The Inappropriate Thesaurus

My Evening with a Seattle Con Artist

2012-02-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

By C.T. Heaney

I had been warned about her ahead of time.

Shortly after I began classes at the University of Washington, just north of Seattle's ship canal, I noticed printouts taped to the sides of lamp-posts, newspaper boxes, and parking kiosks along University Way--the major restaurant/bar avenue immediately west of campus. They shouted "BEWARE!" followed by a long paragraph about a young woman who insisted she had just come from out of town, her car wasn't running, and could anyone help her out with a little money to get back on the road. She's a scammer, the poster asserted, and she prowls the University District constantly, looking for marks. The poster's creator had heard her jawing on a cell phone after a particularly good haul, bragging about the expensive clothing she was planning to buy with it. Surely he'd also been hoodwinked; only revenge would make someone go through this much trouble to publicly shame her. There were dozens of these notices posted up and down the street, and I moved on smiling without much more thought.

Sure enough, I was headed home one weekend evening a few days later, and was approached from across the street by a college-aged young lady. She asked if I could help her with some gas money; she'd moved here only three days ago, lost her wallet, and her car wouldn't start.

"You're the one," I said. "You're her. It's real!"

"What are you talking about," she replied dully. I informed her about the bad press she'd received, though surely she knew already. She kept up face for a few questions, but when I definitively said I wouldn't give her any money, she sighed heavily and moved on.

Several weeks afterward, I left a bar on University Way after midnight, none too sober, and she found me again. She didn't recognize me. "Excuse me, I just got to Seattle, I've been here three days, and my car ran out of gas, so do you think you could help me out?" I was too incoherent to properly interrogate her, but I tried to ask pointed questions about the specifics, which she rebuffed with a constant patter of "What are you talking about"s. She didn't walk away, but presently I did, in search of donuts and slumber.

Two months passed. An acquaintance and I left our regular Tuesday night pub quiz, pleasantly buzzed, and were walking home when a familiar voice called out to us from behind. "Excuse me," it said, and my face lit up as I turned and saw her for yet a third time. Each time I met her, she had essentially the same look. She kept her light brown, wildly curly hair pulled straight back, and wore a smattering of mascara, just enough to sharpen focus on her pale eyes without distracting. She had on flared jeans and an unremarkable top, a pullover or hoodie that hid her figure; in her business, I imagined, seeming sexy could be a liability. Good eye contact (again, an essential in this line of work), and not unpretty, though her teeth were set wide in a gummy smile that didn't flatter her. Ultimately, she was ordinary-looking, resolutely so - someone who would have effortlessly melted into the college backdrop if she needed to.

She was becoming rather a regular character in my life, and I was in an exceptionally good mood; why not run with this for a little while? I waved off my acquaintance, who headed home, and started calling out the huckstress at her own game. I repeated her lines before she had a chance to get them out, and followed with a flurry of fascinated questions. What kind of people did she meet doing it? Was it some sort of human observation project, or just an old-time con? Was she a budding sociologist, probing people's responses to staged deceptions? She blustered for a few minutes, asserting her story again and again, and repeating stone-facedly, as if it were a mantra, "I don't know what you're talking about." But something kept her there. After all, she could have just left, but she doggedly stuck to the script as we walked up University Way and I pressed her on details. Where'd you come from? How long had you been in the city? Where did you live before then? She fired back, and quickly, with the stock answers, but I could tell the repetition was starting to wear her down. I asked, did she grow up in Seattle, or somewhere else in the country? She knew she was losing the battle, and her answers got wilder - she wasn't born here, she was born in Belgium. Oh? So, were you an army baby? Your English is perfect, surely it must have been your first language? "No, actually, my first language was Chinese." At this, she cracked a smile, almost despite herself. I pressed her again, if she'd lived in the city for three days, where had she found a place? "In the northwest." Oh, up by Fauntleroy Way? "Fauntleroy Way is in the southwest!", she retorted, and at this point definitively gave up the ghost. We both knew how unlikely it was that someone who'd spent three days in north Seattle would know where Fauntleroy Way was.

Still, she remained, and started answering my questions - perhaps not honestly, but at least without the patina of bullshit. She wasn't from Belgium, of course, but was a Seattle native, and had lived here most of her life (aside from a short period in Idaho). Her apartment was, indeed, in the northwest of the city - she was vague about exactly where, but from what she hinted, it was probably in Ballard, Crown Hill, or Greenwood. Naturally, she didn't offer her name, but I insisted I'd need some sort of moniker, just for the sake of conversation, so she told me I should just call her "Chevelle". (There wasn't a car of that model near us at the time, and she said she was no fan of the rock band, so I'm at a loss to explain why she chose it). Chevelle claimed to be 22 years old (which looked about right) and had an associate's degree, obtained through a special high-school program which granted her a high school diploma and the degree at age eighteen. She had a day job, a clerical position at an unnamed place that sounded like a Fedex-Kinko's, but seven days a week, she spent her evenings around grocery stores, campus spots, and restaurant strips, hustling the story about just getting into town and running dead out of gas.

We walked up and down University Way in much the same way she would have done in my absence, but Chevelle never told me to get lost. She seemed to relish the attention, and perhaps thought that, eventually, I'd decide the story of her "real life" was interesting enough to merit relinquishing the few dollars that I'd been unwilling to fork over on the basis of the con. Twice she pointedly paused our conversation and asked me for three bucks, for the sake of making her quota for the evening. The second time she did so, she was in the midst of straightening bills against a fat wad of fives and ones, the day's earnings. We had just walked out of Safeway, where she had cashed a roll of quarters and the rest of her accumulated coins into the change machine (somebody, she stated with showman's pride, had handed her his laundry money).

Did people often recognize her? Of course, all the time. She worked the same spots over and over, and became a familiar face to some, but there was enough traffic and turnover to keep the place reliably lucrative, so she saw no reason to quit the area. Did she get yelled at? Sure. Sometimes she'd hear self-righteous tirades from people who'd been suckered before. She didn't like to work past 1:30, because drunk people get angry and rarely give up any dough. Did she fear the cops? No, not in the slightest. We walked by two police cars and she casually scoffed when I asked if she ever experienced trouble with John Q. Law. She said the cops knew her, but what could they do? They had no case. (This is a friendly city to beggars, and what she was doing was, in effect, more of the same; what could they book her for that would stick?) She said she'd been confronted by one woman cop, who told her, "I know what you're doing, and I don't like it," but simply told her to scram.

Chevelle was audacious, in both the positive and negative senses of the word, since she grifted without fear of discovery, prosecution, or retribution, boldly and confidently playing the trick day after day. Occasionally, she bragged smugly, she'd managed to play folks multiple times, after convicing them she'd never met them before. So far as I could tell, she had no compunction about stopping strangers for anything, even as my presence prevented her from completing her immediate task. She asked several passersby for the time and for cigarettes. She waved to a fellow across the street who was a regular panhandler on 45th, remarking that she didn't like to compete in his territory, as a matter of professional courtesy. She even stopped one passing girl to ask if they'd attended the same local middle school. They had, but there was little to say beyond that, and they quickly waved goodbye. Not a good mark, after all.

Chevelle kept to a schedule of sorts. Every Monday, she plied the suburb of Bellevue (she took a city class there on - of all things - self-improvement). She switched things up on other days, but had a list of regular spots: the University Village shopping center, the QFC supermarket in Wallingford, Northgate Mall. I asked, did she ever work the downtown? Never, she replied; she wouldn't work any farther south than lower Queen Anne, just up from the Space Needle. The best money was farther north, in places like Wedgwood and Sand Point. A supermarket parking lot in those neighborhoods, full of wealthy, well-educated, middle-aged, compassionate progressives, was a gold mine. Some nights, so much poured in that she would set multiple quotas for herself; she'd work a block for $100, and then change spots and shoot for $200 at the next spot. She ballparked that the con alone was bringing her as much as $12,800 a month, which would push her into six figures annually. The math of it didn't quite work out, and she was probably embellishing, but if she was pulling in even so little as $200 a night, six days a week, it works out to over $60,000 a year, all tax-free.

What did she do with it all? She bought stuff, of course, but not quite in the way I'd expected. Not drugs, nor booze (she declared she'd quit drinking cold turkey after it got to be a problem). The poster, it turns out, was absolutely right - she told me she was wearing $200 shoes and $200 jeans, and had purchased a considerable wardrobe with her gains. But with a day job, and a 7-day-a-week night beat, did she ever have time to enjoy herself? That wasn't what drove her; what drove her was the game itself. What drove her was working the trick, refining it to make ever more money. "It's a proven fact and statistic," she informed me, that people are more likely to give money to people who look nicer. They hand over nickels to the frowzy homeless; they plunk down twenties to help a clean-cut young woman in a temporary bind. So she kept stylish. She felt she had a knack for fashion, and eventually wanted to go back to school for fashion and business, perhaps when she got too old for the gig, or tired of it. This job, after all, was bringing in a comfortable nest egg, since all she seemed to spend it on was clothing, rent, and transportation. She claimed to have a '96 Benz, with 110,000 miles on it, but the car she had that day (a friend's, I was told) was a sputtering, mid-nineties Crown Vic that reminded me of nothing more than the Peanuts character Pigpen. Her Mercedes wasn't registered in her own name, adding another layer of protection in case somebody decided to follow her and get down her plate numbers.

By midnight, she'd made a call to a friend and arranged to meet up. We walked back to her car, and she asked me once more if I could throw her a few extra dollars for her spent time. For the third time, I smirked and replied, "Are you trying to hustle me?" Perhaps I should have been a bit more magnanimous - after all, we had been talking for almost two hours. As she pulled out her keys, she decided to try one last con, right in front of me, on a young lady jaywalking past the Crown Vic's trunk. "Excuse me, I've been in town for three days and I just need a few dollars because my car ran out of gas...do you think you could help me?" The lady replied, "Sorry, all I've got is my EBT card...", and after fishing in her pockets for a few seconds, she held out her hand. "Here's four cents, sorry...but it's all I can do." Chevelle took the pennies with a curt thanks, climbed into the car, and drove away.

George Carlin's Top 17 Albums

2012-01-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

This list will rank George Carlin's albums in terms of overall quality, with special attention paid to both straight hilarity as well as philosophical pertinence. I chose albums rather than specials for three reasons 1) most of Carlin's albums simply were the audio from his specials [especially on the really important discs]; 2) He has more pre-HBO albums than he has non-album specials; 3) Almost every bit of material from his non-album specials appears somewhere on his albums.

~~~~~

READ THE LIST AT LAUGHSPIN.COM

Seven 'Non-Sexual Pornographers'

2012-01-08T22:21:00.000-08:00

There are some auteurs whose works are – while largely erotica-free – overtly designed to gratify a certain sector of entertainment consumers, and do so with stimulating offerings which “get people off”. These folks can be called non-sexual pornographers.

7) Dan Brown

Target arousees: Religious Skeptics, Conspiracy Theorists

Author of The Davinci Code, Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol, Brown unabashedly shows you what Indiana Jones would have been if there was no divine power in the Arc or the Grail. Those people whose parents had them believing in Santa for way too long get their revenge on sacred institutions with each of these best-sellers.

6) M. Night Shyamalan

Target arousees: Twilight Zone fans.

While Shyamalan would love to be remembered as the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock, the truth is that his canon’s supreme devotion lies with Rod Serling. It's interesting that The Twilight Zone was such a critically acclaimed and popular hit, while Shyamalan’s name alone draws laughs from cinema crowds. Mind-bending alternate-universe mythology seems to have a half life of 15 minutes. Most of Sham’s flicks would make cool half hour TV-shows, but the average moviegoer simply doesn't want to spend 11 bucks for a two-hour fantasy riddle. Still, some T-Zone fanatics find his films un-missable.

5) Michael Bay

Target arousees: Pyromaniacs

Did you ever wonder whether an explosion could play the lead character in a film? Most people don’t. Most people fail to see any human complexity in a ball of flame. This is simply because they’re not using their imagination. In a Michael Bay film, an explosion can be everything. It can be a mushroom cloud symbolizing a tertiary character’s past with psychedelic drugs. It can be an exploding car, symbolizing the looming threat of the technological singularity. It can simply be the spontaneous combustion of a factory, showing us the threat of anti-union de-regulation. If you get your rocks off on massive plumes of flame, Michael Bay’s films probably have posters located on your bedroom ceiling.

4) Clint Eastwood

Target arousee: Clint Eastwood

Remember that movie about the old-fashioned Korean war vet whose humanity shone through to over-come his prejudices as he bad-assedly defended neighborhood families against gang members?

How about the old-fashioned boxing coach whose humanity shone through to over-come his sexism and ageism as he trained a young woman, eventually becoming like a father to her? A father so filled with humanity that he was able to compassionately help her pull the plug after she became paralyzed and life-support bound?

Clint Eastwood’s master plan is to take the best qualities of previous generations and combine them with the best qualities of modern America to demonstrate the ultimate human being: Clint Eastwood. He even made sure to attach his name to Nelson Mandella’s legacy with Invictus. The only reason he didn’t play Nelson Mandella is presumably because he couldn’t feign interest in Rugby.

3) Oliver Stone

Target arousee: Everybody

If you have a particular interest in anything, and Oliver Stone is making a movie about it, congratulations! Because you have basically won the lottery. If you’re a Doors fan, he made the “Doorsiest” movie humanly possible. If you have strong feelings about Vietnam, he made–not necessarily the best, but certainly the “Vietnamiest” war movie ever. 9-11? Oh, he WENT there (twice, if you count “W”). If you think Kennedy’s assassination was a coup, cover-up, conspiracy, or anything other than the work of a disgruntled whack-job, then he made your favorite movie of all time. If Quentin Tarantino is your favorite film-maker, then guess what? Stone had no problem taking an unusable Tarantino script (Natural Born Killers) and forcing it to life, just for the sheer archival of it.

Some people say “nothing is sacred” with Oliver Stone, but the truth is the complete opposite. Nothing is NOT sacred! Everything is--in fact--SO SACRED, that he’s going to make a three hour major studio picture about it. When Oliver Stone’s involved, nothing less will do.

2) Nicholas Sparks

Target arousees: Women

This romance author has plenty of credits to show his unabashed placation of women’s emotions, including Dear John and A Walk to Remember. But his masterwork–The Notebook–voluptuously caresses the prototypical female’s ideal of romance. The Notebook gives girls everything they could possibly ask for out of the very concept of love, transcending it above body, mind, God, matter, and physics.

1) Quentin Tarantino

Target arousees: Revenge Fantasizers, 70′s Pop-Culture Nostalgics, Foot Fetishists, Wannabe Bad-Asses.

Quentin Tarantino is by far the most gratuitous film-maker on the planet. If you’ve daydreamed about it on the last day of school before summer vacation, he’s filmed it. Jewish-American soldiers torturing and killing Nazis by the dozen? Check. Chicks beating up a creepy serial-killer after powning him in a car-chase? Check. Uma Thurman’s feet for such an enduring close-up that Kill Bill had to be released in two parts? Check.

There’s almost no moment in any Tarantino film that doesn’t satiate some type of young man’s brain saying, “yo, how bad-ass would THIS be…” Hell, his creation of Jules in Pulp Fiction more or less invented the modern bad-ass.

Do you think it’d be cool if two mortal enemies found a common ground in killing a pair of redneck rapists? Or if stylish criminals wore suits and maintained a code of ethics even while breaking the law? Tarantino’s catalog is filled with the greatest (and most) non-sexual money-shots in film history.

Six Great Commercials From My Childhood

2012-01-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

By C.T. Heaney

Whatchamacallit

Probably the finest advertising jingle I've ever heard in terms of musical craftsmanship. It's the best song by the Bangles, the Go-Gos, Roxette, the B-52's, and Deee-Lite, all at the same time.

Reese's Pieces

Another great jingle, with its super-German, super-'80s nerdpop feel (although, for at least a decade, the song played in my head at double speed - "chess piecescenterpiecesmantelpiecesreesespieces" all in rapid-fire monotone).

Bubble Tape

This commercial is like Peter Gabriel's video for "Sledgehammer", in that both share the same video-collage style, but also in that no reasonable human being with any basic understanding of the art of short-form video entertainment can call them anything but sheer masterpieces.

Diet Coke Break

For as long as I can remember, whenever it has been 11:30 (AM or PM), I have referred to the time as "Diet Coke break". I do this despite the fact that I neither find construction workers sexually attractive nor drink Diet Coke, which I think tastes like bacon-caramel seawater.

Ragu Chicken Tonight

I don't know if we have a word for "retarded and insanely catchy at the same time" in the lexicon yet, but we need one. In addition to this and many other commercials, the word could be used to describe songs such as "My Humps", "Drop It Like It's Hot", and "Because I Got High". Also, did anyone ever eat this? It looks like it might have been delicious.

Weaver Chicken

This one is at least as catchtarded as the "Chicken Tonight" commercial, and far more annoying, but the phrases "elbows off the table", "take small bites", and "chew it right" inevitably jump forth from the recesses of my mental archives at any point when table manners are discussed. The tune has a Weird Al/Dr. Demento flavor to it that I think is rather more adventurous than most thirty-second jingles.

On "The Death Of Pretty"

2011-12-31T14:37:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting article from the National Catholic register on the Death of Pretty.

I would agree that the worst thing to happen to women's self-identity issues is the rise of hotness. Although I disagree with their approval that a pop starlet of the 60's would have done a better job to project outer ideals that aren't true to her inner life--this is simply an attempt to glorify phoniness.

But the big problem facing women is that for some reason they see the need to have their identities sexualized. This is due in large part--no doubt--to the behavior of men. Still, I find women responsible--just as men--to rise above their physicality in order to offer something to society apart from their appearance. One's value as a person should come from one's compassion, intelligence, originality and confidence. I would urge young girls and women not to crave the wrong kind of attention from males--a behavioral pattern that probably has its roots in good parenting. If you didn't receive good parenting, it's unfair but you need to parent yourself. And I would urge males to ignore the Megan Foxes of the world. Pure shapeliness is laughably common, and its glorification is horrendously un-evolved. You should seek more out of your sex symbols like philanthropy, an education, and a rarer set of graces unique to your own social palate. I know that deep down we're all animals, but we're certainly gonna fucking stay that way if we just keep whipping it out for any mindless, hip-swiveling hourglass that shows up on our radar.

Fox News: "What if Tebow Were Muslim?"

2011-12-10T17:05:00.000-08:00

Jenifer Floyd Engel says, "If Tim Tebow were a muslim, the media would not tolerate mockery."

Why can we mock a Christian, when it would cause outrage to mock a Muslim?
Why are Christians always facing persecution?
Why is it okay to have a war on Christmas?
Why is it okay for black people to use the "N"-word but not us?

These are the general types of questions that are central to Fox News' and right-wing talk radio's programming. They say, "This country was FOUNDED on Christrian values." This is true! So why is it okay to mock Christianity? Why is it okay for people to mock the dominant institutions in society?

Let's pretend this country is a highschool. You're in class. Let's say a special-needs student walks into the classroom and falls on his face. Later, a nerdy mathlete without many friends walks into the classroom and falls on this face. Finally, the quarterback of the football teams walks in after banging a cheerleader in the bathroom; he makes fun of the gay kid, then he falls on his face.

Which kid is it the most okay for you to laugh at?

Now let's look at our country. You have Christians, Muslims and Jews. Which student was the Christian? Which student was the nerd? Which was the special-needs student?

Laughter is natural, but the artifice of satire exists to neutralize those of a higher stature. Comedian Gary Gulman recently talked about the trend in comedy that he doesn't like where standups are making fun of the homeless. He says, "That's really not what comedy's about. Comedy probably started with poor people making fun of the royalty in order to make life easier."

Comedian Todd Glass said it best on the Comedy and Everything Else podcast:
"White people say, 'Why can THEY use the "N"-word and we can't?'
...BECAUSE YOU DON'T FUCKING GET TO, ALRIGHT!!!"

I know Christians feel persecuted. We all do. Most of us, by you. Just wait it out. At some point you'll realize that your churches aren't being taxed and your scriptures are still influencing public policy; you'll remember how internationally popular you are and how historically oppressive you've been and you'll agree that a little harmless Tebowing really aint all that bad.

Why You Can't Actually Vote For Ron Paul

2011-12-05T16:12:00.001-08:00

As you know, I love Ron Paul. I've been supporting him vocally and I'm about to file to switch parties so that I can vote for him in the primary. However, I don't think I would vote for him in the general election, and I don't think you should either.

Backing up... There are two ways you can lean in politics. Right or left. Right is a vote for philosophy, left is a vote for strategy. If you vote right-wing, you believe that you should not be required to help others. And there's nothing wrong with this. It's a point of view, and one that I don't necessarily disagree with, because "should" is generally an indicator of emotionally-driven human scaffolding. However, it is a somewhat somber reflection on the big picture of all reality, one that I wonder how many right-wingers really digest.

If you vote left, you're admitting that you have a responsibility to something greater than yourself, and this vote is part of your strategy for realizing that responsibility.

Anyone who thinks that a right-wing vote is strategically sound for taking care of things greater than yourself has some real reckoning to do. I'm not saying a small-gov system can't create jobs, it can. But jobs are a by-product of its primary function: to create wealth. But for whom? Social Darwinism is exactly that, a rise to the top of the best, and a fall by the wayside of the rest. Left-wing policy-- while doomed to inefficiency and disadvantaged by the nature of incentives--is a function of fairness. "Life ain't fair, kid!" will always be true, but the left wants to transcend that axiom, or at least make it slightly less true.

Both sides of the aisle are completely legitimate points of view. Right wing perhaps more legitimate, since it's based on nature, but part of human faith means attempting to rise up above the beasts.

[For the record, given the current socio-economic situation, I'm convinced that the absolute worst thing for the country right now is fiscal centrism. Centrism is fine as a general philosophy, but during times of crises, it's a hideous strategy. The way out of the quick-sand is gonna lie at either one extreme point or another, but not right in the middle.]

But I digress.

I'm a big fan of Ron Paul's for a lot of reasons. He's the most critical-thinking-friendly conservative in politics today. I tend to have a big problem with people who legislate based on religion or traditional values. Don't get me wrong, religion and traditional values are not bad things, but when they inform public policy, it usually becomes an irreconcilable breakdown of consistency and logic. Ron Paul is the most legitimate and pure right-winger I've ever known, and his principles are beyond reproach.

Here's why you can't vote for Ron Paul. He's actually too principled. He wants to get rid of the Patriot Act. I know it's fun to hate on the Patriot Act as a symbol of Bush and Cheyney going power crazy, but the Patriot Act is important. Ron Paul believes in that Benjamin Franklin saying. "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." [Doesn't that sound just a tiny bit Nazi? It basically means, "If you find survival more important that the general idea of freedom, you don't deserve to live." And by the way, it implies that "If you don't agree with me, you don't deserve to live!"]

This is a dangerous message, and I can appreciate why it was important during the late 1700's. They needed to rally up men and make them feel like pussies if they didn't fight the Brits. But here's the problem with this concept. Ron Paul is applying all the implications of this message to the utmost extreme, he's being a fundamentalist.

In 1776, colonial life was probably a pain in the ass. Winters were harsh, medicine wasn't very advanced, the Brits were forcing you to let soldiers live in your home. Life didn't have the variety that it has today, there was literally less to lose by putting freedom before physical safety. But today, we have iPhones, The Wire on DVD, NFL Football, the internet, Quizno's Toasted Subs, oral sex is considered legit, every style of beer is available, Strange Mercy by St. Vincent... There's a LOT of stuff elevating the daily process of living. And all they're asking us to do is let them make sure we don't have a bomb in our underwear when we board a plane. Or, let some faceless bureaucrat who we'll never meet catalog the websites we've visited. Small sacrifices so that some highly skilled people can help prevent a terrorist from afflicting us with premature non-existence.

The idea that privacy--which I love, by the way... I don't want you to get the wrong idea, there's almost nothing better than when nobody knows what you're up to--is more important, or more American, than not-dying, is an alarming concept. Especially when you consider the fact that pure freedom is a tricky thing! I never voted for a two-party system! It was thrust upon me like a slave-driver's pike! But I make exceptions because it lets me enjoy lots of stuff that intensifies life way more than an unmanageable fight for possibly mis-informed ideals. If you are truly against the Patriot Act--and I don't mean hating the fact that we need it, or hating what it represents... If you TRULY disagree with the Patriot Act, what you're saying is "I'd rather die than let a TSA agent feel my coin-purse." Which seems potentially hypocritical, because most 40 year old men would rather let some doctor poke them in the prostate than get cancer. Is a colonoscopy freedom? It's true you have a choice not to go, but when the symbolism is stripped away, it seems much clearer which is the lesser of two evils.

Don't get me wrong, you probably won't die on the plane even without preemptive gropeage. [Or, you might die even with it.] But really, the Patriot Act--on a basic philosophical level--is a fulcrum between death and discomfort. I understand the attractiveness of principles, but fundamentalism of any stripe is a big problem.

When you see how inflexible Paul is on this stuff, you begin to see that--while he'd be a guaranteed bullshit-free president, you'd better be willing to go the whole distance. You have to ask yourself which is more pleasing: A virtually un-corruptable world leader? Or some politician who will fluff on his promises when he realizes that the real-time consequences of his actions are more important than his approval rating.

Oh, and you also have to figure out whether your a left-winger or a right-winger. I'm still working that one out.

Ron Paul & Tebow Mania

2011-12-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

"American culture is nothing more than a pastiche of fixations. We are obsessed with health. We are obsessed with pleasure. We are obsessed with speed. We are obsessed with efficiency. In simplest terms, we are obsessed by the desire to accelerate every element of our existence in a futile attempt to experience as much life as we can in the shortest possible time. We have all entered a race to devour the largest volume of gratification before it kills us."- Chuck Klosterman

I started watching Mad Men this year. On it's own there was nothing about the show that drew me towards it. Originally, whenever I'd flipped through channels and settled on it for five minutes, all I saw was a sharp dressed dude smokin' a pack of whiskeys and staring into the middle-distance. Based on this, Mad Men would have been a cool painting or maybe a TV screen-saver. But I didn't really see the need to invest myself in the show. However, I was keenly aware of the congregation from which I was missing out. In addition to absurdly high-praise reviews, the percentage of conversations I could join-in at a cocktail party were shrinking at an alarming rate. Hell, some of those cocktail parties were "Mad Men"-themed, meaning we'd wear swanky clothes and drink Old Fashions. I didn't NOT want to watch it, but I wasn't hooked on it, and it took almost the entire first season for me to get hooked on it. Still, I forced myself to ingest hour-long sessions of the moderately enjoyable show. I didn't hate it, but I mostly doing my cultural home-work--hoping I'd eventually get hooked (which, I did)--so that I could take part in one of my favorite things in which to participate: mass hysteria.

Cut to Tim Tebow and Ron Paul. Tebow is my sports hero, for an unlikely set of reasons. I love Ron Paul, and I'm fixated on him. I support him more than I've supported any politician. I find him to be so scarey important that I don't even know if I could vote for him, given the chance. [For two reasons: 1) to do so would be to submit to a reality that I find uncomfortable and 2) because I don't know how much of his politics actually I agree with. I probably would vote for him, but it would be a fucking thrilling moment, pulling back that lever.]

To explain why I love these men, I'd like to refer to independent film-maker Hal Hartly's best-known anti-hero, Henry Fool. In this excerpt, Henry explains the book he's writing--his "Confession"--to Simon Grim, a simple garbage-man he just met.

"The details of my exploits are merely a pretext for a far more expansive consideration of general truths.

What is this? It's a philosophy. A poetics. A politics, if you will. A literature of protest. A novel of ideas. A pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. It is in the end whatever the hell I want it to be. And when I'm through with it it's gonna blow a hole this wide straight through the world's idea of itself...

They're throwing bottles at your house.

Come on, let's go break their arms."

Mad Men, and shows like it (you know, slow-moving, character driven cable-dramas) really challenge an audience's attention span. They dare you to sit down and get sucked in. They have the pacing of live theatre or independent film, execpt maybe slower, since a narrative arc is spread out over several seasons. Really, they have the pacing of novels. This style of creativity does not make for traditionally pleasing American television. But these shows succeed. There are a few things helping them out. For starters, commercials are so much less a part of television viewing than they'd ever been. Between DVR, whole seasons on DVD, Netflix on your tv set, an American can sit down after work and experience the leisure of a two-hour movie within a tight forty-five minutes--and he can't wait for the sequel!

Are these shows truly genius? Or would we gravitate towards any moderately unique serial drama that's afforded with care and craft just north of a daytime soap? It seems to me that all a TV show needs to do is make you crave the next episode--hence the wild success of seasons one and two of Weeds.

[This is not meant to be a diss on Mad Men and Breaking Bad (the latter of which I have never seen as of this writing, but it's luxurious and telling how permeable the zeitgeist has become). I don't think that Mad Man is especially genius, even though I love it. There are plenty of episodes that meander into uninteresting cul-de-sacs for dredgeful periods of time, never to be revisited (as of the end of season 4). But I still enjoy the show for it's characters, who I've spent a lot of time with. And so have most of my friends.]

What does this have to do with Tebow Mania? Well, for starters, sitting through these hour-long cable dramas is not unlike watching a Bronco's game with Tebow under center. It's a varyingly mundane experience with an elevated third act (or fourth, if you will).

If you had shown an average episode--maybe even two episodes--of Mad Men (or, I'm guessing, Breaking Bad) to executives ten years ago, I really doubt that the zoo-like novelty of the inappropriate early sixties would have been compelling enough for them to order a season. Hell, I wonder if even The Wire would have appealed to pre-Soprano's execs. The Sopranos greased the wheels of character-based cable dramas with the advantage of the Mafia context--something that America (for some reason) will never get enough of.

Don't get me wrong, the average bulk of a Mad Men episode is not nearly as bad as the bulk of Tim Tebow's playing time (few things are). Nor is the final five minutes of any Mad Men episodes remotely as compelling as a Tebow playing from behind in the forth quarter. But both of these entities are telling us something important: they're changing the necessary ingredients to generate success, and changing the necessary ingredients for mass hysteria. All of the sudden you don't need accuracy to be a winning quarterback, and you don't need melodrama or violence for high-rated television narrative.

Enter Ron Paul. Ron Paul is changing the necessary ingredients for political success. [And even though he's not currently beating Romney in the polls, you'd have to be pretty ignorant to claim that what he's having isn't some type of success.] What USED TO BE required for political success is: people had to agree with your policies. Ron Paul has a set of policies that can't possibly be identical to that of any single other American. He's an basically a constitutional anarchist who believes the right to property is the most important thing in the world, possibly the only important thing. I exaggerate (only slightly) to reflect what an exaggerated version of a non-politician he is. He's a Christian who is pro-life for non-religious reasons (in fact, I've never heard him attempt to impose his spirituality on national policy, which is more important than I can ever explain). He doesn't care about mindless flag-waving and his love of proto-America is not related to being old fashioned or traditional. He lauds proto-America because he's a bizarre type of progressive. He's the most challenging political figure of any relevance to exist during my relatively short tenure as a registered voter. And challenges are important for any system so that illumination and growth can occur.

At this point I have to admit that my love for these two men goes beyond their sheer unconventionality. The American in me loves that these men have become cultural fixations. There's a great youtube video of Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless tearing each other to shreds about their opposing views on Tebow for almost ten minutes. You would think there isn't that much to say about Tebow. He's a poor quarterback with no fundamental skills but tremendous athleticism, ability to perform in the clutch, and he's inspirational to his teammates. Plus, his flamboyant spirituality makes him a polarizing figure, which draws the media to him and his franchise. That should be about it. But people are losing their minds over this guy! He's dismantling the importance of classical traits which hundreds of thousands hold dear. He's simultaneously entropy and expansion. I'm not a sadist, I don't want people to suffer from the breakdown of their values. I just want our preconceptions to be malleable and for people to realize there's a difference between fact and truth.

So that's why I love these mad men. It's not just because they're extremely unique living challenges that people have to deal with, and not just because they stir up a craze of mass hysteria--or mania, if you will. It's the combinations of both which intensify our culture's pastiche of fixations and suitably increase my experience of living.

Tonight's the night, I'm gonna take it to the limit. / I live all of my years in a single minute. -Foreigner

~~~~

[There are actually two interesting Klosterman articles which deal with some of these topics, a Grantland article about the new cable super-dramas and an essay from Eating the Dinosaur about the conservative/progressive dichotomy of pro-football.]

