Mariah and the Big Red Phone

Once there was a girl named Mariah. She was quite pretty and could sing very high notes, and a lot of them all in row. She became a pop star and made millions of millions of dollars. She was very popular in the States but she was even more popular in Asia, where she and Leonardo DiCaprio were idolized for many many years. A marriage between the two would have caused the Asian news media to detonate with happiness.

Mariah was short and round with a lovely fat boot and a mountainous bosom. She liked to wear tight miniskirts and tube tops that strained at decency. Sometimes, in the throes of passion, she would just explode out of her clothes and join her lover in bed. There were those who thought her dress was indecent but all admitted she was never vulgar like Janet Jackson or even that puta loca Whitney Houston. Even though her clothes were provocative, everybody knew that Mariah was innocent…she was still just a young girl singing songs of falling in love and the young girls of the world sang along with all of their hearts.

Time passed and Mariah grew older and more tired and there were new girls who came up and replaced her, young divas with names like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera whose in-your-face couture made Mariah’s bright microminis look churchy. In 2005 Mariah put out a new record. And though many said it was her best record to date, she knew that it was automatically a failure, that there was no way it could come close to the numbers she had put up in the nineties.

One night she went to North Hollywood to shoot a video for her new single “Get Your Number.” The centerpiece of the performance was a humongous red telephone and this made her suddenly very sad. The phone reminded her of the giant props often used on old “Yo! MTV Raps” videos, particularly early jamz from DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. She sighed and went to her trailer. She would get into wardrobe and go through hair and makeup. This would take hours.



The phone had a splotchy pool of red leaking out of its mouthpiece (intentional, it seemed). There were those who thought the phone was melting. Others thought the phone was crying…or bleeding. Some thought the phone was drooling.



The giant red phone beckoned to the idle crew and—although it was strictly forbidden—many went up and touched the phone. Sitting there, these people underwent a quiet but palpable shift. They became pensive and withdrawn and thought at length about the pointlessness of their existences.

When Mariah finally came out it was after lunch and the crew was tired and bored. She was wearing a tight one-piece black cocktail dress and painfully high high heels. She was very topply for someone so squat and low to the ground and she felt everyone’s eyes on her face and body. The crew wondered about her, wondered how old she was, tried to triangulate her age and came at a range of 33 to 38. She looked a lot older than they remembered and someone thought she would look better if she took off her war paint and dressed like a mom and someone else said was snaggletoothed and a few perverted misanthropes celebrated the withering of a woman whose entire being and career had been defined by its surface beauty.

And though it was forbidden, crewmembers took photos in secret, hoping to show their friends and lovers glimpses of Mariah in 2005. But it was not to be. Mariah’s longing to preserve her former sheen and her deeprooted disdain for what she had become caused the cameras to disobey. The resulting photos were like UFO sighting pictures (out of focus, heads cut off, very grainy)--compelling but not convincing.

Like this:



Or this:



Or even this:



Maybe it was her in those pictures, but then maybe it wasn’t. It couldn’t be confirmed and that was the way she liked it. She liked being soft and impressionistic and ephemeral and making the viewer fill in the gaps from memory.



And though the phone seemed a little lame, and though the crew was small and disinterested, and though she was tired and just wanted some peace, she climbed up to the top of the phone and reclined just so, just like the director wanted. The phone wasn’t meant to be lounged upon and it hurt her backside and she complained a little, but she did so with reasonable cheer. By this time the crew was getting used to her and she was starting to look young again, like that actress Julie Delpy in “Before Sunset” who had aged ten years but become even more beautiful in the interim while that Ethan Hawke guy just looked tired and hungry and snaggletoothed.

Now was not the time to be depressed. The cameras came back into focus and the music came up. She smiled. Her hair was magnificent. She was not thinking about her role in the 2001 bomb "Glitter" or any of those other dark things. She was smiling and she was belting out the words to her latest single.



All these years and she was still on top of her game. On top of the world, if you will.

On top of a phone at least.

I Only Did It Because Lisa B Told Me To

My entry in the Google Poetry cavalcade using the keywords "cleavage" and "hyperbole" (I changed the punc-tilly-ation, of course).

The Weight and Cleavage Sonnet

The details: It’s amazing how
Maybe if you boys showed a bit more
Cleavage (Weight and Cleavage are
Films in French) – the one directly below.

Hyperbole: Unless you (shadow
That you are) mean THAT there
Cleavage. MY ankles and cleavage are
Not what I said. I think you know…

The blues: Maybe if you boys showed a bit more
In our critical reports. Although,
Maybe if you boys showed a bit more
Cleavage! Weight and Cleavage are
More than a bikini top. The others had
Enough cleavage. Weight and cleavage are.

The Secret Lives Of Others

Sometime last week a pinup calendar mysteriously appeared on the camera truck. Somebody (probably the sound department) had smuggled it in and hung it prominently above the bench. It was opened to the month of September where an aging cheerleader stared out at us, sleepy-eyed and legs spread (skirt protecting her naughty bits), her cheeks dented inwards from sucking with tremendous force on a lollipop. The lighting was flat and the image was not particularly erotic and I thought about taking it down because it offended my sensibilities and there were women in my department, blah, blah...

The calendar was called "Hoodrat Hoochie Mamas 2005" and the rest of the girls possessed a similar ghetto-hottie aesthetic. The Latina in cutoffs bending over to sponge a lowrider, the African American girl showing hyperbolic cleavage in a hot pink bra and Adidas sweatpants, the incongrous working-class Irish lush in a tartan skirt holding a Guinness in either hand. The women weren't pretty, exactly--they looked like rejects from the legitimate modeling contest down the street--but their inclusion in this girz-in-da-hood calendar seemed appropriate. Their short bios were sexually suggestive, to the point of satire, and for the first time it occurred to me that it just might be satire after all.

Turns out the calendar was the brainchild of N, the on-set dresser, a short, quiet, respectful young man with glasses, small moustache, and ambiguous sexual orientation. N had made the calendar on spec. This blew our minds. I tried to picture him getting some seed money together, receiving head shots, doing the auditions, casting the girls, approving the costumes, organizing and locking down the locations, conducting the photo shoots, overseeing the printing and the copywriting, all of it. It kind of threw me, it really did. He had obviously spent a lot of time putting this project together.

And that made us love the calendar and love N for making it.

I love that my Southern Boy 2nd Assistant--who won't let his wife work and who smokes very aggressively out of the side of his mouth--I love that he adores old show tunes and drives a Korean car. I love that my PC left-wing loader obtains 80% of her meat from hunting. And I loved that one morning when the reticent, mild-mannered late-40s/early-50s VTR/playback guy started dancing and singing along--COMPLETELY WITHOUT IRONY--to the Violent Femmes on the radio.

It was so surprising, and yet, not.

The Insidious Curve

The neighborhood is Buckhead and there don’t seem to be many right angles here. It takes me a good week to understand that the roads surrounding the hotel and the Tower Plaza form a great curvy triangle and not a square. I have no car and no maps and no real understanding where Buckhead is in relation to Atlanta. I have driven to LAX and gone inside of an airplane, then popped out at Atlanta International, got in a cab, and popped out again at the Doubletree in Buckhead. I have no real responsibilities but to get up in the morning and make the pass van to set. There are no bills, there are no phone calls, my meals are provided for, I am driven around, maids clean my room every day. I am a labor drone with no good reason to understand and/or interact with the world around me.

And so when I walk the neighborhood I do purposely without a map and try to carve out some sort of geographical understanding based only on empirical evidence. And consistently I am shocked at how things fit together in reality from day to day. That mall that I thought was a half mile behind the hotel is actually a hundred yards off to the right side. That restaurant, that building with the vertical neon striping, that sushi restaurant--nothing is where I thought it was. Are these structures secretly moving themselves around at night, a la “Howl’s Moving Castle”—or am I just getting old? Sleepy E of the Good Sense of Direction is no more. He has been reduced to Sleepy E, The Perpetually Lost.

In my mind the map of Buckhead is filled with errors and conjecture, like old sailors maps that possess fictional islands of the coast of Iceland and expansive inland lakes with magical properties, where Africa is a little nub to the south of Europe and the boot of Italy resembles more of a club foot. There are large expanses of uncharted territories with drawings of pirates and sharks and sea monsters filling in the blank space.

One day we borrow a car and drive about twenty miles to a Brazilian steakhouse. We decide on an alternative return route which runs parallel to the freeway, but when I get back to Buckhead it’s as though all bets are off and all spatial relationships have shifted. I pass the street I need to turn on, but when I turn around and head back the way I came I realize that I am now heading in the direction I thought I was going originally. North is south, east is west, up is down, and I have no idea what is going on. I am completely turned around and completely flummoxed. And the sun moves across the sky to accommodate this deception. Right angles are not right angles. If you can’t count on right angles in the world--if you can’t count on geometry--then what can you count on? What can you count on when that straight road you think you can rely on is actually an insidious curve sending you somewhere you don’t want to go?

There is the Date Gone Wrong when I got lost in the woods. There was the time I climbed Mount Si w/ N and went off trail and ended up about a mile off from the trailhead. There were two incidents in Shanghai when I was lost for over an hour. There is the portal into which all my valuable possessions seem to be disappearing these days.

I am the Loser. The Loser of Things, Loser of Ways, Loser of Big Games, Loser of Pounds.

Fists of Fury

Monday I almost got in a fistfight. That's right, a fistfight. That schoolyard event wherein people ball their hands and try to break each other's faces with them. Yes, I am a savage. It is true. I still have brutal manimal instincts undeneath; these things are never quite outgrown. I know this now.

The bottom of this movie's fallen right out and everyone is surly and short with each other and just wants to go home. Even the nice people are hostile and I was never one of the nice people to begin with. What we do here, what we do for a living--it's ridiculous, inane, this isn't important at all, none of it is, and my God look at all of the ego in this business where does it all come from good Lord.

