Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Here we go, the much-hyped 150th post of the year. Does it bring the funny? A little, for sure. Does it live up to the hype? Maybe. Did we make it? We made it.

I'm going to refrain from doing any sort of Top 10 list, mostly because it'd be nearly identical to Adam's. I'd throw in "In the Loop" and "Coraline" to the movie list, as well as Saxon Shore's "It Doesn't Matter" to the CDs, but, otherwise, he pretty much hit upon the things I liked this year. Especially the Lucero, Avett Brothers, and Neko Case albums. Fantastic.

Instead, to celebrate the culmination of another year, I decided to paste together a massive collage of one-sentence excerpts from each of my updates. I was mostly looking for things that would sound funny out of context, but I'd normally pick the first sentence that caught my eye. Here's my conclusion to 2009: It was a good year. I think it's only natural to anticipate the coming year, but 2009 was fun. I knew fairly early on that I'd be moving to New York sometime in the summer. That realization alone made my remaining time in Virginia all the more enjoyable, somehow. Then, in July, I started my life up here, which has been great. The thing I'm most looking forward to next year? Spending all 12 months here.

Thanks for your time, your patience, and your support this past year. Stay cool.


It's nice to be back. You're getting raw, unedited, uncut (and uncensored!) email. Let's get this show started! Also, I can’t even tell you how many times, as a kid, I’d go outside and replay the scene at the beginning of the movie with Marty on the hoverboard when he’s stuck on the water. Soon I will have to update this blog in the middle of the night. I would put this CD in my CD player (because mp3 players weren’t around at the time, kids), put the CD player on repeat, and do puzzles for hours on end. (Warning: do not expose to young children or the easily startled.) My goal is to make it on EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Girls Gone Wild videos. The bags of beads -- usually containing 8 to 10 pairs of beads -- are like missiles. Despite the fact that no one seemed to be paying attention to him, he was up there, jamming out, lip-syncing the words to all the songs on his killer mix. I swear I don't constantly watch the Game Show Network. Someone gave me a thesaurus one time, but it was a boring gift, so I threw it away. LEWIS: I’m roaming again. Nine matches, and we lost all of them. I'm not ashamed to admit that I made a mistake doing the laundry the other day. Who are you, Billy Mays? I am the rabbit that, one day, ate some carrots and, thus, had good eyesight. As with all Kaufman movies, I knew it required a second viewing. But seriously again: People who interpret dreams, what the hell does my dream mean? Why can't I not think of Johnny Depp when I hear about pirates? But really, if book reviewers started using words like "Psh!," I'd probably start reading book reviews. (Apparently I've traded in my love of colons for a love of forward slashes.) Either Devon's vocal range is exactly the same as mine, or I have just as bad of a voice as he does. Richard Meader, thank you. Seriously, CNN, what the fuck? Is it inherently sad or inherently awesome that I'm drinking a glass of wine while making macaroni and cheese for dinner? My blog posts have been very short recently. Now I have to get back to my cupcakes. Still, where else can you witness an epic battle between a barrel-throwing devil and a sexy 8-bit woman? Those despondent, cruel, black-and-white worlds where everything sucks and everyone acts so fucking hopeless all the time. Unfortunately, it was a decidedly average book. Oh. The second video represents a monumental leap in quality... of the transitional effects. So, yeah, my unpacking is pretty much complete. Super glad they have "Twist and Shout" on the disc, as that's one of the Top 5 songs I was hoping for. Does Rivers Cuomo think he's still a teenager? My ongoing enjoying-the-fruits-of-the-city-as-well-as-using-hyphens-to-join-words adventures continue today. If only I had Yahoo Answers in high school. What the hell was I talking about five minutes ago? It's really very hard for me to take anyone who says "queasy" seriously. So yeah, trip out, man. Though I can assume that Adam had a non-stop week of drunken debauchery in a place called Bisbee, AZ. Rock Cock. So my stealing his cool lighter wasn't some deftly performed theft, it was just me waiting until he passed out. The milk I buy around here has a weird name. This is because, while I like bananas, they are not, in fact, "the shit," as Gwen Stefani would have us believe. I've long given up on CNN.com providing useful news. The least you can do is offer anal. The Beatles: Rock Band is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It's kind of like what Ben and I did in the kitchen of our old apartment, except this time I'm getting a grade and I have to write formal papers. Damn you, Marcel Proust! The Weakerthans put on a fantastic show last night. That sounds a lot more edgy and cool without an explanation. Happy 100th post! But the absolute stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard is thinking the President of the United States should be killed because of this. He's probably a toolbag, but still. Can Toby Keith stop making music? He's left-handed, by the way. If you have anything that can inoculate you against bitterness and stupidity, now would be the time to administer a dosage. Maybe I just like song titles with question marks in them. Now get downloadin' and burnin' and reacquaintin' with your southern roots. This is really an observation of no consequence whatsoever, I just felt like pointing it out on behalf of scrawny people everywhere. As I'm eating a bowl of cereal, I decide to look at the ingredients labels on the various foods I have in my cabinet. Think there's someone in the world whose absolute favorite band is UB40? Everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy with no origin. And that's how I was able to get to Irving Plaza. Highlights from the past week (in no particular order): calling Montezuma an asshole in my Literary Criticisms class. Instances of Awkward or Unfortunate Juxtapositions. But no, everything's always so damn serious. Lucero is the band of the day. Not to mention the fact that some of the things she's said have been beyond stupid. What lyrics would you change, given the ability to harness this amazing power? But I'll get back to the (old-man rants / discography analyzes / 14-year-old wanna-be-skater-douche rants) soon. "There are times when he makes a point and I don't understand what the fuck it ties into." What if it's actually one of the best releases of 2009 and no one's given it a shot because of its horrible name and horrible cover art? Does anyone else here completely suck at Pictionary? In case you're wondering, I do a pretty good Cher impersonation. See, I told you I'd be back soon. Thanks, Adam, for taking one for the team and actually listening to Raditude. Can I get my I-didn’t-realize-he-was-that-big-of-a-dork badge now? Me with my one-quarter-turned baseball cap. Burn, Burn, Burn, Motherfucker! Moral: Don't hand Jude Law books. But hey, we're almost at 150 posts. We made it.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Let’s face it: 2009 was a shitty year for this country. We went through an economic downturn, we were engaged in wars that will never end, we lost a lot of famous (and non-famous) people, Jon and Kate divorced, we had terrorist threats and attempted attacks. Not great. Personally, 2009 was a year of change. Moved to Denver, got a new job, and basically gave my life the shot in the arm it needed to break out of the slump. I’ve been exercising, I slightly altered my appearance, I’m living alone and loving the freedom, liking the city and being able to walk to wherever I want to go, and enjoying having the free time to actually live the life a 26 year old should be living, instead of the life of a corpse I was living in Fort Collins. 2009 was the year that I realized my family will not live forever, and it was a hard realization to come to, with my grandma having a massive stroke that she’ll probably never fully recover from, and my grandpa Murray becoming gaunt and racked with rashes. I made new friends, met new people, and started writing this blog again. This year I decided to do a few “Top” lists, and I also decided instead of writing paragraphs about each thing, I’d just write a sentence, so that this post isn’t any longer than it already will be. Here are the lists:

Music
1. Lucero – 1372 Overton Park: Horns, keyboards, and some of the best songs Lucero’s ever written. Not a dud on the disc.
2. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone: Her most mature album yet, worth spending an entire day trying to find it.
3. The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You: I miss the old rockers, but they know how to write a piano ballad.
4. Manchester Orchestra – Mean Everything to Nothing: Leaps and bounds better than the first album, these guys have a bright, bright future.
5. The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come: Quiet and rocking alternately, this is their best album since The Sunset Tree
6. Propagandhi – Supporting Caste: Didn’t hit me as hard as Potemkin City Limits, but continues their tradition of being the best hard punk band out there.
7. Mastodon – Crack the Skye: Metal!
8. Decemberists – The Hazards of Love: Not as good as The Crane Wife, but I still like the way they weave themes and repeat songs throughout their albums.
9. Brother Ali – Us: Hands down the best rapper on the planet.
10. The XX – XX: Sexy music about sex.
Honorable mention – John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives – Spills and Thrills: If this came out in 1959, these guys would be millionaires

7”s/EPs
1. Lawrence Arms – Buttsweat and Tears: The Slowest Drink At the Saddest Bar on the Snowiest Day in the Greatest City is one of the best songs of the year.
2. John K Samson – City Route 85: Sounds like The Weakerthans, and that’s never a bad thing.
3. Paint it Black – Amnesia/Surrender: I’m not much into hardcore, but I am much into Paint it Black.

