Mariah Carey and Mo'Nique At Sundance

Does it concern anyone that Mariah Carey and Mo'nique were not only in a movie featured at Sundance, but that they actually won awards? Maybe it's just me, but the mixing of those two with that event almost feels like the gates of hell opening and a marching band stepping out playing "I'm Too Sexy" with tubas.

For the record, I have not seen Push, nor am I against seeing it. I have not read the book either, nor am I against reading it. Conceptually, they sound pretty interesting. And it is altogether possible that the singer and the comedian did do a fantastic job acting in front of a camera. It could be completely mind-blowing and relevatory of the human condition, I don't know. So, I'm certainly not talking out of any kind of real study or experience when I say, "Mariah Carey and Mo'nique? Really?"

These are two people who have added a thick layer of stupidity to every single film I've seen them in. Other than being mildly amused with Wisegirls, every other movie I've seen with Carey in it has just left me feeling like the people in charge desperately wanted somebody.....anybody, who looked good and had big boobs in a cameo. I can almost hear the conversation, "Well, we couldn't get Traci Lords, and Pamela Anderson is booked.........let's see what Mariah Carey is doing." I've certainly not gotten the impression that she's ever been hired for her abilities to act. Best I can tell, her acting is a mix of her giving a happy and joyful smile to the camera, and later to give a sad pout. And if you've ever seen a Mariah Carey music video, you'll know that neither of these are really anything to write home about.

And Mo'nique? Why people why?

Did someone forget this woman had a lead role in the Parkers? Did the world forget what a turd sandwich that was? Ye gods, her whole career has been her sauntering on camera, making a high pitched "Heeeyyyyyyy" sound, smiling, and then sauntering away. Mo'nique is a fucking sound effect people! She's thrown into films for noise, weak humor, and authenticity. And now you're gonna reward her for this?

I watched Mo'nique in a serious role once. I can't remember what it was called, but it involved her interviewing the convicts in a women's prison, and hearing their life stories and so on. These were real people, not actors. And she was being called on to interview, not to act. A very simple thing, and she still fucked it up. She spent the brunt of the documentary wearing the "Oprah face." Sad eyes, lips tucked in tight, and lots and lots of nodding. The kind of expression that says "You poor thing," but can also be translated as, "Fuck I'm hungry, when are they gonna feed us?" Oprah does it better, we don't need Mo'nique out in the world trying to half ass it.

I'm not so naive to not notice that the Sundance located a half hour away from me has gone to the richy poo-celebs. It's a game the big names like to play, "Let's go to a small mountain town in the middle of buttfuck winter, watch movies we hate, and hype up the kitsch value." It's an elitest's destination, it even gets it's own little pictoral in Us Magazine. So I know that the high end dramatic celebrity rules Sundance.

I'm also aware that many of the big names have participated in low budget independent films. Hell a lot of great names got their start in doing shit like that (Ben Affleck anyone?) And that's perfectly cool, an independent director gets a bit more press, the afforementioned big name actor gets to stretch out his or her acting chops a bit. Everybody wins.

However, throwing Mrs "Touch My Body," and Mo'nique into a Sundance scenario reeks of so much B-grade crap, that I'm beginning to wonder if this event hasn't completely sold out. Yeah, this is a celebrities thing, but at least there used to be an aura of professionalisim to it. Pretentious sure, but skilled and experienced enough to pull it off. But if we're gonna throw Carey and Mo'nique into this mix, well we might as well invite Nickelodeon and MTV to hang out as well. Shit, let's get Miley Cirus and Shia Lebeouf to do a "coming of age" film set during the gas shortages of the 70's. That sounds like art doesn't it? How about Spongebob wearing a fucking beret and smoking a cigarette while talking about the futility of life? Sounds deep to me.

But, like I said I've never seen the movie. Perhaps they really are great in it, and completely deserving of their awards.

I doubt it though.

Eight Years

I was browsing the posts over at Threat Quality Press when I stumbled across something interesting. My mind flew right out the window when I read the following lines:

"Strange to think: in a very real sense, my entire adult life has been haunted by George W. Bush. It’s a bit hard to remember life before him."

Think about it, up until last week the "Dubya" was a fixture in the White House for eight years. Eight years people! Ye gods! There are celebrities who don't even have careers that long, and yet this diabolical nutjob has sustained as our elected spokesperson and mascot for nearly a decade.