So I'm already a little pissy, I've fallen in and out of a crush over a three-day period, I'm tried, my sciatica's kicking in, things are feeling hopeless, New Orleans is in the process of getting wiped off the planet. We're shooting about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta at a cabin in the woods on a pond and it's humid and miserable and the forest is filled with ticks and chiggers and spiders and mosquitoes and Lyme Disease and Hanta Virus and water moccasins that bite you and give you lockjaw and nightvision and a dark, unrelenting depression that never quite goes away. The rain has come and it is not stopping. We're on the outer fringes of Katrina and the wind is coming up and the rain keeps pounding us, harder and harder and harder. The ground is quickly turning to mud. We hide our equipment under a couple of pop-up tents, but our stuff is still getting wet and even though they finally call wrap prematurely, there is nothing we can do but sit underneath these little tents and wait for a break in the storm which just isn't happening. There are tornadoes in the area and one has ripped up 30 houses in the small town we shot at two days before. The storm is moving very slowly and the lightning is all around us, landing down every half minute or so. I try to count the seconds between thunder and lightning but it's all instaneous. We hear there are three tornadoes in the county now and the rain is coming down even harder, it doesn't seem possible, and our big lights are still on and an 18k globe explodes and the grips frantically try to take down their big stands and frames of diffusion which are all just a bunch of useless lightning rods at this point.

The trucks have been parked down a narrow dirt road, single file, about a hundred yards away and we radio transpo to back our truck right up to the set so we can get our stuff to shelter and go home. But the best boy electric has built a little staging area for his lights and stands right behind our truck, blocking half of the narrow dirt road. Our truck cannot back up to set because it is boxed in by all of this crap, so after fifteen minutes of trying to wait out the storm we cover our carts and equipment the best we can and shove through the muck, through the deluge and down the slippery hill, the whole hundred yards to the camera truck. An electrician is hiding under their makeshift staging area and I tell him that they really fucked us here. He shrugs, ambivalent, and says that he didn't make the decision to put the tent there. The best boy electric appears and he claims responsiblity so I repeat what I said, that the erection of this staging area across the road has really boned us in a big way and there better not be any water damage to any of the camera gear.

He's just standing there looking at me.

"Did you hear me?" I raise my voice. "You guys really screwed us here!"

"So?" he says, shrugging, and that is all that I need and I let him have all of my rage. I am ready to throw down on this guy. I don't care if he kicks my ass or I get fired or put in jail I am so ready to physically hurt him.

He sees this, though, sees me go into Manimal mode, and backs off a little. "What do you want me to do about it?" Then, a bit sarcastically: "Sorry!"

"I want you to move your shit off of the road where it should have been to begin with!!!!!"

I'm kind of up in his face and I'm way taller than he is and I'm waiting for him to shove me, to do anything that will license me to take him out. But the thing diffuses and I start to leave and he mumbles something and I spin around and yell "What? What was that? You got something to say?"

You got something to say.

I am in third grade all over again. This is the fighting language I learned back then and these are the words that spit out of my mouth right now.

You got something to say.

I am conscious of how ridiculous this all is, I'm in warrior mode but I'm also floating out and above myself, analyzing the mise-e-scene and the hackneyed dialogue and the environmental response to my rage. I turn back around and continue on to the truck and wipe the camera down and put it away and have a couple of beers in quick succession. And then it is over.

The next day is lovely and everything is lush and the rain never comes again like it's supposed to. The best boy electric works out of his truck all day so I don't see him until lunch. He looks different than the soaked, dirty man I confronted the night before. He looked larger somehow in all of his raingear. Today I see that he is older, in his forties, probably, and he's short and kind of dumpy and his non-designer jeans have a hole in the thigh. His posture is bad and he doesn't say much. He's probably single and he looks kind of sad.

And then I start to feel terrible.

I Hate My Girlfriend

He comes into Starbucks like he is something special and I know already he will sit across from me. There is nowhere else for him to go. I watch him order out of the corner of my eye and notice a lonely female also staring from the two-tops against the far bank of windows. I hate this man already. Whatever he orders (green tea frappichino, black coffee, skinny grande Americano, chai) will not be good enough for me.

And then, sure enough, he is lowering himself into the plush purple chair on the other side of the low coffee table. His hair is gelled and a little spiky, artfully mussed if you will, and his medium-long sideburns swoop into an acute angle just past the pierced lobes of his ears. His face is somewhere in between Don Johnson stubble and clean shavenness and his eyes hide behind gold-rimmed sunglasses. He doesn't look athletic but his arms are large and he's in good shape from working out. His body is meant to carry weight, however, and the obesity will come in ten years time, hopefully sooner. He wears black boots and designer jeans and a crisp black T-shirt that says "I Hate My Girlfriend" in blocky white letters. Just below his right elbow is a skinny black sweatband, the kind basketball players wear. It is an odd choice, but perhaps it works for him. Perhaps it is his little fashion signature.

He is attractive to women, this man, he is everything they desire. He has crafted himself to be so. He pages through a black Daytimer and fingers his cell phone, acts that code him as a businessman in spite of casual-hip dress. His muscly body is designed to convey athleticism and virility. His earrings connote adventurousness. His hair and clothes prove his sensitivity to fashion and aesthetics in general. His T-shirt shows he is a man of irony...and a little dangerous.

But the shirt irritates me. I am reminded of my college girlfriend D, who talked often about buying me a "Shut Up Bitch" T-shirt so that the rabid feminists of Evergreen would tear me limb from limb. She loved the shirt for its in-your-face misogyny and loved the idea of me being castrated by hypersensitive logger grrrls even more. The "Shut Up Bitch" shirt is hateful and unproductive but it's definitely more interesting than the "I Hate My Girlfriend" T-shirt. I don't get this shirt. I don't find it funny or ironic or anything, really. Surely he has a girlfriend. Or many. I wonder what she (or they) think about this shirt. I hate this shirt. This shirt is the worst. This shirt is retarded.

Here are some better options:

I Hate Poo
I Hate Barney
I Hate the Sharper Image
I Hate Clowns
I Hate George Will
I Hate Teletubbies
I Hate Line Dancing
I Hate Vomit
I Hate VHS
I Hate T-Shirts
I Hate Tip Jars
I Hate Lindsay Lohan
I Hate Laundry
I Hate Overcooked Corn
I Hate Ego
I Hate Comma Splicers
I Hate When Your Teeth Crash Into The Teeth of the Person You Are Kissing
I Hate Clan Ties
I Hate Starbucks
I Hate Hiphop
I Hate Fuckers Who Try To Merge Automatically On the Freeway Instead of Yielding Like They Are Supposed To
I Hate God
I Hate Waterbeds
I Hate Tapirs
I Hate Trucker Hats
I Hate Internet Dating
I Hate Pabulum Puking Liberals
I Hate W
I Hate Dumb Broads
I Hate Stoopid Jerks
I Hate Hate
I Hate You

Reasons Why Boys Pull On Pigtails

1. Because they are bored
2. Because negative attention is better than no attention at all
3. Because being sweet to girls won't square with Jerry Scheidt and Rod Garland and the rest of the tough guys in the gang
4. Because they are sad
5. Because they want to touch the hair of their beloved
6. Because crew-cutted boys are curious of how long hair reacts to pulling
7. Because they are lonely
8. Because they want to be punished and sent to the principal's office
9. Because they want to be punished and slapped by the girl herself
10. Because they don't know how else to show they are interested
11. Because they feel weak and powerless and exposed
12. Because they are in love
13. Because they have lost control of their emotions and wish to reclaim them through antagonism
14. Because they cannot stop thinking about their beloved, even when playing four-square, and this kills them
15. Because they know their yearning will never be answered

On Dollar Days and Giving Anonymously

Fridays are Dollar Days. Or Five Dollar Days. People write their names on five dollar bills and put them in a box. At the end of the night a production assistant pulls out one of the bills and the person with his or her name on it wins the pot. Yesterday I put in four five dollar bills, contributing in the names of the cinematographer and my assistants. If one of them won, I thought, then we'd all win. But I told no one about it. I didn't want to ruin the surprise if one of my unsuspecting friends actually won.

Now I feel like I've wasted twenty dollars. If I had been more grandstandy and open then at least I could have gotten some good PR out of it. Look at Sleepy E, isn't he a great guy, isn't he benevolent, perhaps I was wrong about him, gee he's strict but he's sure got a lot of good qualities, what an upstanding citizen, how can I be more like him? Then again, I hate it when Hollywood actors go on the USO junket or the charity train just as an exercise in publicity...or look at the NFL and those guys being forced to go to go into the community and read aloud to retarded kids or fix meals for old folks in senior centers that smell vaguely of urine. How is that any different than an egregious oil company saving a couple acres of wetlands and then advertising in Mother Jones?

Why must we broadcast philanthropy..is it still philanthropy if you get (or want to get) something out of it? Is it wrong to get credit? I guess just the possibility of one of my assistants winning 200 dollars made me feel good. It didn't happen but for a moment I thought it might.

And that is enough.

You Hiram? Yeah, and I Fire 'em Too

I don't think I've ever had to fire anyone before. Because I work mainly in commercials and music videos (two- or three-day jobs) my passive aggressive tendency is to just let the job run its short course and not invite the person back. But this is rare because I almost always hire people that I know and like. There's a first for everything, though, and yesterday I had to terminate my camera loader.

He was a good kid from Atlanta and friendly and hardworking and eager, with a good attitude, which made it even more difficult. Were he an asshole it would have been much easier. "Leave," I would have said, "and take your shitty attitude with you." But he was nice, though forgetful and clumsy and largely incompetent and he didn't listen particularly well. I worked and reworked the speech I'd give at the end of the night, mulling over word choices and pauses and inflections and when to rivet the stare and when to look away thoughtfully.

In the end I succumbed to cliches:

Don't Take It Personally
It Happens
I Want To Thank You For Your Hard Work
Keep Assisting, Don't Give Up
It Just Doesn't Seem Like It's Working Out
I Enjoyed Working With You
Good Luck

Nonsense, pure nonsense.

