Hench!

This is the winner of the annual World’s Ugliest Dog Contest, which I believe is held in San Francisco.

Look at this thing! It’s as if the owner went into the old Chinese guy’s shop looking for a gremlin for their kid, but then the shop owner told them that it’s a cash only joint.

“I’ve got three dollars and thirteen . . . eighteen cents. What can I get for that?”
“Ah! Well, I can sell you this fucking abomination. Would your child like this? I use this to scare the gremlins when they get out of hand.”
“But surely gremlins aren’t scared of anything!”
“Well, they know that if they touch this revolting piece of shit they will catch leporsy. Remember to handle it with tongs.”

I mean, I had a cat with three legs and no tail once, and it had chronic pneumonia or something so it was always sneezing long ropes of snot all over my room, and I was allergic to it, but at least it was fuzzy, you know? It still basically looked like a cat, not a cheap effect in an 80’s horror movie about monsters that live in the sewer.

Have you ever seen that movie CHUD? CHUD being an acronym for Cannibalistic Human Underground Dweller? I saw it as a kid and it scared the crap out of me. I rented it recently and was disappointed to see that it was stupid and didn’t make any sense, but it’s scary if you’re a kid. I don’t recommend renting it. Well, anyway, the eponymous CHUDs used to be homeless people who were exposed to nuclear waste, which made them look like this:

I’ll bet you that dog was this thing’s pet.

Now, the CHUDs look pretty fucking stupid, but they’re not real. They aren’t going to come out of manhole covers and get you. That dog, however, is still out walking around, scaring the living crap out of people.

All right, there doesn’t seem to be any way for me to disable my “Rick has updated his blog” notices without actually paying Friendster a monthly fee. So tough luck, pals. On the other hand, I think that, Gentle Reader, you yourself can disable the notifications if they bother you, which I’m sure they must. Especially for a bare bones boring entry like this one, which I am writing whilst eating my noontime salad.

MIRANDA JULY.

In 1997, Miranda July played a show at Bennington College that was very sparsely attended. It was her and this guy with a sampler, and she did all these absolutely great vignettes/spoken word pieces with sound effects that were really, really upsetting. There was one about a government test subject . . . I forget what the other one was about. I talked to her afterwards. She was very tall and thin and had a pile of bleach blonde hair. She was wearing boots, a red skirt, and a white leather jacket with “I’m FINE” written across the back with red sequins. She was looking straight ahead and kind of glaring. I bought a CD of her stuff and mumbled something about how cool I thought it was and asked her how she started doing it. She mostly said that she kind of just started doing it, and didn’t know how to define what she did. She looked tired, and I felt bad about pestering her.

A few years later, in 2002 (I think) I go to the Whitney Biennial with Sarah, and who has an audio piece in it but Miranda July. I was real excited, but it was installed in the elevator and I couldn’t get people to stop talking no matter how much I shushed them. Finally I stormed out of the elevator and bought a copy of her new CD from the Whitney gift shop. It was great, of course, and a lot better than her first one. It just occured to me now that the track Hotel Voulez-Vouz off her first CD is kind of exactly like the Delmore Schwartz story In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. But I digress.

Another few years later I open up the Onion and see an interview with Miranda July. “Cool,” I think, and then find out she won the fucking Palm d’Or at Cannes. Holy shit! This is what it must have felt like to certain citizens of Pittsburg when they found out that their old paperboy was actually David Lynch . . . or something. I don’t know, it’s really weird. I feel almost retroactively cool and cutting edge, even though I think I only stuck around past their soundcheck because Miranda July was talking into a walkie-talkie, and I probably thought that she and the guy were a digital hardcore band or something incredibly lame like that. I was a real schmuck when I was eighteen, you know?

I guess some of you do know, actually.

CHEESEBURGER.

I would like to proudly report that I successfully ate 2 cheesburgers this weekend as part of my eating meat again training for my Eastern European trip. I’m basically a veggie, but I learned my lesson during my trip through Memphis and Nashville, during which I survived on French fries. Ever eat French fries for two weeks? You’d learn your lesson too. It’s a good lesson to learn. The lesson is that no one gives a fuck about whatever weird diet you’re on.

Seeing as I’m going to the land of sausage and schnitzel, I figured that it would be a shame to miss out on the local cuisine. I also did not want to be rude to anyone who offered me food by refusing them, especially as I am uni-lingual and would not know how to draw a pictogram denoting “I am a vegetarian.”

