Basshead Jazz

Stash Spot.........

2010-12-08T10:06:00.001-06:00

From the secret vaults of heaven...........

2010-12-08T00:45:00.002-06:00

The Sacred Now

2010-12-07T13:43:00.002-06:00

There's something really obvious and profoundly American being missed in all this coverage of the TSA's pointless molestation of the traveling public. Everyone agrees that it's grossly excessive and an unacceptable invasion of privacy........but the real story here is that it apparently IS acceptable. It's being accepted every single day. There was no "opt out" day, there is no nationwide refusal to fly. I'm not judging anyone for laziness or hypocrisy. People gotta fly. I'm just pointing it out the reality of things. We're like Smokey and the government is Deebo. We got mind control. When we get on the plane, we be talkin' again.

To me this proves that, for Americans at least if not modern humans in general, there is literally nothing that can trump convenience. It's easy for us to raise our voices on call-in radio talk shows about our civil liberties...........but it's a little harder to stand yards away from a huge pressurized space shuttle that's fueling up to fire us through the air from San Diego to Sicily in 14 seconds flat and say "No, go ahead without me, I'd rather spend the next five hours standing in this musty ass airport terminal arguing some existential point with fat high school dropouts in blue uniforms who probably agree with me anyway." Very few people are willing to sacrifice convenience to make a point, even if the point is that they don't deserve to get finger-banged before they're allowed to enjoy Christmas vacation. And really.......who can enjoy anything when their stool smells like latex gloves? 2010 will go down in history as the year that a whole nation opened up presents and sang "jingle bells" while sobbing and shaking like teen hookers after their first sado-masochist client, but hey...........at least we got to our destinations fast.

The obvious other point that's being missed is that you're more likely to be named King of Saipan than end up on a goddamn hijacked plane, and that really not even the tiniest shred of your dignity or liberty is worth giving up to protect for such a statistical anomaly. But then we'd have to admit that the global war on terrorism might be based on some pretty shaky premises and questionable budget choices, which nobody is ready to do.

Anyway, don't listen to me. I'm only able to sit here and spout my nonsense because I'm a poor piece of shit who can't afford to fly. Give me a real corporate job with a frequent flyer card and I'll go through the scanners smiling ear to radiated ear.

After many years of searching.......

2010-12-07T12:24:00.004-06:00

.....I finally found it. The entire decade of the 1980's encapsulated in one single image.

That. Just. Happened.

2010-12-06T01:11:00.003-06:00

Forget I was ever gone.

2010 has been an insane year for music, so much amazing stuff. It was like the musical equivalent of a chicken cordon bleu stuffed inside a super-burrito and dipped in a vat of mescaline.............awesome, but it's gonna take a while to digest. I sat down and tried to write a top 10, but I was forced to do a top 20 instead. FORCED. I included some links here and there as well.

These were my favorite albums of 2010..................

Arcade Fire- The Suburbs
Janelle Monae- The ArchAndroid
Kanye West- My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Earl Sweatshirt- EARL
Phantogram- Eyelid Movies
High on Fire- Snakes for the Divine
Royce Da 5'9- Bar Exam 3
Teenage Fanclub- Shadows
Lightspeed Champion- Life is Sweet! Nice to Meet You
Tame Impala- Innerspeaker
Twin Shadow- Forget
The Black Keys- Brothers
Radio Dept- Clinging to a Scheme
Gil-Scott Heron- I'm New Here
Black Breath- Heavy Breathing
The Roots- How I Got Over
Rick Ross- Teflon Don
The Depreciation Guild- Spirit Youth
Warpaint- The Fool
Arial Pink's Haunted Graffiti- Before Today

For me, the best album of the year wasn't even a contest. The Suburbs. 30 years from now I'll be listening to that masterpiece. And I wasn't even generally an Arcade Fire fan before this album. They've matured by leaps and bounds, and really done something that very few artists manage to do every decade, which is find the sound that captures the time.

Anyway, I'm back on the blogspot for good now. Tumblr is cool and I'll keep mine, but ultimately it just a) moves too fast for me, and b) is full of teens, and while they are far more artistic and creative than I'll ever be, they are still teens, and therefore shitty awkward human beings who don't make any sense.

Growth and movement.............

2010-07-20T02:15:00.005-05:00

http://syntheticshipmates.tumblr.com/

With great power............

2010-07-18T14:43:00.000-05:00

Podcast Episode 3: \m/(><)\m/

2010-07-17T22:48:00.002-05:00

The Basshead Jazz Podcast- Episode 3

Download Here

Playlist

The Sword- March of the Lor
Meshuggah- Rational Gaze
Eyehategod- Peace Thru War (Thru Peace and War)
Mastodon- Iron Tusk
Judas Priest- Desert Plains
Lamb of God- Terror and Hubris in the House
Candlemass- Black Dwarf
Slayer- Cult
Dethklok- Bloodlines
Probot- I Am the Warlock
Pantera- By Demons be Driven
System of a Down- Shimmy
High on Fire- Nemisis
Acrassicauda- Garden of Stones

Thanks for listening.

Ghosts of Nevada.....

2010-07-11T12:05:00.001-05:00

Podcast Episode 2: Cool Chicks and Heartless Bastards

2010-07-11T03:41:00.003-05:00

The Basshead Jazz Podcast- Episode 2

Download Here

Playlist

Sia- Death By Chocolate
Heartless Bastards- The Mountain
Band of Skulls- Hollywood Bowl
Gun Club- Ghost on the Highway
Yoko Ono- Death of Samantha
The Dears- Fear Made the World Go Round
Iggy and the Stooges- Gimme Danger
The Depreciation Guild- Dream About Me
Joey Ramone- Like a Drug I Never Did Before
Teenage Fanclub- Baby Lee
Witchcraft- Leva
The Smiths- This Night Has Opened My Eyes
Idiot Pilot- A Day in the Life of a Poolshark

Thanks for listening.

When you figure this comic out........

2010-07-08T15:58:00.003-05:00

............you will know the meaning of life.

Random thoughts and brain misfires...............

2010-07-07T13:20:00.004-05:00

- Louis C. K.'s new show on FX called "Louie" is already one of the best TV shows I've ever seen in my life, and it's only a few episodes in. The way they piece it together is amazing and hilarious. DVR that shit!

- If there was ever an expert on the look of disappointment on people's faces, it's the guy who stands at the exit door of a wax museum.

- A random amazing sentence from the Louise Erdrich novel I'm reading......."The clouds cover the horizon and within the mass, as the thing opens over us, we see the heart of the storm, the dark side of the anvil shot through with an electric lacery of light." I like her.

- I feel like I should own a cactus. I live in the desert. I feel like when you live in the desert you should have a cactus somewhere in your house, and maybe a southwestern style native-american blanket hanging over your couch. I think I'm gonna go get a cactus.

- Love is amazing. And by "Love" I mean the Aurther Lee 60's rock band. Actual love will ruin your life and murder everything you are inside. Which is usually when you start listening to down-tempo 60's psychedelic rock music like Love.

3:10 to Nowhere.............

2010-07-06T13:07:00.002-05:00

Sleep is the Cousin of Death......

2010-07-06T12:06:00.004-05:00

The Most Slept On Movies of the Last 30 Years (according to me)

The Science of Sleep
Redbelt
Dogfight
The Quiet American
The Last Supper
Altered States
House of Games
Punch-Drunk Love
The Fountain
Night on Earth
Bubba Ho-Tep
Delicatessen
The Darjeeling Limited
Stairway to Heaven (also called: A Matter of Life and Death)
Last Life in the Universe

Whatever on that list you haven't seen, rush out immediately and find. DIRECT ORDER!!

What is Cool?: A Haiku........

2010-07-05T15:33:00.004-05:00

Cool is Rod Serling

Smoking While Telling His Fans

Martians Should Eat Them.

(My artist rendering of what Cool may look like)

Synthetic shipmates............

2010-07-04T17:42:00.002-05:00

Happy 4th of July. Thoughts go out to my boys Jason Stoddard and Joseph Bell spending today somewhere in Afghanistan.

A "friendlier" God?

2010-07-04T14:48:00.004-05:00

By far, one of my favorite people living today is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is an amazing woman who actually lived through all of the worst third-world fascist theocracy we hear about only through the news, and she came out of it a champion of freedom and human rights. She literally has a fatwa on her head across the Muslim world for saying things like.............well...........like what she says in the video above.

She is now an atheist who has officially denounced her former religion of Islam. But even among atheists she is controversial in some ways. Especially in America and Britain where we are not at daily risk of being murdered for our beliefs, or lack thereof, and so we have the luxury of over-exaggeration. We atheists in the west really only have one outlet of flexing our mind grapes [(c) Tracy Jordan].............which of course is fuckin' with our moderate Christian friends. We push their buttons. We get in over-the-top arguments in highly inappropriate places, like work or baby shower parties, where we accuse American christian fundamentalists of being "just as bad" as muslim terrorists. We point to the shooting of abortion doctors, mothers drowning their children, half-retarded presidents who think stem-cells are the devil's Lego blocks. And all that IS obviously out there and worth criticizing.................but isn't it a little offensive to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and those who have actually suffered through religious oppression when we equate those fringe aspects of American life that, at the end of the day, are pretty few and far between, to entire regions of the world where beheading, slavery, honor killings, amputation, genetic mutilation, public stoning, martyrdom, rape, domestic violence, and suicide bombings are literally EVERYDAY occurrences and completely sanctioned by whole governments?

Just a little offensive, maybe?

And this is why many atheists in this country have a problem with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, because they don't want to give up that intellectual argument. In her new book Nomad, Ali suggests that not only is Christianity BETTER than Islam in it's practice and it's practitioners, but she goes so far as to say that "enlightened moderate Christians" should be more active in the Muslim regions, spreading their good word and trying to convert people. Why? Because she believes (and I would say rightly so) that while some of us can clearly do without God or religious belief.......................most people in the world cannot. And so her proposition is that for the time being, while we are forced to live with the religious, we might as well promote the "friendlier" religions over the less friendly ones. At one point in the interview I posted above, she makes the point that in a whole region of the world, Islamic fundamentalists have a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas.

On face value, I am one of those atheists who basically disagrees with her. I believe that as time goes on, the world will only continue to become more and more secular. Development and wealth are the solutions. Technology, access to information, comfortable living conditions.............these are what drive young men away from strapping bombs to their chest or killing their sisters to protect family honor, not introducing new gods. Christians aren't better people than Muslims at heart, and god knows (pun intended) that their holy book isn't any less violent or oppressive. If American Christians really believed in a literal translation of their book and truly lived by its word..........I don't think anyone could disagree that we would also have beheadings, slavery, subjugation of women, etc, because all of these things overlap both the Bible and the Quran. In my opinion, Ali's solution is very much like the one we hear every 4 years in political elections when folks try to rationalize their reasoning for not voting for third party candidates who are clearly better.

It's the "lesser evil" argument. And personally, I don't see why we need to settle for any lesser evil. Evolutionary theory is less than 2 centuries old......................of COURSE it's gonna take a while to embed itself and compete with religious superstitions that possibly go back as far as a THOUSANDS of centuries (which if you are decent at math, is a few more than 2). What I'm sayin' is.....................so what, we're in a rough patch? Atheism is not some flash-in-the-pan trend that needs to be coddled, like Scientology or MGMT's career. It's basic logic. And besides, Islamic fundamentalists can be physically fought. I have a couple ribbons on my military uniform that say I'm supposedly fighting them right now, although that's up for debate. My point is that you can't fight fire with fire, unless you're that little bald kid from Avatar, in which case you'd have bigger things to worry about than Islamic terrorism. Like for instance, firing your agent and picking better scripts.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on all this?

She smiles and melts all math and logic.......

2010-07-03T12:15:00.001-05:00

ON AIR...........

2010-07-03T04:14:00.009-05:00

It's okay, you can sit down if you need to, I understand how exciting this must be for everyone. Sandman has a new podcast! And he's, uhh.............he's by himself? WHY NOT!! Is it gonna be any good? WHO CARES!!! Just take the pill and ride the wave, people. We don't have much time.

The Basshead Jazz Podcast- Episode 1

Download Here

Playlist

Lightspeed Champion- I Could Have Done This Myself
Local Natives- Wide Eyes
Queens of the Stone Age- Mexicola
Guided By Voices- Surgical Focus
Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Charlie Daniels- Ghost Riders on the Storm
Ian Brown- Keep What You Got
The Shins- Saint Simon
Cee-lo Green- You Don't Shock Me Anymore
Janelle Monae- Oh, Maker

Thank you for listening, seriously. Leave feedback and tips, large bills only. For all the old Speaker Madness fans, welcome back. To the new fans who have no idea what Speaker Madness was.............welcome to the shit.

In a faint and phantom blue.......

2010-07-02T21:26:00.003-05:00

Furthermore on the topic of time travel.........

2010-06-13T15:52:00.005-05:00

Inspired by my last post.

Top 7 Women from the 1960's I would travel back in time and allow to fall in love with me

1. Ronnie Spector.

2. Lucille, the car-washing girl from Cool Hand Luke. Don't know her real name, but you know..........."Anything so innocent and built like dat just gotta be named Lucille." Word, Dragline. Word.

3. Pam Grier. Technically not a 60's star, but I would go back in time to get her pregnant in 1969, one year before her first movie. Why? Because I'm a selfish asshole.

4. Francoise Hardy.

5. Shirley McClaine. Mainly in the movie The Apartment.

6. Ruby Dee. Yes....Mother Sister. Contrary to popular belief, she wasn't always old. Back in all those old 50's and 60's flicks she seemed like a cool ass wife to have. Smart, sexy, and always a little sweaty for some unexplained reason.

7. Your Mom. OOOOOOOOOOOH!

The Time Traveler's Old Lady......

2010-06-13T11:50:00.005-05:00

If (when) I get a time machine, the first thing I'll probably do is go back to 1965 and allow Ronnie Spector to fall in love with me. I figure I'll walk up to her and say something super cool like, "Hey baby, I can hear music...........in your pants!" See what I did? I took one of her famous songs, and made it about her vagina. That's pretty romantic. And if Phil Spector's little nerdy ass has anything to say about it I'll just punch him in his tiny chest and yell "FUTURE MURDERER" and run away, and everyone will be confused because it's 1965.

It's a working plan.

Editors Note: Yes, I realize Ronnie Spector is still alive. But now she's all old and blotchy and weird. At best, my love affair with her ends somewhere in the late 80's. So keep your smartass comments to yourself.

Everyone Lies, Nobody Minds..............

