What I've Learned

Esquire regularly does a feature called "What I've Learned," and here we stand with another year gone by. In their January 2006 issue, they compiled lists from Bob Saget, Neil Young, Ariana Huffington, John Kerry and others. I don't hate sentimentality. I hate cheap sentimentality, and the "What I've Learned" feature veers from this. So here, to wind down 2005, I write my own list.

Things I Learned in 2005

To drink is to celebrate life. To be a drunk is to waste it. To walk the fine line is a state of ambiguity that is frightening, exhilirating and resoundingly stupid, but it's hard not to live there.

Everything is just a name and just a label.

Cynicism is the best and worst thing for the soul.

Politics is an endless game of bickering that divides anyone from real progress. The same goes for religion. It's not who you pray to, but how you pray, and not how you vote, but how you have really thought it out and come to believe or disbelieve in one side. To sling a name based on Christian, Muslim, Jew, Democrat, Republican or any other grouping is to effectively halt the progress of your own cause. It sounds cliche, but actions speak louder than words.

It's not that men don't have hearts. We just let them give up hope earlier, and we don't really know why.

Intelligent design doesn't deny evolution, only its advocates do. I may not like much about Catholicism, but this is something they (or we, based on heritage, I guess) realized quite correctly.

Pills without work just breed numbness, and it's easy to sleep there, but hard to live there.

People spend all of their lives trying to cheat death. But death is older, smarter and has learned a few tricks in his time.

Lonely people get pets for a reason: because it's hard to be sad when somebody runs in circles the second you come in the door or paws your face when you're going to bed.

The best form of birth control is babysitting.

Arkansas is humid every day, and this is not a comfortable feeling for someone who sweats a lot.

Fuck you

Bronchitis, go fuck yourself.

Noah Baumbach is my fucking hero

There is a multitude of crap out on DVD. Much of this crap I somehow own, including Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Street Fighter (the Sonny Chiba version from 1974, not the video game-based Raul Julia film.) But in this gigantic inundation of trash culture, science fiction and Criterions that I call my DVD collection, there is a void I only wish I could fill.

If this hasn't been stated before in here, I'm a college kid, and I am wont to do college things. You know, like drink. And in typical college fashion, I spend trips home drinking and then raiding my parent's refrigerator. Given that I am not a fan of my home town, this event happens about two or three times a year. Now, my parents are early sleepers, so it's not as if they'd be waiting up for their 21-year-old youngest son when he gets home at 2 or 3 a.m., and thanks to rampant insomnia, I also end up staying up a couple more hours.

So how's a boy to entertain himself? By exploiting the luxuries he can't afford - namely, digital cable and Showtime. Vaguely bored and vaguely lonely, I at first perused some very softcore pornography on Showtime, but scanned the listings for something better. I saw something about the movie Kicking and Screaming on the digital guide, and decided to watch it. It sounded interesting and has Parker Posey in it, who I have a mild school boy crush on.

What I didn't realize when I decided to watch a movie based entirely on the fact that it had a girl Ryan Adams is currently schtupping in it was that the movie would be amazing. The plot follows a group of friends after they graduate from college, and their kind of ambling/aimless lives that result. Witty dialogue, heartfelt situations and characters with names like Otis and Grover would win me over by the time I was ready to pass out.

Then I realized why I had never heard of this movie: it wasn't out on DVD, and the VHS was out of print. Given that Noah Baumbach, the director and writer, would go on to co-write The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Squid and the Whale, this seems more than a little unusual. The fact that it is really fucking good though makes it also a more-than-mild irritation.

I broke down a couple weeks ago and bought a VHS copy of the film, and have watched it repeatedly the same way I did upon watching High Fidelity, Breakfast Club or Almost Famous. I found that the lines we're just as memorable and snappy, lines like "What I used to able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life." or "No, I only told you. We have such a weak, pathetic familiarity that talking to you is like talking to myself."

Next Tuesday, the John Cusack flop Must Love Dogs is coming out on DVD. Kicking and Screaming is not. This is the proof that there is no God, and that Pascal's wager is a worthless proposition.

So if you can find a copy or catch a drunken midnight screening, by all means, go for it. If not, it's too bad that for whatever reason, this little gem won't be seen.

