As tempted as I am to name this, “I’ve listened to this goddamned song like 26 times today, pt. 3,” such posts are usually fast-food posts – quick and efficient ways for me to fill my weekly cup of blogging with lukewarm soft serve that goes nowhere, but does enough. But I think I’m onto something here after repeated listens of Das Racist’s, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” the majority of which, in case you haven’t heard the song before, or haven’t listened to the YouTube link above (which you should), consists of the following repetition of lyrics, swapping a few articles and pronouns, and taking a few twists here and there: “I’m at the Pizza Hut (whut?)/I’m at the Taco Bell (huh?)/I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” over a treble-y, somewhat irritating beat. Essentially, the two members of Das Racist trade off vocal duties, as though they’re trying to figure out where they are, even though it’s obvious. Or is it? It’s a completely stupid song – except that it’s not. Beneath all the seemingly-sophomoric absurdity lies a subtle but intelligent indictment of the shambles that is the contemporary human condition.
Fellow Barker Tim Greenup, also known as the most awesome person on the face of the Earth, and I were texting back and forth the other night. I was telling him about the gulf the song has created between the employees at my job, between those of us who love it, and those who change it the second it hits the speakers. We both decided we stand by the song, talked about why, and most importantly, how the song is so great. Says Tim, “There’s a lot being explored in the negative space of that song. So Dadaist.” Anybody who knows Tim, in real life or through Bark, knows that his tongue is usually in cheek 85% of the time; but there’s always truth to what he says. I don’t know much about Dada, except that smart and artistically-inclined folks like to name drop him, that he’s minimal and subversive (I realize I could Google all the necessary info on Dada, but I’m trying to break that habit), but Tim’s mention of Dada was the catalyst for the thinking that brought me to my thesis statement, if it may so be called. We’ll start with the negative space.
I like to think if I met a celebrity, say Brad Pitt because everyone knows him, I wouldn’t turn into a “Fan”. I wouldn’t pass out, I wouldn’t cry or scream or anything resembling a pre-teen Bieber fan. But this is a lie. If Brad Pitt attempted to have a conversation with me, I would do one of two things 1) only respond with head nods or shakes or 2) keep saying obnoxious things like “OMG” “HOLD ON. LET ME CALL MY MOTHER” “CAN I TOUCH YOUR MOUTH!”
This is because Brad Pitt has reached a certain level of celebrity in my mind that is beyond comprehension. He may as well not be human and instead be an idea. You can’t meet an idea and walk away normal. This is not the kind of fame I would like to attain. On the other hand, as a writer, the worse outcome of my writing career would be if , say, five to ten years from now, no one in the writing community had ever heard of MPT. So what’s the fine balance? I think Jess Walter has it nailed. Read more »
“I wish to propose the following educational technique which should prove equally effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards…” -Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature, 1954
The other morning, I woke in the predawn hours, brewed coffee, readied myself for the commute to the city. My allegiance was still to night: half dreaming, unsure of my physical presence. I opened the back door to let the cats out so they could find a good spot to watch the sun rise over the hills, take in the glint of dew on the bluegrass, listen to the judgment of the birds. I poured my first cup of coffee. There was a frog where my feet were about to be.
His body was six inches long. Electric red dots surrounded him. The tabby with the small features leapt at the frog, biting him again and again in some ancient predatorial dance. I nearly spat my coffee, grabbed the cat to put away while taking care of the frog. He was still alive, though pretending to be another drab, inconsequential piece of the landscape. He flinched as I put him in a box, carried him into the morning night and placed him in the water garden.
After I returned from work and opened the door to let the cats play in the day lily stalks, the frog came back into the house. Read more »
When I was little, I had a really hard time getting anyone to play board games with me. My brother called them “bored games” (so clever) and generally only agreed to play Battleship, a game at which he routinely kicked my butt. My dad was usually the one who would break down and play a game of Scrabble or Sorry (I recently realized how much he humored me when reading the official Sorry! rules and discovered that the game is much harsher than Dad’s version); Mom usually caved for Chinese Checkers. But still, we didn’t have a regular game night or anything like that. Of course, for all I know, we might have played board games far more often than the average family; it’s just that I wanted to play them all the time. I think I burned my family out. Now, when my parents play Scrabble at home, they don’t necessarily link the words or adhere to dictionary rules. They just play the most interesting words they can play, whether those words exist or not, and the person who makes the last move has to tell a story using all the words on the board. Regular Scrabble? Well, they’re just plain tired of it. Read more »
Forget sexy firemen or Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit calendars. What you really want is to have the Men of the Stacks keep track of 2012 for you.
All proceeds go to the It Gets Better Fund, as a dedication to Jeffries Morrisey, the deceased Head of Reference and Research Services at the University of San Francisco Library, and a driving force behind the calendar project.
In the Men of the Stacks own words:
There is an entire population of professional librarians out there who disagree with the way the library profession is perceived in contemporary media outlets and in the historical consciousness of the American mind. Different people and different associations will use different means to try to change those perceptions. This is ours.
