Out of Bounds is Always Out of Bounds...

I have been on pain meds lately to help me deal with a constant hip pain issue (it's the reason that I have not been writing very much the last two months), and as per the instructions given by my doctor, I am supposed to take my pill once a day... AT BEDTIME. Unofficial bedtime – as in "lights out" (though not "TV off" or "phones off") for Jen and I is usually around ten at night, but this does not quite jibe with my ability to withstand the pain in my hip. The meds I have been given help me sleep, though in a pretty light way (which is a nice bonus), but the chief benefit of their use for the past couple of weeks is to reduce my level of pain (and the resulting annoyance with that pain) from anywhere to 50-75%, depending on the night. My mornings are relatively comfortable, but by noon the meds have usually started to wear off incrementally. Each day varies, but most often by around two in the afternoon, the onslaught of discomfort and leg spasms begins.

For the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening, the pain gradually increases. I started out taking my pain medication each evening – after determining a certain amount of time for the pill to start kicking in to at least allow me to settle into sleep – around nine p.m. But I found quickly that I was getting more and more impatient each day to get that pill inside my system, and thus, the time has moved up every couple of days to 8:45, 8:30, 8:20, and so on to the point where I am throwing it down the ol' gullet around 7:45 p.m. So, as I have shifted my pill-taking time, so to has that "AT BEDTIME" time. Last night, this allowed me to seek the downy softness of my pillow just after nine o'clock, where I crashed pretty deeply for nearly nine hours.

The point of this? Well, each evening, I generally stop checking Facebook and other social media sites somewhat early in prime time. I also cannot get onto any news sites at all. The main reason is so that I don't get riled up about something in the news or by something stupid someone says (more often than not lately, the same goddamned thing). If I decide to pick a fight with someone online around 8:30 in the evening, I will go ballistic for about four hours, Jen will never hear the end of it, and my brain will never shut off at all in order for me to get some sleep. Add in another reason being the one-hour time difference between where I am located (California) and where the vast majority of my longtime friends and family are (Alaska), and then mix in yet another reason that so many of my friends seem to get on social media (owing to various family and/or theatre-related concerns) much, much later in the evening – long after I go to bed (and add in that extra hour) and sometimes early in the morning – that it becomes completely futile for me to check Facebook before I go to bed. There just won't be very much there to see until later, so I tend to wait until the morning.

Every once in a while, however, I miss out on something. Last night, people on both sides of the political divide within my group of friends seem to come to agreement over something someone had tweeted about Barron Trump, the ten-year-old son of... eh, you know. The tweet was by Katie Rich, a writer with Saturday Night Live  (who has apparently been suspended since this blew up) and the joke was along the lines of "Barron will be this country's first homeschool shooter." Ms. Rich was not the only one to go after the youngest Trumpster, as it seems to have become a bit of a pile-on to come up with cruel things to say about the lad. Even my hero Patton Oswalt's younger brother Matt got into the swing of things.

Of course, the Facebook thread merely discussed that it was not alright to do something like pick on a kid, but they did not elaborate on who it was about (not by name anyway) or what was said. The thread began last evening, right around the time where the news becomes a "Forbidden Zone If You Want to Get Sleep" for me. They mentioned "Trump's son," and I never even thought about the youngest one. I immediately thought Eric or Donald, Jr., and my reaction was, "Fuck those douchebags. Hell, Junior posed with a severed elephant's tail on safari. Fuck him in the ass and mouth with it. The ass first." Nor was the content of the tweet revealed so I had no idea what was said. I know "vaguebooking" was not meant (for once) with this thread and that the people involved were discussing the issue fully engaged and aware of the story's details already. But for someone just dropping onto Facebook early in the a.m. and finding that thread was the first thing in their feed, and then finding no information within the thread that actually revealed who the hell the victim actually was and who the hell the perpetrator was, it was maddening to me.

