The only excuse for being broke is being in jail
“it’s a serious holy sacrament… people don’t know how to
use it properly to help their own selves evolve to the next species
state… to homo noeticus”
Suzanne, Suzanne Dorn
two times
one minus one. so i got a new bank. that’s pretty much all i have to add for today. and i didn’t do it because citibank blowtorches monkeys, i did imostly for my convenience.
Send somebody out for soda
Rex Chapman and Danny Ferry have both been give the cape of supermang/GM on their own personal NBA teams today, first that makes me feel old, second it makes me wonder about the state of race relations in america (then i remember that rex chapman is singlehandedly trying to destroy the concept of racial distinction) three, does somebody think it’s funny to keep fux0ring up the few cleveland-area things that might potentially make people happy/financially viable/not suicidal? and if they do think it’s funny can we at least have it not involve danny ferry again, please. four, where’s the GM job for dell curry/dale ellis/other celebral 3-point gunners with unfashionable hairdos. Rex you know i love thouest and thy bald, and i shouldn’t compare your shit to DC’s old-man hairdo.
Neon signs in chicago that feature drunk sea creatures
1. Pequod’s Pizza, western Lincoln Park
Content: Whale with panties on his head. is depicted elsewhere in same location engaged in 1980s teen-movie-styled acts of rascally adventure; specifically riding some kind of surfboard, still with the panties on his head, while sticking like a giant pimply Mad magazine style tongue out of his mouth to harass the female whale, who is missing her panties, which are on his head, and is also running away trying to cover up her whale cleavage. also these whales, at least in the second mural, look more like dragons or what a disturbed children would draw if you told them to draw a dog.
2. the bar over there on clark that has a drunk fish wearing a viking helmet on the neon sign (Simon’s). The drunk fish has one eye that blinks on and off (that i think is what establishes him as drunk, since he doesn’t have popping bubbles over his head or a stagger or whale panties on his head.
based on my informal observation of this weekend’s gay pride festivities on the north side of chicago, the following trends will have to be reckoned with:
1. there are way, way more gay people now
2. Allen Iverson is to a certain kind of lesbian what Morrissey is to norteno dudes. sort of. it’s like i’m saying, just i wasn’t ready for Iverson to become the new Judy Garland all of a sudden. Do people know about this.
3. Apparently the way most people watch parades is to get HAMMERED beforehand and then weave around during the parade leering at me and smoking cigarettes like there was money in it. this goes for all people who were actually like invested in the abstract concept of pride and the people who were just rooting for offense if you know what I mean. Is this a new thing, drunken parade watching? Parades I am prepared to finally dismiss, to throw into the compost heap of shit i do not see myself ever enjoying along with:
1. Amusement parks. We, the world, have cars that go faster safer and also are not beholden to the track layout. also, why would you want to be scared on purpose, and also pay $30 to preserve that right on a case-by-case basis. Three, why do you want a funnel cake to keep you company.
2. Fireworks. it’s just light and noise, we have electricity and recorded sound now. how is watching fireworks any less impressive than watching time lapse footage of plants growing? if you are amazed by combustion go turn your stove on and off.
3. the thing with flipping up your polo shirt collar. i have no specific hate for like the genre of dude who does this, but why do you need to be wearing two-three polo shirts to do it all the way. sub-category of my non-understanding: the thing where the street duders wear just white t-shirts but in size 12XL and then that’s what they wear. can we go back to when young urban toughs had some sartorial flair.
Every man has his own batch of poems
Theories of Batman
So, i was sort of waiting for the thunderhead of metacriticsm on Batman Begins to erupt and rain down dissipated erudition on a low-value target after joe budden took out his strap, but the internal pressures are weighing on my wordbladder so i’m going to go ahead and play the best ball, middle-school-staff golf tourney style.
Batman ^4 showed some of the hallmarks of being a bad movie, such as being 15 minutes long and having the kind of fight scenes that only stoned, nihilistic cinematographers could appreciate (shot from three inches away with oliver-stone-academy-of-nauseatic-filmmaking style quick cuts and mostly just whooshing noises and thumps to indicate who’s winning). these fight scenes are particularly foiled by the fact that everyone is wearing black and fighting in either the colorado springs ninja summer camp or a dank alley, or is batman and is supposed to only supposed to be like half visible. And the script was a bit clunky, etc, etc, there were some debatable marketing-related casting decisions (do they really have cockney butlers? aren’t butlers supposed to be classy? if you were a really good butler but you got real paid at age 70, would you continue to be a butler, especially if your only putative buttling charge was declared dead seven years earlier.)
aside from the observational humor, I had some important questions about the mythology of batman as applied to this movie. one, in the accepted Batman etiology, the Joker kills Batman Pere et Mere, and that sends Batman on his lifelong learning-annex approach to theories of criminology/guilt/definitions justice, and then he either kills or perpetually thwarts the joker, depending on the situation, but also discovers the big hole inside his brain that no amount of batmanning can fill, and then he spends the rest of the time being the opposite of clark kent, which is to say a capable, suave machosensual dude who is a beard for his depressive, arrested-development superhero alter ego.
This Batman goes more like this: Batman ceases to be a personal metaphor; there’s not a Batman inside each of us, there’s a larger group-rate United Batman of America, while the tibetan ninja school of criminal justice represents 1) illegal drugs 2) anti-depressants 3) the polar split in US political philosophy (the failure of the new left and the rise of doctrinarian, faux-spiritual conservatism).
