Today's my birthday, and I love it; I've always loved my birthday, and I hope I always will. It's the one day I'm guaranteed to have to be particularly mindful to my needs and interests, and so what if the people around me have to put up with my crazy-ass announcing that it's my birthday and I can do what the fuck I want to do for 24 hours? I firmly believe that your birthday should serve as a big middle finger to death, that you beat it for another year.
I have officially rounded the curve on "30" and I'm now officially in my "30's," with today. Of course, I don't feel any different than I did yesterday when I was technically a year younger, but I've always believed strongly in the premise that age is not in your years, but how old you feel. Believe me, I've talked to folks in their 20s that looked and sounded like people in their 50s. And I don't feel 30 ... or rather, in my 30s.
And I never really bought into attempts by some folks to make profound observations on their birthday. It's almost like eulogies; you can say all you want to, but you're always bound to leave something out, and it doesn't change the fact that some things pass and we can't help it. But, I did start thinking about the things that I've been around and exposed to that really have helped make life pretty fan-damn-tastic. If you, SGM reader, can bear to give me a a moment of reflection, to just focus on these things, it'd be better than any present most folks could give me.
1) Real cherry Coke; not the pre-made kind, I mean the kind where you start out with regular Coke, but the waitress has to add cherry syrup & stir it around to mix the tastes together. Coca-Cola Inc. couldn't bottle that if they tried.
2) Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion effects; you can take your Peter Jackson remake, with its 3 hours of character development and hobbits and computer enhanced graphics. I'll take a Kong made of clay any day of the week, and I'll up the ante with sword-wielding skeletons ("Seventh Voyage of Sinbad"), Ymirs ("20 Million Miles to Earth") and the rhedosaurus ("Beast From 20,000 Fathoms") any day of the week. CGI can suck my dick.
3) Run DMC's "Peter Piper;" the opening lines that display the best tandem rhyming ever commited to wax, combined with that scratch in the middle (the one that follows "Not bad meaning bad/ But bad meaning good" .... "that is"). An almost perfect jam.
4) Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Arguably the best of the tragedies; I have seen the film version, the Kurosawa adaptation, I have four book versions (incl. a children's book [!]), I've seen it on stage twice, and I'm currently looking for a Book-on-CD version that offers an unabridged, solid full-cast reading of the play.
5) Samurai philosophy, discipline & history. If I were reborn into any era, in any place, I would want it to be feudal Japan. The samurai culture, with its emphasis of honor in warfare, is by far very interesting to me. I have even used samurai philosophy to promote wellness through my therapeutic clients.
6) "American Werewolf in London." One of the best horror films ever made. The way the film sets up is on par with the great modern age horror films of all time ("Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Halloween," etc.). It takes conventions of the genre and spins them into that which you least expect.
7) Banana milk shakes. Thank you for the extra forty lbs.
8) Kurt Angle vs. Chris Benoit, Royal Rumble 2003.
9) Steven Wright; I had the chance to see him perform live, and it was great. Now, my comedy tastes have advanced to the Lewis Blacks and Mitch Hedbergs, and listening to older Steven Wright routines doesn't have the same punch, but it wasn't that long ago that I was thoroughly entertained by his non-sequitur comedy. It was Wright that made me think I wanted to be a comedian for all of 2 days when I was in elementary school.
10) Horror comics of the 70s & 80s. "Tomb of Dracula" and "House of Mystery" made me lose more sleep than I'll ever be able to get back, but I would rather have been cowering under the covers than believing at the time that human beings were capable of atrocities far beyond what Marv Wolfman & Cain the Caretaker could ever weave.
11) Columbo. I grew up watching this show on Fridays, really late, wondering at my young age how in the hell this show could be so interesting if you already knew who the killer was ... and damned if I wasn't just glued to the TV. A perfect prologue to Saturday morning cartoons, if ever there was one.
12) Godzilla movies, Abbott & Costello, and Transformer cartoons; when we got our first VCR in the house, the local video store only had more adult-oriented comedies, horror and dramas on video, so my parents weren't about to let me watch those. But, the Video Place also had every Godzilla film, every A&C film, and every Transformers cartoon on video. And I spent more downtime watching those than I care to admit.
