Okay, so this show is coming up this weekend. This Sunday, April 3rd, I’ll be dazzling the Beat Kitchen with my own unique take on what music sounds like when filtered through a dirty man with questionable talents and I would like to encourage all of you to go, if for no other reason than I’ve been practicing and it’ll really suck if I did all this practicing (at the expense of taking care of my children and personal safety, mind you) and then no one showed up to see the wonderfully halfassed results. I mean, this shit’s gonna be poppin off, y’all. Are the kids still saying that kind of thing?
Good.
Okay, I’m highly uninspired today. I started writing about what a dildo Fred Phelps is, and I was gonna segue into Kirk Cameron and make some kind of wacky correlation that proves that closeted homosexual self-loathers are some of the most fucked up people on earth, but it just seems like that’s not really that interesting. I was also gonna touch on my weekend, which was DEFINITELY not interesting, even though I went to a hockey game and had a good time watching two gigantic black twins (dudes) make fun of a trashy drunk mom while we were all crammed into an elevator….ah, good times.
Anyway, the long and short of this is that today, I’m out of ideas, but it’s Monday and I know you all need SOMETHING to do while you’re taking dumps, so here’s this, the most content-free BSC entry in some time. I don’t have anything nice to say, nor do I have anything negative to say. I hate Mondays…I guess that could be construed as negative…BUT! One of my favorite dudes is coming to visit me this week, so that hatred is tempered by enthusiasm for the near future. Also, I’ve got that show, which means I’ll be seeing some of you, my lovely Dogs of War, and that’s a pretty great thing too.
Ah fuck. That’s all. I dunno. Maybe I’ll close with a joke.
This joke was first told to me by the incomparable Pete Anna one day when we were making the journey between Elgin and Chicago (which direction we were going escapes me) in his red Jeep, probably fifteen years ago. It goes like this:
A penguin decided he wanted to take a road trip. He had never really been out of Antarctica and really wanted to check out the States, so he flew to Miami and rented a car with the intent of driving to San Diego before flying home. Well, everything is going swimmingly until, somewhere in the middle of Texas when the ‘low oil pressure’ light comes on. “That’s not good” says the penguin. he pulls off the highway and as luck would have it, finds a small town with a service station.
The mechanic tells the penguin to hang out for about an hour while he figures out what’s wrong with the car. The penguin decides to walk around and check out the little town and return back in an hour. So, he’s walking along and he sees an ice cream parlor. Now, penguins LOVE ice cream, so he runs in and gets a large cone before continuing on his way. BUT, the cone begins to melt in the heat of the Texas sun and the penguin, having only flippers, was ill equipped to deal with the drippings. By the time he arrived back at the service station, he was a sticky mess.
The penguin walked up to the mechanic and says “so, did you figure out what was wrong with my car?”
The mechanic says “Looks like you blew a seal” and the penguin says “what this? No. This is ice cream.”
There you go folks. Pretty good joke. Share it with someone you love.
xoxoxox
Monday, March 28, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
ah, sentimentality
I remember seeing Tim McIlrath’s old band, Baxter at a VFW hall in Arlington Heights Il. for the first time. My band, the Broadways, were loading in and this group of kids, fronted by a crazy looking dude with a wild afro were playing this weird blend of hardcore, metal, emo and pop punk. I turned to one of my dudes (I think it was Dan, but it may have been Chris [or honestly, knowing the way I tend to repeat myself, it was probably both of them]) and I said “mark my words, that dude is gonna be famous someday.”
As long as I’ve known Joe, he’s been one of the most driven and dedicated people I’ve ever encountered. He’s not only a great bassist, but he’s also so fucking determined to be a great bassist, and that’s a distinction that’s important. Once you’re the best, if you maintain the drive that got you there, you’re onto something. If you sit back and rest on your laurels, you’re just another person who was briefly interesting for a second. Interesting fact about Joe: he almost exclusively eats Italian food, or at least that was true when I used to see him regularly. It was ALWAYS pizza or pasta, and never anything else. It’s amazing he’s not six hundred pounds.
I could go through and talk about Zack (a nice dude who was in GWAR [which is amazing] and who’s always been super cool to me, but who I don’t really know very well) and Brandon (a great hang, one of the most fun people on this earth to get into trouble with) but that’s not really the point. I’ve known Joe and Tim forever and they just had a record that debuted at #1 in Canada and #2 in the US and that’s fucking incredible. I’m super, super proud to say that I’m from the same page in history as those dudes, even if my name is written much smaller (and please, that’s not some sort of attempt to fish for compliments or me belittling my own relevance with false modesty. I’m stoked for what my band has done and I wouldn’t rather be in any other band in the world [except maybe Millionaires]).
There’s a lot of shit talk out there in the world of punk rock these days, and if there’s any lesson to be learned from it, it’s that that kind of shit is sort of poisonous and lame. There’s a difference between having an opinion on something and being an asshole. There’s a difference between friendly competition and smarmy bullshit. There’s a weird, increasingly prevalent mentality where people seem content to turn their rifles on each other rather than shooting outwards, at the whole shitty world that corralled us into this subculture in the first place.
I mean, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t call people out for doing stupid things, or that you can’t say that something sucks when it does, only the most small minded pussies in the world would say something like that, but what I am saying is that it seems like there’s not enough positivity being sent out there in the kind of grand, visible stream of collective consciousness that negativity so often treads in, and today man…I’m super stoked for some friends that I knew back when I was a kid that have pulled off a truly amazing feat for a punk rock band, or any musician for that matter.
Bottoms up, Rise Against! (heh…that’s a funny, funny thing to say.)
Okay, I’m out of here. I’m going on about 5 hours of sleep. Time to dust my dick off and get outside.
As long as I’ve known Joe, he’s been one of the most driven and dedicated people I’ve ever encountered. He’s not only a great bassist, but he’s also so fucking determined to be a great bassist, and that’s a distinction that’s important. Once you’re the best, if you maintain the drive that got you there, you’re onto something. If you sit back and rest on your laurels, you’re just another person who was briefly interesting for a second. Interesting fact about Joe: he almost exclusively eats Italian food, or at least that was true when I used to see him regularly. It was ALWAYS pizza or pasta, and never anything else. It’s amazing he’s not six hundred pounds.
