We Are Reaching a New Low

OK, so we had ourselves one extremely mortifyingly/awkward moment yesterday at our company barbecue, an annual event marked by the consumption of way too much of a wide variety of liquids that have the capacity to make unborn children come out looking like this and sometimes impede our lame attempts at operating industrial equipment. And our gross motor functions, which is to say walking without falling onto things and people and animals.

You know how people tend to get loud when they've been drinking everything in sight all day? And you know how they'll be maybe talking to someone else about something that may not be suitable for the entire group, especially because there are children around, but the stereo's pretty loud so what the hey? And you know how sometimes these people will say something really awful right when the stereo cuts out and everyone hears it and these people we're talking about may want to go hide in the sandbox and maybe weep a little, if only because the three-year-old daughter of the boss/party host is standing there with half a Fudgeical and so was able to hear, clear as a bell, this sentence: “IF DISAPPOINTMENT WERE A LUBRICANT, I'D BE ABLE TO FIT A SHETLAND PONY UP MY ASS!”

This happens to other people, right?

Also, apropos of nothing, we think they should make a line of Precious Moments™ figurines depicting various rapes. Because, when it comes down to it, rapists have moms who collect stupid shit too. Just think how awesome a porcelain statuette of a guy going non-consensual backdoor on an Eskimo girl would look in a hutch. This is our second big idea of the week; the first was that someone should start a company that hides insults and swears in Braille. You know how there’s Braille in public spaces, like elevators? Where it’s supposed to say “fifth floor,” our dream Braille product would say something like, “Fuck you, Blindie” or maybe “How do you know when to stop wiping?” or “Do you think you’ll have eyes in Heaven?”

What.

Forza Azzurri

Ah, sweet victory. While we’re not sure which, if any, memories of the 2006 World Cup will survive the atrocities we regularly serve up to our axodendritic synapses, right now we’re hoping that we never drink away the things that nice girl from Mott St did to our salsiccia del destino last night after a whirlwind courtship that involved us paying $9 for each Moretti she drank until our largesse and persistent whining finally convinced her to take us back to her weird basement apartment that she shared with her glowering––but, luckily, quick to pass out––brother. We also hope we remember our new friends Claudio and Marco, two cousins from our part of the boot that kept feeding us weird little shots of grappa (that’s Italian for “lighter fluid”) and entertained us with their terrible ringtones. Claudio’s was that weird circus music you hear in Fellini films and Marco’s was––holy shit––“Disco Duck.” When we ridiculed him for his choice in what sort of noise his phone makes whenever someone equally excitable and swarthy calls him up, Marco very good-naturedly would shout, “No! Is good song!” and then dance like Adrian Zmed waiting for a urinal to free up backstage at Dance Fever. We also hope never to forget the man who grabbed us roughly about the shoulders immediately after the deciding PK and boomed, “Come! Now we go see the French people cry.” (He was dead-on about that: Les Ribbets were weeping on West Broadway like someone just told them that Tom Hanks had spent the entire 105-day Da Vinci Code shoot violating each of Audrey Tautou’s dewy orifices while dressed like The Grimace. It probably didn’t help that he kept throwing cloves of garlic at them.)

By 7:00, we were so drunk that we could only see geometry. As such, our conversation was limited to screeching the names of random Azzurri players over and over at anyone who hove into our field of vision. “Buffon!” we would shout. “Totti!” we would also shout. In this manner, we met our new distaff friend who, parenthetically, had way less arm hair than most Italian girls we know. And if making our escape this morning was at once a little uncomfortable and a lot scary––the only way you could replicate what it felt like to tiptoe past the snoring, yet still vitriolic brother of hers is if you somehow arranged to have Geri Jewell give you a handjob while you both watched a Cassavetes movie, one of the ones with Peter Falk in them––we were glad to have been able to reach out and make that human connection without having to fall back on our advanced English language skills. We’ll also be saying a Novena to sort of ask Jesus’ Mom to maybe deliver us from Herpes, Amen.

