tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25514861737164133372024-03-05T03:47:52.967-08:00DONKEYSHAMEfilm * music * culture * criticism * dog biscuitsBLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-76173637074479680492013-04-02T15:48:00.000-07:002013-06-03T08:54:01.435-07:00I Haven't Felt Like This in Some Time, Maybe Ever<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtloN_uPAhkokrKuRlIaZ2gE8YDmQ2qokfzOBqOSAqlucLgDTK59PVM1mudT0bKoJAfjpM1sDRmMB3mFIS2zYVIoEXYruO_2paLV_wpLjcPdnABW4mvIvrf1T76KsJXyB5oNtj1pzmwLM/s1600/Rancid+Trading+Card.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtloN_uPAhkokrKuRlIaZ2gE8YDmQ2qokfzOBqOSAqlucLgDTK59PVM1mudT0bKoJAfjpM1sDRmMB3mFIS2zYVIoEXYruO_2paLV_wpLjcPdnABW4mvIvrf1T76KsJXyB5oNtj1pzmwLM/s400/Rancid+Trading+Card.jpg" width="337" /></a></div>
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Most days I arrive downtown in the morning with some time to kill before I have to be at work. I won't bore you with the specifics; it just works out that way. Often I will run errands or just wander around for no particular reason<i>.</i> On such occasions, it's all but guaranteed I'll be listening to comedy podcasts, managing to fit in a few fits of laughter between bouts of scoffing at the well-to-do dregs of society who terrorize from behind the wheels of their always slick and often comically oversized automobiles, defiantly jeopardizing not only the safety of their fellow commuters but the future of humankind by brazenly eschewing the traffic laws put in place to best protect us all<span class="st">—</span>but especially the weakest and most fragile among us<span class="st">—</span>from injury and death.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
On a recent sunny, wintry, but rather lovely April Tuesday morning, I was walking toward the City Target to purchase a reasonable pencil sharpener for my kids, which is something that I've been contemplating for some time now (but with no real urgency, as I will occasionally bother our friends Genny and J who live upstairs in the two-flat we share and use theirs; my version of borrowing a cup of sugar). There's nothing sadder than watching bushy-tailed children futilely trying to release brilliant, joyful colors from their wooden confines and, instead, winding up with psychotic, errant and dull indentations littered with mocking hints of color. And there's nothing more deflating than essentially just repeatedly breaking the tips off of pencils while trying to sharpen them in those cute little pencil-case-bred faux pencil sharpeners that usually have, like, the Paul Frank monkey or something on them and that not even the manufacturer would concede work in any fashion; nor would anyone who has ever deigned to use one expect them to. Honestly, you'd probably have more success using your teeth.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
And, after a fruitless trip to our office supply room the previous day, I was prepared to buy a couple of rulers. Because somebody at work keeps stealing my fucking rulers.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
Suddenly, after placing my earbuds into my ears, I found myself accidentally listening to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjj6AtW5rg" target="_blank">"GGF"</a> by Rancid. Here, indeed, "accidentally listening" may sound like a misnomer; but let me give it context.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="st">In all honesty, I don't listen
to music anywhere near as much as I did when I was in college</span><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>probably where my love for listening and creating music reached a fever pitch</span><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>but far more than the
period between post-college infancy and the advent of being able to carry around
every song you've ever heard in your life on a device roughly half the width of your
wallet. Sadly,</span> l<span class="st">istening
to music of your choosing is sometimes more trouble than it's worth when you've got kids who only want to hear what they
want to hear, primarily because they've heard it before. </span><span class="st"><span class="st">But </span>I
try pretty hard to expose my kids to real music rather than hackneyed
recordings of children's music, which isn't really for children at all,
but people who don't like or know anything about music. </span><span class="st">Singing "The Wheels on the Bus" with your kids is great. Singing "Baby Bumblebee" at school or summer camp is grand. But why the fuck would anyone want to listen to a recording of someone else singing it in their living room when they could listen to <i>anything else</i>? </span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">When I do decide to put something on of my choosing, it will invariably be
met with my almost three-year-old daughter demanding in a demonic voice, "I want <i>my song</i>,"
which changes from time to time. It's been "What Makes You Beautiful" by One Direction and "Call Me Maybe" by
Carly Rae Jepsen, and, most recently (and tragically), "Trouble" by the
insufferable Taylor Swift. Usually what happens here is, in the service of
being accommodating, I stop washing the dishes (or whatever I'm doing in
the kitchen; usually washing dishes) and fling a dish towel over my
shoulder and switch our mono </span><span class="st"><span class="st">AM/FM/mp3 player compatible </span>Crossley (</span><span class="st"><span class="st">a
manufacturer specializing in electronics that invariably exemplify the
embodiment of style over substance and, more often than not,
functionality and quality control</span>) from AUX to 103.5, Kiss FM, while trying
to explain to this little lunatic how a relic such as <i>the radio</i> works</span><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>where you are required, if you so choose, to listen to whatever happens to playing at the time</span><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>when she's privy to
the concept of on demand through the magic of the much-maligned Comcast corporation. </span><span class="st"><span class="st">But I must give credit where credit is due: My daughter did graciously allow me to listen to a big chunk of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDmE7OGYjhg" target="_blank"><i>We Are the Champions</i> by Jeff The Brotherhood</a> recently while she played in
the kitchen and I washed the
8,000 cups she and her brother managed to use in a two-hour stretch of
time. But it wasn't without initial bloodshed and the engagement of
resolve. Like the man says, you've got to pick your battles; this was
one of the times I was willing to.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">Don't get me wrong; I love a lot of pop music, including a lot of what they play on KISS FM, but I grow weary of listening to the same shitty </span><span class="st"><span class="st">songs over and over and over again (KISS FM's standard procedure); I don't need to hear "Die Young" by Kei<i>$</i>ha twice in one hour (especially because she ripped off at least one line from a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98WtmW-lfeE" target="_blank">far superior Katy Perry song from three years ago</a>). </span></span><span class="st"><span class="st"><span class="st">Speaking of which: I'm not a huge conspiracy theory guy, but those
"Kidz Bop" sample CDs that have four songs on them that they give out at
McDonald's when there's not some dumb Madagascar movie in theaters must be intended to
force the population's hand in killing itself off; apparently eradication of
the general population by its consumption of McDonald's food is taking too long.
I mean, seriously, even when you were a kid, wouldn't you have rather
heard
the Go-Gos singing "We Got the Beat" than a bunch of kids?</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="st"><i>Excuse me, but do you have <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuD9umfGo8" target="_blank">"I Love Rock and Roll"</a> by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts</i>?</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="st"><i>Hey,
I can do better than that, pal: We have a lifeless version of it
performed by a bunch of children singing over a bunch of hack musicians doing
their best to simultaneously approximate and completely neuter the
original version.</i></span></blockquote>
Why<span class="st"> not take it to the next level?</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="st"><i>Hey</i></span><span class="st"><i><span class="st">—you
know what would make <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWOuzYvksRw" target="_blank">"Achilles Last Stand"</a> by Led Zeppelin better? If it
was played by studio musicians and a bunch of fucking kids sang it.</span></i></span></blockquote>
<span class="st"><span class="st">But kids can't get enough of it. If you ever make the mistake of sliding a Kidz Bop CD into your dashboard <i>once</i>,
it may not just ruin every car ride you will ever take from then on,
but music in general; so tread lightly. I suppose I should be thankful
that our Kidz Bop sampler CDs are strictly associated with the car and
not the house. It's like the vampire legend: it can't come in unless it's
invited, but, once it's in, it won't leave you be until either you've
been drained of your plasma or become one of them by submitting to the
path of least resistance.</span> </span><br />
<br />
<span class="st">I'm pretty much a slave to routine with little variance. Variance in mundane everyday doings makes me anxious to a problematic degree. For example, i</span><span class="st"><span class="st">f, on any given morning, I'm going to make a sandwich for my son</span>'s lunch, and somehow the peanut butter is in a different location than normal, requiring me to search for it, this could throw off the natural momentum of all of the other irons I have in the fire. Which, in my estimation, could easily end in tragedy: the sink filling up for the dishes (sink overflowing), the eggs scrambling on the stove (eggs burning), the iron heating up on the ironing board (it falls over and sets the kitchen and, eventually, our two-flat on fire), etc. I'm working on trying to accept this type of variance instead of letting it consume me, but I usually just try to structure such things so they can occur without requiring much thought. I only point this, and the following, out to convey the unlikelihood of the scenario occurring on one r</span><span class="st">ecent sunny, wintry, but rather lovely April Tuesday morning and, perhaps, its significance: </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<ol>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><span class="st">The previous day I had forgotten my iPod at home. So
later that day when I got to work, I chucked a few podcasts onto my
phone to listen to on the way home. I had forgotten all about the events of the previous day when I
went to plug my headphones into my iPod, thinking I would listen to a
neglected episode of<i> </i>the indispensable <a href="http://wfmu.org/playlists/BS" target="_blank"><i>Best Show</i></a>, at the time approaching two weeks old, an unheard of amount of time for me to be behind, which can be attributed to my recent obsession with <a href="http://billburr.com/podcast" target="_blank">Bill Burr</a></span><span class="st">, even though he frightens me a bit.</span></li>
</ul>
<ol>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><span class="st">I incessantly punch the hold button in on my iPod, because it drives me
insane when I find that something has been playing in my pocket and I
have to try to guess where I had stopped listening, mostly because I'm
usually wrong, which will only occur to me after five minutes of
listening, at which point I'll realize that I've already heard it, and it freaks me out a bit: <i>Why did it take me this long to
figure out that I've already heard this? Was I not engaged the first time around? How much material do I miss on a regular basis because I'm not engaged? What was I doing when I heard
this the first time that I can't remember any of it? Is this because of
those countless times I smoked weed out of that ridiculous (and
impressive) three-foot homemade bong my buddy Chuck made from parts
procured at Pier One Imports and Home Depot with an aluminum foil bowl</i>?</span></li>
</ul>
<ol>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><span class="st"><span class="st">I try on at least a few Fridays a month, when I am afforded the time, to take whole albums </span></span><span class="st"><span class="st"><span class="st"><span class="st">I've recently obtained</span></span></span></span><span class="st"><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>often new releases but sometimes simply new procurements of older
releases, both standards (like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq6OoPB5FIM" target="_blank">Queen's <i>Jazz</i></a>) and curiosities (like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtnCcWOS7y8" target="_blank">Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction's <i>Tattooed Beat Messiah</i></a>)</span></span><span class="st"><span class="st"><span class="st">—</span>and dump them onto what will
become a massive playlist
littered with tried-and-true reveries I know will prick up my ears when hanging out, drinking beer and playing cards or a
finite revolving cadre of board games
with Genny and J. (Genny made it known that
she couldn't tolerate the copious amounts of
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKkFkNtL7KY" target="_blank">pre-American market breakthrough W</a></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKkFkNtL7KY" target="_blank">hitesnake</a> that dominated early latter-day playlists; J has repeatedly confessed that he never
expected to hear <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMAm4iPpORI" target="_blank">anything from The Cult's <i>Sonic Temple</i></a> after graduating
from high school, let alone on a weekly basis. They're incredibly good sports.) It's honestly the highlight of my week; sitting around
with my wife and friends, listening to music old and new. And I love that the technology exists to enable you to make "mixes" that are so massive that, even though you made them, the
amount of time you spend doing it is relatively small in proportion to the
amount of music you can collect in one space, that you can still be
surprised when Bang Tango's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkdFrWK-jc" target="_blank">"Attack of Life"</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmTkBB5yxr0" target="_blank">"August"</a> by Love comes
on after <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvvsmY2mn5Q" target="_blank">that new Riff Raff song you're hearing for the first time</a>:
<i>Hmm. I put that on there, huh? What a lovely surprise.</i> Then I'll name
it something stupid. My last playlist: <i>March Moodiness</i> (don't hate); 536 songs, 1.2
days. It may seem simple or something, but I am truly grateful to have this technology at my disposal. I think it's amazing. Can't I think that's amazing?</span></li>
</ul>
<ol>
</ol>
</div>
<ol style="text-align: justify;">
</ol>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="st"><span class="st">So it was kind of an unusual experience for me to plug
my earbuds into my iPod to listen to a podcast that was actually on
my iPhone, only to discover that the hold switch had either been
triggered off or I forgot to put in on entirely; the previous night, Genny and J had come down, so we listened to some music, all around a rarity for a Monday evening. So here it is now a wintry but still kind of lovely April Tuesday morning, and I'm suddenly accidentally listening Rancid's "GGF," a playlist staple of mine from their (second) eponymous effort from 2000, which I had put on <i>Moodiness</i> (don't hate), was playing. </span></span>The song is essentially an homage
to buy-it-or-don't-buy-it Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong's childhood by
using Golden Gate Fields, a racetrack in his hometown of Berkeley, CA that seemed to cast a big shadow over his formative years, as a conduit: </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is not Churchill Downs<br />
This is not Hollywood Park<br />
When the field's wide open<br />
I'll pick the horse who has the biggest heart</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
It's
kind of diabolically clever, really, how he establishes his punk rock
ethos here by announcing an affection for and ownership of the place by
setting it apart from the other area
tracks, and he even uses a racehorse in a "racehorse" analogy to the
racetrack itself. The verses see Armstrong kind of
talk-singing in that sort of mischievous street-poet cadence that has
been used (to varying degrees of success) by everyone from Bob Dylan to
Lou Reed to Jim Carroll (blecch) to Bruce Springsteen to Craig Finn,
overstuffing an inordinate amount of syllables into a tight musical
corner in an attempt to elevate the urgency and literacy of the piece, wringing the last drops out of those three-chord
progressions when a lesser troubadour with a suspect work ethic would have settled and moved onto
something else. Tim Armstrong sneers and cackles it out in there with an
unlikely loose-ends precision and the urgency of a wild-eyed, disheveled schizophrenic wearing a sandwich
board proclaiming "The End Is Near" while the band pounds and pummels the pace into adherence; the whole thing together sounds like a locomotive plowing through a boxing ring.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But
it's when the song quiets down a bit when it turns into a ghost story,
and transcends the three-chord confines of pop punk, a form of music
that was bought and sold to Disney XM roughly around the time Milo came back and
the Descendents put out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcs3j8qc5SI" target="_blank"><i>Everything Sucks</i></a>. The brevity of it all
makes it more impressive. There's something tragic, haunting, and beautiful about it. But, really, it's the ethereal nature of the experience described, I think, that makes it
so sublime:</div>
<div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Every time I go back to the East Bay I run into Big L<br />
My old friend Big L, lord, he's not doing so well.<br />
See, me and Big L grew up across the freeway from the track.<br />
Yes, we spent many, many, many, many days at the track.<br />
I see Big L come rolling up the street<br />
On his little sister's pink, ten-speed.<br />
He said, "Tim, Tim, don't you remember me? Way back in 1973?"<br />
And every time I see him he has to remind me<br />
Like I would ever forget Big L<br />
But then he's gone like a flash</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<div>
There's something hallucinatory about the image of Big L riding into the center of the song<span class="st">—</span>as the band has cleared some space for him by laying back a bit<span class="st">—</span>on
his little sister's pink ten-speed, left behind, frozen in time and
pleading, "Tim, Tim, don't you remember me?" And it's rendered all the
more heartbreaking given the assertion that "[m]y friend Big L, lord,
he's not doing so well." Saddened that his childhood friend, whatever
his state, could even suggest that their bond is anything less than
lifelong, Armstrong's response, "Like I could ever forget Big L," pulses
like an open wound. And just when Big L's about there, just when
Tim is about to come face to face with his childhood friend, in this place where he
spent his childhood, "he's gone like a flash." It's stunning
and confusing, otherworldly and haunting. <i>It's all so fleeting, man</i>. </div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After listening to it once, chills surging down my spine, I listened to it again, and a strange but very real concoction of euphoria and melancholy rushed through my being. Then, the third time I listened to it, I started crying. Not uncontrollably, but not timidly either. Just <i>crying</i>.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I haven't cried in a long time; and there's no telling how long it's been in relation to being moved to tears by artistry. This was something. Immediately I remembered one lovely spring Saturday afternoon in 2001: I was comfortably seated in our one-bedroom in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood watching <i>The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly</i> on our recently procured<span class="st">—</span>but, years later, doomed to be rejected by the Salvation Army as worthless, sent away to find a sympathetic Best Buy employee who would afford it a place in Best Buy's recycling program instead of saying, "Fuck it, let's just 'recycle' this fucker into the dumpster"<span class="st">—</span>32-inch mammoth of a television and, due to an unfortunate union forged by price point and infancy of the technology, surly and misshapen DVD player, which still, together, mercifully replaced our 13 inch and VHS player. My girlfriend (now wife) Melissa was on our back porch studying: I had only recently realized that she was going to make good on her threats to go to graduate school at the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York. Of course she was and, <i>Jesus</i>, thank <i>Christ</i> she did, but this was something that I had previously been too dumb, blind or self-absorbed to recognize, or was a scenario I was out of desperation unwilling to entertain as likely to occur. I was so moved by the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccafOf4O6Q" target="_blank">Ennio Morricone score and the Eugenio Lardani titles</a>, that I darted out to the porch to fetch Melissa. <i>You have to watch this.</i> Then, we sat down and watched the title sequence, and I turned into a blubbering mess, sniveling and spouting. "It's just so beautiful," I whimpered.<br />
<br />
My point being: Yes, I cried because I was touched by the artistry of the title sequence of <i>The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly</i>. And on subsequent viewings I've teared up. But there was some shit going on that made it more likely that tears would be shed than if shit hadn't been going on. Which is why I immediately thought about that here, before thinking, <i>Who cries at Rancid songs?</i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
I had been walking, and I kind of just stopped and stood there. Not that I necessarily subscribe to the mysticism associated with the concept of an epiphany and its purported transformative nature, but this
seemed to sort of approximate one: I was suddenly overwhelmed with joy and
fear, and a longing and desperation to defiantly <i>carry the burden</i> <i>until I can no longer feel its weight</i>. I've had anxiety issues for years, but it's been an especially rocky road for me the past few months, something that would
probably be easier to cope with if there were a reason for it.
But there isn't, and when I feel like I'm going to melt into a mess of
sweat, organs and gristle because I'm trying to tackle basic things that people do every single day, I feel ridiculous. People have no food, no money, no family, no shelter; what the fuck do I have to worry about? I want to beat my chest and yell and scream, "Just fucking stop it!"</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
But what can you do? </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
So I'm standing there at Washington and Dearborn, just standing there, tears streaming down my face, eyes squinting from the sting of salt and the brilliant sunlight, and I'm thinking about how glad I am to be here, right now, experiencing this thing. I'm filled with wonder. I think about my kids, my wife, my lifelong friends in Texas; why shouldn't I feel lucky? I haven't felt like this is some time, maybe ever. And I'm thinking about how life is too short<span class="st">—</span>and too long<span class="st">—</span>to be riddled with anxiety and sweating the small stuff because it's all amazing. <i>It's all amazing</i>. What do I care if someone takes my rulers, or my kids give me the business when I'm trying to get them in bed? And so I'm trying; I have a lot of work to do, but I'm trying.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
There's that sage old advice: write what you know. That's what Armstrong did in this beautiful, ramshackle punk rock anthem; I don't know fuck-all about Golden Gate Fields or horse races or the East Bay, but he and his band facilitated an unlikely<span class="st">—and accidental</span><span class="st">—eye-opening experience for me by telling his very specific, personal story in a way that</span> I could relate to wholly. And goddamn; that's a hell of a thing.</div>
BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-9027358889727062752011-09-09T11:46:00.000-07:002013-04-12T11:47:40.886-07:00IKEA on a Budget<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqDu4n7EFYZ4miNe_1D2px_synBcTVtvd7S_kdK3sxRjUwolfKz3U6lNYwSabeV-IFcm7XLZ-3Vp7iPhDH_waW7Yt4SsB9mnQXXOuoDnBSwvmNIaKICed2x_BqZRjOG2C6vq2qOOBf9A/s1600/Scandanavian+Potato+Chips.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5650432622267643554" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqDu4n7EFYZ4miNe_1D2px_synBcTVtvd7S_kdK3sxRjUwolfKz3U6lNYwSabeV-IFcm7XLZ-3Vp7iPhDH_waW7Yt4SsB9mnQXXOuoDnBSwvmNIaKICed2x_BqZRjOG2C6vq2qOOBf9A/s400/Scandanavian+Potato+Chips.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 360px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 400px;" /></a>Usually when my wife Melissa says, “I have a crazy idea,” it involves some sort of shopping excursion to the suburbs. Woodfield Mall, Old Orchard Mall, IKEA, etc. And I’m not one of those guys who hates the idea of going shopping. I actually <span style="font-style: italic;">love</span> the idea of going shopping and then wind up hating it when I’m there.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br />
So a few Sundays ago Melissa volunteers, “I have a crazy idea. How about after naptime we go to IKEA?” This, I think, is a fantastic idea for several reasons. First and foremost, “after naptime” means around 4:00 p.m. And every parent of young children knows that Sunday from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.—or whatever your children’s bedtime—is like waiting for a table at a restaurant for four hours while listening to the collected works of Nickelback, or being stuck in an elevator listening to Nickelback for four hours, or being at a four-hour Nickelback concert.</div>
<br />
On Friday nights, I invariably look ahead to the weekend and being in the company of my children with great aplomb. But by Sunday at 4:00, especially if we’ve been housebound for much of the weekend, I’m ready to abandon them at the fire station under the protections offered by the Illinois Safe Haven Program, even if they are a bit too old.<br />
<br />
By 4:00 on Sunday, the tail end of the weekend, I’ve dutifully weathered an impressive amount of whining, even for children, who are known for their whining; have done the dishes approximately fifty times; cooked countless meals and prepared countless snacks that have wound up either on the floor or in the trash or in the refrigerator for a time before they wind up in the trash; and wondered, upon feeling the slow dread set in when there’s only five minutes left of <span style="font-style: italic;">Scooby Doo! Abracadabra Doo</span>, after an amount of television viewing that cut in half would cause the American Academy of Pediatrics to suffer a spit take, <span style="font-style: italic;">Just what the fuck are we supposed to do now</span>? Any respite from the unpleasantry of simultaneously waiting impatiently for the sun to <span style="font-style: italic;">get the fuck out of Dodge </span>while plagued by guiltily realizing that there’s obviously something very wrong with you for feeling this way is heartily welcomed.<br />
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So I run some numbers in my head related to this proposed IKEA excursion. After naptime, it’ll be about 4:00. And by the time we get everybody out the door it’ll be 4:30. It’ll take about 40 minutes to get there; 5:10. We’ll leave there about 6:30, home about 7:10. 7:30 is bedtime.<br />
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“That’s a fantastic idea,” I offer.<br />
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You may think that we’re going IKEA to do some shopping; look for some chairs, some knickknacks, light fixtures, bookcases, etc. And you would be forgiven for thinking this, as if you were to remove all of the IKEA furniture from our apartment, there would be no place to sit except for on the newly orphaned piles of books and records. But no, we go there for “something to do.” You see, at IKEA, there is a play area you can drop your kids off for an hour at this magical place called Småland, whose method of operation initially had my eyebrows raised, wondering <span style="font-style: italic;">What’s the catch</span>? Turns out, there is no catch: as long as your child meets the height/age requirement and is potty trained, he or she can shoelessly roam the play area freely, which includes a vintage Chuck E. Cheese-style plastic ball pit, indoor playground-type equipment, and Disney films showing on an HD TV, free of charge.<br />
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So, while most people go to IKEA to shop, we go there for a little break. And our five-year old son Mascis <span style="font-style: italic;">loves</span> it. Usually he doesn't want to go anywhere, s<span style="font-style: italic;">ometimes not even McDonald’s</span>! But he’d been pestering Melissa to take him there. Though, for some reason, he gets the name mixed up with the Salvation Army’s: “Mommy, I really want to go to the Salvation Army,” he had confessed earlier in the week.<br />
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So on Sunday, we all happily headed to IKEA to take advantage of its free babysitting service. The only anxiety being that, since Mascis had a hot dog for lunch, we wouldn’t be partaking in their 50- cent (!) hot dogs. But I was reasonably certain we’d be able to figure something else out for dinner, given their surprisingly wide selection of cheap, disgusting food options.<br />
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So we dropped Mascis off, loaded our daughter Lulu (who at fifteen months is alas much too young to be dumped off at Småland) into a cart and started wandering around fairly aimlessly, feeling kind of like being at Whole Foods not to shop but exclusively for the free samples.<br />
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We determined that there was one thing we could use from IKEA, that being a five pack of cardboard magazine holders costing a whopping $1.99. We quickly located them, put one five pack in the cart, and then continued to wander around aimlessly among the suburban undead, with their defective internal compasses and deficiencies in ability to determine acceptable parameters of personal space.<br />
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Walking around IKEA (like pretty much every public place, I suppose) really punctuates that there are people who don’t know how to walk around, and their sole purpose is to infuriate people who <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span> know how to walk around. It really illustrates the inevitable moment in the automobile’s infancy when the decision was made to invent traffic lights: <span style="font-style: italic;">We have to do something; these dumb fuckers are constantly smashing into one another left and right. </span><br />
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“I don’t know,” I drawled, trying to conjure some direction. “I kind of like looking at glasses.” “We could do that,” Melissa agreed. “I saw some glasses in someone’s cart that looked pretty cool. So, yeah, let’s do that.” On the way to locating the glasses, we passed the staged kitchen areas, which hadn’t really changed since the last time we’d been there. We had fun dissecting them previously, in a manner not dissimilar to commenting on the results of home makeover shows when they finally reveal the results, so why not give it another crack, I thought. “I sort of like that kitchen,” I said. “It kind of reminds me of a ’50’s farmhouse or something.” “I know what you mean,” Melissa countered, “but it’s way nicer.” We stopped the conversation there, as we had this exact conversation, verbatim, the last time we were there.<br />
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When we reached the glasses, we poked around to no avail. The glasses that Melissa saw earlier in someone else’s cart were either an anomaly or a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation, as they were nowhere to be found. Melissa pulled on the rim of a wineglass housed in cardboard on an endcap to reveal a comically oversized wine glass. Big enough, I joked, for the freakishly large infant—most likely no more than five months old but already the length of a four-year old, having fat wrinkles bubbling from behind his knees, his thick neck holding his enormous and weird head up sturdily so he could search the depths of your soul with his disquieting eyes—slung over the shoulder of his frazzled father with a wearied brow, himself (in direct opposition to his surroundings) strangely assembled, who sweatily got on an elevator going down when he meant to go up.<br />
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We made our way through each of the three floors quickly and unceremoniously, punctuating the difference between an annual (delightful) and a semiannual (uneventful) trip to IKEA. Kind of like seeing a <span style="font-style: italic;">The Usual Suspects</span> for a second time; you know the whole time what’s going to happen, and the construction and minutiae of it isn’t the slightest bit interesting if you already know how it’s going to end.<br />
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Before long, we notice a sign that reads, “All Summer, Kids Eat Free,” and I sort of paw at the sign, as if the words will wipe off to reveal an addendum like “weather permitting” or “certain exclusions apply” or whatever other sinister truth may be unearthed by rubbing a cardboard sign. But, no, there are no restrictions. <span style="font-style: italic;">That’s amazing</span>, I think, my excitement immediately being replaced my guilt. We were already planning on having the kids eat there, but neither Melissa or I would be patronizing the IKEA eatery, as we had learned a valuable lesson on our last visit, having purchased and consumed the handsome but thoroughly icky buffalo-chicken wrap: even if it only costs five dollars, five dollars worth of shit is still shit.<br />
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But now, in addition to babysitting our son for an hour, IKEA was going to feed him and his sister for free. I’m fairly certain that when it put these plans into practice, IKEA didn’t have the family of four that spends a scant $1.99 there in mind.<br />
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But oh well. Our one-hour time allotment at Småland was coming to an end, so we decided to check out with our meager purchase. IKEA doesn’t supply bags for your purchases, which is fine, but Melissa asked, “What are we going to do—just walk around the store with it not in a bag?” “Sure,” I said, “I’ll just carry it around with the receipt and show it to anyone who wants to see it,” as if it were a credential of some sort. And I would, eagerly, rather than have someone ask me; I would rather preemptively wave it said person’s face, which is probably <span style="font-style: italic;">at least</span> as annoying to him or her as it is for me to have someone ask to see it.<br />
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So we retrieve Mascis from Småland, narrowly avoiding being trampled by this misguided lady and her dumb kids, all walking at us ensconced in a mysterious trance to get to the elevators perched behind a turn style bearing bold red letters spelling out “Do Not Enter,” as the elevator was meant only to be entered from the other side of the turn style. After losing this game of chicken we became unwitting participants in, we made our way to the food court up on the third floor.<br />
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The food and ambiance on the third floor is fancy compared to the food and ambiance on the first floor. But, to put things in perspective, they only sell hot dogs, cinnamon rolls and ice cream cones on the first floor, so it’s a relative comparison. To say that the third floor restaurant is cafeteria-style would somehow insinuate that it is somehow a step above a school cafeteria, when, actually, it’s pretty much on par with one. They offer a 99-cent breakfasts of powdered eggs; sad, shriveled diced potatoes; and toast, with something approximating coffee, which seem like a great bargain before you sit down to eat your meal and a rip-off by the time you’ve finished. Even with lowered standards, it’s the pits.<br />
