May 2006 Archives
Something Corporate's I Woke Up In a Car just came on the Muzak station... and I can't claim to have avoided it invoking the word enjoyment. I don't care if it's simple and a watered-down, pop-punk Ben Folds-homage--the band just writes some damn catchy songs.
Look at this thing:
and
...that's a goddamn bird in the background of those pictures, which I snapped as inconspicuously as I could. This customer just brought her bird into our store. Don't get me wrong--awesome. But still. A bird? And that's not all. Just when I thought it couldn't get any stranger, Phantom Planet's California came on the overhead and Bird Lady was obviously a bit of an OC fan. She clicked her fingers and tapped on the desk a couple of times and the Bird started pecking the desk in fucking unison to the song. I shit you not. I just watched a bird sit on my desk and tap along to the OC theme. Jesus this is a strange day. And by stange I mean mind-blowingly awesome now.
We saw X-Men 3 yesterday. It was enjoyable to watch. That's about as far as it goes. I suppose they had to find a way to stop making more movies... if they had followed the Bryan Singer way consistently they would need like 20 films to tell the X-Men saga accurately. As such they took the Phoenix saga storyline they were working on and merged it with (from what I can tell) the House of M/New World storylines going on right now and gave it the cinematic spin. IE: Crushed everything into a small period of time, refrained from character development and took out any dialogue that couldn't be branded on a T-Shirt. With the complaints out of the way it was fun to watch Fraiser beat the shit out of some people. This is not in the vein of the first two or the two Spiderman movies, but it wasn't quite Jurassic Park 3 bad. We hit up the Ultrascreen showing last night and Aaron, SS, myself, Mike and Maya all brought our Nintendo DS's and while we waited the 45 minutes before the previews began we played the shit out of some Tetris. I expect everyone was jealous. When's the last time you played Tetris in a movie theater instead of just listening to Babyface and reading trivia on how much Mel Gibson liked the eyebrows on the animatronic Jesus in The Passion?
Lastly: A cry out to anyone who has read They Shall Know Our Velocity! My copy has a section of about 35-40 pages that breaks from the storyline to present a POV set after the events in the book from the other main character, discounting several mainstays of the piece and correcting conversations and sequences of events. It completely changes the reverberance and context of the book, and it's also something I have never seen in a copy besides mine. I picked the book up for my dad for Christmas and I've leafed through several copies at various bookstores, some with different covers and/or publishers and some identical to mine: I have never found this segue outside of the lone copy I grabbed over a year ago. It's a little offsetting. Any takers on this?
MySpace was supposed to be on the ball for this but it is not. It's safe to assume alcohol is responsible for any of this. These were both for testing purposes and aren't indicative of anything. All I know is I'm a little stir crazy and if I don't start doing something soon I am going to start eating babies. I don't mean to offend--it's just a Modest Proposal.
Also: Here.
Have fun.
I made another purchase at Best Buy last night that I'm emphatically pleased with. More to come on this later, most likely around 11 or so when MySpace decides to stop being such a dick.
Alongside and independent of said purchase I grabbed one of the last copies of Irreversible off the shelf. I had best-laid plans of making this purchase at some point, but my hand was for all intents and purposes forced when I came across a notation on our "Action Center" that the title was to be pulled because it [quote]did not align with company values[/quote]. Best Buy has pulled three other such titles over the past few weeks for the same reason, and the first few looked to be mindless 70's horror movies/softcore porn so I wasn't too concerned. Titles like Don't Deliver us From Evil don't exactly move me and their disappearance is handled with the same lack of attention as their arrival.
