Irony: man's best friend

Whoa, I read this article and got a little nervous and worked up. I always think about how my kids will perceive me. When I was walking through a conference hall yesterday, I was trying to determine which carpet will look really old in 10 years and which styles will endure. Does hyper-ironically enjoying teen pop music prevent us from "becoming the dog," as the author calls it?
Are the ever-compounding layers of irony someday going to make it hilarious when people say absolutely normal stuff? Will my mom make hilarious jokes that she doesn't even get? Will 10 people in a room "get" a joke in 10 different ways, depending on how many personal irony layers they've compounded for themselves?
This is all very strange. Growing up is getting very, very strange. Last night I had a beer and screwed around on Ableton with an old friend of mine. I criticized something he said with, "Well, isn't that observation A just an extension of B?" and he responded, "WELL ISN'T EVERYTHING NOW JUST AN EXTENSION OF SOMETHING IN THE PAST?" I responded, "Man, I try not to trouble myself with thinking too hard about stuff in that manner anymore." He agreed, and said he thinks much more simply these days. I do, too.
I think I promised myself a thousand times over that I would never go down the path of mental comfort and general complacency I'm currently going down, but it feels so good to be comfortable and happy and it's so scary to back track to the dark, defeating, endless mind travels I've so recently escaped.
This isn't really an active transformation, though. It's part "I have enough to think about and enough responsibility to keep my otherwise curious+mischievous mind occupied" and part "I've got the right amount of brainfuck under my belt to be ready to move on."
It would obviously be nice to know how I'll look back on this reflection. Unbridled and hardly-edited streams of consciousness like this usually embarrass the hell out of me once the next mind-environment cycle turns. Like diaries or journals. That shit's hilarious. My 8th grade letter to my 12th grade self says, "Trust in God. Always rely on prayer. NEVER TOUCH DRUGS OR ALCOHOL."
57 minutes until the weekend...

[Edit: completely forgot to link the article. Here it is.]

feed the barracuda

i know this has already been said over and over, but sarah palin is quite clearly unqualified, unaware, and unable to come up with her own thoughts. besides the glaring gaffes of not knowing what the bush doctrine is or how to pronounce "nuclear", her interview with abc's charles gibson showed us how she was obviously being fed lines to say ...over and over:

"GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and need to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

PALIN: Well, first, we are friends of Israel, and I don’t think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves, and for their security.

GIBSON: So if we didn’t second guess it and if they decided they needed to do it, because Iran was an existential threat, we would be cooperative or agree with that?

PALIN: I don’t think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right?

PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself."

wow. Gibson tries to get her to actually answer the question in her own words, but she does nothing but read off her mental cue cards. and to think she's just another face cancer case away from being the person in charge. *shudder*

also: the women of the band heart are super-pissed at palin's use of "barracuda" as her theme song. "Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women ... The song 'Barracuda' was written in the late '70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The 'barracuda' represented the business.)"

irony plz?

Happy Marielle Day!

The great state of Wisconsin, in all its glory, produced this youthful specimen. She is charged with felony identity theft after using her 15-year-old daughter's high school ID to enroll in high school, apparently just so she could go out for the cheerleading squad. To top it off, the $134.50 check she gave the cheerleading coach to pay the activity fee bounced. The maximum sentence is 6 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The question stands whether she would be eligible for conjugal visits from the captain of the football team.































Recent moment of real-ness: last Wednesday, one of my good friends from high school was visiting from Chicago. We went to The Plaza bar to play some Big Buck Hunter and to enjoy a few $2 Capital Ambers (a product of the highest-rated brewery in the world, located just a few blocks from my house). When we left at 9:30 pm, the place was so dead that the jukebox wasn't even playing. Less than two hours later, two patrons got in a fight (over the music!) and when they "TOOK IT OUTSIDE!" one fatally stabbed the other in the chest. Damn!

Anyway, "Man!" I said to myself after work today, "I haven't felt so giddy at the end of a friday since high school. Jobs are so good for producing extreme, relative feelings of freedom, energy and happiness!" Here's to reasoning that we're happy for the rest of our lives.

today is marielle day

it's raining out. i'm holed up inside. i decided to take off my tshirt, then decided to put it back on before i had taken it all off. i have to remake my bed. clean my room. listen to tunes, and maybe take an afternoon nap.

it's been a good day. after all, it's marielle day.

i've been heavy into pop music lately. electro-pop, indie-pop, and disco-pop. i'm sort of sick of the whole dirty "french house" tracks, aka justice/mstrkrft/boys noize et. al. there's a time for heavy club music, and a time when i just want to put something on i can dance like an idiot to while making my bed. songs that sing about simple feelings, like puppy love, sleepovers, and eating ice cream. hipster as fuck: in a state of perpetual adolscent nostalgia. break out the nintendo, put on the breakfast club, we're having ourselves a grand ole' time.

here's some light bedroom disco to go along with it (courtesy of discodust):

memory cassette - listen to the vacuum

memory cassette - sleep on the roof

memory cassette - surfin

p.s. we saw samantha ronson in manhattan today! she was smoking a cigarette. and vibing lesbian everywhere. that is all.

