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You know what? This Onion article is eerily spot-on. Get me the fuck out of here.

Perhaps this is just part of my pre-birthday malaise or maybe it’s been brought on by witnessing a woman on the sidewalk across from my office this morning in a stretchy pink ensemble pull down her pants, hike up her top, and adjust her underwear. And on the street just now I laughed at a junkie who was holding an ice cream cone and sobbing uncontrollably.

Because every last bit of my empathy has been sapped. That’s it! That’s all she wrote!

I’m going up to Brimfield again next week, so at least that’s…something.

Anyhow, this picture. This is my Kim’s Video membership card. I got it right before I moved to NYC. My boyfriend at the time didn’t have a credit card and Kim’s required one, as a deposit. For those of you who are not from NY, Kim’s Video was a NYC institution, staffed entirely by bitter cineastes and musophiles who made it quite clear that your taste sucked. There were two locations, one in the West Village and one on St. Marks Place. (Both of those have since closed, and all the movies were sent to Italy, but now there is a new location on 1st Avenue that I’ve never set foot in.)

St. Marks Place between 3rd and 2nd Avenues, though rapidly gentrifying even 13 years ago, was still quite a bit different from how it is now. There were junkies everywhere and we still had Coney Island High and See Hear Books and various used record stores and performance spaces. These have all been replaced by four frozen yogurt establishments, five Korean fried chicken restaurants, 17 stores that sell bongs and NEW YORK FUCKING CITY t-shirts, and a SuperCuts. I’m not saying it was necessarily better back then, but at least it didn’t look like a wing of a mall in Delaware.

The first movie we rented was Streetwise. I remember it well, because it was one of the only times the Kim’s clerk didn’t sneer at my selection.

Soundtrack: Mark Sultan, I Am the End

THREE UNRELATED THINGS:

It’s been 14 years since I started polishing the chains of the patriarchy by taking up shaving again (after a six-year boycott that really pleased my parents and my myriad backwoods dating prospects, I should add) and to this day I’m still no good at it. I use those supposedly foolproof ergonomic rubbery pink kind with the guards and I still end up gouging myself every time. The women in the commercials make it look like they’re doing ballet and when I do it I look like a monkey washing a cat.

I just came up with an awesome idea for a rom-com: Jennifer Anniston goes out on a blind date with some A-list actor (Gerard Butler? Is he passe?). They have a great time and go back to his place and when she goes to use his bathroom she steps into a time-space vortex and is transported 30 years in the future where she finds that they’re married and also that he’s a reincarnation of Hitler. So then she travels back in time to the present and has to decide whether she should kill him or not. But first she needs him to get her pregnant. It’s going to be called One Crazy Night.

Finally, I was walking up Broadway this morning and saw this guy walking down the sidewalk who was either shouting a lengthy insult at someone or proselytizing crazy stuff like “FAGGOT COCKSUCKER grar grar grar JESUS grar grar grar GET YOU” etc. And in the middle of his oration he stops, fishes an envelope out of his pocket, drops it in the mailbox, opens the door again just to check to make sure the letter went in, and then continues shouting GRAR GRAR GRAR and walking down the street. I don’t have much to say about this apart from wondering how it is that crazy people can remember to mail their rent checks and I can’t.

I have this thing now, it’s called exerting the least possible effort in the fight to save publishing and support independent houses and bookstores. So at least once a month, I buy a book at a local indie shop. I know — I’m a visionary.

A month or so back I bought Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, a memoir by Frank Meeink, a former racist skinhead and recovering addict from Philadelphia, “as told to” Jody Roy, PhD. I chose it for a couple of reasons:

• I am somewhat fascinated by the white power/patriot movement/far-right-crazies
• I lived in Philly for awhile and I was always running into those fucking assholes
• I like French flaps

I will now reveal my own bigotry: I hate the City of Brotherly Love. In 1995, taking some time to “reflect” on what I wanted to do with my life (i.e., trying to pull my shit together after what had been an unexpectedly bad year of college), I lived in Philly with two friends of mine, on a cute little dead-end street in Center City. And I hated it. I hated its bizarrely parochial and stupid citizens, its attitude toward cyclists, its cops, its crustpunks, its Krishnas, its lame music scene, and its seemingly uniform, deep-rooted racism. (And yeah, I do recognize the fact that this was fully 15 years ago and things have <facetious>almost certainly</facetious> improved since then. But my memories of Philly are like a prehistoric creature encased in amber. And I would fully endorse that as an urban initiative.) I had jobs in a couple shops on South Street, selling band t-shirts and rings with dolphins on them and Manic Panic and clove cigarettes to 13-year-olds. And, most annoyingly, I regularly dealt with the skinheads who trolled South Street. They would invite me to come “hang out.” (Blond hair, blue eyes…I guess it was enough to overlook the other, quite obvious signs that I was not an ideal candidate for the white power movement.) And what did I do every single time? I’m embarrassed to admit that I merely politely declined. Because I am the biggest wimp in the world, and these dudes — whom I’d have laughed or snarled at if they’d only been a bunch of your standard Philly inbreds — were indeed kinda scary.

