On Friday I went to see Sleigh Bells play at The Ogden, and it was a PHENOMENAL show. Sleigh Bell's music has been growing on me for the past couple months, but seeing it live has put me over the edge. I am a full fledged fan. Maybe even a little bit gay for the singer, Alexis Krause, who is officially the biggest badass I've ever seen.
Everything about her oozes with rock n' roll confidence--red lips, ripped fishnets, straight black bangs, and high waisted shorts are offset by her adorable dimples and shiny white keds, making her a hip goddess rather than a grungy punk rocker. She dances around wiggling her hips, banging her head, posing in extremes, and to top it off, crowd surfs like a bamf. And her laugh tinkles like bells. Seriously though, I think putting it in words has made me realize the extent of my girl crush.
I thew some mad elbows to make it to the front row (just kidding, I was a loser and got there super early)--but it was completely worth it because i got some freaking awesome pictures. Thank you Instagram. Send in an application to Rolling Stone and Spin--someone needs to hire me as a freelance photographer. Below I'm going to provide you with more pictures than you will wish to see as well as the recommended soundtrack you should be listening to as you view them:
P.S. If it so pleases you, I welcome you to follow me on instagram (@alainarook) for more gems like this. Or like this...
A little while back, my friend Margaret and I went to see one of her favorite bands perform at the Larimer Lounge. The Larimer Lounge is a small, hipsterish bar and musical venue. It's the kind of place where PBR is the happy hour special, the prize for winning bingo are obscure concert tickets , and all the lovely bar maidens are gloriously tattooed with a rainbow of colors and not afraid to show it off. Needless to say, my hip pretensions were in high gear--ergo, much artistic fading and blurring a la Instagram.
The show itself was a little strange. The two openers were slightly random (the first, a band that sounded a little too much like Creed for me to take seriously, the second, an anorexic brunette version of Cascada). However, I have no complaints about the headliner. Sister Crayon rock it out hard. Terra has the most amazing voice that reaches deeply and powerfully but is also sort of magically whimsical. They are like Portishead minus the nineties.
Sister Crayon is spearheaded by two artsy lesbians from the bay area named Terra and Dani, and needless to say my friend (also a lesbian) was SUPERPUMPED to soak up the sound waves of their awesomeness--and gush about how she listened to their music while writing her first novella, which just got her accepted into the Mills College's MFA graduate creative writing program (in San Francisco) so CAN THEY BE BEST FRIENDS?!
)
(Terra selling merch after the show)
The good news is that Terra and Dani were both super nice. They talked to us a little before and after the show. The lead singer, Terra, recognized Margaret because my fanatical friend wrote on the band's facebook wall about how excited she was to see them that night in Denver. Terra came up to us and introduced herself and everything. Needless to say that made Margaret's night. Even more so was her life made when she got pictures with the pair and a poster signed by both of the Sapphic songstresses. Will they be bff's next year out in the Bay? Probably not...but not if Margaret has anything to say about it.
A large portion of my Spring Break was dedicated to having life chats about The Hunger Games, obsessing over the movie and soundtrack, and lending out my Suzanne Collins library. Along with my pension for fangirling for The Wanted, I suppose one might say I am also a fangirl of The Hunger Games.
Because yes, I have read the entire series over three times in the past year. And yes, I did a FB countdown like “47 days!” accompanied by the newest trailer. And yes, on the day it came out I did post “Happy Hunger Games Day! And may the odds be ever in your favor...”. And yes, I did go to the midnight showing, and no, I couldn't sleep after seeing it. And yes, I have seen it once more since then.
So overall, yes. I am a huge fangirl of The Hunger Games Trilogy, and wish I was Jennifer Lawrence in all long-limb, badass glory. Mostly because Joshua Hutcherson/Peeta Mallark's perfectly symmetical face is like my life dream.
In general, I happen to be an overwhelmingly nerdy afficianado of Young Adult literature. It doesn't help that this past quarter my Secondary English Methods class (basically, how to be a high school English teacher class) reviewed a new young adult novel every week to help us become knowledgable on some books that might inspire our students to want to read. Plus, whenever I go back home, my mom always has a giant stack of New York Times Bestsellers in YA fiction waiting for me, in hopes that I won't spend all my time at home on facebook or netflix (her denial of how I am destined to spend my life).
