According to The Death Of Macho, my time is up before it even began. The heavyweight journal Foreign Policy breaks the news that the era of male dominance is coming to an end. And before you shake this off as some cultural tale of extinction akin to the disappearance of the handle-bar moustaches from straight faces or gentlemen losing the willpower to dress in suits and ties for football games, think again. It's the end of men as the bosses of men. Holy Nancy Pelosi, Batman, please say it ain't so? Thanks to Yaweh's primordial conspiracy, dudes have been running the show since creation, and it's just my luck, that just as I'm about to get called up to The Show, the whole goddamn league flames out. These are the times that try men's souls.
So the MTA sneakily raised the cost of a subway ride to $2.25 yesterday. The theory that the price of one subway ride moves in lockstep with the standard price for a slice of cheese pizza doesn't bode well for depression era budgetary constraints. Pizza is simply bread with a schmear of tomato and a little cheese, right? So how the heck can those ingredients effect the price of my mass transit? Or vice fucking versa. Though no one seems to be 100 percent sure which change causes the other, I have to wonder if any of the guys running the MTA are named Grimaldi or DiFara or Lombardi?
Little Man is a hilarious short film, the cinematic realization of a story born on the day Adam kicked down a rib to Eve. It's a real kick in the pants fellas. Have a nice weekend with sexual tension.
Long before the King of Pop took over the world there existed a dance called the backslide. It was a slide step perfected most famously by Bill Bailey. The backslide would become even more famous as Michael Jackson's moonwalk. In the end, Jackson was so goddamn weird that his non-performer personality overshadowed many of his contributions, but when he busted that moonwalk out at Motown's 25th anniversary Special, I was floored. The dance was back, back in a body openly receptive to the old masters as well as the latest patchwork offerings of plastic surgery.
As one who's witnessed the complete tragic-heroic arc of his career, I'm at loss to derive much meaning from his death. Only the most innocent or sadistic could have hoped for his shape-shifting delusions to carry on much longer. It was an act both unsustainable and intolerable. Michael Jackson could never have been that crazy without first having been that rich. And he was rich because he was an amazing dancing and singing automaton for most of his life. That said, I can't imagine anyone truly thinking a return to performing was about to revitalize him or his career. The O2 gigs were fated. Destiny tinged with any glory was out of the question from the first announcement. Michael Jackson might have been a pop culture superman but in the end, he was just a cartoon.
Tom Hardy is mesmerizing as Bronson. It's a bizarre turn by a dude well known to be a pretty crazy fucker in his own right. Dramatic role play always make me question how much acting is really going on and characters like Hardy, as Bronson, reinforce my position that acting apples don't fall too far from actor trees. In short, nuts know nuts. Don't get me wrong, I think it's wicked work but if you happen upon Hardy and Eric Bana discussing method acting over pints, you might oughta steer clear.
I'm not an animation nut but this documentary about the birth of televised cartooning is fascinating. The focus is on Jonny Quest, which at the time, was the most ambitious animated series ever undertaken. With its international story lines, hi-tech gadgetry and cool cat music, it was a revelation to a world of kids previous geeked on physical dust-ups and talking animal hi-jinx.
It was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid. I wanted to roll with J. Quest. So finding this amazing (fan-made?) documentary is a mind-bender since all that's known is that it was “supposedly made for a one time screening at a private function.” Hmm? Doesn't matter. This is a seriously cool history trip down memory lane.
In the 1970s, Jonny Quest became one of the main targets of parental watchdog groups such as Action for Children's Television (ACT). With its multiple on-screen deaths, murder attempts, use of firearms and deadly weapons (especially by children, notably Jonny), frequent use of racial stereotypes, and tense moments, Jonny Quest was decried as the epitome of what was wrong with Saturday morning cartoons. Today, Jonny Quest shall have his revenge. This whole video clocks in at about 2 hrs and 20 minutes, broken down into 27 short chapters on YouTube, and assembled into this single playlist. But if you’d like to create a single file, you can down load all the clips from Chris Webber’s blog, his only caveat:
The original creators of the documentary have given me permission to share this unique documentary but ask once again that if you do download it and decide to copy it or share it, please do not sell it or in any way create profit with it. This was their sole requirement for posting it on YouTube.
If in these troubled economic times you can't afford vintage clothes there's always this. Enjoy it some retro Saturday morning with Bailey's Irish Cream in your coffee. And for god's sake, if not mine, show it to some kids. Just please don't charge them.
Celeb blowhards are ubiquitous. In most cases, it's fine by me if they wanna chime in on the state of the world. After all they're outfitted with scads of personal assistants keeping them in loops, narrowing down endorsement opportunities and apprising them of trending cognoscenti. Use it or loose it logic, I suppose. Well, my friend Brian Clark is not feeling quite so generous. His reaction to discovering Vanity Fair employs Henry Rollins to write “Change You Don’t Have To Believe In, Just Deal With” is a well placed stick in the spokes of the authority vested in the Black Flag franchise's 4th singer.