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But free is free.<br />
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Mascis has settled comfortably into eating chicken fingers in these kinds of situations, which is easy enough, but his sister is a little harder to please. She doesn’t really like chicken, but, oddly, she likes beef. So we got her the IKEA offering that most approximates beef—Swedish meatballs. Which is made out of God knows what. It seems strange ordering Swedish meatballs for a baby, for anyone, really, other than for an old man with bushy eyebrows and foamy deposits plaguing the corners of his mouth.<br />
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I decided to take Lulu to get a table, maybe feed her some crackers, as she was starting to get fussy. Mascis soon followed, which left Melissa alone to make the food purchase.<br />
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“Are these meals really for kids?” the lady working the register asked Melissa. “Because they’re really only free for kids.” “Yes, they’re for kids,” Melissa responded. “But are they really?” the cashier countered. “Yes,” said Melissa, starting to get a little weirded out by the cashier's tone. “Because we have to enter it in if they’re not,” the lady explained. “They’re for kids,” Melissa repeated. It almost seems as if this cashier took it upon herself to stage this impromptu interrogation; I have a hard time believing that the idea was: <span style="font-style: italic;">Hey, let’s offer free meals to children, and then, when their parents order for them, let’s make the parents feel like unseemly criminals by badgering them about whether the meals are really for their children. Maybe it will even dissuade them, if not from ever coming back to IKEA, than at least certainly from trying to get free meals for their kids again. That</span>’<span style="font-style: italic;">ll show </span>’<span style="font-style: italic;">em.</span><br />
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The kids had two bites apiece, as usual, and Melissa and I scarfed down the rest.<br />
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We had promised Mascis an ice cream cone, but not a cinnamon roll as he had requested, because he had those for breakfast. (Apparently, our kitchen turns out food remarkably similar to that turned out by IKEA’s first floor eatery.)<br />
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So we go downstairs, wait in line, and when we get to the register, Mascis is tugging on my (by the nature of their being, stupid, godforsaken) shorts, meekly saying, “Daddy I need to tell you something.” “Just a minute, Daddy has to order.” I order three ice cream cones, one for me, one for Melissa (she kindly offered to share hers with Lulu) and one for Mascis. We get the ice cream cones, and move over to the strange area set aside for people to eat? I think? It’s somewhat unclear: Among the rabidly horrible prepackaged whole coffee beans (do not be persuaded by their inexpensiveness and attractive font), bulk Swedish Fish, and weird lingonberry juice boxes (possibly for witches-in-training) there’s one table with chairs and a few wobbly, chest-height (while standing) tables with no chairs.<br />
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I handed Mascis his ice cream cone. “Daddy—” he started, but I saw that the one dirty and ravaged table was miraculously unoccupied, and delightedly ran to it, as a nomad to an oasis. I took Lulu on my knee to share my ice cream cone (taking a cue from Melissa’s selfless gesture to share hers with our baby daughter, an idea that never would had occurred to me), handed Melissa hers, and asked Mascis, “What did you want to tell me?” “Daddy, I don’t want this,” he confessed pathetically. “I want a cinnamon roll.” I explained to him that we had talked about it, and that he had cinnamon rolls in the morning.<br />
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“But I didn’t want this,” he said, now crying, crouching down on the floor on one knee and hanging his head, yet still holding the ice cream cone erect, improbably.<br />
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By this point, my blood pressure was beginning to rise. What kid cries when you give him an ice cream cone? Mine, apparently. We’ve spoiled him to the point that he’s crying <span style="font-style: italic;">because we bought him an ice cream cone</span>. If my parents bought me an ice cream cone when I was his age, the only reason I would shed tears would be due to their kindness in breaking the cycle of sweets deprivation. I would have gladly accepted any flavor or form of ice cream and carried the joy of having had it with me to bed in the evening. <span style="font-style: italic;">What a fantastic day</span>, I would think. <span style="font-style: italic;">What a magical day of ice cream</span>.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">What a shit day</span>, I was now thinking, half-assedly feeding an ice cream cone to my daughter, pretending that I cared more than I did that she liked it so that my son, in a state of total collapse, might notice that I was not thinking about how upset he was, which, of course, was all I was thinking about.<br />
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I smelled something very un-ice-cream-like, and recalled that Lulu was exhibiting some suspicious behavior when we were upstairs waiting for Melissa and the food to come; I had completely forgotten. So I reached down to stretch out the back of her diaper to take a peak, like you do, soiling my finger in a very unfortunate solution for its resurgence.<br />
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Melissa sprung into action: she went to the counter, grabbed a napkin, and dispensed some water on it from the fountain soda station. I wiped off my finger and threw the napkin in the trash. Melissa had finished her ice cream cone and offered to take Lulu to the restroom and change her. “Take these,” she said, and gave me the five pack of cardboard magazine holders we had purchased earlier. Removing Lulu from my lap revealed a large, damp spot on my (stupid, godforsaken) shorts, which I immediately realized wasn’t pee, which certainly would have been the lesser of two evils.<br />
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I’m not horribly squeamish when it comes to these sorts of things, but even the most hardened among us with no real bodily-fluid aversion would admit to this requiring immediate attention. I looked at my crumpled son on the floor, his arched back rolling in waves with every heaving shiver of five-year old teary moans. “Mascis, I have to go to the bathroom and wash my leg. I will buy you a cinnamon roll, but you have to come with me now.” He looked up, confused. “DO ... YOU ... WANT THIS?” I asked, sternly, slow with the weight of the question’s importance, taking the ice cream cone gently out of his hand. “Because if not, I am going to throw it away.” He indicated that he didn’t want it, and asked why I had to wash leg in the bathroom.<br />
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“Because sissy peed on it,” I said. Mascis’s constitution is more fragile than mine.<br />
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I tossed the ice cream cone in the garbage and shuffled him into the bathroom, and while I scrubbed my shorts and leg with soap and water, explained: “Look, I’m upset, and I’m not buying you the cinnamon roll as a reward, I’m buying it because I needed you come to the bathroom with me immediately because sissy peed on me, and I couldn’t think of any other way to get you to come with me. I’m not at all happy about having to buy you a cinnamon roll, especially because I told you before that I wasn’t going to get you one. And from now on, you aren’t going to melt down in the middle of a store because you don’t get what you want. I mean, <span style="font-style: italic;">come on, man</span>! Things like ice cream and cinnamon rolls are not rights, they are <span style="font-style: italic;">privileges</span>. If you don’t want the ice cream cone, <span style="font-style: italic;">fine</span>. <span style="font-style: italic;">What do I care</span>? I won’t buy it for you. But I also would’t buy you the cinnamon roll, because we already talked about how you were not going to get it.”<br />
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Are your eyes glazing over yet? Just imagine trying to pay attention to this as a five-year old. After we left the bathroom, I kneeled down, and asked him if he knew why I was buying him the cinnamon roll. “Because I was upset,” he said.<br />
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So I bought him a cinnamon roll, explaining again <span style="font-style: italic;">why</span> I was buying it, if not to ruin it for him, then to at least make it a bittersweet affair. I got the distinct feeling that, though he was able to repeat the gist of what I was getting at, he didn’t really care, he was just happy to be getting a cinnamon roll.<br />
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Melissa came back with Lulu. I asked her if it was really bad, and she said, vibrating her head slightly, quickly, back and forth, “Oh, it was absolutely disgusting. I almost vomited.”<br />
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We all made our way to the parking lot, got in the car, and followed the ridiculously complex series of turns to make our way to I-90, then back to the city. We pulled in our garage at about 7:00 p.m.—almost bedtime!—and got out of the car and started gathering our belongings, mostly IKEA food garbage, from the car. “Where’s our purchase?” Melissa wondered, referring to the five pack of cardboard magazine holders we had purchased many moons ago. I then remembered that, flummoxed by the wetness of my daughter’s liquid waste on my leg, I completely forgot that I was put in charge of them, and left them in the ramshackle first floor IKEA café to be found by some sleepwalking slob chomping on a sensibly priced hot dog, caught unaware that his magazines or personal papers even needed to be organized.<br />
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May it bring him better luck than it did us.</div>
BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-77286447571379803822011-08-02T21:00:00.000-07:002011-08-03T09:07:21.476-07:00Old Young Man's Blues<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMSRYl1F-v5AH1ENRfnSlUeecpV_N0K7b7AR-6DMqHhUNEk3UfOxUnUqDnBD_XJrj-Foe1Ih5Lydf6w4QXu2KU651JFeH8rjC9jbIj3lo8IHpU5pmmrDSKo_AOD-NXJ2U4mrjin-u-_8s/s1600/After+After.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 234px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMSRYl1F-v5AH1ENRfnSlUeecpV_N0K7b7AR-6DMqHhUNEk3UfOxUnUqDnBD_XJrj-Foe1Ih5Lydf6w4QXu2KU651JFeH8rjC9jbIj3lo8IHpU5pmmrDSKo_AOD-NXJ2U4mrjin-u-_8s/s400/After+After.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5636385017463177266" border="0" /></a>A few weeks ago, I came to the conclusion that I no longer care how I look. I was packing for a camping trip, just jamming a bunch of shit into a bag without really caring, championing comfort (flip flops, shorts, other things I should be embarrassed to wear) over all else. I don't even have sunglasses anymore. I've traded those in for actual glasses, in true adult fashion. <span style="font-style: italic;">It’s funny how I used to worry about how I looked in a bathing suit</span>, I thought, as if I could not believe the folly of worrying about my appearance as I was wont to do in younger days. <span style="font-style: italic;">Too hairy, flabby, what do I care? I’m married, have kids. I’m at peace with it. My feet are all calloused and crazy, I have a trick toenail; what do I care?</span><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />I tend to do this a lot; bemusedly reaching some level of enlightenment, breathing deeply and laughing silently, imaginary brandy swishing around in my imaginary snifter as I shake my head in remembrance of the fool I once was. But this notion didn’t last long—they usually don’t, as I come to realize that I don't know anything. (I mean, Christ, I don't even know any of my friends' phone numbers.) Needless to say, I have since returned to looking at my male friends’ feet enviously. Summer is the worst for this line of thinking. In winter, everything's covered up, knees and feet; no worrying about what kind of socks look the least stupid with shorts. As if I didn't have enough to worry about with my stupid hair.<br /><br />I've kind of always thought of myself as a fat kid even though I was only really a fat kid for about two years, maybe fourth through sixth grade. But somehow that feeling during those years really stuck with me and I carry it still today. By the time I was a freshman in high school I was hella bony, my face kind of resembling Skeletor's. All through college and beyond, my head was nearly shaved, and I kind of pictured myself as a punk rock guy even though I was in a band that wrote songs that, at times, tragically sounded like Better Than Ezra. After college, I put on an impressive amount of weight and paraded around in Gap clothing and like sandals and shit, because I thought it was the adult thing to do. This didn't preclude me, however, from smoking insane amounts of grass and writing lo-fi mini-rock operas that no one would ever hear.<br /><br />A health scare forced me to lose a ton of weight, returning me to my Skeletorian days. I then grew my hair pretty long, determined to restyle myself as a harbinger of some sort of ill-defined new rock and roll explosion, one that sprinkled insufferable pretension and heavy-duty guitar riffs over songs whose lengths would give Yes pause.<br /><br />I remember back in these long-haired days I seldom worried about how ridiculous my hair looked, ostensibly because by design it was pretty ridiculous. But it was intentional. Now I look at pictures of myself from back then and think I look like a sickly foal.<br /><br />One day I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed the length of my hair in relation to my aging skin and thought<span style="font-style: italic;">, Boy, I really don't want to see what</span> that <span style="font-style: italic;">dude looks like when he's old</span>. So I decided to chop it all off. I remember when I cut off all my hair people would say, “Oh it’ll be so much easier to take care of now.” And this has turned out to be patently untrue.<br /><br />With long hair, it kind of always just fell the same. If it got a little too long, I'd cut it. Sooner or later. Didn’t really make a difference. And since you couldn’t see the back of my neck, it scarcely mattered if it was shaved close. Simple.<br /><br />Now I have a beard and short hair, which you would think is easier to manage. After all, beard, no shaving; short hair, no fuss, right? The first sign that something was amiss came with my wife’s correctly noting, “Dude, you need to shave your neck,” usually in the car on the way to a social engagement, at which time little to nothing could be done about it.<br /><br />And perhaps most troubling, in addition to frequently shaving around my beard, which has proven to be just as difficult and time-consuming as shaving, I now spend most of the little time I spend looking in the mirror trying to judge the ratio of facial-to-head hair, something that is way more complicated and crucial than I would have imagined.<br /><br />For years my wife cut my hair, but it just got to be a bit too much with the kids and whatnot (the last time my wife cut my hair, I was rocking my infant son in his car seat with my foot so he would stay asleep). So one Friday, knowing that there was a Hair Cuttery located next to my son’s pediatrician’s office, I though it brilliant to schedule a haircut during my son’s checkup, which was scheduled for the next day. So I called up and made an appointment.<br /><br />When I got there the next day, I was asked who I had an appointment with by a lady who was completely frazzled. I said that I wasn’t sure; nobody had told me. She exasperatedly opened up what was presumably the appointment book and asked my name. I told her and she said, “That’s with Frannie.” “Okay” I said. She said that Frannie was running late. “Okay,” I said. Then she said that they don’t really take appointments. “O…kay?” I said, wondering, <span style="font-style: italic;">if they didn’t take appointments, how had I made one the previous day for the exact time that it is right now</span>? In my experience, usually, if you call a place for an appointment that doesn’t take appointments, they’ll say something like “I’m sorry, sir, we don’t take appointments,” not “We’ll see you tomorrow at 8:30.”<br /><br />She then begrudgingly told me to follow her, complaining about how <span style="font-style: italic;">she</span> (Frannie, I assumed) <span style="font-style: italic;">always does this</span>. My hopes for a wash—easily my favorite part of getting a haircut—were dashed when she had me sit in the barber chair, haphazardly swooshed and velcroed a smock on me before she began to furiously spritz my head with water from a spray bottle. “Gonna be a crazy day. Gonna be <span>another crazy day</span>,” she said, shaking her head, spritzing, lukewarm water running into my ears. A man walked in at this time, and she said, “Sir there’s going to be a bit of a wait. We’re missing Frannie.” Spritz spritz. Worry worry.<br /><br />Right then, I realized that I would rather be just about anywhere else than trapped her with this person, whom, through no real fault of my own, I had upset gravely, and who, by the nature of her profession, was about to lunge sharp objects at my head.<br /><br />“What number?” She asked. “I’m sorry?” I asked. “What number? 4? 5?” she continued. “Umm…I’m not sure what you mean.” “WHAT NUMBER GUARD . . . ON THE CLIPPERS?” she hollered, somehow managing to stifle the YOU IDIOT that was clearly meant to follow this question. “Uh, I really don’t know.” She rolled her eyes, and showed me the various guards that go on the end of the clippers in order to vary the length of your hair. “How about this one?” she asked. “That looks good,” I replied—it really could have been any length and garnered the same response, as I recoiled into the barber chair, now replete with nerve-induced back sweat—and she put it on and began buzzing away at my head.<br /><br />I dared not tell her my preference for not using clippers—dictated by my wife’s preference for not using clippers. “I can tell they used clippers,” she would say, revealing an amateur by his or her tool preference, and, with a mere six words—the briskest of sentences—truthfully and efficiently deflating the enjoyment of a shiny new haircut.<br /><br />“The next time someone asks you what number,” my Hair Cutterer said, sternly, “it’s a five.” Buzz buzz buzz.<br /><br />The whole thing was over before I knew it, which is saying something, because generally when you’re in an uncomfortable situation, time drags on. When she was done, I paid her, gave her a reasonable tip, and her demeanor and tone changed instantly. “My name’s Lois,” she said, now beaming nearly psychotically and scribbling on a business card, “and these are my hours,” purportedly so I would know when <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> to make an appointment. Excuse me: when to not come in for a haircut, as they don’t take appointments.<br /><br />It was only after I left that I realized that she had never asked me how I wanted my hair cut.<br /><br />I then joined my wife and son at his pediatrician’s office. My wife inspected my head with her hands, squinting. “I can tell they used clippers,” she said.<br /><br />Not long after, I became privy to a friend of my wife’s—a professional stylist!—who cut hair out of her apartment after she had her son. She did a great job, and I really enjoyed the whole experience. We talked about the minutia of being new parents, bands we liked, our former lives, and cigarettes, and she became a friend of mine. Everything about it was beyond pleasant, except for scheduling haircuts for after the kids’ bedtime on a weeknight became too difficult; I work from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,and it's surprising how much that one-hour shift can throw a monkey wrench into the works. So I regrettably needed to get my hair cut on my lunch break, which was really the only free time I had available.<br /><br />There’s three options within walking distance from my work. The first was to go to a salon, and spend upwards of fifty dollars (or, as I like to think of it, between six and ten pizzas, depending on where you or, rather, I order them from) on a haircut, which seems ridiculous, given that a fifty-dollar haircut for one as dumb as mine seems absurd; plus, I just couldn’t afford that. The second option was Supercuts at the Thompson center, by all means an unpleasantly drab experience: ten minutes of idle chitchat, clippers, no wash, B96; it's like getting your hair cut in the salon equivalent of one of those pop-up Halloween stores. It bordered on unacceptable, but it wasn’t as bad as the alternative, which was looking like a disheveled lunatic.<br /><br />One of my biggest fears, which is all but predetermined, is winding up looking like an alcoholic middle-school math teacher: short-sleeve, light blue button-up; Coke-bottle glasses; puffy face; black oil-resistant Sears work shoes; wildly disheveled hair from perpetual neglect; the unmistakable look of surrender.<br /><br />Then one day I went to the uncelebrated Supercuts and it was closed until further notice, because they were doing some kind of renovations. This seemed odd to me, because, if you’re going to a place like Supercuts, clearly you don't care about the environment. You just want a haircut like, <span style="font-style: italic;">right now</span>. Couldn’t they have kept a chair amongst the rubble for emergency haircuts, lest they alienate their client base? (They certainly did with me.) So I began researching option three, the local cheapo barbershop.<br /><br />The place I wound up isn’t really an old-school barber shop, per se, with the candy-cane barber pole and whatnot—Chicago certainly has those—but more like a holdover from the ‘80s; the kind of place that has weird books for reference purposes featuring pictures of people with wildly explosive out-of-date hairdos on pages that look like perhaps someone has liberally grazed or urinated on. The lady who became my “hair stylist” for the next year or so strictly due to her availability on the day I first went there, I’ll call Theresa, is by all accounts a lovely Latino woman, with a bit of a jaw abnormality that makes it appear as if she’s smiling and gritting her teeth at the same time, all the time. She was delightful to talk to; she shared stories of her kids’ sporting events, the tumults of dealing with the bullshit of her extended family (which travails she had little time for), how she would accompany a friend of hers to visit a loved one in prison (and how you’re not allowed to show any cleavage when you’re there, Thanksgiving dish preparation, and the time she thought her son disappeared, but it just turned out he spent the night in the family car.<br /><br />The biggest selling point, however, was that I could get my hair cut during my lunch break. The haircut was marginally better than Supercuts or Hair Cuttery and, though she would use clippers on the back, a cut included a wash, and she would even trim my beard. But then a sort of DIY ethos salon run by lesbians opened up in my neighborhood. Male haircuts cost $20, a mere $4 more than I was paying downtown, the difference being less than the cost of the cheapest pizza on my radar. And, not that I’ve ever indulged there, they offer you a PBR to chug during your haircut (although I must confess that I’m not quite sure how this would work, unless they also give you a straw). The decision to jump ship was an easy one to make.<br /><br />By all accounts, my experience there has been uniformly pleasurable. I’m pretty much relegated to getting a haircut within whatever two-hour period of time on Saturday or Sunday (again, work makes it impossible for me to get there on a weekday) we don’t have some museum, park, play date or birthday party to go to, meaning that—even though I try—making an appointment with the same person isn’t really possible. Which leads to a bit of awkwardness every time I’m there, as I’m not really sure if the person who cut my hair the last time, if they even remember me, wonders why I’m getting my hair cut by somebody else.<br /><br />At this point, I think I’ve had my hair cut by just about everybody who works there, and the conversation is usually unusually great. There’s something comforting about having your hair cut by someone who swears unabashedly, talks about smoking pot with her 13 year-old niece at a time share in Orlando, is dreadfully hung over, or talks about how his mom responded to his coming out. And I get the benefit of being able to talk about being a dad and having a square job in my normal voice, rather than one affected to appeal to the most general audience. (One of the guys, a gay man, who cut my hair seemed encouraged by our conversation, volunteered that it seemed like cool people were having kids now; I decided not to burst his bubble by pointing out that, if you have kids and you’re getting your hair cut by a gay man at a salon run by lesbians that offers canned beer to its patrons, you’re probably not representing the majority of parents out there, for better or worse.)<br /><br />At any rate, I love this place, even though no haircut I have gotten has been the same. In fact, I came out once with my hair parted on the opposite side than when I went in. But I don’t give a fuck. I wholeheartedly <span style="font-style: italic;">love</span> the experience, the people, that it’s an independent business in my neighborhood, and, not least of all, the price.<br /><br />But now I find myself back in the same position as I have so many times in the past. It’s been months since I’ve had a haircut, due to scheduling difficulties. It used to be I felt like we got invited to nothing, but now, with all these kids’ birthday parties, I feel like we’re in an elite circle of socialites, constantly responding to online invitations: “We’ll be out of town. Boo!” or “We have another party early, but should be by late afternoon before we’re having our own party in the evening, which you are certainly invited to!” It’s dizzying.<br /><br />I sometimes see my ex-stylist Theresa on train on my way home, and I imagine it’s a lot like how most people feel running into an ex-girlfriend, though, as I don’t have many ex-girlfriends and they’re good people, I can’t really equate it with that. “I haven’t seen you in awhile,” she said upon our last encounter about a week ago. “Mmm. Ha-ha. Yeah,” spilled out of my mouth as I got off at my stop. What could I say?<br /><br />Which brings us to the facial-to-head hair ratio, a rather difficult terrain to navigate; risky business. If your hair is overgrown and you trim your beard too short, you wind up looking like Ken Burns. Of course, it’s easy to manage if all you do is use clippers for both, but this tactic demonstrates a lack of finesse or bother. It's the tactic employed by the same people who were the demographic for those who would rather hook up a contraption to their vacuum cleaner than pay someone six dollars, let alone get off the couch, to cut their hair. Though it is most certainly a way to avoid the dreaded alcoholic middle school math teacher appearance fate that assuredly awaits me, that’s not me, man.<br /><br />When I go too long without having a haircut, there will inevitably a time, usually some morning, when after having a serious conversation with my wife or disciplining my son, I’ll see my reflection in the bathroom mirror, notice how insanely explosive in all directions my hair is, I'll replay the conversation I just had and wonder how anyone can take anything seriously this guy with the extremely fucked up hair says.<br /><br />So, since the deluge of children’s birthday parties and other family events this summer have made my getting a hair cut virtually impossible, in order to not upset the hair-to-beard ratio, I did what any reasonable person would do: after coming up empty at Walgreen's, I ducked in the neighborhood dollar store that is going out of business and bought an orange (the only color they had) bandana for 85 cents. (See the aforementioned going-out-of-business comment.)<br /><br />I put it on that evening, as we were putting my son to bed, thinking, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hey—here’s a solution to my problem. Plus, it’s like, cool and stuff. I’ll wear this headband; it’s like I’m the doomed muscle-bound cool guy in like </span>Friday the 13th <span style="font-style: italic;"></span><span style="font-style: italic;">or something</span>.<br /><br />Every night, my wife, son and I have sharing time—which may sound even more hippieish than wearing a headband—where we each take turns recounting what happened during the day that we found “good,” “silly” (a recent addition upon my son’s recommendation), and “frustrating or sad.” The headband died instantly, as, when we all settled into my son’s room, my wife could not restrain from covering her mouth, laughing gutturally, and pointing at my head. To no one’s surprise, my headband proved a shoe-in for her “silly” thing of the day.<br /><br />The next morning, as I was getting ready for work, I decided that my beard, approaching braiding length and somehow making my eyes appear to be weighted with a deep disturbance for which bloodshed of the innocent offered the only release, could no longer be neglected, facial-to head hair ratio be damned. I put the adjustable guard at seven—a full two above five, which number in relation to guards I shan’t ever forget—and hoped for the best, investing the 20 minutes in an endeavor not likely to have a positive resolution, but at this time seemed like the lesser of two evils. After showering, dressing, brushing my teeth and plastering my hair with surf goo, I took a good look and, sure enough, the facial-to-head hair ratio had been irreparably disturbed, at least without the intervention of a professional. Despite my best efforts, my head looked like a shriveled, overcooked potato below, a cacophony of discarded Easter basket grass up top.<br /><br />I remembered my thoughts a few days earlier, the briefest flirtation with a certain weightless relief in finally reaching an apex in not caring how I looked. <span style="font-style: italic;">You know</span>, I thought, turning my head this way and that, slowly, with a sort of defeatist’s vanity, <span style="font-style: italic;">I wouldn't care how I looked if I didn’t look so fucking stupid all the time</span>.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-4469109485720218952011-04-21T10:00:00.000-07:002011-04-21T08:51:29.331-07:00I Had a Dream, I Had an Awesome Dream Part 2: I Had Another Dream, I Had Another Awesome Dream<span style="font-style: italic;">Transcription of miniature tape recording. The morning of Thursday, April 14, 2011</span>.<br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />I just woke up from one of the most startling and prophetic dreams I’ve ever had. It was punishing in both content and length, having long, hyper-realistic and unnerving stretches where nothing much happened, similar to those found in a Michelangelo Antonioni film. I can’t help feel that there’s something profound to be learned from it, possibly answering the question “Is there a God?”<br /><br />The dream begins with my going to see the new Muppet movie, presumably the one Jason Segel is writing. Since this film, titled <span style="font-style: italic;">The Muppets, </span>is slated for release on November 23, 2011, this dream most certainly takes place in, and in fact may be a warning from, the near future. In my dream, the only theater that is playing this film is located at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherryvale_Mall">Cherryvale Mall</a> (which in reality no longer has movie theaters) located just outside Rockford in Cherry Valley, Illinois.<br /><br />When I was growing up, Cherryvale Mall was (and still is, I suppose) the premier mall in the Greater Rockford Region. When I was in college, a friend of mine from some weird small town that the people who live there probably have never heard of confessed that its inhabitants routinely drove <span style="font-style: italic;">an hour and a half</span> just to go to Cherryvale. Both Cherryvale and, to a lesser extent, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrstitustrout/4245224844/">Colonial Village Mall</a> were exclusively for the folks who lived on the east side (of the Rock River); the side of town which, if you were of a certain mindset (as I was), seemed to be exclusively inhabited by rich people. <a href="http://www.labelscar.com/illinois/north-towne-mall">North Towne Mall</a> and <a href="http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/machesney_park_mall.html">Machesney Park Mall</a> were the <span style="font-style: italic;">people’s</span> malls; malls for the working-class stiffs who lived on the west side, rummaged the bakery for day-old bread and watched network television because they couldn’t afford cable.<br /><br />We always went to Machesney as my dad refused to go to Cherryvale. Though the malls had a nearly identical roster of stores, my father claimed that at Cherryvale they “jacked up the prices,” a belief he maintains to this day.<br /><br />There was an element of distrust ascribed to Cherryvale by the working-class folk, like its sole reason for being was to pull one over on you. But there seemed to be a mutual respect inherent in shopping at Machesney: <span style="font-style: italic;">Thank you, JCPenny, for this affordable acid-washed denim jacket.</span><br /><br />These days Machesney and North Towne are in pretty rough shape, as is the majority of the west side of town. And Colonial Village has been purchased by <a href="http://www.heartland.cc/">Heartland Community Church</a> (aptly described by usachurches.org as a “mega church”), whose slogan is “A Different Way to Do Church,” which apparently means (a) in a converted mall where the pastors wear light-washed tapered jeans and loafers, (b) using those buzz-kill headset microphones that Sammy Hagar modeled on the “5150” tour (which, incidentally, Colin Quinn also wears in his latest HBO special, which is the sole reason I refuse to watch it), and (c) offering the particular brand of worship lenient enough to supplement “The Message” with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwEeW8oswog&playnext=1&list=PL4ACB9707D1A19EE1">embarrassing rap parodies</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKOxwYV7DPw">silly rock orchestrations possibly written in homage to Savatage</a> mounted on the pulpit.<br /><br />While Machesney and North Towne have had to settle for inhabitants like <a href="http://www.greatclips.com/">Great Clips</a>, <a href="http://www.rrstar.com/updates/x2011269159/Big-Lots-to-open-soon-in-Machesney-Park">Big Lots!</a>, and seemingly inaccurately—but disappointingly accurately—named restaurants like <a href="http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-17489259R-21st_century_buffet-i">“21st Century Buffet”</a> in a fashion similar to the way that your Aunt with crushingly low self-esteem had to settle for shacking up in a trailer park with your slob of an uncle—<span style="font-style: italic;">I know he’s not perfect, but my psoriasis and tooth decay don’t bother him</span>—Cherryvale has thrived, and is the last mall standing.<br /><br />And it appears space is at a premium there, because it is no longer sufficient to merely have stores; every inch of space must be taken up by kiosks and aqua-massage machines somewhat resembling a marriage between the Batmobile and William Hurt's sensory deprivation tank in <span style="font-style: italic;">Altered States</span>. Here and there and everywhere, young hucksters with bluetooth headsets callously thrust hastily copied and jaggedly cut fliers at your person, advertising cell phones that seem not only shady but somehow dangerous, as if they are the methamphetamine equivalent of wireless technology, while some poor sap in a too-big, no-iron shirt and tie combination obviously sold together attempts to trip you up with an impossibly fast remote control hamster.