The New Boredom

I think I can safely assume that at least 90% of people with broadband internet connections have seen that video of women’s faces represented in art history morphing into one another. But what is new to me today is that the same thing was done (I assume by the same people) with women in film history:

and also with men in film history:

What is probably the most interesting thing about all of that tome is which faces I find interesting. There really are timeless and classic beauties and classy looking fellows that pop up through the presentations. While Mister Ed (Julia Roberts) kind of scares me, Ingrid Bergman and Ginger Rogers will always be gorgeous. Cary Grant and Gregory Peck will always be classy looking dudes.

Of all the ones in the art montage though, I found the abstract ones to be the most interesting. I guess I’m weird like that.

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Speaking of weird, it wasn’t until about noon today that I realized what all that stuff was on everyone’s faces. Sorry for being really insensitive. I forgot that Ash Wednesday follows Fat Tuesday.

The idea of Lent has always been really interesting to me. I don’t know much about it or where it comes from, like any of the historical roots of it all, but I always thought of the idea as a nice gesture. This is surprising since I find most organized religious practices to be silly at best. But the idea of “Hey, that guy gave up his life for you, what are you going to give up for 40 days?” is not bad. Giving up something that you rely on every day for 40 days is a really nice reminder of the scale and significance of what your main dude gave up for you. It’s a nice practice what you preach act that goes well beyond the “we’ll think of you in our prayers” type vapor that most people never go beyond.

So even though I’m not really all that into religion, I am into challenges. Let’s see how many days (40? yikes…) I can make it without Hating.

I’m giving up hating for Lent.

That doesn’t mean I’m just going to be a push over or that I’m going to love everything. I just think that I’m going to try and take a break from player hating. I may still disagree, sometimes strongly, with certain things but I’m going to test the waters in taking a break from player hatin’.

I’ll either come out of this a better and happier person or it will kill me.

When every one else zigs and a select few zag, they get the credit and all the attention. I’m dead sick of seeing the same bmx vids all day, every day. I’m tired of seeing the same doofy kids at the skate park who can tailwhip all day but can’t carve a bowl for thirty seconds.

Tate Roskelly had an interview in a recent RideUk in which he called out street riders as a whole of mostly being a bunch of park rat transplants. I think he mentioned that there are really only a handful of people doing innovative and true street riding out there. I’d have to agree and he should know considering he’s got to be the most fun street rider for many to watch since Steven Hamilton.

Mike Mastroni is doing his own thing. He’s making videos that are not about 100% shred but instead takes the stance that a shot can make it in a video and indeed add to the overall experience simply for being a visually pleasing shot. Flowers, architecture, lifestyle, and empty ride spots are frequently what I remember from his videos as much as the smooth and stylish riding. I love seeing him ride on playgrounds all the time and coming up with creative lines where most people would spend all day on the ledges around the park.

and then this video came up care of Kevin Drake and it blew my mind.

The description given for the video says it all for me: Josh Betley rides “The Best Spot in the World.”

I’ll watch that stuff every day for the next 5 years and while flair-to-footjam boggles my mind, I just don’t give a shit twenty minutes later.

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In other Kevin Drake news, I seem to repost stuff on purpose sometimes. I think he may be onto my scheming?

The reason, Mister Drake, that I reposted this awesome video on this fine Fat Tuesday, is that I am going on very little sleep today and some topics that I’ve been wrestling with lately are now under my bleary eyed, sleep deprived microscope. I’ve been juggling the idea that Joaquin Phoenix may well be the new Andy Kaufman and could be pulling a grand slow one on us all with his recent hip hop venture and Letterman appearance. With that beard he looks sort of like the new Zach Galifianakis.

It makes me wonder if T Pain, the man who proclaimed on his solo album that, “I don’t need your sex, I’ll masturbate,” may have pulled a fast one on the entire Top 40 charts in the last year. He couldn’t possibly be taking himself seriously? That he is so willing to make such an open mockery of himself in the I’m On A Boat video shows either the most amazing sense of self humor in all of show biz, or that show biz and the public alike are a bunch of sucker fools for having bought into this man’s ploy to sell us creepy, crooning, voice box harmonizing. I have no idea. Either way, very impressive.

In a personally dis-concerning area, many modern artists seems to always be playing with this contempt for their critics and patrons even going so far as to reject “fans” of their work. The violating nature of some modern art works is obvious. A big sculpture of a raised middle finger. A neon sign that alternates the glowing words “Fuck” and “You” passed off as an installation piece. Pieces of common street trash stapled to the canvas and sold off for thousands of dollars. I just don’t get it. I’m not sure if there is anything there to be got honestly.

