Say "Oh."

Listening to the Vampire Weekend song A-Punk is usually a pretty fun experience for me, but who knew it would contain such a wonderful nugget of wisdom? I'm referring to this line from the chorus:

Look outside at the raincoats coming, say "oh."

I should mention that I have no idea what the song is about (stealing some asshole's ring?), and in the interest of full disclosure, this blog post is not really about the song. It's about the idea Vampire Weekend seems to be communicating in that line.

I've had an atypically hard day today. I won't get into it, because that wouldn't be saying "oh." All the same, I have very little patience at the moment, particularly for artificial padding to make a simple thought into an overwrought writerly mess, so I'll get to the point: there's a common way of thinking that suggests people should face the adversity in their lives by smiling at it, welcoming it, and finding the positive side of it. I can't say I don't admire the can-do spirit that aims to make lemonade out of sour sour lemons, but I think it goes too far when it tries to turn shit into ice cream. Optimism is one thing, but denial is quite another. It's amazing that clarification is required, but indeed, bad things are bad, no two ways about it. Still, grousing through life is no way to live, so what's a man to do? Say "oh," that's what.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that the answer to life's scrapes and bruises is an extra-thick layer of callous. What I am suggesting is a bit of perspective and a bit of acceptance. Yes, people are wearing raincoats, which means it's going to rain. Shall we match the rain with our own facial precipitation? Shall we sing in the rain like a fucking maniac, laughing our way right into pneumonia? Nothing so dramatic. Just go outside as you have in more pleasant weather. Walk the same route you always walk, and turn your face up to the sky as you tend to do. When the first droplet of rain hits you in the cheek or left eyelid, you will not need to react: you knew it was coming. What's more, you know there will be many more to follow. You can feel secure in the knowledge that you spared yourself the double indignity of being wet and angry, and that when it rains again, you may not even feel it. Of course, it's still acceptable to get mad when it rains shit instead of water, but that hardly ever happens.

Check out my sweet ride and phat bling, now on Valleywag! --> http://ping.fm/ZWuj2

Culottes Vs. Pantaloons

For many years, a question has burned in my mind: When did the switch over from knee breaches to long pants happen? And why? Who was the first guy to show up to the social event of the season wearing long pants and subsequently scandalizing the gentry? Conversely, who was the first guy to show up wearing knee breaches, illiciting the snickers and stares of the fashionistas wearing long pants?

Last night I went to a bar where a band called Les Sans Culottes was playing. I didn't actually get in, because by the time I had the cover-money in my hand, the place had filled to capacity; that's a story for another time, or maybe never. What really interested me was their name: as stupid as this sounds, it reminded me of Funky Phantom. Here's a refresher:






And in case you need more:

Wikipedia - The Funky Phantom


I have to admit that I didn't become aware of this character until his appearance on Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. A regular character posed this question:

"I'm seeing a hat, a cravat, and what are those, sans-culottes? So I gots to know: what make you think you're so funky?"

The answer came in the form of a hip-hop video featuring dancing bitches, a horse-drawn carriage with hydraulics and phat rimzz, Antonin Scalia and Pat Buchanan. Hilariously current! In any case, back to the pants. Despite clearly being a member of the aristocracy of the late 18th century, Funky Phantom chooses to wear long pants; perhaps this is an element of his funkiness. But when you consider the main group that wore sans-culottes, it becomes clear that pants were more than just a fashion statement; they were also a political statement.

Of course I realize that the writers of Birdman were only trying to write an outrageous joke featuring an old Hanna-Barbera cartoon character and recognizable contemporary political figures (sad that Scalia can be called a political figure, since politics should theoretically never come into play in the Supreme Court); nonetheless, they may have stumbled into a very loaded set of circumstances. If you took a look at the wikipedia article on Sans-Culottes, you have seen that it was a term coined by the French aristocracy for peasants and the working class who did not wear the fashionable knee-breeches of the higher classes. It makes sense: the lower leg was usually covered by knee stockings and a set of buckled shoes, which would be terribly inefficient to wear during intense physical labor. The stockings would run and tear, whereas long pants would cover the leg adequately from brambles in the field or falling sparks or other detritus in factories. So now that that's clear, back to Funky Phantom. Since his aforementioned tricorner hat and cravat make it clear that he was a member of the aristocracy (he put similar articles of clothing on his fucking cat, for Christ's sake) why would he choose to buck the fashion of the time and wear long pants?

