UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
|
||
|
Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
| UD email
You are just a number to me! And that number is: PAGES UD MADE: My Books Page My Reviews Page My Reference Page My Music Page My Pictures My Store UD-RELATED PAGES: My LiveJournal My MySpace music page My Flickr page My del.icio.us page My Last.fm page My Amazon Wishlist HEAVY ROTATION TV on the Radio: Dear Science Walkmen: You & Me Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes Ratatat: LP3 Beach House: Devotion BLOGS ETC claude le monde nuncstans rock 'em stock 'em tomato nation postmodern drunkard tuckova 22 ghastly mess constintina total virility fuzzysquid drunken bee stacey nightmare elyse from ANTM stereolabrat dark side points jf_franklin 123 i love you READ NOW brotherhood 2.0 NOT BLOGS ETC qwantz (dinosaur comix) go fug yourself the burg cat and girl book of ratings married to the sea icanhascheezburger fire joe morgan fivethirtyeight.com READ NOW hospitality on parade WEIRD LOVE dead amusement pks craters! all content © 2002-2008 Jeremy Broomfield 
Hosted by: HostRocket.Com Comments by: YACCS PRAISE & REVIEWS "[UD] is a genius." --Christian Oates "[Claudia] is fucking awesome, and [UD] is a genius. And vice versa. You should all buy Fear Not." --Tricia Howey MOTTO egeo huic vigorum MY WRESTLING NAME Titan Gently MY PUNK NAME Razor Ection 
WHO LINKS TO UD? • from Technorati • from Google • from Yahoo and here's something weird: my place in Humor 3-space |
Friday, August 27, 2004
The Summer Olympics are finally ending, which is good for the the part of my brain that is uncomfortable with the amount of "women's" gymnastics I end up watching every four years. If you turn on the TV at all during the games you can't escape the televisual barrage of flying skintight glitter freaks, because somebody at NBC decided that Americans will only watch amateur jocks if they show a lot of skin (swimming, gymnastics, track & field, and now beach volley-bikini-up-hot-girls-ass-ball).
I guess gymnastics aren't so much about the nudity, but they're on all the time. The skintightness aspect of the uniform is strange for exhibiting just how stunted and underdeveloped the girls are, looking like 12-year olds even at the age of 25. This freakshow effect helps keep ratings high. Olympic gymnastic events were designed by soviet scientists in the mind-control department of the Lubianka to be utterly, all-encompassingly compelling. You heard it here first: gymnastics were designed to incapacitate a nation of viewers in preparation for a massive communist invasion. I guess the USSR's army is not so much an invasion threat anymore, but drool- and sloth-inducing sport lives on. You cannot look away, you cannot help but absorb some of the rules and procedures, you will start cheering (quietly, internally at first, but later with little vocalized yelps) for your newfound "favorite" gymnasts, and you will very quickly find yourself spitting in disgust at fifteen-year-old girls because of something their foot did. And you will notice that some of the girls seem to be just millimeters away from actual midgethood. This is cruelty, state-sponsored and swollen with nationalistic pride. Carly Patterson, the little Texan bitchcake who won the all-around competition, is the perfect height for me to rest my drink on her head. And in ten years, when she can no longer compete with the new generation of embryonic mutant gymnokillbots, she'll be lucky to find work as an ambulatory coaster. The evening news tonight is showing a whole buttload of footage of the NYPD being trained to handle an encyclopedia's worth of horrifying terror-related RNC scenarios. I bet the people who came up with these training exercises were the weirdest Dungeon Masters in their D&D clubs back in '85. I mean they probably wore fedoras or suspenders when they got to high school -- that kind of weird. Anyway, in the training videos (which I assume they show us so that we'll feel reassured at the preparedness of our cops, when really I only feel like they're prepared to bash the faces of any protester they see wearing a black bandana over his face) you see cops in all-over Tyvek body suits with integral multicolored filtration units (and, one hopes, diapers -- you couldn't really blame your average flatfoot for getting pants-poopingly scared in a sarin gas or "dirty bomb" attack, right) walking through decomissioned subway cars in deserted parking lots. In terms of training, it's unrealistic for a number of reasons, but they strove for realism in the "extras" they hired to play innocent bystanders who were screaming for help, loudly, creatively, and NONSTOP. That seems realistic. I've never been in a real mass panic situation before, but the closest analogue I've got was an almost-accident on I-80 in Pennsylvania; as the car spun helplessly out of control