Brian Setzer Marked For Death

Fuck "Fuck the Police" or "Cop Killer." The most offensive song of all time is "Santa Drives a Hotrod" off of the new album Dig That Crazy Christmas from the fine soulless mooks of the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Having recently took a seasonal job at a certain bookstore to pay the bills, I am reminded of the drawback to selling your soul to a corporation, even if it is a somewhat forward thinking one. That drawback is a little thing called rotation discs. Having worked other retail outlets and chain video stores before, I have been subjected to many, many rotation discs that play the same fucking thing over and over.

But nothing brings out the empty cheer quite like Christmas. Thanks to the the season, the current rotation disc has one particular song on it to draw my eternal ire - "Dig that Crazy Christmas" from the same man who brought us a varied career of bending himself prostrate with such fine songs as "Bloodless Pharoahs" by the Bloodless Pharoahs, "Rock This Town" by the Stray Cats and that obnoxious entry into the utterly irrational swing revival, "Jump Jive n' Wail." By the way, copies of Mr. Setzer and his orchestra's masterpiece of froth, Dirty Boogie, can be found on amazon for the still-too-high price of $0.49.

What such a career proves to me is that like Stalin before him, Setzer is a man possessed of no soul who will use any propaganda tool in his power to motivate his own career. Unlike Stalin, Setzer has thankfully stuck with music. Music is a lot easier to ignore than mass, politically motivated murder. But when punk was the thing, Setzer doddled along in a little unit called Bloodless Pharoahs. Then he joined the Stray Cats and homogenized the rockabilly that punk bands like X and Gun Club were legitimately experimenting with. When Royal Crown Revue and Cherry Poppin Daddies were the new thing, Setzer was there too. It seems with every trend destined to fade away, Setzer manages to weasel his little head in until he has devoured the soul of it completely.

For a few years, he has stuck with the swing thing, though his two Christmas albums have been just as uninspired as the rest of his career. So what's next, assclown? How about some dreads and reggae, or a keytar and some new wave? Are you going to release a rap album like Dee Dee Ramone did? Not fadish enough. No, whatever the next incarnation the sock puppet for Satan takes will be infinitely more stupefying, but in the whole mess of it, he will still refuse to disappear.

Dennis Madalone - America We Stand As One

We Do, In Fact, Stand As One

Watch that video. Let it flow through your mind, let it cycle over and over. Think about it, but not too hard – I don't feel like being partially to blame for a Scanners-esque head explosion. I showed it to a friend, and what we couldn't deduce was if Dennis "Danger" Madalone, a professional stunt double was taking himself seriously. Because if you look at this video, it looks and sounds like Weird Al in a parallel universe singing adult contemporary instead of semi-clever parody.

If Mr. Danger is "serious", would he have been such a patriot standing as one against a propaganda boogey man if there wasn't that little incident? I think it was called Rescue 911 or something. But anyways, why did the political axis shift into namecalling and empty rhetoric, and why are people like a stunt double exploiting the current feelings for a quick buck? This reeks of bleeding-heart-emptiness, and this is the core of why nobody likes us. Does anybody actually understand that the international community hates us because of our stubborn and obstinate refusal to enlighten ourselves in the least?

This video is like every bad, post-9/11 country songs, exemplified to the max. Unfortunately, it's a few years to late to join the whole "Support Our Troops We Ignored Before" sticker crowd. Everything is a little too late, and every problem we work "against" were preventable things. It's like the relatives at a funeral who are suddenly sad not because of the loss, but because they feel some need to be. But where were they during the life?

So thus, this song wins the Ignorance of the Millenium award, because after all, there's only seven years left til we all die. It may even beat out "Do They Know It's Christmas?" for the Ignorance of the Aeon award.

Julianne Moore is typecast

So, has anyone heard about this?

Yeah, it seems Julianne Moore is in another movie where she plays a mother who loses her child who may or may not be there. This same thing has happened in The Forgotten and World Traveller. Now, she has played the mad before (see Safe) but now she seems to be in the same role over and over. Watching the preview during a screening of Rent, I wanted to scream obscenities having seen the preview. Is this where her career is going to die? It appears to be so. There is a lot of typecasting, of course, but how many people get typecast this late in their career? This is why nobody goes to movies anymore.

my rejected mcsweeney's entry

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: If Fan Fiction Were Real Scripts
by John Wenz

Sister Act III: Old Habits Die Hard

Whoopie Goldberg reprises her role as Sister Mary Clarence, having to bring down an insane Alan Rickman as he plots to blow up the Pentagon. Guest starring Christopher Lambert as newly ordained nun, Sister Pius X.