Luckily, I am great at research, and had the answer in seconds. And yes, I agree with all of my friends on that thread, both on the left and the alt-right (sorry, had to get a dig of some sort in there), Barron Trump is out of bounds. He is a ten-year-old boy. He is not an adult, and he has not put himself in the public eye on purpose. Someone did mention in the thread that the president's wife, children, etc. [I am paraphrasing] should be untouchable, and I do not for a second agree with that, however. Trump's adult children – at least the three who have determined (or are allowed) to take this ride along with him – are legal adults who have placed themselves in both the celebrity and the political world of their own free will. The same goes for the First Lady, who was already in the public eye (in rather revealing ways) before she joined the Trump Circus Train.

I am not saying that people should go after them or have a right to go after them just because they are celebrities, but when your face is constantly in the public eye, it is going to happen more often than not. Every actor, actress, comedian, musician, director, etc. out there has fans and haters alike, and the only real way to make any of that go away is to simply not be in one of those professions. And politics? Half the people are going to hate you no matter who you are, and in Trump's case... well, let's leave that stew for a good while. People should not automatically go after celebrities or politicians just "because". But if that celebrity or politician does or says something stupid or terrible... well, by all means. Tweet away. Fire your barbs if you must.

But his ten-year-old son? Leave him alone. Off limits. He is out of bounds. Let him have his childhood, even if his dad seems to be modeling him in his own image, suit, red tie, and everything. What dad doesn't want their kid to be like them? My dad wanted me to love fishing as much as he did, and I wasn't having it at all. I love my dad, but I had a different agenda, even as a kid. Barron might even be a horrid little brat behind the scenes, but that is not for us to muse upon in public forums. Barron Trump is to be left alone, people. 

But there's more to this...

I am saying all of this as a person who has openly and actively despised Mr. Trump for well over thirty years to the point where even seeing his orange-crusted image has me reacting much like Kramer did to Mary Hart's voice on Seinfeld. I do not like the man. I do not want him in the highest office in this country, and I do not want him in charge of anything other than his own worthless businesses. I would rather we built a wall around him more than anything. (And in some ways, he kind of has done that...)

But there is another trend I have been noticing lately – in fact, have been noticing for quite some time – and that has been the calls for extreme violence in response to whoever is sitting in the White House. I don't mean by terrorist groups... I mean by ordinary people on social media or that one encounters in public.

Or by celebrities. The one getting attention right now is Madonna's thoughts about "blowing up the White House," which she says, in the usual half-apologetic, public relations-laden turnaround, was "taken out of context." No, Madge, I think it was pretty clear what you were saying. I don't like Trump any more than you do, but I didn't leave America for years to pretend I had a British accent, and I certainly don't want our political system to become a free-for-all target range for whatever yahoo wants to shoot or blow up the place. We have checks and balances in place for a reason, and Trump has many millions of miles of work to go to actually earn the trust of the American public for real. I'm an atheist, but no one steps on a church in my town. Likewise, no one gets away with saying they would like to blow up the friggin' White House. I don't care if you once had some decent songs...

The same goes for random people commenting on posts on Facebook. I have seen several threads in recent months, some as recently as yesterday, where someone has posted a comment about something political (generally something anti-Trump), and people have most often replied in kind. There is the occasional person from the other side who will provide a counterpoint, and that's fine (as long as it is not obvious trolling). But then, someone will agree with the original poster's point, but then throw in something along the lines of "I think someone needs to shoot him." Wait, what? NO!!! That's not how we do things here in America. OK, yes... that's how most of America operates day to day in the streets, but not in the political arena. Violent upheaval is not how you run a government.

Am I wrong, or isn't it rather illegal (or at least didn't it used to be) to say such things? Or are there just so many people doing it nowadays that our federal agencies have just given up trying to track each instance down? I am pretty certain most of the people who randomly throw such comments out (the most recent instance I noticed was someone who is a housewife day to day, and is probably a pretty nice lady otherwise) are just releasing hot air, and don't really mean such sentiments. Do you really want someone to get physically shot? I mean, shot with a gun, possibly killed by a bullet through their head or decimating their innards. I suppose they could have meant "with a camera," but then why didn't they just say "Hey, I think that person should have some 8x10s taken!" and not sound so violent with their ultimatum?

I think this instance upset me most because it was someone who seemed to have generally the same take as me on the discussion but then they decided to throw in that nasty little tag to their response. No wonder those on the right like to often point out how "violent" liberals are lately when such things are tossed off at random. I am not trying to create an equivalency here in conjunction with this statement, but I am reminded of one of my innumerable doctor appointments about six months ago. 

