The Couch Potato Returns! (Memorial Day Weekend, 2014)

Otto Preminger's Saint Joan - something of a disaster when it was released, this turned out to be pretty good. There certainly are things wrong with the film; there's some obtrusive scoring during a couple of scenes, it has a really bad performance by Richard Widmark as the Dauphin and a rather silly coda. The surprise is that Jean Seberg as Joan is actually not bad. Her performance was roundly criticized back in 1957, but I thought she was fairly effective. The scene where she recants her confession near the end is absolutely heartbreaking. The film itself is pretty enigmatic regarding who and what Joan really was. The tragedy it presents us with is that of an innocent who sacrifices herself for what turns out to be an unworthy cause (the Dauphin is, to put it mildly, a worthless, witless douchebag). This is a Warner Archive release with no extras (might be a trailer - I forget).

Fritz Lang's Man Hunt - a considerable cut above the usual WWII propaganda movies. Man Hunt features Walter Pidgeon as an English gentleman who decides to do a "sporting stalk" of Adolf Hitler in 1939 but gets caught by the Nazis, who, understandably, assume that he was about to assassinate Der Fuhrer. Pidgeon doesn't make the slightest attempt to do an English accent, so the film feels very much like a plea for America to get off the fence and into the war (Man Hunt was filmed and released early in 1941, some months before the Pearl Harbor attack), ending, rather amusingly, with Pidgeon's character hiding in a cave (anyone need a clumsy metaphor for isolationism?) while being taunted by George Sanders' Nazi Captain. Other than having an incredibly dumb closing scene (you can't escape that kind of thing in WWII propaganda films, even those that predate America's entry into the war), this was a lot of fun. Though Joan Bennett is terrible as a Cockney prostitute (she wasn't an especially good actress to start with and the awful accent she adopts here makes it even more obvious), Pidgeon and Sanders are both terrific. The dvd has an ok commentary track, along with a short documentary about the making of the film.

Lewis Milestone's Edge of Darkness - here's another WWII propaganda film from 1943 and this one manages to make the Lang film look subtle. Edge of Darkness delivers its message like a truncheon to the head. Granted, it'd be silly to expect nuance from a big studio film from that time period (shortly after America entered the war), and if you can get past the obviousness of it, Edge of Darkness is actually quite entertaining. It tells the story of an Nazi-occupied fishing village in Norway and the armed rebellion (led by Errol Flynn) that takes place there. All you really need to know about this film is that - SPOILER - the first shot in the concluding battle is fired by a priest who'd previously counseled the villagers to avoid violence!

Stuart Blumberg's Thanks for Sharing - an ensemble comedy/drama about three men dealing with sexual addiction through the 12-step program. Mark Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow are in the most interesting segments of the film. Tim Robbins and Josh Gad are, unfortunately, stuck in the considerably less interesting segments. though i guess Blumberg deserves some credit for getting an actual decent performance out of the maddeningly uneven Tim Robbins. The dvd has a commentary track, deleted scenes and a 16 minute "making-of" documentary, all of which are worth checking out (the deleted scenes especially if you want to hear Ruffalo do a funny Brando impression).

(Checked in here to find this draft from 12 years ago and decided to publish it).

December, 2001

here's some crap I recorded (employing an alternate tuning of my own devising) WAY back in December of 2001. enjoy!

i love music part 2: electric boogaloo.

here's the second installment of my little project. some recordings which date back to late summer of 2000.

i love music

i love music. unlike many other people who feel that way, i made a choice to actually take up an instrument in the hope of making a living as a musician. that didn't happen for me, but i still love playing music (ie: physically picking up and playing an instrument, as opposed to simply putting a cd on, dummy!).

it began in my last year of high school. i didn't receive much in the way of an allowance and had to get a part-time job in order to buy a bass. i started somewhat later on guitar. i was about 20 when i finally purchased a six-string.

