UNIVERSAL DONOR: MA VIE EN CROUTE
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Universal Donor
We can ill afford another Klendathu  feed it up!
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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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Monday, March 27, 2006
I woke up at 6:30am and couldn't get back to sleep, so twenty or so minutes of denial I just got out of bed and started watching The Fog of War, which is a bad choice if you're looking for something to lull you back into a carefree slumber. The part where he talks to Castro about the Cuban Missile Crisis many years later is just chilling, fuck! It goes something like this:
Some years later I had a chance to meet Castro and I asked him, I said "I have three questions for you: 1) did you know the warheads were there; 2) if so, would you have recommended to Kuschev that he use them to strike at the US; and 3) what do you think would have been the consequence of such an action?" And he said to me: "1) I knew they were there; 2) not only would I have recommended that he use them, I did recommend that he use them; and 3) Cuba would have been totally destroyed."I'm not too interested in talking about whether people think that the film was too easy on RMcN, or allowed him to make excuses for various unconscionable actions, because first of all I didn't have a passel of personal emotions tied up with the dude like people who lived through the Vietnam years, but also because like most of Errol Morris's movies, it's just somebody talking, and as in real life, you have to decide for yourself how seriously to take what the talker says. So you know. I thought McNamara says a whole fuckload of interesting and important things, and I don't particularly care, in this instance, why he said them -- his personal absolution is his own business. Fuck. Now I'm talking about it, and I'm not sure I agree with myself. Also, maybe this belongs on the review page. In other news, and I swear this is not included solely to piss off stinkeefresh, but: I saw this dude on the train and I was so dismayed by his outfit that I wanted to kill him with my brain. And it wasn't that bad, I guess, but it was like this: Ponytail. Goatee. Athletic style "letterman" jacket, you know, with fuzzy torso and white leather arms. Jeans, really new, really blue, with tapered legs. Hightop sneakers. So all in all, he was a lot like the dude from American Movie, except that I wanted to explode him with my brain. Wednesday, March 22, 2006
As they renovate the office building, they've been making all the bathrooms wheelchair accessible, which is a good thing. But I've seen the results, and it looks like the new men's rooms have a stall and a urinal instead of the previous two-stall configuration. That's a drag. But the thing that's getting my goat lately is the retarded tango of bathroom keys. While our floor is renovated, we're forced to travel all over the building to floors with completed bathrooms, and in order to access those bathrooms, we need keys, which are provided by the building management. (I'll skip the detailed complaint about how slow the two working elevators are, which means that you can't wait till the last minute to dash to the bathroom.) What bothers me about this situation is the very concept of locking bathrooms.
I've always hated the way retail establishments blatantly lie to their customers about bathrooms ("we don't have a bathroom" -- FUCK YOU!), but I understand why they do it. They don't want a parade of anally incontinent homeless people spraying liquid feces all over the walls or whatever, so they create a blanket policy that denies the existence of the facilities even to clean, paying customers. Partly it's because the only people who clean it are the regular staff, and they don't want to clean up homeless poop, and even without homeless poop the place never gets cleaned and so is unsuitable for customers. But the office building doesn't get that much homeless traffic, and it has a janitorial staff that cleans the place nightly. We get some non-resident traffic, like messengers, salesmen, visitors, whatever. But this whole thing with needing a key is so irritating, such a pointless and pathetic flexing of administrative power. It's stupid power, too, second-class power: the power of petty bureaucrats and bouncers, of rent-a-cops and assistant principals. They can't do anything real or productive, so they assert themselves by making other people's lives more difficult, by creating time-consuming but ultimately ineffective barriers to progress. Grown-ups shouldn't have to ask permission to use a bathroom. (The musical Urinetown uses just this subject to explore systems of control: citizens must pay to urinate, every time they have to pee. Those who are too poor to afford the fee sometimes give in to their bodily pressures and let flow behind a building or into a bush, whereupon they are seized by the authorities and hauled off to "urinetown," never to be seen again.) 90% of the time, the bathrooms in the building are used by tenants, who pay fucking rent. The cost of installing and maintaining the locks and copying and distributing the keys could be better used to fix the goddamn elevators. And don't tell me it's for people's safety. Don't tell me about undesirables. It's all nonsense and justification after the fact. Bathrooms should be open. Bathrooms should be free. I said to PMD last night that one of the worst feelings in the world is needing to sleep but having no place to do it. One of the most irritating has to be needing to shit, but not being able to get into a bathroom because the door is locked. IN OTHER NEWS! I just added a link on the left to a page I've created for reviews of things other than books. Check it out. Also, I'll put a note in the upper right of this page (above the eagle) when I post new reviews, because I've been neglectful of the blog recently in favor of the review pages. Sorry. Tuesday, March 14, 2006
I got two pieces of spam in my work email inbox today that I liked. The first one I liked for its subject line, which is straightforward, helpful, and somehow playful: "Buyer beware - Penis patches!" The exclamation mark is [sic], written, I suppose, by "Thelma Blackburn," the putative author of the email. Thanks, Thelma, both for your advice and your enthusiasm! Oh yeah.... WHAT THE FUCK IS A PENIS PATCH??!?!!? Heh. Well I'm not such a sucker that I'm gonna click actually read the email and find out. Maybe one of you can tell me.