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS: Norm MacDonald on Children and Stendahl Syndrome

2011-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

From FITZDOG RADIO (with Greg Fitzsimmons)

Norm: Stendahl showed art at an art gallery in the 16 century, and he had all the greatest art of Europe. People would come in, and sometimes they would suffer what later would become known as Stendahl Syndrome. The art would overwhelm them and they would actually break down and squeal with hysteria and then cry, and then go back and forth... just from the beauty of the art.

[Stendahl Syndrome] doesn't have to be art, it can be just that you're so sensitive to the world that you're constantly heartbroken, or constantly the opposite. But children have that... Children squeal with delight one moment, and they're crying the next. They feel terror... we can't feel the terror of a child, even though our terrors are real. But if we ruminate on death, we have these intellectual layers that have to get broken through. A child is much more terrified by a blanket hanging over a bed-stand that looks like a monster. And it's real! And that's what I love about children, they're pure and they're real, and when I saw em at the pre-school, they were all different... When I go to see children, it's the most lovely thing because they're all beautiful and they're all different, and then they grow up and everybody's the fuckin' same...

Greg: You can see some of the art of my daughter on the wall. That's a self portrait up there! There's no fear.

Norm: There's no ambition, there's no self-consiousness in that. It's beautiful.

Greg: We'll sit across from each other and we'll do this thing where we do portraits of each other at the same time. And mine are always correct.. in the angular part of her nose... and hers... they almost make me see myself in a different way when I see them.

Norm: Yours are facts and hers are truth.

Greg Proops on Abstract Art

2011-11-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

"Reasonable application? Well what does any art have as reasonable application other than to lift our moribund, banana-slug-like souls off the floor of the fucking disgusting, desicated, mushroom-filled forest and at once take us into flight over the unbelievable periwinkle clouds that harbor and harken the summit of all our expectations and desires? What other purpose has art than to enoble us and to make us forget for two seconds that Dick Cheyney has 6.6 billion dollars of my money!"

Six Outstanding Alternative Rock Performances on Letterman

2011-11-04T06:29:00.000-07:00

Gogol Bordello -- Wanderlust King
"Now all them jokers kept around just like scarecrows in hometowm, watch them traveling from screen to screen, but I'm a wonderlust king!"

~~~~

TV on the Radio -- Young Liars
"Voice string trombone pull me forward onward to the sea. Take my picture, soon all I will be is my disease."

~~~~

St. Vincent -- Marrow
"Muscle connects to the bone. Bone to the ire and the marrow. I wish I had a gentle mind, and a spine made of iron."

~~~~

My Morning Jacket -- Gideon
"Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young. Who are you? What have you become?"

~~~~

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros -- Home
"And in the sticks we’re running free, like it’s only you and me.
Geez, you’re something to see!"

~~~~

Arcade Fire -- Rebellion (lies)
"People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya. Come on baby in our dreams, we can live on misbehavior."

Chuck Klosterman's Nostalgia Crisis

2011-10-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

In this Grantland essay, Klosterman does some linguistic interior design on the concept of nostalgia, and what it means for (in specific) pop music. As usual, there are a lot of really perceptive things Klosterman touches on in this extensive examination, as well as a few conclusions he could have asserted just a tad further.

The central reason most smart people (and certainly most critics) tend to disparage nostalgia is obvious: It's an uncritical form of artistic appreciation. If you unconditionally love something from your own past, it might just mean you love that period of your own life. In other words, you're not really hearing "Baby Got Back." What you're hearing is a song that reminds you of a time when you were happy, and you've unconsciously conflated that positive memory with any music connected to the recollection. You can't separate the merit of a song from the time when you originally experienced it. [The counter to this argument would be that this seamless integration is arguably the most transcendent thing any piece of art can accomplish.]

Right away Klosterman is hot on the trail of pointing out that art is nothing until it is ingrained in people's lives (or, it is less and less anything until it becomes more and more ingrained in their lives). Therefore, if a song on the radio didn't--for example--enhance my experience of driving to the shore with my best friends, then it might not be much of anything to me. It obviously still exists if I have never heard it (as do most of the greatest and worst songs of all time), but for the purpose of discussing the role of art in people's lives, the only way we could have an meaningful objective critique is if we all led the same lives. If "Baby Got Back" had--for one reason or another--not improved the subjective experience of driving down to the shore, then either a) a different song would have or b) driving to the shore might have been less fun.

Or c) the process of driving to the shore would have enhanced the process of hearing "Baby Got Back".

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes to mind, an over-simplification of which asserts: to observe something is to alter it. This maxim, originally applied to sub-atomic measurements--and usually in the sense that the properties of an object deteriorate upon close inspection, much like OJ Simpson's "police-contamination of the murder-scene" defense--can be called to mind for a number of various social phenomena as well as the evaluation of art. However, as opposed to sub-atomic particles, super-atomic painting, films or sets of sonic vibrations can undergo the opposite effect of degradation upon evaluation. In fact, to observe a work of art is to raise it up to the level of an interaction.

I.E. if a buzzard scratches markings onto the side of a tree bark, and these markings--to a visiting extra-terrestrial--read, "Jim-Fran's Sandwich Place", then--perhaps accidentally--the buzzards have communicated with the UFO (quite inaccurately, in all likelihood, but regardless). But let's say the UFO never visits. The scratchings aren't, essentially, anything. They exist, and are potentially a message to be reckoned with, but no evaluation and thus no elevation has occurred. They call to mind a Jefferson nickel sealed away in an underground, decommissioned NYC transit sub-station since 1938.

The act of listening to a song may or may not change your life, but it does change the song. It changes it from a series of vibrations, to a song.

This is one of the big problems with academics, they want works of art to be judged entirely on their own merits. But art is a relationship, it doesn't have intrinsic merits in a vacuum. Without the attached experience of living--or, more pertinently, without being ingrained into the larger process of experiencing--Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart have no merit. It's a tad awkward to see how this supposedly great music is becoming less and less relevant while "garbage" like Rebecca Black and Justin Bieber becomes more and more relevant.

Another very major point that Klosterman grazes by is the importance of repetition. Songs that we simply heard allot sound better by virtue of their familiarity.

You could do this right now, with any song you find remotely okay. Pick a random, unpopular song from your iTunes and play it twice a day for the next six months; in 10 years, I guarantee hearing that song again will make you feel incredible, and it won't have anything to do with a longing for whatever your life is like at this very moment. In fact, let's all do this together: Everyone reading this essay should download the song "White Rune" by Iceage and play it every morning and every night until the NCAA basketball tournament starts. Then we'll reconvene in 2021 and see how we feel about things

I already bored you about how pop music is designed to "hook" you in with a sense of instant familiarity, as opposed to cinema and visual art's attempt to challenge your eyes with expansive adventure. This is a simple product of biological evolution. The ears were used for defense while the eyes were used for advancement. The SOUND of something unknown = danger. The SIGHT of something unknown = new food supply. The repetitive rhythms of tribal drumming were soothing simply by virtue of it's repetition. The ear wants to already be familiar with things, which is why prog-rock (or otherwise unpredictable) music is often said to have a "cinematic" quality. It's also why the very best pop songs are those three minute tracks that make you nostalgic for when you first hear the chorus 40 seconds ago. I think Klosterman's IceAge hypothesis is right on, and I think a lot of critics would be alarmed to find what tracks they could hypnotize themselves into enjoying, if they really wanted to.

Finally, one of the big things that Klosterman forgets to do (as do most critics, including myself) is to point out the difference between art and entertainment. Most of the instances that he uses the word "art", he should be using the word "entertainment". There's a very distinguishable difference which still manifests subjectively, but our lives are similar enough in a lot of important ways that we can allow communicatively meaningful over-generalizations to streamline our essays:

Art is a rendered craft which changes your trajectory, so to speak.

Entertainment is a rendered craft which keeps you on your present course.

If I love a song because of how it "fit into" the soundtrack of my childhood = this is an experience of entertainment.

If I love a song because of how it "shaped" parts of my life (i.e. Pearl Jam's "Glorified G" got me interested in gun-control reform or "In My Tree" got me interested in the drums) = this is an artistic experience.

I like that Klosterman's posits that the debate about nostalgia will eventually become irrelevant due to the internet. But if I could use the art v. entertainment concept to inject some perspective into the debate on Nostalgia, I would do so thusly:

If a nostalgic love for a song had merely an aesthetic feeling, then this is entertainment. If it had a narrative effect, then this is art.

If I love "Fire Water Burn" because it reminded me of when we sat at the lunch-table singing "The Roof.. The Roof.. The Roof is on Fire!": this is entertainment.

If I love "Fire Water Burn" because it got me thinking about burning down the post-office, and discussing this with a counselor led to greater realizations about the value of socialized postal systems: this (perhaps, sadly) is art.

Most of us will agree that art is more important than entertainment. Even if "Fire Water Burn" actually led someone to burn down a post-office, in this instance, it may not be as GOOD, but it is still more IMPORTANT.

Bryan Cranston on WTF with Marc Maron

2011-10-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

"I think any good dramatic writing has a nice dose of levity. And conversely, any good comedy has some sincerity to it, and some pathos. It gives the audience a chance to catch their breath and to see that these characters and this plot is rooted in something real, which makes it more important."

Fans of Breaking Bad will be remiss not to check out this episode of WTF with Marc Maron.

Tsunami Video

2011-10-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Captured from the in-dash camera of a delivery driver during the March 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Pearl Jam - Twenty

2011-10-13T09:51:00.000-07:00

Cameron Crowe’s Twenty is a living scrapbook dedicated to America’s most…. something… rock band. I don’t know exactly what that adjective is, but Pearl Jam is definitely worthy of a superlative. And despite his gushing affection for the band, Crowe doesn’t make any statements in regard to Pearl Jam’s ultimate pedestal. He simply shows us the band’s history and humanity.

It’s easy to forget exactly how stupid these guys looked back in 1990 (and I mean that in the most loving way possible). Vedder was 100% genuine when he screamed “Delight, delight in our youth!” I wonder if today we aren’t too cynical to boost a band like this up to superstardom. I suspect not, when I hear how un-self-aware the music is that mainstream rock kids are still listening to these days. The fact that Pearl Jam matured with their fans definitely did wonders for their longevity, but it was a tad awkward watching the footage of Eddie climbing up on the rafters during the solos with little regard for gravity—or being difficult during interviews and award shows with that dialed-up intense glare.

It’s about as awkward as watching a video of yourself being creative when you were a kid.

[read the rest at Paste Magazine]

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

Scientists dedicate themselves to the least dramatic line of work in order to give us the most dramatic improvements on--and understanding of--the experience of living. I've always admired scientists, and not just because I could never do the kind of book-learning required to navigate the extremities of the physical world. Unlike a great dramatist, painter or composer, a scientist is not (generally) afforded the wonderful curvaceousness of subjective experience. While a literary or cinematic expression can fuel the psyche through unique emotional experiences--including it's flaws, the notes it doesn't play, or the completely individual interpretation of its qualities by the audience--Science achieves catharsis only upon perfect success based on the parameters of our physical world. And when it does, it changes our lives; it changes history.

Steve Jobs was a special type of scientist. He was an artist. While he didn't personally discover the physical advances of semiconduction, he took on the task of arranging scientific frontiers in order to arrange the future. And unlike most men of science, his advances didn't just help explain our physical world, they helped explain our emotional world.

There's an odd fixation that Jobs has always had in regards to the aesthetics of calligraphy. You can hear about it in a good number of his interviews, the most pointed of which were in a 1996 documentary and his unforgettable Stanford commencement speech in 2005. The idea that different combinations of letters should have varying amounts of space between them is very important to Jobs. He didn't want the sterile, robotic experience of decoding lines of data into discernible text, he wanted the aesthetically pleasing experience of reading a book. Technology was art to him and he wanted it be about humanity rather than machines.

The fact that art and science were a singular codisciplinary pursuit for Jobs is even further evidenced by his purchase of the Graphics Group, a digital rendering lab which would go on to become the greatest animated film studio of all time, Pixar. The very purpose of the Graphics Group was to innovate the technology of turning zeros and ones into moving images. Today it teaches kids to follow their hearts, be adventurous, never give up, light the way forward for others, and to generally be amazing.

Jobs wasn't a saint; he was a competitive, cocky, snarky ass at times, and it's hard to tell if "I want to leave a dent in the universe" is true philanthropy or megalomaniacal narcissism. It doesn't matter much to me but I think in a hundred years or so, the true scope of his dent will be more accurately realized--much the way it's hard to contextualize the size of a massive crater while you're standing in the middle of it. It's hard to recall back to a time when the computers in the home were all code and didn't have images to click on, which is probably because--thanks to Jobs--that time never really existed. And the fact that computers hijacked cellphones, cellphones hijacked walkmans, truly moving works of inspiration hijacked animation, iTunes hijacked the record industry, podcasting hijacked talk radio and Mac let Windows keep the faceless cubicles while re-capturing their preferred clientele--the spirits of creativity--all these dominations have taken place in the heart of society: it's day to day culture.

I hope it fits my passion for hyperbole to say this, but I worry it might not... Steve Jobs has done more to shape the products of arts and science into our modern landscape than anyone else ever.

And if you plan on disagreeing, make sure you log off and log back on in DOS mode first...

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" -Jobs to then Pepsi-Cola vice president John Sculley

Moneyball

2011-10-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

Capote director Bennett Miller helms this semi-nonfictional adaptation of Michael Lewis' 2003 book of the same name, written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List). Right off the bat, this doesn't sound like a very sportsy movie, which is fine with me, because Moneyball is not as much about baseball as it is about freeing oneself from traditional values in order to achieve goals more effectively. Lewis' book is supposedly the Freakonomics of baseball (and if you haven't yet read Freakonomics and its sequel, Superfreakonomics, you're wasting your life one day at a time). How often have we done things a certain way simply because that's the way they've always been done? Or because their merits seem self-evident?

Welcome to the world of Moneyball, where the highlight reel is meaningless, and bottom-line runs per game is the real glory. Traditional sports heroes are replaced by undervalued, purely utilitarian players.

[read the rest at LunchbreakBlog.com]

PRIMUS: Green Naugahyde

2011-09-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

There’s a sick and twisted joy that comes in reviewing any Primus album, either in print or on bar-stool, which is rooted in the sub-classificatory nodules of the pre-frontal cortex. Depending on your familiarity level with the band, you may or may not know that every Primus album has a--never strict, but always recurring--sub-genre. These sub-genres are often masked by the intensity of the band’s sinister-silly personality. But the unique sub-personalities of each effort are not unlike strata in the seven-layer burrito on which Winona’s Big Brown Beaver enjoys feasting.

Green Naugahyde is their eighth album (if, like me, you count 2003’s dense half hour of Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People EP as being substantial enough to warrant "album" status... but we’ll downgrade 1989’s live Suck On This to a "compilation", for dissection convenience). And if all seven of their previous studio works represent a layer in Winona’s castor Taco-Bell repast, then it’s appropriate to say that Green Naugahyde takes a big bite out of all of 'em. Real quickly, let’s summarize the previous layers, so that we might glean a better understanding of where the material on Green Naugahyde is coming from:

Frizzle Fry: It truly gave them their “Funk-Metal” distinction for which they would go on to be remembered as, even when the metal aspect eased down a bit.

Sailing the Seas of Cheese: This was their “Classic Rock” album, if it can be even joked that Claypool and the boys ever dipped their toes into classic rock structure. It contains, arguably, their most memorable songs.

Pork Soda: It was Primus’ “Primus” album. The most true to their inner and outer personalities, Pork Soda is their id, their quintessence. It may sound like a cop-out to assign an eponymous sub-genre, but imagine another dimension where Primus is as influential as the Beatles... Pork Soda would be their pop masterpiece.

Tales from the Punchbowl: It’s their art-groove, “Jam Band” album. And, as is common with the best jam-bands, the hits are grand-slams and the misses are Darfur.

The Brown Album: Their “Prison Yard Bluegrass” disk; up-tempo story-songs sounding like they were written next to a barrel-fire and recorded under an over-pass. It represents the more playful side of Primus.

Antipop: Aggressive, vocally choral pop-Metal. (Arguably their least listenable disk, despite finishing strong with two of their very finest tracks).

Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: Their “Space-Prog” exploration. [For the record, the material on Act Like People is one of the main reasons I presume that Les Claypool could have been one of the founding members of The Residents. He would have been 11 years old at the time of their first album, but that doesn’t sound entirely impossible, correct?]

Okay so all these prior works are the minerals in Green Naugahyde’s multi-vitamin. Let’s go through song by song to see how big a dose everything gets.

1) "Prelude to a Crawl" (1:19)

It might have been Les Claypool himself who eventually taught critics that indulgence is not a four letter word. Atmosphere-setting interludes are part of the Primus experiences, and what good would the cultural landscape be if our prodigious musicians didn’t spend at least a certain amount of time simply time dicking around. This moody minute definitely serves a purpose--even if it’s only for Claypool to share his bass tune-up because he sees himself as a one-man orchestra.

2) "Hennepin Crawler" (3:59)

An ode to a giant metal (presumably cumbersome) pedal-powered car (developed by California arts collective Krank Boom Clank), which up until recently the boys were seen riding in a goofy photo on the home page of Primusville.com. "Hennepin Crawler" already sounds like a more successful version of everything they tried for on Antipop. It’s up-beat, agressive and oddly catchy despite its darkly psyche-ska feel.

[Psyche-ska is a phrase you’ll hear a lot in this review, or “Pskachedelic”, if you will. You may also read about Ska-Opera, or “Skopera”. And no, you can’t have a refund on the Internet.]

Hennepin Crawler’s 7-Layer Ratings: (out of 7 $)
Frizzle Fry: $$ (More for drumming than anything else)
Sailing the Seas: $ (Not a heavy influence, and too many guitar and bass effects here)
Pork Soda $$ (For some modestly a-melodic bass fills)
Tales from the Punchbowl: $
Brown Album: $$$$ (It’s the right tempo, and has some staccato “GO!”’s for added rhythm)
Antipop: $$$$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

3) "Last Salmon Man" (6:15)

Last Salmon Man bridges the gap back to Sailing the Seas classic-rock era for two important reasons. One, it features a very analog, straight forward lead bass riff sans the flanger or any other of the many effects processing you’ll hear on bass throughout the GN. Secondly: It’s about fishing. It’s been a little while since Primus’ last fishing song. If I’m not mistaken, the most recent one dates back to Pork Soda's “The Ol' Diamondback Sturgeon (Fisherman's Chronicles, Part 3)". It’s possible that I’m missing some subtext on other songs in between--to be fair, I don’t remember what “Dirty Drowning Man” was about, but its vaguely nautical title warrents a look-up to sift for fishing references.

And boy is “Last Salmon Man” a straight up anthem about fishing. In a disc that’s relatively full of social commentary (probably more so than any Primus album yet), this song is literally about how a fisherman’s dad is worried his son will "be the last salmon man of the MacDonagal clan”.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Claypoool as a songwriter, it’s that he‘s just as good (or better) at writing songs about a slow day dragging in the nets as he is at writing about misappropriated funding for the large hadron collider (which is what I assume all of Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People was about).

My favorite thing about “Last Salmon Man” is Larry’s guitar work. I’ve always said about Primus, “I came for Les, but I stayed for Larry and Tim” (a thesis in itself which will receive due attention in another, much longer treatise). The most epic Primus songs must be hell on Ler because he doesn’t really riff on them; he has to maintain tasteful, song-long solos. And he plays imaginatively and tightly throughout "LSM", including one of his better short shred solos to date.

Frizzle Fry: $ (It’ll be an anthem for deranged fishermen everywhere)
Sailing the Seas: $$$$$$$ (It’s basically a nautical, more epic “Here Come The Bastards”)
Pork Soda: $$ (The mood is there, but not much else)
Tales from the Punchbowl: $
The Brown Album: $
Antipop: $
Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People: $

4) "Eternal Consumption Engine" (2:44)

This two and a half minute jig is the greatest “psychedelic polka”—to use Claypool’s self-descriptor—in the entire Primus catalog. Jay Lane hits an impressive array of bells, whistles and wood-block fills in this commentary about consumer culture. A could-be musical accompaniment to Annie Leonard’s The Story Of Stuff, "Eternal Consumption Engine" is like a weird music-baby between “Space Farm”, the “South Park” theme and the intro from “Toys Go Winding Down”.

Frizzle Fry: $$
Sailing the Seas: $
Pork Soda: $$$$$
Tales from the Punchbowl: $$$
Brown Album: $
Antipop: $
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $$ (There’s an effective toggle between near-whisper and near-scream)

5) "Tragedy’s A Comin" (4:52)

This will be our last (and most direct) stop in Antipop land for a while. This hunk of funky ska-metal could be the sequel to “Ballad of Bodacious”. Claypool sometimes works against himself with such a heavy flange effect on his bass, but I understand how sometimes you need your bass to sound like a guitar when you’re playing heavy riffs. Here, he goes back and forth from the clean funky pops during the main theme and bridge, to a flange-drench for the verse and chorus. This song doesn’t seem to be about tragedy in the big picture sense, so much as some low-life named Tragedy who is indeed on his way over.

Frizzle Fry: $
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $
Pork Soda: $
Tales from the Punchbowl: $
Brown Album: $
Antipop: $$$$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

6) "Eyes of the Squirrel" (5:32)

For my money, this is what Primus does best. Down-tempo, ominous, psychedelic. Love the Flaming Lips as I do, there’s something amazing about rock music that’s simultaneously psychedelic AND threatening. “Eyes of the Squirrel” features octave bass slaps over Jay Lane kick-quadruplets, punctuated by fuzzed out Les fills and a single snare-hit. Repeat. Ler does what he does best, laying atmosphere over top of everything, and a slow, distrubing solo.

This is already one of my favorite Primus songs. It’s a direct descendent of “My Name Is Mud” and I personally enjoy it better. Lyrically, it’s a satirical roll-call of modern entertainment saturation, rattled off in between the every fourth measure mantra: “The Eyes of the Squirrel are Watching”. A tribute to that video of the dramatic squirrel, it mentions reality TV, Octomom, Brangelina, etc. It could be an Electric Six song lyrically, but it could only be a Primus song vocally (and, obviously, musically).

Frizzle Fry: $$$ (It’s a distant, less metal cousin of “Too Many Puppies” and “Toys Go Winding Down”)
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$$$$ (It’s the most memorable, hooky song on the disc)
Pork Soda: $$$$$$
Tales From the Punch Bowl: $$$ (In the extended outro, Les shreds on the bass with heavy delay as the pan goes from left to right... ends up sounding a bit like Floyd’s “On The Run”)
Brown Album: $$ (Vocally playful)
Antipop: $
Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People: $$$$ (Plenty spacey and, at the end, proggy)

7) "Jilly’s On Smack" (6:37)

Definitely the most Animals Like People of the bunch, "Jilly's On Smack" is the space-psych summit of the album. After a one-minute intro of chunky looped bass signals, a dissonant mid-register guitar arpeggio with delay frames the four chord bow-struck bass. The six and half minute rocker has a psychedelic breakdown in the middle, and then goes back into the main theme.

“Jilly’s On Smack... and she won’t be coming back. No, she won’t be coming back... FOR THE HOLIDAYS!” This tune actually sounds like a more rockin “Mary the Ice Cube”, and we’re treated to more of that whisper to scream drama. And I got to say, the “...for the holidays!” line is going to rank up there with “Too Many Puppies!”, “Here they come!”, and “Shake Hands with Beef!” for things the fans are going to want to scream along at concerts. Claypool chooses the oddest things for hooks, but hooks they are nonetheless.

Frizzle Fry: $$$ (The drumming and the mid-song breakdown are the strongest links)
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$$$ (Despite it’s progadelia, it’s successfully catchy)
Pork Soda: $$$
Tales From The Punchbowl: $$$$$
Brown Album: $
Antipop: $$ (It trumps “Eclectic Electric” for sure)
Animals Should Not: $$$$$$$

8) "Lee Van Cleef" (3:28)

A visit to Brown land for sure, this ditty about how “we always got a kick out of Lee” has the bouncing playfulness of half the songs on Brown Album. Also, maybe it’s my imagination, but even the drums sound like they hauled in whatever trash-can lids Brain was banging on during those Brown sessions for Jay to pound on.

Frizzle Fry: $$
Sailing The Seas of Cheese: $
Pork Soda: $
Tales From The Punchbowl: $
Brown Album: $$$$$$$
Antipop: $$$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

9) "Moron TV" (4:37)

This song is really worth getting excited about. It contains probably the grooviest riff on the album, which would qualify it for their grooviest song since “Over The Falls”--but it has a much harder edge. Maintaining their aggressive, semi-threatening atmosphere, “Moron TV” picks up where “Eyes of The Squirrel’s” social commentary left off. It has a significant touch of ska--not in that loveably cheesy “Duchess and the Proverbial Mindspread” sense, but more in that “what you expected Oysterhead to sound like” sense. This may be the top track on the album, depending on which tempo of Primus you subscribe to. In a vacuum, it probably trumps “Eyes of the Squirrel” because its ska-core breakdown is way more keenly composed (as well as musically apropos) than Squirrel’s prog-core outro movement.

One other thing to mention that "Moron TV" represents about Green Naugahyde on the whole: we’re getting much more baritone from Les on vocals. This is not to say that his effective whine-scream is left in the lurch. Rather, Les’ staple redneck alto is just more tastefully utilized, as just a part of his much more dynamic approach on vox.

Frizzle Fry: $$$$$
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$$$$
Pork Soda: $$$ (the music here is less structurally disconcerting)
Tales from the Punchbowl: $$
The Brown Album: $$$$$$
Antipop: $$$$ (vocally agressive, heavy production)
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

10) "Green Ranger" (2:02)

If it can be said that there’s filler on Green Naugahyde, this would be it. Heavy bow-on-upright-bass with an uncharacteristically boring high-register guitar drizzle. The drumming is impressive, but it’s wasted on this song about riding with the Green Ranger. Luckily, it’s short enough that its lack of memorability helps it rather than hurts it.

Frizzle Fry: $$
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$
Pork Soda: $$$
Tales from the Punchbowl: $$$$ (like half the material on Punchbowl, the drumming completely outshines the other elements)
Brown Album: $$
Antipop: $$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

11) "Hoinfodaman" (2:58)

And… we’re back! This is definitely the most “bad-ass” track on Green Naugahyde. It opens with one of Ler’s most aggressive, fuzzed out riffs in over fifteen years, and is quickly joined in by a middle-finger of a bass riff. Early Primus fans will be glad for this face-puncher. “I used to be a pimp but now I’m ho-in’ for the man!” sings Claypool about commercial sell-outs. It’s a relatively simple song, with an absurdist, opera-style bridge. This would be a great one to see them draw out a bit longer live.

Frizzle Fry: $$$$$$
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$$$$$
Pork Soda: $$$
Tales From The Punchbowl: $$
The Brown Album: $$$$
Antipop: $$$$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $

12) "Extinction Burst" (5:20)

What a climax! Extinction Burst is “Bob’s Party Time Lounge” on steroids, and it has roots in every single album, which is impressive because all the movements flow with solidarity in the time span of 5:20 (which is relatively short for one of the “epic” tracks). It’s so frenetic that I’m pretty sure you could connect your iPod to a car battery and play it to jump-start your ride.

Frizzle Fry: $$$$
Sailing the Seas of Cheese: $$$$
Pork Soda: $$$$
Tales From The Punchbowl: $$
Brown Album: $$$$
Antipop: $$$
Animals Should Not Try To Act Like People: $$$$

13) "Salmon Men" (:58)

A wind-down reprisal from Last Salmon Man, in the style of Los Bastardos, but toned down a tad and significantly shorter than it’s respective dad track.

