Famous first lines of great novels as if they were written in Communist Russia

A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of oppression, it was the age of shootings, it was the epoch of Marx, it was the edict of Stalin, it was the season of Lynching, it was the season of Decapitations, it was the spring of attack dogs, it was the (ongoing) winter of despair (and poverty and corruption and shootings and an endless cycle of five year plans that never went anywhere), we had guns in front of us, we were all going direct to Heaven (though none of us would say we believed in such a place to the gulag) we were all going the direct other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The Crying of Lot 49
One afternoon in one of the three days in the season when the temperature topped 10 C degrees, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Box-of-Scraps party whose komrade has perhaps too much vodka in the mud-sauce to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the glorious estate of Russia, a Leningrad house locator director who had once misplaced two million rubles of Mother Russia’s Rubles in his time but still had no assets of his own and flawless enough to make the job of cleaning it up all the more important for the cause.

Invisible Man

I am not an invisible man, but one vital to the contribution of the progress of our state, and, yet I am one whose flesh and bone will go missing if I fail.

Watership Down

The primroses didn’t grow again due to the immense cold.

The Great Gatsby

In my younger and less fearful for my life years my father pleaded some advice to me I’ve been remising I didn’t heed ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember don’t, that’s how you get advantages in this country!”

The Old Man and the Sea

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now bringing in great numbers of fish.

And one if rewritten in the tone of Yakof Smirnoff:

Moby Dick:

In Russia, Ishmael calls you.

(continued...)

Music/ marketing/ Book covers

I guess I shinedboxed someone with the little bit about Gnarls Barkley two posts ago.

First off, maybe this is a good point to clarify what I am going to be doing more often with the purpose of the writings. I am going to start focusing on media and it’s symbiotic effect on us as a culture. The My Generation posts are going to become more frequent, and I’m going to work more on the impacts of shows and music, from how it plays, to who and how it is marketed, and some of the connections between. Ranging from the idiotic appeal of Deal or No Deal, the Teflon power of American Idol and why American Dreamz failed, and the growth of our Generation as boomer culture fades away. Also, comments will be turned off on some of these. If you want to say something, my email's available. Save the jokes for the casual posts.

I will also put up more short fiction and a few more jokey stuff. And of course plenty of youtube clips and tons of emo and Fallout Boy jokes.

+++++

If I had any intent of making a social commentary, I would have expanded it, and I perhaps should have.

What I wrote. “This is probably the least Ghetto album from a “Major Black (American) Artist” in years.

I guess my first mistake was prefacing it with the type of music line, and how this is everything I love about the genre. The type of music was referring to Funk/soul, not to rap, not to “black, urban” music. I have said before I think the best period in pop music history was the Motown Years, not the British Invasion. There was much more albums, singles, and singers that are in the canon than the four years. And the evolution of Motown became funk, which was integrating rock and roll. Rock is blues based; funk is Motown based, and the Gnarls Barkley is the first major label funk release I can think of since Robert Randolph and his Family Band, at the first to get significant airplay since maybe D’Angelo (who I think gets more attention because he is a R&B / Funk hybrid). While I don’t actively search out enough funk, when a big release like this comes out, I’m giddy because adds another dimension to radio airplay and keeps me away from my Ipod or talk radio. Make no mistake, we need more of this, not just more “funk’ per say, but less of the same which we normally get and the less modern radio sounds like classic rock radio and expanding it’s play list, the better the public music scene gets.

I probably should have also referred to it as a release and not an album, because I wasn’t talking about the music itself, beyond the first song. I was referring to the marketing, which I think is interesting because of its something of an anomaly. The play in LA is on KIIS, Power 106 which is where Cee-Lo is normally played, but on Indie 103.1 (who like Danger Mouse) and most staggeringly on K-Roq, which apparently took time out from their hourly airings of Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

The album is also being pushed on websites like pitchfork which for all of it’s sap and over zealous writing, is probably the best overall music site out there since Q magazine began to scale down their online side.

It’s been a while since a major black artist wasn’t pushed in the current common way, from mixtape sales, flyer promotion, and the traditional print/TV outlets of Source, King, BET, and MTV. And the part which I was commenting on about the Ghetto remark is that Gnarls isn’t being sold as most other current black artists. While TI and Young Joc (both also from Atlantic records, and played on the same stations and MTV channels) are being pushed with the Ghetto angle – as a hustler, as a pimp, as someone repping their hometown. While in most cases, it’s just an act to sell their image further, stressing the “hood” side is just an image push.

This is one of my biggest issues with rap music; it seems to the labels that it’s essential to push the hustler and ghetto angles, and so each new wave of artists feed the cycle by adding another level, having more bling, having more Hood rep, more gang connections. Every three years or so, the respective levels increase anywhere from 25 to 50 percent, and they cross into all angles and become a matter of course in the songs, and are pushed more with each new artist. It went from being one girl in a bikini to three, three to five etc. Biggie had one car and sang about the being able to afford champagne. Then Big Tymer’s did “get your roll on” which was all about the perks of being able afford rich cars and putting bells and whistles up the wazoo on them. Most singles now out have at least one refrence to liquor, one to weed, one about rims, and one about women. Say what you will, but my problem arises from the fact the music quality falls to the wayside when artists have to conform a single to a corporate checklist. It’s not as if there aren’t good rap artists out today, it’s just that we’re not hearing them. This competition to be more in your face than they last guy is the same thing that ruined punk and hair metals best periods, the focus became on getting bigger instead of getting better to get signed/successful.

When 50 cent and Jay-Z toured in 2003, both of them admitted that this is all just an act, it’s behind them (for those who did actually lead a life of crime for a bit), but when a music company decides to launch an artist, they look for that angle. To his credit, 50 cent has somewhat bucked this trend, living not inside the lines, but close to it. Wankster was about those who pretend to be hood, and while 21 Questions was about a guy getting locked up, it was more of a love song than anything else. Only P.I.M.P. played to a hustler or Ghetto side, but it was more of a double meaning of the stature of pimp as well as the whole prostitution thing, and it was more of a party song than a flaunting, aggrandizing ganstga-rap song. Jay-Z too got through his last three albums without leading with any real “gangsta-“ tropisms, and even got into social commentary with the “there’s a liquor store on every corner” line from Justify my Thug. And he even gets a pass for the wealth angle, because he has a modicum of cause and effect, he earned this, and that’s why he’s living it, it’s a choice not a personality trait. In the article though, I remember that right around this segment 50 cent told a story about how he was somewhat related to a gang related death some many years before. I'm gonna hold back judgement and place that choice on the journalism side, as if the mag was trying to counterbalance an act of good will.

The problem too comes from when it crosses medias and genres, some get needlessly saddled with the negative connotation, while others get away with it and often with a potential for further damage.

When Kevin Garnett made a war metaphor in the 2004 playoffs, talking about getting out the big guns for a battle, there was a huge media blowback. People were furious, claiming it was insensitive to the soldiers in Iraq, to the crime in the streets in poor black communities, etc. He was forced to make a public apology. The whole thing was ludicrous, and it was a shame because it was totally innocuous, and if he was a white player (and of his stature), little coverage would have been made of it unless he was of representing the white extreme, a card carrying member of NRA. It takes extremes for it to become a white issue, it takes one connection for it to be a black issue.

But when Destiny’s Child made the song Solider and pushed it as a single, no media outlet blinked an eye. Worse was the fact that they were doing Crip walking in the video, something that Snoop Dogg decried (yet latter flip flopped on) as something that should stay out of the videos. MTV even censored his crip flag in the “Drop it’s like it’s hot” video, and radio stations in LA bleeped the line when they aired it. (Interestingly the same line wasn’t bleeped in Indianapolis; take what you will with that) This was a pretty extreme example, and it was Snoop who was censored, not Destiny’s Child. The single was release around the same time as the Garnett incident, and it seems like a pretty poor double standard.

