The name of my funk side project is ...

Hypothetical 3-Way



The name of my imaginary one-man funk side band comes from a discussion with my wife about our respective parent-child secret boyfriends and girlfriends: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin for me, Tim and Jeff Buckley for her. We have given each other permission to have a three-way with our respective SGs and SBs, should the opportunity arise (regular one-on-one contact, however, is strictly forbidden). We're guessing the opportunity will never arise, especially for my wife, because both of her SBs are dead, but double especially because most people would not want to partake in a three-way with a member of their family. Nevertheless, if I ever become an international scenester, or if my wife gets access to a time machine and infiltrates the semi-underground rock scenes of late 60s/early 70s Los Angeles and early 90s New York, look out Penthouse Forum.

Unrelated note: While I was writing this post, a bunch of skinny-jeaned, anorexic, sweaty, stupid-looking indie-rock losers who have just moved into our apartment complex tried stealing the chairs and plant we have sitting outside our window, but I looked out the window, and they all took off. I'm not bragging one iota when I say I could have beaten all 15 of them to a bloody pulp single-handedly while holding the beer I'm drinking. And I'm a lover, not a fighter. I'm the kind of person who would lose a bar fight before it even started. And I would destroy these willowy, wispy, shitty little creeps.

Related note: My sentence construction was a little fucked up, so it reads like Charlotte Gainsbourg is Jane Birkin's mother. Charlotte is the daughter, Jane is the mother. If you're reading this, ladies, I have permission. Don't get creeped out. I'm cool.

Chocolate Milk Death Metal Shootout

This is hilarious. Guitarist for death metal band Malevolent Creation, Phil Fasciana, claims that he stopped in at a Ft. Lauderdale convenience store to get some chocolate milk on Friday afternoon and walked into the middle of a robbery. He claims that the would-be robber, a crazed crackhead, fired four rounds directly at him but missed. He then tackled the robber and took his gun. The robber reached into his sock and pulled out another gun, so Fasciana shot the man twice in the head, killing him. Fasciana also claims that the convenience store owner is offering him free chocolate milk for his lifetime. Fasciana's own unintentionally hilarious account of the alleged robbery can be found here and here. My favorite part of his account is this gem, "It was the most fucked up thing I have ever been involved with, besides my ex-girlfriend!!"
Even more hilariously, Ft. Lauderdale police are emphatically insisting that the shootout never occurred. In fact, there haven't been any convenience store robberies in the city for an entire month, and no murders for a couple of weeks.
The message boards on the metal site covering this story are equally fantastic. Here are some of my favorites:
Domcoccaro writes, "Glad he set the record straight. What's everyone's favorite MC record? Mine would have to be Envenomed."
allihadigave writes, "Anyways, this story is going to put utter fear in the death metal listening to homeless crackhead community for sure. Now they fuckin' know, lol....."
And Then There Were None provides this poignant observation, "I don't follow this band, nor do I condone killing people, but, as said above, that is metal as fuck."
'OWNN-idge lays down this truth, "THIS JUST FLAT-OUT PLAIN RULEZ ALL-
EVERY THING ABOUT THIS IS MONEY!
BETTER THAN ANYTHING IN THE WORLD INCLUDING CHEESE FRIES+"
Wet Toilet Paper makes us all think with this comment, "Alright well Phil deserves more recognition than a life time supply of chocolate milk for his courage and bravery. It'll at least make a kick ass album cover (like Stillborn). HEAD BANG TO THAT FUCKER!!!!"

Multiple metal fans have angrily responded to those doubting Fasciana's story by claiming that thousands of convenience store shootings happen in Florida every day and the police and news media can't possibly keep track of all of them. A skeptical, proactive metal fan has done some investigating to counter these claims: "Ok, the Sun Sentinal and the Miami Hearld, both ft. Lauderdale news papers, say it did'nt happen, no record of it as a story like this. You know this would have gotten lots of coverage. The ft. lauderdale police department (954 828-5700, criminal investigations) say they have not had a death / homicide involving a robbery this month and this did not happen. The County Medical Examiners Office (954 327-6500) said the whole county has not had a fatal shooting / homicide this month.

All of these agencies have gotten together in a conspiracy to keep this quite? Sombody would be talking about it. Check for yourself, make some calls.

As a matter of fact the only person talking about bit is Phill....
WTF........"

bangyermfhead agrees: "Awesome. Thanks for actually doing the legwork. This country is fucked up in a lot of ways but it cracks me up when people act like it's Escape from NY or Mad Max out there and innocent bystanders are just getting mowed down by the dozens on an hourly basis."

Then there's this.

And this commentary on MilkGate is also very funny.

I love this story, and I hope there will be new developments.

Ridiculousness sticks to me like a magnet

13-hour drive yesterday + suppression of excess anger and confusion at the world and anyone who pressures you to aspire to a complacent middle class lifestyle and/or excessive consumer product purchasing + post-vacation depression + failure to re-acclimate to the brutal Texas heat after mild, beautiful Wisconsin weather + back to the office tomorrow + lack of quality sleep last night even though the quantity was there + no air conditioning in rock club + exhaustion + dehydration + three-fourths of the crowd leaving or playing with their phones during the show + bass drum pedal that kept falling off mid-song + drum set that partially collapsed during the penultimate song, which became the ultimate song + mild public meltdown + immediate feeling of embarrassment after mild public meltdown = Wednesday, July 8, 2009 in the life of Dr. Mystery. On the other side of the coin, I got free pizza. Suicide, you lost this round.

Holy shit! Michael Jackson is dead, too

Michael Jackson - Rock With You
Uploaded by klmbaby. - Explore more music videos.

Sky Saxon 19??-2009

"Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?": The Missing Link Between Rio de Janeiro and Hibbing, Minnesota?

Brazilian musician and songwriter Jorge Ben took umbrage at Rod Stewart's 1978 disco-inspired hit, "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" and sued the rooster-haired Brit for plagiarizing his song "Taj Mahal." Listen to the two, and you hear a lot of similarities. Rod admitted he stole parts of the song and agreed to donate proceeds from the single to UNICEF to appease Ben. However, I accidentally stumbled upon another bit of Rod plagiarism from the same song when listening to a lot of Bob Dylan recently. A little organ vamp played by Al Kooper in the middle of "One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" that is only repeated once sounds, to me, like it has been stolen outright and used as a major part of "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?." Go to 2:59-3:08 on the Dylan video to hear it. I looked this up on the Internet and couldn't find anything. Surely someone else has noticed the similarity before.

The Modern Age

When my paternal grandfather was in his early thirties, he was a WWII vet and owned his own farm. I spent the hour between 4 and 5 a.m. yesterday reading the comments posted under an Onion A/V Club article in which many people in their early thirties debated whether the TV sitcom The King of Queens was lowbrow or middlebrow.

Momentary diversion on the road to self-pity

Don't squirrels look hilarious when they're chewing on some food? Sitting upright, grasping onto a nut, chewing on the nut? Hilarious.

