This Boy's Life

By | April 13, 2005

Bloc Party, “Silent Alarm”

Fashion influences music. Music influences fashion. And every now and then an album comes along that kicks the absolute crap out of both. This would be one of them. Bloc Party, a London-based rock group, is the latest and greatest act to be signed to the Williamsburg hipster label, Vice Recordings. Their debut LP, “Silent Alarm,” is without a doubt the urban anthem album of Spring/Summer ’05. In a time when every asshole band is attempting to be “the next Strokes,” fashion stylists, marketing camps and artists have lost sight of real rock in an attempt to create mass market images. (Whatever happened to original rock style?) Hence, the genius of “Silent Alarm” doesn’t lie in its crisp packaging or near-perfect production, but rather the gritty, gully sound of four “blokes” who know how to play an instrument or two and move a crowd. Driving beats, raw vocals, clashing rhythms and layered textures — this is the kind of music that will be inspiring Marc Jacobs, super models, Converse kids and your mom for the next few months. (Hey Cornell Design League: Buy this album and be inspired.)

Shane’s World Productions, College Invasion Series

For those of you who are not porn connoisseurs, “reality smut” has become the latest and greatest thing to hit hard drives and DVDs. Sure, there are “reality” series such as MILF Hunter (props to Sean and the CF Group) and Bang Bus, but the girls being pile-driven in the back of vans and laundromats were “hired guns,” not random girls you may pass on the street. Fans demanded better and Shane’s World Productions answered. (Amen.) Filmed at actual college frat parties, “Shane’s World: College Invasion,” brings professional porn stars to university campuses to produce undergraduate sex flicks. The actors and actresses take over fraternities like bar mitzvah MCs, leading crowds in games such as dildo ring tosses, before finally humping incomprehensibly drunk students at the parties — on camera. Is this some sort of sick joke I’m trying to play on you? — If you don’t believe me, ask the brothers of Phi Kappa Tau at U. of Cali’s Chico State campus who were kicked off campus for allowing the production company to use their house as a film set. (But if there was ever a way to get kicked off of campus for something, this has got to be THE FINEST way to go … assuming none of your brothers want to become congressional leaders one day.)

MovieBank

I don’t like ignorant people. (If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you’ve probably figured that one out already.) I also like instant gratification. (If you read the previous “new style” item, you’ve probably figured that one out as well.) Thus, three cheers for MovieBank: the first ATM-style kiosk where one can rent movies instantly for less than a buck. The system, which requires users to operate a small, DVD vending terminal, allows city dwellers to rent movies on-the-fly with or WITHOUT a membership card. No more pock-marked movie store employee faces to look at. No more waiting for Netflix to send you the next vid on your “playlist” in the mail. Now bachelors can find the nearest terminal (currently NYC metro area only), select their favorite, horrible romantic comedy, pickup some takeout, throw it on some clean plates, cuddle up with their hot date in their tiny, over-priced studio apartment and call it a date. When you’re done and ready to hit the bars, you can drop off the flick and create your own “Hollywood ending.”

Flatlinks

Ask any classic, well-dressed gentleman about style and he’ll inform you that nothing completes a finely tailored suit more than a pressed French cuff shirt with tasteful cufflinks. However, ask any man who has overslept and had to deal with cufflinks first thing in the morning about the word “frustration” and he will inform you that two pieces of precious metal are synonymous with the word “hell.” (Ladies, imagine taking something extremely small and delicate and sticking it in a very tight, unforgiving hole — ok, that was a poor analogy.) However, there seems to be no easy way to get a pair of cufflinks in and out of a shirt. (Twisting your arm behind your back and writing a short essay might be easier.) So in 2000, Theo Stewart-Stand, a graduate from Cooper Union, designed a pair of cufflinks which could be “laid flat” to ease the process of inserting and removing cufflinks for the groomsmen at his wedding. Simply put, the Flatlinks have two hinges, creating two ninety-degree angles which keep shirt cuffs close. When snapped back, the Flatlinks become flat like a piece of paper and are easily removed from a shirt without damaging the material. Go ahead and buy a pair of these — you’ll be purchasing yourself some additional time with the “snooze” button.

