SFW (Sucker!... or I guess it depends on your job?)

There’s actually a Hungarian porn star named Simony Diamond. That’s the most philosophically and ecumenically complicated name for a porn star maybe ever. If you're going to go to hell, I guess, you might as well shoot yourself out of a giant heretical slingshot. Made she can even get some of herself in the devils's eye or hair or whatever, you know, as payback.

"Gotcha, Satan!"

I love how the wikipedia entry for simony, "the ecclesiastical crime of paying for offices or positions in the hierarchy of a church," has "for the actress, see Simony Diamond" at the top. Also, she is a week younger than I am to the day, yet she's made so much more of her life than I have of mine. She's got 167 actress credits on IMDB, including: Fuck Fighters, Eurolegal Cum Suckers, Private Pearls: the Best Scenes of the Year 2005 (Congratulations, Simony! What an honor!), Ass Wide Open 6 (emphasis added), and, one of her last films before she retired last year, Anal Antics. I'll bet that was exhausting.

*Edit* Her younger sister, Susie Diamond, is also a pornstar who has appeared in such films as Sports 9: Paintball Warriors, Share the Load 3, My First Black Cock (despite having earlier appeared in White Bubble Butt Sluts, which came out via porn company Black Ice -- this seems somehow suspect), How's That Big Cock Gonna Fit In My Ass (it really seems like I'm making these up, but I'm not), Black in that Ass 7, and Big Black Beast 2. Wow, I'll be that was exhausting, too.

Three divided by twenty-three is point one three zero four.

So Jim Carrey was in the Charlie Kaufman-written Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Charlie Kaufman was played by Nic Cage in Adaptation, which was also written by Charlie Kaufman.

Nic Cage also played Donal Kaufman, who in Adaptation wrote a script for a thriller called The Three. In The Three, it turns out the killer and the good guy are really the same person, but he can't control himself. It was ostensibly intended as a parody by Charlie Kaufman of the types of things people with integrity don't do.

There are currently trailers everywhere for a new Jim Carrey movie, called The Number 23, in which Jim Carrey plays a man who is haunted by the number twenty three (sample dialogue: "two divided by three, six six six... the number of the devil"). Jim Carrey cannot control himself, and becomes a deranged killer.

And it's directed by Joel Schumacher, who ruins good concepts routinely. Hell, he ruins great concepts. He ruins everything. Of all the world's crafts and craftsmen, he is the man who crafts the least well whatever it is that he happens to craft.

I can't wait for them to bump into each other in the street. How deliciously awkward.

Raw, I'ma give it to you, with (some) trivia

Gene Hackman does voiceovers for Lowes commercials. Lowes' motto is, "Let's build something together." I would shop at Lowes if Gene Hackman instead said "Let's build something together; just you and me, Gene Hackman!" Wouldn't you?

BOOOOOOM HISSSSS SMACKKKKKKKKK PLISHHHHHH

The 80s were terrible for any number of reasons, thank you very much Mr. President. But one of them really sticks out for me. Stephen Malkmus called ‘em “wet wet drums,” and they were a blight – a blight I say – on America, such as it was. Their insidious legacy, incredibly, lives on, virus-like and stealth, often unmentioned but unmistakable. Hair metal was the worst offender, in the British and Los Angelian studios where attempted Bonham swagger collided with digital-assist compression and non-spring reverb (“hey, dude, ‘verb the snare a little more, it’s not sounding wet enough”) to form musical Voltrons of midrange clutter, like sound waves drawn with fat-tip Sharpees.

(By the way, how awesome is 1) it that Dominic West was rhythm guitarist Kurt Cuddy of hair metalists Steel Dragon in the Marquee Mark starring vehicle Rockstar, 2) The scene in Rockstar where he’s talking to the bass player through the PA in the studio and he’s like, “Can we make it a bit raunchier?” and the bass player says “sounds pretty raunchy in here!” 3) The fact that Dom is now the sexiest Baltimore-dialect spewing cop on either side of the Potomac?)

Dominic West, please be less hot. No, don’t. I am a god of the Photoshop blur.

But the stadiums and arenas weren’t the only venues that suffered at the hands of the wet wet big rock drum. And sometimes big rock drums were actually a handicap that made the story more impressive, like a one-armed tennis player, or a sous chef with no sweat glands. Sonic Youth became the best band ever to have two of the least pleasant musical instruments ever: Kim Gordon’s voice, and Steve Shelley’s snare drum. The Kinks took a dip in the big rock pool on Word of Mouth, their 29th album, of all things, which featured "Do It Again," the best song nobody's ever bothered to care about. Boogie Down Productions’s Scott laRock juggled embarrassingly overblown tom toms on the ones and twos. Big Black cut the problem out at its knees by shooting it so far over the top with Rollie the drum machine that it’s not even funny. Actually, it’s hilarious. I’m convinced Steve Albini’s entire life has been a prank, a bait-and-switch, and that somewhere in there is a decent guy, if he could just drop the mega-elaborate joke upon which he has predicated his very existence.