The rock and roll lifestyle

Hey friends,
Last night, the band I am in, The Spacenecks, played our first official non-house-party show at the Carousel Lounge. Many of our friends came and made it a good time, even though I was sick with a horrible cold and had a million pounds of snot coming out of every orifice except for my ass. Thanks for your support and kind words. I would also like to thank Rabbit Fist for playing with us, rocking, being stand-up nice people, and letting us use their super awesome set of drums. Finally, I want to thank my wife's archivist friends for buying me a beer. The lovely Spacebeer recorded a couple of our patented R&B slow jams and 16th century songs of protest. Here they are:

The Brother Trilogy

The future of America is in good hands

A student in one of the classes I'm observing/student teaching this semester told me that when he was in third grade he had an imaginary ice cream truck.

Louis Black Wack Attack

I decided some time ago to quit picking on Louis Black. After all, I'd made my point many times over. But a paragraph from his latest column made me do a triple spit-take, and I wasn't even drinking anything. Here it is, in its entirety:

"As I have walked along the everywhere boardwalk that we all stroll down, living the every day to every day of our lives, my gait has always been uneven, rarely displaying the nonchalant grace, or at least ease, of most others. Almost stumbling, I've never been terribly far from slipping off the solid wood boards into the endless sandstorms raging on all sides. Once the solid boardwalk is left, I find myself tossed around at the mercy of the tiny tornadoes of personal instability and an always-shaky grasp on reality."

Holy shit. That's a Bulwer-Lytton contest winner right there.

The plain truth

A couple of quotes, and a couple of other things:

from an interview with David Lynch:
Interviewer, about Lynch's comic strip, "The Angriest Dog in the World": "... (S)omebody said, 'The comic strip originated from a time in Lynch's life when he was filled with anger'..."
Lynch: "Yeah. 'The Angriest Dog in the World' wasn't really about anger in me, it was more (pause) anger in that dog."

Two girls, from the high school senior classes I'm observing and student teaching this semester:
Girl A, semi-accusatorily: "Why did you quit basketball?"
Girl B: "I didn't like the way Miss __ coached, and she was making me hate basketball. Why did you quit volleyball?"
Girl A: "My booty got too big for the shorts."

Speaking of high school kids, I think I'm going to love teaching them. Several of my college professors, past and present, have delivered elitist tirades about the lowliness and incompetence of high school teachers and how horribly they're doing their jobs, not to mention how unimportant those jobs are compared to the prestigious rarefied air of a tenured professorship. Most of this contempt comes from a combination of privileged upper-class snobbery and an ignorance and/or disinterest in actual good teaching. There are terrible high school teachers in the world, and a lot of them, but most college professors think that lecturing for the entire class period, and never varying their methods or getting to know their students as individual learners, is an effective way to teach. Never mind that a fucking century of research shows that this is the worst way to teach. Even bad high school teachers know this stuff -- they're just lazy and/or embittered. Higher education institutions place more value on research than teaching, and it desperately shows. I'm very glad that a handful of my friends are either professors now, or getting close, because they are curious, non-complacent, and driven people, and college kids deserve good teachers.
I'm just frustrated with the badmouthing high school teachers get from professors because the latter can't engage their students, even though they haven't varied their approach in 25 years. Somehow, it's the 9th-grade teacher's fault you suck as a professor. Some of these jerks can't even conceive that a bunch of 18-year-olds aren't wetting their pants about particle physics or Chaucer or the French Revolution, despite their non-student-centered dry lecturing and regurgitation-based tests.

Blogging from work

You know that noise Sideshow Bob makes when he steps on a rake and it smacks him in the face? I just found out that my whole body, particularly my bowels, makes that noise when subjected to "Birdland" by The Manhattan Transfer. Damn you, Absolute 70s radio!

Lux Interior 1948-2009

A tough year for cult heroes born in 1948. Ron Asheton, John Martyn, Lux Interior. Who's next?

John Martyn 1948-2009

Fun with media manipulation, 1980s-style

#1: Culturcide - They Aren't the World
#2: Negativland - Helter Stupid (newscast)
The ax murder story was a hoax perpetrated by the band, and several news media outlets reported it as fact.

Music nerd stuff

I've spent part of my week playing around with the newish iTunes Genius feature, which, besides shilling product under the guise of "suggestions" (why do they think Guided By Voices fans might also be interested in Bachman Turner Overdrive?), also makes some creepily intuitive playlists based on a song of your choice. Unfortunately, the song must be licensed by iTunes, so a lot of stuff both obscure and super-famous doesn't work, including my Bollywood steel guitar compilation and Beatles albums. The playlists also sometimes get repetitive, with the same songs showing up over and over again. However, this creepy robotic ghost DJ also makes some very interesting connections that flow together like a well-sequenced album. In one instance, robo-Genius followed The Pretty Things' "S.F. Sorrow Is Born" with Pere Ubu's "Non-Alignment Pact," which worked ridiculously well, transitionally speaking, and might never have occurred to me otherwise if I were making a mix. Just now, it included T. Rex in a playlist based on Prince's "Cream." If you were somehow able to exhume dead rock stars, give them the gift of life, and force them to cover songs recorded after their demise, I think Marc Bolan could do great things with this early 1990s Prince hit. Given the Bolan treatment, "Cream" could very easily be a T. Rex song. The lyrics are very T. Rexy, and now I'm wondering if Prince had T. Rex in mind when he wrote it. I never would have considered this without the Genius putting the two together. I also wonder if I'm being tricked into forcing a connection because of the cold, clinical robotic programming of a robo-DJ. If the computer starts making the equivalent of mix tapes on its own, what else will it do? Is this the continuation of a subversive plan to ensure man's enslavement by robots? Is this the rise of the machines? Whoot! Zap! Kablammo!

You have been challenged!!!!!

I was perusing the odds and ends in the fridge and liquor cabinet while considering what mixed drink to make, and I invented a drink that I think may be one of the most horrible intoxicants ever considered by anyone on a desperate night. So far, this drink only exists in my mind and has never been poured into a glass or consumed. My challenge to the five readers I have left after posting so infrequently is this: Make this drink, drink it, then post about it on your own blog, or, if you have no blog (loser), post about it in comment form under this post. I expect no one to take me up on this offer, but goddamn it all to hell, it's time for a meme that's not about something nobody gives 1/8 of a shit about. Whoo!

Sally Jesse Raphael's Last Night in Town
2 oz. tequila, preferably shitty tequila with not much agave that comes in a plastic container
6 oz. of low-fat buttermilk, brand of your choice
1 oz. ketchup

Drink tenderly and slowly, savoring each precious moment!

Ron Asheton 1948-2009

Bummer. I was lucky enough to see him play live twice, once with J. Mascis and once with the reunited Stooges. One of my favorite guitarists.

