March 2005 Archives
Thursday: From the steps of the Universal Music World Headquarters in Santa Monica, California, EELS leader Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, announces 2005 tour:
The past few EELS tours had taken a physical and emotional toll on me. I decided it was time to stop. But then one night I was in the backyard smoking a cigar with Bobby, Jr. and I was thinking about how we've been pummeling the audiences with variations on a distorted, rocking theme for the past few tours and wouldn't it be nice to do something really different? I found myself getting creatively excited about the idea. I couldn't stop myself from calling the office and having my team of experts assist me in making this idea a reality. So here we come again. If you're looking for rock -- turn back. You've come to the wrong place. This is a whole other thing.
if you're lucky enough to live in SoCal, get your ass some tickets to see EELS with Strings. i'm tempted to fly down just to see 'em. May 11th at the Galaxy in Santa Ana and May 12 at the Roxy in LA.
if you're going and want to tempt me more, you know where to reach me.
our president says, upon hearing of terri schiavo's death:
I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others. The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.
unless he thinks you might have once sat next to someone who he heard once whispered "terrorist" in his sleep. then, of course, we should ship you to syria for a feeding tube insertion of your own.
i will not sleep until we reach brooklyn.
what? oh. i mean:
no. sleep! till BROOKLYN!
get off the bus. you're wild man, wild. you're a little wild. really. just a heads up. you're wildish. or maybe you just need some sleep?
no. getting out of bed! till BROOKLYN!
boy. i wish i could pull that off. but since we're not going to brooklyn until memorial day weekend, that would mean bed sores. bed sores are just so last year. not sexy at all any more.
bed head is still kind of sexy, though. and bedroom eyes? hella sexy. bed pan? not sexy.
but yeah. in the midst of a day of customer service hell, i did indeed secure passage on an aeroplane for myself and my betrothed to a nice little place named after our philanderingest president, John F. Kennedy.
if we can shift time around for daylight savings, and pakistan can shift itself half an hour to set itself off from india, and nepal can be fifteen minutes off of that, fuck it. i want my own time zone.
welcome to zack standard time.
i'm not late. i'm just on a different time zone.
i've got a new landlord. our friends and neighbors, thomas and peter, sold the building and moved to fabulous sacramento. they sold the building to daune. she showed up last night.
she's from arizona. works for Coors. moving into a $1.25MM tri-level castro apartment on her own. bought the building without even seeing our unit.
me: hey! welcome home! have you ever lived in San Francisco before?
daune: no. but i've lived in New York so i know what cities are like.
honey. welcome to the castro. it's JUST like new york here. she might as well have said, "i've lived in the sahara so i know what sedona is like."
drag queen party at my house tonight! bring your own fog. and for godsakes, take the ABC train. the express. and would you pick me up some bagels?
i've been arguing with TTN on his blog about baseball, steroids, congressional waste and outrage.
i'm trying to decide if i enjoy it or not.
on one hand, i like having a good argument. on the other, he and i don't always communicate so well. he's all in a snit because congress wasted taxpayer money in some grandstanding session investigating steroid use in baseball. he thinks baseball can police itself and there's more important things for congress to busy itself with.
i think steroid use in athletics is as offensive as ashlee simpson lip synching and baseball wasn't going to police itself. and, sure, that congress is wasting our time and money.
for TTN, the congressional waste is more important. to me, congressional waste is completely standard and picking this session to get outraged about seems counterproductive.
but is arguing about that fun?
no. i think i'll stop.
to repent, today's helpful blog post will about things that are fun to argue about:
i sat in root beer today.
no, not on purpose. jeez. it was just, you know, hanging out on the seat of the muni car. being root beer. so i sat in it. i know it was root beer because i smelled my ass.
don't you wish you were me, with an ass that smells like root beer? the best part is that i've got a doctor's appointment today. i hope he notices!
doc: excuse me. does your ass smell like root beer?
me: i thought you'd never notice! i think you're soooo dreamy!
also, my johnson smells like dr. pepper, but that's another story.
