Thursday, September 27, 2007

mini review round-up: reaper / bionic woman / big shots / where's andrae?

*reaper
yes, reaper is to chuck as ER was to chicago hope; eerily similar premise, but superior execution. not that the reaper (who you should not fear, more cowbell, har har, kill me now) is more buyable than chuck dork-wise, but because his best friend is. rarely, if ever, does a sidekick act as an improvement; eg, i love "shaun of the dead," but when nick frost becomes a zombie (whatever, spoiler alert for a movie that's been out so long they show it on comedy central), my heartstrings are far from tugged.

but our protag's right hand, sock, is not only not-too-annoying, but when they show he has a hot ex-gf, you buy it. because even tho he shops at today's man biggish and tallish and is forced to have a hollywood "see how weird i am!" haircut from the hair by rayanne graff salon (spikey/frosted for boys, randomly braided/streaked pink for girls-- ask about our other styles, like "the creepy dude" [shaved head or bald n'tufty] and "the secret babe" [ponytail or parted in the middle]), he totally sells the confident big dude act. viva the confident big dude! may he lay waste to the annoying as fuck big dude (nick frost in "shaun," god bless him) AND the borderline-retarded big dude (jason lee's scito sidekick on earl).

oh, and also, ray wise is great, as creepy as he was when he killed laura palmer, but we're allowed to find it funny now. and overall, the show has that buffy-y vibe of taking something bullshitty (say, polgara demons/arson hellspirits) and making it believable through the magic of metaphor and humor. basically, both shows are about how growing up is hell, and that's a sentiment i shall never tire of. easily the winner of the "least shameful viewing of the fall season" sweepstakes.

*bionic woman
no the, just bionic woman. making it biggest disappointment of the fall. well, not yet really, because as much as i enjoy battlestar galactica (seasons 2-3.5, anyway), i found the mini-series and most of the first season to be excruciating; i would've pushed through if a, i hadn't promised my dad i'd watch the whole thing with him, and b, we weren't so fucking bored.

we just couldn't get over how humorless it was-- humorless AND self-important. all metaphor, no humor. with a character we called roboslut and the topical map that is edward james olmos' face (that's the 100th time i've made the olmos topical map face joke, so now i get a fresca from my fridge-- thanks, me!).

but ya know, a few victories over the cylons and an "unfinished business" later, and the show is, despite the down premise, actually kind of fun. so bionic woman could follow the same upward trajectory, but right now it's just as humorless and dour as bsg used to be, except, instead of being about the possible end of mankind, it's just about some lady from eastenders or something who has a hard time dealing with the fact her legs now have intel inside. and this is on par tonally with the possible genocide of mankind how?

ps, i know they film in vancouver, but there's more gratuitous rain on this on this show than in a tony or ridley scott movie. nevermind that some of the dialogue is so action-movie-cheeseball that it seems like it's stolen from "team america: world police." and the show was edited in such a way to make you believe that they have shot and reshot this pilot so many times that we were essentially watching a clip show of all their attempts to make this not suck.

much like on battlestar, katee sackhoff, now allowed to be unconflicted about being badass, is the only one having or creating a good time (give this girl one big movie role and i bet my bottom dollar that she replaces angelina jolie as the straight girl's go-to answer for "what woman would you go gay for?"), but fuck them for taunting me with a chief cameo and then giving him all of two lines in a scene with a french guy.

[i love chief! if they gave him a spinoff in which he did nothing but grow and shave a bread, gain and lose weight, and put on and take off his orange jumpsuit, i would have a lifetime season pass in m'tivo, preorder the dvd set, and join the tv without pity boards just so i could chat with other fans in anxious weekly speculation about whether this would be a bearded week, or a thin week, or-- omg-- a jumpsuit to the waist week! "squeeeeeee!"]

for now, the verdict is that i can wait for the bsg prequel miniseries ("bsg prequel miniseries"-- maybe the nerdiest string of words in the english language) and cede the wednesday 9 pm time slot to gossip girl. which i also probably won't like.

*big shots
i only started watching this show because i heard rob thomas (VERONICA MOTHERFUCKING MARS) signed on as a consultant, but i stopped watching it after jeremy goodwin got a text from his mistress about his cock (i know, i know, she's really a choreoanimator) (totally done with the "sports night" references now) and some other asshole described getting "accidentally" blown by a tranny.

not only did he get blown by him/her (thinking he's just a her, NATCH), but we see the story unfold as he tells his asshole friends about it (jeremy goodwin included), and as this guy describes the series of events, saying this woman he meets a truck stop is "model hot," we see a black prostitute who looks like she could be a man standing outside a gas station. so it's a two for one; not only do we hear the joke coming like the great wall from outerspace-- a joke as old as the great wall itself-- but then we get to see it totally botched. so then i'd seen enough.

then i turned the channel to tim gunn's new show where he tries to help women find style but is so unfamiliar/uncomfortable with a woman's body that he requires a 3d imaging computer so he can virtually dress his victim instead of getting anywhere near her horrific boobies.

hey-- tim gunn has his own bionic woman, and the appropriate jaunty attitude to go with it! i smell cross promotion! carry on!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

mini review: chuck


whatever, it's not a terrible show. the whole "loser with doctor sibling married to another doctor" element doesn't not strike a nerve if you're, say, me. and while it would be unwise to go over this show (about a nerd who has the nation's secrets transfered into his brain) with a fact-toothed comb, as it were, one key element of the show does need clarifying.

'cause i can ignore the whole "supercomputer of stock footage" that's supposed to hold encrypted intel, and the use of those amazing hollywood computers that just say words against a black screen and don't seem to run on any operating system, *and* the fact that our protagonist and his date/fbi-agent-in-pursuit appear at one point to be walking around LA at night, like, on purpose (not even homeless people do this, and when i do it, people look at me like i'm a mentally ill unicorn covered with AIDS).

but let's just get one thing straight-- real-life versions of our protag, chuck, are not hot (tm). real-life versions of seth cohen, the chuck of the OC, are not hot (tm). and i say hot (tm) because plenty of dudes like that are cute-- attractive, even-- but only if you don't mind mediocre hygiene, the physique of an albino mole, and constant references to world of warcraft (and chuck's best friend is more standard issue annoying sidekick than a real deal haverchuck, so no dice). but that's not the conventional hot (tm) that most of the world craves; if anything, compu-dudes aren't even ugly, they're just invisible. the way girls who pull their hair back and don't have "PINK" written on their asses tend to fade into the scenery.

(and really, why not just buy sweatpants that have an ass emboldened with the words "SEX HOLES"? or just "ANAL"? or if you want to keep it even more real, "BROWN"? i think, as a general rule, an ass is a poor conduit for communication, but if you've ever gone hiking in LA, you know that mine is not the popular opinion.)

(oh! other tangent-- i'm sure that being named sheldon or leonard will get you made fun of as a kid and maybe crush your self-esteem enough to land you in a dork caste, but having a nerd name doesn't guarantee you'll actually be smart/nerd-worthy; surely there are frat guys with nerd names who've managed to be true to themselves and stay popular and dumb. yet so many writers take the shortcut of giving their nerds "nerd" names, which is so hacky and stupid. and while i've been told our protag was named for chuck klosterman, not for the dorkiness of the name itself (altho naming your character after the world's foremost kiss fan is dubious for its own reasons), this shit's gotta end.)

[image: ANYWAY, the real chuck, or, as he's known in most of the world, selfrighteousmetalfan von gingerballs.]

i thought we were in the post-apatow era, where audiences can be trusted to find the sexy in guys like seth rogen and jason segel, not just thrown some hot actor who we're to believe is a nerd because he uses the word RAM, twitches, and is shod in black converse.

and it's not that i find looking at the guy playing chuck to be such a hardship (and three cheers for "chuck" creator josh schwartz for keeping at least one adorable he-jew in primetime for the past five years), but...there's something to be said for keeping it real.

whatever though, it's not like i have anything better to do than watch this show (which is my unofficial slogan for the entire fall tv season), and any show that has a former firefly cast-member on it, especially if he's the hero of canton, is worth a solid try. but i would be so much more willing to buy the stock footage mega-PC, the chyron-puters, and the LA strolls if I could buy the hero, as well, in all of his real-deal, not-hot (tm) glory.