<br /><br />Call me old-fashioned, but unless it’s like a lemonade or something, I’m not buying anything from a kiosk. “Hey, I like your airbrushed shirt. Where’d you get it?” “I got it at the mall, in the area that used to be designated for people to walk. They set up like these little huts there, like the Ewok village. I also got these Family Guy pajama pants, a foot-long egg roll, a bottle of Vin Diesel cologne, a few body piercings, and this light-up dummy cell-phone that plays <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Sd5c4o9UM">“E.T.”</a> by Katy Perry and is filled with neon green kiwi-flavored edible paste.” They should identify this section of the mall on the directory as “Snake Oil.” It’s like you half-expect Jesus to show up (possibly in Crocs and brandishing a waffle cone) and angrily tear the place down in disgust—you know, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g77AcTbjFo">like he does in Jesus Christ Superstar</a>—and turn it into a Heartland or something. I wonder if optometrist Sanford Ziffthe, creator of Sunglass Hut, is celebrated and revered within this sect of the business community, as he is clearly its progenitor.<br /><br />When I was younger, I rarely went to Cherryvale. In fact, I felt like a traitor when I was there, as if I was a budding socialist at Wal-Mart comparison-shopping for an army jacket. But I remember it well, and this dream version of Cherryvale was the version I knew in my youth; a little more spread out, containing a Walgreens and a movie theater.<br /><br />I was with my brother; we purchased our tickets from the box office, removed our shoes (of course!) and entered into the theater. The inside of the theater was some sort of outdoor café on a hillside whose sole purpose seemed to be to prop up the huge mansion on stilts there. It was nighttime, and the fuzzy yellowish light emanating from the mansion's countless windows was barely adequate to guide us to a black steel patio furniture set where two gentlemen were seated, playing cards. Upon taking the only vacant seat I realized that my brother was gone, and that one of the guys playing cards was Dr. Dre. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Wow, it's Dr. Dre,</span> I thought. I had to say something, as I was now seated at their table and it would be weird to just sit there in silence. “So,” I asked him, “what do you think about this Muppet movie?” He laughed, said, “Man, I don’t know,” and took a hit from a curious-looking blunt. <span style="font-style: italic;">Dr. Dre, you’re not so tough</span>, I said to myself, before Dr. Dre took another hit from his blunt without passing it along. <span style="font-style: italic;">You're also stingy with your pot,</span> I thought.<br /><br />I looked at his blunt a little more carefully, and realized that—I assumed as a high-caliber take on rolling a joint in grape-flavored Swisher papers—he had rolled his blunt with actual grape leaves. <span style="font-style: italic;">That’s some Roman Empire-type shit right there</span>, I told myself. “Yeah, well,” I said nervously, “they say this new Muppet movie is pretty good.” Dr. Dre laughed dismissively and said, “Man, I’m just here looking for beats.”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Hmm</span>, I thought, <span style="font-style: italic;">a true professional, always on the lookout for beats, even while at a screening of the new Muppet movie!</span><br /><br />At that, an air raid siren went off and searchlights haphazardly began spewing mammoth cones of unfocused white light in every known direction. Everybody started screaming in terror and running tentatively, then assuredly. I too ran, flailing my arms and feeling my heart threaten to rupture the veins in my neck, all the while screeching like Alfred Molina does in Raiders of the Lost Ark when he is assailed by the remains of Forrestal. We—by now an enormous mob of hunted game—splashed through a shallow body of water before settling into what appeared to be a church basement.<br /><br />People were calmer now, some sitting on the floor, others in folding chairs. I could hear the unspooling of film reels and the flicker of a film projector, but couldn’t locate it or see any projection. Just as I was thinking this, we were besieged by a modestly sized but enormously frightening projection of the bust of a perhaps wooden character wearing, presumably, tails and a <a href="http://www.gentlemansemporium.com/how_to_tie_a_cravat.php">Victorian cravat</a>, looking like a mix between <a href="http://unrealitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/andy.jpg">Andy Serkis</a> and <a href="http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2003_Willard/2003_willard_005.jpg">Crispin Glover in <span style="font-style: italic;">Willard</span></a>, with jet-black, slicked-back hair and black marble eyes. Almost instantly upon appearing, he gurgled, “Fellow Martian-mallows, blerg ... hack ... marack ... balak ... takk ... gock ... tilk ... brack,” while an all-too-real tongue slobbered around on his chin, and a greenish-tinged motor-oil-like substance oozed from his wooden mouth in amounts both disturbing and improbable. <span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Holy fucking shit,</span> I thought. <span style="font-style: italic;">This is the new Muppet movie?</span><br /><br />The projection stopped abruptly, the lights went on, and all of the church basement dwellers—unnervingly calm now—started collecting their belongings, gently, gently, and filing out the double doors leading to the Cherryvale Mall Theater lobby.<br /><br />And that's when I realized, <span style="font-style: italic;">Hey—this isn’t the new Muppet movie! This is some sort of program designed to brainwash people—by using this strange form of organized religion— into never leaving the mall!</span> But it didn’t work on me, for some reason.<br /><br />Now I knew what I had to do: break the fuck out of Cherryvale Mall.<br /><br />But it wasn’t as dramatic as all that. It was actually really, really boring. I wandered around the mall under an umbrella of the echoes of the people who hadn’t yet screened the new Muppet movie covering for the lack of noise coming from the mutes who had been brainwashed, forced to roam without purpose in service of an unknown type to an oil-spewing wooden puppet of some sort with a loose religious affiliation of unknown denomination.<br /><br />As I walked around the mall, I noticed I was barefoot, but I wasn’t about to go back to the movie theater to get my shoes; there was some weird, shady shit going on there. I moved slowly, suspiciously around, trying to find a way out. But before I could locate an exit, I noticed a Coconuts—the now-defunct music store recently acquired by the soon-to-be-defunct FYE—and they were having a going-out-of-business sale!<br /><br />So I spent a long time roaming around in there, looking at posters (I remember one was of Cinderella frontman <a href="http://www.tomkeifer.com/">Tom Keifer</a>), and thinking, <span style="font-style: italic;">Who on earth is going to buy this shit for $7.99?</span><br /><br />After deciding that the clearance prices at Coconuts were more expensive than the full prices charged by online retailers, I resumed looking for a way out. I located an exit, but it looked tricky to navigate, as it was a winding corridor leading to a loading dock and appeared to be guarded by the <a href="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4145/5047829604_ae8c134382.jpg">dude who fired the death star ray that blew up Alderaan</a> in <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars</span>.<br /><br />Defeated, I wandered around for what seemed like hours, barefoot and window shopping, all the while aware of the slow-boil in my stomach waiting to either erupt in a full-on panic certain to cause my sudden death or dissipate and permeate from my pores when my current situation was resolved. I had to do something. Now was the time for action: I needed to retrieve my shoes.<br /><br />So I journeyed back to the theater, arriving just in time to see a new batch of freshly converted zombies exiting the theater. I walked up to the guy who was hunched over the concession stand counter where he was working—I’m pretty sure he was <a href="http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/27/2771/Y2KTD00Z/posters/ernest-borgnine.jpg">a young Ernest Borgnine</a>—and asked him if anybody had turned in any shoes to the lost and found. It was at this moment that I realized that (a) I had not only left the pair of shoes I was wearing behind, but also a <span style="font-style: italic;">brand new pair of shoes</span> I had bought earlier from Sears, though I couldn’t remember what they looked like, and (b) there were no concessions for sale.<br /><br />Without looking up from the crossword he was doing in the artlessly folded newspaper section he was holding, he mumbled “baahhh” and motioned over by the wall, where I saw a horrifying, mountainous graveyard of mismatched shoes. <span style="font-style: italic;">Are they killing people for their shoes</span>, I wondered.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Of course</span><span>, I realized. </span><span style="font-style: italic;">They’re killing people for their shoes</span>!<br /><br />"Thanks for your help," I warbled nervously to young Ernest Borgnine, who now looked up from his crossword with suspicion and picked up a phone from behind the counter. <span style="font-style: italic;">Why did I come back here</span>, I asked myself.<span style="font-style: italic;"> And what happened to my shoes?</span><br /><br />Now there was no option: I had to accept the search for my missing shoes as a lost cause and make my escape through the exit I had seen before, knowing it was going to be the most difficult thing I had ever done. How would I get past the menacing guard?<br /><br />I sprinted through the mall, whizzing by dozens of poor saps doomed to roam the confines of Cherryvale with no purpose (for all eternity?) before snaking my way through the dingy white corridor while fluorescent lights and cheap drop-ceiling tiles took turns soaring over my head until I reached the door to the loading dock and smashed it open. Still running, I saw, parked in the loading dock, a delivery truck for what appeared to be a cheap Doritos knockoff called “Shock-itos,” and I remember thinking, <span style="font-style: italic;">Wow, that’s pretty lazy</span>.<br /><br />And then there, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dreaded guard, unwavering in his battle stance and resembling a jet-black salamander, menacing and sleek, ready; his sole purpose being the prevention of the very type of escape I was attempting. His rigorous training in this capacity would make him a fierce competitor indeed. The battle would surely be intense, victory only awarded to he with the most endurance and tolerance for pain.<br /><br />I ran up to him, pushed him, and he fell over.<br /><br />I hopped in the truck, where my brother was waiting. He started the engine, and we took off from the dock. I wondered if there were any Shock-itos in the back.<br /><br />There was a really old, boxy TV mounted on the dashboard—obscuring roughly 75 percent of the windshield—showing what looked like outtakes from a film: Brittany Murphy’s smiling, tears streaming down her face as she is reacting to hearing news over the telephone. As the romantic score swells, she starts shaking and crying harder, quivering,“I’m so glad that everything is going to be all right.” “And cut!” an off-screen voice says before Brittany contends, “I can do it better.” The off-screen voice says, “OK. Roll film, sound, and ... action!” and the whole scene plays again.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So sad</span>, I thought, <span style="font-style: italic;">that Brittany Murphy's last film is this bullshit Muppet movie</span>. I rip ped the TV off the dash and threw it in the back, where the Shock-itos presumably would be.<br /><br />It was very dark outside. We squealed out of the dock and, despite our best attempts to break the sound barrier, puttered out of an enormous parking lot jam-packed with cars (after all, people were coming into the mall without leaving) as my brother relayed that the tires were nearly bald. “They must smooth them out,” he said, “so nobody can drive fast.” <span style="font-style: italic;">This isn’t over,</span> I thought. <span style="font-style: italic;">We made it out of the mall, but if they don’t want us driving fast, their grasp must reach beyond the confines of Cherryvale.</span><br /><br />My brother was driving down a gravel road that led out of town—and danger—as fast as he could, though the truck was weaving around a lot due to the baldness of the tires. <span style="font-style: italic;">If we can just make it to the border,</span> I thought, <span style="font-style: italic;">we'll be free</span>. Up ahead, we saw a makeshift little shantytown to the right, and the glow of torches coming into the road. As we neared the glow of the torches, they were revealed to belong to a group of Amish people forming a human blockade at the border.<br /><br />“We are but a simple people,” one of them shouted as we approached. “Please stay and join our community. <span style="font-style: italic;">We need your shoes</span>!”<br /><br />“Go! Go! Go!” I shouted, as my brother slowed down. "Run them down," I commanded, as the truck slowed. “What are you fucking doing?” I was screaming now. “Run them over! Run them over! Run them over!”<br /><br />And so here I am, awake and now alert, with the urgent feeling that I have just experienced something revelatory subdued and shrunken to almost nothing, saddled with the knowledge that I would fervently condone running over a human blockade if it meant escaping to Wisconsin.<br /><br />. . . .<br /><br />The next evening, according to my wife, I woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Cookies. Tee-hee-hee. Um-num-num-num-num-num-num-num.”<br /><br />“Brent?” she said, but I was still and smiling, awash in the luxury of unmemorable sleep.<br /></div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-8902313501447912562011-04-15T13:13:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:33:32.734-07:00On Being a Shithead<div style="text-align: justify;">When I started <span style="font-style: italic;">Donkeyshame</span>, I never had designs on posting all the time, only when I had something interesting to say. Which is kind of funny, because, looking over it now, most of these posts—the most recent being more than two years ago—are if not embarrassingly insipid then at least wholly unimportant. At the time I was still reading the <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Sun-Times</span> every day (which sadly seems absurdly antiquated to me now), and I think I was trying to find a voice similar to Mark Brown or Neil Steinberg, neither of whom I am particularly fond of.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">At any rate, in my mind <span style="font-style: italic;">Donkeyshame</span> has been active the whole time, which I realize makes no sense at all. But you see I’ve been working on something— let’s call it the “Pilots project”—that required, for me at least, a great deal of research and time investment, and a clarity of purpose, which seems these days to be ever more obscured by a dense layer of fog, perhaps of my own device.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">I am now beginning to accept that the Pilots project is at worst a small-scale disaster on a personal level and at best an excuse to procrastinate and be lazy about writing: I’ve had ideas both great and terrible in the duration, but, for better or worse, I’ve shelved them because the Pilots project needed to be my next piece. I read <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shining</span> and sat through the entire stupid mini-series of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shining</span>, listened to the fucking commentary track by the hack director, Steven Weber and Stephen King, thinking that I was going to write something about it after the Pilot project was completed. And now, it’s been so long, I can barely remember anything about any of it. What a waste of like, 50 hours. <span style="font-style: italic;">For some shit I don’t even like</span>.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Yesterday morning, after wresting myself from the grasp of an especially wacky dream, my first instinct was to write about it. But then I remembered that unspoken rule in my head, the one where I can’t write anything until I finish the Pilots project. I instantly realized that, in my writing something, <span style="font-style: italic;">anything</span>, and putting it out there, I would remove this self-imposed exile from writing and, by damning the Pilots project—the exact type of piece that had been the reason for the creation of <span style="font-style: italic;">Donkeyshame</span>—to an unknown fate, I might just save the whole fucking thing.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">I’m not sure why I was so shocked when I recently realized, upon finishing all the punishing research for the Pilots project, that the two years I spent (at my leisure) doing research and watching shitty out-of-print movies in ten-minute segments on YouTube was the easy part of the endeavor; trying to spin something out of what my Grandmother would call “oodles” of notes that don’t necessarily add up to anything (or maybe they do) it is the hard part.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">So I’m trying to convince myself that if the Pilots project is not <span style="font-style: italic;">the next thing</span>, that the occurrence is not necessarily a failure. Or, if it is a failure, then that’s okay.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">I have this mentality that’s all like <span style="font-style: italic;">I can’t do</span> this<span style="font-style: italic;"> if I don’t finish</span> this, which doesn’t even make any sense because I’m always working on 27 different things at once (currently, demos for my now-defunct band, the Pale Gallery, working on forming a new band, writing two screenplays (mostly in theory), writing this dumb Pilots project, and recording a hip-hop record that I’m certain will be fantastic, though I would never tell you that in person, because, actually, I’m certain it will be terrible).<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Plus—the Pilots project is not even suited to the blog format. It’s got footnotes.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">I’ve known that I was going to at some point have to write this, and have been dreading it, because I don’t even really like the conversational aspect of blogs. I love film criticism more than the Mark Maron podcast; I want this to be the résumé on heavy-test paper, even though they tell you not to do it that way these days.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">I can’t even write a blog the way it’s supposed to be written. But being a blogger had never been of much interest to me, whereas being an essayist and film critic has always been an ambition of mine. I'm going to be posting more frequently here (hopefully), but I decided to also start <a href="http://yippiecahiersducinema.blogspot.com/">another blog</a> completely devoted to film, which will mostly be a collection of capsule reviews for films I happen to watch, and perhaps some longer pieces of criticism, such as the long-stewing and troubled Pilots project.<br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">You win some, you lose some. Fuck it.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-43346509195259089952009-02-24T14:14:00.000-08:002011-04-16T18:34:44.697-07:00Twenty-Six is the New Ten<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgJy4iy5brNlyeGQARdZTUvpeL5Kj6cNFFbmiuZR28oVyqO1Mb02vjBDbavRTOxnNg9rusTIpjZu63ckZrRU6w3q6ufiCh1v8iLdaeBaj3hWGp5S1nEFx5pZlVC1mUMJQKWREL2dSPQ4/s1600-h/8f5218fe27d8fe73c98da70d676a4210.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJgJy4iy5brNlyeGQARdZTUvpeL5Kj6cNFFbmiuZR28oVyqO1Mb02vjBDbavRTOxnNg9rusTIpjZu63ckZrRU6w3q6ufiCh1v8iLdaeBaj3hWGp5S1nEFx5pZlVC1mUMJQKWREL2dSPQ4/s400/8f5218fe27d8fe73c98da70d676a4210.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5306501838890688930" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">So there's this thing going around on Facebook where, if you are tagged, you're to come up with the ten albums that influenced you the most throughout your life. Finding that too difficult (or easy, I'm not sure which), and having a lot of free time today at work, I decided to expand on it. I have organized them in order of when they made an appearance into my stupid life, as opposed to when they were actually released. Why not, you know?<br /><br /></div><ol style="text-align: justify;"><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Def Leppard—<span style="font-style: italic;">Pyromania</span> (1983).</span> I would watch MTV’s Friday night video fights over at my friend Kurt’s house, and “Photograph” was unbeatable. I thought that they all looked so cool. It’s funny now to look at how ridiculously they’re dressed, and notice the cheapness of the set. Then, it looked like the future or something. So did the video for “Foolin'." I still love this record and think it sounds like it's from the future.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">“Weird Al” Yankovic—<span style="font-style: italic;">In 3-D </span>(1984).</span> My first case of hero worship. I was obsessed, for years, with this man. I loved his originals—“Midnight Star” and “Nature Trail to Hell” were my two favorite songs on this record, and I sampled the latter a few years ago on an Air Mack record.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">White Lion—<span style="font-style: italic;">Pride</span> (1987).</span> As an aspiring guitar player, Vito Bratta was my Eddie Van Halen. I pretty much learned how to ply guitar listening to this album. His guitar playing on “Wait” and “Little Fighter” still freaks me out. Every time I’ve ever seen my friend Kurt play acoustic guitar, he’ll invariably play a handful of Hank Willams songs before finger picking the intro from “Little Fighter.”</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Metallica—<span style="font-style: italic;">Master of Puppets</span></span> (1986). Made me realize that there was heavy music that wasn’t about lusting after women. I rode my Huffy to the K-Mart on North Main Street (where Kurt, Chris, John Lindmark and I, for the most part, would buy our metal tapes) and bought it there. We all instantly loved it. Jeff Massey would later work there.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Rock City Angels—<span style="font-style: italic;">Young Man's Blues</span> (1988)</span>. I remember seeing the video for “Deep Inside My Heart” and buying the tape immediately thereafter. I thought they were going to be huge. To me, it was the best thing I had ever heard. They were peers of Guns 'n' Roses, kind of bluesy and punk rock (as far as mainstream hard rock goes), but they never caught on. They had a six-million dollar record deal with Geffen, put out one single and three-sided double record, then disappeared. In the locker room, Chad Sneath laughed at me, lodging, “I can’t believe you like that country metal band." And at the first dance that I was at with my first girlfriend, she asked me what music I listened to. “Rock City Angels,” I answered. "Have you heard of them?" “I’ve heard of them,” she said, “but I’ve never <span style="font-style: italic;">heard </span>them.” I was pretty sure that she had never heard of them, but it was sweet of her to say. I wasn’t sure why we were the only couple slow dancing to “No New Tale to Tell” by Love and Rockets (I had never heard it before) until the chorus struck, when it became all too apparent. I had never felt so uncomfortable before.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Public Enemy—<span style="font-style: italic;">It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back </span>(1988)</span>. My friend Jeff Thompson, who loved Anthrax and Megadeth, also loved PE. And since I loved Anthrax, I thought I’d give it a shot. I actually used to watch Yo! MTV Raps with some frequency (and owned cassettes by The Digital Underground, D.O.C. and Snap!) but had never really connected with a hip-hop group before (besides Run DMC). One day in psychology class (this was later, after the release of <span style="font-style: italic;">Fear of a Black Planet</span>), an African-American classmate noticed my PE shirt and was like, “I bet you can’t even name all the members of the band.” I did, even including that Professor Griff was on suspension for Anti-Semitic remarks he made in the press. I instantly felt stupid, like I was taking something away from its true owner.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Cure—<span style="font-style: italic;">Disintegration</span> (1989)</span>. I made a conscious decision, my Freshman year of high school, to try and clean up my image. I was a mulleted metal dude, and I thought that maybe I could try to be more social and outgoing so I could meet my one true love (I was never interested in “meeting girls,” just with finding a girl that I could be obsessed with and melodramatic about). So I replaced my mullet with a much shorter hairdo that wasn’t unlike what is found protruding from the head of Woody Woodpecker. I also started going to “steering committee” meetings (I still don’t know that the fuck that’s supposed to mean) and pretended to enjoy myself while building floats and washing cars. Mostly I just stood around nervously trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing (a ritual I engage in with some frequency to this day). At any rate, I started listening to The Cure, because my girlfriend listened to them, and she didn’t really like Rock City Angels. I got <span style="font-style: italic;">Standing on a Beach</span>, and I thought it was okay, but when <span style="font-style: italic;">Disintegration</span> came out, I listened to it and nothing else for weeks, maybe months. My life is very tangled up in this record and, each time I listen to it, it is with complete surrender—a very strange mix of longing, joy and sadness for experiences that range in spectrum from ethereal and passionate to drunken, joyful and communal. By the way, if anybody wants to hear a lo-fi, bashed-out, albeit very faithful rendition of “Plainsong” recorded by me and Kurt under the Scary Monsters moniker, I would be happy to send it to you.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Various Artists—<span style="font-style: italic;">Say Anything Soundtrack</span></span>. (1989) Pretty bad soundtrack, actually, but it did introduce me to the Red Hot Chili Peppers (who would, for a few years, be among my favorite bands) and Fishbone (another short-lived favorite). I absolutely loved the movie, seeing it six times in the theater. I wanted to be Lloyd Dobler. There’s a line, where Corey says to Lloyd: “me, I’m a great person, but you, you’re a great person.” I remember talking on the phone to a really good girl friend of mine, baiting her, trying to get her to tell me that I was a great person. “You’re a good person,” I would say. “Thank you,” she would say. “No, I mean . . . <span style="font-style: italic;">you’re really a good person</span>.” “Thank you.” My first kiss was to “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. It occurred in the back seat of my mom’s station wagon on the way back from a trip to St. Luke’s Episcopal church in Evanston for its “Advent Lessons and Carols” program. When we would eventually break up, I made a tape of just “In Your Eyes” over and over again on both sides and slid it into her mailbox along with a bunch of really shitty poetry.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Jane’s Addiction—<span style="font-style: italic;">Ritual de lo Habitual</span> (1990)</span>. My brother had <span style="font-style: italic;">Nothing’s Shocking</span> and, after the nausea I felt the first time I listened to it had subsided, I listened to it again. And again and again. By the time Ritual came out, I was completely in love with them. They were still mysterious then. They didn’t grant a lot of interviews, Stephen Perkins was not yet in the boneheaded Infectious Grooves and this was years before Dave Navarro and his <span style="font-style: italic;">Something Wicked This Way Comes</span>-fashioned beard/eyes and shaved hulking chest were revealed on network television and in the tabloids to belong to just some other fucking “dude” who played guitar and was totally into boobs. I liked the “we are serious artists” of it all. I liked the homoeroticism of it all. And the Christ imagery. And the deviant sex and drugs and rock and roll of it all. I still think it’s easily their best album, and “Then She Did” their most harrowing and beautiful song. The end still gives me chills: “would you say hello to my mom?/would you pay a visit to her?/she was an artist just as you were/I’d have introduced you to her/she would take us out on Sundays/we’d go laughing through the garbage/she’d repair legs like a doctor/on the kitchen chairs we sat on/she was unhappy just as you were.”</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Dinosaur jr—<span style="font-style: italic;">Just Like Heaven Single</span> (1989)</span>. The first thing I heard by Dinosaur. The next would be <span style="font-style: italic;">Green Mind</span>, which I got from the Columbia House Record Club, and it completely sealed the deal. What can I say? I had never heard anything like it before, and haven’t since.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Bob Mould—<span style="font-style: italic;">Black Sheets of Rain</span> (1990)</span>. I saw the video for “It’s Too Late” on 120 Minutes and, though, I don’t necessarily think it’s a great representative of his work as a whole, it’s still a pretty awesome song (even if it’s a total rip-off of “Do Ya” by ELO). And it led to a lifelong love affair with Hüsker Dü (and a two-album love affair with Sugar). I got through my first breakup by crying and playing guitar to this album in its entirety. Perhaps more than any record, this album has defined how I play guitar.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Jimi Hendrix Experience—<span style="font-style: italic;">Electric Ladyland</span> (1968). </span>Also a selection from Columbia House. I instantly loved this record, and used to listen to all 15 minutes and one second of “Voodoo Chile” over and over again. When it was discovered that my friend Kurt and I would be attending different colleges, he came over to drink some bourbon pilfered from a ramshackle liquor supply in the basement. We sat in the stairway of my house on Camp Avenue and got real drunk, all the time listening to <span style="font-style: italic;">Electric Ladyland</span> on repeat. I puked in a wicker trashcan.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Descendents—<span style="font-style: italic;">Somery</span> (1991)</span>. My friend Khanh introduced me to Descendents offshoot ALL (we covered the immortal “She’s My Ex”) during our brief stint playing in a band together. I wouldn’t know anything about Fugazi, All, Descendents or Dag Nasty if it wasn’t for Khanh. The album featuring “She’s My Ex,” <span style="font-style: italic;">Allroy’s Revenge</span>, is nothing special, but in the Decendents compilation<span style="font-style: italic;"> Somery</span>, I found punk rock that, for the first time, I could relate to. It was funny and corny and loud and well played and produced. Descendents, to me, are the natural predecessor to Weezer, Andrew W.K. and Damone; all bands that I love immeasurably.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Clash—<span style="font-style: italic;">The Story of the Clash Vol. 1</span> (1988)</span>. My freshman year of college, I was in some shitty art room making some ridiculous sculpture for some stupid sculpture class that was, like, the hardest class ever somehow (I got a D). There was some other dude there and we were talking about music. He told me: “do yourself a favor and get <span style="font-style: italic;">The Story of The Clash Vol. 1</span>.” So I did. It was the first time<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span>I hadn’t really gotten into Fugazi yet<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span>that I liked, not only the songs of both singers, but the fact that there were two people that sang in the band. (I always hated the Mike Mills R.E.M. songs; now I pretty much hate all of the Stipe ones, too.) “Safe European Home” blew my mind apart and introduced me to early punk. The Clash also introduced me to the notion that you could incorporate different styles of music into punk (reggae, old-school rap, etc.) and that political music need not be stiff, angular and humorless.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Ramones—<span style="font-style: italic;">All the Stuff and More Vol. 1</span> (1990)</span>. My brother introduced me to this, the best compilation of their material, probably because it’s mainly just their first two albums in their entirety (and some other shit). I heard this around the same time as The Clash, and I got it and got hooked right away. It was around this time that I started to feel stupid about all the shit that had I spent much of my life listening to and started to realize that my band, while trying to sound like Dinosaur, actually sounded like the Gin Blossoms. Now my son loves The Ramones, and even has a plate/silverware set emblazoned with their crest, thanks to the person who prompted me to write this ridiculous assemblage. (Thanks, Saher.)</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Mr. T Experience—<span style="font-style: italic;">Milk, Milk Lemonade </span>(1992)</span>. My friend Kurt worked the late shift at the college radio station at SIU (where we were both film students our freshman year of college) and I tagged along with him a couple of times. We heard a lot of great music for the first time there (and a lot of shit), the Mr. T Experience being a true discovery. <span style="font-style: italic;">Milk, Milk Lemonade</span> was the first record I got of theirs and, while MTX is strangely soft and non-threatening for a punk rock band, I am a total sucker for Dr. Frank’s wry lyrics. They’re really funny. Also, MTX is endlessly tuneful. I love them. My brother took a picture of them when they played On the Waterfront in Rockford, got their autographs and had it framed. Pretty awesome.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Eric's Trip—<span style="font-style: italic;">Love Tara</span> (1993)</span>. Through listening to Dinosaur, I had started listening to Sebadoh and some other lo-fi stuff, but this was, for me, the first “lo-fi” album that actually sounded like a cohesive record, rather than a bunch of songs recorded in some guy’s bedroom or basement. I especially liked the combination of acoustic guitar and bombastic drums found on “Spring.” It really opened up the possibilities of what you could do with shitty equipment and microphones. You could record an album. (This is what I thought; in reality, engineering genius Bob Weston mixed the record.) When I would play drums, I tried to play like I was in this band.<br /></li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Pavement—<span style="font-style: italic;">Crooked Rain Crooked Rain</span> (1994)</span>. I used to lie in bed listening to this album over and over, dissecting it as if it was a concept album. “Silence Kit,” with its verse blatantly lifted from Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” represented the birth of rock and roll, and its closer, “Fillmore Jive” marked the end of the "rock and roll era.” That’s it, I would think. I thought its legacy would be as the last great rock and roll record, which, fittingly, told of the story of rock and roll from beginning to end. It’s sort of like that, I guess.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Archers of Loaf—<span style="font-style: italic;">Vs. The Greatest Of All Time </span>(1995)</span>. I really liked <span style="font-style: italic;">Icky Mettle </span>quite a bit, but this connected with me in a way that no other indie band had. It was fucked up, it was tuneful, angry and sad, and Bob Weston’s production on it is a gold standard for indie recordings. <span style="font-style: italic;">Vee Vee</span> expanded on this musical formation and, though great, <span style="font-style: italic;">Greatest</span> bests it, or anything else they had done or would go on to do. For me, their seminal record.