the chernobyl of mothering instincts

your dad had a van for a reason

More to come later today on the pastoral dad-sex ad campaign of canadian club blended whiskey. that and the unhealed wounds of modernity. and grand theft auto. i have to do work this morning though. please enjoy my special art project instead.

worth mentioning: CC’s web site encourages you to join the weird dad-sex brigade — i didn’t even have to use photoshop to make my Humbert ad, i made it right on their site. Well, i had to look up a picture of HH, but whatever.

staying positive

a play in one act.

26 YEAR OLD SOFTEDGED DUDE WITH GLASSES (BALDING): (an aside to himself) why is that girl wearing clothes too small? she’s not fat, it’s not like she would be shapeless and unloveable if she wore clothes that fit. is there a name for this phenomenon? besides misogyny?

[a giant CONDOR appears stage right]
[ALARUM sounds]
[CONDOR rips the white dude in half -- you didn't notice initially it was carrying a scimitar in its talons. the scimitar is also shaped more like a penis than usual for a scimitar-- blood is geysering all over]
[you also didn't notice the CONDOR is balding and has glasses and soft edges]
CONDOR: ARE YOU SURE BY ‘MISOGYNY’ YOU DIDN’T MEAN ‘GETTING KILLED BY ME’

-fin-

not about to deface this property

whatever whatever whatever. i work hard for this. stay tuned for more bullshit.

she-hulk

vs.

these two dudes say: DO NOT FUCK AROUND WITH PET ABUSE

incoming bogies for late april 2008:
:: i’m getting a manicure. hypertrophic paw grooming regimen soon to become a regular thing with me. do not ask or otherwise respond to this unless you are going to give me money.

:: purchased: dee brown-related t-shirt at boston area streetwear retailer.

:: clae whitmans. in caramel.

:: faith in re 2008 cleveland indians. this is the year jake westbrook justifies all that cy young hype you’ve been hearing. also the ghost of fausto carmona’s afro-caribbean soul BBQ roots will run up on you. dude is like the vine deloria of pitching. or something. give me $50. please.

:: badger hand balms. A++++. fuck you guys. my hands are my livelihood.

Be kind to your behind

maybe i am just a dick, but what the cottonelle ads that have recently blanketed the Chicago Transit Authority’s fleet suggest to me is:
“Cottonelle: Almost as good as wiping your ass with a live golden retriever puppy.”

—-

i am currently working (in a sort of Jose Arcadio Buendia sense, as far as reasonable expections of non-permanent non-failure are a thing) on a theory in which Jane Austen and the Velvet Underground maybe occupy the same space in your, ah, spiritual closet or something like that.

—-

special news report: Wolf Shirts seem to have taken a turn for the deviant and threatening. especially confusing is the red cross in the wolf’s eye.

dreams of hugging

I saw the above tee-shirt item a few months back but it didn’t really move yr correspondent to more than a bilious chuckle at the time (ed note: most things have this effect). This was always a favorite rhyme (well, ’sentiment’ is probably a better description than ‘rhyme’) from Biggie, not because of any particular dream of mine or from any kind of like, pastoral enjoyment of hip-hop misogyny ding an sich or whatever, but more for its pith.

Biggie’s synecdoche of a certain kind of woman is a panoramic sketch not only of a certain kind of desire, but of a whole category of human experience; not only literal, lived experiences of growing up male in the age of MTV (let’s all not think about what we may have done in accompaniment to MTV’s The Grind after school) but the sort of fleeting, grandiose daydreams that swim in the boundary waters between literature and waking life. You could “marry” someone with soulful singing ability, and you could hug someone with a lot of money in the bank, and you could probably combine them into one person. QED, Bobby Brown or the like. But that’s not really what Mr. Wallace is talking about; it’s not as crass as that, it’s about his desire and what it tells you about his life.

Of course, all this is what I say here and now, now that I’ve had a think on it. But previous to today, I never gave this language much thought, other than maybe using it as a blog post title and occasionally invoking it with and without irony whenever my desires were thwarted or redeemed at in life’s rich pageant. But then it went and turned up on a t-shirt.

