the sunapee manatee

CA to OR: i don't remember.

2009-01-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

here's the deal-- not so long before xmas, i drove with teet and emma to sf, left emma in sf, went on with teeter to eugene, then portland, then CB. stayed there for a bit until we ran into teet's awesome hippie friend at the SSS (sad seaside supermarket) who told us a huge coastal storm was coming, and then started to drive south as to outrun weather that threatened to punish us from the coast to portland to mount shasta.

[photo: shas-tuh! shas-tuh! or mall co-muh! mall co-muh!]

i still have ptsd from trying to get my prius through the rockies in a snow storm, so i literally planned our return trip south as if we were future rebel leaders being chased by our would-be robot overlords sent back in time programmed solely for our elimination (the sarah not-conor chronicles). basically we drove all day until getting past the mountains, then ate the grossest meal i've ever had (congrats, chico, ca-- this says a lot since i used to order take out from cha khan on 8th and university even after my friend found a bandaid in her food. rock me, cha khan, indeed).

long story short, by the time i got back to LA, i had to ready myself for traveling to the east coast for a month+ stay. and btw, while i'm touched that everyone thinks i'm grizzly enough to drive east at this time of year, for the record-- negro por favor. 'sides, even if i did have a death wish, i still wouldn't waste precious holiday family time in my car, alone, shivering with buzzo at a sonic drive-in ordertron 2000 somewhere in biblebraska (because no matter how cold, 'tis always the season for a ddp float).

and then when i got back east, i got sick. literally, within 24 hours, i got saddled with a consumption-like cough that still hasn't entirely gone (and i found out today that a handful of older women in town have had this cold since september and had to be hospitalized, so i guess i should just be happy that all i had to deal with was 3 weeks of waking up and hocking up a large clump of a substance that one usually never sees outside of the nuclear plant where homer works).

whatever, now the holidays are over, and the sickness is contained to a bad sore throat every morning and frequent sneeze pairs (always in pairs! i have the doublemint twins of projectile phlegm!), but my camera with trip pictures is in the shop, and now i'm distracted by preparing for the big DC trip in two weeks for the big-au inaug. as most of you know (since i know most of you), thanks to a simple email to one of my elected republican representatives (who i didn't vote for, and whose local republican colleague i just helped to vote out of office), i scored two tickets to history/pure anxiety/freezing my ass off. tomorrow, no joke, i am going to the local sporting goods store and buying a full body carhartt jumper so that i can be as warm as cordura allows (and ugly and lesbiany-- yes, i can...die alone).

anyway, i have no trip pictures, not even google image search, just a place holder until i can upload the picture i took near cb of an elk herd by the highway (wtf!), or the magazine rack at my friend michael's house in sf containing the latest issue of natty dread magazine (excuse i!), or all the swastikas drawn on the walls of the wrecked house/teen hideout on the beach near teet's house (8 by my count!).

what i do have is a picture of the channukah present from my mom. see, mom's a needle point pro and makes pillows for those she loves for special occasions. eg, she's made 2 pillows for family friend jenny to celebrate the birth of each of her kids, and 3 pillows for my sister with each graduation, but until now, as someone who's accomplished almost nothing (unless you count winning 90s trivial pursuit or remembering to buy trash bags at hannaford, and please don't), i've gotten none. so this is the pillow my mom finally made me, which i like to think is of me. hope everyone else experienced such satisfaction over the holidays. and didn't cough up anything that glowed.

NH to CA: the long and the short of it

2008-11-03T23:39:00.000-08:00

[photo: one last image of nh-- when i went shooting with rick in the woods (my .22, his .45 acp with laser sight) (fuck yeah), this is where he kept the ammo in his truck. in his son's toddler seat. i miss NH so bad it hurts.]

there are many reasons i've put off writing about this trip. 1, this will be the *fifth fucking time* i've written about this particular journey. and since most of my time was spent driving, that's not a lot of material. hell, there's not much difference between driving on I-70 and driving to trader joe's, except the former lets you go 85 mph and has more billboards en route telling you that abortion is a bad idea (more on that later). but whatever, here's this trip in a nutshell since i can't sleep anyway and have yet to find a pitchfork should things go awry tomorrow night (i do have a torch tho-- koreatown, here i come!).

NH, VT, NY:
after spending the first night in syracuse at an old friend's house, my first real "stop" was in buffalo. there was an article in new york magazine this summer about how buffalo is the new 6th burrough (eat shit n'die, philly!), with its cheap housing, and burgeoning art scene, and bike lanes to rival portland. when i was in buffalo, it was grey and miserable as shit, which is just a taste of what it's going to be like for the next 8 months, except it wasn't freezing fucking cold yet (those bike lanes are going to be under 10 feet of snow for 2/3rds of year, you idiots).

whatever, buffalo is a shithole, but because of that, it has some of the finest thrifting on the east coast, so i took a day to hop from salvo (they have 8!) to amvets (2, both the size of walmarts!), and, as always, found myself in parts of town that, despite having charming indian names (north tonawanda, represent!), looked like something out a post-apocalyptic version of the wire. i got a few choice items tho, and before long i was back on 90 headed to cleveland, my next stop, as maysan was there with her family for a vacation, and it's not a cross country trip without a maysan visit. even if i never see her in the same part of the country twice. maybe next time she'll be in north dakota, and then i'll be able to cross that state of my list. 45 down, 5 to go (looking at you, wv, nd, ky, ak, n'hi-- check yrselves).

[photo: still nh, this is the mud zamboni from the demolition derby. nobody believes me when i talk about it, but tada. sigh.]

one thing of note on 90 west of buffalo-- right next to each other was a fireworks & martial arts emporium (explosives and throwing stars, two great tastes that go great together) and a shed mart. so basically, you nunchuck someone, then blow their face off, then put them in your a brand new shed with the rest of your tools n'corpses. so convenient!

NY, PA, OH:
spent a lovely night in a highway sheraton-- far and away the best hotel of the trip-- eating leftovers and watching keith, then woke up early to meet up with maysan and the fam. her mom is just the sweetest (when she said goodbye, she said, "good luck with your career!" this was so much more appreciated than that "safe travels" horseshit), and her dad is like a movie star; he's mister community leader back home, and he carries himself as such, which is pretty intimidating and rad. my dad has a mustache and likes fart jokes, so, ya know.

after that, maysan and i decided we had to see the rock n'roll hall of fame, and while the verdict was unquestionably bad, the description of its badness is the subject of much debate. maysan found the "museum" to be like a chili's because of all the random shit on the walls (one of their exhibits has a silkworm 7", and another has smokey robinson's tour suit from *1992*-- this is not a museum, this is a shitty pawn shop), but i thought it was much more like a hard rock cafe with more emphasis on buying your own tchotchkes than $15 burgers.

[photo: i wish i coulda taken pictures in the museum, because these little kids walked through with us on their school trip and were so f'n adorable i wanted to die. in the crappy "doo wop" room they all broke out in a full on dance party. really, the only "educational" value of this museum is learning being a spazz in public 101.]

either way, aside from the crap listed above, other items included:
-an outfit worn by the singer of paramour (and no, it was not in the "future trivia question" exhibit)
-part of the plane otis redding died in (classy!)
-batteries throughout the ages (seriously-- in an exhibit on technology. fascinating).

i would've taken pictures of this, but they're nazis about photography because "some of the items have been lent to the museum on condition they not be photographed." why the fuck not? because the donor was embarrassed he held onto jimi hendrix's underpants? whatever. we left, but not before buying copies of the only photos they do allow-- one taken of you by the staff when you walk into the museum. i would scan this photo, but i don't have a scanner, so you'll have to trust me that having an image of me holding a drumstick, li'l zayd holding a tamborine, giant sinan holding a guitar (virtually unassisted- dude's a year old and change, he's got hulk strength), and maysan forcing zayd to look at the camera was worth every cent and minute spent looking at ye olde batteries.

after that tho, after a little research, we went to eat at the west side market, which was perfect, because it's just a bunch of stalls of different prepared eats, cheap produce, and meats galore. they also had cornish pasties just like my cousin dee gets when i visit her in norfolk, but these were in cleveland and not filled with lard. so we stuffed our guts, spent a little while at the children's museum (which is really a mall-esque playplace that a, costs money, and b, plays an endless loop of hip hop nursery rhymes that almost make three blind mice sound sexual), and then maysan headed back to VA while i hit the road for my sister's house in IN. i used to hate cleveland, but now, not so much. just the fact i paid money to enter a place that considers john mayer's original lyrics to "my public persona is confusing" (not a real song) to be an artifact worth putting in a glass case.

[photo: this was also available at the west side market, but surprise, we semites took a pass.]

IN:
i ended up spending 5 days here, thinking it wouldn't take me that long to get from IN to SF, mostly because i'm a moron. in fact, looking back, every time i take these trips, i find new and interesting ways to test my intellect AND FAIL ON A SPECTACULAR LEVEL. see: my decision to drive across 10 in 114 degree heat with a dog in the car. did i mention that i'm already booking my next trip in june thru canada? if anyone sees ways in which that could be problematic, speak now before i put myself through 2 weeks of cannuck hell.

anyway, i basically spent my time in IN being the house bitch, doing the grocery shopping and walking the dogs, plus changing my car's oil at an oil mart where the guy who "took my order" looked a lot like jay adams post-prison, way post-dogtown. also, my sister told me to go to the "good" grocery store that had an organic room, but that room was at the back of the store like the porno room at the video store. i felt ashamed for getting almond milk. don't judge me, i have needs.

my sister spent a lot of the time working, but we did get to go to the nearby candy outlet that coats everything in chocolate (a plus), and we spent a day in chicago, really just buying shit. it was so retail-y that we almost went to eat at the cheesecake factory to make the mall experience complete, but no. of course, driving into chicago from indiana means going through gary, which means inhaling gary and trying not to get sick. it's so strange this town that's literally minutes from chicago, that could be primo real estate, is actually a crime-ridden, burning rubber/onion/feces smelling wasteland. the jackson family is from there, if that explains anything, and i think it does.

[photo: click to enlarge because, while i'm getting ahead of myself, i saw this fucking enormous praying mantis in the parking lot of a mcdonalds (what, i was weak) somewhere in the ozarks. they're like tiny dogs with exoskeletons!]

oh, also while in indiana, my sister was kind enough to go with me to see "nick and norah's infinite playlist," which was just heartbreaking for me. i mean, it's a sweet movie, but it seriously made me miss new york in the way having to take the train home alone late makes you miss an old boyfriend, even if you hate his guts now, or especially if you hate his guts, because it's easier to long for someone specific than for someone that never existed.

the new york in this movie is like that-- familiar, in that at least 15 minutes of that movie are filmed on my old block, and one key scene is in my old deli (or a set made up to look like my deli, but there's the deli, there's iris nail, there's the bag store...there's my life from 1999-2006). but unfamiliar in that i'm an old-ass woman and even when i was a youth i had no adventures of that ilk. still, i see movies like that, and i wanna go home. and discover that one of the homeless guys outside of grace church is actually andy sandberg and not the guy we called "outside joe" who liked to sit on the sidewalk picking large scabs off his bare feet. sweet memories!

IL, MO, KS:
i decided to drive south from indiana because that way i could taken 70, which i'd never taken before, and cross another coupla states of my list. i also am an idiot, because, as i once forgot that june is hot as hell in the south, i now ignored the possibility that mid/late october might be tricky around the rocky mountains. so i drove out of my way in order to say i'd been thru missouri, eaten bbq in a gas station in kansas city (on the KS side), and stayed in a motel in topeka conveniently located next to a hooters. and also near some business called cox communications, making it the "chicks with dicks office park" as far as i was concerned.

[photo: the view from my window. cox was, not surprisingly, just to the south.]

one thing i did realize in topeka is that, whenever i pull off the highway anywhere with hotels, i end up in a section of any city, major or minor, that i call "little applebees." even boston has places like this off of 128, islands of chain restaurants, motels, gas stations, and anonymous anywhereania. so i spent the night in the little applebees section of topeka in a good-enough hotel with sign towards the soda machine that read "pop this way." it rained like a bitch, so i thought i'd wake up early when it was light and not thunder and lightening.

instead, i woke up early when it was still raining and dark. but the sky cleared up sometime before colorado. or so i thought.

CO:
the plan was to get through colorado, crash somewhere in UT, and somehow make it to berkeley by thursday night. like i said, i completely underestimated the time it would take to make this trip, so getting to el's by thursday dinner time was looking less and less likely, anyway (she and kumar were leaving friday morning, and saturday was her birthday, so i wanted to try and cross paths in the bay area before making the final leg south). i got close to denver around 3 and called teeter for her eldest sister's info, since i'd be passing thru her sister's (sis chris') town and maybe i could just stop to say hi. so i got the info, and headed into the mountains, thinking i could just get some dinner with chris and then continue on my way.

and then the snow storm started.

[photo: "shit."]

again, me no researchee, but snow in the rockies starts early, and when i say "in the rockies," i don't mean in the fun "general woods and clydesdales and beer" way, i mean, "on a road on the side of a fucking mountain." so there i am in my front wheel drive prius, going in and out of squalls, 12 degrees out with slush and ice, mind completely blown. i spent my formative years driving through snow to high school all the time, but never on an 8% downgrade, and never in a car that, due to its tricky hybrid engine whatever, keeps its wheels from spinning in any matter of slush, thus forcing you to gun it in order to go 40 mph just to get the fucker to move, high altitudes or no, while trucks are passing you and SUVS are flipping you off.

[photo: the view from chris' living room that evening-- snow, storm clouds, and several other things you wouldn't expect until, say, december. i know it doesn't look like much snow, but trust me, on the road, it was a flash slush situation.]

by the time i got to chez chris'n'manfriend, i was a bit shell shocked, and when she told me that the vail pass was closed, thus making it impossible to go on even if i wanted to, i was pretty much relieved. that's the fun part of all these major interstates, especially 80-- they have large gates that come down and just shut the road down when the weather's bad. there are signs with flashing lights basically telling you that you're fucked and to turn around, and that's it. i can't tell whether that's some cowboy shit, or whether the fact that new englanders plow through anything means these rockies types are just a bunch of pussies. moi, i felt like a cowboy, and chris was happy to let me spend the night.

[photo: small dog rodeo!]

and let me tell you, it was like a short visit to a spa-- my own room in a beautiful old house, hot vegan mac'n'cheese for dinner, brownies for dessert while watching rachel maddow, small dog rodeo so buzzo's hijinks were par for the course...just the greatest. oh, AND chris gave me this beautiful shirt dress she was trying to get rid of. AND her li'l ski town is adorable, and you could see the mountain from their living room (when the storm clouds cleared/finished shitting snow on my life). i woke up early the next morning and, after letting my car warm up in the 10 degree weather, bid my hosts adieu and headed west again. towards yet more karma.

[photo: the same view out of chris' living room, minus the fence and road-closing storm clouds. then the view from the road the morning after-- it's pretty when it's not blinding and frozen.]

UT, NV:
i stayed on 70 until UT, whereupon i headed north to go to 80, which had a smaller risk of bad weather. i took a smaller road thinking it'd be scenic, but it was really just a trafficky nightmare through meth country (as ubiquitous at this point as little applebeeses). then i had to drive through provo and salt lake city, which are never not creepy, but i did remember to get gas in salt lake before entering the vast, serviceless wasteland that extends between salt lake and the NV border.

i've written about this before, and i've talked about it with others, but seriously, public service announcement-style, DO NOT drive on 80 between wendover and salt lake, UT with anything less than a full tank of gas. there's almost nothing but desert and dust for hours, and if you run out of gas, especially at night, the chances are very high that you will end up a pile of bleached bones right next to the fresh corpse of a dead hooker tossed over from the NV side. i had plenty of gas, but for some reason, my check engine light went on. i was pretty sure it was because the folks at the oil'n'go in indiana didn't reset the oil milage thingee (it's a prius thing, trust me), but i spent a good chunk of that drive convinced that my engine was going to blow up and my soul would be converted to mormonism before the body was cold.

[photo: this was actually taken somewhere in kansas, because there is absolutely nothing to photograph on 80 aside from a visual representation of suicidal depression.]

it's at this point, however, that i'd like to share a coupla general observations about this great land of ours:
1, i know i've discussed this before, but jesus really needs to hire new PR people-- for some reason he can only afford to advertise on stretches of road that have almost no traffic, or only on pieces of plywood spread out in the fields of a roadside farm land that spell out "GUNS" "SAVE" "LIVES" "CHRIST" "IS" "LORD" as you drive by at 90 mph. it also seems like the least populated towns have the most anti-abortion signage, which is strange, because if the town has less than a thousand people, and half of those people are women, is abortion really that much of a problem? is it because they need every member of the population they can get? or is small town america really that baby blood hungry? the ways of "real america" are foreign to me.

2, as i was making this trip, the whole "real america" v "fake america" debate was going on, but as far as i can tell, in "real america," people are vastly outnumbered by tumbleweeds, roadkill, and, well, signs that hate abortion. by this logic, our country should be ruled by a gutted deer and the word "KILLS." secretary of state would be a large chunk of limestone. U! S! A!

anyway, made it to elko, nv, that night, a town where i'd previously stopped with my father on my way back east last year to get some delicious basque food. since i'd gotten there later, and really just wanted to get something to go, i picked a mexican place on the strip that seemed hopping and got a burrito. then i proceeded to check in to the only hotel on the strip that allowed dogs, which was also the most horrible place i have ever slept in my entire life. i have slept in vegan co-ops, but this place had an even greater chance of giving me scabies. and aids.

[photo: the only thing on the menu that won't give you food poisoning. also, the one bright spot in nevada.]

another general observation-- if, as stephen colbert once declared, florida is our nation's wang, then it would follow that AL, MI, and maybe LA are the national nutsack, and texas the national taint. new england thru MI are obviously the brains, the carolinas back thru KS/NB are our gut, but the four corners are truly our country's sphincter (sorry, NM and CO, but AZ literally houses a giant hole!). CA is our buttcheek, and NV is a festering hemorrhoid where you can gamble in the bathrooms, smoke in the cancer ward of the hospital, and pimp our your children.

if utah weren't so fucked up religious and repressed, nevada wouldn't have to be so fucked up and trashy; if the mormons didn't have to wear special underwear, the whores staying in the hotel i "slept" in would actually wear underwear. or something. nevada is like if the show cops had an enormous theme park.

and i talked about this with sam in sf, but it struck me as i passed a prostitute on the way into the hotel that, as much as 3rd wave feminism teaches us to respect those in the sex trade, and that porn is a noble pursuit, it still would not be appropriate/considered complimentary if i said to that woman, "good evening, you look especially whorey, great top." nobody wants to be called a whore, and while you can't judge women who do what they gotta do to make a living, you can't convince me that it's something to aspire to (or that being a porn star is anything but being a prostitute with a visual record). i know, i know, i always ruin the fun with feminist rantings. my bad.

[photo: count the stains! please note: there are also wet spots that are less visible. i might now have a tape worm.]

either way, this hotel was so gross that i went to the car to get a blanket that i could wrap myself up in like a burrito and sleep on top of the bed (speaking of burritos, the one i got on the strip was so gross that i swear there were chicken bones in it). problem was i couldn't really sleep because i kept thinking that my car was being broken into or that i was getting crabs. so when my watch said it was 6:30, i figured i'd spent enough time "resting" and got ready to hit the road, sunlight or no. what i didn't realize was that i forgot to set my watch from mountain time to pacific, so it was actually 5:30, and the oil change place wouldn't be open until 7.

so i went to get a donut (casinos and bars, by the way, were still open) and sat and waited for the oil place to open, where upon a nice guy wearing some of the finest in urban sweatwear confirmed it was just the idiots in IN, reset the car, and sent me on my way for free. i was out of nevada by 7:15. but i didn't stop scratching myself until i crossed the border into CA.

CA:
ah, tahoe-- so beautiful, so woodsy, so not violating. i drove through the mountains again, this time not-snowy and pretty, and watched the temperature climb from 27 to 82 by 2 pm. i got to paisley's at 3 or so, got a burrito that completely redeemed burritos in my eyes after the one in elko that was filled with whatever chicken bits got stuck in the drain, and spent the rest of the evening in a daze in paisley's living room hanging out and watching TV.

[photo: paisley drove me past this two times so the second time i could take a picture. i am, as always, a grown up.]

sure, i was exhausted, but there's this strange thing that happens after driving that much where it takes me forever to actually relax. i know i'm tired but at the same time my heart's still beating so fast from all those miles going 90 and being on hyper-alert. so hours later, i finally took a shower (no parasites!) and passed out in giant bed in the guest room i think i've stayed in since i started visiting paisley in high school. so comforting in so many ways (ie familiar AND no crabs).

i might have missed elanor, but paisley and i had fun, plus i got to see sam, and generally do the friendsy stuff i'm so loathe to write about here. i also hung out with sharif who spent an hour berating me for not contacting his friends in LA and trying to be more social, and then another hour telling me how those friends are probably too busy to ever hang out. i really did appreciate his description of berkeley tho-- that the people there are so soft and vulnerable to predators, like a human galapagos, with their sandalled feet and bike rights and organic everything, they have no defenses. i feel that way about LA sort of, too, except instead of hippies they're just kind of sheltered mall dwellers who you could probably carjack without a weapon.

[photo: a catholic church somewhere near oakland that paisley and her dad insist looks like a huge vagina. pais even noted how the crucifix looks like an IUD. think about it.]

driving back to LA tho, i wasn't as filled with dread as i thought i'd be (altho man, was 5 in fine smell form-- put gary to shame). when i finally got to the 101 at the cusp of the valley and passed the vivid video building in studio city, it was also comforting in it's familiarity (but probably not without crabs). when i got back to my apartment, lizzy'd left my place in great shape, and after unpacking for hours, i got to sleep around 4.

and now...well, it's not awful, but only because, as is usually true, i have returned west with a stronger sense of purpose. and while that sense of purpose is usually an ambiguous drive to "do stuff," this time it's specifically to get work back east and never have to make that drive again, and to do it by any means necessary. what those means might have to be, i'm not sure, but i have a feeling this will be my most shameless year. i'm not proud of that, but five times across the US, and you do sort of want to stick a fork in the heartland and declare the adventure done.

that's my trip though. and who knows, it could be a good year. tomorrow might go well. molly and maria might get to keep their union recognized by the state, and norm coleman might have to say he lost to stuart smalley, and john sununu might have to eat sudoodoo...but i'm not just a liberal democrat from taxachusetts, but also a red sox fan, so my fear of the jinx will end my tirade right there. still, shit ain't hopeless. if an idiot like me can make it to and fro across this country 4.5 times without an accident, anything's possible.

[photo: from the sox game i saw for my birthday during the sept wildcard race-- the first game of a double header where the jays kicked our ass. in the second game, the one i wasn't at, we won. and now we're both in a rebuilding year. you do the math.]

reviews: "bright shiny morning"

2008-10-17T00:05:00.001-07:00

*"bright shiny morning," james frey

a friend said i should read this book because it's about LA, and i "live" in LA (oh, and because she promotes it for work), but i have absolutely no interest in james frey or books about LA, so i compromised and listened to it instead, in the car. i bought the CDs at a barnes & noble with maysan when i was driving back to nh from ca, and i finished it last week after leaving maysan in ohio on my way back to ca from nh. it took me half a year to get through a bullshit airport book, and i feel like a deserve a medal. or at least a publishing deal.

i've struggled to describe to people why this book is so bad, so painful, so unnecessary, and i think the short answer is this-- it's a quite possibly the least original book i've ever read. the author knows he has nothing original to say about los angeles, but he seems to figure that if he says *a lot* of unoriginal things-- possibly every unoriginal thing-- that will make not only make up for it, but make it a modern epic. perhaps he figured that if he managed to convince oprah he did hard time for being a drugged up badass when he really just did community service for a dwi, anything's possible.

one thing frey can be proud of is that there will never be a more complete compendium of the most stale, tired clichés about los angeles. did you know that famous hollywood actors are often spoiled and in the closet? that good, hardworking americans come to LA filled with dreams and hope? that even the most alcoholic of LA's homeless can have hearts of gold? odds are, you've rarely heard or seen anything else. but now you can have it all in one place.

and if that's not enough, the book is interspersed with random lists and facts about LA/southern california in general, so you can not only read, say, about an earnest, kind mexican-american woman stereotype working as a maid for an rich, evil boss stereotype, but also learn about the history of the freeway system and the history of LA's chinatown. oh, and you can read it written in a completely humorless, macho style that ads an extra level of annoying to the proceedings. this book is like a lifetime movie if it were directed by a 3rd rate quentin tarantino. with the same length and tone as shoah.

what i would love to read-- and i know it's out there, i'm just too lazy to search it out-- is a book about LA that goes beyond the standard bullshit about dreamers, mini-malls, and traffic. maybe the problem is that 99% of the writers in LA a, aren't from there and only know the basic shit/stuff we've all seen on TV, b, spend all their time there with other writers, in their homes, or in their cars, which is not the stuff of great novels (or even mildly humorous anecdotes), and c, aren't dumb enough to try and take such an absurd place seriously. it's like trying to write a dramatic epic about the daily goings on at disney world, as told by a tourist. and if frey was trying to show LA's magnificance beyond the artifice, using nothing but artifice kind of defeats the purpose.

[photo: "welcome to hollywood, what's your dream?" = quoted almost verbatim in frey's great work of literature.]

the weird thing is, frey was so good at making stuff up when he was supposed to be writing nonfiction, and now that he's writing fiction, he can't come up with shit. (it's not just the endless clichés-- one of the many random vignettes in the book is, without actually using his name, a straight-forward biography of perez hilton. it's like reading wikipedia, but even less interesting.) by this time next week, i'll be back in my crumbling apartment in s'lake, listening to the helicopters thunder overhead, eating pinkberry at in my running clothes, and generally living like any other boring asshole in los angeles. and somehow, it will still be more more interesting than this piece of shit book.

[i'm leaving indiana tuesday morning, so i'll write up the trip up to now tomorrow night, altho there's really not much to write up. and sorry molly, but i'm taking my misery through missouri. charm of the highway strip, indeed.]

nh to ca: prelude

2008-10-16T22:55:00.000-07:00

[image: not the most original jpg-du-jour, but i love it so.]

so why would i update this blog when it would take time away from skimming realclearpolitics? from watching the numbers shift on fivethirtyeight? from finishing crochet jobs while watching a tivo full of keith and rachel? this is what i've been doing for the past 2 months. i also went to the hopkinton demo derby, shot a .45 in the woods, and attended a family bake-off in new jersey, but mostly, i'm in an election coma. plus, i've already voted. i'm a cog in the lean, mean shaheen machine.

anyway, i'm already on my way back to CA, taking a break in indiana at my sister's house, and were i not so wiped out from a day of being her helper monkey/sweating through the last hour of the red sox game, i'd wrap-up the first leg of this current journey. the sad thing tho is that, after 4 back'n'forths, this trip's starting to feel like it ain't no thang. add to that my utter ambivalence about to returning to LA and i'd still rather read politico than spend time writing about my day in buffalo.

LA, for me, is like high school-- i know i have to go, and that it will help me go on to better things, but that doesn't meant it isn't a near-daily shit sandwich. right before the tolls on 90 between ohio and indiana, i was fiddling with the radio and stopped on twisted sister's "we're not gonna take it," because a, i was tired and wanting something amusing, and b, it was the only station i could find that wasn't playing some variation on jesus' current #1 jam. so i'm listening to this song, and i pull up to the toll (i have no ez pass since there are no tolls once you cross the mississip', where i do the majority of my driving), and the toll i chose suddenly stops moving. i'm just sitting there in the rain behind 2 other suckers so we can pay six dollars for the pleasure of entering the homestate of dan quayle.

and i just start laughing because dee snider is full of shit, because *all i fucking do is take it, everyday, all the time.* i am in my car, stuck waiting for a toll-collector to come back from the shitter, driving back to the national epicenter of taking it. i don't know anyone right now who isn't taking it at this point, most of them in every hole. which certain puts the ubiquitous nature of jesus jams in context.

anyway, i'm mixing shit up on this trip, going diagonal from here to san francisco so i can cross a couple more states off my list before hand delivering the issue of us weekly i bought today at the supermarket to my friend sam when we have dinner in oakland so she can include it in bibliography of her dissertation. so NH thru OH will come sometime before monday. for now, crooksandliars calls. tomorrow, game 6. at least if the red sox take it all, that won't be so bad. groan.

corky was a hero to some but he never meant a goddamned thing to me

2008-08-08T22:00:00.000-07:00

more fruits of my insomnia.
word.

pt. 4: VA, MD, DE, NJ, NY, CT, MA, NH

2008-07-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

[photo: "baseball is a simple game." whatever, i'm foreshadowing.]

ok. at this rate i won't finish this stupid trip summary before turning around and doing it all over again. here are the cliff notes of the highlights of the illustrations of the end, because i had this grander point i wanted to make (i think? i don't exactly remember) so let's just get to my navel gazing and finish it already. also, my sister got married.