Now I admit, I didn't get involved in my political responsibilities at an appropriate age. In fact I didn't even register to vote until 2004. What can I say, I've stemmed from some serious arrested development. Arrested development may not even describe it, my development was left in some bondage slum, tied to a radiator and left for dead. So I'm only emerging into the world as a barely responsible adult. Still, I remember when the man stepped into office, and I wasn't happy about it. I was just as furious as those of you who voted against him, despite the fact that I didn't ever vote (I live in Utah, it's not like my vote would've hinged on some major tiebreaker or anything.) I expected nothing but bad things from this would-be president.

Still, I had no idea the shit would hit the fan with such epic magnitude, that the rest of us would be stinking of filth long after he was gone. You expected disaster, and you expected casualties, but at the end of these past eight years, I doubt anyone expected the current state of clusterfuck we find ourselves in.

Perhaps I'm biased towards who we currently have in charge, but I just don't see anything that's currently working. There isn't any money, people have no jobs, soldiers are still overseas fighting a war that we supposedly won some five years ago, and everyone's still scared. There are bad science fiction movies from the 80's that have a more hopeful scenario that what we're currently waddling through.

So it boggles my mind seeing the current state of things, and knowing that eight years ago, even my worst nightmares were more optimistic. I look back into my early 20's, the most dramatic, self-obsessed years of my life, and still find a Boogie who was more jovial about the future than I am now. It's a strange thing.

Now I didn't expect great things of George, but nor did I expect things to be this bad. I was honestly kind of hopeful about my government, I was hopeful about a lot of things in fact. And that's not to say that our numero 44 isn't providing some emotional feel goods about a better tomorrow. I'm just laced with a bit of cynicism, much like many of us who have been hardened by the past years. And that cynicism makes for an interesting trip into my own personal past, remembering that fella who, even at his darkest, most long haired metal depressed fury, was still a peppy bastard compared to the older fella who's typing this now.

Or perhaps I just spend too much time using pointless landmarks as a source for remembering the past.

John Lee Hooker Vs. The Modern Blues

The blues have become an anemic art form. Truth be told, referring to oneself as a blues musician means nothing more than knowing how to fondle the minor scale for vast amounts of time, and being able to lazily sing about the same kind of heartaches and tribulations that plague pop singers. Granted, Buddy Guy and B.B King are still out there doing things the way they should be done, but the brunt of modern times, not born "in the day," bluesman are less about boogie and soul, and more about pure technicality. You musically represent your downtrodden state not so much by verbalizing your pain to a steady groove, but by copiously playing a guitar for great lengths of time.

So for those of you who have grown numb to every blues song you've heard containing the words "baby," and "got da blues,"I would like to remind you of a time when blues had a little hair on it's chest with the following:

Admit it, that feels good doesn't it? An off time, off tune soundtrack that has more testosterone in it than any long haired metal guy decked in spikes and makeup. This is pure bravado mixed with problem resolution, all done in blunt graphic detail. And unlike the modern day bluesman whining at great length about losing their woman, you actually kind of believe Ol' John Lee here will back up what he says. I mean, considering how specific he happens to be, I'm fairly sure he's been thinking about this for awhile.

And there are others, many others, from this time who sang up some wonderful, very horrible shit. Dark, decrepit music talking about funerals, physical violence, grime and crime.....you know, the good stuff. What good is losing one's baby when you got tuberculosis and a lynch mob after you? Priorities people.

Clearly, that's not the case today. Blame the loss of superstition or the advent of higher technology. Hell, feel free to blame a recording industry that only markets the crap blues, but in the end, it all comes down to one thing: Bluesmen have lost their way. They've forgotten that the pioneers of this genre were not marketing their craft for convention centers and weddings, but for people who would sit, drink, and listen to music involving liars and deviants getting brutally beaten, and think to themselves, "Yeah, been there buddy." This once was music for the tough, scary, and miserable.

So, for those of you artists, who are thinking that all you need for the blues is a frilly hat, a Stratocaster, and a bit of musical theory, take note. The men and women who's graves your stepping on were dressed in rags, playing instruments that could barely stay in tune, and had much better back stories than you ever will.

Why There's No Fuzzy CD

I occasionally get asked, mostly by those who know me pretty well, why there hasn't been a physical CD copy of Fuzzy kicked into the world. Oh sure, my shit's out there o'digital running the gamut from iTunes to Lala, but nothing that actually exists. No means by which you could fondle it in your filthy little hands or anything like that. So, if the internet turned off tomorrow it would be like my small little body of work never existed at all. Well, I suppose if you want to be technical, it's already almost like it never existed at all, but that's beside the point.

