Rapid Heart Movement

The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, as a concept, is a wholly stupid idea. Taking something as subjective as music and trying to measure it by the same standards as baseball and football players is just ridiculous. It's bad enough that Billboard tracks sales of records instead of just letting them stand on their merits. That anybody buys an album because of how much it sold is so foreign to me. Radiohead debuts at number one every time they out out a new disc, but that doesn't stop me from thinking they suck hard and are one of the most pedestrian and overly-pretentious bands of the last decade. That they will be in the R & R HOF someday and Robyn Hitchcock won't is all the proof I need that it is a joke. And also pointless. So pointless, in fact, that they put the actual museum for it in Cleveland.

That being said, I have to admit I was interested and excited about REM being inducted last night. For the first time they were airing the induction ceremony live on VH1 Classic. I didn't even know there was such a thing as VH1 Classic until I heard about this. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I found out that we actually have it, buried in with the other gazillion pointless stations that come with digital cable. So I stayed up last night watching the ceremony waiting for them to get to Michael Stipe and company. The good thing about it is that when they do the inductions you get treated to a performance of a few songs from the artists being honored or maybe a few of their songs being performed by another band if it someone who is dead or a band that refuses to reunite for the occasion. Or in the case of the Sex Pistols refusing to even accept being inducted, which was just brilliant last year. That was my favorite Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame moment ever, them being told to fuck off by the Sex Pistols.

So I wanted to see REM perform last night because original drummer Bill Berry was going to be with them in one of only a handful of times he's performed with them since leaving ten years ago. No way I could miss it. I had to endure the crappiest band ever Velvet Revolver butchering Van Halen before it got there, but I finally got my payoff.

They were inducted by Eddie Vedder, who feted them in a really sweet, albeit clumsy, speech. He said something about REM not only being able to hit the emotions that were already in your heart but also putting some there that didn't exist before. I really understood what he meant.

REM has been in the soundtrack of my life for so very long. I met the girl who would become my wife because of an REM concert. They got inducted last night less than a week after the 18th anniversary of that night and one week before our third wedding anniversary. And it was happening just a few blocks from where we live.

But their music has been more then just something that coincidentally coincided with my personal life. REM is more than any other group responsible for my lifelong love, some would say obsession, with music and even, dare I say such a gooberistic and melodramatic thing, my musical awakening.

I grew up in Stone Mountain, GA, a short 60 miles from Athens. So I became aware of them a lot sooner than if I had grown up somewhere else in the country. I think I was about 14 or 15 when I first heard them. Up to that age in my life I liked music but I had no real love of anything. I know people my age that grew up with parents who introduced them to things like Highway 61 Revisited, Sgt. Pepper, Joni Mitchell's Clouds, Velvet Underground and Nico, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Who or even Tom Waits. My mom listened to the Four Seasons and Air Supply. The first record either of my parents ever got me was my dad's birthday gift of Bobby Vinton's Greatest Hits. My second one was my mother giving me Disco Duck. You could see why I didn't think I liked music very much.

This all changed after hearing REM. Though I did discover U2 (the first band I truly loved) before them, it wasn't until hearing REM that I really started to discover my passion for music. They were responsible for leading me directly to both Robyn Hitchcock and Billy Bragg, two singer-songwriters who would go on to surpass REM as my favorites. But they didn't just lead me to other great music directly. They showed me that there was more to find out there beyond the shitty pop they played on Z-93 in Atlanta, which as a kid I thought was the only radio station that existed since it was all that got listened to in my house.

After REM happened for me I never heard music the same way again. And I actively sought out new and interesting stuff as much as I could, spending hours upon hours in local record stores in search of anything that "spoke" to me. If I hadn't heard them in my teen years, I don't know if I would have ever become as curious about music.

I also don't know if I'd be alive.

I had a rough time in my teen years, like a lot of people. On top of having to deal with being a social outcast in high school, we also moved right before my senior year. Because my life wasn't difficult enough in high school without having to be a new kid on top of it. I guess my mother didn't think high school sucked enough for me so she had to give it a nice twist for my last year. And we moved to a suburban hell called Lake Zurich, IL that I considered the worst place on planet Earth until I lived in Boston. Luckily for me the great album Document came out close to the beginning of the school year. It was the perfect soundtrack for my life that year, with its beautiful raw energy. Peter Buck's most wailing guitar work, a driving rhythm anchored by Bill Berry's ferocious drumming and the most intense Stipe has ever been vocally. It was the perfect soundtrack for my senior year. And I listened to it almost every day. I had to.

Suicidal teenager is probably one way to describe me at 17. Coming home from another day of being knocked up against the lockers by the idiot football player tying to prove how tough he is by picking on a geek, having my hair made fun of by the cheerleader bimbo who sat behind me in Consumer Econ and being challenged to fights by some jackass named John Knox because he didn't like the way I dressed or my political leanings (I wore a peace sign button on my jacket). Or it was because he had a small dick, I forget which. And then I had to go home to an emotionally and physically abusive mother who liked to tell me that I would get along better in school if I tried to "fit in". There were so many days I just wanted it to end. And I really thought about ending it so many times.

But I would put on my headphones, slap Document in the CD player and crank the volume as high as I could handle. The opening riffs of Finest Worksong would come on and fill me with its energy. By the time I got to It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) nothing seemed so bad anymore. And by the ending of Oddfellows Local 151 the day would usually be washed away and I could breathe again. On some days, especially when my mother was in a particularly raging mood about her life and decided to take it out on her children again, it took more than one listening. Sometimes three or four.

But it always worked. And I believe it's why I survived my teen years.

I've always said that if I ever got the chance to meet anybody in REM I would thank them for saving my life. Without Document I really think there is a good chance I would have been one of those 17 year-olds who gets found in the bathtub with slit wrists or hanging in the garage.

Even though they are not my favorite band anymore and I've really not liked their last few albums, no band could ever hold the special place in my heart that they do. Hell, I wouldn't even have the phrase "favorite band" in my vocabulary if it weren't for them. Or a wife.

And keeping me from killing myself was pretty good too.

Thank you Bill, Peter, Mike and Michael.

Whoring

I've been thinking about whores a lot lately. No no, not the walking the streets in Queens working for your next rock and having a HBO crew follow you around for an "after dark" documentary kind of whore. I'm talking about the anything for a buck as long as it benefits me no matter who else in the world it might hurt kind of whore.

I wrote about this a little over a month ago and I never really got any comments beyond Joe defending the practice of watching out for Number One, so I thought I'd touch on the subject again for my first Roundtable.

I love calling people whores. I do it all the time. One little word can pretty much sum-up a person. Like, it is the perfect description for both Paris Hilton and Donald Trump, right? Even more so if you use "media" as a prefix. If I tell you I think someone is a whore, you get very clearly how I feel about someone. It's one of those beautiful descriptive terms. Like ass-hole.

Side to actual whores: I mean no disrespect comparing your straight-forward service for cash business to bottom feeders like Donald Trump. There just isn't a better replacement word for my point.

Anyway, my point is that the whole world, and especially America, seems to be filled with whores. People just seem so willing to sell their soul for an easy buck, even if it contributes to the pain, oppression, maiming and death of others. "As long as I get mine, fuck everybody else" is the prevailing attitude of the world.

The example that comes to mind most often for me is people who do commercials or promotion for nefarious and just plain old evil companies. And it drives me nuts. Not just because I spent several years studying theatre and never really considered using what I learned to sell diet soda or car insurance. I mean, I think that still makes one a whore for doing it, but there is an argument to be made for an actor trying to make a living. But there is the kind of whoring that is on a whole different level than that.

When someone helps promote a company that causes human suffering because they are getting paid a lot, that's something I find unforgivable. Nobody seems to have a place where they draw the line anymore. Well, there might be one place. Nazis and the Holocaust. Whenever I'm talking to someone (i.e. an actor) about what they would or wouldn't do, and I get to the question of whether or not they would do (or would have done in the 30s and 40s) a commercial promoting the Nazi party or for the extermination of Jews, they say "well, of course not."

I usually like to broaden that question out to whether or not they would have made a commercial for a product that they know was the direct result of, say, forced labor in concentration camps. You know, would you accept money to promote widgets that were made in slave camps where people were forced to work 18 hour days and people were killed on a regular basis? Again, that gets treated as a preposterous question, no decent person would do such a thing.

But then ask that same person if they would make a commercial for the De Beers company, the world's biggest (almost only) diamond company. You usually get a different answer. But why? The actions of the De Beers are directly responsible for the maiming, torturing and killing of thousands of people in African countries that produce diamonds, one of the most notable being Sierra Leone. And many of the people who had limbs chopped off so they wouldn't steal the diamonds from the mines were children. Many were also enslaved to work the mines.

The irony that shadows of hands were symbol of De Beers for so many years is lost on many people.

And I think the two actors that played the parts of the hands in those ads are just as guilty of crimes against humanity as Leni Riefenstahl. Leni didn't actually kill any Jews herself, but she sure did a heck of a job of promoting the Nazi agenda with her propaganda films. Is she off the hook for just "taking a gig"?