VA:
maysan's husband, c., works at virginia tech, which means she has moved from her location during the last trip (MI) to blacksburg (VA) (not an upward move). she asked me if i wanted to see the monument to the slain virginia tech students, but after new orleans and the holocaust cage, i'd had my fill of tragic landmarks. then again, blacksburg is in itself sort of tragic; 4 out of 5 businesses are tattoo shops, there are $300k condos marketed for rich people who need a place to crash during football season, and maysan's building's "pool" looks like this.

we took her boys (ages 3 and 1) and went to target, petsmart and barnes and noble, aka the local art museum (lookit the artistry of the new GO collection!), aquarium (lookit fish!) and library (well, there are books). but i also provided an excuse to go to the mountain lake resort, aka, the place where they shot dirty dancing. i mean, neither one of us is a superfan of the movie, but really, you can only go to target so many times.

and it was totally worth it, because we a, discovered that the next sequel will be called dirty dancing 3: an inconvenient truth, as this here is the "lake" of the resort's name which was featured in the film as the home of "the lift." now it's no bigger than patrick swayze's current carbon footprint. "!"

[additional note on photo: the lake is the silver of blue in the back. it's every so slight, like the wind through my tree.]

and b, we went into the dining hall, stuck sinan in a chair, and literally put baby in the corner.

[additional note on photo: i thought maysan'd want to be cropped out of the photo, but you can see her hand and that she a, didn't just dump her huge infant in a chair and walk off to do the pachanga, and b, was having the time of her life.]

[ok references over.]

oh, these are maysan's kids and my dog. please note that my dog weighs less than sinan the 1-year-old, who, if maysan really wants to buy a minivan, could help contribute to the down payment by working as a bouncer, maybe at one of the local tattoo shops, if such shops had bouncers, and if sinan could walk.

but as boring as blacksburg is, my time at chez maysan did a lot to clear up the misery of the previous stretch. on the one hand, i'm annoyed that i'm giving maysan the short shrift write-up since this part of the trip was fun, while i went on and on about atlanta which was utter punishment, but after you put baby in the corner, what more is there to say? plus, at this point, i sincerely don't remember shit. which, given the 3 days of sleep i needed to recover from this trip when i got to nh, might be a good hting.

MD:
so i decided to not punish myself with an 8 hour drive directly to nyc and instead drive from VA to baltimore to cristie's house. she embraced buzzo (pictured, not so stoked as this time no groin relief was involved, but this is as close to blue steel as my dog gets). we did fun things that nobody would care about. no vermin were exchanged. we bitched about dudes. surely i've said enough.

DE, NJ, NY:
i had to be in nyc for a night to meet with my new subletter, who i liked, which is good since he lives in my house and watches his giant tv on my precious couch. i always hate writing about my trips to nyc because they're basically private friend time, but i will say that buzzo finally got a bath, and i finally got 31 corn lane merch for my birthday (that hadn't actually happened yet at that point, but since i beg for shit all the time, finally still applies), and now i'm finally including a picture of kesone's aforementioned adorable rodent (with buzz staring at him since he seems to be the official recurring motif of this entry).

CT, MA, NH:
before making the final stretch to nh, i went to a bbq at the sperber manse in bk, and i got my 31CL bags as well as a ton of food and red sox talk, and holy shit, it's such a good/bad feeling when you realize you're happy because you feel at home (yay), and that it took you so long to realize that because it's been so long since you've felt that way (christ).

i mean, i travel to see friends a lot, and those trips are always somewhat life saving in nature, but 10 years ago, after i fled an apartment in queens and was waiting to move into the place i am now resubletting to yet more mixed feelings of relief and misery, it was the sperbers who let me sleep on their bizarro couch on bleecker st for 2 fucking weeks. and it wasn't long after that that i met their neighbor, emma, who i didn't spend one-on-one time with until we were both in london months later and i suffered a allegra-induced nosebleed that lasted for our entire dinner together. i was sure my nosesplosion was going to end our friendship right there (as was she, i mean, ew), but somehow, it didn't. and now she's my lifeline in LA, and teeter's sisters still take me in, and both teeter and emma were my dates to my sister's wedding last week. that's next level relief.

what i realized sometime during the long slog of drive after texas was that maybe i wanted to see the alamo (if you don't remember that part, i'm not hurt) because i fancy myself to be alamo-like-- old (about to get older with the birthday et al) and buttressed and famous for an endless last stand that (i'm convinced) i will also lose. but of course, that's self-indulgent bullshit, or really, given that this is written on a public travel diary on the intertubes, next level self-indulgent bullshit mach 9.

[photo: a truly shitty shot of one of the truly shitty waterfall instillations in nyc. not sure if i captured the true essence, but to me, it looked like a scaffolding taking a piss.]

so i lose by my 8-year-old larry bird-era standards, but that's because my best friend isn't a life-sized talking my little pony, i can't breathe underwater, and i don't have any magical powers (duh, because if i did, i'd be riding my my little pony to the seaside so i could go to my summer home off/under the coast of martha's vineyard where all my neighbors are all large, kindly whales). but if the watermellon thump queen, whoever she ended up being (kimmy #1!), thinks she's a winner, then fuck it. davy crockett was killed at the alamo, but he's remembered as the king of the wild frontier and wearer of a signature cap.

you spend enough time sitting in a compact car with a small dog and the threat of don henley, and perspective does seem to fade away. but. now, we remember the good friends and li'l giant babies and poop jokes. remember that we all fight, and we never win, at last according to joss whedon. remember to set your tivo in advance for dollhouse. remember where glenn danzig lives so you can take others, and remember to get buzz's rabies shots renewed next june in a timely manner, and remember how insane teeter and emma looked dancing to tina turner at the wedding. remember only the good times with manny ramirez, before things got ugly. and natch, remember the alamo. and that it's not in el paso. i might not be a loser per se, but i'm still kind of an idiot.

[photo: btw, in case you haven't noticed, that was the navel gazing i warned you about. this photo of the sunapee harbor 4th of july fireworks seemed like the best illustration of that.]

a weekish before my sister got married, cristie came up and we went to see/i photographed the manchester fishercats get slaughtered by the new britain rockcats (these are minor league baseball teams, not some sort of feline ultimate fighting ring). and as we watched more errors made than either one of us thought humanly possible during a semi-professional baseball game, we recalled our favorite line from (the movie that inspired us to go to a minor league game in the first place) bull durham; "sometimes, you win, sometimes, you lose, and sometimes...it rains. think about it." anyway, here's some cake.

[photo: from my birthday, since i love cake and hate birthdays. touche, mom.]

FIN

pt. 3: AL pt. 2, GA, NC, SC

2008-07-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

[photo: my hotel room in atlanta, home of my blueberry night. if i broke down the cost of that room, each berry would've probably cost $50.]

AL:
funny thing about alabama and georgia-- you can't get your dog a flea bath without documentation of a rabies shot. the rabies tag, you say? could be a cheap counterfeit, purchased on the worldwide, underground black market of faked rabies identification. they need the paperwork, which, while simply a piece of paper, carries more weight than an inscribed metal tag. how i wanted to murder everyone, everywhere.

well, when i first found the fleas (i'd now found up to 9 of 'em), i started looking up dog groomers on my 'berry at 1 am (not on my computer-- i'd forgotten the powerchord in texas, or fleas might have taken it out of my bag). i aimed for somewhere near atlanta, where i was to arrive the next day, made a list, and tried to sleep, but it's hard when your dog won't sit still as he has *a handful of tiny bugs crawling around the area near his penis.*

i don't think i mentioned that, and i'm too lazy to check-- fleas are most concentrated, or at least easiest to find, on a dog's groin. needless to say, buzz had trouble sleeping, and i tried to be positive since this incident took place on our 6th anniversary, and he had fleas when i adopted him, but his fur was so thick back then you couldn't see them (or his penis, actually, but that's another story). so i slept like shit, and we left the overpriced hotel early the next morning. i tried to make the hotel worth it by taking a shitty muffin from the breakfast buffet (buffet = table with 5 wicker baskets full of bread goods on it and a toaster to make them edible). and by reminding myself i might have given the hotel fleas.

[photo: i'm photoless here, so apropos of absolutely nothing, here's mike myers in a hockey sweatshirt. wayne campbell, btsh...see, this my 8-year-old self would be proud of. although wayne's world didn't exist yet. so maybe not.]

since all of the georgia groomers required rabies paperwork, i tried to find some sort of relief at a petsmart (btw, this all went down on a sunday, so my vet's office in nh wasn't answering the phone. just so you know i'm aware how fax machines work). besides, everyone i called told me that, since buzz is frontlined, he doesn't actually have fleas-- he just needs more frontline and time for the fleas to die-- but i had this nightmare vision of getting home to nh and the *5 dogs* that live here (sure, not all at once), having one pup get close to what would now be my flea-ridden car, and then watching my mother cry as we're forced to flea bomb the house on the day of my sister's wedding, killing all the floral arrangements and melting my brother-in-law's beloved ice sculpture (that he's since admitted is an incredibly stupid idea, god bless 'im).

so i stopped in the petsmart in montgomery, al, walked out with armfulls of (flea) poison (and some greenies), and, in the 90 degree heat of the parking lot and in the full view of god and all of humanity, proceeded to massage my dog's groin with zodiac flea spray. i mean, i did his whole body, but holding him in my arms baby jesus-style, rubbing poison around his doggie junk without any protest on his part (if anything, he was way too into it), watching the fleas die by my mighty, poisonous hand...if i ever had dignity, i sure as shit don't now.

i got a vet in GA to sell me a pill that'd kill the remaining fleas on buzz within a half-hour of ingestion, and that seemed like a wedding-saving fix for now. so as we left montgomery and i thought, "no fleas at last, no fleas at last, thank god almighty, we have no fleas at last," i pretty much wanted to die.

the lesson here people is that being organic is all nice and good, but you can't fight organic with organic-- vermin is organic. if nature had it's way, we'd be walking parasitic cafeterias. nick had boric acid all over the rugs to kill those fleas, but all he did was provide them with a nice grainy beach to take a vacation on when they needed r&r from making his cat insane. if you get fleas, drink a diet coke, put extra nutra splenda in it, eat some olestra chips, and then BOMB THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF YOUR HOUSE. for chrissake nick, you smoke! you inhale the equivalent of 8 flea bombs a day already! put the tom's of maine deoderant down, tell your pals you can't make it to the farmer's market, drink something strong out of a recycled jar, and unleash the vermin rambo within.

GA:
i went to decatur first to get buzz his pill, and then realized i had to find a hotel again. i had people i was going to meet up with-- teeter's excellent friends cooper and michelle-- but even if they offered to put me up at their house, there's no way i could accept since they have a dog and i wasn't going to risk spreading my cooties (well, buzz's cooties, but we are of one body and mind)(or not). so i agreed to meet up with them later, tried to thrift, was too tired/fed up by the same ol', not-necessarily fair eccentric town bullshit (see rant above), and braced myself for finding a dog-friendly hotel. sadly, the cheapest one i could find anywhere near the city was pricey as fuck, but since the past 24 hours had kicked my ass so badly, i was just looking forward to getting out of my car and the haze of zodiac fog within.

[photo: the hotel had haikus everywhere. obviously, i loved this, but at approx. $90/haiku, i could've whipped up a few myself, like, "my dog has vermin / no tears, eyeballs are sweating / someone kill me now".]

so i ended up in an insanely pricey hotel downtown. i've said this before, but why do only nice hotels take pets? how can the woman at the days inn say, sorry ma'am, we'll rent a room to 8 college kids and a keg, and to those to that nice man and his prostitute and her methamphetamine, but not to you and your dog. meanwhile, the hotel in atlanta had a pet spa, but might've also had a dress code. i consoled myself with the mantra, this is your last hotel. and besides, you're in atlanta, where the players play! and then i remember i've spent the last couple of days being completely played. visions of ludacris danced right out of my head (but jermaine dupri remained like a wiggum-esque deranged leprechaun on my shoulder. which is to say, actual size).

but then cooper and michelle rode in, white knights in their sweet standard transmission wheels, to take me to a soul food eatery. generally speaking, if a restaurant considers mac and cheese and cornbread two great sides that go great together, i'm good. so at least i got to eat well, and get delicious ice cream, and get to hear a lot of the one thing i really like about the south; usage of the titles sir and ma'am by those of us on the other side of the counter. i mean, in the service industry, you're usually instructed to kiss the customer's ass so shiny, it's amazing that the guy replacing your battery at verizon doesn't say, "and do you need help with anything else today, m'lady?" but when the woman at the drive through asks a dude if he wants sprinkles with that and he says, "no ma'am"-- to sprinkles-- well, shit.

btw, cooper and michelle did the artwork for teeter's record (hence, "cooper, thanks for the birds"), and i remember when teet met cooper a jillion years ago at sva, because she recognized him from being on jerry springer on an episode about fetishists or something where he came on as someone who likes to wear diapers. "you will never know the freedom of peeing and pooping in your own pants!" he famously said (but only for the money and chance to be on springer-- he's not so much a diaper guy). and then, when teeter recognized him all those years ago, she shouted that in his face by means of introduction. but whatever, they were ever so kind to me in my darkest, flea-corpse-y hour. bless you, sir and ma'am.

[photo: the cooper of old. he does not look like that now, even ignoring that he now wears clothes, none of which have dri-weave (tm).]

after delicious frozen treats, i was exhausted, as were cooper and michelle, so i got back to the hotel at a reasonable hour to pass out. i had the next day all planned out-- go eat breakfast at the flying biscuit (recommended by michelle, as i love biscuits, and she promised, no pork), get buzzo to a groomer since surely my vet would be ready fax me records by then, and then meet up with maysan, her husband c. (he's an initial guy, there's precedent!) and their kids, and go to the aquarium. i would also get a hotdog at the varsity, as i had planned ever so long ago. atlanta would not kick my ass. i would see the aquarium's famed whales. i dreamt of blueberries.

but when my alarm went off, i already had a message from my vet; please note that while i love my vet, her assistant/vet tech whatever seems to, for whatever reason, hate my fucking guts with all the power her novelty paw print scrubs allow her. (when i returned and shared my woeful tale to a friend in town, she told me said vet tech is like this with every "outsider," and that it took her 15 years to earn this woman's trust. and the thing is, there is nowhere that i am insider, except in the house where i write this and behind the wheel of my fucking car. so unless someone opens a veterinary clinic in my bathroom or in my trunk, you can see my dilemma.)

[photo: the view from my window; hotel room i can't really afford, flea bath i can't get buzz, tom waits show i can't go to. fuck a lot of atlanta.]

so i get a message like this: [in most wtf mean girls-y tone] [ps this woman's in her 50s]: hi, this is [hateful paw print shirt devil woman] calling from [buzz's vet], and...SIGH. first of all, i don't really know what records you need from your message, but just so you know, there's a $5 out of state faxing fee for those records, so i'm going to need your credit card number, SIIIIIGH. huh. looking here though, it appears that buzz's rabies vaccine expired two days ago, so...i don't know if you really want me to fax anything, ANYway. bye."

ok, so that part of the plan is knocked out. and no message from maysan also put the writing on the blueberry wall. see, i know maysan really wanted to go, but i also know it's long, long drive from va to atlanta, and that she has two small kids and a husband who'd just returned from a business trip, and a car that runs on gasoline, so...reality was starting to set in for both of us.

so i called her and called it off. i'd get my biscuit, see some of the sights on a list michelle was kind enough to send me (but see them fast, and park the car in the shade), eat a hot dog, and then go to charleston (i'll explain why later), then to maysan's in VA, all in one day, original plan be damned. so i'd drive completely out of my way to see one thing (not worth explaining yet), then drive back to hopefully get to maysan's before too late as not to wake up the li'l 'uns. and i'd have my fucking hot dog, dammit. suck it, atlanta.

so the biscuit was delicious, and that was a good start, but after the temperature rose, and the museum i tried was closed, and a woman at the varsity fully glared at me when i tried to ask her a question (i even called her ma'am!), that was it. i ate two meals in two hours and hit the road. andre 3000, take me away.

[photo: the famous varsity, as in, varsity-level assholes. moi, i'm 4th team travel planner/dog owner/not-moron.]

SC:
my reasoning for going to sc wasn't dramatic or anything, just hard to casually throw into the middle of all the flea bullshit-- i wanted to see a holocaust memorial co-designed by a friend of my family, robert stein. sure, i also wanted to see charleston, but the memorial was a big deal, and i didn't get to go during the unveiling, so what was another 5 hours of driving, anyway.

[photo: the memorial-- that's supposed to be a prayer shawl in the middle. i say that because the five co-eds tanning nearby in bikinis must not have been aware. "hey kimmy, where do you want to get some sun?" "gee tammi, maybe by the dead jew cage?" oy.]

and really, i got there, saw the memorial (effective, right? even though it's next to a statue of calhoun. i give up). then i went to ft sumter to look at the water (and squint to see the fort) and maybe feel a breeze, got some ice cream on king st, and then off to va i went. so it was nice to spend some time somewhere with no drama of any kind, even though the purpose of going to that somewhere was to see a fucking holocaust memorial.

[photo: the memorial from another angle. i was impressed.]

and you can see why it's taking me forever to write up this trip. not just because i'm not stuck in the wedding vortex, but because of the horror, the horror, etc. no, sir. i did not have an easy trip. it has been kind of therapeutic though. in so much as i'm reminded to be grateful that i haven't had to massage my dog's groin lately.

[photo: kristen schaal's excellent daily show commentary aside, this is a photo of where teet and i will one day reside.]

NC:
i ate bbq'd chicken at a place called bubba's. they also sold t-shirts (smallest size = XXL) and bubba's bubble bath (jojoba and mesquite?). i had my first hush puppy. i got the fuck out of the carolinas.

[(shitty) photo: the heart of darkness (not really, but the photo's dark).]

NEXT: VA, MD, NY, fin

no sleep, new muxtape

2008-07-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

please enjoy.

pt. 2 : TX, LA, MS, AL pt. 1

2008-07-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

[photo: from the game room of the cabela's in buda, tx. redemption for squirrel blood lust is mine!]

TX (days 3-6):
one thing i forgot to mention about arizona-- it was there that i realized how so much of life in the south exists in strict defiance of god. there is no water, no good soil-- fuck, there's hardly any air!-- but people live in southern arizona...in defiance of god. (this phrase came up again in austin, eg, this bbq is practically dusty, so, clearly, this cow was prepared in a method that is in clear defiance of god [and his only son, my personal lord and savior, bbq sauce]).

austin was hot, but not "god is smiting us" hot. my ye olde friend rebecca lives in austin, and when group visits are planned by other friends she left back east, they usually take place over indie rock mardi gras, sxsw, in march (altho nobody in our li'l gang actually goes to any shows...maybe they just like creepy drunks and being in the presence of laminates?).

[SIDENOTE: at one point, and i have a feeling i'm repeating myself, when rebecca (onion), julia and i were trying to figure out what our own personal FAQs would be, mine was, "how do you afford this [nyc] apartment?", j's was, "man, are you tall!" [not really a question], and onion's was, "is that your real last name?" and since that faq'll never see the light of day, fyi, it is.]

[also, at the time, they were both working at magazines and i was attempting freelance, so we decided to one day create our own publication called "magazine magazine: a magazine for magazines," which would contain articles like, "perfume inserts; pain or pretty?", and "subscription cards, huh! what are they good for?", and "summer's here: how to bulk up for your special issue!" coming never to a newsstand's newsstand near you.]

[photo: said bbq, inorganically blessed by my condiment messiah.]

before i got to austin tho, i was warned about two things; one, nick's cat molly (nick = rebecca's fiance) had recently had fleas. which is to say, she still had fleas, but i didn't know that yet. buzzo is frontline'd, which basically means he's walking flea poison, so i wasn't worried, but still, heads up, fleas. also, and this was not so much a warning, but rebecca had just gotten a taste for friday night lights and was eager to watch more more more. i couldn't understand how anyone who lives in fnl hq could've slept on it this long, but whatever, i had the dvds in my car to further indoctrinate my parents in the ways of mr. and mrs. coach.

anyway, within hours of arriving in austin i already had a pair of cowboy boots, a bizarro housewarming present for my sister and bro-in-law, and a couple vintage battlestar glasses. i love shit shopping from coast-to-coast! please note, however, the the most liberal artsy college towns you go to, the more they start to blend together into one big austinportlandberkeleyprovidencewhatever. the landscape and climate vary, but within ten minutes of being dropped on the arty main drag, you'll find your old movie theater, vintage clothing/crap store, vegetarian slop hole, etc, etc, but some places show certain strengths (austin's movie theater [which i'll get to] is killer, but berkeley meets more veggie needs, etc). and natch, i like all these places, i'm just sayin, you seen one little liberal oasis, you seen em all. just as you see one sufficating christian conservative middle american deathtrap, you've also pretty much done the full tour.

so we strolled around (sweating), and then had a nice dinner party with some of rebecca's friends from her dept. at UT and some old hs people, and we watched fnl protected onto a wall, courtesy of nick's home theaterstraveganza. i love this, because rebecca grew up in a rambling farmhouse in nh with no tv; they entertained themselves with parlor games and, upon the procurement of a vcr, rented troma movies. so she grew up being amused by taboo and the toxic avenger, and now she watches tim riggins three feet tall and in stereo surround. did i mention that the screen (aka, the wall) is framed by a red, beaded velvet curtain? and fleas?

the next day the plan was to go swimmin', because fuck was it hot. the main, famous swimmin hole was closed for cleaning (the local swimmin holes are fresh water from the local river-- thus, they must be flushed once a week or so), so we went to deep eddy, which is still fresh water but in a concrete pool (as opposed to an actually riverbed). the shallow side was closed, so everyone, and there were a lot of everyones due to the heat, had to share the sliver of deep side not filled with lap swimmers. so, soaking in the cold water, the topic turned, as it often does when in the presence of doctoral candidates, to a discussion of harold and kumar 2.

[photo: crowded vs. soiled. read on.]

i loved it, rebecca and friends hated it, both of our reactions based largely on the amount of poop humor. there used to be a store on newbury st in boston called kakas furs that i'd to ask my mom to drive me by when i was little as a treat so i could LAUGH MY ASS OFF (it's no longer there, but the name is still etched on their old building-- believe me, i've checked) (and, now that i'm a big girl, driven myself by there more than once). i once bought a stamp at paper jam on 3rd ave that just said "SHIT" because i was sick of walking in to look at it and laugh when spending $.50 to have that novelty in the comfort of my own home didn't seem like a bad investment (it wasn't, STILL FUNNY). recently, during one particularly long stretch of driving on this trip, i considered getting a very ornate, fillagree-y style tattoo of the word FART somewhere on my body. so yeah, poop humor por vida.

it was around this point of course that one of us asked one of the nice teen lifeguards why the shallow side was closed, and the poor girl, sick of finding discreet excuses, just said, "a little kid made a doody in the pool, ok? so we're just tryin' to clean it up." sitting in cold water, hearing someone say the word doody...mama, am i in heaven?

they finally reopened the shallow side, so we went there to sit for a while, got out when we found ourselves actually getting cold, and i had the ladies explain to me what actually happens at academic conferences. (altho, to hear nick tell it, most of the ones he goes to [film phd] have way too many buffy panels-- that's right, he thinks there's such a thing as a glut of academic study on the whedonverse. and i love this because someone like me, who's logged countless on-ass hours watching buffy (well, less so seasons 6 n'7) can write a huge paper on it and become dr. on-ass. god bless america!)

i think we were discussing how to de-sentimentalize rebecca and nick's wedding ceremony when everyone got kicked out of the shallow side again, and the poor lifeguardette had to admit that they found yet more doody, and someone was taking care of it. then that night, still feeling unclean despite showers, we watched the latest rambo at the onion singleplex, which was awesome, not just because (bringing it full circle) buffy's darla is in it and almost eaten alive by a large pig, but because the dialogue to exploding faces ratio is right where it should be (unless you could the exploding faces' last "aahahahahah!" to be dialogue, where upon it evens out some). also, i love that rebecca can totally stand behind a movie where a character just impaling someone makes him seem like a pussy (as opposed to impaling and exploding them) (and then fucking their parts pile), but will not suffer a film that displays graphic diarrhea.

[photo: on this kid's CV-- water safety, cpr, scooping up fecal mater with a long net.]

[sidenote so i have an excuse to write more about poop: at the dinner party, someone had read a book (phd people are always reading a book, even if it seems to have nothing to do with their field, don't ask) about how c-sections might be effecting obesity rates, because kids are supposed to inherit their digestive bacteria from their mothers at birth-- see, moms often poop themselves during delivery (and pee themsleves, and tear their vages...miracle of life!), and babies, who are in a sterile environment up to that point, tend so swallow just a soupscon of poop as they enter the world, but if they don't ingest said poop, their digestion might be wonky. whereupon someone else said they'd just read a book (natch) about how people who live together start to have similar intestinal bacteria/fecal flora after so many months, so i thought that a good way to keep rebecca'n'nick's vows sapless was to involve how they are as one, in life, in love, and in fecal flora. but that actually might make me cry.]

i had to stay one more day to work out the timing with my next stop down the road, so while rebecca and nick read stuff, i went to cabela's in buda, tx. i've often spoken of cabela's, so i will let the pictures do the talkin'.

[photo: the cabela's in dundee, MI, has two fighting bears out front, rendered in metal, forever locked in glorious combat. this has a cowboy and his li'l buckaroo pointing to exactly which game they're going to shoot in the face.]

[photo: these are towers for hunting-- you bring them one out into the woods, set it up, and stalk away. they're in the parking lot so you can practice on patrons returning to their cars, but it's not as easy as you'd think, considering 90% of the shoppers are in camo.]

[photo: also in the game room-- boar balls! that there's boar on the cafe menu upstairs worried me, given that the cut of the boar was not listed.]

that night we went to the alamo drafthouse to see the foot fist way, which was perfect, because i'd try to see this movie a million times before leaving LA just to watch plans crumble over and over, and i really wanted to go to the alamo drafthouse, not just because it's got alamo in it, but because i know they serve food n'drink during the movies, which is how it should be everywhere always, and because it's just a famously awesome place to go. and while there's nothing about the foot fist way that's shockingly innovative, it does what it does well, and i laughed many times without feeling like i was watching a rehash of anything else. and i got to eat chicken.

when i finally left texas the next day, I had to drive on some smaller highways to get back to 10, and in one town with a name like lulling, i passed all these signs by the road that said VOTE FOR CARLY! or ANNA #1! or JESSI FOR QUEEN! and then also there were banners on the lampposts that advertised something called the watermelon thump festival, and i realized that these girls were making a zillion signs-- and in some cases standing by the tiny highway with bullhorns-- in order to be voted thump queen. i wanted to grab one of these girls and smuggle her out of texas for her own good, but alas. i made my flight for freedom while they were left to fight for ascension to the the thump throne.
[photo: one last cabela's shot-- this is the camo breast cancer awareness chair. it's absurd on so many levels, but what i like best is the idea that this camo is only effective if you're trying to blend in at a forested gay pride parade.]

LA:
i got to new orleans just in time for dinner, and i decided i wanted to go to a place called mother's, because, again, as much i aim to search out regional cuisine, most of the cuisine of this region is not my favorite. years ago, my parents rented out a room in our house to a young couple, and the husband was a cajun chef, so i've done extensive research into how much i don't like spicy, shrimpy sadness bowls (tm, patton oswalt) (as is "in defiance of god," i now realize. kudos, patton!). new orleansian food is literally a casserole of everything i don't eat-- pork sausage, crustaceans, powered fire-- but mother's had a chicken po'boy and sweet potato pie, plus it was downtown, so that was my next gps'd stop.

[photo: this highway is running directly over a swamp, mere feet above the stinky water... humans commute here in defiance of god (and boats) (and patton oswalt maybe).]

but here's the thing about new orleans, and really, much of the old south, at least for me-- it's hard for me to feel comfortable in a place that is so inherently uncomfortable. not just because of the heat, but because of the history of slavery (and seeming lack of shame for said history), and, in the case of new orleans, because of katrina. i mean, the first thing i saw driving into the city was the superdome, and all i could think was, is this the overpass where cops kept people from getting to safety? is that the place where people lined up everyday for fima buses that never came while they watched their grandmas die in the heat? and can most people still come here and just think, is this the place we can drink in public and maybe see anne rice?

so i waited for a while, got my sandwich, drove around a bit at twilight to see the old buildings, the tourists, the tense-from-heat locals, and hit the road. and i kind of want a new orleans do-over, but i kind of don't. which is how i feel about most of the places i stayed in from this point out.

[photo: welcome to new orleans! see that giant white thing? tons of people suffered and died there for no reason! laissez les bon temps roulez!]

MS:
my time in mississippi was mostly spent sitting in 10 detour traffic, listening to a prince megamix on some radio station that was one fucking awesome half hour, and wondering if i'd ever get out of mississippi.

AL:
by the time i decided to conk out, i was in mobile, AL. this was unfortunate, because, IN DEFIANCE OF GOD, mobile was hosting a tennis tournament (they don't make people play outdoor sports in that kind of heat and humidity at gitmo even). which meant no hotels, ANYWHERE. i finally found a room in a way overpriced residency suites place, priced yet higher because they found out i had a dog, and all i wanted to do was shower and pass out so i could get to atlanta the next day in time for dinner, but buzz seemed...restless.

i held him by the belly and parted a random stretch of fur on his haunches.

