Human beings hate fun. That’s pretty obvious. There’s absolutely no place on this earth where fun takes precedence over toil and sadness and self deprivation. A lot of that has to do with the fact that life is hard and it sucks and in order for us to have things like pants and vibrators and corn, somebody has to bust their ass to make sure it gets produced and so we, as people that want to make sure that the vibrators keep getting produced, have to compensate the vibrator-monger properly and so we need to do things so we can have means to compensate him and next thing you know, boom! We’re living in a society and we have money and jobs and everyone is fucking bummed because Hey! Didn’t we just start this so we could all have dildos? Now I’m spending all day in this fucking fry station at this Burger King and I don’t have hardly any time to play with my asshole anymore! Life sucks.
And that’s part of it. Life is just hard. It’s funny to say that because life for us is immensely easier than it’s ever been for anyone in the history of the world, but that doesn’t make it easy. The smallest dick in the interracial gangbang movie is still a huge dick, to paraphrase Mark Twain, and the easiest life in history is still fraught with injustice and bullshit on an epic scale that dare not be observed for fear of fully recognizing the agonizing dickpunch-soup that we, as sentient beings, are eternally mired in.
So it seems that since we’re all here in the same boat, and we all generally like the same things (to a point) that we’d be cool with the notion of each other having fun, you know, just to while away the time between the dual stretches of eternal blackness that bookend our shitty, tiny, futile little lives. But alas, that’s not the way it is at all. The most obvious culprit here is fucking. People just don’t like the way you fuck, man. It’s their business, they MAKE it their business to make sure that your shenanigans aren’t any better than theirs, and if they suspect that you’re having more fun than them, well, then you’re disgusting, you’re depraved. They will literally shame you and make laws to make sure that you can’t experience your fun.
I liken this to the way people treat food. People look at fat folks sitting around a table dipping their meat lovers pizzas in ranch dressing and call them disgusting, but they’re just going for it, man. Lighten up. It’s not your problem that they’re fat. Your problems are that A) you don’t like fat people B) You’re too hung up on how you look to really let shit roar and C) You can’t STAND that these fuckers can just sit there and eat whatever they want and feel fine with it, that they aren’t consumed by the guilt that you’re consumed by (to be clear, I’m not suggesting that YOU want pizza dipped in ranch [though that shit is GOOOOD], only that you recognize in the pizza/ranch eating fatties the wanton abandon that comes with doing exactly what your id craves and since you don’t have the balls to get YOUR version of dressing slathered pizza [whatever that is for you, maybe a cheeseburger on a donut bun or sixteen scoops of icecream] rather than confront your own guilt/prudeness [which, let’s be honest, provides an important ‘survive and thrive’ function in your psyche] you choose to look at those people without your hangups as depraved beasts).
This can’t be more clear than in the world of homophobia. The most vocal homophobes are, without fail, deeply closeted cock enthusiasts who just don’t have the balls to come out and go for what they want. The notion that other people could be SO MUCH BRAVER than them makes them feel so ashamed that they lash out at those brave men out there, giving anonymous blowjobs in bathroom stalls, and call them depraved beasts and vote through legislation that would aim to make the very act of them sucking each other off illegal. That’s fucking INSANE. How in the world does one guy’s dick in another guy’s mouth do ANYTHING but stoke out the two guys in question. On what plane of existence is that a relevant act to anyone else anywhere, ever? Only a plane where someone wants with the passionate fire of instinct based need to suck a dick themselves, but for convoluted reasons of self loathing and fear and confusion, find themselves unable. That’s where Fred Phelps and Michelle Bachman’s husband (marcus…btw, if you google ‘michelle Bachmann g’ google completes it with ‘gay husband’ which is pretty rad) and Larry Craig and Ted Haggard and your shitty uncle get all their hate.
But it’s the same for slutty chicks or asshole men. Everyone hates the fun they’re having and shames ‘em for it. The truth, folks, is that we’re wired to crave sex on the level of sleep and shitting (we’ve been down this road before) and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anyone banging anyone else who’s down to get banged. To make this totally uncomfortable, I’d say that on paper, I should have no problem with my wife getting railed by a random roomful of dudes if the mood strikes her, provided of course that they use protection, but of course, I don’t really love the idea of that at all. In fact, it bums me out to even consider. But why? I love my wife. If she wants to fuck a room of strangers, why would I want to deny her that experience? It seems that I should actively pursue making sure that she’s happy. It can only work out in everyone’s best interest, right?
Well, no. Because I’m a human being too, and just like the rest of you dicks, I hate fun too. This starts at an early age. When my baby girl starts playing with too many toys or drinking too much milk, my son hits the fucking roof and starts punching her and shaming her. He’s 3. He didn’t learn that from me or his mom or anyone. He’s a human being wired to get super fucking pissed the second someone else decides ‘fuck it! I’m gonna have more fun than the rest of these assholes’ and he responds accordingly.
Eh, I dunno…I guess if my wife REALLY wanted to bang a room of strange dongs I’d be okay with it, but I wouldn’t want to be there. I’d probably rather be in my own room of strange dongs, er….chicks! Women! Tits! People with pussies! Uh…shit. Er….What?
Never mind.
Have a good weekend.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
upcoming recording for my solo record. if you're not a fan of the lawrence arms you will NOT care about the below post
This weekend I’m going into the studio to make a record. I’m excited and a little bit nervous. My drummer has a fucked up hand (it’s creepy, it looks like a baby tyrannosaurus arm) and that’s gonna make shit difficult. Ha! No. He’s not actually deformed. He fell off his motorcycle and his hand puffed up like a baby hand and the recovery has been slow and stupid. Take note, children. Once you get to be about thirty, the pain, when it arrives, hangs around for aeons longer than it used to. I mean, fuck. I slept on my arm funny about a week ago and it’s STILL driving me insane.
Anyway, I’ve gotten all my instruments set up, I’ve borrowed good gear from folks and tonight and tomorrow are the last nights to put the lube on the tips of about 2 or 3 more demos and then it’s time to party. Matt Alison will be at the controls and Justin Yates (of Dec. ’09 ‘Young and Hung’ centerfold fame) will be assisting. Should be cool. As of right now I have four songs already completely recorded and mixed and I’m planning on getting 8 or 9 done in Atlas over the course of the weekend and a few subsequent follow up days. If everything goes well at the end of this will be a record that I’ve been writing and demoing and even recording for over a year, that I’ve re-arranged my whole life to record (in 2 different states with a rotating cast of the best, most appropriate musicians for each song) that you guys can illegally burn, listen to once, cavalierly dismiss as shitty about ten minutes into it, and move on to whatever dumb shit is coming down the pipe next. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, the public consumption of the creative process.
Nah, I’m pretty excited because I’ve got a real different endgame with this record than I’ve ever had before. Before, I’ve always had a competitive streak when it comes to making records. This is true in a few ways. Chris and I always pushed each other during the songwriting process to go to weirder and tougher places whenever we were putting together any Lawrence Arms release. This was ‘competitive’ technically, but it was more of a friendly tension where the results came not from a desire to crush each other or anything but rather a desire to not end up looking like a total asshole.
For example, when writing Oh! Calcutta! I had written a bunch of songs and so had Chris. Suddenly, Chris brought in Great Lakes/Great Escapes and played me the acoustic demo, and my first thought was ‘wow…I’m gonna have to write some new, highly awesome songs if I’m gonna put them on a record next to that song.’ It wasn’t that I wanted to be the best, I just didn’t want to look like the dipshit that sullied the vibe of that song with some tossed off turd. This definitely went both ways for us and it was and is a super healthy collaborative uh…’competition’ I guess, but that’s not the competition that REALLY drove me. The one that really drove me was the one that featured Chris and Neil and me on one side and everyone else in the world on the other side.
Whenever the Lawrence Arms would make a record (and I can only speak for myself here, though I suspect that Chris and Neil would be at least a little bit familiar with the perspective I’m about to describe) it came from a place of feeling desperate, alone, marginalized and…I don’t want to say underRATED, but maybe underestimated. We started out as a crappy 3 piece that wasn’t as cool as the broadways (Chris’s and my previous band, who weren’t that cool to begin with) and, apparently tried too much to sound like Jawbreaker. Then we became the band that was just like the Alkaline Trio in that we came from the same town and had the same general line up, but we weren’t as good/cool/dynamic. Then we became the (tubbier, older) band with punk songs and guitar solos on tour with Taking Back Sunday and Yellowcard during the explosion of the pop-emo craze Then we became the new band on Fat, alongside cool, credible bands with already growing (and more importantly to the notion of my perspective) ‘cool’ fanbases, like Against Me! and D4. THEN we became a band that had been around for a while but hadn’t blown up and we were suddenly the new kids in the Hot Water Music pool, where the fans are great and dedicated but there’s still a spot here and there where only ten kids show up and no show is ever as big as the kids that attend think it’s gonna be (this, remember was before the miracle, David Blaine-esque move of Hot Water Music breaking up for a week and then getting back together to find themselves six times bigger). And throughout all this we’ve been consistently compared to every single one of the bands that I mentioned and described as an inferior version.
Now, far be it from me to complain about or even disagree with this comparison. Alkaline Trio, Against Me!, D4, Hot Water Music….shit, as far as my tastes go, these are some of the best bands around, and well, we definitely AREN’T as good at entertaining the TBS or Yellowcard crowd as those guys are. These are all reasonable bands to compare us to and I can understand, very, very clearly why we would be considered inferior to all these bands.
What that has done though, is that it’s made me (and PROBABLY Neil and Chris, though we’ve never discussed it overtly) hungry to stuff every record we ever made up everybody’s ass. The whole goal of our band has always been to subvert expectations within the very small wiggle room of our sound. I mean, I’m no dummy. The Lawrence Arms aren’t revolutionizing anything at all, (even though some of those bands I mentioned above may have been) but we tried to make a pop record when we’d never previously written a song with a chorus, then a weird, weird record that would shock the shit out of anyone who thought that we didn’t think things through or pay attention to craft, and then we decided to make a super jagged punk record that embodied everything we’d ever stored up about loving punk rock once we'd been written off as pussies. Then we made a record called Buttsweat and Tears. Ha!