And we don’t need to thug up R &B any more than it’s already becoming. It’s fine in some cases, for the most part, when Usher is the best selling artists and acts like Maxwell are getting no airplay, R & B is in as weak of a public state as rock and roll right now, and just as over the top emotionally (see Ray J, Dashboard Confessional).

There was a minor flare-up around this when it came to the NBA’s dress code last year. I have a long post about it I never posted because it was way too unfocused, and I finished it about 2 months after the fact, making it almost worthless.

Here’s a bit of it:

Iverson will always be hurt by his thuggish image, even when, by all sensible thought, he should be remembered for his play (the good, not the entrance of the shot happy 1 as a player) as one of the top 5 little men ever to play in a land of 7 footers.

It’s not that the NBA is decrying black people, it’s that it’s trying to establish a unity in the face of the league. They want to hide all traces of criminality (like the doo-rag and its prison based roots), and enforce a level of professionalism in the workplace. This is about a subculture in a corporate world. The only reason people want to bring up race is the connection to the community of which it relates to. That is something of a shame in itself, but not racist.

(that’s the end of the original and I am not really that happy with it, but it’s part of a point)

In the end, it was a difficult and straining decision, but what it did do was to move the focus back to the game, and not to the idiosyncrasies of single players. It, and the concurrently revamped NBA cares program, was a direct response to the Artest melee, and it did help to clean up the image issues for the audience for the leagues corporate marketability and to the fans. Did it destroy some of the games uniqueness?

Maybe, it’s up for debate. The ABA was partly successful because it was filled with a funky additude, players with fro’s, white centers in mink coats. Part of the success came from the fact that it was in direct confrontation to the buttoned up 70’s NBA. The play was more street (not solely blacktop, but in the free flowing pickup style of ref-less games in gyms across the nation) in the ABA, the three point line, the prominence of the dunk, the open offenses. By the time the ABA-NBA merger, every progression in style and play of the NBA set up the league to be saved by the big three of 33, 32, and 23.

But the plus side of this is that the audience is more likely to single out a guy like Iverson for his play instead of his image, and then to single him out for what was for a while in the late 90’s, his street rep and thuggish style was created a racist “Unforgivable Blackness” backlash in the eyes of the white media and much of the viewer-ship, and many hated him for nothing more than the bad qualities of a different race and class.

Is it a not a good thing to crack down on individuality, especially since it was tacitly aimed at a very select group, but it’s not a bad thing to avoid racial profiling by an audience.

The implicit connection is not that rap artists need to tone down their ghetto image (it’d be nice, but not a firm need), but that the record companies need to stop exploiting it to further record sales. An Artest like explosion from the hip hop world isn’t destined to come, but it’s minutely possible and has happened before.

Rock and Roll had Altamont, The Who stampeding deaths in Ohio, the death of Dimebag from Pantera, and while I am not making the connection or placing blame, it’s hard not to think of Colombine as something of a rock tragedy. There were signals of foreboding problems, and yet they didn’t get enough attention until disaster struck.

Part of the concern I have about the current iconography with rap is it’s stressing the issues below, and I mention the Artest angle and the rock and roll tragedies because I get a small sense like something is coming, whether it’s a major act shooting each other (unlikely) or a more serious racial strife. With the current immigration debate, racial tensions are as high as they have been in years. Add the ongoing war debate, everyone is a little more on edge about everything, their eyes more sensitive to difference. Both music related and social/ racial tragedies are like volcanoes, they explode huge, leaving massive destruction in it’s aftermath, and the collective pressure is eased and everyone eases up and works a bit harder to do their part but thinks not about another eruption, and pays little attention. Where I work, I am allowed to be a fly on a wall to a lot of drunken conversations of people from all over the country, and it’s scary how many of them are racially fueled, and deeply worrying how venomous some of the dialogue becomes. It may be a false alarm, but I am sensing some minor shaking.

Gnarls Barkley are being pushed as an act more than as individual, which is the current and dominant style. The whole Ghetto thing isn’t being included as a matter of course, and it’s been a while since a black artist has been marketed and promoted without the ethnicity in the forefront.

I think that’s a welcome relief to hear the art leading and not the persona. And not just in rap, but in rock, pop, and R&B. The worst side effect in terms of music after the death knell of grunge in 1997 or so, is that we are seeing the artists with crossover potential 2:1 or more than to “just the music” oriented bands. The major music landscape is littered with acts like J. Lo, Britney Spears, Rob Thomas, Lindsey Lohan etc. The music machines are looking for singers who can act, who can sell makeup, who can shill Pepsi.

It’s important to note:

J. Lo’s movies post 1999 haven’t been any bigger than if they cast a similar actress, and her albums have been huge.

Crossroads flopped.

You Got Served was a punchline for any comic in the country.

Every who likes the NBA, hated ABC using Rob Thomas to have the theme song.

Lindsey’s albums are minor hits.

But Bow Wow is in the new Fast and the Furious, Ciara is in an MTV series, and Paris’s album lurks ever closer.

Coming out this year is OutKast’s Idle wild. It’s basically a visual album and they have been working on it since Speakerboxx/The Love Below. And it’s probably going to be very good, because they took it from it’s inception to it’s finish. And it stands good odds to sell a million soundtracks and to crack 75 million at the box office. I certainly will go, and buy the album.

But part of me is reluctant to see it, because it’s going to copied as a business model, and studios will likely green light copycat films. Can you imagine a Fallout Boy motion picture. Their video for “A little less 16 candles…” is torture enough. I’ve watched it 4 times and I still can’t figure out why the vampires are dancing in the street while the guitarist fights them, or even why the band is playing instruments in the video. Are they supposed to be rock and roll vampire hunters, or vampire hunters who formed a band and practice when the vampires sleep through the sun? But the odds of this movie get closer to even if Idle Wild breaks 100 million. And it’s the record companies to blame, not the artists.

++++

As for the whole music taste thing, I listen to a lot of music by black artists. I don’t care if it’s geared for a black audience or if it’s geared to white people. I care if it’s good. I mention Biggie almost every 5th post, I mentioned Lupe Fiasco a week ago, and my of my top 5 singles, 2 were of black artists, one was rap and the other R & B.

But I don’t aim to give the “but I have a lot a black friends” defense. I don’t care to search for any scene because of where the music comes, and that’s a matter of tasts. It’s why I took down my Houston post, because the whole issue of that was to mock the repping culture, but it went away and became too much of an assault on the emerging artists and scene. Part of it was tempered with the needless marketing push because two artists from the city came out, and the albums then pushed everyone from their out, but in the end it became a “I don’t get it” and while I think most of the stuff that came out was crap except for Chamillionaire who has fleeting moments and a decent enough voice to keep listening. But the whole thing was not written well enough to seem like anything other than a white guy bitching about rap.

But the whole; Black music for black people or white music for white people? Please. Most of the time I listen to music to understand a different part of humanity, whether it’s Britain, the Dirty South, or Brooklyn, I don’t care. That’s part of the charm of the music, but just the same I am often looking for music take me away to the ethereal. I want good music for all people, and it’d be nice to hear and see it at face value. Ethnicity is often tied with one’s introduction to music, but it’s not responsible for taste, and don’t accuse me or anyone of a connection because of race or upbringing.

I have jokingly said I know how a black guy must have felt during the 80’s before 1988 and the emergence of hip hop; basically being inundated by music and promotions of a culture you don’t connect to, and often the most extreme examples. In the 80’s when all there was on MTV was four hours of hair metal bands and then a LL or Run DMC video. And it’s not really now about seeing rap being promoted more than rock is; or in the 80’s seeing Poison girl it up more so than other alternatives. And music fans certainly have more outlets to find music than every before, and maybe it’s pointless to comment on it. I just am angry that more artists like Lupe fiasco are not promoted well enough, and his video/song is on once for every three times My Chemical Romance or Paul Wall videos are aired. And moreover, why artists like Bloc Party or The Streets or Secret Machines only are played on an anomaly like Indie 103.1 or on a late show like Rodney on the rocks, and the videos show on alternative hours on Sunday nights.

