Pressing Questions for a remote control nation. By the way, the last 40 minutes of Tuesday Night Live are pretty bad.

Viewer feedback time, or maybe, you will hopefully, you know, respond… we’re so lonely here.

*Cue crickets*

It's time for a new running segment (which means I will likely do it once more, and then never again).

When it comes to putting the list of the top rock bands: Nirvana or Queen?

Stones vs. Beatles is an endless argument. And Zeppelin vs. Floyd depends on whether you drank or smoked pot in college. Nirvana vs. Queen is one of the more intriguing either/or questions I have come upon.

If you had to put your life in the hands of one action (not super) hero, who would it be?

Let’s all concede that it’s terrible. But how many times have you watched or listened through R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet. And what did it do to you: make you feel shameful, admit you are powerless to idiot-pop/R&B, or selflessly admit that we need crap in our life to justify our sad devotion to bands no one will remember but us in 20 years, but we will always be able to look back and tell our kids that this song is sung by a guy in jail, all while waiting for the line of preposterous events to transpire.

On average, how much of the TV that you watch is reality shows? What do you think this says about you? Side-note: Do you watch it for the drama, to feel better about yourself in contrast, to watch the fires that will bring down our society down slowly start to build on the kindling of loser apathy, or because you start to watch it because nothing else is on, only to figure out 4 weeks later that you are now hopelessly obsessed with the lives of teenagers in Orange County?

If you are a woman, which star would you rather go to see a movie for: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, or John Cusack? Which would you go home with on the self-perceived notion they are closest to the characters they play in their movies? And, as such, does this put Tom Cruise out of the running?

If you are a man, which of those three men would you feel most comfortable around knowing that you woman might leave you for one of them? And does someone’s reported homosexuality and height issues make this an easier choice. (Personal note, I would be fucking terrified if John Cusack showed up single to a party I was at.)

At what point in your life do you see yourself changing from Self-destruction to self-preservation. Is this one of the big years, those either end in a 5 or a 0. Will it be when you hit rock bottom? Or when your parents finally stop giving you money? Your wedding or first or, god forbid it takes two, second kid? Never? (If you answer this, then I say, rock out with your cock out!)

When you go to a bar, which do you usually tend to go with the intent of doing? Going to get drunk? In the hopes of not waking up alone? To pick fights with smaller people (2-8 drinks) bigger people (9-17), just for the scars (20+)? Going to only have a few drinks, look at a few potential mates, only to begin to cower in fear, shut down any outgoing spirit and hope that someone is able to see your unique individuality across the bar and fall in love with you?

If you were in a town with only two bars, with one being a gay bar, the other being a biker bar, which bar would you go to first, and where did you think you be at last call?

If you were given the chance of have a one night stand with your personal sexual icon and having even odds that it will last for a while (months to years) (and the sex is the best of your life), or having one night with your soulmate where the night is pretty good, but by choosing this option it then reduces the chances that you will ever meet them again to 10%. Mind that you may in your life, you may never even meet a soulmate, even if they truly do exist. If you choose the former, how many people would you tell? If you choose the latter, and you never run into the person again, will it cause you to get cold feet on the night before your wedding to someone else? Do you take the sure thing or wait for a serendipitous reunion? Does your answer depress you or are you able to reason out your choice?

Which countries National Anthem would you choose for America’s if The Star Spangled Banner never were written? And if the choice were presented, would you rather sing the Theme Song from the Jefferson’s or the anthem of the U.S.S.R.? Would it even be close?

Sonic Youth or The Who?

In the movie Demolition Man, which of the movies futuristic concepts do you find more extremely outlandish and unlikely: that the bulk of society is well mannered, without a 1/1000th of the crime, and genuinely civil, or that Taco Bell is the only restaurant. The later part may seem like a joke, but think of it this way, which is less likely to happen in America: that society becomes as close to a Utopia as it has ever been (and while this is not the Utopia I imagine, but it’s peaceful, almost crime free, and people are more civil to each other than any 50’s sitcom ever was, and I am ignoring the whole sewer subculture for arguments sake, because it would certainly exist, but don’t factor it in to your answer), or that a corporate empire eliminates all choice in consumerism?

There is a traditional question of which would you rather have, only one arm or only one leg, or one of the human sets that come in two. Rather than have you make a depressing choice, which would you rather have endowed to you (and suppose that all of humanity is given this option): three arms, three legs, three eyes, three ears, and, what the hell, lets throw the option to have one more additional piece of genitalia?

Would this forever tarnish the records of professional and amateur sports for you, or would you match the stats of three handed Tracy McGrady with two handed Michael Jordan?

Which would you choose, and after this choice, do you think you would both consciously and subconsciously attracted to people who made the same choice as you? If you think yes, it this an indication of your sexual preference in terms of race, or that you would rather have a spouse that can play three handed tennis, basketball or slapjack together? And if you married someone that made the same choice as you, would you secretly be disappointed in your offspring if they, come 14 (the age where the choice is presented), chose a different extra appendage? Do you think this also may make you someone bigoted? And what if they chose to have an extra wang or buh-gina? Would this make you lower their curfew by an hour? And (last one) if you were to go through a divorce, do you think your initial regret would be that (supposing you didn’t already) choose the extra genitalia for your single years, and if you did choose the extra sexual appendage, how much of the blame would you place on your choice.

If you had to choose between having a truly great president (or Prime Minister or King, on the strange chance someone international reads this thing) and have a tumultuous time (war, attacks, economic depression) that ends on a upswing in most every level or a bad president with only half of the problems and leaves the country mildly to noticeably worse off then when the President started.

Somewhat of the basis of this comes from Batman, the comics. There is theory in the books that maybe the maniacs in Gotham exist because Batman is there; somehow in the fact that Two Face and Joker came to Gotham is because there is someone who specifically fights characters like them. Batman, of course, fights the low level thug, but his attention is usually hijacked by the maniacal über-villians. Would The Joker, Two Face, Scarecrow etc. do what they do or even exist in Miami, Indianapolis, or San Francisco?

This is simply a theory in the books, and I won’t add anything else to what the theory may be (I’m gonna try this brevity thing for a bit), but take that as is.

Would you rather have FDR or Lincoln and have to live with equal strife (though not identical) that they had in their presidencies. Or would you rather have a Jimmy Carter, Clinton or Reagan? Is it worth living in a world of fear yet believing in your leader? Or is it better to live comfortably, yet see things going downhill, and be able to point your finger at the President other people chose. Would you rather see things get slowly worse, or would you be willing to live through hardship, knowing that good is happening from the top, and have the light at the tunnel ever present.

If you choose the lesser president option, do you consider your decision selfish or rational? If you chose the Great President alternative, are you admitting that no good can come without bad, saying that struggle is a necessity for societal greatness, or are you an eternal optimist? If you chose the FDR option, did you also choose the one night stand with your soulmate?

And third, if you are a democrat, would you take a president like FDR instead of Bush II, where we would live in a world without an Iraq (his) war, but we would have one more event like 9-11, and 50/50 odds of a third one in his tenure?

(continued...)

One of my favorite posts.

This is another old writing. One of my friends asked me about dark side of the moon. I gave me answer, and it turned out to be something far beyond what I would have concieved. I wrote this in 2004, when my blog was a email. I kind of miss the idea of knowing the people who read my writing, but at the same time, I was always going for further notoriety. So now to the Indiana of a little bit ago:

I have been in a conversation via email with a friend about Dark Side of the moon. Below is the extent of the text.

I have been meaning to do a peice about Pink Floyd and what their place is in the scheme of rock and roll history. But for me, it's like the white album. I love Floyd so much and for so many reasons, and perhaps not for the reason so many are attracted to the band (drugs), I have a hard time talking about it with most people because I fear they don't get it and they only tarnish my love of that band, because it hurts me that people aren't getting the whole picture. For those who understand it's something special and far better than a drug trip.

Anyway, this one gets lenghty and very philosophical. It may seem a little disjointed at times due to the fact I haven't re edited yet. But to be fair, I rarely do these with edits, because I have already thought of this things way in advance and I don't like to let reason and changes of heart to corrupt the original passion. I'd rather live with a mistake than re-edit the past.
Enjoy,

All of I know about Dark Side comes from listening to it when I used to sit in my bedroom and read. I got the album, along with Zeppelin Remasters, when I turned 14. It was like giving a kid a hand grenade. But I sat and listened to it, over and over again. And it was mostly for the sonic resources. When I was that age, I was so self obsessed with literature and devouring everything I could about anything intellectual. It was the same soundtrack for mind expansion that so many druggies turn to in college.

Which is why there are so many copies of that album sold. Every day for drugs or intellectual loneliness, the dark side of the moon is able to appeal.

As for the actual meaning, it is about madness in life. Or this is at least the meaning I have heard from commentary from Waters and Gilmore and co. More specifically, it's about getting into the rat race and the methodical routines of everyday life, and how that slowly takes away any semblance of eternal self. Because most of the album was fit together after the fact, the sequence (outside of the closer track) is somewhat irrelevant thematically. But we can see the mass of themes from which they were grabbing from. A drive for money, the endless drive of time (the sun is the same in the relative way but your older) against your individualism and the ultimate showdown between conforming and self.

