This Is Why I Blog

MIMS “This Is Why I’m Hot”

Looking for some hot metal to pour into the moulds for the grand re-opening of the ideelz factory, I hit up the Billboard Hot 200 to see what was at the top of the charts.

I’d actually heard “This Is Why I’m Hot” in the car a month and a half ago driving with my friend Jeff from Sea-Tac to downtown Tacoma without realizing, or caring to remember, that it was called “This Is Why I’m Hot.” I listened all the way through, withholding judgment for maybe a guest verse or a change in the beat, but before I knew it the song was over. I didn’t hate the track but I wasn’t sad to see it go, either.

Seeing “This Is Why I’m Hot” at the top of the charts a couple days ago, I didn’t recognize it at first. The title conjures up images of a Pussycat Dolls–like group, a breathy chorus enumerating the various reasons why the hot singers are, sexually speaking, hot. Maybe in more ways than one, i.e. turned on as well as pert of breast and pouty of mouth . . . or maybe there would even be a couple lines saying something like, “I’m wearing a parka / In your apartment / But you’ve got the heater on / Turned up to one hundred and one / (CHORUS) This is why I’m hot.” The name of the performer, MIMS, didn’t provide many indications otherwise. Maybe each letter stood for the first name of the hot girls that sang about why they were hot? Monica, Irena, Michelle, and Serena.




Thanks to Google Images for help assembling the MIMS supergroup.

Anyone who has seen the video and read some Wikipedia and some Yahoo! Shopping understands that MIMS is not an acronym for four hot women who sing in breathy voices, but rather is an acronym for Music Is My Savior, which is the title of his album. Anyone who has taken this much time with the song, trying to find a reason to care about it, is probably only a little more “meh” about the whole thing than really disappointed in the song’s failure to provoke any reaction whatsoever.

Is there anything to be said about this? I thought “This Is Why I’m Hot” worthy of an easy write-off; of course it’s Number One. Remember Daniel Powter? Gargabe-y riff-raff write vacuous tunes all the time and they nevertheless become the "hot"test chart-toppers of their day(s).

In the shower this morning, though, a couple thoughts hit me. First, unlike with Powter and other boring groups that crack their way into everyone’s drive-time and therefore the top of the Billboard Hot 200, I had actually made a conscious decision to NOT have anything to think about MIMS. With Daniel Powter, it had been more of an involuntary reaction the songwritery garbage that I’d dealt with since I was eleven, sitting by the radio waiting for the Gin Blossoms songs to end, hoping that I would be able to cue the Record Button on the tape deck in time when the opening riff to Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” would start. That is, Daniel Powter faded easily into the background for me, like other people’s conversations at a restaurant; they simply don’t matter. I only think about Powter when I see his name on the charts or at Yahoo! Launch.

For whatever reason, though (maybe simply because most Rap songs manage to deliver), I feel a need to find something exciting in radio rap, and can usually content myself with at least a couplet of clever word-play, a pun that has been dragged from far enough back in pop culture or the animal kingdom to merit discussion or at least quotation, or a brag so ostentatious it is actually just a joke. I didn't find any of these things if "This Is Why I'm Hot."

Structurally, the title of “This Is Why I’m Hot” suggests a sort of middle-school five-paragraph-essay structure that revolves around a well-articulated thesis. Thematically, it suggests that MIMS should at some point state that he is hot for one particular reason.

In Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” Juvenile's “Back That Thang Up,” and many other instances, a hip hop song’s titular deictic has an obvious referent or at least gives the listener a chance to guess. Snoop Dogg gives us context clues like “When a nigga get a attitude,” so we know that the “It” we’re supposed to drop is likely a heavy object, and we’re probably supposed to drop it on someone’s head. If you bought “Back That Thang Up” with the Explicit Content sticker on it you know for certain that “Thang,” to Juvenile (in this particular case) means “Azz,” but “Damn you look good [. . .] You’s a fine motherfucker” gave radio-listeners enough hints that “That Thang” was more likely a body part than, say, a pickup truck.

MIMS doesn’t give us any such help. “This Is Why I’m Hot” doesn’t yield anything so direct or obvious as the help Snoop Dogg and Juvenile gave us. The line “This Is Why I’m Hot” does not, in itself, explain why MIMS is hot, and the surrounding verses aren’t any help. What is the antecedent of “This”? One might suppose it is the smattering of imagery and directly stated instances of hotness contained in the verses, the structural ingenuity with which MIMS put together his rhymes, or, if MIMS assumes that people are watching his video, maybe he points to his face, his balls, his chain, anything to give the listener a clear answer to the central question of the song: Why is MIMS so hot?

The verses aren't super, a monotonous rhythm over and over again, and the rhymes about cars etc. aren't really spectacular or even particularly convincing. Do we even really believe MIMS when he says he's hot? MIMS makes brief efforts at rectifying his argument: "I'm hot cause I'm fly / You ain't cause you not." MIMS’s best defense of his position is a combination ad hominem and weak tautology. I most vividly remember a song’s failure to address its central question from Wee Sing in Sillyville, a video I watched in middle school and high school:



Those four yellow guys, the Yellow Spurtlegurgles, sing an adaptation of “Auld Lang Syne” that, like MIMS, leaves the listener dissatisfied: “We’re here / Because we’re here / Because we’re here / Because we’re here” ad infinitum. There are, however, numerous mitigating circumstances that don't apply to MIMS.