To me, the biggest whore in the Whore Hall of Fame is Michael Jordan. The man has no shame or soul whatsoever. He certainly doesn't have the "need the money" excuse that so many actors tend to use. At one point he was the most recognizable person in the world, and a prime example of elite athleticism. And what does an elite athlete encourage kids around the world to do? Eat McDonald's and drink Coke. I would guess that he didn't get to be the best basketball player in the world by doing that. Oh, and he had his name put on a really expensive shoe that was largely made by child laborers working in substandard conditions for up to 16 hours a day for very low wages.

The kids who made the shoe may have not been getting much, but Michael made sure to get his. It has been said that while Jordan was playing he was paid more money each year by Nike than they paid their entire Vietnamese and Indonesian workforces combined.

Of course there are examples everywhere, not just in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Doctors and scientists who work for the tobacco industry or do infomercials for "health products" they know to be worthless come to mind. Like I said, we seem to be surrounded by whores.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think I have a point, or do you think that anything anybody does to make a buck is OK? Where would you draw the line? Outta sight, outta mind, or do people need to think more about the effect of their actions on others even if they don't get to see it first hand?

But even more importantly, who are the people that you think are the biggest whores?

Let's Hear It For The Beige

I'm off to Chicago for the weekend and will not be on the tubes of the internets at all while I'm gone. The Beige One does not have his Roundtable up yet (come on Jose! It's almost 4:00am PST ya lazy bum), so I have no idea what it is about.

But when he does post a topic it will be here. And I'm sure it will be as enlightening and intense as Kevin Bacon's "time to dance" speech from Footloose.

See y'all after the weekend.

Hot Air

Like a ton of other people, I watched the Oscars last night. I generally hate award shows, I don't see the point of having a competition for art. Theatre, film, music and the like are not sports, and it's somewhat annoying to see them treated that way. And the shows themselves are usually really annoying and boring. The Grammys are the absolute worst, I don't even remember the last time I even tried to sit through that nonsense. Call me when they bestow a lifetime achievement on Billy Bragg or Robyn Hitchcock. I'm not holding my breath.

But I still watch the Oscars for some reason. Probably because I was a theatre major and that's what you did. If you were in rehearsals for a show, it would be scheduled around Oscar night and there was always a party. There would be lots of drinking and a lot of bitching about who got "robbed" that particular year. Good times.

Last night was supposed to be a mini version of that. Our friends Joe (also a theatre major in school) and Megan were supposed to come over. A perfect time for Joe and I to drink beer and criticize everybody and everything in the Oscar telecast. But the weather forecast for New York last night was not pretty, which meant that Megan would have to get up even earlier for work this morning to be able to take the Long Island Railroad to work instead of her usual two hours on the Long Island Expressway, which would probably be covered in ice and dumb shit drivers who think they drive great in the snow (they don't). So they stayed home so they wouldn't be getting back at 1:00am to have to wake up at 4:00.

It was too bad. Except that I got to keep all the Boddingtons I bought for the occasion for myself. First introduced to it by my buddy Armando several years ago, it is one of my favorite special occasion beers, with all its rich and creamy goodness. Mmmmm.....

Anyway, it was great to see Martin Scorsese win last night of course. It will never make up for the intolerable cruelty of having lost to Kevin Costner in 1990, but still, it's good to see a long overdue recognition of the greatest director of his generation.

Probably nothing in the Academy Awards is as bad as the usual choices for original song, and this year, despite that I generally like Melissa Etheridge, was not much better. Three nominations for songs from Dreamgirls? They are nothing more than slicked-over, homogenized, musical theatre versions of the "Motown Sound" from a show that was crap even in its stage version.

Meanwhile, some of the most interesting original music in a movie was completely shut out. How they could give so many nominations to Little Miss Sunshine but overlook the song Til The End Of Time by DeVotchka is just mind-boggling. It really was the best song written for a movie this year (listen to it here if you don't believe me). Rewarding over the hill rockers and vanilla-flavored, pedestrian crap is supposed to be the Grammys' job, but there is no shortage of that at the Oscars either. It seems that their only nod to anything interesting every year is Randy Newman, but even his recent stuff isn't nearly as good as his 90s movie songs. About the last time the Academy took a chance on anything interesting for songs was the 1997 to 2000 run of Elliot Smith, Amy Mann and Björk. And they lost to that horrible Titanic ballad, Phil Collins' Tarzan song (which amazingly enough, was even worse than just normal Phil Collins) and a late career Bob Dylan snooze-fest, respectively.

Last night also had a lot of praising of Al Gore for "inspiring everyone here" to do something about global warming. Now that's all well and good. I personally feel pretty good about my low contribution to the amount of global warming-causing gases in the atmosphere. In fact, I would say that I'm probably better than a vast majority of my fellow U.S. residents when it comes to that.

Listening to the way people were talking on the stage last night and the way everyone cheered when Gore was thanked for making the country change its ways about carbon pollution, you would think that all the people of Hollywood were better than the average person about not contributing to the green house gas problem. But does anyone seriously believe that? How many people in the Kodak Theatre last night do you think took the subway there? Seriously, of all the places in L.A., that part of Hollywood is probably the easiest when it comes to public transportation. There is a subway stop literally outside the front doors of the theatre at Hollywood &Highland. (Though that station was closed yesterday for "security" reasons, the next one is only a few blocks away at Hollywood & Vine) From there you can take a straight shot one-seat to the Valley, or downtown and transfer to light rail that will take you to anywhere from Pasadena to Long Beach. But I have yet to hear of any stories of DiCaprio popping out of the subway or hopping off the bus and making his way to the red carpet. Or dropping his bicycle off at the valet.

So while all of the famous people were talking the talk about global warming and clapping for Al, do you think anybody in the building last night besides some of the ushers and bartenders, and maybe Ed Begley Jr. if he was there, got there by any means other than a car? And I've never heard that they make a hybrid limo.

I guess celebrities' way of contributing to solving the problem of global warming is to tell the rest of us to take the subway.

Boy, I hope that personal sacrifice doesn't put them out too much.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on them. I suppose it's too much to ask them to walk to the bus stop in those brutal Los Angeles winters. Brrrr.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow, Back Again In A Couple Weeks

Because the media is longer based on journalism but rather infotainment with bimbo airheads (I'm looking at you Soledad) reading teleprompters, I have to hear way more about Britney Spears than I want to. Well, anything about Britney is more than I want to hear. The current news about her is, of course you've heard, that she shaved her head. Now besides the fact that this isn't actually news by any definition of the word, the other stupid thing about it is that just about every damn print and TV media outlet has referred to the shaving of her head as evidence of some sort of "meltdown" she is having.

When exactly did the whole world (or at least the media) become as bat-shit crazy as my mother?

IT"S FUCKING HAIR! Who cares?

Jesus H. fucking Christ, it grows back. It even grows back pretty damn quick. What the hell is the issue?

I will never understand people's obsessions with how other people cut their hair, what kind of clothes they wear, the piercings they may have or their tattoos. Damn, let people do what they want and leave them alone. It's called personal expression.

Especially hair. I mean, shit. It's not like a tattoo that takes expensive laser surgery to fix if you don't like it. All you have to do is wait a little while and you can change it again. That's the damn beauty of hair, you can try whatever you want and it doesn't matter. But for some reason it seemed to matter to my insane mother when I was a teenager.

The crazy woman was obsessed with my hair when I was younger. Well, she was obsessed with pretty much the entire look I chose for myself, no matter what phase it was. Whatever I did she seemed to hate and acted like it was the end of the world.

I was a new-waver in high school, so you can imagine what it was that I did. Lots of black in the wardrobe. Haircuts that would involve the back and sides being buzz cut, and then maybe spiked at the top or long and hanging down in front of my face. For a while I had the left side of my head shaved and long hair hanging down the right side. I kind of pulled off a Robert Smith from The Cure look for a short time, though that was just too hard to keep doing for long. Once, I had my friend Andy shave the back of my head in the shape of a peace sign. My mother went ballistic on that one. She also went crazy (well crazier than she already is anyway) when I had my hair buzzed all over except for about two-inch wide spot on the front right-center with about 6 inches of length that hung down in front over my right eye. It was my pseudo-punk look. Sometimes I braided it, and other times I used a crimper on it. I remember really liking that one a lot.

But my mother thought it was the end of the fucking world sometimes. That and my clothes. One thing I remember that really drove her crazy was when (and I did this for years) I used to wear one black Chuck Taylor All-Star high top and one white one. The fights she used to pick with me over that were ridiculous. Or when I wore the bowling shoes I bought used from a bowling alley. You know the ones, the multi-colored alley rental types.

What I wore and how I cut or colored my hair seemed to be my other's obsession. It was really a side effect of her wanting me to fit in and be popular. She had dreams of her kids doing things like run for homecoming king or queen and being one of the cool kids in high school. I, of course, had no interest in that at all and just wanted high school to be over as quickly as possible. Run for homecoming king? Hell, I never even went to a homecoming dance.

My mother wanted me to be the Molly Ringwald or Emilio Estevez characters from Breakfast Club, and instead she got Alley Sheedy. Except I did have friends. Just not the kind my mother wanted me to have.

And she thought she could get me to change by insulting me every chance she got. I think my hair became her top concern in life from the mid-eighties until I graduated college and bolted to Seattle in the mid-nineties. She used to accuse me of doing it just to piss her off, when it was really just about me wanting to be weird and arty. That it pissed her off was just a bonus.

