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Culturology #88 - Name Drop City

Published

on May 6, 2011

. 3 Comments

Wow. So what a month of poetry it was (check out the documentation at www.omiami.org)! Not one to let all my responsibilities constantly slip by, the month of May brings a return to my culturological musings, and my vainglorious quest to make it to 100 posts. So this one might be a bit scattershot, as I pick up some pieces from the past month, but I'm really thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might make it back to my form of yore and drop some serious cultural science all over these here internets. Let's see...

During O, Miami, I met many incredible poets. I also met Kool Moe Dee and Monie Love, both of whom turned out to be incredibly caring and eloquent people.

I also met James Franco, which probably means something to all you fans of the Spider-Man movies. Here's pictorial evidence :

This, I think, would officially be the closest I've ever gotten to an encounter with pop culture. I think you can tell from our facial expressions that it really meant a lot to both of us.

The next most recent encounter, before the festival, was a time two winters ago, when I was walking down the street in Chelsea, Manhattan, just after a large snowstorm, and walked past Willem Dafoe (I know, the other Spider-Man actor!, crazy!), and I was looking at him, being all, like, "I think that's Willem Dafoe!" and he looked right back at me and without even nodding, acknowledged the fact that he was, indeed, Willem Dafoe, and that no words or body language need pass between us.

And one of my best friends kind of looks like Elijah Wood, who is easily confusable with Tobey Maguire, and my mom used to watch Wings a lot, so I feel like I've pretty much met all the important actors from the Spider-Man movies. And Kirsten Dunst. Kirsten Dunst.

Culturology #87 - Poetry Opening Preview

Published

pete

on April 1, 2011

in Culturology

. 5 Comments

So, as I mentioned last post, I've been quite busy recently, co-founding the nation's most cutting-edge poetry festival, down here in Miami, Florida. Today I was down in the Wynwood neighborhood, at the gallery where we're hosting a month-long exhibition of Miami photography, along with a made-for-the-show installation by a handful of alumni from the New World School for the Arts down here, a kind of "writing village" in which visitors will write ekphrastic poems based on the photographs on display.

The show, done in conjunction with Abe's Penny micro-magazine, also features a lecture space where we're having several readings, taking place throughout April. Christy Gast, who runs the gallery, asked me to pose in a few places in the gallery, to take some preview pictures. And, by chance, I was wearing my Audioshocker.com t-shirt (this only a day after being pictured in the Miami Herald wearing a Dogfish Head brewery t-shirt (brewing up a minor scandal of my own)), so I thought it was only right to share a couple of preview images here as well, a day in advance of the show's opening on Saturday night.

Pete at the Abe's Penny Poetry Podium

"My Name is Pete, and I'm a Culturologist."

Culturology #86 - Excuses, Excuses

Published

pete

on March 4, 2011

in Books and Culturology

. 1 Comment

I know I've been erratic with my Culturologying for the past few months, but by way of an excuse, I present a link to the thing which is my full-time job: O, Miami. It's a brand-new month-long county-wide poetry festival in Miami-Dade County, inaugurating this very April. Please check back to that site often, as we'll be updating information on it from this point forward up through and during the run of the festival.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll have time for some Culturological bulletins here and there in the meantime.

Culturology #85 - Your Favorite Band Sucks

Published

pete

on February 18, 2011

in Culturology and Music

. 13 Comments

I've never been one to pride myself on topicality, preferring to analyze cultural on-goings from a safe hermeneutical distance (I think I was a sophomore in college the first time I heard the word "hermeneutic;" it was in a talk about new advances in understanding the psycho-physiology of deafness and interpreting Beethoven with computers (or something like that), at Carnegie Mellon. Which was mostly a bunch of fuzzy musicological clap-trap, but did cause me to then go home and look more into what hermeneutics were, and then to spam the music school's dlist with a definition of hermeneutics (having been fairly well convinced that most of us in the audience had no idea what the aforementioned musicologist was talking about), but here I am now, using the word "hermeneutical" in an ironic sense, but in a sense that sincerely carries an understanding of what hermeneutics are (so I'm not sure if I'm thanking that musicologist or not)), but with the release of their newest album in pay-what-we-say online format--as I emailed to my friend Dan, whose favorite band is Radiohead, this morning--I've got to say it: your favorite band sucks.

