A Short Series of Twisted Observations

I was reading “Vice’s Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,” and this is what happened.

I’m not going to review a piece of journalism.  Instead, in an unhinged act of defiance, I’m going to create my own piece of journalism. 

Something that isn’t true

What’s more tortuous than writing, asides from shaving your own eyebrows or getting a blowjob from a girl with braces?  How about trying to come up with original ideas.  When I was younger, and just slightly more flippant towards the world, I realized that originality meant being sort of weird and outside yourself.  I became my own deranged experiment in an attempt to intellectualize the absurdities of real life and fantasy. 

Unfortunately for most people, there’s no originality in being totally unoriginal. On the other hand, being too original comes off as desperate and obvious.  So ideally, you want to fall somewhere in between mediocre and semi-unoriginal, which is basically the stylish personification of not giving a @#$%.

A + B  = I have no idea

Am I out of touch with the normal world?  I’m a spiraling optimist with no sense of direction.  Instant gratification is the tragic rhapsody of my life; therefore, I'm usually drunk.  I read in a self-help book on how to be smart, that the inability to foresee the potential consequences of a normal act or decision is a result of the brain’s underdevelopment, which, evidently, is permanent after you hit a certain age.  Do you know what that means?  That some of us are doomed to a life of lost jobs, messy break-ups, miscalculations and parking tickets. 

Don’t listen to me?

How do you "find yourself?"  Do you backpack around Europe for 3 months and spend every last penny you have?  Do you go to Thailand and get completely wasted every night and hook up with the world’s finest transients?  I'm not sure.  Either way, self-revelation can require an extreme journey across the unfamiliar landscape of staunch experimentation.  Whether it’s sex, drugs, music or school, nothing works better for me than mixing it up; routines are for stand-up comics and traffic cops.  

Next time: all-nighters and one-night stands  

Toast and Peanut Butter

Wow. I just finished reading an essay by Chuck Klosterman from his book, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs,” and I'm vaguely bamboozled – I think. His essay draws a parallel between the consumption of sugar cereal and the struggle for aging hipsters to be cool.

He illustrates the relationship, first, by addressing each cereal mascot's unique character flaw and situational dilemma. For example, the Trix Rabbit, often marginalized as “silly”, has never been allowed to enjoy even one bowl of his favourite foodstuff. Klosterman’s logical explanation for this restriction intertwines both age discrimination and racism, suggesting that we are to accept that Trix is reserved exclusively “for kids”.

Klosterman touches on a few other examples that, to me, have very little correlation with the thesis his analogies aim to support: “a product’s exclusivity is directly proportional to its social cachet, which is the definition of calculated adult coolness.”

Chuck presses on to describe in excruciating detail exactly what kind of coolness he’s referring to. Until that moment, I had never considered or appreciated the commercial implications of coolness on such a warped level. But Chuck seems to have a lucid understanding of this unspecific paradigm, extending far beyond mainstream teen coolness and aging hipster default coolness, both of which apparently reflect an opposing (and sort of pathetic) consumer aesthetic.

Despite the ostensible disconnect in his comparisons, the essay is held together by his sardonic style and obsessive eye for detail. There are points where you don’t really know what he’s saying, but it doesn’t really matter because it might make sense if only you were smarter – whether it actually does or doesn’t.

The truth is, reading Chuck will make you smarter – probably. Have a dictionary on hand and prepare to have thoughts like, “who the !@#% does this guy think he is?” But really that’s just the voice of your inferior intellect speaking.

Klosterman’s style of writing epitomizes the Converse sneaker, Argyle V-neck sweater, angular haircut, and thick-framed spectacles fashion. He makes you feel smart (for being able to connect with his insight) and stupid (for not being able to express it), as you laugh at his witticism and writhe with contempt at the pomposity of his prose.

Girl Talk Anyone?

Girl Talk Gets Naked. Often. That’s the headline of the article I read in the October issue of GQ magazine, written by Paul Tough. It features a picture of Greg Gillis – a.k.a Girl Talk – screaming into a microphone as sweat pours from his body on a crowded stage at a show in Norfolk, Virginia.

Gregg doesn’t exactly fit the stereotypical profile of a sample-based DJ. His style of music, strange and alluring, transcends genres in an almost nonexistent way. Gillis basically dismantles the anatomy of any and all forms of music, then mashes together the most unlikely combinations he can conceive in an ADD-like fashion to create a sort of eclectic mixture of every song you’ve ever loved – on one three minute track.

Before Girl Talk

Gregg’s background in music isn’t of the highest standard either, academically speaking. In the article, he tells a story of how when he was a boy, in the late ’80s, he would walk around everywhere with a cheap boom box, and when he heard a song that caught his interest, he just hit “record” and held it up to whatever – the TV, the car radio, his sister’s CD player. You can imagine what the final product sounded like. A mess. But he would listen to it on his Walkman, forty-five minutes on each side, until the tape was destroyed.

Gregg proceeded to explore the underworld of weird sub-genres in search of the next big thing: "speed metal, math rock, drone-pop, death funk, riot grrrl, beep-core, electronic garage, whatever."

It didn’t matter that Gregg couldn’t play an instrument; he formed a band with his friend Joe, anyway. They called themselves the Joysticks Battle the Clip-On Expressway to Your Skull. They were like the antithesis to mainstream anything, concerned more with mocking popular culture and annoying the audience than actually playing music. “We’d line up ten CD players with scratched CDs and play them all at once and then break them, and that would be the show,” Gillis says in the article. “Or we’d play the Forrest Gump soundtrack and smash a TV. A show might last twenty minutes, or it might last five seconds.” It didn’t seem to matter though. Gregg was pressing the boundaries of his eccentricity as a performing artist – for good or ill.

Final Word

This was a fun read, in part because Girl Talk is such an amusing subject. From the beginning, Paul draws you in with an active tone of palpable excitement. He pilots you through each event leading up to his first encounter with Girl Talk backstage before a show. His descriptions are clever but not pretentious, so you don’t feel alienated as the reader. He animates the story with nice flow and pulls meaning from even minor details. The article isn’t overwritten, but retains an eloquent style that showcases Tough’s skill as a professional writer and journalist.