The reason is that most people don’t care as much about music as some of us freaks do, and don’t notice, or are so turned off by the shitty music they don’t even listen to the radio anymore, leaving the lowest common denominator to play to the ones who do listen to the radio the most, 11-19 year olds. And while that’s the consumer’s blame, the companies don’t do anything drastic to push the new artists outside of printing their album. When new artists come out, the videos come out of their end, and getting them played on Viacom channels can be just as hard as getting signed in the first place. Maybe if they actually paid for decent promotion or attempted new methods it’d work. The companies actually resisted advertising on Myspace until it became a hit, and it’s going to change the way music is forever shipped.

But to see Gnarls Barkley get promoted at all is a minor miracle. I’m damn glad to see it in any form, and happier to see it buck a trend.

(continued...)

No secrets here. Just a few good links.

There are dirty erot-o-mags, high class gonzo, and yet sometimes, there is something so transcendent that it stupefies the testosterone in you, reducing the state of sexual aggression to that of a kid at the end of the bench. You don’t want to be the man, you don’t even have to be in the game; you just want to be closer to it.

In the semi-related category, you must be this hot to pull off this sort of femme dominance. Anything less, and it’s a cry for help (read penis Envy). Now if a guy wears that shirt, that’s cool.

Contra-diction:
I am in a blonde phase. That’s the kind of girl I want to date. Yet when I look at girls at bars, and at porn, I keep going to brunettes and ethnic. We’re all this weird ladies.

I don’t hate my job, but I am getting ready to move on. But when I come home from work, all I want to do is freebase cuteoverload.com. Which would be the very thing that would get my fired from my new job.

Speaking of, this is my current desktop. cuteness!!!

I mean few things are ever going to get a concept so perfect. The penguin is scared, and has dropped his saber. Meanwhile the bear seems like the leader, and is ready to stand. But it’s the cat who actually wants to fight. I mean, why are these animals even scuba diving, and why are there some ghosts who look like animals, and others that don’t.

But the best touch of all? The cats eye patch; you can actually imagine him with a gruff voice saying “I crap bigger than you,” and it’s too cute.

The lost finale is on now, I’ll continue in 2 hours or so.

And what a finale. Jesus. I actually got buzzed during the scene when the button wasn’t pushed.

When I bought the first season DVD and watched it in long sittings, the show gets a little bit worse, it’s wonderfully plotted, but the moment to moment writing and some of the episodes themselves are kind of weak.

But I really love watching it week to week, because they throw out so many twists and turns, and under the arc of the mystery of the island, even a disappointing episode has little bits do keep the viewer going. The whole four toed foot of a statue of the Colossus, that geeked the hell out of me. That alone is going to keep me coming back.

While this isn’t on the level of Sopranos or Arrested Development, this is going to be the biggest and most important cult TV show of all time when it’s done. Bigger than X files and the Twilight Zone. People will be talking about this for years, because it’s the first drama to hold the audience in baited breath after every episode.

Notice I didn’t mention Star Trek. I think that show has gotten mainstream enough that it’s no longer cult. Most everyone knows about it at this stage, and while the geeks went a little overboard, it’s in the cultural forefront, not the back annals of Sci-Fi.

Or maybe it was just this.

Charlie Murphy! Craig Kilborn as James Kirk.



My favorite youtube.com clip of May.

David

(continued...)

It Stinks! (Dave plays a critic)

Quick notes for five albums I bought in the last month.

Secret Machines: Ten Silver Drops

Uneven breakup album that is brilliant in moments. The opener “alone, jealous and stoned” is dynamite sad bastard music. A little long in parts, it’s good to see prog rock done well, but the flow of the album as a whole is tarnished by the two songs that are industrial prog compared to the quieter, slow burn songs of the rest of the album. Whenever the bass replaces the drums as a rhythm, I tend to tune out.

In its moments, it’s the best kind of breakup album; it allows one to wail in the misery before inducing a lovelorn purge. The downside is that this doesn’t make for everyday listening.

The Streets – The hardest way to make an easy living
It’s somewhat strange being a Streets fan in the states. I hate to say it, but it’s his voice, as good as his rhymes are, there is a lot of difficulty in introducing newcomers to cockney rhymes over Garageband beats. Part of the appeal came his antithesis to American hip-hop, it was about being a suffering 20-something, instead of boasting about hos, he was talking about the foolishness of taking a girl’s trust for granted.

And it was about drugs and boozing, filled with the highs and the lows, missing the scene and the first time yet watching friends fall by the addiction wayside. The opening track is about a tour ravaged Mike doing bumps in the morning to temper him out.

Some of the beats are predictably low-tech, which is fine, because it’s the atmosphere he created with them in his previous two albums (Dry your Eyes, it’s too late, Stay Positive), but he really upgraded a few here, to the point where you may hear them from mixtapes of US rappers or bought right out, if Mike’s into that kind of thing. The title track and Two Nations- originally slated for the Biggie Duets album, but left out for reasons that translate as nobody knows him here)

Good album for those who like him, it’s not going to win him that many new fans, but all things being…probably the weakest of his three albums thus far. But once again, his sleeve photos are fantastic.

The Artic Monkeys – Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.

A decently solid album, yet it’s hard to judge because of the extreme hype behind it. I only heard one person mention The Strokes and loved the album from it’s opening track. But I had heard abot the Artic Monkeys for two months and from thirty different sources. So it’s hard to know whether this is just a solid album with overblown hype, a bad one forced down our throats (not the case here, the push was as grass roots for the first stage as it gets, and will be copied for decades), or a great album that all of us rock fans have been dying for but don’t want to go out on a limb to canonize first.

It sounds like a small album, and maybe that’s the problem. Or it is for 2006, as this album makes the Strokes almost prog by comparison. There album is too clean, in the sense that if this album was recorded on equipment from the 70’s it would have an edge to it that it doesn’t. While they are not going to have a song track like Orgasm Addict, they sound at times like a more Americanized Buzzcocks (And I know they are Brits, but roll with it).

Speaking of Orgasm Addict, I am going to relay my favorite part about this album, which are the capital F Fantastic titles of the song. My three fav’s (not including the lead single)

1. You Probably Couldn’t see for the lights but you were staring right at me
2. Perhaps vampires is a bit strong but…
3. Red light indicates that the doors are secured.

Bottom line… Solid, and flashes of some seriously good writing. The band as a whole has to evolve, or it’s just the post-punk fodder we want instead of Good Charlotte, and not the kick ass rock and roll like Jesus Of Suburbia we are dying for, yet thankfully not gay… like Fallout Boy. Wait for the next album.

By the way, a woman in NC called their concert experience a liberal, gay extravaganza. That, made my week.

Going back to The Streets album, I like the parts about drug use because of the context, and it’s exactly why I change the channel on any rap song where they rhyme Bacardi or Patron, or Hennessey. Quoting the atmosphere at a party is easier than rhyming love with above, and just as common.

One of my top five Streets songs is Weak become heroes, because it gets the point of taking illicit narcotics for the first time. Somewhere between feeling a sublime sensation never known before and having to deal with the lack of control that comes with it is as high on the degree of difficulty of replicating as it gets for writing. That’s why, for all of his shortcomings, Hunter S. was so impressive. Maybe more magnificent was his ability to recall it later, but that’s another point. It’s easy to write about the high. It’s just as simple to write about a hangover. Combining the two so that the listener connects a moment in a song or book to a time they had some long time ago.

And I think back to Drive By Truckers classic, and one of the five front-runners for song of the decade, “Let there be Rock,” and the line: One night when I was seventeen, I drank a fifth of vodka, on an empty stomach, then drove over to a friend's house. And I backed my car between his parent's Cadillac's without a scratch. Then crawled to the back door and slithered threw the key hole, and sneaked up the stairs / And puked in the toilet./
I passed out and nearly drowned but his sister, DD, pulled me out.