Movies
1. The Fantastic Mr Fox – I loved every glorious second of this movie. Wes Anderson’s best since The Royal Tenenbaums.
2. Adventureland – I did not expect this to be so good, but it was so good. Funny and touching and meaningful.
3. The Hangover – Best comedy of the year, and an entertaining movie to boot.
4. Inglorious Basterds – No one can make two people talking in a room more suspenseful than Quentin Tarantino
5. District 9 – Best science fiction movie in a looooong time.
6. Zombieland – I love zombie movies. This is a movie for people who love zombie movies.
7. Up – Good year for animated movies. This one has the best opening sequence of any movie of the year.
8. Drag me to Hell – Finally, someone made a horror movie that isn’t this torture-porn, let’s be as graphic as possible shit. This was scary and funny as hell.
9. The Road – As good an adaptation of the book as anyone could hope for.
10. I Love You Man – I had to pick a 10th. I actually thought this was a little weak as far as this crew normally goes, but it was still okay.

Concerts
1. Against Me/Ted Leo/Future of the Left – One great band, two great bands, three great bands. Perfect show.
2. Lucero/Jack Oblivian/John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives – Jack Oblivian kind of sucked, but the new Lucero is amazing, and JPK was the best opening band I heard all year.
3. Neko Case/Some dudes from Calexico – Calexico bored me, but Neko Case sounds just as good in concert as she does recorded, and her banter is hilarious. And she’s hot.
4. Flobots/Kinetix/Houses – Surprise show of the year! Houses is a solid rock band, Kinetix surprised me with some bring-you-to-your-knees awesome lead guitar and really talented musicianship, and the Flobots were also good.
5. Gaslight Anthem/Murder by Death – I was super hyped for this, and it was good, but not transcendent. Performances were uninspired.

I have one New Year’s Resolution: Keep being awesome.

If anyone has any Top lists of their own, or any comments about 2009, please put them in the comments below.

See you in 2010!

Monday, December 21, 2009

I think I’m going to start calling Google “The Goog.” “So, I was on The Goog last night and found out that etc etc.” It’s like The Fonz. People will think I have this awesome friend who hops motorcycles over shark tanks and stuff. Except, I better not say “I was on The Goog” last night if that’s the case. Maybe “The Goog told me.” I’ll work it out. Not all my ideas spring fully formed from my head like Athena.

I’ve finally gotten to check out Amy Hempel’s short stories. I wanted to look into her since I heard from Chuck Palahniuk that she was a big influence on him. And I have to say, having read most of her first collection, she was a BIG influence on him. Their writing styles sometimes could be identical, which is awesome. Simple, striking language. I’ve always been a fan of the short story form, because I have the attention span of a newborn goldfish. I also think it takes a lot of talent to be able to tell a story or make someone feel something in less than 10 pages. Not all of the stories in Hempel’s book work, but the ones that do are amazing. In particular, I don’t know that I’ve ever read something that illustrates grief as succinctly and pitch perfectly as “In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried.” If you can find a way to read that, you should, because it’s an amazing story. Also in the short story department, I haven’t recommended Raymond Carver in a while, and I would just like to take this opportunity to let everyone know his stories are so good. So good.

Anyway, a Grandma update is probably in order. She was getting slowly better every day, then she had a couple of days of setbacks where she couldn’t talk anymore. Then she started getting better again. Now she’s out of the hospital and in a rehab place, where she’s receiving four hours of therapy a day instead of the 30 minutes she was getting at the hospital. I haven’t been able to talk to her for a few days, but Grandpa says that she’s able to put a few words together into sentences now. She understands everything that everyone is saying to her, even if she can’t respond. And he said yesterday that she took her first difficult steps since the stroke. She’s gotten to shower and change into her own clothing, and Grandpa said that really cheered her up. The therapists say that she’s probably got another 4-6 weeks in therapy before she can go home, but they seem to expect her to get back to 95%. That’s pretty good.

There’s a woman who works here, Dona, whose husband had a massive stroke a couple of months ago. He was basically a vegetable at the beginning. Last week, he came in to the office and it was remarkable how well he was doing. He was talking at a good pace, he was showing us how he could move his arms up over his head, and stretch his legs. Walking was hard for him, and he forgot words so he had to kind of talk his way around a lot of things. I heard he cried the whole way home because he felt like he’d made a fool out of himself in front of everyone, but Heather was tearing up, and I was trying hard not to do the same. I don’t know if stroke victims know what they’ve been through, but no one in the room thought he was anything but great. He had a sense of humor, he had a fire in his eyes, and he wants to get better. If he can come back from something like that, Grandma can come back too. But, this will be the first Christmas without her at the table, without her world’s-greatest potato salad and sweet potato casserole.

December’s almost over, and after this post we have two more to make it to our arbitrary goal of 150 posts this year. That’s damn near one post every two to three days. I probably won’t post again until after Christmas. Just so you know, my last post of the year will probably be some form of a Top 10 list. Music or movies or games or something. I just can never remember what came out until everyone else puts their lists out. So then I steal from them. I’m headed to Atlanta later this week, and my birthday happens, and Christmas happens, so yeah. Anyway, I get back on Dec 27, so sometime thereafter I’ll see you again. Oh, and today’s my grandpa’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Grandpa!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Brian here. Sorry for the absence. Had kind of a busy week. Not only working on the last of my papers, but also doing MFA/social things. Fun times. But let me get right to the breaking news...

Brittany Murphy died? At 32? Crazy. I never followed her work closely, but I liked her. Both the CNN and BBC News articles mentioned Ashton Kutcher's Twitter update. CNN then went on to quote from two or three other famous people's Twitters. Look, it's cool if celebrities want to use Twitter. And it's cool if they want to use Twitter to offer condolences (however tacky a forum to do so that seems to me). But seriously, CNN? You're going to use Twitter as one of your main sources of information in the article? Granted, not a whole lot of info has been released (probably) since the story is still so fresh. But why not just make a shorter article, like BBC News did?

Ugh. I wanted to do something funny here since I haven't done something funny in a while. Instead, I just ended up cutting a poorly-written old-man rant about the internet and how it leads to stupid people doing stupid shit all the time. (I cited the IMDB message boards for Brittany Murphy's profile.) Guess I'm just not feeling the funny right now.

But hey, we're almost at 150 posts. With this, that leaves two posts for Adam and one more for me, then we're there. Nice.

I've been listening to Josh Ritter's The Animal Years album recently. "Thin Blue Flame," in particular. It runs nine-and-a-half minutes and never gets boring, to me. Here is one of my favorite lines: "If what's loosed on earth will be loosed on high, / it's a hell of a heaven we must go to when we die."

