Perhaps you haven’t heard, but there’s a movie coming up that’s going to SHATTER YOUR WORLD (assuming your world sucks) and it’s all about Facebook. It’s directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin and features Justin Timberlake — how could it not be great? Oh, right, it’s about a website that is but six years old and it’s a serious drama.

But Jeremy and I are nothing if not dreamers and we see all the sparkling promise of this movie.

Here’s a taste of what we hope to see in The Social Network:

1. A scene set to “Friends In Low Places” by Garth Brooks, ideally when Mark finds a friend request from a kid who used to bully him at Harvard (shown in an earlier scene; bully is played by Jake Busey.)

2. Justin Timberlake landing on the moon.

3. Zuckerberg looking at a girl he’s in love with through a window at the university cafe. Later he goes home, looks at her profile even though they’re not friends, and masturbates while hitting the right arrow key through her Profile Pictures.

4. A porn virus and/or the word “Zuckerfucked.”

5. Zuckerberg’s assistant trips over a cord and drops the GoGurt he requested be brought to him in a dim room, sending it spewing across the floor. Tension. From a shadowy corner and with a threatening tone, Zuckerberg will say, “You fucking didn’t.”

6. One character who indignantly and sarcastically says, “Well that’s just Scrabulous.”

7. When scrolling through people’s Interests, Zuck’s partner says, “Dubstep? What the hell is dubstep?”

8. One scene where someone holds a gun to Zuckerberg’s head and says, “I said ‘force quit’ you bitch.”

9. Zuckerberg breaks up with his girlfriend. He goes through all of his photos untagging her name and retagging her “WHORE.”

10. Warren Buffett cameo where he looks at Zuck, winks, then turns to friend and says, “That kid will be okay.”

A disclaimer: I originally wrote this essay as part of a creative nonfiction class, working from David Foster Wallace’s incredible Consider the Lobster and its predecessor, M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. I’m perfectly aware I don’t so much as touch their masterworks and that this has turned into a creature of its own. I’m also aware that neither footnotes nor writing of this length are friendly to deal with on this here blog. I won’t be hurt if you wave the flag of TL;DR and go running back to the comforting embraces of infographics and Facebook personality quizzes, but for those of you who muscle through it: thank you! I hope you goddamn love it.

–

An incredibly French gym teacher in a swishy Le Coq Sportif tracksuit is here to teach us a lesson about soda. He stands before my eighth grade class with perfect posture, a highball glass and a one-pound sack of refined sugar. He rhythmically doles out ten tablespoons, then looks out at us like a falcon trying to choose which fidgeting tween to subdue and shred alive for dinner. Finally, predictably, he announces, “Voila! Every can is zhees much!”

It doesn’t take performance art to know that sodas are sugary beyond reason, bricks in a wall of death if you drink enough to build one. On the other hand, Splenda and its ilk remain shrouded in scientific mystery even to scientists; to be certain, no physically fit Frenchman with a spoon and stage time ever taught me (or will teach me) what is in my Diet Coke. That soda, what is currently the marriage of Coca-Cola and Splenda, has dominated the low-calorie soft drink market since its debut in 1983, its revolving door of artificial sweetener partners notwithstanding. Saccharin, aspartame, sucralose, cyclamate, perillartine, miraculin,[1] alitame — as long as the label bears the Coke logo and a bunch of zeroes, as a public, we’re willing to drink it. I’ll drink it. I put my faith in something every time I buy a diet soda; the porky, business casual-clad Sunday Funnies character that lives inside me quips to no one, “Well if it’s so bad for you how come the good people of Evanston Gas & Food keep a whole cooler of it?”

The answer gets political fast, which is probably why I spend some ninety-seven percent of my beverage-consuming hours plainly not considering the issue. Most of the time, it’s enough to assume that an authority out there in the American abyss (maybe the President or Deepak Chopra or Ashton Kutcher) has penetrated the minutiae of its chemistry and signed off on its safety for the rest of us – not ideal, but enough.[2] After all, diet soda is entirely about satisfaction of a very limited variety: temporary, immediate, ironically short of splendor. Nobody ever remembers that magnificent diet soda they had that one time; often we’re just thirsty for another. But now, it’s not that I don’t want to trust the Amorphous Bureau of Trustworthy Somebodies that allow for over five thousand grocery items to include Splenda, it’s that we’ve brought such a chemical into existence in the first place.

Without writing the words “selective chlorination” any more than I just did, I can tell you that Splenda is six hundred times sweeter than anything nature has come up with. It begins with sucrose, a natural sugar, but given two chlorine atoms our metabolisms don’t process it as a carbohydrate or secrete insulin, making it safe for the diabetic population. The differences in its molecular structure cause it to appear flakier and taste sourer,[3] texturally closer to pills pulverized with a credit card than the comfortingly uniform crystals of granulated sugar. Year-long tests on creatures ranging from starved rats to artificially inseminated rabbits to Marmoset monkeys and beagle dogs showed no harmful effects[4] apart from a few pregnant female animals that experienced gastrointestinal distress from undigested Splenda. Still, between its long shelf life and its stability in processing, it remains the most versatile artificial sweetener, a door opener for the food and drink industry eager to meet our endless demand for sweet things.

Radical believers in the cult of the yellow packet not only deem it more evolved than other artificial sweeteners[5] but as an improvement on nature. An average Diet Coke drinker won’t call it a food: “It’s a seasoning, a flavoring,” one offers, as though he’s introducing me to the gospel of Chef Paul Prudhomme over a roasted chicken. People in deep Splenda denial will throw around the word “efficiency,” implying it was borne out of the Great Sugar Famine as a solution and its consumers are eco-conscious forward-thinkers – but even to them it doesn’t merit being called food.[6] The fabrication and quasi-euphemisms swelling around the word “additive” point to a distinction between food and edible nonfood: the former has a necessary relationship with nutritional value, bulk and naturalness while the latter is stuff we nebulously deposit into our mouths and happen to digest without dying.

Where it gets murky is that the category of edible nonfood is burgeoning in tandem with technology and diet-related diseases, really preventable ones that are killing an incomprehensible number of people. The way edible nonfoods are commonly categorized by food manufacturers makes them seem even more bizarre in concept: there are gelling agents like agar which make our food firm in texture, bulking agents like guar gum which create the illusion of there being more without actually increasing food’s nutritional value,[7] and glazing agents like carnauba wax which render food shiny.[8] Granted, it’s easy to make groceries with these ingredients sound as though they’re grade-D People Bait strategically placed in our paths by diabolical aliens, but it’s just as easy to subconsciously deem these qualities positive and desirable in food. Somewhere amid our carnivalesque delight that the solid squirt of filling in Combos can be made to taste like a whole pizza, the question lurks: should we be eating things that are not food?

