Miami Shore

Before I write about all the important stuff I’ve been meaning to write about the last 3 days I have to talk about the Jersey Shore Season 2 premier tonight, something I’ve been anticipating and dreading for months now.  I have to say that if you really want a good run down of the show you have to listen to the first 15 minutes of the Tony Kornheiser show from this morning as he tries to wrap his head around the idea of the show, absolutely priceless.  Of course Michael Cera has been added to the cast as a sorta nerdy hipster writing an article for his school newspaper and falling in love with an outcast Jersey girl that doesn’t fit in or something.

What we do have is the Jersey shore Guidpatrol being sent to Miami the Jersey Shore of the south.  Let’s not pretend for a second that South Beach of LeBron and Hollywood is not the real Miami by any means.  Anyone who has read a Florida newspaper knows that is in every way the dong of America and while Miami isn’t the white trash shit whole that northern and central Florida is, it has it’s own flavor or trash assitude.

I’m quite sure that the Jersey shore kids will fit in just fine with the slightly racially different, but culturally similar Miami beach scene.  Not fitting in, or not getting drunk enough, or not finding people to fight was never going to be the problem.  The problem was going to be what happened to the Real World over the first 3 or 4 seasons, which due to this new media age and what has occurred before this process will have sped up greatly.  When the Jersey Shore first hit the scene what separated it from the later years of the Real World and all the other realty shows on TV at the moment is that the Shore was not self aware at all, absolutely no post modernism at all.  These people were actually like this, they simply acted like themselves, almost unaware that they were on MTV.

This is no longer the case.  They have been swept up into the MTV reality celebrity machine, taken around the world to do appearances, opening clubs, told how to speak, how to interview, had their most guido trash ass edges sanded off.  And most of all, they have to know what it is to be reality stars, they have seen the scripting, the editing the finished product.  They know what sells, what doesn’t, the finished product, so once the curtain has been pulled back and wizard has been seen how can they close their eyes and forget what they’ve learned and return to the glory of last season.

If there has every been a group of people that had a chance of doing this, it is these guys, they are the only ones that could pull this off, so we can only hope that all the hairspray has killed their long term memory, that the axe body spray and the Ed Hardy cologne has destroyed their minds they can return to the innocents of season 1, we can only hope.

Clown make up is so hard core

Since you read this blog I can only assume that you very aware of GOTJ 11, or as it’s officially known the 11th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos and the amazing infomercial for this event that can be found over at the youtube.com.  Not that I’m not a fan of hatchets to the dick or anything, but I find the idea of an entire subculture completely based around the fictional world created by Insane Clown Posey to be almost incomprehensible.  One time my sister said she thought that you had to burst through some kind of bubble to leave the atmosphere of the earth and although completely stupid, I can at least understand how someone might think that, Juggalos on the other hand simply make no sense.  I remember being at a park in a pretty nice area of Salt Lake and running into some Juggalos who felt the need to tell us about how they keep meat cleavers in the back of their cars and all had multiple DUIs but the last one was for weed so it didn’t seem fair they had to get one of those breathalyzer ignition devices.  Anyway, the next day we did a bunch of mushrooms and went back to the park where there were a bunch of like 10 year old kids playing and my buddy was so worried that they may grow up to be Juggalos that he had to go back home where he had a total freak out for like 4 hours.  So there’s that.

I have to say that I am having a very hard time believing that there are so many groups out there that thought,”boy what my crappy rock rap needs to make it awesome is crappy clown make up mixed with a Slip Knot aesthetic.”  Thanks once again ICP.  I’m glad that these ethnically ambiguous wiggers for lack of a better term have felt that just doing meth and hanging out at Wallmart to buy pink hair dye and pregnancy test did not define their culture well enough so that the Juggalo had to be invented.  Also what the hell is Naughty by Nature doing at this thing?  Have they become mother fucking hatchet killers? Whatever that means.  Also I hope you paid special attention to the guest comedians, because where else are Tom Green and Galager going to headline.  I have to say I was also very intrigued by the idea of special ICP seminars, how great would an SNL skit be with Tony Robbins talking like Juggalo.  I’m almost to the point that I want to go to this thing and write a Rolling Stone style 5000 word expose on it.  Here’s Juggalo News just in case you guys thought that they went too far with that parody.

Also, normally I wouldn’t advocate killing people nor would I ever want to agree with a youtube commenter named jesuslovesblackmetal, but he has a point when he says, “Just bomb the fucking "gathering". It's just a bunch of worthless, trailer trash, inbred fucking undesirables in one place at the same fucking time. Nobody will mourn their deaths. In fact, I'm quite positive we will gain more than we lose doing this. Juggalo genocide, anyone?”  Thanks jesuslovesblackmetal for making me hate myself a little bit.

Food, Food and Food

A couple weeks ago the City Weekly ran an article about some of the great Salt Lake restaurants that had closed down over the years and then last night while I was waiting to go out I watched an episode of No Reservations from last year where Tony went around to some of the great old New York spots that have survived into the modern culinary world of today.  I have a certain sick love for these kinds of restaurant reviews, a mix of depression and ennui and nostalgia that I think is at the very heart of the Hipster Generation and although I find it ridiculous that kind of attitude has a certain resonance with my personality at a basic level.  Especially when it comes to food in Salt Lake, this city is a wasteland for good food, there seems at times like an almost willful desire from locals to destroy everything good and turn this city into junior Phoenix, the land of chains and strip mall food.