Anyway, I’m not saying that any of these records were necessarily great (though, come on. They totally are), and I’m definitely not suggesting that my competitive streak was aimed at those above-mentioned bands. It wasn’t. It was aimed at the faceless world at large that unfavorably compared us to everyone. Those records all came from a hunger to show the world that we were the best, and fuck everyone else (fans, journalists, bands, punishers, indifferents, haters, label heads, promoters, roadies, everyone) entirely. Did they do that? Of course not, but that’s the MOTIVATION, which, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you would recognize as something that I think is completely irrelevant when it comes to discussing the merits of art. SO, what’s my point?
My point is that right now my new record isn’t made yet, but the time draws near and as such, I’m pretty fucking excited and all I have to talk about is motivation because that’s what’s coursing through me right now. And I don’t really have the desire to stuff this record up anyone’s ass. That’s not to say that I don’t think that you all are even remotely close to expecting what’s gonna be on it, I don’t think you are. BUT, I’m not looking to make a name for myself as some sort of iconoclast, I’m not struggling to push my sound and I’m not worried about how it’s received. I’m back to square one where I’m just making a record that I spent forever writing because I finally scraped together the resources to lay it down. That’s my motivation. I’ve got some songs I like and I think I’m finally ready to record them. This is the first time I’ve done that since I was a teenager. And shit, for a lot of bands, that first record is the best. Well, this is as close to a ‘first record’ as I’ll have done since I was fifteen. And I’m stoked. And if you don’t like it, well, I’m not gonna be surprised or care.
Woooooooohoooo.
Anyway, I’ve gotten all my instruments set up, I’ve borrowed good gear from folks and tonight and tomorrow are the last nights to put the lube on the tips of about 2 or 3 more demos and then it’s time to party. Matt Alison will be at the controls and Justin Yates (of Dec. ’09 ‘Young and Hung’ centerfold fame) will be assisting. Should be cool. As of right now I have four songs already completely recorded and mixed and I’m planning on getting 8 or 9 done in Atlas over the course of the weekend and a few subsequent follow up days. If everything goes well at the end of this will be a record that I’ve been writing and demoing and even recording for over a year, that I’ve re-arranged my whole life to record (in 2 different states with a rotating cast of the best, most appropriate musicians for each song) that you guys can illegally burn, listen to once, cavalierly dismiss as shitty about ten minutes into it, and move on to whatever dumb shit is coming down the pipe next. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, the public consumption of the creative process.
Nah, I’m pretty excited because I’ve got a real different endgame with this record than I’ve ever had before. Before, I’ve always had a competitive streak when it comes to making records. This is true in a few ways. Chris and I always pushed each other during the songwriting process to go to weirder and tougher places whenever we were putting together any Lawrence Arms release. This was ‘competitive’ technically, but it was more of a friendly tension where the results came not from a desire to crush each other or anything but rather a desire to not end up looking like a total asshole.
For example, when writing Oh! Calcutta! I had written a bunch of songs and so had Chris. Suddenly, Chris brought in Great Lakes/Great Escapes and played me the acoustic demo, and my first thought was ‘wow…I’m gonna have to write some new, highly awesome songs if I’m gonna put them on a record next to that song.’ It wasn’t that I wanted to be the best, I just didn’t want to look like the dipshit that sullied the vibe of that song with some tossed off turd. This definitely went both ways for us and it was and is a super healthy collaborative uh…’competition’ I guess, but that’s not the competition that REALLY drove me. The one that really drove me was the one that featured Chris and Neil and me on one side and everyone else in the world on the other side.
Whenever the Lawrence Arms would make a record (and I can only speak for myself here, though I suspect that Chris and Neil would be at least a little bit familiar with the perspective I’m about to describe) it came from a place of feeling desperate, alone, marginalized and…I don’t want to say underRATED, but maybe underestimated. We started out as a crappy 3 piece that wasn’t as cool as the broadways (Chris’s and my previous band, who weren’t that cool to begin with) and, apparently tried too much to sound like Jawbreaker. Then we became the band that was just like the Alkaline Trio in that we came from the same town and had the same general line up, but we weren’t as good/cool/dynamic. Then we became the (tubbier, older) band with punk songs and guitar solos on tour with Taking Back Sunday and Yellowcard during the explosion of the pop-emo craze Then we became the new band on Fat, alongside cool, credible bands with already growing (and more importantly to the notion of my perspective) ‘cool’ fanbases, like Against Me! and D4. THEN we became a band that had been around for a while but hadn’t blown up and we were suddenly the new kids in the Hot Water Music pool, where the fans are great and dedicated but there’s still a spot here and there where only ten kids show up and no show is ever as big as the kids that attend think it’s gonna be (this, remember was before the miracle, David Blaine-esque move of Hot Water Music breaking up for a week and then getting back together to find themselves six times bigger). And throughout all this we’ve been consistently compared to every single one of the bands that I mentioned and described as an inferior version.
Now, far be it from me to complain about or even disagree with this comparison. Alkaline Trio, Against Me!, D4, Hot Water Music….shit, as far as my tastes go, these are some of the best bands around, and well, we definitely AREN’T as good at entertaining the TBS or Yellowcard crowd as those guys are. These are all reasonable bands to compare us to and I can understand, very, very clearly why we would be considered inferior to all these bands.
What that has done though, is that it’s made me (and PROBABLY Neil and Chris, though we’ve never discussed it overtly) hungry to stuff every record we ever made up everybody’s ass. The whole goal of our band has always been to subvert expectations within the very small wiggle room of our sound. I mean, I’m no dummy. The Lawrence Arms aren’t revolutionizing anything at all, (even though some of those bands I mentioned above may have been) but we tried to make a pop record when we’d never previously written a song with a chorus, then a weird, weird record that would shock the shit out of anyone who thought that we didn’t think things through or pay attention to craft, and then we decided to make a super jagged punk record that embodied everything we’d ever stored up about loving punk rock once we'd been written off as pussies. Then we made a record called Buttsweat and Tears. Ha!
Anyway, I’m not saying that any of these records were necessarily great (though, come on. They totally are), and I’m definitely not suggesting that my competitive streak was aimed at those above-mentioned bands. It wasn’t. It was aimed at the faceless world at large that unfavorably compared us to everyone. Those records all came from a hunger to show the world that we were the best, and fuck everyone else (fans, journalists, bands, punishers, indifferents, haters, label heads, promoters, roadies, everyone) entirely. Did they do that? Of course not, but that’s the MOTIVATION, which, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you would recognize as something that I think is completely irrelevant when it comes to discussing the merits of art. SO, what’s my point?
My point is that right now my new record isn’t made yet, but the time draws near and as such, I’m pretty fucking excited and all I have to talk about is motivation because that’s what’s coursing through me right now. And I don’t really have the desire to stuff this record up anyone’s ass. That’s not to say that I don’t think that you all are even remotely close to expecting what’s gonna be on it, I don’t think you are. BUT, I’m not looking to make a name for myself as some sort of iconoclast, I’m not struggling to push my sound and I’m not worried about how it’s received. I’m back to square one where I’m just making a record that I spent forever writing because I finally scraped together the resources to lay it down. That’s my motivation. I’ve got some songs I like and I think I’m finally ready to record them. This is the first time I’ve done that since I was a teenager. And shit, for a lot of bands, that first record is the best. Well, this is as close to a ‘first record’ as I’ll have done since I was fifteen. And I’m stoked. And if you don’t like it, well, I’m not gonna be surprised or care.
Woooooooohoooo.
Monday, July 25, 2011
And there she is, let's all turn around and laugh at her!
Okay, so Amy Winehouse is dead. That’s something I guess. I’ve read every opinion on this subject from ‘fuck her I’m glad she’s finally dead’ to ‘what a tragedy…so young’ and while I guess I tend to side with the latter opinion, human beings are really, really ghoulish when they’re dealing with the abstractions of celebrity life and/or things that go on far away from them, so I’m not even remotely surprised by the former opinion.
Lots of people this weekend were saddened by what happened in Norway, which is, no two ways about it, a senseless tragedy. Lots of people in America, and presumably all over the world also said things like “who gives a fuck if some asshole in Norway blew up a couple of Norwegians.” I get that mentality. I do. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. In the day to day of waking up, working some shitty job, eating some crappy lunch, going back to the shitty job, crapping out some greasy turd in some filthy, sweaty bathroom cube, taking the train to the check cashing place, waiting in line, dealing with some onion-smelling lard ass, shoveling down some shitty dinner, making conversation with someone you foolishly ended up living with because A) you were dumb enough to fuck them one too many times or B) you seemed like a couple of dudes who wouldn’t bum each other out too badly, drinking yourself into oblivion, passing out on top of your sweaty, swirled up sheets and then waking up to “I Got You Babe” on the clock radio and doing it all again, yeah, what the fuck does some group of dead assholes in Norway have to do with anything? Who cares about some dead junkie? My life sucks ass and nothing’s gonna change that. People die all the time. I’ve gotta fucking stop and take stock of the universe every time someone dies? Fuck that. I’ll keep my sympathies local.
I get that, but it’s (of course) an unbelievably selfish and myopic point of view, one that we really love to cultivate here in the US (and now, here in the future, where everyone has a portal to the universe and a point of view and a viewable opinion, we’ve taken myopic selfishness to the level of art-form, but anyway). The thing that’s so funny about the people that tend to be the most staunchly ‘fuck strangers’ is that they’re the same people that (in my experience) bitch the loudest about stubbed toes, shitty bosses, fat wives, limp dicked husbands and other things that are (really, truly) interesting/important to nobody but themselves. It’s kind of reductive to simply call it childish, since there’s a level of xenophobia and pro-idiocy-agenda that’s also part of it, but since I deal with two little monsters every day who truly, honestly have no conception that there are other people in the world who also hurt and want and miss and all that, and that’s what all this reminds me of the most closely, I’m gonna go ahead and just call it childish.
(I know, ‘childish’ is reductive and not quite right. It’s like when someone says that Cameron Diaz is “hot.” Of course she’s not hot. She looks like Yoda, stretched, tanned, taxidermied and disgraced with a hideous wig/makeup drag situation, but due to her richness, her relative fitness, the way she carries herself, the fact that most dudes are dong-powered-hogs that would fuck anything that moves and her fame, we understand that she’s SUPPOSED to be hot. There’s no real word for that, so ‘hot’ is what we’re left with. It’s cultural shorthand).
