Brief Riff about Women Skaters

Elissa Steamer's part from Bootleg 3000. Note the indie nosepick back over to three-flip at about 1:23, one of the coolest lines I've seen.



The connection between skateboarding and a traditional sport like figure skating is worth exploring. Both involve judged competition in which speed and brute strength are not the sole criteria for success (X-Games:Olympics). Both center around movement as an end rather than a means, (rotation, aerial maneuvers, keeping one's balance as opposed to "getting a first down"). Decisions regarding who is the best skater (in either sport) are highly subjective. This raises several questions.

? # 1

Figure skating is one of the few sports in which women and men appear to have achieved parity (in terms of popularity and respect). Given similar criteria for success, why hasn't women's skateboarding taken off? Will it later? It's possible; according to Wikipedia's history of figure skating, International Skating Union competitions didn't include women until 1902, a decade after the organization was founded. When Madge Syers finished second in one such competition, women were quickly banned from competing with men, and a ladies' event was established four years later. It's been a long, hard battle for equality ever since, and even if the men's and women's competitions are about equal in popularity (according to my assumption), there's still a big old sexist discourse about the women's outfits being pretty and male figure skaters being fem, the comps themselves remain segregated, etc.

It is likely that skateboarding started out gendered; streets are dirty (masculine), and a fall on concrete means getting scrapes, whereas a fall on smooth ice does not yield such blemishes (thanks to indoor rinks and perfectly zamboni'd ice, plus a general acceptance of falling on ice as "not that bad" i.e. feminine). As such, street skating doesn't conform with many gender norms about girls, but ice skating has recently contorted itself to do just that (think tutus and leotards versus jeans and t-shirts). If it is the case that skateboarding started as a gendered activity, it is amazing how quickly it has been cemented as such.

? # 2

Why don't figure skaters perform on icy "street courses" or vert ramps like skateboarders? A double axel is basically a 900, arguably the most famous trick in the history of vert (the ollie is up there too, but let's not split hairs / parse follicles). Skates on ice probably have a lower friction coefficient than ball bearings on casings, so ice skaters would definitely get pretty gnar on a ramp pretty quickly.

And in a double-reverse-side-of-the-coin closer, I would also love to see skateboarders of all genders start wearing sequined outfits in competition and also during regular street sessions. If it will help women fight for their right to hard-charge and barrier-barge, I'm all for it.

Ideelz Unconventional Warfare

In the first and last ever Ideelz news roundup:

9/11 now funny, but not really.

Jerry Falwell died. Is this funny? Would it be 'funny' if not "funny" if he'd died in the 9/11 attacks? That wasn't a joke. This is making me uncomfortable.

To sum up, from Gchat with a friend in a prominent news organization:

me: jerry falwell died
weird
Sent at 10:59 AM on Tuesday
friend: i know
things are crazy around here
me: i bet
i'm sure you're very busy

Gawker celebrated. Is this just a necessary part of being journalism affiliated and having certain views (namely that some people deserve to die)?

It is possible that today a man died and a large portion of the media said "Too bad journalistic ethics forbids making a story happen, or I would've had a big scoop a long time ago."

Awkdogs.

Now She Won't Do Venn Diagrams Because I Bent Her Diaphragms

Plus



Equals



Cake Bake Betty appeared to Water and Vegetables compadre Puffy Shoe via some Bloglines Vlog trolling and he sent me a one-liner email containing only some http, namely the http that reads http://www.unitedvloggers.com/2007/04/26/64-little-white-things/.

Lyrically, the chick resembles a cross between stream-of-convo undergrad poetry workshop kids who just read howl and are mad excited that DISJUNCTIVE IMAGES GO TOGETHER IN INTERESTING WAYS and Craig Finn from The Hold Steady when he's big-upping Rhymesayers.

Example of the former, from the "Bio/Love" (I know I know stay with me) section of her homepage:

She hears, upon that water without sou[n]d,
A voice that cries: "The tomb in Palestine,
Is not the porch of spirits lingering;
It is the grave of Jesus, where He lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

Pretty Elizabeth Bishop, right? But don't worry it gets better (although it doesn't have to by much because Bishop:poetry contests::Eminem:Rap Olympics); all of this is tempered by some Big Daddy Kane shit, but instead of "birthday" with "first place" it's "ate me," "hate me" and "tasty." Elementary by rap syllable standards, maybe, but the thing is the chick is singing in a Lil' Orphan Annie style, which brings up a new contention [of mine] that if diction-wise everyone just tried to sing like rappers and/or Craig Finn, I'd be a lot more up on a lot of the melodic, sparse, hip, grip-and-rip soft rock going down the YouTubes of late.

