Six Word Story

In the spirit of this Wired Magazine feature I give you my own six word story (with apologies to Ray Bradbury):

Once, books were printed. Now? Burned.

Heading to Hollywood: #6

The CONTRACTOR, oh, where should I begin?
Blueblocker shades? The beard used as a chin?
The seven inches of expos-ed chest?
The hopeful-hopeless comb-over (the best!)?
So many points there on that tasteless chart
That pointed to a sad and wounded heart:
"That fuckin' bitch," he said with great ado,
"If I see her, I tell you what I do."
He ne'er finished that thought, got too choked up.
"Fuckin' slut. Fuckin', goddamned whore, coked up
Ev'ry day and then, what? She gets it all.
She's laughin' now, yeah, shoppin' at the mall
On my motherfucking Roosevelt dime."
Oh, love's a cliff! The meek, they dare not climb!
"I'll show her, though," he said it more than twice,
"The sun, the sand, the girls. Shit, this sounds nice."
He planned on making cash with swimming pools,
"A great biz: take your time and milk the fools.
'I'm sorry, lady, hit shallow bedrock.
You want it quick, you can just suck my cock.'"
Where was he from? Westchester? Manhattan?
No, sir, from that island they named Staten.

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here.]

Heading to Hollywood: #5

There was a guy, was just about my age.
Figured when he arrived he'd be the rage.
He was a RAPPER, called himself G-man,
And claimed Snoop knew his stuff and was a fan.
I know 'cos he was working on a line
Describing how he'd headed out to find
The fame the five buroughs had denied him.
It was terribly mean and deadly grim.
And also premature, if you ask me,
I'll say it but not claim it's quality:
"You bitches think you know me, suck my dick,
I never showed you nothing, you a trick.
Think I should owe you something, get in line,
Your shit is ugly, fucker, mine is fine."
Yeah, that's what I remember as the best,
(And I won't bother to repeat the rest -
Most all his rhymes, they had an awful slant,
And I was never sure just what they meant.)
I know that I'm supposed to think it's art,
But I prefer that music have some heart -
I'd rather Dylan, Pearl Jam or the Dead
Than any lyric that the rapper said.
Vernacular! Give shit a fancy name
And some claim it and Dante are the same.

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here.]

Southhampton: kitsch

Tara and I stayed in the Hamptons on Labor Day. Southhampton, to be exact. We stayed in the greatest house ever. Look!

Heading to Hollywood: #4

I can hear what you're thinking it's so clear,
"He said it was awful, and yet look here:
Two pretty girls...he thinks he should complain.
This is hell? Only pleasure, no real pain?"
Don't worry friend, the bus it was jam packed
With freaks and oddballs and others who lack
The basic skills possessed by you and me
To sit and drink and talk and simply be.
There was this guy - NEUROTIC to the core.
Always yapping: a monumental bore.
"Excuse me sir," this is just how he spoke,
"Excuse me, but I think the toilet's broke."
You know, first it was too cold, next too hot,
Never happy with that which he just got.
He said that he was rich, but couldn't fly,
A bump or dip would make him scream and cry.
I wished he'd left that nonsense in the air;
He'd hear a noise and like a siren blare.
"Oh, what was that? I think we blew a tire!"
I quickly grew to hate this new town crier.
He wore thick glasses and a mustache wisp,
He spoke in a real high-pitched, whining lisp.
Why would someone like that take such a trip?
What was so important he couldn't skip?
His dad was dying, that's what he said,
Needed to see him before he was dead.
I felt a bit of sadness at his plight,
But mostly I just couldn't stand his sight.

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here.]

Heading to Hollywood: #3

The goddess who was sitting up ahead.
The legs up to her ass, the bleached-blonde head.
There are girls you should bring home to mother,
Her, you would bring home for something other.
(In fact, it really might not be so bad
To keep her out of reach from dear old dad.)
If deified, what would her domain be?
The sun, the moon, the fields, the tranquil sea?
She'd tell you to stuff your past'ral notions,
N'also flush your soporific oceans.
I think she'd be the queen of pounding beats,
Of fishnet stockings worn with schoolgirl pleats.
Ah, she'd be the keeper of metal poles,
Stilettos pointing out from women's soles.
She was a STRIPPER, a gorgeous one who
Had figured she should try out something new.
She was going to give mod'ling a shot,
To see for once if she had "it" or not.
I don't know if she did, but she had me,
And if she'd pitched it, I'd have drunk the sea.