Much of what I have heard from the band about the themes is about how these things can drive you mad and put you in such a place as so you cannot understand the external world. Combined with the real life dealings of watching Syd Barret go insane from drug induced haze certainly figures into this. Which perhaps can be extended to a bigger sense, almost in a matrix like sense of two worlds, where there are those who are locked in one state of mind from the trappings of everyday life, and those who go mad trying to find something bigger. At the time, it could be argued that it was drugs, but in truth, I never believed that drugs changed the world of those people in Pink Floyd, drugs never changed their views or were opened to other things. They were far too smart and I think the other world was one of near enlightenment, where the truth would be revealed.

Which brings us to the two central icons in the album, the sun and the moon. In perhaps the most basic sense, the sun equals life and the moon equals death. The sun gives us everything and in the rotation of the earth, we are able to see all of the sun. It is always there and it is what drives life on the planet. We know what it is and we can take it as it. But with the Moon, we only see one side of it. It's the dark side of the moon because it is never shown to earth. There are two objects in the sky that we can clearly see, but we only know of the half of one of them. That intangibility of the moon is so alluring and so mystifying. As I think it works for death. We know what it is, but we don't know the other side of it. We know the face of death so to speak, but what is in the darkness, it remains a mystery. And so I think in the end, everything is overcome by the dark side of the moon.

As for the inevitability of people to dismiss negativity. I already have accepted I am going to hell. I mean, I have committed some sins in my life, between pride, gluttony, wrath, lies, deceits. Even on the smaller scales, I think that I don't deserve to go to heaven for not being bad, because simply, I don't think I did anything that great to deserve entry. But even in a deeper sense, I say hell because its a kind of knowledge that I will die, and even if hell is not torture, it is sadness. And I probably don't believe in a greater scheme beyond life, I think we have to make the most of life as it. Because really how great could heaven be if we have to lose everyone around us to get there. Eternal bliss and knowledge can ever truly fill the gap of heartbreak and loss. Even if you were reunited with people in heaven, would you want to see them again? They have lived their life for so long without you or since your departure, it not going to be the same. As good as it may feel to be reunited, you can never go home again. It breaks my heart to think about it, because death is so hard as it is. What would life be if we didn't learn everything we wanted to or had the love of our life we all deserved. Simply, it would be misery.

And thats the reason why regrets stay with you for so long, they are reminders of how hard life can really be. The downfall of great memories is that their effect lessens with time in your own mind. It begins to take other people or other events to trigger the feeling once again of those memories. But once they fade, it leaves an intense sting of melancholy because you know that time is long gone. I try not to think of my friends from back home too much, because it only makes me sad in the end. I feel like one of the best things in my life has passed me, and I have only the memories which will slowly let fade away and lessen with time on their own.

Simply put, I think most of the world will always be optimists because they want to believe that everything will work out. It's much more comforting to be climbing to the top instead of working from the bottom up. Most people have a psychological need/fix to believe in heaven because they need to believe that their is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They need something to keep them going to avoid indulging the thought that it might all be for naught. As much as I don't agree with people of this ilk, I do not look down upon them, for surely I am looking for my own truths in the world as well, I simply would rather be enlightened through life than from death.

Studies show that people who are able to believe in one form or another that they are doing what they ultimately want to move to be far happier than those who feel like they are failing. Of course, this comes as no surprise, but the other part of this is that those people who do believe are far more likely to be successful in life while those who don't are infinitely more prone to panic attacks and mental breakdowns. It is in the very same vein of reasoning why so many people who rediscover religion are suddenly that much more successful than they were at their moment of rock bottom. They suddenly have something to move towards. It's the light at the end of the tunnel, its the light we move to when we die. It's something to hold on to and it can be a mighty buoyant preserver.

But I am not a religious man in this sense. I still don't believe we are really working to an other worldly goal. I think that Buddha was on to something when he wrote that all life is suffering, and all suffering comes from desire. It is only when you accept these two and give up desire that you can reach enlightenment. Conversely, he also wrote that if the string is too loose, it will not make a sound, but if it is too tight, it will break. If you think of the two in a combined greater scheme, as to believe that realizing that not all of life is rosy and that much of our mental anguish comes from desire of things we don't truly need (which means everything but food, sleep and water), but not too take anything to far as to be dominant and not too be too lax as to be ineffective.

As for an afterlife, I don't really want to believe the common thoughts of heaven, from any sense of the world. First off, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. I am sure sex, meeting your idols, and talking with the angels and learning the truth of all of history and the universe would get old. I also don't believe that Satan could be so evil. If this was a man cast out of heaven, why would he torture the souls of those cast out of heaven like he was, essentially still fulfilling God's will. Moreso, if rock and roll, miniskirts, and booze are all instruments of the devil, Heaven would be awfully vanilla. You would become numb in Hell. You would also become bored in Heaven, and you probably would go mad too, for what could is knowledge you cannot use. Earth would become a spectacle you would forever long to rejoin, knowledge and pleasure be damned.

In Fight Club, there is the scene where the narrator is given a chemical burn from Tyler Durden. It's classic transfigured Buddhism, as you have to let go and hit rock bottom (in essence a sense that perhaps nothing may ever go your way in life). Only then, when you know the extreme of pure pain and sadness may you reach the pure pleasure of enlightenment By saying I believe I am going to hell is not truly a belief that I am destined to a life of torture, but it is transposed Buddhism. I am not afraid of death; I know that there may be no tomorrow. That is my rock bottom. But it was from there, from a deep realization that life may be the only time we ever have, that I really began to appreciate everything all the more.

Enlightenment is that moment when you are able to see everything in perspective, when life makes sense. I came out of this realizing that much of what we have thought about life is reversed. Most of our lives we are taught that life is a great mystery, that nothing is set knowledge.

I think it's the opposite. Life is not the mystery but the question, and it is each life and each soul that is the enigma and from where we may reach a higher plain, whether you call it heaven, enlightenment or rapture.

Life is out to reveal us.

(continued...)

This is an oldie but goodie

Originally written 4-02-04

I thought I'd change things up and do something a little different:

So now I will transform into:

Archibald Montenegro, reviever of bad films galore.

Grind (2003):

Somewhere in the late stages of 2001-2002, one of the studio execs must have noticed that skateboarding was popular again, like it was in the mid 80's and late 60's. Also seeing that it was popular to those of their main target demo (14-18 year olds), they thought they couldn't miss.

First off, we must realize that a good skating movie has never been made, and likely never will be made. Thrasin has the Chili Peppers and still sucks ass. So does california Air and that movie where they have an inline skate race at the end and one of the boys states: RULE #1: There are no rules.

Essentially, watching a movie about a subjective judgement sport is about as compelling as listening to poetry in dead languages. You still don't know the winner in the end. It's really hard to tell who had the superior run unless someone messes up. Instead of having the game end on a last shot or a game saving block, you watch two poeople do routines. I mean, I have watched Bring it On a few times. As well as Center Stage. But in the end, I was still looking around going "why did someone lose." I am not putting these down as sports, well, not entirely, but as for movie engines, I mean, I would have no idea who won the skate off at the end of this movie if not for the celebration of the characters. This also goes for "You got SERVED BITCH" (I added the last word) I mean, unless one of the poeple messes up, who outside of dance experts can tell who wins (sorry, I'm having a hard time writing these following words) a hip...hop...dance...off.

Anyway, Grind is a terrible movie on almost every level. There are multiple scenes where the action/ punchline seems to go on way too long or cuts before any discernable turn out. In one instance, the good group of skaters is in a highway throwing war with the rival...wigger...skaters (and no, it doesn't really even make sense in the context of the film). Just when you hear the engine of the good guys van rev up and it looks like they are going to move to a bigger showdown, there is a cut to the side of the highway. Me and my friends were dying at this point.

This film also has the single worst character in cinema in years, (if you ever see it, you'll know who I am talking about immediately). The only one comparrable is John Laroquette in Richie Rich (or Mac Culkin, for that matter in that movie. *side note, when the guy who does the voiceovers for Dodge out acts everyone in a movie, ho boy). This kid spends half of the movie with his lips puckered and continually lays some of the worst lines that someone must have thought were funny out. (He does have one good one, where upon falling he yells "I think I sprained my taint!) But rest assured if not for that, he actually takes away from every scene he is in. It's actually a fascinating thing to watch, as there is no doubt that this movie would not be awful with anyone else, but in every scene he is in, you can just feel his dead weight bringing the scene and movie down with him. It's perhaps the greatest act of sabotage in years. It's quite an accomplishment when you actually want to strangle an actor for being so damned awful.

So lets recap here:

The worst actor in a movie in years.
An indecipherable climactic skating showdown.
Scenes that either go nowhere or cut halfway in.

And more:
Needless celeb cameos: From Tom Green to Bam Margera
A massive dance scene (to Play that funky music, no less)
Awful skate punk soundtrack (really, these kids all have NOFX stickers, so how can they tolerate Simple Plan)

AND FINALLY

Near the third act of the movie, the group of the boys go to a Clown College, where upon they find the annoying actors parents. They reuinte and he says he's a slackers because he really wants his folks attention (NO I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP)

This movie is really a sight to be seen, an act of both corporate greed and artistic incompetence. Bravo.

