Say Cheese...

If you're like me, you'll enjoy this photo gallery of celebrity mugshots. Courtesy of Sam Zell's shell corporation. Happy Monday, everybody!


Of course they finish on the best celebrity mugshot ever (You know who I mean, but you'll have to click through to get to it).

Letter to the Editor

When I lived in Iowa City, I shopped at the New Pioneer Co-op, a fine little grocery store that sold all sorts of good things, including organic produce, vegetables, and an ass-load of soy shit. As Edan is still technically a member of the Co-op she gets their amazing newsletter every month. This month featured a letter to the editor from a longtime New Pioneer Co-op member. It reads as follows:

"Dear Members:

I stopped drinking cow’s milk and started drinking soy milk about five years ago. Because Silk brand soy milk is the most available throughout the country that is the one I started drinking.
And all that fancy California advertising on the box also helped me decide. But then, after I learned more about Silk soy milk, I switched brands. I understand that the soy beans used to make it come all the way from China, in powder form, they tell me, to be made into soy milk in California to be transported all over the country. The cardboard container shows the picture of
a soy bean field being irrigated with water from a windmill. I am waiting for the picture showing a gigantic cargo ship transporting the soybean powder from China to California being powered
with windmills. Now I buy the Organic Valley kind, although this kind is only in the Iowa City store not in Coralville.

Thing is, the soy milk that comes from China tastes better than the one from ... Wisconsin? And I will never understand... how can they grow the soybeans in China, transport the mall the way to here, and still be able to sell the milk for a lowerprice than the more local one?

After thinking about it for about two years, I finally bought a slice of cheesecake at the coop. The first bite was okay, but I couldn’t eat it all. The taste of boiled egg is too strong for me.
I have been a member of New Pioneer for about fifteen years, and I have been thinking ... I would like to start a campaign to get us to stop selling bottled water at the stores. We are just not
practicing what we preach on this.

Yours,

A fucking lunatic

Holy fucking shit. Come clean, dude. You're actually Sam Lipsyte, right? There's no way that letter is for real, right? Right?

The Bewildered Father

I've been thinking about this for awhile now, and having been on Facebook and seeing how many of my old friends have kids has only intensified it. There's a certain type of character, usually fictional although there's one example of it that I can think of in 'real life,' a father who's sort of aloof to fathering, at least as the previous generation did it. Usually, these characters are trapped in a sort of arrested development, a permanent adolescence, and yet, as the audience, I think we're suppose to believe they're good fathers. I'm thinking of Paul Rudd's character in Knocked Up, someone who, when asked to watch the kids, says "Oh, good, we'll watch Taxi Cab Confessions." Being a parent seems almost like a joke to them, or that it isn't really happening.

The Platonic ideal of the bewildered father is Jeff Tweedy as portrayed in the documentary I'm Trying to Break Your Heart. There's a scene (a shiny new donkey for whoever brings me the YouTube clip of this scene) where the tour bus stops at a rest stop, the kind of place that features a Roy Rogers restaurant, a shop selling souveniers of whatever area it is, and a TCBY that's never open. Tweedy carries his crying kid into the Burger King where he finds his wife waiting in the line. The scene plays out something like this:

Tweedy's wife: "What happened? Why's he crying?"
Tweedy: "It's not my fault."
Tweedy's wife: "Well, what happened?"
Tweedy: "The claw machine." (Gives kid to wife and makes a claw with his hand.) "The claw machine ate his quarter. He had the little Spongebob guy all lined up, and the machine..."
Tweedy's wife consoles the child, then: "Jesus Christ, Jeff." (Walks off to do some real mothering.)
Tweedy stands there, looking like he isn't completely sure that what transpired actually happened, and that maybe he'd like some curly fries.

Other examples of this phenomenon would be Moe in Beautiful Girls, who shuffles around the ice rink looking like a doofus, and watches helplessly as his kids pour mustard on each other's laps. Another good one is David Duchovony (sex addict) in Trust the Man. There's a certain nonchalance to his character, maybe due to the fact that he doesn't have to work, and he brings this same attitude to his parenting. He buys porn with his three-year-old daughter, happily takes mid-morning naps, and lets his son struggle to get down an art project that he shouldn't be taking home yet anyway (If you haven't seen this movie, you ought to. There's at least ten really good lines, which is all you need to have a rentable movie.).

My question to you, fair reader, is this: why is this type of character suddenly becoming so prevalent? Is it the case, as my wife believes, that such a character can only exist in the imagination of the fatherless man? Is this the natural reaction of our age -- already so tinged with irony to begin with -- to growing up? I'd love to hear from some folks with kids.

Past to be Prologue for Republican Party?

