impossible courses, the even more ridiculously obscure prelims and the generally serious academic mood, something’s gotta give. Comedy offers no better way to balance the C.U. pressure cooker.

Cornell’s Program Board (CUPB) rolls out the laughs by hosting a gamut of comedians to offer their biting wit and spot-on observations. But did you know that there are student on-campus comedy troupes, too? And that a few of said comedians have dipped their toes — even gotten their feet wet — in the waters of stand-up? And, lastly, did you know that these kids are funny? I mean, really, really funny?

You can’t spend a night — or the requisite Collegetown three — of dressing like a sexy police officer, Sarah Palin or an oversized pumpkin and come out smelling like roses. This week, the Daze staff share their wildest moments from All Hallow’s Eve: raw and (mostly) unedited. From disastrous high school pranks to men whose fetishes happen to be your specific Halloween costume, writers divulge their best and worst nights. It may have been a long time since elementary school going door-to-door; but that doesn’t mean the tricked and treated memories are far gone. So when Friday (and Thursday and Saturday) come along and the inevitable good and bad times happen, just be glad you weren’t us.

Thief in the Night:

Sunday, Oct. 26, 6 p.m.: “... I’m sorry?”

“They have so much sex in Risley, they have orgies like every night. Everybody knows that.”

I consider myself a pretty accepting person, but it was shocking that this sort of behavior was tolerated by Cornell authorities. I figure I should do some wiki-stalking before I spent a night surrounded by supposed sexual deviants. Here’s what I discover:

Camera MenIt’s not infrequent for Cornellians watching Entourage or The O.C. to sigh longingly and wish that our fair University were located somewhere a bit more star-studded or sun-basked. But these dreamers can take heart in the fact that once, a long, long time ago, Ithaca was the center of the movie universe.

Adam Vana '09Adam Vana ’09 doesn’t mind if you don’t call him a musician. “I think DJs who insist on that are just insecure,” he says. One of Cornell’s most prolific practitioners of electronic music, Vana prefers to use the word “prosumer,” a concept that fuses the roles of producer and consumer.

Vana, along with fellow Cornell DJ Dan Bailey ’08, has a residency at Le Poisson Rouge on Saturday nights at Collegetown’s City Style Salon and Sake Bar. An equally talented DJ with a complementary style, Bailey plays alternate weekends. Since its introduction this summer, Poisson Rouge has become one of Collegetown’s few dependable non-top 40 club ventures.

You know the person you bumped into at Temple of Zeus today? When your elbow knocked into his or her oh-so-delicious soup and sent it flying over his or her body and spilling onto the stack of pages he or she lovingly clutched to his or her chest? Well, that person may very well have been Cornell’s next Kurt Vonnegut, and those pages you accidentally destroyed may just have been the next great, American novel. (Good job.)

Cornell has nine dance groups who perform it, two classes taught exclusively about it, four radio shows that feature it, funding agencies and concert organizers who sponsor it, one official blog devoted to intellectual discourse about it and now, over a 1,000 records containing it, more than 500 original flyers advertising it and about three decades of photographs of its infancy. What is it? It’s Hip Hop, in all its quixotic, nonconformist, ever-evolving, hard-to-define glory.

It features the photographic archive of Joe Conzo, Jr., who, at 16, started going around the Bronx with a camera around his neck in an attempt to attract girls, and inadvertently captured some of the most momentous moments and characters from Hip Hop‘s inception.

Mr. Gorilla Man and Senor BananaOn October 31, 2006, a gorilla woke up, got dressed and decided to spend his day chasing a banana around campus.

Or more accurately, two dudes decided to pull an ingenious prank on Halloween — a guy in a gorilla suit chasing a guy in a banana suit throughout campus — classrooms, up and down lecture halls, skipping through Ho plaza, even meandering through Trillium and Libe Café, picking up some much needed coffee and potassium.