If in fact any of you floundering seniors are looking for a way to spend your last few months of senior year--drowning out all those long hours playing hooky from homework--distraught at the fact that you are done with all three of The Hunger Games novels, fear not! Dystopian trilogies and love triangles are all the rage right now, and I spent my spring break power reading through the lot of them.
Matched—Allie Condie. For the first book of this trilogy think The Giver but with heavy emphasis on the love story aspect (a love triangle of course). The second book, Reached, is a little more action-packed (wars, impossible mission, conspiracy theories, rebel groups) than the first, and takes it in a direction that makes it seem like anything might go in the third book (coming out next November).
Delirium—Lauren Oliver. Another trilogy in the making, this little dystopian conspiracy number has the government claiming that love is a disease that needs to be eradicated (so they can better control the passionless, emotionless population). Obviously, a forbidden sort of love story ensues. I'm in the process of procuring the second book, though rumor has it another love triangle is on the horizon (big surprise.)
Legend—Marie Lu. Set in future L.A., this dystopian trilogy is like Robin Hood meets Blade Runner, meets teenage girl's daydreams. It's rife with mysterious deaths, star-crossed teenage lovers, government conspiracies, and the dalliance of a love triangle (but really, one of those sad ones where there is no competition). The greatest mystery of all--even the blonde haired, blue eyed characters are slightly Asian is Marie Lu's future California...my question, why also not slightly Hispanic, Marie Lu?).
Not a dystopian trilogy, but surprisingly awesome, Warm Bodies—Issac Marion. The Walking Dead on Valentine's Day. A loveable zombie regains his humanity by falling in love with a rebellious bombshell. I was skeptical too, but couldn't put it down. Plus, it is soon going to be out in theaters starring the too gorgeous to be true, Nicholas Hoult.
Take it and run with it, kiddos. The good news is your love for cheesy YA fiction can be a secret, and I will do all do all the embarrassing debasement by putting the truth out there on a very public forum like the internet for all my future employers to see. You can pretend like you are too cool for school now, but when these are all awesome movies like The Hunger Games you know you will be all like "Oh, I read that before it was a movie...".
After my last blog you may be asking yourselves, so how does a #21goingon12 year old spend her Spring Break? Surely with my track record for margarita consumption, one might assume I would take the first opportunity possible to head down to Mexico and partake in some truly tequila-inspired raging in the sun. I wish for your sake as much as mine that was the case (for the blog you would be reading might be much more entertaining), unfortunately I lack the funds to engage in such debauchery.
Rather, I've spent the majority of my Spring Break the way one might assume.
Fangirling (--or the act of being a fangirl). So while you all were hopefully doing adventurous or productive things with your time, I was youtube and twitter stalking The Wanted. And yes, I realize the sadness of using that word to describe myself, but there isn't any use in sugarcoating a disease. It's like saying, I've got a spot of the cancer or a bit of the AIDS--there is no halfway for the fangirl.
(compliments of google images, actual Wanted Fangirls...and boy?)
Catching up on all the shows I missed during finals week (season finale of The Walking Dead+season premier of Mad Men?!?! Be still my heart.)
Fantasizing that I have the financial resources and the bod to pull off half the looks in http://lookbook.nu/
Playing with my cat.
However, a friend of mine who goes to school in Seattle did come to visit for her Spring Break so we did, on occasion, do some interesting things!
I went up to the mountains last weekend for the first time all year (better late than never). I didn't get a ski pass this year because I knew that the graduate program I'm in at DU's Morgridge College of Education would not allow me the leisure time of weekend jaunts up to the mountains. This truly is a bit of a shame because I have a house in Breckenridge that my friends and I love going to for alpine adventures. However, this did leave the house wide open for my brother and his friends to have excessive amounts of fun in our cabin--(just take a glimpse into our poor, swampy hot tub).
Two of my best friends from high school along with some friends from CSU came, so their were nine of us in my little house. Needless to say some madness ensued. The next day some us went skiing, but I chose to enjoy the spring time weather around Breck. We ate crepes and and window shopped in all the expensive boutiques.
When we got back to Denver, our friend invited us to make sushi with him, which I had never done before but was surprisingly super easy (but expensive). We went to Whole Foods to buy fresh vegetables, sashimi, and special rice. Then cooked up the rice, cut all the fish and vegetables, and when it was all ready we rolled 'em all up in seaweed! It was a delicious feast, and now that I know sushi is so easy to make I'll be getting cozy with my Asian roots much more often I think!
