Category: Uncategorized

a leni riefenstahl production written by torquemada and starring charlton heston

A long time ago, when I was a journalist, one of my colleagues was the excellent arts writer Ernest Hardy. Looks like he’s still doing it. Google shows him writing about film for the L.A. Weekly.

Around that time the movie Soul Man came out. This wasn’t just a bad movie. This was a vile movie. The whole thing rested on the wacky humor of “reverse racism” in which a white guy tries to be black in order to get a full scholarship to Harvard. That’s painful to think about for 10 seconds; imagine it as a 90 minute movie.

Ernest gamely went off to review the thing. I wish I still had his review around. The part I remember is that he said another audience member summed up the film perfectly about 10 minutes in when he yelled “THIS SHIT AIN’T FUNNY!” to the general murmured approval of the audience.

I’ve been thinking about that review a lot lately. Every day I read something here, or in a news source or something, and I find myself yelling the same thing at the screen:

THIS SHIT AIN’T FUNNY!

It isn’t, none of it is. And it’s far worse now than in 1986. We’re going fucking backwards in time.

out of spiritus mundi

The angry bro guys in their huge trucks. The nervously ironic hipsters, giggling endlessly about pop culture. The self-satisfied middle-aged white guys explaining the world to each other with phrases from talk radio. The impossibly strict radical activists lecturing each other with phrases from Cultural Studies classes. The sullen, slow moving underclass teenagers. The very, very quiet Mexican ladies working menial jobs. The subculture kids piling on makeup and leather and making new schisms of nothing. The armies of couched people in front of televisions, pounding beers and watching us rationalize to each other. We’re all nervous as hell.

Everyone knows it. This thing is ready to blow. We’re all watching a cigarette ash grow long, far longer than it should. When is that damned thing going to drop?

I remember standing in the middle of the street at midnight, on Ventura Boulevard, in the middle of the L.A. Riots. There was a curfew on, but the cops were all down south. Greg and I walked down the center median of an empty street. “Do you think it’s the end?” he asked. “No,” I said, “More bullshit yet to come.”

This time I can’t smell smoke, and we didn’t have to drive through an angry armed crowd. No troops on the streets.

It feels like 1992 again though. The economy is teetering, about to slide, taking the lower middle class down to the bottom again, exposing all the inequities, pushing people past their limits. There’s a hell of a lot of wealth around me every day but it’s clearly fake. If the Chinese ask for their money back or someone cooks off a suitcase nuke in Chicago, or maybe even some little moth’s breath of fate happens to tip things over, something impossibly tiny… Suddenly we’ll see what we’ve been living.

I feel like I’m in a bar full of angry drunks lately. All it will take is one elbow bump, and we’ll find out what shits we were all along.

I just paid $29 to make my life slightly more annoying.

The people at Mark/Space finally released their sync application for Mac OS X and the Sidekick, and I of course bought the thing, $29.

It’s necessary and yet very annoying. First, you can only put it on two macs. What the hey? iSync with .Mac works everywhere. Why not restrict it to one Sidekick? No, two macs and two Sidekicks. Which makes no sense.

Second, you can only sync up to 8 times per day. This is funny, because iSync only has “manual only” or “once an hour” as options. So you have to use cron and applescript to say something like “run iSync update every 3 hours”.

This follows the rule that everything involving Apple, and everything involving Danger and the Hiptop, is simultaneously totally cool and so annoying it makes my head vibrate to bits.

I’m glad you care.

quote of the day

From a song facts page about “I Write the Songs that Make the Whole World Sing”:

I have seen House Arrest Chris on the local club scene here in Lauderdale. AWESOME! He covers many songs, but yes, “I Write The Songs” is my favorite too. Head-banging version of course. It is definitely a show for adults, with lot’s of profanity and suggestive dance moves by Chris. When I saw him over Memorial Day weekend he set his penis on fire during his version of “Dancing Queen”.
— Gary, Fort Lauderdale FL

Watermelon smashing brothers duel

This is too weird. On the patio the other night, a bizarre rumor came up that the comedian Gallagher had actually retired due to illness, and that he’d hired his brother to replace him but not advertised this, so that if you saw Gallagher at your county fair it was actually a different person now. Too odd!

After a few minutes of web searching, the real story is weirder.

The original Gallagher, Leo, never retired. He did indeed have a heart attack but he’s still fine and performing, showstopper fruit smash and all.

His brother, Ron, had been performing as Gallagher II. Gallagher Primary tolerated this for a few years, but then Ron started referring to himself as “the real Gallagher” and giving out autographs as his brother, telling people he was his brother, and worst of all doing the signature watermelon crush. This forced a brother against brother lawsuit in which Leo got an injunction to keep Ron from doing his act.

I can’t find the fate of Ron after that. Maybe he had to get a job at Jiffy Lube or something.