can it be that it was all so simple then

when did it all go wrong for #12?

scumbags

Today's word is: scumbags. Scumbags have hacked Dennis Cooper's blog site—probably one of the best blog sites out there. The author of Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period (collectively, the George Miles Cycle), The Sluts, and, most recently, God Jr., Cooper maintained a blog that was one of the best sources of information on the the whole J.T. Leroy blow-up last fall, which I followed pretty religiously as I traveled back east on I-80. Hopefully blogspot's servers have a temporary backup of his information and writings (of which there was a ton), but for now, he's rebuilding his blog at dennis cooper-the weaklings.

the tyranny of distance

update: 11.15.06
Pretty much all day today I've been getting these angry Myspace bulletins from my friends in San Francisco about this WTO press release and its proposal to introduce a form of what it calls "compassionate slavery" into Africa. The release is based on a conference held by WTO representative Hanniford Schmidt at the Wharton Business School in Philadelphia, and its contents range from the outlandishly insulting to the absolutely ridiculous. Among the notable quotes:

"Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.

"Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he [Schmidt] said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care. With each life valuable from start to finish, the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."

Each time, he [Schmidt] noted, the trade has brought tremendous wealth to the West but catastrophe to Africa, with poverty steadily deepening and ever more millions of dead. "So far there's a pattern: Good for business, bad for people. Good for business, bad for people. Good for business, bad for people. That's why we're so happy to announce this fourth phase for business between Africa and the West: good for business—GOOD for people."

"This is what free trade's all about," said Schmidt. "It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."

After reading the article I could see how quick the left would be to jump on this. Of all the evil organizations to rail against, the current Republican administration, pharmaceutical companies, the automobile industry, and the WTO are in the top five. And with WTO reps making comments like the last one above ("It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."), it becomes an even easier target, a figurative untapped oil well to fuel the hatred of corporations for left-wing reactionaries, peace punks and anarchists. But one quote is key here:

One conference attendee asked what incentive employers had to remain as stewards once their employees are too old to work or reproduce. Schmidt responded that a large new biotech market would answer that worry. He then reminded the audience that this was the only possible solution under free-market theory.

There were no other questions from the audience that took issue with Schmidt's proposal.

The quote, while pretty mild in terms and relations of the other outrageous proposals in the press release, should be significant as a red flag. On the one hand, it shows that the WTO's prominence and authority over trade and its ambition over control of the world's industries cannot be questioned. Intelligent people in the audience didn't seem to find any problem with a proposal of formal slavery in Africa, the idea of helping third-world countries by, in a sense, giving people (i.e. corporations) in first-ones an ability to feel "empowered" by doing so.

To some people, it should have raised another red flag—one more akin to a corporate wink and nod. There's a group called the Yes Men who have, in the past, impersonated representatives of the WTO at various high-level conferences in Europe, proposing equally ridiculous ideas and garnering similar response (one proposal in Geneva was to outfit corporate managers in a gold lycra suit, with vibration sensors on the ass to monitor employee morale, as well as this big phallic projection that extended from the crotch of the suit with a monitor at the end facing the wearer of said suit, presumably to watch employees over closed-circuit surveillance) from the audience. That is, very little. Some murmurs, some concealed giggling (at the revelation of the suit [underneath a tear-away business suit]), some note taking, but no questions. It's possible that the audience was so baffled they didn't know where to start, but part of the Yes Men's M.O. is to show just how far organizations can go without being questioned as an authority. The other part of their M.O. is this: "Identity Correction: Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else." (Quote taken from their site.)

[Aside, the Yes Men have a movie: The Yes Men Movie. And here is a pic I stole of the suit:

End aside.]

On the other side of that are the fooled, in this case, the left wing. On the one hand they were so quick to pounce on the WTO and its ridiculous propositions that lines like, "Those who don't like whaling can purchase rights to specific whales or groups of whales in order to stop those particular whales from getting whaled as much," failed to register as satire. The same way that very-intelligent backers of free trade were exposed by the Yes Men's antics as WTO representatives as passive and unquestioningly supportive of the WTO, no matter how fucking retarded their claims were, the November 15 press release showed a lot of otherwise intelligent lefties as visceral, and sometimes naive, reactionaries. They read the outrageous proposals and their hearts raced and blood pressure jumped. They also took what the WTO says at face value. I'm no fan of the right or corporations, but this time, the joke is on the left.


you've been had guys. sayonara.

random notes: check out the similarities of the pages

real WTO page

Yes Men page

also: i just realized i've entered the real world of blogging. which sucks. blogging has ruined the writing market. everyone who has one of these thinks they're a writer. i just helped put myself out of a job. there's no money in writing anyway. top picture: image i made for a mix-tape. photo from a cross-country airplane shot on chrome with yashica t-5.

have you seen this man?

come back scottie. come back and skate. i'll lend you that 25 cents you wanted. oh yeah, why do you look like donnie darko in your mugshot?

K.H.

run motherfucker run.

people gettin' married

edit: updated 10.29

my boy brian got married this weekend to his girl juliana and it was a hell of a wedding. man i had a shitload of fun and so did brian because he was tearing the shit out of that dancefloor. i'm drunk now, and gotta go to work in a few hours, but i'll post up more pics as i get them. congrats to those two.

ps. my boy ben got married last weekend but i don't have any pics of that. hooray for ben.

pps. i have more pic of brian's wedding, but i'm too drunk to upload them right now... so tomorrow i'll hook up more.

here we go:

oh snap, bronco on the loose

danny d rockin out

anthony and tyler outside the church

joey and laurie outside too

me and ben outside smoking... trying to steal a free limo ride

rahmer burning it down on the dance floor

zack getting down while waitng for tyler to ask him to dance

laura and the sex panther aka billy

brannon and some broad he brought; i don't know her name

me drunk and ernie having a ball...

until joey sends me flicks, that's it...

