Mandatory Chaos

Lucid Fluids vol. 1

2011-12-12T19:19:00.001-08:00

I present, LUCID FLUIDS vol. 1, the first in a series of surrealistic, experimental flash fiction based on the fantastic and disturbing pillow visions of Mene Tekel. These 14 tales (including three poems) spelunk into the deep, incoherent abstractions of the mind -- memory, dreams and fear. Written with an admiration for Franz Kafka, Stanley Donwood, the cartoons of David Firth, with a little bit of Neil Gaiman and David Lynch for good measure, Lucid Fluids will fill you with a restlessness and dread that's all too familiar.

You can buy it HERE.

In Rotation: Wavves and Arcade Fire

2010-10-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

In Rotation
Melodic nostalgia and poor decision making
By Troy Farah
Published on 09/30/2010

Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: The Suburbs
Rating: 4.5/5

Continuing their obsession with neighborhoods and citizenship, Arcade Fire’s latest, The Suburbs, winds around familiar streets of escapism and nostalgia. Less gloom and more zest, it’s a departure from their more elegant Funeral and intensified Neon Bible, but retains that classic, quiet desperation that originally hooked fans.

The Suburbs is based on truth. Unlike suburban kids such as Joe Strummer and Bob Dylan who pretended to be train-hoppers their whole lives, Arcade Fire is recording their actual experiences.

There’s still that foreboding sense of apocalypse mixed in—that feeling of how fragile everything is around you, especially growing up in a neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses and cookie-cutter people. But there’s no judgment, just facts and feelings, orchestrated beautifully by frontman Win Butler’s melancholy voice.

The title-track opener is a ragtime piano based on a photograph of Butler’s neighborhood, a mixture of the past, present and future all at once. It tugs and pulls at memories that are similar, touching on an unnamed-yet-universal feeling associated with home.

Unlike most rock stars, Arcade Fire stresses the importance of community and family. A strong desire to settle down is echoed in “City With No Children,” which questions why certain districts, such as Williamsburg or Amsterdam, are filled with aging hipsters and no kids.

It’s not until “Empty Room” that The Suburbs picks up like more familiar Arcade Fire, but something still seems distant from the typical Arcade Fire tune.

“We Used To Wait” is certainly the one song that hits home the most. Literally. Besides being about patience entwined with love, Arcade Fire collaborated with Google to incorporate customized satellite images of fans’ childhood addresess into a music video. Butler even breaks the fourth wall, telling you to wait for the chorus, but it never comes.

Like the very subject the album illustrates, The Suburbs could use some compacting. A little less than half the songs could be better used as b-sides and crowd out the rest of the music. It’s one step below a rock opera, only because it’s easy to get lost in. And for a more lyrically based album, the music is shuffled into the background.

No band can mix sentimentality and community as well as Arcade Fire. Their third album may not be as direct or familiar as fans were expecting, but the beauty is in what it is, not what it’s not. Looking back at your childhood experiences don’t get much more poignant than with The Suburbs.

Artist: Wavves

Album: King of the Beach

Rating: 3/5

Wavves frontman Nathan Williams downed a cocktail of ecstasy and Valium right before performing at a huge Barcelona festival, started a fight with his bandmates, canceling the show and the rest of their European tour. Saying Wavves third album recovers from that incident is an understatement.

King of the Beach cleans up the lo-fi and features a new line-up, with Billy Hayes on drums and Stephen Pope on bass. The attitudes on King of the Beach can be summed up best by the chorus from “Post Acid”: “I’m just having fun.” There’s nothing to read into, but that’s the point. Some music is only good for lovemaking, for falling asleep or for cleaning toilets. The noise punk that oozes from this San Diego-based band is good for chugging Sparks. It gives you a good buzz and enough energy to get through any night, but it’s best used as background music.

Beneath the surface, Wavves is just power-chord pop-punk with more adult subject matter and enough lo-fi to sound credible. The result is more than tolerable, but as the song “Idiot” would imply, it doesn’t feel smart. It feels like a drunken idea, like climbing on random buildings and pissing off the edge. That is to say, it’s fun.

Each song attempts to outdo itself in terms of bad decisions. “Green Eyes” is a love song to Mary Jane, or having to choose between your friends and weed, something Williams seems all too familiar with. “Baseball Cards” drips with lethargy and high-pitched synths, while “Mickey Mouse” is an Animal Collective-take on wanting to do nothing all day.

Wavves are doing their own thing, at least what they want to do, and that’s good for them. King of the Beach is a step in the right direction, but really doesn’t break out of it’s own mold. All the kids these days are writing songs about weed and laziness and Wavves doesn’t add anything.

Additional photos for this story:

Kind of old albums no one likely cares about this month. Oops.

Europe Diary – Antwerp, Kinderdijk, LCD Soundsystem, etc.

2010-09-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

Hard to admit, but I am enjoying boredom a lot more lately, because it’s so rare now that I get to sit around and soak in my own lethargy. There’s so many errands to run, places to explore and school, of course. So forgive me if this is rather condensed compared to my last entry.

It’s nice that I can go to another city in an hour on whim and it’ll cost less than a tank of gas. So I went to Antwerp with Jeff. Arrived late in the evening, so not much to do, but had some of the best beer and food in my life. Primavera pizza (baked eggplant and zucchini) is incredible and Belgian waffles are my crack. Also, don’t forget Belgian chocolate – it’s not world famous for nothin’.

My Finnish friend Jaleh and I went to Kinderdijk, the place with all the windmills and had a relaxing time just walking around, taking touristy pictures. Some guy stopped us on the street, started unnecessarily proselytizing us but his English was poor and it was hard to communicate. I did learn that Holland means “empty land” and the name change, Netherlands, means “low land” and that I should be humble instead of empty. OK, then.

I really get along with the Finnish. Olli’s friend Matti came up for a weekend and he kept asking about America and cultural differences I’ve noticed. I guess I’ve settled in, the culture shock faded, because I when I first arrived I spotted hundreds and now I can barely think of any.

It was this kid’s 21st birthday and I became his photographer. We took pictures on the roof, looking at the brightly lit Grote Kerk (Big Church) and it was beautiful. That kid got a drink with lots of straws. He threw up all over the bar.

Jolien has become my guide and closest friend out here and she showed me around Redhairday. I interviewed people, Britt took pictures, maybe this’ll turn into some journalism thing. Maybe not.

School started and it’s hell, but that’s nothing different. I’ll always be a terrible, disgruntled student. Still, I go from 9 to 5 everyday and around 11 my brain forms this impenetrable crust over itself so nothing else can get in. Even lots of cigarettes and coffee can’t crack through.

Well, as a little vacation to myself I headed off to Tilburg (a rough town that’s got a lot more crime than little ol’ Breda) and immediately got lost. I did find the 013 venue and just in time for LCD Soundsystem. Few people I know have heard of James Murphy and even less care, but LCD has always struck something with me. LCD Soundsystem had been playing a lot of festivals this summer, so that means short sets. They finally got a two hour set, so all this energy was just POURING out of the band. For a reserved, kindy artsy group like this, it was pretty intense. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to because each song addressed some hope or fear or dream that I’ve been dealing with.

I wonder if this one video can convey a little bit of what I was feeling. (wait till the 3 minute mark) I was all alone no less and that's not a good idea at a concert. It made me feel really self-conscious, but once the music came on my fears were shed and it was perfect.

Happiness is an emotion I know better than ever. Not so much peace or anything like that. Good trade.

Europe Diary Week Uno

2010-08-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

TOUCHING DOWN

Flying never feels real to me. For the first time, instead of feeling superior, looking down on all the people, cars and buildings slowly shrinking, I felt small. I felt like a spec in the eye of God. Nothing.

I think it was the sleep deprivation. Sure, we’ll blame that. I had two hours before arriving at the airport at 4 a.m. and I can never sleep on planes. I guess that adds to the surrealism. Without sleep, the world becomes white static, I drift through the day like molasses and I feel mummified. Without some kind of upper, caffeine, nicotine, what have you, I can’t function at all.

Due to a weather delay, the connection from New York to Brussels took even longer. I sat upright the whole time, zoning out on some censored version The World is Not Enough, occasionally scrolling on my iPod to listen to music so muted it sounded alien.

Because I didn’t have a visa, I got stopped by border control and taken into a dark, crowded backroom. I was chewing my fingernails to a pulp but the more my stomach filled with clippings, the more I was convinced I was on deathrow. Belgium let me in anyway, thankfully, but if it were America I’d likely wind up in Guantanamo.

LOSING IT, LOSING IT, LOSING IT

I missed my flight, but the airline gave me a complimentary coupon for the food court and booked me a later flight into Amsterdam. I used the coupon on beer, nice frothy Belgium beer.

Understandably, I found my gate and passed out on the seat. I slept for less than an hour before I woke up with a jolt and realized I had missed my flight by ten minutes. I was right fucking there! A blind old lady wouldn’t do something so boneheaded.

I ran thru the airport, cursing enough to shame Ozzy Osbourne. There were no more flights to Amsterdam that day and obviously I wasn’t going to spend another sleepless night in a country that didn’t want me around.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop looking like a lost, disheveled, ugly American. I navigated around a train station and was back on track. It was 4 in the afternoon, a full 36 hours since I’d been in Arizona, sleeping uncomfortably on my couch.

The train was filled with commuters giving me suspicious looks and I tried not to sleep again, lest I miss my junction again and wound up in Denmark. I lost that fight until a ticket master woke me up and informed me I was in first class. So I went to coach and didn’t rest again.

AMSTERDAM WILL NEVER FORGIVE ME

Once at Schipol, Amsterdam’s airport, I tried to locate my luggage. Even after an hour of waiting in line and talking to a receptionist, there was no luck. They said they’d mail me my bag, which had all my clothes and toiletries in it, if they found it. Unfortunately, I didn’t know my address.

More swearing as I hopped a bus without paying which dropped me off in the southside of the city. I found my hostel, Hans Brinker, recommended to me by VICE Magazine, and it was better than any ritzy hotel I’ve ever stayed in. There was a bar in the lobby and another bar downstairs in the “disco lounge” which had a glass cube room with a stripper pole in the center.

Even if the rooms were just bunkbeds, they accommodated well. The lockers were busted, so I worried about losing everything else I had. The stress was surmounting, flooding my head like a jelly filling, but of course I was lighthearted about the fact that I was in one of the coolest cities in one of the coolest countries in the world.

I needed a drink. Yes, I perused a coffeeshop first, which had excellent bud for only 10 euro. Then I discovered a whiskey bar with some of the finest drink I’ve ever experienced. I still don’t know what the bar tender gave me, but it came from a barrel. Classic.

A tweeked out man persistently tried to sell me marijuana and the streets were crowded with fucked up people. Not like an American bar scene, everyone was jovial and good-natured, but I decided to call it a night.

I slept like a baby – if you gave one morphine, I mean. I woke up just in time for checkout, had a coffee and then puked all over the bathroom and my jeans right before leaving. Call it a tip.

DROWNING IN BREDA’S STREETS

I was reeking of body odor, beer, puke most of all and had no clothes to change. I hopped another train to Breda and stayed with a friend for a couple of days while I waited for my landlady to return from Spain. She left without telling me so I couldn’t even move in or call the airport to mail my luggage.

This was beginning to sound like a really bad Judd Apatow movie. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, of course my power converter was in my baggage so I had zero laptop battery and I smelled like what G.G. Allin must of smelt like when they found his corpse in the gutter.

Three days later, I had orientation, so I got to meet some people, mostly international students like me. I’m the only American in my department and my nationality sends off the most negative vibes. However, everyone in Breda is very friendly and so I was invited to a huge party at a bar called Speeltuin.

First, I got set up with a cheap, durable bike and a cell phone. By now I was pretty acquainted with the city, except the area where I was going to live. It had been raining all week, but tonight was the worst of it. It felt like twenty monsoons at once, I had to bike three miles in it, clutching my backpack and praying my laptop didn’t short circuit.

My landlady let me in, me soaking like a homeless cat and showed me my room. It’s spacious, like a writer’s study. The only problem is she sleeps and rises early, like it makes her healthy, wealthy and wise or some shit, so I must be home at 11 each night or I have to find a place to crash. That’s going to be a strain on my friends, none of whom I’m even close to at this point.

I left for the Speeltuin, biking in the rain again. Soon I was surrounded by new (and a couple old) friends. I had shot after shot of something called Hot Shot, which tastes like a mouthful of Hot Tamales candy. Then, I don’t remember so much. See, I woke up in a park on a bus bench not even a block away from my apartment. My bike was gone. I hadn’t even had it 12 hours. I don’t remember how I lost it or how I got to the park.

I was soaked to the bone, my socks blue and purple, absorbing all the dyes in my now ruined shoes. I dripped from store to store buying socks and a shitty, used bike that was pulled from the canal and crusted with rust.

I biked home, crashed and slept thru the second day of orientation. And like an idiot, I decided to drink again. That night ended in vomit and shit everywhere and waking up to a choir outside singing the most annoying Dutch songs invented. At least that night I wasn’t alone – a Finnish kid was puking with me.

That’s where this story ends so far. It’s been exactly one week since I left the states and it’s been nothing but chaos. I did get my suitcase today and everything seems to be looking up. I took a walk through the park across from my house and the sun was coming out for the first time since I arrived, soaking the towering aspens with green and gold. I am almost convinced I died in my sleep that fateful night in the park and arrived in Heaven. I don’t remember booking a flight, but flying never seems real to me.

If I can send a letter back to Earth, this is it. I hope this finds you well.

In Rotation: Bizarre rants and insecure R&B ballads: M.I.A. and Drake

2010-08-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

In Rotation
Bizarre rants and insecure R&B ballads
By T. Farah
Published on 08/12/2010

Artist: M.I.A.
Album: MAYA
Rating: 5/5

Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A., is the whole package. She’s got enough fashion sense to match Lady Gaga without looking trashy and bends more genres into one song than some can fit into an entire discography. M.I.A.’s latest mishmash album, MAYA, is a step up from 2007’s Kala, with 53 minutes of irritating, catchy samples and hooks that will either infect the mind or aggravate the senses.

It was entirely M.I.A.’s intention to piss off everyone’s eardrums—to jolt everyone awake to how even in the age of the Internet, information is still controlled by a select few. The Internet is our Tower of Babel to M.I.A. and she laughs at everyone taking it so seriously through her Twitter. Even she can’t resist the World Wide Web’s charms, but questions how it’s changing culture.

M.I.A. was a visual artist before she was an avant garde singer- songwriter, and her album’s graphics are made before she writes songs for it. The cover art on MAYA, with the YouTube player bars and the gold bricks spelling out her name, hints at the album’s themes of information politics, greed and fame. MAYA is a schizophrenic attempt at deconstructing our current Web- obsessed culture and it hits surprisingly close to home.

Already, the second single “Born Free” has been overused in skateboarding tribute videos, but the official music video has a strangely poignant message. A group of thuggish cops round up all the redheads in an apartment complex and then execute the confused gingers in graphic, disturbing ways. It could be a mirror to Arizona’s own immigration laws or the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib or just the general senselessness of genocide. Nevertheless, it’s more ballsy than anything MTV has seen in years. As a Sri Lankan refugee, mass murder was a part of M.I.A.’s childhood, so she feels it’s absurd that the Internet provides global communication but humans are still dismembering each other.

Even if M.I.A. campaigns against genocide, she’s no John Lennon, stating on “Lovalot” that she’ll “fight the ones that fight me,” perhaps a response to the death threats against her 1-year-old child. She’s a character of contradictions, but even sifting through her conflicting sentiments has more weight than other female vocalists who only sell sex.

“Tell Me Why” is a cut for fans of M.I.A. who are only familiar with “Paper Planes.” Floaty singing instead of rapid-fire rap with the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers chanting in the background make a more radio-friendly, familiar tune.

After a three-year wait, M.I.A. has exceeded every expectation, making plenty of enemies along the way. MAYA is a bold step for an even bolder artist.

Artist: Drake
Album: Thank Me Later
Rating: 3/5

Canadian hip-hop superstar Drake is less concerned with guns, bitches and bling and more interested in fighting his inner demons. Drake’s introspective slow jams deal with the burden of fame, heartbreak and self-esteem, falling somewhere between Kanye West minus the ego and Kid Cudi minus the upbeat synths.

Thank Me Later, Drake’s chart-topping debut has already grabbed the MC a fistful of nominations and awards, a step-up from Drake’s career acting in TV movies. In New York, a free concert resulted in a riot, as tens of thousands of fans packed a venue dangerously full and grew violent after the show was cancelled. If anything, the guy is making huge waves.

After signing to Young Money under Lil Wayne, rumors abounded that Drake was ghostwriting for Weezy. Accusations that Drake ripped off Kanye’s 808s and Heartbreaks soon followed. Like Drake laments on Thank Me Later’s opener, “Fireworks,” money changed everything and the 23-year-old recording artist can’t handle the pressure.The poor MC is lost in the spotlight that he created for himself.

His sleepy, auto-tuned vocals sometimes sound like Aladdin singing “A Whole New World.” Other times, the feedback can get really grating. Far more R&B than hip-hop, Drake aims to write sexy tunes for lovemaking and naturally, cheesy clichés abound. Some metaphors hit their mark, others fizzle out, like his comparison of his career to firecrackers. Does he mean to say he’s loud, pretty and short-lived? Drake probably has the lowest self-esteem of any rapper, and all he seems to want to talk about are his feelings. People started rioting over this guy?

Thank Me Later starts to pick up midway, but never gathers steam. Even enjoyable tracks like “Up All Night” feature typical lyrics about “all the haters” and how much Drake is above the bickering. Then why is he even paying attention to it? Every musician has critics but few feel the need to call them out on a record. That’s called insecurity.

Alternative hip-hop star Saul Williams once encouraged other MCs to put their weapons away and expose some humanity. Underneath that tough exoskeleton that gangsta rappers present is emotion, depth and philanthropy. But Drake’s raw openness comes across more like watching someone bleed than feel.

Country Leaver

2010-08-07T19:27:00.001-07:00

My flight is booked, my room is reserved, in little more than two weeks I'm leaving.

Breda is going to cost me a lot of money. Thankfully, school pays for the bulk of it, but cost isn't going to be easy. So I want to thank all the awesome people I hung out with this summer for sharing drinks and smokes with me and understanding I was completely broke. I won't forget any kindness and I hope I'll be able to return the favor tenfold.

College sucks. The last three years have not been a non-stop party like you were maybe imagining. If college is really supposed to be the best four years of your life, I want a refund. I wish I hadn't left behind Phoenix and lost connections with so many people. Thankfully, I had this summer. It's been one of the best and brightest thus far.

Breda is the only thing making NAU seem worthwhile. And yeah, college did change who I am. So will the next four months in Europe.

When I was in high school, I was jealous of all the people who were taking trips to Europe. Now I finally get one and I'm not gonna be some tourist or whatever. I'm going to make the most of this. And I'm gonna miss everyone. So there.

I'm going to leave off with this song. It's perfect for the occasion.

Uncertainty - Look What the Cat Dragged In

2010-07-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

Old, never published before. Now seems good.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

"I find this uncertainty exciting and embrace the indecisive nature of my work." - I don't care.

My computer, crashed. My cell phone, dead. I couldn't ask for better circumstances.
It came suddenly.

For me, I've never felt the desire to slow down, become one in isolation. But I love being abandoned in the middle of nowhere. I love being inaccessible to humanity, no one has any idea where I could be. I love that. Stranded, helpless, in the wonderful vastness of nothing.

Now, I hope that great expanses of technology collapse. Some say, solar flares are gonna burst up 'round the year 2012 and that will demagnetize everything and destroy computers all over. Makes Y2K look weak.
Or, better yet, the poles are gonna shift (in 2012 again) and demagnetize everything again. No more laptops, iPods, or 3G networks. Fuck it all.

I don't really believe these fantastic theories, but one can dream. I want to be sent back to the stone age. All great things must come to an end.

But until then, I have my moments of isolation, where I have no perceived audience, where my rules are my own, where freedom is it's own weight.

In the desert, I imagined it much differently. Everything hot, with a warm filter on the lens. Sweating heavy, til it dribbles down the bridge of my nose, dabs my lips and I can taste nothing else.
I would extend a stiletto and cut down the forearm because I wanted the swelter to mingle directly with my blood. Would anyone understand that? That I need fire in my veins.

I would have brought a gallon of water and enough bread for three days. And I'd pour the water over my head, til it soaked into my salty flesh. I would have fed the bread to the vultures. I would have screamed and run my fingertips over cactus needles, sewing them into my fingerprints.

But what did I expect? Instead, I walked for less than ten minutes, drank what little was left in a small water bottle and discovered nothing. I found the burned out wreckage of a car, perhaps set aflame in the desert by drug cartels or the Mafia. But nothing else. I returned to air conditioned slavery and schedules and homework and paychecks, directly deposited, every two weeks.

Starving! Thirsty! Delirious!

The End can't come soon enough.

(appendix):

A second visit to the desert proved more fruitful. Where were we, the other end of the planet? It was darker than a basement, the stars like old, white Christmas lights.
We happened upon some bombed out shell of a brick house, inside, nothing but the remains of pests. Nothing even infested this place anymore.
Of course, we burned it all. I flicked cigarette butts into the underbrush, hoping to "accidentally" start a blaze, but it didn't happen, of course. I pulled out a flare and it bloomed like the sun and wielding it like a torch, chased Luke through the wilderness. He swung a wooden bat at me, but even as I stepped back, my voice advanced with eerie strength.
"C'mere, c'mere," I said. Yet, it was not I that spoke.
The flare burst in two directions. Eric sparked up a bonfire and the flame grew luminous and green.
The air is not natural here, I thought.
When the flare started to dwindle, I threw it into the fire and the whole blaze turned red as blood. I darted off, blinded and snagged myself on a rusty barbed wire fence. I was able to snap it back and the wires crumbled in my fists.

In Rotation: Against Me!, Crystal Castles, Magnifico

2010-07-08T22:23:00.000-07:00

In Rotation
Cliché punk, pleasing incoherence and raunchy Euro fun
Troy Farah
Published on 07/08/2010

Artist: Against Me!
Album: White Crosses
Rating: 2/5

If you’re in a punk band in this day and age, you’re entitled to a lot more scrutiny than other genres. It’s that age-old question: is punk more about the attitudes and lifestyles or about how one plays a powerchord?

Against Me! seeks to answer this question on their fifth album, White Crosses, but doesn’t add much. Instead, themes of wasted, misguided youth abound, hinting that lead singer Tom Gabel is worn out by the same way of life he once advocated.

Like a flip-flop reprise to Against Me!’s classic “Baby, I’m an Anarchist” White Crosses’ first single “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” comes across as some limp, mid-life crisis response to adolescent politics. Sure, dressing in all black and rioting against cops is as conformist as heading to law school and voting straight ticket Democrat. But if political action was all about clothes and mob mentality instead of some kind of substance, maybe you didn’t believe in anything to begin with.

This attitude acts as a marker for the rest of the album. It sounds good, with plenty of catchy choruses to sing along with at their concerts, but it’s soggy, apologetic and tired.

For example, “Because of the Shame” begins with sentimental piano before busting into a “whoaaaa” chant all about falling in love too deep and losing a lover. It’s definitely sad, especially if it’s true, but it’s execution is disheartening.

“Suffocation” feels like the plot to every suburban teen drama from “The OC” to “Kids.” Unfortunately, the album has nothing left to offer.

White Crosses sounds like a break-up album. Even their drummer, Warren Oakes, quit the day after it was released. All that would be dandy—seeing Gabel and co. in a new, better-suited outfit. But what we’re left with isn’t much to work with.

Want to form your own opinion? Against Me! will be performing at the Orpheum Theater, 15 W. Aspen, on Thu, July 15, at 8 p.m.

Artist: Crystal Castles

Album: Crystal Castles (II)

Rating: 4/5

For some members of the Y Generation, the blips and beeps of video games are more embedded in childhood memories than Saturday morning cartoons. If you are such a person, familiarize yourself with Crystal Castles, a jaded collection of eight-bit medleys and spewing-puke-drunk punk. It’s so danceable, so angry and so eager to bring back the ignorant warmth of childhood.

Alice Glass, the band’s incoherent frontwoman, is famous for running away from home at age 14, living with a band of drug addicts and changing her name to Vicki Vale. She met Ethan Kath (short for ‘Catheter’), recorded six songs and disappeared for six months. The band was forgotten until Kath found Glass strung out on narcotics and the two reunited.

Of course, this is all speculation. Crystal Castles are notorious for lying to the press just for the hell of it and, more likely, to create an image bigger than themselves to get attention. Their sophomore album, another self-titled release, is worthy of any and all gawking. It’s the equivalent of stepping into a sensory deprivation-chamber. Glass’ vocals are rarely, if ever, understandable over the heavy drum beat and raging synths. You can lose yourself in this music.

Crystal Castles (II) is more thematically dense and put together with less haste. The lo-fi is dumbed down, with less ambiance and more fiery, manic hooks like on “Doe Deer.”

“Year of Silence” samples vocals from a Sigur Rós song, taking the gibberish speak to a new level, but Kath’s high-pitched cover of Platinum Blonde’s “Not In Love” doesn’t have any edge. That’s about it for experimentation.

Overall, (II) doesn’t sound much different from their debut and adds little to Crystal Castles’ diversity. Even if this Toronto- based duo are accomplishing something unique, they still have room to grow.

Artist: Magnifico

Album: Magnification

Rating: 4/5

Slovenian superstar Magnifico (Robert Peut) looks like something that walked right out of the ’70s, complete with a thin, porn star moustache, a white suit, yellow-tinted aviator glasses and a cowboy hat. Combining the suave of Gogol Bordello with James Bond’s guitarist, Magnifico’s horny, Balkan jams will get you thinking about socialism in former Yugoslavia as much as long nights of sexy dancing.

