From the Heartland

Me and Kid Gleemonex are in Texass for the occasion of my grandmother's 80th birthday -- posting sporadic this week, if at all -- it is 104 degrees here. Have avoided many political conversations so far -- and that, friends, is a good thing. Holler atcha later when my core temperature cools off some ...

PS: You know what the [global big-box retailer] sells here? Diabeetus stuff and scamtastic weight-loss products. Draw your own conclusions about the habits of these proud patriotic Real Americans.

PPS: Have been carded for alcohol four times already. I'm 34. They're crazy.

No rest for the wicked

Remember when Princess "Shoulda Realized What She Was Getting Into, Marrying That Douchebag Charles Just So She Could Be A Fucking Princess" Diana died, and everybody just about hemorrhaged trying to outdo one another about what a saint and a humanitarian and most beautifullest and goodest person ever she was? And then like a week later, Mother "Human Suffering Is Good -- What, Y'all Didn't Get That Part of My Message?" Theresa kicks it, and but everybody's already used up all the "saint" and "humanitarian" language by vomiting it all over Diana? Well, the genius mind behind Mega Superior Gold says it better and nastier than I could. Protect yer chops, Heath Ledger, cause they're about to get clopped!

There's a place, a place in hell, reserved for me and my friends

Internets, have you met my IRL friends? Well, here's a little impromptu collaboration that happened in an email string amongst us yesterday, in re: the whole weird Christian Bale thing with his (ex-rodeo-clown??) mom and sister (which by the way, I really can't figure out -- I don't think he's actually a mom-n-sis beater, but WTF was going on??). Aaanyhoo:

Went to Sissie’s house to get her out of the pad
Fame ho said somethin that made me mad
She said somethin that I couldn't believe
So I grabbed the stupid bitch by her nappy-ass weave
She started talkin shit, wouldn't you know
Reached back like a pimp, an I slapped the ho
Our Mama jumped up and she started to shout
So I threw a right cross and knocked her old ass out!

'Cuz the boys from da Wales is always hard
Stop talkin that shit or I'll pull your card
Knowing nuthin in life but to be legit
You can quote me, boy, "Batman's the shit."

So hey, you still wanna party with us? Wait, come back here, we were KIDDING! Come on ...

Thought paella

DRIVE MY CAR INTO THE OCEAN
Waiting for the bus this a.m., I saw a guy go by in a tiny little low-slung, obviously brand-new two-seater Porsche convertible. Riding in the passenger side: a garishly-upholstered carseat, correctly strapped in and clearly well-used (no child in it at the moment of sighting). Who in that life situation (parent of very young child) would buy such a vehicle? Well, I know why (DENIAL), but then why use it as the transpo for said child? Aren't those cars manufactured and marketed specifically as cruising vessels for picking up chicks, and wouldn’t it kind of ruin your chick-gathering mojo to have a Cheerio-covered carseat riding shotgun? I mean … “Hey baby, guess what? My boys can swim! Aww yeah! So, um, I’ll just swing by the house and drop this off, and be back for you in like an hour?”

WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LIKE A TREE
AND GET OUTTA HERE
I read this news feature the other day about Generation Y and what they’re like in the workplace. Apparently, “the kids” are into getting lots of feedback from managers, they don’t want to pay any dues, and they like to be praised and rewarded all the goddamn time. Hey kid – you do get rewarded. It’s called a fucking paycheck. It ain’t your little “everybody wins” soccer league out here, and I don’t give a shit whether you feel validated or not. Now go tell all your Facebook friends what assholes we X-ers are and get the fuck back to work.

MIXIN UP THE MEDICINE
Why is it the law that we have to speak of the American nineteen-sixties as “turbulent”?

I can get you a toe by three o’clock this afternoon. WITH nail polish.

OK, so y’all know how I’m always with the venting of spleen about stupid inconsequential things, like arugula, hamsters, KFC Chickie Nobs and the love lives of comic strip characters, instead of the real Issues, even though I am a very politically aware and invested citizen? Mostly this is because the things that really deserve my (and your) real outrage seem too big and too knotty for me to tackle in blog form – the image that comes to mind is from Dumb and Dumber, when Lloyd rear-ends somebody in the limo and the airbag blows up, and he’s thrashing against it, getting nowhere and still hollering at Lauren Holly, who is already in the airport and therefore cannot hear him. (I do make with the hi-tone references, don’t I? Look sharp, culture mavens – I’m pretty hard to keep up with.) In my rare forays into Politixx, I get all spluttery and incoherent and make even less sense than usual.