The part of the edible nonfood-eating experience we’re most confident about is that it doesn’t have short-term consequences, but it would make good sense if it’s contributing to the shortening of our lives in a way that a jog or a trip to the farmer’s market can’t counteract. Still, so long as the Amorphous Bureau of Trustworthy Somebodies (or worse yet, an actually identified, actually trustworthy somebody) doesn’t specifically identify the consequence, the risk in each bottle or packet feels intangibly, almost pathetically low. Casual consumers of the stuff are more or less comfortable with the idea that, in this hand, we have seen true food and raised it health and pleasure. If we haven’t improved on nature, we’ve still granted ourselves practically unlimited access to the gustatory and aesthetic sensations of sweetness and shininess and jiggliness and so forth, all behind nature’s back.

Given the ubiquity of Splenda, even implicitly suggesting its slogan ought to be something like “the edible nonfood shortening our lives” feels sensationalist and condescending to everyone and no one, the sort of belief that can earn you snide social labels ranging from elitist to hippie to vampire. “I get immense satisfaction out of saying I haven’t had soda in over two years,” said a dear friend who has become more diet-conscious since being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Even still, pressure to beat society to the punch was palpable as she added, “I’m also an asshole.” Despite the blueprints of sucralose’s molecular structure and almost-conclusive heath warnings before me, I’m tempted to beat my chest like a frat boy at a NASCAR-themed party and bellow, “Just shut up and drink the shit!” followed by a hearty “AMERICA!” There is something very American about the concept and culture of Splenda: the idea that we can have a free pass sparing us the need to exercise discipline and self-restraint similarly underpins everything from Eight Minute Abs to Internet porn to the lottery, each a gas-fiery burst of shallow enjoyment[9] that doesn’t promote responsible behavior of any kind. What Splenda does promote is that we can get something for nothing; that it’s fine for indulgence to mutate into a given; that we’re entitled to having an unreality realized for us just because. We can scrape the depths of our willingness to be ignorant and put patches on our desires and weaknesses, but stacking quick fix on top of quick fix can’t possibly work.[10] Our fantasy of “getting away with it” has to backfire when we’re trying to make a fool of our own physiology, as does the self-delusion in treating “good” as synonymous with “nontoxic.”

In theory I can talk myself into thinking of Splenda as rubber-flavored Satan dust for the mind, body and soul, but in those moments of droopy-eyed dehydration I still reach for it. Why? At the risk of sounding petty and irresponsible, I assign partial blame to the Frenchman and his swishy tracksuit. It was he who first inculcated the message in me that real-deal soda is a danger beverage, wicked and off limits.[11] Nine years later, his voice reverberates in my mind issuing stern anti-sugar warnings as though we’re connected by invisible can-and-string telephones long distance. By contrast, though the troublesome aspects of Splenda abound, I don’t have a distinct enough health reason to shun it. Somehow, the consumer testimonials and my own speculative fears and even the image of beagles in a lab don’t meet the burden of proof in the fleeting moment when I decide I’d like my coffee sweet. Despite that it’s the tip of an unsettling moral and cultural iceberg and that it’s neither sugar nor seasoning nor food, I do derive a distinct enough satisfaction from it. It constitutes one miniature daily pleasure, like remembering an old favorite song or having an interaction with Comcast customer service that doesn’t leave you completely infuriated. Of course it’s unessential in the grand scheme of things, but the life-enhancing quality is there, humming just a little louder than the vague medical concerns and the tinny chemical off-notes of Splenda’s taste. It’s not a habit I can be proud of, but I can act like discreetly opening one more packet won’t make a difference to anyone. I’ll take the small pleasure where I can find it and hope the shit misses the fan.

[2] Never mind that the FDA has a track record of granting artificial sweeteners approval for the market before implicating side effects, some as minor as headaches, some carcinogenic. The list includes saccharin and aspartame, which are omnipresent nonetheless.

[3] During a product assessment in 1997, a year before its FDA approval, chemists claimed it had a drying effect and described its flavor as being slightly rubbery. One would think diet soda’s purpose is to escape such sensations.

[4] Besides the moral discomfort of having fed a bunch of beagles Splenda for a year.

[5] Particularly in that its flavor palate has far subtler notes of poison than those of Equal (aspartame) and Sweet ‘n Low (saccharin.)

[6] Actually, the scientists who discovered Splenda didn’t even mean for it to be food. As its history goes, a young Indian chemist named Shashikant Phadnis misunderstood his adviser when she instructed him to test the substance and instead tasted it. That may not have been the most prudent choice given that their original mission was to create a new variety of insecticide. I suspect Dr. Phadnis would make a fine reality television contestant given his blind willingness to lick powders of undetermined toxicity.

[7]Like the ingestible equivalent of the mark-to-market accounting that preceded the Enron collapse.

[8]So really, it’s only a matter of time before we’re all on the Free-Floating Zero-Calorie Glow-In-The-Dark Jelly Jiggle-Cubes Diet.

[9] I suppose re: Internet porn “enjoyment” really depends whom you ask, should you choose to ask at all.

[10] If it does, they’ll have to revise the entire story arcs of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and the Martin Lawrence movie Blue Streak, among others.

[11] Fine, I suppose the tracksuit didn’t do anything wrong.

These guys are not in the "Best Music" list, but they swept the "Take A Shower" awards.

We do a lot of talking at Taintbrush. Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we are right. The latter is one of these times. These are some jams I liked a lot in 2009 and why. They are pretty typical and I am boring, but with respect blow me.

Best Absolutely Everything: Japandroids – self-titled

The No Age record of the year, which means it rocked really hard with two people. It’s loud and boisterous, has some great anthems, and is possessed with a fatalism in the songwriting that matches the intensity of the guitars, grabbing you and making you believe, Yes, who gives a fuck, because I’m in love with you tonight. You might also be thinking, Jeez, this record is a lot of romantic bullshit. Well, I am a romantic. I think it is the best record I heard all year, and there is not a song I disliked. It’s not better than Nouns, but who cares? I had 97 chances to see them in New York and didn’t go.

