"Shake N Fries" As Performed By My Hens

My writing game has been off due to...ya know. I'm getting it back, but meanwhile please enjoy these video offerings.

You might also like "It Was a Good Day" as performed by my hens.

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The Adventures of Chronic Pain Barbie

It's never a dull moment in the life of Chronic Pain Barbie! Her adventures include stretching all day, getting misunderstood & disqualifying for disability--all while lookin fly.

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Millennial Rappers, The 2011 Albums

VIDEOPLOGGERY: Mini-reviews of five fave 2011 albums by Millennial Rappers to be found herein. Wishing you more good music--as well as non-musical good--for 2012.

Q: What do you mean "Millennial Rappers"?

A: Why that's the very first thing discussed in the video!

Q: Guess I'll watch then. Do you perchance do any videohoery in here?

A: ... :) ...

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When Occupation Is Therapy, Talk Is Not Cheap

I HAVE NEVER been fond of protests. I was inculcated into lefty protest culture at a young age, and it seemed to mean belonging to a marginal subgroup yelling irrelevantly, much like when I had to go to Lakers games and root against the Lakers.

I did not expect, then, that my heart would warm to the Occupy movement as it has. Here in Oakland things have gotten out of hand every possible way, and the local news is often painful. But I also got to watch news chopper footage of the Port with an ant swarm of Oaklanders, publicly agreeing on something quite important. Precisely what that thing is I can't say any more than they can, and I think that is fine. Not everything is articulable, after all.

The agendalessness criticism not only misses but subverts the point. Why must it always be anti-government nuts and right wing media screamers who get to be generally aggrieved, while lefty poindexters are supposed to tiptoe into the halls of power with their briefcases full of bullet-pointed 'demands' in a sensible font?

Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker:

Yes, O.W.S. has 'changed the conversation.' But talk, however necessary, is cheap. Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics.

And for the very first time I disagreed with him. In a world where Congressional Republicans are three hundred-pound brutes in pads who look plumply ineffectual but prove startlingly strong, and are single-minded enough to block our gallant, lean-muscled president from passing even a bill saying please let's at least keep teachers and firefighters...general shouting may be just the thing.

Rather than being based upon an agenda, Occupy is a manifestation of a feeling, one we all sort of have. When we see those protesters out there, we know what they mean. They don't have to spell it out. That they should make particular demands is great--like financial tranfers tax, awesome. But to focus exclusively on such would be a sign not of maturity but of timid self-limitation.

Occupy is a fresh wind blown in. The recent past has seen America awash in wealth worship. The vast cultural force that is Entertainment News scolds against hating on the rich. It's so flippin cool to be rich! cheer the Entertainment Newspeople, out of whose whitened smile mouths come terrible things. But hateration is about envy. The 99% solidarity ethos is about anger. Anger over wrongness.

Wealth can indeed be unethical, I believe. Hard core 1%-er wealth is inevitably built others' backs. The work of armies of immigrant gardeners and nannies and housekeepers hums along in the background. Regular people turn off lights when they leave rooms, while the fabulously wealthy keep a heated pool at a third home. And of course there's the elaborately choreographed fucking-over of other people that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

There actually are limited resources in this world, and when they are allocated preposterously it's many ways helpful to yell about it. Even as cold and cops blow Occupy adrift, it does something.

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In Which I Dip a Toe in Videoploggery

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West Coast Hugfest

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The Soul-Soaked Ms. Winehouse

I NEVER saw Amy the way some people did, as junkie fuckup tabloid fodder. To me she was wonderful. Glimpses of her dark side saddened and worried me, but I did not mistake the ugly pictures for her.

It is possible to edifyingly consume artwork without respecting its maker, as though we believe the artist herself is not to thank for her own work. Many seemed to perceive Amy as an obnoxious, unworthy vessel for her Talent. I made that mistake myself at first: I liked her, but I didn't respect her. Fans can be cruel like that.

I came to properly appreciate her, though. How could I not, when Back to Black so uncannily resembled a gift granted me from Adonai above? You see, I was collecting tapes of the Supremes and the Shangri-Las back when the other little girls were on Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. Hearing that girl group sound from the quaveringly brassy vocal chords of a London Jewgirl with tattoos and rapper collaborators and British writing skills was almost more than I could bear. Amy was like a chimerical joint invention of my inner child and outer adult. (She even threw in some Specials covers to appease my inner teenager.)

IT'S FUNNY how much you can care for someone as a fan. I needn't try to explain the collision of internet mourning and the peculiar nature of loss when you are mere fan to the dearly departed, because Jay Smooth already did here.

I did cry. In the bathtub and on the floor of the Oakland Marriott. You only spend a bright summer Saturday in a hotel in the downtown of your own city (inhabiting the floor even) if you are recovering from a herniated disc and using your mom's stay at said hotel as an opportunity to abscond from your home for a change of scenery, so of course that was my reason. But the setting was fortuitously Amyish.

I completed the first inevitable cycle from "Back to Black" to "Tears Dry On Their Own" feeling sheepish, struck by how perfectly Amy had provided a soundtrack for mourning her. Her work made it too easy for me. And that's the gift I think we undervalue.

We can cluck about drugs and fame, but there was a more essential, if ridiculably "tortured," artistic quality to Amy. Tearing your heart open and pouring the contents into music can be healing, but it also costs something. We took Amy's end product, whatever it cost, lapped it right up. At best we listened to what she sang and really heard her. (And I suspect being heard was the compensation she sought, not money or fame.) At worst we violated her privacy and made sordid junk food meals of her pain.

That thing we got from Amy--that elusive, potent magic--she put it there. Herein lies the demanding quintessential skill of an artist. Perhaps we cannot directly see or hear the result of the exercise of such skill. But we do experience it some way, and are drawn to that quality. Crying on the floor was a poignant meme for me because Amy made it so. She did the alchemical drudgery. I got to enjoy the pain-turned-beauty.

If you really have a heart and it really breaks, some faux-angsty song like Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" won't do shit for you. "Back to Black" or "Wake Up Alone" might. That is the difference.

Someone once said to me (when I was in fact dressed for Halloween as Amy) that he could be no fan of hers, since he only listens to 'real Soul.'

I say real Soul really comes from the soul. Amy's damn sure did.

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