She finally got over that obsession, I think. Now she's obsessed with Jesus. But that's a whole other weirdness. I think I preferred her insulting me over praying for me.

But the point is, get the hell over this obsession with hair people. Britney Spears may have a lot of things wrong with her (like that god-awful music she makes), but shaving her head is not one of them. It's stupid to make a big deal out of it, as well as sexist. Nobody makes a big deal out of any guy shaving his head, why is it that when a woman does it is some sort of sign of her losing it? She is the same brainless twit as she was before the haircut, and nothing changed about her "character" as a result.

Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit about Britney Spears. I'd be fine if she just died and I wouldn't have to hear about her anymore. But if we are going to demonize people let's do it for things that they deserve it for, like beating their kids or invading a country without provocation.

My wife and I have discussed maybe having a kid and I hope that this kind of shit would be the last thing I cared about. If my daughter wanted to get a Mohawk, I would say no problem and take her to the barber myself. I would hope that I'll be a lot more concerned with how she's doing in school and that she's not shooting heroine or becoming a Republican than with whether or not her hair and clothing choices would be the ones that I would make for myself. It's going to be her body after all. And if you can't do weird shit when you're a teenager, when can you? Damn, isn't that how you find yourself at that age?

I'd much rather she look back at pictures of herself and laugh at the goofy hair and clothes she had when she was younger than think about what an ass-hole her father was when she was growing up.

Who Wants To Live Forever?

Been thinking about immortality lately? Well, Carol at Feeling Peevish sure has. Go check it out at share your thoughts on the idea of mortality/immortality with her.

I would, but whenever I think about living forever I get distracted by the idea of having Sean Connery as a sidekick and hearing the music of Queen in my head all the time.

Jet Not So Blue

I mentioned at the end of one of my posts last Thursday that I was going to be in lovely Chicago for the weekend. Well.....guess which airline I was booked on.

None other than Jet Blue.

As you may have figured out already, just based on that last sentence alone, my wife and I never got to Chicago. Our flight on Thursday was canceled, and the earliest they could book us on anything else would have been Sunday, which was the day we were scheduled to fly back. So we didn't go at all.

Now there has been a lot of bad news in the press about Jet Blue's problems over the last week, and rightly so, considering today is the first day that they actually got back to actually flying their whole schedule, a whole six days after the Northeast snowstorm. It has been that long since they got more than two out of five daily flights from JFK to Chicago off the ground, and none of them on time. That's pretty damn bad.

But you know what? For us it was a blessing in disguise. We never got stuck at an airport waiting for a plane that would never come, we knew our flight got canceled before we left the apartment. So we didn't have that stress or the stress of being stuck somewhere trying to get home in time to go to a job or anything. We just didn't get to go to Chicago on a random weekend we had picked because it fit in to my wife's schedule. And after some schedule juggling, we found time two weeks later that we could go, and re-booked the whole thing. We're even staying a day longer.

Best thing about this? Well, there are several. First, instead of being in Chicago with a bunch of snow on the ground and the temperatures in the single digits, even worse with the wind chill, we now get to go on a weekend that is forecast to be in the upper 30s/low 40s. And the snow is even going to melt in the meantime.

Second, airports suck in general. Airports suck even more on the day after a major storm shuts them down and forces several hundred flight cancellations, and they are full of thousands of tired, cranky and often smelly people trying, for the second day in a row, to get on a plane. We got to skip all that.

Best of all, I got to book myself on an earlier flight so I could skip on down to downstate Illinois, where I went to college, so I could spend a night hanging out with one of my all-time favorite people in the world. A trip to see great old friends is even better when the list of who you are going to see is one person longer. So this worked out especially sweet for me.

I couldn't be happier.

Thanks Jet Blue. Pass me some blue potato chips and let's see if there is a West Wing marathon on the digital TV.

I've Got A Message For You, Rudy

I know the election is almost two years away, and you are probably sick of hearing about all the candidates already, both the officially announced and the ones who have "formed exploratory committees." But I just have one quick little observation.

Of all the candidates out there lining up and lying to the American people about everything they can, from Mit Romney's daily changing story about how he feels about abortion and gay marriage (as well as his big lie about how big the budget deficit was in Massachusetts when he took over) to John McCain's always changing views on, well, everything, and calling it "straight talk."

But there is one way that we as a country could prove ourselves to be a stupid people and completely delusional.

We elect Rudy Giuliani as president.

I am so sick of this guy being called "America's Mayor." His whole image is based on looking kind of tough during the attacks on the World Trade Center, and it seems to cloud people's ability to remember the truth about Rudy. He was leaving office a disgrace before September 11, 2001. From his deplorable defense of cops who committed horrible acts of brutality against innocent minorities to his to having his mistress live with him at Gracie Mansion while he was still married, his legacy as mayor of this city was one of failure. He was going to be lucky to even find a job after he left office.

But then some crazy fuckers crashed planes into some buildings, and it was a whole new ballgame.

And Giuliani couldn't be happier about it. It was the best thing that ever happened to him, and now he has the gall to run for president.

It would just be another step on the ladder he has climbed built on the backs of 3000 dead innocent people. He makes me sick.

Years before the planes crashed in to the towers, New York built a new commend center for their emergency response. Giuliani was told by his police chief and security experts not to put it anywhere near a high-profile target like the World Trade Center. so where did he put it? On the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. Rudy was also told for years that the radios used my first responders were inadequate and needed to be updated. They knew this because of the problems they had with them when the towers were attacked the first time in 1993. He did nothing to make sure that the police and fire departments had working radios. He was way too busy making sure that cops were properly harassing people in minority neighborhoods.

It is quite possible that a lot more people died on that day than had to because of this idiot's blunders. So what does he do now? He runs a few security consulting firms. Oh, and goes around the country making speeches and raking in millions of dollars.

He has turned thousands of families' personal tragedies in to a major personal gain for himself. And he doesn't seem to feel even a twinge of guilt about that. Shame on you, Rudy. So many people thought the worst thing you would ever do was marry your cousin. Boy, did they underestimate you or what?

He must get down on his knees everyday and thank his god for 9/11. It is the best thing that ever happened to him. And he has not hesitated to take full advantage of it.

If we reward him for it, what does that say about us?

The Infotainment Age?

On this week's Roundtable, John speaks to the topic of decade definition. You know, how every decade can kind of be labeled with something that seems to define what it was about? The 30s were about the depression, 40s about the war, 50s middle class suburban boom, 60s were civil rights and hippies, and so on. You get the idea.

The question John is asking, is what defines this decade? Of course, I'm still not sure if we ever decided what defines the 90s.

Anyway, go over to johnsadowski and share your thoughts on the topic.

In the meantime I'll be heading to Chicago for a weekend away to see old friends. Mmmm....Chicago in February, is there anything better?

The Guilt Of Pleasure

On today's Roundtable, Suzanne takes on the topic of guilty pleasures. It seems she has a ton of them. Though hers are more of the variety of things she likes to do even though she should be doing something else. There are also the kind of guilty pleasures that are things you like to do that you would rather people not know that you are into. Like, say, maybe watching Around The Horn on ESPN or the movie Grease 2 or the deliciously over-dramatic TV show Cold Case. Not that I do any of those things, um, I'm , you know, just throwing out a few examples.

So head on over to Perfecting the Fine Art Of Procrastination to see what makes Suzanne feel so good, and bad, and share your own guilty pleasures.

And if yours is sleeping with your sister, well, maybe that one you should just keep between you and Jerry Springer.

Smokey Smokey

This posting probably won't be that interesting. It is just going to be me boasting and celebrating an achievement that I'm pretty proud of having accomplished.

Today is an anniversary for me. Five years ago tonight I smoked my last cigarette. I was sitting in a bar next door to the Royal George Theatre in Chicago after rehearsal for a show I was stage managing. It was a Wednesday night, so it was just me and the bartender/manager sitting there talking, and I was a regular since I had been doing a show next door for close to a year.

I had been walking to the El that morning, smoking a cigarette of course, and just kind of decided that I would finish the pack I had and be done with it. I really hadn't enjoyed smoking for a long time, I was just feeding the addiction. Don't get me wrong, for years I absolutely loved smoking. Smoking after a good meal (or any meal), smoking while waiting for the bus (in Seattle) or El (in Chicago), smoking after sex, smoke breaks at work, smoking in an under crowded bar while loading money in a jukebox and with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It was paradise for years. But for a while I just wasn't enjoying any more than one or two of the twenty smokes I was having each day. For those of you who have never smoked, that's how many are in a pack. That was my usual, a pack a day for about eleven and a half years.

I didn't quite live up to my goal I set for myself that morning. I had two more after I finished my pack. I bumbed them from the bartender while I sat there talking to her. Usually not the best sign of success when you break your goal on the very first night. I had tried to quit several times before and that was how I always started again, falling off the wagon once and then just saying "screw it" and start smoking a pack a day again.

But this time that didn't happen. I stuck to it, and now I haven't smoked in five years. I can't believe it has been that long. The first six months seemed like an eternity, but the last four and a half years have just kind of flown by with very few times that I've ever wanted one. I don't even like to be in smokey bars now. I love that so many places have laws against smoking in bars, including the last two places I've lived. It's actually hard to be in a smokey room for me now. Maybe that means I really have kicked it for good.