That’s a moment. It’s the start to a long story session where everyone around the table launches into idiotic tales of the like. The sense of transportation is what I like best about DBT, well that and there love of booze and their whole sound which is right out of the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers/ Exile stage.

This is southern rock, and it’s as pure as rock gets. Blues bases, filled with internal sorrow and self-loathing from the five tenets of great rock music starting points:

1. Drinking (check)
2. Cheating (check)
3. Gambling (check)
4. Panging for love (check)
5. Heartbreak (check-mate)

Up, up, and away you go from my blog has it best, simply why are these guys NOT rock gods at this point. And hey, while were at it, Brian House, if I owe you anything, it’s a thanks for that 2004 summer where you played this in your old Chevy Blazer. Steve McQueen was from Indiana, and I’ll never forget it.

That and we’re in year 23 of our friendship. I miss you hombre.

And so…

A Blessing and A Curse – Drive by Truckers.

At this point I love this band so much, if they pulled a Weezer and made a stinker like Maladroit and ruined everything I liked about the band, I still would recommend the album.

Thankfully, DBT don’t call a sellout an album. There are three great songs on the album, Aftermath USA (points for the Stones ref), Space City, and World of Hurt. Gone are the tacit ties to the confederate homeland, the songs are about the life, but not about the place of the south, and while maybe it’s about branching out, it lacks the sense of place. There is no “boys from Alabama” or reference to the Southern Thing, but the mood is still there, it’s just not directly implied.

But this album is really good. And it continues the DBT streak of opening lines that few will ever match. On Decoration Day, “Marry Me” opened with the line: “Well my father didn’t pull out, but he never apologized.”

For Blessing and a Curse, the closing track starts with: “Once upon a time, my advice to you would have been to go out and get your self a whore. I guess I’ve grown up, because I don’t give that kind of advice anymore.”

If you don’t get the greatness of that line, maybe DBT isn’t for you. For everyone else, you know why I and so many others love DBT, because as they say “to love is to feel pain.”

There ain’t no way around it.

And the finale.

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm.

So maybe I’m behind the times. I don’t know why I didnae buy this album when it came out. But as it is, and I know I haven’t listened to all of Emancipation of Mimi yet, I am calling this the best album of 2005.

And the PS.

The opener off of Gnarls Barkely, Go Go Gadget Gospel is effin great. Everything I want from this genre of music.

This is probably the least Ghetto album from a “Major Black (American) Artist” in years. It’s not spectacular, but it’s really good, and it’s a case study of how to play to ones talent. You give a voice like Cee-Lo’s meat to be a melodic voice, and not a harmonic one to the PCD, and you have the producer know what he is doing. I would like to hope that this is continuation of a great idea set by Rick Rubin / Jay Z and letting producers who know what to do with an artist, instead of selling outside beats (Swiss Beats/ Neptunes/ Track Stars/ Jazzy Phay. Etc.). Lets match the makers to the artists, not t’other way round. Negotiation, not commerce, makes for great music.

(continued...)

Barry and 714, 715.

I hate Bonds getting the record, but not because of who he is as a person, but because of the lack of moment tied to it. He wasn't a hero, he isn't an anti-hero, and sadly, he doesn't seem like he is out for anything other than himself. As a baseball fan, I hate seeing this moment, because I know how great it is, and I can get little joy from it due to everything that surrounds the chase.

Tied back to the great home run race of 1998, Bond's 73 and 714 seem artificial and joyless, because in 98, it just came out of nowhere, and both Sosa and Big Mac played with smiles. And thinking of when Mac hit 62, and had the great speech about Maris's bat, we just don't get any of that from Bonds. He seems tied to the antithesis of history of baseball, he doesn't embrace it beyond wanting to plant himself in it. Those are all superficial fan views, but that's what rings out for me.

While Maris was given the Asterisk be the commish at the time, we as a sporting community seem to level a similiar quantitive doubt on Bonds, and it's not about dismissing his 73, but his 714, and 715.

His subborn facade will never win over fans, and will be ratcheted up by diamond historians as a Pujols or whomever 15 years down the line. In comparison to the others of the records, Bonds doesn't seem to have earned this in our eyes, he simply accomplished it.

Wile the steroids flag will always fly high, I don't hold it against Bonds. This is a sport of cheaters, and I think thats why we admire it and why it seems so "American."

If I took steroids, I still couldn't even hit 50 hrs in the MLB in 22 years. I wouldn't even sniff it. But Barry, at his core, doesn't seem like one of us, as a fan, as a baseball lover, or even as a guy who loves playing baseball for a living. The whole record feels like an albatross around him and around us the fans. Few people in the world, and perhaps even Barry, are having a good time with this accomplishment. And that's why I hate this moment. Click the title for a great article by Jason Whitlock on ESPN.

(continued...)

Link

Enjoying racism in a solipsistic way.

I am really sick of racism. It really shouldn’t exist at this point, every war has been fought, and there isn’t any reason why a person born after 1975 should be subject to racism. Everything anyone could teach you about how one race is different from another is wrong. Sure, there are truths to stereotypes now and again, but the whole thing is incorrect because if religion has taught us anything, it is that over-arching truths do not exist.

I mean, racism should be over at this point.

But whenever an event in this country flares up in the news, it’s tied back to racial preconceptions. The whole immigrant debate isn’t just about people from South of the border, there are millions of Asian and Indian people who are screwed by the same system as Mexicans and El Salvadorians. But the minute people waved Mexican flags at rallies it became about Mexicans, and the venom started to flow out of everyone.

The Mormon leader Jeffs from Utah, is of a religious sect that only their people uphold. But invariably, it comes back to white people being so repressed about having sex, and in order to have sex with 15 year old girls, they create a religion. Puritanism at it’s best, even if they have COLD (Latter Day) warping their minds.

There are parts of me that lean towards racism in moments. Whether it’s in my hotel, as I pass next to a worker and he asks: “How are you my friend,” and I answer, “tired and with a headache,” only to have him answer, “Fine, Fine.” Maybe it’s the black guy who never shows up on time. Maybe it’s the white boss who says every criticism with a smile to not offend.

You see these tropes, and it’s hard not to revert to basic societal setups. It’s easier to dismiss the whole instead of the shortcomings of one individual.
The upside of working in a multi-ethnic town like LA is that you don’t work within your race. I had never worked with El Salvo’s or Guatemalan or Brazilians or Laotians before. And I had barely worked with black people as well. As soon as you get to know them, you know that the whole face of racist thoughts is only a visual sense, and easily rendered worthless.

There was a young black girl who used to work at my hotel, and all things being, she was our best cashier in terms of performance. She knew the system, she could handle stress, and she remembered the VIP’s and frequent guests. Occasionally she would let an Ebonic type phrase slip out, yet we stood by her because it wasn’t about the grammar slips, she was as good as we could get. Yet she got fired because she was warned, disciplined, suspended, and then terminated because she kept cursing around customers. The easy point would be to say she was fired because she was “too ghetto” slash “too ethnic.” It’s not incorrect to say she was fired because she acted “too black” but the real reason was she was immature. It was her youth, and inexperience that cost her the job, and while other factors may have played to her dismissal, it was immaturity above all, a lack of growth to know when and where. That's a distinction I would not have made when I was 15, or 19 (her age) and it was a downside for both.

Outside of work, it’s a different thing and it falls back to the sight instinct. Part of comes from the mindset one takes when they go out to a public forum (the whole Shakespeare Life’s a stage thing), where people are in their private persona and life. The difference of the work mindset (where you know the people and not the ethnicity) vs. the public (where that black guy may be a gangster and so on) always plays terribly to the unknown, and while it can be the same in a one race town –where it’s age, or clothing style, or general persona-vibe- the difference is the book’s cover. In a flare up of fear, anger, or intimidation, that’s where we as humans go.