I'm headed down to Virginia tomorrow. I'll be back a couple days before the end of the year. I'll check in one last time then. Hopefully with the funny.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Journal entry number 146. Stardate: December 16, 2009. The year was 2009. The day was somewhere in between Tuesday and Thursday. One man sat down at his computer and composed the following, and the world was never the same:

Dear American Airlines is a book that is 180 pages long and took me twice as many days to read. Since we’ve been on the topic of book reviews recently (and yes, dear readers, I am fully aware of how “exciting” this topic has been), here is my review of Dear American Airlines. It sounds interesting. A novel length letter to American Airlines from a man whose flight to his estranged daughter’s wedding was cancelled, asking for money back. Throughout the letter, we learn about him, his past, his failed relationship with his daughter and her mother. He comes to know himself better and thus, we witness, through a refund request, a man’s transformation from jerk to jerk who knows he’s a jerk. Sounds interesting, right? Well, not so much. There are sections of this book that are fantastic, normally the ones involving the man describing his past actions with a sense of forlorn longing, wishing he could go back and change things. These sections of the book account for, by my estimation, a quarter to a third of the book. They’re great. They’re well written and they read fast. The other (we’ll say) two thirds of the book are split between the man describing what’s going on in the airport, which is okay but pretty pointless, and serves to remind us over and over and over again that he’s stuck in the airport and it’s uncomfortable and he isn’t happy about it; and a translation he’s working on of some Polish book. These sections are almost unbearable, because they have little to do with our hero’s plight, and the story they tell isn’t interesting. The book actually ends on one of these translated sections, and while I was hoping that it would finally tie this in to the main story arc, it didn’t, making the book feel like it was really straining to get to its already short length of 180 pages. So, skip it. It would have been a nice short story, if he had just focused on telling us our protagonist’s backstory, but it just doesn’t work as a novel, with so much padding.

It’s my favorite time of year. No, not Christmas time. Not Hanukkah time. It’s time for everyone to put out their end of the year lists! Best Music, Best Movies, Best Games, etc. And, as an added bonus, everyone is doing Best Whatevers of the DECADE! It’s like a super list! Oh, how I love lists. Well, anyway, these decade lists are weird because, really, how are you going to pick the single best album that came out in the last 10 years? Rolling Stone picked Radiohead’s “Kid A,” an album that I just don’t like. I know it’s supposedly one of the best things man has ever created, but I don’t like it. OK Computer was great. Kid A is too weird. The songs aren’t strong. I realize that Radiohead was experimenting and trying new things, but they left the songs behind. I listened to Kid A when I was in high school. I listened to it in college. I listened to it within the last year. And I just don’t like it. I’m sorry. The other one I remember is Paste Magazine calling Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinois” the best album of the decade. Sure, it’s a good album, but the best one of the decade? Illinois is one of the most painstakingly created albums I’ve ever heard. There’s so much going on, so many noises, sounds, instruments, vocals, backing vocals, that it’s no wonder that Stevens has basically given up on creating music now. But it’s not the best album I heard this decade. “So,” you ask, “if you’re going to tear everyone else’s choices apart, what is the best album of the decade?” The best album of the decade, without a doubt, is Justin Timberlake’s “Futuresex/lovesounds.”

One more thing. For the most part, I agree with Brian’s assessment of The Onion’s Top 50 Movies of the Decade: I’ve seen about half. The ones I’ve seen are memorable enough. I don’t really have a problem with them. I agree that Eternal Sunshine is probably the best movie I saw in the ‘00’s. I like The 25th Hour too, though I don’t know that it would make my top 10. But anyway, The New World is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a week and a half long, nothing happens, and by the time I was done watching it I had died from boredom and been reincarnated as the cool dude you know me as today. It’s in the top 10 movies of the decade though. You can ask whoever I watched that movie with (Cam or Danny), that movie sucks. It sucks not only because it’s boring and stupid and nothing happens and I would have had more fun listening to Justin Timberlake’s “Futuresex/lovesounds” for the seventeen years it took me to watch The New World, but also because it’s got that air of pretention that apparently fooled some people into thinking that there was a single redeeming factor about that movie. Like (read this in a British accent) “Yes, quite, quite the good movie, yes, hrumph hrumble, indeed, quite.” Give me a break with this New World shit.

Stardate: 20 minutes after the stardate at the beginning of this. World: Changed.

Monday, December 14, 2009

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is probably the best book I’ve ever read. If not the best, top three easily. It’s a relentlessly realistic portrayal of the end of the world, and a father and son’s trip to the coast and south. They’re not going to the coast because they know things are better there; they’re going because they know it can’t get any worse than where they are. What caused the end of the world is never mentioned, aside from a truly memorable sentence thrown in at a seemingly innocuous place: “There was a sheer white light, and a series of low concussions.” That’s it. It’s a sentence that’s full of menace, because you don’t know what the light and the concussions are, or what caused them. All you know is the world has been reduced to ash. Ash floats in the air, coats everything, falls like snow. The portrait you get is that of a black and white world. White and gray ash everywhere, with black, dead trees sprouting up.

Roving bands of looters and cannibals roam the land, looking for food. There is no humanity left. After the end, people were reduced to their basest instincts. No one has a name. There’s no point in names anymore. The child was born after the world ended, and it’s all he’s ever known. His father is tasked with teaching the boy how to live in this cruel world, and telling him about the way things used to be, before. Finding a can of Coke is a rare glimmer of the old world, as is visiting the house in which the father grew up. The smallest good fortune, like the Coke can, seem like the best things in the world compared to the desolate despair that pervades every other second of their lives. There are plenty of horrifying situations in this world: babies roasting on spits for food, cellars full of dismembered naked people, their limbs having been cut off for their masters to consume.

In case you haven’t read the book, I won’t ruin everything. It’s a harrowing read, one you won’t want to do if you’re depressed, but the prose is magnificent, matching in tone the world it portrays, and while there’s not much that actually HAPPENS to the characters, the bond between father and son is portrayed perfectly, and you care deeply about each of them. By the time the ending happens, you’re in tears. Speaking of the ending, it is the perfect end to a nearly perfect journey. I read this book shortly after it came out, and when I heard they were making it into a movie, I was both excited and terrified. The book doesn’t lend itself to a movie, and I was worried that Hollywood would come in and wreck its mood, turning it into a slightly harder version of 2012.

I saw the movie this weekend, and I was actually impressed. The landscapes they found to try to match the tone of the book are very impressive, and I believed wholeheartedly that this was the world described in the book. That said, even these otherworldly ghost-scapes could not match the intense darkness of the book. Some color seeps in, which I didn’t feel like existed in the book. I had mixed feelings about the voiceovers as well. I thought the movie spoke for itself, and didn’t need Viggo Mortensen to tell us what was going on. That said, the voiceovers were some of the best passages from the book, and I’m glad that people who saw the movie and didn’t read the book got to hear them. I was disappointed that the “sheer white light, and series of low concussions” was voiced over instead of shown. I would have loved to see the bedroom light up and hear “boom boom boom” in the distance.

The increased presence of the mother, who was barely in the book, was not as bad as I thought it would be. Her scenes served as a reminder of better times, and a devastating story of what the end of the world drives people to do. Most of the important scenes from the book are present here, with a few added or expanded on that actually add to the story. One scene in the beginning has a family hanging from the rafters. The boy asks his dad why they killed themselves, and he replies “You know why.” Scenes like that, coupled with powerful scenes of the father showing the boy how to shoot himself in the head, and the fantastically disturbing aforementioned “basement human meat” scene, serve to illustrate just how bad things are, since McCarthy’s descriptive prose is absent in the movie.

