I have to do work. But Frank Catalanotto, yes? Yes.
Things Consumed, 2/28/05
1/2 Reuben sandwich
1 cup diet root beer
1 cup coffee
6 pieces Frosted Mini wheats with Extra Fiber (you can still respect me because i stol the cereal from someone else)
Cingular turning my phone off for non-payment (tugs at collar)
Swedish snus
I will get back to all this.
Stop rubbing your orange hatchetface on the computer, cat. Not stopping. I was going to write several thousand words about how I had a fevered premonition (seems to be the only kind I ever have) about how the Texas Rangers are going to ruin, in an emotional capacity, for me personally, the months of october and november by winning at least one and possibly as many as three playoff series. I still might do that, but later on, Pete realized that the Rangers still don’t have any starting pitching, so it doesn’t matter that their entire infield could hit 30 HRs each and they have the Tex Nix. What am I going to do is post notice that it is Time To Talk About Baseball more or less constantly until next November. At which point we can stop to talk about football, briefly, and then not speak for some time. I have to go, I have a headache and I want to read instead of wasting my time with this shit.
Seems like everybody else is busy looking into the future, for whatever reason, so I figured I would spend sometime looking into the mule-colored past. by which I mean i am going to, piece by piece, compile a people’s history of my own blog, complete with a glossary of terms and inappopriate religious iconography. That’s just something for you to look forward to, or look forward to avoiding, as you deem necessary.
from roughly 10:12 to 10:39 this morning I was sitting in the exact middle of the No 6 Bus listening to Wowee Zowee very, very loud and reading a scene in a book. the scene entailed a recalcitrant child being whipped with a harness strap for hours on end because he refuses to learn the catechism. then he dumps out a tray of food in the corner and then later eats it like a hungry animal. I had a very bad hangover and a weird vibration somewhere in the side of my mind that either the bus was going to drive off LSD into the lake and be torn to pieces by lake-dwelling giant alligators. so i got off the bus at Jackson literally wobbling out of pure terror. and my shoelaces came undone. but then the people at work gave me $150 for three weeks of work and it turns out that $151.25 actually cures hangovers and Faulkneritis. anyway more later, less now. We can make it.
1. For whatever reason (being of charitable mind, getting tired of listening to the mp3s i downloaded, didn’t feel like downloading more mp3s, didn’t feel like choosing a song every five minutes, wanted to torture self) i decided to check out the minnesota public radio rock station that was mentioned on Pitchfork (hey, cut me some slack you fucking racist ideologue). Anyway, I have this standing problem with all things public radio. Actually I just have a problem with radios, in general. When, at this point in the game, a person with even moderate interest in their music collection can assemble a digital mixtape that lasts a month without repeating a song, non-talk radio is completely worthless, unless 1. you’re not interested in hearing new music or 2. it’s live 3. music is being programmed by a DJ with something like obscure but not obscurantist taste who has a stated agenda of playing music you have not heard but will want to hear again. what was my other problem with the radio: right, talk radio. I fucking hate NPR.
I have no problem with people enjoying and habitually consuming NPR. I would be a fascist if it turned out I had some kind of fairly-developed plan to dynamite NPR affiliates. I don’t actually know the differences between the stuff on NPR and what’s like particular to WBEZ or other NPR stations I’ve been exposed to. I don’t know if WENS is one of them. Basically just take NPR as a catchall phrase for slow-talking white-sounding -people-hosted programs. This is about my hate, not about defining what is and isn’t NPR (editor: author is vaguely aware of several large holes in his argument/logic. also sharply aware of his own non-desire to hear readers or commenters point these holes out. get your own blog.) Anyway, foul-mouthed ranting begins below.
1a. NPR is not a viable response to anything you might categorize as “mainstream culture.” It is mainstream culture, just for people who went to college or grad school or were raised by nerdwolves. I’m not sure where this was going. I think my point is that people who say they only listen to NPR when someone else brings up something that the first person thinks is low culture. They’re probably dicks, the first person(s). At the same time, if the other person is trying to talk about I Love The 90s, they’re both dicks, but that’s a bonus, a gimme situation where you can write both people off completely. Complaining about how “culture” is dumb or lowbrow or something is like complaining about how brush fires show a consistent disregard for socioeconomics when destroying property. That’s the fakiefake Chuck Klostermang part of the thingthing. All I will say about NPR-related enterprises is that they are a totally acceptable source of news and opinions, just like the newspaper and the internet and your imagination. They have many good reporters and writers, and they have a reassuring level of familiarity with Dignity and the Low-Voice-Talking-thing that makes it pleasant to listen to and sleep with on. There, so my complaints with NPR, at least in line item 1a, are that I don’t like people who use NPR as a stick to try to poke into other people’s eyes and nose.