I was waiting to see my allergist in a room shared by a variety of doctors. There was a couple sitting almost directly across from me in the room, and they were watching the news on a television hanging down from the ceiling that was tuned to CNN. The couple – both caucasian – were in their forties, perhaps early fifties, seemingly in the same general age range as me, though they were two different patches of much rougher road. It was a Jack Sprat situation: the lady was obese enough to require a cane and was eating a sandwich from a Tupperware container in the waiting room; the man was pencil thin, wore a ratty T-shirt and trucker cap, and noticeably had what just had to be "meth mouth". They were eyeing the news with suspicion, as it aired an interview with Barack Obama. The TV sound was low enough, and I was far enough way, so that I could not make out most of what the then-president was saying, but I could hear what the couple was saying in reaction to the fact that he dared to be on the television in front of their faces.

The lady said, "Oh, I hate that man so much" and the man replied, "Yeah, that motherfuckin' n----- should be shot! If I don't do it, somebody should!"

Beside myself, there were about a half-dozen other people in the waiting room when this was said. (My mother-in-law was in the restroom.) It was said loud enough that no one could mistake the words, and in fact, the man's voice raised slightly – puffing himself up in about as macho a pose as he could – as he said it. I was the only other white person in the room, and his speech made me feel filthy just by proxy. Everyone else in the room clearly heard what he said, including the three receptionists at the counter about fifteen feet away, and there was noticeable agitation in the room. But no one said anything in response. I glared straight ahead at the couple, and I caught the man's eye, and when he saw I was staring hard at him (I easily had a hundred pounds and six inches on him), he actually kind of withered and lost his resolve. When my mother-in-law returned, I whispered to her what had been said, and she was shocked.

I thought hard about contacting the FBI or Secret Service about the situation, but then let it go. I knew it was just a couple of bona fide assholes letting off some steam, and knew there was nothing behind their stupid threats besides ignorance. And that's how I feel about most of the people, on either side, who throw out such words. There's nothing to it. So why do you have to say it? Do you really want to see someone shot? Or raped? Or blown up? Wouldn't you rather live in an America where no one gets shot, raped, or blown up?

People on both sides are equally capable of saying terrible things about anyone. I am not going to say one side is more guilty of it than the other, because such numbers are unquantifiable and not really worthy of discussion. And I don't care if you are "on my side" or not, talking seriously about killing someone for any reason is not OK. It doesn't matter who they are, what you perceive they have done, and most certainly what position they hold in government. Even if you hate that person beyond all reason, it is not OK. Not one bit.

And if you are an adult, don't pick on ten-year-olds. No matter whose kid they are.

Out of bounds is always out of bounds...

RTJ

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)

Tweet Emotions: Notes on the Process of Futility [Pt. 3]

So, now I have spent a month establishing myself as yet another constantly tweeting knucklehead, and losing those tweets amongst millions of others, having them read only by a small fraction of the 140 or so followers on my Twitter page, only three-quarter dozen of whom I can claim any sort of real, lasting friendship, work relationship or kinship.

With such a tiny, immediate audience available, why I would think Twitter would be a decent place to push The Cinema 4 Pylon and the writing that I place upon it?

The answer is this: it's better than nothing. Certainly better than my options currently at hand, which is less than nothing. As I said, Facebook and MySpace have proven to be busts for this. Only a few friends are willing to make the journey over to this site, and they are known quantities. Otherwise, I believe those sources are tapped out for the most part (and I used "tapped out" in a more traditional sense, rather than in the sense that lead to a line of idiotic T-shirts). And while I do get some decent comments from complete strangers on the Pylon directly, it is so random and so infrequent as to be not much of a factor. Thus, trying out Twitter seems as worthy an attempt at reaching an audience than any other. The potential for audience gain is immeasurable; the trick is getting people to the site.

I must state something to anyone new coming to The Cinema 4 Pylon, whom I will mostly assume to be those who do not know me in the least: there is nothing for sale here.