If it's ever coming on TV, either run, or grab 3 friends and 20 beers, and you'll have a blast.

(continued...)

Frodo Form 7-27, Star trek, Omegas, great comedies of all time and Wedding Crashers

Little brain blips and rehashes and then one big one.

The more I watch it, I am continuing to notch up my ranking of The Killer’s “Mr. Brightside” in the canon of all time great music videos. It’s not just the atmosphere and thin plot of it, or even that Eric Roberts is in it (Eric Roberts), it’s that there is barely a single cut of that video that is not absolutely compelling or thrilling.

Entourage may be the single finest representation on film of what real male life is actually like. From the running dialogue, to the constant goading and an inability of these characters to not act like idiots, to minimalist plots that require the episodes to be driven by interaction and not necessarily from atmosphere. This is a addendum to what character driven means. It’s a show about 3 guys who have a Hollywood star as a friend they mooch off, but it’s really about living in your twenties (and living in LA, more so, and why me and my flatmate like it) and going through life and business with your friends, often at the same time. Turtle may be the finest example of this. Every guy has a friend in their group who is the omega dog. Alpha dog is kind of blurry, because there are usually two or more who lead the gang, and there are betas which covers everyone else. But guys have whipping boys.

Side note:

The Omega guy of any group is a strange anomaly. Somehow, the ranking system is established very early on, often without any verbal communication. The guy is just there. He rarely is able to bring birds into the mix, and usually wind up costing other bed time, and they usually stammer, or can’t make great comebacks. Turtle is a great omega, because he brings nothing to the table with marketable skills that most women like. But Turtle brings weed, and is the driver (except when E drives the Maserati). We love these guys, because we see a little brother factor in them. We trust them, we love them, but if there is going to be a mishap that we all laugh at, it’s usually the Omega who does it. We will all bother the betas, and occasionally the alphas (only occasionally because they have a Reagan-like ability to bounce this off of them), but we constantly go after the Omegas and turtles. The truth is there is no malice is this. It’s only busting balls, and we always look after the Omega. In fact I have never met a group of guys without an Omega set, it’s just something that happens across the board. Some guy eventually makes it in to the group because of a small connection, and they wind up being someone who is always there. I have never met a group of women who kept an omega. Men just do not have that killer instinct like women do about their group of friends. (Which is perhaps why women never like their boy’s friends, for the simple fact that they are taught to eradicate what is not working in their view of themes)

I am still undecided on “Stella” on comedy central. But I know that the pilot episode is dynamite, simply for the argument on funk, funk rock, and funk rock. That and the line when a man wearing a skunk tail (to be dressed as a skunk person, not a skunk) to a board of 3 African Americans – “may I address, the board, all black.”

Is it strike anyone else odd that one of the tracks on Coldplay’s X and Y is called Low, like the David Bowie/ Brian Eno album, since they are clearly ripping off that style, you know, sound without silence

James Doohan passed, and it was a moment for all nerds/ fans of Star Trek. While many thought it was just a passing of a TV star, there was a bit of humanity (The nurds) who felt a bit of sadness. Say what you will about the geeks and dweebs who like Sci-fi, but what most of the mocking will never get or have is the profound love for what may eventually be, and a life that isn’t so myopic. When a culture of cool prevails over all art forms on one level or another, excluding and including journalism, Sci-fi remains as the eternally uncool. Maybe the reason that they are worthy of mocking is their ability to put their heads in the clouds and disattachment to most of reality, that they don’t care about what’s in the know or now. But the truth is that Sci-fi fans (well maybe born again Christians who are waiting for the second coming of Christ, which in all odds, is as likely as a alien landing, and I am degrading neither group or likelihood) are the greatest group of living optimists on Earth, because they keep waiting to believe that something is going to make everything better, holding on for an opening of opportunity. James Doohan, or Scotty, was not so much a loss for the betterment of society, but the absolvement of a link to a better place that so many people hitched their worldview on. Losing him wasn’t about losing hope, but merely missing a fragment of something that made them hope for the better when they were younger.

Speaking of escapist fantasies, I feel I should touch upon Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But, seeing that the whole thing is about 2000 words, it’s now its own post.

http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2005/07/harry-potter-and-half-great-media.html

I finally saw Wedding Crashers. This film may have the worst third act of any good movie I can think of. But maybe it’s a symptom of the comedy genre in the era of the mass controlled studio age.

Greatest comedies since 1980:

1. Caddyshack. I told a group of guys I worked with that were all part of one minority group or another, if you want to succeed in the white business world, memorize this movie.

2. Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery. – When we as a culture are able to forget the sequels, this movie’s greatness will shine. It’s not only non stop with jokes, the jokes are varied in style. Sight gags (the cement roller room), lines (allow myself to introduce, myself), satire (why don’t you just take him outside and shoot him? No, I’ll put him in an easily escapable situation and hope that everything goes as planned), bad guys (Dr. Evil), idiot jokes (One million dollars!), failure jokes (I’m still alive, just very badly burned), a great climactic fight, and the absolutely random (Dr. Evil in group therapy may be the greatest comedy monologue of all time).

3. Top Secret! – Combine Elvis movies, spy films, and the Zucker-Abrahms at their prime, and you have a masterpiece. That no one knows of, or at least to a point where it should be known is a shame. Val Kilmer sings. Underwater bar fights. The greatest joke ever that involved a magnet.

4. The Naked Gun – It’s a gem of a movie on it’s own, and warranting of this place, but I rank it above # 5 because of the third act. As soon as this movie hits the baseball park, I can’t stop laughing. For 25 minutes, we are not going on plot, but on gags. From Drebin searching every player, to becoming the most home town umpire of all time, to the goofs video, and the butchering of the National Anthem, no scene in history makes me laugh as hard every passing year as this does.

5. Airplane! – It’s a shame to put this movie so low, but I’d still rather watch the four above it more. But not by much. It’s not that this movie is full of jokes; it’s overrunning with them.

6. Dumb and Dumber – In all it’s hilarity, it’s here because of one line above all.

Just When I think you couldn’t get any DUMBER, you go and do something like this.

(long pause)

And TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF!

7. This is Spinal Tap – It may seem like a crime to put this so low, but at the same time, this movie is not greatly funny the first time around. I mean, parts of the film on the first time are hysterical, but it’s the secondary viewings that make this great. Only this low because it drags in parts, the third act sucks, and it’s not as consistently funny as the rest above it.

8. Something About Mary – This seems about right. It relies so much on charm and sight gags that we forget the great one liners and nastiness the characters have. The retard line is a great example; in the movie, everyone but Stiller and Diaz go way over the line in their descriptions.

9. Trading Places – It’s really more watchable than it is funny. I mean, the whole thing with the gorillas is borderline preposterous, but this movie is so absolutely engaging from frame one, it makes up for the lack of jokes.

10. Super Troopers – It’s funny enough as is, but what does it is Farva. The jokes are consistently coming. The story is solid. The characters are so fully developed this should have been a TV show. But it’s Farva that brings me back. He’s not just a dumb guy, it’s a dumb guy you know, and one you work with, and it’s done perfectly. Every answer he gives is so terribly imperfect. Every delivery is done with such pure awkwardness and impropriety. The movie is great as is, Farva moves it up here.

Off the list.

All movies with a dramatic angle: Fast times, Breakfast Club, Rushmore, and Princess Bride.

Romantic movies: Better Off Dead (and this one hurt me to not include). To keep a list short, think of any movie where it was about a guy getting the girl outside of Mary and you have a start. Like Swingers.

Others off: Ghostbusters (too much of an action movie to be considered a comedy). Stripes (the second hour is dead weight). South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. (It’s a musical as much of a comedy, and that’s why we keep coming back) Tommy Boy and Black Sheep (too much a product of the time and place to be great). Old School (sucks for the bulk of the last 40 minutes). Bachelor Party (dies after 50 minutes)

And all of those which you think should be on here. If you can think of a legitimate one I missed, post a comment. I’ll do an addendum if I realize you were right.

Anyway. Wedding crashers is fantastic for 75 minutes or so. It’s worth buying the DVD for. But then it goes too far in Wilson’s plot line.

It was nice to see an R rated comedy be so heavily promoted. But at the same time, the movie stops being a true comedy of old and starts being a chick flick. Most comedies start with a familiar genre. But it makes you lament for a time when comedies were unrelenting.

Airplane is a disaster film.

Super Troopers and Naked Gun are cop films.

Caddyshack is a sports film.

Austin Powers is a spy film.

With all of those films, they built the comedy around the traditional plot formulas of the genre. They are almost identical to their serious counterparts with the exception that they make a joke whenever possible.

Caddyshack is a great example. It’s basically the story of Danny Noonan and his rise from caddy to triumphant golfer. As is, it’s a 40 minute film. If you were to beef up the girlfriend role, make Ty Webb a more serious mentor, and make the film more serious, it’d be a bad sports film.