But then there’s 1B, which is that NPR isn’t funny. It is never ever funny. I think that’s my complaint. And it’s supposed to be funny. And isn’t. And some of the people have real wanker voices and aren’t actually pleasant to listen to at all.
Where does this anger come from: I think it was from making myself listen to something that wasn’t NPR or even representative of NPR. It was public radio, sort of, but it was most rock music. I had a larger point about what’s wrong with the radio and I got very sidetracked talking about how I think NPR isn’t funny despite spending an average of zero hours a day listening to NPR (probably an average of 1 minute per month, actually). ANyway I have to go get the socket plug thing for this computer before it runs out of batteries. Hold on.
OK. I plugged it in. My larger point was that the people who i listened to on Minnesota Public Radio were the worst DJs I’ve ever heard and played bad boring crap. What I learned, then, was that the hyperbalkanization of music and music consumption is ultimately a necessary evil, because if my standing fetish for listening to ’60s doo-wop music, Dutch freakbeat, country music and bad Australian pop rock means, as far as i can tell, is only protecting me from having to listen to idiots from Minnesota with squeaky voices who insist on playing out of date indie rock and probably driving cars with anti-Bush stickers on them. I guess I just dislike everybody now. Is that how it goes? I know, from this weekend and prior experience, that I seem to hate everyone younger than me, which group is only going to expand from here on out, and i definitely hate a lot of other people for hard-to-define personal political reasons (you’re wearing that shirt wrong, you are tall, you are too flamboyant about the way you’re standing behind me in line at the store, because you have red hair)
MY ACTUAL POINT
I FIXED THE COMMENTS. SO YOU CAN LEAVE COMMENTS AGAIN. Just don’t mention poker, or any ED drugs, or pretty much any brand name drug, OK. THE COMMENTS WORK! later i will fix the ugly bloggrill.
I have new viewpoints about hipsters. maybe it’s not a viewpoint. it’s something. give it a minute
2.
I stole a vegetable cream cheese from Au Bon Pain downstairs. Fuck you for judging me and fuck them for asking for $1.07 (more than the bagel itself) for like not even enough cream cheese with which one might enjoy the bagel itself. So it’s OK, Biblically speaking, to swipe bread to feed a starving family. Is it OK then to promote cream cheese so as to better enjoy your stolen bread. And I paid for the bread anyway, which sort of renders the whole enterprise in a foggy gray area. Or just a gray area in which I should stop appropriating cream cheese under the banner of class warfare. Because I was definitely muttering shit while I took it. I was going to pay for it, I swear. Isn’t cream cheese, in a legal sense, like a condiment? Like in with ketchup and mustard and butter as a thing you Should Not Pay For (unless we’re talking about gourmet mustard). I have to get back to what I was doing, so thank you. I blame Cingular Wireless and the federal gov’t for all of this. Also, the Internet is not good.
Also, somebody bring me a copy of the Red Streak, please. I don’t want to work anymore.
I’m not a big advocate of Valentine’s day, in the same ways that i am not a big advocate of Christmas or Thanksgiving. There need to be more holidays with inscribed drinking activities, so as to spur semi-distant family members into sharing feelings. But I am a fan of making lists of music that I like, so I figure I can use Valentine’s day as an excuse to bite off Moacir and Whet and others and share some shit that I lifted from the same online Usenet or whatever that Whet was talking about the other time. Actually people are looking at me like I should be doing work when they walk by. Let me assure you that when I get a minute, I’m going to bring you a neatly categorized list of music that I’ve heard recently. And the categories are going to be sort of like this
1. Nice songs
Somewhere in the Onion there was once a joke about how someone’s subletter was trying to convince them that Kenny Rogers (with and without the First Edition) were actually an incredibly good band. My understanding of the pre-Gambler K. Rogers is that the First Edition did that song in the Big Lebowski about checking in to see what condition your condition was in. But I can now proudly say that the greatest hits of K.R. plus the First Edition are deeply enjoyable. So I don’t understand what the Onion was trying to prove or I guess they were just making some kind of weird reverse reverse hipster joke. I think I mentioned Kris Kristofferson already. Also extremely necessary: More Specials by the Specials. Very good. Excellent music to stumble around Promontory Point in a fog.