[ps: speaking of suspending disbelief, i can withstand only so much of heroes' humorless, plot hole-y crap, but when you have a character from the 1600s who says things like, "i need to find me a drink," it's like...sure, don't even make a half-assed attempt at giving the guy bullshit shakespearean-speak. why not just go balls out and have the guy say, "i needs to get my drink on, hezizzle"? this show is lazier than i am! and those mangled irish accents at the end-- jaysus! but whatever, see unofficial fall tv slogan. fare thee well for now, boyeeeeeee.]

UPDATE: the actor playing chuck's real last name is not levi, but helm. this is the first time in recorded history, at least as far as i'm concerned, that someone has purposefully hidden their gentile status and faked tribe membership for personal gain. mind blown.

Friday, September 21, 2007

review: 3 of the very worst movies i've ever seen


[christ, the flashbacks!]

i was driving around with my friend emma the other day (something we do a lot, since we live in la and emma cannot drive [and i mean can not, on any level-- she has no license and really shouldn't operate any machinery bigger than her blackberry]). my hatred of the movie "magnolia" came up, and she said, "you are always going on about your hatred of magnolia! you are magnolia hating crazy!" and she was kidding. but if you add up all the times over the years i've gone off on how shitty it is, she wasn't.

so here, in brief (i swear!), are three of the worst movies i've ever seen, made worst-er by the fact that most people, for reasons i'll never understand, thought they were good. and i've already convinced emma i'm right, so now it's your turn.

*magnolia
let's start with the obvious entry; a cloudburst of frogs does not redeem the 3+ action-less hours before it. this movie's like a tv procedural, but there's no corpse or crime. so, without anything to do, the characters aren't even flatly/narratively going through the motions of solving a murder or putting together a court case-- they're just endlessly talking about how they feel. and is there anything worse than having to listen to someone talk about how they feel, in real life or on film? it was like 3 hours of listening to a stranger melodramatically describe their dreams.

you're sad your husband is dying? then don't just react verbally, DO SOMETHING, because if i just wanted to watch people talk i would have rented that movie where wallace shawn eats a fancy meal. or even just spied on people at a coffee bean.

and making grieving/emotive people active isn't a film cheat, that's what real people do-- nobody sits next to a corpse saying, "as i sit here next to this dead person i was once so close to i am ever so sad oh woe is me!" they snap at other people or busy themselves with preparing a brunch or look through photos or SOMETHING. and they're not even responsible for keeping an audience's attention.

[oh yeah, tom cruise's whole king cock shtick was *really* important and in no way just something that amused the director which he then crammed into this movie to fill in the spaces between scenes of NOTHING HAPPENING.]

and didn't the dad in this movie take, like, 10 minutes to utter his dying breaths? they're supposed to be last words, not last paragraphs. like how, in that last matrix movie (talk about bad! but negligibly bad), that lady's "last breath" was somehow sinatra-style circular, because she wheezed out a 20 minute treatise about the truths of the universe. but at least in that movie shit blew up.

i would expect a teenager to write something like "magnolia", as impressed as he or she would be with his or her imagined insights into death, family, and love. but this was written by a grown-ass man who should have had the good sense to know that most people over 17 understand that death is, in fact, sad, and relationships with daddies are, no joke, sometimes hard. for everyone. not just for john q. teenager who recently lost his golden retriever to old age and believes that no one in the world understands his despair. after seeing this movie, there isn't one audience member who doesn't understand, for now we despair, too, for all those precious hours we lost that we could have been doing something, anything else than witnessing this masturbatory exercise in showcasing feeeeeeelings. and frogs.

*crash
the musical avenue Q is currently on tour, and you should see it, if not for the puppets fucking, then for the song called "everyone's a little bit racist." it's funny, it's insightful, and it's basically what the movie crash is about except it amuses you instead of boring you into a stupor while treating you like a moron.

[image: thandie newton wondering how she she could go from "flirting" to this crap, comforting herself with truth that at least "norbit" will be better.]

back to the procedural analogy. on law & order, the characters exist to either talk about law or order, exposition puppets that are distinguishable only by race, gender, and facial hair; in this expositioniverse, using sarcasm or having a lollipop or some shit count as character depth. in crash, the characters exist only to educate and MAKE A POINT. they speak in racist overtones. they're a rainbow coalition of prejudice (and being prejudiced against). they spend so much time dealing with racism it's a wonder they have any time to sleep or eat.

you know that when the brown lady talks to the black guy, she's gonna say something against black people, and he will counter with an anti-brown comment. no real reason why, and the lady didn't seem like a bigot a second ago, but this is a movie about RACISM. racism is bad! bad enough to make character development, plausibility, and subtlety obsolete! i have seen local car dealership commercials that are less annoyingly in your face.

and like death, racism is rarely, duh, this overt or simple. but complexity is hard, and we as the audience are too stupid to understand that sort of thing, and besides, this issue is IMPORTANT! again with john q. pretentu-teen who gets upset when his dad locks the bmw doors as they drive through the bad part of town and feels the need to alert the world to all the hatred they don't see! except that they do see because they're not 17 and many are usually on the outside of that bmw.

i had to leave this movie half-way through, but if there wasn't an nbc-shooting-star-"the more you know" at this film's end, i'll be damned. or i won't, but either way, if you went into that movie a little bit racist (and you did), you still walked out a little bit racist, and a lot-le bit patronized. paul haggis and p.t. anderson should meet up for brunch at the scientology center [not that anderson's scito, but he did give tom cruise an oscar moment]. they could congratulate themselves on their insight into humanity, jerk each other off, and have a good cry, maybe not in that order. and they should be forced to wait for their thetan-free food for 4 extremely boring hours.

*napoleon dynamite
i can't claim comedy expert status, but from what i understand, jokes have some pretty standard ingredients. like, for a standard joke, you need a step up and a punchline. some jokes are one-liners that get their humor from being absurd, or just observational, or totally random, whatever, but it's also generally agreed that jokes can get stale, or be corny if the subject is out of date. these are some of the basic building blocks of making yucks.

which is why i didn't just hate napoleon dynamite, i didn't get it-- there are no jokes in this movie. a nerd wearing moonboots isn't a joke, or even really a sight gag, because the nerd image is as old as time (time beginning in at least the early 80s with revenge of the nerds) and stopped being a straight sight-gag sometime after howard hessman left head of the class. side ponytails, caboodles...good fodder for another vh1 stroll down memory lane, but not funny in and of themselves.

and why is pedro funny? he's a quiet mexican guy named pedro, and...there's no and. that's it. that's the joke. between pedro and the "wigger" brother (a joke that hit its expiration date over a decade ago, no matter what jamie kennedy might think) whose girlfriend is so black her last name ends in "uh" instead of "a", the not-jokes aren't just not funny, they're also...well, all i'm saying is, maybe the (mormon) couple who wrote this movie need to rent crash.