It felt like breaking up with someone. What was even worse is that he didn't even see it coming. I was kind of hoping I could just motion him over and that he'd clue in and realize he was about to be fired and I could have some minimalist Mametesque moment where I just said "Thank you" and shook his hand and everything above could have been communicated in a silent, final handshake.

But it was not to be. "Why?" he said, trying to buoy himself up, "Can I ask why?" His eyes were wide and his responses were clipped and grotesquely cheerful.

Horrible, just horrible. It took me a while to get out of there and after riding the van home all I wanted was to have a beer or two in my room and watch Sportscenter. But no, it was not to be--there's the Sunday law down here probiting alcohol sales in stores from 12 midnight Saturday night to 12 midnight on Sunday. I got home at 12:02AM. We were two minutes into the Sabbath and there would be no imbibing of spirits or watery domestic beer, that is, unless I went to a club or bar which is that last thing I wanted to do.

I got a welt from the Bible Belt.

Freezing In Hotlanta

First, there is the ice storm, which comes in late January and closes down the airport. That freakish bit of weather traps me in Mobile with a bad man and sabotages a next-day LA job with a good man. Then, there is the South in general and their love affair with meat-locker temperatures. The meat salads I can understand, the passion for deep frying, the diabetically sweet sweet teas, okay, the Y'allin, the Yes Ma'amin, the ailing Hawks franchise, the slow-movingness, the chewy humid air, no problem--but I swear to you I have to put on a sweater in the hotel lobby or I will die of hypothermia. Riding home in the shuttle van w/ icy AC blasting against my bare knees, goosepimples form and remain, there is a painful tickle in my throat now, this cannot be good for me, this late-to-the game attempt to replicate un unheated Victorian parlour in December.

This is a picture of the Bandit, chilling in sub-zero Atlanta temperatures. He will be 70 in February and he's in way better shape than E. His arms are sinewy and he knows what women want.

Things That Should Be Illegal

1. Magazines That Print Fiction Without a Colophon or Endmark or Little Black Square At The End So You Turn The Page and Realize That the Story Is In Fact Over and You Have To Go Back Two Pages and Read the Ending Again To Give It the Proper Import.

2. Freeway Off-Ramps Without Corresponding On-Ramps So When You Miss Your Exit and Get Off At the Next One You Don't Get Tangled Up in a Snarl of Unfamiliar Surface Streets, Backtracking A Mile, Trying to Get Back on the Freeway.

3. Anthropomorphized Food Products Like Talking Chickens or Cartoon Pigs With Sunglasses or Animated M and Ms With Arms Legs Feet Hands and Bulging Eyes.

4. The Teetotaling Bleachers In the Outfield of Dodger Stadium (aka Prison) From Where You Cannot Buy Alcohol Nor Gain Entry to ANY OTHER PART OF THE STADIUM THAT MIGHT SELL BEER GOD FORBID.

Off the Radar (Magazine Division)

M-Brow and I worked out the details of a future book-swapping program last night, heretofore called Off the Radar (also known as the Book Assignment Scheme Toward A Robust Development (or BASTARD for short)). Since I don't read adventurously anymore (or really...at ALL anymore) and have very little to offer in the way of suggestions (which is fine, according to the inclusive BASTARD covenant), I've decided to create a list of...err...magazines.

Earlier this year, in an attempt to nurture my ill-advised journalism pretentions, I spent close to $300 (the same as the Sea Bag, coincidentally (or not)) on dozens and dozens of unfamiliar (to me) low- to mid-circulation culture magazines. I had my singular clip in Giant Robot and wanted to see what other like-minded publications might accept some whimsical spec prose from Sleepy E.

Although I got bogged down in the documentary and haven't queried any of these magazines, it was a wonderful couple of months slogging through these strange worlds. What a pleasure to read articles on fonts and architecture and video game design and city planning in Dubai.

Here is a list of my top ten favorite "new" magazines, listed in order. A disclaimer: Because a magazine is not included it does not mean I hate it. It could mean I still have never heard of it. Or it could mean I had already heard of it before the Orgy of Buying took place. It could mean many things. Please bear this in mind.

1. Cabinet Quarterly "A Quarterly of Art and Culture" -- a glossy squarish perfect-bound collection of intelligent, witty essays about folding things and fakery and science. Some articles from the current issue: "Hating Your Country (Instead of pretending you don't live there)", "Confections of Zeno (The Consequences of Carographic Fantasy)", "The Kingpin of Fakers," "A Matter of Degrees (The FBI on the trail of the world's most lucrative diploma mill)", "Utopia on Vinyl (The History of the industrial musical)".

2. Stop Smiling "The Magazine For High-Minded Lowlives" (!!!!!!!!!) -- Issue 19: Rebels + Outlaws issue: Christoper Hitchens, Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick, William S. Burroughs, Mark Mothersbaugh, The Cardigans, Shermans March. Issue 22: The Downfall of American Publishing issue: Lewis Lapham, Saul Bellow, an oral history of Hunter S. Thompson, Curtis White (post Middle Mind).

3. Mastermind Quarterly (defunct, I think). I'm not sure what this is, but it's amazing. Topological subway map art, stamp art, close-up Chinese money art, recipe for Silly Putty, photography, a massive deconstruction of the "Matrix" trilogy, Washington DC monument proposal (the American Museum of slavery), a video game treatment, artwork of the Dark Continent from early explorers, graphic novel excerpts.

4. Swindle. Big. Quarterly, I think. Design and art-oriented. Issue#2: Mark Mothersbaugh and his mutant photography, Easy E, Dead Kennedys, Militant Mural Art, LA Roach Coaches.

5. Dazed and Confused. I got the Lyrics and Literature special, which was great. I don't know how they are normally. A letter from Neil LaBute. Good articles.

6. Colors Magazine. Benneton's surprsingly good culture magazine. Better, more lively than National Geographic with many more (shorter)--and more adventurous--articles. A truly bilingual magazine, printed in alternating English and Spanish columns.

7. Crimewave--hilarious black and white zine from Ypsilanti, Michigan. I enjoyed this very much.

8. Maisonneuve "Eclectic Curiosity" -- uneven but charming arts and pop culture magazine from Montreal: B-list dinosaurs, Are Clever T-shirts Ruining Our Society?, interview w/ Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential), Least Promising Names For a Relief Pitcher, fiction, memoir, horoscope. Lots and lots of short articles.

9. CMYK "Inspiring Visual Communication" -- Art and Design and Portfolio Work. Photography, Illustration, the art of marketing, font theory. Good visual candy.

10. Juxtapoz "Art and Culture Magazine" -- Not so unheard of, this one. Feels like Giant Robot, but for the hipster art crowd. Recommended.

Found Poetry, Vol. 2: Four T-Shirts, Recently Glimpsed

Protest Lutefisk
I Fling Poo
Don't Be a Dick
My Cat Hates You

The best thing about the "Protest Lutefisk" shirt is that it was worn by a middle-aged Latina woman working the perpetual sidewalk sale on Westmoreland. At first I thought I had read it wrong, that it actually read "Protect Lutefisk." The back of the shirt said, rather enigmatically, "A hug waiting to happen." I went back around and gaped at her front once more to confirm...Yes indeed, it said "protest," in big white blocky capital Helvetica letters.

Sea Bag -or- Reading Without Choice

Living abroad in pre-Internet and pre-Amazon.com Asia created an Every Man For Himself reading environment. There were only two or three bookstores in all of Pusan with English-language titles and these were usually limited to a few classics for the ESL market. One had to scavenge and trade with other expats or just go through the twenty available titles at the little bookstore in Somyon and browse with an open mind. One couldn't compile a reading list...or even go in search of a specific title. You had to just go and see what few titles were actually available and then purchase one of those. This was awful but also kind of interesting because you were forced to read things you wouldn't normally even consider (Steinbeck, for example). In the end I read very little that year--probably my poorest outing of all time (10-12 books in the year). I remember purchasing Chaim Potok's "I am the Clay" my first day in Pusan and I remember taking the Seoul Train on a random and desperate book run (Gogol's "Dead Souls" was the odd purchase) and I remember reading some of the books left behind by the previous English teacher (Irving's "Son of the Circus" and Faulker's "As I Lay Dying") and I remember my swapping with my upstairs neighbor for a copy of Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49" but I remember very little else.

When I moved to Japan (which was even less Internet savvy, strangely), I decided to be more proactive and seize control over my reading life. I mailed Middlebrow a check for $300 and asked him to put together an eclectic used book purchase for shipment across the Pacific Ocean. And that he did. He did a bang-up job, let me tell you. This is back when he was still living in Bellingham and courting Dr. Write. A trustable, pre-dissertation Middlebrow casted about B-Ham for literary value, discovered a form of cheap international shipping called the sea bag, and piled in all of the booty. I even think he might have sent me a check for the money leftover. Thirty days later the bag came to my small apartment and sixty or so paperbacks spilled out all over the tatami. Maybe it was seventy. It sure was a hell of a lot of books--some by authors I recognized, some I didn't, some I had heard of but never read. That year was a record year (I wound up reading close to 80 books in a ten-month period), a fine year, a memorable year, all said. Putting your reading life in the hands of another human being is a vulnerable, frightening experience. But M-Brow came through. He introduced me to Donald Barthelme, Ivan Doig, Nadine Gordimer, John Edgar Wideman, David Lodge, Philip Lopate and a million others.

My reading stats have declined every year since then. This year I may break the previous all-time low set in Korea. I have thought about trying this experiment with Middlebrow once more. Or maybe giving a three-month period to four different people. When you ask someone for their ten favorite books that you haven't read, you're bound to get something good.

So give yourself. Give yourself to the Brow.

Monkeybarrelling

2005 represents the ten-year anniversary of my decision to become a writer. I've always had vague artistic notions--I wrote some stories in high school, an awful feature-length screenplay my freshman year of college, a short filmscript a few years later, some scenes and theatrical sketches here and there, the occasional poem--but on January 1, 1995 I decided to commit to the process of becoming a writer. Not an ascot-wearing, cigarette-smoking, martini-weilding, soiree-attending writer, but someone who hammered down day after day, month after month, year after year, and produced a large body of work. Publishing was kind of a non-issue--an elusive thing for real writers and born geniuses and the literary elect. I would not take classes or go to workshops, but I would read widely and write daily and this is how I would improve.