Best songs: “The Boys Are Leaving Town,” “Young Hearts Spark Fire,” “Sovreignty”

Best Black Music Dilemma: Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move

Rough timeline: Dirty Projectors song and album, Bitte Orca, comes out. This album is either great because of its R&B leanings (because I’m a boring rockist who’s never listened to Mariah) or shitty because it shamelessly co-opts black music with an indie rock sheen for wussy Brooklyn crowds (because I am a pessimist). Then the Solange version of this song drops, and it’s either great because of its R&B leanings (because I am hip and Solange is urban enough to be without critical reproach) or it’s shitty because it’s boring and is too much R&B for my boring rockism (because I am a pessimist). Then I put both versions on a mix CD for a girl and either sleep with her (because I am hip) or don’t (because she sees my ruse and sleeps with the high school quarterback). Either way, I have lost.

Best Retro Outfit: The Raveonettes – In And Out of Control

Okay, so they haven’t really changed their sound since I started listening to them in high school: There was always lots of feedback, lots of hooks, lots of Jesus & Mary Chain ripping. I specifically wrote about their last album, Lust Lust Lust, that it was good but unoriginal, that all the shameless influence ripping was making me queasy. Well, this album did the same thing except by now I don’t care as much about innovation because I’m boring, so it was okay! Aside from the best rock song I heard all year in “Bang!”, an under-three minute garage stomper about dirty love, the Ravers also twirled into the abyss with the death-poetry of “Last Dance” and “D.R.U.G.S,” making it okay to still wish you were 15 and in love. Forget the awkward diatribes of “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed),” because every album has embarrassing PSA songs.

Most Secretly Depressed: Matt & Kim – Grand

Somewhere in between becoming the soundtrack for every University of Illinois dorm party and headlining the 2009 MTV Woodie Awards, Matt & Kim gained the reputation for being a “cute” band. Then Matt gave an interview where he said he’d been seriously depressed for the last 4 years. I feel like this is a coincidence. It wasn’t until the robo-beat of “Lessons Learned” and synthesized whine of “I’ll Take You Home” that I realized that jeez, maybe he really was depressed, what with all the lyrics about being romantic in the face of mediocrity and waving goodbye to your dying friends in a city you love a lot (maybe that’s not what the songs were about, but it’s after midnight). Then they played Pitchfork 09 and proved that amazingly, hipsters could mosh to “Yea Yeah” but they could skip the Jesus Lizard for being “too boring.” Sigh. The requisite cute song in “Daylight” was also pretty good.

Bloggiest: The xx – self-titled

I saw these guys play at Goldsmiths College when I studied there in the fall of 2008, at a party for freshmen students. They were alright, but the music didn’t fit the club atmosphere and I spent most of the time wondering when the DJ would be playing Nelly songs. And then I got kicked out for disregarding a rule I didn’t know existed. It was a shitty night! However, one of my best friends liked the band so much that he kept following them back in America, even seeing them play a small club and listening to them on Myspace and Hype Machine when he could. It was how you used to follow a band before you read about them, seeing them randomly and deciding you liked them enough to keep going. Anyways, when I visited NYC over the summer, the hype had finally built up to a “Best New Music” label from Pitchfork and undulation from the music press and blogosphere, culminating in a #1 spot on Hype Machine for “most listened.” My friend was upset – not because they were popular, or because he was first, but the hype meant that thousands of people would download the album, listen to it once, then glibly dismiss it as something they didn’t like, when he had spent months following and enjoying this band. When you like something, seeing people snarkily reject it is painful. 12 hours later, a friend of mine IMed me to ask me if I had heard their album. The moral: Being the first on something almost never pays off.

Most Kate Bush: Bat For Lashes – Daniel

Somewhere along the line, Natasha from Bat for Lashes gained this mystique for being an indie rock goddess, someone who wore funny makeup and made cryptic press statements and danced around a lot like Ian Curtis. Add in the foxiness, and the quotient for indie rock fetishization was sky-high. Does the craziness sound similar to another pop starlet in the early 80s? Because we don’t have Kate Bush to make music anymore, we have a Bat for Lashes to fill her void. This songs was things like “ethereal” and “haunting,” making it a great song to put on mix CDs for girls to appear “thoughtful” and “egalitarian.” The lyrics may also be about the Karate Kid. Regardless, that chorus syntax – “When / I / first / saw / you / Daniel” – is perfectly propulsive, and it’s fun enough to be Kate Bushy.

Best Dad Rock : Yo La Tengo – Popular Songs

No Dad, you shut up! Another consistently good album from the best trio of indie rock dads and moms in the business, shaming all other parents with their guitar heroics and solid rhythm sections, even if the funk on “Periodically Triple Or Double” makes you wince. The experimental fog of “Here To Fall” wades you through a sonic swamp, and songs like “Nothing to Hide” speed along with pop delight. I hope I’m still this good at age 50.

Best Album That I Ignored Out of Sexism: Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

My worst sexist trait is that I don’t trust anything that only women like. When this Phoenix album dropped, the only people I knew who were bumping “1901″ were girls who I didn’t like. This sounds pretty bad, but I figured the album couldn’t be that good and ignored it for a while. Then I picked it up and it was actually pretty good. I can’t always be right.

Second Most Kate Bushes: La Roux – self-titled

I saw Alexa Chung dancing along to “Bulletproof” in a NYC story, so La Roux must be doing something right, right? The angular rhythms of songs like “In For The Kill” and “I’m Not Your Toy” provided the best scoff faces to dance with in 2009, and I once referred to the lead singer’s hair as the “anti-Wavves” of music. Then I dove into a tar pit and swam until I couldn’t breathe.

Best Lyric Absolutely Ever: UGK – She Luv It

“Put my dick inside your mouth / Try and fit my whole dick and nuts inside your mouth” – RIP Pimp C

Worst Dad Rock: Dinosaur Jr. – Farm

Plodding and slow, and I couldn’t get through the album because I hated myself for it. Let’s just move on.

Best Reissues: R.E.M. – Murmur/Reckoning

If you haven’t downloaded these yet, please do so. They are the Rosetta Stones of indie rock. Hallelujah.

Favorite Songs:

The Raveonettes – Bang!
The Dirty Projectors & David Byrne – Knotty Pine
Neko Case – This Tornado Loves You
The xx – Islands
Matt & Kim – Lessons Learned
Chris Brown – I Can Transform Ya
Phoenix – Lisztomania
Weezer – (If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To

Oh, this crowd. My roommate and I are here because she called into the radio station and won tickets, and now to my right is a girl who has taken her shirt off, wearing just a leopard print push-up bra and jeans. This is what we won. Her dance move of choice is some sort of fist-pump/vadge-thrust combo and I spy thong straps. Within moments she’s been hoisted up onto the shoulders of a tall blond boy and she’s doing the same move minus the legs. All that thrusting against the nape of his neck makes it look like he’s suffering from whiplash. “She’s going to fuck his head off,” I worriedly think to myself as I run for cover.

