Grandpa Wrestling

Tonight was my Grandpa's 98th birthday, which was pretty cool. I learned that he used to herd cattle (which neither of his daughters knew), that he met Howard Hughes (whom he says was , surprise surprise, crazy) when he turned down a lucrative job to work for him and that his grandmother came over on the second wagon train to ever go to Oregon (and the first with women). In addition to these facts, he also told me emphatically that religion is stupid because there is no proof for it. I've never heard him come down on religion or politics before, but the man was a Sunday school teacher and a deacon as well as an engineer/lumberjack/cattle-hearder/naval officer.

I got to tape some of his stories. He is deaf so rather than converse, all he really does is tell stories from his past. When they're not sprinkled with engineer-speak that he assumes I know, they're really fascinating. Above is my favorite.

As I'm moving around all of this stuff that was my dad's I'm thinking about the mutability of history. It's only in and around this last century, during the time that my grandpa was alive, that we've been able to record music - before you had to listen to the musician live or nothing at all. There is no record of the sound itself from before, only instruments and documentation (at this point in the post I should warn that I've been smoking, so if I'm not already blowing your mind you might want to bail). Similarly, all the things that my dad left me are really part of my memories of him; I think about all of my things now in terms of what I want to pass on to my children (when they exist).

I spent a long time tonight letting my grandpa go through an old family album and tell me who the people are. If he doesn't do it then no one else will! My mom doesn't know who the people are any more than I do and my grandma can't see them.
The best story that came out of it:

There's a picture of my grandpa at about ten-years-old dressed in a policeman's uniform. Grandpa told me a story about visiting a sick family friend who was, at the time, also being visited by "a big Scotch-Irishman." "Oh great, just what I need, a cop," joked the sick man. "Help me officer, this man is accosting me!" At this point grandpa revealed to me that his fake uniform came with a real billy club (his college also had a shooting range under the gym, just to give an indication of how times change). He started beating on the other guy with his club. "I pert near took his head off!" laughed my grandpa.

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

Elsewhere in the dinner I argued with my aunt and uncle about how good The Wrestler was. "The guy was such a loser!" my uncle kept arguing, as if that meant something. "What a meathead!" We came to common ground when he invited me to come with him to WWE Wrestlemania the week before I leave. Whhaaat? My whole family was shocked at how much I knew about WWE, except for my cousin who used to play WWF: No Mercy on N64 with me. I guess that was a phase in middle school the rest of them missed. This is understandable because I only watched Smackdown because my friends did and I didn't have cable. I'm still not sure how seriously my uncle takes it. Maybe he expected The Wrestler to follow a storyline similar to those that happen during WWE matches. Like, maybe he thought Micky Rourke would get surprised at Raw Is War and challange Mankind to a Pay-Per-View ladder-match. Probably that or the plot of Rocky.

In other entertainment news, I also saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and it was awesome. That and Gone, Baby, Gone have me excited about Casey Affleck's future career, cuz he really knocks those out of the park. At least, as excited as you can get over the career of an actor I don't know or an Affleck.
Plus, Skins is back with a whole new cast! I'm gonna watch it right now and see if the magic is still there! And by magic, I mean drugs. (Update: just watched it. OH. NO.)

Also read my other blog!

These Are The Sounds of Days That Are Past

Here I am blogging again. It feels a bit strange getting back into writing here, now that I'm home and have people with similar interests around me I don't really need a blog as an outlet anymore, but I thought if I didn't keep it up now I'd probably lose the knack completely and then where would I be? My mom gave me a book for Christmas about finding one's strengths and apparently my #1 is the desire to collect knowledge, information and objects. If you don't have an outlet for these things, though, it can be stifling and lead to stagnation, which is really the subject of tonight's show:

Q: What have you been doing since you've been home, Dave?
A: I've been clearing out all of my dad's old stuff and figuring out what to do with it. Like myself, my dad was a collector of things that he didn't really need. As my mom says, he kept things because he loved them.
This extends to vast collections of nerdy items that I'm really getting off on, like a mammoth collection of '70s superhero comics that I don't know what to do with. I thought initially that I would read them all. You see, I have clear memories of picking them out of their cataloged cardboard boxes as an elementary-schooler, lying on the flea-infested rug in our guest room with some Hostess snack cakes, my nose in an old comic. I loved the smell of them and the quaint old ads for fruit pies (there are about 3 fruit pie ads per comic).

My favorite series at the time was The Micronauts: a little-loved comic about a group of royal aliens who are forced to flee their home planet and traverse the galaxy, but get this - when they come to earth they're really small! Micro, you could say...
The idea of having little people running around in my kitchen was already in my imagination, so this fed into that nicely; especially in the second comic where they run into a kid mowing the lawn (like I did!) and he helps them defeat tiny enemy spaceships (like I wished I could do!).

The problem with the Micronauts was there was not much reason for them to be on Earth, which meant their story quickly shifted to other planets where, for the most part, they were proportionate to everything (making them just Nauts, I guess). This fed into no fantasies of mine, given that I found space pretty boring on a whole.

(the guy with the sword was my favorite)

The problem with these Marvel comics I inherited is, in general, now that I'm not 8-years-old, they're really lame; boring and poorly written. This bums me out. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to weed out whatever gems there might be. My dad sold all the really valuable ones, too (and made a pretty penny by all accounts), which accounts for big chunks of plotlines missing. I think I'm going to take them en masse to a comic store and see what I can get for them, which is pretty sad, but my mom told me I need to save my energy and I can't see myself putting them all on eBay one by one.

Other collections involve role-playing war-strategy board games, tin soldiers and tiny racecar sets, among other, more badass things. My dad was such a cool guy! The things that got him excited were often the same ones that excited 12-year-olds. I loved him so much, man. I can't really look at it objectively, but I'm sure that explains something about me.