For one, the Spurtlegurgles are singing for kids age 3-6. Furthermore, they are at least trying to answer their question, and one feels, through their unending repetition, a certain level of commitment to resolving the issues at hand. MIMS, on the other hand, can’t even endear himself to us with his preoccupation with the issue. He hopes his “This” will suffice: that’s the way it is, it is what it is; Do not pay attention to this song.” MIMS probably got bad grades on his five-paragraph essays in middle school, too distracted because the heater was on too high and he was wearing a parka, or Monica, Olga, Serena, and Eve were beginning to blossom into womanhood.

MIMS’s failure to write a good five-paragraph rap song really isn’t as frustrating as it is boring, in part because no one really asked MIMS why he was hot in the first place. MIMS is just a hard-working hip-hop artist who owned NYC for a couple weeks with “This Is Why I’m Hot,” which in turn yielded him a record deal, major airplay, and his current position on the pop charts.

To wrap this up in a somewhat cute fashion, we’ll quickly address two final problems with “This Is Why I’m Hot.” First, like Eminem’s “Smack That,” "This Is Why I'm Hot" song presupposes a future in which its own existence will impact its structure. For anyone to ask “Why is MIMS Hot,” people must know MIMS. How do people know MIMS? Because he’s on the radio, explaining why he’s hot.

Second, it is for precisely this circular logic of its own existence that “This Is Why I’m Hot” finally merits attention. Imagine yourself stranded on a scorchingly hot desert island. At first you tried merely to physically escape, sending smoke signals, writing “HELP” in huge letters in the sand. As you got used to the island, though, you set up shelter, found food, and otherwise adjusted to the environment, so you turned your efforts toward maintaining your sanity and your sense of self. You started painting, creating masks, and searching for signs of other life on the island.

You’re digging for roots one day when you strike a bottle. There is a message written on a piece of paper on the inside. It bears only the words “This is why I’m hot.” Hope wells up inside you. Someone has been here before. No answer is proffered because the important thing is not the answer but the fact of asking it. No meaning is conveyed by the immediate structure of the language, but on a higher level, an immensity of meaning emerges. Someone has been hot! They knew why! And they want you to know, too!

MIMS's "This Is Why I'm Hot" similarly contents itself to be an artifact of MIMS's existence more than a testament to any particular topic or idea. "This is why I'm hot" amounts to "I'm here," and, like a bunch of starving, scraggly Robinson Crusoes and Tom Hankses, America listened, but not really very carefully.

Shaw Recreation Center

The long-awaited cinematic re-up of ideelz.

The Schmaltz and the Smooth

From "In the Street, Today." _Thrasher_ 1.1 (January 1981):

"A curb is an obstacle until you grind across it. A wall is but a ledge until you drop off it. A cement bank is a useless slab of concrete until you shred it. A street is another downhill to be tucked. A multi-level garage is built for cars until a gang of skaters discovers it. You've got to give the streets fair due, rolling is way cooler than walking. Don't restrict your boundaries, skate architecture is everywhere, grind every edge--You've gotta find all the lines you can."

This rhapsodic quote, which, like excerpts from many skateboarding editorials, is both endearing and cheesy. This nostalgic approach to skate aesthetics often provides room in skate videos and other places for a particularly schmaltzy soundtrack that both enthralls and repulses. Part Husker Du, part lost 80s never-rans, this music occupies a strange place in that it would seem out of place anywhere but as the soundtrack to skate videos. Here is an example from Transworld's _i.e._:



The song is by Built to Spill, which I guess people listen to without skate videos, but I really don't see how. It's sort of evocative of the controlled-noise, you-can-do-it attitude exhibited in the _Thrasher_ editorial. Especially "I got the words and the music wrong / but life goes on."

Both works (that is, the Thrasher editorial and the Built to Spill song) break the normal rules. They're both self-conscious and blushing but nevertheless touch a nerve with anyone familiar with skatboarding. The works become yet more endearing when the reader approaches each as an artifact of human labor, not as a piece of inspiration that fell from the heavens. The same way people enjoy their friends' bands, blogs, and books even when they break the rules of good lyiricism, writing, journalism, or even compelling diaryism.

By the way, _Thrasher_ has published its first twelve issues online at this url: [http://secure.thrashermagazine.com/index.php?SCREEN=articles_1st12]. Good for both nostalgia and a peek into the longest-lasting, most far-reaching codification of the skateboarding-punk connection. Found via boing boing. (wah wah.)

I'm Not a Yeti Yet

I'm just heavyset. Get it?
Just get the jet ready.
I'm a snow beast.
Call the police.



Get it?