It is in these public areas when racism can sprout from roots. They are seeded in all Americans, it merely takes hate to let the flowers bloom. Flareup’s don’t happen at work don’t happen just because of race nowadays. They may have in the 50’s and 60’s, but not now. But when a group of Abercrombies meet a group of Izzle’s and someone bumps shoulders, the fight is going down more out of racial tension than property. We let ourselves be fueled by it in the bad moments.

And you know what. We as men HATE this. I don’t like reverting to racism. I think less of myself when I admit it, and I judge people less for saying statements out loud when they have spite behind them.

Because if there is a fight between black and white guys, (or any group vs. another, and in most cases, it’s the most feverous of the two squaring off) the rest of the group is trying to stop the fight, not add to it. And in most situations, the equality levels out at the end. Maybe it’s the male test to qualify manhood vs. another, but when done is done, most underlying hatreds are gone because we find out the similar truth beneath. Maybe that’s in the best sense, but as soon as real dialogue is opened, people realize they are one of the same, and we are not the real enemy.

Men hate racism. We hate doing this because we know it’s all impulse and not reality. Through competition we know there isn’t much difference. We trust our teammates in sports because they are with us in the trenches.

And when it comes down to a skirmish we hate when someone crosses the line.

As soon as someone says: Nigger, Spick, Charlie, Whitey, etc, it’s the “go get your shine box” moment. You can’t turn away, the gauntlet has been thrown, and we know we shouldn’t, but it’s a matter of facing torment from friends or facing a new foe of little consequence.

We men hate when it comes to this.

+++

But women LOVE racism.

They can’t wait to hold it against men. They can’t wait to hold onto that moment when a black guy in a Caddy cuts us off and we yell “Fucking Nigger” or we get approached at a stop sign or Home Depot by day laborers and make a blithe comment about Beaners or Spicks. Or for us to blame “Whitey” or “Charlie” for having the high positions.

They want to hear everything bad so they can secretly funnel stereotypes into truisms for their life, and to hold it against the men they know.

They want men to act the bad part so they don’t have to.

Sadly, any semi-attractive girl is going to be hit on by a man of every ethnic group in her life. It’s a male thing to look for a port in a storm, but on both sides, the romantic opening is still fueled from the visual impulse. Whether it goes further or ends there, 99% of the time, people go back to thier respective home world of incubated identity.

Most women don’t ever work in the lower class jobs that most men start in. While judgmental assholes like Trent Lott will be replaced in 20 years by honest men of all creeds and race who worked and befriended men of every race, will this be the same for women? While I am not trying to be blanketing in statements, I am hard pressed to think of work scenarios where women work with men/women who can’t speak English, who are just trying to get by. Do average women work construction, farming, or basic service jobs anymore? I hate to be general, but the only women I see doing the shit jobs are immigrants. American born women who work the low ranking jobs are Hostesses, Waitresses, retail associates, etc. and in all cases the more they play up their female charms, the more they succeed. I am not even remotely saying that women are incapable of leadership, equal pay, or equivalent standing; I am just asking one to look at the gorge between the low man vs. low woman. If a girls gotta to eat in town like LA, are they going to Bevery Hills or Torrance.

Women don’t get the same experience, they never suffer in the trenches, especially since most of the low posts are filled with Hispanic 30 something’s. They never get the immersion, and so they coast on the premonitions.

They can’t wait to judge because they are women. And while they will hold back on judgment on Wisteria Lane, they have nothing but bar experience when it comes to looking at men and women. It's not a lack of intelligence I hear from women, it's innocent ignorance.

++++

And yet for men, it will not come to a point about our likeness, but a flashpoint about our women. Divisiveness comes in from in the feminine, and when one transgresses that’s when it gets hairy, and the chests pop out.

We still see each other at their worst when it comes to the women of our races, because it’s about protecting the pride of oneself and a narrowing of the field. Sure it’s something to do about love, but tis more about someone outside having a chance with “OUR” women.

Man to man we get through it. We see the similarity.

Man to woman: all we see is the incomplete bridge in between, our love of our women/race fuel it, and we keep pressing.

We want to fuel it, and all that is left is the other sex, and they are worse off than we are. Just wanting to push the buttons and go on surface readings.

We are so close, but held back from the true view of all sides.

The more we all are human and decent, the better it will get.

Don’t know it, try to believe it.

(continued...)

Two of two for Today. Because the Junior Senator for Ny is that misbegotten.

First off, Sen. Hillary Clinton, go fuck yourself.

That whole comment about our generation seeing work as a “four-letter word” could not be more off base. Your boomer generation has done nothing but run the other direction from the strides made in the 1960’s. We are in every sense worse off thanks to the reign of Boomer Lawyers, Flip Flop moralists, and the economic ramifications of the Me Decade and suburban expansionism. The whole do as I say and not as I did rings especially hollow from a woman who didn’t have the balls to stand up as a women and divorce Bill for breaking the vows of marriage, and you want us to see you as a strong, female leader? And how about the job market for college graduates that before this year, hadn’t had a good year since 1998. Or how about the acceptance of an immigrant worker class that takes all of the positions where teenagers and young kids are supposed to get their start?

In most cases we have been here for under 25 years, while you have been acting as you please since the end of WWII. Even if the work ethic has yet to be formed (and the laziness you perceive is relegated to the wealthy and those lucky enough to have connections), I can’t see how it’s our fault. Hell, most of the people I work with have two jobs. We can’t survive on the mere wages of flipping burgers, it’s hard enough paying for gas on minimum wage.

I am at a place now where I don’t care that I am poor, because I am willing to take the bohemian artist sacrifice for hopes in a greater tomorrow, and for while it sounds hollow for a kid with a college degree to complain about not being able to get a job the fact remains that this countries middle class is in the shitter, with little or no help from the boomers. But I did tyr for the normal life, and have done so everytime I question my path. And you know what is a blast? Answering a bunch of hypothetical scenarios instead of actually trying to commmunicate my personality and work skill to an employer.

Just maybe:

If your generation wasn’t so obsessed with youth and trying to stay cool, 40 wouldn’t be the new 30, and 27 wouldn’t be the new 21. Boomers keep trying to remain relevant and hip instead of tottering into antiquity, we actually would have an opportunity to advance. And it might not even be about age, because last I checked Mrs. Clinton the man you married shirked his responsibility for his country (and just as it was then, there still is honor in defying the generations before yours’ battles), and you got rich and where you were from dirty real estate deals. For the latter, you don’t have the right to caw from a high perch.

On the maybe we don’t have the work ethic side maybe we don’t have any desire to enter the muddled workforce that your generation has mutated and shaped into one of soft compliments, terrible leaders, and crippling mass idiocy. You are a generation of Lundberg’s from Office Space, a bunch of BA’s who were promoted when your parents generation retired, and because you questioned EVERYTHING they did, you never bothered to learn how to do the job the right way.

Or maybe it’s the lawyer thing, so many of you were so reckless in your destruction of the old status quo, you never learned the proper quiet etiquette of the workplace, and felt the need to prevent any direct criticism to a lousy employee. You merely added law after law to ensure the safety of the feelings of a worker that you never figured out how to weed out those incompatible for certain lines of work.

While I admire your part in the civil rights movement, and the woman’s liberation as well, you guys took the allowed the birth right of every creed, race, and gender to move from equal stance to a level where every ill-nurtured soul, lost cause, and weak individual to have more than the right to complain about ANYTHING they see fit. A woman spills coffee on her lap? It’s the company’s fault. A man breaks into a house, seriously injures himself, and wins a lawsuit against the homeowner. Only a generation as cowardly as yours could empathize with such lost causes. One has to earn the right to complain, it’s not a birthright, and incompetence is not an excuse.

Sure you agreed that minorities are equal, but after the protests for their rights, did your generation actually ever try to give them a helping hand OUT of poverty. You put them on your level in the eyes of the law, but you placed them out of sight, and out of mind, and then you complain how they didn’t become functional. And the boomer’s answer? Affirmative Action.

