Your Weekends Probably Don't Involve A Taken Swimming Pool

As I was casually awakening from a mid-day nap (hey, I've got that kind of flexibility), my mom asked me if I wanted to go to dinner at my aunt's boyfriend's house. Seeing as I really didn't have much else going for me, I decided to go. Frankly, this was one of the best decisions that I've ever made...ever. To begin on how crazy this day was, I have to start from the very beginning and I do mean the very beginning.

We roll up to the house, and there are people hanging around on the porch doing whatever. This is pretty normal. It was slightly strange because people were yelling from the porch down at us. But, the absurdity begins when I walk through the door and first experienced a hurricane named Bob. The real Hurricane Bob hit land at a Category 3: pretty strong, but you might still have your house if it wasn't built out of wood. The Bob that I encountered on Friday was far more damaging to one's environment than his natural counterpart.

First things first, I believe Bob said to me when I walked up, and I quote, "who the hell are you?" After introducing myself, my aunt explains that I'm her nephew. This term "nephew" was one that did not have a lot of resonance for Bob, as he spent about five minutes trying to figure out what exactly a nephew is. I didn't think it was that difficult, but this also might have been subtle foreshadowing for what was about to happen over the course of the night.

As I asked where the drinks were, I learned that Bob made the first set of margaritas. At a later point in time, I could tell this to be true because they were not nearly strong enough to withstand what I was seeing. Seeing as I've used all of this conjecture, let me actually begin with my story. After getting a margarita in my own generic red cup, I sit out on the porch and find that special angle on cast iron furniture that we all wish for: the one that is comfortable. Anyway, as I'm looking for this, Bob starts talking about how he only wear boots and that he wears his boots everywhere at all times. The only time he takes his boots off is in bed.

This works as a not-so-subtle lead-in into Bob hitting on my mom. No bullshit. And, he was going hard at it no less. Seeing as she is more than capable of defending herself (believe me, I have proof), I drowned my embarrassment in booze. Among other things that I remember from this discussion was him actively making attempts to bed my mom, talking about how awesome he is in bed. At some point during this conversation, the topic stayed on hitting on my mom but switched to how much Bob hates living in Lancaster County, PA. For those unfamiliar with American geography, Lancaster County, PA has one of the highest concentrations of the god-fearing luddites more commonly known as the Amish. Anyway, he went on a riff about how he hates going to the club there and blah blah blah.

The next thing I know, I have a loud redhead running across the porch, turning off the classic rock playing inside, and replacing said rock with The Pussycat Dolls. This did, in fact, lead to her singing along with the songs, and me being generally, and genuinely, confused. I felt like I had left out of my regular life and entered an alternate universe where everyone was just wasted. I had to go take a smoke and come back. The smoke did help out. I started hanging out with the sane people, and the day became considerably more tolerable. Although, from hanging out with them, I did learn that a divorce settlement led to one party taking a pool. Not the house, just the pool. Yea, that's West Virginia for you.

Anyway, as the night progressed on and I got drunker (I think I was about 3 margaritas and 2 beers in at this point. In the in-between time, I was asked why I don't have a girlfriend and found a connection with another due to the fact that shoes are never worn in the house if at all possible), Bob became a lot more amusing as his intended goal had passed out from being way too drunk early in the day, as she forgot that oh-so-important skill in drinking: pacing.

Instead of trying to pick her up, he tried to pick up everything else in the room with a pair of boobs that wasn't already taken of which there were many. My family, real and assimilated, can all handle itself very well, so the outcome of this situation was very amusing to watch, especially while drinking. As I watched him, I quickly began to realize that if this was not a sign of desperation and/or over-intoxication, I'm not really sure what is anymore. Bob was completely out of control, bringing up inappropriate conversation topics in public, being belligerent, and making a generally uncomfortable atmosphere. And, I'm a guy saying this. I create uncomfortable situations all of the time, and I'm uncomfortable. That's how bad it was. Luckily for me, Bob started to fade back into the sea of noise as I continued on with my drinking and went down the hill. Honestly, if I hadn't gotten so wasted to cope or take notes, I would have put up a verbatim list of discussion topics.

