Paris and London: just the lowlights

Let me start by getting one thing out of the way.  That old adage about how Paris would be wonderful if it weren’t for all the French?  Bullfuckingshit.  Paris blows because it’s filled with Americans.  Everywhere you go, it’s Yanks all over the place.  What the fuck, I thought we were in some massive sinkhole of economic diarrhea – yet, Paris, one of the most expensive cities in the motherfucking universe, is filled to be brim with holidaying Yanks.  Fucking blows my mind.  Granted, I was there to do the same, so I’m not gonna begrudge someone else’s holidaying shenanigans, but goddamn there are a lot of Yanks in Paris.

Anyway, two weeks in Paris with a slight detour to pre-Olympic-bullshit London yielded some entirely pointless observations:

French countryside.  For all talk about the visual orgasm that is the French countryside, it’s remarkably dull.  You might as well be driving through the middle of New Jersey.

British graffiti sucks.  Banksy notwithstanding (which is technically is street art, not the sort of graffiti I’m talking about).  On the left is what was scrawled on the back of a loo in an average pub right off Greek Street in London’s Soho.  Compare that to the right, taken from the bathroom at Max Fish in New York’s Lower East Side.

When you make the mistake of going to see the Mona fucking Lisa, you usually have the misfortune of getting crammed with about 150 other boneheaded tourists all clamoring to see the same stupid painting.  Problem is, every single of one of them will be a complete imbecile.  Not only are they pushing and shoving, you get dipshits like this trying to take a picture of the painting from about 30 feet away.  Using an iPad.  Took every ounce of self-restraint not to swat that iPad out of his hands and send it hurtling towards the Mona Lisa itself to test out the painting’s perspex shielding.

 

This fucking guy at Versailles.

Café du Flore, Café Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp – apparently this view affords you a tiny lukewarm cup of espresso that’ll set you back 10 euros.  We hit all three landmark restaurants in one sweep one lazy Tuesday afternoon.  Sure, they were lovely and boasted all sorts of literary history, but holy shit do they know how to work the whole tourist trap thing.  In fact, all the tourist traps are finetuned to perfection.  We hit a whole bunch of them – Au Pied du Cochon, Bofinger, Chartier, the three above.  You walk in and not a single Parisian is to be seen in any of these places.  Yet, somehow they make you feel OK sitting down and having an unspectacular yet unoffensive meal.  You know full well that you’re in a tourist trap, for some fucked up reason, you’re OK with it.  Which is heaps different from any given tourist trap in New York.  I think.  I haven’t been to New York tourist traps in a long while, so I’m just projecting here.

Andouillette.  Speaking of restaurants, my typically brave demeanor when it comes to food finally betrayed me.  On my final night in Paris, having already tried so many typical French foods, opted for one of the few remaining things I had yet to try: andouillette.   Sounds like an andouille, right?  And I fucking love andouille.  I had to try it.  Even if the description is nothing like andouille – andouillette is a sausage that’s constructed of chopped up tripe stuffed into an intestine.  Not just a natural gut casing, but the whole fucking intestine.  Filled with chopped up tripe.  How bad could it be?  Holy shit, never ask that question when it comes to andouillette.  Because the andouillette will punch you in the mouth with a definitive and declarative answer.  It tastes like you’ve just eaten the toilet from Trainspotting.  And you can’t swallow it because it’s all hard and crunchy and it tastes like shit and you start to gag and the combination of gag and a mouthful of shit causes you to asphyxiate, and your only solution is to wash it down as quickly as possible by guzzling wine right out of the bottle which causes you to instantly become the ape-like retarded tourist in the restaurant.  Everything is horrible and you want to die.  After coming to, I politely sent the plate of Satan’s pinched loaf back and ordered a steak tartar instead.  You have no idea how delicious a raw hamburger is after you’ve tried andouillette.

The subway music is much more interesting.  That’s not to say that any halfwit walking around with an accordion equals something good.  In New York, half these schmucks on the subway create some indiscernible racket and demand loose change from you.  Parisian minstrels, on the other hand, often sound like they might actually be good at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Deodorant.  Europe is gonna be so awesome when they discover deodorant.

Jack White: design junkie first, musician second

I can’t believe that Jack White’s been around for about 15 years now.  But when you stop to consider all his different projects in, between, and after The White Stripes, you start to realize – how did he ever find the time to put so much music out in such little time?

In 15 years, we’ve been treated to ample servings of The White Stripes, two albums from The Raconteurs, another two from The Dead Weather.  And that’s not counting the many albums he’d produced for other artistes (like Wanda Jackson), all the collaborations with different artistes  (like Danger Mouse or Alicia Keys), and running his own record label, Third Man Records.  Now, we have his long-awaited debut solo album, “Blunderbuss”.