season of the siccness got me brooding

well fucking A. it's 3AM again. i can't ever go to sleep early. anyway, i actually got off my ass and did something i said i was going to do and wrote a piece for fanzine on Bill O'Reilly and the Republican preemptive strike in anticipation of losing the House and Senate in three weeks. north korea, log cabin republicans and the bush administration are all in cahoots to thwart republican's chances in november—well, according to bill o'reilly's logic. i should probably change the title to Preemptive Strike. also, if anyone wants to give me a late birthday present, i'm currently needing this video: Brotha Lynch Hung: Ghetto Celebrities.

try to be nice and look what it gets ya

i was at the bus stop on 11th and cherry today waiting to get on the bus back to nyc. this lady starts talking to me. i could tell from her voice she was a little fucked up and on something. she asked me to help her carry this big bag onto the bus for her. i carried her stuff onto the bus and tossed my bag onto the middle part of the bus. "go to the back of the bus," she said. so i carried her stuff to the back of the bus. i say, "ok, see ya" and she grabs my hand and starts rubbing it saying something like, "oh, you don't want to sit back here with me?" and trying to get me to come back there, which i didn't really want to do, but she wouldn't let go of my hand. she says her name is Toya. finally the bus-lady came on and asked for our tickets and started yelling at Toya to get off the bus. i guess she knew Toya didn't have a ticket. she says to me, "oh, i'm gonna run to the store real quick i'll be right back. what's your number?" i gave her a fake number and she got off the bus and i was praying she wouldn't come back on, urging the bus to take off before she had a chance. then instead this cute girl came on and sat behind me. she looked like someone i used to know, but she had glasses and this red lipstick on, which the s.i.u.t.k. probably never wears(i totally have a thing for cute girls in glasses). i never get to talk to the one i want. the only people who talk to me are (a) hookers; (b) cops pretending to be hookers; or (c) agents of creditors pretending to be hookers.

abating the inevitable

the above photo is pretty much famous now. it is significant for two reasons: one, it's me and and my nephew phoenix when he was almost 1, reading hustler at my brother's house when he lived in LA. today (10.10) is his second birthday, so happy birthday to my main little man. two: the author of this photograph of infamy is my best friend sarah, who went to LA with me to see a taping of the price is right. today (10.10) is also her birthday, so happy birthday, sarah.

i'm trying to get back updating this thing because i know nobody is reading it and i need some exercise in futility that doesn't have anything to do with: (a) trying to meet interesting women in brooklyn; (b) the fanzine; (c) the fanzine's long-drawn-out tax status; (d) cutting my own hair; (e) national and world politics; (f) internet pornography. i always try to update this blog late at night, so before i get distracted by (f), i'm trying to force myself to do an update for all you non-readers out there. first, i updated the maine trip finally with some brief observations of peak's island and my times spent there. two, i don't want to take away from the post i made earlier today, with the always great billy bragg doing "waiting for the great leap forward" (updated for these times) on craig ferguson's show a couple nights ago, so i'm leaving that as its own post. watch it and have a better day.

i have a couple short pieces lined up for fanzine this week: one—actually both—related somewhat to the billy bragg video. they're still brewing somewhat, but i need to get them done pretty quickly before the news goes stale. i wrote up a couple of news items about them on fanzine. one is an extension of my piece on the north korean ICBM test this summer and a somewhat satirical look at their recent nuclear test (was it or wasn't it?) and bill o'reilly's assertion on monday that north korea and iraq/iran (to him, they're the same country... so probably about half the country also believes this... FOX is where most of the country learned osama bin laden and saddam hussein were brothers-in-arms right? that they both planned 9.11? right?) are attempting to influence next month's elections by increasing violence and detonating nuclear devices. terrorists would love to defeat bush and weaken america, and installing democrats into congress and the house of representatives by any means necessary is a surefire way to do that. democrats, in the essence of o'reilly's argument here, are just like terrorists—putting them into office means a weaker america that's more open to terrorist attacks, and the two go neatly hand-in-hand as a sort of puppet regime, one can suppose. and following this line of reasoning, so are denny hastert and his fumbling crew of clowns.

meanwhile, there are over 2700 U.S. soldiers dead in iraq (we don't even bother counting the tens of thousands of dead iraqis as a result of the war), and millions of people back in the states have been affected by their absence, deaths, post-war trauma, the futility of fighting a war we are increasingly realizing we cannot win and despite numerous official assertions to this effect as well as the fact that we can't turn back, our republican leaders hold fast to their (unfounded) ideals and (wrong) beliefs that ultimately we will triumph.


take comfort, all you worried souls. we got this: flat daddies, almost as good as the real thing.

i also want to do a closer look at the YouTube/Google merger. Google bought YouTube, the source for this blog's, and countless others' video links and sourcing, on Monday for $1.65billion (mostly in stock options), harkening back the to early nineties' dot.com explosion and securing google's place as the leader of pretty much everything public on the Internet. however, it also means a lot of combing for the new YouTube, since companies have been dying to sue the fuck out of them for copyright infringement pretty much since they started (think of how many tv/movie clips you've dug around and linked from there... hell there's five of them on my myspace acct. already and i just posted another one earlier) and now that they're owned by Google, the biggest moneymaker in recent virtual history, there needs to be some big changes if Google expects to keep most of that money. it's likely YouTube will lose some of its teeth while under the responsibility of Google—even if they had enough money to handle the thousands of copyright infringement suits, they probably wouldn't. i like Google, and i love YouTube, but this brings G one step closer to owning the Internet.

what the fuck. i'm leaving myself pretty open to getting my shit stolen, but everybody is a fucking "writer" these days. which is probably why i can't get a real job. blogging has made everyone a writer, everyone is their own editor. this is why i see listings for jobs that will pay me 50 cents a page for articles. fuck this. give me a real fucking job.

oh yeah, got exterminated two weeks ago. kate ended up doing almost $50 worth of laundry. i did about $12 worth and was bummed, but didn't think i had room to complain. so far we haven't had any bed bug issues or seen any, though earlier i thought the two i caught a couple weeks ago had escaped. hopefully they never come back. oh yeah, i think i got crabs from the strippers in AC.

all hail the youtube juggernaut

Okay, I know I've been slacking on this blog for the past week. But here's some news: Google buys YouTube for $1.65b. Should be some story on this.