I could go through and talk about Zack (a nice dude who was in GWAR [which is amazing] and who’s always been super cool to me, but who I don’t really know very well) and Brandon (a great hang, one of the most fun people on this earth to get into trouble with) but that’s not really the point. I’ve known Joe and Tim forever and they just had a record that debuted at #1 in Canada and #2 in the US and that’s fucking incredible. I’m super, super proud to say that I’m from the same page in history as those dudes, even if my name is written much smaller (and please, that’s not some sort of attempt to fish for compliments or me belittling my own relevance with false modesty. I’m stoked for what my band has done and I wouldn’t rather be in any other band in the world [except maybe Millionaires]).
There’s a lot of shit talk out there in the world of punk rock these days, and if there’s any lesson to be learned from it, it’s that that kind of shit is sort of poisonous and lame. There’s a difference between having an opinion on something and being an asshole. There’s a difference between friendly competition and smarmy bullshit. There’s a weird, increasingly prevalent mentality where people seem content to turn their rifles on each other rather than shooting outwards, at the whole shitty world that corralled us into this subculture in the first place.
I mean, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t call people out for doing stupid things, or that you can’t say that something sucks when it does, only the most small minded pussies in the world would say something like that, but what I am saying is that it seems like there’s not enough positivity being sent out there in the kind of grand, visible stream of collective consciousness that negativity so often treads in, and today man…I’m super stoked for some friends that I knew back when I was a kid that have pulled off a truly amazing feat for a punk rock band, or any musician for that matter.
Bottoms up, Rise Against! (heh…that’s a funny, funny thing to say.)
Okay, I’m out of here. I’m going on about 5 hours of sleep. Time to dust my dick off and get outside.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
I'm gonna howl now
Well, Liz Taylor is dead and on television I just found some asshole pre-teens advertising something called “Kidz Bop” to my 2 year old (no small feat considering that this ad is on an educational channel which specifically promises to never have advertising…I guess Kidz Bop is such a good product that they fudge the rules for it).
Liz Taylor was extremely beautiful for a long time. She was Cleopatra. She got married, got divorced, got married again, she was kind of like the horseshoe crab version of Madonna, in that she was a different breed of ‘take no bullshit’ kind of woman than the staunchly anti-fun, anti-male types that people tend to think of when they think of anything surrounding the idea of women’s rights (though that’s completely stupid. It’s about the same as thinking that everyone in the army is a moron or everyone that’s Mexican in the US hopped a fence or swam to get here…but that’s a whole other deal).
Liz Taylor kind of took ‘slut’ and turned it into ‘go fuck yourself,’ which is pretty cool. She was classy and hot and then she got old and crazy (you’ve all seen her howl at the moon when, near the end of her life, that reporter asks her if she’s gonna marry again, right? It’s worth a google if you haven’t. Wow) and she hung out with Michael Jackson and I dunno, man. She was an original and her actual life was a work of experimental art. It’s sad that she’s dead. What’s left? Kidz Bop.
Now, Kidz Bop, for those of you who don’t know, is a CD of hit songs as sung by kids. So, it’s the tunes of dipshits like Jason Derulo, BOB, that one douche with the real soft voice…Mark Posner, shit like that. Some of these people are little more than kids themselves and the whole thing seems to wildly vacillate between completely irrelevant and vaguely offensive. I mean, I really don’t have a problem with kids listening to whatever songs they want. I had a rogue copy of 2 Live Crew’s “Hey, we want some pussy” that I listened to on headphones when I was a wee lad, and aside from being a jobless waste of space with a penchant for foul language, I turned out okay. It’s just more that I don’t want to hear kids singing about lighting up clubs or fucking on the dancefloor, not because it’s salacious, but because it’s fucking stupid. These kids don’t even know what they’re singing. Nope. Actually, they really, truly don’t. Let me give you an example.
The song 50 Things by the Dead Milkmen was a big part of the soundtrack of my middleschool years, when I was approximately the age of the kids in the Kidz Bop ads, and it featured the line “no, I haven’t got any pills. No, I haven’t got any hash” and I thought that it referred to vitamins and corned beef hash. I thought the song was literally about getting your day started right, with a hearty breakfast and some vitamin C.
Now, it’s completely possible that this could be because I was stupid, but it’s more likely simply because I was a kid. Even though I did shit like write graffiti and look at playboys and ride skateboards and follow skateboarding and punk rock culture through magazines I sent away for, and even though I hung out with the dude that ran the bong shop that was located inside the skateboard shop, and I heard people talking about drugs and stuff, I just NEVER even considered that the song would be referring to ACTUAL pills and hash. Here’s the weird part: I didn’t realize what this song was really about until I was in my late 20s, and to this day, I still vaguely associate that song with breakfast.
My point is, kids don’t pick up on direct references, so they definitely don’t pick up on Usher’s euphemisms for getting head. I dunno, maybe they do. Maybe the kids are just that much more sophisticated than they were. I guess that’s entirely possible.
I mean, what happened to that simple time when a young girl from Arkansas could grow up and marry 8 times and hang out with a manchild with an ape for a best friend? What happened to that golden, bygone era of sweetness?
RIP Liz Taylor.
Liz Taylor was extremely beautiful for a long time. She was Cleopatra. She got married, got divorced, got married again, she was kind of like the horseshoe crab version of Madonna, in that she was a different breed of ‘take no bullshit’ kind of woman than the staunchly anti-fun, anti-male types that people tend to think of when they think of anything surrounding the idea of women’s rights (though that’s completely stupid. It’s about the same as thinking that everyone in the army is a moron or everyone that’s Mexican in the US hopped a fence or swam to get here…but that’s a whole other deal).