Any promotion that I do to get people to this site is solely so I can have you read what I have written. All of my writing is from my heart, and is not meant to promote anything else except for my opinion. That is it. The Cinema 4 Pylon, as I have stated numerous times before, is nothing more than my notebook, filled only with film non-reviews (though most would think they are actually reviews, criticism of film criticism itself, tributes to my favorite films, records, comics, books, etc., and attempts to begin discussions on just about any topic that catches my fancy at the time.

There are no ads on here at all. No Google Sense, no AdWords... nothing. I do not allow them on the Pylon, even though I have had a couple studios contact me to ask if I would place ads on here, owing to the fact that I primarily write about movies and video. And I will never allow them on here. I am not against commerce, and on another site built for mass appeal rather than personal depth and growth, I would certainly consider it. But the Pylon is not the place. It's about keeping my opinion pure. And myself in the process.

The problem on my end is producing material worthy of having more people tuning in to it. If you dig back a couple of months on here, you will find a series of articles reflecting my dissatisfaction with myself (you will find I am my own harshest and most terrible critic) over the work I had done on the site since September, when I still reviewed for Spout and last believed myself to be firing on all circuits, and just before I hit my latest deep and sincere bout with depression. And since taking myself to task, I have done relatively little in the way of "reviewing," instead throwing most of my concentration into my real world employment (I get paid to work for a soccer organization, co-edit their website, and write and associate edit the organization's membership magazine, which goes to 90,000 homes quarterly).

It isn't that I haven't been writing; I just haven't been concentrating on my own work, fairly putting it on the back burner, and only working on it sporadically. What I have been doing, though, is watching droves of films, all based around the moment when I will be ready to plunge headlong into writing more again. Also, in the meantime, I started goofing around on Twitter, TwitPic and Blip.fm -- all in the last month -- and I will not lie to say that they have had some small, detrimental effect on the way I approach writing these fuller pieces of late. Once you start thinking in 140/150 characters, it is hard not to do so. It's like when I play a video game too long, and then go to bed, but the game is still playing out behind my eyes, and I can't get to sleep. I keep working your brain through escapes to get me to the next level. The same with Twitter, where I can't even eat a burrito or lose it later through other means without working through a dozen different sentences to place on my Twitter page. After a single month, it has evolved -- or de-evolved -- my grey matter.

But, assuming that my work once more reaches a level where I am halfway satisfied with it, the question remains: why should you come here? What is in it for you? The truth is, this site is no good for those looking for a quick fix, seeking out a place for pocket-sized opinions and celebrity gossip. You will only get something out of it if you are the sort that isn't looking for a "This film sucked!" approach to criticism, though I do hold out the possibility for you that on the day that there is a film that sucks so mightily that I cannot blurt out anything else but "This film sucked!", the reason for my not posting more than three words regarding the film's failure as entertainment on any level is because I ran out to get my first driver's license, purchase a car, purchase a house with a garage, drive my new car home legally, lock myself and the car in the garage, and then turn on the engine so I can rid myself of the memory of said suckhole of a film.

My approach to film criticism has very little to do with the way it is practiced popularly, and rarely has much to do with the overall excellence of a film. It's a small part of every piece I write, to be sure, but its not the most important part. My chief thrust here is criticism as self-held therapy. When I talk about a film, it is usually because I am trying to understand what I see or don't see in it, how it affects me personally, how what I bring into the film emotionally and experientially affects the way I see the film, how what I have seen before affects the way I see the film, and how the current film fits thematically into the massive pile of films I have already seen. For me, as always, each film watched -- feature-length, animated short, etc. -- is part of my personal conceptual continuity; every film, no matter the quality, as equally important to my overall artistic sense as the next. And none of my approach depends at all on worrying about spoilers or sneak peeks or pirated advance copies, etc.

If this seems like pretentious hooey to you... well, goodbye. I don't need you. I have told you already that this site is primarily for me to immerse myself therapeutically through the cinema. If knuckle-headed fanboy stuff is your thing, go back to your Harry Knowles-type sites and enjoy spoiling films for yourself with idle speculation long before they actually come out, or head off to your four-word review sites for a less-than-haiku wackoff session. Because I don't do "condensed" here, and I don't do gossip. I like to take my time when discussing a film or an idea, and if you are sort that wouldn't mind hanging around for that, then I invite you to join in. Leave a comment or two, take part in the discussion, and please, always leave a link for your site so that I can follow you too.