i didn't have a straw.
no sir. i don't take steriods and i don't like people who do, because people who take steriods are big stupid stupidheads and i am a baseball god.
sir.
no, i will not sully the reputation of this grand game by telling you that jose conseco likes to fondle badgers while wearing women's undergarments which were MADE IN SWEATSHOPS! Iranian Sweatshops! North Korean Badgers! and he likes French people! eyes whats seen him eatin' baguettes!
sir.
ha ha ha! it's fun to watch big burly stupid stupidheads get spanked by congress. it's practically all that congress is good for these days, spanking baseball players. and sprinkling magic fairy dust on the animatronic zombie that is terri schiavo.
i wish i wish i wish.... come alive NOW! poof! i swear she just laughed at me. she smiled. in her head. because i'm such an idiot. or maybe she was remembering that episode of Everybody Loves Raymond? what? she's BEEN A VEGETABLE since before that show even went on the air? well...
fuck you then.
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Albert Einstein, excerpt from Religion and Science, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930
i realize that i write the word "just" a lot. and "anyway." that i'm frequently tempering my statements as if they'll be challenged.
i also realize that there's no U in team. i really need to make shirts that say that. and ones that say "shut up hippie" because bartlebee forwarded this to me:
Open "Mike"
You are invited to an extraordinary event!
Who is Michael?
Michael is an entity of 1050 individual essences or souls, who have already lived all their lives on the physical plane and now that they are recombined into one consciousness, they bring their teaching forth from the causal plane. The purpose of this teaching is agape, or unconditional love, acceptance and understanding. They bring forth information that empowers the individual to fully be who they really are, expressing their own unique divine nature and purpose. Michael is a group of intelligent, wonderful, compassionate, humorous, wise and loving beings, here to serve in the transformation of consciousness of this planet now so rapidly taking place. Their information is awesome and very helpful. They also like to have fun.
michael also like wiffleball, hot wax, size 50 H breasts pressed up against his windshield, and cash donations. his pet peeves are people who eat hot dogs next to him in the movie theater and the scientific method.
no hippies.
please leave me a message on the causal plane.
i just bought malcolm gladwell's new book blink: the power of thinking without thinking. it's about what he calls "the adaptive unconscious": how our snap decisions can be more valuable than well considered scientific investigation.
i also saw this article in the new york times today about how Dr. Charles Townes, Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the laser, won a Templeton Prize for spirituality. so i looked him up using our friend the internet and found this paper he'd written called Gathering of the Realms: The Convergence of Science and Religion that more or less addresses the same theories that i'd broached on this blog a few weeks back.
then i found his email address and wrote him.
what the hell, right? he lives in berkeley. i thought he might want to read my blog and comment.
how many Nobel Prize winners read your blog? my blog is lousy with all sorts of prize winners. i can barely type for all the statuettes around here. shut up. most of them do not come with a kung-fu grip.
i was thinking, sure, why not? i'd like to buy you dinner. all of you. i could give you your choice of chicken or halibut or a vegetable terrine, maybe, with like four or five appetizers and a salad and naan and rice and chutney and cake service.
would you like that?
would you like some (*wink wink*) cake service?
good. it's a deal. who cares if it costs a quarter of my annual salary? you're my friends and i'm gonna do it.
in exchange, all you will have to do is take a shower that day and then do the chicken dance.
Designer Milton Glaser presented a speech titled "10 Things I have Learned" at the AIGA Voice Conference in 2002. In it, he quotes John Cage's brilliant advice for surviving old age:
You know, I do know how to prepare for old age. Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceeding well prepared for my old age.
damn straight.
the rest of the speech is worth reading, too.
just as a quick follow up to my post last week about Lebanon and Syria and the assassination of Hariri:
today's NYT reports,
Hundreds of thousands of pro-Syrian protesters poured into a central Beirut square this afternoon in a demonstration called for by the militant group Hezbollah that vastly outnumbered recent rallies demanding that Syrian forces leave Lebanon.