After Bob decided that it was time to put it down, we all decided to wrap it up. I left still able to walk but definitely under the influence. Anyway, I definitely will not forget the time that I spent with Bob on this Friday night because, most likely, I will encounter Bob again. Well, that and the thing about the swimming pool. Seriously, who takes a swimming pool instead of the house?

I Actually Wish I Had Something To Post

That title is misleading because I actually have material that I can post. I should rewind from this moment and explain forwards.

I was reading my RSS feeds and getting ready to start posting until

BLAM!

the power went out. So, with the power going out, I decided to take a drive and go down to the park to read. The only park near my house that I could remember was about a fifteen-minute drive away. It was good times, but I felt like my position on the top of the kids' slide was giving me the hater eye from the parents in the area. Anyway, when I get around to going through my reader, there isn't a lot going on.

I have a lot of essay type things to put up such as how TV is trying to out David Lynch David Lynch and the NBA as performance art, another entry into the theoretical defense of athletics as artistic and/or intellectual endeavors. But, I don't actually have time to write these pieces right now because I have to go to dinner in about a half-hour, enough time to maybe get through the intros.

I Have To Go Off About This

As everyone knows, I try to avoid ranting because I have a problem of ending up in a completely different place than I started, but, for this rant, it is very, very simple: Paris Hilton is not news.

Today, I have seen the mainstream media obsess about Paris Hilton leaving jail to be placed under house arrest. She's not important at all. What has Paris Hilton actually done? What? Nothing at all. She opened her legs and got filmed doing it. Oh, and this is on top of her throwing homophobic and racial slurs around, dissing her friends, flaking out on appearances, and being a terrible role model for young girls who invariably follow her every waking move because any magazine with a mostly female readership is obligated to cover her.

Amongst other things that happened today, Oman got hammered by a cyclone which killed 25 people and another 26 are missing. We have suffered the 3,500th Death in Iraq today. We're already over that actually. Also, in a tie to Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine are about to go to war with each other. And we have President Bush in Germany endangering the long-term health of the planet by not accepting limits on carbon emissions. But, none of this is important. What is more important is the fact that a woman with no discernable talents of any sort is getting out of jail 20 days before she is supposed to.

Words do not express my anger at this situation. When I grew up (and this is like maybe 13-14 years ago), news was about important current events. It was a place that you went to learn about the day's happenings in the world, in Congress, in your local community. It was intended to be an informational source, keeping people up to date and making them effective, informed citizens. News departments were not held to the same standard as entertainment because news was never intended to be entertainment; it was intended to be informational, and information is not always the most exciting thing. Unfortunately, this ethos has disappeared. Now, when I open my RSS feed from supposedly the best name in journalism (CNN), I am surrounded with fluff pieces about Paula Abdul and Paris Hilton. This isn't news; this is entertainment. And entertainment is fine when it is not considered real news. But, when you start calling it real news, you are doing a disservice to the public at large.

The public has lost sources of news. They have been replaced with infotainment, some weird hybrid to attract people like me (youth demographics, 18-35) to it. But, on the contrary, it has repelled me. I think my breaking point was the commercial free coverage of Anna Nicole Smith. When it happened, I saw people pontificating and thinking about it and thought someone important had died. Then I realized: it's fucking Anna Nicole Smith, a gold digging has-been playmate.

I came to understand that my dreams of actual news on television that didn't involve white kids (they don't have by-the-minute coverage of searches for Black kids and we all know it), white girls (same logic as above plus girls are oh so useless, they can't do anything without the help of the mainstream media), and celebrities was exactly that: a dream. It actually makes me really sad to say that the news has become self-defeating. It really does. Between the run-up to the war, the non-stop coverage of reality programming like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, and the constant coverage of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton on CNN and MSNBC, the mainstream media is lighting its own path to self-destruction. Apparently, people dying in Iraq, the unfurling of the new Watergate, the lack of agreement on immigration, the disregard for civility in Washington, the rollback of Women's rights, the obstinacy of the Bush administration, and the allowance of torture and unjust military prisons isn't really important if Paris Hilton gets let out of jail early or a little pretty white girl is lost.