You're a good-looking man, Tony

Journalism at its finest, Part 789

For the last half-decade, at least, most mainstream culture magazines have stopped publishing book reviews and have chopped their movie reviews down to Pizza Roll-sized nuggets of filler. That's hardly surprising, since we're a stupid country full of fat idiots. I have to admit, though, I'm a little surprised that someone is pulling down a salary to "write" movie reviews, like the following, for FHM Online. Granted, FHM is a terrible, terrible magazine, but I'm guessing they used to hire writers who could at least communicate semi-coherently, with a minimum of grunts, hoots, and bizarrely placed commas. A hydrocephalic emu placed in a room with flashing lights and an air-raid siren constantly going off while getting punched repeatedly in the rectum and being yelled at by Hardball's Chris Matthews could produce a more coherent review of the new Paul Rudd comedy, Role Models. For your enjoyment, here's the whole thing, unexcerpted, untouched by my hands (or an editor's, it would seem):

"When depressed energy drink salesman Danny (Paul Rudd) has meltdown and lands himself and his party animal coworker Wheeler (Seann William Scott) in jail, they are forced to spend 150 hours in the Sturdy Wings Big Brother program or face jail time.
Role Models feels like a dysfunctional family film. It’s got a lot of that warmness, but there is also cursing and boobies. It’s got a good moral in the end, that you would want to share with your kid, but might feel uncomfortable with the nudity, or not. It’s a little bit like a dirtier Meet the Parents.
A+ to the Casting Department for Role Models. Paul Rudd plays a sarcastic, asshole, a role he has played to much acclaim in Knocked Up. Seann William Scott plays a character that reminds us of a Stifler in his 20s. This may sound like a bad thing, they play their characters well, and work well together as a comedic duo. Besides, we always wondered what happened to Stifler.
By hearing the premise, you might have already guessed the movie's ending. Role Models falls into a lot of standard movie clichés. At the same time, it’s still entertaining throughout, and easy to follow.
Role Models was originally announced under the title Big Brothers. After Big Brothers was put on hiatus and Paul Rudd was commissioned to retool the script, the film was re-titled Little Big Men. "

If you don't believe me, here is the link. This was really published, and someone was really paid to write it. This did not come from a 7-year-old's MySpace page, or not. This may sound like a bad thing, an abused, retarded emu did not write it.

Shameless self-promotion

Hey, blog readers,
I'm not just a grumpy old crank who posts intermittently. I'm also a member of the world's first three-man barbershop quartet, The Spacenecks. Click here for songs about puppies, Old Glory, and the importance of prayer. I'm the blinking, indiscriminate blur behind the drum set.

Kindness is its own reward

On the bus home today, I sat next to heroes. Wonderful, selfless people who would do anything to help others. Class acts. Doers of good deeds. How did I know this? They said so. A woman. A man. She does her friends' dishes if she sees them in the sink. He gave her a ride home when her car died. She drives her friends home when they're too "fucked up." People ask her all the time, Why are you doing so much for other people? Why wouldn't she help if she could, she usually replies. He agreed. It's the little things that mean so much. He tries to do little nice things for people every day. It means so much, you know. She agreed. It makes her feel good to know that people come to her when they need help. Just like when he gave her a ride when she needed one. It feels good to help. He agreed. It felt good to give her a ride when she needed one. Her appreciation was reward enough. It's the little things. She agreed. The little things make such a difference. They add up. She is glad she can be counted on to consistently help others. He agreed. When he needs a ride home from the airport, he knows that some friends, even though they've been friends for years and really are good people deep down, can't be counted on to pick him up on time, if at all. He can always be counted on to pick his friends up at the airport, if needed, or anything else. He is here to help others. She agreed. Helping others is good, and it makes you feel good. He agreed. Then they got off the bus at their stop, continuing to tell each other about the good work they do for others. It's the little things they add up it's good to be needed warm fuzzy helping agree others help pick up at airport love hugs nice to be needed feels good to help helping good helping helpiness helpism helption helpy help help.
I believe this conversation continues still, and will continue until one of the kind, helpful platonic friends dies of natural causes in the other one's arms. One minute later, the survivor will smile, shed a few tears, look heavenward, ask "Who will pick up David from the airport now?," sigh contentedly, with only a tinge of melancholy, and cease to exist. I will found a church based on their teachings.

2008 vs. 2004

In Barack Obama's victory speech, he told those who didn't vote for him that he would be their president, too.
When Bush won in 2004 with 51% of the vote, Cheney said they had been given a mandate by the American people.
Class vs. Ass, "my friends."
I can't wait to see Bush and Cheney slither away in January.

Whoo!

The Nixon/Reagan/Atwater/Bush/Rove/Cheney/Murdoch/Hannity/O'Reilly/Coulter/Limbaugh/Bush II years are over. For now.
Obama has inherited what they refer to in the biz as a "fixer-upper." I hope he can do something with it, or at least knock it down and put a roller disco/pizza parlor in its place. In the meantime, I'll be learning Chinese.
Seriously, though, it feels like something great maybe happened.

Rope-a-dope

I'm listening to a radio interview with Mike Leigh, one of my favorite filmmakers, and the interviewer keeps hammering at him about what the symbols mean in his latest film. I love his answers. When asked about the symbolism of his main character's large circular earrings possibly meaning a deluded happiness that's locked in a cycle, and her taking the earrings off indicating a new way of looking at the world, Leigh politely but firmly tells him that most earrings are symmetrical by their very function, and she took them off because the next scene they filmed required a lot of tussling and struggle and the earrings made too much noise on the soundtrack. Then the interviewer asks him if the character's back pain symbolizes a reluctance to look at her past. Leigh: "You are plainly a fundamental unreconstituted top-rate intellectual, which I am not. I think it's fascinating, your analysis, but I think it's a load of old rope. I can't go along with it at all."
There is so much depth and mystery and substance lodged right on the surface of great work, and people are so afraid to deal with it directly and plainly, so they have to go symbol hunting. It's like all the music critics I used to read but now generally avoid who spend most of their word count analyzing the meanings of the lyrics, without once making an attempt to find a way of talking about the sound of these words, as sounds, as a part of the texture of sound created by the people performing the music.

Terrifying fact

I'm almost twice as old as I was when Bill Hicks died, yet every one of his non-New Kids on the Block-related jokes is topical. Holy shit.

Post Edited 2 Minutes Later: New Kids on the Block are currently in the midst of a reunion tour. I forgot. Please mentally delete the phrase "non-New Kids on the Block-related" and weep aggressively. Thank God McCain is running as inept a campaign as every non-Bill-Clinton/first-and-only-term-Carter Democrat since my birth. I also think it's astonishingly depressing that Biden is the second-poorest politician in our current Congress, yet he still makes about six times what my parents make, and no one is even remotely close to starving at either my mother's or father's home.