(and if there was a heavy-handed movie about religious intolerance that focused on the unfair persecution of scientologists and mormons, i would recommend it for myself [and never, ever see it]).

like most people, i went into this movie wanting to like it-- the ads made it seem like it had a rushmore-ian quirkiness, but after a half-hour it became clear this movie had all the quirk of a williamsburg hipster, right down to the moonboots (seriously, i had seen napoleon dynamite-esque dudes on the L train for years before this movie, right down to the ironique hair and t-shirts). napoleon dynamite is the urban outfitters catalog adapted for the screen. 9/11 didn't kill irony, this movie did.

in some ways, this movie is encouraging, at least to comedy writers-- why are we working so hard, we just have to show a slack-jawed brown person and the audience will pee their pants! but in other ways, it's baffling. it reminds me of the movie "idiocracy," where the number 1 movie is "ass," and that's all it is, 90 minutes of a farting ass. "it won 8 oscars that year," the narrator explains, "including best screenplay." that, to me, is the napoleon dynamite of the future. you don't even need to bother with the side pony tails and moonboots.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

review: "the IT crowd" series 1

[l to r: ms. manages to sells a period joke, mr. the guy from "darkplace" who has my dog's haircut, and mr. why do i find you attractive even after seeing this taint shot.]

the other night, for reasons i can't possibly fathom, i tivo'd a preview screening of a show called "the big bang theory." i guess i was blinded by my decades-long love for (darlene's ex) johnny galecki, because the show, which is about two geniuses who live next door to a hot girl (really, that's the whole premise) is done by the guy who created "two and a half men," so really, "the big bang theory" is just "two and a half nerds." i watched two and half minutes before wondering if i'd accidentally lobotomized myself with a crochet hook when i decided this piece of shit was even tivo worthy.

for years, multi-camera comedies (like "bang") were the norm-- eg, johnny's old gig, roseanne, with its laugh track/studio audience, cheeseball sets, goofy establishing shots (so that's what the house's exterior looks like at twilight!). all my favorite shows as a kid were multi-camera sitcoms, and in my memory, they were all great, but the tastes of anyone 8 and under are dubious at best; most kids get to like anything their parents let them have. for years, i would order some nut-based ice cream because my mom suggested it, and it took me til i was 7 to realize that i fucking hate nuts. if they're not in butter or amaretto-flavor form, they can go straight to hell. but all i thought before that was, yay, ice cream!

still, "the golden girls," "cheers," "seinfield"...all classics, all multi-camera. these days, however, it seems that if a show has that format, it's a red flag that i will enjoy it as much as i do nuts. my beloved amy sherman-palladino, she of gilmore girls (and roseanne, now that you mention it), has a new show coming out this season called "the return of jezebel james," but there's no reason you'd know that because fox isn't promoting it at all and has probably already planned to cancel it in the middle of the first episode and cut to something american idol-related.

(side note: fox is notorious for canceling shows, many of them great [undeclared, wonderfalls, firefly!] either before the show's credit has even had a chance to appear on the actors' imdb pages, or after the show has gathered just enough of a dedicated audience so that, when they drop the axe, it pleases the fox dark lord that much more.)

anyway, "jezebel" is multi-camera, and despite having queen amy at the helm, i have to say, the preview didn't seem so great. it fell into that trap of stupid, easy jokes that shows with a live audience can't seem to avoid (i'm supposed to laugh at a dog sneezing? no wonder i loved this shit when i was 5). i thought if anyone could break the curse, it would be amy, and maybe the second episode's the charm (if fox lets them get that far), but in the meantime, there is still hope. you just need bit torrent in order to find it.

as tempting as it is to launch into a treatise on the superior quality of contemporary british comedy (and chocolate, and shoes, and cheesy pop music, and rail system...but yes yes, the teeth and the food, i know), i'll just say that there's a lot more to check out than just "the office" and ali g. while those shows make you simultaneously laugh and squirm (or, if you're me, put a cushion over your head while going LA LA LA LA LA), i (not surprisingly) prefer the sillier, more surreal fare.

on the early-90s news parody "the day today," the anchor/creator(/genius), chris morris, would randomly say things like, "those were the headlines. god, i wish they weren't," and "fact me 'til i fart!" (check imdb, i swear). then he'd cut to a story about the rampant problem of bullying among priests. then back to an environmental report from a she-reporter who's essentially half-goat. AND WHY NOT.

[oh, that's a picture of alan's desk of sport from "the day today," which i think is actually funny with absolutely no context.]

speaking of priests, "father ted" was silly and sweet enough to make all the church-mocking forgivable, and it was even an irish show. (plus it was made in the mid-90s!
if they tried a show like that on american tv right now, the city of boston would take up arms! [ahms, actually]). it's multi-camera, lots of sight gags and physical comedy, tidy endings and lessons conclude every episode, but also, there's a priest named father jack whose vocabulary is limited to yelling the words "feck," "drink," "arse," and "girls." but you can't take offense and get on a hotline to the pope, because jack's also got some sort of old priests' disease, which means he's growing hair all over his face and hands like a werewolf. OF COURSE.

graham linehan, who wrote "father ted," is the mind behind "the IT crowd," now in its second season on britain's channel 4. between pal and region 2 bullshit, getting your hands on a copy can be a pain in the ass, but viva the internet. i watched all of season 1 in a single sitting (not that hard-- i'm lazy, and, for the most part, a series in england is all of six episodes), and it was 3 hours of multi-camera gold. and more importantly, as a show about two semi-socially retarded IT guys and their lady-, computer ig'nant manager, it does right by nerds, making it the anti-big bang bullshit. plus there was a fake elton john, several references to the band cradle of filth, and a man who unknowingly has feces on his forehead. DUH.

[to the left: our heroes and the show's catchphrase, rendered in craft.]

and even when jokes were introduced that seemed like the worst of sitcom hackery-- pms makes you a bitch! one lie leads to another! girls like shoes!-- a joke about goth-discrimination or, and i can't say this enough, a man who unknowingly has feces on his forehead, made it all ok. plus the actors are just great; aside from my crush on chris o'dowd (tall, spazzy, and bad hair, call me), and the pitch perfect aspbergersy performance by richard ayoade (who was also on armando iannucci's "time trumpet", which i like but not as much as "the thick of it," and nothing compares to "i'm alan partridge"...ok, i'm done), AND the fact "the day today"'s morris plays the big boss, i was kind of mindblown by katherine parkinson in that i realized, hey, she's not just the token pretty girl manager, she's really fucking talented and funny. even their token female characters are better in england! fuck the bad dentistry, sign me up.

the show's already been picked up for an american adaptation (by the people that redid "the office" and "ugly betty," and the guy who currently programs all of nbc), but unless it's done by the exact harvard twats that do "the office," my hopes are low, ie, back to "big bang" territory we go. personally, i don't think the show's any sillier than "how i met your mother" (just a bit more weird and clever), but for some reason, silly always gets lost in the translation. which is so weird, because what's more universal than silly? are poop jokes, no matter how bizarre, not the international language? is mankind not united in a shared love of farts?

some britcoms (ugh, but i'm lazy) are available on region 1 dvds (i just rewatched "father ted" via netflix), and the rest are either torrent-able or here (this is the kind of site i can lose hours to, but instead of seeing them as hours i could have been getting work done or wooing the opposite sex, i will instead curse myself when working and/or wooing the opposite sex for not being on that site). because if "the big bang theory" and even "jezebel james" are any indication, this fall tv season might be hurting for comedies. but of those crappy comedies, at least the american ones, i'm sure they won't be hurting for cameras.

crib sheet of shows to torrent/buy a regionless dvd player for:

-the day today
-brass eye
-spaced
-knowing me knowing you with alan partridge
-i'm alan partridge
-time trumpet
-the thick of it
-rock profiles / little britain (maybe just s1)
-garth marenghi's darkplace
-look around you
-father ted
-the IT crowd
-this
-gilmore girls season 4 (just sayin!)

[to the right: the aforementioned "this."]

update: seen all of "the IT crowd" series 2 that's aired so far, and if you thought they'll couldn't trump man who unknowingly has feces on his head, might i introduce you to "gay: a gay musical." youtube beckons.

update II: "jezebel james" is indeed pushed back to mid-season. better to postpone the disappointment til i'm numbed by this fall's crop o'crap, anyway.

update to update II: oof.