3 fleas.

SHIT.
(except not funny).

to be continued!

also, from now on, maybe it'll be in defiance of rambo.

NEXT: AL, GA, NC, SC

pt. 1: CA, AZ, NM, TX

2008-06-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

[photo: buzz and i seconds before entering the prius.]

[also: please note this trip is long and, despite all concrete geographical destinations, is actually leading into the heart of darkness. if i was not made out of stone at the start, i might be now. buzzo, however, is still equal parts fur, eye boogers, and pee.]

[prelude] CA:
the night before leaving, I got to do 2 things; eat my beloved blue velvet cake at the alcove, and see glenn danzig's house. finally. and the thing is, i guess it's creepy, but if people think this is truly spooky, then the shit shacks in claremont, nh, are the stuff of vincent price-narrated nightmares.

to me, the cake is spookier, because a, it tastes like blue (no trace of berry or misc kooky flavoring, just...blue), and b, if you know what digesting red velvet cake is like, it's like that, but smurfy.

anyway, lizzy and i walked to and fro tha feliz, and while i admire her for trying to talk me into loving LA, when you're mere hours away from making a journey to your motherland, talk is cheap. the car was loaded, the dog was anxious, and i, like the local morning show of my youth, was RTG, ready to go.

[photo: the difficulty of night photography...you better think about it, baby.]

at some point the next morning, after already logging several hours on rt 10, presumably towards a large open oven door, i arrived at a random gas station on the cusp of AZ. and while it was advertised nowhere on the highway, this particular shell/exxon/assraper whatever was adjacent to a museum dedicated to general patton (see above, with companion). and again, from the highway, all they advertise is gas. olbermann-y special comment: once again, oil is valued above the service of our nation's heroes. tim russert RIP.

[photo: adjacent tank graveyard; the parking lot to view a parking lot.]

also, why is there a trailer in there? is this just a museum dedicated to patton's love of camping with his dog? in which case, yeah, the gas is a bigger deal.

AZ:
i would like to forget my hours driving thru arizona as it was 114 degrees. it's like how people in buffalo and rochester compete every winter to see who gets more reamed by the lake effect, as if being burried with snow and freezing your ass off for 5 months of the year is something to be psyched about. and i'm sure people in AZ get all stoked when they can fry an egg on the sidewalk and burst into flame when they walk from the car to the house. people are funny when they live somewhere miserable. sorry, lizzy. LA doesn't even need to get that hot for there to be inferno.

NM:
i've seen santa fe, which i've heard is nm at its finest, and i couldn't really get it up for las cruces, so yeah, nm happened.

TX day 1:
because of the old '97s, i got it in my head that the alamo is in el paso, when in fact, it is in san antonio. i think i also thought this because i am an idiot. like, here's some idiot math; it took me one very long day to get from la to el paso ("it's a loonnnnnggg waaaaayyyy...back to el paaassssso. woah!"). with one more day, i could have gotten to austin by dinner, but rso told me she wasn't getting back til the 18th (she's returning from nh, my destination-- and i'm sure not even she knows why she's leaving northern new england to enter the 12th circle of hell [a further circle, cuz it has bbq]). it's idiot math tho cuz i left on the 16th instead of the 15th thinking i was compensating for this timing problem, as i can't add.

please note: doing the math to figure out that the celtics won with a 39 pt lead took me maybe 20 minutes.

anyway, at the end of the day, i furthered the assault on my stomach with a belly full of sonic drive-in. i lay in a particularly soul-crushing smoking room in the el paso la quinta inn thinking a, sonic should only sell drinks, because their food kind of sucks, and if they pureed that food and swirled it with m&ms, it'd probably be delicious, b, nothing is more disgusting than a smoking room, as evidenced by the fact that touching the sheets and then my eye made my eyeball burn so bad that the former guest couldn've just been a smoker, but also a giant cat, and c, you get what you pay for when you chose hotels based on dog friendly status and proxmity to sonic drive-in. but then i couldn't stop thinking, even if it wasn't logically, and didn't sleep for shit. i guess it's just plain hard to sleep after 12 hours of staring at the road. and drinking diet soda, sometimes laced with sugary icey goodness. and a leftover alcove cookie. ah, the idiot diet.

anyway, i gave up sleeping around 7 and found a restaurant on roadfood to eat breakfast at, a diner in a carwash near the rio grande. but here's the thing that sucks about this particular route i'm taking cross country-- i kind of hate all the regional cuisine. i have a tender, semitic palate that makes spicy food painful, plus seafood allergies, and it'd hard to eat a deep fried anything when you know you're going to be digesting it in the L position while driving through a toilet (or really literal) desert. plus roadfood is the worst about that, because all of their favorite restaurants feature lard, heavy cream, or balls of lard filled with heavy cream, then coated in bacon and deep fried. this is not driving food. this is tp wand food (get the reference or don't, i can't hold your hand through ever entry).

but on the other hand, you don't come to texas to eat falafel, knawmean? i had huevos rancheros at this place that i'm sure were very delicious if you like your huevos extra runny and your rancheros on fire.

[el tangento!: i was listening to the book "the curious incident of the dog at nighttime" (i might have missed a word in there), which a, just convinces me more and more that i'm tistic myself (i hate anything but scrambled eggs, he can't even look at the color yellow...i'm practically rainman), and b, nearly lulled me into a coma one afternoon with a lengthy, step-by-step, thru-the-eyes-of-'tism description. i switched to the radio. i had not used my henley guard. i paid the price. (this i'll help you out with; as discovered on previous trips, this nation's long love affair with don henley is still going strong. unless i start my day with 5 henley-filled seconds from my ipod, a henley-filled spacula as it were, i will find him all over the dial all day long. my last worthless evening, indeed.)]

TX day 2:
so, post-heuvos, i headed towards san antonio, wondering how i could make it across a third of the country in a day but would not make it through texas itself for at least three times that amount of time (and this is at the point where our nation is at it's thinnest, probably because much of the excess of the south has been burned away).

this is also where my idiocy once again became impossible to ignore: aside from the fact i was going to san antonio before austin because i'd so completely miscalculated my timing, i also wondered, who the fuck drives across the south in the summer, and with a dog in the car? pulling over to eat, a staple of such journeys, was virtually impossible, unless i wanted to return to a use my car as an e-z-bake dog oven. so finding dog-friendly hotels became even more important, as i'd have to find a place to park buzzo if i wanted to pick up food, which meant a fairly abusive relationship with la quinta inns.

now the issue wasn't being violated by a smoking room, twitching all night with burning eyes and phantom bedbugs (FORESHADOWING SORTA!], but staying in semi-major cities with semi-major prices. in the past, hopping from one shitty hotel to another was no big deal, since i'd just stop when i got tired in assholevania, oh, find a days inn, and spend 6 hours with my eyes closed. but hotels in real cities charge real money, and even tho i chose a la quinta next to a cracker barrel, twas i who was the cracker sent in a barrel sent over the falls.

[photo: hard to see, but that's a watertower across from my hotel for miller's bar-b-q, a local chain, that's presumably filled with sweet sweet bbq sauce. so at least the view was worth it.]

i tried to make the most of it by having an early night with some "healthy" (read: bland) tex-mex-meh food in front of the celtics final, but sitting there, robbed of much of my la quash, with my small dog hoping in vain for a piece of a really shitty taco, i couldn't help but remember the last time i gave a shit about the celtics, 22 years ago, and thinking, if you told my 8-year-old self that, at 30, i would be watching the celtics their next championship in a hotel room in san antonio, texas, by myself, on the way home to my home in nh, even tho i "work" in la, in quotes because there are no jobs, and my nh home is shared with my parents, and my dog is deaf, and the celtics are nowhere near as white as the lakers anymore (not a bad thing, but something which would so confused my little 8-year-old larry bird-loving mind!), and i still can't eat spicy foods, and don henley is still popular...would i just burst into tears and never stop? would i slap myself? would i slap my sister, just because it was a hobby at the time?

when i told onion about this, she thought i'd find it cool that my grown-up self traveled all around like a leaf on the wind, but i'm not sure. plus, nerd reference, the last leaf on the wind i know about was impaled. but at least i would get to accomplish one thing in san antonio, which was seeing the alamo, because for some reason, i was determined to see it, drawn in with the pull paul simon felt for graceland. except, if you'll recall, i fucking hate elvis and refused to go to graceland. and i don't give a shit about texas, the mexican army, coonskin caps...like most, or like the old '97s, i remember the alamo, but i don't recall who won. (alas, not those in coonskin caps).

so i woke up early, stepped out into the soggy morning heat (85 degrees at 8 am, yeehaw), and went to the center of san antone, to the alamo. which was closed. but the thing is, i didn't care. inside, outside, i didn't give a shit, just show me the alamo in one for or another. i probably would have been ok with a trip to an alamo rentacar. again, no idea why. maybe that's what 2 solid days of con queso will do to you.

[photos: alamo? alacosed; the outer-mo]

i also walked around a bit, saw all the shitty tourist crap they plant next to any grain of history that exists (i took a picture of the ripley's believe it or not, guinness world records museum, and tomb raider 3d ride in a row across the street, but really, take my word), strolled around the pretty town square, and felt ready to leave.

[photo: self-portrait]

i didn't really figure out my alamo-thing until driving through thick fog between nyc and nh at 3 o'clock in the morning at the trip's end, but at this point, i was just looking forward to getting in the car, listening to my tism book, eating breakfast in austin with friends and ordering something sans queso (but maybe with bbq sauce). and then maybe my mood'd be less blue than my not-yet-entirely digested cake.

NEXT: TX (austin), LA

Pt. only: SF/Berkeley/Mtn View/NOT LA

2008-06-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

[photo: squint, see the hawk, shrug, say, "there's a hawk, huh."]

(let's just say) THE BAY AREA:
i like these long waiting periods between trip and write up, because it saves me from going overboard and describing songs heard on the drive and thread counts at my friends' apts and all that bullshit, plus i'm about to leave for the big trip later this week that will make the five hours in a car to sf seem like nothing. as it is now, it's nothing. i'd probably drive that far just to go to a sonic drive-in. not even during frozen beverage happy hour.

besides, the drive was uneventful, just windy as only the middle of any stretch of land can be windy (see: middle of ca, tx, the entire us), which was perfect because a, it makes pumping gas an adventure, and b, santa cruz was on fire, and gusts always help. it seems i always jump ship on this side of the country at the start of fire season; last year, it was just after griffith park sizzled, so i left just as the misplaced wildlife came to my neighborhood to hide. my dear cousin, a post-grad at santa cruz, has friends who lost their home in the current blaze, which is just awful, and i'm sure LA's yearly combustion isn't far behind. this from a city whose basketball team is the watery lakers (displaced from minnesota, but still. and why the fuck don't franchises just change their name? i'm talking to you, utah jazz.) but whatever, the lakers are just another example of how LA loses. i'm out of here (temporarily).

[photo: a giant slug seen on a walking trail in berkeley, and if he was on the run from the fires on santa cruz, i should adopt his epic journey into a screenplay.]

so i drove up to sf with (one of my few friends in LA, sam, who's actually moving to SF just as i leave-- lose lose lose!), past cowschwitz, the giant slaughter house that smells like guts, dead guts, and grass that had been housed in guts not much earlier. when we got to the city, sam went on her way, i met friends for dinner, including emily, whose apartment is a catsplosion, and teet, who, as always, fell asleep midconversation on a couch. then i got to stay with paisley at her family's house, where i haven't been to since i was 18, and see her mom and her two geriatric giant black poodles, who got along well with my own golden-aged li'l black poodle, just turning the place into an overnight canine assisted living facility.

but then i went back into SF, then to mountain view to see said cousin, where i met her new dog, oscar, who, if i don't mind saying, fucking FELL IN LOVE WITH ME and wept upon my departure. then back to the east bay, where i met up with elanor and kumar to eat bbq and watch the red sox lose in a bar. this is a recurring theme with me. i never see the games where coco punches the tampa bay pitcher and we still end up beating them like a dirty rug, just the ones where youkilis strikes out at every at bat and big papi looks bored. which is exactly what happened on sunday, but in person, and sitting two seats away from a very smug oakland fan. but we sat in a pod of sox fans at least, and i was sitting behind a lady who also loved youk for his talent and tribal status, making our own mini jews for joukilis chapter in the stands.

[photo: kumar and el, making it work despite their baseball differences.)

but it's also worth noting that on saturday, el took for me this amazing hike in the hills looking out over berkeley, and here is this picture taken from the splendor of nature where i think you can see the university's bio labs that make deadly bacteria. somewhere, right now, there is a drum circle in protest.

[photo: pretty death!]

and we saw a slug and a hawk. not bad.

also, el has a plot in a community garden with peppers and peas and all sorts of good stuff, and other people are growing artichokes and carrots, and it's kind of amazing, because in nh, we're sort of limited to herbs, cherry tomatoes, and squash (and really, you only need to eat, like, one squash a year, and we end up having 300 and bending over backwards to stick it in every pasta, soup, dessert, etc.) did i mention i'm leaving for new england later this week? go celts.

oh, and we saw indy 4, which had, like, a solid hour of "yay, indiana jones!" and another hour plus of "nigga please." it was like a speilberg/lucas time life comp of their greatest moments-- i think the real reason they switched from nazis to commies was because adding a twist of schindler's list was taking it just one step too far. otherwise, all that was missing was a giant shark. plus the skull looked like the head from a "visible alien (tm)" kit bought at a comic book store, stuffed with saran wrap. altho, if you hate shia labeouf (sp? who cares), you'll love watching him get digitally pummeled in the crotch for 15 minutes.

but, back to the baseball game, at least i got to sit behind these fine people. they felt my pain.

and teeter's been giving me shit for being a jock lately, but if you knew homesickness like mine, you'd understand. homesickness and frustration. most days, i wake up to another surprise water shut-off, courtesy of my building manager who i've now decided looks like a li'l/stoner dog the bounty hunter, and the tendonitis in my hip makes me limp so bad that, when i went to a shoppe the yesterday to buy slacks, they saw me gimping through the racks and gave me the handicapped dressing room. oh, and i have to vote for obama now. and i'm driving thousands of miles during a time when gas is laced with platinum for some reason. i know, i know, call the whaaaaambulance, whatever. point is, being distracted by boston teams-- boston, where people are refreshingly crass, where a hundred-year-old building is considered prefab, where there are 500 ice cream stores and my two other baby dogs-- fuck it, it makes sense. and also, i'm nostalgic for larry bird and robert parish. and really, who isn't?

anyway, by the middle of next week, i'll be in texas, hopefully eating bbq'd meats and taking pictures of bats (from several yards away), clear eyed and full-hearted, so i can't lose. unlike in LA, where one can't do anything but.

sf soon-- for now, haiku!

2008-06-01T00:27:00.000-07:00

*my neighbors
drill rock, them dump it
drops so far, my whole house shakes
next door, it's baghdad

*my neighbors, pt 2
diggin that new trench
really, no pun intended
it's where dog turds go

*beirut (the band) / kids in the hall
darrill's umpah band
but not just in darrill's head
vocals? morrisey

sf trip soon. i know all 5 of you are dying to hear how much i enjoyed gourmet ice cream and went hiking and saw a hawk. how will you survive the wait?

dirty south/rock'n'roll tragedy/hiptits

2008-05-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

*clothe me, feed me
before i forget, i wanted to solicit suggestions for places across the bottom of this country where i could find food or thrift treasure. i'm driving across rte 10 in less than a month, and while i have austin covered, surely there are other places of interest in towns like mobile, AL, or new orleans, LA, or even in atlanta, which i'm stopping thru on my way north.

also, i want bbq and weird regional foods like the basque food i had in nevada and the steak place my dad and i went to in omaha that seemed frozen in amber from 1962. and yes, i will stop at the varsity in atlanta. fingers crossed their delicious hot dogs aren't deep fried and won't jizz on my car (see: wall drug. just what i wrote about, NEVER IN PERSON).

[photo: me wantee!]

*rock'n'roll dating
i was just looking at that site as it was linked via jezebel or gawker or somesuch, and let me say this; if you are in your 30s and put bad religion, blink 182, sisters of mercy, goldfinger, anal cunt etc. on your list of musical favorites, there is a reason you're single. and it's not because girls are like, "ew, anal cunt!", it's because you're a grown ass man who listens to pop punk and/or novelty hardcore. not that you should try to lure ladies in with john mayer records and then pull the municipal waste bait'n'switch, but still, if you can drive yourself to warped tour, you're too old to go.

*no fatties please
as most friends of the 'tee know, i'm not such a big fan of public nudity (name a publicly uncovered part of a stranger that's normally covered-- toes, nips, midriff, etc-- and i'll tell you just exactly how it makes my skin crawl). as such, i prefer the one-piece swim suit. to me, bikinis are like jimmy choos or $6000 handbags; they're supposed to the status quo of what women want, but i was sick that day of womanhood school, and now i just don't get the appeal. i am an advocate of keeping the gut personal and private. hell, most men should be wearing one-pieces. and fuck a lot of man flip-flops. but we don't need to cover the issue of toe beards again.

long story short, life is hard for the one-piece shopper. first, you have the brands that seem marketed to those ladies among us who are so fat that they have to wipe their ass with a special tp wand (you thought i was gonna go with washing their backs with a rag on a stick, i know, but too easy).

nobody under 200 lbs wants to buy something called a "miracle suit," but i swear, this brand dominates the one-piece market. as if it wasn't hard enough to buy bathing suits, you now how to go into it knowing that it takes a fucking MIRACLE for you to fit into one and show your face in public. the other nightmare that keeps popping up is "storm in a D cup." i get the pun, but i feel like the only women who would buy this brand are current and/or former hosts of the view. and the lady who killed that poor 15 year old girl on myspace. and maybe tyra when she's fat.

but the worst thing i've seen this year is the following make of suit-- it's usually sold as the sole, sad, token one-piece in a pile of bikinis by designers who hate the fuck out of some fatties, or probably women in general.

most people call it muffin top, but that's at once cutesy and weirdly sexual, as it's on top of one's "muffin," and i hate when people use cutesy terms for penis or vagina (vajayjay? not okaykay, and about 17 months away from being funny). moi, i prefer the term stated up in the title-- "hiptits." because they're like boobs on your hips that hang over your pants, and while they're worse for the fat (especially in this era of mid-hip jeans), nobody is immune. except the supersickly thin. like model-era tyra.

so this bathing suit is basically a one-piece with hiptit windows. and really, if you don't care about showing off that part of your body, wouldn't you just buy a fucking bikini in the first place? belly button shame? it looks like your fat broke through the spandex levee of the suit and is now oozing to freedom, sending bikini-clad, barely legal teens to run for their lives so they don't catch fat.

[photo: even this model has hiptits! somewhere, a gay designer is laughing and filling his winter line with more trapeze dresses.]

[tangent! people sometimes get mad at me for throwing the term fat around so freely, but fuck it-- some people are tall, some people are olive-toned, some people are (different levels of) fat. fat and ugly aren't the same thing, and shouldn't be seen that way-- ugly is a straight up insult, fat is a factual state of being. people who call themselves ugly are fishing for support and compliments, while some people who call themselves fat are just telling it like it is and don't give a shit what you think.

if someone has a higher BMI than they should and wears a size 14, they're allowed to call themselves chubby because *that's what they are,* and when you scorn them for saying that about themselves, you're basically saying they should be ashamed of their bodies. which is why most women won't admit to their chubbs outloud, because they're locked in imagejail thanks to hardy seconds of denial fed to them by thinner people who are trying to help. a better reponse to someone talking about their D cup hiptits is, "whatever, yr lookin good, who gives a shit."

(and ps, i don't care what you weigh, keep your fucking clothes on and wear closed-toe shoes, just long story short, let's just destigmatize the world fat. hiptits and tp wands for everyone.)]

whatever, i hate this bathing suit.

sorry this was the bloggiest thing i've ever written. you'll hear nothing from me 'til i get back from sf.

"fuck"+wnyc+honey bunches of oats = HEAVEN ON EARTH

2008-05-14T03:20:00.000-07:00

i know this has been posted everywhere today, but seeing as today was another downer for the 'tee, i thought i'd spread the love as watching this clip 15 times in a row is what kept me from hunting down my building manager and smashing his bong over his head (not that i've ever met him, but i might recognize him by his stench) (i just rewatched that s3 episode of buffy where oz can smell willow's "fear" and then finds her "having smoochies" with xander, and i put fear in quotes because you watch a show so many times and your thoughts can't not turn dirty, especially given the context of smoochies).

this clip is to me what that haitian weatherman clip was to the rest of the world. enjoy!

pt. 2 : nh, ma

2008-05-13T15:26:00.000-07:00

[photo: didja ever notice that a honey bunches of oats box makes a good makeshift target? i sure did! fuck you, you delicious son of a bitch!]

[my father now refers to this breakfast treat as "honey bunches of lead."]

[also, i painted my nails black'n'badly so i'd stop biting them so much. and because i'm going to be mentally 14 until i die.]

NH:
the good part of forgetting to write this up until now? i also forget most of what happened, so consider the fat trimmed, baby!

as you might recall from when i started this travel summary 104 weeks ago, i came to nh just in time for ice out, which was sort of bittersweet in that i'm never really there for the ice except when it's just forming or on its way out. because i love to kayak around the lake's great island, but you're not really allowed on the island unless you live in one of the houses there, and i'm kind of dying to know what's in the middle, since from a kayak, you're really limited to the shore view. i know it's a small hill, but is there playground equipment on it? a mayan temple? the head and torch of the statue of liberty (i love you, dr zaius!)?

[photo: not the great island, or an island period, but still great.]

so, since nobody lives there in the winter (there's no bridge, and, as should be clear by now, the ice isn't always on your side for travel), i've always wanted to take advantage of the ice to walk over and check it out. alas, another year's passed where it was not to be. on the other hand, it was freakishly warm, so i got to tan on the dock with buzzo (who did not tan, but snoozed under a tree and woke up polkadotted with sap. oy) next to floating plates of tinkling slush. and to think that when i get back, i'll be in swimmin mode. oh my sweet new hampshire, what compells me to go. sigh.

also, see photo, i shot m'gun.

but other than that, i thrifted, worked out my summer work hours at the store, saw my few friends...i was going to mention this before in my discussion of danzig/casual male xl(ucifuge), but the powerhouse mall in west leb has a ladies clothing store called "daffodil," and a bigger ladies clothing store (ladies are bigger, not the store) next to it called "daffodil woman," which just seems odd to me. i went to that mall with my parents to eat at lui lui's, which is like an i-talian chili's but much less offensive to your intelligence and much more delicious to your mouth.

[photo: i am so cute and clumps of me smell pine fresh!]

somehow, i was reminded of a teacher at my high school named mrs. white (alas, as you'll see, i can't change her name) who worked in the health center (boarding schools don't have a nurse's office, they have a health center, which is the same thing, but bigger and licensed to distribute ritalin to those precious spoiled assholes who got bullshit prescriptions and made sport of snorting it in their dorm rooms).

right, so while mrs. white was running one of the sex and drugs classes that freshman had to take, teaching the class on womantimes, she got her womantimes, and in eponymous pants, no less. and the mood of the class, being comprised of 14-year-old girls, hovered somewhere between totally amused and extremely horrified.

and she got mad at one of my friends, who was her student but also her advisee (my school had student/teacher advisee groups, keep up), for not telling her what was happening. my parents and i were trying to figure out tactful ways one could've informed her she was bleeding her (namesake) pants, and the best we could come up with were:
-mrs red, i have a question? sorry, easy mistake.
-mrs white, are the red sox playing a home game? (in your pants?)
and, bringing it full circle,
-mrs white, are you trying to prove you're qualified to shop at daffodil woman?

then i went back to boston and we all began preparing for passover, which is like jewish thanksgiving, but with god, and in which those feasting play the native american-esque role.

MA:
so aside from the above explanation and a positive review of the meal and time spent with family and old friends i rarely get to see, there's not much to add about boston. i went walking with my mom in the magical woods behind the mall, and bought something at the gap for the first time since 8th grade (my one stop shop for kurt cobain-y stripy t-shirts!), and played tennis with my dad at harvard next to my favorite kind of harvard doubles game, balds vs. hair'ds.

but one cool thing was when i went with dad to pick my sister and her husband up at the airport, we had to wait in the new (well, new to me) cellphone lot at logan, which is right on the water. and even tho i lived in boston for my first 18 years, i'd never seen the city like, well, a tourist, essentially. it's pretty! and from a distance, you can't hear people screaming at you in their cars!

[photos: the stub end of the hub, southie from the sea/an accent by the ocean]

so i came back to LA, went to see tim & eric awesome tour, had fine cheese with friends at the getty, saw a preview of tr0p1c thund3r (get ready for "you only love me for my farts" to become the catchphrase of the summer) (also i'm afraid of universal people finding me over google and suing me for spoilering their catchphrase).

but then i got sick, then entered into several shitstorms, so i can't wait to navigate out of these choppy, fecal waters, first to sf next week, then all the way back to nh in june. ang and ashrita came to visit during the eye of the storm, which was a great boon to my sanity, but still. anchors aweigh, bitches. oh my sweet disposition, may you one day carry me home.

[this post is in memory of ryan adams' blog. shine on, you crazy (no really, literally, crazy) diamond.]

? & !

2008-05-05T22:27:00.000-07:00

?:
vs.

just curious.

!:
i have dreamt of this. oh, yes.

just had to share.

keith-style special comment: gta, fyi

2008-05-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

in one of the zillion new yorker magazines i came home to when i got back to ca, there's an article about human trafficking in moldova. while such trafficking includes men sold into construction work in europe that amounts to indentured servitude, it's mostly about women sold into prostitution. it's fucking mindblowing. but then, when i read another of said stacked magazines, entertainment weekly, and see that grand theft auto 4 gets an A, it all makes sense.

[photo: yeah...not knowing whether to laugh or cry.]

i know GTA is just a fun game to play, but here's a more funner game-- take statements and replace "women" with "black people." eg: "in grand theft auto, you can fuck a black person, and then get extra points by murdering them afterwards." man, now that's an evening spent with playstation that would be worthwhile!

or if you want to play my game on the political spectrum, let's discuss one of my favorite 527s spawned from this election cycle, the anti-Hillary group Citizens United Not Timid (cunt cunt cunt!). now, let's plug it into the game to make it even more hilariouser! how 'bout an anti-obama 527 called National Institute for Government Growing Ever Respected. oh shit, it's the N word y'all! fuck a lot of the C word! (and then be rewarded for killing it afterwards!)

ok, game over. i often tell people that when it comes to identifying with waves of feminism, i'm pretty much a suffragette-- most of my objections with third wave feminism's approach to what amounts to self-objectification, plus a lot more insight that my little brain is not capable of, is expressed ariel levy's "female chauvinist pigs" (read it, ladies and gents!). either way, i am admittedly old school.

the fact remains that, no matter where you fall on the feminist spectrum, we have to remind ourselves that feminism is not a first world problem, nor is it astoundingly complex. you can talk about the madonna effect, vaginal imagery in literature, whether to spell it womyn or wimmin, whatever, but at the end of the day, it comes back to the bumper sticker saying that "feminism is the radical notion that women are people." and in a world where women are depicted in (admittedly addictive) video games as objects one should fuck and kill, can have a valuable and admirable (political) career ignored based on gender, and, most disgustingly, are bought and sold on the black market like pairs of levi's, then that notion is still more radical than it should be.

obviously, my little game doesn't serve to compare the struggles of women and minorities, just to show the level of hatred against women in popular culture to which we've become completely desensitized. when i ran hockey (see photo), i used to tell guys that misogyny is like chlamydia-- a lot of people have it but don't realize until they find themselves checked on it by a doctor. or, in the case of misogyny, by a loud hockey she-commish who wants to know why, in a co-ed league, a grown-ass man has no women on his team (which is why, when you see said photo, you see a bunch of rad ladies [sup, ali! sasha! molly! lady i don't know!] amongst the dudes). so just don't let things like GTA and that hateful 527 go unchecked. because when we get comfortable with those notions, we don't notice where they lead. in the end, it's not just those women in moldova and elsewhere that are robbed of their freedom and their lives; we're all robbed of our humanity.

bullshit / pt. 1 : nyc

2008-04-27T23:45:00.000-07:00

*sup! TANGENTORAMA!
pt. 1: dradamsfilms.com
first of all, hurrah that ryan adams' blog is back, even if it was briefly and it's got this moronic metal theme whatever. i know people hate him (i kinda do!), but i wish he didn't try so hard to be cheeky and "likable." nothing is less appealing than people who try so fucking hard, and i should know, because this is me ages 14-18 (to now? who knows, at least i've stopped trying hard enough that i don't even pay attention anymore). so if you like posting pictures of yourself, and writing rambling poems, and playing with imovie, fucking do it. sure, it's narcissistic and often wanky, but that's yr choice, do it with pride. answer to no one. and please keep updating because my life is so fucking empty.

pt.2: glenn danzig
i think i walked by his house the other day, but ever since his infamous pile of bricks was moved/stolen/disappeared, i'm not sure. for those who don't know, danzig (glenn, diminutive former singer for the misfits ((for those who really don't know, which is fine, you have lives)) lives in los feliz in a house that looks like the munsters was shot there, or at least that someone was literally shot there, since there's a hole in the roof and a (former) giant pile of bricks in the front yard, and also a famous story about him hiring people to make his gate more creaky and spooky to complete the overall aura of "boo! i'm danzig!" anyway, the bricks are gone, so if anyone can give me his address so i can find his brickless palace, i'd appreciate it. ("i stole your goddamn pile of bricks! you better think about it baby!" still funny.)

anyway, there's a picture of danzig and his eponymous band (from 1988) on dr. adams' blog, and unless he's standing on, say, a pile of bricks, he somehow managed to find 3 musicians who aren't just as metal as he is, but as short. did he hold auditions with a plywood sign that said, "you must be this tall to join my band" with a chicken holding up his wing to all of 5'4"? there are these stores around socal called "casual male xl," which always make me think of international male, so i think they're filled with sized 8xl gay pimp gear. but are there stores called casual metal lilliputian so danzig and henry rollins can find just-my-(adorably tiny!)-size black pants? it boggles the mind.

