Filed under: Michael Jackson
I come home from my first real day off in a month. I feel like shit, like I’m catching a summer cold. I jump on line, and it’s like fucking holy god damn crap, what is it a joke? Michael Jackson found not breathing. 6 minutes later he’s confirmed dead. The end. No build up, no nothing, like a whimper. Besides revering him every time I hear him on a dance floor and EVERY ONE dances, I don’t think about him much. For me, I haven’t identified with him for years. Michael Jackson Thriller was the second tape I ever bought with my own money. He played my town of Denver in 1983, when I was eight, and I remember having a conversation in the kitchen with my mom about it being sold out, but we both wanted to go. We didn’t go. My friend had cable and I got special dispensation the week that Thriller came out on MTV to go over to his house every day to wait for the video to come on, sometimes I’d be there until 9 o’clock on a school night waiting for it to come on. He was the best dancer I ever saw. Ever. I cried when I saw a headline proclaiming the death of James Brown at Christmas a few years ago. I left the coffee shop I was in with my mother and went out into the snow and cried. I cried for a long time. I balled when Kurt Vonnegut died. I got this news and didn’t cry right away-because it’s almost a relief that he’s gone. And certainly if he was hurting people it’s good that he’s at rest now. And i can tell you by looking at photos of him from the past 10 years his swagger was gone. All of his beautiful confidence: gone. I would like to remember him when he was loving life, when it was easy for him. Is that wrong? I feel like Elvis just died. Or Marilyn Monroe.
So I didn’t cry right away. Then I watched the video of his Billie Jean performance at Motown’s 25th Anniversary, and I sobbed. He had such a youth and goodnesss and vitality to him in the 80’s. I never knew him as part of the Jackson 5. I knew him as a dancer and a singer. Human Nature was my favorite song in third grade. I remember the premieres of Beat It and billie Jean on MTV. I Didn’t listen to Off The Wall until I was a funky College student in the 90’s. And then I learned how to dance: Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough. Michael was the first pop star that I shared with my mother. That was neat, we watched that Motown thing together. When Michael comes on, people dance, that’s always what has bugged me in the last several years; People will talk endless trash, and yet they still dance their asses off when he comes on. I hope that he is remembered for his gift to music and not as a creepy old child molester. It feels like something is over, officially, almost like my childhood is over. Like for another generation when Frank or Gene died, like some for Farrah Fawcet who also died today. You just don’t expect Michael to go and die, and like a buddy said, you almost wish he woulda died when he was young and on top; before it all got so weird. He was in show business at age 5. If I’d only know the show all my life, I’d be weird too. So what do we remember Michael for? There’s people on the dance floor every single day, all nite, the remember him the way he should be remembered: with their bodies.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Girl Who Silenced the UN For 5 Minutes
I didn’t realize that this speech was made in 1992. Holy shit have we blown it! Suzuki’s speech is even more relevant now.
Filed under: corruption, politics | Tags: 99 cent store, capitalism, conspiracy, economy, environment, global depression, Rockefellers, student loans
well crap. everybody’s getting their teeth kicked in. Jobs in every echelon of society are slipping through the porous underbelly of a capitalism that has fulfilled its own destiny. I’m pissed at the executives who took our money to pad their pockets on the way out. I think they should be hung up on a one tree hill and stoned within an inch of their lives. But Capitalism taught them to steal, survival of the fittest, be smarter than the average bear, use and abuse the system to your advantage. Have I paid off all my student loans? Hell no!! Will I ever? Not If I can help it. That attitudes not good if I expect future students to attend college with loans from the government. I’m ruining it for everyone else, because I was raised to think that I want to win, I want to separate myself from the crowd, I do not want to go down with the ship. In that sense the behavior of said slimy executives who used fed bail out money to pad their coffers one last time was in the spirit of Darwin. Wouldn’t you do the same thing if you could figure out how? Of course you would, any good capitalist would. When a new 99 cent store opens, they sell ipod nano’s for 99 cents. People line up around the block. They camp to get a twelve pack of frito’s products for 99 cents. Do people actually need these items? No. But who in their right mind would say no to a 99 cent ipod? That’s Value people. And in capitalism a good deal is god.