on the snow-covered roadway, spinning at like .75 rps, the passenger in the backseat next to me said to the driver "Dan what are you doing Dan what are you doing Dan, Dan, what are you doing Dan what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing?" in an eerie and loud monotone. In the news segment's footage the bystanders are screaming, for example (and imagine the following in all caps, italic, and bold, and underline (the "everything bagel" of text formatting)): WOMAN: Oh my god my baby my baby help my baby help me my baby! MAN: I have to get out of here! I have to get out! For god's sake get me OUT! MAN: Somebody tell me what's going on! What's happening? Etcetera etcetera. Perfectly plausible. So I want to write those lines for those people, if they're not completely ad-libbed, because plausible includes a lot more interesting things in a real panic. Here are some lines I like: 1. "Help me oh my god I've misplaced my briefcase oh god there are important papers in there my boss will KILL me oh god oh GAAHHHD." 2. "Metrocard! I still have Unlimited! I'm on it! Thirty dollar! Fuck-ah! No no no!" 3. " I ain't smell shit, I ain't hear no shit blow up. This is some crazy bullshit, son! Crackers runnin' round up in here with guns an' shit. Shee-it. I ain't movin'. You crazy." 4. "Derek Jeter Derek Jeter Derek Jeter Jerreck Deeter Jerreck Deeter!" My office gave us the week off, how bout that! Maybe I'll post dangerous, man-on-the-street updates from the safety of my own home. Wednesday, August 25, 2004
So Much to Talk About, so Little Attention Span. I feel like my head is full of queenless bees. If I could get them all to work together on something, I could make sweet honey for you, but without an organizing principle or a common goal, they're just buzzy little fucks, which although pretty and stingy individually, you wouldn't want to spread them on your toast. Buzz buzz.
My vacation was great, even though it was very short and 1/3 of it was spent in the car. Ritalin is really good for long drives, because you can just cruise without distractions like hunger, fatigue, or the desire to have blood in all of your limbs. Also, I feel like it helps me get to the coveted autopilot-ish driving "zone" faster than Chemically Unassisted Driving (CUD). During my six-hour driving leg from Perry to Kennebunk, ME, I reflected on how complex the act of driving is and how many things one has to keep track of and how amazing it is that one can even enter a "zone" wherein one does not need to pay attention in any conscious way and in fact one can trundle down lengthy digressive reverie-paths in one's head and still somehow manage not to get into high-speed crunching death situations. (I can be fairly productive in that state, too; during a 2001 road trip I wrote a speech in my head for Al Gore which, if he had delivered it to the American public in the two weeks prior to the election, he would have been in the White House now, regardless of the vote tampering trickery perpetrated by the state of FL. It was a genius speech, but of course when I tried to write it down, about 80% of it disappeared from my head, the memoryspace immediately filled with the lyrics to the theme song to The Jeffersons, or the discography of Queen, or the names and specialties of the nine muses or WHATEVER.) Anyway, don't you agree that the fact that one can unconsciously operate a car is pretty miraculous? It's pretty amazing that I get to work every day, which I don't take a car but still I'm doing unconsciously. And how many mornings have you woken up at home, hung over like the devil is raping your eyesockets, with no concept of how you got back last night?. Miracles of motion. Buzz. I have so many things to tell you, but the rest of today's hive space is almost completely occupied by thoughts of Isaac, who holds the current title of awesomest person in the world. I've mentioned him before, calling him my surrogate cousin; he's my friend Zorgot's 19-yr-old half-brother. Two weeks ago, after I told him I'd be driving through his hometown of Kennebunk in a few weeks, he told me to email him a picture of myself and the name of my band, or a slogan of some kind for my musical pursuits. It was all very hush and unclear, his purpose. Voodoo? Tattoos? The photo part was easy enough, but the band name presented a slight problem. For years I've been recording (mentally, at least -- I haven't actually released anything officially) under the name Land of Nod, which if you click that link you'll see there's been a band of that name for a number of years. That really sucks, because I've liked the name for a long time. So I considered alternatives like Land of Nod UK or maybe Land of Nod 3000, but then J.Ro told me to quit fucking around. After much deliberation, I decided that I might like to record under the alter ego John Barleycorn. I like its numerous