UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
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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 
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Thursday, January 27, 2005
Here's what I'd like: brilliance. I want to be blinded by it, and I want it to come from me. I want to market myself as a man of reliable -- but not predictable -- effulgence, I want to hire myself out for parties. This ad for a movie called The Wedding Date makes me want to make my living by going to parties, and although I could easily be the date for the desperate sibling or bridesmaid, I'd much rather be the stunning walking talking wit of the century, and nobody's date but... um... Destiny's? Hello, I'm UD. You must be the bride, Oh, you're her mother?, Fa fa fa!, let's dance! Twist my arm and I'll sing you a song -- about Jacques Lacan! Ah, but fuck it. This is not brilliance. This is uncle material, as in "your uncle UD is such a card," oh god. Anyway, getting paid for going to parties just sounds wrong, like a hot girl giving you chocolate to convince you to have sex with her. Cut to the professional skydiver, windburned and craggy, who screams over the propeller noise "I get paid to do what I love, man! How much better can life get?" and he leans back into the void with a lusty whoop as the cameraman tries to hold the poop in his underwear until they land.
Brilliance is a bad goal. Brilliance hides in your blind spot, and you can't attain it by striving, goddamn it, or every yokel with a good work ethic would have a glowing blurb from Michiko Kakutani or Sven Birkerts on his dustjacket. Brilliance is the girl on the train who you are pretty sure is looking at you but every time you lift your head or eyes to check, she's deep in that book, and frankly she looks about two stops away from a morning snooze. What was she doing last night? Say one time you found brilliance and it felt like falling through the only thin patch of ice on a frozen pond. Well if your friends see you two years later, jumping up and down two-footedly on a body of water that could only be called a puddle by the descriptively generous (you know: "the line was a mile long and we waited an eternity for our brioche -- Dean & Deluca is good but I must have sweated a billion gallons in there!"), let's hope they have the decency to wait a week after dropping you at the asylum before dividing up your CD collection. Half of the musicians I like would never get past the first audition round of American Idol, and that's as it should be. (Incidentally, The Beatles are not overrated; they are rated exactly where they should be.) Americans fetishize British accents in certain weird ways, like for some reason we are more likely to respond to a kitchen appliance infomercial if there's a guy with a limey accent in it, supporting the blond American pre-matron. Likewise, Simon from AmIdol gets to say things that would get an American dude punched in the face, or diagnosed as a serious sociopath. In the case of the infomercial guy, I think that the accent is used to hold people's attention. His particular accent just sounds outlandish, and you kind of keep watching just to hear him say normal words in a weird way. A lot of American boys who watched too much Monty Python think they do a good Brit accent, but they are wrong on two counts: 1) Their accent is bad, and 2) they don't substitute the right idioms to actually pass for Limey. Everyone can remember lorry, boot, fag, shag, flat, and lift, but it's hard to remember to say "hang on" instead of "hold on", "in hospital" instead of "in the hospital", "get on" instead of "get along"and "it's actually quite brilliant, rilly" instead of "it rocks." Anyway, these themes may get chased down at a later date. When it comes to chasing ideas, I'm not so much FloJo as I am AdRock in the video for "Sabotage" -- flashy, stupid-looking and useless, and probably on a rooftop. But I'm pretty sure nobody I know was on that commuter train in L.A., so I feel okay putting together a setlist for my imaginary lounge singer act (So far it's only this: Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat; Taking a Chance on Love; Kissing a Fool; Bohemian Rhapsody; Hallelujah [L. Cohen]; Lady Madonna.) Suggestions are welcome, as ever. [Oh and by the way I feel like some of you have asked to know when I'm hosting the pub quiz that I periodically host. Well, I'm hosting it next week. Detail in the comments to this post.] Thursday, January 20, 2005
I'm really "ramping up" the whitetrashifiction of my lifestyle. First it was the sweatpants which I used to own as a joke, but somehow more recently I find my self wearing them without any ironic purpose at all. Then when I needed a comfortable piece of furniture for the living room, I opted for a loveseaty couch thing -- that reclines. A double recliner. Hoo boy. Then, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I succumbed to Ron Popeil's leathery pitch, and I'm now the proud owner of TV knives. This trend disturbs me. I am more comfortable, and I can slice things easier, but I as long as I don't like Kid Rock or Jeff Foxworthy, I think I can keep my City Slicker Card. Yee-hah!
