Theater Review

In ancient Greece, the people of Athens would once a year gather for a grand festival of drama to honor the god Dionysus. The greatest writers in the land would compete in a game of moving the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens with tragedies and comedies that played upon and brought to light the commonalities of the Greek soul and vision of life. The theater was a secular temple of imagination, a shrine to the power of images and narrative, an experience of worship where art combined with the collective gaze and body of the audience brought the spirit of the god to life, if only for an evening.

Similarly, in the 21st Century the friends and families of people who want to be on TV really bad gather in local community centers and non-profit art spaces as few times as possible to be robbed of $15 dollars and several hours of their time. They sit in the darkness and their imaginations run wild as – right before their eyes – a mere “performance” becomes a “reality” of it’s own, and reality starts revealing itself to be, more and more, a mere performance better when you're watching TV. Thoughts swirl: “Why did we spend do much money for our son to go to film school?” “I’m glad I don’t run the risk of accidentally going to a theater major party anymore. God those sucked. Those people ruin everything,” “Why is it acceptable for adults to spend their time dicking around like this? I wish they were just doing this with their friends at their house and I could imagine they were drunk or had some excuse” “I bet those two are fucking. I'd fuck her.” Cell phones are checked, words of praise and encouragement are practiced silently in heads, how quickly what the last actor just said could lead to a possible end to the story is guesstimated. Dionysus lives again.

Theater: 1 ½ stars, and owes me $15.

An open letter to Linda Ronstadt

Dear Ms. Ronstadt,
As a representative of all Millennials everywhere, I'm writing to tell you that I don't understand you for a minute. Seriously, what is going on? Who are you? Where should you be placed in the cultural landscape of my mind? Why did you decide to be famous? Who are your friends? Who buys your records? Are you my mom? Do I want to fuck you? I can't tell. Sometimes I hear one of your covers on the radio and, if I do the ear equivalent of a squint, it kind of makes sense. Later I'll catch "You're No Good," and I'll really feel it. Along comes "Blue Bayou" and I'm floating in non-space, looking desperately for something to cling to, wondering how I could be so fully lost and feel so fully right at the same time. It's like a dream of my childhood house that fills me with the warmth of nostalgia until I realize something is out of place, then I find it's not my childhood house at all but some kind of dopple-childhood-house, then I realize it isn't anything I even recognize as a house or a childhood, and then all my teeth fall out and I'm covered in tiny dogs.

You with what became The Eagles. Alright.

Alright.

(also, imagine this photo I saw of Mick Jagger wearing a t-shirt that says "Linda Ronstadt: Queen of Rock and Roll" that I can't find anywhere right now)
Wait. What?

Seriously?

Oh shit.

Tiny dog stage.

At this point the only place I can find for you is that of the matriarch of the wide-fat-nosed, generally kind-faced placeless musical mind-fuckers genre, alongside Sheryl Crow, Kelly Clarkson, and sometimes Pink. If music were high school I feel like all of you would be more or less well liked and sometimes show up at parties w/o incidence, but do mostly post-sec senior year, blossom in college, and no one would really ever hear from you again. And you're not on facebook.

To all of you: please respond with a mission statement, brief bio, resume, and a cover letter.

Very Truly Yours,

Nick

Boarding Tips

The other day I had to fly to Minnesota and the airport was pretty crowded. It's a good thing I know how to handle that situation. What I do is I make sure to stand up really close to the gate about 20 minutes before they start boarding. That way I have a prime spot, so even though my seat is way in the front and I don’t have Elite status, I’ll be in line the fucking SECOND they call my row. That strategy also lets me block out all the other passengers who would probably try to budge in front of me. Sometimes people whose rows have already been called assume I’m in line, so they wait behind me, but that’s their fucking problem. The stakes are too high for me to risk losing my awesome spot near the gate. Unfortunately the flight got cancelled, but if it hadn’t, I would have boarded that shit like a master.

Empathy Rays!

I didn’t actually read this article, I just read the subtitles. But I’m pretty confident it goes on to explain that we all shoot empathy rays out of our skin whenever we empathize with people. Which, for me, is like non-stop. Scientists should learn how to harness the power of these empathy rays into some sort of machine (thermodynamics?) and use it to fight terrorism.
Science is funny and cool.

Reading like it was 1813

Footnotes may be boring to actually read, but they are interesting as a concept. That said, if you were thinking of getting me this new hyper-annotated version of Pride and Prejudice for St. Patrick’s Day, please just give me the cash.
According to the NYT,

Any reader who sticks with the program and absorbs the wealth of material that Mr. Shapard offers will, insofar as such a thing as possible, read “Pride and Prejudice” as it was read and understood at the time of its publication, with all the period details in place and correctly interpreted.

I'm glad I can finally read P&P as if I were a real person in 1813, stopping every three seconds to read a footnote just like they did!!
Here's a question: how much do writers consciously write for posterity? It seems like most of the "contemporary fiction" I own will have to be footnoted like crazy for audiences a hundred years from now. As opposed to the MC, which is timelessness if I've ever seen it (AND I HAVE).