The acting is across the board excellent, from the main two characters to the surprisingly high profile supporting characters. Robert Duvall in particular is astounding, partly because you can’t even tell it’s him until halfway through his screen time, he’s so haggard and devastated looking, and partly because he takes a character that was ever so briefly in the book and turns it into the most interesting person they meet along the way. And the ending that was so pitch perfect in the book is largely intact here, which I was so grateful to see. They did alter it slightly to take some of that wonderful ambiguity out of it, but they didn’t change it into a “everyone lives happily ever after” affair that would have negated the whole thing. Overall, I was pleased with what they were able to do with a book that by all accounts shouldn’t have ever been attempted to make into a movie. Not perfect, but faithful, and an extremely solid effort. I do think that, even though the movie isn’t as good as the book, it helps to have read the book before seeing the movie. Really, though, my point here is just this: Read The Road. It’s awesome. Then, see the movie. Just not if you’re depressed, or you like romantic comedies.
I had a dream. Not in that world-changing, bridging-racial-divides way, but a literal dream. One that I remembered when I woke up this morning. And, much like the other dream I remembered recently, this one involves a celebrity: Jude Law. Yeah, we were just hanging out. Whatever. No biggie. We went to a modified dream-world version of the ISAT part of JMU's campus. Afterward, we headed back to my apartment in downtown New York. (Apparently ISAT is in the lower east side of Manhattan. Who knew?) Anyway, somehow -- maybe because I prompted him, I don't know -- Jude started reciting parts of Hamlet. Except that he couldn't remember anything past the first two lines of this one soliloquy. So I grabbed my Bevington-edited The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and flipped through it. However, the inside of the text was plagued with large, colorful advertisements. It was like looking at a teen magazine. One page would be an excerpt from, say, Macbeth, then, on the other, was a huge ad for (I think one of them might have been) Super Mario Brothers. Interpretations I derive from this: rampant marketing/commercialism; Shakespeare is somehow a sell-out; Brian needs to stop taking drugs before going to bed. Regardless, I finally found the passage Jude Law needed. He read it over. I said, "Good thing you're done performing Hamlet, huh?" And he said, "Tonight's the last show." Then he had to leave to get to the theater in time. In all this bustle, I didn't realize until after he left that he had stolen my Shakespeare book. Moral: Don't hand Jude Law books. He will steal them.

Did you catch Thursday's episode of The Daily Show? If not, this was a great bit:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Beck - Not So Mellow Gold
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political HumorHealth Care Crisis


I really do not like Glenn Beck. I don't understand how he gets away with the kind of propaganda shit he gets away with.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

I’m almost done with all my work for the semester. All I have left is an analytical paper for my Theory class and a creative assignment for my literature class. Over the past three-and-a-half months, I read fifteen books. Yowza. And now, the mini-reviews (in no particular order):

Books That Brian Will Hereafter Force upon Others and Make Them Read ASAP, Lest They Burn in Eternal Damnation (So Help Them God) (a.k.a. The Ones I Really Liked)

--Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson: A short collection (yay short books!) of linked short stories. Johnson does cool stuff with language. I thought he captured the gritty desperation of living in a rural area quite well. (Kind of reminds me of what life must’ve been like for the townies in Harrisonburg.)

--Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo: Another short book. I haven’t read Marquez, so take that into consideration when I say: Pedro Paramo is the best surrealist/magical realism book I’ve ever read. Lots of fun. Kind of creepy, at times, but fun.

--The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector: You have to be a fan of post-modern authorial intervention to enjoy this book, otherwise you will quickly become annoyed with the narrative. But if you’re cool with that, then you’re in for one amazing ride. I read the New Directions translation and couldn’t believe it was a translation.

--A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami: I mentioned this book earlier, and how I read the first hundred pages in the span of 24 hours. Crazy. Of all the books on this list, this is by far the easiest to read. The most non-English major-y, if that makes sense. It has an engrossing story, and, unlike Pedro Paramo, it’s fun without being creepy. Well, depending on your definition of "creepy," I guess.

--The Daydreaming Boy by Micheline Aharonian Marcom: I really got absorbed into this story. The world Marcom creates was incredibly vivid to me. Couple that with her stylistic elements, and you have yourself a very talented writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this read. (It’s pretty short, too. Er, reads quickly, anyway.)

Books That Brian Would Most Likely Object to Tossing into a Bonfire, Were This Germany, Circa 1933 (a.k.a. The Ones I Thought Were Pretty Good)

--Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian: Ever want to shatter that image of Tibetans as peaceful, quiet people that only do good? Read this book. It’s fiction, but fiction-based-on-real-life.

--Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber: A series of five short stories that have subtle links tying them together. My favorite piece is the titular story.

--Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant: We only read five or six of the stories in this collection, so, technically, I didn’t read the entire book. Whatever. She’s a French-Canadian writing stories about French-Canadians (for the most part).

--By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano: My second Bolano read. I liked it better than The Savage Detectives. He’s still not my favorite, but I feel like this is a good introduction to him. (Who do I think I am? Some sort of Bolano expert, having read two of his books?)

--The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman: I read this book out loud. Not only because it helped me concentrate on the text, but also because Wideman has a fantastic ear for language. I was particularly impressed with the tonal qualities of his words.

Books That Brian Would Recommend Maybe Checking Out (If You’re into That Sort of Thing), Should You Find Them in the Bargain Bin Somewhere
(a.k.a. The Ones I Thought Were Okay)

--S/Z by Roland Barthes: You have to be in a structuralist/post-structuralist literary-theory mindset to want to read this book. It’s dense, but there are some amazing moments to it, if you understand it. And therein lies the problem: I had a hard time understanding most of it.

--Practicing New Historicism by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt: This book is six chapters long (plus an introduction). The intro and first two chapters are about New Historical tendencies. It’s not the most interesting read in the world, but important to getting a gist for who they are. The last four chapters are hit-or-miss discussions using New Historicism in practice. You won’t look at potatoes ever the same again, if you read chapter four.

--Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust: Even with three weeks, I still feel like I had to rush through Proust. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it more if I had the chance to read him at a more leisurely pace. I don’t know. What I can say: I’m glad that I read it. And when Proust is on, he is fucking on. More than any other writer I can think of, he tackles issues about what it means to be human. Unfortunately, a lot of what it means to be human is incredibly esoteric and, thus, hard to follow in his stream-of-consciousness style.

--Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald: It’s very much like Proust, but not as interesting as Proust. Enough said. (Okay, fine, one more thing: There are pictures in this book. That’s cool.)

Burn, Burn, Burn, Motherfucker!
(a.k.a. The One I Didn’t Like)

--Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson: I didn’t actually read this book, so maybe I would’ve liked it if I had finished it. But I read the (very cool) introduction and the (very disappointing) first couple stories before realizing it wasn’t worth it for me to continue reading. I liked what he did with his characters, but I couldn’t stand the writing itself. Read the synopses, not the stories themselves.

Friday, December 11, 2009

The Onion's AV Club has released their list of The Best Films of the '00s. I've seen exactly half of them. And, from the 25 I've seen, I agree with most of their choices. A couple of them seem overrated, but I understand why they're there. The biggest surprise for me: The #1 movie on their list. Incredibly well-deserved, in my opinion, but wow. Awesome. A second surprise: The #2 movie on their list. I thought I was one of the few people who actually liked it. (Not to flaunt the "pretentious indie movie-watcher" badge too much. [I'm amassing all sorts of badges all of a sudden.]) So yeah, check out their list. See if you agree.

How about some poetry? I put my mp3 player on random today and a clip from the final Geek and the Greek radio show came up. For the last show, we did a retrospective of our two years on the air. The clip I heard today was a call-back to our slam poetry episode. (Unfortunately, I didn't tape that show. It was one of the best ones we did, too, of course. [Figures.]) Anyway, our second slam poetry attempt is all I have to offer. It's a woefully immature mocking of frat guys/sorority girls. And since I need some padding for this post (there's no way I'm anywhere near the dissertation-length of the past few updates), here goes:

Frat Guy #1 (written/performed by The Geek)

Hey, hey. Look at
me and you, girl, we got it going on.
Me with my one-quarter-turned baseball cap.
Me dancing with you to this song.
Me with my drink in a cup.
Let’s grab the
tap, tap, tap.
Who’s
there’s only one sororitute for me.
See, her name is Lee.
Gee, I hope she sees me.
Me. My name is Todd.
Me with my popped collar makes me closer to God.
Holla.


Sororitute (written/performed by The Greek)

Put some clothes on, sororitute.
I see you sprawled out on the Quad and you think you’re mighty cute.
I’d rather see the teacher than your stupid thong.
It bothers me so much that I wrote a slam... song.
You’re shivering in the winter in that mini-skirt,
waiting for Mr. Right in his popped-collared shirt.
Don’t try to talk to me. I don’t want to know your name.
Go back to Alpha Beta whatever, your BFFs forever -- or so they claim.

(That "your" might be a "you're." Yannos, [if you're reading this] do you remember which it was?)

