An American Werewolf In Belfast

Woman Finds Skinned Chipmunk Living In Her Couch

2009-03-15T22:42:00.000-07:00

As the four regular readers of my blog know, I read CNN daily and often write here about it when I feel like it. Today I clicked on a story apparently about Bob Dylan's home being too smelly (what?) and it transferred me to KTLA.com which is, from what I can tell, where crazy news goes to die. It's full of stories that got caught between the fiction of The Weekly World News (RIP) and more respectable news outlets. Among the insane headlines I was met with when I visited KTLA:

Martha Stewart's Dog Killed In Explosion
Woman Hurt In Sex Mishap Involving Power Tool
Chimp Plans, Executes Attack On Zoo Visitors
Five Human Heads Found In Coolers
SoCal Man's Body Mistakenly Delivered To Pet Store
Woman Finds Hungry Cat Living In Her Sofa
This photo gallery

I'm speechless.

As for my life, my dead squirrel may have been stolen, but after I sent my prayers for more corpses out into the universe Ham delivered by finding me a dead chipmunk. I was going to cut it open tonight but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I was holding it in my hands and it's little eyes were staring straight into mine. I think I need Skippy there to hold my hand while I turn the little guy inside out. Either way, my skin fever is satisfied.
I thought I could keep the little guy in the Fels fridge for a couple of days without anybody noticing as long as I labeled the container this time. I left it in a Cheez-It box and then realized that people don't refrigerate Cheez-Its so I labeled it "Spinach and Lentils Pilaf - Do Not Touch" because I thought no one would want that. Then people got high and touched it and there was screaming and the chipmunk ended up in the microwave. Luckily I was there to save it. I miss my fridge.

Sitcom class is going well. We just wrote a scene for a never-going-to-happen Western sitcom which we ended up titling Full Jailhouse (my other suggestion: Fresh Prince of the Unincorporated Territories).

It sounds like my life is all skinning and classes, but I'm sure it be more than that. I'm trying to get used to being around people that I know all day long and having everybody know what I'm doing all the time. I'm also getting sick. Maybe that's a reason to miss Sue's class tomorrow. :-)
I've also been texting people a lot and it's led to me using emoticons more. :-(

Crushed Dreams and New Hopes

2009-03-11T21:18:00.001-07:00

On the heels of discoveries about Abraham Lincoln's watch and Shakespeare's portrait, CNN reported today that one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century has now been solved. In typically dry fashion, buried far under a story entitled "Hot dogs lead cops to burglary suspects," is an article saying that DNA testing has definitively proved that princess Anastasia Romanov died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. All I could think about was the children of the future who will watch Disney's Anastasia with the knowledge that it's all a romantic falsehood; the princess is dead and there are no such things as talking bats.

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

In personal news I just ran karaoke at the Student Center. Maggie got me find a pirated version of Photoshop, so now I can do everything I want.
I listened to Beck's Modern Guilt finally and decided it's ok. Everything else is going fine. I have a revised list of birthday gifts that I need but never got:

A black knit hat to replace the one that was stolen from me when I went to see Coraline.
A dead animal to replace the one that disappeared.
More Secret Chiefs 3 albums.

Things I Learned From CNN Today

2009-03-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

Meghan McCain is kinda sorta awesome.
Walter from The Big Lebowski was based on the writer of Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry.
Quoting films to other people in lieu of actually talking "stirs passion." Presumably because it makes you look like a twat.
They found and authenticated an actual portrait of Shakespeare.
Bad marriages are bad for your health. Ice is cold. The ocean is deep. Snow is white.
Barbie is based on a German gag-doll of a gypsy prostitute named Bild Lilli. Also there is a life-sized Malibu dream home that features, among other insane things, a chandelier made out of Barbie's hair.

There's such a thing as a "green" bullet.
The article "Some banks should be allowed to fail, say two top Republicans" looks like a parody because Sen. Ron Shelby cuts a figure that makes me imagine his inner life to resemble that of Montgomery Burns:

When Republicans are talking about stem cell research it is of dire importance. When a Democrat is talking about it, it's a distraction. Also, Republicans fear that soon we will be "embryo-harvesting." Wait, is that a distraction or something to get hysterical about?

ALSO:

If you missed The Daily Show last Wednesday night it was a really fucking great episode. Ch-ch-check it out.

ALSO:

Maybe I got out of Northern Ireland at the right time.

How Do You Wear Oregon?

2009-03-07T15:25:00.001-08:00

The other day Skippy showed me how to skin a squirrel.
On my birthday the heavens gave me a beautiful dead squirrel just laying out in front of commons to satisfy my desire to make taxidermy. My fridge broke down and I decided nobody would mind if it was in the Fels fridge (based on the assumption that nobody would look inside the lumpy garbage bag without a note on the vegetable crisper). Unfortunately some hungry souls did go poking around and weren't happy about it. Then it lived outside in a labeled box until either:

An angry Felsian threw it out to spite my carelessness
A maintenance or cleaning person threw it out
A wild animal took it (unlikely, cuz it probably would've left the box and garbage bag)

Anyways, Skippy still showed me how to skin a squirrel by letting me work on his. It's a weird thing skinning an animal. It doesn't smell very bad but the smell it does have really gets into your nostrils. Skippy said it smelled like dog farts. It was really stomach acid.
The weirdest part is when you pull the squirrel's arms out of its arm-skin leaving it with a set of skinned, chicken-arms and a pair of furry arm-wings.

Soon, it will be taxidermied and then I'll feel ready to taxidermy my own squirrel without much direction. I don't know where I can find another dead animal, though; the last one dropped right into my lap.

Settling into classes and bullshit. Sitcom'll probably be fun. Projects is looking good. Etc. Don't know how I feel about Marguerite's class - it's a little intense.

Emily's bday party is tonight. I'm supposed to dress like my homestate, but I'm not sure how to dress like Oregon. I want to be a sad, beardy, guitar guy, but that's more attitude than appearance. Otherwise... how do you dress like Portland? I could be a Klan member, but unless you're from Portland that probably won't register as place-specific unless you grew up with historical pictures like this in the whitest city in the Pacific Northwest:

And only dickholes dress up like the Klan. Maybe I'll be Elliot Smith with a knife in my chest. Maybe only dickholes do that, too. Maybe I'll just be the spirit of seasonal depression.

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

Yesterday Diggy came to visit for half a second. I remembered how much I like Diggy when she related some pearls from her Disney Channel lifestyle, the choicest being that her friend was behind the wheel of the car that killed Buddy, the Clinton family dog.

Quote Wikipedia:

Buddy, however, suffered the same fate as Clinton's previous dog, a cocker spaniel named Zeke, when he was killed by a car while running loose near the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York, on January 2, 2002.

What it doesn't say there is that the friend was skipping school and she was afraid that if she stopped she'd get in trouble. Or that the Clintons lived by a highway. After the hoopla of Socks passing away this past week I was wondering how I never heard about this.
Oh the seedy underbelly of upstate New York. You could make a really benign series of noir comics about it.

R.I.P.

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

It's really strange to me that people I don't even know or don't know very well read this blog. I always think reading other people's blogs feels voyeuristic in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Especially when nobody comments on it - it's like performing for an invisible audience. Sometimes somebody will sheepishly tell me that they've been reading it and I'm always shocked because writing a blog feels so self-indulgent it's hard for me to believe that somebody would have any interest in how my classes are going or reading about smelling squirrel stomach acid. What's weirder: that or the fact that I find most blogs so boring and wanky, including mine? I guess if you hang your dirty laundry on a public line you shouldn't wonder if anyone stops to look at it.

The Future is a Big Place

2009-03-02T17:37:00.001-08:00

Hey fools,
Now that I'm back at Bennington it feels funny to write here because most of the people who read it already know what I'm doing daily as much as I do. It's like writing about being an amoeba for the amoebas you share a petri dish with.

What's new:
I had a birthday party. I'm now officially 22 and I feel younger than ever. I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way once my body starts to fail. No wonder old people are prone to depression. Growing up you get used to a constant personal sea change as you grow - each year you feel pretty distinctly different than the year before. But, it seems, once you hit 21 you sort of just go "So this is it? What's left?" All the fun parts of growing old are behind me. It's depressing to be in the middle of the prime of my youth knowing that for the rest of my life I'll just be fighting fat and wrinkles. It makes me wish our culture revered age and wisdom as much as we do youth. Where's my cane? Youth is wasted on the young! I used to be like you kids! What's a tanned, taught body to experience and worldliness? I need a drink.

But my party was fun. It got to the point I had wanted but dared not hope for - there was no room to walk and you had to just stay where you were standing. That's the sign of a successful party in the Barnes houses. Third Street represent! My glorified closet was decked out pretty well, too. Nice wedding lights and a portrait of Jesus staring down. This was, of course, not just to look festive, but because the Bow's traditionally offer our bodies into spiritual wedlock with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on our 22nd birthdays in the hopes that we will be blessed with carrying the next Christ child. It didn't work for my mom so the burden's all on these here shoulders.
What the hell am I talking about? How's your side of the petri dish?

Annnnyways, the white russians flowed like water and the presents and tchotchkes ran to my open arms. Among them, $100 for amazon.com from my mom. I took the opportunity to buy some CDs I've been wanting like Self's amazing Gizmodgery (which I've had off SoulSeek for years now, but always wanted to make it legal, kind of like my love for Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has now been formalized), TVOTR's Dear Science, Beck's latest (I'm hoping for OK and prepared for the worst after the terrible concert I saw last summer), Low's Drums and Guns, QOTSA's Lullabies to Paralyze (same deal as Gizmodgery - a fucking fantastic album), Coldplay's Prospekts March (because I've completely embraced my love of their blandness), Hatfield and the North's The Rotters Club and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's List of Lights and Buoys.

Pretty good for $100, I think. I've been listening to Soundgarden's Down on the Upside a lot over the last couple of days. I got Superunknown when I was really young and it has engrained itself in me a long time ago - so much so that I can't really listen to it anymore because it's so familiar - but I didn't get Upside until college. Kind of like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden albums sort of sound heavily samey on first listen, I think, but after time the intricacies open themselves up. And really Kim Thayil is one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Ben Shepherd is amazing and Chris Cornell generated enough goodwill from Soungarden to make me forgive Audioslave - just because he can't sing a song without wailing for the rafters doesn't mean he can't wail with the best of them.

The B-side of Down on the Upside is a little spotty and, to me, never really rises above "pretty good," but the A-Side is outstanding, from "Pretty Noose" to "Never Named;" it's flawless as far as I'm concerned.

Blah blah blah. While I'm wanking about music, here's a couple of the songs that have me the most excited about my amazon purchase:

By the way...

2009-02-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else see the response to Obama by Bobby Jindal and think it was incredibly silly in almost every way? I didn't know what to make of the fact that the GOP had suddenly started touting him as their future - "Hey, you guys like young, ethnic men? We got those!" I was ready to see some formidable opposition from the Grand Old Party, but, man does this guy seem like a clown. Am I wrong?

Click here to watch it

"I actually suck!"

Back to School Like Rodney Dangerfield

2009-02-25T15:05:00.000-08:00

Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...

Me

Stray notes:

Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.

Coraline and Nine

2009-02-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw Coraline, which was exciting. The Nightmare Before Christmas played an important part in fascinating me as a child while kind of spooking the living shit out of me at the same time. Plus, Laika studios is in Portland, so hometown pride abounds (except the kid in the film pronounced it "Ore-gahn" not "Ore-gun" which is distinctly wrong).

The visuals were amazing, but, is it just me or is Neil Gaiman not really that great? I only know a little bit about his stuff, but what I have experienced seems to me to be mish-mashes of other ideas and themes into wholes that don't necessarily become original. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of the children's movies I enjoyed growing up like A Troll in Central Park or The Last Unicorn weren't bastions of originality either, but still, that's not an excuse really... While watching Coraline I couldn't help but feel that it was a collage of themes and imagery I'd seen in a myriad of other places with little original substance of its own. It's the same way I felt about Stardust, Mirrormask and Gaiman's adaptation of Beowulf. I guess to make that claim I should have some solid evidence, which I don't, but did anyone else just find themselves recalling things like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, James and the Giant Peach, etc. and not really appreciating the movie as something on its own?

I saw it in 3D, too, which was cool but exhausting. I guess it's a neat technology and it's sure improved since the red/green glasses days, but I don't miss "2D." For one thing, putting things on different planes but keeping them at the same level of focus isn't always realistic - sometimes it's just weird. Also, I felt like my eyes could never rest - they're still burning a little.

In other news, all my dad's tools are gone and most of the books are packed up. I helped Larry, Moe and Curly move a bunch of stuff into a storage unit out in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon yesterday (which is an unincorporated part of Salem). Now I'm counting down the days that I have left in my childhood home. It's really hard to pack everything you own when a) you hate cleaning b) you hate packing and c) you hate getting rid of things.

Tricycle Christ and the Sunday Blowout

2009-02-16T01:42:00.000-08:00

Hey, as of yesterday I have 100 posts here! Wowza! Let's celebrate with a still from the (near) titular movie of this blog:

NSFW?

This weekend I traveled down to Roseburg with a friend. What an amazing little shit-hole. I saw the giant pit in the ground where I was born. I was told by my parents that, long ago, Douglas County Hospital (now the pit) used bo be next to a hill where famous goats roamed free. (When I was in elementary school I told my class I was born "in a hospital by goats" and they all laughed). The hill, Mt. Nebo, no longer has its Mt. Nebo goats, which used to come down into the hospital grounds and predict whether it would rain or not with their very presence. My friend told me that they all fell into traffic or were killed off. This is just one of the changes that Roseburg has experienced since I left it 20.5 years ago.

As we tried to leave, the tire on my friend's car went flat an hour out of town, looking like it ran over a lawnmower blade. We didn't have any of the right tools, so we had to call roadside assistance, which took an hour. After they left we discovered the battery had gone dead and we had to wait for another thirty minutes. Then a woman with no teeth on her bottom jaw except for canines (reverse vampire!) told us that the tire department at the local Walmart had shut down thirty minutes before our arrival. We eased up the freeway on a spare until we got to Springfield.

Springfield is nothing like it looks in the Simpsons. At the Springfield Walmart, Jeff Spicoli told us that they had just closed up an hour early, but that the Walmart we had come from usually stayed open later. Of course, nobody else was open given that it's a Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but if he wanted to get somewhere I'll bet he would have wanted four tires (unless he rode a tricycle).

Since there was no other alternative in sight, we drove to Portland on the spare, never going above 45 mph. This meant hugging the guardrail with the hazard lights on while the world literally passed us by. It was kind of nice, because it slowed down the whole day (it took four hours to get from Springfield to Portland, 2x what it should have), and there was a distinct sense that something wanted us to take it slow. Whatever the cosmic reasoning, we missed the 10:20 showing of Coraline, and that's that.

Tomorrow mom and I begin moving our lives down to a Salem storage unit. My room looks like a hurricane came in and fucked it. It's emptier than it was yet dirtier than it was. I can't bring myself to pack up my CDs yet. There are mixes that need to be made!

Some Things

2009-02-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

Whew, I haven't found time to write in here forever. I think my readership has dropped off to zero (to match the readership of my other, more self-indulgent blog). Today I still can't be assed to make a proper blog entry, but here are some things:

I watched Demitri Martin's Comedy Central special yesterday and laughed and laughed. Comedy Central is my de-facto channel to put on while I'm packing eBay packages because stand-up makes for good background. They've been advertising Martin's new show every five minutes until I got sick of his floppy-haired visage. I was a big fan of Demitri Martin when he was the youth correspondant on the Daily Show and I've always thought his whole schtick was just a little bit grating and I couldn't figure it out until someone told me they thought he was a smug little shit. He is kind of a smug little shit, isn't he? I don't think I could hang out with him, funny or not.
I'm going down to Roseberg, the town of my birth tomorrow. It will be a great pilgrimage. I will take pictures of the depression floating by on the breeze.
I'm in the process of packing my childhood bedroom into boxes. It's a very strange experience. It's given me the idea for a book, though. I've had the desire to write clawing at my brain for weeks now, but I haven't had a good subject (that's probably why I don't write in here anymore. Plus, like I said before, I have more of a life now that I'm back in the US). But I think I'm going to contrast some of the dumb shit I'm throwing out with some of the sweet shit I inherited from my dad (a machete, a skull, mysterious teeth...). It will give me something to do in Sue's class.
Tonight I'm seeing Lykke Li. I was stoked until someone told me she was just ok in concert. Now I'm medium-stoked.
The other night I dreamed about mice crawling all over a burlap dummy hanging from the ceiling of our garage. I tried to beat the dummy so the mice would fall out and I could catch them in a brown paper bag, but I was failing. My friend told me the mice represented petty fears and annoyances. I don't know.
I just looked in a notebook I was keeping during travel from Belfast to home. In it I wrote a in/out list for 2009. The best one: Out - High School Musical. In - Reform School Musical.
I started writing a couple of blog entries the other day, but I got tired of them and the fizzled out. One was about the batshit craziness of the comic strip, Safe Havens, and how I'm sad they've replaced it in the Oregonian with a terrible local strip. The local strip is called Adams' Apples and is about a teacher named Mr. Adams who teaches a class of wise-alec, adorable elementary school kids. I like to imagine it's about Sean's future. The strip looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and most of the jokes are like yesterdays: Person A: "I'm looking for those tablets that help you lose weight. What should I ask my pharmacist for?" Person B: "Girth-control pills!" That shit makes Garfield look like Proust.

Half-assed tv follow-up post

2009-02-08T17:12:00.001-08:00

I'm finding it hard to keep up with real life here now that I have one. In lieu of that, here's some more comments about tv and junk:

My fears earlier this week were unfounded about The Office. Oh man was that a good episode; right back into the bittersweet funny.

My fears about Skins were very founded, though. (Spoilers if you care) Skins took a page out of Degrassi's book this week and sent its most interesting character to Africa (right after we got to know him!). There were some ok moments as stories and characters develop a little bit, though I sure wish it would stop trying to be edgy and crazy and just represent how real teenagers act. In my opinion, the inclusion of a mobster character who gets tangled up with teenagers for some reason (not to mention his comical henchmen) is like when The Flintstones added the Great Gazoo or Itchy and Scratchy added Poochy: it's just unnecessary and bizarre. If they went all the way and made him act like a human being (problems with that this season) they might get somewhere, but instead he drinks Cup o Noodles to show he's tough and challanges a 16-year-old to a fight that consists of eating raw peppers. What the fuck? What universe is this?

As for what's happening in the Bow household, I'm surrounded by things that need homes. Since my mom and I are both moving, everything we own needs to be packed, given away or sold. A mountain of old t-shirts and baseball caps is going out the door to make room for weird inheritances like a machete and creepy masks. They're not interchangable when it comes to usefulness, but some things are more important than others.

All Things Geek

2009-02-04T00:33:00.001-08:00

Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.

From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.

Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.

In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.

As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.

I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!

Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:

But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.

These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.

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

Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?

Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?

Steve Martin and the Bloody Nose

2009-02-02T16:50:00.000-08:00

"Waved to Sal, he's Filipino!"

Amelie Gilette at the Onion AV Club wrote about Saturday's SNL with this really cringe-worthy banjo performance by Steve Martin. I was aware that SNL had stopped being funny, but I hadn't thought about Steve Martin. I know he's a comedy legend, but all I can think about are Pink Panther parts 1 and 2, Cheaper By the Dozen parts 1 and 2 and this. IMDb is telling me he was in The Man With Two Brains, but I don't think I believe them. Was Steve Martin ever funny?

Regardless of history, this performance is not for comedy's sake nor is it for an upcopming children's album. It is an honest-to-God, sincere song for adults. Shocking.

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

I don't normally write about truly personal things here. It feels exhibitionistic and cheap to me. But I felt like sharing today.
Last night I think I had my first dream truly dealing with my dad's death. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago where he was around and I had to wake up to remember he was dead, which was strange, but this was different. In my dream I was reading out of an imagined childhood book I owned, personalized with a main character named David Bow. In the book David finds a briefcase containing paternal signifiers like a trenchcoat, fedora and pipe. When he opens it his father magically comes back. I was reading from the book to friends, but when I got to the part about opening the briefcase I just started crying so hard I couldn't read. All my friends understood.

Earlier in the dream I was at a party with some people. The party was like a child's themed birthday, with giant inflatable barnyard buildings we were informed were empty. I thought that meant there would be no animals, but I found a pen with some coyotes inside. The pen-keeper told me and my friend that they called them "big porcupines," which made sense to us when he grabbed one by the scruff of its neck and lifted it, yelping, outside the cyclone fencing. He then proceeded to lay it on the ground, where it exposed a big, jagged mouthful of teeth.

I couldn't tell what he was doing to it, subduing it or killing it, but he had a knife out and was moving around its body. Blood started to come out of its nostrils and, it seemed, elsewhere, forming a big river of blood in the mud at our feet. I was startled and my own nose started to bleed. I wiped it with my hand and ran to the bathroom across the dirt road to wash up to save me the embarrassment of having the man notice I was bleeding as well. This is the third night in a row where I've dreamed of my nose bleeding in response to being startled by things (last night it was a horse rearing at me). This is weird in a lot of ways, one of them being that my nose doesn't bleed when I'm startled (though once it bled in 6th grade Humanities class when the teacher said "Regina, Canada" and I contained my laughter so much I think it created some kind of pressure).