Cake Bake Betty
Myspace

Water and Vegetables Hates on Metaphors in Myspace-Related Article

Away Messages as Lyrics Quizzes

A friend of mine whom I retain on my buddy list but with whom I rarely actually communicate has taken to placing song lyrics in his away messages. However, rather than leaving the quotes out of context as a sort of clue for friends/crushes about his emotional state, my friend explicitly uses these quotations to test his buddies' musical knowledge.

For example, from the current away message:
lyrics game #5. name artist/song. "Y'all be frontin. Me give my heart to a woman. Not for nothin' never happen' I'll be forever mackin'.
If one can simply Google these lyrics, thereby reverse-engineering the song title, then this isn't really a test of one's musical knowledge as much as it is a test of one's desire to know/free time (or, perhaps, one's desire to communicate with my friend). In this way, it would seem the internet has functioned as something of a great equalizer for people seeking expertise on any kind of information that is easily organized, categorized, and Google searchable.

I'm hoping we are reaching a moment when expertise in subjective aesthetic fields becomes so diffuse that no one really listens to anyone's opinion anymore, because there are no more experts and there is no more credibility/objectivity, and music journalism becomes what it is first and foremost - a place for talented and funny writers to make puns and share anecdotes.

I once read a review of a middle-of-the-road skate video in Thrasher where the reviewer conjectured that the measure of a good skate video is whether or not it makes the viewer want to go out and skate. The measure of a good piece of writing, journalistic or not, might be whether it sparks further interest in the topic at hand, regardless to its truthfulness or integrity, terms that, in a sea of readily accessible information exposing lies and plagiarism for what they are, are quickly losing relevance.

Tracy Bonham - So What? So What? So What?

I've been wanting to do something about NOFX, specifically about "Linoleum," a perfect little bit of wankery that lasts only as long as it should. During my research on the subject, I came across the YouTube top search result for NOFX, which happily is a rendition of "Linoleum" for a festival called the Bizarre Festival:



Perhaps as important as the performance itself is the typical Fat Mike asshole Tracy Bonham joke at the beginning. I remember loving "Mother Mother" when I was thirteen, during the years of Weezer, when Nirvana videos were still all over MTV and it wasn't quite certain that the earthquake was really over and these were just aftershocks.

It appears at first that Fat Mike's joke at her expense has been nothing short of devastating - as we never got served an obvious "Mother Mother" sequel ("Daughter Daughter"), and Bonham had joined the Blue Man Group by 2003 - an act known to insiders as "Going Blue, big time."

Fortunately, going blue big time isn't as bad for you musically as you might think, especially if you only go blue small time. If the collaboration yields soft-quiet-soft on a throaty chromatic-sounding percussion track (must be those big plastic pipes the Blue Men use) with big bang electric choruses pending in the background. Tracy ("Tracky" to her friends) still sings like an unhinged teenager with a trust fund and a drinking problem who hits on you in a bar then tells you you're disgusting. I could see someone like Mark Appleyard skating to this (hey, he skated to "Sucker Love" in Menikmati). That, and Apples kind of looks like a guy who would skate to a Blue Man Group song while dressed in blue latex, catching marshmallows in his mouth while he nollie flips the Leap of Faith. It could be metrosexual, or it could be gnarly. Apples has always walked that line, and for good reason. If he didn't, I probably couldn't admit to liking Placebo. Or Tracy Bonham:



APPLES! BONZOS! Do the thing! Only in Brooklyn!

Bonzo Blue Man Collabo MP3

Appleyard SOTY 2003 clip

Jokes about Jokes

Steve Carrell (or his writers) has (or have) a habit of developing his characters by implying that they enjoy certain forms of entertainment.

In The 40 Year Old Virgin, Carrell sees the Ultrasound of his friend's child and asks, "Is this the movie about babies that are geniuses?" The reference is to Baby Geniuses, recognized among film reviewers as a movie without a conceivable audience. The joke works on three levels, at least. First, the rephrasing, "Babies that are geniuses," is funny because one would expect someone who knew that much about the movie could also remember its obvious title. Second, confusing an ultrasound with a movie about babies is funny. Third, the movie is sufficiently bad that one would not expect it to be shown to a group of adults.

This final reason appears in similar iterations on NBC's The Office. The joke has a pretty simple structure. Someone mentions the idea of doing something funny, and Carrell or another buffoon mentions an example of something they consider funny but that is actually quite corny. From my foggy memory, the example ran something like:

Jim: We're talking about something funny.
Dwight: Oh, you mean like Dave Barry?