School

The bloom is off the rose. I want to be done. I want a real job. I want to be done. I'm too old to study for tests. To quote the eighth-graders I student-taught last spring, my classes this semester are "stupid and boring."
One of the fun parts of college, part 1 was staying up all night on weeknights. In college, part 2, all my classes are early in the morning. The metabolism of the Dr. Mystery of today is a jerk. I want the metabolism of the Robot X of yesterday. I'm tired of reading academic articles about education. The fads of today don't work. Also, the perpetuation of grotesque, monstrous, selfish, unequal, greedy, failed policies don't work. All public schools should have equal funding, you anti-Robin Hood motherfuckers. Keeping poor schools poor hurts everyone, and the kids who stop going to those schools because they have no books, computers, working bathrooms, good teachers, etc. are absolutely justified in carjacking and stabbing your ugly, handsome children. Constant group projects don't teach kids anything about individual responsibility. Standardized tests don't teach kids anything except how to take standardized tests. Letting politicians dictate curriculum standards is like letting politicians dictate medical procedure.
My biggest beef, however, is the bus. The bus is always massively overcrowded. Trying to find a seat on the bus this semester has been a cockfight of clusterfucks.
And for god's sake, when the bus is crowded, and more people get on, and you're already standing up in the middle of the bus, and there's space in the back, MOVE BACK! And if there's an empty seat, SIT IN IT! What the fuck is wrong with you? Fuck! All you selfish idiots who won't sit down in empty seats or move from your precious spots when the bus driver lets 38 more people on the bus are contributing to about 65% of the cockfight of clusterfucks! Why are you so stupid and boring and worthless? Why are you such narcissistic bags of shit? Why didn't your parents abort you? Or at least teach you some manners or public etiquette? Were they too busy calling the school every time you got less than an A- to harass your overworked teachers? Were they too busy letting their housekeepers raise you while they went to Belize for three weeks? Did they let you make important household decisions when you were three years old? Did you get whatever you wanted if you cried long enough? Does your geographic proximity to Russia give you foreign policy experience? Despite reading "all" of the newspapers, are you unable to name even one? Are you, like 50% of the people in my English classes, an English major who inexplicably has zero interest in literature or the written word of any kind and never reads any of the assigned work? Are you just a dick? Or an asshole? Or a "motherfuckin', titty-suckin', two-balled bitch" (a phrase chanted on the playground of my elementary school)?
I'm just a grumpy old crank. Like my Grandma used to say, "You can't walk across the pigpen without getting some mud on your shoes." Even better, to quote Orson Welles quoting Ferenc Molnar: "Never touch shit, even with gloves on. The gloves get shittier, but the shit never gets glovier."
No recess for the wicked!

A guest post from John McCain

You know what I hate? Pork barrel spending. I wasn't named Miss Congeniality in the Senate. Maverick. Maverick. Maverick. Pork barrel. Miss Congeniality. Obama said that Wall Street/Main Street thing, right? Let me say it fourteen times, then. Maverick. Pork barrel. Maverick. Where are my brain pills? Maverick.

My other grandmother, my dad's mother, died this morning. That makes the fourth death in the family this year. My aunt died in February, my maternal grandmother died three weeks later, and my great-uncle Fred died a few weeks after that. Now my paternal grandmother is gone, and I feel like I should be sadder. There are a handful of reasons why I'm taking this latest news so well. First, I simply have death fatigue. I'm tired of grieving. Second, my grandmother hadn't been herself for several years. Her death was sooner than expected, but still expected. She had Alzheimer's, diabetes, and renal and liver failure. She spent most of her time sleeping and repeating the same few lines of small talk over and over. I resigned myself to the fact that my grandmother was gone three or four years ago when she stopped bathing, combing her hair, clipping her fingernails and toenails, and managing her insulin and had to be placed in a nursing home. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly thereafter. My dad, while definitely sad, mostly sounded relieved today. I also feel that relief. I don't want to see my relatives linger and decay, and I don't want to linger and decay myself. Third, I had little in common with my dad's mother. While I had, and have, so much to say about my maternal grandmother, an attempt to capture some of my paternal grandmother's life in as unsatisfactory a medium as a blog post would look something like this: She loved her family, liked to watch Murder, She Wrote and gossiped about the neighbors. We didn't really have conversations, just exchanges of small talk and occasional news about family and friends. However, I do remember her with affection. The last time she was well, about five years ago, I was home for a visit. My brother, sister, father, and I were eating dinner and watching a nature documentary about blue whales on PBS or Discovery. Soon, the topic of blue whale sexual reproduction came up, and the whale's gigantic penis filled the screen, popping out and wiggling around, looking for blue whale love. It was nearly the size of a medium-sized tree trunk. The narrator discussed the difficulties of attracting a mate in the ocean. My grandmother looked up from her fried chicken and said, "He's bound to get something with that thing." I will fondly remember her making way too many frozen pizzas every Christmas Eve, overestimating the size of our family by at least six people. I'll also remember mowing her and my grandfather's lawn every week for six or seven years, coming inside after I was done to eat a ham and cheese sandwich, drink a strawberry pop, and collect my five dollars.
On campus today, I heard a girl in the library answer her cellphone and say, "Hi, Grandma." I immediately thought to myself, "I don't have any grandmothers anymore. I had two of them and now I have none." I have only one grandparent left, my mother's dad. Two weeks ago, my 92-year-old great-uncle Swede had to move into the nursing home. The old generation in my family is rapidly disappearing. My parents, aunts, and uncles are slowly, but not too slowly, becoming that old generation, while I can put "middle-aged man" on my business card in less than nine years. My mother visited the cemetery in my hometown last week to see her mother's headstone and looked around a bit afterward. She said, "I know so many people there," before waiting a beat and correcting herself -- "knew so many people there." Someday, I'll be old, if I'm (un)lucky.
I decided to just get on with my life today, and the rest of the week. I went to class today. Movie night is still on for Saturday, band practice for Sunday. I made myself scarce after my aunt's and maternal grandmother's deaths, but I'm in a different place now. I think getting on with the business of living is the best way to proceed this time. What a year.

Norman Whitfield 1940-2008

See Saw

Rick Wright, keyboardist/pianist/organist for Pink Floyd, died of cancer today. He didn't get as much attention as the other guys in the group, but he wrote my favorite non-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd song, "See Saw." I have a particular fondness for mellow, breezy, pretty psychedelia, if that description makes any sense, and this song brings home the mellow psychedelic bacon. By the way, Mellow Psychedelic Bacon is opening for Trey Anastasio at the Hepatitis Festival at some organic farm this weekend.

A great man

I came home from class today, turned on the television, and heard Maury Povich say these words:
"Cassandra tells us that she suspects her husband of stealing money from his own children to take another woman to the circus."

New rock urban legends

It's been too long since a ridiculous rock urban legend hit the streets. What happened to the days when tales of Rod Stewart's stomach full of semen, Marilyn Manson's child acting career on The Wonder Years, Paul McCartney's secret death, and Alice Cooper's on-stage ingestion of Frank Zappa's shit (or was it the other way around?) were blindly accepted as fact on the mean streets of Anytown, USA? It's time for some new ones. Feel free to unquestioningly accept the veracity of the following claims and freely spread them all over town, or add your own!

1. After leaving Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett played shortstop for the Atlanta Braves for three seasons. He mostly sat on the bench, but he did see game time in the bottom of the eighth inning against the Montreal Expos in the 1971 season.

2. After losing an all-night poker game, former member of 'N Sync Joey Fatone became Elton John's butler for one year.

3. Jim Morrison is Chuck Woolery's second cousin.

4. The Arcade Fire's Win Butler admitted to a French journalist that he was sexually attracted to Carol Channing. The journalist later disappeared.