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here.]

Heading to Hollywood: #2

And so we'll start with her, Ms. Riot Grrl,
The UNDERGRAD so certain of the world.
Priv'lege, she could spot from miles away
From Bennington or Sarah Lawrence, say.
She was headed West for some good reason:
To shame the latest crook for some new treason.
Don't stand so close to her, you could get sued;
All pins and politics and attitude.
"Sleater Kinney, who's that?" I mutely thought,
"Someone who'd been imprisoned, maybe bought?"
And yet, despite her efforts she was cute,
Pink hair, ripped jeans, Sontag: a sexy brute.
Too bad she hated me right off the bat
When I kinda stared a touch too long at...

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here]

Heading to Hollywood: Intro

It's 1995. Kurt Cobain is dead, yet grunge is still king. The flannel industry might as well be printing money as checkered shirts. The dot-com boom is ramping up, and jokes about hanging chads are half-a-decade away. And I, lil' k, am a high school student. And in Mr. Greco's English Lit class we read the prologue and a story or two from The Canterbury Tales. Our assignment: write our own prologue to a modern day Canterbury Tales. Being a nerd, I do it and get a kick out of it. Two years later I go to college and sell my prologue and flannel shirts for drug money and a copy of Bob Marley's "Legend."

That's not true, but I did lose the prologue and have always wanted to rewrite it (or redo it anyway, because I don't remember much of it). So, here's what I'm gonna do: At least once a week (hopefully), I'm going to post a bit of what I'll call (for now) "Heading to Hollywood." I will do my damnedest to write it in heroic couplets (more or less) and swear (scouts honor) to try to make it dirty and stupid.

Oh: and as this is being written as I go, it will also be rewritten on the fly. So, minor changes will likely sneak in here and there.

All additions will be linked to on this page.

Prologue:
No. 1 - Opening
No. 2 - The Undergrad
No. 3 - The Stripper
No. 4 - The Neurotic
No. 5 - The Rapper
No. 6 - The Contractor

Heading to Hollywood: #1

The Port Authority, you know it, right?
D'ya know the types you see there 'round midnight?
I'll let you know the truth since we just met,
There's two: the desp'rate and the des-per-ate.
Yeah, I hear bitterness there in my voice:
It was years ago, and without a choice
It comes back to me. The sour Greyhound smell.
The still sourer people - God, was it hell.
"Hell is other people." That how it's put?
That is pretty close to true, I guess, but
Truer still: Hell's a bus that only could
Leave from New York and go to Hollywood.
Ah, bartender, another, si vous plais.
Oh wait. What was I just about to say?

It left at midnight, that awful, reeking bus,
And bleary-eyed we stumbled on. All of us,
I think, believed that we would find new life.
(New job, new love, new start...a new ex-wife.)
We'd cast our foolish plans and petty schemes
There on that sunny coast made up of dreams,
(Yes, yes, I know it's a bit of a cliche
And yet for certain dreams, the only way.)
What dream was mine, you wonder? We'll get there.
First ev'ry tale should have a maiden fair.
Mine has two: there's a harlot and a shrew.
I like to hear the bad news first, don't you?

[To head to the Intro and Contents for "Heading to Hollywood" click here.

Other Things Justin Timberlake Considered Bringing Back before he Settled on Sexy:

- Crystal Pepsi
- The "u" in "flavour" [US only]
- LBJ's Great Society
- Helen of Troy
- The Latin Mass

[placeholder: from the miss teen usa pageant]

[laughing is not a hobby.]

Other TV Show Political Groups

The media is going crazy for "South Park" Republicans. Here are some other groups that the media hasn't mentioned.

- "Deadwood" Greens
- "Captain Planet" Right-to-Lifers
- "Blossom" Whigs
- The First Eight or Nine Seasons of "The Simpsons" Libertarians
- "20/20 Downtown" Socialists
- "Cop Rock" Democrats

[review what i wrote]

Click here to read my review of The Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine."