I will probably get one or two of you at most, but if you are quality people, that would be just fine. It would certainly help to class the joint up around here.

Tweet Emotions: Notes on the Process of Futility [Pt. 1]

Let me be honest from the start... I don't make a move online without sizing up the parameters of my actions. If I sign up for a site or program, I immediately think how I can use that particular spot for my own purposes. Self-serving? Sure, aren't we all? Isn't that what survival of the fittest is all about? Helping yourself to a heaping slice of this survival? It is only natural, in any venture in which we involve ourselves, that we seek out that which will allow us to reach our goals in the quickest way possible.

With the proliferation of social media sites these days, however, it seems that most people in the net-a-verse aren't so much concerned with "keeping it real" (though they have convinced themselves of this deplorable and completely erroneous phrase), but rather "keeping it noticeable..." Well, that and making lots of quick and easy cash. And if one can combine both efforts -- being popular and bringing in the Benjamins -- isn't this the whole point of life? Millions of Tweeters seem to think so, because half of the pages I run into seem to merely be there to convince me that this is the aim toward which I am supposed to be building. Which just proves to me that they do not know me very well.

When I signed up for Twitter, I did consider briefly that it might be a good way to introduce people to this site, The Cinema 4 Pylon. I've been plugging away on my little notebook of a blog for about four years now, all to little notice, and I have liked it this way. A handful of loyal pals, along with my natural impulse to vent and a low regard for sleep, have kept me writing. Through whatever rough spots and bouts with depression over this span, the Pylon has been here for me to work out my personal refuse, along with providing an easily accessible storehouse for my opinions on just about anything that crosses my path -- movie, music, animation (which expanded into the Pylon's sister site, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc), books, politics, and absolute silliness. The thrust of the site has never really been about reviewing popular culture, though, but rather about how popular culture has affected me, for both good and bad, throughout my existence on this sphere, with a simultaneous goal focusing on my need to combat the cliches of popular opinion and, especially, film criticism.

I would be lying if I said that all of my other online moves -- starting pages on Facebook, MySpace and their like, writing "reviews" for a selected writing group on Spout.com for a year -- were unladen with intentions of expanding my reach. At every instance, I thought how nice it would be if I could get a few more people, especially my friends who are hooked up with me on those sites, to bounce over from those pages and leave a few constructive comments on the Pylon.

Which never happened. I can get 168 legitimate, tried-and-true, actual friends and acquaintances of mine on Facebook, but I can't get a single extra one, beyond the handful that regularly attend services on the Pylon, to pop over for a note or even a quick look. MySpace was a tremendous bust, not in a good way and not just as a website, but as a portal for anything involving my interests, and the potential audience pretty much involved the same people with whom I now converse on Facebook, plus a massive amount of online hookers... and that asshole Tom guy.

Spout was great until I decided to chafe under certain suggestions, began a futile campaign of aggressiveness against those certain suggestions, and then tried to recover with an equally futile campaign to apologize to people who were giving up on those certain suggestions anyway. And sure, a few hundred people would check out each of my posts on Spout, and I received some nice comments and met a couple of interesting and generous people on that video-oriented site. But I couldn't nudge a soul, at least regularly, over to The Cinema 4 Pylon in all that time. Was it over-nourishment? Perhaps I should have just posted a few lines of each post on Spout instead of the whole piece. They got the milk out of the Spout consistently; why suckle straight from the udder?

Through the last four years, I have received positive and helpful comments from a genuine rock star and producer, a Disney comics editor and publisher, a couple of online animation historians, and a director who said I was the only critic to ever precisely nail the emotions behind his film after showing it worldwide at festival after festival. I have also received a not-so-positive comment from a former producer of Ren & Stimpy (and animation archivist), who decided to chide me for being too negative over the use of blackface in old films (let's make that archiv-racist...) Fine and well, these comments, both positive and negative, as long as the comments help me find my way or teach me something.

But what I really crave is even more exposure, which would hopefully lead to even more discourse. Not just nine or ten regular to semi-regular readers, and not just good friends, but a greater diversity of opinion in those comments. The good with the bad. Which is what drew me to the social sites in the first place. Which is what drew me to finally creating an RSS feed, and then posting my Pylon writing directly onto Facebook as well.

