Month: April 2009

Last night I watched another cinematic gem from my distant relative (probably) Steven King. This one was a little more recent but no less camptacular. My copy of the movie had messed-up sound, but I was so engrossed that I watched the entire thing, even though the dialogue was tracked to proceed the images by about a second. This lent itself to an bonus level of surprise (“What was that sound? Oh, I guess it was a car crash”). Besides, my quality standards for horror movies are appallingly low. One lonely night several years ago when my HBO On Demand was glitching I watched the entirety of “Friday the 13th Part 5,” (arguably the worst one) through digital static that would have driven lesser men to epilepsy.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this movie was so awesome. Maybe it was the fat suit that made the protagonist look like Jiminy Glick for half the movie. Maybe it was the way Joe Mantegna showed up 45 minutes in and began killing and maiming gypsies with hydrochloric acid like it was just another day at the office which, considering his career, I guess it was (incidentally, separating Joe Mantegna’s dialogue from his image makes it impossible not to the imagine all of his lines being delivered by Fat Tony from “The Simpsons”). Or perhaps it was the way the movie ended with a quadruple homecide performed by a strawberry pie.
The flick tells the whimsical tale of a currupt Jiminy Glick who accidentally kills a gypsy woman while getting road head from his wife. He receives his comeuppance in the form of a Jenny Craig rapid weight loss curse from the woman’s crazy old gypsy father (pictured here cursing someone else for calling shotgun before him). Steven King does another of his trademark cameos as the lone witness to the accident. I still prefer him to Stan Lee, but in his latter movies his characters start to seem borderline retarded. I don’t know if this is a deliberate comment on the New England folk he so frequently chronicles, but having seen his work in “Creepshow” it feels like he’s phoning it in.
Anyway, our hero gets increasingly freaked out as he starts dropping pounds like Al Roker and his wife decides to switch it up and give road head to his doctor instead, breaking one of the binding laws of marriage: love me, love my gypsy curse. He proceeds to declare war on the old man, enlisting the help of Joe Mantegna the gypsy slaying badass. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but the long and the short of it is he stomps the gypsy only to be taken out by the pie.
This could be a morality tale about justice and responsibility. It could be a scathing look at society’s obsession with keeping fit. It’s not though. It is however an exciting gypsy revenge tale with lots of fat suits and acid burns that served to successfully blot out the horrible monotonous memories of my day, allowing me to escape into dreams of strawberry pie and road head.
I recommend the deluxe edition with shitty sound. Use the dialogue to predict the actor’s choices before you see them, then watch them disappoint you every time. Fun for the whole family!

That was the front page headline in the paper today. News-flash: we are a narcissistic culture. The article turned out to be one of those irritatingly deceptive book reviews disguised as actual news: a series of interesting claims are capped off with the modifier “…says the book” and instantly I’ve gone from reading a well-researched news article to a half-assed summary, much like a fascinating story that devalues itself with the ending, “…and then I woke up.”
Shitty newspapers aside, I did a little research into the book itself when I got to work. It’s called “The Narcissism Epidemic,” and you can read all about it here (I especially recommend the blog and the FAQs on the “About” page).
The long and the short of the author’s claim is that narcissism is over-running our country, and that the long term effects will be severely detrimental. I agrees with this theory (which I call the first sign of the Apocalypse), though I disagree with some of the author’s reasoning as to the fundamental causes. She places a great deal of the blame on parents who tell their children that they are special and unique, and suggests the following as a way of combatting narcism.

1. Instead of teaching [children] “You have to love yourself before you can love others,” teach them something much closer to the truth: If you love yourself too much, you won’t have enough love left for anyone else.