Other news of high importance: all hail Billy Bragg on Craig Ferguson's late show.

more tk, with maine update.

slacking off

i didn't forget about the heroic asshole aspect of this blog. i'm pondering who to do next: john becker or archie bunker, who is pretty much the prototype. though gary is tellling me to do wayne arnold, but i really can't think of anything redemptive about him just yet. been really busy with Fanzine stuff since i got back from maine. our listings in NYC and SF really went to shit this summer, and now that casey is somewhat back from his three-month coke and poetry binge, he's slowly getting back into Fanzine. still kind of annoying. "did it ever occur to you that maybe i would like to go do coke and fuck girls and stay up til 5AM (not because i'm working) having fun? no, i bet that never crossed your mind..." ah well. it's a paraphrase from bottlerocket. more TK. i'm way behind.

picture: nothing special. digging around in old folders and found this one of emily and megan at golden gate park a couple summers ago. 2004 i think. my pic with emily's fancy camera.

maine

updated: 10.10.06

old stuff: was so pissed about delta i didn't even get to the part when i was actually in maine. here's some pics from branden's wedding last year because i don't have the energy to write more at the moment. i'm still mad.


my grandparents at the hall where my cousin had his wedding reception. wish i took this one. don't know who did, most likely a family member of some sort. someone take credit for it. i was off getting drunk.


me and branden on mary's mother's bike. wedding outfits were pretty wacky, but yo it wasn't my wedding so it's cool. i think the last time i wore those pants was in high school. branden got his the day before the wedding. good times.

[edit: photos were taken by my other cousin's wife, pamela, who also used to go out with this asshole matt wright, or wrong as i'd prefer. what does that have to do with her? well... nothing. i just wanted everyone to know he's an asshole, and not of the heroic variety.]

new stuff: ok. it's been a few weeks since the whole delta incident and i think i've finally calmed down enough to talk briefly about the maine trip. Peaks Island is probably the best place i've been to in the last year or so since my cousin's wedding. i can't really articulate what's so great about it, but after six years of living in major cities something about Peak's is so utterly refreshing even though during most of its summer months is very touristy and crowded. i've never been there when it was like this. peak's is two miles off the coast of Portland, in the Casco Bay. you take a ferry to get there, and all along the way you'll see orange floaters with ropes tied to them. at the end of these ropes are lobster traps. they're all over the place. the back of the lobster boats are open, like a pickup truck without the tailgate, and lobster people fish up the ropes and haul the lobster out of the cold, clean water. i'm working on trying to get a job on a lobster boat.

once you get off the ferry you walk up a driveway to a parking lot and a couple stores. we jump in a car. the doors are always unlocked. nobody locks their car doors here, it seems. at least the locals don't. there's a tiny post office and a little market, a gas station that looks like it's reserved for fire trucks, an actual fire station, a library, a bike rental place, a couple of pricey but tasty restaurants, and a elementary school tucked in there somehwere. there's a lot of houses: some of the usual cape cods; some multi-storied beachfront houses with yards and long, winding porches; tacky new houses that stand out like sore thumbs; expensive, obnoxious looking glass houses. there's no code here, no neighborhood standard to tell you what to build, which has its obvious ups and downs. my cousin's house is gray with a spire and a crow's nest platform which is good for smoking cigarettes on. inside there's FIFA06.

FIFA06: this was the source of much competition between my cousin branden and i. i don't know how mary dealt with it most of the time. ever since we've been kids, branden and me have been screaming at each other over video games—the last i remember being goldeneye for the N64, though we'd usually team up with my brother on perfect dark's version of the PvP and fight like 8 or 9 computer controlled characters. i don't really know much about soccer, but i got pretty into the world cup this summer. i picked Barcelona since i know ronaldinho plays for them and that dude eto'o and that lou ferrigno-looking guy puyjols. anyway, we spent hours screaming at each other, cheating, talking ridiculous shit, doing my best not to throw his controller at him, and ultimately the score inched near even after losing the first 8 matches. i know he's up there practicing for the next time i go up, so i have to buy this game.


[ me and branden getting drunk in front of my parent's house at my brother and mari's baby shower a couple summers ago.]

back to the island: me and branden went fishing a couple times on the ocean side. first time we went at night and it was pitch black; the only things we could really see were our smokes and the white crush of waves crashing agains the little rock jetty we were standing on. the water was rough—if we fell in we'd be goners. plus we only had one fishing rod so we both had to take turns smoking and fishing. we caught one striper that night. a couple days later we went in the morning and the sky was bright and sea was blue and cold. this high tide was a lot calmer than the previous venture out, though i'd probably still be doomed if i fell in, but i'd probably die happier. feeling the sun and the cool, clean air, seeing the cliffs and the pine forests of the adjacent islands felt like you were really supposed to be there; not just here on the island, but here—like this is what people should see everyday of their lives: the enormous night sky, the patient air, the tall cliffs and thick trees and the hushed ocean stretching beyond. i couldn't even tag there, though somehow i wanted to know that i'd been there. it's probably the closest i can get to the vertiginous sections of US1 i'd rush off to past pacifica south and muir woods north when i'd have crazy mental breakdowns and stand 200 feet over the ocean and imagine the silence of falling down. anyway... we caught two more fish that day and tossed them back in. me and branden had some fake mexican food in portland, and i'm pretty sure i found a pube in mine (fucking hippies). saw some little punker kids, which for some reason was pretty amusing and fun. caught a plane back to nyc and have been plotting a way to get back ever since.

delta. don't do it.

edited: 9.22.06
just don't. don't do it to yourself. read why.

back in mid-august i bought a ticket to go to portland, maine, off the coast of which my cousin and his wife live on this unspoiled paradise of the north called peaks island. the ticket was $142RT—pretty cheap. i got it through expedia and i was supposed to take off last friday 9.15 at 8.45pm. the flight was through delta, but the actual plane was operated by something called freedom airlines. i was trying to get out of brooklyn and up to maine pretty much all summer long, but because of work stuff and people flaking out i couldn't make it until just this past week. i was dying to get out of here.