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Superchunk—<span style="font-style: italic;">Here’s Where the Strings Come In</span> (1995)</span>. It was around this time that my future wife, Melissa, and I were spending a lot of time together. She absolutely loved Superchunk, and it was great to have that common musical interest. I would visit her in Champaign, IL, where she was studying Anthropology at the University of Illinois, and we’d hang out in her room (a converted sun porch, which was blistering hot in the winter from the disproportionate heat piped in) and she would just lose her shit on the chorus to “Green Flowers, Blue Fish.” And that’s when I fell in love with her.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Blue Cheer—<span style="font-style: italic;">Vincebus Erruptum</span> (1968)</span>. My friend Chuck introduced me to this record (I had seen the video for their version of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” on MTV’s Closet Classics), and it knocked me out with its bludgeoning, particularly unpleasant brand of longhaired blues. The dual guitar freakouts were unlike anything I’d ever heard before (now you hear it all the time). Blue Cheer was, purportedly, Jimi Hendrix’s least favorite band of all time. I think that’s funny.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Black Sabbath—<span style="font-style: italic;">Black Sabbath </span>(1970)</span>. I had no idea, until my friend CB played “The Wizard” for me, that Black Sabbath was actually good. Having come of age when Ozzy was in full-on soccer mom regalia (which I was totally into) early Sabbath seemed too old and comical for my tastes. I remember hanging out with my buddies Tony and CB at their crappy little coach house in Lincoln Park (the one bum building on the block), getting totally blown and listening to the first Sabbath album on vinyl, and just thinking it was the most awesome thing ever, from the instrumentation (particularly Bill Ward’s drumming) to the production. And of course those lyrics of Ossie’s: “Oh, no please god help me!”</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Chavez—<span style="font-style: italic;">Ride the Fader</span> (1996)</span>. The first time I heard “The Guard Attacks,” I cried. Because of the sheer majesty to be found in the interplay of the guitar, bass drums and vocal melody.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Rancid—<span style="font-style: italic;">Rancid</span> (2000)</span>. I remember when my good friend and roommate Erik got the first Rancid record (their first self-titled endeavor) when we were in college and I fucking hated it, mostly because the bass is all over the goddamned place—it sounds like a can of extra-chunky peanut butter sprouted wings and is buzzing around your head incessantly. My brother-in-law loved them for a bit, too. After <span style="font-style: italic;">Life Won’t Wait</span> got good notices, I decided to give them another shot. It would wind up being the perfect soundtrack to a road trip Melissa and I took to Toronto. But when <span style="font-style: italic;">Rancid</span> (the band’s second self-titled endeavor) came out, they became my heroes. Unfortunately, neither my brother-in-law nor Erik likes them any more, so I find myself alone in my enthusiasm and adoration for Rancid (except for that first record, which I still think is pretty awful). Oh, well.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gillian Welch—<span style="font-style: italic;">Soul Journey</span> (2003)</span>. I heard Gillian Welch playing at a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan while I was visiting Melissa, who was now my wife and in grad school at the Teacher's College at Columbia University. (I was still in Chicago trying to get my shithead rock and roll outfit off the ground.) I don’t think it was this record that they were playing<span style="font-style: italic;">—</span>I think it was <span style="font-style: italic;">Time (The Revelator</span>)<span style="font-style: italic;">—</span>but I went out and bought <span style="font-style: italic;">Soul Journey</span>, thinking it was the one I had heard. And, now, having heard all of her records, I have no problem saying that it is easily her best album. I have come to love it to an unreasonable degree, and it has provided me with a entry point into the music of The Carter Family and Alan Lomax’s field recordings (the “Southern Journey” series), both of which I find amazing.</li><li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Wolf Parade—<span style="font-style: italic;">Apologies to the Queen Mary </span>(2005)</span>. Though I have recently gotten pretty excited over The Blood Brothers, Black Mountain and The Brother Kite, among others, Wolf Parade’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Apologies to the Queen Mary</span> was the last album I was completely enamored with. It was practically the soundtrack to my friends Kurt and Meredith’s wedding, and I remember spending a lot of time painting the room off of the dining room, which was to be my son’s room, anxiously awaiting his arrival. I finished it up and he was born two days later. At two and a half, he prefers <span style="font-style: italic;">At Mount Zoomer</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">Apologies</span>, and went through a good three-month period of time where he would listen to nothing else in the car except for the first song on the record.</li></ol><div style="text-align: justify;">Lately, I've just been listening to a lot of Clipse and Black Flag. Except in the car—my son's new favorite: Samiam<br /><br />Honorable Mentions: Tesla<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Mechanical Resonance</span>; The Action<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span><span style="font-style: italic;">Rolled Gold</span>; Alex Chilton</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span><span style="font-style: italic;">Bach's Bottom</span>; Faith No More</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">The Real Thing</span>; <span>Bruce Springsteen</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Nebraska</span>; Polvo—<span style="font-style: italic;">This Eclipse</span>; The Cars<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Heartbeat City</span>; Daryl Hall and John Oates<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Big Bam Boom</span>; T. Rex<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">The Slider</span>; Eddie Cochran<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Somethin' Else: The Fine Looking Hits of Eddie Cochran</span>; Black Flag<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Wasted . . . Again</span>; Fantomas<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">The Director's Cut</span>; The Who—<span style="font-style: italic;">The Who Sell Out</span>; Fugazi<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">In on the Kill Taker</span>; Walt Mink<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Bareback Ride</span>; Guided by Voices<span style="font-weight: bold;">—</span><span style="font-style: italic;">Alien Lanes</span>; Soul Asylum—<span style="font-style: italic;">And the Horse They Rode In On</span>; Hüsker Dü—<span style="font-style: italic;">Everything Falls Apart and More</span>; Iron Maiden—<span style="font-style: italic;">Number of the Beast</span>; Jawbreaker—<span style="font-style: italic;">Dear You; </span>Samiam—<span style="font-style: italic;">You Are Freaking Me Out</span>; Kingdom Come—<span style="font-style: italic;">Kingdom Come</span>; Velvet Underground—<span style="font-style: italic;">White Light, White Heat</span>; Morrissey—<span style="font-style: italic;">Kill Uncle</span>; Pearl Jam—<span style="font-style: italic;">Ten</span>; Iggy Pop—<span style="font-style: italic;">Lust for Life</span>; Tommy James & the Shondells—<span style="font-style: italic;">Anthology</span>; Weezer—<span style="font-style: italic;">Pinkerton</span>.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-66769603331650985052009-01-02T07:53:00.001-08:002011-04-16T18:36:56.111-07:0028 Meaningless Conclusions I Came To Regarding Meaningless Events Ocurring In 2008, an Otherwise Unusually Meaningful Year<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgczfZSuzaovjMriCJd3XJoRm-V6StHcFosQ_3smPEZ9xotF_Nw8uxj1ciX09gqnI8lu0fYR5-J9n48s5Hga-Rjlo0cQE40cXcchSN6uwyneM-Kn5gzOuSOviYbL_JNzP7mtax08jF9l1M/s1600-h/BAR+and+more.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 151px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgczfZSuzaovjMriCJd3XJoRm-V6StHcFosQ_3smPEZ9xotF_Nw8uxj1ciX09gqnI8lu0fYR5-J9n48s5Hga-Rjlo0cQE40cXcchSN6uwyneM-Kn5gzOuSOviYbL_JNzP7mtax08jF9l1M/s400/BAR+and+more.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286873711463963154" border="0" /></a>1. I saw exactly 16 American films that were released in 2008. The best was <span style="font-style: italic;">Burn After Reading</span>. The worst was <span style="font-style: italic;">Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay</span>. (Oy.) Here's all of them, best to worst, and their star ratings (on a four-star scale):<br /><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Burn After Reading</span> (four stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Be Kind Rewind</span> (four stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Step Brothers</span> (three and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Bank Job</span> (three and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Dark Knight</span> (three and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Iron Man</span> (three stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">WALL·E</span> (three stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</span> (two and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired</span> (two and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Semi-Pro</span> (two and a half stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Leatherheads</span> (two stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Baby Mama</span> (two stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Tropic Thunder</span> (two stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Rambo</span> (two stars)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Jumper</span> (one star)<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay</span> (zero stars)<br /></blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAqGNw3zr44oQn6WXUSOsLixqkerTM12gYB9jif0xHT_VpmZ11H_mWZwCB-n-jIb4vATb1gfR2betKQGlGFikkhtI6gMHw4KnDBDhM2cE-izbHeOXi0MxWF5W_aecTysERBu9Afrrm56o/s1600-h/baghead+and+more.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 146px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAqGNw3zr44oQn6WXUSOsLixqkerTM12gYB9jif0xHT_VpmZ11H_mWZwCB-n-jIb4vATb1gfR2betKQGlGFikkhtI6gMHw4KnDBDhM2cE-izbHeOXi0MxWF5W_aecTysERBu9Afrrm56o/s400/baghead+and+more.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286873809370666274" border="0" /></a>2. There were 32 more (strangely, exactly twice the amount I saw) released that I <span style="font-style: italic;">really</span> want to see. They are (in alphabetical order):<br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">88 Minutes*<br />American Teen<br />Baghead**<br />The Band’s Visit<br />Blindness<br />Body of Lies<br />Changeling<br />Cadillac Records<br />The Curious Case of Benjamin Button<br />Death Race<br />Doomsday<br />Frozen River<br />The Grand<br />Gran Torino<br />JCVD<br />Man on Wire***<br />Meat Loaf: in Search of Paradise****<br />Midnight Meat Train*****<br />Milk<br />Miracle at St. Anna<br />Mister Lonely******<br />My Name is Bruce<br />Paranoid Park<br />The Pineapple Express<br />The Promotion<br />Revolutionary Road<br />Strange Wilderness*******<br />Synecdoche, New York<br />Valkyrie<br />The Visitor<br />W.<br />The Wrestler</blockquote>*I know, I know; I can't help it.<br />** Possibly more than any other movie.<br />*** Though, I have to admit, I'm baffled at how this could possibly be as good as everybody says.<br />**** Fuck off. I can sense you judging me.<br />***** Clive Barker purportedly wrote this when he was stoned. How on Earth does something like this even get made? I must see <span style="font-style: italic;">Midnight Meat Train</span>.<br />****** Currently in my living room.<br />******* My friend Chris swears by this. I am currently devising a plan where, on the same night, I will watch <span style="font-style: italic;">Strange Wilderness</span> and he will watch <span style="font-style: italic;">Without a Paddle</span> (a pleasant surprise if there ever was one), after which we will discuss the merits of both via telephone.<br /><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-_3a8lW63NHw5u5p8S6081zL1NiLtXjFCOIWyb0IL4zHAnX-PRAPwCiIyJoQvlPDkAWohm_rUtax2Cioj5qxp7KZfc0e3xP8bnvmczqHSd56toC48bZ2AlOwkv3iI-2qJacpUBXETRhI/s1600-h/Metal+Beatles.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-_3a8lW63NHw5u5p8S6081zL1NiLtXjFCOIWyb0IL4zHAnX-PRAPwCiIyJoQvlPDkAWohm_rUtax2Cioj5qxp7KZfc0e3xP8bnvmczqHSd56toC48bZ2AlOwkv3iI-2qJacpUBXETRhI/s320/Metal+Beatles.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286865192005664002" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />3. The Beatles, discounting <span style="font-style: italic;">Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band</span>, are actually pretty good. And, further:<br /><blockquote>a. <span style="font-style: italic;">Revolver</span> is, perhaps, their best record; and<br />b. <span style="font-style: italic;">And Your Bird Can Sing</span> is, perhaps, their best non-single.</blockquote>4. Metal Church's third album, 1989's<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Blessing in Disguise</span>, is surprisingly rad.<br /><br />5. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhe1SuBGkiA"><span style="font-style: italic;">Neon Knights</span></a> (from 1980's <span style="font-style: italic;">Heaven and Hell</span>) is the best—and, maybe, only good—post-Ozzy Black Sabbath song. (May require further inspection.)<br /><br />6. After listening to much of, if not the entirety of, its catalog (including 2008's <span style="font-style: italic;">Good to Be Bad</span>, which was, inexplicably, my first-ever digital download purchase), I can confidently report that Whitesnake has produced exactly one great song (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqb5EcU65IQ"><span style="font-style: italic;">Still of the Night</span></a>, from 1987's <span style="font-style: italic;">Whitesnake</span>), one pretty good song (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4LQN1Bx1Q"><span style="font-style: italic;">Slow An' Easy</span></a>, from 1984's <span style="font-style: italic;">Slide it In</span>) and one okay song (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKkFkNtL7KY"><span style="font-style: italic;">Hit An' Run</span></a>, from 1981's <span style="font-style: italic;">Come An' Get It</span>).<br /><br />7. Though it may be the wimpiest (and/or worst) song ever, Kid Rock's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gGWYJugM9k"><span style="font-style: italic;">All Summer Long</span></a> was a huge smash hit, further lamenting Rock's image as an old-school white trash badass, rather than exposing him as a thin-armed, deflated, silly-hat-wearing douche bag.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7K1ge3FwhLvsikPkska35-1vED4maGQ4KBW-zH8BdM3H_tvZsvL2bnL3bAxQx8dvkgjJ0JOKzG3Le7t9dEV7q8zCYSziaRM2y4NA7p3yd_KZc9d1Md4nYaflv27S84vNTi5hYqcafK9k/s1600-h/Black+Stooges.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 133px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7K1ge3FwhLvsikPkska35-1vED4maGQ4KBW-zH8BdM3H_tvZsvL2bnL3bAxQx8dvkgjJ0JOKzG3Le7t9dEV7q8zCYSziaRM2y4NA7p3yd_KZc9d1Md4nYaflv27S84vNTi5hYqcafK9k/s400/Black+Stooges.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286874205294135682" border="0" /></a>8.Clipse's <span style="font-style: italic;">Hell Hath No Fury</span>, though pretty fucking awesome, is exclusively enjoyed by well-educated white people (especially music critics).<br /><br />9. Black Flag's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwJswad9hfA"><span style="font-style: italic;">My War</span></a> (album) is nearly as heavy and awesome as The Stooges' <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsuV-D0bmS0"><span style="font-style: italic;">Funhouse</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">.</span></span><br /><br />10. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bNDr1A6dTU"><span style="font-style: italic;">So What</span></a> by Pink was second only to Katy Perry's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAp9BKosZXs"><span style="font-style: italic;">I Kissed a Girl</span></a> as the most surprisingly good single of 2008 (though <span style="font-style: italic;">So What</span> is the better song).<br /><br />11. The Ramones is the greatest rock band of all time.<br /><br />12. The Gaslight Anthem is pretty good. (Though the song <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOBb13yDnzo"><span style="font-style: italic;">The '59 Sound</span></a> is simply <span style="font-style: italic;">great</span>.)<br /><br />13. Dinosaur jr is still capable of putting out good records and playing transcendent live shows.<br /><br />14. The Stooges are capable of neither.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmAD50t9ibrFA7CITkSxS-h-rjgAbsc3JNS6I6_p3pkR2DC8d8XkSsIqxszWqHiwDekqyFdZ3aBdJNCBaciVbq2Fhmwt0mt2M6uXgF21lRm7I4HUSsgjiFaDsHkszgRN-MLUh6HQkFAzc/s1600-h/Art+of+War+2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 140px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmAD50t9ibrFA7CITkSxS-h-rjgAbsc3JNS6I6_p3pkR2DC8d8XkSsIqxszWqHiwDekqyFdZ3aBdJNCBaciVbq2Fhmwt0mt2M6uXgF21lRm7I4HUSsgjiFaDsHkszgRN-MLUh6HQkFAzc/s200/Art+of+War+2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286868683902518386" border="0" /></a>15. There is an <span style="font-style: italic;">Art of War 2</span> starring Wesley Snipes.<br /><br />16. I will see <span style="font-style: italic;">TR2N</span> on opening day, even though <span style="font-style: italic;">TR1N</span> was pretty boring.<br /><br />17. Never buy anything from buy.com. Ever.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzGMeKHjlkRxAZwTLGp11S2xmh7TyJVx0Xzs8ZcPFh2lGKk14WNQRMbmNfL7UnGAxhHWdoZpiNXXyftO9MTj3sh6CIMrnc-_pO6GUEaB4WW_JGGCCk_O4yxsS96EynTjkgDAhITT0Zqp0/s1600-h/food.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 104px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzGMeKHjlkRxAZwTLGp11S2xmh7TyJVx0Xzs8ZcPFh2lGKk14WNQRMbmNfL7UnGAxhHWdoZpiNXXyftO9MTj3sh6CIMrnc-_pO6GUEaB4WW_JGGCCk_O4yxsS96EynTjkgDAhITT0Zqp0/s320/food.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286867997222381954" border="0" /></a>18. Home Run Inn makes what is easily the best frozen pizza since the creation of frozen pizza. (Sausage and Pepperoni.)<br /><br />19. The best new flavor of chips I tried last year was <span style="font-style: italic;">Limited Edition McGraw's Spicy Jalapeño </span>Fritos brand corn chips. The second best is Vitner's Buffalo & Blue Cheese potato chips (though I can't find any record that they ever existed).<br /><br />20. The best new trend in frozen foods is, easily, Birdseye Steamfresh vegetables. (Fuck the Green Giant ones; they're taller than the inside of my microwave and come out all crazy.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgpiIda1QK9XUSnDT9EAoZh5H8Irwk56l8Ol9KB0cMnpwONEgbW0yK4OqYQY8i0mg5UA3AOJ9gJt67RbHs-iDU8SCQ8ezXgcvEjg0o7UfPkDnKnGTQjB3oalCIBTKOQyfh2aztGZ2im44/s1600-h/Escape.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 143px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgpiIda1QK9XUSnDT9EAoZh5H8Irwk56l8Ol9KB0cMnpwONEgbW0yK4OqYQY8i0mg5UA3AOJ9gJt67RbHs-iDU8SCQ8ezXgcvEjg0o7UfPkDnKnGTQjB3oalCIBTKOQyfh2aztGZ2im44/s400/Escape.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286870695836415010" border="0" /></a>21. The best movies I saw last year (for the first time) <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> released in 2008 were (in no particular order):<br /><blockquote style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Morris">Escape From Alcatraz</a><br /><a href="http://www.killerofsheep.com/">Killer of Sheep</a><br /><a href="http://www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk/">This is England</a><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1907687705/">Aguirre, the Wrath of God<br /></a></div></blockquote>22. Like Iron Maiden or tequila, summer sausage is best enjoyed in small quantities.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga6-aqnh6LB-6WxOLbBi-ewMJMxFJ6bHqYIRp_ztYf3j6Dmr05m6pHFyms1ctEJ4QdficC7NQAKt9CVtNy1BZVBXm7XvcJJI_GLiteZzbFMXyfa8lr7II6tSRJT8LArvpi6cipz9bfzAE/s1600-h/Mad+Lipstick.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 156px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga6-aqnh6LB-6WxOLbBi-ewMJMxFJ6bHqYIRp_ztYf3j6Dmr05m6pHFyms1ctEJ4QdficC7NQAKt9CVtNy1BZVBXm7XvcJJI_GLiteZzbFMXyfa8lr7II6tSRJT8LArvpi6cipz9bfzAE/s400/Mad+Lipstick.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286874491780370706" border="0" /></a><br />23. There's an outside chance that when my favorite TV show (<span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>) returns, it may, inexplicably, be under the guidance of someone other than its creator.<br /><br />24. There is no chance that my second favorite TV show (<span style="font-style: italic;">Lipstick Jungle</span>) will continue in any way, shape or form, though me and my wife and have created a future where it is resurrected by Lifetime and, though there is absolutely no evidence or documentation anywhere to suggest this, we both foresee this as a likely possibility, as it is just easier that way, rather than letting go of one of the few things we enjoy equally.<br /><br />25. After being persuaded otherwise by the near masterpiece<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3wuXyOUKJw"> <span style="font-style: italic;">Rocky Balboa</span></a>, Sylvester Stallone reminded us all that he's a very special type of nutso with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGzGdKFyRT8"><span style="font-style: italic;">Rambo</span></a>.<br /><br />26. The best Rolling Stones song that isn't <span style="font-style: italic;">Gimme Shelter</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Beast of Burden</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Street Fighting Man</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Honky Tonk Women</span> is <span style="font-style: italic;">Jiving Sister Fanny</span>.<br /><br />27. <span style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span> may just best <span style="font-style: italic;">antisocial</span> as the most misused term in the English language.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM33dD2r5PjmkV8VjuIUZ_oWTfbjiTxfysb8Bt66-nZZIN2Tpmm8Lt3Zd4J-RwJhFOjTvO7jFqoExLFVdzLlBI1ADuDuyLVh18M8rNKcJuk9b2OnfdDqM1xrpM7VvPbCH2a9VkebVAZm8/s1600-h/The+Jerk+Too.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 175px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM33dD2r5PjmkV8VjuIUZ_oWTfbjiTxfysb8Bt66-nZZIN2Tpmm8Lt3Zd4J-RwJhFOjTvO7jFqoExLFVdzLlBI1ADuDuyLVh18M8rNKcJuk9b2OnfdDqM1xrpM7VvPbCH2a9VkebVAZm8/s320/The+Jerk+Too.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5286869024492925794" border="0" /></a>28. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Jerk, Too</span> is only available for purchase in the U.K. Trust me; I checked.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-42798676614975351952008-11-04T13:21:00.000-08:002011-04-16T18:37:42.125-07:00You've Come a Long Way, Baby, and All You Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Note: Don't read this if you don't want to know (albeit in a vague manner) what happens in Seasons One and Two of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span></span>.<br />1.<br /><br />About ten years ago, upon serving on a jury, I became aware that Americans hate women—perhaps nobody more so than women, themselves.<br /><br />Though this may be a bit of an overstatement (and without getting into the particulars of the lawsuit), I left feeling as if the plaintiff—a woman—was the recipient of some weird pent-up ire that was in total disproportion to the particulars of the case. People turned her into the accused, in what was like a more opaque (and less traumatizing) instance of blaming the rape victim for the rape.<br /><br />And no one was harder on her than the women.<br /><br />It was awful, and I left feeling as though my half-jokingly entertained suspicions had been confirmed with quick and humorless authority: my opinions on things were the <span style="font-style: italic;">exact opposite</span> of those of the average person.<br /><br />It’s a strange realization to come to—that not everyone has read <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey">Laura Mulvey</a> and <a href="http://www.owtoad.com/home.html">Margaret Atwood</a>.<br /><br />When I was a sophomore, my mulleted female college counselor with unshaven legs and a penchant for swearing at her eight-year old daughter over the phone suggested I take a feminist film theory course. Sure, I figured; I didn't know from feminism. I mean, as a sixth-grader, I was surprised to learn (though I had suspicions) that girls pooped. That's where <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> came from.<br /><br />But I enrolled in the class, and it floored me. I felt like everything I had been taught or instinctively thought about women was a lie. It kept me awake, panicked, at night. And there is was—right there this whole time, staring me in the face, so obvious. It was as blatant as seeing Southern Blacks endure the weight and thrust of fire hoses wielded by the purveyors of injustice: here was indisputable evidence of social discrimination so ugly, you'd be a fool to not recognize its wrongness.<br /><br />Finally, I owned it. I made earnest but laughably cryptic attempts (i.e., out-of the-blue phone calls from an ex-boyfriend somberly professing <span style="font-style: italic;">I'm so sorry if I treated you with anything other than the respect you and other members of your gender deserve</span><span>—is that weird?</span>) to apologize to those who may have been affected by the older, less-enlightened me. And I recast women in my worldview as strong-willed, capable and independent.<br /><br />So you can imagine my confusion when my future wife, while we were visiting a friend's house, asked me to go downstairs and fetch her a Popsicle.<br /><br />2.<br /><br />One of the things a liberal education affords you is an inflated sense of the fairness and goodness of other people out there in the real world. Most of whom, as it turns out, either: (a) haven't been exposed to the material that you have; or (b) if they have, don't scarcely give a fuck. Ultimately, for the rest of your life, you find yourself nervously avoiding eye contact in the actual real world, where you realize that <span style="font-style: italic;">maybe we actually haven't gotten past this</span>.<br /><br />I carry suspicion in my pocket (next to my keys, the longest of which is usually sandwiched between my index and middle fingers in case I need to jam it into an assailant’s eye on criminally short notice) and I pulled it out to process the <span style="font-style: italic;">severious</span> demonization of presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton, which somehow managed to best the previous demonization of senatorial-candidate Hillary Clinton, which bested the previous demonization of first lady Hillary Clinton, and so forth. People, for some reason, just hate her—is it because she's assured and educated?<br /><br />I felt similarly suspicious of the public’s reception to Sarah Palin.<br /><br />Look—I am not, in any way, insinuating that Palin is Clinton’s intellectual equal. That would approach the absurd. But what I am suggesting is that that they do have something in common: the generally encouraged vehemence of their detractors.<br /><br />Interestingly, <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Sun-Times</span> columnist Michael Sneed addressed the public’s disdain for Ms. Palin (and Ms. Clinton) in her September 17, 2008 entry in her column, under the incendiary banner <span style="font-style: italic;">Revoke My Feminist Card</span>:<br /><blockquote>Hmmm. Maybe . . . I am not a feminist after all.<br /><br />Maybe . . . working in a man's world for 42 years and busting my butt to beat them up the ladder deletes me from the feminist category.<br /><br />Perhaps . . . struggling to be a good single mom in a very married world—yet meeting my five-day-a-week column deadline—doesn't earn me a feminist handle either. . . . [I]f appreciating a woman who chose a husband who supports her ladder-climbing skills puts me in the non-feminist category, well maybe that's where I belong. . . . She is real. She is rural. She may not be a brilliant tactician, but she's got street sense. Palin is so unlike the very controlled Hillary Clinton, who would never be caught dead in red heels.<br /><br />Thus, it now appears Palin has emerged as ‘everywoman’ to a huge portion of our female population; a woman never really identified with what we thought was our quintessential role model—a highly educated woman who wears tailored suits, whose voice is never shrill and who has a husband who makes more than she does.<br /></blockquote>It's a gutsy thing to write—even if it's borderline insane—and, though I usually find something cringeworthy in her column, that Sneed (itself a cringe-worthy moniker) would stand front and center in direct opposition to the rest of Obamaworld (p/k/a the <span style="font-style: italic;">Land of Lincoln</span>) to support another woman, was pretty, oh, I don’t know—<span style="font-style: italic;">radically feminist</span>. Like how when Blake Schwarzenbach sang: <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7ENaTjQHA">You're not punk</a> and I'm telling everyone/Save your breath I never was one</span> was, like, <span style="font-style: italic;">totally punk</span>.<br /><br />There is a danger in suggesting that feminism as an ideology is <span style="font-style: italic;">whatever you make of it</span>, and open to limitless interpretation: it makes it easy for educated dudes to pretend that visiting a strip club is encountering female empowerment in action, rather than encountering titties in action.<br /><br />However, measured dissent against the majority and its dominant tenets is all too rare these days on the liberal side of things. It's the kind of thing that keeps people on their toes and, at the very least, affirms their own identity within a cause, group or ideology.<br /><br />Hell, in the same column, Sneed asks: “what fault is there in admiring a woman who is against abortion—even though I believe in freedom of choice?” That's batty!<br /><br />In the next day’s column, she wrote:<br /><blockquote>. . .Hillary Clinton ran for president and was hit with more sexist barbs than St. Sebastian had arrows.<br /><br />And when John McCain chose (gulp!) a good-looking woman from Alaska named Sarah Palin as his running mate, the liberal pundits threw every red shoe at her they could find. . . .Being first and fair was my journalistic baptism in the tumultuous 1960s.<br /><br />Unfortunately, fairness keeps getting redefined.<br /></blockquote>So here's a hard-nosed, well-respected, old-school Chicago female reporter who felt the need to write a defensively apologist article for <span style="font-style: italic;">supporting</span> the woman attempting to lay claim to the second-highest seat in the land—I mean, isn't that just fascinating?<br /><br />Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a big fan of Palin's. I do, however, find her a pinch more appealing than her male equivalent, Ted Nugent, primarily because she doesn’t write terrible songs in addition to discharging ridiculous-looking weapons.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGxK5at7IvGz038QBdOtzavuxlzPLKHiH-Aws0oUsOLrw1dip2oHGzIMprp3CYDyamNX-qzCrjGXvu8XkSGb3NWiKtRwbsbFKZVZMAdch-1vj1eZi76G_W-qgZJT-jj5K0CYjv_zXeTEI/s1600-h/palin.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 353px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGxK5at7IvGz038QBdOtzavuxlzPLKHiH-Aws0oUsOLrw1dip2oHGzIMprp3CYDyamNX-qzCrjGXvu8XkSGb3NWiKtRwbsbFKZVZMAdch-1vj1eZi76G_W-qgZJT-jj5K0CYjv_zXeTEI/s400/palin.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5272782617899547522" border="0" /></a>Her troubling policies, values and ignorance are only slightly less troubling than the scary, down-home, outdated survivalist mentality of those whose cauldrons she stirs the bubbling violence in. (See picture: <span style="font-style: italic;">Really? You want to kill people because of their politics?</span> Joke or no joke—that's fucking <span style="font-style: italic;">scary</span>.)<br /><br />But I don’t buy that she was chosen merely to appeal to those obviously closeted-racist Hillary Clinton supporters who, upon Obama’s securing the nomination, found themselves <span style="font-style: italic;">on the fence</span> (?!!!) in deciding between McCain and Obama. Though that's certainly part of it.<br /><br />I’m guessing she wasn’t picked because she had never been out of the country before. Or because she has a pregnant, unmarried teen-aged daughter. Or for her inability to summon up a single Supreme Court case besides <span style="font-style: italic;">Roe v. Wade</span>.<br /><br />No matter what anyone says, Palin is a woman of accomplishment—she's <span style="font-style: italic;">Governor of Alaska</span>, after all. And that is, no doubt, admirable. But tell me—what did you find more impressive when you watched the Vice-Presidential debate: her political prowess and grasp of the issues? Or how good she looked, having giving birth just a few months prior?<br /><br />Imagine if we put her running mate up to such scrutiny.<br /><br />I think that McCain and his sleazeball campaign put her up for the slaughter. Not only did she take the fall for the Republicans, she did it with the majority of the male population ogling her. And I think that John McCain and his advisors are <span style="font-style: italic;">total bullshit</span> for that.<br /><br />In the October 18, 2008 edition of The New York Times, Mark Leibovich, in his article <span style="font-style: italic;">Among Rock-Ribbed Fans of Palin, Dudes Rule</span>, writes:<br /><blockquote>It is not unusual for fans of Sarah Palin to shout out to the Alaska governor in the midst of her stump speeches. It is noteworthy, however, that the crowds are heavily male. ‘You rock me out, Sarah,’ yelled one man, wearing a red-checked hunting jacket as Ms. Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, strode into an airplane hangar here on Thursday. He held a homemade 'Dudes for Sarah' sign and wore a National Rifle Association hat. Kenny Loggins’s 'Danger Zone' blared over the loudspeakers. . . . While there are plenty of women, including wives and daughters of male fans, at Ms. Palin’s appearances, they acknowledge they are outnumbered. 'This is not a ladies campaign,’ declared Linda Teegan at a rally in Weirs Beach, N.H., . . .'There seem to be lots and lots of guys here,' she said. 'I’d guess 70-30, maybe 65-35, men to women. It’s quite noticeable to me.'<br /><br />The dudes tend to make themselves noticed. 'You tell ’em baby,' a man yelled out at a rally Wednesday night on a high school football field in Salem, N.H.<br /></blockquote>In other words, Palin was chosen, in a last-ditch effort, as the pharmaceutical <span style="font-style: italic;">Sildenafil citrate</span> needed to pump some much-needed blood into the flaccid penis of the Republican Party.<br /><br />3.<br /><br />I remember, as a college student, watching the episode of <a href="http://www.tv.com/my-so-called-life/show/968/summary.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">My So-Called Life </span></a>where Rayanne sleeps with Jordan Catalano behind best friend (who has a devastating crush on JC) Angela’s back. I remember thinking—<span style="font-style: italic;">Christ, why would she do that to her best friend</span>? It seemed so unlikely; I thought it was merely a side of drama hastily whipped up by the writers to go along with the story-arc cut of meat, until I recalled instances where girls I knew in high school did the <span style="font-style: italic;">same exact shit</span>.<br /><br />In these situations, guys of this age will, basically, sleep with a girl because he’s able to and his hormones are on high alert. But girls will sleep with a guy to hurt another girl.