I have a book from 1938 about dream interpretation that I consulted when I woke up this afternoon. It says that a nosebleed is a good luck sign and "augers health and relief from anxiety." Or at least it did in the '30s. Online dream journals all say different things.

Anyways, I dreamed for so long that I woke up very late and now I'll be awake again all night.

Grandpa Wrestling

2009-01-31T21:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-30T21:25:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-29T15:43:00.001-08:00

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...

Happy holidays

2008-12-17T17:41:00.000-08:00

Well world,
Blogging for these last few months has obviously made an impression on me, because I'm blogging while I'm drunk, now. I've just said goodbye to my physical friends, now I'm saying goodbye to my virtual ones.
I'm leaving for Spain in a bit and I thought I'd send out a message of peace and goodwill to the world. I don't know if I'll have the internet where I'm going - if I do, that's cool, if I don't, it'll probably do me good - but merry Christmas, anyways. Keep checking back here during the holiday season, because I'll probably find a way to keep posting. If I don't, I'll start up again on Jan. 4th when I get home to Portland. If I don't until then, keep letting that eagle soar, America.

Hey, let's pretend that the last 8 years were a joke, ok? That'll be my Christmas present.
Now I have to pack...

What's a-Happenin' Hot Stuff?

2008-12-16T09:59:00.000-08:00

I only got a few hours of sleep last night, so when I got home from lectures today I just took some me-time. Tomorrow night I ship out so all I have left to do is study and pack, really. I also went to Top Man today and got a second pair of jeans, cuz I like the other ones I bought and they're only 20 pounds, which is pretty great. While walking around in the rain and the fog I took some farewell pictures of Belfast that I'll put up on Facebook or something. But let's talk about The Happening.
Following the many delights that I found in An American Carol, I thought today I would watch another infamous movie from 2008 that I've been curious about and don't mind seeing on the internet.

Remember when The Sixth Sense came out and suddenly M. Night Shyamalan was the hottest new director with a cult that seemed to form overnight? Then Unbreakable came out and people were like, "That was a bit of a misfire, but he's still young; they can't all be winners." Then Signs came out and it was ok, but seemed a little Christian-y and Mel Gibson-y and the big twist (people were starting to notice a reliance on these twist things) about the aliens' weakness was really stupid? By the time The Village came out all the remaining fans had turned to apologists, though, from what I remember, it was like most of the movies beforehand with a pretty good build-up - it was just the explanation at the end that blew. Then Lady in the Water, which, from what I hear, is really really bad and has water-nymphs in it.
Remember all that? What a long, disappointing trip it's been.

Then Shyamalan came out in 2008 with The Happening, which I had heard was his worst yet. But, like, so bad it's good. I asked myself, "Could M. Night have already turned into a parody of himself?" A few days ago the Christian girl who lives next to me and only enjoys movies like Step Up and Nanny McPhee told me that it was the only horror movie she liked, cuz it made her think. Now I was really intrigued.

Today I spent an hour and a half watching a movie that, though it can't beat An American Carol in the race to be the worst big-budget movie of the past decade, it nips at its heels - though I haven't seen the update to The Wicker Man (mostly because I liked the original more than I like Nick Cage), which sounds like it could give The Happening a run for its money.

The Happening is shockingly, hilariously bad. Not misguided- and ugly-bad like American Carol, but what-was-everyone-thinking-bad. As well as being a former-Shyamalan apologist I'm also a Mark Wahlberg apologist, having really liked him in movies like The Departed and Four Brothers. Unfortunately, here he turns in what can only be classified as a tribute to the spirit of awful cinematic performance. Zooey Deschanel is worshipping right there with him, as they play adults who cherish mood rings and get jealous over dessert-invites and cough-syrup purchases like 8-year-olds.

The twist to the movie, alone, is ridiculously dumb. It comes about 30 minutes into the movie, but if you don't know (*SPOILER*) the movie is about plants giving off fumes that make people kill themselves. This means lots of Mark Wahlberg and co. running from the wind, which is just as silly as it sounds. He also meets a weird horticulturist who's obsessed with hotdogs, a crazy old lady who accuses him of being homicidal for no reason (and has the best non-sinister sinister line in a movie ever when she says "Why are you eyeing my lemon drink?"), a military officer who says things like "cheese and crackers!" instead of swearing in times of national crisis and more.

Thankfully, some youtube heros have put together clips of the very best moments. And oh, they are so, so sweet. I like that two clips claiming to have the best moments from the movie are made up mostly of different equally hilarious parts (except the guy laying down in front of a thresher and Marky Mark's placation of the crazy lady, which made both cuts). The second clip is shittier quality, but worth the watch, if only for Wahlberg singing and the kid in his class saying "global warming."

Cheese and Crackers!

Non-Post

2008-12-15T17:56:00.000-08:00

So, while Bennington is letting it's current students out into the freezing Vermont tundra, I'm still here in Belfast. Only two more days after today, then it's on to Francia with mama mia (was that Italian? I don't know what I did there).
I've been spending my time here studying, drinking, saying goodbye and writing blog posts nobody reads.

Other activities:

Sketching portraits based on people's Facebook photos, which is really just a big image library (if you're creepy).
Reading my horoscope for 2009, as predicted by The Onion.
Bulleted lists
Trying to remember how to say "stabbed to death" in Old English for my test on Wednesday (it's "ofstingan")
Listening to "Johnny Hit & Run Pauline" a gazillion times, by X, punk's cutest couple this side of Kim and Thurston:

Discovering that dating is obsolete, courtesy of Mr. Charles Blow (...David Charles Blow??). That means if you haven't been going on dates much recently you're ahead of the curve. Go you! Go me!
Spending all my UK pennies on a blank casette.
Watching Top Gear and kind of understanding why it's the biggest show in the UK and not just a British Discovery Channel series. Kind of.
Thinking about how I'm going to get to the airport but not actually planning anything.
Procrastinating.

Shoe Me Once, Shame On You. Shoe Me Twice... We Won't Get Shoed Again

2008-12-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

I can't stop blogging!
I thought the post I just did about An American Carol would be my only one of the day, but this was too good to pass up. These last three posts have actually been a triptych (in honor of Benjamin Busch) documenting things that are so amazing they need no parody.

When I got home tonight and turned to CNN, I was treated to the information that an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at George Bush today (apparently "one of the ULTIMATE insults an Arab can make"... besides, you know, blowing you up).

Symbolic actions like this rarely hit the intended mark, in my view. A lot of times somebody making a big scene to call attention to a cause or belief will either interrupt or hinder something that's actually working towards their aim or put off supporters by the sheer callousness. But here, it's really pretty perfect, isn't it? It's not like it interrupted some peace talk that might be actually taking us somewhere - Ol' GW is just over in Iraq to give some face-time while he's counting down his last days. And I don't know how put off any Iraqis could be - even if shoe-throwing is the ULTIMATE insult - considering the even ULTIMATER insult of fucking up a war in their country.

Let's look at what CNN has to say:

The shoe-thrower -- identified as Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist with Egypt-based al-Baghdadia television network -- could be heard yelling in Arabic: "This is a farewell ... you dog!"
While pinned on the ground by security personnel, he screamed: "You killed the Iraqis!"
Al-Zaidi was dragged away. While al-Zaidi was still screaming in another room, Bush said: "That was a size 10 shoe he threw at me, you may want to know."

What a great response! "You killed Iraqis!" "Hey, that guy threw a pretty big shoe at me. That could have really hurt! Must have pretty big feet, heh heh."

"So what if the guy threw his shoe at me?" Bush told a reporter in response to a question about the incident.

Yeah, so what? People throw things at him all the time! Maybe nobody told him it was the ULTIMATE insult...

"Let me talk about the guy throwing his shoe. It's one way to gain attention. It's like going to a political rally and having people yell at you. It's like driving down the street and having people not gesturing with all five fingers. ...
"These journalists here were very apologetic. They ... said this doesn't represent the Iraqi people, but that's what happens in free societies where people try to draw attention to themselves."

I bet if they still had a dictatorship nobody would be embarrassing the country like that. Maybe those Taliban guys have a point...

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

Just below on the CNN homepage: McCain Won't Say He'd Back Palin For President.

McCain was pressed on why he can't promise support for the woman who, just months ago, he named as the second best person to lead the nation.

"Have no doubt of my admiration and respect for her and my view of her viability, but at this stage, again ... my corpse is still warm, you know?" he replied.

Yes John, we know.

Blogging An American Carol

2008-12-14T08:58:00.000-08:00

So I have a bunch of work to do before I'm ready to take a trip to Spain on Thurs, not the least being my big Old English exam, but some things can wait and others can't. I had to put down The Dream of the Rood to study a different artifact sure to have anthropologists of the future dissecting it for centuries to come. I am, of course, talking about David Zucker's An American Carol, a movie I have been perversely excited to see. Luckily, watch-movies.net has it uploaded so I don't actually have to give anyone money for the joy I am anticipating (which would, incidentally, decrease my joy considerably). What happens when the creator of such comedy classics as Airplane! and The Naked Gun puts together a satire or the Amurrica-hatin', Commie-lovin', baby-abortin', dope-smokin' liberal left joined by a cast dripping with desperation (Gary Coleman, Chris Farley's brother) mixed with senility (Leslie Nielson and the boss from Seinfeld who's now on Family Feud), smugness (Bill O'Reilly, playing himself) and the only social conservatives in Hollywood (John Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Trace Adkins)? I can't wait to find out!

(This cartoon is from a blog raving about the film: "At long last, a Hollywood film that isn't flamingly Moonbatty!"

I'm going to blog about the first fifteen minutes or so, just so I can pretend we're enjoying this together. You can follow along here (I'm using the third link) if you feel so inclined. Or perhaps you think you're above spending your evening watching Gary Coleman play a character named Bacon Stains Malone...?

It opens on a 4th of July picnic as grandpa Leslie Nielson, surprisingly still vertical, flips USA-burgers for his clan of lily-white children. Then, true to his roots as an American comedy giant, Leslie pegs an old lady in the face with a frisbee. Leslie's back!
The story of the "Scrooge who hated the 4th of July" begins in Afghanistan, where everyone's named Mohammad Huessein! Hahaha! Their culture's different than ours! For some reason, however, when something goes wrong the leader swears, "Jesus!" Given that it's not played for comedic effect, methinks David Zucker could've done a little bit more research into fundamentalist Muslim culture...

4:56 - "Leader," pleads a terrorist, "ever since the Americans came people have hope now, they are voting, women own buisinesses." Mission Accomplished! Wait, does that mean we can leave now? The Taliban (which is apparently made up of three guys) decides they need to find a director to make recruitment videos for them who hates America (which "won't be hard to find in Hollywood," har har; real patriots make movies about frisbees to the face). Enter Chris Farley's brother playing Michael Moore (here, Michael Malone).
6:33 - How does David Zucker tackle Michael Moore's footage of bringing desperate Americans to Cuba for health care? By showing us what we all really know Cuba is like: dirty, Hispanic commies who execute wheelchair-bound Americans for no reason. When Malone wraps shooting of his movie, Die You American Pigs (seriously) gets back on his raft to leave, all the Cubans rush it to leave their Godforsaken shithole of an island and arrive at America's shining shores.

9:05 - Michael Malone snubs some Boy Scouts taking donations for our troops in Iraq. Why? If you hate the war, you hate our troops, duh. He goes and buys Girl Scout cookies instead. Cuz he's fat!!
10:00 - Malone's 4th of July abolition rally is fronted by a send up on MoveOn.org (here MooveAlong). Zucker unmasks MoveOn for what it really is: an organization run by ignorant teenagers (they don't know who Nixon is - they really must be Commies) and supported by the following embarrassing groups: People Against the American Way, Vegans Against Fur, Manboy Loveboat, Padawami Casino and the Church of Entitlement. I like that Native Americans and vegans rank up there with pedophiles on the conservative hate-scale. (btw, wouldn't Manboy Loveboat make a great band name?)
11:40 - Michael Malone eats rat-infested pizzas and buckets of lard. Subtle, Zucker. Bob Cratchet shows up in the form of Michael Malone's country music-lovin', navy-hero nephew. He invites Malone to a Trace Adkins concert (who is, according to this movie, a big country music star all over America except in New York). Does this mean Trace Adkins is Fezziwig??
13:50 - Malone's agent: "Apparently Michael, the people who like your movies don't actually go to movies." This must really be a subtle dig at the Academy after they gave Moore that Oscar back in 2003, yet have overlooked such David Zucker gems like Superhero Movie and Scary Movie 4. They probably don't like Trace Adkins either.
14:06 - No, it's even better: "I'm an Oscar-winning director," Malone says. "Yeah," counters his agent, "for a documentary," as he makes the jack-off motion with his hand. Does David Zucker go to movies?
15:40 - Hey, Paris Hilton's in this! Does she even know that she's being used as a punchline? Does she even care? She's presenting the MooveAlong.org award for best documentary, the Leni Reifenstahl Award. Get it?? GET IT??! "Through the creative manipulation of truth, she was able to influence history, demonstrating the power of film. Although unfortunately resulting in the death of over 60,000,000 people in World War II, her place in any cinematic hall of fame is secure." GET IT? GET IT?????!! David Zucker really doesn't like documentaries, huh?

Holy fucking shit, it just keeps getting better and better. I'd love to blog about it minute by minute, but the real fun comes from watching it not reading about it. Remember in my last blog post how I said one of my favorite things is when parodies are so ridiculous they become parodies of themselves? That's An American Carol in a big way and, suffice to say, it's even better than I could have even imagined.

UPDATE: I just finished watching it and my mouth was seriously open for the last 30 minutes. There is absolutely no way to anticipate things like Dennis Hopper picking off ACLU members with a shotgun while they try to remove the Ten Commandments from a courtroom or Trace Adkins telling Michael Malone that a stadium full of marines listening to modern country was "the real America" (Sarah Palin all over). Everyone has to see this movie.

Odds and Ends

2008-12-13T10:40:00.001-08:00

So I've got a real post in the works, but I don't feel like writing it right now, so I'm just going to share some things:

I've gone into detail before on my love of shitty political cartoons that I disagree with. In the midst of a bunch of fawning cartoons about Obama at Slate, there was this:

All the reasons that this cartoon is stupid are so numerous and obvious I won't go into them. I'll just let you soak it in. Really, cartoons that unintentionally mimic The Onion's intentionally awful editorials like the one below make me laugh. I love it when reality outdoes parody for ridiculousness. Also, no matter what, editorial cartoons are never really funny, but they can become transcendentally greatly awful when they apparently come from some paranoid, misanthropic crank who's scared of change and knows his way around a pen. I wish I could see what the artist of the above cartoon would have written about Lincoln's victory if he'd been alive then.

Today I went into city center to pick up some Xmas gifts. I got my mom some earrings and myself some CDs - among them Death Cab For Cutie's Narrow Stairs. I've always been put off by Death Cab's extreme blandness coupled with Ben Gibbard's irritatingly writerly lyrics. It's the same mixture that has always kept me away from the Decemberists as well. I took a writing class once where the teacher talked about how distracting it is to the reader when they can "hear the writing," and that's what I feel about the lyrics of both bands. The lyrics that "She can't relax with his hand on the small of her back/ and as the flashbulbs burst, she holds a smile/ like someone would hold a crying child" are beautiful and evocative but they seem too calculated and unnatural to me. There's a coat of self-satisfaction on the whole thing.

Regardless, I was won over by the feeling and hooks of songs like "Cath..." and "I Will Possess Your Heart." At least, won over enough to plop down a few pounds for a used copy. All that's a backhanded way of saying that a band that I've always rolled my eyes at put out some songs that I think are really affecting. The rest of the album still sounds a bit like the soundtrack to an indie waiting room to me, but, you know...

What does it do for my mixed feelings about the album that Ben Gibbard looks kind of like Rainn Wilson mixed with a Hobbit in this video? I haven't decided yet.

The other CDs I picked up were Exile in Guyville and Portishead's Dummy, two albums that get blessed with the "classic" label a lot but I've never really given much time. I also got Under the Big Black Sun by X, The Ink Spots' Greatest Hits and an album called The Magic Wurlitzer that I was really excited about, but I kind of underestimated the annoyingness of the Wurlitzer as an instrument. It's pretty interminable. But it was cheap and I guess if I ever buy a skating rink and can't hire my own organ player I'm set.

(3) people hate you - A Love Letter to Banner Advertising

2008-12-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

There's a new trend in pop windows and banners on websites that can obviously tell where your server is connected. They try and personalize their advertisements in hilariously contrived ways. A favorite of mine are the fake chat windows that pop up with women in bikinis who are so desperate they cut right to the chase: "You're in Belfast, too? Wanna hang out? I'm horny! ;-P"

I just found one that takes a tact I haven't seen before. If I could take screencaps with this PC I would, but I don't know how, so I just have to recreate it here for you:

There's a picture of a heart in an envelope a d a flashing button that says CONTINUE. Above that it reads:

You Have (3) Hate Letters
(2) People have a crush on you from Belfast.
(3) people hate you.

I thought this was so funny that I had to click on it. Predictably, it just directed me to some page asking for my email address. This was too high a price for further satiation of my curiosity. When I tried to close the tab, though, a warning would pop up saying:
IMPORTANT - YOUR CRUSH IS TRYING TO CONTACT YOU AT THIS VERY MOMENT. PRESS OK TO READ YOUR LETTER.

I love the idea of the idly curious loner who holds on to the shred of a possibility that someone is trying to contact him through banner ads. "I have a crush?" this hypothetical person asks himself. "Impossible! ... Or is it?" Maybe it's the sheer force of these pronouncements that leaves these poor pushovers into clicking on these ads; like a misplaced fear of being rude: "My crush must really want me if they're going so far as to advertise to get my attention. Maybe they own a banner ad company. I mean, they probably don't even exist, but if they do... shouldn't I know about it?"

The best part of the above ad is how it hedges its bets. If you're not desperate enough to believe that mysterious crushes are trying to contact you, maybe you're paranoid enough to believe that your enemies are. Maybe both! Show your imaginary enemies what's up by rubbing their noses in the imaginary letters from your imaginary crushes!