2010-06-12T19:22:00.005-05:00

I've spent most of my life being annoyed by pretentious hipsters who almost pathologically lie when you ask them what movies/music they've been enjoying lately. They usually pull the most obscure local synth pop band that opened for New Order once in 1984, or some indie doc they claim they saw at some Palestinian film festival that never happened. In reality.........they've mostly just been listening to Jay-Z and watching America's Got Talent like everyone else. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's habit, but they've developed this skill for building up their own legend with white lies.

I don't have that. At all.

Maybe it's out of spite of the aforementioned hipsters that I hate, but if you ask me what I've been watching and listening to lately, I'm gonna fucking tell you. For better or worse. Like now, I'll tell you straight up the last movie I watched was Land of the Lost with Will Ferrel (which I thought was hilarious), and as I type I've been listening to Cocteau Twins and Morrissey solo albums. The entire time. Pretty gay, right? See? You're already calling me a loser in your heads. Silently judging me. Even the name of this post came from Morrissey lyrics. So why the hell did I tell the truth? I could have said anything. I could have just as easily told you the last movie I watched was some newly restored Kurosawa masterpiece, and while I was typing I was listening to a Bob Dylan/Iggy Pop jam session bootleg that nobody knew existed but me (mainly because I just invented it, but also because it's INCREDIBLY RARE).

But I didn't. And that is the textbook definition of "honest to a fault". White lies can clearly help you look cool, but for some dumb reason I choose to opt out of coolness in the name of some misguided integrity.

Another example.

I watch the Turner Classic Movie channel. A lot. And not in some nostalgic "they don't make 'em like they used to!" kinda way. We've already established that I think post-Anchorman Will Ferrel movies are funny. Trust me, I don't own any high horses. I just watch a shitload of movies and have absolutely no filter for what is acceptable viewing. Old, new, foreign, whatever. It's all worth a try. And my late discovery of the miracle that is DVR technology has only made this unhealthy obsession worse. I'll press record on pretty much anything that sounds halfway interesting or features Sidney Poitier. The sad fact is that this means I end up watching an uncomfortable amount of musicals every month. I don't know if Ted Turner just has a soft spot for motherfuckers tap-dancing in kilts or what, but the regular programming schedule for any given week on TCM will lead you to believe that roughly 83% of all movies released from 1929 to 1959 were sweeping set-piece musicals.

Don't get me wrong...........not all of them are terrible. Road to Bali for instance, the old Bing Crosby/Bob Hope comedy, is pretty hilarious and dumb and I watch it anytime it's on. And I don't think anyone who's actually seen Singing In the Rain could bring themselves to say anything bad about it. It's a legitimate classic. But still............there's really no cool way to tell someone the last movie you watched involved choreographers and costumes. And yet, I put myself in that position more often than anyone should.

Most recently, I saw an old musical on TCM starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy called "New Moon". It's about a French revolutionary who escapes on a ship headed for New Orleans posing as a petty criminal to be sold into slavery. Falls in love with a wealthy debutante who owns a plantation. Becomes her man-servant in New Orleans. Reveals his identity when the French come looking for him. Leads a slave revolt. I know, it sounds boring. But it's really a fucking awesome movie, I promise. Well written, funny, action packed. There's one scene deep in the Louisiana swamp where Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald are singing to eachother romantically, and outta nowhere they get interrupted by this weird voodoo ritual involving slaves dancing around an ancient tree and calling to dead spirits, and it all can very easily be taken as racist or a product of the time in which the movie was made (1940)............but really it's a beautiful and haunting scene, no matter how you slice it.

Anyway, so it was a great movie and I enjoyed it. The next day at work (and remember, I'm in the military, I don't work in some curtain store where this kinda shit is acceptable) a friend of mine says "Hey Mike, you have pretty good taste in movies, what's the last one you watched?" Instead of doing what I should have done, which was lie my ass off, I said "Oh, last night I watched this one called New Moon". He says, "What.........that fucking Twilight vampire movie?" I had totally forgot that was even a thing. Never seen those movies. So I quickly corrected him, "Hell no, I don't watch that bullshit. No, this is an old movie from the 40's I saw on TCM, a musical about the french revolution." No sooner did the words leave my mouth than I realized this made me seem a million times gayer than if I HAD been watching Twilight, and had been literally drooling over Robert Pattinson in a room full of teenage girls. While licking an oversized candy lollipop.

So my mid-year's resolution is to be a liar from now on. And next time when you ask me what I'm listening to on my Ipod and I tell you Black Sabbath or Clipse, please don't grab the headphones and call me on it, cuz neither of us will feel comfortable when the truth comes out.

The late, late blues............

2010-03-26T11:52:00.007-05:00

I've been pretty busy lately what with HAVING THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD and all. I also took the 3rd class petty officer exam last week, which I only realize now that I've typed it all out on the screen is of absolutely no interest whatsoever to anyone on planet earth. If I pass, I move up a rank, that's all you need to know. But I have still been faithfully reading a book a week. Here's a quick rundown of the last 4 weeks..............

"The Artificial White Man" by Stanley Crouch

Probably the most talented "black intellectual" when it comes to pure novelistic prose, he also manages to be the most controversial, just because he has the nuts to point out that gangster rap might be full of overblown stereotypes of murderers and whores. As a rapper, and a kid who grew up on gangster rap, do I agree? Well................yeah. It's kinda hard not to. Especially when he writes like this.............

"As people of the western hemisphere, we are a mix and a mess and given to reinventing something more important than the truth, which is the poetry of our connections, above and below, in the heavens and the sewers, the happy blues, the plaintive blues, and the hilarious blues."

Wow.

Anyway, the book is a collection of essays on race and authenticity in popular american cutlure, and I highly recommend it. Whether you agree with him or not, if you are not reading Stanley Crouch, you are wrong.

"Pygmy" by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck's last 5 or 6 books have gotten mixed reviews at best, if not universally bad ones. Sometimes it has been warranted (Haunted, Snuff), and other times it has not (Rant, Lullaby). And yet we still all race out to read anything he puts out, which has to say something about the guy. Either way Pygmy is no exception to the mixed reviews.....critics and readers have been pretty dismissive of it so far. But I have to say, I loved it. I thought it was his best book since Invisible Monsters. And it's probably his funniest book, period. It has a real slapstick feel to it, mixed in with the usual Palahniuk topics.............you know............anal rape, zombie consumerism, and love.

The plot follows Pygmy, a foreign exchange student from an unnamed asian communist regime, who is secretly a member of an impending terrorist plot against the United States. Pygmy speaks a broken english, which to some can come off as borderline racist, but if you just let go and accept the joke premise it's really hilarious and impressive how Palahniuk uses this speech pattern to play with prose. Pygmy sees nothing but evil and ugly in Americans and their culture, especially his host family. Much of the story takes place in three settings that even to the most staunch patriots could be seen as the biggest representations of anything and everything wrong with America............walmart, church, and high school. But Pygmy doesn't see Americans as frigid right-wing puritans. The America he sees is a world where high schools are unsupervised orgies, and batteries are in short supply because all the oversexed adults walk around with sex toys lodged inside them.

Even with all the judgment being passed on western culture, make no mistake............this is not Fight Club 2. Whereas in Fight Club you felt like Palahniuk was, for better or worse, assaulting you with his own personal views, in Pygmy you get these high-minded socialist rants from a brainwashed terrorist fresh from the reeducation camps, and you never feel that it's Palahniuk speaking through the character. In a weird backhanded way, this is a very pro-american book.

"A Man Without a Country"- Kurt Vonnegut

No explanation needed really. The genius of the second half of the 20th century talks about stuff, and things.

"More Information Than You Require"- John Hodgeman

If you don't know who John Hodgeman is, you are missing out. He's probably most known as the "PC" in the PC vs Mac commercials, opposite Justin Long. He also is a regular contributor on the Daily Show, which is a pretty good representation of his style of humor. Nerdy. This is a sequel to his first book, "The Areas of My Expertise", which was basically a book of fake facts written in the style of those old timey almanacs from the 1800's. But it's so much more than that, and you really have to read it for yourself to understand. Areas of My Expertise was by far the funniest book I have ever read. At the time I remember being amazed that one human being could fit that much hilariousness into every single page. Even the JACKET of the book was funny. Little did I know he had enough for a whole new book, and what's more he has hinted that this will be a trilogy.

I'm about halfway through the new one, and already it's even better than the first. So you can get a basic grasp on what kind of thing these books are filled with, here's Hodgeman's description of Ulysseys S. Grant, 18th president of the United States.............

"Financial scandals plagued the Grant administration, though historians debate how much Grant knew about it due to his fondness for whiskey and for not knowing things. We do know that when the robber baron Jay Gould proposed to take all of the nation's gold and hide it in his private mountain, he invited Grant to join his heist as a grappling-hook man. But Grant declined. His skill with a grappling hook may have won the Civil War, but he was not corrupt. He saw the White House as a brief chance at drunken peace and an opportunity to work on his many hobbies, such as throat cancer."

That's just a random passage I picked. Seriously, get both books immediately if you haven't read them yet.

I'll try to stay on top of the blog now that I have some free time again.

Week 5- Paper Tigers

2010-02-07T16:32:00.003-06:00

This week I read "The Book of Lost Books" by Stuart Kelly...........

The title says it all, it's a loose and wildly speculative journey through the history of what could have been, books that are either lost forever or were never completed. Instead of making it a straight-forward list of individual books, Kelly has the chapters broken down by author, starting with Homer and ending in the 20th century, which gives him a lot more leg-room. And he kicks a lot. Some chapters are about one lost book, some about multiple. Often a chapter will be less about a book than the circumstances of the author's life that led to it being lost, in particular those that were censored or burned. In these cases, the political and social atmosphere surrounding the author is, admittedly, much more interesting than whatever fiction might have survived. The result is a series of biographies chopped to shreds, with only the most insane and eccentric parts of the authors' lives left in.

The big surprise for me in reading this was that Stuart Kelly is such a wonderful writer himself. I mean, this is essentially a toilet-book for literature nerds, so it's not like he had to be too poetic about it. He could have easily just let the stories speak for themselves. But at times it's hard not to notice that his own style and prose is better even than the author he's covering. Kelly is consistently witty, with the kind of dense flowing vocabulary you would expect from a veteran novelist, not a first-time amateur historian.

The biggest problem I had with the book also concerns Kelly's style, though. Halfway through the book it started to bother me that he has a kind of balls-out final authority about every topic. The tone he presents is basically "THIS is how it was, no matter what hundreds of historians have written about these people over centuries, what I say now about them is law." He has a habit of belittling biographers, for what seems to be the purpose of propping up his own (more interesting, maybe) version of events in an author's life that contradict a popular consensus. When you take into account the fact that most biographers are fanatic experts of the personalities they write about, it's hard not to find more than a little egomania in the picture Kelly paints of them as naive and lazy.

But at the end of the day, that's a small criticism for such an interesting and unique piece of work. Kelly's enthusiasm for the topic bleeds through the pages, and if you share even a fraction of his love of reading then you will love it. Personally I got excited just to learn that something like this even existed. And you can, if you want, treat this as a toilet-book, skipping around the vignettes in any order you please.

One point that Kelly constantly hammers home is that, given the long history of wars between nations, natural disasters, and self-destructive tendencies of authors themselves, it's a downright miracle that any of our greatest literature exists at all. After reading this book, it's hard to disagree, and even harder to not harbor a little more appreciation for the rest of your bookshelf as well.

Week 3.......and 4. Sue me.

2010-01-31T14:50:00.005-06:00

Okay, what had happened was............

I work a lot. I'm a Navy air traffic controller. There's gonna be some weeks when I literally have no free time whatsoever, from sunrise until midnight. Last week was one of those times, and so the book I was reading necessarily spilled over into this week. To make up for it, I read another one in a day. So technically, I read two books in two weeks. That's called math, folks.

Sometimes you come across a book that changes the way you look at the world. It might not be life-changing in the sense of some college student reading Ishmael and being inspired to eat leaves and grow douchebag dreadlocks. Maybe it just changes the way you think about a certain period in history, or challenges what you thought you knew about a topic. The first book I read was one of those experiences for me. It was Neil Postman's "The Disappearance of Childhood", an amazing and entertaining piece of pop scholarship that deserves it's own Ken Burn's documentary. I really can't say enough good things about this book.

Like I said, the revelations I had reading this aren't of the kind that are gonna change my daily life in any way, they weren't some dramatic Deepak Chopra epiphany............but it was a huge paradigm shift for me in the terms of how I view children, childhood, and the history of western culture. I just always took for granted that childhood and human nature were a package deal. That the idea of childhood had always been here, in the same conceptual form it is now. But Postman argues (very persuasively) that the modern concept of childhood has NOT always been with us, that children were NOT always viewed as a special and separate class of people apart from adults, and finally, that the concept is on the decline once again thanks to mass media treatment of children as both consumers and sexual beings (ie: kiddie pageants).

His basic thesis is that the age of the printing press ushered in a new kind of knowledge, and that the ability to read and write became a cultural line in the sand between adults and children, something that didn't exist prior to that time. He gives evidence that before the printing press came along, children were viewed as "little adults". For example there was no such thing as children's clothes, and regardless of age children were not shielded from grown-up talk about sex, death, curse words, and anything else that we say "earmuffs" for today. There was no public school system before the printing press, and so kid's went to work at a much (MUCH) earlier age.

And that's just the first chapter. I'll let you read the book for the rest of the "journey of childhood" and why Postman believes it is declining.

The book did leave me with my doubts...........I mean, it's a little difficult to imagine that there was NO concept of childhood as we view it today prior to the 17th century, when every museum I've ever been to features wooden toys and dolls from virtually every time period in human history, going back to ancient african, native american and mayan civilizations. I mean, I would think that the idea of a toy itself points to some separation between adult and child. But the book mainly defines childhood as those ages between 7 and 17, so maybe it's a moot point anyway.

I highly, highly recommend this book. It's one of the most fascinating non-fiction books I've read in a very long time.

The second book I read...........or in this case, re-read............is a personal favorite of mine. "Mao II" by the ridiculously talented Don Delillo.

I'll say it, I think the guy is a certified genius. His way with words is unequaled in modern American writers, followed closely only by Tom Robbins and Cormac McCarthy at their best. And even they would have a hard time digging as deeply into the human condition as Dellilo does with one paragraph from any of his classic novels (Libra, White Noise, the list goes on).

Mao II is my favorite book by Delillo, and this is my second time reading it. Ostensibly it tells the story of a reclusive writer struggling to finish his long-awaited third novel. But between the lines it's a rumination on the nature of genius, art, terrorism, terrorism as art, and maybe most of all, mobs and crowds and cults as social phenomena. From the first page onward this book digs into your gray matter and doesn't let go, and I don't think any other novel has more deeply influenced my own writing, or at least ambitions of writing.