We’re in a depression. Is this new era a conspiracy crafted by the old money families of the gilded age? I don’t think so. Have you heard about the Amero? The devaluation of the dollar? Two of my friends, coming from diametrically opposite walks of life, both believe that this world depression is a super conspiracy engineered by the oldest money on the planet. If you can crash all the world markets to the point where the current currency (i.e. the dollar, the euro) is worth absolutely nothing, you can introduce a new currency that’s backed with water, oil, oranges, any commodity that is not gold and never was. If you, a person more private than the federal government, are in charge of distributing and determining the value of this new currency, what’s to stop you from controlling the world? AHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHAHAH! AHAHAHAHAHAH! I will make these humans my minions!!!! One of the people who buys into this theory is an entrepreneur worth millions, the other is a yoga instructor who is currently out of the country. I don’t believe the global economic crisis is a conspiracy. I believe it is the result of three decades of boom, three decades of people reluctant to take responsibilty for their consumption. The greatest tragedy will happen when people forget the environment as they continue to bitch about where the money’s gone. The truth is that the global economy and the global environment are forever connected and dependent on eachother. It is no wonder that they slip and slide together. We must consider one as we attempt to fix the other. This young lady puts it a lot better than I possibly can at the ripe old age of 33.
Filed under: Los Angeles, Red Sox, The Departed, Yankees, baseball, drinking, hot dog, universe
The only problem with writing about sports is it’s temporality. Can I use that word? What I mean is, you gotta stick with it, it changes, teams win, and people go home. It’s temporary. If you’re gonna write about baseball, you should really write about every pitch. That’s the beauty of baseball: every pitch. I learned that from watching the Yankees and the Mets with my uncle in his apartment on the upper east side. He has two twin beds in his bedroom. He refuses to get cable in the living room. If you want to watch baseball, you gotta watch it in the bedroom. So we walk down the street, eat at the same restaurant every time, and come home. I lie on one bed, and he shifts between the other bed and smoking his pipe at his desk. When I lived in New York, it was a weekly ritual. Now that I live in Los Angeles, we watch baseball once a year, usually in June for about five days.
I can ask Uncle Bill anything. If it’s an obvious question, he’ll look over his glasses when he answers it, as if I’m retarded. This usually occurs when I get the Leagues and their different rules mixed up; a lotta questions about the DH, a lotta questions about the pitcher batting, pinch hitters and runners, and the order. He’s happier to answer questions about splitters and sinkers, and he demonstrates how you hold the ball for each pitch; the difference between a 2 seam and a four seam fastball, and when and how you use them. I used to place teams in the wrong league (which made him mental) until I realized that it’s just a feeling. National League teams are scrappier, they have mascots, they seem to have a little more fun. American League teams are elite; they’re machines, they’re legit. It could be said that when comparing pitchers from the two leagues, you add one full run to the earned run average of the National League pitcher. Why? Ask Uncle Bill. I haven’t written since the beginning of the League Championship Series’ because there’s just too much to write: pitch by pitch. I didn’t pick a team. I started watching the Sox Indians when the Sox were down 3-1. I found my team. The underdog remember? I went to school in Boston, a lot of my friends are from Boston, and the favorites are down 3-1. 3-2. 3-3. Every pitch. The favorites go to the World Series. Every member of the Sox stretches and reaches and hits and sacrifices and steals. Even old Lugo. Even Coco Crisp. Everybody contributed. There is no I in team.
