Still in the BQ Phase

It'll end soon as there have been events in the past 24 hours. In the meantime though this is enjoyable although written by someone better and more obvious. This is an extension of an evolving and likely wrong idea about girls that started in Tacoma and has, surprisingly, tightened even on the coast that is allegedly saner.

Eileen had long thin cool white hands too because she was a girl. They were like ivory, only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory but protestants could not understand it and made fun of it. One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff [!!!] and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like the gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory, House of Gold. By thinking of things you could understand them.

From the Portrait. Someone told me the other day that this was a boring book.

What's One More Good Line

This from over yonder:

[preceded by if clause so . . .]in 2007, you should get an Oxycontin habit going because you're gonna need to address that shit somewhere down the line, and since you'll lack the minerals and vitamins, you might as well get your Berlin-era Lou Reed on).

I'm talking about something inside that rages against the sign and signifier. Something inside you that says, I am allafuckinglone. And I will do whatever it takes to feel otherwise.

And there is a breed of athlete and creative artist (one in the same if you've ever tried both) who gets that, whether consciously or not.

Can't Be Helped

I was jabbin with a good friend -- code name speedra -- the other night about how I was for once gonna keep the world of ideelz separate form the grind of the noon-to-nine but what can I say? My world is different for like eight or more hours a day now, so here's a small and hopefully sufficiently vague linkage.

In honor of the Fed being behind the curve and only giving us a quarter point, here's some videos from (a tad) too long ago.

The first is top-to-bottom inspirational.



The second, less from back when, is a simple triumph, replete with incandescent bulbs. Also there's the excuse that the construction site next door was blaring it this morning.

You Should Care about This

See if you have powers of observation.


In this spirit, something else for the sidebar. Full disclosure: It is written by me and not another person.

How Can We Listen to Classical Now?

This Is Sort of How



It's tough to just sit around jamming out to some Mozart or whatever nowadays, even alone. I get self-conscious when I bring it up on iTunes when I have a hangover (which is often) or am reading an economics textbook to try to advance my career (which is rare). No one's around most of the time in either situation, so the stigma that stinks up the act of enjoying some Rachmaninov roars pretty fierce.

Problem: Classical music is not just for people who wear turtlenecks or gesture too much with their hands and won't shut up.

I was thinking this when it occurred to me that maybe people had made some sweet video montages on YouTube set to classical tunes. If they had, I could just relax and enjoy the songs without feeling arty, because what would I really be doing? Just lookin at some YouTube videos, per usual! Well, no one really has made sweet video montages on YouTube set to classical tunes. But they probably should start.

Yeah, I know Disney did Fantasia, which makes this point not entirely original, but it gives me hope that maybe we can make smart things wholesome again by making them dumb. All we have to do is post them on YouTube as mashups.

Unrelated: This is just pretty heartwarming. Without giving away too much, it involves orange Gatorade.

The Gawk Toss-Up

Emily Gould, whom I don't really know very well, and Choire Sicha, whom I've seen but whom I know even less (not at all), quit Gawker last week, offering this parting shot.

The piece is personally gratifying because of my admittedly tangential connection to the New York media blog. It's a concise and effective punchline to a setup that got going when Sulky brought me on board to write (very) few posts for the abortive Gawker Weekend project.

As a weekend editor, Sulks had gone through hell, spending each Saturday and Sunday doom-and-glooming over what to include on G-Weekend. He knew that Choire's vision made Gawker important and that he'd, at least formerly, thought very highly of the site. When he brought me on board, I was flattered. When I saw something I wrote on the site, I felt pride.

But during those few weeks, we started to get sadder about the Gawk. I pitched a couple ideas that Sulky thought were beneath the site. One Monday, I noticed that an idea I'd had was independently developed into a post by the weekday editors. This tells less of a story about Sulky's poor judgment (he was right not to like my idea) and more of one about the emerging cracks in Gawker's veneer, the sinking hill that had been their moral high ground.

If you're going to clown on media for having dumb ideas, you'd better have standards. After Sulks quit and Gawker Weekend died, leaving me with only an extremely dubious connection with the site (but with a firmer-looking connection depicted on my resume), we started taking a more critical eye to the blog we'd once admired so greatly and from whose halcyon days I'll admit to taking not a few stylistic cues.

By the time I'd moved to NYC, I'd come to hate Gawker. The comments section was filled with a mass of vitriol. The readers often contented themselves to assert that "I hate [subject of post]." The jabs seemed aimless, and it became progressively less clear who the good guys were. The opening volleys against a recently unassailable institution shot out.

It got to a point where Sulky rightly pointed out that Gawker should just end. The job is done, the metamorphosis complete. The Internet is firmly on at least equal footing with major media. Why continue?

Emily's post signals, in a sense, that finality. It's certainly the case that she and Choire were the only people posting lately who even looked like they knew what they were doing, and they brought the most heart to the project. They may be replaced by similar writing talent, but Gawker's reign as leader of critical-minded media youth has likely ended with their departure. And good riddance, given what it's become.

That is the part of Emily's post that is personally gratifying.

What should have broader appeal is that the piece is a masterwork of personal writing.

No sooner had I entered my apartment Saturday morning, back from my Friday midnight run to Atlantic City, than Sulks asked, "Did you see the Internet yesterday?"

"No."

"Go to Gawker."

I sat in the living room reading the piece. I said four sentences out loud while my roommate cut some sharp cheddar and put it on crackers.

"Whoa."
"Oh my God."
"No way."
"Thank you. This is the best thing I've read in a long time."

The piece plays to strengths of Gould's that Gawker's tone and style had managed to hide. The girl is funny and has a quick eye for observation, something that's worked well in the Gawk's detail-oriented flaw-magnifying universe. But as can be seen in her blog, she can evoke sadness, loneliness, and vulnerability in crisp, bright images that are the more moving for their apparent effortlessness. Of course, there's little room for that kind of thing at Gawker.

Read the piece. The recurring motifs -- inevitable disaster, everyone's personal view to the decline of New York, the intersection of the personal with the professional -- feel completely hashed out in spite of the brevity (oddly, commentary on the thing includes a main observation that it is an over-long post for Gawker).

The image that makes the piece's primary implication so delicious illustrates the writing horsepower that had been behind Gawker's now-departed driving spirits:

The Statue of Liberty looked like a little dashboard adornment beyond the B.Q.E.

Unpacking this sentence seems vulgar, but I can't really help myself. It says we who are involved in this media process, who are secondary and tertiary or dramadairy to the development of New York's cool, who are the "creative underclass," who live in Brooklyn, have forgotten some very basic elements of New York's enduring cultural centrality. I reacted to that line in two ways.

1) Am I actually being moved by a Gawker post? Despite diligent but failed attempts over the past few months to feel a twinge at emotion at anything I come across on the written page in McSweeney's or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even (gulp) The New Yorker, I was getting all tingly over a blog post, a handful of paragraphs.

2) I can't write like this.

This is a form-matches-content tour de badass that illustrates in its liberated formal techniques the very things that it disusses. In other words, it says implicitly by being better-written than a Gawker post can be what exactly is wrong with Gawker.

I'm thoroughly impressed by the bravery, skill, and finesse Gould shows here.

Whatever words continue to appear at gawker.com on Monday, Sulky and I have gotten our wish. Gawker is over. Thanks, Emily.

Forgive the Gross Language

It's a direct quote

I was reminded today of a conversation I had back in Tacoma with a girl I worked with. It was a slow shift which meant she was going next door to the Tex-Mex place to get free shots from the bartender over there. I would've pumped her full of Cape Codders because I was nice to the wait staff, but the thrill of sneaking booze from the bar where you work isn't as great for some people as the thrill of sneaking out of the bar where you work to the bar next door to sneak booze.

After she took several trips and there was still no one in the restaurant, we started jibbajab about some banal topic straight opposite sexers get into when there isn't a lot going on romantically or otherwise between them. We probably talked about a show her cousin's band was playing that weekend and said some music preferences when a propos very little, she broke out with a line:

"Do you want me to suck your dick?"

It was known at my place of work that I hadn't been getting a lot of lady action, basically because I was honest about it when asked, so maybe this was a charitable suggestion, I couldn't tell, but whatever the case, it appeared by all rights an honest one.