The Collapse of the Englishlanguage

At my previous copyediting job, publishers and editors would sometimes lament a current (or perhaps enduring) trend: Compound words are continually being replaced with a one-word amalgam. Dictionary.com offers the following explanation:

"The trend in English is for frequently used word combinations to 'grow together' from two words to one, sometimes passing through a hyphenated stage. The two-word phrase 'data base,' for example, is now most commonly written as one word: 'database.'" (http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g22.html)

This appears alarming in part thanks to George Orwell's _1984_, in which havoc is wreaked in part because of the condensation of English words into a limited and difficult vocabulary. The Party created ridiculous-seeming constructions like _doubleplusungood_ to limit possible uses of language, thereby stifling dissent.

My first (and obviously not my best) thought was that the URL was a corroborater in this Orwellian trend. For some reason you can't put spaces in a url, so I figured that this spaceless block of information was responsible for the continued condensation of our compounds.

Not so; people have been making word mashups before either the Internet _or MTV_ existed. In the age of Old English, people would take concepts from foreign languages like Latin and enunciate them as one word that had formerly been two:

"The words that Old English borrowed in this period are only a partial indication of the extent to which the introduction of Christianity affected the lives and thoughts of the English people. The English did not always adopt a foreign word to express a new concept. [. . .] _Patriarch_ was rendered literally by _heahfæder*_ (high father) [. . .]. For _baptize (L. _baptizare*_) the English adapted a native word _fullian_ (to consecrate) while its derivative _fulluht_ renders the noun _baptism_." (Albert C. Baugh, and Thomas Cable. _A History of the English Language._ Fifth Edition. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002. 90.)

Baugh and Cable then list the following word connections.

fulluhtbæ[th]** (font)
fulwere (baptist)
fulluht-faeder (baptizer)
fulluht-had* (baptismal vow)
fulluht-nama (Christian name)
fulluht-stow* (baptistry
fulluht-tid* (baptism time) [Like Skating Time!*** I wish the link button were here! Youtube vid coming soon] (90).

The concept of shooting words together to create new ones is not new or even particular to English (cf., for example, Chinese _mei guo_* [_America/"beautiful land"_]). What creates anxiety for me, though, is that we feel the need to eliminate spaces in between words. Maybe we do this to trick ourselves into thinking we've created a new morphological unit where really very little has changed. At the very least, collapsing words is an unnecessary inconvenience for copyeditors.

But maybe it gets worse. At the publishing house, the big headache had to do with policymakers, which has recently entered the lexicon (formerly policy makers, like database/data base). The ostensible justification for this is that policymakers (people who somehow by definition make decisions) are different from policy makers (people who just sometimes happen to make decisions). By this rule, rhyme sayers become rhymesayers, snow beasts become snowbeasts, baked-goods makers become bakedgoodsmakers, and we get a bunch of whole new words, by virtue of eliminating the space. We also get a whole new kind of people--those who were destined to become doers of the various tasks their names indicate.

This is the kind of thing Orwell was worried about; when class or politics comes into play, the use of language becomes much more important. Feminists had something to say about _congressman_, and pretty soon we had political correctness as a bandage to put over these psychological barriers created by language. I'm skeptical that anything changes in the space between policy makers and policymakers, so the creation of these new words looks a lot like a falsehood perpetrated by hegemons. Because not much changes in terms of denotation when we get rid of the space, though, I'm also not sure that putting the space back in will serve to counter the political effects of language collapse. Politically correct language failed for similar reasons.

However, an interesting thing happens if we reverse compound-word creation. It is possible to create word phrases that convey new meanings by separating existing compound words into their possible (though nonlegitimated) morphemes. Witness Jay-Z, who was on the right track on the Diamonds Remix f. Kanye West. (Although the actual track listing shows Jay-Z featured, careful listeners really know who was featuring whom.) Jay doesn't exactly follow the scheme I've outlined in this paragraph, but he does transcend the trend and electrify listeners by cutting _businessman_ into pieces:

"I'm not a _businessman;_ I'm a _business,_ _man_!"

It gets even crazier when puns are introduced. Other possibilities, of the top of my head:

Trans former (former of transexuals, from _transformer_ =robot in disguise)
Cross dresser (Jesus Christ [wearer of crosses], from _crossdresser_ =wearer of women's clothing)
Punt er (kick her out [punt+'er], from _punter_ =football kicker in bad situations)
Space bar (watering hole in outer space, from _spacebar_ =the thing you hit to separate words)

I think Urban Dictionary, Juelz Santana, and Young Jeezy have all done a lot of work already in this category, but the possibilities appear endless; we can create new words out of two disparate ones, then separate them at different places to create new phrases. And in the meantime, we get puns, misunderstandings, and end-line rhyme (rapping)!

Subquestionz: Is there a way to prove that there is a finite (or infinite) number of word-combination/separation possibilities, just like the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers? Does anyone apply number theory formalization to words to answer such "big questions"?

*I apologize for the lack of accents on OE and other words. I can't figure out how to do em on a mac.