I grew up in Colorado when the hometown team was the triple A Denver Bears. I left before they became the Zephyrs (a gentle wind) and was long gone before the Rockies got to town. My dad and stepmother have lived in the same house in Denver for 27 years. They were rooting for the Colorado Rockies. Cinderella Story, outta nowhere, the Rockies ran over the Dodgers, the Padres, the Mets, the Phillies, and the diamondbacks(I won’t capitalize the diamondbacks). They won 21 of their last 22. How could you not root for such a scrappy team? The pursuit of excellence is how. Watching baseball played the way it’s supposed to be played is how.. Two Boston rookies and an old man lead the Sox to a sweep. Everyone on the team hit. They pinched, they rotated, they played National League baseball better than the National League Champion.
For game four, I went to a bar down on La Brea that is Boston as soon as you walk in. The crowd was enormous, way over capacity; the air was dank with sweat and Drakkar Noir. They made fun of the commercials: ”Hey lady watch out for the cahr, don’t run into the cahr lady, look out! Ohhhhhhhhh!” When the commercials sucked, two quarters were dropped in the juke box and they danced to the theme of The Departed by the Drop Kick Murphys. When the following weekend’s Patriots game was advertised it was greeted with a deafening roar. I stood there with my college mate from Brockton, and my girlfriend from Newport, and basked in the Dunkin’ Donuts of it all. It was, and is, 1993 in that bar, the first year I went to little Emerson College. Red Sox jerseys, Patriots jerseys, beaded necklaces, goatees, shorts with sneakers and white socks, and a brown eyed girl in a backwards Red Sox cap, who got in front of me at the bar, ordered “another” hot dog, and ate it. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for four years, I drive by Pink’s every other day, and I have never seen a girl in Los Angeles eat a hot dog. What could more perfect? Sox win. The “Yankees Suck.” “Let’s go Patriots,” beer in the face, beer down the neck, let’s eat some hot dogs. The crowd collapsed out into the street, where they screamed and waved brooms at passing cars. People who watched the game at the bar drove past and yelled Yankees insults. I was one of those people. My girl and I went around twice, I screamed “Dustin Pedroia is my illegitimate father!” “She screamed “Yankees Suck!” and they all yelled back, and it wasn’t Los Angeles, not even for a second. It was 1/159th of Landsdowne Street, a name I can no longer spell because I haven’t been on that street in eleven years. It was home. It was real. And I watched a girl in Los Angeles eat a hot dog.
Filed under: Battle Star Galactica, David Milch, Knicks, Mets, Red Sox, Yankees, drinking
I’m a New York Mets fan. I’m a New York Knicks fan. Yea me. Doomed to root for the underdogs. I lived in New York for six years, when Alllen Houston got the bounce against the Miami Heat in ‘99 before they got stomped by the David Robinson Tim Duncan San Antonio Spurs. I was born in Colorado, my football team is the Denver Broncos. I never loved a baseball team until the New York Mets. Iwatched the Subway Series in Soho. A year later I watched the New York Yankees play the Arizona diamondbacks from a bar on west broadway, about thirteen blocks from ground zero. Only time I ever rooted for the Yankees. I think all of us were rooting for the Yankees. The diamondbacks won, with the unit, Randy Johnson, and I will forever hate that team, even more than I hate the dreaded Atlanta Braves. Since I rooted for the Yankees, they haven’t won a pennant, much less a World Series. The only time I rooted for the Boston Red Sox was against the New York Yankees. I listened to that comeback on the radio, while I was painting the house of an obsessive compulsive. The Red sox won, after coming back from 3 down and a 15 run loss. They went onto win the World Series in a sweep, breaking the curse of the Bambino, winning the Series for the first time since 1918. I can’t root for Boston in 2007. They’re too good. I’m rooting for the Cubs, who will certainly lose to the Arizona Fuckbacks. I can’t root for Colorado, even though I was born there, because I haven’t been with them the whole time. I was dying for Yankees Red Sox, but the Yankees can’t hold up their end of the bargain. So who do I root for? The Mighty Ducks? Pushing Up Daisies on ABC? I rooted for Deadwood for three seasons, and HBO pulled the plug on that, it was too expensive. Do you know David Milch wrote on Hill Street Blues? Do you know he created NYPD Blue? I’m rooting for the fourth and final season of Battle Star Galactica. To win the World Series in six.