How do you know when you are devolving into madness? Well, I think I'm displaying several symptoms of a psychosis I'd like to call transitioning—or what happens to seniors as they realize that they are about to leave the warm swaddling blanket of the education system. It's a disease that's been slowly simmering since winter break, watching all of my friends filling out job applications and making portfolios and overall, wading out into the murky waters of adulthood. But now, I'd say that it's come to a boil, and all of us are going stark, raving, CRAY.
You see half of the time, it's like we are on a high speed train with the last stop imminent: REAL WORLD! The other half of the time we are clinging to the great dream of Fun Town, USA, where we made a cozy home for the past half decade of our lives, where the greatest worries of our young existence were finding the cheapest textbooks, dealing with roommates eating your Ben and Jerry's, and passing finals every ten weeks.
I am inhabiting an especially strange mental space, seeing as I am in fact a senior, but another year hooked into the DU matrix is where my path leads. So all my friends are waking up, leaving me in the dust—though in some ways, I'll leave them in the dust when I graduate with a Masters and Bachelors degree a year from now.
So what are some of the symptoms of this senior-year epidemic? Well, it may be slightly different for every person, but some of the general symptoms are similar to Senioritis or Spring Fever. Apathy to all school work is unavoidable (as they would say in Superbad, “Last two weeks, f--- it”), while the desire to behave as irresponsibly and provocatively as possible (like freshman year without the excuse of not knowing any better) is all-consuming.
I would say the panic that accompanies my own insanity parallels the fact that right now I am in graduate school trying to set myself up for an actual career. Reality-inducing pragmatism in every sense of the word, resulting in a state of hyper-regression in my subconscious. This paired with the fact that I spend four days a week in a high school student-teaching (half trying to make all the students like me, half trying to fend off their inappropriate questions or advances) I fear I may be twenty-one going on twelve, or as I tweeted #21goingon12. Yes, I would say getting a twitter account and hash-tagging the s*** out of my life is also another symptom of this sickness.
So what exactly does this regression entail???
Spending money as if I actually had some to spare. After depriving myself all year (minus the essential purchases such as burritos and margaritas at Illegal Pete's), I have finally broken. I've just been spending all my savings on kicks and giggles:
shopping sprees at Cherry Creek Mall
excessive amounts of Illegal Pete's (even for me)
concert tickets like it's going out of style (good for you because I'll actually have things to blog about, bad for my bank account) Some of the bands I am seeing:
2. Becoming overly obsessed with pop songs and sexy British boy bands.
THE WANTED: In addition to blowin' up my itunes with playing The Wanted on repeat, I have literally watched every #wantedwednesday video on their expansive Youtube archive in the past two weeks.
CALL ME MAYBE: My current dream is to make a Call Me Maybe video, and can often be found peer pressuring my friends into making one. Additionally I can't stop tweeting things like #callmemaybe and miss you #sosobad!
Once again, I am as fearfully aware of the pathetic ridiculousness of this regression. I just can't seem to help myself.
I formally invite you all to have the real DU experience, via social media resources.
As college students, we are all inherently a bit rebellious (snarkiness and youth go hand in hand). We are all a bit pissed off (tuition bills and being broke-ass college students cause resentment). We are all a bit insatiable (would anything ever be enough?). And as college students, we are members of a selective group of intelligentsia that have started revolutions throughout the ages: the Prague Spring, Tiananmnen Square, Kent State, and D.A. (Dumbledore's Army).
How are the student's of DU putting their creative energy and rage at the man to good use? How are we speaking out against the great machine of American bureaucracy? How are we protesting the traditional institutions that oppress the little guy?
Coombe Daddy.
Coombe Daddy is a piece of satire that pokes fun at our chancellor, Robert Coombe. Though the university had some opposition to it, it seems it is here to stay, and thank goodness, because man does it give me a laugh. Here is an article from our student newspaper, The Clarion, that better details the face off between student's freedom of speech and possible slander charges.