…
What do we want to tell you about who we are? What are these alternative images? Easy. We are, or [sic] course, professionals. We are educators, programmers, project managers, entrepreneurs, program coordinators, contractors, consultants, and speakers. We are academics. We are authors, diversity officers, historians, administrators, deans, professors, and researchers. We are creatives. We are musicians, bakers, painters, and storytellers. We are athletes, yogis, gym-rats, runners, and hikers. We are passionate. We are dog-lovers, radicals, conservatives, Christians, and Buddhists. We are in our twenties. We are in our forties. We are in relationships. We are perpetual bachelors. We are privileged beings who try to use their advantages to better the lives of others.
despite all economic indicators across the board being pretty dismal, trust us when we say we are a very fast growing and dynamic company located in the heart of a very exciting place in which you will love to work even if you have to commute many miles to get there.
our products are so amazing, it’s hard to believe we even need someone like you to help us sell them, but since our completely realistic goal is 112% market share and then total world domination, we are looking for a marketing director who has a lifetime of experience in our ridiculously obscure industry and who’s worked in a fucking-warpspeed-hyperdrive-faster-than-anything-physicists-have-proven-is-even-theoretically-possible fast paced environment. you must be exceptionally talented beyond our current needs, but willing to work for a salary we would normally only offer to people who were merely “good enough” in a more stable economy. this position will report to a vice president whose job the desired candidate could probably do for him (in their sleep). the right candidate must be able to quickly look at massive amounts of data and then hastily create an action plan that is really really similar to what we’ve already done in the past because change comes slow and we don’t want to freak out the board. you will play a key role in very little within our organization, but you will be able to reasonably claim on your resume that you did when you search for a new job in 2 months or 12 months or 24 months or whenever you’ve forgotten what a colossal pain in the ass it is to look for jobs.
In case some of our readers hadn’t figured it out yet, I’m a bit of a geek. I may be a student of the humanities but I love science, I love technology, and my other big passion besides writing is video-games. It could be argued that the 1996 PC title Riven, a haunting game that explored the wonders and ethical dangers of storytelling, was actually responsible for my initial desire to write. I’ve found it compelling over the last decade to watch as electronic media emerges as an art form unto itself, and I follow developments related to that sphere with great interest.
Of course, as with any innovation, the results are not always shiny-happy-progress. Sometimes the results are actually harmful; more often than not, though, they’re just stupid. Kotaku’s Brian Crecente reports that a recent documentary by UK studio ITV features purported footage of “IRA terrorists” armed with Libyan anti-aircraft weapons, shooting down a Royal Army helicopter in 1988. The footage, while certainly riveting, is actually gameplay from 2009′s online combat shooter ARMA II. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen ARMA being played, and the graphics are quite good, if a bit dated. On the average low-quality TV screen some viewers, unfamiliar with modern conveniences like “video games” or “that awful rock-and-roll music,” would likely not even notice. That said: come on, guys. ITV claims this was a mix-up over use of the wrong clip, but any video editor worth his salt should have picked up on this right away. The glitchy, stilted movements of the soldiers in the beginning should have been a dead giveaway. Read more »
Alan Heathcock’s aptly titled story collection, VOLT, open with a fast, brutal scene: An unbearably painful accident, told in terse, beautiful language, sets the reader off into the powerhouse opening story, “The Staying Freight.” It’s not always easy to read this and what follows – and yet it’s hard not to. The flood of positive responses to VOLT, ranging from the New York Times to NPR to the hallowed halls of Bark, is a testament to the finesse and skill Heathcock brings to bear.
Alan Heathcock
Heathcock, who teaches writing atBoiseState, said he wrote VOLTover 12 years. He answered these questions by e-mail earlier this month.
How long have you been working on the stories in VOLT, and for how long have you had in mind the connections of place and characters of Krafton? Did you start with the notion of writing stories about this place, or did that unity emerge as you wrote the stories?
I started writing about the town of Krafton way back in the late nineties, just because I was drawn to the landscape—I’ve always found something mysterious and curious about rural landscapes, the crops and woods and openness. I quickly discovered the dramatic advantages to working within this setting, the isolation of characters forcing them into a kind of contemplation that allowed me to investigate certain themes. The unity of which you speak is, I think, in part due to the themes investigated within the place. The stories come back, again and again, to look at the invasive nature of violence and the tenuous nature of peace, of how community—both secular and religious–enable or disable these things. Because I kept hitting on questions of justice and faith I found the two main characters, Sheriff Helen Farraley and Pastor Vernon Hamby, kept appearing.
As mentioned in my super rad last post, I recently moved back to my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Which is fine. I’m living with a couple friends of mine. They’re good dudes (always have been), but I was, admittedly, a bit nervous to move in with them, only because I had lived alone for awhile, and had grown quite used to it. Rather liked it, actually. But, to my delight, I currently love living with my roommates. Why?
Some wild and crazy guys.
1) it’s cheaper
2) it’s less lonely than living alone (imagine that!)
3) incredible things happen on a daily basis, like
today a silverfish walked into our house and caused quite a stir. When John found it on the kitchen floor, he really lost his shit, and tried smashing it with a Pledge bottle. But he missed, and the silverfish ran beneath the sink. Read more »
Recently I had dinner with two Millenials. I mentioned some news story I had seen on Yahoo’s homepage when one of them said to the other,
“See, her generation is all about Yahoo.”
I hadn’t realized I was all about Yahoo, but I do have a Yahoo email account that I check several times a day and when I do, I imagine I become yahoo-ed.
An X-er recently told me I should switch to a gmail account so I wouldn’t be profiled as out. Do you profile people based on their email addresses?
I remember when all my peers switched to gmail. They sent messages such as this:
“I’m tired of receiving Viagra ads in my email so I’m switching to gmail. Please update your address book.” Read more »
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