Jack White III sure is an industrious thirtysomething.

That said, Jack White’s offering has been pretty much the same the past decade-and-a-half.  No matter what band or collaboration he’s in, at the very core, he’s an obsessive white boy from Detroit who plays deep Mississippi blues.  White confessed that his entire sound has been developed on the basis of chasing the Son House sound.  Son House is Jack White’s great white whale.

But look at how he’s brilliantly packaged the Jack White brand so differently over the years.  We’ve always known about The White Stripes’ persistent red and white aesthetic, but I hadn’t didn’t realize how seriously he had engineered that persona until the New York Times Magazine article in which he divulged that The White Stripes walked away from their first label offer because the record company wanted to put their green logo on the spine of The White Stripes’ album.  That would never do for Jack White, he told the record company to get fucked, The White Stripes walked, and the rest is Grammy history.

(Source: http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/)

When White set up his side project, The Raconteurs, he quickly established a different aesthetic: bronze.  In live shows, White would play bronze-colored Gretsch guitars wired through bronze-colored pedals.  The first album would feature a bronze-colored frame.  All of which was to remind you that you were suddenly listening to another Jack White band not called The White Stripes that demanded your attention.

(Source: Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN via austin360.com)

For his other side project, The Dead Weather, White would make yet another shift in his color palette.  Everything about The Dead Weather was black and white.  He would play a large Gretsch White Falcon, as would Jack Lawrence, the band’s bass player.  The band would frequently wear only black when playing live.

White’s record company, Third Man Records, bears a black-and-yellow theme.  The website, the employees in his Nashville record shop, all of it.  Jack White’s attention to the power of color isn’t limited to just his bands.

This week, we see the release of Jack White’s debut solo album, “Blunderbuss”.  And with that, of course we’re treated to another spectral branding of the artiste – Jack White has entered his Blue Period.

When you listen to “Blunderbuss”, it is unmistakably Jack White.  Sure, it doesn’t sound anything like The White Stripes (I feel “Blunderbuss” probably closest to a Raconteurs album), but the Jack White DNA is unmistakable.

Through all these iterations, Jack White hasn’t metamorphasized.  He’s stayed the same, he’s been faithful to his sound.  Unlike Madonna or Primal Scream through the years (can’t fucking believe I just compared Madonna with Primal Scream – just kill me now).  Jack White is Jack White is Jack White.  No matter what the aesthetic on the outside, he’s still Jack White doing the Jack Whitest things in the Jack Whitest ways.  Yet, his red-and-white guise is a different animal from his bronze guise, which in turn is different from his black-and-white guise, and so on.  I can’t wait to hear his Lone Ranger soundtrack.

Who else is as carefully thought out at Jack White these days?

Regardless of how “Blunderbuss” does (I’m sure it’ll sell just fine), surely that sort of attention to design has got to count for something in the Gobi desert that is the global music scene.

Jack White = fucking genius.

 

Help me, I’m stuck in a tree (hugging) house of horror

When the rain is pissing down so hard that it looks like the book of Exodus has opened at your front door, that’s the best time in the world to make your way to a tree-hugging festival in the middle of NYC, right?  Right.

Which is what I did yesterday.  Wifey’s idea, natch.  She was all into celebrating Earth Day so she signed up the whole family for the NYC Green Festival.  Which I suspected was going to be every bit as terrifying as it sounds.   You fucking know it: a fully-sustainable clusterfuck of granola, drum circles, and hemp shampoo.

To help protect Mother Gaia, do we do the right thing and take public transportation to event?  Fuck no, we all hopped into our 250hp fossil fuel-fed four-wheel drive family sedan and gunned it down the West Side Highway.  I may have even hit a bird on the way down.  We then spent another 30 minutes circling the west side looking for a parking lot that wasn’t full so we could park our car.  Fuckin’ A.

Eventually, we got to the event, which was tucked into one corner of the Javits Center.  It was the smallest event at the convention center that day.  It was dwarfed by something else called the International Beauty Show (they used the most unfortunate acronym, IBS New York – I was expecting row upon row of portajohns), and some college fair.  We snaked our way through what looked like a million Snookis and another half-million high school imbeciles.

 

When we got into the Green Festival, it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting.  Being at the Javits Center, this was like a trade show.  But open to the public.  Four massive aisles of booths, multiple stages set up across the floor for talks and workshops, and a floor full of extras from Portlandia.  We started our wander through the booths.

