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 |
Thursday, June 30, 2005
INTERMISSION: MEDIA NOTES While I'm working on the California Travelogue Part II, please consider the following: • Becky Carter Photography. Soak up the home page a bit, then go to the samples...color examples section. Is she a Fine Artist in the photographic tradition of Pierre et Gilles, except with girls? Or is she trying to find real live Barbies and Skippers? Is she the house photographer for the JonBenet Industry? You be the judge, but always beware of a website with a canary-yellow background. I am shivering. • On NBCs Hit Me Baby One More Time, a reality show in which "one-hit wonders" from the 80s reprise said hits and then play a contemporary song of their choice, Wang Chung (who are at least a two-hit wonder) elected to interpret Nelly's Hot in Herre, to surprising success. It is, in fact, totally awesome, and way too short. Go listen. But hey Wang? Where's the breakdown, you Aussie sluts? I want you to give me a little bit of ah! ah! with a little bit of ah! ah! • Back in 1995, at the age of fifteen Rosario Dawson played Ruby, one of the slutty young teens in Kids. Leo Fitzpatrick, who played main character Telly (the "I'll trade you your cherry for some AIDS" guy) played Johnny the Junkie on HBO's The Wire and Selma Blair's cerebrally-palsied boyfriend in Storytelling. Justin Pierce, who played Casper, hanged himself in 2000. • George Romero put Asia Argento in his new zombie movie, an awesome in-joke for zombie movie fans. • I've always thought, without being exposed to any of its actual content, that the musical Rent was probably an awful stinking pile of shit. And not because it's a musical (I know a lot of people, perhaps even some of you, who just prejudicially hate musical theater with blood-bubbling ferocity), because I have a lot of respect and yes, even love, for the art form; my mom had a video library of classic musicals that I watched over and over as a kid (Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Fame, etc.) and my dad had a number of soundtrack recordings from Broadway shows (Threepenny Opera, Sweeney Todd, blah blah etc.) so I learned to appreciate a well-executed musical. Recently, I've seen good live stuff too, like Cabaret, Urinetown, and especially Assassins, and I thought the movie of Chicago would have been almost perfect, if only they had found a way to explosively murder Renée Zellweger onscreen (and I don't mean her character, Roxie -- I mean that Renée Zellweger should be violently and publicly destroyed, her entire talentless body turned inside-out, or made into smaller, more manageable pieces by, say, running her slowly, feet-first, into a wood chipper). Anyway, so I like musicals, but I suspected Rent was made of donkey shit. The website for the forthcoming movie version calls Rent a "Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical," so I assume they're now giving Pulitzers out like strip-club flyers on Times Square streetcorners. Because I watched the trailer for the movie, which featured the worst. song. ever. It is just mind-fellatingly bad, something about how many minutes are there in a day/year/life/love, and it is painful watching actors of some quality (Taye Diggs, Rosario Dawson, Jesse Martin) smile superbig and try to SELL that giant honking fuckbag of a song with all their hearts. If that song is indicative of the quality of the rest of the show -- and you'd think they'd pick one of the show's best for a trailer -- then I hereby state with confidence: Rent rivals Hitler's nutsack for badness. Rent makes Greg Araki look like Orson Welles. Makes the Shaggs sound like the London Symphony Orchestra. Rent is poop and they're gonna put it on the big screen, where it will be big shiny poop. If you feel like telling me otherwise, you can shut your fucksuck face, because you like poop. Tuesday, June 28, 2005
NOTES ON CALIFORNIA, PART I
Shit, bitch! I'm back in the NYC and it's more humid than swamp crotch. How do you people live here? Oh fuck -- I live here, somehow. I can look forward to two months of punching my way through a visible wall of airborne water molecules. But who cares about that? I just had one of the most restorative vacations of my life, and I'm gonna tell you all about it, and you can't complain that I'm bragging or anything because you KNOW I've been feeling like Hot Buttered Shit What Got Hit With a Hammer for the last godknowshowlong. I will spare you the boring story of my replacement credit card. But you will hear about how Zorgot and I almost got Mystic Rivered! I arrive on Thursday night and Claude le Monde lets me rest for one hour before taking me to see Batman Begins, which I'm told was awesome. I fall asleep through most of it, which was really only a result of monstrous fatigue and NOT a judgment on the flick. My ViewMaster-style still-frame memories of the movie look pretty cool, anyway, like the world's most vivid presskit. The next morning we have Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles as I shout at my credit card company for about 20 minutes after being on hold for about the same amount of time. The first time I ever went to R'sC&W I got all contrary and ordered a plate of liver. Um. Have you ever looked down at a big steaming plate of liver? It has a bluish cast and smells like underpant. So this time I play it safe with the C&W, and the Lord saw the C&W and they were good. I'm relatively okay, energy-wise, for most of Friday, but it's just adrenaline and