Check both of these books immediately.

Book-A-Week-A-Thon-Fest...........Week 2: the Weekening

2010-01-16T00:19:00.005-06:00

You like what I did there?

So for week 2, I grabbed somethin' from my large library of unread books I've bought over the years, or as I like to call it, the hall of great financial decisions. This is what I just finished reading.............

The cover says "a novel", but really it's a collection of short stories by Neil Jordan, including Night in Tunisia.

Now, I'm a fan of Neil Jordan as a filmmaker. Michael Collins, The Brave One, and of course The Crying Game, which was only recently dethroned as the ultimate haha-you-watched-a-gay-movie movie by Brokeback Mountain. In my opinion, Mona Lisa with Bob Hoskins is one of the most underrated flicks of all time. So Jordan is cool with me. But I had never read any of his fiction before, and barely was even aware that he was known as an author, until sometime last year when I found this collection of short stories at a goodwill. But I never got around to reading it. So now I read it.

I was not very impressed.

It's not that he's a horrible writer..............although he is incredibly pretentious and definitely clunky with prose. But he's still not horrible. He knows how to paint a vivid picture and build believable characters. The main problem I had with his stories is not his technique. It's that as a writer, he is (and I know this will come as a shock based on his filmmaking career) obsessed with sex. And not in the guilty pleasure "who/what will Chuck Palahnuik make his characters fuck next" kinda way. In a really awkward "what does this have to do with anything" kinda way. To illustrate this, I've come up with a few examples of what a normal fiction passage may look like, next to how Neil Jordan might write the same passage.

Normal Passage:

"It was then on his deathbed that he realized how much he loved the girl, his only daughter, and as they held hands he knew she would one day become a kind woman in spite of his absence."

Neil Jordan Version:

"It was then on his deathbed that he realized how much he loved the girl, his only daughter, and as he saw her growing breasts he knew she would one day be a woman. And like all other women she would find that after years of dancing at the town pub for any and all sexual attention, her eyes would soon show the deadness that he was about to feel in mere moments."

Normal Passage:

"The boy rode the horse on the beach."

Neil Jordan Version:

"The boy rode the horse on the beach, fully erect."

You get the idea. Dude likes to color his commentary with unnecessary filth flarn filth. And the few times when it's NOT unnecessary, it's usually because the entire story itself is about awkward sex.

The book also contains the original screenplay of The Crying Game, which I skipped partly because I've already seen the movie, but mostly because I'm not Brian fuckin' Grazer. What do I need with a screenplay? When I read a story I don't wanna know where the camera pans, followed by 8 pages of straight dialogue.

Sandman exits room.

Blog page slowly fades to black, with Danny Elfman score.

Reading is fun......damental.........ly gay

2010-01-03T14:44:00.005-06:00

Last year a friend of mine, a school teacher from Wisconsin named Mike Strusz (whose blog can be found here) made a goal in 2009 to read a book a week for the whole year, 52 in total. According to him he came up 13 short from his goal, but that's still nothin' to sneeze at*.

Now,.........I read a lot. Too much, according to my wife everytime she stares blankly at the full bookshelf in her living room, fantasizing about all the other things she wishes were there instead. I don't think there's been a time in the last 6-7 years when I wasn't in the middle of a book. Once I'm done with one, I pick up another the same day. Sometimes I will even read a whole book in one day. But mostly "reading a book" means I've been reading 3 pages a day of some Graham Greene novel exclusively on the toilet for 2 months. So even for an avid reader like me, 52 books in a year is a lofty goal.

It would have been especially lofty if I would have tried it in 2009, a year the majority of which I spent in boot camp or Navy A-school, places where outside literature is treated the same as a bottle of Jim Beam in 1920's Chicago. Coincidentally, Navy boot camp is also in Chicago. It's like that city can't function unless it's prohibiting shit.

At any rate, Mr. Strusz has made the same goal for 2010, and since I have a lot more free time now that I'm done with training and out in the mythical fleet, I can finally attempt to run this nerd marathon with him.

So, I'm startin' the first week off with a book from my favorite cynical conservative irish asshole (more than enough of those out there for me to choose a favorite) P.J. O'Rourke.

"Eat The Rich" is his hilarious take on Economics, with chapter titles like "How (or how not) to reform (maybe) an economy (if there is one)". He traveled pretty extensively to research this book, and uses some obvious countries as extreme examples of economic situations. The breakdown is something like this:

Good capitalism- United States
Bad capitalism- Albania
Good socialism- Sweden
Bad socialism- Cuba

O'Rourke is a libertarian and unapologetically pro-capitalism, as any sane person should be, but he really doesn't pull any more punches from the US than he does from Cuba, Sweden, or Russia. The overall thesis of the book seems to be "nobody knows what the hell they're talking about when it comes to economics, including the experts". I'm about 2/3rds of the way through it, and it might be O'Rourke's best book, which is saying something for the guy who wrote a book called "Parliament of Whores", maybe the best analysis of the fucked up Washington DC party power structure ever written. I still quote that book.

So every week on the blog from now on I'll post what book I read, and a quick review of it.

*Unless you're a dapper dan 1940's TV ad executive, or a crusty old black delta bluesman named "Smokestack Willie", nobody should ever use the phrase "nothin' to sneeze at" as frequently as I do.

Onward through the fog and whatnot...........

2010-01-01T13:57:00.004-06:00

Well.............it was a good decade, folks. Maybe not for you. But nobody wants to hear your stupid problems. This blog is about me and my incredible life. A time capsule, if you will, to be discovered in the future by aliens or Viggo Mortenson. And for me it was a good decade. I did what every American white male does in their teens and early 20's.........made a shitload of rap albums.

I also did other far less interesting things, like get married and have children. BOOOORING. Somewhere in between there I went to disneyworld too, I think.

I was a lot of things in the 00's. A fast food fry flipper, a photographer, a semi-successful semi-underground local rapper, a TX state employee, and most recently an air traffic controller in the US Navy. All of which put me in places I probably had no business being. As a state employee I frequently took "bathroom breaks" and snuck my way into Senate sessions, chillin' in the mezzanine looking about as out of place as Pat Buchanan at a Quincenera. As an usher for the Frank Erwin Center, I got to watch UT Longhorn football games ON the field, occasionally pretending to do my job. As a rapper I was able to open up for some of my childhood gangster rap heroes, like Bun B, Method Man, and the Hanson brothers. Don't ask me to explain that one. Now I spend my days in an air traffic control tower, telling planes full of people what to do, which should probably scare you into driving wherever you travel from now on.

I've lived in many places this decade. Austin, Jacksonville, Ship 11 in Great Lakes Navy boot camp, Pensacola, and Nevada. Coincidentally all places where far too many rednecks are walking around with guns.

In conclusion, I sincerely hope the 2010's bring us many new and exciting things. New friendships, inspiring art, better relations between cultures and nations, and............you know...............robots we can have sex with.

Happy new year.

Put on ya wig woman!!!

2009-09-24T15:21:00.001-05:00

A Side Civilians Do Not See..........

2009-09-24T07:28:00.003-05:00

I just ran across this Australian news story, a history lesson on the many methods WWI and WWII soldiers from various nations tried to weasel their way out of the front lines, or the military altogether. Nothing in the piece shocked or surprised me. In my short time in the military, I have seen so-called "heroes" turn into cowards on a level I could never imagine before.

I've seen grown men purposely piss their beds in boot camp multiple times in order to get "stress discharges".

I've seen marines and sailors, in attempts to get "failure to adjust" discharges, stop taking showers for literally weeks at a time until they are sure you can smell them from another room.

I watched a kid in boot camp, after sneaking a lighter into the compartment, burn into his hand a prison-style mexican gang tattoo hoping it would be enough to get him discharged. His skin will forever be marked with a gang he isn't even affiliated or familiar with.

Another kid in a separate division managed to start a small fire in the head, hoping that being a pyromaniac would be enough to get discharged.

I've seen countless people purposely do drugs to pop on random piss tests.

I've seen countless people threaten suicide, or cut themselves.

A girl in my boot camp division was secretly married to another woman but never disclosed it to the Navy............she waited a couple weeks, saw that boot camp was "too hard" for her, and when the time was right she pulled out her marriage certificate to the RDC's. One way ticket home.

At A-school, I've watched one particular sailor try to eat his way out of the Navy. He broke his leg early in his time here, but over the months has healed up and should have been back to regular weekly PT (physical training) a long time ago. But somewhere in between the time he decided he no longer wanted to be in the Navy. Perhaps the prospect of getting back in shape was too much for him. He's still on crutches in public, but when he turns a corner he walks without them. He gets fatter and fatter by the day. He is in the process of being discharged for it.

In that same vein, another sailor (very much in-shape, unlike the one above) confessed to me that his plan to get out of the Navy is to wait until he arrives at his next duty station, and simply fail 3 PRT's in a row. The PRT is the Navy "Physical Readiness Test". Max pushups in 2 minutes, max situps in 2 minutes, and a mile-and-a-half run. You have to reach certain minima for your age to get passing scores. If you fail 3 in a row, you can be discharged from the Navy.

Maybe the most disgusting of all, I've seen women purposely get pregnant to get out of military service.

It's a side of the military most civilians don't see, but this is just a small sample of the things I've seen, and would be 10 times longer if I included the stories I've heard from others. Military life is definitely not for everyone, but you still have to fulfill your committment and be a man/woman. For some people, this is too much to ask.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing..............

2009-09-23T18:11:00.003-05:00

I'm a writer. Not in the sense that I sit brooding in front of a typewriter with a glass of bourbon in my shaky hand staring at a leaning stack of unpublished manuscripts for my next alternative history novel.................but in the sense that I write purely as a hobby, almost as much as I write rhymes these days. Just for myself. Maybe one day I'll write something good enough to show someone else or even get published, but for the time being I'm just at that wierdo obsessive stage of gettin' random shit stuck in my head, floating phrases and ideas that I have to get out before they leak out of my ears and ruin my dinner. The way I normally do that is either by texting myself a note on my cell phone, or when that's not available, believe it or not I achieve the same thing by taking a wood and lead device and scratching words on what ancient civilizations called "paper". It's ridiculous, I know, but it's a last resort.

In any form, these notes are almost immediately forgotten and stay that way for months. Then I find them and maybe 10% of them will make any kind of sense. The other 90% make me second guess if maybe I'm really a scizophrenic whose other personality is Animal from the Muppet Show on peyote. Because they're insane, and they're never complete thoughts, just shards of scenes I saw or heard or imagined to remind me later that it's worth formulating into a story or something. To give you an example, here's LITERALLY what was written on a wal-mart reciept I found in my desk drawer today................

"Realistic dream pill two farms papa japan rick-a-shaw"

WHAT??!

And yes, I wrote "rick-a-shaw" spelled exactly like that. You're guess is as good as mine, cuz I have no fuckin' idea what it means. I feel like a guy in a movie who just woke up on a rooftop with amnesia and a business card. It's all a mystery.

But you know what...............maybe life is a mystery, and we are all the leading men and ladies.

See how I took a post that was going nowhere fast, and turned it into something heartwarming??! That one's for free, sports fans.

Things that are Incredibly Underrated............

2009-09-22T19:38:00.003-05:00

R.L. Burnside's musical recordings
Mushrooms (non-magical)
Typewriters
Metalocalypse
Telepathy as a superpower
Zines
Being the new guy
The color brown
Milton Nasciemento's musical recordings
Fantasia's lips
Ol' fashioned fistfights
Professional actress Tilda Swinton
35mm film cameras
Deja vu
The motion picture The Life Aquatic
Descendents musical recordings
Comedy porn
The desert
Standup Comedian Doug Stanhope
Armchair phrenology
The old Hanna Barbara cartoon "Top Cat"
Libertarianism
The motion picture Straw Dogs

That is all.

Move over, Thriller.............

2009-09-20T15:32:00.003-05:00

Youtube is still the best website ever. When you're sittin' all alone and it's raining outside, and you're reminiscing to past years, and by chance you catch a little piece of something..............just a little flash memory of something you saw or heard decades ago, something that had a big impression on you as a young kid but you thought was forgotten and lost forever. THAT thing is on youtube, I swear to god. Just look for it, it's there.

I'm one of those people that almost obssessively searches for all my many "THAT things" on youtube for hours and hours on end, and sometime it just really pays off. Today I found this, a music video for the song "Bewitched" by 80's metal gods Candlemass, which I saw in the early 90's while my metalhead uncle and his friends were watching a public access video program. I never remembered who sang it, so I could never find the video. The funny thing is, I have Candlemass albums. They're on my Ipod and all the "Sabbath-ish" playlists, next to Saint Vitus and Kenny Rogers (I might've put him on the wrong playlist)..........but I never connected the two.

Here's my question, though, before you watch it. What's the best music video of all time? Is it really all subjective?

No. The answer is nay, because after your eyes take in this smorgasbord of awesome, you will literally be incapable of disagreeing with me that no better music video has ever been made in human history. The big budget special effects, the cinematography, the acting.......halfway through, you might ask yourself, "Wait a minute, is this a music video or a lost Coppola masterpiece, because I can't tell the difference!" You might even cry, the level of artistry is that high.

So grab a loved one, put it on full screen, this is BEWITCHED!!!

Something I had to write down............

2009-09-14T20:29:00.003-05:00

We found a small restaurant named after a woman, and sat as the sun found shape over the reddish highland mesas, stacked like stone idols from early evolution. Inside my young mind it raised grand and violent scenes of cowboys and raiders clashing and dying on the new mexico desert sandscape, the sky twisting with electric pink so brilliant it burnt the senses.

Nobody puts baby in a coffin!

2009-09-14T19:53:00.003-05:00

My friend: "Man I can't believe Patrick Swayze is dead."

Me: "RIP to the best damn cooler in the business."

My friend: "Roadhouse! Awesome. Honestly that was the only thing I liked him in."

Me: "Wow. So you don't like your mom?"

My friend: *look of disgust and hatred*

Me: "I'm just sayin'. That's kinda messed up man. She's still your mother, no matter what she did in the past."

My friend: "You're an idiot."

Me: "You're just mad cuz Uncle Pat is gone and he never took you to the park like he promised. It's ok man, work all those emotions out, I'm here for you. This is good. This is good."

My friend: "This joke is going on way too long."

Me: "DON'T YOU THINK I'M AWARE OF THAT!"

Diggin In The Crates...........

2009-09-12T17:52:00.013-05:00

Me and two friends from the barracks were bored today and decided to take a field trip to one of the 3 amazing flea markets here in Pensacola. I should clarify that I judge whether a flea market is amazing or not solely based on how many pit bull fights I see in between booths of fake Jordans and throwing stars.