I was too taken aback to utter an affirmative to this prop mainly because we had just been talking about the Misfits a little bit ago. This despite that in my imagination the beej had already taken place more than once. I'm sort of ashamed to admit this but not really too much.

The girl had done her best in her young life to destroy a body that to spite her had remained well put together. She had tattoos on her neck and wrists and wore big sunglasses like Marilyn Manson during the Mechanical Animals era. Nice by most accounts, she showed a self-absorb sitch in her efforts to get other waitresses to leave so she could make more money on busy nights or to get herself to leave on slow nights. Even if her proposal had been merely to pass the time, as her track record with the bars' patrons might have indicated, she still meant what she'd said, as much as was possible.

I admire honesty in people and vulnerability in women, and the forthrightness of this betrayed both. I'd nurtured feelings for this girl in spite of myself since I started working at the bar and this brash move only reinforced the thing.

But I couldn't act. Not for prudishness, but because that abrupt revelation of sexual appetite and peek at what might look to most as psychological dysfunction made me rare back.

I don't regret that I couldn't do a De Niro in Jackie Brown, but I'm seeing now that this kind of push-pull sexual dance may contain enough breakthroughs into gross overtures that I'll need much more toughening up before I can offer simple acquiescence.

There might also be moral obligations lurking somewhere in these occasions, I don't know.

The Decline

I don't know a lot of people who at one point read The Onion's "A.V. Club" section with the same fervor I did from 1997 to 1998 (before the avclub.com url, clicking past The Onion's main page to get at the archives and look at what Henry Rollins had to say in his first interview), but I assume that those people are nonetheless out there.

The law diminishing marginal utility vis a vis A.V. reading didn't seem to apply during that time (q.e.d.: 2nd-half 1997 RS covers featured The Prodigy's Keith Flint, RZA and Zach de la Rocha and Puff Daddy; 1st-half 1998 of same featured Fiona Apple and Mariah Carey). Around 1997 to 1998, there was, post-grunge, a new and emphatic divide between "mainstream" and "indie," as the terms applied back then.

It was during these two years that the information barrier that kept obscure artists obscure began to disappear. Napster was on its way to the middle-land. At that stage in the game, the A.V. Club was perfect; anyone interested in finding out what was going on in the then-extant underground had only to read a feature interview in A.V. then leave their family computer on all night, hoping at least one of the low-ping downloads would be sitting on the desktop in the morning. Ani Difranco was on the cover of SPIN magazine in 1998. White critics were still pretty brave to write about rap music. White kids were still not sure whether to feel guilty about liking what rappers had to say about women.

The A.V. continued to yield this kind of enjoyment until around 2004, when blogs and Pitchfork hit it big. Suddenly it was very easy for obscure musicians to rocket from obscurity to relative obscurity.

Now, as has been repeatedly and emphatically pointed out, the gap between "indie" and "mainstream" has been obliterated, as "indie" has become less a descriptor of music and more a derogatory name for people with an irritating sense of fashion.

No publication, I think, is a greater casualty of the bridged indie chasm than the A.V. Club.

There are other considerations. The Onion moved from Madison, Wisc., to New York, N.Y. September 11 happened and the 'ion couldn't really handle it, pussing out the day of (I never understood the laudatory comments indicating the editors showed good taste by holding off until the following Tuesday, thereby creating a safe distance and editing out snide comments at a time when snide comments were especially needed), Pitchfork and Gawker rose up. Likely all these events co-conspired to kill the main things that made A.V. special, but the biggest change was one that extended beyond the newsroom and into a unified pop landscape whose towering mountains and obscure valleys became increasingly flattened.

Rock N Roll Friends

Check each other's books back in.

"It's My First Monday Off in Seven Months"

A by-now predictable Monday tragedy plotline unfolded this morning. The three unities and fate reared their heads surprisingly intact; 24 hours of the sleep cycle were contained neatly in a Fort Greene location, and the single action of hardhats breaking cement with jackhammers ensured an appropriate point of no return.

The Gods were doing their usual building and breaking, casting me and Sulky around on their winds. All was going according to Their plan. There was only one wrinkle.

"Hey!" a voice from a nearby apartment.

The jackhammer continued.

"Hey!" Louder this time.

The construction dudes stopped hammering a second to let this guy yell at them.

"It's Columbus day!"

I imagined at first the voice belonged to a ruffled guy in a wifebeater and boxers with male-pattern baldness and a Number Five haircut on what he has left, probably wearing boxer-briefs. The image conjures up working class and is therefore probably too generous. If he was upset about being woken up at around 8:30 a.m., it's unlikely he was a factory stiff or a dock worker. Plus, his tone, again, was commanding and far from fatalistic.

"You guys need to cut it out!" The jackhammer had restarted, to no avail. The picture is now clearer: a guy in a light 400-fibre linen bathrobe his fiancée gave him on Valentine's day and what is on Friday nights (and maybe even Monday through Thursday) a faux-hawk atop his head. Dark hair and a decent face. He doesn't work in publishing, but he does live in Fort Greene. He owns a public address system left over from his days as a singer in a band that covered, among other things, Eagle Eye Cherry and Buckcherry. The P. A. is how he was beating the jackhammers.

"This is my first monday off in seven months! It's Columbus day! You guys took two days off for that Jewish holiday. This is a national holiday. No one works today! Everyone is trying to sleep. THIS IS MY FIRST MONDAY OFF IN SEVEN MONTHS!"

I was laying in bed trying to sort through the taste of Jameson and last night's Packers loss stuck in my mouth, so I couldn't tell by looking what was going on between Eagle Eye Cherry and the jackhammers. I do, however, know that the Eye paused long enough to hear some kind of response. I have no idea what kind of dialog could've been going on, or what the construction guys would've said to this maniac with a microphone raining misplaced rage on them from a fifth-floor two bedroom. But it probably eventually got to the f-word.

After a couple minutes, the apartment guy gave up and turned off his Peavey system. I looked at my watch and saw I could still catch a couple hours of sleep before I would have to go to work.

I hope the guy with the P.A. caught a nap sometime later, and that his fiancée wasn't too embarrassed by his yelling to tell him about the blue line on her EPT kit. Kids really deserve as much advance planning as is possible.

Fire Door

I was walking back from Fort Greene Park after a morning trot when I happened on a mass of five-to-twelve-year-old children, holding hands in double file. They wore white and blue uniforms, and every score or so was headed up by a youngish woman. All the children, essentially, were black. They were having a fire drill.

I remember that in high school fire drills were a welcome reprieve from classroom boredom. We had one every quarter, which seems frequent now. I estimate that a new student joined our ranks at about the same rate, so maybe my school thought the best way to greet new kids was with an exciting simulation of catastrophe.

Either that, or we were testing each newbie's courage.

I now work in the financial district of New York City. I like to imagine a skyscraper's worth of young professionals, holding hands in double file, walking and joking their way out of the danger zone at the end of every fiscal quarter. Something tells me fire drills still happen to adults, but something else tells me they don't happen in quite the same way.

Solja Boy

Solja Boy tell 'em. He likes Superman. And kettle drums. Some guy did a video mashup of his new #1 Billboard topper using exclusively Maury Povich paternity tests. This is clever because when the alleged father is exonerated (he is not the father), he gets up and starts dancing. Kettle drums kick, Soulja Boy joins the fracas, and Solja Boy tells em that Soulja boy does tell em.



On another YouTube clip, Soulja Boy is getting his haircut and 50 is talking about how Soulja Boy learned to dance on Rap City. Also: "I like Soulja Boy. I like Soulja Boy a lot. You know what I'm saying?" 50 jokes about the barber cutting off Soulja Boy's eyebrow by mistake, leading to subsequent promos in which Boy would have to play off his shorn eyebrow as the latest style. I'm guessing rap actually works that way only occasionally, like when Slick Rick lost an eye or when Hammer couldn't find his pants and had to use some Hefty bags instead (or, come to think of it, when Eminem was born white). It's a risk Soulja Boy is gonna have to take if he doesn't want Iovine to shelve his ass. That is, provided he loses an eyebrow.



But at least the "Soulja Boy dance" is outselling Kanye, who like I've been saying has been a bad rapper since the Dropout and probably even before that.

Addendum:

From Wikipedia:

[Soulja Boy] is the second person after Sean Kingston to be born in the 1990's and top the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

Interrupted only briefly by Fergie's incomprehensible week-long tenure at #1, two guys roughly my oldest little brother's age have made songs involving Jamaican things. (Kingston = Being named after Jamaica and also from there, not to mention singing like he's from there - - - Boy = Using kettle drums in a song about cockin.)