And what ultimately drew me to Twitter...

[To be continued...]

Dylan Goes "Select, Rik" - Shuffle Mode, Monday, May 4, 2009

Man, I really wanted to get Part 2 of my Troll movie adventures recap up before this weekend, and I did say I was going to expound on my ratings scale on Sunday. I really did intend for all of that to happen. But, as it happens so often, migraines got the best of me for a couple of days, and everything, to paraphrase Rigby Reardon, kind of shifted all out of whack. So, I am still working on finishing both pieces, and Part II of For Whom the Bull Trolls will likely not get up until at least tomorrow night, followed by the ratings explanation sometime on Thursday.

As a temporary space-filler, here’s a peek at my iPod this morning, which kept me going as I tried out my brand new sneakers. The old ones squeak incessantly, having popped a few of the support struts during my speed-walking routine of the past few months, and the squeaks were getting goofy looks from people sitting on bus benches and cars at traffic stops. Or maybe I was getting the goofy looks on general purposes. Probably the last one… but I am used to that.

Here’s this morn's shuffle:

1. It’s Gonna Be A Long Night – Ween / Quebec
2. Oh Daddy – Adrian Belew / Mr. Music Head
3. I Ride My Bike – Cracker / Tucson (ep)
4. Cold War – Devo / Freedom of Choice
5. It’s A Dark Day – The Reverend Horton Heat / Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
6. Holiday for Strings – Spike Jones & the City Slickers / The Spike Jones Anthology
7. Kevin Barry – Lonnie Donegan / Rock Island Line: The Singles Anthology 1955-1967
8. Why Does It Hurt When I Pee? – Frank Zappa / Joe’s Garage
9. That Teenage Feeling – Neko Case / Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
10. Take Me With U – Prince and the Revolution / Purple Rain
11. Sifl & Olly News: Olly’s Psychic Helmet / The Sifl & Olly Show
12. Good Texan – The Vaughan Brothers / Family Style

I like the transition from Donegan, a British skiffle/folk singer who deeply influenced the Beatles, to Zappa’s social disease silliness, then straight to the haunted vocal landscapes of Ms. Case. Wholly inappropriate, such segues, and exactly why I have slowly grown to love shuffle mode. Of course, jumping from the Reverend Heat's bleak blues to the chicken-squawking, awooga-horn-laced Spike Jones oddity is just as goony a jump. Actually, my old squeaky sneaks would have fit Jones' Holiday for Strings quite nicely. Just another wacky percussion instrument in a giant pile of wacky percussion instruments.

As a side observation, I discovered twt.fm today, a Twitter app that allows you to search out a favorite song, and then prep it to play from a link placed on your Twitter page. Started out with one of my favorite Robyn Hitchcock tunes this morning, which has garnered 19 plays, and might have led to two people dropping my page. One can only hope. Those without the proper taste, or at least those without the capacity to try out new artists and styles, are not welcome. Must weed out the weaklings.

And now, after a nice 12-hour day of prepping our new work website for tomorrow a.m.'s scheduled launch, I am too exhausted to write any longer. Hopefully, I will be able to finish the second Troll piece tomorrow, because tonight is one for the books. The Celtics lost before I even made it home an hour ago, which has me grouchy, and my stomach is aching, not from hunger, but most likely from an alien life form nestled somewhere behind my pancreas. That little green guy is clearly as tired as I am, and just as pouty. (The other one, most likely green from a misspent youth, is never sleepy...) So, to bed for me, and I will plan on reading some R.W. Chambers until Jen gets home. Though, with any luck, I will be asleep in mere seconds. Out.

Coachella Updates, just not here... technically...

So, I am not going to blog about the events at Coachella. I have decided to go the route of the internet "tweet" to post my notes about my adventures at the show in Indio, CA on Friday. Once we returned to the abode early last night after a delirious day mucking about in Palm Desert and Palm Springs after getting about four hours of sleep, I began posting a series of notes on Twitter recalling everything that I saw at the show.