**OE Thorn has been replaced with [th].

***http://sulkynotes.blogspot.com/2006/12/no-joke_27.html

Movie Idea



I haven't been blogging because I was in Upper Michigan with a friend for a couple days to ski, but no matter, because on the chairlift I had an idea for a horror movie set on a ski slope. The rundown is as follows.

The Thing You Would Read about This Movie If You Saw It on the TV Guide Channel:

A group of hard-partying college coeds join some cute boys for a weekend of fun on the slopes in a little out-of-the-way Washington state town, when a blizzard traps them on the slopes. It's all fun and games until they realize there's a killer on the loose. 1/2*

The Characters:

-Stu, the cute boy who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by me.
-Eva, the cute girl who parties hard and loves to have a good time. Played by a female actress (or just a friend).
-Jimmy, John, and Joe, Jane, Jeanne, and Jessica, the cute (but not as cute) boys and girls who get killed pretty early (more on that later).
-Carl, the deformed and creepy ski-sharpener who works at the rental desk and sharpens the skis to a razor-sharp point (could he be the killer? or is he just very industrious?).
-Assorted bed-and-breakfast people who also get killed throughout the movie.

Sample Dialogue:

"We're trapped here at this creepy resort for like five days until the blizzard blows over."
...
"Let's Shred!"

Ways People Can Get Killed:

-Someone gets hog-tied to a ski pole
-Someone gets strapped to the cord that holds the chairlift and gets grinded up in the pulleys that make the chairlift go up the hill
-Ski decapitation
-Pushed off a cliff/chairlift
-Fed to the snow machine
-Forced to do awesome tricks in the half-pipe until they die of exhaustion
-Thrown in the fireplace
-Fed to Bears

The Ending:

I will not give away the ending.

[. . .]

Ok so it turns out that there's kind of a 1977 movie called Snowbeast that involves people getting killed on the slopes. At the IMDB Entry, Big Movie Fan from England says:

"Some Sasquatch type creature is butchering people staying at a ski resort and no-one seems to be able to locate it or kill it. Throughout the movie it kills people and causes some carnage. [. . .] I recommend Snowbeast to anyone."

My movie is just like Snowbeast except the killer is not a yeti, it is just a crazy person. 1/2*

Saviors 2006:

The Hold Steady
Heldref Publications (editing)
Shaw Recreation Center
Bud Heavy
Poker
No Resolve
NFL

Saviors 2007:

Big Titty and the Bobbies
Unemployment (writing/blogging)
Mount Ranier
Bud Heavy
Weightlifting
Resolutions
NBA

Scourges 2006:

Full-Time Employment
John Mellencamp's Sunday omnipresence
Parties and Our Forcible Removal Therefrom (?)

(Anticipated) Scourges 2007:

Substitute Teaching
God's Sunday omnipresence
Tacoma, WA

Placebo Girlfriend

The film adaptation of a novel.

Ray Barbee

By the way, here's some newer-than-oldschool footage of Ray Barbee. He does a no-comply at about :50 and another one as his last trick.

He wrote the music he skates to.

The Big Payback*



Yesterday (Christmas), my brother Patrick and I were trying no-complies in the driveway when a cat colored like an alpaca sweater picked its way into our yard from among some pine trees.

"Hey look at the cat."
"Hey yeah. It kind of looks like that sweater I got from Aunt Nancy."

Back in DC, we fed a couple alley cats who would show up in our backyard, climb up on the steel bars that protected our back door, and paw at the glass like a couple of hungry orphans. In DC, I'd yell curses at the cats so they'd leap from the bars and quit smudging the window. But today, hey, we were in Milwaukee, it was Christmas, and this cat literally looked like a gift, so I figured I'd just leave it to the pines and keep trying flatland tricks with my brother.

After a few more laps around the driveway, I rolled up to Pat and told about the buttery no-complies this old-school skater Ray Barbee used to do back in the day, and he was awed. Then, after a few tricks:

"Hey look, is that the cat?"
"Where?"
"By the side of the road."

Over by the cat, there was a small puddle of viscous-looking blood. It lay prone, all four legs stretched out as far as they could go. Its eyes were open, its mouth agape, turned up at the corners in that triangular way that cats open their mouths to hiss.

Pat said, "Oh, God," and we stood there for a minute. A red pickup rolled by slowly, and a woman called out the window:

"Is it dead?"
"Yeah." So she drove away.

Eventually we decided to check its tags. The cat's name was Tess and she had a phone number.

"Should we call them?"
"I don't know. It's Christmas."
"Well maybe we should get it off the side of the road." I grabbed Tess by her tail and dragged her toward the curb. Pat said something about not being able to watch the blood smear on the street.

"I'm going to go get Dad."

Inside, we told Dad. He called the family immediately and left a message. He's good at breaking this kind of news; he's a doctor. He suggested we grab a cardboard box and put Tess inside it so if the family comes back they could pick up its remains in a receptacle. "You know, if they want to bury it," said Dad.

As we hunted in the basement for the box, we wondered where we were going to put Tess.

Pat said, "Whatever you do, just don't put her in a brick wall, like that Poe story about the Masons."