Irreversible, on the other hand, is a very good French film that received many awards and made a lot of top picks from critics with whom I would not feel ashamed aligning myself with. I rented it a few years back and it does have two scenes that are a little disquieting, albeit not entirely cinematically unpropitious. The film is the French Memento, about a man seeking revenge and told backwards. It is unflinching, it is a project that examines human nature and how evil begets evil, and it blends CG into situations that you would not expect CG to be used, doing so in a way that makes the entire film seem like one continuous shot without dulling the brain over time as something like Russian Ark does. The two scenes in question are horrid in the way you would expect a movie about the Holocaust or the Backstreet Boys to be horrid and they are not exploitative by any means. They did still earn a nice little box on the front that states [sic] Warning: This Film Contains Scenes of Graphic Sex and Violence. For Mature Audiences Only, which made me terribly excited to bring it up front so I could purchase it from my co-workers. By one look at the cover and the description on the back this warning seems redundant, and if anything I expect it serves to draw in customers who would be seeking "graphic sex and violence" and who would consequentally be dismayed to learn that the film is, indeed, in French.
The point is: Best Buy is pulling this title because they are uncomfortable with the content and not the context. This is the equivalent of them taking a film preaching the dangers of spousal abuse and removing it from the shelves because it shows a woman getting hit, and not just because it's probably a terrible Lifetime movie. This is what Walmart does. It's a step towards censorship. This film doesn't attempt to market itself to children, it isn't misleading, and it's not a morally decadent film. It seems to me it should be up to the customer if it aligns with their own values, not Best Buy's, and the fact that a movie that is anti-violence and anti-rape is considered in opposition to Best Buy's values... What the hell are their values then? I'm a little concerned. Top that off with the fact that the stores just sold out of their copies of the new Ashley Parker Angel and... Jesus.
On a side note the sole copy of O-Town Solo goodness that I sold to a customer was to a person of about 16-18 years of whom I couldn't distinguish any sort of identifiable... sex. I'm pretty sure it was a male who just happened to be fully-capable of nourishing an infant through the skill of lactation, but regardless of which way the chromosomes fell I was a little dismayed. And amused. And [s]he was damn excited for Ashley Angel, which made it all the more entertaining. I've come to the conclusion that at one point in time the customer's parents had to come to a mutual decision on an important and unique problem in a quick way. I can only hope they're okay with the choice they made.
Lastly: The new Guster leaked. I don't know if the word delicacy applies, but I can't resist the urge to use it. I'm for sure checking these guys out again come Summerfest.
My prescription to pragmatism aside, I'm beginning to revert to a state of cautious cynicism. Put another way: I'm aware of several things that require change in some form, but I can't think of a single one that will quell this growing sense of irritation I feel towards people in general. I'm still maintaining a state of patience but my patience towards the practice of patience is starting to decline.
Because I am bored, I will summarize:
I just bought a new guitar.
I think there's a strong chance I'm going to walk out on and quit Best Buy in the coming weeks.
I'm
also looking into the logistics of faking my death to eliminate debt so
I can resurface as a street juggler on the west coast.
That is all.
So on Facebook a few of my friends decided to make a group called "Emo music, the worst oxymoron ever." The description reads:
For anyone who knows that emo music is not in fact music. Just because you put some beats on and read from your diary does not mean you are making music.
They also have an illustrated emo kid, complete with tears and weezer glasses and bulletin points tagging off the insults in the proper locations. I can't stand the term Emo, and I can't stand the majority of the "scene" bands out there, but I still felt the need to join and give them my "You're Wrong" reply. I figured MySpace was probably the best place to see if my historical recollection is flawed, so feel free to chip away if you think I'm an idiot and have just proven it. Please note the and have just proven it before chiming in that I am an idiot. This latter is not false and I won't argue that it is, but at least have reasoning behind the claim. This was my group response:
***
I just needed to join and point out that it seems like you have a problem with Emo Subculture, or "Trendy Ass Kids", and actually don't have a clue what would constitute Emo "music." I HATE the term myself, as Emo is more of a Phylumatic term than it is an indvidual stratum, but it's important to respect musical origins even if the end result does, well, suck.
Elvis Costello is largely considered one of the first "true" Emo artists as he put the focus on the abandonment of form and more on "emotion", both stylistically and lyrically. During the transition from "Emo" focusing on DC-based punk bands such as Rites of Spring, Milwaukee itself became more and more prevalent in the scene, birthing such bands as Cap'N Jazz, Sunny Day Real Estate, Boy's Life, The Promise Ring and Braid. While a more appropriate term for these specific bands would be Experimental Indie Rock, the "Emo" label gets used more often and they were influential bands in a genre that had not yet given way to over-saturation and commercialization.