In the process of fleeing the hell away from this two-headed tower of human promiscuity I accidentally bump into another collegeish boy who has decided to take his shirt off. It feels like walking in on someone else having sex, er, not just walking in, more like tripping and collapsing into bed with them; in other words, sticky and horrifying. He’s “in the zone” or whatever and doesn’t notice me, meanwhile I can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or a sort of kamikaze of body parts if I use one of my hands to brush his sweat off my arm.

I escape to the bar where water – poured from a bottle of Crystal Geyser into a plastic bathroom cup – is five fucking dollars; beer is three. I ask for a cup of ice (free dollars and ninety-none cents) and wait a minute until it’s melted into ice water. Feeling satisfied with my resourcefulness I re-enter the crowd, only to have the cup snatched out of my hand and flung into the audience. The song playing has only one or two audible lines of lyrics: “All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha,” and back to the bar I go for attempt #2 at hydration.

Speaking of concerns of hydration, here’s where I really slip into being a geezer, because fuck it: The band, or DJs, or Apple store Geniuses or whatever they are up there, is called MSTRKRFT. Or MKRJFJRTKFRT or FKTFBLARKMARKFART or something, but it is pronounced “Mastercraft.” Despite how energetic the music is, this whole genre is a bit of a shrug for me. It’s fun and explosively dancey but usually lacking in the structure that I think makes a song a song. What? I like melodies. With this, you can’t exactly tell when one is starting and another is ending except for when they change the color scheme of the iTunes visualizer projected behind them; it’s constant thumping and sound effects. All 7,000 of us are facing the stage but there’s certainly nothing to watch if you’re more than 30 feet away, or, if you’re like my roommate, you’ve danced your contact lenses out.

But I’m still having fun. I vacillate between just sort of going with it and seeing this whole event like a festering bacterium under a microscope; sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I have no idea what I’m doing, sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I know they have no idea what they’re doing. Some people say they’re there to hear the music live (live…from…laptops….) but this whole scene is full of people making out and dry humping, like a multi-county middle school dance where every patron has a rocket vibrating in his ass or something. While dancing with one guy, I endured a swipe at my crotch so forceful I think I sustained an instant urinary tract infection. All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha.

As the show ends I realize just how drenched in sweat I am and how randomly crunchy my hair feels (crunchy! AAH!) and decide that this experience has been close enough to athletic activity to merit a Gatorade. We go home and retreat to our rooms. I put on fleece pajamas and turn on Feist like a fucking sucker.

Some heroes look like Cary Grant. Mine looks like this.

I. I think I’ve just seen my hero walk past me in a Barnes & Noble. He is almost middle-aged, wearing a ferocious beard with square-rimmed glasses, a white t-shirt stretched over his pudgy frame, normal jeans, squeaky voice (he just asked the clerk where the bathrooms were) and has now walked past the security detectors, out of the doors, and down the hallway. I consider two things: a) it would be slightly creepy to start following him; potentially, if we meet in the bathroom, it will be more weird than cool and b) either way, I absolutely have to do it. I start walking behind him – 10 feet at least, see him get on the escalator, follow at the top like the world’s least subtle spy, and begin to wonder. Is he going to the bathroom? What is he thinking right now? If he sees me standing behind him, will he assume I’m a normal person or a fan? If I get close enough to say something, will I? (How are you? How’s it going? I loved your stuff. You’re my hero. Be mine forever. Okay, probably not). Predictably I get distracted by my thoughts during which he turns a corner, walks out of my sight, and it finally dawns on me that to follow him is an act of lunacy. There would be nothing more awkward than saying any of the things I had thought a moment before. So I stop, walk over to the rows of chairs in front of a podium where he’s scheduled to speak in twenty minutes, sit down, and take a deep breath. I take out my phone and text to my friend, “I think I just stalked Chuck Klosterman down an escalator!”

II. Yes, you read that right. My hero was Chuck Klosterman. I was 17 and 18 once upon a time and had never read a writer who blended pop culture and existentialism like he did, assuring me that matching all of my observations on life to pop culture phenomena was not only forgivable, but logical. To some, Klosterman is a talentless hack who goes for the low-brow every time and is only meaningful to people without ideas or ways to think about life; to those people I would respectfully say fuck you. What separates Klosterman from any other pretentious pop culture essayist is that I truly don’t think he believes what he’s writing all the time; that if someone proved him wrong, he would accept it and go from there. He isn’t trying to enforce his ideas as much as offer them to the universe, a perspective I find enviable. So what if he wrote 5,000 words on why Billy Joel is a genius? He’s just trying to get you to see where he’s coming from, even if you don’t believe him.

But ANYWAY (to borrow a popular Klosterman-ism), at 17 I didn’t have Derrida or Heidegger or even Bangs; I had Chuck, who wrote things I was already thinking and made me think, “Geez, someone is thinking just like I am” (not a unique phenomena) and also, “Geez, I can make a living doing this!” (also not unique). But this was important. This was the kick I needed, heading into my freshman year in college (I bought Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs the summer after high school) on a tepid interest in journalism, a stronger taste for creative writing nascent in my brain but a seemingly otiose thing to pursue formally in college. Why do I need to pay $50,000 to learn how to write a story? I thought, and so I was going to college with no real idea of what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what front of the book or back of the book was, had no concept of AP style, had never heard of the inverted pyramid, thought “hed” was misspelled, thought “lede” was double misspelled, and so on.

I was not a natural journalist. I wanted to write, and Klosterman was that bridge between creativity, fact, and reality-stretching that, to be fair, hundreds of thousands of other teenagers also recognized and said, “I want to be like him!” And so, everything I wrote in my freshman year in college was decidedly Klostermanian, to coin another bullshit phrase. I once wrote a 5,000 essay about attending a Chicago Bulls game in which I compared our front court to albums by the Replacements (a gimmick I’d picked up months earlier, when Klosterman drew analogies between every woman he’d ever been with and members of KISS). I wrote pop culture columns for the paper in which I tossed off analogies like, “This album is slower than Shaq in transition,” “Wilco is like Gram Parsons meets Pavement only they don’t actually want to kill themselves,” and “American Idol explains where our society is at” (yeah, seriously).

