Category: neck deep in the zeitgeist

gratuitous donut porn

I stopped at a convenience store Saturday night and found this rack of donuts sitting forlornly outside. I assume they were old and about to be thrown away, but I couldn’t help but feel an intense “hey, free donuts!” rush. It was a struggle not to scoop them all up and dash away into the night. And I don’t even like donuts much when they’re fresh and not, you know, parking-lot aged. Wouldn’t that be fun to explain to a potential employer when I had to disclose on my application that I had been convicted of misdemeanor pastry theft?

I’ve been enjoying checking my site stats and seeing how people found this blog. Most have wandered in through links to other people’s blogs “and thanks very much to the people who’ve linked me”, but here are some of the more interesting search terms that have led people to Plooble:

Arlus Fruck

Natasha Fattedad “I hate to think she and Arlus found themselves on my list of funny names”

North Korea the democracy

fuck you you fucking fuck get shorty

2003 email directory of hung in korea “from Google Denmark”

oenophiles

Ballantrae Shiraz 2001 “my apologies to the wine enthusiasts who found my tasting notes”

2Xtreme Sports Chair

laptop looks like a car

Nokia’s commercial dishwasher

I want to buy a chuckwalla.

I also found a link that totally wigged me out. I knew there were sites that allow you to translate web pages, but seeing my site in German was very disorienting. Useful if you want to know how to say “Holy Crap” the next time you’re in Berlin.

And now, ANUSTART.

I first heard about this from my friend Katie, who either saw the vehicle in question, or heard from someone who did. It’s a minivan somewhere in the Chapel Hill area with a personalized plate reading ANUSTART. Anus tart? How did that get past the DMV? When the driver was asked what her plate meant, she pronounced it “a new start.” But I’ll bet she gets lots of strange looks in traffic, not to mention interesting propositions.

Artist Kirk Fanelly, who definitely seems like a Plooble kind of guy, immortalized this monument to inside-the-box thinking in a painting. Here’s a closeup. Thanks to Ryan for alerting me to this. He loves this plate even more than the one he saw on a Jeep that read BUMTOY. I hope those two have found each other.

Bellafea at Kings

As much as I love writing and music, I hate writing about music. I’ve made a few attempts, including one published in The Independent Weekly, but I just never feel comfortable doing it. I read far too many impenetrable wankfests disguised as music journalism in the NME in the ’80s, and that probably instilled my antipathy for much of the genre. The worst music reviews seem to be about anything but the music, and mostly about the reviewer. All I ever want to say anymore is “I like them: they sound like Sonic Youth or “I don’t like them: they sound like a trap case full of symbols falling down the stairs” Besides, in Chapel Hill everybody is a music critic, and a casually tossed-off comment like “this reminds me of Beulah’s first album can get you into a tedious ten-minute argument.

So don’t take it as dismissive that I’m not going to say a lot about Bellafea’s set last night at Kings in Raleigh other than this: it was great. I first heard about Bellafea through Myküll, who is friends with Heather, who is half the band “with Nathan on drums”. She sent me CDs to give to my friends who work for labels or otherwise help to influence the direction of Chapel Hill music, and everybody enjoyed them. I really like their sound. It’s unusual without being unapproachable, and I love the way they play with the mood of the song, going from quiet and introspective to loud and frenetic and then back again “of course, this leads to embarrassing moments of clapping-before-the-song-is-over, which I did last night”. Heather is a lot of fun to watch onstage, jumping around like Laura Ballance and contorting her face as she sings from the depths of her tiny body. Bellafea recently relocated to Chapel Hill from Wilmington, and they’re going to be a valuable addition to The Scene. I think they’d be perfect in a lineup between Work Clothes and Lud, if that means anything to you.

Okay, I guess I did say a lot about the show. And one other thing: I think it’s great that The Rosebuds used their CD release party as an opportunity to give exposure to their friends, but six bands are too much. I know this will further brand me as an old fart, but I’ve only got about 90 minutes of rock appreciation in me anymore. And turn it down, you kids.