Lastly, for that dirty fucker Zidane, who brought shame to himself, his team and his entire nation––dude, unless you’re The Man of 1,000 Languages, you can’t get mad about shit talk you don’t actually comprenez––here is the second installment of The Suck Trilogy, the unambiguously titled “French People Suck.” Enjoy.

Wait Until Dork

Couple things.

First, our scary Drug Lord neighbor across the street––we call him American History X because he looks like Ed Norton’s buffy tuffy White Supremecist, down to the Hitleriffic neck tat––launched a fireworks attack at our building last night which left us feeling a little like Francis Scott Key, only instead of being inspired to compose “The Star-Spangled Whatever,” we threw together this***. Dude sent about 30 bottle rockets up and over the front of our Z-Bricked façade and into the backyard, causing the landlord’s dog to shit on the patio in abject horror. Or maybe he just used the barrage as an excuse to shit on the patio. He’s an asshole that way. Anyway, he followed that fusillade with a bunch of flares, one of which landed on the roof and made some wildly disconcerting You’re-Going-To-Be-Homeless-in-an-Hour sounds. After the attack ended, my landlord timidly went out into the street to inquire as to why, exactly, dude was getting all Ft. Sumter up in our piece. His response: Mind your own beeswax, more or less, only instead of those exact words, just yell motherfucker over and over again and suggest that if anyone were to, say, call the authorities, that same person might be divested of many pearly whites and would have to gather them from the macadam with “two fucking broken arms.” So. And then a really uncomfortable 10 minutes went by, a sort of oh-sweet-Lord-what’s-he-going-to-do now period that was brought to a halt by the explosion of an incendiary device that sounded a little like dude duct-taped a dozen cherry bombs to John Madden’s scrotum. This basically left an infant-sized hole in the road, shattered the side windows of the car parked immediately to the right of the blast and set off every car alarm within a two-block radius. Somewhere, the Founding Fathers are dispatching their spectral footmen to convey their apologies to King George III. “Sorry, Old Bean. Didn’t realize that everyone would turn out completely retarded. Snuggles, Thom. and a J with a squiggly line and an ‘s’ that looks like a fucked-up ‘f.’”

Earlier, we repaired to La Strega to watch the Azzurri kick three kinds of shit out of Germany in the World Cup semi. Victory aside, our favorite moment was when ESPN ran an ad for Time Warner Cable’s pay-per-view service featuring clips from the remake of The Producers. “Springtime for Hitler” segued into a crowd shot of about a half million flag-waving Germans that had gathered outside of the stadium, which prompted the old Italian guy next to us to remark, “Oh no. Now they start marching.” This was accompanied by his approximation of what can only be characterized as Disco Goosestepping, a routine that was marred only by his constant juggling of his cell phone, which was glued to his ear throughout the match and into which he kept shouting inscrutable bursts of commentary, and the omnipresent cigarette, which he used to punctuate every one of his gnomic utterances. When he was done with the pantomime, our new friend returned to his barstool and began rhapsodizing on what Uma Thurman’s vagina must taste like. The weird consensus: Figs.

*** If you don’t happen to pick this up in the first few bars, the name of this song is “Fist Fuck.” It is performed by the California hardcore band Dr. Know, and should be played at top volume in your office if your HR guy is cool with that sort of thing.

Ob-La-Dee, Ob-La-Douchebag

We’re back, at least for the nonce, which is Parisan hip-hop slang for “the elapsed time between when someone tries to hype us on that Gnarls Barkley shit––White People sure do love them some Danger Mouse––and when we punch them in the face with an anvil." Which is to say, maybe not so long as all that, but we’ll see. At any rate, we thought we’d dip a toe back into the brackish waters of the bloggy blog with a quick account of what we’re characterizing as The Greatest Celebrity Sighting Ever. (Suck it, Gawker.)