Finally, "Beautiful Girls" flows like Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup on a thick slice of French toast. Which is to say it is delicious, slow, and a little ridic (does anyone even eat French toast anymore?), but it'll make you fat (look at Sean [Kingston]). BUT: It's like I always say: Better happy and a fat than soulja and a boy.

Kate Bush

Try to picture being nineteen and having a record contract and somehow writing a song about an Emily Bronte novel, then deciding the best way to make a music video for that song would be to go out in the English countryside wearing too much lipstick and a red dress and doing some ballet moves and pelvic thrusts while you lip-synch the song you just wrote.



Imagine having such a naive misapprehension about the erotic that your weird convulsions are actually eroticizing, and that it's kind of hot that you might not know you're doing this but you are nevertheless doing this.

I have the hots for Kate Bush even more now that I have seen these videos.

Epicly Later'd

Something for the blogroll

Here's some cool Epicly Later'ds on Jason Dill and Neck Face. All in all an informative and occasionally fun look at skateboarding's controlling personalities.





The show is in some way affiliated with VBS.TV, an online video-centric site mainly about rap and skateboarding . . . Spike Jonze is the creative director, which explains both the level of their access (Kanye interviews) and their narrow impact ("WTF is VBS.TV?").

Belts and Wrenches

Here it goes.

Grunt.

Grunt.

Plop!*

The story of Fergie is inextricably interwoven with that of the Black Eyed Peas, so to tell the yarn correctly I'm going to have to take us back to the late 90s, a time of quiet desperation for Kosovars and me.

I'd heard the Peas originally on "The Box," a fuzzy channel-8 music video network we weren't supposed to get. I don't think it came with cable packages, and its provenance never really became clear to me, which makes me think now that maybe it was some un-FCC pirate deal used to raise cash for some cutthroat underground-media types, the same types who now poach YouTube videos for their blogs.

The Box's concept was that Milwaukee-area music fans could tune in and then call The Box to see their favorite music videos. I really started tuning in to "The Box" at the stage in mid-high school when white people such as myself start to understand that maybe they shouldn't be afraid of rap anymore.

The rap-appreciation scene at my school consisted of two kinds of kids; kids that dug The Roots and Wu-Tang clan as kind of a supplement to weed-induced appreciation of Bob Marley, and the kid who sat behind me in homeroom telling completely false stories of how a Honda Civic outran an Impala on 33rd street and the cop let him go because he was so impressed that anyone could bring a Civic up to the speed-limit, let alone beat out Milwaukee's (then) choice ghetto muscle car.

COP: Do you know how fast you were going?
GUY: Yeah! I beat an Impala!
COP: Yeah! I saw that! Normally I'd have to give you a ticket for running two red lights and doing eighty in a twenty-five, but because I've never seen something so funny as a Civic outrunning an Impala, I'm gonna just let you go. Nice job.

[COP and GUY shake hands.]

The guy who told these stories brought a lot of CDs to class, but the only two I remember was a Slick Rick one where he's wearing a diamond-encrusted eye patch, and 8-Ball's Lost, one of many albums of the post-Pac Southern Rap fad of the late-90s. But we're getting off topic, in a way.

Around the same era, Bulworth came out and for some reason Warren Beatty's awktown freestyle didn't seem that awktown to me, so I started tuning into The Box because "Ghetto Supastar" was in the heaviest rotation The Box had ever seen; basically if you turned on Channel 8 you were going to get Mya Wyclef and ODB riffin on "Islands in the Stream." One thing led to another, I bought the Bulworth soundtrack, and "Joints and Jams" was Track 10. This is how I met Black Eyed Peas.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the family computer room (we used to have rooms dedicated to a single computer), Napster was not-yet illegally delivering "Weekends" and a BEP freestyle featuring Chali 2na from Jurassic 5, and I kind of became enamored with the goofy legumes.

My friends and I would drive around at night stealing lawnmowers and "Tom Shellak for School Board" signs and placing them in awkward positions on our friends' lawns. Not really pranks, because there was no cause-effect or even joke associated with it, not really even vandalism because we were too scared to do that, but a little gangster to us because we were listening to the BEP Family while we did it.

Flash forward a couple years to Eminem and college, the eventual return of hardcore, battle-based rap to my life via 8-Mile, and suddenly the cheeky fun-rap of BEP seemed stupid. Still, I bought tickets to their 930 Club performance and was going to go with a pretty girl named Steph who wound up transferring to Columbia later, but my roommate had made me go to a Rollins Band concert the week before and the second-hand smoke had made me sick, so I stayed in and my roommate took Steph. At that point, BEP and I basically parted ways. Kazaa and T-1 had rolled around, and I got possessed by that undergrad urge to find out "what this Minor Threat is all about," "who are the Bad Brains anyway?" and "Ooh! Radiohead!"

This worked until I left for Senegal and stayed with a rich Catholic family that was patched together after my host dad became a widower in 01, promptly replacing his Russian wife with a half-Vietnamese, half Wolof woman who ruled the house with sternness and not much care for the two newly-motherless children.

On the upside of the domestic situation, Tele5 broadcast in Senegal and my host brother had a big TV, so we sat around several afternoons watching a Box-like call-in TV show where people all over the French diaspora were requesting, of all things, Black Eyed Peas.

Only now, suddenly there was a blonde chick with them who appeared tacked on to the BEP Family's already tacked-together schtick, and this just confused the pants off me. Plus I was busy listening to "Frontin'" by Pharrell and Jay-Z, not to mention "Crazy in Love" by Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Pretty soon I came back to America, discovered everyone hated "Where Is the Love?" but still had bought it or requested it, and forgot about Fergie. Years passed without even the slightest hint of Fergie being anything. "Let's Get Retarded" came out and that was alright with me, such a stupid-fun song that now I could feel nostalgia for, almost five years post-high school, and everyone clowned on BEP because really, who can be serious if they're writing songs about becoming retarded? Moreover, Fergie didn't seem to do anything in that song other than just dance and prance in the video. Her purpose was always in question, which also led me to wonder about her viability as an individual performer and as a human being.

Now, finally, Fergie is fully in view, and I am free to judge her without the dubious buoys of the Peas to support her. Baby girl, fully busted out solo, is performing songs like "Big Girls Don't Cry" that remind me more of Shania than Mya. "Big" shows the degree to which Fergie was always an afterthought sex symbol, in that the purpose of the song appears mainly to have an accompanying video in which Fergie, who actually is kinda hot, walk around in her panties and a largely unbuttoned shirt.

Given that she started in funky hip-hop stupidity and now roosts firmly in jangly, unoriginal country-pop-Matchbox 20 stupidity, really, Fergie would have been better placed in a different age. In The Box era, music videos were hard to come by, and the Internet provided porn, sure, but alone-time in high school by the family desktop was rare, so guys named Chip were still selling stolen Playboys to freshmen. As a sex symbol/performer, Fergie belongs back in those days, when the scarcity of music videos would have kept a song like "Big Girls Don't Cry" out of my life, but I might've scored a photo spread of her in a worn, thumbed-through adult mag. This would be harsh if it didn't seem so close to what Fergie actually wants. Call it early-90s of me, but if a performer of music is serious about being a performer of music and not just a performer of her own underwear, she might have to do more than bang out some shellack and then walk slow-mo in front of a camera "givin em a little shoulder."

Soft porn or music, Fergie. The multimedia age was not made for constipated waffling. Time to shit or get off the Hot 100.



*UMG won't let me embed this, I suppose to suppress proliferation of this song throughout the Internet. Good idea.

Denis Johnson Update

In his NYT review of Tree of Smoke, Jim Lewis has his own idea about the "Again for H. P." dedication up front:

it’s dedicated “Again for H.P.” and I’ll bet you a bundle that stands for “higher power”

Maybe it stands for Hewlett-Packard. Typewriters are slow, and that's a big book!

I Broke My Kingpin

No, no, no! Like this!



I was trying some half-cab kickflips on a slanty part of the school playground (you couldn't even call it a bank, really, more like a credit union) near my apartment today (thanks, unemployment!) when of a sudden the metal thing that holds two of my wheels to my board (the truck hanger) flew away from the board in a curlicue motion that looked a lot like a helicopter after James Bond shot the tail propeller.