Something about this sentiment’s bow on a material commodity, plus the additional spice of depicting in half-tone silkscreen the specific R&B bitches to dream about hugging set my mind to wander, the paltry evidences of which are above and below. There’s a tidy graph or two to be written about what it literally means to want to do that, but I’m increasingly excited about clothes. Not just in the traditional having and wearing sense, but thinking about what it means to wear something.

Micro-topically, I have no idea where i stand on streetwear as an artform or just a multivalent hustle to look good and underwrite other dudes’ looking good by giving them $40 for $5 worth of cotton and screenprinting. T-shirt symbology slots right into some kind of larger cultural gulfstreams towards pastiche, referentialism, earnest and ironic nostalgias (vid Slick Rick below). i’m not up here at the podium to cash out why people do things, why other people respond to them and why I might be one of those kinds of people, in terms of sympathies, despite certain screaming disparities between me and other people (e.g. I am a prematurely balding academic publishing foot soldier; I do not own a skateboard; i have no professed opinion towards grabbing your crotch while drinking champagne from the bottle).

But anyway, this shirt breaks my jaw, to borrow a coinage. If someone wears this shirt, they’re not really expressing or affirming their own/Biggie’s longing for a non-romantic physical relationships with a songstress of a particular genre. Rihanna is probably not their preferred object of desire. Maybe once you reach a certain point of overdetermination in re culture you aren’t really capable of loving/desiring someone for what they are. You’re maybe stuck with who they are, which is to say, with loving them in your own personal noumenal world. Does that also govern your love and desire of things, such as up-market streetwear t-shirts?

Probably not. I’ve found room in my life for stupid, expensive t-shirts, and I don’t think that my 10 Deep t-shirts really say much about me other than “I had $40 one time and didn’t get much for it.” But what the Biggie shirt expresses clearly is more knotted: there’s a contradictory willingness to be identified as someone who knows and appreciates, for lack of a more precise verb, the contents of the shirt, and a displayed willingness to set yourself apart from people who like Biggie, but not enough to buy this shirt. Clothing, apart from demography, is probably the only ready-at-hand visual expression of the concept “I prize the Notorious BIG’s body of work”. Posture, maybe? Not important.

What is important (well, what has meaning) here is that you chose this Biggie-lyric-shirt over other meta-Biggie or generally ’street’ concepts. Cf, the t-shirt for sale at the wig & nails place on E. Hyde Park Blvd featuring a poorly-rendered airbrushed King Kong manque clutching fistfuls of $100 bills, decorated with rhinestones and gold glitter, on top of the empire state building, screaming “I LOVE THE BLOCK.” Which I am taking to mean “I am at home in the american inner city setting and organize or want to organize my social lives around illegal narcotics retail-culture,” vis a vis a traditional favorite garment of the underclass. But in fact, that’s not what you chose this shirt over; that shirt costs $10; this one likely costs three or four times as much. You chose this shirt over Banana Republic, or Uniqlo, or fuckifiknowwhatkindofclothing. Nahmean? It’s weird enough to have seconded drug dealers as culture heroes, having lower-middle-class white kids idolizing either 50 Cent or Master Chief (the dude from Halo, whatever his name is). That’s normal, Ford assembly-line American weird, the same brand of weird that gets you spaghetti Westerns and people who work in morose, alienating offices watching the morose, alienated comedy The Office. Normal American modernist contradiction.

But (somewhat) art-for-art’s-sake people searching out obscure boutique reductionist clothing bearing obscure, poetic vulgarity, then fetishizing as a refinement of the above: Weird with scientific notation? Or just a deep reading in regular weird?

I dunno what I’m after here; this isn’t really about streetwear specifically, it’s more about what you can know from another person’s clothing, both from its genotype and phenotype. I started thinking about this when i was farting around Target the other day and decided the next time I had some loot I needed to come back and get some adult-contempo business wear there, since it was cheap and totally acceptable looking. At the same time, I keep buying silly hats and shirts, mostly for quiet personal enjoyment, but also for sharing with the world, despite feeling like, well, I have no business owning these things. (well, actually i have as much as anyone else, but whatever).