But all the modern art stuff tends to stick within the realm of the art world. It would be down right amazing to me if the same ruse from the art world is successfully pulled off in the mainstream by acts like T Pain and Joaquin Phoenix… bow down to them for they may be truly amazing.

Over the weekend I went to go eat a sandwich and decided to save the 2nd half for dinner later. I was riding home with the leftovers in my hoodie pocket and about to roll down the hill to my apartment when it fell out on the street. I slammed on the brake and turned around to ride my bike back up the street to grab it when a car coming down the road veered off course well on purpose to run over my sandwich. “No fucking way” my expression seemed to say. Also my mouth. Hater instinct kicked in and I rush to the remains of my delicious sandwich and I grab what I can of it and start sprinting my bike off down the hill (where I’m often as fast or faster than traffic) and I catch up to the car that wrecked my dreams of continuing to enjoy my sandwich at the bottom of the hill at the stop light. I bang on their window and give them the “roll it down” signal with my hand.

The window slides open. It’s two high school aged pricks and they are still reveling in their cleverness and laughing.

“You just had to run over my food back there?”

“We thought you would find that funny dood,” the prick in the passenger seat says.

Without thinking much about it I took the remains of the sandwich and chucked it pretty hard into his face, smearing it with would-have-been delicious avocado. The rest of the sandwich exploded across the dash and I’d guess most of the remains ended up by the driver’s feet.

I rode away calmly rejoicing as I heard a series of “AWWHH, AWWW, DOOOOD, AWWW” coming from their car.

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In other news, John Reynolds just posted this awesome video of banger clips from last season and you can see it here:

He will have a Top 5’s article up here soon but he’s having trouble filling it out. He said his answers keep making his come across as either a “huge piece of shit” or a “total pussy” so when he’s done editing himself into the cool guy that we all know him to be, those answers will be up here.

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In still other news, I just wrote out this big aimless, ranting article on Litter about how your bike is too light and it’s probably because you suck.

You can read that here:  http://www.littermag.com/2009/your-bike-is-too-light/

I sense some people will find my opinions harsh and most disagreeable. Sorry for not being a bullshitter and giving you a trophy just for showing up. Life isn’t a pee-wee soccer league.

I used to watch Beavis and Butthead when I was a little kid even though my folks weren’t really okay with it. These are the smae parents that took me to go see Pulp Fiction and Fargo in theaters when I was like 9 or 10 years old. I recently re-watched some of the Beavis and Butthead episodes on borrowed dvd collections from a friend. One thing I noticed among all the fart and boner jokes was this uncanny perspective that Mike Judge had of the world at the time and has continued to display in select King of the Hill episodes and Office Space and Idiocracy. Many people initially dismissed his first show as little more than being about two stupid kids and their antics. But if they gave the show a chance they would see that the show had its fingers on the pulse of our society, revealing the ugly truths of our times.

One of these harsh realities is the portrayal of adult characters within the show. They were unable to provide these two stupid kids with any kind of solid roll models often ending up right by their side in the closing scene of each episode, laughing with that same inane chuckle, completely surrendering their authority in this world in favor of a state of perpetually arrested development.

So what does that have to do with The New Boredom? I dont know. But this silly blog will reach 100 entries with this post, and that makes it a long lasting blog according to some stats that I read recently. A huge chunk of all blogs are started and abandonded within 5 posts. I know that Phactory Phillis Wheeler contributed to this on a few occasions.

So what have my 100 posts been about? Other than promissing you guys more writers to provide a wider range of material and never really delivering on that (come on “contributors”, where are you?), I’ve gone off about the bike industry a couple times, dorked out about design a few times, ranted or raved about some movies and music, and shared some video clips that I found pretty interesting. My blog has the focus of an air horn. In retrospect, it seems like this blog gets a handful of readers every day that are people I probably already know and this is just a centralized place for me to show them nifty shit that I find on the web. I’m obviously a long ways off from writing anything professionally or making anything of myself with this stuff.

So here’s a story that has something to do with the Beavis and Butthead stuff I mentioned earlier.

I used to work for a now defunct bike shop called Bicycle Werx and mostly worked in the service department where I would weasel people out of entirely too much money to change their flat tires so that the shop could stay in business for another twelve seconds. I had this manager named Nate. He was a nice guy and mostly just loved bikes. I don’t think he had any dreams or aspirations of being anything more than a good bike mechanic in his life and I honestly admired that. As a teenager with a lot of pressure on me to figure out my future, it was nice to see some one happy to be at work doing something modest and simple like making people’s bikes work better. It as good to see him take pride in a job that some people would foolishly look down on.