Oof. If I were a bad stand-up comic, that would be the start of my act. You ever stop and think about the white stuff inside an Oreo? No? Good. DON'T DO IT. I always start thinking about after I've shoved like five home-made double-stufs down my stupid throat. It's got to be like Crisco and confectioner's sugar, right? Oh disgusting. The following is a line from the Spice Girls song "Spice Up Your Life," which is featured in the climax of the movie Spice World, which I luckily caught on some HBO channel:"Yellow man in / Timbuktu / Color for both / me and you / Kung Fu Fighting / Dancing Queen / Tribal spaceman / and all that's in between." So put aside for a moment, if you can, the utter retardation of the complete lyric. Bad lyrics are fine with me. No, I'm bothered by the fact that nowhere along the production line -- nowhere at all, from writing, through arranging, rehearsing, recording, and eventual release -- did they encounter anyone who knew where fucking Timbuktu is. Not one single solitary geographically educated soul who knew that Timbuktu is in Africa, in Mali to be precise, and hence is fairly short on "yellow men" -- assuming of course that the term "yellow man" here is the traditionally offensive imperialist term for East Asians. Which... yes, yes it is. Which makes you wonder further: if they had said "yellow man in / [insert East Asian city here]" would it have been any better? The L.A. River, (that concrete monstrosity, the trapezoidal cutaway featured so heavily in movies like Terminator 2, Grease, and Point Break), usually bears ironic moniker with jolly aplomb. What now? That shit is flooded, B! The L.A. River flows again! No more ironicker moniker! And yet I can't find a single picture of the dampened waterway. Anybody help a brother out? This is like Halley's Comet in terms of rarity. Finally, to close out this terrible abortion of a post, here is a quote that demonstrates why I love allmusic.com: The [Iveys'] new name, Badfinger, came from the working title of the Beatles song "With a Little Help From My Friends," "Bad Finger Boogie." It beat out such suggestions as the Glass Onion and the Prix (which came from John Lennon, who surely hoped it would be mispronounced frequently). Hee. Thursday, January 13, 2005
Okay, sorry for the lacuna, again, I got distracted by Alias and Ronco Knives and then I remembered something totally crazy and went into a coma: remember cell phones? No, wait -- I mean: remember PAY phones? Right! Remember when you couldn't just call anyone from anywhere and you needed ca$h money to make crappy curbside boxes work? I guess you can still find the "booths" on the street, though now they don't have four walls or moving parts and they're as likely being used as makeout hutches or cigarette-lighting windbreaks as they are for actual telephony. Are they going to disappear and confuse a whole generation of children when they first come in contact with Superman? PS: the movie version of a phone booth, Phone Booth, was unbearably craptastic (still, I'll watch anything once) and stands as a terrific reason not to see Phantom of the Opera, as both were directed by uberschlockmeister Joel Schumacher. The other good reason being Andrew Lloyd Webber, but you don't need me to point these things out to you, right, because you weren't going to see PotO anyho. Right? [UD's hand hovers menacingly over "incinerate" button.]
ANYWAY! So Boston opens its arms to us and we drop in on some friends of mine. J played Jesus in a movie we worked on together and now he plays the organ at Fenway Park, which amounts to about the same thing if you're from Boston. I play Cribbage with his wife while he rehearses with some friends who are more important then I am. I love Cribbage, but Manic keeps on getting like 5-J-J-Q-K in her cribs, so I feel like a retard until somehow by magic I get A-A-7-7-7 and it turns out to be awesome. Yay Cribbage! That night I can't sleep at all. Such is my life. I fidget so much on the folded-down futon that after like half an hour lo says "if you don't stop moving I think I actually might die" so I trudge downstairs to try sleeping on the couch which no go so I move some cushions to the floor and flop around all night like a flounder on a spit in a sleeping bag. Next morning we leave the now empty house and get some fresh bread from lo's former coworkers at a very nice bakery called the Hi-Rise Bakery. It's some hippie shit, but you can't argue with fresh challah. OH MA GAH THIS IS BORING. So then we fought a dragon. Driving in Boston is for shit. lo did all of the driving in the Greater Metro Boston Area, because I found it stupider and more frustrating than New York driving, without actually being more fun. Man, I love New York driving! Boston, in case you don't know, is even more hostile to non-residents looking for a place to park than NY because you need a fucking PERMIT to park in anyplace interesting. Or as a New Yorker in a movie would say: "a fuckin' poimit! Fuhgeddabouddit! I'm walkin' here!" So here we are, full of bread and coffee and no one to hang out with for a number of hours, and it's wicked cold and what the fuck are we doing taking a vacation in New England in January fuck fuck fuck so we go to a movie. We see Finding Neverland, a four-hanky weeper starring Johnny "everything I touch turns to genius even a remake of Willy Wonka" Depp as J.M. Barrie, weirdly puckish author of Peter Pan. Well, it's a four-hanky weeper if you are a fan of movies and if you are a human being with a soul. lo, apparently, is