associations and connotations, and I like that it has the same initials as my real name (in a similar vein, I also considered using the band name John Brown's Body, but there's already a shitty (I assume) reggae band of that name). I wasn't 100% decided yet, but Isaac needed an answer, he said, to prepare a "surprise" for me. When I got to Kennebunk on Thursday night, I was taken to Isaac's job, which it turns out he works at a screenprinting shop. Well, here's one picture of the eventual surprise. Holy fuck. The design is based on a New Kids on the Block shirt from the mid eighties. Using extra clothes left over from completed jobs, Isaac printed at least 200 shirts, tank tops, and even a couple sweatshirts. No two shirts are the same color fabric, and I think he tried at least 12 different ink combinations, which if you know silkscreening you know takes a long time. I do believe that this is the awesomest thing anyone's ever done for me. Can you fucking believe this? What the fuck? Dear world: I love Isaac. I will have more stories for you tomorrow, and soon, shirts will be on sale in the store. Get psyched! Tuesday, August 17, 2004
I stare at my computer all day, wondering why nothing resembling work seems to appear on the screen. How can I justify spending an entire day doing anything but the small amount of non-challenging work with which I am charged? Well, I got a clue from Nick "no relation" Broomfield's 1996 documentary Fetishes, in which a dominatrix says something like "working all day at a job that doesn't challenge you -- that's the real torture." I hate having knowledge dropped on my by someone who refers to herself with a straight face as "Mistress Delilah," but you take your wisdom where you can get it these days, am I right? Far be it from me to disdain advice just because it came from HBO OnDemand's sketchiest menu. Oh lord. Can someone rescue me? A book deal or a record contract. Draft me into a secret wing of the government, force me to electrocute kittens, I don't care! As long as it's challenging!
lo left New York this weekend for the hot and tornado-y city of Houston, bequeathing me a memory-foam mattress-pad and an Insound Trading Card Series trading card featuring The Fiery Furnaces. I keep staring at the card, mostly at Eleanor Friedberger, thinking that she doesn't sound as cute as she looks here, and maybe I'm weird. Do I think she's cute because I got one of her songs in my head? What's the value in thinking someone's cute when you know that if they were standing right in front of you, you would barely have the energy to smile, let alone slip them a copy of your demo so they could help make you famous and ruin your life? Buy you a drink? Don't mind if I do! What's your story, stranger? OH FORGET IT. But maybe, my children, maybe the fact that I still respond to music is a good thing. Let's not fight it. I spent part of today reading this kid's reviews on Amazon. As you will see, he has written a lot of reviews. They are terribly written in a glistening train-wrecky kind of way -- bad spelling, bad theses, bad subject matter. But the kid has heart! He writes reviews of posters. Movie posters! He can't wait for the DVD to come out, and he's got no other venue. But really, I don't care if he has heart. His taste is for shit. Add to my list of people I hate: Anybody who knows all the words to that rap in the middle of that Barenaked Ladies song in that car ad from a couple of years ago. This includes the Barenaked Ladies themselves. Also on the list: whoever invented Entenmann's Popems. Because alone at home this weekend I took a hard fast slide into cliché, one glazed donut hole at a time. Death to! Thursday, August 12, 2004
So by now you've probably heard that New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey just resigned for cheating on his wife. Turns out that despite the happy family image he projected for most of his career, things weren't all tea and crumpets in Trenton. More hypocrisy from politicians! Will it never end? Still, didn't Rudy Giuliani cheat on his wife, too? He sure as fuck didn't resign because of it. He stuck around and didn't even really seem ashamed, saying thigns like "What, you don't like my new girlfriend? Why don't you come on down to the Bowery, you fuck -- we'll settle this old school, with a couple spaldeens and a brickbat. You hold the spaldeens and I'll bash your face with the bat! You muddahfuckahs! I'm the fuckin' Mayor here! Fuhgeddaboutit!" Then he unleashed an army of cops in to Yankee Stadium, where he had already corralled all the homeless people. Carnage, my friends, all because the Mayor "opened his press pool to freelancers." But so McGreevey shouldn't retire. He should apologize, buy New Jersey a box of penis-shaped chocolates, and let's all agree to move on. And I think that if he sang his apology us, up here on our balcony, we'd be his forever.
