Enough Is Enough!

Snakes On A Plane would probably not have been half as good if I hadn't seen it opening night. It was one of the top two theater experiences I've ever had. I mean, when that snake jumps out and Sam Jackson shoots the guy in the chest, it's pretty tight. But when it happens and everyone around you bursts out laughing and cheering? That's what makes this movie great.

Someday we're going to rent this and we'll be disappointed. But for now, it was totally badass.

Suspicious Activity

Today I bought Suspicious Activity by The Bad Plus. It's supposed to be really great and I'm looking forward to hearing it, but it's one of those Sony BMG discs and it won't load into iTunes. That's bullshit. Instead of ripping it in a different program, I'm going to illegally download it, and put that copy on my iPod. I'm not sure that this will accomplish anything, but it will sure make me feel a lot better. I guess what I'm really getting at is that even though I've pretty much given up piracy, I have absolutely no problem with downloading any album published by Sony.

WHATS YOUR FAVORITE VIDEOGAME?

Yesterday I went to Powells and saw Maddox. His speech was entertaining enough, if not especially captivating, but the Q & A session consisted of about three intelligent questions, and a bunch of nerds asking things like, "WHEN DID YOU DECIDE YOU SHOULD BE RULER OF THE WORLD?"

It was moderately worthwhile, assisted in part by all the free food being doled out on the street below. PF Chang's spring rolls? Divine.

I also got my cast off, by which I mean I went into the backyard sunday night and cut it off with a pair of tin snips. Hand seems to be fine, despite Tristan's best efforts. Now I just want to finally play frisbee again.

Post About Music

"Any band that needs to attempt to find legitimacy by actively separating themselves from success isn't a legitimate musical force; they're just some crappy band trying to be fucking trendy by faking integrity."

That's very true.

I saw Sonic Youth on Saturday, and it BLEW MY MIND. Sitting there in your room or your car listening to feedback is one thing. Actually seeing Thurston Moore wave his guitar around in the air between two amps is an entirely different experience. When you hear it, it's noise. When you see it, it's AWESOME.

Cake is coming out with a live album this fall. I'm tepid on this. I'd have to see the tracks, and even then, I don't know if Cake is a good enough live band. I men, I'm sure they're great live, but there is a difference between being great live and being good enough to put out a live album. I personally hold that the live tracks should sound different enough from the album versions to warrant a new release, and I don't know if Cake is that kind of band. We shall see.

PEACE.

I Can't Commit To Anything, Even Quitting.

That's all I'm going to say about that.

I'm typing this with one hand because I broke the other in a freak frisbee accident. Everyone I tell about it says something to the effect of, "I didn't know frisbee was such a rough sport." Well, you've obviously never played with Tristan. He is, shall we say, exuberant in all aspects of life. Last night he got into an argument about Venom during the Spiderman trailer, despite several requests to shut the hell up - that's what kind of person he is, in a nutshell.

This entire experience has taught me, above all, that a well-trained, one-armed monkey, or perhaps a rather crude machine, could do almost my entire job. This thrills me to no end. For most of the day I get to do normal setup tasks, letting my gimp hand fall to the side and putting the burden onto my other, soon-to-be-buff arm. Other times I can get away with just making other people do things for me. That's one of the perks - getting sympathy for a complete inability to do the job for which I was hired. Other times, not so perky, as my disabled ststus percludes me from avoiding select less-desirable tasks: "Alex, the bathrooms didn't get cleaned very well yesterday..."

I'm saving a ton of money on gas though. The idea now is to keep the cast forever and use it whenever I'm in public. If I'm lucky, I can just drift by for the rest of my life. As if that wasn't my plan all along.

The Love You Take

I've got to confess, I really don't have the time, willpower, or ideas for this anymore. I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking original thoughts about interesting things, and my actual life doesn't exactly merit writing down for the most part, so I think I'm pretty much done. It's a little hard to do - for three years it's been some semblance of constance at a point in my life where everything won't stop changing, but I really just have nowhere to go with it anymore. If at some point something happens that makes me come back to it, and I think it's important that people read about it, then I'll find some way of making that happen. As it is, I'm still hesitant to call this a totally closed book. But... yeah. It pretty much is.

A quick glance through the archive reveals that I spent most of the time writing shitty posts on subjects that no one cares about anyway, this included. Thanks for putting up with that.

Two... Extremes.

The thing that bothered me the most about X-Men 3 was that once they decided to use plastic "cure weapons," they disregarded their conventional wespons completely. That's dumb. Once you cure the mutants, they'll still be a mob of angry, able-bodied citizens. They could have retained a few clips of rubber bullets or something.

The thing that I love most about Pedro The Lion is that fact that I can put in Achilles Heel and listen to a song about a horrible hangover, safe in the knowledge that the next song is about a guy getting his legs run over by a train.

The thing that bothers me the most about "The Soldiering Life" is that he has never felt so much life than that night in the middle of the most miserable war in history.

The thing that I love most about the Hollywood theater is that they're playing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end of the month.

Speaking of shows, I've got a few spare tickets for Cake, Violent Femmes and Decemberists on August 26th. Let me know if you're interested.

Are You Sure We Can Sleep Here?

"Yeah, yeah. It's fine. Starbucks corporate strategy is to encourage loitering because it promotes a sense of community and communication. Burger King is trying the same thing. It's fine."

As it turns out, Starbucks corporate strategy does not involve letting us stagger in at five in the morning to sleep in their chairs. Bastards.