Kings is only a 30-minute drive from the Cat’s Cradle, but Raleigh feels like another country sometimes, even though I grew up there. There is some Chapel Hill-Raleigh scenester cross-pollination, but mostly they seem like two different species. For instance, in Raleigh some of the women actually dress up. I saw one woman last night who looked like an escort, and quite a few more who were seriously working the rock ‘n’ roller thing. One emaciated blonde sported the classic drugged-out vacant stare along with a shoulder-baring Motörhead t-shirt that relegated the sleeves to the role of bicep warmers. She looked like she should have been hanging out in a dressing room waiting for Lemmy with a towel and a bottle of Jack. Contrast this with Chapel Hill, where the typical female hipster looks like she got up at 3:00 p.m. and put on the clothes her drummer boyfriend dropped on the floor the night before. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that look. As long as it’s not smelly.

I realize now I might have illustrated my point with photos, since I had my new digital camera with me, but I’m not sure how I would have gone about explaining myself. “Hey, do you mind if I take your picture to illustrate a blog entry about Raleigh women dressing like slutty heavy metal groupies?

That reminds me: I still haven’t written about ANUSTART. Oh, well. No time now. I’ve got to wipe down my leather pants and head back to Raleigh.

This photo is only marginally related to this post, but I still like it.

I’ve been using the word “crap” a lot. I blame Strong Bad.

So, REM is in town, and apparently they were hanging out last night at Orange County Social Club. Sure, it would have been fun to see them drinking in one of my locals, but you can see plenty of great musicians getting shitfaced there on any given Tuesday. However, today Ryan tells me this:

When they left the Social Club, Mike Mills, Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey went to The Cave, and played an impromptu set with Jon Wurster on drums. Ken Stringfellow and Pete Yorn also sat in. The set list “god, I love the Internet” included The Ballad of John and Yoko, Hang On Sloopy, and a medley of Bang a Gong, Mr. Soul and Sweet Jane.

At The Cave. “It’s slightly larger than my kitchen, only with a lower ceiling. It’s cleaner, too.” The first time I saw REM was in 1983 at the Concert for African Relief at Meredith College in Raleigh. It was a smallish show, and I met Peter Buck and Mike Mills afterwards. The next time I saw them was at the Dean Dome on the UNC campus six years later, when they had Gone Major, and it was nowhere near as much fun.

I know I live in Chapel Hill and we’re supposed to be blasé about rock stars and stuff, and I’ve missed plenty of “must see” shows. “When people ask me if I was at “that Archers show” or “that Superchunk show,” I usually just say yes. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. I’m sure this statement will brand me as a philistine for many, but unless somebody spontaneously combusted onstage, only a handful of shows stand out after five years.” But damn. I wish I had been there last night.

Tonight I am going to Raleigh to see Bellefea, The Rosebuds, et al. I’m sure that while I’m gone, REM will come to my house and make pancakes.

The Great Study Home Office De-Crapping is <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after for real.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after for real.html’,’popup’,’width=422,height=316,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “_blank”complete. I can’t remember the last time I felt so light and airy and carefree. I feel like skipping. Perhaps I will. BRB.

The final tally:

Hours spent de-crapping: 19
Giant fricking garbage bags filled: 16
Increase in dust mite-related allergy symptoms: 7000 percent

Hastings is still freaked out by it. He keeps wandering around sniffing everything as though I’d built an addition on the house. “That’s him in the picture examining my chair for evidence of extreme activities.” I mean, come on, dude. Don’t act so surprised. Have a little tact. Of course, I’ve lived here for five years and had him for four, so it’s entirely possible that there are sections of floor he has never seen.

Yet I still have plenty of crap. If you’re considering buying anything – anything at all – talk to me. Need office supplies? I thought I had a home office, but now I realize I have a <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/welcome to office depot.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/welcome to office depot.html’,’popup’,’width=336,height=252,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”home Office Depot. I could wallpaper my bathroom with Post-Itsâ„¢.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t buy anything with a cord on it, anything that plugs into anything or anything that has things plugged into it without <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/wired cat.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/wired cat.html’,’popup’,’width=211,height=363,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”checking with me first. Need speaker wire? I have enough to wire the Pentagon. Coax cable? What do you want, three feet, six feet? Stereo cables? We will not be undersold. RCA to RCA, or RCA to phono jack? How about a little green thing that connects two things I don’t own anymore? In the market for a mobile phone? <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/mobile madness.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/mobile madness.html’,’popup’,’width=390,height=230,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”target = “blank”Step right this way. And if anyone I know buys a telephone cord, he or she will be strangled with it.