I'd love to see a cross-section of the people who actually do click on these ads (the idly curious, like myself, excluded). Even more, I'd like to see a meeting where cyber shysters come up with new ways to hook suckers in 12 words or less. "What if you have to click a button to make Amy Winehouse punch George Bush? And when you knock him out your crush will send you a funny video of a cat falling off a bike? Then we'll sell them car insurance."

~~~~~~~~~~~

In completely unrelated news, I always appreciate it when someone smarter and more articulate than me can argue my views for me so I don't have to hurt my brain trying to do it for myself. That's why I enjoyed seeing Jon Stewart state the case for gay marriage against lovably affable social conservative and bipedal Basset Hound, Mike Huckabee:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mike Huckabee Pt. 2

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Watch it if you want to feel the same vicarious thrill that I'm feeling. Of course, we all know where arguments pitting logic against faith get us. Still, I like imagining I'm over Jon Stewart's shoulder saying things like "Yeah!" and "So there!"

Dream Journal vol. 3

2008-12-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

You know what's more boring than vacation photos? Someone telling you about their dreams. Luckily, my blog has both of these features. I figure it must be like a double-negative making a positive because my blog is the most interesting blog ever.
Nothing new from the past couple of days: I've just been hella-stressed trying to tie up all the loose ends before I leave in a couple of weeks and still enjoy myself. Did you know that I have to write 3 essays over Christmas break? Gag me. One of them is going to be about Great Expectations. I'm expecting it to be greatly boring.
I also have a test in Old English next Wednesday. I just finished cramming some of the grammar and I'm feeling a little bit more confident. I'm at least confident that I'm not a dumbass, because, in cramming I've realized that one of my main stumbling blocks was the sheer amount of grammatical cases we have to memorize. How am I supposed to remember the 16 different case-types the word "they" can take? It's ridiculous!
It's all studying from now on, though. I've just finished translating The Dream of the Rood, an Old English poem about a guy who dreams Jesus' cross comes flying into his room and talks to him. The cross tells him how horrible it was to be the cross that Christ was killed on and how sad it made him. At no point does the dreamer question the authenticity of the flying, talking, sentient, 1000-year-old cross. I guess if you're willing to accept such a thing's existence, it's not a stretch to believe what it has to tell you (especially if what it has to tell you is the same old boring crucifixion story: "They nailed Jesus to me and I was sad! Wah!" - you're a cross!)

My dreams over the last month haven't been about flying religious curios. Than what? Read on...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I was traveling with the cast of Futurama in a black, death-metal mini-bus from Africa to a famine-ravaged Poland. We had been told to leave Africa, where the hyenas were plentiful - a common source of food - by a deceitful, giant snake. At least the leader of our crew somehow obtained one of the snake's serrated fangs. While I was showing it to the crew members at the back of the mini-bus I put it in my mouth and sucked on it, forgetting that it was venomous. Upon remembering this, I spit it onto the row of seats in front of me and determinedly fought off sleep and inevitable death.

The bus wound up at the entrance of my private high school, running over a sign advertising the Eminem concert set to take place that night. Because of this violation, Irish cops in yellow reflective jumpers stopped our bus and we couldn't go any further.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I was a regular at a gambling parlor with Max Bussman. I didn't have the requisite entrance fee so Max spotted me enough pounds to get in, but I had to hold the pile of clothes he was carrying while he did so and I lost one of his socks.
I told him he could have one of mine once we made our way up to his bedroom and I'd scattered the pile of clothes on the floor. I convinced him my socks were clean, but it took some time.

Later, I was using the bathroom in his house when his mom came home to give a piano lesson. I held the curtain over the window that was unfortunately set at eye-level to those sitting on the toilet, giving a direct view out into the driveway. While I was attempting some modesty, his dad came through the hallway where the door was open and noticed his Buddy Holly Greatest Hits CD at my feet and he asked me if I owned it. I told him that no, I had a different greatest hits collection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Last night in the Dublin hostel I dreamed that the hostel owners took our bags from our room while they were serving us breakfast and there was nothing we could do about it. I also dreamed that I, or a friend, had a flying machine that manuevered the swampy green fields right outside the hostel window.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed I woke up in a Washington, DC apartment I was temporarily staying in with Raphaela and a different friend while some sort of festival was in full swing. On adjacent buildings and all through the street people were committing all sorts of naked Mardi Gras-style debauchery. The apartment was even full of people no one knew, most of them drugged up on the floor or patiently sitting on the couch. None of them remembered how they got in.

My friend was gone and all that remained familiar was Raphaela's hungry pet ferret that I finally cornered in a room for it's own safety. I blocked the door with boxes so it couldn't get out. Ferrets can't climb.

I left the people in the apartment and walked down the street wearing a nice sport coat and hoping I'd run into Bill Clinton. After I struck a leisurely pose on a concrete city planter, Bill came by and welcomed me to join him and Hilary in the Capital building. We were on a first name basis.

They had me wait in a little kitchen filled with terrible, rowdy kids and an overwrought babysitter. I tried to give her advice - "Don't back down; stay consistent" - but it didn't help anything. The kids were so out of control I barely constrained myself from slapping on of them or boxing their ears, despite their age. Finally Hilary came to collect me and gave me a VIP All-Access badge to the Capital building: a white heart sticker with cherries inside of it. We then left together to have lunch in George Washington's old office, which had been kept just as he left it. Marveling at the room, Hilary and I ran our hands over all the first president's possessions, especially his lovely mahogany desk.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I dreamed my mom read my dad an article in the newspaper about Chinese overpopulation and expressed the view that this made her scared I would become the next Charles Manson. I told her that assumption offended me, but I couldn't make her understand why. I said, "As long as I grow up right, I'll be fine."
My dad's solution to growing up right: "Wheat. Oats. Cookies."

~~~~~

Ok Junior Freuds out there: what does it all mean?

America Missed Out

2008-12-07T17:06:00.000-08:00

Remember in 2004 when British band The Darkness blew the charts open with their disarming mix of winking over-the-top attitude and a sincere love of Queen? Their subsequent backlash (we were just talking about this, right?) must have come too quickly for their hometown friends Goldie Lookin Chain to break in the US. Or maybe it's because they're like a walking in-joke on British chav culture, which holds no cultural relevance in America.

Either way, Goldie Lookin Chain is an exquisitely stupid rap group who had five exquisitely stupid hits: "Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do," "Have Man Half Machine," "Your Mother's Got a Penis," "You Knows I Love You," and the extremely British slag off of Victoria Beckham, "Your Missus is a Nutter."

Just like The Darkness, Goldie Lookin Chain really says more about the people snickering at it than the people it's ostensibly making fun of. I always thought The Darkness made their irritating fans who were too self-conscious to indulge in glam rock without a safe layer of irony look worse than people who aren't embarrassed to listen to Journey or Boston. Likewise, listening to GLC was probably more comfortable to a lot of young British folks than listening to NWA was. Either way, check out this awesomely bad video for "Your Mother's Got a Penis" and imagine seeing this on American MTV.

Katy Perry, How I Hate You

2008-12-07T06:46:00.000-08:00

Today I needed to share how angry Katy Perry makes me. I don't know if her 15 minutes is up in the States, but it keeps ticking over here (though it's definitely on a downswing). She reminds me of other artists in the past who I've stood on the sidelines and watched part of the world go ga-ga over (I know anyone reading this isn't included there, but, to prove my point, CNN chose to interview her the other day) just waiting for the inevitable backlash. I was trying to make a mental list of these other artists who were really hot one day only to have all of their fans disowned them the next. Of course, this happens a lot in the "indie" community - usually when a band gets semi-popular - but nobody but the indie community is listening to those bands, so it doesn't count. I was thinking more along the lines of Creed and boy/girl bands (also still strong in the UK), where it felt like the whole world went crazy for a little while before dumping them. What other names am I trying to think of?

Anyway, the point is, Katy Perry is one of those artists - I can tell she's one of them because I can't seem to write about why she's so awful, the reasons seem too glaringly obvious for any right-thinking person. This isn't snobbery, it's common sense. The levels of ignorance and faux-attitude in the first line of "Hot n Cold" speak for themselves, don't they? Don't they, world??

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes/ Yeah, you PMS like a bitch, I would know."

Nothing could make me angrier than a walking Betty Page-lite miming feminine empowerment, yet undercutting it with retrograding gender stereotypes and calculated sass. How can you hear lyrics like that without seeing the league of middle-aged, male writers who put the song together (Dr. Luke and Max Martin, in this instance)? Isn't it a bit like the white guys at Disney writing James Baskett's Uncle Remus-jive talk in Song of the South? There's condescension just dripping off the thing. The message coming from these lyrics is that women are inherently fickle and bitchy. Because they're not girls, men should be above these traits, but women can't help it.

And it's not that I'm just an overprotective dad, but it disgusts me to see middle schoolers choking down this kind of thing. It's like those shirts little girls buy that say "Spoiled Princess" or whatever, thus reinforcing this Super Sweet 16 attitude; telling little boys and girls that it is appropriate and desirable for girls to be sassy, sexy bitches. I'd rather Jeff Dunham were popular with todays youth.

The bottom line is, that, like Creed before her, I will be happily relieved when Katy Perry falls on her face. I look forward to her lame sophomore release that will cause the Disney Channel Generation to find some new pop tart to worship, while Perry joins Fergie and Avril Lavigne in outdated corporate sex-symbol purgatory (Fergatory?).

HEY KIDS! You don't understand my points? You wanna read an updated opinion on why I hate Katy Perry? You think I'm an old jerk who just doesn't understand and wanna send me some more hate mail? Then bop on over to the new and improved rant and tell me what you think!

Ostrich Nog

2008-12-06T21:04:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I ate an ostrich. It gave me mild food poisoning, but was good enough that I'd eat it again. I could have had wild boar or kangaroo, but I had to choose wisely. Maybe some other day...

Tomorrow I'm going to make eggnog for the folks in my flat because they've never had it before. I mentioned it the other day and was met with blank stares. Unfortunately eggnog is not something that sounds good when you describe it (the exact same thing happened around Thanksgiving with pumpkin pie). "So it's raw eggs?" asked one. "No, you add nutmeg... and liquor... it's good." I replied. No one was too enthused. I'll show them! I converted non-believers into eating pumpkin, I can sure make them drink something with liquor. They're Irish and freshmen, after all.

In other news, I saw the greatest video today:

Leave the Christmas Tree Queen Alone!

2008-12-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

CNN Headlines of the day:

Robbers in drag steal $100 million in jewel heist
Christmas tree queen told: "You're crazy"

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

It's been a slowly day. I was interviewed by a girl doing a social-economics class about what it's like being an American in Belfast. It was more of a conversation, though, because whenever I'd say something then she'd tell me about her thoughts on it. And it lasted an hour longer than she said it would. Partly because she talked more than I did. Boring.

I finally saw the Christmas market in city center, which was full of delicious looking food. Santa was supposed to be there, but now I guess he's gone. My plan was/maybe still is to get a picture of him holding up a Christmas greeting to my secret Santa in the house, but now he's skated and I'm not sure where to find him. I guess he's up at the North Pole with the carpenter elves making presents. Like Bratz dolls.

Speaking of Bratz dolls, did you hear that Mattel won a lawsuit and now has the power to make them go away forever? Say what you will about Barbie (and there's plenty to say, the slag) but she's way better than those slutty little preteen freaks with their miniskirts and their excess cranial fluid. Of course, Mattel could just decide to manufacture Bratz on their own. Given how much money they make I wouldn't be surprised. But it would still depress me incredibly. That would mean Mattel would have a monopoly on unrealistic standards for little girls.

Worse than normal Bratz? Bratz Babyz.

Look at this little tramp. A bikini top, a coy little pose and a mouth like a blow-up doll and she can't be three years old. What is the world coming to? What are we teaching our babies?? Is our children learning??

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

On a completely different topic, I started watching My So-Called Life this Friday. It's one of many shows that's been on my radar as a show I need to watch, but I know that when I do I'll get totally sucked in, so I've avoided it 'til I have time. Now that my heavy reading's over, I can indulge myself. Other shows like that: The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks/Undeclared (which I watched some of when they were originally on, but were a little close for comfort at the time. I still get cred points, though) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (which was on a lot in the Bow household when I was really young, so I have fond memories of it. I'm curious if those hold up or, like all my other Star Trek reactions, I don't cotton to it).

Anyways, My So-Called Life is nothing short of amazing. As I told Maggie Duffy, I am not in high school anymore and I'm not a female (anymore?) but I still feel a high school girl inside of me reacting like this show defines her whole existence. If you were to split up my personality into stock characters (like a certain Robin Williams movie I've heard is on the horizon) one would be a pre-pubescent boy, one would be an old man and one would be a teenage girl - call her Bowtina (or Boesha). I'm not saying that's all I have going on in there (one's bound to be a 21-year-old male from Oregon) but they crop up a lot. Anyway, Bonica - who is probably the impetus for rebelling against Victorian novels and regressing back to middle school with Twilight when I get home - is totally in love with this show and lives in a blissful world where Jared Leto never got fat and made Chapter 27.
Also, it really reflects my memories of the '90s. Some shows from this same period - like Friends, which is constantly on here - reflect '90s pop-culture, but not actual life. The Friends characters never lived in a world that wasn't two or three disconnects away from reality (have you seen their apartments? And Joey's an actor!). Watching Friends only reminds me of what it was like to be in the '90s watching Friends. My So-Called Life is reminding me of what it was actually like to live then. Wowee wow wow. And I'm only one episode in (so maybe I'm jumping the gun with my praise a little bit).

In other media news, I watched the awful '80s slasher, Pieces today. It was record-setting bad. I wish someone else had been here to watch it with me, but nobody here likes real horror movies. They'll watch things like Saw, which is like saying you like rock music because you listen to Hinder - it doesn't count.
The best scene in Pieces posted below. Please click for an Oscar-worthy performance by a woman playing a tennis-pro/detective(?) She's just discovered the body of another tennis star (topless, naturally) cut up in the locker room (by a chainsaw, naturally).

I also have to watch the BBC version of Tipping the Velvet, which should be interesting. I'm not sure how the censors would even approach a story about cross-dressing homosexual vaudevillian prostitutes. I mean, even the title is a euphemism for cunnilingus! So what I'm really saying is that I was basically assigned to read a book and watch a 3-hour adaptation called Cunnilingus.
I've been imagining what euphemisms possible sequels would have for titles and trying to make up my own. All of them are gross and none are funny enough to repeat here. I like to imagine that, had the book been written using slang from American Victorian culture rather than British it would be called something like Pussy Lickin', which would undoubtedly sell books. Or some made up slang, like Jazzin' the Cat or Washing the Dishes.
What is wrong with me?

Girls Aloud Made Me Made Me Love Them

2008-12-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask me which song most defined my Belfast experience it would have to be "The Promise" by Girls Aloud. You should really watch the video while trying not to hate it and simultaneously trying not to love it.

I've heard this song at least a hundred times since I landed here, none of them of my own free will. Unlike that shitty Kid Rock song and all of Katy Perry's songs which refuse to stop being popular here, this Girls Aloud song has entered my ear and begun to control me like the yerks from the Animorphs books. I don't like it or respect it, but it has turned my hatred for it into a grudging affection, even though it sounds like a hybrid of No Doubt with the Spice Girls at their euro-trashiest.
This video is also a good barometer for what the music scene is like here. In a word: shit. But Stockholm Syndrome has set in and I'm beginning to understand my captors and sympathize with them.

Runner ups:
The Saturdays - Up.
This song is a boring version of "Disturbia":

Who Da Funk - Shiny Disco Ball:
You may think this is the trashiest of euro-trash and you wouldn't be wrong. But don't get too snooty, Jack; the atrociously-named Who Da Funk are from the US. I feel dirty by association.

I'm grumpy

2008-12-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

I haven't had much time or desire to write here lately, but this morning I slept through my class this morning, so I thought I'd catch up on my real work.
When I started this blog I was planning on steering away from the self-indulgent whinefest model that most take, but today's entry is an exception. Sorry!

The weather here has turned into pure, icy shit and my classes are superlame. I've realized that learning Old English is really hard and that I've neglected to do it. That and it's getting hard to force myself into actually working; my initiative has just gone out the window. Was it naive of me to think that we'd be reading translations of Old English and analyzing them, rather than translating them? Maybe. Either way, it's a shame because analysis takes a backseat to technicalities like syntax and gender. Being an English student, these things should be easy for me, but I'm really only an English student out of convenience - my plan committee wouldn't let me be a "liberal arts focus" because, though they acknowledged that I wasn't flaky some people chose that focus just because they were flaky and... they wanted to treat flakes and non-flakes equally. Or something? Alls I know is that Griff Maloney got the ok to be a liberal arts student and I didn't, so...
All that's fine, though, cuz I sure do like being an English major and readin' and junk. It's just that being out of my comfort zone and learning about verb clauses and the like is a real pain in the ass right now (whhiinne). How can I keep my mind from going somewhere else when this stuff is so boring! Can someone just put it all in a Schoolhouse Rock song or something?

Also frustrating: I finished The Way We Live Now (yay!) only to come to class and find that literally no one else had read it... and it was ok! (boo!) Not like it was ok because I misunderstood the directions, but just that the professor did not care. Are you telling me that I read a 750+ page Victorian novel about speculative capitalism just for shits and giggles? Yup.

Why? Because my Televising the Victorians class is not a class on adaptation (as it was billed) but a fake film studies class for lazy lit students who want to pretend they're film students but they don't want to read or take real film classes. And that includes my professor who throws out terms like mise en scene that he found in his jumbo film terms dictionary. All of the film knowledge this guy has shared with us comes verbatim from this stupid film terms book and not from actual film - which is fine, because my classmates haven't heard of films like Gone With the Wind. Not that they necessarily should, given that this is an English class, but we're not studying books here either, apparently.
So what are we studying? Amateur theories about how prop-placement and shot distance reflects character and motivation. Seriously. "In this shot they're seen together, indicating fellowship, only to be shot in seperate close-ups next, representing a fracturization of their relationship." Argh! No!

Mostly I'm just looking forward to going to Spain with my mom. We're both pretty exhausted and a break will be really nice. I'm definitely ready for the next and last phase of my overseas adventure. My plan is to grin and bear it and just gun through the remaining work I have, but it's a bit like pulling teeth. Which I guess means that my grin won't be that attractive when I'm done. (har har hurrrk) Send me a message and cheer me up!

Hey, while I have your attention, how about this funny video?:

Hunger

2008-11-30T16:09:00.000-08:00

I want to go have dinner but the freshmen I'm living with are singing along with and dancing to a boy band cover of Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" and I don't want to get involved.

Spreading the Gospel of Basil

2008-11-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I put up a post about Toni Basil and how awesome she was. It has come to my attention in the past 24 hours that there is even more to Basil's awesomeness than evidenced by her videos alone. To save you the trouble of going to Wikipedia, I've done the hard work for you.

A list of other gifts from Toni's elvish heart:

She choreographed the "Once in a Lifetime" video by the Talking Heads and showed David Byrne footage of epilepsy sufferers for inspiration

She choreographed and directed the (admittedly kind of silly) video for the amazing "Cross-eyed and Painless." In so doing, she also invented the moonwalk before Michael Jackson!

She choreographed David Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour.

She choreographed the Monkees' insane movie, Head, cowritten by Jack Nicholson, as well as other sweet movies like American Graffiti and Muppets from Space.

She appeared as one of the prostitutes who flips out in the acid trip scene from Easy Rider (she's the one with black hair), as well as a movie called Mother, Jugs and Speed with Bill Cosby and Raquel Welsh (Mother and Jugs, respectively) and the aforementioned Rockula alongside Thomas Dolby(!), among others. She was also on an episode of Baywatch Nights as a fortune teller.

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Ok, I actually thought that list was going to be longer, but that's still nothing to sneeze at. Plus she's six years older than my mom. Whoah!

On a related side note, did you know that in the '90s the Talking Heads reformed without David Byrne as The Heads and released an album called No Talking, Just Head? And it sucked? My goodness.

Toni Basil Wishes You a Happy Post-Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

I said before that if I was living in any cartoon universe I'd like it to be that of Betty Boop. Well, if I could visit any music video universe I think it would be fun to visit that of Toni Basil. The only thing is that I know I couldn't hack it. They're wildly energetic; everything's moving all the time. Toni lives in a void surrounded by theater props and her multi-racial troupe of dancers. So cool!
Until tonight I only knew about "Mickey," her super-hit. I didn't know that, like the Obama family, Toni Basil was a pixie made out of pure joy.
My favorite videos:

You Got a Problem:
A Devo cover. Holy fucking shit.

Shopping From A-Z:
Dig how they call out all the groceries ("F: fish!") and for "X" they just yell "Nothing!"

Be Stiff:
Another Devo cover. Imagine if this was your band at prom. You wouldn't know what to do. Plus they'd out-dance you and you'd just stop trying.

The Night:
In 1990 Toni Basil was in a movie called Rockula about... well I don't know. The whole movie's on youtube, but I don't think I can bring myself to watch it.
This scene not only looks like it was awkwardly shoehorned into the flick, but it features: a guy in chainmail licking his lips and scratching with a victrola; Toni doing a really awkward rap; the actors trying to act with nothing to do; a golden piano. Oh, and the song's awesome.

Extra credit - videos not embedded here to save space:
Street Beat: I don't know what to say about this. It's over the top.
Street Life: Not to be confused with "Street Beat."

Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

Obama Pixiefish Wishes You a Happy Pre-Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

Hey, tomorrow's Thanksgiving! I'll be spending it with some Americans that I met. They like to cook and I like to eat so, basically, I'm set. This will be the second Thanksgiving dinner I've bummed this year as two other Americans cooked me a budget feast on Saturday. We had microwave chicken, potatoes, gravy, canned cranberry sauce, apple crisp and instant stuffing. Yum!

Wanna feel warm and fuzzy? Check out these pictures of Thanksgivings past Slate put up.

While I was on Slate I had to take a look at the political cartoons featured. Favorites include this one of the religious right, who apparently have changed their name tag post-election from "the voice of real America" to "prophets misunderstood in their homeland."

And this delightfully strange depiction of the Obama family in fish/pixie form:

Multi-National Mediocrity (co-starring Robin Williams)

2008-11-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

Now, when I talk about pop culture differences between Ireland and the US I usually find myself neatly picking out the worst, most glaring aspects of Irish pop culture (the ones most visible to me) and juxtaposing them with my favorite aspects of US culture (likewise). But that mindset overlooks perhaps the ugliest sides of both, which, to my mind, are products of seething banality. Both in the US and here I'm shocked by the terrible, terrible mediocrity that is embraced nationwide.
I hear myself getting on my high horse again, which is never fun to read. I don't mean to sound like some Chuck Klosterman-like arbiter of holier-than-thou taste.
But I do know what I like and what annoys me:

I've bitched before about how passable, Nashville blandoids The Kings of Leon are treated like rock gods here. Am I crazy? I mean I know it's not terrible, but it's not that amazing is it? Doesn't it sound like the Rock 'n' Roll Generator is set on "Default?"
That said, "Sex On Fire" is kind of fun.

I've been trying to find an analogous mediocre American band that also made it big here. I knew there must be sweet, sweet examples of middle-of-the-road history repeating itself. Imagine my happiness when someone told me that the Fun Lovin' Criminals were huge in Ireland for years and are even still touring. Don't remember them? Yeah you do:

Of course, when the Northern Irish aren't runnin' around robbin' banks all whacked off of Scooby Snacks they're watching X-Factor, which, like American Idol is complete shit. Unlike American Idol, though, everyone tunes in weekly, from old grandpas to 8-year-old girls. And Northern Ireland even has it's own horse in the race, the living Cupie Doll that is Eoghan Quigg:

Speaking of that awful Snow Patrol song, they played that at halftime during the Northern Ireland football match I went to. There's a lot of support for local artists.