The thing that I find somewhat fascinating in both these cases is the way that people are using sudden deaths to push agendas. This is hardly new, as nothing motivates like a corpse, (ask all those people who are suddenly slathering at the bit for arbitrary time limits put on how long you can wait before you report a child’s death) but for whatever reason it seems super overt and gleeful right now. The people who are “glad” Amy Winehouse is dead are SO stoked. People are thrilled to be throwing around words like ‘dumb junkie hack’ and so forth, as though she’s really ever done anything but sing some songs and get fucked up. That’s hardly a personal affront to anyone except for maybe her parents. I mean, at the risk of bumming people out, Kurt Cobain couldn’t hold it together any better than she could. They both died at 27 and he had a fucking kid! That’s about a zillion times more irresponsible. But THAT was a tragedy. This time it’s a junkie getting what they deserve, which is interesting enough, but even the JOKES I see about this Amy Winehouse death are just mean spirited. I’ve seen exactly one funny joke, which I’ll attribute to my buddy Rich Gill who posted it on facebook and that was “congratulations to Lilly Allen on a long, hard fought victory.” The reason that’s funny is because while it comes quickly on the heels of death (making it seem tabooish) it’s really not mean spirited, except that it openly mocks Lilly Allen’s dumb sense of egomaniacal competition with Winehouse, who honestly didn’t seem all that aware of Lilly Allen (or much else, I guess).
But see, the point is, that’s how you joke about dead folks. You have to make it FUNNY. Mean isn’t funny and funny isn’t mean, because funny trumps everything. If a joke is truly, TRULY funny, it’s not mean, racist, sexist, homophobic or any of that. It’s funny. If it’s mean, then chances are (100% in fact) that it’s not funny. That’s because meanness isn’t really humorous. It’s shocking, which is an ELEMENT of good humor, but that’s just one element. Funny things have to be relatable and there’s nothing relatable about dancing around the corpse of someone you don’t know because you’re suddenly morally superior because they wound up dead. That’s what Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden and other ideological zealots do. And there’s NOTHING less funny than ideological zealotry.
Now, to get back to Norway, the GLEE with which leftist types are reporting that this nut that blew all this shit up and shot all those people was a fundamentalist Christian, right wing conservative honky is a little bit shitty too. “Here’s the new face of terror, Republicans! It’s YOU!!!!!” The left seems pretty stoked on that. I think it’s fucked up. I mean, sure, yeah. The dude’s a white Christian but SO WHAT? He’s also a mass murderer and those dudes are pretty much ALWAYS white Christians. Isn’t John Wayne Gacy a terrorist, or the Son of Sam?, Dahmer, Bundy, Gein, David Berkowitz (what do you mean he’s jewish?), Dick Ramirez (Mexican? Really?) these dudes terrorized the shit out of people, and just because they’re only tangentially tied to any sort of ideological agenda doesn’t mean that they’re not exactly the same as this dude in Norway or Osama. Shit man, those two guys are only tangentially tied to their purported larger agendas, as no matter what the very vocal and visible zealots and/or opposition may have you believe, neither Islam nor Christianity promotes mass murder.
The notion that this is some kind of blow for ANYTHING (moderate Islam, those opposed to the ongoing wars, anti-racial profiling folks, people who generally hate republicans) is completely fucking asinine. It’s just a bunch of dead people and twisted girders and a huge fucking mess and that shit is never a blow FOR anything, much in the same way that meanness is never funny. It’s a bunch of dead people, a terrible mess to clean up and a metric dickton of bullshit left behind, and assholes going on about how retroactively, they were right and everyone else was wrong and so on and so forth. Nice. It’s real nice. It’s like a complete vulture culture of smug Dr. Drews just vampirically using tragedy to further agendas.
And that shit’s just dark people.
RIP all around.
Lots of people this weekend were saddened by what happened in Norway, which is, no two ways about it, a senseless tragedy. Lots of people in America, and presumably all over the world also said things like “who gives a fuck if some asshole in Norway blew up a couple of Norwegians.” I get that mentality. I do. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. In the day to day of waking up, working some shitty job, eating some crappy lunch, going back to the shitty job, crapping out some greasy turd in some filthy, sweaty bathroom cube, taking the train to the check cashing place, waiting in line, dealing with some onion-smelling lard ass, shoveling down some shitty dinner, making conversation with someone you foolishly ended up living with because A) you were dumb enough to fuck them one too many times or B) you seemed like a couple of dudes who wouldn’t bum each other out too badly, drinking yourself into oblivion, passing out on top of your sweaty, swirled up sheets and then waking up to “I Got You Babe” on the clock radio and doing it all again, yeah, what the fuck does some group of dead assholes in Norway have to do with anything? Who cares about some dead junkie? My life sucks ass and nothing’s gonna change that. People die all the time. I’ve gotta fucking stop and take stock of the universe every time someone dies? Fuck that. I’ll keep my sympathies local.
I get that, but it’s (of course) an unbelievably selfish and myopic point of view, one that we really love to cultivate here in the US (and now, here in the future, where everyone has a portal to the universe and a point of view and a viewable opinion, we’ve taken myopic selfishness to the level of art-form, but anyway). The thing that’s so funny about the people that tend to be the most staunchly ‘fuck strangers’ is that they’re the same people that (in my experience) bitch the loudest about stubbed toes, shitty bosses, fat wives, limp dicked husbands and other things that are (really, truly) interesting/important to nobody but themselves. It’s kind of reductive to simply call it childish, since there’s a level of xenophobia and pro-idiocy-agenda that’s also part of it, but since I deal with two little monsters every day who truly, honestly have no conception that there are other people in the world who also hurt and want and miss and all that, and that’s what all this reminds me of the most closely, I’m gonna go ahead and just call it childish.
(I know, ‘childish’ is reductive and not quite right. It’s like when someone says that Cameron Diaz is “hot.” Of course she’s not hot. She looks like Yoda, stretched, tanned, taxidermied and disgraced with a hideous wig/makeup drag situation, but due to her richness, her relative fitness, the way she carries herself, the fact that most dudes are dong-powered-hogs that would fuck anything that moves and her fame, we understand that she’s SUPPOSED to be hot. There’s no real word for that, so ‘hot’ is what we’re left with. It’s cultural shorthand).
The thing that I find somewhat fascinating in both these cases is the way that people are using sudden deaths to push agendas. This is hardly new, as nothing motivates like a corpse, (ask all those people who are suddenly slathering at the bit for arbitrary time limits put on how long you can wait before you report a child’s death) but for whatever reason it seems super overt and gleeful right now. The people who are “glad” Amy Winehouse is dead are SO stoked. People are thrilled to be throwing around words like ‘dumb junkie hack’ and so forth, as though she’s really ever done anything but sing some songs and get fucked up. That’s hardly a personal affront to anyone except for maybe her parents. I mean, at the risk of bumming people out, Kurt Cobain couldn’t hold it together any better than she could. They both died at 27 and he had a fucking kid! That’s about a zillion times more irresponsible. But THAT was a tragedy. This time it’s a junkie getting what they deserve, which is interesting enough, but even the JOKES I see about this Amy Winehouse death are just mean spirited. I’ve seen exactly one funny joke, which I’ll attribute to my buddy Rich Gill who posted it on facebook and that was “congratulations to Lilly Allen on a long, hard fought victory.” The reason that’s funny is because while it comes quickly on the heels of death (making it seem tabooish) it’s really not mean spirited, except that it openly mocks Lilly Allen’s dumb sense of egomaniacal competition with Winehouse, who honestly didn’t seem all that aware of Lilly Allen (or much else, I guess).
But see, the point is, that’s how you joke about dead folks. You have to make it FUNNY. Mean isn’t funny and funny isn’t mean, because funny trumps everything. If a joke is truly, TRULY funny, it’s not mean, racist, sexist, homophobic or any of that. It’s funny. If it’s mean, then chances are (100% in fact) that it’s not funny. That’s because meanness isn’t really humorous. It’s shocking, which is an ELEMENT of good humor, but that’s just one element. Funny things have to be relatable and there’s nothing relatable about dancing around the corpse of someone you don’t know because you’re suddenly morally superior because they wound up dead. That’s what Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden and other ideological zealots do. And there’s NOTHING less funny than ideological zealotry.
Now, to get back to Norway, the GLEE with which leftist types are reporting that this nut that blew all this shit up and shot all those people was a fundamentalist Christian, right wing conservative honky is a little bit shitty too. “Here’s the new face of terror, Republicans! It’s YOU!!!!!” The left seems pretty stoked on that. I think it’s fucked up. I mean, sure, yeah. The dude’s a white Christian but SO WHAT? He’s also a mass murderer and those dudes are pretty much ALWAYS white Christians. Isn’t John Wayne Gacy a terrorist, or the Son of Sam?, Dahmer, Bundy, Gein, David Berkowitz (what do you mean he’s jewish?), Dick Ramirez (Mexican? Really?) these dudes terrorized the shit out of people, and just because they’re only tangentially tied to any sort of ideological agenda doesn’t mean that they’re not exactly the same as this dude in Norway or Osama. Shit man, those two guys are only tangentially tied to their purported larger agendas, as no matter what the very vocal and visible zealots and/or opposition may have you believe, neither Islam nor Christianity promotes mass murder.
The notion that this is some kind of blow for ANYTHING (moderate Islam, those opposed to the ongoing wars, anti-racial profiling folks, people who generally hate republicans) is completely fucking asinine. It’s just a bunch of dead people and twisted girders and a huge fucking mess and that shit is never a blow FOR anything, much in the same way that meanness is never funny. It’s a bunch of dead people, a terrible mess to clean up and a metric dickton of bullshit left behind, and assholes going on about how retroactively, they were right and everyone else was wrong and so on and so forth. Nice. It’s real nice. It’s like a complete vulture culture of smug Dr. Drews just vampirically using tragedy to further agendas.
And that shit’s just dark people.
RIP all around.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
dynamite.
Lady Gaga was on Howard Stern the other day and she was just awesome. Not only did she handle all Howard’s questions and come across as driven and eccentric without sounding like a total shithead, she also is one of the only people I’ve ever heard skate the line between answering the more titillating questions and saying “I don’t really think that’s appropriate” without sounding like a complete turd/prude/person with something weird to hide.
To top it off, she performed two songs, “Hair” and “Edge Of Glory” with just vocals and a piano and both songs were absolutely unbelievable. It’s not often that I listen to ANY music and have to consciously think to myself “uh, dude, you may potentially start crying right now if you’re not careful” unless I’m super-duper wasted/hungover/emotionally vulnerable, but yesterday I was just driving along and boom, I was about one click away from being Spade and Farley listening to the Carpenters in Tommy Boy.
