"Mom, listen, I'm just going to kill the demon INSIDE you. Okay?" I guess this is what actor Michael Brea (Ugly Betty, Step Up, blah blah) was trying to say when he hacked his mother to death with a "samurai sword".
pop cult
breaking booze\/\/four loko like a man
I always knew you were a bitch, Massachusetts. With your stupid and difficult to spell state name, your arrogant universities, and your annoying sports fans, I can't believe I didn't see THIS coming.
playing the dream job \/\/ the magical economy of the sims
Creative jobs can be dreamy. They may offer or seem to offer dreamy things; things that can surface only as dreams in other jobs: engaging your curiosity and knowledge, materializing contents of your imagination, making something to love with love. We have entire television shows that let us watch others pursue their creative dreams. In the United States, we’ve got American Idol, for example. Or Project Runway, or America’s Next Top Model. HGTV’s nearly erstwhile Design Star. Participants on such reality shows tend to arrive with experience under their belt, the pursuit already began, but the dominant narrative theme of such shows, predictably enough, places the crux of the pursuit within the domain of the show. The show is your ticket to Making It (if you Make It Work). Reality television participation becomes your job, and by law, only one person really survives, and even them, maybe only ephemerally. Despite the precariousness of success for entrepreneurs, artists and artisans, the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity reported a burst in business start-ups in 2009, and Etsy stores just keep opening, as the un- and under-employed do what they can to try to make ends meet. But dreams are easier to live [...]
24 hours in new york
What can you do in a 24 hour period in the Big Apple? Whatever the fuck you want to do…so long as you have wheels to get around in. I jump in my ride (a pickup truck) and start heading east (from Manhattan to Long Island). The first thing I see is a stainless steel casket on wheels on the curb…waiting for its new owner? I was heading to the beach on an adventure with no expectations other than seeing the all-girl rock band Open Ocean. They were playing a show in Montauk at the Memory Motel (of Mick Jagger fame). On the way there I called my buddy Jesse even though I knew he would be hesitant to sign up for a mission with me. Jessie and I were building the Vitamin Water Chapel at the Williamsburg Waterfront starting at eight o’clock the next morning, so this is a dude with whom I go way back. The girls aren’t playing until the afternoon, and I have to give Jesse some time to get his shit together. To kill some time I drive through Fort Greene and stop by the Brooklyn Flea (which some claim to be the best flea [...]
dressing up at dragon*con
It’s Fashion Week in New York! But the fashion event closest to my heart took place a little over a week ago in Atlanta. Once a year, over Labor Day weekend, thousands of geeks and nerds of all ages and fiction preferences gather downtown for a celebration of fantastic fandom called Dragon*Con. Dragon*con days are made up of attending panels, checking out the art show & dealer room, gaming, screening independent media productions, meeting your favorite sci-fi figures and recovering from the previous night’s festivities. And you can do some top-notch people- and fashion-watching during the days, but it’s Dragon*con nights that the fashion-show is out in full force. Droves of DIY-costume clad con-goes fill the convention hotels’ lobbies, hallways and elevators — many fueled on assorted combinations of caffeine, food court fares and adult substances — to mingle, party and take a ton of pictures. Yours truly has attended the festivities as, variously, the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, Romana from Doctor Who (1978 to 1979) and the Flash – among others. Dragon*con might not be the most overtly political space you can find, nor the most critical & inclusive one (ironic enough for a celebration that’s in many ways about embracing your [...]
the future is full of spiders & surprises
New beginnings can hit us any time, of course, not just on regularly schedule calendar dates and socially recognized life-markers. It’s obvious, but sometimes I forget, caught up in cycles of birthdays, new years, new semesters, commencements, break-ups, weddings, new jobs and cross-state moves; the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. By now I have just enough new beginnings under my belt that I can’t help but notice a lot of the big, official ones seem to fall in the first two or three decades of one’s life. Or they’re supposed to, anyway. Maybe there’s no official document dictating the schedule of our allotted new beginnings, but we do seem to share a general idea of what this timeline would be: kindergarten then grade school the high school, dating then marriage then kids, education then training then career. Rebellion, experimentation, stabilization. Isn’t the renown condition of middle-aged malaise supposed to be about grappling with the notion that you’ve already done all the big things you’re going to do, that you’ve already gone through your supply of fresh starts? Maybe that’s why I find it easy to like stories about unexpected, unpredictable new beginnings. Unforeseeable new beginnings [...]
welcome back, jonny quest
Our intrepid author, upon forgetting his column deadline while moving to Chicago, bumps into an old friend, Jonny Quest.
forgetting & remembering\/\/music is my time machine
A year ago my hard drive crashed and I lost the music collection I’d been building since college. Much of the music I listened to regularly I had in albums on CD, but a good portion of the songs I lost were from various bits and pieces of soundtracks and compilations, mixes gifted from friends, albums I no longer liked and CDs acquired as a joke and then neglected. The kind of songs I’d forget I had until they came up in the playlist. At one point I’d backed up all of these stray songs on a variety of miscellaneous mixes I made for things like road trips or mowing the grass; I liked to throw in surprises to shake things up. But when my hard drive crashed, not long after a +1000 mile move, and I couldn’t remember the fate of these made-for-discman CDs. Music is said to help aid memory retention. So is repetition. This means its easier to learn state capitals or the letters of the alphabet when they’re set to a tune, but it also explains some of the contents of my music collection. I have songs, decades old, that I hated when they first came out. [...]
in the background
Every night at the restaurant where I work I dread the same moment. It occurs when the dinner crowd arrives and the ambient music switches from mellow indie rock to Brazilian music. I desperately hope that tonight, this one night, the manager will forget to make the change. I could even deal with Iron and Wine–SPEAK UP, sir. Anything worth singing is worth singing louder than that–over the Brazilian tripe. Not that it’s especially bad music. It’s just so dreadfully innocuous. And it is for this reason that management has decided it is the perfect “background music.” Where did this concept come from, that some songs are worthy of our utmost attention and others simply serve to fill in the silences while we chew? I ask this from the perspective of a busser, a member of the background myself, expected to smile but not to talk. What do we ask for in our backgrounds? And I refer here not only to music, but to art, décor, etc. (I have some experience in this area from my one-day stint selling hotel art door-to-door). Obviously, the quality of a background is not strained, there are no wild guitar solos or daring splashes [...]
consume for the job you want\/\/a movie about work
Hey ya’ll, I just finished writing exams last week, which means my summer has finally, really arrived, but it’s also left me a little brain dead (the exams, not the arrival of summer. I think). I’ve been coping with long bike rides and movies from the 1990s. One of these movies was the 1997 romantic comedy/drama Picture Perfect starring Jennifer Aniston. You will love this movie if you like semi-dated romantic comedies that don’t go overboard on coherency and explore both the encroachment of work obligations and duties into the worker’s off-work time and the correspondent, compulsory blurring of work/life boundaries for privileged contemporary American workers. I know I fall into that category! The premise goes like this. Jennifer Aniston plays 28 year-old Kate, who makes up advertising campaigns for clients at an advertising organization (like this guy, but different), and who is bit of a free spirit (no Polly exactly but certainly no quietly unhappy good girl either). Maybe a bit too much of a free spirit, according to her job! They pass her up for promotion because, as her boss tells her, they have no reason to believe she will remain loyal to the company and not suddenly one day take [...]
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