You may or may not know this, but Funky Phantom became trapped in his house during the revolutionary war and was not released until a group of kids not unlike the Scooby Doo gang stumbled into his home and freed him. In the Birdman video, he is clearly down with Scalia and Pat Buchanan. Do you see where I'm going with this? Funky Phantom is George W. Bush! The long pants are part of his populist affectation, but when the war came knocking on his door, he promptly turned tail and ran, letting the people he hoped to identify with do the dirty work. Granted, there was no Republican Party yet, so he was probably a Federalist with proto-republican leanings.

So we have a partial answer: long pants were introduced by the working class, not as a fashion statement, but out of necessity. Cartoon ghosts with heavy political prescience aside though, the working class cannot account for the switchover in the upper classes. Typically the upper classes try to hang on to the earmarks of their lives of leisure, and since knee-breeches are so laden with delicacy, refinement, and inefficiency (read "decadence"), it's difficult to reconcile the plummet in popularity the would experience in the coming years.

I can't say I have a real answer, but I do have a theory. There is only one class that mixes attributes of the lowest among the working class and some of the highest strata of the aristocracy: the military class. Around the turn of the century, the United States was still in the midst of military birth-pangs, and in France, there was total social upheaval. Lesson from the Guerilla-style Revolutionary war must have taught the militias of the time of the disadvantages of wearing sheer stockings into battle, and indeed, early military uniforms show long-pant early adopters could be found in the ranks of the military.

I wish I had more to say on the subject. I still wonder about the first man to be laughed at for wearing knee-breeches in a roomful of snooty sans-culotte wearers. I wonder how present this question was in the mind of the creators of Funky Phantom. I wonder how the band Les Sans-Culotte sounds, and if they're aware of the wry nod to fashion, politics, and populism in history their name represents. Most of all, though, I wonder when the short-pant-and stocking combo will come roaring back, and whether any of us will be ready for it. Word to your mother.

Sounds Like Rain

I enjoy rain, but I also enjoy sounds like rain. a really old hard drive spinning up and clacking softly, for example.

I so my one-a-day thing fell apart pretty fast. I really do have a lot to talk about, but the main thing is that I've really overloaded my plate. too much to do and not enough time to do it means I only get to write at 4 am. so instead of forcing a new post, I'll just put up my latest work. Please enjoy.

Too Soon to default to the day's news...

...but I'll probably do it anyway.

Um... um... why don't you tell me about your day?

Ok, so on the for-realsies tip, I have a lot of things I want to talk about, but no time. I'll come back later and update when I'm finished with my day's doings, and also when I'm more drunk. Please to check back.

Repost: The One-a-day promise

Hello, society of friends. Welcome! If you're not a Quaker, you're also welcome (only less so). Here is a repost from my Blog on Myspace... sadly, it gets a lot more traffic than Epistles. At any rate, voila le reposte:



Wow, that has a nice ring to it [The title was also "The one-a-day promise". This will be my last interjection]. I should write ad copy:

Let's face it: your anal cavity is like a painful boiling cauldron of lava. Under these conditions, even the toughest industrial grade analgesic suppositories disolve quickly and easily, and require two, three, even four applications in one day. But who has time for that? You're a busy person with a busy intestinal lining. Smingers' Analgesic Suppositories is guaranteed to be the only suppository on the market that lasts the whole day. Smingers' brand can take the heat... so you can get on with your life. Say goodbye once-- and for all-- to anal discomfort with Smingers': That's the one-a-day promise.

Sometimes I surprise myself.
Sadly, I have nothing so pleasant as pills that go in your butt. What have comes out of butts: more talking. As in talking out of my butt. Hm... probably should have worked on that one.
In any case, here's the real promise: I promise to post at least one blog post per day for the next month. Super duper pinky swear. That's not all: at least once, I'll post a piece of original artwork by me, and I'll try to include at least one complete work of fiction, one film review, one uncomfortably candid intimation of personal details, one news analysis (that one's easy), and one of something which I haven't decided on. Hopefully I'll have time to end with some fireworks.

Here's the catch: I won't be doing it here. I'll be doing it on my "legitimate" blog, Epistlesatdawn.com.
There are a lot of reason I want to do this, but I think if I get into them, I'll lose some of my steam. Steam is a precious resource, as is punk, which is why they're so kick-ass together. Hopefully I still have some of both. I suppose we'll see, won't we?


***

I hope you all... no, that ain't right... I hope both of you appreciate the wonderful layer-cake of metatext I baked up. Don't make me spell it out. I'm a shameless self-aggrandizer, don't test me.