The film uses a basic, and compelling (if formulaic) storyline as an engine to move the movie along. The greatness of the film, and why it’s so watchable, is because it relies on the added characters and actors. Make no doubt about it; Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, Chevy Chase, and Bill Murray are all filler characters. But the film is built so these actors can outshine the main plot. They are all tied to the character and the location in one way or another, but we remember them instead of the plot. This is how comedies should be; getting the talent to outperform a basic role. Danny is a fantastic character and his arc is solid. But he’s only there for the others.

I suppose Wedding Crashers is a romantic movie (in the same way the comedies above represent their genres). Something About Mary is the only romantic comedy to be truly great because it keeps the sulking of the loves to the end.

Think about this for a second. How many great romance movies (where the couple we are rooting for) drag along the third act before coming to the inevitable?

And how many of these romance movies’ third act was genuinely compelling?

My answer? Almost none.

Of my favorite romantic movies:

Brief Encounter is about the good bye, not the reconciliation.

In Casablanca, they do not get together.

In Gone With the Wind, they don’t really get together.

The Philadelphia Story works because it comes out of nowhere. We kind of suspect it, but we aren’t prepared for it.

Jerry Maguire I still don’t believe they last after the “you complete me” scene.

The Notebook (for movies of the last 5 years) might enter the conversation if not for the awful modern day angle.

Maybe the only truly great example is It Happened One Night. The struggle to get the two love interests back together is done perfectly. There are plot roadblocks that work. The reconciliation happens at the best possible moment.

The only other romance that works in a way that isn’t terribly cheesy I can think of is Eurotrip, simply because the plot of the movie is so far fetched in the first place that all suspension of disbelief is long gone by the point when the loves match up.

And don’t get me started on Pretty Woman.

Needless to say, Wedding Crashers fails to be as compelling as “It happened one night” or even as stupidly charming as “Eurotrip.”

Even worse, it manages to make every mistake possible in elongating the final moment. In the struggle, there is one good joke, and it’s done on an answering machine.

All that said.

The opening montage is fantastic. It’s been a while since I saw an opening 10 minutes done this well.

I laughed for 3 minutes after the joke at the Vaughn line “It must be sprinkled.” I literally slapped my knee in joy. And I was one of four people in the theater who found it funny. My co-contributor was one of them, and I am sure he was laughing because I was dying as much as it was for the joke.

Can you recommend a movie that is as flawed as Wedding Crashers?

Yeah, because it’s a true joy for most of the experience. It’s going to kill on cable because we can watch the bits we like. Did he have to go to weddings alone? Did he have to be beat up again by the fiancée, did he even have to meet the Will Ferrell character? This movie could have been wrapped up 15 minutes earlier. Some of the plot points were just aggravatingly boring and needless. And it wasn’t just that they were merely pushing the plot, it was that they weren’t even funny.

It’s just a shame that something so great pulled up instead of going for the end mark. Because if the movie didn’t pull the punches after the second act, we would have movie (not just a comedy) for the canon.

(continued...)

Harry potter and the half great media

When I was 19 and back in Indiana for the first summer after college, there was a division between most of us. We were a group that shared communal texts like none other. From Star Wars, to Austin Powers, Seinfeld, South Park (literally, for one night all we did was quote the Fat Abbot scenes) Ender’s Game, LOTR, and Caddyshack.

But there was a split. Those who read Harry Potter and those who didn’t. It was 7 to 1 against. It’s now about 50- 50, but for a while, my friends and I were like so many other of our age, who simply didn’t get in on the ground floor of Harry Potter. We were all in high school already and didn’t hear about it until we were too old to be reading kids books.

It took a while, which is a shame, because it’s one of the most significant texts to come along in mass media in 20 years. It’s universal, but more importantly, it’s quality, which is a rarity in the world of Survivor, Desperate Housewives (which I realize is only really for one gender, but it’s still terrible), and the Real World.

Think to yourself for a moment: how many ongoing texts (bands, books, TV, movies and sequels) of mass media reach over 10 million people and are talked about that have come along since, and starting from, 1985.

Now think of the good ones.

I can give you The Simpsons, Harry Potter and Seinfeld.

Not enough people, especially of older generations, get the genius of South Park or Arrested Development. People watched Just Shoot Me instead of NewsRadio. Too many people in America hate Oasis. Radiohead was always too slight in sales. ER was only good for 3 seasons. Same with Friends, which maybe had 4. As revolutionary and solid as it was, I think the Cosby Show is weakening with age, because even though it was better than most any other family show ever made, it’s still no All in the Family, and it’s now completely familiar and more charming than funny. Notorious BIG may be beloved by many, but there is still an entire 75% of the population that will never listen to hip-hop. I am convinced that the masses will never listen to Drive By Truckers. Nirvana had 2 and ½ great albums. Pearl Jam had 2. So did pumpkins. No one except for the elitists, learned, and Goths know of the Smiths beyond the name.

People are only now coming to realize how perfect Band of Brothers is, but almost no one watched it in the wake of 9/11. And I’ll stand by my statement I made after the bonus episode of the show (the documentary companion), this is the finest piece of work mankind has made since Catcher in the Rye. (With The Beatles albums (one by one not as a whole), Star Wars and Empire, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and 2001, and The Godfather 1 and 2, rounding out the top five).

Even Sopranos is a reach. It’s probably the greatest achievement of television, but it doesn’t have a tenth of the notoriety as the Godfather or Goodfellas.

Anyone 21 and above knows about Seinfeld and Simpsons. They can likely quote it to you. But with Harry Potter, it’s still a stretch.

Which is a shame. Because those below 21 grew up with a text we should all envy.

Harry Potter is the Star Wars (episodes 4-6) for the generation that is about to turn 18. While this generation is immediately fell by Britney, BSB, N*Sync, Black Eyed Peas, Blink-182, and an endless knowledge of American Idol and other reality shows, Harry Potter may prove to be a steadying and saving grace.

Outside of what the books did for reading, and what they did to make kids turn away from the TV, HP is a mythology for a generation, and is a once in a lifetime blessing. When I think of generations, I think of Nirvana and Pearl Jam for the Xers. I think of the Beatles and Stones for the Boomers. I think of Hemingway and other writers for the lost generation. I think of the Golden Age of cinema (Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and Philadelphia Story, and so on) for the Greatest Generation.

As for my generation, the small bit between 1973 and 1983, it is Star Wars, Saved by the Bell, and every cartoon TV show from Thundercats to Transformers to Simpsons and the Cosby Show. And I will go on.

We all live our lives, but we are always going to be connected to the media of the time on the same level as we are to our presidents. They are not who we are, but what we grew up with and will remember.

Harry Potter, in terms of the books is a good thing. What J.K. Rowling did by making them is a great thing.

Book Six, is a book that is impossible to put down. But that’s only because of the compelling aspect of the plot, not so much the story itself, but because it’s one huge build, inevitably to book seven and the end, but for fans of the series this is where the story shifts into top gear.

As a whole, it’s a weak book. Sadly, it feels too much like buildup than progression in terms of storytelling. It relies, almost by a third of the story, on memories. As much as we need and want to know the back-story, this section is not a side plot, but the driving force. While it’s somewhat interesting, it’s all exposition, which should be dealt with more tactfully by an author on her sixth book.

There are some great moments and chapters though. Harry and Dumbledore’s trip to the cave is thrilling to no end. The kiss that Harry has is sublime, as is match of wits between the “real” Prime Minister and the Wizard Minister.

But maybe I judge this book too harshly because of the last book.

Order of the Phoenix (OOTP), two years later, has aged to the point of absolute beauty. It’s not that it was good and better than the next and previous books, but because it’s absolutely genius as is.

OOTP is as good as book I have read in the last 10 years. It’s not just that it is the best book in a series of entertaining books, it’s like “Mr. Brightside,” in the fact that everything is done so well in the book that there are few scenes in the text that are not perfect.

The antagonist is perfectly matched to the protagonist (and with the readers sympathy). The protagonist begins to face their shortcomings, yet at the same time, figures out their importance. The side stories and characters steal the show (Fred and George, mainly), and it’s done so well that one can’t wait for them to show up again.

I talked about the build of book 6, how it just seems to ratchet everything up to the end. Book six is the first half of the third (of 3) act of the seven book series. (Sorry, I had to make that overly complex for esoteric reasons). OOTP is essentially the second act of the whole Harry Potter saga.

The book is a slide into darkness, both in terms of the depth of the plot and the world around. Starting with the end of Goblet of Fire, the Potter series became much more about real life than whimsical fantasy. The first four books were fun for their pure wonder, but they hinted at a future of more consequence.

The book slowly eases the whole series into the darker finality, taking a step down the serious path, but then letting up with a lighthearted plot moment. After every loss is a small victory.

Harry finds the mass of the wizarding world doesn’t believe what he says, and finds himself as a pariah. But he then finds that those he is aligned with are more loyal than ever. Mr. Weasly is nearly killed, but we are able to learn about one of the side characters and enjoy a Christmas season. Harry is being assaulted by his new teacher, and loses most of the battles with her, but is able to then start his own club that allows Harry and his friends to learn more about their skills and to mature beyond their years. When Dumbledore is forced out of the school, he does so in a blaze of glory.