In those pre-Internet days Middlebrow and I exchanged work weekly, then every other week (semi-weekly? fortnightly?). Those were dark times but I've never been able to match that period for sheer output. Since I was just starting out there was really no pressure to be good and I approached every story and poem as an exercise. We gave each other assignments and fulfilled them--there was great pleasure in writing quickly and then shoving the pages into an envelope to meet the Friday deadline. There were those agonizing Mondays when Middlebrow's envelope didn't arrive, those Tuesdays, those Wednesdays turning into Thursdays as our frenetic write-send-receive-and-read cycle slowed to a reasonable pace. The audience was clearly defined--an audience of one--and the point was to amuse the other person...that's all...nothing more. Middlebrow introduced me to a lot of crazy European forms: I wrote a villanelle, a pantoum, surely a sestina, and something called "The Fondle Rondel," which sparkles in its own weird way but would never be written today.

Ten years later and I'm still unpublished. Perhaps it's because I don't send out enough; perhaps it's because I just suck. This year I decided to put together a collection of new short stories, 1) to see if I still like writing fiction, and 2) to get beyond the Perpetual Revision of two or three pet stories that have been on my plate for four years. I call this collection "Monkeybarrelling." It consists of two of those "pet stories," two resurrected and reworked tales from the Grand Productive Days (1995), and eight brand-new pieces written this year.

I have to admit that I've enjoyed working on this new stuff. I think I've finally figured it out. Write fast, write often, and don't look back.

My New Poster

My new poster is eighteen inches by twenty-seven. The back is white and glossy; the front features a Latina woman in an emerald green bikini staring at the camera with lips parted. Her head is turned slightly to the side and her artfully mussed, light-brown-and-blondish hair falls over her shoulders. She is frontally lit with soft bright light and poorly composited against an ocean and beach scene behind. The background consists of three parts: the suggestion of a sandy beach on which the model stands, a blue lagoon in the middle distance, and a point of land that curves out farther away toward the ocean. Palm trees jut from this spit of land and too-bright lights glow from house and hotel windows, betraying a long exposure time taken at dusk. The dark blue sky and water have been tinted toward the greenish end of the spectrum. The woman's hair intersects with the dark palm trees in a crude and unconvincing way, not unlike the bad greenscreen work done on the Sid and Marty Kroft show.

If one looks closer he or she notices a graphic crosshatching behind the model and in front of the dusk beach scene. Its function seems to be to break up the incongruity of foreground and background lighting conditions. It resembles Venetian blinds, or a forcefield. The suggestion is one of enclosure and inclusion. The viewer is enclosed inside a graphic bungalow of sorts, with a sexy, front-lit model. The background is separate from us--a view for our pleasure only--and we do not interact with it. Above the woman's head and off to the left a green, yellow, and white cartoon hornet hovers, its gloved hands balled into fists. The hornet is drawn like a minor league sports logo and the name of the product stretches off to the right in an olde-tyme sports font. "MICKEYs" it says, in white caps bordered by gold. There is no apostrophe. The ess is also a capital letter, but it is half the size of the previous letters and it is positioned superscript-style so that its top edge aligns with the top edge of the word "MICKEY." The ess and the ess only is underscored. The words "FINE MALT LIQUOR" sit one line below, adjusted so they left-justify with the em and right-justify with the wye in "MICKEY." The words are printed in an all-gold, squatter version of the font above, at about one-third of the total height. A white capital ar with a circle around it floats in the void between the superscript ess and the ar in "LIQUOR."

There is a lot happening in the emerald green crotch area of the model. The model's left thumb pulls on the front of her bikini bottom while her four fingers grip her inner thigh. The same cartoon hornet has been superimposed on the model's skin, halfway between her unpierced navel and pubic triangle. The hornet is supposed to be a tattoo but is clearly just a graphic pasted onto the overall image. The hornet has the same posture as the larger one in the top left corner of the poster: fists balled, wings flapping, eyes scowling, determined. His stinger arcs under him and forward, pointing at the opening in the bikini bottom where the model is hitching her thumb. The front of the woman's right wrist is propped up on a jauntily cocked hip. Her thumb and first three fingers encircle the throat of an artificially composited green bottle of Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor. The gold screw cap is visible under the tight pressure of her thumb and forefinger; she holds the keyed-in bottle at an erect forty-five degree angle and her right elbow juts out a little to get the perfect position. The bottle has been photographed at a higher resolution than everything else; it's perfectly sweaty and shiny and glows from within. The model's pinky lingers further down the shaft of the bottle. "GET STUNG," it says, beneath all of this, in a 3Dish green-with-gold-border Copperplate font. In the bottom left corner of the poster is a Nordic-looking white-green-and-white tribar flag. Words on the two white bars of the flag are written in green and words on the middle green bar of the flag are written in white. The flag has a Parental Advisory aesthetic to it; it reads "WHEN YOU GO WIDE, GET A RIDE. DON'T DRIVE DRUNK."

I have never heard the expression "go wide" before.

Old Skool Flava Unit -or- The Weirdness of Root Beer

A couple of days ago I offered my friend Bea one of my Curiously Strong Liquorice Flavored Altoid Breath Mints. While she commended my correct pronunciation of the word "liquorice," she pooh-poohed the flavor selection and turned away, grimacing. "At least it's not the ginger-flavored kind," I said, secretly enjoying those as well. But this got me thinking a little about the Death of Licorice as we know it. Licorice seems like another weird (but time-tested) flavor destined for the scrap heap of sweeteners. Say licorice to anyone under twenty-five and they probably think Red Vines or Twizzlers. And what exactly is a Twizzler anyway? It seems Europeans still enjoy liquorice, the heady challenging kind (another reason why they are superior to us), and I even think I might have had some salty liquorice in the Amsterdam airport (am I dreaming?), but here in America the Palate Numbification Project has been going for some time now. Sweet and tasteless, that is how we like our desserts. Order a vanilla milkshake and you get some white soft serve in a disposable cup.

Like all things in life, it's probably connected to our move away from an agrarian society. We just don't know where our food comes from anymore. We don't raise animals for slaughter, we don't grow our own corn, we don't make our own desserts from scratch. No wonder that ginger root, anise, tapioca, and licorice seem like a bizarre place to start building a dessert. Look at some of the original ingredients of root beer: "allspice, birch bark, coriander, juniper, ginger, wintergreen, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, spikenard, pipsissewa, guaiacum chips, sarsaparilla, spicewood, wild cherry bark, yellow dock, prickly ash bark, sassafras root, vanilla beans, hops, dog grass, molasses and licorice." How weird is that? An enterprise like that would never get off the ground today. I wonder often how close the original Hires recipe varies from what we drink (or don't drink) today.

Of course, now that I write this I'm noticing a blurb in Time Magazine for Palapa Azul, which offers "frozen desserts in hibiscus and cucumber-chile (spicy but refreshing) flavors." I am not sure what I think about this. My initial reaction is very very negative but I don't know why. Check back later. At first it appears that maybe we are coming full circle--that a hibiscus-flavored juice pop is in close kinship to that orignial root beer recipe--but I am extremely skeptical. Who will pay to eat an upmarket snack like this? Richies in Sedona, perhaps, and they only.

Admittedly, the Asianification of the US is bringing a lot of interesting flavors to boba shops everywhere. Lychee, taro, ume (sour plum), red bean, and the appearance of green tea ice cream (it's too sweet, okay) seem promising. I don't think Americans will ever be able to truly enjoy "anko," that sweet and glutinous red bean paste present in so many Asian desserts. People can't reconcile the refried-beany texture with the thick and chokey sweetness. Forty years ago, though, I don't think we'd have a problem with these sweetbean desserts. I mean, people were drinking absinthe and eating brains back then, right?

These things I remember: ginger snaps in Grampa's house, licorice candies in pastel hues, the odd pleasure of a cream soda in the afternoon, Gramma's peanut brittle (or is it brickle?) on that large glass plate, Pops scooping up spoonfuls of tapioca pudding on his birthday, and a young Sleepy E marveling at the weird, granuled, fish-egg texture of the stuff.

Critiquing the Critique

Today I'm in our nation's capital grabbing some last-minute stock footage from the wonderful National Archives. It's swampy and moist and the cicadas are out but it's only about 85 or so and very tolerable. I'm not doing any sightseeing, really. Just hammering down at the Archives and visiting an old friend in Baltimore. I rented a humongous Chevy F-150 from Enterprise (there were no other cars available in the Baltimore/DC area) so it's been kind of fun bouncing around town in this gigantic penis-compensator. I've never really driven a penis-compensator before (except for a 5-ton grip truck once). This vehicle is living large, I tell you. It makes Middlebrow's Buick look like a Corolla. I am large and I am so in charge. I almost couldn't make it into the National Archives parking structure I am so large. The yellow-and-black bumblebee-striped pole said "Clearance 6'8" but I forced the issue and barely avoided scraping the hell out the rental roof. Oops.

What's really on my mind is this: I just received another scathing film review and it's kind of throwing me. It shouldn't throw me but it is. Alas, just when I was feeling good about the movie...a critique has to come along that f***s w/ my head. Now I am starting to have doubts. I think her comments are logical and make sense (mostly), but I question whether she's meeting the movie halfway and/or at least trying somewhat to understand the movie on its own terms...

I think it's human nature to want to believe the people who say you're a genius while discounting everyone else. I don't want to do that. On the other hand, I kind of feel that she's predisposed to dislike my film anyway and that any changes I make aren't going to work for her. It's not her thing, that's all.

Here are some of her notes (she works as an editor):

"The film is too long by far and you already know that. You are locked into a structure, and that structure is not working."