in my early 20s i played bass in a few different bands, none of which got anywhere. by the time i was in my late(ish) 20s, i felt confident enough to try forming a band based around my own singing, songwriting and guitar playing. i was probably over-estimating my talents at the time. i was writing pretty good songs, but my presentation of them was terrible. i sang in the most godawful loud, blustery, faux-soulful voice it might ever be your misfortune to suffer exposure to and accompanied myself on a guitar amplified to the most perversely grating and unpleasant tone imaginable. looking back, it's hard to believe that i actually found people willing to play with me in a band. maybe they figured there was something so strikingly rotten about what i was doing that it was bound to make waves. obviously, they were wrong.

i essentially gave up on playing music with other people when i was in my early 30s. the band i was fronting at the time had completed its third demo, but then dissolved since the three of us could not see eye-to-eye regarding the band and where it should be going. to be honest, over the four-or-so years i'd spent playing my music with other people, i'd had serious problems regarding their creative contributions to my songs which made it fairly easy to close the door on that part of my life. for about seven years i resigned myself to the idea that i would not be playing music in much of any capacity beyond noodling on my guitar in private (and occasionally for friends).

sometime during 1999 i got the itch to do something with music again. something that wouldn't put me in the position of having to include other people. i bought a bass guitar and a drum machine late in the summer of '99, thinking that if i could record satisfactory backing tracks using my stereo cassette deck, i'd then go ahead and buy a tascam 4-track machine. after roughly a month's worth of experiments, i felt confident enough to set up a proper home recording studio. along with the bass, drum machine and tascam recorder, i also purchased a ZOOM effects board.

my lo-fi solo odyssey began in january of 2000. i was briefly encumbered by some (in retrospect) misguided ideas about keeping things as simple as possible (the rule was 4 tracks of instruments/vocals per song, with absolutely NO track bouncing), but by mid-february i had thrown that nonsense out the window and was experimenting with overdubbed vocals and guitars. during 2000 i recorded over 150 songs: some brand new, some written during my seven years of (not exactly but sorta) inactivity and some dating back to the period when i'd led my own band.

in december of 2000 after nearly 12 months of recording whenever the mood hit me, i actually needed to take a break from music again. i decided that after this interregnum (which lasted roughly three months), i would record only when i had enough ideas on hand to make an album's worth of songs.

and so from march 2001 to january of 2004 i kept my home recording activities confined to short bursts which generally lasted 1-2 weeks and which, as a rule, had to yield at least 40 minutes worth of music.

my interest definitively waned after january 2004. i made attempts to record material during the summer of 2004 and spring of 2005, but was unhappy with the results. in the spring of 2008 i wrote a half dozen songs and decided to record them while also finishing up the tracks i had lying around from '04 and '05. the work i did in the spring and summer of 2008 constitute my last completed "album". it's not that i'm lacking for inspiration, mind you. when i pick up a guitar, it's inevitable that i'll create the germ of a song within a few minutes. for some reason though, i never feel like doing anything with the ideas i come up with. it's not writer's block. more like writer's ennui. writer's laziness? old age? i dunno.

in any case i've decided to start posting my "albums", hopefully at the rate of 2 per year. which means that i should be done with this little project in about a decade. the music's offered under a standard creative commons license: free to anyone for personal use, but if it's employed in any context where money is generated, i want my share.

first up: october 2003. along with some notes on the recordings, i'll be including lyrics with the downloads. though i don't think they'll make my songs fully comprehensible, as lyrics are not especially crucial to what i try to accomplish as a songwriter. for me, songs are (more or less) finished once i get the structure and texture down. while the vocal melody is important, it's only one component part of the song. that's why i generally mix my vocals low, so that they're part of the overall texture without dominating the song. at least that's the idea.


enjoy! (updated with new notes and creative commons license)

relating to art, my so-called life...

last week in the av club's relating to art q&a i hastily posted things which, predictably, made a couple of people angry. i want to elaborate on what i wrote and make my point(s) a little clearer. certainly not with any hope of making those i angered any less irate though, because those idiots are a lost cause.