I did discover some more fun stuff, though. I had forgotten how many trip journals I’ve kept in little foreign notebooks over the years. Fascinating excerpt:

“My feet hurt, as does my left knee”

Holy crap! I just found a name and address I wrote in my London travel journal in 1990. It sounded familiar, so just for the hell of it I did a web search. Remember Craig Shergold, the sick English kid whose friends and family started a campaign to get him into the Guinness Book of World Records for receiving the most get-well cards? It’s him. I must have seen an announcement of the campaign in its earliest stages, long before he got well and started begging people to stop mailing him. This means I got spammed before there was email. Now that’s bleeding edge.

Ryan just called. It’s 1:35 a.m., but he was just hanging out at OCSC with REM, so that’s worth calling for. He accidentally drank Mike Mills’ beer. Classic. And apparently Michael Stipe is not a sports fan. Go figure.

Other items from the de-crapping:

A quote from Groves at an Evil Wiener show in 1996:

“Don’t forget to tip your bartender, leave promptly when the show is over and buy a fucking t-shirt”

An item from The Chapel Hill News announcing seats available for a UNC program called “Reading the Stars: Astronomy, Divination, and the Cosmos” The headline is:

Space Available in Astronomy Program

A list written on the back of a Far Side calendar page:

Thunderitchy
Mondale
Topless Bar Sluts of the South
Don’t Touch the Dog There
We Live As We Dream, Stallone

I might have been trying to come up with album titles for my non-existent band, Catflap. That last one is pretty funny, but I have no idea if I made it up or not. I’m like that.

There’s more, but I’ll stick it back in the blog fodder file for a night when the well is dry.

Okay, one last thing. I found a rough draft of a personal ad I considered placing in 1994. I was trying to play with the conventions of the genre, and it’s painfully over-clever “”I like long walks on the moon and candlelit dinners on the beach” but I still like the final line, which requires remembering NBC’s “Must See TV lineup from that period:

Friends first, then Seinfeld.

You’d have answered that ad, right?

Is there any point in adding my voice to the chorus of praise for “Lost in Translation? No? Whose blog is this, anyway? I loved that movie for so many reasons, but it was especially poignant for me having lived in Tokyo, oh god, 17 years ago. I was a DJ and program director for an English-language cable radio station called FM Banana, naturally “our weak FM signal was on 87.7, which can be pronounced in Japanese, in a kind of cutesy-poo way they use for this kind of thing, as “ba-na-na”. I also hosted a very small TV show on a very large cable network, Tokyu “sic” Cable Television, which was in its infancy. “They considered putting my face on a t-shirt to give to subscribers, but that idea died a quick death.”

Watching Bill Murray trying to work with a director who speaks no English cracked me up, because I did that. Our director, Menju-san, began his career working as a ticket collector for the massive Tokyu zaibatsu “they own a subway line and an entire suburb, among many other things”, but they made him a TV director because he had a master’s degree in urban planning. Of course. He didn’t speak much English, but he always knew when I had screwed up and would politely ask for another take. It was one of the strangest and most enjoyable times of my life, despite the fact that I was forced into a Santa Claus suit on three “3” separate occasions: once to sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with a grammar school choir backing me up. Menju-san told me I would be doing that about ten minutes before we started shooting. I have it on tape, and if you’re nice to me, I won’t make you watch it.

Considering the size of Tokyo, I was amazed at how much I recognized in the movie. When Charlotte makes her first foray out of the hotel, she gets off the train at Omotesando, which was my stop for work. When she and Bob have their awkward lunch, it’s supposedly in Daikanyama, the neighborhood where I lived with my parents. But for me, the most evocative moments of the film are the insomnia sequences, with both characters lying awake in that peculiarly-Tokyo pre-dawn light, a siren wailing in the distance. I remember that so well, and it reminds me of walking out of a basement nightclub I frequented called Cleo Palazzi, leaving at 6:00 a.m. once the trains had started running again. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more dissolute.