If I sound cynical, I am. I'm just fed up with the state of news right now. I want news to be news again instead of being bullshit like it is now. But, with the constant coverage of Paris Hilton, I'll be assured that this will not happen any time soon.

Boobs Don't Always Swing

Every year in the summer, my aunt in Frederick has a formal ball for her Walk for the Cure team. Because it's a nice cause, the people are involved are family (my aunt and her daughter do the walk together with a couple of other people as well), and know that I would never hear the end of it if I didn't come, I wear a tie for one of two or three times all year and attend.

I have gone to this event twice, and it really has yet to let me down. Last year, the ball was full. There was a local blues band playing along with a DJ who had no clue of what it meant to make the dance floor move. But, luckily, the DJ's inability to make people dance did not stop some of the people at the party from busting a groove. When I say busting a groove, I mean busting a groove. Nothing can make a group of people get really, really raw on the dance floor than drinking a shit ton of booze. Honestly, booze is the only way to explain why a guy would get on the dance floor and do the worm not once or thrice. But four times! four! And it wasn't during the DJ; it was actually during the blues band. Yea, my jaw dropped to the floor, too. It left me laughing the whole night and thoroughly enjoying the experience of the night even though no one could do the electric slide all that well and the buffet sucked.

While the year has changed, the event hasn't really changed. The blues band was rebooked but cancelled before the event so it was just the DJ by himself. This was a tragedy within itself, but it wasn't as much of a tragedy as the buffet was this year. Chicken, potatoes, green beans, pre-made salads, and rolls. That was the meal because I don't consider the piece of leather that they gave me and called roast beef to be a part of the meal (If I ask for medium, I don't expect a piece of meat to be brown all the way through). But, like last year, there was more than enough liquor flowing through the room, especially since the liquor was dirt cheap and being shelled out with the efficiency.

While there weren't as many people as the year before, there don't need to be a lot of people for someone to make an ass of themselves on the dance floor. This year that title when to this guy and his "friend with benefits" (read: fuck buddy, booty call). The FWB, apparently, never danced in a formal dress and hiked it up far too high. So high, in fact, the DJ, and almost the entire room, found out what kind of underwear she was wearing when she got low. Oh, also, she had ridiculously fake breasts. They didn't move. And, yes, I did stare and I'm not ashamed. If you were there, you would have stared too. They were unreal *rimshot*.

Even though we were mesmerized by her boobs, we, and I do mean we, stopped looking at her to gape at her buddy who was clearly on another level. Adopted family member Gretchen (she comes to enough of our family events to be a member of our family)noted that he dances like he has prosthetic legs; his knees don't bend. Her assessment is right, but that's an insult to people with artificial legs because I'm convinced that they can dance better than this guy. He couldn't do the cha cha slide. The cha cha slide tells you how to do the cha cha slide. I can't understand how someone could be off of it. But, at multiple points over the four hours of music, him and another guy threw rhythm out the window and went all out. It was amazing to watch, but, wow, it was definitely some of the worst dancing that I've ever seen in my life. I can only hope that when I attend this event next year b/c I probably will have to again that it is so drunken and rhythmless.

This event was legitimated from being a misplaced house party (there were like 30 people at an event meant for about 100-150) after we found out that one of the women catering the event was actually suffering from breast cancer. She had a double mastectomy and was still being treated. She thanked us immensely for what we were doing. That did make it worthwhile. But, it also probably would have been worthwhile if I had donated some actual money to the cause. But I can't donate the money that I don't make due to my unemployment, so cut me a little slack. I'm not so heartless as to not donate to a cause that would affect many people in my life such as Breast Cancer if I can.