But could anything drop my spirits and lift my ire like the fact that universal boil Jeff Dunham has wormed his way into the hearts of people in both the US and the UK? I turned away from the US, embarrassed that Jeff Dunham's Christmas special was the most-watched program in Comedy Central history, only to find that Northern Ireland has embraced his hacky, broadly-racial ventriloquist act, too. It's this kind of humor that makes me even miss the out-and-out, inarguable atrociousness of someone like Carlos Mencia. It's the type of thing I'm almost sure my dad's side of the family undoubtedly thinks is great (other things they like: the movie August Rush, Josh Grobin, church)
Why, world, why? Why do the freshmen I live with quote Achmed the Dead Terrorist to me?
I dare you to watch all 11 minutes of this clip - the most popular youtube clip in my hall at the moment - without clawing your eyes out so you can get to your brain to switch it off:

Oh, but it's not all question-setup/answer-punchline with a dead terrorist puppet; there are plenty of other too-bland-to-be-offensive stereotype puppets on display.
Like Sweet Daddy D! The lisping, jiving, black pimp!

Look at that lily-white crowd laugh! But Jeff didn't forget about them. What about hillbilly Bubba J? He likes - get this - watching Nascar and drinking beer! Haha! I relate to that!

And who could forget Jose Jalapeno. He's a sleepy Mexican pepper... on a steek! Watch purple abomination Peanut tell him what we're all thinking - your accent is funny! "What the hell is feeling "cchhhappy?" You fucking freak!

US and Ireland: this is your culture. You have the power to kill it; you have the power to make it stronger.

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Speaking of August Rush, I had to go imdb to remember it's name. While there I looked at the movies that Robin Williams currently has in production. Listen to these plot synopses and tell me that you can't already picture the movies in your head/ have maybe already seen them:

The Krazees - "Unable to deal with his daughter reaching puberty, a psychologist (Williams) has to get a handle on his emotions, which have come to life as different characters."
Old Dogs - "Two friends and business partners find their lives turned upside down when strange circumstances lead to them being placed in the care of 7-year-old twins."
World's Greatest Dad - "A comedy about a man who learns that the things you want most may not be the things that make you happy, and that being lonely is not necessarily the same as being alone."

Hey, I have a script: unable to deal with the pressures of making a few good movies in the '90s, Robin Williams handles his emotions by becoming a giant self-parody.
That, or Hook 2.

Neat Things

2008-11-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

I can't make a coherent post right now, but I wanted to share some of the artists whose work I've been looking at over the past couple of days. Neato:

Josh Keyes

Laurie Lipton

Martin Wittfooth
Martin Wittfooth going through the process of doing a painting.

Espira

Coldplay makes you gay, Chaucer makes you stupid

2008-11-23T18:19:00.000-08:00

So I'd agreed to go out with my friend and do whatever she wanted to do last night, but upon finding out it meant being 5th-wheel at a gay club I opted out. Her and the three guys she went with came back and told me that it was too "underground" and "grimy" and basically ended up saying that it looked like the product of an actual subculture and not a place that was trying to look like the product of a subculture. I think I'd much rather find myself in a place that caters to an actual subculture than one that caters with the idea of a subculture to bourgeois people intent on "slumming it." But maybe that's an elitist, "slumming it" attitude to take itself.
Either way, I would've been pretty out of place, though a girl basically told me the other day that I was gay because I told her I liked Coldplay. That's cool; I'm secure enough in my heterosexuality to rep Rush of Blood to the Head 4 lif - Lord knows I listen to gayer music. But you'll never find me repping X&Y. That record's for pussies.

I was going to watch Play Time and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul this weekend but, even after downloading the supposedly all-region VLC Media Player I still can't watch Region 2 DVDs. It's weird because it let me watch Pasolini's Arabian Nights the other week, which you can't get on DVD in America. Why? Maybe because a guy shoots a girl's vagina with a penis-arrow. Or, more likely, because it's long and draggy, the acting's bad and it looks like it was dubbed into Italian by a 5th-grader.

I don't mind the dragginess and all that because over-all, I really love how Pasolini adapts classic texts in a way that is true to the gritty, unsanitised realism of the time they were written. He finds romanticism in the actual grime and dirt of the era, which is really refreshing to me. It feels truer to the stories. He also purely seems to be interested in the stories from the classics that deal with sex, which can be fun when it's done right (The Decameron), disturbing when it's done right (Salo) or just kind of boring (Arabian Nights). Apparently his Canterbury Tales adaptation is nothing to write home about, either, but, after I finish reading it I'm going to rent it (on VHS in the States, unfortunately).
Even if the rest is boring, this scene from Hell is pretty promisingly bonkers:

Thank you, Pierre Paulo Pasolini, Now I've seen it ALL! Wah wah. Ba dum dum.

For similar entertainment of a more painful nature, a bunch of high school English classes put up video adaptations of noted slag "The Wife of Bath's Tale." They're all bizarre, but I'm not going to post them here because I know almost no one else cares. If you're a video masochist like me, though, and you want to see exactly what's wrong with the youth of the nation you might enjoy:

The version shot in night-vision where a guy tells the young filmmakers that women in the ghetto most desire crack (1:50)
The vulgar Southern students version feat. flying Bush and Kerry heads, armored basebal caps, general misogyny
The version with a kid beating a girl with a baseball bat for calling him a "silly goose" to "When a Man Loves a Woman."
The version with a "Hey Ya" dance scene. PS - please go to 1:48 to see mom make an appearance; it's the best part. I'm serious, you won't regret it.
The version where a girl on a broomstick rapes another girl and literally tears up her "V-card." Also a girl says she desires a man that will let her fart in bed without judging her. Go to 4:35 to see marital discord at it's most harrowing.
Or might I interest you a boy raping a dog in a wig that talks like Betty Boop.

It really just keeps going and going. It's funny how simultaneously amusing and depressing this kind of thing is.
You know what's more depressing? The fact that I have 350 pages of The Way We Live Now to read by Tuesday morning and I spent over half and hour watching films by high school kids. My priorities are all messed up.

Grainy '80s Sci-Fi TV-Movies in our Classrooms

2008-11-22T13:08:00.001-08:00

So I'm really excited about the re/reading of all these middle school novels on the horizon. Does anyone want to do a middle school book club with me, come January? Sally, you said you'd be down. We can raid the young-adult section of our local libraries without shame.

All this talk about middle school had me thinking of other media memories inflicted on me. I spent a little while trying to find this film that we watched in my seventh grade English class. I know we also watched Schindler's List during the Holocaust unit (if your parents signed the note saying it was ok) and the TV-movie adaptation of the awesome Lathe of Heaven, which was significantly less awesome:

Lathe of Heaven is on youtube (in all 15 parts), too, but I'm not going to try and inflict that on anybody.

Anyways, after a little research I found the short film I was trying to remember, All Summer in a Day. Like Lathe it's grainy late-'70s/early-'80s sci-fi, it's kind of a bummer and it's firmly entrenched in my memory. It's all about these kids who live on a planet where it rains all day every day except very special times when the sun comes out for, like, two minutes. Did anyone else watch this?

Fun fact: this movie accurately portrays what living in Portland is like.
Fun fact #2: recently the kid who plays little bitch-ass William in this played "Loudmouth guy" in the movie Just a Little Harmless Sex opposite international film star Rachel Hunter.
Here it is in it's entirety:

An Art Journey From Good to Worse

2008-11-21T16:29:00.000-08:00

You know when you're searching for one thing on the internet and it just leads down a rabbit hole of weird and interesting discovery? This happens to me sometimes and I end up with about 20 windows open with pages of things I want to know more about.
The other day I saw a painting by Franz von Stuck that reminded me of Edvard Munch's Madonna and I wanted to know more about him.

This led me to looking up pictures of paintings by von Stuck and a bunch of other artists listed on the Wikipedia page for Symbolism, most of whom, I'm guessing, people who actually took art history or painting classes probably know about. To be brief and not list all the ones I thought were super-cool I'll just say that I enjoyed almost all the art that I ended up looking at. Since I know fuckall about visual art I'm not even sure how legitimate Symbolism is as a term to classify a type of painting (I mean, the Wikipedia page is big and all, but symbolism is kind of a broad term, isn't it?) so I've just decided that it means paintings with things I like in them like snakes eating horses, whimsical boats and leapord people.

In looking into the work of Félicien Rops, one of the few painters I'd heard of in the list, on google image search I ran across the work of Stu Mead. I discovered that Mr. Mead is a very controversial artist, mainly because he's an open pedophile and all of his work basically sexualizes little girls (as a quick spin on his Myspace page will demonstrate). The controversy drummed up by his paintings and the long conversation about objectification in art it invites is kind of beside the point, I think. The overall effect of looking at his paintings, to me, was that of looking at somebody's homemade pornography, meaning that my feelings of revulsion were quickly overwhelmed with feelings of boredom. Just because it plays with taboos and you put it on a canvas doesn't mean it's any more interesting than some lonely guy's hand-drawn Futurama porn. (On a side note, there was a kid on my pre-season soccer trip in junior year of high school who got caught looking at Futurama porn on the internet. That's called tragi-comedy).

Anyways, apparently there's a book called Apocalypse Culture II that contains an article about Stu Mead and other artists who are controversial. The article (which, always being curious about controversy in art, I found on the internet) is written with a tone that I've come to be familiar with in reading about things of this nature in books of this nature. It's the reverential, sanctimonious tone of someone who came to a freakshow, decided to stay there and has lost sight of the reasons it was billed as a freakshow in the first place. The taboo becomes normal when you make it your sole focus. The rest of the world just doesn't get Stu Mead and I don't get why - isn't it cool how controversial this is? asks the writer, a self described "musician (Boy from Brazil), transformist, eroticist and a self-taught art aficionado." Ugh, ugh and ugh. Oh man, you're into Nazis too? Wild! Who could've guessed??

Speaking of which, the article lead to a couple of other artists, notably Blalla Hallmann, who apparently hates the US, the Vatican, Nazis and consumer greed, yet he is obsessed with making paintings about them. It all begins to stink of something deranged and hypocritical pretty soon. But I'll let the eroticist and self-taught art aficionado tell it:

"Blalla despised the Art world, whose stars, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Josef Beuys were seen as brown-nosing valets to the rich. Remarking that every paintings these guys were selling was money he wasn’t making, Blalla believed that the aforementioned artists were stealing from him."

I wonder why the American art world isn't lining up to throw money at paintings accusing them of being greedy, Nazi bastards from someone who bills himself as "the ambassador of hate?" And I wonder why this criticism is coming from someone who sounds like a greedy, misanthropic bastard himself? The questions just pile up.

All that said, I actually thought Hallmann's paintings were pretty cool. His schtick worked for me, partly because I think his composition and style are neat. He sounds like a paranoid lunatic and thoroughly unpleasant person who, like Stu Mead, has found that he can pay bills just by selling his obsessions to a small niche of the public that like having their buttons pushed.

All this leads to a collective of artists that call themselves Unpop, whom I spent more time looking into than they deserve. The other artist mentioned in the article above was a woman called Beth Love, whose paintings I think are pretty interesting, if undeniably disturbing.

Unfortunately, she and the rest of Unpop seem like pretty foul people. While I like her work, all the other art on display was terrible in thought and execution. More importantly, the whole thing reeks of that kid from Ghost World - you know, the one who thinks he's hot, dangerous shit because he has a zine that focuses on serial killers and Nazis and torture and freaks and yadda yadda (he also publishes pornographic art by a pedophile who creates computer images of little girls because he can't have the real thing. Hmmm...). Unpop is all about offensive jokes under the guise of art and, like the loner in your art class with a trench coat, they're rebelling against you so they're impervious to criticism. They don't care what you think, neuter! You just can't handle Unpop!

It all pisses me off because I do fall for real artists who take the risks that the Unpop people think they're taking. The problem is that there's a thin tightrope between the Scylla of self-rightous, self-aware envelope-pushing and the Charybdis of pure, stupid exploitation. What most of Unpop doesn't realize (and would have you believe that they don't care) is that shitty paintings of golliwogs and screenprints of Joseph Goebbels are useless to the world at large. Offending the public in and of itself is not art (or at least not good art) because after the initial shock and revulsion there's nothing really to think about. It's more offensive because bandying about racist or misogynistic imagery just to get a reaction gives artists who can incorporate those images into something thoughtful and meaningful a bad name. It makes it harder to defend artists who aren't afraid to push boundaries as not just exploitation. Why even give Kara Walker a second look?
And, really, what is uglier than a group of aging white males from privileged backgrounds making rape and race jokes to each other, especially with the sanctimonious idea that they are seeing the world in it's true colors and everyone else is just too diluted or dumb to agree. Man, it makes me angry!

What's the antidote? What happens when we take paintings that deal with hot-button issues off the table? The answer may surprise you:

Though most girls call it "vagina" and my mom calls it "Virginia"

2008-11-18T17:43:00.000-08:00

As you may know my family's going through some tough times right now. To cheer my mom up I sent her a bunch of youtube videos that regularly make me laugh. I sent nice(/creepy?) things like talking dogs and the dancing walrus to keep things clean and mom-like. With a little trepidation I put a link to Strong Kids, Safe Kids at the end. Sometimes I underestimate my mom and I forget that she gave birth to me, mixing her and my dad's senses of humor into my genes. "What does it say about me that I laughed the most at that one?" she asked me. "What does it mean that I laughed the most at that one?" I asked myself. My mom has a sick sense of humor.

Holy moly, I have so much to weblog about, but not the time nor energy.
Why? Because I've been hanging out with Margery Kempe all night, learning about how much Jesus loves her over the course of 400 pages (answer: thiiiiiiis much!).
Though I know it's not true, I like to imagine that this prematurely balding mongoloid on the cover of my copy of The Book of Margery Kempe is, in fact, the author. I think it's actually the stained glass window from the church where she worshipped by crying all over the place, St. Mongoloid's.

Reading this thick-ass, Jesus-packed non-starter of an autobiography along with Ancient and Victorian English has spurred me onto a new quest for my non-FWT.
It all started with all this hullabaloo and bullahooha about the new Twilight movie. Since my job this summer teaching little girls who are reading this presumably bullshit book I've been patting my back because I'm now a certified bonafide grown-up who doesn't go for that kid's stuff anymore. Yet... today there was a New York Times article yesterday about how fucking huge this phenomenon apparently is with the just-menstruating set. The Grey Lady said that girls are getting so excited that, before meeting the film's hunky, pubescent star outside of Hot Topics nationwide they're scratching their necks so they'll bleed for him. What?! In my day you didn't bleed for any books (except Island of Blue Dolphins, which demanded a child sacrifice).

How good must this book be to inspire young girls to cut themselves nationwide? (counterpoint: Linkin Park also has this effect). It must at least be titillating to some, weird girl-hormone. Or maybe... woman hormone? That's right, moms love Twilight too.

So, spurred on, as I said, by thick, boring, Jesus-y, Medieval lit and: a) a deepseated love of young-adult literature (having been a young-adult myself once) and b) a deepseated love for horror trash (see: the fact that I'm watching True Blood religiously every week even though it's kind of bad) - spurred on by these factors I think when the term ends and I go home to write my final papers for the term and relax/putter around the house I'm going to read at least the first book in the Twilight series and see what all the young girls/awful American tourists are cutting themselves about.

This also makes me want to revisit those other young-adult classics from the pit of middle school, as well as catch up on ones that I never got around to reading. It could be really fun! Plus, they take, like, a day to read now that I am taller/have better skin/don't think Garfield is funny. My freshman FWT I reread The Giver for my job at the Oregon Children's Theater and it was bomb! A list of the top of my head:

Lord of the Flies - started rereading it a few years ago, scared the shit out of me
Island of Blue Dolphins - never read it
Flowers of Algernon - never read it
To Kill a Mockingbird - read it twice. It's rad.
Shabanu - I remember my whole class hating this book. I also remember descriptions of growing breasts (likened to apples and camel-droppings - gross), listening to your nomadic parents have sex in the tent next to you (gross) and camels cumming all over the ground (sexy. just kidding, gross). There was a storyline, too, but I can't remember it.
Red Badge of Courage - never read it. The OCT was working on a production of it my freshman year as well as a rap musical. I bet that went well.
Hatchet - fucking baller
A Day No Pigs Would Die - read it. Don't remember anything.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - ditto
The Cay - maybe read it... I think?
Secret Garden - fucking baller (in a feminine way)
Holes - pretty good. Ruined by Shia Lebouf.
Animal Farm - sweet
Yearling - sweet

What am I missing?? That's a pretty good list, if I do say so myself. What should I read this winter? Hatchet's definitely calling out to me. Wasn't there a sequel, too? Bowie Knife or something? (bad joke, but seriously) What else? And remember... ANYONE CAN COMMENT!
Please love me. I'm gonna put that reminder in bold until you do. In bold.

Breaking News/Grandford

2008-11-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

Hey guess what dudes and dudettes,
I didn't know I could do this, but I fixed my blog so now

ANYONE CAN COMMENT

regardless of race, creed, gender or whether they have Blogger or not. Even old people can do it! All you have to do is click "anonymous" and you can sign your name at the bottom if you wish, unless your name is Anonymous, in which case you're taken care of.
Don't hesitate to leave me your comments! Love me like a CPR dummy! (sorry that's gross, don't comment about that)

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Things my 98-year-old grandpa has bought in the last year:

A tooth-whitening kit after seeing it work for my aunt. My grandpa has approximately half of his teeth left. He signed on for $90-per-month deliveries of this stuff and promptly forgot he ordered it.
A home electrolysis kit to stop hair from growing on your face. He told my grandma that he had been shaving for too many years and he was tired of it. Apparently it only partially worked and now hair just grows in patches. My aunt had to talk him into shaving again because he looked crazy.

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My DVDs of these BBC/Masterpiece Theater still haven't come. They've been caught up in customs and I may not get them for months. Fortunately, Cranford is on youtube in it's entirety. Unfortunately, I've discovered this a little late for my class tomorrow morning. I'm soaking up as much as I can, but it's 5 hours in total and it's already midnight, so... Whatever happens, I'm definitely not catching up with True Blood tonight.

The nice thing is that Cranford is actually pretty good (if you have five hours to kill I recommend it). After watching the execrable adaptation of Jane Eyre and enough of the adaptation of Great Expectations to know that it's execrable this is a pleasant surprise (for free!). And Dame Judi Dench is in effect, rocking a bonnet like it's 1846.
The best part about it is that it's actually true to the tone of it's source material - a Victorian novel about change in a small town - and actually improves on the scant story of the book by fleshing it out. Of course, improving on Bronte and Dickens is pretty tough, while improving on Gaskill is not so daunting - her writing is looser than the former and the loss of her authorial voice doesn't hobble the story like it does the others.
The other adaptations really labored under the duel purposes of staying true to their classic source material - knowing that straying too far would anger purists - and trying to make their adaptations stand out as new, culturally relevent adaptations standing out among the dozens of others; the fact that the books are so well-known and loved is a complete burdon on them. This leads them to wobble about, drolly hitting the expected notes, yet with an irritating attitude and need to prove that they're "not your father's Great Expectations/Jane Eyre." It reminds me of the less gifted son of a brilliant father trying to prove himself in his shadow - clinging to it sometimes and distancing from it at others (call it Sean Lennon Syndrome). The dirty-sexification of Victorian novels with the aim of filling pocketbooks - or worse, with the idea that because Charlotte Bronte couldn't write frankly about sex she really intended to and that by imposing it her true aim is fulfilled - it just makes dull, bad movies.

Except, of course, Alfonso Cuaron's Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, Gwenyth Paltrow and Robert De Niro. Get this: Pip's name is now Finnian Bell and Mrs. Havisham's is Mrs. Dinsmoor; Pip's not a lawyer he's a famous painter and Joe's not a blacksmith he's a shrimp fisherman! - how can you say this is not an improvement? It's so dirty-sexy!

Anyways, to sum up,Cranford the book is charming and Cranford the mini-series is pretty good and my grandpa's funny.

Exciting Movie News

2008-11-16T12:23:00.001-08:00

Well, it's been a shitty week to top all shitty weeks. In the least shitty bit of news among the shit, I went to go see "Heaven's Gates, Hell's Flames" today but couldn't find the church and ended up walking around for 3 hours. The plus side of that will be toned legs. Or sore legs. I'm gonna try again tomorrow but if I don't make it I'll have missed my chance!

Anyways, at least the movie stars are aligning. I found out today that Danny Boyle's new film, Slumdog Millionare stars the kid who played Anwar on the awesome Skins! Even though the trailer doesn't give me reason to hope that it will be Trainspotting + 28 Days Later + Skins, it's apparently a very good film in it's own right. That said, will someone please make a film about sexy British teens shooting heroin and fighting zombies? Please?