Liz Taylor kind of took ‘slut’ and turned it into ‘go fuck yourself,’ which is pretty cool. She was classy and hot and then she got old and crazy (you’ve all seen her howl at the moon when, near the end of her life, that reporter asks her if she’s gonna marry again, right? It’s worth a google if you haven’t. Wow) and she hung out with Michael Jackson and I dunno, man. She was an original and her actual life was a work of experimental art. It’s sad that she’s dead. What’s left? Kidz Bop.
Now, Kidz Bop, for those of you who don’t know, is a CD of hit songs as sung by kids. So, it’s the tunes of dipshits like Jason Derulo, BOB, that one douche with the real soft voice…Mark Posner, shit like that. Some of these people are little more than kids themselves and the whole thing seems to wildly vacillate between completely irrelevant and vaguely offensive. I mean, I really don’t have a problem with kids listening to whatever songs they want. I had a rogue copy of 2 Live Crew’s “Hey, we want some pussy” that I listened to on headphones when I was a wee lad, and aside from being a jobless waste of space with a penchant for foul language, I turned out okay. It’s just more that I don’t want to hear kids singing about lighting up clubs or fucking on the dancefloor, not because it’s salacious, but because it’s fucking stupid. These kids don’t even know what they’re singing. Nope. Actually, they really, truly don’t. Let me give you an example.
The song 50 Things by the Dead Milkmen was a big part of the soundtrack of my middleschool years, when I was approximately the age of the kids in the Kidz Bop ads, and it featured the line “no, I haven’t got any pills. No, I haven’t got any hash” and I thought that it referred to vitamins and corned beef hash. I thought the song was literally about getting your day started right, with a hearty breakfast and some vitamin C.
Now, it’s completely possible that this could be because I was stupid, but it’s more likely simply because I was a kid. Even though I did shit like write graffiti and look at playboys and ride skateboards and follow skateboarding and punk rock culture through magazines I sent away for, and even though I hung out with the dude that ran the bong shop that was located inside the skateboard shop, and I heard people talking about drugs and stuff, I just NEVER even considered that the song would be referring to ACTUAL pills and hash. Here’s the weird part: I didn’t realize what this song was really about until I was in my late 20s, and to this day, I still vaguely associate that song with breakfast.
My point is, kids don’t pick up on direct references, so they definitely don’t pick up on Usher’s euphemisms for getting head. I dunno, maybe they do. Maybe the kids are just that much more sophisticated than they were. I guess that’s entirely possible.
I mean, what happened to that simple time when a young girl from Arkansas could grow up and marry 8 times and hang out with a manchild with an ape for a best friend? What happened to that golden, bygone era of sweetness?
RIP Liz Taylor.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Trust Jesus
Okay, let’s get this out of the way first. I have a show coming up that first Sunday in April (the 3rd) at the Beat Kitchen. It’s just gonna be me and my lovely guitar and voice and the whole thing should be a pretty good time. Dave from the Arrivals is playing acoustic, along with the full band stylings of the Haverchucks and The White Wives (which features two of your favorite Chrises from Anti Flag). Come down, have some fun and stagger home drunk, or at least drunk on punk…or spunk, depending on what you’re into. I can’t predict nor can I control the actions or sets of anyone else, but I can promise that I’m gonna be totally great up there. That alone should be enough reason for you to come out. Don’t be a pussy. Bring your friends, or if you’re a loser with no friends, bring a pocket of drugs. Expect new songs and old favorites, lots of singing from everyone around and a pretty low key atmosphere. Is that cool? Can we still do stuff like that? I just did this kind of thing in Denver and it was amazing, and that was booked in like a week. Don’t let me down Chicago. They may have the weed depositories and the mountains, but we’ve got the weirdos, right? Of course we do!
See you there.
Now onto our regularly scheduled prepared remarks.
The best crime involves art. I think that of all crime in that’s ever been concocted in the history of the world, graffiti is by far the coolest. I mean, putting up ‘illegal art’ is so awesome sounding that it conjures up visions of rebel artists and rouge designers battling in the shadows against an all-powerful, joyless military state, and I guess on some level that’s what’s going on (if you’re a hyper dramatic dork), but really, practically, it’s kind of about going around the corner on the train and seeing a huge, brand new mural illegally installed on some roof duct of some shitty warehouse. It looks cool, but that’s just part of it. It’s also like a weird rare flower or something that only blooms for a few days and then it’s gone forever.
The impermanence of graffiti is a huge part of what makes it so cool. But then there are some pieces that beat the odds and stick around forever. The whole thing is a dice game with no basis in quality or anything. In that way, graffiti may be the most tragically perfect reflection of humanity that we’ve ever come across in art. Much in the same way that John Lennon and Len Bias were senselessly scrubbed off the earth after a short time but your creepy pederast great uncle lived to be 90, a beautiful and poignant stencil or mural, meticulously crafted with its surroundings in mind, may be up for as little as twelve hours, but that dumb, hastily sprayed potleaf on your garage may stick around for forty years.
And yeah, it bears mentioning that most graffiti is more like the latter than the former. Like all art, or all of anything, most of it sucks and just a fraction is good. Now, I’m by no means an expert on graffiti, but I used to do a little graffiti writing when I was in highschool (I really never wrote much of anywhere but on newspaper boxes in my neighborhood and in the school bathrooms, and I abandoned the hobby when I realized that I was terrible at it, and I could go to jail. I stuck with guitar, which I was[am] also terrible at, but which is vastly less illegal) and I’ve followed the progression of the genre just a little here and there, and as such, I’ve got some pretty half cocked opinions on the matter.