on Saturday I crash like Sam Walton's heir. I stumble through a trip to the Natural History Museum like a reanimated corpse, leaning on anything I can. "Wolfgang Puck" created the snack bar's menu, but if I'm supposed to believe that a five-star chef was ever in the same county as the burger I was served, I'm not buying it. I think Wolfy sold the right to his name in perpetuity, and now anybody who pays a high enough fee can slap his Teutoniker atop their recycled-falafel stand and make bank off gullible tourists. People hate tourists, but they love their money!!! (If somebody ever asks you "are you a tourist?" they are actually asking "are you an asshole?" and you should never answer "yes" to the first question unless you would answer "yes" to the second.) If our tour guide hadn't been Dean, the most hyperkinetic dynamo in the history of museum tours (I'm talking a children's-show-host energy level, like boi-oi-oi-ngggg!!!!), I would have fallen down dead and been preserved in a diorama of early-21st Century East Coast hipsters. What pisses me off about people like Dean is that they can do that shit all the time without any help other than a large coffee at breakfast and maybe not even that. Motherfucks. I could eat Ritalin like Skittles and I'd still fall face first into my Penne after a one-hour session of explaining early dinosaurs to overprivileged third-graders. Gabble. I elected to skip the insect zoo, which was like a live, crawling display of my personal nightmares. Instead, I kicked it in the zoo lobby with another 'phobe, a nice girl from New York, whose name I don't remember. I'M SORRY I DON'T REMEMBER YOUR NAME, NICE GIRL. But it's been like that lately. If I meet you, I will forget your name unless you kick me in the balls, give me a present, or exchange fluids with me. My brain's namespace is full. I needed to make room for trivia like the name of the leader of the Decepticons. Later that night, despite being half-asleep, I win a game of Trivial Pursuit, because of the headspace thing. Several of my opponents, who will go unnamed, advanced a theory that I won because I was asked an unending string of easy questions, while they were consistently asked "impossible" questions. It is my belief that I won because I offered a large number of CORRECT ANSWERS to the questions I was asked. This wasn't too hard to do, since we were playing the GODDAMN YOUNG PLAYERS EDITION. Still, I can appreciate the ignominy of being defeated by an obvious zombie who catnapped between turns. I just hate sour grapes over board games, unless you were totally victimized by a supposed loved one in a game that allows for aggressive acts against opponents (e.g. Risk, Diplomacy, Settlers of Catan, Sorry!), in which case I know that some people take that shit very personally. Those people should not play those games. When you first get to LA, you think that you are surrounded by assholes, because everyone is wearing sandals and sunglasses. But pretty soon you figure out that you need sunglasses too, because your cheeks hurt from squinting. But you don't have to wear sandals -- especially not Tevas or their knockoffs -- if you have any sense of style or pride. I went to a Ralph's, which is a chain supermarket not unlike Grand Union or Stop N Shop for you Easterners, with the significant difference being the produce section. Oh my god. OH MY GOD. I know it's awfully gay of me to utterly poop my pants over a goddamn produce section, but people, it was a work of art and love. Someone loved that place and polished it and smoothed its edges and perfected the ordering and made the displays look like something Caesar would have had for a party. Except better! First of all, I noticed the rhubarb right away, because several people had been like "You'll never find rhubarb in LA, duuuude" and I had been kinda bummed about that. Not bad at $4/lb, either. Not great, but I can appreciate that this place had some overhead to take care of, like the well-deserved and hopefully astronomical salary of the guy who manages the produce section. They had eight types of plum, bitches! Don't get me started on apples, because who cares about apples, but the selection of mushrooms, salad greens, and bizarre tropical fruits, would make a vegan weep. I guess when you have a lot of vegetarians in town, it pays to watch your (wait for it) Peas and Kumquats (snorf!) but goddamn, bitches! I can only take so much freshness before I start to get giddy! Fuck yeah! Produce! More to follow, kidlets. Wednesday, June 15, 2005
I'm already giddy about my vacation, I have been for days now. I'll be sitting staring gape-mouthed at a blank Google search page, and at the pallid bust of Palpatine atop my monitor, and I'll inhale sharply. I will smile and I'm sure I smell the ocean, or hot dogs on sticks, or In-N-Out burgers. In my head I've got an old-fashioned click-click Stereophonic Viewmaster, and I'm cycling though images of all the beds I'm gonna sleep on, and exactly how much they're going to hurt my back -- each one has a numerical rating of Pain While Sleeping (PWS), Pain Upon Waking (PUW), and then there's the slightly harder to calculate Lingerance Factor -- how likely am I to still be feeling a bed's effects at 5pm? It's hard to calculate because how do you know it was last night's bed that caused today's drive-time pain, especially when you've been in and out of various non-ergonomic cars all day and sitting on all sorts of injection-molded public seating? Fuck it! I love California! I love vacation!
