Hench!

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.