What did the kids immediately make a beeline for?  The first few booths, which had tons of chocolate, all boasting fair trade, organic, small batches made by Nicaraguan cave children or some shit like that.  Kids didn’t give a shit, they just saw open bowls of chocolate and they were encouraged by the nice hippie ladies behind the counter to help themselves as much as they wanted.  Thanks for nothing, bitch, you’re not the one who has to deal with the sugar crash in 20 minutes.

 

Eventually, I came across a booth that didn’t piss me off – a bike shop!  They had some sweet small brand bikes, but in the end, they didn’t really have anything that excited me too much.  The only bike I wanted was the owners fillet-brazed steel fixie.  And he wasn’t about to part with it.

Right in the back of the hall was this big white bus.  The inside of the bus was a kids’ play area, but the whole thing looked suspiciously like some brainwashing lab on wheels.  I imagined my kids going in as normal kids who eat hot dogs and play with lightsabers, but then coming back out wearing a hemp sackcloth, eating a bean taco, and asking to adopt a goat.

Thankfully, Kid Uno did not disappoint, as he took to their whiteboard and happily predicted the devastation of the earth’s poles (left).  I have never been prouder.  My kids ain’t half bad, after all.

Also not half bad was the centerpiece of the event, an all-electric Ford Focus.  I have a difficult time with Ford.  Being an American car, I can’t be blamed for thinking it’s going to be a piece of shit, but the Ford Focus also has roots in Europe, which means it can’t be completely awful.  This electric version was eye-opening, that’s for sure.  Not only did it not suck, the build quality was quite decent, design fairly ergonomic, and the ripped-off-from-Aston Martin front end was flattering rather than offending.  Downside was that it’s still a short-range, single-speed, 40-grand hatch.  It may be one of the first all-electric cars that doesn’t look like a Tamagotchi toy, but it’s not quite the answer yet.

And in what shape did I emerge from this whole thing?  Fuck if I know.  All I know is that my kids had a blast, wifey enjoyed it, I ate some really shitty food (vegan cheese and kale chips), some not-so-terrible food (corn salsa and vegan macaroons), and I wanted to punch this fucking guy who kept walking around playing a guitar…

 

And I escaped without getting caught up in some tree-worshipping pagan ritual.  Boo yah.

Downton Abbey is much, much sluttier than Mad Men

Like many others, I’m now in limbo waiting for the next season of Downton after ravenously eating up season 1 and season 2 in a hurry.  Thing is, I’m not even sure why I enjoy that fucking show.  When I think of Downton Abbey, the first thing that comes to mind is that I hate how each episode is written – I hate that an episode starts with some dramz but it always – ALWAYS! – gets tidily resolved by the end of that episode.  All wrapped up in a bow.  (Speaking of bow, what the fuck is up with O’Brien’s bangs?)

Whatever happened to having several arcs stretch across multiple episodes to let stories grow bigger and develop for our amusement?  Starting and ending shit within one episode is for the land of stupid sitcoms, bitches.  Stories like Cora’s baby or the disfigured Patrick with the Canadian accent (who oddly enough looked like a real-life version of South Park’s Canadians) lasted a mere 60 minutes.  Would it have been that hard to draw those out a bit longer so that more shit can happen to those stories?

Anyway, now that Downton’s gone ‘til at least the fall, we have Mad Men to fill the void.  I got so fucking tired of Mad Men towards the end of the last season, way, way back in 2010.  Maybe ‘cause there was a glaringly diminished appearance of Trudy on the show.  [Sidebar: Trudy is easily the hottest thing on television.  But then Megan came around, and that was cool, but then it went pear-shaped when Draper does a completely unfunny impersonation of Roger Sterling by trying to marry his secretary.  I guess a hint of the absurd is what keeps us on our toes, right?]

But can Mad Men properly fill the Downton void?  And that’s the way I see it, by the way – Mad Men is filling in the Downton Abbey void, not the other way ‘round.

Because I’m convinced that Downton Abbey is way sluttier than Mad Men.

Slutty how?  For starters, Lady Mary is with three dudes in two seasons – Kamel Pamouk, Sir Richard Carlisle, and Matthew Crawley.  Four, if you count the non-starter with Evelyn Napier (English accent AND a creepy girl’s name?  Must be evil).  The most screaming siren on Mad Men, Joan Holloway, only hooked up with two dudes, and one of them, she was actually married to.  Lady Mary Crawley?  What a trollop.