Exhibit A

For a long time, I really prided myself on my thorough-going ambivalence to The Radioheads. By the time I was aware of their presence on the pop music scene (via friends listening to "Creep" or those animated videos from OK Computer) I understood to write them off as "whiny post-grunge opportunists" and "tools of the corporate hit-making apparatus." So even tho OK Computer came out at a time when my susceptibility to such things should have been quite high (I was a sophomore in high school), I never even bothered to listen to the album straight through.

In fact, I made it all the way through college (when Kid A and Amnesiac were released to massive accolades) without ever listening to OK Computer all the way through (though I did give at least cursory listends to the aforementioned smash electronica hit albums). It wasn't until I went to graduate school for the first time (Fall 2004) that I finally listened to OK Computer straight down (due in some part, I'm sure, to the fact that one of my roommates that year was the aforementioned Dan, whose favorite band The Radioheads are). To put it succinctly: I didn't realize what a good band Radiohead was until Coldplay came out.

And then Radiohead did their whole In Rainbows thing, which liked more for the "pay what you want" model of its release. The album itself was pretty lame, and I was sad to read/see interviews where the band talked about how much they liked it (I thought Hail to the Thief was way better). But it was nice to see some anarcho-socialist principles in play with an album self-released outside of the accepted corporate-driven control structures of pop music, with consumers empowered to pay what they believed the content of the album to be worth. And some of the tracks were fine.

But now, with The King of Limbs, we're back to paying standard-issue fees for digital versions of the album ($9? Get out of here...). And Radiohead have proven themselves as just another pop band churning out singles (see the above video), not really interested in pushing forward their music stylistically, or continuing to sit on the forward guard of the new music market. Oh well. A band that was pretty interesting there, for a few years, is boring again. Yawn.

Culturology #84 - My stang dois storkyn

Published

pete

on February 11, 2011

in Books, Culturology and Music

. 6 Comments

Last week's column got me thinking, since clearly neither The Frank Sanchez Band nor AxCx was first responsible for shouting "fuck yeah!" in song, who had done it first? I didn't find out the answer, but I did find the first-ever printing of the word "fuck" in English arts & letters! It was by the 15th Century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, in his (bawdy Scottish) poem known as either "A Brash of Wowing" or "A Secret Place." You can read it here.

The glorious stanza is this one:

His bony beird wes kemmit and croppit,
Bot all with cale it wes bedroppit,
And he wes townysche, peirt, and gukit.
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane.
Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit -
"Ye brek my hart, my bony ane."

Pretty evocative. Fuck Yeah! There's another classic stanza in there was well, in the history of racy verses:

Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."

According to his Wikipedia entry, Dunbar is also a forefather of printing the word "cunt" as well, but I really think that both "tyrlie myrlie" and "crowdie mowdie" (especially the latter) are better.

Culturology #83 - Fuck Yeah!

Published

pete

on February 4, 2011

in Culturology and Music

. 7 Comments

A SPECIAL CULTUROLOGICAL REPORT!!!

I fell into a kind of stupor entering 2011, and one of my apparent New Year's resolutions was to allow Culturology to slip into an unannounced hiatus. But we're back, because of developments on the scene of nasty novelty rock that we here at AudioShocker just shouldn't let go unnoticed.

Back in the Fall of 2006, having spent the previous two years living in Boston, I found myself back in Pittsburgh for four months. Nick and I took full advantage of my time there, not only getting Dirty Weekend back together for an epic reunion show at the 31st Street Pub and recording fine demos of two new songs, we also recorded a handful of new tunes under our The Frank Sanchez Band moniker. When the ghost of Frank Sanchez occupies our bodies, Nick and I can sing some pretty filthy things. But I should touch on one other thing...