Who: Chris Burke, aka Corky from Life Goes On
When: Yesterday morning
Where: Han’s Deli, at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker
What He Was Wearing: White dress shirt, brown tie, blue pants, tinted eyeglasses
What Happened: There was a palpable frisson in the air when Corky walked into Han’s, a deli we frequent because they have passable coffee and because we are in a heart-wrenchingly one-sided love affair with the Asian girl who works behind the counter. (Having been clued in to our infatuation, which borders on the pathological, some of our less charitable co-workers refer to her as our Special Secret Lotus Blossom. But we digress.) Corky strolled to the muffin rack––he’d obviously been there before––selected a blueberry (without using the wax paper, we might add), and brought it to our girl.
What We Did: Clearly, something needed to be said. And since the only two episodes of Life Goes On we ever saw straight through were the one where he raps “Fight the Power” at the school assembly, much to the consternation of his father and the American viewing public, and the one where he sets the restaurant on fire, we decided to go with the first reference. After all, he probably still feels really shitty about the restaurant fire, even though it was his extravagantly-eyebrowed father’s fault for allowing his retarded spawn oversight of a full-service eatery. And a book of matches. So we say, “Hey, Chris”––an earlier incident with the guy who played Urkell taught us how uppity actor types get when you call them by their character’s name––and he looks over and we continue, “Do you still rap?” Because we’re trying to be cute, we get a ten-minute monologue from the fucking guy about the band he’s in, and suddenly our celebrity encounter has devolved into the conversation you have with any other d-bag in the East Village who’s in a band who’s not the AIDS-y looking guy from The Strokes. [Band name: Bored By Corky.] Anyway, we deftly avoid his clumsy overtures about a) our maybe booking his act for our next party, which we assure you, we do not ever have––all those people touching our stuff, judging the contents of our book shelves? No thank you––and b) offering an autograph, which come on already.
The Upshot: For a guy whose chromosome count is a little dicey, the guy is totally independent, even if his clothes didn’t exactly match. He had a briefcase, and even if it had been filled with coloring books and packets of Lipton Soup Mix, it still bespoke a certain kind of Johnny Lunch-Box respectability. And he certainly seemed to understand how to use money. At one point he did say that he liked our tie, which is pretty much the literal evocation of damning with faint praise, if only because, as we mentioned earlier, his was brown and perhaps crotcheted. Maybe. Also: Consider the source.

Addenda: We see now that we used the word “uppity” in reference to Jaleel White. We didn’t mean anything by that.

Also, this is the official Chris Burke Web site. To put it as crudely as possible, no one in the history of recorded sound gets less pussy than the bearded twins who make up his backup band … and they seem OK with that. Of course, keeping time for Corky and the Num Nums can’t be any more embarrassing than, say, being in Danzig.

Oh, and yes: We are aware that many of you are likely to find this entire post offensive in the extreme; as such, we’d like to extend a peace offering. From the hit long-playing record We’re the Meatmen and You Still Suck, here’s the first installment of what has come to be known among the initiated as The Suck Trilogy, “Crippled Children Suck”.

Rendezvous With Anus

Yeah, yeah: We suck. We update the blog with the same frequency with which we bleach our pubes. Boo hoo. Listen, people––or person; we’re guessing the readership is probably down quite a bit, given the whole deadbeat dad routine we’ve been playing on all you fine folks, who, no shit, we totally think of as our children––we’re busy. It’s not you, it’s us. Your ass does not look huge in those pants. We’d like to still be friends.

Whatever. Here’s a Turbonegro song to set things straight. Think of it as the hastily grabbed bouquet of flowers you buy for $5 from the bodega in order to make nice the day after the little missus walks in on you making sweet love to a Pringles can stuffed full of hamburger meat**.


**Add a raw egg. It will totally feel like prom night. Later, after you’ve rinsed off, you can make the world’s most shame-filled meatloaf. Like, literally.

Baby There’s No Guidance When Random Rules

Memes are the lazy, overworked blogger’s best friend. Here’s our annotated iPod shuffle questionnaire, which if nothing else suggests that we are living in the past, but not in a stinky-Boomer-hey-man-we-ended-the-war-in-‘Nam kind of way but in a huffy-prick-who-hates-everything-and-bores-people-with-stories-about-how-we-drank-beer-with-Legs-McNeil-that-one-time kind of way. Which we never do, but still … only four of the songs that came up were released during this century.