i showed up to JFK at around 6.30pm. i took the L to broadway and made a surprisingly easy trip from the A to the airtrain. took about an hour and 15min total from the graham stop, and there was actually some pretty interesting stuff to look at along the way—bunch of huge and ancient cemetaries, some of them completely overgrown by weeds and trees; a ton of graffiti spots and a yard or two with probably about three decades worth of paint on the walls. the delta terminal was a shithole as soon as i walked in—there were 60 people wrapped around in a broken line that in some circuitous fashion led to the ticket counter. i went to the e-ticket checkin and punched in my confirmation number and got some message on the screen: IT IS TOO LATE TO CHECK-IN FOR THIS FLIGHT with another, smaller message that stated my flight left at 12.51am the PREVIOUS morning. obviously there was something fucked up here... i called the delta number and talked to the first of many people from bombay, india (i asked them). the flight was actually delayed until at least 1AM—which didn't work for me since the last ferry to peaks island was at 11.30pm. so i rebooked for the next flight for 1PM on saturday and went home. all around me there were other people whose flights had been cancelled or otherwise inordinately delayed.

saturday. i called delta and talked to bombay, india dude #2. took him like 10min to find my flight info and finally told me my flight was delayed til 1.50pm. i showed up at noon; the delta terminal looked a lot more orderly. i went to the e-ticket check-in. after finding out the flight was delayed to 2.45 i got another retarded message while trying to check in. i waited in line for the counter. i tried to check-in with this delta lady, but she said she couldn't find my flight, my information, and my confirmation number didn't exist. then these people from israel cut in my place in line and the delta lady stopped helping me. then later when she was finished with them, she gave me a boarding pass without a gate number on it. it was just some generic boarding pass to get me out of line. i went through security with no problems.

i got to gate 23 (the gate listed on the tv screens at the airport), and saw somewhere around 200 people crowded around the gate entrance with like three people working. this was the literal end of the airport—the corner where delta shoved all the angry, pissed-on and otherwise disgruntled customers and jerked them around for several hours while their desperate workers scrambled around to find the outgoing airplanes for all these people, whose annoyance was increasing exponentially and sweeping across newcomers to the gate. i had more than 2hrs to wait for my flight out, so i went to burger king, which was probably the worst place i could have gone to. i had these chicken things that i remembered were ok from the last time i ate there, which was around 10 years ago. now they are shaped like cut-out king's crowns and taste like dry newspaper. i went back to gate 23 and saw my flight was delayed again until 3.20pm. the crowd was getting restless.

gate 23 was the area where delta sent all its customers whose flights were delayed or cancelled the previous day (when i called they claimed there were weather problems, which was total bullshit because it had stopped raining in ny at around 4pm on friday). the three delta workers wouldn't even talk to us on the portland flight because our plane was not physically on the ground at JFK. in fact, they had no idea where the plane that was supposed to take us to maine was—as would become clear in the next few hours. they were trying to find the plane to boston. they announced the plane to boston was in the air somewhere and would be here soon. at 3.10pm the screen shifted to 4pm. at 3.50 they announced our plane was in manchester and was getting ready to take off and that we should be ready to leave at 4.30 (again, bullshit: it takes at least an hour to fly from manchester to JFK) and promised an update on the flight status by 4.15. at 4.50 we hadn't heard shit and the flight was now set for 5.20. at 5.30 they changed it to 6pm. at 6pm they announced our long-lost plane in manchester was still in manchester. bullshit. i had enough. the flight was being delayed indefinitely. i got the fuck out of there.

over the course of the day i was on the phone with a bunch of delta people from bombay, india. i talked to them about possible refunds and cancelling the ticket. apparently it was delta policy not to refund tickets until the flight has departed. another told me the only way to get a refund was to talk to someone at the counter. another told me i would not get a refund on anything. another told me i would get a small refund or a voucher for another flight on their shitty airline, and to use this voucer i'd have to give delta 50 bucks (this would later prove to be true). i went to the ticket lady back downstairs and explained what was up and that delta was fucking around and i wanted to cancel my flight and get a refund. "we don't have your money," she said. "expedia does."

i called expedia when i got outside. "we don't have your money," the lady said. "delta does." after about two hours of arguing with expedia and delta, this dude manuel at expedia tracked down some guy at delta named Ian Scott, who turned out to be another indian dude from bombay, india who offered me the voucher that i'd have to pay delta another 50 bucks to use. no thanks, i said. just give me my money back.

delta fucking blows. if there were an asshole company of the year award, they'd be in the top two. they don't have any infrastructure or organization and i'm pretty sure they will be filing for some sort of bankruptcy protection after losing about 1000 customers this past weekend in JFK alone. the upside to all of this is that branden (my cousin) and his wife (mary) bought me a ticket on Jet Blue for later that evening. Jet Blue is the polar opposite of the bullshit that was Delta. diametric opposite. as soon as i got into the jet blue terminal there was no stress. it was well-lit and clean. people were smiling. i had a beer and watched baseball while waiting for my flight, which left exactly on time and arrived in portland early. almost as an intentional "fuck-you" to delta. i got into portland at 10.20pm saturday, 24 hours late.

Red Foreman, heroic assholes take 2

"When I die, I want to be buried face down, so that everyone who doesn't like me can kiss my ass."

update: 9.15
that's my most memorable quote from the dad on that '70s show. admittedly, i didn't watch this show very much when it was on. i knew it was funny, but for whatever reason i never really watched it (reasons vary from: (1) i didn't have a tv; (2) i had a tv but only got like 2 channels; (3) i had a tv but i didn't get any channels; (4) i didn't know when it was on.). well anyway i started watching the reruns in the past few months. foreman is the archetypal, red-blooded american tv dad. he's mostly an asshole to his friends (donna's dad, bob), his wife (when he can), and the kids (the dumbasses). [personally, i want to do with "douchebag" what red foreman did for "dumbass"; that is, make it a household epithet.] aside from being a nixon-lover, red has his redemptive side too—see the episode when hyde's dad comes back and hyde moves out of the foreman house. or the episode when they have to clean out jackie's parent's cabin and red finds a stash of pot on hyde and kicks him out of the house, even though you can tell he doesn't really want to. he's a man of principles—but he's also somewhat beaten down by life. he has a Walter Mitty thing going on with kitty, even though he strives to pretend he's the man of the house, as most men will try to do before finally surrendering any say in the relationhip. anyway... this whole post is kind of silly, but red foreman... he's not number 2 by choice, but rather by merit of the above quote, which bumps him up to somewhere in the top five. i think i'll have that engraved on my tombstone... well... since i plan on being cremated maybe i'll have it engraved on an urn and tossed into the sea.