Going to college in the first years of the millennium, certain cultural experiences were pretty standard for the course, and two that I associate pretty closely are 1) Watching CKY videos (CKY2K coming out just in time for my and Nick's freshman year of college) and 2) Listening to songs by Boston's cock-metal favorites, Anal Cunt. Maybe because there was an AxCx song in CKY2K. Anyway, it was mostly for their track titles, which were super-offensive, but occasionally, one--looking back--must admit, made one chuckle. "I Got Athlete's Foot Showering at Mike's" is a classic. I don't think I watched CKY stuff very often, or ever listened to these songs very much, but they were out there.

So, when you come to record vulgar variety songs of your own, you tend to be aware of your influences. My biggest influence was Nick (I think my own song-writing was safely of the lonely nerd novelty genre, until he coached me along the Way of the Dirt), and his influences were... I'm not even sure... 2 Live Crew, certainly... and, Rod Stewart, I guess. Bill Cosby? But never did we say to ourselves "Let's record songs like the kind Anal Cunt makes."

Fast forward to 2010. Those 2K6/7 Frank Sanchez songs have been up at MySpace for nearly half a decade already--and listened to about twice a year. And Anal Cunt has just put out a new album. Anal Cunt, presumably, still has the strong following of shock-giggling teenagers that they've had since making the scene back in the late 80s. The Frank Sanchez Band, thankfully, goes mostly unnoticed there on the ol' internet. So, without further ado, I present two you two exhibits:

EXHIBIT A: The Frank Sanchez Band - "Fuck Yeah" (2006)

Find more artists like Frank Sanchez at Myspace Music

EXHIBIT B: Anal Cunt - "Fuck Yeah" (2010)

Listen to it here.

As much as I want to take some kind of credit for this--that one of the 49 listens of "Fuck Yeah" on MySpace was by Anal Cunt, and they were like "great idea,"--the moral is, mostly, that there are only so many ideas to be had out there in the world of offensive rock music. But we got to this one first. And then, thankfully, retired. (Like Frank Zappa would say, "they're just words," but after a while, I think most of us get tired of them...)

Culturology #82 - Funny, Not Funny, Funny Again

Published

pete

on December 17, 2010

in Culturology and TV

. 1 Comment

In the spirit of Nick posting Time Log many hours late yesterday, I'd like to go ahead and sneak a Culturology out, here, ten minutes before the end of the work day (having just managed to hit an important deadline in my non-Audioshocker work). So... one thing that seems worth mentioning is that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which was America's funniest television show back during its third season, but then drooped mightily in seasons four and five, really picked it up again this year with episodes packed wall-to-wall with crack-me-ups. The show is mean-spirited enough that it laps back around to just being funny without me feeling concerned about its mean-spiritedness (like I think it did in seasons 4 and 5; had me concerned, that is).

It's nice when a TV show that used to be funny and then stopped being funny gets funny again. So it has me thinking of other times when that's happened. I'd say South Park pulled off a similar trick, since it was quite funny when it first came out, but then got pretty old pretty fast--by the middle of the second season, in terms of the whole foul-mouthed 3rd-graders things. But then, in season five, the Towelie episode came out, which was hilarious, and got me to watch South Park again for a while, until it got old again. But since the Towelie episode, the show has consistently had some great episodes every season, and plenty of chunky ones. The last great peak, though, was across seasons nine and ten, between the "Trapped in the Closet" episode and "Cartoon Wars" (the latter of which finally and ultimately won me over to the South Park cause).

Sadly, The Simpsons never had a similar surge. I realize that some people have thought that The Simpsons are funny during the past decade of seasons, but the show has never returned to the heights of its 3rd-7th Seasons. There was some talk of a resurgence a couple of years ago, but that seemed, again, more like a decision made by over-zealous fans that are over-educated and don't like it when TV points out how mindless and lazy they are as middle-class consumers, who then decided that, damn it, The Simpsons was funny again. So that they could feel better about watching The Simpsons instead of, I don't know, voting.

What I've been wishing for a while now is that somehow those direct-to-dvd American Pie spin-off movies would suddenly become hilarious. I mean, it was a long time ago that American Pie came out, but I remember it being pretty genuinely funny. And it always seems like direct-to-dvd should have the kind of culture in the States that it has in Japan (or, more correctly, that I presume that it has in Japan, based on watching, like, three direct-to-DVD movies from Japan).