~~~~~

In summary, Green Naugahyde is perhaps the first Primus album to avoid settling into a sub-genre, but rather taking from all the styles in Primus’ back catalog. (Although, if you’re on a bar-stool, you have my blessing to refer to it as their "Ska-Funk" album ;-). There are both upsides and downsides to this paradigm. Treating their previous body of work as a buffet line lets them pick and choose the most successful elements of their music to focus on, resulting in a significantly more solid album than many of their efforts; it’s less hit or miss than Punchbowl, it’s more accessible and direct than Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People, it’s more lively and entertaining than Pork Soda, and—again--it’s just plain better than Antipop. Realistically, it’s probably the third most thoroughly listenable Primus album after Seas of Cheese and Brown Album.

However, the flip-side to this buffet approach is that it’s their first disc in a long while which doesn’t have one or two of those unreasonably epic tracks which simply annihilates your entire notion of what music can be. There’s no “My Friend Fats”, no “Final Voyage of The Liquid Sky”. There’s no “Return of Sathington Willoughby", “Southbound Pachyderm”, or “Fish On”. And frankly, I’m fine with that. I’m ready for a thoroughly enjoyable Primus album. They can go back to re-inventing the wheel next time.

By the way, the transition to Jay Lane on drums is almost seamless. There’s a feel of that early Frizzle Fry funk-metal in the drumming, but Les and Ler have moved on to more advanced things. I could use slightly less effects on Les’ bass playing. But on the other hand, this is art, not entertainment. So if Les thinks it’s important for some of his bass-fills to sound like the buzzing mosquitos of vampiric corporate culture, then who am I to argue.

Hunter Thompson on the Baltimore Ravens

2011-09-03T15:04:00.000-07:00

"Watching the Baltimore Ravens play football is like watching scum freeze on the eyeballs of a jackass, or being stuck on an elevator with Dick Cheney on speed. The Ravens will pounce on you and gnaw you to death, which can take eight or nine days." Hunter S. Thompson

People Simply Have No Clue How To Prepare Corn

2011-09-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTS: Greg Proops on Truffle Salt

2011-08-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

"I don't know if you've ever booted heroin in your eyeball with the dali-lamma while butterflies swirled around your head and a pink waterfall made effervescent drinks for your and your friends that was served by a lizard king. But that's what that truffle salt is like. I was H-I...G-H on the truffle salt... It's really hot stuff. It's like, you know how when you look at pictures of flowers sometimes like an orchid or some yawning tropical thing, and there's an enormous red stamen coming out of it covered with fur that's clearly reproductive powder, and you see them swaying gently in the hibiscus scented tradewind. It's that kind of boner, you know what I mean? A lovely, lyrical, lilting, lavender boner that tilts towards the object of its desire. Not a threatening, rapey, Cro-Magnon, take control, never listen to women boner that's insensitive and doesn't want to snuggle. But a really caring boner that makes a bower and brings gifts. How did you carry that gold chalice? That kind of erection is the one I'm talking about."

Welcome to Contemporary Life!

2011-08-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

Chapter 3: The ER

2011-08-24T02:03:00.000-07:00

John strolled into the emergency room with a gait which--were it not for his general appearance--might cause one to confuse him for holder of title deed on this particular property. He just had an altercation with that ginger hobo, and decided that due to the possibly lethal dose of benzos (which he had mostly barfed up a few hours ago), he was gonna hang around in the ER just to be on the safe side.

"Standing room only," he said out loud, much to the confusion of a passing wheelchair-bound gastropod who couldn't help but notice that there were plenty of seats available in the waiting room ER.

What he was getting at is that he'd be damned if anyone found out about his ill-advised brush with pills, so rather than actually check in as a patient, he was going to stand around in the ER waiting room for the next two or three hours (because sitting was no good: were he to pass out sitting around, this would not be dramatic enough to catch the eye of anyone who he would need to stab adrenaline into his heart or whatnot).

He knew he was probably fine, but this would be an additional part of his penance for attempting to assassinate such an important local philanthropist such as himself. He rolled his eyes at his own indulgence in such meta-grandeur, a not uncommon occurrence.

He wandered into the waiting room, stood next to the vending machine, and began to ogle his cellphone--a past-time of anybody trying not to draw attention to oneself.

"William Blackshaw" called out the triage nurse into the p.a. A latino-looking man with a young woman escorting him got up and sludged over to the check-in desk. John found himself resenting the fact that--as he took mental inventory of the room--he was unable identify exactly what everybody's ailment was. After all, most of these people probably just had a bad fever, but his expectations of the E.R. waiting room archetype is that everybody should be sitting their with their own severed foot in their hands or burns on their face or a shark through their wrist... none of this 'everybody looks vaguely sick' crap.

"You don't look too sick," a voice said to John that he immediately begged to be a permanent deterioration of his hippocampus resulting in irreversible hearing of voices instead of pending interaction with a nearby denizen. He looked over his right shoulder and saw a blond gentleman roughly his age clutching his stomach.

"Seriously?" John's eyes said to Blondie without ever opening his mouth.

"Sorry, I know that's a dicky thing to say and generally a poor observation," followed up his new pal. "I'm just beside myself with frustration, because I've been here for hours in pain. But the pain is starting to be replaced with anger, perhaps that's the therapeutic philosophy of this waiting room."

John did that half-smirk pursing of the lips that indicated general ambivalence, and turned his head back to his phone.

"More likely though," continued the unfortunately real person, "they need to hire more white staff members, cuz this is getting ridiculous."

"Oh yea?" said John who was wondering why he had been singled out for this unusual S.O.S.

"I actually live closer to Methodist, but it's like all blacks working there. Fuck that," said Blondie.

"I take it you find that African Americans offer sub-standard medical care?" said John condescendingly.

"Dude, please. Don't even get me started. They've had a different genetic evolution than us. Who's more likely to injure or steal when things get tough, a group that evolved in a tribal setting or a group that evolved in a feudal one?"

"You sound like a very intelligent gentleman," John said as he wondered why he was always a lightening rod for shit like this. He was less interested in this dick's personal reasons for being a racist than his reasons why it was acceptable to engage a stranger in this type of conversation. This guy must be a special breed to take such personal ownership of the social contract.

"Look I know racism gets a bad name, but why do you think there was no looting in Japan after the Tsunami hit the power-plants? Simple! No blacks. They're all rioting in New Orleans. I personally have no problem admitting being a racist, I think people presume that all people are actually equal, which is very short sighted. I'm Brian, by the way."

"Well, Brian, I can appreciate your selective lack of presumption, but what would be your solution the the issue of blacks having an incompatible genetic evolution to whites?"

"Short of just sending them back to Africa. I don't really see a realistic solution."

"Really Brian? With all those answers in that brain, you think that we're simply doomed to make the best of a situation where different races start to evolve together?"

"I wouldn't call that evolution, I'd call it devolution."

"Let me ask you a hypothetical. Would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?" John said, putting his phone away.

"Hell, no. We live in a nation of laws, and I have a responsibility to support my family so that we never get put in that situation. I'm a hard working American. I'm Tea Party all the way."

"Brian, I hate to break it to you, but despite what you hear on Jon Stewart, true Tea Partiers aren't racists. I know you guys all think you want to be racists, but deep down you know that race isn't really what your politics are all about. The politicians say it and you guys all wink in agreement, but--unlikely as it is--it's actually true. Constitutionally centered small government is simply incompatible with racial intolerance. I can appreciate your desire to hold on to all the traditions that your grandparents handed down, but I'm afraid it's a lost cause."

"What, the Tea Party?" slammed Brian?

"No, racism." John replied.

"Are you gonna sit their and deny that 75% of incarcerated men are not minorities?" Brian retorted?

"Yea, I get all that, but what you're talking is intolerance of a group of people. That's not true racism. Racism is a prejudice. It's an intolerance of a specific person because of their inclusion in a group. Listen, if you had a black neighbor who owned a successful small business and paid his taxes and voted for Tea Party candidates, you wouldn't have any problems with him, correct?"

"Well... No. Because all those things that make black people unlikable don't apply to him."

"Exactly. That wouldn't be pre-judgement, that would be judgement."

"Well, I'd be an idiot--"

"Yea, I know. On an individual level, you have no incentive to dislike a person just because of things that other people with their skin color do. Remember earlier when I mentioned how intelligent you sound? Well it's possible I was being a tad facetious. See, the thing about racism, it really only afflicts very average minds. Geniuses and the mentally challenged are never racists. Genuises, because they hold no value for lazy thought. And the mentally challenged, because their thought is so very lazy that it prohibits them from making the initial connections that would compare group actions to their skin color for the purpose of abstracting a worldview. But completely average intellect, they hear some rhetoric about how there is actually some science behind blacks and whites being different, and they want to use knowledge to help them navigate the world. Only problem is, like a chess game, you can only process a couple moves ahead. You know what it says about black people that they have built-in instincts for tribal behavior like crime and violence. But you don't know what it says about you for how you process that. When I asked what your solution was, you just shrugged like an asshole and daydreamed about them not being here anymore."

Brian snapped back, "Okay, Mr. Genius, if you're so smart, why don't you tell me the solution."

"The solution to what?"

"To the genetic predisposition of blacks to crime and violence."

John stared at him, "There's no solution for that."

"So how come no solution makes me an idiot and you some type of fucking yoda?"

"Cause you're the one who had a problem with them."

Brian rolled his eyes, "You know, not having a problem with things doesn't make you smarter than me."

"It does if my goals are to not have problems."

"Now who's not critical thinking! If I have a problem, and there's no solution, I can't solve it by saying, 'It's not a problem anymore'!"

"Listen, fucker, a predisposition to crime is not a problem. You know what's a problem? Crime. If I have a predisposition to alcoholism, I have a potential problem: DUI. You know what would be good for me? Not hanging out in bars. If you're so worried about the African American prison population, maybe you should stop voting to cut programs and cut welfare. For someone who seems to think that blacks have no choice in the matter but to act criminally, you sure have no problem making the runway as slick as possible, you shallow cunt! I'm not a very compassionate person, my sense of charity is basically limited to decreasing landfill volume by re-routing unsold breakfast burritos to hobos stomachs. But salt of the earth dicks like you preach about Jesus and compassion all the time, until an arbitrary group of people has a difficult time assimilating to your standards, and now it's 'to hell with those guys'. I'd love to see your attitude towards those with special needs. Send 'em back to the womb!"

Brian interrupted, "Always with you liberals, it's coddle, and no personal responsibility."

"Hey, fuck you buddy, I have no problem with the fact that most incarcerated men are black. If they wanna steal a car, fuck'em, they're going to prison. You're the jackoff who has a problem with some nurse just because a bunch of drug dealers in Detroit want to spray bullets at each other all day."

Brian's red shirt had distracted John from the fact that he was bleeding Spartan-like through the fabric.

"What the shit happened to you anyway?" John asked.

"Some nigger stabbed me and took my wallet." Brian replied.

John remember earlier wishing that this stranger wasn't real. He was beginning to take it back.

He was beginning to wish he was real.

John realized he wasn't standing anymore. He was down on one knee, the unfortunately imaginary aryan he was screaming at melted away and security guards were on their way over. He could make run for the door, but he wasn't sure he could trust his senses. Still, as the security guards approached, he had to admit to himself that he was not feeling particularly cooperative.

FLAWLESS VICTORY: Turntable FM

2011-08-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

click for full size

Louis vs Dane on Deadspin

2011-08-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

I'm having a hard time understanding the thesis of the Deadspin comparison of Dane Cook to Louis CK. I love the idea of over-analysis, naturally. But I think this is just expositional masturbation. (Which of course means I love it. But I'm worried that it's pretty meaningless).

To address one of the questions they raise: Yes. Critically acclaimed comedians ARE more similar to each other than non, that's just the cycle of criticism. If someone showed up sounding like Lou Reed today, nobody would really give a shit. But Lou Reed back then was critically huge because the idiom of rock music didn't have a "you don't need polished music, you just need honesty" standard-bearer. At that point, half-competent unpolished music was important by virtue of it's visceral nature and lack of polish, but today that doesn't do anything to move the art form forward. That happened to comedy in the mid nineties, after the sienfeld era was over, it became enough just to talk about your life, with a dash of humor.

Today's most critically acclaimed comics are the ones who are the funniest while being the least universal. Louis CK is just plain funny but when he calls his daughter an asshole or used the N-word and the F-word like he owns the place, that's pretty challenging to pre-existing standards. So Louis wins for being effective AND avant-garde. Jeff Dunham, on the other hand, has jokes that a five year old can appreciate, which means that to enjoy his jokes, critics wouldn't be utilizing any portion of their brain that makes them feel smarter than anybody else.

Dane Cook is a critical disaster, because his point of view is always over-amplified by his high energy (and, obviously, loudness). It doesn't take a genius to like a loud, overly-confident person making fun of things, which is why so many teenagers love him and critics hate him (and that goes for back in 1999, when his jokes were actually effective for their own quality--as opposed to today, as his jokes are watered down by the heaviness of his personality and the amount of material being required of him yearly by trillionaires).

Louie and The Guard

2011-08-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

Got to enjoy The Guard, which I thought I wasn't gonna like it. Reviewed it for Paste Magazine.

In other news, huge shit over at Louie. First of all, if you didn't see the "Moving" episode (Se2Ep3), do it now on Hulu (I don't know how long that link will be valid for). It's probably the purely funniest episode I've enjoyed yet (although I don't have cable so I'm just catching them when I can at dudes houses or on Hulu).

Less funny, but more importantly, Louis had Dane Cook on epiosde 7, and Videogum took an important look at it.

Chapter 2: Losing it

2011-08-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

John sped off to the scummiest, filthiest parts of the metropolis, with a trash-bag full of food that, to be honest, he wouldn't feed a rabid wounded dog. But these types of folks he was going to be feeding were lower than dogs. They had no loyalty. They had no value as human beings. They existed simply as spinning tops bouncing off the good intentions, and sometimes cars of trustees and social workers who were stuck in a Winston Churchill nether-childhood. He didn't blame crackheads for their behavior, everybody is free to choose what's important to them. But if your decisions make you a pain in the ass to everybody else, well then you deserve to eat flammable, un-compostable sodium-saturated balls of processed dye that would make for good hors d'oeuvre over at the Texas-size garbage continent floating in the pacific.

He cried some more and considered swerving at most pedestrians he saw.

He didn't particularly like the effects of alprazolam. He only owned the pills because they eased his occasional bouts of furious panic that possessed him whenever he was clear-headed. He enjoyed not panicking, but he tried never to take them if he didn't have to because once his Gaba receptors were inhibited, he seemed less concerned with things. Nothing seemed important. And one of the only things that kept him showing up at his fucking JOB every day was minor, bitter illusion that certain things were important. Well guess what, this post-slacker meals-on-wheels shit was fucking important because he would be damned if this food was gonna fill up landfills, packed up in plastic biodegredation-prophylactics so that fucking awful gulls couldn't even choke it down.

The whole thing was a fucking nightmare.

"So let me get this straight, we're gonna pretend that the environment is important to us, and that feeding the poor is important for us, but we're gonna take tons of garbagy unwanted food, and stack into a skyscaper of un-usable land which will out-last us fucking miserable rodents by a million years?" He had a habit of yelling to himself in the car.

Some days he didn't even give a shit about the environment or the homeless, he was just so sick of other people pretending to care, and then flailing through the world like obese infants waving their brutal pelican arms and living beyond their means in a cocoon of apathy.

Normally xanax wouldn't make him think like this, but he was manic now after successfully expelling the lethal dose from his poorly conceived self-dispatchment. Who knows how much was still in his system but it wasn't gonna be enough to do him in, especially now that he was in the mood to plow his car through the first police station he saw.

"FUCK THEM!" he screamed at an eleven year old waiting for a bus.

As he got deeper and deeper into the lousiest rat-hole of city, he continued to look around.

"Jesus, aren't there ANY white people in this hell-hole?" he tried to yell over the radio, which was his iPod plugged into the car he was driving without a license.

He saw a young white woman with her hair in a bun walking on the left. He nodded with approval. As he continued to pass her, he saw her eight month pregnant tummy and rolled his eyes.

"Seriously? A pregnant lady? The LEAST SOPHISTICATED TYPE OF WHITE PERSON!!"

He made an ugly face as he absorbed a blow of instant karma, recognizing THE OFFICIAL: least appropriate, least intelligent thing he's ever said out loud. She didn't hear him, nobody did. But the fact that he said it means that he thought it, and the amount of contemplation that would normally be required to process a spoken-out-loud statement like that was currently unavailable, because he had to start finding some homeless assholes fast and shoving his discarded 7-11 food down their ignorant mouths before he started running over every dog he could find.

Coincidentally, the first uber-pathetic looking person he came upon was chilling cliche-like under a bridge. He was white and he had a dog.

"How convenient, I can be eased into this with someone I am automatically semi-comfortable with." His favorite part about mania is is that he could fuel it intentionally. He couldn't always "kick it off" intentionally (once in a long while he could) but if it was already present he could feed the type of thoughts and physical motions that would make him more manic (or, manic longer). Among them were alcohol (which was off limits for tonight thanks to his god-forsaken benzo's) and physical activity. Running in place was common while he was on a Sim Life trip, but the most potent thing to rile up his inner soul was drastic, sudden changes in scenery. A drive out to the grundle of town was hardly sudden enough, since he obeyed the speed limit like a fucking spineless asshole, but it sure was drastic enough. He got out, and stared at this white Rastafarian like a thanksgiving turkey ripe for the stuffing.

"Hiya, friend!" said John, with bitter, ecstatic tears in his eyes.

"Goin on..." said whitey without looking up.

"Boy I sure hope you're hungry, you fucking Argonaut!" This drew a slight bit of attention from the urchin.

"Uh... sup?"

"Look at you, ya Greek sailor, you're definitely ready to eat!" He wrestled the over-stuffed trash-bag from his passenger seat, giving audible yelps when its stubbornness to be jostled loose interfered with his current sensory palate.

"You wanna know my favorite Rush Limbaugh quote?" yelled John at, unnecessarily, the top of his lungs.

"Hey man, I don't--"

"It's from his first book, The Way Things Ought To Be. I like this book, because a man who sees himself as fucking important, tells us about the way things ought to be!!"

Rasta-man gulped and started to make a brief mental inventory of his few belongings which were scattered around him.

"I like to read Rush, because evil men are amongst the most effective mother-fuckers in history... Don't get me wrong..." he lugged this bag over right next to his mark, "I don't believe in evil in an empirical sense..."

The former Spin Doctors singer began to realize this was going to be a long evening, and started to position himself for possible evacuation.

"Still... I believe that some men are not at all the type of men I would want share a sidewalk or a kidney with, ya dig? Anyway, I won't bore you, but the quote is this:

Now I want to make clear that when there is damage to the environment, there is no one who wants to fix it more than I do. However, I refuse to believe it is necessary to attack the American way of life or to punish the American people for simply being themselves.

"Isn't that just FUCKING MAGNIFICENT! Rush wants to fix the environment MORE THAN ANYBODY!" He reached into the bag and grabbed a foul piece of crumb cake. He threw it blunt at the dog.

"Woh, woh-" Alexi Lalas started to protest.

"Sorry Al Gore, NOBODY wants to fix THE ENVIRONMENT more than Rush Limbaugh! Do you realize how truly profound that is! That's a real quote from his book! HOWEVER, he refuses to believe it's necessary to attack the American WAY OF FUCKING LIFE!"

He grabbed the dude by the shitty shirt collar and started shaking his face. "RUSH refuses to believe it's necessary to punish the American people for simply being themselves! Come here, you fucking female eunuch..."

"Dude, get the-" he had already smacked John off of him. He would have head for the hills, but he was actually a tad interested in that monster sack of food.

John felt a sharp sting from the smack and was already half histerical, so he was crying like toddler. "He thinks th-the- the American way of life is gonna fix the environment... Why do people always thing they can have it two ways?"

"Yo, you got any of those toquito's?" asked the hungry dude.

Chapter 1: Poor Planning

2011-08-08T22:26:00.000-07:00

John stared at the bottle of pills, flush with Alprazolam (the bottle, not yet him), and he wondered why benzo's weren't a more prevalent method of suicide. They would seem to be the least painful final approach to the great landing-strip, if slightly less dramatic than the draining, dangling, stabbing or shotgunning preferred by his many literary and music idols. But maybe drama wasn't necessary because to him, suicide should be just as much about NOT making a statement, as it was about making one. John struggled with this paradox at length because he realized that no single act carried a more succinct, convincing message about one's view of the human experience than willful termination. In fact, he had often daydreamed quite fancifully at the idea of dedicating his life to a cause, in the most profound sense of the phrase, by ending it in a manner which would draw worthy publicity. I.E. pulling a pistol out during an incumbent president's press conference and pulling the trigger--upon which, being swiftly de-activated by the special protector-dudes, but just before his lifeless body slinks to the floor (possibly on camera)--a sign rolls out of the barrel saying, "please visit www.Leftover711Sandwiches4hobos.com".

Because, one time, John saw a statistic about how many pre-made, probably-nasty but certainly-calorie-dense sandwiches get discarded nationally by the 711 company due to being unsold for only two days. Of course he forgot the statistic, but even if it were only 4 per day per store... And a given city has five 7-11 stores, that's 20 semi-stale sandwiches per day that can be driven around and distributed to that city's underwear-bandana'd population. This is not even taking into account the pallets-worth of unsold soft (mostly hard) pretzels, pastry-cases full of donuts, and admittedly only semi-edible, but seemingly metabolizable hotdogs and weird taquito-fusion tubes that spin slowly on steel rods like prize dismembered dicks at futuristic alien boardwalk-games.

He used to work at a Sev lifetimes ago, and every day the ritual of throwing all this stuff out made him practically sick to his stomach. He vowed to start some program where automobiled do-gooders go around for an hour every day picking up this shit and dropping it off at soup kitchens or neighborhoods where crack-cocaine has replaced protein and carbohydrates entirely. (And then quickly jetting the hell out of there.) It wouldn't even need to require full-time dedication by anybody involved, just some one-time attentive organization and coordination followed by a rotating schedule of volunteer drivers.

Corporations show no decency towards the homeless. Recently John had read a story about how Walmart had been instructing their employees to cut up the unsold clothes so that no dumpster-divers could benefit from bottom-wrung unwanted throwaways. People on the clock were getting paid to ensure than the very poor did not divot into Walmart's profit margin. When he read this he almost gagged. It's not that he was a redistribute-the-wealth-hippie, he just felt that most people were halfway decent but were terribly shortsighted at planning their behavior. And greedy practices like corporate discard were so appallingly wasteful that it drove him mad.

The way he saw it, the world worked like this:

If you need to take a hundred stuffed-owls from point A to point B, and you need to take 75 aborigine mask replicas from point B to point A... Do you follow the policy of fueling up two trucks and sending them on two separate errands? Or do you instruct the one truck to drop off the owls and return with the masks all in one trip? This very basic approach to world navigation would seem like a no-brainier, but the modern era's general lack of strategic thought anywhere past the dollar was perhaps his greatest cause of despair.

Inefficiency was also one of the reasons why he had not been voting for big-government as much as he had in his younger years. He saw both righties and lefties as idealists, but he had to ask himself if he wanted to vote for an ideal he agreed with slightly more but which was doomed to be poorly managed... Or vote for an ideal that was shittier but had hopes of being run by people with business experience. And that was one of the dems' biggest weaknesses, they generally had no background as greedy, dishonest pigs working for the bottom line and therefore were unable to get much accomplished. This was best illustrated by the current incumbent: America's first black, most honest, best intentioned and least effective President probably ever. The new genre of politics he tried to invent, which he called bi-partisan cooperation, should have been called Puke-athon 2008.

The failed Obama experiment was the official nail in the coffin for decent human beings in political office. Obama made John promise himself he would never vote for a non-dickhead again. And this was largely emblematic of why he was now staring at a tall, frosty bottle of pills, feeling divorced from his country and from his era. Perhaps he would never vote again period.

Or perhaps he would vote just once more, and make sure this particular vote got on the 6 o'clock news.

He was unsure why the concept of suicide had always been so important to him, and he never risked mentioning it to his therapist, because in these suburbs, counselors have about as much contextual nuance regarding the "S" word as TSA agents have for the "B" word. He rarely, if ever, felt suicidal, but he ruminated the intellectual implications of it almost constantly. During his manic spells he daydreamed about all the aforementioned types of history-changing suicides he could implement to make himself an important person. During depressive spells, he valued suicide as the single thing he could definitely and without question control and achieve--giving a final F-U to God for having invented him only to tease and torture him with the knowledge that the great feast of daily miracles called life will someday be folded up like a used condom and tossed in the dumpster like so many rock-hard and oddly moist 7-11 pretzels.

He stared at the bottle some more and thought that, if heaven is indeed a neurological post-mortem chemical phenomena, this would certainly not disrupt it like a bullet would. And who knows, maybe that type of heaven is forever, perhaps one's ability to experience time would change completely.

Alright, sometimes all this talk goes to far. It's time to stop being a fucking pussy and just do it for real this time. He didn't feel like he wanted to, hell he never felt like he wanted to, for the same reason death made him unable to enjoy life in the most satisfying ways. He didn't feel he wanted to but he THOUGHT he wanted to. And just like it is less effective for some poor cocksuckers to have 9 kids than it is to use a rubber and get a degree, sometimes we have to do not what feels good but what we KNOW is good. And what John thought was good was to no longer be a jerk-off puppet for fictional gods, especially when virtually none of the powerful people in the world could agree on strategic implementation of a consistent value-set.

He certainly wasn't manic, but weirdly, he wasn't quite depressed either, which he found alarming (that he was reaching for a bottle of pills during relative clear-headedness).

"Better to do it quick, like a band-aid," he thought, "before I change my mind."

He swallowed the entire bottle of pills before he actually made a decision.

"Holy cow was that painless!" he thought.

Holy cow, he never regretted anything so thoroughly and instantaneously in his life.

"Alright, time to vomit, like, on the double!" he said out loud, and then giggled that such a sentence was being uttered so light-heartedly in his kitchen, with stark contrast to the declaration's decidedly less-than-lighthearted ramifications.

Of course this wasn't the way to go out, he hadn't even penned a god-damned manfiesto!

FUCKING GET YOUR HEAD TOGETHER AND MAKE WITH THE VOMITING, JESUS CHRIST!

"Um, okay, so first thing's first I guess it's with the fingers down the throat."

The fact that John was born without a particularly compelling pharyngeal reflex had never been brought to his attention before. The next three minutes would have been hilarious in a silent film with no life-or-death ramifications. Jim Carrey would play "Guy trying in vain to puke."

A stubborn man, he was not going to call 9-11. He refused to get caught in what would be called by others a "cry for help". If there's one thing at which he knew for a fact he was not going to be found ineffective, it's suicide (or, quick recovery from indecision thereof). It always baffled him how someone could fail a genuine attempt at suicide, and he always looked down on those who did. No, his pride was now at stake, and he was going to figure out a way to regurgitate, or die trying. The brief satisfaction of actually embarking on a short, manageably attainable mission with very important consequences on the line gave him a quick smile, and manic surge--both of which he quickly scolded out of like a hurt-locker general chiding a troop for dicking around on the clock.

