balding angrily

I’ve avoided writing straight-out reviews on this site because reviews aren’t my strong point. I do much better with stories about the area between my knees and my belly button while keeping such stories distinctly non-sexual - or more correctly - non-erotic. Sex is funny, and I’m not going to limit myself if the point of a sex story is to make you laugh instead of turn you on. I’ve got a story rolling around in my brain that I’m trying to figure out how to frame so as to gross you out enough to make you smile, but not turn off the real people that have to eat dinner with me and look me in the face.

One of the unwritten rules I made for myself when starting this blog is that I wouldn’t do a movie review even though movies and the Filmspotting Boards take up a lot of my time. The people on the boards, and Adam and Sam do such a great job that I don’t really even want to try. My reviews would be along the lines of, “I liked it because I got to see Christian Bale’s wiener” or “I didn’t like it because I don’t like guns.”

However, I’ll talk about books and music.

For anyone that is a fan of 80s music, please buy Pet Griefby The Radio Dept. (I’m not sure why Dept. is written as an abbreviation, but I’ll go with it.) When I listen to this album, I can’t help but think of The Cure, Pet Shop Boys, and New Order. It’s no wonder that Sophia Coppola included three of their songs in the soundtrack to Marie Antoinette. They’re a modern group that absorbed and recombined the sounds of the 80s perfectly. From the Pet Shop Boys you get the synthesized beats and lazy voice of Neil Tennant without the whine. You get a perfect imitation of a Johnny Marr guitar, and when the beats aren’t electronic you get a drum that would sit comfortably next to New Order’s “Ceremony.” You also get the mood of The Cure - not the bubbly Cure from “Lovecats” or “Close To You”, but the foggy Cure of “All Cats Are Grey.” In fact, the mood of Pet Griefis so consistent that it would be considered monotonous if you don’t love this mood, which is on the edge of being narcissistically sad, the kind of sadness you wrote in the poems you wrote as a freshman in high school - the ones you look back at now and laugh.

Pet Grief helps me remember that when I was growing up the 80s, music I liked was considered “alternative.” The Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, New Order, Duran Duran, and The Cure were artists that made me feel a little bit dirty as a kid on the edge of puberty; I felt they were a little too grown up for me. Now their music is lumped in with Debbie Gibson, Taylor Dayne, and New Kids on the Block, and people point to the 80s as a vapid decade. The Radio Dept., because they’re a little-known group, reminds me that this kind of music was once considered subversive, or if not subversive then strange.

Think about Robert Smith with his Edward Scissorhands haircut, black-painted fingernails, and smudged lipstick. My mom would have worried about me if she saw his face on the cover of an LP in my collection. Well. Worried MORE about me.

So, kids of the 80s, go get it. I’ve had it on almost continuous loop since I bought it.

A warning about this post. It’s not funny or meant to be, and it’s pretty specific to the U.S. However the issues behind the specifics are being discussed in other parts of the world.

I’ve been rolling Rights (with a capital R because it’s big and important) around in my head the last couple of days because of Gizmodo’s RIAA Boycott. I got interested in fair use, copyright law, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) when I bought my iPod video last year and tried to put my purchased DVDs on it. I wondered why iTunes comes with a “Import CD” button but not a “Import DVD” button. That’s when I discovered that unlike CDs, DVDs come encrypted. In order to download the electronic file stored on the DVD, a person must remove the encryption. (I’m sorry if this elementary to you. I’m taking you through my process to show you how I got interested in this subject.) Then I found out that if iTunes were to include an “Import DVD” button, they would be breaking the law because according to the DMCA, it is illegal for Apple to sell or provide software that makes it possible to remove encryption. Further, it is illegal for me to remove encryption using software legally available outside of the U.S.

Then I remembered hearing somewhere that it was considered legal, back in the days of vinyl and cassette tapes, to copy an album or CD for your own personal use onto a cassette tape. It was illegal to sell the cassette, but it was legal to make the cassette to use on your Walkman. This, under copyright law, was called fair use. Fair use protects certain instances in which people that do not have permission to copy copyrighted material. As in the example with the cassette tape and CD, it protects, among other things, educators who wish to excerpt material for their students, critics who wish to review a book, movie, piece of music, or game, and anyone who wishes to parody a copyrighted work.

Hopefully, you see where I’m going. It is illegal to remove encryption from a DVD, but it is legal to make a copy of copyrighted material for your own personal use. So, I’m fucked with my DVD-to-iPod situation, if I wish to not break the law…but fair use says that I wouldn’t be breaking the law. To me, this is a conflict between my consumer rights and greedy movie studios, companies who wish to re-sell the same material to me in a different format.

So, I’m asking you to write your congressperson to support any legislation that will allow me to watch my legally purchased movies on my iPod on a long flight to Sundance. I should also ask you to write your congressperson to support my right to marry Jerry, but, you know…one step at a time. Today: watching O Brother, Where Art Thou on a 2 1/2″ screen; tomorrow: my right to inherit Jerry’s Social Security should he fall down a mountain in Sundance.

Oh. And sorry for the lack of funny.

In the fall of 1993 I went to Italy with a bunch of fellow American architecture students. A lot of them were hippies, but I wasn’t. I was a closeted, scared introvert. Closeted might be too severe a word because I honestly didn’t know where I was sexuality speaking. I hadn’t been with another man, but I was very curious. The two stories I’ll share really don’t relate aside from happening in Italy. I suggest you try to divine some cosmic significance from their pairing. You know, for kicks.