<br /><br />I had always chalked this type of undertaking up to manufactured, overwrought teenaged dramatics. But, now, it is particularly disheartening to consider the dynamics of young women hurting another over some guy, not least of all because few of us are as brooding and attractive as Mr. Catalano—the Jackson Brown of dyslexia.<br /><br />Being a man (or, more accurately, the opposite of Muddy Waters' <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEGiGIaDmS4"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mannish Boy</span></a>, a <span style="font-style: italic;">Boyish Man</span>), I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman at any age. Each age seems to be fraught with new societal pitfalls: in grade school, the boys are mean to you; in high school, the girls are mean to you; and in college, the boys are, again, mean to you.<br /><br />Then the pressure cooker really starts to rattle: get married, have children; ignore any maternal instinct to stay at home with your young child(ren) in order to pursue a career, even if you decide that you no longer want to; and try to stay thin, youthful and attractive.<br /><br />If you stay single and independent, you are envious of your married friends with kids. And if you are married, you are envious of your single friends. The song <span style="font-style: italic;">Single Girl</span> by Ruby Vass—a standard that knows a few variations and has also been recorded by The Carter Family (as <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub6Bj08X2PA"><span style="font-style: italic;">Single Girl Married Girl</span></a>), among others—seems to pointedly take the side of the single girl:<br /><blockquote>Single girl, single girl<br />Goes to the store and buys<br />Oh she goes to the store and buys<br />Married girl, married girl<br />She rocks the cradle and cries<br />Oh, she rocks the cradle and cries<br /><br />Single girl, single girl<br />She's dressed in silk so fine<br />Oh dressed in silk so fine<br />Married girl, married girl<br />Wars just any kind<br />Oh, she wears any kind<br /><br />Single girl, single girl<br />Goes where she please<br />Oh, she goes where she please<br />Married girl married girl<br />Baby on her knee<br />Oh, got a baby on her knee</blockquote>And TV’s <a href="http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span></a> explores this dichotomy in splendidly over-melodramatic fashion; particularly in the character of Peggy Olson, portrayed heroically, as having an unlikely combination of perseverance, earthy elegance, irresponsibility and callousness, by Elisabeth Moss.<br /><br />Pulling off the character of Peggy Olson, both in the writing and acting, is quite a nifty trick, indeed. Peggy is meant to represent the unlikeliest of archetypes—one that has never really existed, nonetheless—without playing like one.<br /><br />At first, as a viewer, if you think you know what Peggy wants, it’s that she just wants to be left alone. You feel sorry for her. She seems utterly powerless and victimized. But as her character develops, so does her power. And then sometimes you feel sorry for the people she comes in contact with. Not because she’s vicious, but because she leaves unprecedented amounts of wreckage in her wake.<br /><br />She is initially bombarded with inappropriate come-ons from the men and criminally bad suggestions from the women (namely office manager/goddess Joan) involving contraception and the importance of showing a little leg in order to snare a husband—with undisguised sexism the ruling party in both camps.<br /><br />Peggy gets pregnant after a frivolous roll in the hay with he of the snap-together aristocracy: the smirking-when-he-isn’t-pouting, pear-headed Pete Campbell. When she is pregnant, she is ridiculed because everyone thinks she is fat. She has the baby, gives it away, suffers the possible damnation of the Catholic church to which she belongs, and certainly of her much older, afghan-weaved sister, who is charged with taking care of the child.<br /><br />Peggy longs to be part of the boys’ club, yet she is clearly riddled with guilt about it. And as she makes headway at Sterling Cooper it is, to some degree, at the cost of her womanhood.<br /><br />Femme fatale Joan is seemingly happy being the plaything of the conservatively perverse Roger Sterling—the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sterling</span> in the fictional ad agency and centerpiece of the show, <span style="font-style: italic;">Sterling Cooper</span>—until she meets and gets engaged to a coveted doctorial candidate. Scenes of the two fiancés together at home suggest a new side to Joan previously unseen. She is tolerant and nurturing, wounded but trusting, eager to please and intelligent. And at work, she shines while assisting Harry Crane, “head of the television department.” And just when you’re feeling really happy for her, Crane replaces her, and it’s just devastating.<br /><br />And then her fiancé rapes her.<br /><br />And what to make of the mess that is Betty Draper as played by January Jones? It is thoroughly unpleasant to watch the former model—who has given her all to be Mrs. Donald Draper only to be repeatedly cheated on and lied to—begin to unravel. But the following reading of her character by Erin J. Shea in an October 22,2008 article from <span style="font-style: italic;">metromix.com</span> (and appearing in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Tribune</span> offshoot <span style="font-style: italic;">Redeye</span>) would never have occurred to me:<br /><blockquote>The long-suffering and disturbingly evil Betty Draper typifies every wretched stereotype of the early ’60s housewife, including how she treats her children.</blockquote>I was very confused by this, as I have consistently found Betty to be a sympathetic—albeit thoroughly damaged—character. And I would be remiss if I failed to point out that this assessment of her character was written by a female, though I’m not entirely certain that it's the sole determining factor. But it was so decisively different from my own interpretation of the character that I had to wonder: is this a specifically feminine reading?<br /><br />What's with the acidity?<br /><br />The women on <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men </span>are made to suffer, not entirely unlike women in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_von_Trier">Lars Von Trier</a> film. Sure, the men are made to suffer, too. But it’s a different type of suffering: their suffering is directly related to the guilt of how they treat the women in their lives, and they are allowed to cope with it by drinking obscene amounts of old-fashioned cocktails and smoking ludicrous amounts of unfiltered cigarettes. And sleeping with other women. And being gone for days at a time.<br /><br />Conversely, the women are raped. Or have to give up their babies for adoption. Or be a mother and sole caregiver while the men are gone.<br /><br />And when Betty wants to get back at Don for cheating on her, she has anonymous sex in the back office of a bar. Not out of desire or lust, but because of the pain it would cause her husband; it seems to have more to do with him than it does her.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span> is immeasurably less about advertising than it is about gender roles. It is not accidental that it takes place on the cusp of <span style="font-style: italic;">The ‘60s </span>as cultural event, counting on the audience’s by-now ingrained understanding of the term and the social and societal changes implicated therein.<br /><br />A man’s responsibility, as Don Draper understands it, is to be an earner, to provide a comfortable lifestyle for his family. His obligations, largely, end there.<br /><br />Betty is expected to be forthcoming in the bedroom, to cook and clean and take care of the household and kids while remaining elegant and attractive—but not too revealing so as to not satiate the desires of the wrong element. And, when <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span> begins, in the <span style="font-style: italic;">middle of things</span>, that’s exactly what she’s doing. And then things start to crack, slow and hushed, all around them.<br /><br />Don Draper represents the last gasp of a very particular lifestyle. There are peripherals of <span style="font-style: italic;">change to come</span> all around him—the beatnik crowd surrounding fever dream Midge Daniels; buffoonish ascot-wearing Orwell understudy Paul Kinsey’s black girlfriend and their march in Mississippi; the drafting of openly gay “European” Dylan fan Kurt as a fresh, youthful perspective within the firm—and Draper advances as if he is impervious to them.<br /><br />Draper serves as the link between masculinity before World War II (the <span style="font-style: italic;">Great War</span>) and after Vietnam (the lousy one). He will be the last of a generation whose men fought wars, shaved daily and struck their women when they were “hysterical.” Men like Roger Sterling wouldn’t change—their ideologies die with them; but a man like Draper is present for the unspooling and all of the confusion it awakens.<br /><br />As is Betty, and as things start to fall apart, they still clutch on to the way it was supposed to be. That’s all they know how to do.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Single Girl Married Girl</span>? Here there’s no discrimination; they’re both severely punished.<br /><br />4.<br /><br />So the <span style="font-style: italic;">second wave</span> of feminism (the <span style="font-style: italic;">first wave</span> being, primarily, the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century) hit in the 1960s and lasted into the 1980s. Forty years isn’t enough time to render the playing field equal. Kate Lorenz of <span style="font-style: italic;">CareerBuilder.com</span> writes:<br /><blockquote>According to the AFL-CIO, the average 25-year-old woman who works full-time, year-round until she retires at age 65 (if that's when she's able to retire) will earn $523,000 less than the average working man?<br /><br />At the current rate of change, working women will not achieve equal pay until after the year 2050. That's almost 100 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, prohibiting discrimination based on sex resulting in unequal pay for equal work.</blockquote>Maybe by 2050 things will start to make a little more sense. As it is now, every time I see a man hold a door for a career woman, I take it as a personal affront to the women’s movement: <span style="font-style: italic;">you'll never bridge that salary gap if you keep playing the subservient role.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Equality</span> is the only ideology under which true harmony and freedom can be achieved. But nobody's really certain how to divvy up the duties any more. Now everybody works and nobody wants to do anything when they get home. Everybody does everything.<br /><br />Men are no longer <span style="font-style: italic;">providers</span>, and women are not <span style="font-style: italic;">housewives</span>: my wife makes more money than I do; I sure as hell never fought in a war; and I cook more than my wife does, and not because I'm some sort of gourmet chef or something.<br /><br />And who would want to go back to the way things were? Oh yeah, that's right: like <span style="font-style: italic;">half the fucking population</span>.<br /><br />I think that the only way to achieve true equality in the workplace and at home is to be a fabulously wealthy couple, where both work and just pay other people to do everything for them. Which means, ostensibly that <span style="font-style: italic;">equality</span> is a concept that can only be enjoyed via the oppression of others. <span style="font-style: italic;">Who's driving the car? Why, the driver, of course. Who's taking care of the children? Why, the children's caretaker, of course. Who's washing the dishes?</span> You get the point.<br /><br />More and more, I feel like maybe, in order to wear the hats we’ve been fitted for, we’ll evolve into one species, not unlike Marilyn Manson on the cover of <a href="http://www.ilbaluardo.com/Cover/Audio/M%20-%20N%20-%20O/MARILYN%20MANSON%20-%20Mechanical%20animals%20-%20Front.jpg"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mechanical Animals</span></a>. Only browner and, hopefully, with a couple extra arms and more manageable hairdos.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-51102314892081359372008-10-13T20:22:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:38:10.197-07:00Amazing Things Part Two<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0nMTXEkqbDGizUtjfb1xmLzm3QKI0GV4IOeqHcrSbYGD3Kx0rZBJAhxDNtIbVLjvOgwGLagFOo47T7gqjzvA1PYthHReTkXa3FBGXEF3JzGnrjSsZcZg3TQtSdDNs27bOnl1lmXnfMYE/s1600-h/indy+001.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0nMTXEkqbDGizUtjfb1xmLzm3QKI0GV4IOeqHcrSbYGD3Kx0rZBJAhxDNtIbVLjvOgwGLagFOo47T7gqjzvA1PYthHReTkXa3FBGXEF3JzGnrjSsZcZg3TQtSdDNs27bOnl1lmXnfMYE/s400/indy+001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5256844874644253586" border="0" /></a>From: <span style="font-style: italic;">Toys "R" Us Weekly Ad</span>, Sunday, October 12, 2008.<br /><br />This Halloween, why not spend $16.99 on an officially licensed <span style="font-style: italic;">INDIANA JONES Electronic Sounds Whip</span>, and dress your child like a Steinbeckian dust-bowl era hobo? With a whip. (Outfit sold separately.)</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-27895561311804998862008-10-06T19:44:00.000-07:002011-04-20T12:12:51.556-07:00I Had a Dream, I Had an Awesome Dream<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Transcription of miniature tape recording. The morning of Monday, October 6, 2008.</span><br /><br />I just woke up, feeling an urgent need to urinate and, more importantly, to document the specifics of the dream I just had, in the hopes it will prove beneficial to all of humankind.<br /><br />In this dream, I am living in the 1950s and working in advertising. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with the fact that I watched two episodes of <a href="http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span></a> last night and, frankly, the suggestion of which diminishes the seriousness and weight of this revolutionary concept and its ideas, so let’s not for a second even consider it.<br /><br />I have traveled back in time, from 2008 to the past by a means that is so simple and feasible, I can scarcely believe that it has yet to be implemented. More on that later.<br /><br />I’m sitting around in an office with five or so rather well dressed gentlemen. One has a beard, is smoking a pipe and bears a striking resemblance to Orson Wells. Another rather timid fellow is wearing a bow tie and glasses and <span style="font-style: italic;">goddammit</span>, come to think of it, maybe these are the guys from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>, because there’s another rather smarmy little prick over there by the window named Pete Campbell. And the others I’m pretty sure are from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>, too, like the guy, who’s name escapes me, that the closeted Italian guy has a crush on (the one who had been <span style="font-style: italic;">published</span>), he’s there, too, and why shouldn’t they all be from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>? That’s fine—it need not diminish the potential contributions of my dream to science or, more specifically, the science of time travel or society at large just because there are some characters from a TV show in it. Big deal. <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span> is utterly serious: its moments of levity are few and far between and, themselves, still quite upsetting. It’s a very highly regarded show. And unlike the New York depicted in <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>, we’re in the Chicago of the 1950s.<br /><br />So I’m sitting around in an office with some guys that are probably the characters from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span>, and we’re trying to brainstorm for a customer account or something. I make the suggestion that we all try to come up with things that are currently of interest to us personally. One of these is Kleenex, another, black baseballs and, another, spiral ham.<br /><br />I look out the window and see an immediate signifier that I am indeed in the 1950s—the window frames a view from atop a super-tall building where, since it is the 1950s, half of the land below is concrete and generally very hustly and bustly, and the other half is submerged in water, just as Chicago was in the 1950s.<br /><br />Not sure I can verify the truth of that last statement, but I’m also not yet sure how significant it is that half of Chicago was submerged in water during the 1950s; this will be determined later, with further investigation of this aspect and its relevance to the importance of the concept as a whole. (If it turns out to be a minor topographical detail and its importance to the concept is determined to be that of merely a cosmetic nature, then—perfect! If it proves to be integral to the concept, then we may have to verify this by: (1) interviewing people who lived in Chicago in the 1950s; (2) photographs, etc.)<br /><br />At any rate, there are some really large and tall boats out there (on the water portion), as they were the primary means of transportation in Downtown Chicago at that time. (Again, may need to verify this.) The portion of land that is not submerged in water is swarming with businessmen all dressed up like they often were in the ’50s, wearing hats and stuff and carrying around accordion-style briefcases, a pictorial representation of which makes up Fig. 1. (IMPORTANT!)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyrNEvxJCYJChQMDKQOKa5-X_fmeCEhtNwa0TXDBjhMIi5XdLzPztg5nrkZDZL-YDKZGLoe2-YETcMChG_1q5YOcIAeXtDK-3W-mypfJc4sWCBOx10fjXr1e4oltPmsdeMbwoDPRpb5gI/s1600-h/Fig.+1.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyrNEvxJCYJChQMDKQOKa5-X_fmeCEhtNwa0TXDBjhMIi5XdLzPztg5nrkZDZL-YDKZGLoe2-YETcMChG_1q5YOcIAeXtDK-3W-mypfJc4sWCBOx10fjXr1e4oltPmsdeMbwoDPRpb5gI/s400/Fig.+1.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254258068277008738" border="0" /></a><br />I am looking out the window with the other gentlemen, one of them noting that it <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> quite a view, and this makes me smile. <span style="font-style: italic;">Oh, ye simpletons of the past</span>, I think. <span style="font-style: italic;">Impressed by the simple construct of a half-water, half-land metropolis. How amazed would you all be by the all-concrete futurism of the true present day (in the future)? I fear that your poor heads might explode.</span><br /><br />Though the specifics of our conversation/brainstorming session escape me, I remember constantly berating myself for using the word dude (as I often do when talking to our nanny and my boss) because, I’m fairly certain, people didn’t talk like that in the 1950s.<br /><br />It is important to note here, before we get too far into this thing that, for those existing in the 1950s via time travel, it was (is?) imperative that their secret remain as such, as there are some that view their very existence as a threat to civilization. But we shall delve into that in more detail later, as its role in the situation expands, at which point it will be impossible to ignore.<br /><br />I look up, seeing a moose head (Fig. 2) mounted above a desk littered with papers, fountain pens <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPNVoDC4ED_HBfuBt6NvNVuRSP7VWJ0KNi8VXo5lvo1iO9MLLuewlbCpFmtfXabs_t1eB_NWgko8btTg2InD-LdHFkR_hsVlFEBvjjq4Y3ulP82yKlltVO_gV53CAWiWdqBFXveIqoB8/s1600-h/Fig.+2.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizPNVoDC4ED_HBfuBt6NvNVuRSP7VWJ0KNi8VXo5lvo1iO9MLLuewlbCpFmtfXabs_t1eB_NWgko8btTg2InD-LdHFkR_hsVlFEBvjjq4Y3ulP82yKlltVO_gV53CAWiWdqBFXveIqoB8/s400/Fig.+2.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254258073166102674" border="0" /></a>and coffee mugs. From the 1950s. Behind the desk, on a small rolling cart is a 1950s-era computer, and—<span style="font-style: italic;">wait a second; a computer in the 1950s?</span> Looking at the design of the IBM logo on its screen (Fig.2(a)), I am quickly reassured as, <span style="font-style: italic;">ah yes, every office did indeed come equipped with an IBM computer in the 1950s, an this IBM is most certainly of that era, given the vintage of the IBM logo.</span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6bvg4MM9SmB7az-OUGnmmK3t2oLSADvj6D6-xJ7hK_B6TvZOLgueSdzKkm-k941WOtEWwrhgIuVQ7W114rdBwBHQ-c-KNz9tk6gXs6d959QRisY-JkYzb_AWlTk3UyKw1SHLXPVc6hU/s1600-h/Fig.+2%28a%29.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-6bvg4MM9SmB7az-OUGnmmK3t2oLSADvj6D6-xJ7hK_B6TvZOLgueSdzKkm-k941WOtEWwrhgIuVQ7W114rdBwBHQ-c-KNz9tk6gXs6d959QRisY-JkYzb_AWlTk3UyKw1SHLXPVc6hU/s400/Fig.+2%28a%29.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254258082723533058" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I am finding it difficult to refrain from asking if anybody has heard that new Pink song, the one she performed on the 2008 <span style="font-style: italic;">VMAs</span>. And I want to know, mostly because I am wondering if anybody thinks she is as attractive as I do. I am looking for validation, because I am not sure why I find her so irresistible, <span style="font-style: italic;">but no, I must remember that I’m in the 1950s, and Pink and the 2008 VMAs won’t exist for years. </span>We are listening to Rosemary Clooney on an ancient turntable—though it’s most certainly new to these human fossils—until one of the gentleman, I’m thinking the bow tie guy with the glasses, slips a CD into the archaic (it was the ’50s after all) CD drive of the aforementioned computer. I ask him what he is playing, as it sounds to me like Daft Punk. He says he doesn’t know, that he got it from Gabe, who works at the Sears Tower.<br /><br />Well, <span style="font-style: italic;">hell’s bells</span>, I think. <span style="font-style: italic;">He must be talking about my pal Dorosz. It’s just the sort of brash move Gabe is known for making: time-traveling back to the 1950s and introducing the people of the past to Daft Punk. </span><br /><br />So I ask him: “Is that Gabe Dorosz?” not really considering the possibility that Gabe might use an alias.<br /><br />“I don’t know,” he says. “I only know him as Gabe from the Sears Tower.”<br /><br />“Well, does he laugh like this?” I extend and shake the fingers of my right arm, which is bent at the elbow and locked at my side, releasing the heft of my best laughing Gabe impression.<br /><br />“I don’t know,” he says, somewhat confused. “I’ve never heard him laugh like that . . . or at all.”<br /><br />“Well,” I sigh, “is he Greek?”<br /><br />“Yes,” he says and, for me, this is affirmation.<br /><br />I now know I am not alone. <span style="font-style: italic;">There are other time travelers here. Friends. Like Gabe Dorosz</span> (who is actually Polish).<br /><br />We break for lunch, and after I walk through the building’s lobby and out its revolving doors, I run into my friend Chris.<br /><br />“Dude, what are you doing here?” he asks in a whisper. He looks and talks just like he did when he was fifteen, with braces and a tendency to mumble. Oh, and he is wearing army fatigues. “Whatever happened to buckling down and giving it one last chance?”<br /><br />I now remember, that back in the present (2008), we co-own a struggling pizza parlor called <span style="font-style: italic;">Pizzeye</span> (Fig. 3), <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eyULJTSkQvTmG3iTNORem9a4IPsBmW1waM1coHiE-8YPO2MRiS-ZVVsLBMEoDmz4b12BONADW0IFJ6NOwxm_1n8fHbTFqXY_HbcWV7NQReOJCxJ7kW4q3bjC1v5wJMCQoX9I7KblQXs/s1600-h/Fig.+3.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7eyULJTSkQvTmG3iTNORem9a4IPsBmW1waM1coHiE-8YPO2MRiS-ZVVsLBMEoDmz4b12BONADW0IFJ6NOwxm_1n8fHbTFqXY_HbcWV7NQReOJCxJ7kW4q3bjC1v5wJMCQoX9I7KblQXs/s400/Fig.+3.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254258085853407634" border="0" /></a>which is also the name of our band that plays exclusively at our pizza parlor. We had sworn to each other, in the 2008, you see, from beneath our chef’s hats and from behind our flour-powdered aprons, that we were going to give it one last shot before packing it in and going to chef school.<br /><br />“How long have you been here?” I ask him.<br /><br />“I don’t know. Four months,” he mutters. “Come with me.”<br /><br />I follow him through what looks like downtown Columbus, OH, where, if you’ve been there, you know that everything, in an attempt to impress, is a bit unimpressive.<br /><br />Given his comment about <span style="font-style: italic;">whatever happened to buckling down and giving it one last chance</span> I am somewhat unclear as to how this whole time travel thing works: <span style="font-style: italic;">is the time spent here, in the past, equal to the time spent there, in the present? Like if you’re here for four months, when you go back to the present, does that mean you will have disappeared for those four months?</span><br /><br />Without me asking him—and I think that this sort of mind-reading phenomenon may have something to do with time travel, or at least time travel as it pertains to this situation here—he looks at me and says: “No. That’s the best thing about it.”<br /><br />I wonder <span style="font-style: italic;">if we’re here in the past and there in the present at the same time, then how is my being here a detriment to giving it one last shot in the present? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I refuse</span>, I think, <span style="font-style: italic;">to feel guilty about this.</span> Besides, I am in advertising now, which is certain to have more of a future and be more lucrative than the whole pizza parlor/band thing.<br /><br />I follow him into his neighborhood, which appears to be more residential. We break into other people’s residences along the way by indiscriminately smashing windows with bricks and cinder blocks, mostly sifting through the belongings in their basements and littering them all over the floor. Occasionally, Chris will steal something, as he does with a bottle of laundry detergent and a gallon of milk. “Milk and detergent,” he reveals, “are expensive here.”<br /><br />I wonder what his motivation for time traveling back to live in the 1950s is.<br /><br />“Do you work?” I ask.<br /><br />“No, I don’t have to.” He says. “You can live really cheaply here. My rent is like seventy-two dollars a month.”<br /><br />And here’s where the whole method and funding of this time travel deal blows wide open and starts to make logistical sense. I guess I had been somewhat hazy on this until this conversation with Chris, but of course, I now remember how this works. And this is really the part that’s going to be ultra-revolutionary and change the way we live, and how we all view time travel.<br /><br />Time travel accounts are available only through a disguised, secret posting—though I can’t remember exactly the nature of that listing, I’m sure I could pick it out from the others—on craigslist.org (though, if you type in craigslist.com, it’ll still work), and payments for impending time travel excursions may only be made with a valid Pay Pal account.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Of course. That’s why that shit is such a big deal. </span><br /><br />For example: if you deposit $5,000 into your Pay Pal time travel account here in 2008, when you arrive in the 1950s, you’ll still have $5,000 at your disposal. And everybody knows that $5,000 in the ’50s has, like, exponentially more value than it does in 2008.<br /><br />Pay Pal, in conjunction with craigslist, has developed and provides this time-travel service at no cost to you.<br /><br />And now I remember that Chris had been eyeing a dummy check made out to my wife—hmm, wonder what happened to her—back in 2008, denoting a $5,000 deposit to her Pay Pal account.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Was he eyeing it so he could steal the money and use it to travel back in time? And if you spend that money in the past, but return to a point in the future before you paid the money to Pay Pal, then do you even have to bother to pay the money to Pay Pal?</span><br /><br />“No,” Chris says, once again using his mind reading powers, which, it is becoming incresingly clearer, are indeed inherent in time travel. “You don’t pay again. You pay once, go back in time, and just make sure you return to a point in the future before you’re supposed to pay. So it’s essentially free.”<br /><br />I guess you can’t really be mad at somebody for stealing your money, as long as, after returning from the past, he makes sure to return to a spot in the future before the point where he is to steal your money, making sure that it never really happened/happens.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">This is unbelievable</span>, I think.<br /><br />“It’s addictive and it’s dangerous,” Chris warns. “If you’re exposed as a time traveler, they’ll kill you.”<br /><br />It’s getting dark, and Chris and I stop at a row of newspaper dispensers to grab a newspaper of some sort. “French fries,” a robed, hunched-over woman, purportedly homeless but sounding and looking more like a witch than a homeless person, bellows. “French fries! One dollar!” Chris and I are engaged in heady conversation—I can’t remember the particulars, but it has something to do with avoiding being killed by <span style="font-style: italic;">them</span>—and are scarcely paying attention when we each hand the woman a dollar in exchange for the fries she is selling.<br /><br />“From the future!” she screams, removing her hood and revealing herself to be neither a witch nor homeless; she is a normal looking person wearing some sort of disguise. Selling french fries to expose the time travelers.<br /><br />“They’re from the future! They paid one dollar for fries—a full month’s rent—when they should only cost five cents! They’re from the future!”<br /><br />People are starting to stare. “We had better go,” Chris says, and takes off running. I take note that that is a big disparity between paying one or seventy-two dollars for a month of rent; someone here has their figures wrong. Still, we fell for it. <span style="font-style: italic;">How could we be so careless?</span><br /><br />As we scurry, I notice that Chris is eating his fries. “Aren’t you afraid that they’ve been poisoned?” I asked him. “No,” he responds, continually jamming them in his mouth.<br /><br />We finally arrive at Chris’s apartment building, and I am struck by <span style="font-style: italic;">how indicative of the 1950s it is that the entrance to his apartment is via an elaborate series of narrow tunnels sliding down into the underground.</span> I am somewhat concerned and claustrophobic about being too broad to fit in, and make it through, the tunnels, but before I know it, I’m on his “patio," a sprawling, white circular wafer; immaculate, smooth and reflective. In its middle sits an aluminum, circular patio table with four interrogation-room-style chairs (Fig. 4).<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJjBPgppNolM5QXeVD5CuJpAgHNSY118gzHjlLpUqa48fAmN7NPBSwBbr9R3XQnIKnA3B5S0b-sJ3eqNXB-Erx_uUv_-uciz8fQcxKs5GAL5iN18DiwWOD0aJEIOtcAp1ycSzA-hCiufA/s1600-h/Fig.4.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJjBPgppNolM5QXeVD5CuJpAgHNSY118gzHjlLpUqa48fAmN7NPBSwBbr9R3XQnIKnA3B5S0b-sJ3eqNXB-Erx_uUv_-uciz8fQcxKs5GAL5iN18DiwWOD0aJEIOtcAp1ycSzA-hCiufA/s400/Fig.4.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5254258094931019026" border="0" /></a><br />“The apartment’s not that great,” he says, “but you can see the entire universe from here.” And you can. Except that the universe is an indescribable expanse of water, space, steel and dirt; you can scarcely tell where one construct ends and the other begins.<br /><br />It is beautiful and it is heartbreaking, and now I know that the majesty of time travel is worth risking death.<br /><br />Before I can dwell on such notion, Chris and I are in some sort of junk shop, gathering unknown supplies for reasons not entirely clear.<br /><br />I notice a crudely designed <a href="http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5715284&sourceid=1500000000000003260370&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=5715284">rolling-mechanism hot dog warmer</a>, like the ones advertised in <a href="http://www.skymall.com/shopping/homepage.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">Sky Mall</span></a> that have since shown up in the sale fliers of Kohl’s and Target. Recognizing the worth and usefulness of such a machine, I ask the shopkeeper how much it costs. “Fifteen dollars,” he snaps. “Without the filter.”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Fifteen bucks in the 1950s; that’s like 600 bucks! Or something.</span><br /><br />Though I’m not at all certain what the filter is supposed to do, given that we’re in the 1950s and there is a filter for this queer apparatus available, I am assuming it is, if not essential, at the very least more hygienic.<br /><br />“How much for the filter?” I ask, pitching the tone of my words to include the utter disbelief that such a thing would cost so much.<br /><br />“An extra fifteen percent.”<br /><br />“Fifteen percent? Are you joking?”<br /><br />“Look—you’re not fooling anybody, “ he accuses. “We carry these things for you people but we’re not fooled by you. We know where you come from. Fifteen dollars.”<br /><br />It becomes clear that, not only is there a <span style="font-style: italic;">black market of products</span> designed for time travelers from the future living in the 1950s, but that I have given myself away by showing a familiarity and an interest in a rolling mechanism hot dog warmer—a thoroughly 21st-century concept.<br /><br />“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I blubber, blushing and sweating.<br /><br />“Get the fuck out of my store, time traveler!” he shouts.<br /><br />The doors to the shop burst open, revealing gas-masked, black-clad officers armed with comically gigantic flashlights and <span style="font-style: italic;">seriously frightening dogs</span>, obviously looking for time travelers from the future to mangle.<br /><br />I snatch the rolling mechanism hot dog warmer from the counter and hurl it at them, and they all turn into balloons emblazoned with the image of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD36ZhpHPpE">Captain Caveman</a>.<br /><br />And then I woke up.<br /><br />I am somewhat reluctantly coming to realize, after recounting this tale in urgent and regaining my composure, that there is scarcely anything to be learned from this dream.<br /><br />No wait, strike that.<br /><br />There <span style="font-style: italic;">are</span> two things I have learned: (1) I am perhaps the only male in America whose dreams featuring characters from <span style="font-style: italic;">Mad Men</span> contain only the male ones; and (2) that the mixture of a pint of Walgreen’s brand ice cream and 10 mg of Paxil is a super shitty before-bed elixir.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-24201124148972732762008-10-03T12:13:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:40:10.975-07:00Enduring Metallica Part VI VI VI: Death Magnetic<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOkuiAt4iNUzV_e8KiSvQ0eYAHZ3oJOPkJCAdDz1-uyBKbrE_zqInya5blKdCBNm3V33fmLJ4ZkcfRuYioVwB_C5gqy3FwH5c0-S-OhYUVz1UkVGzV8iUcyClDVrqNDnWaBxu7bRRVFNk/s1600-h/death+magnetic+cover.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOkuiAt4iNUzV_e8KiSvQ0eYAHZ3oJOPkJCAdDz1-uyBKbrE_zqInya5blKdCBNm3V33fmLJ4ZkcfRuYioVwB_C5gqy3FwH5c0-S-OhYUVz1UkVGzV8iUcyClDVrqNDnWaBxu7bRRVFNk/s400/death+magnetic+cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5253012685975652338" border="0" /></a><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">VI. VI. VI.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span> kicks off with <span style="font-style: italic;">That Was Just Your Life</span>, its reverb-drenched, cascading guitar picking sounding more than a little bit like those which define the calm-before-the-storm in many a metal-era Suicidal Tendencies exercise. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2RskJVFUoQ">You half-expect one of Rocky George’s sweetly dissonant guitar leads to come-a-weeping, or hear Mike Muir chime in with: <span style="font-style: italic;">what the hell’s going on around here?