The best graffiti, hands down is the stuff done by burnouts. The pentagram out by the drainage ditch, the words “zeppelin rulez” on the back of the highschool, the weird nicknames like “Stinky Dave” or “The Falcon” (which is, not coincidentally where the band name comes from…it’s an imaginary burnout’s tag. It’s funny, because people always ask me what Lawrence Arms means, but the story is dull. The Falcon actually has a cool genesis, and it’s never been brought up…goes to show: don’t think about anything ever, because no one else cares). After that, I like the stuff that’s real non traditional, the stuff that doesn’t look like what you expect from graffiti. The weirder the better as far as I’m concerned. My very favorite artist is a dude named Alexandre Orion from Brazil. He’s great. I think Banksy is great too (I hear a lot of people out there groaning, but hype machine notwithstanding, he’s doing really cool things and breaking the laws of art in new and exciting ways. I mean, he put his own shit up in the Louvre for fucks sake! That’s cool, and if you don’t think so you’re A) lame or B) lame and old) but I like anything that’s not just that shitty 90’s wildstyle with the ghetto duck dudes hanging around. So, if you come across someone who, say, hastily brush painted a shitty, drippy tv on the side of a walmart with pink interior paint, that’s cool, but a big thing that you can’t read that’s all blended and pro with some kind of dumb character next to it, that shit is wack. That’s my feeling on the whole thing.
Coming in after the weird stuff is the retro NYC in 1980 shit. Bubble letters and turntables and shit like that. That stuff is pretty neat, just because it seems like it’s mostly done by people who have a really weird idea of what’s going on. Now, I’m sure there are hipsters and stuff who paint that old school stuff as a tribute or whatever, and that’s okay I guess, but there’s still a TON of that shit around NY (and by extension the whole country/world) that’s obviously done by people who are trying as hard as they can to be relevant, with no idea that they’re doing something in a style that went out of favor and came back twice already, and that’s the stuff I’m really talking about.
But graffiti is just one facet of art crime. People who forge works of the masters or art thieves, who steal famous art from museums and sell it to weird sheiks who don’t care that they’re housing something hugely famous that they can’t really show anyone, that shit is incredible. It’s just a simple truth. Any crime is cooler once art is involved. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Killing Dimebag wasn’t cool. That was lame. I mean, frankly, music may be the exception to the art-crime corollary. Nothing criminal is cool just because it happens around music. I guess it’s pretty much just a visual art thing, actually, because forging, say, a Mark Twain diary or going into the sewers with swords to act like Frodo seems more like the pursuit of a dork than a cool work of criminal genius.
Eh, who knows? I’m off to the aquarium.
See you there.
Now onto our regularly scheduled prepared remarks.
The best crime involves art. I think that of all crime in that’s ever been concocted in the history of the world, graffiti is by far the coolest. I mean, putting up ‘illegal art’ is so awesome sounding that it conjures up visions of rebel artists and rouge designers battling in the shadows against an all-powerful, joyless military state, and I guess on some level that’s what’s going on (if you’re a hyper dramatic dork), but really, practically, it’s kind of about going around the corner on the train and seeing a huge, brand new mural illegally installed on some roof duct of some shitty warehouse. It looks cool, but that’s just part of it. It’s also like a weird rare flower or something that only blooms for a few days and then it’s gone forever.
The impermanence of graffiti is a huge part of what makes it so cool. But then there are some pieces that beat the odds and stick around forever. The whole thing is a dice game with no basis in quality or anything. In that way, graffiti may be the most tragically perfect reflection of humanity that we’ve ever come across in art. Much in the same way that John Lennon and Len Bias were senselessly scrubbed off the earth after a short time but your creepy pederast great uncle lived to be 90, a beautiful and poignant stencil or mural, meticulously crafted with its surroundings in mind, may be up for as little as twelve hours, but that dumb, hastily sprayed potleaf on your garage may stick around for forty years.
And yeah, it bears mentioning that most graffiti is more like the latter than the former. Like all art, or all of anything, most of it sucks and just a fraction is good. Now, I’m by no means an expert on graffiti, but I used to do a little graffiti writing when I was in highschool (I really never wrote much of anywhere but on newspaper boxes in my neighborhood and in the school bathrooms, and I abandoned the hobby when I realized that I was terrible at it, and I could go to jail. I stuck with guitar, which I was[am] also terrible at, but which is vastly less illegal) and I’ve followed the progression of the genre just a little here and there, and as such, I’ve got some pretty half cocked opinions on the matter.
The best graffiti, hands down is the stuff done by burnouts. The pentagram out by the drainage ditch, the words “zeppelin rulez” on the back of the highschool, the weird nicknames like “Stinky Dave” or “The Falcon” (which is, not coincidentally where the band name comes from…it’s an imaginary burnout’s tag. It’s funny, because people always ask me what Lawrence Arms means, but the story is dull. The Falcon actually has a cool genesis, and it’s never been brought up…goes to show: don’t think about anything ever, because no one else cares). After that, I like the stuff that’s real non traditional, the stuff that doesn’t look like what you expect from graffiti. The weirder the better as far as I’m concerned. My very favorite artist is a dude named Alexandre Orion from Brazil. He’s great. I think Banksy is great too (I hear a lot of people out there groaning, but hype machine notwithstanding, he’s doing really cool things and breaking the laws of art in new and exciting ways. I mean, he put his own shit up in the Louvre for fucks sake! That’s cool, and if you don’t think so you’re A) lame or B) lame and old) but I like anything that’s not just that shitty 90’s wildstyle with the ghetto duck dudes hanging around. So, if you come across someone who, say, hastily brush painted a shitty, drippy tv on the side of a walmart with pink interior paint, that’s cool, but a big thing that you can’t read that’s all blended and pro with some kind of dumb character next to it, that shit is wack. That’s my feeling on the whole thing.
Coming in after the weird stuff is the retro NYC in 1980 shit. Bubble letters and turntables and shit like that. That stuff is pretty neat, just because it seems like it’s mostly done by people who have a really weird idea of what’s going on. Now, I’m sure there are hipsters and stuff who paint that old school stuff as a tribute or whatever, and that’s okay I guess, but there’s still a TON of that shit around NY (and by extension the whole country/world) that’s obviously done by people who are trying as hard as they can to be relevant, with no idea that they’re doing something in a style that went out of favor and came back twice already, and that’s the stuff I’m really talking about.