This is doubly unfortunate because tomorrow I return home to visit my family and watch an old friend get married (gift: silicone measuring cups, set of five - I gave matching track suits to the last friends who got married, but that was before I heard of online gift registries). I had planned on checking out a new skatepark they built by my old high school since January when I last visited, but now I'm going to have to sample the wares using someone else's equipment.

Here's what a half-cab kickflip looks like.



Time for bed, because I'm waking up at 3 a.m. for a change.

ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.

OMG I Went to a Gay Bar

Not to do the whole chatty Kathy thing but I went to one and Oh My God.

Met with a friend for drinks when we were joined by a third friend, a gay friend, who as according to his reputation, wanted to go to a gay bar to score some gay pussy. The gay friend, whom I don't know very well, asked me "So do you have any women in your life?"

This question has plagued me since I moved to Tacoma and I'd hoped it would stop in New York City but even though I have not shut down libido-wise, sometimes the cards don't stack right and I've always had to be somewhat ashamed when I reply "No."

I said "Not really."

He said "That's too bad. You really are very attractive. If I had any hot girl friends I'd be sure to hook you up with them."

We talked for a little bit about this and before long some questions arose about the size of my penis (I said jokingly that it was tiny, which is normally a funny response but in this case was taken seriously; my friend said "I've never been able to get with a guy with a very small penis") and my straight friend mentioned my weight, which I'd previously said was around two hundred pounds. I took it down to one-ninety in this conversation but the result was still the same.

"All muscle," he said. "Feel his arms."

My gay friend did not feel my arms. I pressed him about the penis thing and he said "It's all immaterial anyway, since I'm not in your domain." I had missed a beat in trying to rib him about his penis preferences anyway, which to me made me sound closeted (which, if I am, I'm so deep I don't know it and it will be a long before I find a nice pair of shoes or searsucker slacks). I wondered if anyone else thought similarly. At any rate, I decided to chicken out of the macho one-upmanship and just said "Yeah [you are not in my domain]."

Along we went, stopped at a bar that just had a neon sign of a cock (like the male chicken, get it?) but there was a three-dollar cover and no one inside, so we went next door to a bar with a one-syllable name that wasn't "Hump" but I like to imagine it was.

Inside there was a drag-queen calling out bingo numbers and on a couch in the corner three dudes were pawing up on each other. No one appeared very drunk. My gay friend, surprisingly, averred that "Drag queens are the worst people on earth." My straight friend didn't have a problem with her, though; he thought she was funny.

We played a round of bingo but no one was hitting on any of the three of us so before long our drinks were done and so were we.

Before we left, though, we decided to go to the bathroom. On the door was a sign that read "Only One Person in the Bathroom at a Time" (gay bars use MLA-style capitalization). I went into one, where there was a trough, and, you know, when all of a sudden a lanky dude with a mohawk exploded into the place, leapt over to the sink, and he must've already had his pants unzipped because he began very promptly to precipitate all up in that sink.

I've never had a bashful bladder before, but of a sudden I couldn't even buy a trickle for the trough.

It got even worse when another guy, this one with a faux-hawk and checked shirt, busted in and started using the trough with me. I got started for a minute then stopped, then the sink-soiler left and I started to groove.

When I got out of the bathroom my gay friend said to my straight friend "Nice job watching the door." Apparently he got busted in on as well. Sheepish grins all around.

We left the Hump and my gay friend decided he'd try his luck at the Cock. My straight friend and I (the normal people) chose rather to take the train home.

I admire the persistence and sexual frankness exhibited by some young gay men, not to mention their reckless talent for laying tons of people. I normally consider myself pretty sex-libbed, but recent toe-to-toes with serious sluts have prompted some reconsideration on that front. Oh well, as a good friend of mine used to say, "Tons of unprotected sex, no bugs and no kids. This guy did all-right!"

Jenga.

Denis Johnson

Nothing really "somehow" escapes my attention. If I don't a thing it is my own fault and not that of unknown forces. In the spirit of honesty I confess that Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson's forthcoming book about Vietnam, escaped my attention despite the fact that press-release emails about it have been going around the Internet for a couple weeks now and, more incredibly, that an advance copy is sitting in my roommate's bedroom (Thanks, journalism!).

At any rate, I'm interested in several elements of this advance copy that do not include Johnson's narrative itself. For one, FSG publisher Jonathan Galassi included, where the "cover flap" is supposed to be (I believe - I didn't go to publishing school), a letter to his "Friends," the journalists who are, as we speak, reading this book. In this letter he expresses that the memory of this book has somehow not escaped his attention since he finished reading it, it's the best book of the century, and other such laudatory comments that I am inclined to believe because I read Jesus' Son.

My roommate doesn't have any other advance copies laying around, so I can't really compare, but I wonder about the function of this friendly note. Does it appear inside the cover of all books produced by all publishers, or is it a flag to journalists that they'd better read this one because it is actually fairly good? My gut instinct is that this cover-flap thing is an oft-used marketing strategy (I used to send an email version of cover-flap things to bloggers when I worked for a magazine), but there's a heartening chance that Jonathan Galassi really cares more about Denis Johnson than other writers that hit his presses. If so, the two of us have something in common.

The second element is basic - the dedication that reads "Again for H. P. and those who." There is no period at the end and presumably the dedicated already know what they did. Johnson is normally pretty confessional in his writing and candid in his interviews so I'm curious why he would trail off in his dedication. Maybe he needs a trimmed sentence to preserve his image as a druggy bumbler - by not saying what these folks have done he leaves in the reader's imagination some heroic acts heretofore undescribed in his fiction. But probably he's just respecting people's privacy.

At any rate, I'm not going to read DJ's book just yet, for ethical (Journalism) as well as book-club (The Corrections :'() reasons. But more on book flaps and dedications as the situation emerges.

The Island

The YouTube post below should have served longer as a tide-me-over but here I am shaking and nauseated, still nursing a hangover from Last Night's Party, and Ideelz is calling me again.

I don't do transitional material, though, so I'll just plow right into the fact that Tacoma is upwards of 3,000 miles behind and I now live with Sulky in Fort Greene. Parties were thrown, tiles were broken, old friends were seen/offended/saddened, people were talking, and other specific things were rendered as general to protect me from having to actually relate them.

I've been in survival mode trying to decide between a job for a CIA type operation (but not the actual CIA), Penguin, or a magazine about prescription drugs, so I haven't even really had time to notice the differences between New York and Tacoma, except the predictable ones like everything happens three hours later here and as my dad said "if you're smart for Tacoma you're not that smart. If you're smart for New York then maybe . . ." He trailed off cause I had called to ask him to lend me some money.

Perhaps after I get on the 401(k), Dental, and Medical bandwagon - a wagon I fell off pretty hard when I started in the food-service industry eight months ago - I will have more to say about the cancerous growth of the white population in this town, the awful process of determining how much money your labor is actually worth (in my case between 10K and 100K per annum), and of course my best friends' blogs. Meantime go to LOLPizza.

This boulder will start to roll when I am a little stronger.

So Far From Home

Sometimes it's good to know they're holding it down lakeside.


Thanks Patrick.

Ideas Re Bourne Ultimatum

the Bourne movies have left behind perhaps the strongest residue of mainstream anti-government paranoia since '70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days Of The Condor. (Tobias, Scott. "The Bourne Ultimatum." The Onion A.V. Club. August 2, 2007.)

Amid the new and familiar faces (David Strathairn and Joan Allen), it introduces a couple of power-grasping, smooth-talking ghouls and stark reminders of Abu Ghraib that might make you blanch even if you don’t throw up. (Dargis, Manohla. "Still Searching, but with Darker Eyes." New York Times. August 3, 2007.)

Before we go into the Bourne movie, let's jog over to YouTube for a sec to watch Slavoj Zizek deliver an incisive look at what is wrong with September 11 and the two 2006 movies that depicted its events (for those that don't know, that's United 93 and World Trade Center).

[. . .]

Apparently the clip I watched on YouTube yesterday violates the terms of use, so I'll have to sum up the points Zizek made. Since we're talking Greengrass here I'm going to leave World Trade Center largely out of the discussion, although most of the points apply to both films.

