Lou Dobbs Gallery for Two, Please

Time to clear the air. It may be obvious that I'm not Lou Dobbs' biggest fan (he is).

At any rate, Los Blogueros are badass.

Kickflip Over BMX Double Hump

Wheeeeeee!



From April 2008 Skateboarder Magazine cover. Did I mention that's a kickflip?

Pentathlete Profile: Ed Marion

Editor's Note: In honor of the upcoming inaugural Daniel Feehan Pentathalon - a grueling three-day athletic competition testing some of the nation's best and brightest in the fields of Jenga, Texas Hold 'Em, Frisbee Golf, Foosball and Ping Pong - Ideelz, in conjunction with the event's namesake, is publicizing the vital stats of each competitor as part of an ongoing series. The event is to pop off Feb. 16-18, 2008 in Belton, Texas.



Pentathlete #2: Ed "Moves" Marion
Hails from: El Paso, TX , Dirty Jerz, Nineveh Province of I-Rock

Get to know Ed....

By Day: Ed is the wheels and cogs of the US Army. Literally.
By Sport: Street Ballin', Dance Dance Revolution, Celebrity watching

Pentathletic Strengths: Alcoholic tolerance

Professed weakness: Poker. Known to declare, "My stars, what a hand" when bluffing

Intangibles:
Ed's attention span. When focused, Ed's a machine. When distracted by bright colors and moving objects, Ed tends to wander. Literally.
The incorporation of his infamous dance moves into the events will make or break his team.

Quotable Ed: "Homer Simpson: Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."

Did you know?: Ed won the first (and last) Mosul Idol competition this past July.

Tomorrow's Featured Pentathlete: Patrick Feehan

Sitemeter

Sometimes my sitemeter disappears. This is disastrous for me because it means I don't know whether any more writers whose stories I like are stumbling onto this blog. Plus I need to know whether my employers have found this thing yet.

If you see my sitemeter please email it back to me. It must have peeled off or something.

Pentathlete Profile: Andrew Tein

Editor's Note: In honor of the upcoming inaugural Daniel Feehan Pentathalon - a grueling three-day athletic competition testing some of the nation's best and brightest in the fields of Jenga, Texas Hold 'Em, Frisbee Golf, Foosball and Ping Pong - Ideelz, in conjunction with the event's namesake, is publicizing the vital stats of each competitor as part of an ongoing series. The event is to pop off Feb. 16-18, 2008 in Belton, Texas.




Pentathlete #1: Andrew "Yangtze" Tein
Hails from: Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, Houston

Get to know Andrew....

By Day: Tobacco Lobbyist
By Sport: Equestrian Golf, Synchronized Swimming, Dogfighting

Pentathletic Strengths: Jenga

Professed weakness: Frisbee-related events

Intangibles:
Andrew can carry a conversation.
Andrew has a history of ankle issues which should not impact his performance.
Andrew has never won anything athletic, but he is willing to start.

Quotable Andrew: "I just hope everyone has a nice time."

Did you know?: Andrew has been tasked with removing the smog from Bejing for the upcoming Olympic games.

Tomorrow's Featured Pentathlete: Ed "Moves" Marion

Why Not?

Every publication everywhere should endorse a presidential candidate. It's fun!

Money in the mouth:

Republican candidate: Mike Huckabee - Once fat and funny, now funny. Hard to beat that.

Democratic candidate: Barack Obama - If he added an apostrophe in there and had been born a mere matter of centuries earlier, I'd be reading about him in Wars of the Irish Kings. He's a little lean, but looks like he could handle a rapier. Plus: he makes young people crap their pants in excitement.

The World Is a Different Place Today

I've been pretty resolutely on the fence about the whole election situation and through negligence and ignorance did not register to vote on this most Super of Tuesdays. However, many of my friends who know something about politics and ideas have been pretty forthright about their support for Barack Obama, a young senator from Illinois who, as near as I can tell, is running on hope, change, and the idea that the Iraq war never even looked like a good idea. I guess I can get behind each of those. Not that it matters right now.

Okay on to the video above, which made its YouTube debut Saturday.

Yes, the BEP are and have been ridic since basically when they came out and for them to make a video endorsing a presidential candidate is also a ridic idea. But it taps into something a friend of mine told me on New Years Eve about Obama's speech at the Jefferson Jackson dinner: "See? The fact that he can make people like us care at all about what happens is what makes him so unique. We're not supposed to have feelings about politics."

Yes, politicians are rarely inspiring and I am not predisposed to caring one way or another about whether someone wins unless they are complete knuckleheads who put my friends in a desert to be shot and blown up for no justifiable purpose.