"It's hard for me to answer your questionnaire since I don't buy your structure. At All. I feel like you didn't know where to put some stuff and so you made a chapter to take care of it. It doesn't flow and almost every-time it threw me right out of watching the film."

"I found Lou to to irritating right away and then he went downhill from there. I don't think you need him. I know you think you need him but you don't. He's obvious and pedantic."

"I understand that you're trying to tie it back into the opening that air hockey is sort of the culmination of human thought but it feels forced."

"The opening is too long."

"The chapter titles over black are also bogging your pacing down. Pick a style and stick with it. You've chosen some stylized film making techniques but it's not an overall style."

"I don't like the device of someone saying some word and then jumping to a title like "art" or "music" (this section is very thin anyway) . not working for me. seems obvious and a bit of a cheat."

"Why black and white anything? Also not so wild about the Asian guy with the comic book. Not too interesting . Definitely not interesting enough to come back to."

"I hope that the night stuff with Mark is better than what I saw. which was a black pixalated screen. That low angle shot where he's driving makes him look like the unibomber if that's what you're going for."

"I don't find any connections within the sections at all. Like cutting to old footage of Mark with a frozen beard. What? Why?"

"Almost all of your scenes could be cut in half."

So there you go. Now I'm wondering whether I need to just submit a rough cut to Sundance and spend the next few months tailoring the movie to this one person's point of view.

I'm starting to realize that Lou (the air hockey philosopher who forms the spine of the film) is working as a cinematic version of SERFS. I love this guy and think he's contagious and energetic and inspiring, but a lot of people (like the person above) have commented that they HATE him. Perhaps that's SERFS working. If you hate Lou then you're going to hate the movie and you're going to hate anything that I have to say...so you better get your hatred out of the way or you're going to be stuck watching this thing for 90 minutes.

Then again, maybe Lou does need to come out. Hell if I know.

The Shortest Party Appearance Ever

Walk to Liquor Store
Purchase Six-Pack of Mickey's Big Mouths for BYOB White Trash-Themed Party
Drive to Hollywood
Park 3 Blocks Away
Walk In
Answer Questions to Security's Satisfaction
Enter Soundstage Parking Lot
Meet and Avoid Unfamiliar Stares
Enter Soundstage
Observe High Ratio of Young Hipsters to Normal People
Observe DJ and Small Contingent of Girlies Shakin They Ass
Say Hello and Shake Hands with One Familiar Person (Male)
Watch Him Walk Off
Deposit Mickey's Grenades at "Bar" (A Table Where 2 Scantily Clad Ladies Retrieve Beverages)
Get Told That I am to "Order" from the Bar Ladies and then "Put Money" in the "Tips Bitches" Bucket
"Order" One of My Own Mickey's
Deposit Last Dollar From Pocket into Said Tips Bitches Bucket
Look Around at the 60ish Partygoers (All Strangers)
Drink Uncomfortably
Wince (Mickeys No Good No)
Stroll
Try To Find the Woman I'm Thinking About Chasing After Who Said She'd Be at This White-Trash Themed Party
Fail at Finding Her
Rethink Objectives (Chase Some Skirt, Get Sloshed, Both Maybe?)
Finish Grenade (yuck!)
Stand Uncomfortably
Go Outside and Look Around
Throw Empty Grenade in Garbage
Figure Out What To Do With My Hands Now That I'm Not Holding Anything
Begin To Experience Existential Wrath
(Not Existential Angst, Existential Wrath)
Think About Having Another Grenade But Realize I've Left Wallet In Car (Malt Liquor is Expensive Tonite!)
Consider Other Things I Could Be Doing Right Now (Studying Japanese, Sleeping, Bathing)
One Final Fruitless Reconnaisance
Pass Thru Parking Lot
Pass Security
Walk the Three Blocks
Get in Car
Retrieve Forgotten Wallet From Front Seat
Turn On NPR
Crank Ignition
Drive Home

Total Time Elapsed: 30 minutes
Actual Time at Party: 5 minutes

Dating For Dummies, Vol. 1: The Hike As Date Event

I confess a certain fondness for afternoon dates. To me, the familiar dinner-and-a-movie dating stricture has always been a bit stifling. An afternoon date is interesting because 1) you can actually see what the other person looks like, 2) you can do daylight things (like go to the dog track or the beach or long walks through areas that might be more dangerous at night) , 3) both parties are usually more lucid, 4) it feels less datish, that is, it seems more like just hanging out with someone (rather than a 2-hour romantic compatibility test), 5) the date can be terminated early for any number of reasons, and 6) if things go well then it can become a long megadate, spreading into the evening hours.

Two years ago I had the brainstorm of taking a second date on a hike up into the Santa Monica Mountains. At the time this seemed like a particularly ingenious idea--we'd drive up to Will Rogers State Park in the afternoon and go on a shortish 2-hour hike, finishing up around sunset, then hit the pub for some post-workout refreshment, then maybe dinner as well if things were going decently.

A hike seemed like a good idea because it is active (unlike a movie or a play where one just sits there) and also provides you with something to do (besides chew thoughtfully and visit your wine glass) when the conversation well dries up. It also fell in line with Sleepy E's Requisite Filtration Scheme (SERFS), which I have employed to screen out Ditzes, Golddiggers, Snobs, Bims, Actresses, Superficial Types, False Intellects, Workout Fanatics, Plasticians and Botoxennes, Makeup Overdoseurs, the Perpetually Bitter, the Perpetually Spiteful, the Humorless, the Self-Obsessed, and the Entitled. Unfortunately, SERFS has proven to be so effective over the last couple of years that E rarely dates at all anymore. But I digress. At the time it seemed logical to go on an unconventional (for Los Angeles) hiking date because someone who enjoyed themselves doing this might actually be someone I'd want to get to know better.

I'd hiked this particular trail a few times and though it was located about halfway between Pacific Palisades (and the coast) and the 405, one could see the twinkly ocean from certain spots high up on the ridge. I usually continued to walk westward for as long as I could before backtracking to the parking lot and my car just as the gates to the park were closing. This time, though, I thought it might be interesting to take a cutoff that ventured down into a valley and then looped back to the parking lot from the north (avoiding the potential monotony of seeing the same scenery twice).

Well, we descended into that valley and after about 90 or 100 minutes I knew we were fairly close (a mile or less) to the backside of the parking lot. But the trail just ended. Just stopped. One minute it was there and the next minute it was overgrown. We backtracked a bit to the last fork and continued on in the opposite direction but it was clear that was taking us further away from our destination (or was it? I didn't have a compass but the sun still sets in the west, right?). We followed the trail back to where it ended and I picked my way through some dense brush and over a fallen tree, thinking the trail might open up on the other side, which it did not. I spent about fifteen minutes trying and failing to find the trail. And it was getting dark.

Eventually my date gave up participating in the problem-solving process and just glared at me. It had taken 90 minutes to get down here and the park was closing in about an hour and I didn't think we'd be able to make it back to the trailhead on time (we had to ascend out of this valley, remember?). But at least we wouldn't die. So I made the decision to hightail it out of there and just go back the way we came and if we were locked inside the parking lot then so what we'd have to call some friends and get a ride out, whatever.

I was feeling like an ass but also having a good time in a perverted kind of way. She was not. She let me know that she had lied to me and that she'd always hated hiking and that she just came along to be a good sport. Hilarious. Even more hilarious was the thick four-foot snake that blocked the narrow trail at one point. I wound up throwing rocks at it from afar until it slid into the underbrush and waited. We ran past (stupidly) and by some miracle missed being fanged or choked out by this thing. It occurred to me then that this would be the kind of bonding story couples looked back on and laughed about...something they recounted at parties...the snake that almost fanged them when they were falling in love, etc...but by this point it was clear my date was not having fun.

We got out of the valley with about fifteen minutes to spare and then jogged the ridge all the way to the parking lot, arriving just as the gates were closing. I drove us to a nearby pub where I had a very large, very satisfying Guinness and she drank a small Diet Pepsi. Then I took her home. We never talked again.

Moral: Some women don't enjoy getting lost in the woods.

Found Poetry, Vol.1: I Just Don't Want Any Beef

I found this while shooting at an apartment complex in Compton last week. I was going to send it to Found Magazine, but I lost interest so I will publish it here instead. It's a ripped-off square of college-ruled notebook paper, about four inches by four inches with loopy chickwriting on both sides.

In Pencil: "Now you know how it feels! Write/Back what'd you write on the note? Sorry, I ripped it. I was PISSED!! & you got Anthony being f***ed (up arrow) 2 me 2! W/B"

In Pen: "I wrote I'm sorry to because U said sorry so I'm saying sorry don't mean we have to be cool."

In Pencil: "I DON'T want to be coo' w/you Anymo! I just don't want any beef. So, sorry & bye. w/b if you want! 'Bi-Polar'" (weird sad face with a tear)

In Pen: "I really sorry to be like that At luch but if it ment not being coo it was't worth it. W/B if want."

(Here the manuscript breaks off...)

The Anklebiters, the Starry-Eyed, the Surlies, the Hangers-On, et al.

Three years ago I began a book project called "Out of Focus: A Year in the Life of a Low-Budget Camera Assistant." According to my proposal, the book would follow a cameraman (Sleepy E) through the "often amusing, sometimes dangerous, always disorganized and anarchic world of low-budget fimmaking." It would lead film lovers into the "hilarious mayhem" of the B-movie world, "past Stephen Baldwin, Eric Roberts, and Corey Haim, past the Anklebiters, the Starry-Eyed, the Surlies, the Hangers-On, the Has-Beens, and the Never-Wases." It would explore the author's "love/hate relationship with B-movie schlock" and his "continuing, hapless struggle to escape to the 'big shows.'" It promised a lot of things. There were a few agency nibbles, but I had created publishing poision: a conversational memoir by a nobody, lacking structure, arc, forward movement, universal appeal, etc. It was a relentless series of numbing anecdotes that went nowhere, without the uplift of an ending.