MacGyver vs. Walker, Texas Ranger

The king of contraptions matches wits and hits with the god of roundhouse kicks in a simple misunderstanding gone wrong. Includes a steamy love plot involving MacGyver, and Lucas, the young boy infected with AIDS. MacGyver, in the finale, uses a combination of floss, Formula 409 and a metal barrel to create a anti-roundhouse spray. He also cures AIDS with breathmints, tin foil and a can of Coke.

Highlander: Mac Style

Conor McCleod discovers that there can be only two, when MacGyver is revealed to be the One. Clancy Brown reprises his role as a really, really menacing hairy guy.

X-Men 4

Jubilee finds her chance to lead the team after Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine and every other character who doesn’t suck is abducted by some obscure Morlock that escaped the massacre in Uncanny X-Men #211. Features a team of Psylocke, Gambit, Gateway, Longshot and other b-list favorites. Lance Henriksen appears as Cable, the token time traveler with a needlessly convoluted past.

Gilmore Girls: The Movie

Rory experiments with other girls and college and Lorelei discovers love in an unexpected place: a bus stop. Snooty French guy at the hotel finally gets what he has coming: marathon fucks from body builders. Hilarious and unrealistic quips ensue.

Tomb Raider: Cradle of Boobs

Angelina Jolie appears really, really naked and squat thrusts and shoots her way through a jungle full of bare-breasted Amazonians who totally, totally like to make out. And some secret society has a plot to make the film appear to have a plot.

Batman and Robin Redux

Removes nipples, hockey teams from hell and Joel Schumaker to prove that Uma Thurman and George Clooney could have carried this movie. No really. Also edits in a love story between Alfred Pennyworth and some smarmy old British woman who can crack wise with the best of ‘em.

Howard the Duck 2: The Duck Quacks Back

Ninety minutes of a midget in fowl costume strangling George Lucas and shoving molted feathers into his mouth when he chokes for air never sounded so appealing.

Fantastic Foursome

Answers any and all questions about what Michael Chiklis' lil’ chicklet would look like if spray painted orange and made to look like rocks.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the Ring that They Thought Burned Up

(insert poor plot and hobbit joke here)

Harry Potter and the Needless Franchise

Harry grows up so the rest of us can stop having to be called “Muggles” by greasy kids with bad breath and thick glasses.

Star Trek XI: The Untouched Country

Kirk and Spock crash land on the frozen Klingon moon they were once kept prisoner on, and must use eachother and a little Vulcan touch to keep warm. Rated NC-17.

Sideways 2

For the viewers so unimaginative they couldn’t pretty much put together what Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti did after he rang her doorbell at the end. Hint: it probably involved a little love making, a little crying and a whole lot of bad facial hair. Oh fuckles, I forgot to put a spoiler warning in there. But Jesus fucking Christ people, seriously, what good does knowing do you? They probably got married, got divorced and he took a bunch of ambien and swallowed it down with a cheap Wal-Mart merlot in some vain effort to kill himself before writing his own version of Bukowski’s “Post Office” in a drunken haze, the ambien leaving him unable to remember writing what would later be acclaimed as his only good novel. Oh, and throw in some bullshit about Thomas Haden Church fucking a tranny and Sandra Oh getting a heroin problem.

Holy shit. I just wrote fan fiction.

A Festivus For The Rest of Us

My last post involved "alternative" cards I made for various holidays about three years ago. They were all made on MS Paint, and I finally stumbled across them on an old CD-RW. So, as not to let you all down, here is all them them, save Thanksgiving, which we already saw. I apologize for the small size. It's the best I could do.










And, as a bonus, a Family Circus cartoon I edited to cut down the cute factor...

Happy Thanksgiving

Words that rarely appear in Penthouse Forum letters

Rest area
Sweaty trucker
Ball sweat
Soup can shaped penis
Chode
Kitten
Cat
Furball
Pooper
Pooping
Pooped
Relative
Limbless
Chamber
Den of sin
Confessional
Crying
Knife
Glenn Danzig
Purple nurple
Failed to simultaneously orgasm

MacGyver was a pedophile

Any little kid who saw the show MacGyver probably remembers it as having been awesome. He could make anything with a pocket knife and a thought, and pull off a mullet while he did it. The oversight we, as children, had was that Angus MacGyver may have tried to be our buddy, too. A really close buddy. An illegal buddy.