Steve Carrell himself delivers a similar example in another episode.

Jim: We're going to do something funny.
Michael: Oh, you mean like the Jamie Kennedy Experiment?

These jokes appear to function purely on the premise that the comedy discussed is not actually funny, and the characters are fools for thinking otherwise.

In another way, the jokes imply a set of preferences held by the writers of the show and presumably shared with its audience. It's the old business about allusions flattering the audience.

The joke doesn't work (yet) with shows or performances that are widely acclaimed. It might be funny, however, if a character on the American Office made a joke about the British version. This kind of dialog could actually function to reinforce the idea that Jim, Pam, and the gang actually inhabit a real office in the same world that we live in, and go home to watch a show about the annoyances of office life. Or we could wait until the sarcasm of liking bad jokes becomes the reverse sarcasm of liking good ones.

Just Throw in a Dash of Em

Tacoma Water recently mailed me an advertisement titled "Drinking water - and people - you can count on." I found this quite hilarious for the (perhaps) obvious reason that, at first glance, Tacoma Water appears to suggest that one drink people in addition to water. Furthermore, the wisdom of drinking the very people one "can count on" should evidently be questioned.

Typographically, there ought to be a way to more accurately convey the intended message ("Tacoma Water provides reliable drinking water by employing reliable people").

When copyediters are in short supply, the o-dash, (actually, according to em- and en- convention it should be spelled oh-), immediately conveys the idea that "I'm splitting up this phrase in an awkward - perhaps even hilarious - way, but you know what I really mean - business." Start using it, Tacoma Water.

From the body of the document:

Brown Water: This is often caused by disturbances to the main, such as main breaks or fire hydrant use, that stir up the sediment that has settled at the bottom of the main. While it may look unsafe, the sediment is harmless river silt particles from our unfiltered water supply. If you experience this problem, avoid using any water for two hours. If the water does not clear, call Tacoma Water. If brown or yellow water occurs frequently, it may be caused by corrosion in you home plumbing.

Faceblook

There appears to me to be a contract surrounding facebook profiles. That is, "Do not change your profile too often." For some reason a mutable profile conveys instability and insecurity, and I've even witnessed a wall post hating on someone for always having "updated recently" (this was back in the days of "Profile Updated Recently," pre-news feed [news feed kind of a 9/11 for facebook in terms of turning point, community not really knowing what to do with new communication structures, etc.]).

Anyway, it strikes me that part of the wonder of facebook is its mutability and frivolity. The real reason for the outcry over the news feed was its potential to convey damaging or semi-private information to people who are not frivolous--that is, people who are employers, or worse, people who do not have facebook profiles.

I propose a new facebook-blog mashup wherein people feel at liberty to change their profiles without fear of sanction, where people can lose interest in reading, cease participating in the activity of "sleep," and remove Coldplay from their favorite music category without fear of repercussions. In short, I would like to see a facebook that is exclusively a joke on facebook and makes no effort at sincere communication of the lasting and integral parts of any given person's personality. Either that, or I would like everyone to start liveblogging their identities in the language of facebook profiles, continually updating with cleverness and humor the minutest details of their favorite movies, their complications, their about thems.

In the Tomorrow Zone, no one is afraid to change themselves.

KH re Facebook news feed

Name-Centered Jokes Make Final Cut: BBoard #1 Evaluation (Sands Are Shifting)

Ideelz up. Ho's down. (No embed.)

A comparison occurs to me as I listen to "Makes Me Wonder," the doughy flapjack Maroon 5 have served all the way up to the top of the stack of foodstuffs that is the Billboard Hot 100.

Maroon 5 : Disappointment :: Babylon 5 : Dilgar.

That is, Maroon 5 the band is as full of an aggressive species of disappointment determined to spread throughout the universe as Babylon 5 the TV show is full of Dilgar, the aggressive species of alien determined to spread through the universe.

The song starts off with 1 (one) quirky bass line filtered through what sounds like a Boss SBY-3 Bass Synthesizer pedal. Just when I'm starting to rock back and forth in the comfortable chair next to the pillar in the Tacoma Public Library (the only place where I can plug in my laptop), Adam Levine comes in with a scratchy whine. He repeats the same word (anymore) several times, and whatever boner I was developing over this song booked a direct flight to Droopsville.

What I mean to say, of course, is that Maroon 5 pack no surprises. If it were my fifth birthday and I invited Maroon 5 to my party, they'd give me a Maroon 5 CD. And from then on I would not invite them over to my house for apples and peanut butter.