Now, there are a lot of issues to address here, most of them involving me being a total pansy for A) having any respect for Lady Gaga or worse, B) being the kind of aging hipster douche that PRETENDS to like Lady Gaga because it’s eccentric and shows a breadth of taste and the sophistication to see the masterful simplicity of the songcraft in the vapid pop machine and blah blah blah. There’s of course C) Only total homos cry, except for at your army buddy’s funeral or at the ceremony where your son receives the medal after getting Osama.
Other issues include the fact that these renditions of “Hair” and “Edge of Glory” sound a LOT alike and that she’s making some pretty weird faces, playing piano with talon-like nails and generally the whole thing is rife with easy-to-mock trappings. There are long responses to all these issues but the quick answer to all of them is pretty much this: Hey man, whatever. I thought she was great.
There’s this pervasive notion in the mainstream and counterculture alike that as a collective, humanity is nothing but a mad grip of buffoons and we heap all this praise on these talentless hacks just because they’re beautiful and have access to the studio wizardry of Wil.I.Am. We all get furious because these shitheads don’t deserve it. They’re ciphers. They stink. What ever happened to talent? To substance over style? To artists like Phil fucking Collins! That motherfucker may not have been beautiful, but he could sing the dick right off a dog, boy. But this new batch of shit…Who likes this shit? Pre teen girls? Fuck. Hell in a handbasket. That’s where we’re headed with this bullshit.
And on and on like this.
It’s funny because (and this is getting dangerously close to ‘leave Britney alone’ territory) Lady Gaga is a great singer and a great songwriter and she’s kind of funny looking and finally, after a decade plus of mindless pop and boybands and Svengali-pupeteered dipshit pigs we finally really, truly do have a megastar that’s actually a great musician, talented songwriter, gifted vocalist, weird iconoclast, who’s also odd looking, and yet when you look up and go, ‘man, lady gaga is just fucking incredible’ people smirk and go, “Oh man, I didn’t think you went for that pop bullshit” or worse “oh, look at you with your shitty, ironic hipster praise of another pop turd. You’re essentially Pitchfork sucking off the Carter 3” all the while ignoring that this woman is actually the real deal that deserves the praise she’s getting because she’s done all the things you need to do to earn said praise and she did it while being weird looking in a VERY superficial industry and in front of an increasingly fickle public.
It goes back to enthusiasm and being a poser and the way that everyone is afraid to show any interest in anything at all because we live in a poisoned culture of cynical dicks, but this time the teenaged girls and the homos were right. Lady Gaga’s piano performances on Stern were truly powerful and touching and sure, maybe all you like is Slayer and it seems mad gay to you, maybe you just listen to Eminem and the Geto Boyz and that weird-chick-on-a-piano shit has nothing to do with your tastes. But me, I’m an old shitty man who has very little faith in anything and who decided to get into punk rock because I thought polish and stadium seating and virtuosity were overrated non-necessities that only got in the way of the visceral impact of the shared experience of music, and this shit floors me. Go ahead and call me a pussy.
I think Lady Gaga is fucking incredible.
To top it off, she performed two songs, “Hair” and “Edge Of Glory” with just vocals and a piano and both songs were absolutely unbelievable. It’s not often that I listen to ANY music and have to consciously think to myself “uh, dude, you may potentially start crying right now if you’re not careful” unless I’m super-duper wasted/hungover/emotionally vulnerable, but yesterday I was just driving along and boom, I was about one click away from being Spade and Farley listening to the Carpenters in Tommy Boy.
Now, there are a lot of issues to address here, most of them involving me being a total pansy for A) having any respect for Lady Gaga or worse, B) being the kind of aging hipster douche that PRETENDS to like Lady Gaga because it’s eccentric and shows a breadth of taste and the sophistication to see the masterful simplicity of the songcraft in the vapid pop machine and blah blah blah. There’s of course C) Only total homos cry, except for at your army buddy’s funeral or at the ceremony where your son receives the medal after getting Osama.
Other issues include the fact that these renditions of “Hair” and “Edge of Glory” sound a LOT alike and that she’s making some pretty weird faces, playing piano with talon-like nails and generally the whole thing is rife with easy-to-mock trappings. There are long responses to all these issues but the quick answer to all of them is pretty much this: Hey man, whatever. I thought she was great.
There’s this pervasive notion in the mainstream and counterculture alike that as a collective, humanity is nothing but a mad grip of buffoons and we heap all this praise on these talentless hacks just because they’re beautiful and have access to the studio wizardry of Wil.I.Am. We all get furious because these shitheads don’t deserve it. They’re ciphers. They stink. What ever happened to talent? To substance over style? To artists like Phil fucking Collins! That motherfucker may not have been beautiful, but he could sing the dick right off a dog, boy. But this new batch of shit…Who likes this shit? Pre teen girls? Fuck. Hell in a handbasket. That’s where we’re headed with this bullshit.
And on and on like this.
It’s funny because (and this is getting dangerously close to ‘leave Britney alone’ territory) Lady Gaga is a great singer and a great songwriter and she’s kind of funny looking and finally, after a decade plus of mindless pop and boybands and Svengali-pupeteered dipshit pigs we finally really, truly do have a megastar that’s actually a great musician, talented songwriter, gifted vocalist, weird iconoclast, who’s also odd looking, and yet when you look up and go, ‘man, lady gaga is just fucking incredible’ people smirk and go, “Oh man, I didn’t think you went for that pop bullshit” or worse “oh, look at you with your shitty, ironic hipster praise of another pop turd. You’re essentially Pitchfork sucking off the Carter 3” all the while ignoring that this woman is actually the real deal that deserves the praise she’s getting because she’s done all the things you need to do to earn said praise and she did it while being weird looking in a VERY superficial industry and in front of an increasingly fickle public.
It goes back to enthusiasm and being a poser and the way that everyone is afraid to show any interest in anything at all because we live in a poisoned culture of cynical dicks, but this time the teenaged girls and the homos were right. Lady Gaga’s piano performances on Stern were truly powerful and touching and sure, maybe all you like is Slayer and it seems mad gay to you, maybe you just listen to Eminem and the Geto Boyz and that weird-chick-on-a-piano shit has nothing to do with your tastes. But me, I’m an old shitty man who has very little faith in anything and who decided to get into punk rock because I thought polish and stadium seating and virtuosity were overrated non-necessities that only got in the way of the visceral impact of the shared experience of music, and this shit floors me. Go ahead and call me a pussy.
I think Lady Gaga is fucking incredible.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Uh, dude?
Well, I had quite a weekend. It started out with a bang when I went into a walgreens and passed the pharmacist a note that said I had a bomb and needed a few bottles of Oxycontin or else I’d detonate said bomb. Then I caught a cab to the show, and right before Soundgarden busted into Rusty Cage (one of my all time favorite classic jams!) the pigs showed up and hauled my super wicked high ass to jail. Major anti-stokage bro.
That whole story is a bummer. For those of you who don’t know, the Level 9 elf that plays bass for Coheed and Cambria fell into the dank pits of despair that only watching Soundgarden every night can induce and subsequently went ahead and committed the very deeds outlined in the opening paragraph. I mean, seriously? I fucking HATE Soundgarden. What the fuck are they doing touring? They stink. They are the suckiest bunch of sucks to ever suck and if I was on tour with Soundgarden I’d probably figure out a way to get super high and then physically removed from the tour myself. In the context of having to hear a zillion dildos warbling along to Black Hole Sun every night for a month, threatening to blow a Walgreens back into the stone age if they don’t make with the oxys seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do.
I recently asked (via my favorite social media platform, twitter) if there was a worse band in the history of music than soundgarden, and the answers were many splendored, though the big winner was Audioslave. I don’t think I agree with that assessment though. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Audioslave sucks. I think they’re terrible and have pretty unredeemable songs but I find audioslave to be about ten buhzillion times more palatable than Soundgarden. Here’s why: Audioslave is a complete fucking mess. On paper, they’re the worst idea of all time. It’s the irritating screecher from Soundgarden fronting the hopelessly dated electro-grunge-guitar-wank groove of rage against the machine. Terrible. On paper, Soundgarden is actually a kind of a good idea. They’re a cock rock missing link between Motley Crue and Nirvana. That’s got some serious potential, don’tcha think?
Well, sadly, instead of being raucous and full of swagger, turns out Soundgarden is pretty much the dreariest shit out there, topped with ridiculous howling and featuring the Kriss Angel of rock and roll up there just twisting around like such a punchable douche while the rest of those dudes...ugh. I don’t know. They don’t do shit. The whole thing sucks.
Audioslave fares a little better just because the expectations are SO AMAZINGLY LOW, and they’re so completely unremarkable that it doesn’t really offend beyond the general “who the fuck thought this was a good idea” knee jerk that pretty much everyone but your bald, bemulletted uncle that ‘still parties’ instantly has when confronted with the band’s concept.
Tom Morello plays some fairly interesting shit and generally, Cornell’s shrill bullshit is a toned down to the point where it’s just crappy rather than offensive. At this point, I’d like to restate that I’m not endorsing Audioslave here, merely pointing out that in the choice between douche and turd sandwich, I’ll take the turd sandwich, thank you very much.
But man, the dude from Coheed and Cambria must have thought that holding up a Walgreens was preferable to 1) not being able to take Oxycontin and 2) Telling his buddies that he was really, really interested in getting high. This kind of blew up all over his dick because number one is a crime and because of that everyone knows that he really likes getting high. So, uh, oops. Now you’re not high and you’re in jail. Bad combo.
Now, I’m no big city rockstar and I don’t know all that much about how to get drugs like that, but I gotta imagine that when you’re in a band that has a gold record there’s a slightly more convenient way to score than threatening to blow up the Walgreens. Ask the drum tech or the local promoter or that creep that’s been to every show since Syracuse, right? Fuck, go on stage and ask for pills from the crowd, ask one of the crew dipshits that’s walking around wiping Chris Cornell’s ass every night. Lord knows those dudes have to have heavy narcotics on them to be able to deal with being responsible for setting up and enabling Soundgarden’s painful stink. One would think, at least.
I mean, it’s probably kind of a no-brainer, but here’s the take away: if you’ve got serious issues with drugs, like I’m-gonna-flip-out-if-I-don’t-get-some-drugs issues, but you’re not interested in seeking help, for fucks sake, make sure you’ve got at least one homie nearby who knows what you’re doing, if for no other reason than so when you get that look in your eye and say ‘uh, I’m gonna head down to the drug store and go completely berserk until I get my drugs’ he can talk some sense into you and point you in the direction of the nearest degenerate, help you beat up said degenerate and take HIS drugs. I mean, god. How hard is that?