Damn, I'm proud of myself.

Guerrilla Gofers

OK, so everybody has heard about the crazy shit that happened in Boston last week. My friend Jose sent me this blog posting of a guy commenting on it. Now this guy made some good points about the whole thing, despite being a Bostonian. He must be a transplant to the town of the intellectually challenged.

I especially liked his skewering of the media and their inability to gather any actual facts before reporting, or doing any info checking about the show on Cartoon Network that was the center of all this brouhaha.

However,

One thing that has been really getting on my nerves is that these guys have been referred to, by both this Bradley's Almanac guy and the mainstream media, as "guerrilla artists."

OK, these guys are not fucking guerrilla artists. They are a couple of low-level lackeys who went out in the middle of the night and put up a little light contraption designed by some marketing guy sitting in an office somewhere. Nobody calls the guys who paste the pictures on billboards "artists," so why would we call these guys that? Because one of them has dreads? Because they acted all weird and talked about 70s haircuts in their little press conference after getting out of jail? "Ooh you are so non sequitur and esoteric, you are such an artist. Its so deep. I wonder what the meaning of the 70s haircuts is supposed to represent? Oh, they are so creative."

Give me a fucking break. This is what happens when advertising has co-opted our entire culture. Guys who are nothing more than than a couple of agents for the corporate machine, and just a couple of errand boys at that, get labeled as artists.

This is just another sign of the way that marketing and product placement has become just another ubiquitous part of our society. The media even pointed out that it was young people who didn't think it was a big deal because they are "used to" this sort of marketing. Well, forgive me if I don't think that's a good thing. Just because they are used to it, having had advertising ingrained into their skulls since birth, doesn't make it a good thing. In fact, it is a sign of just how low our society has gotten. We expect to see advertising wherever we go and don't even shrug about it. An old sports stadium gets renamed after some corporation who buys the naming rights, and by the next day people are calling it by the new name without even thinking about it. People actually watch the Super Bowl for the commercials.

We allow ourselves to be told what's what by the PR firms of the world and then say thank you and give them our money.

We've got to start saying no more. You shouldn't be allowed to co-opt our culture for your own nefarious aims. Going out on a secret mission to plaster a city with advertisements for a cartoon doesn't make you The Living Theater. You're a lot more like Ronco.

One of the things that hasn't been mentioned in the press so much is the fact that this guerrilla marketing stunt used public property without paying for the space. It's bad enough that we are underfunding public transportation so much that they have to sell advertising on the trains and stations, but now these companies think they can do it without asking and without paying.

A couple of the bridges that these things were placed under in Boston are along a path that runs beside the Charles River, part of a public park called the Esplanade. It's one of the few long stretches in Boston where you can walk and be surrounded by a view of trees, grass, water, bridges over the river, and you don't have to be subjected to advertising. It's what a public space should be about.

And these ass holes decided it was OK to ruin that experience for people because the Cartoon Network gave them a few bucks. I hope they, and the guys on Madison Avenue that thought this marketing scheme up, get jail time. Not for what what they are charged with, which is dumb and won't hold up in court (something about a hoax to purposely cause fear or some shit), but for defacing public property.

We don't stop this and what we call art in years to come could be very scary.

"Hey have you seen the new exhibit down at MOMA? It's the newest 'Head On, Apply It Directly To Your Forehead' video sculpture. Next week we are going to go to the Met for the Mr Whipple career retrospective. Should be amazing."

Gunter Glieben Glauchen Globen

Like foreign languages? Like slang? Love foreign language slang? Well then you're in luck, that just happens to be the topic of this week's Roundtable.

So head on over to Incurable Insomniac and check out Steph's favorite foreign expressions and offer up your own favorites.

And no, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)" does not count. This is Roundtable, not 9th grade study hall.

Me Love You Long Time, Cheap

I've had this back problem for a few years. It gets sore and stiff when I'm walking or standing for a long time, and my right thigh will get a little numbness. My wife had theorized that it is a slightly bulging disc, on top of just a regular old stiff back. I'd kind of resigned myself to just having to live with a back problem because there is not much that can be done medically for them anyway, barring major, painful and not always successful surgery.

Since I got married almost three years ago I now have health insurance for the first time since college (thanks Honey), so I actually get to go to the doctor when something is wrong instead of waiting to see if whatever it is goes away. I had my first check-up with my new doctor last month and mentioned my back problem, and she did not even hesitate to refer me for physical therapy, telling me that I shouldn't have to live with a back problem and that physical therapy could make it go away for good.

I had no idea. I've always thought of physical therapy as something people got for injuries or post-surgery, I didn't even think about it as something I could do to help my back problem. I'm glad I finally told my doctor. Lesson learned here is don't make assumptions about your medical condition, tell your doctor everything they should know.

Anyway, as could be expected, a lot of physical therapy cases are sports injuries. So the Russian physical therapist guy I drew seems bored because, instead of a torn ACL or "quad" problem, he's got a dorky guy with a sore back. And the room where the exercising takes place is covered with autographed pictures of jock types. There are tons of basketball players and football players with signed posters of them in action all over the place. A disproportionate of the football players seem to be New England Patriots, which seems odd considering we're in New York. I suppose it's not too surprising. Everything else about Boston sucks, so they must have crappy therapists too.

I'm feeling completely out of place there, and I'm looking around for something I can cling on and relate to. And then I see an Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater poster. Aha! OK, so they help artists too, I don't have to feel bad about being here. As I'm looking at the Ailey poster while I'm spending time on the stationary bike, I notice on the bottom that it says the Alvin Ailey season is sponsored by Philip Morris.

What the fuck?!?!

Elite dancer/athletes and they are being funded by Philip Morris? This was a poster from 1995, but still. It's just not right.

We are such a race of whores, us humans. I've got friends from college who have done Nike commercials. They make more in a day of work than a kid working in a Nike factory 15 hours a day in Indonesia makes in a year. But they don't care if they are helping in the oppression of an underclass as long as they get theirs. McDonald's commercials too.

Tennis players being sponsored by Virginia Slims, race cars (which are already evil in themselves, don't get me started) splashed with ads for tobacco and, of all things, alcohol. I'm all for drinking, but encouraging the marriage of cars and alcohol is a little messed up.

Doctors who endorse products in infomercials, despite the fact there is no evidence that they actually do anything, for the cheap price of a few thousand dollars and their integrity.

Fuck everybody else. Who cares who it effects? As long as I get mine.

It's pathetic.

And these people will look down on the street walkers in Vegas or a butt boys in Central Park giving hummers for 50 bucks a pop.

But that's an honest kind of whoring. And at least they are selling themselves out, not everybody but themselves.

15 Seconds Is More Than Most People Deserve

Andy Warhol accomplished a lot in his life, from trippy films to his soup cans to his Marilyn portraits. But his most lasting legacy will probably be his "15 minutes of fame" prediction. Though I think he was slightly off. It's not that everyone will get their 15 minutes of fame, it is that everyone wants their 15 minutes and thinks they deserve it, regardless of not really having done anything to earn it. Seems to me that so-called "reality" TV has a lot, if not the most, to do with this.

As I've written before, I do a lot of temp work, that's what a theatre degree can do to some people. This week I've been working the reception desk at a well connected talent agency. By that I mean they have a lot of names here, and they are not the kind of agency that starts representing the guy fresh off the bus from the State U. theatre department. People like Dave Chappelle and Tony Kushner are repped by these guys.

On an interesting note, as the receptionist I have to look up talent in the database when someone calls to talk to their agent, so I've been finding out lots of people's home addresses. If I wanted to stalk Morgan Spurlock I totally could. Weirdest thing I've learned so far is that Ricki Lake's alias is Betty Boop.

Oh, and for those of you that assume that agents are inflated , scum-sucking bottom feeders, well, you are pretty much right on the money. These ass holes act like they are saving the world, when all they are doing is negotiating for somebody to get a role in National Treasure 2.

Anyway, I was working the desk a couple of of days ago and a call came in from this kind of nasally voiced guy. He asked me if we took on clients even if they weren't in the union yet. I told him I didn't think so. He then explained to me what he was calling for. See, he had just appeared on the 6th season audition portion of American Idol and now wants an agent to move forward.

What the fuck is with people? He auditioned for American Idol, was not picked, and now he thinks he should have an agent???

What the hell is next, someone tries to get a movie deal because they held up a "Hi Mom" sign outside the Today Show studio?

People should really get over this obsession with fame. It will not magically make your life worth something.

When the 15 minutes is over, you are still the same schmuck you were before.

Take A Seat

Ever thought about who you would want to play you in the movie about your life? Sure you have, don't lie. Well that's the topic being pondered by Prego for this week's Roundtable, an homage, if you will, to the Algonquin Roundtable. Every Thursday (yes, this week's came early) a different member takes the lead in a free flowing exchange of ideas. I am delighted to be a new guest at the table. I'll get my first crack at choosing the topic in a few weeks. In the meantime, go over to Rustbelt Ramblings and tell Prego why you should be represented by Fabio on celluloid, or digital video as I suppose it's all going to now.

For me, it would be Crispin Glover, hands down.