Teenagers who listen to

Everyone is talking about this study, and how it suggests that teenagers who listen to sexy music are more likely to have sex. But no one is discussing the other results:

- Teenagers who listen to The Arcade Fire are more likely to own ironic clothing.
- Teenagers who listen to U2 are more likely to care about stuff...and things.
- Teenagers who listen to Frank Sinatra are more likely to make it past the first round of American Idol, even thought they don't really deserve it.
- Teenagers who listen to "The Big Chill" soundtrack are more likely to actually be my parents.
- Teenagers who listen to unsexy music are more likely to have unsex.
- Teenagers who listen to Elvis Costello are more likely to complain about his recent, genre-hopping work.
- Teenagers who listen to The Grateful Dead are more likely to be living in a past that they never experienced.
- Teenagers who listen to John Mayer are more likely to write bad poetry about fucking unicorns or some other lame shit.

Things that Need an International Standards Group, No. 1: Ratings

If you open up Time Out NY, you may be surprised to find out that they give up to six stars in their reviews. Six. Six Stars. Then you have the Times Dining section, which, on a Michelin-like scale gives up to four stars, but getting one means "good" (Confusingly, readers on the website rate on five star scale, with completely different meanings. Look here. See!). New York Magazine gives five stars...but is also on a Michelin-style scale (where, in typical New York Magazine form, five stars equals "ethereal, almost perfect." Almost! Ha! Like: "Nothing could live up to the Platonic ideal of what a restaurant should be."). Then you have movies, which are usually up to four star reviews...except when they aren't, Netflix with five. There are also only three possible states to two thumbs: two up, two down, one up/one down. But one of them belongs to Roeper, so you can immediately ignore it. The other belongs (or belonged?) to Ebert, and you can just read his (up to four star) reviews. Rolling Stone has up to five stars for everything (including terrible albums by great rockers). Then you have the up to 10.0 review offered by Pitchfork (Art Brut's most recent album got an 8.9. Eight-point-nine. That's just fucking priceless). The up to 100 review for most game magazines. The much-cribbed three-star Michelin guide. Metacritic, which converts everything to "out of 100," anyway. The helpful, but not quite objective Allmusic with up to five. And the Village Voice...with letter grades - for music, anyway.

I propose: An International Standards Group for all criticatorial services. I also propose that said group force all publications to either adopt a standard four star or Michelin three star rating system. What most of these places refuse to acknowledge is that a four star review means something (and not just in a 4/4 = 100 kind of way). It has a certain cultural meaning. "This is a four (or three or two or one) star movie" makes sense to me. "This is a five out of six star movie" does not make sense. Dear critics, at your core, you provide a service. Don't make my understanding of your service more difficult than it should be.

[placeholder: mystic, ct]

Spam Biography: Beulah Ali

[Spam Biography: a biography is produced based solely on the fake name attached to a piece of mail that winds up in the Spam folder of my gmail account.]

Beulah Ali was born Beulah MacAlister in Belzoni, MS in either 1897 or 1898 to a farmer named Padrig MacAlister and his wife, Meaghan. She would later describe her childhood as "Small people living small lives in a small town. It was alright." In 1914, she won the title "Miss Saw Mill" and was sent to Cologne, Germany to represent American industry in the 1914 World's Fair (The infamous "Werkbund Exhibition," in which the first German-designed tanks were "jokingly" pointed directly at Serbia's table and sole representative - generally considered a small, but important incident in the run-up to WWI.). While there, Beulah met and fell in love with Jacques "Scimitar" Ali, the knife juggler at The Ottoman Empire's "Healthy Man of Europe!" Pavilion. As war broke out around them, Jacques and Beulah fled to his native Paris (Jacques was a French citizen of aristocratic extraction who had been hired by the Ottoman Empire for his robust mustache and willingness to change his last name) and were hastily married on the steps on Notre Dame.

Unfortunately, Jacques was drafted and sent to the front within weeks of their arrival in Paris. Beulah eked out a living by singing in clubs at night and weaving bandages for the war effort during the day. As the war dragged on, Beulah became well-known for her cabaret act, a set of self-penned songs in a mix of English and French that detailed - in quite explicit language - how happy she'd be when her husband returned from the trenches. She recorded "That Shot'll be Heard 'Round the World" in August 1918, on the eve of Allied victory. It became the unofficial anthem for the end of hostilities and the homecoming of millions of soldiers. Unfortunately, her own husband, Jacques, perished on the battlefield days before the Armistice. Beulah never recovered. She wrote and recorded a handful of songs after receiving the news, but destroyed the masters before they could be released. "They were my love letters to Jacques. I didn't want anyone to hear them," she said.

