The New Boredom

If you hate any number of these songs then we will have a daunting mountain to overcome on the long trek to friendship.

Number 1- The Black Keys “Meet Me In The City”

This cover comes from 2006’s Chulahoma EP composed of 6 great Junior Kimbrough songs filtered through The Black Keys. When this song hit my ears back in May of that year, I knew this song would always be by my side. I’ve gone back and forth as to whether it’s a happy song or a sad one and I am currently resting on the chickenshit conclusion that it is bittersweet after all. I must have listened to this song well over a thousand times in the last 3.5 years. I never get tired of it. I always want to listen to it one more time. I love it.

Number 2- Modest Mouse “Trailer Trash”

I hear these doubled up mumbles in this song have had me wondering since first listen: did he just slur nothing or everything? Does it matter? This song sounds like a hopeless surrender to poverty and heartbreak that somehow makes that defeat seem triumphant. This is much less significant but Joe Cox rides to this in his part in Voices- one of the best parts and videos in bmx history.

Number 3- Modest Mouse “Polar Opposites”

This and Trailer Trash could be in any order here. I love them both. Listening to Lonesome Crowded West in high school was how I think it must have been to listen to The Smiths if you grew up in the 80’s. I would lay in bed for sleepless nights listening to this on my little discman (nostalgia?!) trying to take apart the lyrics and find out just why the hell it felt like these songs were written just for me. I never figured that out but these two songs in particular on that album are responsible for at least one worn out cd player in my younger days.

Number 4- Wilco “Ashes of American Flags”

Considering how many times I played Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in high school I think it’s amazing that it took me about 5 or 6 years to get another Wilco album. I just didn’t occur to me that I should get something else of theirs until late last year. This song gets me every time when those little bells ding and Jeff Tweedy says “speaking of tomorrow, how will it ever come?”… slays me every time.

Number 5- New Order “Ceremony”

So I like Joy Division but I’m sure glad that from that tragedy, something like New Order could come out of it all. And by this 1984 performance, they had made Ceremony truly something to celebrate. I remember hearing this song way early in my youth and having it pop up occasionally throughout my life. In the last couple of years it had been one of maybe a half dozen New Order songs on my ipod and within the last year it became one of the most played songs on that ipod. I had been sitting on it for a long time to use it in a bike video edit and finally pulled the trigger in the final video that I made for Yeti this last year. Evan Powell had won the junior class, Ross Milan had won the mountain cross with DZ right behind him, and Chris Boice won the race and the series overall. I was glad to see my friends do so well. Between that and knowing that I wouldn’t be doing any bike videos for a while seemed like as good a reason as there ever would be to bust out Ceremony.

Bonus- Lucero “I’ll Just Fall”

This is my go-to song for feeling like I just want to not exist. Which isn’t as often as it used to be. To capture that self torment in such an elegant and simple song is an accomplishment. But then to serve up such subtle reminders that this crushingly shitty feeling is temporary and you just need a few more minutes down here is great. And to not drag anyone else down with you like some sappy emo garbage but to just say that you’re not in anyone’s way being down is nice. MT put is pretty well when he said “sometimes you just need to feel like you should drink a gallon of whiskey and slit your wrists.” This is a good soundtrack for those days.

So… sorry if you don’t dig those because they are awesome. And if you agree then hey, that epic mountain climb to friendship is behind us.

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One of my all time favorite Simpsons episodes, the Beer Barron, Rex Banner, banana-kaboom. Priceless.

My world forever changed last night when my friend Dolphin (yes, Dolphin, the king of fish) posted this atrocity of a video. Now I have to cope and somehow live in a world in which brokencyde exits.

Be warned, the screen caps are plenty enraging enough but if you ever really felt like you needed your head to explode in rage then listen to about the first 30 seconds of the audio in the video too. Your blood pressure will skyrocket, your veins will boil out, your ears will spray blood across the room.

If there was ever a case for abortion, there it was. Show that to the pro-lifers and watch as federally funded abortion vouchers are passed out like a ticker-tape parade. So now that you’ve somehow survived that, let’s break it down a little. Not that there is any substance to analyze but often times such an anomaly should at least try to be understood for the sum of its parts.

Exhibit 1: One of these assholes gets out of the back of a Range Rover as if it were a camping tent. And guess what, he just camped with TWO girls! Wowee!

Exhibit 2: This prick starts yelling and he doesn’t stop. His only task seems to be trying your patience in a comically poor job description of “Lil’ John Type” that mostly hangs back and yells shit over and over. At least Lil’ John yelled words, regardless of how lackluster What, Yeah, and Okay may be.

Exhibit 3: I presume this is the dill hole from the Rover Tent earlier as we haven’t seen him for a while. He’s got a pig suit on now. That is all.