[sorry i had to find this ripped off copy, but still, brilliante).

pt. 3: mazel tov heather / no man no (allowed to) cry
[i loathe bob marley's music (controversial!), but friend-o-the-'tee heather once dated a guy named jimjim who was maybe the biggest stoner i have ever met in my entire life, and when approached by a marketing researcher who asked him what he thought of when he thought of bmw (the car), jimjim coughed and said, "bob marley and the wailers. nice." heather just got engaged to a guy who isn't jimjim (a major red sox fan from nh, no less-- score, heather), so congrats to her and her beloved. and note to the ladies: never date a guy who owns bob marley legend, aerosmith's permanent vacation, and snoop dog's doggy style all at once and still puts them in heavy rotation. you'll thank me later.]

another friend was telling me about how her man called her during a long-distance fight, so i wanted to take a moment to do a public service announcement for the lads out there in the audience tonight: dudes are not allowed to cry unless a parent or your dog has died, and maybe at the end of the movie rudy. but seriously, nothing is more unappealing and boner-killing than a grown-ass man sobbing like a baby with a full diaper. now, i used to be a hair-trigger weeper, but between having almost nothing left to cry over (new insults to my appearance have pretty much run dry, my dog's holding on, i don't watch ER anymore) and being so dead inside it's starting to smell, i'm more of a shrugger and ignorer. don't tell me men should be in touch with their emotions-- i hate emotions! the fewer emotions out there for either gender, the better. get it together, man! and don't start a metal blog.

pt. 4: losing steam
should i bother mentioning how funny the new harold and kumar movie is? ps, kumar, call me.

*OK! my stupid trip home!
pt. 1: NY:
i hate writing about my ny trips, because they're mostly made up of seeing friends, eating my favorite foods, and marveling at ashrita's indie rock existence. anyway, that's not the stuff for public consumption, but i will say that i went to the brooklyn museum for the target sponsored free saturday night mirakami dealie with kesone and her husband chris, and even tho it was a zoo and i didn't get there in time to even get into the exhibit (altho i did see judy chicago's "vagina feast," or whatever it's called), i loved going because never in LA would you see an art museum busting at the seams with people of all ages and races and walks of life. and i know it was free, and on a saturday, and featuring an artist affiliated with kanye, but even still. apparently, every free first saturday is a zoo, kanye or no, so suck it, los angeles. enjoy the grove.

[photo: a shitty picture of the melee outside the bk museum. you can almost make out the giant creepy sculpture inside (where you can also purchase louis viuton bags emblazoned with the same image).]

oh, and kesone and chris have achieved "the dream"-- a 2 bed/2 bath. and a terrace! so jealous. congrats, my adult friends! you give the rest of us hope!

oh, also, one of my favorite cousins, jen, got married to a guy named adam who fully charmed me at the rehearsal dinner, so mazel tov to them, and yay for me to acquire a new relative i don't hate. also the wedding was great because i love my jersey cousins, plus, there was pie.

ok, nh is waiting til next time so i can drag out this new content for as long as possible. get stoked for gun pictures tho! and tales of matzo!

prelude: plugs / sox / mini review: black postcards

2008-04-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

[photo: this is what's called "ice out." it's when the lack thaws and the ice pulls away from the shore, not what ice says at the end of american idol.]

[more on nh next entry.]

*plug tunin'
i swore to myself i'd never add to the internet's utter bullshit content, so excuse my silence/lack of posts about getting sick of my own cooking and joining the sad, sweaty masses that joggingly circle the silver lake reservoir/concrete pit. but! while i was treading water, friends were ever so busy! observe:

-cat tyc and i used to work together in the soft skull bookstore that was located in tonic; the store was formerly run by incommunicado press, and after soft skull got booted/had a board coop/temporarily imploded, the store and its famed book cave moved to brooklyn and i think the old space became a coat check, and not so long ago tonic was shut down by the dreaded LES condo cancer...either way, not so long ago, cat moved to portland and went to film school and now she's up for this rad award for a video she made. so vote for her, won't you? cat's video is your new bicycle!

VOTE!

-rebecca woolf's book is now out and available! and her new baby'll be available this winter, i think, which is insane, but whatever, oh the miracle of life and the wheel in the sky keeps on turning etc etc. rebecca's one of the only people i've met in LA who i'm not afraid of offending because when i first met her in nyc years ago she showed me the scars from her breast reduction. she also took a maternity-like thrift coat off my hands that i never wore. quel foreshadowing! go buy her book so her baby tk won't have to go barefoot!

BUY!

-amanda got a story published in a literary journal! she and i went to college together especially for the purpose of learning writery, but unlike other writers (me! me!), she's always driven to improve, and never skips other people's readings or events, and loves all god's creatures (DOGS), and is not afraid to live in harlem above columbia where the murders used to take place. anyway, here's her story, which was so good i felt like i'd been there, and given the number of bk parties i've been to (the last one = a few weeks ago), i might have been, cept for the fact i don't drink or agree to be in the same room with anyone i used to date.

READ!

-also, diana's selling janome sewing machines now at make workshop! amy baker had a baby boy! my old old friend billy designed lighting fixtures that will be sold exclusively at abc carpet and home! some guy cursed the yankees with a t-shirt! amy acker was cast on dollhouse! teeter's got a man who's never seen the golden girls! my mom's car, ha malkah latifa (that's hebrew for queen, fyi) is soon to have over 175k miles on it! my dad still has a mustache!

REJOICE!

*event! dodgers/sox exhibition game, 3/29
[photo: my people!]

long story short, we lost. long story long, i went to a dodgers/red sox exhibition game at dodger's stadium with my friend lizzy and her two friends who were sisters and asian and when i said i couldn't tell dice-k from the other japanese pitcher because i'm racist they thank god thought it was funny. even tho lizzy is from LA, she is just crazy amazing genuine, and her love of the dodgers is 100% dedicated and true, and we all know how much i love and respect superfans the world over. after all, a sports fan is a really just trekker for a certain team. just with less of a stigma and a smaller chance of wearing glasses.

[btw, remember, the stereotype of LA people is that they are fake, but i don't think it's fakeness so much as an inability to relate to other people after spending 99% of their lives hermetically sealed in cars, offices, homes, etc, ie, they aren't being disingenuous, they just go blank when forced to share air with another human being and wonder when tv became so lifelike.]

i am coming to terms with the fact that the sox game i went to 15 years ago will probably be my last at fenway park (i don't know who you have to blow to get tickets these days, but i bet even the act of felating this someone has a long line and will cost you $200). still, dodger's stadium was crazy nice, and they offer dodger dogs in turkey meat (i am such a protein lesbian, because i do love any animal with a breast), and i got to sit next to the bullpen, even if it just meant watching all the young pitchers warm up before going out onto the mound to suck.

[photo: somewhere in there is dice-k NOT PITCHING.]

the night before was the big exhibition event at the coliseum to honor the 50th year the dodgers have been in LA since leaving bk (a day my mother still mourns), and at that game, the sox kicked their ass. but the game we went to was just a bullshit exhibition that commemorated nothing except a chance for the sox to try out their youngest arms with no risk to their standing. but ya know, whatever, i love going to baseball games, the food was delicious (and astronomically fucking expensive!), and lizzy's nephew was conned into cheering for the sox, so all was not lost.

*mini review: black postcards, by dean wareham
i have a friend who is a record nerd who refuses to even listen to bands with members who have wronged his friends. he is friends with damon and naomi, ergo, he hates luna and all dean wareham forever. for those who don't know, dean, damon and naomi made up a band called galaxie 500 that put out 2 very good albums and 1 good album in the late-'80s early-'90s. but also for those who don't know, if you didn't know that, you probably won't want to read this book in the first place.

liz phair reviewed "black postcards" in the times, and she loved it, but she also once wrote a letter to the same publication in response to a bad review of her s/t sell/out album that compared the author to chicken little, so her cred is now shot on the songwriting and times writing fronts. anyway, she said the book is rock n'roll, and in a way it is, because mr. dean is sort of an unabashed asshole, as are more lead singers, except they're usually more abashed than he, or at least less self-aware of their assholery. they are tortured or ignorant assholes, and dean is a placid asshole. such is the life of a harvard graduate.

[huge tangent: speaking of tortured assholes, i cannot stop reading ryan adams' blog. it's like strapping on a virtual reality helmet and experiencing pure mental illness. all mania, all the time. i have a weird stockholm syndrome thing going on with ryan adams; i know he's a crazy dickfaced asscunt, ok ok every rock journalist in america, i get it, but while stuck in my car or my office or the city of los angeles as a whole, i find that his songs have this comforting aspect to them, a warm nostalgic frequency that brings you back to a safer, simpler, funner, broker time that you've never actually probably lived, like watching "roseanne" at its prime or most of the movie "bull durham."
{photo: i want to assert my presence with authority!}

a place where there are screen doors, pants are high-wasted, the cereal is generic, it's always summer, everybody drives a piece of shit car, there are several emotional moments in parking lots, and everyone's drinking beer from the can. have you ever heard the old whiskeytown song "empty baseball park"? fuck it, dude. it's like a portal to that place, but when you take the portal through a whiskeytown song or a ryan adams song or a cardinals song or a pinkhearts song or any of his 403301 bands, the price is, ryan rides shotgun.

{photo: one day, this might not seem so funny.}

and the thing is, on his blog, he's trying so hard to be liked or even just acknowledged while at the same time making fun of himself and talking about how lonely he is and how nobody should like him...whatever, it makes sense in crazyese. in nostalgia town, he and i are drinking cans of beer in a parking lot wearing light rinse denims at night while sitting on the hood of his shitty car. but in this world, he is a sad pretentious guy who shits out great songs sometimes and i have no choice but to refresh, refresh, refresh.]

dean wareham, on the other hand, unrepentant asshole he is, is also a humorless asshole, and that's where the problem lies. it's not that the book is totally dull and jokeless (if you like your humor drier than a stale biscuit covered in hot sand), it's that he is so fucking serious about everything, so when he says he never wanted to be a rock star, you wonder why he's so dedicated to all things being in a band. i mean, the diaries he must of kept over the years to remember half of this shit have to be incredibly thorough, whereas most dudes i know who've been in bands and toured, aside from whining about how lonely it is, can only really remember that one time they had a contest in the van to see who would take a shit in a plastic bag.

[photo, l-r: dean wareham (casual asshole) and britta phillips (a perfectly nice woman i'm sure who mr wareham left his wife for). missing: a shirt.]

so on the one hand, when he talks about leaving galaxie 500 because damon and naomi patronized him and formed a voting block that made band democracy impossible (the two were a couple since high school, and are now married and in their own, eponymous band), you sort of believe that it wasn't just because he wanted the spotlight and more money. on the other hand, you sort of don't. and again, if you don't like galaxie 500 or luna, you probably don't care. if you do though, "black postcards" isn't totally not worth reading, but it's not very juicy. dry things usually aren't. nor are assholes.*

*-sane ones, anyway.

soon, i swear, i'll detail my trips to boston, nyc, and nh, and back to boston again, but for now,

***SPECIAL BONUS! REMORSEFUL MUXTAPE FOR YOU!***

(of random, mostly mopey songs from my own mixes of the past year! )
(yeah, the fine print is always a bummer.)

and happy passover! exodus have never been so delicious!

a belated valentine to the man in my life

2008-02-27T23:59:00.000-08:00

aka, keith olbermann.

[a man so patriotic, the flag doesn't give him a boner, it IS his boner.]

oh, keith. the days have been so long as of late; i haven't been sleeping well, i'm stuck in LA without travel for at least another month, my dog recently squatted and peed on my bathroom rug while i was standing 2 feet away which tells me he was sleepwalking at the time and dreaming not just about being outside, but about being a girl. i keep getting sick and writer's blocked, buzzo keeps getting weirder and harder to clean up after. i'm fed up with nyquil, with my crappy cooking, with the dolor of my day to day. but at least at the end of the day, as the blue cloud lifts and i prepare another shitty dinner, i know that you'll be there for me. in my tivo. and we will make dinner and recover from cold medicine and hate bill o'reilly as one.

you're like jon stewart, but you don't mug, and you have to be taller, and you don't have a bunch of disappointing correspondents (unless you count the guy who made the "pimped" chelsea clinton comment, and i admit, i also don't like how flirty you seem to get with rachel maddow, who has a semi-gay haircut but since i've taken to cutting my own bangs/am one pair of jean shorts away from looking like the og early 90s not-blonde indigo girl, who am i to judge, but still, you better just pretend she's gay because if catch you making eyes at her one more time i'm gonna cut a bitch.)

[baby, it's cool, i'll go get you some of those trader joe's choco-pretzel balls you like to help you relax. and notice i didn't "shush" you, because that shit won't fly with my girl. bitch, i know your life. now, let's play oddball.]

let's break this down simply; danny was a character on sports night, and if his dream dude status weren't proof enough of his being completely fictional, danny actor josh charles' current run as he-nightmare on "in treatment" (a show that's about as amusing as watching flashing christmas lights if those lights were assholes) really hammers home that there could be no danny in real life. all hope is not lost, however, because, as we all know, sports night was based on sports center, a show i've never watched (when not trapped on jet blue during baseball season), but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if casey and dan had real life counter parts, they were dan patrick and yourself. you, with your references to mystery science theater and your take charge "special comments" and your ability to talk to pat buchanan without puking your face and soiling your always-stylish tie. and, unlike danny, you wrote a book when you 14, plus you've been on the simpsons, nevermind that i could spend a whole weekend just lounging around in your eyebrows.

[let's also ignore your whole weirdness with my girl hilz ("which hillary is it today"? the one who's reacting to a statement in context. sometimes she's placid, sometimes she's working people up at a rally, sometimes she's pissed at an obama press release...it's not like she's for the war one day and a socialist the next, i mean, really babe), although let me say this to all the hillary haters out there-- please don't tell me you don't like her because you think she's too political, because that's about 8 shades of stupid. she's a politician. she's supposed to look for compromise on issues, find a middle ground, see policy from all sides. that's like people who resent doctors for being know-it-alls; if you want someone ill-informed in charge of your health, go for it, but me, i'll go for the one who knows it all, thank you very much. i voted in nh for the lady who did right by the state of new york, who's never been found guilty in any of those bullshitty cattle futures/whitewater/whatever investigations, and who can truly get shit done. and if it comes to it, i'll vote for the skinny rookie dude who talks like a preacher, but when it takes him 2 years to get anything done and we've lost the house and the senate, expect an i told you so. but not you keith, because you'll already know. you're just that smart. i bet you could murder chris matthews and not get caught, sayin.]

long story short, happy valentine's day keith. we spent it as we do most evenings; sharing our shitty dinner, discussing the primaries, disliking le rove. i hope i make your best persons list, because when i'm with you, i'm truly closer to fine.

mini review round-up: michael clayton / kate nash "made of bricks" / blackberry 8830(?)

2008-02-14T01:05:00.000-08:00

no images until further notice. my connection is slow, and my will is weak.

*michael clayton
in an effort to write something spoiler-free, i'll just say this; this movie hinges a great deal on a character who's bipolar, and i always have mixed feelings about movies that "use" mental illness because they tend to get it pretty wrong. the worst offenders are those movies with women characters who are total borderlines but we're supposed to believe they're actually just free spirits misunderstood by everyone but the one solid man who can save their broken, wayward she-souls (see: eternal sunshine of the meow meow meow, most of the mid-career movies of drew barrymore or angelina jolie, etc).

it's like when your dude friends tell you, "oh, i met this girl at a bar, she's totally fun and crazy, she danced on a stool like a ballerina and tried to eat a foosball with her eye and then blew me next to a deli atm while making a withdrawal at the same time and i think i'm in love," and you say, "sounds like she's actually crazy and probably dangerous," and dude calls you a boring old person until a week later when said girl has sent him to the hospital for stitches because he was looking the counter girl at pita grill in the eye and he's wondering why all women are so nuts when it's really just the women he likes who happen to actually be nuts.

long story short, writers often use crazy as a cheat that they can bend to do whatever the story demands, having a character do wacky things under the umbrella of bipolar disorder that are actually completely uncharacteristic of the disease. (or, to be slightly more cohesive to the thoughts above, to write off crazy altogether as just being "free spirited," because mental illness is just this mystery made up disease and it's time to quit stalling as you make your journey across the bridge away from xenu etc). so this character has a change of heart as he stops taking his meds, and maybe it's realistic, although it's more likely to me that a manic person'd try to fuck everyone in sight, write the great american novel, and eat the world's best pie instead of find his moral center, but whatever.

so for everyone else who doesn't share my pet peeve, enjoys 70's-y cop/justice movies, and wants to fuck george clooney or loves someone who does, then sure, see this movie. for those who are also wary of crazy on film, "michael clayton" won't really offend. and it won't make you not want to fuck george clooney.

*kate nash "made of bricks"
what is it with me and british music lately? i think it has to do with the fact that this past year has been all about driving and running (more like jogging, or really the "anchorman"-ian yogging, but whatever), two things i never did in nyc, and two things that require a very specific soundtrack. i can take the train listening to "black sheep boy," but can i push my fat ass up a mountain to it? not so much. i can barely stay awake in traffic to the album's second half. but i've listened to "our earthly pleasures" on the trail so many times i could time it to specific curves. and i don't care if kate nash is supposed to be lily allen lite, her record is a lot more fun and i think it's solely responsible for taking my speed from "embarrassing" to "arthritic."

emma's friend barbara hates this record because she thinks kate nash's lyrics are like director's commentary on her boring cute life, like, "i woke up this morning and ate an apple and took the subway and buildings are tall and i like boys la la la." and while those are not real lyrics, "and she was wearing a skirt and he thought she looked nice and yeah she didn't really care about anything else cuz she only wanted him to think that she looked nice and he did," are. but it all redeems itself with the chorus (and this is the same song, "birds"), when the he explains his feelings to the she, both of them being, from i can tell, the world's most adorable chavs; "yeah birds can fly so high and they can shit on your head, yeah they can almost fly into your eye and make you feel so scared, but when you look at them, and you see that they're beautiful, that's how i feel about you." some would puke. moi, even though this is a lower tempo number, i make with the moving of ass.

the more uptempo songs are obviously better movement material, but fun's fun, and fun's a motivator, and that i don't get from all that low tempo integrity shit that's domestically made. so viva kate nash and her stream of consciousness fake-cockney musings. here's to making the transition together from "arthritic" to "possible palsy."

*blackberry whatever
i got a fancypants phone/ass computer (that's the pocket it lives in, i'm not being dirty) because my contract made it cheap to get, and i only bring it up here because i wonder-- does anybody with a phone like this get a genuine ampersand? does anyone else care about the lack of ampersand? 'cause i think i care. the iphone probably has one since it has everything else but verizon it seems, and since no other carrier works in my state of residence (except us cellular, which only works in the woods, essentially) (which is why you've never heard of it), i'm stuck. and i'm forced to use a plus sign, which is ironic, given how negative i've been feeling lately. or really just unmotivated to do anything but sleep + yog. crazy!

pt. 2: nh, ma, the magic castle

2008-01-27T17:05:00.000-08:00

ok! if i wait until have the will to find/post pictures, i'll never get this up. so here it is unillustrated. pix tk if i ever truly emerge from the haze of cold medication i pumped myself up with last week.

nh:
it's not just that it's been so long since being in nh that i don't remember what happened, but that, since that time, i have taken such a rainbow of 'quils, boy day- and ny-, that all my immediate memories that occured before my illness are lost in an orange/aqua haze. so i was sick, and LA was wet, and NH is a fog.

i do recall new years at rebecca's house, which has been going on for i don't know how many years. me and my oldest ladyfriends and their manfriends (formerly manfriends du jour, but now, as we age, manfriends por vida) plus other friends get together, i show up at the last minute as not to offend my family and our friends back at our house an hour away, everybody else cooks for hours before i get there, we eat ourselves sick, most everyone gets drunk.

we play celebrity (like taboo, but with the names of famous people from pop culture, fiction, etc, plus a 2nd round where you have to guess the celeb after one word as a clue, and a 3rd round that's just charades). i submit an inappropriate name (see: the big pussy incident of '04-- sorry, rebecca's mom who doesn't watch television and probably still thinks i'm a perv! this year's inappropriate entry was dick sweat, former nh politician and most famous political sign maker ever, but at least she knew who he was and he made for a convenient one word clue with "crotch!").

then we all have to find places to sleep, and rebecca gets mad at me for lobbying for a soft surface since i am physically unable to sleep on floors (let's not mince words-- 15 years of lugging boobs around has turned my spine to a mangled strip of driftwood inhabited by rabid gremlins that are only subdued when fed massive doses of aleve). meanwhile, all the couples are given master suites (not really) while us single peasants unroll our bamboo mats and sleep in the hay and dirt (not at all).

this year i smartly circumvented rebecca and found a mat of my very own, although i'd already weaseled a spare shitty sleeping pad from a nice young lad i won't name because, being that he was the only single dude there who wasn't into dudes himself, and being that i live clan of the cave bear-style minus the clan or even the bear, i feel shame for myself and pity for him at my level of flirtation.

i can't tell whether i'm being reasonable, ie, chastizing myself for being a putz and being a flirtron with some guy who i won't see any sooner than the eve of 2009 (and he smokes! ick!), or if my months of solitude have made me a combination of dudephobic and completely lacking in self-esteem, ie, that i'm less ashamed at the ludicrousness of the situation but of the fact that i'm some sort of camryn manhiem/mel gibson in the man without a face combo beast who should never leave my clock tower because the peasants will chase me with torches and the sight of me will cause not repulsive people to become sterile. and that this poor, cute dude will remember new years 2008 as the night he spent many confusing moments forced to joke around with somebody who looked just like daniel day lewis in there will be blood right down to the mustache and a-1 authentic ye olde facial shine, but then, also, had tits.

i guess the self-esteem thing is the real issue. anywho.

and then i had to wake up elanor (who wasn't actually sleeping, faker) so she could help me arrange the mats so that there was enough room between my mat and dude's mat (he was still downstairs, probably trying to drink the image of my shiny mustachioed face out of his corneas) so that it didn't seem like i was going to stick my straw into his milkshake while he slept, even though there wasn't a lot of space left in the room and we needed to leave space for julia and her man to get by (so they could get to the futon in the back where their precious pair of backs could find cushed comfort). and it worked out, but i guess the point is, happy new year, there was a snow storm, i'm going to die so alone that my reflection will be long gone. but without all the vampiric perks, trust me.

oh, and i voted in the nh primary, woo, and went back to MA for another snow storm, and then to NYC for a day of non-pariah status, and then back to LA.

la:
so aside from rain and illness, two things of notes have come to pass here since i've returned.

1, emma's cat perry has always had a problem with his narrow urethra, getting blocked up with crystals and causing him pain and constipeetion and what not, so last week the vet decided to widen said urethra by removing the constricting cat penis that housed it. so now he has...well, it's not exactly a vagina, because it's not like he's taking hormones or is an arquette or anything. i said it was like an innie penis, or maybe a ur-gina, or a va-rethra, but these suggestions struck emma as mean. my father said the cat should be renamed varethra franklin, and thus deserving of a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.

and if i were doing images here, there'd be one of a lol cat saying "CAN I HAZ VAGINA?"

and the thing is, i hate cats, so hate cats, but if buzz needed to have his ween removed, i wouldn't just pay for a new vagina, i'd probably give him my own i love him that much (and hey, it's not doing me that much good). and those who know buzz know just how much he loves not just his own penis and the act of keeping it sparkling clean, but the joy he takes in other dogs' penises and keeping their hygiene up to snuff. my heart breaks just thinking about it.

anyway, perry's recovering in cat hospital. or at least most of him is.

2, i went to the magic castle! if you've ever seen arrested development and know of gob bluth's feud with the magician's union, then know that the union is kind of a joke (i hope, at least) but their hq is not-- the magic castle is an actual LA-style castle with stained glass windows of owls and shit on franklin that is open to members only. and tada, my friend lizzy's brother-in-law's bff is a real life magician and a card carrying magic castle member. cue: the final countdown. we were in!

and even if i were doing pictures, i'd have no pictures because there is no photography in the magic castle. there's only expensive food (magic castle (tm) garlic bread!), posters of sigfried and roy, and THE ANCIENT ART OF ILLUSION. after finishing my enchanted chicken breast i went with my party to see a total of 4 magicians who magicified with rope, cards, random audience jewelery, random giant silver balls, doves, novelty trays, more quarters than a laundromat, and scarves, scarves, scarves. it was everything i love-- chicken breast, genuine/non-ironic camp, and jazz hands. please bury me there under the haunted piano so that i can co-haunt it and make it play "the final countdown" all day and night.

oh! also, i saw in bruges, which was inbrilliant, even tho colin farrell showed up afterwards for a q&a wearing a vest over a t-shirt, jeans with the most ornate asspockets ever, long hair, and a black and white yassar arafat scarf around his stubbly neck. gay terrorist chic doesn't suit him, i assure you.

otherwise it's going to rain tomorrow and i will try to make myself care about the patriots. or look for pixtures. or for my lost self-esteem.

Pt. 1 : england (in a nutshell)

2008-01-13T21:00:00.000-08:00

[image: dee's back patio. her back yard is more like a pasture, if you want to get technical.]

LONDON:
credit card miles gave me a free ticket, and emma and her birthday gave me a free place to stay and an excuse to go, so why the hell not spent christmas in ye olde accentshire? staying with emma's family is great, not just because her dad looks like the dad on the fresh prince if he were white and her mom is always making delicious soup while listening to cds of the 2000 year old man, or because emma takes me to places like london's oldest tea shop and insists we spend christmas day watching kylie minogue on the dr. who special, but because emma hasn't lived in the house since she was 16 or so, so everything she owns there is like a shrine to the early/mid-90s, which is exactly when i really gave a shit about english pop culture. so when i go to england, i don't just travel to europe, i travel back in time to a magical place where wonderwall is still on the charts and richie manic is alive and accounted for and the next stone roses album still has the potential to be genius (if it would ever come out, i mean jeez!).

[image: this painting hangs in the upstairs dining area of the oldest tea shop in london. in the basement, there's a shop that sells tons of APC clothing. the shop itself sells an almond pastry that made time stand still. that is all.]

to me, london is exactly like boston (or vice versa really, but you know what i mean), except everybody's really funny instead of really angry. that and it's a lot more expensive (so much more expensive, sweet christ!). and everybody hates the irish instead of everybody being irish. but the tube and the t both run their last trains way too early (altho, unlike the t, the underground map does not resemble a swastika). and everything is old. deliciously, beautifully old.

between family visits (i'll get to that later) and academic stuff, i've been to london a bunch of times, so i've done all the touristy shit before, plus i timed my visit right around the time the entire country shuts down for jesus. so i did see a play (the patrick marber dealie about poker, and let me say that for a guy who was so funny on the day today, marber as dramatiste seems to be a humorless, self-important dick, because some of the dialog is so overwrought it's almost like you can picture it being written by a guy in a beret [although it was nowhere near as bad as closer, thanks god, in that it was at least about something besides the offscreen presense of natalie portman's nekt cooch]). mostly tho, i shopped, ate, spent time with emma's family, and, as previously mentioned, watched dr. who.

i've been trying to avoid another scifi obsession and skipping dr. who and torchwood altogether, and emma's grandma didn't want to watch it, either, because she didn't want to miss dragon's den, but emma wanted to see kylie. and it was kind of shocking how much emma enjoyed the show despite hating scifi, and how much grandma enjoyed the show despite the fact she called it "disgraceful" or "atrocious" every fifteen minutes (before returning to gaze at the screen with slackjawed wonder).

and even shopping i didn't buy too much stuff (so! ex! pen! sive!), but i did get some marks and spencer mini chocolately bites for new years eve (also to be discussed later) and a pair of boots that make me look like robin hood (minus the soap star good looks, alas). oh, and an overpriced train ticket to kings lynn. still waiting for my refund, england. let's hope it takes less time than that stone roses album! blimey!

