Your taste in music

People who like "anything with a good beat really"

What constitutes a good beat exactly? Do you like Joy Division? There are some great beats on Joy Division songs. What? You don't like Joy Division? OK, how about The National? You've never heard of them? You'd like them, their drummer is great. I'll play some right now. What? You don't like them either? African tribal music? Pow-wow music from a reservation? Traditional Korean polyrhythmic drumming? The guys who used to hit drums at Warriors games? No? No? No? No? OK, I get it now. You like The Rolling Stones' Greatest Hits album. True enough, the Stones have great beats but they aren't the only ones. Broaden your horizons and stop trying to look so widely informed. This is the kind of thing John Key would say and that should tell you all you need to know.

People who like every kind of music, "especially Jazz and anything groovy"

People who like every kind of music, especially Jazz and anything groovy, invariably know precisely nothing about Jazz (Kenny G, right?) or anything groovy (Groove Armada, right?). NEVER let them near any kind of publicly-audible sound device.

Anyone who thinks their taste in music is "eclectic" (including us)

Much like bands describing themselves, you have no right to this term. "Eclectic" doesn't mean you like top 40 rap AND top 40 rock AND, just to blow my mind, your parent's copy of Billy Joel's Greatest Hits. It means you dabble, knowledgeably and passionately, in pretty much every genre under the sun. Does your country selection stack up with your classical selection? Your afro-beat with your Americana? Your folk with your funk? Your rap with your roots and your reggae and your rockabilly? Your speed metal with your Scandanavian death metal with your thrash metal with your rap-metal? See what I mean? Your definition of "eclectic" is my definition of "you're a dick".

Beer Loyalty

When Andy worked in hospitality, people, normally middle aged men, would come into the restaurant and declare things like, "Oh sweet, they got Speights and Tui, that's good cos I'm a Speights and Tui man."

Not CD? Not DB? "Nah, I wouldn't drink that shit," they say as though it was comparable to urine, whereas Speights and Tui are the nectar of the Gods. Let me get this straight. You think your generic beer of choice tastes better than another generic beer? Here's a secret. You're an idiot and you have been fooled by marketers. It all tastes like a f**** w****’* c***.

Under a blind test, you wouldn't know the difference between Speights, Tui, Budweiser, DB, CD, VB, XXXX, (s)Hite or motherfucking sewer water! Fact. Go on, try it. See? Not only are you swearing loyalty to something that tastes disgusting, you're operating under the false assumption that it tastes noticeably different to similar products. Chump.

There are two acceptable reasons for drinking cheap beer:
1) It's cheap and you're poor.
2) Sometimes it's so cold you can't taste how bad it is.

If you're drinking cheap beer, you better be doing it for one of the above reasons and you better not be swearing loyalty to a brew of choice!

One Liners

Sometimes at UUJM we come up with things that are so shit we just don't have that much to say about them. This week we're cleaning out the one liner drawer and here's what we found....

People who put photos on Facebook without rotating them correctly
-If I can work out how to do it, you munters can too!

Adults who grab each card as soon as it's dealt when involved in card games
-What are you, twelve?

Asian bread
-It's not a dessert. Why is there sugar in there? Where are the grains? What is this shit?!?!?!

Kings of Leon
-Snore. Snore. Snore. Look at the fans of your fourth album. How do you live with yourselves?

Mispronunciation of pronunciation.
-I appreciate irony but this is just annoying. Say it with me: pro-NUN-see-ay-shun. Not: pro-NOUN-see-ay-shun. Idiots.

Digital correspondence with too many exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!
-OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!! We've met you in real life!!!!!!!!!!!! And!!!!!!!!!!! We know you're not that interesting!!!!!!!!!!!! You're not fooling anyone!!!!!!!!!!!