1... i never find art relatable. that probably came off as pseudo-nitzschean "i'm better than everyone else" boasting and i (sort of) understand why a blunt statement like that might rub someone the wrong way, so i want to add this: for me, art is generally an escape from the world as i know and experience it (don't misinterpret that as meaning my life is terrible, as i have lived a fairly comfortable existence and things are better than okay lately after a borderline disastrous six months in 2011). books and movies may deal with situations i've been in, but they don't come close to the way it felt when i was in them and i never expect them to. no paragraph in a book/shot in a movie can capture the intensity of what it feels like to have sex with someone you love for the first time or what it's like to be in a fistfight or what it's like to watch someone you care about as they're dying. a writer's approximation of what it is to be in love or afraid or lonely or sad or angry or happy can never be anything more than after-the-fact descriptions of those feelings. that can be beautiful and affecting in its own way, but it's NOT the real thing. i've always been acutely conscious of the difference/distance between art and real life and always will be, i think. attempts to replicate feelings and experiences in art are, for me, too far removed from the immediacy of actual existence to be anything more than a simulacrum, and a faulty one at that. deeply felt emotions are completely outside anything that can really be represented in words. have you ever read a passage in a book that conveyed the exact thing you felt the first time you were with a man or woman you truly loved? i honestly never have. because those words don't exist. and then there's my sense that art always limns human experience with the gift of hindsight. crazy, blundering, thoughtless, headlong rushes into disaster or ecstasy suddenly become explicable thanks to the magic of time, distance and language. again, i acknowledge that that has a value. but it most emphatically has nothing to do with life as i've lived it.

lastly, much of what i've come to love in books and movies comes from exposure to perspectives that i find completely unrelatable. i could never  enjoy movies featuring over-entitled middle class douchebags like the characters that writer-director nicole holofcener (walking and talking, lovely and amazing, friends with money, please give) favors if relatability was as much of a deal-breaker for me as it seems to be for a lot of people at the av club. that's a huge element of what's great about art, IMHO: it's a way of seeing the world through viewpoints that are alien to me. i have never read a book or seen a movie and said afterwards "that was ME on those pages/on that screen", and i don't ever expect to. relatability just isn't what i'm looking for in art.

hopefully these (clumsily expressed, i admit) ideas offer a slightly better explanation of what it is i feel on this particular subject. art definitely has an important function and value in my life, but relatability is not part of the equation for me.

2... i also did some carping about the old tv show my so-called life and i want to add this: i never felt that angela chase's big existential crisis on the show mattered or should even be taken especially seriously. big fucking deal that she felt conflicted about deserting her friends to run with a more popular crowd. a character who makes that particular decision deserves the utmost contempt imaginable no matter how much manufactured regret and/or shame the creators of that character have her experience about making that decision. attempting to legitimize weak (or destructive and bad) thinking by ascribing guilt or regret to the character who engages in it is often nothing more than a lame trick to con an audience into somehow accepting those weak (or destructive and bad) ideas as having (at least some) validity. more often than not, they don't. few people in life transcend the class or social barriers which are generally imposed from birth, but the few who manage to probably spend very little time regretting it when they do. i will admit here that whenever i find myself writing about my so-called life (not all that often, thankfully) i tend to conflate all the characters with angela and talk about wanting to beat them ALL up. honestly, i can't even remember the others now that i think of it (and am pretty sure i only caught a few episodes of the show anyway). one thing i clearly remember though: angela chase and her phony (so-called) dilemma always ticked me the fuck off.

it was probably a mistake for me to post my complaints about my so-called life on a thread started by someone who actually loved the show. if you want to have an ms-cl circle jerk on the av club boards, i promise to stay out of it. although i should add here that i plan to post somewhat less on the av club boards in the future. i'm tired of the sad fuckheads who take things like an evisceration of my so-called life to heart. i don't give a shit how much you liked this or any other tv show, you should not be personally offended if a total stranger posts a negative opinion about it on the internet. this is one of the embarrassing by-products of the "relatability" issue: otherwise intelligent adults who forge such intensely emotional connections with art that they take umbrage when others disparage it. grow up already. jeez.

i reject my so-called life and everything (i think) it represents. if someone wants to point out that my not being able to accept the show's perspective contradicts what i also wrote about how unimportant relatability is to me when it comes to art, then so be it (hey, we all contain multitudes). but there's something wrong if you're the kind of person who can't have this argument without getting angry and upset about it. even if we are on the internet that's no excuse for launching ad-hominem attacks on someone who disagrees with you about a stupid fucking tv show. seriously.