The one time I ate meat in Memphis was when we went to get soul food from what was purpoted to be the best soul food restaraunt in the south. It was really good, and our waiter had a southern accent so thick that I couldn’t understand a fucking word he said. This was a problem for me throughout that trip—I would ask for directions, and some Boss Hog-looking fucker would say “Het owhn hie Maple rud, heyeh? Het owhn hoOOvah five laights. Heminy, Heminy haw, haw haw, heminy, HAW?” And I would nod and smile. I’d never been to the south before.

Anyway, at this soul food joint I ordered smothered chicken, which was chicken in what tasted like bacon gravy, and was probably about the tastiest thing I’d eaten in a decade. Five minutes later we were digging through a Salvation Army for thrift gems when my intestines immediately cramped up and I broke out into the kind of sweat you break out into before you vomit, and I realize that my body is about to effect an full-on purge.

See, your body stops producing the kind of enzymes it needs to break down meat, and the results are very unpleasant. I spent the rest of the day sweating and weak. So now I train. If I can eat pork by the end of the week I should be all right.

God, the human body can be disgusting. Does anyone else out there watch David Cronenberg movies and identify with them? I hope this all pays off in the end. I usually only subject my body to the world’s blandest food, so I hope this schnitzel and pork roll Eastern Europe diet doesn’t actually kill me. Killed by schnitzel, you know, it could happen. As it is I feel like a car that’s not running on all its cylinders. It’s enough to drive a young man to an accupunturist, I’ll tell ya.

Tom, I hope this fulfills your request that I discuss my bodily functions in a quasi-public forum.

ONE LAST THING.

I’ve recently noticed that a lot of people, when typing, very badly misuse the ellipsis. An ellipsis, or ” . . . ” is a very specific form of puntuation consisting of three periods seperated by spaces. There is no such thing as an ellipsis with four or more periods. That isn’t an ellipsis, that’s just too many fucking periods.

Now, I’m not exactly captain grammer, especially in emails and stuff like this blog, which I write on the fly and seldom read over before posting, but someone has to say something. It’s really the only thing that can drive me up the wall, especially when I read a message that goes something like this:

“hey….how’s it goin..i’m fine it’s nice here…………ha ha…..i talked to my mother the other day and shes fine but really hungry….you know…….she eats alot of food………………potatoes………chinese food…broccoli………its cool…..bye

I know that some of these people have college educations. I’ll forgive them anything if they would only reign in their assault on the ellipsis. It’s like a meter that ticks while their brain is working on what to say next. “Shit, twenty-six dots, he must have fucking flatlined there for a second.” We all learned about the different kinds of punctuation, didn’t we? See, my secret theory is that using ellipses like this is sort of the equivalent of how some people hit a certain age and decide that they’re just going to wear sweatpants all the time.

I discovered this weekend that friendster sends a message around to everybody whenever I update this thing. I’ve been trying to figure out how to turn that off (I thought I’d turned it off when I started this stupid blog) but I can’t. What a bunch of crap. If any of you know how to disable it, please let me know.

Anyway, it’s pouring down rain outside and I forgot my umbrella, so I’m in a pissy mood. Did you ever get on the train soaking wet and then have umbrella-carrying people give you that “oh you poor schmuck” look? Ah, fuck ‘em. It’s my own fault. I didn’t even bother to look for an umbrella this morning because it was too much effort. I also didn’t bring back the DVD I’d rented, which I’m now going to have to do in the dark while it’s raining like a fucking commando.

On the plus side, it is Friday, and I just got a 2CD set of Wilson Pickett. Man. This music somehow crushes you into a small cube, sets you on fire, lets you burn to a pile of bones and ashes, showers you with buckets of magic joy, watches you reconsitute yourself like a dried-out sea monkey, buys you a new set of clothes, gives toothbrush and some deoderant, hails you a taxi, takes you to a towering mesa in the desert where there is a single chair and a single table, brings you a plate of alligator sausage and Cote du Rhone, tells you a funny story about a dog that could jump fences and later became a beagle detective named Jim Walker, gives you a copy of the best book you’ll ever read, takes you out to the bar, conveniently “goes to the bathroom” to allow you time to talk to the person at the next stool who will turn out to be your life’s great love, returns with a funny story about their friend “Busky,” drives you home, and then calls you the next day to inform you that you are glowing with an aura of psychic goodness that’s exploding like a red and orange supernova out of your brain, and your very presence now works to detoxify our culture’s horribly poisoned collective unconcious. What a pal! So you call up the person you met at the bar and you go dancing.