But the worm feels as though it's turning in my loins here. I kind of get a tingle when I hear Obama's voice and I almost want to believe that he really would make the country better.

I certainly like that the Black Eyed Peas made a video of him talking and them singing and that they probably believe this will in some way help the world become a better place. It's hard to imagine any hip-hop artist doing that for Hillary or anyone else in the race (maybe Edwards, or - call me bananas - Huckabee).

And that there is a candidate who can inspire this kind of conceit - a candidate who creates a world in which YouTube exists so people can make music videos about their favorite political candidates -- strikes at my (however perverted) sense of what America should be like.

So alright Barack Obama, I'm sort of listening, and you have Will.I.Am to thank for that.

My Pal Made a Lolcat

One of the easier things to blog.

Reversal!

Various people have indicated at various times that Google is really a master spin artist. During the net neutrality debate, the search dominatrix took a tone of moral authority and violently defended neutrality as a necessary freedom. Google neglected to mentioned that neutrality was also best for its business.

The company hasn't stopped the charade. Google said today that the Internet should not be controlled by a single behemoth, which is awk, because everyone knows Google controls the internet.

The people who believe in Yahoo! - I know a guy - are probably rejoicing right now. In 2008, Google will be the dynasty to beat, and Microsoft and Yahoo! a patched-up team of proven losers.

Also, the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl last night.

Just sayin'.

Really?

It turns out I'm the same person as a lot of other people.

Link, Friend, Link Link

-Suicide Attempts By U.S. Soldiers This is apparently another result of the government's continued mistreatment of its favorite rallying flag. There is anecdotal evidence of a mounting drug problem among troops as well.

-Lawrence blogs about the DRC for Africa Matters. Also see his analysis for the Diplomatic Courier.

-Could a Will Smith movie actually seem palatable? There's definitely more to be said about this but I can't quite figure out what at present.

-Epicly Later'd stepping up its game to do a 16-part (!!!!) series on John Cardiel. Cardiel is famous for his rail- and bowl-slaying part in Transworld's Sight Unseen video and for generally stepping up to the plate harder than younger pros who should be way hungrier. The intro monologue about his brush with paralysis says a lot about him and the brighter side of the skateboarding ethic generally.

The Time for Action … Is Now?

Editor's Note: Ideelz is pleased to welcome its first-ever guest blogger, recent golden-star award winner and military aficionado Daniel Feehan. Daniel is a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army and writes occasionally for publication on evite.com. He currently lives in Texas.

I am the American dream,
The rape of Africa
The undying machine,
The overpriced medicine,
The murderous regime,
The tough guy's front
And the one behind the scenes

-fiasco, lupe

Whilst my wheels spin in a boundless state, mentally retarded women are remotely detonated in loose statements of religious fanatacism. Hill-dog will look at the options, Barackus will offer white man an out, Johnny Mc will find honorable victory at the cost of dishonor, and I will battle america's identity crisis on foreign shore. Men will be brave and some men will hurt, but will Britney live?

F150s line endless highways of a land too big to understand. Cows cross roads and stare at man, also grazing. Pride is farmed in balls of foot and sold in marts of wal, and when storms come out of the east, surely this is its ow-n country.

The eyes of Texas are upon you,
all the live long day.
The eyes of Texas are upon you,
You cannot get away.

-alma mater, uTejas

The Same Person

Omar Little

Stagger Lee

Is this a new character type, or an old one?

One More, Then Hitting the Showers

A good line from ESPN.com's Mike Sando on the prospects of a Giants Super Bowl win:

The Giants might pull the upset -- Eli Manning is playing like a champion -- but picking against New England is like hitting on 18 in blackjack. You get credit for good fortune, not smarts, if you happen to draw a three.

Hi!

Per Sitemeter, someone from New Mexico got to ideelz by Googling "Evan Lavender-Smith." This is either the man himself or someone who likes his stuff too. If you are said Googler, thanks for dropping in and if you're Evan Lavender-Smith, say hi. Say hi even if you're not Lavender-Smith. Say hi even if you're not the Googler. If you're the Hamburgler, say rubble rubble.

"Appalachian Spring."

Ballin.

If you never come back, it was good while it lasted. Enjoy the weather.

Also, don't be embarrassed. We've all Googled our new friends or ourselves. It's a sign of respect, or self respect.

Similar, but Different

From Leda and the Swan entry, Wikipedia:

The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man.

Those were different times (see below).