Sheesh.
That whole story is a bummer. For those of you who don’t know, the Level 9 elf that plays bass for Coheed and Cambria fell into the dank pits of despair that only watching Soundgarden every night can induce and subsequently went ahead and committed the very deeds outlined in the opening paragraph. I mean, seriously? I fucking HATE Soundgarden. What the fuck are they doing touring? They stink. They are the suckiest bunch of sucks to ever suck and if I was on tour with Soundgarden I’d probably figure out a way to get super high and then physically removed from the tour myself. In the context of having to hear a zillion dildos warbling along to Black Hole Sun every night for a month, threatening to blow a Walgreens back into the stone age if they don’t make with the oxys seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do.
I recently asked (via my favorite social media platform, twitter) if there was a worse band in the history of music than soundgarden, and the answers were many splendored, though the big winner was Audioslave. I don’t think I agree with that assessment though. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Audioslave sucks. I think they’re terrible and have pretty unredeemable songs but I find audioslave to be about ten buhzillion times more palatable than Soundgarden. Here’s why: Audioslave is a complete fucking mess. On paper, they’re the worst idea of all time. It’s the irritating screecher from Soundgarden fronting the hopelessly dated electro-grunge-guitar-wank groove of rage against the machine. Terrible. On paper, Soundgarden is actually a kind of a good idea. They’re a cock rock missing link between Motley Crue and Nirvana. That’s got some serious potential, don’tcha think?
Well, sadly, instead of being raucous and full of swagger, turns out Soundgarden is pretty much the dreariest shit out there, topped with ridiculous howling and featuring the Kriss Angel of rock and roll up there just twisting around like such a punchable douche while the rest of those dudes...ugh. I don’t know. They don’t do shit. The whole thing sucks.
Audioslave fares a little better just because the expectations are SO AMAZINGLY LOW, and they’re so completely unremarkable that it doesn’t really offend beyond the general “who the fuck thought this was a good idea” knee jerk that pretty much everyone but your bald, bemulletted uncle that ‘still parties’ instantly has when confronted with the band’s concept.
Tom Morello plays some fairly interesting shit and generally, Cornell’s shrill bullshit is a toned down to the point where it’s just crappy rather than offensive. At this point, I’d like to restate that I’m not endorsing Audioslave here, merely pointing out that in the choice between douche and turd sandwich, I’ll take the turd sandwich, thank you very much.
But man, the dude from Coheed and Cambria must have thought that holding up a Walgreens was preferable to 1) not being able to take Oxycontin and 2) Telling his buddies that he was really, really interested in getting high. This kind of blew up all over his dick because number one is a crime and because of that everyone knows that he really likes getting high. So, uh, oops. Now you’re not high and you’re in jail. Bad combo.
Now, I’m no big city rockstar and I don’t know all that much about how to get drugs like that, but I gotta imagine that when you’re in a band that has a gold record there’s a slightly more convenient way to score than threatening to blow up the Walgreens. Ask the drum tech or the local promoter or that creep that’s been to every show since Syracuse, right? Fuck, go on stage and ask for pills from the crowd, ask one of the crew dipshits that’s walking around wiping Chris Cornell’s ass every night. Lord knows those dudes have to have heavy narcotics on them to be able to deal with being responsible for setting up and enabling Soundgarden’s painful stink. One would think, at least.
I mean, it’s probably kind of a no-brainer, but here’s the take away: if you’ve got serious issues with drugs, like I’m-gonna-flip-out-if-I-don’t-get-some-drugs issues, but you’re not interested in seeking help, for fucks sake, make sure you’ve got at least one homie nearby who knows what you’re doing, if for no other reason than so when you get that look in your eye and say ‘uh, I’m gonna head down to the drug store and go completely berserk until I get my drugs’ he can talk some sense into you and point you in the direction of the nearest degenerate, help you beat up said degenerate and take HIS drugs. I mean, god. How hard is that?
Sheesh.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Dinosaur content!
My house is a fucking insane asylum right now. Two days ago I was told that my wife’s best friend from highschool would be coming to town. This, it turns out was only part of the story. The whole story goes something like this: She was coming to town Wednesday (yesterday) and bringing her husband and two kids and they were all staying here in our apartment, which is nice, but relatively small even for my own family of four and two dogs. Now that there are eight humans and two canines, shit’s pretty Chinese up in here (not because we’re gonna eat the dogs, just because of the crowding).
I slept in a room with my baby last night and she’s pretty chill, but she beeps and squeaks all night long and the results are not good for a person with my sensitive sleep habits. My bigger kid got up at six and (to borrow a phrase from the pornography industry) I’m bushed. I’ve had a whole pot of coffee and seen all the buttholes on Isanyoneup and it’s not even 8. The real dickpunch is that our guests, who are sleeping in my room, are still asleep even as my own children rove the halls and bathrooms like stray, screaming gremlins. My jealousy knows no bounds.
Today, I’ll go to the museum and show some kids some dinosaurs. Those little motherfuckers love them some dinosaurs, boy. It’s astounding how much kids give a shit about history when that history involves this entire planet being overrun with gigantic lizard/bird monsters. However, I don’t understand what the fascination is, or more to the point, why the fascination is ALWAYS dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, as a kid, dinosaurs were my favorite historical personages too. But why?
Let’s take my three year old kid as a case study. He loves dinosaurs. Some of his favorites are the T-rex, the spinosaurus and the stygimoloch (I know! What the fuck? They came out with new dinosaurs? How the fuck does that happen [Ugh…I know how it happens, so please, nerds with interests in paleontology and a lack of ability to understand rhetorical questions posed only for the sake of highlighting seeming absurdity, please stand down {funny, completely unrelated side note: we were on tour with American Steel and Rory was getting all pissy about the amount of guestlist spots that they were gonna have in their hometown of SF. We were splitting the spots right down the middle, as that’s where our record label is and we have lots of friends, but we dig that it’s home for them, so we gave them half the total spots even though we were technically ¾ of the show and the headliners and blah blah blah. Pretty nice, right? Well, Rory wasn’t having it and he was kind of throwing a fit, so Buttcheeks, American Steel’s guitarist, busted in and said “Rory, what don’t you understand? These are how many spots we get, and it’s fine” to which Rory replied, in an extremely loud and frustrated voice, “Ryan! Stand down!” Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal communication, but uh…’stand down’? That’s the kind of shit you say to an uppity slave or a misbehaving dog, not a peer. Needless to say, we died laughing and now tell each other to ‘stand down’ all the time}]).
I understand that the idea of dinosaurs is crazy. I mean if someone from space looked objectively at the earth in the context of galactic history, they would undoubtedly refer to it as “that one gigantic lizard planet that had those monkeys come out and destroy it right there at the end” and that kind of boggles the mind. We’re living in the remnants of a very successful society of lizards and that is an unusual reality to come to grips with.
But see, that’s because I’ve got a relatively huge amount of perspective when it comes to the expectations of what this planet is. My kid has no real notions about pandas or WWII memorabilia or a chimichanga or skeleton keys or a double rainbow or mushroom clouds or naked boobs or hockey or mazes or lobsters or France or anything and frankly I don’t understand why dinosaurs are the things that stuck so instantly. Couldn’t, theoretically, anything be that fascinating if you’ve never seen it before? Why is it always dinosaurs for these kids? I mean, I guess the easy answer is that there aren’t shows about mushroom clouds that are aimed at entertaining them, but there was a time when there weren’t shows about dinosaurs either. That developed in response to a groundswell of interest from the under-ten set. Pretty fucking weird, right? Right? No? Yes? Hellooooooo?
Oh, just stand down everyone. It’s gonna be a long day.
I slept in a room with my baby last night and she’s pretty chill, but she beeps and squeaks all night long and the results are not good for a person with my sensitive sleep habits. My bigger kid got up at six and (to borrow a phrase from the pornography industry) I’m bushed. I’ve had a whole pot of coffee and seen all the buttholes on Isanyoneup and it’s not even 8. The real dickpunch is that our guests, who are sleeping in my room, are still asleep even as my own children rove the halls and bathrooms like stray, screaming gremlins. My jealousy knows no bounds.
Today, I’ll go to the museum and show some kids some dinosaurs. Those little motherfuckers love them some dinosaurs, boy. It’s astounding how much kids give a shit about history when that history involves this entire planet being overrun with gigantic lizard/bird monsters. However, I don’t understand what the fascination is, or more to the point, why the fascination is ALWAYS dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, as a kid, dinosaurs were my favorite historical personages too. But why?
Let’s take my three year old kid as a case study. He loves dinosaurs. Some of his favorites are the T-rex, the spinosaurus and the stygimoloch (I know! What the fuck? They came out with new dinosaurs? How the fuck does that happen [Ugh…I know how it happens, so please, nerds with interests in paleontology and a lack of ability to understand rhetorical questions posed only for the sake of highlighting seeming absurdity, please stand down {funny, completely unrelated side note: we were on tour with American Steel and Rory was getting all pissy about the amount of guestlist spots that they were gonna have in their hometown of SF. We were splitting the spots right down the middle, as that’s where our record label is and we have lots of friends, but we dig that it’s home for them, so we gave them half the total spots even though we were technically ¾ of the show and the headliners and blah blah blah. Pretty nice, right? Well, Rory wasn’t having it and he was kind of throwing a fit, so Buttcheeks, American Steel’s guitarist, busted in and said “Rory, what don’t you understand? These are how many spots we get, and it’s fine” to which Rory replied, in an extremely loud and frustrated voice, “Ryan! Stand down!” Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal communication, but uh…’stand down’? That’s the kind of shit you say to an uppity slave or a misbehaving dog, not a peer. Needless to say, we died laughing and now tell each other to ‘stand down’ all the time}]).
I understand that the idea of dinosaurs is crazy. I mean if someone from space looked objectively at the earth in the context of galactic history, they would undoubtedly refer to it as “that one gigantic lizard planet that had those monkeys come out and destroy it right there at the end” and that kind of boggles the mind. We’re living in the remnants of a very successful society of lizards and that is an unusual reality to come to grips with.