"Okay what in my apartment can cause me to vomit?" he said half out-loud.

For some reason he looked under the sink, because that's where most of the clutch poisons always seem to live. As he shuffled through various cleansers, the back of his mind reminded him that most of these are things for which if swallowed, you are instructed to induce vomiting, I.E. THEY WON'T MAKE YOU VOMIT, THEY'LL JUST MAKE IT MORE IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO VOMIT THAN IT ALREADY IS!

"God Dammit, Think!"

Okay, do I have any experience vomiting in this house? If so does it involve any substances that are available to me? He ran to the pantry and grabbed the lone bottle of bourbon which was... half-full.

"There was no way I was that stupid to have spent a full two seconds staring at that bourbon," he one-fourth said out-loud. It's possible if guzzled quickly it could have made him puke, but god forbid it doesn't, now he's left with a stomach full of xanax mixed with pass-out-juice.

"There has to be some way for a civilian to empty the contents of his gut without getting anyone else involved."

He looked out the window like a moron, as if the old 7-11 he worked at ten years ago was going to inspire any MacGuyver-like throw-ups.

"CHEWING TOBACCO!" he yelled as he grabbed his keys and wallet, and--out of habit--his cell phone. He had never partook, but he read that swallowing even a small amount of the juice can empty out a torso pretty efficiently. He would slurp-down half-a-canful like an oyster and then suck on the rest, swallowing every droplet if need-be till he hit paydirt.

He ran across the street and saw three people at the checkout counter. He was somewhat well-read on the social contract, and decided that the minute-and-a-half extra of getting in line like a normal person would be worth it to avoid the overly athletic task of demanding loudly, with cogent explanation, why he needed a canister of chaw IMMEDIATELY.

During the short wait in line, he was unlucky enough to have a grandmother of seven playing lotto. All her grand kids' birthdays!

No matter, the alprazolam was making him less anxious about the crucial nature of total barforama anyway--Fucking Benzo's!!

"Can I help you?" says the clerk.

"I need a Red Man, stat!" Having once worked behind that counter, he knew every brand by heart.

"Sorry, we're out."

"Kodiac."

"Hah, this dude just bought the last one!" he thumbed to a shirtless guy with a tattoo of Jesus holding a broken hockey-stick. Why the fuck was he serving a shirtless guy anyway? And didn't every consumer in America know you had to wear a shirt to a store? John didn't mind it on a personal level, he saw shirtlessness as significantly less disruptive of the free market than tons of other things, but these jerkoffs behind the counter generally went so mindlessly by-the-book on everything--

"Okay, real quick. I need you to grab the first chewing-tobacco product you see and hand it to me as fast as you can." He slapped down a ten on the counter. The slap sounded like one of those floating noodles you would play with at the pool growing up. He dinged the attention bell four times quickly either to add urgency or because he was all neurons at this point, and those neurons were having more and more of their GABA inhibited as every second passed.

The bell only slowed the kid down.

"Can I see some I.D.?"

"YOU MOTHER FUCKER, I USED TO WORK HERE FIFTEEN YEARS AGO!" he asserted in a sort of whisper-screech. He fumbled for his wallet, knowing the ID wasn't in there. He lost his previous wallet two weeks ago and hadn't been to the DMV yet because... if there was one government bureaucracy that he was most reluctant to spend time hanging out inside, it was the DMV.

He stumbled out the front door hating everything about modern America, sobbing with odd bursts of laughter as his consciousness started to deteriorate. He leaned up against the trunk of a parked car feeling really fucking emotional about what a shitty coincidence biology was. He heard a clang and looked over his right shoulder. A different employee was hoisting two heavy trash bags into the dumpster. One of them caught a sharp snag on the top of the dumpster, and no fewer than 40 thousand pretzels, croissants and hot-dogs rained down on the entire trash area like a garbage confetti-cannon. With that sight, John hurled angrily all over the trunk of the car for a good 9 seconds.

He leaned down to a kneeling position with a sobbing but victorious grin. He looked straight forward to see puke dripping down an Obama bumper-sticker, and with genuine rage he began vomiting again while running full speed directly at the employee who was on his iPhone sending a tweet about Casey Anthony. He grabbed the other, unripped trash bag and drove to the shittiest part of town, laughing and vomiting the whole way there.

Craft Beer and Internet, The Antichrist

2011-08-02T18:13:00.001-07:00

How is craft beer doing so insanely well? You might be tempted to say, "It's just better, so of course it's going to do well." Transformers 2 earned $402 million stateside to Frost Nixon's $19 million. And those numbers in a freeze-frame would seem to reflect Dogfish Head's sales to BMC (Bud, Miller, Coors). Yet, nobody thinks BMC is doing "better" than craft beer at large. CNN Money says that Anheuser Bush's profits are down 17.9% since 2004. MillerCoors, the 2008 merger targeted at AB's position of dominance, hasn't been doing all that bad in terms of management, costs and margin, but their sales volumes have been flat at best. Meanwhile, different sources estimate Craft Beer sales rising anywhere from 5% to 15% each year during the last decade. DURING A RECESSION.

And you don't have to be a business journal nerd to see that every sports pub or bar and grill has seemed to have had an explosion of tap handles at some point in the last five years. Big-city Beer Weeks are getting more and more numerous every year. And, those mid-size breweries that can afford to advertise nationally on TV (i.e. Boston Brewing's Sam Adams brand) seem to be over-emphasizing the word "Craft" in their commercials. Same goes for BMC-owned upscale brands. Blue Moon: Artfully Crafted!

So times are tough, people are losing jobs, but they're drinking more expensive beer in increasing numbers every year? How is this happening? A few reasons. Wine drinkers are "trading down" ($10 can buy you a crappy bottle of wine or a world-class bottle of beer), while craft beer drinkers will sooner sell their car than trade down to natty light. But what about plain old regular swill drinkers who are forking over more and more cash each year to trade up to craft beer?

Enter Google keywords.

BeerAdvocate.com is the leading Beer culture website, and has been proselytizing since 1996. So, the geek militia has been touting the glory of hops for years and years, but it's been over on the margin--as opposed to the AB Clydesdales which had been center screen. Cut to the turn of the millennium, and all of the sudden, the Internet starts to become part of the mainstream.

Try typing in a Google search for "beer". You won't see a single Clydesdale or female mud-wrestler.

Instead you'll see a combination of top micros (Dogfish Head, Sam Adams, Yeungling) fighting it out for highest billing, along with resources like Beer Advocate and Beer.com (sites which rarely mention BMC). Budweiser (the nation's largest brewery) is the 14th result down if I include a seven-item "Places for Beer Near You" list, which mentions a number of local craft breweries like Yards and Flying Fish.

Can the Internet tell you what to spend money on? Can it tell you what to like? I don't know, but it sure can spread ideas around pretty efficiently. Lots of people only drank BMC because it's what their dads drank or their college buddies drank. So it's no surprise that organized religion is also on the decline.

As you know, the web is the modern Library of Alexandria (the original on was a favorite torch-target of the religious). For better or worse, I have often referred to the Internet as the biblical anti-christ, in that it's very charismatic and provides for the needs of people, while leading them away from God. If you recall, the very first story of the bible punishes humans for eating the Fruit of Knowledge.

With the intoxication of perspective comes a more challenging array of choices. Should I be spending my decreasingly robust paycheck on increasingly decadent ales? Seems almost sinful, but how can I say no to a tall Founders Rye PA?

The inevitable decline of BMC starts to make you realize both the advantages and disadvantages of organized religion. Humans are not necessarily evolved enough to wrangle their desires into a really effective set of perpetually mature decisions. So, in some ways, it was good when I didn't really know about the more delicious, more expensive (and arguably, *gulp* more addicting) beers. Same as it was good when I went to Church every Sunday and followed all ten commandments out of fear for divine retribution. I would never consider sampling the admittedly delightful sensations of blasphemy, coveting, theft, pre-marital, skipping church, spilling seed, keeping for myself that which I could give to charity, revenge, and lots of other things which remain under biblical ban.

The web is our Tower of Babel. A man-made construct bringing together Marshal McLuhan's well prophesied "global village". I'm sure God isn't thrilled that we're getting from one another the guidance which we used to get only from him and his priests. Furthermore, he's certainly not happy that we're informing each other of ideas like how he might not exist... or that we might be able to live without him.

The net makes all things equal. It gives every recipe, philosophy, comedy video, product-review and Beer Week special the opportunity to be judged on it's own merits. A hierarchy killer, the superhighway is bad news for BMC because now consumer demand is informed by consumer rituals like "Like"-buttons and Ignatious Reilly-esque user-reviews.

But can I regulate myself to drink only three beers instead of six now that I'm paying an extra two dollars per pint? Can I demand secular ethics from myself even if I don't think anyone up there is keeping an eye on things? These are the types of challenges implicit in modern adulthood that keep many of us on Xanax, due to our inability to handle what Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom". The anti-christ is here, dismantling those monoliths whose merits can't support their weight. And we have to ask ourselves if--as a culture and as a species--are we adults enough to handle it?

This is a bit embarrassing.

2011-08-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

I know that deep down, there's a portion of your brain which--after various quantities of contemplation on the issue--is unable to understand the popularity of facials.

I told you this would be embarrassing, and furthermore, I hope that this doesn't bring the wrong type of web traffic to my precious web log.

However, I have the mixed blessing of completely understanding the appeal of... facials... (there's a sentence making my parents wish they had never gotten us the internet in 8th grade.)

Furthermore, this is not a matter of taste, and I'm not simply explaining why they appeal to me (which, for the most part, they don't). I'm explaining why some people enjoy viewing or doing them.

Okay here goes....

*shudder*

Okay so at some point in the history of adult videos, people realized that the traditional manner of climax turned out to be, cinematically speaking... anti-climactic. As "money" as it was in real life, it just didn't translate that well on film. However, when some dude unloaded all over a young lady's face, it was, for better or worse, visually dramatic. Far moreso than when he buried it where it couldn't be seen. Turns out, more visually dramatic = more effective films.

Okay so that's why it's in the videos, but why is it popular in the bedrooms?

Well, for one thing, I don't know exactly how popular it is there. Probably significantly less popular, if I were to place a wager.

But it's still more popular than it should be (if I can make the rare judgement call). And the reason for this is that a lot of people (males in particular) experience sexuality on video long before they experience it with other humans.

Just as child-molesters face a statistical likelihood of previous victimization, people get trained by their earliest sexual memories. And if half the men in America were watching pornos before they were getting laid, there's a good chance that the fuck-Fellini's added that little bit of superfluous superfluidity (it's like the pyro at a Kiss concert) into guys' sexual realities.

A friend of mine told me he used to be into bush for years and years because the first time he ever saw a naked lady in a sexual context, it was in a flick from 1979, and so the rest is history.

I'm not going to go on and on about this. You get what I'm saying. Adult videos are setting guys up to want weird things in the bedroom, and I hate to say it but it's not going away. You can expect this kind of behavoir from more and more guys as the Internet skyrockets the amount of males who watch inappropriate videos at a young age. I'm not saying that women have to put up with it, but I'm just saying that this is a type of social devolution that does not necessarily make your boyfriend some misogynistic dickhead.

BTW this is in no way agenda-driven, I just heard the umpteenth person say, "I don't get it" and I want you to know there's a reason.

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I watched Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day attempt to plot the murder of their bosses. It felt a bit like I was watching a long episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia in a movie theater because the plot was about the grotesque plans by unrealistic jerk-offs and Charlie Day's performance was the funniest part. One feels both congratulatory and fearful of Day's fully established comedy shtick. He has cemented a successful "character actor" status, and that character is the infantile, panicky, fast-talking schemer we've grown to love over at It's Always Sunny. The congratulations are warranted, though, because prior to the Sunny show about our fair city, Charlie Day was a rather obscure comedy actor. This is his first leading role in a major studio comedy, and he really knocked it out of the park. The fear comes in when one notices the relatively limited lifecycle of such a character. If you recall, Jim Carrey only got a small handful of true victories before his shtick grew vomit-inducing, and was forced to reinvent his approach. Day's great and all, but one worries about how well he will fare with reinventions. I don't mean to pigeonhole him, and I certainly wish him the best. I just hope he paces himself now that offers are going to be pouring in.

[read the rest at Philadelphia Citypaper.]

ETEWAF: Weird Al's Style Parodies

2011-07-19T22:41:00.000-07:00

Weird Al's new CD Alpocalypse is out. Like usual, it is filled with some fine parodies of pop tunes. "Party in the C.I.A." pokes fun at Miley Cirus, "Perform This Way" steals Gaga's "Born This Way". Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" gets turned into the hilarious celeb-gossip satire, "TMZ".

Additionally, there are a number of tunes known as "style parodies". These are usually Al's less famous songs, since they don't directly rip off a well known ditty. However, for music nerds, these can be the most exciting because you're hearing Al and his band make a musical interpretation intended to epitomize a certain artist's archetypical sound. "Craigslist" is probably the most specific of these, as it exemplifies a stereotypical, unmistakable Doors song (it even features Ray Manzerek on keys). Interesting that Al and the gang choose to do this quite frequently, because some of their style parodies are so very specifically styled after a specific song ("Craigslist" being "When the Music's Over") that it would almost seem easier (or, at least, funnier) to directly rip off the original song exactly. According to Al's F.A.Q. page, he doesn't have very much trouble getting permission from the original artists (technically, he doesn't need permission for parody, but he tries to stay classy). I guess poking fun at a band's entire catalog is sometimes more fun than poking fun at a song. This is probably best evidenced by his every-Cake-song "Close But No Cigar" off of 2006's Straight Outta Lynwood.

But there's a pretty old debate dating back to 1993's Alapalooza about a style parody that I would like to ask your help on (via the comment section). It's a debate that I thought only myself and losers who know me have had, but I found on the Alapalooza's Wikipedia "Discussion" page that even the "experts" seem to have trouble settling. I also visited www.weirdalforum.com and apparently the good folks over there have no definitive answers either.

The debate is: Which song off Alapalooza is a style-parody of Peter Gabriel? "Talk Soup" or "Waffle King"? Both of these songs sound--in their own unique ways--reminiscent of Gabriel's "Sledge Hammer". Again, for him to make a style-parody that sounds very close to one particular song is not rare. What is unheard of is for two completely different songs to be seemingly ripping off the style of the same song.

I won't sway your opinion with what I think (although, after you vote, you can check out my comments on the talk page over at Wikipedia [second paragraph under "Talk Soup and Waffle King"]).

So here's the original:

And here's contestant Number 1:

And here's contestant Number 2:

Vote Now: Does "Talk Soup" or "Waffle King" sound more like a style-parody of Peter Gabriel, via "Sledgehammer". Or, does one of them sound more like a different Peter Gabriel song (such as "Steam" off of his 1992 album Us)?

Or do either of them sound more like a different artist?

Or, is Al brilliant for finding enough unique elements in a Peter Gabriel classic to celebrate in style tribute with two different songs? In the meantime, I'm going to work on getting in touch with the man himself to help settle a bunch of wagers. (For my analysis, visit the Wikipedia Discussion page (second paragraph down in the "Talk Soup and Waffle King" sub-section).

So Long, Glen Beck

2011-07-06T00:11:00.000-07:00

Last week's final episode of The Glenn Beck Program marks only the 9th episode in which Beck cried no tears. The normally wistful Beck seemed almost happy as he looked back on his two years (doesn't it seem longer?) on Fox News and he congratulated himself for all the important things he's informed us about on his daily chalk board-fueled contemporary civics lesson.

Before I go any further, I should point out that I don't hate Glenn Beck. A man like Beck appeals to me, perhaps because he's a big-picture type of guy, and he often presumes that one thing can mean lots of other things. This type of thinking seems important during the pre-apocolypse, and even though our politics may differ, I can appreciate what Beck stands for. Despite the fact that Jon Stewart is one of my heroes, and I have frequent lucid dreams about punching Bill O'Reilly in the face... Glenn Beck is the sort of right-wing nut that I can admire.

There's a difference between maniacs and jerks. I have simply no use for jerks. They do disappointingly little to advance our understanding of ourselves, and are usually unpleasant to deal with. Maniacs, however, are the "yardstick of civilization". The word maniac is derived from "mania", which--a quick trip over to TheFreeDictionary.com reminds us--is "excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; a craze". It's somewhat common knowledge amongst both the left and right wings that Glenn certainly has THAT. But for some reason, this designation is used more often to discredit him than to justify him.

People say, "Glenn Beck is just an act. He hams it up for the cameras." It's true that he's a performer, but I'm not sure I can appreciate this categorical separation between a performer and a true maniac. Was Chris Benoit not a performer? Wesley Willis? Evel Knievel? Gary Busey? The entire Polyphonic Spree? There are certainly a bevy of genuinely unbalanced performers of all types. In fact, short of writers and dentists, performers are probably among the most poorly adjusted emotional professions. Come to think of it, the only performers who immediately come to mind as obviously PRETENDING to be maniacs are Gallager, Roberto Benigni, Dane Cook and maybe, MAYBE... Weird Al Yankovic.

Plus all you have to do is watch Glenn Beck visit Bill O'Reilly's show for a few minutes to see the jerk/maniac dynamic come alive. Despite sharing important seats on the right wing commentary throne, O'Reilly will always do his pushy journalist thing while Beck just goes on tirades about god knows what. Rife with metaphors, giggling non-sequitur jokes, and massive conspiracies, Beck's average sentence is enough to make control-freak O'Reilly's head spin. While O'Rielly always tries to look smarter than his interviewee, Beck always tries to swallow up the conversation with vague, big-picture comments about the coming powder-keg. One of them always looks more professional. The other always looks like a whack job, but an honest whack job.

Even their respective "losing their temper" viral youtube vids show you clear distinction between a bossy asshole and a manic-depressive. Bill O'Reilly's "Do It Live!" shows a cry-baby jerk-off yelling at his crew, and Glenn Beck's "Get Off My Phone!" shows a truly unraveling-at-the-seems ideologue whose inability to process the divorce between himself and the left wing sends him into a spiral of massive proportions. [And by the way, the points Beck makes in "Get Off My Phone" are actually pretty good points. Were it not for the post-emotional explosion, one would be hard pressed not to call Beck the winner of that particular debate.]

"Get Off My Phone", in addition to being ungodly entertaining, shows us Beck's true colors. For better or worse, Glenn is up-to-the-minute genuine. No true calculation would tell even the most melodramatic phoney to cry nearly as often as he does. Recently, we've seen a number of reports about how much more money Beck can make without his measly 2 million dollar show if he simply focuses on books and lecture tours. But he's taking Glenn Beck online to "Glenn Beck TV", where--for a subscription fee--only his most loyal followers are likely to follow him. It's reminiscent of Howard Stern setting up shop on Sirius radio. Except Glenn must know that only his most inflamed core of proto-Americans are going to be joining him, and I doubt he would have it any other way.

Israel is the latest of Beck's many, many fixations. In never truly comprehensible terms, Beck has talked about how Isreal is the victim of... some terrible ubiquitous paradigm. Signing off, he talked about the courage it must take to live in such a violent country, surrounded by evil. He talked about how only the most courageous people must live there and how he's heading over there to try to tap into that central core of courage. I don't know what any of that means, but Beck is almost certain to suffer from Jerusalem Syndrome while he's there, which is a very real psychiatric disorder afflicting certain visitors to Jerusalem in which the visitor suffers from delusions of prophetic or messianic grandeur. Sounds like a safe bet, no?

If O'Reilly and Beck are Batman villains, culture warrior Bill O'Reilly is Liam Neeson's Ra's al Ghul. Glenn Beck--whose derailing jokes, bizzare schticks and absurd conspiracy-mongering annoys O'Reilly, Jon Stewart, and everyone--is Heath Ledger's Joker. And that's a super-villain I have to respect.

GOD BLESS THE FREE MARKET: DiGiorno's Pizza and Cookies

2011-06-26T18:05:00.001-07:00

The modern free-for-all has a lot of people on Xanax because of what Søren Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom". The discussion of whether or not a.. ahem, merger... of this kind should be "allowed" is basically over in about ten seconds: we are all adults and we can purchase these products separately anytime we want. It should certainly be legal for companies to profit off the insatiable suicide-lust of the modern consumer.

But how does our American genome keep up with the on-slaught? Social Darwinism seems to be killing regular Darwinism. The inability to control one's appetite (or smoking, drinking, other life-shortening emotional weaknesses) is not severe enough to kill people before they have kids (especially with healthcare being what it is today). It's only severe enough to kill people while they're kids are still growing up (during an age when parenting is less than stellar).

Okay, so let's say you believe in the free market and have brains enough to know that pizza and cookies should only be purchased together once a year (like, New Years Eve). Your fellow shoppers disagree with you, so the product succeeds. Your fellow shopper dies at age 50 while his many children are ages 6-22. You now have four fatherless kids with a likelihood to spread on the same cluster time-bomb genes, while you--a hardworking, high-IQ'd free market whiz--are probably only having 1 or 2 well-exercised kids who are likely to become president some day. Congratulations, you've won social darwinism with good parenting, work-ethics and intelligence.

Only problem, your son or daughter will be president of nation in crisis. Or they'll be the CEO of a company that can't keep good employees because it can't afford to pay health benefits. Competition is all good and true, but being the top of a genetic/social mass-nightmare is not what our founding fathers had in mind.

BUT WHAT ABOUT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?!

It sounds like the left wing are not the only dreaming idealists. You have to realize that when the rules change during the game, there has to be some GROUP responsibility. Doing the best for oneself sometimes means doing a bit of reluctant parenting for the group at large in order that, as a nation, the free market can keep competition alive in a meaningful way. Otherwise, go ahead and keep Red 40 dye available and your brilliant offspring's version of the American Dream will be racking up points in dodgeball against a spectrum of autistic classmates--who some-day, he'll have to take care of just like all the other citizens of the early-cancer, low IQ, shit-genepool American Commonwealth. You think the taxes are shitty now? Wait fifty years when unregulated cellphone towers cause one-in four Americans a malignant tumor by age thirty and the government goes into some crazy emergency tax-triage that makes Obamacare look laissez-faire. (That rhymes, for those of you who are not reading this out loud).

The left and right wings are basically competing modes of idealism who, with some nudges towards the center, may actually start to agree on some legislation that actually WORK. I'm not saying that Nestle should not be allowed to sell their shitty products in tandem, any more than I feel Micky D's shouldn't be allowed to put toys in their happy meals. But it just gets you thinking about what a transcendent decision it would be for a successful company like Nestle to publicly retract this product line as an attempt to take a small part in social evolution.

Because isn't that what social darwinism is really all about?

On the Passing of Ryan Dunn

2011-06-22T15:26:00.000-07:00

by C.T. Heaney

Philadelphia summers are full of humid, muggy days, unfit for most living things, and I found myself at a friend’s house with nothing to do on one such hot Sunday last summer. We made a run to Wawa and decided we’d check the offerings at the movie theater the next block over. While neither of us had a strong desire to see any particular film that was playing, merely standing in the oppressive combination of sun and Delaware River vapor steeled our determination to enter the theater for whatever was available. The only movie we could agree on – which neither actually wanted to see, but which neither had a strong opposition to – was Jackass 3D.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’d never seen the MTV show and knew little about Bam Margera except that he was a prankster with a pretty shitty band and a nightclub in the Philly suburbs. I soon found that I had shelled out fifteen dollars to see a ninety-minute, R-rated YouTube video highlight reel. The Jackass aesthetic is a short step up from “Scarlet Takes a Tumble” or “Grape Lady Falls” and a long step down from The Three Stooges; it is physical comedy taken to its simplest, nastiest, and most brutal extremes. That is not to say I did not enjoy it at all, although I do not think any sane person can say that he enjoyed all of it; no one except the pathological, I am convinced, genuinely enjoys watching diarrhea rectally ejected skyward. I think I rather enjoyed it more than my companion – he said afterwards that he had to look away from the screen several times to keep from throwing up, while I did not have any trouble with my alimentary canal (and I can barely keep down three beers).

Jackass 3D did not inspire me to watch any more films or episodes in the franchise, but I think I understood its purpose fairly well without the need for much further study. The point of most Jackass skits is to induce vomiting (in the cast, crew, and audience, as shown in skits like the one where Steve-O drinks a cup of Preston Lacy’s sweat) or giggling at the misfortunes befallen by the team members – a pre-teen’s schadenfreude, built around pratfalls, crotch kicks, and fart bombs. Most, but not all. What I consistently enjoyed most about the film, and what kept me from writing it off as entertainment only for children who are not allowed to see the film without their parents, were the skits that showed inventiveness and ingenuity in their shock – the ones that left the arena of mere cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and evinced thought processes more along the lines of true daredevils or comedians, both of which the Jackass kids are sometimes generously called.

The film’s first skit (after the opening 3D sequence, which is sincerely the most impressive use of the technology I’ve seen outside of Avatar) hints, however obliquely, at such intricacy. The team builds a gigantic, spring-loaded padded hand in a doorway, then lures people through the threshold and smacks them with it. This is funny because someone unexpectedly gets flung back five feet, and it is funny because of repetition (they do it at least a dozen times to different people, and sometimes the same people over and over). But it’s also a fairly complex prank – it required obvious construction and planning, was very large and difficult to hide, and yet was still successful. The fact that any of these people can still prank each other is perhaps in itself impressive; you’d think, by this time, they’d be so wary of each other as to never let their guard down.

Several other sequences also demonstrated elevated levels of engineering insight, comedic savvy, or both. In one, a male and a female midget sit at a bar full of normal-heighted customers. A third midget walks in and picks a fight over the girl, and a brawl breaks out on the floor between them and several more midgets, as the other patrons look on in horror. Soon enough, a brigade of midget police come through and begin arresting the scufflers, and an injured participant is carried away on a stretcher by a team of midget paramedics. This elaborate scenario could be taken at surface level, as carney spectacle on the level with dwarf tossing, but it readily invites deeper analysis. It’s a brilliant use of the reality format, capturing candid reactions by the puzzled clientele trying to decide if what they’re seeing is real or fake, and whether they should see it as hilarious, depressing, frightening, or bothersome. Academics, or rights groups, could doubtless spin it as a Randy Newmanesque fable about the social separation between short and tall. In their own way, it could be argued, Wee Man and his associates in this skit bring awareness to such issues as much or more as Newman, Hervé Villechaize, Verne Troyer, or Little People, Big World. I will not argue this…but it could be argued.

In another, a feather-bedecked Ryan Dunn is catapulted into the air and shot with paintballs in a real-life re-creation of Nintendo’s Duck Hunt. The skit required two stuntmen to leap from a cherry-picker onto a huge air pillow in order to launch him. But my favorite scene in the film begins with Ryan Dunn sitting in a nice leather chair, with a suit and sunglasses on, directly in front of a large stereo speaker. As the music swells, a wind kicks up, until Dunn and his chair are sent flying offscreen by the immense force of the current. The scene cuts, and it is revealed to the audience that Dunn was not blown back by the force of the speaker, but rather by the thrust of an airplane’s jet engine placed in front of them. A montage follows with various people and items being thrown into the air stream, including one where a football pass is attempted, but the ball goes sailing hundreds of yards off.

Ryan Dunn is dead. He drove his Porsche off the road at 3:30 on the morning of June 20, and we do not yet know how or why. Alcohol appears to have been a factor, as it often is in such matters. Montaigne wrote that the character of a man’s life should not be judged until after the manner of his death is known, and perhaps it is too soon to do so in this case; but I think it safe to say that Dunn died as he had lived, dangerously, recklessly. Given that some scenes in Jackass 3D openly discuss the legal imbroglio that would ensue if the crew tapes a stunt that results in an accidental death, it’s perhaps most surprising that he didn’t die as a result of injuries sustained during a prank gone awry. He was not much older than I am, not much older than, in all probability, most

of the readership of this site. In some ways, he accomplished much; he was part of a cadre of enormously successful entertainers and businessmen whose work was known worldwide and who were familiar to millions. He died in a Porsche. But in other ways he accomplished very little; what does it mean to be famous for recording videos of yourself shoving a toy car into your rectum and visiting a proctologist? Was he merely “famous for being famous”, someone who had no real reason for being in the public eye other than outlandish behavior? Was his a life well-lived if he left as his sole legacy a stubborn, open refusal to enter adolescence, let alone maturity?

Did Ryan Dunn contribute something worthwhile to society in his short timehere? As someone whose patience for the sophomoric is legendary, but whose patience for the scatological is quite thin, I am nevertheless inclined to say that he did. Humor is a notoriously fleeting quality; it is the very essence of ephemera, difficult to catch and keep, harder to understand when called upon from beyond its own era. The more sophisticated it is, the less likely it will survive to be appreciated by later generations. This fact may make Jackass some of the most enduring comedy of our era, for better or worse; its simple, raw physicality will translate easily because it works at some of the most basic of human levels. It is a populist humor, one that gleefully micturates upon the heads of high art and elevated entertainment; perhaps that makes it postmodern, although prehistoric is probably a more apt descriptor. (And if prehistoric humor still translates among today’s audiences, does that make it timeless?)