Back outside, three people hovered over the cat. After a second, I recognized one of them. It was Mike, a high-school acquaintance, with his family. Mike had wound up at NYU, studying theater I think.

"Hey Mike. How's it going," Mike asked.
"So-so. How about you."
"Sad," he said, in a sort of theatrical way (convincing, though; not overdone), and he looked at the dead cat, who was still laying stretched out on the grass. "I called the owner." Then he looked back at me. "Well, merry Christmas." And he turned around and walked off with his family.

My dad picked up the cat and put her in the box, taking her around the side of the house.

"You aren't going to put her on top of the recycling, are you?"
"That's what I was thinking, yeah. But maybe I'd better put her in the recycling so the animals can't eat her."
"You're going to recycle the cat?" Patrick was a little freaked out.
"Yeah, they'll just melt her down, re-mold her, and sell her: 'This cat 90 percent post-consumer waste.' She'll be a little browner and granier than the new kind, but it's good for the environment."
"Gross. I'm going inside."

Dad took some time to peel the postage label off of Tess's coffin. Then he opened the lid and set her inside the recycle bin.

I went inside and talked with Mom for a little bit, then checked my bloglines and read the news. A little later I was playing pool with Pat listening on the new Ghostface joint, when Ghost of Christmas Present dropped this down my chimney:

"Like James Brown / It's the big payback."

RIP to all, and to all a good night.

*see also http://riffmarket.blogspot.com/2006/11/hypnotize.html

I had some ideas a-baking in the back of my dome. Unfortunately, I'm on my mom's iMac (complete with single-clicks and apple keys) thanks mainly to my PC laptop's wireless card's case of cold impotence; problems have arisen. Safari, that mac-ganked version of Explorer that even carries on the navigation symbolism with a cute cartoon compass on the "dock," can't handle any kind of google- or blogger-enabled boldface or whatever. All I can do is post pictures (see below) and check my spelling (see all over).



This is a top-25 Google Image search result for -=50 Cent Christmas=-. I watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" with my lil bro and lil sis to ring in the new baby. But the post has no clever title, because of boldface. So I'm just gonna go listen to Ghostface, cause I got "More Fish" (no italics either) from my brother for Christmas. Be back later with musings on Ghost and the Father from Uganda who delivered the Christmas Mass at 11 am today.

Happy Holidays!

Seth Beckhardt Big-Ups the Mundane World

This appeared in the NYT in response to their article about Bob Burnquist's megaramp.

A Ramp to Self-Indulgence

To the Sports Editor:

Re “A Skateboarding Ramp Reaches for the Sky,” Nov. 1: Clearly, Bob Burnquist can be described in many ways: risk-taker, athlete, committed and passionate come to mind. But the one word that is never applied to his high-adrenaline world of X Games participants and their fans is bored. After all, one has to be really bored — or convinced that the mundane world is too difficult to handle — to conceive of such an idiotic, wasteful and valueless pursuit as the world’s largest skateboard ramp. Seth Beckhardt

A lil reactionary, not to mention the weird supposition that there are two "worlds"--one "high-adrenaline" and the other "mundane"--inhabited by skateboarders and normal people respectively. Would that it could be so, Seth! Skate Planet! I'll write a letter to NASA asking them to keep the Hubble searching. I'm sure they have time to poke around the galaxy; they're probably really bored - or convinced that the mundane world is too difficult to handle - to conceive of such an idiotic, wasteful, and valueless pursuit as the world's largest telescope.

Big Blog Trumps Slutty MySpace Warmup Edition

Apparently there's a new skateboard company called Mentality Skateboards, a company whose only video, Skateboarding Explained, features Dan MacFarlane, a counselor a skateboard camp called Lake Owen. That is, Mentality's pro is a guy who teaches six-to-eight-year-old kids how to ollie.



Mentality's selection of MacFarlane as Skateboarding Explained's featured skater introduces a new and (hopefully) singular type of professional.

Most skateboard companies build up their credibility and mystique by creating videos and ads featuring athletes who jump down enormous flights of stairs, fly upside-down in halfpipes, or get in fights with security guards. The skateboards they sell basically signify the tricks they capture on film, and their brand identity relies heavily on whether their videos feature hip-hop, punk rock, fighting, drinking, weed, girls, grimy spots or smooth picnic benches. The attitude portrayed is all or nothing, land or crash, there is no between.

The more typical companies that do create "how-to" videos for skateboarding like The Basics of Skateboarding or Tony Hawk's Trick Tips have generally relied on the skills and expertise of seasoned pros; when a kid pops in a tape, he still gets to watch Geoff Rowley do a manual or Andrew Reynolds 50-50 a knee-high ledge. It's not amazing stuff, but at least the pros' smoothness teaches the kids to get comfortable on a board. Seeing Ed Templeton, whose parts normally feature noseblunts on steep banks, just ollie onto a curb gives a sense of ease, comfort, and bridled talent. More than that, one gets a sense of the months Templeton probably spent tripping the back trucks on the curb and faceplanting right when his pretty next-door neighbor came out the front door to walk her dog.