Monday, September 17, 2007

review: "restless virgins: love, sex, and survival at a new england prep school" - abigail jones & marissa miley


"restless virgins: love, sex, and survival at a new england prep school," by abigail jones and marissa miley, attempts to reconstruct the experience of milton academy's senior class of 2005 through the eyes of seven students-- a sampling of jocks, arty kids, popular girls, etc-- as they weather not just their own teen experiences with school, pressure, and sex, but reconcile the events of one monday in january when a sophomore girl performed oral sex on five varsity hockey players in their own locker room; despite its best efforts, however, "virgins" is a bland exercise in teenspoiltation that does no justice to its subjects, the general student body, or the incident it's so sensationally centered around.

see that? that's a (mediocre) thesis statement. it would be followed by three topic sentences, and then those topic sentences would each get their own paragraph of supporting evidence, and then there would be a conclusive paragraph that reiterated by thesis statement in a new and exciting way. if i were to do it for real, without the help of my mom, i would probably get a b or a b+. i was always a solid b+ student. at milton academy. go 'stangs. sup.

but since my reviews are generally a structureless ramble of opinion and bullshit, let's just start with exploring milton academy. the story got picked up by the media-- got turned into this book, and by two fellow graduates no less-- in large part because the lewd act in question took place at 200+ year old milton academy, alma mater of ts elliot, ted kennedy, and james taylor. milton academy, home to the offspring of the east coast elite. milton academy, that prep school that (isn't exeter or st. pauls but) matters for some reason. they find a way to slip these facts in the book at least a couple times. the school mentions these facts every chance they get.

and then there's the truth-- yes, milton is almost 210, but the aging process has been awkward, from being all boys to separate girls and boys schools to a co-ed campus where the p.e. program was the last to integrate (and many, say, those forced to play dodgeball with a bunch of angry he-juniors from wolcott house, wish it stayed single-sex).

ts elliot attended milton for just one year (his senior year), ted kennedy is rumored to have been almost expelled for cheating (just to be saved by his last name), and james taylor spent a year or two at milton before transferring to the arlington school, which is the academic program at mcclean hospital, where he went to overcome a rumored heroin addiction.

so as milton has always struggled to compete with the bigger new england prep schools-- see how many of our students go to ivy league schools, did we mention we educated a kennedy, how about that speech team-- it seems they finally made a name for themselves. as the blow job school.

i didn't know much about the hockey scandal when it broke, just what my parents told me from the globe-- that an underclassman blew a bunch of hockey players on school property, and then the rumor spun out of control, and the hockey players got dc'd (went before a discipline committee made up of faculty, admin, and student leaders), expelled, and were facing possible rape charges and sex offender status. and i believe my reaction was....so? james taylor shot up in the library twenty years ago. what else is new.

for the record, i don't hate milton. my college education paled in comparison, i made great friends there who i'm still close with today, and the classic milton 5 paragraph essay (described above) will probably come in handy until i die. there was one thing about milton that always bothered me, though-- one thing that i'm sure hasn't changed, and is true at any competitive place of learning-- and that was the all-or-nothing mentality.

if you have a nice singing voice, that's great, but if you can't hold your own in a 6 part harmony of a song in latin, the only singing you're going to do is in the shower. if you like field hockey, that's good, but if you're not a captain by senior year with field hockey recruiters hounding your parents (if such recruiters exist), then why are you wasting your time? and if you like anything this school has to offer, we're ever so pleased, but if you aren't one of the best people at this school in your field of interest, we encourage you to go fuck yourself.

not meeting the best-or-no-dice standard was just one of the many reasons i felt like an outsider there. then there was the fact i'm a jew, and not just a jew, but a jew who had previously gone to a jewish day school where harsh israeli teachers, women who'd done time in the zahal and spent their finite supply of patience on suicide bombers from hamas, tried to drill hebrew into my brain for seven years with all the gentleness of krav maga.

at milton, if you had to miss a day, even for religious reasons, you had to get a special slip signed by all of your teachers from the classes you'd miss, granting you permission (to attend shul), and, best of all, the slip was routinely printed on the academy's finest marigold paper. that first september, age 12, i was a jew in a sea of wasps, a bat mitzvah in a crowd of coming out parties, clutching my bright yellow third reich paper to be excused for my belief in my bizarro not-jesus-god. it set a girl apart. that and the fact i didn't have the good sense to shop at j. crew.

the biggest reason i didn't fit the milton mold, however, was the unfortunate fact that, in the immortal words of ashlee simpson and her original nose, i am me, and that was really the only thing i excelled at. being good at me, or at least teenaged me, entailed focusing only on subjects i liked, being nice only to the teachers i deemed worthy, and paying attention only to/not heaping scorn upon the people i deemed to be not assholes. it also included being mouthy, not understanding the basic rules of social interaction (i like to thank the israeli-ettes for that-- there is, after all, no hebrew word for tact), and being easily pissed off. oh, and a dude named john fluevog. (get in your time machine, kids, it made sense at the time.)

long story short (and it really was going to be a long story-- how i went off on my journey to rejecting acceptance, even including the heartbreaking story of how hurt i was not to be invited to the south shore plaza to buy sambas with all the popular girls in 7th grade!), i didn't meet the milton standard, and as such, i rejected the standard entirely and found refuge, either in the company of my friends, the tv in my bedroom, or the new releases rack at the newbury comics in harvard square.

there were certainly cliques at milton-- white hats (jocks), nerds, members of the forbes family-- but in my experience, there was no clique envy. between being saved by the pixies thanks to a kind counselor at summer camp when i was 13 and generally being an angry little fucker, i didn't give a shit about going to parties thrown by those assholes on the lacrosse team who all seemed to go clothes shopping together, or at least pass around a catalog.

i had a vague idea of their exploits-- rumors involving beer, vacation homes, almost cartoonish sex acts ("the party on cape cod where dude got so drunk that he fucked girl so hard that her period blood got on the ceiling" was a piece of farrelly-esque gospel)-- but i had no interest in being a part of that world. my major interest was rewatching the "santa claus vs. the martians" episode of mystery science theater. and i'm as unashamed of it now as i was then.

i can't speak for all of my friends (none of whom were as dorky/disaffected as i was), but even if they did yearn to party on weekends in someone's empty mcmansion, they didn't seem unhappy with the world we'd set up for ourselves; formal pot luck dinner parties, concerts/readings at school that we'd organized via the school groups we were a part of, or, most often, just going to chili's in harvard square, seeing a movie, and ending up at elanor's house later that night eating chicken flavored stove top.

(a, chili's was such a great training restaurant, like one step between mcdonalds and an eatery that doesn't have a frialator, i regret none of my crispy chicken sizzlies or whatever, and b, elanor lived on campus because her mom worked at the school, and they shopped at costco and always had warehouse flats-worth of stove top in the basement, no idea why, but thankgiving always makes me think of milton at night).

if it sounds like it wasn't a particularly sexy high school experience, it wasn't, but i don't think mine was the only group that wasn't really getting any. when touré, a fellow milton grad, reviewed "virgins" today in the times, he was baffled by the amount of sex this book depicts-- he admitted to graduating from milton a restless virgin himself. and for the record, my friends, my girls with whom i'm still close, are fuckin' babes. and still, back then, nada.

at 5'8", i'm the shortest of the group (3 outta 5 are close to 6 feet) and also probably the least blonde (as in, i'm not. neither is cristie, but she's so tall and lithe that no one can get close enough to her head to know for sure). yet only one of us had a steady milton bf during our time there. yet yet, it didn't seem that weird back then that none of the almost-models i call friends were always single. a lot of people at milton were single. they weren't happy about it, but they weren't alone in how alone they were.

when people think of prep schools, images of bored girls in plaid skirts and dumb horny heirs often come up (see; this book), but kids that are anything like that make up just a fraction of the milton student body. most are kids that worked hard to get in, study to do well, push themselves to get into college, over-intellectualize everything...nerds, basically. even the cool kids, deep down, were nerds. and i mean the smart kind, not the strictly sci-fi kind (ahem).

granted, the guys involved in this incident were hockey players, who are not traditionally the over-intellectual type, and, even in my day, were part of the group from which the party rumors originated. (very few students are admitted to milton's junior and senior classes, except for hockey players, recruited specially, the more canadian the better.) but they're still being told all the time how special they are for being at milton, how lucky they are to be getting a first-class education, how well they'll do in the world once their days at milton end.

and instead of burying their heads in books, heaping on the extra-curriculars, and generally being in a constant, subconcious state of panic that they can't rise to the challenge (or even, as this young philospher did, responding to the challenge with a whatever, i hate you, is ren and stimpy on), they hear how important the school is, and they think something along the lines of, "fuck, yeah," followed by, "and i'm a hockey player at milton academy, so who wants to show me her tits?" minus the "at milton academy" though, and that sentiment is shared by football players, burnouts, thugs, and basically any hormonally-charged, macho teenager in the country or maybe the world. wealth and privilege don't change much.