Magnifico aims to push boundaries in a culture redefining itself. He’s even starred in Slovenian movies such as “Porno Film,” something like “Zack and Miri” but (mysteriously) without any nudity. His music, a combination of Balkan, funk and disco with glitchy electronica, also rub against the edges of multiple genres with an eccentric sense of humor to match.

Magnification is his 10th studio album, which caters more toward English audiences than his mainly European fans. Many more of his songs have English lyrics, but remain faithful to his style. On the downside, the album is much more tame than usual for this character.

“Zum Zum,” the album’s opener, includes Black Francis-like wailing and enough salsa dancing for a Pace picante commercial. Branded like an Apple product, “iThink” has more Southwestern influence with plenty of Mexican horns. Unlike an Apple product, the song’s political message calls for less talking and more acting.

With cool, surf rock guitar riffs, “The Land of Champions” mimics the lyrics of “House of the Rising Sun” while giving a history lesson on Magnifico’s tarnished homeland.

While Magnification mixes strong sexual desires with rampant political activism, it also brings back exotic music branded with Magnifico’s signature smirk. His catchy riffs will blend well with anyone who likes raunchy, European fun.

Everybody Poops but Not Everybody Eats! - Free Book Download!

2010-06-27T01:18:00.000-07:00

So teaching kids things is important and all, so I went out on a limb and drew up a kiddie book called Everybody Poops... But Not Everybody Eats. It's about world hunger.

It seems important to teach kids how to poop, how to recognize colors, how to count, etc. But they're saturated with that, so I wanted to teach them about something no one really talks about - starving slowly to death. That's important, too, right? I wouldn't know. I don't actually have kids.

Maybe you're thinking this will give children a negative worldview. Or will it give them a realistic worldview? Flip a coin. They're gonna grow up to pop Prozac just like mommy and daddy anyway. Why not expedite the inevitable?

You can download the book for FREE and decide for yourself. Don't tell me you're above experimenting with your kids. You're already gonna treat one of them better and see which ones becomes more successful. So take this a step further, B. F. Skinner, and scar your children for life with my cheery colored pencil drawings of hunger ravished people. You'll thank me later.

Download here!

P.S. The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share this book, but you can't sell it. Let's make the world a less hungry place. By thinking about it. That works, right?

Chugging Past Collectivist Consumerism

2010-06-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

One of the weirdest pitfalls of consumerism is collectivism. Nearly everyone I know who owns a house has a room for junk filling. In some cases, an extra room just for storage is a huge plus when shopping for a new home. Those that aren't so lucky rent one of those dozens of Armored Storage cells, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded 24-7 by rent-a-cops and surveillance cameras.

It's all a bit distasteful to me, especially when hoarding becomes a hobby. I'm not talking about collecting coins or Angelina Jolie's kids. Just the immense amount of crap we own and our excuse for keeping it. It's a retarded breed of circular reasoning. I collect things because they are collectible.

Collector's items are a bullshit idea to begin with. This heavily manufactured, mass-produced item is somehow valuable, but only because the manufacturer itself says so. When I was 9, I had a binder filled with Pokémon cards that were printed for less than a nickel, yet I was told I should buy pack after pack for $10. I filled my room with pieces of paper, thinking each one was precious. I was too young to know what to believe, so I believed what the TV said.

Every month, Burger King unveils a new cup or toy or whatever to commemorate the latest blockbuster movie. There are actually people who buy this shit and hold onto it, hoping one day they can hawk it at a swap meet. And maybe, someone will buy it, for whatever idiotic reason, making that Shrek 4 jock strap or Star Trek drug sample cup have an accumulative value. But really, when you think about it, is it worth anything?

I will admit my own attachment to things, but it thoroughly disgusts me. I want to move away from that, and the first step is admitting what I have is not worth a damn. I demonstrated this in the below video, with a Phoenix Suns Coca-Cola bottle that celebrates something no one can remember anyway. And this is even more aggravating -- we're stockpiling soft drinks while millions starve on our city streets. Despicable.

The scariest part? The coke was still carbonated, tasted fine and didn't make me sick. Coke has no clear expiration date. Anyway, I plan to absolve my attachment to things a little more. I hope you'll do the same.

Similar thought in a previous post called The Audacity of Humanity.

Laptops and iPods: MC Chris and Math the Band

2010-06-15T23:11:00.000-07:00

I saw Math the Band and mc chris this past weekend at Tempe's Clubhouse. I didn't know who either of them were a half-hour before the show, but I had an extraordinarily good time. I took videos too, which came out sucky, but I decided to upload them anyway because I have a weird hobby of saturating YouToob with crap.

Math the Band makes Game Boy glitch music and play it on an iPod adding in guitar and (as you can see) Justine's synth and awesome drum kit. She was wailing all over the place, my friends and I were moshing (which pissed off the boring hipsters) and we had an exhausting good time. The bizarre thing is their albums sound nothing like their live shows. Whatever.

You might know mc chris for his work on high-pitched voicework on Adult Swim as MC Pee Pants or his internet famous song about Boba Fett. He's one of those reluctant nerdcore rappers who sing about Star Wars, weed and video games, and it works.

According to chris, he threw up twice before coming onstage and hated his last experience in the Phoenix area. So it was up to us to make it a better show. Hopefully, we did a decent job but Phoenix's music scene is not the greatest.

There was a t-shirt contest that was rather boring and it lost a lot of the energy of the show. After a couple limp songs, it came back with a vengeance, with a classic rock version of Fett's Vette. It seemed like he was lip-synching to a lot of it, so he stopped playing his laptop for a minute and busted a rhyme without any beats. Whatever. It was fun and it was movement. That's what people really go to shows for. To blow out their eardrums and sweat and move a lot. It's more fun than the gym.

Good show all around.

I'm OK With Giving Up

2010-06-01T19:34:00.000-07:00

( note: I'm in the process of moving my blog to filthfiller.com I just gotta learn how to use an FTP server. )

What a good way to kill an afternoon. The clown is Bernie. The music is fienix.

Tijuana Diary: Fabricated Poverty

2010-05-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

So this was it. We were homeless now, crouched low in the overgrowth behind a university gym. To us, home. Smoking cigarettes, our hands placed over our sleeping bags and blowing twisted smoke rings at the branch canopy above us.

"This is the taste of freedom," Levi was saying. "The best cigarettes are the ones under a night sky."

"Isn't this kind of patronizing, condescending, you know?" I puffed, cringing, paranoid of every sound. "Like, we're homeless, but we're only tourists. We can escape this whole thing tomorrow if we wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"We chose this. We had a bed for the night and we chose this. Urban camping. But is it belittling to those who can't choose it?"

"Even if this experience is fabricated, it still means something," Levi said.

Our campsite.

I've always wanted to be homeless, ever since I read a book called Evasion that glorifies being a poor, traveling hobo. Hopping trains, eating from trash cans, hitchhiking and exploring the planet on foot. So now, this was the realization of a dream, the fact that no one knew where we were. I had complete freedom at hand. I seriously considered never going back. Ditching that ol' degree I was pursuing. Letting my identity die out, replaced with something new. Street cred or whatever. Earning it.

Earlier, we met a homeless kid, round our age, who told us he was stoned, a high school dropout, but he was wandering around, enjoying life. He told us to sleep in an elevator near Chipotle, because he did once to get out of the rain. We chose the more comfortable bushes.

Morning. Neither of us slept well, what with all the yelling and fighting we heard in the night, but we were happy. This was freedom.

We paid for an all-day trolley pass and took train after train, all the way down to San Ysidro. People on the trolley with us gave us looks of disgust. Some old woman we sat across from panicked and moved to the back. Maybe we smelled bad.

The homeless, the actual homeless, they bothered others for spare change. Not us. We had all our possessions on our backs, so we were just like them. I've never felt such a kinship with an ignored, disrespected and ugly group of people. It felt good, even when crazies approached us, gave us the once-over and started nodding and humming at us. Like their lips were sewn shut. It was silent association and it meant something.

We went to Vons and ate a loaf of French bread and a whole baked chicken with our fingers outside the store while smoking cigarettes. Middle class soccer moms selling girl scout cookies wouldn't even look at us. Everyone seemed confused.

Still, we weren't dirty enough yet. We barely smelled and we weren't poor. I had some $200 in cash on me, sewn into my left pocket with my passport and ID cards. In my right, I had a cheap film camera. I was a motherfuckin' millionaire.

One minute through the border, and everything changed. Now everyone thought we were rich. Every storefront we passed by people begged us to buy something. We wandered around, trying to find a really cheap hotel. I had heard rumors of $6 a night places, but everything was $20, at least. We weren't gonna last the week on that.

A woman named Gabriella (we assumed she was a prostitute based on how she was dressed) grabbed hold of us and gave us a short tour of the motels lining Avenida Revolucion. Our last stop was the Hotel La Paloma (The Dove Hotel). $7 bucks a night, the manager said. We can go up, check out the room and if we don't like it. . .

We almost stayed here, then realized it was a deathwish.

We said goodbye to Gabriella, but not before she offered to sell us a plethora of drugs. Our room was 19, a shithole of a place. The walls covered in graffiti, trash in the corner, one creaky bed and a chair. The window was covered by a blanket. Tearing it off and looking out, we saw a thin alley filled with plumbing and garbage. But the biggest problem was the door. It had a huge hole the size of a watermelon, hastily repaired with a loose piece of cardboard. You could pop it out easily, reach through and unlock the door.

So we were moved to room 17. Here, the graffiti was even worse. DIE KIKES was burned into the ceiling, a mirror on the wall was smashed and written underneath was FUCK YOUR LIFE. On the door was a long message about how these guys were gonna come back and if they didn't know us, there'd be trouble. Obviously, someone had broken into this room before because the doorjam was hanging by a thread.

We moved again, to room 10. Compared to the last two, this place was a suite. It had bright pink walls, barely any graffiti, a locker, a nightstand and a chair. Still one bed, no window and trash in the corner. But at least the door wasn't in danger of being kicked down. Yet.

For a week we lived in this shit hole. The front desk sold cigarettes for $2, so we loaded up and lit up in the room or in the courtyard. It was a shitty garden filled with bizarre statues, mostly angels and Virgins and Crucifixes. A couple stray cats and some cheap patio furniture.

Well, we found that when people asked us for money on the streets to say no, but offer a cigarette. It's only ten cents, but then these beggars smoke one with you and you can learn their life story. I heard dozens of miserable, odd and funny stories throughout the week. I empathized with them as best I could, realizing it was still fabricated poverty. Because I was white, everyone assumed I was down for spring break, going to a big university and I could leave any time. Just because it was true didn't mean I didn't want to stay forever.

See, I've been on a church mission's trip to the outskirts of Tijuana before. I helped build one of two houses for a couple impoverished families who live on Shitstack Hill. You've heard the stories, where their sewage runs through the street, stray or dead dogs line the dirt road. We built a house for these people, then went back to our campsite and listened to iPods before falling asleep in tents.

Back then, we didn't experience poverty. We just witnessed it and that's not the same. And now I was nearly as poor as these people around me, eating the same food, drinking the same beer, sleeping in the same roach motel.

Experiencing the middle class of Tijuana was equally, if not more, bizarre. Going through a Costco, taking samples and marveling that a business like this was thriving. Not a block away, we witnessed a man digging through trash and another shooting up heroin under a bridge. I have to wonder how the middle class feels about this, going on all around them. And it's not really different in America, is it? How do I feel about it in my own country?

We left at the end of the week, both of us ready to go home. Time to see friends again, eat hamburgers, Facebook, work. Walking back through that border was heartbreaking because of all the people I saw around who were stuck in this sewer. They were people, too and they had every right to cross with me. Fuck all that legality involved. It takes years for most people to get greencards. If the choice is this or risking illegal crossing, what would you do?

As soon as we were back on that trolley, we stopped at an In N' Out and gorged ourselves. A sign said don't feed the birds, but I did anyway.

OK, OK, I didn't really do a good job of remaining objective throughout my experience. I don't like making myself or others feel guilty about their ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF WEALTH. It's just stupid to think poverty is always glamorous, but even when it's not, I sometimes prefer it.

In Rotation: AM Taxi / Paper Tongues

2010-05-14T02:10:00.000-07:00

Emo’s death throes and imitation arena rock
By Troy Farah
Published on 05/13/2010 in Flag Live!

AM Taxi
We Don’t Stand A Chance
Rating: 1/5

It’s still early in the decade, so give it a couple more years before those awful, stereotypical emo bands completely die out—bands like AM Taxi. It seems this new act is riding the last wave of this tired teenage fad and that crushing surge can’t come soon enough.

As you know, emo is just punk turned inside-out. When you can’t be angry at your government, teachers or parents, instead you’re just mad at yourself. In other words, emo is punk without anything to say. Bands like this are an easy target, but that doesn’t stop major record companies from pushing this swill onto airwaves.

Dressed like half the garage band garbage on MySpace, complete with jet-black-dyed hair and fake British accents, the Chicago band’s debut, We Don’t Stand A Chance, is a melancholy collection of tunes about razors, pills and suicide. It’s a soap opera that makes “Days of Our Lives” look tame.

The album starts with tales from “Dead Street,” yet another “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” where every kid has hung-up hopes and is hooked on heroin.But really, it’s just a rip-off of the Offspring’s “The Kids Aren’t Alright.”

“The Mistake” is one of those songs for 15-year-old girls who lost their virginity to the wrong guy and are trying to make up for it by sleeping with the entire football team. So they have another cigarette, another drink, instead of actually coping with their issues.

“I am the mistake/worst you ever made” sings vocalist Adam Krier, his voice dripping with self-loathing. What makes it more disgusting is the amount of groupies who will fall for that.

Even when tracks like “Fed Up” encourage angry adolescents to fix their problems, the message is smothered with gimmicks. Krier pushes every stereotype from death to vampires to how much his hometown blows. “We may as well sleep in body bags/Living in the town was a drag.”

“Tanner Boyle Vs the 7th Grade” is just evidence of what age group this band appeals to—AM Taxi is ideal for brats who think angst is equal to individuality and complaining is equal to artistic struggle. But the band is right about one thing: gee whiz, life sure isn’t how we thought it was gonna be! Yet if all you’re doing is drowning in your sorrows, you really don’t stand a chance.

In RotationPaper Tongues
Paper Tongues
Rating: 3/5

Even if they’re not quite there yet, Paper Tongues are a new act trying very hard, almost too hard, to imitate arena acts like Muse, Queen or U2. The package is complete—superficial lyrics with a stress on chanting and an echoing emphasis on “humanity needs to join together.” There’s the hip-hop beats, the occasional rapping, and Aswan North, the vocalist with pipes like Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala. And most of all, their main focus is how loud and famous they can get.

Their eponymous debut is filled with scattered influences, borrowing strongly from Queen, Led Zeppelin (without much guitar) and the people-unite mantras of Rage Against the Machine. Unfortunately, Paper Tongues don’t have much identity themselves and the album doesn’t head in any clear direction.

“Ride to California” details the true story of how the Tongues raised money for a trip out west where they started their careers after a chance encounter with a well-known producer. There, another chance encounter with Randy Jackson made the American Idol judge their manager.

After that, the Tongues’ rise to fame was like taking an elevator and up is the only direction they’ve got left. So far they’ve opened with Muse, Anberlin, 30 Seconds to Mars and AFI, and it won’t be long before they’re selling out at Wembley Stadium.

The seven members definitely have strength as a group, on “Trinity” for example, where the band all seems to be fighting for the cause of the poor orphans and widows. They increasingly spread the cheesiness on thick with “Soul,” an anthem attempting to unite everyone who is “lost and needs to be found.”

They even get sentimental with Styx-style piano on “Strongest Flame” when North reminds us that love is the greatest force on earth. In case, you know, someone forgot.

Paper Tongues have gotten astronomically lucky thus far and it seems like they’re here to stay, so long as they don’t try too hard. Musically they’re talented but have yet to make anything that stands out. However, as their growing popularity shows, that doesn’t really matter.

An (Unfair) Comparison of Fight Club and Up In The Air

2010-05-03T19:50:00.000-07:00

Up In The Air was Jason Reitman's latest campy romance, another decent story told the wrong way. And the more I watched, the more I realized Up In The Air was the exact opposite of Fight Club.
It's a bizarre, almost unfair comparison, but stay with me. I think I can use David Fincher's masterpiece to point out the flaws in Air's philosophy. I could do this with a lot of movies by just comparing them to better ones, but I think Fight Club and Up In The Air have a lot in common.
Well, first we have to admit that Fight Club's central themes are accurate. For the sake of argument, we will.

In Fight Club, Jack (Edward Norton) is a man unhappy with his job who flies around the country constantly. His profession is pretty evil - he tries to cover up whether the automobile-related deaths should initiate a recall. Frustrated with his current state, he starts a violent underground club to take his anger out as therapy and begins a casual, sex-only relationship with a strong independent and attractive woman. In the end, things get out of control and Jack wonders what he really wants.
In Up In The Air, Ryan (George Clooney) is a man happy with his job who flies around the country constantly. His profession is pretty evil - he fires people so their boss doesn't have to and somehow makes the victim feel okay with it. To justify his lifestyle, Ryan goes around doing weekend conferences as therapy and begins a casual, sex-only relationship with a strong independent and attractive woman. In the end, things get out of control and Ryan wonders what he really wants.

The first problem with Up In The Air is unbelievability. A character who is constantly flying, his job ruins people's lives, doesn't have a home to go to, no friends or close relatives and nothing but a string of meaningless relationships is supposed to be happy? He's happier than you and me, with our stupid love and possessions! And he mocks us for it. At least show the guy on anti-depressants.
In Fight Club, Jack is so depressed about his job that he hopes the plane will crash. He's stuck and despises all that fake hospitality airports and hotels hand out, whereas Ryan gets hard off it. All those layovers and time changes leads to his insomnia and eventual insanity. Whereas a programmed lifestyle is Ryan's way of feeling close to people, fight club and group therapy is Jack's way of feeling close to people.
But of course, Up In The Air is like almost every Hollywood film and won't let an asshole stay an asshole. So Ryan decides he actually does need people in his life. Somewhat lazily on Reitman's part, Ryan doesn't have enough time to actually do anything about this.
In Fight Club, Jack ends up destroying himself. This has nothing to do with his need for human connection so much as he realizes his job sucks and wants to change it.
The reason why everyone who is canned in Up In The Air is so miserable is because in American consumer culture your job is your identity. If you're fired, you have nothing. Fight Club says, fuck that. Let's rebuild society to fit our needs, not build our lives to fit society's. You are not your job, are you? Air tries to tell you are.
Up In The Air at first says, material possessions are dragging you down. Fight Club does this with more flair, but in the end, doesn't change it's mind. But why? You are not the shit you own, are you? Air tries to tell you are.
That's the difference in the main philosophy, both of which borrow from carpe diem, but go off in entirely different directions.
Fight Club says, your life sucks, so break it down and build something better. Up In The Air says your life sucks but you should just settle into it and whatever. Both ideas aren't that unique and at least Up In The Air was tangible. Somehow, I just can't imagine blowing up buildings to solve my petty problems, but what's wrong with Air is presentation. By the time Up In The Air gets to it's conclusion, I just didn't care.

And no, frankly, I don't want to be told the way to live my life is to settle down. In 2006, Fight Club changed the way I look at my life and life decisions. All Up In The Air managed to do was tell me I need to get married. Blah.

So in effect, Ryan Bingham is the exact opposite of Tyler Durden. Up In The Air wants you to accept your fate, Fight Club wants you decide it. Is that an unfair comparison? When reviewing a movie, you're not supposed to compare one film to another, but fuck it. Up In The Air really pissed me off.

The Mexican Bible

2010-05-03T01:07:00.000-07:00

This was written by my father in 2006. It's a true story and it reflects some of the issues Arizona's latest and greatest fascist stupid law, SB 1070.

Someone left a Bible in the back seat of my taxi recently.
I know he was an illegal alien because of the nature of how the book got left there. It was Halloween night, and I received a telephone call from a colleague of mine. There were three Hispanic men standing outside a convenience store. They spoke only Spanish. He spoke only English, and was not going to take the trip. Maybe the trip would be worth something. Would I like to talk to them?
I hate to turn down an opportunity without at least looking at it. And besides, I have learned enough Spanish to get by. I drove up to the convenience store to see what I could do.
Three young Hispanic men stood in the shadows by the pay phone. As I eased my taxi to a stop, one detached himself from the shadows, and approached my car. We greeted each other in Spanish, and he proceeded to tell me that he had to get to Los Angeles to see his fiancé.
I know enough about the law to know when to ask questions and when not to. Plausible deniability is not just the prerogative of presidents. I could surmise why they were not taking a bus or airplane. I named a price; they agreed. The trip was uneventful until we got to the Arizona California border. The three men were nervous about the border check point. I told them to relax, the authorities were only checking for fruit coming across the border. I don’t know if it was true or not, but it sounded good. They relaxed.
We swung into a gas station outside of Twenty-nine Palms to fuel up. There was a police cruiser in the parking lot, and once again, the three men in my cab hunkered down, and tried to stay out of sight. I filled the gas tank, and shook my head. My suspicions of their immigration status had been confirmed by their behavior. I didn’t tell the cop. I’m not that kind of person. Besides, I didn’t want any trouble for myself. It might not be legal to cross state lines in a taxi with a cargo full of undocumented migrants. I was not really in a mood to find out.
A few miles away from the gas station, we witnessed a bad car crash. I dialed emergency services on my cell phone, but did not stick around to see the police show up. Again, the less trouble the better.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. I left them at a house in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a real upscale neighborhood, but it wasn’t a slum either. Sort of a middle class home that everyone in America dreams of owning some day.
I was home before I noticed the Bible.
The bible is a Spanish version, small, with a battered black leather cover. Inside it had a few notes on small pieces of paper. The New Testament was heavily thumbed through, and the pages of Mark and Luke were rather dog-earred. Many verses had been underlined. The Bible has sat on a shelf in my bedroom since the day I found it. I had not even thought about it until I was tidying up today, while a talk radio station played in the back ground from my clock radio. The host was on some rant about W’s new immigration policy.
I wonder if the talk show host realizes that these illegal aliens have lovers? That they have expectant, future father in laws, who are glad to see their new son in laws, yet somehow apprehensive for the future of their daughters? Does the radio talk show host know the fear these men felt waiting in a gas station for a cop to leave? Does he know the joy on the faces of these men as they stepped out of the taxi in Los Angeles? Does this same radio talk show host that almost every day claims to be a good moral conservative Christian know that an illegal alien left his Bible in my cab? A Bible that had been studied, and marked by some one just as devoted to the same faith as he? Or would such thoughts put too human a face on the issue? Would thinking these things mean that we have to deal with real problems involving real people, not just abstractions of law breakers?
And am I the only one who finds it ironic that the very Bible that both the radio show host and the young Mexican man read says to be kind to the strangers in your land?

MGMT and BRMC

2010-04-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

Artist: MGMT
Album: Congratulations
Rating: 4/5

What did you love about MGMT? The raving synths? The primal cosplay? The muted vocals? The ironic, clever lyrics?

Whatever it was, it seems the Brooklyn duo took their sarcastic single from Oracular Spectacular, “Time To Pretend,” a little too seriously. Mocking the heroin-addicted, trophy-wife-toting, sports-car-driving rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle just became too real. Now MGMT is taking the exact opposite route on Congratulations by stripping off everything distinct about them. No more weird makeup, no more penitent nostalgia and most noticeably, nothing that sounds like the raver anthem “Kids.”

MGMT doesn’t even plan to release singles off Congratulations, hoping people will download the entire album instead of stealing a few radio-friendly hits. And not surprisingly for a band that proactively analyzes their own popularity, Congratulations is a direct response to MGMT’s overnight success. The band is reluctantly famous and they loathe every ounce of American celebrity culture.

At first Congratulations seems like nothing more than a pop album, but it grows on you.
Starting with “It’s Working,” the album sounds like a party you’re not invited to. But the more you acquaint yourself with the music, the more it grows on you, until you get inside and realize all the guests are moping around wondering where their wonder years went.

Still, the music is crammed with varied influences, particularly ’60s- era psychedelic pop with a dancey heartbeat. Plus, it encourages you to stop being so obsessed about your status (on the internet and elsewhere) or as vocalist Andrew VanWyngarden puts it, “stab your Facebook.” “Flash Delirium” is the nauseated anthem of a self- indulged generation, changing moods like an ADD teen flipping channels. “Siberian Breaks” is a 12-minute, mind-bending trip, like witnessing the end of the world. It’s proof MGMT are not your average musicians.

The lavish dose of hero worship on “Brian Eno” and “Song for Dan Treacy,” along with the line “you’ll never be as good as the Rolling Stones” on “Flash Delirium,” indicate the duo still have someone to look up to. But the bizarre instrumental “Lady Dada’s Nightmare” suggests MGMT wants nothing to do with the amount of stardom the fame monster herself, Lady Gaga, is appointed.

Congratulations asks the question, is fame actually worth anything? The answer from MGMT seems to be “well, it’s something to do.” All the band wants is for that initial praise to mean something in the long run. For now, all that matters is keeping the music fresh and MGMT deserves more than just applause for accomplishing that.

----

Artist: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Album: Beat The Devil’s Tattoo
Rating: 5/5

With a name taken from the 1953 Marlon Brando flick “The Wild One,” the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club conjures up images of switchblades, rumbles and that “my girl” mentality. But musically, BRMC are rock ‘n’ roll zombies, bringing good ol’ fashioned garage rock back to life. For good measure, the band throws in some neo- psychedelia and stompin’ Americana, sounding like a White Stripes album but with more sex, drugs and leather.

Lead singer Peter Hayes once played guitar in the Brian Jonestown Massacre before getting kicked out and the Black Rebels were born.

Beat The Devil’s Tattoo is the L.A. trio’s sixth studio album, carrying much of the badass attitude present in their career, such as the time at Leeds Town Hall when the band rocked so hard the floor broke. You don’t get that kind of reputation on accident.