In stranger news, the new Todd Solondz movie reportedly features both Paris Hilton and Paul Reubens! Charlotte Rampling's in there, too. What happens when a famous socialite, Pee Wee Herman and the Nazi-loving dancer from The Night Porter get together in a Todd Solondz movie? I can't wait to find out! We already know what happens when Philip Seymour Hoffman enters the Solondzoverse:

Brick Casey Taught Me the Confidence of Abstinence

2008-11-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

Everyone who watches enough viral videos has seen that clever French contraception PSA where the dad is trying to do his grocery shopping and the kid is being a brat. Don't have unwanted children, har har. In between doing my homework (I'm back reading The Way We Live Now and it feels so good!), when most of my blogging takes place, I started thinking about how many awesome pro-abstinance commercials there must be available on youtube. I found professional videos (sweet), non-professional youth-group videos (sweeter) and music videos (ultrasweet):

If you're like me then you assumed that the note being passed is about the teacher. This point of view makes this PSA much more enjoyable.

What is TRUTH? Can we really trust it? You really can't trust anyone about anything! You're living in a two-dimensional city of lies! Oh, except trust my disembodied voice about this no-sex thing... that's true.

But what does acclaimed CDBaby artist Brick Casey have to say? This music video has the answer.
Best part: "If he really cared he would go to church and pray wit' ya/ all he do is talk a lot and play wit' ya (BLAH BLAH BLAH)"

Yo, straight outta Guyana, SolidYouth is here for your feature edification! It's like a group of four Sean Paul's and they are all Christian. SolidYouth's suggestion for an alternative to sexual actvity: A walk at the zoo.

Whoah, nothing gets your attention like a record scratch! The (only?) three members of this youth group seem to be suggesting that there is something wrong with politely asking before sharing an STD with a loved one. Honestly, I have to give this kid some points for class - though personally I would have written a little poem.

The user that posted this ad says it speaks for itself. I beg to differ. Could this commercial be more elliptical? I suppose it doesn't matter, as all other thoughts go out the window after the disconcerting close-up of the dude grabbing his boner.

The scary thing - the baby's father is a shadow puppet.

No words can describe the shitty awesomeness or the awesome shittiness of this video.

This clubhouse full of 12-year-olds picking up 12-year-olds is a regular Gomorrah.
"What are you about to do?"
"Oh, I'm 'bout to... you know! Come on now!"
"No man, that's not cool."
Oh ok, problem solved. Now just materialize on a couch and tell me all about it.

The real crown jewel that I found is this slow-as-molasses computer game nightmare masquerading as a lazy attempt at a school project. Lemme break it down for you to save you 4 and a half minutes and try and explain what I think is happening here:
Geddy Lee enters a French maid/Little Bo Peep's future mansion in hopes of "a smooch." Luckily she rebuffs him with an "Eww!" and hits him with a rubber chicken(??). "Get lost you scumm!"
Geddy promptly apologizes for offending her and they sit in armchairs staring at the walls. After an unbearably long pause he tells Bo Peep, "I feel something between us." This must be the so-called confidence of abstinence where the video gets it's title, and apparently it's not creepy at all.
Cut to Geddy and Peep standing in a vortex waving, saying "the confidence of abstinence." Fin.

According to 15-year-old auteur, Jakeh89, one of the main themes in this video is playing with the viewer's expectations by presenting pro-abstinence images with "pro-sex music" (read. 50 Cent fucking non-stop). I'm pretty sure he thought if he stuck that on here he could swing a C and survive until gym class.

Bitching Post: Americans vs. Natural Beauty

2008-11-14T11:53:00.000-08:00

Went to the Giant's Causeway today and dealt with terrible, terrible, terrible Americans on the bus. I had already complained about the people in my study abroad group, but little did I know that some of the kids who are studying the Republic would be 10x worse. They came up en masse this weekend to go on a catered trip around NI and I tagged along with some of the people in my group. It was awful. Things that I was subjected to listening to on the bus:

The worst game of "Would You Rather" ever. Sample questions: would you rather fuck your mom or be fucked by your dad? Would you rather get AIDs or (something equally offensive and unclever).
The fact that most of these college-age Americans don't know what "secession" means nor do they know who Robert E. Lee was ("Was he a poet?").
Insensitive stupid shit about Northern Ireland like "There's no old buildings 'cause they've all been bombed." They also split their group into two teams for some drinking game they have planned for later, naming themselves the IRA and the Loyalists.
Speaking of that drinking game, they talked about it for at least five fucking hours. How can you talk about a future drinking game for that long? Why? Are you trying to impress somebody? What is there to say? "You just gotta chug it, playa."
"That's what she said."
A long joke about the different connotations of the phrase "eating out."
The fact that they are all simultaneously reading books in the Twilight series (you know, the one about vampires that the 7th-graders I taught this summer read?).
"Tonight I'm gonna get as stoned as a witch in Salem." "Weren't they burned at the stake?" "Oh, then I'm gonna get blazed." (...kinda clever comeback)
A couple making out and dry-humping in the seat in front of me.

Despite the awesome natural beauty of the Causeway (pictures later), this trip was just a cherry on top of a delightfully shitty reading week sundae. I really forget how specialized and marginalized they people that I really enjoy spending time with are in the whole scope of people my age. I also forget how awkward I am in general around people I don't know. Things to cheer me up:

First of all, courtesy of the Miami Sun Sentinel via the AV Club: a list of the worst football rap music videos of all time. A taste - you'll think you won't want to watch all five minutes of this, but I defy you not to:

Robots! Presented in the most casually snarky, British way possible:

Also, I got three movies from the library - Ran, Bande a part, and An American Werewolf in London (which I, ironically, have never seen).

Also, I'm going to eat chicken dinosaurs for dinner. Nothing can stop me from having fun!

Get off your cellph, that cow's talking!

2008-11-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

Today while I was scouring the Prelinger archives for some old films to watch I ran into an ad for a Northern Irish horror movie called Shrooms. It's about American students (like me!) who go to Northern Ireland (like me!) to get high in the woods (not yet).
Seeing as how it looked like B-level, straight-to-DVD horror I was pretty sure that someone would have loaded it onto Megavideo and I was right. Unfortunately this isn't B-level fun horror like Basketcase, nor F-level fun horror like Plan 9 From Outer Space. Rather, this is D-level terrible horror by an Irish sub-Eli Roth (who himself is strictly sub-par) that is so mind-numbingly, skull-scrapingly awful it makes you want to throw a petrol bomb. The dialogue bears no semblance to how real people speak, coming from three identical bimbos, a backwards-hat-wearing thug with roid-rage (named Bluto!), a muscley Jay from Jay and Silent Bob and an Irish guy who's obviously actually English.

Oh, also some drooling, livestock-screwing locals in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and every other movie that ripped it off. One of them confesses that, unlike his brother, he never fucked pigs. "My only weakness now would be for a bullcalf tied to a gate. Lovely tongue on a bullcalf - like... sandpaper." That's the authentic Irish flavor I've been trying to communicate in this blog. My other favorite moments:

British guy: One rule - no mobile phones.
Roid-rager: But I'm lost without my cellph!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roid-rager: (on finding a strange girl in an abandoned car in the middle of the woods while wandering in his underwear) Lemme in lemme in lemme in!
(she rolls down the window)
Roid-rager: (pulls his dick out) Look what I got for you baby? Yeah, you like that.
(she obviously gives him a blowjob)
Roid-rager: Oh yeah! Yeah, babygirl. So soft. Oh!
(Oh no! It wasn't a girl at all, but an ancient druid! It pulls his dick off)

The choicest dialogue comes from the girls. Writer, Pearse Elliot must have never heard real human females talk, because judging by Shrooms their only conversations are about is sex and tampons, plus these true-to-life exchanges:

Bimbo 1: (on being charged with voyeurism) What, you think we wanted a peak at your hairy 'stache?
Bimbo 2: You know what, bitch, at least my tits are real!
Bimbo 1: Oh you wanna play like that, Chewbacca? 'Cause I will rip that hair right off you!
Bimbo 2: Fuck you.
Bimbo 1: Eat me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bimbo 2: (on a hike in the woods) I wish I'd brought adequate footwear.
Bimbo 1: Yeah, well maybe if you took better care of yourself your boyfriend wouldn't have to check me out every five minutes.
(catfight)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bimbo 1: I'm so sick of this - our bickering, the mood swings, our stupid fights when you go on the steroids, and your pimply ass... and most of all your perverted behavior.
Roid-rager: You know you're not so hot yourself.
Bimbo 1: What?
Roid-rager: You fart in your sleep
Bimbo 1: No I don't! (farts)

Slather that class on top of a bunch of quick cuts, fish-eye-lens and "am I scaring you yet?" wannabe-Ring cheap-shots and you have Shrooms! Not only is this film unrelentingly stupid, but it's never scary (watch out for those druids!). Maybe now is a good time to mention that this film was nominated for two Irish Film and Television Awards, including Best Film. Really, Ireland? Really? This?

Perhaps the scene that put it in the running is the following exchange where Roid-rager, sulkily pondering his pimply ass downs some shrooms, vomits on his own face, follows a mysterious naked girl into the woods and discovers a talking cow that sounds like the movie trailer voice-over guy. To get the full effect of this scene you have to imagine dissonant strings in the background, a cool, blue color palette and a cow speaking with the most sinister, gravely voice imaginable:

Roid-rager: Holy shit. Huh huh huh. Hello?
Cow: Well well well...
Roid-rager: Haha, you can talk.
Cow: That's cuz you're out of your mind.
Roids: You see a girl?
Cow: She went that-a way.
Roids: Thanks.
Cow: Wouldn't do that if I were you!
Roids: Why not?
Cow: You know you're fucked.
Roids: EEEEe, yes I know.
Cow: I mean.... dead fucked.
Roids: What, you're just a fuckin' cow.
Cow: A fuckin' cow... that can fuckin' talk.
Roids: I gotta go.
Cow: Yeah... bye bye.
Roids: (vomits)

Does Northern Ireland just hand out awards to every Tom, Dick and Paddy who figures out how to make a cow talk? Or is this movie actually a sly commentary on American students?
Whatever it is, I thought I'd turn it off pretty quick, but this movie sucked so hard that it sucked me in. I really wanted to see if it had bottomed out early or if there was deeper to go. Does that make Shrooms a success? Maybe...
Let me ruin the ending for you and you can decide. As she's being carted away in the ambulance after the ordeal is over, protagonist, Bimbo 3, realizes that all along the killer was, in fact HER! Why?
Because the whole time she was tripping...

...ON SHROOMS!

Paul Broun Says What We're All Too Sane To

2008-11-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

Imagine my surprise and delight upon finding a CNN story today titled "Congressman sorry for likening Obama to Hitler." I often post CNN headlines in this blog that make me laugh by being unintentionally silly, but these stories usually have a context within the article that negates or explains the accidental humorousness they give off at a glance. Not so here! This article is pure jingoistic crazy from bottom to top. Like how Tina Fey only had to repeat Sarah Palin's own words for them to be self-satirical, this story does all the work for us. Observe:

(CNN) — Republican Paul Broun is sorry for calling President-elect Barack Obama a 'Marxist' and comparing him to Adolph Hitler, the Georgia Congressman said Tuesday.

“I regret putting it that way,” he told WGAC radio in Augusta, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “I apologize to anyone who has taken offense at that.”

In an interview with the Associated Press earlier this week, Broun admitted to calling the future commander-in-chief a 'Marxist' at a recent Rotary club meeting, and said Obama has expressed support for policies similar to those of Hitler.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Broun told the AP. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may– may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun was specifically referring to a July speech by Obama, where the then-Democratic presidential nominee said he supports a civilian force helping the military when it comes to national security: "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded [as the military]," Obama said in the speech that was largely a call to national service.

Responding to those comments, Broun told the AP Monday: "That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun added. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

The Obama transition office did not respond to Broun's comments, and in his interview Tuesday to WGAC, the first term congressman said, “The point I tried to make is that he is extremely liberal, he has promoted a lot of socialistic ideas, and it just makes me concerned."

"Look, I guess it may sound a little crazy and off-base, but all I'm saying is Barack Obama is Satan. I mean... he reminds me of Satan. Wait, was that offensive? I'm not comparing him to Satan, I'm just saying he has potential to be Satan."
Forget it, I can't even make fun of it, it's too crazy in and of itself. Luckily for Paul Broun, it's impossible to stay mad at this face:

Hey Dave, what's going on? Nothing.

2008-11-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

There's still not much to update about.
I have a cough that won't go away. Apparently it's classified as a "tickly cough," as opposed to a "chest cough." This means that instead of cough drops or something I'm taking Veno's tickly coughs solution, which is a mix of honey, lemon and menthol (and magic). It's pretty foul.

This is my week off, or "reading week," and I had originally planned to go somewhere, but now I think I'm actually going to read. I have four days off every week to take a day trip or something and this is pretty nice just catching up. I finally finished Great Suckspectations and now I need to finish the last story in Cranford before delving into The Way We Live Now again. Oh, and my other two classes.

That's about it. What will make this blog update more riviting than it already is? How about videos.

It's hard to debate Keith Olbermann's annoyingness, but here he pretty much hits the nail on the head. Unfortunately, anyone he's actually preaching to probably changed the channel pretty quick.

And hey, this is pretty neat:

Norwegian Thrill Explosion

2008-11-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

CNN Headlines of the day:
Winner of World's Ugliest Dog contest dies
Message to Mormons: Stop baptizing dead Jews
Ted Turner: 'I'm not chased by demons.'
Are you rude? Maybe you should think again

Last night, when not racing through Great Expectations, I was watching some sweet music videos from Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp. Ch-ch-ch-check it out (in order of favoritude):

Awww, poor Leno

A Love Letter to... 1994: Pt. 3

2008-11-10T12:55:00.000-08:00

This is my final self-indulgent post about why 1994 was an awesome year for albums. Why? I have a bunch of reading that I don't want to do. I always feel super-self-indulgent when I write long things about the albums, so I'm just gonna give 'em a quick introduction and post some videos I like. Besides, I'm watching these videos anyway, so I might as well put them in a blog post. Feel free to not comment and I'll see you when I write about 1995!

1994 was the year Green Day broke through with Dookie. It was kinda popular.

The Smashing Pumpkins, having released Siamese Dream in 1993 released Pisces Iscariot as a follow-up - a collection of stuff that they'd done post-Gish that didn't make the next album. I like it more than Siamese Dream, actually, as I think the Pumpkins are sometimes at their best when they're not taking themselves so damn seriously and allow themselves to play a bit (and cover Stevie Nicks).

Speaking of acid, how about the Lords of Acid? I got their best album, Voodoo-U, when I was 17 and highly susceptible to Coop's drawings of naked, lesbian devils on the cover, plus Ruth McArdle singing about sex, rough sex, sex with young boys, smoking weed while having sex and more. I have several pet electronica/dance bands and they're all really sleazy. Partially, I think this is because could you take an electronica group with lyrics about, say, politics seriously in any way? And if you're going to sing about something over grinding technotronic beats you might as well go the whole way and sing about sex. That is, for better or worse (17-year-old Dave says better), all Lords of Acid sing about. In high school this is pretty much what I imagined a Lords of Acid concert would be like:

The Toadies have released three albums over two decades and the two I have are amazing. Most folks only know them because of "Possum Kingdom," but their 1994 album Rubberneck is great from start to finish. It doesn't deserve its place in the bargain bins. I can't embed any videos here thanks to Universal Music Group, but if you watch any videos I'm posting watch this one.

Ween put out their first album that sounded like an album in '94 with Chocolate and Cheese, cementing their title as They Might Be Giants for stoners.

Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon got together in '94 to release an album that hasn't really found a place in history like most of the other albums I'm mentioning (except for Compulsion, which no one cares about but me). Their album Prairie Home Invasion is fucking amazing, though, fusing Jello's punk fire with Mojo's folk/country sensibility. I gave a copy to my dad thinking he'd like it. He didn't. It opens with the 9-minute-plus "Buy My Snake Oil" and goes on to cover protest songs by Pete Seeger and more.

Like Green Day, Nine Inch Nails released the seminal album they can never escape from in 1994, too, with The Downward Spiral. Mostly known for "Closer" and, much later, for "Hurt" it's hard for me to think about anything bad about this album. Pretty Hate Machine and The Fragile are great, but they're not as polished or coherent as this bad boy. (Let's not talk about With Teeth or Year Zero, at all...) Plus it was recorded in the house that Sharon Tate was murdered in by the Manson family! Speaking of which...

Trent Reznor also produced the debut album, Portrait of an American Family, by a young, scrawny prodigee named Marilyn Manson and his band the Spooky Kids in '94. Regardless of Manson's rise and co-option of the national media to become a spooky boogie man followed by his transformation to weird to irrelevant to boring, I will never stop defending this album. Like the Pumpkins, Manson is great when he's not taking himself seriously - something you never really see post-Portrait. I miss the nerdy goon pushing buttons by imitating Willy Wonka and writing songs about killer cars and lovable cyclops. Plus his videos had kittens and roller rinks in them! Amazing.

For the grown-ups, Tom Petty released Wildflowers. What can I say about this album? It's flawless.

Young up-and-comer Jeff Buckley also released his only proper album, Grace, before tragically dying. Man oh man, what could have come after this? You know the album's good because it alone carries Jeff Buckley's reputation of amazing songsmith.

And lastly, Tori Amos released my favorite of her albums, Under the Pink, featuring songs about masturbation, atheism and more. Oh, and a song about wanting to kill a waitress - perhaps a response to Live's bizarre song pleading for a friend to leave a tip? I like to think so.
Did you know this song's about female circumcision? Now you do.

Here's my final list of why I think 1994 was fucking awesome. I hope I changed someone's mind or affirmed someone's opinion. I know that in the act of listing these I proved to myself why I love the mid-'90s, which was pretty nice, and that's the only thing that matters, right?

Jar of Flies - Alice in Chains
Mellow Gold/One Foot in the Grave/Stereopathetic Soul Manure - Beck
Parklife - Blur
Anarchy - Chumbawamba
Comforter - Compulsion
Dookie - Green Day
Live Through This - Hole
Grace - Jeff Buckley
Prairie Home Invasion - Jello Biafra/Mojo Nixon
Orange - Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Throwing Copper - Live
Voodoo-U - Lords of Acid
Portrait of an American Family - Marilyn Manson
The Downward Spiral - Nine Inch Nails
Ungplugged in NY - Nirvana
Vitalogy - Pearl Jam
Pisces Iscariot - the Smashing Pumpkins
Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star - Sonic Youth
Ruby Vroom - Soul Coughing
Superunknown - Soundgarden
Purple - Stone Temple Pilots
John Henry - They Might Be Giants
Rubberneck - Toadies
Wildflowers - Tom Petty
Under the Pink - Tori Amos
Chocolate and Cheese - Ween

Shock and Sadness in Video Form

2008-11-10T08:59:00.000-08:00

There's nothing exciting going on in my life right now, but the world is full of exciting things. Among them:

CNN inexplicably posting the whole audio of the Jonestown Massacre. It's like near an hour long, so unless you're in for about 48 minutes of bummer you can skip it.

Miriam Makeba passing away. :-(

For an even better video click here.

Also, Chris Russell has notified me that Barack Obama is actually not American/Kenyan, he is in fact Irish.

French Miaou

2008-11-09T18:10:00.000-08:00

So I went to Dublin this weekend and now I'm back. While I was there I went to the Museum of Modern Art and saw a display of some of the films by Russian/French animator Ladislas Starevich's, which I didn't know existed. The awesome ones I saw there aren't on the internet, but here's a taste for everyone else who likes puppets.

This is from his first feature-length. It's a musical number sung by a fox to a lioness. I don't know what else is going on. Rachel?

For this one turn the sound off because I'm pretty sure the music accompaniment is not right or synced up. You'd be better off just turning on your own poignant music and enjoying this nice little short. It's also about royal lions and it's very sad.

A New Era

2008-11-06T08:21:00.000-08:00

I have to go to Dublin tomorrow with my study abroad group, which will be fun for the photo opportunities at least. Can you believe that I've been blogging every day for the past month or so? What a pathetic achievement! Also, four people commented on my last entry, which is almost a record. This truly is a new era.

I watched Hard Candy today. I'd put that movie off for a while, but it had always been on my radar. I generally enjoy any button-pushing movie that can walk a line between arty-pretension and exploitation without falling either way, but I'm not sure if this movie succeeded. It sure started out creepy enough. It's like, as the cat-and-mouse game goes on and more things come to light, it goes from being a great movie down a couple notches to pretty good. But it's hard to beat the two performances. Noted non-uggo Ellen Page was amazing, and she was only 15-years-old (imdb tells me). She's the same age as me! What the hell am I doing with my life? The stench of perpetual failure never comes off!