Thursday, December 10, 2009

There are people who think everything on Youtube is hilarious. I am not one of these people. Sure, some things are funny, but really? Numa numa guy? Star Wars Kid? Chocolate Rain? Am I dating myself because these things were all popular back when Youtube was new, and I don't know what's funny nowadays? Regardless, there's really nothing funny about them. There is nothing wrong with people filming themselves doing stupid things they think are cool. Hell, Brian and I made our careers early by producing four hilarious home videos. Is there some kind of weird mob mentality with these internet memes (I had to look that up), where because other people think they're funny, other people somehow convince themselves they're funny? It's annoying being asked "Did you see that Youtube video about the leprechauns?" It's more annoying when I say no, then go look up what they're talking about, and find that it wouldn't pass for a bad SNL sketch, which is saying something. I don't know, maybe I don't have a sense of humor. But that's not true: What do you call twelve rabbits in a row hopping backwards? A receding HARE line! Obviously, I've got a sense of humor. Actually, maybe THAT's why I don't find Youtube videos funny.

This my college football prediction. Please note, this is a work in progress, and after the bowl games are over I'll come back in here and change this to make myself look psychic. And I guess I'll delete that sentence and this one at that point too. But when this thing takes off and people come read it, I'll look awesome at this. I predict that WINNING TEAM will win the BCS Championship game! Many people think that LOSING TEAM will win, but WINNING TEAM will really pull it out. And boy, it will be a NAIL BITER/BLOW OUT. The score will be HIGH SCORE to LOW SCORE. Mark my words! This game will really make people BELIVE THAT THE BCS RANKING SYSTEM IS A FAIR AND UNBIASED SYSTEM/LONG FOR A PLAYOFF SYSTEM LIKE EVERY OTHER SPORT IN THE WORLD. It will go down in history as one of the MOST/LEAST exciting games ever played and will be remembered forEVER/ A COUPLE OF DAYS. There. Backup career as a sports psychic, check.

Yesterday on my Google homepage there was a headline that read: "Kim Kardashian reacts to Tiger Woods' alleged infidelities." Due to this type of hard hitting reporting, I now use Yahoo as a search engine.

Speaking of college football, kind of, what's the deal with school pride? I get all this stuff in the mail from CSU now, asking me for money, and trying to play off of my sense of school pride. Stories abound about how people's parents went to school there, and the kid goes to school there now, and it just fills them all with a sense of meaning in this world. Now, I've read through our old blog entries, and back then I made it pretty clear that I hated going to school there. I honestly don't think that I would have enjoyed going to school anywhere else any more. I'm pretty sure that I just think a college education is an unfortunately necessary waste of time. Sure, I enjoyed the social aspects of going to college, and I would definitely recommend my kids go to college because there's nowhere else that they're going to get that kind of personal growth in such a short amount of time. But the actual education? I am definitely not a better or smarter person now because I had to read books and write essays about them, or learn about literary theory, or take one semester of chemistry, or anything like that. I feel about it now like I did then: the Creative Writing classes were fun, the rest of them were huge wastes of my time so that I could get a piece of paper saying I put up with school for four (okay, 3.5) years, and if I can put up with school for four years, I can probably be trusted to hold down a job. And sure, I'll root for CSU if they're playing whatever sports they even play anymore (bad football, bad basketball, maybe squash, who the hell knows). But I don't feel the need to ever go to another CSU game (unless I get free tickets), and I don't feel like I need to donate anything to the school, and I don't feel like joining any kind of alumni organization, and I don't feel like my kids need to go there or that this is going to be some kind of dynasty. I went to CSU because my friends were going there. It was okay. It's a nice campus. I met great people there. I no longer give a shit about it.

We legalized medical marijuana here in Colorado, and weed stores (called "dispensaries" for some reason, though I guess no one bothered to come up with a fancy name for liquor stores) are popping up all over the place. I walked to my house from my car last night and realized that now there's one right behind my building! The storefront is a brick wall with a banner hanging above the door that says "Discount Marijuana." Inside is an empty room, white walls, no decorations, with a solitary desk, and a man who is OBVIOUSLY a pot head wearing a lab coat. There's a door in the back that probably leads to the weed. All in all, it looks like a drug dealer set up camp in a building. Politicians and citizens all over the state are crying foul on these dispensaries, like they didn't expect for people to open stores to sell the stuff after they legalized it. If I walked into one, I wouldn't be able to get weed, because I don't have a medical marijuana card, but these people are worried that if a dispensary moves into their neighborhood, their kids are at risk and stuff. This was a great opportunity for the pro-weed movement to show society that weed can exist openly in society without said society falling apart, but as usual, the pot heads are showing that they are, well, pot heads. First, the dispensaries look like drug dealer stores, and not like actual businesses. Not a great idea, if you're trying to convince people you are a legitimate business and not a drug dealer. People don't like drug dealers in their neighborhoods. Second, people have now started robbing these dispensaries at gunpoint. Great move, fellas! While we should be grateful that we're one step away from legitimizing weed as something to not be scared of, that should by all accounts be legal, instead we're going "Great, now instead of paying for weed I can rob a dispensary!" Oh well. Maybe next time!

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

I think there should be an annual conference where people present scholarly articles on independent music. (Maybe this already exists? That’d be cool.) Here is an example of what I have in mind:

Lagwagon, a Southern California punk rock group, went on a five-year hiatus after releasing Let’s Talk About Feelings in 1998. From ‘92 to ‘98, they released five albums: Duh, Trashed, Hoss, Double Plaidinum, and Let’s Talk About Feelings. The band’s first two efforts were their grittiest. The songs were short, raw, and, at times, borderline metal. (Kind of.) Hoss offered a significant change in the band’s sound; although the fast tempo remained, there was a noticeable shift towards catchier melodies and cleverer lyrics. (I’m thinking of the songs “Violins” and “Razor Burn,” in particular.) Double Plaidinum is the black-sheep in Lagwagon’s catalogue: after Hoss, Derrick Plourde, the drummer, and Shawn Dewey, a guitarist, left the band. Recorded with two new members, Double Plaidinum is the darkest Lagwagon album. However, along with the bleak aura came a noticeable increase in production values –- Plaidinum was, at the time, the band’s best sounding record (from a technical standpoint). Let’s Talk About Feelings is an appropriate culmination of the band’s prior work: 12 songs in 25 minutes, sing-along melodies, strong lyrics, crisp production, and the use of audio clips in two songs (“Gun in Your Hand” and “Leave the Light On”). Indeed, if you followed The Irreverent Times Journal, my co-authored, multiple-award-winning blog [Author’s note: I’m imagining that this reading occurs sometime in the future, in a time after our blog rockets to fame/stardom/infinite money-making], then you already know that I consider Let’s Talk About Feelings one of the 25 Albums I Most Enjoy/Enjoy Most.

Between the years 1998 and 2003, Lagwagon released a three-song 7” and a b-sides compilation. So to say that I was anticipating Blaze, their first studio album in five years, is an understatement. But here is my point, my thesis (finally): “Burn,” the first track off of Blaze, is the quintessential Lagwagon song. It perfectly encapsulates the band’s prior sound, while indicating the more mature direction they’ll forge in Blaze. The track opens with a quiet drum part: there’s a moderate 4-4 beat on the high hat (I think), accompanied with a subdued snare on every 3rd beat. This seems oddly similar to “Kids Don’t Like to Share,” the opening track to Hoss. Except that in “Kids,” it was the bass that had its own quiet solo. Ten seconds into “Burn,” the other instruments enter the mix: a clean guitar picking notes, the bass slinking along to the drum’s slow beat, and Joey’s hushed vocals. “You won’t find me condescending at your closed door,” he sings softly. “You won’t hear how I feel.” Very appropriate, given the quiet opening. And it seems representative of a trend that began with Let’s Talk About Feelings: Lagwagon appears to be much more aware of matching the sound of a song with its content. In the early records, there isn’t much derivation. They’re all aggressive, fast punk rock songs. But, with Feelings (and most definitely in Blaze), the band switches things up.