other stuff... my flight to maine got cancelled by the dicks at delta, who failed to inform me until i was already at the airport. when i tried to do electronic check-in, i got some fucked up message that told me my flight had already left at 12.51 am the previous night. then i called delta to find out what the fuck was going on and i got some some outsourced customer service dude from india who took forever to confirm my flight was cancelled and to tell me the next flight out of JKF wouldn't be for another 5 hours. so i have to fly out tomorrow, which sucks because it's pretty much like losing a day and a half of hanging out in maine. tonight i told alexis i didn't want to talk to her anymore and she sent me some link of steven seagal singing the blues with some backup band. why, i don't know—in both senses. for some reason i'm a dick for wanting fried chicken and get annoyed when people say "oh, that's gross." well, ya know what? i think a fuckin' $30 hamburger is gross. sorry if my taste buds aren't as sophisticated and well off as yours. anyway, another night. i'm still the asshole.

ps. to people who don't have bedbugs: you don't really help the situation by making light of it to the people who do. you don't understand that you're being an asshole. unless you've actually dealt with bedbugs, woken up 15 times at night slapping at things you think are bedbugs, woken up screaming and covered with hyper-paranoid sweat because you know you have bedbugs and you know that, at some point in the night, they're going to get you, checked yourself every morning for the 5 or 6 new bug bites that appear in random spots from your back to your legs to your arm to your neck to your face, don't talk to me about bedbugs, and please don't fucking try to make fun of me about having bedbugs or make me sympathize with you for being creeped out about bedbugs. that's not very nice, and to paraphrase number one asshole vincent gallo, being nice feels real good.

crocodile hunter r.i.p.

i didn't really plan for this to be my next post and it's somewhat tangential to the heroic-asshole theme, but i don't really mind (well, contains elements of both heroism and asshole-ish behavior, but they're separate in this case). i was getting a lot of shit earlier today for being bummed out that steve irwin died yesterday. some people went so far as to say, "oh, he got what he deserved; if you want to live by jumping on alligators, then that's what you get." what an asshole thing to say. irwin loved animals—but he was by no means naive about it, as opposed to someone like timothy treadwell. irwin knew the line and knew when he was pushing it; he also did a lot of crazy shit and handled himself far better in very dangerous situations than you or i, as commoners in this world, would. the guy loved animals—and i'm by no means a fellow animal lover (i think of animals more like people; some i like and some i don't. i especially dislike little, yappy dogs.)—and he was passionate about them, but there never seemed to any other hidden agenda with him. i have to respect him—for his craziness and daring, but also for his passion and the fact that he always seemed honest about it. i don't know... part of me is trying to be less cynical and less uptight, despite the overall nature of this blog. i have to give it up to him. i had fun watching his shows. r.i.p.

heroic assholes, take one

i think i'm finding a direction for this blog, and that is to profile curmudgeonly, self-hating, obsessive, ostensibly unlovable assholes in an attempt to make sense out of my reality. for lack of a better term, i will call them heroic assholes, until i come up with a more appropriate, catchier term. [it is also a way to distract myself from the bug bites i keep getting and the frustration of being unable to find any of the culprits for the past two weeks (the only empirical evidence we have are the bites on our ((mostly mine)) bodies.)] the reason i call them heroic assholes is because they are an archetype—they're bitter, caustic dicks to everyone around them and everyone who cares about them, or might have the potential to have some sort of emotional tie toward them, and yet has some sort of hidden redemptive personality flaw that ultimately wins people over. i'm not talking about assholes the way football jocks in high school were cocky assholes to make up for the fact that they were closet fags, but more so the way quiet, aged men have become assholes because life has let them down. i don't include myself among this category of assholes; i'm more of the incorrigible type right now. and if you think otherwise, you're probably wrong.

vincent gallo is at the top of my list of heroic assholes; more specifically, billy brown played by vincent gallo in buffalo 66. this was a difficult choice that i weighed over many years, but his character finally won me over, although i believe gallo actually loses heroic asshole points for trying to be such a blatant asshole in real life. (a girl i knew once, who lives with my friend trish, i can't even remember her name... said she met vincent gallo at some party and their conversation consisted of him telling her to shut up 90 percent of the time... i don't know her very well [see name, or lack thereof] so i don't know how credible her story is.) see his personal website here. i actually joined his message board at one point, in an attempt to spy on him and make note of all the shitty things he said to people, so we could happily persecute him at the Fanzine as our archenemy, but his message board is, unfortunately, no longer updated. he did, however, leave me with this:

Old messages will be occassionally pruned. However, if I notice any polluted messages, which usually come from bitter, jealous, ugly, poorly-hung men, who are unhappy at work and wished their whole life to be like me, I will remove these unproductive nasty little posts and I would like to say to these twisted queers and half-men, I feel sorry for you. All I ever wanted to do was be me. I hope one day you feel the same about yourself and release yourself from the petty, small-minded urges of polluting this message board and distracting its wonderful members. So go ahead and say whatever you want nasty about me, but know that we will all know by your insults just how small your pecker really is and how miserable your life has always been and how long it's been since any girl under 500 pounds responded to your cheap lines at the local pub.

As for girls who badmouth me, I don't know what I did to offend you, but I'm sorry. Please forgive me and be nice. My mom was mean. She never liked me. So have a heart.