Maintaining it is a different story, so how does BRMC make it look so easy? The album’s title track answers with “I thread the needle through / You beat the devil’s tattoo.” BRMC draws on the taboos of yesteryear, knowing that nothing is as prickly sweet as those bygone years when “hell” was a dirty word and piercings and tattoos made you a social outcast. For BRMC, this model works perfectly.

But BRMC isn’t a one-trick pony. Their influences and styles are far and scattered. “River Styx” is a tantalizing cruise with a fierce undercurrent where “every soul is a setting sun.” “War Machine” has all the vocal power of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” but lacks any direct anti-war message. BRMC’s guitar ranges from pop to classic rock on “Aya,” sounding like a softer version of Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks.”

The 10-minute “Half-State” closes the album with distorted, atmospheric riffs and Hayes’ hazy vocals, proving once and for all, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t dead. At the same time, Devil’s Tattoo makes imitators like Nickelback and Wolfmother look pathetic. For flawless, noisy rock reminiscent of the Jesus and Mary Chain or the Velvet Underground, choose to Beat the Devil’s Tattoo.

Confessions of a Meat-Eater (editorial)

2010-04-15T10:24:00.001-07:00

Confessions of a Meat-Eater

There’s long been a war between vegetarians and carnivores, a battle that focuses on everything from animal cruelty to the environment to healthy cuisine. Your typical meat-free character is nice about their choice, realizing it’s a personal decision. On the other hand, you have the agenda-pushing, in-your-face, “Meat is Murder!” type, the ones who strip naked outside of KFC and push pamphlets of decapitated poultry into your hands. Organizations like PETA are on a crusade to end the production of animal flesh, doing so in such a way that aggravates and alienates your average McDonald’s connoisseur and even people who genuinely care about animals.

As an unrepentant meat eater, it wasn’t until recently that I considered the merits of these anti-meat arguments, realizing there actually was some validity. I always assumed those videos of pigs kicked in the groin and cows with their throats slit were part of a propaganda machine and the images came from slaughterhouses in third world countries. None of that happened here, not in America.

The truth is, animal-based industries are not pretty. Yet, as Oscar Wilde once said, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

PETA does work like a Soviet-era propaganda machine, sometimes comparing the conditions of factory-farmed animals to the Holocaust and heavily editing their footage to seem more extreme. Their agenda stretches far beyond just using animals for food; they don’t want you to wear fur, test on animals or even keep pets. To many, it sometimes seems like their positions are so drastic they prefer animals to people. Indeed, PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk sent a letter to Yasser Arafat about a donkey used as a suicide bomber, essentially saying it’s okay to blow each other up, just don’t involve animals. Newkirk told the Washington Post: "It's not my business to inject myself into human wars."

Radical organizations like PETA are why many people ignore what’s actually happening to livestock in America. Sure, you can’t believe everything you hear, but some of it is true. Chickens, for example, are placed in stocks and their heads are dipped into an electrified pool called a “stunner.” Some birds aren’t fully dead when they’re hacked into. At birth, pigs are castrated without anesthetic, their tails chopped off and at death, electrocuted. Again, this method doesn’t always work, sometimes just breaking the animal’s backs. The animals are miserable from birth to execution and the list of cruelties is nearly endless.

The real issue isn’t whether humans should eat meat, it’s how to do it in less barbaric ways. In most cases, animals today are shoved into unsanitary conditions, living out their short, miserable lives in windowless sheds until harvest. The side effects contribute to weird diseases, boils and bacterial infections. So then the meat is treated, and those chemicals go into those that eat it. The piles of waste left by the animals contribute to greenhouse gases (much more than transportation) or the poop is thrown into rivers and lakes, poisoning the water and killing fish.

But the only option isn’t to go meatless. A recent article in Time promotes the idea of keeping cows in pastures instead of slaughterhouses. By putting the large, methane-producing animals in a field, they mash their manure into the ground and cultivate the grass. The grass becomes healthier, retaining moisture and microbes but most of all, keeping CO2 in the soil, not in the air.

Even the grass the cows eat makes up a smaller carbon footprint, instead of the grain cows on feedlots are fed, which must be grown using fertilizers, pesticides and transported hundreds of miles. Feeding cows in pastures doesn’t just reduce carbon emissions; it actually makes the result negative. Some researchers predict that curbing feedlots could be the solution to capturing the entire planet’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

And all this contributes to a much healthier cow, leading to healthier meat and a healthier consumer. Pasture-fed cows produce meat lower in saturated fat and higher in healthy fat cells called omega-3s. Similar equations, such as free-range chickens or pigs, result in the same thing.

Nearly all the problems associated with eating meat can be solved with how we cultivate it. Except for one, obviously -- the killing.

Most vegetarians are against all exploitations of animals, especially killing. Treating livestock humanely and slaughtering them humanely all equals murder to the vegetarian mind.

Hypocrisy of this sort is just what makes PETA and friends so unbearable. It’s not okay for humans to use animals for anything, not to even befriend them as pets, yet the rest of the animal kingdom has been doing so since the beginning of time.

When a lion attacks a gazelle and mercilessly tears out its throat while the herd watches from afar, that’s ok. Taking a bird to a chopping block for a quick and easy finish, however, is not.

We are human beings. Our canines are specifically designed to tear apart meat. And if that meat is prepared as humanely, healthfully and environmentally safely as possible, there is no reason not to enjoy it. We haven’t reached a dream industry of this sort yet, at least not popularly or cheaply, but it would be good to note that vegetarians and carnivores alike share many of the same goals.

Digital Suicide

2010-04-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

(a bit whiney this one. But I'll bet you can relate.)

It's impersonal. It's faceless. It's full of stalkers. It's a waste of time. It's Facebook.

And I refuse to socialize like this anymore. I deleted my Facebook, as best as I can*.

A friend said to me, "If you delete your Facebook, you'll basically cease to exist."

Well, fine. I don't want to exist if that's what this means. I'd rather be a ghost, floating through life unaccounted for, off the grid. Gone.

I remember when MySpace first became popular. Some friends were talking about being up all night, talking to each other. I felt left out, so got an account as a joke. I predicted it was a fad, but five years later, I'm an adult and still using a similar childish application.

So now, I refuse to allow my friendships be numbered and ordered and pushed into grids. People shouldn't be shelved away like dusty library books. And I'm tired of being watched silently by people who are supposed to care about me. If someone does care, they "like" it. That's it. No one really talks to me online anymore or reads what I write except five core people.

I already talk to these five on a daily basis and would tell them about my day-to-day regardless. For everyone else, shame on you. Why the fuck am I forced to talk to you through social networking? Yes, forced. If I delete my Facebook, I'll never hear from you again. Why can't you be adults, living people dammit, and just give me a phonecall one day? Why are we communicating through screens? Smoke screens, even! Are you expressing true emotion or putting on a front? How the hell can I tell? Why are we ranking each other, ignoring each other, adding each other, like some kind of insane baseball card collector?

I've felt this way about social networking for a long time, but I didn't stop because I wanted others to care about what I had to say. Yeah, that's right. I stopped caring about the stupid shit you were spewing, but not enough to stop spewing it myself.
And nobody cared, except those five people. Those five people that I would rather talk to in real life anyway. It's degrading to do otherwise.

Now I don't care who cares about me. I don't know why I ever did. But this is like inviting everyone you know to a birthday party. Of those who show up, you know they really care. Well, no one has showed up to my life, so I'm cutting the cords on this dead weight. (haha, that sounds like a suicide note. And maybe it is, in a way. I'll no longer be anyone now. I've committed digital suicide.)

Goodbye, Facebook. Good riddance.
I'm going to treat the people in my life like people. I'll now have hours of spare time freed up that I won't waste on your stupid website. So I'm going back to reading books. Keeping a journal. Going outside.
I'm going to create, love, breathe and die.
It's sad that I let you get in my way.

Computers are a weed, rapidly outgrowing themselves. They are a virus that replicates the human mind.
They will never outgrow the capacities of the human brain because we will never accommodate them.
A human being cannot create something better than himself.
Even the Tower of Babel crumbles beneath us.

I predict a great computer crash. When they cannot advance any further at all, people get stuck, stop feeling amazed with pixels and .mp3 downloads.
Then people will return to their lives and embrace them like never before. It will be a time of great prosperity.

Or not.

*You can't really delete your Facebook, only deactivate it. This is disturbing in and of itself. Facebook will always retain your personal information. One log-in and you'll get it all back, exactly how you left it. I'm not going back, I've promised myself, but it'll always be there.

Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die

2010-04-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

Artist: Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die
Album: Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die
Rating: 4 out of 5
These aren’t exactly the Care Bears. Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die, Flagstaff’s most devilish, ursine death metal bandits, are releasing their self-titled debut this Saturday at the Orpheum’s third annual Hammerfest, blaring with all the growling and screaming of a grizzly versus a boy scout troupe. As the band’s vocalist, Gupie, puts it, the music “wraps you in its bear hug of cuddly rage.”
Since their formation in late 2008, the Teddy Bears have left their claw marks on Flagstaff’s local scene, playing with other heavyweight acts Regicide and Black Orchid. The Bears are Gupie on vocals, Mike Mercer on bass, B Low on guitar and Johnny Longhammer on drums. The quartet mixes thrash metal with hardcore punk, part Dethklok and part Sex Pistols, driven by their sardonic sense of humor and cynical social commentary.
“Drunk Driving Speed” is their snarling kick-off, a sarcastic one-finger salute to MADD, the cops and anyone driving alongside them. And even if it’s an old joke, the Bears mock Hot Topic groupies and dime-a-dozen pop-punk bands on “Skinny Jeans."
In the eponymous track “Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die” a New Kids on the Block tape is placed inside a talking teddy bear (Teddy Ruxpin, for those of you who remember those things) creating some of the creepiest, darkest metal riffs on the album.But the Bears have a violent side, too, like manic-depressives that went off their meds (bipolar bears?). Angry anthems and dark, hateful lyrics abound on songs like “Da Tofr Da Beddr” when Gupie sings “Landfill mouth/The s**t you spout/It can’t even be real/Clogged up ears/Don’t even hear/Too numb or dumb to feel.” The enraged “Ho Bag O’ S**t” curses out some cheatin’ whore with more f-bombs in two minutes than even the best gangsta rap.For their first studio album, Where The Teddy Bears Go To Die have done well, able to entertain metal fans (and a few non-fans) with the best and funniest thrash metal has to offer.

In Rotation: Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

2010-03-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

Gorillaz

Plastic Beach

3/5

In the five years since their last release, the Gorillaz have changed from the inside out. According to Damon Albarn, the brainchild behind the virtual apes, Gorillaz isn’t about four animated characters anymore. The focus is now on collaboration with other artists, creating new projects and pushing this idea as far as it will go.

Plastic Beach is the product of that idea. A follow-up to 2005’s Demon Days, the album employs a sweeping cast of guest stars from Lou Reed to Mos Def to Snoop Dogg, including many of the same existential, post-modern themes.

In the world of Plastic Beach everything is fake, super fast and jammed with glitz. But it isn’t a condemnation of this culture—instead it’s identifying with this new ecosystem, claiming that artificiality has its place in the world.

The Gorillaz became popular for their brilliant combination of electronica and hip-hop. With each release, the band dabbled in new genres (punk, trip-hop and children’s choirs) so it’s no surprise Beach throws in some reggae, disco and more. But this album pushes pop to the limit, almost losing track of the actual music. Most Gorillaz albums get right into the groove, but it takes nearly three tracks for this one to pick up.

Plastic Beach could do without the overdone orchestral intro, Snoop Dogg’s cheesy “Welcome” and the misplaced “White Flag.” It’s not until “Rhinestone Eyes” that we get the Gorillaz we’re familiar with.

Next is “Stylo,” the pumping, driving kind of single fans were waiting for. It even has the expensive video to match, starring Bruce Willis in a high-speed car chase alongside some high-end computer animation.

With the amount of fame and glamour associated with this band, how can they condemn the silicone-obsessed, money-loving culture they’re part of? The answer is they don’t. And they aren’t about to apologize.

Other highlights from Beach include Lou Reed’s appearance on “Some Kind of Nature,” the depressingly poppy “Melancholy Hill” and the industrial-dance groove “Glitter Freeze.” But overall, the music doesn’t have the strength or direction it used to. The album fizzles out with the lazy “Pirate Jet,” leaving a resounding “that was it?”

The Gorillaz know better than anyone all that glitters is not gold, but that isn’t to say shiny, fancy things are worthless. Plastic Beach isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but the few tracks with strength make the album a worthwhile vacation.

originally published in Flag Live

Fiesta, Fiesta! or, Three Hours In Tijuana

2010-03-10T18:36:00.000-08:00

At the first of the year, I took a little crazy adventure to the south of California and tripped over the border to Tijuana. When relating this story to people, most are surprised or confused, so I'm cementing this tale in writing for anyone wanting to know how bizarre and terrifying Mexico's streets are during the hours of darkness.

It began at night, in the terrifying parking lot of a shady motel on the outskirts of San Ysidro, San Diego. I was crouching down below the seat while Luke went inside to buy us a room. They charged more for two, so I hid, more from bizarre ideas in my head than anything else. I believed people were coming out from the shadows for me, gonna kick me down and put their boot above my head. Fears like this gripped me the entire night.

I texted my friend and said, you know what to do if I die, right?

Going up to the room shocked me as I realized I'd never bought a motel room for myself before. Somehow, this room being completely ours gave me a surge of power. The feeling quickly subsided as I opt to watch Mexican "Funniest Home Videos" television, one of the more bizarre things I've seen, instead of nearly burning down the Travelodge.

We stretch into Denny's, and order some toast to-go.

"We haven't done anything normal on this trip," Luke says. "I feel like California was this bubble and we existed in it, but didn't disturb anything."

"Thousands of people all around us, going through their daily routines, and we were just the background," I say.

"Ripples in a pond. Or purgatory."

"Where are we going now?"

"Hell."

We headed to a huge sidewalk stretched over the highway. We walked above the freeway and I felt like I was floating, Last Crusade-style, over a huge chasm. All the cars below, everyone heading to the border. Looking over the road, was a hillside brimming with lights. A million homes like candles in a Catholic church. It was so hard to imagine less than a mile away was an entirely different world.

THROUGH THE GATE

Just imagine this at night. source: Wikipedia

We parked a block from the border and as soon as we hit the sidewalk we were surrounded by people, herded in this mass exodus to the border. There was a train station and terminal. Everyone carrying their luggage, walking quickly, hailing cabs. But this wasn't like the airport, where everyone stands around quietly stifling yawns. Here, everybody was a refugee of some sort, eyes darting around in paranoia, bags clutched close to their sides.

I could just envision a huge bombing going off and everyone fleeing for their lives, their sole belongings on their back. I was stuck in a scene from Children of Men mashed with the cantina in A New Hope. It's wrong to forget we're all refugees at some point.

We were instantly lost in this mess, until some disgruntled border guards pointed us to a sign that said TO PARKING GARAGE AND MEXICO. To get to Mexico, a country that has a population of 111 million and a G.D.P. of $1.563 trillion dollars, you have to walk through a parking lot. A goddamned parking lot. It's as humiliating as it is bizarre.

We head up three stories of ramps, then cross through long, dark concrete hallways over the road. You could look through windows down on the miles of traffic snaking into the country. Then, it's down three more ramps to a walkway. We go through a giant, fenced in turnstile. Once you're through, there is no going back, except as Swiss cheese. This really did feel like a long corridor of Hell.

Everyone trudging in front of us is Mexican. Most are carrying shopping bags, going home after a long day cruising American business. There is a beautiful artsy mural on the wall where a couple of armed guards are standing. The guards are masked and not looking at anyone, tightly holding M16's. Up ahead is another turnstile, but this one is small, like for a carnival or a movie.

Then, we were through. It was just that easy.

AVENIDA REVOLUCIóN

As we walk down the sidewalk, there was already a huge crowd of people, mostly Mexican men in business suits handing out fliers. If you've ever been to Vegas, the same thing happens, except people there generally stand in a line and slap their palms with booklets of prostitute ads. Here, they come right up to you and don't even care if you already have a dozen of these stupid ads.

Loud music was playing, flooding the air and I immediately felt like I was invited to the world's biggest party. I looked down at one of the cards, which was for a stripclub called Amnesia. I don't know about you, but after a night in Tijuana, I really don't want to black out at a seedy strip joint.

We come to a cab stand, a parking lot filled with yellow cars. A fast-talking man in a suit immediately ushers us over to a cab and said, "Where do you want to go?"

We have no idea where we're headed. We didn't think we needed a cab to get there, either, so we turned and tried to escape. Men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded us, arguing with us that we wanted to take a cab. There was no way out, so we jumped in.

It was five dollars to Avenida Revolución, the main "party" strip in the city, which is six or seven miles from the border. There was no way in hell we could walk there and stay alive. We didn't have weapons or cell phone service or even know martial arts. We were at the mercy of this cab driver. There was no meter and he didn't speak much English. He had the radio tuned to a station that was American friendly.

A shitty drunk picture of Amnesia.

"This whole place feels like Pleasure Island," I said to Luke. "We are going to wake up feeling like jackasses."

Luke smiled and said, "Why do you say that?"

The cabbie dropped us off at Amnesia, where a bouncer opened the cab door for us, trying to usher us inside. Again, we wanted to wake up in the morning without stitches, so we politely declined and walked on. They wouldn't take no for an answer. A second bouncer flanked us from our right, begging us to go inside.

"We got the best girls. C'mon, they'll do anything, you'll have fun." One bouncer said. We dodged to the left and a man in white business attire ran down the steps at us, clapping his hands and saying, "Fellas, fellas, what's wrong?" Now his hands were out, flat, begging.

The only way we could get away was by jaywalking across the street, dodging into a dollar store and regrouping.

"It's going to be like this all night," Luke said. "I've heard that the cabbies have it in with the clubs and they basically demand you go inside. Do you want to go through this all night?"

"I'm having the time of my life." No going back now.

We peeked out the door and quickly headed down the street. No idea if we were heading south or north or any direction. Passed an Italian restaurant, which was a laughably bad idea. The sidewalks were wide and crowded, trash piled near the street and Mexican teenagers leaning against graffiti-coated walls taking drags on cigarettes. Occasionally, large statues of Mayan or Aztec gods blocked the street.

Every couple of feet we passed an old men peddling clove cigarettes (which are now illegal for sale in the U.S.). His eyes followed us, peering out from his trench coat. There were loads of people selling like this and it seemed like they could all offer something else.

Every storefront we trickled by had handwritten signs selling Viagra and Vicodin.

We passed dozens of clubs, the music pumping so loud it hurt my ears from the street. The city was alive in so many ways that it makes a normal American town seem dead. I half expected the streets to be filled with a parade instead of countless cop cars and cabs.

A man approached us and asked us if we wanted some prostitutes. $40. He asked us if we wanted drugs, or something called a "sucky, sucky". I kid you not, he used the term sucky sucky, not even realizing he was a parody of himself. Then, no kidding, he offered us a donkey show. Was this place for real? It seemed we were in a bad Will Ferrell comedy.

We told this old man no, but he kept pressuring us, shoving ads into our hands. So we ducked around the corner and into a karaoke bar called the Black Bull. It was small, but modern and clean. No one was singing. A few people were crowded around the bar, speaking to the bartender, who decked out in a tuxedo.

An incredibly short woman approached us, asking something in Spanish. My mind blanked. Selfishly, I must admit, I thought that everyone in this country knew or would prefer to speak in English. I thought they would attempt to accommodate us and become like us as much as possible. That makes no fucking sense and I'm embarrassed to ever have thought that. It's an idea that's nationalistic, egotistic, even a bit racist.

So I try to speak back to this woman in English.

She gives me a confused look. "Do you speak Spanish?"

Like an idiot, I admit, no. Then, there was a creeping paranoia that I would now get ripped off. I kept my wallet close and my passport closer.

"What would you like?"

We order two Dos Equis for $2 each (cheap!), played a round of pool and tried to act normal. Luke pointed over to the center of the bar. There was a lonely stripper pole.

I miserably lost both games while quickly smoking a cigarette, nervous as hell. Luke wanted to leave and didn't even want to finish his beer. So we went further down the street, avoiding the old bastards on the corner. Outside a seedy massage parlor, a man asked us if we needed a backrub. $40 and he hinted at a happy ending. No thanks. In that case, better just go for the whole package. It's the same price.

We passed club after club, each one teeming with life, each with a man at the door trying to drag us in. One of the straight forward names of these places was Peanuts and Beer. What a joke.

We reached the end of the street which was filled with closed shops. A Whataburger. A G.A.P. These gaping storefronts seemed like a parasitic intrusion into the integrity of this city. The place does have integrity. Yeah, maybe Tijuana isn't safe. In 2008, there were 843 murders in the city or 56.8 murders per 100,000 people. All these drug cartels rule the streets and there's definitely an air of chaos. But building American shops shadows over the good things about this place.

"There is nothing good about this place," Luke says. "Let's either go into a club or get the fuck out of here."

CARLOS MENCIA

We dodge into the biggest and most yellow club we can find. It has a basketball hoop on the front and sad, deflated balloons on the rails. According to Luke, two girls were leaning over the balcony and winked at us. What a fitting choice.

The music could have burned holes in even a siren's eardrums. It was this bizarre, endless remix of cacophonous American pop songs that were popular a year ago. Every song was covered by Spanish-speaking musicians mixed in with random Mexican styles and a rattling techno undertow. Everything sounded vaguely familiar, like a hyperactive muddled meth-infused memory.

The bar is built on the second story and decorated in obscure American memorabilia. One sign has Smacky the Frog, another says, Lover's Lane. There are postcards of Marilyn Monroe and cacti and many other weird, misguided American relics. Somehow, this was like being in the wrong factory in Taiwan, filled with sentiments that have nothing to do with each other each one far, far outdated.

But the bar is empty. For all the loud music and being 10 p.m. at night, no one is here. A waiter serves us drinks and we drink alone and stare over the balcony at the busy street. The girls from before reappear at the end of the balcony.

Then, Carlos Mencia appears. He's a guy with a NY baseball cap, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a whistle in the other. He blows this whistle in our ears and demands to pour the bottle down our throats. We decline, again and again, but he won't go away. I don't mind getting drunk, but barfing in the streets of a dangerous, strange country seems like a death warrant.

It was then my Spanish speaking skills start to take over. In desperation, I pick important vocabulary from my brain. Alto. Alto means stop. And if you yell it at a guy with a whistle, he'll shuffle off for a while.

Carlos goes over to the two girls and pours a drink down their throats, watching us the whole time, whistling in their ears. The girls are very Mexican, very pretty and very young.

Now Carlos Mencia comes up to us and demands that we pay for the drink we just watched him pour down the girl's open mouths. Luke negotiated angrily and made sure that we got some drinks ourselves. Without consulting me. Suddenly, my neck is tossed back and a vat of tequila is sloshing down my throat. I can't hear anything with all that whistling, I can't see anything and the world is spinning.

The tequila is greatly watered down, so I'm not worried anymore. But after I raise my hand and say alto again, Carlos Mencia picks me up on his shoulder and spins me around the bar. When I'm set down, I nearly walk into a wall. My legs are springs.

This whole charade with Carlos happens at least four more times during the night and each time, he demanded we pay him. He won't take no for an answer. As the bar got more crowded and the more I got spun, the more I, the stupid American, was laughed at by young, rich Mexicans.

Our waiter kept coming back to refill our drinks and we kept telling him, we're taken care of. Then he leaned down and asked us what we thought of the girls next to us. We were promised both for $40. Everything in this town is $40.

Some well-dressed Mexican kids came in, giving the impression that they had rich parents and were "slumming it" and started flirting with the girls. They danced, for a very long time, sometimes girl grinding on girl. The music got increasingly more annoying.

"He's paying for that, you know," Luke says. "He's paying $40 to dance with a girl."

I had to piddle, so I padded over to the urinal. A man sat at the sink, reading a newspaper and watching me piss out of the corner of his eye. He had a sign that said "Your tip is my salary" which immediately got me thinking he should get a real job. I paid him a dollar and didn't even have him wash my hands.

We drink a bit more, don't dance and try to avoid Carlos Mencia. I stare over the balcony at the street, smoking cigarette after cigarette and watching people. I watch an old white man talking to a young Mexican man for an hour. I want to know everyone's story, feeling at once connected and cut off to the whole world.

HASTY EXITS

We sneak out of the club quickly before we get tied down and force fed more watered down alcohol. This time, walking down the street we avoid the calls of shady businessmen by pretending to be bored and deaf. There were flashing strobe lights at the end of an alley. Ominous and terrifying. We're tempted to stroll down and check it out, but run into that same old man again.

He offers us the same things all over again, coke, weed, prostitutes, a sucky sucky. We ask about the donkey show. How cool would that be, to sear our corneas forever watching people fuck a fat, lethargic Eeyore? Of all the dirty, despicable experiences available in this city, this had to be the most left field.

"Just get into this cab," the old man says. And suddenly, it didn't seem like such a good idea anymore. Possibly, going to the outskirts of town to see this in the most seedy, creepy place on earth. We decided to leave this hellish place.

We get in a cab, but don't have change, so he drops us off at a currency exchange. I'm drunk as hell, going up the slot and had no idea what to ask for. The guy didn't speak English anyway. I came back with a fistful of Mexican money, not sure it was the correct amount or not. We were off.

The cab pulls up the sidewalk and a kid opens the door, his palm out. We don't tip the little bastard and scurry down the street past all the poor Mexican women selling purses and luchador masks laid out on blankets.

Then it's through one of those gate turnstiles and down a long corridor. There's no crossing over the street. There's a line. A guard takes your passport, asks if you have anything to declare and swipes the card. The end. As long as you have a piece of paper, you can enter into the glorious country of Amerika.

Tijuana was one of the best experiences of my life, for the three hours spent there. I don't think many people understand the place. It's dirty, terrifying and dangerous, but it still has value. It doesn't deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth on principle alone. I'm probably lucky to be alive, even though I didn't do anything particularly dangerous.

