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Q & A, 1.2

Q. Please describe your writing style.

A. A grizzled African-American man sits atop the fog-enshrouded precipice of a mountain, lone soul to know this peak.

Once a bank teller. Once a famous rapper. Once a jazz aficionado, well-acquainted with the dark corners of the night and the alleys that led to sweet sounds, grime-covered walls and tables filled with empties slowly refilled with a musical brew that shifted and changed according to the whims of the players.

How did this man—who once had a name, probably more than one, probably more than he ever knew about, but now none because the mountain didn’t require nomenclature or, really, even a sense of personal identity—how did he come to be perched here, cross-legged, staring at a static tableau of nothing? He didn’t know, once thought the purpose of his presence here was to figure this out, but it’s been—years? months? days?—since he even gave the topic any thought.

He yawned. An observer (sad impossibility) would have seen this as the mere shift in levels of tightly-knit gray and white, movement giving but the slightest indication of a mouth under the tectonic plates that hid his lower face.

There was money, always money. At the bank, other people’s. In fame, his own, spent on pre-scripted possessions—the boat, sprawling mansion, roomful of cars…bling. In later days, it was about making others’ money his own, just enough to support a dependence on the unpleasant chemicals that were too easy to become acquainted with in the darkness he found himself feeling his way through night after night.

On the mountaintop there is none of that. There is morning precipitation licked from rocks, squeezed from pillows of moss. Where there were once long tables of food prepared by hands skilled in the arts of flavor and texture, there were now large, ominous beetles caught and consumed.

Movement in the corner of his eye. He shifts his gaze in the direction of the stone stairway, a carved path disappearing in the clouds below. A beetle the size of a thumb crested the top step and crawled in the direction of the old man, who extends his gnarled hand and deftly snatches it from the mountainside. The bug disappears into the rocky terrain of the man’s beard.

My writing style is like that beetle.

Q & A, 1.1

Q. Please describe your writing style.

A. My writing style is like a cougar fighting a leopard.

I know what you’re thinking: Impossible, cougars and leopards originate on different continents and, thereby, will never be observed fighting. And you’d be right in your facts but, come on, this is the age of globalization and anything is possible.

How about in a zoo? Most zoos are pretty good at keeping the animals in their respective habitats, but there has to be at least one shoddily-constructed zoo out there. Like, say…o.k., here’s a scenario. There’s this zoo that was built by a construction company that saved the cat house for last because the cat house is out on the far side of the zoo and it made sense to do it that way, it’s not a conspiracy or anything. But so, when the construction company set to work on the cat house, they got all of the spaces built for, like, the bobcats, the ocelots, the Geoffroy’s cats…no problem, let’s cinch this cat house and go get some beers, the construction workers probably said to each other. And then they realized—they didn’t have enough steel bars to finish the simulated living environments for the cougar and the leopard. One of the guys, though, was really smart, in fact used to own a candy cane factory before an out-of-control addiction to buying cans of steel-colored spray paint drove him to embezzle from his company’s coffer, ultimately leading to his company going belly-up and landing him in as a member of this construction crew. And while everybody else was freaking out, pacing back and forth in front of the feline environments, this guy cleared his throat and said, in a calm and confident voice, “You guys, I have an idea. I have a storage space full of candy canes and an unreasonable amount of steel-colored spray paint….”

The cougar and the leopard had come from the same zoo—zoos in fact, as they were career caged animals and had seen their share of artificial living habitats. And there was some bad blood, as is wont to happen when animals spend a lot of time in captivity, which is not an indictment on the concept of zoos as a whole but is rather a plain fact stated plainly—not every animal can like every other animal, that’s the science of zoology or something. Being career zoo animals, however, it never occurred to the cougar and the leopard that the bars of their cage could be anything less than steel, certainly not a hastily-spray-painted confectionary treat normally enjoyed during the winter holiday season. No way. So they paced their cages, eyeing each other menacingly, day after day.

Until that day.

Of course, we can’t be sure what happened—this being a hypothetical scenario, it could really be anything. I personally like to think that a pudgy kid with olfactory giftings visited the zoo and immediately recognized the “bars” for what they really were—candy—and exposed the ruse with a quick snap and gobble. But if there’s some scene you like better, well…have at it.

The leopard and the cougar, rage fueled even more by the realization that freedom could have been theirs many days/weeks/months/years earlier, wasted no time attacking one another. If zoogoers were present, they surely fled quickly.

Teeth sinking into flesh, rending muscle to tattered shreds. Sinewy tendons flexing and moving like serpents in a canvas bag—not like a reusable grocery bag, but much bigger and tougher, like an old fashioned flour bag that you’d see at a recreated historical scene of a general store or something. Hellish sounds, like, you know…stuff from hell, like metal scraping against metal and, well, giant cats tearing themselves apart limbs by limb, that’s pretty hellish in and of itself. And the blood—oh, the blood. You don’t even want to know about the blood, but suffice to say, there was a lot. Buckets of blood isn’t even an exaggeration in this scenario because there was a lot. A whole lot.

That’s what my writing style is like, a cougar fighting a leopard.

Why Generation-Y Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues - WSJ.com

Of course I think this is bullshit. This article better exemplifies my stance toward digital communications and social networking: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

But I’m glad to see this author, for whom I have zero respect, publishing in the WSJ, a neo-con rag for uninformed sycophants and fuddy-duddies.