But the Hip Hop Lawyer, aka the Hick Town Rap Star – THERE’S a man who can break it down for you. I’m sure he’s on a watch list somewhere, because what he has to say about the march to war with Iran is so clear, and so concisely argued, that none who read it could muster a denial – and that’s thoughtcrime in today’s America.

This is back when kids went on dates. Waaay back when.

Apropos of the B-team YA novel series thought the other day:

YA Novel Series That I Read as a Yute, Which, Frankly, Really Could’ve Been Time Better Spent Otherwise, but Then I Wouldn’t Have These Golden Memories

Swept Away: This girl figures out how to travel in time. TIME TRAVEL!!! Like, with her own home computer (something about time being the fourth dimension?). She chooses as her first destination – and what more perfect confluence of my two main obsessions could there ever have been? – the antebellum South. Ho shit. Of course she learns all these valuable lessons and stuff. The other books in the series involve her sending her friends one by one to: the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1930s (that was a good one – the girl becomes a movie starlet). (Shut up, it was.)

Cheerleaders: Um, a bunch of high school cheerleaders and their misadventures. The prettiest cheerleader, Mary Ellen, is so po’ she can’t afford soda from the machine but she lies like a rug to keep anyone from knowing that, and a couple years down the line, marries fellow cheerleader and rich a-hole Preston; there’s this coach (an obvious dyke, though they never say it outright) called Ardith Engborg (GOD, why does my brain store this info and lose all that trig?); the handsomest guy is Patrick, cousin of Preston, and is a garbageman. Lessons are learned, and whatnot.

Class of 88: Four friends start a newly-built high school as freshmen. Each book of the four covers one year and focuses mostly on one of them. Celia, Nick … oh hell, who are the other two? Anyway, actually not that bad a series. They don’t all stick together the whole time, either. But Nick and what’s-her-face get together in the end (very satisfying, I must say); he’s a writer, she’s a jock, they happen to be heading to the same college, she’s the only one who gets him and understands the pain of his parents’ divorce.

A series of standalone teen romance novels with titles like PS I Love You. There are kisses, but no one ever Does It, and there’s always some sort of love triangle that resolves itself by the end. I can still remember exactly where these hardback books were shelved in the junior-high library.

A series of standalone HISTORICAL teen romance novels, in which the protagonist is always front and center at some historical event or moment, sorta like Forrest Gump – she works in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and survives the fire; she’s sailing on the Titanic and gets a spot in a lifeboat; she’s a millworker in a New England garment factory in 1842, etc.

Less a series than a grouping, or a hard little cluster of malfunctioning cells: those Lurlene McDaniel serious-to-fatal illness books, which were the thinking girl’s gateway into health paranoia (a service provided to today’s teens by Dr. Google). Some girl just like you was obsessing about boys and grades and stuff, and then she felt kind of weird one day (a cough, a swollen gland, lightheadedness, take your pick) and the next day, BOOM! Cancer. Or diabetes. Or scoliosis. Sample (actual) title: I’ll Never Dance Again.

SVH: No need to explain this one, I trust? Don’t deny it. You were there.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR!

In re: the All-Star Game: Laying it on a bit thick with the Last Days of Yankee Stadium soft-focus warm-voiced elegiac-tacularity, aren’t we? I mean, I get the history and how huge this is (the stadium and its history are part of what made me fall in love with the team, and I am on record as being very very very much against the new stadium – I think it’s bad juju all around), but to hear that fucknuts McCarver waxing Nostalgic and Important about it for ten goddamned hours on FOX, my most hated venue for baseball coverage, got old REAL FAST.

By the way: had you heard? There’s a young man on the Rangers ballclub, a young man with a troubled recent history – he was on drugs. No, not steroids, DRUGS. Like from the ghetto, drugs. And he overcame his drug troubles, and he’s now a real good kid with a heart of gold and a bat of solid titanium! He credits Jesus with the transformation, of course! Shall I tell you it all again, or perhaps seventy-four more times? Yes? Well, you see, there’s this young man on the Rangers ballclub, a young man with a troubled recent history – he was on drugs. The kind of drugs that get you high, and make you get bad stupid tats and blow all your bonus money on hoors, but then baseball and jeebus and his grandma dug him out of the ditch [repeat, ad infinitum]. Ugh. Way to make a cool story throat-punchingly annoying by putting it on an infinite verbal loop, guys.

Plus also: Fuck you, cat-butt-mouth Papelbon. You’re not fit to wash Mariano Rivera’s Saturday skivvies, so shut your FACE about how you oughta be closing it instead of him. You hear how the whole stadium was hollering MA-RI-A-NO the entire time you were on the mound? Listen closely, shithead -- it's the sound you'll hear in your dreams forever and ever.