I had a fair share of culture shock and fear, but I wouldn't trade those feelings for anything. It made me realize how safe and boring Americans want their life to be, and the petty thoughts and judgments I have could fill a book.

Anyway, time to watch some more TV.

Another Movie Review This Week: Frost/Nixon - Boring/Lies

2010-02-23T21:18:00.000-08:00

Anyone can become Richard Milhous Nixon. They mass-produce the little masks and sell them during Halloween. In 2008’s Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella becomes the notorious ex-president almost as well as Nixon himself, complete with a prosthetic nose and several pounds of Hollywood makeup. But it wasn’t just a mask – Langella captured the core of Nixon, a broken-down old man who feels remorse for the Watergate scandal. Only, what actually happened is much different.
The fallen president has recently resigned from office. He’s old, fat and discouraged about retiring until David Frost (Michael Sheen) baits Nixon with a surplus of cash in return for an unscripted interview. Nixon takes the money like a greedy child.
Frost, with his sculpted hair, plastic smile and oblivious attitude can’t get anyone to take him seriously, not even the audience in some cases. Because Frost had just been canned from his popular talk show, the Nixon interview was just a way for the unemployed man to make himself famous and meaningful again, but even Frost doesn’t seem incredibly concerned with the outcome.
For months, Frost’s team of investigators prepared hard-hitting questions to “take Nixon down,” implying that this vendetta is what America needed to move on. Frost picked some intelligent companions who uncover some damning evidence, but Frost also chose boring and two-dimensional people. Sam Rockwell plays the underdeveloped James Reston Jr. who’s only personality trait is getting angry about the former president. Executive editor Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) sits in the back, quietly sulking, occasionally angry about Nixon. Even John Birt (Matthew Macfayden) only defends Frost’s every boneheaded move and again, gets angry about Nixon.
The rest of the cast are forgettable, including whatever chick Frost was boning and Nixon’s uptight aides. Director Ron Howard truly only invested in Frost and Nixon, pitting them against each other to make the interview seem of extreme importance.
Historically, the interviews were insignificant in the sense that they didn’t change anything and were mostly forgotten. And watching the original tapes is little more than two boring people talking candidly. Unlike the drama on screen, Nixon almost never raised his voice and Frost’s stoic face never cracked.
The movie doesn’t mention that Frost interviewed Nixon almost ten years prior to the big one. In 1968, Frost visited the White House with his mother, celebrating Christmas with the Nixons for a campy fluff piece on how great America is. The interview was bland and lifeless, and that attitude didn’t change much by 1977.
Even what the interviews were supposed to signify was lackluster. Ford had already pardoned Nixon, so admitting guilt in Watergate would have done nothing. Besides, Nixon never did admit guilt, unlike what the melodrama in the film suggested.
All the interview did was line the pockets of an old, retired thief. All the movie did was make an unimportant debate seem like a justice was finally brought forth. It wasn’t.
But Ron Howard’s creation came out just after Obama was sworn into office, which wasn’t mere coincidence. In interviews and DVD featurettes, Howard compared Nixon’s abuse of power to President Bush’s similar administration. Howard was hoping to encourage a repeat in history, perhaps with a different ending.
So far this hasn’t happened, but if it does, one can expect the same results. Why would anybody expect a president, let alone anyone, admit to felonies and treason on national television? The Frost/Nixon interviews weren’t exactly Judge Judy. Bush would make the same excuses for his civilian-bombing wars, wiretapping and abuses of power that Nixon did. And Bush would also get away with it, several million dollars richer.
Broadcast journalism employs a lot of theatrics, but the leaps and bounds Frost/Nixon makes in the fact department are absurd. First of all, what’s with all the pseudo-documentary interviews with characters in-between scenes? It’s as if the drama couldn’t speak for itself, so Howard gave his spiritless supporting actors a couple more lines to explain the plot, all while inaccurately representing the real people they were based on.
The tension-building phone call between Nixon and Frost never happened, but from the screenwriter’s point of view, it makes sense to include it. It made the final interview seem like a bloodthirsty fight to the finish, pumping up the action so the climax was more rewarding. But one question remains: if they original story didn’t have enough action to begin with, so much that you have to falsify history to include excitement, why make a movie about it at all?

Entre Les Murs (from NAU's French Film Festival)

2010-02-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Entre Les Murs (Between The Walls and known as The Class in America) is a 2008 French docu-drama based on the real-life experiences of an inner-city school teacher named François Bégaudeau (played by himself under the name Mr. Marin.)

So you write this autobiographical account of problem kids in your (presumably) underfunded public school and then play yourself in the movie adaptation with a different name? Already this movie seems a little bizarre.

And it is. Hundreds of movies have been made about classroom settings, where screwed up kids are somehow made normal and educated by some random teacher. In fact, most adult movies about high schools make them out to be prisons (an accurate description if I say so myself) and every example from Sister Act 2 to Notes On A Scandal to the more recent release Precious just seem to up the ante. Make the kids as dark and troubled as possible.

Give a fat black girl an AIDS baby with Down syndrome and another on the way, impregnated by her rapist father. Make the girl stupid as hell and make her mother abusive and make it seem hopeless. Bam! Send in a lesbian teacher named Blu Rain and then, everything is better.

Which is why The Class is so out of it’s own league. None of the “problem” kids have any serious issues with drugs, sex, violence or even rock and roll. Their main issue is they’re a bunch of lazy teenagers. It’s a little more realistic and easier to relate to when the story isn’t bogged down with melodrama that most people don’t see in their high school experience. Drugs, death, etc, happens, but it’s not omnipresent.

As far as I can remember in high school, it blew as bad as being incarcerated. You couldn’t leave when you wanted, there were cops everywhere and the teachers didn’t care what you learned, so long as you passed the AIMS test (a type of educational parole) and didn’t complain. There were plenty of kids killing themselves with guns, razors or needles, but otherwise it was mostly boring. It wasn’t some kind of twisted soap opera. School is prison, sure, but it’s not exactly Oz.

In the end, the teacher in The Class really doesn’t change much in the attitude of the kids. He does a helluva good job compared to American school teachers, but he still can’t influence them deeply. So if even awful French education systems are better than American’s and can’t push this boulder uphill, maybe public school isn’t the answer.

No Understanding for Old Men

2010-02-22T10:06:00.000-08:00

I rewatched No Country For Old Men and remembered all the confusion the movie caused two years ago. I wanted to write an explanation for those who "don't get it", but I've completely forgotten what I had to say. So I'm going on a tangent and maybe I’ll hit something.

Expect spoilers.

The Coen Brothers aren't inclined to explain the symbolism in their movies, which is why sometimes they confuse an audience. By the end of Barton Fink, Burn After Reading, Fargo and especially No Country, a lot of folks asked, what was the point of watching that?

You're not gonna find an explanation from the directors, but luckily No Country was their first adaption, so we can look to the book.

Wait, Cormac McCarthy is nearly as reclusive and ambiguous as the late J.D. Salinger. Oh well, you can read the book anyway and have a much closer guess.

It helps to note that the main character is Sheriff Bell, not Llewellyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin, the guy who dies in the middle). Here is a man caught in a vast wasteland overflowing with unspeakable violence and according to him, it didn't use to be this way. Now everything he ever understood is in chaos.

Still, the story centers around Moss, who stole $2 million dollars and let greed ruin his life. Everyone he knows or cares about is dead by the end of the film. It’s kind of a metaphor, so don’t look at it straight on.

Moss has the ultimate showdown with Anton Chigurh, more than once. This is because, really, Anton Chigurh represents the Grim Reaper. Anton, dressed in all black, carries an unusual weapon made for killing cattle instead of a scythe because in 1980 Americans reaped a much different crop. With few exceptions, anyone who meets or "sees" Anton meets a violent and untimely demise. One minor character asks, "Are you gonna shoot me?"

"That depends," Anton replies. "Do you see me?"

He says this with a wide, sadistic grin. He enjoys killing because he has nothing to lose. And undoubtedly, few people have met the Grim Reaper and lived to tell the tale (except for Bill and Ted).

Then there's his weird coin flipping habit, made to prove that death is all chance, but in every way it's inevitable. Everyone, from Moss to Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) to Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) deeply fears Anton (or should). He's the ultimate, formidable enemy and no one can stop him. They can only accept his existence.

Bell deals with Anton differently than everyone else, who get their heads blown off. He quits his job, finally “outmatched” by his environment. On his first day, Bell has nothing to do but sit quietly, muse over depressing dreams and wait for death to come anyway.

Somehow the ending is the most hated part of the film, but Bell's dream is the whole point of the movie. He describes it as his father traveling far ahead, starting a fire and keeping the cold, surrounding darkness warm. That's what death means to Bell -- being taken out of disastrous circumstances and into warmth with long lost relatives.

Only Carla Jean, Moss's wife, understands and doesn't completely fear Anton (Death). When she is confronted by Anton in the end, she calls him out on his insane nature. But arguing with Death doesn't get her far. It is only implied that she dies, but that implication is best. Here, she accepted her fate and fought for her life, if only using words. Out of all the characters in the film/book, she made her life the most meaningful.

But it all ends. Blah blah blah. The point of watching No Country for Old Men is to remind yourself that the world is violent, cold and dark and one day, it'll catch up to you. So it asks you, how do you face the callous cattle killing of Anton?

If you look at No Country for Old Men (even the title is directed at Sheriff Bell) this way, maybe you’ll appreciate the film a lot more. I suggest you rent it again and see if the message rings a little more true.

FAREWELL RIDE (Free book download)

2010-02-17T19:40:00.000-08:00

I wrote a short story over the weekend to accompany some weird images I found once. You can download it for free. It's seven pages including images. The story is only about two paragraphs long.
It's just a little something I made that's supposed to be pretty.

You can download it at:
http://filthfiller.weebly.com/words.html

or

http://rapidshare.com/files/352178773/FAREWELL_RIDE.pdf.html

Thanks.

How to improve your life in three weeks or less!

2010-02-17T10:48:00.000-08:00

dye your hair random colors!

In order to make your life exponentially better you must first add in shit. If you do something shitty, say you go to the world's cheapest, ugliest, worst bowling alley and your game could never be actively worse. So from there, every bowling event will be better. The tip is to plan beforehand to have your personal worst bowling game ever, drink a ton and revel in the joy of failure.

You can make your life exponentially better just by adding shitty elements to it!

So go to a seedy Chinatown restaurant that gives you colon cancer, quit your job and work in a shoelace factory and cut off your fingers in the garbage disposal. Soon you will realize how precious life can be!

Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival

2010-02-02T12:55:00.000-08:00

When you hear the title, Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival, you may think it's just a gaudy, violent and crude occasion for low-lifes who laugh at poo poo jokes to come out in public and scare the normals. I was hoping for that more than anything when Spike and Mike came to Flagstaff's Orpheum theater and it more than delivered.

But more than just inappropriate humor, Spike and Mike have aimed to showcase short animation that is foreign or independent, the type of artistic sweat that you may never see otherwise. The aim of the hosts may just be to act indecent, but they also warm the artistic heart.

It's also a throwback to a forgotten culture. I remember growing up that there used to be short animations before feature films. Now what do you get? Bradford fucking Howe, the Screenvision guy trying to sell you a damn cellphone or shell your soul over to the Navy. Unless it's Pixar, you don't get an appetizer before the main event. You get commercials and that's disgusting, not to mention soulless.

The 70's and 80's were full of independence: independent theaters, film fests, underground comics and animated shorts. These days, everything is a cookie-cutter chain store selling you shit from China. Things like Avatar and Wall*E should have big stickers that say MADE IN TAIWAIN all over it. Our entertainment is fake and boring and it's always been this way, but at least thirty years ago we had other options.

Spike and Mike (and little theaters like the Orpheum) are keeping ideas of independence alive. Their festival is brilliant, inspired and above all, controversial. It's not some bullshit, wiped-up and glossed over film about how we all need to be nice or save the environment. It's a feeding frenzy for those feverish primal urges everyone gets and a damn good excuse to get drunk while enjoying "the simple pleasures" in life.

It began with the eerie "Who's Hungry?" by David Oochs, which luckily I have found on YouTube. It's an eerie, dark retelling of Hansel and Gretel, perhaps the way it should have been told, but with some strong imagery invoking Hostel, a hand reaching from a blender, grabbing at a little girl's skull.

There were a lot of zombie flicks, such as Chainsaw Nurse and Touchdawn of the Dead. Zombies are just so easy to film, yet (as Shaun of the Dead proved) so good for humor. There were also rambunctious owls, dogs with electric collars and all the things you can dream of.

There were the occasional penis cartoons, satisfying the most primal desires, and maybe it's mindless entertainment. It's still beautiful and funny and important. Animation is an art that modern audiences are losing, Pixar nonwithstanding. Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Festival is a celebration of an unappreciated, underground culture. We need more things like this in the world.

Chauteux on Central

2009-12-13T12:51:00.000-08:00

My mini story is about Chauteux on Central, a half-built condominium district in downtown Phoenix. During the housing boom, this complex was built in hopes of charging residents between 1.4 million and 4 million dollars to live here. Then the recession hit and the developers, Central PHX Partners, declared bankruptcy.
But that’s not all! The New York Times did a story on Chauteux and hired a photojournalist to take photos of major undeveloped buildings across America, kind of as icons of the recession. However, the photographer photoshopped several of the images in the slideshow, was fired and the slideshow was taken down.
So I took it upon myself to show accurate photos of Chauteux. I shot black and white C-41 film, which, even if the final result can be falsified, the negatives never can be.

The Phoenix New Times has a perfect version of the story.

Here is a link to the original site.

Additional photos:

Ryan McGinley; a school essay thing

2009-12-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

NOTE: Part of an essay I wrote that I thought was charming. I just like making indepth bullshit interpretations. I'm not sure I meant any of this, but it makes sense, right?

2. Find a PORTRAIT photographer of national prominence (not a local photographer or someone from a trade magazine). Describe what he or she does best. Apply it to what you have learned in class, or what you hope to learn in the future about photography. Also, discuss how that photographer uses light and composition to make photographs work. Exclude Ansel Adams.

Ryan McGinley has suddenly gotten a lot of attention. He’s barely 32, but when he was 24, he was the youngest photographer to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. American Photo Magazine named him photographer of the year in 2003, and world-famous weird rock band Sigur Rós used one of McGinley’s photos as an album cover. The picture features four people running naked across a highway, a theme that is omnipresent in McGinley’s work.

Almost all of his portrait photography is nude. His style evolved from documenting his artsy friends in real-life, everyday situations (for some reason his friends were constantly naked) such as wrestling, playing with fireworks, swimming and whatever else it is that naked people do.

Soon, McGinley was too famous for his own good and had to start constructing his portraits. He said he didn’t have time to wait around for his friends to do interesting things, so he fabricated fantastic, bleak scenery but he kept the naked theme.

Perhaps minimalism is taken to an extreme with McGinley. Maybe not. In his series called Moonmilk, the young New York photographer took hundreds of snapshots of his naked friends in huge, looming caves that were discolored with tinted spotlights. The result is something out of a bad sci-fi movie, but somehow McGinley makes it beautiful.

My favorite portrait by McGinley is called Lily (Black Eye) which features a naked woman (presumably Lily) holding a cigarette to her mouth and a lighter clutched in the other. She is barely, casually covering her breasts. Behind Lily is a couple of flawless white sand dunes. Lily’s hair is blowing in the wind and, while it’s barely noticeable, she has two, huge, black shiners under each eye.

Poor Lily. As she’s about to light her cigarette, she looks incredibly exposed, somehow even more naked than naked. First, the black eyes, glancing timidly off to the side, inferring that she is abused. But unlike some victims of domestic abuse, she isn’t covering it up with makeup. It’s very in your face.

Then, there’s the cigarette, which Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once called a form of “slow suicide”. It is revealed that Lily is abusing herself, perhaps more than her assailant.

But she’s naked in a hostile desert. And the minimalism almost becomes claustrophobic, drawing the eyes right into Lily’s emaciated, exhausted frame. We can’t look away.

The shadows and the harsh lighting really tie the photo together.

Ryan McGinley’s talent isn’t really in nudie photos; it’s in exposure. Revealing a layer of humanity through his lens so that the viewer can also feel exposed. It’s hard not to feel like you’re the naked one when viewing Lily.

Who wouldn’t want that talent? But that’s not exactly something you can learn in a classroom. You have to be the kind of person who is able to expose that kind of humanity. Some people won’t show it.

The best way to learn it is probably watching masters like McGinley work and continuing to try to understand the layers we hide under.

Sensationalism!

2009-11-18T17:31:00.000-08:00

Say it with me: senSATIONalism! Really emphasize it.

[1.]

We live in a period of sensationalism. I don't want to say if that's good or bad, I just want to be in control of it, not the other way around.

But I'm discovering the limits of my mind and my memory, running up against too many walls. I have to write everything down, or I'll forget to do it. Sometimes, I take on a third persona (besides me and I) and almost treat my mind like a child. It's hard to explain, but maybe you know what I mean.

Why am I always so busy? Why have I started fast-forwarding to the best parts of everything? Why do I never have time to watch movies? Why is it, if I'm doing something, I immediately want to be doing something else? And why does nothing bring me happiness like it used to?

I can barely find the time to write these days. I only read on the toilet. I never take little museful walks like I used to. I'm always tired.

I really want to disconnect myself from the world. I guess I'm blaming the internet for my poor time management skills. But what else is there that's causing this? School may be part of it. But I know I will still be forever stuck like this even if I had a 9-5 job.

Whatever it is, I want answers to these questions. Many of my friends are probably going through this, but they don't have the time to even read this. As they say, TLDR. Good for them.

Like most of my solutions to problems, I want to take the drastic way out. I want to smash my cellphone, delete (deactivate) Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and uninstall Firefox. I'd be free! And it would feel excellent!

But I can't. This is possibly the only way I communicate with most of my friends these days -- through a motherfucking screen. As much as I loathe screeangers, I've become one.

It's a choice between mental health and freedom or friendship. I really can't decide. Finding a balance has been difficult and distracting.

I'm being pessimistic, exaggerating a little and it's possible no one cares. But I'm doing that to really put the problem in focus. These are sensationalist times we live in.

I want out.

[2.]

I have 40gbs of music. For some people, that's nothing. They have libraries of music bigger than entire generations created. That's cool. I'm happy with my 40gbs and every week, it increases, little by little.

The problem is, my mind could never, ever contemplate this entire library. I'm always forgetting bands or songs that I used to listen to for weeks. Whenever I go on trips, I try not to bring along an iPod and "fast" from music awhile. During that time, songs play in my head that I never recognize. It's agonizing, yet refreshing.

So what's the point of having all this music? It's not to show some kind of muscle. Most of it was paid for, so I'm not just taking it just to take it. I hate digital downloads because if my computer crashes, I will lose everything. Why am I afraid of losing something I can't fully understand or fully use?

I can never give equal attention to a band or album as I usually do, so when friends tell me a band I haven't heard is good, I usually just agree. Minus the Bear is a perfect example. I have all their albums, I've listened to three songs once and I went to their show two weeks ago. I told everyone how excited I was and talked up the band and when Minus came onstage, I was disappointed. All of Minus's songs sound the same, emo and kind of boring.

Does this make me a poser? I hope not. I can't stand the idea of being inauthentic, which is why I'm being so honest here. I think I'm just overwhelmed.

I would have to listen to my entire library for 22.8 days in order to hear every single song I own. This is (personally) impossible -- I've tried so many times. My computer is not a radio station and I am not a computer. I don't want to be either.

So what's the point?

[3.]

When a Bookman's first opened in my neighborhood, I was 14 and overwhelmed by the size and variety and volume of their used books, music, movies and video games. I actually became depressed for a day, because I was 14 and I became depressed about anything and everything. Moreover, I realized I would never be able to read all the great books in the world, never be able to hear all the great albums and never be able to see all the great movies.

Even if I live to 70, there isn't enough time.

So I immediately resolved to ONLY enjoy quality things. Yes, Bookman's turned me into a hipster. I became volatile about my opinions. They were the best! You can't argue!

If something was wasting my time, I would reject it. Which explains why I have about 25 books on my shelf that are half-read, probably 100 albums I've listened to once (if at all) and dozens of DVD's on a list that I will never, ever see.

Lately, since the spring, I've just been indulging in stupid things on purpose. B-movies and vintage comic books and shit like that. Trying to sabotage myself. I want to break away from this idea I gave myself that being properly entertained was the best way to live.

So, no, I really don't give a fuck anymore what the greatest movie is. Is it Citizen Kane or Citizen I-Have-Better-Things-To-Think-About? I haven't seen it. I won't see it. And so I haven't seen a lot of excellent films. Maybe I wasn't born having already seen every fucking thing Robert Ebert gave two thumbs up.

And are The Beatles the greatest band in history? I don't care. Half of them are dead anyway, so it does them no good. It does no one any good. I don't care if I only own the White Album. As Scroobius Pip said, "Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals, no matter how great they are, or were. The Beatles were just a band. Led Zeppelin, just a band . . ." etc.

I'm over all the hype we give artists. Over it, over it, over it.

Don't even get me started on books.

Anyway, NPR, Spin and hundreds of other publications are riding on the last wave this decade has, really dragging it out and making all kinds of lists. The Best This of the '00s or The Best That of The New Millenium.

I was going to do my own list, but really? Does it matter? Furthermore, isn't it a little early to tell? A best of the '60s TODAY is a hundred times more practical than one that was released in '69. Or maybe it's the other way around, but I think it depends on what people are STILL listening to.

I've noticed something else. Some bands like Radiohead, The Velvet Underground and tons of others market their music by saying (literally or figuratively, it doesn't matter) "If you don't understand this album, you are stupid." But then, almost everyone instantly likes their album (honestly or dishonestly, it doesn't matter). Some people just don't want to seem stupid.

Well, fuck that. It's worse than being pretentious or wrong or whatever. It's inauthentic for an artist to have that kind of attitude. It means your fans don't give a shit about you, they just show up to your shows to look intelligent. But now I still don't understand Minus the Bear and I also don't care.

Unfortunately, nearly every band is inauthentic for one reason or another, isn't it? Besides, that's the point. Music, movies and books give you false hope. And false hope is very, very entertaining.

So unfortunately nothing in section [3.] really changes what I like or how I interpret art.
I know what I like, I don't care if you disagree (but I appreciate it) and I'm not ashamed and so there you go.

[4.]

Have you noticed, that whichever band's album you listen to first tends to be your favorite? This is the case with myself and at least three other people I know, even if it's not technically the band's greatest cut.

For example, I adore The Mars Volta's 2006 release Amputechure way more than Frances the Mute. I know a lot of fans were disappointed with Amputechure and everyone raves about Frances, but that's how I feel and that's how I'll probably always feel. Obviously, I heard them in that order.

Personally, I can't think of any real exceptions to this rule except Nirvana, Muse and Franz Ferdinand. That's not the point.

The point is, this is the power of precedence. That first album sets the precedent for how you think that particular band should act. This is why you will nearly always hate a band's latest album. Or at least be disappointed.

The power of precedence is sensational. It carries over to everything. I hate it.

For your father, it sets the precedence for what a man should be. And most people know what happens to people who don't have fathers.
For your mother, it sets the precedence for what a woman should be.
For the first person you fall in love with, it sets the precedence of love and that's why every single one of your relationships are gonna be the same. Different face, but not a different person, same problems.
Etc.

I feel trapped by these precedents and I want to break free, but I don't know how. I don't even know if I should. I just don't want to seem wrong.

That's it. That's the whole thing. The whole point of this ranting, disorientated, too honest writing.

I feel very, very wrong.

Outside Forces

2009-11-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

October 23, 2009
2:10 a.m.

Lately, I feel so many outside forces attempting to disarm me of my dreams.
But now, in this moment, I have one that fights for me -- ironically, insomnia.
Insomnia is what gives me my hope.
All a concoction of too much alcohol and caffeine.
Maybe a few nightmares.
I adore my nightmares, but they're generally stressful dreams that wouldn't transfer to others.
Running from the cops. Trying to solve all my problems in an afternoon. Insects devouring me.
Maybe those would translate, maybe they wouldn't.

I want to write something about a lactose intolerant kid who is hiding from the zombies in a deep freezer. Oh, God, that's got to be the worst zombie scenario ever. Nothing but ice cream to eat, nothing but cold, no light, no windows and no way out. I mean, the poor kid could have picked a latrine to hide in instead. That'd be preferable. And when the power goes out, when all that ice starts to freeze and the meat starts to smell, God, that will be the worst.

Nixon had his coma.
Dracula had his funeral.
I too, must rest once in a while.

My mentality is a beehive that never sleeps.
Awake, my thoughts never find a home.
I can write it down, as Kafka did, and as he said, it loses meaning.
But sometimes it gains a new meaning.

A seaside home sighs for occupation again.
Sheets cover the furniture, boards over the windows.
How the home lies in disrepair, exactly as revisited memories.

Nothing important hasn't been done.
Nothing important won't be done.
When God turns off the light, everything will be in its right place.
I hope that for myself.
Like a cup, taken from the cupboard, drank from, rinsed and replaced.
I would come from the earth and be placed back beneath the ground.
Like a seed.
I too, must rest once in a while.

Law Abiding Citizen / This is It: Two Movie Reviews

2009-11-02T00:49:00.001-08:00

I've been trying my muscle at more precise, thoughtful movie reviews. Someone, somewhere, may one day give a fuck.

This Is It starts with tears. It’s the story of Michael Jackson’s months of rehearsal planned for his last world-tour. Unfortunately, as we all know, Jackson died eight days before the tour launched. Here we have a tragic behind-the-scenes glance at what that concert may have looked like.

The final result melts the eyes. Jackson has never looked so bad, almost needing no make-up to play a “Thriller” zombie. Claiming he was doing the whole rehashed shtick “for the fans” (also the intended audience of the movie), Jackson reimagines his classic tunes alongside a line-up of break dancers, a cover band and bikini dancers. This Is It blends between live and rehearsed acts with jarring levity, stopping and going with unending schizophrenia.