neither, because my sidelong glances during the most tear-wrenching scenes confirmed the dryness of her cheeks and the rock-solid non-quiveringness of her lips. I've accused lo of not liking movies before, because when she still lived in the city we'd go to movies all the time, like three a month, and every time she would express disappointment or boredom or straight-up dislike. Why did she keep going to see movies? I dunno. I think she liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So before you slip into comas and sue me for your resulting head wounds, I'll do the stream thing, like a kid narrating the stuff out the car window: Boston slush all around and we leave the movie paak the caa very faaa from haavud yaad and fuck shit it is cold dinner with catpants at a foncy pizza place that brings me a slice with sopressata and little ponds of greasy liquid fat ick and then to radarbee's house and we eat and then she takes me to The Only Building in North America Designed by Le Corbusier and to the library which is the perfect paradigmatic library and basically slaps you quietly in the face with a 2x4 that says I'M A LIBRARY! SHH!! on it, and then we download some hip hop for her new iPod because her old iPod, laptop, wallet and backpack were stolen from her locker in the Divinity School, like oh ma gah you fucking totally classless thief, couldn't you have stolen shit from lockers at the business school? but anyway after some chatting about cat poop, royalty, and sufism, I sleep fitfully on some foam and the sleeping bag and in the morning it's eggs and pancakes and radarbee and I talk about how much we loved I ♥ Huckabees and how we want to make everyone watch it and then I cry into my pancakes as bee makes me realize that I desire to experience the infinite, that I crave transcendence, but that shit like that won't fly in the pragmatic world of the biiiig city and maybe I'm depressed a little bit and maybe that why my sleep is so weird or why I don't blog often enough or why I never want to do anything and why I call in sick to work like twice a month but so anyway forget all that because the snow has dumped a fat sticky four-inch blanket on New England and then the temp crested 33°F so now it's ice city and we cancel the junket to Kennebunk, ME for safety's sake even though I think it's a total wimpout because the girls around me and the people who actually live/lived in the GMBA insist that there's nothing pussy about not wanting to die an icy spunout flippedover 'pikedeath so we go see the blp and his honey Nurse E and we have Thai food that doesn't make me want to yakk and we play a terrific (i.e., almost nothing like Scrabble™) variant of Scrabble™ called Speed Scrabble™ (for a bad description see here ) until my Ritalin wears off and then on Friday morning lo gets all pissed at me because I "make her" drink Dunkin Donuts coffee and she almost has a freaked out fit about me eating a b'fast sandwich while driving, calling it the unsafest thing ever, which is funny cuz it requires about as many hands as smoking while driving and a lot less brain power than using the cell phone, which she had done the day before and I even saw her steer with her knees for a couple-ten seconds on Tuesday and alls I'm saying is pot kettle black etcetera BUT SO we drive south and stop outside New Haven in the winter wonderland of Bethany, Connecticut, home of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation where lo's hot archivist pal HotWheels works and we go to a diner which has the nerve to serve me MANHATTAN clam chowder but that's okay because the trip is almost over and after some psychotic zooming down the gorgeous Merritt Parkway (on which we listened to Stephin Merritt's latest Magnetic Fields album) we arrive back in Brooklyn and isn't that a relief for your underpunctuated eyes? Oh, and somewhere in there we saw Meet the Fockers because lo had decided that instead of Finding Neverland she really would have preferred a comedy, and a friend of mine had told us that MtF was funny, and worth seeing, and it turns out that my friend was either in the employ of Universal Pictures or had a cruel streak because the movie was simply awful. Hoffman and Streisand are great, but DeNiro cannot do comedy and Ben Stiller looks like a fucking monkey and I'm sick of Costanza films, you know, where the whole comedic scaffold is the humiliation and misfortune of the lead character. Blythe Danner is wasted on a character as wispy as cat dander and the girlfriend/daughter/bride is a complete nonentity. If you're thinking of seeing this movie, quick, send me the $10 and I'll buy the ticket for you (a fast way to send me money: go to my store page and click the button for a CD -- it's about the same price, and if you leave a note about the Fockers I won't send you the CD) and then I will eat the ticket and absorb its evil into my GI tract. BUT! If you really loved Meet the Parents, you should go see the sequel, because it's almost a perfect clone. Then you should stop reading my site because you also probably love the Schumacher oeuvre and you should go live in a box way off the highway of taste. Bon Voyage!! Monday, January 10, 2005
I'm pretty sure that the Travelog blog entry is almost as boring as the proverbial slideshows that our parents were forced to sit through by Evil Dinner Hosts in the Swingin' Sixties. But maybe if I'm all impressionistic, woozy, and stream-of-consh, it'll be more tolerable? I will try to pepper my account with witty observations about life in Old New England.