Mentality's model is different. They built a company around instruction, demystifying skateboarding, being famous for being accessible, for being the opposite of Greco/Daewon. For Mentality, just landing the trick is enough. MarFarlane doesn't look comfortable doing any of the tricks he lands, and one gets the sense that he is totally letting loose to land a kickflip on the flatground, that he pulled out all the stops just to stick that boardslide on the flatbar. When someone buys a Mentality board, they're buying the brand of mediocrity. And they get a free wallet with every purchase.

The result feels sad, for MacFarlane and for the kids who'll watch his video and might even buy his decks. The message of Mentality is style doesn't matter, just learning the next trick--the end result of a lifetime of skateboarding can yield a mediocre role in how-to videos. "Those that can't do..." "blogger.com," "The Believer," "Lupe Fiasco," and all that. The floogates are open but the filters aren't tight enough, the semen's leaking through the condoms, the editorial department is the news board, everyone's reporting, nobody's hating. In the aughties--the age of TMI--you gotta hack through the hackery to get to the gems.

And so:



Skate More!

Grew Up a Screw Up

This track brings the fuego in the sense that it has Luda rapping on it about how he was as a baby. He was pretty much the same as a baby.

Jeezy and Luda---GUASU Via Still Listen to Gagnster Music.

Ships Ships Ahoy

People been up in the crow’s nests peerin out to the horizon looking for the next Hold Steady joint (due October), because during these bleak times they’re the only ones who indicate there’s even a drop of sweetness to be squeezed out of the lattices of today’s empty and cynical pop from the dance floor; people are panicking at the disco and everything’s gotten so sad that my friends are starting to write personal essays again.

Pitchfork has the dibs on the latest MP3 from the Hold, but the track shouldn’t be new to the devoted few. They definitely played it at their landmark show at the Warsaw this past July, and we were definitely more excited about it then than we are now.

But seeing the Hold Steady live is a religious/rebirth thing, and not just because of their overt Catholicism-dropping or the community displayed amongst the 30-somethings who hired a babysitter so they could go to the show, and it’s safe to guess that from now on the album tracks are always going to pale in comparison to the heat of the live performances.

Here’s why.

Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday laid the groundwork for what the Hold Steady have been searching for the whole time; enjoyable pop music in the vein not of their obvious musical influences (Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and every other musical influence critics were clever enough to see name-dropped in the lyrics), but rather in the vein of the two of rock’s greats: the Ramones and the Beatles.

Finn and co. were smart enough to realize that “And Your Bird Can Sing” couldn’t exist properly without the context of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” wouldn’t have made sense without “Gimme Danger.” It’s the contrast between the squeals of joy and the wails of sorrow that give rock its get-you-high vibe. The contrast is what rock used to be about. No band knew that better than Nirvana, whose dynamic changes forced nearly every song to live in the tantalizing space between the dregs and the cream.

Rock has two tonal poles that have been nearly completely neglected in this era of stylistic mimicry and cute postmodern allusion. We have well-worn grooves to get into now that rock is creeping towards being a hundred years old (if you count my way), but the tension between pure joy and pure agony is what separated the classic behemoths of the genre (the aforementioned Beatles, Ramones, Stooges, Stones) from the mere sonic vehicles bands ride nowadays in an effort at getting there (Queen, Led Zeppelin, pretty much everyone else).

No band in recent memory has so deliberately and carefully built towards the sweet side. Witness “Chips Ahoy.” Lurching in this direction has been their goal all along. Forget the 80’s and its dances. We’re going for a drive. Pretend this matters.

(Credibly) couching hard drug references in a song with whoa’s should be every rocker’s dream. Listen to them yell “Ahoyahoyaho.” Then hear Craig Finn singing now, not shouting, but doing his damndest to make that shitshow of a voice squeak out a couple notes, sometimes even hit them.

“How am I supposed to know if you’re high if you won’t let me touch you?” Finn’s not setting a scene; a guy cares about a girl, they’ve been through hell together, and now it’s all coming an ambiguous end, but an end all the same.

Tilting toward a belief in anything external is the ultimate goal for the children of the aughties. For all the sadness and confusion of our times all we’ve gotten so far is Indecision by Ben Kunkel and a bunch of decent R&B tracks. And Indecision was only good when it was sad, and the R&B hasn’t been anywhere besides inside the comfortable confines of sexiness and groping on the dance floor, big butts etc.

But that’s where “Chips Ahoy” wins the race. The music had been hard rock, now it’s pop. We’ve gotten through the E, the gutter, the bars, the taxis, all the youthful American stuff our parents laid down so firmly for us to tread upon, and now the two of us are laying down together, one grey and cold, on a bad trip, the other just trying to reach for it. The “Whoas” are the only way to get there, and it’s in the franticness of this simple and anti-intellectual space where rock and roll has always thrived.

There’s still a little hope.

October awaits.

_____ ______.

burnz

Ed. Note: Ideelz fact checkers have been all on my case about the Hosoi post because the VA Beach Skatepark MT Trashmore has burned to the ground (via Art of Skateboarding).