I’m with Chris Rock on this; no one deserves any better treatment, but if it’s a tie, give it to the little guy. But helping out the kids is a band aid solution for integration, when it’s clear it’s the familial unit and the community as a whole that needs the government to fight for their inclusion. Poverty breeds more poverty. Maybe if your generation had decided to “jog” through the disparate areas of town, you might have realized the problem.

It’s a generational mindset to only give to the most impoverished candidate, you think you are doing “good”, but in the end, it’s only throwing lottery tickets at the problem, some of them will get a winner, and one in a million may even hit the jackpot, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the whole. But hey, I know you feel good about that little donation you made for buying the Inner City kids decent textbooks.

Maybe if you paid attention to anyone other than the eternal “me” you might have:

Heeded the warnings about oil shortages (remember the early 1970’s?)

Figured a way to fix the worker class in the country instead of letting cheap immigrant labor work as a stopgap solution.

During the economic boom of the mid 80’s and late 90’s tried to pour the money back into the working economy instead of the service one.

I can go on.

But the bottom line is:

If I want to learn how to do a job, I am going to ask the guy who fought in Korea or WWII. I am not going to want the opinion of the suit and tie who tells me motivational quotes and tries to have a work-friendship with the little guy in IT.

Maybe the Greatest Generation weren’t the best parents for a time when everything was already in motion for a massive cultural change.

All I see now is a aging generation who fueled the wave of change by breaking barriers and questioning everything laid before, yet in their reign, all they have done is to establish weak barriers when it comes to morality and fierce fences for the weak.

For all that the boomers questioned, changed, or decried they have yet to come up with a better way. Just one a lot more accepting and much less efficient.

In my generation I see at worst a bunch of nostalgia loving criminals and hustlers, people who play poker for a living, who scam idiots on the internet who don’t know the simple fact that giving out one’s SSN and CC# to a faceless stranger is a bad idea until they have been stung and tried to sue for their money back.

At best I see a generation that has been given no choice other than to fix everything set wrong over the last century.

Excuse me if we don’t have the enthusiasm to fall into the fold of your regime.

But hey, why don’t you go buy a “support our troops” magnet for your minivan. That’ll do a lot of good.

And you know what bothers me most about this? It’s the sort of general statement Trent Lott would make. I'm a democrat andI find this revolting.

Hillary Clinton, you don’t have any right to speak for your generation until you admit your culpability to the problems. It wasn’t the right wing conspiracy, it wasn’t voting error, or your parents fault. It was yours, the generation who stopped caring when they got rich.

To me, Boomer is a synonym for whiny, indecisive, and overly litigious, and most certainly, a four letter word.

(continued...)

Music one of two for Tuesday

There’s funny, and then there is the last 5 minutes of MTV’s Yo Momma. Just hearing Wilmer V stumble with his accent as he calls it “cash money” (sounds like CASs Monee).

+
Fergie (she of little talent and the Black Eyed Peas) is in Poseidon. I could go on a rant about putting hip hop stars in movies, but when they are in a life or death situation, the shaddedfruend (sic) is worthwhile. If I know she dies, I will pay to see that Junker of a film.

+
On another note, Bow Wow is in the third Fast and the Furious. It’s going to be the first time in cinema history where the shortest actor in a film is not Asian. I mean, it’s like the reverse of game of death with Kareem and Bruce Lee.

+
Speaking of Fergie and the Peas, after 160 weeks they have been relieved of the title of “most commercially pandering, vapid, awful song about a serious social topic” as Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park side project Fort Minor knocked off “Where’s the Love” with the “where’d you go.”

“Where’d you go
I miss you so.”

I always wondered why half of their songs were decent and the other sounded like rock/prog Britney Spears. Shinoda cannot write a rhyme better than a four year old. Cosmicly bad. I suppose the old axiom holds true, never underestimate how bad a song can be when one of the principles has a song whose chorus was a shouting of SHUT UP.

+
The new Mariah Carey single really pisses me off, not because it’s shitty and MTV / clear channel are pumping it, or even because Mariah is nearing 40 and still singing about love like she was 15, but mainly because the song seems less like a single, but like the result of a DJ scratching together Mariah tracks and fading Snoop Dogg in every 10 seconds. It sounds like a DJ’s hypermix without a heavy hard four club beat

+
Just when I think hip hop has the market for self promotion and aggrandizing monopolized, I tune over to K-roq to catch the end of Tom DeLounge’s press tour for his upcoming Angels and Airwaves tour.

The raw smugness of it was unreal. I am going to paraphrase from memory here:

“I feel like a lot of people don’t get what rock and roll is anymore. I wanted to re-create it for a new generation. What we are doing with the project is a combination of media, meant to overwhelm the senses and put you in another world of enlightenment. Too many people are living negatively; I want this music to change it. This whole project is geared to reestablishing a world many of my fans never knew of, to bridge the gap, and to forge ahead with our new form of music. We are going to redefine rock music for this generation.”

(Bean, half jokingly)”Wow, I am just going to go to the beach this summer, you’re trying to save rock and roll.”

DeLounge: “This is going to be a reinvention, and if it saves the rock and roll world, or the world itself, well, I know I did my job.”

With not even a pretense of humility, or doubt, DeLounge sounded like he had just made Sgt. Pepper, The Dark Side of the Moon, Ok Computer, and went back in time and saved Lincoln from being shot. Try watching the movies

First off Tom, when you make prog rock, you have to under-write the lyrics, the vaguer the better. The voice is meant to be part of the fold, and if the lyrics make more sense when you are high, that’s a step.

Anymore than 200 –repeated words not counted- words in a song and you better have written something equal or better than Yes. Sung words are supposed to span seconds, creating an ethereal sense and complimenting the high. You can’t pass off ditzy fourth grade poetry about science fiction if you sing it the same way you do in a pop-punk band. To some extent, the faster we understand, the less impressive your writing seems. And having a killer guitar riff that opens the song fade out when the vocals come in (with no attempt at harmony), is like having buying a three million dollar beat from Pharell and just shouting your name over it. It didn’t work for Spacehog, it didn’t work for the Offspring, and it’s not working here.

Just because you started to listen to Pink Floyd and Radiohead, read Steven Ambrose, and got baked and watched 2001 again, then decided to combine the three doesn’t mean that your output is going to be better than all three combined. I know your conscience must be getting to you, “All the fame I have is because I ran around naked and mocked Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. What do I have as a legacy? As an artist? Box Car Racer? Even I know that was a Blink 182 ripoff where I was the lead singer instead of Mark.

Wait. I’ll make a rock band for humanity!

Excelsior!”

On a side note, Kanye has already copied all of this for his next promotional tour.

+
I guess it probably says more about me that I am completely geeked out at the upcoming Lupe Fiasco album. Nerd rap by a Muslim from Chicago means so much esoteric value for all of us who want to like hip hop but can’t get past the clichés of the albums, if someone were to attack Ameoba records on the day it is released, the entire LA music blogging community would perish.

+
And finally, the best link I have seen in a while:

http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/worst-album-covers/index.shtml

(continued...)

Two jokes from Dave

Why I am posting this is beyond me, I just had fun with it. In one sense it's useless to describe the essence of a joke, you either get it or you don't. So, maybe these are appreciations of these two jokes, which means they may not have any point for anyone else.

But I was writing these for my own files regardless. Maybe you'll enjoy.

Two of my favorite jokes of all time:

First off, the first joke is more of a litmus test for reception for humorous idiocy. I first came upon it in an Esquire article by Drew Carey, and have since heard it only a few more times. Like the central premise of the ‘Aristocrats’ joke, it’s entirely performance fueled and the improv level is almost wide open. When I read it, I loved it more on a passive joke level, it wasn’t hysterical, but it left me in a funny buzz, as if by a mere joke I had had my mood transformed to an almost post-coital or cannabis bliss.