Studylink

Is there a better example of an organisation with a left hand and a right hand that haven't met? No, if recent events in my life are anything to go by. In the last two days I have received no less than six emails from Studylink, each rendering the others useless through a series of contradictions and repetitions. Hmmmm. To clarify things, I could ring the 0800 number and wait all afternoon to talk to someone who will probably only resubmit my applications for X, Y and Z so I can get another confusing batch of emails next week. Alternatively, I could continue trying unsuccessfully to log on to the website on which I submitted my original applications and was promised new log-in details which never arrived. In the meantime, a sum of money has turned up in my bank account but I have no idea what it's for. I'm happy for this to keep happening but I can't escape the feeling that something drastic will go wrong further down the line. At the time of writing, I suspect Stupidlink have only paid Victoria University for three of my four courses and if I don't take proactive action, I'll find out about that a week before I think I'm graduating.

The Cruddylink system needs a comprehensive overhaul. There is no reason these things should be so confusing and so consistently useless! It's not just me. Muddylink is truly shit. Has anyone ever had a good Studystink experience?

Black Swan may have been overrated, but it ain't shit

Ok, I'll say it. My co-author Andy has gone WAY too far in his demolition of Black Swan. What a ass!**

Andy on point for some of it: the film is definitely overrated. It isn't five-star material by any means. And the "darkness was in you all along" message was obvious from the beginning and unsatisfyingly developed by the end. Yes, the muff-diving was probably included to strike up controversy rather than for 'artistic reasons'. Much of the symbolism was indeed contrived.

But if you use your "brain cells to rub together", it's quite easy to see past this.

Given its obviousness, I didn't even take the black/white rubbish to be the central point of the film. To me it was a convincing and scary portrait of an artistic industry, one where the gap between the public veneer (the art) and the dirty underbelly (the politics) is perhaps greater than any other. As with Aronofsky's other work, the atmosphere created was completely suffocating, and intentionally so, creating an air of inevitable tragedy that is true to the Greek meaning of the word. Aside from the ballet antics, Portman's performance contributed masterfully to this. Throughout I was hoping Nina would take the many outs offered her, but watching the slow subsuming of nervousness by psychosis in Portman's performance was, probably, quite true to real life.

Yes, if all films must do everything well to be any good, then this film sucks. But that's a perfectionist standard, and I took the central message of the film to be: all perfectionists can use a reminder of the potential self-destructiveness of this trait now and then.

Black Swan gets a thumbs up from me.


** My retort was suspended for a while after allegations emerged that Portman danced much less than we were led to believe, but that story is going nowhere conclusive so it's time for me to hit back.

Earth Hour

Shauny, a Black Swan fan, is struggling with the wool that's been pulled over his eyes and that's making it really hard for him to respond to my criticism of that awful movie. Being a good bloke, I thought I'd buy him some time by complaining about something else: Earth Hour.

Earth Hour is the ultimate in token gesture-ism, or, as I saw it called, "slacktivism". Let's all pretend we care about the environment by turning the lights off for one hour every year. In a non-leap year, there are 8760 hours. Most of the people who get right in behind Earth Hour are oblivious to environmental concerns for the other 8759 hours in the year (99.98858%). Pathetic.

What little we save in energy, some of us gain in smugness. I overheard Selena from Wadestown talking to her sister, our good friend, Helena form Seatoun. As an unknowing member of the smug brigade, Selena said this:

"Oh, I did my bit. Did you see the way I turned those lights off? Did you see the way I was on my computer for an extra hour the night before, messaging my 12,098 Facebook friends to tell them to join my Earth Hour group and watch my Earth Hour Youtube video before forwarding the information to their friends so they could spend an hour doing the same? Did you see the way I drove my Hummer down the road to the mall and bought candles so we could have light without using electricity? Did you see how I chopped the tree down and burnt it in my backyard so we could be warm for an hour without the heater? Yeah, I did my bit. Don't no one tell me I didn't! Oh, it breaks my heart to see the Earth being destroyed...."

Ugh. Buy a bike and ride it.

PS: What's possibly even dumber than Earth Hour are the movements to boycott gas stations on certain days. As idiot organisers drive past the gas stations to see if their boycott is working, they're playing right into the hands of the large oil companies they're trying to punish. The only way to trouble gas companies is to stop using gas. Switch to alternate fuel powered vehicles, public transport, cycling or walking. How this isn't obvious to the morons who try this shit every year is beyond me.