We stand by our story because of a "rising from the ashes" lead-in angle that will make next week's made-up coverage/liveblog of the event easier to write.

For All My Friends Who Used to Exclaim "JESUS CHRIST ON A BIKE!"



In spite of the onerous responsibilities of blogging/living life, I would nevertheless be remiss in my duties as a commentator of ideelz if I neglected to mention the [c]upcoming tour/documentary [video preview sort of] about meth-dealing, Bible-slinging Christian “Holmes/Christ” Hosoi narrated by Dennis Hopper of E-Z Rider fame and featuring commentaries from all the expected skateboarding legends.

The path of Hosoi’s career starts, for ideelz, back in 1988, when my parents bought me Skateboard Superstars (Holy Goddamn this Google Video provides nearly all of life's necessities), a video featuring mainly Rodney Mullen and Christian Hosoi, but also some New York groms who skated downtown and did handstands on Broadway because it was the 80s and no one really knew how to ollie yet. Despite the lack of Gelfland-inflected skate style, the video marked my first foray into pro-skater admiration/envy and helped to cement skate aesthetics as a primus motor for most of my adolescent and even adult actions/activities/critiques.

In the video, a narrator explains that Hosoi is the biggest thing ever to happen to skating, and that he’s a role model admired by many. Although my critical faculties were pretty good at age 5, I didn’t know that at that time Hosoi was also busting chops à la present-day-or-late-90s artiste-heroes/degenerates like Dustin Dollin, Ali Boulala, or Jim Greco (who is now supposedly and awkwardly clean). The video wisely airbrushed the druggy haze that was also part of Hosoi’s life for the benefit of its young audience, parents still bought kids boards, and everything went along pretty well.

By 1997, when I got back into skateboarding due to an exit from frustrated middle-school nerddom/not sure what girls were/weren’t, Hosoi had already plummeted out of the picture, due to the ollie revolution, Koston, Daewon, tech, baggy pants, 540 flips, and picnic benches. I’d forgotten about him anyway, because I’d picked up a Transworld and saw people skating handrails.

During this time, Hosoi was presumably crawling along the dark underbelly of lapsed fame and drug-addled torment. By 2000, he was arrested in Hawaii for bringing to the airport enough meth to erupt a volcano. In jail, he underwent a Malcolm X-style conversion, except he found Christianity instead of Elijah Muhammad and, thanks to his preaching to other jailbirds, was released early for extraordinarily good behavior, thanks in part to a letter-writing campaign. (Eventually there will be a blink piece about born-again skaters, a powerful and unlikely segment of the legendary lineup, which includes most prominently Hosoi and, of course, Jamie Thomas, but isn’t limited to them [I think Austin Stephens is also Christian].)



This ties in nicely with the whole 5vs1, lapsed Catholic, Hold-Steady, fame as depression and vice versa, get saved, fast revulsion and redemption theme, of course.

Anyway now Hosoi's out and he skates again, and like such other vets as Alva, Caballero, and definitely Dwayne Peters (who probably will garner his own post eventually, whether or not there is a time peg to render it “meaningful”), he’s got a world-weary edge to his skating and just oozes “respect this life I’ve chosen.”

This documentary promises to bring legit footage, and to promote it, Quicksilver is also sponsoring a tour with free screenings and demos by such incredible pros as Arto Saari and I believe Holmes himself. If you’re near a town that is carrying this tour, I highly recommend a visit. Cover it for your local alt-weekly etc.

Tour Sched (cribbed from Skateboardermag article):

8/17: Huntington Beach, CA
8/19: Wilson Skatepark, Chicago, IL
8/20: River East Arts Center, Chicago, IL
8/22: Mt. Trashmore, VA Beach, VA [!!!! If you live in DC and have a car and read this please email me or comment so we can road trip out to DO THE THING!!!]
8/23: Fairman’s, West Chester, PA
8/23: Chester County Historic Society, West Chester, PA
8/27: Knitting Factory, NYC, NY
8/29: 3rd Lair, Minneapolis, MN
8/31: Bluebird, Denver, CO
9/1: Denver Skate Park, Denver, CO
9/3: Pacifica Skate Spark, SF, CAli
9/3: The Log Shop, SF, CAlicious

Keep in Touch BABY!

IDEELLLZZZZ out.

Streets Is Watchin'




Can't Ban the Tool Man (1.2.1)

...

Positive Jam

This couldn't be more of a positive jam if it was a jelly jar with a firm belief.

Note the g-turn about 3 mins in.

For the uninitiated: Do not feel threatened.

<3

Skate=Takes=Slates

Ed. Note: At anewyorkthing.com, you can see t-shirts that say such quotes as "Crack is Back...Again!" and feature pics of arms with legs. I would've posted these illustrations but they use flash to show off their designs, probably mostly so bloggers won't copypaste and make fun of them.

On to the story...

Where I went to high school, there was a kid named Dave. Dave had played soccer since he was five, he was handsome, and he had a sharp tongue that betrayed—through the veil of his horrendous academic performance—genuine, well-greased gears churning constantly and rapidly inside what should have been a drug-addled and useless head. Not entirely incidentally, Dave could skateboard.