don't look down

here's a tune i wrote and recorded in october of 2003 which is NOT on my youtube channel.

i wanted to put this up about a month ago, but for some odd reason, it's become impossible to add a video on blogger when you're using the google chrome browser. this morning i suddenly had the bright idea of trying to put the video up using firefox and VOILA! here it is.

fun in nyc

i'm trying to eat a cheeseburger in front of an office building in the midtown area. a tourist walks up to me with the vacantly stupid look that afflicts the truly lost and clueless. the following conversation takes place.

tourist: I hate to bother you while you're eating...

me: and yet here you are bothering me!

tourist: (laughing sheepishly) yes, well, the thing is, I was wondering if maybe you knew where I could find the...

me: people who would be happy to give you directions while NOT eating their lunch? they're all over the place!

tourist: but the thing is...

me: (pointing) look! there's one now!

tourist: oh, i understand.(frowns and walks away)


lately the streets are positively lousy with people soliciting for charity. the other day one of them tries this approach on me:

douchebag: hey! you look like an intelligent person...

me: nope. i am a fucking idiot. seriously.

douchebag: oh, now. really...

me: no. if i told you my life story you'd probably give me some money.

douchebag: (sounding a bit discomfited) uh, well...

me: c'mon. hook a brother up, why dontcha?

douchebag: (ignoring me and starting his spiel on someone else)

the last is not typical of my encounters on the street, but i was having kind of a shitty day.

and recently i noticed an ad on the side of a phone booth for some product called "headshave". the ad featured a big picture of Telly Savalas on it with a caption saying something about a classic look that never goes out of style. are people endorsing products from the grave now? more like "deadshave" if you ask me.

an unplanned vacation...

not that anybody gives a fuck, but i won't be around for a while. comment moderation will be in effect until i return.

take care...

WTF?

i was recently jousting with an obsessive (scroll down to this comments thread) conservative troll who goes by the name SteveAR over at "zandar versus the stupid" and for some reason, the first 2 paragraphs of the following post were not allowed up.

i don't like trolls, plain and simple. the proprietor of this blog is a liberal who posts articles written from a liberal point of view. for a hardline conservative to visit this blog and continually post contrary opinions is like someone visiting a site devoted to how great heavy metal is and then insisting in post after post that heavy metal music is terrible. what's the point other than angering people? there is none. you know going in that no one at that blog or website is interested in your point of view and all you want to do is aggravate them. what you're doing is stupid and considering how much of it you seem to do, almost frightening.

you actually think there's some value in confronting everybody who disagrees with you? there isn't. other than declaring yourself the winner of every argument you have with liberals, where exactly is all this getting you? have any liberal blog proprietors renounced their beliefs after being shown the error of their ways? has any liberal blog shut down rather than face the withering onslaught of conservative wisdom you have to offer? would it ever in a million years occur to you that sometimes people close comments threads due to how frighteningly oblivious you seem in debates? and lastly: why do all you guys seem to believe that anybody who hasn't heard your doctrinaire conservative horseshit is somehow missing out on the finer things in life? get over yourselves, for fuck's sake. nobody's crying because you force them to confront such harsh truths about themselves and their political beliefs. they're crying because you bore the living fuck out of them. you haven't got an original idea in your head.

i'm not Z's "sock puppet" (i'm the sort of vaguely anti-obama lefty regularly derided by Z as "manic progressive" or "useful idiot"), i'm writing to you because i honestly think that what you're doing is sub-moronic and purposeless. you will never change anybody's mind and as you can plainly see from the responses your posts engender, all you really manage to do (here and on the other blogs you visit) is reinforce the stereotypical image that many lefties have of righties.

what you do seems sick and compulsive to me. i'm not going to urge you to get help (that would be an easy laugh and wholly insincere to boot), but i'd be lying if i didn't admit to thinking that you're a badly damaged and extremely sad human being. i'm sure you feel the same way about me, but in a court of genuinely objective observers i happen to think that you're the one who'd end up looking bad.