I mean, his premise crumbles at the very beginning. He’s talking about middle and high schoolers. Excepting the home-schooled (a demographic that, let’s face it, doesn’t represent the cutting edge of technology and tends to consider cathode rays the devil’s sunbeams), we’re talking about the age group that is forcibly injected into one of the most complicated social constructs ever conceived by mankind. Think about the social interactions you had in high school—the awkward conversations with strangers at the beginning of every school year, the complex dating games, social positioning, friendships. No Facebook account or amount of Tweeting can make that horrid social maelstrom go away, though it can add a new layer to interaction. I guess some people wish for a time when things were simpler, but, in regards to the complexities of social interaction, that time never really existed.

As for the author, he’s currently peddling a book called The Dumbest Generation, a subtle title for a manifesto declaring young people to be not as smart as his generation. This is the stance of most elderly people when looking at a new generation of people being groomed to snatch pocketbooks and skateboard all over lovely beds of petunias. It’s just wrong, but I’m sure I’ll be complaining about the kids and their telepathy-enabled inter-cranial communicative devices when I’m old.

(Please don’t let me get old.)

Radio Friendly Song (via jonlajoie)

(NSFW language, so headphones up.)

Two things about this video.

1. I love curse words. I really do. Being brought up in a conservative Christian climate (alliteration!), I didn’t really get to practice my cursing that much and still feel like only sometimes can I curse with the natural ease of, say, a sailor or city-slick salesman. But even in my more timid days, when my tongue would fearfully wrap itself around a whispered “damn,” I felt that curse words were a necessary part of any dialect and that denying them a place in our daily vocabulary, we deny ourselves a rich history of linguistic evolution. And (because a younger me used to have a lot of Ideas with a capital “I”) that the American tendency to shy away from saucy language reflected our national disinterest in the history of everything that defines our existence.

Obviously, this was before Youtube. Now every human being, even your grandma and your grandma’s pastor, knows that cursing is awesome and hilarious, as exemplified by this video.

2. In my days of writing for money, I always gravitated toward assignments that involved interviewing musicians. It makes sense—I’m a musician, they’re musicians. But some of the assignments involved interviewing people who were not at all like me. (Which is not to say that either of the two parties indicated—me and them—is any better or any worse, in a grand sense. In a commercial sense, of course, they were in fact better than I, as they can effectively produce at least one product that appeals to a wide range of fellow humans, while I sit at home and write songs about farting for my 4-year old daughter.) I’d list a few names, but you wouldn’t recognize them because that’s the nature of one-hit wonders…one’s married to a famous television and movie star, though, so I guess things worked out for him.

But my point is, this guy—who is a very funny man with insights that my funny bone appreciates—has adopted a knowing, wink-wink tone that seems to assume that these radio-friendly rockers are somehow in on the joke. This may be true in some cases, but the vast majority of my interview subjects were totally serious about their craft. While even your grandma’s pastor (who has become quite the connoisseur of popular culture in recent years, aye? Now you walk into his chambers and he’s got in his white iPod earbuds and is laughing at YouTube videos so hard that his Jones soda comes out his nose in a vivid rush of naturally-sweetened carbonation, and he gurgles, “Oh, shit!” and laughs even harder at the irony of his MF Grape-stained white collar, because pastors understand irony now and that’s why our generation is hellbound), even he knows that these people aren’t artists but producers of entertainment, because all performers start out with a drive to garner recognition by exciting the senses and only gradually grow into the role of artist by somehow achieving staying power, and that one hit isn’t exactly a bedrock foundation for a long-lasting career. Your grandma knows this. But this obvious truth (truth? Is there any truth?) eludes the star-struck young performer and infects them with a heart-wrenching sincerity made all the more sorrowful by the cultural knowledge that this young performer will either end up working at their hometown WalMart or being verbally berated by Katherine Heigl.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Actor Piven cleared in sushi row

Normally I avoid the news. Because all the news seems to be bad and gives me nightmares, like last night, when I dreamed that a clawed killer performed a very messy murder in our house (of an unknown third party) and, upon returning home and finding a bloody mess and goat eating what appeared to be an organ of some kind, my family and I were forced to contemplate what our next action would, nay should, be. And then the government called and told us to never speak of this incident, that we were in no danger and they were in control of everything, that apparently Wolverine had gotten a bit sloppy with a mission.

(I don’t know.)

But this morning I opened the newspaper in my Internets browser and was greeted with some good news. Strike that—great news. America’s favorite…uhm, actor? Yeah, actor, Jeremy Piven, has been cleared of all the charges leveled against him by the producers of the play he quit acting in due to mercury poisoning contracted as a result of eating too much sushi. Got it? Doesn’t matter, because the nightmare is over and now Jeremy Piven can go back to…uhm, acting in awesome television and movies.

May tonight’s dreams be untainted by an overwhelming concern for the future of Jeremy Piven’s career. May the nightmares cease forevermore.

I...

…am lazy with this thing, but I’ll keep it b/c, inevitably, I will one day become very prolific on Tumblr.

Pink Limousine (via pigeonjohntv)

Brooklyn tattoo artist files $220M lawsuit against city over alleged sodomy attack by cop

What??! No! NoNoNo!!

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis, Comedy Deathray, and Bradley Cooper

start

Oh, yeah, it is so on.