When news emerged last night that Wes Craven died, is it wrong that the first thought I had was, “This is the guy responsible for Scream 2 and Scream 3? I can’t be the only person, right?
Lately the Grandmother has made a very uncomfortable habit of asking me what day it is. “It’s Monday,” I tell her, but she’s hard of hearing. “What did you say,” she asks. “IT’S MONDAY,” I scream.
She’s quiet for a second. “You don’t have to yell at me,” she says sounding a bit butt-hurt.
“I’m not yelling at you,” I tell her. “You can’t hear shit, so I have to yell.”
This is a bit that happens daily.
I went on a jaunt today that had me circle the Trump golf course while listening to the latest Buddyhead mix tape.
I was out and about this afternoon, and there was a homeless teenage girl walking around who bore a striking resemblance to Nina Hagen. “Hey,” she yelled out to me. “I really love your hair.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No really. I love your hair. Really.”
And then I took off for my next errand stop.
I wanted to talk to her a little and see if she really was a reincarnation of Nina Hagen, but seeing how I am so strapped for cash myself I feel bad for engaging and not have a little something to give.
It really was nice of her to like my hair even though I really hate it. Actually I really hate my overall appearance, but it felt nice to hear her say it. It makes me wish that more boys would say something to assuage my ego. It also makes me wonder why I don’t get more nude shots of boys. Maybe I need to put myself out there more?
I spent most of the weekend adding posts from 2005-2007 on here, posts I thought were lost when the entire site when into the shithole and weren’t crossposted to LiveJournal. But thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, most of them survive much to my astonishment/horror/surprise. So they’re here.
Saturday night I watched the series finale of Hannibal, the first time I ever watched the show live on television. I finally caught up with the series a couple of days ago, so it seemed like a good time to actually watch the show when it aired. I haven’t liked this Red Dragon arc, so I gotta say…
Thanks to Archive.org, I found an old Tripod version of this website that looks a little like this:
It is embarrassing to see the pretension of the 21-year old version of myself (look at the nom de plume!!!!!), how I was trying to cultivate my own identity and just how derivative and poorly executed it was. 15 years later, it’s nice to see my execution skills are still lacking. No, I’m not going to bother linking to that archived site. It’s embarrassing enough that I have imported the blog posts over here. You know, for the sake of posterity. Or hilarity.
The scary thing is reading back on these posts, I remember exactly what was going on with me at the time. I remember what I was into, what I was exploring, what I was feeling. So while the outside person might read these and just think they’re bad and nothing more, I read them and am transported to being 21 in Santa Barbara again.
One thing I am curious about is seeing older versions of websites I made. I think the first ones I made date back to February 1998. So that’s two years of pretentious bullshit that have disappeared. And I’m supposing they were especially pretentious since I was still going through by goth phase at that point. Hell, the first internet nickname I made came from a Bauhaus song: “Who Killed Mr. Moonlight.”
I decided a hike at Forrestal was in order on this first day of the heatwave. Smart, I know. I didn’t make it a long jaunt — I made sure to get through the elevations, hence the sweaty mess you see above. It’s been nice to get back out on the trails the last couple of weeks now that things with The Grandmother have stabilized somewhat.
The new episode of the podcast is up and running now. I really hated Walter White and thought Breaking Bad let him off the hook in the finale.
The best question I was asked today: have you ever pissed in a diaper? I think I’m erect.
It only took several hours to get through the 317 pages of Pedro Martinez’s simply titled memoir Pedro, and it was really fun to read. Take for instance:
I knew [Don] Baylor didn’t know anything about pitching when I heard him speak. He should have known that [Andrés] Galarraga had an open stance that he closed up as he stepped into his swing — he stepped into plenty of pitches and the fact that he wore those pussy pads on his elbows only made it easier for a pitcher like me to locate in the inner half of the plate when he was up to bat. [emphasis mine] p. 100
But as with any other ghostwritten memoir comes the same dilemma: how much of the book is the subject and how much is it the ghostwriter? Pedro may have read through Michael Silverman’s copy thoroughly before approving it and sending it off to the printers, but that gnawing question never goes away. And I’m not saying that to denigrate Pedro. I thought the same thing while reading Joe Torre’s The Yankee Years back in 2009 which was ghostwritten by Tom Verducci.
The same thing crept into my mind earlier this year when I read 1Q84. How much the of gorgeous prose was Murakami and how much was the translators?
I really don’t know if I like this book. I’m really leaning towards really liking it. I want to love it.
This is a concept book about May 10, 2014, rainy day (although no rain fell on that day in Los Angeles where a bulk of this book is set.) The main story is about a 12-year old girl Xanther who has seizures and is going to get an Akita puppy with her stepfather. There is also a story involving a gang member in East LA, a EDM-phile in Singapore, some folks in Texas, Mexico and other arcs which do seem disposable. Here are some pros and cons about this volume.
+ The Xanther story. I call it the main story since most of the pages are devoted to her, and it is well written. You get the insecurities of her mom Astair, stepfather Anwar, all of it.
– The bulk of the book is dreadful. There are some 880 pages or so, but because of the layout, text art and what not it is more like a 300-page book.
– There are many characters in this book that don’t intersect, and some of these folks are not fully explored and thus you don’t really care about them.