That’s bullshit, because love isn’t a finite quantity like a fucking gallon of milk and I think that teaching kids to ration their love is eventually going to produce a bunch of assholes.
Also, I believe that kids NEED to be told at a young age that they are special, unique and that they can be anything they want to if they set their mind to it. The simple reasoning is that, for better or for worse, in today’s world that’s how they need to behave in order to succeed. My parents did a pretty good job of reinforcing my uniqueness (being an only child helped), but I still feel that the socially conscious, Northwestern-hippie way in which I was raised left me ill-prepared for the cut-throat, self-promotional world of the entertainment industry. I’ve watched many opportunities float by me while I wait politely for others to discover my genius on their own. If you aspire to be an artist, an athlete, or have any other job that is commonly considered an American Dream, you become, in effect, your own product. Any salesman could tell you that you don’t pitch a product entirely honestly, or else you’d have Cambell’s comming out with adds like “This soup’s pretty good. But hey, it’s fuckin’ soup, right? There’s a lot of it out there.” No, they tell you they’ve got the best soup on the market. When chasing the America Dream, people must do the same with their own self worth. There are just too many people going for too few jobs (incidentally, the second sign of the Apocalypse), and a little narcissism goes a long way in properly pitching your product.
I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to be in high school right now. It’s always been bad, what with everybody’s egos abruptly developing at once, jockeying and re-jockeying for social status. But since Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and the reign of Reality Television, I imagine that the shit storm has been upgraded to a diarrhea hurricane. The author of “The Narcissism Epidemic” places some blame on these factors, but not nearly as much as I do. On the one hand we’ve got social networking, which is essentially a way of decorating your locker of trapper keeper for the entire world to see. Everybody remembers how brutal friend groups can be in high school. Now these groups have gone from abstract social systems to concrete groups online, that you can be quite clearly included in or excluded from with the click of a mouse. Self-promotion has become more than a way of achieving the American Dream…it’s necessary just to get through high school.
One the other hand we have Reality TV. It’s only natural that kids will emulate what they see on the screen. New York is overflowing with actors who grew up on sitcoms and soap operas and couldn’t conceive of doing anything else with their lives. That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I’m writing these words. The problem is that kids now are growing up on “Real Housewives…,” “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and “For the Love of Ray J.” The ONLY trait exhibited in these shows, in fact the only trait that seems necessary to get a show like this, is extreme narcism. It has transformed from a byproduct of the fame achieved with great talent to the self-fulfilling reason for the fame’s existence. Of course kids will continue to imitate what they see, and what they see are people building successful careers on the backs of their massive egos.
We’re not going to be able to stop narcissism. As I said up top, it’s a sign of the Apocalypse and will continue to grow as our planet spirals slowly into the sun. It’s a necessary result of long-term capitalism, the glorification of wealth and the social networking entrepreneurs who ran out of things to sell and started selling each other.
I feel that the challenge lies not in blocking narcissism, but in encouraging empathy. Everybody talks about themselves. Everybody is listening to your story while mentally planning their own reply. I’ve never been able to fault anybody for self-interest, but I have absolutely no tolerance for those who’s self-interest precludes their interest in others. People are so fascinating, far more worthy of attention than anything else I’ve found in this world. Why would you limit your focus to just one person?
Narcissism is necessary for success in society.
Empathy is necessary in order to not be an asshole about it.
Be sure to catch a deeper exploration of narcissism and it’s relation to reality TV and zombies in my new show “TMZ TV,” written and directed by me and premiering next month at the UCB Theatre. Look for more promotion soon on kingjamie.net, the website all about me. Thanks for reading my thoughts on my blog, and your continued interest in my life.
Next week: irony.

I have several modest life goals.
In order of importance, they are:
1) Inspire an action figure in my likeness.
2) Necessitate definition in my own Wikipedia page.
3) Star in a horror movie.
That said…the movie is gonna be fricking awesome! Okay, so I do my hopeless romantic schtick as I’ve done many times before, only in this movie the girl I’m unrequitedly in love with is fucking POSSESSED, being eaten away from the inside by a crazy demon! The actress playing her (who is incidentally also the writer and director) lost ALMOST 100 POUNDS over the course of the two year shoot. As unhealthy and border-line nutty as that is, you can’t argue with the fact that seeing the girl waste away over the course of a two-hour movie is going to look fucking SICK.
Since this weekend was the finale, I spent most of the time doing what every non-evil character does in the finale of any horror movie: running around screaming and looking confused. Things that confused/frightened my character included:
1) Pools of blood.
2) Botched exorcisms.
3) Getting licked on the side of my face by said demon/girl resulting in a crazy burn.
4) An awesome scene where I made out with this same girl in a bathroom, only to pull away and see that, oh snap, she turned into the fucking demon again!
As both of you who read this blog might have guessed, I have an almost religious devotion to formulaic horror movies and the slack-jawed idiot characters that populate them. To the people that made this happen, thank you. It was an indescribable honor for me to walk in Ali Larter’s shoes for a few days.