2. Songs by Burt Reynolds that are cited in the title of this post (no longer true after inserted paranoia)
“Let’s Do Something Cheap and Superficial” by B. Urt Reynolds.
From a musical approach, about as worthwile as William Shatner singing “Rocket Man” or something. Actually possibly even less worthwile; I can’t say how compentent Shatner is a singer but Burt falls somewhere in between Ashlee Simpson and me, as far as ability to carry a tune goes. And the backing music is really snotty generic ’70s countrypolitan. The lyrics, on the other hand, are really TVing good. As a result I give this my highest recommendation, which is like 2.5 snaps.
3. Songs that give me the Fear
“The Weight of My Chains” by Tompall Glaser and/or the Glaser Brothers.
This was located off one of the readymade klassic kountry mixes that some noble soul posts on EasyNews. Basically this song broke my head from the first line, which is “I almost made it in to work today.” The rest of it sort of takes the concept of Old Sad Bastard Music from High Fidelity into the realm of expressionist art. God damn this song. This song could overpower like sex acts and underbaked cookies to make me depressed.
4. Songs that are in Withnail & I, which i watched yesterday
Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower” is actually, I’m prepared to admit, slightly better than the Bob Dylan version. On the other hand, “Voodoo Chile” encapsulates the entire problem with Jimi Hendrix which is that his lyrics are like fourth-rate psych crap. Like you could find better lyrics on Dutch freakbeat records about vegetables. I will grant that “Voodoo Chile,” sonically, is apt for soundtracking a drunk maniac driving a TVed-up Jaguar down the highway and then tinkling all over a police station.
5. Songs that are creepy a capellas about how your relationship is fucked up
“Communicate” by Twin Diet
Also from EasyNews (I think these are all from EasyNews, after a moment’s thought). This is just some weird archaeo-indie rock crud. If this was an MP3 blog i guess I could post it. I’s starting to understand the futile aspect of this.
This the part where I lose steam and get back to writing an e-mail to my mom. I also have to finish the Dennis Haysbert story and the book proposal and write a bunch of stuff about cue sports. So I’m going to take my leave of you. I apologize for the unscheduled instance of narrative, or at least grammatical, cohesion in a place where I depend on both those things never darkening the door.
From recent cover letter for bouncer job
I would diagnose my own plusses/minuses as a doorperson as follows.
Pro: I am a pretty big guy, like in terms of width and depth and hat
size, and I have an almost-shaved head, which is sort of intimidating.
I'm ok with sitting around and making sure nothing bad happens. Won't
let girls into the bar if they smile at me, and I'm a stickler for
rules, as long as those rules are related to my paycheck.
Con: I have glasses, which isn't very tough.
I’m sitting in the offices of Billiards Digest listening to Martha & The Vandellas and chewing five sticks of Trident. Some important questions from the past few weeks:
1. So Robyn Hitchcock is actually pretty good? And that band the Ponys, that everybody was like, hey you have a record, you might be good, actually also good. I think. Kris Kristofferson’s Me & Bobby McGee: Unfuckingbelieveable.
2. I don’t understand the CTA. Why are all the trains mounted on the narrowest possible gauge rail, so that they all shake violently whenever the train slows down, speeds up, stops, or turns? I’ve been on a few forms of mass transit in my day, and the CTA’s new program of giving all passengers motion sickness is some bullshit.The MTA does not have this problem. SEPTA does not have this problem. The train I vaguely remember riding in Japan did not have this problem. the BART, presumably, does not have this problem, and the MUNI bus is so cool-looking it could be permanently in flames and I would still not complain about it. I think maybe the T in boston (why T? What’s a T? T Martin?) was about as bad as the CTA. But the T cars were so long and Eastern European looking I didn’t really give a shit.