On the bright side, I left the headphones in while trying to figure out something to say about "Makes Me Wonder" (not much obvi). The following playlist, generated by Yahoo! Launch's randomizer algorithms, ensued:

"Never Again" - Kelly Clarkson (even after Breakaway, the girl has still got a mad set of pipes). I wish I were attracted to Kelly Clarkson. She's kind of like the girl in high school who asks you to the dance and keep thinking while you're slowdancing about the girl who you always mention among your friends by both first and last name ("Jane Galloway is so hot!") In other words, Kelly Clarkson should be known just as Kelly. But "I hope when you're in bed with her / You think of me!" is a great set of lines.

"Grace Kelly: Who's Next" - Mika. [I can't find this on YouTube but I'm sure it exists elsewhere, sorry I'm not in the business of tracking things down.] Mika does a deec Freddy Mercury impression, which of course is what we've needed since The Darkness disappeared (where are you Darkness? I miss y'all.) If the video'd had purple aliens and Mika had toweled himself off with them we might've had a new "I Believe in a Thing Called Love." But he didn't, so we don't. One thumb up.

"I Don't Need a Man" - Pussycat Dolls. This is not "Loosen Up My Buttons" but it doesn't need to be. I was mostly writing the last paragraph while this song was playing so I don't have any objections.

"Since U Been Gone" - Kelly. Straight fire since day one, always has been. I will never be disappointed that this song is playing, least of all when I happen to already be dancing.

If I can thank Maroon 5 for anything at all, it is that I only had to wait a couple minutes through "Makes Me Wonder" to get at some toons worth grooving to. But back to the rotation.

HAHAHAHA LIVE VERSION OF "GIRLFRIEND" BY AVRIL LAVIGNE. She has two backup singers to help her shout "hey hey you you."

"Hey Avril."
"Yeah?"
"'Girlfriend' isn't Number One anymore."
"Oh no! What happened?"
"Maroon 5."
"Maroon 5?"
"Maroon 5."
"Shit."
"Avril? Avril? Stop crying. Maybe people just got confused. If you read 'Adam Levine' carelessly, it kind of looks like 'Avril Lavigne.' And he is pretty. People just got confused."
"I am going to kill that motherfucker Adam Levine."

Back to the Xtian Skaters

Okay I have to admit I totally blew it on a post a couple days ago about Christian skaters by not really dealing with the videos themselves, so caught up was I in an "aw shucks" preoccupation with surface contradictions that don't really hold up against scrutiny noways.

The Music

First off, it's difficult to deny the simple pleasure of listening to the music that plays in the background as Matt Beach and Chad Timtim gently shred the streets of America. Matt Beach's song is called "The Crayon Box Song" and was written by William V. Mason. This tune, gentle in its explanation of why Jesus is awesome, serves a striking contrast to music played in most skate videos (punk, rap). Although I love listening to metal while dudes like Dustin Dollin charge down inhumane numbers of stairs, Mason's little ditty about colors and Jesus more effectively captures the serenity that accompanies the best days of skating. Out in the sun, landing that flatland kickflip, just manualing across a pad, not stressing, just feeling the board under your feet.

The effect of the music on this viewing experience is hard to overestimate. It would be an interesting experiment to remix these videos with aggressive music to see if the serene skating still shone through.

The Style

Beyond the radness of the music, which for some reason I find it hard to admit, the skating itself appears informed by the holy spirit. These cats are skating for God, and damned if they haven't achieved some sort of spiritual calm on their boards. When Matt Beach falls, he doesn't swear; he says he feels like he got in a "motorcycle accident," then chuckles nervously. The unselfconscious sincerity of the declaration makes the skating appear all the more free and natural.

It's tough in today's skateboarding market to find pros who aren't straining at the bit to land the gnarliest trick out there, to one-up their competition by grinding a rail one stair longer. Say what you will about the lameness of believing in God, it sure helps these dudes' skating.

A Brief Return to Three Hunny

Slavoj Zizek takes a minute to dispel the mythical uproar surrounding the 300 film, reviewed by myself a matter of weeks ago. In his review, Zizek points out that the Spartans were the militarily inferior of the two fighting forces and, for this and other reasons, bear closer resemblance to Iran and Iraq than to the U.S.