I’ll sign off on this shit up to a point; i never really bought into any superhero other than Spiderman as a personal narrative; Superman is not actually about how the solution to injustice is a brother from another planet, Batman, for me at least, seemed really unsettling and awesome, because it’s about white flight and the siege mentality and living in the wreckage of hamiltonian urban democracy. metropolis gets attacked by Doomsday or corporate moral collapse once a week; Gotham City is always falling apart, Batman is just evening the score as much as he can, but it is a comic book, so he does have to work in bold colors, SVP. Which is why the ’90s Adventures of Batman cartoon on the WB cartoon thing had a lot of appeal to me, not because it embodied the kind of unpleasant roots of Batman but instead turned into like Weimar Batman.
Uncollated notes:
The scarecrows’s bete noire is licorice? at least give him something scarier than worms (katie holmes) or bats (batman). like make him afraid of peer review or chiropractors or something. at the same time, you have commend whoever decided that if you were a crazy psychiatrist who wore a bag on his head and yelled “Scarecrow!” all the time, that if you got sprayed with your own crazy spray but were subsequently freed to wreak havoc, you would almost certainly find the first available horse, put the burlap sack on your head and ride around yelling “Scarecrow.” I mean it, that’s probably true.
Who eats toast
baseball-related topics for speculative celebrity fiction:
Adrian C. “Cap” Anson
Dock Ellis
Charlie Sheen
the guy who plays Donovan in major league meeting the guy who plays Donovan in indiana jones and the last crusade, which was on TV at the same time as an indians game last night
non-baseball-
the civil war bum who is outside this internet cafe right now
so i was walking back from the hardware store and there was this guy,
who sort of looked like me and had the same male-pattern-baldness and
general build and was wearing camoflauge shorts, which i took as an
analog to my paramedic shirt, which i was wearing, and was doing the
same thing i was doing, which was namely not being at work despite it
being 10 am on a tuesday and being in his mid-20s and being on the
1400 block of w.winona, and then like his neighbor came outside and
said hi and his name was peter. i’m being erased, is the upshot, i think.
absurd rich-person food item teaser:
something called Heritage Flakes, which is a cereal and is not some kind of bath product that keeps you extra-caucasian.
baby greaser george
i know, i know that i don’t live in new york anymore and i don’t get a vote or whatever, but doesn’t it explain everything that’s wrong with everything when the feature illustration for The City section article about The New Brooklyn(s) and how awesome Brooklyn is and how many writers live in Brooklyn and how much Brooklyn is working out great for everyone, the illustration for that article, is a picture of a woman standing in in redhook looking out at… manhattan. just saying is all.
i moved all my shit to andersonville; i have free laundry; there is something called non-GMO buttery spread that is also somehow vegan despite its buttery aspirations and is much, much worse for you that actual butter, as far as my bleary, somewhat tired eyes told me this morning while i managed toast production. my main blog-related goal for the next week is to make a full, living database of all the dumb shit in this apartment so that when the person involved googles me they will find a death’s-head staring back at them in the form of their own spending habits. like how serial killers in movies secretly make a pattern on a map or how Paul Auster and the other fake Paul Auster write out letters on the map when walking: my rudeness to people who indirectly treat me kindly is breaking into the eighth dimension and shit.
also, can i just say, this blog was about Grady Sizemore two goddamn years ago and now the national sports media decides he’s good at baseball. can i get a free chicken sandwich or something out of that.
the second fronde
as astute readers may or may not have discerned this blog is going to be undergoing a temporary relocation, in the world of concrete and seagulls, to somewhere in between broadway and clark on “winona street” which is a fine name for a street, although i have a stated preference for number-based street names, conferring as they do an air of city living. anyway, i am looking forward to the forthcoming kulturkampf summer jam. although it seems like prevailing kultur, on the various main drags of andersonville, breaks down like this:
broadway side: vietnamese people; junkies; subfaction of shoeless, extra-confused junkies, subfaction of shoeless but lucid junkie-manques.
clark side: very nice gay people; old people of all different kinds; some junkies.
which is to say, i don’t know if this is the appropriate theatre that i thought it was for being alienated all summer. which is to say that i know it isn’t. anyway, i still feel like there is a great deal of potential for anthropological research this summer, although i’m crestfallen that i don’t get to use the word kulturkampf that often. i should probably own up and say that i’m just killing time here, i have nothing to do until 2:15 except go to the bathroom preemptively, which cancels out the fun out of actually getting to go to the bathroom. well, this is inane. I had a kobe beef hot dog last night, it wasn’t very good.
thunder only happens when it’s raining
For the old firm:
At c 1730h on the 1500 block of E. 57th street, the franchise was approached by the gentleman bearing unremarkable outward similarity to pootie tang. he asked me if i was “into art” while i was putting shit into a car to move said shit northwards to the summer cottage. i said yes before getting a visual make on what and why he might be asking me that, which was because he was carrying a somewhat dented, metal-frame Gauguin print. after i said yes, he sort of waved it at me and said make me an offer, to which i said, oh, sorry, no, i don’t want that. to which he said, just give me some money then, a couple dollars, to which i said, no, no, sorry, not me, i’m for different stuff, to which he said, are you into art, to where i felt compelled to explain that i was into art, yes, all kinds of art, but not that kind, or maybe that kind wasn’t art, at least no it in the way that i like to give you money for it. so then he went across the street and i was left behind.