Piracy is back baby.
There has been a lot of talk in the news this week about the Somali Pirates who are currently holding 16 ships and more than 300 crew members hostage off the coast of Africa. The word “Pirate” carries somewhat whimsical connotations, since it’s almost impossible to separate the term from it’s historical context (note the “Jolly Roger” in this Associate Press article). These days Pirates are beloved, familiar characters, closely associated with wonderful things like Peter Pan, Johnny Depp, corsets and cheap rum. Pirate appreciation is firmly ingrained in our culture and I’ve seen more Pirate costumes and theme parties than I’d care to remember.
Given this, I think it’s time to retire the word “Pirate” as the technical term for modern day acts of violence at sea; there are just too many adorable associations. We’re talking about a bunch of desperate murders and thieves with guns, they just happen to travel by boat. However when I hear “Pirate,” I get an image in my head very much like the one above. This feels highly inappropriate considering the seriousness of the situation, and I move that from now on we try to avoid using the word outside of it’s historical and mythical meaning.
I can think of no other instance in which a crime carries such a loaded label due to it’s context, instantly casting the criminals as cute cultural caricatures.
When someone shoots up a bar in Dallas we don’t respond with “Ah yes. Cowboys.”
When someone is beaten to death in Japan, we don’t necessarily attribute it to Ninjas.

I read an astute cultural observation the other day on the “Stuff White People Like” Blog. If you haven’t checked out this site yet I think you may be in the minority. The Canadian genius behind it has so many people reading his astute cultural observations that he was able to leverage a book deal out of it. That would be pretty sweet right?
Right?
(sound of internet-crickets chirping)
Right. So anyway, this guy makes a nice living pointing out racial differences, and I thought this one from several months ago was especially fine: White People like Black Music that Black People don’t listen to anymore. You can read his detailed and well-phrased analysis here, but the basic gist is that what’s chic in African American culture right now won’t become popular with White Hipsters for several years. You can extend this argument through the histories of jazz, blues and rock n’ rock, but it’s most applicable to my life in terms of hip hop. I will be the first to admit that I love “old school hip hop” (i.e. anything that black people were listening to in the mid-nineties), but much of the music being released today that is wildly popular with African Americans is completely lost on me.
This is most true in terms of R&B.
It seems to me that R&B lyrics have gotten pretty ridiculous in recent years. I think the tipping point was R. Kelly’s epic “Trapped in the Closet” video series. With this seminal work, Kelly took the standard R&B template (passionately speak-singing over two chords and a stuttering drum machine) and wrote lyrics so beautifully banal and conversational that he created a work of comic genius.
In case you are the one person on the planet who hasn’t seen it (hi Mom!), Kelly narrates a series of ludicrous events as if he were barreling through the libretto of an urban opera. And much like opera, the inherent style of R&B drips with passion and sincerity, so that the topics he’s singing about (infidelity, murder, midgets, etc.) are in hilarious contrast to the way he’s singing about them.
Here’s an example:

“Hurry up and get in the closet”
She said, “Don’t you make a sound
Or some shit is going down”
I said, “Why don’t I just go out the window?”
“Yes, except for one thing, we on the 5th floor”
“Shit, think, shit, think, quick, put me in the closet”
And now I’m in this dark ass closet, tryin’ to figure out
Just how I’m gonna get my crazy ass up out this house 

Kelly bravely shattered the stigma that lyrics should be composed rather than simply transcribed from everyday conversations, and was innovative in establishing that just because the musicality of R&B is akin to an aural roofie, you don’t necessarily have to sing about love, or seduction, or really make any kind of sense at all. And if you DO sing about love, Kelly teaches us that it’s okay to focus on the practical rather than the poetic, to speak-sing about the logistical realities and complications of modern love. His message is warmly embraced in this new song from Soulja Boy, a very successful artist whose current popularity baffles me (but I’m sure in ten years I’ll love him):