"So, what's the deal?" You may ask. "Why the hell don't you get off your lazy ass and make us happy by creating a physical CD for those of us who don't feel like flushing our hard earned cash down the rectums of Apple and Amazon?"

The simple answer? CD's cost money, and money is tight.

I'm not going to bitch poverty, because at the end of the day, I'm sitting all right. Not secure or anything, I certainly won't be building that Mini Cooper bumper cart rink I've been toying with anytime soon. But I can stay fed and warm, and am currently typing away on a damn fine laptop with a quality media player by my side, so shit isn't dire on my end. Regardless, the well spring isn't flowing so high that I feel good about tossing money at this. I mean, let's face it, my body of work isn't exactly bringing them in. I don't have the masses clammoring for a piece of my pie, so the incentive for doing this is pretty flimsy.

But, on an equally important scale, I just don't have the artwork for a real CD. There is, of course, the album cover which is featured to your immediate left. And I think it is a damn fine piece of art, but that's all I really have to work with. Yeah, I've discussed concept art with the artist who drew this stuff, and have actually seen a few stencils put together, but I can't move any faster until that shit is done. And since I'm in an intimate relationship with the artist in question, forcing her to move quicker would mean less evening priviledges for me. A sacrifice I'm just not willing to make. I need my evening priviledges damnit.

And while there are a few people I'm close to who have been wanting a CD, and who I feel very much deserve one, the world at large seems to spin just fine without it. So, I haven't been in any real rush to get one out there.

But if there is one problem with not having physical media, it's that nobody takes you seriously. Unless you can stand in front of a camera holding a CD that has your quality work on it, you're not regarded with any more respect than the forty-somethings who have a Dokken cover band on the weekends. Media organizations, blogs, and anyone willing to give you any kind of press is just not going to accept you as anything but asscrack if you don't have a CD to give them. And while there have been some very cool podcasts like SoupyGato and NBT who've been kind enough to give me and my nonsense a little airtime, at the end of the day I'm still quite the ingrown hair on the landscape of the interweb. Which is weird right? You'd think that considering how 2.0 savvy all these sites are claiming to be, that digital distro would be the way to go.

But, rather than take the obvious routes, things have to be complicated. And the paramaters they instill are just ridiculous. I can count numerous music based blogs who I've submitted work to with these ridiculous conditions. They don't want you e-mailing mp3's, instead they want links to webpages. But they can't be any of the pages that other folks know and use on a regular basis. No Myspace pages, no Facebook pages, these have to be custom independent pages. But they can't be real webpages, no they just have to be a page with nothing on it but a link where they can download your material at their leisure. And this is of course assuming that the blog and/or podcast isn't affiliated with some organized setup that requires you to be a member first.

Or I can mail them a CD. And it can't just be some cheapo CD-R with a few url links either. No sir, they want that shit looking polished. And if you've gone through all the time and finance to actually make and mail them a professional looking product, it only means they'll consider checking you out. So, if the fanatically snobby music blogs think your material is crap, that is one bit of time and effort you'll never see again.

Now I can deal with rejection, and I can deal with knowing that there are lots of people who don't dig on the kind of stuf I write, but I'm not going to pay money to be told I suck. The whole "spend money to make money" credo may sound great, but as a functioning organism it's no more effective than the dodo. This is the internet for fuck's sake. Technically, the whole world is listening. And it only takes one pass for people to decide whether they like my stuff or they don't. So, I don't see the point of jumping through hurdles at this juncture. Especially when you consider just how well CD's have been selling lately.

But hell, what do I know? At the end of the day, I may just be half-assing it.

The inauguration of President Barak Obama

Today is history. A moment in time that when we spend our lives looking back on, and constantly remind ourselves "I was there, I saw it happen." And while I'm don't know how this generation and this president will be remembered in the annals of history, no one can debate the impact this will have on all of us.

I'm an excessively thought-laden man, most of them crude. But watching the inauguration has completely stripped my mind. All I seem to be able to put together is "I can't believe this is happening," over and over again. I have fully embraced how important this moment is, and find myself with few adequate words, most of which are landing on this page.