Exhibit 4: This oafish wigger shows up and gives all mid-20’s-males-living-in-their-parents’-basement-due-to-a-tough-job-market/poor-fiscal-responsibility a bad name.

Exhibit 5: The Doofy Wigger and Yelling Guy pick on an ethnic minority who seems disgusted and, assuming she makes it out of there, will hopefully fire her agent and find a new one worth their salt that won’t suggest jobs like this will diversify her resume.

Exhibit 6: After presumably driving that poor asian girl to ritualistic suicide, they move on to straight up choke-yell this sassy white chick. Yelling Guy’s frail emo arms are no match for her, resulting in barely more than an inconvenient tickle. She plays this one cool knowing she can just murder these pricks later and totally skate away on “self defense” claims.

Exhibit 7: Yelling Guy pours out some of his supposedly alcoholic beverage on the driveway of the foreclosed mini-mansion where this whole abomination was shot for pennies on the dollar of what a music video with real street cred would cost. The pouring of the beverage is presumably in honor of all Yelling Guy’s “dead homies”… strangely “dead homies” simply implies that his friends grew up, got a fucking hair cut and a job like normal, productive human beings.

Exhibit 8: Affirmative Action reminder alarm goes off when they realize they have but 7 seconds remaining in the video and hastily hire out half second flashes of some black dudes most likely cast in the last second from the crew, possibly the grip/electric department.

Exhibit 9: Wrap it up with a montage of flashing the posse’s “sign” which appears to be WW… admitting any number of truths: “We’re White!” or “We’re Wiggers!” or “We Wsuck!”

I don’t think I really need to explain myself when I say these guys are not helping the Pride movement. These pricks make Elton John look like John Wayne. If you’re into the garbage excuse for music or style then you and I have nothing in common. You and the rest of the real world have nothing in common. I’d be okay with all fans of this trash being sent off to a small, peaceful island community to live out (or not) global warming and increasing ocean levels. They would have brought about their own slow, drowning death with this frivolous excuse for a lifestyle anyway.

At least there are people like the Lonely Island dudes who are willing to lampoon such easy targets with such wild success that it brings legitimate support from non-comedy players:

This one is pretty simple: Annoying laughs are annoying.

I take a whole hell of a lot of my daily pleasure in hearing other people laugh regardless of what initiates the act. When some one has an annoying laugh it just grates my patience to a fine powder that blows away in their cackling stupid wind.

There is a very fuzzy line between a quirky laugh and an annoying laugh. Much like the Supreme Court’s ruling on porn, you just know it when you see it- or in this case, hear it.

A good laugh is priceless. It can be one of a person’s most attractive traits or one of a friend’s most comforting signs of approval and acceptance.

Sometimes I get a little freaked out that if I ever have kids, they will come out horribly disfigured as a karmic payback for my lifetime of being an asshole. But I could probably handle it and I’d tough it out, whatever their maladies may be. But if I prayed, I would pray to the god(s) that, above all, my kids would have a good, hearty, normal laugh.

If you’ve got an annoying laugh, then chances are pretty good that it’s a deal breaker and we may never be much of friends even if you’re perfectly compatible in every other way.

In a continuing rant about on-line profiles and all that internet persona business, there are surprisingly few things that really piss me off about the whole ordeal. I’ve pretty much covered the big ones in that last post on having vague, over-generalized taste. Tofu personalities are pretty whack and having a bland tofu-level taste in culture often accompanies the personality. The one thing left that really grinds me the wrong way about on-line personality is when a person will ignore an entire genre or classification as a way of defining who they are.

Dismissing an entire genre of anything (movies, music, literature, philosophy, whatever) doesn’t tell me anything about your character other than the fact that you’re an ignorant fool. That’s almost as bad as dismissing an entire medium…

When I read through some one’s on-line representation of themselves (or talk to them in 3D, too for that matter), and I see something like, “I like all music except country and rap” (that one happens all the god damn time) it throws up the biggest possible red flag in my mind about this person. What’s wrong with Johnny Cash or Arlo Guthrie? What’s wrong with great American story telling via song? Just because some asshole thinks his tractor is sexy on the radio doesn’t mean that the entire pool of country music is rotten. Likewise for rap… or hip-hop. What’s wrong with modern American urban story telling and poetics set to beat driven music? What’s wrong with Run DMC, Public Enemy; what’s wrong with Buck 65- a white guy from Nova Scotia talking about how times were better when people wore shine-able shoes? Just because some asshole on the radio mumbled something about why he crazy, why he somemumble-mumble… doesn’t mean the entire genre of rap music is shit.