Baby you know that I miss you
I wanna get with you tonight but I cannot babygirl
And that’s the issue
Girl you know I miss you
I just wanna kiss you
But I can’t right now so baby kiss me thru the phone
(kiss me thru the phone)
See you later on..
Kiss me thru the phone
(kiss me thru the phone)
See you when I get home

 

I mean that’s kind of romantic. It’s just hilarious to me the way he crams these awkward run-on sentences in between the thumps of the 808 drum machine. I also like to imagine the rampant high-fiving in the studio when he realized he could rhyme “miss you” and “kiss you” with “issue.”
It gets weirder. I saw Raheem Devaughn’s video “Text Messages” the other day at Radioshack. By this point artists are actually making the banal romantic. I can’t think of many things less romantic then text messaging (maybe kissing through the phone) but this guy pulls it off. An excerpt:

I’m sending you some text messages
But you can call em sex messages
And IDK when I’ll be there
But I’ll TTY later & we’ll be loving ASAP
And we can X-O-X-O
Do it all night long
Soon as I get home
You’ll be making smiley faces
Switch positions, trading places
Girl you gonna get it
As soon as I send my sex message

Just to clarify Raheem’s updated definitions of texting terms, X-Oing is intercourse, smiley faces are orgasms, and “IDK when I’ll be there” means “Bitch stop calling me. You wanna kiss someone through the phone try Soulja Boy.”
The winner of course in the ridiculous R&B lyrics contest that I am apparently having is last year’s groundbreaking, “Let Me Smell Yo Dick.” If for some reason you haven’t heard about this yet (Mom, you’re still reading this?) then you should probably click the link so you can see for yourself that this song is all too real and deadly serious. It’s the first release from up-and-coming artist and prime girlfriend material Riskay (pictured here preparing to smell your dick) and it takes Kelly’s conversational crooning to a new level: she’s not singing about love, or even the trivialities associated with it like sex texts and phone kissing. She’s gone to the other end of the spectrum. While it’s still an R&B song with sugary synthesizers and drum machines dripping seduction, the subject matter is actually a brutal argument about infidelity and dick-smelling as a reliable means of discouraging it. The lyrics in R&B songs have officially become polar opposites of their romantic style. It’ll still be a decade before the white hipsters catch on, but I think the following excerpt should make one thing perfectly clear to everybody: If you X-O with Riskay, be sure to kiss her through the phone, or IDK what she could be capable of.

Nigga this is the 15th muthafuckin time
That I called and left yo ass messages
I done text yo bitch ass,
And u ain’t respondin to nothin
What the fuck is you doing
Who the fuck is you out there with
You think I’m stupid,
My gurlz already done put me up on your ass tonight
When u get home I got some news for yo bitch ass
[Chorus]
Why you comin home 5 in the mornnn
Somethins goin on, can I smell yo dick
Don’t play me like a fool, cause that ain’t cool
So wat u need to do is lemme smell yo dick

I’ve been seeing a lot of posters around town advertising “The Nora Roberts Collection,” a series of Lifetime movies based on romance novels so smoldering that one of them caused it’s lead, country music singer Leanne Rhymes, to cheat on her husband with her chiseled costar. I decided to look into Roberts herself, the writer who supplied the material for this erotic controversy.
As usual I began and ended my research with Wikipedia, uncovering the following juicy tidbits:

During her sophomore year in high school, Roberts…met her first husband, Ronald Aufem-Brinke. They married, against her parents’ wishes, in 1968, as soon as she had graduated from high school.

Sounds a little bit salacious, right? Two young lovers, striking out on their own in direct defiance of their families, finding their way through the world by the light of their love. But wait, it gets better:

Roberts met her second husband, Bruce Wilder, a carpenter, when she hired him to build her bookshelves.

WTF!?! If that’s not the plot of a romance novel I don’t know what is. A lonely, recently divorced novelist…the humble but passionate carpenter she hired to build her bookselves. His calloused but gentle hands…
As a man who experienced much of his sexual awakening flipping through romance novels in grocery stores, I know a thing or two about pulpy plots.
My conclusion: Roberts is not a novelist.
She is a very skilled and prolific autobiographer who just happens to have lived the MOST ROMANTIC LIFE EVER.