Handjobs For The Holidays

OK. So we go to a friend’s party in Tribeca this weekend, and wind up staying the night because all of the sudden 2 a.m. becomes 5 a.m. and we don’t exactly want to deal with the subway in our state. Plus, it’s rude to have half-hearted, sloppy intercourse with someone and then just skedaddle once you’ve deposited your genetic blueprint all over some disappointingly low-thread-count bed linens. (Sorry, but aren’t women supposed to be at the bleeding edge of sheet technology? Along with the jones for chocolate and the endless rounds of shoe shopping and all the crying for no good goddamn reason, isn’t a skirt’s whole how you say raison d’être wrapped up in pampering herself with nice sheets and eleven different kinds of soap and a dildo shaped like John Forsyth?) Anyway, we wake up at around 10:30, and discover that our friend’s weird, Fraggle-looking roommate is up and pulling tubes in the kitchen. Now, normally we don’t smoke much, because it makes us crazy and paranoid, and it seems to wreak eleven kinds of havoc with the potions we take to bevel off the psychic peaks and valleys, so to speak, but our head needed to be dealt with gently, and there’s really no better way to deal with morning toxicity than getting ripped to the tits on the Green Fairy.

So we do.

Time dilates, much attention is paid to a cat, we try our hand at drawing a picture of Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Bill Cowher, who, for the purposes of this particular work of art, has taken over Slim Dunlap’s role in the sucky latter-day incarnation of The Replacements. We get Cowher down pretty well, what with the faithful reproduction of his steam-shovel mandibles and the moustache that looks like it’s always making preparations to crawl off his face, but frankly, our Westerberg looks like something that Eddie Murphy would fuck if Prince had ever taken him to 7th Street Entry. All of which is to say that we are having a grand old time. Eventually, we feel the need to leave the apartment, and by extension, Manhattan. But for any number of reasons, we take the world’s most useless detour and wind up at the Virgin Megastore on 14th. This is probably a mistake.

We spend upwards of $300 on records, most of them by bands we’ve never actually heard before. One of these bands was Broken Social Scene.

A team of neurologists working around the clock for the remainder of the decade wouldn’t be able to explain to you why we bought the self-titled Broken Social Scene album, because we don’t even know and it’s our brain that made the decision. And while we’re not going to go into a painstaking exegesis of the album and why it doesn’t really do much for us, we will say this: Canadians really buy into the old strength-in-numbers dictum. By our count there are 17 people in this band, an utterly ridiculous number, unless you’re in the cantina band on Mos Eisley. What is with these people, exactly? It’s perfectly OK to leave some people out of your band, you know? Not everyone gets to participate in a meritocracy. It’s rock n roll, not the Special Olympics. The fucking Wu Tang Clan doesn’t have as many people in it, and that’s including various ancillary members (read: 24-hour posse people). Plus, there are enough chicks in the mix to field a volleyball team. The fuck?

That said, there are two or three standout tracks here, including “Superconnected,” “Major Label Debut” and the crescendoing closer, “It’s All Gonna Break,” which sounds like a 10-minute nervous breakdown and poses the trenchant question, “Why are you always fucking ghosts?” (The liner notes remind whoever’s twiddling the knobs on this record to “make sure ghosts doesn’t sound like goats.” The other suggestion: “Make it sound like Bob Seger on acid.”)

Overall, we can’t say that we’re too pissed with our purchase; after all, the CD represented a mere one-seventeenth of our overall expenditure, which included a Richard Hell thing that we’ll probably only listen to once and the expanded edition of Sonic Youth’s Goo, which but for “Disappearer,” “Mary Christ” and “Dirty Boots,” we don’t even like. Now we have more of it.