Baby, I don't cuddle. Don't blame me, blame science.

According to a recent study, after sleeping in the same bed, both men and women sleep more poorly. However, a one Dr. Neil Stanley says that "women are pre-programmed to cope better with broken sleep." Which may explain why women fared better in cognitive tests then men after a night in a shared bed (even though both individuals reported to have slept well).

Bed sharing also affected dream recall. Women remembered more after sleeping alone and men recalled best after sex..."Historically, we have never been meant to sleep in the same bed as each other. It is a bizarre thing to do"

I'm calling Shennanigans on this one boys. There are solutions to your latenight dead-arm woes. Stop talking and hug it out bitch.

We are all Going to Die

Being at work an hour early makes me want to kick puppies, blog, and generally make others suffer with me. Good thing the end of the world is near.

The Large Hardon Collider (insert graphic joke set up here) has officially been turned on (punchline).

According to the BBC, everyone is very optimistic and things seem to be going on well enough so far. So what does this doomsday contraption do? send particles at each other so freaking fast that they...well...nobody knows exactly what happens when particles smash into each other at that speed.

"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang. That is amazing, that really is fantastic."

The LHC should answer one very simple question: What is mass?

"We know the answer will be found at the LHC," said Jim Virdee, a particle physicist at Imperial College London.

The currently favoured model involves a particle called the Higgs boson - dubbed the "God Particle". According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the Higgs.

We're looking for "the answer" and "God." And we're looking for them on the French-Swiss border.
Ok. So this is pretty much my idea of what is happening right now:

Curtain Rises
Enter stage right: Julie Andrews and Trapp family fresh faced and rosy cheeked out of the alps, singing about figs.

Enter stage left: Patrick "Professor Xavier" Stewart on his floating handicap steed of steel, singing about Cerebro.

The two run/float quickly up the hill, unabashedly prancing about in such a careless manner that they collide! OH NO.

Enter stage somewhere: A mouse and the number 42.

Curtain Falls
The end. (quite literally- the end of everything)
+ =

How to Chop Firewood ~OR~ Surviving the Energy Crisis ~OR~ DIY Fatal Bloodloss *PART ONE*

First, never pay for wood. Trees are very easy to steal because nobody's yard has those store-gates that beep when you suck at shoplifting. But seriously, trees fall down all the time, and for most people, it's a huge bitch to deal with an enormous fallen tree on your property. They would have to pay someone to take it away, so everybody wins when they "let" you have it for free. The same goes for trees that fall on city property, like the ones between the sidewalk and the street. Your mayor will be like "omg, srsly thnx so much 4 stealin that crappy sugar maple, cuz i h8 makin firewud.... To be honest, I am woefully ignorant as to the chopping process."

Step two: use your chainsaw to cut the tree into manageable 2 ft segments. Each of these segments will be unimaginably heavy. You thought you understood why wood was buoyant, but this experience will challenge that knowledge.

Step three: Get a maul. Axe heads are really sharp and thin, but if you don't split the log on the first try, the head ends up stuck really deep in the wood, and it's scary to yank it back out because you're never quite sure when it'll release. It's kind of like the sword in the stone, but you are *NOT* King Arthur.

A maul, on the other hand, has a really heavy wedge-shaped head with the power to basically explode logs, so you *ARE* just like Merlin . KaZaam!
Next time, I'm going to teach you the basics of my father's chopping method. His technique is only marginally safe, and only if you are also a 270 lb. man with arms like mighty St. Bernards. If you are built more like a young lumpy Orlando Bloom and you have minimal understanding of applied physics, I can guarantee that this method will be CrAzY dangerous!

ANDY'S BOX

There was a kid named Andy in my sixth grade class who had severe ADHD. He couldn't sit still and bothered everybody around him. Our teacher got really fed up and finally came up with a unique punishment/treatment plan.

She cut out the small top and bottom panels of a refrigerator box, so that it was just one 7 ft tall cardboard tube. She'd have Andy sit down in his desk, and then she'd put the box over him, so that he was completely surrounded.

The thinking was that Andy could listen to the lectures through the open top of his pen, but he wouldn't be distracted by seeing the rest of the class. It actually worked (maybe?) for a couple days, and then the insanity started.

At first, we'd just hear minor scuffles coming from the box. Then he started randomly throwing things out of the top of his box, like erasers and pencils and wads of paper. Sometimes he would climb up on top of his desk, so that he could peak out over the top. The teacher would retaliate by banging on his cardboard walls.

He poked a hole through the back of the box with his pencil, so that he had a little spy hole to hold his eye to. Eventually it was big enough for him to stick a wiggling finger through. Hilarious.