The proverbial heads of state are no better.  Look at Lord Grantham trying to shag a maid, while trying to semi-confess to some prior offense (when he tells Mary that she’s “not the first Crawley to make a mistake” – you know that shit’s gonna hit the fan in no time).   On the other hand, as far as what we know on Mad Men, Roger Sterling only hooked up with Joan before getting hitched to his secretary.  Roger Sterling is just the best character on Mad Men, bar none.

And then you’ve got those two hyenas, O’Brien and Thomas, on Downton.  I swear, those bangs on O’Brien are like the snakes on Medusa’s head.  And Thomas is a level of scumbag the likes of Mad Men haven’t even come close to.  There’s no Thomas equivalent on Mad Men.  Who’s the most evil person on Mad Men?  Let’s not talk about Draper, everything’s all me-me-me with him, he’s like a big child.  He’s not evil.  The most evil?  Pete Campbell?  Probably.  You put Pete Campbell up against O’Brien and Thomas, and you see who gets kicked in the nuts.  O’Brien killed an unborn baby, for fuck’s sake.  NOBODY on Mad Men has the balls to do that!

How about all the blackmail in Downton?  Between Carlisle’s threats regarding Mary’s shenanigans with Pamouk, and Mr. Bates’ evil hag of an ex-wife, it’s more like a Scorsese film than a period series.  The closest we got to blackmail in Mad Men was Campbell threatening to blow Draper’s Dick Whitman story.  Big fucking deal – what a non-starter that was.

Listen, I can go a million ways on this.  Besides, one’s set in York, and the other in New York – how far apart can these two shows be anyway?  The truth is, given the amazing array of poor decisions and bad behavior on Downton Abbey, I gotta say that Mad Men’s got a shit ton to live up to.  Something HUGE better go down this season if it’s going to measure to up to the guilty indulgence that is Downton Abbey. Maybe Betty kills Megan or something.  Or Pete gets splattered all over the road by drunk driving Duck (never trust a recurring character named after a water fowl, amirite?).  Fuck it, just bring a dowager on to Mad Men and we’ll call it even.

 

You want March Madness? THIS IS MARCH MADNESS!!

March isn’t about hoops.  Who gives a shit about college hoops (alright, alright, tons of people give a shit about college hoops, just not this guy).

For me, March is about an awakening.  An awakening of metal, carbon fiber, rubber, combustible liquids, and the manifestation of insanely complex physics.  CAR RACING, motherfuckers.  And I mean proper car racing, not that NASCAR driving-around-in-a-circle-with-antiquated-steel-tubs bullshit.  In March, the only balls that matter are those attached to the driver.  For a petrolhead, is there a better time of year than March?  No, no there isn’t.

Because March marks the end of a weird, gestation period in Formula 1 every year.  The sleepy winter tends to see racing factories “shut down”, though you know the engineers and supernerds are all still grinding away at race car design in secret.  The season’s race cars are typically introduced around January.  Then all the teams go to various racetracks and test the shit out of their new cars.  Problem is, you can rarely tell what they’re testing for – often it’s aerodynamics, sometimes it’s a suspension setup, sometimes it’s an exhaust configuration, sometimes it’s fuel consumption, sometimes it’s the tires.  But the lap times these cars rack up are typically useless to your average fan because you don’t know what they’re testing for.  Still, all of that comes to an end by early March.  The bullshit stops because it’s pencils down, and every team packs up their race gear – cars, tools, marketing swag, all of it – into large containers and fly the lot to Australia for the first grand prix race of the season.  March is when everyone stops fucking around.  March is when F1 gets real.

March is when I stay up ’til 5am on a Sunday to watch 24 completely insane drivers in race cars with wings and screaming engines fly around a racetrack for two hours.  At that hour, it is dark, it is quiet except for the 2.4 liter V8 engines, and it is fucking glorious.

So the F1 cars this year have fugly noses.  And we still have horrible teams that don’t belong in the sport (looking at you, HRT and Caterham).  But I’m not gonna care about that anymore…  because of this fucking guy:

KIMI‘S BACK!!!  ZOMG!  KIMI’S BACK!!!!!  I haven’t been this excited about any single driver since, say Sebastian Vettel’s first race for BMW at the 2007 U.S. Grand Prix.  Thank God this madman is back in the sport.

F1 is back.  And it’s a beautiful thing.  In spite of that nose.

 

But March isn’t just about F1.  Le Mans cars will only now be gearing up for some good and proper thrashing around the test tracks, in preparation for the annual slog in July.  Le Mans is a treat for the eyes, the ears, the heart, the mind, all of it.  This year, everything’s full of hybrid/electric/kinetic-powered/voodoo witchcraft/space-age wizardy.  I’m quite sure that teams are permitted to cast magic spells and summon dragons during pit stops.  Audi have announced two mental cars for this year’s competition (no need to bring up last year’s crashes, mmkay).  That’s lovely and all.