13) Elmore Leonard writes him some damn good books.
14) Warren Ellis writes him some damn good comics.
15) Universal's Wolfman; Lon Chaney's pride & joy.
16) "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. One of the best mysteries ever penned.
17) To quote one of my best friends, Willard: "I'd never hit a woman, but I would smack a bitch." You will not deny the wisdom in that statement. Peace to you, Thriller.
18) The Pistons NBA title win in 2004 was probably one of the most exciting in a long time.
19) Galaga & Street Fighter II; easily, hands-down two of the best stand-up arcade games ever made, from the era when arcades sucked money out of pockets.
20) The Riverwalk Park in downtown Greenville, SC.
21) The well-tempered steel of a sword or knife.
22) Chasey Lain ... love her. Back when I worked at the video store, and wasn't dating, I was the designated "back room" restocker. And trust me, when you stand in front of a wall of porn chicks, it starts to fuck with your head. But I remember some guy bringing in an adult video, chucking it at me and saying that it was damaged & he wanted a free replacement rental. Well, he had also checked it out three days prior, so after quizzing him about it (which he no-sold by repeatedly asking if I was calling him a liar), I made up some rule that we have to preview all tapes that are reported as damaged before we issue any replacement rentals & took this one to the back. It was "Nymph" starring Chasey Lain, and needless to say, there was nothing wrong with that video ... hell nah.
23) The return to a "big three" in professional wrestling; for as long as I've been a wrestling fan, the sport has always cycled around three major players, as far as organizations/federations were concerned. When I was younger, it was AWA, NWA (Jim Crockett Promotions), and the WWF. It wasn't long after that the AWA folded, NWA became WCW, and the WWF ... well, they stayed the same. A few years later, Eastern Championship Wrestling changed their name and booking tactics, Extreme Championship Wrestling was born, and we had a "big three". That lasted until the year 2001, when both ECW & WCW went out of business and were absorbed into the WWF. And then there was one. Thankfully, this is changing, as TNA seems to be building steam with a solid roster and critically acclaimed pay-per-views every month. And I gotta say, the more ROH I watch, the more I'm convinced that if they latched onto the same zeitgeist that ECW did, more people would be impressed with their product to gain them national attention (there was a recent Entertainment Weekly article on them, if I'm not mistaken). All this, while WWF continues to go into the shitter. 2006 looks to be an interesting year to be a fan.
24) The Curt Hennig Memorial Lethal Lottery Tournament; it remains one of the most rewarding board projects that I am still committed to doing on a semi-regular basis.
25) Homicide: Life on the Streets, perhaps the greatest television show on man's planet.
26) Of all the jobs I reflect on in the past, the three that I miss the most, but not enough to want to ever go back to them, are 1) Pizza Hut delivery (fat money on a weekly basis, plus all the hot waitress nook I could get); 2) Buckingham Correctional Center staff psychologist (I miss those crazy, incarcerated fuckers); and 3) Foozles Books in Pigeon Forge (half price on any Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge attractions for county employees, plus all the hot coworker nook I could get).
27) The Cascades hiking trail near Radford, VA.
28) That feeling when I'd pop a crowd by dunking in a basketball game; being the white guy that I am, it always felt good to get that one short burst in a game when I'd take the game above the rim & have everyone from teammates to opponents patting me on the back, saying, "Damn, man, you got some ups." Track was my sport of choice, but my love's always with my balling days.
29) Grapes, the best damn fruit that has ever populated the earth.
30) Public Enemy, the rap group. When everyone my age in my lower-middle class white neighborhood was playing the rebellious, pubescent rage act by growing their hair long and listening to heavy metal, I kicked it up a notch and busted out "Get the green, black and red and/ Gold down, countdown to armageddon" during the family meal. 'Cause if you really want to rebel, you couldn't do it better than by being a white kid listening to angry, politically-charged black urban music. Those Metallica kids up the street didn't have shit on me.
31) Firmly adhering to my "don't drink, don't smoke, don't drug" policy. I don't have any ill feelings toward those that do it ... I just choose not to. And I don't think I'm better than folks that do those things, either. I just have this belief that my body and mind are sacred architectures, built and maintained by physio/biological science, and to put anything in there that is unnatural is to succumb to loss of control. And that loss of control cultivates weakness ... watch a smoker 5 min past his or her nicotine fix, and you'll see what I mean. I maintain control as much as I can, and I believe that this has kept me young, even when time has not.