3. Is it a viable plan to want to go to Poland to teach English? Is Poland safe? Will I get sold into white slavery, or will a bunch of pimply kids attack me with bootleg Louisville Sluggers? I heard baseball bats are a popular gang weapon in Poland.
Caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken…. it took me back to something
ON THE SUNDAY MORNING SIDEWALK WISHING LORD THAT I WAS STONED
BECAUSE THERES SOMETHING IN A SUNDAY MAKES A BODY FEEL ALONE
4. So are people from Philadelphia more or less hate-filled and violence-prone now as opposed to last week? It seems like they were pretty resigned to their fates, really. Jim Thome needs to bring his ass home. Also, Gammons says the Indians are a solid contender in the Central. I think what he meant was that the Indians already won the World Series and they’re just editing together the special contingency holograms that show the Mets winning once the Bush White House concludes that an Indians WS title would not be acceptable in the larger design for introducing democracy to the Middle East at gunpoint.
1) total amount of music on your computer:
I don’t have a computer, actually. the one i used to have has music on it. this question is stupid.
2) last CD you bought was:
16 lovers lane by the Go-betweens. which i haven’t listened to because i mostly bought out of some desire to support people who support Ribs a/o Bibs.
3) what was the last song you listened to before reading this message? was it deliberate?
“Bed and Breakfast Man” by Madness. No?
4) write down five songs that you listen to often and/or mean a lot to you.
a) “What Deaner Was Talking About” by Ween
b) “Running Scared” by Roy Orbison
c) that one Alicia Keys song where Method man gets arrested in the video
d) “To Love Somebody” by the Bee Gees
e) “I Have a Boyfriend” by the Chiffons
5) who are you going to pass this meme onto?
people i don’t respect
I can’t remember when exactly I started to refer to Bill Belichick and his Patriots teams with/under the epithet “Coastal media-bias boarding school oligarchy network.” It might have actually been applied before it was actually clarified that Bill Belichick did a post-graduate year at the Phillips Academy in Andover where he was classmates with Jeb Bush and H.G. Bissinger (what the fuck?). Mostly I think the epithet was used to explain adverse luck at Super Smash Brothers at the former Hyperborea (e.g., someone was able to beat the mighty Marf because of the east cast media monopoly boarding school shadow hand)
As it turns out, then, anyway, Bill Belichick went to Andover with the President’s brother. For a guy who is busily being re-marketed as the New God of Winning, which means you might find an inspirational quote from M. Belichick on your office break room wall in 2025, I still fear Belichick. A great deal of my fear originates from being a child during Belichick’s first post of command in Cleveland.
Bill Belichick, at least during his spell as Browns head coach, was like the single most inept communicator in the history of sports. Which is saying something. Most coaches, when you take a step back, are pretty stupid. They taunt players in public (Bill Parcells), they utilize racial slurs to describe the playbook (Parcells, again), they blame players for losses (Larry Bowa, others), they manage to charge answers to mundane questions with some kind of impolitic vibe. Bill Belichick was never dumb enough to do anything like that. He was smart (dumb) enough to tell the truth, pretty much on anything ever. Why did the Browns cut Bernie Kosar: “Diminishing skills.”
What I think happened to Belichick, after getting kicked off the blimp as Modell evacuated Cleveland, was that he realized the important of obfuscation, of covering up that he’s much, much smarter than most everyone else involved with the NFL with the exception of Paul Tagliabue, the lawyers, and maybe that guy on the Vikings who went to Harvard. That’s why his assistant coaches are banned from giving interviews, as a rule. That’s why he’s content to mumble niceties about the other team and spew teamwork cliches when other coaches might be talking up themselves, or their players, or both, at any opportunity. I’m curious to find out more about why Belichick has some kind of blood feud with Tony Dungy.
The aimless Belichick notes portion of today’s writing is over. I actually have to do something sort of like work here, so I want people to marinate on Belichick Theory, and we will get to the bottom of this. Before i move on to my discussion of what the dynastic Patriots represent for the future and eventual collapse of Democracy in America, I will say that Bill Belichick is clearly like the Robert McNamara of the parity NFL and will clearly live to 150 and live in a tower like the one guy’s dad in Braveheart and even then he’ll be coaching teams to Super Bowl glory, even with like one eye held in with scotch tape and shit. Also, side note: Do Not Chew Nicorette for Fun. It always goes south, fast.