Denied!

Last week my wife and I were up at the gym in our building (actually, it's in the building next to us, which we share a lobby, maintenance staff, door staff, etc. with, but I shouldn't always feel the need to over-explain every little detai....d'oh!), which is a great little perk that came with our apartment. It is a small gym with about two step machines, a couple of bikes, a weight-lifting four station contraption (no idea what it would be called), and four treadmills. And they all face a window on the 38th floor looking north from the lower part of the Upper East Side. It's a pretty decent place to work out, especially since it's free.

Now the four treadmills they have there are two pairs of competing brands. They are slightly different, the display screens don't look alike, the cup holders are different sizes and one kind has longer side bars than the other. But they're treadmills. You hit start, it moves, you walk or run. They seem to both be able to go the same speed and you can change the incline on all of them. You can run them in manual or in one of many pre-programed modes that will set the speed and incline for you. They both are capable of checking your heart rate by grabbing on the bars with both hands.

But for some reason the people who work out there have favorites. Now, I won't say that I don't have a preference when I go up there. I certainly have a first choice when I walk in to the room. But if the machines with the bigger cup holders and longer bars are taken, I just use one of the other ones. Some others, though, really want their favorite machine and will wait for it. We've seen it happen before, with this guy who will slowly pedal one of the bikes nearby until my wife and I get done with the ones he's waiting for. Ha almost knocked my wife over one time running on to the machine as she was getting off. A little obsessive I thought.

So anyway, last week right after we had gotten on to the two treadmills and started walking, an older couple walked in the room. They looked at us with some sort of shocked confusion and stood there for a minute. Then the woman came up and asked us how much longer we would be, which I thought was a kind of rude thing to do considering there were no other people in the gym at the moment, so every other machine in the place was empty including the other two treadmills. After we told her we just started and that we would probably be another half hour or so, she conferred with her husband and they walked out of the gym.

Now this just doesn't make any sense to me. I can't get my favorite machine so I just won't exercise? What, they would walk in to a movie and if their two favorite seats are taken they just say "fuck it" and don't watch the movie? People are weird. They eventually came back and waited around for us to be done.

I just loved it. I really love denying people of things they want. It makes me happy.

I often have to do temp work in my life, since no one is giving me a million dollars for my brilliant writing or my theatre directing. Mostly I do reception work because I have no office skills whatsoever and it's usually a job that gives you enough time to do things like write a blog. I also love it because there are many opportunities to deny people what they want. So many sales people call companies trying to get their business, and nobody ever wants to talk to them. So as a receptionist, one gets to tell them no all the time.

Can I speak with the person in charge of I.T? Not if you don't know their name you can't.
What's so and so's direct line? I can't tell you that.
Can you give me the email for the head of HR? Hell no!
Who purchases your office supplies? I could tell you that, but I won't.

It happens like that all day long. And if they get bitchy with me I can just hang up. It really is a beautiful situation. You're like a gatekeeper. And you can make people be nice to you if they want to get through.

My favorite thing to do is fuck with the copy machine scam people. If you haven't heard of this, here is a quick run-down. Somebody calls the office and says they are from "your copier company" (sometimes even say a name) and need to get the copier serial number. What supposedly happens if you give them this number is that a bunch of copy supplies will get shipped to the company and they will claim that of course you must have ordered it because you gave us the model number of your machine so we could send you the right supplies.

I'm not sure exactly what kind of moron this scam works on, but it must work a decent amount of times because those calls keep coming at just about every company I've ever been a temp receptionist.

Lots of receptionists will keep it polite and say something like, "I'm sorry I can't give that information out" or some other such thing. I usually hang up on them. A couple of times I've just come out and asked the person how often this scam works. I've never gotten an answer, they'll just hang up after I ask.

When I'm in a real good mood though, I say, "Sure, hold on one sec."

Then I put them on hold. And leave them there.

It's so much fun to see how long they'll actually wait. And I just love the thought of some guy sitting on the phone thinking he's found a sucker to give him the info he needs to pull a con job and then slowly realizing he's been duped himself.

One time a guy actually called back and told me that I left him on hold and that he still needed that number. I said, "Oh, sorry about that, let me get that for you."

Then I put him back on hold.

Jingo Bells

I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every night before I go to bed. Obviously, this doesn't make me special. It is just nice to end the evening with people making fun of those in power and other bloviating blow-hards. Now something I've discovered recently is that the O'Reilly Factor, on you-know-which-network, runs its late repeat of the day's show at the same hour that Jon and Stephen are making me giggle with glee.

I will often flip over to Bill-O during commercial breaks on Comedy Central to see what madness is spewing out of his leathery pumpkin head at that moment. Now mind you, I don't like to watch the crazy fucker. I prefer to get my info on the diseased lunacy he his spreading to the country from my friends over at Media Matters because, well, I really don't want to develop a brain aneurysm while I'm still in my 30s.

But there are times I just can't resist flipping over for a second. It's really fun during Colbert to go back and forth between the satire and the real, unbelievable as it is, thing. It really is a self-inflicted torture that I just can't seem to stop.

And this is really Girls Gone Wild's fault. The need to flip channels during late night on Comedy Central is really because of how many of those commercials they run. I swear, I think they sponsor the whole damn Colbert Report sometimes. They are like the Mutual of Omaha to Colbert's Marlin Perkins. I just have to switch channels because they are so vile. And I feel guilty whenever they are on the TV, even though my wife is asleep in the bedroom and I didn't put the dumb "college" girls on the TV on purpose. I just feel like I'm doing something wrong if they're on.

Anyway, to get back to the point. If you read Media Matters enough, you know how the dumbshit O'Reilly acts, with his bullying, screaming, half truths and all-out lies. But sometimes when you watch him yourself you can catch some of his more subtle propaganda and psychotic nonsense.

I flipped over for a minute last night and he was talking about OJ Simpson, because Newsweek has apparently gotten a hold of a chapter of his infamous book that was canceled, which O'Reilly still claims credit for getting axed. And he was going on and on with his grandstanding bullshit calling OJ vile and disgusting and at one point saying he wasn't "newsworthy," somehow missing the irony that he was covering it. And to punctuate his point on why OJ was vile and disgusting he said that "he killed two AMERICANS!"

Not two people. Not two innocents. Not two human beings. Two Americans. Like somehow that matters.

The ridiculousness of the extreme jingoism of people like O'Reilly has taken them so far off the edge that even a 12 year old murder gets framed in the context of terrorism and national identity. It's as if he's saying that if OJ killed them then maybe he'll kill you too, and we better support President Bush because only he can save you good Americans from the Juice.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe "he killed two Americans" was his way of saying "that good for nothing nigger killed two white people." So it could have been a racist O'Reilly moment and not a nationalist one. I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

I really need to program my cable box to block FOX News.

One Door Closes...

I had a job interview back in late November. It is one of those jobs that I really wanted, the kind that I would keep my eyes open for all the time. Something I've got experience in and I think I'm good at doing. It involves an industry that doesn't have a lot of permanent type positions, but a lot of contract work, which is what I am always doing. It's great work, and it pays well, but it isn't consistent. It involves using actors to play patients for medical students to be able to evaluate their communication, physical exam and diagnosis skills. The actors are independent contractors, obviously they don't need them every day for 40 hours a week. But one position that the schools or centers will have is a trainer/coordinator, and that's a job I've been trying to land for a while. I had a great interview for one in Cleveland, when my wife was considering a job offer from there. I think I had a great shot at it, but had to withdrawal my name when my wife picked the New York job. Don't worry, I'm not crying over not living in Cleveland.

But after we moved to New York I got wind of a job coming open at one of the medical schools here. So I finally had the interview and have just been waiting. And waiting. And fucking waiting. Finally, I got an offer last week to work a bunch of dates in the spring by another place that does standardized patient (that's what it's called) cases here. I had to let them know if I could take the dates so I had to email the other place to find out what was going on.

I didn't get the job. They had already offered the job to somebody else, but hadn't gotten around to telling me. Who knows how long that I was still hoping where there was no hope? That's the part that really burns. It takes like two minutes to write an email saying "Thanks, but fuck off." At least I could have moved on quickly and gotten over it. It's not like this was a job at Wal-Mart that two hundred people applied for. There were three people interviewed.

This is the second time in my life I had an interview for something that could have really altered the way my life was going to go. You know, something that would probably have been a gig you would like going to every day, would pay well and offer some kind of potential long-term security. The other one would have been teaching drama at a prep school in Seattle. That one only had two of us interviewed, but I also waited a ton of time there and then contacted them, only to find out they already hired the other person.

You know, when someone says at the end of an interview, or anything else for that matter, "we'll be in touch," they should be in fucking touch.

So I was down a little over the weekend. I called my friend Barb, who was my first boss in the standardized patient world, and wrote me a glowing recommendation for the job.

She reassured me that something good would come along for me. She also said that even though she knows I don't believe in fate, Barb's one of those people that knows that about me without having to read my blog, she is sure it happened for a reason and that it means something better is going to come along.

And I really want to believe that. I really, really do. But it's hard. I'm the kind of person that tends to believe that the reason it happened is that the world hates me and I'm not meant to have any success in life.