Fine, fine. But this counter-reading brings up an interesting point about the assumptions people have brought to the film. What about the movie makes it appear to many journalists as a piece of American propaganda? Zizek doesn't go there, but maybe the answer is that Americans have so greatly internalized discussions of civilizational conflict that they believe Spartan society do be the ancestor of Westernism/Americanism and Xerxes' Persians to be the antecedents to some sort of Mid-Eastern bloc opposed to U.S. interests. One fears that Zizek himself may have fallen into the same trap by taking and legitimizing a view that, though it directly opposes much criticism heaved at the film, is trapped within the same dialectic. It is not really so important for 300's viewers to ask "Okay, who are the Americans? Who are the Iranians?" as it is to engage the many possible meanings of the film, be they relevant (or irrelevant) to America's and Iran's problems.

Perhaps Samuel Huntington casts so long a shadow that it dims the sight of America's best and brightest--that is, its film reviewers. This entire debate about 300's propagandizing, which has captured even Zizek to a small degree, might be more easily laid aside if one takes Amartya Sen's view of the condition of current global politics. From Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (which, not coincidentally, I just finished reading):

A uniquely divisive view goes not only against the old-fashioned belief that all human beings are much the same but also against the less discussed but more plausible understanding that we are diversely different. The world is frequently taken to be a collection of religions (or of "civilizations" or "cultures"), ignoring the other identities that people have and value, involving class, gender, profession, language, science, morals, and politics.

Despite the simplicity of Sen's idea (the entire book is largely devoted to fleshing out and illustrating the above-stated thesis), its reach is quite large. One might have a lot more to learn about 300 (someone should do a remake titled Three-Hundred) if he or she could take a less reductive view of the film and engage it along lines that don't merely address the civilizational argument. It appears clear to everyone that there are none-too-subtle overtones in 300, but there exists profound disagreement about what the movie actually means a posteriori.

It could be that 300's shocking, unclear message resembles the garbled language of terrorism. By spreading an aggressive, deeply cryptic message nestled in visceral terror and violence, the film provokes, even among the intellectual elite, a blustering and confused reversion to ideas that appear sound and comforting, in this case Samuel Huntington's Clash. More disturbing yet is the notion that real terrorist acts of the twenty-first century have done little to disengage the media from the civilizational debate, even over the subject of something so comparatively trivial as a fictional action movie based on a comic book.

Finally and tangentially, k-punk's jargon-laden, hard-to-follow backlash against Zizek. The dude is too old! He's sloppy! Maybe I took my tact because I didn't get this. Anyway both k-punk and I at least agree that Slavoj is missing the boat.

Onward Christian Skaters

I mentioned before that there was a fast-growing contingent of skaters in the U.S. who are probably just as mad that ESPN took the Christ out of the X-Games as they are that whoever it was took the Christ out of X-Mas.

Skaters and Jesus go back at least to the late '80s, when Mark Gator Rogowski converted to Christianity shortly before being convicted of the murder of Jessica Bergsten. However, whereas the Gator version of Christianity was seen as an insane move by an unstable man, current Christian skaters seem very well-adjusted, and some, including Chad Timtim and Jamie Thomas, are among the most successful in the sport.

For your viewing pleasure I give you Matt Beach's part from Kaleidoscope, a film centered strictly and exclusively on professional skateboarders who walk in the light of the lamb.



Note the force of conviction behind the closing monologue, as well as the references to the lecherous lifestyle that claimed many of the dude's friends. Note also that the skating is on par with most of the stuff you'll see on this blog in terms of creativity and smoothness.

Anyone who saw the eight-year-old blonde girl dancing to Christian metal in Jesus Camp knows that we live in an age where evangelical Christianity is willing to branch out into hip subcultures in an effort at rescuing more souls from Satan's grasp. It's therefore not much of a surprise or a shock that skating has its share of believers. Still, there exists some apparent contradiction between the often reactionary mores of Christianity and the devil-may-care (or even I-like-the-devi), punk attitude that characterizes much of skateboarding:


Thrasher Magazine

Zoo Ministries

From 777 Skateboards' Web site:

What does “777” stand for? In the Bible, the number 7 stands for completion and perfection- 777 is the alternative to 666- and you don’t need to be a Christian to know what that stands for. If you are tired of skulls and crossbones, violent “cartoons” and messages of death- if you are looking for something different-
check out what we have to offer.

Notice the up-front presentation of coolness as uncool and vice versa. The style is somewhat reminiscent of straight-edge (that is, convictions--and not just shocking lifestyles--are the true currency of cool).