(Anyone who has read to the point, thanks.)
Friday, December 30, 2005
Thirty-one reflections to pass the day
Shit I hate
Honorable mention: Morristown, TN. That place is primarily responsible for my hatred of entries 8, 5, 3, 2, and 1, but I'll cut the hellhole some slack and assume these concepts are somewhat universal.
8. "Sin" taxes. People shouldn't have to pay extra to slowly kill themselves. If you want to raise revenue and punish the right people at the same time, raise the taxes on reality TV shows, Will Ferrell movies and Hummers. Oh, and any music albums where the "star performer" didn't write at least 75% of the material.
7. Midgets. Look, if you're a midget and you're on TV and people are laughing, they're laughing at you because you're a midget. But I'm not laughing, because you're creeping me the fuck out. Especially those two midgets who host that real estate scamfomercial.
6. Single women with kids. Sorry, but if it makes you feel any better, I'm not going to buy a half-eaten sandwich, either.
5. Stupid people in general. The dumbasses that don't fit into the top four categories, yet manage to make life harder for the rest of us in ways many and varied. If there's a warning label on something, it's your fault. Cigarettes are unhealthy, you don't eat those little packets that come in shoeboxes and if your head hurts so badly that you're taking your twelfth Tylenol in two hours, see a fucking doctor. Or just die.
4. Myspace. People use the phrase "race to the bottom" to refer to shit getting worse and worse in any given situation. Well, the race is fucking over and Myspace won. When you see a 16 year old girl posting allegedly "sexy" pictures of herself in a bikini for the whole world to see, there's nothing else left. Except to nuke the planet from orbit. Just to be safe.
3. Confederate Apologists. Look, the South fought for slavery, lost the goddamned war 140 years ago, the Confederate Flag is America's swastika and fuck you. To clarify a misconception, I'm not offended by the Confederate Flag. In fact, if you think it's worth displaying, I prefer that you do so. That makes it easier for me to tell that you're a total fucking retard in the event you've managed to obscure the swelling of your water-filled skull (most likely with a trucker cap bearing said flag). And you might not think you're a racist, but you probably are and your great-great-grandfather definitely was.
2. Bigots. Racism has to be the dumbest ideology on earth, if you want to call it an ideology and risk ruining the word "idea" forever. Sure, fundamentalism takes whatever the given ideology is and runs it straight into the ground, but making assumptions based on someone's race? That's a kind of lazy I don't understand and I once spent three hours hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock every seven minutes rather than get up and go to class or just turn the damned thing off. And not only is it race, but it's skin color, too. When I was in middle school there was this kid Jeff, who was pretty well tanned. One day, this total piece of white trash that lived a few miles from me got on the bus and I noticed his knuckles were shredded. I asked him what happened. He said something like "I took a swing at that fuckin' Mexican Jeff and he ducked. I punched the wall." I said, "Michael, he's not a Mexican. He's a really tanned white guy." "Oh." (Michael was also the first person I remember having a mullet, which he gave himself in a drunken stupor. At the age of 13. He also had a mustache. At the age of 13.) Homophobia, though, takes the cake. You're basing your opinion on who someone is fucking? Are you out of your goddamned mind?
1. Fundamentalists of any stripe. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Capitalists, Socialists, Conservatives, Liberals and any other ideology that has adherents who buy into whatever theory they've been sold in whole and become dogmatically rigid, unable to see outside of whatever perspective they've taken up. That, in and of itself, isn't the problem. What pisses me off to no end is when these assholes try to reshape society in the image of whatever bug crawled up their ass. Living in America I have a great distaste for Christian fundamentalists, but if I lived in, say, Iran, I'd have been stoned to death by Islamic fundamentalists. (The only thing keeping Jerry Falwell from having people stoned to death is that we as Americans just aren't going to put up with that shit. Yet.) If I lived in Israel, I'd be torn between having to kill the Islamic fundamentalists or the fundamentalist Jews that think Israel should rule over all of the Holy Land. Fundamentalist Atheists like Mary Murray O'Haire give Atheists like me a bad name, anti-tax jihadist Grover Norquist should be drowned in a bathtub and I want to reanimate the corpses of Joseph Stalin and Joe McCarthy and let them battle to the death. Then I'll kill the winner. Actually, I got a bit off track there. The point? Fuck fundamentalists.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
And thus it ends...
nothing like it began.