Jackson’s new tracks, yelping for world peace and environmental justice are preachy, sappy and overshadowed by the violence, sex and glamour, perhaps as it should be.

But all this asks, is this really a proper tribute to the King of Pop? Will fans really enjoy the surrealist manufactured feel throughout this unending outtake reel? Something always feels missing here and it isn’t just the eerie feeling of watching a dead man prance about again. It plays more like a DVD featurette than a biopic.

This Is It really isn’t it. It comes off as a way to make money on a dead man’s ticket, not a reminder of how great that man was.

-----

Law Abiding Citizen at first bows to America's love of brilliant killers, the typical genius murderer one step ahead of the authorities, but it soon lends to the ridiculous and trite.

Gerald Butler plays Clyde Shelton, a victim of a home invasion that resulted in his family slaughtered by two thugs. When Shelton's power-hungry lawyer, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) refuses to take the case to court, our victim turns vigilante not only against his aggressors but the entire court system of Philadelphia.

He's got valid reasons, as the holes he pokes in America's justice system actually exist. Many guilty criminals are let off with lesser sentences through plea bargaining or the like, so the idea of taking law into his own hands is fresh and gripping.

Immediately, Citizen grabs viewers by the balls, playing out like a cross between Se7en and Fracture with the pacing to match, but the treads in the story wear out midway.

The first half is acceptable and there isn't a moment you don't feel caught in the grasp of Shelton's antics yourself. Shelton utilizes Saw-like torture to kill the thugs responsible for his family's death, setting off a cat-and-mouse game with the District Attorney's office. Shelton admits guilt (sort of) in return for some petty favors, but even within prison he's right where he wants to be. With chess-like precision, he manipulates and threatens the D.A.'s office and commits several more gruesome murders remotely from his prison cell.

Plot isn't weakened by pacing but by plausibility. By the second half, it's difficult to believe anyone can procure military grade missiles that can be launched at a carefully chosen cemetery just to threaten one lawyer. Some of Shelton's actions (such as mailing a DVD of a man being chainsawed in half to a ten-year old)

become so bizarre, brazen and out-of-line with his original intent that the concept is almost lost.

Citizen is finally toppled by an anti-climatic, clichéd ending. Justice (or Shelton's view of it) is served to a select few and everyone else gets off with a saturated warning. But it all goes back to Law Abiding Citizen's real intent -- to be a crowd pleaser.

The constant, building tension; the gut-wrenching violence; the ingenious killer whose stand is his downfall -- it all equals a formulaic story-line with few rewarding plot twists or meaningful character development. But if the popcorn is fresh and buttery, it'd be worth a sit through.

De Blob: Anarchy, Art and Video Games

2009-10-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Fun, colorful and maybe it has a deeper message.

I don't really play newer video games, but I got the chance to try out De Blob, a Wii game that feels a bit like Mario Sunshine, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kirby and The Tick. De Blob even looks a bit like Tick, doesn't he?
I'm not saying it's original, but it's delightful. The plot is, an evil corporation called INKT has invaded Chroma City and turned the entire place to a colorless, soulless place. Your job is to maneuver De Blob to paint capsules and soak the entire town in color. You rescue citizens from their lifeless, cultureless existence and everyone cheers and music plays and it's great.
The bad guys, the Inkys, they're like Nazi's. Watching cut scenes of them are like old Nazi propaganda films and a less funny, less violent Happy Tree Friends. But it's an interesting perspective to have on fascism, at least for a video game -- that government is uncreative and soulless and the best way to fight back is ART.
There's even the Church of Inktology (which you destroy and turn into a skatepark), a thin veil for religious commentary or maybe just attacks on Scientology, but I don't see much difference.
Yes, it's a game about Anarchy and graffiti and it's marketed for kids. I think this is spectacular. My brothers and sisters who own it will maybe grow up thinking for themselves. Or maybe not. They don't read into much.
And that's half the reason I don't play newer video games -- there's nothing to read into. There were some bizarre, troubling morals in the games I played as a kid, like Majora's Mask, Link's Awakening, Metroid and Zombies Ate My Neighbors, but at least there was something. There's nothing anymore. Halo? Please. All those stupid WWII games? Yeah right, not even a "don't join the army" warning. Even the newer Zeldas and Marios are vapid.
But De Blob is an exception. A beautiful exception.

If I had a Wii, I'd buy it.

Healthcare and (hopefully) addressing real concerns.

2009-10-09T01:42:00.001-07:00

august 30

As you know, I hate both the Left and the Right equally, so this whole healthcare debate has me aghast at both levels of stupidity.
As you know, I am against big government, so obviously, putting my health and life in the hands of a self-minded bureaucracy doesn't seem smart.
But hearing the conservatives argue against it is ludicrous! God, their petty bickering is exactly opposite of what I believe! They aren't arguing for freedom, they aren't arguing for anything but their own agenda. After all, Reagan introduced plenty of bills that made our healthcare more socialist.Bush and Bush haven't helped shit.

And yes folks, by definition this healthcare plan is socialist. Some think that's ok. "Hey, it works for Canada and Sweden." But how certain are we that it will function under OUR government, which is leaps and bounds larger and more disorganized? With the national debt reaching bazillions of dollars we think we can pay for this with 3¢ taxes on Coke? We are funding unstoppable wars that are killing innocent people, now we think we can save ourselves? This isn't about the elderly getting coverage, this is about collapsing the entire infrastructure of Capitol Hill.

I disagree that socialism -- if it works at all -- works in the long run. It may work for Canada now, but who knows? In ten years, thirty, it could fall on them. It didn't work for

I hate the argument that government health care will be run like the Post Office. It'll be way more like the DMV. Hours of waiting, go to one window to get this tag to take to this window ... while the doctors and officials try to weasel you out of coverage. Has the government ever given something away for free that wasn't dripping with reluctance? Even FEMA is haphazard and inefficient to our own "huddled, starving masses," namely, victims of hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. And I know what it's like, I've been on government healthcare before.

Did you know you have to renew it every six months? This may take six to eight weeks to process. So for a maximum of 16 weeks out of the year, don't you dare have a hospital emergency. Just try getting covered then. My sister had a fine time with that when she had appendicitis.

And I'm SO SURE if this access was mandatory to everyone it would magically improve, not deteriorate. Let's up the scale of this unreliable system to a national level!

Well, wait, this isn't about me OR you. This is about the children. They are dying in droves because Obama is not here to hand them a band-aid -- which is about all your kid with leukemia will qualify for.

But it's true. Our healthcare system blows. But isn't that because the Clintons, the Reagans and everyone since FDR have made the problems of a market a problem for the bureaucracy? What I'm saying is, when the problems get worse as the government shoves its pointed nose in deeper, is the real solution MORE of the same?

It was Benjamin Franklin that said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Strange Graves

2009-10-05T01:17:00.001-07:00

photo by Squared

She calls me after work, carrying an orange juice box full of flowers and she says, let's go to the cemetery.

I'm reluctant. I'm slightly hungover, at the very least tired, not amused by anything. I'm overcast, like the sky.

Trudging through puddles, accumulations of soggy pine needles and dead leaves, fall feels omnipresent. Inescapable drudgery.

We place brilliantly-dyed flowers, the stems hacked off, onto any graves that look lonely. Neon green, canary yellow, periwinkle and opal white. Fake colors.

I'm ignoring any new or military graves, looking for the markers placed in Citizen's Cemetery that are for normal people, people so long dead they never knew what electricity was or chemical warfare or strip malls or nuclear holocaust or ATM's or any of this. Doesn't their pain, centuries old, long buried, seem more justified than this? Even if it's forgotten?

I yearned for causes of death, some kind of excuse, but there were none. My thoughts couldn't connect.

I searched for the graves of children, babies with the same birth and death date. I found pairs, two brothers who died before they were my age. Those tombstones for married couples, the one side already etched deep with dates, the other, empty . . . patiently waiting. Over one such couple's grave, I kissed her, long and hard.

She was crying. It was hard, raw. It could be us soon. But maybe that's just selfish thinking.

And there's a picture of our feet, the box, the tomb.

We gave the remainder of the flowers to a man bringing his kids to the cemetery.

self-loathing self-portrait

2009-09-25T17:56:00.001-07:00

My Oscar Picks 2008

2009-09-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

I found this in my drafts, finished. I wish I had posted it, but it's kind of funny that I am now, 10 months late, just because I'm a little bored.

MY OSCAR PICKS

I believe the Best Picture Award should go toward a film that brings new cultural understanding, breaks taboos and adds cinematic value to American culture. For example, between There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, No Country deserves the win, no contest, because while Blood was commentary on oil dependency and human corruption, No Country was a unique version of what could be a cliché story, told with metaphor, symbolism and tragedy (it also mused on human corruption; no one in either Blood or No Country were good guys, not really).

But the Oscars suck. They rarely pick movies that do bring cultural significance. For example, 2006 was between The Departed and Children of Men, both incredible movies. Departed won, yet Children was the obvious pick. It was an example of cinematic excellence, with its masterful tracking shots and immersion in a world gone mad. It's story was a commentary on the Bush administration's fearful scare tactics, America's racism and totalitarianism. The best example, is the scene in the prison camps. In the background, you can barely make out a man wearing all black, arms out stretched and attached to electrical wires. Yes, the movie was saying, America, this is you.

That, of course, is why it didn't win. I really don't think there's a point in making "Oscar Picks" because it's a stupid organization that doesn't bring anything to the table, except on accident.

That said, here are my Oscar picks for this year.

FROST / NIXON

Didn't actually see it, but I know the story, a bit. This film acts as a thin veil for the lynching of W. Someone tried to prosecute Nixon for crimes, which should remind people that Bush committed war crimes and he should also be tried. But that's too bad, because anyone knows Bush won't and if he does, they should also execute Obama and any other senators that approved the legislation allowing W. to commit those acts of inhumanity. BUT THAT'LL NEVER HAPPEN. So this movie's entire point is lost and does not deserve an Oscar. Which brings me to . . .

W.
Does the W stand for WASTE, as in "waste of time"? This was the first film I ever snuck into, and I'm glad I didn't pay for it. It's terribly long, irrelevant to actual truth about the bastard elect and comes so late in the administration it's ineffectual. Occasionally, the movie tries to be objective, but it comes across as contrived. There's only one motivation for this film and that is to tarnish the reputation of Bush, only it won't do that. It won't do anything. Speaking of which:

MILK
Yet another blatantly motivated political film. Yay. This one is wedged between Obama, MLK and the gay rights movement up in arms over Prop. 8 and Prop 102.
Great, I agree, give the gays rights, but this movie? Seriously? Melodramatic (like when Milk's boy toy commits suicide), sappy and irresponsible. Historically accurate, yes, but that exposes how Milk was a corrupt, power hungry beast. What he did for gays he only did for himself, and he did it by bending the law, making slimy deals with another crooked politician, the guy who eventually killed him. Ha ha ha. Irony.
But this film doesn't matter, it doesn't impact the gay rights movement and it doesn't make any politician a saint. A film for our time it's not.

CADILLAC RECORDS
Speaking of minorities, here's another of those nearly-all black films. See also: Dreamgirls, and all those Tyler Perry films. The problem with this film is its historical accuracy; it barely has any. It takes too long a period of time, speeds it up and tries to view it too easily. Like a bullet train tour through Chicago, you don't see anything.
The music is great, the acting is great, but the story isn't an impact on society.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
A smooth mix of cool, exciting and dramatic. It opens a brand new world, the spectacular country of India. It has a tale of hope, desperation and a gentle perspective on a very negative issue, namely poverty. As India rises as a world power, many Americans despise the competition, but this film shows our neighbors are human and just want what we have.

THE WRESTLER
Didn't see it, but damn, I wish I had. I don't think it has a chance, however, but wouldn't mind if it did win something. At least best actor. From what I can decipher from trailers, this is a Rocky of our time. Speaking of Rocky, it won best picture in 1976, pushing out Network, which was another terrible Oscar snub. Fuck Rocky, it's a terrible film, especially the sequels.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
Clearly the most beautiful, poignant film since Requiem for a Dream in terms of existensial angst. I cried, a lot and I'm not embarassed by that. It's a film that has a message for me: embrace life, embrace it hard and do the best with it. My personal favorite film of the year, but I'm still not sure it's "The Big One".

CHANGELING
I think Angelina Jolie should win something for being the most anorexic housewife of the twenties. But seriously, her acting was something else. The rest of the film, however, just isn't up to standards of significance.

THE DARK KNIGHT
Just kidding. This isn't nominated, although perhaps it should be, so I don't think I should mention anything, except this: one dead actor is not enough to make an entire blockbuster film worthy of social impact. At least, not in this case. If Robert Downey, Jr. dies before the making of Iron Man 2: The Subpar Sequel that won't make the film Oscar gold.

WALL•E
*snort*.
This should have been a silent film. The first several minutes acted that way, but then it turned into this boring, melodramatic moral tale. Soulless machines telling us how to run the planet and condemning consumerism? And then having Disney place Wall•e's ugly mug on every cereal box, dinette set and condom dispenser? That's not irony, kids. That's hypocrisy. All this film teaches is to be blind to actual issues and whine like a bitch.

MAN ON WIRE
An indie documentary about a man who did a trapeze act between the Two Towers, creating the single most incredible art crime in history. The film was inspiring and riveting (I can't think of better words) and it didn't once mention the 9/11 attacks, which was an interesting touch. It doesn't deserve best picture, but best documentary or something.

CONCLUSION
So, I've filtered it down between SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, BENJAMIN BUTTON and THE WRESTLER. I can't pick one, because I haven't seen the Wrestler and I have a personal bias for Button (If you can guess why, I'll give you a dollar). I actually don't think any of those will win. It'll probably be something lame. Anyone want to place bets?

Basterds

2009-09-07T03:12:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to write a review of Quentin Tarantino's latest, but don't expect a lack of spoilers. Go see the movie and come back. You won't regret it.

It was perfect. It was certainly the best movie in the last ten years (since Fight Club, obviously, exactly). A crowded theater, midnight showing, everyone cheered and groaned perfectly.
But it was awful. Awful in the literal sense, full of awe and full of what's terrible.
There are five chapters, each one built upon a beautiful scene of dialogue ending in revolting violence. Tarantino has a real muscle for language, any language, French, German, Italian, especially English. Every dripping word is spectacular, every verb builds up tension like a game of Jenga using the Sears Tower. And then it explodes. It explodes in the most horrifying, beautiful, awesome, awful way possible.

There is more symbolism than I probably caught, but it spoke deeply of the nature of man. First, the trivial, how Bridget von Hammersmark gave a gift to Wilhelm's son, a napkin, yet it ended up being the death of his father.
How, Shosanna Dreyfus, in the scene of her death, became the "Woman in the Red Dress" quite literally by betraying Fredrick Zoller.
The milk.
The meta-ness of the theater burning (for a moment, I thought Harkins was actually aflame and I should bolt for the nearest exit).
The propaganda film that twists Zoller's facts, likewise Tarantino shamelessly twists the facts of World War II, making himself the propagandist.

This alone, Tarantino has created a film that people will use a yardstick for the future of cinema. That's no small feat.

Yet, there's a moral cavity here. The greatest irony in the film is that the Jews become Nazis. They get revenge and mercilessly destroy human life, as judge, jury, executioner. It doesn't have to be right, I'm not asking for anyone to be kind, but there's something darkly eerie when a room of 300 people are applauding these sickening acts.

Does that mean we are softened? Will we be easier to draft, to be flown across the sea to kill others? What will historians think when they view our film history and discover we never had any true heroes. The protagonists in most popular films of this past decade (too many to list!) have no clean-cut morals. I prefer this, but is it right?

The whole thing, an audience clapping when a head is scalped, seems inhumane, but it instantly reminds one of the scene in Chapter Five of Hitler chuckling as Zoller executes American soldiers. I don't think Tarantino is making any solid moral statements here, but you're not exactly supposed to desire them from the man. But calling out violence in film is like spoiling fun or guilt-tripping people for nothing. Party pooper. But I'm not calling it out. I too, am not making any foundational argument here. Just noting.

On the other hand, the movie doesn't only act as a twisted revenge film; it acts as an anti-grace film. Any character that shows mercy instantly goes to Hell, such as Dreyfus pulling up the bleeding body of Zoller, such as the French dairy farmer, such as Landa who gets his skull carved into. Even Landa's murdering of Hammersmark was unneccessary, since he had already planned to betray his country at that point.

But maybe it's just war, then. Maybe there are no excuses.

In the end, adding this whole thing together, it's either the most sickening reflection of inner humanity, like shining a light down the filthy orifice to see how far it reaches. Or maybe it's the most beautiful image of depravity. I like to think it's both.

Doomed! V. 1

2009-08-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

After two months of lazy deliberating, here are all the details from my first comic book, DOOMED!

I was desperate just to create something, publish something, like a little zine, but I had absolutely no direction whatsoever, so I gathered up some humorous sketches and threw them together at Kinko's. For five bucks, I published five issues (I made a lot of mistakes). I'm thinking of selling them (possibly to record stores or whatever) for 2 or 3 bucks, just to cover printing costs. And then I'll print a second edition. And then a volume two, which will have less shit and more point.

(click to enlarge)

I may change the name, details, etc. I may work with other artists, if they are somehow less lazy than me and don't expect a lot of cash. Email me at fireserphent@gmail.com if you're interested (include samples, unless you personally know me.)

(click to enlarge)

I guess that's all I have to say. Lately, I've felt very inspired by Matt Groening's book Love is Hell and Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Date Book. I'm developing characters and violent fantasies and I feel good about this boring comic escapade. I'm writing a children's book, too, which will be just as stupid or worse. The future is exciting!

You can view the whole book, free, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/menetekel/sets/72157622203013136/

(click to enlarge)

Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger

2009-08-14T19:26:00.000-07:00

So. . .
You just watched Andy Warhol eat a hamburger. Maybe you're wondering what it's all about. It seems simple enough, just Andy in a green room munching his lunch, but he's famous. Maybe in this case, he does something interesting.
So you watch as he opens the bag, pulls out the burger and unwraps it. No fries. The burger could be from anywhere.
He dabs ketchup on the side and dips the burger into the ketchup instead of laying it on top, even though he pulled off the top bun. What?
Now you're curious, is he gonna do anything more? So for the next three minutes as he chews and chews, you're mind is racing. You're wondering, what the hell is Andy Warhol thinking? He stares off into the middle-distance, chomp-chomping away and he doesn't look bored or happy or sad or even hungry. He is the epitome of emotionlessness.
Suspense builds in your head like a pot boiling over. You're still trying to figure this out. He pulls the hamburger apart and doesn't even finish it! What the hell? He wraps the mess back up and stows it back in the sack, sets it aside, then twiddles his thumbs. He looks lost, glancing around, nearly paranoid, and his mouth is half open, like he's gonna say something.
Now the suspense is killing you! Is he gonna explain this all away? Is he? He opens his mouth . . . and closes it. . . and opens it again! He does this for nearly a minute!
And it's the longest minute of your life. Longer than that moment you almost drowned. Longer than that moment you were fired for stealing from your job. Longer than the minute you first inhaled.

Suddenly! It zooms in on Andy's face and he says,

"Um, my name is Andy Warhol and uh, I just finished eating a uh, hamburger."

That's it.
That's it. It's perfect.
It bars no explanation. It needs none. But for those of you confused, or unsatisfied, think of it this way:
It's either the greatest joke ever told or a masterpiece of the simplest things in life. Perhaps it's something sexual.
But I think Andy is mocking his own celebrity status. Of all the artists in history, Andy Warhol is probably the only artist more well-known than his art. And his art is simple, commonplace objects turned upside down. By videotaping an act so simple that no one values, Andy is saying, why does anyone value me?
It's the most self-loathing, despairing video I have probably ever seen. And I hope you understand it like I do, because it truly is great.

Copper - Everyone's Changing

2009-07-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

Two years ago when I first read the adventures of Copper and his dog Fred, I hated it. The art was cool, but the preachy, over-bearing optimism annoyed me. Plus, it's an obvious rip-off of Calvin and Hobbes (my all time favorite comic) but without the humor.

I recently reread all of them (there's less than 50) but saw them in a different light. I liked the optimism and joy. It isn't bad.

I guess this means I'm growing as a person or something.

Read the comic here: www.boltcity.com/copper/

Conversation with the Supplicant or Fear and Loathing on Twitter

2009-07-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

May 27
Note: this is old (two months almost) and I barely feel this way anymore, but I still find this interesting.

I've been reading a book called FEED which deserves it's own review when I set it down. In the meantime . . .
It's set in the future, where people have computers in their heads and of course, these kids try to break theirs.
God, I hate sci-fi.
A quote on the book says the novel can be interpreted as a promise or a threat.
So, I'm suddenly all freaked out about how lifeless people are becoming since the internet became mainstream and how Twitter is almost exactly like the computer chips in the brain, except not here yet.
To me, the internet is for sharing life, not for having one. Like characters in a novel, we have to exist off the page. We have to, or we sacrifice our humanity and it saddens me and scares me that more and more, people are shelling themselves into screens. A mind chip will only seal the deal.
I was going to spend hours writing a detailed account of how I'm freaking out, but decided to copy and paste a conversation I had with Dave which moderately expresses every sentiment I was going to write anyway. This is faster, more concise and . . . feed-esque.
God, I hate sci-fi.

Dave: You know why I quit twitter?

It's BORING

me: oh yeah, well it's totally changing the way people are perceiving information.

i'm sorry that bored you

it scares me

7:59 PM I've been alive for 19 years and I've had to deal with way too many extreme social changes in the last 9 alone. From blogging to myspace to facebook to twitter, all of it getting more and more compact and destroying the peaceful, thoughtful world I once knew.

8:00 PM I'm reading a book about this disaster and that's fueling my paranoia to unknown lengths, but what am I to do?

I just want people to use payphones again. Read books. Watch movies on VHS.

Dave: Blogging: Never have so many with so little to say said so much to so few.

8:01 PM Twitter: Blogging on crack.

me: Fair enough, but now, no one pays attention to much else.

8:02 PM Dave: Like anyone ever has?

8:03 PM The only difference between the inattentive, dumbasses of today and of yesteryear is now we can gawk at each other's sublime retardation in HD.

8:04 PM me: I don't know why I'm concerned. It's all going to end in nuclear way anyway.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iURO8fOyWVOA0ytFlaAGuC9F7R9wD98EMMPO0

Dave: Don't forget Iran.

8:05 PM me: that's this weekend, isn't it?

Dave: Their President thinks his role in history is to bring the end of the world and cause the second coming of Arab Jesus.

what's this weekend?

me: Iran invasion

Dave: Fuck if I know.

I never pay attention to these things anymore.

me: maybe the weekend after next

8:06 PM Dave: It will always be some big bad foreign person versus the glorious "Christian" USA

Just look at that death toll thing you posted earlier

The war industry is what's made our congressmen wealthy

that or the other aspects of the over-arching death industries

People will always kill each other for reasons that end up being utterly pointless.

8:07 PM It's just the kind of guys we are.

The older you get the less you start to give a shit.

And I started out not giving a shit pretty well.

me: oh boohoo, existentialism.

8:08 PM i just want to live in fear!

at least until 2012 blows over

that's a joke, by the way.

Dave: right

8:09 PM me: but I am getting very nostalgic lately. Especially for discarded novelties of generations I didn't even exist in. Retro, vintage, these words have no meaning to me, I want things to always be relevant

8:10 PM Dave: Just don't get nostalgic for lawn darts. I don't think Bobby's head can take any more abuse.

me: So I've been watching Tim and Eric's Awesome Show because of the crappy videography reminiscent of the '90s, viewing old fashioned pictures on Flickr and collecting shit at thrift stores I don't need.

8:11 PM Dave: Ugh

tim and erics awesome show

On second thought, maybe lawn darts wouldn't be such a bad idea...

We were born out of time

we should have been born in the 40's or 50's so we could have come of age in the 60's

8:12 PM

I miss the 90's

in some ways like I miss a hole in my head

8:14 PM me: I hate the '90s. It was incredibly stupid, way worse than the '80s. But I still miss its simplicity, its stupid dialup, Furbies and grunge music.

Dave: omg

furbies

haha

8:15 PM after like 4 months of trying i taught one curse words
me: hahaha, so did we

Dave: at least the chinese know the meaning of community support

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE54O3BW20090525

8:16 PM me: that's amazing

Dave: isnt it thou?

5 minutes

8:22 PM me: i'm going to play GTA and kill pigs

8:23 PM Dave: say wha?

8:28 PM http://last-straw.net/2005/06/the-us-invasion-of-iran-has-already-begun/

That's back in 2005

5 minutes

9:30 PM me: "Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity."
--Robert A. Heinlein from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

9:32 PM "My wife set off the metal detector at the airport the other day. Apparently it was the collar."

Past and Pending

2009-07-21T19:05:00.001-07:00

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/07/19/man.greatest.achievement/index.html?eref=rss_mostpopular

This article that asks "What is Mankind's Greatest Achievement?" has got my head turning.

It's that I can't choose just one. The suggestions, written word (possibly my favorite), music (internationally understood regardless of language. Hmm.) cup noodles (pretty ingenious) and peace (yeah, when it lasts.)

I guess I'm just reminded of the good of man instead of the bad. Life feels special again, somehow.

Maybe the greatest achievement will be immortality or time travel or something great in the future. Who knows.

Debbie Family History - A Nostalgic Requiem

2009-07-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

debbie family history from Kyle Anderson on Vimeo.

Squared and I were lost and strayed into random back alleys until we came upon a pile of discarded VHS tapes and old SNES games. We took as many as we could carry, found our way home and later in the year, would drink and watch whatever we popped in.

One video, "Debbie Family History" was especially intriguing but only when the gears started turning did we realize what we discovered.

8mm home videos, mutely filmed decades ago, memories transferred from negatives to positive to VHS to digital, dissolved a hundred times over until the spaces where the light hit the film barely remains.