By the late 90's remaining bands from the Indie/Screamo/Post-Hardcore sub-genres that make up "Emo" had started to find some mainstream success, these notably include bands such as Jimmy Eat World (who were playing "scene" shows with underground namesakes like Chrstie Front Drive and SDRE as early as 93-94), Saves the Day, and Further Seems Forever, the latter pretty much independently thanks to Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional. As interest piqued larger companies started buying up newer arrivals to the scene and hundreds of the Emo "clone" bands that started springing up and the music became much more accessible, much more commercialized, giving way to the focus on image and terms such as "Scene Kids".
You're looking at an over-saturated 27-year old music scene and a marketable image trend, of course it's going to be a great source of ridicule. But "putting some beats on and reading from their diary" would be making more fun of Beat Poetry or Interpretive Performance than it would Emo Music. It's the equivalent of using Three Doors Down as a launchpad to claim that all rock is terrible, including the Rolling Stones and Bowie. It's a terribly uninformed place to be coming from.
I love giving shit as much as the next guy. In fact, I go so far as to say I love giving shit MORE than the next guy. But when I do it I direct my ire towards the correct target and with stunning execution, tact and precision. You're going after the Emo Image, which I can fully get behind. You're going after Scene Kids, which I can again fully get behind. And if you were going after "Emo" as an oft-abused musical term I could get behind that too. But pulling insults and forging a Facebook group off of a few kids you see around campus that apparently like Hot Topic and aren't aware of the concept of Self Identity--it's flat out ignorance, and I really didn't take any of you specifically as ignorant people. Well--never mind, I'll stick with that claim I just made.
So essentially you've created an anti-sentiment group targeting kids who prescribe to poor fashion sense and a lack of musical taste based on a half-baked view that lacks any sense of dilineation and seeks not one whit of counterpoint? Wow. Way to go, Nazi's.
PS: Yellowcard does suck.
***
Anyone on UWM's facebook can find the group here. Anyone who wants to provide backing vocals for me feel free, I'm always game for starting a good argument, especially if I'm not the lone player on my team.
EDIT: This is a quote I thought applicable from Tom of Houston Calls' page:
If for one minute you think you're better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day t-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.
In Utterance: We are here!
In Remembrance: We were gone!
I can't actually tie together thoughts in a coherent enough manner to justify a posting, sorry. My head is under a bit of construction or, at least, I hope it is--things are a bit of a mess.
I mistakenly believed that I worked at 10:00 today, so when I got a call while I was getting ready at 9:30 asking why the store wasn't open I was a bit befuddled. I was in the wrong, we opened an hour late because of it, and I have the feeling shit is coming my way because of it too. What irks me of this is that every one of us at this store is guilty of poor timeliness, current case-in-point being I'm the only one here when relief was supposed to arrive at 12:00 and I'm supposed to be at Job #2 come 4:00. Awesome.
Next Thursday it looks like a Brewers Game/P&P day with guest appearances from Madison. This weekend the M&M's are graduating from MIAD and as such I believe it's hi-jinks and festivities all weekend long.
As stated above: thoughts are too erratic to narrow-down on anything. I'll probably expound later.
The title for this kind of suggests it's going to be lengthy, intricate story. It's really not. I'll try my best. Scout's honor. Actually- that's not worth much, I was kicked out of Boy Scouts. But that's a different blog for a different day.
So yesterday I'm driving up Hwy-45 to go work at Best Buy, and I'm trying to get there early enough to pick up and cash my paycheck before clocking in, which leaves me driving a bit more aggressively than I normally would. They're still running construction on the section of highway where 45 overlaps 94, so merging on is backed up and once traffic has sorted itself out it's still pretty dense. Nevertheless people are driving as if they are from Milwaukee and the average speed is still 5-10 over, it's just that the gap between cars is pretty much bumper-to-bumper.