Happening across ... Rollins’ column while sitting at my computer, sipping on a cold can of beer, I was shocked (yes, shocked!) at how mind-bogglingly terrible it was. How poorly written. How intellectually lazy and misguided. How directionless and pointless. How utterly juvenile. Most importantly, how undeserving of the imprimatur of legitimacy that comes with being a columnist for a magazine like Vanity Fair, having one’s work presented alongside that of real writers like Christopher Hitchens. Rollins’ piece was so bad that after I finished it I put down my beer and read it again, just to make sure I hadn’t missed something the first time around (nope – it was still terrible).
On this, the 2nd anniversary of my first Father's Day as a father, I was invited to type along with a daddy advice blog. The select staff of opinionated nut jobs launching this venture will certainly shake up the world of baby raising traditions. If not the babies themselves. Captaining this monsterssori ship is Gavin McInnes. Beyond yours truly, the cast of characters include luminaries Chris Nieratko and Jim Goad, plus some jewish dude named Benjamin who's there, I assume, to provide a more circumcised perspective.
Had I drawn the assignment in time to actually write for Father's Day, I would have fleshed out the thinking behind this morning's Tweet: "Wondering how many father's would promise to never have sex again just to get through this day?" Snappy fatherly thinking, eh? I'll try better for Gavin, the gang and you, so check My Dad Homies from time to time for the latest in child rearin', rip roarin', fun stuff.
Fantastic documentary on the skeletons filling the Iranian revolutionary closet by the underappreciated Al-Jazeera English.
In four parts, the documentary sets the stage for Revolution, profiles the man chosen by God to be their Supreme Leader and lays bare the backstory for the current Iranian political/religious maelstrom. It's some real P.K. Dick meets John LeCarre styled-shit with copious opiates and gender bending.
Follow up with Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 and you'll assuredly know more about Iran than anyone in your political district.
BTW: God has chosen Me to man this screed of a blog, with sincere apologies to Strunk & White and my religious diety of the day, Zoraster. Enjoy some manna today if you can source it.
If you grew up in Southern California, you likely spent more time watching Cal Worthington grinning broadly through a picture tube than Three Stooges or Little Rascals reruns. Worthington was on TV for only one reason, to sell cars, and he became a living legend in the process. He is probably the nation's longest-lived TV pitchman of any sort, and during his remarkable career, he single-handedly invented the practice of big-time car selling -- or at the very least, made it an enduring success.
In his autobiography, Blur bassist Alex James admitted to blowing a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. This confession led to an invitation from Colombia's President Uribe to visit the country and see the damage being caused by the drug trade. He went, and the BBC filmed it as The Cocaine Diaries. While the BBC series is great, the book Bit of a Blur is real wallop of sex and drugs. Mix the media; it's a surprisingly pleasant cocktail.
One of the greatest baseball characters of all time was the outrageous Satchel Paige. Without his relentless showboating and barnstorming through an America tainted by Jim Crow there could have no Jackie Robinson in MLB. Period.
His life was something, totally screwed and completely amazing at the same time. For me he'll always be the greatest baseball pitcher ever. The rest can hang fire. He was a trickster so crazily confident that he'd pull his teammates from the field and challenge the opposition alone. Whether white or black, those dudes had no chance against his 'titty,' 'nightmare,' or 'four day creeper' pitches. Satchel page was as great as they get. Do yourself a favor and listen to Larry Tye talk knowingly about Satchel Page on Fresh Air.
Analog TV signals will cease forever today. I imagine all the Extra-Terrestrials out there monitoring our convoluted radio frequency transmissions are gonna wonder what the hell happened. Saucer captains might just mistakenly launch a land rush at the infotainment void, so keep an eye on the night skies friend. And turn your radios on.
As many of you know, I lived without a TV until 9/11 made me desperate for images to corroborate the ones I'd personally witnessed. TV's changed the world but it's changed us too. We're addicted to the comforting HALesque modulation of the boob tube as it glad-hands us through the fun and not so fun stuff of life beyond our rooms. Today, in solidarity with my brothers in analog, I've decided to revert back to TVless Trace. It's not really such a deprivation with the interweb at hand but I like to think of it as a small protest against the end of free TV. Fuck cable and its narrowcasting ways.
I admit I'll miss the company and, in particular, the fast forwarding through recorded sporting events. My eyes glued to the box score graphic as the images hurtle by, on the look out for the slightest tic of a score to signal hitting the rewind and replay buttons. This rapid grab approach to TV made possible by the DVR was a time saver to be sure but may just be have been the fuel charging the adderall revolution. Saying bye bye to my TV won't change much, other than getting me out of the house more often. So look for me on a couch in front of a TV near you soon.