This lone tape, now sitting on a bookshelf in my room, is possibly the only remnant of these things that happened.

So we had the brilliant idea of melding the six-hour video together with music and some of my words. We tried to keep the nostalgia as intact as possible.

The writing was inspired by an even older VHS tape I once watched as a kid. The BFG, a cartoon adaption of the Roald Dahl classic that terrified me but left poignant imagery in my head for years.
The story goes, a giant lives in a cave in the sky and captures floating dream things in jars and releases them into little kids minds. I took that concept and reversed it, an unknown being that takes memories and dreams that are no longer being used. As discarded as the cassette we found.

We Hate Love - Bitter Rantings of Mayhem Festival in Phoenix

2009-07-20T00:29:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, after going to the Mayhem Festival at Cricket Pavilion, I am certain I have a brain tumor.

Apparently, KUPD, the "Big Red Radio" and Rockstar put on this little show to glorify their biggest and baddest "loud rock" bands they glorify. The fest could have done with more planning (the concert was so disorganized they forgot an entire stage in L.A.) and less sponsors, because the breeds of music tended to contradict and clash worse than thrash metal chords.

Slayer and Manson? Please. Those go together like The veteran metal heads drummed up their drunken, hardcore fans (constantly screaming the band's name) while the cross-dressing weirdo Manson only attracted more of the like. This only scattered and weakened the crowd resulting in a bunch of people standing around, too bored to mosh or even move.

As you can expect, the audience was a mix of skinheads, long-haired bikers and emo highschoolers. In short, everyone there was an absolute tool, including myself, who wore a plaid-green button up shirt. Hipster, some may say, but I'd say "easy target". I stood out like Manson's nipple's in a sea of black t-shirts and choker necklaces.

I'm still not sure how I ended up there with my friends Luke, Corey and Bryce. We (them, really) only went for Marilyn Manson, I went because I had a free ticket. We rolled up as a killer dust storm rolled in and as Killswitch Engage killed their set.

Getting inside was a chore, because they banned lighters and matches, apparently to stifle the fires random assholes started on the field last year. Still, the rent-a-cops didn't bar cigarettes, and people got in lighters somehow. Then they looted toilet paper from the bathrooms and started little bonfires all over. Since the paper burned quickly some people set t-shirts aflame or threw in empty beer cups. Believe me, it smelled great.

Luckily for them, Cricket came prepared and mounted a water cannon above the field. Whenever a fire got too big, firefighters and security would aim the cannon from across the pavilion and sprinkle it out. This barely worked (distance, wind and pyromaniacs shielding the fires with their bodies were factors) and really only created mud. People danced and slid downhill in the mud til it was black.

So then, to get new fires out, teams of security officers rushed into the crowd, threw everyone aside and extinguished the flame. Then they left, leaving the smoldering plastic bottles and paper towels and the cancerous smoke that blew in everyone's face. Minutes later a new fire would start.

The whole blaze thing was amusing and as insane as concerts should be, but it's about as interesting as the fest got. Like I said, the hundreds of fans that screamed for Slayer stood around, arms crossed when the band actually came on. Most of the fans were too drunk or busy burning shit to care, I suppose, but you'd think that the intensity in which they screamed would have started a riot or two. No such luck.

Which is probably why earlier, Killswitch Engage screamed "Fuck You!" to their audience for being too tame (they made up for it at the end by rambling about love or something and seeing Phoenix again soon). Who knows why this concert was such a disaster, maybe it was the 116º heat or the general Hot Topic crowd or something. According to Bryce, Ozzfest was actually intense, so it's not necessarily the city's fault.

Most of the Slayer tools left when Manson came on. The freak said something about how glad he is about going to Hell because it'll be cooler than Phoenix and all these cool Phoenix people will be there and whatever. Then he played a few songs from his terrible new album, undressed and dressed up a dozen times in a row and made some incessant staticky sounds. Along with the burning plastic fumes, I'm positive Manson gave me brain tumors the size of ostrich eggs.

I'm sure if you've read through this far you think I'm a whiny bitch that doesn't have any fun. That's not true, I had a blast and it was totally worth the free price. I just feel entitled to criticize musicians (and the fans thereof) that I dislike, especially when their only gimmick is hate. Yawn.

It seems to me that bands like Led Zeppelin and others were criticized of being Satan-worshipers, which they denied, but then new bands sprung up emphasizing zealous devil-worship to sell more records. Sooner or later, Manson became the king of such marketing. Whether or not any of these bands burn crosses or carve swastikas into their foreheads or whatever is besides the point. To me, even if Manson is faking it or not, it's just a gimmick.

I can agree with Manson on a few things, such as American foreign and domestic policy, but screaming such diseased lyrics isn't encouraging social change at all (not that it's important) nor is the creep shouting anything entirely unique. It's just kind of . . . pointless. If it does something, it does something, but as far as I can see it's a stagnant message lost on his disinterested public.

The majority of the audience I was cast upon may not agree, but they sure had less enthusiasm than I had jeering at the whole debacle. Manson screams into this boring, listless group of people and they're his FOLLOWERS? As they say (not really), if you scream in the abyss, the abyss screams back at you.

On religion, Manson has a lot more pitfalls. Even if the Christian Right (ironically, it's neither) is a hive of morons that ruthlessly judge others and value war, Manson hasn't said anything that's less hateful than the vehement anti-gay, pro-carpet-bombing, anti-abortion demonstrators. As Christ once said, "You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

The only blot of purity that Manson has claim to is not having directly hurt anyone. Big fuckin' deal. A lot of worthless people have that claim.

But I don't think that Manson should be shut up. As a follower of Christ, I'm against censorship of all kinds. Let Manson, Slayer and all the rest sing their petty little songs and incoherent lyrics. It amuses me more than anything. And at least they're good at what they're doing, in a way (but it's not hard to be hateful or join the Church of Satan).

Above all else, I wonder what Mayhem will be like next year and how they'll handle banning lighters or maybe the general lineup won't suck. If nothing changes and I somehow wind up there again, I'll be bringing a backpack full of kerosene soaked rags and I'll torch the whole place.

The Audacity of Humanity!

2009-07-08T20:47:00.001-07:00

It is never a good thing to think anthropologically, which is something I constantly do, which means I am stuck living in the future, but the way, way distant future. I'm constantly considering who will discover my civilization when it crumbles.

As Chuck Palahniuk once said "Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash."

Because of this, I'm always careful of everything I throw away. If I don't want some garbologist to find my dirtiest of dirtys in the year 3021, I burn it.

On the other hand (and this is the point) I also find some things in humanity I want to destroy for the benefit of future generations. Sometimes I go into thrift stores and "drop" fragile pieces of absolute shit and I don't feel guilty. Why should I? I have purged the Earth of another fuckin' Anna Nicole Smith snowglobe or High School Musical porcelain dildo.

And I realize with certainty that I have no authority to decide what is worthwhile and what is not. I'm also glad that this same ideal hasn't been applied to things of relevance today or even my own works. That would be quite depressing and disgusting. Rest assured, I hate censorship with a passion.

But perhaps this is different. Separate somehow. Anyway, no one else is fuckin' doin' it!

It is an understatement to say that Americans need a lot less shit. From Furby cake decorations to Yu-Gi-Oh! adult diapers to Hannah Montana diet supplements, it's all shit that doesn't even deserve to dent a landfill.

This is the Audacity of Humanity.

Last night on Hulu, I watched "Giant Spider Invasion" a 1975 b-movie about trans-dimensional blackhole-traveling tarantulas. Confused as to why their meteor landed in Wisconsin, the spiders decide to eat everyone. The film was so worthless, no one even bothered to save a decent copy and the Hulu version is full of bad cuts, scratches and distorted sound, like a grindhouse film sans sex and violence. It goes without saying, it was fucking terrible. Here are the most intelligent quotes from the whole film:

"Sometimes the only time i know you're still alive is when I hear you flush the toilet."

"You're so dumb you wouldn't know rabbit turds from rice crispies."

I kinda of wanted to pick apart the plot a lot, like how the spider was emitting so much radiation that even if it was squashed, everyone would die of cancer. But what's the point?

I put "Invasion" on in the background and lazily got some work done and occasionally glanced up to see a bunch of Disco-era nobodies scream and violently get ripped apart at the hands of their radioactive arachnid tormentors.

The best part was the 50ft. spider which roamed the countryside and ate helpless cattle and douchebags that tried to shoot it. The tarantula was made using hunks of polyester and sherbet-tinted headlight eyes. And apparently, giving it too much radiation makes it explode orange, green and purple like a Willy Wonka wetdream. And someone actually took the time to design and construct this thing?? Such audacity!

But there's so much of this crap, it's unbelievable. Do you really think Transformers 2 is going to last another ten years? Yeah, that's what I thought about Pokémon: The Movie. (Note: generally, nothing called "the movie" is ever going to worth shit)

Now that poor, worthless spider is going to lie buried next to your collection of pogs and my mother's favorite John Cusack DVD's for centuries until Xeta anthropologists excavate it and ponder how stupid we were.

Announcing: FiLTHfiLLER.COM!

2009-07-06T00:51:00.001-07:00

I am proud to announce the launch of my new website, filthfiller.com

It's going to act as a little portfolio for my work, much better than flickr or a blog can provide. Right now, it sucks, but it will grow and look nice and stuff. It has the potential to do a lot more than just show myself off, but I have little to no web skill, so I guess this is enough for now.

The name means nothing. It's just like Nine Inch Nails or Häagen-Dazs, a catchy, pithy title.

Anyway, bookmark that bastard!

Michael Jackson is NOT Dead

2009-06-25T23:47:00.000-07:00

I've been hearing a lot of rumors that Michael Jackson died. I know, according to some negligible sources, that Michael was found in a coma and later, died. This is as much a hoax as Jeff Goldblum dying (but not as funny).

Let me give you proof.

Elvis: King of Rock & Roll.

Jackson: King of Pop

Since Elvis went to join the aliens and he was a king, obviously Michael went, too. I'm not even talking about the fact Mikey looked like an alien before his death. This is all about "king-dom". When Sting dies, he will be in outer space, living immortal among the stars. After all, he was the King of Pain.

So please, deny these rumors of Jackson's "death". He is very much alive and always will be.

song idea

2009-06-14T01:49:00.001-07:00

OK so here's my idea:

A record that's got 60-300 tracks, each one 1-3 seconds long.
The idea is, they play together so well, you can put the album on shuffle and listen to a new song almost every single time.
I'm not a musician and we could figure out the technical stuff some other time, but it's totally possible.
Any music friends with me?
Fuck, I'm wasted.

A Thought for the Day

2009-06-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

If I were a logging company, I would threaten to cut down large, ancient trees in the hopes of forcing environmentalists to live in them for a couple of months.
I'd have no actual intention of hurting big trees, there are plenty of smaller ones to go after, but it would be funny to me to see hippies clinging to the branches in the rain.

Existentialism Diaries: Part One: There is Still Time ... Brother

2009-06-06T23:12:00.001-07:00

When I was 12, I had this strange habit of watching ancient black and white films just to make fun of them. Until, I saw On The Beach and it completely changed my life.

I was young, so maybe I didn't understand the deeper meanings, but at the time it was one of the most beautiful films I'd ever seen. To say the least, I was surprised there was so much meaning packed inside.

On The Beach is a 1959 film set in 1964, right after World War III, right after all the bombs fall, atom bombs blossoming in the sunset. Gregory Peck, Anthony Perkins, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire are four people living in Austrailia, awaiting huge clouds of radiation to float down and suffocate the world's only survivors. The film focuses on the last scraps of humanity, slowly being eaten away, the extreme existential emotions of expecting the inevitable.

A lone submarine journeys to America to investigate a strange Morse code signal and find survivors, but upon arrival in San Francisco the crew realizes their worst fears. The end really came.

And so they submarine returns to Austrailia and the characters wait. They go to the pharmacy and the government gives them suicide pills if they wish, and everyone waits.

A few people fulfill their lifetime dreams in quiet desperation. Fred Astaire races a vintage Ferrari. Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck have a romantic fling. Old men sit in their country clubs and complain about the wine. A waiter plays pool. Everyone goes fishing and they sing, "Waltzing Matilda".

They do meaningless, stupid things because they want to. Because they can. They want to add some last-minute purpose to their doomed, pathetic existences. And then the power flickers out.

For years, the poignant imagery in the film has been stuck in my mind. The empty streets of San Francisco, the empty Golden Gate Bridge. The S.O.S. Coke bottle in the window. The banner, waving in the wind, proclaiming, "THERE IS STILL TIME. . . BROTHER." Few plot lines fascinate me as much as the inevitable.

I realize that my introduction to On The Beach was my first experience with existentialism. And I am an existentialist as well as a follower of Christ. They don't always contradict. My existentialist views can be good because of the retarded anxiety they produce. I am constantly trying to accomplish the goals and dreams I have, as if I'm already a decapitated chicken.

To the rest of the world, On The Beach was a warning to the world, a promise more poignant than The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) (another film I saw merely to make fun of and ended up loving). And perhaps the message of OTB was not entirely a don't-blow-yourself-up plea. Maybe it was a reflection of humanity. At this moment in time, we humans aren't facing imminent extinction, at least that we know of (global warming aside), but we all have the same anxieties. We all have these dreams and awkward motivations to somehow make our eating, sleeping, shitting, breathing MEAN something.

Only, because, since we don't fear death as much as the Australians watching the skyline from the Beach, we suppress our desires. Procrastinate. We never worry about that next breath.

I always come back to this, because I believe life has the meaning we give it: life means nothing unless we recognize our Creator and more so, realize brokenness is the only way to survive. In that sense, On The Beach completely changed the way I look at life and got me closer to God. At least, in an "eat, drink and be merry" sorta way.

It's kind of terrifying to be so open about that belief, but I'm not trying to belittle anyone who doesn't agree with me, only it can come across that way.

Still, I hope to live life with the helpless anxiety portrayed in the doomed eyes of Anthony Perkins as he serves his wife and child cyanide laced tea. Or maybe without that gaze. I can't decide.

I leave off with what Yeoman Swain said in the film, right before he jumped ashore in San Francisco, essentially committing suicide, "I have a date on Market Street, Captain. I'm going home."

Five Fotos: Week Uno

2009-06-01T21:06:00.000-07:00

I want to integrate my photography a lot more with my writing, starting with a five foto's of the week (that will likely happen once a month). The point is to showcase my favorite shots of the week, no matter what comes out. Anyway, here's the start.

To A New Place

Canon AE-1 35mm Kodak Plus-x Pan Film - Arizona

• Onward, to adventure and self-discovery.
• Self-developed, under-developed and turned all the film red.

--

Unloading Bay

Canon AE-1 35mm film - Arizona

• Trash dumped behind abandoned Wal-Mart. Returning shit to whence it came.

--

Crushed

Kodak Disposable Camera, 35mm film - Flagstaff

• Bored ice cream parlor with lazily stocked shelves, products designed to catch the eye, begging to be picked up. Muting the colors and downplaying that gimmick, as if the slogan is now "Empty Feelings Inside!®"

--

Borrowed Gift

Pentax K-1000 35mm film, green filter - Flagstaff

•Such a grand tree, borrowed camera and filter.

--

Story of the Eye

Pentax K-1000 35mm film, zero flash - Bathroom

• Eggs in a toilet. Recreated scene from "The Story of the Eye" by Georges Bataille, but definitely NOT for the same reasons as the author.
• Eggs were hard to flush and I had to crush them with a plunger to get them down. In retrospect, not a good idea at all. They probably started to smell, but luckily I moved out the next day.

[Insert something conclusive]

'Valkyrie' is a Joke

2009-05-24T23:30:00.000-07:00

I rented 'Valkyrie' because 'Synecdoche, New York' wasn't in stock. Forgive me.

The history behind the whole event interested me enough, but the story didn't make up for the terrible filmmaking. It was kind of like 'The Fellowship of the Rings' as directed by Michael Bay. Yech. How can you take such a beautiful, poignant thriller and dissolve it into such trash?

In fact, the whole movie was presented almost as a joke, a joke without a punchline. Since most people going into this film have an idea that this isn't how Hitler actually dies, they know how the film ends. Just like how everyone knew Obi-Wan couldn't fuck up too much in the Star Wars prequels; no matter what, he'll end up as a hermit on Tatooine. Which is to say, it's boring. With this type of movie, don't focus on plot tension, don't focus on the history so much as the drama, the paranoia and the general emotion of the characters.

Well, maybe that's what you get for hiring Bryan Singer to do the job stiff, dry story-telling and unmemorable dialogue. And placing Tom Cruise in the role of Germany's greatest hero wasn't the wisest choice either.

Despite being generally accurate historically, Valkyrie is an insult to the true conspirators.

Bad Design for Bland Bands

2009-05-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

Anyone got an explanation why bands are now doing this boring, simplistic shit? I'll bet there's a dozen more albums just like this that came out recently.

Senescent Lost Cat / GarbageBand

2009-05-10T00:18:00.000-07:00

I like to make music using GarbageBand, a simple Mac program that allows anyone to think they are talented, myself included. I know adding a few loops and strange sound effects doesn't make music good, but it's as good as I can do. Or maybe as good as I'm willing to put forth effort.

Anyway, I made a song with my sister in less than an hour, recording chipmunk voices and quoting lines from a lost cat poster. The poster looked like a really bad '80s rave dance party, so I made a really bad '80s rave dance song.

I have better songs I could talk about, but this is my most recent (and most inspired, probably).

You can download the song here and listen to more boring music at my MySpace.

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=9t5nlktg9mc

Swindle Flu

2009-04-29T00:05:00.000-07:00

The Hitchhiker's Guide had solid advice when it said "Don't Panic!"
Yet, every couple of months that golden advice goes unheeded, as most Americans seem to do the same thing. Freak the fuck out.
Before we fretted about the economy, it was the tomato salmonella outbreak. Then bird flu, then West Nile, then SARS, then terrorism, then Y2K. Nothing came of that, did it? At least, not in terms that our fears imagined.
We totally forget that we were terrified mere weeks ago of some other mystery monster.
Stupid Americans. Why aren't we afraid of real problems, like poverty, failing infrastructure or drug cartels? Oh wait, we are. We Americans are afraid of everything, the epitome of xenophobia, like gophers afraid of our own shadow.
We don't really solve our problems here, we throw money at the pigs on Capitol Hill and hope they'll do. . . something. Well, for the last 40 years our elected idiots haven't done shit, not really. Their War on Poverty, their War on Drugs and their War on Terror have all made those issues much worse. Thanks, guys!
If fear and government haven't helped us, what will? Maybe if we ignored these problems, would they disappear?

But back to Swine Flu. So far, 159 people have died and 3,400 have been infected. That's hardly a pandemic, and all this media coverage is only spreading panic. My advice is to relax and wash your hands a bit more often.

I want to condemn people and reflect the advice of Hitchhiker's Guide but it just seems pointless even to poke fun. I could mock you, but I really don't have to. We mine as well be fearful of a zombie invasion, at least that's more likely to be serious.

Anyway, here are two videos, one on the exact same fear before it was recycled and another from Congressman Ron Paul adding some logic to this insanity.

Wind is Entropy

2009-04-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

I wrote a haiku:

Wind is entropy
But really, it is static
Change is illusion.

It got published on twihaiku.com, but I don't think that's really a big feat.
Anyway, now I'm reminded why I hate haikus and that's because I don't only have three lines worth of thought on wind or static or change or anything.
I want to talk about how much I adore the wind, in all it's chaos and I don't want to be restricted to seventeen stupid syllables.

I love it when hot sand and gravel blow into my pores, and I walk around like I've risen from the dead.
I love it when gusts of air blow plastic bags into trees and they tangle around sapling limbs like flags of surrender.
I love it how nothing stays the same in wind, how trees swing low, how ponds evaporate, how houses topple over.

In wind, trash goes everywhere, leaves and sticks and stupid worthless things become important.
In wind, those tufts of dead grass I walk by every boring day, they come alive.
In wind, everything struggles to bend back in place, everything becomes a challenge, everything is victory.

I'm reminded how when I was young, I would stand in the middle of our street and raise my arms and welcome the stinging, chaotic dust storms, the first before each monsoon. I'd stand until everything around me was red-brown and smelled like rain and then the storms would come.

Fuck haikus.

Agnatha

2009-04-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

I ran into a street preacher today. I always wondered if they still yell and scream when no one is around and it turns out, they do. He was shouting at no one, no one but me, tellin' me the end is nigh. He spelt Yah-Weh wrong. Yay-Way.

The wind was so bad last week that it blew all these fake plastic flowers from the local cemetery into a ditch, floating atop a thick layer of mud and trash. I've been picking up plastic flowers on the side of the road for months, but never realized they blew over from headstones.

It's windy again today.

Vinny

2009-03-17T21:57:00.000-07:00

Brilliant is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Vincent Verbryck, for he was both a great thinker and he had a certain light about him. I always felt attracted to his radiance.
I loved Vincent and will always treasure being his friend.
I liked making him smile, and as he was known for his silence, I loved making Vincent say a lot. It was a challenge, but I only did it because it was worth it.
He made me smile, too. He had a great sense of humor, always sarcastic, deadpan, direct delivery. Vincent made me laugh hard.

I don’t think he understood me, but he accepted me in a way that was unique. He called me by my favored name, and he knew what that meant to me.
He did something few people will ever do with me; he wandered with me. That was special, because together we explored Knott’s Berry Farm and Anaheim, California; the torn apart, barely built neighborhoods of El Mirage and the jungles and beaches of Jamaica. We talked about deep, meaningful things and he listened really well.
Often, on AIM he would leave a message and immediately logout, not giving me a chance to react. He once left me a link to Rick Astley’s famous video. Yeah, he was the first to rickroll me. Last year, he started sending my poems by Tennyson. And he did stuff like that fairly often.
When we did talk online, we had casual but serious discussions. Once we were arguing about socialism and famous authors and I mentioned how well he argued. He didn’t try to convince me of his viewpoint, he just stated his side and listened to my opinions and to me, that was more effective than being right. I started imitating that, and he taught me how to discuss ideas without belittling people. I often felt enlightened and humbled talking to Vinny.
I think that in a way, Vincent admired me, but I admired him just as much.
I wrote this about him in January 2007 but never published it because I didn’t want to embarrass him:
There are times when I wish I could be a little more stable, a little more calm. A little more dignified, a little more introverted.

I really admire Vincent for being such a quiet person. I often tease him about his apathy, but I know he cares much more than he shows. I'm in awe of him, that he can keep his opinions silent, and go through life without provoking anyone. How he does it, I'll never know. I can't stand being so inwardly focused.

His sister told me she doesn't understand Vincent. That he walks around on his roof at times, and is always in his room. I laugh at this, because I understand all too well.

I would be lying if I said I didn't see a little bit of myself in Vincent.

I guess that makes me seem like a fanboy, but I still believe that. I saw a lot of potential in Vincent. I once tried to hook him up with my kid sister, which I wouldn't do if I didn't trust and value him a lot. I joked about starting a band with him called the Sketal Heads, a mixture of his trumpeting talent and his favorite genre of music.

He once told me that he didn’t have any passions in life and that greatly pained me. I wanted him to find passion, somewhere, anywhere. And for weeks, I tried to help him.

I often saved him a seat in church or asked him to come with the group when he wanted to be alone. He never seemed to enjoy being dragged along, but at least he did it. At poker nights at the Edahl’s, it wasn’t a complete party without Vinny there. It wasn’t really a LAN without Teh Boy.

We created some great memories together, I believe.

On Wednesday, before I knew what happened, I had spent the entire day drifting in and out of memories of Vincent. It was very uncommon, but it was nice. I remembered Jamaica and drinking virgin strawberry daiquiris and snorkeling in the reefs and how he went out for longer and farther than almost anyone and his mother was so worried when she heard that story. I remembered a lot of things like that, for no particular reason. It was surreal but it made me happy.

Later that night, when I learned what happened to Vincent, it was just like they say; my world shattered. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, or feel or hear and my vision locked up. It hurt unlike anything I’ve ever felt.
The next couple of days were like a film, which isn’t to trivialize it, but it was so perfect and it felt like I wasn’t living my own life. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t real.
Thursday morning, it snowed and the sky was lint grey and still beautiful. It was like even the weather wore black and mourned with me. It was perfect.
A woman handed me a tract, and I threw it away almost immediately. I was angry at her, I was angry at everyone.

Some people may say, well he’s in Heaven now or something and that may comfort you and that’s fine. But for me, one of the only comforts right now is that I had my time with Vinny and I used it well. He was here. He made my life better. He deeply changed the person I want to be and the person I am. He made my life what it is.
My entire life with Vinny, I felt like a better person around him. He often humbled me. I spoke less and thought more. And the reason we’re here today, that’s just another way my friend Vinny has humbled me. I cried a lot, I blamed myself a lot, I broke down a lot. So I gotta say thank you to every one of my friends and family that helped me out with this tragedy, especially the Verbrycks, my parents, Kyle and Gean.
I’m here to celebrate the light, the brilliance that Vinny brought to me and to many of you here. I’m here to say goodbye.

Pictures of the Weekend Pt. 1

2009-03-11T22:19:00.000-07:00

Went to the artwalk with my buddy Squared. Flag's First Friday usually blows, so you have to create your own chaos. I brought my Canon AE-1 and Squared tugged along his Pentax K-1000.
These big ancient cameras attract attention; everyone wants their picture taken, or on the other hand, they want you to put it down. There's the strange guy who demanded we take a picture of his dog (Squared did; I took a snap of the owner) and there's the grumpy gallery curators who don't want us selling prints of their precious art on eBay (a creepy old woman kept watching us take a picture of a shop window).

We ran into some handicapped people who admired our cameras. We ran into a man dressed as Bigfoot (it was really a bad Chewbacca costume) who ran into traffic and scared a bunch of drivers. We ran into police and breakdancers and drunks and small town poets and terrible art.