Despite 93's vaunted realism (it was in real time, it was coldly neutral in its dealing with the terrorists), its apparent neutrality gives it an unexpected political message. Because 93 deals primarily with ordinary people in an extraordinary moment, its main message is one of humanity triumphing over adversity. In this way, 93 is not an exceptional film, plot-wise. By making September 11 into a heartwarming tale of the human spirit, the film robs the day's events of their necessarily political context. That Greengrass uses a cinematic technique we call ultra-realism makes this robbery all the more insidious, in that we come to believe that, in watching United 93, we're actually watching history as it happened. This, of course, is an absurd belief; United 93 is a Hollywood picture that takes place projected on a screen. It is as unreal as The Bourne Ultimatum.

Greengrass's way of dealing with violence has not changed much since The Bourne Supremacy. The camera wobbles furiously, fight scenes are fraught with confusion - as with cock-fights, it's difficult to tell in Greengrass's world who is winning until one man lays on the floor unconscious or covered in blood.

This technique employs so many conventions of films we consider realist (homemade video, cell-phone cameras used to capture a trajedy, the jiggly footraces of the COPS TV series) that Greengrass has succeeded in convincing his audience that his movies produce a transcendent truth. Dargis talks at length in her review of Ultimatum about the consequences of violence, how we are robbed of the thrill of violence by being thrown in the middle of the fights; the camera reels as a blow is struck, and presumably, so do we.

More insidiously, the movie flashes to scenes in which Jason Bourne experiences simulated drowning and executes a man he does not know, a man who wears a black cowl over his head. These gestures toward torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib firmly situate the Bourne movies in our political context. How we feel about violence as depicted according to the conventions of hyper-realism in The Bourne Ultimatum reflects how we think we feel about it in real life.

One cannot mistake the political message of the first two-and-a-half Bourne movies. It is one of natural and necessary skepticism toward the American intelligence community, which throughout the trilogy is a society of thieves, zealots, and the power-mad, where the good die young in dark basements at the hands of their superiors or are unceremoniously fired for objecting the the atrocities they commit.

In the final scenes of the Ultimatum, this skepticism is nearly completely subverted. The baddies are brought to justice, the stern but feminine Pamela Landy presumably gets promoted to run the CIA, and a new era of ethical black ops begins, the illusion rule of law returns, etc. Meanwhile, Jason Bourne, a character rivaled perhaps only by Jack Bauer in his status as a U.S. foreign policy action figure, lays inert, floating in water. The audience is uncertain as to whether he is dead, until the final moment of the movie, when he jerks back to life. America applauds; their superhuman master of violence and torture has been resurrected (the Guantanamo-style simulated drowning no doubt served as preparation), and now, finally, the CIA is an organization we can trust.

It may be that Paul Greengrass more effectively articulates the American inability to deal with its current political situation than any other director currently making films. By shaking the camera around during a fight scene, Greengrass places us into the situation we think we face in the real world. When we're there, we cheer as our American boy fights foreigners and toughens himself up with torture. The resolution we feel at the end of the Bourne trilogy is not a resolution of our feelings toward violence; we're still glad Bourne is there to fuck some shit up. Instead, our feelings have changed toward American institutions of violence - we've come to trust them. In this sense, perhaps Paul Greengrass is not actually as courageous a filmmaker as we thought. Riveting? Certainly. But honest? Probably not.

The Bourne Ultimatum rocks out. It's awesome to see America win. But Bourne's ultimate message - that we should be comforted that the evil and power-hungry in our nation's inner circles are exceptions and not the rule - is not as hyper-realist as the shakey cameras we're treated to during our American boy's fist fights.

HOLY SHIT WHO THE HELL IS SEAN KINGSTON

It's getting so a man can't leave his keys for a minute to pursue career opportunities. It's getting so things like this begin to happen:



It's getting so I am losing my keys (more on Sean Kingston in a second).

I set them on the coffee table before I go out to The Matador to get some Carne Asada tacos (they were on happy hour but I just had to have some black beans and rice with it). I sit alone listening to lawyers gabble about their "PROBLEMS." When my plate is empty I throw a twenty in the big black wallet they use at nice places, then an extra ten because my waitress is pregnant, then stand up, when a barfly leans over the fence (I was sitting on the patio):

"HEY! MIKE!"
"HI STEVE I'LL MEET YOU OUTSIDE."

Just as I'm crossing the threshold a meaty skinhead with a black button-down shortsleeve accosts me with some restaurant politesse:

"HEY ARE YOU LEAVING YOUR TABLE?" (In floor-manager talk this means "I think you just skipped out on your tab but I can't say exactly that so I'll say this instead.")

"YEAH I'M LEAVING. THANKS FOR ASKING."

I have one tequila drink and some tacos in me, and the carne is pretty tasty, the tacos gourmet-tasting with all that cilantro, but even that is not enough to put me in a good enough mood, thanks to baldy. It's getting so a man can't be unshaven and wear a T-shirt into an upscale place in downtown Tacoma without people thinking he's a meth-head in for a freeload.

So I greet Steve the barfly on the outside and he asks me about the move to Brooklyn. He's got the dog he got back from his ex wife and he looks happy. Maybe that girl who left him in San Francisco finally called him back. I'm listening halfway because I've stuck my hand in my pocket and:

1) My box of cigarettes is empty
2) My keys are nowhere on my person

Shit I never leave home without a set, but here I am, looking over at the shaven floor manager's piggish dome as he buses my table. Our eyes meet again, and I give him one of those head-nods with my lower lip under my teeth to show him I'm not gonna say the "F" word in front of all these nice people but I sure have that first letter ready in case the scene changes. And I'm doing this all without the comforting metallic sound and feel of keys jangling in my pocket.

Long story short, I ride the 11 all the way to Matt's winebar to pick up his set and ride back downtown to, ironically, help some "I like the lights" girl back into her apartment ("Locked herself out," but carrying a ring of keys that would make a dungeonmaster envious). We sip on some Budweisers and she tells me stories from her childhood (hiding in the clothes racks, likes The Fountainhead) and I ask her why she's always hanging out with at least half a dozen men and no ladies in sight.

[. . .]

"...and I never cry."

"I bet you cry all the time."

"Humph! THAT'S REALLY FUNNY."

One thing leads to another, (strictly) conversationally, and finally the question:

"YOU DONT WANT TO FUCK ME TOO DO YOU"

"YEAH I DO" I am an honest man.

"OH FUCKING GREAT" She's sitting in the window that overlooks the trash compactor, petite with tattoos all over her chest and one full sleeve. She drags off her Camel Menthol (I had one too so I can't say much about that) and looks like an upset tough-girl who's had too much to drink. She might even be fighting back tears, I don't know, I've been doing online marketing for a magazine since 7:30 a.m. so I'm a little bleary-eyed.

Pretty soon we're just watching Green Street Hooligans in silence and she goes to the bathroom (faucet running). She comes back suddenly K.O.ed, which is good cause I was trying to figure out a decent way to leave her apartment, but I'm too distracted by the water running, which doesn't cover anything up it just makes it sound like this chick has a fucking flume between her legs.

So I check back across the hall to my place, put on some "Banging Camp," and sip on a Keystone Light while I wait for Matt to get back. He does, we drink and smoke a while, then it's lights out.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you step away from your blog for too long.

There used to be a band, no a "group" more like, called the Kingston Trio, with a girl and two guys. She probably saw each one of them naked, and after the first couple tours she stopped running the faucet every time she used the bathroom in their shared Motel 6 room. Maybe one night she got into some nasty nast with the mandolin guy and lil' Sean was on his way of a sudden. Maybe she read Atlas Shrugged while he lit a cigarette. Maybe all of this happened in Kingston, Jamaica. Anyway, everything in this paragraph is absolute truth, for all I know about Sean Kingston. So I'll have to get back to you on that.

"Hey There Delilah," in the meantime, is a piece of lovelorn shit.

Security Update: Tacoma Public Library

A twenty-something dude's girlfriend approached him as he was using the computer card catalog*:

"What's taking so long?"

[Voice louder than appropriate, even if used outside a library, which it wasn't (it was used inside)] "I'd be done already, but there's bum cum all over the keyboards!"

There is some serious class conflict in this library. I wouldn't be surprised to see an increase in already-ludicrous levels of security.

*Cannot access internet/porn.