I'd like to think of this as one of those opportunity moments. You know, I just say to myself, "Well, I guess this is just one of those door closing, another opening moments, so I guess I'll just try to focus on writing that book idea I've got banging around in my head."

I want to be that guy. But then I just turn around and think, "Right, the publishers are going to just be lined-up around the block for that. 'Look there's a guy with a blog, and his friends say they like it, let's give him a book deal.' Sure that sounds plausible."

I try to remember what they say, that you can't succeed if you don't take risks. Of course if you don't take risks, you also don't face rejection. So there's that.

And nothing sucks worse than rejection.

It's amazing I survived being a theatre major.

God Of Thunder

I got a phone call the other day from one of my favorite people. Thor was pretty much the first person I became friends with in Seattle when I moved there after college. He lives in L.A. now, and I in New York, after detours through Chicago and the much reviled Boston of course. But in 1994 we were both new arrivals to the Emerald City, he came from Indiana that autumn and I got there a couple of months earlier fresh out of college in Illinois. Both of us picked a place as far as we could get from where we were from (and our families) and both ended up with jobs at a local pizza chain called Pagliacci, where 40th Street crosses Stone Way. I was a cook, he was a driver.

Owing to probably both our personalities, we naturally hated each other.

Eventually we came to see each other as kindred spirits. We both love music, though not always the same thing (I'll never understand his defense of Guns & Roses), but we hated a lot of the same stuff that we couldn't believe was popular. We discovered we had a pretty similar view of the world and that we both love Noam Chomsky and hated Ronald Reagan. We became known for calling each other bitch, or beeotch, as the vernacular of the 1990s white kids who think they're hip would have us saying it.

But what really bonded us was our general disdain for most other people.

Being two people in their twenties who were trying to make it in artistic professions (music and theatre, respectively), we naturally had a lot of crappy jobs, and they often involved the service industry or some kind of thing that would force us to deal with annoying people. We basically responded with some kind of abuse or smart-assiness. And we were really good at it. People really deserved it, too. When a guy comes to the coffee stand I worked at and asks for a double tall non-fat latte with THREE-QUARTERS OF A PACKET of sugar, how I supposed to not be rude to him? Really the big struggle is not to punch the elitist, yuppie, Seattle-passive-aggressive snot in the face. And that's exactly the type that won't leave a tip anyway.

Thor always understood exactly how I felt. His reaction would be exactly the same, and his annoyance level would match mine, which was, you know, the right level.

My favorite Thor story came when we were working at Pagliacci, our first Seattle oppressor. A really crappy job all the way around, except for one thing. Spinning dough was a lot of fun, a zen-like experience. But everything else about that place sucked. They had an "incentive" program among the drivers there. Drivers basically lived on tips, and they also got a commission per order which was mostly to cover their gas. The general commission was something like a quarter, but "top drivers" got 50 cents. These were comprised of the ass-kissers who gave a shit for some reason. When Thor was getting his review, the manager told him he was doing his job well (fast with the deliveries is the basic goal) but that he could be one of the "top drivers" if he had a better attitude. And Thor's answer pretty much defines why I love him so much. He said something along the line of, "How about you keep your quarter and I'll keep my attitude."

It was a great moment in the history of labor relations.

There was the time that we went to a party and decided as we were walking in that we should, as we phrased it, be bad. It mostly involved us getting drunk and challenging the beliefs and attitudes of the weird backward cap frat-boy types that were there. Thor was trying to explain to one of the morons that Disney cartoons were there to teach women that they were supposed to be obedient servants. The argument worked in to a fever pitch, due mostly to the frat-boy's inability to see the overlying messages in movies like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, until the guy said that when he would gladly show those movies to his daughter when he had one and Thor replied, "And she'll grow up to be as stupid as you."

And thought the guy's head was going to implode on itself. He probably spent days trying to shake off the newly formed in his head idea that maybe Disney cartoons aren't good for children after all.

It was a classic night. When we tore in there it was a hopping party , and when we left a couple hours later it was a stunned silent group of people with their heads hurting. It was magnificent. They never knew what hit them. People need the things they believe to be challenged more often, and Thor and I were always willing to answer the call.

When you are surrounded by the moron masses you need a comrade in arms. And Thor was always mine.

Of all my friends that live far away from me now, I miss Thor the most. This isn't to say that my other wonderful friends aren't missed, they are. But a lot of people find the way I am, I don't know, I guess quirky or edgy. I'm really not at all though. I just kind of say what I'm thinking. And the people that like me find it entertaining and maybe even think I'm witty. But Thor understands exactly where it comes from, and a lot of the time is thinking the exact same thing.

Like when I say that Katie Couric makes me want to jam an ice pick in my eye, others might giggle a little, but Thor will say, "No doubt."

I miss the little bitch.

No Sympathy For The Devil

Now that he's dead, we will be hearing tons of tributes to Gerald Ford. There will be all of the mentioning how he led us out of the "national nightmare" of the Watergate era and the talk of how he "healed" the nation. Especially now that it has been found out he gave an interview criticizing Bush's decision to go to war they will be comparing him to W when talking about his presidency. Of course if that's where you set the bar, just about anybody else's presidency will look great. I mean, saying you were a good president because you were better than Bush is like saying you're a great father because you treat children better than John Wayne Gacy.

There will also be a lot of people talking about what a kind person he was, and how he was so nice. This is image is upheld by the fact that he was a "folksy" Midwesterner and was so old that he reminded people of their grandfather.

In this day and age of media spin and infotainment, Mark Antony's line from Julius Caesar, "The evil that men do lives after them/ The good is oft interred with their bones," could not be more untrue. The opposite seems to be the rule in this day and age. The evil is brushed aside and replaced with quaint clichés and empty tributes.

But I believe the evil that men do should be remembered. So as you're watching the elaborate, probably grotesque, state funeral for a man who led this country because he was appointed by his criminal friend, rather than elected by the people in a democratic process, here are just a few little things to remember about his short presidency.

When they speak about what a nice, caring, generous, honest, genuine, and "down to earth" person he was, notice that none of the people saying it will be from East Timor. I would guess that they don't hold him in such high regard after his administration's support for the evil regime that oppressed the East Timorese for over two decades. Ford and Kissinger not only sold Indonesia the weapons to carry out their invasion and occupation of East Timor, but explicitly approved of the plan. Ford's hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese civilians. (Great resources here, here and here)

He also pardoned Nixon. That should be under the category of "nuff said" but it seems to have been spun so much over the decades that it is now considered one of the good things he did. Well I call bullshit on that. His defenders can claim he did it for "national healing" or that it was necessary to move beyond Watergate and get on with governing, but I don't buy it. He did it to protect his friend, who just happened to be the one that appointed him Vice-President.

You know what would have been a lot better at healing this country? Throwing Tricky Dick's sorry, lying, corrupt ass in jail. The chilling effect of that pardon was letting all future presidents know that they can do whatever illegal thing they want and will never have to answer for it.

And finally, when seeing the death toll rise in Iraq and wondering how our country came to be in such a horrible state, think about this: Gerald Ford is directly responsible for the careers of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Both were given their first big jobs in his administration, both served as Chief of Staff at different times and Rummy got his first tour as Secretary of Defense. Ford also did a lot to advance the career of George H. W. Bush, his CIA director and fellow co-conspirator in the crimes committed against the people of East Timor. Needless to say, the chain of events started by Ford have eventually led us to the national tragedy called the George W. Bush administration.

So forgive me if I don't shed any tears for Ford on Tuesday, the announced day of national mourning and the time of his state funeral.

My thoughts will be with the people of East Timor, now the independent nation of Timor-Leste, who just a few short years ago were able to finally free themselves of the terrorism brought to them by one Gerald Rudolph Ford.

Music Geekdom On Acid

When I was living in Seattle in the 90s I was pretty resistant to technology. I know, it was a weird place to be living and not want to delve into the world of the internet and resist getting an email address. I finally gave in, reluctantly, mostly because so much communication by 1996 in the Seattle theatre scene was already being done by email. I was starting to miss out on rehearsal schedule changes, meetings and job announcements. I got an email address at a local internet cafe, not having a computer myself of course, but probably still didn't actually "surf the net" for over another year.

I was reluctant mostly because I saw technology like the internet and cell phones (which I went a lot longer without before finally caving in) as making people less social creatures, not more so, as the promoters of these things claim. I still think that's true, but I've come to see the benefit of it, I guess.

I originally only went on the net to read and look, not to participate in any community of any sort. I avoided internet message boards because they seemed like a drug to so many people. What finally drew me into them (as I wrote about in my Geekspotting trilogy here, here and here) was the lure of live music trading.

I joined the Wilco fan site to find people who would supply me with CDs of live shows. And it worked great, I started a nice little collection of Wilco and Jeff Tweedy solo concerts. I just love collecting shows. When you like a lot of the musicians I do, the shows are different from night to night, compared to , say, a Britney Spears lip-synched dance show. So it's great to be able to hear shows that I would have loved to been at if I were wealthy enough to actually follow my favorite bands on tour. And it's great to be able to get copies of shows I was at to be able to hear again whenever I want.

But when trading shows, you have to actually deal with other uberfans out there in the real world, even though you meet them in the virtual world. And then people start to think that they are friends. Anyway, I won't rehash all that, it's all in the previous stories. Needless to say, I got in too deep and had to get out. But while I was there I discovered something that the super-music geeks had already been hip to for a while, Torrent files.