Bring back gold

As anyone who knows me knows, I’ve been planning my mansion for years. My sketchbook from when I was eight is filled pretty much front to back with mansion designs. One mansion has six mini-golf courses, and another one has soda fountains in every room (which it turns out are not fountains made of soda, and they suck. See: disillusionment, Salem). Most feature sliding as the exclusive means of transportation.
The best rich people were the rich people of late-19th-century America. They understood what being rich was really about: owning a lot of shit, and putting gold on all your shit. And being really into the Near East. Mansions today in comparison are like dirty hovels. I would be cooler with getting rid of inheritance tax if there was a law that rich people had to commission third-graders to design their mansions.

Newsflash: the secret lives of intellectuals are boring

Apparently public intellectuals do not understand the term "guilty pleasure." Hint: it does not mean “computer programming,” Richard Dawkins, and the fact that that’s the best you could come up with makes you seem sorta repressed, or like your initial submission was “snuff films” and they had to tell you to take it down a notch. Another thing I learned: public intellectuals are basically just girls on Facebook (Stanley Fish: “Favorite music: so embarrassing, but I can’t stop listening to country!! For real though, indie rock, miles davis, and regina spector.”).
I thought we were kind of past the idea of “guilty pleasures." WINNERS: Catherine MacKinnon and Zizek, the only ones to point that out. I bet they would have a cool / fucked up baby.

Diddy Condoms

A friend of mine's little brother is an NYU student who got a job as a personal assistant to P. Diddy. He reports that, while packing for P, he found a bunch of condoms that had an image Diddy's face printed on the wrapper. When he opened them he found that Diddy's face was also on the latex. I'd say "the man's a genius," but I'm one step ahead of him: I already have his face tatooed on my penis head.

I HAVE BEEN PROMISED SAMPLES/PICTURES, SO STAY TUNED.

The Internet

isn't just fun, it's also a great learning tool.

What my dreams are like

I can't embed this. Check it out. CHECK IT OUT. Skip the part where the woman who isn't famous is talking and imagine me riding a huge version of my childhood dog with a beautiful island girl. The end won't disappoint.

Re: LOL so true

This is a response to the post directly below it.

1) I'm telling that joke to kick off Liz's eulogy.

2) I wonder: if we had given them Facebook in 1906, and presented it as a solution to the anonymity and isolation problems created by the telephone, would they have sighed relief or become more anxious?

3) A related anecdote:
When I was in college, I went to a media studies conference and saw a grad student read a paper on how cable news screens were corrupting news(journalism? information?) by showing viewers so much information at one time that it was impossible to properly focus on any one story. She drew a diagram of the Headline News set-up and pointed at what she drew to represent the anchor's head, the over the shoulder image, and the news ticker below the anchor's face, over and over really quickly to show us how our eyes/minds were working when we watched that kind of show. Afterwards, two dude classmates of hers commented "Walter Benjamin said the same thing about newspapers." And their faces were like "we are sooo close to kind of fake laughing out loud right now. That's how stupid your paper is."

I wanted in on the fun, so I quickly started pretending like I could have started fake laughing at any moment. Others in the audience joined us. I thought we were doing this because we had all read newspapers and found it actually works out pretty well, so, like how Benjamin, in retrospect, sounds irrationally scared of newspapers, the presenter sounded irrationally scared of cable news which we all watch and don't really have that hard a time processing.

I just finally looked up that Benjamin essay (Storytelling), read several paragraphs of it online, and re-assessed that situation. Now I'm pretty sure the dudes we were laughing like "No shit, you idiot bitch. Benjamin already wrote about this problem, and in the exact same way. As fellow grad students this is hilarious to us because it means you have failed miserably in your research and have proven us to be the superior minds we always knew we were. Cable news is soooo confusing to us. I wouldn't even look at a newspaper for fear of complete disorientation. This is common knowledge."

LOL So True

This is from an article in Slate about an old person who joins Facebook:

But the anxiety older people feel about social-networking sites stripping away the privacy of the younger generation and leaving them vulnerable to whoever is on the other end of the equipment is nothing novel...Carolyn Marvin writes that the same concerns were raised by the original social-networking instrument, the telephone. Marvin recounts a telephone joke from 1906. A woman answers the phone and is asked by a suitor if she'll marry him. "Of course I'll marry you!" she replies, then adds, "Who is calling, please?"

People with telephones will marry anyone.
I <3 olden times so much.

Can you get syphilis from sharing a bottle of talent?

Every day I walk past the guy selling Spare Change who basically orders me to smile, and I do it, because I’m weak. But today at the gym I saw an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch where Sabrina switches identities with a sassy female rapper, Baby K2K, and learns that even white people can stand up for themselves. On my way back I was about to pass that guy, and I crossed the street.
The first two years of that show I thought Salem was just a creepy looking real cat, and to this moment I remember when my friend was like, “no, idiot, it’s a puppet.” I grew up a little bit that day. Thinking back, it’s weird that I didn’t know how to recognize puppets until my teens.

Political Humor

Political humor is just like regular humor, only more intelligent. Here's an old political joke I love:

Q: What did one young Republican say to the other young Republican?
A: I think it's time we started examining our father issues.

another:

Q: What did Bill Clinton say to his new intern?
A: I'm happy you're working with me to solve the world AIDS crisis.


Or how about a political cartoon?

"Doo-di-doo. Just solvin' the world AIDS crisis :)>"

Whatz up Faggots?!?!

Hey, Pretty Lady.

Barack Obama EXCLUSIVE

The crack staff at MC has done it again. The following is some exclusive video footage of a recent meeting Sen. Obama held with campaign strategy staffers:

I am loving this guy.