Sasquatch was a ton of fun, even though we weren't able to find tickets for Sunday. I blame this failure mostly on Rob's van (not Rob himself, mind you), which broke down around mile marker 40, costing us quite a bit of time. It was also pouring and hailing when we got there, and we got immediately drenched to the bone. We walked around all wet against a massive flow of people out of the venue, and when we finally arrived at the musical "ground zero" we discovered that the show had stopped due to inclement weather and may or may not resume.

Undeterred, we continued inside, and after about an hour The Tragically Hip started their set. The frontman? Crazy. He made seagull noises and got into an argument with his microphone. It was weird. The Shins were really good, but their sound wasn't very good, so they were stifled in a way. Ben Harper played a really good set, and then came back for an eight song encore. Normally this would be acceptable, but it was almost 12 by this point and the Flaming Lips still had to play. They were amazing. Corbin said that they could upstage Jesus, and it's quite possible that this is true. They have by far the best show I have ever seen.

The upshot is that we had a great time, although some of it was less fun at the time, such as wandering around and getting absolutely no sleep Friday night (it's possible that I'm the worst boyfriend ever). Looking back it was all great. It was unfortunate that Rob and Erin were unable to join us. There's always Bumbershoot though.

The Facts Of Life

Ronald Reagan didn't invent crack, Ayn Rand did, because not only is she disingenuous to her own principles, but she is a money-grubbing whore. Also, Alan Greenspan egged her on a little, for his own nefarious ends.

Jimmy Fallon is actually funny, but Tina Fey intentionally wrote shitty parts for him that play to his childish sense of humor because she wanted everyone to hate him so he'd quit because one time she caught him having sex with her boyfriend. And yeah, he totally is.

Jon Stewart, on the other hand, is not funny because he states a set of facts and then stares at you incredulously. And you think it's funny and comic timing, but it's not. It's just Jon Stewart staring at you incredulously.

Nobody killed Kennedy. That's ridiculous. Kennedy was sold to Russia as a means to end the Cuban Missile Crisis, but his body was intercepted by pirates in the middle of the pacific ocean and sold to a body farm. To date, only 43% of the fomrer president has been accounted for.

Meg White has been dead for eight years.

Coca-Cola was unthwarted by the complete failure of New Coke. Instead they've just been chainging the formula a little bit every year. By 2017 we'll all be drinking New Coke and we won't even know it. Once that happens, they'll pull a stunt like that scene from the After-School-Special "The Wave" where the guy turns on the TV and it's Hitler, and he's all "THIS IS YOUR LEADER!"

Bob Dylan is not the greatest American songwriter. All great songwriters have names that start with "J". Cases in point: John Lennon, Jeff Magnum, Jack White, Jeff Tweedy, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. Like A Rolling Stone? Nice try, "Job" Dylan. Now GO HOME.

The Mexican government uses subversive tactics to enforce racism against Mexicans in the U.S. They figure that if they keep letting themselves get screwed over time and time again, and completely lose all sense of national identity, they'll just get annexed by the U.S. and recieve all the benefits of statehood without having to do any of the work.

Give it five or ten years and Elias will be the King of Pussy. He'll be beating them off with sticks. He'll have a Hugh Hefner-like vibe.

"Tucker Max" is actually the name of a team of writers composed of guys who worked on absolutely brilliant pilots and movies that got cut in favor of shit like Kangaroo Jack. They work from a composite of personal experience, hearsay, and a sort of "drunken debauchery magic-8 ball" to compose each of the stories.

The American Idol voting results are genuine, and are not tampered with in any way.

Chuck Palahniuk is a visionary modern genius, and Tyler Durden is the hero of a new generation of liberated men. Do EVERYTHING he tells you to. The first rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions.

They're More Than Horses

People who like Unicorns are exceptionally easy to identify. They have long-ass hair, some of it braided, some of it straight, unless it's curly, in which case it's just this huge mass of ugly curls. The hair is always real fizzy. They wear pastel-colored shirts (often with pictures of unicorns - but that's too easy) unless they dress all eccentric. Not good eccentric, more like Crazy Michelle eccentric. They come in groups, speak only in inside jokes (of which they have MILLIONS), laugh at dumb things, and often delve into more general nerd-related activites. They're like horse people, but they have occasional Lord Of The Rings parties and some of them play WOW or are into anime on the side.

People who like Unicorns think that Unicorns are peaceful. That's a ton of shit. Giant horns like that evolve for a reason.

One thing I love to do is sit and watch people and try to gauge their entire personality based on a minute or two of distant observation. This is fun, but it is not hard. One time a bunch of us were at Ice Cream Renaissance, and there was a folk band playing. Three of the players (lead guitar, bass, drums) interacted with the audience between songs and sets, bantered with each other, and were fairly dynamic for a folk band playing at Ice Cream Renaissance. The second guitarist just sort of sat there on his stool and played his parts and didn't really talk. Based on how he sat there, how he was dressed, and just his general appearance and demeanor, we determined that he was a huge introverted nerd who had a few really good friends with whom he sat in his basement and played D&D with while listening to metal and grunge music. We were probably right - at one point, he unzipped his jacket to reveal a System of a Down t-shirt. This is hardly proof positive of all of our assumptions, but it's a start.

This is a good thing to do at restaurants. At restaurants, when people are in groups of four or more, they to a ridiculous number of things that give hints as to their overall persona. The way they eat, the way they hold themselves, the way they interact with the people they're with - it's all there. You can work backward with people you know - watch their mannerisms and see how they reflect the things you know about them. It's fun times.

This post is sort of boring, and I'll be honest - I just wanted to use that lyric as a title, and this is where I went with it. Also, I thought it had been too long between posts.