Torrent files are the bestest, greatest, most wonderful thing that has ever happened in music. Someone tapes a show, puts it on their hard drive, "seeds it" on the internet, list it on a "tracker" site and then members of that site can grab it for their very own. And after I have the show myself I become a seeder and more people can get parts of the show from me and others who have the show. And it's free! It's like the old Dead-Head tape trading thing, except I don't have to go hang out with some unwashed, patchouli-oiled hippy and his "old lady" and take communal hits out of his skeleton bong just so I can get a copy of the Golden Gate Park '75 show.

It is so beautiful. It's like reading a menu and deciding what you want. Robyn Hitchock at Maxwell's on 11/19/06? Sure I'll take that, I was at that one. Billy Bragg in Dallas on 2/22/92? Don't mind if I do. Jeff Tweedy at the Vic in Chicago in 2003, The White Stripes at the Aragon Ballroom, The Dresden Dolls in Munich? Load it on the plate, please. Genesis in 1975 on the Lamb Lies Down tour?!?!?! Please sir, may I have some more?

Dessert? Oh no, I just couldn't. What, you have Robyn Hitchcock doing a Syd Barrett tribute at a Pub in London from just a few days ago that includes performing The Piper at the Gates Of Dawn in its entirety? Or Robyn performing the Beatles' White Album at the same pub from a couple of years ago? Oh goodness, how will I ever decide? Well I better just have both.

Best of all, I get to have all of this without dealing with a bang-my-head-against-the-wall mundane conversation with the Jack Black character in High Fidelity over whether Billy Bragg's better band was The Red Stars or The Blokes, or whether Peter Buck's guitar playing was better during the Green tour or the Life's Rich Pageant tour.

Thank you internet!

Homophobia And Sexism Run Amuck

I got this email from my sister yesterday with a Chicago Tribune article about a guy arrested for child porn in the Chicago suburb where we used to live. Well, child porn and explicitly chatting with someone he thought was a fifteen year old girl. You can see where that's going. It was a cop not a fifteen year old girl. But the reason this is supposed to be of interest to my sister and me is that the guy is a coach/teacher at our old high school, and was when we were there. My wife actually remembers him well and she had him for driver's ed (and was often with him in a car, just her and another 15 or 16 year old girl, ewww). She couldn't really stand the guy, found him somewhat creepy, and didn't seem surprised that he got busted for something like that. I have only a vague memory of him, since I only went there my senior year.

I was talking on the phone to my brother last night about it. He didn't go the school at all, since we moved there after he graduated. When I told him about what the guy did, including that he was trying to get busy with who he thought was a fifteen year old girl, my brother said, "Well at least it was a girl instead of a guy, so it's a little less creepy."

In one short sentence my brother managed to say something both sexist and homophobic at the same time.

The sad part is, this isn't just some stupid comment by my idiotic Republican brother, I really think this is how a lot of men in America think. "Well, he's a child molester, but at least he's not a gay child molester." As if a 59 year old man who seeks out teenage girls is less perverted than one who seeks out teenage boys.

Somehow, in the mind of straight, white male America, a straight rapist is more normal than a gay rapist.

Makes me sick.

And my brother has kids. Three girls and a boy. What, he's going to be less upset if something like that were to happen to one of his daughters compared to it happening to his son?

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer to that question.

Anti-gay hatred and misogyny continue to thrive in America, even affecting our attitudes toward sexual predators.

Whew! We Dodged A National Fucking Tragedy On That One

Well, Miss USA gets to keep her crown. Boy, imagine the turmoil our country would get thrown into if we had an impeachment of the Great Busty One. Stock market crashes, hospitals close, schools shut down, floods, locusts, forced abortions, a president takes office without being legitimately elected (oh wait...), George Lucas makes another Star Wars trilogy and who knows what other horrible things may have come to pass if (gasp) the runner-up had to take over for her. But luckily the Great Benevolent One, Donald Trump, saved us all from the national nightmare.

That sound you hear is me gagging.

Who cares about this? I honestly didn't even know that Miss USA still existed. Isn't this the contest that can't even get a network TV deal anymore? Or is that Miss America? Heck, does Miss America exist anymore? Can anyone name her? Can anyone name any Miss USAs/Americas from the past? I can name one, and I'll bet you can think of only one too, and it will be the same one as mine. More on that later.

I was home watching CNN, because I like to torture myself, when they broke in for the live news conference concerning the fate of what's-her-face. Live. CNN, and other news channels, actually decided it was the most important thing happening in the world at that time and needed to be covered live. And because Donald Trump is involved all of the media outlets had some sort of variation of "Will Miss USA be 'fired?'" as the way to lead the story. Get it? HA ha, see it's funny...'cause Donald has that show...and when the loser gets booted...ha ha. Boy those media types are just geniuses. It took a sharp mind to think of that. Well, the mind of a fourth grader anyway. Not to be out done in the wit department, Miss Thang herself used the phrase when she got up to speak to the press after finding out she would keep her sash.

And then she started to cry. And while about a hundred times more photographers than covered the Chief Justice Roberts confirmation hearings snapped pictures, she declared that she would use her second chance to "be the best Miss USA ever." Boy, that ought to be really difficult. She'll have to work her ass off to beat...ummm...that...one...ummm...you know...the girl from...uh...that state...in that year...

I really wanted the press to do a follow-up and ask her what she will specifically do to become the "best" one ever. Here are some answers I imagined she might give.

"I'm going to put on the glossy red lipstick thicker than it has ever been put on before."
"Super Strength Vasoline for my teeth."
"I'm going to cut ceremonial ribbons to open county fairs like have never been cut before."
"Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be able to compete with my new head turn/hair flip move I'll be unveiling at the People's Choice Awards."
"I'm going to stand with one leg straight and the other slightly bent while wearing a bikini like it's never been done before."
"I'm going to be sporting the pushiest push-up bra the world has ever seen."
"I'm going to encourage more teenage girls to hate their bodies and have low self-esteem, and create more cases of anorexia and bulimia than all of my predecessors combined."

You go girl! Be all that you can be. Wouldn't want to use that pea-sized brain of yours instead of your tits and ass to get along in the world. My god, if you had been tossed who knows what you may have had to resort to. You may have had to find a real job, or enrolled in an actual college to learn something and better yourself. Thank your lucky stars that Sugardaddy Trump saved you from such horror.

So Trumpy created another publicity stunt, and that's all this was. He was never considering getting rid of her, this was just all created to get people to notice the Miss USA thing again and to actually know her name. I still don't know her name, because I didn't bother to notice it. But a lot of people do now that didn't before. And all the overuse of the phrase "you're fired" over the past week right before the new season of his dumb TV show starts, you think that's a coincidence? I doubt it.

Come on, this has all the makings of a contrived publicity stunt. Her so-called "bad" behavior sounds like a paint-by-numbers male porn fantasy. She snorted some coke, drank some cocktails and made out with Miss Teen USA. Damn, if they had included that it happened at a football game, every dunderhead male in America would be glued to the TV for the pageant. And that's exactly what Trump is counting on.

And it might work. So who's the one Miss America/USA you can name? Right, Vanessa Williams. And it's not because she was the "best" Miss America ever, but because she had a bunch of pictures taken of her licking another girl in lots of fun places that ended up in Penthouse. And it turned out to be the best thing that happened to her (hell, my mother bought that issue) because it made her a household name overnight. She lost her crown and ended up with a singing and acting career. Not a bad trade.

Oh, and as a follow up to this whole thing, the beauty pageant pimp showed his true nature after getting called out by Rosie O'Donnell. Basically she made fun of him for acting like a moral compass for young people when he cheats on his wives and leaves them when they start to approach their sell-by date, which for him seems to be about the age of 35. It was a really great rant on his imagined moral authority.

And how did he respond? He called her a fat slob.

Just in case his owning a shallow "beauty" pageant that objectifies women wasn't proof enough that he's a sexist ass, his best response to being criticized by a strong-willed woman is to bag on her appearance.

Classy to the end. What a misogynist prick.

Ho Ho Hum

Well "The Season" is upon us again. And, as usual, I can't wait for it to get the hell over with.

I hate Christmas. Hate it like I hate the sound of Rita Cosby's voice.

Now wait, hear me out. I'm not some sort of Scroogy curmudgeon ogre, contrary to what a lot of people (and you know who you are) believe.

Don't get me wrong. I have no desire to take Xmas away from anyone or ruin anybody else's enjoyment of it. I just want the chance to opt out. I have declared no war on Christmas. I'm Switzerland, I don't care if people celebrate it or not, but can't you leave me out of it? If Bush wants people to be able to opt out of Social Security, why can't I do the same with the Pagan holiday co-opted by the Christians?

I have my reasons. I'm not just an angry guy with an attitude problem. Really.

First off, despite its previously mentioned Pagan origins, it is an explicitly Christian holiday. As I've mentioned thousands upon thousands of times before, I'm not religious. I don't celebrate Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanza or any other religious holidays. Why am I expected to celebrate Jesus Day? It's like it is the default holiday in this country. If you don't pick another one you just get stuck with Christmas. Well I don't use Windows Media Player just because it came with my computer.