His new teacher, Ms. Umbridge, deserves her own paragraph. In terms of all time great enemies or foes, Umbridge is able to fill a role that all of us are familiar with, the unrelenting teacher; the professor who for one reason or another, hates you as a person, and seems to align themselves with the people you despise. They don’t listen to your reasoning. They harshly over criticize everything you do. You literally cannot win any battle, and with each round of fighting, you find yourself even further down on the scoreboard.

As the reader, you find yourself investing so much hatred in this character you cannot wait for the comeuppance of Umbridge. And Rowling is able to time this with exquisite pacing. Each time you think Harry has a shot to a victory, she is able to hurt him more. The final stroke is that it’s not Harry that brings among her ultimate downfall, it’s Umbridge herself who brings the battle to an end. Harry doesn’t have to step over a line of morality and the war ends.

The only things I can really compare the book to, as a second act of a series, are The Empire Strikes Back and The Two Towers.

Part of a series, but able to taken on their virtues in stand-alone form. And of course, all three of these are my favorites of the series.

But to finish the analogy, the overall potency of book 6 in Harry Potter is like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Not so much in the fact that it nearly ruins the final chapter, but that you can get where both creators were going with their idea, but it just seems undercooked.

The Ewoks started as Wookies, which we all KNOW FOR A FACT WOULD HAVE BEEN A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER, and the whole point was that it was not industrial might, but an indigenous race of nature that helped tear down an empire. It’s a great concept. It just was done horribly wrong. Add to the mix that all of the atmosphere of the non Luke scenes seems to be flat in ROTJ, and you just feel let down, because it’s missing the potency of the earlier installments.

Half Blood Prince was not a bad book, but you just get the feeling it could have been a lot better. As is, it just seems like the series treaded water for a book before moving on.

That said, I have no doubts that book seven will be amazing. So much was set up in book 6 that the exposition that held back Half Blood Prince will not be an issue. It’s set up to go full steam and we can get to the end. And then read it all again. After that, pass the books on to your parents. They shouldn’t miss out just because they thought were too old for a book about a teenage wizard.

(continued...)

Chinos & Von Doucheface

Chinos & Von Doucheface

Drew Barrymore once told me that of all the words in the english language, the most beautiful combination was truth or dare.

Okay, here's the razzle dazzle - I want participation damnit! And I want it to be esoteric! So post any of the following three things:

• truth: Ask a question of me or of the audience.
  
• dare: Its not like we can verify, so think of fun stuff.
  
• Never have i ever: Yeah, it's an entirely different game, DEAL!.

I'm guessing no one will respond, but if you're looking to entertain yourself (and others) on a monday morning, dig it.

(continued...)

I dig music... I'm on drugs!!! And one look at W fans

Nothing bothers me more than people who say they listen to everything when it comes to music. Because, they don’t. It’s the same thing with people who call them selves political.

I could go on, but really, make a choice people. Take a fucking stand. You are either a fan of hip hop, rap, country, classical, opera, or Gregorian chants. You are either left, right, Neo Con, communist, Anarchist, fundamentalist from religion. Don’t tell me you are in to the whole thing.

When I went home for the period after the 4th of July, I spent a great time with my Uncle talking about all sort of things, but mostly music. I have no restraints about calling myself a music elitist. And this is not a knock everyone else, but a statement to qualify my right to be considered in the mix of those who actually make the canon for music. My uncle and I share a love of music and a passion for all knowledge about it. Maybe it’s the idea that there is some unifying truth about life that is begat by a disaffected youth in their twenties matching melody to words they scribbled on a placemat at a diner nights before (and no doubt in the midst of a tough breakup). Or at least that’s how most of us who cherish music so deeply want to think of it. For one reason or another people like me and my uncle are stuck in a perpetual mode of teenage love for music. Sure we mature and so do our tastes, but it is all founded on the feeling we got we were 15 and listening to the same records over and over.

I once heard my uncle talk about hearing my father play Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way, and how my uncle then proceeded to spin the record over and over again. Not only was an insight into what my father listened to when he was a teenager (it was one of the 20 cds of my dad’s collection I grew to love), but it was an experience I understood. I was one where your eyes, or more specifically your ears, suddenly are more new than they used to be. This may not have been his beginning to his love, but merely the first steps to obsession, it was something else.

Bottom line, my Uncle truly does listen to almost everything. The fact that he can play Flying Burrito Brothers and follow it with Billy Holiday and have it make sense is proof. He is the argument against the undecided.

I believe, as best I can remember, that in the Rolling Stone history of rock and roll, the chapter on The Band has a very personal digression of the author who remembers spending the better part of a year listening to the first two albums of the Band, over and over again, and looking out over the Ohio River in his apartment. There are many bohemian, dreamlike qualities to that sentiment; maybe the best of them all is tying yourself at an age to a place and time, and most romantically, pieces of art. I like to think that maybe my father spent one summer of his life listening to not much else other than Miles Davis.

There is a bit in High Fidelity (the movie, I can’t remember it as well from the book) where Rob is being interviewed by a music journalist, and he throws something out about wanting to be known as a music appreciator. It’s a selfish fantasy, one that requires people to listen to music secondhand; not by the artists themselves, but by those who can frame it for you. It’s a dream of being in a position where your knowledge of a mass (or any kind of, for that matter) media is revered, to somehow dignify one’s countless nights spent in lieu of real experience, but in reflection of your previous life through the spectrum of someone else’s view. You make yourself see a connection between your teenage years and Born To Run. A breakup of a relationship that was never meant to be coalesces with Blood on the Tracks. That life is a system of basic emotions and it all matches to everyone in the world. And I believe that. Not to a point, not in bits, or in cases, but that your life at any moment, and as a whole, can be dissolved into a song or movie.

It may seem that music fans are a depressed lot, which is not an unfair implication. It’s just slightly skewed. It’s that we listen to “sad bastard” music to remind us of our own lives. We listen to songs that allow us to reminisce about other times. We are a happy lot, generally, and back to the wall, we couldn’t be diagnosed as clinically depressed, because we aren’t. We just make ourselves overly emotional to hope that we will finally feel jubilation like we hear in the music we listen to. We are waiting for our “Sergeant Pepper” year.

For me, 1998 was this year for me. I bought Radiohead’s Ok Computer in January, and I can honestly say, I did not go a day with out listening to it start to finish until May of 1999. And it wasn’t just daily, in some cases, it was the only thing I spun all day. There was a trip my class took for the speech class and I couldn’t get 3 songs into an album without switching back to Radiohead. And while I still to this date believe that Ok Computer is the best album I have ever heard, I don’t have anything that I could fairly compare it to, because the next few albums in terms of listen counts (London Calling – 200 times, Murmur 150, the Bends – 350, Exile on Main St – 100, Born to Run 200, Wish you Were here and Dark Side of the Moon- 300 each, Led Zeppelin 4- 500), all of these numbers pale to the number of times I have heard Ok Computer. This is not evidence why Ok Computer is better, but that I will likely never listen to an album as much as I did that one.

And to answer a question, the number of times I have heard Ok Computer is probably around 1500. And that’s in 7 years.

I touched upon this a little in this post

http://ineverlovedyou.blogspot.com/2005/05/eighteen-balding.html

but it’s a fragment of something larger. I will never get over my love of Ok Computer. It was the album that made me care about everything in music, and expanded my life to so many other art forms. Combine the fact that Saving Private Ryan and Rushmore came out in the same year, and that my friends and I played Goldeneye non-stop, no year may ever compare in my memory to 1998. Even though it was not the best year of my life in terms of experience (though it’s in the top 3) I automatically can think of four texts and where I was at that time.

When I think of Rushmore, I think of being in New York to scout NYU, falling in love with the city and having one of the best trips of my life.

When I think of Saving Private Ryan, I think of an entire spring before where my Spielberg friends and I did nothing but talk about the movie. I think of seeing the movie at the college park theaters in Indianapolis at 12:30 in the afternoon with Will Zink and Mike Griffiths, where all of us were speechless when we left the theater, walking by a vet in a wheel chair at the back of the theater dressed in his uniform, barely being able to say goodbye to each other because we couldn’t physically talk, and then sitting in my dad’s suburban crying for about 10 minutes because I literally could not drive from the emotions in my body. I also remember falling asleep during a theater production of Tommy that night with my friend Andrew Appel (for which he bought my tickets for) because I was exhausted from the movie.

When I think of Goldeneye, I think of countless, endless weekend and post test days and night where we would gather in the parking lot and head straight to my or someone else’s house to play the game. We would have parties-with girls no less- where we would have 4 man games where the winner stayed and 3 new guys would jump in.

And when I think of Ok Computer, I think of all the hours alone, sitting in my mom’s basement and my dad’s living room, feeling that someone finally shared my point of view. Not only that, I felt that someone had finally shown me a way to another place of thought.

And for better or worse, it caused me to forever be obsessed with music. I bought countless albums (as aforementioned), spent hours reading online reviews of the band and the album to make sure I wasn’t alone in believing in something, and most of all, listening to the album. My mother always chastised me for always buying too many albums, too many toys, spending too much money towards things I couldn’t appreciate down the line.