What Goes On: Modeling

From conversation:

me: hey
Speedra: yo
me: what's goin on
Speedra: not much
trying to get a new project goign in the lab
me: cool
bout what
Speedra: radiation response of tumors
trying to predict response
based on a pre treatment biopsy
using RNA microarrays which measure gene expression of the tumor tissue
basically
collect 54000 pieces of info about the tumors
and then train that data
by telling the modeling program
this is a responder, this is a non responder
me: wow
do you think you'll get something good?
Speedra: i dont know
it seems easy
like
when i first got here
i was like
oh ya
no big deal
but the analysis is complicated
and it doesnt always work
you have to try your best to eliminate any other variables in the samples
anyways
dude
i gots to run
ill talk to you later

(emphasis added, subsequently removed).

It's Life and Life Only

In a begginging of "The Second Battle of Moytura," the first story in Wars of the Irish Kings (David W. McCullough. Three Rivers: New York, 2002. 6–7.), a dispute over who should govern Ireland arises after King Nuadu loses his hand in battle. (Apparently one should not rule one-handed.)

After some flimflam, the people who decide these things settle on Bres, an illegitimate child of Eiru. The author then describe Bres' conception. Eiru is coolin out on the beach when a silver boat pulls up. On closer examination, the boat turns out to be a man who wants to have sex with Eiru.

The courtship is short:

The man said to her: "Shall I have an hour of lovemaking with you?"
"I certainly have not made a tryst with you," she said.
"Come without the trysting!" he said.

One Hour Later:

"Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I have two things that I should lament," said the woman, "separating from you, however we have met. The young men of the Tuathe De Danann have been entreating me in vain -- and you possess me as you do."
"Your anxiety about those two things will be removed," he said.

The ship-man (who finally tells Eiru he's Elatha mac Delbaith, king of the Fomoire) goes on to tell Eiru that she will bear a child who will rule Ireland and drive out invaders.

Assuming the sex was consensual (maybe a big assumption, but Elatha does have "golden-yellow hair down to his shoulders"), this passage adds to a long list of sex scenes from the sixteenth century and before where a god or king comes along and gets busy with a fine woman. Elatha doesn't have to say or do much to convince her, and the news of pregnancy either isn't a big deal to Eiru or is not discussed as such. Nota bene: she says specifically the two things that are bothering her, and neither one has to do with the act of sex itself; that appears to have gone off fine.

Instances of this kind of encounter abound. Courtly love stories in chivalric tales, Leda and the Swan, the Immaculate Conception, etc. all play with this notion of impulsive sex whose consequences are either neutral or incredibly positive. Again, the line between rape and sex here is poorly drawn. All I'm saying is it's conceivable within these stories' frameworks that the sex was consensual (so don't come bangin at me about Leda -- I'm well aware). Because the discussion of these scenes is so offhand, there's some reason to believe that the audience understood sex in a similar way.

I'm picturing a time before there was much to do but work in a field or be a landowner who had to fight to protect his land. Men and women just sort of got together and had sex, and if there was conception, they either got married or otherwise went along. The Church had ideas about feminine purity, whatever, but as a practical matter people probably did the deed a fair amount.

The coupling is important mainly as a generative act in these tales, as opposed to an act of any other kind. The window dressing around it is not that important to the narrator or to the audience; the important thing is that it did happen.

This is a very different approach to sex.

Maudlin!

Barf barf barf barf barf.

Like, honestly. We all like Robert Frost and whatever, but tell me that this wasn't just an excuse to -- cleverly! -- sneak some of his lines into the reporting. The piece's tone is also one of unnecessary aggrandizement of the Yank (Bronx Bomber?) Poet. Everyone knows he was an awesome all-American who wrote really beautifully, capturing in meter the natural flow of speech.

But still. Exaggerating his value to make his house by extension somehow important is pretty dishonest and a cheap play at exigency. In real life, it hardly matters that some people had a party in Robert Frost's farm house, or that they ruined some of his stuff. He is dead. And his poetry, not his kitchenware, is what we really care about.

Imagined rejected things the author thought of while writing this article:

"The foundations of the house must have snarled and rattled. Later, the revelers stumbled out, out -- of the house."

"When they left the party I'm pretty sure they had miles to go before they slept. Miles to go before they slept."

"I wonder if it was a swinger party. Not of birches, mind you."

Everyone just needs to chill when these things happen, and please restrain themselves from writing "beautifully" about a worthless topic.

A Wonderful Exchange

In years of excellent instant messaging, this had never happened:

Will: party on wayne
me: party on garth

Until today.

[. . .]