KINGS LYNN/NORWICH:
as previously mentioned, i have family in england-- cousins on my father's side-- who live in a diary cottage an hour or so outside of norwich. the matriarch of this wing of the family is my cousin dee, who started renting the cottage 40 years ago when, as a young hippie, she needed a cheap place to live and didn't mind the lack of plumbing or the goat that lived inside. then she lived in london for a while, had a family, visited the place on weekends, whatever, but now, as an older hippie, she's in norwich fulltime 3 toilets, central heating, and, with the kids all out of the house, not so much as a dog, so i was glad to keep her company, even if it was only for a couple days.

[image: where i slumbered. sigh.]

[image: the indoor plumbing of which i spake. the bathroom itself might have been installed 10 years ago, but the toilet itself is so old i think jesus might have used it to turn his piss into grog. can't be sure where that is in the new testement though. probably right near the passage that says you can't be gay.]

i've always taken after my father more than my mother (see: nerdiness, tact deficiency, mustache), and my dad and dee were pretty close growing up, so dee feels more like an aunt than a cousin once removed on the side whatever whatever. and it was also a treat to see milo, jamie's (dee's son's) kid who i last saw when he was maybe a week old and had no name. i don't think milo had a name until he was almost a month old because jamie and his wife are both architects, and therefore highly perfectionistic across the board. add to that that his wife is from israel (but really nice, i swear to god!) and was looking for a name her family could pronounce, and that jamie wanted to carry on dee's family tradition and give his son at least 5 names (i think jamie has 7...dee's oldest daughter, mary-jane, has maybe 9, one of which is hurricane). so yeah, milo took a while to come up with. but natch, he's an adorable little guy, and i expect great things, even if his mother's teaching him hebrew.

[images: pre-milo living room, post-milo/childsplosion living room]

on saturday, dee and i had a lovely day around dairy cottages, eating lentil soup, tending the fire and listening to bob dylan dj a show on bbc 2 in which all the songs were about dogs. hippietastic! and i love her house, no matter how fucking cold it gets in the winter, because it's so old and built for people so much smaller that you can't not feel like a hobbit. i should note tho that dee, hippie she is, absolutely schooled my ass in scrabble like a word jock. and granted, i suck at scrabble, suck like that guy meadow soprano dated who, when they played in her dorm room, spelled words like fat and poop, but the beating i got was still sobering.

then on sunday we caved and bought milo a tiny christmas tree to prepare for his arrival (he's old enough to know he's missing out, i guess, even though his household is religion-free), ate a lovely early supper, and then poor dee had to drive me back to the train in the dark fog so i could get back to london before emma's mom got worried on my journey from one surogate jewish mother to another. but at least i got to see dee, and i assured her a good room in the house when she comes to becca's wedding (more on that later-- so much to be discussed later!), and when i got back to emma's, there was cake. and more soup.

LONDON AGAIN:
long story short, emma wanted to see a movie and get high tea on her birthday, so not only did i agree to see enchanted, but i wore heels, so let nobody ever question my love for emma and my appreciation for her birth but not long after that i had to fly back to boston on an american airlines flight that is pretty much the airborne version of steerage/traveling to europe on the back of a pick-up truck, and so i traveled back in time to the oasis-less present day while sitting next to an enormous russianess in a sweat suit. then i got scooped up that the airport and went off to new hampshire in a snow storm, having gotten through security with not one, but two containers of mini chocolately bites.

[image: happy birthday, emsie! and no, that's not a lush or happy mondays or cornershop or whoever LP]

next: new hampshire, new year's, n'high school musical two. which, believe it or not, doesn't make for a long entry. shrugs.

i lost the keys to the kingdom! / mini mini review: atonement

2008-01-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

[image: in london over xmas, emma figured out her new years resolution early.]

seriously! due a series of technically problem/general lack of mental prowess, i was e-silenced from my own personal one-stop internet source of self amusement! unable to write and read my own witticisms, i had to recite them to myself while alone in the car, but let me tell you, i lose a lot off the page!

anyway, it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so i will do my best then to sum up the last month while sitting in this office and listening to the ice dams break. for now, just know that i got to vote today and you didn't, it's not too late to wish emma a happy birthday, and what my opinion is of atonement.

*atonement
i didn't really want to see this movie, but pickins was slim; we never seem to go to concord, which means the closest movie theaters are the west lebanon 6, aka the west leb anonymous, so nicknamed for the fact that the steps leading up to the projection booth are labeled with the 12 steps of recovery (bill t or whoever was a cinaste, who knew?), and the nugget, the nonprofit/semi-arty movie theater on main street hanover that we all enjoy going to despite the fact that the audiences are always made up of loud, deaf old people and young, drunk dartmouth people. and really, there is so little to do in hanover that going with your dorm buddies and sneaking a few 40s of mickeys into the 8 o'clock of syrianna seems like a strong plan for a saturday night.

i guess i did want to see this movie because james mcavoy is in it, and i'm comfortable with my cliche white girl crushes at this point, although (SPOILER ALERT NOT REALLY!) i do think it's weird that this short, super-pale, semi-ginger actor, as hot as he is, is the go-to male lead to fucks ladies against walls. or bookcases. or i guess in starter for 10 it's more of an awkard push onto a bed, but still-- in the last king of scotland he gets it on against the wall of a grotto! he's a hairless, 5'6" englishman-- would you pick him out of a line-up as the vertical grotto sex haver? daniel craig, maybe, but james mcavoy? will wonders never cease. or recline.

anyway, the reason i can go off on all this non-plot related shit is because this movie doesn't really have a plot, or more accurately, it doesn't have a middle. there's the shocking EVENT of the first act, and that leads to a result, but the getting to that result is essentially filler. bad for the story, good for those of us who just want an excuse to look at james mcavoy.

also, in the way the movie enchanted depicted the most turned on a woman's ever been by chest hair, atonement (SPOILER ALERT FOR CERTAIN!) shows us that tossing around the word cunt can ruin your entire fucking life. but it can also get you laid while standing up. knowing that (and looking at the picture below), you can probably skip atonement. which means i just saved you the price of a movie ticket, ya lucky cunt.

pt.1 (also, the only part): oregon!

2007-12-15T17:15:00.000-08:00

CA to OR:
teeter says that i'm a little too into my warrior woman phase lately, what, with my gun and boots and army jacket, but let me just say this; a, it's a rifle, the boots are white fryes, and the jacket is essentially j crew, and b, i drove 15 fucking hours in one day from los angeles to oregon.

i spent much of the day before cleaning up my house and packing-- tossing perishables, hiding valuables, gathering my extra car key from paisley's swank digs in los feliz-- then woke up at 6:30 the next morning to pack the fuck out of my car. we're talking air mattress, sheets, cooler, garments, croche project, toiletry suitcase, small black dog, all of it arranged just so at dawn after many flights up and down the 34 stairs to my apartment.

so when i set out at 7:45 for the top of the country after toiling in silence for the previous 12 hours to prepare for my journey, i admit, i did feel like i had some insight into daryl hannah's character in clan of the cave bear (which, incidentally, is not a movie any child should see, so thanks, dad, for not processing that a movie with a "doggy" "style" rape scene might not be suitable for your kids, even if the rapist and rapee are fictional cave people as well as casual cave acquaintances, and even if there was nothing better at the videoshedd video store that particular saturday night).

aside from that movie's rapey part, i remember that daryl and her blonde dreadlocks were cast out of the clan when she got knocked up with her rape baby, found shelter in another bearless cave, and spent her time in solitude becoming a total hardass to the point where she had no problem serving as her own obgyn for her rape baby's birth. so while i would not like to give birth unassisted (or get pregnant, period, but that's also something you also can't do unassisted, ahem), i would like to shoot some shit with my 22 when i get to nh in a few weeks. i am also thinking of dying my hair.

[photo: you know things will have gone too far when my skin and hair start to match my aforementioned boots.]

anyway, i left la early on saturday, and while i thought i'd be ready to crash by the time i reached redding, i so wasn't, and decided to just push through to the end, arriving in portland at 10:30. teet was still working, so i went to pick up dinner at a restaurant she recommended called montage, where the kitchen staff delights in yelling random shit and most of the men on the waitstaff looked like the awesome dungeon master with the crustache on freaks and geeks. except they weren't awesome, and they really shouldn't have taken so long to help me place a take-out order for chicken jumbalaya. in addition, their toilet was a crime scene.

and let me say that during my 15 hours driving north, i visited many restrooms, most of which were in gas stations, all of which in better shape than the one at that bullshit hipster cajun restaurant with the screaming kitchen staff and the weak cornbread (you heard me-- enguarde, cornbread!). i used to pride myself on having a bladder of steel, claiming i had the special ability to store urine in my right thigh (and let me tell you, it's an ample thigh), but, like the country songs say about beer, you don't buy diet coke, you rent it, and i literally went from gas station to gas station buying 20 ozs at the counter and depositing 20 ozs in the not-so-gross, unheated bathroom located on the station's side.

and it's kinda fucked, because the west coast is really beautiful, especially (or maybe only) the further north you get-- mountains, trees, everything with the name shasta attached to it (fun car game-- everytime you pass a shasta sign, eg, lake shasta, shasta regional forest, etc-- chant shasta in the manner of metallica's master of puppets. shastuh! shastuh! never gets old and really keeps up the morale).

but i've seen all that shit before this trip, and not only that, i saw all that shit on this trip for several hours at a time, so i am now officially so hardened that this country's natural beauty is totally lost on me and instead of seeing the forest for the trees, i see it for all the hidden meth labs.

oh! and while i'm in a shit mood and just being complainy (and about to possibly be repetitive, i'm not sure), let me also add that i-5 is home to some of the worst smells i have ever smelled, worse than gary, indiana, worse than the linden cogen plant that you pass en route to the ikea in elizabeth, nj, worse than (but similar to) to contents of the thermos of orange juice i buried in my sandbox during the summer when i was 5 that nearly made me puke when i dug the thermos up and smelled said contents many days later. i-5 is not only host to several roadside cattle ranches, but at least one sewage treatment megalith (can't merely be a plant) and, from the smell of it, a dead body or two. smells so bad you can't help but laugh as you wretch.

but through all this, i made it to portland. and i will write more tomorrow as i am currently as tired right now as i was after those 15 hours in the car, even tho i haven't even been awake that long today. but i did watch "don't tell mom the babysitter's dead" on cable, and that can really take it out of you. oh, josh charles. so good looking, you've got two first names. AND MY HEART.

PORTLAND:
i've covered portland before, but let it be known that this time i didn't stay with simon but at the jupiter motel, which is essentially the urban inn-fitter and a shonda on our generation (if you don't know, shonda = yiddish for "shame," just doing my part to spread the language of my people and take the christ out of christmas).

[photo: i tried.]

there's a rock club there, a tattoo shoppe, a sex toyerie, and our hotel room came with ear plugs, a condom, and two furry green turds on each bed (see photo). seriously, like snuffalupagus took a dump for the turndown instead of mints.

[photo: i succeeded! tell me that doesn't look like a giant muppet shit/ween!

i also had to sneak buzz around because, ironically, shitty motels often hate pets while the four seasons or whatever will offer dog walking services and have an in-house groomer and put greenies in your minibar. but he was a trooper, and we (=me+buzz+teet) stuck around portland just long enough for me to see not only simon, but diana, who's on tour promoting her super rad/educational book, "s.e.w: sew everything workshop" (makes an excellent stocking stuffer!).

i tried to go to her demonstration at a fabric store, but said store was lodged between 3 freeways with no obvious entrance from any of them, like something out of that book by jg ballard where people end up in a lost-style scenario except its a traffic island instead of a tropical testing site with polar bears (isn't that it? i don't watch that show. i won't look at matthew fox until he shaves).

by the time i finally discovered the secret, myst-style entry-way, she was packing up her sewing machine and giving away the last of the hot cider. but we did get to meet up with simon and his friend for dinner, and simon's doing good and his friend was funny, and simon being simon, he knew the cook at the place and just asked for whatever was delicious. so i ate til i got sick, and then got a voodoo donut on the way back to the hotel, and by a donut i mean 9 donuts of which i ate 5 over the next 12 hours. clearly, it was time to enter hipster detox and head off to teet's house on the coast.

CANNON BEACH:
cannon beach facts--
1. it's on the coast of oregon, and is the home of haystack rock [photo!], made famous in the motion picture goonies, in which it is used as a landmark that must be lined up on an amulet in a search for mysterious treasure.
2. it's one of the several towns recently hit by a huge coastal storm, and while neighboring vernonia was essentially wiped out under 12 feet of water, cannon beach got off with a bunch of downed trees, 5 days without power, and no more free internet for me or teeter.
3. it's home to a (in no way accredited) bible college and is basically owned and operated by members of the god squad.
4. being a member of the god squad does not mean you can't run a mini meth lab under your kitchen sink or father children out of wed lock.
5. small towns are gossipy.
6. it is also where the scenes of bram being chased of the road by troy were filmed.
7. i fucking love goonies.
8. i'm not so keen on JC, but hey, he did keep the town from being flooded, so jesus saves...some of the places where goonies was filmed.
9. i went running every day past haystack rock, which was awe inspiring on two levels-- 1, i felt so close to the rich stuff! and 2, i was running without being chased.
10. they have 2 kite shops. maybe not worth saving for last, but essentially, cannon beach is like stars hallow if taylor always got his way. also, pre-trip, i IM'd teet the following: "the other day i was watching gg and luke came on screen and i swear to god i imagined what it would be like to snug a giant mandude in a flannel shirt who smells like old spice and irish spring who loves his propane grill and nearly fainted sayin."

anyway, my time in cb was pretty mellow. we drove to seaside, which is like dartmouth, mass, in that it's the armpit of the coast, where we got groceries, internet, and the willies. we ate burritos in manzanita, and completed the goonies tour in astoria with a photo sesh outside of mikey's house, the jail, and the museum where mikey's dad works. oh look, photos!

[photo: i woulda posed for this but i didn't want people to get confused and think we'd somehow exhumed anne ramsey for the shot.]

[photo: i am allowing this photo of myself with mikey's house because a, i am tiny in it, and b, i am about to do the truffle shuffle.]

and we had lunch at the columbian cafe, which is kind of like the shopins of the west, except their menu isn't just 220 different variations of shitty sandwich but actually quite delicious and the rockabilly waiter was adorable despite being rockabilly, which is like saying the feces were delectable despite being human waste. and i know that's harsh but all this time in LA has really made me rockaracist, because it's basically like living your life on call to be an extra in grease, except the music isn't as fun and all the girls do rollerderby.

otherwise we cooked, or i cooked, or teet did 2 months worth of laundry while i ran (on purpose, who am i?), or i croch'ed while trying to get teet to stay awake and watch season 1 of friday night lights, and btw, i haven't lost hope for season 2, but jesus fucking christ, what is that show about anymore? i don't even like football, but where the fuck is the football, ie, the thing the characters once lived and died by? it's like the entire town is made up of tween girls, and sure, zac effron/football was super important last year, but that was a year ago, and now we're really into shia lebeouf/murdering people or doing older brown ladies or (full circle!) discovering meth labs.

or if there is a friday night game on the show, it will inevitably be some rudy-like last minute win at the hands of the team's underdog. and can anyone tell me when/why landry just up and quit the team after being their savior? was it because tyra was a bitch to him? but then why were they buds, like, 2 weeks later? hey, why not cut out this bullshit and put in some stupid football? it's so crazy it just might work!

[photo: they just look surly cuz they're defensive about how unlikable their characters have become. et tu, landry?]

in oregon news, however, i woke up friday at the crack of dawn and went back to LA again. but this time it took 16 hours and included a stop at sonic drive-in (if their diet dr pepper float is the work of jesus, then consider me saved) and much time dedicated to hearing the comedy of patton oswalt (i know, i didn't want to like him either, but his bit about kfc big bowls will DESTROy you) and the audio book of jarhead, which just ties back to teet's theory about my rambo-ing out, but whatever.

that was my trip to oregon, and if it seems rushed, it is, because after spending saturday and sunday in LA, checking in with friends (all 2 of them) and enjoying my last faux-pork bbq sandwich of 2007 from pure luck, i woke up at the crack of dawn this morning (actually, more like pre-crack, like, upper back patch of hair of dawn, assuming dawn's more of a don) and flew to boston, which is where i'll be until tuesday morning, when i get up at the mid-vertebrae of dawn/don to fly to london, where i'll be visiting family and friends (well, one friend, emma, but her family makes plural).

so i'm giving the mini report of this trip so i can spend all day tomorrow finishing up late-channukah presents (back to dechristing christmas again) before i'm back to pulling heavy bags around and putting myself through travel hell...when i finally get to nh, i'm going to end up buying a motorcycle. or maybe just start cut out the middleman and start bathing with irish spring and old spice.

mea culpa/mini review: juno

2007-12-04T18:12:00.000-08:00

heads up, i'm going on a trip next week, so expect travel tales. i've just had teet visiting, plus my life is empty, plus i've started waking up early (instead of staying up late and writing bullshit) and actually running on purpose and now i have a splinted shin and have to carry aleve in my tote. i had to pop 2 during juno because i couldn't cross my legs. aleve was my sister's "prescription." that's like going to a dentist who looks at your cavity and recommends a certs, but whatever. and also, ow.

*juno
juno was promoted in such a way that i dreaded seeing it, because i was convinced i would have a strong opinion about it, and that that opinion would probably be negative, and can't i just go see a movie for once where shit blows up and i'm amused enough for 2 hours and forget i even saw the movie a month later? i seriously yearn for this.

because juno is billed as a comedy, but also, for whatever reason, it's being promoted as, brace yourself, preciously quirky, at least in the preview-- hamburger phone, terry cloth head- and wristbands, drugstore clerk who says "homeskillet." jesus christ. when i see a movie where every character seems quirky or wise beyond their years, it just strikes me as lazy. one or two characters, ok, but if you want every character to speak in the same voice, your material is better suited for a one man show than for the screen.

plus, i worried juno was yet another movie that would be so visual-heavy as to be content-light (see: anderson, wes). and why is it that a woman writer can't get ahead without doing time showing her titties for money/material? or pretending to be a molested transsexual boy? or writing about shoes? jesus christ. again.

the pleasant surprise about juno tho, is that, while guilty of over-quirk in both the words and visuals, there are actual genuine emotions in there that give the characters more depth, give them life beyond their sweatbands and hamburger phones. juno speaks like a wisecracking sitcom character, but were you to prick her, she would not bleed catchphrases, but actual blood. this happens when characters have a real story to tell (see: not anderson, wes). and while the story is one sonic youth reference away from a lifetime movie, the characters pick up the slack.

[also, sidenote, the moldy peaches/kimya dawson are all over this movie, and i've never really liked her/their music because it always seemed way overhyped, part of that early-00s group of nyc bands like the strokes and the yeah yeah yeahs that got written up as part of a thriving scene by desperate freelancers when said scene was actually invented by the bands' shared, shrewd manager who knew how to pitch to desperate freelancers who were willing to believe anything that smelled remotely like a scoop/pitch. so to people who read said press at the time and bought it, nobody in the city outside of celebutards liked the strokes (and they played most of their shows in philly, anyway), the sidewalk was/is a shitty venue one rung above the continental but not quite as low as the long-lost spiral, and the moldy peaches were the vanity project of a nice jewish boy and his former baby sitter who liked to dress like a bear. sorry to ruin christmas.]

[that said, when the mp/kd shit is at its heaviest in juno, they made it work. but the strokes were, are, and will always be totally irrelevant, so there.]

blessedly, i didn't hate juno. i didn't love it, either, but, that said, if there had been a few more (or really, any) explosions in it, i would have truly been satisfied.

mini mini review haiku: thanksgiving in four parts/project rungay

2007-11-29T00:50:00.000-08:00

thanksgiving in hollywood I:
feasted at erin's
she knows many she-actors
no shit, they ate, too!

thanksgiving in hollywood II:
one of the roommates
won much cash on singing bee
thanks, joey fat one!

thanksgiving in hollywood III:
temptation island girl
gave teet a lapdance post-meal
teet texted for help!

thanksgiving in hollywood IV:
garlic mashed with cheese
i was beached, couldn't help teet
tofurkey and crotch!

[teeter worried that these haikus were mean, but really, just jokes, i had a lovely time-- erin and her roommates (who were so nice i didn't believe they were actors 'cept that they were unreal pretty) were gracious hosts who didn't make us lift a finger, and the food was delicious, and the bud light flowed free and easy, and as such, i'm sure the temptation island lady does not remember giving teet a lap massage, and if she does, i think she'd sooner laugh it off than die of shame-- she was on temptation island! twice!-- but whatever, just to be clear, i am grateful to erin n'roommates for their kindness, and it was funny to watch teet get danced on, and thanks to all, and to all a good night.]

whatever, teeter's here, which means we spend all day fucking around in search of food and then all night complaining about how much our stomachs hurt while watching project runway. can you believe that ricky is still on that fucking show? he should get the dq for his hats alone-- if he showed up next week wearing a pink plastic fireman's helmet, i wouldn't be surprised.

and is this not the gayest project runway of all time? jack has hiv? does that mean christian has a meth problem? or that chris is adopting a child with his partner? or maybe chris is just pregnant. dude doesn't make it work, he makes it supersized. he doesn't shop at mood, he shops at food. seriously, i could do this all day. except i can't, because ironically, i'll be busy eating. as always, carry on.

mini review: margot at the wedding

2007-11-21T19:57:00.000-08:00

every review of this movie says essentially the same thing; the characters are pretty much unlikable, the cuts are stylized and abrupt, the director (noah baumbach) and the star (jennifer jason leigh) are married, etc, etc. unlike most other reviewers of this film, however, i'm a much bigger fan of baumbach's first two movies, "kicking and screaming" and "mr. jealousy" (yes, i like that movie, it's like a really great short story from the new yorker but you can watch it instead of reading it in installments while on the toilet and it's an excuse to watch chris eigeman exist).

most critics act like everything pre-squid and the whale is a youthful digression by the director, best ignored; i get the impression that baumbach feels that way, too. but i think the difference between the first two films (well, 2.5 with highball, but that was more of a home movie, even tho it's worth netflixing for the "everybody felix, it's felix's birthday" bit) (trust me, it's funny) (or don't) and the last two isn't just the first two are more comedic, and we all know that comedies don't "mean" as much as dramas, meow meow bullshit, whatever.

but that in those first two movies, the characters weren't necessarily more easily likable by the audience, but you get the feeling the director likes them more, too. that he's enjoying them instead of mocking them, or coldly displaying them for our scrutiny. "kicking" and "jealousy" were what they call "small" films (eg, nobody really saw them), and when you're the kind of guy who wears corduroy blazers around the house and writes shouts and murmurs essays, making films to little acclaim probably bruises the ego more than you'd care to admit. making films becomes more torturous than fun for said director, and, it seems, so do the films themselves.

moi, i miss the fun. i miss the rambling dialog and the familiar-yet-not-hateful characters and even the 90s haircuts. i don't get nearly as much enjoyment from watching a pompus-yet-talented guy become subconsciously disenfranchised with his trade, film by film. it's don't just enjoy it less, i respect it less. being arty and writing about crazy women is easy. comedy is hard. whereas margot at the wedding, while well made, is just hard to watch.

pt. 3: nh, nyc, ma, aka, manatee gets her gun

2007-11-15T23:45:00.001-08:00

NH:
ok, this is really just about nh, because various random bullshit happened in boston and during my 10 blissful hours back in the city [and i'll explain usage of the word blissful later], but nh is where my life was changed. and when i think about it, nh is usually host to my major epiphanies. i mean, aside from epiphanies, thrifting, and crocheting while watching tv, what else is there to do once the weather gets cold?

actually, that's a lie, because i actually went kayaking while i was there. two years ago, when i lived in nh for six+ months, i decided i wanted to keep swimming through october and went to the local diving shoppee to get a wet suit. when most people think of diving shops (or at least people who've only experienced diving culture on shitty vacations to islands where you're either a guest at the giant resort or a local living in a concrete hut with 12 other family members who all rely on the patriarch who captains a glass bottom booze cruise), they think of stores filled with neon snorkels, rash guards, and various bits of island-abilia that look like stuff found at jimmy buffet's garage sale.

the lake, for obvious reasons, don't do diving that way. first of all, the only people that snorkel in the lake are looking for dangerous plants (millfoil alert!) or lost car keys. the lake bottom, where visable, is 90% boulders, 7% sand, and 3% deflated rafts that were once used to drag children behind boats, concrete n'keys. the lake is deep enough in most points that you can't see the bottom at all. and if you really scuba to see the bottom, then you're in for some really, really big boulders. and maybe a treacherous rock bass. and my dad's wallet that he had in his pocket while sailing a sunfish in 1984.

long story short, lake snorkeling, as is true for most activities in northern new england, is more practical than fun, the practical purpose being the anchoring or un-anchoring of long, floating boat docks when they're installed in the early spring or removed in the late fall . (because the lake freezes pretty solidly, and the thick ice shifts, wooden docks have to be removed lest they're shredded to toothpicks).

(this is also why wooden boat houses on the lake have winter bubblers that keep the water around the houses moving/unable to freeze, which is why i hate walking the dogs on the lake, but then again, like the old song goes, we can all feel like jesus and walk on water when it freezes.)

anyway, the store sells wetsuits for the dock installers/removers, ie, people who swim in the lake when it's either just thawed/about to freeze, so the wet suit i bought (and the only kind they sell) is so fucking thick that i can't only hardly swim in it, i can barely walk in it, and when i do, i could easily double for scuba steve (if you don't know your quality sandler, i can't help you). or i can swim in the pants (more like skin-tight inch-thick overalls), but if i wear the top (skin-tight inch-thick zip-up mock-turtleneck with attached bike shorts for xtry humiliation) i can't only thrash around like a gold retriever.

[image: me in my wetsuit being pawed by a giant child.]

so the suit's not so good for swimming, but if i wear the pants (among other layers of waterproof outdoorsy bullshit), they're perfect for kayaking. kayaking is already essentially jogging for paraplegics-- no legs required-- and if i do tip for some reason (even tho i can't imagine feeling tippy in a kayak-- they're like canoes if they were barcaloungers), i'm as buoyant as a an inflated raft used to drag children behind boats. so i went out in the kayak a few times, saw the last of the foliage, the empty houses, a handful of loons, and generally felt at one with nature. and like a sweaty ball of rubber.

i also played outdoor tennis with my father in 35 degree weather, but that's just because we're incredibly stupid. i've got no good excuse/nature trivia to back that up.

but, the main event came friday, when my friend rick told me that the local gun shoppe had my gun in stock. my gun being an auto-loading .22 ruger rifle with a black synthetic stock for easy care and maintenance. i could pick it up that night. and don't forget the ammo.

[image: the ammo.]

to back up: my house is under siege by red squirrels. red squirrels, like gray squirrels, bears, and many other woodland creatures, are not only territorial, but, for lack of a better word, consistent. if a red squirrel has found food somewhere, let alone lived there, they will return to that somewhere every time they're hungry until the end of time. (same with most types of bears-- once they develop a taste your garbage, they will keep coming back for more every spring whether the garbage is there or not [or until rick {bear hunting permit permitting, it's a lottery} shoots said bear with a bow and arrow]).

anyway, squirrels used to live in our basement, but we tore up the basement in the spring to turn it into my parents' retirement suite, as our basement is actually on ground level (the house is on a hill) and now my parents can grow old in a stair-free environment (at least when it's done, whenever that'll be, i'm afraid to ask rick, who's my parents' contractor, lest he shoot me with his bow and arrow). but now that we're essentially putting the basement back in, the squirrels have come home to roost, and in the process they're essentially eating the new construction.

[image: today, cardboard. tomorrow, the squirrels! but not the world. i'm not insane.]

nevermind that they get into the house through other nooks and crannies (the house is over a 100 years old, has no foundation, and is mainly populated by two older adults who don't understand why leaving an open bag of chips on the kitchen counter might be a bad idea). it's always fun to be sitting on the couch, reach in between the cushions to find the remote, and realize you've stuck your hand into a small stash of acorns, dog food, and the trader joe's version of pirate's booty.

(please note that not only do we have mice, and squirrels, but we also now have moles. you heard me. no concrete foundation plus slob inhabitants = mole problem. i saw one in a trap. it was like a mouse but with no ears, a really pointy face, and a broken neck.)

so rick has been telling me how much he'd like to come by on a sunday with one of his weapons and pick those fucking squirrels off, and i was like, why do you get to have all the fun? i'm a fucking nh resident, shouldn't i own a firearm by now, if not 8? cause i'm never gonna come through with the pick-up truck or the drinking problem. and rick told me that if i was serious, he'd bring a catalog and call his favorite gun shop, and tada.