[side note: the mascots of young wealth in this country are usually people like paris hilton or those terrifying brats on "my super sweet 16." new england wealth-- old money-- is an entirely different animal. we think of the super rich and curse them and their offspring; they're so ostentatious and snobby, just spoiled trust fun kids who turn their nose up at us for shopping at target and driving passats. images of ye olde john hughes movies (and i guess brand spanking new "gossip girls") still ring true, with the "richies" tormenting our financially-challenged heroine just because she doesn't live in a mansion and her dad is harry dean stanton.

for the record, new england/mayflower rich people like the ones i went to school with don't quite work that way. they don't really mock the poor because they never interact with them; they'd never be snobby about your passat because they don't know what that is and don't understand why you don't just buy a range rover, they're so cute! people that have had money for generations don't really have an perspective on how much money they have, especially when they grow up with other rich kids, are educated alongside more rich kids, and then either go to work for the family biz/their friends' dads they've known since their days at the country club pool, or use their wealth to do something righteous and money-losing, like start a sustainable organic dragonfruit farm near their private expanse of maine coastline or host a few ex-gangbangers as artists in residence on the family island off of martha's vineyard.

sure, teens can get brand snobby-- they go on and on in the book about having just the right expensive bag and jeans-- but that's true at any school to some degree. because when i was at milton, it was fashionable to either dress like you'd just gotten off the ferry from nantucket (it's a prep school, after all) or just returned from a sojourn on the appalachian mountain trail. patagonia was a status brand, which, while expensive (aka patagucci), isn't exactly glamorous. fleece is, as a general rule, never glamorous. in ten years, the kids could be wearing the finest in western gear, who knows, but wealth doesn't necessarily set the style/snobbiness bar.

and i say all this because when i hear people get really bitter about those who have more money, trust fund kinds, etc, i don't get it. yes, i know we all want to be very rich and are bitter about those who get wealth without having to earn it, but to me, it just seems like a waste of energy-- for every minute you spend judging someone based on their obscene wealth, they spend absolutely no seconds acknowledging your existence, let alone making fun of your poverty. at least if they're from the north east. and not on mtv.

oh, and as far as jews go, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than talking about how much money we do or don't have, which, for the record, is almost always described as being "comfortable." sure, we have our million dollar bar mitzvah types, but even if you ask the mother of the boy-to-man-to-be, sitting by the pool of her sopranos-esque manse while her husband pulls up in his lexus hybrid suv that matches her own, she'll probably wave one bejeweled hand and say, "feh, we do ok."

because, deep down, we all think that the minute we freely admit to being wealthly, the russians will want to take us down a peg again and before we know it we're bribing our way into steerage with all cash and jewels we could grab sewed into the linings of our coats and t'filin. correct me if i'm wrong, but no jews have had a super sweet mtv 16, and until they do a super sweet 13 with my chemical romance getting paid to sing a torah portion, i think we're in the clear.]

so i guess this is a really long way of saying that the sampling of students in this book don't accurately reflect the student body, but what's worse, their stories (none of which have direct involvement with the incident) don't do much to explain a damned thing. i might be guilty of overwritting (no, me?), but if you want to know why a bunch of teens did something sexual and stupid, i'll still save you 300 pages of reading; it's because they're teens. a fifteen-year-old who understands camus in the original french at a college level doesn't necessarily understand how to deal with his or her sexual desires at any level at all.

and the issues that are interesting-- what actually happened, the cases for and against expelling the girl in question (she wasn't), why girls so smart value their bodies so little-- are mentioned only in passing, certainly not explored to any satisfying end. it could've been a gripping expose of what's actually a surreal, fascinating little community of students and teachers, the portrait of one girl who decided the only way she could meet the all-or-nothing standard was with her body instead of her mind. instead, it's a novelization of "the hills," all faked teen drama and characters we're encouraged to envy/hate. it exists not to explain, but to titillate. and it doesn't even really do that.

kids generally arrive at college excited, friendly, and open to experience, guards down, because everyone at least shares the core bond of wanting to be where they are, and being grateful to be there. nobody at milton seemed happy to be there, maybe because we were exhausted smartasses who were sick of never being good enough at anything, or maybe just because being excited about school is the least cool thing in the world at that age. but i don't blame the school-- they pushed, but they also offered us the best of everything (and if you chose not to take all you could, like i did, well, your/my loss, thanks for the memories, friends, and the great cd collection).

in an all-or-nothing vortex, the first thing to go is simple appreciation-- not just for the good-not-best, but for other, "grayer" things, like complex human relationships. and i guess i was lucky in some ways for rejecting the hard-line status quo, because complex human relationships, great friends, are the best thing i took away from that school.

there are so many things one could take away from a place like milton, but trying to make sense of that experience via an awkward, imposed structure-- an intricate sociological study as 5 paragraph essay/7 student profile that sums up how the school fails-- is a futile exercise. what i want to know now is, aside from all the stuff this book was supposed to explain but didn't, is what the authors' milton experience was like. what they took way from the school to make this book the thing they give back. i think if they worked together on that book, they'd answer a lot more questions, not just for me, but for themselves.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

mini review: "the shape of punk to come" - the refused


for whatever reason, i found myself listening to this record the other day, and i realized, "fuck. this is still so good." back when it first came out (brace yourself-- about 10 years ago. sup, mortality!), it was my go-to "car record"-- music i could put on in a car full of like-minded friends to absolutely no complaints. lucinda williams' "car wheels on a gravel road" will be my family's "car record" until the end of time. the lemonheads' "it's a shame about ray" does nicely whenever i'm cruising around with my friends from high school. you get the idea.

what's funny though is how "the shape of punk to come" had absolutely no right to be as good as it is. first of all, the refused themselves didn't exactly inspire high hopes-- if you had any casual knowledge of them at all (and why would you, they're swedish), you probably remembered them as a hardcore straightxedge band (sorry, but writing it out the normal way just looks weird) right down to their t-shirt sleeve hair bands, clothes that hated drinking (or at least said as such), and shitty music. as someone who doesn't drink, i resent the fact that i'm supposed to be represented by some of the crappiest music ever made. because there are certainly tons of songs, if not bands, that celebrate the alcoholic lifestyle, and their output is of a much higher quality. i'd much rather have josh homme be my mascot (or house boy--i wish we could go away, drink wine and screw, indeed) than earth crisis. boo.

anyway, second, the record came out on epitaph (distro only, and just in the us, but still), which at that point had put out so much middle-of-the-road punk (tm) that it seemed to exist only to give warped tour bands for their third stage next to the army recruiter booth. and then to call the record "the shape of punk to come"...they might as well have named it, "steaming hunk of crap with lyrics from babelfish."

and then there was the video for "new noise."