PS: i'm currently unemployed and consequently have time to fart around on the net like this. but i don't troll conservative (or libertarian) blogs. even considering how much of it i have lately, i've got better things to do with my free time.

i tried splitting my reply into separate posts, but though they seem to be about equal length, only the second half went up. i even removed the profanity from that first section. maybe somebody over at ZVSTS likes trolling conservative blogs and took offense at what i wrote? whatever the reason, they're off my blogroll! that'll learn 'em! they must have gotten at least 2 visitors thanks to me. maybe. aw, who'm i kidding? i barely get 2 visitors a week myself.

in case anyone's curious as to why i insist on posting stuff nobody agrees with over at the av club, i'll explain: it's called "the av club", NOT "a site for smarmy, politically incorrect white guys". it's wrong to post comments that are insulting to women, gays and people of color on a site that should be welcoming to everybody. i'm sure there are plenty of sites that explicitly cater to an all-white frat guy mentality. i have no interest in visiting them and would never in a million years think of breaking up the obnoxious, deliberately offensive threads one might likely find there.

obama to liberals: "how many times do i have to tell you guys to GO FUCK YOURSELVES?"

obama held a press conference yesterday and he used it to lob another hearty "blow me!" at liberals. it's like bill clinton all over again. the guy almost seems to enjoy telling us to drop dead.

This notion that somehow we are willing to compromise too much reminds me of the debate that we had during health care. This is the public option debate all over again. I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats have been fighting for for a hundred years. But because there was a provision in there that they didn't get, that would have affected maybe a couple of million people, even though we got health insurance for 30 million people, and the potential for lower premiums for maybe 100 million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness, of compromise.

according to doctors who support single-payer, the uninsured will number something near 23 million nine years after the plan has kicked in. but hey, fuck them too!

If that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it: We will never get anything done. People will have the satisfaction of having a purist position, and no victories for the American people. And we will be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.

This country was founded on compromise. I couldn't go through the front door at this country's founding. If we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn't have a union.

slavery went on and on thanks to compromise. and then the south fired on fort sumter. but naturally, some of his enablers on the left cheered BO's hippie bashing routine.

there's something fundamentally wrong with people who don't get what a pissy jerk-off obama sounds like there.

at some point in the future they may wake up to how utterly bankrupt the "enlightened adults know that compromise is the way to get things done" position really is when the other side is a group as detached from mainstream ideas as the republican party.

i'm not among those who believe that obama is a "manchurian candidate", but he is doing immense damage to the cause of progressivism right now. to keep insisting time and again that borderline-crazy republicans have to be placated to get any legislating done ignores the fact that this kind of behavior clearly emboldens them. somebody needs to stand up or this will never stop. when democrats are in control they'll continue to barely address the concerns of most of the country and the watered-down legislative gruel we get will be rammed down our throats with a reminder that "it could have been so much worse" or "hey, we had to do something or else...". there'll always be an excuse for doing as little as possible and explaining that we should be grateful for it.

no.

we all understand that the democratic caucus is too unwieldy for certain things. that doesn't excuse obama for giving away the store BEFORE negotiations even begin.

beyond that, indulging the republicans as they get more and more extreme is simply a mistake. it's bad for the entire country in the long run. obama is not stupid. the democrats are not stupid. they have to know what a huge mistake they're making. meeting lunatics at some halfway point brings one dangerously close to crazy territory.

if i recall correctly, obama told us to push him in the direction of progressivism, didn't he?

"Let the Republicans back in power." that's a typical threat obama supporters use. they have no idea how hollow that starts to sound when it's repeated over and over and over.

not all of those who disagree with obama are doing crazy things like forging alliances with anti-tax zealot grover norquist the way jane hamsher of firedoglake has. some of us are simply raising entirely legitimate questions about why it is that obama seems almost eager to sell out progressive ideas going into every single fucking negotiation.

