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.