She retreated from the world, living in a small apartment in Montmartre off royalties and the kindness of a still appreciative public. She died in 1942 while working on her first new songs in over two decades. Only "Vichy Victory," a scathing critique of French collaborationism, was released. While suppressed, it became popular abroad and among the resistance. At her request, her body was interred in her family's cemetery in her native Mississippi. "Since I can't be with Jacques," she said, "Mississippi seems as bad as anywhere else."

Time Out...Time Out NY

This summer, Time Out NY has thrice (thrice!) gotten me to buy it with an interesting looking cover story. The first promised "Food Getaways." Now, when I think "Getaway," I think short, easy (e.g., "Go to Philly, and hit these ten spots over a weekend to become a cheese steak connoisseur."). They were, instead, offering advice on full-fledged vacations (e.g, "Fly to North Carolina, rent a car, drive two hundred miles to a strip of restaurants that's BBQ Heaven."). Since, I'm not sure if getaway really has the connotation of being quick and easy, I let it slide. Then, I bought an issue that promised interesting "staycations" in New York City. Y'know when I should have known that it was not going to be great? When it had the word "staycations" on the cover. Anyway, most of the "staycations" were kind of hectic and jam-packed (one would do a lot of subway riding) and fairly expensive...and kind of lame.

Last week's issue's cover says: "Why didn't we think of that?! How to make New York better by stealing the best ideas from other cities." I looked up, read that, and thought, "Hey, that's interesting." And I bought it. And most of the ideas are kind of bad. Or at least not needed. So, I'll provide a rebuttal for their top five bad ideas.

1. Downtown Minneapolis has tubes connecting buildings, so pedestrians stay warm in the winter.
Bad idea because: Minneapolis has a population of less than 400,000, and it has a longer, harsher winter. In other words: suck it up. The cost of building sky tubes to accomodate the millions of people in Midtown Manhattan including commuters and tourists for a (relatively) mild winter seems like it would be gigantic. Also: have you been to Yankee Stadium and walked through the tube that connects the parking lot? That shit is ugly.

2. We need something like London's Hyde Park, where people can stand on a soapbox and make fools of themselves.
Bad idea because: If you want to exercise free speech in NYC, make like the Black Israelites or Moondog and find a busy intersection. We don't need a publicly sanctioned, tourist-ridden spot to do it.

3. Herring is a popular snack in the Netherlands. We need herring as a snack food in New York City.
Bad idea because: You looked around NYC and decided that what it needs is herring? What? What! Herring? Fah!

4. Paris closes down an important road, fills it with sand on the Seine, and creates a beach. We should do that on the FDR.
Bad idea because: Maybe not a bad idea, just a really, really unnecessary one. Paris is landlocked. It's like 3 hours from the ocean (according to google maps). New York is not. Coney Island. Rockaway Beach. Orchard Beach. Knock yourself out. Wait: the French do this in August. Aren't the French famous for taking the month of August off? Meaning, wouldn't traffic be a million times worse in NYC, because not everyone is on vacation. I change my vote: bad idea. Bad idea.

5. We need a Waffle House!
Bad idea because: Don't you want to at least pretend that New York is special? That it's an individual place? You're suggesting that what New York needs is the regional chain that you visited when you were hungover in college? C'mon! Go to a diner or a coffeeshop.

This leads me to my real problem with the article. I'm not one of those "New York ain't New York if it ain't dirty" people, but New York is not just the sum of its parts. It has a character, and the people who wrote the article, in several places, just didn't account for that. This is worrying, because they, working for a publication that covers New York, should be best informed as to what makes New York special, and how it can be improved. Look at it like the Galapagos: New York evolved diners and coffee shops to fill the same evolutionary niche the Waffle House does in the South. Enjoy them. If you want to kill off all the finches by importing competitors, go for it, you heartless wretch. I don't.

[placeholder: mao's little, yellow arcade fortune]

[placeholder: tickets! tickets! tickets!]