The original idea was to take notes for my fifth year of camerawork in Los Angeles. I gave myself a Five-Year Plan when I relocated here and the plan stated that I would give Hollywood an honest five-year shot, after which I could reconsider my career and my life in LA. But I would not quit prematurely, so stated the Plan. And I agreed. After four years of awfulness there was no real future in sight--it was succeed or fail by the end of that fifth year. And this was the ticking clock that would give the book its "urgency."

Unfortunately, things rarely work out cleanly and I continued to labor on awful low-budget productions that were just slightly better than those I worked on before. My friend Ard (who disappeared in India 8 years ago) always said that Marx's Revolution of the Proletariat would never happen because it didn't take into account the Man and his masterful ability to engender the illusion of forward movement in the minds of the exploited. Similarly, someone was telling me how video slot machines use these same psychological responses against gamers: video slots create the illusion of forward movement (last turn I only had one cherry, now I have two cherries, now I have two bars) while still robbing players of their money. It feels like you are getting closer to winning--that you are making progress--so you continue to play and lose. This is how I felt at the end of my year. I was working on films that were marginally better...enough to make me think there might be a future...and to continue playing. But in the overall scheme of things I was still very much a loser and an even bigger loser because I neither became a smashing success nor a miserable failure. I just continued on, same as it ever was. And I was an even bigger bigger loser because the book project languished and then died. The act of working on the book became a daily reminder of my foundering career. As my career languished, so did the book. They were very much connected.

So I quit the project as that fifth year came to a close. I think about it at times but it's essentially dead and buried, which is too bad because I was three-quarters of the way through a first draft and there is a lot of great tragicomic messybaggy material in it. About a month ago Middlebrow suggested that I pick it up again and finish it. So I've been thinking about it more and more. The structure of the thing would need to be reenvisioned because the immediacy of the Five-Year Plan is long over. Over the last year I've managed to drag myself out of that low-budget world, thank God, so that in itself is kind of a happy ending. But I still resist delving deep into that world again, even just revisiting my old notes. I don't think I have a psychological barrier to this period (although one of my friends certainly thinks I do); it's just a matter of choices: do I want to spend six months getting an ms together or do I want to use that time productively on something new?

Last Tuesday I went out did B-camera on "National Lampoon's Trick or Treat," a comic pre-adolescent horror movie destined for direct-to-DVD sales. I recognized two-thirds of the crew from those Dark Times. The production manager, the script supervisor, the boom operator, the gaffer and two electricians, the key grip and three grips, some production assistants--these people have not graduated from low budget. They are still there, slogging away, barely making minimum wage, working fourteen hours a day, getting yelled at by hacks, expecting and receiving and accepting the Perpetual Beat-Down that is low-budget filmmaking. It was nice to see all of these people but they are stuck there and may never get out. They have to take the work if it comes their way--they can't not work, you know? And my persistent, low-level complaining about the work conditions didn't exactly improve morale (or the conditions), if you know what I mean.

So part of me wants to revisit this time and create a big strange book out of these experiences. But another part wants to think it was all kind of a bad dream. I want to put those years in a little wooden box and throw away the key, just like William Hurt in that underappreciated masterpiece, "The Village." Maybe I'll go on a hike or take a swim in the ocean or learn how to cook something for a change. I can think of a million things to do besides complete this manuscript. Then why do I feel guilty about leaving it undone?

Those We Don't Speak Of: The Village, Contact, A.I.

I have been thinking about M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" for two straight days. This is not a good movie; in fact, it is preposterous...laughable even at times. The writing is stilted, the camera angles heavyhanded, the ending contrived. There is Shyamalan's awful Hitchcockian cameo, a determined blind heroine on a quest through a haunted wood (of course), and plot manipulations too many to count (many of which are executed through the crazy antics of the village idiot).

And yet this movie is working on me in some primitive, visceral way that I cannot explain. The last time I felt this way was after viewing Robert Zemeckis's "Contact" in the theater. Logically I knew that the movie was mediocre, that the writing was wretched in parts and that Zemeckis runs a close second to Ron Howard and pre-Minority Report Spielberg for naked sentimentality. But I was completely moved by that film and emerged from the dark theater a total mess--mystified and teary.

These films are fascinating because they are able to split my unconscious emotional side and my skeptical intellectual side right down the middle. I should hate these movies, and indeed I do on some level (I kind of resent them actually), but I still get sucked down deep into their characters and the worlds they inhabit. And I cannot pinpoint where they are getting their power over me. Perhaps in the case of the Village it's just the old myth of monsters living in the forest, living in your town. The simple color scheme, the beautiful photography, the moody pacing, the sweet and unjaded (and asexual) love story...the raw earnestness of the characters...these all undid me.

Perhaps that is what it is: earnestness on the part of the characters, and, by extension, the author. Earnestness. A weird concept. With earnestness comes all of that other evil stuff--sentimentality, nostalgia, on-the-nose dialogue, melodrama--but you also have access to something more primitive and moving that irony and cleverness miss every time.

Whatever it is, as a filmmaker and a sometimes writer it is something worth studying.

I Walk the Line

In the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" music video, a long Steadicam shot pulls back with frontman Richard Ashcroft as he walks angrily down the street, barrelling into anyone who gets in his way. I used to think the video woked as a showcase for Ashcroft's arrogance and misanthropy while having the neat effect of making the skinny Engishman look tough...badass almost. I realize now though that Ashcroft is not intentionally slamming into people; he's just staying his course down the sidewalk and those who cross over or veer in front of him get wiped out.

I have become Richard Ashcroft in the "Bittersweet Symphony" video.

Over the past month I have stopped getting out of people's way when they veer on a collision course toward me. I walk the line, baby--I hold steady on my path--and then I run them over. Old women and infants in strollers get spared, but everyone else gets impacted by an unflinching Sleepy E. Everyone thinks this is dicklike behavior but I don't care. I'm sick of slow-ass pedestrians who screw my left-turn opportunites; I'm sick of people who weave all over the sidewalk so that I cannot pass; I'm sick of people who are not conscious of how they take up space and how it affects the things happening around them.

Angelenos walk like they drive--with total disregard for others. Actually, they EXIST like they drive--with total disregard for others. I don't know if this is an American thing, or a Californian thing, or an LA thing--or if it's just something that I notice now after living in Japan--but people are totally fucking rude in this way. The times I've ridden the bus here I see young thugs taking up the handicapped/elderly areas, people sprawled over two or three neighboring seats (forcing others to stand), assholes not giving up their seats for old people, jerks swearing loudly, obnoxious cell phone usage, people playing awful hiphop music (a crime in itself), feet on seat backs--just a relentless, unceasing spree of disrespectful assholery.

Then there are the supermarket bastards (and bitches) who park their carts across aisles, who see you rolling toward them from a mile away...yet who do not skinny up and let you pass, but instead force you to growl a tight-lipped "excuse me" before they'll act suprised by your presence and pull off to the side.

In Japan I used to see guys folding up newspapers into little squares if they were reading on the train. You know, so that they didn't invade everyone's space with a gigantic spread-out sports section. When's the last time you saw that here?

We are a nation of savages.

In the meantime, I walk the line. If it's supercrowded, I will accommodate. If there is some sidewalk construction that diverts people into my path, I will accommodate. If someone else is walking the same line as me, I will accommodate. Everyone else who weaves into me gets knocked over. I am not getting out of the way anymore.

David Byrne & Arcade Fire at the Hollywood Bowl

"If I were David Byrne,
I'd go to galleries and not be too concerned.
Well I would have a cup of coffee
And I'd find my surroundings quite amusing and
People would ask me which were my favorite paintings."
---Crash Test Dummies "When I Go Out With Artists"

Sometimes I think concertgoers are divided into two lopsided groups: those who want to hear the hits (the overwhelming majority) and the true fans (and collectors) who are looking for a singular, ephemeral live experience (the minority). It's difficult to feel sorry for David Byrne, but I did feel a little pang of something when people listened in dutiful silence to his first four newer, unknown singles, then came awake and sang along to "Burning Down the House." Don't get me wrong, "Burning Down the House" is a fine song (and the Tom Jones/Cardigans version approaches spectacular), but surely this must have eaten at him? Did he feel like it was over, that he was a has-been? A relic? I almost wanted the crowd to sit down and not enjoy themselves so much--so that their obvious sense of boredom while listening to the non-hits would be diminished, or at least disguised. I began to understand Eric Robert's hateful reaction when I told him I was a big fan of "Runaway Train." "I've done lots of other good movies too, you know," he snarled.

But then Byrne is a pro and he probably doesn't care one whit. He stood up there in his light pink suit and his clever shoes and white hair and bopped around and sang his songs. Byrne has been a role model for many many years. Byrne is middlebrow; he is clever without being pretentious; he is vulgar and lyrical, ebullient and melancholy. He makes records, he makes films, he writes, he makes art (Powerpoint art even), and best of all, he exudes a goofy, nerdy sexiness, even in his fifties. Arcade Fire blew him off the stage but Byrne is still the one in my heart. I hate to think that he won't live forever.

This is a picture of the Hollywood Bowl, where the people onstage look like ants:

Wocka Wocka!

1. Today I broke up a giddy group conversation by using the word "non sequitur." After that silence-inducing bomb I used the word "superlative" on the only woman left. She got quiet and left too. These people do not like me.

2. When did "disconnect" become a noun?

3. What are the origins of "bling bling"?

4. This is a picture of what kids do in the jungle when no one else is around:



5. Man Leans In For Kiss, Sticks Tongue Out Too Early, Blows the Whole Deal



6. Liquor Flowers



7. Is "quezadilla" a misspelling or a variant?



8. Trivia question: What does the following picture mean?



9. The official spelling of Fozzie Bear's post-joke exulting is w-o-c-k-a. As in "Wocka Wocka!" More on the Muppet clones later.



Thanks for listening.