Also, my blog is somehow on Tacoma, WA time or maybe even some kind of pacific island time. No, just Tacoma time. Maybe I forgot to pack it when I moved.

Strong and Strong

The world is by turns a kind, gentle place, and a fierce, desperate one. When it is fierce and desperate it feels as though it will kill you just for being in it. But when it fails to kill you, it appears momentarily kind and gentle again.

Because the world is like this, it is also just a place where people live, and where people do their best to go on living.

There isn't ever much point in getting hung up on more than these simple ideas, if that can really be avoided. At least, that is how it appears to me today.

And now I will sleep for sixteen hours, if all goes well.

Some Saints of Note

Saint John the Evangelist aka John Divine: Patron saint of Milwaukee.



Saint Amand: Patron saint of bartenders.



Saint Francis de Sales: Patron saint of journalism.



Saint Elizabeth of Portugal: Guards against jealousy.

[Not pictured]

Saint James Intercisus: Patron saint of lost vocations, also martyred by being cut into 28 pieces.



Saint Lydwina of Schiedam: Patron saint of skaters (ice, mainly, but probably finds time for other kinds).



Mary Magdalen: Saint against sexual temptation (fits). Also patron of glove- and drugmakers.



The Virgin Mary is/has been saddled with a whole host of duties, but among them is patronage of travelers, and Delaware.

Patron Saints Index by Topic

I Ain't Scared of You Motherfuckers

Bernie Mac is very funny in this video. The repetition, the rhythm, the abject filthiness, and the force of his egomaniacal persona just wash all over the place.

By the third time he says "You don't understand," I don't think there's anybody who isn't on board. And this material ought to be a hard sell.

It isn't.

Rwanda Interview Transcript

A segment of my sister's transcript of an interview conducted with a worker at a school in Rwanda:

Our students help each other a lot.

26 18 05

We even received a national certificate of unity.

26 34 10

We practices national unity at this school. For example, in 1997, there was a massacre of children.

26 55 15

The interhamwe came here and told the children to separate

27 05 09

They told the Hutus to stand together and for the Tutsis to stand together. But the girls, since they were taught to stay together,

27 18 21

They refused to separate. They said that they were all Rwandans, and by refusing, they gave their lives.

27 29 21

They killed 17 young girls

27 35 21

Because they refused to separate into groups of Hutus and Tutsis, they were killed.

27 41 23

They killed 17 and there were 20 that were wounded.

27 46 18

Those girls are still handicapped. This is a moving example. These young girls

27 55 11

from 12 to 20 years of age, who had the courage to die instead of to separate.

28 03 19

Instead of saying “you are Hutu, you are Tutsi” even in the face of death.

28 09 10

They accepted death, and that is very poignant.

Fiction and "The Wire"

Back to "The Wire" for a second.

A couple months ago, someone raised an interesting objection. The line goes that the show's realism actually just feels real because it conforms to our racist stereotypes and expectations about how drug dealers are in real life. The critical praise of this realism only served to further entrench "The Wire" and its problematic racial overtones.

This idea never sat well with me because "The Wire" strikes me as patently, even overtly, fictional in just about every moment. In other words, it still behaves like a TV show more than anything else. The dialog is clever and snappy, there are lines that are setups for punchlines. There is a blind guy who knows everything, aka an oracle, which has existed as a literary device since fiction was invented by the Greeks (true story), and which has continued through the stillborn run of "Freaks and Geeks" (Harris). Also, the characters are obvious foils to one another (Daniels relates to McNulty because he has a tarnished reputation going back to the "bad old days," McNulty relates to Bubbs because they're both fuckups, etc.).

So it's an uncomfortable position to take that the show really goes all that far in perpetuating stereotypes when it seems so palpably fictitious at every turn. Yeah, there are a lot of persuasive, moving, or resonant aspects of "The Wire." But it's hard for me to see anyone as believing in its truth any more than they would any other show (except "The Office," which is, like, exactly what work is like [barf]).

A Few Things

-Not my idea, by the way, but (or maybe therefore) worth chewin over: Part of the reason politics are so crazy in America is because during the New Deal, Roosevelt made all manner of government institutions, willy-nilly. That's fine and whatever, it's not like I'm on a tax-and-spend rant here because that would be stupid. But these agencies aren't anywhere in the Constitution! There are basically not any rules about how they are supposed to operate and they kind of do whatever they want. Presidents can change them but they are also kind of entrenched. The Presidential election is important but not as important as we think, given that this is true.