I would like to note that though we like to make fun of the bureaucracy that runs our campus, we also are simultaneously, making fun of ourselves. We can laugh at the fact that most of us are the progeny of upper-middle class suburban American, and we are willingly here, paying for the copper plating on another new building. When push comes to shove, we are proud to be a part of such a beautiful campus. We can also make fun everyone else, from CC, CU, CSU, UNC—no one is safe. Let's face it, we are just the veritable Mean Girls of the Colorado schooling system. As attested by all the inside jokes of our school meme page:
(This one is a shout out to all your prospees: here's lookin' at you kids...)
And although the voices of dissent might make DU seem like a riotous, unfriendly place—don't let that fool you! DU is still the place of sunshiney rainbows and magical educational experiences that you all think it is.
(Seriously though some shameless plugging: come to DU and have opportunity to go to places like this. This is a picture I took while I was abroad in Ireland...)
If you all are faithful readers of this blog (unlikely) or happen to scroll down a few entries to a blog called "Terminal Kings", you will see that recently, DU has been an integral part of bringing some mainstream street artists to the Denver scene, which up to now has been a bit lacking in that department (much to my chagrin).
Now it has been several weeks since Terminal Kings, and since then, one of the artists featured, David Choe (who you will also note if you refer back to aforementioned blog, I have been a huge fan of for a very long time) has BLOWN UP in the media. You all can also note that at the end of that blog I propehtically gave you all a video of Choe painting the new facebook headquarters--or what he was doing while I was not meeting him at the Terminal Kings exhibiton.
Soon after this video was made, it was brought to light that this was not Choe's first time working with old Zuck. He in fact, painted the first fb headquarters--and got paid for the job in stocks. He thus is now "the 200 million dollar street artist".
And thus, my main man, and Asian brotha from anotha mutha has gone into hibernation. Now, as appreciative as I am that my own David Choe signed print has probably exponentially multiplied in value (not that I would ever sell it), I hope for Choe's sake that the publicity does not put a damper on his artistic vision or the production of his phenomenal work!
However, now Denver can say one thing about our street art scene: we got the last big David Choe production before all the Facebook craziness took over his life! So thank you DU for sponsoring this project, and fate for your epic sense of timing.
Additional to his work for the DU sponsored Terminal Kings,Choe, DVS-1, and Joseph To put together a collection of murals near the Convention/Performing Arts Center in downtown Denver (13th and Champa). I made a pilgrimage there a few weeks ago, and here are some pictures of it for your viewing pleasure.
Part Deux goes a little something like this: At the poetry reading, my friends and I ran into one of the PhD creative writing candidates (Bragging Rights: DU's creative writing doctoral program was ranked the number one in the nation, chicka chicka yeahhhhh). He invited us to go out with him and a bunch of the other PhD students for drinks after the reading, and we gladly but apprehensively accepted.
You see, for the lowly undergrad, the doctoral candidates are an exclusive bunch. In some cases, they have even been our professors. They live in some mysterious realm in which they seem to spend their free time getting drunk while casually going over lost, personal home videos of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, while chatting about the the literary theories of Foucault and Derrida. Like a living, breathing version of The Feminist Ryan Gosling.
*On a side note, for I know there are a lot of newbies joining us in the reading of this blog, I am in fact twenty-one years old, and am technically a graduate student at the school of education. Thus, this was not my first time at the rodeo of drinking with professors. The best part of being twenty-one? Even cooler than when you can finally go out to bars legally? The fact that “adults” want to drink with you and tell dirty jokes with you and overall, forget that you still look up at them sort-of wide-eyed and awe-struck.
Before we met up with the PhD candidates, we headed to the Denver Diner for some grub. We needed a little something in our tummies to root us down—after all, who wants to get sloppy drunk while hanging out with their professors? Buzzed perhaps, but blackout? Not so much.
The Denver Diner is an infamous sort of place in this city--open twenty-four hours a day with that classic “All-American Diner” feel to it—a giant case of pies at the entrance, a lot of shiny red vinyl covering the seats, and of course, breakfast served all day long. While we chowed down on an assortment of fried foods, I took the opportunity to Hipster-out with some Instagram pics for your enjoyment.
We then joined the PhD students at Charlie Brown's for a drink. Charlie Brown's was an interesting bar—kind of a mix between a darkened London pub and the old-school billiards room in your local Yacht Club. Groups of late-twenty-somethings huddled in close for conversation around their tables, while a piano man played a mix of classic rock and show-tunes in the background.