With this all said, say whatever you want, but try to be productive and positive and friendly. It's nice to be friendly. I was friendly once. It felt real good.

if he'd have just stopped there i might have considered a gallo/billy brown double billling, but no—he had to go and do this. yes, that stands for vincent gallo merchandise dot com. it's the site where he sells everything from his tassled blue-leather jacket he got when he was 14 to his own personal copy of Yogi Berra's The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra (signed by vincent gallo, not by yogi berra). other items of interest on vgmerchandise.com—a puffy white coat with screened images of reagan (legend) and george w. bush (hero), an 8-track copy of "Fish Out of Water" by Chris Squire (of YES) that he supposedly played while having an affair with an older teenage girl who (also supposedly) wouldn't shut up. this item is also mysteriously signed not by chris squire or any member of yes, but by vincent gallo. in fact, there's a lot of items here that gallo owned that he thought would assist the market value of, by signing them in his own name. kind of like, for example, if i presented a friend with a copy of william vollmann's Whores for Gloria (of which i actually do have a copy signed by vollmann) with my own signature across the inside front page, in an attempt to increase the future nostalgic, and eventual resale value of the volume. well, i'm not vincent gallo. but all of this still might be forgivable in this realm if it weren't for the two bookend items on this page. the first one: a date with vincent gallo.

On my 14th birthday I went to see the film Rolling Thunder and had my biggest crush of all on the actress Linda Haynes. I wished and wished and wished everyday that I could meet all these girls. I thought of a lot of sexy things with Susan Blakely after seeing her in Lords of Flatbush. In my mind I could do with her anything I wanted to do. So believe me, I know and understand what it's like to wish and dream about spending time with a movie star. Doing things that couples do. Couples in love. At least couples where the guy is hot and knows how to handle a chick.

I, Vincent Gallo, star of such classics as Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny have decided to make myself available to all women. All women who can afford me, that is. For the modest fee of $50,000 plus expenses, I can fulfill the wish, dream, or fantasy of any naturally born female.

ok, well i myself would like to offer these services to women of all types. although i wouldn't be trying so hard to make myself look like a jerk. but not more so than his now famous offer for insemination:

Sperm is 100% guaranteed to be donated by Mr. Gallo who is drug, alcohol and disease free. If the purchaser of the sperm chooses the option of natural insemination, there is an additional charge of $500,000. However, if after being presented detailed photographs of the purchaser, Mr. Gallo may be willing to waive the natural insemination fee and charge only for the sperm itself. Those of you who have found this merchandise page are very well aware of Mr. Gallo's multiple talents, but to add further insight into the value of Mr. Gallo's sperm, aside from being multi talented in all creative fields, he was also multi talented as an athlete, winning several awards for performing in the games of baseball, football and hockey and making it to the professional level of grand prix motorcycle racing.

but even more so, this:

Mr. Gallo maintains the right to refuse sale of his sperm to those of extremely dark complexions. Though a fan of Franco Harris, Derek Jeter, Lenny Kravitz and Lena Horne, Mr. Gallo does not want to be part of that type of integration. In fact, for the next 30 days, he is offering a $50,000 discount to any potential female purchaser who can prove she has naturally blonde hair and blue eyes. Anyone who can prove a direct family link to any of the German soldiers of the mid-century will also receive this discount. Under the laws of the Jewish faith, a Jewish mother would qualify a baby to be deemed a member of the Jewish religion.

so he's decided acting like a royal asshole is the way to further his artistic/film career. but he's obviously over-reaching, being an asshole for its own sake, and nobody really believes he would say these things himself had he not had any sort of prior success and be semi-famous. so he loses heroic asshole points.

billy brown


billy brown is a lot closer to how gallo described himself, also on vgmerchandise.com site: "In his lifetime, Vincent has received only a few presents." i've actually dropped friends over the movie buffalo '66 in the past. billy brown is a heroic asshole in every sense of the term. he kidnaps layla (christina ricci) from the tap dance studio; steals her car; makes her get out of the car to clean the windows because they're dirty; figures out that he can't drive her car so he makes her get out again to drive (in effect, carjack) her own car; makes her stop the car so he can pee by a tree (Don't let me see you move one finger. Not one twitch or l'll come back. l'll choke you to death. l'll take a bite outta your cheek and l'll shit you out.); asks her to hold him then shoves her aside; makes her come to his parent's house to pretend like she's his wife; "hiya pop"; his dad, played by ben gazzara, turns away. "jan, your son is here."

other choice examples of H.A.: at the bowling alley, billy's former kingdom, talking with jan michael vincent (formerly of airwolf): "Who's the girl?" "I'm his wife." "She's not my wife. [laughing] I picked her up hitchhiking" "Five years in the joint, you don't waste any time, huh?" "You know me, right?"

also in the bowling alley, with christina ricci. CR: "Who's that girl?" BB: "Just some girl. Girlfriend l had."
- What happened to her?
l don't know. l'm a free guy, you know. That's not my style. l need to be free a little, so l let her go, you know?
- Oh.
Can l get a little room here? Why don't you go sit over there?

and another paramount H.A. example, in the denny's with christina ricci:
Let me tell you something. l don't care about you or your fuckin' hot chocolate. l don't need anybody. Did you hear what l said? Did you hear what l said this time? Want to know the truth ? l could have had any girl l wanted in school. Any girl l wanted. You know why l didn't have a girlfriend? Huh? Because there was nobody that l liked. Nobody that l liked. That's the truth. l could have had anybody. There was nobody that l liked, because girls stink. They stink. They're evil. And they're all bad, all of them. They're backstabbers like you. So, let's go, all right ?

so here we have one of the possible roots of H.A.-ism—yeah, it's juvenile and immature, but i can relate... to a certain point. you're a loser. nobody loved me. as we get older, the ground gets colder. billy brown at least, after saying all those shitty things, went out and bought heart cookies from the dunkin doughnuts at 4AM. so he has a secret, redemptive side to him—a sweet, honest, albeit still self-loathing, side. jimmy brown (ben gazzara) was a true asshole, with no sort of lighter side to him. just an unhappy bastard in a v-neck T-shirt. billy, however, was heroic—he just wanted someone to love him. maybe next column i won't spend so much time expounding on the real-life (i.e. jimmy brown) vincent gallo's assholish qualities. next column: john becker or red foreman, i haven't decided yet. i'm still incorrigible, however.