What The Patriots Are For
I’ve always had a football-team-shaped hole in my lung or kidney for the Patriots. There are two reasons for this. The first is the 1985 Patriots and what happened to them in the Super Bowl. It’s very hard to not to feel deep and lasting sympathy for the entire fanbase of a team that gets stomped that bad. They probably couldn’t have beaten that Bears team in 50 tries. The second reasons is that Pat the Patriot is possibly my favorite team logo-mascot-signifier of all time. It’s a Minuteman and he’s playing football. It’s like a shark wearing a monocle playing hockey, except slightly more likely, in that sharks cannot ice skate or wear clothing and it would be hard to diagnose a shark with vision problems so that you would know to give him a monocle. And, sharks don;t really have cheeks, which makes it difficult to like actually wear the monocle.
I continue to have love for the Patriots, at least as I know the Patriots, which is mostly though my friends who like the Patriots. It’s hard to watch Three Games to Glory or Three Games to Glory, Again or the forthcoming Three More Games to Glory without feeling a deep fondness for New England sports fans. When they’re not being drunken assholes or whining about the curse, New England fans are generally OK. The Patriots, as of 2001, were especially appealing because their entire season, up to the playoffs, did not really make any sense, nor did they appear to be especially good, on paper (Tom Brady? Come on). The Pats also had the charm of being an old AFC team with a long track record of sucking. I always thought of them as the NFL’s Clippers/Brewers.
All of that, plus the irony of a team called “The Patriots” winning the first post 9-11 Super Bowl had every casual to serious NFL observer grinning their ass off, when Vinatieri sent the Mike Martz asshole Rams home. The Rams had already gotten their title two years earlier, the Kurt Warner story, although hard to fuck with, could be one-upped by the combo Tom Brady/Bledsoe returning to win the AFC title game thing. So everybody was pleased about the Patriots.
And that seemed like the end of the story. The next year, as per the guidelines of parity, the Pats crumbled to 9-7, although they did manage to shit all over the Dolphins in the process, which was enjoyable. Everybody agreed that this seemed about right. Then last year happened. I admit that by the second quarter of the Super Bowl last year, I was openly pulling for Carolina. I think the only way to explain this is entropy. This year, again, being not in the presence of anyone who might be offended by not rooting for the Patriots, i was loosely in favor of some kind of upset victory, just because it was an upset, and who gives a shit, right, as long as mobody’s feelings are stepped on?
My own complicated response-systems for the Patriots being good are not terribly germane. What I’d like to excavate is what this Patriots team being good encodes about America.
Tom Brady is problematic, specifically in how predictable he is. Dude is like the Bob Dole of superstar quarterbacks. Bob Dole, at this point, is a sort of cuddly old punchline for both parties, but in his time, he was like the meanest Republican ever (referring to the war in which he lost the use of his arm as a ‘Democrat war’ to make a point in a vicepresidential debate is pretty goddamn raw, really). Now that he’s a Daily Show regular and in Viagra ads and what have you, everybody has a laugh. But beyond qualitiative shifts in what Bob Dole means, there’s no denying some facts about Bob Dole: For a person whose job, essentially, is to connect to people and make them want to vote for him (i.e. a candidate for the Presidency and other high offices) he was really bad, in his heyday, at connecting with people and making them want to vote for him. It’s clear that Bob Dole getting 40-some percent of the national vote in 96 was not so much his viability as a candidate (at that point, with him falling off stages and mumbling, his viability was non-extant) but a creeper commentary on how Republican shit was getting, quietly. The values-driven gestalt shift that everybody just figured out in November. It took the Brett Favre of Democratic leaders (Think about imporant parallels b/w Favre and Clinton) and an abortive Perot run to keep Dole from coming close to actually getting elected to the leadership of the free world.