We were walking with our equipment hanging out (I know how that sounds) and a drunken Navajo wrapped in a blanket asked us to take his picture:
"Actually," Squared beamed. "I would love to take your picture." He raised the lens to his eye.
"What if I die?" The Navajo asked.
"Uh . . . well, we all will . . . some day. . ."
The Navajo pursed up his fist. "I could use some change. . ."
"Well, okay, we'll give you a dollar if you let us take your picture."
"Deal." He said. Then he raised his arms like a hawk and shouted "FREE!"
"Dude, you're not a freak. Don't worry."
Drunk Navajo Guy raised his arms again and we snapped two pictures.
"What's your name, anyway?" Squared asked.
"David." He said. "And I'm not a giving you any last names either. Just David."
"...Right."
A young college girl walked by and patted Dave on the shoulder and said, "Night, David." How sweet, she knew him and was being friendly.
David growled and said, "Don't touch me."

Later, we walked by a beerpong tournament outside the Mad I. Squared wanted to take a picture of the players, he raised his camera but a bouncer talking on his cellphone told us no pictures. We argued with him, that the sidewalk was a public space and we had the right.
"I know it's legal, but it's not cool."
Frustrated, we left and Squared muttered something about how we shoulda taken it anyway.
So we went to the corner gas station, I pissed and we came back. The bouncer was inside, not paying attention and Squared got the shot, easy. But I wanted to provoke the bouncer, so I turned on my flash and pushed the test button. Flash.
We walked on, but the bouncer ran after us, cursing. He stopped us and told us to delete the picture.
"We're shooting film." And I didn't want him ripping out the entire roll, because of the other great shots we had gotten that night. Bigfoot, the poets, the guitar-hero wannabes, everyone.
"We have two options, because I told you not to take a picture and you did," The bouncer said. "You delete that picture, one way or another."
I was shaking for some reason. I always get nervous in these situations.
"Let's compromise," I said, biting my tongue. "Why don't we just apologize and promise we won't use the picture, because it's film and we can't delete it."
"I don't care."
We argued for a few minutes, trying to tell him what we did wasn't illegal and it wasn't hurting anyone, etc. He tried to tell us he was a business law major and that our First Amendment Rights suddenly didn't matter.
Finally, he agreed to an alternative; we go into the bar and apologize to the manager, playing beer pong. Well, seems like a good idea, but as he led us into the bar I couldn't help thinking this was a trap. He was going to lead us into some dark backroom, beat the shit out of us and destroy the film AND the cameras.
But he didn't. He brought us to some random guy who looked bored and didn't care, we apologized and promised we wouldn't use the photos in a newspaper. That distinction should be emphasized. Everyone was happy. In the end, my first solution became the final one and I really think the bouncer only dragged us inside to embarrass us.
Squared is going to use the photograph, on his flickr, but that's about it. Victory or not, it was fun. Here it is:

Later, we went to NAU's carnival night a little Friday night program to keep Freshmen dying from alcohol poisoning. Yeah, it's a way to control everyone on campus and they tempt you with a raffle that serves as a reminder you are poor and never win anything.

Squared and I waited in line for an hour to get cotton candy with friends Angie and Katie. After waiting, Squared and I decided to take pictures of worker's reactions to strange things. I popped a few balloons next to them and then screamed as loud as I could.

We waited in line for another two hours to get balloon animals because Gean wanted an owl. But by the time we got to the front of the line, the balloon lady quit. Balls. However, a girl wearing a cap and a red Robin Hood hat also had a peacock balloon hat. She gave it to us and then disappeared into the crowd. As if her sole purpose was to give us a balloon and disappear. But we ended up passing the peacock hat off to someone else.

I collected as many balloons as I could and then some asshat tried to hit them out of my hand. Later, I saw him get into an argument with a stranger, who socked him in the face and ran out the fire escape door (which set off an alarm). I tried to get the shot and whipped out my camera, but he was gone and I let go of my balloons. . .which got stuck. What a disappointment.

Whatever. After that I went home and watched lame VHS tapes.

Three of the photos are by Squared.
You can read Angie's account of the weekend here:
http://angieonie.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/this-past-weekend/

It's Time to get serious

2009-03-10T15:31:00.000-07:00

I got about 30 rolls of film (or 650 pictures to take) and I want you in them.
I want people dressed up silly and posing and whatever.
If you've already posed for me, that's great, let's do it again.

I want to do people smoking in front of NO SMOKING signs, an idea I am practicing with Luke, eventually. I got a neat t-shirt to go along with it, if you can fit in a Large.

I want to get people jumping unhappy. I heard somewhere that pictures of people hopping about are always happy. Well, time to prove them wrong. I think Vincent would be good for this.

Those are two ideas that will work out for now. If you have time, I can find it.

The Giants Fall

2009-03-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/

Denver based newspaper that survived the Civil War, a flood and lots more closes under this shitty economy. The New York Times shall be soon.

Ford, GM and Chrysler won't last much longer even with the bailouts.
Same goes for Fannie and Freddie and Washington Mutual.
What's next? Will we see Yahoo! go under? Wal-Mart?
Will Nike lose stockholders and file chapter 11?

Facebook? What would you do if Facebook no longer existed?

We live in an age where the corporate giants will tumble. Anything can happen and anything will. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

I Don't Have Time

2009-02-16T18:57:00.000-08:00

This is the fifth blog I wanted to write about how I don't have enough time, but I don't really have time to explain why.

This is the second blog I wanted to write about the chaotic details of my early and current journalism life, but I don't think it will interest you.
Conflicts about talking to stuck-up celebrities and deadlines and story changes aren't the kind of stories that make the movies.

More important than grabbing your attention is that I don't even have the time to do it.
I have started writing in my journal again, but it's keeping me up an extra hour each night.
I'm getting insomnia, but it's worth it just to write for myself and just to reflect for once.
To pause.

I still don't have the time to write anything else but school, newspaper and my novel.
I got a great idea for a short story last night, when I was trying to drift off, but I can't find the time to write it.

It's about a guy named Edward Abbey. Doesn't that name ring nicely?
He's balding prematurely and he wears thick glasses and he lives at home on disability checks.
His only companion is his grey tabby cat, Clyde.
The story opens on a depressing winter morning. Edward Abbey is munching on soggy cereal and talking to Clyde.
A pistol is on the table, fully loaded and menacing-looking.
His is thinking about lonely things, like his dead mother and other sad stuff. He doesn't have any friends.
He is considering suicide.
He goes on the internet and dials-up (yeah, it's the present but he still has dial-up. Isn't that depressing?) and finds a website that allows you to tip the cops off to drug dealers. It's so very interesting because it's completely anonymous and such a ratfink thing to do.

I got the idea for this when browsing "how much is an eightball of cocaine" and how much it costs. Ironically, I stumbled upon the info on a cop website based in Michigan that actually allows you to snitch on drug users and dealers.
I looked up some Michigan politicians and sent in tips that they were sniffing coke. I'm causing chaos in a state I don't live in. It's funny.

Here is the link so you can do it yourself:
http://www.huntteam.net/AnonymousTip.htm

Anyway, Edward Abbey is so lonely and so bored and so depressed that he decides to submit his own name. He types in "Edward Abbey sells drugs to school kids" and his address and his full name and his height (5'3''), his eyecolor (grey), his weight (213 lbs. [he weighs himself to be accurate]) and finally his birthdate (Dec. 1. 1973).

The next morning, Edward Abbey notices an ivory white van sitting outside his house. He checks periodically and it's always there. It has Michigan plates, (cuz Edward Abbey lives in Michigan) and Edward Abbey realizes that he is being watched. He excitedly pours himself another bowl of soggy cereal and tells all this to Clyde. He feels like a celebrity.

The van is there for a week and then it disappears and this depresses Edward Abbey so he logs on again and rats on himself again. He says, "Edward Abbey has a drug den in his home." The next morning the van is there and Edward goes to the grocery store and the van follows him. As he shops, he notices that a shady young man is following him. This guy pushes a shopping cart and occasionally loads in random objects, but they're not things a man like him would buy. This is a clue the guy is shady because a normal man does not have tampons and saurkraut and Good Housekeeping in his cart.

Edward Abbey realizes he is being watched and he is ecstatic about the attention. He looks in his cart and realizes that he has the same old gross cereal and cat food and some hemmerhoid lotion. He decides that he needs to impress the shady character browsing the same aisles but picking up Tabasco sauce and kid-sized toothbrushes. So Edward puts the cereal back and buys a nice, big steak. He buys A1 steak sauce and a set of steak knives and potatoes and chicken stuffing and carrots. He blows half his disability check on this and the cashier flirts with him. Edward has never felt so good.

But then, in the parking lot, he realizes the shady guy and the ivory white van won't follow him much longer unless he has some real evidence against himself. So he pushes his cart of groceries past his car and down an alley and finds a homeless man.

He tells the man, got any cocaine? And the homeless guy laughs and says sure. And Edward Abbey asks how much it'll cost and the homeless guy says $200. Edward gives him the other half of his disability check and takes the eightball of cocaine and stuffs it in his pocket. Down the alley, he notices the shady guy duck back. Good. He was watched.

And Edward pushes his cart back down the alley and gets into his car and goes home. The white van follows him. Edward cooks his meal and talks to Clyde and Clyde purrs. Edward burns half the meal, but sets it on the table anyway. He removes the pistol, which is still sitting there and he looks at it and feels foolish that he ever felt suicidal. This is the best day of his life. It's like he has guests. He replaces the pistol with the eightball.

Then he sits down and eats and watches TV. When he turns to the six o clock news, he notices his mug on TV. He beams! He's famous! Maybe like Andy Warhol once said, he's only famous for fifteen minutes, but that's still something. He turns up the volume and listens to the anchor talk and talk and talk about . . . HIM! Edward is crying tears of joy. He eats his steak and his stuffing and his mashed potatoes and they're mostly burned, but it's the best meal he's ever had.

Then he hears a million sirens and the cops pull up and the police copters and the news copters are buzzing overhead, louder than a hurricane and he hears a cop scream through a megaphone, "Edward Abbey, come out with your hands on your head!"

This is Edward's big moment. He doesn't know what to do, so instead of panicking, he packs up the leftovers from his meal and puts them in Tupperware and labels them and puts them in the freezer. Clyde is freaking out and clawing up furniture. Edward is crying again, but not tears of joy.

The cops yell at him again. "We know you're in their!" Edward realizes his mistake. He realizes this is the end. That he can't go to prison. He was already living in a jailcell his entire life. He's already had his last meal. He's already on death row.

So Edward takes Clyde into the bedroom and he brings the pistol. I know, this is horrifying, I thought, but it has to happen. It just HAS to. It makes the story anti-climatic if poor, depressing Edward doesn't destroy some outside part of himself. So he does. He points the barrel at Clyde and pulls the trigger.

The cops hear the shot and start firing. Edward is safe, however. He goes to the front door and he opens it and he shoots and that's the end. The scene ends with only the silohette of Edward passing through the door and the extreme brightness of all the spotlights trained on him. Trained on HIM. And we watch Edward crumple to his knees.

And that's the whole story I thought of last night. I know it starts out depressing and ends depressing, but maybe that's okay because our main character learns something, he grows and he steps outside himself a little bit. Only he did it the wrong way, and maybe this serves as a moral for you; don't blame yourself. Instead, free yourself.

And maybe you think it's an excellent storyline despite many of the obvious faults. Maybe it's just like one of those movies. Maybe it's perfect idea. Maybe you're telling me, "why don't you have time to write that? You have to!" Well, maybe I just did.

Finger Crossed (A Depressing Look at the End)

2009-02-15T00:48:00.000-08:00

I hope the economy collapses. Flatlines. Nothing left.
I think we could use it. We can rebuild from the rubble.
A new start? A new dawn? Sure.

Let's hope those 2012 predictions pan out as well.
The sun scorches the earth and earthquakes split the ground, eat us alive. California launches into the ocean and the magnetic poles turn upside down.

And I don't care for them, but those environmental scare tactics about climate change? Mine as well pray for mass extinction and melting ice caps. The new El Niño.A new ice age. A new dawn.

Remember that Russian professor who predicted the downfall of America by the end of this year?
He forecasted inevitable civil war and even estimated how the states would be divided. I wrote a New Year's blog about how to make this next year, 2009, the best ever because it could be America's last.

Wonder if we'd still be killing random Arabs then. Wonder if we'd still torture. Wonder if.

But back to that prof. -- I don't feel I've really made my life all that much better by now. It's only been a month and a half, and January always blows. I'm not exactly behind am I?
But now I'm worried. So worried that I just want my worries to come true.
I still haven't found a way to deal with any of this. I don't have a World War Z plan. I don't have a metaphorical bomb shelter. Nothing.
All I have is my camera, my pen and a package of cigarettes to protect me.

Oh, and today I learned that Wal-Mart and Walgreens are completely becoming dry labs by March. Target will likely follow suit. No more film developing, except for send-out, but that's a little more expensive, I believe. I don't have the money, but that's OK; I have the debt.

Everything is going digital much faster now because it's cheaper. In this economy, no one can afford to spend $10 just for 24 pictures. Soon CDs and Vinyl records will be gone too. I hope print newspapers and books will last another decade, or at least that, but I don't have my fingers crossed.

Here I am, shivering with my soon-to-be-obsolete technology. It's comfortable, isn't it?

Maybe the solution is to curl up in a ball and listen to sad songs.
I recommend The Bad Plus' cover of Wilco's "Radio Cure".
Arcade Fire's "Windowsill".
Elbow's "Grace Under Pressure".
Radiohead's "No Surprises" or "Lucky" or maybe just all of OK Computer.
Maybe I should just make an apocalypse playlist and then I'll sit on a mountain and play it while writing what I see, those atom bombs blossoming in the sunset, and the whole event will mean something.

As Bright Eyes said once, "I just can't work it out, but for memory and clarity, I had better write it down."

When I was a kid, I used to read those Bailey School Kids books, about the four friends who always assumed their teachers were vampires, werewolves or leprechauns. Sometimes they were close to right, sometimes they were dead wrong, but it usually had this open-ended, cop-out finish. That one girl, Liza, whenever she freaked out and worried her teacher was a goblin, her nose would start bleeding. This fascinated me, and sometimes I wished it happened to me. I like bloody noses. They make me feel important.

I got sick of the Kids and started reading Goosebumps. Both series of books had terrible cookie-cutter plots with cliché bullshit endings. They were supposed to be scary, but never really disturbed me. Except the aliens. I was never afraid of ghosts or witches cause I knew for certain they didn't exist. But aliens? No one could disprove that. The aliens books gave me nightmares of having the life sucked out of me, of being dissected, of being kidnapped.

I also read those worse than terrible Left Behind books, but the whole "the sky is falling" storyline scared the hell out of me. I musta been ten and I cried and cried that The End was Nigh. That I would die at age 11 and never live a full life and I would never experience all the wonderful life promised me once I reached 21. Or at least once my balls dropped.

I was never, not really, worried about Y2K. As grocery store shelves emptied of water and canned goods, I just went to school and drew comic strips. I played Nintendo and used AOL. When the big night finally came, when the ball dropped, I was sitting in the living room, playing Donkey Kong 64 with my brother. My alarm went off and that meant it was my turn to play. The power didn't even flicker.
I heard the next day some casinos lost memory, but the rest of the world was safe. Airplanes didn't nosedive out of the sky, gas tanks didn't explode. In the morning, the pacemakers and credit cards still worked and the rest of the planet was still on life support.

Those things, those worries, seem silly now. Adorable, if you think neurotic children are adorable. There's got to be a way to face these current problems differently.

I could ram a truck into a gas tanker like this woman, only do it the right way.
http://www.azdailysun.com/articles/2009/02/14/news/20090214_front_190872.txt?rating=true

I could listen to the advice of Interpol: "Pace is the Trick / and to all the destruction in man. . .and to all the corruption in my hand."

What I'm most likely to do is keep worrying, petty and stupid and helpless. But like I said, I'm so worried I just want my worries to come true.

But perhaps this is the best advice of all from Robert Anton Wilson:
"All of us should treasure (John Dillinger's) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: "Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.""

Right and Left (On Mt. View)

2009-02-11T22:23:00.000-08:00

JAN 10 2009
Tomorrow I leave for Flagstaff again. It's time I reflect on what this month had to offer. What I did.
No, scratch that.
I mean, I had a few major goals and I only scrambled to accomplish a couple in the last week. They don't even seem to matter now.
I don't really remember what happened anyway since I stopped keeping a personal journal. It's a hard habit to keep and I don't really spend any time alone anymore, just pondering. I wish I could, I miss it, but I don't have the time.
No, scratch that.
That should have been my new year's resolution. To make time for myself.
Ok, scratch that, let's start over.

This is a specific story.
At the beginning of this adventure, I badly wanted a picture of a decaying billboard four miles from my house, turn Right on Mountain View Rd.
I waited until the day before I left when I drove down there with Dave. He went a little past it and we discovered some stencils on a dumpster outside a tattoo parlor. I got out and took a few pictures. Many of the stencils were old and amazing, such as one of a distorted baby face. And then the manager came out and asked what I was doing.
"Taking pictures."
"Of what?" He was tattooed from head to toe with piercings to match. His hair, unkempt, beatnik style, someone way into a decade 60 years ago.
"Stencils." I said. "I like stencils."
"I thought it was a little strange that someone was taking pictures of my garbage, so I came out here."
"Hope you don't mind."
"Nah, it's cool, just ask permission next time, so I know what's up."
Yeah. Like I'm going to ask if I can take pictures of your dumpster.
I got my shots, including the one of the billboard that I loved. It was beautiful.

Later, Dave generously drove my sister's boyfriend, Daniel, home and I went with them so I could lend Dave gas money. We stopped at QT, just as a cop pulled someone over. The gas station was packed and busy, even at midnight.
While waiting, I met an old man.
He was a babbler, talk talk talk, but worse than that, he was an incoherent babbler.
Couldn't understand a damn word he said.
He was dressed well enough that I didn't think he was homeless, even when he told me a sob story about how he was locked out of his car and needed to get to Glendale.
"I feel like a horses' posterior. Could you lend me enough money to get some gas?"
I didn't question the inherent contradiction. I just gave. He needed gas to get into a locked car? And he's gonna borrow the money, like he's ever gonna pay me back? Sure.
The old guy told me his name, but I couldn't hear it. He told me how he is a professor at Luke Airforce Base. He asked me if I was going to get my masters. Told me to retake the SAT. A lot of random shit.
Suddenly, I noticed the gas station was completely empty. Footsteps echoed. A kind of peace filled me.
Then the old guy asked for money again. This time, he needed it to buy a snack inside the QT to raise his bloodsugar, since he has diabetes. I told him, I gave him everything. But he was being nice about it.
"I'll even open my wallet for you to prove it."
"No, no." He said. "Your heart is bigger than your head."
I'm not sure if that was an insult or not, but it felt wrong. I felt stingy. I truly didn't want to give him anything.
"Um, I have this quarter I found. . ."
Suddenly, Dave appeared, and the guy started his sob story all over again. Dave, poor Dave, gave him enough to buy some coffee, even when I know he has less than 47 cents in his checking account.
Then this guy asked me if I could give him a ride. Just to 17th Ave, down Mountain View, not even out of our way.
"Dave's the driver," I said.
Dave shrugged. "Ok."
We waited for the old guy to buy his coffee and filled up. The old guy took his time, told me, "I never do anything fast." Laughed.
He said a funny thing, that he may not be around next Christmas. "I'm 63 and I don't want to be pessimistic. . ."
Somehow, that made it so that the money didn't matter anymore.

"Don't ask me how I know, I just know." He said. "But you're a night person."
"Yeah."
"You know how I could tell?"
"It's night?"
Old Guy was being incoherent again, but I could make out clips and phrases.
"I don't want to be such a presumptuous bastard, but I'll just say this quick, but the Man upstairs is your ticket." He thrusted upward with his index finger.
"You a Christian? You don't have to be, but it helps."
"Yeah, I am."
He started mumbling something Hebrew and then translating it into English. It may have been a blessing, but I couldn't follow him. Then:
"I know this is gonna sound harsh, but I used to be a football coach and you don't get someone to be all they can be by patting them on the back." He said. "You get them to be all they can be by kicking them in the ass."
Dave laughed. "OK. . ."
"So, get off your ass!"
I looked him straight in the eyes.
"God gave you some special gifts. You have no idea. You have gifts in areas that you have never dreamed of. Don't ask me how I know, I just know. Of all the times you've failed, I've failed ten times more. And any success you've had, I've had. So get off your ass. Use them gifts."
I smiled. I've been feeling shitty about my life accomplishments lately and that's what I needed to hear.
We drove the guy to his place, Left on Mountain View and he said, "I don't mean to be such a presumptuous bastard, but could I ask for one more favor?" He begged us to take him to a church near a hospital. Or maybe it was a hospital near a church. He was so hard to understand.
Old Guy asked us to drop him off at his apartment complex and then come pick him up in 40 minutes. I don't know why, but Dave agreed.
But as soon as we pulled into the parking lot, three people surrounded the van and started looking inside at us. Looking for drugs. The one woman looked like a meth addict and they didn't get what was going on.
The situation totally upset Dave and he drove off.
"The whole situation threw me off." He said. "And then I just abandoned the situation."
"The old man inspired me," I said.
"He said some interesting things."
". . . That's about it."
"I realized that he said exactly what he needed to say to keep me interested long enough to give him a dollar and a car ride. And I realized he was just using me. I didn't feel comfortable in the situation and I knew he was using me so I went back on my word."
"Oh well," I said. "He'll live. Let's hope."
"Yeah," Dave said. "And if he doesn't, then it's not my fault, because he's a grown man and it's his responsibility to take care of himself."

FEB 11 2009
I got my pictures, I'm not sure anything said matters, but I got my pictures.

You Could Have It So Much Better / Lucid Dreams

2009-02-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

When I was 16, the four most important bands in my life were Muse, Radiohead, Interpol and Franz Ferdinand. I can't decide which band the most, but least likely is, surprisingly, Muse. Perhaps most likely is Franz Ferdinand.

I got their first two albums, Franz Ferdinand and You Could Have It So Much Better at the same time. I liked them so much that they introduced me into my favorite genre of music, Post-Punk, which encompasses the White Stripes, the Warlocks, Interpol, the Killers, She Wants Revenge and thousands of others. So in a way, they got me into music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_9GR9kdZ3o

Their first album was ok, not bad, but disorganized. Still, their music videos and album art really grabbed me because it introduced me into Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Avant-Garde. Also, in "Outsiders", the lyrics "In seventeen years will you still be Camille, Lee Miller, Gala or whatever" are a reference to the lovers of the artists Auguste Rodin, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí. So in a way, the band got me "back" into art.

I say "back" because when I was very young I wanted to be an artist, then a cartoonist and then I had a terrible middle-school experience where a teacher told me I was worthless and so I gave up those dreams. Years later, I decided I wanted to be a writer, which, to me is the best decision of the three. Listening to Franz Ferdinand made me want to pick up art again, and so I did, but only as a hobby. I don't take my artwork very seriously (which explains why it isn't very good).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ken2Tz3h0Zs

On a side note, I've always wanted to be a photographer but I thought it would be complicated and boring. I still dreamed of National Geogrpahic quality prints. At times it is tedious, but I became an amatuer photographer anyway after taking a terrible college course in darkroom developing. So, you could say, I have become everything I ever dreamed of becoming, except a published novelist.

Franz Ferdinand's second album is better than their first, by far. Several of the songs, "The Fallen" and "Outsiders" had even religious influence on me, because their lyrics gave me a very liberal way of looking at faith.

The videos for You Could Have It So Much Better "Walk Away" and "Do You Want To" made me want to live this life of complete artistic expression and wild exuberance. They made me want to be cool, cool like Alex Kapronos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_T14vUcH8o&feature=related

Franz had a new album that was released this last month. It's spectacular. But I had to wait three years for it. In the meantime, I looked up their b-sides, which they weirdly made videos for.

"Jeremy Fraser" made me look differently at how I viewed my life and my eventual death. "L. Wells", "Eleanor Put Your Boots On", "Fade Together" and "Wine in the Afternoon" were these songs that had such incredibly beautiful, sexy, artistic women in them. In a way, they defined what I looked for in a significant other, altho on a personal note, I didn't date anyone like the girls in the videos until I met Gean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJM2iCH_XR8&feature=related

Now, their newest album, which I bought the day it dropped (AND GOT A FREE LP!) is amazing. "Ulysses" and the rest of the album make me want to party all night long. Only, the video for "Ulysses" takes the band to a new level of cool, of suave. Dancing and doing drugs in a dull laundromat? MY NEWEST DREAM. I want to be THAT fuckin' amazing.

But then, today, I realized that real life isn't like artsy fartsy music videos. It isn't like Glasgow rock ballads.

I built the person I am today, it was a lot of work on my part, but a lot, (no, a shit ton) of outside influence. If I'm any bit unique it's because I found many, many unique people to admire (Franz Ferdinand is just an extreme example. See also: Franz Kafka, Chuck Palahniuk, Hunter S. Thompson and Banksy). These heroes showed me the way and any idea that's completely my own (almost) is because I was given the eyes.

So, yeah, now I sadly realize my life can't be like a glamorous, drug-addled rock star surrounded by art and music and cheap wine. I can be cool, but not THAT cool. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdGGqScwe4w

etch

2009-02-04T23:05:00.000-08:00

One day I will be a particle of light, searing through the air, lured by your brilliant gaze, your beauty, sucked in like an insect, to land on the film of your cornea and forever etch my image.

Cardinals in the Super Time Warp Continium Thingy

2009-02-03T13:32:00.000-08:00

Normally, I hate football, but I wanted to celebrate the Cardinals in a somewhat unique way. I got baked. Therefore, I'm not serious about an ounce of this, but so what? Enjoy it.

First of all, I hoped the Cardinals lost. They came all this way, through thick and thin, and they still lose it? Amazing ironic drama that would make.
But really, it just ended up being kind of sad. I still laugh, tho.