[image: the branch was the bullseye. be afraid. be very afraid.]

now, i might be a pinko, but i do have a fondness for civil liberties than some could see as a libertarian slant (see: nh residency). while i think it should be harder to get a gun (buying a gun in nh is redunkulously easy-- the form literally has questions like, "are you a fugitive from the law?", questions the salesman pre-advised me to answer with NO), guns aren't going away. and besides, gun ownership, like, say, animal slaughter, is usually only seen in staunchly negative/in black and white terms by people who haven't spent much time around guns or animals. just die hard movies and cats (altho die hard movies are pretty cool) (fuck cats).

eg, a .22 is not a 30 ot 6 isn't an ak-47. owning a gun in new hampshire doesn't mean the same thing as owning a gun in new york or even new jersey (be it newark or south orange) (or the other nice parts but where tony soprano was supposed to live). and if you've fired a gun, you know it's a lot more than a murder machine. not that i think everyone should go out of their way to understand what firearms are really about, because it's just safer to assume they're murder machines and stay the fuck away since most people aren't responsible enough to own an iphone, let alone a gun, but still.

as for the animal side of things, i have many vegan friends, and i respect their efforts. but i don't buy that people are supposed to be intelligent enough to have the compassion that lesser predator animals do not. to me, that goes hand in hand with, say, wanting teenagers to be "smart enough" to abstain from sex. if the galapagos taught me anything, it's that even the gentlest creatures living in an earthbound eden are still vicious, territorial little fuckers who fight to the death for food, let their second born babies die of exposure for the sake of their own survival, and bust their asses to get laid.

your average human is slightly more sophisticated than your average marine iguana, but deep down, the wiring is the same. see: the hockey dad, the day after thanksgiving shoppers at walmart, the brazillian wax...it makes the violent shit animals do for their base needs look refined and quaint.

[image: this apple wanted a piece of me, so i shot out a piece of it (har har). or, since it was just rotting under our tree, you could say i put it out of its misery.]

long story short, i won't lose sleep over killing a squirrel, especially one that's trying to eat my house. i don't see the point in going out and killing a deer, because we've got no beef (or venison, i guess), but if necessity struck, i'd certainly kill a chicken, because if you're going to eat an animal you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking it became a mcnugget by dying of old age.

the most interesting thing i've noticed about pods of hardline activists of the vegan straightxedge ilk (it's always self-righteous in philadelphia!) is that they can be some of the most vicious, gossipy people you'll ever encounter, little dreadlocked heathers in terms of vindictive mindgamey bullshit. for all the rhetoric that goes with living in a vegan co-op in the ghetto (fort awesome/castle grayskull/chez asbestos) where everyone rides a track bike and helps with the house's unofficial pit bull rescue and wipes their ass with a reusable rag recycled from an old pair of dickies, the reality is often way less diy eutopia and more lord of the flies (which works well, since everyone is already dirty and wearing torn clothes). which is to say, animals are saved, but people are torn to shreds. this is not progress.

[please note: i also know at least one vegan activist type who also works with battered wives and teenaged girls and is rad overall, but for every one of her, there are 100 20 year olds who proudly don't vote and make mean girls look positively soft.]

naturally, i've lost my train of thought, but the point is, owning a gun isn't inherently wrong, hobbes was right, and i hate philadelphia.

[image: my idea of hell/my early 20s.]

MA/NY:
boston was sort of boring, as always, but in NY i saw friends, took the subway, tried on 13 items at h&m, all the bullshit i took for granted after 10 years in the city that now makes me feel like i'm on crack. oh, to have friends i can just lunch with and shoot the shit! to be surrounded by hundreds of people who are both alert and indifferent and good at hiding the fact they're judging you! tasti d-lite! the worst thing about the strike is that it makes me feel like moving back is that much more of an impossibility, but i'll take my hits of home when i can. more than anything, i miss my friends, all these funny, smart people who do such interesting stuff and make me laugh. and totally don't think less of me now that i own a gun.
ps: don't you hate it when tv shows make their characters unlikable or their plotlines annoying for the sake of "character development"? it's like the spinach of story arcs, like when rory and and lorelai stopped speaking to each other or when keith compromised his otherwise rock-solid morals to save veronica and in turn (most likely) ceeded the position of sheriff to vinnie van lowe. long story short, while i see what they're trying/have to do, fuck matt saracen 2.0 (lord knows the nurse will).

ihsp, r.i.p.

2007-11-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

ok, so here's the deal-- for a year+, i did a blog with andrea called ihateselfpromotion.com, but as we aren't promoting anything current, and as hosting isn't free, ihsp is very likely going to go dark soon. it is where i first travelogued tho, so here, in it's entirety, is the reprinted story of my first drive from new york to california. see the first mention of pee wee roads! my hatred of elvis! my love of toilets! tada!

----

late october 2006

pt 1. - we love promoting dollywood
as was reported in the watchtower, andrea and i are currently driving across the country to begin our respective careers of asking questions on behalf of the shy and entering contests that involve eatings pies wherein i will eat more pies than anyone else. since we have no place to live, not across the country or on the east coast or really anywhere, we’re taking our sweet time on the road and wasting money we don’t have. as such, we went to dollywood.

dollywood is in the smoky mountains, so named because a, on the way there there was a stretch that smelled just like hickory smoke, which made me want turkey very badly, and b, the hills are on fire due to strip mining and environmental rape. getting to dollywood is kind of hellacious, because you have to drive on a 2 lane highway that’s so curvy i would guess it was used in the film “pee wee’s big adventure,” and if you don’t know the scene, just know it was curvy. but then you get to take this wee rode through the woods with vista parking lots all over, and then you can stop and takes pictures like this one.

and also this one.

but fuck that, look, it’s my dog!

anywho.

after you drive through what is essentially the branson of appalacia (which is the vegas of the midwest, so do the math), you get to dollywood (and dollywood splash down, fyi). here are the important things to know about dollywood.

1, it costs $47.50 to get into dollywood.
1a, that is per person.
1b, that does not include parking.
1c, that is not per pound, or most people at dollywood would have to pay thousands of dollars.

note the beauty of dollywood, the bounty of obesity, and the one black person. god bless her.

2, the handicapped parking lot at dollywood is larger than the general parking areas at most shed auditoriums, malls, and abandoned supermarkets.
2a, see 1c.

3, dollywood is not for the young. while there are rides and deep fried foods a plenty a poppin, there are also crafting exhibitions, blue grass performances, and a taffy assembly line manned by women dressed to look country/amish/colonial williamsburg/wildly uncomfortable. there are also pie slices the size of your head sliced from pies that weigh 20 lbs each.
3a, those slices cost $6
3b, see 2a/1c.

a dress so authentically southern, you can almost feel the agony of the slaves who made it!

4, dollywood is currently in the midst of its gospel and harvest festival, which pretty much translates to jesus and food, which is what dollywood seems to be celebrating every day of its existance.
4a, if you are, say, a jew, the southern states can get a little uncomfortable. if you are a really tan jew that could pass for a handful of brown minorities (instead of just a left-behind-mud-person), people get incredibly confused as to why they want to avoid you.
4b, also in pigeon forge (home of dollywood) (gateway to the branson of the vegas of the hillbillies [a term they embrace, fyi]) (there’s lazer tag also) is a theme park called christus gardens. we considered going, but we spent all our money at dollywood on admission, kettle corn, and in my case, a unicorn leather keychain tooled with the letters FTW. we were also afraid that upon entering christus gardens, we would burst into flame.

you have to hold it up to a mirror to read it, but this mug (filled with mr pib, mind you) costs $28 dollars, give or take $21 dollars. that’s still a lot for a beverage most people wouldn’t drink if you paid them $28, give or take no dollars.

this might seem a little early, but it’s xmas everyday at dollywood. also, note the love of fountains.

5, did we mention the eagles?
5a, dolly parton loves eagles.
5b, 9 to 5 is such a rad movie, and how the hell did they get away with all those weed jokes?
5c, her tits are huge. if you talk about dolly, you have to mention this. it’s a law.

if you don’t go to dollywood, the terrorists win.

in sum, we love dollywood, and not in that bullshitty ironic way because we are too old to attempt to be cool, which is why we ate at a chili’s outside of nashville for dinner so we could hustle to our hotel to watch project runway (which wasn’t on, anyway. fuck.). we also love dolly, because when she built dollywood, she raised her li’l corner of appalacia from nothing and made it into the thriving, tourist trap, pancake restaurant capital it is today. she’s also written some great songs and saved a bunch of eagles.

if you are driving along the bottom part of this country, don’t bother with graceland– elvis was a hero to some but he never meant a goddamn thing to me, etc– go to dollywood. expect to spend the equivalent of dolly’s family’s annual salary circa her coat of many colors childhood. and read this sign (from one of the parks 392839 places to eat/get fat) so fast that it seems dirty.

dollywood por vida.

pt. 2 - nashville is a mall that sells mugs, guns, and bullshit.

it really wasn’t fair to expect a lot from nashville because dollywood was pretty much the zenith (of our lives?), so it was all gonna be downhill from there. the decline started upon our arrival at our hotel, which smelled a lot like cigarettes, except said cigarettes consisted of a 50/50 blend of tobacco and feces. also, we did not get bravo, because southern cable carriers hate queers and neck tattoos, so we had to hear about jeffrey from the internet and the cover of usa today, which is just wrong. wrong being his victory, our failure to witness it, and the way in which we discovered this abortion of reality tv judgment. i’m surprised somebody from the pro-life thrift store i accidentally bought a shirt at today wasn’t standing somewhere with tape on his mouth in protest.

anyway we woke up early and spent the day driving around nashville. we ate pancakes, tried to thrift (and accidentally supported tape-mouthed zealots), but the most noteworthy thing is, we tried to go see the grand ol opry. while i am aware of the fact that the original grand ol opry is the ryman (sp?) auditorium, if only because i stayed awake through most of that recent neil young movie, we decided to see the new one, just cuz. the og ol’ opry is beautiful, has great acoustics, and from what i’ve seen on film with neil young, has a sweet projection system that can make a backdrop look like a rolling savannah. and while most of the country music i like is either ancient or really bourgeois, i was curious to see the place hank hath wrought. and this is not it. tada.

blurry? insignificant? afterthoughty? why yes. even if it weren’t raining and the temperature hadn’t dropped 20 degrees.

for this is the grand ol opry circa 2006:

it’s a mall. a mall, convention center, and home of the great southern tradition of commerce (and country music also).

and to bring it full circle, good to see malan is on his feet.

but see, this is the way the south works, at least to someone with the expertise of 2 days in a car driving through it; nothing in the south is small. the churches (which outnumber people) have mcdonaldses in them, the people (which outweight the churches) also have mcdonaldses in them, and the “historical” monuments have malls in them (that contain church going fat people) (and mcdonaldses).

it was lame and kind of depressing, but all hope was not lost! for just across the highway, there was willie, and it was good.

if you are like me, you are amused by the juxtaposion of willie nelson and anything smokable, but that aspect of the red headed stranger’s life is not one this museum/gift shop has chosen to celebrate. andrea and i did not venture further than the shop/the point when it stopped being free, but from what we saw, the most drug-related item in the willie museum and general store is as follows.

did i just blow yr mind?

so i guess the museum not only caters to willie’s fans who want to snuggle with him, but also his fans who hate black people.

which might be why you can find this establishment directly next door.

yes, it’s a little blurry, but if you look directly at this dukes of hazaard b-character’s shrine to himself, your eyeballs burn.

as for the rest of the day, it rained, we couldn’t find this bbq place that jenny recommended, we finally did and it was delicious (and located on bbq lane!) but entirely creepy, and then andrea had to eat at taco bell. not that this is punishment for her– bitch sprints to the border!– but as someone who grew up in new england and did not have taco bell for my formative years, i have to ask, what the fuck is up with taco bell? i seriously have never eaten there, mostly because, if you don’t know what’s in the food, you never will. the menu will say “grande taco fiesta-style chubby” or whatever, and that sounds fascinating, but can somebody tell me what that consists of? it could have chicken, beans, cheese, pico de gallo in it, but also semen, and i know it’s silly, but i would really like to know when i’m signing up to eat excreta of almost any kind.

taco bell is like the freemasons or something– either you’ve been tapped in and know to order the seven layer taco minus the extra cheese, but with quac, and nix the semen, or you just stare at the menu and try to figure out the difference between 4 burritos and what makes potatoes covered in cheese mexican. i’ve never had to do internet research to order at burger king or popeye’s. altho, to eat at the latter, i do usually have to order through bullet-proof glass.

tomorrow we drive to oklahoma. so there’s that.

pt. 3 - the real question is, why do you *like* elvis?

so i didn’t write anything yesterday because all we did was drive. woke up in memphis, got in a car, and drove to okla city. here’s what i know about okla city from my one night there:

-fuck taco bell, sonic is where it’s at. there was one in the mall/hotel/industrial waste complex where our hotel was and the diet dr pepper float blew my mind so hard i left brains on the orderbot 9000 that i spoke into to get the thing. see, sonic is sometimes drive-in only, so even tho we were on foot, we were not to enter the sonic hive where the magic was made. and on the door to said hive, it reminded you there was no entry, and also no pets (dog with line over it), and also no guns (handgun with line over it). so, rest assured, it was the creamy mixture of vanilla frozen something and soda that caused my brains to blow out, not a firearm.

please note: i had my inaugural meal at taco bell today– chicken was involved, cheese was not, and there was a ranch dressing that, and don’t act like you didn’t see this coming, slightly resembled semen. i didn’t love it, but i’m willing to try again on something ranchless. i just have to remember to do my research before going back, which, by the way, is still annoying.

please also note that said meal was had in amarillo, texas. why would anyone go to texas and eat taco bell? i don’t know, but don’t tell anyone we did, because we could be extridited back to texas and executed.

-toby keith has his own restaurant in okla city called toby keith’s i heart this bar and grill. as you may or may not know, toby keith is a country music sensation/shameless rightwing bigot– imagine a young pat buchanan in a cowboy hat and shirt purchased from casual male. so, while his signature eatery proclaims his love…for his signature eatery, a good subtitle would be what he doesn’t heart, ie, women, for’ners, brown people, etc. maybe his restaurant has special sections for each of them? we’ll never know.

-they call it okla city. moi, i’d go with OK city, but hey, they’re the ones with guns.

-oklahoma is flat and windy. so windy that your subcompact car will get shoved all over the highway like anyone who dared to mosh with me and my friend liz during dances our freshman year of high school. the speed limit is 70 but most of the time yr just hanging onto the wheel for dear life at 68 mph hoping you don’t swerve into a dodge ram (everyone drives a fucking dodge ram, it’s like dodge is OK’s official sponsor). (i mean okla! please don’t shoot!)

windmills by the highway. this proves that a, they know it’s windy as shit, b, they are trying to squeeze gold from a turd, and c, people here love jesus so much for a reason since they’ve felt his wrath as he’s constantly trying to flick them off of route 40 with his mighty, invisible index finger.

-people are still fat. we stopped somewhere for andrea to ‘rinate and a lovely obese couple in the car next to ours asked me what the millage on my car is. i couldn’t help but think that they were only interested in a car with good milliage because it would mean less trips to the pump/having to get off their kind-yet-obese asses. if only there was a dodge ram hybrid.

so that was oklahoma.

we rose early this morning and drove the rest of the way through ram country, right thru the top hat of texas (which is probably not what anyone there would call it, because it sounds kind of queer, and i’m glad i’m not in texas because a 2nd degree inference of queerery can get you executed) (twice if you’re retarded).

and again, i can understand why people here love jesus so much, because if you lived in a place like this…

…where all you have is high school football, the super walmart, and the ten guys in your high school class from whom you must pick your husband, wouldn’t you be praying for a better after life and the end of the world? i repeat:

and wouldn’t it be convenient if there was a tangible symbol of the love this part of the country has for mr the christ? ask and ye shall receive.

of course, behind every enormous fiberglass crucifix, there is a silver lining, and for us, that was to be found the moment we entered new mexico.

let’s just soak in it, shall we?

as we drove down the maindrag to check into our latest pricelined palace, it truly felt like the rapture had occured and (instead of burning eternally with the rest of the mud people in an earthbound inferno, as prophesized by kirk cameron) we had entered heaven. not just because we passed two sonics for me and two taco bells for andrea, but also because the people don’t look miserable, and the wind wasn’t punishing, and the fucking amazing place we ate at tonight (maria’s, get the blue corn soft tacos, 100% semen-free) didn’t have a no guns sign on the door. tomorrow we’ll do touristy stuff, probably involving georgia o’keefe, physical movement (as 2 solid days of driving have caused all of me but my right leg to atrophy), and a diet dr pepper float. yes, indeed: santa fe, living the fanta se.

-sb

ps: you might also have noticed that we spent the night in memphis, and yet there is no mention of graceland. i mentioned earlier that i had no interest in going there, and the way people have reacted, i finally understand the way vegans feel when people ask them why they don’t eat cheese (except fuck that, i love cheese). to make this quick, there are three good reasons for not visiting graceland.

1, elvis was to the contemporary black music of his day as paul simon was to south african music in the late 80’s except elvis didn’t give anyone any credit or play a huge concert in central park that was released on cd for me to enjoy very much when i was 13. also, elvis never wrote shit, let alone anything as good as “slip sliding away.”

2, graceland costs money, and that money, or a good chunk of it, goes to his daughter, lisa marie, which means a good chunk of that goes to the church of scientology. and if i have to explain to you why that’s creepy then i’d also like to politely decline your offer for a stress test.

3, i don’t give a shit about any of his music, probably wouldn’t particularly like him as a person, and find the whole elvis kitsch to be really forced and fake. good kitsch is kind of ugly and odd, which elvis kitsch is totally ugly and stupid. it’s a safe “weird” thing to like, like star wars or napoleon dynamite, two things which aren’t actually weird at all (and the later of which is total excrement).

so if i don’t genuinely like elvis, ironically like him (ew!), or musically like him, why would i pay money to look at his stupid house so that another member of the sea org can get their wings? why would anyone? i’d rather buy toby keith’s racist ribs (they’re on the menu under the black people are lazy blackened catfish, i’m sure of it).

pps: andrea wrote her own entry today! i haven’t read it yet but if she doesn’t mention it she’s totally drunk.

ppps: andrea was just flipping past snl and my chemical romance was on. it’s not worth describing their musical product (or listening to it, natch), but post-song, it was announced their song was sponsored by budweiser. evidentally, snl has being getting musical sponsorship for years from bud, but considering so many musicians are current/former drunks, this is an odd choice. one of said recovering drunks? gerard way, lead singer of my chemical romance. loving elvis is not ironic. the above tidbit is.

pppps: new caprica, rip. please remain dead (like elvis).

pt. 4 - in which i once again mention sonic. and santa fe, also.

today was spent fully soaking in santa fe, which is something we haven’t really done yet on this trip, ie, spend a full day in a city. we tried in nashville, but it was raining/a giant mall, so spending a whole day in a city in the car doesn’t really count.

most of the day was spent in the touristy ye olde historick zone, where andrea checked out this marketplace of turquoise jewelery and i strolled around. when i say checked out, i mean easily spent 2 hours carefully chosing which native american relics to call her own, and when i say strolled, i mean fully canvasing the 5 block radius around the town square with buzzo. this was great tho, because 2 days of car sitting had me yay close to needing physical therapy in order to walk again, and because buzzo is totally fat. let’s not sugarcoat it. plus there’s that thing where he cannot read my mean mean words.

long story short, i really like this place, as does andrea, and i’m not the one dripping with silver. i think we both like it cuz it’s purty:

the desert blooms! just like a certain middle eastern warzone i know, except totally different!

and cuz if something like this was in oklahoma, it would have a bus ad for big and rich’s big and fat steakhouse.

i like santa fe, not just because i can walk down the street without worrying about being lynched or because i saw a totally hot dude at breakfast this morning whose black wranglers, semi-tallness and greyish hair pretty much made him add up to “the dream,” but because i truly believe it is a secret portal to bizarro new england. i left new england long ago, but only because boston could not offer me all that i wanted, let alone trains that ran after midnight or people at rock shows i didn’t recognize. santa fe, however, is like a voltron of new england; all the best things from every state in one tidy package. altho by every state, i’m excluding connecticut (which would contribute what, an ikea?) and maine (inbreds, oxycontin, pepperidge farm accent, oh my!). anyway, observe.

are they building adobes on south willard street in burlington, you ask? i say, nay! that’s santa fe!

is that the main square in west lebanon, nh (or “west leb” to those of us proficient in ct valley lingo)? sorry friend, that would be santa fe.

gee, are those annoying begging teenagers (who still manage to afford hairdye, leather boots, and sweet camping gear) “chilling” in the pit in harvard square? or, since i forgot rhode island, are they a particularly lame crop of risd freshmen? fuckin a, it’s santa fe!

the biggest link in the chain, however, is the big catholic church downtown. it wasn’t until i left boston that i realized that cardinals weren’t on the local news every night anywhere else, that being irish and wearing a crucifix wasn’t your only alternative to being jewish, and of course, years later, that i was right to find priests creepy. in downtown santa fe/not-new england, there’s a sculpture of st francis of asisi, the animal saint, but the animal they’ve chosen for him to commune with is kind of an odd choice.

it’s a catholic saint (priest? i dunno this shit) talking to a beaver. one only wonders what that conversation is like. god loves you, and i love you, but not in that way? i fight god’s righteous battle, but i don’t play for the beaver team, if you catch my drift? hey, could you give me the number of your friend, the young he-goat? (that would be a male kid. animal humor). if you think i’m grasping at creepy straws, i also took one at this angle.

perhaps this would have been a more appropriate animal for him to be “communing” with?

corny? clever? i don’t even know anymore.

otherwise, just to get these out of the way, there’s 1, heaven’s menu, 2, clarice, and 3, the weird sculpture of a woman shitting on a guy’s shoulders or trying to sneak into the us that i couldn’t bother to pay and see in its entirety.

i also think andrea liked it tho because the whole town looks like a giant taco bell.

(count the pick-up trucks)

and buzzo loved it because it providing him with his favorite things in the world; beautiful objects to claim thru water rights, as i call them.

not to spoil the ending, but he peed on those.

tomorrow we wake up early, eat at some other delicious place, and then drive to phoenix, stopping at some national parks on the way so we can get there late enough to not see the megamalls and rich old people and just go to sleep. here’s the question tho– as much as i have enjoyed my time with sonic, drinking their delicious shakes and enjoying their no gun policy, should i consumate our relationship with an actual meal even tho i’m about to leave sonic country, not to be reunited for the forseeable future? the only sonic in CA is in anaheim, so unless i want to go to disneyland or drive by gwen stefani’s childhood home, sonic and are going to have to part once we get through arizona. should i make the most of our remaining moments together, or stop at point of no return before feelings get hurt? your input, please.

also, georgia o’keefe had no idea her flowers looked like vaginas. it’s true. i just saved you the $8 admission to her museum (unless you like her vaggy flowers, but i thought they were kinda eh).

pt. 5 - the circle is unbroken.

full disclosure– i am fucking exhausted. we woke up at 7 this morning so we could eat breakfast at a place called the chocolate maven (best thing about traveling with a vegan– free food research). i’ve been trying to convince my parents to visit santa fe, and at tha ‘maven, i thought, this place has chocolate, fancy coffee, a wide assortment of baked goods…how could this eatery be more perfect for my dear papa?

i expect he is on priceline now.

anyway, i drove the AM shift, then we went to the painted desert/petrified forest. i went on a trip out west with my family and our friends the stein family when i was 10, so i feel i’ve seen enough pueblo kivas and navajo pottery to last me a lifetime. but whatever.

obligatory pretty picture:

you get halfway through the park before you see any of the old wood, but we weren’t in the park for 10 seconds before making a record number of hard/old/stiff wood jokes. grown ups!

naturally, i thought the wood looked like turds.

also naturally, andrea needed to touch it.

i would post a bunch of pictures of how pretty the landscape was, but all i could think was how the brush looked like a black guy’s chest hair, which kind of killed the moment. ask your nearest black dude to take off his shirt, you’ll see i’m right.

and there were some pines. or something.

also, we thought this guy was a cop.

he was a village person with a cb radio. we’ve been tired for a long time.

the tired culminated with our arrival in phoenix, during which we blasted the michael jackson song “got to be starting something”, windows down, and pulled into the hotel/priceline palace parking lot just as the last mamasaymamasawmoomawkoosaw was fading into music history.

also, please know i just wrote “we blasted the michael jackson song “got to be starting something” by michael jackson” before erasing it. it is 9:30 pm.

let me tie up some loose ends tho. 1, i did the deed with sonic, but with a twist you probably did not see coming:

sonic drink of dreams and chickeny wrap, but with taco bell sauce. two worlds, together as one. it took 8 days, but i have reached the zenith. pretty desert can go fuck itself.

prepared to be taken higher? we were served by this person who andrea swears was a dragqueen…

…but might not have been, because we needed the gps to give us directions back to the hotel, which is 2 blocks away. please note that they are for the retarded.

i shouldn’t even be writing right now because i know this isn’t very funny, but i wanted to show the magic toilet, the black man chest hair, and to share a moment of revelation i had during my 4th hour of driving 87 mph: one song we’ve heard a lot on this trip is “won’t be home,” by the old 97s. (and don’t get on my dick for having shitty taste in music, i know i do, i’ve retired from giving a shit, and you try driving for hours across the desert listening to nurse with wound).

the chorus begins with the line, “i was born on the back seat of a mustang,” and while i have sung said line at full voice many times, we all know that there’s no way in hell someone who drives a prius should be able to make such a statement, even in jest. besides, if you want to get technical, if i really was delivered in my parents’ car, then i was born on the backseat of a pacer (mistakes were made). so what i figured out is, given how scatalogical my humor is (see: pictures of a shitter and wood turds in this entry alone), i’m pretty sure i was born on the seat of a toilet. judge me if you must.

ALso, call this a blog if you wanna, but the second this trip ends (which is tomorrow, fyi), there’s no way i’m going to do constant updates about how much i hate trying to find an apartment or why LA is hell on earth (eg, why do they call food courts farmers markets, why do they put “the” before their numbered highways when nobody says i drive on “the” maple street, why does it suck so much, etc). so fuck this blog bullshit. maybe tomorrow i’ll post pictures of joshua tree and fatburger, but tonight, i leave you with the knowledge that the planets have truly alligned; i found the perfect food, great thrift (did i mention the hotel’s near a savers that’s open til 11 for halloween? i mean, shit), and, last but not least, outside of a taco bell, i have actually found the semen (and i didn’t even need a blacklight).

thank you, thank you very much! good night!

ps: also, due to wearing dirty socks for 4 days and then no socks in sherpa-lined vans, my feet stank so bad today *in my shoes* that i think i killed the last trace of jerry’s new car smell (the car is jerry because it completes me, the gps is karen because we have tamed her like ricky bobby’s cougar, keep up).

my senior year of college i lived with this girl who got the nickname lesbian mcswampfoot (wasn’t a lesbian, did have the worst smelling feet of all time), and joining the ranks of l.m. brought me immeasurable shame. the only reason i’m admitting this is because i know andrea’s going to have a field day with it and i want the world to know that a, i am not proud of this foot incident, b, i washed my feet *the second* i got into our shitty (three stars WHAT?) hotel room, and c, the car still smells, so maybe it was andrea’s vegan face. just putting that out there.

pps: mamasaymamasawmoomawkoosaw

pt. 6 - a, this is long, b, it’s not very focused, c, nothing much happened yesterday.

we got in really late last night, but not really, but i got back to my luxury squat late after leaving andrea at her mom’s house because i could not leave before the gilmore girls/veronica mars prime time power hour(s). i’m currently staying in an empty on-the-market condo until i can find my own place, which means it’s just me, an air mattress, and a few very sad piles of all of my local earthly posessions. even my dog is kind of bummed because, while it’s better than the car, it’s lacking in things to pee on. he really doesn’t ask for much.

also, like i couldn’t comment on this, i really hate christopher. a lot. readers of the 05 gilmore girls eff toss know that christopher didn’t even make it past round 1, and it’s not just cuz he’s a loser, and don’t say he’s changed because we all know people don’t change. personal change is like dieting– at first, you see a difference and have people compliment yr undeniable transformation, but 2 years later you’ll be double fisting trader joe’s chocolate covered bananas in front of celebrity fit club and using yr thin pants as a bib. which is to say that christopher might have shit together for once but the countdown clock is ticking until he reverts to his old k-fed of ct status and leaves lorelai so he can slink off to take care of yet another one of his oopsy offspring.

but beyond being the unstable inseminator, he’s not luke. sure, luke hid his bastard daughter and took 7 years to move on from his generic brand blue cap ™ to the bold step of using his head to support a baseball team, but luke can build shit, and punch dudes, and i’m sure he’s killed something with a bow and arrow. christopher probably needs to hire someone to open a jar of pickles. he’s a country club, candy assed, well-educated-but-secretly-stupid fancy lad and if lorelai sells out and ends up with him i quit.

i was talking about gilmore girls, by the way.

but oh yeah! the last day of the trip. there’s not much to say except that we went to joshua tree, which really should be called cool cactus/insert real name of cactus here national park, because these fuckers were everywhere and they were super rad.

they look muppety (but probably didn’t feel that way) and totally made love to the camera.

these shots are going to be featured in the student art show, right next to some black and white shadowy shots of a naked she-stomach and a study of a homeless lady.

and then, tada, the joshua trees, who got their names from mormons somehow, and as far as i’m concerned, that was strike 3 against the park, strikes 1 and 2 being the complete lack of phones (the rangers use radios only, which wasn’t that important, but kind of freaked me out since there are bobcats in the park and a walkie talkie seems kind of bullshitty in that situation), and the association with U2, who are pretty much my least favorite band of all time. they’ve been around for so long that there are pretty much no new observations about U2, good or bad, but aside from the fact most of their songs are the exact same song, a, nobody should have their name be “the [noun]” unless they have a sense of humor (ie, do you smell what the edge is cooking), b, bono is balding, i am 99% sure of it, and c, people more knowledgable than i have told me about how a lot of his humanitarian work with 3rd world relief actually has strings attached that benefit corporations, and those people have footnotes and details and shit, so yeah, what they said.