Archived article by Ari B. Cantor

CCTJ Holds Fair Trade Event

By April 14, 2005

Cuban music set the tone at the carnival organized by the Cornell Coalition for Trade Justice (CCTJ) in the Memorial Room of the Straight yesterday afternoon. The event was planned in an effort to raise campus and community awareness of trade justice issues, and to oppose the passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). “Trade justice is an ongoing effort,” said Tina Lax ’05, president of CCTJ, as club members threw rice-filled balloons, danced around the room and perused the informational tables. The carnival sought to mobilize public support for a more equitable system of global trade, and served as a venue to circulate petitions. “Hopefully [the event] will get people to sign these really important petitions so that the government will start noticing that people do care about fair trade,” said club member Nina Fixell ’07 as she looked over the petitions. Next to the table of laptops set up for students to e-mail representatives to encourage them to stand against CAFTA when voting time rolls around this May, clever games were set up to encapsulate the vision of the carnival. A game named “Dump your Friends,” in which participants basically dump rice on their friends, was a “spectacle to show what’s happening in a lot of poor countries, that is, agricultural dumping,” Lax said. Agricultural dumping, Lax explained, is when “subsidized U.S. big company goods such as corn [are] dumped in places like Mexico for cheaper prices so that the Mexicans buy cheaper U.S. corn instead of Mexican corn.” Though seemingly good for the economy, it is actually an “unfair policy between industrialized and developing countries, reinforcing poverty instead of lifting it,” Lax said. Ben Adler ’06, a student who drifted into the carnival said about CAFTA and other unfair trade policies, “I think it’s a completely unsound economic system. It doesn’t fall into basic supply and demand and just artificially inflates the price.” CAFTA is a free trade agreement that promotes trade liberalization between the United States and five Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is modeled after the older North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which involves the United States, Mexico and Canada. Its effects thus far are controversial, with some saying that it has brought economic growth and rising standards for the three countries, while others, like StopCAFTA.org say that NAFTA has been “a disaster for small farmers and working people with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, family farms foreclose, and public interest laws overturned or challenged.” The Center for Trade Policies Studies website highlights CAFTA, including supporters that argue that CAFTA would reduce trade barriers between the involved countries and raise living standards in neighboring countries where the United States has a strong foreign policy interest. The supporters counter opposing views saying that CAFTA would “consolidate the economic, social, and political progress achieved in a region that was in turmoil in the 1980s but has now turned to democracy.” The Bush administration has made it clear that the completion of CAFTA is crucial in the advancement of Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), another free trade agreement that would encompass a total of 34 economies. The issues regarding FTAA are similar to those of CAFTA. The small-scale carnival was an effort of CCTJ to bring awareness of such trade policies and to encourage Cornellians to join the fight against CAFTA. By bringing in popular a cappella group Cayuga’s Waiters and offering an enlightening and entertaining time, CCTJ expanded on previous club actions, which include educational forums regarding the trade agreements and a crafts fair advocating fair trade. “Workers are faceless, nameless. We disconnect commodities from the people who’ve created them,” Lax said. So CCTJ and its efforts, like yesterday’s carnival, aim to repair that disconnection in order to mobilize Cornell students to understand and then take action on trade justice.Archived article by Anita Oh Sun Contributor
M.I.A.: Arular