Monday morning and I go to pick up lo in Williamsburg. I am tired as fuck so I take a nap on the couch while she frets about some grad school application form that makes unresonable requests like: "list the full name of every professor you've ever had" or "please estimate the number of pages of textbook you read during your Junior year" or "guess how many peanuts are in the jar on the desk of the Bursar's assistant." We go to diner for brunch and hit the road. A diner breakfast is a tricky start to a road trip because you have to drink enough coffee to counteract the soporific effect of the high-lipid bacon egg and cheese sammich. I undercaffeinate a little bit, but the Ritalin props me up. Driving out of New York City is a glorious adventure of soaring bridges, elevated highways, and complex, swoopy interchanges where twelve different arteries collide. I fucking love it. I especially love it when construction shuts down so many lanes that all you've got to drive on is an eight-foot strip between two jersey barriers, because everybody else hates it so much and I feel like I'm special because it doesn't bother me at all. At the rest stop the gift shop has a sign that reads "a $1,000 winning scratch-off ticket was sold here!" and it makes me want to cry. I take a nap instead, during lo's driving shift. Providence! (The place, not the concept of planning and guidance. This vacation is an exercise in antithesizing small-p providence.) Dinner with lo's cute friends K & E at the worst Mexican restaurant I've ever been to, where we are forced to rechristen the Carne Asada "the Beef Cape" (it could actually be used by a superhero to stop bullets) and lo's veggie burrito featured potatoes and tomatoes, which doesn't that just seem weird? [No, just incredibly boring to mention in a blog entry that was advertised to contain "wit." Get "wit" it already. -- God] Recovering at their house, we have a cup of tea and watch a rerun of Law & Order, which they cutely call "DrumDrum." I'm way off guessing Lenny's pre-credit cadaver wisecrack. I was like "he shoulda tipped 20%" but Lenny of course said "I always heard that people are dying to get a table in this joint." Damn! Have you ever tried to guess the CadaverCrack? It's fucking hard to do, but if you ever come close, it feels like five tabs of Extasy. Rest in peace, Jerry and Lenny. Back in the kitchen, I try to find the my teabag, which I left on a dish, in order to make more frokkin' tea. I find a cat named Uncle getting avunclar with my used teabag. Specifically, he's sitting on it, and not by accident. Yes, Kate's cat's got my wet sack up his cat ass. Meow, motherfucker! I am so sleepy by the time lo drops me off at Tom Thumb & The Gin Dog's house that my internal furnace has shut down and I need heavy FDR-style leg-blanketry in order to feel less like a meat popsicle. I sleep, however, in the L.L.Bean Sleeping bag, so I have to shut my shiverhole -- apparently L.L. found a space/time fabric rip that goes straight to the middle of the Sun and they put that shit in in the sleeping bag. Boston! Oh, I've bitched about you before, Berntern, but that was in the summer, when you still had street I could walk on and leaves on trees. I used to think the gagtastically high percentage of college "students" was the worst thing about the place, but Boston has a lot of these guys, too: the kind of guy who carries a Leatherman tool around with him wherever he goes -- but not an actually handy, useful, contractor kind of guy, no, just a guy who likes to think he can fix anything when really what he's good at is unscrewing and rescrewing stuff for an hour only to stand up, brush imaginary dust from his hands, mop the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve, and announce in a bemused but manly fashion "well I'll be damned if I can figure out what's wrong with her" -- he actually says "her" to refer to the sink -- and finally declares in his boundless, generous wisdom: "guess we'd better call in a pro" and helps himself to a beer. No, it's not that Boston has a lot of those guys. Boston IS that guy; the city itself. It's flabby, unkempt, a terrible driver, never completely sober, and with a massive, thrumming inferiority complex. More Trave-blogue Tomorrow, featuring the following chapters: • Fock you, too, Ben Stiller. • Slickéd Wippery! • Can Maine have a tortured metaphor too, Mommy? • Full Disclosure: the game of "Speed Scrabble™" involves no amphetamies. Only Scrabble™. BONUS POSTSCRIPT. My esteemed co-worker Joanne observed today that Paris Hilton always looks like she just stopped sucking a dick. Not like her chin is glisteny or anything -- she didn't necessarily finish sucking a dick -- but Joanne sees something in her eyes that says "Mmm. How was that? Hmm? Yeah? You like that? That's hott. Meet me in twenty behind that ficus plant." |
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" |