But here come Toyota – “I tell you what, there’s no school like the old school”:

Just look at that fucking thing.  It’s hideous.  Sure, it’s a new car and all, but it’s got this lovely old school look and feel about it.  And… and… ahh, fuck it, it’s not gonna win anything anyway, so I’m not gonna waste anymore time on it.

In fact, I think I’m done rambling about racing now.  Let’s just watch some videos of the Morgan-badged OAK Racing prototype and the Aston Martin Vantage GTE and call it day.

Time to go racing, bitches.

 

We’re getting the band back together again!

 

ZOMG!!!  THE STONE ROSES ARE REFORMING!!!  The Stone fucking Roses!!  This is HUUUUUUGE, amirite?!! OMGOMGOMGOMG, THE STONE ROSES ARE BACK!!!!

 

When the Roses hinted earlier this week that they may be getting back together, I called bullshit.  I’d heard it all before, and in the past, it’d always been some overly eager shithead reporter who forcibly mangled a quote out of one of the former members and twisted the shit out of it to suggest that a reunion might be in the works.  Why should this be any different – I’ll believe when I see it was what I thought.

Then came the press conference.  This was real.  This is really happening.  This is happening now.  John Squire will put down his plaster and paintbrushes and pick up his Gretsch Country Gentleman again.  Mani will walk away from Bobby Gillespie and company for a bit.  Ian Brown will need to stop making shit records and start tapping on bongos on stage again.  And Reni… dear old Reni… Reni will quit his job as night manager at a BP station and sit on that throne again.

Some people will cry at this tour.  People will scream.  People will lose their minds.  People who haven’t so much as gotten a contact high in the last 10 years will be doing massive amounts of drugs at these shows.  Some people will feel some sense of redemption.  And some people will get proper closure on this band’s bullshit break up in the ‘90s.

But hang on… wait one fucking second here.

Should I really be getting this pumped about this reunion?  Where the fuck have you guys been the last 15 years?  Why get the band back together?  Why now?

Just look at this incredibly douchey press photo I nicked off the interweb yesterday.  Do you really buy the idea that these four guys really want to spend several months on the road together after being apart and hating each other for 15 years?  It’s like the most forced press photo since Chaz Bono took off  her his shirt to show her his freakishly fat and mutilated torso.

 

Who really needs this reunion now?

Ian Brown cranked out some decent albums when he first went solo.  I fucking loved his first three albums.  “F.E.A.R.” will always be one of his most brilliant (albeit, terribly commercial) songs.  But everything since then has been a lot of shite.  You just want to punch him and tell him, “Listen, if you’re not gonna try, then don’t make the rest of us listen to your crap.”

John Squire said something a few years back to the effect of being done as a musician.  He was an artist now.  He was pumping out contemporary art like there was no tomorrow.  Had showings in galleries and museums and all the shit.  Which, for me, was quite frankly a complete waste of talent.  I believed Squire was the heir apparent to Jimmy Page.  Most folks hate the Roses’ second album for that.  I fucking love it for that reason.  I loved that he went mental on the guitar work (suck it, haters).  Then it seemed like the talent quickly drained away.  His subsequent bands – The Seahorses, his solo albums (OMG, the groaning!) – weren’t terribly interesting.  Then it was Squire The Artist.  And now I’m supposed to believe that Squire The Guitar God is back?

I was talking this over with a friend last night, and of Mani, he agreed, “I don’t understand what’s in it for Mani – he’s got a better band to play with now!”  And he’s right.  The genius of Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point, XTMNTR, and Evil Heat had to have come from Mani’s monstrous bass work.  No Mani, no Kowalski, no Kill All Hippies.

The one who needs this the most has to be Reni, hasn’t it.  I feel bad for Reni.  Pound for pound, Reni was the single-most talented member of the Stone Roses.  For me, I genuinely believe he’s the greatest drummer alive today (Rush fans, you can all fuck off for free).  Reni was – is? – simply brilliant.  When the band go back on tour, I want to see Reni more than anyone else.

This is classic “I want what I cannot have, but now that I can have it, I don’t really want it anymore.”  Perhaps I’ve overthought this, but I like the idea of the Stone Roses much more than the actual reality of seeing the Stone Roses back together again.  But then again, the idea of the Stone Roses seems to be about comebacks.  This is a band that was seemingly obsessed with comebacks (“I Am The Resurrection”, “Second Coming”).  Might as well have called the band “Jesus Complex.”