ALso, since by law i must mention this once a day, i’m from boston, and i remember when U2 played the garden one year on st patrick’s day and it was like that whole corner of the city was baptized in green vomit. my whole impression of irish culture growing up was a, nuns and bad touch priests (see: santa fe), b, people who called my friend dave queeah cuz he had a pony tail, and c, with or without you. that should explain a lot.

so i had it in my mind that i was going to take a picture of buzzo peeing on a joshua tree because that would be the perfect image of my disdain for mormonism/bono/our national treasures, but we took a wrong turn in the park and the trees disappeared. and then we weren’t in the park, but in the town of joshua tree, desperately searching for a place to eat so that i would not crash and tantrum like my friend maysan’s two year old. except he looks a lot cuter doing it.

alas, we didn’t find a place to eat right away, and then andrea tried to give me driving tips, which, while well-intentioned, was ill-advised. i have many dude-like traits– love of movies where things get blowed up, ability to eat my own weight in [insert food/fat here], several pairs of pants– and driving touchiness is definitely one of them. raise your hand if you can remember being in the car with yr parents as a kid, hearing yr mom telling yr dad something about his driving, and then hearing yr dad offer yr mom the wheel before offering to just turn the car around and go home. brings it back, doesn’t it? anyway, thus begat the one spat of the trip that andrea alluded to, and really, i blame bono. not that i didn’t get a picture of a joshua tree.

turns out the town of joshua tree is full of them, and they don’t cost $15/car to see. and no, it’s not running away from my wrath– it was taken from a moving car (that andrea took over driving). at that point, we were ready to just get there already. which, with LA traffic, took 4 more hours. and then we spent all today in the car, so really, LA is a road trip every day in which you get nowhere and, if you’re lucky, get jamba juice.

that’s really the whole trip tho. if you have anything you want written about, do let us know, but the thought of writing daily updates about life seems incredibly depressing. those of you who know me (and that’s got to be all of you, because really, how else would you find this site? google searching green+vomit+vaggy?) know that my idea of a good time is shopping at trader joe’s and crocheting an inanimate object. that’s not a movie i’d go to see. or read. whatever. in the meantime, a, we made diet dr pepper floats tonight and it wasn’t the same, b, fuck bono, and c, give me a job.

review (not really): nice strike if you can get it

2007-11-10T19:52:00.000-08:00

tomorrow, i'll have words and pictures about the ma/nh leg of this trip (i shot things! i live free while a target dies!), but for now, i must share this with you, as it's made me feel that much better about life in general. as i have said before, california, a state shaped like an apostrophe, is fucking retarded when it comes to using apostrophes. *or is it.*

one note about the writers' strike tho (" S' ", because it is a strike possessed by writers plural, just fyi): as someone who was raised by pinkos, writes for money, and enjoys chanting, i totally support the strike. if new media makes no money, what the big deal with giving writers' a bigger percentage of no dollars, don't they know most writers live off residuals, the internet is not just a fad, etc, etc. plus, joss whedon says it's a good idea. so whatever, strike on, you crazy diamonds.

[image: a banner with many sets of legs and feet.]

but please note, as someone who writes for money but also has to teach crochet/resell thrift/live off trader joe's (among other things, none dirty) in order to actually live, who has been on the production side and knows how badly those "below the line" are shat upon (now to the point of being fired), and who has heard the directives to join the writers on the picket line but not to hassle (read: TALK to) them because this is not a time for networking (ew!), i so, so want these people to go fuck themselves.

one of the daily show writers had a strike diary published in the times today, and of the many (jokey) points she made, she asserted that a, writers are solitary creatures, and b, writers are not aggressive, hence the awkwardness in picketing. and while i think it's a funny piece, and that she's totally right on the first count, saying that writers aren't aggressive is total horseshit; there might be a little passive thrown in there for good measure, but writing professionally is so competitive it's terrifying, no matter if you're writing for tv, magazines, technical manuals, you name it, and if you aren't always hustling, you aren't just going to be not-writing, you aren't going to eat. if it's awkward for those writers on the picket line, it's probably because they have to show solidarity with people who could one day steal their jobs.

[image: on the tv show spaced, the character daisy steiner (front L, mouth agape, not simon pegg) was a freelance writer with a shit work ethic, a dog named colin, and no day job. she got away with this because she was both fictional and in a country with these magical things called "the national health service" and "the dole." she was also the most realistic freelance writer character in the history of television. go figure.]

previously, the times (and now EW) wrote negative pieces about the strike, pieces written by journalists (ie, writers) who probably aspire to TV gigs themselves, or resent how much more TV writers get paid even tho, as journos, they have stricter deadlines and higher wordcounts, or who simply hate writers (by which i mean, writers they don't know) because, like most writers, they hate themselves and all those who are dumb enough to chose the same soul-crushing profession. (so when writers have writer friends, as i myself do, we largely bond over how much we hate ourselves and our soul crushing profession. see how that works?) that, joss whedon, is why the press isn't being supportive.

that and because the wga, while a union, is to most writers more exclusive than the skull and bones. they are not taking a stand for the everyman, but for the one-in-a-thousand man (and one-in-ten-thousand woman) who was on the harvard lampoon, or had a cousin who was a manager, or just got luckier than most writers do.

i don't blame the writers for the strike, or the negative effect it's going to have on the industry-- the studios have had somethingteen years to make a deal and they haven't, and they're the ones firing production staff instead of coming back to the table, and writers are always getting screwed, i get it, i know, i don't disagree. but as i said to my friend cristie the other day, it just comes down to the fact that, as much as i support the wga, the wga in no way does anything to support me, let alone include me, and as a hermity, competitive, self-hating writer, that's why the strike gives me pause.

for most people in my position, it means more competition for/less magazine work, that much less of a chance of getting insurance anytime soon, and less of a reason to spend time in LA. which means more road trips, which means more travel diaries, which, ironically, means more writing. for new media. that i will never, ever get paid for. if only joss whedon would take up my cause, or at least help me pay for a much-needed physical.

fucking finally!

2007-11-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

the greatest five minutes about boston, ever, now finally on the yourtube (don't think i haven't been searching for ages) (altho i do have a search palsy):

also maysan thinks i hated my whole trip. does it really seem that way? because looking at the sea lions was enjoyable, just not exactly interesting to write about. and i still haven't uploaded any pictures because i'm still doing laundry/picking up our dogs from various points all over boston/rewatching certain episodes of friday night lights/being exhausted. but whatever, photos tk, now you're on national fuckin' tv, and here we are.

pt 2: galapagos

2007-11-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

the thing is, i don't even know where to start because this has been 7 days of waking up at 6 am and spending all day with my family and every single cast member from cocoon (plus steve guttenberg if he was espanish). seriously, not a coherent thought in my head, cepta that i'm tired and going to get a bad night's sleep besides. anyway.

let us start with the boat:
it's a converted ferry ship that used to hold a thousand cars and now holds about 65 people, most of which, ironically, are over 65. i really can't emphasize enough how fucking old these people are; some are merely 50 something, but then the median age is brought up by the one woman who's easily 80, who we call bluebonnet, because her sun-proofing haberdashery of choice makes her look like a way elder extra from "little house on the prairie."

i grew up with boats, but the dinky kind that never leave fresh water, smell like fine cheese (a nice way of saying mildew), and exist merely for two person sailing jaunts around the lighthouse or motorized trips into the harbor for ice cream. when kayaking in nh, i frequently pass the lake's yacht club (which, as a child, i pronounced as yaCHt, in the manner of the hebrews that most people [who aren't german/jewish/arab/hated by most of the world] can't make their throats do, which i know is ironic since that place is filled 24-7 [at least in the summer] with the WASPist, whitest, most-embroidered-with-golf-club-yellow-pants-wearing grandpas whose veins flow not with blood but with gin).

(and who, ironically, come from the same age bracket as 89% of the people on this boat.)

as i've mentioned before, going to this part of the world from anywhere not in central/south america is stupid expensive, so, while we were determined to make mom's dreams come true, corners were cut with the precision of a nascar driver. case in point: we got the two cheapest rooms this boat had to offer (one for becca and aaron, one for "the left behind"). the room i share with my parents (i'm over it) has two tiny windows that allign perfectly with the platform from which the zodiac boats arrive and depart everyday, and the curtains don't really close, and the entire bathroom is the size of my shower in new york, which was an upright coffin to begin with, but if you don't get dressed in the bathroom post-shower you're giving a free show to a bunch of ecuadorians and a handful of old people in wet suits and life jackets returning from yet another snorkeling trip to see manta rays.

[image: a, cute, b, the level of intimacy i had to share with my parents in our spacious sea cubby.]

and did i mention that i share a bunk bed with my father? surely i have mentioned that i share a bunk bed with my father. we chose beds based on who sleeps the worst, which is why mom got the single bed (she hasn't slept through the night since april 7th, 1976, the night before my sister was born), i got the bottom bunk because i'm the lucky audience of one for the nightly snorus (snoring chorus-- shit you not, i sleep with earplugs in, the custom ones i got when i was 15 and mom worried i was damaging my hearing at all those lemonheads shows), and dad, who once slept soundly through an entire flight from boston to a conference in hawaii when he wasn't even tired, gets the top bunk.

and it's perfect, because in this arrangement, nobody sleeps at all, not even dad, who climbed down the other night to pee, fell, and found his footing *on my calf*, thus waking me up by putting all of his weight on one of my precious bones. i cry out, wake out mom who can wake herself up when she snores just a little too loud (which is to say, unbelievably fucking loud), but my earplugs are in so it's all like some strange underwater nightmare. and we wake up everyday at 6:30, except for today when we woke up at 6 to go on an early morning hike up 300+ steps to see a nice view, which i just reasoned as being like going up the public stairs 3 times to get to my car in my days before having my own parking space, but i'm getting ahead of myself.

[image: the morning's hike, or, if my beat up silver prius isn't still waiting for me at the top i am so screwed.]

the activites/guides:
it's hard to break this trip down day-by-day because it's one big mental slurry of zodiac (boat) rides, "hikes" (which is old people for walking very slowly for an hour), sea lions, iguanas, kayaking, lectures, lava, darwin, old people, alexis the waiter (we always run to the same five-top at meals so we don't have to sit with any cursed strangers), oreos (in a jar, in the "library," kill me now), marine iguanas, blue footed boobies, land tortoises, more sea lions, the really mean naturalist who in another life was a lesbian gym teacher (same wardrobe even), coke zero (what diet coke has evolved into in this part of the world), not sleeping, food, land iguanas, sea tortoises, running to get to meals early to get the table with 5 seats and alexis, documentaries about galapagos, birds, and food again.

[image: marine iguanas, l-r: jubjub, jubjub, jubjub jr, jubjub x (converted to islam in prison), jubjub]

[everyday the extremely cheery/nice/rad head naturalists announces what documentary'll be showing in the lounge post-lunch or dinner, and it's always galapagos-related, but i always hoped once she'd announce a documentary and it'd turn out to be paris is burning or grey gardens or shoah.]

the guide was got the first day was the greatest, so natch, we've never gotten her again. i'll call her hilda, and she was super cheery, and didn't get too mad when we accidentally strayed off the path on the hunt for a horny frigate bird (in order to woo ladies, frigates inflate a giant red balloon on their chin, because nothing says, "i'm good mate material" like having a giant ball under your face).

[image: the frigate. ladies, hide your boners!]

then there's the lesbian gym teacher, then the weightlifter, who we actually like because he doesn't really give a fuck if you go off path. and he let aaron touch a crab, and all aaron's wanted to do the whole fucking time is touch something, which is of course completely illegal and i'm sure if he did touch a sea lion, even by accident, he'd be thrown in the galley for the rest of the trip, fined a jillion dollars, and be forced to support that sea lion for the rest of its life since aaron's touch would make the sea lion smell wrong to its mama, get it rejected by its herd, and force it to be raised in captivity at the darwin research center where it would probably see less of the galapagos than aaron did . or it might just die. the crab survived though.

[image: a, cuter, b, can't touch this]

[image: aaron begrudingly accepting the naturalists'/mr. hammer's dictum]

[also: please note that my mother bought one of those hats for each of us and i was the one member of our party not to wear one. call me vain if you must (which you'll take back after i post another picture later on), but when you're traveling on your parents' dime, are sharing a bunkbed with your father, and are constantly reading about a writer's strike you don't earn enough to be effected by, you tell me whether you'd wear the hat or hold on to the one spec of dignity you have left even if it means scalp burn.]

we went to the darwin research center on our day "in town," which was spent on the only island with a town/that isn't 99% national park (merely 70%). that was basically land tortoise day, where we saw diego, the male tortoise who had the noble task of pretty much single handedly repopulating one of the islands with land tortoises after goats were introduced there and ate all the vegetation, causing the tortoises to die either of starvation of falling down the mountain now that it was slick and plantless. we also saw lonesome george, the last tortoise of his breed, who has two women tortoises in his pen that he's a dick to. fuck him then, right?

then we went to a guy's farm to see land tortoises a strollin' through the fields for a snack, and up close, they look like 600 pound boulders with thin necks and heads with these little michael jackson nostrils. they eat by sticking their heads down to the ground and just yanking up grass and swallowing it whole, and i watched one eat for five minutes until loud cunt (see next section) came within 5 miles and the tortoise made a sound like a tire deflating and retracted its little grassy michael jackson face into it's fucking enormous shell. (interesting fact: because tortoises are in such hard shells and can't expand when they inhale, they have to move their innards around every time they breathe, especially when they hide, hence the great effort and sucking sound.) (i went to a lecture!)

[image: see, not vain, and this is probably the only picture of myself i'll ever display in a public forum, ever. my words might seem negative, but the pictures, they tell another story. and the tortoise is on the right, btw. jerks.]

it's hard to get sick of seeing sea lions, cuz they're just so fucking cute, and this is pup season (fun fact [more fun than interesting]: one big difference between sea lions and seals is that sea lions have external ears, and seals don't. fuck you, san francisco bitches!] i am sick of their poop (huge), and i'm sick of marine iguanas, and sick of the way [same lecture!] they sneeze out salt from the water they drink like gross baseball players. there isn't much in the way of fresh water around here, so all the animals seem to expel the salt from their faces. sea lions cry it out, which is why their eyes always look all junky, but that just makes them look even more like dogs, and dear lord do i miss my dog. unlike the sea lions, he's snuggable, but just like them, he smells!

[image: teva burn-- the white man's burden. sleeping on the bunk bed below the dude with teva burn-- the white woman's burden.]

and i only went snorkeling once because i kind of hate snorkeling, if only because of the wet suit. nobody looks good in a wet suit, not even a hot person, and especially not a person with boobs. not unless you're wearing your wet suit provocatively unzipped, where upon you're just posing for a poster in 1989 during a break between metal video gigs and having sex with random dudes in exchange for coke, not jumping into 65 degree water to just breathe through a plastic tube and look at maybe sharks through a piece of plastic smothered in your own saliva.

but let's say you've been on a boat for 6 days that feeds you 5 times a day and offered flan the night before so delicious you ate a hunk of it the size of a land tortoise. then you really don't want to attempt putting on a wet suit, especially if you started the week sans the flan, so then, like me, you end up swimming in that water wearing a bathing suit and trunks, and while i'm a hearty new england missy who used to jump into the lake in april *mid-thaw*, i'm also now old and slightly less stupid.

([literally cut and pasting this from an email to teeter since the medium exists for the two of us to exchange stories about our fatness:] for the first couple of days i ate these fiber crackers they had in the "library" and didn't realize that had *700 calories a package* and were essentially the weight gain nutrition bars from mean girls except in cracker form. so fucked! i can float home on my own!)

[image: just wanted to post another picture of a land tortoise. they can't all be laffers.]

but only slightly less stupid, because in i went, and all i saw were the same fish i saw in my two trips in a glass bottom boat (oh yeah, i went in a glass bottom boat), except through spit-o-vision, and under the threat of being kicked in the face by these two single obese women on this trip who probably aren't gay, just midwestern, but have found some sort of love none-the-less (one is here alone, one is taking care of blue bonnet, both have found a snorkeling buddy for life).

so i've kayaked, taken a glass bottom boat, communed with a land tortoise, "hiked," overeaten, not gotten guano'd on by a frigate, seen a shit ton of sea lions (still cute!), and basically communed with nature to such an extent that i am so ready to go home to my tivo and watch friday night lights now.

the passengers:
beard papa. beard papa is this douchey old guy who looks vaguely like that actor (now dead) who was in fast times and coockoo's nest and looked like human tortoise (ironic). or maybe he just looks like brian posehn's grandpa, but i like brian posehn, and i fucking hate this guy.

[image: beard papa and mama. don't ask how i got this picture. and it doesn't really do much to show why he sucks so much, but the hat's a decent hint.]

and he's so annoying because he suffers from that painful disease (painful for everyone around him) where he a, believes his every thought is correct and worth sharing, and b, believes you are entitled to his advice (like, "you should look at this bird," to which i can only respond, "you should kiss my ass"). and if there's anything i've learned in this life, it's that the most worthless advice is that of the unsolicited variety. jesus fucking christ.

if someone (9 times outta 10, a dude, but the few women who do this are the fucking worst) comes up to me and says, "you know what you should do?" my answer is, yes, and i'm fucking doing it. didn't ask you, cumsock. and if that sounds extreme, keep in mind i ran a hockey league for 7 years, and that i'm not a dude, and men absolutely love to tell women how to run things, especially where sports are involved, even if they've never run a fucking thing, not so much as a lap to help clean up the courts. i rarely see dudes do this to their dude kin, because walking up to a dude you don't know that well (at a hockey game, no less!) and telling him what they're doing wrong is an invitation to get your face punched in.

[image: l-r: dad's multi zippered'n'pocketed/legit raver pants, sandals'n'socks'n'sand, and some of the scariest old lady legs i've ever seen. and i know that makes me seem like a horrible person but it's not personal to this nice lady, just further proof that all bodies everywhere are gross, and i fear the day that my own legs look like gnarled drift wood.]

ooh! or if someone prefaces a statement with, "listen, everybody's been saying that," you have my official permission to not listen to a fucking word that comes after that. because what they're really saying is, "i'm fucking with you and making you paranoid, and i have no idea what other people think, but if i make you defensive enough you'll do what i want." when they stop talking, say, "if everybody's been thinking something, they can talk to me themselves. in the meantime, if they don't have the balls to step up, they can continue to suffer in silence, i don't have the time to read their minds. anywho. you weren't saying?"

so yeah, we hate this guy.

after a few days, you just start observing these fucking old people, who are more interesting than the native exotic animals much of the time, because those animals just sit there, and these people were too-short shorts, don't know when to shut the fuck up, have some of the ugliest old people legs i've ever seen, drink like fish, and are generally ridiculous. par exemple: on the first day, we went on that hike that showed us blue footed boobies, frigates (normal and face-balled), iguanas, sea lions, yellow footed boobies, and hawks, and we've seen this animals pretty much everyday since (give or take a tortoise, penguin, shark, etc.)

so, while beautiful, it's not exactly exciting. trying to get the good table is exciting. or avoiding beard papa. or trying not to stare at Doinks, who's a really nice older guy, but seems to have recently gained 30 pounds without upgrading from his thin clothes. seriously, his shirt keeps riding up as if he were the creepy gay dude in boogie nights. and his shorts are now doinks (which = too short man shorts) that give him mooseknuckles (mooseknuckles = male camel toe) not just when he sits, but stands. but at least he's not an asshole.

[image: look all the way in the back...doink!]

or blue bonnet! she's actually really interesting, and refuses help whenever it's offered, even if it's offered to not get crushed by a zodiac in a beach landing, but she looks way too much like mother theresa, and my sister and brother-in-law, being bone surgeons, are just bracing themselves for that day when the movements of the boat knock her over and she breaks a hip (she's already broken a finger! and still she goes out everyday to see the fucking iguanas!).

and loud cunt. loud cunt is a woman who is so loud that i can hear her in my sleep. i can hear her in my bones. the first day we were here, we had to run an emergency drill before we could pull anchor, and loud cunt practically molested my father in the act of "helping him" with his lifejacket. she did this in front of her husband, a guy who's even fatter than doinks and, natch, is a proud yankees fan. theirs is a marriage made in my worst nightmares.

other than her, there's orgasmatron (an old lady who seems to get off on every fact the guide says on hikes ("this is guano" "oooooh, uh, oooh. uh")). there's the gay couple (they're gay, together, at once). there's t-shirt man (been wearing the same t-shirt for 7 days, might sleep in it, who knows), teen nerd (currently receiving a gold medal for getting everything right on the end-of-the-trip info quiz and wearing a tool t-shirt, which makes me so happy i'm old now, cuz if i was his age i would be wondering how i could get him to fall in love with me even though he would ignore me either cuz i don't know linux, don't look like jessica biel in fantastic four, or both), the moron (he's a fucking moron), the hot brazillian guy (is the ship videographer, maybe the only guy in my age group, definitely teeter's type, but he once sneered at me when passing me in the hall, which was a, unnecessary, and b, too evocative of my teen days yearning for shitheads like teen tool), the giant social director (she's really nice but she looks like she took this job after getting cut from the WNBA, just like the woman i used to work with in the parks department who had "ieishsh" in her name and could easily palm a basketball), and the black person (just jokes!).

[image: another reason to leave the sea lions alone-- every pack of sea lions has a big daddy that guards the patch of beach, sexes the ladies, and basically enjoys king shit status. get too too close, and you have 600 lbs of screaming blubber, fur, and salty eye junk torpedoing in your direction. some lit'ler sea lion was coming upon this dude's turf, and this dude was like, "don't make me get up off this rock." so no, he's not adorably yawning.

also, i ruined the l/r photo dynamic, it's the last one, such is life.]

?:
tomorrow we disembark for the last time, and tonight we had baked alaska at dinner, which entailed a small ecuadorian man setting a quasi sheet-cake on fire in a dark dining room while the sound system loudly played the theme to ghostbusters.

please to reread that last sentence.

that's as good a place as any to wrap up this report of my boat trip, and tomorrow it's back to the mainland, and then back to boston after that. this was fun, these people were old, and that guy's an asshole. i ain't afraid of no ghosts!

galapaghosts!

so tired.

pt. 1: ma, fl, ecuador

2007-10-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

[please to note: i am writing this from a boat surrounded, from furthest to closest, by much ocean, a ton of sea lions and shit ton of old white people. as such, reception is slow and not picture loading-friendly. images to follow when i'm back in my own country, or at least the hilton in ecuador in the major city that rhymes with vagisil.]

[sorry, ecuador, and really to all of central and south america, for a, not speaking spanish (although i can't speak french or hebrew after 6+ years of instruction, either, and lately, my english isn't so hot [last night i had to ask my mother to define the word "espouse," as in, i espouse the theory that i am a dumbshit when it comes to language]), b, not being able to pronounce the names of your major cities (or remember their names, period, except their phonetic relationship to an over-the-counter topical ointment for lady jock itch), and c, all the irritating old white people on my trip (except my parents, who are at least funny), because they're the only people who can afford a trip like this even though they're too old, stiff, and veiny to be active enough to truly enjoy it (you wanna make a boner joke? fine, i won't stop you, but it wasn't my idea). so, sorry. also, sorry for not having enough juice to look up sorry in spanish on the internationalnets, so please cut and paste my apology into google translator for my full contrition. vamos, por favor.]

[i tried.] [also, image = sounds like]

MA, FL, VAGISIL:
our flight left very early from boston after game 2 of the world series, which means nobody got to sleep very early since FOX has been working for decades in a lab to find a way to make baseball games even more drawn out and boring and are showing us the fruits of their labor.really, when you think about it, all of the jewels in FOX's crown are 8% show, 92% advertising (same ratio as merchandise:attitude/empty space at supreme, or pleasant people: white-haired-unsolicited-advice-spewing-asspains on this trip). i tried to sit through an episode of american idol during its first season, but i couldn't understand why anyone would want to watch a show that's essentially the first act of any episode star search padded into an hour where only some of the contestants actually sing and then they all get together and "act" to try to get you to buy a ford focus. and no ventriloquists, or dance teams, or real hank kingsley! but the celebrity judges on both shows are equally credible.

[image: pronounced "why-a-keel," not like it's spelled, because then it really does sound like an ointment.]

anyway, we left early, and i was exhausted and cranky (see last entry), and by the time we got to miami i was so pissed off at my sister and my mother that i called teeter to complain about them while they were next to me on the trail of tears between terminals. my mother and my

and sister are an unbreakable team, always have been, always will be. if my sister were to stab me, my mother would ask me to sit still because the more i struggle, the more time my murder takes, the last time my sister has for her work out, and she needs her workout! why must i always make things so difficult!

[please note that a, i worked out with my sister today because this boat is seemingly trying to fatten you up to sea lion size, and b, my mom actually took my side the other night, and i said that if could put a plaque on a moment, this would be it, and then changed her mind and backed becca again, but i was sublime while it lasted.]

and my dad, god bless him, is allergic to confrontation, so while he'll remain cheerful and peace-keeping, i have to get on my cell to reach someone who actually has my back. and then in miami, my brother-in-law arrived, thus making everyone cheerful, and while i like aaron, i've never been so happy to see him because he is like heroin to my sister—three seconds with him and she goes from anxious patronizer to high, flaccid (yet still insanely muscular) corpse.

we got from miami to ecuador, meet up with our tour, and then got bussed on to the hotel where we got another ten minutes of sleep before waking up at 6 for our mini-flight to meet the boat to the galapagos (not that i remember where that was-- i'm sorry!). all told, we flew about 11 hours and i watched 5 episodes of the first season of weeds (eh) and rewatched 6 episodes of the first season of friday night lights that weren't on the bravothon/the most heterosexual day of programming in the network's history (damn that show's good! and how could anyone not love matt saracen? he sang to his grandma, he knows from art, and he's a fucking adonis, and oh my god this is the official moment i have turned into blanche dubois [which i guess is better than being bea arthur.]).

[image: like football or no, like the show or no, you've got admit it's a fine piece of outerwear.]

[please note: after writing this, i realized i had confused blanches and mixed up rue mclanahan with one of the great characters of american theater. but i'm keeping it, because i'm not just turning into a creepy ol'cougar, but an insane person.]

we got off the plane to a zodiac, which is basically a giant inflatable raft with a solid floor and a motor, where you sit on the sides and exit the boat with a stripe of water on your ass. plus, getting off the bus to get the boat, our guide du jour ("the weightlifter," one of many guides, and many nicknames) warned us not to pet the sea lions, let alone get closer than five feet, because tada, right there on some benches near the walkway to the boat, 4 giant sea lions, sleeping in the sun, not giving a single shit.

[image: not the landing sea lions, but still actual sea lions we hung out with, maybe their cousins, who knows, couldn't ask, don't speak spanish.]

in case you don't know, the animals on the galapagos, evolved so far away from humans as they are (and around very few predators, period), don't have the fight-or-flight instinct, which is to say, they don't run. or more aptly, they don't move. i'll get into this more later, but to go from wanting to stab my sister to a fancy hilton buffet breakfast in central america to hopping off a bus to a huddle of sea lions was, in a word, odd.

but the weightlifter (so named for his belt-buckle of a what looks like a flexing oscar statuette, and i say looks because he's still wearing it, and always wears it, even snorkeling) got us to the boat, and a nice lady got us to our tiny room in the hull, and i managed not to kill myself when i saw that, not only would i be sharing a room with my parents, i'd be sharing a bunk bed with my father (i called bottom bunk, but don't cry for him, because i can't sleep for shit lately and he could sleep sitting up in a restaurant if the mood struck). and then they told us there'd be cookies and announcements in the lounge, and then lunch, and then more food, and blue footed boobies, also. but meanwhile, cookies. two kinds. and crackers and fruit.

this isn't some monster cruise ship tho with kathy lee gifford on the ledo (?) deck though, so don't get the wrong idea. it's 60ish (mostly 60+-year-old) person tour co-run with a legit science org (tm/google fear), and all the guides are native naturalists, and every day there's a lecture about evolution or single-celled organisms or whatnot, and so many of the passengers on this boat are so fucking smug about it i want to scream but at least the tour itself is keeping it real.

so next time i'll discuss the boobies, and the 700 calorie crackers, and the other be-nicknamed characters/shipmates like old blue bonnet, the loud molester, mr. moron, mean meanie/lesbo gym eacher, and, of course, beard papa (how we hate beard papa!). for now, i love matt saracen, i am old (but not as old as the other people on this trip), and have you driven a ford lately.