In other news, I finally got the new BFP today. I was so happy because I had assumed it'd been "lost in the mail." Maybe it sounds like a) I think that my college newspaper staff should/do care what I think and b) I'm scared of people I don't know bringing my dick-sucking to light if I say that this edition is one of the best I can remember, but it honestly is. Having an election to write about probably helped. Since my last post was a snarkfest and there's so much hope in the air, let's look at what went right. If you don't go to Bennington and you're reading this then bail out now; it won't make enough sense to be worth your time, and your time is very valuable:

Imagine my shock to find Senator Apple-Potatohead himself leering at me from the front page as if paper-McCain had frozen in time upon hearing the news that his real-life twin had just got his ass handed to him. I guess not enough people followed the first part of Geoff Pigman's plea to "choose experience," opting instead for the latter bit, "choose judgement."
Meanwhile Brian Morrice, official Obama Student Representative, takes some time to remind the laymen who haven't worked closely with the President-elect that there were lower-level races to be won as well and provides a handy little guide to them, which is nice to see.

The politics continued throughout, but, oh my God, it's like all my BFP wishes came true: they were all unique opinion pieces and not dry reporting! I was happy to see:

Sarah Palin's full name (Sarah Louise Heath Palin McLoserstien)
Chris Matthews' earnestness compared to Ralph Wiggum
That the young Panzariellos were brought up to call Bill Clinton "the monster." Honestly, if you think back on most of our recent presidents as "the monsters" and put yourself in a child's shoes it doesn't take much imagination-stretching to make them seem pretty scary looking (except Obama, who is dreamy). Incidentally, it's always best to put on the shoes of children when thinking about politics. (Just ask Dennis Kucinich! Zingggg!!!!kill me)
The headline "Late-breaking newts" made me extremely happy.

In even better news, Zimmer's angry screed against dining hall problems is back, in more succinct form. I agree with every statement in it except for the bit about vegans eating meat - Michael, just because Kilpat wishes it lived in a barbecue grease trap instead of a house doesn't mean the rest of us do. Will change come to the Dining Hall? Er... doubtful.

Also, Baking With Faith is now hand-drawn and adorable, featuring a cartoon Amanda Vorce and the personification of Baking. Question: why does Baking have to wear a mask? What has she done previously in life that she needs to hide her identity? My guess is that she sold her soul to the Devil to ascend from life as a verb to that of a person. Amanda, for her part, must've sold her soul for that sweet harmonica that plays itself.

Two complaints:

Big Guy/Little Guy has taken over the paper, spreading over four pages like a virus. I think the lot of the Guys is a sad one: perpetually floating in space, talking in elliptical conversations with no endings. Now that politics has entered the scene the conversations are going to become more and more insufferable. I guess there's not much to do while waiting for the rest of your head to materialize.
Where's Dr. Randy's column? Is Geoff Pigman the new Dr. Randy?? Is Geoff Pigman a liscenced gynocologist???? The women of Bennington deserve answers!

Heaven's Snoogle-Fleejer, Hell's Ying Yang

2008-11-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

Big news in America last night: Sasha and Malia Obama are getting a puppy! Only time will tell if Obama follows in John Adams' footsteps and names his dog Satan. I was looking at the wikipedia article about presidential pets - totally fascinating.

My favorite: Jimmy Carter's cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang, seen here with his daughter, Amy.

Also, did you know that in 1995 Jimmy and Amy Carter collaborated on a childrens' book together called The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer? Now you do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other exciting news, walking home from class yesterday some old men from a fundamentalist church handed me two exciting documents! The first was everyone's favorite family newspaper, End Times, which, apparently, proves Richard Dawkins wrong about the theory of evolution. You see, in 2005 Dawkins said in a lecture that he believes everything in the universe is the product of Darwinian natural selection, but he technically can't prove it. Why? For starters I'm going to guess that cataloging everything that ever existed in the universe and proving it's origin is a bit ambitious, but what do I know?
The End Times contrasts this with a letter that Dawkins sent to his daughter on her tenth birthday.
(I'm going to give that a second to sink in)

In the letter Dawkins tells his ten-year-old daughter:

"Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: 'Is this the kind of thing people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?' And next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?"

Ah-ha! Caught in your own snare, Dawkins! (On a side note, that's a pretty heady message for a ten-year-old, isn't it?)

The other wonderful pamphlet I was handed was an invitation to see the Christian theatrical guilt-o-rama Heaven's Gates, Hell's Flames next Sunday. If you haven't heard of it before, HGHF is basically a live Chick tract where people die in the middle of overwrought sin scenarios (gay drug abortions! prostitute Eucharist smashings! I actually don't know the particulars 'cuz I haven't seen it) and proceed to St. Peter's to be judged accordingly. I'll let this youtube clip do the rest of the talking. Either way, I'm totally psyched about going. Now I just need to find an Irish friend who appreciates irony. "Right on, baby! I hear this is Snake territory!"

"Joey you can't die! I didn't tell you about Jesus!" Here's a full trailer for more sweet, sweet madness.

Tuning-Peg Carrot vs. Lumpy Sack: Election Megapost in Three Parts

2008-11-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Hey did you know you can leave me comments on my blog just using your AIM screen name? You don't even need a blog! There's no excuse not to love me!

In other news, did you hear? There's apparently an election today. Some black fella is running against a greased-up baby. Or is it the lovechild of an apple-head doll and Mr. Potatohead?

+

=

?

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

Speaking of elevated political discourse...

When I was young my parents subscribed to Newsweek. When it came I always turned to the page that had three political cartoons on it. I read them because I liked cartoons not because I cared about politics or really understood them all the time. That I understood them at all is really a testament to the nature of political cartoons, not intelligence on my part; even an 8-year-old gets the basic message of, say, a man crushed under a thousand lb. weight labeled "taxes."

Political cartoons are often unfunny, unclever metaphors scrawled by some grumpy, old, sectarian fuck who only goes outside his house to drop off his latest ravings at a publication. Despite (or because of) this, I really enjoy them. At their best they are funny and at their worst they are much funnier.

To catch up on the latest political cartoons I usually head over to Slate Magazine's website, where they're compiled in a little unwieldy ghetto of a page by subject. You can troll through the issues, scoffing at the bad cartoons from the far right, feeling vindicated by the also-bad cartoons from the far left and scratching your head at the cartoons from other countries.

Some of my latest favorites:

This representation of Palin is just mind-blowingly bad. Jesus Christ, Gary Markstein, have you ever seen the woman? You didn't even get the hair right!

Speaking of bizarre Palin drawings, what happened to her face in this Irish cartoon? She's like some malevolent ape. Which might explain the bone in her hair.

Heinous.

By contrast, this guy makes most political cartoonists look like Michelangelo. He's turned these three recognizable men into bizarre simplifications of themselves. Barack Obama is a carrot with tuning pegs for ears. John McCain is a lumpy sack. George Bush is a... butterfly on a stick? Or, like, an angel for the top of a Christmas tree without a head...? Or...?

This one is not only unfunny, but it also telegraphs pretty clearly that Joel Pett is some kind of self-loathing racist who thinks that his inner conflict is common within the reading public. It really says nothing about politics but volumes about it's artist. Sad volumes.

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

But maybe the most baffling to me are the Obama-alarmist cartoons. I understand disagreeing with the man, but surely he can't be as scary as these cartoons make him out... or is he?

Subtle.

He's really malevolent when you take his head off.

I like how, here, McCain looks like Joe Everyman while Obama is like the Nightmare King of Black Supremacy.

"Hey, I'm Gary Varvel! I can do caricatures! Available for birthday parties and street fairs! What, you don't want to leaf through my portfolio?? What about just one cartoon?"

In case you missed it, Obama is Stalin, the devil is a liberal and Batman is George Bush.

Just like Obama, always playing the race card.

Obama's not just Stalin, he's also Dr. Moreau.

It just goes on and on doesn't it? Don't forget to vote!

Photojournal #5

2008-11-03T07:10:00.001-08:00

Hey, guess what happened yesterday? A big ol' parade in the middle of Belfast chock full of sectarian drama. Exactly the kind of thing that I came to Belfast to experience. It's the kind of thing you really can't see anywhere else.

Hey, guess where I was yesterday? Taking pictures of cats.

That's right, in between reading more boringness from Margery Kempe and twiddling my thumbs I took a walk through a little 'burb of Belfast called Dullsville.
I probably wouldn't have been awake for the parade anyways.

And can you get comedy like this anywhere else?

Bwahahahaha....ha....ha..
I'm, like, the worst tourist ever.

That Lame Guy Stole My Lame Move!

2008-11-02T06:53:00.000-08:00

Like my sleeping habits, another thing I get called out for by the people who care for me is my one non-dance move. I have pitch and rhythm like a motherfucker, but when I'm dancing my arms do some sort of ski-pole maneuver. I know exactly where it came from, too:

I think when I was hitting puberty and my body was figuring out how humans move it placed the first five seconds of John Travolta's dance into it's sense-memory and called it a life. That's also why I'm a Scientologist.

So imagine my surprise and horror when, this morning, I was watching an old video of the Firehouse Five Plus Two playing and I saw my move! The lamest guy in the audience held a lame mirror up to my lame face. If you skip to 2:15 minutes in you'll be shocked and awed:

I like how, when he notices the girl is looking at him, he decides that head-nodding is probably a safer choice. To be fair to me, I never do the around-the-world thing with my hands, I can move my feet alright, and I don't wear backwards children's fireman's hats. To be fair to him, though, it's obviously working, cuz that girl is hooked - although it's possible that her smile just froze on her face when she was paralyzed by his whiteness.

Another embarrassing thing I do when I dance: I snap. It's uncontrollable! Don't try and change me, I'm lost. My body is a machine made for dancing at shows, that is all. As long as I can look head-banging/hurky-jerky I'm fine - it's when I have to look suave/human that things go wrong.

No, Macaulay Culkin, No!!!

2008-10-31T19:43:00.000-07:00

My friends have made fun of me before because I complain about my "sleep-cycle getting screwed up." What none of these so-called friends realizes is that getting up at a reasonable time is a constant struggle for me. If I give my body an inch by sleeping in as long as it wants one day, it'll take a mile the next.
Well, ever since coming back from the US I've been complaining about jet-lag. What's really happened, though, is I just haven't been firm enough with my body to make it wake up when humans do this week. I missed one-and-a-half lectures this week because I hit snooze so many times on my alarm clock that it malfunctioned and gave up on me (three days in a row!). I have to put it across the room and just admit that I have a problem - there's no other way. Otherwise I'll be waking up at 3:30 in the afternoon every day.

Like today. Since, like my other post said, everyone leaves on Fridays, it was a really mellow Halloween. I have to read Great Expectations for the third time and it's really slow going now that all the suspense and discovery is sucked out of it (Rachel, "you may kiss me if you like"). I also have to read the book of Margery Kempe, which is a Medieval diary by a crazo woman who talks about Jesus hanging out with her and how she loves crying in front of stained glass windows and abstains from meat and sex with her really patient husband and blah blah blah. What a sweet Halloween!

I did celebrate a little, though, by watching one of the movies that absolutely scarred me as a child, The Good Son. Post-Home Alone and right before leaving films for a decade, Macaulay Culkin was looking to shake up his image a bit. He did so by being in a 1993 movie where he plays the absolutely most hate-able little shit you will ever see.
I remember coming into the family room as a child and seeing the movie on TV and plopping down to watch good, old Mac. Before I knew it he was forcing Elijah Wood to watch him shoot at animals with a crossbow and simulate suicides in order to cause highway accidents. It really resonated with me, having been forced, like little Frodo, to spend many awkward hours with kids of my parents' friends who were certifiable psychos.
Anyways, the movie's aged really well and, though I've seen it three times, it never fails to creep the ever-loving shit out of me. Must be a masterpiece. It's on youtube, if you want to see it, but you have to watch a clip called something like "THE MOTHER OF ALL CLIFF-HANGERS" to watch the end.

A similar movie that I haven't seen since it first came out is Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy. I kind of want to read the book first and confront my demonic memories of this movie by understanding it. I was like, ten or eleven when my dad brought it home from Hollywood Video and I loved horror movies, but I definitely wasn't old enough for this movie not to leave an impression on me. Plus, I'm in Ireland and Patrick McCabe's practically royalty here, right? Or maybe I should make an effort to experience some culture elsewhere.
Dig the awesome intro:

Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing

2008-10-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got hit with an egg walking to Lavery's pub. That must mean it's....
Halloween in Belfast!

Or, I guess, the night before Halloween. Since everyone goes home on the weekends here Friday-Sunday are dead and Monday-Thursday are wild. Plus everyone drives on the wrong side of the road all the time.
So last night was effectively Halloween, since no one will be around tonight. I was probably hit with the egg because I wasn't wearing a costume. Or because people were being wankers (the egg didn't break 'til it hit the ground, though, so no harm done). I got accosted by drunken ghosts, cowboys, Storm Troopers (the Stars Wars kind, not the Nazi kind) and lots and lots of cavemen. Y'know, if you can't pull the caveman costume off, it really turns against you. Also, have you ever seen a group of guys in mariachi outfits talking with Irish accents? It's really disconcerting.

In celebration of this, the day belonging to our Dark Lord and Master... two of my favorite Halloween cartoons!

Betty Boop's Halloween Party: If I could live in any cartoon world it would be Betty Boop's. I really like how everybody is constantly bopping along to some beat. In this cartoon, Betty holds a Halloween party, leads her guests in the traditional Halloween song, "Let's All Sing Like the Birdies Sing" before her party is crashed by... the Halloween Ape or something.

Disney's Skeleton Dance: This cartoon upholds various animal myths, like the fact that the cat's tail is connected internally to it's nose and can be played like an cello if stretched; or that you can pluck a bird's feathers by throwing your detached head at it. Also, skeletons ride each other like pogo sticks, play each other like xylophones (while pelvic thrusting!) and ultimately merge into a quadruple-skeleton-horse. I love this cartoon!

Comments Round-Up!

2008-10-30T13:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, did I get an anonymous mention from an anonymous person in the BFP? That's all I ever wanted! I take everything back!
I also got anonymous comments! Does this mean that the ol' Bennington gossip train has picked up my blog as a passenger and been chugging along through the BFP staff? Does this mean that people are showing freshmen my blog and facebook page and telling them what a horrible person I am?
Oh no!

"fuck you" writes:

"YOU'RE A HUGE DICK SUCKER.
First of all, it is a freshmen perspective, meaning her own opinion as a freshmen at Bennington. You're an upperclassmen, so get the fuck off her back. Second, it's really stupid of you to say "sorry if you're reading this Connie", and then continue to rant shit about her.
Go keep on blogging you pathetic asshole, at least Connie has real friends who care about her instead of stupid fucking cyber fantasies of friends. Enjoy the rest of your life as a huge cock sucker you fuck!"

Dear fuck you,
First of all, it's my senior perspective on Connie's freshman perspective. Honestly, I don't know who Connie is and I didn't realize I was on her back. If one of these friends that you mentioned felt it was their friendly duty to show her my blog and her feelings are hurt than I apologize to her. If anything my comments on her article are only indicative of my own curmudgeonly bitterness and have absolutely nothing to do with her. Plus she's writing for a paper, which is more than I'm doing, so clearly she wins. Plus my mouth is full of dicks and I have no friends.

Speaking of fellatio, Leahliana writes:

"(Oh, and "Tipping the Velvet" is a pathetic attempt at gay fiction. If you want to read something halfway decent with queer themes, I suggest either Virginia Woolfe's "Orlando" or EM Forster's "Maurice".)"

Dear Leahliana,
Thanks for this addendum to a conversation I didn't realize we were having and thanks so much for edifying me about Virginia Woolfe and EM Forster. Being a literature student at Bennington, I've never been exposed to these writers or books. I'll be sure to mention them to the professor who assigned me Tipping the Velvet.

Constant Reader writes:

"It's not my fault the people love me!"

Dear Constant Reader,
I don't know who you are or what you are talking about.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear friends and cyber fanatasies of friends,
I don't want to fight. If I bothered to write a big long post in my personal blog about the BFP it's because I always look forward to the BFP and enjoy reading it. Like I sort of said above, I totally respect anybody who is even bothering to write for the BFP because I know it takes work and time. I keep a fucking travel blog - I obviously lose.
If that post was bitchy it is because I like mouthing off about my opinions like a cranky old man, but that doesn't mean that I think my opinions are more valid than anybody else's. And I love having long discussions about the things I'm opinionated about, so if you actually want to leave your name and talk about it, I'm totally down. Or - hey! - the BFP can write a scathing review of my blog! It's riddled with grammatical errors, self-indulgence and other things that should be making me blush. The power is yours, Connie Panzariello '12 - rip me a new asshole.
Hatchet: buried.

Big News That Relates To No One But Me

2008-10-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

CNN Headlines of the day:
"Haunted jail sounds freaky, cops say."
"McCain: 'Racism exists.'"

Exciting news! I know the world has been holding its collective breath waiting to hear what classes I'm taking in the spring. Well, relief is on the way. I know that I'm getting into three 4000-level classes at least: Sitcom with Kirk Jackson, Advanced Readings in Shulz, etc. with Marguerite and Sue's projects class!
I tried to get into Stephen Bach's Advanced Screenwriting class, but he was a total bitch about it, so I happily parted with that idea.
I'm also trying to get into screen-printing workshop. That's 2000-level so I just threw my hat into the ring and am hoping for the best. If I don't get that I'm going to try beginning painting. Either way, sounds like a fun curriculum!

To celebrate: Funny dogs!

Suggestions for Teeth

2008-10-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

I'm finally becoming comfortable with the fact that I dress differently than a lot of the people here. It's hard to be in a new place where you're not familiar with the customs and be aware that you're visibly different than everyone but you feel helpless to change it. Now I sort of know what the fashions are and I feel ok bucking them. It's sort of like knowing the rules so you can break them.

Except that that sounds really bad-ass whereas all I'm doing is wearing my ratty sweatshirt and beanie instead of nicer clothes. But, as I stood at the crosswalk today with a girl who had low-slung jeans with a mystifying zipper that ran perpendicular to her buttcrack and under her belt-loops and a guy with a frosted fashion-mullet I felt ok about that.

In other news, I've been catching up on movies finally now that I've figured out how to stream them illegally. At Bennington I had Netflix and the library, but here I was pretty much out of luck on the legal DVD front (unless I, y'know, wanted to pay for them individually).
Thankfully the internet has a lot of movies on it! Even though a lot of the movies are things like Rob Schneider's The Hot Chick.

Hey, remember The Hot Chick?

The irritating thing is that a lot of the movies have been compressed weirdly, maintaining their widescreen imagery but squishing it horizontally so it fits into a standard viewer. Because of this and the general poor image-quality, I've been trying to watch movies that are more talky and less visual.

The movies I've watched:
I watched Network the other day. Have you ever seen that movie? It is maybe the best film I've ever seen. I was absolutely blown away. In Freed-ian terms: so good!

I then watched The Savages, which wasn't blow-you-away good, but pretty good nonetheless. It's hard to go wrong with Philip Seymore Hoffman and Laura Linney.

Finally I watched Teeth. You know, the movie about a girl with a toothed vagina? After being weaned on movies with brilliant ideas and shitty execution, any horror movie fan knows when not to get his or her (probably his) hopes up too high for movies that sound too good to be true. If every horror movie lived up to the promise of it's premise, Troma would be pumping out Oscar-winners instead of absolute trash (except for Cannibal: The Musical, which is pretty good).

So, obviously, Teeth wasn't amazing, but it was alright. It's hard to judge a movie about vagina dentata (that's right - that's the medical term) by standards except for those that it sets up. It's not like there's a long history of great vagina-teeth movies that it has to live up to.
That said, some suggestions on how to make the movie better:

When the vagina eats things it should go "Nom nom nom!"
The twist at the end should have been that Dawn's boobs were also eyes, so her body was like a walking head.
The vagina should talk.
Show the vagina. They showed one of it's teeth, as well as severed penises being eaten by both a crab and a dog, but I'm still curious. The best idea they give us is the morgue dental expert saying that the strange tooth came from something like a shark mixed with a lamprey.
Dawn should meet a squad of similarly afflicted women. They should form a new A-Team.

"You Forgot Not To Kill Me, Mummy"

2008-10-27T17:13:00.000-07:00

Let it be known that my favorite type of commercials and billboards are, by far, public service announcements. Let it also be known that my favorite movies are horror movies. Therefore, maybe it's no surprise that I absolutely love PSAs that play out like gritty, fucked up horror movies. I love them! A prime example of this at it's best are the amazing Montana Meth ads and billboards (thanks for the tip, Ian D-T!).

Here in Northern Ireland there are a few issues that seem to warrant advertisements that trade completely on shocking your pants off. Among these are: not walking alone at night (you'll get raped!), not carrying a knife (you'll accidentally stab someone!), changing the batteries in your smoke alarm (your child will die and reprimand you!) and almost every law pertaining to driving.
Some of my favorite PSAs:

I. CAN'T. TAKE. MY. EYES. OFF. YOU!

I'm not sure why this version of the commercial is in Hebrew. You can tell it's European because the lyrics on display ("Body to body, funky to funky, we know how to rock the party") are British songwriting at it's best:

But it's not just Northern Ireland! All of Europe loves making you throw up a little while watching TV:

This comes courtesy of Denmark. Ever see the French movie Irreversable? It's kind of like this, but nobody makes a face as funny as when the lady side-ends the car.