However, the moments when I found Dunn and the Jackass crew most entertaining were when they constructed simple skits that required real intelligence in conception or execution. Running in the path of jet engine exhaust is a simple idea– but who would have thought to actually do it? And who would have gone to the length of renting an airplane, setting up the cameras, and firing up the turbines? There’s tremendous comedic potential in this thought, and it’s being exploited by folks who play-act as the dimmest of bulbs. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to come up with the human Duck Hunt, but you do need a good understanding of physics to make it work, and you need some keen insight into what makes physical comedy so enduringly funny, while social satire, parody, irony, cultural referencing, and other comedic devices fade so quickly. Any five-year-old gets the humor in Three Stooges shorts and old Warner’s cartoons, but it takes advanced degrees or a plethora of footnotes to understand why Washington Irving, Miguel de Cervantes or Joseph Haydn were considered such wits in their own day. And it’s not because the slapstick or the cartoons are simple-minded, or at least not just because of that; it’s that they’re also effective, and well-crafted, in ways that are not immediately apparent.

Dunn and his friends became famous for doing three types of stunts: things that many people wanted to do but were afraid to (such as going offroading with golf carts), things that very few people wanted to do (such as using superglue as a depilator), and things that no one thought to do before (such as sit in a wheelbarrow and slingshot oneself down a Slip-‘n-Slide, over a ramp, and into a kiddie pool). They succeeded in doing all three of those things, and thus, in some small and self-consciously absurd way, they expanded what we think of as possible in human endeavors. That’s what daredevils do, and while I called them daredevils and comedians above with a qualifier, I think I owe them that credit on both counts.

I only had a glancing encounter with Ryan Dunn’s work. In some sense, his entire life was his work; the way he lived was his performance. There was no separation between the stage persona and the private life. Dunn was cavalier with his life on-camera, and off-camera, too, we have just learned. Because of this fact, he wasted the better part of it, the forty or fifty years he won’t get to live. Dying so young is always a tragedy, and it certainly casts a pall on the Jackass skits as I look them up on YouTube again. In light of the context, they fade as comedy, and begin to feel more like a powerful memento mori, a reminder that we must not be cavalier with our lives, because they are much more fragile than the young imagine them to be. If Montaigne was right, then it's a shame Dunn did not see fit to take more care, and die better than he had lived.

Bridesmaids

2011-06-16T05:15:00.000-07:00

Kristin Wiig is brilliant. This remains true despite a concerted effort on SNL‘s part to make me hate her—a campaign that Lorne Michaels ran consistently since the ’90s against some of their funniest women. If you’re a female and you join the cast of SNL, watch out—SNL thinks that funny female equals over-the-top annoying. Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Anna Geysteyer, Ratchel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler have all suffered from this phenomenon which may or may not have started with Victoria Jackson. In fact, the only SNL lady who seemed completely immune to this was Tina Fey and, oh look—she was the head writer.

Unlike The Hangover, which was basically a long comedy sketch, Bridesmaids is actually a movie. This is always the big question when it comes to comedies. Should you aspire to make a full cinematic experience and risk coming up short (Wedding Crashers) or do you simply shoot for non-stop emotionless laughs and achieve wild success at a less transcendent achievement (Anchorman). The high-water mark for thoroughly hilarious, complete-narrative cinema is currently Superbad (despite the unoriginality of its premise). And Bridesmaids guns to outdo Superbad on an emotional level (which isn’t too hard to do—as successful as Superbad was, its cathartic risks never shot from outside the paint).

Read the rest at Paste Magazine

Why Does This Video Exist? (#2)

2011-06-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Enjoy these twenty seconds of reality and then join me for a discussion below!

[Note, this video, originally uploaded four years ago, was re-uploaded this year, and I'm using the re-upload because the audio is no longer aligned on the original one (which is still up, with a glorious cache of comments built up over the years.)]

Okay, so... where to begin.

Let's look at the FACTS:

$- The actions in this video depict a man ripping off three pairs of pants, and then punching a young woman in the face.

$- This video may be an actual candid moment captured on camera, or it may be "fake".

$- If it is "fake", that means the young woman does not actually get punched in the face, although the man does actually rip off three pairs of pants.

$- If the woman does not actually get punched in the face, a group of at least two (2) people saw incentive to demonstrate a punch in the face (in conjunction with ripping off three pairs of pants).

$- If the punch in the face is "real", [it seems safe to list as fact that] the girl did not expect it.

$- Ripping off three pairs of pants and punching a young woman in the face are two things which are not DIRECTLY related.

Okay, now lets discuss both realities

NOT FAKE:

In the context of being real, this is a truly bizarre 20 seconds of footage to exist. The juxtaposition of silliness and brutality is so sharp that I'm pretty confident in saying we haven't seen anything like it before. Additionally, because the blow is non-life-threatening, the series of events is (depending on how terrible of a person you are deep down) somewhat within the realm of funny. Rarely are two extreme, unrelated AND non opposite actions (that's an important distinction) located so close together in a given time and place. Don't get me wrong--ripping off three pairs of pants isn't amazing... by itself it falls just short of "belongs on YouTube". But if you saw it happen spontaneously at a cocktail party (or even weirder, not at a party) it would be a significantly elevated moment, one which would definitely make you wish you had it on tape. Additionally, a young woman getting punched in the face is certainly horrifying, but through the filtration of YouTube, it's more interesting than horrifying (YouTube emotional decontextualization is an interesting phenomenon that I'll get more into at a later date).

If the video is real, the juxtaposition of "three pairs of pants being ripped off" (uninteresting but cool) and "girl getting punched in the face" (uncool but interesting) within a five second span... well, it activates entirely too many neural regions not to be some sort of sick thrill to behold. One can't help but wonder what it would have been like to be there. What was the relationship like between the guy and the girl? What type of cocaine was he doing? How long did he practice the pants trick? At what moment during the pants trick did he decide he was going to be punching someone in the face?

The more you think about it, the more you begin to realize that this video tape is, in many ways, too good to be true. I don't mean that it's awesome that a girl may have been punched in the face, but--were this a real spontaneous event--the videotape thereof is almost too phenomenal to handle. While it's scope is different, it is categorically similar to the internet's best video (that I'm aware of), The Battle at Kruger, for it's unrivaled capture of natural occurrence.

But like I said earlier, it's really too good to be true.

FAKE:

Some days (yes, I think about this video about as often as I think about my own childhood) I can't tell what is more phenomenal: a real video depicting a guy tearing off pants and punching a woman in the face -OR- an agreed upon plan to film someone ripping off three pairs of pants and then immediately punching someone in the face.

Imagine this sentence being spake aloud: "We should make a video where I rip off three pairs of pants and then punch Claire in the face" or "Hey we should film you ripping off three pairs of pants and then pretend to punch me in the face" or "Jimmy, you should let me film you doing your pants trick, IMMEDIATELY followed by the trick you and Claire do with the punch in the face."

And then imagine a response to any of these being, "Holy shit, you're right!"

Any combination of one of the first three sentences with the last sentence is almost as bizarre an occurrence as the real thing actually happening. And--assuming it is fake--a conversation like that DID take place, as evidenced by this video's existence.

The fact that this video is fake (and lets face it... it is) but looks real, speaks volumes about how the creators view YouTube. This video is definitely not a descendant of America's Funniest Home Videos (even though, by virtue of it's overwhelming absurdity--and as evidenced by the comment section--it has clearly generated some laughs). Furthermore, it's not quite a tornado-vid or car-crash-vid or some other "Holy shit I can't believe they got this on film!" (unless it's real, which it isn't). It's not really a fail vid because the guy is clearly acting on intentions with some success. And lets be honest, as much as people are concerned about this in the comment section, it's NOT a simple glorification of violence to women and that's it. Because, rapid removal of pants is simply not related to non-sexual violence towards women (and we can agree that the punch in the face is largely non-sexual).

I think the reason I find this video so compelling is because it's the fusion of two things that are dramatic, cinematic, drastic, and--again--COMPLETELY unrelated. It's like that blog Nick Cage as Everyone, where pictures of famous (NON-Nick Cage) people are photo-shopped to have Nick Cage's facial features. The reason the blog is hilarious is not because the pictures are bizarre (which they are), or because Nick Cage's features makes everyone in history look stupid (which they do). It's because, as we're viewing each .jpeg, we're very familiar with 1) what Nick Cage looks like and 2) what the other celebrities are supposed to look like. These two very identifiable but utterly unrelated images are fused together simply for the cross-section of an absurd new reality. It's like when they put Anton Chigurh in a Photoshop interacting with the Mario Brothers (I'm not sure I've ever seen this, but this is my residual impression of the Internet). It's the real reason True American Dog is hilarious. Bizarre, sure. Absurd, definitely. But when members of different families we know well get pushed up close to each other, it has a dizzyingly silly effect. Imagine going to charity bake-sale and spotting your coworker from the cubicle next to you, dancing the Charleston with your aunt. How do they even know each other?? Why is your aunt in town from Toledo without you knowing about it? Their two worlds are full of meaningful context individually, but together, they defy comprehension. For me, this is like a roller coaster. I can't do real roller coasters because my inner ear does not enjoy disorientation. Some people would be so confused by their coworker dancing the Charleston with their aunt that it would be upsetting, like some kind of psychedelic trip gone too heavy.

I suspect most people would laugh with bewilderment.

To me, ripping off pants is my co-worker, and punching someone in the face is my aunt. I'm perfectly adjusted to them individually, separately... but together I have no clue how to process them. And the lack of explicability for very familiar things is an intense level of absurdity on par with that described by Albert Camus in The Myth Of Sisyphus, except the detachment of the Internet filters out the despair, leaving only an intellectual tilt-a-whirl.

Epilogue:

One of the many, many pages of comments has someone saying, "if you search stunt reel: Nancy McCrumb, you'll find her doing this again". Another comment tells the people complaining how awful this video is to shut up because it's part of a stunt girl's demo reel. I've looked into this, and there is a video featuring a girl with similar features getting her ass kicked in a bunch of stunt-takes. I don't know if it's her, but it probably is, because that would be very strange of someone to try proving something fake by offering fake evidence against it (you know, with having relatively little to gain, as would be the case here).

Sadly, a stunt-reel is the one scenario that (sorta) makes this 20 seconds of magic make perfect sense. Finding this out is sorta like finding out that Santa's not real. Still, there are probably other videos out there as inexplicable as I wish this video was. If you know about them, please send them to me, post haste.

NOSTALGIA CRISIS: 90's Alt-Rock (Part 2)

2011-06-03T05:01:00.000-07:00

The Past Is Gone, but Something Might Be Found to Take its Place
by C. T. Heaney

I drove 45 minutes into the Philadelphia suburbs last Saturday night to spend three and a half hours watching an utterly ordinary cover band. Why would I do this? Why would anyone do this?

Jayy Mannon of Bonehead

The band I went to see is called Bonehead, and if you’re from the Philly area and listened to the radio a lot, you might have run across them. Around 1998 or ’99 they got a few spins on local alt-rock stations like Y100 and WZZO with a locally-released song entitled “I Know”. If you came along a couple of years later, you may recognize them under a different name: Familiar 48. They signed to big-name label MCA Records in 2002 and put out a fully promoted album under this name, managing some minor nationwide exposure. One of their singles, a breezy, wistful pop-grunge tune called “The Question”, even scraped the bottom of the Billboard radio charts. Success didn’t last long, though, and both the label and the group imploded almost immediately afterwards.

Familiar 48’s lead singer and songwriter, Jayy Mannon, subsequently tried his hand at a solo career. Since he had better name recognition locally as Bonehead, he eventually went back to using his (probably trademark-troublesome) old band name in booking local shows, which was all he could book at that point. He put out some new music a few years later, but was pretty out of it as far as new-media marketing was concerned, so the comeback EP more or less sank without notice. Mannon then did what any reasonable person would do, and found ways to pay the bills; he started a customized wedding-song service and got weekend gigs at suburban bars as a cover outfit, which brought in a lot more people than the originals did.

Scoff all you want, and prattle on about bad taste and artistic integrity, but the fact remains that this is probably exactly where Mannon should be in his career. He’s

a competent but not impressive musician, rigidly locked inside the musical paradigms of the 1990s. His deep, raspy voice lands him somewhere in Eddie Vedder/Jason Ross territory (that’s Seven Mary Three, so you don’t have to look it up), and he can do a spot-on Scott Stapp impression. Familiar 48’s album was behind the times when it was released, and perhaps reminds one of no band more than Three Doors Down, whose spotty and often bland songwriting made much of their work forgettable despite a few standout singles. Mannon still does his hair like Mark McGrath, gelled up, with the frosted tips. He is, for all intents and purposes, a rock dinosaur, unable to change with the times, though a single released this year shows slight tinges of more modern electronic production. It could’ve graced any of the last three Lifehouse albums.

Given all of these factors, it's quite sensible that he is where he is. This is his social function – playing Rock Hits of the Nineties to a bar full of Phillies fans who would be paying for these songs on the jukebox if he weren’t there. Maybe that makes the bar owners idiots, but he brings his own devoted crowd, who probably buy enough drinks to make employing him worthwhile. His set list included a few older numbers (Tom Petty, Billy Idol, Bad Company) and a few newer ones (The Killers, Kings of Leon, Finger Eleven), but overwhelmingly he drew from the decade that brought you Pearl Jam, Goo Goo Dolls, Fuel, Matchbox 20, Green Day, Eve 6, Gin Blossoms, Foo Fighters, 311, Sublime, Creed, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sister Hazel, and Lit. And yes, he did “Kryptonite”, though technically that song came out in 2000.

Two things struck me about the evening’s performance. First, it was obvious that Mannon loves what he does. He was jovial on stage and off, having a great time chatting with the local yokels who spend their Saturday nights at the taverns where he plays. Furthermore, he’s playing his own favorite music. He plays the songs he thinks are the best of his generation, with a full electric band behind him. I think he recognizes how lucky he is to still be doing this, at any level, when he’s a few years shy of forty.

The second thing I found remarkable regarded the set list, which was mostly covers, but not all. I saw the band play about thirty songs, and five or six of them were originals, including their new song “Real”. As a fan of some of the old Bonehead and Familiar 48 material, I had come hoping for more originals, but I knew before I arrived that they’d revamped as a cover band, so I was prepared for the possibility of hearing none. What amazed me was how seamlessly the originals flowed into the tenor of the evening. That would make sense, since they were pop songs written in the nineties, bracketed by hit pop songs written in the nineties. Yet one might expect for them to stick out, as “the song nobody knows” or “what the hell is this? Play STP!” That didn’t happen; there were no boors drunkenly demanding Buckcherry, no mass exoduses to the restrooms. Many of the regulars were singing at the front of the stage, and I even saw a few people toward the back of the bar cock their heads, as if in recognition, and start to hesitantly mouth along as the choruses repeated. They seemed to think they knew the song from back on VH1 or the radio, which clearly they didn’t; they were picking it up as they went along. They did recognize something, but it wasn’t a specific tune. It was a more generalized recognition, the sound of a familiar era, one that evoked the musical signifiers of a time and place without actually being a part of these people’s lives in that time and place. It was a sort of nostalgia by proxy, if you will.

I grew up with this music, both the originals and the covers. I, like many people of approximate age, spent a lot of time and effort learning specifics about this music, concerning myself with the names of bands and songs, memorizing lyrics and buying albums. It matters to me in very specific ways. However, I recognize that people who did not live through this time, or who did not have the extreme leisure time that American adolescence typically provides at the same moment I did, may not care to devote themselves to attaining the level of expertise that I and many people (mostly men) of my generation have about nineties-era rock music.

This divide will only grow wider with the passage of time. Subsequent generations will devote more time to the music of now than the music of then, and this is inevitable, if perhaps not natural (our preoccupation with “progress” in art and the pathways of commercialism prioritize new things and make children generally hostile to cultural traditions). Specific artists and songs will fade, and they will be replaced with a delocalized notion of the epoch, the musical zeitgeist of the 1990s (or maybe, as time passes, an even larger time period). My generation thinks the same way about previous eras – take “classic rock” as an example. Most twentysomethings think of this less in terms of a constellation of unique musicians and more as a consistent whole, filled with singles whose artists they may not even know, and in many cases, aren’t familiar with beyond one radio hit: Blackfoot, Ram Jam, The Ides of March, Sugarloaf, Argent. Play them a song by Wishbone Ash, or Uriah Heep, or Humble Pie, or Delaney & Bonnie, and they’ll immediately be able to place it stylistically, but they’ll have no inkling of how important these bands were to young people forty years ago.

Take it back even farther; consider swing jazz. How many jazz bands can you name? How many swing musicians? How many songs? Only a few aficionados could count off more than a half dozen at most – far fewer than our grandparents. For most people, this genre doesn’t exist as discrete pieces of music that matter in and of themselves; they’re content merely to hear the sound of it, the familiar patterns. A new jazz band playing the same tunes – or new tunes in the same style – is just fine. Ragtime, boogie-woogie blues, rockabilly, reggae, bluegrass, trance, most varieties of classical music, anything non-Western – all the same. What matters isn’t any particular, beloved work; it’s the sound, the feeling of the sound. In time, this will occur to virtually every genre of music, even the ones you love or that you think are particularly diverse, unique, or artistically worthy. It’ll happen to ‘80s dance, to shoegaze, to ska, to modern indie rock, to post-rock, to anything we can put a name on. It’ll be cut free from the individual artists and abstracted into an archetype, into an idea, into a feeling.

This abstraction is already starting to happen to rock of the ‘90s, and that makes people like Mannon begin to look little more important, if we reposition him from has-been to ambassador. I wrote in my last post about the idea of rock being something perpetuated by a small number of acolytes who defend and maintain its stylistic positions, rather than the presumptive mouthpiece of a generation. The nineties sound will need such acolytes, people who go on playing this repertory and representing it for younger and younger people. They will be what Interpol is to Joy Division, what Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones are to Dusty Springfield and Carla Thomas, what Sara Bareilles is to Carole King, what Fleet Foxes are to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young – only less lucky when it comes to being noticed by a label's or critic's influential ear. They’ll be more like the streetcorner and coffeeshop guitarists who go on playing twelve-bar blues now that Muddy Waters, Skip James and Son House are long gone. If everyone stopped playing this music live, it would begin to die; any music without a living community of practitioners can be said to be dead, in perhaps the most profound sense.

It is of course too soon to pronounce alt-rock dead, but many of those bands have broken up, or have already reduced themselves to phoning in their old hit(s) on the casino circuit. The music’s long since lost its vitality (and most of the remaining bands are charging way too much for admission). How many of them did you get to see live, anyway? Of the bands whose hits Mannon played, I have seen the Goo Goo Dolls, Fuel, Matchbox 20, Foo Fighters, and Sister Hazel in concert. That’s probably more than most people, and if you really wanted to experience all your favorite hits of the decade live, you’d blow through hundreds of dollars in Ticketmaster fees alone.

I got to hear two dozen of them, in one night, for free.

I spent an evening listening to a live band play more than twenty songs whose words I knew in their entirety, songs I mostly loved and even a few I don’t like but didn’t really mind hearing so much after all. Of course, I sang along to everything; this is as close to karaoke as I will ever get. The most apt analogy I can think of is going to see one of those old doo-wop quartets, all but one of whose members are dead. The remaining member, who now owns the rights to the name, hires a bunch of geezers from other vocal groups of the day and tours, singing their one hit along with a cornucopia of other familiar ‘50s platters. To sit there and huff about originality or buck-chasing is to miss the point of being alive. Try shoo-bopping along with the bass instead.

I started this post by calling Bonehead an “utterly ordinary cover band”. Then I spent several pages explaining why, at least for my sake, they are anything but ordinary. To any casual observer, including some of the bar’s clientele that evening, ordinary is surely what they are. I might have said the same, until I realized how important and valuable than can be. And with it, I got to hear a few tunes that were, to many, pleasant if mediocre rehashes of a time gone by, but which I had been waiting to hear in concert for a decade or more. I got to sing along to those, too, something I’d never be able to do anywhere else, and which I may never be able to do again when I move away from this part of the country.

The Gin Blossoms song that Bonehead covered toward the end of the night was, naturally, “Hey Jealousy”, the Blossoms' most durable hit. This is one of the five best songs written in the decade of the 1990s, and I will physically fight anyone who argues with me on this; it is a song of explosive emotional power, and its lyrics cut to the marrow of human desperation like a scythe. I don't know that I've ever heard a counterpoint as expressive as the interplay between the lead guitar and voice in the chorus. You can see the Gin Blossoms on tour right now; they’re back together, though the member who wrote “Hey Jealousy” blew his brains out back in 1993. But even a standard-issue bar band can wallop you with that song, and every day the last line of the refrain seems to apply to more and more, including to the music itself.

Foster the People & New Tipping Points

2011-06-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

This past April (not two whole months ago), L.A. pop-rock band Foster the People played Philly's Kung Fu Necktie--a venue which accommodates about a hundred people, maybe a buck twenty. Later this month, they will play (and sell out) the TLA, which holds a grand. By the end of August, don't be surprised if they headline Lincoln Memorial Field.

Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book, The Tipping Point, coined its eponymous term describing the long sought-after 'critical mass' of momentum for a product, style or idea. Not too long ago, your product needed the help of "salesmen", "mavens" and "connectors" to go viral. Eleven years later, YouTube is six years old (that's it!?) and getting 3 billion visits per day and the word "viral" means way more than it did in 2000. Gladwell's tipping recipes seem to have been outdated by a short decade of modern history.

There are two ways you can look at music. You can view it as a collection of songs or a collection of artists. Those who look at music as a collection of songs are the more common group (Group A). They are the casual music fan. These folks enjoy a well-adjusted relationship with a good beat or catchy melody. But the type of person who looks at music as a collection of artists (Group B) has elevated the importance of music beyond "something to be enjoyed" and sees it as a lifestyle and a reflection on oneself. In fact, the most extreme (read: craziest) of Group B folks actually go a step further--they see music as a collection of albums by artists. These self-medicating brow-furrowers often end up as music journalists.

READ THE REST ON CITYPAPER.NET

Facebook Buttons: "Like" vs "Reccomend"

2011-05-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

This is why they offer a "Reccomend" button...

Narrating the Pre-Apocalypse: Jim Breuer

2011-05-26T07:15:00.000-07:00

Jim Breuer talks rapture, Dave Chapelle, a hypothetical Half Baked sequel and other harbingers of the end times.

I asked Jim for his thoughts on the May 21st rapture.

I got three kids, elderly parents, I can't think ahead three minutes from now, I don't know what's lurking around the corner. The last thing I need to worry about is someone who depicts a part of the bible saying it's all ending tomorrow. Nobody knows anything. There's no predictions for anything, nobody knows anything. That's just what it is. Zero. Nobody knows. You can read a Koran, a Bible... whatever a Buddhist reads, inside and out. It's so vague. Well, it says that--NO IT DOESN'T! It's like when you sit down with a psychic, "Well, she knew the name of my dog!" No, dummy, you told her without knowing it. They go vague and you wanna believe it. There's no predictions, otherwise you'd know when the next volcano or earthquake is hitting.

At the end of the day, I always say it's one of two things. It's either A) a publicity stunt to get you involved, which is clever and genius... Or B) a hidden agenda of people who DON'T want you to have faith, to make faith look stupid. (mason shit?)... You just never know. You never know. It could be! What a great way to smear anyone's spirituality and faith by making it look bad and stupid. So you get an evangelist, and you expose him for his sexual deeds. As long as professional wrestling still exists and people believe it's real, I can't put anything past people's minds.

I asked whether he thinks there will ever be a half-baked sequel.

Honestly, no. I remember Dave Chappelle, after Half Baked came out, he said, "They've been really hounding us to do another one." And maybe I am at fault, I said, "That is gonna go down as one of the greatest cult films ever, don't ruin it with another one. Wait till we're about 50 or 60 years old. THEN you got a whole different concept, we can all be grandparents who are these straight-edge, corporate guys, brilliant Wall Street execs... and then we all go back to our roots!"

"I'm one of those people who are so smart that I'm uncomfortable in this world, and I'm scared to live"- Dave Chappelle

I haven't heard from Dave, I don't know what he's doing anymore. I don't know if he's left show-business for good. I haven't heard from him in 3 years. I reached out to him recently, but he's never reached out to me. Which is... I don't know... it's odd that I don't hear from him because I consider him a really good friend. Dave was also a guy that, he never got to live life at all. I stressed that a lot to him, especially when he had kids. Dave never got to enjoy life. When he was a kid, 16 years old, he was out of his house. All he knew was show-business. And he was ripped off a lot. He was taken advantage of a lot. There's some really dark ugly sides to our business. And when you're young and coming up in show-business, it's really easy to be taken advantage of. And Dave was REALLY taken advantage of. There were some pivotal moments in his life and career that took some really bizarre turns and hits. By the time he came out with that show, we all knew he was that funny and that brilliant. Who knows what was in his head, but it wasn't that pleasant for him. I remember before it all went down, he talked to me. Here he is, probably the most successful show in history, for such a short-lived show on CC. He got a $50 million dollar deal for two seasons. Seinfeld wasn't even offered that for 5 or 6 seasons. He'd say, "Jim, these people never stop, they don't let me breathe..." He always wanted to be free. He just had enough. He wanted to relax and enjoy life. I always tipped my hat to him. $50 million, not worth it. I'd rather go home and watch my kids grow up. I think that's a mortal situation. Then they paint him as a wacko cuz a lot of investors go, "I just paid millions for that negro to be funny, what happened?" And people go, "Uh, he's on drugs..."

Favorite flick from the last few years is...

The Hangover. I must have watched that 20 times.

Thoughts about the sequel coming out?

Ehhh, I don't know... anytime they're making another one, 98 percent of the time, they're going for the cash. First go-round, you're driven by the artist and to make people laugh. The second time around, you're driven by money. And that usually makes a poor product. But I'm gonna have my hopes high for it. Also, people don't realize, there was no expectations for the first film. People didn't know those guys. Now, everybody knows all of them, and expectations are VERY high. They're really gonna have to pull something off for number two.

Worst sequels?

Blues Brothers 2000 was pretty bad. But the ultimate number one... Arthur. How do you take one of the greatest funny classic characters... When you watch that original... DON'T TOUCH IT! I don't care who this guy is... are you KIDDING ME???

Also, Friday. I think if they never made another Friday, the real Friday would also be looked at similar to Half Baked. I much have watched that 50 times, before all the sequels.

Although, at the end of the day, you are doing it to get paid unfortunately. You see it mostly in those super crazy big-budget things and the sequels and prequels. Listen, if I were in The Hangover, sign me up for 2, 3, 4, and 5. The mission was done. Half Baked, I got just over a hundred thousand dollars. I don't really get royalties, it was my first movie. A second one, I could have got around 5 million. I do gigs, I'm guilty. Look at the Anti-Social Network comedy tour, those guys are hilarious but they do this different type of material than I do. But look at the money! Yea I'd rather make in one 20 minute set the same I'd make doing 7 shows at a city club!

On the end-times for modern man?

We started out with flaps over our willies, hunting bugs and mud huts. It kicked ass for thousands and thousands of years. There's still a few left out in Africa. It's gonna end with the same type of living. It started raw, it's gonna end raw. The only way WE could end it is some jackasses trying to blow everything up. I don't THINK we're gonna get there. But the other thing is that when God's had enough, he's gonna blow some snot rocket at us and blow this planet right out of the solar system *hock's a sound effect loogie*. All done. It's over. That's when you realize you really have no control of anything. When you see a freaken tsunami tidal wave coming at you, when you see the Earth just swallow you during an earthquake... You realize you're really a grain of salt. We're so self-driven, we really think we're everything. We're in control. We can affect this and that and change all this. At the end of the day, you got no control of nothing. The only thing you have control is--maybe--your bowel movement... and when to drink that coffee to get that thing moving.$$

Is Lady Gaga the Closest that Mainstream Gets to Avant-Garde?

2011-05-25T15:52:00.000-07:00

Author's Cut, originally published on www.Citypaper.net.

In the world of pop tunes, presentation is--arguably--much more the "product" than the music. In that respect, there's almost no question that Lady Gaga is pushing boundaries. Unless of course you count Marilyn Manson as a pop star. But as you know, he doesn't make pop music, he makes industrial goth. What Gaga lacks in doing it first, she makes up for with doing it in a far less adventure-ready arena. And whatever "it" is, she aint bad at it. I'll bet it's with no fully dissolved solution of respect and envy that Manson watches the video for "Bad Romance" with a twisted grin on his face.

But courageousness aside, can we really call Lady Gaga a member of the avant-garde?

www.TheFreeDictionary.com defines the avant-garde as "A group active in the invention and application of new techniques in a given field, especially in the arts."

Okay, if the given field is pop music, which we're defining--cynically--as the packaging of a singer for mass consumption... Then yes, we can say that at least part of what Lady Gaga does is completely new.