But one day he flipped out and what looked like a knife came stabbing through the side of his box. It turned out to be the big pair of scissors from the teacher's desk. She yelled for him to stop, but he kept going until the side panel was perforated enough for him to rip his way out through. He dropped the scissors and tried to take off running down the hall.

Now that the side of his box was hanging open, we could see that he had completely covered the inside of it with horrifying graffiti.

can we get lunch some time, sasha frere-jones

sasha frere-jones on the laptop in music

whenever i have to explain how i dj without turntables, i find myself coming off as an idiot. i only use a laptop and a keyboard. people consider djing eponymous with turntables. that's slowly changing. hopefully.

fuck fashion

it's that time of year again, when even more stuffy socialites gather around than usual to worship the latest batch of clothing to grace the super tall super thin super models. fashion week hit nyc this weekend.

(to be honest, looking at the collections so far, i do like what i see)

fashion doesn't drive trends - it mostly reacts to them. music and arts pave the way for the clothes to come. styles and scenes are grown from artists, writers, and musicians. the simple beatnik style of black tights and tops. amy winehouse grows a beehive on her head that farms for heroin, and suddenly big hair crops on runways everywhere. the sex pistols have a group of followers so devoted to them that they are coined a name: the bromley contingent. among this group is billy idol and siouxsie sioux, who both go on to be punk rock icons, inspiring goth and punk fashions for decades. karl lagerfeld finds a muse in cat power.

perhaps i'm being too hard on fashion. i feel that its artistic scope is limited by its need for functionality or accessibility. though i guess the same goes for architecture, and stuff like furniture design. it's just that when i look back at the history of fashion, i always see it a half step behind music. it seems now, though, it's anyone's game.

anyway, this rambling was just an excuse to post justice's mix they did for dior homme's spring/summer '09 show in paris. because when i think dior homme, i think electro prog church rock.

justice - planisphère (Part 1)

justice - planisphère (Part 2)

justice - planisphère (Part 3)

justice - planisphère (Final)

footnote: karl lagerfeld is also the host of one of the fake radio stations in grand theft auto 4. wtf?

I just beat the shit out of two big stray dogs

There are a ton of dogs in my neighborhood, and they are all adept at escaping from their homes/yards. I think it's great, because catching stray dogs is seriously really fun. You gotta be all nice and soothing, throwing treats at their head from a distance, seducing them with your voice, earning their trust, and then lassoing them.

When I was littler, my mom came home from work to find a random psycho german shepard running around my room. I told her it had just "crept in from outside", but I had actually lured it in with kraft cheese singles.

So this morning, when two huge husky dogs I'd never seen started hanging out in my yard, I was like "Jackpot. It's go time." The owner had been driving around yesterday, asking people to keep an eye out for them, so I knew they were definitely renegade.

One was all black, and the other one was all white. EX:

I ran outside with some dog treats and tried to grab them by their matching pink & purple collars. The white one seemed like a decent fellow, but when I got up close he bit my hand twice and then they both ran away. My hand has a detailed print of his dental records, and it's pretty cool to see how the teeth in his top and bottom jaw line up.

Not being one to pass up excitement, I ran into the house, grabbed a piece of string cheese (bait) and a leash, and started hunting them. It took 45 min of running around through strangers' yards, tracking them by the sound of their jingling collars. I eventually caught up to them in a field, where they turned to make their final stand. A few neighborhood kids showed up to watch the spectacle, but I told them to "stand back, these dogs are dangerous!"

Blackie ignored my existence, like he was autistic or something, so I focused on Whitey again, luring him close with pieces of string cheese. I started prancing on my toes like Muhammad Ali, and this time I was too fast for him when I darted in and grabbed his collar. Once I had the leash on, he mellowed out a bit, and I was able to read the phone number off of his tags. I sent one of the kids to get me a phone, but THEN WHITEY TWISTED HIS HEAD OUT OF HIS COLLAR. That's NOT how collars are supposed to work. And now Whitey was fucking pissed. One of the kids started screaming and ran about 50 yds away.

Had I been wearing any shoes, I would have just started kicking Whitey straight back to hell. But since I didn't want him to bite all my toes off, I pranced away quick.

This whole episode had agitated Blackie, now the only one with a collar, and he started runnin in circles around me. That is when my primal instincts took over and I legit jumped onto Blackie's back, like he was a small pony, and like, used my thighs to squeeze him into submission. I think Whitey is in love with Blackie, because as soon as I had Blackie hostage, Whitey surrendered too.

The kid came back with a phone, so we called the owner to come pick the hell hounds up. He offered me a $20, but I said "no prob".

Hurricane Watch

Just an update everyone- I got a little wet walking to the bodega next door today but I THINK IT WILL ALL BE OK. Or at least that's what Miley has taught me.