But see, that’s because I’ve got a relatively huge amount of perspective when it comes to the expectations of what this planet is. My kid has no real notions about pandas or WWII memorabilia or a chimichanga or skeleton keys or a double rainbow or mushroom clouds or naked boobs or hockey or mazes or lobsters or France or anything and frankly I don’t understand why dinosaurs are the things that stuck so instantly. Couldn’t, theoretically, anything be that fascinating if you’ve never seen it before? Why is it always dinosaurs for these kids? I mean, I guess the easy answer is that there aren’t shows about mushroom clouds that are aimed at entertaining them, but there was a time when there weren’t shows about dinosaurs either. That developed in response to a groundswell of interest from the under-ten set. Pretty fucking weird, right? Right? No? Yes? Hellooooooo?
Oh, just stand down everyone. It’s gonna be a long day.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
wait, you're telling me why your favorite band is terrible?
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
these dreams go on when i close my eyes! Every second of the night!
Dreams are pretty weird. They seem important but in fact there’s nothing so dull as listening to another person’s dream. A particularly weird dream is impossible to not relay to your friends but they don’t care. No one cares about other people’s dreams even in the slightest, and that’s because dreams, while vividly real (truly, a dream is EVERY bit as much of a brain’s ‘reality’ as any waking life, except for the lack of consequences) are real ONLY in the realm of one brain. To all other brains it’s just a bunch of completely meaningless bullshit.
Yeah, there are people, psychiatrists, therapists and irritating hippy types mostly, who claim that they can interpret dreams, to which I reply: no, you can’t. Dreams may have a meaning but to interpret them as symbolic of anything universal (as in, Oh, you’re dreaming about your teeth falling out? That’s really about money) is a bunch of bullshit. There’s no way that different brains operate under the same umbrella of esoteric symbolism. That’s a pretty asinine thought. When you consider that one person could look at a steaming pile of shit covered in bloody vomit and want to barf and cry and another person could look at the same pile of bloody bile-poo and get a glass-cutting boner, it becomes pretty crystal clear that brains function in completely unique ways and that there’s absolutely no way that something like subconscious symbolic imagery could possibly have any sort of universal semblance. I mean, fuck, just the idea of actually losing your teeth means different things to different people. For some, it’s primarily a vanity issue, for others it’s a health issue, for others it’s more of a practical irritation and so on. So how come suddenly when we’re asleep, losing teeth suddenly always means the same thing? It’s fucking dumb.
Now, I’m not suggesting that dreams are completely meaningless, just that blanket interpretations (like books called “What do your Dreams Mean”) are the domain of the very dumbest of dummies. But sure, there’s gotta be a connection between me having very stressful dream situations and my life being stressful. There’s gotta be SOME meaning in the dream where I’m banging a woman with a beautiful body and the face of my oldest friend Chris with an Abe Lincoln beard (this is, unfortunately, a real dream I had). The dreams where I write songs and then remember the songs when I wake up (they’re usually terrible) have to have some sort of relation to my life and my general interest in writing music. It’s not just complete random garbage. But it’s not cut and dry either. And as such, it’s pretty hard to be interested in listening to anyone talking about their dreams, unless it’s a dream about them fucking or getting fucked by something really weird, but usually people keep those to themselves.
The one place where I kind of think that dreams become interesting is when they’re recurring dreams. This is kind of a wild phenomenon that’s a little more transcontinental than the one-offs. I have a few recurring dreams. The first one is where I’m incredibly good at jumping. I can jump like princess toadstool in super Mario 2 where once I reach the apex of my jump I can hover for a while. As I jump farther and farther and higher and higher, it eventually becomes a lot like flying, although it’s always based in jumping and never soaring. Pretty fascinating, right?
I also have a recurring dream where I’m perched somewhere that’s really high and precarious. I start out feeling confident that I can go wherever it is and do whatever I’m supposed to do, but once I get out there I’m paralyzed by fear and I end up just crouching, completely white knuckling the shit out of whatever I’m on, frozen and terrified until I wake up. This dream blows. I have one other recurring dream that involves me descending down stairs into underground windowless rooms. Each room is just covered in unpainted white drywall and has a stairwell going up and going down. Once I get to about the tenth level down, I realize that the walls are covered in roaches. The roaches are huge and some of them can fly. I wig out (because I’m no good with roaches) and run back up the stairs only to realize that the room above is even MORE roach infested. Usually at this point I start freaking out so badly that I wake up.
Those are my recurring dreams. Now that I see them written down I’m gonna have to go back and say, nope, Beex, you’re wrong. Recurring dreams are no more interesting than one offs. It’s all gibberish.
On that note, get back to work, slackers! Dreams are for suckers. You’ve been warned.
Yeah, there are people, psychiatrists, therapists and irritating hippy types mostly, who claim that they can interpret dreams, to which I reply: no, you can’t. Dreams may have a meaning but to interpret them as symbolic of anything universal (as in, Oh, you’re dreaming about your teeth falling out? That’s really about money) is a bunch of bullshit. There’s no way that different brains operate under the same umbrella of esoteric symbolism. That’s a pretty asinine thought. When you consider that one person could look at a steaming pile of shit covered in bloody vomit and want to barf and cry and another person could look at the same pile of bloody bile-poo and get a glass-cutting boner, it becomes pretty crystal clear that brains function in completely unique ways and that there’s absolutely no way that something like subconscious symbolic imagery could possibly have any sort of universal semblance. I mean, fuck, just the idea of actually losing your teeth means different things to different people. For some, it’s primarily a vanity issue, for others it’s a health issue, for others it’s more of a practical irritation and so on. So how come suddenly when we’re asleep, losing teeth suddenly always means the same thing? It’s fucking dumb.
Now, I’m not suggesting that dreams are completely meaningless, just that blanket interpretations (like books called “What do your Dreams Mean”) are the domain of the very dumbest of dummies. But sure, there’s gotta be a connection between me having very stressful dream situations and my life being stressful. There’s gotta be SOME meaning in the dream where I’m banging a woman with a beautiful body and the face of my oldest friend Chris with an Abe Lincoln beard (this is, unfortunately, a real dream I had). The dreams where I write songs and then remember the songs when I wake up (they’re usually terrible) have to have some sort of relation to my life and my general interest in writing music. It’s not just complete random garbage. But it’s not cut and dry either. And as such, it’s pretty hard to be interested in listening to anyone talking about their dreams, unless it’s a dream about them fucking or getting fucked by something really weird, but usually people keep those to themselves.
The one place where I kind of think that dreams become interesting is when they’re recurring dreams. This is kind of a wild phenomenon that’s a little more transcontinental than the one-offs. I have a few recurring dreams. The first one is where I’m incredibly good at jumping. I can jump like princess toadstool in super Mario 2 where once I reach the apex of my jump I can hover for a while. As I jump farther and farther and higher and higher, it eventually becomes a lot like flying, although it’s always based in jumping and never soaring. Pretty fascinating, right?
I also have a recurring dream where I’m perched somewhere that’s really high and precarious. I start out feeling confident that I can go wherever it is and do whatever I’m supposed to do, but once I get out there I’m paralyzed by fear and I end up just crouching, completely white knuckling the shit out of whatever I’m on, frozen and terrified until I wake up. This dream blows. I have one other recurring dream that involves me descending down stairs into underground windowless rooms. Each room is just covered in unpainted white drywall and has a stairwell going up and going down. Once I get to about the tenth level down, I realize that the walls are covered in roaches. The roaches are huge and some of them can fly. I wig out (because I’m no good with roaches) and run back up the stairs only to realize that the room above is even MORE roach infested. Usually at this point I start freaking out so badly that I wake up.
Those are my recurring dreams. Now that I see them written down I’m gonna have to go back and say, nope, Beex, you’re wrong. Recurring dreams are no more interesting than one offs. It’s all gibberish.
On that note, get back to work, slackers! Dreams are for suckers. You’ve been warned.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
sunday dumb ideas.
should I start doing record reviews? Publicists, send me your records and I'll do em. Seems like a good fit. I mean, after all, Im one hell of an overlord and my opinions are cast in iron.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
The Trial of the Century!!!!!
I think that really when it all comes down everyone has the same dream and that dream goes something like this: “Man, when I finally get to a point where I’m set and I don’t need to deal with all the bullshit I’m dealing with today, I’m gonna go tell every last person that ever motherfucked me to go sit on a dick.”
Now, most of the time people never arrive at that point and on the rare occasion that they do, usually they’re so stoked that they don’t waste their energy telling old bosses and naysayers and so forth to go fuck themselves. Which is exactly why watching Casey Anthony’s lawyer’s remarks to the press yesterday was so fucking awesome.
Now, let’s get a few things out of the way: that lawyer dude looks evil as shit. He looks like the kind of guy that sits around and smokes cigars with Dick Cheney and makes jokes about the death toll in Iraq while stoking the fire with his discarded Thai child hookers. He looks like George Lucas and generally does NOT embody my notion of a ‘cool dude’ by pretty much any standards I can come up with except for the fact that he completely fucking went for it and told the world to suck his dick on national tv the first chance he got. I really respect that.
For those of you who missed it, this dude, his name is Cheney Mason (fuck, he’s even got the same name as old Six-Hearts-Dick), went out to confront the press immediately following the Casey Anthony ‘not guilty’ verdict and he essentially walked out, gave everyone a real shitty look and then said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Fuck all of you. You cocksuckers walk around blabbing like you know what the fuck you’re talking about when you clearly don’t. You’re fucking lawyers for Christ’s sake! You’re supposed to respect the process but instead you spew your ‘expertise’ all over the dumb tards that watch your crappy programming and you condemn the defendant in MY CASE based on evidence that YOU DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO and now look. You dumb cocksuckers were all wrong and I’m right. Go fuck yourselves, I’ll see you in hell. Get fucked. In conclusion, suck my balls.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as the ranting of an evil man who’s constantly shitting on others, making the world generally lamer and constantly droning on to everyone how right he is if not for one simple fact: He’s totally correct. He’s 100% right. Sure, I thought that Casey Anthony was probably guilty, and I was almost sure she was gonna get charged with some form of murder/manslaughter/child abuse/whatever. I also truly believe that from what little I know about this case, she had a pretty rough uphill battle to fight to not end up full of lethal injection. I mean, lack of evidence (notably cause and time of death) notwithstanding, she’s a crazy slut mom that partied for a month after her baby daughter was dead without letting anyone know, made up a nanny that didn’t exist and then eventually wound up face to face with the mutilated and decomposing corpse of her kid that she (or someone she knows) had duct taped up. Pretty fucking weird, man.
