Marine reservists are facing the recall, militias battle for influence and territory in the refugee camps of Darfur, the NSA is still spying on you, Iran won’t bend to western pressures, Oakland’s homocide rates are through the roof, the DOW and NASDAQ can’t hold their gains and some guy set up a couple of matresses in front of the coin-op downstairs and is now my neighbor… Two mattresses– how the fuck did you get there here? I didn’t ask him… He was in a bathrobe and I didn’t really want to intrude in his personal affairs…

Lots going on around here so I’ve been sitting on the couch with potato chips for some marathon viewing of the Canadian show “Trailer Park Boys”… Sorry if I’m a little late to the party but it’s only now been making the rounds at work… The pay may not be great and there’s no sense of your job being meaningful– no premature babies are nursed to health and amputees don’t suddenly sprout limbs and begin dancing– but burned DVDs of trash humour are readily available and if you can’t enjoy that you’re probably sleeping on the sidewalk in front of my house…

The show’s conceit is simple– two recidivists attract the attention of a documentary crew who follow them from imprisonment back to civilian life at the Sunnyvale Trailer Park… There’s no overarching plot vehicles beyond staying out of jail– I don’t even know why there’s a documentary being shot in the first place… The pilot, according to the no-lives posting on IMDB message boards, is about the two main characters acting as pet exterminators silencing loud neighborhood dogs so, perhaps the camera crew is explained therein…

It’s a character driven show: a mental midget hothead who can raise pot plants from the dead; a DeNiro wannabe milking rum and cokes trying to score enough the retire from petty crime; a bug-eyed cat-lover living in a shed stealing shopping carts to sell to competing malls; a former cop cum trailer park supervisor; his barechested assistant/lover; bleach blonde former girlfriend; long-haired redneck wheelchair alcoholic father; de-barred hot dog loving vet in a camper; lily-white B-Boy schemer and his black posse; tweedledee and tweedledum pothead Nintendo freaks.

You have reservations? Of course you do– it looks idiotic at best, right up there with anything readily available in various dilluted forms all across the television spectrum… While a co-worker slowly explained to me the show, trying to tie me off and turn me on, I was desperately looking for a polite out… The fact that my laptop DVD player couldn’t handle burned discs wasn’t enough– the gospel needed to be spread…

And I’m glad because the show really is fucking good in a very strange way… The expected overt acts of potty humour are plentiful but the underlying sarcasm and absurdity are what makes the show better than most comedies… The joke’s not that Ricky can’t perform in a low budget porn being shot at J-Roc’s mom’s trailer but that Ricky honestly is doing this to get money to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring… Everyone can see aspects of people they know, and if they look hard enough and they’re in the mood they’ll see aspects of themselves in the characters… Each person is a composite of various stereotypes stretched and pulled and distorted for maximum effect but the stereotypes are true enough to make the characters work…

Perhaps the show works best because so many of the people involved, the director and the producers and the cast, have known one another in previous lives… Many are from the Halifax theatre scene, the show’s creator knew the two leads in highschool, and the actors all play off each other really well… The scripts are probably kept loose intentionally and the boom in the show filming suddenly seems less contrived than you thought it would have been…

The other night a friend came over and she, my roommate and I sat down to the first disc of MTV’s reality show “Laguna Beach: The Real OC”… Similarly a character driven show except this time they’re all interchangable: spoiled brats snivelling about petty converns closer to your and mine than our friends up in Sunnyvale Trailer Park… No one’s trying to boost lighting equipment for the illegal nightclub because everyone’s concerned about if they’re cute, popular and cool enough… The show has a slicker documentary image more akin to The Real World than TBB’s boom in the shot running down the street look and a soundtrack of today’s (yesterday’s) interchangable pop product… Everything about it is fake except, if you believe MTV, it’s real life drama unfolding before your very eyes… This drama seems to be centered on if douche bag will hook up with Stupid Girl A or B today…

Could a show about a circle of teenage friends in their last year of highschool be insightful, engaging, amusing, heart-breaking and revealing? Of course, but not with these kids… These real life people are stereotypes themselves but their characters are based on stereotypes readily available on TV and movies, not composites of people you see sleeping in front of your house, the whacky guy at the liqour store, your mom, your neighbor or you… These kids are as real as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Madonna, Britney Spears and that penis she married, Gov. Arnold and President Bush… I’m sure more people would rather know the Laguna Beach future America than the quirky full fleshed creations up in Nova Scotia and that’s a damned shame…
-Slept in too late to make the library so thanks for the computer loan Greta…

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One night not too long ago I was in a fine drinking establishment – I honestly can’t remember which one – when 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” came on. Shocking, I know. If you’ve been semi-lucid and in the proximity of any alcohol in the past four years, this situation has happened to you. Indeed, on the racetrack of possibilities where hearing this song is the course marker, I can’t even guess at what lap this commemorated. But I’m pretty sure I’m losing.