The other email I liked for an embedded image, which I've slapped up on Flickr for your enjoyment. What I love about this image is that somebody used a fairly sophisticated little graphics package to create these faceless little homunculi, just so they could show me, sort of, how to use a bizarre-looking sex... toy? aid? (It actually looks more like sex furniture, doesn't it? Like a dirty director's chair, scaled for a midget? Or a dirty ottoman. A hottoman. Heh.) Back in the old days, magician types would create golems or homunculi out of clay, twigs, berries, or belly-button lint, and animate them somehow to perform some thankless, repetitive, or unrewarding task. I like to imagine that this is not a CGI of two people, but rather a wallet-sized photograph of two animated magical monsters that the Hottoman corporation animated and forced to do it with a footrest. So I was cheered up by some spam today after getting hopping mad at the television in the office building's lobby. The new owners of the building have made several weird choices for the building's decor, but putting a large flatscreen TV in the lobby makes the least sense of any of their choices. Perhaps it was put there to distract tenants from the fact that they're waiting an average of a minute for an elevator to arrive. (That doesn't sound bad? It is. It's almost like eternity. It's like waiting infinity (Remember when you first learned that word in like second grade everybody started using it all the time? That was awesome.).) But if you're gonna have a TV on all day in the lobby, you should at least tune it to MTV2, or something better than 24-hour Business News Channel, aka Abbreviations on Parade, or the All Acronym Channel. Anyway I got nervous/mad because when a prescription drug that you take is on the television, it's never good news for the people who take it. And poor little Ambien, my personal favorite script and absolutely essential sleeping pill, is getting a lot of airtime these days. Apparently some dipwads took Ambien, went to sleep, and then got up to go for a little drive in the car-car, for real, and got in some accidents, and woke up with no memory of any of it. The reporters seem to express particular horror over the blacking-out aspect of the story, which is totally sensationalist, playing on our primal fears of loss of control, like I wonder what else these crazy sleep-drivers did before they got into their wreck? Did they lose the baby's college fund at an online poker site? Did they order the entire run of Girls Gone Wild videos? Did they put the meat plates on the dairy shelf?!?!? DID THEY WEAR WHITE AFTER LABOR FUCKING DAY? It makes me mad, and I really hope they don't take my Ambien away, because insomnia sucks, and the classic alternative sleep aids (antihistamines or benzodiazepines) make me groggy as hell. And to be honest, I've spoken of Sleepy-Time Jer before, which is me if 1) I've taken Ambien, 2) I haven't fallen asleep yet, and 3) I start talking to other people. It's true. I don't remember most of these occasions, but STJ's interlocutors always claim that they were tremendously amused by the conversations, and that STJ never did anything to embarrass his host body. So they're trying to kill off a person (a personality? A manifestation?) to whom I've become attached over the years. He's provided entertainment to many generations of roommates, and it would be a crime to deprive the world of his antics. Right? Or do I have a totally overblown sense of Sleepy-Time Jer's worth? Roommates, friends, or bedmates who have good STJ stories are invited to share them on the comments board. And who knows. Maybe Lunesta does the same thing. (I'll try to expand this later.) Friday, March 03, 2006
God, you think you're safe when you single out something like the fedora for derision. You picked something so inarguably obsolete, so universally reviled, that it's stopped being a real thing and ascended to the status of punchline. (In fact, from a comedy standpoint, it was lazy, lazy, lazy -- if you had coupled it with "trenchcoat" instead of the "duster," you could have written straight to the Hack Writer's Guild (founded by the staff of MadTV back in '97) and demanded honorary membership, dues be damned.) There may be a few articles of clothing less acceptable to the zeitgeist than a fedora (see examples: 1, 2, 3), but even the fedora's acceptability relative to those monstrosities doesn't leave it in the realm of the wearable. Not even close!
Now if a reader didn't know that these articles of clothing are not wearable except by actors portraying the mentally ill, I'd say that reader had deliberately spent time and energy avoiding this knowledge. Why would they do such a thing, you ask? Since they're (please god oh please) not wearing a fedora now, it seems they are acting in defense of a past -- in which they evidently wore a fedora. But hey! Wearing one in the past is no problem! Forgiveness is free in Jesus' America! "Mom" always said that It Takes All Kinds To Make a World, or maybe "one Man's Proof is another man's Pudding!" Oh wait, it goes: "To each his own" said the lady in the lime green terrycloth tracksuit from Juicy Couture as she blew a rooster. It's time for the reader to let go of all embarrassing things in his or her past, and to STOP pretending they're not embarrassing! He can embrace the pastime Poindexter, but not identify with him! She can shout: "She's dead to us now! We are no longer she, hooray!" (but under no circumstances "Huzzah" or "Milady" or "Good Sir Knight"). Together we can get through this. But I must stop writing because it's 5am and I can't keep my tenses straight anymore. [Hey, you know what's fucked up? I totally made up that green tracksuit as a joke, but OMG look!] |
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" |