(this post is nothing more than a slightly edited version of some comments i posted on "zandar vs the stupid". what can i say? i'm lazy.)

andy harris: asshole of the week

andy harris gets the booby prize this week. he's the newly-elected tea-party republican congressman from baltmore who ran on repealing the healthcare bill, but at his freshman orientation got all bent out of shape when he found out that his new congressional healthcare plan wouldn't kick in until 30 days after being sworn in. it's douche-y and i did get a pretty big laugh from it, but i can't get worked up over the story. the guy now has a job that includes healthcare benefits. what's he supposed to do, turn them down? he didn't run promising to repeal the congressional plan, he ran promising to repeal a plan that would have absolutely no bearing on his life and health if he got elected. and people voted for him! how can you not laugh at shit like that?

he's no different than any other tea party-er. they're great when it comes to yammering against welfare and lazy people, yet there've been numerous funny stories in the news detailing tea party candidates who've been more than happy to take a suck on the ol' government teat when times were trying for them. some (like joe miller in alaska, who lost his senate bid anyway) have come pretty close to what might be seen as abusing the system. i guess it's ok when they do it, because, y'know, they're not lazy malingerers. it's those other people. the ones who, uh, look different. right?

shit. now i am worked up. i'm going to baltimore to kick andy harris right in his fucking teeth. i'm sure the congressional plan includes dental, so it shouldn't be a big deal. plus it'll give him one more reason to bitch about having to wait so long for his healthcare benefits. that'll be good for another chuckle. hey andy! long after your plan kicks in, nearly 40 million americans will still be uninsured!

asshole.

she said "no"

there are 2 new clips up on my youtube channel as of yesterday, but this one (like "false canoe") is exclusive to the blog.

the softest thing

howdy. here's a personal favorite of the many songs i've written and recorded. if you check my blogger profile there's another blog listed there with links so that you can visit my youtube channel and download most of the songs i've posted. based on the stat counter reports, i know a lot of people who don't much care for me are visiting from the av club. personally, i can't imagine why you'd waste your time. in all the years i've been posting there i've looked at maybe a half-dozen of your user profiles. to each his own.

things to come...

one of the reasons i don't post much here is that i spend a lot of time writing posts on other folks' blogs.

this steaming pile of horseshit is from a blog i visit quite frequently.

A huge power shift is going to come while the economy stabilizes and hopefully begins to come back. Wastefulness will no longer be chic, and creativity and hard work will divide the long term winners from the losers. The geek shall inherit the earth. That's our silver lining, but the journey we take will be a tough one. There is more to this than learning how to clip coupons and recycle leftovers. This is an attitude adjustment, long overdue. With a little humility and eye opening, we will get through.

i responded:

there won't be any winners other than that very small percentage of the population with the disproportionate share of the world's wealth. the "creativity and hard work" folks (a group i assume you consider yourself a part of) that you talk about? in relative terms, they're now earning a lot less than their counterparts in this country 40 years ago and that trend is not going to change. social divisions and the enduring inability of humans to look past cosmetic differences to find obvious commonalities will enable some people to delude themselves into thinking they've won something. what most of you will be winning is more work, longer hours and (again, in relative terms compared to those in similar positions years ago) less money. but you won't be flipping burgers like those dummies at mcdonald's or begging for change like those losers on the corner or sleeping in an old refrigerator box under the bridge, so "whoopee!" you win!

"we'll get through" means nothing. more and more people will sink and those of you/us who don't follow them will find any number of excuses not to give a serious fuck (ie: actually DO something), same as we do now. statistical maps and charts will be trotted out on a regular basis to offer any number of objective explanations why more and more people are going hungry or homeless while the rest of you/us will knuckle under and accept less money for the work we do in the desperate hope of avoiding a slot on one of those charts. america is no longer a first world country and it never will be again. market rules dictate that labor either has to be completely devalued (the way it is in much of the service sector) or cowed/conned into accepting considerably less than what it deserves (the way things are for most of the rest). do you see america moving away from a "market rules" economy anytime soon? really? good luck with that.

our fucked up economy will always be characterized by bubbles. those peaks and yawning valleys keep everybody unsettled and unsure. the folks who keep their heads above water will continue to do only that. they'll never look at those who are failing and see anything other than that failure.