There are still a couple great old places that have survived due to a small number of loyal customers that actually life good food and there are a great number of really good, authentic ethnic places scattered around the valley that must never be overlooked.  It’s the more mainstream traditional good restaurants that are hopelessly with a home here.  It is a city that desires trends more than anything else, always looking for the newest trend, a surprisingly faux hip place in a lot of ways, Williamsburg West I’ve called it many times.  But there is no heart to any of it, whatever trendy chain blows through town that someone heard about when they were in LA or New York hits and hits hard for a while then is gone.  There are of course the Gastronomy places that have been here for years and serve a quite high level or uninteresting sea food, but still good.  There is one great Italian place, maybe two actually, but truly great French is not to be had.  There are a lot of places that survive on ambiance more than food quality as well, and there is lot to be said for ambiance, but both things would be nice.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I would really like to make more of an effort here to at least document, if not bring some kind of notoriety to some of the great local places on this site.  As much as I hate people and would much prefer to eat in an empty restaurant to a full one, it would be nice for some of the great places that happen to still be here to stay in business.  I would hate for the Golden Dragons to be replaced with PF Changs and the Mama’s Kitchens to be nothing but KFCs.

Finally someone admits that hipsters are just rich homeless guys

I think this article over at High Snobiety about Julia Chesky’s photograph series “The Original Hipster” was probably supposed to be about something different, especially with a quote like “I’m calling this series The Original Hipster because on most days he doesn’t even look like he’s truly homeless.“ but the only thing that I took away from it was that hipsters are just trust fund kinds spending lots of money to look like they are homeless, because as you can see, this guy totally looks homeless all the time.

I have to say though, it’s the Mark Jacobs bag next to him in all of the pictures that really makes these pictures what they are.  I’m pretty sure that at some point someone’s fall line is just going to be clothes they have stolen from bums and the prescient view of the future portrayed in Zoolander will come true as we Derelict from Marni for fall 2012.

The one thing that Julia gets wrong about this is Chris here is totally lacking in any sense of unwarranted self importance that is always plastered across the face of any real hipster.  Good try though, maybe next time do a series of dogs with scarves on, everyone loves hipster dogs.

The Triumphant Return

My triumphant return to my personal blog is starting off with a blatant rip off of an quick post that Lance did over at Film Drunk one of my favorite sites on the web.  I’m even going to steal his crappy photoshop for it.

When I first started to read the article about L.A. Zombie it seemed to be the usual crap, bunch of Aussies pissed off about gay zombies.  Having spent some time in the eastern Mediterranean with a couple over privileged Australian guys I realized that everything that Europeans hate about Americans really should be directed towards Australians.

They were loud as hell, constantly yelling at various Greek and Turkish service workers in some strange language that none of us understood, they claimed it was English.  They also referred to almost everything as poofters, asking over and over again if I were a poofer, or others were poofters the entire time drinking Smirnoff Ice by the gallon.  It was like some strange other frat guys from another dimension, I mean I understand pounding Mike’s Hard Lemonade and accusing everyone of being a fag, but what the hell was this?

It was when I was reading the quote from some stupid newspaper and came to this line “rejecting the film by Canadian director Bruce LaBruce.”  At first I thought it was something from the filmdrunk commentary, and a joke, but it wasn’t, that was actually the guys name.  Which I found very odd since we know that everyone from Australia is named Bruce and I’m pretty sure that LaBruce is a very standard surname as it clearly means Mrs. Bruce, probably indicating that he had a single mom, poor bastard.

What really made this so utterly amazing was in the next quote from Brietbart.com that indicated that the film festival board director was named Donald McDonald; how this could not be a huge prank I have no idea.  Since Donald McDonald is clearly the most Canadian name ever I think this all boils down two long lost brothers, separated at birth due to the crash of a streamliner in the north pacific, one adopted by his Canadian aunt, the other taken in by a lowly pig dog breeder in Australia that read about the tragedy in the news, and by read I of course mean over heard someone shouting about it at the pub.

This story of gay L.A. Vampires has brought these two brothers together across the biggest ocean in the world and a world of difference in their views on life, pretty much Perfect Strangers mixed with Crocodile Dundee and Strange Brew.  Built in audience, 80s nestolgia, gay vampires, give me a call Hollywood, I’ll have the script ready to be re-written 4 more times by Monday.

Now that’s a photoshop!

Moving over to blogger

Hi, I've decided to move over to blogger with all the rest of my stuff, it's a google world now for me I guess. I'll be back on top of things this week for everyone who likes to read my opinions of the world.
It's November 11th today, and I have to say I agree with the late Mr. Vonnegut that changing this holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day was a great mistake, but typical of the trajectory of the US in the 20th century.

First in a while

Sorry, if anyone actually reads this blog for the long hiatus, but I'm back and will start updating again. This is a very interesting talk by Terence Kealey that covers multiple interesting topics.
The one that I found most interesting was his discussion about the costs of research. That to copy an innovation costs the same amount as to invent it in the first place. This is a very strong practical argument against one of the fundamental tenants of patent law.
The argument that one hears most for patent law, especially concerning the drug industry is that without patent protection all of the drugs would just be copied and that no one would invent new medicine and we would all die. Well, since it is no cheaper to copy the medicine than it is to invent it, this makes little difference. There would be a period of natural monopoly for the drug inventor while the other companies invented their version of the drug, giving an incentive to invent and then a drop in prices when their drugs came on market, using market share as the incentive to copy.
There would also be an in incentive for the original inventor to sell his drug formula to the other companies at a time discount, thereby increasing the speed of innovation, but maintaining profitability.
All that the current patent regime has done is to slow innovation, increase the price of goods by artificially extending the period of what would be a natural monopoly and transforming it into a state monopoly and generally wasting time and money.

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