Quick product note: I love the idea of Audioscrobbler, which tracks all the music you listen to on a web page you can look at, and er... show to your friends? I dunno, exactly. But it would be cool, if it WORKED. Today it is not tracking my songs, and I'm at a loss. But maybe you'll like the idea. Welcome to New York! It sure is hotsy-doodle today, pals! [last sentence writeen on Tuesday --Ed.] I'm not complaining about the amount of sweat I've created, but anybody within ten feet of me is! Yuk yuk! I'm sure looking forward to Lost Angeles, did I mention that? Because, as you may know, IT'S A DRY HEAT. And apparently, not so hot, either, this time of year. To return to the bed thing for a moment, Lulu has a Swedish NASA SpaceFoam Sumo Wineglass Mattress (as seen on TV) and I am looking forward to sleeping on that thing, which seems to be the closest I will ever get to realizing my dream of a Neoprene Morphine Harness. Oh! And I figured out today, in regards to a previous discussion, that Feist sounds like a cross between Joni Mitchell and Beth Gibbons of Portishead. Through a hideous oversight in my education, I've never read The Iliad, but I got to watch Troy the other night, so it's all good, right? I was really amused by the casting, which featured Brian Cox (who's Scottish) as Agamemnon, Brendan Gleeson as Menelaus and Peter O'Toole as Priam (both Irish), Eric Bana (Australian) as Hector, Orlando Bloom as Paris and Sean Bean as Odysseus (both English), so it was like a crazy commonwealth patchwork of non-Greek accents. Sean Bean was a particularly weird choice for the famous hero, seeing as he seems to specialize in weaselly pricks in movies as diverse as Ronin, Lord of the Rings, Goldeneye, and Patriot Games. I guess the Trojan Horse was kinda weaselly, and it was his idea. Brad Pitt played Achilles like a Brat Packer who believed his hype too hard, like maybe River Phoenix. But the thing is, my assumption going into the movie was that we were supposed to be cheering for the Greeks; after all, Homer was Greek and as such got to write history from the side of the winner, and Paris stole Helen, didn't he? But I swear, Wolfgang Petersen or his screenwriter literally flipped the script on us, portraying the Trojans as the noble and tragic heroes, and Eric Bana in particular played Hector as the Superdad/Husband for Heaven/Honorable Number One Son/Super Soldier, the kind of guy who probably brought sprays of Aegean wildflowers home to his wife and rubbed her feet every night and didn't fuck the servant boy more than once a week. I dunno. I feel like a maroon for not having ever read the fucking Iliad, but I've always felt that the Trojan Horse represented a triumph, and occasion where the good guys found a way to defeat an evil enemy. And now I'm confused. But thinking back, Wolfgang Petersen was able to make me take the side of a U-Boat full of Nazis, cheering as they sank American convoys and biting my fingernails to the bone as they dodged Allied depth charges for hours at a time in Das Boot. Does he sympathize with losers, or with aggressors, or is he playing devil's advocate? I'm not sure yet what the explanation is (maybe you guys can shed some commenty light on the sitch here) but in the end, I liked Troy because it was structurally sound, and not a complete disappointmenty waste of time (hmmm... it seems my entertainment standards have lowered over the years) and as a bonus I feel like I've read the Cliff's Notes of the Cliff's Notes for Iliad now. The Cliff's Notes squared. Hey-- do you guys remember Andrew W.K.? You can probably remember what he looked like: lanky stanky black hair to his nipples, white tee and white jeans, both stained with sweat and dirt, high-top sneakers. But I challenge you to remember what he sounded like. OKAY SHUT UP. Even if you can remember that big song of his (and even this far into this sentence I still can't hear it in my head -- I just see him spinning a mic around on its cord, pissing off his sound man) you remember it sort of the way you remember the lyrics to "I'm Too Sexy," i.e. with shock that such a thing was given enough airplay to tunnel so deeply into your long term storage banks. Can profound cultural irrelevance be fought off, foiled by rote repetition? I still can't get the A.W.K. song to play correctly in my head, but I hear a pastiche, like: "Uh uh party uh! Wigga digga unh! Party! Poop, pop, wimble foozy unh! Uhn! Party, unh!" and I can visualize his tree-trunk thighs and I see him punch the air and swing his long girly hair around like a special princess, and I can furthermore picture his idiot guitarist who wore like Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and had hair like a fucking Fraggle. GET THESE PICTURES OUT OF MY HEAD! Okay now I may not talk to you again before I go on vacation tomorrow for ten days, and there is a very good chance that I will not post at all during the trip. So this is goodbye until the 28th or so. I love you and will miss you. It's too bad they don't have the InTerWeb in California. What a neolithic nightmare land! Wednesday, June 08, 2005