I had been smiling all day before I heard that news. I didn't know why, but walking down the street with my coworker Joanne I felt like my face was gonna sprain from the case of the grins I had. How do you know if it's a happy smile and not one of those crazy smiles? I'll tell you: you show it to every girl that walks by, and if they smile back, you're happy; if they fall down, cross the street weeping, or even just crinkle their noses a bit, you're crazypants, and it's time to call the guys with the giant butterfly nets. Because that's how they catch crazy people: big-ass butterfly nets. And speaking of crazypants, I bought three pairs of pants yesterday, brand new, nice pants, for the crazypants price of $12. Monday, August 09, 2004
I look terrible with stubble, and I'm intensely jealous of men who can roll into work with three-day growth and make the secretarial pool all dizzy. I just look like street scum who got past security, no matter where I go. I'm catsitting at my mom's house again, and damn if I can do a goddamn thing when I'm there but watch TV, rent movies, and eat fruit. I certainly can't bathe, shave, do dishes, or, like, move. Ironically, I spent much of the weekend watching the X Games, whose participants are involved in the exact opposite of sitting on the couch eating cherries in your underpants (for photos, send cash). No revelation on that front, I guess; modern sports spectation has been synonymous with sloth for a while now.
I like watching the X Games. This is not an embarrassing fact; anybody who is not impressed by professional vert skateboarding has a ball of salt where their heart should be and a bag of dirty syringes where their Sense of Childlike Wonder should be. This is my second year watching it with TiVo, which makes the experience about a kajillion times better*. In the old days, when you could only watch television in stupid, boring, 20th-century "real time," watching the X Games was almost impossible. Like, you could have your eyes open as it happened in front of you, but unless you were an expert in the particular event, you couldn't really process what had taken place. TiVo gives you a fighting chance at comprehension -- my thumbtip is blistery from taptaptapping the frame advance button through like forty minutes of footage -- but I still don't really understand what I saw. The so-called experts don't seem to help much. As in most sports broadcasting, the commentators are always ex-competitors, but the X Games dudes are charmingly untrained in the art of live sports comment. The concept of "play-by-play" is often lost on them, because during an especially good performance they go from naming the tricks to just screaming "dude!" and "WHOA!" and finally just variants of "AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!" I'm convinced that the main reason it's impossible to process vert tricks is that they are actually impossible to perform. Impossible. Compared to skateboarders, all other athletes, including all Olympic athletes, are stumbling hunchbacks. This guy Bucky Lasek won Thursday's event with "a switch rodeo to switch heelflip backside 360 combo" which I won't even bother describing cuz I can't. I'm now a gibbering moron. I'm talking about sports. What is wrong with me? I'll try to analyze this more later, maybe. I want to explore the fact that I can watch something five times and still be unable to describe it, and the ramifications that has for the validity of eyewitness testimony in general. How come anybody trusts eyewitnesses? I bet if you looked at trial statistics, you'd find that most people are convicted/exonerated on the strength of witnesses over DNA evidence by a nauseatingly high factor. Somebody go look that up. I owned a skateboard for about a year, and I used it to get around okay without ever learning any tricks, mostly because I valued the integrity of my bones over looking cool, especially because a) I didn't look very cool on a skateboard and b) I found other ways to look cool (for tips, send cash). Also, skateboarding is very loud and not at all smooth -- my feet felt like jellysacs after two blocks. Watching the X Games, I'm glad that I didn't get into skating earlier, because I wouldn't have wanted to enter adulthood calling everybody I saw "bro," which is apparently a requirement