But graffiti is just one facet of art crime. People who forge works of the masters or art thieves, who steal famous art from museums and sell it to weird sheiks who don’t care that they’re housing something hugely famous that they can’t really show anyone, that shit is incredible. It’s just a simple truth. Any crime is cooler once art is involved. Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Killing Dimebag wasn’t cool. That was lame. I mean, frankly, music may be the exception to the art-crime corollary. Nothing criminal is cool just because it happens around music. I guess it’s pretty much just a visual art thing, actually, because forging, say, a Mark Twain diary or going into the sewers with swords to act like Frodo seems more like the pursuit of a dork than a cool work of criminal genius.
Eh, who knows? I’m off to the aquarium.
Friday, March 18, 2011
friiiiday! Advice! Windsurfing!
This is the best ad I’ve seen in a while. I mean, you want to talk effective and on-message without being a chore to watch? I don’t know who did this, but the world of people selling things should be banging down their door.
So anyway, it’s Friday and I thought I’d kick things off with a little more advice for y’all to marinate on over the weekend. Here’s the query:
Q:
So yeah, since you're dishing out advice, and obviously have had luck in this department here it goes...
I'm in my late 20's and a mother one pretty rad little girl. In fact, she's so rad that I've decided I want to make another. Now my husband says he's on board with this but ever since we made the decision to "try" our sex life has gotten weird, mechanical, and almost nonexistent (which as we all know is NOT the way to make a baby). The first time he knocked me up was kind of an oops that turned out to be one of the greatest things to ever happen to us. We were newlyweds, it was after a wild night at the titty bar, and it was pretty hot. Now actually trying to get knocked seems, well, not hot at all. In fact, the whole act of "trying" totally turns my husband off to the point that we have less sex now than we did before (and I'm not even that crazy bitch with the ovulation kit saying "I'm fertile, it's time!"). All I want is to get laid every other night but the entire act of "baby making" sex seems to turn my husband off (and no, I didn't let myself go after the first one I'm actually pretty hot). How do I make trying to have a baby sexy? Does he just not want another kid & is afraid to tell me? I'm pushing thirty and my clock is ticking...
Help!
Fertile and not getting laid
A:
Okay, well, this one seems like kind of a no brainer to me, but that’s maybe because I’m a man with a penis and for us, the answer is ALWAYS blowjobs….But let’s start at the beginning. The situation here is that your husband, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to bone you. You’re hot. You guys usually enjoy hot sex and now, in the act of trying to make a baby, he’s not interested. You’re not trying to make the whole thing clinical but it’s too clinical for him. Is that about right? Hmmmmmmm….Tough one.
Um, there are two possibilities here, and I think you’re aware of them. The first one is the one you’re putting out there on the surface. He’s turned off by the notion of sex as a reproductive function. He wants to fuck you and he wants a baby but when the two things are combined it sucks and there’s seemingly no way around it. This makes sense on paper. Shit, I love chocolate ice cream and I love salmon, but I don’t want them together. In fact, these two things I love and often desire, when combined make me sick. This COULD be what’s going on. If it is, the answer is pretty simple. Give him blowjobs. Make him blow his loads in interesting places. If you’re so inclined, take it in the ass. In short, completely eliminate the possibility of a baby happening while you get your sex life up to warp speed and then, once the pressure’s off and you’re fucking like drunk nineteen year olds, you’ll be able to uh…water the lawn, so to speak, without it seeming like a big, functional deal. See? The answer, ladies, is often blowjobs.
BUT! There’s also another possibility, and it’s one that to me seems VASTLY more likely: he doesn’t really want to have another kid nearly as badly as you do.
Kids are hard work. Kids change the shit out of your lives and kids change people from hot chicks and cool guys to moms and dads. Even if they’re hot moms and dads, they’re still moms and dads. The wild nights at the titty bar are probably not what they once were, are they? The blowjobs at the breakfast table have probably decreased in frequency, eh? The nights of sloppy drunk sex or the mornings where you just lay around all day and bone, then put on a robe to get the pizza you ordered and then go back to bed are probably kind of gone, right?
I mean, I should hope so…you’ve got a kid running around. This is all stuff that just happens, not only because of a change in the way sex is desired after a kid is born (although that’s a real thing too) but because of the practical considerations of having a little person around who wakes up, sees things and needs attention all day long.
Now, I’m using sex as an example because this question ostensibly concerns sex, but this is just one of the many ways that life changes once you have a kid. It’s a big, huge change. And having two kids is a big, huge change from having one. It’s scary and unknowable and the prospect of a stranger coming into your house and completely fucking everything up now that you’ve finally got a handle on this last person that came along and fucked everything up, can be a hard thing to get your head around, much less get excited about, even if it’s almost guaranteed that you’re gonna like this new stranger.
But you’re on board. You want another kid. You’ve got a limited time to have one. You’re hot and you’re fun to be around and your husband realizes that this isn’t the kind of thing you can just put off, and he wants to give you the things you want, AND he realizes that by denying you a kid he’s altering the “Things You Want Out Of Life” irrevocably, but having another kid may NOT be something he can really feel like he wants to get behind right now.
Now THAT’S an advice question: “dude, my old lady and I have a great kid. Recently, she decided she wants another one. We both love our daughter and we’re not getting any younger, so I said “for sure, let’s go for it.” The thing is, the idea of another kid freaks me out. I feel like I’m BARELY getting the hang of having one, and I just don’t know that I’m ready for another one right now. My wife is doing a great job of not pushing me too much, but any pressure feels like a lot and the result is that I’m just completely clamming up when it comes time to bone. She thinks I just hate the clinical aspect of ‘baby making’ and I can’t bring myself to correct her and tell her how I’m feeling. She’s still super hot, and I know that she wants another baby and that we kind of have to do it soon if we’re gonna do it, and I know that we CAN do it and that I’ll love the new baby and our new, bigger family, but I can’t shake the dread that consumes me whenever I think of a second screaming baby in this house, much less the burden on our finances and what remains of our social life. What do I do?”