These are from Mainland Britain, where playing in traffic is a national pastime:

Maybe if they're not surrounded by fiberglass, bikes should take longer to look for me:

Stop copying me! Stop copying me!

I couldn't find the smoke alarm one, which is easily the most quotable, but I did find Nathan Franklin's seminal short film, "The Happy Smoke Detector," which is about as disturbing:

Land of the empire builders, murderers

2008-10-26T18:52:00.000-07:00

"Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr Hurtle and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed."

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

"I'm a bookkeeper's son/ I don't wanna hurt no one/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive./ Got a case of dynamite/ I could hold out here all night/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive.

- Steely Dan,"Don't Take Me Alive"

Dream Journal vol. 2

2008-10-25T18:27:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamed my mom called me vain and I wrote her a letter saying that she, the name-caller, was the one in need of reprimanding. I was really hurt.
I was staying in a wooden cabin with guys from my high school and I tried to explain to them that I'd enjoyed the camping trip we'd just been on more than any other. Kush was incredulous.

Though everyone else slept in one room, I slept in a single with a giant picture of Laurie Anderson or some frizzy-haired '80s pop chanteuse on the back wall. Looking through the door's peephole you could only see her eye. If it was light and filled with a silhouette of a sailing ship the room was unoccupied.

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

I've been having a recurring dream of a Mike Patton album (sometimes with Mr. Bungle, sometimes with Fantomas) from 1999. It has a white cover with dark, inky arabesques from old marine biology textbooks. Inside there are pages of the CD booklet with flowery designs for each song followed by duplicate pages where the same designs are portrayed with Lite-Brite pegs. And the music is so fucking heavy and amazing! I want to listen to it right now!

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

I had a dream in which I was the "Vanna White" on a game show in which a famous Cocker Spaniel in a transparent polygonal box circled a conveyor belt before I put him in an airport x-ray machine.

Later I was feeding a pet rat a candy called Fancy Chocolate Meiths in milk. When I tried feeding the candy to the rat without milk I was surprised by it's power as it jumped and tore the bag open, scattering Meiths everywhere. The Meiths on the carpet mingled with rat shit. I sat on the floor, shocked at the mess, feeling powerless.

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

I dreamed I had to decorate the scaffold of an under-construction high rise building for a movie shoot starring stuffed-animal apes. I was given a bag of jump ropes to tie to the railings in order to make it look more "industrial." The jump ropes ended up supporting a large, haning object. I decided to tie the other end to a desk phone and snubbed the crew member who politely questioned my logic in doing this with a curt word and a quick retreat.

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

Last night I dreamed a girl I dated years ago was a transvestite. I tried not to act surprised.

7th Graders Debate the Election in Song Form

2008-10-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

Love Letter to... 1994 pt. 2

2008-10-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

Much to my surprise, somebody told me that they enjoyed my post on '90s albums the other day. I was pretty sure I was just pleasing myself, so that was really nice to hear. Though, I guess it is my blog, so pleasing myself isn't so criminal.
In the spirit of that, here's some more knowledge emptied out of the part of my brain that isn't being used for math or science. In the interest of brevity I'll try not to talk each album into the ground, with the exception of the first entry:

In 1994 the artist who shaped me musically more than anyone, Beck, released three albums. The first, Mellow Gold, was his debut with his presumed one-hit-wonder, "Loser." The others were an album of folk/blues, One Foot in the Grave and a collection of throwaways and oddities from past tapes, Stereopathetic Soul Manure. After buying 1996's Odelay and having my 4th-grade mind blown I had hoped that Mellow Gold would deliver the same impact. It did and more.
Beck has dismissed the album as being hastily written and recorded. The evidence of this is apparent and also why I love the album so much. There was no time for perfectionism - it's like a rock album by a crazy junkman, veering from blues to hip-hop to heavy metal to Indian raga and mixing them all up. Abrasive songs like "Sweet Sunshine" and "Motherfuker" were scrutinized endlessly by me like archeological objects. Who made songs rapping through a harmonica mic with a drum machine and a kalimba? My young mind saw what some deride as sloppiness and nonsensical dadaism (an argument I now sympathize with, even if I don't necessarily agree) as some mysterious language to decode.
What Mellow Gold delivered in that respect, Soul Manure delivered in spades. Though not a classic in any means, the sheer audacity of this album (if you can call it that) still amazes me. It's something that could only be loved like I loved it by a 12-year-old - especially the 20+ minute noise collage at the end with ramblings about leaving horses in the desert for sourdough bread and other nonsense.
Lastly, One Foot in the Grave is, like many of my favorite albums now, a record that I hated the first time I heard it. It didn't deliver what I expected at all. In the end it became an even more special album to me than the other two, introducing me to music forms that I had previously had no interest in.

The album that perhaps defined Brit-pop in the '90s was Blur's Parklife. I won't get started on Oasis being puffed-up hacks - comparing Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon's career output to the Gallaghers' does it for me - but I think it's safe to say that even the biggest Oasis apologetic has to respect this album. Known stateside mostly for the hit "Girls and Boys," the album has no weak track. I love their previous, more sprawling album, Modern Life is Rubbish, even more, but Parklife did something that album couldn't - it created a movement (except in the states, where nobody gave a shit).

Elsewhere, in Ireland, one of my favorite overlooked, under-appreciated bands put out the first of two albums. Compulsion's Comforter is probably not on anyone else's 90's best-of list, but it's seminal for me. While Blur explored Britain in a shinier, poppier way, Compulsion put out songs about city sprawl and class unrest, eating and mental disorders, crime and other things in Ireland's musty basement.

And speaking of writing songs about things people don't want to hear, some of my musical heroes and eventual undeserved musical punchline, Chumbawamba, put out the amazing, Anarchy. There's not a lot of love stateside or elsewhere for a 9+ group of vegan anarchists who write unabashed pop songs about politics, but, to my mind, there should be. The thing I love about Chumbawamba is that, like Steely Dan and Randy Newman, they write deceptively smooth and sunny songs about dark, dark subjects. Operating under the ethos that more people are going to listen to you if your music is easy to listen to, Anarchy is full of angry songs about unchecked homophobia, class and, um, anarchy subversively couched in pop songs.

Another overlooked group, Soul Coughing, put out their first album, Ruby Vroom in 1994. As with Chumbawamba, it's not surprising that a band made up of a jungle/jazz drummer, a sampler/keyboardist, an upright bassist and a surrealist beat-poet struggled to find a niche on the pop charts, but it's something of a shame. Soul Coughing put out three albums, each with a sound distinct from the others and distinct from anything else. Mike Doughty went on to become a semi-successful adult-contemporary songsmith and the sampler, Mark de gli Antoni, put out a really bizarre album on John Zorn's label.

Similarly nerdy, though with a considerable cult following, They Might Be Giants put out John Henry, their first album to eschew drum-machines for a real band. Though I hesitate to call John Henry stranger than TMBG's previous, very strange output, it is extremely weird and undeniably darker. Songs like "Why Must I Be Sad?" "Stomp Box," and "A Self Called Nowhere" are songs with a heaviness not evidenced on earlier tracks like "Birdhouse in Your Soul." Likewise, the patience-tasking breakdown at the end of "Spy" is pretty unreal. There's also a track about dirt bikes taking over a town (or something...), painter James Ensor and a gracious hermit crab:

Also experimenting and defying a public that seemed to want conformism was Sonic Youth. Having just put out their most accessable album to date, Dirty, Sonic Youth changed directions and made a truly singular album. Though it's seen by many fans as a bridge between the straighter-ahead noise of the early ninetees to the dense, mature sound of Washing Machine, this view doesn't do Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star justice. This is my favorite type of album: one that fires in all directions and succeeds. It even begins with an acoustic song - more shocking than anything else SY could've done - and netted them their biggest, surprise hit, "Bull in the Heather." It's an album where each track asks to be taken on it's own terms, which is something I love.

Lastly, an album that is nerdy in a way none of these other ones are. Like the Brian Setzer before him, Jon Spencer used to play harder, faster music in Pussy Galore before leaving it to reinvent older styles in the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Taking notes from the Cramps, the Blues Explosion put out their best album in '94 with Orange. Though I think it gets silly at times the best tracks on it are hard to deny (plus they gave Beck an impromptu call to rap over the phone on "Flavor," yielding appropriately strange results - Beck would later remix the song and accompany them in the music video in a chef's outfit, assaulting people on the subway with a Godzilla doll).

Next time, if there is a next time, the end of 1994 - softer and harder, younger and older.

boring post about self-revelation - the honeymoon's over, Belfast

2008-10-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

Hello again Blogosphere,
This is the kind of navel-gazing blog post that I normally hate to read, so, if you're like me, take that as a warning and skip the first bit.

I've just been moping around since I got back from Portland. I met a 21-year-old girl in the student village laundry room the other day. I told her that I feel like I'm a freshman again living with all the first-years here. "I know, isn't it great?" she replied.
No, girl, it's not. I've already done freshman year (and sophomore and junior) and the bloom has well worn off the rose. I'm really itching for companionship from people for whom college isn't still a novelty.

This is part of the whole "plunging into a strange environment" thing. As I bitched in my earlier post about music, I naively assumed that I would be around people who might not like the same things that I liked, but would introduce me to new and better things that I would also like.
Obviously, it's not that simple. I guess it would be like coming from here to Duke University or something and being disappointed with the fact that everyone really liked watching "Step Up: To The Streets" and listening to Low by Flo-Rida and T-Pain (which, incidentally is still really big here).

I didn't even think about the fact that, if the things I am passionate about are enjoyed by a small niche at Bennington, then of course the niche would be much smaller at a big, foreign school. I'm just so used to being around like-minded people!

In one of the many handouts they gave exchange students here was a graph of the normal exchange student's happiness level as the term progressed. It started at the ecstatic "honeymoon period" where everything is new and exciting then dipped into a long slump where the exchange student "hates everything Irish" before finally coming to the "acceptance stage" somewhere around December. While I don't hate everything Irish, I have come to realize how much I like certain things in America - or, at least, in the niche I've found in America - and I hope it doesn't take until December for me to be totally comfortable here.

If nothing else I'm being forced to find a new comfort zone. I guess it can be hard in a big university to find like-minded people - a social lesson I feel like I'm learning kind of late.

But, tomorrow I have plans to go into the city with a friend and try and find things for a Halloween costume, then to break away by myself and do some sightseeing, if it's not too cold. Nobody's here on the weekend, so it's the perfect time.
I don't know what I'm going to be for Halloween. I keep coming back to the low-budget idea of getting some clothes, ripping them up and putting fake blood on myself and coming up with some clever reason why I'm dead. Or maybe I'll be evil St. Patrick - bringing snakes back to Ireland. Or a Protestant/Catholic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that beats himself up.

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

In my moping I've been listening to this great little tune from the Eels' first album, Beautiful Freak. It's really wonderful. Presented here by World of Warcraft gnomes, for extra pathos:

And in cheering myself up I've been listening to the greatest James Bond theme of all time, courtesy of Duran Duran. Top this, Jack White:

Photojournal vol. 4

2008-10-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

You are commanded to relax and shop.

"What the fuck you lookin' at?"

Happy Tootie Day!

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

Strap another horse to the bitchin' post

2008-10-22T16:04:00.001-07:00

Dear Belfast and friends in Belfast,
I'm a little drunk right now, but before I go to bed I have a confession to make: I hate your music. The music you listen to here is, almost without exception, complete shit.

Before coming over to the UK I labored under the delusion that there was great music in Britain that never made it over to the US due to our cultural differences. I was wrong. America actually does a great job of making sure your Euro-trash nostalgia has as much chance of crossing the Atlantic as British soldiers in redcoats.

I tried to reach out and find common ground, like the Knife, Lykke Li and hip-hop from the '90s, but you rejected me. I wouldn't feel so hostile if you hadn't derided my music, instead putting on the following songs:

Don't fuck with me, Belfast, I know I'm right. The year 2000 is over. You need to move on. None of this is viable music, even if (especially if) you have to put a rave beat behind it and drop pills to make it relevant.
And don't get me started on that fucking Kid Rock song. If you didn't know who Lynyrd Skynard was before hearing it, you certainly haven't been "singing 'Sweet Home Alabama' all summer." Also he rhymes "different things" with "funny things," which is not something a "Rock and Roll Jesus" would do.

Also, please stop playing Blink 182 and Wheatus' "Teenage Dirtbag." It's like rolling a corpse over just to smell it fresh. Some things deserve to be buried!

A Love Letter to... the Mid-'90s: 1994, pt. 1

2008-10-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

So I'm back in N.Ireland and I've so many stories to tell. But instead of doing that, I'd rather write more about '90s music. I was initially thinking that I'd write about important albums in a chronological order. Then I thought that I'd do it alphabetical by bands... I've decided that I'm gonna do some mix of the two. Mostly I want to communicate albums that are timeless to me and examples of how awesome I think the mid-'90s were.

Obviously everyone's got their own classic albums and their own tastes. On the whole I fucking hate music journalism, so this is just a personal account. Plus I can't speak for albums I haven't heard, so I would never purport to write about albums on a whole. I'm much more comfortable writing a field guide for albums that have been important to me and that I think sound of their time while being timeless.

Like I said before, I draw a circle around 1994-1997 - between Kurt Cobain's death and the release of Radiohead's OK Computer is the sweet spot. There are albums building up before '94 and echoes afterward, but there is something distinct about those four years. Genres were merging and shifting and, most importantly, exploring.

Let's start with 1994. It was the year that OJ Simpson led reporters on a chase after killing his wife and Ron Goldman. Meanwhile, figure-skating competitor and Portland-home-town-hero Tanya Harding and her husband had rival Nancy Kerrigan's knee bashed in. And, of course, after putting on REM's seminal album, Automatic For the People, Kurt Cobain blew his head off in his Washington home with a shotgun.

This was after Nirvana's appearance on MTV's Unplugged (a show that could not exist anymore), but before the album came out. Though they'd just released an album produced by Big Black's Steve Albini in an attempt to counter the perceived commercialism of Butch Vig's treatment on Nevermind and return their sound to sludginess, the Unplugged in New York episode and album helped convert the hesitant to accepting Cobain as the (unwilling) voice of his generation. Perhaps the most powerful moments in the concert are the band's covers of some of Cobain's heroes - David Bowie, Leadbelly and the Meat Puppets (who show up on stage to help out):

Meanwhile, fellow grunge-elite Alice in Chains had also stripped away the distortion to create their quietest, most heroin-soaked album Jar of Flies. As with Unplugged, the less harsh sound lent the album an understated power that was subtly effective in ways the band had not been before (not coincidentally, Alice in Chains had their own episode of Unplugged, which is pretty good, too). It was also a daring move for a group whose fan base consisted of more hesher, metal-heads than most of their grunge contemporaries.

(There's a great music video of "No Excuses" out there, but the embedding is disabled so I'm posting this video of someone's vacation pics instead)

And while Kurt was busy bearing the burden of everyone liking him, his wife, Courtney Love's - at that time just as respectable, if more-unknown - star was on the rise. It was shortly after her husband's death that Love's band, Hole, released it's breakthrough (and best) album, Live Through This. In the years since Cobain's death that Love's star has dropped tragically and drug itself around through the mud (with plenty of help). It's a shame that her tattered personal life has completely overshadowed the fact that, at her best, Courtney Love was an amazing, charismatic singer and songwriter in a genre that was (and still is) too much of a boys' club.

Back in the boys' club, the Stone Temple Pilots were putting out their second album. Emerging on the scene a couple of years earlier, STP was still a couple of years too late to be taken seriously. Though successful commercially, the band was derided by critics as being nothing but a Pearl Jam knock-off.
Indeed, if everything they put out had continued sounding like their debut, Core, then this derision would be founded, yet the follow-up, Purple, was it's own beast; a more mature, layered record. In part because the guitar/bass duo of the DeLeo brothers had the jazz chops to lead the group into more intricate places and in part because Scott Weiland, presumably tired of being called a poseur, was conked out of his gourd on heroin, Purple is deeper and more interesting than anything Core hinted at, with tracks like "Big Empty" touching on sadness more profound than the . The album begins with the rolling "Meat Plow" (I remember asking my dad what a meat plow was, thinking it was some sort of farm equipment - he told me it was a penis. In the context of the song, neither makes sense) and ending with a hidden track of Weiland crooning smooth jazz.
Famous, of course, for "Interstate Love Song," and lesser hits "Big Empty" and "Vaseline," there are so many indelible songs on this album, though, that it's a shame that STP remains more of a punch-line than a respected band.

And while Stone Temple Pilots were being compared unfavorably to Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder's band had critics scratching their heads. Upon releasing their monumental debut, Ten, Pearl Jam were saddled with so much critical acclaim it seemed to feel the need to buck it at once. The more people wanted them to be "grunge as it should be," the more Eddie and co. tried to be something else.
Their third album, Vitalogy, was one of many "fuck-you, take-me-as-I-am" records Pearl Jam gave to a head-scratching public that eventually diminished to a cult. Part of the message was Vedder's unhappiness with the still-new CD technology compared to vinyl. In response, Vitalogy was released on vinyl two weeks before CD and sported the unfortunately-named song "Spin the Black Circle." Other parts of the message were off-putting tracks like the accordian-accompanied rant, "Bugs" the bizarre "Satan's Bed," and the bizarre-r "Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me." At this point in their career, though, Pearl Jam were still magic men and the public ate up anything they did. The fact that the album sported strong tracks like "Better Man" and "Tremor Christ" didn't hurt either.

Meanwhile, a band truly deserving of the accusations laid on Stone Temple Pilots, Live, put out their breakthrough album, Throwing Copper. One can draw a line through famous Eddie Vedder impersonators with diminishing returns: Scott Weiland -> Eddie Kowalczyk of Live -> Scott Stapp of Creed -> Nickelback. While I consider STP to be a greatly overlooked band, Live not so much (though I think their name is pretty clever).
This album, though, features some really good songs. And it was produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, as if to single-handedly give it cred. Among those songs is "Selling The Drama," which hints un-rock-like to Kowalczyk's Christian leanings, and perrenial adult-contemporary favorite "Lightning Crashes," perhaps the only top-40 song to ever contain the word "placenta." For my money, though, the best song is the riveting starter, "The Dam at Otter Creek." In my favorite Vedder-impersonation to impersonate, you can hear Kowalczyk get fired up as he sings the lyrics, as if he can't wait to let loose in a Vedder-like howl: "took a dead man to the riivvvveerrrr...." The album hits it's silliest moment in the overwrought silliness of "Waitress," Kowalczyk's plea for tipping, due, inpart, to the fact that the waitress in question, though a bitch, "wore a funky dread in her hair." "Leave some change behind... some fucking chaayy-yee-ayyeeeyange!"

And lastly for this entry, Soundgarden put out Superunknown, a sprawling album that completely sums up the ambition and excitement of this period. It's hard to write with any objectivity about this album; when I got it for $6.00 in middle school it absolutely did my head in. Everything I try to write about it is just gushing - just to warn you.
Let me first state my problems with Soundgarden: Chris Cornell is one of those vocalists who has an amazing range, yet uses it on every song, thus eliminating subtlety and surprise. Likewise, Soundgarden could sound sludgier and heavier than almost any mainstream band, a fact they employed almost too often, making their music drag somewhat.
But, both of these facts are offset on Superunknown by the amazing versatility of the writing and the virtuosity of the playing. Unlike prog bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or metal bands like Metallica, Soundgarden could play intricate, complicated songs without seeming to break a sweat. Charting time signatures while listening to this album is a real treat for me, nerd that I am. I love that even on singles like "My Wave" or "Spoonman" they make liberal use of 5/4 or 7/8 while making it sound natural and easy: almost unheard of elsewhere. I'm gushing again.
For Superunknown, Soundgarden's sound had also transformed into something new. Ben Shepherd's songs like "Half" and "Head Down" are almost unclassifiable, as are "4th of July," "Like Suicide" and "Black Hole Sun," though the latter's freshness has been dampened by years of radio overexposure.
I could go on and on, but I don't want to sound like an infomercial. I'll just end this entry by saying that any album with "Black Hole Sun," "Spoonman," "The Day I Tried to Live," "Fell On Black Days," and "My Wave" on it would be bound to be a classic. However, on Superunknown these singles are part of a much deeper portrait that, as this writing attests, is very personal to me. I love this album - it is a perfect example of the promise that grew out of grunge's death of something bigger and stranger.

Wow! It's really fun to write about albums that I like. Is it any fun to read about them? Is anyone reading about them? Did you find anything here that you liked? Hated? Leave me a comment, friends.
Next time - More '94, less "post-grunge" more "alternative."

Two Amazing News Stories

2008-10-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

Two amazing news stories:

From the Charleston Daily Mail via the Portland Oregonian:

In Charleston, W.Va., a man was charged with assault after police said he farted at an officer.
Jose Cruz, 34, was arrested for suspicion of drunken driving and taken to police headquarters. While being fingerprinted, Cruz moved near one of the officers, "lifted his leg and passed gas loudly on the officer." Cruz then allegedly waved the air in the direction of the officer.
"The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature" with the officer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From Harpers:

From a police report filed as evidence in the assault trial of William Singlagah, twenty-seven, of Whakatane, New Zealand. In April, Singhlagah was found guilty and ordered to pay $350 to his victim, who was not named in court documents because he is a minor.