These were not good things to write; important maybe for me to realize how absurd my own sense of superiority had come by recoiling from my opinion in printed form, but as far as making the campus think I was awesome, I failed pretty hard. I got a bunch of hate letters, the student group that organizes the concerts at my school (and fails miserably) started a feud with me that has never ended, and to this day I still think a third of the people who actually pay attention to campus media would like to punch me in the face. I get where I erred now, but in 2007, the failure to ingratiate myself to my peers through my dazzling pop culture observations seemed like bitter failure. I was embarrassed then; in retrospect, I’m embarrassed now. Following Chuck had led me nowhere successful; I took my patchwork style, mostly (okay, completely) influenced by his and ditched it for something more pensive, and moved on.

III. I had a minor revelation two years later one night while sitting very stoned in my room, unable to even hold a videogame controller or reach for the bag of Cheetos (SHOCK!). The crisis was such: Being that I didn’t know everything (everything as in every piece of art, thought and history that had ever been created, expressed and occurred), how could I comment on anything? What authority did I have – what authority did anyone have? Was there ever a point I could reach where I could speak authoritatively about anything? As a writer, how could I even pretend I knew what I was talking about, ever?

By accepting my own limitations and ignorance. By being able to be wrong, learning from my mistakes, and going from there. By being un-self-conscious enough to cast away bitterness from going the wrong way and having the strength to go the better way. It didn’t matter whether or not I was absolutely right, as long as I thought I was mostly right and could accept being mostly or absolutely wrong if the time came. It’s like having a guilty pleasure; this revelation was enough to cast away irony and the need to feel guilty for liking something or even needing to justify why this thing is worthy of being objectively liked (see: Slate on Creed, Robert Christgau or Christopher Hitchens on anything). Those Lester Bangs pieces I read where he dissed Exile on Main St. only to laud it as brilliant a year or two later weren’t the sign of a weak writer afraid to stand by his convictions; they were the mark of a strong writer unafraid to look silly if it made him a better person, overall (as much as listening to the Stones can do that).

In this light, Klosterman’s aspirations and my own were much easier to reconcile. Klosterman always maintained he wasn’t trying to get anyone to think a certain way; when ESPN columnist Bill Simmons asked him in an e-mail exchange, “Don’t you think this is disingenuous? You have to know your personality influences people to agree with you,” Klosterman responded that it wasn’t his responsibility to account for the malleability of his audience’s brains, a fair claim considering he wasn’t exactly trying to get anyone to kill the president. When I had written like a mini-Chuck as a freshman, I wanted people to think the way I think, to see the connections I was drawing between culture and life and to accept these connections as omni-present in everything.

Reading Klosterman, I agreed with him so much, his writing mirroring things I was literally writing at the same time (before I bought his book, I wrote a mini essay on why I hated soccer that roughly covered some of the same things that Klosterman’s essay did, or at least I’d like to think so) that I never considered the other truth: Plenty of people think Klosterman is an idiot because they think he is trying to convince them that what he thinks is fact. If he was trying to make his objective case, then yes, his failure to appeal to these people could be seen as a failure of persuasion. But persuasion was never the name of his game; general rhetoric and idea-sharing was. As long as I thought in the latter, I couldn’t lose; if I tried to persuade people, I would always fail.

IV. Back to the hero thing. After hearing Klosterman speak at a panel this summer, right after I had considered stalking him to the bathroom/Starbucks/wherever he was going, I had the opportunity to stand in a line and get my shit signed by him. Normally this never matters to me because you never get face time at a meet n’ greet, so why waste the time for a pleasantry and a scrawled signature? But Klosterman was different. Klosterman had been my hero. He wasn’t anymore, but he had been so important to my development as a writer that I needed to validate my sputtering 18-year old self reading passages from Killing Yourself to Live in a room full of girls by standing in this line for 15-20 minutes and meeting him.

So I waited and waited (making a fool out of myself trying to small talk Nathan Rabin, the semi-genius writer of the A.V. Club who, despite writing an entire book about how awkward his life was, came off smoother than me trying to ask him how to get a job) until it was finally my turn. I put my book down (Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs – the first book I bought from him and the most worn out), and asked him about the NBA, like a ton of other people had, I’m sure. We shot the shit about the draft for a bit, I tried to shoehorn my post-modern conception of the Minnesota Timberwolves (which he brushed off) and then, like a total herb, I busted out the following words:

“I just want to let you know that you were a really important writer for me. I’m really glad I got to hear you speak, because when I was younger, almost everything I wrote was influenced by you in some way. I guess I’m out of my ‘Klosterman’ phase now (full air quotes) but it was a place I needed to be for a while, and I’m glad I was there. Also, can I suck your dick?” Okay, not the last sentence. He looked sheepish and thanked me for the words, then shook my hand, wished me well, gave my book back to me, and let me skip away while thinking, I’m never going to wash this hand (I did about a minute later, after going to the bathroom).

Now, I’m not fooling myself into thinking this was meaningful for him at all; it’s entirely possible he thought, Oh God, another fanboy, tuned me out, and then went back through the motions once I had thankfully gone. It is possible he thought my haircut tragic and my clothes pedantic and that later than night, he told the anecdote of the dork who had wassailed him with love to a UChicago grad student he eventually banged. That much is possible. But it didn’t matter to me. I hadn’t said those words for Chuck – I had said those words for myself, and completing the circle of hero worship by actually meeting the hero was all I needed. I realize that possibility everyone in the line felt the same way, or not at all; it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it happened to me, and that I felt that way, and nothing else.

V. So how did I react in a post-Klosterman world? By freaking out when I unwrapped a copy of his newest book, Eating the Dinosaur, in the office of my fall internship, debated stealing it for about 10 minutes before asking the editor whether or not I could borrow it and being absolutely giddy when she said I could keep it. Goodness gracious! I started reading it on the train and finished it the next morning after staying up all night reading as much as I could, and immediately started it again on my way home later that day.

How is it? Pretty good, I think. It’s sadder than his other books because Klosterman, like Jonathan Lethem (another New Yorker who writes about pop culture and smoking weed), seems to be realizing his limitations as a human being in the techno-driven world we live in, and is becoming increasingly depressed about it. His other books may have seemed mildly opinionated; by contrast, I think he even admits to not really believing most or some of what he says in this one. Doesn’t matter; it’s going to sell a lot of copies, get some fawning/spiteful reviews, be successful for other 17/18-year olds like me, and the cycle will continue. I liked the essays about the Unabomber and the David Koresh/Kurt Cobain comparisons, didn’t fully get the ABBA chapter because I only know “Dancing Queen,” and appreciated what he had to say about football. You may find my criticism very dull; fair enough. At this point, Klosterman doesn’t have to convince me to keep reading, and unless he throws up a giant stink bomb (like the ‘09 Cubs or Season Two of Heroes), I’m going to keep reading.