But now, looking at my CD cases, I don’t just see a collection of albums. I see points of where I was in my childhood. And all of these CD’s allow me to recall moments of my life. I remember buying London Calling and I have memories tied to it. Same with Exile On Main St, Born to Run and Joshua Tree (both of which I bought twice for the gold edition) Maybe I have a great memory for commerce, or maybe I can simply remember music purchases more because of a heightened sensory experience, but I can honestly remember 90% of every one of the CD’s I ever bought.

My Uncle is opinionated, no doubt, but he is no longer driven by the same conversionary fuel that I am. He now stands as a collector, as a librarian of the music world. He keeps buying albums because he is trying to get more so that he can allow people to call upon his knowledge, not as much for opinion, but for understanding encyclopedic.

I have become a protector, as much as I am a librarian. While I am more than happy to tell you about a band, I am undoubtedly going to tell you what I think. Not because you want to know, but because I view myself (and I try to control this as best as I can now), as someone who can expand your mind. I want you to know, but more so, I want you to feel what I underwent with the albums. I just want you to know as much as you can about something I believe in. It’s inherently didactic, and while I apologize for it, I hope at some point you can come to a place where I am, where you truly believe in music as a saving form. There is a reason I invoked a religious sub theme to my punk opus (which I am probably going to re-edit one of these days), it’s because it’s about getting to a point where you believe in something. I believe in rock and roll, as well as jazz, Beethoven, B.I.G. and movie soundtracks by John Williams. I may believe they are better than what you are listening to, but more so, I believe they are worth your time not to pass up.

I have never understood why we stand by and love mediocrity in music en mass. We may all go to see a crappy movie (think summer movies) but we don’t protect it and argue it. We tend to, on the bigger scale, go to good (while usually not great) films. We don’t go to bad films continually. Looking at the top 100 most successful films:

(http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm)

a great deal of them are fantastic and part of out culture. Out of the 100, I can list maybe 5 I don’t want to see again (Gladiator and how the Grinch Stole X-mas among them). But when compared to the list of the 100 most popular songs of all time, do you really want to hear songs from the soundtracks of Footloose or Titanic. We don’t tend to suffer fools gladly in cinema (even counting Michael Bay) but we do in music. I have always hared the American listening public on this. How can you not love the great songs, why are BSB and N*Sync the top selling first week artists of all time.

I only hope some semblance of quality is attached to yours. I simply desire people to remember Sonic Youth instead of Wang Chung and Milli Vanilli.

I am in one way or another linked in memory of my life to my love of music. My collection is my diary. I only hope that your memory isn’t tied to passing fads.

***On a side note, Bush (43) may be the closest thing to a pop president we have ever had. Most anyone who knows anything about politics has an extreme opinion on the man. But in spite of all of the venom coming out of Hollywood, New York, and Massachusetts, and the fact that the Left is now becoming the party of the intelligent as well as the impoverished, Bush is loved by a great deal of the people. People who often don’t give tremendously compelling arguments for you to believe. Arguing with a person about why they like W. is like talking to a teenager about why they like Simple Plan or Britney Spears or Black Eyed Peas. You are not going to get a reason out of them more than the fact that somehow, they are used to the person and like him for basic levels. And, as I have learned, this is not a sign of a bad person, but it’s basically arguing high art against low art; why should someone who has no interest in the works of a German composer 300 years ago want to hear the 9th over “We belong together.” It’s a losing argument. Their change will have to come from within. Maybe that’s the finest point about why I don’t like Bush (outside of policy or actions), he seems to survive not on the usual conservative support, but on the indifference of the masses who have yet to come to a point where their vocabulary can dignify and explain their support beyond gut feeling. I have met some, and I have liked their points. But this is about %3 of the people I have talked to. Some people don’t want to rationalize their affection for music. It ultimately falls into an ignorance is bliss paradigm, where they are happy where they are. If Bush doesn’t represent what pop/ people who listen to everything for Politics, nothing ever will.

(continued...)

Meli Melo

Méli Mélo

A few things.

• A shemale banging a chick is not gay.
  
• A chick doing you... with any object imaginable... still, technically speaking, not gay.
  
• And for god's sake, whatever you do in a skybox is sooo not gay (it's just good business!)
  
• When I say Jean, you say Michel!
  
• Yeah, I rock a blue fauxhawk with the pink polo, but guess what?! No dude has ever been south of my border! I wrote a hit play, so I'm not sweating it either!
  
• Even if your tummy hurts real bad, it's still called bulimia. You're only fooling yourself babe!
  
• If you don’t want it, can’t handle it, and wouldn’t get it in a gazillion years, then save us all some time and don't ask for it.
  
• If your answer to “How are you?” is “Still single,” followed by a sigh, then you need therapy or Dynasty. Wake up! This is the O.C. era - you need to ask yourself WWL.C.D? [answer: she'd be the best friend she knows how to be, then take it in the poop from Soapy Dick Stephen while Kristin was getting roofie raped (aka forget-me-fucked) on the bathroom floor of a cabo cantina.]
  
• You wanted to know the difference between stocky and fat? Does it shake or does it jiggle?
  
• I know some of you did not get the memo, but when wearing a muscle shirt, the muscle at the top of the shirt should be larger than the muscle at the bottom of the shirt. Thanks for your attention.

So now it's you're turn. I know you're reading, so say something... something fun, k?!

(continued...)

Little Pink Cookies

Little Pink Cookies

sans our foxy front chick - a nico vixen for the next millennium...

more to come.

(continued...)

Link

The conclusion that we are all assholes is never a more cogent argument then when one makes it in an airport.

Chivalry, is dead. The grammar on that last sentence is inherently flawed, but when ever someone say that phrase, they inevitably pause after the word “chivalry,” as if to provide the listener a moment to think to themselves “hmm, common courtesy by men is…”

I don’t think there is a more popular phrase by semi-intellectual writers that paradoxical. Other than being a pair of dox, a paradox is, by definition, something that exists although it shouldn’t. It’s existence is somehow impossible, because whatever is happening it not supposed to be, or the answer to a question is in contradiction to the question itself. Catch-22 is so much of a paradox it has become shorthand for anything of the quality of paradoxical.

Last night, I flew home first class. It was only my second time. The first time I was 15, and it was because the airline messed up me and my friends seats. We sat in first class and lived the life up by ourselves. Last night, I knew I was going to fly first class, and it’s was a world of difference than the first time. The first time was a surprise, and it was more akin to winning the lottery or winning at gambling. You are not supposed to get the better treatment, but somehow you do. Last night was different because the anticipation was there. I was leaving home (Indiana) and going home (LA) and I knew the minute I stepped in the terminal, I was going to have it easier than everyone else.

Penny Lane and Jerry Seinfeld said two great statements about First Class.

Jerry: Have you ever flown first class?
Elaine: No.
Jerry: Ok. Then I am taking first class. I have been there. I can’t go back.

Penny Lane: Famous people are just more interesting.

Jerry’s plea can’t be logically outwitted by Elaine. She clearly does not know the upside. Penny’s view, like Jerry’s, is taken from a different point because they know the downside.

Jerry meets a jeans (!)* model in first class, and has the time of his life on the flight. He eats Sundaes, he drinks fine spirits, he has a fantastic trip. When the steward asks: “Would you like more of anything,” his response is, “More everything.”

*If you were to ask any man, and to press them, Jeans model would probably rank higher than Lingerie for the simple fact that they looked great without the help of sexy underwear. Underwear helps present a fantasy, Jeans are either made or broken by the women wearing. Men still talk about Kim Smith, Claudia Schiffer, Niki Taylor and Victoria Silvstedt.

Interestingly enough, one of Penny’s main characteristics is that she often performs the Stewardess rant at random. The whole “fasten your seatbelts, tray tables and seatbacks” speech. And tellingly so, her personal goal is to fly to Morocco and live a different kind of life for a while. The key words in her life goal are: Fly, and for a while. Her character arc in the movie is to be beautiful, to be attached to the lead guitarist (Billy Crudup, the guy who brings you the priceless MasterCard commercials), and to be unattainable for the common man in the protagonist.

Penny Lane is fueled by her desire to be first class. She doesn’t want to be a groupie. She calls herself something else. She is there for the lifestyle, not for the glory, i.e. she wants to be part of it; with the band, she is ostensible, not obsessed. She knows the flight crews speech not out of repeated memory, but because she wants to remember what the perks of the good life are, and so she can recreate it for others and create it for herself. She is the ultimate stereotype of the American woman at her worst; someone who uses her sexual guile to move up in the world (and her final reveal is the tell of her base intentions). Yet, we as a people do not fault her for this. In fact, we understand her, as we all want to be part of the bigger, grander life. The fact that she is endlessly charming no doubt clouds our vision, but in truth her earnestness is redeeming.

In a commerce society, we all want to move up. It’s statistically proven to us (in inherently flawed rhetoric) that success is a good thing. And while Gordon Gekko will tell us that greed is good, it’s a half truth, which only tells us the parts we want or don’t want to hear.

The secret is that the people in first class are, in most definitions of the word, better. They tell better stories. They have been all over the world. They can preach to you philosophy of the uncommon existence, letting you know about facets of life that we are rarely available to.