So here is what would be one of my favorite-of-all-favorite songs (with apologies to Paul Simon’s “Graceland," but man, how do you pick between all the songs on that album for the best song scabbed with big rock drums?), permanently marred in my mind by the production on the kicks and snares and “galloping” toms. Seriously, where do those tom toms think they're going?

Kate Bush – Runnin’ Up That Hill (A Deal With God)

Never For Ever has always been my favorite Kate Bush album. Call it what you will, slight and unassuming, lacking the philosophical and emotive weight of The Dreaming or Hounds of Love. But what it isn’t is ponderous. And I don’t mean pejoratively ponderous (who am I to accuse anything of being ponderous in a bad way). But man, is she good when she’s fresh-faced.

Incredible to think that, just a couple of years later, people were doing this with/to their kits.

Naked Raygun – Soldier’s Requiem

Sometimes, no money is good money. I'm obsessed with this guy's fills.

Sartor Resartus

I wonder if the phrase "a nosegay in the buttonhole" sounded as funny to Henry James as it sounds to me. He just keeps using it.

And the survey SAID, you're DEAD!

I decided it would be a good idea to do a live-to-looped cover of my favorite Wu Tang song, then make a music video for it. So here it is. Me doing Wu. Don't worry about fucking with me, though. I am full well fuckwitable.

From now on, I’m fucking Macs and using Dudes.

In the last ten years, I’ve only got mad enough to punch the shit out of inanimate objects on occasions that involved either women or IBM compatibles. And yet, for whatever reason – call it brand loyalty – I have stood steadfastly by both.

Perhaps it’s their flashy complexity. The sense of overcoming an obstacle that you get from conquering something that isn’t very user-friendly. Maybe it’s the way some of the cases light up red, and their packaging is frosted and S-curved and gaudy, not at all like the simple class-act monochrome geometry of the Apple-cum-Man. Maybe it’s the way there’s more than one button on the PC mouse, and you can draw out endless combinations of graphical and audio effects by double-clicking them and squeezing them in different combinations. And it’s not that you can’t drag-and-drop a Mac or a dude – it’s just, the pyrotechnics are strictly functional, and not at all for show.

My retort to Republicans used to be, “Hey, look, if using Macs was a choice, why would you choose it?” But now, I think I get it. PCs suck. And if using a Macintosh is a choice, I’m going to see if I can make it. Because let’s face it, Heaven is pretty much out of the cards for me. This isn’t going to send me to Extra Hippy Hell, where the kids who pretend they don’t have trust funds are forced to spend an eternity living lavish lifestyles and driving $90k cars, and the kids who once thought about kicking a cat have to kick a cat once a minute for infinity minutes. I'm on my way to regular Hell with the rapists and murderers and non-Islamicists.

Conventional wisdom used to say that you could only catch viruses from guys, but it turns out the easiest way to get them is fucking around on a PC. As it happens, the Windows platform is a festering hotbed of scabs and sores and purulent boils, warts and off-colored discharge and itches that you can’t scratch away. Milling around like idiots are the overpowered white blood cells and clueless antibodies, antiviral armies that open their knees wiiiiiide for the Trojan Horse. Fuck me, wood horse, fuck me with your drip-dripping flaming hot spyware horse cock. I like the way it feels with no firewall. Sometimes you can even shoot a squirrel over the castle gates (shout out to Monty Python).

I installed Service Pack 2 on my Dell yesterday, the notoriously worthless update for Windows XP that all your friends seem to resent. It’s like a computer engagement ring. It makes the thing far less valuable, far less functional, but ultimately more in tune with the way Microsoft, for our purposes the Catholic Church, says things should be. I only downloaded it so I could use Windows Movie Maker, which only comes with SP2, but which, oddly enough, did not install itself on my computer when I installed SP2. The only thing that happened when I installed SP2 was, my computer started freezing every fifteen minutes, and wouldn’t play any video or audio files, or even open any players for video or audio files. Call it going out with the boys for a beer. It’s out of the question now that you’ve got the Service Pack. Sure, allegedly it’s insurance that your computer stays “clean,” doesn’t get “infected,” but we all know that it’s just cosmetic. Pure in name only. My internet browsers won’t open, either. I can’t even see tits. It just mills around in a big retarded circle, making sounds like a vacuum and complaining that the neighbors have a refrigerator with an internet connection and when am I going to get promoted.

At the same time, my dad just bought this $4k Mac video editing workstation that’s the computer equivalent of an 18-year-old Dominican poolboy. I’m feeling feelings I never knew I could feel. Feelings of lust, but also of power. Feelings of sympathy, but also violent passion. Feelings of difference and strangeness and new wonder, but also feelings of lascivious anger and preternatural heat, heat coursing through me like I were an ovulating chinchilla. And it doesn’t feel wrong, it doesn’t feel right, it just feels necessary, like this is what God wants for me. And right or wrong, I hear the call, and I’m going to follow it. He's there for me. He wants me to use him. I have to use him. I call him Enrique.