I love movies. I love film: two very different entities. Ironic that my first blog about movies comes after seeing one I never planned on seeing. I love A Dog Day Afternoon. I love Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I love The Blues Brothers. These I consider films. Throw in a Taxi Driver, an Annie Hall, a Harold and Maude. These films I consider to be classics, because they capture the spirit of the times in which they were made, the methods of film making employed when producing them are stellar, timely, and they are completely relevent when viewed today. Then there are movies: Animal House, Star Wars, Fargo, Dead Poets Society; all classic movies. What’s the difference? I think films are craft, and movies are entertainment. I say all this to qualify my comments about the Da Vinci code. It’s like taking a girl home and going through your records on the floor; you want her to know where your coming from; you want to show her how cool you are. The Da vinci Code was the Harry Potter of crime thrillers. People ate that shit for breakfast when the book came out, it ruled the best seller lists and the collective mind-state. Three out of five people on the subway going into Manhattan were reading the Da Vinci Code. I did not read it for this reason: mass hysteria terrifies me, I’m ”cooler than that” I can’t read the same book the world is reading if I want to keep up my iconoclastic airs. It took me years to finally dig Vonnegut and Bukowski because my whole college was up on that shit like a wild pony stuck on a forlorn fence. I didn’t listen to Kid A for two years after it dropped because folks were brushing their teeth and flossing with Radio Head. I did read Davinci’s predecessor Angles and Demons quite accidentally in my first L.A. appartment because roomate number four left it next to his bong on the coffee table. I thought it thoroughly entertaining.
So I went and watched The Da Vinci Code; it came in the mail, so I watched it. The book was a hit; the movie was panned beyond belief, right up there with Water World and Ghost Dad. Why? It’s a little long, but when you throw it up against the other studio pictures of it’s genre, other movies as it were, it’s fine. It’s good. I love Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen is always lovely, I’ve still got a crush on Audrey Tautou from Amelie and her pretty war movie. It’s a mystery, they run around, people die and they figure it out. Why was it panned? Were the expectaions too high after the book? I finished up the last two Lord of the Rings books before I saw those movies and I was a bit disappointed, but that’s fucking Tolkien. How could you make a “Tolkien movie” without disappointing someone? I think The Davinci Code was panned because it openly questions the fact that Jesus is the son of god. The religious right control the media. Do they worry about books? Do they really worry about books? I don’t think so. There was a small evangelical christian uprising about Harry Potter, about the witches and witchcraft, but they didn’t crush the book. Movies in today’s society reach millions upon millions of people. TDC suggest that Jesus was mortal, he was decreed the son of god by the church; they needed a figurehead, so three hundred years after he died they decided he would be big j Jesus. If I was Rupert Murdoch, I’d have a problem this movie. The entire Western world, our system of beliefs is based on god being Jesus’ dad. It’s how Rupert sells papers, the fear of god. It’s the basis of our moral code, our laws. The constitution afforded us separation of church and state, but come on! it’s on our money! In God We Trust. The United States of America is based on big G God.
Reading this it’s clear that I went after too many ideas. It would take me writing a book to explain all of this…maybe I should write a book! So I post this knowing that my arguments are incomplete, but I assert that I will continue to study this matter. The End.
