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.

Last night I went to this bar called Bait and Tackle in Red Hook, where I proceeded to get drunk with Anne Hill and her brother Dave. Dave introduced us to this guy in his late fifties who wore his pants really high, i.e. up to his nipples. The pants were white, this shirt was red and white horizontal stripes, the shoes were pointy, the hair was in a gray pompodour, and his arms were covered by crummy tattoos. Nice guy, bought us drinks.

More interesting than this guy, however, was his dog, who could catch snacks really well. The bartender was throwing him goldfish crackers one after the other—have you ever seen them feed seals at the aquarium? Very similar. What an amazing dog. I wish I had a dog, but I don’t think I’d want the blah blah blah.

That night I had this complicated dream in which I was filling out a lot of forms because some forms had been returned to me. One of the forms that had been returned to me was from American Education Services, one of my friendly neighborhood student loansharks. I guess I had forgotten to fill out a line in this form, so the whole thing had been returned to me. I was woken up by the phone ringing, and passed a groggy hello to the person on the other line who was, of course, and AES representative wanting money. I told her the check was in the mail and that I’d like to reduce my payments. She said she’d send me some forms, so I guess they should be here any day now. I wrote out a check and mailed it to them on my way to work. More evidence of my precognitive abilities?

Also interesting to note is that our friend Matt Kelley used his OWN HANDS AND BRAIN to assemble and mail me a CD of Cambodian pop music. Lemme tell ya, I gotta Mad Ave. you a recommendation for about Cambodian pop: It will pull your mind apart. Now, this collection is put together by two guys in the Sun City Girls, and I think their record label is called Sublime Frequencies or something. Some of the stuff is pre Khmer Rouge, some post, but it’s all great—it doesn’t sound like the Mothra song with a dance beat behind it, if that’s what you’re wondering. My mind has expanded into new dimensions now that I have this music.

Depressing Caveat: Most of the musicians who recorded stuff pre-Khmer Rouge were, of course, executed.

The guy on the radio said the heat index was going to be 105 degrees today. 105! I might as well stick my head in the oven and turn on the gas.

As you may be aware I fucking hate the heat; also, Tuesday is my least favorite day of the week. I get real, uh, remedial in the heat, and cranky, and listless. Have you ever seen movies where the crew on a boat is hot, and dehydrated, and seasick, and they’re just laying on the deck in their own waste staring into the sun while seagulls circle, waiting to peck out their eyes? That, Gentle Reader, is more or less how I feel about the whole thing.

Last night Sarah and I, miserable and snapping at each other, walked around our neighborhood in search of bank lobbies so we could go in and hang out in the A/C, staring at the ATMs. My skin goes apeshit in this weather as well, and I’m already starting to get weird plagues of zits and rashes. Disgusting. Some people bear the heat gracefully, and I envy them. They look like they’re soaking up health, whereas I look like the Day of the Dead in polyester pants.

Maybe the pants are the problem. I should invest in some linen pants. I’m basically a hippie as it is, I might as well go all out.

1. That 90’s glam punk band DGeneration
2. Smoking
3. Grinding my teeth
4. Blatantly crappy detective novels
5. Late era Public Image Limited
6. Stealing other people’s food
7. Staying up really late, especially when I have to wake up the next morning
8. Venting my lousy moods on convenient scapegoats
9. The smell of cheap hairspray
10. Talking about my dreams, which is about the boringest thing you can do. Besides keep a blog, of course.

Waiting for this CD to finish burning at work. It’s the A Frames new album, Black Forest, and it’s very, very good. I’ve been making a concentrated effort to listen to stuff that’s recent and stop mucking around in old music by dead people, at least for a little while. So here’s new stuff I really like.

A Frames: Black Forest
Kind of like a bunch of second-string Amphetamine Reptile sessionmen trying to do Devo versions of Transylvanian War marches. Their self-titled album is great as well. Songs about surveillance, being a robot stuck repeating the sum .333333333333333, Eva Braun, chemicals, and being caught in a very boring hostage crisis.

Dub Trio: Exploring the Dangers of
Live dub reggae done krautrock style. I like dub a whole bunch, and I’d stick this right up against anything by my beloved Scientist.

M.I.A.
Sri Lankan refugee art student blah blah blah blah blah. The songs are really, really good and the beats are frankensteined [do I capitalize this when using it as a fake adjective?] together. It made me pull out my Clash albums, which I listened to, and then put most of them away again. Why did I buy Sandinista? What the fuck?! I was eighteen or something, and didn’t know any better. In fact, I didn’t even know Sandinista was supposed to be a triple album, and my copy only has two of the records. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to hear the second record, but I’ll bet it sucks. This M.I.A album isn’t better than London Calling but I’ll bet her next one will be, assuming that her ego hasn’t swelled to the size of something that’s really fucking swelled.

Angels of Light: Sing Other People
This is kind of a cop out because Mikey Gira is about 80 years old, but this album is real swell. Thanks, Akron/Family, for making an old man sound good! (Note to self: also thank current hacks in the Fall for same, must be harder when dealing with a 48 year old toothless wetbrain.) Better than any Swans album, probably, except Soundtracks for the Blind, maybe. Or maybe I’m just getting old. Now that I think about it, I never really liked the Swans.