Anytime I go to a flea market, I play a game. I call it the "let's see how much goofy shit we can buy for under $3". I should probably shorten that name if I want the game to get popular. Nonetheless, I spent a grand total of 50 US cents today, and bought two great items.

The first one isn't that goofy, actually. It was a copy of The Federalist Papers. Because when I think of Florida swamp-swimmin' rednecks renting booths in a dirt lot to sell things they think their peers will enjoy, I usually expect to walk out with at least one classic of political theory. At the very least.

So that was one quarter down. We walked around for a while. Some guy tried to sell me a homemade paddle for $2, telling me "trust me man it works", which to me implies that you're tryin' to sell me somethin' that touched your ass. No thanks.

The next booth that caught our eyes was owned by a guy who kinda looked like Newman from Seinfeld, if he was even fatter and wrapped in an indian blanket. He was basically selling comic books, but many other things were up for grabs as well, ranging from samurai swords to homemade aloe vera to decades-old trading cards. We're talkin' Alf cards, Garbage Pail Kids, etc. While the date on some of these cards alone would have been enough to make me throw down some change, I was lookin' for something a little more...........rare. And ridiculously cheesy. Didn't take long for me to find that. My next quarter went to these bad boys, circa 1990...............

Where to start. I'd like to think these were unpopular cards even for their time, but who knows the level of douchbaggery the culture was allowing to thrive 20 years ago. I was only 5, and not a very rad 5 year old at that, so you can't blame me. The cards are structured similar to Garbage Pail Kids, with only a fraction of the artistic value and none of the humor. Each one features a different "totally gnarly" character with a rhyming and/or alliterated name, usually performing some extreme sport or anti-social behavior, ie: radness. There's Messy Marty, the Bicep Brothers, and of course everyone's favorite..........Piggin' Out Owen. They didn't even try with that one.

Here's my favorite two, though, starting with..............

At first glance, it looks like two excited crackheads flaming up in a TigerMart bathroom. But no.........these are the "Cherry Bomb Dudes", and they're about to blow up a toilet. You'd think they would get tired of doing the same thing everyday, but when you name your gang after such a specific activity, your options are kinda limited. Little known fact: the guy on the right later became known as Congressman Ron Paul.

Without further ado, my favorite one by far.............Teasin' Toby.

Now, there's really only two possible scenarios here. Either some marketing guys at Pacific Trading Cards Inc thought, in their pursuit of radical activities with the most mass appeal, that kids loved teasing babies almost as much as half-pipe skateboarding. Or scenario two, possibly even more disturbing..............kids in 1990 really were teasin' the fuck outta babies, often enough for it to enter the world of stereotype. I have no idea which one is true, but I can't stop laughing everytime I look at Toby's face. Kids of all ages could just walk in and buy this over the counter with their blowpops and big league chew. I doubt they they were mentally equipped or prepared at all to understand even the more normal run-of-the-mill sexual fetishes, much less baby teasing. No wonder they all grew up and filmed themselves wearing diapers on "Porntube".

All in all, the day was a huge success. One of the guys who came with me found a comic book called "Red Son", which apparently is the story of what would happen if baby Superman had landed in Russia instead of America. On the cover, the S on his chest is replaced by a hammer and sickle. He paid $1 for this, mint condition. I was pretty jealous. The other guy didn't buy anything, and mostly was just confused at why we would "waste good money on bad things".

Yeah.............he has no idea what life is all about.

Roger f**king THAT

2009-08-31T20:18:00.004-05:00

Dedicated, hooyah,
Motivated, hooyah,
GRADUATED HOOYAH!!!

Disclaimer: Pink Card does not = Air Traffic Controller. I still haven't talked to one real aircraft yet. That will happen about 3 weeks from now. Oh shit.

But it is a huge panty dropper. Why else would they call it a "pink" card? Because of the actual color of the card? I THINK NOT.

Wilde at heart..........

2009-08-31T15:00:00.005-05:00

"Over the low roofs and jagged chimney stacks of the houses rose the black masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the yards."

- Oscar Wilde, from the book The Picture of Dorian Gray

WOW! I've read these two lines so many times in the last week I've memorized them like song lyrics. Shoutout to Yudy, my lil' sister from Columbia, we went through boot camp together and she told me about this book I should read. She didn't remember the title or author, only the plot, and it really interested me. Going through the base library............which by the way doesn't even deserve to be called a library, it's more like a shelf warehouse that happens to have 13 random scattered books apparently for the sole purpose of holding the shelves steady............and by chance I came across this book, read the back and immediately checked it out. Wilde's style was hard to get into at first, so deep into british high society and all the effeminate males*, but the prose is amazing. And the story ended up being great too. The detriment to the soul a lifetime of a man giving into his own darkest pleasures and passions and seeking new ones for the sake of corruption itself, the dehumanization of making beauty your golden calf............hell, it'd be the great american novel if it was american. When I was done I wanted to read every single one of Wilde's novels. And I would have, if he had written any more after this one. Apparently he was a famous playwright or something, not a novelist. WHO KNEW?!! Hey, don't look down your noses at me, with your fancy english degrees and Ikea english degree holders made in Sweden that match your hardwood floors! You think you know everything?!? Go FUCK YOURSELF!

Speaking of books, now I'm reading God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Vonnegut. No effeminate males in his books, I'll tell ya that damn much, sports fans. Just a lotta real men, doing real men things.........like killing eachother over greed and power and generally acting like under-evolved homo-sapiens. I have no idea what point I just made.

*Being such a huge fan of music, literature, and film, I found out a long time ago that the first step to opening yourself up to ALL of the great stuff out there, is to get over your own hangups with masculinity/femininity. I know I had to. Just because you teared up at the end of The Times of Harvey Milk or think The Smiths make beautiful music, doesn't mean you like cock. It means you're an adult who can appreciate good art. The cock part is optional. Before Night Falls is, in my opinion, one of the best movies ever made, and that shit is gayer than your Uncle Tootie.

(Famous Dublin statue of Oscar Wilde "puttin' the vibe out")

I am secretly Alain Delon

2009-08-30T17:14:00.005-05:00

It's raining outside and I'm listening to Charlie Parker. Somethin' about rain and jazz music makes me feel like I'm in a French new wave film, smoking a short cigarette outside a nightclub with Filipe who just got out of prison for smuggling diamonds. Sometimes I seriously wish I could go all out and dress like a character in a Jean Pierre Melville movie, and I swear to god I would if it was even a little bit acceptable. The problem is I would probably get my ass kicked by my own family and friends. I already left the hood to go to the Navy...........I mean, don't get me wrong, salty fleet sailors are some of the hardest knucklehead motherfuckers I've ever met, but if I go back home showin' my friends how to tie a neckerchief, they'd probably take my lunch money. They don't respect that. So I probably shouldn't add any more conflict onto that by goin' to Meadowbrooks projects in a grey inspector gadget raincoat, a brown tweed suit and a fedora. There wouldn't be enough croussants in the world to plug the bulletholes in my chest.

(Recent picture of Sandman outside of a Home Depot)

To Kill a Mockingperson............

2009-08-10T20:23:00.002-05:00

SouthBound theater presents...........

My Saturday with Daniel McDaniel,

or

"The Lion, The Witch, and the sociopathic hill-dweller hiding in the wardrobe with a scope rifle"

A one act play

Cast:
Sandman as The Hero
Daniel McDaniel as Himself

The curtains open to a scene of two young sailors, roommates, sitting on their respective racks on a rainy saturday morning. They both pulled duty section all weekend, and are unable to leave the barracks, so they are forced to spend their time in the room with eachother. Our hero is browsing dead hip hop forums on his tiny, almost laughable laptop, while Daniel McDaniel is sitting in front of his own laptop, simultaneously playing a violent GTA-ish crime-spree video game and listening to 1950's country music. Let's join them now........

Sandman: "It's cold in here, right?"

Daniel: "Muuuuh"

*Daniel coldly shoots an old lady, her dying sreams make him smile*

Sandman: "You know, I have no problem with the music you like, or video games where you murder innocent people, but when you put them together............I'm not gonna lie, it's disturbing. Horrific actually. Nobody wants to be part of a mass murder with a Johnny Cash ballad background."

Daniel: "Gaaah. Sumbitch got away."

*Daniel pulls out a zippo and starts lighting his own thumb on fire*

Sandman: "You're gonna kill me one day, aren't you."

*Daniel comes across a helpless man, and mocks his cowardly cries for mercy*

Daniel: "Waaaah, I have a wife and kids! waaaah! Not anymore ya don't! BAM!! Huh? You were sayin' somethin' man?"

Sandman: "Yeah, actually I was gonna tell you I have a wife and kids, but obviously that doesn't work."

Daniel: "You're funny."

Sandman: ".............funny enough to live?"

Daniel: "Wha the hail r you ramblin' bout, brother?"

Sandman: "Dying. Death. You know I never went to Disneyland or had sex with an asian girl or submitted that short story to a contest like I always said I would? Never."

Daniel: "Wale shiat, ever body gotta die some sunny day."

Sandman: "Yeah..........yeah, I know. I don't really have a problem dealing with the fact that I'm gonna die one day, I just don't particularly like knowing who's gonna do it."

Daniel: "I 'member back when, way back me n Charlie had this horse."

Sandman: "Who's Charlie?"

Daniel: "Charlie got behind the horse to pet it, 'n the mean ol' bastard kicked 'im in the jaw. Charlie died. He dead still to this day, if you kin believe it. Won't be no more Charlie. So you know what I did? I took me up a tree stick and jabbed it in that ol' horse's eyeball. I surely did. It fell, and when it did I stomped on 'is head til he was like Charlie. Just like Charlie."

Sandman: "................."

Daniel: "Ya get what am tryin' to say?"

Sandman: "If that's what you would like, then yes. I completely understand and also agree."

Daniel: "You wanna see me burn somethin'?"

Sandman: "Are the walls getting closer to you?.......*pulls at collar*...........it's hard to breath in here. Why is it so hard to breath!?"

Daniel: "Sweeeeeet home A-la-Tucky"

Sandman: "That's definitely not how that song goes. But that's OK. It's a good song you made, Daniel. A good song."

*Daniel blushes and chews on an alfalfa leaf*

Daniel: "Aww it weren't nothin."

It certainly weren't, young Daniel..............it certainly weren't.

*close curtain*

Im a buy me a gun as big as my arm..............

2009-08-07T19:34:00.003-05:00

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stuid than a hat.
- P.J. O'Rourke

So.................I haven't updated this blog in a while. Mostly because every waking hour of mine is spent on a navy base, completely isolated from the civilian ("real") world, and so any story I tell no matter how hilarious to me and my fellow sailors and marines will probably take about 8 pages worth of explanation, general military training, and a multiple choice test just to be halfway coherent to a civilian, much less funny in any way. So as a solution...........I just don't post at all.

But, I have readers. People actually read this piece of shit. And they asked that I update it. With stories from the Navy. Then I realized that pretty much everything that happens here is ridiculous and worth telling SOMEbody. I don't know if some of the old readers/fans of this blog will stick around, but you know what all the old folks say, if you love something, you gotta let it go. If it comes back to you................then that shit was just unnecessary. A complete waste of time. I think that's how the old saying goes. Ah the wisdom of the elderly.

So hey, let's start with this.

I live in a Navy barracks. They're all named after real ships. I live in the "USS Theodore Roosevelt", a.k.a. "The Big Stick", which makes it pretty uncomfortable when you're on watch and someone requests to "hop on the big stick".

My roommate is a backwoods redneck runaway from Kentucky named Daniel McDaniel. That's his real name. The dude literally joined the Navy cuz he was homeless. He's single and has no family or bills, his whole paycheck is play money. He has no idea what to do with it. Nevermind starting a savings plan, he's spent hundreds of dollars on Conway Twitty box sets. One time I came back to the room and he was sitting in the middle of the floor with hundreds of dollars worth of gold dollar coins in front of him, and he goes "Look man! You go to the candy machine and put a dollar bill in, and it gives ya one a these! Isn't it great?" He bankrupted the change machine, you put a $10 bill in and it gives you all quarters now. Another time I came back from school and he was sleeping curled up fetal position on top of his desk. Two inches from his bed. Even when he does sleep on his bed, he doesn't use a pillow. I happen to have two pillows cuz they gave me an extra one when I came from boot camp, but I only use one so I constantly offer to give him the other one. He always refuses.........but then complains to people that they won't give him a pillow to sleep with. We had room inspections today, and while standing at attention with the inspectors right next door about to come to our room, I smell something burning. Daniel McDaniel has a lighter and he's burning the inside of his trouser pockets. A couple weeks ago he ordered a $500 laptop on Ebay, just "to see what it all the fuss is about with this internet junk." This is a kid who has never had a computer or access to one. It came in the mail today. He's spent the last 5 hours straight looking at porn. Lesbian porn, piss fetish, big black cocks in little white milfs............it's like the scene in 2001 where the neanderthals find the bone. Doors are opening for young Daniel McDaniel. I just found out today that his middle name is Wayne. Daniel Wayne McDaniel. Like all budding young serial killers, he'll probably start with small animals, work his way up to hobos and hookers, and then eventually..............roommates. This is basically my goodbye letter. Print this out and send it to the police if I stop posting for a while.

Leave behind some green-eyed look-a-likes..........

2009-01-24T01:49:00.004-06:00

My daughter goes crazy anytime "Single Ladies" comes on. Literally crazy. She can't even walk yet but she clearly tries to copy dance moves from that video. We have it on tape. She cries if someone changes the channel, and I've seen the great abyss of eternal darkness in her eyes if you're so rude as to talk during her theme song. It's like living in that twilight episode where the kid with magic powers controls the whole town. She just turned 1 last week. When I get mad at her for doing something bad, she kisses me. She's a lot like her mother.

My son on the other hand loves the Fleet Foxes album, probably because I forced it on him and everyone else in my life in 2008, but regardless........he legitimately loves it, and has commented many times on the empyrean CrosbyStillsNash-ian (his word) harmonies and poetic lyricism. I might have made that last part up. He's just 2 years old, but either way I have a feeling we'll still be talkin' about "blue ridge mountains" when he's 42. It's one of those. He also can count to 10 and wakes me up at 5 in the morning to take walks for no apparent reason. Earlier today I pointed out a bird in a tree and he said "Get down here bird, I'm gonna eat you!" I'm very proud of him.

When I run miles on the track everyday to get ready for boot camp and I feel like I can't go any farther, I just say their names over and over until I'm done. In 7 days, I'm leaving both of them for 6 months.

Anybody got a gun? Anybody? No? Thanks anyway. I'll be fine. Probably not.