But is it actually a technique? Or is it just the glorification of flinging stuff at the wall because the market is ready for it? Let's look at the definition of "technique".

technique (n): "The systematic procedure by which a complex or scientific task is accomplished."

I don't know whether Gaga's procedure can be called systematic. Hell, I don't even know if we can call it a procedure. This aint Claude Monet developing more exaggerated brush-strokes of light and shadow to render a stylized impression of landscapes. If anything, the Gaga schtick seems to flourish by virtue of it's sharply asystematic, "WTF"-appeal.

Is it rebellion that Germanotta taps into? If so, then why does she keep the music so effortless to hear? Remember, the music is still part of the equation, and if she wanted to be really rebellious, she would have stayed with her earlier rock or hip-hop songwriting instead of re-tooling Madonna and Michael Jackson for an easy swallow by the millions.

I guess that "m" word really explains it. Lady Gaga knows how to feed the machine with the tunes necessary for pop universality. She knows that fashion, photography and music video are far more avant-ready mediums for the bizarre or unusual. Music, not so much. That's the key to pop-song success: instant familiarity. It's why the same four-chord structure comprises half of the songs you hear on the radio. The ear and the eye are such different animals. The eye is hungry for more data. The ear wants to maintain the status quo. Why do you think alarms are so... alarming? Evolutionarily, the ear "stood watch", protecting us from predators and rival tribes. The eye worked on hunting, learning and reproducing. Advancement. The eye is the offensive squad, and the ear is the defense. Ever hear someone listening to really weird music and then joke that they're on drugs? The phrase, "you have to be high to enjoy Phish" is not entirely un-scientific. When music has too much color, complexity and other variables, our primal ear turns off from it. Illicit substances, for better or worse, are known to boost the visual qualities of our other senses. By the same token, have you ever honestly been thrilled by looking at a picture of a tree in a field? BORING! I've seen that like a thousand times by now! Show me something interesting, like melting clocks drooping off the side of a mesa!

Does this mean anything?

But I digress. Lady Gaga is not an avant-garde artist, she's a marketer. She certainly meets the standard of an "artist"--she's definitely expressing herself in a way that could change how you look at the world. But her strategy of connecting unusual sights to the same old sounds are nothing short of a marketing strategy. She's a shrewd businesswoman, a supposedly postmodern creatrix whose craft is the attachment of contrasting packages to each other, in order to increase demand for the "product".

I tell you what though, she IS "active in the invention and application of new techniques in a given field", but that field is making millions, not shedding light on the inner-life of the world.

Unless of course marketing is an elaborate--and coincidentally profitable--performance piece about modern humanity...

For the record, I love Lady Gaga.

On The Rapture Meme

2011-05-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

After hearing about Saturday's rapture on two separate, somewhat polarly opposed Philly-area radio stations (93.3 WMMR and 103.3 WPRB Princeton, which should give you an idea of how far spread the rapture-matrix has permeated), I did a search for the hashtag #rapture on handy-dandy Twitter.

That's when it occurred to me...

The predicted May 21 Rapture is getting — what must be — many thousands percent more publicity from the snark-o-sphere than those good-hearted folks at Harold Camping's Family Radio Worldwide who sold their houses to drive mobile billboards around the country to tip us off about their very important event. The most common type of joke is, "what are you going to be wearing for the rapture?" followed by "x sports team beat y sports team, it really will be the end of the world." These are a variety of pseudo gallows humor, which seeks to create congruity between the extremely important, and the extremely un-important. About 60 percent of my search feed looked like this.

READ THE REST AT CITYPAPER.NET

Why Does This Video Exist? (#1)

2011-05-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

I'm over-due to begin a somewhat self-explanatory series. To introduce it, I'd like to share one of my favorite quotes by an important critic, Lester Bangs.

Lester Bangs

"I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing jazz whether I like it or not."

There's something so gloriously nihilistic about that quote which makes me really love it, and which also makes me reconsider my working definition of nihilistic. I've used it a lot lately because I think I extrapolate more meaning from it than people are used to. For example, last week, I was asking The Onion editors Chad Nackers and Joe Garden "Whether you view your roles as either: acting as a reflection of the zeitgiest, or simply running a nihilistic joke-machine for cash?" As they answered, I began to realize that "nihilism" is a concept that is more connotative than literal, and as such it seems like a much less effective descriptor than I expected. So let's examine:

From www.thefreedictionary.com

ni·hil·ism
1. Philosophy
a. An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.
b. A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
2. Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.
3. The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.

This seems like a reasonable representation of the working meaning of nihilism, but different from my personal relationship with the word.

[By the way, an exciting realization is that dictionaries are not the final authority on the meaning of words, they are simply a reference point, aggregating the active meanings of words based on the real authorities: the English-speaking community. If you were to use a word 'improperly' and I know exactly what you mean, then that's more proper than whatever Oxford has to say about it. Why do you think there are so many 'volumes' and 'editions'? Neologisms and portmanteaus are on the rise and have shown that language is just as much a living organism as earth's environment or the economy.]

But to me, the word nihilism is so much less attitudinal and so much more phenomenal. [There's another word that's taken on new meaning. By phenomenal, I mean relating to observable occurrence. I use both nihilistic and phenomenal with somewhat neutral connotations.] In regards to The Big Lebowsky definition, "We believe in nothing!" I subscribe to the more basic way to arrange that sentence: "We don't believe in things."

...that must be exhausting!

Nihilism to me is the absence of the great scaffold. A syllogistic breakdown to zero (or, one, as it were). A non-emotional view of something for exactly what it is and nothing more. Hell, my view of the modern role of dictionaries is pretty nihilist, as are a lot of my views nowadays. [Which is why I feel I've been skewing more right-wing lately. People mistake religion and faith as part of the right-wing lifestyle, but a true breakdown of government stems from a very reptilian, Darwinian, "every man for himself" view of the world. If you think Jesus was a republican, you haven't read a single page of the Bible.]

So, I've been using Nihilism to indicate a complete removal of context, an uber-utilitarian framework. But people have been hearing it in a "cynical" or "bitter" context. It's true that skepticism is a large part of nihilism, but you have to remember that skeptics are not cynics, and optimists are not (necaserrily) naive.

Bangs' quote about Clarke to me is the ultimate realization of a critic's true place in the world. A critic isn't creating anything, we're just attempting to shuffle things around--to reposition those things that other people have created into more logical scaffolds because, deep down, we're uncomfortable with the fact that art and entertainment (especially art) is simply zooming wildly across the big grid, existing independent from any REAL systems, creating ripples both intended and unintended; and we want to lasso them in like rampant steer so they can be most effectively channelled, consumed or discarded. This rather Sisyphean attempt to put untethered phenomena in its place is rather amazing to behold at large, and Bangs' quote really captures the essential defeat of the lesser of two gods. Between a god that creates and a god that reduces, there is often less incentive to be the former, and it feels cooler to be the latter, but the former's work will always be more complete, because even if it's bullshit to us, it DEFINITELY exists without regard to our opinions.

Which leads me to the first video in the series, "Why Does This Video Exist?"

Don't get me wrong, I SORTA understand why this video slipped into existence. It's not completely beyond explanation in the bottom-line, nihilistic sense of the word. But it's that ever elusive BIG PICTURE explanation that I fail to capture. Hell, it seems absurd to even attempt to abstract this video into the big picture, which is probably what draws me to it.

And regardless of what you think about the value of this video, you have to admit one concession... it doesn't NOT EXIST...

[I'm going to be pretty embarrassed if this video gets removed for any reason, because then, it will not, in fact, exist.]

More Thoughts on Grantland

2011-05-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

By The Pour Curator

Bill Simmons' new Grantland, which promises to be an Interwebs shrine to the unholy union of pop culture an professional sports, is probably anticipated by its detractors more than its likely supporters. The fact that we already know who the detractors are, before it even exists functionally, tells a square most of what he or she need know about it. The most eloquent disemboweling of the not-yet-site was launched by African dictator-cum-blogger Mobutu Sese Seko. It was given the stamp of approval by one of the many excellent vaguely anti-Simmons sports blogs, The Big Lead, and so it is now more widely read than Dostoevsky. In his evisceration, Mobutu even acknowledges that one of the articles on the pilot page is superlative, but somehow this in no way dissuades him that the project must be a total waste of time. That's the level of response Simmons brings out in smart people.

So he's a lightning rod, because he's famous and his fame is now tied to who he is. As Mobutu writes, this lends his old "just-another-guy" tone a level of insincerity, but that's only if you assume he ever wanted to be a serious writer, instead of just a very well-read blogger. Some of the criticism of the new Grantland site seems to be that the star-studded lineup (Eggers, Klosterman, Gladwell) and the lofty title (a reference to a revered early 20th Century sportswriter) implies a gravity befitting of the early ESPN.com Page 2, which featured writers like Wiley, Hunter Thompson and David Halberstam. I instead see it as a celebration of all of pop culture's facets, including the ugly ones, on which these writers are uniquely qualified to comment.

All that said, here are a few points I think one might consider before writing off Grantland before it has actually published things. They lack the passion of Mobutu, but perhaps their simplicity will make up for it a little.

I used to love Simmons's writing, and now I do not, and that is mostly, I believe, due to a combination of two things: 1) Like basically every sportswriter not named Joe Posnanski or Ralph Wiley, he got lazy at a certain level of fame and, rather than seeking to continue improving, just played the hits because he knew people liked them and would sing along. 2) He clearly got more interested in other forms of media. His Podcasts are very good when they are not very bad, and I think his work on 30 for 30 was undeniably great. When he focuses, he is capable of producing insight, and I think he will focus on a multimillion-dollar enterprise that is his baby.

Say what you will about Simmons, he has totally defined how a writer can become a socially relevant, important person in the post-publication age. He started as a blogger, and is now the most popular sportswriter on the planet. We may not like him, but that is the prototype that I, Dr. Carey, and everyone under the age of 60 is following. Possibly even Mr. Mobutu is following this model.

Klosterman is alternately great and terrible. For that matter, so is Simmons. For that matter, so is Gladwell. So the fact that Mr. Mobutu found on the site one great story and one terrible story is not really surprising. I expect this site to be 100% chaos and inconsistent in quality, just like (wait for it...) pop culture. Sometimes you get Two and a Half Men, sometimes you get Justified, sometimes you get Jersey Shore.

Perhaps most importantly, I believe Mobutu's response is guilty (as so many of our online missives are) of forgetting the cardinal virtue of the Internet, which is choice. Can we please stop acting like we are somehow obligated to read/watch/listen to people we hate? If you really hate Klosterman or Simmons, please, feel free to go read one of the ELEVENTY BILLION OTHER THINGS ON THE BLAGOSPHERE. Seriously. I run a niche blog about niche art in a niche part of the beer industry, and I have readers. There's good stuff out there, and the Internet's too big to ever read all of it, so go read something you like. Of course I disagree with the Disney practice of forcing writers to adulate Disney, but if you're not familiar with ESPN, and that Disney does not allow self-criticism, then you have larger cultural awareness issues than can be solved here. We can read things and still consider the source.

So onto the question of whether a larger, star-studded, certain-to-be-obnoxious celebration of pop culture is warranted.

I have no research to back this up outside of a personal anecdote. If you hate Simmons, you probably hate personal anecdotes, so feel free to stop reading (see? I practice what I preach.).

Today, a friend sent me the Mental_Floss list of 10 versions of Rebecca Black's "Friday," including versions by Stephen Colbert and Meat Loaf.

Etewaf: reconstituting all cultural units into processed nuggets

Now, it's worth pointing out that I am having a bad week in the middle of an all-time bad month. It happens and, like most men of my age, I've developed the necessary stoicism to experience this stuff while still functioning and waiting for the simple laws of large numbers to even things out a bit and resume my comfortable, treasured mediocrity. I don't deluge others with what's going on because I want them to think highly of me, and I don't like wasting people's time. But, you know, it still blows. As with said stoicism, the only real way to rock it is to just assume that all which is in one's near future is likely to suck, and there is little to be done about it. So I hoped for no great salvation, just the healing march of days. Streetcar named Resignation, all the way til the end of the line.

Then I get this email, with 10 versions of a song so unspeakably bad that just thinking of it makes me feel worse. I actually responded to the email with irritable hate about "Friday," but was politely told to just watch the Colbert version.

I thought nothing could make me feel better, and I was wrong.

Then I listened to the "Meat Loaf" version:

Okay, but what does any of this have to do with Simmons and Grantland?

Simmons is nowadays a pretty bad writer. He used to be great, then he decided he cared more about other media, and he largely phones in sports columns filled with the same lame pop culture and Boston sports references. They're painful because they lack any originality... they're in many ways like Rebecca Black's "music."

But the beautiful thing about terrible pop culture, the type of stuff that makes guys like Simmons and Klosterman hard, is that it can lead to unexpected, inspired brilliance. It provides a challenge to those who are so good at what they do they sometimes need to make it a bit harder (Simmons would call to mind here the times Larry Bird would shoot left handed just because). It can remind us that there are people so dedicated to doing things that make us feel good that the importance we attach to ourselves is, in a tiny way, not totally invented. The single best thing about this smaller world we now inhabit is that we're constantly an audience, and being a part of an audience is hugely empowering. Stephen Colbert heard the worst thing that a completely artificial pop culture can crank out, and decided that it could be the basis for something between high comedy and an actually moving performance. Some people heard it, and decided they could Meat Loaf-ify it enough to the point where his signature maudlin, mourning power ballad style would lend it an emotional resonance and weight only heightened by its absurdity.

Pop Culture often sucks and Grantland's writers are Pop Culture's absolute though champions, so, yes, they often suck, too. I expect there to be tons of garbage on this site, like the idiot piece up there now. There was lots of garbage in newspapers back when they existed, too. There's multiple ways to get to greatness, though (and on this I absolutely agree with Klosterman et al): There is "so good it's good," and there is "so bad it creates good." They are different, and, I can totally respect Mr. Mobuto's view that we should only strive for the good-good.

But no poem by Rainer Maria Rilke or song by Warren Zevon or painting by Jackson Pollock was going to make me feel better today. It took Stephen Colbert and the Roots covering the absolute worst fucking song in the history of music. And if that isn't worth celebrating on a Website, I don't want to be on the Internet.

On Mobutu Seko's Grantland Assasination

2011-05-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

The notorious former African dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, seems to be done forming vast child-armies for the cultivation of blood diamonds, however, he is far from finished dictating.

His latest decree is that the ESPN owned Bill Simmons vehicle, Grantland, is going to be really quite bad.

I had a chance to interview one of his former child-army lieutenants, Jawara Onyejekwe, to get a sense of where the former dictator's head is at.

Inappropriate Thesaurus: What was the dictator like personally?
Jawara Onyejekwe: Well, he was very skilled, he was a talented man and he worked very hard to be the best he could be at any endeavor he set out to accomplish.

IT: Was he as adept at expressing himself then as he is now?
JO: Oh, very much so. He would often spend 45 minutes after a raid on a small village extolling the efficient pillaging we've done.

IT: Did he ever lambast you sternly?
JO: Well...

IT: It's okay, his reign of terror is over, he's in hiding from an army of angry ESPN fans at the moment.
JO: Okay, well sometimes... he would be very unsatisfied with our performance. Sometimes we would let some women and children live because their death was strategically irrelevant to our agenda. He would castigate us for hours and hours. There were periods when he would be impossible to satisfy. Sometimes he would shoot some of my fellow officers right in front of everybody. We feared him truly, but his methods of shooting us down were very effective and drew a lot of attention to his authority. One time, he was so miserable, that he shot a number of us down before we even left for the raid! He screamed at us for hours and hours about how terribly he expected the raid to go, based on some minor aesthetic grieving he had about the formation of our convoy. He also thought a number of our lieutenants who were very popular among the rest of the soldiers were bad officers.

IT: Who were some of the lieutenants he didn't like?
JO: Well, the main officer he despised was Senwe Simmons. Simmons was a very popular officer. His track record was no better or worse than any other officer, but lots and lots of soldiers really liked him. I think it was just his personality that people enjoyed. He had some strong leadership qualities, and he would often say exactly what was on his mind regardless of whether or not his opinion was well formed or in good taste. He had a bit of over-confidence, which we all seemed to find entertaining.

IT: Who else didn't the dictator like?
JO: Azikiwe Klosterman was friends with Senwe Simmons and was also very confident in himself. Sometimes Commander Klosterman would spend extra time re-examining various courses of action which were already presumed to be exact by most of the group, even if he would end up with the same conclusions. Other-times, he would make comparisons between a certain type of machine gun, and some other, unrelated thing like a certain variety of tiger. Mobutu Sese Seko thought these comparisons were stupid, but we all generally understood the point that Azikiwe was making, and whether we agreed with it or not, we were generally appreciative of his effort to explain tribal-militia culture to his fellow soldiers.

Then there was Cheikh Gladwell. Seko hated Gladwell because Gladwell would state the obvious in an interesting manner. He would present a new way of understanding--sometimes self-evident or sometimes exaggerated--life-lessons about how the world works in a way that people really liked, which a lot of soldiers enjoyed.

IT: Why do you think this got to Seko so badly?
JO: Honestly, nobody can say. Envy comes to mind, which was understandable because Seko was also a very talented communicator, but not as popular as the other men. Some of the officers liked Seko, especially those who found the other officers annoying. There was a final officer named Dumaka Eggers who Seko disliked because it was sometimes hard to tell if he was being straightforward when he said things. Nobody really knows why this bothered Seko so much. Most people simply didn't understand Eggers, and of those who did, some people liked him and some people just ignored him.

IT: So, what did Seko do about these officers he didn't like?
JO: Seko shot all three of them in the face.

IT: Doesn't that seem a bit harsh?
JO: Well, "harsh" is what he was going for, and when you're trying to call attention to yourself, it would be less effective to simply be reasonable. It would be less of a spectacle to show human decency. Seko was really skilled at shooting people right in the face. He could do so accurately and quickly. And there were definitely reasons why lots of people deserve to be shot in the face, perhaps Seko himself included. We all have a lot of imperfections which we can certainly be assassinated for. But a constructive, civilized, conversation benefits the recipient more than the advice-giver. On the other hand, a destructive, point-blank bullet through the cranium gains Seko the benefit of lots of other people saying, "Woh, did you see what Seko did to Simmons! That was... how do you say in Ameringlish, --Bad Assed! We should keep an eye on him because of the intense things he's capable of doing!" We weren't all that mad because Seko was just being selfish, which is understandable, especially in the blood diamond business...

IT: Fair enough. By the way, take a look at this beautiful engagement ring I got for my wife?
JO: [Jawara begins sobbing uncontrollably...]

Narrating The Pre-Apocalypse: Daniel Coffeen, Ph.D.

2011-05-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

There is an eschatologic strand that has run through our culture for eons and runs through our very private sense of self. There is a deep ambivalence about it: "Holy shit, I don't want it all to end!" And, in the same breath: "Please, let it come down — all of it. This life it too much."

Speaking of the end of times wreaks of nihilism, of a death wish — the ultimate death wish.

But of course it is obvious that the life we lead, here in the US, is unsustainable. The engine of our society literally runs on oil — and we're burning through that at an alarming pace. This is a self-cannibalizing circuit that inevitably trends towards zero.

And the other main natural resource is human vitality which is being drained even faster than oil: we are being tapped dry, sustained by hormone-drenched lattes, Xanax, Adderall, and flat screen TVs. This is the same zero sum game: we need bodies to do the work but we're killing the bodies, literally rendering them impotent (see: pervasive use of Viagra etc).

Michel Houellebecq

But just because the logic of the system is zero sum doesn't mean it must see this logic through to the end. Human beings, like many viruses, are adaptive. Oil will give way to something else. And the human body will give way to something else. Michel Houellebecq suggests that we'll eliminate breeding and childhood as we introduce cloning and, in his "Possibility of an Island," more and more virtual interactions.

The end of the American Empire — which surely is at hand — is not the end of times. It is the beginning of new times.

What we call culture is emergent and, like everything, is in a state of flux, of becoming. Order emerges, necessarily, along multiple paths and in multiple forms. Foucault traces the movement from hierarchy — royal power from above — to panopticon: power everywhere, enforced by the ubiquitous, invisible gaze.

The panopticon is now giving way to new forms of power, new modes of control and order, at once terrifying and liberating. On the one hand, we have the dominance of corporations and their Spectacle, enforcing loyalty to work and Capital by co-opting identity: "I am a Mac," "I am a PC," "I think it's cool to work for Google," etc. This is hard to resist because it's so insidious; the Spectacle entangles our very sense of self.

Michel Foucault

On the other hand, we get these distributed circuits of information and the rhizomic distribution of goods and capital. As corporations have tended towards centralization, the interwebs keeps offering lines of flight, alternative paths: local music distributed globally, gift economies, new currencies, the rise of amateur knowledge (Wikipedia, this blog, etc), etc etc.

My point of all of this is: things are changing. Change is constitutive of life. And change is always, necessarily, ambivalent if not multivalent.

Daniel Coffeen, Ph.D. on Twitter | Blog

Explaining Patton Oswalt's "Etewaf"

2011-05-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever.

There are so many ways that Patton Oswalt's Wired article from this January speaks to The Inappropriate Thesaurus' central mission statement, and so many ways to go about examining it, that I'm almost reluctant to get started. Because if I don't commit to an angle, if I simply keep you loitering in the pre-contextual foyer of this very paragraph, then the joy that is anticipation of writing the following essay--for which I have almost no fully formed thoughts, and which will mostly be screaming neurons shredding through myelin sheath like a frothing crowd of parents trampling trough a Walmart on Black Friday--will shortly give way to the pressures of arranging statements with varying importance into a vaguely readable scaffold, like those of a sweaty air-traffic controller on his ninth Pall Mall.

Okay, so that's out of the way. Here goes...

I've talked in the past about how the internet is probably the biblical antichrist, but Patton goes one further and accuses it of stealing the very soul of nerd-love everywhere. After my first read-through of his article, titled Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die, I was reminded of Fred Armisen's chin-beard hipster on Portlandia, who goes around town reacting with disgust whenever a regular-dude type square is enjoying something once only enjoyed by the chin-beards. But, upon a re-read, the main crux of the article isn't classical elitism, but more that nerd-fervor, once reserved for things that were truly marginal and often polarizing--and indulged in only by those folks alarming enough to get their rocks off on cultural obsessions--is now partook in by everybody, about everything.

The fervor, that is.

Patton wistfully mentions Lord of the Rings, which used to be a secret club for those who could actually read the entire books. But the important implication of the article is not that regular guys at the gym are fans of Star Wars, but that every participant of pop-culture (read: everybody) is enjoying nerd-caliber rumination on every imaginable morsel that sprouts up on the pop landscape. Patton's main thesis is that, with the current array of technology from internet message boards to DVD director's commentary to spoof youtube vids, nobody has to endure the labor of love that was once required to build your "thought palace" in tribute to whatever cultural unit you personally adore. The pop logosphere is being populated by a modern army of shallow experts. The end result is that there's no underlying passion; no patriarchal transcendence gleaned from years of tutelage over your cerebral shrine to The Simpsons or Pearl Jam or Homestar Runner, what have you.

I have no incentive to tape House MD on a VHS every week--like I did in 7th grade with La Femme Nikita, Bill Nye The Science Guy, and Comedy Central Presents--until I've experienced the entire narrative over the course of several years, rewatching episodes many times during the interim. Now I just download the entire seven-year series illegally in ten minutes and watch them over the course of a long weekend like a weird combination of the human passengers from Wall-E and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. And the end result is a hapless, well indulged asshole who might as well have just eaten a year supply of over-sweetened birthday cake because... I LIKE BIRTHDAY CAKE! AND LOOK, I JUST PUSH A BUTTON AND BIRTHDAY CAKE APPROACHES MY FACE!

So that's Patton's main concept regarding Etewaf: effortless consumption yields a massive lolipop guild of youtubers, VH1 list shows, and cultural aggregation blogs (perhaps not unlike this one), both lowering nerd standards by obsoleting the forge that once build geek kings, and cluttering the creative spirit away from any drive of originality since you can just go out and play on the pop-trivial swingset. And Patton longs for Etewaf to speed up, because he posits that it will culminate in a type of pop culture singularity--an event horizon at which everything's value will revert to zero, and arts and entertainment will have to start over (for a while, he says, it will be nothing but "politics and farming").

I know Patton is being ironic about this "A-pop-alypse", but I really can't tell which type of irony he's using: the hyperbole type (my personal favorite) or the sarcastic type (the only part of the 90's I don't miss). I would assume it's the sarcastic type, because Patton's smart enough to know that entertainment is such a massive social system that, regardless of how asinine it gets, it will never be deflated since there isn't enough atmosphere outside of it for all of that value to escape to. At whichever point entertainment implodes, it's not going to implode on its own, leaving the rest of America fine and dandy, glad for the palate cleanse. It's going to implode along with the economy and the American way of life. And since Patton surely knows this, I don't think he's using hyperbole irony. I'm afraid he's using sarcastic irony because it seems axiomatic that arts and entertainment--while they may certainly reach some point where they slow their pan-cultural malignancy once most pop entities have over-lapped with most other pop entities--they're not just going to pop like a zit and shrink back down to zero. We've never seen history reverse itself in any other social cross-section, and we're certainly not about to watch pop culture actually turn into a Hindu Brahma. So I fear that Patton's apopalypse is simply his hopeful daydream that will never be realized.

But is Patton definitely justified in longing for this? Is the current mode of nerdery definitely less advantageous than what Patton grew up with? Could his article simply be Patton's version of "You kids today and you're robot servants!" Nobody likes to grow to a certain age and see that certain facets of life that meant so much to us are virtually meaningless to the next generations. We like to have things in common with the next generations because it makes our essential irrelevance seem either palatable or like a shared burden. Lets attempt to empirically examine the difference between a pop-culture landscape in which one must to go out of one's way to saturate oneself over many years--vs Etewaf, Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever.

In 1987, you had your pick of top 40 radio artists. If you were the type to really nerd out about your favorites, they really had to allure you.

Today, a website called Pandora asks you what musician you like and then says, "Here's five or ten other bands stylistically similar to your favorite, you've never heard of them, and one or two of them does better whatever you like about your current favorite. By the way, the stuff that was available in 1987 is still here (available, forever... as it were) but now we also know about the stuff from 1987 that nobody knew about. No, no, put your wallet away. I insist."

In 1987, Lord of the Rings was--as it still is today--a seminal nerd/stoner tome that managed household nomenclature. You read it for weeks, and each book was a triumph to complete.

Today, you go on Amazon and find used copies of LOTR, saving money, and when you go to check out, some magical aggregatrix says, "People who bought this ALSO bought these..." which you can now afford because you found a dusty LOTR sitting in a warehouse in Sioux Falls. So instead of re-reading LOTR, you're enjoying a different book recommended by Amazon that you can compare in a meaningful way to LOTR and gain some more perspective on what you like about literature. You're less of a LOTR monolith, but if it means that much to you, you can always tell well-roundedness to go screw.

In 1987 you were a lucky film consumer if you happened to work at the cinema (which Patton did), because you just happened to see a shite-ton of movies. Otherwise you were only likely to see the blockbusters, and unless you went to college in a major city, the chance of you seeing a picture that wasn't OKAY'd by a dozen businessmen in suits was virtually nill.

Today, you pick any movie or television series in order of how badly you're interested in them, and the internet mails them to your house (but not before showing you recommendations, plot summaries and trailers of five or ten films you haven't heard of, based on your tastes). So you watch a number of different movies and only watch Bladerunner twice per year instead of 8 times per year.

Okay, so we have a wider net to cast in Etewaf, and a deeper net that goes back farther (obviously). But is it really all that tragic that instead of a thousand people having 4 "thought palaces" each reaching a mile high, now a million people have a hundred palaces each reaching twelve stories high?

There's still a heirarchy in the nerd world, and the fact that nerd is now the mainstream currency doesn't necessarily ruin the potential for robust creativity. The emotional attachment that one has to one's obsessions does not have to suffer due to one's obsessions coming saturation-ready. I've discussed Marc Maron's Nerd Cock Theory, and the manner in which the internet simply levels the playing field for all people, allowing for equal cultural opportunity so that only the most intelligent and inspired people will shoot ahead. And in that regard, it's better that we have Etewaf, because a hypothetically reluctant film nerd who lives next to a theatre no longer has any advantage over a naturally curious, sensual glutton who was forced to take care of his ailing family matriarch until he was twenty-four.

And guess what? Those people who have that inner flame burning will always shoot ahead. The nerd army of meh will have to be led by generals. In 1987, the people who are generals today would have been the only ones on the field. Monolithic appreciators and insatiably creative personalities will always stand tall over the din. There's no real suffering in Etewaf because whatever extra effort you might have had to put forth in 1987 will now be used to build your palace wide, in addition to tall. You can be rest assured that youtube mashups aren't distracting the next Kafka. Quite the opposite, I'll bet...