So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way: the book. You know what? If it helps just one person realize that Racism is Bad, then that’s great. I wish Meeink well; I hope he stays sober and keeps doing what he’s doing and running his youth hockey program. But this memoir left a lot to be desired. It plodded, it meandered, it repeated itself. And in trying to capture Meeink’s voice, Roy manages to fill page after page with some seriously hokey metaphors and language (I mean, c’mon: “ain’t”? Listen to the Fresh Air interview linked below and tell me how many times he uses “ain’t.” ). And it simultaneously offers too few compelling details and too many unnecessary details. There are dozens of instances in which he recalls the picayune — the precise number of pills he took or how much something cost or an entire headcount at some meeting, for example — yet neglects to recount the important details, like what people looked like or the conversations he had. This book would have benefited from more guidance (and a hell of a lot more editing). What should be a compelling look inside the mind of a legendarily violent skinhead and how he ultimately came to question everything he believed is, instead, an endless saga lacking the elements of passion or introspection the story deserves.

You can hear his Fresh Air interview here. I found listening to him talk about his life far more interesting than reading his memoir. He says something interesting, that as an angry teenager, he could’ve easily fallen in with any group; the skinheads just happened to be the first to get to him. In high school, I often wondered about some of my friends in the hardcore scene — clambering for the mic at shows to sing anti-homophobic anthems, they seemed like they’d have been just as comfortable if the lyrics had been about putting gays on an island and blowing it up.

Speaking of: I know I mentioned this already, but I’m fascinated (though unsurprised) by the recent murders of white power movement leaders. And I think both stories are entirely plausible. Have you ever seen a skinhead rally? It’s basically a codpiece and a full set of teeth away from a goddamned Pride march. And there actually are gay “racialists” out there. I had an issue of MaximumRockNRoll that had an article on the topic of gay skins and the MRR archives are pointing me to an article from 2002 but I’m pretty sure I read it in the early 90s–if anyone has a scan of it, feel free to email me at genius@derasso.com.

Weak ending, I know. I had a whole ‘nother section about the hardcore movement and its thuggishness and misogyny (what a treat!), but that’s just going to have to wait until later. I started this post a month and a half ago and I don’t feel like waiting another month and a half to publish.

[edited to add: In thinking about it some more, I feel like I've been a little mean to this book. It has messages that will resound with some people -- one being that fucked-up parents beget fucked-up kids, a very popular memoir theme these days -- but the (unintentional) volleying between the banal and the ultraviolence and the prodigal-son-returns stuff just didn't appeal to me. But you know what? I hated Soul On Ice too. I think I just must have a problem with men!

Oh! And! Another thing that creases me is that Meeink speaks about racism on behalf of the ADL, a group I am not particularly fond of, because I also have a problem with assholes.]

I am back from Florida and to my immense disappointment, all the half-written posts I had kicking around did not auto-complete and publish themselves in my absence. I have a meandering review of Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead in the wings that just keeps getting pushed back and lengthened because the racists keep doing such funny fucking things lately, like making passes at the former gang members they hire to mow their lawns and getting stabbed to death in the process. Plus, I just love talking about white power folks. They’re my favorites.

Over the winter break I downloaded a number of mp3s from various music blogs’ “best of 2009″ posts in an effort to bring myself somewhat up to speed on what the cool kids* are listening to. Somehow I ended up with quite a few songs by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. (Go to HypeMachine and you’ll find hundreds of posts about them.) I listened to them a bit and thought, hm, this isn’t so bad.

So I googled them and found their site. Why? Why would you do that? It’s like Hippie Peanut Butter Jelly Time. (For a second I actually wondered if it was a gigantic animated gif, but no…Flash. Everyone’s favorite.)

Then I found their Wikipedia page. The lead singer was formerly a member of a “pop-punk” band that toured with legends of rock such as Hoobastank. Then he got sober and spent a year in seclusion and had a vision and led his followers to their deaths in South America formed this new band.

This discovery turned the sweetness of their sound into saccharine.

So then, check this out: It’s them on David Letterman.

He looks like he should be spraying a deli buffet with watered-down feces and she’s laughing and dancing like she’s having some sort of Sufi/transcendental meditation-induced orgasm. STOP BEING SO HAPPY, PEOPLE. It’s Letterman, not Jelly Bean & Blowjob Land.

Finally, I looked them up on Pitchfork, a site I rarely read because it might as well be written in Sanskrit for all I know about music these days. This review summed it up better than I could:

Remember Fruitopia? How good that sounded for a couple minutes? They’d roll out these big, beautiful kaleidoscopic ads before movies sometimes, swarming strawberries in stereo, and you’d look down at your Cherry Coke and feel somehow as though you’d failed. Of course, in the lobby’s light, you came to find out that Fruitopia was not in fact made by hippies using ecologically sound methods for growing giant fruit, but rather extracted and besaccharined by the very Coca-Cola corporation that had seemed like the source of so much pancreas-punching horror not moments before. Fruitopia was, in a way, more evil than your simple soda; evil, because it tricked you into believing it was good when it wasn’t.

Just as I had hoped. Sure, that song “Home” is pretty catchy until that stupid “conversation” in the middle takes a big aural dump on the whole thing. Sure, their influences are intriguing: Brooklyn Bridge, Arcade Fire, Ennio Morricone, Spencer Davis Group, Lee Hazelwood, David Bowie, Journey, and every psychedelic band named after a flavored appliance. I haven’t heard all their songs, but smart money says that there’s some Jim Kweskin-style jugband and kazoo as well as something along the lines of Subway’s “$5 Footlong” jingle. Because why the fuck not.

But it’s all so fucking calculated. I suspect that the dude’s “year in seclusion” was spent reading Gartner reports on what hipsters like to listen to.

*Not these Cool Kids.