war

i've lived in a lot of shitholes in my day; most of them a lot worse than this, and i've battled many species of vermin. in LA i fought rats, mice, ants, and bees i once thought were of the killer-type that lodged in a rotting section of our roof (bill poon helped out with those while wearing his bear suit). Mission Records was probably the shittiest place i've lived—before i even moved in the place was a dump. i had to wear a face mask to keep from breathing in the rat shit and dust when i was cleaning the hallway out of trash, old mattresses, piss bottles, and pretty much every other form of debris you can think of. there were NASTY city rats that ran between my room and buzz's room and roaches that lived in our electronics (yeah, they can learn to eat the dust that forms inside your clock radios and monitors and tape players). i took care of those rats, though, and it only took me two days to get their number. and these were not friendly rats—these motherfuckers would chase each other right past us while we were playing GTA3, or run down the long hallway toward my room. i actually chased them once and one of them jumped at me like a tiger shark out of water.

i think i've met my match now, though. i'd almost prefer to be back in mission records. these bedbugs have got me by the balls. i haven't even found any bedbugs, or even any evidence of them. last week i spent hours spackling and caulking holes and cracks in my floor; i thought i beat them but no. i went several days without any bites, but over the last few days they'be been biting the shit out of me. i've barely slept in a week, plus i've been sick in a way that anything deeper than a several shallow breaths leaves me coughing and gasping for air. i wake up every night with the sheets soaking wet, screaming or completely out of breath, slapping and grabbing at anything that feels like it's crawling on me and i never find anything. new bites appear throughout the day and the welts grow in size over time. i'm a beaten man—they've run me ragged. my impotent defenses consist of a bottle of caulking, a small tin of spackle and an expired tube of cortaid. i need professional help, in exterminator form, before i set myself on fire. oh yeah, whoever brought these into my house is gonna pay something horrible.

the life of suck

well, since i'm waiting for all this spackling and caulking to dry i might as well update this thing. all day i was setting up to write this long-winded argument about the whole jonbenet murder thing and the guy who is allegedly the killer. i still think the whole affair is stupid and glorifies the lives of crazy, rich white parents and their freakish child, as well as John Karr, the pervert (this is not alleged—the guy was picked up for having a collection of child pornography back in 2001) who says he killed her. apparently he was planning on holding her for ransom in the basement of her own home, then "accidentally" killed her and sexually assaulted her to boot. sounds like bullshit, and i really had this all prepared but something more important came up.

my roommate came home after being gone for a few days. i saw her after work today and she was totally covered in bug bites, all over her arms and legs. poor kid. she showed me them. lots of weird pairs and trios of bumps which gave me the chills. i did some reading up—fuck... bed bugs... a sure sign. above is what those motherfuckers look like. i'm presently flipping the fuck out. i tore my room apart looking for bed bugs, digging around in cracks in the floor and the wall by my bed, tiny bloodstains on my sheets... still haven't found anything, but i spent 2 hours patching up the holes in my floor under my bed. yeah it's hardwood floors but i don't give a fuck. more so in the last week than my whole 5 months here have i realized how much this apartment sucks. so yeah, i don't give a fuck if the hardwood floors have caulk and spackle on it. i'm still searching for more tell-tale signs, but i haven't found any. again, i don't give a fuck. i'm cleaning this shithole up. i'm so pissed. poor kate. fucking scabies.

in other news... i started working at random house for a few weeks. job is boring as hell and i'm getting sick also. you won't believe some of the morons who work there. this girl across the cube from me doesn't know the basics of excel nor does she know what a pdf is. anyway, i get paid an astronomical sum for what i'm doing. here's to hoping it lasts for the whole 4 weeks. hopefully tomorrow i'll put my thoughts together to do this JonBenet thing.

the admiralcy

we used to have this thing, this anomolous, imaginary vehicle that once we were smugly proud to be a part of called the lonely boat. it's been many years since the lonely boat first set sail, to wander its aimless ways though the waters of love and lovelessness. we had rules; not just anyone could be a mate on the lonely boat and many charlatans who wanted on were trialed and subsequently kicked off for their frequent midnight outings and unauthorized shore leaves. i've been the admiral of this particular boat for nearly 7 years. people think it's funny, they want to join for fun and to feel sorry for themselves when they're down, but they'll soon get the boot because they don't have the heart. they come at it like it's a self-deprecating joke. even samantha, an old love of mine, keeps up on the admiral kick, thinking i should be the admiral forever, giving me a liquorice pipe that actually would go very nicely with a peacoat and a navy blue admiral's hat. but the joke is stale. i don't want to be the admiral anymore.

buzz started the lonely boat. he's been off and on since i took over the admiralcy. he was the original admiral. that's him in the picture above with shawn (pumpkin) on the roof of my old apartment in san francisco. he still lives there, and like me, is trying his hardest to get off the boat. the boat sucks. it's my albatross. at one time we thought it was like our fight club—a place for the unloved, lost souls disappointed in everything life had given them—but now it's really not that desireable, to the old timers anyway. on that note (SF), susan went home today. i had a lot of fun with her here and probably drank too much. in all honesty, she ought to be here. but she's in SF. i still like SF. i still have a lot of friends there (and some unfinished business with some asshole kid). i just think she should be here instead.

in other news... i miss my roof in SF, watching the fog roll in so fast over twin peaks every night in summer. particular spots i like in SF: clement in the richmond. amazing food for cheap. my friend cindy lived out there and kept me alive for over a year. el castillito on mission and 17th. get the quesadillia castillito. sandwich place on 16th and mission. phone booth on 25th and van ness. turkish coffee at phil's coffee on 24th and harrison. the japanese lunch place at pacific and sansome (avocado sushi, jerry plate special, cheap half-teriyaki chicken). chilin' stair spot on sansome or battery and washington. drinking beers at night on bernal hill. bonfires at ocean beach eating baked potatoes. when i think of more i will edit appropriately.

also today (8.13) is heather's birthday. happy birthday, heather. also i think i telepathically vibed sonic youth to open their set at mccaren park with teenage riot on saturday night.

wish you were here

edit: i went out on 9 august to mccarren park. watched some pick-up softball game, watched girls looking very nice walk past, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes. weather was fucking beautiful.

there's something fishy about 9 august. i think at some point i screwed up the fabric of time or tapped into some unholy secret and now this date is cursed for me. 9 august last year, casey gets to drinkin' and ends up getting hit by a motorcycle on valencia and 21st. he gets thrown 40 feet into the gutter and police and doctors figure him pretty much for dead with severe head trauma, but he lives (miraculously), with a crushed testicle being his only major injury. doctors (also miraculously) somehow reassemble his crushed nut and supposedly it works perfectly, for all you ladies out there.