-A store can run out of a certain DVD. When we were in Circuit City (we'd already tried Target), the clerk told us that they sell "The Wire" over the Internet now. He might have been making a clever joke, but that was also the truth apparently. Why do you have a store in real life if you only sell things on the Internet? It's making more and more sense now that we live next to a fledgling apartment complex called ClermontGreene.com.

-On the other hand, Circuit City is very well stocked, carrying every conceivable episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond," one disc of "The Unit" (they probably started with three but a couple people confused it with "The Wire"), and on the New Releases rack, "New Adventures of Old Christine." I'm not going to hate on Julia Louis Dreyfus, who's actually funny (and weirdly hot nowadays), but in a better world Circuit City's DVD section would only have "The Wire" Season 4 and the Raymond fans (aka "Everybody") would be the ones who have to have the Internet.

-A graffiti artist who calls himself (or herself?) "Kunt" keeps tagging our neighborhood. Because of the misspelling it can't just be a dirty word. So someone out there is calling themselves a bad name anonymously and at the same time letting everyone know how they feel about themselves. I bet Kunt has a blog, since it's kind of the same idea.

-I fell asleep reading a book at around 8 p.m. and woke up at around 2:00 a.m. I tried the usual tricks of eating, drinking water, etc., but might be bound for dawn here.

-It's unclear whether the discontinued practice of giving money to homeless people is geographical, biographical. In DC it was just easy to give a few dollars here and there. In Tacoma the homeless people were so obvious about the voracity of their drug addictions that it seemed even more futile than usual to give them anything other than cigarettes, which is what they usually would ask for anyway (which says something geographical I think). In New York there may just be too many, or maybe the weird signage that actually admonishes against giving to panhandlers is working on me. But I kind of doubt that's it.

-With time, it gets easier, not harder, to make big mistakes.

-I miss Water and Vegetables. Puffy Shoe, where are you?

Just for Starters

In writing it is possible to begin by typing the wrong letter. Letters I typed before getting these sentences out:

M
S
H
L

Feel-good Hit of the Winter

Devine Calloway.



With a name like that there is only one path. And it involves big-spins.

Decisions

-New Book
-Plane Ticket
-Insolvency is not so bad
-No long bus rides for a while (but not too long a while)

This Is How the Magic Happens

Speedra: does harry potter come out
me: and it probably won't be flattering
Speedra: in the last booK?
me: no dumbledore
Speedra: oh
dude
me: and thaat was just a made up thing
Speedra: i wish harry did
me: so you could fuck him!
Speedra: do you think there is harry potter gay porn
ill look
me: ooh
me too!
Sent at 11:57 PM on Tuesday
me: i'm going to start blogging now

[. . .]

Fantasies Of a Virgin: Harry Potter

Another Good Line

From Evan Lavender-Smith. "Appalachian Spring." Land-Grant College Review 3, 13-19.

Mr. Feingold was angry that funding for the music program had been cut in half, so he threw a euphonium through the ceiling.

This is the introductory sentence to a new paragraph. It continues the pace and tenor of the rest of the piece. The imagery is cartoonish. Some people still know how to make this stuff happen.

Shaving in Fiction!!!

I shaved this morning and it occurred to me that a literary passage ought to be written about such an event.

He brought himself, after weeks of neglect, to the basin. The task had loomed, growing evermore insurmountable as each facial hair crawled farther outward from his face.

The thought of grooming himself had become terrifying. A looming mass of fiery, tentacled redness taunted him. His hand trembled as it reached for his dulled, weather-beaten Gilette Mach III.

Holding the razor poised to strike, he met the cold eyes of his reflection.

"Time to get your life together, hoss."

With that, he set to work.

A Good Line, But ...

From McCullough, David Willis. Wars of the Irish Kings. New York: Three Rivers, 2002. xx.

To be glib, medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is king.

Totally rad! Warring Wisconsin farmers! Nacho cheese! Anarchy!

But ...

"To be glib" is a sucky way to start any sentence. "Guys! Hold on. Just to warn you, I'm about to be seriously glib. So I don't want you to get carried away with what I'm saying. It's just glibness. Okay? Here we go!"

This Is Just So Effing Good

Hello Stranger "Her in These Lights"

Genuine despite all the synthiness. And as I've said before, she is a BAABE!

Rock Band

Rock Band is a new video game that simulates various elements of being in a rock band. There is a toy guitar like that of Guitar Hero, there is a toy drum kit, there is a microphone.

I was chatting with a friend the other night who plays real-life drums, and she remarked that, basically, on drums at least, Rock Band can actually teach people to play songs.

A couple weeks ago, an acquaintance who teaches guitar lessons for a living remarked that several of his students, aged 10 or so, want to learn songs by Kansas because of Guitar Hero.