Dave got laid by the waifs, anorexic hippie girls who smoked pot and came to the homecoming dance high as hell. He himself was into acid, mushrooms, and, of course, marijuana, which he and the wannabe rastas at my school would smoke during the lunch hour in an alcove between two of the buildings.

Dave liked me ok, and we even skated together a couple times. But I was too sensitive, angry, and into math to ever really hit it off with the guy. When I couldn’t land my kickflips, he’d say “Don’t turn your body,” then nail a perfect one down the seven steps leading to the pool building. He’d roll off silent and clean, walk back up the stairs, and light a cigarette. He’d give me a look that seemed to say, “You’ll never do what I just did now.”

During those years, my face and body fell short of the pretty portrait Dave cut, and I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think I ever believed I could get laid by the waifs or crack a knowing joke just because I could pop an ollie over a 20 oz. Coke bottle. I knew that, for some reason, skating was cool, and of course it wasn’t bad that I could at least say “Hey” to guys like Dave in the hallways, but I also knew that I had motivations for skating beyond the elusive and probably hopeless possibility of losing my virginity or garnering the respect of awesome athletes before I graduated from high school.

The simple explanation is that skateboarding is intensely physical. Each session yields extreme results: personal injury, the pure mental symmetry of landing a kickflip in the driveway, or board-smashing frustration at landing primo. For the college-bound, high school is essentially a half-decade of preparation, and, in the context of constant slogs through Charlotte Bronte or asymptotes, skateboarding offered immediacy: pleasure or pain.

Skating offered Dave another way to exert his dominance over the angry nerds, and it offered me one of my only ways to break up the monotony of the M-F test-prep-kit disaster that was my high-school existence.

This Times Magazine piece from Sunday posits a different set of motivations for the current hip set.

Apparently, getting pretty rich and somewhat famous has supplanted the effortlessness of the knowing look or the life-affirming agony of the broken toe. Having an anti-commercial lifestyle is now commercially viable. What’s more, anyone can cash in on any counterculture. All they need is a Comcast subscription and little start-up capital. And skateboarding figures big into their marketing strategy.

All this makes sense; possessed of blogs, pitchfork, thefader, New York City, hipsters, ripsters, our very rich society, packed to the gills with savvy, overeducated minorities of every possible description, is currently mass-producing countercultures that are just as hip and alluring as all the ones of the past, only now, everyone gets a piece of the action. Don’t like the Canadian indie bands? Fine, you can like the guy who sings about states. Don’t skate? Fine, get a funny haircut and design a t-shirt. With so many different products available for purchase, countercultural images have never been more accessible. And it’s never been easier to be a maven. And, possibly for that very reason, the whole catchall pop-indie hip-hop outdo-your-neighbors hip NYC-is-everywhere scene seems to be getting more hollow by the second.

Several things separate the high-school kids at the skatepark in Shaw by my house who wreck themselves trying to hit a pivot on the 8-foot quarterpipe from the Hundreds jokers who flunked the bar but still make cash by creating exclusive and somehow skateboard-like designs.

First, there is no cash in cool for the Shaw kids, who wear white tees and smoke Marlboros and spend the money they scrape together on tattoos and weed.

They will not be taking the bar exam; they don’t have opportunities to squander. So they’re doing their own thing, spending their time after school smoothing out their flicks, hoping to catch the perfect trey. They are bereft of the sense that there is anything else for them. Like all rebels from Bob Dylan the Hell’s Angels to the Zephyr team to Rocky to the Ramones to the 90s Zero team, they carry an aura of desperation. For musicians and skateboarders, each note and every trick is an ideel to be treasured and sought after more than money or fame. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Beyond that, though, there lies an even simpler distinction. Skaters actually skate, and skaters are skaters because of what they do, not because of what they buy or sell. They aren’t upset by the idea that their aesthetic sense might never lead to rock-star parties or pseudo-fame. They don’t feel entitled to those things because they don’t even want them in the first place; at least they don’t want them any more than they want to skate.

Meanwhile, one wonders if the would-be lawyers who sought meaning in designing t-shirts ever thought that, given the lifestyle horrors of corporate law, they might have been better suited doing something with actual meaning, instead of creating luxury goods for the upper and upper-middle classes. Given a chance to crack into the top echelons of a culture they view as mildly corrupt and grossly superficial, these kids take the easy way out and churn out some pictures to put on some stretches of cotton for the very conformist classes they despise for being fake and clueless.

Where is the allure of authenticity in something so completely devoid of meaning as t-shirts that do nothing other than signify upper-class taste? Why the preoccupation with the tangential elements?

Because the tangential elements are easier to imitate and sell. Maybe in the future, no one will even have to skate or play music. We'll just get rich making t-shirts that allude to legitimate activities as historical phenomena.

For the moment, at least, the joke’s still on these mauvaise-foi t-shirt weinerhogs. Because who buys their expensive, counterculture cache goods?

Corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who read Slate.

I promise to start the next one off with a positive jam.

Until then.