One last thing. There is a third type of modern irony in addition to hyperbolic and sarcastic, and I'm starting to think that this is the one Patton was utilizing. The third type is absurdist. Absurdist irony is simply a statement whose meaning is not an exaggeration of what is written, nor the exact opposite of what is written... But it's a playful, aesthetic dance of unveritable post-truths whose meaning is simply in the--almost erotic whimsy of shared thought. This is probably what Patton does best, which is not to say that he doesn't have important messages for his audience to hear. But the nihilistic glee of postmodernism is a mastery for which I bet Patton is half-embarrassed. Not that there's shame in the non-literal message, but one must admit that it's suitably less importa [the author died mid sentence]

Back To The Future Funny Faces

2011-05-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

Robert Zemeckis did more than direct one of the all time great adventure films of American cinema. He managed to inspire facial tours de force from almost every cast member, be they lead or extra. Enjoy these 28 jpegs depicting what I consider the best facial expressions from all three Back To The Future films.

Four Chords and the Axis of Awesome

2011-05-04T19:35:00.001-07:00

This video is funny, but more importantly, it really says something about what it means to be a pop musician. What exactly it says, I'm still processing. Hit me up with a comment if you have any leads.

TK421 Why Aren't You At Your Post?

2011-05-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

There's a terrible fear of abandomnent that pervades the human spirit, and the most bitterly dissapointing losses are the trust of people we used to know we can rely on.

The phrase "Star Wars" is bittersweet for a number of people--most notably, adults with B.A.'s in English. George Lucas is a source of great consternation for many of these good folks, as illustrated on standup comedian Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lolipops album, which offers a succinct complaint about the prequels.

"I don't care where the stuff I love comes from, I just love the stuff I love!"

Taking it further, Brian Posehn views the prequels as a violation of trust.

"I look at those movies as betrayal. To me, it's like... your uncle put his dick near your mouth. I don't mean back when you were a kid. I mean now, while you're in your thirties. Your uncle's your bro, he's like your favorite person in your family... But then you're at Christmas, everybody's asleep, you're watching Letterman and it's like, 'What's by my ear--OH FUCK!'"

If you're on The Inappropriate Thesaurus reading this article, there's an 80% chance that your favorite Star Wars movie is The Empire Strikes Back. There is also a 70% chance Empire was NOT your favorite when you were a kid. I'll discuss why this is relevant to your hatred of the prequels in just a moment.

But first, let's step back in time. When George Lucas made A New Hope during the mid-seventies, he set out to make--quite successfully, to be sure--"a movie for adolescents". Adolescents saw it and loved it. But there was a problem...

Adults loved it too.

Lets take a look at the other older-kids' films of 1977.

George Lucas's movie for youngsters was a tad racier. Good vs. evil, attractive princesses, fighting (albeit with flashlights and flashlight guns), exploding planets, scary villians... Not necaserrily for kindergaardeners, but certainly suitable by fourth grade.

Lets compare to Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. Imagine for a second that when Disney made that third Love Bug movie, they had invented new technology never before seen on the big screen. Imagine that herbie had invented a genre and set a standard for the still-adolescing motion picture industry itself. This would have compelled adults to see, discuss, and appreciate a movie for youngsters much the way Toy Story did.

Let me push even farther for a brief moment, into music. Take Schoolhouse Rock (remember "conjunction junction, what's your function"?)--seminal kids' music of the 70's. Imagine that the Moog synthesizer had not been first demonstrated at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival and then popularized in the 70's by Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Emerson Lake and Palmer and Yes. Imagine the Moog was invented for, and then popularized by Schoolhouse Rock. Now we look back at music history and realize the popularity of signal oscilation in pop music was originally created to drive the narrative of a bill becoming a law. That elevates Schoolhouse Rock to--a bit more than kids' music, wouldn't you say?

So, we can realize how a product for youths can transcend its target audience. And you can understand why our dads sat us down with Star Wars in 1990 saying, "I remember when these movies came out, and I've been waiting for you to be the right age to see them."

And, naturally, we loved them! We were kids!

Why aren't our dads as furious as we are about how bad the prequels (and the special editions) turned out? They INTRODUCED US to this stuff!

Well, it's simple. These films didn't shape their childhoods. To them, it was just "a big deal at the movies". To us, it's been a world of imagination, personality, meaningful ethics... and it was definitely always there for us when life got tough towards the end of middle school (socializing is often difficult for people with imaginations, and you didn't have to be on the Napoleon Dynamite level to have noticed that the very athletic seemed to live on easy street).

Lucas was like a second dad for us. In fact, he's quite like the uncle Posehn describes.

But here's the problem. When it came time for him to make our prequels (which, EVERY fan looked forward to), George wasn't making them as OUR uncle. We were in our 20s. He was making them as the uncle to contemporary 8-year-olds.

Betrayal!

I have two cousins around that age who were shown all six of the movies in order of I - VI. Their favorites are Episodes I and III (the older prefering III). The original trilogy (IV-VI) is too slow paced for them, not enough action. The aliens are not lively enough, the dialouge get a bit boring, everything's sort of bogged down.

Are these kids idiots? Well, only in the sense that all the kids are idiots--too much SpongeBob and red-40 dye. But they're also kids. If pod-racing had "existed" when I was 9, I would have told the Tosche Station and their power-converters to go screw.

Which leads me back to my earlier point. Our favorite episode is Empire.

Why do you suppose that is? Because it's clearly the best, right?

More accurately, it's the darkest. The post-pubescent fan was still able to love it for more than nostalgia value. It was the closest to the "real world" of any Star Wars movie because there were various emotions, pain, loss, and only a few minor victories sprinkled in with the devastation. As our understanding of film matured, we were able to stay current with it's deeper layers--as though Empire was growing up with us. Also, it doesn't have any lame kid stuff! No cheesey ceremonies, no ewoks, no "the force will be with you", no happy ending, none of the stuff that the Star Wars franchise was actually all about.

It's our favorite because we were going on to be English majors and Empire is the central conflict of the narrative arch. We also learned in highscool that life can be shitty, and Luke and Han's lives were shitty with us. We eventually got our liberal arts degree and realized that teeny-bopper shit is lame, and Empire was crystalized the most relevent Star Wars film.

It's for these very same reasons that Empire was the least satisfying episode when we were eight.

If you show A New Hope or Return of the Jedi to a liberal arts major who DIDN'T grow up with any Star Wars exposure (these specimens do manage to fall in between the cracks, but are certainly rare--half of us would have been surveyors or actuaries without Star Wars, instead of unemployed) they translate just as unwatchable as the prequels.

So, let me summarize. The original Star Wars movies (IV-VI) were kids' movies that were loved by kids and appreciated by adults. The "least kiddie" of these remains an intimate part of the life for any Star Wars fan over 16.

The NEW Star Wars movies (I-III) are kids movies on steroids, and probably closer to what Star Wars always would have been, had the technology been attainable during the 70s.

Whatever subtlety or nuanced humanity existed in the original films was solely a result of the limitations of the time. The prequels are Lucas' true vision of Star Wars. This might make him less of a visionary--to have settled for the more easily attainable goal of pleasing kids--but it doesn't make him an inconsistent or unreliable film-maker.

Unless we need all our geniuses to be our dad.

Late 90's Rock: A Cabinet of Alternative Curiosities

2011-05-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

by C. T. Heaney

Anyone who spent sufficient time listening to rock radio in the late 1990s should have been struck by how profoundly weird much of the music making the charts was. There was something about the confluence of time, the prevailing aesthetics, and an economy flush with prosperity that resulted in a musical landscape dotted with all manner of oddities which somehow, over and over, kept breaking through to a wider audience.

I started paying attention to music in 1996, and perhaps my vision is dulled by a lack of insight into the previous few years. To be sure, there was a fair bit of weird music hitting the charts all through the nineties (hello, Flaming Lips' “She Don't Use Jelly”), and the fact that bands like, say, Tad, King Missile, or Primus even had major-label contracts in the first half of the decade is evidence of something unusual being in the water.

There's an already-well-established historical narrative for why this should be so, and I think that explanation is valid, so I will summarize it.

In the wake of the sudden and explosive success of Nirvana in 1991, “grunge” swiftly became the biggest musical buzzword in more than a decade, and in the band's wake, major labels and larger independents started snapping up virtually every band in the Pacific Northwest they could slap a label on. As this new sound gained momentum – though it imploded very quickly – it amounted to a wholesale paradigm shift in what a popular rock band should look like; it reestablished the mainstream validity of punk-derived notions: authenticity, resistance to authority, anti-corporatism, pervasive irony, and ugliness/rawness/abrasiveness as aesthetic ideals. It turned them into philosophies that every streetcorner kid adopted and demanded from their musical role models.

Thus, weird bands who reflected some or all of these ideals suddenly became potential buzz-bin successes, and labels like Atlantic, Geffen, Giant, and many others started throwing a lot of money at bands that, five years earlier, would never have made it out of county except in their own vans. By the middle of the decade, a new crop of bands had been found and signed that hewed rather closely to the Seattle sound, but which increasingly came from farther and farther away (Candlebox; Seven Mary Three; Collective Soul; Bush; Silverchair). These bands were successful, but so were more mainstream acts that looked back to '70s roots music and '80s college rock for inspiration (Hootie & the Blowfish; Gin Blossoms; Toad the Wet Sprocket; Dog's Eye View; Matchbox 20). This latter movement – a critical Port-a-Potty, and still without its own snappy subgenre designation – was a major force at the time, and still remains profoundly influential and popular, in addition to having produced some of the decade's most endurably compelling ditties.

These two strands – which occurred at the same time, and which intermingled, but which I see as musically distinct – made up the bulk of what was hitting rock radio at the time. They were the “normal”, to which may be added a few hugely successful but somewhat freestanding other groups such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, and Green Day. These fit rather illy under the umbrella of “alternative”, but they were generally grouped into it at the time (our mania for categorization was no less obsessive then than it is now.)

“Grunge” gave way to “alternative” as a descriptor for new music as it broadened into something that reflected less a particular sound and more an orientation towards making music alternate to mainstream pop, to the dance groups, slick R&B singers, and cocky rappers who then (as now) were generally the most popular and best-selling musical artists of the time.

I think the expansion of the idea of alternative rock was confusing to A&R reps, and I think it was confusing to many musicians, too. There was so much to work with – rock, pop, folk, hip-hop, techno and other electronic musics. Musicians were making strange music, as they always did, and label scouts were looking for hits, as they always did; both continued playing their roles perfectly through the 1990s. But because the new aesthetics were so confusing, many, many musicians started with bizarre substrates and managed to graft a pop hook, or a tricky rhythm, or something catchy, onto it, and thereby convince a label that one or two 3-minute surefire singles were worth six-figure advances.

And this happened dozens of times over. And – and this is important – radio stations still broke bands; they still had enough independence to start playing whatever wacky shit ended up in their USPS totes in order to give it a chance to catch on. Nobody really knew where music was going. Nobody knew what they were doing – not the artists, not the suits, not the deejays at the stations. Anything could catch on – anything.

The poster child for this carnival show is Beck. Beck should not be famous, and we are all richer as human beings because he is. However, he was a space-cadet oddball when he first landed airplay in 1994 with “Loser”, a song that is still shockingly bizarre after all these years. What the hell do you call that song? It's rapped, but it's not a rap song; it uses samples and is heavily beat-driven, but that still doesn't bring it around to hip-hop; features a slide guitar and is by a musician with folk experience, but can't seriously be called folk or folk-rock or blues; it's ridiculously infectious, but is pop only in the broadest, most inclusive sense of that word. We called, and call, it “alternative” because it makes no sense to call it anything else.

Beck's early discography could be listed in the dictionary under “hit-or-miss”--it's as quirky as they come. His landmark 1996 release, Odelay, carpet-bombed rock radio and MTV with a raft of super-catchy, super-weird singles, and alongside it--or directly after it--came all kinds of sounds that deformed, demented, and outright detonated what pop and rock were supposed to be.

And if you had the radio on at just the right time, you heard this nutty stuff coming forth, and chances are you took some of it home with you, too. Like “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods. Have you ever listened to their album Rocket? No, of course not, even if you did buy it – and hundreds of thousands of people bought that record. It's a lo-fi four-track home demo made by a barely competent songwriter, and it's rather charming in its amateurishness and possibly unintended humor, much like those first few Beck records. But the one thing that really works – that worked spectacularly, shooting up the charts in the summer of 1996 – is that deathless single, built around a ghostly piano-and-synthesizer background, a hip-hop drum loop, and a sample of B.B. King – B.B. King!

Try some other examples. “Your Woman” by White Town. “Circles” by Soul Coughing. “Head” by Tin Star. “Possum Kingdom” by the Toadies. “Better Days” by Citizen King. “In the Meantime” and “Mungo City” by Spacehog. “Pardon Me” by Incubus (yeah, remember how fucked it sounded when you first heard it?). “Stepping Stone” by G. Love and Special Sauce. “Banditos” by The Refreshments. “Place Your Hands” by Reef. “The Oaf” by Big Wreck. “Wait” by Huffamoose. “Flagpole Sitta” by Harvey Danger. “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. “Pepper” by the Butthole Surfers. “Hooch” by Everything. “Lump” and “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States of America. “The Sweater Song” and “Buddy Holly” by Weezer. Even pop got weird – really, “Tubthumping” and “Amnesia” by Chumbawamba? “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai? “Steal My Sunshine” by Len? This is strange, strange stuff. Some of it broke harder than others, but it was all part of the rich tapestry. Even the flash-in-the-pan movements, which we now recognize as movements, sounded totally odd and new at the time they started showing up. Like neo-swing (“Hell” by Squirrel Nut Zippers? “Zoot Suit Riot” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies?), or third-wave ska (“The Impression that I Get” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones? “Sellout” by Reel Big Fish?), or neo-'60s (“Walking on the Sun” by Smash Mouth?).

And let's not forget – the first time that a lot of people heard Eminem's “My Name Is” was on rock stations, who played it as a novelty hit rather than hip-hop. It was a hectic time, where there was almost no center, and certainly no sure direction. The only common thread I can find between these songs, besides rough temporal proximity, is perhaps a vague sense of wry wit in the performances and lyrics of the songs. People looked forward, they looked backward, they looked around to other cultures, other places. It was a rich time, far richer than it's given credit for, precisely because it had no clear idea of what ought to come next out of this idea of “alternative”.

And so, eventually, “alternative” came to mean...pretty much everything.

Around the end of the decade, courses began to set themselves, and rock regularized. Rap-rock enjoyed its second moment in the sun, as it inevitably would and possibly will again. A new strain of forceful and anguished rock, directly inspired by grunge but increasing the production values and taking more of its heaviness from thrash, set the tone for the new mainstream rock of the 2000s. Soon after, Dashboard Confessional, Saves the Day, and Jimmy Eat World broke emo, which was punk's newest progeny and, in a very real sense, became the new “alternative” for a new decade. Meanwhile, critics demanded that rock return to other ages (though it had been doing that all along) and bands reinventing other strands of the 1970s and '80s (The Strokes, The White Stripes, Interpol) were heralded as saviors of a musical style that wasn’t really dying.

It was just a little confused, that was all.

In recent years, I think that, after those new paradigms became well-established, they were employed and explored, and, to some extent, they were used up. Or at least, that is the way that a lot of musicians have taken it; the prevailing styles of the 2000s became seen as tired and trite near decade's end, including the wistful indie-rock sound (Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, Ra Ra Riot, Band of Horses) that blossomed over that time period. Rock no longer dominates the conversation the way it often did in the 1990s; R&B and hip-hop have now almost fully supplanted rock and non-dance-oriented pop as the predominant idioms, and both mainstream and fringe musicians question the value of spending so much time thinking about rock music as something worth “saving” - i.e. perpetuating. Like jazz and the blues, I believe more and more people are coming to the conclusion it may be time for rock to become a niche, a tradition defended and kept alive by devotees, rather than the default listening material for a generation.

But where will Rock lead? I don’t think anyone has a good answer to that question. We need to go somewhere, and we know it, but we haven’t heard a particularly compelling mission statement in quite a while, perhaps longer than a decade. That’s resulted in a raft of schizophrenic, kitchen-sink recent releases that stab wildly in new directions, trying (and, I think, often failing) to come up with a mix of old and new, far and near, that will result in artistically compelling new pathways. Examples abound: Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. Yeasayer’s Odd Blood. TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain. Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz. The Dirty Projectors. Vampire Weekend. M.I.A. and Sleigh Bells. Virtually everything Pitchfork has trumpeted in the past couple of years – post-dubstep, drag, chillwave, and most recently, awkward white kids rediscovering ‘90s R&B, like The XX, James Blake, and How to Dress Well. We have no idea what to do with music, so we’re trying everything. Again.

The results of this experimentation aren’t making much headway at radio, which is far less diverse than it used to be, and is arguably obsolete anyway. It’s being played out on blogs, on YouTube, on SoundCloud and BandCamp pages, and, of course, on albums, which are inevitably receiving limited-edition 180-gram splatter-marble double-LP treatments as statements of their preciousness. It’s indicative of the era that the new sounds (The Now Sounds?) are available in formats that are ultra-ephemeral and ultra-collectible all at once. An age of extremes, I guess.

Furthermore, some of this isn’t breaking out past the cool kids, and normal teenagers are still listening to stuff that does make radio and thus isn’t on the cool kids’ radar – the continuing mainstream still indebted to grunge (Nickelback, Breaking Benjamin, Sick Puppies, Shinedown); emo-pop and its related alternative tributaries (A Day to Remember, The Maine, The Ready Set, Never Shout Never); country (let’s never forget that this sells way more records than anyone who lives in a city ever gives it credit for); and, of course, pop, nowadays almost exclusively hip-hop and house-derived dance music.

But the weird stuff breaks through, still, every now and then. The albums by Animal Collective and Sufjan Stevens I mentioned above all cracked the Top 20 of the Billboard 200; Vampire Weekend went to #1; M.I.A. had a Top Ten hit single. Kanye’s new album – fucking strange. In a slightly different direction, I think Cage the Elephant, whose “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” sticks out noticeably among its peers at radio, harks back to those strange sounds that littered FM in the late nineties. That’s not to say that it’s better – in fact, I think a lot of the mainstream stuff the cool kids are missing is a hell of a lot better than what they obsess over – but it is, at least, making things interesting.

The Tale of Osama Bin Laden

2011-05-02T06:16:00.000-07:00

Today, the defining myth of modern America comes to a close.

I choose my words carefully, but people can get the wrong idea when they hear the word "Myth". They think of "Mythbusters", urban legends, Greek Gods... This word can commonly be understood quite simply as, "Something that isn't true". But there is a more important connotation to "myth" that I would like to utilize in this instance.

I call the "Tale of Osama Bin Laden" a myth because it's a story which would still be important even if it weren't true. It's a larger-than-life chronicle which helps a large group of people understand itself. A universally relevant narrative that is meaningful to any American you could possibly encounter. It doesn't mean the same exact thing to each American, but it means something to all of us.

The mythological potency of the "Tale of Osama Bin Laden" was illustrated particularly strongly by my twitter feed. I was not surprised to see everybody discussing and/or mentioning it. But I WAS surprised a the sheer volume of retweets--as opposed to plain old-fashioned tweets of one's own thoughts--which populated my timeline. Many of them were the same handful of people (i.e. @hodgman, who, among others, seemed to go on an aggregation rampage). But still, more than a third... almost half of my timeline (especially going back closer to last night) was composed of people sharing the proclamations of others.

Bin Laden's death is the reason language exists, so that people can help explain the world to each other. We can take insanity like 9/11 and put a face and a reason behind it. It's actually not far from a religious myth. One of the key differences is that an assortment of voices can agree on the same events having happened. Factuality lends this myth to quicker and more unanimous acceptance.

Certain people will doubt that Bin Laden is dead. Even more will say that he's been dead for quite some time. But whether or not he's 1) finally dead 2) been dead or 3) still hiding in a cave somewhere... is not actually all that important. What's more important is that the most cathartic, most redemptive of these three possibilities has culminated in a kairos for our president to make a long-awaited speech and put a capstone on the history of our decade.

This tale is not unlike religion, and you don't have to look hard to find the word "minister" in "administration". While Obama does attach himself personally to the destroying of Osama, he offers a clear congratulations to the official hero in the story: America.

This is the spirituality that is perpetuated by the "Tale of Osama Bin Laden". It is why accusations that 9/11 was an inside job--while asinine and groundless--are briefly entertainable when you see the inflation of our government's relevance against the backdrop of a villain.

Despite my tone in these last few paragraphs, I don't know that our dependance on myth is necaserrily a bad things. I'm not sure that our modern psyche has the fortitude to stand up on its own quivering legs without the support of a consistent narrative. OR... Are tales like that of Osama Bin Laden just training wheels keeping us from realizing the chaos that Heath Ledger's Joker tried to highlight in "The Dark Knight"?

While we think that over, enjoy president Obama's most poised, confident speech ever. And one which will certainly resonate in his favor come next November.

Gogol Bordello

2011-04-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

It's good to know that the era of the spectacle rock show is not over. Theatrical road shows like Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists still bring literary overtones to their over-the-top performances, and epic live rockers like Arcade Fire, Mumford & Sons, and Dr. Dog keep the spirit of high-energy rock passion alive.

But Gogol Bordello, man... you've gotta see it to believe it.

Half the phenomenon is the collective psychosis of the crowd. If you've never seen a rock venue jam-packed with a live assortment of pre-electroshock therapy patients of all ages dancing and speaking various languages (mostly yelling), then you probably haven't been to a Gogol Bordello show.

And the musicians, a post-Klezmer dub-core troop of meso-eurasian folk-thrashers, does everything to satisfy the imagination's lust for a band of violin-and-accordion-wielding James Bond mini-villains. Gogol Bordello played two sets. After playing all their hits, they came back to play some of their newer, quieter, (less crowd-pleasing but frankly, more musically compelling) semi-anthems. We heard an ode to alcohol (which, exhilaratingly, I couldn't figure out if it was meant to be ironic — but I did determine that it was definitely not a Barenaked Ladies cover), as well as a version of Stan Jone's "Ghost Riders in the Sky" (which fit their second-set westerny motif).

There was something truly phenomenal about the Gogol show that really stuck with me more than anything else. It came during their infamous "Star Wearing Purple" — a chorus which seems an oddly vapid choice of central mantra for a band otherwise dense with social and macro-psychological messages. Although, to be fair, I don't know what kind of megalo-fascist European regimes in the gypsy-punk zeitgeist are represented by the tertiary colors. On the other hand, it might just be a meaninglessly catchy turn of the phrase. (Does that make it less important? Not my call.)

During the climax of "Start Wearing Purple"— which could aptly be described as the climax of the evening, if not the climax of year 2010 — there is a carefully crafted build-up to a communal spazz-out the size and potency of which I have never seen. Not at Pearl Jam, not at Roger Waters, Radiohead, Jimmy Page and the Black Crows, Gorillaz, Weezer, Phish, Primus, nowhere.

At the moment of choral release, a capacity crowd of over-the-top lunatics powered up their Dragon Ball Z war-screams and 6 foot vertical leaps to create a supernova of psycho-kinetic energy that nearly sublimated in a pair of flying electric-chair inmates sliming the venue and destroying amplifiers. Insurance premiums would rise unmanageably.

What is it about an old fashioned sing-along (especially a drinking song, which, lyrically, is not what "Start Wearing Purple" is about but, aesthetically, it's about getting annihilated on vodka and punching your landlord's wife in the forehead) which harnesses the power of emotional energy in large groups? How does Gogol Bordello take a phrase like "Start wearing purple for me NOW!" and turn it into the most important thing for a thousand would-be soccer-rioters to lose their shit and scream at each other in perfect unison? Is that simply the power of a good hook? And, do dangling violin and minor-chord acoustic flourishes with symbol-rolls prime vocal participation through-the-roof from any mob of music fans? Or does the Bordello command some sort of neural pathway to the rowdy immigrant within all of us? Maybe it's different for different fans. I know when they return I look forward to entering the Bordello again. A spiritually charged house of hooligan horrors that makes for a memorable evening of high-powered, brutal flamboyance that you'll never forget. Even though I don't personally relate to the Eastern European immigrant experience, this new fan was sung about by John Popper: "The hook brings you back."

Author's cut of article posted on www.Citypaper.net in December, 2010.

Chris Hartelius, Creator of True American Dog

2011-04-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

What do dogs, eagles, soda, horses, inventions, rescue and the internet all have in common?

One word = AMERICA

New Jersey native Chris Hartelius is a 29 year old graphic designer for Harmonix (Guitar Hero). Six years ago he moved to Boston, and started a blog in the format of fake newspaper. It had a big image, a story, and three side images. Updating it every day for three months, he quickly got burned out. Cut to June of last year. He discovers Blogger and its super easy formatting. He started doing the single frame photoshop with headline that we know as True American Dog (which you might have seen on Huffington Post and Gizmoto). He's been keeping it simple and updating regularly every since.

I asked him about the main jist of True American Dog from his standpoint...

I honestly don’t know what compelled me to do it like this. Seeing news stories of how dogs save women from drowning from time to time, those are real news stories! The concept of dogs doing ridiculous things to help man-kind, that was the original push behind it. A couple friends and I would spit out some headlines, and if the headline is funny enough, we’ll put it into an image.

As I’ve been doing this, I’ve been spending more and more time doing like a "Where’s Waldo" element... just throwing absurd things into the picture. I put funny ideas in the image, and hide things in there for people to stare at for a while.

The one from last week with the eagles attacking the cars... that was a happy accident. I was gonna have a yellow line for road crossing, and I just pasted an eagle in there and it looked like it was looming over the car.

TAD has a particularly strong soda motif. I asked him where that came from.

I don’t know, it’s just things America loves. The soda thing started to take on a life of its own. I have to thank the commentors for that. When I made the "True Soda" brand, it sorta became an evil corporation. But the origin is taking a jab at American lifestyle.

Naturally, I was curious as to where he got his photos.

It’s primarily Google search, but there is a link for people to send in their pictures of dogs. It’s cool to have people send in the pictures of their dogs and come back to look for them.

Ownership of pictures...?

That’s a big question mark right now. I’ve had one person from the Thanksgiving post saying, "I don’t understand why this baby is in this picture, his mother’s not very happy about it!" The picture I used was 6 or 7 years old. It was a comment on the post, but they really didn’t pursue it further. They’re not entirely mine, but this is a hobby for me, at worst it’s "take the image down!" and then I continue doing what I do. I have replaced people's faces to the point where you can just change their eyes a bit so they look like a different human. I do that when someone’s face is totally clear. When I change parts of their face I feel like I’m pretty protected. Ya got a different human being.

But I do have a list of questions for lawyers.

I asked him about my favorite, "Horse-shaped Bullets Plant Trees Instantly".

I collaborated with a college friend. He and I have a very long document of headlines that we would brainstorm. It’s stream of consciousness. Ninety percent of them are complete nonsense, not that funny.

In the original photo, neither guy was holding a gun. The guy on the left had a shovel and the guy on the right was just standing there. They were posing like they were planting a tree. I had to find a picture of some marines and use their guns.

I wondered how much of TAD's popularity Hartelius owes to Photoshop?

Basically, all of it. Like, when you said earlier, "why would anyone spend time working on this??" ...there are a lot of bad photoshops on the internet. When I spend a lot of time on this stuff it makes me happy because things have reflections, shadows, etc. They’re very colorful images, you can boost the contrast to make things pop off the screen more. It’s not that it doesn’t look fake but it looks pretty stylish.

Can we look forward to any new motifs, or will it be more of the same from this point out?

I bought http://tigersonsurfboards.com/. Back when I did "Man Bribes Dog With Internet On a Stick", I needed something on the screen to show that someone was visiting a website. I was surfing the internet and I found a tiger and I sorta just put it on a surfboard. I liked that image enough that I made a couple images. Now Tigers on Surfboards has a life of it's own. Pee-wee Herman tweeted about it two days after I put it up. I was pretty pumped because I love Pee-wee Herman and I grew up watching Pee-wee’s big adventure and Pee-wee’s playhouse. I wasn’t planning on doing much more for that. But I found that if you don’t keep reminding people that it exists, it sorta starts to go away. I’ll probably do a tiger of the month... $$

The Fun Theory -- World's Deepest Bin

2011-04-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

I like this video because it contains nine (9) of my thirteen (13) favorite things:

1) "On the Go" style muse-ack
2) Germans
3) Garbage
4) Highlighting of unintelligence
5) Bikes
6) Presumption of ownership of public facilities
7) Strollers
8) Assininity
9) Incentives

SADLY, it does NOT contain the remaining four (4) of my favorite things:

West Highland Steer

Magnetic Paper Clip Holders

The Halifax Metro Ferry

Pre-Op Transexuals

Syfy Tries a Comedy?

2011-03-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

Syfy (that's the re-imagined name of the Sci-Fi network, for those of you scoring at home) is looking at a possible half-hour comedy. According to Deadline.com, they've narrowed it down to three possible pilots.