[image: this boobie is mid-mating dance. or stoked about the series win. or about to poop.]

and while i am in the middle of the ocean, many miles from my birthplace, with the sea lions etc, I AM STILL IN THE RED SOX NATION. viva (spanish!) that obnoxious terms! in conclusion, woo. not sorry!

prologue: going on a holiday

2007-10-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

[above: what i hope to find evidence of on my trip.]

so tomorrow, i'm going on a trip with my family (mother, father, sister, brother-in-law) to the galapagos. on the one hand, who the fuck wouldn't want to go to the origin of the origin of the species, and kayak among the seals, and generally hang out with a bunch of aging nerds on an academic package trip boat that offers lectures, wifi, and fine cuisine.

on the other hand, i am a grown-ass woman going on a trip that costs more than i make in a year (on the books, anyway), so i'm sharing a room with my parents. so i'm basically going to be starring in my own very special episode of "get a life," except at sea. so i might have better hair than chris elliot, but he got to be on letterman back when it fucking ruled, and i get to bring ear plugs so i can sleep through my parents' two part deviated septum harmony.

or maybe i'm more like one of the many lovable losers on this season's primetime schedule, except instead of having a secret superpower that contrasts so nicely with my everydude loser image, i have just have boobs, an arthritic dogs, and debt. all of which i'd gladly trade for a computer brain or service to the devil or whatever horseshit i'll gladly sit through any night of the week (well, keep the dog, lose the arthritis).

anyway, i'm now in boston, where the air is cold and filled with victory (for now, at least, i know, i know). as such, we went out for ice cream, and then my father has bought a youkilis shirt to match my own (viva the jewk!). and please note that the line at jp licks was long as hell, because that's what we do in boston when it gets cold; boston fucking loves ice cream.

[ice cream with jimmies, which is not a racist term, because that makes no fucking sense. f-j care to weigh in on this one? because to make the leap from a set of discriminatory laws to those who said laws discriminated against to their race to the matching color of an ice cream topping seems like a little bit too much of a journey to me. [[and i buy confusion on the west coast when you say jimmies, because jimmy is slang for condom i guess, and i feel much better about inadvertently making people think my ice cream is coated with prophylactics than marchers on selma.]] but whatever, you want jimmies to be racist, go ahead, and also, paul is dead, 9/11 was a conspiracy, and that is the ghost of a little kid in three men and a baby. you got me, you clever genius you.]

like i said, the boat has wifi, and mom got a special waterproof digital camera, as well as uv protectant shirts, a brand new pair of those hideous foot basket watershoes, books about darwin, etc. but as mom prepared in all ways except remembering to bring a bunch of my swimming attire from my nh homestead (who's gonna be swimming in army shorts and discovering the origin of the skin rash? me me me!), the wifi might also be somewhat unreliable. so pictures of seals n'shit might have to wait. and certainly no reviews of gossip girl.

whatever tho, i have to be awake in 6 hours and still haven't packed my own youkilis shirt, cortizone cream, or application to the handsome boy modeling school. woo.

mini review: gone baby gone

2007-10-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

[photo: the sox win the pennant! the sox win the pennant! anyway.]

this is only a mini review because a, this is one of those movies where the plot gets twisty and i don't want to ruin it for anyone like i ruined that episode of battlestar for alex where starbuck "dies" (alex i'm sorry! and look, she lived!), and b, i sat so fucking close to the screen in century city that i didn't so much see this movie as i did the inside of casey affleck's nostrils. that said, i really liked this movie.

also, in case you did not know, and lord knows i haven't mentioned it enough, i am from boston. and not that the promotional material for this movie ever mentions it, but boston happens to be where this movie is set.

it's set in dorchester, specifically, which is one town over from where i used to go to high school, where my dog will hopefully be staying when i go on my travels (next week, get psyched for not-reviews!), where the popeye's used to be on blue hill ave (rip) where i'd send my mom in to get me and my sister chicken tenders, biscuits, and a trough of spicy fries (ordered through plexiglass) if we did well on tests in middle school, where i interned at sub pop the summer before college and sent out harmacy promos and made beds in the sub pop spare rooms for the grifters and elliott smith, where the chez vous rollerskating rink is that's great except that people tend to get shot there from time to time, where the whalbergs are from (before they bought their parents a nice house near the town i grew up in) and where mark beat and almost killed some guy but who's counting.

and finally, near the quincy quarries (featured in the film!) where i used to go rock climbing with the hiking club in high school (whatever, it got me out of PE), this when we weren't "hiking" through chickatawbut, which is an indian reservation in the blue hills, but really a place where gay men meet up for anonymous sex, so nobody'd ever have a heart to tell the math teacher who lead hiking club why there were always pairs of ripped underwears by the trail.

oh! and it's also where the dunkin donuts was where my friend dave would go and always be told to "cut your fuckin' hayah, you look like a queeyah," which is why i like all the local extras in this movie so much, because they all basically have the same function-- to insult people ("fuck you, cocksuckah!")-- which essentially all i've ever heard from people in dorchester, so these were parts these locals were born to play. and kudos to michelle monaghan for a, not feeling obliged to try the accent yourself (oof, vera farmiga in the depahted), and b, being as good as you were in "kiss kiss bang bang" when you were supposed to be about the same age as robert downey jr and still made it work.

anyway, i liked this movie, and hopefully, i've ruined nothing. except maybe battlestar galactica. and popeye's.

furthermore, WE'RE GOING TO THE WORLD SERIES, COCKSUCKAHS! PAPELBON, YOU MAGNIFICENT BAHSTAHD! BOSTON #1!

review: indie rock hates black people [now with addendum!]

2007-10-18T20:07:00.000-07:00

[sure to be edited later for typos when i can be motivated to give a shit.]

[ok, still not edited, but new addendum to follow at the end.]

well, maybe less a review, more a (rambling, natch) open letter, but either way, since i'm sick of pontificating about the fall tv schedule, i thought i'd weigh in on that sasha frere-jones article in the new yorker that laments how white rock music is. my initial reaction, naturally, was something along the above/best jpg of all time.

what's next? why aren't there more black artists making rockabilly? how does kathy from the thermals sleep at night knowing the drums on the last (excellent) record were so far from funky? since racial musical fusion equals credibility why does nobody praise the insane clown posse where praise is due?

then i started wondering when sasha frere-jones (now just f-j-- i'm lazy and his name, while not his fault, strikes me as pretentious) decided to be rock crit's point man on race; let us remember a year or so ago he went after the magnetic fields' stephin merritt for alleged racist tendencies. the accusation wasn't based on stephin's music, because if you're going to equate all dry, synth-y music with racism, then you'd have to expect every erasure or new order concert to turn into a klan meeting, and this is not the case. a gay pride parade, mayhaps, but f-j has not chosen homophobia as his cause (even though that's much more rampant in popular music, across several genres, including/especially those genres considered black, but that doesn't make for a sexy new pitch).

stephin merritt was outed as a racist for making a passing comment about how much he enjoyed the music from everybody's favorite incredibly offensive disney movie, "song of the south." and while the movie is more certainly racist, the song "zip-a-dee doo-dah" isn't so much, and it happens to be featured prominently in the film (which you might not know since disney prefers to act like "song of the south" never happened).

[photo: stephin merritt, face of hate (or at least a disdainful quip)]

mr. f-j also cited an article in the times in which merritt was asked to name a handful of his current favorite records, all of which were made by white people. oh, and merritt said in time out ny that he doesn't like rap music and named some specific black artists he found distasteful. thus, stephin merritt was labeled a racist. by these standards, most people i know over 40, white or black, are racists, but whatever.

because what you'd think f-j would know, as a knowledgeable rock critic for the paper of record as well as a former professional musician in the band Ui (which reached the height of their "popularity" during the indie rock heyday of the early/mid-90s just when the magnetic fields also peaked), is that stephin merritt is a cranky, drole, misanthropic gay dude who caps every sentence with a sigh and considers himself more of a composer than a rock musician. in other words, that merritt doesn't like rap, or doesn't acknowledge the forgotten, toxic context of a classic song, isn't only unremarkable, but totally meaningless. maybe it would be interesting if he pulled a paul simon, went to the congo, and returned with a record that sounded like cole porter meets fela kuti, but his failure to do so doesn't exactly put him on par with don imus.

so now we have round two, this new yorker piece that shows the general removal of black influence from white music, and even though its general assertion is nowhere near as hollow as his attack on merritt, it still seems awfully misguided. when johnathan franzen wrote that piece in harpers attacking the modern novel, he at least through down the gauntlet for someone, namely himself, to get fiction out of its rut.

but what is f-j trying to do with his platform? arrange a sit down between radiohead and al sharpton? because what he's actually doing, at least as far as i'm concerned, is doing what every rock fan over the age of 30 does when they talk about music, whether they're paid to do it or not-- bitch about how much better it used to be, whether that means it was more "pure," more "original," or, to chose f-j's approach, more "black."

[photo: "wilco? hell no i will not!"]

and every one of those fans can reel off examples, give loads of supporting evidence by way of naming all the bands they used to love in high school. rock critics might consider themselves more objective, but at the end of the day, it's hard to pretend that you weren't once a 16-year-old who truly believed that husker du/pavement/the arcade fire saved your life. and if you're chosen rock criticism as your career, you really do buy the life saving bit, because otherwise, you wouldn't have entered a field that pays you less than a part-time gig at wendy's, but garners you even less respect.

but, while being a "serious" critic and writing about music that's maybe slightly more obscure than you're average 3 star special in rolling stone is more artistically satisfying for the author, it's also often about as interesting to read as a description of someone else's dreams. [and i'm not talking here about interviews/band profiles, i'm talking straight up criticism-- record/concert reviews, essays like the one in question, etc.]

if you're writing for what you know is a knowledgeable audience, like a review for arthur or wire, you're a, not getting paid, and b, essentially wasting your time unless you have something unfavorable or provocative to say. because a positive review will read like an effusive, flowerly shopping list of the band's equally excellent influences, and besides, if you're writing to an audience of record nerds, they're probably aware of the record already and don't really care about your opinion. unless of course your opinion is vitriolic and controversial. (but not so vitriolic as to anger the record company so they cease sending you promos, the sale of which to used record stores being your only reliable source of income since, remember, you're not getting paid.).

then again, magazines and the critical musings therein don't carry the weight that they used to, if only because it's easier to just download a cd and make up your own mind than read what some schmuck has to say before going through none of the trouble of finding a torrent. of course, some rock critics are just fun to read, or at least were, but lester bangs died a long time ago, and those who emulate his style these days often read like that high, overly-serious, talky asshole at the party who really needs you to understand why this band he just saw at that warehouse near that restaurant by where that other club used to be is the best band and how their mixture of feedback, noseharp, and a singer who wears pantyhose over her jeans (and also has big tits) will change your MOTHERFUCKING LIFE.

[photo: lester bangs-- fan of rock music, cough syrup, and prophetic garments]

f-j acknowledges the way the internet's changed music-- he asserts that easy access is part of the reason that musical strands don't intersect-- which, when you think about it, seems to be the opposite of true. while i grew up in the age of having to get tapped into a secret rock society by some elder statesman/your friend's sister in college who'd then guide you to an unrest cd, these days kids can get entire discographies in a fraction of the time it took me to hunt down "fuck pussy galore and all her friends." if anything, music is mixing at such a rapid rate that you don't even notice what influences come from where.

when the stones "borrowed" from the blues, it was innovative and exciting. 40 fucking years later, when robert johnson and muddy waters are now a permanent part of rock dna, going back to the lab and adding more blatant blackness to rock music results in korn and limp bizkit-- not only shitty, but über-white, if that's possible. but often, either because these cross overs are so commonplace we don't notice them or because these influences are coming from so many places that they aren't easy to place, the music produced these days is as much of an indiscernible slurry as the contents of your fridge put through a cuisinart.

there might not be any obvious "blackness" in the arcade fire's music (music, which, by the way, sounds a lot like 3 mile pilot/isn't music i particularly like)-- none of the heavy percussion or ye olde call-and-response that f-j refers to (and which, when singled out that like and given african roots, has a jimmy-the-greek quality to it that gives me the willies)-- but i guarantee you it's there. if they're borrowing from virutally any band from the 60s, then they're borrowing from black music second hand. or third hand, since they're canadian.

one thing f-j also fails to remember, despite being a rock critic and a former musician, is that the influences a band names and the influences you hear on their records aren't always the same thing; eg, i once read an interview with L7 in sassy where they sincerely claimed to be influenced by del tha funkee homosapien. f-j lists of a handful of black influences on Ui, but i saw this band twice in my life, and to me they sounded like yet more of the mathy bullshit that was so popular in their day, another band to put on a bill with tortoise and five 5tyle that everyone (read: critics) thought were so innovative but to me sounded like minimalistic phish, all the notes with none of the "fun." so yeah, i did not hear the meters. and at both shows, they managed to be both testy and stiff; james brown, they were not.

[photo: if you listen closely, you can really hear traces of "bob dobalina" all over "hungry for stink".]

[one of those shows i saw was when Ui opened for stereolab at nyu-- the opening opening act, it's worth noting, was dj spooky, who is not only the least funky/soulful/let's just say black djs alive (despite being black), but is also proof that anyone can call themselves a dj regardless of what they do with or without turntables, because this guy didn't spin records or even turntablize as much as spend a half-hour recreating the sonic experience of a running dishwasher (how do i remember? i wrote a review). how that's dj'ing, i'm not sure, but whatever, i made dinner tonight on a stove, so now i'm dj dinner. why the fuck not.]

[photo: Ui, although i can understand why you'd mistake them for earth, wind & fire.]

so f-j, feeling ever so deeply that things aren't as good as they used to be, truly believing his old band stole the soul, and hoping to god not to lose two of the sweetest gigs in the history of rock criticism by seeming irrelevant, has decided to take on (and in some ways create) the issue of race in (indie) rock. this despite all of the argumentative flaws mentioned above, praising dinosaur bands that actually straight-up stole from black musicians, and, most of all, the strange, ridiculous notion that indie rock actually means something; that it is a viable, popular form of artistic expression worth analyzing, applying high ethical standards to, and lamenting over in any way. in other words, i'm glad (indie) rock saved his life (and mine too, maybe), but that doesn't mean it's objectively important, especially to people who aren't white, socially retarded, and myopic (and i mean in the literal, glasses-wearing sense, but behold how it works both ways).

the irony is that there are countless writers searching to make music relevant enough to other people so they can make a living of it as critics, but they start taking it so seriously they sterilize away all the "life saving" qualities they once held so dear. in some ways, making indie rock seem important is f-j's job; in other ways, making it important in that way is what makes rock criticism suck so much in the first place, makes it seem even more arbitrary and ridiculous. like thinking your band will be the next great rock/funk hybrid when they really sound like a singing calculator.

i hope f-j's opinion serves him well-- keeps tongues wagging, gets him a raise, maybe a spot as a talking head on a vh1 special or two (and won't kalefa sanneh be pissed!). but he has to know deep down that indie rock isn't any more or less black (or just plain broken) than it was when he found it, played it, or started writing about it. rock has not forsaken you, f-j-- you needn't go to your room, put on that grizzly bear record, and hold your knees wondering why they're the only band that understands. don't kill the messenger, or whitey. rock doesn't need saving anymore than your life does. nor, i guess, if you keep writing provocative pap like this, does your career.

[below: husker du might have saved your life, but if you keep writing stupid shit that makes you sound like the president of your high school's multicultural society/annual sponsor of a zebrahead screening and discussion group, husker du are more than willing to taketh that life away.]

[addendum: please note that i did not write this to a pick fight with anyone. so then you might wonder why i did write this-- and publish it in the most public of forums, no less!-- and the answer is, i did it to amuse myself and the 6 people who know this site exists. were i good at self-promoting, and i am not (see my other co-blog, linked to the right), this would certainly be intended as a tossing of an e-gauntlet, but as it stands, not so much.

[[i used to promote shows, and it wasn't really my thing, if only because promoters have to promote themselves as much as the shows they're putting on (or at least that's what i gleaned from the half semester i spent at Sean Agnew's Institute for Promotional Technologies before i dropped out. i sometimes regret not sticking around since some promoter [not sean, who i've never met and who, during the time i was at SAIPT, was taking a sabbatical in mike mckee's beard] taught a masterclass junior year i really could have used called "not paying interns, venues, or taxes: greed as scene pride!," and for some reason it was always held in a parking lot in williamsburg and was actually a matt & kim show.]]

[[[if you didn't get any of the above references, don't worry, it just means you've never been to abc no rio/eat meat/have a life. sincerely, viva you, teach me your ways. oh, and much respek to matt & kim. and mike. and fine, everyone else i mentioned in the above tangent, whatever it takes to be able to make a joke without starting beef, especially since everybody mentioned above is probably vegan.]]]

"good" freelance writers, and by "good" i mean "not working a day job," can self-promote with ease, usually by writing articles like the one i take umbrage with above and starting fires all over town. this is not my style. getting people to hate you is a short-cut to notoriety, but i'd rather be undercover than pride myself on how much i piss people off, especially if the off-pissing is done for off-pissing's sake.

and don't think, based on the length and number of images i pulled from google, that the above essay reflects that i care a great deal about this issue or the author of issue-y essay, because i think i wrote an equal number of words about some tv show about assholes i only watched 15 minutes of and really didn't like. i once filled six post-it notes with instructions for 2 hours of dog care. mama likes to write.

don't think you have to be a fire-starting business card-giver to succeed in freelance, either-- i've gotten some of the best writing jobs i've ever had this past year, and i live like a monk right down to the robe and pretzels. and strangely, those jobs have been virtually anonymous. i'm a leaf on the wind, watch how i soar, etc.

long story short, increase the peace, but decrease the foolish notion that indie rock was, is, or will ever be a sound of blackness. i'm going to go listen to "pretty suzanne" by the monks now (the chorus is "please please love me!"-- ironic!). manatee out.]

mini mini review haikus: i'm reed fish, rockin in the free world, ryan adams

2007-10-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

the film "i'm reed fish":
waste of baruchel
how'd this bland movie get made?
et tu, rory g?

rockin in the free world, by neil young:
fucking love this song
the lyrics are so absurd
toilet paper what?

ryan adams/"young winds" made me cry:
what a cocksucker
even more than i hate him,
hate there's songs i like

again, sick of reviews, but soon i'll have some travels to log, so there's that to look forward to. and look, LadybiRdS were in billboard! 2 legit 2 quit, bitches!

review: the darjeeling limited

2007-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

[l-r: a literal 3rd generation rip-off of max fischer, dignan going through the motions, and beautiful sun dial-faced adrien brody doing his best to make his character more than "the one with the sunglasses."]

i could go off on this, and i mean OFF, like an entire separate website on the subject or a graduate thesis in cinema studies at some suspect university, but it basically breaks down like this: i love rushmore, love it like a man loves a woman (if that man isn't gay. and i guess if that woman isn't gay, either). all anderson output after that, not so much.

rushmore's chock full o'random quirk (mr. little jeans, hand jobs, budweiser swim trunks), but also cohesive quirk, little details that add up to themes that add up to lovely motifs. eg: when max first sees ms. cross, she's reading robinson crusoe, and we hear the sea. max's dad tells max he's like a clippership captain, married to the sea. then max tries to build ms. cross an aquarium. one of her students paints an octopus. then we find out that ms. cross' husband drowned. mr. blume has already done a high dive into his pool and let himself sink to the bottom. etc, etc.

that there are random slow motion moments, a supercool british invasion soundtrack, and meticulous visuals (sets, costumes, you name it) is a bonus, but they're not all that makes the movie great. there's real substance there beneath the artifice, genuine sincerity dolled up with hipster panache. it's stylish without being aloof. it's heartfelt without losing its sense of humor. it's a coming of age movie on par with harold and maude. it's just fuckin great.

and i would argue that every movie wes anderson has made since rushmore has been little more than rushmore afterbirth, because the use of quirk, music, and visuals are the same (sometimes exactly; the siblings in the royal tenenbaums basically add up to max, quirk-wise-- a better looking/more famous max fischer voltron, if you will). problem is, the heart is gone.

the characters have as much depth as the zombies song they die to in slow motion, and why wouldn't they, because nothing seems to be at stake. mr. blume explains his love for ms. cross by saying, "she's my rushmore, max," the thing he lives for, the center of his world. in these latter films, none of the characters seem to have their own rushmore. they just have mustaches, or headbands, or monogrammed belts, but those do not a compelling character/film make.

[margot tenenbaum wrote plays. max wrote plays. but he also did other things, things more substantial than wear eyeliner and enter dramatically to nico.]

so basically, the darjeeling limited is rushmore on its third trip through the washing machine. three sad brothers on a train with nothing much to do, so they say everything they're feeling about their dead dad while framed by stunning sets, fill time by walking slowly to the strains of a(nother) kinks song, and manage to have a short brush with bill murray. it's the ultimate in detached artifice, like a photoshoot for W magazine adapted for the screen. and-- symbolic spoiler alert-- when the boys finally come together at the end of their trip and run for another train, leaving their bags behind-- literally TOSSING THEIR BAGGAGE-- it's beyond shallow, it's lazy.

the darleeling limited (and the royal tenenbaums, and the life aquatic) is like max as we first meet him; too caught up in frivolities like calligraphy club and kite flying society to see what's really important, let alone risk what's really important and emerge victorious (to the vocal stylings of a young rod stewart). darjeeling has the calligraphy and the kites, but nothing of import, no risk, and no real victory. i can see max confronting these empty later characters-- "i saved latin! what did you ever do?" with no good answer for that, they'd probably just skulk away, ashamed. in slow motion. to a kinks song.

mini review: friday night lights

2007-10-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

FYI: it was reported in the LA times last week that warner bros has officially decided to stop making movies with female leads. this is odd, considering they made "the brave one," and also because it's COMPLETELY RETARDED.

i know boycotts are often ridiculous and futile when it comes to this sort of thing, especially since i am posting this via time warner cable, but my small gesture is not going to see michael clayton (which stars a-- no-- the man, george clooney). and posting this here.

*friday night lights
i couldn't watch this show past the pilot when it came on last year, because a, it had a lot of football, and i really don't know shit about football aside from the fact that touchdowns are good, high school football players in towns where football is king are generally the biggest dbags you'll ever meet, and the biggest football player at my prep school where football was far from king (hockey was, of course!) insisted on going through finals week (in january, in new england) wearing a shirt slit down the sides that made him look like a perp on cops, and b, in the 44 minutes of actual show, there were two large, public prayer sessions to the big JC, and i know that happens a lot in almost every state that doesn't touch the ocean, but that's a reason why jews like the salty air.

what's weird tho is that the pilot of this show isn't so representative of the series itself, at least in the chunk of s1 episodes i saw on the bravo FNL-athon in m'tivo. i've seen 6 plus episodes, none of which contain actual football or a public shout out to god jr. just some interesting scenes from a marriage, some very realistic teen performances, and murderball featuring lucien from "undeclared." i don't know why they'd put a pilot out there that's so misleading about the show's content on such a basic, elemental level, but there's a lot about tv i don't understand. like, how the actor who played a goofy cad on chicago hope is now a producer/auteur. if you consider this or the kingdom "aut."

i still have trouble caring about football, especially since the show's set in texas where football is everything and i know that if i had to live in a town remotely like that i would have hated those fuckers for getting a $3k camera from their booster club while the drama department couldn't afford a stage. but i don't have trouble caring about a lot of the people on this show, at least in as much as i care about characters on a tv show i barely watch. so as long as i can ignore the football crap, i think i have a new season's pass. that is, after all, what what jesus would do.

mini mini review: i like pushing daisies, but not as much as wonderfalls (a haiku)

2007-10-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

that "5 years, 8 hours" crap
i could live without
yay lee pace's 'brows!

seriously sick of reviewing tv, but these are weirdly busy times. until things settle down, here's a picture of chris o'dowd. enjoy.

mini review round-up: the king of kong / moonlight

2007-10-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

*the king of kong: a fistful of quarters
i don't want to say too much about this movie, because, as much as i loved it, i worry i'd end up throwing in so many of my favorite moments that this review would turn into a detailed synopsis and then you (all 4 of you who read this) would never bother to see the film.

(not that it's easy to see-- the only theater it's playing at in LA is the $3 place on melrose where emma's sister lisa went to see a movie and had to leave midway because some guy a coupla rows over told the guy behind him to stop talking on his cellphone and the cellphone guy responded with a blast of mase to the complainers eyeballs, and even then lisa only knew about it when some employee came in and said, "everybody out, mase," in a tone that implied whatever, somebody got mased again. but then they let them in again five minutes later, but that's at least $4.50 worth of entertainment right there.)

long story short though, "the king of kong" is a documentary about two men competing for the world's highest score in donkey kong, which, according to the many aspergers-y men in the film, is the hardest of the old school arcade games. one of the guys, billy mitchell, has been a video game champ his whole life, as well as a successful hot sauce entrepreneur and husband to a woman with the fakest tits i've ever seen (and i live in LA). the other is steve wiebe, a talented guy who can't seem to get a break, who gets obsessed with playing donkey kong after getting laid off from his job at boeing.

billy is so cartoonishy douchey that you wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in a cave lair slowly stroking a cat, and steve is such a softy that at one point, despite being a grown man built like a minor league baseball player, he cries on camera. and i don't believe for a second it's just manipulative editing-- so many of the guys in this movie are so ott/on the spectrum that you couldn't make them up if you wanted to. and while i'm stopping myself from detailing any of the action, believe you me, there is action, and humor, and suspense, AND many shout outs to the funspot arcade in weirs beach, nh, which, unbeknownst to me, is the premiere old school arcade in our nation.

(weirs beach is one of my top 3 places in nh-- funspot is on the highway, but there are at least three equally amazing arcades right on the boardwalk, plus a waterslide park, plus fried dough, plus the largest annual meeting of motorcycle enthusiasts on the east coast. bikers AND nerds! AND fried foods. heaven on earth.)

[oh, that's billy, a jug of his hot sauce, and a tie that isn't the american flag (which is rare for him, believe me).]

"king of kong" is like "american movie," one of those documentaries you go to see expecting something ironic and smug that turns out to be totally earnest and engrossing. i would absolutely go to see this movie again, even under threat of mase.

*moonlight
moonlight is that new show on cbs about a vampire PI that is essentially angel except with a different overly-producted hairdo and none of the side-character fixins that made angel bareable (oh, fred, you were taken from us too soon). or that's what i thought until i sat through the first five minutes, where not-angel (don't remember his real name, don't care) is lying in a michael jackson-style freezer, imaging himself being interviewed by some lady, against a black background, cup of coffee in hand (blood and two sugars?), debunking vampire myths-- he doesn't fear crosses or garlic, he's impervious to wooden stakes, daylight makes him sick but not flamey, he sleeps in a freezer instead of a coffin, etc.

and then of course he wakes from his she-charlie rose fantasy to say something like, "i often wish i could just explain myself." i often wish writers wouldn't use such tacky, awkward expository devices, or delude themselves into thinking they can do the modern-day vampire myth better than joss whedon can, but at least moonlight reveals its true colors within the first three minutes, thus saving me many more minutes of sitting through crap.

[photo, l-r: not-wesley, not-cordelia, not-angel, not-first season blonde lady who left to be gay on law & order]

actually, i did stick around for 3 more minutes to see what jason dohring (of VERONICA MOTHERFUCKING MARS) would contribute as vampire #2, and all he did was a watered down version of logan echolls, and by watered down version i mean he played an obnoxious guy whose most interesting feature was his wacky vampiric contact lenses. and again, at least moonlight showed me that it was the writing on V(MF)M, not the (extremely scientologist) actor, that made logan such a great character. so my 8 minutes of moonlight viewing were not a total waste.

but really, what the fuck were the creators of this show thinking, changing up the rules for tv vampires that joss hath established? david greenwalt, co-creator of angel/major honcho on buffy/inventor of the term "hellmouth"/overall rad dude, was working on this show for a while, probably given the job in order to keep him from straight-up suing these fuckers for plagiarism, but i can understand why he quickly bailed. it's not just a matter of joss loyalty, either, at least for me-- the potential for being staked, bursting into flame, or seared with holy water ("it only makes me wet," claims our hero, who would then at least incurr damage to his mortal hair) is what gave angel much of its uniqueness and dramatic tension.

(because there sure as shit couldn't be any real sexual tension, at least until they created a loophole to de-neuter their star, and as i've said many times, angel had more loop holes than most crochet work i've done, except mine involve yarn, not outta-nowhere prophesies or finding holes in established prophesies or flashbacks to ireland in the 1800s were i have to wear a shirt, even tho the vampire to my right (who is actually almost 20 years my senior) does not, because i've gained so much weight over the course of my televisied vampire career and co-vampire remains lithe and bleached despite the fact that he's as old as wilfred brimely.) (and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call, "a stretch.")

so sans tension, moonlight's really another csi, but our lead detective is an immortal guy who shoots up blood (ok, even high school goths know vampires drink blood, nigga please). n'thenx. i'd rather just watch the "smile time" episode of angel or that V(MF)M from season 1 where logan gives his first righteous beating (to one of the (grown) kids from home improvement-- both of whom cameo!).

maybe some channel (NOT FOX) should just have a battle of the network stars-style show where the network stars are actually actors from beloved cult shows so that people like me can avoiding having to sit through desperate housewives in order to see nathan fillion and can instead get our fix by watching weevil and wesley compete in shotput or something. because i sure as shit won't watch moonlight again. and unlike on angel, that prophesy is rock solid.

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

2007-09-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

*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!

mini review: chuck

2007-09-25T12:38:00.001-07:00

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.

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

2007-09-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

[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.

review: "the IT crowd" series 1

2007-09-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

[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.