Is that possible? Is there even the most remote chance that this is the case? I mean, like I said above, I’d bet you ANYTHING that it’s this and if it is, you guys need to have a serious talk where you listen to each other and take the time to understand that you’ve both got legit life altering issues on the table, and do it as a team, not as competing negotiators. I mean, after all nothing fucks up romance like financial problems and kids and about 100% of the time, those things go hand in hand. Obviously, there’s no one besides the two of you that can say ‘have a kid’ or ‘don’t do it’ with any authority, so y’all need to hash it out before he winds up windsurfing in mexico with a broken soul while you start over screeching at the kids between dates with kindly, well meaning dorks.
SO, my advice is to seriously discuss his apprehensions, which he definitely has, because let me tell you something about the penis: as someone who’s had one for 34 years, very little can get in the way of wanting to bone someone you find attractive, if you’re just ready to go. If I was in a stinky porta potty and my old lady wanted me to bone her to take her mind of the smell, it would be no problem. If we were at my best friend’s funeral and she wanted me to bone her as a measure of consoling, no problem. If we were on a plane heading into the ocean…you get the idea. If everything you say here is true, then there’s almost no way that it’s simply the rote act of baby making that’s bumming him out.
But hey, if it is, try the blowjobs and the buttfucking (but keep in mind that if your husband is smart, he’ll gladly go the buttfucking and blowjobs route just to put off the conversation you’re going to inevitably have to have. I mean, what’s the downside there, right?)
Have a good weekend everyone!
So anyway, it’s Friday and I thought I’d kick things off with a little more advice for y’all to marinate on over the weekend. Here’s the query:
Q:
So yeah, since you're dishing out advice, and obviously have had luck in this department here it goes...
I'm in my late 20's and a mother one pretty rad little girl. In fact, she's so rad that I've decided I want to make another. Now my husband says he's on board with this but ever since we made the decision to "try" our sex life has gotten weird, mechanical, and almost nonexistent (which as we all know is NOT the way to make a baby). The first time he knocked me up was kind of an oops that turned out to be one of the greatest things to ever happen to us. We were newlyweds, it was after a wild night at the titty bar, and it was pretty hot. Now actually trying to get knocked seems, well, not hot at all. In fact, the whole act of "trying" totally turns my husband off to the point that we have less sex now than we did before (and I'm not even that crazy bitch with the ovulation kit saying "I'm fertile, it's time!"). All I want is to get laid every other night but the entire act of "baby making" sex seems to turn my husband off (and no, I didn't let myself go after the first one I'm actually pretty hot). How do I make trying to have a baby sexy? Does he just not want another kid & is afraid to tell me? I'm pushing thirty and my clock is ticking...
Help!
Fertile and not getting laid
A:
Okay, well, this one seems like kind of a no brainer to me, but that’s maybe because I’m a man with a penis and for us, the answer is ALWAYS blowjobs….But let’s start at the beginning. The situation here is that your husband, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to bone you. You’re hot. You guys usually enjoy hot sex and now, in the act of trying to make a baby, he’s not interested. You’re not trying to make the whole thing clinical but it’s too clinical for him. Is that about right? Hmmmmmmm….Tough one.
Um, there are two possibilities here, and I think you’re aware of them. The first one is the one you’re putting out there on the surface. He’s turned off by the notion of sex as a reproductive function. He wants to fuck you and he wants a baby but when the two things are combined it sucks and there’s seemingly no way around it. This makes sense on paper. Shit, I love chocolate ice cream and I love salmon, but I don’t want them together. In fact, these two things I love and often desire, when combined make me sick. This COULD be what’s going on. If it is, the answer is pretty simple. Give him blowjobs. Make him blow his loads in interesting places. If you’re so inclined, take it in the ass. In short, completely eliminate the possibility of a baby happening while you get your sex life up to warp speed and then, once the pressure’s off and you’re fucking like drunk nineteen year olds, you’ll be able to uh…water the lawn, so to speak, without it seeming like a big, functional deal. See? The answer, ladies, is often blowjobs.
BUT! There’s also another possibility, and it’s one that to me seems VASTLY more likely: he doesn’t really want to have another kid nearly as badly as you do.
Kids are hard work. Kids change the shit out of your lives and kids change people from hot chicks and cool guys to moms and dads. Even if they’re hot moms and dads, they’re still moms and dads. The wild nights at the titty bar are probably not what they once were, are they? The blowjobs at the breakfast table have probably decreased in frequency, eh? The nights of sloppy drunk sex or the mornings where you just lay around all day and bone, then put on a robe to get the pizza you ordered and then go back to bed are probably kind of gone, right?
I mean, I should hope so…you’ve got a kid running around. This is all stuff that just happens, not only because of a change in the way sex is desired after a kid is born (although that’s a real thing too) but because of the practical considerations of having a little person around who wakes up, sees things and needs attention all day long.
Now, I’m using sex as an example because this question ostensibly concerns sex, but this is just one of the many ways that life changes once you have a kid. It’s a big, huge change. And having two kids is a big, huge change from having one. It’s scary and unknowable and the prospect of a stranger coming into your house and completely fucking everything up now that you’ve finally got a handle on this last person that came along and fucked everything up, can be a hard thing to get your head around, much less get excited about, even if it’s almost guaranteed that you’re gonna like this new stranger.
But you’re on board. You want another kid. You’ve got a limited time to have one. You’re hot and you’re fun to be around and your husband realizes that this isn’t the kind of thing you can just put off, and he wants to give you the things you want, AND he realizes that by denying you a kid he’s altering the “Things You Want Out Of Life” irrevocably, but having another kid may NOT be something he can really feel like he wants to get behind right now.
Now THAT’S an advice question: “dude, my old lady and I have a great kid. Recently, she decided she wants another one. We both love our daughter and we’re not getting any younger, so I said “for sure, let’s go for it.” The thing is, the idea of another kid freaks me out. I feel like I’m BARELY getting the hang of having one, and I just don’t know that I’m ready for another one right now. My wife is doing a great job of not pushing me too much, but any pressure feels like a lot and the result is that I’m just completely clamming up when it comes time to bone. She thinks I just hate the clinical aspect of ‘baby making’ and I can’t bring myself to correct her and tell her how I’m feeling. She’s still super hot, and I know that she wants another baby and that we kind of have to do it soon if we’re gonna do it, and I know that we CAN do it and that I’ll love the new baby and our new, bigger family, but I can’t shake the dread that consumes me whenever I think of a second screaming baby in this house, much less the burden on our finances and what remains of our social life. What do I do?”