After flying some model airplanes with a friend of mine, my roommate and I went to a certain outlet we wouldn't go to if it weren't for Chronic insomnia. We weren't looking for anything in particular, just passing some time, but somehow "passing some time" ended up with us going home with a wooden spoon, a bag of chicken nuggets and MacGyver: The Complete First Season. We made some chicken nuggets and popped in disc one.

Episode one, directed by Alan Smithee (who's not a real director), opens with MacGyver and his little buddy palling around. The next thing we know, MacGyver has to stop some disaster or other, blah blah blah. None of the rest of the episode matters to the thesis of this. What matters is that, at the end, MacGyver and his "little brother" are playing basketball. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this. Except that MacGyver has a basketball hoop in his living room, which is filled with toys and he is alone in this house with the little boy. Now, MacGyver's innocence can still be inferred from this. After all, he's just helping this inner city youth have a real role model. Nothing wrong with that. Sure, the bachelor with a room full of toys is a little suspect, but we can ignore that.

Until episode two, when MacGyver slaps a Burmese boy on the ass. Now, it's a sporting gesture, sure. My junior high football coach slapping me on the ass and yelling "Where is your buttpad?" may have been the *ahem* butt of many jokes. But the fact that MacGyver seems to concentrate all his attention on this little boy seems a little kooky. Him hugging him throughout it is a little strange. But him slapping the child on the ass is what we would call a little much. At this point, my roommate and I were dumbfounded, and we rewinded to that scene and played it in slow motion. And it was still just as creepy.

The third episode is where things go even more overboard. MacGyver teams up with an adorable gypsy girl, trying to get a watch back. The watch has a secret hidden in it, perhaps the secret to MacGyver's sketchy past. At the end, MacGyver rescues the gypsy girl's family and they make it to the Austrian border (from Hungary). MacGyver ensures their passage to freedom, then proceeds to pick up the little girl, kiss her on the mouth, spin her around and nuzzle his nose with hers, looking intently into her eyes.

The rewind/slo-mo process happened again. It got creepier. We watched the fourth episode, the last on the disc, intent on finding out if there was anything else to corroborate our new theory. Unfortunately or fortunately, there were no children in the episode ... just John Vernon. There was brief speculation that the connection between MacGyver and Vernon's character may have somehow related to Vernon molesting a young MacGyver, but it may have just been wishful thinking, like when creationists find a flaw in modern evolutionary theory to prove that there's a God.

At this point, we went to bed. We didn't pop in disc two, but rest assured, the saga of MacGyver's private life isn't over. We are going down a dangerous road, the road of discovering that an icon of USA Network may well have been a pederast.

Don't you remember you told me you loved me baby?

So, instead of doing something constructive with my life, I spent my afternoon watching a low-quality bootleg of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. For those unfamiliar with this heart wrenching family drama, instead of actors, the film is all done in Barbies. And it's fucking amazing. Somehow, with characters whose mouths won't moves emote more than any television movie could hope to. If you can find a copy, best of luck. If you can't, I guess you're just SOL.

Hey, guess who's back?

That's right, the chubby guy with the bad jokes. Having just officially launched my mp3 blog, Hyperbole Will Change Your Life (which is, in fact, a blatant parody of the line in Garden State) I decided a place for non-musical writings might be necessary. Mostly because I need a place to tell the world that I am addicted to watching people orgasm so that it's out in the open and it can't be held against me some day. What's that, you say? Addicted to WHAT?!?!?

Well, thanks to the fine folks at Esquire, I have spent the last few days, when not working or pretending to attend class, looking at videos from Beautiful Agony. The site features hundreds of videos of people achieving orgasm. The words of Bad Brain's song "Pay to Cum" never rang so true. It would ring truer if it were "find some torrent because you're fucking broke to watch people cum," but the song was written before my time.

Each video is strictly a shoulders up shot. It's kind of like one of those awkward sexual encounters where you can't close your eyes, and it lasts anywhere from a minute-and-a-half to ten minutes. Call it post-modern porn, if you will, but nothing has ever been committed to tape that was both chiefly erotic and depravedly voyeuristic like this is. It's also utterly fascinating. This isn't the kind of thing you sit down with a bowl of popcorn, a tube of lotion and a gym sock to.