On Saturday, February 9, at about 8 P.M., the Defendant, William Singhlagah, was with a group of associates walking along Eivers Road.
The Defendant was carrying a hedgehog.
He approached to within five meters of the fifteen-year-old Complainant and threatened to throw the hedgehog at him.
The Complainant asked him not to do this.
The Defendant, however, took deliberate aim and threw it directly at him. The hedgehog hit the Complainant in the lower right hip, causing a large red welt and several puncture marks. Two quills were left sticking out of the Complainant's hip and had to be manually removed.
The Defendant picked up the hedgehog and threatened to throw it at the Complainant again.
The Complainant's mother intervened, and the Defendant walked approximately twenty meters up the road before pulling his trousers down to his knees, thereby revealing his boxer shorts. He bent over and pointed his backside toward the Complainant.
He then pulled his pants up, rejoined his associates, and continued walking up the road.

Happy Tootie Day!

2008-10-18T13:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my mom reminded me that it was Tootie Day.
When I was much much younger I decided that I would create a holiday. Or something. I can't remember why, but I did create a holiday called Tootie Day, in which "little bugs that bite," called tooties, come out of the ground annually. I remember that I chose Oct. 17th as Tootie Day because it was coming up and I wanted to celebrate my holiday soon. The proper way to celebrate Tootie Day is to have cake.

I'm pretty sure the inspiration for Tootie Day, besides the desire to have someone make me a cake, was my favorite game at the time, Cootie.

The rest of it's genesis is shrouded in mystery.

Anyways, yesterday was Tootie Day and I made a delicious spice cake, on which I frosted a horrendous, green bug with metallic teeth. It was served and enjoyed by the rest of the Bow family.

I am welcoming everyone else to celebrate a belated Tootie Day by making and eating their own cake. I am also welcoming everyone to remind me this holiday exists next year, as I'm sure I will forget and it is the only holiday I've ever created.

The Three W's

2008-10-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

So I was trying to find trailers to watch for Oliver Stone's new historical clusterfuck, W. I can't say that I love Oliver Stone's films - Natural Born Killers was alright but Platoon is way overrated - but I'm definitely fascinated by his gall. He makes history films in broad strokes with little regard for reality. His attitude is even evident in his casting - James Cromwell is awesome but he is no George H.W. and Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, but he sure as hell isn't Richard Nixon. There's a surrealism in seeing famous actors playing even more famous historical figures. It takes a lot of balls, too, and I'm really curious about how/if it pays off at all.

In looking for the trailers on youtube I stumbled across even more strangeness. First, one of the official W. trailers:

Then someone's bizarre pet project full of spliced films, newsreels and soundbytes (and Zeppelin!). It's baffling to me why this was made, but even more interesting in the way that it works. There's no denying how cinematic George Bush's story is. (For the record, you only really need to watch the first 30-45 seconds of this to get the point, though the end is pretty good).

And lastly, and most importantly, I ran into this trailer for a completely different W. which I'll let speak for itself.

Which film would you rather watch? Fiction, non-fiction or whatever that last one is?

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

On a similar note, did anyone else see McCain and Obama doing stand-up comedy and roasting each other at the Al Smith dinner??? Since when does this happen? Has the world gone mad?

It reminds me of this Onion article: World Leaders Gather to Roast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A Love Letter to... the Mid '90s

2008-10-16T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking over the past couple of days about my favorite period in modern music. I think that, when reminiscing, every music nerd has a space of a few years that holds a more specialer place in their heart than all other periods. It's not that this period is better than any other - it's just that they identify with it more than any other. Some people love early '60s rock, or late '60s, or late '70s glam, or mid-'80s new wave, etc. etc. I have a correlating theory that one's magic period is usually focused on the time that they, themselves, became aware of the music coming out around them.

At least both of these things are true for me. Somewhere wedged in my chest is a hollow of glitz and glitter devoted to post-grunge, '90s alternative circa 1994-1997. In reality, the whole decade has me in love with it from the 1989 stirrings of Mudhoney, Nirvana, Jane's Addiction, the Happy Mondays, Faith No More and Primus to the final death-rattles that alterna-rock gave as it was successfully co-opted by adult-contemporary radio to be replaced by boy- and girl-groups and the likes of Matchbox 20 and the Goo Goo Dolls.

But, to my mind, after Cobain died the muddy self-seriousness of grunge filtered into a mainstream stew with Brit-pop, electronica, funk, punk, folk, blues, etc. to create a really exciting mixture of sounds that, to my ears, look more to the future than most of the throwback rock/pop that makes it onto the radio now. From the likes of the White Stripes, the Strokes, the Hives and (ugh) Jet to the Killers, the Bravery, Interpol and (ugh) She Wants Revenge to the Kings of Leon and whatever other bland bullshit has been bumping for the past three or four years, mainstream rock radio has become populated with bands that traffic in impersonating attitudes and sounds by bands that did them better decades ago.
It's not that the mid-'90s were a font of originality born fully-formed out of a vacuum, but there was a sense of reaching for something new. Today bands reach to the past; retro is in, whether it be murky carbon-copies of the Velvet Underground or Joy Division.

Modern indie-rock, for it's part, has become Ouroboros-like. Fans look for bands based on contrived shticks and self-conscious flailings to set themselves apart from other groups, leading to bizarre sub-sub-categories of music by fans trying to distance their pet-groups from others. "They're like this freak-folk, sleaze-core group from New Hampshire, but they all wear black stockings on their heads so they can't see what they're doing. At the end of the show the lead singer always dresses up like a butterfly and runs through the audience. Their name is unpronouncable, because it's entirely made up of Arabic punctuation." Music has become overlooked for cache and gimmickery causing the turn-over rate for hot new bands has become miniscule.

Meanwhile mainstream rock has become almost non-existant leaving bands-least-likely-to like Nickelback and Hinder to wear the mantles of rock kings.

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

But it wasn't always like this.
Over the next couple of days I want to write about my favorite albums of my favorite 4 years of music. They will almost definitely not match up with anyone else's tit-for-tat, so I want to know from people reading this about their favorite period of music. Who else identifies with a musical chunk of history more than any others? You have to answer, cuz this post will look really sad with no comments on it.

I am Joe the Plumber

2008-10-15T16:05:00.000-07:00

Dear Dave,
Where have you gone? Just the other day you were blogging like there was no tomorrow and now your computer's broken and you can't even be bothered to go to the library and tell me how you are. What's going on?
- the general blogging public

Dear GBP,
I'm right here! As some of you know, I've also been incapacitated with a cold, an ear infection and general jet-lag. As some more of you already know, I've had to go back to the US for a week and take care of some bizniss. What kind of bizniss? Call me and I'll moan about it to you.
But every shitstorm has it's silver linings. One such lining is...
My mom is loaning me her brand new laptop! This means I can use the internet now and I have Skype!

For those of you interested in talking to me face-to-digital-face you can now do so! My name is david.cbow

It's funny: in the past month I've grown really used to communicating (lopsidedly) with the world via this blog and I'm really looking forward to getting back into it. Tomorrow: a big blog post.

PS. Did anyone else watch the Project Runway finale? I don't want to give it away if you didn't/you aren't gay but needless to say, I am happy. Also, Kenley vs. Wendy Pepper: who is the greatest Project Runway villain?

Jane Eyre - Total Uggo

2008-10-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

So it's been a week of not-fun bullshit. The least lame of the lame bits being sitting through the BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre. Oh wow is it dire. Not awful-awful, but pretty bad.
Problem number one being that Jane Eyre is a total frog-faced uggo:

Problem number two being that it's total melodrama/fairy tale nonsense. Just because the book is the prototype for the romantic novel as we know it doesn't mean that you have to play it like a pulp novel. The guy who plays Rochester's pretty alright, but the script doesn't do his portrayal justice. Instead of drawing out the themes in the book it just telegraphs them to us through stilted expository dialogue:
"Has anyone seen my book, 'The Beast Within?'" "You don't really believe a man could be serene on the outside while hiding a dark secret, do you?"
Gag.

But there's hope: a new movie adaptation (adaptation #1000, I believe) is on the horizon with Ellen Page as the titular character. Ellen Page - good actress, not an uggo.

Oh shit oh shit

2008-10-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

So N. Ireland electrical currents have killed my computer.
All other Americans' computers are fine, though...
Anyways, I'll come back for a proper blog post the next time I go to the library (I'm here right now renting All That Heaven Allows and 3:10 To Yuma).
Gay
Gay
Gay

The BFP turns me into a bearded clam

2008-10-07T14:51:00.000-07:00

CNN headlines of the day:
"'Help me!' woman yells, then car explodes,"
"'Power Ranger' could face death in yacht killings," and
"Skinny dipper invades Imperial Palace moat" ("Man splashed, threw rocks at police who pursued him in boat... Palace official says its unlikely emperor saw nude swimmer")

So I finally finished The Cranford Chronicles (or 2/3 of it, which is all I hope I need to read) and I feel like I've been sipping tea with old ladies forever. It was a good book, but not what you'd call a page-turner; the conflicts are small and there are no villains - it's just a big, warm-hearted slice of aging Victorian elegance.
Fuck that. Now I'm reading Tipping the Velvet, which is all about oyster-shucking boy-ladies who get it on. Though it's about the late 1800s, it's the only modern book I'm reading this term (I don't think many Victorian novelists wrote about cross-dressing lesbians) and it shows. What an easy read! And not just because of all the hot, seafood euphemisms (did you know the 'bearded clam' is actually a seafood dish?).

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

I also got the second Bennington Free Press in the mail today, courtesy of Laurie Kobick. I'm hesitant to write anything here that someone who writes for it might read (though how many people are reading this? Three?) so I'll be democratic and state my likes with my dislikes:

I'm glad people at Bennington care about current affairs (pro). I'm pretty sure that we're all a tiny bit plugged into politics at the moment. But honestly, BFP, honestly you are the last place I'd ever go for news (con). Even if the writing was outstanding, why would I wait for Henry Lyon to inform me about the financial crisis (in a misspelled front page bulletin, no less) when there are hundreds of sources like CNN, The New York Times and even the fucking OregonianBFP - one Before the End of the World is enough. at my fingertips. The mind boggles! Come on I am interested in reading students' opinion-pieces about current events. Those are unique and something I can't get anywhere else, but I don't need the BFP informing me that the presidential debate was held; the world knows.

Ok, so I said I'd try not to be a bitch, but the above paragraph is pretty bitchy. Let's move on and try and keep it sweet:

There's a tribute to Archie (pro) - along with Dave, the most lovable security guard of all. He will be sorely, sorely missed. A fourth of the tribute is really about Sarah McAbee - the second time she's been mentioned in the two BFP's this year (con).

Someone's taken over Dee's baking column (with the nice title "Baking with Faith") (pro). It begins by suggesting that people of our generation don't know who Gene Kelly is (con). Faith, you go to Bennington - we know.

This next bit might get a little cunty:

Connie Panzariello '12 serves up the requisite Freshman article about how new and exciting and quirky Bennington is and how we're all going to be friends because Bennington is unlike anywhere in the world!

"A Freshman Perspective On Bennington:
I like to think of my first night at Bennington as what will probably be a metaphor for my entire college experience here. At the student center, there was this drum dance. That's really the only way to describe it; only it wasn't exactly a dance in the traditional high school vein. In fact, most of my high school population would have run out faster than you could say the words, had they been there. I had my doubts as well, until I just stood there and watched for a little while. Everyone was dancing, or moving their body to the rhythm. They didn't care about how they looked or what anyone thought about them, they just did it. And after several minutes of inital 'Oh my god, what am I doing here?' thoughts - I joined in.

Oh God, Connie Panzariello '12, gag me with a spoon. (Dear Connie Panzariello '12, if you're reading this, I'm sorry). Some things:

Your high school population would have run faster than you could say what words?
Those people you saw dancing - they cared about how they looked and what people thought of them. And/or they were high.
This is not a metaphor for your college experience. I don't even know if it's really a metaphor... I think it's just a memory.

Connie then says she's on a path to self-discovery. It goes on:

I liken it to the proverbial falling without a parachute; only, it's not like you forgot the parachute; it simply does not exist. Before, at home, you probably had your parents, your best friend, and your dog, to fall on. Here you have yourself and about 231 people who are in the same exact plane as you are, but alas, they don't have parachutes either.

Connie, if falling without a parachute is a proverb at all it is one to warn against poor planning and stupidity. Also, it almost certainly ends in death. Are you saying that the freshman class has made a collective stupid decision to go to Bennington and they will all die? Also, who falls on their dog?

It's hard trying to figure out where you stand, how you stand or if you should even be standing there in the first place. Yet, I think the beauty of this place is that no one is going to tell you; you have to figure it out yourself.

Ah yes, the beauty of Bennington. I can see Connie now, five or six months down the road; she is wearing big sunglasses and chain-smoking a hangover away, complaining that nobody knows what they're doing here and that the dances all suck. It's too late to go to Bard, Connie - your credits won't transfer! (con)

Back on track:

Big Guy/Little Guy. What the fuck? I mean seriously. (con)

Eileen Scully's brother wrote Sarah Palin's creepy speech at the RNC? (con) Thank you, the skinny, this is exactly the type of interesting information the BFP should be giving me (pro).

Danny Brylow's thoughtful piece on Nick Brooke's awesome Time and Motion Study (pro).

Paul Newman's in the paper (pro)! It's cause he's dead (con).

Zack Franklin's Lucky Strikes graphs. Does this really need to take up half a page? Is there any logic behind any of this? Also, Zack Franklin, did you ever make a graph in school? (con)

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

That was exhausting. It's like four years of anti-BFP aggression just rushed out of me. Is anyone still with me? Did that get too ugly? Why am I not reading about lesbians right now?

Dingfelder/Wangle '08

2008-10-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

Today I got my absentee ballot.
The coolest thing about it is the Military/Overseas Voters' Guide, in which I can look at every candidate's statement. It takes the whole running-for-president-is-like-applying-for-a-job thing to the next level by letting me go through everybody's resumes. Chuck Baldwin's crazy-insane bid for the presidency is a clear favorite. Plus this one - get it together, Mark Hass!
But ultimately, despite the fact that a Baldwin/Castle ticket promises me that it will pull us out of the UN, treat abortion as a crime, return us to silver and gold money, veto federal funding for education and "pull the plug on the unaffordable American empire," Obama ended up getting my blackened oval.

While the ability to vote is pretty cool, the true benefit of getting my mail today was that I could make
A list of some silly names from the Oregon ballot:

Rick Dancer
Allen Alley
Walter F (Walt) Brown
Pavel Goberman
Eldon Jossi
Michael Meo
Jaynee Germond
Jackie Dingfelder
Keith Wangle

Northern Ireland Playlist #3 - you'll notice i'm still stuck in the '90s

2008-10-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog I lamented the fact that 99% of all blogging is nothing but self-indulgent ramblings that are completely inconsequential to anyone but the writer. I've tried to make this blog interesting over the past month or so in the interest of my friends actually wanting to know what I'm doing halfway across the world and subsequently showering me with comments about how much they miss me. Today's post, however, falls squarely in the useless 99%. If you are not interested in how I spent my day shopping and what (awesome) music I've been listening to in the last week, just go to Boing Boing and please check back tomorrow. I promise it'll be better.

Upon waking up today I was reminded of the fact that I ran out of food before my family visit weekend. All that was left for me to eat this morning were apples, peanut-butter and celery (which all go pretty well together) as well as cereal (no milk) and pasta sauce.
So I trudged down to the local Tescoe's to stock up. Here's the thing about grocery stores in N. Ireland: they seem to cater to the New York City idea of buying groceries every couple of days as appetite warrants rather than the rural New York idea of filling the pantry with bulk items that'll last a month or two.
In this frame of mind, all perishables are set to expire within three to five days of purchase. How the fuck am I supposed to eat a tub of cream cheese or hummus in three days, Tescoe? (I warned you about this entry)

But, all of this cream cheese related anger can be waived with a bangin' playlist. Most of what I hear in the outside world of pubs and clubs consists of "I Kissed a Girl," "When I Grow Up," and other gayer-than-gay songs.
Did you know boy bands are still really, really big over here? Have you ever heard of Boyzone or Girls Aloud or Westlife? Me neither. And it's not just fifteen year-old-girls - our 50-something, male cab driver (after lamenting America's sizable "coloured" population) put on a live Kylie Minogue album. Europe, you are so gay and you don't even know it.

Here's what I've been sheltering myself with, presented to you in embedded videos. Have you noticed how much I like putting videos in my blog entries? If a picture says a thousand words than a moving picture must say 24-thousand words per second.

1. The Eels - Fashion Awards
2. The Pogues - Sally MacLennane
3. Harvey Danger - Radio Silence
4. Wings - Jet
5. Happy Mondays - Stop On
6. Radiohead - Just
7. Cold War Kids - Something Is Not Right With Me
8. Faith No More - Malpractice
9. The Good, The Bad and The Queen - Green Fields
10. Goldfrapp - Happiness
11. Muse - The Small Print
12. Green Day - Hitchin' a Ride

Start it out quiet

Check out Paul's mullet and double-necked guitar friend!

How high do you think the Mondays were during the conception and shooting of this video? On a scale from 8 to 10? You're twistin' my melon, man!

My favorite video from a band known for making great videos

For all the movement in this video why is it so boring?

The second creepiest song off of Angel Dust. It's about being awake during surgery. Shivers!

Nothing seems more British to me than this concept album about England. I'm sure British people would disagree with me, though. It is, in all fairness, no Girls Aloud.

Goldfrapp has the solution to the Cold War Kids' problem - it's not just movement that makes the video, it's perpetual movement shot in one steady-cam shot. And ice-cream-coloured suits.

The most straight-forward rocker on the awesome Absolution. I still haven't got Black Holes and Revelations, because I'm an old man who fears change and stays consistently five years behind all popular music...

...as evidenced by the fact that I never got the memo that Green Day is strictly for tweens now. What a killer album Nimrod is. Do you remember this video? I sure don't. It's like Green Day saw The Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight" video and said, "We can do that... with a Betty Boop giraffe!" The rest was non-history.

Video News

2008-10-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

Oh blog, what would I do if I didn't have you? Who would I tell about my adventures? People I could see?

News:

I have purchased a pair of really nice jeans at Topman making me a metrosexual from the waist down. Also, now that I know that Topman exists I finally get who Damon Albarn is making fun of in that Blur song, "Top Man" (me!).

I finally finished Jane Eyre (behind the schedule I set for myself) and it was amazing. Easily the best book I've read all year. Now I'm about a third of the way through The Cranford Chronicles, three Victorian comedies which are just as gut-busting as their BBC adaptation (which I also have to watch) looks:
I just got back from a trip to Navin in the Republic with the five dire Americans in my study abroad group. We were down there on our mandatory weekend homestay with a real Irish family. Guess what - not that different from American families. We watched X Factor (Britain's "American Idol" - please watch all of the clips below) as well as Top Gear - a show that's enormous in Britain, but I still can't figure out why. The family was nice enough all-around, minus Copper, the shaved Cocker Spaniel who constantly had a pink, semi-erection dragging on the ground (and anything he jumped up on like my legs when I was at the dinner table trying to eat).

And speaking of eating, the main difference between American families and Irish: the Irish food is amazing. Today I had three potato dishes, turnips with carrots and turkey for lunch. Last night they served us (no joke): fried eggs and fried white pudding to go on fried pieces of brown bread, served with fried sausage and bacon. It was the most delicious, artery-clogging dinner I've ever had. Also, they drink tea and eat biscuits (cookies without the guilt) all day long.

Irish people keep talking about how Americans are fat but they love fried food here! All Chinese food resturaunts here serve french fries. Also, I recently went to a chippy shop, which is basically an assembly line of deep-fat friers and witnessed people ordering things like "the cowboy supper" - fried, battered sausages with fries and gravy.

This is my life now

2008-10-01T16:47:00.000-07:00

Just wait'll I blog about this...!

2008-10-01T03:29:00.000-07:00

Today I had my first lecture - Discovering the Earliest Writings in English.
Hey, did you know that Old English is not actually English at all? It's actually some hurby-gurby language that sounds all fucked up and shit.

I had been led by Hollywood to believe that Old English was like this:

In fact, it's more like this:

That's right, everything in Old English is about God and farm animals. Crispin Glover nor Angelina Jolie have been mentioned.
And listen to how they start the Lord's Prayer:

Faeder ure,
the the eart on heofonum,
Si thin nama gehalgod.
Tobecume thin rice
Gewurthe thin willa
on eorthan swa swa on heofonum.

Whaaaa?
If you are pronouncing that correctly, you should sound something like this:

Luckily, tomorrow I have Medieval English, which I have been led to believe is something like this:

~~~~~~~~~~
Jane Eyre, for it's part, is coming right along. That means I only have three more books to read. Yay!