There's an old saying, I think I first heard it from Ross Perot, batshit crazy as he was. Something about democracies only lasting 200 years. Or maybe empires. I don't know and my knowledge of history is withering away daily, so I can't remember and it may not even be true. But I've heard the notion put forth a few times and if it is true, I think I know why. This may not even be an original thought, but here it is. After about 200 years, the populace has become so far removed from tyranny and fascism that they no longer fear it. Or even know how to recognize it.
There's another old saying, being that you don't discuss religion or politics over alcohol. Or at work. Over alcohol, you'll likely say what you really mean and at work you can't even come close to saying what you really mean.
In training today at Cingular, the domestic wiretapping issue came up and one of my coworkers said that she doesn't care if the government listens to her phone calls, because only criminals have anything to worry about and it keeps her safe. I can't say "I don't give a fuck if you feel safe" when concerns about HR-friendliness abound. I really don't even know what to say to something that childishly simplistic anyway, just laugh at her fear of the boogeyman. But "9/11. Terror, terror. Bark, bark, howl." If I killed every other living thing on earth, I'd feel safe, but that doesn't justify anything.
Another coworker declared that there are "millions of terrorists" in this country. Millions.
Millions.
Fear of the boogeyman. Somewhere there's a Jewish dude saying "I'm glad it's not me this time." Communists agree. "We had our forty years in the spotlight. Let someone else play the demon."
Allegedly small-government Conservatives tripping over each other to defend a brazen act of big-government that violates the Constitution or to find a way to smear the Libruls with it. "You thought the Plame leak was so bad, why aren't you hollering about the NYTimes publishing this?" I'm more interested in finding out how much you sold your principles for and if I can get a similar price. I need a new car.
Patrick Henry says "give me liberty or give me death." My coworker says "I'd rather be alive than free." I say, "I'm sure the Germans said the same thing under Hitler, the Soviets the same under Stalin and the Chinese the same under Mao." "That was in the past," she says.
And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Sunday, December 18, 2005
PE and the VRWC
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2005/1.2/white_house_pre.html
This guy uses Public Enemy in a fictional account of torture and the mainstream press. Fairly comical, especially the use of Professor Griff
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Writing for a purpose
NP: Random Radio Paradise Music
Rarely, maybe once or twice a generation, a cultural icon appears to usher in a new era in American society. Elvis Presley. James Dean. Frank Sinatra. All of these names mean more to previous generations than they do today. A picture on Turner Classic Movies. A note in a textbook. But to our parents and, in some cases, our parents parents, these names and their body of work represent an important watershed in their lives when things changed. Maybe they weren't ground-breaking transformations, but people remember the impact of individuals like Presley, Dean, and Sinatra. They made the world a somewhat better place and inspired individuals to work harder, helped them relax after a day at the job, or gave people a sense of escapism that allowed them to continue through the day. And really, who hasn't dreamed of moving to Las Vegas after the King's performance in Viva Las Vegas.
Today, our generation is hopelessly lacking in cutural icons. One could argue quite persuasively that we no longer have a culture. Mass media, the advent of information-on-demand, and greedy music, literature, and movie producers have completely segmented our culture. What plays in the African-American community, for example, will not sell five copies in the latino community. Therefore, every niche is marketed to with almost no cross-cultural transmissions. Toby Keith couldn't draw an audience of a dozen viewers on BET, and ten out of those twelve would just be too distracted by their cell phones/chatroom conversations/e-mail to change the channel. Of course, I wouldn't walk out my front door to hear Toby Keith (and would probably walk out my back door so I wouldn't have to hear him), but I may be in the minority of my cultural group.