You know, I just can’t understand how people can listen to flaming bullshit like Hot Hot Heat or whatever when stuff like this is hanging around. Then again, I can’t believe people listen to shit like Eric Clapton. Or Cream. The Yardbirds were OK, because they were pretty upfront about the fact that they were just covering songs by actual geniuses. They were good covers! I don’t know. Sometimes I see people buying this fucking music and I feel like they must not be human beings if this stuff doesn’t put them to sleep. And I don’t mean that all music has to be an amped-up electric energy fest, I mean that so, so much of stuff being touted as the next big shit has about as much flavor as a bowl of unflavored Quaker Oatmeal.

I guess some people like unflavored Quaker Oatmeal. Me, I hate that shit. I don’t want food made by Quakers. Give me onion bagels or a pile of fruit on some waffles or something like that. Exotic teas of the world and all that. I have certain acquaintences who encourage me to listen to this indie rock crap, and I really do try to like it. I do! I just can’t. It reminds me of novels by people who haven’t really done anything with their lives except go from private school to private college to grad school and then immediately started writing a novel. Their books are usually

A) About suburban alienation and a relationship that might be going bad but no one can tell because they’re too boring and disaffected, OR

B) One of those fucking books that end in “ist” and use someone’s profession as a uni-metaphor for everything in the book. The Archivist, the Intutionist, the Arealist, the Lobotomist . . . there’s a ton. It’s sort of like semiotics 101 for assholes. It’s not even novel writing, it’s more like the kind of lazy criticism you get when a critic learns some biographical fact and then pilfers it like some crummy Rosetta stone that doesn’t actually work. “Chekov crafts his sentences with the care of a physician” or whatever. It doesn’t even have to be true. “Einstein, with the methodical mind of an ex-patent clerk, slowly collated the theory of Relativity, hoping to file it away in a desk drawer somewhere in Austria.”

You know, crap like that (OK, the Intuitionist wasn’t bad). I hate the “ist” books, and I can generally give a crap about suburban malaise—especially since no one has added anything to the old surburban malaise discourse since Devo were wearing jump suits and singing songs like “Mongoloid.”

All right, I should wrap this up soon because it’s stopped raining and I need a cigarette and I’m treading water. But the indie rock equation really does bother me. I don’t understand how bands like Iron and Wine can capture the imagination of so many people. I have never heard something more boring than that music. And repulsive: that guy sings like one of those people who breathe heavily into the phone and talk with their mouth so close to it that you can like hear their saliva moving around. Christ, I want to gag just thining about it. And he just kind of moans in this overweight, revolting way about the most banal things possible. It’s like getting an obscene phone call at three in the morning from a 400 pound naked off-duty hardware store clerk who proceeds to read the back of a Wheat Thins box to you.

A lot of music in banal in a really good way, you know. Doo Wop, girl groups—but then again, those people brought some actual emotion to it. I never question the sincerity of the Shangri-Las mini-operas about dead boyfriends, and I’m always right there with that guy from the Inkspots who does the talking section in the middle of every song. They could sing anything and make you believe it. This Iron and Wine creep could sing my favorite book and it would still suck.

You know how you’d be reading a really good book in class, and it would be some asshole kid’s turn to read and he’d read like a lobotomy outpatient? And it really kills the mood? Or worse yet, if you were reading a play in class and he got assigned the only interesting part? So he’d be saying “Every . . . uhhh . . . cloud . . . engenders . . . not . . .uhhhhh . . . a . . . storm . . . ” and then he’d lose his place, and you’d be wondering why the fuck the teacher didn’t assign that kid to read the stage directions? You know, in life some people have to read the stage directions! This Iron and Wine guy should be made to read the fucking stage directions already. His fans should be forced to Memphis at gunpoint, where they’ll be forced to tour the Stax soul museum until they rush home and burn all their Ponys records. Can you imagine a thousand Iron and Wine fans pouring kerosene over their record collection, screaming about how they’ll no longer tolerate mediocrity? I guess it could never, ever, ever possibly happen.

See, this is what happens when you forget to bring your umbrella to work. I should really keep an umbrella here in the office, considering that I always forget to bring one and end up buying one anyway and so now I have about seven umbrellas. There’s nothing like wet shoes and socks to really get you depressed.

On the plus side, Sarah and I are going to see this movie Rise, which is about some insane dance that kids do in East LA. They dress up like clowns and move incredibly fast . . . I don’t know much more than that right now, but it looks great. There’s nothing like the physically improbable to really cheer you up.