The attitude is much less confrontational with skatepunk ideology than it seems on the surface. The smoothness with which these videos carry over is abetted greatly by the ease with which one can get over atheistic hoitytoit and just enjoy watching these guys rip it. In fact, the similarities between these guys and other pros far overshadow the differences, in terms of both interest and scope. The way Kaleidoscope's skaters talk about Jesus is very similar to the way most skaters talk about skating. And they rip just as hard. Chad Timtim:



Stoked, the documentary about Gator's rise and fall

Family Christian Stores catalog listing for Kaleidoscope

777 Skateboards

Gchat for the Stars and Stripes

Got a lot of sleeping to do today so before the logsawing session begins I thought I'd at least do some blogsawing and break off a little Google Chat 'twixt everyone's favorite 1LT (who, due to paranoia, will appear as 1LT and truly yours (who, due to Google Chat convention, will appear as me) re Memorial Day (not pictured), Vegas, Lupe Fiasco, Entourage, and Pat Dollard.

me: got any blog ideas?
1LT: word.
yes
me: yes?
1LT: yes i do
let me formulate
me: you could even do a guest blog post if you'd like
1LT: haha

[Ed: Guest blogging still laughable among military types] [. . .]

1LT: have you heard lupe fiasco's album yet?
me: no man but i saw the video where a toy robot comes to life
1LT: you will love this album
he's a native'tongue esqe hip hopper who also enjoys skateboarding
me: yes i heard of him a year ago perhaps
he had a song called "kick push"
which was okay but just okay for me
i admit he's got flows though
1LT: kick push is alright
hurts me soul and american terrorist are amazing
me: ah
okay
i'm checkin the youtube right now

[Ed: Hurts me soul is amazing, in fact here it is embedded]



[Ed: Check out his moves!]

1LT: one more vegas selling point, if you come, we'll have our fifth for the Entourage vegas episode re-do
you can be eric or turtle
me: haha
is eric the samwise gamgee guy?
aka rudy?
1LT: hahaha yeah
me: haha okay who's the other guy
1LT: the dude who wears jerses
ys
me: oh ok that works
i wear jerseys sometimes

[. . .]

okay i'm going to blog a fraction of this conversation
1LT: fair
me: what is your mil rank?
1LT: 1LT
me: 1LT?
ok
1LT: first lieutenant
me: yeah but at least i can hear the audio
man
he's just saying what white people do
1LT: yes, i believe indicating who the american terrorist is and has been
me: ah
oh btw did you ever check out patdollard.com?
1LT: wow now, i will now

[. . .]

me: are you seeing that patdollard shit?
1LT: right now
me: thoughts?
1LT: [. . .]
who the hell is this guy
me: he's a former hollywood talent agent
actually has been compared in VF to Ari Gold of Entourage
Gould?
1LT: woooow
me: anyway dollard got an embed position w/ marines
and made this wacked out movie
that is supposed to be the anti-farenheit 9/11

Although 1LT gave his two cents on the Dollard issue, you won't get more than this from me: "he is an instigator and a preventor of peace/a real douche." The stream-of-consciousness upshot from all this is conscious rap is still about (what to make of this, and Chris Rock, a little later in the week), Pat Dollard is obvi an American Terrorist who hurts me soul, and the bathwater complaints about Sean Hannity need to stop because it's just a silly game to all of them.

See you in Vegas.

<3.

Plenty of Wu-Tang in the Fridge (250 Wu-Tangs)

Wu-Tang is giving away 250 songs from the 2003-2005 era. This of course illustrates how prolific the Clan is, but what is the reason for this sudden generosity? A post about the songs themselves when I have time. Mostly just wanted to use that pic, though.

Lots of Free Wu-Tang for your Groove Thang.

Via.

RATM Coachella: :'( or : \ ?

I suppose it's a bit unclear what we were to expect from the reunion of Rage Against the Machine for the 2007 Coachella festival in Indio, CA. Sure, they would probably be loud and raucous and political. But Rage are primarily a band borne of early-to-mid-nineties anxieties about race, equality, feminism, and globalization. For some reason, their iconography--Free Mumia, Che Guevara, Malcolm X--seems quaint now that the world really is much flatter and Ralph Nader has fallen from top-ten to not mentioned at all (did I take him seriously because I was eighteen, or was 2000 really that much more idyllic and naive than 2007?). So the question isn't really even "Do we need Rage now more than ever?" so much as "Should we feel sad that we don't need Rage?" or even "Should Rage feel sad?" and "If not now, then when?"

Witness this Reuters Canada report of the band's onstage conduct:

The front man addressed the crowd only once between songs, when he likened the current U.S. administration to Nazi war criminals. "They should be shot as any war criminal should be," he said.