no more t-shirt sleeve hairbands for these lads, resplendid in fitted sweaters...and wax paper jumpsuits, and daft punk-style plastic masks, and a bunch of random shit that came out of nofuckingwhere and was a total mindfuck for anyone who saw it. and it's not just the visuals, of course-- within the first minute, the song has metal (that opening riff!), shitty techno (the beats'n'squeaks breakdown that comes RIGHT AFTER), and when the lyrics finally do come in, boom goes their ye olde hardcore roots ("CAN I SCREAM!" why yes, yes you can). and if you're not won over by the time he sings "woo!" like a college girl at spring break, it's only because you still can't figure out what the fuck is going on.

at its core, "new noise" is so goddamned fun. i'm sure it's making an important statement about something-- how can you get anyone to listen if you use the same old voice? you need new noise!-- but it's mostly just fist-pumping good times. which is pretty much the tone of the whole record. my favorite song was always "summerholidays vs. punkroutine"; another killer opening guitar lick (gross, i just said guitar lick!), important statement (rather be forgotten than remembered for giving in!), fist-pumping a plenty. "punk to come" is a sincere document of rebellion, but it also has electronicy interludes, spliced in applause, snippets from live performances, strings, traffic sounds, and THEN it has songs that are both brutal and melodic at the same time. i still have no idea how they pulled it off.

there's that rock cliche about bands that only sell 500 records but inspire those 500 people to start bands, but in this case, the refused sold a decent amount of records, many to bands that already existed and made mediocre music, and inspired them to...keep making mediocre music but maybe make videos that looked more like "new noise." musically, they all worshiped "punk to come," but if the blink 182 song formula ain't broke, don't fix it, i guess, so just show your love by directing a video for those tards in taking back sunday or whatever, make them wear cat masks, and call it an homage. thursday hired the "new noise" director for a video where they're supposed to be underwater(?), but putting a thursday song in a refused video doesn't change much-- you can't polish a turd. there were plenty of shitty screamy bands at the time who probably thought they were of the refused school, except they had no hooks, no fun, no anything but a lead singer with throat pollups and a standing invitation to play at abc no rio any saturday they desired.

the title "the shape of punk to come" sounds like nothing more than a crappy album name thought up by people who speak english as a second language, but it's actually even more simple than that-- this record should have been the shape to come. but even those people who loved it didn't know how to even attempt following its lead. the refused couldn't even do it-- they broke up, and the next band the singer formed, the international noise conspiracy, was all the political rhetoric with a third of the punch of "punk to come" and none of the fun. they fit in really well on warped tour in 2004, where they sold faux army caps that bore their name. the revolution will be accessorized, indeed.

when you think about it, punk, or really music in general, went everywhere but where this record suggested. revolution, if you can call it that, fell into the hands of hippies-- black dice went from punching people at abc to putting out half-hour long heavy jams that sounded like an ambient waves sound machine flirting with a sizzle ride cymbal. some people try to convince me that against me! are trying to rise to the challenge, but i dunno. can they scream? especially when the songs i've heard from their early records sound like ani defranco's tetchy younger brother?

and while so much of the music that came out around then by the people who claimed to be "punk" sounds as dated as a howard dean joke, "punk to come" has lost nothing. maybe there's still a chance it's actually the sound of punk to come. until then, it still sounds killer in my car.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

travel: nh, ma, ny

nh:
fuckin' finally.

i'm ignoring the first four days of my trip, either because they were hell (mom circling logan 45039teen times with 4 dogs in the car because the leftover ralph's sugar free lemon loaf in my checked suitcase alerted the drug-sniffing hounds or something) or were heaven/boring (and nobody's business). but labor day is all about the hopkinton state fair, and the fair, for me, is all about the derby.

last year i got to the fair early enough to see me some prize winning goats and eat myself sick with kettle corn, cotton candy, cotton corn, etc. this year, i cut it close and just got there in time to meet up with eilene and bill and watch cars go boom. eilene and bill have been married for longer than i've been alive, which is why eilene can hassle bill about giving her the right change from her apple crisp even though he had to go up and down a million bleacher steps to get it, all without killing her in return. i've known them forever, and along with my own parents, they're a truly inspiring model of successful marriage, except, unlike my own parents, they smoke, ride motorcycles, and have matching tattoos. my parents just have matching shorts, but i think, more likely, my dad is just accidentally wearing my mom's clothes.

eilene and bill live in nh near where i live, and they've bailed me out so many times in the past it's ridiculous-- like when eilene came at midnight to help me find a bat who had tried to grab my hair and give me face aids while i was sitting in my living room watching "shaun of the dead," or when bill kept me in gasoline when i had to run the generator the winter an ice storm took the electricity out and i had to go outside every 5 hours to fill 'er up or become a manatee-cicle. it's one thing to spend time alone in the middle of nowhere, it's another to do it knowing that somebody will notice if you've been mia for a few days and come find you in the woods were you tripped on a root, broke your leg, and have had to fight off the circling fishercats with a stick and your one long fingernail. or, more importantly, if somebody will get you a ticket to watch cars go boom.

i'm more interested in the boom than the rules, but from what i can figure, there are 3 heats, each of which produces 4 cars which will go on to the finals. then, while the finals cars are trying to heal thyselves in order to ride again and take the prize, there's a winner-take-all 4 cylinder round that has just one winner. no hitting the driver's door, and if your car is done, there's a plywood stick outside the driver's window that s/he has to break off to indicate that s/he is out and please stop driving into my car. before and after rounds there's a water truck that comes out to water the dirt (a mud zamboni (tm), if you will) so the ground'll be mushy and slow down the cars. before the fun starts, a small child does an adorable/cringeworthy rendition of the star spangled banner. during the fun, an announcer details all the action that nobody can hear over the sound of the engines. "refs" stand on the sidelines with green and red flags in case they have to stop the action to get a driver out of a car so he doesn't, say, explode. drivers have to keep moving and hitting other cars. whatever, boom.

the problem is that you can't really go boom and also survive your heat, and you can't win big money if you don't get to the finals, so there are always a few cars who use the following strategy-- drive across the field over and over, driver's side out, love tap the other cars on your team, and bore the shit out of the audience. and get yelled at by myself, eilene, and bill. bill even walked down in between heats to hassle one such driver, and he can do that, not just because his cause is true, but because he's a former marine who probably knows more than a dozen ways to kill a man. one of the many reasons it's good to have bill on your side. that and the apple crisp.

so this year was way slower than last year due to many love tapping teams, but the 4 cylinder round was better than last year due to three exploding cars instead of just one, and the 4 cylinder rounds are always better because there's only one round, one winner, and nothing to lose. unlike last year, the hopkinton volunteer fire dept got the fires out quick/figured out how to use those tricky extinguishers, but it still smelled pretty bad, and while i didn't want to say anything, especially at such a joyous event while sitting next to a veteran with a novelty "terrorist hunting permit" on the back of his pick-up, the smell was pretty 9/11-y.

anyone who lived in new york during that period'll know what i'm talking about; for a week plus, most of the city smelled like ozone, smoked meat, burning rubber, and straight poison. it got into all of your clothes, into your hair, into your food...i remember seeing one of the dudes from blonde redhead biking down 2nd avenue with a mask on and thinking, perfect, now your music is not the only thing about you that is obsolete. resistance was futile. better just to deal with it and move on, be it with your life or with your enjoyment of cars going boom.

so yeah, it was fun, altho not as exciting as the year previous, and later that week i got to see eilene and bill's new house, which was pretty fuckin' sweet.

above is an arty shot of eilene's collection of figurines. it's right next to the giant tv, across from her oil paintings of her native american ancestors. who, i can assure you, were not captured on canvas tormenting white people (we like our version of the truth! we're wall drug!).