By April 14, 2005

M.I.A.’s fantastic debut album Arular blisters with restless energy. But how did Maya Arulpragasam, the incredible 27-year old voice of London’s rising grime scene, ever go from exile to musician? It was hard enough to grow up in the aftermath of a bloody dispute of power during the mid-’80s in her native Sri Lanka. Raised in the South London projects after the battle became too oppressive, where her family was burglarized on a regular basis, life was better, but not by much. Arulpragasam’s mother worked for minimum wage, and eventually the family moved out of the Phipps Bridge projects into better housing. Her mother’s hard work paid off when Maya got the chance to realize her creativity, and she later graduated with a degree in film from Central St. Martins College of Arts and Design. While commissioned to make a documentary about the rock band Elastica’s tour, Arulpragasm managed to orient herself with the MC-505 Groovebox, which is a fool-proof, all-in-one drum set and synthesizer — an expressway to self-producing rough beats. The edge and flexibility of the Groovebox suited Maya’s personality well, and three years later we have the revolutionary debut album Arular, which appears under her assumed artistic personality, M.I.A. There’s a bit of experience behind tighter instrumentals from brilliant producers like Richard X and Anthony Whiting, but Arular is almost an entirely solo output. Even the artwork, a wallpaper of tanks, fists, peace symbols, loudspeakers and parachuting Blackhawk helicopters was designed by the same woman who wrote the lyrics, arranged the music and fights for “the people” as she lets us know in nearly every breath. M.I.A.’s lyrics, including the way she introduces herself on the first true song (she does pepper the album with meaningless, but still enjoyable skits), paint her as a revolutionary, a guerrilla and usually as an independent and dominant female, but they also portray her enigmatic personality. She first sees herself as a voice of proletariat radicals: “Pull up the people, pull up the poor/ slang tan/ that’s the M.I.A. thang/ I’ve got the bombs/ yeah, me got God/ And me got you/ Bang bang bang.” She compares growing up to a “guerrilla getting trained up,” or as a “freedom fighter in action.” As an involuntary citizen of a country not her own, M.I.A. makes constant references to her inner refugee. She identifies with the Palestinians, the Cherokee Indians and she “screams for the nation.” M.I.A. is the self-proclaimed leader of the People’s Will, and achieving their goals usually comes with a price tag of violence. Murder is reduced to a courageous act: “Semi-9 and snipered him/ On that wall they posted him/ They cornered him and then just murdered him/ He had his way, I’m bored of him/ I’m tired of him” she reflects without an ounce of regret. If she’s not angry at what obviously becomes the Establishment, sometimes in the form of masculinity, she’s playing to our lustful sides. It’s a bit confusing to hear M.I.A. switch without warning from assertive to innocent. “Let you be superior/ My stamina can take it/ You like me vulnerable,” she says in between songs about “clocking him.” The pattern of these lyrical changes becomes obvious after a few listens — if you bring men in with promises of submissiveness and sexuality, you then can pounce once they try to “check this girl.” She’s got us under her thumb, and isn’t afraid to push down — it’s all “for the sake of having fun.” Musically, M.I.A. is the prototype of an emerging genre, grime. Somewhere in between American crunk and Jamaican dancehall, grime combines elements that we mostly associate with cell phone rings. There are beeps, buzzes, high-pitched screams and an assortment of other rather atonal implements. Besides these staccatos, the only other production element is usually a super-electronic basic drum set, except the cymbals are muted, the high-hat is a constant nuisance and the bass sets an incredibly punched, heart-racing tempo. M.I.A. soothes some of the corners in grime’s roughness. They are often, however, tools to invoke images of her guerrilla anger. On “Bucky Done Gun” there are battle-crying bugles and the chorus uses a snare drum to sound like a popping machine gun. Sometimes effects are picked right out of old arcade games with firing shooters and B-52 bombers. “Bingo” has a melodically important steel drum, and other percussion including glockenspiels and bongos are used. One of the best reasons to listen to a grime voice like M.I.A.’s is simply the way she talks. The accent is thick with the bitterness of rough, outer London neighborhoods like Swansea and Bow. The dialect is a language all it’s own with words like “galang” and “wha-gawn” spliced into Jamaican half-rhymes and revolutionary buzzwords. M.I.A. has a tendency to scream or at least raise the pitch at the end of every line. In addition to raising hairs and heartbeats, this brutally forces her message home every time. This is clearly someone who has a lot to say. It’s gritty, funny, honest and inspiring — in other words, perfect.Archived article by Elliot SingerSun Staff Writer