Insane Purchases: The Economy of Comedy

Back when I was a pup I used to do B-camera now and again on the low-comedy masterseries "Son of the Beach." Near the end of every season I would spend more and more days splitting off and doing 2nd Unit pick-up shots for all of the year's episodes. A shot of a clock here, a doorknob turning there, an establishing shot, a close-up, whatever. Filling in the gaps. One day we were down at the Long Beach marina and we 2nd Uniters set up off to the side on the boardwalk and waited. Eventually a tiny old Italian woman appeared, we lined up the shot, the director called action, and somebody threw a chocolate milkshake in her face. "Manja Manja!" the woman shouted.

Then she went home.

They ended up paying this old lady about $800 for 2 minutes of work. She was a featured extra, with a line, there was a wet bump, hazard pay, old age stipend, humiliation fee, milkshake charge, and who knows what else...$800 is small potatoes by film/television standards, but it got me thinking about the economy of comedy. Is it worth $800 for a laugh? Yes, absolutely. Earlier that year we did a show called "The Gaytrix," where the hero lands down in an alternate reality filled with gay men. We did four of the requisite Matrix-style time-slice shots, where the action freezes and the camera flies all over the place. Cost? $30k or so. Is it worth $30k for four laughs? Absolutely. These are small potatoes after all.

Last week I was confronted with a similar decision: Is it good economics to pay $1000 for a 20-second clip of Al Gore talking about air hockey? $1000 is a good sum of money. But not really. It is and it isn't. It's rent (or rentish). It reminds me of the high cost of living in Japan and how when you went out you somehow always spent 10,000 yen ($100 or so). We started calling the 10000Y notes "Teners," as in "I dropped another tener last night." So that's kind of how I feel about this fee. I agonized for a few days about it, beating myself up about being irresponsible with money, how I should be spending this money on rent or utilities or wooing women or textbooks or gardening supplies or tune-ups or funky shirts or something....or just leaving it in the bank where it belongs.

I finally resolved to get the $100 screener cassette. If it was good material, if Al Gore cracked a joke or two about air hockey, then I would shell out the $900 for the licensing charges.

In the end the decision was made for me. ABC in New York couldn't even find the clip of him talking about air hockey. We had the speech isolated but they couldn't find the stuff. The guy who gave me this lead said the quote "wasn't worthwhile anyway." WTF? Maybe he made it up. Maybe it was just a passing reference and it just blipped over the ABC people. Who knows? Either way the Al Gore stuff is no longer part of my movie and I am $1000 richer. Amazing! I am in a great mood now! What a lucrative day! I think I'll go out and celebrate!

Boshintang-jip Vol. 4

A good question to ask of life is: Where does the meat come from? In the case of the K-town boshintang-jip, it's hard to say. Any illegal business must operate under radar just to exist, which means they are unregulated, which makes things far more dangerous than they need to be. Who knows how many hits of acid are really on that little tab of paper? Who knows if that prostitute has AIDS? Who knows where the dogmeat comes from? It's not like they ran down to Vons and asked the butcher for a few pounds of ground hound.

So I did a little research and ran across some hysterical (as in freaking out) articles on the Internet. Apparently, there are freelancers called "bunchers" who are in the business of trafficking illegal dogmeat. These guys go around and pick up Free-To-A-Good-Homers and bring them to restaurants. I also read about kennels where bitches are kept perpetually pregnant and the offspring are eaten. Maybe this is true. I expect some of it is. So where does the meat come from and does it matter? Does a USDA or FDA sticker on my beef really mean anything? Because I purchase meat at Vons and not on a streetcorner shouldn't do anything to ease my mind, but it does somewhat, I admit. The thought of men corralling dogs in the night and killing them and dumping them off in burlap bags makes me queasy. This meat is going in my body?

The most shocking thing of all was something I had completely forgotten about: the adrenaline factor. I used to live above a "stamina foods" restaurant in Pusan, and while I never did witness this firsthand, the teachers who were leaving town when I arrived told me they used to hear Mr. Yi beating his dogs to death down below. The prevailing view is that a last-minute surge of adrenaline makes the meat tastier, so these animals are often brutally tortured before they are butchered and eaten. In China I heard stories of cats being put into bags and smashed against things. I've heard of animals being blowtorched (before and after death), animals being drowned, animals being electrocuted.

That is all.

I have switched over to salads and fruit and soy products now. I am reading that polar-bear-looking dude--Dr. Weil--these days, and exercising regularly. I am drinking lots of water and lots of green tea and thinking about where the meat comes from.

Boshintang-jip Vol. 3

So I went back to the feared boshintang-jip yesterday. I was walking around K-town doing errands and realized it was a perfect afternoon for a heaping bowl of dog stew. These realizations happen but once in a lifetime (never for most) so it's important to act on these weird impulses, especially if you are in the rare and fortunate circumstance of living a mere two blocks from an illegal boshintan-jip. It was bright and sunny out but the restaurant was still gloomy inside and when I entered two Korean middle-aged women stared me down. I had to explain that I was there to eat and could I please be seated? They waved me toward a booth (reluctantly? suspiciously?) and I consulted the menu.

The menu had everything translated into English except for two items: heukyeomso boshintang and yeomsochim. I don't know what heukyeomso means but yeomsochim is obviously a variant of it, whatever it is. But since it's a standalone menu item, then it's probably an Edible Noun. So in the first item heukyeomso is an Edible Noun modifying boshintang. But I digress. The boshintang was $14 and the yeomsochim was $13 and all of the Engish-language menu items were around $7. There was a burner in the middle of the table so you could cook up a cauldron of the stuff and ladle it out to your date and/or her friends while laughing about your hard day at the office.

First, I should say that I consumed this stuff on two occasions back when I lived in Korea. It's considered a stamina food and old men eat it during the dog days of summer. Seriously--it's supposed to be an energy replenisher in hot weather. It's also purported to have aphrodisiacal qualities, especially if you eat the penis (which I will not be doing any time soon--I don't care how good the presentation is). Then again, I think a lot of this comes the eternal Chinese obsession with "sex foods" and "stamina" and the elitism of eating exotic zoo animals like snakes and rhino horn and wookies. I won't go into detail but I feel it is my duty to report that 1) my first time eating it I definitely felt the effects of the hound on my system, but 2) the second time I had diarrhea for 2 days. So my tests were inconclusive.

By the way, I'm not trying to be confessional here; I'm just trying to report the facts and amuse my readership at the tiny cost of being humiliated.

In the end I wimped out. I ordered some wonton soup with gelatinous rice cake disks, which was mediocre. My assessment of the situation is this: heukyeomso is an Edible Noun Modifier that changes "dog stew" to "something-style dog soup," which is what they would serve if I asked. It would proabably be a dog-stew-style stew, but made with beef or pork. That is my guess. However, the implicit understanding is if a Korean person orders this item then they get the real-deal dog, quick fast in a hurry, don't worry, Flavor-vision aint blurry... They will never serve me dog stew, even if I order it. What is a tall white guy doing in this neighborhood anyway? Clearly I am an agent of the Man.

This isn't over, though. This is just beginning. I will investigate further and I will return. This dog will have its day.

The Abysmally Unexpected and Grotesquely Unbelievable

Today I checked out the brand-new Library of America collection of HP Lovecraft's short stories. I read Lovecraft ten years ago and found him boring and overwrought--a pulpy Poe imitator. I am just now beginning to understand his genius. Consider the following passages:

1. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.

2. The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of misamal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror.

3. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in that hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon.

4. Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and the grotesquely unbeliveable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied.

5. I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.

6. I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.

7. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka, in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile.

8. And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

And this is all in the first 20 pages!

Boshintang-jip Vol. 2

I finally went to the dreaded boshintang-jip last night but they were already closed.

This is a picture of the boshintang-jip. I shot it frontally, utilizing a stark flashbulb and wide-angle lens to emphasize the restaurant's grotty swarthiness and dubious character...



It is very dark inside. It is difficult to see what is going on in there.



Tune in tomorrow.

Working On My ABs (Boshintang-jip Vol. 1)

I've decided I'm going to start working on my ABs (anticipatory blogs). Instead of using the blog as reportage, I'm going to project into the future, so to create a sense of anticipation--nay, desperate yearning--in the Front Porch Readership.

Today I stumbled across a hole-in-the-wall boshintang-jip. For people who cannot read Korean, a boshintang-jip is a dog soup restaurant. Yes, that's correct: soup made of dogs. Now, this begs a lot of questions. The first is: Is it REALLY a dog soup restaurant, here in LA? Really? Well, that is what I'm going to find out tomorrow night. I don't know, but one would guess that this practice is probably illegal here in the States. Why? Because it's inhumane. Why? Because dogs are cute and cows and chickens are not. Still, one cannot help but wonder. I mean, it's not like the sign says "Dog Soup Restaurant" in English. It says "boshintang" in Korean...and even if they claim boshintang is a more general and inclusive word that deals with "health foods" or (to use the Korean vernacular) "stamina foods," I have to believe that real boshintang, with dog flesh, is available for the rich Korean salaryman who demands it. I will be that rich Korean salaryman. I will demand my soup made of dogs. And I will accept nothing less.

I realize it is not politcally savvy to alienate the largely vegetarian Front Porch Readership with tales of dog-eating savagery and political incorrectitude. But the dogmeat debate is an interesting one and one in which I side with the people of the Hermit Kingdom. You see, many years ago there was a great king who said that, well, because the peninsula is a poor one and cattle are scarce, the consumption of one species of dog is a necessary evil, for us to survive as a people, to get our protein fix. We shall eat dogs. But not just any dog. This one kind of dog. A non-cute dog. No pets or anything like that.

I aim to find out a lot of things. Check back tomorrow for a full report.

Middlebrow Takes It To the Rack With Authority

Minimalist DIY Poster Art

Losing the WTB

Lately I have been losing my WTB (will to blog). I don't know why. I have been inactive and have no good excuse. I have been posting pictures to avoid the act of typing. I have not been checking my comments. Perhaps it is time for the blog to go. Perhaps I am finished with the blog and the blog is finished with me.