in a few years when things are even worse than now i'll pop in and remind you of this post.

have a good weekend...

signed,
a regular reader who hates libertarians and their repulsive social darwinist bullshit.

fuck john boehner in the eye socket.

so john boehner thinks that last night's election results were a message from the american people. fair enough. but if that's really the case, what exactly were the election results in november 2008? because i've never seen evidence that republicans have any interest in listening to messages from the electorate when they lose elections.

of course obama called boehner up and congratulated him. i hope the republicans do impeach obama. the guy is a clueless/spineless idiot, like almost all the democrats. i vote for them, but sweet fucking jesus! they make me sick.

false canoe

done

either this song is a sensitive attempt to address the issue of statutory rape, or it's a crass excuse for me to sing the line "babe, i can't wait until your panties drop".

yikes!

i dunno. if you saw this poster outside a local restaurant would it function as some kind of incentive to get you in? or would you be creeped out by "gyro lady/jersey housewife-possible tranny" here and run, RUN GODDAMMIT! to some other establishment?

maybe it's a cultural thing. i see this poster in the window of a gyro joint near me every day and the weirdness of it never ceases to unsettle. why? i have no idea. it's not like there're human fingers in her gyro (i've checked). she's just fuckin' creepy.

teadoust has a dream!

i rarely remember my dreams. months, even years go by without the slightest memory of what takes place in my head at night. this morning, i actually remembered something i dreamt and decided to write it out...

i'm working in a large office space with many individual cubicles. there are potted plants hanging all over the place and some larger ones on the floor as well.
i'm chatting with a few people at a cubicle when a dumpy looking woman walks by and i insult her, which seems to be a regular routine for me.
"hey, why don't you try shoplifting your clothes from someplace besides goodwill?" i ask her as my coworkers laugh.
she calmly reaches into one of the hanging plant pots, pulls out a knife and attempts to stab me with it.
i manage to wrestle the knife away from her.
she then walks over to one of the larger floor plants, from which she produces what appears to be a samurai sword.
"i've got weapons stashed all over the place" she says coldly, "and i'm going to kill you."
"why?" i ask.
"because you've been insulting me from the minute you were hired!" she says, lunging at me with the sword.
"that's ridiculous!" i yell back at her as i run for an exit, "i was working here for at least 3 hours before we even met!"


that's all i remember. funny, no?

adults should know better...

one of the more depressing things about the internet is the free reign it gives to people's worst instincts, especially men.

there's an interesting article up on the av club site this week about overly distracting actors in movies. naturally, the nerds who congregate there were glad for an opportunity to let off steam about any number of supposedly insufferable performers. as expected, julia roberts came under heavy fire. disclaimer here: i like roberts a lot. whatever constitutes a "movie star", julia roberts has that quality in spades as far as i'm concerned. that doesn't necessarily mean i think she should be universally appealing. but the degree of invective the woman inspires in certain circles amazes me. i may not be the biggest audrey hepburn fan on the planet, yet i don't have trouble being objective and seeing what others might respond to with her. there's precious little of that on the av club site regarding anybody though and the stuff people casually write about roberts is just... weird.


*Rupert Giles

Somehow I totally missed Ocean's Eleven's release, and first caught it on TV, having heard nothing of the casting (I know, I must have been living in a freakin' cave), except Clooney & Pitt. When they waited by the grand stairs for Tess to descend, and the camera slowly panned up from her feet for the reveal, I was dumbstruck. Julia fucking Roberts?!? The ONLY WOMAN IN THE MOVIE, the glamorous prize, the object of studly men's fawning and drooling, and that's who they chose? I actually gasped out loud. Most overrated magazine-cover celebrity in history, with a bizarre giant mouth.

*Everybody here calls me Vicky

I used to find Julia Roberts charming until it became evident that the whole leaving-Keifer-at-the-altar thing wasn't just a product of youthful nerves and that she is in fact a megabitch who thinks the sun shines out of her ass.