I drank Strongbow out of a bottle, and felt weepingly nostalgic for all the delicious cider-beers I guzzled down while studying abroad in London. (For a look at my attempts at another hopelessly lax, non-DU-sanctioned blog about my time abroad, check this old thing out: http://alainarook.wordpress.com/ ).
(Flash back! Two words to describe my time abroad: Frosty Jack's--the cheapest cider beer/nectar of the gods to come in a two-liter bottle)
It happened to be two of my professor's birthdays that night (one of which is British, only furthering my U.K. yearnings), and the group was celebrating hardy. However, as we feared, we were either too awkward or they were too exclusive for us to really fit in. After a drink's worth of painfully forced conversation we said “Adieu” to Charlie Brown's and the PhD candidates and wished our professors a last “Happy birthday!”. And like most nights, we made our way to our home turf—Illegal Pete's, to devour more chips and queso than a human should possibly ingest.
A big hello to all you new prospees (lingo for "prospective students") checking out this little old blog of mine, I'm gunna let it shine. And a hearty congratulations for your acceptance (or potential acceptance) to the University of Denver from me to you. It seems I am apologizing altogether much too often for irregular posting, for here I am again, asking for you all to forgive me my lazy typing fingers. Let's also chalk it up to the fact that as a college student, one is free to have many adventures--or more likely in my case, to spend many hours buried up to one's ears in homework. Both of which often take precedence over blogging.
I did have a lovely sort of outing last weekend--I attended a poetry reading at the Dikeou Art Gallery. I go to the readings they have here all the time, but what made this one really special was that two of DU's most illustrious, tenured creative writing professors were reading.
(one of the gallery's most infamous pieces)
The first was poet Bin Ramke (who also happens to be my adorably flighty but faithful academic adviser), and the next was Eleni Sikélianòs (who was once on the cover of Greek vogue...see below: yeah, that s*** is cool). Bin was charming in the same carelessly profound way he leads all his classes, while Eleni was as experimental as her Naropa-bound roots, reading and bouncing in accompaniment with a live nyckelharpa performance (essentially a complicated looking Swedish violin).
(Greek Vogue?!) (Eleni reading with the musical accompaniment)
The Dikeou Gallery is also home to a collection of eclectic modern art, which one observes in a maze of small rooms filled with everything from pictures of icebergs to a fully installed belly-of-a-whale landscape. This time, my friends and I happened to get a private tour from two enthusiastic interns, who had taken full advantage of the free keg, cheap wine, and cheese platter offered to all the reading's patrons. Drunk as they were, they still had a lot of insight into all the pieces, which made me look at pieces I have seen many times in a whole new light.
(my friends...not the drunk interns)
Another great thing about readings at the Dikeou Gallery is its location--literally, right in the middle of the 16th Street Mall (16th and California), which means after you get a little culture in, you are already set up for a night on the town in downtown Denver. But this, my friends is a story, for another time, which I like to call PART DEUX.
On Sunday night, my friend Carson got a few free tickets to see Toubab Krewe at the Bluebird Theater, and who am I to say no to a free concert?
We started off across the street from the Bluebird Theater at the Goosetown Tavern, and were happy to find that the entire band were also frequenting this wining and dining at this local establishment t! Carson, who had made some concert posters for this event in his screen printing class, even got a few signed by several band members. Funnily enough, we all happened to be there during the Giants v. 49ers game, and the musicians were so divided in who they were rooting for that they had split up into different rooms of the bar to watch the game.
We headed over in time to catch the end of the second opener (a sick performance by DJ Equal), and we had already danced our butts off by the time Toubab Krewe came on. However, we would proceed to continue our wild dance sesh for the next TWO HOURS, in an impressively long set by the pseudo-jam band. I don't know if they can actually be considered a jam band, but man, during some of those endless songs, I felt like I must be at a Phish concert.
The best part about Toubab Krewe is that their sound is so eclectic and transformative. It is constantly evolving. One minute you feel like you are viewing some folk from the deep South--music a la Old Crow Medicine Show. The next moment, you are swaying around like an acid flashback at an STS9 concert, the pop of electronic beats and dubby sounds ringing in your ears. The next minute you are stomping your feet like a mad African tribal dancer, and in the next song you might be transported to Brazil—sambaing and dreaming of Carnivale.
(image courtesy of Lisa Higginbothom)
We went home tired, sweaty, and happy.
And this, so concludes the spectacle that was my life last weekend.