Is that possible? Is there even the most remote chance that this is the case? I mean, like I said above, I’d bet you ANYTHING that it’s this and if it is, you guys need to have a serious talk where you listen to each other and take the time to understand that you’ve both got legit life altering issues on the table, and do it as a team, not as competing negotiators. I mean, after all nothing fucks up romance like financial problems and kids and about 100% of the time, those things go hand in hand. Obviously, there’s no one besides the two of you that can say ‘have a kid’ or ‘don’t do it’ with any authority, so y’all need to hash it out before he winds up windsurfing in mexico with a broken soul while you start over screeching at the kids between dates with kindly, well meaning dorks.
SO, my advice is to seriously discuss his apprehensions, which he definitely has, because let me tell you something about the penis: as someone who’s had one for 34 years, very little can get in the way of wanting to bone someone you find attractive, if you’re just ready to go. If I was in a stinky porta potty and my old lady wanted me to bone her to take her mind of the smell, it would be no problem. If we were at my best friend’s funeral and she wanted me to bone her as a measure of consoling, no problem. If we were on a plane heading into the ocean…you get the idea. If everything you say here is true, then there’s almost no way that it’s simply the rote act of baby making that’s bumming him out.
But hey, if it is, try the blowjobs and the buttfucking (but keep in mind that if your husband is smart, he’ll gladly go the buttfucking and blowjobs route just to put off the conversation you’re going to inevitably have to have. I mean, what’s the downside there, right?)
Have a good weekend everyone!
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Austin Massachusetts?
I’m up early. I’m not the greatest sleeper in the world and last night was just one of those nights where it doesn’t happen for me. I got up at 515 after lying in bed for an hour and pretending that I was gonna fall back asleep. This will, in no uncertain terms wind up biting me in the ass today in the form of grumpiness that almost brings me to tears sometime around 2 when these kids should be napping, but mercilessly decide not to. That, however, is neither here nor there right now as I’m awake and very comfortable. I’ve just done some exercise and now I’m drinking coffee and chatting with you turds. So, what’s on the docket today?
Well, since I’ve been home from SXSW film, a bunch of people have asked me different versions of the question “what’s the difference between the music festival and the film festival? Which one do you like better?”
Well, they’re definitely different. For one thing, there are just WAY more people slithering around during the music festival. Everywhere you look there’s some group of filthy mongos with guitars, playing on the sidewalk, washing their balls w a water bottle right there on the street shielded only by the open shotgun-door of their van, staggering drunkenly all over the place and generally being the human equivalent of piss stains. I’ve been this guy more than a couple of times down at SXSW, and it’s been pretty fun, but it’s one of those things that I’d liken to being at your local hipster bar.
Namely, at your hipster bar, you look around and you see a bunch of people that you think are ridiculous, who look like they listen to terrible music, who are making lame fashion choices and acting aloof to the whole stupid thing going on around them, which can be defined in no uncertain terms as them and their ilk making an already lame place lamer by their lame existence, appearance and attitudes. BUT, don’t you see what’s really going on? They’re looking at you the same way! You’re part of the crowd to them. YOU ARE ACTING ALOOF!!!! RIGHT NOW! UNAWARE THAT YOU’RE PART OF IT! JUST! LIKE! THEM!
Yeah, that’s what the music part of SXSW has always been like to me. I’ve always kind of walked around thinking to myself, “look at all these dumbasses. Don’t they realize that this festival isn’t gonna do shit for them? They’re just gross wastoids stumbling around, Peter Panning their way through one of their only moments of being ‘on tour’ before they go home to their crappy, dull lives,” blissfully unaware that I was every bit the dildo I was describing to myself.
I guess there’s one difference between me and my presumptuous vision of everyone else, and it’s not insignificant. There was NEVER a point upon me attending SXSW or CMJ (the new york version of SXSW. For those of you who don’t know anything about either of these acronyms, essentially both are ‘discovery zones’ where zillions of bands and a bunch of tastemakers completely take over a city and play/go to as many shows as possible over the course of a week in hopes of becoming/finding the ‘next big thing.’ I’m sure that both festivals have hearty and impressive resumes of the artists discovered therein, but I don’t know/care what they are) where I had any thoughts of being “discovered” or signed or anything like that.
We actually never played any shows anywhere with that in mind. I guess that I always felt that our records were better than our shows when we started out (yipes!) and if anything was gonna get us signed, it would be those, and by the time we got good live, we were on Fat, so for better or for worse, I guess we were truly the WORST kinds of musicians at SXSW: unnecessarily filling up space, not concerned with playing well, happy to just stay in the Omni and get free beer and eat at Stubbs.
So, in closing, the music festival was always a FABULOUS time. No pressure, no worries, nice hotel, free beer, packed show, no expectations, on to the next town armed with a warm feeling of unwarranted, smug superiority.
The film festival is probably like that too if you’re a filmmaker in the festival, but if you’re a guy with a plane ticket, no badge, no place to stay, no friends and a bag full of your movie’s trailer on DVD, it’s a whole different scene. It’s daunting. Everyone gives you the once over and then decides to ignore you (something that happens at the music festival too, but since I always qualified as ‘someone’ [if only in delusion] I never paid it any mind). When people asked me why I was there, my answers ranged from pathetic (just down here with a bag of trailers to see what happens) to bald faced lies (I’m covering the festival for Vice/Rolling Stone) depending on how desperately I was trying to get into whatever was going on. I ate free food that software companies were giving away on the street and I slept on floors, took the bus and had to stand next to a clown named Thwappy who constantly screeched through a megaphone just so I was able to drink his company’s free beer beneath the merciless Texas sun. I don’t recall going to the bathroom even once on the trip. I definitely never took off my shoes.