Later that day after finishing it, I was at a female friend’s, catching up in the years since high school. Her alt-chick roommate stepped in the room and joined the conversation, which turned to the perks of my job. I mentioned getting Klosterman’s new book, and the roommate got excited and asked me how it was. I responded by taking the book out of my bag, opening it to a page, and reading from it out loud as I had when I was 17, when I was 18, and now, 21, to people who I thought had to “get it.” Once a Klostermaniac, always a Klostermaniac.

"What's up, Real?" "Oh, nothing, Chase - just about to get my dick sucked. You?"

I do not feel safe in the world.

I don’t have health care, because it’s expensive. I can barely pay for college, because it’s expensive. Three months ago, I got doored while riding my bicycle, so now I wonder if I’m going to get hit again every time I head out on my wheels. The local paper ran an article about gangs attacking men in their 20s between midnight and 2 AM last week in my neighborhood, and I’m a man in my 20s who comes home between midnight and 2 AM last week in my neighborhood. I suffer from gout. Alright, not really – - I don’t even know what gout is. But anyways, I’m also afraid VH1 is trying to brainwash the way I think.

This is not a Klostermanian segue into a witty pop culture thesis from my own boring personal life. This is something that wracks my brain, albeit only under certain conditions, because I think it might be happening to you and me and everyone we know.

Let me explain — I’m going off memory here. In 2002 or 2003, Flavor Flav was on The Surreal Life, a show where washed-up celebrities congregated in a single house to be dramatic and washed-up together. As Flav seemed to be suffering symptoms of early dementia, this of course means he was given his own spin-off show with Brigitte Nielsen, the 7-foot Amazonian temptress who has bedded everyone who might have been hung up on a teen boy’s bedroom wall in the ’80s. The name of their show escapes me — I think it must have been something like Double Trouble, or Fear of a Brigitte Planet, but that can’t be right.

Anyways, that show ended and Flav had another show, Flavor of Love, where a bunch of aspiring actresses or models competed for the right to give Flav a blowjob on camera. I think this must have happened a lot. Anyways, there was a notable contestant on that show, Tiffany “New York” ______, a loud woman who looked like a Muppet and had a fine set of fake breasts, who achieved notoriety for being that girl on the reality show, the only contestant who was ready at any moment to head tantivy into any embarrassing or uncomfortable situation while being as tactless as possible. I’m sure you all know this, but anyways, after the show ended, Tiffany got her own reality show, entitled I Love New York, and eventually, I Love New York 2.

Are you following me? When those shows ended, another show started up that is currently running right now: Real Chance of Love, which follows two of the outcasts from I Love New York named Real and Chance as they really try to get some aspiring models to give them blowjobs on camera. If anything stopped Flav from getting as much pseudo-groupie slobber as he could, it might have been the shred of self-respect he had as a man in his late 40s, realizing, Hey, I’m the hype man for one of the best rap groups of all-time, I don’t need to whore myself out on TV to get something I can easily get already. The man has like seven kids; he’s not that hard up for action. But Real and Chance? Oh, they definitely needed this attention from the ladies; if not, it was back to Z-list Celebrityland. So their show is going on right now, and it’s a train wreck.

This is the family tree that has sprouted up from this affair, and the thing that is going to kill me: The Surreal Life –> Don’t Brigitte The Hype –> Flavor of Love –> I Love New York –> Real Chance at Love —> ???. If we think about this chronologically, it means that the contestants on Real and Chance are fifth generation reality TV stars, with their 15 minutes being traceable back to Jordan Knight and that unremarkable girl from American Idol with pretty hair. And the thought that kills me is that this cycle is going to keep on happening; eventually, the fifth generation reality stars on Real Chance are going to get their own series, and we’ll get the sixth generation and beyond.

It happens elsewhere on VH1, but with less complexity: There was Brett Michaels’ Rock of Love, which branched off into both Daisy of Love and Megan Wants A Millionaire. It gets more complicated if you consider the I Love Money series, where contestants from all the shows compete with each other. As Real, Chance, Daisy, and Megan competed on these shows together, it makes them interconnected, so that contestants on Real Chance can be traced all the way back to the guy who wrote “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” even though the stars they’re directly descended from never tried to touch Michaels’ dick.

This is probably unremarkable by itself: Studio produces crappy shows, what else is new. But VH1 is both a) getting people to tune into all these shows, as Real Chance averaged 2 million viewers per episode despite being about two contestants on the reality show of a contestant who was on the reality show of a real celebrity, and b) making these shows good. If you watch them, you will be entertained, especially if it’s in the haw haw what a bunch of idiots way. The editing is tight, the characters are all ridiculous (my favorite guys are the two best friends on Daisy of Love, one an emo scenester who remembers Pink’s cyclist ex-boyfriend, one a guido Steve-O who’s five feet tall), and even if you don’t care (because you don’t), you will sink your Saturday afternoon getting high and watching all this shit.

I scribbled down a note when I was watching TV – “Do the people who make Daisy of Love recognize the shitty product they’re making and not care, or do they totally want to kill themselves, or do they actually think they’re making valuable TV?” I don’t know the answer – I suspect it lies somewhere between the first and second explanation – but right now, VH1 has perfected the ability of making us watch crap we don’t care about, but will totally be entertained by, and they’ve found an endless way to keep reproducing the success by reproducing the contestants in as many spin-off shows as they want. It’s the bare iota of creative output right here; while it took some tiny level of ingenuity to think, “Hey, let’s throw a bunch of washed-up quirky celebs in a house together,” or “Hey, let’s watch Daniel Baldwin try to lose weight!” (or not), all VH1 has to do now is keep eating its own tail, like Jormungandr, the Norse serpent that circles the world. The emo/guido BFFs on Daisy of Love I mentioned? They’ll probably get their own show soon enough, and the cycle will continue, until once day VH1 does a reunion show of all of these casts and reveals the Wizard behind the curtain. “You idiots,” they’ll say, “It was all recycled! None of it was new!” But by then, you’ll just sink your teeth into the new show and grab a handful of Froot Loops out of the box, ready to stop caring and start watching.

mfw, lookin' for some cutie Asher Roth fans

Acoustic hip-hop covers are the most unheralded genre in music, because music critics are afraid of the transformative power of a bro bleatin’ rhymes in a flat tenor over weakly strummed chords on a two-bit guitar. Do you want to listen to rap but you’re afraid of the loud beats and barked curse words? Is your mom not down with Nas, but totally twee for the Dave Matthews Band? Then head over to Youtube to find an array of awesome covers for any artist, all done by your favorite Sigma Rho members in backwards baseball caps.