5. Former Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi told Ronnie James Dio that he could eat the world's biggest hoagie in one sitting. Dio scoffed at Iommi's claim and arranged the delivery of the hoagie at Ritchie Blackmore's birthday party the following weekend. Iommi never showed up, and most of the hoagie had to be thrown away. Dio begged Blackmore to give the uneaten portions of the hoagie to Blackmore's 13 Rottweilers, but Blackmore angrily replied that his dogs only eat dog food, and if you give people food to dogs, you spoil them. The dogs will forever after never be satisfied with dog food, Blackmore continued. I mean, Jesus Christ, once they get a taste for hoagies, they'll expect hoagies every day. The two men argued long into the night until their wives begged them to give it a rest. They were tired and wanted to get some sleep. The two men agreed, but on his way out the door, Dio looked up at Blackmore with a fiercely determined glare and said, "This is not over, Blackmore."

6. Amy Winehouse has been dead for six months. A Las Vegas female impersonator, Herb Friedman, has been portraying Winehouse at her recent public appearances.

7. Bill Cosby briefly recorded with Godspeed, You Black Emperor! before realizing he had walked into the wrong studio door. He wanted Studio 114, not Studio 115. He was on his way to record a voice-over for his book-on-tape, Come On, You People! Get Off the Drugs, Dammit! and assumed the experimental rock group were providing sound effects and between-chapter segues.

8. If you say you hate jam bands and emo, people will think you're pretty cool. It's a position only the most maverick, daring, and complex thinkers take. Your brave stance will win many admirers. If you also say The Grateful Dead suck, particularly if you say this to indie-rock scenesters, you will be feared for "dangerously telling it like it is."

Coincidence is either hit or miss

I spent the summer reading every short story Flannery O'Connor wrote. I also took two classes. In an assignment for the first class, Overcoming Reading Difficulties, we were instructed to read whatever we wanted for an hour, as long as it hadn't been assigned by a teacher for a class. The next day, the professor asked each one of us what we read, wrote the titles and authors on the board, and used these titles for a discussion about reading. I liked her as a professor and as a person, and the strategies she taught us to help struggling and reluctant readers understand and engage with texts will come in handy when I start teaching. However, our aesthetics couldn't be more different. She sees reading as a social act that brings us together and shows us how, deep down, we're all the same. She believes literature is at its best when the reader can relate his/her life experiences and background with the text. She also believes the curriculum should assign books featuring characters with the same demographic background as the students. I see reading as a solitary act that benefits us most when it presents us with our differences, not our similarities. We all want to be loved, we all bleed when we get cut, we all need to sleep. So fucking what? It's our differences that matter. Over-reliance on relating our own life experiences to the words on the page creates too many opportunities for shallow, superficial readings and misreadings. We're imposing our own backstories on the text and making it all about us instead of about the work. The time to relate our own experiences to a piece of writing is after we've read it closely and understood it, not during the reading process itself. This touchy-feely, hippy-dippy, put-yourself-in-the-text approach in secondary school jarringly and abruptly morphs into pointless symbol-hunting and post-colonial canon-shredding in college. Sometimes you get lucky, but mostly you're told that literature is only as important as its analysis, criticism, and/or use as a launching pad for theory. But that's another story. When my professor called on me and asked what I read, I mentioned the O'Connor stories. She then asked suspiciously, "This wasn't for a class, was it?" I was the only one who was asked this question, and I was a little insulted. Then, another student asked what kind of things O'Connor wrote. My professor said, "Southern."

O'Connor lived in the South for most of her too-short 39 years, and most of her writing takes place there. She wrote incisively about the South, and her take on racism and black/white race relations in a specifically Southern context is one of her greatest achievements as a writer. But I felt this description of her entire body of work in one geographical word limited and marginalized her. My professor might have said other one-word descriptors: "Death." "Christianity." "Hypocrisy." "Ignorance." "Humor." "Terror." "Families." "Faith." They could apply, too, but they're equally limiting and ghettoizing. Flannery O'Connor writes Flannery O'Connor stories. To find out what that means, you have to read her, and read her closely. Like all good artists, she's too strange to fit the tidy niches where we try to shove every messy, slippery thing. And everything is messy and slippery. Except for the music of Conor Oberst. You can safely file that under "Shit," my friends.
While reading the O'Connor stories, I thought a lot about my grandmother, who died in March. See, I told you everything was messy. Here I am, doing what I tell everyone not to do. Imposing my personal life on the work. Both O'Connor and my grandmother were devout Catholics, while I'm as secular as can be. I only believe what's in front of me. However, both O'Connor and my grandmother were creative, intelligent people with wonderful senses of humor. Their strong, personal, admirable faith is something I don't have, but something I feel close to anyway. I was raised Catholic, and Catholicism will always play a part in my life. (Obviously, I'm talking about O'Connor's personality traits that come through in her writing and in reading about her personal history.) I'd like to think my grandmother read and enjoyed O'Connor, and I wish I could talk to her about it. I asked my mother last week if my grandmother read any O'Connor. She wasn't sure, but she thought so.
My grandmother's favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, and one of her favorite songs was "Over the Rainbow." In the weeks immediately following her death, my iPod on shuffle played both Harry Nilsson's and Jerry Lee Lewis' versions of the song several times. My mother said she also heard "Over the Rainbow" on the radio several times in those three weeks. (I'm not sure which version.) She told my uncle this story on the phone. When he hung up, he turned on the radio. "Over the Rainbow" was playing. He immediately called my mother back and told her. That same uncle had recently started dating a woman, and it was going well. She had been in two abusive relationships, so when she was driving alone in her car, she asked for a sign that my uncle was a good person. "Over the Rainbow" started playing on the radio. Surely, this should instill a little faith in me, right? No. These are just coincidences. Lovely coincidences that make me think about a wonderful person I was lucky enough to have in my life for 30 years, but coincidences nevertheless. My uncle and the woman he'd been seeing have since broken up, eliminating that sign from God. Judging from the frequency of the song's appearance on limited playlist corporate radio stations in western Nebraska and Colorado, I'm guessing someone has recently covered it and had a hit with it, or the oldies stations are working it into the repertoire. And I put the Nilsson version on a playlist on my iPod. Songs in the playlist tend to come up more often on shuffle, though this could be a coincidence as well.
Last week, I watched the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" on YouTube, which syncs up Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album with The Wizard of Oz. The supposedly staggering number of synchronicities leads many gullible, conspiracy-loving and/or stoned individuals to insist that the band specifically wrote the album to match the 1939 classic movie OR some kind of cosmic interference from some mystical realm created the synchronicities for reasons we can't understand. Ignoring for now the Herculean task of attempting such a folly with pre-DVD, pre-VHS 1973 technology and the fact that the movie is 1.5 times longer than the album, there are still many problems with these theories. I agree that there are a shitload of coincidences, which send chills of delight and spookiness up my spine, particularly the fact that each song ends right as a scene changes in the movie. But, and this is a big but, for everything that synchs up perfectly, there are at least, AT LEAST, ten things that do not. I'm happy that so many freaky coincidences happen when the album plays at the same time as the film because it's a lot of fun, but in order to believe some grand design, one must ignore everything that doesn't work. We're talking about a cognitive bias here called apophenia, which is seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. Once, I rented Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis, but I didn't care for the score, so, roughly ten minutes into the movie, I hit the mute button and played Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II" instead. Many movements of people and machines matched the music perfectly. Many others did not.