Blow thru ya hair, seabreeze, sticks and shit..........

2009-01-22T15:40:00.015-06:00

I've had a fade haircut of one kind or another since I was 12. Bald, razor, southside, and of course as I got older and wiser, tapered. One way or another, for as long as I can remember my hair has never been longer than maybe an inch-and-a-half, which by the way has helped me out many times in the past because it turns out it's way less than what a drunk person would need to grab in a fight (or as I like to call it, "hate handles"). So when I moved out to Florida for these two months before Navy boot camp, my wife says, she says to me one day she says, "Why don't you just grow your hair out? They're gonna cut it for you when you go to boot camp anyway. And besides, it ain't like you have anybody to look cool for out here, nobody knows you." I nodded in agreement and said, "Yes, you're right baby, I AM the coolest person out here."

She said that's not what she meant.......but I know she was just being polite because all her uncool relatives were in the room at the time. She's such a kind soul.

So now it's 2 months later, and my hair looks like a cross between Corey Feldman in the Goonies, and Ian Curtis around the 5th hour of swinging from the noose. It's pretty sweet. And by sweet, I mean chaotic and embarrassing for everyone involved. It's the MTV music awards of haircuts. It's the Nick Nolte's haircut of haircuts. They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, and if that's true then I'm pretty sure there's at least 10 people down here whose first impression of me is that I live in a trailer with my shut-in "big mama" who only cuts my hair on the two most important holidays: Easter, and the anniversary of Ronnie Van Zant's plane crash.

Point being: I look ridiculous. If I wasn't me I'd tell myself, hey..........knock it off. You look ridiculous. But somehow still unbelievably attractive. I wish I was you.

The only question left is what to do with all the hair once they cut it off. They usually just throw it away, but seeing as how I'm a famous local rapper and philanthropist, they obviously won't be mixing my hair with all the "normals". In all likelihood they'll gently place it in a box with bubble wrap and hide it in a combination safe of some kind. But what next? I'm way too humble to be so selfish as to keep it to myself, so what lucky soul will be the new owner of my thinkin' cap jacket?

I'm thinking the only fair way is to set up some sort of nationwide lottery system. What do ya'll think?

Here's this too................between this Sia performance, and the TV on the Radio "Wolf Like Me" fiasco from a couple years ago, I'm beginning to think they slip the artists somethin' in the water in the green room there at the Letterman show. Just wow.

Maple syrup. Grows on trees.

2009-01-21T23:35:00.004-06:00

10 William H. Macy films with titles that also sound like bad Cinemax midnight skin flicks:

Lip Service
Roommates
The Maiden Heist
The Client
Foolin' Around
Hit Me
Bart Got a Room
Keep Coming Back
Twenty Bucks
The Boy Who Loved Trolls

(Mr. Macy after reading my list. I think he liked it.)

Point and shoot..........

2009-01-11T20:31:00.014-06:00

A lot of people been askin' me for pictures of the kids since we've been down in Florida. So here's a couple while I upload the rest and send 'em to various family members with equally busy bodies.

Also, these should serve just fine as photographic evidence that both my children are alive and well. Take THAT, Greta Van Susteren!

Amani eating the usual breakfast we give her.

"As your accountant, Daddy.....I strongly advise
you to buy more appey juice"

Christmas present #1

Christmas present #2

"I need a break......and by break, I mean drink."

The last picture taken of the pilot before the horrific crash.

It gets foggy in Florida

That's it for now. Maybe next time someone will take a picture of me.

"Probably not" (c) Reggie Coby

My Top Ten movies of 2008 (*revised)........

2009-01-04T22:21:00.003-06:00

EDIT: List has been revised after goin' to the movies last night and seeing my new #1 pick.

I didn't see shit this year, so this is really a top 7 list with 3 good films latched onto the end to round it off. The last 3 are all great films that I loved and are all lightyears ahead of the rest of the stuff I saw this year (Appaloosa, Indiana Jones, Dark Knight, Pinapple Express, etc) but I have a feeling if I saw more stuff that was on the critic's lists they wouldn't even be in my top 20, let alone my top 10. But here's the list anyway.......

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. In Bruges
4. Man on Wire
5. Frost/Nixon
6. The Fall
7. Encounters at the End of the World
8. Religulous
9. Cadillac Records
10. Seven Pounds

Liam, you sneaky bastard........Or, the best dream ever

2009-01-01T22:38:00.005-06:00

I've only had like 3 dreams in the last 5 years. Or I should say, it ain't that I don't HAVE them, I just don't remember 'em. They happen, I'm sure...........but when I wake up it's all blank. So imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning and remembered perfectly the dream I just had. I was beginning to think I just didn't have a soul anymore. Or that my brain was going rogue and being an asshole by rationing out my dreams for his own sick entertainment, maybe to get me back for all those years of filling my skull up with smoke. Apparently I can still dream, though.

I don't know what was different last night from any other night, but I wish it would happen more often because my dreams are hilarious. I'm really missing out. Maybe it was the fact that I killed a whole bottle of champagne last night. Why? Because my father-in-law couldn't get the cork back on. He didn't want to waste it, but also didn't want to help finish it off, a combination that put me in a tough spot since everyone knows I'm morally opposed to people wasting perfectly good alcohol, with the obvious exception of the time me and my brother stood on a rooftop by a major street in the middle of the night, shook full beer cans and threw them in front of cars and watched the people swerve in horror from the mini-explosions of Lone Star. Those were simpler times.

I really hope that's not the actual solution to my problem, though. Champagne. How embarrassing would it be to explain THAT shit on A&E Intervention? The bald guy is giving his little speech, "I just see a whole bunch of people who love ya to death, and they feel like they're losing ya, and they wanna fight to get ya back. So what's gonna happen is they're gonna talk and then you're gonna talk and then we're all gonna watch it back on my forehead. So Sandman, why did you become an alcoholic?"

"To make dreams come back for make feel good."

"...........This is the alcoholic kid, right? I thought we were doing the paint huffer next week? Can somebody get this kid outta my face, why is he climbing on my back?!"

"Happy New Years! Happy New Years, Dr Phil!!!"

Anyway..........the dream.

So it starts with me walking through my old middle school, only it's some 17-story hyper-realized grand ballroom version of my old middle school, which for some reason is always the way I dream about old schools I went to. It's probably better that way, since my middle school was a certified shithole with more cops than teachers and a daycare center. So I'm winding my way up the spiral staircase going to computer class (which we all know shoulda just been called Oregon Trail 101) and I pass by this room with some old asian guy standing alone dancing back and forth with himself. It's extremely creepy, so logically I go in to get a better look, which is what we all do when we see a mentally ill person dancing with an imaginary partner. He immediately stops dancing, swings around, and it's George Takei. The asian guy who played Dr. Sulu on the original Star Trek. Now........that's a strange thing for anyone to dream about, but I happen to be a 23 year old who's never watched one episode of Star Trek in his life, much less the 1960's version that was hot when my pops was a pre-teen. I literally only know who George Takei is because of one Simpsons episode, and the William Shatner Roast on comedy central. That's it. I had to use wikipedia just to spell his name right. So now he's two feet in front of me in my dream, and he's giving me a real uncomfortable stare, and finally he says, "Do you want to hear a song?" How can I say no? He proceeds to sing "What's the Story, Morning Glory" by Oasis, which I assume was only in the dream because I had heard it on the radio yesterday afternoon. He sung the whole song, and then I woke up. The End.

If you don't know who George Takei is, you're probably wondering why I even wasted the time to type that out. But if you know who George Takei is, and you've heard him speak, then you know why I've been laughing nonstop about this all day. In the car, laughing. On the toilet, laughing. At the mall, crackin' the fuck up. It's a funny ass visual. "All your dreams are maaaaaaaade..........." I'm laughing right now writing this sentence.

So now I've decided that if I ever get rich, I'm gonna get George Takei to sing "What's the Story" to a camera and sell me the tape. He can name the price. Whenever I'm having a bad day, I'll just pop that hoe in and all will be right in the world. Religions are built around less.

Hope everyone got through hangover day in one piece.

Resolutions are for fat people.........

2008-12-31T23:24:00.006-06:00

Well.............we made it, sports fans. 2009. The year of the jackrabbit. Obama is in, autotune is out (I pray to the ceiling), and Ghostface Killah is still out there somewhere fuckin' fans as we speak. I'm fully aware that this is usually the point where any self-respecting cool (read: cynical) writer would shit on the previous year and focus on it's failings, but I gotta admit.........2008 was pretty fuckin' awesome for me personally. It was great. Then again, I have a habit of judging every year based on how good I'm doing compared to my friends from the neighborhood who are either dead or locked up for 40+ years, but still, on it's own merits last year was undeniably a hallmark of memorable moments in the life of me. Let's go down the list real quick.............

1. Daughter was born on January 16th. Amani. The most beautiful girl I've ever laid eyes on. Don't know if I'm ready for those teenage years, I feel sorry for any pimple-face pud puller that knocks on my door to take her out for a date. I'm just gonna start swingin'.

2. Performed at SXSW music festival for the 2nd year in a row. Shoutout to Matt Sonzala, a cat that truly inspires me everyday. Keep doing what you do, and a million thanks for puttin' us down once again. It was an honor. We'll cross paths again.

3. Joined the US Navy. Signed the dotted line and swore to protect and obey the president. And this is Bush we're talking about since it was still 2008. The things a man will do for his kids. I'm sure I'll be making a shitload of positive and negative remarks about this particular year in my twilight for this alone.

4. I finished not one, but two full albums that I'm really proud of.

5. I didn't get buried alive. That's my biggest fear, however irrational since I don't practice voodoo and I'm not Uma Thurman, but still..........any year I don't get ambushed and forcefully locked in a coffin and covered in dirt is a great year in my book.

6. Barack Obama was elected president, and I voted for him. As much as I may disagree with many of his individual platform issues, I can forever look my mixed-race children in the eyes and say, you too can be president, you can be whatever you set your mind to, we live in America the greatest nation on earth, for all it's faults, in capitalism the greatest system man has yet invented, for all it's faults, where your success is directly measured by your drive and ambition. You have no idea how much that means to me.

7. Gnarls Barkley "The Odd Couple" dropped, one of the best albums of my generation. You really think I give a fuck if you agree? Ha! See how far that gets you. These are two real life geniuses in the flesh we're talkin' about.

8. I'm alive, and so are you.

"New Year's Day is every man's birthday".
- Charles Lamb

Get drunk and get naked. Peace.

The Bible had singing animals too, didn't it?

2008-12-30T22:03:00.004-06:00

Earlier today wifey took the kids to Chucky Jesus. That's what my son calls Chucky Cheese's, which needless to say makes me nervous everytime he says it because........well.........I think we all know there haven't been too many scenarios involving christians and toddlers in the last decade that haven't ended in new laws named after little girls. No offense to anyone, I just don't want my son to be the first male with a rape law named after him, just because some pizza-pushin' pedo priest asked him if he wanted to go "play in the tunnels". And it doesn't end there, then we'll have to deal with the ripped-from-the-headlines Law and Order episode. They'll have the dude with the creepy huge muppet eyebrows grillin' some curly head Italian child actor playing my son, since they still don't allow mixed race people to get SAG cards in hollywood. It'll just be a big mess.

Matter fact..........I figure if I can just get this kid to 18 without him becoming a case study of ANY kind for pre-law undergrads, I should get a big A+ on my daddy report card. That's your job description as a father. Don't let your kids set any precedents.

I know, I should write a parenting book. You're welcome for the free words of wisdom. Each one, teach one, that's what I always say.

I never say that.

Cuban Miss Crisis

2008-12-17T17:58:00.013-06:00

So today I decided to go down to the Jacksonville Public Library and get myself a card so I can do me some book-learnin', and I pretty much just ended up sittin' at a table by myself reading Spin magazine for an hour because M.I.A. was on the cover with two colors of lipstick on. I'm easily distracted, what can I say. We could spend the rest of this post psychoanalyzing the fact that I didn't lose interest even after realizing she was pregnant in all her photo-spreads, but I don't feel like being judged by nerds who read blogs all day, so let's get back to the story I wanna tell. DO YOU MIND?!!

Okay, so I fully expected to get distracted by a female at the library, real or in print. Honestly I expect that regardless, anywhere I go. But what I didn't expect to happen was for one of the best things I've ever seen at a public library to unfold right in front of my eyes. Not the best, mind you. That honor still goes to the time I saw a dirty ass homeless dude with no shirt on reading Marques De Sade in a downtown Austin library. But one of the best, definitely.

So I'm just sittin' at the table, minding my own business, reading some incredibly hilarious graduate student/Spin editor yap about how wrinkled and irrelevant Madonna is these days. Yeah.......kinda like your own writing career, right Studs Urkel? I'm sure his parents get a free Spin subscription every month and use it to wrap fish patties. Anyway, where was I........oh yeah, so I'm sittin' there when this older hispanic lady comes and sits at the table in front of mine (I was gonna say Mexican, but I forgot I'm not in Texas anymore. Fun fact: Cubans will fight you for calling them Mexicans, don't ask me how I learned that). So she sits down, pulls out her cell phone, and apparently calls her husband's divorce attorney because the conversation that proceeds is one of the loudest, most spiteful, curse-filled tirade I've ever heard. Not just in the middle of a library, but anywhere. The fact that it was in a library is what took it from slightly uncomfortable to high comedy.

She's screeching about how her "crazy fucking" daughter needs counseling, and how her "dumb dick" husband isn't gonna get anywhere near either of them ever again, or she's gonna call the police so he can "get fucked daily in prison like he's fucked me every day for the last 7 miserable years."

After like 4 long and hilarious minutes of this, a security guard finally stops laughing for long enough to get up and tell her, very politely, to take her phone call outside. The lady stops mid-sentence, stares at the security guard like she just crawled through her bedroom window to tell her to stop talking so loud, and she just says........no, let me put this a different way, I don't think I'm doing it justice..........she doesn't just say this, she yells it. All at the same pitch, no breaks or breaths or punctuation. She goes:

"CAN YOU PLEASE GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACE I'M HAVING A SERIOUS DISCUSSION HERE THANK YOU!!!"

The security guard tries to keep herself composed, and now she's asking her to leave. The lady's trying to continue her phone call. The guard asks again nicely. The lady walks five feet over to a rack of romance novels, picks one up and hurls it at the security guard's face. It just barely misses.

I lost it. My sides were hurtin'.