9 august 2004 was the last time i saw simon, my friend in the picture above. we drank a pitcher of beer in 30minutes at the hemlock, along with other assorted drinks—among them the sapphire and tonic he loved. we only hung out for an hour or so that night. a week later some girl from school called me to tell me he died and off i went to ohio to watch him get buried in some dumb sweater. well, when he was living he was the bees knees; a wild soul full of piss and holy water, and one of my best friends for the short time i knew him. we inadvertenly bought the same suit, which i still have. i wore it to his funeral.

stay indoors on 9 august. i'm going to sleep all day since i've been up all night putting up an amazing piece by benjamin strong for Fanzine on the parallels of the events led to nixon's final days and what should culminate to be president bush's. read it here; it's probably one of our best pieces yet. also, special thank yous to susan for taking me out on my birthday. we saw steve buscemi by the bathrooms of the IFC.

i took the pictures of simon with an olympus pen-ee half-frame—one of my favorite cameras of all time—during our drive back up to SF from thanksgiving in LA. traffic was absolute hell; a self-fulfilling prophecy to those who read the flashing signs for SLOW TRAFFIC AHEAD as commandments and not advisories. we cruised along the I-5 at a cool 35 mph for nine hours and simon was shouting about assholes with stupid vanity plates for most of the time and i chainsmoked to deal with being crushed out on a girl back in LA and laughed my ass off. somewhere along the line i lost the roll of film and it got heat damaged, and now looks all arty. sayonara, simon.

older and colder

my birthday is coming up and i'm not trying to turn the direction of this blog into some stupid personal diary, but i wanted to let people know that i get exponentially more ornery, grumpy and depressed when it gets this close. also, bad, ominous things tend to happen the day after my birthday, so stay indoors if you can. maybe this year my luck will change, though. anyway, i'm trying not to be a huge asshole about it since my friend susan from SF is in town this week and i want to rock out and have fun.

i finally put up my article on national missile defense (title: "god bless you, kim jong"; subhed: "a short critique of the political wank that is the symbiotic relationship between national missile defense and north korea") for Fanzine. took me a while to do the research on it, and even still i couldn't get all the technical info up on there. meant more as a column piece, though if north korea tests another taepo dong-2 missile i want to do a more in-depth piece. for now, i think it's just ok.

also, i met the guys from Celebrity Skin magazine last night at that shitty bar Beauty Bar. actually, the one in NYC isn't that bad; it's way better than the other shitty Beauty Bar in SF next to where Mission Records was. celebrity skin is this porno mag that susan's friend frank works for. somehow this magazine has been around since 1979 and they charge $9 an issue to look at video stills of famous actresses getting nude in sex scenes from movies we've all wanked it to before or saw on the Internet. or paparazzi photos of lindsay lohan at the oscars with just a tiny peek at what might be a nipple or a mole, or a 3/4-angle photo that makes her tits look like they're not even in her dress. photo-magic. yeah we've all been there. anyway celebrity skin's circulation is an amazing 650,000 and the editor-in-chief is this guy james, who kind of looks like a shorter, less robust ron jeremy. frank is like a skinny cowboy, and they were both pretty cool. i might want to talk to them about a potential article on porn magazines, pseudonyms and publishing, but then i got distracted by this while searching for the magazine's url, and will most likely be my next piece. oh yeah the whole reason i was there was this ghetto beauty pageant that wasn't much to write home about.

i took this picture in berkeley, i think... or maybe one of the many office buildings i used to deliver stuff to when i was messaging in sf. also today is frances's birthday, so happy birthday, frances.

i started making a bday playlist the other day too, but it took a sort of morbid turn. still pretty good so far though...
boris - when we is thrown away
iggy - death trip
tom waits - cold cold ground
catpower - we all die
new order - leave me alone

it just kind of goes on like that...

fighting is gay

found this video of me fighting some crazy crackhead at a baltimore show with bad luck 13 wayyyyyy back in 2001 or so. the crazy shit was after i fought him about 15 other kids jumped on him and the guy got up smiling. cracked out on angel dust i guess. very crazy and very dangerous. the next time i did something like this i got beat up in San Francisco by some stupid hardcore gang from reno called OBHC. woot. that's another story though. other things to watch for: my boy ernie doing the wildest jump kick you ever did see in the first 10 seconds of the video; my boy piggie doing some f-ed up backflip off the stage and running at a bunch of people with a big board of wood. how that got in i don't know. lots of fun back in the day.

this is planet earth

i've pondered making one of these things before. i don't know why i decided to start now because it isn't like my life is suddenly a lot more interesting that would necessitate making a blog. plus "blog" is an ugly word. i like to read them though, especially those of my friends who live in other countries. i've never been to another country. i grew up in delaware and lived there on nigh 23 years before moving to los angeles, then moved to sacramento, which was a lot like delaware, then to berkeley, which was boring but had the particular noteriety of a 7-11 that actually closed at 11, then to san francisco where i lived for almost three years, and now i am in brooklyn. i do a web zine with my friend casey mckinney (he actually writes a lot more on this site) called Fanzine. see? i know some html.

not really sure where this will all lead. i don't really have a theme in mind yet, besides the obvious. i will probably just make you all look at a lot of my shitty photos and then tell long winded stories about them. i'll keep this one short though: the cows picture was taken on US1 on the way up from LA to SF, which is, in my experience, one of the most mesmerizing, gorgeous, and surreal drives in the country. i'd almost fight a war to save most of it (the drive).