At previous listenings, this song has triggered the conditioning I underwent at the hands of high school dances where dark lights, bouncing girls, and driving bass boost heart rates and erode taste, causing me to get up and shake my thang. This masterpiece is in every DJs ‘break in case of emergency’ tool box.

On this occasion, however, my Pavlovian response was on vacation and what I heard was not a man in control of his situation – a Caesar of debauchery and violence sent to lead us into a Golden Age of intoxication, ecstacy, and patriarchal absolutes – but a poser who insists on the claims he’s making all the more emphatically because deep down he’s terrified they’re not true.

Not that I thought 50 was an icon of truthiness before, but the slick-yet-dirty production and intensity of the song suspended my disbelief under circumstances that could best be described as ‘spinny.’

Instead of a universal rallying cry for all things booty, the song became the introductory monologue of a character that you know is going to realize the hollowness of his efforts at the end of the play, unseated by a more virtuous and humble upstart; a call of desperation by someone so deep in the carrion of excess that they saw no way out. In this ironic light, the following lyrics took on a whole new meaning:

You can find me in the club, bottle full of Bud
Mama, I got that X, if you into takin’ drugs
I’m into having sex, I ain’t into making love
So come give me a hug if you into getting rubbed…

…And you should love it, way more then you hate it
Nigga you mad? I thought that you’d be happy I made it
I’m that cat by the bar toasting to the good life
You that faggot ass nigga trying to pull me back right?

In my mind, 50 Cent went from the most indictable proponent of fratboy narcissism to one of the most brilliant critics of the same behavior. If you can hear the words in this way, it’s like one of those 3D computer generated images where you have to cross your eyes a certain way: Everything in the song takes on new meaning.

Other mind games you can play with yourself to make life more interesting:

1. When watching talk shows, pretend all the guests are stoned. (works better with some celebrities – Harrison Ford, surprisingly – than with others)
2. Instead of just walking down the street, imagine you’re on top of the world rotating it with your feet. Also works when walking up stairs and feeling like you’re pushing the whole world down.

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Quote of the Week:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

   A stately pleasure-dome decree:

      Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

         Through caverns measureless to man

            Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced;

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

   Floated midway on the waves:

Where was heard the mingled measure

   From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

   A damsel with a dulcimer

   In a vision once I saw:

   It was an Abyssinian maid,

   And on her dulcimer she played,

   Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 't would win me

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Kubla Khan

I’ve been thinking about Xanadu a lot the last couple of days.

No, not this Xanadu.

Not this Xanadu, either.

Rather, this Xanadu.

As the world order seems to be dissolving or rearranging or ovulating (reference any major newspaper for details) I would like to order a new world, with chili sauce on the side. This is costly, so costly I can’t afford it.

I read in the news that Justin Timberlake does drugs. Maybe if I gradually insert myself into his life I can be around him while he’s all high and stuff and take his ATM card.

I’ll pick up where this *NSYNC pantywaist left off

and pay the cosmonauts to hook me up.

It will be me and a big space tank of ol. It will take a long time to get to Xanadu, but it will be worth it. I’ll take my tank of ol and pour it into the rivers of liquid methane and ethane carving Earth-like features into Titan’s landscape.

I will still Moonshine.

I will sit still and pet a dog with a fishbowl on his head and look back towards the sun and the world I left behind. I wonder if at that distance the sun will be blinding, or if I could just take it in like an extra big star?

The Earth will be too small to see, but I can look closely at Saturn, which will surely dominate the night sky way out there. It must look five times the size of our moon. It seems like it would always be night.

And then I’ll be blindingly drunk all the time, staggering around beneath enormous rings of particles.

I’ll be much closer to the edge of the solar system, and every time I look up, wasted, beneath that bizarre and unfamiliar sky, I’ll get a feeling like vertigo, or a door opening behind me at night.

If I jump I’ll feel like I might just drift into space.

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