Plus also: Yogi Berra should’ve pushed McCarver (aka the Human Urinal Cake) out the window of the fucking broadcast booth the very first time he asked how it is that Yogi comes up with all those tee-hee funny little sayings of his. Beating!

Plus also: Reggie -- God love ya, Reg, and the rest of us do too. I mean, I know you know that, but I'm just confirming.

OK, now that’s done with. Back to baseball, people. Suit up, let’s go! We didn't get this goddamn huge fiddy-inch HD plasma teevee to watch y'all stand around scratchin yourselves!

Schlock tips

JORDAN ALMONDS: STRONG BUY
Hey Liz -- the eighties called. They want their "colour" scheme back. (And on a side note: Lawrence is gay, right? If I may be permitted a sweeping and possibly offensive-to-some generalization, what's with him accepting this teal-and-violet nonsense without demur? No demurrance at all, Larry baby? Really? I think the union's gonna dock you for that one.)

MOONLIGHT/MAGNOLIAS: HOLD
Apropos of nothing: Y'all remember that piece-o-shit dramatic television miniseries event North and South, based on the craptacular piece-o-shit pulp novel of the same name by the Master of Schlock, John Jakes? Holy moly, was I into that, back in the day. I had this insane Deep South/antebellum obsession, manifested in such things as making a stop at the Olde-Tymie Picture Shoppe at Six Flags every time I went there to get my photo done in a goddamn hoop-skirt dress, reading Gone with the Wind ten hundred times, and of course, watching/reading North and South. This one time, my brother got hold of the VCR remote while I was watching my taped-from-TV copy of N&S, put it on super-slo-mo and played this shot of (I think) The Swayze smacking the crap out of some blonde woman again and again and again. And it kept gettin funnier the more times he did it. And more than twenty years later, just thinking of that still makes me laugh my braying donkey laugh.

COUGARAMA: SELL
I gotta give A-Rod points for originality -- you all know how much I hate that energy-sucking, postseason-allergic, baseball-ruining douchebag, but at least he busted up his marriage over something other than the usual boring 19-year-old stripper, eh?

Lit-Crit Wednesday

“OH CHET,” SHE WHISPERED SHAKILY, TREMBLING …
There’s a sort of junk shop on my route home, which puts some of its wares out on the sidewalk to tempt passersby, and I always slow down to take a look at the book cart – I’ve scored a couple good things there, like an old hardback edition of Daphne duMaurier’s Don’t Look Now (Sars of Tomato Nation got me hip to that one) for a dollar. But most of it looks like the crap you’d find in a cardboard box in someone’s mom’s garage -- all these weird 70s and 80s diet fad books involving celery and leotards, “celebrity” biographies of J-list network TV eventual drug casualties, vaguely religious motivational/self-help stuff with covers that look like tampon ads, and YA novel series that obviously couldn't get a toehold in a Sweet Valley High world.

And of course, the romance novels – row after row of nothing but adjectives, adverbs and blushing.

More than once in my life as a cube-dweller, I’ve thought, “Well hell, I could make a living doing THAT. How hard could it be? And with a pen name, which all of these obviously are, no one would ever even have to know it was me.” But of course that’s folly – have you ever picked one of these things up, even in jest? Holy raven-haired, quizzical, handsome, emerald-eyed broad-chested Shatner, people. Brain aneurysm territory, I’m serious.

SLICEY, DICEY, JULIENNED
My girl Sars just keeps on giving: check out Walter Kirn’s review of James Frey’s latest pile. Ho shit, this is good stuff!

Sample bit, and not even the meanest: "Then there’s Joe, the drunken bum, who in his drunken bumness is strangely noble. After ending up in Los Angeles for no good reason except that it’s where drifters run out of continent, he 'stood on the sand staring across the ocean' and 'heard one word — here here here.' This is one word repeated three times, of course, and that’s because Frey’s idea of meaningful prose — the kind that conveys not just information but feeling — is that it must possess lots of rhythm, rhythm, rhythm. Minus the commas commas commas."

DANCE, MONKEY! DANCE!
There is a UIL contest category called “Literary Criticism,” or Lit Crit. It should surprise no one that HHL – a person whose powers of reading comprehension, analysis and synthesis are both vast and spectacularly speedy -- won a state medal in this contest back in the day (which contest I believe he was pressganged into entering by one of the teachers at our mutual alma mater, likely backed by some dire and borderline unethical threat -- good old CB never minded twisting an arm or three, did she?).