</span></a><br /><br />The galloping guitar propelling <span style="font-style: italic;">That Was Just Your Life</span> is quite comforting and sad, really—like running into an old friend at a funeral. It <span style="font-style: italic;">kind of</span> sounds like old Metallica. Ulrich’s double kick, though played with perfect precision, is such an oddity that it sounds like he’s merely proving he can still do it. Though Rick Rubin's production is similar in some ways to <span style="font-style: italic;">...And Justice for All</span>, it sounds decidedly more overdriven. And the cymbals on the bridge sound as if they were mic’d up and compressed by <a href="http://www.breathingprotection.com/dave_fridmann_discs.htm">Dave Fridmann</a> in an attempt to best the oversaturation of <a href="http://www.sleater-kinney.com/">Sleater-Kinney</a>’s excellent swansong <a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/21791/SleaterKinney_The_Woods"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Woods</span></a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span> sounds like no other Metallica record, and sounds like them all.<br /><br />When Hetfield extends the word <span style="font-style: italic;">die</span> to <span style="font-style: italic;">diyyeeeeeaah! </span>to conclude the verse, he sounds a little more than a lot like his former self. But the song works better when Hetfield keeps his mouth shut—his affectations often sound forced, a product of the same determination and discipline that negotiated his sobriety. And his lyrics are a constant reminder of the new Metallica trying to inhabit old Metallica space. Now, when Hetfield scowls, it’s clear that his loyalties have changed:<br /><blockquote>Like a general without a mission<br />Until the war will start again<br /></blockquote>Used to be Metallica identified more with the infantry soldiers than the higher-ups. It was all about rising up and lashing out, not strategizing the next phase of the battle. It is a pronounced difference, diminishing the scope and effect of the music.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The End of the Line</span> starts out promising enough, with some tricky time signatures rolling out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by some steam-rolled palm muting. Then it quickly devolves into some sort of blunter, less-nuanced version of the verses of Pearl Jam’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Even Flow</span>, which is, itself, neither particularly subtle nor nuanced. The song manages to get back on track for the verse before insisting on repeating that goddamned bridge again.<br /><br />There’s uncompromising delight in hearing James Hetfield spit out sinister word associations like <span style="font-style: italic;">Choke! Asphyxia!</span>, that is, until it becomes apparent that he’s talking about the rigors of being a spotlight-hungry celebrity. It's as if he's the Ghost of Christmas Future coming to say, <span style="font-style: italic;">meet your maker, Paris Hilton</span>.<br /><br />Still, repeated listenings to that palm-muted verse could cause quite the strain on the muscles in the hinge of your neck, especially if yours are as out-of-practice and creaky as mine.<br /><br />After the chorus, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield masterfully harmonize their chunked-out guitar runs as if they were playing aural BATTLESHIP with Iron Maiden. And, wait a second—is that bass I hear? Wow. Here, Rubin negotiates something, literally, unheard of in most Metallica records—and it’s not just the bass. Rather, it’s the union of the three stringed instruments nakedly chugging in unison atop the drums, without the addition of a rhythm guitar track to “fill out the sound”; good recordings of smartly written parts don’t need them.<br /><br />Unfortunately, the part is over as quickly as it began. Fortunately, it is followed by the sort of wah-wah freakout guitar solos that Kirk Hammett was created to perform. And it is worth noting that this one is so pervasive and unwavering in its staccato that it could just as easily be utterly stupid if it wasn’t so fucking awesome and hilarious.<br /><br />After a good, let’s say two-minute run, Hetfield decides to ruin the song again, this time swooning all snake charmer-like through a vocoder. (You know, those things that made Cher’s voice in <span style="font-style: italic;">Believe </span>and Sean Kingston’s in <span style="font-style: italic;">Beautiful Girls </span>sound all like they came from outer space.) Though its presence is fairly subtle or, rather, about as subtle as a vocoder is capable of being, Hetfield’s lyrics and vocal melody are not.<br /><br />At this point in the song, I would not think it unreasonable to hide your face in your hands out of embarrassment, or uncommon to suffer from a stomachache.<br /><br />This agenda of this silliness is forwarded, purportedly, so the music can swell and plod along clumsily when Hetfield bellows: "The slave becomes the master!" The line defies logic in the context of the song; it’s like an assignment that would earn a C- in Aggression Writing 101.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Broken, Beat & Scarred</span> is probably the best, and most original, song here. Rolling Stone has already pegged it as a “likely fan favorite,” robbing me of my sense of discovery, but that doesn't diminish its impact. Lyrically and melodically, Hetfield employs a structure perhaps best described as <span style="font-style: italic;">round-like</span>, suggesting a sort-of <span style="font-style: italic;">Row Your Boat </span>about sadism. Something about the repetition of the words, and the brute-force employment of the phrase “what don’t kill you make you more strong” works magically; as does the psychotic Greek chorus, headed up by Hetfield, muttering “show your scars,” its collective teeth gritted. The song only goes to good places, nicely thrashing about, when it stomps up the stairs .<br /><br />Given its subject matter; it might just be about Rocky Balboa!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Day That Never Comes </span>starts with the kind of atmospheric, dreamily processed guitar you would normally find populating the records of <a href="http://www.thebrotherkite.com/">The Brother Kite</a> or <a href="http://explosionsinthesky.com/">Explosions in the Sky</a> these days before segueing into a very familiar Metallica construct, leaving any alternative interpretations to burn faintly in the distance. Kirk Hammett lunges little guitar squiggles over the precision and simplicity of Ulrich’s drum accents, <span style="font-style: italic;">this time</span> relegated to single snare hits and bass, and <span style="font-style: italic;">this time</span> played by Robert Trujillo. It’s an incredibly comfortable and familiar precision—though it’s really only been executed <span style="font-style: italic;">One</span> time previously—and it is a convention that serves its inventors quite well. The guitar line to the verse sounds an awful lot like a few-notes-short version of the guitar line to the verse of <span style="font-style: italic;">Fade To Black</span>. The chorus soars with dread, with Hetfield’s put-on affectations just barely saved by Hammet’s symphonic guitar harmonies and Ulrich’s aptly ludicrous tom rolls.<br /><br />But when all the instrumentation gallops to a pause, there’s nothing and no one to bail out Hetfield when he claims "No the son shine never comes" with a subtlety approximate to that of Randy “Muscle Man” Savage imploring you to <span style="font-style: italic;">snap into a Slim Jim</span>, and elicits the same instinctual head-shaking and involuntary forced-air-through-nose laughter.<br /><br />Such sentiments return when, after about a 30-second instrumental break (nothing really special), Hetfield returns to the mic to profess:<br /><blockquote>Love is a four-letter word<br />And never spoken here<br />Love is a four-letter word<br />Here in this prison</blockquote>Wow. Not sure if Hetfield was really trying to invoke prison love and all that entails when he wrote this, but it is commonly thought that in prison, love is a four-letter word, indeed.<br /><br />The final three minutes of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Day That Never Comes </span>are nearly all that one could hope for musically in this type of Metallica song. It speeds up, has nice little tricky, yet melodic guitar noodles and concusive drumming, and after about a minute of these final three minutes, Metallica’s guitars start to hammer-out a hammered-on progression that ranks, musically, alongside the best of Metallica. It sounds familiar and new at the same time—the first and, alas, last such moment on <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span>. But it’s thrilling while it lasts.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">All Nightmare Long</span> starts off sounding as if could be an outtake from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album</span> before opting for a more obtuse, raging old-school thrash metal onslaught, letting up for a second to let Hetfield gurgle <span style="font-style: italic;">one, two</span> in very classic Metallica fashion. The structure of <span style="font-style: italic;">All Nightmare Long</span> is pretty bizarre—even as it jumps all over the place, Hetfield keeps things together with his vocals, and employs them to convincing effect in the fist-pumping anthem of a chorus. It’s big and dumb but, at least this time, who’s complaining?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Cyanide</span>, like most of the songs on Death Magnetic is a mixed bag, but this one is particularly heavy on the tricks and light on the treats. It starts out with a mildly interesting interplay between: the shotgun kickback of snare and guitar chords; and the pellet spray of cymbals and, again, Hammet’s explosive wah-wah. Then, everything halts, and Metallica, for the first time, sounds like a second-rate (is there any other kind?) bar band, as the drums and bass bounce around unremarkably, until the guitars come in to save them, but instead wind up sounding like—<span style="font-style: italic;">bad, early Stone Temple Pilots</span>?<br /><br />The chorus is engaging enough, and has a kind of interesting rhythm relative to its melody; I’m found myself humming it when I’m too tired to know better. The mid-section of <span style="font-style: italic;">Cyanide</span> offers the most embarrassing moment of any Metallica record or song to date, where Hetfield wonders: “Say is that rain or are they tears?”<br /><br />This line has also relentlessly haunted me: it’s so grammatically, I don’t know, <span style="font-style: italic;">fucked up</span>, but I can’t figure out how to fix it, given the amount of syllables allotted by its context in the song. Say is that rain or <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> it tears? Nope.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Unforgiven III</span> might have been funny, if it weren’t so depressing.<br /><br />I’m not too familiar with the <span style="font-style: italic;">Unforgivens I</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">II</span>, but my fellow ’80s-Metallica brother-in-arms Jeff (though he’s no fan) has assured me that there’s some sort of narrative to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unforgiven</span>, where Hetfield sings of the third-person him, which turns out to be him or the first-person Hetfield. <span style="font-style: italic;">Surprise!</span><br /><br />That certainly seems to be the case here. I think that Hetfield envisioned <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unforgiven III </span>as some sort of romanticism-in-suffering version of sea chantey or something, rather than the lamely conceived, loosely connected series of clichés it ultimately is. Though, musically, it has a few minimally interesting parts (and plenty of unbearable ones) and, certainly, the chorus is super-catchy, Hetfield’s maritime metaphor gives birth to the self-parody of a self-pitying sea captain, and it’s embarrassing to the core:<br /><blockquote>He’s run aground<br />Like his life<br />In water much too shallow<br />Slipping fast<br />Down with his ship</blockquote>Uh-huh. And so Hetfield sinks with this one, bringing everybody aboard (including you) with him. Surely, one amongst them knows that <span style="font-style: italic;">The Unforgiven III</span> is pretentious, childish drivel. Is there no one in the band willing to stand up to the mighty (on the outside, <span style="font-style: italic;">inside he's crying)</span> sea captain? Or are they each so full of contempt for him that they relish the thought of his embarrassing himself?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Unforgiven III</span> does offer one essential moment: when Hetfield talks of the <span style="font-style: italic;">search for seas of gold</span>, it’s good fun to imagine him saying, <span style="font-style: italic;">search for Caesar’s ghost</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Judas Kiss </span>bashes around pretty amiably for about eight minutes, and commits no real offense except for its really boring chorus—but is rarely exciting either.<br /><br />The instrumental <span style="font-style: italic;">Suicide and Redemption</span> should, by all means, be fantastic. No ridiculous lyrics to contend with, and, like the fantastic slow creeper <span style="font-style: italic;">To Live is to Die</span> from <span style="font-style: italic;">...And Justice for All</span>, it’s paced slow and pitched low, and runs for about ten minutes. But the bend-it then chunk-it riff at the core of <span style="font-style: italic;">Suicide and Redemption</span> is the least interesting part of it, which is unfortunate because, as these sorts of things go, they have to keep coming back to it. Still it has some quite nice stretches—some of the best of them having as much to do with Black Sabbath as Metallica.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My Apocalypse</span> is the album's closer, and any fan of <span style="font-style: italic;">Puppets</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Justice</span> knows what that means: it’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Damage, Inc</span>. and <span style="font-style: italic;">Dyer’s Eve</span> time, where Metallica places that one song so fast and so aggressive, they wouldn’t deign to attempt to play it live. In the context of <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">My Apocalypse</span> serves this purpose better than anyone has the right to expect. It’s pretty fucking fast, and Hetfield is up to his old tricks again, yelling threats like “Fear my name extermination” and “Demon awaken my apocalypse,” and it’s pretty nice.<br /><br />But <span style="font-style: italic;">My Apocalypse </span>feels more like a jumping off, rather than a winding up, point. Maybe Metallica feels the same way: though it is the last song on <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span>, its lyrics are inexplicably printed first in the<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>liner notes.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">My Apocalypse</span> and the whole of <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span> comes off as neither scary nor dangerous ( maybe a little bit <span style="font-style: italic;">kickass</span>) but, rather, as thoroughly deliberate and reeks of desperation. It's as if Hetfield & Co. painted themselves into a corner of <span style="font-style: italic;">shittery</span>, and they're trying to claw their way out, but are unable (or unwilling?) to stymie the tendencies that derailed them in the first place.<span style=""> </span><br /><br />That it is unquestionably the best thing Metallica has managed to produce in the last 20 years has at least as much to do with the poor quality of its output during that time being complete nonsense as it does with the quality of <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span>.<br /><br />And what’s with that title—<span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span>? It reads the same as if you went into a diner and saw <span style="font-style: italic;">cheese grilled</span> on the menu.<br /><br />It’s as if they think, utterly wrong-headedly, that with the proper application per square inch of intent and brute force, they can just <span style="font-style: italic;">turn things around</span>, and no one will be the wiser.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-78330502371021983012008-10-02T15:47:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:41:07.573-07:00Enduring Metallica Parts I–V: Mytallica<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCo2XHcXZVc6RvB7DusJRl9IHVjmkIi8tRfqRNXSjYaPGPtGlQP8NxYuY9oaZw2ATGrf4GY1FkAqsmtQT5cQyE79BdotlDkSVW8sZJgx80y-mAbu28CWVxrbfs0hoqku8A-Ec0WoPiEos/s1600-h/Puppets+and+Justice.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252981391159401570" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCo2XHcXZVc6RvB7DusJRl9IHVjmkIi8tRfqRNXSjYaPGPtGlQP8NxYuY9oaZw2ATGrf4GY1FkAqsmtQT5cQyE79BdotlDkSVW8sZJgx80y-mAbu28CWVxrbfs0hoqku8A-Ec0WoPiEos/s400/Puppets+and+Justice.jpg" border="0" /></a>I.<br /><br />It’s not easy being a Metallica fan—whatever that means.<br /><br />My unqualified love affair with and <span style="font-style: italic;">gratitude</span> for the existence of Metallica is relegated to music made during a very short period of time relative to the amount of juice I’ve wrung from it: 1986–1988, when their third and fourth albums, <span style="font-style: italic;">Master of Puppets</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">...And Justice for All</span>, were released.<br /><br />Lots of people, especially when they’ve been drinking heavily, will tell you that <span style="font-style: italic;">Puppets</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Justice</span> are bullshit; that the real Metallica albums are the first two, <span style="font-style: italic;">Kill ’Em All</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Ride the Lightning</span>.<br /><br />That’s fine with me—they can have ’em.<br /><br />While I do admire those first couple of albums, they’re a little too uncured for my tastes. The guitars all sound like stupid-colored Jacksons plugged into plastic-Crate half stacks, and when James Hetfield doesn’t sound like he’s singing in the bottom of a well, he sounds like he’s singing through a shitty digital effects processor.<br /><br />Though <span style="font-style: italic;">Lightning</span> is certainly better than its overcast production (after all, it does contain <span style="font-style: italic;">For Whom the Bell Tolls</span>), the vocal-less chunky soup of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Call of Ktulu</span> is easily rendered negligible by the excellent instrumental tracks on <span style="font-style: italic;">Puppets</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Justice</span> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Orion</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">To Live is to Die</span>, respectively).<br /><br />And <span style="font-style: italic;">Kill ’Em All</span>’s minor masterpieces (<span style="font-style: italic;">Seek and Destroy</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Jump in the Fire</span>) take a back seat to the best thing about Metallica’s first record—how totally stupid they all look in the <a href="http://img1.nnm.ru/imagez/gallery/9/0/4/b/8/904b87c9b3852258490efab61a49cb2a.jpg">photo</a> on the back cover.<br /><br />Any fan of early Metallica, if he (or, randomly, she) doesn’t loathe <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album</span>, will at least acknowledge that it pales in comparison to Metallica’s earlier albums. What you’ll never find is the person who likes the first four records (or some variation thereof) and claims that Metallica <span style="font-style: italic;">just keeps getting better and better</span>. Saying you think that <span style="font-style: italic;">Master of Puppets</span> is pretty good, but you really like <span style="font-style: italic;">Load</span> is like saying that you think that Jack Nicholson is pretty good in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Chinatown</span></a>, but that you prefer him in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/cornwall/film/images/anger_management_sps.jpg"><span style="font-style: italic;">Anger Management</span></a>.<br /><br />Honestly, and I think this really goes to the heart of the problem I have with post-<span style="font-style: italic;">Justice</span> Metallica, I see no real difference between the <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album</span> and populist modern country music by Brooks and Dunn, or Kenny Chesney or something—you know, it’s all <span style="font-style: italic;">built Ford tough</span>.<br /><br />Metallica’s appeal reached its apex with the release of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album</span>, which sold 15 million copies. Only people who didn’t like it: fans of the first four Metallica records. So they bolted.<br /><br />But according to RIAA statistics through 2005: 1996’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Load</span> has sold 5 million copies; 1997’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Reload</span>, 3 million; 1998’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Garage, Inc.</span>, 5 million; 1999’s <span style="font-style: italic;">S&M</span>, 5 million; and 2003’s <span style="font-style: italic;">St. Anger</span>, 2 million. Do you know anyone buying these records? I don’t. (Besides my friend Chris, who purchased <span style="font-style: italic;">St. Anger</span> and threw it out of his car window after listening to it on the way home from the record store.)<br /><br />II.<br /><br />Used to be the Metallica-coined language of speed metal was, though certainly not universal, at least spoken by kids with different <span style="font-style: italic;">accents</span>; you were just as likely to see a skater wearing the same <a href="http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/TEE_BRAV/MET2009%7EMetallica-Metal-Up-Your-Ass-Posters.jpg">Metallica shirt </a>as your average mullethead.<br /><br />The only other band I can think of from that time with similar broad cross <span style="font-style: italic;">genre-ational</span> appeal was Suicidal Tendencies, though their social melding may have been of a more divisive nature. When kids wore Metallica shirts, they were at least advertising the same records, if not lifestyles.<br /><br />But the first Suicidal Tendencies record was hardcore punk, and the mid-career one-two punch of <span style="font-style: italic;">Controlled by Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Déjà Vu</span> (itself a compilation of two EPs that, as far as I can tell, were never released separately) and <span style="font-style: italic;">Lights, Camera, Revolution!</span> were pretty much straight-up speed metal, purportedly due to guitarist Rocky George’s metallic background. When <span style="font-style: italic;">Hatred</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Revolution</span> dropped, I could have scarcely given a fuck about early Suicidal—but I sure did love those metal records. The skaters probably felt the opposite, preferring the misunderstood youth of <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6418981950523381596"><span style="font-style: italic;">Institutionalized</span></a> from Suicidal’s self-titled debut to the groovy Satanism of <span style="font-style: italic;">Hatred</span>’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdx6I1hgCzQ"><span style="font-style: italic;">Waking the Dead</span></a>.<br /><br />So I suppose, then, that former Suicidal bass player Rob Trujillo was a good choice to fill the oafish shoes vacated by Jason Newsted (himself the replacement for original bassist Cliff Burton) when, in 2001, he left to concentrate on his side project with the impossibly stupid name <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=111h_EZQxDk">Echobrain</a>.<br /><br />Unhappy with letting Echobrain define <span style="font-style: italic;">embarrassment</span> in his post-Metallica career, Newsted undertook the depressing business of putting the <span style="font-style: italic;">meta</span> into <span style="font-style: italic;">metal</span>, banding together with the mötley düde attached to Tommy Lee’s famously generously proportioned wiener and G’nR’s shitty <span style="font-style: italic;">Use Your Illusions</span>-era jack of all trades Gilby Clarke for the reality TV show/band <span style="font-style: italic;">Rock Star Supernova</span>. Even though it proved to be the band Lukas Rossi was involved in with the comparatively subtle name—he had previously been in a band called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm0oZWF-33I">Cleavage</a>—Rock Star Supernova’s sole album somehow managed to go platinum in Canada.<br /><br />Newsted, famously the perpetual victim of the band’s relentless frat-boyish hazing, had been unhappy in Metallica for some time. Things, it seems, never really got any better for him from the time he joined the band. According to legend, Hetfield and Ulrich had insisted that producer Flemming Rasmussen bury Newsted’s bass to such a degree that it was inaudible on <span style="font-style: italic;">...And Justice for All</span>. Consequently, the first time he heard the album’s final mix, Newsted wept.<br /><br />The Hetfield-Ulrich Dictatorship that rules Metallica appears to be actively vying for the title of disproportionate assholeishness relative to talent, which is currently held by the mean-spirited, leather-faced brothers Van Halen, Eddie and Alex. (VH with David Lee Roth: awesome. Van Halen with anybody else: not so awesome.)<br /><br />James Hetfield, the taller half of this damaged incorporation, recently told MTV of new bassist Trujillo (he joined in 2003, but <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic </span>is the first record he’s played on): "In the studio—and no offense towards Jason—but Rob has already contributed more to this record than Jason did in 14 years.”<span style="font-style: italic;"> Hey—none taken buddy</span>.<br /><br />And Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, the shorter half, has said it’s “difficult to praise Rob without insinuating that there was something not great about his predecessor.” Jeez. No wonder dude quit.<br /><br />Word is <span style="font-style: italic;">Death Magnetic</span> is a return to Metallica’s speed-enhanced days of yesteryear. But that was the bald-faced lie buzzing around the last one, too, 2003’s <span style="font-style: italic;">St. Anger</span>, perhaps the worst of Metallica’s career—though it may be worth noting that I have never been able (nor do I ever plan) to listen to it enough to confidently grant it that distinction.<br /><br />The return-to-form agenda as advanced by Metallica, its publicists and record label appears to be gaining traction fairly effortlessly. As far as I’ve seen, of all of the reviews in major media outlets, only <a href="http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/145305-metallica-death-magnetic">Pitchfork</a> (predictably) has given it an unfavorable review.<br /><br />Brian Hiatt, in his four-star (out of five) <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/22723926/review/22787142/death_magnetic?source=album_reviews_rssfeed">review in <span style="font-style: italic;">Rolling Stone</span></a> gushes:<br /><blockquote>Just as U2 re-embraced their essential U2-ness post-Pop, this album is Metallica becoming Metallica again—specifically, the epic, speed-obsessed version from the band's template-setting trilogy of mid-Eighties albums: <span style="font-style: italic;">Master of Puppets</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Ride the Lightning</span> and, especially, the progged-out <span style="font-style: italic;">...And Justice for All</span>.</blockquote>And <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20224803,00.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Entertainment Weekly</span></a>’s Chris Willman, in his B+ review writes:<br /><blockquote>Producer Rick Rubin suggested they quit all that messy evolvin' and get back to the grinding sound of 1986's <span style="font-style: italic;">Master of Puppets</span>. The result might just be patronizing the faithful, but if so, it's some of the thrashiest, most thrilling appeasement you'll hear.</blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">Gee, thanks, Metallica!</span><br /><br />III.<br /><br />This whole metal thing is exceptionally tricky. First of all, there are so many different definitions of what heavy metal even is. If you were to tell my friend John, a pretty old-school metal dude (<span style="font-style: italic;">Judas Priest and Black Sabbath</span> is his aural <span style="font-style: italic;">meat and potatoes) </span>that Poison was a heavy metal band—he just might punch you in the face. More likely though, he’d shake his head, and just walk away.<br /><br />The closest I can come to defining heavy metal is: any music that I like that my wife thinks is stupid. And I don’t blame her—any genre of music whose protagonists are oftentimes wearing codpieces is inherently ridiculous. (Ridiculously awesome!)<br /><br />To paraphrase Blake Schwarzenbach of <a href="http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20444325">Jawbreaker</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">one, two, three, four, who’s metal? What’s the score?</span> Alice Cooper? Blue Cheer, White Lion, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, ELO, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Guns ’n Roses, Warrant? (No, maybe, yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes, not really, no, yes.) But that’s scarcely the point. This guy may not agree with that guy that Aerosmith is a metal band, but both will easily agree that <a href="http://www.manowar.com/">Manowar</a> is.<br /><br />And, certainly, Metallica is—settling, definitively, what’s in a name.<br /><br />But somewhere along the way, everyone forgot that rock was created as a tool for freaking out parents. Always has been. Or was supposed to be, anyway. From the <span style="font-style: italic;">negro music</span> reviled by fine, church-going southern whites to the no-good white hooligans with mop tops and toothpicks threatening to undo the social and moral fabric of America. From hippies on acid growing their hair long and pointing the finger at <span style="font-style: italic;">them</span> for their failings to the mad-grinning, googly-eyed Satanism of heavy metal losers. From the indiscriminate fucking and vacant coke-sniffing of glittery disco dancers to the broken glass and sheer volume of nihilistic punk violence, and the greed and gaucheness of nihilistic gangsta violence.<br /><br />And that’s it. Now its shuffle or, if you prefer, repeat.<br /><br />And when top-selling artists advocating actual murder in the real world is greeted with a more-of-the-same style shrug, then maybe things have been taken about as far as they can go.<br /><br />With gangsta rap moving many units and the grisly and disturbing <span style="font-style: italic;">CSI</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</span> being two of most popular shows on television, shock—outside of real-life horror—is hard to inflict these days. But Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath used to manage quite handily.<br /><br />IV.<br /><br />In 1982, the satanic imagery of Iron Maiden’s seminal album <a href="http://uhservis.eu/zajmy/hudba/Iron_Maiden/discography/cov_alba/1982-IronMaiden-TheNumberOfTheBeast-FrontLarge.jpg"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Number of the Beast</span></a> may have been frightening, but it has since become comically impotent. It could be that the passage of time has produced a pronounced lack of a Maiden-led satanic uprising. Or it could be the market saturation of all of Maiden’s obscenely priced reissues, as there is nothing faintly Satanic about a <span style="font-style: italic;">Deluxe Reissue Remastered with Over 5 Hours of Bonus Material!</span> Or it could be that frontman Bruce Dickinson has emerged as the William Shatner of heavy metal, writing genre books and just kind of running around all goofy-like.<br /><br />For the impotence of Sabbath, <a href="http://www.ozzy.com/music/just-say-ozzy"><span style="font-style: italic;">Just Say Ozzy</span></a>; he was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1911033.stm">invited by George Bush to the White House</a>, for fuck’s sake. These days, all these former purveyors of evil seem to renounce or deny their former wicked ways. Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has stated:<br /><blockquote>[A]ny lyrics that I or Ozzy wrote were actually warnings against Satanism . . . I had a very strict Catholic upbringing, so I read a lot about Satan. But we never, ever promoted Satanism or black magic, we only used it as a reference, and it wasn't our only topic. We wrote a lot of science fiction lyrics, anti-Vietnam war songs, the occult was only dealt with in three or four songs. But people completely misinterpreted them, the way they always do.</blockquote>I can’t for the life of me figure out how people got the wrong idea.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbszqJtAYhAdd6VvWFzQE55mVgDUQRhIhOleFHf0tnJO5ils0hzlQexsT_q7cDV_6Zo4H1ZqIGeGub9w-yLeoe7pag64R9rQiRf-InHlffw0El0nT8DUEOMCqm8c7XUDiursjooS1Jdeo/s1600-h/sabbath+collage.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252986675273955410" style="cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbszqJtAYhAdd6VvWFzQE55mVgDUQRhIhOleFHf0tnJO5ils0hzlQexsT_q7cDV_6Zo4H1ZqIGeGub9w-yLeoe7pag64R9rQiRf-InHlffw0El0nT8DUEOMCqm8c7XUDiursjooS1Jdeo/s400/sabbath+collage.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrFSyWcgy_FGHyb-RHkKmE3dDpz34ZSEoNhrFq-FgzMcrGuhEopxUv3tohiizHAG_su0kmz_kNGfz65LRbakH7s_XIQtfUxLv4zxG0JHrdUHv5Ws-VV6OWE8wXmgS2hSeNkhBywzcOwsM/s1600-h/ozzy+collage.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252986676318059362" style="cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrFSyWcgy_FGHyb-RHkKmE3dDpz34ZSEoNhrFq-FgzMcrGuhEopxUv3tohiizHAG_su0kmz_kNGfz65LRbakH7s_XIQtfUxLv4zxG0JHrdUHv5Ws-VV6OWE8wXmgS2hSeNkhBywzcOwsM/s400/ozzy+collage.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Everybody was scared to death of heavy metal in the ’80s, mostly because everybody in heavy metal wanted to scare people to death. Twisted Sister, who in retrospect seem positively vaudevillian, actually scared people. Even though their music sounded about as sinister as the theme song from <span style="font-style: italic;">Cheers</span>, they brought the scary by dressing up like murderous trannies and pretended to indiscriminately eat big meat legs of indeterminate origin.<br /><br />Most people figured that heavy metal was at least as likely to cause American youths to commit suicide as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_&_Dragons#Controversy_and_notoriety"><span style="font-style: italic;">Advanced Dungeons and Dragons</span></a>. Whether in horror movies or music, the occult freaked people out, and it was exploited by many a metal band for that particular reason. (But not Black Sabbath or Ozzy.)<br /><br />And it was never more popular.<br /><br />Although they came later, Metallica still had that black aura of danger and wickedness swirling around them. They weren’t Satanists. They didn’t play dress-up. And they weren’t funny like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmbGredaJFQ">Savatage</a> or <a href="http://www.myspace.com/kingdiamond">King Diamond</a> or <a href="http://www.helloween.org/band/news.html">Helloween</a>. They were decidedly serious, angry. Fast and, most importantly, heavy as <a href="http://www.wwe.com/superstars/halloffame/captainloualbano/bio/">Captain Lou Albano</a>'s lunch pail.<br /><br />For better or worse, the influx of hair metal bands and their incessant power-balladeering waltzed in and replaced a decidedly ugly brand of danger with that of insincere blush-cheeked emoting and sleazy bathroom sex. Soon, even the veteran metal stalwarts were releasing and making videos for their versions of the power ballad, playing ball with the record companies, MTV and most importantly, record buyers. (Scorpions, Dokken, Mötley Crüe, Kiss, Whitesnake, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, etc.)<br /><br />So I guess we should have seen it coming. 1988’s <span style="font-style: italic;">…And Justice For All</span> finally spawned a Metallica video, after they had sworn up and down and every which way that they would never make one. The video was for the song <span style="font-style: italic;">One</span>, which is, I suppose, kind of ballad-like. But rather than being about love, it’s about being a blind, deaf, mute living war casualty with no arms, legs or means of communication, the latter of which he is desperate to regain so that he can let somebody, anybody to <span style="font-style: italic;">please kill him</span>.