Well, no more of the weaker sex, friends. As soon as I can save up $4k, I’m buying a Macbook and a bus ticket to San Francisco, and I’m starting a whole new life. You’ll know me when you see me – I’ll be the one happily strolling down the streets with trademark white earbuds tickling my pleasure centers with their firm, knobby fingers, telling me exactly what I want to hear, not because I want to hear it, but because it’s the right thing to do. Who’s coming with me? Don’t worry too much, I can always come by myself.

Pith

Sometimes I get the urge to call the 8,300 girls I used to be in love with one by one and ask if they're as fat as their moms yet. Y'know?

Marge... I think I hate Ted Koppel! No, wait, I find him informative and witty. G'night.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve disliked Andy Rooney. Y'know, the guy who’s apparently paid enough dues to get the last 5 minutes of 60 Minutes to talk about whatever he wants. We all know that people start to get insufferably inflexible when they hit the 300 year mark, but the dude just went on a rant about how George Bush mispronounces “Nuclear” (punchline: “You’d think the first lady, or maybe a doorman at the White House, would tell him how it’s pronounced. It makes you wonder how he graduated Yale”). Now, I’m never against a cheap shot at the president, but people have been making fun of him for this for years. It's about as fresh and topical as pointing out that Nixon was, in fact, a crook. He, the president, has made fun of himself for it on at least two occasions that I can remember, and I hate nothing more than people who rip into other people for their publically admitted flaws. That's why you're not allowed to call me ugly, bitch. It's just all kinds of lame. I'm not against lame in and of itself, but when the point is wit and the result is lame and you're not even self-effacing about it, you're officially on my shitlist. If you can't get it up, don't go on national television and try to jerk off.

Not to mention, if Bush actually did start pronouncing the word right, every single comedian and smartass, myself and Andy Rooney included, would jump down his throat or up his ass or both for being inauthentic and pretentious and we’d all gloat that he finally “learned his lesson,” which is why people hate to admit they've learned lessons, even when they have: because when they do, jerkoffs gloat about it. There’s nothing worse than people acting high and mighty when all they’re reflecting is conventional wisdom. "Oh, yeah, Bush is finally pronouncing 'nuclear' right. God, what an idiot! It only took him seven years as President of the United States!" You would keep pronouncing that shit wrong too. When our junior high class took a trip to D.C. and I saw the Magna Carta in the glass case, the Ye Olde Cursive "C" looked like a "G" to me. So, on the bus, when I mentioned to my friend the Magna Garta, and he told me that's not what it was at all, I was like, "Dude, I have a cold. Of course I know it's actually the 'Magna Carta! But, you see, I'm ill, and so I pronounce 'C's as 'G's." And I stood by that shit until, like, right now.

And strike 3 against Rooney: we all know how easy it is to slide through college with Cs. It’s not like Yale is some kind of superman academy. Just because the children of the rich and powerful get in, doesn’t mean they’re run through some kind of academic gauntlet to test their mettle. It’s college, for chrissakes. The halls of higher learning are populated by 72% statistically retarded people, just like every other kind of halls. I’m just saying, it’s amazing to me that this man makes probably high-6/low-7 figures to make the jokes that high school sophomores were making 6 years ago when Bush got his sorry self elected. Impeach Bush and Andy Rooney. Or, better yet, just force them to switch jobs. I would love to see Andy Rooney try to do something that I care about at all, and I would love to hear 5 minutes of Bush’s thoughts on partially hydrogenated soybean oil in foodstuffs and the sexual dalliances of the jetset. Why not?

Actually, you know what? Here's to Andy Rooney, the world's premier video blogger! Go Andy, go Andy, go!

Deerhumper

Whether or not Killdozer was better than Architecture in Helsinki or Deerhoof (they weren’t even close -- not exactly), the fact remains, they were Pigfucker. Hyper-prog? Thank you very much, Pitchfork, for coming up with the worst subgenre name ever, and drilling us with it like Major Payne until it stuck. Jesus. It should have just been called "Deerhumper."

Killdozer - The King of Sex
"I am the King of Sex, and I come from the state of Texas... Neither Christ nor the Holy Ghost can quite satisfy a woman's soul."

Where today are the album titles like Intellectuals Are the Shoeshine Boys of the Ruling Elite, or The Uncompromising War on Art Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat? At least Reagan was, in some respects, a worthy adversary (before he lost his shit and his mind). He elicited rage, too, but it was a kind of smoldering slow-burn rage, a rip-a-tooth-out-of-your-own-mouth rage, a little more bilious, but also a little more flip. You had to be sarcastic, because he was too smart to be chopped down with axes. Liberals were like Kierkegaard to his Hegel. Nowadays it’s all this hyperactive sense of superiority that people use to cover up their insecurity. It’s all Ex-Congressman Huckabees going “The most important thing is the sanctity of human life, and I will always err on the side of life, and make sure gay people cannot get married because so many normal, and by normal I mean real, and by real I mean heterosexual marriages are failing [because, as per most of the world's problems, it’s the fault of gay people that straight people cannot stay married] and the most important thing is that life is precious and we need to kill our enemies, that's the most important thing.”

Are things better than they were? Maybe, maybe not. But the important thing is, they’re not as good as they could have been. Because, god damn it, where's the give-take? Where's the satire? Where's the Piledriver? Where's the Killdozer?