I watched two movies, one great, one not so great, under vastly different circumstances. The great one I had a VIP ticket for. The not so great one, I literally ran into when the ticket taker went to the bathroom. I also met some really, really cool people and kind of got to immerse myself in a completely new world. I used subterfuge and what would be called ‘charm’ on someone who was actually charming in order to get to know some people that I would never have otherwise met, and who I’m excited to attempt to stay in contact with and work with.
Fuck, at one point, I found out I had scored a meeting across town that I wasn’t expecting to get, so I left the bar I was in, tab open, card behind the bar, cheeseburger already ordered but not yet arrived, and sprinted ten blocks, hit the meeting, and then came back an hour and a half later, found my freezing cheeseburger and carried on, thanking the dude next to me for saving my stool/only meal of the day.
The shit was super exciting and nerve wracking and fun and vaguely dangerous, which is always cool.
At the music festival, I had no expectations or aspirations and I met them with ease, without ever even thinking about it. With the film festival, I had no expectations but my aspirations were through the roof, and that, to me, makes the film festival more fun, if only this time.
Hell, in a few years, when I’m back in the Omni, I’ll probably be back to unwarranted smug superiority. Til then though, um…yeeha? Yeah. That’ll do.
Yee ha.
Well, since I’ve been home from SXSW film, a bunch of people have asked me different versions of the question “what’s the difference between the music festival and the film festival? Which one do you like better?”
Well, they’re definitely different. For one thing, there are just WAY more people slithering around during the music festival. Everywhere you look there’s some group of filthy mongos with guitars, playing on the sidewalk, washing their balls w a water bottle right there on the street shielded only by the open shotgun-door of their van, staggering drunkenly all over the place and generally being the human equivalent of piss stains. I’ve been this guy more than a couple of times down at SXSW, and it’s been pretty fun, but it’s one of those things that I’d liken to being at your local hipster bar.
Namely, at your hipster bar, you look around and you see a bunch of people that you think are ridiculous, who look like they listen to terrible music, who are making lame fashion choices and acting aloof to the whole stupid thing going on around them, which can be defined in no uncertain terms as them and their ilk making an already lame place lamer by their lame existence, appearance and attitudes. BUT, don’t you see what’s really going on? They’re looking at you the same way! You’re part of the crowd to them. YOU ARE ACTING ALOOF!!!! RIGHT NOW! UNAWARE THAT YOU’RE PART OF IT! JUST! LIKE! THEM!
Yeah, that’s what the music part of SXSW has always been like to me. I’ve always kind of walked around thinking to myself, “look at all these dumbasses. Don’t they realize that this festival isn’t gonna do shit for them? They’re just gross wastoids stumbling around, Peter Panning their way through one of their only moments of being ‘on tour’ before they go home to their crappy, dull lives,” blissfully unaware that I was every bit the dildo I was describing to myself.
I guess there’s one difference between me and my presumptuous vision of everyone else, and it’s not insignificant. There was NEVER a point upon me attending SXSW or CMJ (the new york version of SXSW. For those of you who don’t know anything about either of these acronyms, essentially both are ‘discovery zones’ where zillions of bands and a bunch of tastemakers completely take over a city and play/go to as many shows as possible over the course of a week in hopes of becoming/finding the ‘next big thing.’ I’m sure that both festivals have hearty and impressive resumes of the artists discovered therein, but I don’t know/care what they are) where I had any thoughts of being “discovered” or signed or anything like that.
We actually never played any shows anywhere with that in mind. I guess that I always felt that our records were better than our shows when we started out (yipes!) and if anything was gonna get us signed, it would be those, and by the time we got good live, we were on Fat, so for better or for worse, I guess we were truly the WORST kinds of musicians at SXSW: unnecessarily filling up space, not concerned with playing well, happy to just stay in the Omni and get free beer and eat at Stubbs.
So, in closing, the music festival was always a FABULOUS time. No pressure, no worries, nice hotel, free beer, packed show, no expectations, on to the next town armed with a warm feeling of unwarranted, smug superiority.
The film festival is probably like that too if you’re a filmmaker in the festival, but if you’re a guy with a plane ticket, no badge, no place to stay, no friends and a bag full of your movie’s trailer on DVD, it’s a whole different scene. It’s daunting. Everyone gives you the once over and then decides to ignore you (something that happens at the music festival too, but since I always qualified as ‘someone’ [if only in delusion] I never paid it any mind). When people asked me why I was there, my answers ranged from pathetic (just down here with a bag of trailers to see what happens) to bald faced lies (I’m covering the festival for Vice/Rolling Stone) depending on how desperately I was trying to get into whatever was going on. I ate free food that software companies were giving away on the street and I slept on floors, took the bus and had to stand next to a clown named Thwappy who constantly screeched through a megaphone just so I was able to drink his company’s free beer beneath the merciless Texas sun. I don’t recall going to the bathroom even once on the trip. I definitely never took off my shoes.
I watched two movies, one great, one not so great, under vastly different circumstances. The great one I had a VIP ticket for. The not so great one, I literally ran into when the ticket taker went to the bathroom. I also met some really, really cool people and kind of got to immerse myself in a completely new world. I used subterfuge and what would be called ‘charm’ on someone who was actually charming in order to get to know some people that I would never have otherwise met, and who I’m excited to attempt to stay in contact with and work with.
Fuck, at one point, I found out I had scored a meeting across town that I wasn’t expecting to get, so I left the bar I was in, tab open, card behind the bar, cheeseburger already ordered but not yet arrived, and sprinted ten blocks, hit the meeting, and then came back an hour and a half later, found my freezing cheeseburger and carried on, thanking the dude next to me for saving my stool/only meal of the day.
The shit was super exciting and nerve wracking and fun and vaguely dangerous, which is always cool.
At the music festival, I had no expectations or aspirations and I met them with ease, without ever even thinking about it. With the film festival, I had no expectations but my aspirations were through the roof, and that, to me, makes the film festival more fun, if only this time.
Hell, in a few years, when I’m back in the Omni, I’ll probably be back to unwarranted smug superiority. Til then though, um…yeeha? Yeah. That’ll do.
Yee ha.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
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.
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.
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