I know that the phenomenon of Engrish “we called it Janglish” is pretty well covered on the web, but here are my favorites. Somewhere in the house I have containers of all of these products:

a sports drink called Pocari Sweat

a non-dairy creamer called Creap, for “creamy powder

a beer called Penguin’s Bar

a yogurt drink called Pokka White Sour, with the legend “Its sweet taste of sour yogurt will extend on your tongue softly, and be a sweetheart”

I also have an ashtray from a gift shop near Mt. Fuji that features two penguins on water skis. It says, “Let’s Attack Water Skiing!

There is a pro baseball team called the Nippon Ham Fighters.

My train ride to see my now ex-wife, The Mighty Frith, passed an apartment building with a sign reading “My City Home” That’s not funny until you know that the Japanese have a hard time with “ci and pronounce it as “shi” Hearing someone talk about a Honda City was always fun, too. “And the photo above might be a little more amusing now.” Nissan had a domestic model called the Langley “named after CIA headquarters?” and another called the Laurel “which came out “ro-re-ru” and I wondered why they inflicted that on themselves.

It got to the point where the Janglish had to be really good to even warrant a mention. As a newcomer I roared at a t-shirt that said, “Let’s Jogging With Me” and the line of Basic James Rabbit consumer goods “featuring a bunny in a waistcoat looking at his pocket watch and saying, “She should be along here now”, but after a few months those barely elicited a snicker. For one thing, it was a constant bombardment. My father’s morning walk used to take him past the Aoyama Health Club, which had a plaque out front proclaiming, “Where Young Men and Women Meet to Exchange Sweat: Since 1983”

Dang. Now I miss Tokyo. And being 20. I don’t miss Pokka White Sour, though.

There is nothing happening in California there is nothing happening in California there is nothing happening in California there is

It’s no use.

I’m not going to talk about this alot, because I’m sure it’s all over the blogosphere right now, just like it is the TV. I was going to wait to mention it until the results were official, but what am I here, the goddamn Associated Press? Jesus H. Kindergarten Cop on a Hitler-loving bicycle. Bring on the meteors.

I did a web search to find an embarrassing photo of Gov. Conan, and for some reason the one above came up. I think it summarizes the whole issue nicely.

Today, in and around mourning the state of American democracy, I began the process of cleaning up my study “that’s “home office” if you’re from the IRS”, and any of you who have been to Plooble HQ know what an Herculean task that is. “My cousin-in-law John said I should just call it “the garage,” and then it would be fine.” I also bought a sweet but relatively inexpensive Panasonic digital camera “with a Leica lens!” with some of the insurance money I got for the cool, old cameras that were stolen “I wonder how many rocks Mr. Burglar got for my Olympus 35SP rangefinder with spotmeter?”, so I took <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office before.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office before.html’,’popup’,’width=480,height=360,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false” target = “_blank”</before and <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after2.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/office after2.html’,’popup’,’width=499,height=338,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false” target = “_blank”</after pictures. In the before picture you can see my new desk chair, which, I swear to you, is called the “2Xtreme Sports Chair.” I don’t really do anything extreme in it, unless you count, er… blogging. It’s definitely too extreme. This afternoon I wanted to work on my resume, but my chair was out bungee jumping.

You can see some of my first digital efforts to pollute cyberspace in my new photo album. You can find the link wherever the hell the link will be once I’ve created it. I think it’s over there.

One of the fun things about cleaning up my study, in addition to being able to get to the window, has been finding old crap. In the process of spelunking through one pile I found the Harris Teeter receipt from my housewarming brunch in October of 1998. My cashier was Chiffon. You bastards ate $13.98 worth of smoked salmon, by the way. I also found a receipt from a store I’ve never heard of, let alone remember patronizing, called Gadzooks #191. Apparently I bought an S/S BLUE BLUR PLAID for $38.00. I didn’t know I owned any SS clothes. Maybe I can wear it to Arnold’s inaugural ball.

I also found my Dad’s Christmas wish list from probably 1999, in which he expressed his desire for four identical calculators. It actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.

The thing that made me feel especially slovenly and pack-rattish was finding utility bills from 1997 with my previous address on them, which means I must have brought a pile of starter crap with me to the new house. It’s kind of like making sourdough bread.

Coming soon to Fistful of Plooble: ANUSTART.