A friend of mine knocked on the window to the apartment tonight because she was bored and wanted to go drink with my roommate. Common decency says "shut off the porn." My enraptured state said "Wow, I feel really dirty right now but can't stop watching." She saw the screen and said something along the lines of "What the fuck?" Then she got kind of enthralled.

Esquire said it ruined porn with its unabashed honesty; but me, it's just ruined my life.

BANANA PHONE!

CLICK!

I don't think I've ever seen a more perfect example of memetics, the belief that thoughts, ideas and slogans can be transmitted like viruses.

I'll warn you...it'll drive you nuts.

Someday, we will all be digital

It's no lie - there will be a day when our entire lives will be digitized, and each bit of ourselves will be broadcast for the world to see. With the increase in communication forms - from the advent of blogging to the proliferration of sites like myspace.com and thefacebook.com, there is a new facet of our personalities hitting the world. Where actual, social confrontation becomes a much feared thing (and trust me on this one, I've got a few social anxiety problems), there is an increase in the actual online personalities, and how they flesh out as opposed to the real person. With the pictures with profiles, though, it becomes increasingly to create an image of yourself. Why, on the opening page of my website (johnwenz.com if you were paying attention here) there is the image of me in zombie make-up and an army helmet, then lyrics from a Public Enemy song. And, of course, there are the flashing Chuck D.s too. So the thought may cross some minds of "that guy is a little...off." And while this may be in more than a few ways true, let's make a statement of a few facts you wouldn't guess from the banner.

1. I do not actually live in a terrordome.
2. My website is not actually that terrifying for a terrordome.
3. I don't even think it really meets ANY of the qualifications of a terrordome, whatever they may be.
4. I do not actually even know what a terrordome is - outside of a great Public Enemy song.
5. I do assume that a terrordome is either a metaphor for the world, or some kind of post-Apocalyptic, Mad Max style dome.
6. I assume that if it is the latter, this dome would be terrifying in nature.
7. I am not a zombie.
8. I am not a member of the army.
9. I am not a member of a zombie army.
10. I am not a member of the army who came back from the dead to get revenge.
11. I cannot, in fact, breathe fire.
12. There are not, in fact, five of me.

Now, these revelations may come as a shock to you. In fact, I may have just shattered your view of the Terrordome we call Earth. But that's just the point - we have begun to construct ourselves as memes, as an image that replicates itself in the minds of everybody that looks at a website. From there, it is either sent on or ignored, but not necessarily forgotten. There is an image ready to proliferate under the proper conditions.

Sometimes there's nothing better than a good cry...

Ok, I'm kidding. If you cry you're like, a total woman.

No, but really. Sometimes there's nothing better than putting on depressing music and just sort of swaying and smoking to it. Case in point: last night I went to a friend's house, and after watching some movies, drinking some beer, etc. suddenly it turned into "listen to Radiohead and sway depressingly" time. And it was great. Getting swept up into "How to Dissappear Completely" made me want to dissappear completely. Instead, I got tired and went home, though.

But once there, I felt the need to play a few depressing songs of my own.

So here, in that spirit, I present to all none of you readers a list of songs to sway depressingly to.

"Heroin" Velvet Underground
"Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" The Decemberists
"Asleep" The Smiths
"I'm So Tired" The Beatles
"Rock n' Roll Ghost" The Replacements
"Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key" Wilco and Billy Bragg
"Shoot Out the Lights" Richard and Linda Thompson
"Underwear" Pulp
"Hold On" Tom Waits

Western Front

Oh, by the way, here are some mp3 links to the least talented band you will likely ever hear.


Western Front - Bonn to Warsaw

It's what would happen if the Shaggs became angry post-punks.

Western Front - Great Nordic Battle in the Sky

A song about Nordic gods and phallic symbols and a huge battle ... in the sky. I hazily remember recording it, and I think somewhere in the lyrics Thor is riding a gigantic penis through the clouds. Don't try to make sense out of it.

sleeeeeeeeep

I have this little problem with sleep - I get way too much of it, essentially. Or too little. But never in between. It's a strange little double edged sword. This is something I hope will correct itself in due time.

Welcome to my Idiocy

This is a blog for irrellevant thoughts from an inveterate timewaster. It's a chronicle of a Morrissey obsessive stuck in a Killers world. It's the story of me - a young man struggling to find himself in a world that seems to be descending into insanity a little more everyday. It's a tale of stupidity, nerdery, slobbishness, social awkwardness, dating retardation, musical obsession and caffeine addiction. So prepare for an MS Paint filled ride!