But seriously, from a wide reading in culture, from Mexican anti-emo riots, to me buying a hat with a gremlin on it, through wee tiny occult stuff like Straight Cash Homey, or through damaged fashion, highsnobiety, Kanye or Ice Cream or whatever, clothing is more and more like a medium than an agricultural byproduct-cum-enduring social meme or whathaveyou. I’m not talking about tiny upmarket culture war (again) or the bonfire of the inanities or some shit, I mean the claddings of contra-culture that are increasingly a kind of social capital.

A long time ago BQA explained to me that a small part of his sartorial philosophy involved subverting other people’s expectations by causing them to jump to conclusions about him through his clothing, then not living up to the presumptive conclusions in some vector or another. I’ve always taken that to heart, although I am going the long way around by trying (not very hard, but it was hard for me to try this non-hard, if you know what i mean) to look like a garden-variety rust-belt urban white dude with pretensions towards like neoliberal world citizenship and also a healthy appreciation for Americanana such as baseball. the subversion comes in… I’m not sure where. I guess the neoliberal world citizenship thing. anyway, what rattles now is that, pace MySpace and Facebook, a diffused but still multi-monolithic youth culture (think about it) prevails; mass- and semi-mass produced articles of clothing have more and more pieces of demographic data splashed on them, even though interpersonal interaction seems to be on the wane (the interior life, not of the mind but of the SMS and the poke or whatever). What’s causing it? Well, I already posited my guess, in so many words. A roasted soy nut for your thoughts?

Brandt can’t watch, though, or he has to pay a hundred

fuck you tuesday #3:
the more i think about this beer commercial, well, the more it transparently references demeaning but enduringly popular sex acts. which i guess is fine (no, actually, it is). the pick to click is the absurd jump cut from when the female waitress starts to reach down for the dropped bottles to when she’s getting up and tell me what you think is going on. then there’s the fact that the bartender gives a sage nod of approval to the dude who just received a conceptual servicing.

so, what does getting anonymous favors from a member of the food service industry imply about beer heaven, or heaven in general? i don’t think it’s really worth the time to make a list of the logical/bibliographic shortcomings of a miller lite ad w/r/t historical/literary concepts of heaven and how none of them involve spontaneous hummers. well, i shouldn’t say that with anything like authority actually. but anyway, advertising, being a collection of genial but seditious lies, wants you to know that A) beer heaven has less to do with beer than with what happens to you when you drink the beer and B) male-dominant promiscuity is not only rad and a thing to insist on, but should happen IN PUBLIC. especially creepy when you consider that maybe she’s doing it to apologize for bumping into him?

you can punch up the hate another notch if you watch the next ad in the series wherein the beer servers transmogrify into different heteroethnic/gender beauties depending on the demographics of their clientele. given the workload suggested in Exhibit A, this implies that beer heaven is more like sex industry heaven. i think we can assume the cut scene of dudes playing air hockey on a plasma TV is a stand-in for what they couldn’t show, which was people getting it on that tv. it’s a pretty good parody of yuppie desire to think of people rutting on a Sony HD 1080i, then to metaphorize it as air hockey. beer pong would be funnier though.

jesus i can’t even think about that beer pong table ad. it’s ludicrous. identical whorish blonds, irish national colors, the absurd “8′ in length,” the creepy splooge mark in the background.

White dude soul crisis corner: Why baseball is better than other sports:

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.

Second: the game does not give unusua1 preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc. And there are all kinds of strategies.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view: the spectators and the players can see what is going on. Per contra football where it is hard to know what is happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc. And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul. There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from the marvelous timing built into the game and not from trying to police cheaters etc.

Fifth: baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time. Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and throws it to home plate, and so on.

Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This means that there is always time for the losing side to make a comeback. The last of the ninth inning becomes one of the most potentially exciting parts of the game. And while the same sometimes happens in tennis also, it seems to happen less often. Cricket, much like baseball (and indeed I must correct my remark above that baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball), does not have a time limit.