Story 1:

We were in the architecture studio working on our final projects for the semester. The hippies were drinking coffee, listening to something college-y, talking about how much they learned about a different culture like the Real World housemates do on the last episode of a season. They say insightful things like, “I never knew I was a bigot! This experience has really opened my eyes! I never would have thought I could have a gay friend! I thought Aaron would be having ass sex every minute of every day! Wow! Gays are people now!” My American hippy classmates were slightly less caricature-esque in their debriefing of the semester.

One of the hippies asked me what I was going to do after graduation. I was only a semester away from graduation, where most of the other students were juniors. I told him that I would probably, you know, get a job…doing architecture. The guy who asked me said, “Have you ever listened to the lyrics to ‘Once in a Lifetime’? That’s going to be you… ‘This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?’ Man.” I imagine he said “man” like a stoner hippy, although that might be unfair. “You’re going to wake up one day and realize you sold your soul to Corporate America.” I was listening to a lot of Talking Heads then, so I knew the song. I hadn’t heard the meaning behind the song until then. That sentiment still hits me in the chest plate whenever I hear it.

Story 2:

We lived in a small town outside of Florence. If we wanted to take a day-trip, we took an hour-long train ride in. One Saturday I went by myself. I did a lot of traveling by myself that semester. I went to shop, to browse the Ufizzi, to go to the Duomo for the fifth or sixth time, to sit in a piazza sketching, and to just be in Florence. I sat in the piazza next to the Duomo watching the gypsies rob innocent passers-by thinking, “Whaddya know? It looks so obvious. Those gypsies are really good.” I sat on a concrete planter or bench. I felt a mild, lonely melancholy, the kind of melancholy a person feels on a sunny fall day where lawns have blankets of brown and red leaves and the bright sun gives no warmth, where the day is so quiet that a person might feel like if he listened hard enough he could hear ants crawling in the cracks in the cold sidewalks. A guy sat down next to me and pulled out his cock for me to look at. I got up and ran in to the Duomo.

I looked for that concrete planter or bench when Jerry and I went back last year, but I didn’t find it.

I spend more time than some people looking up the correct usage of a word or phrase. That’s not to say I’m all intellectually curious like John Cusack’s would-be girlfriend in Say Anything. It’s more like I’m a little obsessive/compulsive about being right. My favorite look-up concerns the Alanis Morisette/Irony debate. I typed in “irony +Alanis Morissette” to Google and I got directed to any number of message boards and essays that attempt to either call Alanis on her sloppy use of language or argue that Alanis’s writing is brilliant. Many people have tried to give me examples of what true irony is, but still I get lost, or at least I’m going to pretend to be lost for the purpose of this sentence. Irony is a slippery concept to me. Don’t try to explain it to me again; you will fail in the attempt, and I will hate you for it.

I got called out on some boards about my use of the word “morals.” The person said I should be using the word “ethics.” I’ve looked up the two words, and I’m still confused because they still seem more or less interchangeable to me. Again, please don’t explain it to me. You will fail; I will hate you.

Why is this important? I was trying to think through what Dr. Laura would call a “moral dilemma” the other day, and got caught at the semantics. Was what I was trying to work through really an “ethical dilemma?” Is Dr. Laura misspeaking when she continues to ask about callers’ “moral dilemmas?” Is this one more reason why I should hate Dr. Laura? If “ethics” are the rules that attempt to codify “morals,” is it “ethics” or “morals” that prevent me from exposing my bare ass to the nearest Republican?

Here’s the ethical or moral dilemma that started this whole messed-up, confused line of thinking. I’m having a hard time figuring out when forced castration becomes a “should.” This is what I’m thinking about while I’m walking to Tin Star for lunch.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t know, I’m a moderator over at the Filmspotting boards. We discuss movies and our favorite podcasters, AdamandSam. A while back, they gave their “So Bad They’re Good” Top 5 list. Xanadu was on someone’s list, and I’ve been mulling this over for the months since that podcast. In general I can’t get into camp, but I have some exceptions; Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion is one.

I’m not a vinyl collector, but I appreciate them. I found my original Like A Virgin album that my brother and sister gave to me on my 14th birthday in the attic this past weekend. Let’s hope I’m not holding on to my old vinyl for nothing. Hopefully Jerry’s nieces will pull these out of our space-age, space-saving device when we’re dead and have a good laugh.

A couple of years ago I was looking through some vinyl bins at a garage sale, and I saw the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing. I made an audible sex noise, like I just had a mini-rubdown. I was moments from pulling out my wallet to buy it when a guy standing behind me said, “Believe me; you don’t want that. I went through my ironic phase also…you don’t want that.” I looked him up and down, saw that he was hipper than me, and put the album back in the bin. When I think back on that exchange, I realize that I wasn’t being ironic. I really, truly would love to have that soundtrack right now. I know this because I’m also sitting here listening to the soundtrack to Xanadu. I don’t like Xanadu because I’m trying to be ironic. I don’t think that Xanadu is so bad it’s good, or so bad it’s bad; I think that Xanadu is so good it’s awesome.

Granted I haven’t seen the movie in years. But when I was young I used to wish that I could fly into the sky powered by a Nagel-esque neon outline surrounding me. I also used to turn around with my arms out hoping that I would turn into Wonder Woman via an exploding belly button.