Anyway the joke follows:

Two knights are traveling in the forests of England. They are dressed in full Knight Garb, sashes, armor, swords, helmet etc. They seem to be unsure of their path when they approached a young handmaiden.

The first Knight asks her, “Have you seen a Knight pass thru here? He was traveling on a chestnut brown horse, he was in garb similar to ours, red with gold sashes, and he most likely was traveling west.”

Her answer was uncertain, yet she pointed further West. The Knights both looked at each other and headed along.

They approached a wealthy man on the edge of his estate. They proceed with caution to make sure the lord of the manor is aware of their respect. He calls to them: “Dear Knights, how may I help you?”

The first Knight speaks up again: “We are looking for a Knight who travels with us. He disappeared three days ago, and he is usually draped in bright red attire around his mail. Gold surrounds the edges of his cape garb as well as that of the crest, a single Lion. He might have passed trough here on his was west to the town.”

The man’s answer was vague. The two Knights continued. Finally they reached the town and rushed to the Governor, and and second knight asked: “My Dear Lord, not three days ago our companion was separated from us in a terrible fight with infidels. I Hope you have seen him, as he likely moved through this town on way to the Castle. While he garments would have undoubtedbly been damaged in his voyage, they were of the Lord Montague, a red shield with the crest of an Lion holding a serpent. I believe on a horse with a purple cloak to honor the lost Queen, and he surely carried a Flagpole with him to put in front of his sleeping grounds!”

The governor was disheartened to tell them no.

The Knights rode on until the one asked the other, “Where the fuck is Frank?!?”

++++

The obvious crux of the joke is the needless buildup to a flat resolution, yet the brilliance of the joke is not in its anti-climax, but in the utter hopelessness. In the case of most longwinded jokes without a definitive punch line(let’s call them Federlines), the mere act of wasting the listener’s time, delivering a finale which harps on the consequence of letdown, via either non-sequitor towards nonsense as comeuppance, or a realistic unraveling of the setup of the joke to call nonsense of the form of a joke itself.

The former joke is something like the “Two men in a shower” joke than ends with one of them asking to pass the “typewriter.” The setup is geared for the storyteller to embarrass to listener by pretending to get the joke by inferring the joke is not only extremely easy to see, but highly hysterical as well.

The latter finale for this is to build the utter realism in the very nature of telling a joke, only to dissolute the potency with a line of unreasonable seriousness. It’s akin to fishing with artificial lures; the process is to lay in waiting for the fish to take the bait, only to capture them with a cheap knock off. One can mock them for taking the bait, or prolong the pain by telling similar jokes.

+++++

Don’t get me wrong, I love either style of joke as infantile as they are, they serve a pure aspect of humor which not only allows for laughter, but self satisfaction as well. Yet these are so sophomoric in terms of technique that they fitter out where the knight joke doesn’t.

The essence of the Federline is to not be funny. It’s to put the joke on the audience and on the joke as well, if nothing works, it’s a train wreck of an outcome, and that’s the point. (You know what; I love the K-Fed analogy so much I am giddy)

It’s meant to be wasteful, and that’s the enjoyment of it.

The Knight joke serves as an IQ test to humor, because it is no doubt working on similar principles or structure in relation to a Federline joke, but its punch line is the difference. Instead of getting its power from the condition of joke telling idioms itself, it gets them from the actual human condition itself.

The joke builds as if it was a mystery not as comical throughline. It‘s about a search, and as the joke goes on, the level of worry seems to escalate, as do the attempts to find the person itself. And the crux of the brilliance is to continually introduce red herrings, as if the complication of the set up will lead to a massive payoff, only to have the joke reduced to common human life. This isn’t a joke about a wild character, about what this wild person may have done, or even why he is missing, it’s all about two people pissed off about having to look for a co worker, and it finally falls out when they realize that for all of their skill, they are probably looking in the wrong place. In the end the joke is not on the teller, the listener, it’s on the knights. You just can’t miss someone dressed like that.

Speaking of dress, it’s certainly why I link it to the other joke on this list, this one being a film example.

I have the rare ability / track record of finding something so funny I slowly divert all attention from any focal point in the room to my laughing. I did this in every year in grade school, and in some cases in multiple classes during the school year, to the point where my laughter became so uncontrollable I was kicked out of class, and in others, I created such a fervor it retrograded the momentum of the teacher two lessons before.

When I find something truly funny, I never forget it, and odds are you won’t forget it either, ask Donnell about the “Photoshop Hall of Fame.”

But the biggest outburst I ever had was in a movie theater, when I was laughing so hard, and the only one who was seeing the joke unfold, I was louder than the soundtrack. I was the only one laughing, and I was the point of attention.

This was during Wayne’s World 2. And I was asked to quiet or leave the theater.

After Wayne believes his girlfriend may be cheating on him, he creates a recon mission to see for himself.

In a comedy such a scene is typical, and it usually allows for a bit of genre stretching, so to hear the Mission Impossible theme is almost a primer for an expected plot point.

But the joke isn’t of playing spy genre, the whole espionage is merely a decoy.

The group is hiding around a local coffee shop undercover. Wayne is pretending to be a maintenance man for the DWP, Garth is street level as a traffic officer, and the other two are hanging at a USO center as a sailor or pretending to be a biker at a bar.

What happens in the next three minutes is a slow morph from a Mission Impossible send-up to the real point of the joke… to make an elaborate (and quite possibly the penultimate) Village People joke.

What’s key is in the beginning how the real meat of the joke is kept in check, before they are spotted by Cassandra, the shot jumps from character to character, jogging the subconscious, and yet the dialogue on top of it is mere patter. Instead of creating aliases or speaking in code, it’s merely “Position 1, or position 2.”

All of this is just filler, because it’s drawing out the laughs, which start to some as soon as they have been made, and all four of them appear at once on screen.

And in that moment, you recognize a Village People joke is coming.

Aside from them being chased by a wonderfully game Christopher Walken (you mean I’m goin-g to bE chaaa-sing for guays, down a sta-reet) and then they are pursued into of, all places, a gay bar (aptly named The Tool Box). And for the moment, they are safe.

When they try to make for the back entrance they are foiled (and I don’t know if this is true or not, but I heard that Village People would occasionally start shows in a similar fashion) and their chase is up.

That is until the fey DJ sees what’s going on and thinks it is part of an act.

Perhaps why I like this joke so much is not because of the sheer lunacy of the outcome, or the irrelevance to anything else in the movie (save a perfect Indian joke), or even sight gag factor. It’s the lack of irony. In our Simpson / South Park / Family Guy world (I list these as the three main sources of parody for pop culture, since SNL is unwatchable now), any satire or parody is done with a smack of sarcasm, regarding the text as obtuse or ridiculous, knocking the iconography of the masses. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, our culture is more spiteful now that it ever was and won’t let people make a joke on us (or at least we think so)we are not in on.

Don’t get me wrong, these types of jokes often hysterical (or not, see best week ever or Family Guy), but this scene in Wayne’s World 2 is so different, because it has the set up for the satire, and it seems like a parody.

Once the characters realize what’s happening the scene turns to homage, a tribute and recreation of the enjoyment of something both sublimely silly and iconic. The characters on screen and the narrative progress of the movie at this point reach a similar conclusion to simply: Go with it.

The men in contume gamely embrace the uniqueness of the situation somehting
impossibly farfetched, once in a lifetime coincidence (both the band and the joke in the movie).

in design yet splendidly gleeful in execution, it’s a perfect tribute to the Village People, incorporating everything humorous about the band in one short scene. And rather than mock the past, the embrace the singularity, and that sells the joke to another level, becuase if someone had no knowledge of the Villiage People, the end of the scene works because they give it their all to seem like they can dance.

One joke is about convention, the other about capturing lightning in a bottle twice.

Yet all things considered, I’ll laugh anytime someone yells “STOP THE PRESSES!!!” on TV. It’s Pavlovian at this point.