For me personally, I couldn't be happier. This will be the first time in my life where I feel like I can relate to my Commander in Chief. The African-American's of the world claim him as one of their own, which is justified. And the Muslim parts of the world also claim him as one of their own, which is also justified. But Obama is also a self-professed mutt, a half-breed, and a person of mixed descent, which also makes him one of me. My mixed background has been something that stands out so much, and that I wear every single day of my life, that it's impossible to deny. And while I won't go so far as to say it defines me, it is something that makes up a good piece of who I am. Many say that no one can understand what it's like to be of an ethnic background unless you are born ethnic. The same is true of half-breeds, if not more so. Charles Mingus once referred to it as the "colorless island," a phrase I've often used myself. I'm not going to use this space as a reason to talk about my personal trials and tribulations, but understand that when I see a man of mixed background take over as this nation's leader, I feel like this man can understand where people like me come from.

The man's apparently also a southpaw, which only sweetens the deal.

As I said, the future may not paint Obama as the hero we're seeing today. I certainly hope it does, but one never knows. And he still has plenty of critics here and abroad who would love nothing more than to tell us who supported this man, "See? I told you he was no good." I have no more idea what the future holds than you do, but I ask all of you, supporters and detractors alike, to take a look around you today and see what your country mates have in their eyes...

Hope.

Your nation, and all the people in it are hopeful once more. That perhaps they really do have some say in how their country is run. That on the top of the hill, there is a man who is willing to listen to you. We have license to dream again, a feeling which I hope you take as much advantage of as I intend to. Most of your country has united behind a man who is saying right now, that no matter what bolt of cloth you wear, and what flag you carry, if you mean well to your brothers and fellow citizens, we will support you. And that's something good.

Enjoy this moment people, enjoy the sense of unity, and togetherness. If you voted for the man, and even if you didn't, celebrate this. For today, we're all bound by a new President, and a new set of responsibilities to this country. Starting tomorrow, our country changes. Maybe not fiscally or by any mark of law, but by the attitudes of the people who live in it. And if you don't agree with the man and the title he now holds, I hope you are still willing to fight and work with all of us in trying to be better, to do better, and to live better lives.

This is history my friends, revel in it.

Exhaustion

I am so drained people.

I crawled into the end of last week, barely able to stand or speak. My voice was a raspy mess of phlegm and stale air. I could barely maintain my body temperature, and my balance was for shit. In fact, I'm surprised I didn't tumble down the stairs on my way to bed.

I've been nurturing the same cold for more than a week now. What started last week as a bit of stuffiness and a fever has blown up astronomically into a huge disease clusterfuck. I've been coughing nonstop for four days now and around Tuesday night , my body broke out in hives. I've been a splotchy, itchy, miserable looking man.

And yet, I'm fairly sure I've done some good.

This is an interesting job I find myself in. Yeah, it's the education field, and more of the same education stuff I've continually fallen into (and continually swear that I'll never do again,) but things are admittedly different. First off, the hours can go from sub-standard to capital punishment at a moment's notice. Some days, you pull a three, and then there are days like last week where I was pulling nines and tens. Coming from a background where a full eight hour day was considered "working hard," an extended shift can just lay you out on your ass. And this isn't just sitting in an office staring at a screen, this is being in front of a room full of people, hoping that the information you are telling them sticks in any way possible. The state of mental drain you send yourself home with, trying to think if there was a better way to say this, or a better way to explain that, can be immense.

But it definitely can be rewarding. This isn't just rehashing the water cycle to a room full of kids who have probably heard it better and more entertaining from Bill Nye or some other PBS knockoff. It's important, valid information that people actually want to know. And at the end of the night, when I'm barely hanging on to my guts, and my brain is so shot to hell that I can't even process a commercial on TV, I can let myself slide into sleep and think to myself, "I think I did alright today."

This is probably one of the hardest jobs I have ever done. I rarely come home from a day where I don't feel completely fried, and where I have a hard time falling asleep at night because I'm thinking of what I can do to make the next day more seamless. But, I'm not using this space to bitch. It's hard yes, but it's a good kind of hard. I've got more freedom and space to function the way I like to, and I'm teaching to an objective. One that's pretty hard to miss. So yeah, it's not like my heydays when I got to decide what I wanted to talk about and present it the way I liked to, but it's close.

So, that's my story thus far. It's what resulted in a distinct lack of posts last week, and may serve to do so again. But I suppose, considering the ridiculous nonsense I do generate when I generate something, that you're probably better for it.