I’m not a pinball wizard, nor am I a computer whiz. Why the h? Isn’t whiz short for wizard, or does it describe the sound of something moving very quickly, past your head, over your head into nothingness, into ignorance, or into infinte wisdom?; whizdom. I wish again that I had taken Latin, so I could get to the bottom of these roots, so that I could watch The Davinci Code with knowing sighs, “Ah…Ofcourse,” I would utter, as Amelie and Tom Hanks fostered another step down the path to ultimate religious-masonic enlightenment. I haven’t seen the Davinci code, I studied the French language for many years, and when in France can speak it urgently, at great volume, with rather Itallian hand gestures. It takes me 5 minutes to alert a hostess that “I’d like a reservation for three, outside in half an hour. I see there’s a table out there that’s free…we could sit down now to wait for our missing dinner mate, if that would make things easier. Do you have a vegetarian menu?” My mind clogs up, but I can still get it done in French. However I don’t know how to put a link on this site for Jon Ruf’s blog. I’d like to help my good friend Jon by sending him some traffic, go look at his video’s and drunken poetry at www.jonruf.wordpress.com. He’d appreciate it. the link you see to the left of this paragraph is to his Dreaded Myspace page, also worth a look. The two are strangely similar in content but he’s promised to bolster his blog with new stuff.
Remember the guy from Network who said “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”? He was at a breaking point, as far as the network was concerned, and they meant to let him go. But what they found was that New Yorkers, and other apartment bearers everywhere, were leaning their heads out the fucking windows of their fucking apartments and yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” The anchor’s frustration was mirrored by the network’s audience. Viewers identified with his rage. The ills of the world had accumulated to the point that everyone was mad as hell and nobody could take it anymore. How could the network fire him? Ratings spiked, the show was hot, they left him on; to a point. The point at which his act overwhelmed the news, it overwhelmed the content, it became more important than the ills. Why does it have to be this way? Why, when you howl in frustration does everyone get so absorbed by the howl that they forget the meaning behind it. IT IS NOT COOL TO SPEAK UP, IT IS NOT SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE TO RAISE YOUR VOICE TO A PURPOSE. And not only isn’t it socially acceptable, it’s illegal. If you protest or speak out in any way in or near a place where government business is done, for that matter anywhere where someone might hear you, the plug is pulled. The “authorities” command you to leave, and if you don’t leave, if you DON’T SHUT UP, they hurt you, they beat you, they humiliate you, they break your ankle, they taze you. If you get together with your friends in the park and start whoopin’ it up about health care or the war, the police surround you, they control you, and if it gets frenzied, if it gets intense, if people really start digging down and howling, people get arrested, people get hurt; and this is okay. Rev Yearwood wore an anti-war pin to Petraus’ testimony. Guards wouldn’t let him in. They stopped him. and when he stepped up to them, they humiliated him, eight officers fell on him, eight armed officers fell on him, they got him to the ground. He broke his ankle in the melee. College student in Florida asks John Kerry some tough questions in a room full of students, they cut him off. When he struggles he’s “ta” by police. The other students are silenced, they don’t want to be involved. Is the kid a spaz? Does he have cooties? Is he armed woth a “tazer” to defend himself? We keep cooling our jets, trying to make as little noise as possible while our government represses us on every level. Free Speech? Sure, as long as it’s a mile away from government buildings where the press can ignore it; it’s not “in the shot”, where baby bush’s virgin ears can’t hear it, it’s o.k., sure, it’s covered in the bill of rights. We citizens have lost control of our country, when we do speak out, the media bends our words, they make our news safe. When 80 thousand show up at a demonstration, they’re described as “several thousand”, when it’s 300 thousand, the media’s estimate is 100. How can it all be crooked? How can it all be corrupt? Are you mad? Cause I sure as hell am, and I’m not gonna take it anymore. And neither should you.
well another batch of ebola has hit the congo my friend, thats the one that makes you bleed from all the holes on your body including the eye sockets,another day to be grateful to live in the west ,safe ish from shit like that until one of the cunts bleeding from his or her eyes crawls into the landing gear of a jumbo jet on its way to amsterdam, blood dripping all the way over all those countries, germany ,italy , spain france dripping into rivers and reseroirs feeding water to europe spreading ebola like crazy,live in the moment geoff, you never know whats gonna happen a bus might twat ye when ye not looking,just a thought to ponder on mate. have a lovely day and if you are looking up at planes all day for blood drips try not to get any in ye eye and dont forget that fuckin bus. cheers bloke. -Stephen Jones
