Which seat should I take?

Goooooood morning! This timechange is fucking up my whole program, but I don’t REALLY care, because the feeling of waking up and looking at the clock and seeing it say “730” is rewarding somehow, even if my body is still waking up at the same time. It’s nice out today and I had a good weekend and I’m ready to face the universe today, which is not usually my program during the beginning of the week.

As some of you may know, I spent the weekend in Austin at the film festival part of sxsw and it was pretty cool. I met some really great people and I think I may have even made a connection or two that could wind up being helpful in selling my movie. Nothing terribly lifechanging happened, but it wasn’t a bust, which is uh…pretty good considering I went down there with no place to stay, no badge, no real contacts to speak of and nothing but my farty charm and grating sense of humor. Someone in a position of actual power in Hollywood did tell me that I looked “neither young nor dynamic” during a brief chat at a party, which I thought was a pretty good way to put it. Maybe that’ll be the name of my solo record. “Brendan Kelly: Neither Young Nor Dynamic” Then you kids can call it BK:NYND. Pretty snappy name….anyway, let’s get to the point for today.

Obviously, some terrible stuff has gone down in Japan recently and there really seems like no end in sight. In fact, it seems like it may all get worse before it gets better. In my experience, Japan is one of the most welcoming and generous places I’ve ever been. It’s really heartbreaking to see all this footage (especially that footage or the fishing boat caught in the whirlpool. That, for whatever reason made my spine tingle more than any of the other horrors that were broadcast immediately following the earthquake/tsunami). I came home from Austin a little bit giddy after a much needed vacation and a fairly successful business trip, and I was fully expecting to come crashing back to reality, bombarded with even more images and tales of horror from Japan.

And there were some of those, for sure. 2000 bodies floating in the sea…that’s grim shit. (That’s so grim that it would be a good name for a really brutal band. I’m not trying to make light of anything here, but 2000 Bodies Floating In the Sea is too good of a band name to just pretend it’s not there. Okay, just sayin). But the world, and our societal focus had definitely shifted by the time I got home. And to what?

This.

Now, I get it. I do. Really. It’s bad. Ha. Ha. Ha. Okay. It’s even REALLY bad. But really? This is worth all the commotion? I’ve gotten this fucking link so many times in the last 36 hours that I’ve gone from curious to fascinated, to bored to deeply disappointed. Look, I’m all for people mocking the shit out of one another, and I’ve said it right here in this space (about myself even) that you shouldn’t dare try and entertain people if you don’t want to be mercilessly ridiculed and have your self esteem put to the ultimate endurance test, but really everyone? Really whole world? We’ve got one of the nicest nations on earth floating in a sea of corpses and nuclear runoff and we’re all going apeshit because some thirteen year old girl didn’t fully flesh out her abilities before attempting to pull off a manifestation of her dream? Sad. That’s what it is. It’s just sad.

For those of you who don’t want to click on the link, it’s to a video for a song called Friday by a girl named Rebecca Black. My research reveals that she’s 13. The song, no doubt about it, sucks ass. The video is lame and the whole thing smacks of…well, of being a collaboration with a thirteen year old. Apparently, the sort of mob mentality here is: How dare this dumb, untalented little rich girl use the tools at her disposal to do her best version of something when it’s so bad. She didn’t even write the song! She’s got a label! This REALLY SUCKS! IS IT THE WORST SONG EVER?”

Well, yeah. It sucks. It does, but so what? I guess maybe (to take back my earlier statement) I just don’t get it, actually. I don’t care for making fun of someone so young just doing what they want to do. I mean, when I was thirteen I had lots of really half cocked, retarded ideas about who I wanted to be when I grew up. I briefly considered being a pro basketball player, for example, and I played basketball as badly, if not significantly worse, than Rebecca Black sings. I was a pretty half assed skateboarder. I even wrote and performed horrendous songs. The difference was that I didn’t have an avenue with which to put those songs and other assorted efforts in front of the world. But if I had, it would have undoubtedly be disastrous and that’s the part that bugs me about this: Thirteen is an age where you’re doing ALL SORTS of stupid shit and doing it poorly to boot. The general sentiment that I’m getting from the world at large here is “wow, ha ha! Thank god I was too shy/unconnected/cowardly/smart to attempt anything when I was still young and dumb. Look how fucking poorly it turns out!”

Man, that’s terrible. And people make fun of this girl because she’s rich enough to do something like this? Well, what the fuck does that have to do with her? She’s 13! If I was presented the opportunity to do something like make a video the world would see when I was thirteen, I would have jumped on it, whether it was from my wealthy dad trying to help me realize my dream or from some weird indie record label in LA (that's actually just a production house that produces high quality videos for dumb kids with popstar dreams [most likely at the expense of their [gasp!] rich parents). She’s just a kid, man. She’s just a kid who wants to sing. I mean, she’s not even particularly aggressive or shitty in the video. She sits in the back seat for fucks sake! She’s not ‘fronting’ on you or anyone else. She's not even the alpha dog in her own video! She clearly isn’t presenting herself as anything more than a young girl doing her best impersonation of the music she likes with her friends. What a monster.

Look, I realize I’m being a wet blanket and that this is hardly a big deal…except our world has MADE it a big deal. I mean, I dunno. Let’s see what happens. Maybe it’ll be revealed that this whole thing is the product of some Banksy-esque genius and ‘rebecca black’ is really a 27 year old Parisian man and the whole thing’s a farce and all that. Then, the joke will be on who? Me? All of us? I dunno, but man…I dunno. Seems shitty.
Yup.