The security guard didn't find it as funny as me, she definitely had to remind herself real quick she was a library employee and not Layla Ali, cuz I saw the fire in her eyes. The old lady woulda got molly-wopped in the home & gardening aisle for real, she had no reach and I'm pretty sure she was on some kinda pills. Sadly there was no fight though, instead the security guard just sat back down, calmly picked up the phone and called the police. But at this point the lady has her back turned, so she's still goin' on with her conversation like nothing happened. Then, I swear to god, she looks up right at me and gives me this look like "Can you believe some people? Geez", like she just stood up to a schoolyard bully or some shit. Like we're all on her side. I gave her a look back like, "bitch this ain't the mighty ducks, why are you acting like the cops aren't coming? I hope you ain't on that pretty pink iphone pissing off the only lawyer you know right now."

Fast forward to 10 minutes later, Jacksonville's finest are in front of the library. She walks up to the front to give her side of the story, but they ain't wasting any time, just start escorting her out and to the car, and she's doing the famous let-go-of-me-I-can-do-it-myself move that old white ladies seem to love to bust out whenever the cops come. She's trying to tell the cops something, but they're not listening. She's telling them she left her purse at the table. I didn't even notice. I looked over, and there it is.

And there it goes.

Some kid just walks by and grabs it all nonchalant, looks at me with a big ass grin on his face. Got himself a new pink Iphone.

I bet Twain ate some fried ox tail............

2008-12-07T21:17:00.013-06:00

Well I officially live in Jacksonville Florida now. That magical land of dreadlocks and intolerance, where every mall is the "hood mall" and all the restaurants seem to be competing for which one can have the most passive-agressively racist name (actual sign a block away from the Navy base: "Ying's Chinee Takee Outee").

If you ever feel the need to make the 15 hour drive from Texas to Florida in a moving truck through the land that time forgot (or more likely, left on a doorstep crying and wrapped in newspaper) called the South, hey how about this, first try chopping off a finger. And if you're still conscious and haven't had enough self-inflicted suffering after that, here's some quick tips to help you on your journey.

1. Don't drink and drive. You'll lose the competition you didn't even know was happening, and it's the semi-finals.

2. Don't be an interracial couple. It just confuses people. Bathroom breaks in Mississippi mostly just brought me and my wife the kinda looks that say "wow, he sure does give his slave girl nice clothes."

3. If you lose your mapquest directions, don't worry. You'll know you're halfway there when the only radio station (FM or AM) that isn't a re-broadcasted church sermon from 1973, is a "classic rock" station that seems to only play "Copperhead Road" on repeat all day long. It's all downhill from there!

As easy as it would be to spend the rest of this post making fun of Alabama, it really is like steppin' into an alternate universe. It's like David Lynch meets Deliverance meets a Bosch painting in some places, and by some places I mean anyplace that isn't a cemetary or a book section, and even those can get kinda..............Left Behind-ish (you decide which one I meant). We stopped in Birmingham to get some gas, and some random 30-year old black dude with an eyepatch a fur coat came up to me and said, "You from Birmingham?"

"No."

"................Are you lost?"

I said no, but in retrospect the correct response was probably, "aren't we all?" Just a weird philisophical moment in Alabama, from a guy who I might add seconds later walked off to fill up a 2 gallon gas can and took it into a nearby Waffle House, presumably to light himself on fire like a tibetan monk in the name of some righteous intangible truth in evidence of human freedom, or because he was high on meth.

As a bonus, at the very same gas station this festive christmas ad was on the wall above the pisser:

Nothin' out of the ordinary about that. No sir. Perfectly fine christmas present for loved ones of all ages. Why, I remember as a young kid, I couldn't even sleep on christmas eve I was so damn excited from the smell of deisel fuel coming from under the tree. It was the only thing I asked Santa for in my letters. If I listened close enough...........I could swear I even heard hooves dancing on the rooftop and a sleigh taking off into the night. With "Copperhead Road" playin' in the background.

I'm really not just trying to pick on Alabama here. I mean, it's a weird fuckin' place, but Texas ain't exactly the stuff of Jane Austen novels either. I always love goin' North past Dallas and driving through the great town of Fate, Texas, just to see the big sign on the highway lettin' you know the next exit takes you to "Bass Pro Drive".

Ahh Bass Pro drive..........the lifeline of a bustling metropolis. As Rue Saint Louis en l'Ile is to Paris, so Bass Pro Drive lays in the midst of the cultural hub of the western world, Fate Texas. Where the socialites drink the tallest of tall boys and the sculptures are mullets.

Hey, I also saw this somewhere:

And I don't doubt for a second that it did. But when I woke my son up at 2 in the morning to tell him this hilarious story, I don't think he fully appreciated the sarcasm.

That's about it. Nothing else exciting happened on the road. Nope. Nothing at all EXCEPT THAT SOME BRAVE SOUL FINALLY CAPTURED AND KILLED SASQUATCH!!!!

It's true. Now, you may be the skeptical type. You may be wondering why such a legendary creature, after being wrestled and killed, would be left sitting on top of a Ms. Pacman machine in rural Georgia. Allow me to answer that question with another question. Are you lost?

Way too happy...........

2008-11-24T13:20:00.009-06:00

I was goin' through a shitload of photos from all the concerts I been to this year (way too many according to wifey), lookin' for the best ones for the portfolio, and in a group of shots of Dred Skott at Emo's I caught somethin' in the crowd that made me crack up for no reason.

That dude is awesome, but I also kinda hope he got in a horrible car accident that night.

Oh yeah, and Dred Skott are some homos. Word up.

Tequila Sunrise..........

2008-11-21T13:00:00.006-06:00

I didn't just wake up hungover today.........I woke up drunk. That's always a frustrating couple of minutes when you realize your cunning plan to sleep yourself sober was pointless, and you coulda stayed up doing jumping jacks and finger painting for 6 hours and still felt exactly the same. Fuck it.

My friends threw me a going away party last night at my brother's house, and boy oh boy did it get wild. Not really, but I learned if you just say "Boy oh boy" in response to any question about a party, it makes people think it was a Caligula-style blowout, and not just a quiet get-together in an apartment with nice platters of coconut shrimp.

"Boy oh boy? Wow, it must have been too wild for him to even describe! What a hip cat, the guys want to be him and the girls wanna be with him!! What a handsome rake! A real ham dinner!"

In case you're wondering, this hypothetical is taking place in a 1927 speakeasy. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever used "ham dinner" as a slang term. But it gets better when Al Capone walks in and shoots this guy in the face.

Back to sane topics, my co-workers also threw me a lil'............don't know what to call it..........shindig?........luncheon. It was a luncheon, I'll go with luncheon. Complete with nachos and beans, and let me tell you, friends and countrymen............nothin' makes you feel better in the middle of the worst hangover of your life than soakin' up all the tequila still coating your stomach with beans, bell peppers and velveeta. If you aint' picking up on the sarcasm yet, don't worry it's probably just hidden underneath all the vomit.

Boy oh boy.

In other news, I got rick roll'd on the street earlier. Now.......I'm no fan or supporter of 2-years-past-stale internet memes, but that had to be the most awesome shit that's ever happened to me that didn't involve a warm vagina. You might be wondering the logistics of how a rick roll works in real life, and what kind of person would even do it. Basically I was standing outside of the state building where I work catchin' some fresh air, when this 30-somethin' year old asian guy pulls up next to me in a pickup truck, literally stops by the curb in the middle of traffic, turns up his stereo to full blast and it's "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you doooooown!!", and he's singing along and dancing in his seat so hard it's shaking the truck. Complete stranger. Then he just turns the radio off like nothing happened and drives off.

I laughed so hard I almost coughed up my own alcohol diseased liver. That guy deserves to go to heaven, despite having no creativity whatsoever. Small criticism for a great man.

Anyway, that's my friday so far. It's all downhill from here. Thanks and much love to anyone readin' this that was at the party last night, I won't miss any of you simps but you can write me letters when I'm gone anyway.

Good riddance, please don't leave............

2008-11-20T16:32:00.005-06:00

Judging by the complete lack of comments/e-mails from non-texan readers on the "R.I.P. DJ Screw" post a couple days ago, and the overflow of e-mails from drunk white friends of mine wanting to argue (with their fists) about the "Chinese DemoCRAPcy" post from yesterday, I think it's safe to say I've alienated a good chunk of my readers. Impressive.

And while there's a weird part of me that wants to just go ahead and get rid of the rest of you by posting turtle porn or "fun" thanksgiving recipes, I think I'll play this one safe and just post some things we can all agree are awesome.

1. The House Party scene from Fresh Prince.

2. Radiohead doing the Smiths live on a webcast. At least one part of that sentence has to warm your cockles.

3. This picture of Rosario. This picture? No stupid.......this one.

4. Japanese children's show from the 70's called "Gimmie Gimmie Octopus". No wonder they all grew up to love tentacle porn.

Okay. That's all I got. If you're still around, please feel free to leave a comment tellin' me what it would take to alienate you and make you never read my blog again, and I'll try to get around to that next week.

Yeah, more like Chinese DemoCRAPcy...........

2008-11-19T17:11:00.006-06:00

Sorry, I been waiting a long time to say that, whether or not the new Guns N Roses album was any good or not. It was inevitable, like WWII or herpes.

Anyway, don't worry this ain't gonna be a review. This is NOT a review blog, and if it ever becomes one feel free to load a gun for me to take to the woods and bite. I just came to say that I'm really enjoying myself watchin' all these "hardcore metal" fans bend over backwards to defend an overly-polished pop/nu-metal album (which is exactly what Chinese Democracy is) just because of the name of the band on the cover. It really has been the highlight of my whole year so far.

First black president? Boring. Olympic summer games? Do I look like a pedophile? Nah, my choice for the cover of Time Magazine's "person of the year" is definitely this chick, cuz I'm sure this album release is the best thing to happen to her since the successful conviction of the guy on the right at the date rape trial.

To be honest I don't really have an opinion on the album, in the same way I don't have an opinion on the Jonas Brothers or cabbage soup. I could easily just say "this fucking sucks" and be done with it, but the truth is it just ain't my cup of tea. Cups of tea aren't my cup of tea either, and really just cups in general. I drink everything out of wine goblets. My point is that I don't just write blog posts to be negative. I'm a good person. All I'm sayin' is it's hilarious to me that the same people who shit on douchebag nu-metal bands (and rightfully so) with spiked hair, white contact lenses and zombie make-up from the November 1st Walmart clearance section, are now fawning over an album that makes Static-X look like Black Sabbath. That's all.

And don't get me wrong, I think it's great that 2008 could be the year when all the Metallica and GnR fans collectively found peace in their hearts, and finally got excited about something other than filling their autograph booklets with all the B-list celebrities they give cart-rides to at their airport security jobs...........that really is a heartwarming finale to the last few decades of being condescended to by record labels, stand up comedians, and VH1 rock docs...........but I find it really hard to believe that anyone waited 16 years to hear Axl Rose sing lyrics like "If the world would end, would our love slip away" over Oceans 14 soundtrack-esque strings, with guitar solos that sound closer to skinemax sex scenes than anything Slash ever bothered me with. But hey, keep up the act as long as you can.

And it fucking sucks.

Ok I'm done. Enjoy the record, guys.

Good Mourning...............

2008-11-17T10:07:00.012-06:00

"Around that time, I heard my first gray tape/
1994, Hurricane Duck, up on the playscape/
That Soul II Soul intro, ironic cuz it brought me back to life."
- Sandman- Screw Shop Freestyle

So yesterday was the 8th anniversary of the death of the man who had a MUCH bigger influence on my life (along with every other kid from the hood in Texas in the mid-90's) than Biggie, Pac, and Eazy E all put together.

Talmbout DJ Screw, noamsayin'. Robert Davis Jr, fool. The originator. You forgot my gunshots, Screw yoooooooou.

So why didn't I make this post yesterday? Cuz he died on the 16th, but I found out on Nov. 17th, so this is my day of mourning, ya feel me.

I remember walkin' up to the back of Crockett High on that day in 2000, to the woods where all the gangbangers chilled on benches smokin' blunts before class, and for the first time ever it was quiet. No music, no yelling, no shameless girls dancing tryin' to fill the void their foster parents couldn't (yeah, it was a lot more fun than sittin' in the lunchroom next to the nerds playin' with magic cards). Everyone was just sittin' with their heads down. Black, white, mexican kids, all sittin' together lookin' like they saw a ghost. Or maybe hoping they would. When they told me DJ Screw died in his studio the night before, I just sat on the bench along with everyone else and couldn't say anything. The bell for first period rang and nobody moved. After maybe 15 minutes, someone popped in the gray tape of "The Final Chapter" from '96. Not the best tape he ever made but the most fitting eulogy any of us dro-baked dumbasses could put together on the spot.

In retrospect we couldn't have picked a better tape, since a) it was a Tupac heavy tape, and b) it had Lil' Keke flowin' over the beat for Bone Thugs "Crossroads".

8 years later, and every year it seems Screw's legacy is fading more and more, even in Texas. Some people like to blame it on the new generation of Houston rappers not paying homage enough. Others use MTV along with the trendy "hip hop is dead" meme to scapegoat the new generation of young fans out to be undereducated or ignorant. I don't buy into any of that bullshit. To me it's a lot simpler than that. Screw was an isolated phenomenon in one small region of the country. It was a huge movement, but an underground one that never crossed over to the mainstream (though definitely in some dope backdoor ways that few people noticed). Those thousands of kids who it did touch, called themselves (to this day) "screwheads", and that's how I'll always describe myself as well. But look around..............look at your friends...............the screwheads are grown now. Even those of us who were in the youngest group of Screw fans back in the mid-90's (I was 9 when I heard my first screw tape in 1994), are in our mid-to-late 20's now. To put it simply, Screwheads got kids, got married, got corporate jobs, moved out of Texas, and just generally became squares. So who are the ambassadors to carry on the legacy? 30 year old computer programmers drinkin' purple margaritas at Baby A's with their co-workers?

Just face it. It was a moment in time that doesn't translate real well to the new millennium rap scene, and let's be real, didn't much translate to the 90's rap scene either. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Why does it have to be? Music movements come and go. I'm sure there was a lotta Cocteau Twins fans pissed off when the 80's ended and they realized that the shoegaze walls of sound that changed their lives weren't translating too well to the grunge takeover of the 90's.

Fuck it. The Kids are Alright. Just because the movement you were a part of isn't relevant anymore, doesn't mean it was somehow taken away from you forever. As long as we got the tapes, we have the culture. And really it just makes the music that much more meaningful to the holdovers who don't forget, who I might add were already obsessed with hoarding rare gray tapes back when there was a lot less rares than there is becoming now (shoutouts to TheScrewShop.com, home of the rare-tape hermit crabs).

Still it's weird to think that the next generation of kids in Central Texas won't grow up in an environment where you can't walk past a stoplight without ten cars bangin' screw so loud it shakes your eardrums like maracas.