of the lifestyle, along with listening to terrible music and mistreating women. I'll assume there are exceptions to these rules, and I'll go ahead and assume that one of them is Bob Burnquist (on the right), who I'm adding to my list of famous men I love. I'm not usually a sucker for a well-produced puff-piece human interest segment during a sports program ("Gibby has ten children and built his home out of twigs and loves his wife and Jesus and honky-tonkin' all night") so it wasn't that. I've been watching Bob for years, and he seems just swell. JUST SWELL. I was thinking of adding this kid John Robinson to my list too, but it seemed a little creepy. He's too pretty for the list. So pretty! * Watch enough X Games and you'll begin to believe that "kajillion" is a real number Tuesday, August 03, 2004
I said goddamn. As you may have noticed, the website was down for like a millennium this weekend -- down for so long I almost forgot what it looked like -- which left me with nothing to do but sweat. Not like I ever post on weekends, but you know how you feel when a website isn't working. Like what if it never comes back? OMG! So I did weird things all weekend. Like folding the futon in the living room down into bed formation, just for a change of pace. Then I turned on the air conditioner, because I have trouble sitting still, and if I move I have trouble staying undrenched with sweat. I tried to sleep during the day like a Mediterranean, with mild success. Sunday night was like the tenth consecutive garbage night that my roommates have been coincidentally absent, forcing me to deal with the gawbidge aw by my wonesum. Poo-uh me!
So then in order to feel powerful, I went out into the staircase, thinking maybe I could flex a little for the children in the building, who like nothing more than to laugh at white twentysomethings. But what the fuck was this? I smell gas! Now a chance to really make things happen! I called 311, which is like prep school for calling 911 in New York City. If you don't know, it's supposed to be the city information line, where you can find out your garbage pickup days, or parking rules, or where your polling place is, or where to find a hooker who doesn't mind cuts as long as they're small. But so I call and tell them kinda offhandedly that I smell gas in my building's staircase. I was like: no biggie, but I smell gas. Could you inform Con Edison for me, thanx. But the operator was all: Please hold for 911. I was like "What? Seriously? Because they're gonna send fire trucks, aren't they?" She goes "Please hold." So for two sweaty minutes, I wondered whether I had really smelled gas or whether it was just rotting garbage in the courtyard, which actually woudn't be too far-fetched. But sure enough, woop woop, two GINORMULUS fire trucks pull up, laden with firemen in that arctic gear they wear all year. I sure hope the underlayer wicks away moisture. "Wicks away moisture," ewww. They come up the stairs via magic teleportation and they bang on the third floor doors, and at this point I'm feeling preemptively VERY sheepish, in case they can't smell it and I'm revealed to be a dangerous crank. I've already started shoveling ice cream down my throat to try to put out the raging fire of guilt in my belly. But it turns out that a neighbor's pilot light had gone out. So I'm a goddamn hero. What the fuck have you done lately? |
OTHER REVIEWS: John from Cincinnati Menomena LATEST BOOK REVIEWS: The Game Moneyball One-Upsmanship Siddhartha You need the Fear Not Guide to Life. Buy it already. ($4) Now available! The Broomfield Variations CD ($10) or go to The UD Store 
MY IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDS Chan Marshall Rotem of the IDF Eleanor Friedberger Amy Goodman Bernardine Dohrn ('69) Maya Rudolph Joanna Newsom Imogen Heap Caroline Dhavernas Shana Rae Ray DISALLOWED FOREVER "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you!" - "from whence" - "...the exception that proves the rule" - any use of the question "spit or swallow?" - the phrase "drop trou" - fake-o reviewer verbs: "penned" for wrote "helmed" for directed "lensed" for whatever - "expat" - the euphemism "passed away" - pronouncing merci beaucoup as "mercy buckets!" (see also: "grassy-ass!") PET PEEVES "confinscated" - trying children "as adults" - "drownded" |