Island Nations: A Thing Thereabout

1) Quatloos, a "Cyber-Museum of Scams & Frauds" discusses a scheme involving a fictitious island nation called the Dominion of Melchizedek. From Quatloos:

The so-called Dominion of Melchizedek (hereinafter "DoM") is a fake nation which exists only in cyberspace, or in the literature and actions of the scam artists who perpetrate this fraud. There is no real Dominion of Melchizedek, but this doesn't stop the scammers from selling utterly worthless bank licenses for tens-of-thousands of dollars.

The DoM attempts to hold itself out as some sort of quasi-religious body, even to the point of having its own version of the Bible. But for all their self-righteousness, the truth is that the DoM not only commits fraud, but also materially facilitates the fraud of others by creating phony banks, stock exchanges, arbitration forums, etc., in an attempt to give some illusory legitimacy to criminals who are directly defrauding the public by way of pyramid-scheme bank debenture scams and other criminal schemes.

According to Melchizedek's Web site (which DOES EXIST), the President of the country, whose name appears below a Star of David, is a former law enforcement official from Los Angeles (he doesn't really exist, but they have a photo!).

The story rapidly gets less slightly less interesting when reality kicks in. The guys behind the Dominion are just a father-son team of felons convicted of evil doings numerous times.

The story gets more interesting again when you realize there are several fictitious island nations on the Internet. Presumably they could declare war on each other in some sort of Battlespace Involving Information.

But back to the main thing: Tlon kind of happened in 1996!

My Job of Many Colors

Applying for a job at a major media research company, I came across the following (optional) drop-down-menu question (if I knew HTML I could probably actually program the thing right in here. Maybe I'll get a book from the library today, but probably not):

Ethnicity:
-Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)
-Not Hispanic (Spanish-Speaking)

I mean they had a separate category for "Race," but still pretty funny that a company openly parses job applicants along the Hispanic-Not divide.

This brings me to a larger point mostly about the Facebook, but about other Web sites too. For a while, the "Political Views" category on the FB's profile information yielded a drop-down menu with, I think, five categories: Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative. People responded (at least I picture it this way) largely by gleefully placing themselves in one of these categories ("Conservative"), thinking about it for a second then deciding that it wasn't that big a deal even if the labels weren't perfect ("Liberal," "Very Liberal"), or out-and-out flouting Zuckerberg's categories and refusing to answer the question (the soon-to-be-added "Others").

Right, right. We took Anthropology and Sociology in undergrad so we all got that factoid about the Census and college applications forcing people to identify themselves using problematic categorizations. But it appears that we could easily allow people to type in their own categorizations, then dump the entries in a database, control for misspellings or variations on the same concept, and get a more adequate distribution of data. If we felt like imposing problematic categories on the data ex-post, we certainly wouldn't have a problem doing so; we'd just have to, for example, include "biracial" self-identifiers in the larger "minority" category. At least the underlying data would be more specific.

In my mind I'm picturing infinitely divided pie-charts. Each slice is a slightly different shade of the color next to it. Look at it one way, it's a color wheel; just some red, some yellow, whatever. Look closer, and there's a bajillion variations. With computers, we should be able to make job-applicant pools act in a similar way. There seems precious little reason for the multiple-choice cop-out now that we have Google or even, God help us, Concordance.

Executive Thrasher

From the guy over at Water and Vegetables, in case you haven't seen it:



I can do this because it's skateboard related. Sorry about not blogging for a sec but I've been doing edit tests for magazines pretty nonstop. It can drain even the savviest of sieves, including me. See you tomorrow with some actual ideas. Or maybe in a couple minutes.

COME OUT TO PLAAAAY

Like Cam throwing that laughable dis at Hov in '05, I feel I will ultimately lose a battle with Hua Hsu but someone has to throw a shot here.

The impetus for the gig comes from a Hsu Slate slideshow documenting in slapdash fashion the way YouTube has caused the demise of rap battles.

My main beef here is that, according to Hsu, rap battles go back to '96 (some might say they go back further but let's stick within the guy's argument). Despite this long and storied history and the elapsed time between the epic battles (often years), it's only been like six to twelve months since rappers have been using YouTube, and although maybe some of this idea about using a new medium to replace dis tracks has some weight, I can't help but think that in six more months we'll have a "The Rap Battle's Rebirth: Rappers Using YouTube To Do Awesome Freestyles," all because rappers went back to rapping after dabbling in the vids.

I'm thinking it'd be very easy for a rapper to say something like "You don't even rap you just YouTube" but making it rhyme, and suddenly everyone will be back on the mixtapes. But it might not even have to go that far ... Allhiphop.com shows Gucci Mane dissing T.I. in a (strictly!!!) audio file that was uploaded two hours and thirty six minutes ago, showing at least a little heartbeat on the dis track's monitor.

Beyond all that, Hsu's claim that YouTube vids are unimaginative neglects the creativity involved in the new artform. Cam and 50 are throwing cool video shots at one another, the disses aren't as "unimaginative" as is claimed, and video and audio are by no means mutually exclusive, so even if YouTube replaces the mix tape, who's to say it's bad for the music or the creative expression?

Add those shakey stilts to the massive counterexample of Lil Wayne's audiofiles actually posted on YouTube (often only with only a still shot of himself kinda like the TK thing I wrote about earlier). The "Ether" and "Show Me What You Got" disses on Jay-Z basically put the one nails not hammered by Kingdom Come firmly in the pinebox. I'm shaking mad at arguments made more to get a piece together than to show something really happening. Like the YouTube thing is a bit in itself, why throw in "It's bad for rap" for almost no reason.

So the whole thing just makes me a lil frowny on the edges.

Power to the People Making AdSense with Their Mouths

Is Jessica Hopper Dennis Hopper's hard-partying, hard-faced, wildly fuckable daughter who ultimately just wants to be cuddled in the middle of the night?

[. . .]

[. . .]

Of course not.

Sulky points me to this tinyluckygenius, who judging by her screen name thinks some pretty good things about herself, and suddenly I'm reading pseudo-art blog posts that try to take a Strokes angle on the trials and tribs of loving music and being a feminist at the same time (apparently these things are at odds, sometimes).

None of this would really be a thing if Sulks didn't point out to me that this lady did some simmering a summer ago by starting a big thing about the Magnetic Fields guy being a racist, all of which was pretty ridic in the wash (I'm not together on all the details, but from what I hear Hopper dissed the singer for writing in the Times that he liked music and listing only white performers), but illustrates the power of baby girl's angles.

My knee-jerk has me urged to riff all over this as lamezoid bligablag in a similar way that Keyhole dissed Manohla Dargis for taking a throwaway feminist jab at Transformers.

But on second thought, are we so wrong to hate on someone for being unnerved by Kelly and The Game? Feminist reactions to chauvinism in hip hop are usually beside the point in my mind but not totally without merit, and it's not like the genius doesn't have any moves. Plus you don't want to always be the guy who's defending meatheaded stuff about hating women as not really hating women or "just words."

The cityskape is alive with a lot of ugly stuff, and some of it is probably even worth blogging. Living in Taco-town has taught me that much, so I gave the tiny dancer a chance. I zipped to her most recent post and suddenly she even had me going with her on a ride for a sec:

So out of desperation, you and your friends go the bar you hate trying to make good on yr efforts, and the vibe is like an episode of Cheaters and everyone is acting like the James Spader character in an 80's teen drama and you sit there sucking down yr ice water and thinking "I put on shoes for this?!"

Good refs, the sentence has speed and the lady is doing some observations. The shoes thing is maybe a little Sex and the City, but hey it's 2007 and L7 and Bratmobile now mostly appear on XM 54 between midnight and one a.m., so I can't blame Hopper for some pomo third-wave pogoing, even if generally I'm not for it. We can at least relate to hating what you're doing in the search of fun, and there's some directions you can take with an observation that's acute like this.

So, Hoptown, where you driving this motorcycle? To a graveyard with a pocket full of acid tabs? In other words, are you taking this lonesome cityskape snippet to a place that will make us understand this internet-and-80s-mediated world a little better? Do you love them ho's?

You walk home with your best friend, each carrying an end of yr bent up bike, trying to remember the chronology of the Husker Du discography and it's all the lame-fun you need right there. Aging loners waxing nerdy in the night light.

NO!

Hoppers doesn't even close us out with a complete sentence. Yeah you're a feminist but you ain't [got] a predicate.