I remember ridin' with my boy Donnie at 4 in the morning bangin' "Da Funk is on Your Mind" tape over and over, sittin' in the parking lot of Chalmers Court projects for hours jammin' the Fat Pat and Keke freestyle, still one of my favorite tracks ever.

I remember in 9th grade sneakin' a bottle of apple juice filled with Tequila into english class, and gettin' so drunk I fell asleep on my desk with my walkman on. Of course, I woke up with an empty walkman, and someone had stole my "Still a G at 27" tape. Whoever it was, I hope he/she got as much pleasure out of it as I did, cuz I wore that cotdamn tape out.

I could go on like that for pages, but I'll leave it at this.

R.I.P. DJ Screw

Thanks for giving Texas something of our own

Birdies that don't chirp........

2008-11-16T01:44:00.000-06:00

2002- Sandman & ESG, backstage @ Dorris Miller Rec Center

From the vault (vault = shoebox)

How I Almost Killed the Mexican Shang Tsung........

2008-11-14T15:53:00.000-06:00

I fully planned on coming back from lunch today and updating the blog with just some random youtube clips of blaxploitation flick trailers, that are all just as good (and sometimes better) than the actual movies. But something happened to me on the way back from lunch that is seriously making me reconsider whether there's such a thing as divine intervention. Strap yourselves in because this one is a real nail-biter.

It all started with me driving down Riverside, a.k.a. the taco truck mating fields, just minding my own business (listening to Lionel Richie "Dancing on the Ceiling" on Jammin 105.9 which as I said is MY OWN PERSONAL BUSINESS), when out of the corner of my eye I see this older mexican cat walkin' up a hill from this chicken joint. He gets up to the sidewalk, where logic would follow that he would stop and wait for the extremely heavy traffic flow to teeter off before he crosses the major street............but logic did not follow, dear reader. On this day, logic was blind and it's seeing eye dog was shot with a nailgun by Macaulay Culkin. This guy just keeps walking as if he found a new secret crosswalk nobody knows about yet. Apparently if you drink enough cases of Bud Light, the standard pink elephants turn into crossing guards. He just keeps on goin'.

Fine, I think to myself, I can deal with this. Everyone who knows Sandman can tell you I have the reflexes of a cat (and if any frozen burritos are being microwaved in the general area, the sense of smell of one, too). So I slam on my brakes, thus beginning the time-honored tradition of the near-pedestrian-murder experience we've all been through a million times, on both sides of the coin. We all know the drill. It's a 5-step process:

1. The pedestrian almost gets hit.
2. There's a moment of confusion, like both of you just woke up in bed with St Louis style pizza in your underwear.
3. Blame is assigned to the guilty party through facial expressions and telepathy.
4. The pedestrian moves back to the sidewalk (not so subtle foreshadowing here)
5. Both parties go on their way cussin' like sailors*

It's tradition!

But no.........this guy ain't having it. He's a rebel. A desperado, if you will. He says "chinga tu madre" to tradition and sticks his pinky in it's stinky. Basically what that boils down to is that instead of moving back on the sidewalk like a normal person, he stood in front of my car for what felt like infinity plus uno, just staring into my eyes with a confused look. He never got past the second stage of the process. After a while I'm yellin', honking the horn, whatever to get him to snap out of his stupor and move so I can get back to my very important job, so important that I have plenty of time to relate inane, rambling stories on a blog.

Finally he does move and I do drive off. But is that where the story ends? You'd think so, friend..........but you'd be dead wrong. Prepare for the shock of your young life. The horrible twist to this tale.

See, if this had all been happening in someone else's lane and I was just a spectator, I would still probably be writing about it here right now, because it would have been fucking hilarious regardless. So that this happened to me and not someone else is besides the fact. Also besides the fact is that this exact same refusal-to-move-after-near-accident situation happened to my wife on the same street literally less than a month ago, which in and of itself brings up disturbing trends in traffic laws south of the border. All of that is besides the fact, though. All of it takes a backseat to this new revelation that hit me somewhere around the 340th second of this guy staring into my soul with his unsteady drunken brow waving like a scuba buoy............the revelation was, "Hey, I recognize this guy."

But from where?

It wasn't until I got back here to the safety of my half-cubicle-half-toolbox thing that I'm sittin' at right now that I realized where I recognized him from.

Yes, that means another story, but I'll make it quick.

About 3 years ago, I'm driving past a 7-11 on my way home (yeah, to another apartment complex on Riverside. Who the fuck are you to judge the rate of my progress in life? HUH??!), when I see a circle of people, mostly high school kids, standing around jumpin' and screaming. Which we all know can only mean one thing. One beautiful thing.

FIGHT!!!!

Needless to say, I immediately pull into the 7-11 parking lot and get out to watch. And it's a good ass fight, too, it's two black kids maybe 16 years old, and they both had hands like a good metaphor for something with a lot of hands. But I could barely concentrate on the fight cuz on the other side of the circle, there's this guy........this old mexican guy.........and he's yelling over and over "FINISH HIM!!!! FINISH HIM!!" It was just weird and uncomfortable. He was completely ruining the mood of what otherwise is supposed to be a clean family event. And he wasn't even directing it at a specific fighter. Dude just wanted to see somebody get finished, didn't matter who. Eventually the cops came and everybody ran away. In the words of the great philosopher Cam'ron, "All you hear woop woop, want want, beep beep". But I never forgot that old man sincerely screamin' a Mortal Kombat catchphrase in the middle of a high school fight.

Fast forward to 3 years later, and I swear to zombie christ it's the same guy that I almost "finished" with my front bumper earlier today. With Lionel Richie almost providing the soundtrack to the final twilight of his life, which apparently not unlike mine, was mostly spent on and around East Riverside Lane. Proof that there's a God somewhere up there, who smokes a lot of angel dust. And I don't mean the dust of angels either, we're talkin' huge amounts of PCP, in all likelihood purchased from behind the 7-11 on Riverside.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Now that I think about it.........whoever made up that phrase was a dummy, cuz I coulda fictionalized the fuck outta that story and made it a million times stranger. Like I could've gave the old mexican guy a duck beak and my car could've been the pope-mobile.

Truth is still pretty strange though, you gotta admit.

Footnotes:

*Or any other profession that's filled with enough morally bankrupt people as to be singled out and stereotyped with an activity that everyone on earth does on a daily basis.

Screwtape in the (poop) deck..........

2008-11-10T13:55:00.000-06:00

Damn I'm gettin' closer and closer to boot camp everyday. Life is gonna be hard for a while, but I just remind myself I'm doing it for my kids. And they better appreciate it, too, goddamnit. Seriously. I want a hand-drawn letter of appreciation every single morning waiting for me at the breakfast table, with some cool spaceships and ducks in cowboy hats on it, and those cute backwards letters that kids do in the movies.

That's just a quick artist rendering of what I'm lookin' for, but I don't expect my son or daughter to turn out anything THAT high quality. They're just children after all.

I just wanna drink beer all day and do music, you think the Navy would agree with that? I hope so. I hope there's a specific rank just for that. Petty Officer Third Class Drunk Rapper. Accelerate your life. Maybe I'll legally change my last name to Morgan and work my way up to Captain, and then just start reporting to duty wasted every day with a Halloween pirate hat on. I like to think MY United States Navy has a sense of humor, and will totally appreciate these improvements on their uniform and daily activities (ie: drinking rum and making fake toddler drawings instead of watching for dangerous Iranian speedboats).

We will see.

Land of the lost..........

2008-11-10T10:17:00.000-06:00

The Epic Quest of the Security Deposit.......

2008-11-08T15:57:00.000-06:00

So in 2 and 1/2 weeks I'm gonna uproot my family and move them to Florida to get them set up down there before I go to the glacier cave to slay the ice worm (a.k.a. Navy boot camp in February). So needless to say we're about to start the fun part........moving. My wife was trying to remind me to call Budget Rental earlier, but there was a communication breakdown (all praises due to Plant).

What she said: "Call and ask about the dimensions of the storage space."

What I heard: "Call and ask about the midgets of the storage space."

I know it's crazy but for a minute I thought we had a troll problem. No offense to little people, ain't tryin' to play with offensive synonyms, all I'm sayin' is that for a split second I got excited and started brushin' up my riddle game. Thought I was about to embark on an oddysey.

I seriously forgot how to spell oddysey, woulda been completely lost without the spell-check. Some match I'd be for a 2,000 year old riddling troll. I was about to have to resort to phonetic spelling, which would have REALLY fucked me up even more. I wonder what the outcome would be if you phonetically spelled the word "phonetic"? Pretty phuckin' shocking, I bet.

Gotta go. My wife just brought home a puppy named "Barbie", so I gotta go in the bathroom and check if my balls are completely gone by now or just fading like Marty McFly's siblings on polaroids. Peace.

Romero = Riefenstahl

2008-11-07T10:53:00.000-06:00

Now that Obama is president and human racism is over, I think we need to start workin' on the racism in other creatures. The obvious first choice would be German shephards, but I'm gonna go against the grain here and say they're probably not that big of a threat. I mean, even if some kind of "Hitler-Shephard" hypothetically rose to power in one neighborhood by barking his hateful message through the fence, he'd probably get run over by a car or eat some chocolate out of a garbage can and die before he could escape and establish any serious, viable movement with other racist dogs. But if you still wanna picture giant armies of Miniature Schnauzers marching in cute SS hats, I won't judge you.

Matter fact, let's just rule out animals, period, cuz they don't have souls. So what other creatures can we teach tolerance? My proposal...........

Zombies.

Think about it. Has anybody ever seen a zombie? No.......and yet in all the horror movies, the zombies are always either green or blue. Who the hell made that rule? One green zombie wrote a screenplay and now the rest of the zombie community gets disenfranchised? If (when) the zombies take over the world, I think we'll see that they come in all colors and disgusting shades. This is just Hollywood perpetuating yet another bullshit racist stereotype. It shouldn't matter what color the flesh-eater's flesh is colored. Somewhere along the way, we've lost sight of the fact that on the inside, all of our brains are gray. And tasty.

Speaking of green zombies, Joni Mitchell turned 65 today. I wonder how much that is in human years?

Happy Friday everyone. In the words of the great philosopher Mr. T, "Everybody gotta wear clothes, and if you don't, you'll get arrested."

Life in green and electric skies............

2008-11-05T09:50:00.000-06:00

Just shot a roll of Kodak Portra last weekend (yeah, I was kinda exaggerating when I said it all disappeared off the shelves, but I did have to hunt it down). Half the roll was a small photo shoot I did for a friend of a friend named Frank, who is a dope rapper by the way and I'll post some of his shit soon, and the other half of the roll was some random personal shots. Here's some of the better ones............

NOTE: I have no idea why it ain't showing the whole pictures, but just click on each one and it will enlarge.

These are low quality grainy versions since a couple weeks my son felt it was necessary to step on my scanner and break it. I told him gently (ie: not with my fists or broken pieces of the scanner) there's other ways to reach his cup, like for instance, not breaking equipment that is essential for making money to put things inside the damn cup. Anyway, I happen to like grain so I guess it doesn't matter and I should shut my whiny mouth. I'm just sayin' all this to say this now............I can't believe how vivid the colors on this sunset came out. I took this last week in a wal-mart parking lot. This shit really happened in the sky, I felt like there should be crowds of people hugging and crying, with national geographic film crews on top of the building. But no..........all the fat slack-jaws pretty much just kept movin' towards the food section (away from the garden section) with their heads down, eyes on their shoes. Welcome to America.

And of course, no roll is complete without the obligatory shot of Adrian, a.k.a. Lil' A, a.k.a. A-dro, a.k.a. Dro Budden. If you look close the face he's giving me is "Oh sorry daddy, I stepped-ed on your picher scan thingy. I can has juice now?"

"Witness to Changing Hands"..............

2008-11-04T23:09:00.000-06:00

Listen, this is all I'm gonna say tonight.

Don't let the conspiracy theorists or partisans steal this moment from you, whoever you are. Don't let anyone tell you America isn't a great nation. Don't let them tell you that McCain's concession words or Jesse Jackson's tears were disingenuous. Don't let the hateful write history. No matter who you voted for, all politics aside, whether you're republican or democrat or libertarian or none of the above, if you're not feeling some real deep pride and patriotism right now, then hate in one form or another rules your life and it is a problem. And now your personal problem is fully exposed to your friends, family, neighbors and co-workers in this historic moment.

I have the next 4-8 years to criticize Obama's policy decisions the same way I did Bush and Clinton before him, but for now me and my black wife are beside ourselves watching something unfold that neither of us ever imagined would happen in our lifetimes. Remember that sometimes perception can be far more important than literal politics, and no matter what Obama actually does during his term(s), his platform of positivity and progressive evolution of our nation will change, and in many ways has already changed and lifted, the consciousness of not only America but the world. He spoke directly to the WORLD in his victory speech. Don't let anyone tell you that was wrong.

E Plurbius Unum, boys and girls.

"I may not get there with you.............."

"I found my special purpose!" (c) Navin Johnson

2008-11-04T08:01:00.000-06:00

So the other day I was chillin' with a friend of mine, and he said "Did Goodie Mob and 8-Ball & MJG ever collab? I don't think they did. That would've been dope."

Would've? Would have? See, these are the kinds of moments in life where my 15 years worth of unbridled Dungeon Family dickriding finally has a purpose. My time on this earth has meaning. I can help someone.

A lot of people don't know but back in 1995 when Soul Food dropped (and exploded my skull), that same year a vinyl single for the title song also dropped with some remixes on it. One of those remixes was done by legendary Houston producer Crazy C, the man behind so much of Scarface's early shit, Mr. 3-2's underappreciated "Wicked Buddah Baby" solo Rap-A-Lot album, a lot of Woss Ness's later stuff, and the infamous Rap-A-Lot group Too Much Trouble with the white midget. You know, the one billed as the "Baby Geto Boys". Nobody I know admits to liking that album, for obvious reasons, but the production was as much on point as any other Rap-A-Lot release.

Anyway, back to the point, Crazy C did one of the remixes and on that "Suave House" remix, friends.............were none other than Suave House artists 8-Ball & MJG. The track has been on a million underground mixtapes in Texas for the last 12 years, but I guess it's relatively unknown outside the south. Well, here ya go...........

Goodie Mob- Soul Food (Suave House Remix feat. 8-Ball & MJG)

Definitely a classic. And not in the douchebag "real hip hop head" way that Big Noyd or Jeru the Damaja albums are "classic", but in the real way, in that people actually listened to it.