While Donald Trump, George Bush, Paris Hilton, and Sean Combs represent everything wrong with the upper class, they are part of a incorrect media represented facsimile of the rich. These people are not everyday rich; we just are made to think they are. What they are, in actuality, are members of a super elite, showing America they glory of wealth, but not the greatness. While Donald Trump’s success may seem that he is a financial genius, I have little doubt that he is no more than a man with a 115 IQ (and let me note here that James Joyce died extremely poor), these people on a whole are so far off of the indistinguishable quality of many of the rich that many of us fall into a despise/envy of the rich instead of trying to emulate them.

The rich that do not appear on TV outside of reality shows have actually made it. They took a path and struggled their asses off to get there. They studied, and then they worked, and then they struggled to prove themselves. Conrad Hilton is far more interesting of a person Paris, yet his life is common enough to the American Dream success story that we do not want to watch it. Even with reality doctor shows, we do not see how creative and spectacularly genius many of those who have made are. We are given vain bastards like the Docs of “Dr. 90210,” or the money grubbing lawyers of CourTV. We are forced to see these people at their working form, filled with ambition, focused on the job, and for an end result. The end result we do not see is their quality of their life (outside of the cars and bling), which is full of dinners which feature discourse of the minute satisfaction of wines, the literature of Russia, and their views of socioeconomic trends in respect to a fast food nation.

Somehow, we have villianized the wealthy for what they have instead of what they are. These people are extremely well educated. They have been given masses of information that they have to recall on everyday. In every way, shape, and form, these people are more than what the common man is. Not because they were born that way, or because they are at their endpoint of success, but because they took the tremendous effort to get there. Bluntly put, (famous or not) these people are more interesting. They have respectably earned it.

Most people see first class as a tremendous privilege, so much so on the privilege aspect that they see it as a slap in the face, that these people would pay x amount of dollars more not to have to board in sequence, or to be fed the food of the commoner. The cold of this is that it’s a benefit of being well off. While many people of every ilk do not fly first class, and they can be wonderful single serving friends, the odds of you sitting next to someone interesting vs. someone abhorring is 90/10.

But the abhorring part, while true, is actually a skewed figure, because there is a difference between all those who fly first class and those who fly coach. One is buying into the service industry; one is buying a ticket to the transportation business.

While the people in the first class may have a higher likelihood of being more interesting to talk intermittently with on a flight, this is not a rule or a guarantee (you could wind up sitting next to Rich son #3, which would be paralyzingly boring). Where they are coming from is not the issue. It’s that the people in first class feel pampered, and therefore feel special and comfortable. The people in coach feel cramped, shuffled, and viewed as a part of the bottom line. One is pulled, the other pushed.

While I have had a couple of wonderful experiences in coach (New Years 2003), I have had many more rotten times, simply because the person next to you is uncomfortable, limited in space, and not given free booze to lighten up. It is here when we become our worst. Our only goals are armrest space, domination of the space below the seats and in the overhead, and getting away from the crying baby. We resort to dogs, marking space and barking scare tactics for territory.

No one wants to be marginalized, particularly when we have no control of a safe arrival. We all hate airline travel on some level of another because we all know that if we die in a plane crash, our only fault was buying a ticket. Everyone would rather be the dumper instead of a dumpee in a relationship, because they know they ended it. Flying in an airplane automatically subjugates us to the role of the helpless. Even if one doesn’t realize this may be your last hours on a conscious level, they act as such on a primeval level, because one dies, they at least want to die in power of some facet of control. Human instinct on an airplane is to lower everyone else in your row to your lowest level of existence, so that they die on your terms. And so people bicker. They take the peanut packets of those asleep. They take the limited blankets and pillows for themselves in case.

Any case that humanity deserves to be saved is a fallacy because the proof that all humans are created equal is defied by comfortable impulse on a constricted place on a 3 hour flight.

But the worst theater of airline travel is the denouement. When everyone finally gets off the vehicle that defied the odds in surviving, they have to go to a mass structure to get their belongings. The baggage claim is a retched experience on many levels, from smell of passengers who have been in confined and usually too hot area for too long, to smokers waiting for a fix, to coordinating the ride home concurrent with your readiness. Everyone fights for the spots next to the claim. They want to be right next to the belt, ready for the rare chance that their baggage will be among the first released by the mechanism. People never move from these spots. They will stay 30 minutes or longer, simply because they HAVE to be there. No matter that they could simply and politely ask their way to the front of the line when time comes, they fear the worst and stake claim for their luggage at the forefront of the madness.

Men and women will use their children to fill their spot in the queue. They will place piece 1 of their luggage in your way to wait for pieces 2, 3, 4, and 5 of their cargo entourage.

And in most cases, the timeframe is unlimited. Almost no one is in dire need to get out of the airport and to a car. Anyone who makes their plans on the timeframe of a airline flight is kidding themselves. They simply are driven by a base desire to get the hell out of the mass of people.

One could argue that men should always step aside, and let the more delicate gender take their time to get their belongings. Men surely have no greater rush on a whole than anyone else, but yet, there we are using carts to block people on the incoming side of belt.

Chivalry, is dead. Not because of a lack of class or manners, because it certainly is a distinction driven in the means of wealth. It’s gone because we all know that when push comes to pushing for a better spot in the hope that our luggage will be before yours, we don’t care who or what you are.

And yet, people rarely remark on the wonder that we can go from our homes to ends of the world in less than a day. And yet, in this near magical result of technology, we cannot stop from being enormous assholes to one another because of limited space and control. We seem to overlook the fact that average Americans can take the transport of people immensely wealthier than the common man.

We as people who fly on airplanes are completely displeased with the ability to see loved ones thousands of miles away.

We are now in an age of TV’s in headrests, thousand dollar sound systems, and Turkish cotton floormats in cars, I think this is because we are finally at a point where we have gotten to the point where nothing short of instantaneous teleportation will be satisfactory.

The vastness of the world is available to us within a mere day, yet we bitch about the journey. We are all tremendously spoiled. And when anyone of any salt looks at this, it doesn’t make sense. This is something that is a near miracle in and of itself. And yet, we as humans can’t stand it.

Maybe it’s why love in humans is doomed to fail. When we can convince ourselves to removes joy from privilege, that has to be something that exists against itself. This is not how it’s supposed to be.

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Cambodacious

July 10 1970

Twenty five years and two days ago, LIFE magazine was published with two headlines: One about a an unpopular conflict in a far away place, and another about ass cheeks... They could have at least made the chick in the bikini a lil oriental! The inside is coloured with foreign car adverts, touting their newest technology to counter the gas crisis, american car ads, unapologetically flexing their size and muscle, letters from the middle of the country chastising the "dope-sodden, nutty, bearded misfits" - specifically hollywood stars and college students - whom were destroying the values of our fine nation, and a hint of uncertainty in the president in every paragraph of every article... In thirty five years the only noticeable difference is that we've replaced the word negro with urban. But I love ephemera, and this is a classic specimen. As you read the description below that accompanied the cover article, remember that LIFE magazine was enormously popular in 1970, and there's a very decent chance your father rubbed one out to Katie o'Pace of Ventura, Californa...

Scientists aren't sure what makes California Girls look the way they do. Some say it's the sunshine, others all that orange juice. A few even claim that living near the San Andreas fault somehow firms up the muscles and tightens the skin. However it happens, California Girls have an undeniably healthy look about them, and when summer's heat drives them out of the hills and onto the beaches, the look is very nearly Total. Although it is estimated that each California Girl owns 2.5 bathing suits, it is difficult these days to find anyone wearing mroe than .5 of an outfit. This benefits everyone. Girls get a well-nigh allover tan, bikini makers get $25 an issue for a bandanna's worth of material, and spectators get a heartening view of one of California's most remarkable natural resources: youthful exuberance.

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Elle est avec stupide

Je'taime

Physically, aspergians are no different from non-autistics. The difference lies in the social life. Most people are able to gather a whole host of information about other people's cognitive and emotional states based on clues gleaned from the environment and the other person's body language. The individual with Asperger's can be every bit as "mind-blind" as the person with profound classical autism - they may, at best, see a smile but not know what it means (perhaps overwhelmed with the possibilities -- is it an understanding, a condescending, or a malicious smile?) and at worst they will not even see the smile, frown, smirk, or any other nuance of interpersonal communication. They generally find it difficult or impossible to "read between the lines"; that is, figure out those things a person is implying but is not saying directly -- not because they can't imagine the answer, but because they are unable to choose among the possibilities.

Asperger's syndrome can involve an intense and obsessive level of focus on things of interest and is often characterized by special (and possibly peculiar) gifts. Particularly common interests are means of transport (for example trains), computers, and dinosaurs. These interests are often coupled with an unusually high capacity to retain and recall encyclopedic amounts of information about the favored subject. In general, orderly things have appeal to individuals with Asperger's. In pursuit of these interests, the individual with Asperger's often manifests extremely sophisticated reason, an almost obsessive focus, and eidetic memory.