At some point about a mile-and-a-half before the Hwy 145 exit that will take me to Brown Deer--and subsequently work--I'm forced to decide if I want to slow down and hang out behind a semi, or if I want to hop into the middle lane, drive like an asshole and cut the semi off. I decide instead of gaining maybe 10 seconds for being a dick I'll just wait it out. Then, about three cars in front of me in the middle lane, a pick-up truck has this flat, empty trailer attached to it that suddenly bounces up into the air, shakes loose, and spirals into the path of the semi. I noticed it immediately, but it still took me a moment to realize the severity of the situation. The thing looked like a giant piece of cardboard, and at 70-miles an hour it just kind of bounced around for a moment before being smashed off into the shoulder of the road, causing all the surrounding cars to swerve and slam on their breaks.
Had I been a little faster and ended up where the semi was- I would definitely have been crushed by the trailer. I'm driving a plastic box, that shits going to cave-in at the threat of impact. Had I been an asshole and tried to overtake the semi? I would've been right behind the pick-up and the outcome would've been the same. As it worked out? The semi took the hit, probably got a dent and some scratches from it, and I was at the front of the pack when the traffic came to a halt, which allowed me to drive on ahead, a little shocked at what I had just seen and what I was seeing in my rear-view mirror. As I took my exit I saw the pick-up truck pulled off to the side of the road, the two guys who had been driving climbing out of the vehicle and walking to the back to scratch their heads and wonder what was different. I got to hit next track on my cd player and suddenly come across the question "Did I... Did I just almost die?! Huh." immediately followed by "I don't really like this song. Next track."
Yesterday was Cinco De Mayo. For those of you who don't know alcoholic holidays or Spanish, that's the 5th of Mayo. This year it happened to be on May 5th. Next year? I don't fucking know, I'm not obsessed with holidays. Jay had people over and one of my old East Madison Best Buy co-workers was coming up for a party. I missed the people part of Jay's and my Madisonian friend missed the coming up part, so those were both kind of no-go's. I hit up Brothers on Water to begin with, but I hit it up while the "bar crawl" was happening so it was packed-the-shit-full of people. It took me 5-10 minutes to get a hand in on the bar with cash sticking out of my fingers as bait to draw over a bartender, and there was a girl squeezed up behind me trying to get in as well.
Me: (after bullshit full-bar comments) How about I tell them
both of our drinks when I order mine so you don't get stuck here
waiting like this any longer than you have to?
Bar Girl: Oh hey, yeah, thanks! (bartender comes over)
Me: I'm just going to get a Dos Equis, and...
Bar Girl: Yeah, same thing. Dos Equis.
--no I did not make a Dos Dos Equis joke--
(I pay)
Bar Girl: Um... (fumbles at her cash)
Me: ...ok, how about you get the tips and I got the drinks and you just won a little bit.
Bar Girl: Well, all I've got is this ten, I could see if my boyfriend-
Me: (without skipping a beat) A ten? Here's six bucks and we're golden.
Okay, so I'm a bit of an asshole. In my defense she glanced towards some douchebag across the room and with the place as packed as it was, once she got over there she wasn't making her way back. Counter to my defense I didn't think about that fact until about 45 seconds ago.
After they closed up the bars I took off and made my trip out to Qdoba for some delicious burrito action and did a triple-take as I bumped into our former upstairs-neighbor Pat from the Prospect apts. Pat was good shit, although I never really saw him awake a lot. After not getting drunk with the guy in over a year I had the "Hey, that guy looks familiar" from the car as I pulled in, the "Seriously, that guy looks a shitload like Pat" as I walked in the door, and then the "Ah hey, it's Pat! I didn't even see you there." as he spotted me and spoke up first.
Last thing I have to say about cinqo-de-mayo: I'm used to coming out of bars to walk right into drama unfolding on the steps or directly in front of the doorway, but coming out of The Corner last night was one of the first instances where I had to figure out how to step around that crying girl in the Giant Fucking Sombrero! For serious- it was a first.
I am tired.
I am true of heart!
Dave Eggers has it straight out.