I'm hoping that in subsequent editions the guitars become more and more complex, until they are just actual guitars, and that we're using video games to make an entire generation into inadvertent musicians.

An Idea for a Video Blog

Take full-length porn videos and edit out the sex scenes. You're left with 5-minute short films.

People would watch these because they get to do a lot of the work. Initially, it might not be clear that the videos are edited porn, but that revelation would be a gratifying punchline. After that, the videos would make an interesting comment of some kind (although maybe not super interesting). What are horny people willing to sit through between scenes of human depravity? The answer involves a lot of babysitters!

One of the conventions of erotic film (talk about diction!) is an everyday situation quickly turning the bend into a not-so-everyday situation involving private parts. People often laugh about the flimsy seductions that drive porn plots to the sex. However, I'm beginning to wonder if it's the sheer improbability that makes those scenes funny? Is seduction really that unlikely?

The reason to ask this question is that porn obviously shows people acting the way a viewer would want to be acting. For most of the screen time, this simply means getting some jollies with an athletically-to-artificially-built other, but in the other scenes it means exercising some form of charm over another person, being uninhibited, etc.

It'd be strangely revelatory to see people acting the way we wish they did, without the ensuing payoff. Or, it would just be ridic and funny if it weren't also sort of :'( . See also.

Toubab

Toubabing around comes from the Wolof, Toubab (n): white person; someone who doesn't know what's going on; moronic automaton. Picked up the Toub in 2003 during a nude excursion to Toubab Diallo, a tiny resort town in Sunu Gaal. The night involved showers and Ivy Leaguers, gin and guilt.

Started being a good little toubab - in earnest - around 2005, waiting tables in Bethany Beach, DE. Just trying to not let it get to me when I didn't get someone's Poffenburger to the table quickly enough or I got a three-dollar tip.

Maintained toubabitude through some harsh events out in Tacoma involving wait-staff and assistant managers at coffee houses, a cigarette habit and far too many beers every day, which did, indeed, net me a decent-sized "spare tire" (inner toubab) from January to April.

Played the Toubab in a brass band until lately when I've been sick and can't jam out on the video-game bikes over in New York Sports Club so I'm skittish of late, my toubab fighting for its life.

The toubabs only come out at 3 a.m., but they are not a frightening race.

Doing a lot of toubabing lately. (Riding the tobabogan = mounting a sled full of toubabs.)

Fucking toubabs. I've got em bad, from my head to my shoe-bobs.

----

Pretty tired of talking like everything mattered ... Someone asked me today "poetry?" and I said "I don't know how I lost that bug."

We used to be a lot heavier into monstrosity but that was before we knew how find it in the dictionary.

I walked home today about a half a mile and the whole time I kept thinking about how my Seattle Mariners beanie flips up to one side and makes me look like a conehead.

I put on my pants (the same pair) for the third time this work week, it is Wednesday, and I think I just might go for the whole thing -- pants aged five days, they get a certain sweetness about them.

I took some NyQuil last night and woke up thinking about grabbing a steak knife out of the drawer and doing something mean with it but had a couple thoughts in the meantime:
-"Wait you are high on NyQuil [what?]."
-"We don't even have a steak knife."

Without NyQuil, the night before that I dreamed my brother had drowned at a swim meet and I was in the stands. Someone big and furious made a snide comment about drowning in a swim meet (which come to think of it is sort of funny). Over my mom's protests I challenged this lunkhead to an outdoor brawl, like in the movies. We had to push past all these high schoolers in swim suits to get outside and when we got out there the mook pulled of the hood and it was a Girl! And I couldn't fight the Girl because the Girl was a Girl so I went back inside to watch the swim meet and grieve about my brother. [He's fine in real life though.]

There is an expression called "upside surprise" in financial reporting. This is always worth a giggle.

Someone told me the other day "heart attacks aren't funny."

Antonio Banderas was at one point considered one of the sexiest men in the world. Is that still true?

I have not even gone on Billboard.com in over a month to see what's #1.

[.......]

T-Pain again!

I saw some pitstains the other day and they looked pretty natural.



Yeah.

In some sports the line is out in others the line is in.

Can you fix the way you look in that shirt?

A guy in a wheelchair on the subway today kept himself from drifting around the car by buttoning his coat around the vertical pole that is more commonly used for standing people. I wanted to ask him about the brakes but it seemed sort of a rude idea. He was in good spirits, though, so it would've been fine.

My room smells like excrement and has for several weeks, through no fault of my own (ask around, it's true).