How does the world see you?
“Just a Friend,” Biz Markie. OK, we’ll take that. The Biz is perhaps best known for his clownish demeanor and his dogged pursuit of the fairer sex … although we could do without all the exposition. All that shit about him signing in at the gate and trying to find the girl’s dorm room sort of unnecessarily delays the “Oh, snap! Guess what I saw?” dénouement.

Will I have a happy life?
“Back in Black,” AC/DC. Sounds like a no, but then again, what the fuck is the guy with the silly hat even singing about here? Would have preferred one of their more grotesquely parodic songs, like “Big Balls,” but there you have it.

What do my friends really think of me?
“Shocker in Gloomtown,” The Breeders. That this is a GBV cover certainly suggests a free-fall into alcoholic dissolution, plus there’s the whole Kelly-Deal-Has-[Or Had]-Big-Problems element. Because it’s a Bob Pollard composition, the lyrics actually don’t mean anything, but there’s something telling about the last verse: “So tell me: How the hell did we miss it? / Bared his ass for all to see / and no one got to kiss it.”

Do people secretly lust after me?
“Everything’s Worse,” Giant Drag. That’s generally the sentiment expressed by the ladies after they’ve made their secret lust for us not secret anymore.

How can I make myself happy?
“I Don’t Care About You,” Fear. Shit, this thing is like a fucking Ouija board.

What should I do with my life?
“Methamphetamine Blues,” Mark Lanegan Band. Next.

Will I ever have children?
“A Wolf at the Door,” Radiohead. Another spooky response, if the chorus is anything to go by: “I keep the wolf from the door / But he calls me up / Calls me on the phone / Tells me all the ways that he’s gonna mess me up /
Steal all my children if I don’t pay the ransom / And I’ll never see them again if I squeal to the cops.”

What is some good advice for me?
“Search and Destroy,” The Stooges. And here’s our advice to you, Iggy: Invest in a few shirts. How do you get past the maitre d’?

How will I be remembered?
“Jesus,” The Velvet Underground. Heh.

What is my signature dancing song?
“We Don’t Make Each Other Laugh Anymore,” Arab Strap. This is almost perfect. We stopped dancing in bars and in our apartment when we stopped living with The Ballerina, aka The Girl Formerly Known As The Girlfriend of Sakebomb. We stopped living with The Ballerina when she we made her cry more than we made her laugh.

What do I think my current theme song is?
“I Wanna Know Girls,” Portastatic. Hmmm. “I wanna know girls, don’t wanna know men / I’m already stuck inside the head of one of them.”

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
“Your Phone’s Off the Hook (But You’re Not),” X. “All of New York is a tow-away zone.”

What song will play at my funeral?
“Road to Nowhere,” Talking Heads. This is spookier than discovering that Tyne Daly is now the hot one from Cagney & Lacey.

What type of women do you like?
“Sunday Girl,” Blondie. “I know a girl from a lonely street / Cold as ice cream, but still as sweet.”

What is my day going to be like?
“Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad,” The Clash. We certainly hope not.

The World Loves Us And Is Our Bitch

See those ugly fuckers in that photo right up there? That’s Chris, Tommy and Paul, looking exactly how you think they might look after all these years/beers. No idea who the blonde dude is, but he clearly wants you to smell his finger.

Anyhoo, as has been confirmed by Billboard, The ‘Mats are reuniting to record two new songs for a greatest hits collection that will be released by Rhino on June 13. Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was? will include the first new Replacements songs in 15 years, “Message to the Boys” and “Pool & Dive.” They will undoubtedly suck––Westerberg’s songwriting skills have gone the way of Debbie Harry’s looks and the mustache that was once attached to the tiny man from Hall and Oates, but we’d be lying if we didn’t fess up to being more than a little curious.

While you await the inevitable leak––the Internet has turned the music business into your grandmammy's withered Froot Rollup™ vagina––relive the glory that is the video for “Bastards of Young” here.