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That's the brakes, that's the breaks

About every six weeks at my hotel, they have a NA meeting for the weekend, former narcotic users run around the place, and most of them can be lumped into one of two categories; A: Sex fiend (they come to these things looking for an orgy) B: Chain smoking Cigarette fiends. I heard a guy say he went thru a carton over a weekend. That’s like me killing a keg in the same period.

So they don’t drink, they are all desperately skinny, they always smoke or they are looking for a sexual rush to fill the void. Screw showing Requiem for a Dream to deter kids from drugs, take them to a NA meeting, these people are burdened by the single fact they can’t do what their body desperately craves. Hanging near death, looking still strung out, and forced to convene in a B rate hotel with people just like you was enough to scare me away from heavy drugs (at least for a while, but thankfully there’s another one coming up soon).

These people are terrified of the outside world, their old friends probably stopped being friends during the addiction, and they all look 10 years older due to the drugs. It’s a rotten lot in life. I got the feeling some of them wished they had died of an overdose.

Yet, I still don’t think they have it worse than lesbians. All other things being equal, I can think of few other roles that would be as aggravating as a lesbian anywhere from 24- 80.

Let’s do a top ten.

10. Men look at the same porno they do. This means that you are getting off to something someone that has no idea what it’s like to have that kind of love making is. It’s like me getting a big bowl of ice cream, cuddling up in an afghan, and watching Desperate Housewives, THEN chatting online with my mother and aunts and talking about how it relates to my life for 90 minutes.

They’re thinking about the actual act, and how it gets them in the mood, or how it was.

We’re sitting there thinking “TWO CHICKS!!! AT THE SAME TIME!!! In all honesty, most men I know would peter out at the sight of a lesbian scene like those in porn.

Come to think of it,

9. It is entirely possible that the qualified success for female liberation was successful due to the rise in Lesbian Porno. Sure, sure, you’re born equal to us, at what point do you start kissing? Subconsciously, men will agree to equal wages if it means a 1-1000 chance to see women in their panties having a pillow fight. Dangling a sexual carrot has always been a solid approach with the male gender, dangling this newfound liberation (women read voting rights, equality, men read women going out to a bar with the company after work and hooking up with that 22 year old secretary from Arizona State). We as men already know that there is little difference from day one. But we’re still angling.

8. The L word and Ellen (the sitcom):
Completely unwatchable.

7. No matter where you are, if you even come close to a PDA, everyone will look. People have been brainwashed to look away from guys kissing or holding hands. But a hug and a kiss by a gay female couple? Gawkers unite! Bad enough are the looks of a 13 year old b-b-b-boy, but they have to endure the judgmental/inquisitive stares of the women as well.

Gay men defer all stares except of those from other gay men and chicks who were aroused by Brokeback.

Women kissing in public elicit raw human emotional facets like the Hindenburg.

6. While every other (sub)-culture has icons in film and in culture, the high profile lesbians of note are few and far between, and judging on two of the top ten (Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosie O’Donnell) it’s not going to bring anyone into the fold. Gay guys have drama, they have Kevin Spacey, Ryan Seacrest, Judy Garland, and Bettie Davis; a lot of straight women and men like them. Men hate Rosie O’Donnell, and for that matter Oprah, just come on out, we know what’s his name that begins with an S is a sham.

Even worse, the whole lesbian look has been taken over by Emo/Goth guys. Ubersensitve with too much care placed on hair flips, makeup, and hair product, it’s hard to distinguish a Fall Out Boy fan from a girl who likes girls, they hide in big groups, they are struggling with their feelings, and there have been times in their life when they considered or consented to the cock.

5. Women can have gay friends. Lesbian’s can’t really have male friends. Aside from the whole When Harry Met Sally thing about men and women friendships, (yeah, we’re going to try to sleep with you, part of it’s carnal, but most of it’s almost instinctual) when men are challenged in something like Sports Knowledge, Car Mechanics, or arm wrestling. From the first days of the schoolyard, being called girly was taunt #1, and how can men be cool with that. They say “I can’t believe the Texans passed on Bush for a guy who sucked against decent talent,” we think, “Well, she knows what she’s talking about, maybe I can convert her. She’d be an AWESOME girlfriend.

4. With the exception of The Boss, when I talk to a man named Bruce or Gary, I know they are gay. Is Sue as lesbian name, what about Margaret, or Jane? If any lesbian is actually reading this, and made it thus far, get started on this. I’ll even start it for you, the name Rose. Tis now a lesbian name. Really, I think to be accepted in society, there has to be a slanderous epithet for you. I don’t think there is one that is negative enough for the accuser to feel hate. It’s almost a show of illegitimacy.

3. The definition of a lesbian for the rest of the world has got to be drastically different from the actual truth. Sure, all stereotypes are damaging, but I can think of few (if any) that are met with disappointment upon actual contact. If you are telling a horny boy or a curious girl that most lesbians look like KD Lang, you might as well tell a four year old Santa doesn’t exist. The latter would be slightly less damaging. Of this entire preconceived notion of beauty with women (the whole the female body is a work of art load) and two of them together is so far off base it’s almost comical. We can easily deem gay men as girly, but it’s nigh impossible to reason a mannish women for most people.

2. The girls born in the age of Britney Spears, Girls Gone Wild, and Ecstasy are even more sexually loose than the hippies in fuck fest ’67. Most of them hook up with other girls as a matter of course. It’s “cool” and “funny.” I’d imagine being a Grad Student lesbian or a TA at FSU must be torture. For them it would be like the straight version of going to college in the late 80’s and early 90’s paranoia about AIDS and grunge phase. Three to five years later, women are giving it away. It’s got to be a sick torture to know that the acceptance prevalent now would have made it all the easier to come to grips in the teen years, and years later, it’d be easy to fool around with the prom queen or golf team captain without ridicule. Just a horrible hand dealt by fate.

1. They have to live with a cold hard truth that every man knows: Women are completely insane.

Somewhat joking, rather serious, I really feel terrible for Lesbians, because I know that as a horny boy who liked lesbian porn as a starting point (when I was 16 I was too homophobic to even look at MF shots) and I have always dreamt of a three way with two women but am flabbergasted at why a girl would want two guys. Men and Lesbians both like women, but different kind of women, in the end, it’s a raw deal. Acceptance is there, but understanding is years if not decades away.

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For the Indiana in Indiana Dave

Pacers lost. And I am somewhat glad. I didn't need to see this team go half the distance to fall apart again. This team needs to be blown up and refit for chemistry. Coach rick is #3 in the league behind Scott Skiles (Far and away the best the league has seen since, well... Phil Jackson (don't call it a buddhist thing, it is, but don't call it that.

get rid of J7, and Jax, and Tinsley for Garnett. Get rid of Jax and Tins period.

But for now, lets celebrate the one year retirement (not to the date, but to the out of the Pacers) of Reggie Miller.

Next comes #5, but lets go with #31 for now.

to know life is to know winning and it's to never fear that you may lose. If it's on the line, you

just

do

it.

His finest moment was not the 25 in a quarter to win game 5 against the Knicks, or even the last second stho in game 4 against the Bulls.

but 8.9 seconds when he took a team down 6 points with no time left.

I'll paraphrase Simpsons "Kamp Krusty" here.

The crowd starts to leave, the Knicks fans elated, and for the few Pacer Faithful in Madison Square Garden, it seemed too sure. it was time to go.

Everyone was running out, they forgot the outcome.

"Wait a minute! You didn't hear how it ended!"

The crowd pauses.

"WE WON!!!"

*Cheers all around*



And the rest....

The Only man to ever show up Kobe is one thing:



Thats balls.

The only man to show up MJ, that's the highest form of praise you can give.



And the finale.



until I find postable footage of the memorial day miracle, we'll have to wait.

Why not think it. It's Cinco de Mayo, but for me, it's always been...


Miller Time.

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