-----

I Went One Day

To Shinda Shima

You've Got It All Wrong

You Can't Get It Right

In younger days, I used to have an 8'x4'x1' box and, inspired by the ollie-then-3-flip in this vid, I'd jump over something like three inches tall, but not level out after popping, to get that lazy effect you see in Reynolds' skating. Then I'd go right over to the box and do a f/s 50 on it, just feeling pleased as punch at the simplicity.

In the Kazaa days of college, I found this vid and found out Archers of Loaf were responsible for the song. "I'm never honest with you / Cause you don't deserve it anyway."

Steroid Up and He Won't Come up out That Bitch

Lyrical gym workout, amino acids, we do sell steroids
Lyrical gym workout, amino acids, we do sell steroids
That's right if you wanna press up and bench up for cheap
We do.. have.. steroids

- Kool Keith

Various NY tabloids, including the Times, are taking swipes about the irrelevant baseball steroid scandal's slow, aggravating lava flow trickling down the island to Village of Rap (population: 100?).

The Times piece in particular spills an awkward nut graph trying to explain why rappers would do steroids in the first place. The answer is obvi - a battle aesthetic and (haha) "pressure ... to maintain perfect, even superhuman physiques."

Blaming rap culture for steroids is too crazy, given that many of the greats were total heavies.

In rap, as in most things (barring professional sports), if you want to have more than 5% body fat, most people won't care. If there's anything interesting about the rap-steroids thing (which is debatable), it's that steroids have different applications. 50 Cent is not juicing so he can one-up The Game by making it through 600 bars. He's doing it so that women continue buying his albums.

Also: Mary J. Blige? The Marion Jones of rap? Baby girl is not a runner, and while I give her props for those pipes, they're probably not pumping any more wind thanks to the shots in the butt she's taking. This solidifies my point. In addition to making you hit home runs or knock receivers over like Atari Bigby or (sadly) sometimes make you flip out and kill your family, steroids can make you hot. The extent to which rap is vulnerable to this is the extent to which everyone is vulnerable.

The extent to which rappers are subject to investigation for it is the extent to which they are rich and famous.

These Corny Assholes Get to Do This for a Living?

Everyone. Please. Stop watching horrible videos on the Internet just because they are on a site that is otherwise tolerable.

Together, we can put a stop to this.

Some Performers of Late

Hello Stranger (So Hot)

Big Fun (So Fun)

Juiceboxxx (So Famous) -- Of white people, he says: "They wanna rap, but they're afraid." He is not afraid.

Re: Wrong Ideas, or, Tradition and the Individual Talent

"Whiskey in the Jar," as it turns out, offers a specific instance of the general idea I was driving at in last week's post.

A brief look at Wikipedia reveals that the song is a traditional dating back to the 18th century and has been through an unknown, but vast, number of lyrical iterations.

The criteria we use to know that a song is "Whiskey" are less exacting than the ones we normally use to identify music. Each version of "Whiskey in the Jar pretty much must contain several narrative elements:

-Whiskey
-A Jar
-A Femme Fatale
-A Highwayman
-A Lawman

However, across different interpretations, the song's setting moves to different counties, the name of the treasonous woman changes, and the lawman serves different authorities. I haven't done the legwork, but I get the feeling the song has been performed in different keys. It certainly has been through different rhythmic tumblers and fallen all over the place, timbre-wise. All this adds up to mean that "Whiskey" stays "Whiskey" no matter what you do to these things.

This happens in jazz a ton and is not really that weird in most genres of music. Anyone who's sat through a jazz appreciation class knows that "Autumn Leaves" has been done about sixty million different ways. Taken together, the many versions might even demonstrate that there are very few aspects of "Autumn Leaves" that make it what it is.

Weirdly, pop songs ordinarily seem much more rigid, and maybe it's record-shop pedantry that keeps people jumping on somebody's case for singing the wrong words, but something has gone wrong with that. I mean really, who cares if you know whether Britney Spears is saying she's a professional learner or an exceptional earner? (It's the latter for anyone keeping score -- which you shouldn't be.)

What's cool about "Whiskey" is that it's not set up to be expanded musically, although it certainly could be. Because it has lyrics and sort of an obvious storyline, you'd know "Whiskey" from another song, even if the melody and the chord progressions changed.

So one upshot of this is that the line from Metallica's version, which I love, is not actually even technically wrong, given that the lyrics to "Whiskey in the Jar" are not actually known. I'd like to do one more and say that they are not knowable, but that seems a little pomo and I've slogged through enough theory articles to know that that's mostly a cutesy thing theorists do to pat themselves on the back.