Talk to the ball-peen hammer

Listen, you chatty motherfucker on the bus, you social retard, you ignorant boob of a man: I do not ride the bus to make friends. I ride it to GET TO WORK. And what I want to do during that ride is one of two things:

1) Read
2) Sleep

Do you see "Converse with you about the dumbest things ever and listen to you talk about your job and SF's urban planning or lack thereof and its consequences for this or that building we are currently passing et cetera ad infinitum, from the stop where we both board the bus till the stop where we both disbark, which is unfortunately for me the end of the line so as to allow for maximum running of your stupid mouth" on that list? No? Then what the cocksmoke are you bothering me for?

Why do you love talking so much, and particularly to the one person in your near vicinity who has not one but BOTH of the Universal Leave Me The Fuck Alone signifiers deployed (iPod and open book)? Why did you have to distract me from Clockers (last week) and Return of the Player (this week)? What are you not getting about "Yeah -- this is sort of my naptime. I have a nine-month-old baby, you know. So I usually like to sleep on the way to work if I can"?

I hate you so much. May termites infest your stupid new deck, sir, and may laryngitis strike you with a mighty vengeance forevermore. Praise the righteous Shatner.

We like the boom

Watch out
You might get what you’re after
Cool babies
Strange but not a stranger
I’m an ordinary guy
Burning down the house

--Patrick Stradley
[that’s for HHL – respek knuckles/terrorist fist jab to Talking Heads, yo!]

Watching the Yanks in Pittsburgh last week, Mr. Gleemonex and I about passed out from fireworkxx envy – they were constantly running commercials for these paradisiacal supermarkets full of Serious Ordnance for use in celebrating the Glorious Fourth. Holy fireballing Shatner, y’all – I am such a pyro, it was torture to look at such abundance and not be able to have any of it. We’re stuck with safe ‘n lame workxx here (nothing that flies, explodes in the sky, makes a teeth-rattling KABLAM – just little cone fountains, those spinny UFO thingies that make black marks on your driveway, the hated snakes, etc. – stuff you’d let your 18-month-old play with, back where I’m from) and we’re lucky to get those – ours is the only town within 100 miles that even allows so much as a frickin sparkler. Something about fires, burnination, yada yada yada loss of life & property, blah blah blah. Fuckin killjoys.

So, you lucky bastards who get to fire up some REAL fireworkxx – please, for me, enjoy yourselves this weekend. Light fuse and get away!

PS: right here, y’all, is a collection of the stupidest lyrics in the history of ever: Def Leppard’s Pyromania. Oh, if I could only get back some of the energy I expended on this ridiculous band and their ridiculous ripped jeans, back in the day …

Kick off your Sunday shoes: Potpourri Wednesday

GOES TO SLEEP BY FALLING DOWN ON HIS FACE
This is the blog of a right-thinking person of sterling intellectual quality and unimpeachable good taste. You should all get hip to the Righteous that is Spanish Johnny today – he will tell you whether you are a douchebag and why (FYI: probably you are). Mach schnell, people. Mach fucking schnell.

CETTE RUE N'EST PAS UNE TOILETTE POUR VOTRE CHIEN.
Stolen from BlabberMouse, who is obviously real good people and would totally be my BFF if I had one of those: Photos ruined by photobombers (people who deliberately fuck with your photos while you’re taking them). So funny I cried, like twice at least. For some reason, these sort of reminded me of that time at Versailles when me & Mr. Gleemonex and our friends the Smeefers saw this trashopean couple taking pix of each other in front of the fountains, doing deep-knee rock squats, complete with flying devil horns, for completely indecipherable but clearly non-goofing, serious reasons; this of course caused a total breakdown on our part, and we spent the rest of the day taking pix of each other that way, which only got funnier the more wine we consumed. Yay France!

WITH HIS DAUGHTER SITTIN LIKE A CHERRY ON TOP OF IT
I’m sure I surprise no one when I say that I have more than a passing familiarity with the Footloose soundtrack. Between the number of times I’ve seen the movie (literally uncountable, it must be somewhere in the upper one-hundreds, closer to 200 than 100) and the fact that it was one of the first cassettes I ever owned and I played it back to back to back to back to back until it wore completely out and started sounding all Satany, I know all the songs (and their placement in the movie) better than I know my own ABCs. (Seriously: Ask me which comes first, M or P, and I’ll have to think a second, but ask me what scene boasts the audio classic “Dancing in the Sheets,” and “the one at the drive-in Sonic type place when Ariel pops in a tape and they all bust a move until Lithgow blows in and shuts that shit down, DUH” comes out my mouth before I realize I’ve spoken at all.)

All of which is to say: These are “reimaginings” of the songs from the Footloose soundtrack, the title track of which it took me an unforgivable ten seconds to figure out what it was when Mr. Gleemonex played me it out of his laptop – Kenny Loggins gdangy-guitaring OUT, soft brokenhearted emo gurgling IN! It is astonishing, trust me.