Joe Blubaugh’s Blog
This one’s been a long time coming, but it seems that the LOL phenomenon may be nearing a peek. LOLcats have been around forever, but the lolrus, lolpres, and lolcode seem to spell the beginning of the end for the latest dumb-internet craze. I hope it collapses quickly under its own weight and we’re spared the prolonged kiss goodbye of the Chuck Norris phenomenon.
kthxbye
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that even Geoffrey Chaucer is in on this.
I’m heading down to Valparaiso this weekend to check out Kat’s environs and enjoy what will hopefully be some beautiful Memorial Day weather. Scattered thunderstorms, we’ll see.
Ten from the iPod:
ABC4 News warns us all about a dangerous new culture:
One site instructs, “dye your hair black. Style it in the gunshot wound and never be happy. Happyness is a sin to emo culture.” In a state where the number two cause of teen death is suicide, experts say parents need to know emo culture and understand it.
Hide your daughters!
So, there are at least two nights (potentially three) that I have, have to go to Summerfest. I mean, sure I could try and go for the half-ironic fun of watching Def Leppard, Styx & Foreigner keep going, or see Blue Oyster Cult, but my friends, there are two absolutely essential shows here: Weird Al Yankovic, and Spoon! Also, the same night as Spoon, B.B. King! Good day, sir! On the third potential night, Morris Day & The Time will be getting their funky groove on, but I don’t know if it’s worth a third night of admission prices. Son Volt will also be bringing it to town on a fourth night, but why must all the good bands be so damn spread out? I don’t have quite that much time and money.
It is encouraging to see at least that many good shows on the calendar, though. It’s actually a decently varied festival for a city like Milwaukee; there are rappers - good ones - like Lupe Fiasco and Ludacris, some classic rock, some modern whine-rock, some good shows, some decent country, even. Huzzah!
So it’s done. Goodbye Veronica. I’ll miss the entertainment value, the highly improbably rich-poor dynamic, and the dialog that delightfully treaded the line between Gilmore Girls absurd and One Tree Hill banal.
I won’t miss this season, though. Weevil has just turned into one giant charity case when he could have been a great story about a guy trying to live clean. Mac and Wallace are barely there. Veronica can’t carry a show on her own, and Logan is so moon-eyed and mopey that I could care less what happens to him.
The biggest problem with VM season 3 has always been that college is just not as good a setting as high school. The show had to spend too much time introducing relationships between characters to get a good mystery going. Then, the characters would disappear for a while. College is too big for a show that tries to have a continuing plot line like VM, and the experience is so varied that you can’t appeal to a stereotypical experience the same way as in high school.
VM relied on the stereotypes, twisting them slightly and making them more fun. They failed that every time they tried it in college, with sorority girls, frat boys, and feminists. The two-episode shadow organization from tonight’s episode is a prime example of the problem. There’s no archetype, no history to draw on. Still, it almost managed to pull me in because the writers finally hit a plot that resonates: Wallace willingness to sacrifice his own luxury for his morality and his friends. Unfortunately, they discarded it far too quickly in favor of another go-round with the Kanes.
Bonus points to tonight’s episode for the Neko Case.
Yahoo! has a full page up, including a theatrical trailer for The Golden Compass. It’s funny to see Eva Green and Daniel Craig in another movie together so soon. This book was so, so good, but I find myself worrying just what they’ll cut out. It’s likely that the subtleties of adolescent sexual awakening will be largely subsumed by the adventure story, but that’s a shame. The whole series hinges on sexual awakening, the concept of sin, individualism, and authoritarianism.
If they make it through the series-as-movie run, here’s hoping that they let the small, sweet moments of the books make the large impacts they’re supposed to.
I know that I’m a year behind the times here, but you should really read Absurdistan. A satiric novel that can name-drop Joseph Heller without it feeling like an attention-grab or a too-knowing wink deserves some attention. It’s got an over-obvious author stand-in character, which makes a great skewer for the self-congratulatory Hemingway style. It’s got a great Russian mirror of all the misguided idealism and willful ignorance that we apply to our foreign policy in this country.
We’re all graduates of Accidental College.
Kat came up to visit me in my new Milwaukee place this weekend. She got to my place before me, due to some sort of mysterious traffic attack. We were both greeted to an apartment building with no electricity. It’s a good thing that it’s summery, so we were able to spend time walking around outside and going places, neutralizing the effect of the outage.
I’m even more enthralled with my neighborhood now - I can walk to everything that I would need or want in an environment. There are parks, shops, restaurants, bars, theaters, and a hospital, so I’m covered for just about anything, including bike repair.
I eventually got fed up with the power outage, since all the other buildings on the block were lit up and we were sitting around in the dark. I called the power company, and they told me that the service was turned off. They couldn’t say why, since I didn’t own the place, but I finally got through to my landlord (five hours after the first message that I left him) and he did whatever it was he had to do to get the power back.
Yesterday I was talking with a girl who lives in my building and found out that the power bill had been delinquent for something on the order of months (!!) and that our property was listed as a commercial entity for some reason. It is illegal in Wisconsin to cut the power to a residence without some kind of court proceeding, but not for businesses. I’m ready to go toe-to-toe with my Aunt Sue about bad landlords now. I haven’t had to get a restraining order against mine like she did, but I think I’m pulling ahead in the irresponsibility department. I’ve had a landlord fall through my ceiling, leave my roof half-finished, and fail to pay the power bill now. Top it.
It’s been fantastic having Kat here for the weekend. I’ve had a great time showing here all the reasons I like living in Milwaukee. There’s something great about watching someone else discover something you love and love it, too.
You must be me.
When you first meet Chuck Palahniuk, you’re not sure that it’s him. He’s slender, with big ears and a quick smile. Is this the same guy who wrote about a psychic death poem, the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, and a split-personality terrorist who was just looking for love? He doesn’t speak like he writes, either. He’s mannered, and he considers his words before he speaks. He doesn’t curse.
Listen to him long enough, though, and his authorial voice comes through, as if his characters are really a way of amplifying aspects of himself. The gleeful way that he recounts stories (he once got an American executive hopped up on pain pills and scotch), and his stirring recollections of finding meaning in unexpected places bring to mind the best parts of his prolific collection (he’s written ten books in ten years). His taste for the macabre didn’t start to come out until later in the talk, when he told a series of severed finger stories and began tossing fake limbs into the audience.
The crowd at a Palahniuk talk is different from most ‘meet-the-author’ crowds. A man who was there with his daughter observed that “it’s heartwarming to see so many young people reading.” It seems, though, that many of the attendees would rather be the tragic accidents of characters that inhabit a Palahniuk novel than learn the lessons that his characters ignore. His main characters do have a fatalistic allure, but one can only hope that the youth are savvy to the lesson and not just the surface glitz.
What great surface glitz it is, though, and Chuck Palahniuk brought plenty of it to Alverno tonight. He read two unpublished stories, “Cold Calling” and “Love Nest.” The former story showcases his all his strenghts: an alienated hero in a dead-end job makes an improper but meaningful connection with somebody, then helps it all unravel as he discovers the artifice that holds the relationship together. It’s really a powerful one, and I hope that we’ll eventually get to see it in published form.