I'm still hoping there's more examples of shows that went from good to bad and then back to good again (maybe SNL counts, when one of its cast gets funny for a couple shows before sucking again?), but I'm guessing they're mostly going to come from the ranks of basic cable networks, since mostly, once I think gets old, it gets put out to pasture. On the DVD commentary track to the Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob follows the Simpson/Thompson family to Cape Fear (or whatever it was called, is that what it was called?), the commentators point out that in that joke where Bob steps on the rakes for such a long time, there's this balance where the gag is funny for a couple takes, then stops being funny, but then, once it goes on for way too long, becomes extremely hilarious. And so maybe that's really the phenomenon here: these shows are still just hitting the same beats, and have managed to stick around long enough that the repetition of the same shit over and over again has gotten funny again.

Culturology #81 - Zombies Are Republicans

Published

pete

on December 10, 2010

in Comics, Culturology and TV

. 6 Comments

Not interested in having Neal jump my slot again, Culturology is back with what Vanilla Ice might have called a "brand new adventure," but I'll call "more complaints about stuff that most people think is just fine." Namely: the zombie TV show that was just on and so popular, The Walking Dead.

Is it just me, or was this show popular because people like Mad Men and Breaking Bad so much? Like, people want so badly for there to be good programming on cable television, that they just will themselves into believing that a show which is mediocre at best is one of the great achievements of contemporary televised entertainment. Now, I like zombies as much as the next person, and I think there are probably are interesting things to be said about the current trend of putting the "geist" back into "zeitgeist," but, having gone ahead and jumped on this bandwagon, and watched all six episodes of The Walking Dead, I'm mostly left scratching my head about what people see in this.

The biggest thing that I see is what South Park figured out years ago: the conservative powers that run our censorship boards don't mind grotesque violence. There's a massive double standard between censorship of violence and censorship of sex or speech acts. So zombies are pretty much the safest vehicle for cutting edge cable-TV violence, since they don't have sex and don't talk. In a lot of ways, The Walking Dead is about little more than acts of "Look what we can show on cable TV nowadays! Amazing!" It does nothing new for the zombie genre, nor for the TV drama genre, or anything else, other than there's lots and lots of rotting flesh and gun shots to human skulls. I haven't read the comic book, but I presume a lot of the flat-ness of the zombie mythology is they fault of the book, and not the TV show.

Again, there are probably interesting questions to ask about zombies, so maybe this show was an excuse for zombie nerds to talk about zombies? I'm not really a zombie nerd. I don't really want to talk about it.

Culturology Presents... The Punisher in OVER THE TOP 2

Published

nick marino

on November 29, 2010

in Comics and Culturology

. 5 Comments

In the comments for the most recent Project Basement, Kaylie and Pete suggested some Over the Top fan fiction starring the Punisher (inspired by Katie's Punisher vs. Marv drawing, of course).

Feeling inspired myself, I decided to write it. And seeing as how Pete published his brother's incredible fanfic (pt1 and pt2) earlier this year in Culturology, I figured this is as good a place as any to post it.

---------------

I never dreamed I'd become a major competitor, let alone make it to the top. But here I am, in Las Vegas, with stakes out the ass and money riding on my every move.

Will I trip on some errant urine in the men's room? Will I give some guy the wrong look and get my face punched in before the final round? Who knows.

But what I do know is this -- I'm Frank Castle and I'm the underdog contender for the 2010 World Arm Wrestling Championship.

The Punisher in... OVER THE TOP 2

My room is nice. They're paying for me to stay in that one hotel that looks like a pyramid. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of all the crime going on right under my nose -- brothels, card counting, dining and ditching. But that's the name of the game here in Vegas. And I've got bigger fish to fry.

Once I win the 2010 World Arm Wrestling Championship, I'll be in the inner circle. I can trace the bookies and bets all the way back to the top and find the guy that funded the drugs that my wife and kids used to shoot up uncontrollably for 24 hours a day for two years straight.