That shit is all pretty indisputable. That means that pretty much any jury, any group of even halfway reasonable people are gonna be predisposed to hate her, and with good reason. She’s obviously a nutty bitch and more than a tad insensitive. The fact that the jury is pretty much letting her walk is testament to the effectiveness of the arguments, and like it or not, that’s kind of the way this shit works.
Now, I’m not saying that I think that she’s guilty or innocent. I don’t have any idea. I DO know that I see people on the interwebs saying things like “well, sure helps to be cute and white in America” and well, of course it does. It SURE does always, in pretty much any circumstance you can drum up (barring situations like being in jail or being caught out late in a fucked up neighborhood or being cast in an interracial gangbang) it helps to be cute and white in America. But the thing is, you know who’s cuter and whiter than Casey Anthony? Her daughter. The corpse that’s all decomposed and wrapped up in duct tape. You know who curries sympathy better than anyone in this fucked up land we live in? Little white girls.
I know firsthand the effect that cute white baby girls have on people. They’re room stoppers. It’s mesmerizing, and there’s no way, since the cute white baby girl is gonna stay dead either way, that Casey Anthony’s own cute whiteness trumped her daughter’s and made people just decide that she probably needed to just be free and get on with her partying. It doesn’t make sense. The baby is far and away the sympathetic character here, not the crazy-as-shit slut mom.
So she was acquitted and now everyone is super pissed, talking about how justice wasn’t done and all that. But what I don’t get is how everyone knows. I mean, presumably the jurors were regular people who actually watched the whole trial and didn’t need to rely on the legal versions of Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann to get the synthesis of what was going on. They, like you, like me, probably don’t like Casey Anthony and think that what happened to her daughter is gross. But they were there to hear the whole thing and found her not guilty, so how the fuck does this loudmouth dipshit that I’m friends with on facebook who can’t stop running his mouth about his outrage have some sort of inside information that they don’t have? How the fuck is he so sure that the jurors are dumb and were duped and that the prosecution is corrupt and so on and so forth?
I mean, righteous indignation is an irritating character trait to begin with, and this shit is really bringing it out in motherfuckers and it’s bumming me out. Because here’s the thing: She’s gonna get pregnant again. Give it a year, tops. She’s gonna get pregnant and then this bullshit is gonna start all over again. And you know what? THEN it will be fine, because I think that even if she didn’t, in fact murder her daughter, tape up the eyes and the mouth and dump her in the woods (though, honestly I’m kind of with this asshole on facebook…how exactly did she not do that?) she’s still a crazy unfit mom who should be sterilized (for fucks sake, I need to show ID and answer questions to get into Canada but all this crazy bitch is gonna need to do to have another kid is find a dude who’s just drunk enough to bang her but not so drunk that he can’t blow a load) but she’s gonna have another kid. I would be willing to bet all of you thousands of dollars that within 2 years (max) she will be pregnant and back in the headlines (if she’s not just straight up killed by some angry mob in the next couple of weeks) because people are furious that she’s having another baby. Nancy Grace will explode.
Which is why I don’t want to focus on any of that shit. It’s gross. Party mom is gross. Dead kids as entertainment is gross. Guilty or innocent, it’s all gross. Dumb self righteous assholes getting all pissy all over the internet is gross, but that dude coming out and doing the old upper class professional version of "fuck all you assholes. fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, fuck you. Goodnight. Kiss my ass" was pretty awesome, even if he does seem like a cocksucker. He’s living the dream, and today I bet he’s booking a trip to Thailand where he’s gonna drink margaritas and fuck little kids til the cows come home, and then he’ll probably eat those cows and drink their blood.
Ah, I don’t know. Maybe he won’t drink the blood. It’s all idle speculation. I thought that was what we were all doing now, right?
Now, most of the time people never arrive at that point and on the rare occasion that they do, usually they’re so stoked that they don’t waste their energy telling old bosses and naysayers and so forth to go fuck themselves. Which is exactly why watching Casey Anthony’s lawyer’s remarks to the press yesterday was so fucking awesome.
Now, let’s get a few things out of the way: that lawyer dude looks evil as shit. He looks like the kind of guy that sits around and smokes cigars with Dick Cheney and makes jokes about the death toll in Iraq while stoking the fire with his discarded Thai child hookers. He looks like George Lucas and generally does NOT embody my notion of a ‘cool dude’ by pretty much any standards I can come up with except for the fact that he completely fucking went for it and told the world to suck his dick on national tv the first chance he got. I really respect that.
For those of you who missed it, this dude, his name is Cheney Mason (fuck, he’s even got the same name as old Six-Hearts-Dick), went out to confront the press immediately following the Casey Anthony ‘not guilty’ verdict and he essentially walked out, gave everyone a real shitty look and then said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Fuck all of you. You cocksuckers walk around blabbing like you know what the fuck you’re talking about when you clearly don’t. You’re fucking lawyers for Christ’s sake! You’re supposed to respect the process but instead you spew your ‘expertise’ all over the dumb tards that watch your crappy programming and you condemn the defendant in MY CASE based on evidence that YOU DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO and now look. You dumb cocksuckers were all wrong and I’m right. Go fuck yourselves, I’ll see you in hell. Get fucked. In conclusion, suck my balls.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as the ranting of an evil man who’s constantly shitting on others, making the world generally lamer and constantly droning on to everyone how right he is if not for one simple fact: He’s totally correct. He’s 100% right. Sure, I thought that Casey Anthony was probably guilty, and I was almost sure she was gonna get charged with some form of murder/manslaughter/child abuse/whatever. I also truly believe that from what little I know about this case, she had a pretty rough uphill battle to fight to not end up full of lethal injection. I mean, lack of evidence (notably cause and time of death) notwithstanding, she’s a crazy slut mom that partied for a month after her baby daughter was dead without letting anyone know, made up a nanny that didn’t exist and then eventually wound up face to face with the mutilated and decomposing corpse of her kid that she (or someone she knows) had duct taped up. Pretty fucking weird, man.
That shit is all pretty indisputable. That means that pretty much any jury, any group of even halfway reasonable people are gonna be predisposed to hate her, and with good reason. She’s obviously a nutty bitch and more than a tad insensitive. The fact that the jury is pretty much letting her walk is testament to the effectiveness of the arguments, and like it or not, that’s kind of the way this shit works.
Now, I’m not saying that I think that she’s guilty or innocent. I don’t have any idea. I DO know that I see people on the interwebs saying things like “well, sure helps to be cute and white in America” and well, of course it does. It SURE does always, in pretty much any circumstance you can drum up (barring situations like being in jail or being caught out late in a fucked up neighborhood or being cast in an interracial gangbang) it helps to be cute and white in America. But the thing is, you know who’s cuter and whiter than Casey Anthony? Her daughter. The corpse that’s all decomposed and wrapped up in duct tape. You know who curries sympathy better than anyone in this fucked up land we live in? Little white girls.
I know firsthand the effect that cute white baby girls have on people. They’re room stoppers. It’s mesmerizing, and there’s no way, since the cute white baby girl is gonna stay dead either way, that Casey Anthony’s own cute whiteness trumped her daughter’s and made people just decide that she probably needed to just be free and get on with her partying. It doesn’t make sense. The baby is far and away the sympathetic character here, not the crazy-as-shit slut mom.
So she was acquitted and now everyone is super pissed, talking about how justice wasn’t done and all that. But what I don’t get is how everyone knows. I mean, presumably the jurors were regular people who actually watched the whole trial and didn’t need to rely on the legal versions of Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann to get the synthesis of what was going on. They, like you, like me, probably don’t like Casey Anthony and think that what happened to her daughter is gross. But they were there to hear the whole thing and found her not guilty, so how the fuck does this loudmouth dipshit that I’m friends with on facebook who can’t stop running his mouth about his outrage have some sort of inside information that they don’t have? How the fuck is he so sure that the jurors are dumb and were duped and that the prosecution is corrupt and so on and so forth?
I mean, righteous indignation is an irritating character trait to begin with, and this shit is really bringing it out in motherfuckers and it’s bumming me out. Because here’s the thing: She’s gonna get pregnant again. Give it a year, tops. She’s gonna get pregnant and then this bullshit is gonna start all over again. And you know what? THEN it will be fine, because I think that even if she didn’t, in fact murder her daughter, tape up the eyes and the mouth and dump her in the woods (though, honestly I’m kind of with this asshole on facebook…how exactly did she not do that?) she’s still a crazy unfit mom who should be sterilized (for fucks sake, I need to show ID and answer questions to get into Canada but all this crazy bitch is gonna need to do to have another kid is find a dude who’s just drunk enough to bang her but not so drunk that he can’t blow a load) but she’s gonna have another kid. I would be willing to bet all of you thousands of dollars that within 2 years (max) she will be pregnant and back in the headlines (if she’s not just straight up killed by some angry mob in the next couple of weeks) because people are furious that she’s having another baby. Nancy Grace will explode.
Which is why I don’t want to focus on any of that shit. It’s gross. Party mom is gross. Dead kids as entertainment is gross. Guilty or innocent, it’s all gross. Dumb self righteous assholes getting all pissy all over the internet is gross, but that dude coming out and doing the old upper class professional version of "fuck all you assholes. fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, fuck you. Goodnight. Kiss my ass" was pretty awesome, even if he does seem like a cocksucker. He’s living the dream, and today I bet he’s booking a trip to Thailand where he’s gonna drink margaritas and fuck little kids til the cows come home, and then he’ll probably eat those cows and drink their blood.
Ah, I don’t know. Maybe he won’t drink the blood. It’s all idle speculation. I thought that was what we were all doing now, right?
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
here's a FASCINATING hypothetical for you!
If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would you choose?
This is probably the most generic “let’s get inside your head” question bandied about in the western, English speaking world. It’s a hypothetical that’s intended to illuminate the personality of the person being asked by highlighting their ultimate choice for companionship in a sophisticated setting (meaning, the question isn’t ‘who would you most like to pummel/fuck/get high with/be trapped on an island with [all of which are vastly more interesting questions requiring much more careful consideration, btw]). It’s just a dinner. That means that the considerations are pretty much limited to conversation and maybe food.