The Correct Term is Flight Attendant

So, while I was riding home from mother's day dinner and thinking about things that I could have done (read: hit on one of the waitresses at the restaurant. She could make a colonial outfit work for her; how could I not want to hit on her?) had my family not been there to harass me if I had gotten shot down, I finally realized how I want this blog to run in actuality.

The main thing that you will notice that there will be less specifically political posting. While I am passionate about politics, I also don't want to post about it all of the time. It does not hold my specific interest; It holds a lot, but not all of it. I am a cultural person at heart. Things about music, film, art, literature, and society at large are more distinctly interesting to me than explaining the absurdist logic that runs through much of the American legislative and executive system. If your heart should be falling quickly within your chest, I will be writing some political content from time to time. I think that we all understand that Iraq is a quagmire. I don't really need to inform all of you of that. But, I will try to avoid talking about the policy failures of the American government a lot now. There will still be politics discussed, but they will not be the central focus as I believe that they currently are on this blog.

Additionally, the celebrity posting will step up a bit, but it won't be like the other celebrity blogs that you will read. I don't care about celebrities enough to know where they are eating their lunch, shopping for their clothes, or taking their dogs to get groomed. Those things have never been interesting to me and will continue to be uninteresting. If they want to throw me pictures of Jessica Biel looking hot, I'm not going to complain. She makes me hot under the collar.

In the end, I hope to make this blog more cultural and better-written with less political commentary and more comments on celebrities, television, and music. While it will stay on the website, the political commentary will switch more to an aesthetic assessment or a semiotic assessment of a situation/issue (read: how they present themselves and/or reality in public through image or words) rather than a criticism of someone's failure or a dissection of a problem. This is a good example of what I would like to do in the future although less vitriolic and preachy. It will be a more theoretically-driven assessment of politics and its language and images. They'll fit in with my views on the American culture.

We Did It!

If you are a continual reader of this blog, you already know that every week I go to trivia night. The first week, we didn't get into the money (read: gift certificates), but we were really close. Second week, we crossed the precipice and got third place (10 bucks, but the place we play has half-priced beer for a good while because we're always early). Third week, we knew the answer but tried to play smart and bet nothing. This ended up in two words: no dice. This week, we finally did it. FIRST PLACE, BITCHES! While this is only 25 dollars, it's a lot more than that also because we were only one of two teams to get the final question right (the first non-American to be Time Man of the Year was Mohamas Gandhi). It wasn't even close. We won by 300+ points. Just wanted to love it a little bit.

NOTE: This is a rant!

I try to stay on some general point because it helps me from going into a stream-of-consciousness rant, which I have a propensity for doing since I rarely think in straight lines (all of my mental lines are gay). Anyway, I have a large bone to pick, one that will come far too close to my own position. I have a huge problem with "social critics," which starts from reading other blogs on this service. I will refuse to name names because it is only symptomatic of a larger problem that I have with the group.

Let's address the ambiguity of such an absurd title for the time being. What is your stance as a social critic? What do you want to do with that position? If you cannot answer these questions in an effective, positivist manner (read: more than "just because" or it sounds cool. You know, a real answer) regardless of philosophical orientation (e.g. nihilist, existentialist, optimist, Lacanian, Hegelian), you cannot give yourself such a title.

Additionally, the social critic, once one believes that they are fully qualified to maintain such a title, must understand the necessity and the inherent difficulties in their position. Being a social critic does not mean taking blatant stabs at other groups of people. For example, this is a post that I came across about the author's working at a record store. In the post, the author talks about how when he played a lot of difficult, esoteric post-hop in his record store (If you know about hip-hop, those aren't artists you are going to drop on people without solid knowledge) and gets mad when people get freaked out by it. This, somehow, launches into a larger argument using classical Marxist and Gramscian language about how Gangsta Rap is corrupting the larger society and implying, logically, that if you listen to Gangsta rap, you are somehow a coward, moron, or closet racist (that's for whitey, there). Here is a part of the argument:

Gangster rap is for cowards and morons. It's for people who have been stripped of their culture by this horrific bourgeois-capitalist system. Mainstream rappers are the generally-speaking, the biggest Uncle Toms ever. Suck-up to master for the money, while dissing him behind-his-back, with that wink that it's all an act anyway. Pathetic.They are sucking the Man's cock, frankly, so you know what they are. Their rabid-fans aren't any different, and they're swallowing the hype put out there by corporations controlled primarily by rich White people. This is more-pathetic than being a slave on a plantation, and can be viewed as wallowing in one's own misery and exploitation. For that reason alone, I'd love to see all of this shit die forever, just leave us all the underground, it's worth saving.

The first sentence alone implies that I, a college educated Black male who graduated with honors and loves gangsta rap, am a moron. Additionally, this says that I don't know anything about my own background or the history of the Black struggle as it dates back to the shores of Virginia in 1619 when a Dutch ship brought the first of my people to this country to be held and forced to work against our wills by greedy white men, the same white men who would later go on to strip us of the rights that we were granted in 1865 following the Civil War with the use of scare tactics and physical intimidation and circumvention of the law. Oh no, I don't know anything about my own culture! I must have lost my culture by listening to N.W.A. and Ice Cube!

Additionally, this guy knows very little about hip-hop as a form. There are very few artists who have promoted their way to the top within the true community, the community that makes decisions. Everyone has to get the come-up through the mixtape circuit, doing freestyles, getting on other peoples' tracks, etc. The content has changed, the game hasn't. Artists who are not good perish. The good ones survive, and that applies to the mainstream as well. Also, as someone who listens to underground hip-hop, there is a reason that some of them are underground. It's not because they are dropping science that the white man doesn't want people to hear; it's because they suck. Weak flows, weak beats, weak techniques lead to weak albums. Dudes are too focused on trying to be innovative instead of trying to be solid with their verbal work and beat production.

And, at last, I, as Black person, do not appreciate the analogy being made to being a slave on a plantation. Firstly, it's not true for most mainstream rappers as they control their own firms, their own images, their own releases, etc. Secondly, this makes the assumption that it is not appropriate for Black people to have societal success. Hip-hop is built around rapping about what you know. Since most of these dudes are drug dealers (something that was not true with the older rappers), they rap about selling drugs and gun fights because that's what they did. Most of them are not glorifying their lives; they are telling a story, something that is frequently lost on so many of hip-hop's detractors. Notice, I didn't say everyone wasn't glorifying their lives.

If this all has been making you wonder what this has to do with social critics, this is what: social criticism has a larger responsibility than being a title for people who like to bitch about stuff. A good social critic has to be articulate, factual, driven by something less passionate than personal opinion especially when critiquing. Additionally, a good critic should ensure that along with being necessarily critical, they do work introspectively and recognize the need for being fair towards the object/subject being critiqued. Clear and dispassionate arguments are what should be expected of the social critic. One of the most infamous social critics is Theodor Adorno. He wrote a hotly contested argument against jazz. While I do not agree with his assessment, Adorno refrained from petty name-calling and race baiting to present a compelling, if not wrong, argument.

It is OK if you choose to be against something. That is what this country is built on. That is what effective discourse is built on. But, effective discourse is not a name-calling competition either. It is a give and take, with both sides respectful of their opposition and their viewpoint regardless of how wrong you see it being. This is something that has not happened with the example. It is a general problem throughout the blogosphere. I feel kind of bad for taking this guy out behind the woodshed, but it was really necessary as his criticism, as he wishes to call it, is anything but critical.

So, if you hope to be a social critic in your life, hopefully this will serve as a note to say that criticism is more than being judgmental and standoffish. It does require fairness and an attempt to understand the subject being critiqued.

The New Wave

IMG_0951
Originally uploaded by speedboywonder.

There, that's the face of this personal revolution.