A few days ago 7th Ave. (one road up) was blocked off and a street carnival was installed there. Who assembles these rides? Why did we never think about this as children when we were riding the fearsome Zipper or even the vomit-inducing Tilt-a-Whirl? Is it truly safe? Really? What kind of man (or woman) assembles rides at at a blocked-off-street carnival? Does he have a license? Is there a test or something? Is it not almost guaranteed that this person is high on something?

Well, I finally found what I was looking for, a low-rent psychic, and was offered the choice of paying five dollars for a palm reading or ten dollars for "the cards." I chose "the cards," because I always look for the best value when dealing with the future. Surely, if it cost ten dollars then I would be getting a more genuine reading than the five-dollar crap reading the cheapskates endured. Yes, indeedy. Basically the woman told me that I was undergoing a change, which was later ballsily expanded to "a move," which is true, I am intending to move from my K-town lair. Amazing! She also told me that I was a very negative person (she can see inside me!) and that I am surrounded with dysfunctional love relationships. Huh? "You have a lot of love surrounding you," she says, looking into my eyes. I nod, expressionless. "Hmmmm." "You are feeling stifled; you are not getting what you want from these women, perhaps it's sexual." She is watching me for a reaction, which I will not give her. Instead I reach over to my notebook and start to take notes, which she absolutely forbids. I complain to her sister, the real psychic here in the sidewalk tent, and I am once again cleared to take notes. Ha! I say. Ha! You should have seen that one coming!

She then tells me that June, July, and August will be very good months for me. Very good. Hmmm. These are auspicious months to move or handle lingering love interests. Very well, then. I feel much better already.

Now if I could only learn to love the blog again then all will be ducky.

This is a picture of the Dragon Wagon.



This is a picture of where some lady told me about the future.

Three Goas, Two Gabbers, and a Darkstep

From the acidplanet.com list of Electronica Sub-Sub Genres:

Abstract Ambient, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Soundscape, Big Beat, Breakbeat, Funky Breaks, Nu Skool Breaks, Club, Eurodance, Dub, Illbient, Trip Hop, Ambient Drum n Bass, Breakcore, Darkstep, Drum n Bass, Drill n Bass, Jump Up, Jungle, Tech Step, Progressive Electronica, Symphonic Electronica, Experimental Electronica, Garage, Two Step, UK Garage, Deep House, Filtered/Disco House, Hard House, Progressive House, Tribal, Vocal House, IDM, Acid, Detroit, Gabber, Happy/Hardcore, Intelligent Techno, Minimal Techno, Rave, Old School, Ambient Trance, Goa, Hard Trance, Melodic Trance, Progressive Trance, Psytrance

Kissmobile

A Fine Hollywood Moment

Today a director I used to work with called me out of the blue and asked me how my documentary was coming. This was odd for three reasons: 1) directors don't call me, 2) It's been about a year and a half since I've seen this guy, and 3) I don't think I ever told him about my project. Surely he wanted something.

Yes, of course...his friend had written a script about air hockey that was "friggin hilarious." The problem: He'd never actually seen real air hockey action. This is where I come in. I'm supposed to deliver them a DVD of my rought edit so that he can take the best parts out and put them in his "Dodgeball" retread. "This script is hilarious," he repeated. "You should get in on it. Maybe if you help him out he'll let you collaborate on it or something."

Now this kind of story has a familiar ring to it. Country rube makes good, goes to Hollywood, has his work appropriated and bastardized, gets cheated, gets upset, gets drunk, kills himself, and then goes back home where his old girlfriend won't take him back.

"Someone's gonna make a movie about air hockey soon, and it's gonna be big. They're making comedies about all kinds of retarded sports these days. My friend just sold a logging comedy for six figures."

Now, it's not that I'm against selling out. On the contrary, I'm all for it. I'll sell out with a wink and a smile and then use the cash to work on some more meaningful projects. But something nags at me here. I wouldn't call it a crisis of conscience or anything like that, but when Hollywood finally does an air hockey movie (which they just might), it'll be vapid and insulting and forgettable, just like "Dodgeball." It can't be any other way. A Hollywood air hockey movie will be broad comedy. It has to be. And it'll make millions.

And it's not as though I feel protective of the air hockey players who have opened up their lives to me. Or that a movie about air hockey has to be earnest, hard-hitting drama. I think these guys can handle themselves; they understand that they are playing kind of a fringe sport. Furthermore, if a Ben Stiller air hockey movie came out that mocked their subculture but had the end result of increasing air hockey interest by a thousandfold, well, I don't think they would mind that too much either.

So what is it then? What is this vague sense of...of...horrible dread? Why do I not want to help out this director and his writing friend? Why do I want to get drunk and vomit on their shoes? It couldn't be an integrity issue--I have none of that. No, maybe it's because it's a spec enterprise.

Yes, that's what it is. That's where I draw the line, dammit: I Won't Sell Out On Spec. Show me the money and I'll do whatever you want. Otherwise just leave me alone.

Fishbone

Signifying N made some comments about meter maids in my next-to-last blog that immediately triggered a memory of an old Fishbone tune where the guy yells, apropos of nothing, "And f*** the meter maids, f*** em! That's just how I feel man!" I went back looking for this bite and found it on their 1991 masterpiece "The Reality of My Surroundings." And this record IS a masterpiece. This is the most insane, dense, frenetic music I've ever heard. I listened to it regularly back in the day but I think the music was WAY ahead of its time so I didn't fully appreciate it then. Don't get me wrong, it's very difficult to listen to in the way that "It Takes a Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back"-era Public Enemy is difficult to listen to. It's a loud, aggressive Wall of Sound. There is a lot going on here. It is not music to relax to. It is madness, and it will both thrill and disturb you.

There is:
Funk Metal With Horns
Ska Craziness With An Old West Player Piano ("Housework")
Spoken Word With Jews Harp Accompaniment (can we say Jews harp anymore? mouth harp? jaw harp?) ("Junkie's Prayer")
Radio Friendly Sly and the Family Stone Style Songs ("Everyday Sunshine')
An Awful Ballad
Strange Slave Comedy ("Asswhippin")
A New Orleans Jazz Funeral March
And the song "Pressure," about which an Amazon reviewer says: "You haven't lived until you've seen Fishbone perform "Pressure" live backed up by gospel singers while people hurl themselves from the stage like some insane church service! More fun then you can imagine!"

Here it is for you to download. You might have to download each track separately but you should be able to get them all going concurrently.

The Original Frankenfoods

Experimentation, on the whole, is a good thing--in life, in fashion, certainly in art. In the realm of food, though, I tend to disagree. I do not like my sushi buggered with. I am not so bored with the act of eating that I must search far and wide for culinary newness. Sure, some of the city's most elite restaurants and celebrity chefs can futz around with recipes but I'll never shell out the bread to eat there. I want my caesar salad to taste like a caesar salad. If I go to Pinky's, I expect that my dog will taste a certain way. A carne asada taco is a carne asada taco, and it should not cost $30.

I remember waking up on Sunday mornings to the smell of waffles cooking--then marveling at the strange combination of fear and desire that would elicit in me. The pleasure of Sunday's comics reading, waffle eating, and 8-hour orgy of football watching was undermined about once a month by Pop's decision to experiment. Corn waffles, bacon bit waffles, or something worse--you just never knew. I didn't want unusual waffles. I wanted them the same way every time; that was the whole point. But Pop had something in him, some desire to chart out new territory in wafflery. I didn't realize it then, but he was predating the trendy fusion movement by twenty-five years.

There was his tendency to put Mrs. Dash's Flavoring Salt (this is not salt, trust me) on corn, cantaloupe, and watermelon. There were the strange breads that came out of his R2D2-shaped breadmaker. There were his monster servings of ice cream stabbed with so many pretzels that they looked like kooshes or underwater mines or some mutated protons. There were the times he tortured us with green milk on St. Patrick's Day and encouraged us to do a blind taste test to see that the milk did not, in fact, taste "green." There was something eccentric and Wonkaesque in his designs, and once in a blue moon he would give us a couple of those decorative cake candies that look like little ball bearings. He called them "happy pills" and we would get a couple when we were good. Happy pills, indeed.

These days there is clam pizza, but that is a new thing. There is also the time he put some leftover pizza in a brown wrapper and wrote "rotten meat" on it so that N and I wouldn't devour it. Of course we were hoodwinked.

The Miseries of Street Parking

Every Thursday at 1:55 PM the south side of Leeward Ave. is packed with parked cars. Each and every car has a solitary person inside sitting in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead. Just one person, just sitting there. It's as if everyone's anticipating an atomic blast or an alien invasion and they're getting ready for a mass exodus. It's kind of creepy. It also has an army-of-aliens-posing-as-humans or Stepford Wives vibe. All these people sitting there, parked at the curb, staring straight ahead, one after the other. They, of course, are claiming their spots for when 2 PM rolls around and the street cleaning window ends.

I know this because lately I've had to learn how to cope with the miseries of street parking all over again. Having recently purchased a new vehicle while still being in possession of the old puts me in the position of having two automobiles. This is not a problem since my underground parking space (which I pay for) is fortuitously large and able to hold two vehicles in it comfortably, without causing any discomfort or inconvenience to anyone else. My building manager (a cowed but stubborn stooge) told me (in a rare act of goodwill) that I'm entitled to park one vehicle only and threatened to tow any others that may be sharing my generous space. So there.

So I've had to put my old car out on in the world and do the street cleaning shuffle twice weekly. The problem with this is that everyone else in a half-mile radius is doing the same thing and all spots are taken by 2:01 PM. Last Friday night I got home at 5 in the morning after an 18-hour workday, pulled my old car out of my garage, put my new car in, then drove around for almost 40 minutes looking for a spot to park. I ended up finding a spot about ten blocks away, then made the half-mile walk home and slept for about 12 hours. Then someone ripped off (literally) the tags on my license plate and put them on their own vehicle. Then I got a ticket for not having those tags. Then about five different vendors shoved fliers under my windshield wipers. Then pigeons shit all over my car.

Who would ever live in Los Angeles by choice? Even the nice areas are awful. I'll bet this bs never happens in the SLC.