1) In the Dark

In the Dark follows a misfit group of third-tier ghost hunters whose misguided efforts tend to highlight their incompetence rather than paranormal activity. From Universal Cable Prods., In the Dark is being written by Michael Davidoff and Bill Rosenthal, who are exec producing with Dan Taberski through Idiot Box Prods.

So... it's basically going to be Ghostbusters sans Egon? I love the concept of having an alternate universe where ghost hunters are totally legit, so that a bogus group of f*ck-ups looks hilarious by contrast.

"Hey, Jimbo, did you accidently release the containment field again?"

"No, but I started brewing coffee, it should be ready soon. BTW, whose decision was it to put the new coffee-maker right next to the C.F. interface? We should move that, it could cause accidents..."

*Ghostly starbucks employee materializes, pleading:*
"Sir, I don't set the prices, and I don't know why they call it venti! Sir, put the gun away, please!"

"...Jimmmmmmmmmm-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!!!!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2) Three Inches

In Three Inches, professional daydreamer and underachiever Walter Spackman is struck by lightning and develops a unique "super" power -- the ability to move any object using just his mind ... but only a distance of three inches. He's soon immersed in a world of extraordinarily ordinary people like himself. Three Inches was one of two drama pilots about ordinary people with powers along with Alphas. When Syfy in December opted to pick up Alphas to series, it put Three Inches in redevelopment as a half-hour. The project's studio, Fox TV Studios, extended the cast's options until June. Harley Peyton is the writer/exec producer. Bob Cooper is exec producing through Landscape Entertainment.

For some reason, this reminds me of that Family Guy where everybody gets powers and Meg's is that her finger-nails can grow kinda quickly.

"Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"

"No, officer, how fast was I going?" *Walter squints a little bit and the cop's gear shifts into reverse, the car starts slowly rolling down the hill.*

"Dammit! My CAR!!!!!"
*Cop runs after his squad-car and show does not get picked up for a full season.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3) Me and Lee

Me and Lee, once produced as a pilot for Fox, is about a down-on-his-luck twentysomething who goes in for back surgery, but the procedure doesn’t go well. Enter Lee Majors, who entices the young man into his ultra high-tech lab and makes him bionic. Majors becomes the unlikeliest of mentors helping the young man get his life back together. Weeds creator Jenji Kohan exec produces Me and Lee with the project's writer Matthew Salzberg, Allan Loeb and Steven Pearl. Lionsgate TV is producing.

Lee Majors, the original Six Million Dollar Man has graduated to crazy scientist, and will create his own six million dollar man (the price will be about the same because the inexpensiveness of semiconductors has been neutralized by inflation). Not a bad Syfy type show, but they're gonna make it a COMEDY?

"Lee... I need help..."

"How could you be calling at this hour??-- oh, I see... Just stir a crushed up viagra into a Redbull and hum Final Countdown. Make sure you wrap it in tin foil because latex won't be strong enough for THIS go-go Gadget!"

*queue FINAL COUNTDOWN*

Dentists Interviewing Dentists (A Trade Journal)

2011-03-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

Interview with accomplished maxillofacial surgeon and voice actor Greg Clark, D.D.S.”

Published in Defenestration Magazine

Published on Thought Catalog

2011-03-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

Top Seven Non-Sexual Pornographers

(spoiler... Number 1)

Some Recent Picks

2011-03-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

I discuss Microsoft's folding of Zune on Critical Mass @ Citypaper.

A call for the tentative retirement of The Office and 30 Rock while they're still funny, and lauding of Parks and Rec as NBC's strongest sitcom moving forward.

Interview with comedian Eugene Mirman of Flight of the Conchords, Delocated and Bob's Burgers. (Not sure what's wrong with the formating over at Citypaper, but they recently changed over their website, so a bunch of my older articles are gone or badly formatted.)

I put this youtube video together to try to help viral-ize the catchiest song I've heard this year, "Dumb it Down" by local folk-rockers If'n. Don't get it stuck in your head, or you will start to like your lobotomies the same way you like your nudity: full and frontal! (What?)

Dead Island Trailer

2011-03-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

I have to be honest. I will probably buy this game. [1] The hype surrounding its trailer (which I wrote about HERE for Citypaper) is the gold-mine meme which was everything marketers were hoping it would be, probably times ten. The only real controversy--note, REAL controversy... Any claims that the trailer is too violent or makes inappropriate emotional ties between a young girl's death and buying a video game, well. Stop. Just stop.--is the fact that the trailer doesn't depict any scenes or game-play from the actual video game. From what I've read, it seems that it doesn't even depict any CHARACTERS from the video game (with the obvious exception of the character type, Zombies). It wasn't even designed by Techland (the developers), it was designed by Axis Animation in Scotland. They simply hired axis to make a super-compelling short film about zombies and this is the result. So, it does draw attention to the product, which makes it a good trailer, but it LOOKS LIKE A VIDEO GAME, which makes it somewhat disingenuous. Ethically, things get a little fuzzy.

There's no law saying a studio can't purchase old Adam Sandler clips and run 45 seconds of singing about sloppy joe and then stamp SHREK 4 at the end of it.

(That may or may not even be true, and I'm certainly not going to be the one to look into it.)

But in the free market sense of the word, there shouldn't be anything unlawful about that, and yet it still shouldn't be done. Especially if Sandler gets animated and all Shreked-out. Other types of products are required to put things like "Not actual size" on the ads. There are definitely lawful precedents for products to be advertised correctly. But art and entertainment is a gray area. We remember the trailers for Austin Powers 3, and some of the jokes in the trailer were not actually used in the movie. Nobody flips shit because, really, it's impossible for anybody to realistically care about that outside of a media-ethics think-tank.

Well that's what THIS is... at the moment, anyway. If a trailer is a commercial for the product (movie), then to what degree should the commercial be required to be accurate? Should the commercial be required to be cut entirely from the final product? Should a trailer be treated as art which is allowed to represent the larger art work any way it wants, regardless of how abstract?

These are my favorite types of hypotheticals because there's virtually no way to arbitrate where the line is drawn, and we all have to resign to the golden rule.

Which of course is... try not to be a tremendous dick.

However, back to the issue of why I'll probably be buying this game. It's the same reason I got excited for Snakes on a Plane. Because contemporary marketing strategies can sometimes be works of art in themselves, and I didn't care that the movie sucked. The main thing I was excited about was taking part in something unusual. We tailgated in the megaplex parking lot with barbecue, brewskies and frisbee. We put each other's numbers into that Sam Jackson auto-messanger and had Sam leave boastful messages on each other's voicemail. We enjoyed the fact that a major studio was embracing true self-aware crap. [2] I was enjoying taking part in a modest frenzy awarded this well-deserving, unique cultural cash gambit. I enjoyed contemplating what it said about Samuel L. Jackson that this film became officially part of his legacy (and I honestly never figured out exactly what that was, or what it implied about his other work).

I think Dead Island is probably gonna be a pretty good game. I don't think it will be amazing but it probably will be as entertaining as the average zombie-survival. But since I only reward rare video games with a purchase, and I enjoy crowd mentality, I will probably take part in this subcultural event.

You might say I'm just another hype zombie. I prefer to look at myself as a fake one choosing to blend in with the crowd chanting along with the real zombies for culture... but there really is no difference.

[1] To put that into context, I generally don't purchase video games of any kind, and I don't think I've even played non-social video games since I broke my foot two years ago and borrowed Starcraft (which I love). This is not to say that I normally spend most of my time outdoors or at the gym or doing any kind of activity. When my foot isn't broken I am usually out weakening it pub-crawling. Any alone time I have is usually spent in cyberspace doing this stuff, reading essays or watching youtube. Even when I do play video games it's usually borrowed from someone who's had it for ten years or bootlegged it on the shady.

[2] I was slightly confused when some people were actually pissed when they inevitably found that the film indeed did suck. Wasn't that the point? It's called Snakes on a Plane! Did you think they were gonna sneak Casablanca on you?

Today's Horoscope 2/11

2011-02-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

Aries: March 24 - April 19 Do not drink the open gatorade you find on the subway platform, or you will not be able to trust your peripheral vision until the equinox.

Taurus: April 20 - May 20 Brittish Petroleum will plan to scapegoat you for their next gaffe. Not to worry, it won't be nearly as disasterous (they will over-pay in their merger with Siemens Oil & Gas).

Gemini: May 21 - June 20 You will be walking down a narrow hallway, a stranger will stop to let you pass, but you've already stopped to let him pass. Then you will both try to pass at the same time. You will both chuckle politely, and one of you will say, "After you!".

Cancer: July 21 - July 22 Because of the new conflicting astrology layouts, you have never been born. You don't exist, and the only reason you think you're reading this is because Amy Adams is helping a retired climatologist understand a Greyhound schedule in Cedar Falls.

Leo: July 23 - August 22 Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive line coach Pete Mangurian will testify at your neighbor's arraignment hearing. I can't say why, exactly, but this is pretty important.

Virgo: August 23 - September 22 You will be solicited to buy Girl Scout Cookies from a family you already puchased from this year. This should not be taken as an affront to your figure, it's just that times are tough, and girlscout cookie sales certainly do not run counter-cyclical to the economy.

Libra: September 23 - October 22 You will hit a deer. Not while driving, but you will be fuming mad over a lost bet with Mickey Rourke over whether or not Andy Dick wears a merkin.

Scorpio: October 23 - November 21 You will find an iPad being clutched by a deceased street-dweller. His name was Gregory, and his spirit will live in the iPad until you take it down to the Apple store for a memory wipe.

Sagittarius: November 22 -December 21 Your favorite epoxy will fail to contain leaks in your plumbing. Consult Google for sump-pump rental information.

Capricorn: December 22 - January 19 Scott Thompson (the Canadian) will write and direct a cabaret musical about your parents (the American prop-comic Scott Thompson will contruct a midget-sized cellphone to make fun of your the late 80's).

Aquarius: January 20 - February 18 In a courtroom, the worst defence is a good offence.

Pisces: February 19 - March 20 You will get physically sick when the guy from Man VS Food attempts cunnilingus on the octo-mom.

Big Ben VS Mike Vick: Differential Ethics in Stadium Sports

2011-01-24T08:20:00.001-08:00

I think I'm finally disappointed in Big Ben.

I've generally been a Pittsburgh sub-fan for almost two decades. I would always root for them in the playoffs after they shellacked whatever unlikely AFC team I cheered for (Bills in the mid-late 90's, Jets in the 00's). I rooted for them because they were familiar faces in my conference of interest, and they always seemed like solid dudes. I loved Roethlisbergerever since his rookie year when I saw him simply plow dudes over to cross the goal-line. He was a rookie who said, "rookies aren't incompetent and they don't need to be coddled".

When my sub-fanmanship had increased dramatically due to a change of crowd, they coincidentally won the Superbowl. I felt pretty comfortable as an ethical bandwagon jumper, and they kept doing well. Then I watched them win another Superbowl victory a few years later (well, I blacked out, but I saw highlights on TV).

When Big Ben crashed his motorcycle without a helmet, I thought, well fuck... there goes an awesome guy to a accident which is probably caused by the same reason he's awesome to begin with (delusions of grandeur, dumb jock-ness). AND THEN HE RECOVERED. What's not to love?

Cut to the date-rape charges. I was generally unimpressed. With the charges. I'm going to say something which probably makes me a bad person, but at least I won't be rude and pretend to be a good person.

I tend to have very little sympathy for alleged victims of date rape. For a number of reasons. First and foremost--the unsubstantiated nature of the charge. It is, at its root, a her word against his situation. Unlike rape, where there is signs of violence, circumstantial evidence, and--often times--no reason for the two people to have been having consensual sex, true date-rape seems just as likely as a false date-rape allegation to occur. Women know that not a single guy on campus is seriously interested in partying with them all night, getting good and sloshed and then going back to his place to watch Outsourced and fall asleep. So, while going home with a guy at the end of the night does not make a girl deserving of date-rape, it seems like something that she really shouldn't be doing unless she wants intercourse. Why? Because, you COULD get date-raped!

This is not some new bit of data, it's probably almost as well known as "wear a condom". If you have sex without a condom, you have an certain percentage chance of getting an STD, HIV or babies. We tend to have very little sympathy for couples who get knocked up because they didn't use protection. This doesn't warrant a rape-penalty, but it is still THEIR RESPONSIBILITY. Just as the the members of the couple have a shared responsibility to use protection, there is some responsibility for a girl not to put herself in dangerous positions. The guy's share of the responsibility is obviously 100% not to date-rape anybody. Is the girl's share then 0%? No, because their responsibility dividends are not cut from the same pie. If a girl can feasibly control the situations in a manner which put herself at less than 2% likely to be date-raped, then I'd say she has a 98% responsibility not to GET date-raped. If my wallet is stolen because I hung it out of a moving trolley with one-hand, and I'm aware that people out there like to snatch wallets, I may be a victim of theft, but doesn't that doesn't mean I had no responsibility to look after myself.

What if my wallet wasn't stolen. What if I was just drunk and feeling empathetic and I gave it to a homeless person? The next morning I sober up and decide it wasn't a good idea. Can I now charge that person with a VIOLENT CRIME--against which he has no recourse whatsoever?

What if walk up to a hobo with wallet in out-stretched hand, offer it to him, he takes it, and then at the last minute I ask for it back. If he doesn't let go of it quickly enough, does he deserve jail time?

These seem like ridiculous comparisons but you have to consider the very drastic drop in legality between two people fucking (legal) and two people rounding third base and then at the last second one of them changes their mind and expresses this with varying levels of clarity (jail-time).

The severity of this crime which in many ways can be determined as such by a likely intoxicated, possibly careless, and hopefully honest person is where my lack of sympathy for alleged date-rape victims kicks in. ESPECIALLY where famous people are concerned. Once you accuse a man of something like that, there's no getting his reputation back, and it could damage his career. If the dude's famous, a girl might have every incentive to do it.

So let's move this back to Big Ben. In light of Tiger Woods, we've seen that it's good business to go out and jump on the sexual coat-tails of superstars. When women were accusing Big Ben of date-rape, I was believing them significantly less than I would have believed a regular case. Not only did my opinion of Big Ben not waver, but if anything I found myself sympathizing with him for what I knew could be slanderous ruining of a dude's career.

And then I watched the pre-game show before last week's Pittsburgh/Baltimore game.

Bill Cower was interviewing his former players, asking them how badly they hated the Ravens. One of the questions was: If you were on your way to the stadium, and you saw Terrel Suggs on the side of the road broken down, would you stop and give him a ride? Most of the dudes said "no". Big Ben said, "I'm a changed man now, so yes."

WTF?

I saw that as him basically admitting guilt for an incident famous enough that he doesn't need to mention it. The only one I'm aware of is sexual assault.

If now I believe the charges against him are true (which, now, I do) then how can I seriously root for this guy ever again?

This isn't all that bad a dilemma, especially because my Jets are in a position to be serious Superbowl contenders sometime this decade. The really bad dilemma is this:

If I'm abandoning Big Ben for his personal behavior, how do I justify continuing to root for my favorite player, Mike Vick, who is also guilty of some heinous shit?

Oh man, there's a doozy. Because I'm a dog lover. A crazy dog lover. Back during college, I had a subscription to Dog Fancy Magazine, and for lol's, we'd put the centerfolds up on the walls. Generally speaking I like dogs more than girls. And they were killed, not rufied!

I kid, of course, but I sling these exaggerations to point out how seriously I take Vick's crimes. When I positively identified a Halifax Bed and Breakfast Owner's dog as a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel in 2009, I solidified my long-standing alliance with the K-9.

You might ask, "how have you been rooting for Vick all this time, considering what he's infamously done?".

And I've always answered, I love him for his touchdown synthesis and his role in the evolution of the NFL. Killing puppies doesn't violate any agreement he's made with me as part of our fan/QB contract. It's certainly fucked up, I'll admit, but it doesn't make what he does on the field a lie.

Aye, there's the rub. When Big Ben drives the ball, I'm rooting for the Steelers as a personality, and for Big Ben as a player of a game. When Vick does his thing, I'm rooting for Vick as an athlete--and for the Eagles as an extension of what Vick represents on the major landscape of professional sports.

Let's scoot over to an alternate reality--one in which neither Vick nor Ben have any poor reputation. If you said to me, "Tomorrow, football will be illegal, never to be played again. We're going to execute one player. You get to chose between Mike Vick (my favorite player) and Ben Rothlisberger (maybe in my top 20)." There's no question about it that I would give the bullet to Vick. Because, outside of the realm of the NFL, Vick does nothing for me. He has evil-ass eyes, he's not particularly loud, and I really don't think I relate to him on any personal level.[1] But on the field, he's a machine. A gun-slinging, scramble-sprinting machine who proves that football's future will be owned by progressivism. Big Ben is just a clutch, cocky beefhead who loves this shit. This makes me like him a lot as a dude but only so much as a QB because my inner rebel will always prefer game changers to good examples of the status quo.

So, the reason I don't give a shit about Mike Vick's dog thing is because, on a humanity level, I really don't give a shit about Mike Vick. I know that a certain quotient of humans are going to do terrible things, especially to the helpless and I've come to terms with that. If Vick wants to drown a dog who can't win a fight, that's really no difference than some dog in the wild who gets eaten because he can't win a fight (well, it's a little different, but the end result is the same, and that's important). Is it fair that a squirrel gets grabbed by a hawk and eaten after a good neck-crushing? No. Evolution is a horrible horrible thing, and the real world is an ego-crushing nightmare. Mike Vick is an extension of the real world out on the field. He's stronger and faster, and so he tears down tradition QB values. And since football is maybe the grandest of our modern large-scale myths, I find I enjoy a little cold-hard expectancy-violation pumped into it. Vick lets me enjoy the horrors of natural selection from the comfort of my arm-chair. He makes it more like actual gladiators defending the nearby city-state.

To cheer for Big Ben is to enjoy the puritanical notion that if you want it bad enough and you focus hard enough and you have the guts to take some hits and maintain a steady hand then you'll make it to glory. And while I just lauded the value of dog-drown-dog future-bowl, I ALSO like to enjoy some of the more traditional and less nihilistic elements of old-fashioned bowl [2]. But Big Ben went from a likable bro to definite rapist in one interview--and well then isn't that fucking special. He's no longer a tall reflection of part of my inner America. He's just an actual douchebag giving the hipsters more fuel to hate fraternity brothers and over-use the word douchebag.

That's right, I managed to tie hipster-hate into a Sports Philosophy.

It seemed important...

[1] Really goes to emphasize the shitiness of human nature: we are only concerned with those who are in some way like US.
[2] I generally try to enjoy all things on all levels imaginable. I'm an glutton.

Rebunking The Washington Post's Debunkage

2011-01-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

The The Washington Post ran an article debunking some of the popular myths about alcohol.

Sadly, much of this article is inaccurate.

It claims to use scientific studies, however it mis-represents scientific data, and debunks these "myths" inaccurately.

There's a reason they're called myths... because they're true.

1) Drinking coffee will get you sober faster. False (says the Washington Post). The "science" that they offer is that coffee "may wake you up but it will not lower your blood alcohol level". Well first and foremost, I guess we need to define our terms. What is meant by "sober"? When asking someone if they're sober, they generally don't mean "what's the alcohol per volume of your blood?". They mean, "Are you cool to drive?". Insobriety is not a medical condition, it's a temporary personality and skill-set condition (blood alcohol concentration IS a medical condition).

So, can coffee increase your awareness and alertness?

Search your feelings, I can't answer this for you, only you can answer it for yourself.

I'm not encouraging anybody to feel okay with driving after they've been drinking simply because you drank a cup of coffee. It's sort of like condoms for middle-schoolers. Some of you kids are going to drink and drive no matter what you read on The Inappropriate Thesaurus. As much as I despise this fact, you might as well feel more awake while you're doing it. There's no need for innocent bystanders to get killed just because the Washington Post told you that coffee does nothing to sober you up. This seems pretty irresponsible to me, and I expect them to run a correction (several, actually).

More to the point... coffee can increase your body's metabolic rate. Similar to (but less effective than) running wind sprints (which is shown to help burn off alcohol 15% faster than sitting still), caffeine can actually help you metabolize your blood alcohol quicker. So, while the presence of coffee in the body may not directly remove the alcohol, it gets your insides moving quicker to burn all that off--and YOU may be moving around more too if you if you're suddenly feeling more awake.

FURTHERMORE!!!

If you want to get really literal about all this... I'm here to tell you that--it's quite frankly a scale of proportions, but--drinking ANY LIQUIDS that are non-alcoholic, will decrease your blood alcohol concentration. How? By increasing the volume of your blood.

You remember that lady who died because she chugged a gallon of water in five minutes for an on-air fraternity hazing? Well the reason she died is because blood is made up of liquids and solids, and one of the liquids is water. The amount of water contained in your blood is a result of different things, but it's directly related to how much water you drink. All of the other stuff in there comes from the bone-marrow and liver, and probably a few other places... but the water in there comes almost exclusively from your mouth. So, when she drank a gallon of water, the amount of "extra liquid" making up her blood plasma spiked very quickly, causing all her blood vessels to expand. Sadly, the brain is a complex computer and doesn't have quite as much wiggle room within it's internal components.. and you've seen what happens when you spill water on a laptop. Well, think of that gallon of water as alca seltzer and think of her brain as a seagull's stomach.

Why am getting all gruesome about this poor young lady's death? To bring up a math equation.

100lbs woman gets drunk drinking 4 beers at 5% alc/12oz. (12 oz x .05) = .6 oz of actual alcohol per beer (a bit less than half a shot glass [1.5 oz], which would usually be filled with a 40% abv liquor--just so we can all mentally envision the physical ethanol). The amount of BLOOD in an average adult is, what, ten pints? So we'll call that 150oz for easy math. 4 portions of .6 oz of alcohol enters the blood stream, and now 150oz of blood has 2.4 oz of alcohol IN IT.

The blood alcohol concentration of that woman is 2.4 ounces of alcohol per 150 ounces of blood.

Now lets say we're chugging 24oz of water. To be fair, I really can't say how much of that water will hang out in her blood stream and how much will goes straight through to the bladder. It can't be completely negligible because it keeps athletes going, and a gallon was enough to pop a girl's brain like a water-balloon. However, alcohol IS a diuretic, so lets guess as modestly as possible to throw all the reasonable bias against my argument. Lets say, ultra conservatively, that only 3 ounces of that 24 ounce water makes the cut, into the bloodstream, the rest goes straight to piss. This increases the over-all volume of her blood to 153 ounces. Now, lets say we chug two Dasani's. 156 ounces of blood, same amount of alcohol (actually, less with every exhale). You see where I'm going with this. If you get a breathalyzer, your BAC number will literally be lower with fluid intake than without.

It should be obvious that one cup of coffee or a sip from the tap isn't going to effectively negate a full night of keg-stands, but a 100lbs woman with 4 coors lights could actually hydrate her blood volume up to the number of ounces a slightly larger woman might have flowing through her. There's no real scientific dosage, but with fluids, you are, incrementally, making yourself more sober.

(It's science...)

Okay so that was a really long and important debunking of just one of The Washington Post's alcohol mis-steps. Lets move on to the next...

2) Beer then liquor, never sicker. Liquor then beer, never fear.

FALSE (they say): "There is no chemical interaction between these drinks that makes you feel particularly bad the next day."... They they go one to ponder: "Perhaps when you have already had several beers you'll drink more shots, and more quickly, as your self-control will be reduced."

Okay well I think we got to the bottom of that one rather quickly. A night of beers can easy-up the painful but fast intake of a shot of liquor, we agree the effect is entirely psychological. But that doesn't make it a myth. The psychological affects of booze are all well documented and so very non-mythical that alcohol continues to do well during a recession. And by the way, when you're trying to use CHEMISTRY to debunk thoroughly helpful folk wisdom, just remind yourself of my grand-dad's motto: if it rhymes, it probably wasn't discovered by doctors.

3) Absinthe is a hallucinogen. False (they say). "...[the active ingredient] thujone is not a hallucinogen, though it is toxic to nerve cells and causes seizures at high concentrations. "

Look, nobody claims that a shot of absinthe will get you a visit from J Edgar Hoover. The understanding about absinthe is that it will get you a different feeling of intoxication than regular liquor (red wine does as well).

HOWEVER...

Long term abuse can case brain-damage. And nothing gets you some hallucinations like brain-damage. So, in the big scheme of things, it can certainly lead to hallucinations. In the immediate sense, if a high enough dose can cause seizures, I'll bet that a few stops before seizure on the thujone train, you can get off at halluconationville, U.S.A., population: you.

(Technically, thujone is not a categorical hallucinogen, but I don't want Washington Post readers thinking that they can drink absinthe and be guaranteed a hallucination-free ride...)

4) Wine consumption explains the "French paradox." (which is the statistic saying: despite a diet high in sat-fat and cholesterol, the French suffer from a noteworthy lower heart-disease average.

False (they say). And they are actually correct here. The French don't consume any more wine than surrounding countries. Whatever causes it has nothing to do with lifestyle, because the statistic is national, not regional (i.e. skiing, something in the water, etc. would share a benefit with nearby city-states). Because it's national, it has to be something policy related. It's probably got to do with their national health-care. I don't know what, but the U.S. should probably jump on board that socialism train, and quick!

4) Beer drinkers will develop big bellies.

They say, "FALSE: The caloric content of a bottle of a beer can vary dramatically, from 95 calories to nearly 300. If anyone is going to notice the belt-busting effects of beer, it should be the Czechs, who consume more beer per person than drinkers in any other country [but studies show no no increased gut-size in the Czechs]."

To say that the calorie content of beer can vary dramatically does absolutely nothing to compare the calorie content of beer to any liquor or food. And if you want to talk about low-calorie beer, lets start with their main shebang, the pilsener, which is what Miller Light is modeled after. So, if Czechs don't have big beer bellies that means beer bellies don't exist? Try telling that to an Irish or Brit, who drink big dark ALEs and have skinny faces and legs trembling under the weight of their huge ale-paunches. If a Czech enjoys pilsener with 100 calories, and the Brit likes Boddington's Pub ale with 170, and both go out for 5 beers three times a week, the Czech will only be getting 1500 extra calories. The Brit gets 2550 extra. Over the course of a year, the Czech get 78,000 extra calories, the Brit gets 132,600 extra calories. Do you think one of these folks is going to have a bigger gut over the course of an adult life-span?

Let's say that the Post didn't mean to imply that they were comparing beer to hard-liquor (70 cal on average). Lets say they were just comparing beer calories to calories in food. Well, a Purdue University study has found that carbohydrates taken in liquid form are more likely to result in a positive energy balance (i.e. not burned off) than carbs taken in from solid food sources. And since soda isn't quite as life-style oriented as beer, the term "Soda Belly" never gained as much traction.

Does drinking beer get you a big belly? YES! How is this even up for debate?

5) There are plenty of ways to cure a hangover. The Post says False! They point to two articles (one of which needs a log-in to fully read) to establish that "No scientific evidence supports any cure or effective prevention for alcohol hangovers."

Look, this is very important, so I'm going to cut the double-talk and get straight to the point. Remember how I talked earlier about guzzling water as a way to incrementally make you more sober? Well a hangover (caused by a combination of dehydration, and residual toxins in the blood stream) CAN BE PREVENTED. BY DRINKING WATER. The link on the Post's website explores aspirin, banana's, even vegemite... but they never mention water (or any of their myriad items in combination with water).

Let me tell you something about science... it's not always sophisticated enough to accurately measure feelings. If you can hydrate your way to the feeling of not being hungover (and you can), then CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE NOT HUNGOVER! And I don't care what your lab readings say.

In a very literal sense, you can say that it's not a great cure to hydrate when you wake up hungover, because it takes a while to kick in during a time when every minute feels like Lord of the Rings. But if you guzzle some agua before bed, you WILL feel a lot better. Hell, I start in the afternoon before go-time, getting my blood volume nice and heavy for a long evening of consumption. It's important.

But let me re-iterate the causes of a hangover 1) dehydration (cured by water) 2) residual toxins in the bloodstream (carried promptly to the kidneys and out of the body by water). SO... The Cure is in the Prevention.

Most of you know this, I feel like an idiot even pointing this out, but some people take The Washington Post seriously, so I have to make it clear: DRINKING WATER BEFORE YOUR HANGOVER WILL SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE YOUR HANGOVER.

I'm not really sure exactly what The Washington Post was trying to accomplish here... Even a far-reaching thinker like myself can't quite cook up a particular agenda for concocting a bias-neutral set of incorrect facts the way they did. My guess is that they're probably getting slammed for this by more important publications than mine, so I don't want to lay it on too thick. However, to the management at the Washington Post, I say you should probably have a guy like me on your staff to do the higher-echelon fact-checking on any future pseudo-mythbusting. I'm not being sarcastic. Please contact me if you'd like to discuss editorial positions.

Ryan Stout in Philly

2011-01-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

I got to interview Ryan Stout, one of the strongest touring comedians in the country when he came through Philly.

Full article here.

And Now For Some Clutch Pretentiousness

2010-12-30T14:40:00.001-08:00

Got to review Gogol Bordello live at The Electric Factory...

It seemed important...