But I am also a person who rates this band as one of the top 3 most influential bands of all time and I never got to see them live back in the day.  I wasn’t at the famed Spike Island show.  So when you get a second chance – a Second Coming! – at seeing a band this influential to you, you tuck away your cynicism, buy the ticket and lose your mind at the show.  While wearing a bucket hat.

More shit that keeps me up at night

Wax museums.  I don’t get wax museums.  Is the idea like, “I can’t see the real thing, so let me pay gobs of money to see some shitty facsimile and still not see the real thing”?  Has anyone ever left a wax museum thinking, “I’ve never seen Lady Gaga, but now that I’ve seen a wax replica of her, I’m all set”?

I think wax museums should at least animate their wax figures.  And have these characters do something the real life versions would never do: Napoleon in a race car, Beyonce vacuuming, Stalin in a beekeepers outfit.  Tell me you wouldn’t pay to see that.

Porsche 911s.

That is an absolutely ludicrous range of models for just one car.  How the fuck do you choose?  Which ones have a turbo?  Which ones don’t?  Which ones have special suspension settings?  How do you know if you want this bit or that?  What a fucking ridiculous range.

American Apparel.  Super-creepy CEO notwithstanding, I can appreciate a clothing company centered on simplicity.  But with American Apparel, everything’s almost a bit too simple.  And there’s that thing of overcompensating that simplicity with an overwhelming amount of ridiculously gratuitous porny ads.   I’ve wanted to like this company for a while – the whole made in USA thing, the simple designs where a shirt’s a shirt and socks are socks – but the whole thing’s just pretty fucking ridiculous overall.

Asparagus.  To be specific, asparagus and my digestive tract.  How the fuck is it possible that I can have asparagus at lunch and if I go take a slash 10 minutes afterwards, I have asparagus pee?  How the fuck does that happen?  And it’d be one thing if I metabolized (is that the right term?  fuck if I know) asparagus at lightning speed, somehow the asparagus stays with me for days.  I’ve had asparagus pee three days after eating the fucking things.  Again: how the fuck is that possible?  In this day and age, it is not possible to genetically engineer an asparagus that doesn’t produce asparagus pee?  You’d think.

It’s gettin’ old, let it go

Star Wars.  It was quirky, I was kinda into it because I was happily living vicariously through my kid who is all Star Wars all the time.  But he’s six, and it’s his goddamn right to be all Star Wars all the time.  But all the other Star Wars shit that sprouts up in blogs every week – that’s getting a bit too much.  It’s time to calm the fuck down with all the quirky Star Wars shit.  It’s bad enough that the fourth day in May is now universally considered Star Wars Day.  But enough with the art deco posters, crocheted tauntauns, Death Stars made of cheesecake, VW Passat ads, and fuck knows what else.  There’s a reason we all hate Episodes I, II, and III – anything other than the original three movies is utter shit.

Pippa Middleton.  Stop it: she’s not that hot.  She’s a bit of a butterface, and she’s really not that interesting, is she.  Everyone’s banging on about how hot she is, her ass is this and her ass is that, when in reality, while she might be a London 9, she’s about a New York 5.  Puh-leeze.  If she wasn’t related to the girl who married a prince, there’s a better than average chance that you wouldn’t pay attention to her in a bar on a Saturday night before five Stellas.

Doctor Who.  If this isn’t the most improbable TV success ever, I don’t know what is.  How the fuck did this fucking show make it out of its first season.  It’s a ridiculous premise with incredibly shoddy production value, and like a pint of warm bitter, only the Brits have an appetite for it.  Ridiculously better shows have come and gone, yet this stupid show about wheeled trash cans with toilet plungers carries on for about 50 years.  What the fuck.  Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant cap the genius of “The Office” (I’m not acknowledging the stupid, unfunny U.S. version) and “Extras” to two seasons a piece.  And this Doctor Who shit gets regurgitated for five decades?  I repeat, what the fuck.

Natalie Portman.  Let’s not hear from you again ’til that kid of yours is ready for college, how about that.  Is it just me, or did this girl crowbar her way into one in every three movies over the past year?  Enough already.  You’ve got gobs of cash from those shitty Star Wars movies, you really don’t need to say yes to every script that gets dropped into your mailbox.  I got over the Black Swan by the time you started to cry for the third time in that film.   Like fuck that was the best movie of 2010 (for that, please see “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”, thank you very much).  Since that movie, it’s been one hacky bullshit movie after another.  I was really hoping that this would be the last thing we see from you for a while:

Ex-F1 drivers racing in circles.  Good God, enough of this shit.  All thanks to that fat asshole, Juan Pablo Montoya, no less.  Just because his girth qualified him for stock car racing doesn’t mean that every other ex-F1 driver needs to have a go at NASCAR.  Going to and failing at NASCAR (which they’re all doomed to do) simply bogs down the reputation of grand prix drivers.  It makes Yanks think that grand prix drivers are rubbish.  Which is entirely untrue, unless your name is Felipe Massa or Mark Webber.  Which is what makes Kimi Raikkonen’s insistence to go to NASCAR after fucking around with the WRC that much more irritating.  Knock it off, Kimi – you used to be one of the best grand prix drivers on and off the track.  F1 hadn’t seen a beast like Raikkonen since the advent of his own hero, James Hunt.  I can’t see any other driver in the past 10 years who was marginally close to Kimi’s skill of not giving a fuck about the rules: getting loaded ’til dawn between races, dressing up in animal costumes during race weekends to hang with fans, taking part in contract-violating jet ski races incognito.  Kimi was brilliant in every way, right down to him Cylon-like interviews.  There was no other driver like him.  Not even close.  And now he’s fucked that up by associating with likes of Juan Pablo Montoya and Jacques Villeneuve by driving around in circles Stateside.  What an asshole.

The girl in Glee with the large schnoz.  I don’t know what her name is, I’m irritated enough as it is for even knowing who this broad is.  God, am I ever sick of seeing her on magazine covers every month.  What makes her particularly annoying is her propensity to flaunt what she doesn’t have – a rack.  Put your retarded bird chest away, seriously.  It’s just stupid.  Who’s your publicist, Kate Hudson?  I have a chubby belly, you don’t see me running around pulling a “Situation” every time someone takes a photo of me.

Art by and for assholes

[Originally posted March 2011]

Another weekend, another day out with the kids.  This time, it was to MoMA.  Impetus?  There was some kids’ movie event about magic that was free.  Free being the operative term here.  And while we were there, I figured I could trick them into exploring some cool shit around the museum.  Had to be careful though – this being a modern art reservation, I had to scout each exhibit hall ahead of the kids to make sure that there weren’t things in there that’d freak the bejessus out of them; you know, your garden variety decaying-vulture-stuffed-into-a-plexiglass-toaster-with-jam-pouring-from-the-vulture’s-eyes-portraying-the-struggle-of-our-primal-nature-against-the-industrial-oppression sorta bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love art museums.  I almost never pass one up.  It’s one of the few times and places I’ll willingly put up with the beard-stroking pretentious bastards who saunter around and examine each exhibit with such concentration that they look like they’re trying to hold in an agonizing fart.  I like to walk up next to these guys, glare at the item for a bit, then tell them, “Man, this painting’s making me hungry”, and walk off.  I don’t even need to look back to enjoy the “what the fuck” faces I’ve left behind.  (Don’t do this with Georgia O’Keefes – you’ll just come across as an enormous creep)

What I like about art museums is that I always walk out of there with some sense of equilibrium.  The enjoyable stuff is almost always balanced out by some really annoying shit.  I don’t pretend to know my art.  Let’s be clear: I don’t know my art.  But as the Pope said, “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.”

So by now, I’m sorta over the bicycle wheel and the lobster phone.  I’m a little less offended by the bicycle wheel as I am the lobster phone, I will admit.  Maybe ‘cause I ride bikes and so I think Duchamp’s fork and wheel in the stool is kinda cool, but I go bananas when I think of the lobster phone.  How high was Dali when he conjured up that pile of bollocks.  I still think it’s retarded, even though the thing’s been “explained” to me a dozen times.

That said, right now I’m refusing any “explanation” for the following:

Awesome, contemporary art by Blinds-To-Go.  Or a shitty interior decorator.  I nearly lost my shit when I saw this.  I wanted nothing more than to walk over the wire barrier and kick the shit out of these blinds.  Minimally, I’d hoped that whatever fuckhead put this together and had the Jupiter-sized balls to call it “art”, would at least have the decency to give it some interesting name.  I looked to the wall, and the placard read, “Vertical Blinds”.  What an asshole.

Then right behind that wall was this:

Who’s curating the MoMA these days, Jed Clampett?  Who the fuck knew that there was art littered all over the Flyover States Of America?  It’s a large bale of hay, douchebags. How the fuck is this art?  Because we’re in NYC and we don’t have hay in the middle of the city?  By that rule, what’s considered art in the middle of Iowa?  A dented hubcap off a cab?  I hope that whomever agreed to put this up as art is under that hay bale.