And what is it with Christians and lying to their children? The Jesus myth wasn't kooky enough so you had to invent Santa Claus too?

I could like Xmas if it lived up to its hype. But it doesn't, and that's another one of my main beefs. Peace on Earth, good will towards man? Have you been inside a store in the winter? People get in to fist fights over PlayStations, Nintendos, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Elmos or whatever other dumb thing is the "must have" gift in any particular year. It's not about peace, love, giving or family. It's about buying a bunch of crap nobody needs. Well, that and getting the whole family together to fight in the same place. Good times, good times.

And I'm OK with buying crap I don't need, but do we need a yearly ritual for it. How about everyone buy the pointless shit they don't need for themselves and we can get rid of the whole concept of "gift receipts."

Fighting through crowds at stores I would rather not be at to begin with, getting shopping done in time to mail gifts a week ahead of time, standing in hour long lines at the post office. Because, I suppose, everyday life wasn't stressful enough so we needed to spice it up. Anybody wonder why the heart attack rate goes up in December?

And stress, oh man. I've only been married less than three years and I can't see myself coming up with another fifty years of good ideas for Christmas gifts. I think I peaked with the digital camera last year and I'll never be able to top it. I was hoping to go maybe a good five years before I had to start just buying what she tells me she wants. But here we are.

On a random day of the year when I do something simple like buy flowers for my honey for no good reason, she is surprised and happy and loves me. Something so small goes a long way. This time of the year makes me feel like the future of my marriage is dependent on some brilliant, original idea to wow her with. I know it's not, but still.

The most god-awful genre of music, besides TV commercial jingles, is carols. They make me want to jam an ice-pick in my ears.

Anything that Bill O'Reilly is so in love with that he wants to marry it has to be bad.

And what about Jesus freak cards and form letters about the family's events of the last year? My brother and his wife jumped on that bandwagon this year, complete with opening paragraphs about this being the season to "praise His name" and a bunch of other crap that made me cough vomit up in to my throat. It's my damn brother. He knows I don't believe that nonsense, yet he sends me that card? The single biggest problem with the holiday is the free license people think they have to preach their stupid gospel to those that they know full well to be non-believers. And thanks to Dickens, if you protest at all about it they have a name at the ready to call you. Next year I'm going to send them card praising the name and celebrating the glory of L. Ron Hubbard or the Prophet Mohammed.

It's not all bad. There is a really cool light show at Grand Central Terminal's main hall this year that is just cool as shit. And the outdoor markets that pop up at various places in Manhattan usually have some cool stuff. But we don't need a holiday for that. They are good ideas by themselves.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. I had every intention of getting out. When I was in my late twenties I was going to tell the family that I was done with Christmas and I would no longer participate in exchanging gifts. But before that happened I got together with my wife, who seems to like it. I don't know why she still likes it since she added my nieces and nephews and multiple sets of parents (ah, the modern dysfunctional family) to her shopping list. And she out does herself every year. So I wasn't able to bow out of the celebration like I always planned. My wife, being a lot nicer than me, just wouldn't let me get away with that.

So I guess like my dream of living outside of America, my hopes for a Jesus-free winter will have to go unrealized. Oh well, my wife is the only person in the world that is worth going through all this for. But don't think I'm not trying to wear her down and bring her to my side. I'm thinking a gathering of my whole family at Christmas time would do the trick very nicely.



Happy Winter Solstice everyone.

Holy Shit

Well, It's finally official. Conservative Christians are just completely bat-shit crazy. I know, I know, this isn't a real big surprise. But there is the deep end, and then there's the DEEP END.

Of all the figures in the conservative agenda movement it has been easy for a while now to point to Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson as the linchpin of the insane right. But there is someone who is trying to fight for that crown for himself. And Dennis Prager has a great shot at it the way he's going.

Prager has been foaming at the mouth all week over what he sees as the most horrible thing to happen to America ever. A politician is going to have his picture taken with a Koran. That's it. Really, I'm serious. Prager is in an absolute tizzy about a Representative-elect planning on using his Koran in his ceremonial picture after his Congressional swearing in ceremony. Oh, the guy is the first Muslim elected to Congress, by the way.

Now the great thing about the right (and by "great" I mean "stupid") is their tendency to act like they are really smart, but then go and prove how absolutely stupid they are.

In his original column about this pointless topic, Prager went on a rant about how this would be causing an "Islamization of America," that "he should not be allowed to do so" and that the "act undermines American civilization." He addressed the Representative-elect directly, saying "But, Mr Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath."

Funny thing is, America, as in the Constitution or any other U.S. legal document, doesn't say a damn thing about swearing on a book at all. The bible, or any book for that matter, doesn't have anything to do with the swearing in of public officials. Sure the presidents always use it, out of choice and/or tradition, but it serves no official purpose whatsoever. And Prager is a fool for not knowing this.

Of course, this was pointed out to him eventually, so he had to alter his argument somewhat. He states in his follow-up column that he knows it isn't an official part of the ceremony, but it is obvious in the first column that he thought it was. He also claims that he doesn't advocate it being a law that someone has to use the bible. So what then did he mean that Ellison "shouldn't be allowed to" take his oath with the Koran?

He makes tons and tons of other dumb accusations and statements. On TV the other day, Tucker Carlson's show, he said Ellison is the first politician to break the "tradition" started by Washington of using a bible at the swearing in. This, of course, is not true at all. Media Matters dug up this AP story from last year that had some inauguration facts in it, and it seems that the bible tradition was broken as early as John Quincy Adams, who put his hand on a book of American laws at his swearing in. Another reason to add to the list of why old J.Q. Adams was probably our best president. And proof that the son of a president becoming president himself doesn't have to be a bad thing.

Prager has been arguing the revisionist history claim made by most of the righties about how our country was founded as a Judeo-Christian one. His claims are that our values and morals come from the bible and not our Constitution. I get so sick of this claim.

Right-wing Judeo-Christians like to think they invented moral values. The ideas in the bible were not original concepts by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't need that silly book to know the difference between right and wrong. The idea that killing someone is wrong pre-dates the damn bible. And I can pretty much figure out on my own that fucking my neighbor's wife would be a bad thing.

The funny thing is, this kind of forced religion on people is exactly what our founders were trying to protect us from. The freedom of religion in our great document means I get to have freedom from religion. But that's what they are trying to do, force it on us. And they pretend to have some moral high-road over us (gasp) secular people. And while people like Prager are attacking someone for not having the same religious beliefs as him, they turn right around and play victims. "War on Christmas" anyone?

So it boils down to a Muslim having his picture taken with his religious text that has Prager's panties in a bunch. And he accuses the left of practicing "hate" by calling him on it. That's what he has decided is the most important thing to deal with at the moment.

Typical of the religious right, they care nothing about the actual bad things going on in the world, just care about pushing their screwed up personal religious agenda on everyone else. Over 400,000 are dead in Darfur, and millions more displaced, but Prager focuses on calling his audience to action against a guy's choice of reading material. Really, Prager has a fairly sizable audience and some moderate influence, and this is what he wants to get people mad about. He could be calling his audience to action in helping to do something about genocide or helping to end poverty. No, he'd rather get his mouth all frothy with bigoted attacks on someone with different religious views than him, and based on lies and misinformation to boot.

I did a quick check on Mr. High and Mighty Morals' website to see if he has even spoke out against the genocide in Darfur. I did a search on his site of the terms "Darfur" and "Sudan" to see what I could find. There were a total of six hits, which were to episodes of his radio show. They are for sale, for twelve dollars each. Pretty much the whole site is for schilling his idiotic rants and writings for money, and to tell you what you should watch and read.

But there are summaries of what was said on the shows (I wasn't going to actually buy one). Most of the times he has mentioned Sudan it has been in the context of "proving" the "liberal media bias." On half of them he brings up Sudan as something the media should be paying attention to instead of the abuses at Abu-Ghraib. Basically he uses it as a way to lessen what happened at the American run prison in Iraq. Or he uses it to bitch about some other thing that he's pissed about (liberal media, the UN, too much attention being paid to tsunami victims), not to actually talk about the horrors going on there. He used it as a helpful tool to condemn his imagined enemies and then discarded talking about it when it was no longer useful. He hasn't mentioned Sudan since 2004, though the genocide continues.

I suppose we'll hear him talk about it again the next time some of our soldiers or cops get caught on tape abusing someone, so he can say, "That's nothing compared to the genocide in Sudan."

Look, everyone who reads me or knows me (I suppose that's mostly the same group) knows that I completely despise all religion and think it is the number one worst thing that has ever happened on this planet. That includes everything from Judaism to Catholicism to Scientology to Astrology to Mormanism to Jehova's Witnesses to crazy comet people.

But if people keep it to their damn selves and don't try to make me bend to their beliefs, I'm talking to you Dennis Prager, I could give a shit what you believe or what book you get your publicity shots taken with.

I would say that Prager should be ashamed of himself, but he has no shame. I don't know a right-wing Christian that does.

Of course, he makes the "but I'm a Jew" argument while saying that every U.S. office holder should swear on the bible that includes the New Testament.

You know what they say, if it looks like a Jesus freak and talks like a Jesus freak...




Read more on the idiocy here and here.