This week, we’ve labored to bring you the best covers of Asher Roth’s “I Love College” that we could find. We won’t do the social analysis of white suburban kids aping a white suburban kid who apes black music, forming a multi-headed Hydra of cultural backwash that can’t be easily ignored – that is, if we choose to acknowledge it in the first place. Asher Roth’s schtick is that he’s the one white guy all the black people in the room are down with, which he demonstrates in almost all of his music videos. But we will let no pessimism enter the list – instead, close your eyes and let your emotions drift away on a sea of Jello shots.

There’s something in this guy’s flat delivery that’s just so charming, the way he reduces Roth’s swagger-jackin’ rhymes to humble offerings of his desires and aspirations. Yes, fill up his cup; yes, let’s get fucked up; no, no bouncin’ in his house; yes, Hakeem Olajuwon and Allen Iverson. The backwards baseball cap is standard, as is his chiseled Grecian jaw. Picture yourself on a hazy June day, sitting on a friend’s porch, watching his roommate play this song while trying to romance any number of girls who stare at him with fawning eyes, awash in his musical transcendence. You’ve just been date raped.

Listen, if the house band starts playing “I Love College” and there aren’t any girls around, don’t fret. You’re more mature than that; you don’t have to waste a good track just because there’s no biddies to get acquainted with. No, you muster up your courage, walk over to a bro, and grind on him. You touch that man’s penis. And you enjoy it. Eyyyyyyy.

So sad. So plaintive. So raw and emotional. If you’ve ever wanted to watch Asher Roth sung with the melodrama of Celine Dion with the sonic execution of a backing-track-less Ashlee Simpson, here you are. He is staring into your eyes because he wants you to love him. He is waiting for your response.

Black girl covering a white dude covering black music? Urrhgghh….my collegiate perceptions of race and class just got shattered… how to even properly snark on this? Oh well, back to watching anime “ironically.”

If the best thing you and three of your friends can do on a Saturday night is lay down a weak cover of this song, then I don’t think you get this whole “being a productive human being” thing. I mean, maybe it’s a fun way to spend a night, but I don’t know what’s being gained or lost when something like this is the culmination of human productivity and desire to act. I mean, maybe we’re irrational actors in an irrational world, flailing in the darkness to find whatever meager solitude we can, and that solitude is “I Love College.” I’m not sure man, I’m really not sure, I just know that if you’re doing this shit then you had better be ready to die for it. If not, then what’s the goddamn point.

You’ve made it through my favorite “I Love College” covers. Congratulations! Kill yourself.

(via Buzzfeed)

I didn’t watch the Michael Jackson memorial because I was being a working person doing work at the time of its bajillion-channel broadcast (I still love you, liveblogs.) Regardless of business hours, the strong-willed and sensible among us would agree that based on premise alone (put a coffin on a stage, have a clashy mix of celebrities sing and act sentimentally, involve the E! channel) there was no conceivable way to make it tasteful or even un-painful.

In a ceremony that looked more like an American Idol season finale than the commemoration of a really great-weird public figure, the only thing I can possibly call “good” is the resurfacing of this man, one Darryl Phinnessee. He is what would happen if the cast of Tim & Eric Awesome Show and maybe How Stella Got Her Groove Back and RAAAANDY cumswapped (um, apparently I know porn verbs) and backwardly surfed the waves of time to a whitewashed corporation in the ’90s. This person, with his heartbreaking typo of a name (would you guess it’s pronounced like ‘finesse’ or ‘Tennessee’? Both?) and hypnotizing dragon face (somebody take out the calipers and take measure of this person’s wacky skull) is also the lyrical genius behind THE FRASIER THEME SONG.

Up until today I’d really completely forgotten about the song “Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs.” That one is deeply nestled into the nostalgia ball pit, buried under layers and layers of more easily recalled entertainment hallmarks of yore (haha Saved by the Bell haha) and far out of most people’s reach. So I extend a cold thank you to Mr. Phhhinnesse, both for having a last name that appears to be the sound cartoon characters make when they’re falling off a cliff and for composing that hilarious turd of corporatized lounge music. More like, Phinn-YES, right? Darryl’s the only Phin I See! Ha-cha-cha!

* * *
Hey baby I hear the blues a’callin’
Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs

And maybe I seem a bit confused
Well, maybe, but I got you pegged

But I don’t know what to do with those
Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs

They’re callin’ again

– Darryl Phinnessee, memorial star

In the vacuum of gangster drama, no one can hear you emote.

The above title is irony. Public Enemies will not make you shit yourself. It is also not a shitty movie. But, given the expectations of the summer action blockbuster that has permeated most of American mid-year film culture, you will leave the theater flushed out of over-CGI and girls in skimpy clothes, cagey one-liners spilled from actors’ mouths like burnt popcorn on the stove, perhaps disappointed in what you’ve seen after your high wears off and you realize that smoking weed actually made the movie worse. Then, perhaps, you will stop going to see shitty summer movies like Transformers 2 and maybe go to the alternative cinema, emboldened by PE’s promises of artistic transcendence. You will have had a filmic public enema while watching Public Enemies. Lol

Public Enemies is a 2 and a half hour experiment in mainstream gangster fiction because Michael Mann didn’t want to make a movie that would be compared to The Godfather, or worse, something like American Gangster. It looks murky, shot in digital format and not actual film. The cinematography is choppy, taking place behind trees and hidden by staircases. There’s star power – Johnny Depp acting as gasp, a jovial and wacky dude, and Christian Bale grunting a lot – but no one-liners or typical narrative build-up. The scenes swirl, lacking a clear thread or arc for the characters to grab ahold of – by the end, the sinking feeling is that there isn’t any higher meaning to the bank robberies committed by John Dillinger, or typical Hollywood platitudes. There’s just crime and violence.