This made my fucking day.  I didn’t shoot this in the back of some Staples.  This was in the museum, in the middle of some floor.  With a placard explaining what the fuck it was!  I can plainly see what it is, assholes.  It was a box for an HP printer filled with junky bits and packing material.  What the, holy mother, are fucking shittin’ me.  This was one where I truly regret not setting it on fire right there and then.  Look assholes, even I’m an artist: I’ve set this box on fire to express my outrage through a medium that is ‘alive’ and allows me juxtapose all-consuming desire with the danger of ignition, love me, love me! Can’t you just feel that asshole coming through that box of shit?  God, I wish I could write the word “asshole” in this blog with much more expression and feeling, just so I can vividly get my point across on how much fucking bullshit this exhibit is.  B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t.

Like I said earlier, I don’t pretend to know my art.  Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not that sophistimacated.  But I do know absolute shit when I see it.

 

 

10 people whose crap I’m tired of

[Originally posted January 2011]

Angelina Jolie. She plays every role the exact same way: “I’m so hot it hurts.”  Does she play anything other than some femme fatale who’d do you and kill you, but not necessarily on that order?  This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like Brad Pitt because I’ll bet he’s pretty sick and tired of her shit, too.  How can he not be, he’s smoking a bowl of hash every night just to get by.

Jay Leno. He’s been a powerhouse at lowering the bar of late night TV for close to 20 years now, to the point that putting a bowl of string cheese on the air at 11:45pm is now considered edgy stuff.  Fuck Jay.  Fuck him forever.

Vampire Weekend. This entry should technically qualify as four people, not one, but even I can’t cheap out that way.  Besides, I’ve got a lot of hate to give.  And I really hate these four Upper West Side douchebags.  It was quirky, mildly interesting two years ago, then they became awful, dull caricatures of themselves, and those Tommy Hilfiger and Honda ads didn’t help.

Steve Jobs. Everytime I want to buy a new Apple product, I punch myself in the face.  Then I turn over my credit card to the smug nerd at the Apple store.  I like uniformity, I like my shit to all work together.  Thing is, these Apple pieces of shit don’t always work the way I want them to.  They work the way Jobs wants them to.  They’re all designed to work for Jobs and Jobs only: “Fuck your needs, you do everything his way from now on.”

Julian Assange. I’m not convinced you raped anyone in Sweden, but I am convinced that you have seriously creepy rapey tendencies (big difference).  Your leaked emails removed any doubt I might’ve had.

The Palins. All of ‘em.  I’m pretty sure the only one of them who isn’t an attention whore is the baby.  And even then I’m not sure.  John McCain, national hero and all, but I will forever hate his ass for bringing us Mama Palin.  That was fucked up, and now he’s fucked us because we’re stuck with this shrieking harpie airhead while he probably has no problem chilling out in his hacienda in Arizona with a couple of Coors Lights on the porch watching the sun set.  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we now have to deal with her fat daughter dancing on TV (how the hell do you stay fat while competing in a rigorous dancing contest?!), her little tweeting shithead kid, and that almost-son-in-law jerkoff.  Is there a more loathsome family on earth?  Maybe those shitheads with the 19 kids?  Somehow I don’t think so.

Ted Williams. Listen, I’m happy he got discovered and he’s no longer living in the streets.   But 24 hours of him and I’ve had enough already.  I don’t even care that he’s got baggage (the nine kids, the half-blind wife he ran out on) – who doesn’t.  But enough already.  This guy may be back on the straight and narrow, and he’s already fucking up.  I think we got as much as we need out of his story, move the fuck on.  I so don’t care anymore.  Even if he does keep getting busted by cops.

Sammi and Ronnie. I got tired of these two clowns two seasons ago.  In a house full of maladjusted fuckwits, these two are king and queen of astronomical stupidity.  And if you know the Jersey Shore crew, you know that that’s a seriously tall claim.  Even with Angelina off the show.

Rex Ryan. This massive ridiculous tub of lard thinks he’s bigger than the league. At the rate he’s going, he might well be. Especially since his coaching rants includes gems about going to “eat a goddamn snack”.  WTF, you fat fuck.  Then there’s the fact that he’s a toe-fucker.

Banksy. This fucker’s getting too big for his own good.  Banksy was awesome when he just did the graffiti and buggered off.  Leaving the masses to sort out what he’d left for us in the dark of night.  Now, this asshole’s got a movie.  WTF. Then there’s that ridiculous “auction” on ebay to reveal his identity.  At this point, even if the real Banksy came forward and admitted that he was Banksy, I wouldn’t believe him.  I almost don’t care at this point.  When Banksy was an enigma, he was fun.  It used to be about the graffiti, now it’s all about him.  Fuck you, Banksy.