So he seemed like an okay roll model or something like that at the time, just like the authority figures in Beavis and Butthead. But then one night, Nate went out and did a little too much drinking. It was winter and it had started snowing that evening and when Nate left the bars, he saw the conditions and decided he didnt want to ride his bike home in that mess. He didnt have a car so obviously the next best solution was not to call a cab but rather to hijack a city trash truck and procceed to drive it straight into a parked cop car on the way home. The way I hear the story, he woke up the next morning in jail and got a new job with the state making license plates for the next few years.

I havent heard anything about Nate since then but I hope he’s doing well. I’d like to think that he’s off somewhere turning wrenches on bikes again but if the Beavis and Butthead model holds up- well, who knows.

Anyways, here’s to another hundred aimless and wandering posts on The New Boredom. Coming up soon will be some more Deal Breakers, I’m Sorry For:’s and Top 5’s, as well as some other less planned rambling about nothing particularly important.

Now I went through 4 years of rigorous babysitting and was rewarded with my sweet Arts & Crafts degree, so I’m no business student, but I’d like to think that I could just as easily be a moderately intelligent monkey in a suit all the same.

It seems to me that “business” is just a fancy pants, made up word for the act of tricking people with money out of said money. And who has money these days? Hipsters. By definition, one of the prerequisites to being hip is having the money to afford the minimum fifty new trends per week. Have you ever seen a poor person and thought, “Hey, they sure look cool, let’s dress/act/eat like that!” Of course you haven’t (though surely some Hipsters do think this way). There’s no glamor in beat up shoes, picking your nose, and eating ramen 9 times a week.

Tricking a hipster out of their money once seems quite simple. Fishing with dynamite simple. But getting a hipster to keep coming back and fork over ample moneys in perpetuity is the hard part. But even that seems relatively easy to me. Just make them feel empowered over their purchases. Hipsterism depends on a certain degree of bittersweet democracy anyways. In order for something to be cool, it has to be popular. But in order for something to be really cool, it must also be fresh so it’s popularity is doomed for a short lifespan and must be replaced quickly.

Enter: Threadless. The sheer common sense genius of this company is unrivaled in both its genius and common senseness in the suited monkey business world. They empower the masses by allowing them to determine what designs get run on the next batch of tee shirts. You voted for it, they run it, you buy it. It’s basic drug dealer economics. You come back next week because your shirt you just got is showing up all over music shows and coffee shops all over town, and so you need a new one. Their profit margins are huge as they pay the winning designs peanuts (but subsidize the contaminated peanuts with 15 seconds of internet design fame), the blank shirts are cheap as dirt (cheaper in some cases, have you seen the cost of potting soil lately? yikes.), and the screens are easy to make. Shipping is passed off to the customer often, and the next thing you know, blam-o, $30 million in annual revenues with an insanely high profit margin.

Enter: Democracy’s Failure. I was a member of the Threadless community for a while about 5 or 6 years ago. I tried to look up my customer number but got pissed off at the site when my log in didn’t work. So screw it, just trust me that I was up in the first few thousand members (not to boast or anything). Now that Threadless has exploded, the voting base of customers has proved to have little to no taste in design, typography, or illustration. The shirts that get run now are pretty much crap. But people will buy the shit out of them because that’s what they want; they just told you so by voting for it. And now Threadless is making a ton of money off selling you some poop to smear all over your torso.

Dang Y’all.

Bleh.

Now that’s what I call business.

You know… I had an idea like that once… a lot time ago.

Oh yeah Bill, what was that?

It’s a jump… to conclusions mat…

But seriously, who wants to help me write up a load proposal for The Ruined Jeans Store (patent pending sucker fool) idea that I’ve been sitting on for the last 8 years? Any monkey-in-suit students out there want to help me get that crap off the ground? Just wait until we have to tell the bankers that they will be giving us money to produce the Micheal J Fox Bobble-Hands dashboard doll (but it’s cool, we’ll give much of the profits to Parkinson’s research… jeez, I’m not that much of a prick). The banker’s will be aghast and ask us to please leave. But then we’ll just say “How is that any dumber than gambling tens of billions of dollars a year on buying  houses for people with no verifiable income?” and they will pause and eventually reply, “How much money are we talking here for this loan?”

See, I told you I could be a moderately intelligent monkey in a suit.

Gunther from a great Futurama episode.