Individuals with Asperger's have emotional responses as strong as, or perhaps stronger than, most people, though what generates an emotional response might not always be the same. What they lack (or are markedly slower to develop) is the inborn ability to perceive the emotional states of others or to express their own emotional state via body language, facial expression, and nuance in the way that most people do. Many people with Asperger's report a feeling of being unwillingly detached from the world around them; they lack the natural ability to see the subtexts of social interaction, and they equally lack the ability to broadcast their own emotional state to the world accurately.

Those affected by Asperger's may also manifest a range of other sensory, developmental, and physiological anomalies. It is common for Asperger's children to evidence a marked delay in the development of fine motor skills. They may display a distinctive 'waddling' or 'mincing' gait when they walk and may walk with their arms held out in an unusual manner. Compulsive finger, hand, or arm movements, such as flapping, are also observed.

Some Asperger's children suffer from varying degrees of sensory overload, and may be pathologically sensitive to loud noises or strong smells and may dislike being touched.

As with most gifted children, children with Aspergers are often misdiagnosed by teachers as being a "problem child" or a "poor performer," but the reality is that they simply have an extremely low tolerance and motivation for what they perceive to be mundane and mediocre tasks, and will often rather daydream within their own focused universe than work on the task at hand.
from wikipedia

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Link

Would you like me?

loves-her

7:15:23 AM toastycake: dude... tonight i met this girl, and...

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stainless steel sex appeal

coxotic: foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; marked by lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action... as a result of blowing too much magic unicorn dust off a cute lil blonde's titties.

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Kanye, more Jessica vs. Ashlee, and Craigslist

So, the new Kanye West video is out and his new album is weeks away. I can’t stand this guy, and I have ranted about him before.

First off, the guy can’t go 40 seconds without ripping off someone else. Whether it’s simply stealing a hook or sample for his tracks (and the man is a great producer, I’ll give him that) it’s hard to call him talented as a rapper when he steals the best lines from all those before him. Maybe it’s Wyclef’s “Gone ‘til November” OutKast’s “for-ever-ever, for ever-ever-ever” or Happy Gilmore’s “We eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast” (In a song about Jesus no less!), the man can’t go a verse without repeating someone else. He even ripped off the Toys R’ Us Jingle from the 1980’s. There isn’t a word in the English language that means insipid, unoriginal, needless, unintentionally comic, and out of place in a work of an artists who demands to be taken seriously.


He ripped off the Chipmunks trademark gimmick and called it a track for multiple songs.

He’s ridiculously racist. In the video for “Diamonds (from Sierra Leone),” the people dying from the blood diamonds are all pompous white people. Fine, it’s not a bad thing to point out the atrocities of the diamond trade and those who benefited. It’s another to rap about fat women, flashing riches, and everything else materialistic in the same song with a message video.

He is the cinematic equivalent of Brian De Palma. A poster child for worthlessly used. talent.

Both:

Make / made their careers off redoing and remixing works of others. For De Palma, it’s Hitchcock, Hawks and Antonini. For Kanye, it’s everyone else, (I mean, half his soundtracks sound like the chipmunks!!!) including bits and pieces from De Palma’s Scarface.

Both:

Rarely improve anything in which they remake.

De Palma has a scene in Scarface that is nearly 20 minutes about laundering money. 20 MINUTES!!! AND IT’S IN THE THIRD ACT. Granted it slows from the whole incest arc, but, 20 minutes of a circular argument. About finances that couldn’t be less interesting.

Kanye incorporates the history of hip hop and pop culture and only rarely gets his point across amid the rip offs. “All Falls Down” is a good attempt about materialism gone amok in black women. Except that he buries it so far it’s almost a lost cause.

I keep watching both of them because I know they are capable of doing something great. They both are immensely talented, but just excessively unfocused and unoriginal.

BTW, Kanye, Propellerheads did the whole James Bond and Shirley Bassey thing 8 years ago. And they did it better than you.

SO I wanted to expand on the whole Jessica vs. Ashlee thing. It’s part of a larger scheme.

Men and masculinity can be divided into three categories. Jock, Nerd, and Gay.

Sports. Star Wars. Musicals.

Jersey on the floor. Vintage Shirt of Captain Caveman worn no less than 100 times. Caring about if your shoes match you belt.

Tries to score with as many chicks as possible and tries not to care. Thinks about sex all the time, and wants to worship women that fit into their fetish fem iconography. Looks at their shoes.

Football team. AV Club or band camp. Drama.

There are permutations, and while there are myriad personality (stereo) types, they all can be distilled back to these three, or a combination of two.

Me. Nerd jock. Nerd first because I look at Reggie Miller as a hero more than a archetype for success.

Skater: Jock nerd. Active but part of a subculture.

Goth: Gay nerd. Because they care about how they look. But it’s the makeup.

I can go on.

Women can be divided into three as well.

Blonde. Bitch. Slut.

Dinner dates. Lunch meetings that end in a discussion of the nature of femininity. Sex in the bathroom.

Goes to college for:

Her MRS degree. To quench her overwhelming penis envy. The parties and boys.

Sexuality is:

Dressing up and then lying in the missionary. Proving themselves as equal (forgetting most men suck in bed). Gives into anal and FFM urges.

I will stop.

Not for you, but this will turn into literotica.com if I can’t control myself.

Anyway, female sexuality has so utterly changed in Anglo culture over the last 60 years that neither gender knows how to be sexually attractive in spirit. Men were cajoled into thinking the tough guy was a bad thing and the sensitive thing is not good, (this is the opposite of what needs to be, and the 80’s sitcoms we were raised on taught us that the good guy wins.

So now, I will say what I have been dying to for a while.

Fuck you, Growing Pains. )

Yeah, the good guy keeps the girl after a while but he can’t smother the girl. Which is idiotic, because when the largest male icons of our generation are either quasi-gay or effeminate (Tobey, Leo, and Tom) or self-destructive (Cobain to Jackass). We know this now, but we are already too far along in the wrong direction that we crack.

I tried being cool and ignoring the last girl. I lasted 2 days because I saw the rerun of Dawson’s Creek. (I tend to put it on in the lunchroom at work around 10 am; the viewership is fantastic.)

We have no idea how to obtain the appeal of Jake Ryan. We just know how to act like him when he falls for Molly Ringwald. Which makes us Ted the Farmers with little to no appeal and a desire to be loved.

So, now we are in a battle of the sexes in who will cave to sensitivity first, and we are both losing every step of the way.

But the girls are just as lost. Gone is the three months waiting period for sex. Women learned they could open their legs after the sexual revolution. Learning to close them is a case-by-case matter.

But lost in all of this were the roles of vixen, seductress, temptress and femme fatale. If a girl puts on a thong at 13, she’s taking it off way before prom.

Sexy is now a way to describe clothing and P. Diddy’s Acne problems. Sexy is not an attitude anymore, and we are lesser for it.

Women sleep with us when they want to. Men are still willing takers, naturally, but ever since strippers were deemed empowering by Demi Moore and Madonna Mid 1990’s, seduction went out the window.

We now have women who:

Know they are hot. Women who want to be hot, but will share a bed for high ground. Women who want to be the sexual creatures men can be (we stopped being predatory when the one night stand became a phase).

In short, Jessica is barely sexy. She knows she is hot. She looks fantastic in her new video. But when she’s willing to put on a bikini and wash the General Lee for the sake of a music video tie in for a movie, we know it’s not that hard.

But other than the dressing hot, she never sells sexy. She smiles too much. She never looks like she is putting on a show that we don’t deserve. She seems like a sorority girl who giggles because it’s pimps and ho’s night. Or dresses as a nurse for Halloween. If women are playing to our fetish properties before we ask them, well, it’s just not the same.

Really, make us feel like we have earned it. What are you going to do for an encore if you blow a guy in a cop uniform on the first date? (Sorry I never called you back Gen)

Of course, we are already going to be such stammering idiots when it happens; we are already trying to say we want to date you before it’s post-coital.

Even if it is all an act or direction of Joseph Kan, Ashlee sells sexy in her video for La La. We know what La La means. But we still don’t know if what you mean is what we think you mean. We, as men, will go much further on pretense then we will on absolutes in both the relationship.

I mean, she takes a lollipop of a friend and puts it in her mouth. It’s not just the suggestion that we may get head, but that we may see a ménage. Neither could happen, but we are sold on pretense alone.

Hot girls don’t learn to be sexy nowadays, mainly because they don’t have to and don’t think the have to. Any man over 35 with wealth is going to try to scoop them up and promise them the skies, which is probably the worst side effect of the USA’s growing wealth gap.

The rest are just trying to settle for what’s in their age group, and honestly, we can’t compete unless we were the high school or college sports star. If Penny Lane believes that famous people are more interesting, than what am I supposed to do with my whole sensitive routine and endless supply of pop culture quotes.

All forms of sexuality are essentially acting jobs. The hot girl might kiss another girl to turn her man on; the sexy girl does it because she might be interested in her as much as you are.

Anyway,

I must thank Craigslist as I am now the owner of a bike. I am in what is likely the worst shape of my life, and I am slowly turning it around. I was able to find a bike and a seller I liked in 30 minutes.

I find few things as interesting as the barter and free sections of that site. Just the worlds first lazy shop meet.

I’m wary of the dating though, because it’s desperate enough that I looking at armoires.

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