43 seconds into the song, the energy finally returns. The drums kick things up to a punchy rhythm, the distorted guitars breeze from power chord to power chord, the bass runs freely, and passion enters Joey’s voice. Interestingly, 43 seconds later, at the 1:26 mark, the band has already lapped itself. In the same amount of time it took them to finish one verse, they’ve completed two verses and (almost) the first chorus. Again, “Burn” is a blend of the old and the new: Lagwagon is comfortable slowing things down, but they haven’t forgotten their roots. The first chorus, in particular, has a distinct Hoss-like vibe, to me. Something about the way the guitars accent “And any fool can play. I’ll raise the stakes with another turn. We risk, we roll, we burn.” After the chorus comes the first solo. Liberally, it’s ten seconds long. Conservatively, it’s five seconds long. Regardless, it’s short. And it’s distinctly metal-sounding. A perfect fit for Duh or Trashed. After the blistering solo comes the bridge. At the 1:48 mark, I love how the song almost seems to end, but it keeps going. It’s hard to explain, but the way the guitar sustains its chord lends itself to a fade-out ending. Instead, there’s a jump-start when the guitarist strums while muting the strings. Symbolically, this is like the group itself –- which, after the first few years of the hiatus, people assumed had simply disbanded –- restarting with fresh ideas and a new sound. Indeed, the melody Joey sings after the mid-bridge reboot is completely different than any other melody in the song. “My true friend,” he says, “I’m spewing. And only one more positive. I just might spill some notable insight. I didn’t think before I purged.” Check out the internal rhyme, the slant rhyme, the linked imagery of spewing and purging. These are much more sophisticated lyrics than “Oh, beer goggles. I love to put them on” from their debut album. It’s more reminiscent of the lyrical work from “Love Story” off of Let’s Talk About Feelings: “Interstate, in debate, an impasse. Driving out the hope and gas.” One last thing I want to mention about the second half of the bridge to “Burn”: the “and only one more positive” lyric is, to me, the band acknowledging that they only have one more album (Blaze) lined up. At the time, I think everyone expected it to be the last Lagwagon record. (And if it weren’t for the unfortunate suicide of Derrick Plourde, it very well might have been.) This playful, self-referential quality surfaces four tracks later on Blaze: the song “Falling Apart” is all about the band realizing they’re getting too old to be punk rockers.

The second solo begins at 2:11, right as Joey wraps up the bridge. Solo B lasts roughly 20 seconds and has a completely different tone than the first solo. It’s less hectic, more in control. It’s less about shredding, more about harmony. And I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like a solo that would fit perfectly off of Double Plaidinum. I think of “Making Friends,” in particular, for some reason. After the solo, there’s another abrupt shift: the song’s sound reverts to the opening, but with an added audio sample (a heart-monitor beeping in time). The heart monitor, of course, is ripe with symbolism: the thought-to-be-dead band reanimated; the pulse of the music; the gentle, gradual recovery of life (as represented in the opening). Or, conversely, it’s the band on its last legs, on life support, all too aware that this could be their final effort. Lyrically, the fourth verse also returns to the beginning of the song: “So here I am, attempting to unlock your closed door. I wouldn’t break it down, cause you’d be gone for sure.” Again, the music reflects this sentiment: the slow beat, the clean guitars, the hushed vocals -- they’re all not the least bit menacing.

The song speeds up again for its last verse and second (and final) chorus: “And you’re sinking me while you stay afloat in the tank you built. We drop, we never learn.” The song ends (almost immediately after Joey sings those lines) in what sounds like a downward spiral, a sinking. The guitars and bass hold their final notes, then slowly slide down the necks. Also, the “we never learn” line implies a sort of recurrence, a circularity. Just as “Burn” repeated itself (quiet to fast, then quiet to fast again), so does Lagwagon, perpetuating the SoCal punk they so deftly embraced in the ‘90s, yet, at the same time, refining it, maturing it, and making it a bit more complex.


Wow, holy shit. I didn’t expect this to be so long when I began. Kudos to those of you who actually read all of it, especially since you probably haven’t even heard “Burn” before.

Can I get my I-didn’t-realize-he-was-that-big-of-a-dork badge now?

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Well, shit. Adam’s recent posts make my teeny-tiny updates look like jokes. Like fortune-cookie aphorisms. Like movie taglines. Well, it’s time to remedy that. That’s right, the change train is a’comin’. And it’s chock-full of apostrophe-lovin’, consonant-droppin’ fun. This is going to be the most extensive post I’ve written since... three posts ago? (So, basically, if I’m over 150 words, I’m solid. [Almost halfway there! Nice!])

I’m glad to hear that Grandma Jones is recovering well. I kind of felt like a Nanny McPhee (trademark, Jesse Hempen, 2006), knowing that she was in the hospital while I was here talking about cereal or Hugh Grant movies. (Actually, I’d feel like a Nanny McPhee talking about Hugh Grant movies no matter what the circumstance, but that’s beside the point.) There are two things that I wanted to mention:

1. I believe people own exclusive rights to their grief and it shouldn’t be exploited. Meaning, I wasn’t going to talk about Adam’s grandma before he did, if he would at all. But, to apply this rule more generally, I’m tired of groups of people (i.e. the media, political parties) capitalizing on other people’s tragedy. I’m thinking of Michael Jackson. I’m thinking of the 9-11 widows. I’m thinking of Terri Schiavo. Hell, I’m even thinking of Tiger Woods. Sometimes it’s okay to just let things be. Convey the news and move on. Which leads me to...

2. Things will move on, eventually. So, yeah, I kind of felt like a jackass posting innocuous updates in light of the circumstance, but I think distractions –- the not-tragedy among the tragedy –- are important. Not to downplay the seriousness of the situation, of course, but simply to emphasize something that’s not grief, that’s not pain, that’s not despair, that’s not misery. It’s okay to have reminders that there’s something else out there. (Or maybe you disagree and think I’m merely bullshitting a self-justification to mention my [actually quite good] Cher impersonation.)

I don’t know if any of that made sense, since I was speaking in a vague/not-specific/ambiguous way about something I know all too specifically. Whatever. But to play devil’s advocate to my own argument: Isn’t that exploitation sometimes worthwhile? For instance, with Terri Schiavo, it entailed a discussion of euthanasia, patients’ rights, the authority of family/loved-ones to make decisions for another when that person is unable to, etc. To which I say: Yes, it’s healthy to debate these issues. But, one, we shouldn’t require a specific, case-in-point situation in order to spark these discussions. Why not debate euthanasia without name-dropping Schiavo? And two, I think loved-ones –- the ones who are actually enduring the tragedy -– should be the ones to relinquish their grief, not outside groups like the media. But even that gets a little iffy, to me. Remember Cindy Sheehan? I agree with her agenda, but I still find it off-putting, even when she, herself, was the one to willingly abdicate her tragedy. (I’m not sure if “abdicate” is the right word, but it’s a smart-sounding word that I don’t think I’ve ever used before, so I felt it was time.)

What I would like to say: I have always considered Adam’s grandparents better grandparents than my own. On my dad’s side, the language barrier prevented any sort of meaningful relationship from developing. As for my mom, her mother died before I was born. And we rarely saw her dad, my grandpa. Thus, growing up, Adam’s grandparents were the ones I saw most frequently and felt the most affection towards. Uno Hearts. Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies. Bologna sandwiches. Goddamn, those were good times.

I’d also like to say: Thanks, Adam, for taking one for the team and actually listening to Raditude. I simply cannot get past that godforsaken cover art. I know I’ve already mentioned three times how bad the cover is, but fuck. It’s bad. (On a side note, allmusic.com, my [once-respected] go-to music review site, gave Raditude 4.5 stars out of 5. To put that rating in perspective, that makes Raditude just as good, in their opinion, as The Who’s Tommy, Guns and Roses’ Use Your Illusion (both I and II), and The Beatles’ Let It Be. It also makes Raditude, in their opinion, half a star better than Lucero’s Tennessee, That Much Further West, and 1372 Overton Park, as well as –- and this just kills me -– one full star better than The Avett Brothers' I and Love and You.)