But this brings us to an interesting juncture. I've thought before about music being largely a thing that mediates our life and permeates through our personalities, illustrating our prejudices and highlighting our personal experiences more than being a thing that just sits outside ourselves that we can critique in a sorta highfalutin' way. I've also claimed that I would rather read reviews that contain anecdotes and illustrative examples and bracket notions of whether a tune is good or not in favor of discussing its intersection with real life, something music writers are rarely interested in.

So maybe the situation is that to get at this arty approach to "culture" minutely defined as that which media-savvy people with B.A.'s and some connections to magazines think about, we're going to get some stuff/criticism/anecdoting that isn't totally heartfelt, maybe even a little hateful, and / or not really interested in the right things. And a bajillion people are sometimes going to read it.

Blogger/journalists who can sometimes write a sentence can get surprisingly far in this game, regardless to the level of thought in their ideas or the checkability of their refs. And sometimes an odd perversion of PC comes through and people can even be attacked over it??? And without complete sentences! I'm gonna write awktown and I'm gonna mean it.

But, as they say, we're all just bloggin.

A Good Typo

Faceboom.com

Thought about Wrestling and Rap

John Cena Reverses Mystikal's Career Trajectory by Rapping First Then Joining the Military

Early Cena



Wrestling contains some of the most heavily mythologized personas in the New Era age, as discussed in the previous post on Chris Benoit and Owen Hart.

Rap might benefit from the application of wrestling's model by developing a McMahon-type "heel" and "face" structure. Labels could recruit wack or one-trick rappers to join a sub-stable and then pretend to feud with their face rappers. Some of the greatest moments in rap stem from beef but beef often turns mad-cow and people get shot, so why not just fake the feuds, save some lives, and let everybody listen to some crazy dis tracks.

Gay? Blogger?

Gay Blogger Needed!

Two Things (Both Suicide-Related)

1) Of course we all know Chris Benoit died recently. I've been reading a lot about professional wrestling on Wikipedia, and a few link clicks in I was at Owen Hart's page. Hart died in a tragic accident when his harness unbuckled as he was being lowered from the ceiling at a live event. He fell nearly eighty feet and landed chest-first on the ring's turnbuckle.

Benoit's death is tragic and puzzling, but what is striking about Hart's demise is that he died as a heel, or bad-guy/joke wrestler. All wrestlers go through cycles of heel/face to help generate audience interest, but the indignity of being a national joke for a while is compensated by the promise of turning face again, often within several months.

What I didn't know before was that the stunt that killed Hart was designed specifically to amplify his heel status and make him more of a joke. Hart's storyline portrayed him as a weakling with delusions of superhuman power. Ironically, his harness was set up so that he would fall on his face once he was lowered to a safe distance from the mat, so the crowd could jeer him for attempting to fly. Obviously, the entire joke took a horrendous turn.

One of the many downfalls of a career in professional wrestling is that you may die in a moment of extreme public humiliation. Obviously the WWE doesn't put its wrestlers through the same risk that caused Hart's death, but the heel/face convention is a necessary part of wrestling's continually evolving plotline.

It is likely that Benoit died for wrestling just as Hart did, and the symbolism is equally resonant. Benoit likely flew into a steroid rage that led him to murder his wife and son in his home, then take his own life by hanging himself on the cord of a weight machine. Benoit's role in the WWE was that of an athletic talent; obviously almost every pro wrestler uses steroids, but they become especially necessary for those whose athleticism is essential to their character.

The overlap of fantasy and reality that is part of wrestling's huge appeal makes it one of the few forms of entertainment where endangering a character, either physically or psychologically, also endangers his actor alter-ego. There will be more posts on wrestling in the future.

2) I got some Eliott Smith CDs from the library today. I missed out on him when he was still and only really took an interest in him reading the SPIN story of his death. The tunes are good, but no one talks about this guy anymore, like not even a little. That strikes me.

Me, Too

From Jorge Luis Borges, "The Art of Verbal Abuse," Selected Non-Fictions. Ed., trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin, 1999.

A conscientious study of other literary genres has led me to believe in the greater value of insult and mockery.

If only Borges could blog.

I say that about once a day.

Heinz-Dog Ketchup Ads Not As Intriguing As First Thought

There is a that helps exphttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giflain in part the weirdo homemade Heinz ads that are proliferating/procreating all over YouTube.

I encourage you to click the link and watch a disgusting orgy of viscous tomato "stuff" get slopped on to all manner of food. A promised perk of participating in the contest: "Your video will be seen on YouTube." And maybe blogged about on Ideelz! This contest is huger than you think.

Even though, much like the bad guys in a Die Hard movie, the KetchupYouTubers (FrenchFryers) have revealed that their primary motivation is money, the tonal similarity among the three previously posted videos is unnerving, as is the impression that these videos have been stolen from people's homes and uploaded onto the internet for the sake of humiliation.

That said, I'm pretty excited to make my own YouTube ketchup video.

Can You Be Serious Marines

Along with this quote:

LCPL Chad Codwell, from Baltimore, Maryland, with Charlie Company 1st Battalion 5th Marines, carries an experimental urban combat skateboard which is being used for manuevering inside buildings in order to detect tripwires and sniper fire. This mission is in direct support of Urban Warrior '99.

More data here.

Dogs and Ketchup - An Internet Trend?

I was trolling YouTube for some interesting videos of pets and animals for an application to TheDailyTube (using search terms such as "animal funny" and "crocodile funny") when I came across not just one, but several homemade advertisements for Heinz Ketchup.




The last one embedded is "Dan's Heinz Commercial #4," implying three preceding commercials of a similar nature. That makes a total of at least six amateur ads, three of which focus primarily on dogs' relation to the condiment.

Is this just because the "cats" in catsup makes for easy jokes? Or is there a deeper correlation between the personality type that makes amateur ads and an equally distributed affinity for pets and tomato sauce?

Also note: The similar apartments. Very Office Space.

Satan the Academic

From the Edith Grossman translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote:

[The book is] so difficult to read that not even Satan can understand it. (199)

This is a recurring thing in the novel; Satan as the smartest being around, or at least a superlatively smart one. There is little comment in the novel about Satan as a source of evil, making him sort of the figurative equivalent of, say, Einstein or Stephen Hawking. In the middle ages, I guess people gave the devil more cred than he gets nowadays, mutating as he has into a pitchfork-weilding little imp with hooves, which is more cute than anything else.

Really the only recent cultural product that posits Satan as a gifted rhetorician is The Exorcist. Father Merrin explains:

Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. We may ask what is relevant but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don't listen to him. Remember that - do not listen.

In Spawn, the Devil, as far as I can tell, doesn't spend much time reading and is more a warlike despot fighting against the forces of Heaven.

It's hard to come up with a definitive figure of the devil for the aughties - horror movies are more concerned with torture and psychosis lately than the supernatural - but I'm about to poke around and see what's hiding in comics or movies or books. The Devil is everywhere so it shouldn't be too hard to dig something up.

Thing re Double Negs

From Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language (2nd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002):

For a long time English permitted the use of a double negative. We have now discarded it through a false application of mathematical logic to language; but in Elizabethan times it was felt merely as a stronger negative, as indeed it is today in the instinct of the uneducated. (248)

1) Double negs ok?

2) Instincts. Killer instincts.

Question

For some reason I'm hesitant to drink water I left sitting on my counter in a water bottle for a week. Is this any worse than drinking water that was sitting in my pipes for a week?

Some Notes about San Francisco

1) Many of the famous skate spots, including Embarcadero (EMB) and Pier 13 (I think) now have heinous contraptions screwed into the concrete that prevent anyone from doing grinds. In a bitter stroke of irony, the city has even elected to chip chunks out of the stairs surrounding a statue at Embarco to prevent anyone from skating it. Apparently Frisco's willing to destroy a piece of architecture simply to prevent people from wearing slowly away at it, especially if they wear away at it with aluminum trucks.

2) The most scenic day spent in SF netted zero photos because I'd neglected to bring my camera out to Scott's house in the East Bay for a night of drinking and chatting about InfoSys, India, and journalism (of all things).

This turned particularly problematic when I took the BART commuter rail back into downtown and decided to walk the 10 miles along the bay/coast back to my friend's apartment in Ocean Beach. Sure, I saw everything, but no one on Facebook is going to know.