This is similar to the tactics those incredible douchebags like John Edward use when they claim to speak to dead people to exploit the grief of the bereaved for money. These "cold readings" usually involve a barrage of guesses. Some of these guesses are going to be correct, and grieving people desperate to hear from a loved one on the other side tend to ignore the incorrect guesses and grab onto the correct ones. Another of my recent YouTube obsessions is watching magician/skeptic James Randi debunk psychics, cold readers, mediums, astrologers, faith healers, etc. Beautiful stuff, especially when that idiot Uri Geller squirms on "The Tonight Show."






If there is an afterlife, maybe I can get together with Syd Barrett, Flannery O'Connor, and my grandmother and watch "Dark Side of the Rainbow" on a puffy cloud while John Edward and Sylvia Browne burn in hell below. I'm open to being wrong about the whole secular/skepticism thing.

By the way, I have an uncle who does a perfect imitation of the Cowardly Lion.

This next post is entitled "Sucking the Bloodworms of Necrotic Destiny"! URRRRGGGGGHHHH!

A poem entitled Selected YouTube Comments for Pavement's Video of "Range Life", aka Better than Anything Floyd Did After '74, Motherfucker

malkmus is bad at lip singing, but then again he rules all that is man :)

Billy Corgan sucks Malkmus's dick at being depressed

Why did they beeped out FUCK ?!? it's just a stupid word, how can a word be that bad that it's not allowed to be heard ?

Siamese Dream is a good album. Plus, Billy Corgan fucked Courtney Love, and they probably did a lot of heroin together. So, I like Corgan. Though, Pavement is probably my favorite band from the nineties.

song ends with a Squier riff. unstoppable.

I think pavement sounds simmular to the beatles great so what a happening

He means to live on the range...Out in the countryside. Away from the bullshit.

yeah you guys fucking rule,,how cool is visiting a pavement post for range life and talkin politics and terrorism,,rock and fucking roll dudes- trendy fuckin cocksuckers suck my retard vomit pussy cunt

Amazing...beautiful song...this is kinda random people but it really reminds me of travelling in Nepal aged 18 before this BASTARD "king" wormed his way in....respect to the Malkmus...............

I love Pavement. But, god, 90's clothes. Just... xD
reply: what do you wear?? - catsuit motherfucker

this is pavement isn't it?

thing is though... Stephen Malkmus said that he never dissed smashing pumpkins music... He just dissed there statement

I'm Robertson. Do you guys wanna hang? I got some beers and pizza at my house. I'm lonely.

This is awesome Pavement Rules!!!

Reply #1: Really, the band can't be considered as a whole so say "Pavement rule", if you see my point. You're refering to a single thing but it's made of several parts, i.e. band members.

Reply #2: why cant it be considered as a whole? Figure that out revolt guy

Reply #3: So, Would you say that a car "rule"? It's also a single thing made of several parts. If you talk about the sum of all parts then you say "Rules".

Good enough to almost be it
Who like music can't hear it
Doomed
Pick your pockets full of sorrow
And run away with pavement tomorrow
PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE
Now seriously, both bands are such amazing, stop being such a pusy and get over it.

Better than any thing floyd did after '74 mother-fucker!
Reply: That is your opinion which is fair enough,why the need for the insults and expletives?

i would usually skip over this song on the cd. however once i started hearing the whole song, i immediately fell in love. the song now brings me solace.

This I dont get .. Ive heard better music. He doesnt have a tune to it

Ch-Ch-Changes

I have decided to re-name my film blog. I called it "Film-Watching Robot" to match "Can-Smashing Robot," but that name has started to bother me. It implies that either the film audience in general, or me in particular, is a mindless automaton sucking up irrelevant content. That may be true, but I don't want to be the one to say it. The new title comes from a line in the movie Stroszek. Additionally, I have started posting an image of the day. I will do this every weekday unless I actually have something else to post. Toodle-oo, chummmmmmmmmmmmps.

Check out the new blog, same as the old blog. Get fooled again!

Don't ask David Bowie to pick up your dry cleaning because it may not get done in a timely fashion

An exchange of comments from David Bowie's "Space Oddity" video on YouTube:

Person #1: "Good song, but God damn, he creeps me out."
Person #2: "what do you think he's going to be a regular johnny dependable"

CD cover meme

I'm not the biggest meme fan, but this one is actually pretty fun and involves two of my favorite things-- fake album covers and randomness. Click here to play the game. Here's how mine turned out (I'm guessing this fake artist would probably end up on a bill with String Cheese Incident, Trey Anastasio, and/or Bob Weir):

The humid press of days

What does everybody do now instead of posting blog entries? Listen to Bright Eyes? Eat lemon meringue pie? Start a be-in for peace? Tell off-color jokes to aging priests with drinking problems on bingo night? I've got nothing, and I've had nothing for weeks and weeks and weeks. I can't think of any Can-Smashing content. I've written a few posts on the movie thing, and there's always a couple movies to write about per month on the horror movie thing, but I feel pretty devoid of inspiration lately. There's so much fucking content in the world! Look how many episodes of Family Matters there are! I mean, Jesus, it's fucking unbelievable.

Aw jeez! Gimme a break!

It was all worth it

Headline from Yahoo News, July 7, 2008
"Iraqis now free to pimp out sports cars after Saddam's rule"

The uplift junkie slap-bass date-rape party plan

If you want to get depressed, take a few minutes and look at the comments for any random YouTube clip. You won't have to read too far to find incredibly racist bullshit, no matter the subject. However, on rare occasions someone posts something great like the following (commenting on whether or not the Red Hot Chili Peppers suck):
"We know more about the mythical California than anyone ever wanted to know, and really, it's just a goddamned state, for chrissakes."

I just want to thank whoever posted that for making me laugh instead of making me despair at the seemingly endless supply of fascist creeps who think every YouTube clip needs a string of comments about ridding the world of blacks, Jews, and homosexuals.

The Great Blue-Eyed Soul Cocaine Malaise of '73

The CC DeVille/Rivers Cuomo equilibrium

These guys switched identities in the late 1980s. First up, a picture of CC DeVille from an early incarnation of Poison:






















Next, a photo of Rivers Cuomo's 1980s hair-metal band, Avant Garde. He's in the center in the top row:

Educational program flashback of regional interest

Hey kids!
In the 1970s and 1980s, daytime programming on my home state's PBS affiliate was devoted to locally produced children's shows. I wonder if this still happens. I'm guessing it doesn't. In Nebraska, the shows were written and produced in Omaha. They aired throughout the state, as well as in South Dakota and Ontario, Canada for some reason, and I watched a lot of them in my elementary school classes. Most of them seemed to be about people locked up against their will and forced to read children's books to their captors. Kind of creepy, in retrospect. Star Lore was about a group of space alien children who stared at a blank blue screen all day until they got bored. Then, an adult alien woman with a blue Afro would hit a button on a weird machine and a kid's book would pop out. In Once Upon a Time, Marion the Librarian is kidnapped by a witch and forced to read her children's books, which, once again, pop out of a weird machine. My favorite one, however, was Reverse the Curse. Two ex-librarians turned archaeologists discover the Egyptian tomb of King Hop-To-It, but the tomb is cursed. The King comes out to play, complete with gold facepaint, and informs the two women that they must stay in the tomb and decipher the hieroglyphics while passing on literary information to the King, or the curse will kill them. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, the very first episode of Reverse the Curse is now available. Come for the Egyptian curse, stay for the boogie-rock theme song, mannered overacting, and Carole King sing-along. I'm not joking.