+- There is a lot of dialect used. Some of it works. I think I’m one of the few people who liked the Singlish (as you can see above). But there is an Armenian taxi driver character which was pretty bad. The East LA gang member was also pretty bad.
+ Text as art. Danielewski is a master in this, and he’s not afraid to show it.
Mark Danielewski has 27 volumes of this planned with the second volume due out in October. Maybe some of these folks will get more attention in the next volume. But it definitely has me intrigued.
After sweltering this weekend in near-triple-digit heat, this cooled down remarkably yesterday for me to do normal things like doing laundry and climbing up hills and such. So laundry was done and hills were climbed. It was a very productive Monday for the most part.
Today I had lunch at Tampopo Restaurant which of course reminds me of the 1985 movie Tampopo which is an excellent movie. They have a special on what they call their Tampopo Set, their ramen, a small plate of fried rice and 3 gyoza for $7.99. I then headed across the street for an iced coffee at Caffe Bene which plays the worst music imaginable. Think Richard Marx, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion and the like on repeat. Fucking Koreans.
Here are the most recent search terms for this little website: anal blowjob, hotsexymessages, jimmy garoppolo bare chested, jimmy garoppolo girlfriend, hand job blow job video.
I found myself in the middle of an existential crisis last night. Sweat was beading down my brow and I was on the verge of tears. Sure, it was a hot night and I was watching Project Runway. But still. Here I am: an unashamed liberal who believes the Affordable Care Act didn’t go far enough, that CEO salaries and bonuses are outrageous and leading to the death of the middle class. But here I find Donald Trump and Ann Coulter absolutely charming.
“My main reason for opposing gay marriage is once your friends get married, you lose them.”
“The angry gays don’t like me, but the angry gays don’t like anybody. My theory on the angry gays is they’re not really gay: They just hate their fathers.”
“Gays are right wingers who like butt sex.”
I’ll be honest. I don’t think too much about talking heads. I know what I believe in and don’t need anyone to tell me what’s good and what’s bad. So I really do tune a lot of this noise out. But before I learned how to do this, folks like Coulter would drive me up the fucking wall.
So I was shocked when I kept laughing throughout the profile. Not ha-ha-she’s-so-backwards, but ha-ha-that’s-a-smart-crack. And that’s when the crisis set in.
ohmygod am i becoming a conservative? oh no i think donald trump is funny too. does that make me a bad liberal? do i now have to wear ugly pleated khaki pants and have sexual desires for 14-year old girls?
Thankfully the crisis didn’t last long. No, I’m not becoming a conservative. No, I don’t agree with the majority of what Coulter or Trump believes. No, I won’t ever wear pleated khaki pants. No, I will never have sexual desires for a 14-year old anything.
I reminded myself of something I watched earlier in the day, a relic of the 60s when Woody Allen had his own talk show and invited conservative superstar William Buckley.
They don’t agree in politics, but they seem to be having a good time here. They seem to like one another. Why must we hate people we don’t agree with?
Just listen to the hatred on a particular gay subreddit:
“She’s not a gay icon. She is, quite frankly, a complete bitch who, to top it all off, apparently strongly opposes equality for her friends.”
“Sadly, the fact that gay men voluntarily hang out with her is proof that we are not automatically smarter than our straight counterparts.”
“She’s trying to be popular by being edgy, and that Junior High mentality isn’t getting you anywhere in my opinion.”
Such pearl-clutching responses a la Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons is pretty funny. This is why I want Trump in the presidential race for as long as possible because it’s hilarious to see people lose their shit.
So crisis averted and logic has returned. All of you assholes can now return to being smug sanctimonious jackasses.
Screengrab from Melanie Martinez’s “Dollhouse” music video.
I’m listening to someone named Melanie Martinez and a stream of her debut album Cry Baby because Vice sounded very enthusiastic about it this morning. With its music box keyboards and toddler themes evident in song names like “Sippy Cup”, “Training Wheels” and “Dollhouse”, it’s like a record a pedophile would get off on which is a bit unnerving as a 36-year old gay man.
You know that Ms. Martinez is edgy because she has a filthy mouth (“They call you cry baby, cry baby/But you don’t fucking care”. “Fuck all your ABCs/I’ll fuck that boy.”) along with her breathy vocal stylings. She has the look that Tina Root knocked down pat in the mid-90s with Switchblade Symphony. The music is a more diluted version of Bjork at the turn of the century.
I guess as pop music goes it’s just fine, but is this inoffensive sanitized mediocrity really what the kids are listening to now? Is this what counts as “youth rebellion”?
I always assumed that as generations progress, music gets more and more offensive. Elvis Presley and his hips were the devil. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles were filth personified. Bob Dylan was a commie. Madonna was (and amazingly enough still is) a slut and a whore. The stuff I grew up on — Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, PJ Harvey — was noise and garbage. So I was waiting for the day when I could say that the music the kids listen to was garbage and a bunch of noise.
I’m still waiting. Music is dull as shit, and the only way to seem edgy and dangerous is to sell sex. Take all the sheen away from this album, away from Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money”, you have music that could cure insomnia.
I guess for a 20-year old who became famous for being on a television talent show called “The Voice” a few years ago, this is fine. But as a culture, shouldn’t we expect more? Much like presidents, I guess we get the art we deserve.