UPDATE: If you find yourself falling out of love with TV like I did, but are starved for video based news, use Livestation. It's pretty nifty.
Climbers Jonny Copp, Micah Dash and filmmaker Wade Johnson went missing last week attempting to summit Mount Edgar in the Sichuan province of China. Apparently victims of an avalanche, the bodies of Copp and Johnson have been recovered while the search goes on for Dash. It will seemingly take a miracle for his safe return to this world.
My friend Pete Takeda is one of the selfless members of the climbing community who's gone to China to aide the search. The situation is fluid but you can follow his early notes here. The wonderful video put together by the talented Johnson focuses on the relentlessly challenging and beautifully adventurous Copp and Dash. No guts no glory. In the piece, I was particularly drawn to Copp's shirt which read "Unfuck the World." It speaks volumes about who these guys were and how they should be remembered; special people not satisfied with easy options or playing it safe but still people of the people. As a show of solidarity, do something mighty today and see if you can't unfuck the world just a bit. It's takes guts to be different.
Food writer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and Robert Kenner, the director of the new documentary Food, INC., discuss the upcoming film. Please give the link below a listen. It will blow your fucking mind.
If you're loathe to invest in an e-Book because you long for the physicality of books, you can now purchase book perfume designed to replicate the smell of books. The Smell of Books™ aerosol e-book enhancer might just double as a way to get your kids off the X-Box. Making their bedroom smell like a musty old learning library would surely get them to go outside and sport around in reality. Wouldn't it?
Thomas Paine was by all accounts a prickly and intransigent bastard. But as a revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual and one of the most important characters in the history of the United States, Tom Paine killed.
Common Sense jump started and fueled the shaky American Revolution, his Rights of Man cemented the notion that democratic political ideals were worth fighting for and the Age of Reason's call to arms against organized religion planted the enlightened seed of deism in generations of free-thinkers. As you see, by all accounts, he was also a bad ass.
Paine died in New York City 200 years ago today and remains to my mind a neglected hero. He was not into people telling him what to do, neither governments nor churchmen nor slave owners. He endlessly harangued contemporaries to end unquestioning adherence to feudal gentry and monarchical bullshit. In turn, they threatened to hang him. Though he was bounced from country to country and burned in effigy by his enemies, the little guy remained a shit stirrer on a mission till the end. Tom Paine, not John McCain, was the inventor of straight talk. So pour a libation to a fallen hero and spend the day stirring pots and smiting fascists in his honor. I assure you I will.
Have you heard of this new J.D. Salinger lawsuit concerning the title 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye? Salinger claims the book by a pseudonymous writer calling himself John David California is an unauthorized sequel while the purported author admits that's it's at least a variation on Catcher in the Rye. Hmm... wtf?
Thankfully, Ron Rosenbaum posited this great "what if?" in Slate:
Wouldn't it be a brilliant jest on us all, for example, if Salinger himself had actually written the Holden Caulfield sequel 60 years later, hired this (apparently) Swedish guy to impersonate the pseudonymous author, then sued himself to insure no one would guess the real author? It reminds me of radio talker John Calvin Batchelor's brilliant stunt: a mock-scholarly speculative essay published in the mid-'70s considering whether Salinger was Thomas Pynchon, who would then have been not a recluse but a pseudonym.
The number of people who lose sleep over Salinger's strange saga may no longer be enormous, but he still has a cult following, and there are also those of us who—without being cultists—think he's an important figure in American literature whose work (and whose subsequent 45-year-long nonpublishing silence) are both worth paying attention to.
A little over a year ago emails to Steve O started returning with a strange automated response. Because of my own addictions, I can't recall exactly want the message said but it was something akin to EMAIL IS THE DEVIL and I HAVE LOST MY MIND, DON'T CALL BACK. It was mild surprise at best coming from Stephen Glover.
The New York Daily News says that Eminem dropped an F bomb and stormed from his seat at last night's MTV Movie Awards after Sasha Baron Cohen swooped from the ceiling into the rapper's lap - with his pants dropped. If it was planned in advance, hilarious. If it was a Bruno free-style, it's legendary. Who dropped the bomb on motherfuckin' whom?
According to The Death Of Macho, my time is up before it even began. The heavyweight journal Foreign Policy breaks the news that the era of male dominance is coming to an end. And before you shake this off as some cultural tale of extinction akin to the disappearance of the handle-bar moustaches from straight faces or gentlemen losing the willpower to dress in suits and ties for football games, think again. It's the end of men as the bosses of men. Holy Nancy Pelosi, Batman, please say it ain't so? Thanks to Yaweh's primordial conspiracy, dudes have been running the show since creation, and it's just my luck, that just as I'm about to get called up to The Show, the whole goddamn league flames out. These are the times that try men's souls.
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