that's as opposed to:
On Monday, in the biggest demonstration yet of anti-Syrian anger, more than 70,000 Lebanese shouting "Freedom! Sovereignty! Independence!" filled central Beirut. The demonstrators waved Lebanon's cedar-tree flag and shouted, "Syria out!"
if hezbollah mobilized hundreds of thousands, i'm now curious to know who's mobilizing the anti-syria protesters? anybody? or just discontent? and why did the pro-syrian government resign if the balance of favor appears to weigh in their favor?
what does a man need to do to get some real news around here?
i've got two words for you:
here are three more:
what the fuck?
posh bagel? this is what i walked past today on my way to work. a store called posh bagel.
posh bagel is what is commonly referred to as an oxymoron. accent on the moron. it's like Splintery Lube. just not a good idea. i mean, when you think posh, right off the bat you're thinking Jews, right?
no.
and bagels? posh? someone is vastly unclear on the concept. the Posh Scone, yes. the Feh Bagel, sure.
the Posh Bagel is where you go to get a bacon-flavored soft roll with artichoke-maple-goat-testicle spread.
sorry. it just irritated me. and i'm still tired after the iditarod.
note: updated album w/ pix from kat-dog
after sleeping for 16 hours, taking a nap, and drinking lots of water i am now mostly sober.
the urban iditarod, despite my lack of a team, was a drunken success.
actually, a team would have just slowed me down. as it was, only kathrin and i ran from the much ballyhooed and boo-hooed Team Fear & Loathing.
and she ran as a sick puppy.
i mostly stumbled in honor of the late Hunter S. Thompson. i seem to have bedrunken quite a lot of tequila. i also seem to have taken a bunch of photos even though i can't remember bringing the camera.
when one is dressed as HST, one finds oneself the recipient of much boozy generousity.
i'll write more tomorrow, but for now here are the photos.
(also: check out Joe's quicktime slideshow)
ajax says my blog needs more balls.
balls to that, i say.
and balls to the urban iditarod.
after trying the soft sell, the hard sell, the bait n' switch, and the dangling of sexual favors i am now officially abandoning my idea to front a team for the race.
the race tomorrow.
i'm still going, mind you. just i give up on trying to organize anyone. after all my work we were down to josh, his not-really-into-it wife nikki, kathrin, and two of her friends whom i haven't met. then, the final straw, josh says he has to work until 9:00 tonight. in San Jose.
so that means i'd need to steal a cart myself and organize the decoration with three people who've never run the iditarod before and who haven't even seen Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. and nikki who doesn't drink.
it is with great regret that i am forced to inform you that you are an old sorry bastard.
yes. you.
for a few weeks now i've been trying to rustle up a team to "compete" in the urban iditarod this saturday. it's everything one could hope for: idiotic costumes, forced drinking, calesthenics, public sex acts.
many a soul heard the pitch, saw last years pictures and said loudly, with joy in their hearts, "maybe."
what, you want something?
jeez. yes. i have not been blogging a whole lot lately. why? because i hate you and you suck.
also because i've been busy at work, which is different, and i've been busy at home and because i have been too tired to think.
the sleeping. it isn't happening so much.
luckily, my friend kenneth and i swapped some medications and i think his might be better then the stuff i've got. his is called supa-anti-spasmatronix or something. you take it and then you slide off the couch into a puddle of manflesh.
i took one of these pills last night after bartlebee totally flipped out. because after doing all the math she realized that she wouldn't have enough money to cover her share of the rent this year. couldn't even pay rent, let alone eat or get lap dances.
totally bloo-bloo-blooey.
she was really upset but i was really confused. how could this be? with the fellowship money and all the budgeting she'd done, how come now all of a sudden there just isn't enough bread to make a half-sandwitch?
because she forgot about half the money she was getting! there's plenty of dough! full sandwitches for everyone!
ha ha ha. life is fun when you're planning a wedding and finishing a thesis and trying to prove the existence of god using post-its and maple syrup.