then i saw bill's bike in their new garage, which is also sweet-- the bike because it's wide like a lay-z-boy, the garage cuz it's got a fridge and a baseball card collection (go sox!). he's ridden that thing up and down mount washington during weirs beach bike week, so seriously, if you still had the slightest notion of messing, really, don't.


ma:
i spent a day in boston to see my sister and her giant puppies; my brother-in-law, he of the mystery toilet and the impending racism, decided to get 2 giant schnauzer puppies to replace his own giant schnauzer who died earlier this year (rip ronsko the dog, but, please keep in mind that ronsko's pedigree left him so inbred that he was riddled with seizures that weren't just distressing to him and everyone around him, but also rendered his bowels in capable of producing solid waste, and eventually traumatized him so much that he ended up blind, which is when aaron decided he had to put ronsko down. so, it's sad, but the dog's in a better place, and my sister's in a place that she knows won't be covered in projectile, seizure-induced diarrhea).

i heard about this puppy decision from my parents, and i had the following questions; don't these dog grow to be 80 lbs each? aren't becca and aaron living with you right now? doesn't becca already have her own dog, and don't you have 2 of your own dogs, thus bringing the in-house dog count to 5? doesn't everyone in that house have a full-time job? in other words, isn't this a really bad idea? here's the thing tho-- nobody in my family listens to a fucking word i say unless i misspeak or make an off-handed sarcastic comment that falls off the humor radar. so if i say something like, can any of us really afford a wedding planner?, everyone looks around quizzically, wondering if they just heard a cellphone ring. but if i say something like, what's that liver disease that i always think is a rash, or, sure, you should totally stick that fork into the toaster, only pussies unplug, my family doesn't just hear me, they descend.

so my dog concerns fell into the ether, and sure enough, aaron spent 3 weeks training his shetland ponies before he had to move off to indiana to start work, moving temporarily into a condo that doesn't allow dogs. so. i'm not saying i told them so, because nobody'd listen, anyway, but let's just say this: if you want medical advice, or a discussion about chaucer, or a full report on the quality of public mental health care in massachusetts, ask the MDs that make up my family. if you want practical advice from someone who doesn't live on planet bullshit, ask the mouth-breather with the bfa. you'll be glad you did.

oh, the family unit also went to celebrate baby sarah's first day of kindergarten-- baby sarah's mom is the daughter of the woman who introduced my mother to my father. plus, baby sarah's name is fuckin killer, and there was gonna be pizza, so i was on board.

and i like baby sarah, really-- she's the most articulate, verbal little kid i've ever met, and she has great shoes, and her name is just the best. but the party was for her and her friends also starting kindergarten, which meant a room full of little kids, which is kind of my idea of hell. i used to worry that i was turning into a mean grown-up-- into the enemy that years of watching nickelodeon had warned me about ages ago-- but then i remembered that i have *always* hated other kids, even when, or especially when i was a little kid myself. kids are mean, they don't hold back, they're violent, they tease, and when you're a 5 year old with the neuroses of a 50 year old woody allen, you'd rather just watch tv, walk around the playground alone, or hang out with your parents' friends who humor you when you want to sing them the entire score from annie.

my sister didn't realize how much i hate kids-- she had some fantasy about me moving in with her and aaron one day for a few months to help with my newborn niece/nephew-to-be-- but she also didn't realize that getting two gigantor puppies was a bad idea, so it's not her fault for being completely oblivious. i just looked around the room at that party at the parents of these kids, and they all looked tired, and bored, and covered in what their children had just eaten. plus, kids grow to be even bigger than 80 lbs and the risk of projectile diarrhea is the least of your problems. not that anyone'll listen.

ny:
i spent the last part of my trip in ny-- first in the city for one of my mini-trips where i just stuff my face, get a haircut, and hit h&m, and then up to hudson for my friends' sarah and andy's wedding. the second year of hockey, i decided to join up with the captain of the previous season's champions instead of joining my high school friends' new team (they had just moved to carrol gardens to live in a large apartment with 5 girls total, had never played hockey, and chose their team positions out of a hat). their team and my team became hockey siblings of sorts, so it was no surprise when my captain and their goalie spent an entire evening flirting with each other at the bar after the games and emailed me for each other's info. and of course, that captain was andy, and that goalie was sarah, and six years later, they got married at an applebarn (altho it should be noted that our teams merged/got married a couple of years earlier, and that there was no family or cake to witness the event and celebrate).

so the whole ny leg of my trip was kind of a whirlwind, from picking up my friend cristie (yes, she of berkeley-- that's some good attention-paying!) next to the sturbridge tolls (and i mean next to the tolls, just right off the pike in the kind of creepy parking area where divorced parents stop to let their kids run from mom's car to dad's during weekend visitation or gay dudes go to park their cars head or trunk first to signal the dude of their choice to go into the thicket and sodomize/get sodomized) to only going to and being disappointed by the soho h&m to dining with lola in chinatown before getting back in dad's luxury suv to drive north.

and just like my last trip to the city, i spent the whole time wishing i could move back-- again i went to better burger, and this time i realized how much i miss the tacky, ott gayness of chelsea, the stores that sell rainbow pink triangle cock ring windbreaker sets and the bars like the gym and rawhide that practically require a clean hiv test along with an id in order to get past the (insanely cut) bouncer. and en route to dinner, i realized how much i miss the stench of chinatown sidewalks, all coated in a thick slime of dried octopus dust, bubble tea, and puke. and how much i love walking around in chinatown because, instead of just feeling like an outsider, i actually am one, surrounded by people i don't look like, speaking languages i couldn't begin to understand, written in characters that are words to them and ugly tattoos to me.

the closest equivalent in la is driving past the jolibee, part of a filipino fast food chain, that advertises "crispy chickenjoy" and "juicy yumburger" and is rumored to not offer a single dish that doesn't somehow contain pork. i don't know what it smells like because i never roll my window down, and besides, i'm past it three seconds later, driving by another nondescript block of low buildings with bars on the windows. it's even more boring than queens. which is not something i ever thought i'd say.

and i can't say too much about the wedding, because i'm not going to review my friends' nuptials, but it was one of the few times i've heard that two people i know getting married and not had a second of wondering who i'd get to keep as a friend after the divorce. sarah and andy are so perfect together, and not in a gross romantic way, but in a practical, they-are-good-for-each-other-and-function-as-a-couple-and-just-make-sense way. in a lot of ways, the wedding was a lot like the parties at that brooklyn apartment, except that apartment-- a first floor and basement-- wasn't as nice as the barn (in fact, it was gross-- my nickname for it was watership down, not just because it had chambers underground, but because water literally came down off the pipes and the concrete basement floor was covered in hraka). but it did have all the same people dancing badly to all the same songs. except in nicer clothes, and wit the aforementioned family and cake.

so i guess it was a nice trip overall, but also bittersweet, because it's just a sampler of all the stuff i love that i'm now far away from. and i don't love these things in a gross sentimental way, because the derby wasn't as fun, and my family acknowledges me as they would a fart, and my friends are all moving out of the city and getting married and generally not in the place they were back when we were young and has the stamina to play hockey and go to bars and live in shithole apartments. back when i had the energy to hustle a living in the city and run a hockey league that was financially a wash but introduced me to many amazing people, and introduced many other amazing people to each other. sarah and andy's is the sixth hockey wedding that i know of. i'm pretty sure they'll keep playing in the league, but most people get married and then move away. blah blah, you deal with it, you move on, but it still sucks.

i love going home, but i hate it. i know so many happily married people with their matching tattoos and short pants and team shirts, but the idea of being married myself seems absurd and totally unappealing. and i miss new york, but i miss it most not when surrounded by happy queens, or lucky cats and custard buns, or even old friends, but when i read that firefighters had died in a fire in the deutsch bank building. the times said it was eerie, the funnel of smoke rising from downtown, the firetrucks barreling south, the familiar acrid smell that filled the air...that's when i wondered how i could be anywhere else. i know it makes about as much sense as "juicy yumburger," but it's the truth. so that's my trip in a nutshell-- wanting to be there for the people you care about during the important milestones, the good and the bad. because moving away doesn't mean you no longer care. in my case, at least, i care more than ever.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

review: my top 5 boston songs


camera's still not working, plus i have to wake up at 7 (!) to drive to nyc, stopping along the way to pick up my friend cristie at a pull-off by the tolls at sturbridge as if she were a truck stop whore (or a pull-off whore, but that sounds redundant), but here's a quicky that i was thinking of today while heading to the savers in west roxbury, listening to my beloved wzbc, driving like a total asshole, and basically feeling at home.

these are 5 songs by bands from boston about boston that i have loved since i actually lived in boston (which was ten years ago, and in the suburbs, but who's counting). oh, wait, i am counting. starting with number...