If this isn't enough content for you , then consider the following image:






Maddening, wouldn't you say? No? Entertaining? Silly? Funny? Witty? Irreverent? Reverent? I'll take anything. I any case, I've noticed that blogs tend to get more traffic when the readers are more visually stimulated. In a calculated effort to express a fraction of my contempt for... well, everyone, I have chosen to keep this space at least 95% image-free. Now squint in pain at my woefully underworked layout and tiny Draconian fonts.

No more free logos

So I made a logo for a co-worker for free. I'm not sure why agreed to it, but it may have something to do with my prosthetic spine. In any case, I was fairly proud of the work; it's nothing out-of-this world, but it is a nice little idea executed in a way that isn't totally suicide-inducing. It can be seen here.

I probably shouldn't complain that she hasn't posted a blog since December given my spotty record and yes, out-and-out disdain for anyone who would read more than three words written by a hack like me (who am I talking to anyway?), but dammit, I don't want anyone else squandering my efforts! I do a damn fine job of that on my own.

30 Days of Night Review

The Vampire Movie genre is a funny thing: it's much older than the zombie movie genre, but has none of it's cohesion or consistent formal conventions. Nosferatu, of course, is a classic: Murnau's vampire was inhuman, loaded with metaphorical value while staying essentially creepy. By all indications, the vampire would be the gold standard of fear in cinema. But from the moment Bela Lugosi stuck a pair of (I assume) funny-smelling plastic fangs in his mouth, the genre was doomed to a future of campy jokes, silly accents and affectations, and really bad wardrobe. You might be thinking that I'm referring to the extremely gay Interview with a Vampire (and I don't say that derisively; the movie is laden with homosexual subtext and, well, text), and I am, but I'm also thinking of the Blade and Underworld Movies, which basically cranked out clumsy vampires by the barrel and cut through them like Chuck Norris cuts through gangs of ninjas. Some films, like Larry Fesenden's Habit, were well-done, but they got caught up in the sexual aspect of vampirism. There's no doubt in my mind that Bram Stoker's Dracula is an extended sexual metaphor, among other things, and I'm certain that the oft-maligned Fessenden was paying tribute to the B-movies of yore like Daughters of Darkness. I'm not going to lie: I love a sexy movie as much as the next guy, but turning a vampire into an object of sexual desire (or mirthful escapades as the case may be) is in direct conflict with it's sense of menace, it's inhumanness, it's pall of fear. Me? I want blood.

I have no idea why the vampire was defanged in this way, but 30 Days of Night set out to undo all the damage done over the last several years. The film is set in the northernmost town in Alaska, during the part of the year when there are literally 30 calendar days of perpetual night. A group of vampires cut off the town's communication and go on a month-long feeding frenzy. Without commenting overmuch on the premise, it's quite refreshing to have one that doesn't involve vampire race wars and the Ultimate Fate of vampire-kind. This is a small town and a small faction of vampires intent on nothing more than sucking all the blood they can.
The protagonist, Sheriff Eben Oleson, is also a key to the threat posed by the vampires. Although he is generally a quick-thinking, capable man, he is far from being the super-cool Blade or Selene, who slay enemies by the dozen with a dry quip and a dry brow. Oleson is not a badass hero, but a protector who is barely able to protect a small group of survivors, let alone a whole town. He great under pressure, but the pressure is so great that at moments he appears to be on the verge of cracking.

But who wouldn't? These vampires are menacing, the way vampires should be. If a porcelain Tom Cruise wearing a puffy pirate shirt accosted me, I'm sure that I would die... laughing. The vampires in 30 Days are not the foppish aristocrats of the night we've become accustomed to, nor are they the leather-clad glorified red-shirts that Wesley Snipes eats for breakfast: they are monsters in men's clothing, razor-fanged, crazy-eyed, blood-soaked beasts with contorted alabaster faces. Everything about them says fear, from their normal-yet-slightly-stressed attire to their gutteral vampire language. The wonderful thing about them is not that it's a unique re-envisioning of the vampire, but a return the core foul thing that predates all cinema. They are part of no underground cabal or society just beyond the scope of human eyes, just a pack of dangerous, hungry scavengers with nothing more in mind than tearing out a throat or two.

All told, the movie is generally unspectacular, but likable nonetheless. It dusted off a few tricks from the horror movie playbook and filled in the blanks with great makeup, good but scant gore effects, and a hasty tacked-on romantic angle. That said, I would watch this movie again and possibly buy the DVD. I like gore effects, great makeup, and the horror movie playbook. I would go so far as to say that I'm skeptical of films that think they can improve on it. Even though this is a perfectly likable little movie in the grand scheme of things, in the here and now, it's a wonderful treat for those of us who have been waiting for a vampire movie with scary vampires in it.