<br /><br />And it was rad at the time, even if now it seems like a premonition of weak things to come. They were pretty beastly looking, as if they could scarcely give a fuck what you think<br /><br />The best thing about the video for <span style="font-style: italic;">One </span>has to be watching Newsted’s fingers expertly traveling the fretboard of his bass, purportedly playing notes.<br /><br />Even if the songs on <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album </span>were a bit prettier, Metallica was still pretty ugly. After <span style="font-style: italic;">The Black Album</span>—though hugely disappointing, it still had songs about, like, snakes and shit on it—Metallica plunged ass-first into an abyss of boneheaded self-actualization. In <span style="font-style: italic;">Hero of the Day</span> from 1996's <span style="font-style: italic;">Load</span>, Hetfield warbles the line: “Excuse me while I tend to how I feel.” That’s a far cry from the cryptic imagery of <span style="font-style: italic;">Damage, Inc.</span>'s “slamming through, don't fuck with razorback.” (I’m not quite certain what or whom razorback is but, rest assured, I won’t be fucking with it.)<br /><br />All of a sudden (I had not really paid too much attention for some time) Metallica looked like rock stars instead of underpaid bouncers and town-lockup drunks.<br /><br />Gone were the signature scumstaches of yore. All of Metallica’s hair was shortened, and teeming with product. Perhaps most shockingly, Kirk Hammet underwent a transformation of Chris Cornell (Cornish?) proportions, suddenly becoming Metallica’s most handsome member. Shortly thereafter, rumors abounded that he was, in fact, gay.<br /><br />Metallica had become the very thing it actively promoted it would never become: the establishment. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Thing That Should Not Be</span>. (Sorry.)<br /><br />At any rate, Metallica lost their sense of danger and, if you ask me, their sense of purpose. And it angered a lot of people. (Especially a lot of drunk ones.) The only other group able to inspire such earnest admiration for its early work and clenched-fist-shaking wrath for the perceived <span style="font-style: italic;">Et tu, Bruté </span>style betrayal of its fans, is Guns ’n Roses. (Though they, <span style="font-style: italic;">inarguably</span>, had only one good record.)<br /><br />V.<br /><br />Part of the thrill of listening to music of a different era is putting it into its proper context. Early rock and roll is rambunctious only in conjunction with the tumultuous time it appeared—without which it would be defined by PBS Doo-Wop fund-drive specials and Rock ’n Roll Elmo.<br /><br />David Bowie may be a cuddly bisexual now that we’ve experienced Culture Club and Wham!, but can you imagine that shit <span style="font-style: italic;">back when it happened</span>? Even Jane’s Addiction was a bit shocking when, in their prescience, they released <span style="font-style: italic;">Nothing’s Shocking</span>.<br /><br />So its easy to imagine PTA moms with large, feathered hair flipping out over Accept’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Balls to the Wall</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Animal (Fuck Like a Beast) </span>by saw-blade-as-penis lunatics W.A.S.P., but when was the last time a metal band inspired fear in the hearts of Americans?<br /><br />It wasn’t that long ago, actually. In the mid-to-late-’90s, Marilyn Manson caused a veritable shitstorm when he released the albums <span style="font-style: italic;">Antichrist Superstar</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Mechanical Animals</span>, the latter of which featured a truly creepy rendering of Manson naked, with nippleless breasts, but without genitalia on the <a href="https://www.nakasha-spain.com/shop/images/Marilyn-Manson-Mechanical-Animal-157240.jpg">cover</a>. He was also gallivanting around with <span style="font-style: italic;">he of the Church of Satan</span> and writer of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Satanic Bible</span>, <a href="http://www.churchofsatan.com/">Anton LeVey</a>; staging concerts patterned after Nazi Germany rallies; openly advocating the use of hallucinatory drugs; and, most importantly, facilitated outrage and protest from Christian groups all across the country, on every stop of his 1997 tour.<br /><br />Kudos to him. Amazingly, even with the subtlety of the hydrogen bomb (his name <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> Marilyn Manson, for chrssakes), people fell for it. Gloomy and defiant wore it on their faces, because their parents were frightened and outraged by it. (And I suppose that’s part of the appeal of gangsta rap. But there’s something less tangible about drinking someone’s blood out of allegiance to the unholy one than there is to shooting someone in the face because of paper, or some damned thing. Whole different ball of wax.)<br /><br />Manson reinvented heavy metal imagery, making it shocking and dangerous again, but has since all but lost his edge. Was that the genre’s last gasp?<br /><br />There are those crazy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal">Norwegian black metal bands</a> that actually, like, kill each other, but nobody really listens to them. So the only real reason to be scared of a Norwegian black metal band is if you’re in another Norwegian black metal band.<br /><br />So what is a new, back-to-its-roots Metallica record supposed to convey, anyway? Even if they thrash it out like they did in the old days, what does that mean? Anything? If it isn’t scary or dangerous—and surely anybody who’s seen the film <span style="font-style: italic;">Some Kind of Monster</span> can attest to the fact that there’s nothing remotely scary or dangerous about eschewing guitar solos from your songs in favor of group therapy and sobriety—then how can it be adequately <span style="font-style: italic;">kickass</span>?</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-54006123032681915282008-09-17T06:16:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:41:37.038-07:00Amazing Things Part One<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.directsourceinc.com/index.html"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx1-nQeFT_CInXVZBj_swrxEyMZq5uQhkB1f5KryvPm2ncvzEnYkQUJkow3RG3qCkfXp01nEQPfXUqCSzTrEMbA41rdTxvQNJOFzp-IPwOEVNas0mcFfLNFLqjD7z9TlD1811ji7EClLA/s400/farting+teddy+bear.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246979896903868418" border="0" /></a>From: supplement to <span style="font-style: italic;">The Chicago Tribune, </span>Sunday, September 7, 2008.</div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-69644934947848215032008-09-15T07:17:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:42:27.995-07:00Dude—Sweet Van.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXoQXRRoA3t7ZIsmRPJdQgmgUxD05VKOBFL04cuTYZR-not7wNEfCUObOLL0HRMXc1Q_9hiTYT5QrGLrxrPZeIw4FBtzlTJV9VYu9OirW_DjbMTZDErdVJcSc_gA-OTlf5ybVplER3Nx0/s1600-h/Van+and+Zoot.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5246319256480969202" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; cursor: pointer; text-align: center;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXoQXRRoA3t7ZIsmRPJdQgmgUxD05VKOBFL04cuTYZR-not7wNEfCUObOLL0HRMXc1Q_9hiTYT5QrGLrxrPZeIw4FBtzlTJV9VYu9OirW_DjbMTZDErdVJcSc_gA-OTlf5ybVplER3Nx0/s400/Van+and+Zoot.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >Van Morrison, circa 2007 (left); Zoot of The Electric Mayhem </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >(right)</span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-weight: bold;">I</span>.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I feel only the slightest twinge of guilt stating that I have nearly unwavering contempt for the music and persona of Van Morrison. You know: </span><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Van the Man</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">,</span><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">or </span><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The Belfast Cowboy</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">? Whew. The former sounds like the tagline for </span><a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276434/"><i>Van Wilder 3</i></a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> and the latter, the inevitable stage name of the star attraction of an international gay gentleman’s club. </span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Morrison has proven to be an enormous influence on U2 front man Bono, who, though slightly less-so than fellow one-monikered goofs <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG3PnQ3tgzY">Taco </a>and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-tJTT6CLQ">Falco</a>, is clearly one of the most ridiculous entertainers known to the modern world. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><i>Brown Eyed Girl</i>? Hate it. <i>Wild Night</i>? Hate it. <i>Domino</i>? Hate it. I despise them all with exasperation. The only thing more embarrassing than the song <i>Moondance</i>—except for, perhaps, sweaty, contempo-jazz lunkhead <a href="http://video.aol.com/video/moondance/1112732">Michael Bubblé’s version of it</a>? The entire album of the same name. Morrison’s blubbering affectation on <i>Crazy Love</i> is so utterly stupid; it makes me want to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGosYIlXdmU">tear my teeth out</a>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">That blunt instrument commonly known as the <i>blue-eyed soul</i> (a term, lest we forget, also associated with Michael Bolton) of George Ivan Morrison is tirelessly resurrected from the <i>blue-eyed</i> graveyard to bludgeon movie audiences over the head with prescribed emotion every time something presumably sad or wonderful happens. (See <i>When a Man Loves a Woman</i>, <i>Nine Months</i>, <i>Phenomenon</i>, <i>One Fine Day</i>, <i>Michael</i>, <i>The Matchmaker</i>, <i>As Good as it Gets</i>, <i>Patch Adams</i>, <i>Bridget Jones’s Diary</i>, etc.) And didn’t Julia Roberts dance around and try on clothes or something to <i>Brown-Eyed Girl</i> in the insipid, gouge-your-own-eyes-out-inducing <i>Pretty Woman</i>? (Come to think of it, it was probably <i>Pretty Woman</i> by <a href="http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/roy-orbison">Roy </a><a href="http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/roy-orbison">Orbison</a>.) No matter; even if she didn’t, you can easily imagine it, which is precisely the point. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">The music of Van Morrison, itself a lazy appropriation of black American soul and R&B, has been enlisted, utterly lazily, to permeate the subconscious with a representation of a specifically white, yet <i>hep</i> to the American black experience, world-weariness that blankets both pain and whimsy. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Like, say for, “Honey, I have brain cancer,” cue <i>Crazy Love</i>. And for a flashback to when an uptight professional mom was a freewheeling college girl, cue <i>Brown Eyed Girl</i>. Slather, rinse, repeat. The possibilities and variations, as you know, are endless.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">It’s not unlike the kitchen scene in <i>The Big Chill</i>. Or when Murphy Brown would sing and dance to her beloved Motown records. Behold the middle-aged, white, well-to-do Boomers who <i>get</i> it. They empathize with and understand <i>black suffering</i>, so they get to partake in the catharsis of black music. It always reeked of entitlement, and forced me to avert my eyes in some fashion. This was partially out of embarrassment for the actors and writers, but mostly out of shame, due to shared pigment hue. Reportedly, a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1051272/">remake of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Big Chill</span></a> is in the works with an all-black cast, and I am hoping and praying that it will update the classic kitchen sequence to see its black characters doing the dishes to <a href="http://www.therattpack.com/">Ratt</a> or <a href="http://www.teslatheband.com/home.aspx">Tesla </a>or something, reliving their ‘80s hair-metal heyday. It would only be slightly more ridiculous, though certainly less offensive. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>II.</strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">So that musty, slow-aged portion of Van Morrison is nowhere to be found on his 1968 album <i>Astral Weeks</i>. It is, quite simply, a miraculous piece of work. And it was so bizarrely conceived, and its success so contingent on myriad factors, that its very existence seems as unlikely as the occurrence of any other natural, extraordinary thing. It stuns you during its stay, and when it departs, it leaves you awestruck and shaken, wondering where it came from. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">And its title is fantastic, though not the best I’ve ever heard. That distinguished honor belongs to fellow red-haired <a href="http://www.boyscouttrail.com/webelos/webelos-scouts.asp">Webelos</a> compatriot Donnie Cappy, whose poem entitled <i>Why Does My Dick Get Hard When it Touches a Church Pew?</i> has yet to be dethroned.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">When I decided to write a little something about <i>Astral Weeks</i> after <i>Madame George</i> shuffled its way into my headphones and made me want to vomit joy, I was under the impression that <i>Astral Weeks</i> was a hidden gem of sorts. I only know of one other person who loves it, and he is not coincidentally the only other person I know that has even <i>heard</i> it. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">I hadn’t heard it, or any of <i>Astral Weeks</i> for that matter, in quite some time, and <i>Madame George</i> blindsided me. Immediately and for days after. I couldn’t listen to anything else. What struck me was—you know how you’re always bullied with the false, clichéd mischaracterization of punk rock as being only four tossed-off chords (automatically disqualifying every song by The Clash or Fugazi)? Well, here’s a song that’s, literally, only <i>three</i> chords, with absolutely <i>no variation</i> in the order in which they’re played. And it’s like ten minutes long! </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">But there’s something swirling around those three chords. Something marvelous, where the architects of the work’s legacy can be found.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>III.</strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Morrison was a mere 22 years old when he recorded <i>Astral Weeks</i>. This makes perfect sense, given the way it expertly bottles the breezy swagger and unrest of youth, but is utterly baffling when considering the ludicrous shit I was up to when I was 22. (I’m pretty sure I was that age when I chipped my front tooth on a 40oz. bottle of Magnum Malt liquor while drunkenly bashing the drums to the original composition <i>Casper, the Friendly Jesus.</i>) A contract dispute with former label <a href="http://bsnpubs.com/nyc/bangstory.html">Bang Records</a> (for whom he recorded <i>Brown Eyed Girl</i>) proved to be a bit hilarious and a bit sad, with bad blood being drawn by the drafting of lawsuits. Warner Bros. Records would eventually duke it out with Bang, but before that would happen, Morrison would be denied work in the clubs of New York because they were too chicken to risk enduring the ire of Bang. And he was still under contract with them, which prevented him from recording for another label. So Morrison developed the compositions of <i>Astral Weeks</i> in the <i>mean streets </i>of Cambridge, MA, without no home for his songs.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Noting that Morrison was “twenty-two—or twenty-three—when he made this record,” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycneOGo6fPc">Lester Bangs</a> has said of <i>Astral Weeks</i> “there are lifetimes behind it.” The incomparable <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greil_Marcus">Greil Marcus </a>(the best rock critic most people have never heard of) championed <i>Astral Weeks</i> when editing the 1979 book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=0dsVOtM-Q3UC&dq=marcus+stranded&pg=PP1&ots=LV3j95sr5u&sig=MUDwx_dJXkrcClOtxk7FTh1khU4&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result"><i>Stranded</i></a>, where Bangs’s (the only rock critic most people have ever heard of) <a href="http://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/%7Emurray/astral.html">tender assessment</a> appears. Bangs claims that <i>Astral Weeks</i> provided him with “proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction.” He heralded it as “a record about people stunned by life . . . because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim.” Bangs was particularly fond of <i>Madame George</i>, considering it the centerpiece of the album. So passionate was he, that he accused Morrison of being a liar for claiming that the title character of <i>Madame George</i> wasn’t a transvestite. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Additionally, Marcus claims that <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/scorsese_m.html">Martin Scorcese</a> told him, somewhat inexplicably, that <i>Astral Weeks</i> served as the primary influence on the first half of <i>Taxi Driver</i>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">So, as it turns out, me and my friend (who recently texted me this summation of <i>Astral Weeks</i>: “That shit is nuts”) aren’t <i>Astral Weeks</i>’ only admirers. In 2003, <i>Rolling Stone </i>magazine placed it at #19 on its list of the <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5938174/the_rs_500_greatest_albums_of_all_time"><i>500 Greatest Albums of All Time</i></a>; in 1995 MOJO put it at #2 on its list of the <a href="http://rateyourmusic.com/list/scottbdoug/mojo_magazines_100_greatest_albums__august_1995_issue_/"><i>100 Best Albums</i></a>. Though it failed to chart upon hitting the streets in 1968, it went gold about seven years ago—<i>33 years </i>after its release.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">How on earth does an album with no singles or discernible fan base weasel its way into the revered Establishment’s canon? Everybody knows, minimally, the Top 20 albums from <i>Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time</i>. Everybody knows <i>Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band</i> (No. 1), or at least <i>With a Little Help From My Friends</i>, <i>Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds </i>and <i>When I’m Sixty-Four</i>; everybody knows <i>Pet Sounds</i> (No. 2), or at least <i>Wouldn’t it Be Nice?</i> and <i>God Only Knows</i>; everybody knows <i>The Velvet Underground and Nico </i>(No. 13), or at least <i>All Tomorrow’s Parties</i> and <i>Heroin</i>; and everybody knows <i>Thriller</i> (No. 20) because its, well, <i>Thriller. </i>So, then, everybody must know <i>Astral Weeks</i>, or its songs <i>The Way That Young Lovers Do</i>, <i>Sweet Thing</i> and <i>Slim Slow Slider</i>, right? </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">The <a href="http://www.applesinstereo.com/">Apples in Stereo</a> aped the <i>Pet Sounds</i>-era Beach Boys before <a href="http://www.myspace.com/rippityrippity">Panda Bear</a> did, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavement_%28band%29">Pavement</a> aped the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mn71fQpXNY">Velvet Underground</a> before Cold War Kids aped Pavement. So where are the <i>Astral Weeks</i> imitators? Isn’t that the true measure of creative success?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>IV.</strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">In 1969 to ‘70, and before he was my father, Charles Allan Larson was also known as <i>Birth Control</i>, radio operator for the heavily armed infantry of the First Cavalry in the sort of Vietnam immersion <i>Rushmore</i>’s Max Fischer adeptly surmised as being <i>in the shit</i>.<i> </i>During his allotted five days of R&R in October of 1969, which he spent in Hong Kong, he bought an AMPEX turntable and had it shipped back to the States. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Much to my grandparents’ chagrin, he later decided to take advantage of the Army’s early release program, extending his tour in Vietnam by 55 days so that, rather than serve stateside, he would be honorably discharged upon his return to the States. As further incentive, the Army granted participants in the program seven days leave. Problem was, soldiers were only allowed to go to designated R&R sites, which ran for five days rather than seven. So the U.S. Army kept those two days for itself, and my father again returned to Hong Kong for five days after giving up on Bangkok, where he really wanted to go. See, there were no flights to Bangkok scheduled, and he’d be goddamned if he was going to wait on some plane that might never show, and watch a rare, albeit short, reprieve from the terrors and boredom of the bush mingle with the smoke fleeing the cherry of his Camel Filter. It was around this time that he saw an ad for a then-state-of-the-art <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:VinAd60Ampex2.jpg">AMPEX reel-to-reel tape player</a> advertised in the military newspaper<i> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_Stripes_%28newspaper%29">Stars and Stripes</a></i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_and_Stripes_%28newspaper%29">. </a>It was home before he was, in Illinois, where <i>Charlie</i> was the name his mother called him, rather than the shifty, complicated enemy of the bush.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">I had previously thought that my father had purchased his Hi-Fi system while on R&R in Saigon. But, as he recently told me:<br /></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As far as Saigon goes, it was off limits to the First Cavalry. The closest I got was a guy I met named "Frenchy" from the 1st of the 12th Cavalry and I left the R&R center and went to an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) officers club and had a few drinks and it was on the outskirts of Saigon. Fortunately we didn't get caught.</blockquote></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">At any rate, in 1969, Warner Bros. Records predated the flimsy plastic <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkU1teKNjwQ">K-Tel </a>revolution with the introduction of its <a href="http://www.dustbury.com/music/wbloss.html">Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders</a>. These mail-order-only double compilation albums were offered up for sacrifice by Warners for a mere $2 in an effort to promote its exponentially expanding, drug-addled roster of the new talent it otherwise had little idea what to do with. My father, smitten with the Leaders’ bang-for-your-buck quality upon seeing an advertisement printed on the inner sleeve of some other Warners full-length, ordered the first two: <a href="http://www.dustbury.com/music/wblist2.html"><i>The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook</i></a>, which featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience (<i>Red House</i>), The <a href="http://www.electricprunes.com/">Electric Prunes</a> (<i>Finders Keepers</i>) and the would-be immortal (except for its mortality) <i>Wide, Wide River of Shit</i> by disturbed New York weirdos <a href="http://www.thefugs.com/">The Fugs</a>; and <a href="http://www.dustbury.com/music/wblist2.html#336"><i>The 1969 Warner/Reprise Record Show</i></a>, featuring Neil Young with Crazy Horse (<i>Cinnamon Girl</i>), Jethro Tull (<i>Fat Man</i>) and<i> </i>the best-ever song by the Mothers of Invention, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge6j7uUCwQc"><i>Electric Aunt Jemima</i></a>, which is also, as far as I know, the only good song ever written about pancake mix.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><i>Slim Slow Slider</i> appeared on <i>The 1969 Warner/Reprise Songbook</i>, which I discovered in 1991, when I was about seventeen while pilfering my father’s record collection. I had never heard anything like it; it made me feel, I don’t know . . . <i>weird</i>. Maybe that’s why—though it may only hint at the dizzying form and function of <i>Astral Weeks</i> and even if it is the final song to appear on the album—<i>Slim Slow Slider</i> seems to me a logical and likely entrance to <i>Astral Weeks</i>. It certainly was for me, and maybe the brass at Warners knew it would be for others, too, when they slapped it on <i>Songbook</i>. Or perhaps they just had to put <i>something</i> from <i>Astral Weeks</i> on there, so why not its shortest song?</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">So there lay <i>Astral Weeks</i>, this unheard relic, manifested in cassette form and nursing a giant gash in its spine presumably administered by a near-impotent hacksaw. It certainly didn’t have the appearance of a classic; it just lay there, half-buried in the other non-performing specters of the cutout bin at anti-savings juggernaut <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicland">Musicland</a>. So then, for me, <i>Slim Slow Slider</i> earned the distinction of becoming the sole piece of music from either of the aforementioned Warner/Reprise Loss Leaders (I already had <i>Smash Hits</i> by The Jimi Hendrix Experience) to translate to a sale of the album from whence it came. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">I knew less about the recording process then, about most everything really, and would, therefore, not have burdened myself with noticing the adept yet abrupt tape edit at 3:26 in <i>Ballerina</i>, or the odd, accidental-sounding dropout of the string section at 2:43 in <i>Madame George</i>. And it took me quite awhile to figure out that the elasticity of the bass was due to the fact that it was an <i>upright</i>.<span style="font-size:0pt;"> </span>But I thought <i>Astral Weeks</i> was pretty adventurous, and it was certainly a useful tool in sinking to lower depths when I was already sunk pretty damned low, as teenagers are prone to do. <i>The Way Young Lovers Do</i> was easily my favorite track on the album for what I thought was its precise songwriting, as I mistook the <i>arrangement</i> of it for its songwriting. But what resonated with me most and still does about <i>Astral Weeks</i> is the way the varied instruments seem to haphazardly swirl around one another without submerging the whole thing into the piths of chaos. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">But I never gave it the same undivided attention as I did to my then current favorite records, like say, <i>Ten</i>, by Pearl Jam or the predatory pornography disguised as progressive hippie-ism that is<i> Blood Sugar Sex Magic</i> by the embarrassingly cocksure Red Hot Chili Peppers—both of which I preferred to <i>Nevermind</i>, to which I felt a certain disconnect. (Though my appreciation for Nirvana has outlived and eclipsed that of Pearl Jam and the disposable Peppers a hundred times over, I’m still baffled at how Kurt Cobain is considered the spokesman of a generation; he’s clearly awesome, but his provocative, confrontational, drug-addled femininity is too unique, and his lyrics are too obtuse to represent anything other than Kurt Cobain.) And then came Pavement and <a href="http://www.dinosaurjr.com/">Dinosaur jr</a>, with whom the levels of my obsession and admiration knew no limits. <i>Astral Weeks</i> was always there, though, as countless once-loved records fell forever out of favor.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">So all that was quite a long time ago, and may be of no greater importance to this dialogue other than to demonstrate the absurdity and unlikelihood of anything that occurs of <i>ever occurring</i>. That the brilliance of <i>Astral Weeks</i>, though not in any way <i>understood</i>, was not entirely lost on the naïveté and privilege of one brazen youth. And that, strangest of all, Van Morrison and his <i>Astral Weeks </i>would come home with a soldier from the jungles of Vietnam. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">It is paramount, then, to clarify that the subject manifested in this writing is explicitly <i>guilty by association</i>. That is; it is not only the <i>very </i><i>least</i> profound thing to have come from my father’s stint in the bush, but utterly laughable in its dependency on something with as much <i>gravitas </i>as a soldier’s tour of duty in a famously tumultuous Conflict, however integral to my ever hearing the damned thing it may be.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">V.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-style: italic;">Astral Weeks</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">, the first song on the album of the same name, Morrison howls:</span> </p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">There you go<br />Takin’ good care of your boy<br />Seein’ that he’s got clean clothes<br />A-puttin’ on his little red shoes<br />A-pointin’ a finger at me<br />And here I am<br />Standing in your sad arrest<br />Tryin’ to do my very best<br />Lookin’ straight at you</blockquote></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">These lines didn’t necessarily resonate with me back then, but they sure do now. I have assigned intensely personal meaning to them, and I’m apparently allowed to do so:</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Morrison has long lamented, generously, that his lyrics’ meaning are contingent upon who is listening to them. According to Bangs, Morrison told </span><i>Rolling Stone</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">, “I look at some of the stuff that comes out, y’know. And like, there it is and it feels right, but I can’t say for sure what it means.” The most surprising thing about the </span><i>words</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> of </span><i>Astral Weeks</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> may not be their ability to forcefully grab hold of specific, personal assignations varying from these ears to those ears, but to </span><i>change</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> along with the age of the listener over the short period of time she or he is allotted. </span></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Used to be the song <i>Astral Weeks</i> made me want to drop out; <i>y’know</i>, like the <a href="http://www.petersellers.com/">Peter Sellers </a>character in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkwvcxSQPN0"><i>I Love You, Alice B. Toklas</i><span style="font-style: italic;">!</span></a>, or The <a href="http://crime.about.com/od/murder/ig/The-Manson-Family/">Manson Family</a>, only with less disastrous or murderous results. It made me want to smoke pot all day and <i>make love</i> in an enormous wheat field sporting a Jesus beard, flailing around in a white robe.<span style="font-size:0pt;"> </span>It made me long for an era I wasn’t part of and perhaps had seen in a laundry detergent commercial. Now, when the thought of living in a field enters my mind, all I can think is <i>where is mutherfuckers supposed to poop?</i></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">The song <i>Astral Weeks</i> has moved me to tears quite recently though, and not because of the realization that the ideal of a perpetually stoned Jesus look-alike wearing dirty, tattered clothes is nothing to aspire to, unless you’re maybe hoping to wear the hat of the village burnout or the helmet of a bicycle messenger (the possible exception being the <a href="http://lostboys.wikia.com/wiki/Barnard_Hughes">Barnard Hughes</a> character in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsv_NQFbQzo"><i>The Lost Boys</i></a>). </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">It’s due to the hope and despair communicated by words and echoed in the instrumentation. It’s due to the egg shaker toe-tapping around in the left channel and expertly giving way to the quivering, racing string section, letting the song breathe while heightening its gentle dramatics. It’s due to that glorious and commanding upright bass, sounding and keeping time like waves and sediment plunking the bottom of a rusted aluminum boat before squeaking into a higher register, stubbornly repeating the same note so melodically. It’s due to the twittering flute and its circling, unburdened pep. It’s due to the classical guitar’s delicate and proper noodling relegated to the right channel, in service to making its presence known without drawing undue attention to itself. It’s due to the two-chord progression of Morrrison’s acoustic, <i>dead center</i> and percussively advancing the agenda of the melody. It’s due to Morrison’s words of bewilderment and to their delivery, and more than a little to the warm spring reverb luxuriously coating their tones and annunciation. And its due to the effortlessness by which it harnesses all of this in its execution, easing into your unconscious and seizing your <i>heart by the throat</i>, never really letting it go, maybe even for years after you’ve heard it. </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>VI.</strong></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">From song to song, <i>Astral Weeks </i>never quite lets you settle in, often engaging in the business of hijacking a heightened emotion and leaving it for dead by the side of the road, only to erect another in its place. Like when the peppy, major scale <i>joie de vivre </i>of the title track segues into the minor scale, foreboding depths of <i>Beside You</i>, whose title, when howled in pain by Morrison, sounds more threatening than promissory, as destiny necessarily manifests as a lifelong, joyless struggle routed in shared misfortune:</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">And I’ll stand beside you<br />Beside you, child<br />To never never wonder why at all<br />No no no no no no no no<br />To never never wonder why at all<br />To never never wonder why it’s gotta be<br />It has to be</blockquote><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Though it’s exceptionally beautiful, it’s nearly too crushing to listen to. </span><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It has to be</i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">. It’s brutish and bullying, and bankrupt in its idealism. But it’s not without tenderness. It’s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1A0p0F_iH8">Stanley Kowalski screeching </a><span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1A0p0F_iH8">Stella!</a> </span>on the Rain-slicked streets of New Orleans.</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> It’s the romanticism of the suffering inherent in being dragged down to crawl on the bottom by and alongside the one you’re with.</span><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">And though the following may in fact be a reference to <i>smoking drugs</i>:</p><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">You breathe in<br />You breathe out<br />You breathe in<br />You breathe out<br />You breathe in<br />You breathe out<br />You breathe in<br />You breathe out<br />And your high on your high flying cloud</blockquote><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">it is chugged out in such a heightened state of paranoia and panic, it makes the usual celebratory <a href="http://hightimes.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">High Times</span></a></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> model of weed smoking and the counterculture it has sustained for the better part of</span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">50 years (e.g.,</span><i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzEio_1trro">Half-Baked</a></i><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAS3ne-fJqA"><span style="font-style: italic;">Dazed and Confused</span></a>, hip-hop) seem </span><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">more sinister and unappealing than Just Say No crusaders </span><a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTx2cGHSh8">Nancy Reagan and Gary Coleman</a><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> could have ever imagined was possible.