I Googled the names of the three actors to see what they're doing now, and actually found all three. Marlin Rothe is a GLBT activist and heavily involved in theater in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Peggy Billo is involved in theater in Los Angeles and has done some bit parts on network television, and the hilariously named D. Chetley Kraft writes teacher's editions for elementary schools.

Here's the opening to Once Upon a Time. They decided that overly delicate hippy-folk was the best way to set the mood here.



Finally, I need to present the theme music to Tales in a Treehouse with Mrs. Kozeny. I wasn't a big fan of this show, which consisted of a woman in a treehouse reading a story, but the theme music sounds like a collaboration between Aphex Twin and Perrey & Kingsley.

Tales of small-town life: KISS edition

Listening to Paul Stanley's stage banter this week, I realized that many of my formative childhood and young adult memories are somehow related to Kiss. Which is funny, because I was never much of a Kiss fan. Gene Simmons was, and still is, a revolting pig who could give two shits about rock and roll, though I think the rest of the band honestly enjoyed playing music. He has stated that when he and Paul Stanley get too physically decrepit to play live, they will hold auditions for their own replacements and keep Kiss going like a professional sports team. He hit a new low for me with that comment. He's got so much contempt for his fans that he is deliberately planning to let them pay upwards of $225 to see a cover band. A Kiss website for fans of the original lineup features a message board where every single contributor refers to Simmons as Mean Gene the ATM Machine. They've done more "farewell" tours than Ozzy Osbourne. If Cliffs Notes existed for the dumbest song ever written, "Rock and Roll All Nite" would be those Cliffs Notes. However, I'll always have a special place in my heart for Kiss, particularly for how they keep showing up in my personal life. Here's the rundown:
1) I came out of the womb with a love of comic books, horror movies, and rock and roll permanently imprinted on my brain by Baby Jesus, so Kiss' image was right up my alley. Some of my earliest memories consist of a total fascination with how the band looked. I hadn't heard any Kiss songs yet, but I loved staring at pictures of them, their record covers, and their images on television. I remember being four or five and seeing the Kiss episode of "3-2-1 Contact." One of the hosts got to work backstage at a Kiss concert in Abilene, Texas and interviewed the backstage crew, the lighting guys, the sound guys, etc. The Kiss stage spectacle, in all its glory, presented for a children's science show. My mind was blown. I remember being almost beside myself with excitement, and I also remember actually praying to God each day before "3-2-1 Contact" aired and asking Him to re-run that particular episode. It finally worked one glorious summer day, and I couldn't believe my luck. Thanks to the magic of YouTube, here it is. (It's not quite as exciting as I remembered it.)



2) The Ogard brothers lived four blocks away when I was a wee little man. They were several years older than me and had most of the same interests. Three or four times a year, they sold a lot of their old stuff at their mother's yard sales, and I was always in heaven. I usually left their yard sales with a giant stack of horror comics, a couple of cool robot or monster toys, and the occasional Black Sabbath or AC/DC cassette. One year, they were selling a complete set of Kiss toys. I wanted them so badly, but they were a lot pricier than the usual yard sale stuff, and I had to go home empty-handed (except for the giant stack of horror comics, of course). I don't know where they are now, but I ran into them in the bar in my hometown at Christmas about ten years ago, and they said they were playing in a few punk bands in Seattle and Portland. They were too old for me to hang out with, but I always felt a little better knowing that someone else in town liked the same weird stuff as me. It made me feel less lonely and detached.

3) My babysitter Amber told me that her cousin was in the front row at a Kiss concert in Denver and got burns on his face from a pyrotechnic mishap. I remember feeling a little scared and a little excited by the story. "I want to go where rock and roll happens," I remember thinking. "However, there is a chance I could get physically injured, which simultaneously excites and terrifies me." I'm paraphrasing, obviously. I don't think I would have said it that way at age seven.

4) I remember being in a small house in the country as a very small child. My parents are still in their twenties and are drinking in the kitchen with a few of my uncles, their friends, and whoever lives in the house. I don't remember who it was. My parents hardly ever drank because they were upset by their fathers' drinking problems, so I think it was the afterparty following a friend's wedding. My memory is really fuzzy about this, though. Here's the part I remember clearly. I started to get antsy and irritable because the only other kids there who were my age fell asleep. I wanted to look through the record collection of the guy who lived in the house, but I was afraid to ask. My intentions must have been obvious, because a nice, pretty Hispanic woman who I think was a friend of my aunt and uncle asked me to pick out some music to play. I flipped through the records happily and came across a copy of Kiss' "Destroyer." "Play this! Play this!" I yelled. The woman told me that although Kiss looked cool, their music wasn't very good. I didn't believe her, though I hadn't heard much Kiss yet. She told me to pick something else. I believe I picked a John Mellencamp record, back when he was known as John Cougar (without the Mellencamp). I think it went over well. I wish I knew the details of this evening a little better. It was the only time I was ever in that house. I wonder who it was.

5) A tale of college-town life: While at school at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, I worked at a record store. (It's sad that that sentence will soon read as "I once worked for a blacksmith.") One night, a co-worker and I joined forces at my place for a Kiss double feature. His bootleg of "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park" was followed by my rented copy of "Runaway," starring Gene Simmons, Tom Selleck, Kirstie Alley, and robot spiders. This is not a very interesting story, but it was a good night, and it gives me an excuse to present a scene from "Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park," a masterpiece of ineptitude.



6)One of my gifts on my eighth birthday was a compilation called "MTV's Rock 'N Roll To Go." The tracklisting is as follows:
Pat Benatar - Hell Is For Children
The Cars - Drive
The Fixx - Are We Ourselves?
Hall & Oates - Say It Isn't So
Billy Idol - Rebel Yell
Kiss - Lick It Up
Cyndi Lauper - She Bop
Madonna - Lucky Star
Steve Perry - Oh Sherrie
Ratt - Round and Round
The Police - King of Pain
Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now
Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It
Wang Chung - Dance Hall Days

I think "Lick It Up" might be the worst song on the album, but you know what Paul Stanley has to say about that: "If (the people who think Kiss sucks) didn't really believe that the best band in the world was the Thompson Twins, they might be here tonight and you crazy motherfuckers would show them what rock and roll is really all about, uh huh."

7) My three favorite Kiss songs.
#1: "Black Diamond." The Replacements covered this on "Let It Be." I bought the Replacements album during my senior year in high school, the day after my first experience with LSD and the day before my first and only time snowboarding. I was in Laramie, Wyoming with a friend of mine visiting his older brother. I always thought "Black Diamond" was yet another great Replacements song, and I was shocked to find out it was a Kiss cover. "But Kiss sucks," I thought at the time. Not always. This performance of "Black Diamond" during Kiss' Madison Square Garden show from 1977 rocked my balls off, then rocked my right ball onto my left side and my left ball onto my right side, then rocked my balls back off, then rearranged my balls in the correct order, then rocked my balls back on. It's pretty kick-ass is what I'm trying to say. Gene Simmons, even back then, looks like he's thinking of marketing schemes instead of rock, but Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss keep the faith.