5. summertime - unnatural axe
the unnatural axe were one of those bands that were around during the era of the modern lovers and the real kids, but i never heard of them until an exbf put them on a mix for me (natch, he was also from boston, or more accurately, the suburbs, cuz really, in my imagination, living in the city itself [allston, jp, and slummerville don't count, assholes!] would entail either living along the freedom trail or having an apartment in the hancock building). anyway, it's about how great it is in the summer when all the college kids leave, and all i can say is, amen, brother. i spent many weekends in harvard square as a youth, and while the epicenter of square shittiness was "the pit"-- the brick sitting area next to the t station that was filled with suburban kids begging for change (for the meters where their cars were parked?) and engaging in the adolescent drug trade-- actual harvard students are/were the worst. nevermind bc, bu, emerson, mit...ps, i love this song.

4. umass - pixies
not that they're talking about umass boston (which would be funny-- i long for the day somebody pens a tune about cape cod community college, aka 4 Cs by the sea, the school everyone at my high school joked about having to go to after getting rejected at all the ivys they applied to, ha ha ha what dicks!). whatever, western mass is always lumped in with boston, and we're eager to take it (unlike worcester, which we'd easily give to connecticut, no questions asked), and if you've ever met anyone from umass, you'd find this song apt. i happened to know a young man from umass when i was in high school, and while that's another story, he was pretty much the classic stereotype of pioneer valley academia-- smart, smug, and extremely confused. that said, there were a ton of great bands from the western half of the state (hello, dinosaur jr/sebadoh, duh, but i'll throw in new radiant storm king for shits and giggles), and had they written heavy regional songs, i would've included them, too, but it was not meant to be, so, as always, the pixies own the spotlight.

3. crutch - buffalo tom
oh, buffalo tom. the first rock show i ever went to was a wfnx ("BOSTON'S ALTERNATIVE RADIO STATION", hello, 1992)/boston phoenix readers poll concert, and i say rock show because my parents dragged me to folk concerts since i was 5, but shawn colvin never counts for anything, ever. anyway, i was going to see matthew sweet, and my dad came, not just because i was 13, but because he also loved "girlfriend," and my friend cassim came, but i have no idea why. i mention this because, being a readers poll concert, they announced the winners of the phoenix's readers poll for best song/album/video whatever, and buffalo tom swept the motherfucker. "let me come over" is such a great goddamned record, it's aged like george clooney, and i swear, everytime i finally arrive in the city at the end of a long drive from elsewhere, i try to put on the last song, "crutch," not just because it's so pretty, but because every time i hear him sing, "i can't believe i'm back in boston," i can't believe it, either.

[incidentally, the other bands on that bill were the sugarcubes and the smithereens, but we didn't make it past the sugarcubes because they were so scary-- i was 13, my dad's canadian, and this was when they were promoting that single where the ugly guy repeats the phrase, "I SAY OUCH, THIS REALLY HURTS!" we literally ran from the orpheum theater for our lives.]

2. 100000 fireflies - magnetic fields
i remember the exact moment when i first heard this song-- in a dorm room at chapell hill/chancey hall summer theater program (sup, costumes and tech crew! now you know why i never wear all black). my roommate prefered the soothing sounds of elton john (even tho i swear her brother was in the lemonheads for 5 minutes, but maybe i made that up), but i had just started listening to wzbc, and i remember that when this song came on i wondered why they were playing the theme song to "muppet babies." the thing that used to make the magnetic fields so great to me, before they became the sound of smugness and an npr house band (along with wilco, they might be giants...white people are funny, huh), was that, with the exception of muppet babies, they really didn't sound like anyone else on the radio. when susan anway was the singer, all the songs sounded like demos from bizarre off-broadway musicals, and since i was knee deep in musicals at the time, this clicked with me. then again, this song clicks with many people-- say, "i have a mandolin" in front of a group of glasses-wearing, messenger bag-having, and yes, npr-listening people in their late 20s/early 30s, and they will immediately/without thinking say, "i play it all night long, it makes me want to kill myself" like the manchurian indie rocker. the boston stuff is incidental-- when she asks, "why do we still live here in this repulsive town?", she's referring to sommer "slummer" ville, mentioned above-- but one of my favorite shows i ever went to in high school was the mountain goats, john davis, john davis and john darnielle singing smiths covers, (horrible sleepyhead, but we'll ignore that) and the magnetic fields at the middle east upstairs. for some reason, they let me sit on the side of the stage. and they played this song. sure, we were in cambridge, but it didn't seem so repulsive to me.

1. roadrunner - modern lovers
like there could be any other. fucking jonathan richman, man. back when tower records was at the end of newbury street, they tried to start a "boston rock walk of fame" on the sidewalk outside. on that walk as of 1996 (the year i got out)-- aerosmith (who are actually from, no shit, nh), nkotb (that was the year they were attempting to make people forget they were actually the new kids on the block, the same way kentucky fried chicken became kfc so you'd forget the southern/bad-for-you thing), and jonathan richman. i once forced him to take his picture with me, and in it, he looks totally terrified, which makes sense, cuz his voice always sounds vaguely afraid, like there's someone offstage with a hook and a sharp stick.

when i was 17 tho, it sounded like someone who was really excited, because driving on 128 by myself was exciting, especially with the radio on, especially when it was dark outside. i preferred the star market to the stop'n'shop, but whatever (altho the best chain, now gone, was purity supreme-- there was one not far from 128, on rte 9, not far from my house, and years later i met someone who grew up right near there and used to refer to it as chastity ultimate). that whole record is the best musical document this city has to offer-- the museum of fine arts, government center...the power of massachusetts when it's late at night! damn!


godsmack, white zombie, extreme, the bosstones (who i actually saw more than once, but this was the early 90s, and if you didn't go to at least 3 bosstones shows before the age of 15 you had to pay a fine or do community service)...were they asked to be on the boston rock walk of fame, despite being more famous than the modern lovers and having more exciting outfits? no. because no matter how many records those shitty bands have sold, and no matter how strong their connection to the city is, they do not love boston-- love life!-- like jonathan richman does. you can hate curt shilling, you can hate mitt romney, you can hate letters to cleo-- in fact, please, hate all of those people!-- but no matter how much you hate boston (ie, how much i sometimes hate boston), you can't hate jonathan richman, and you can't hate this song. radio on! right, alright, bye bye!

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

we are experiencing techmological differences.

someone, most likely my brother-in-law but also possibly my sister, has thrown away my toothbrush. and any other evidence of my existence that was once in the bathroom my sister and i have shared since we were children. and to rub it in, i walked into my bedroom to find a box of her excess toiletries. so now i can't brush my teeth but i'm sleeping in sephora's warehouse.

in short: i am in boston, i am agitated, i cannot make my camera work with m'puter, so i cannot fully describe the demolition derby until tomorrow. for now, i will sleep and dream not of cars bursting into flame, but of my sister waking to find her toothbrush, dirty and violated in her sink.

so here's a short review: everything. hate it right now. g'night!