The Daughters: ?
I don’t know if these guys have an album out yet, but they’re a hilarious gore/grind band from Providence RI who dress in H&M clothes (or something) and are fronted by a long-haired Southern Rock looking guy who is really, really funny. When I saw them he did all the standard stuff, you know, spat on the crowd, pulled out his wee wee, etc., but his ongoing standup between numbers was great. I’m going to see them again, even though all that grindcore shit sounds exactly the same to me.

Anyway, time for me to get out of here and do some writing.

Some Things I Hate

1. The word “toffee”
2. Being called by my last name
3. U2
4. When people spell “Brooklyn” without all the “roo” so it says “Bklyn”
5. The New York Post
6. Cleaning up crushed cockroaches
7. People who chew gum and look bored and selfish
8. Bad table manners
9. Television
10. Barnes and Noble
11. Crossword puzzles
12. Smarmy indie rockers
13. Che Guevara t-shirts
14. Fat men with short blond hair plastered down on their head wearing blue shirts and khaki pants.
15. Ayn Rand
16. When people drown puppies
17. Making decisions by consensus
18. Most natural disasters

I woke up this morning confused after a strange dream in which I was trying to kill this werewolf that lived in some midwestern family’s basement. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to kill it fast enough because I had homework to do for my classes at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Time passed in a really odd manner, and the next thing I knew I was in this basement with about half a dozen werewofl corpses and no time to do my work. When I got back home there was a message on the answering machine from one of my professors informing me that I’d gone to all of the wrong classes that semester and was going to be kicked out of the program. No mention was made of the fact that I’d singlehandedly solved Iowas werewofl infestation singlehandedly.

This weekend seemed really long. It included a visit from my dear old friend Dave, who is doing well in Seattle, a meeting with Garth about Vigilance and our subsequent meeting with the head of the New York Butoh festival where we will humbly ask for interviews and pointers. There was also a very close game of scrabble, a visit to the Basquiat exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum via bicycle, a cancelled meeting of the League of Heroic cyclists, being caught out in the pouring rain twice, and watching Little Otik, the latest Jan Svankmayer flick. I’m a little “eh” about Little Otik. As great as Svankmayer’s stuff can be, his scripts could really use some tightening. It can get really fucking boring sometimes. Interestingly, I like his Faust a whole lot, and everyone seems to think that’s the worst of the lot.

The other interesting thing that happened this weekend is that Sarah and I got our tickets to Serbia. How about that, pal? Going to Serbia, going to the see the golden brass summit, with stopovers in Munich, Budapest, and Prague. Possible jaunt to Romania, although we might save that for a visit to Russia next year. A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be travelling all over the place but here I am, travellin’ around. It’s really a lot easier than you think, the tough part is getting the money together, sez I. On the other hand, Sarah is the one with the gift of a good directional sense and planning acumen. I mostly just hang onto the passport, yell at cab drivers when they try to stiff us, and figure out how the public transit works. All pretty minor, really. If Sarah wasn’t with me, they would have found my corpse being devoured by bees in the desert of Turkey, dingos fighting over my remains.

Bees, dingos. You know, the sort of thing that can happen to you if you’re not careful.

This weekend I was hanging out with Tom and Tavo, which was a lot of fun. Tavo brought over ear candles. I don’t really know why, maybe as party favors. For those of you who aren’t in the know, ear candles are these like wax tubes that you stick in your ear. You light the other end, and the heat is supposed to suck all this crap out of your ear so that you can hear better. I was disinclined to go first, so Tavo laid down on the floor, stuffed the candle in his ear, and lit the end.

I put on the CD that Tavo had brought over, namely, a performance of Oil Can Chuck. OCC was a band consisting of Tavo, Tom, and our motocycle enthusiast friend Greg [see previous post]. Greg wrote all these down and dirty biker anthems, like Quench Your Thirst, Low Hustle, Centerline, Axe to Grind, etc. Me, Tom and Tavo wrote songs for him for fun, like Gasoline Seed, Eve of My Seed, and Slippery Ring. Pretty fucking ridiculous, but really really catchy, or at least I always thought: three 19–20 year olds with really good chops and a desire to make retarded, priapatic hard rock. The CD was live and caught them in rare form: Tavo’s guitar solos were frequent and hilarious, and Greg sounded like he was trying to simultaneously take a dump and make love to a flying bear.

I turn off all the lights in my apartment so that the only light comes from the blazing candle that Tavo has stuck in his ear. He’s lying in the middle of the floor, trying to act natural. We talk for a while about the music, and then I notice that my apartment is filling up with smoke. The ear candle, remember, isn’t really a candle, it’s like a cloth tube covered with wax. And there’s a six inch flame rising from the end of it.

“Tavo, your fucking head is on fire!” I exclaim, running around in the dark and tripping over things in order to open the windows.

“What?” Tavo says, pulling the candle out of his ear. His entire ear canal has filled up with smoke, and it’s slowly wafting out, as if his skull was filled with dry ice. He notices the smoke, puts the candle back in his ear, and starts worming across the floor towards the window, trailing smoke and flames. I’m following behind him with a window fan, trying to blow the smoke towards the open window. Tom is playing scales on my guitar and trying to pretend like none of this is going on and is isn’t actually friends with retards like myself.

The candle is eventually extinguished, the lights put back on, and the smoke dispersed. We talk as if nothing had really happened. Tavo gives me a CD of some of his new recordings, and a couple of them are really great. One in particular, written to be the ballroom music from the Shining, is just completely awesome. I think it’s called “Theme for Delbert Grady” or something to that effect. Absolutely great. Someone should give this kid a record contract.