And then if you wanna get looser with the definition of "collab", Cee-lo was on the track "Paid Dues" off 8-Ball & MJG's "In My Lifetime" album, but that one ain't rare at all. If you call yourself a Hip Hop fan and ain't heard that track, please eat a grenade. Or just listen to it. Either way.

Don't really know how to end this, so hey.............since we're talkin' about Dungeon Family songs from 1995, here's the best one:

A Toast to Old Drunk Guys..........

2008-11-03T10:23:00.000-06:00

So today there's yet another poll up on some ("respectable") news site asking which candidate you'd rather have a beer with. That's like the 7th one I've seen throughout the election, and every single time I voted the same way. And this has nothing to do with politics or who I actually voted for in the booth.............but in that hypothetical pitcher-swiggin' scenario I'd definitely choose McCain. No question. All bullshit caricatures aside, he seems like a funny guy who's seen and done a lot and could drop some old school wisdom on you, while Obama seems like a genuinely uptight nerd that would have very few interesting stories to tell about his life. Let's be real for a minute....this is a guy who wrote and published not one, but TWO books about his life before he ever accomplished anything worth writing about, including becoming a senator, which as a general topic crams the memoir section of any bookstore enough to make the whole endeavor seem about as meaningful as changing a flat tire. Again, nothing to do with politics, that's just a self-important douchebag activity (like having a blog). McCain on the other hand was by all accounts a "wild party animal" in his teens and twenties who was in a war, flew planes, crashed planes (a lot), spent years as a POW, married and divorced like 17 different women who all happened to be models, hung out with presidents and dictators and warlords, got caught up in political scandals, is probably on the private list of every "washington madam", and by his own admission doesn't spend a lot of time on the internet.

Does any of that make him a good candidate for president? God no. Some of it makes him unelectable and probably a little mentally unstable. But that also describes most of the people I call my friends and prefer to drink my 151 with. And I damn sure wouldn't want any of those knuckleheads running the country, either.

So next time you see one of these goofy polls and wonder who the 23% is that went against the grain and voted for the old guy, just think of me passed out next to an empty box of bud with a dumb smile on my face.

On a serious note, I really do wish this election would never end. It's been hilarious and historic and I enjoyed every single horrible minute of it.

This day in history..........

2008-11-03T07:58:00.000-06:00

Important historical events that happened on November 3rd:

20,000 BC - Neanderthals discovered cocoa beans, and quickly began crushing them and covering the butter on ants, raisins, and their own ashy kneecaps.

1546 AD - Martin Luther nailed a church door, and was arrested for public indecency.

2006 - Saddam Hussein, having been captured in a spider web 3 years prior and held for trial, shocked the world by bringing Johnnie Cochran in as his legal defense. The trial only lasted 13 minutes, wherein he lost and was sentenced to death. Some blame the brevity of the trial on the fact that his representation was a dead, lifeless corpse.

THE MORE YOU KNOW

Analyze this..........

2008-11-02T08:23:00.001-06:00

I had a lucid dream last night. It was awesome, as lucid dreams usually are. In the dream I was talkin' to my brother Lowkey and my homeboy Bosnian (huge departure from my real life) and a naked redhead that looked like my high school algebra teacher walked past on the sidewalk. Not only did I realize at this point that I was dreaming and got really excited about that fact, but I chose to also share this new info with my brother and Bosnian. Who, if you're keeping track so far, were not real. Only existed inside my dream. Okay. It went kinda like this:

Me: "Yeah man, we should go to the banana death camp dungaree conventi...........what the hell? Is that a naked lady?"

Dream Bosnian: "Where?"

Me: "Wait this can't be real. Am I dreaming? Ohhhh shit I'm dreaming! ha!"

Dream Lowkey: "What? You sound crazy right now banana death camp."

Me: "Nah mayne for real, check this out. If it wasn't a dream could I do this?"

*walks up to naked lady and punches her in the titty*

Me: "See?!? She just smiled. She don't even care. Females usually care when you do that, or........so I heard. Anyway I didn't feel it either. DREAM!!"

*Dream Bosnian turns into huge lizard and tries to eat me while Dream Lowkey starts dancing in circles*

And then I flied away. Because really, what the fuck else are you gonna do in a lucid dream? Save the world? Just fly and get it over with.

Nowhere to go but down.............

2008-11-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

The Pinnacle of Youtube

The Pinnacle of British People

The Pinnacle of Taffy-based Candies

The Pinnacle of Songs About Weed Featuring Fiend

The Pinnacle of Horror Movie Posters

The Pinnacle of MTV

The Pinnacle of DMX's Career

The Pinnacle of Songs about Pinnacles

The Tale of the Last Fogelberg Fan...........

2008-10-31T08:51:00.000-05:00

About a week ago I was at the HEB on south congress and Oltorf pickin' up some film.......which by the way, is becoming an even more expensive hobby than it already was, since apparantly all those dedicated photographers who made me fall in love with 35mm are fuckin' sellouts now, driving the whole market towards digital faster than Gary Busey towards the big "In Rememberance" screen at next year's Oscars ceremony. Seriously, this shit is a perfect lesson in supply and demand, the B&W film I buy like crack went from $4/roll to $9/roll almost overnight, and the color film I used to buy isn't even being made anymore! It just disappeared from the shelves. I felt like the main character in every cheesy ghost story.........

"Yeah I'll have some Kodak Portra please."

"Kodak Portra? I'm sorry we don't sell that."

"Really? Man that sucks, I just bought some last week."

"Sir, that's impossible...........we haven't sold that film here since 1945. It died in the war."

Dum-dum-duuuuuuuum!!!

Anyway, all recent fuck-ups of capatalism aside, here's the real story. The adventure. The event that changed my life forever, and may very well change yours when you have finished reading the tale. So there I was walking up to the store, minding my own business.........and by that I mean lookin' at all the mexican women at the paleta stand and wondering if maybe the real Montezuma's Revenge is a flat ass........when all the sudden I almost stepped on something on the ground in front of me. A small white object. What could it be? A dead albino squirrel? A flattened bag of cauliflower someone drove over? Bird shit in the shape of an Ipod?

No, an actual Ipod. Cool, right? No, not cool at all, because while it didn't turn out to be literally made of it, I did find some bird shit.........on the inside. When I turned it on, this is just a sample of the playlist that greeted me:

The Eagles
Foo Fighters
Billy Joel
Duran Duran
Coldplay
John Denver
Buena Vista Social Club
Norah Jones
Dan Fogelberg
Tom Petty
Foreigner
John Mayer
Billy Idol
Rod Stewart
Yes

Now, any one of those artists by themselves would have been fine. But all together in the same playlist, this thing could be put in a goddamn museum and studied for future generations as proof of the failure of the human experiment. And yes............you read that last band name right. Yes. YES!! If just seeing the name doesn't disturb you enough, allow me to take you all the way down the rabbit hole now, friends. There was not one, not two, but 3 WHOLE ALBUMS worth of Yes in that folder. Think long and think hard about that little tidbit. That means that not only is there some unabashed Yes fan walking freely the streets of our safe neighborhood, where I let my KIDS play, but this man/woman/evil robot sat down at their computer and spent no less than an hour importing their proud prog rock collection into Itunes, plugged up their Ipod to update with a dumb smile on their face and said "I see nothing wrong with this scenario." Jesus christ, even if you switched that mental picture to a dude sittin' in front of his computer watching child porn while wearing a Mitt Romney halloween mask, it somehow still wouldn't disgust me as much.

So needless to say, finding this Ipod did not give me the warm feeling you would get from, oh, I don't know..........finding a free Ipod that wasn't pre-owned by a sociopath. The pure level of douchebaggery contained within this device made what would usually be a cool discovery into more of a mix of success and shame, kinda like what I assume is felt by any dude who ever woke up with a hangover next to Yeardly Smith in the morning.

So for the last week, I've been obsessed with this guy, the owner of this thing. Who is he? What does he do for a living? How does he dress himself every morning? After a lot of sleepless nights and crumpled notepads full of algebra calculations, this is my best reconstruction of who this man is, based on the evidence on the Ipod and the location where it was found...........

First of all, he is a he. The Norah Jones and Billy Idol had me leaning towards the female box on the checklist but at the end of the day, we all know no woman has ever been satisfied by Dan Fogelberg, musically or otherwise. So this is a dude. His name is Marcus Dzienkowski, he's 49 years old and he works at a store that sells reflective biking gloves and coffee beans. As a kid nobody could pronounce his last name so they just called him "fat head", on account of his head being way too big for his freakishly small body. Which in reality was a sign of malnourishment from living with his senile grandmother who sent him to bed at 6:30pm every night with only a werther's original caramel candy for dinner. One time in the elementary school lunchroom, the cool kids let him sit at their table. "This is it", he said to himself, "I'm finally being accepted". But as he ate his usual lunch of bananas and ketchup, the kids started to laugh. Eager to please and naively thinking they were laughing WITH him, he smeared the ketchup over his face and did the traditional polish dance his grandmother taught him. The kids laughed harder and harder, and finally realizing the situation, he began to cry. "I'll show them. I'll grow up to be somebody special!" And so the day he turned 18, he left his small town and moved to Hollywood. He worked as a waiter and went to the gym constantly, building up his body to make his head look smaller. He eventually became a somewhat successful saxophone player, and can be seen in the movie The Lost Boys playing for a large crowd of people who appear to be enjoying themselves, proof that at one time (or, as we call it, the 80's) his brand of simpishness was acceptable in society. It was during that same year that, while both backstage at a Corey Hart concert, he met his lover and life partner Lorenzo, star of the wildly popular gay porn series "Lorenzo's Oil (in the butt)". In late 1999, Marcus found a job in Austin choreographing chinchillas in tap shoes for a performance art piece, and Lorenzo followed along, deciding to enroll in the University of Texas graduate program working towards his PhD in Plant Biology. They still live in Austin to this day, jogging town lake every morning and handing out Scientology pamphlets in the afternoons. On his way inside HEB to buy a bag of sweet coconut herbal tea, Marcus dropped his Ipod.

The End.........to be continued?

Nah, not really, I just always wanted to do that since I saw it on an episode of ALF. Truth is I gave the Ipod to a friend of mine since I already have one of my own, filled with lots of unbelievably great music but also a couple albums by people like Sufjan Stevens and Danzig that would probably make anyone who found my lost Ipod say "Man, what a huge douchebag."

My Guardian Angel.........

2008-10-29T10:11:00.000-05:00

10 reasons why I turned down Brandy's marriage proposal.......

2008-10-28T12:52:00.000-05:00

Some of ya'll may or may not know this, maybe you read it in the trade papers or saw the video of us sunbathing on TMZ, but it's true............multi-platinum R&B recording artist Brandy and me have been seeing eachother for a while now. It's been a fun couple of months, we went to Disneyworld, ate spaghetti with no forks, got matching star tattoos on our inner thighs. She ain't really one for tradition, but she shocked even me when she got down on her knees and popped the question last tuesday at Joe's Crab Shack, right underneath all the romantic lights and plastic lobsters wearing tie-dye shirts. It wasn't easy, but I've thought about this a lot and finally came to a decision. If you're reading this Brandy (and I know you are), I think you deserve an explanation, so here's my reasons why I have to say no.........

1. Your parents gave you a dog's name. Those are no in-laws I want over for Thanksgiving.

2. Your eyes are farther apart then your nipples. Anatomically, that does not sit well with me. Many cultures would label you a witch just for that alone.

3. You were single-handedly responsible for "five-head" jokes gettin' played out in the 90's, and now Rhianna is gettin' a free pass!! Unforgivable.

4. You look like Sam Cassell and Lilo from Lilo and Stitch had a baby together. And that upsets me because I don't like thinkin' of the late great Sam Cassell as a pedophile, let alone a toon sex fetishist (don't know which is worse), so I'd rather not wake up to a face that suggests such slanderous things.

5. Two of the actors who played your pretend boyfriends on Moesha have died horrible deaths in real life. Your vagina is obviously cursed, whether it's acting or not, and not cursed in the manageable Erykah Badu "oh no now I gotta wear green skull caps" kinda way.

6. Puttin' peanut butter in your mouth everytime you have to talk would get old really fast.

7. Countess Vaughn would probably show up at some get-togethers, and everyone knows how bad our break-up was. Awwwwwkward.

8. The episode of Moesha where Moesha meets Brandy, the R&B singer, fucked off my whole view of reality, relativity, and causality. And I needed those!!!

9. You named your daughter "Sy'rai". That's one letter away from Syria. You hide it well but you're obviously a one-woman sleeper terrorist cell who has already infiltrated the television, movies, and music industries, and in a post-911 world I just can't support that.

10. Insert whatever alien/praying mantis/doberman jokes are left.

So Brandy, that's why I will not marry you. I hope we can still be friends. And also please note that there were no jokes about you killin' people in car accidents because you were on a cell phone, cuz that would just be in bad taste. But seriously, stop texting me on the highway.

Love,
Sandman

The big question...........

2008-10-28T10:56:00.000-05:00

Why another blog, Sandman?

Well, let's look at the other two blogs I've had.

Dirty Ass Aisles was kinda fun, and I did one funny interview that people all over the world still send me e-mails about with "LOL's" in 'em. And I got some sweet hot sauce out of the deal. But I only did it to get a job at a local publication that was lookin' for critics, and I needed SOME kind of resume or writing to show them. That failed predictably, and so now I don't do that blog anymore, cheifly because I hate critics and hated myself for pretending to be one, even for a little while.

Speaker Madness is great, it's only 5 episodes deep and already has hundreds of listeners and people seem to love it. That's not going anywhere soon. But the SM blog itself serves a single purpose, to post new episodes and polls and all things podcast-related. It's not my personal space for thinking and typing. It belongs to the other two hosts just as much as me, I just happened to have a blogspot account already.

So that's why I'm startin' this new blog for myself. I'm going into the Navy in exactly 3 months, and after that I'll be stationed on a ship somewhere, and after that I'll be stationed most likely in a foreign country. There's a lot of people who (for whatever masochistic reason) enjoy reading what I write on the internet, and while I do have a myspace page where I post regular blogs, I don't think it's fair to punish people by having to go to myspace to read them. Plus it's a music myspace page, and as my brother Lowkey says, "blogging is gay".........so I obviously can't have the gayness mixing with the hardcore rap image, cuz!! Blucker blucker!!

So basically what I'm saying is this is gonna be my outlet to the world for a while, it looks like. And I plan on updating pretty regularly. Not everyday, but enough for nobody to get bored and forget it exists. Post a comment if you're excited about that, or if you're ashamed of excitement, just post the title of your favorite made-for-TV movie.

Sandman a.k.a. Slick Talk a.k.a. Slick Moranis Honey I Shrunk the Haterssssssss
Peace