737 words! A real update!

Monday, December 07, 2009

Here is my long awaited review for Raditude: It sucks. But, it is not, in fact, as bad as it could be. The lead single I Want You To is Weezer’s usually deceptively catchy song, and the lyrics aren’t even terrible (compared to the rest of the album). In fact, there are several songs on the album that could be classified as “not bad.” The problem is, lyrically, this album is absolutely insipid. Rivers Cuomo has given up on writing lyrics about anything at all, but he really hasn’t forgotten how to write a catchy tune. If you were listening to this in the background, you could easily be duped into thinking this was Weezer’s best effort since Green. But as soon as you sit down and really give it a listen, you realize that you simply cannot forgive the lyrics. Every line rhymes, leading to painful, nonsensical lyrics that could actually be turned into a fun game (“Guess the rhyme and win!”). He writes songs for 13 year olds, which is more than a little offputting considering he’s got to be nearing 40. And, if you were wondering if the song titles, such as “I’m Your Daddy,” “The Girl Got Hot,” and “Can’t Stop Partying,” were really cleverly titled to make you think they’d be stupid but really aren’t, you’re wrong. The Girl Got Hot, for example, is about a girl who got hot, like when girls from the 80’s would take their hair down and take their glasses off. Can’t Stop Partying is actually not as bad as you’d think because it’s impossible for me to believe that it’s written as anything but ironic. With Lil’ Wayne stooping to new lows (although he does point out it’s Wheezy and Weezer, which totally explains his presence here) with his verse, Rivers basically turns any mainstream rap song into a Weezer song. It’s actually one of the better tracks because there’s no way to take it seriously. And, believe it or not, there is a song that I would classify as just plain old “good” on here. Put Me Back Together is the standout track on the album, even if it starts with the super awesome “When I walk down the street, I’ve been trippin’ on my feet. And my clothes they don’t match, and my blue jeans need a patch.” That should serve to show you what I’m talking about with the rhyming. Keep in mind those lyrics are poetry compared to 90% of the album. That said, the chorus is catchy as hell, and it’s really one of the best Weezer songs in years. Then there’s the second half of the album, which takes the surprisingly okay first half, shits all over it, and then eats it and shits it out again. Trippin’ Down the Freeway is a go nowhere song, Love is the Answer takes George Harrison’s worst Middle-Eastern sounding songs, complete with sitar, and makes them worse, even aping (and ruining) the Beatles “Love” themes. Let It All Hang Out starts out with a fancy guitar solo and then dissolves into a catchy but completely vapid chorus about Rivers hanging out with all the homies (his words) and letting it all hang out. In the Mall would run for one of Weezer’s worst songs if they hadn’t ever written the garbage that was Beverly Hills, and I Don’t Want to Let You Go deserves to be on the Top 10 Worst Songs to Ever End an Album. It’s boring, slow, goes nowhere, isn’t catchy, and features (guess what?) awful lyrics. Overall, the first half of the album is surprisingly good, especially if you don’t listen to the lyrics. The second half of the album is as bad as Weezer has ever been, especially if you listen to the lyrics.

I know I’m in the minority here, and I risk being called Scrooge, which would really hurt my feelings, but I really hate Christmas music. I hate it. I don’t want to say I hate all of it, because that’s probably not true, but I hate a good 99% of it. And I hate that radio stations start playing it constantly before December ever hits. I don’t know what it is about it, but everything just rubs me the wrong way. The lyrics are all stupid. The melodies are all too cheery. The fact that everyone who’s ever been on TV at some point decides to record a Christmas album, thinking, I guess, that they can breathe new life into these songs we’ve all heard a hundred million times before. I don’t even like it when artists I like put out Christmas albums (Sufjan Stevens). I don’t like the Christmas themed commercials, I don’t like the Christmas themed displays. I don’t like it when right-wing groups get all up in arms about the fact that not every sentence out of everyone’s mouth in December has something to do with Jesus the Christmas Monkey. Or whatever the hell Jesus was, or stands for nowadays. I don’t see why our country is in jeopardy if we say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Or vice versa. I will not boycott a store for saying Merry Christmas. I will not boycott a store for saying Happy Holidays. I will not boycott a store for saying Chappy Chanukkah. I hate how Christmas time is supposed to be this time of cheer and brother love, and every year I have to listen to these same wackos talking about how they hate anyone who doesn’t believe in Jesus or won’t say Merry Christmas. There are other holidays happening right now! Why exclude everyone else, OR why assume everyone you speak to is Christian? It’s not like people are saying Happy Holidays (fuck Christmas, and fuck your mother). Christmas is a holiday. So when people say Happy Holidays, they’re in essence saying “Merry Christmas, unless you don’t celebrate Christmas, in which case I still want you to have a good holiday season.” Now that I say it like that, I can see how it’s offensive. After all, anyone who doesn’t believe that Christ is the virgin-born son of God Almighty, who was born on Dec 25, year 0 AD, and whose non-fiction biography is recorded with 100% accuracy in the Bible, the greatest book ever written in the history of the 6000 year old world, is going to burn in hell anyway, so fuck ‘em. That said, Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love getting to see my family, I love everyone being in the same place, and simply being grateful to be together. This Christmas I’m so thankful that I’m going to get to go home and see my grandma again. I think everyone knows this, but she had a stroke last week and she had to have brain surgery to fix an aneurysm. As of yesterday the ventilator she was on was removed, and she’s breathing on her own again. Talking to her makes me cry like a baby, but she knows who everyone is and she’s able to say “I love you.” It’s heartbreaking, but I’m so incredibly happy that I’ll get to see her for Christmas that the tears are worth it.

Next time: Meditations on life and death and religion, in a post that doesn’t mock religion nearly as much as usual. And, I’d like to sum up what I learned about myself and Brian by reading the old blog posts. Catch you later!

Sunday, December 06, 2009

See, I told you I'd be back soon. (Some may consider this tactic [posting short updates, but more frequently] cheating, but I beg to differ.)

New York, we've gotta talk. If Episcopalians in Los Angeles can be more progressive than you, we're in bad shape. (By the way, there's such a thing as an Archbishop of Canterbury. Maybe this isn't news to you, but it was to me. I found it kind of funny because, when I hear the word "Canterbury," I can really only think of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," which makes me think that the Archbishop of Canterbury also belongs in the 14th century, along with the saucy Nicholas and Alison from the Miller's Tale. [Yeah, I had to look that one up on Wikipedia.])

Finally, (Finally? I just got here.) there is a store/chain of stores here in New York called P.C. Richard & Son. On a commercial for the establishment, they use the tagline "Richard IS Reliable." The "IS" is even underlined. And here's where my proclivity to find humor in irony is unfortunate -- I will never be able to trust that Richard actually is reliable. Sorry, P.C. (Which, according it Wikipedia, stands for Peter Christiaan, with umlauts over both of the "a"s.)

Saturday, December 05, 2009

New York, your weather here is disappointing and confusing. So while people in Virginia got snow, we just got shitty rain and wind? WTF?

Hugh Grant has a new movie coming out. Believe me, I'm just as surprised as you are that I know this. I think someone should invent a device that traps people in certain decades. For instance, Hugh Grant shouldn't have been allowed to progress past the 90s. Weezer, also, should be locked in the 90s. Eddie Murphy, the 80s. George W. Bush, the 50s (zing!).

I love the crazy names generic cereals have. At the moment, I have both Honey Nut Scooters and Frosted Mini Spooners. I'm sensing a theme.

In case you're wondering, I do a pretty good Cher impersonation. I'm available for birthday parties and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.

I apologize for such a short entry. I'll be back soon. (I'm serious about this reaching 150 posts thing.)