Personally, I sometimes believe that all games are determined already. It's a performance and it really happens but the one team decides to lose on purpose. They have more to gain that way.

But the Superbowl has to be super interesting so no one suspects, except paranoid weirdos like me. So what happens? An interception at the endzone that is run to the other side. TWICE. Yes, it was quite a coincidence, don't you think? My girlfriend predicted it. She also predicted some of the fights and few other things. Coincidence? I think not.

And why would the game for the Cardinals be fixed? They just had a stadium built and they want a way to justify it, and if they win the Superbowl, what better way? What will they justify next? Maybe they'll pay for anything they want.

ANYWAY

Football is amazing. Amazing.
The way those little men coordinate and move.
Their attacks are precise and brilliant and painful. They lift each other off the ground in mid-air and slam to the earth and it's just incredible. IN-CRED-I-BLE. I've never watched a game so closely before.
It's greased machinery. So sci-fi.
STARE.

Humanity has never been so great nor so terrible. The Superbowl is proof of this peak, but global war is proof of this valley.

DID YOU KNOW?
John Madden will be assassinated. He may not seem like much, but he is one of the most important political figureheads in the world. Of course you know that already, subconsciously. When Madden dies, chaos will break forth over the earth.

But everything is planned anyway. There is no chaos. Everything is so amazingly orchestrated. Nothing happens by accident. It may have merely been an explosion but the creation of the universe was a chain reaction that started a chain reaction that is so intricate and perfect. Who cares if it's controlled by strings or something else, the point is it's so tightly knit, it's unbreakable.

Everyone does what they're supposed to. How can anyone act surprised, ever? Terrorist attacks? Bound to happen. Earthquakes? Just a matter of time. The end, the end, the VERY end? Just wait.

Time is a circle, the creation and the destruction of the universe are the same explosion on different ends. The end is going in, and the creation is going out. A mobius strip. President Bush steals his election, always has and always will. The Cardinals lost, they have always lost and always will lose. In a couple billion trillion years, the cycle will repeat and they will lose again.

In that case, you are a reincarnation. You are you, but you are always you and you never were not you. (You weren't anything else, not a beatle or a sloth or whatever. You are a reincarnation of yourself). When you learn, you are simply remembering something you've known all along. Hard to explain that feeling, isn't it?

But most important to realize is that an animal that lays eggs has it's uterus inside that shell, technically. It's not called that, but whatever. So therefore, pregnant women have the shell of the egg inside them. Pregnant women are therefore giant eggs.

I think I will write a Star Wars blog next.

Forgetting How.

2009-01-30T21:01:00.000-08:00

Note: None of this is really all that true. It’s an experiment?

I think I’ve forgotten how to talk to people.

Whenever I’m contradicted, I get this pain in my gut, a metaphysical pain, a sucking, existential gnawing that everything I know is wrong, I’m wrong about it all. But then I remember that the person I’m talking to has only said they don’t like Radiohead. Or that taxes are a good thing. Nothing serious.

Instead of relaxing, I just don’t say anything. I know I can probably argue better, or at least try, but now I just refuse.

I don’t think it’s weakness; it’s either laziness or apathy or something. Maybe it’s also fear, fear of arguing, that’s what it is. But it’s a temporary ailment, as far as I’m concerned and I’ll get back into the swing of shouting my opinion back.

I mean, I won a YouTube argument today. How about that? I didn’t think it was possible and yeah, arguing on the internet is like running in the special Olympics, etc. But hey, I proved a point and did it peacefully and the other person didn’t have anything to say. That’s a start, right? Soon I’ll be able to stand up for myself and argue again. Or maybe not.

I got an email today telling me to call my Senator and tell him that I don’t support the new bailout “stimulus” garbage. So, spur of the moment, I called Sen. John Kyl and when I got one of his secretaries, I started my rant:

“I want to tell Mr. Kyl that I don’t support this bill and that it will make the economy worse and, and, and –“

“—Mr. Kyl has already voted NO on the bill and as far as I know, his opinion of the bill hasn’t changed.”

“Oh.” And I believed him.

“Good day.” Click. I didn’t even bother calling McCain.

Talking Just to Talk - Warning: Stupid Politics Inside

2009-01-20T13:35:00.000-08:00

Talking Just to Talk - Warning: Stupid Politics Inside

(please read all of this before you discuss, it makes it more intelligent).

This is Not News

Last night, I was watching CNN, some commentary about Obama moving into the Oval Office and how chaotic it can be. As a journalist, it disgusts me that broadcast television calls this newsworthy. Seriously? You couldn't comment on Obama's foreign policy or how he's approaching the terrorism in the Gaza strip or anything?

In the Arts and Entertainment section that I work for, if my editor asked for a story idea and I told him, "The president's furniture." I wouldn't have a job, let alone a story.

Today, I woke up and Obama was already being sworn in. The entire school was celebrating with wide-screen, plasma screen TV's and red, white and blue deserts topped with tiny American flags. Commentators, heads talking just to talk were telling us how this is a "glorious day for America". Really? Glorious? The Hand of God reached down and touched the bald forehead of Barack?

That's the thing with broadcast journalism. There is so much editorializing and shit that is unjournalistic. Commentators never say anything of substance or importance. In my opinion, I think important news should be something that affects you, directly or indirectly.

Good example of news: A salmonella scare.

Bad example: Britney Spears' boob job. (By the way, the only reason she made a comeback was because the media said she did. Maybe they felt bad for ruining her life? To me, she's still a bimbo, a terrible artist, a terrible person and always will be. You can't make a comeback from that.)

The agonizing inaugaration was not important to me and 90% of it didn't count as news.
I thought maybe if I ignored him, Obama would go away.

Promises, Promises

So far all, nearly all Obama has done is make a bunch of promises and a bunch of excuses because he can't possibly keep those promises. He can't change America, not in the way people think.

Some people think that Obama may not be able to make any actual positive change, but he can at least inspire people enough to make change for themselves. Really? A morale boost is all this country needs?

Imagine this: Throngs of people in the street, cheering that they are losing their money, their jobs and their homes. Cheering that they are still at war with Iraq and Afghanistan and moving into war with Palestine and God knows where else. These same stupid people that elected this socialist into office.

Socialist? Yes, it's not just namecalling, Obama really is a socialist. He has voted YES on every single bailout proposed to the Fed and plans to make healthcare social. So when our mortgages, our cars and our very health are owned by the government, you still want to say Obama believes in a free market? Ha!

Maybe you don't understand the definition of socialism:

From wikipedia: Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership.

Under Obama, the state will run the majority of American car companies, mortgages, banks and hospitals. And all this before Obama was even sworn in! Give the bastard four years (or God forbid, eight) and who knows what kind of chaos he plans?

My biggest problem with people who like Obama is their blind trust. Because Bush was so incredibly bad, they will turn a cataracted eye to anything terrible Obama will do.
Let me make it clear, Bush was a fascist and the only difference between the two is the security policies of both presidents. But in actuality, Obama has a very similar security policy to Bush. OH NO!

Complete Evil?

Let's look at what Obama has already done as a senator.

DID YOU KNOW?
He has voted for every single piece of pro-war, pro-military legislation that has come down the tube to him. A PERFECT RECORD. Every single one. What's wrong with that? Well, I won't try to convince you war is completely evil, but that means that Barack did vote for the Military Propriations Act, a little law that expanded on the USA PATRIOT Act.

As you probably know, the PATRIOT Act essentially shredded the Bill of Rights and made it legal to torture human beings. Not every single person in Guatanimo Bay or Abu Gharib is guilty. Many of those prisoners were pulled off the street, given no trial (or a mock one) and never got to defend themselves.

DID YOU KNOW?
This torture violates the Geneva Convention. Can you imagine if that happened to you?

But Obama is for peace! He said so! Yeah, big difference between saying something and being it. It is true that Obama is against the war in Iraq. He often says he didn't vote for it. That's easy, because he wasn't in the senate when it was heppening. Aww. . .

Obama is an oppurtunist. He is against this unpopular war, not all wars. He has expressed interest in invading Palestine and Darfur, an excursion that will further bankrupt America and threaten us with another World War. After all, Palestine has nukes and allies, unlike the other two countries we are blowing the shit out of.

DID YOU KNOW?
That proves Barack Obama is a socialist, fascist (he can be both, by the way), torturer (by association) and just plain EVIL. Today, millions were wishing Obama good luck as president. It's really the American people who need the help.

---x
NOTE: I didn't mention race once in this entry (not counting now).That's because it isn't important. Wow, Barack is black. As this may prove, it doesn't influence whether Obama is a good president or not.

The only thing I hope to accomplish with this blog is to spark a little cynicism in you. Even if you don't agree with me entirely and still adore Obama, I want you to stop trusting him. I want you to stop being blind.

Comments?

Brownie Thoughts

2009-01-19T18:17:00.000-08:00

Obama will go crazy. The job is so incredibly powerful and stressful that it will turn him into a madman. I've noticed that every single ex-president of this century looks broken, defeated and his soul is tattered. Look at Nixon, H.W, Clinton and most recently, W.

Without even time to recollect what insane activity he did last night, Our Hero examines the cuts and bruises that mysteriously appeared on his hands and breathes in deeply, ready for another swim.

Tiny door

Do you think that when Mary Jane is legal, they will manufacture pre-packaged, one hit, disposable pipes or just cigarettes?

My hair is a poem, like the rings of a tree, tells the age, the disasters and the triumphs of my life.

New Fiction: Inheritance

2009-01-15T19:17:00.000-08:00

Never finished this, publishing it anyway.

http://menemenetekel.blogspot.com/2009/01/inheritance.html

Bus Fire

2009-01-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

There was a bus fire a couple of weeks ago at Union Hills and the I-17. My friend Dave and I drove out of our way just to see it. It was considered a hazmat site because the Valley Metro buses have special gases in their tanks.

It was really cool and exciting, watching it burn, as a crowd gathered around us. It was strange, how I met people I never would have known if it wasn't for the negligent destruction of a stranger in a government occupation. It's strange how we connect sometimes.

You can see more pictures here:
http://flickr.com/photos/menetekel/sets/72157612265305327/

Gestapo Curfew

2009-01-06T00:40:00.001-08:00

I was taking a late-night walk with my girlfriend and we stopped to kiss. A bright light was flashed in our faces. A cop was stopped in the middle of the street, glaring his spotlight into our eyes.
"How old are you?" He yelled.
Confused, we answered.
"You look twelve." And he drove off.
This curfew in Phoenix is just more evidence that we live in a fascist police state. The Gestapo used to stop people and I.D. them. "Are you Jewish? You look Jewish. You have a big nose."
The U.S. government profiles Iraqis and often, Arabs will pull random kids off the street, claim they are terrorists and turn them into the military for a reward. These people are sent to prisons such as Abu Gharib or Guantanamo Bay, tortured and given a mock trial, if a trial at all.
Furthermore, the curfew is unconstitutional. My privacy is not to be sacrificed because some idiot parents can't watch their kids. Of course, that's not the real reason the curfew exists. It exists to terrorize people.

Journalism Final Paper

2009-01-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

A paper I did for my advanced reporting class that I got a B in. I must have gotten an A or a high B for this paper, because those were the grades I usually got on my reports. I interviewed a lot of friends and artists that I know, but I couldn't use all of the quotes I got. For this, I apologize (and also for taking so long to publish this). I hope you find this interesting, somewhat.

Street Art Movement Grows Stronger

An unlikely contender, graffiti and street art has grown more respected by the modern art world. An illegal and once unappreciated form of art, the medium has now moved into galleries, including the prestigious Tate Modern museum that covered their riverside façade with street art from artists around the world.

“I think [street art] is influencing the art galleries to open their eyes and actually view it as a modern art form,” said Mad One, a street artist from Phoenix.

The most famous graffiti artist of today, and possibly in history, is the anonymous stencilist, Banksy. The artist has left is mark all over the world, including the Israeli West Bank Barrier, Disneyland, decaying sections of post-Katrina New Orleans and his hometown of London.

His art has ranged from sculptures installed in public to towering murals with strong political messages to a “pet shop” in New York City with animatronic food representing the exploitation of animals, but Banksy is best known for his signature stencil work.

"I use whatever it takes,” Banksy stated on designiskinky.net “Sometimes that just means drawing a moustache on a girl's face on some billboard, sometimes that means sweating for days over an intricate drawing. Efficiency is the key."

Banksy has sold canvases to celebrities Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves and Christina Aguilera and other artworks have far exceeded expected prices at auctions, making Banksy one of the most popular - financially speaking - artists of his time. A piece called Space Girl & Bird, depicting a child wearing an antique diver’s helmet, sold for £288,000 (US$576,000).

Banksy’s art is so popular that his street work is sometimes stolen, literally chunks of walls chipped out and sold on eBay for large amounts of money. In 2004, Banksy’s statue The Drinker, a parody of Rodin’s The Thinker, was kidnapped and held for ransom by a group who called themselves AK47. They demanded £5,000 but Banksy only offered £2, told them to buy some gasoline and set it on fire.

Banksy’s fame has opened doors for other street artists to get a chance inside popular galleries but not everyone sees the movement as positive. Some people, especially government organizations, see graffiti as an eyesore. An iconic piece by Banksy imitating Pulp Fiction showed Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta holding bananas instead of guns. Transport for London, the local government transportation bureaucracy, painted over the graffiti and claimed in a BBC News article the work created a “general atmosphere of neglect and social decay, which in turn encourages crime.” Banksy defiantly repainted the scene with the characters instead wielding guns and wearing banana suits.

But judging from the reactions street art can have, positive or negative, art or not, graffiti clearly has influence.

“I was always just aware of graffiti without paying attention to it, until a friend showed me some stuff and I began to realize it had more meaning and expression than just vandalism,” An anonymous graffiti photographer said.

“I don't do it, [but] I photograph it and write about it,” the photographer said. “I want to provide a better quality of descriptive writing with more positive balance about the art and the significance, the symbolism, the history of the genre and anything I know about the writers and artists.”

There are many different types of graffiti, including stickers, installed mixed media objects such as sculpture, paste-ups or wheatpaste (posters that can be adhered to almost any surface) and the best-known type – spray paint.

But modern graffiti does not limit itself. Organizations such as the Graffiti Research Lab have strived to invent new forms of street art, blending technology and public space. GRL invented LED “throwies,” a combination of LED lights, a lithium battery and a magnet, which can be thrown onto any metallic surface and will light up the area.

GRL also invented the L.A.S.E.R. Tag system, a huge laser pointer system that projects an image or phrase onto something as large as a 25-story building front. Such types of street art don’t work as well in a gallery.

“Street art is at its best when it is illegal and created on the street,” the photographer said. “[My favorite kind] is wildstyle writing done without permission. A significant piece of stencil art, which is well-placed, well-cut and thought-provoking is always good. At the other end of the spectrum, paste-ups and stickers are not really street art, there was almost no adrenalin invested in their placement.”

“Graffiti writing is art, tagging isn't,” He said. “When the writer has set out to propagate their message or their ID using their own highly stylized form then the image is simply ‘art’.”

“For me graffiti is what it is.” Prof. Shawn Skabelund, an art teacher at NAU said. “I see it as a form of vandalism. I am all for protest art or what we call guerilla art, art against the corporation and or the art establishment, but I question the need and/or validity of an art form that marks or tags something. I'm not even sure I would go so far as calling it art.”

Crunchy Pickle, an artist from Phoenix, disagrees.

“Anything a human does, in one way or another, is a form of art,” he said. “Of course graffiti is an art. Pure vandalistic destruction is an art too. As with painting, most anyone can fling paint at a canvas, but it takes practice to make something pleasing. With graffiti, it takes practice to achieve the desired result. And, yes, even breaking windows is an art. It is all creative destruction.”

Pickle doesn’t even identify himself as a street artist.

“I'm a graffiti writer,” he said. “In a way they are the same - the creation of unauthorized images - but the "street artist" isn't taking as much risk in a spot. Pasting pre-printed images isn't the same statement as wielding a spraycan in your hand. Street art is like cheating at graffiti.”

“For me it satisfies the urge to Create, and the urge to Destroy.” Pickle said. “Perhaps that's the primal hunt-kill instinct, applied to modern society. And if you ever hear writers sitting around a table of beers, it sounds an awful like the Hunt and War Stories that men have told since before history began.”

Graffiti comes from the Italian graffiato, which means, “scratched.” Graffiti is prehistoric, as old as ancient Egypt, where the Romans carved obscene messages into the walls and monuments. Graffiti has been discovered in Pompeii, including Latin profanity, magic spells, political slogans and famous literary quotes, all of which gives archaeologists clues into Roman street life. The Mayans, the Vikings, and even Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael did graffiti, according to an article by The Atlantic Online.

Modern street art is a bit different, since the invention of the aerosol can and heightened security against the act. In the ‘60s, political activists used graffiti, mainly because it is an appropriate medium to get a message across.

“It’s really in people’s faces,” as D3ADM3AT, an artist from Concord, New Hampshire put it. “It’s on almost everyone’s street.”

But graffiti began to be used by gangs to mark territory and soon gained a negative connotation. At the same time, it grew into an element of hip hop culture, mostly because it was practiced in areas where elements of hip hop were evolving.

The golden age of graffiti was from the 1970’s to the early 80’s. From 1985 to 1989, new reforms greatly changed the culture of graffiti by making it more difficult to tag. Many taggers quit, but others saw the obstacles as a challenge. This made certain tagging areas more coveted and the movement became violent, possibly the most violent period in graffiti history. Strength in numbers became much more important and artists that went out alone were often beaten and robbed.

Graffiti calmed down once many artists started getting shows and gallery exhibits. Street art moved from darkened alleys into the cultural spotlight and with that shift came commercialization. In 2001, IBM launched an advertising campaign in the streets of Chicago and San Francisco to promote Linux using stencils but several of the “artists” were arrested and IBM was fined more than $120,000 in damages.

In 2007, Adult Swim tried a promotion for their TV show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” by installing LED light boards (similar to the LED throwies) around Boston. The installations triggered repeated bomb scares across Boston, prompting bridges and a stretch of the Charles River to be closed. Adult Swim paid $2 million in fines; $1 million to the city of Boston and another million toward charity.

Graffiti has even been the main theme of several video games, such as Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure, a game that pits the player against a totalitarian government. The main character, Trane, fights back using graffiti protest. The game is controversial and was banned in Australia for giving a basic how-to on graffiti. The legal action greatly disappointed Mark Ecko, the urban clothing designer whom the game was named after.

“Graffiti is without question the most powerful art movement in recent history and has been a driving inspiration throughout my career,” he said.

Despite the popularity graffiti is receiving, even if it moves into galleries and becomes more accepted by communities, it will probably always stay on the streets.

“I paint the streets because I want to participate in the development of free urban space,” 500m, an artist from Montreal, said. “And I want my practice to be interdisciplinary. Street art is not just painting, its contextual painting. Always using different spaces and textures and working according to them. I think street art has the role of democratizing the arts; it makes people feel that they need to live with art. They need to embrace their creativity. It has a liberating role.”

The End is Nigh (So Let's Get High)

2009-01-01T13:51:00.001-08:00

I.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

Skim the above article and then wallow with me in trivial discussion.

Suppose the country you live in and love were to be in utter chaos in less than a year. It seems logical, almost. The states will withhold tax payments on these shitty bail-outs, the Fed moves in with military force, the rest is history. Even if that doesn't happen that way, suppose this Russian professor was a least half-right.

What would you do?

This should put a lot more strain on whatever reflections, if any, you have on 2008. If this coming year were the last you experience before everything changes, changes beyond belief, what are you going to do? Isn't it obvious?

Make it kickass!

Get off your lazy ass and actually commit those new year revolutions, the ones from last year that you gave up on.
Get off your lazy ass and fulfill the dreams you had as a kid. The hardest part is getting started. You can keep yourself motivated enough to keep going.
Get off your lazy ass and breath in real air and tell everyone you love them. That's most important.
Do something with your life.
The end is nigh.
This is your last chance to do something meaningful.
Now, do you have any excuse left?

II.

Saw YES Man with Jim Carrey. Great film, very funny, provoking message. Basic premise is a man who never takes a chance decides to never deny another opportunity again. He causes chaos in his life, but it's good-spirited, happy chaos. The kind I lust after.

It made me reflect on my carefree, driven attitude on life. It made me grateful for all the opportunities I've taken, the chances I went for.

Romantic, illegal, terrifying, dangerous, wonderful. I don't care if I ever got in trouble, which rarely happens anyway, I just care that I did it.

A long time ago I decided I wanted to become a person who always had an interesting story to tell. I'm happy to say that today I feel I am that person. I didn't say no.

III.
I wrote some of my own personal reflections, if you care.

I think that 2008 was the best year of my life. Before that, it was 2007, and so on and so forth. I love my life. I have no regrets, but I wouldn't regret it if I did.

I long ago imagined the kind of person I wanted to be one day and have ever since strive toward that role. That role is Mene Tekel. I want to become him, something I created, something I am not. In 2008, I have made the largest steps toward becoming my own person.

I became a journalist this year. It started with work at the Lumberjack, then the menial tasks at the Citizen but most of the fall, when I started to really hound down stories and pound out reviews. I feel like a journalist when I step into a room. An amateur, to be sure. I know I'm not great, but this is a step and I will continue to strive toward it.

I became a photographer. I was forced by my class to take pictures with an expensive camera, hated it, then fell in love with it. In 2007, I took 2,000 pictures on my point and shoot (in the 7 months I had it). In 2008, I took 8,300 not including the several dozen film rolls I burned through. I bought a Flickr pro account which really gave me incentive to take pictures more decently. While none of that makes me a pro photographer, an amateur to be sure, I still strive for photographic decency. I carry my cameras wherever I go, in hopes of finding a great shot. In fact, I did find such a shot today when I discovered a burning city bus with Dave.

I long ago realized that to attract a wonderful lover, I must be a wonderful lover. And years of hopeful, agonizing patience have paid off. I've discovered a blossom, someone I really want to bloom into old age and even death alongside. Gean Shanks is the companion and friend and lover that I have worked hard to earn. I still don't deserve her, and probably never could, but I will continue to strive towards making our life pleasant by being decent to her.

I overcame a lot of personal self-destruction. For the first time in my life, I don't outright hate myself and I feel free from several disastrous addictions. Any childish angst I retain has been redirected into something productive, such as my downright disgust for unauthorized authority. At least, I hope so. Hard to say for sure.

I traveled more in one year than I think I have ever done. I visited Las Vegas, San Diego (twice), Catalina Island, Tucson, New Hampshire, Boston, Virginia and Maine. I learned much from the people I encountered and added stories to my endless list. I think I became more worldly, open-minded and loving towards humanity. Wow, that was probably the world's worst attempt at being humble. If that's not true, if none of this is true, whatever. At least I got some nice pictures out of it.

I kept all my resolutions from last year, but one. I think that's pretty good. I will make some more this year that have more to do with who I wish to grow into, such as get a tattoo, learn to write better (in tons of ways), get another internship if possible, get a show, publish a book (either by myself or through a publisher, which would be better), don't worry about money and most of all, don't get caught.

My goal is to make 2009 the best year of my life.

(Note: I started every above sentence in section III with "I". For once, it's me, me, me and I don't have to feel guilty. But I'm bored with discussing myself, so let's talk about you. What are your plans for the last year of normality, before the economy collapses and the levee breaks?)

Snapshots

2008-12-23T13:25:00.001-08:00

I bought a Polaroid camera for two bucks. It came with 9 pictures in it already, but each one I took came out distorted and mangled and barely developed. Awesome.
Seeing as most film companies are ceasing production, such as Kodak and Polaroid, I figured film would be cheap. I stupidly forgot my economics. Film is so expensive now it's ridiculous. $20 for ten Polaroid shots and not worth it.
An average roll of film is $5 plus the cost to get it developed and onto a CD which is $4.50, almost ten dollars total.
I'm anxious, I guess. I like taking pictures with film, but one day, Target will remove their developing machines. Wal-Mart, CVS and others will soon follow. I'll have to buy film online and develop it in my dorm. Augh.
All artists are willing to suffer for their work, I guess.

---

I started taking pictures of homeless people as a photojournalistic thing. This always makes me nervous, that they will attack me or get insulted, which is worse. I don't want them to judge me for judging them.
I got two shots of unsuspecting homeless people, but then I went into a ditch and saw two old men drinking 40's and talking about how kids have no respect. I took snaps of all the graffiti in the area and then raised my camera to them.
"Don't take my picture. Get that fucking camera out of here! No respect!"
I asked the guy why not.
"You'll steal my spirit, like a native."
I reluctantly put my camera down and left. I still wish I had just taken the shot and I felt angry at homeless people for the rest of the day.
"Why are you upset about this?" My father asked. "They were psychotic. Who cares?"
J.R. was right when he said the camera is this generation's handgun.

---

I went with my father to Safeway to buy dishsoap. At the checkout, the cashier gave me a strange feeling of Deja Vu.
"Did I go to school with you?" He asked me.
"Ethan?" It clicked. He had tattoo sleeves and gages, but it was him.
"You in college?" I asked.
"PVCC."
The school we attended was a mile down the street. He probably never moved anywhere else.
Outside, my dad said, "Small world, huh."
"No, that just means nothing has changed."

---

My father told me about some guy from Boston he got in his cab who came all the way down to Phoenix for the Red Socks game. Someone who has that much money to blow.
My father recognized him as a kid from school, since my father grew up in Massachusetts. He used to beat my dad up for his lunch money.
Too bad this guy didn't realize who my dad was. And so my dad took the long way around and cost this guy an extra $20.
"I got my lunch money back plus interest." He told me.
"How is that interest?"
"Well, shit, lunch money back then was only a quarter."
This guy told my father all his problems, ironically, and my dad still listened. Poor guy tried to solve all his problems with alcohol, his wife was in the process of leaving him, etc, etc.
"When he got out," my father says. "I told him, payback's a bitch."

Heroism is Simple II

2008-12-16T13:38:00.000-08:00