It's hard for me to part with most of this stuff, but my mom and I are both moving in the near future and neither one of us needs tin soldiers. Hell, my dad didn't need tin soldiers; he just liked them. As for the games, those have gone on eBay and are selling quite nicely. There are a lot of retired nerds out there who are willing to cough up money for PanzerBlitz and Imperium - Empires in Conflict: Worlds in the Balance.

Most of the books went to Powell's, except for a big chunk of classics that are in my sights (and some sci-fi/fantasy gems like Conan and Tarzan, which my dad loved and I hope, in the future, to read and appreciate). Some of these books are way cool and have led me to the creation of...............

A NEW BLOG

which you can view at your leisure.

As for books, my scheme of a middle school book club has been put on hold (though it's still incubating). In my recovery from learning Old English and Victorian tea-lady etiquette I've reverted to comic books. Aside from the comics I waxed nostalgic about and disowned above my dad also left me his collection of Zap Comix and other sweet goodies that I was not allowed to see at a young and impressionable age. They're great! Most of Zap is just things having sex with other things, which is pretty easy to read. But more on all that later. I'm worn out from trying to update this thing already. See you soon and welcome back!

Katy Perry, I Still Hate You

Ladies and gents, when I wrote my post about Katy Perry's enduring shittiness back in December, little did I know that it was going to be sent around the internet and discovered by actual Katy Perry fans. Increible! The power of this information super highway!

The responses I've gotten have inspired me to get back on that blog horse and ride, clarifying why Katy Perry sucks and you should hate her, too (that's hyperbole, middle schoolers; don't get in a tizzy yet). I'm happy to find that, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Perry's 15 minutes lasted its rightful course. That doesn't mean she's gone, though. So let's hold our breath and go back in, taking it back to the opening lines of "Hot n Cold" again to pick that shit apart.

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes"

Ok, so that's just playing with a hackneyed stereotype; not necessarily offensive, but certainly not trenchant or funny. It's the kind of thing that seems so outdated to me; an ignorant sweeping statement from a past age. It might as well be about women bringing home so many hat boxes that men don't have room for their golf clubs. "You make excuses like my wife makes supper - poorly! Har har! Now lemme tell you about airplane food!" More disturbing than the implication that women are fickle and indecisive (at least when it comes to clothes - they love their clothes, amiright?) is the implication that men aren't and shouldn't be because it's a feminine trait.
More on that later.

It goes on:

"You PMS like a bitch - I should know"

Here's where it gets more complicated. PMS, something that is inherently feminine (at least in the literal sense), is being used as an insult. Basically, "you're acting like a girl;" a little playground chauvinism. Like "don't be a fag," it's putting down a whole group of people for being different. More than that, Perry ropes herself into the inferior group. She's a fickle bitch and she's proud of it! But that doesn't mean you can be one, indecisive guy; unlike her, you can probably help it.

Where does this weird latter part come from? Why, it comes with help from the song's co-writers, Dr. Luke and Max Martin! Two men - surprise! See, if Katy Perry were just a shitty singer-songwriter things would be a little different, but the fact of the matter is that she is part of an industry made up of people - many of the men - who are capitalizing on selling this inferior, bimbo-bitch image to the very people it's trying to keep down. Not like it's trying to keep them down in some sinister/conspiracy-theory way - I doubt Dr. Luke, Max Martin or even Perry herself even thought about it - but a minstrel show's still a minstrel show.

That brings me, briefly, to Perry's bigger song, "I Kissed a Girl." Where once Jill Sobule tread with introspection, Perry struts with the lesbian-lite, attention-grabbing look-at-me attitude of a college girl who thinks it's wild to kiss someone of the same sex. Aren't I crazy? Bet you never thought you'd see me doing this! Fuck you, mom and dad! But don't worry, I still have a boyfriend and care what he thinks, so I'm not really an icky lesbian. That's hot, right?
On that note I could go into her failed single, "Ur So Gay," but that really speaks for itself doesn't it? Doesn't it??



But that's just who Perry is, old maaan! She's a crazy bitch who don't care what no one thinks!
You mean she's not a calculated, iron-on icon who was created to fill pockets? Then what do we make of her career starting point as the Christian pop singer, Katy Hudson? Ellen Carpenter at Spin Magazine says it better than me:

"But I can claim to be an old-school Perry hater. It began in 2004, when she told another music magazine, "I'm completely outrageous and I'll do anything for attention!" This from the daughter of two pastors, who had already attempted to be a contemporary Christian music star, but whose debut didn't skyrocket her to Michael W. Smith heights (despite Christianity Today calling her song "Growing Pains" "pure ear candy with the message that we're being molded perpetually into Christ's image")."

Now I know it's been almost ten years since Katy Hudson came out and I know that people can change, but my guess is that the change that came over Katy Perry was a desire for more money.

Now with that all said, I'm willing to pull the microscope out. I hate it when adults spend their time wringing their hands about the impressionability of today's youth. I was a youth not very long ago and I remember how little credit I got for my own intelligence. I also understand the argument that "the song's just fun." Why pick it apart?
Well, because it's everywhere. And kids are listening to it. And some kids - maybe not you bright young things reading this - are dumb as dirt; willing to swallow the old gender stereotypes that this contrived cash-cow is pushing.

Lastly, my speculation on the future of Katy Perry:
Next comes the weak sophomore effort with songs that sound like "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" but less catchy. People will move on to someone else. Maybe Miley Cyrus will start flashing her crotch getting out of cars or something and that's where attention will shift.
After that, Katy Perry will reinvent herself, releasing a softer, more mature album of acoustic songs showing "the real Katy Perry." It will have a one-word title - probably Katy. One of the songs might be about God.
Then the world will forget...