PHONE LADY: Hello, thank you for calling S_____, how may I help you? UD: Hi there! My name's Universal Donor. What's your name? PHONE LADY: (freezes up) Uhhh. What is this regarding? UD: Huh? The [blah blah] software; I'm about to purchase some from your online store. I'm calling from a company New York, and I asked you name so I could say "Well hello, Mary, how's the weather in California?" PHONE LADY: It's just fine. Let me transfer you to tech support. UD: Sigh. Sometimes people really wear me out. Californians are supposed to be friendly to a fault, so what's up with the lady who thinks I'm gonna press the "pistol whip" button on my phone if she tells me her name? My Californians are better than that, and I'm hella looking forward to visiting their gnarly asses. Countdown T minus one week and one day. I had a birthday party last weekend, and it turned out pretty good. It was a shared party with J.Ro and Hadaly, which took some of the pressure off of me to provide a giant crowd of hilarious revelers. In the past, I've had no problem doing so, but a combination of factors has led to my demise as a social host. I dunno. A lot of people who RSVP'd in the positive didn't show up, which I guess was mostly attributable to the a) the rain and b) the general flakiness of our friends. A lot of people who weren't explicitly invited but should have known to come anyway didn't come anyway, which is either attributable to a) shyness, b) hypersensitivity and hurt feelings (misplaced in this case), or maybe c) not being fucking magical mind readers. I am on record as a hater of E-Vite; I despise everythig about it, but I was overruled by my cohosts on this occasion. I hate responding to E-Vites because not only do I have to come up with a pithy yet uproarious one-liner response, but I have to read everyone else's attempts to do the same. Glorp! YOU'RE NOT FUNNY. STOP TRYING (Note: this diatribe does not apply to anybody who responded wittily to my E-Vite -- you guys are funny). I hate the idea that people are checking the list of who's going to a party to decide whether they'll go. You should decide whether or not to go based on the classic things: how much you like the hosts; whether you can smoke in their house or if they'll make you loiter on the sidewalk like a common thug; whether they have hot single friends; whether you have to bring a gift; and how long your late night drunken train ride will be. Today is my half-sister's "graduation" from 6th grade. I think it's pretty comical, but at least her school has a separate building for 7-12. So I'm off to see a bunch of eleven-year-olds fling miniature mortarboards into the auditorium air. I'll try to keep a straight face. Wednesday, June 01, 2005
In the deli I heard this song, which I'm sure I've heard before, but this listen was the camel-breaking straw, the critical mass of awfulness, because I realized that it was THE WORST SONG EVAH. Well, the worst song ever for today, anyway. Armed with this minimal amount of information, I naturally assumed the singer was Dave Matthews. I came back upstairs and sang a sort of scat version to my coworkers, who, after accusing me of swallowing a cat AND the midget who was in the process of strangling it, I identified the perpetrator as a man who goes by Five for Fighting, who is terrible in his own right, but is really damned to hell forever by the company he keeps in the Recommended if You Like/Similar Artists list on his Allmusic page: Counting Crows, Creeper Lagoon, Jack Johnson, John Mayer, Rainer Maria, Sister Hazel, and Train. A-whomit! Ga-hackle! Honestly, I haven't heard most of those "artists," but reading that list makes my teeth hurt. Am I right?
I'm going to see Sin City again tonight with a passel of fools I've snookered into joining me. One of those fools is my dad, who hasn't seen Star Wars Episode III: Revenging Attack of the Lava Senators and suggested that we sneak into a late show of that treasure after seeing the first flick. What a crazy dad, yeah? But I'm feeling a little daffy myself, my little kidlets, and since tomorrow I'll have to put away childish things and see through a glass darkly and all that shit because I'm turning stupid THIRTY FUCK YOU ALL, I'd better yuk it up while I've still got short pants on. That's a lot of movie, though, and what if I get hungry? I might have to eat a Star Wars nerd's oily face. This next bit is lazy and bad blogging, but I thought it would be courteous to give future historians a snapshot of my mental state of the eve of my fourth decade on earth. Here are some websites I've been to today, for no fucking reason: • Naval Radio Operations During World War II • yurts! • Speak Northern Irelandish • lyrics to the Decemberists' The Mariner's Revenge Song, which has this beauty in it: ""Find him, find him/ tie him to a pole and break his fingers/ to splinters/ drag him to a hole until he wakes up/ naked/ clawing at the ceiling of his grave." That's Hott! • The Defense of General Yamashita, "The Tiger of Malaya" • My gal Michiko's review of Sean Wilsey's Oh the Glory of it All Okay. Stop the presses. An FBI agent just walked into my office and handed me his business card and a subpoena. This in itself is not all that weird; he's just investigating wrongdoing by some lawyer in New York State and we can give him what he needs. The weird, great thing is his name: Bullets W. Campbell. On the rizzle, and for sheezy! |
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" |