</span><br /></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">And then <i>Sweet Thing</i> appears, which may be my favorite song on <i>Astral Weeks</i> (but then, any of them might be), with its cascading strings and slightly overdriven, ragtag high hat. That same high hat also keeps time, albeit in support of the ride, in the collision of energetic bravado that is <i>The Way Young Lovers Do</i>. Besides inexplicably missing <i>That </i>from the title (Morrison employs the words the way <i>that </i>young lovers do for the chorus), <i>The Way Young Lovers Do</i>, as has been previously stated, was an early favorite of mine from <i>Astral Weeks</i>, its constitution constantly expanding and retracting, threatening to joyfully burst into a thousand particles.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Though <i>The Way Young Lovers Do</i> is perhaps the most accessible track on <em>Astral Weeks, </em>its velvetey rythym is deceptively tricky. I have a vague remembrance of, for the <i>longest time</i>, being stunned and utterly confused by it, as I was by Led Zeppelin’s <i>Black Dog</i>, and son of <i>Black Dog, <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,318175,00.html">Something Out of Nothing</a> </i>by Soul Asylum. Unfortunately, I rarely find myself in such a situation these days. Though it frustrates me to no end, I love that feeling of <i>trying to get it</i>. But I have had some trouble recently with much of <i>The Bedlam in Goliath</i> by <a href="http://www.thebedlam.net/">The Mars Volta</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQH_LXpBaIg"><i>Real</i> by Lupe Fiasco</a>, and the opening of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMjIhEQ6L08"><i>Rape This Day</i></a> by Tomahawk, whose thundering drum hits throw me off every goddamned time. </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>VII. </strong></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Without intending to diminish the brilliance of Van Morrison’s songwriting on <i>Astral Weeks</i>—and it is unequivocally brilliant—the notion of hearing his performing <i>Astral Weeks</i> sans the marvelous accompaniment present on the album is particularly deflating. Though Morrison had performed the brunt of <i>Astral Weeks</i> alongside a trio of thoughtfully selected musicians throughout Massachusetts prior to entering the studio, none of them played on the album. Producer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Merenstein">Lewis Merenstein</a> is credited with putting together a studio band of seasoned jazz musicians: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Jazz_Quartet">Modern Jazz Quartet</a> drummer Connie Kay; guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on Charles Mingus’s fantastic <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJNPDwkgT7U"><i>Black Saint and the Sinner Lady</i></a>; and the impossibly talented and dexterous Richard Davis on upright bass. While the occasional horns masterfully blowing along with John Payne’s flute and Larry Fallon’s breezy string arrangements (and harpsichord on <i>Cyprus Avenue</i>) are certainly integral to the texture and mood of <i>Astral Weeks</i>, it’s Davis’s incomparable upright bass lines that clearly impose the definitive context and fluidity of <i>Astral Weeks</i>. </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Revered alt/art-rock trailblazer John Cale, who was situated in a recording studio with derelict-rock outfit the Velvet Underground just down the hall from Morrison and his assembled musicians during the <i>Astral Weeks</i> sessions, has controversially stated: “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” This has all but been proven not to be the case. Davis—himself by all accounts no fan of our man Van, purportedly due to his lack of professionalism—claims there was little guidance from Morrison. Connie Kay told <i>Rolling Stone</i>: “I asked him what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing. We more or less sat there and jammed.” </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">It is essential however, to note that <i>jamming</i>, as used here, has little, if any, relation to the bastardization of the term, which has unfortunately come to signify the disparate clutter that is inevitably born of the cacophony birthed by musicians hell-bent on random improvisation with nary a thought as to what the other guy is playing.<i> Jamming </i>is generally styled around a lead sheet—noting any chord progressions and time changes—as a framework for improvisation. Morrison had no lead sheet, much to Davis’s chagrin, but, rather, Morrison chose to show his collaborators the chord changes by playing them on his guitar. </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">In the hands of less adept performers, the results could have been disastrous. As producer, Merenstein proved particularly prescient in this regard: his assemblage of musicians of the highest caliber, albeit beholden to a different form of musical expression, provided a previously unknown quantity, reconfiguring Morrison’s simple, folksy compositions to weep with lavish, extravagant orchestration. It was an unusually happy arranged marriage between the confines of pop songwriting and the experimentation of raucous jazz improvisation. The two disparate styles compliment each other quite impossibly, and often quite literally, from the snare rolls evoking the “soldier boys” Morrison sings of in <i>Madame George</i> to the tide-rolling bass line crashing like the waves on “some sandy beach” in the particularly venomous final track of <i>Astral Weeks</i>, <i>Slim Slow Slider</i>, where Morrison, as jilted lover, unleashes his contempt and longing for the former object of his affection. As <i>Slim Slow Slider</i> ends, so does <i>Astral Weeks</i>, collapsing into a fluttering, beatnik-inspired freakout, leaving you bloodied and invigorated, wondering what the hell just happened. </p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><strong>VIII.</strong></p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;">Actively seeking information in the hopes of assigning universal meaning to a held-dear artistic endeavor is not without its perils. Depending on how closely you hold it, the process may just take the thing itself from you, and forever change it, too, by clouding it with the impurity inherent in over-thunk application. Or it might ruin it. And though, here, none of the peripheral or pertinent information concerning the making of <i>Astral Weeks </i>has diminished my experience of listening to <span style="font-size:100%;">it</span>, I wouldn’t necessarily say it has enhanced it either. And I must say, the more information I gather regarding the making or supposed meaning of the eight masterpieces on <i>Astral Weeks</i>, the further I stray from the purity of the person I was when I first heard it. Boy, do I long for those days of discovery.</p><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: justify;"><i>Astral Weeks</i> is unmistakably the work of a young man, assigning proper respect to joy and pain and their requisite co-mingling, howling with uncertainty for what came before and what comes next. Its performer is such an unreal, perfect expression of a youth so singular that, though we may all age with his work, no dearth of new interpretations or meaning to extract from it, he is frozen in time, stubbornly refusing to age. And that’s fine. The <i>Astral Weeks </i>Morrison, amidst his ragtag band of instrumentalists, died with its release or, at the very least, went missing, never to be heard from again. Morrison has, reportedly, been playing the entirety of <i>Astral Weeks</i> (with the exceptions of <i>Beside You</i> and <i>Slim Slow Slider</i>) in recent concerts, though I can’t imagine. But good for him. </p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The stars must have been aligned: Morrison never sounded better than, or even remotely <i>like</i>, he did on <i>Astral Weeks</i> before or after, thanks to the most-bizarrely <i>perfect</i> collaboration between him and his gloriously makeshift band, as orchestrated by a visionary producer. Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion, that who you surround yourself with, whether friend or foe, lover or adversary, may just make you better than you really are.</span></div><p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </p>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-53039741443729628162008-08-25T10:43:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:43:06.306-07:00Beware the No-Name Street Vendor<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5238954963389452322" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI74tFekrGWfkKXj9Bh1j5sM8bz5EPP31fjTCHkFtKcLa6AMtOGaGhIj8bTY080hohDrst4RmUkl6MyD8sMyQbmna09F6TQLITzKiRHHrdHkzHW9ejeHtzBRYmk-sbZg2MzH7AT-ivODs/s320/GYROS+SANDWICH.jpg" border="0" /></span><span>Although it seems like a lifetime ago, I was a vegetarian for just about ten years. Upon our graduation from college, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) introduced the idea to me, and I eagerly accepted her challenge. Our reasons for engaging in this culturally-fringy behavior were fairly different, but complimented each other's perfectly: she had just earned her degree in Anthropology from the University of Illinois, having studied <a href="http://www.primates.com/monkeys/capuchin.htm">capuchins</a></span><span> in the Costa Rican rainforest, and decided that she could no longer in good conscience eat animals without sadness; and I wanted to continue to have sex with her.</span><br /><br /><span>In general, I became what my friend Tony once described as "one of those vegetarians who eats just chips." My basic plan of attack was to replace all meat with cheese and, since I had already eaten a fair amount of cheese before I gave up meat, I was now eating double the cheese and, quite regularly, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_cheese"><span>processed cheese food</span></a><span>. I was caught off guard when I, unexpectedly, grew to be quite large and constipated. <span style="font-style: italic;">What kind of shit is this</span>? I wondered.</span><br /><br /><span>After a fraudulent health scare, I stopped eating cheese, and also things like bread and any food that derived its calories from anything other than fiber. I was quite skinny, and the mass amounts of fiber I was consuming rendered me quite unpleasant to be around. I became quite vigilant about my lifestyle and beliefs, and became a humorless jerk of sorts. I refused to share my backyard bbq-bound cooler with a good friend of mine who seemingly constantly picked me up and drove me around everywhere and was like my <span style="font-style: italic;">brother</span> because I didn't want his "nasty-ass burgers dripping shit all over my shit." He gave me a ride anyway.</span><br /><br /><span>I also lectured another good friend, newly back in town after living in Washington, D.C. for several years, upon inviting me to the movies one Friday night, that I had "changed," and didn't go to movies any more on Friday nights—<span style="font-style: italic;">perhaps</span>, I would on a weeknight—but on Fridays I was "more into having experiences with real, actual people." This mostly involved going to the local </span><a href="http://chicago.metromix.com/bars-and-clubs/neighborhood_bar/gold-star-bar-east-village-ukrainian-village/141275/content"><span>hole-in-the-wall</span></a><span> and getting hammered on Old Style, smoking an entire pack of Kamel Red Light cigarettes while talking to the same four or five people I saw every day about some very particular element of rock music (Iggy Pop's role in Bowie's Berlin trilogy; "Fade to Black" foreshadowing Metallica's tendency toward late-career embarrassment, etc.), getting a vegetarian burrito with no cheese and passing out.</span><br /><br /><span>Reveling in my newfound skinniness, I would, from time to time, yell "fuck you, you fucking fat fucking son of a bitch!" to those passersby who would dare run afoul of my new brand of living my best life. Once, this occurred because I had stopped my bicycle in the middle of the street, with my tippy-toes dangling, in order to lean over my handlebars, which were smashing my breastbone, in an attempt to pick up a found quarter, prompting an perfectly average-sized driver to brake quite unexpectedly and honk his horn. "Fuck you, you fucking fat fucking son of a bitch!" I wasn't even able to get the quarter.</span><br /><br /><span>The height of my devotion to this new and exciting form of living came when we had to break it to my fiancé's parents that the food served at our upcoming wedding reception (which not only were they paying for, but also hosting in their backyard) would necessarily have to be all vegetarian, which, despite our having been vegetarians at this point for about five years, still couldn't have shocked them any more than if we would have divulged to them that we were planning a Scientology-themed wedding, after which we were joining the circus. I proudly took one for the team</span><span>—</span><span>my </span><span>wide-eyed soon-to-be </span><span>wife staring silently and nervously in the opposite direction</span><span>—</span><span>declaring that, being vegetarian ourselves, we couldn't put on an event that would make us responsible for the slaughter of untold numbers of animals, no matter how picky the guests were or how delicious the food would be. "We just don't think people should eat animals," I shrugged, looking square at the couple who would become my in-laws, my fiancé still timidly crooking her neck to the side to avoid the sheer horror of it all. "You know," my future father-in-law said as he stood up to tend to some burgers he had on the grill, "they'd eat you if they could."</span><br /><br /><span>After we got pregnant (her with our child, me with fear), the tenets of our vegetarianism began to melt right off the bone. She began to crave things like hamburgers and concluded that, for the sake of the baby and its development, eating meat was their best and healthiest option. Which was great, because I had already decided the previous Christmas Eve at her Aunt and Uncle's house that when I had been drinking and nobody was looking I would jam as much turkey in my mouth as was possible without choking.</span><br /><br /><span>This led to my invention of what I called "Event Meats," as in "I'm vegetarian, but I'll eat what I call Event Meats," a totally pathetic attempt to hold onto a fading vegetarian ethic that was nearly as misguided as that of the strip-mall dwelling "vegetarian" who eats fish and chicken, which is like professing to be a member of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_for_Jesus"><span style="font-style: italic;">Jews for Jesus</span></a><span>. Example: Thanksgiving turkey? Event meat (and when placed on a disposable napkin in a misguided attempt at portion control becomes what I like to call the "turkey nap"). Corned Beef on St. Patrick's Day? Event Meat. Ham on Christmas? Event Meat. Fried chicken on my birthday? Possibly Event Meat. Ribs at the Super Bowl? <span style="font-style: italic;">Maybe </span>Event Meat. Chicken fried rice on Saturday? Just meat.</span><br /><br /><span>And that was it. I am no longer super skinny and, though I'm over the feeling that I need to eat ten chicken legs in one sitting because it may be the last time I am ever to eat chicken, I still try to take my meat selections seriously. I never throw away or send back any meat, lest an animal gave its life in vain. And if I'm going to eat it, and deal with the residual guilt I harbor for turning my back on my former vegetarianism, then it had better at least approach delicious.</span><br /><br /><span>So, last Friday evening, when my wife introduced the idea of taking our two-year old to the </span><a href="http://www.bucktownartsfest.com/"><span>Bucktown Arts Festival</span></a><span> the following Sunday, I gave it my most enthusiastic endorsement. Oh sure, some of the art would be fine, but any time there's a street festival, there are street vendors selling culinary abominations you wouldn't normally dare to eat, but what are you going to do? Street vendors don't sell Brie and walnut salads, so I guess I'll have to settle for the deep fried taco-on-a-stick and a turkey leg mutated by gigantism.</span><br /><br /><span>When we arrived at the festival on Sunday, I had visions of hot dogs dancing in my head. Since I've been back aboard the midnight meat train, I have not yet indulged in a Chicago-Style hot dog—not even at the Home Depot (though I was fully-prepared to on one occasion, the stand was, thankfully, closed). I think about them about two to three times a week, their particularly nasty health-assaultive qualities beating out their possible deliciousness in most every scenario. In fact, a running joke in our house used to be my asking if where we're going has hot dogs. "You want to go to the Gap Outlet?" my wife would ask."Sure," I would reply. "You think they'll have hot dogs there?" This joke is no longer in rotation, not because my interest in hot dogs has dwindled, but because, apparently, it's not very funny, especially after hearing it 1,000 times.</span><br /><br /><span>When it was time to eat, we—one crabby kid and two increasingly crabby adults—headed to the modest row of street vendors in search of fulfillment. The first tent we stumbled upon, apparently run by the nuevo punk rock health enthusiasts who run </span><a href="http://www.emptybottle.com/bite.htm"><span>Bite</span></a><span>, was <span style="font-style: italic;">precisely</span> the type of vegetarian-friendly refuge we used to wish they had, but never did, at street fairs, selling the intriguing "BBQ </span><a href="http://vegetarian.about.com/od/glossary/g/Seitan.htm"><span>seitan</span></a><span> taco" alongside minimally aorta-punishing meat selections, like the delightful-sounding chicken sausage. My wife, generally a fan of all things natural, organic and good for you, immediately decided that we were going to eat there, and that I should get the seitan taco, correctly lamenting that it was just the sort of thing I used to go monkey bananas for. I urged her to wait until we had viewed all the food tents, citing the expense of the chicken sausage—that she and my son were to share for a perfectly reasonable $6—but really wanting to find, if not a hot dog, then its culinary equivalent. She gamely agreed, and we made our way to the end, passing corn dogs and funnel cakes, and fried rice and pizza, mouths watering nary a drop. She hurried back to the healthy tent with our starving child, and I suddenly found myself staring down the gyros tent.</span><br /><br /><span>I'm not, like cuckoo for pita puffs or anything, but I will enjoy a gyro (which—though most people who mispronounce the word gyros do so as \jī·rōz\—for some reason my father mispronounces as \gear·ohs\) about once a year, if my constitution leans towards the particularly lamb-deficient.</span><br /><br /><span>As there were no posted prices for the two delicacies offered for purchase—gyros and chicken pitas (by this logic, wouldn't they be <span style="font-style: italic;">chicken pitas</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">lamb pitas</span>?)—I asked how much a gyro might set one back. "Eight bucks," snarled the chef/cashier, looking and sounding not unlike the grizzled, tobacco-washed </span><a href="http://www.thesimpsons.com/episode_guide/1110.htm"><span>ghost of Lucille Ball from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Simpsons</span></span></a><span>, her puckered lips appearing downright negligent for not dangling a Basic 100 to within an inch of its life. After adding a 20oz. Diet Pepsi to my order (bringing the grand total to $11), I was, much to my shame and embarrassment, left with a mere 55 cents to banish to the mandatory, yet empty, tip jar. "Finally," she said, responding to the mini-thunderous clanks of the three coins before clearing out a laugh whose closest aural resemblance would be to that of a stubborn attempt to start a flooded engine. I smiled and hurriedly shuffled away with a vaguely warm heft of inherent possibilities neatly wrapped in foil in hand, my shoulders hunched and my eyes averted, before the true value of my paltry contribution could be discovered.</span><br /><br /><span>I found and sat with the rest of my party, where I administered an unwrapping of and an open-lipped teething to my newly-acquired lambwich. Hmm ... Didn't realize it came equipped with the grilled green peppers and onions</span><span>—</span><span>a slimy, nearly tasteless concoction until two hours after you've eaten it and for the entirety of the four hours after that, when its acidic mist returns to burn your trachea when propelled from urgent, unannounced depth charges originating somewhere in the lower torso region. The pita began to flake apart as if it hadn't been properly heated or, perhaps, had been dormant in its plastic storage bag for a month or so, slowly ridding itself of any semblance of moisture in anticipation of my seizure of it. The lamb meat was thin and tough, its taste and texture falling somewhere between a ham-flavored fruit roll-up and the tongue of a canvas shoe. There weren't enough tomatoes, and there was only a mild essence of </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzatziki"><span>tzatziki</span></a><span> sauce—what any gyro will tell you is its finest quality—as if it had been sprayed daintily from a perfume bottle. If I were being generous, I would rate it a 2 ½ out of 10.</span><br /><br /><span>And then it dawned on me as I scanned my short-term memory ... This isn't a real gyro, because that wasn't a real gyros place at all. It <span style="font-style: italic;">had no name</span>. No affiliation. Just signs featuring photographs of gyros and chicken pitas, perhaps taken by the same poor lady who prepares them. And they weren't even the </span><a href="http://www.kronosproducts.com/pos.html"><span>good signs</span></a><span>. You know, the ones featuring a curly-coiffed, classy in an '88 Judith Light kind of way, <span style="font-style: italic;">woman of a certain age</span> (let's say 37) enjoying a gyros sandwich, proclaiming something like "Mmm ... Gyros!" And there were certainly no traces of the magnificent </span><a href="http://www.interestingideas.com/roadside/gyros/gyros.htm"><span>handmade gyros paintings that adorn many a ragtag Chicago gyros operation</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><span>I had been blinded to the fact that this particular brand of gyro was of the no-name variety by the potential of the moderate satisfaction gyros have been known to produce, and was now left to suffer its punishing after-effects for the next 4 to 8 hours. Reportedly, the first gyro in the United States was introduced in 1968 in Chicago, and I swear, that may have just been the one I got.</span><br /><br /><span>After returning home and laying my son down for his daily nap, with the threat of battery acid tickling the end of my throat and filling my tired eyes with unwanted water, I picked up the ever-thinning Sunday <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Tribune</span> and ran into an article entitled </span><a href="http://www.rimag.com/articleXML/LN841681588.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">10 things you might not know about Meat</span></a><span>. Number 7 on this list was that "(t)urkeys have been bred to have such large breasts that they can't have sex and must be artificially inseminated." My former, vegetarian self would have been outraged, but all my dumber, meatier self could wonder was <span style="font-style: italic;">what kind of sick bastard would want to have sex with a turkey</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">large breasts or not</span>?</span><br /></div><span><br /></span>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-64939768309243946172008-08-22T11:00:00.000-07:002011-04-16T18:44:09.558-07:00For Indy, Whenever I May Find Him<div style="text-align: justify;">I<span style="font-size:100%;">n its most recent issue, <em>Entertainment Weekly </em>declared <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000184/">George Lucas</a> to be an “enemy of fun” in a <a href="http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20219195,00.html">review</a> of <em>Clone Wars</em>, which is widely being dismissed as a feature-film length commercial for the animated TV series of the same name. Luckily, an unfortunate character flaw rendering me indifferent to animated films, coupled with my sincere disdain for peripheral <em>Star Wars </em>projects (let alone the duress of finding a babysitter and neurotically debating whether ordering tickets online in advance is worth the extra dollar per ticket) has rendered the possibility of my viewing <em>Clone Wars </em>virtually non-existent. But I think that the folks at EW may be onto something.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Lucas has seemed to systematically destroy all of the trust of his long-suffering fans over the course of many years through the extortion of untold small personal fortunes from the believers, who have longingly spent one dollar at a time on the futile hope that something, maybe <em>something</em>, will reconnect them with the manifestation of Longinus’s <em>Sublime</em> they felt upon seeing <em>Star Wars</em> or <em><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1981/06/15/1981_06_15_132_TNY_CARDS_000119462?currentPage=all">Raiders of the Lost Ark</a> </em>for the first time. Among Lucas’s many well-documented offenses is the release of the Special Edition of the <em>Star Wars </em>trilogy. Upon its release, it seemed a generous offering, affording the fans and novices alike the eye-widening opportunity to bear witness to the <em>Star Wars</em> trilogy on the silver screen, but upon reflection and, perhaps, a bit of hard-earned cynicism, proved to be an elaborate ploy to revise our memories to include images that weren’t there the first go-round, in order to advertise for the forthcoming, ill-fated Episodes I, II and III. Sorry, but Boba Fett was never in <em>Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope</em>, even if his dad (<em>his fucking dad!</em>) was a major plot point in the aptly-titled <em><a href="http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/21864_STAR_WARS_EPISODE_TWO_ATTACK_OF_THE_CLONES">Attack of the Clones</a></em>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">It’s almost as if Jim Davis were to go back and remove all traces of Jon’s live-in, mustachioed pseudo-homosexual love interest (and, lest we forget, Odie’s owner) Lyman from <em><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345443823">Garfield at Large</a> </em>and <em><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780345449757">Garfield Gains Weight</a></em>. Sure, the uninitiated or the casual fan may be oblivious, but if you were there the first time around, you know that it goes a certain way. The United States didn’t win the Vietnam Conflict and Arthur Dimmesdale doesn’t live in the end. You can’t rewrite a history that could be recanted by untold thousands. Lucas tries anyway.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>So, then, it should come to no one’s surprise—though it did to mine—that Lucas would go back and tinker with his early masterwork <em><a href="http://www.thx1138movie.com/">THX1138</a></em> a little bit, adding a few expansive CGI shots that make the picture a little less claustrophobic, claustrophobia being the whole point.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>For me, though, Lucas’s most heinous offense is his changing the title of <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em> to <em>Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark</em>, and inserting it and its sequels, numerically, into a lineage that includes the sleep-inducing television series <em>The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones </em>(re-titled <em>The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles</em> by Lucas for its recent DVD rollout) that somehow managed to be less Indiana Jones-like than either ABC’s <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083488/">Tales of the Gold Monkey </a></em>or CBS’s <em><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083391/">Bring ‘em Back Alive</a></em>, having Young Indy cavorting around with historical figures in lame-duck scenarios. And that’s how Indiana Jones met Howard Hughes ... and that’s how Indiana Jones met Dizzie Gillespie ... and that’s how Indiana Jones met Abbot and Costello, etc.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>Now, <em>American Graffiti </em>remains as Lucas’s only unaltered major work.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Raiders of the Lost Ark</em> is my favorite movie ever. Sure, sometimes I wish I could say my favorite film was Godard’s <em>Weekend</em>, or <em>Last Year at Marienbad</em> or something, but it’s not. And I vehemently deny and reject the notion—while understanding its importance in the equation and its applicable weight—that this is so primarily because I was seven years old when I saw it for the first time. That certainly accounts for my near-panic driven desire to buy any and all Indiana Jones merchandise, modest as it is ( and certainly for the nearly untouched box of Indiana Jones emblazoned Apple Jacks in my pantry), but there are plenty of things I loved with as much fervor that I have no problem disavowing, or even denying any knowledge of ever having heard of in order to spare myself unneeded embarrassment. No, <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark </em>is just about perfect, and there are many reasons why; primarily the brilliant script by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001410/">Lawrence Kasdan</a> and the dust-up direction of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000229/">Steven Spielberg</a>, less-so the creation of Indiana Jones (nee Indiana Smith) by Lucas.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>So it was with an awkward, manufactured optimism that I greeted the news of the fourth installation of what was soon to be the former Indiana Jones trilogy—after all, this making of a quadrology out of a trilogy had just been done somewhat successfully with the former <em>Die Hard </em>trilogy, which, strangely enough, nearly mirrors the steady decline of the <em>Indiana Jones</em> trilogy film for film: the brilliant first film; the exciting yet ridiculous second film; and the hugely disappointing, yet I can’t help but want to like it because it has some brilliant elements but man some of it is so terrible third film. After all, I figured (as I had with <em><a href="http://www.livefreeordieharddvd.com/">Live Free or Die Hard</a></em>), they have already caused irreparable damage to the series with the third one; what’s there to lose?</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>Everything seemed to be in place for at least the possibility of the great Dr. Jones of our youth to make a heroic comeback. Pictures released from the set of <em>Indiana Jones 4</em> showing Harrison Ford in his trademark fedora and yellowed, casually destroyed white button-up shirt inspired man-crush goose bumps. Karen Allen was, finally, back as Marion Ravenwood. Cate Blanchett looked assuredly wicked and cruelly beautiful as the sure-to-be formidable Soviet villain. Rumors, seemingly fuelled by the filmmakers, abounded that the plot had something to do with the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Then they released the name, <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</em>, and everything deflated.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Vanity Fair </em>published a very insightful <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/02/indianajones200802">article</a> documenting how <em>Indiana Jones 4</em> came to fruition: Lucas had been pitching the impetus of what would become <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</em> to Spielberg and Ford for the better part of 20 years to no avail. It’s this or nothing, Lucas warned. So screenwriters were hired, one after another, in the thankless task of attempting to spin Lucas’s unyeilding refuse into gold. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0462895/">David Koepp</a>, a good writer (he wrote the screenplays for <em>Carlito’s Way </em>and <em>War of the Worlds</em>) was the man who finally won the endorsement of all parties involved with an uneven script that, at times, gets to the core of what made <em>Raiders of the Lost Ark </em>incomparable entertainment and, at other times, resorts to the silliness that ruined the series.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>Having now seen <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</em>, I suppose it was okay, and though there is, indeed, a crystal skull, its kingdom is nowhere to be found. There’s a strong (practically <em>ripped</em>) possibility that <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull </em>is a terrible offense, and I’m either being generous or cowardly in my assessment that it was okay because I want to like it so badly. Regardless, I will most definitely purchase <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</em> upon its DVD release because, well ... Christ, who knows? But hopefully there will be an absurdly expensive two-disc Special Collector’s Edition that will render the notion of my purchasing the one-disc version seem just preposterous.</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>The first red flag raised was that goddamned title, <em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull</em>, which struck me in way not dissimilar to the way <em>The Phantom Menace</em> (itself somehow akin to “silent but deadly” as another euphemism for expelled gas) struck me: I thought it was uniformally stupid. So I have chosen other possible—dare I say better—titles for an Indiana Jones movie, inviting a visualization of the films they could represent:</tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Last Slice of Pizza</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Challah of Salah</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Bucket of KFC</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Flatulence of Angels</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Can of Low-Sodium Tomato Soup</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the University of Illinois at Chicago</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Loincloth of the Lord</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Official Sportsdrink of the NFL</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Parameters of Decency</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Grand Mitsubishi of Elmhurst</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Season of Giving</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Gayle</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Preponderance of Sexual Ambiguity</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Thawing of the Frozen Hamburger</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Undercover Fatsuit of American Shame</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Curse of the Country Kitchen</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Burning Bush of the She-God</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Boner to end All Boners</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Farts That, Surprisingly, Were More</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Gravy Boat of the Future</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the House of Hunan</em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em></em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb><em>Indiana Jones and the Temple of Donuts </em></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb></tb></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><tb>Adios, Sapito.</tb></span></div>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2551486173716413337.post-1533651609739900582008-08-20T18:00:00.000-07:002008-08-22T13:52:48.460-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7_GmP1ce1D7Yr1pehwxsdfziUXVp64Ff4iNNF4yY7L6a5Rxs4wpNvdNpOogxW1P7rTz4amN57eVYjkS78d9R-dekn2YGtztls22N3P3fW6pfE__bP5nuCgc0OusMzg84LROWV6LisOM8/s1600-h/BLARS.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7_GmP1ce1D7Yr1pehwxsdfziUXVp64Ff4iNNF4yY7L6a5Rxs4wpNvdNpOogxW1P7rTz4amN57eVYjkS78d9R-dekn2YGtztls22N3P3fW6pfE__bP5nuCgc0OusMzg84LROWV6LisOM8/s400/BLARS.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5236769954815088450" border="0" /></a>BLARSOhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02870498539961547229noreply@blogger.com0