#2: "Hard Luck Woman." Paul Stanley originally wrote this one for Rod Stewart, who failed to record it. Peter Criss steps up to the plate again, proving that you can't go wrong with a singing drummer who's dressed up like a cat. I first heard this song when it was on a K-Tel compilation of random pop music from the 1970s that I bought from the Case brothers when I was in grade school. The Case brothers were a couple of long-haired ne'er-do-wells that hung out with my mom's youngest brother, who was still in high school at the time. They used to come over to my grandmother's house and play metal guitars with my uncle. They loved Randy Rhoads. The odd thing about the Case brothers was that they were still in high school, but they owned and lived in a little house by themselves. I don't know if they were emancipated minors or if their parents were dead or in jail, but I'm sure it was very easy for them to drink beer and smoke weed without parental consent or disapproval. My grandmother drove me over there once when my uncle was hanging out with them so I could ask him if I could buy his ZZ Top - "Tres Hombres" cassette. (She was a great lady.) When the Case brothers saw me and my grandmother at the door, they turned off their lights and ran toward the back door. I'm sure they were either drinking beer or smoking weed with my uncle. I was too dumb and young to expect that unsupervised teenagers were going to be doing something untoward and wouldn't take kindly to their friend's mother and cousin unexpectedly knocking on the door, so I was baffled by their behavior. I want to belatedly apologize now, but nobody knows what the hell happened to the Case brothers. I also want to point out that I was extremely surprised this was Kiss, because I expected insane, demonic heavy metal based on their appearance. It is also worth mentioning that the song preceding "Hard Luck Woman" on the K-Tel record was "Boogie Fever."



#3: "I Was Made For Loving You." No story about this one, I just love every single classic-rock-goes-disco song. (Dig that crazy falsetto at 2:30, Starchild!)

You like surprises, right?

I was checking my blog stats just now, and someone found one of my sites by Googling "double vaginal surprise." They were probably disappointed. All three of those words can be found on my blogs, just not adjacently. Maybe it was Paul Stanley.

Richmond, Virginia! Is this, or is this not, the rock and roll capital of Virginia?

I just downloaded seventy hot tracks of Paul Stanley stage banter, and I can't foresee any possible circumstance in which I will regret it. Here's a sample:

Don't be a fool, stay in school

They tell you no matter how much preparation you have, you will never be ready for your first year of teaching. After much research, I've narrowed down what I think it's going to be like to the following two scenarios:

Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland of Earthly Delights

I love the awesome destructive power of Mother Nature. We had a kick-ass storm last night. I had been reading Flannery O'Connor short stories for about four hours straight when giant, perpetual thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and hail came barreling through town. Today, I grabbed my iPod and headphones and took a long walk all over the neighborhood. Besides the blanket of leaves and mud covering almost everything, I saw this stuff:
1) A sidewalk covered in dead birds. The wind and rain must have slapped them out of the trees, but it looked like some huge musclehead type had picked up each bird individually and threw them down on the sidewalk as hard as he could. Splat! You birds got pranked hard!
2) A huge tree branch that fell and landed on a Blazer, knocking the automobile's tailgate off, smashing all the windows out, and basically imploding it.
3) A rusty nail that I stepped on. Not only that, it was a Warner Brothers-cartoon-sized rusty nail. I thought a giant rock had wedged itself into the bottom of my shoe. Fortunately, the sharp part of the nail was bent and went through my shoe without going through my foot. A tetanus shot would have soured my afternoon.
4) An albino squirrel! Hot damn, I couldn't believe my luck. Doesn't it say in the Book of Revelations, "And an albino squirrel shall lead them?" I'm going back out on the streets later to find the squirrel, trap him, and teach him to read, write, and speak. Together, we are going to pitch a buddy-cop film idea to Paramount Pictures. I haven't decided yet whether I will be played by William H. Macy or Bernie Mac. The squirrel will play himself. We aren't going to like each other at first, me being a loose cannon who plays by his own rules, and the squirrel being a by-the-book straight shooter two years from retirement. Eventually, we bond over our shared love of tandoori chicken, the music of Roberta Flack, and taking no-good punks off the street.

Fighter Hayabusa vs. King Slender

Hey, everybody. My brother restarted his blog. Read it here.

Problems and solutions. Just kidding, I have no solutions.

When you have nothing to say, throw pies. Sometimes it's absolutely goddamn embarrassing to be a liberal.



Here's the mega-retarded YouTube description:
"Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled 'Green is the new Red White and Blue' was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its 'natural place in the global order.' Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a suprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating:

----------

Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face...

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism's conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of 'green' - the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

* for his pure arrogance.
On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists -- we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman's 'Green' as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face."

On behalf of the earth? The earth doesn't give a fuck about Thomas Friedman, pies, the U.S., Iraq, Palestine, Israel, environmentalists, or Greenwash Guerrillas. The earth will outlast the whole puny shebang. By the way, the U.S. military is NOT the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. That would be China, you dreadlocked fucknuts, who recently overtook the U.S. as a whole (not just the military). I'm not defending the U.S. military, I'm just stating some very quickly researched facts that are available to any human being who has two minutes and an Internet connection or science teacher nearby. Come on, assholes. Also, you morons seem to think that cool-whip is toxic. I ran some experiments on this over the weekend. I fed cool-whip to several small children. Guess what? Non-fucking-toxic.

Don't blame me, I voted for Motorhead.
(Just to clarify for some people who thought I was a Libertarian. I am not a Libertarian. I am also not a Republican. I am a hedonist with a heart of gold.)

By the way, the first thing I do every morning, as a committed environmentalist, is print a bunch of fucking leaflets.

Aw jeez! Gimme a break!

On campus yesterday, a pigeon flying overhead urinated on my arm. I had to duck into the nearest building and take the escalator to the second floor bathrooms while holding my arm in a stiff, awkward, unnatural position so the pissy dribble would remain relatively stable pooled in the crook of my arm and not trickle down, contaminating more of my flesh and dripping on my t-shirt and/or jeans. Sorry I used the word "arm" so much in that sentence, but there aren't too many useful synonyms. Left gun? Foreshank? Upper appendage? Torso-leg? Cannon #1? Hand-post? Lucille? At any rate, even after multiple scrubbings, I still felt my torso-leg was unclean. I didn't feel like Dr. Mystery again until I got home, changed my clothes, and scrubbed my hand-post several more times. Pigeon urine? What kind of jive is that?

By the way, the photo accompanying this post is the first one that popped up when I Google image searched "pigeon urine." The man in the photo is a tannery worker in Morocco, dying hides. The red dye is made of pigeon excrement, acids, and cow urine. I shit you not. Get it? Shit? Am I right? Factoid: The country of Morocco is no relation to retired professional wrestler Magnificent Muraco, who is from Sunset Beach, Hawaii and spells his name differently. His opinions on animal urine are, as yet, unknown.