Recently, in the throws of dissertation procrastination and the general end of the semester malaise, I have discovered one individual who I think has the chance, albeit the slight chance, of uniting individuals from a myriad of backgrounds and economic circumstances into a national culture once again. This person has collaborated with a number of people outside his own ethnic niche and, while staying relatively true to his cultural roots, has managed to fuse various performance styles into a comprehensive and coherent body of work. That man. The new cultural icon of the new America, is Nelly.
Nelly is a unique individual in the hip-hop community. While his body of work is too long to list here, he has done a great deal of collaboration projects. His single with country singer sticks out as the best rap-country project since Tammy Wynette sang the hook on KLF's 1991 track "Justified and Ancient" and Wyclef Jean covered Johnny Cash's "Delia's Gone" at the Johnny Cash tribute show in 1998. Nelly's work with Mcgraw shows that he is willing to expand the boundaries of hip-hop to include traditional country-western styles into his work. His dual release "Sweat" and "Suit" is the most groundbreaking double album concept since the technically perfect "Use your Illusion I" and "Use your Illusion II" by troubled metal band Guns N Roses. While Nelly does not have quite the talent to emulate GNR and the coke-fueled guitar rage that was Slash, he makes a good effort at music immortality.
Nelly, however, will surely receive his due in the history books for his latest single, entitled "Grillz," currently at the top of MTV's "Direct Effect" chart. Nelly uses "Grillz" to highlight emerging trends in African-American dental care and share them with white, latino, and other cultural groups. His lyrics, while eloquently written, convey the sense of pride associated with the advances in prosthetic teeth since the late 1990s. Nelly is taking a cultural phenomenon of his own people group and is sharing them with the masses. And we are better for it.
The rhetorical skill exhibited in "Grillz" is nothing short of phenomenal. Take the opening invective, sung over the synthetically produced beat:
"Rob the jewelry store and tell em make me a grill.
Add da whole top diamond and the bottom rows gold."
Simply brilliant. Here, Nelly is sharing his taste for expensive jewelry and other precious stones and, quite literally, putting his money where his mouth is. This clearly shows that the problems of poverty and urban decay, associated with inner-city areas and minority groups since the late 1960s have been overcome. Nelly, a cultural icon of the hip-hop community, is sharing with everyone that his level of disposable income is so high he can afford to deck his teeth out with gold and diamonds. Surely the problems discussed during the "Long Hot Summers" of 1964-1968 have been solved. Thank you Nelly, for showing us the light.
The rest of the lyrics are also nothing short of outstanding. Lines such as "If I could call it a drink, call it a smile on da rocks/If I could call out a price, lets say I call out a lot," and "My mouth piece simply certified a total package/Open up my mouth and you see mo carrots than a salad" are mind-numbingly creative and well-articulated.
As with any good collaboration, especially on a project that praises masculinity in the form of artifical, diamond-encrusted teeth, an attractive, sweet-voiced female sings along. While in many rap songs these voices are used as little more than a doormat for their male counterpart, Nelly's "Grillz" bucks that trend. Behold, the lines from the buxom and beautfil Ali, as quoted in their entirety:
"Dis what it do when da lou
Ice grill country grammar
Where da hustlas move bricks
and da gangsta's bang hamma's
Where i got em you can spot them
On da top in da bottom
Gotta bill in my mouth like im Hillary Rodham"
It is beyond my literary capacity to add any further comment to augment the sheer brilliance of those words. Especially the part about Hillary Rodham having a bill in her mouth. I just can't add to that.
In short, should Nelly be able to continue producing singles with the combination of catchy beats and culturally-significant lyrics like "Grillz," he will emerge as the cultural icon of this generation. There is little doubt in my mind that in twenty to thirty years, Nelly will be featured prominently in the history textbooks and a central part of the narrative on the turn of the 21st century.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Here's one for Josh
Go to this site and look at the "debate" over a similar letter to mine. A kid from U of Kentucky wrote a column and got these people fired up. Its very comical
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Today is ... Fantasy Book Saturday!!
(So what, it's a day late.)
I started this on "that other site," and thought I'd spread the love here, trying to get back to my normal writing level.
So, today, on SGM, my favorite match that never happened and may never happen is ...
(ECW, 1996)
vs.
Samoa Joe
(ROH, 2004)