Here’s how Tom Brady is like Bob Dole: For a multimillionaire athlete-playboy, he;s a bit of a prig. He’s very dorky, yet women love him. A Republican, but still somehow, according to marketing, in touch with the spending habits of young people. He’s supposed to be cool/flamboyant/some kind of sex symbol. He’s not any of those things, except arguably a sex symbol in the way that your boy Kirk Herbstreit is a sex symbol for emotionally-trampled women and or closeted married men on saturdays in the autumn. The real clincher for the Brady-Dole comparison is that both are clearly Not Good, yet somehow Good, at their respective occupations. The problem is that Brady doesn’t have a Clinton to keep him out of the White House. Brady as game-manager-virtuoso, as well as Brady as cultural figurehead, get over because 2005 American can’t really produce an alternative. Baseball’s biggest stars are either crusty misanthropes/jerks (Schilling, Bonds, Randy Johnson) or not American (the hispanic guys) or both (Pedro Martinez) which is why Derek Jeter keeps being on the box for All-Star Baseball video games, because he’s one of like six likeable MLB players left, likeable in a broad sense, even though i can think about 75 people who I know would kick Jeter in the face if they thought they could get away with it, or maybe even if they thought they couldn’t. Back to Brady:
That’s not to crap on what the Patriots did on the field. They’re clearly the best team of the past five years, and Tom Brady is clearly their quarterback. So who’s the (Caucasian) face of the NFL right now? Peyton Manning.
How come? Well, Manning’s willingness to chant “Cut that meat” and “Let’s go, insurance adjusters, let’s go” is clearly a part of it. Being the son, and brother, of famous NFL players also inches up his Q rating, or his notoriety, or whatever you want to call it. His being Southern eventually fits into gunslinger tradition (Starr, Unitas, A. Manning, Stabler, Phil goddamn Simms, Favre, Elway [somehow a hick, despite being from So. CA], Vick.) Not to mention that Manning is probably, as far as just like being inside-your-own-limitations good at football, the best player in the league right now. But he’s also a big loser, by anybody’s standards, playing for a loser coach on a loser team in ultimately a loser city (when was the last time the state of Indiana won a title? 1986?) I don’t know what my ultimate point about Manning being more visible than Brady despite having three less rings. I think what is creeping in is a kind of New Victorianism, a reemphasis of Order. Manning was mocked by NE fans during the divisional game with a impressive ad hoc chant of “Cut that meat.” Obviously this was no more meaning-laden than chanting “Who’s your dealer” at the Yankees during the baseball playoffs. But I sort of wonder whether the Patriots fans weren’t in some way acting out a sort of castigation of Manning, shaming him for ‘running it out’ and making a buffoon of himself. Maybe this is all still the fallout from Nipplegate or whatever you want to call it but I think the pedigree from Andover/Wesleyan/model of restraint Belichick 2.0 shit, as well as the advent of the Humble Champion Patriots clearly signifies the arrival of New Victorianism in America. Bush might even be pulling some Disraeli-type shit by coopting important bits of liberal reform rhetoric and using it to dress up his shit and get it through. OK I promised to myself that no politics. I should really do some work.
as an esteemed colleague pointed out earlier today and i will paraphrase, the only thing i’m prepared to address, in an intellectual capacity, at the moment anyway, is like shitty old cartoons. Not new cartoons. I finished that book about Sonny Liston and here’s what I came up with:
1. Nick Tosches probably needs to get cockpunched. I mean that in the friendliest way possible. I mean it. The friendly part, not the cockpunching part. I’m not sure about the first part anymore
2. Sonny Liston clearly like one of the best things ever to happen in America.
3. I am all in favor of the new “muhammad ali is overrated, both as a boxer and as a human being” angle. I will thank Nick Tosches for that. Taking the piss out of people should be the national sport. For some reason putting more piss into them seems more popular.
I tried to play video games today. I got distracted. I don’t know whether to take that as a sign of some kind of looming disquiet or that maybe I had just eaten 1.5 bags of Skittles (the blue kind — somehow tropical) and was going through some kind of manic episode. that was the first time i’d had Skittles in a while. Not clear why I visited the self-abuse on my head. This laptop keyboard is too small. Like each individual keyboard finger-receptacle is too small. This is boring. I should not, in hindsight, have taken a five hour nap from 7 pm to midnight. Which is why it’s 3:34 a.m. and I don’t get to go back to sleep. Go back to sleep.
Things are going to change around here? Are they? I need to get a real job. I don’t actually want one, is the thing.