As I was watching the movie, I hated it – I mean, really hated it. I fell asleep around 30 minutes in, completely bored by the formless bloff on screen as Johnny Depp strolled around with his Johnny Depp grin and some people were killed, although why they mattered I wasn’t sure. I woke up to the ugly ass digital format staining my eyes – an aesthetic choice akin to scrubbing your eyes with bleach – and kept checking the time to see if this 150-minute adventure into gangster minutiae would finally end. I scoffed at Bale’s incessant gruffness; I laughed at Marion Cotillard’s half-in-half-out American accent; I wondered if Billy Crudup’s bit role as J. Edgar Hoover would have been better if he was glowing blue and showing his dick. When I walked out of the theater, I was asked what I thought. “What a fucking waste,” I grunted, not in sarcastic snark but in the disappointment that I had just spent my afternoon watching “that bullshit.” Then I went to a burger joint and watched a fat man endlessly scoop peanuts out of a free box full of them into his palm. This did not seem like a 4th of July worth remembering.

The lesson of course is that I am an idiot. Public Enemies is not a bad movie because I fell asleep, nor is it a great one because I can read reviews bemoaning the lack of action and think, Well, it’s an art film! It’s a daring take on gangster formula, because Michael Mann was handed a huge budget, two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, a 4th of July opening weekend, and decided to use the time to troll any family intent on seeing a fun summer blockbuster in between bouts of grilling. I have to respect the obvious middle finger to convention. It’s also a major let down, because for all of Mann’s lyrical musings on the existential squalor of actually being a cop or a robber (or both, if you’re a Chicago cop), the movie doesn’t go anywhere. All of the characters are cold (except Cotillard’s weeping wife) and never learn anything; the robbers are slowly mowed down as the war on crime escalates, and the cops get more and more ruthless in their attempts to apprehend Dillinger. Is Dillinger aware of the ultimate mundanity of his life, how hollow his good living is? Maybe, but he will keep living anyways. He must have known he would be gunned down at the Biograph Theater (only 20 minutes from my house in Chicago!) when he went to the movies with his friends, but he didn’t give no fuck about it.

Cotillard is the only character worthy of audience empathy; it’s too bad Mann felt the need to drag it out from viewers by having her get beat up in a harsh interrogation scene (Those jerks! you say from your seat). If you feel bad for Dillinger, just an honest man trying to make a dishonest living, then keep your sympathy to yourself – Depp’s character, bereft of all emotions but love, doesn’t need your tears or your companionship. One gets the idea that he goes through life collecting acquaintances not because of the need for friendship but for routine. He goes to the movies because he needs something to do; he shoots a man responsible for his partner’s death ouf of principle; he works with criminals like Baby Face Nelson not because he likes them but because they’re good at what they do. General morality is no concern to Dillinger; just his own personal sense of right and wrong.

Seeing Public Enemy is more recommended than seeing Public Enemies.

The obvious connection I can make is the recent The Assassination of the Outlaw Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Who Totally Shot Him In The Back, Isn’t That Fuckin’ Wack? starring Brad “I Can Act” Pitt and Casey “I Want to Act Soooo Badly” Affleck, a film with similar musings on the harshness of criminality, buoyed by idyllic cinematography on the frontiers of America and way more connectable characters than this one. I mean, even if you hated Affleck’s sniveling Ford or Pitt’s brash, rude James, they at least make you feel; the biggest crime about Public Enemies is that too many of the characters don’t even seem to matter. Why invest an opinion in any character that doesn’t even seem important in the context of their own film? The success at empathy, aided by a not-so-subtle narration track and of course, that beeyooooooootiful photography, is what made TAOFOJJBYCRFWTSHITBITFW? a minor success in the Oscar-bloated field of 2007. The lack of empathy in such a plot & character-driven movie (cause Mann sure ain’t showing you the beautiful scenery with the washed out shitty digital filming) is what sinks Public Enemies just a bit.

One thing is totally awesome about the movie, no questions asked: The sound. Mann’s the guy who directed Heat and that show about the gay cops in Miami, so you better believe he knows how to make gunshots pop out from the theater sound system like they’re right behind you. A friend of mine once told me about how the audio for the gun fights in Heat had been recorded in a vacuum using actual firearms, so that the ring and slug of every bullet could be perfectly called up in film for chilling effect and maybe he did the same thing for PE,  for these are not a typical shoot-happy scenes. In the theater, you feel like you are being shot at, at least, like a nearby spectator in the mayhem.

Eventually, the feeling seeps in that you are just a spectator to everything; there’s no understanding any of the characters, their motivations, or why anything in the movie happens. It simply happens in a perpetual state of in medias res. Even when the movie ends, the final emotion is of an unfinished story, a promise never delivered to the character in it, and just the same, the audience. Public Enemies is as worthwhile of a movie you’ll see in a big theater this summer; just don’t expect to fall in love with it. In the movie, all love leads to is death.

Gwyneth loves Spanish tradition! Especially a hearty vegan, gluten-free, macrobiotic paella.

In light of Gwyneth Paltrow’s outpouring of adoration for Spanish culture, I ventured into my local video store (HAHA local video stores) to peruse the Spanish film section. Feeling dwarfed by the multitude of titles and words with accents, I didn’t even know where to begin! It seems she hasn’t done much in the way of making such high culture accessible to the masses, as Gwyneth is wont to do. Oh, Gwyneth, democratic principles needn’t be a bother to you.

Though we can’t possibly possess her level of sophistication when it comes to foreign language, that shouldn’t mean we’re left out of the loop on her tastes. We can do more to include ourselves in her world than just purchasing her favorite Japanese socks for $16 a pair. Accordingly, I’ve created a helpful Guide To Spanish Film by providing the titles first in Spanish and then translated into English. Enrich your minds!

* * *

AMORES PERROS

English Translation: Must Love Dogs

* * *

Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN

English Translation: Your Mother, Trebek

* * *

LA ESPINOZA DEL DIABLO

English Translation: Spinach Devils

* * *

AMOR DE HOMBRE

English Translation: Gay Dudes

* * *

VOLVER

English Translation: The Volver Report with Stephen Volver

* * *

NO TE FALLARE

English Translation: I Won’t Fellate You

* * *

GUERRERO

English Translation: Gwar (Live Tour DVD)

* * *

LOS ANOS BARBAROS

English Translation: The Anus Barbers

* * *

Hopefully this list will make your first foray into Spanish film a more palatable experience and lend us all the means through which to “nourish the inner aspect.” Yes, consider this the first step on the path of knowledgeability that leads to the sacred land of Gwyneth. Three cheers, mates.