45 minutes ago I was flat on my back in Pulaski Park, glaring at the stars. Normally any adjective would easily take the place of glancing, but drunk as shit and lying my ass off about being as drunk as shit to earn my selfdom sticks me with consequences such as lack of objectivity when it comes to adjectives. As such: flat on my back in Pulaski Park.
There are a lot of fucking stars in the sky. The next part, leading from
I am true of heart!
is a bit tricker.
This was uncalled for.
It's true. It was, is and will be. The fact holds: I am of a mood. THIS WAS UNCALLED FOR! I don't know else to express this (take two). An hour ago I sat post-Pulaski in the Wolski parking lot, unable to depart and unwilling to decry. The fact that I extricated myself and---
Drink. Drank. Drunk.
The estimated life on any of this blog is nil. I am going to go watch THE PRINCESS BRIDE, possibly followed by LABYRITNH. Out!
[The Interim] (while hungover at about 9 AM)
Updating. Be patient.
I think I got drunk and read 40 pages or so of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last night. The blog title suggests this. My previous blog full of quotes from the book suggests this further.
Plus, I woke up with book in hand and a bookmark in it.
Hmm... clues.
[Alternate subject titles include the following:]
Inconceivable!
How We are Satiated (part 2)
Mona is a whore and I'll pick whatever subject I want. (This last was too similar to Romano is a tool and, thus, rejected, passed over and discarded)
Rodents of Unusual Size? I Don't Think They Exist.
and, lastly
My Beard, Reviewed (which was the last McSweeny's entry to cross my path. Good stuff)
[The Implicit] (circa now)
Reading is not a good thing to do while drunk. Chances are you're not going to remember much of it and you'll have mucked everything up. Regardless, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius still holds as one of (and currently the) greatest books I've ever read, down to the copyright information which includes "Random House is owned in toto by an absolutely huge German company called Bertelsmann A.G. which owns too many things to count or track. That said, no matter how big such companies are, and how many things they own, or how much money they make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like 99 percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, or Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep iand dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly worth worrying about." and I also found I woke up with a strong desire to start my own quarterly publication which may (or may not) be called Things We Shout at the Ground, in no Particular Order. I thought about the implications and irrationality of the whole thing while consuming 4 12oz glasses of water to deal with my hangover, and found the roadblocks more difficult to track down than I would have imagined, what with graphic design-graduate relatives/roommates and two sets of relatives that own printing businesses. Either way, give me a few hours and all will be forgot.
Posting anything whilst drunk is also a tricky matter, as previously evidenced, but I am always a little curious to see what shit my drunk self wants to give my non-drunk self. I did once write a list of things that I feasibly could have done drunk but didn't do, with the intent to scare the shit out of myself in the morning. My drunk self thought it would be hilarious. In retrospect, it kind of is. The day of when I made my first apologetic phone call and got a response of What the hell are you talking about? it was less so. I was also a little surpised to see that this morning I drunkenly used the word decry, which I had to look up to find meant open denunciation. Huh. When I left the Red Room last night I was a little surprised to look back and see that with the empty drinks there wasn't much open room left on the table, and that's considering several empty glasses that were carried back to the bar before ordering more. I hit up my buddy Tucker's new place for a while and drank some more, then realized I didn't want to crash there but was in no condition to crash elsewhere. Hence: I passed off the disguise of sudden soberness and hung out in the park and my car until enough time had passed that my head was clear.
A quick question: Does anyone know what the hell is wrong with Fred Savage's character in The Princess Bride? Is he just mildly sick or is he slowly being eaten alive by some debilitating virus? Off that, and more relevant, I found out that my good friend's dad who, last I had heard, was almost demolished by cancer, is now in the free and clear 100 percent. It was a relief and it was a topic I had worried of broaching but now I'm glad I did. I think it's important to take counsel and council of your friends, and mine repeatedly and thoroughly bestow upon me something that I find I inherently lack: Perspective.
And sometimes, also, alcohol. I am not one to complain. I think I'm going to go get me some Quiznos, and I also think I'm out for the first portion of Pitcher N Pizza tonight. I'm not out for the night, just for one of those previous P's. Hint: I'm never out on the former.
