putting the j in jjosh

Well at this point everyone’s probably at least a little familiar with the Wii, Nintendo’s semi-revolutionary game system with the motion sensor controller. I haven’t played the thing myself (game systems make me stay up until 3 in the morning trying to win the robot) but everyone I know says it’s the greatest thing since Guitar Hero. The new Wii Fit game(?) made the front page of the New York Times Sunday Style section a few weeks ago, so it’s definitely in the popular consciousness.

A while back I came across a pretty keen Ted lecture about how to use the Wii remote to make some sophisticated and cheap equipment…it’s pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing…I love this stuff, listening to brainiacs wax poetic about their specific area of uber-nerd expertise…

but then MM (thanks, Malcolm!) hipped me to this new Wii game that made me realize they have barely scratched the surface of what this thing can do. It’s available at ThinkGeek.com, but let’s not bother with descriptions or critiques, let’s just go right to the videotape:

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Some of you are loving this (I’m looking at you Devito!), some are hating it (M Trump, nice to see you), but I have to say I do love this part:

According to the Japanese text on the box "Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing."

What a pleasure it is. What a true pleasure it is.

As I move more and more out of the realm of various intoxicants (and into the realm of various antioxidants) I find the I have more respect for art that is able to transport me to that same, mind-blowing realm while I’m stone-cold sober. I tried to do it with the PhD mix and I feel like I was able to get pretty close. As much as I am a fan of the idea of "Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To", these days it seems more badass to me if you can conjure up that feeling while straight-minded. In the daytime. Drinking water.

This song by "Milkshake" by Holy Fuck is doing a great job at that. Jack gave me the album when we visited NC in May and I’ve been giving it a thorough listen. This track sort of takes over my mind by force in the beginning, only to relax its grip once the vibes kick in. It’s fantastic.

(Holy Fuck – Milkshake)

In the same vein, I recently revisited the animated film "American Pop" by Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi gets (sort of) a bum rap in the world of animation, I guess mainly because his stories are pretty thin, his animation takes cheap short-cuts, and I’ve heard he’s kind of a jerk. (Plus he made "Fritz the Cat", which I haven’t seen but is notable for being the first X-rated animated film…) He also made the first "Lord of the Rings" film back in the 80’s. It’s not very good.

Be that as it may, when I first saw American Pop — a rotoscoped low-fi animation sort of history of popular American music — I was appropriately under the influence and was totally blown away. The rotoscoping looked amazing, the songs that appeared were unexpected and awesome ("People Are Strange", "I’m Waiting For My Man"?! "Pretty Vacant"?!), and the pizza I was eating was delicious.

Upon re-viewing, however, it didn’t hold up so well. The story was kind of a joke, the animation is still pretty neat, but the parts where he cheaped out are more obvious. The songs are still good, but when the story is that meaningless the songs are kind of beside the point. The look of it is pretty cool though, and it’s rotoscoping way before Linklater thought up A Scanner Darkly or Waking Life…

When I first saw it, the film’s final scene totally blew me away. I was so caught up in the psychedelic majesty of it all. Now? Well, parts of it still hold up, but wow the very end is kind of embarrassing…I do love the bit early on where he’s handing out the music and he says "Pass ’em out, turkey!" People should still call each other "turkey", it’s such an endearing put-down…

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It’s been a long time since I listened to one track on repeat over and over and over again. I think the first time was in college, pulling an all-nighter to finish a report for a speech I had to give in History 102, taking Vivarin (first and last time) and listening to David Bowie’s "Heroes" (the full version) over and over and over and over and over. What a night. Needless to say, my speech was really really weird.

All the speeches given up to that point had been really dry, and since the grade was half from the professor, and half from student evaluations, I figured I should make my speech kind of funny, you know? So I wrote in all these "jokes". Let me be the first to tell you that jokes written in the middle of an all-nighter on Vivarin are not going to be funny. At best they will be odd. So I gave my speech, red-eyed and fried, and babbling incoherently about how the German soldiers of World War One wore funny hats. I can remember thinking it was strange that no-one was laughing at the funny bits. My friend PatH who was in the class later told me that it wasn’t making any sense.

Sure enough, when I had slept and re-read my speech, it was a mess.

Lately, I’ve been listening to "The Low Murderer is Out at Night" on repeat 1 and it’s been great. The song is kind of a mini-suite, going through several movements, each of which adds on the previous one.

Initially it’s a bit like Air, with an acoustic guitar groove and bubbling electronics. Around 2 minutes in, a distorted guitar and funkier beat get added. At the 3 minute mark a sweet Floyd-esque solo comes sweeping in and I feel the presence of JWilmeth is hanging out with me. So good. I once read this description of a track by Country Joe and the Fish and it said something like "at the 2 minute mark, suddenly the walls begin to melt." That’s how it feels, the wall begin to melt. Then the vocal sample, and the dirrrty synth at 5:15 and we’re in it deep, you know?

Loving it.

(Low Motion Disco – The Low Murderer Is Out At Night)

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My favorite wound:

I was 16, working as a prep cook at The Rustic Inn and one night I had to train a new cook. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she was nice enough, I guess. One of the things we prep cooks were responsible for was to slice a load of ham and swiss for the evening’s Chicken Cordon Bleus. I was showing her how to work the slicer, which was one of those classic, giant deli slicers with the rotating blade and metal handle to hold whatever you’re slicing.

It wasn’t going very well. I was trying to demonstrate to her exactly how to slice it, what thickness to set the blade to and so on, but the cheese kept kind of sliding out of the handle mechanism. So I, playing it cool, was all like "Of course, sometimes the handle won’t hold it, so you just sort of use your hand to keep it steady." And I reached up and held it with my left hand. 

On the next slice, my hand went too far and the outside of my left pinky finger slid into the slicer. It was so quick, sharp, and smooth that I didn’t even notice what was happening for a second. I think I only realized what was happening when I saw the blood spin around the rotating blade and splatter the cheese. Ick. I pulled my hand back quickly, and saw that it hadn’t gone all the way through, that the skin was still attached.

"Umm, no problem, you know, no big deal…"

"Are you sure? It kind of looks pretty bad…"

And I grabbed some paper towel and wrapped it around my finger, where it quickly became blood-soaked. My finger didn’t hurt at all, but my humiliation at looking like an idiot was acute.

When it healed it scarred over very strangely.

Many years later, when I learned what the word hubris meant, I was able to retroactively categorize many incidents in my life as pertaining to hubris. This was one of them.

June’s banner photo is from a few weeks ago when Maxine and I spent a day and a half at NC’s Outer Banks…we first came across the buoy at night and it was really scary, looking like a spaceship washed up on the shore. Apparently it washed up a few months prior when NC had some serious storm waves.

We ran into people later who told us that it costs a million dollars to haul a buoy back out to sea when it beaches like that. And that if the serial number can be read, then they can tell which agency is responsible for it (coast guard, etc.); if the serial number is unreadable (quite likely) then nobody takes responsibility and they just leave the darn thing on the shore! It was massive and striking on the beach.

Does the hi-five seem particularly egotistical? It’s a way for two people to somehow share in a self-congratulatory moment and also turn that moment into a big public display. "Hey lookit us, we did something great!" And yet, when done unselfconsciously, or in the true joy of a moment, it is somehow, fantastic. A pure form of "Yesss!"

I love the idea of the hi-five unironically (I think), though it should be reserved only for the best occasions.

This is one of those occasions.

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from Will Ferrel’s picks at funnyordie.com…I saw this almost a month ago and it won’t leave my head!