"Recall" is perhaps not the appropriate term, as most of the notes were written at the show as they happened, or just after, on both notepad and on my phone. I had been planning to Twitter from the show itself, but the phone service truly sucked. We had full bars on our phones the entire time, but most likely due to all of the electrical equipment at use, I couldn't even call Jen properly from ten feet away. She could text me, and I would get it... but then I would try to reply -- and she wouldn't get the message until... well, last night. I sent two tweets that never arrived on my Twitter page when I checked it the following morning, nor did Jen get voicemail from me until well after the show. So, I gave up early, and decided to go this route.

If you want to catch up, check out my Facebook page (if you are a designated "friend")... or you can check out the handy listing on the right side of the blog here, from which you may click to read the whole damn series on my Twitter page. I will likely be putting these up well into this evening, or even tomorrow morning (Monday).

And, as a footnote, Raw Meat should have been there. Didn't have my musical wingman... but I have disappointed him as well recently by not drunkenly seeing Suicidal Tendencies a couple weeks back in L.A. Turnabout is fair play, I guess...

Hope you join me for the tweets...

Turn and Face the Strange...

Any frequent blogfly of this site has probably noticed, far down on the sidebar (where blogflies are apt to wander uncontrolled) for the past couple of years, a list of about 250 to 300 films in alphabetical order. It was a list called Leave Me Alone! I Have to Watch These Again… and Again…

The list was basically a picture-window view onto my DVD collection, in at least 75% of the cases, representing to some degree a list of my very favorite films. Once I constructed my first version of it, I discovered that there were very few films from about 1990 onward, so subconsciously intent was I to make it a true glimpse into my influences that I negated the impact that current film was having. So then I would sometimes add recent films that had made a particular impression upon me, and I would sporadically survey the list and wonder why such-and-such wasn’t on there and such-and-such was. It became tiring. By and large, though, it was pretty much the sum total of what I would consider my "canon." All genres, all periods, all styles... just my favorite films. It was intended as an easy way for the wayward traveler to get to know me. (How convenient of me, I know… that’s the kind of guy I actually am not...)

And now that list is gone, a victim of my need to futz about with everything on the Pylon. Recent events at work have allowed me to experiment with a new template not of my own vested interest, and with it, I have become emboldened to try out new features that have popped up on Blogger in recent months which had left me personally fearful for my own site’s life. Trying them out on a new, barely considered site is apparently no problem for me, and with each small success grew the desire to begin mixing things up for myself on the Pylon.

Honestly, the film list had to go. It was hard to keep up, hard to add to the way it was set up, and so far out of the way to do no good at all. Especially because no one ever saw it or cared about it. The chief reason, though, was that it was time, for my own purposes, to begin properly using the Labels function in Blogger. I had added the little demons to posts rather infrequently through the years on here, but was always confused as to why I was using them, since they never showed up properly on the site. I swear – though I am sure someone will tell me I am dead wrong – that the sidebar gadget I ran into the other day which allows their use openly on the sites was not there the last time I looked into it a year or so back. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking in the right place.

The latter is probably the case (or was it guitar?), and it is all academic now: the labels are finally live and in place of where the film list once oozed. The problem is that I now have to go back through four years of posting and start adding appropriate labels to everything. This is going to take almost as much time as it did to write and post the damn pieces in the first place. I guess we create our own hells – I'm sorry, we call that “fun” around here.

Also finally added is a subscription service, now that I have actually opened up a live feed through Feedburner. Along with that, a box featuring all two – count ‘em – TWO, GODDAMNIT!!! – of my faithful followers. Brothers and sisters, lend me those “follow” fingers of yours! Look, I’m your pal here. It’s not like I have added a ridiculous, unwarranted “donate” button to the page, and it’s not like I cram any ads onto the page (because what would I earn? Six cents a month?) All I ask is for the same amount of loyalty I would pay in return. Occasionally comment on my blogs and I will occasionally comment on yours. Follow my Twitter page, and I follow you in return (oh, yeah… another feature I enabled on here). Subscribe to me, and I you. That’s all I ask.

Not a lot of changes, actually, but enough to make the place seem different somehow. It's one of those "did you move the sofa?" moments. Yes, I did, and hopefully getting a better view of the rug will help tie the whole place together better. At least until someone decides to wizz on it...