Not exactly incendiary, and judging by the only audiovisiuals from their set currently available to me (cell-phone cams, YouTube), RATM look a little worse for wear, despite the fact that the Empire is probably more Evil now than it was when they broke up seven years ago. It could just be the technological limitations of the recording devices, but Tom Morello looks a little like he's standing still, and Zach de la Rocha sounds a little like he's trying to rap along to his own lyrics. After a couple minutes' thought, it seems it would've been hard to experience anything at this reunion other than pitying sadness and nauseated nostalgia.

[...]

Fucking 9/11.

Lil Gawk for the Tweakers

Took a brief trip to Gawk-town today, offering up a timely piece about hapless non-draftee, Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn. And they accepted it. Ballin!

Brady Quinn Gawker Piece

I Guess I Knew It Was Coming

You can make him like you.

Just as a cartoon vase shatters on the head of a cartoon cat, so does cartoon punk Avril Levigne shatter the Billboard charts; the preteen demographic's favorite skater chick has hit Number One.

"Girlfriend," the single in question, rides a lot harder on the effervescent, uptempo aesthetics of producer pop (hand claps, shouty chorus) than on the sulky, vaguely annoying histrionics of adolescence (orchestras, tonsil-baring whole-note laden chorus). That is, "Girlfriend"—-more heavily influenced by Kidz Bop than Linkin Park --exhibits Lavigne reveling in her corporate pop power, having abandoned all angsty teen alternative inhibitions. Whether those inhibitions were ever real is hardly the issue now, as listeners are confronted with a monster they helped create.

For, as much as "Sk8r Boi" and "Girlfriend" share a poppy-go-lucky musical vision--"Sk8r" with its bouncy guitars and "Girlfriend" with its Go-Gos singalong jump-right-to-the-chorus intro, they're fairly exactly narrate the same story from diametrically opposed perspectives; "Sk8r" plays as an anthem to the sexually powerless, "Girlfriend" a paean to the third-wave slut in all of us.

During the bridge to "Sk8r Boi," a more innocent Avril looks back, now happily going steady with her "superstar" boyfriend, whom she had the vision to see was more than just a stoned high-school loser. Meanwhile, her ballet-performing foil who, due to peer pressure, initially spurned the Boi in question has to stand in the crowd at his punk show, nervously biting her nails and kicking herself for her lack of vision.

"Sk8r Boi" shows Avril the vengeful loser, awkwardly paying her dues during conformist high-school years only to win out "five years from now."

Three lines, however, largely unnoticed in 2002, betray Avril's sadism and serve, in hindsight, as a warning of things to come:

five years from now, she sits at home
feeding the baby
she's all alone

The girl who "took ballet" is now a single mother, scarcely out of teenhood, with no one to help her. And we're supposed to feel good about that because Avril wound up getting the boy. But wait, it gets worse.

In 2007, Avril certainly has a lot more chutzpah than she did when we first heard from her. It appears the post-high-school Avril character of "Girlfriend" has learned the power of her own sexuality, and unlike the largely passive persona in "Sk8r Boi," is now turning outward to pursue new conquests. And, as the video shows, she's willing to trollop it up to pillage as many taken men as she can:



Note self-satisfied lines like "I'm the motherfucking princess," not to mention baby girl's bleached-blonde hair extensions. Gone is the green t-shirt, forever lost is the loose necktie of 2002. Enter Avril of womanhood, with blue short shorts and an uncomfortable penchant for mugging the camera a bit too aggressively.

It's a familiar arc. A girl goes through high school with shattered self-esteem and a love for Blink-182. The years are hellish and drag on. Soon, however, she graduates (or drops out), loses her cherry, starts going to bars, and witnesses with her own eyes the manipulative power of heterofemale sexuality. Five years on, the endearing frustration that made everyone root for her in the beginning has hardened into a callous, insatiable desire to possess and dominate any boy/man she sets her sights on.

Avril's image has always been a little hard to stomach. Her schtick, designed to go after the preteen ladies who hate themselves some Britney but still need some slick studio pop to groove to, has been so transparent as to come off as pomo parody. But there was reason to like the anthemic "Sk8r Boi"; it gave play to the pimply skateboarder fantasy that one day it would be possible have a hot girlfriend who loved watching them try varial heelflips. Now Avril's all about spreading that pootie wherever it'll go, and following it around just isn't as appealing as it was back in the day. She's slept with too many skaters.

Country-Style Bacon

[By the way, today I'm doing my best to Write Like a Skate Magazine, that is, quite informally and often with a loosely constructed, sloppy style that may or may not appeal to readers over the age of twelve.] Alright, alright I'm going to admit it. I thought I was going to have a hard time blogging today, partly because I slept all through the sunlight, and the Internet just didn't seem as enthralling as usual. But then I trucked over to Skateboardermag and found an entire skate team I had never even heard of until today! Here's the vid, as lengthy as it is strengthy. It's so gnarly that it's even eating my blogroll, but that's not gonna stop my from EMBEDDING IT DEEP IN THIS THING ANYWAY.