I don't ask much, and I don't ask often, but a repeat of this performance during this year's vice presidential debates would be wonderful:



The sound kind of sucks, I know, but you have to give credit to the director on this one. He (or she) cuts to a two-shot of Quayle and Bentsen just as Quayle is mentioning Kennedy. The look on Bentsen's face is just incredible. "And I'm going to be on a first-hand basis with these people because I will be the Vice President, and I will be in charge of drugs and space and things."

Of course, the Democrats lost the '88 election. Think about that for a second...for four years, the United States was 'a heartbeat away' from that glorified lemur running the country. Hail to the Chimp indeed.

Again with the YouTube?

Yes, again. But not Eddie Money this time, stuff that's actually good. Or at least, stuff that I think is good. First up, I would like to meet this teenager and buy him a drink. The backstory, for those who haven't seen this clip before, is that this kid's school was looking for a new "ring tone" for the bell they use to signal the end of a class. Somehow, they settled on his suggestion:



Male a capella groups are generally pretty square...except when they're rocking Beirut:



For those who know nothing of Beirut, I present some footage of a show from the Avalon Ballroom that I went to last fall. It was nowhere near as good as the show at the Troubadour the year before (that show ended with the band in the crowd, letting strangers play their instruments), but this encore (even the part where he forgets the words) redeemed an otherwise eh show:



Speaking of great live performances (that's what we in the blogging business call "a segue"), this Jeff Tweedy performance of "Gun," one of the early Uncle Tupelo songs, is pretty god damn great:



Does that make up for subjecting everyone to Mr. Money? I hope so, because I'm too drunk tired to post anything else.

Eddie Money: The YouTube Chronicles

I'm a little buzzed, which means it's the perfect time to talk about Eddie Money. My obsession with Eddie Money goes all the way back to high school, when he would regularly perform at a nearby racetrack with local star Benny Mardones. For those of you who don't reside in 1986, Benny sang the song "Into the Night," which was a big hit for awhile. It was about statutory rape, as best I can tell ("She's just sixteen years old, leave her alone, they say."), and he was never heard from again...Except in Upstate New York, where he passes for a celebrity and doesn't have to wait in line at the fashionable discotheques. Anyway, about Eddie Money.

By far, the best Eddie Money song is "Take Me Home Tonight." I mean, it's got a classic hook, some really incredible lyrics, and Ronnie Motherfucking Spector sings the refrain. Seriously, Ronnie Spector! But have you seen the video? Oh man, the video is first rate. Check it out and then we'll talk about it:



What's not to love about that video, right? First, can we talk about the lyrics? Now, Chuck Klosterman has famously pointed out that many Bruce Springsteen lyrics are pretty bad, with the strapping of hands across engines and whatnot, but I don't think the Boss ever wrote a line quite as dumb as the first line of "Take Me Home Tonight." The first line, which is repeated later in the song, is "I feel your hunger, it's a hunger." That's not even a metaphor, that's a tautology. And yes, he goes on to talk about how his lust is so strong that it could take over the city and that it isn't "safe to walk the city streets alone." And then there's a car reference that is vintage Springsteen, and then Ronnie Spector sings.

But about the video. First of all, how about that hair. Feathered and fabulous. Guys I know like to brag about how they don't have to spend a lot of time on their hair in the morning...Eddie spent some time on that hair. And you know what, it paid off. His jacket...well, the rest of his wardrobe is back in style (ah, fashion, you cyclical bitch, you), but that jacket...If I live to be 100 years old, that jacket will never be back in style. It's that bad. I recently saw a picture of myself from eighth grade on Facebook in which I was wearing a sweater that was sub-Cosby level, but compared to Eddie's jacket, it was chic.

And how about the mise-en-scene of this particular masterpiece. He's on an empty stage in an empty auditorium. It could be anywhere, but let's imagine that it's the Utica Aud. The great irony now is that the only way they'd let Eddie into an auditorium of that size is if he bought a ticket. Or maybe won tickets from a radio call-in show. At the beginning of the video, Eddie's not real sure he wants to sing. He's a little hungover -- hence the Ray Bans indoors -- but the rhythm starts to take hold of him, and he can't stop. He's a slave to the groove. He pops his collar, the Ray Bans come off, and before you know it, we're finding keys and turning engines on.

The set is appropriately spare, Eddie being a no-frills rocker and all. Just a simple ladder. And where exactly is that ladder going? It's going up, of course.

Then there's the sax solo. I used to play the saxophone, and I can tell you from experience, Eddie never did. He plays the saxophone like a crackhead with Parkinson's. Why have the saxophone there at all? Why did the director of this video think that particular fiction was going to play? If you're going to have him impersonate a saxophonist, why not have him and Ronnie ride off on a winged horse at the end of the video? Both scenarios are equally ridiculous.

The more I see this video, the more I wonder how hard up Ronnie Spector was to be associated with Mr. Money. There aren't ten people with more important voices to rock history than Ronnie Spector, and here she is in a video with a cut-rate Huey Lewis. It's sad. And yet I watch it 2.5 times a day. Go figure.