This is the question that your ‘cool’ (creepy) uncle asks your best friend and that every beauty pageant contestant is forced to answer at least once. This question is asked in almost every major media, softball, quasi-in-depth interview with ‘important’ people. It’s the ultimate way to allow people to sculpt their image and freely bullshit without really thinking about it. Watch:
“Oh, Gandhi. I’m fascinated by his ethical stance on revolution. I’d love to get inside his mind and see what can make a man simultaneously break all the rules while creating an extremely prescriptive set of new rules for himself.”
Or
“Genghis Kahn, because he’s simultaneously a brilliant tactician and a barbarian. He’s the first superpower, and a walking id that’s also the father of imperialism. That’s a rare combination of volatile genius that I’d love to experience.”
These are just off the top of my head and I don’t agree with either of these at all, just by the way. Gandhi would probably be a bit out of my league, intellectually and spiritually, and Genghis Kahn would undoubtedly kill me and neither of those situations sound like a good way to spend a dinner (it DOES bear mentioning that these two meals would be entirely opposite, cuisine wise. It’s chickpeas vs. Horse legs). However, it’s all moot because they’re dead. I can SAY that I want to eat with either of these people and, since there’s never a follow up to this question, I can sound like I’m an adherent to nonviolence and fascinated by self discipline or that I’m deeply engrossed in the psyche of highly contradictory, complex individuals; I can seem deep and interested in lots of things (hence interesting) without really being interested OR interesting.
It’s a totally stupid question/exercise. And here’s the thing: it becomes even stupider once you realize that the two answers above are NEVER going to be someone’s answer because EVERYONE answers this question by naming one of four types of people. Those are:
1) someone in their own family who they admire (usually dead)
2) a living celebrity that is extremely famous that they’re obsessed with (like Lady Gaga or Robert Pattinson)
3) Someone that they find to be extremely sexually attractive (Brad Pitt, Lexi Belle)
4) Jesus
In fact, almost EVERYONE says Jesus, and that’s because Jesus is a great answer (actually, this is a lot more complicated than this. Jesus IS a great answer because he’s easily the most polarizing figure that’s ever lived. He obviously had a lot of charisma and besides Ronald McDonald, there’s no one that’s ever been more famous. He’s also worshipped as a god and despite your own opinion on his deism, there’s no doubt that dining with someone that people herald as the walking, talking creator would be pretty fucking wild. The thing is that since so many people say Jesus, it’s become the only answer that anyone looking to curry favor with the masses can say. For example, Obama, when asked this question, HAS to say Jesus because otherwise he looks like a Kenyan Muslim Cigarette Smoking Socialist Infidel [this reminds me, very tangentially and quickly, of the guy working at the fireworks stand in Gravois Mills Missouri who I bought roman candles from this weekend. He was skinny with a mustache and a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear. He wore a hat that said “I’ll keep my money, guns and freedom. You keep the change.” The implication here clearly being that Barack is a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth and take away guns and freedom. Hey asshole, you work part time at a fucking FIREWORKS STAND in one of the poorest counties in America. If ANYONE could do with a little socialism, it’s you, you fucking hillbilly dipshit] simply because EVERY other president has already said Jesus, and to NOT jump at the chance to have dinner with Jesus, well, you’re pretty much a terrorist that hates America and freedom. Bush said Jesus. So did Reagan. And Clinton. And well, pretty much everyone. How can you not say Jesus? What are you saying? You hate Jesus? So yeah, Jesus is actually a default answer that’s become bad because it’s so predictable, the fact that he really would be fascinating notwithstanding), and I don’t know if, given the opportunity, I could really handle turning down a dinner with Jesus.
However, as the long and interrupted parenthetical note in the last paragraph spelled out, it’s a pretty stock answer at this point, one that should be eliminated from contention if this question is to ever do anything interesting. So who would it be? Who would it be?
Immediately, the other three categories come to mind. It’s either gonna be someone famous you’re thoroughly fascinated with, someone that you’re dying to bone, or someone from your family. My wife picked her paternal grandmother last night while I was conducting (almost no) research for this column, proving my theory correct. The only people who say someone they want to bang are mongoloid dudes and teenaged girls who get boning and love and celebrity fascination all mixed up into one grand and overwhelming emotion (but that’s a lot of people). Everyone else just knee-jerks to the one interesting turd from the one movie/album/show they’re currently obsessed with. Truly however, even with the restriction, almost everyone says Jesus anway, so this whole exercise is somewhat academic.
Also, (and this is an untested theory, but if I know anything at all about human nature I’d be willing to bet it’s almost 100% accurate) once anyone reads any sort of prediction about what EVERYONE will answer when asked a certain hypothetical question, all of those people will end up answering in such a way that works against the theory at hand just to prove to themselves and the cocksure asshole that went ahead and put words in their mouth that they are, in fact, fascinating individuals with unique opinions. So go ahead and tell me that you’d have dinner with Dustin Diamond or Ed O’neil or Ben Franklin or Hubert Selby Jr. or Charlotte Bronte or Mario Andretti or Johnny Cash or Cliff Burton or Ed Gein if it makes you feel better.
I know you were about to say Megan Fox. Jesus.
This is probably the most generic “let’s get inside your head” question bandied about in the western, English speaking world. It’s a hypothetical that’s intended to illuminate the personality of the person being asked by highlighting their ultimate choice for companionship in a sophisticated setting (meaning, the question isn’t ‘who would you most like to pummel/fuck/get high with/be trapped on an island with [all of which are vastly more interesting questions requiring much more careful consideration, btw]). It’s just a dinner. That means that the considerations are pretty much limited to conversation and maybe food.
This is the question that your ‘cool’ (creepy) uncle asks your best friend and that every beauty pageant contestant is forced to answer at least once. This question is asked in almost every major media, softball, quasi-in-depth interview with ‘important’ people. It’s the ultimate way to allow people to sculpt their image and freely bullshit without really thinking about it. Watch:
“Oh, Gandhi. I’m fascinated by his ethical stance on revolution. I’d love to get inside his mind and see what can make a man simultaneously break all the rules while creating an extremely prescriptive set of new rules for himself.”
Or
“Genghis Kahn, because he’s simultaneously a brilliant tactician and a barbarian. He’s the first superpower, and a walking id that’s also the father of imperialism. That’s a rare combination of volatile genius that I’d love to experience.”
These are just off the top of my head and I don’t agree with either of these at all, just by the way. Gandhi would probably be a bit out of my league, intellectually and spiritually, and Genghis Kahn would undoubtedly kill me and neither of those situations sound like a good way to spend a dinner (it DOES bear mentioning that these two meals would be entirely opposite, cuisine wise. It’s chickpeas vs. Horse legs). However, it’s all moot because they’re dead. I can SAY that I want to eat with either of these people and, since there’s never a follow up to this question, I can sound like I’m an adherent to nonviolence and fascinated by self discipline or that I’m deeply engrossed in the psyche of highly contradictory, complex individuals; I can seem deep and interested in lots of things (hence interesting) without really being interested OR interesting.
It’s a totally stupid question/exercise. And here’s the thing: it becomes even stupider once you realize that the two answers above are NEVER going to be someone’s answer because EVERYONE answers this question by naming one of four types of people. Those are:
1) someone in their own family who they admire (usually dead)
2) a living celebrity that is extremely famous that they’re obsessed with (like Lady Gaga or Robert Pattinson)
3) Someone that they find to be extremely sexually attractive (Brad Pitt, Lexi Belle)
4) Jesus
In fact, almost EVERYONE says Jesus, and that’s because Jesus is a great answer (actually, this is a lot more complicated than this. Jesus IS a great answer because he’s easily the most polarizing figure that’s ever lived. He obviously had a lot of charisma and besides Ronald McDonald, there’s no one that’s ever been more famous. He’s also worshipped as a god and despite your own opinion on his deism, there’s no doubt that dining with someone that people herald as the walking, talking creator would be pretty fucking wild. The thing is that since so many people say Jesus, it’s become the only answer that anyone looking to curry favor with the masses can say. For example, Obama, when asked this question, HAS to say Jesus because otherwise he looks like a Kenyan Muslim Cigarette Smoking Socialist Infidel [this reminds me, very tangentially and quickly, of the guy working at the fireworks stand in Gravois Mills Missouri who I bought roman candles from this weekend. He was skinny with a mustache and a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear. He wore a hat that said “I’ll keep my money, guns and freedom. You keep the change.” The implication here clearly being that Barack is a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth and take away guns and freedom. Hey asshole, you work part time at a fucking FIREWORKS STAND in one of the poorest counties in America. If ANYONE could do with a little socialism, it’s you, you fucking hillbilly dipshit] simply because EVERY other president has already said Jesus, and to NOT jump at the chance to have dinner with Jesus, well, you’re pretty much a terrorist that hates America and freedom. Bush said Jesus. So did Reagan. And Clinton. And well, pretty much everyone. How can you not say Jesus? What are you saying? You hate Jesus? So yeah, Jesus is actually a default answer that’s become bad because it’s so predictable, the fact that he really would be fascinating notwithstanding), and I don’t know if, given the opportunity, I could really handle turning down a dinner with Jesus.
However, as the long and interrupted parenthetical note in the last paragraph spelled out, it’s a pretty stock answer at this point, one that should be eliminated from contention if this question is to ever do anything interesting. So who would it be? Who would it be?
Immediately, the other three categories come to mind. It’s either gonna be someone famous you’re thoroughly fascinated with, someone that you’re dying to bone, or someone from your family. My wife picked her paternal grandmother last night while I was conducting (almost no) research for this column, proving my theory correct. The only people who say someone they want to bang are mongoloid dudes and teenaged girls who get boning and love and celebrity fascination all mixed up into one grand and overwhelming emotion (but that’s a lot of people). Everyone else just knee-jerks to the one interesting turd from the one movie/album/show they’re currently obsessed with. Truly however, even with the restriction, almost everyone says Jesus anway, so this whole exercise is somewhat academic.
Also, (and this is an untested theory, but if I know anything at all about human nature I’d be willing to bet it’s almost 100% accurate) once anyone reads any sort of prediction about what EVERYONE will answer when asked a certain hypothetical question, all of those people will end up answering in such a way that works against the theory at hand just to prove to themselves and the cocksure asshole that went ahead and put words in their mouth that they are, in fact, fascinating individuals with unique opinions. So go ahead and tell me that you’d have dinner with Dustin Diamond or Ed O’neil or Ben Franklin or Hubert Selby Jr. or Charlotte Bronte or Mario Andretti or Johnny Cash or Cliff Burton or Ed Gein if it makes you feel better.
I know you were about to say Megan Fox. Jesus.
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