Notice how often these guys skate in cement parks, revert, and powerslide. Even though the tricks aren't hyper-gnarly in terms of length-of-handrails (there might not even be any handrails in the vid, I don't remember), the tricks are creative and kind of tossed of in a manner that says "We just went to the park this weekend and brought a camera." Which is the best way to film a video.

Pretty much everything about Bacon Skateboards appears designed to appeal, but can't be, since most of it is happenstance. Here's a list of awesome things about Bacon:

-Regional Gem status (the Macalester of skateboarding? No, the Reed of skateboarding i.e. based in Portland);
-Team members named, ridiculously, like NFL quarterbacks: Benji Galloway, Lincoln Nass, Johnny Turgeson, Oudalay Philavanh, Mason Huggins (okay maybe not all of them), and Donovan Rice;
-Web site basically just a Blogspot page, making Bacon basically a bunch of bloggers;
-Web site logo features unholy combination of pig and porn star, laying on side with come-hither stare, HUGE rack of eight fake silicone breasts;
-Graphics that look like this.

-Myspace slogan: "Bacon Tits."

Finally, I have to leave some space on this blog to address the music selection. The Myspace page has a metal song titled "Annihilation of the Nile." The songs selected for the Cuntry as Fuck video shown above include, as you have noticed, "Standing Ovation" by Young Jeezy and "Polar Opposites" by Modest Mouse. The third song is about "Beer and bacon for my friends," and rules just as hard but I can't seem to find it by Googling the lyrics.

This post, like many skateboard mag articles, walks the crumbling mountain summit of skaterag journalism, teetering on the brink of death with actual coverage of a topic sloping down off to the left and straight-up commercial promotion on the right. Rest assured, though, that this is not a dusted-off press release (funniest joke on the blog? maybe, def funniest on the block :P). It is one hundred percent my original thoughts on the issue of Bacon Skateboards. They rule.

How to Make Any Song as Good as "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Take most rockish songs from the twenty-first century. The levels on these songs generally stay the same throughout, so you, the listener, must make the remix. Fortunately, all you need is a volume knob. Then follow these simple steps.

1) Let the intro play one or two times at the normal (quiet) volume.
2) CRANK THAT SHIT UP!
3) Let the verses play at normal volume.
4) Crank the choruses UP!
5) Obey these rules, religiously. Make an exception if the last twenty seconds of the song isn't a "chorus" per se. If it isn't, crank it up anyway.
6) After the song is over, shout "A Denial" about a dozen times at the top of your lungs.

Even if this doesn't leave you as pumped as you would have been if you'd just listened to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," you should still feel pretty pumped. If you don't, just listen to "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Bonus: Applying the volume trick to "Teen Spirit" itself. Be sure to wear protective gear.

Painting Billboards

Climb in the ideelz carriage, babies, cause we're going for a stroll.

Ten weeks ago, Timbo and J-Timbo teamed up with Nelly Furtimbo to press a single for the club's turntables, a verse-chorus-verse paint by numbos. N-Furtado does the same breathy generic shit she pushed on us with "Promiscuous Girl," not surprising since Timbaland produced that as well. Timbo raps about producing, but of course the main feature of the song is the only sexy person in the trio.

Timberlake sounds like he's trying even harder than usual to be a rapper, even defending himself with zingers like "If sexy never left, why's everybody on my shi-i-i-t." Transitioning from boy-band to b-boy, Justin's landed at the uncomfortable boy-boy stage.

But enough about "whether the song is good" or "what the artist is up to," and none of "what the beat sounds like" because holy yawns on all that, right?

The most compelling feature of this otherwise bland song--besides the end-line (dammit RID DH) stuttering--is the music video. Note each performer's movements. Nelly points her hands at the camera to emphasize her point. Justin points his hands at the camera to emphasize his face. Timbo points his to de-emphasize his face. One gets the impression by watching this that the three artists are being melted into paint, stirred in a big vat, poured into cans, shaken in one of those automatic shakers, then opened and spilled all over a dance floor, where people had just been minding their business, and now suddenly everyone's coated in this beige liquid, but as with all club mishaps (vomiting, pill-fueled wig-outs), they try to pretend it didn't happen and just keep dancing. And so "Give It to Me" coats the nation (maybe even the world), and we're all nearly eleven layers thick (1 wk/layer).

Give It to Me on Youtizzle!