But I will take one more shot before I go for a jog. It strikes me as an enormous strength when a song (or a work) demonstrates sufficient flexibility to have its words rearranged, its characters altered, its instruments of performance electrified. Whiskey in the Jar is good whether the Dubliners, Thin Lizzy, or Metallica perform it. I haven't heard the Peter Paul and Mary version but that's probably alright too.

Mistaken or lazy reinterpretation may not be as laudable, but it would be interesting to see if there are any masters out there who can take something fairly unappealing and retroactively turn it into something awesome via the same kind of dinkering we see in "Whiskey."

Sidenote: Sort of a similar thing, although not as broad in scope, is the decision by "The Wire" to include different versions Tom Waits' (or maybe someone else's) "Way Down in the Hole." For more spelunking on "The Wire," check out a recent post by a hazy Sulks.

Wrong Lyrics

One of my favorite lines comes from Metallica's cover of the Thin Lizzy version of "Whiskey in the Jar," which from what I gather is actually some kind of Irish folk song or, failing that, one that was at least at one point performed by a band known as The Dubliners.

The line in question, sung by Hetfield, goes, "Here I am the ball and chain." It follows the line "Here I am in prison."

Other versions insert the grammatically correct "with," and though the words are slurred (Irish), the ball article may switch to indefinite. If that's the case, the metaphor and/or metonymy implicit in the line get totally wrecked, leaving the listener with some bland-ass lyric unfit for even a facebook profile shoutout.

[Side note: It's kind of a good idea to just drop this construction in everyday and not so everyday situations. When blogging: "here I am the keys and blogspot"; when swimming: "here i am the suit and water." Like, what if someone called you on the phone and said "what's up" and you answered "here I am the beer and TV."? The world would be a little better.]

So my favorite line is technically incorrect. This happens fairly often, and not only to me, I imagine. But it shouldn't really be wrong to have favorite lines where the blanks have been filled "incorrectly." The words in place are usually better -- I picked them out.

So to all you pedants, I'm just writing my own lyrics when I get em inaccurate so don't correct me because whoever wrote them in the first place did just a first draft and I'm a good editor. Plus I don't like blushing about being wrong about things.

Hemingway, Kerouac, and Fun Activities

Sulky and I were just juicing about The Sun Also Rises (you can tell he's reading it by some of the things he's been saying lately).

Sulks raised a question that comes up often enough: "I wonder how these people had the money to do these things?"

My gut response was "Maybe it was cheaper back then ... ?" which reeks of golden-age mythology that "everything was easier before."

I remember at 18 thinking how great it must have been in the 1950s to go drive around the country like Sal and Dean, and lamenting how America had gotten too dangerous and full of serial killers for anyone to actually hitch across the country anymore.

Living in Paris briefly a few years down the road, I felt the same pangs whenever I passed a cafe and saw a delicious-looking cake or some old guy sipping a little coffee and continued on because I thought I couldn't afford that kind of thing.

It's lamentable that hindsight allows us to slip into this bent nostalgia for activities that, when these authors did them, probably seemed as natural to them as several things that are readily possible for the children of the New Era Age.

So instead of getting sad about the faded glory of driving through Denver or lazing around in a Parisian flat, it's time for a catalog of awesome stuff we can still do.

1) Blogs (thanks to Sulky for the sugg): One day people will probably say "It must've been great when you could just sit around and blog, but now we have this other thing, so you can't do that anymore."

2) Fucked-up poor countries: The supposition being that eventually those will somehow disappear: "Man it must've been so awesome to go fight poverty and genocide in Darfur. Too bad we don't have that anymore."

3) Chinatown bus: When our generation's luminaries get discovered and it is revealed that those of them living on the East Coast used to ride these things, the Fung Wah and the 2000 Coach will seem like impossible relics -- cheap, dirty, adventurous links between some of the stinkingest cities in the world.

4) Poker: The Internet, Matt Damon and ESPN are already making/have already made this reckless toothgrind wholesome and common. Beware: Different forces are doing the same thing to recreational drugs of all varieties.

5) AIDS: When this gets cured, people will wonder about how thrilling and adventurous a dance with death sex had been.

6) T-shirts: I'm not sure what's going to happen to them, but the outlook isn't good.

And finally, several fun things that are now dying or being reinvented.

1) Zines -- now blogs.

2) Porn was once rare and harder to come by -- and sometimes controlled by the Mafia.

3) Race (???)

Ben and Aparna

Ben being gay all over the stage. All over it.



And Aparna being Asian (?) over less of the stage (she's smaller).

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!