3) There was much talk of the distinction between Pwnage and "getting served." Theories included that Pwnage has to involve the Internet, and "getting served" has to involve breakdancing. We did more than watch that video of the four-year-old getting served/pwned by a Times Square breakdancer though. At one point we walked into a bar that served such drinks as "Tequila Mockingbird." DJ Takes Self Too Seriously (not really his name but nevertheless his name) was spinning and there was a projector showing people breakdancing behind him. The bar included mostly people in tight jeans who probably wouldn't have quit smoking if San Francisco hadn't outlawed it in the bars. My party and I pretty much agreed that we had gotten served, and not just Speakeasy Pale Ales.

4) While in attendance at the Gay Pride Parade on Sunday, we noticed numerous things.

a) A Pride parade does not consist entirely of rollerblading conga lines wearing only tight white rayon pants. Sometimes there are also balloon-clad transsexuals.

b) You will see exposed boobs at a Pride parade, but not really any more than you'd see on any other day when you go to a strip club.

c) House music!

d) If you are me you will get kicked in the butt by a gay man, right in the crack. More than surprising, the act was confounding. Was it a sexual overture? Did he want to start a fight on arguably the most loving of all days? I shot a questioning look back at the perpetrator, and his face seemed to imply that both of my guesses were true. For better or worse, I have since resolved that, gay or no, any man who kicks another man in the butt crack is asking for a fight. Luckily for the gay community, no one else tried it.

e) Yahoo! sponsored the festivities, or at least helped by passing out purple stickers pronouncing the pride of the stickee. I wonder if those guys handing out stickers were interns or what. Whoever got assigned to that, they were probably "Just glad to get out of the office."

5) If you are in a bicycle messenger bar, it is best not to say how lame biking is. According to Alan, it is like "being in the lion's den and hating on gold fur."

6) Barry Bonds can hit a home run most of the time.

7) Knocked Up was okay but not as good as Rotten Tomatoes said. Certainly, though, not as controversial/sexist as some haters have said. It's odd to argue that a movie isn't feminist or whatever based on assumptions about the guys women will/won't fall in love with. Beautiful up and comers sometimes date and love total slobs and douchebags (believe me I know this to be absolutely true) - even guys far worse that Seth Rogen's character, who actually got his shit completely together together (including tearing through three baby books) in like five weeks I think. Sod off, wymyn, sometimes a hot chick likes a guy you don't like, even if you are, unlike her, not pretty enough to play a doctor on Gray's Anatomy.

8) If you have vaguely reddish hair, telling people to order a Red Headed Slut at the bar is almost always an okay idea.

I Am on Vacation but I Couldn't Resist

From a scathing review - if a poorly written and line-edited review can really be scathing - of Knocked Up:

The writing doesn't feel real or natural. It's just a bunch of guys sitting around the table being lewd, vulgar and riffing on each other.

If you could still be serious about using the word "riff" before now you are definitely in troubs when a lady who uses sentences such as

My happy feet really wanted to get the heck out of there

is copping the steez.

Jeezy Responds

To a pretty antagonistic and moral-panicky Q&A in the June 2007 SPIN:

I'm not a plumber, I can't rap about pipes. I'm not a roofer, I can't rap about houses.

I'm not a rapper, I can't rap about raps. :'(

A Few Facts and Opinions About the Tacoma Public Library

1) They have a lot of DVDs that are not Masterpiece Theater or documentaries, including such as The Marine starring John Cena, The Devil's Rejects, and Transformers: The Movie. I wonder if they think public libraries should carry these films for the same reasons that I do.

2) Many of these unconventional DVDs, including Back to the Future, in addition to being uneducational in the traditional sense, are bootlegs! Do Phyllis and Janet (two of the librarians or at least two librarian-sounding names) go to those guys who spread out blankets on the streets to stock the shelves? The intellectual commons meets copyright law at the library in more ways than just letting you at books for free! I kinda imagine DVD bootleggers have a deal worked out where they can slang product as long as they donate some merch to the public well-being. We should do the same for drugs and prostitutes maybe.

3) You can't look at pornography using the wireless, unless it's through Bloglines. I don't think that they respect Bloglines users more, they just have outdated software.

4) A child was molested by a man here in October 2006. Security is very tight at the library. They only let one person in the bathroom at a time, and search it after each use (I'm thinking drug deals). Four security guards prowl around, making patrons feel even more uncomfortable than they already are just being in a public library. The guards are not afraid to tell you not to tip back in your chair.

5) Just down Tacoma Ave sits the Pierce County Courthouse. Right next to it, the jail, which houses an above-average percentage of the population, if you catch my drift. It might say something about a town that the nearest building to its library is its jail. Are they hoping spillover from one to the other? Or maybe fearfully anticipating the opposite.

That man [in the jail] and the man in the [library] / Don't realize how close they really are
--Nobodys

6) Every once in a while, someone will enter the library talking at a very high volume. Maybe the frequency of this occurrence is accentuated by the fact that I'm spending a lot more time in the library than ever before, but I seem to remember places like Milwaukee Public and Georgetown University enjoying a greater degree of quiet.

6) [Opinion only] Good library.

Bagenius ("Je me souviens du confondement entre le B et le V en espagnol, [putain]")

The Filename of This Photo Is "headshotr.jpeg," Which Gives You a Good Idea Just What Kind of L.A. Band We're Dealing With Here

It was senior year of college, graduation rapidly approaching. It was maybe February, and I'd started hanging with a couple girls who came by Tuesday nights to take stale bagels from me as my shift at the coffee shop ended.

When I got off we'd hang in the food court at the student union and I'd mostly listen to them talk to one another about their days: papers turned in late, boys affronted, their love-hate relationship with my friend Scott.

After a fashionable time, one of the girls, named Pheebs, called me up.

"Hey Mike my friend's band is playing at the 9:30 Club. I have tickets. Want to go?"

"Sure."

"I don't want you to think this is a date or anything."

"Of course not."

The show was Kings of Leon (yo Leon! These guys are the Kings of you!), and the Kings of Leon are alright I guess but Pheebs knew the openers, a little supercool L.A. band called Vagenius. They reminded me of a band that played at my high school called Loserface, who called me and another geeky white dude onstage to freestyle rap (I can hardly believe it either, but rapping was once part of my life).

Vagenius reminded me of Loserface because the lead singer of Vagenius had dyed-black hair, was a girl, and played the keytar, kind of like the lead singer of Loserface had real-black hair, was a girl, and played the keyboards. Both girls were hot in a Joan Jett kinda way, but the comparison isn't as obvi as you might think by the photo. They had moves and could belt it out pretty, not like Joan who bless her heart is a yeller (and a good one). They guys who backed them up just looked like guys I went to high school with.

So Vagenius played some gay-wave (you knew that, though, keytars and all), but good gay-wave, better even than The Killers or Interpol, because it wasn't synth-y and they played the keyboard like a keyboard and guitar like guitar and didn't play either like the other one (maybe my main objection to the Aughties-Eighties vein of music).

The tunes were crisp by definition and the singer had a whispy voice.

When the Kings came on we got to go upstairs to the VIP section and meet Vagenius. I didn't say a lot but I remember the singer telling a story about how Kings of Leon heard their tape and asked them to tour with them, and Vagenius'd never heard of Kings of Leon so they had to listen to "Trani" pretty avidly so they could pretend they really loved the Kings. (Why not have a band just called The Kings? That's a great name, right? Also why not have a band called the Beetles? I've wondered about that a lot.)

This was pre-Youtube post-Napster so it was probably pretty hard for this woman to make time to like the Kings of Leon, but Pitchfork was doing the damn thing so it couldn't have been that bad.

I guess it worked out okay because about two months after the show when I got over myself and the "What am I doing with myself now that college is over," I came back to their Web site and started banging Vagenius tunes on the regular, actually more like on the constant. The delivery is nostalgic, and whereas the timbre is different, they kinda remind me of Jane's Addiction (see post below).

Well as songs are wont to do after 10,000 plays, the early Vagenius wore out, and I ditched it for some "Don't Like the Way" and some joints by this group Guided by Voices.

The reason I'm remembering all this is because I'm going to San Francisco to visit Scott tonight and he mentioned via Gchat that Pheebs might be around. Some memory triggers got pulled and before I knew it I was back at Totallyvagenius.com and they have this new album called "Hello Stranger," the lady singer is still there, she speaks Spanish, and not much has changed in the way of this music still being moving.

So check out some Vagenius. The embed is a little short and weird but that's okay.