I still think she's extraordinarily attractive, especially considering how horsey her features could be when taken separately (see Nancy Kerrigan for an example of those same features NOT working well), but the vulnerable, forehead-veiny thing she does so well can no longer fool me, and I wish people would stop inviting her to awards shows because she cannot shut the fuck up about herself.

how does one get to be an adult and write such craziness with such a disarming lack of self-consciousness? i'm not a particularly big nic cage fan, but other than casually tossing "i wish he'd go the fuck away" into a post where i was discussing him, i can't muster anything resembling the kind of personal animosity these julia roberts haters manage to tap into. cage's recent embarrassing problems with bankruptcy don't matter to me and even if i wanted to have a laugh at his expense, it'd be pretty hollow considering that the guy's comic book collection is worth more than i've earned in my entire life.

the posts above were pretty polite compared to this though:

*Unregistered Asshole #1446387

Julia Roberts was tolerable enough in "Pretty Woman," but after that her "shit don't stink" personna turned me off for good. I didn't care too much for Cameron Diaz back in the day, but the way Roberts' character sabotaged her in "My Best Friend's Wedding" made me like Diaz in that movie much more than her, because I know they wrote Roberts' role to fit her personality. Ashamed to admit, but I almost cheered to her character getting raped by her husband in "Sleeping With The Enemy." And how much more fun do you think "Conspiracy Theory" would have been if Mel Gibson had demanded a BJ from her?

note that homeboy has no problem with using mel "you should get raped by a pack of n*****s" gibson to help make his point about JR. how do adults reach a point where it makes sense to express sentiments like these in public? how do other adults tolerate such things? it's part of what makes the av club such a fascinating place. most of the people who post there are genuinely intelligent, yet many of them see the 'net as nothing more than a vehicle to express feelings otherwise unacceptable in the real world. i felt compelled to answer.

*teadoust

isn't it great that roberts exists though? she gives you an outlet for your rather obvious misogyny. it's amazing that people like you can post offensive tripe like this on a regular basis and not feel embarrassed about it. that's why i find posting here so funny: in the av club court of public opinion, what you wrote is actually acceptable. fucking astonishing. if you had any common sense you'd contact the av club editors and ask them to delete your post for the offensive misogynist garbage it is. if they had an ounce of decency that's what they'd do without your even asking.

nobody will pay much attention to that. the offensive comment won't be deleted. and likely as not, somebody will come along later and call me "teadouche" for posting it.

gwyneth paltrow also comes under fire a lot on the av club boards. bet you didn't know that every day millions of people are FORCED to visit paltrow's lifestyle site "goop" did you? i didn't either, but it must be so because there's no reason for anyone to get upset about anything paltrow does when she isn't making movies, right? ok, if "goop" was devoted to disseminating white supremacist propaganda, or if there was evidence floating around that paltrow spent hours each day physically torturing her children i'd completely understand rejecting her as an actress. but she runs a goofy lifestyle website and says dopey things in interviews? those are deal-breakers for you? get a fucking life already, freak.

*Maliah

Ugh, I haven't been able to stand Gwyneth Paltrow since she was a whiny, self important reporter in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Remember that one? I remember seeing her in an interview saying that she was interested in the part (which was terrible) because it was closer to being an art film than to an action movie. She drives me nuts.

Although so does Katherine Heigle, so perhaps I just hate tall blondes with classically pretty features and annoying voices.

not so bad, right? don't worry, it gets worse.

*Annoying Tall Blondes? Big Surprise...

They both confuse my penis, because it would like to penetrate them both, but somehow my brain is capable of overpowering this natural urge by reminding me of the stupid shit that comes out of their mouths in real life.

Think somebody said it best on this site a while ago: if nothing intelligent is going to come OUT of your mouth...

Great tits, though. I'll give her that.

haha! i get it, bro! stuff a COCK in that mouth! FUCK YEAH!

crap like that is why so many people have an idea that the majority of men who post things on the internet are frustrated perpetual loners with serious issues regarding women and intimacy.

oh, i have referred to nic cage as "a fucking idiot" several times on the av club boards. however, cage is a man and i'm not being entirely serious when i call him names anyway, as opposed to the rather obvious hostility some of these people are expressing towards women. i understand that some may see me as a hypocrite though.