Thursday, December 03, 2009

I'm going to put forth a challenge. This post is the 135th post of the year. That's pretty impressive. But I'd really like to make it to 150 by the end of December. That would double our previous year-total of 75 entries. Think we can do it?

So, it's December 3rd and today in New York there was a high of 60 degrees. Something tells me this isn't normal. I was expecting to move to a colder area. But, according to weather.com, it's actually colder back in DC than it is here. WTF?

I'm not the greatest speller in the world. For an English major, I'm probably average in the spelling department. But here's what I don't understand about my spelling ability: certain simple words always trip me up (like "occasionally" or "unnecessarily" or "the"), yet I can somehow consistently spell words like "acquiesce" or "curmudgeon" or "mannequin" correctly. Am I some odd-word-spelling savant?

Does anyone else here completely suck at Pictionary? Because I do. And, this weekend, while playing the game, I had an amazing revelation about why I suck at Pictionary: I spend too much time establishing context. For example, the first word I got was "electric eel." A normal person with even the most rudimentary Pictionary skills would probably draw a snake-like figure with lightning bolts beside it. But I chose a different route. The first thing I drew was a mermaid. The second thing I drew was a fish. (Really, in hindsight, I should've just gone for the fish. The mermaid was excessive.) That set the underwater scene. Then I drew my electric eel, which was basically just like a snake. This was an okay plan, but, unfortunately, "electric eel" was an all-play, and, by the time I finished setting the scene, the other team had already guessed the word. And this is the reason why, when divvying up teams ("divvying" is an odd word that I did not spell correctly, so so much for the savant thing), I revert to racist legislation from the 18th century and consider myself 3/5 a person, if a person at all.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Hi folks, it’s me, Adam, your friendly driving instructor. It’s come to my attention that you could all use a little help driving in the snow. Don’t worry, it’s hard! Here are a few tips for you to follow to ensure that you get where you’re going without me taking a golf club to your car or your face:

1. 4 wheel drive doesn’t equal invincibility: You spent all that money on a big SUV, so naturally you would assume that because you have all four wheels spinning, you can drive 70 miles an hour and make hairpin turns on ice, right? Wrong! You’d also assume that you can stop on a dime from 50 to 0 in six inches of snow, right? Wrong! What you actually paid for when you got your SUV was a big vehicle that can see over other cars and gets shitty gas mileage and is hard to parallel park. While 4 wheel drive may help you accelerate up a mountain in the snow, it will not help you turn or stop, so if you could drive like a normal person, that would be great.

2. You are a snow moron. A snowron: There are two types of snowrons, so see which of these categories you fit into. Slow snowron. You’re a snowron who drives 10 miles an hour because there’s a dusting of snow on the road. You are a danger to everyone else on the road, and you’re preventing me from getting to work on time, and now my wife has to deliver the baby in the car because I couldn’t make it to the hospital. Enjoy having a large truck ram into you from behind because no one in their right mind expects to be coming up on someone “driving” 10 miles an hour. OR, fast snowron. You’re a snowron who gets fed up with people driving the speed limit in the snow and you want to see how fast you can get that rear wheel drive Vette going before you start spinning out. Hey, buddy, I’ll see you down the road a little ways, wrapped around a telephone pole. The correct speed to drive depends on the amount of snow. If there’s a dusting of snow, or there road has been cleared by other drivers driving on it, drive the speed limit! If there’s a ton of snow and every time you try to accelerate you slide sideways, drive slower!

3. Snow on sidewalk doesn’t equal snow on road: If it snowed but it’s been too warm recently to stick to the road, so the road is wet and the grass on the side of the road is snowy, you need to drive like it hasn’t snowed. If you want to enjoy the sights of snow, go for a hike or something, you weirdo.

4. Snow doesn’t mean there are no longer lanes on the road: Are you the first person to have driven on a road after the snow? Chances are, you’re not. But if you are, you still should have a sense of where lanes should be. For example, usually there is not a lane that drives down the exact center of a one lane road. Please use your driving senses to be in a lane. In the much more likely scenario that you’re on a road that’s been driven on extensively since it started to snow, do you see those tire tracks in front of you? That’s where people have been driving. You should drive in those too. Just because it snowed and you can’t see the lines on the road as clearly as before does not mean this is a time to be blazing your own swervy, nonsensical trail all over the road. There are still other cars on the road, and some may want to get by you at some point. We don’t see you as the fearless snow-driving leader you see yourself as.

5. Snow doesn’t mean parking lots are now lawless fields: Sure, there’s snow in the parking lot, and yeah, maybe you can’t see the lines. Are you the first person in the parking lot? Probably not, but if you are, there are usually light posts or some other kind of marker you can use to show you where the lanes for parking generally are. Pick one of these markers and park in front of it. Are you coming into a parking lot that other people have parked in? They’re probably parked in at least some kind of logical order, and you should know generally how big a parking spot is. So line your car up next to another car, at the same distance you always park from them. Good enough! That way we can avoid this phenomenon I’ve noticed of people slinging their cars into parking lots at all kinds of angles, with no regard to lanes or the fact that you might be taking up six parking spots because you’re sideways and in the middle of two rows. Snow on the ground does not give you a blank canvas to paint your parking masterpiece.

Hopefully those five tips help you. Snow driving is a very terrifying and altogether otherworldly experience that has no similarities whatsoever to real driving, but if we work together, we can attempt to hold some sort of coherence together through these trying times. If anyone else has any more snow driving tips, go ahead and comment them below.

Tiger Woods cheated on his wife with hot young girls! Shock? Awe? Honestly, Tiger is one of the people that I’d really hoped wouldn’t be succumbing to fame and fortune’s perils, but I’m not altogether surprised, and I don’t feel like he owes me an apology. As long as there are whores spreading ‘em open for men who are famous, there will be famous men cheating on their wives. The question is, is it impossible to be faithful to your wife nowadays? Maybe famous people aren’t a great example to look at because they’re all weird, but I know plenty of regular people in relationships who have cheated or been cheated on. Why do people get married anymore? Seriously. Tell me. The same reason people still subscribe to religions? Because their parents did? Because they feel like they should? Can you not have a fulfilling relationship with someone without signing a legal document to prove that you love each other?

I’ve been reading through the old blog entries from back before the Great Silence. I have two general observations: We were funnier then, and we were more boring then. I liked this line from one of the old posts: “They should call ‘Little Women’ ‘Little Women Sucks’ because it sucks.” Comedy gold. I’m also appalled at how many books I mentioned reading for class then that I have absolutely no memory of now. I think that just goes to show you, you immediately forget everything you did in school as soon as you’re not in it anymore.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

I know Adam and I are both old-men curmudgeons when it comes to embracing the digital-media transformation, but if you're hip to the whole downloading albums thing, then I've got news for you: Amazon.com is offering a bunch of ridiculously good albums for $5. I don't know how much longer they'll be on sale, but some of my recommendations are:

--The Avett Brothers' "Emotionalism"
--The Avett Brothers' "Four Thieves Gone"
--Regina Spektor's "Far"
--Neko Case's "Middle Cyclone"
--The Gaslight Anthem's "The '59 Sound"
--Okkervil River's "The Stage Names"
--Okkervil River's "The Stand Ins"

If you only want to lay down $10, my picks are "Emotionalism" and "The '59 Sound." One's a bunch of unplugged instruments romping through some rocking Americana tunes, the other is a blue-collar, New Jersey-ode to catchy songs from, well, the '59 era.

There are also other albums I don't have, but either imagine are good or I've been told are enjoyable:

--The 500 Days of Summer Soundtrack (still haven't seen the movie)
--The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife" (never really got into them, myself)
--Grizzly Bear's "Horn of Plenty" (this was popular at the radio station)
--Bon Iver's "For Emma, Forever Ago" (again, never really got into them/him)
--Weezer's "Raditude" (okay, I'm just fucking with you on this one)

So yeah, $5 albums. Not too shabby. (Minus Weezer's sure-to-be-atrocious new album. [What if it's actually one of the best releases of 2009 and no one's given it a shot because of its horrible name and horrible cover art?])