Another one that really gets me is when someone says they “like pretty much all movies- except musicals!” And then when I ask why the hell not musicals the common response is that they just can’t suspend their sense of disbelief that people would communicate via song and dance or that an entire town full of people would know the steps to some number when it breaks out in the street. Well then dumb shit, you surely must hate science fiction? No, you really like Star Wars? Oh, well then your suspension of disbelief isn’t really the issue. If you didn’t like Moulin Rouge or Chicago then I’m with you there. But to dismiss a rich history of great on screen musicals (and theater) like Singin’ In The Rain, Pennies From Heaven, Le Million, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Willy Wonka, Marry Poppins, the South Park movie… well then you’re just a fool. There are good musicals just the same as any other classification of movies.

One of the most unbelievable ones that I’ve ever come across was, “I only read non-fiction” – really? You only read history textbooks and autobiographies? You’re going to fore go the entire imaginative craft of story telling and character creation in favor of pure reenactment? Geez. If anyone is hopeless in this world, it’s the chump that only reads non-fiction.

Before you dismiss an entire genre, maybe you should give it a real chance and at least try to exhaust the library of possibilities within the genre first. There’s nothing wrong with disliking a genre so long as your distaste is fully understood and explored. Passing on some really great stuff in a sub-category of media due to closed mindedness will leave your life a little less rich in the end. Purposefully closing yourself off to excellent craft and art just because of where it might get shelved in a store is absolutely a deal breaker for me.

As much as I hate to admit it (or is it more the guff that my friends tend to give me?), I’ve been on myspace and facebook since probably 2004. In all those years I have only “met” maybe two or three people who have been remotely interesting and one girl I dated very briefly that ended up being a completely ignorant bigot (but that’s a post for another day). Not good numbers considering the 100+ million people in my “extended networks” and all.

Everyone that I “meet” that is worth a shit, has been met in 3D, with a hand shake, and an honest to goodness face to face conversation. It’s only been recently that I have stumbled onto other people’s blogs that I have been able to admit that “good people” are out there to be “met” on the internet . Social networking sites just don’t produce the same kind of window into a person’s character that reading months’ worth of a person’s writing can provide.

Some of my 3D friends are true elitists that take great pride in believing that they have incredibly deep pools of good taste to draw from. I’m sure some of them could reasonably be considered experts on good taste but they also have earned the image of the snob. With modern media so easily accessible and widespread, many of these elitists have laid claim to being authorities on music, movies, and literature.

It just seems impossible to break down an interesting person into categories and put them into little boxes full of text. A person worth talking to has to be more than the sum of their information box parts, right? I’d guess that this applies greatly to on-line dating networks, too.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the people with no discernible taste whatsoever. Much like social-tofu, these people don’t really think for themselves, simply settling for the force fed, mass produced pop-culture. This shines bright when it comes to on-line profiles. There are the certain kind of bland responses that these bland people give in their profiles that reveals the fact that, above all, they have nothing interesting to reveal.

Favorite music: “Oh, you know, I like everything!” or “I’ll give anything a chance!“… you’re so full of shit that I’m not sure how you can bend over to tie your shoes. You can’t possibly like everything you hear. If that’s true then you don’t actually have taste. You have to have contrast. If you don’t dislike something then how can you know what you do like? The only other possibility for you to like “everything” is that you haven’t branched out enough to discover something that maybe you aren’t into. You haven’t pushed your boundaries enough to find the edge of what’s comfortable. You just “like” whatever your friends play all the time and lack the gumption to find something outside that itsy-bitsy circle. You may claim to give everything a chance but really, what wild new thing have you tried lately ever?

Favorite movies: “Oh, anything that makes me laugh!” or “I love all movies but especially The Shawshank Redemption“… Comedy is great but to restrict yourself to enjoying movies that make you laugh is like going to an all you can eat buffet and eating only your napkin. If you don’t love at least one movie that makes you cry then you’re the kind of shallow tofu that enjoys the company of white-bread-turkey-sandwich-friends. And the ubiquitous top choice movies like Shawshank may indeed be good films but are so universally accepted as being good that listing that stuff as a particular favorite is barely more specific or revealing than noting your love of breathing or appreciation of gravity or indoor plumbing.

Favorite books: “I don’t read much, lol!” … go fuck yourself. There’s a difference between not particularly enjoying the upkeep on 100+ page a night reading assignments for your college course load, and purposefully neglecting the sharing of printed ideas. If your cultural ideology and identity comes solely from a tiny group of immediate friends then you are tofu. You lol at not drawing from a rich library of human emotion, culture, and experience  ignore the flavor of reading something completely new.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with liking the mainstream, easily accessible, pop-culture media and ideas if you have thought it through and have come to the sound conclusion that you’re just plain into the stuff that is most readily available. But lazily accepting all that surface stuff due to lack of effort in discovering something else is unforgivable and certainly a deal breaker for me.