They told me they wanted to stop, damn it!!! They told me they would quit!!! But everyday I'd see them with those fucking needles in their arms and that black tar heroin smeared all over their lips. FUCK!!!

Anyway, back to the arm wrestling. See, I saw this movie called Over the Top a few years ago. It's a Stalone flick. You ever see it? It rules. Point is, it's fucking Stalone fucking arm wrestling and kicking ass. You ever see Rambo? That was awesome too.

So I decided I wanted to take it over the top. Yeah, I know my kid wasn't kidnapped or anything, but screw it. I have this grudge about my dead family and I hate criminals and I've got this fake ID with the name Moose Bullworth on it, so I figured why not give it a shot, right?

And now it's time for me to get ready for the final match.

----

Two hours of meditation followed by five minutes of masturbation and I'm ready to go. I ate a Hungry-Man TV dinner and I feel like a million bucks. I'm gonna take it OVER THE TOP tonight!

I step out onto the stage and the crowd goes nuts. They love my stylized skull t-shirt and my rugged good looks. They're clapping and yelling "DEAD MAN! DEAD MAN!" as I walk out, trying to intimidate my competitor before he even sets foot on the stage. This is amazing.

Then my opponent comes out of the shadows and I'm shocked. The audience wasn't yelling for me... they were yelling AT me! She's a 7' tall amazonian piece of she-meat, green from head-to-toe and wearing a purple bathing suit. What in the shit is going on???

Her name tag says "Jennifer" on it. This can't be right -- I never signed up to get my arm crushed by a roid-freak goddess parading around in her underwear! I wanted to feel the sweaty sting of man moisture on my palms as I slammed his hand against the mini-mat. THIS WASN'T PART OF THE DEAL!!!

Whatever. It doesn't matter. I can still win. I'm the goddamn Punisher and I'm gonna punish her.

----

She gets her elbow lined up and ready to rock. PSSSHH. Amateur. I've been ready for two minutes.

I'm ready to fight, ready to win. I'm gonna win.

I grip her hand hard and show her what I'm made of. Damn, she's got big fingers. Like thick little green sausages. I could eat one of them right now, I'm so fucking hungry to win. I'd just bite it off and suck the goopy irradiated green blood out of it like the cream filling in a Twinkie. FUCK.

The ref shouts "START!" and we push our hands together, our arms bristling with the exhilaration of competition. The audience cheers us on. Actually, no. They just cheer her on. But what do I fucking care? I'm the Punisher, damn it.

I fight hard. Real hard. But things are looking down. She's stronger than me and she's got more energy. But I'm ready... ready to take it OVER TH--

WHAT!?! What's she doing??? NOOO!!!! That's my move! She's realigning her fingers, starting out with the index finger and slowly rewrapping her grip over top of my hand. SHE'S TAKING IT OVER THE TOP!!!

How could this happen to me? Did she see that movie too? C'mon! NO ONE SAW THAT FUCKING MOVIE! It's my favorite movie, not hers! I'm out to kill the heroin-daddy that slaughtered my family with his addictive smack! I'm ready to kill in the name of American freedom! This can't be happening to me!!!

I feel a pop in my right elbow. It's sort of liberating, really. I can give up now. My bone begins to tear through the skin as I start to black out. There's blood oozing onto the floor and the crowd is going nuts. She says "Eat it, dickwad!!! I just took it over the top!" right before I hit the ground.

----

I wake up to see her standing over me, the crowd silent now. She tore off my skull t-shirt and wrapped it around my arm to slow the bleeding.

"Frank Castle, you're under arrest," she says. "You have the right to remain silent, and anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of--"

"FUCK YOU," I tell her as I spit in her face.

"You wish," she says with a smile and a wink.

Oh well... I gave it my best shot. I tried to take it over the top. It just didn't work out. I'm gonna go to jail for murdering thousands of evil slime trash deadbeat hustler criminals and cleaning up the streets of New York. I make it safe for these ants to live their meaningless stupid little lives and what thanks do they show me? They wanna lock me up and throw away the key. What a fucked up world.

Culturology #80 - Are You on TV? Then You are a Republican!

Published

pete

on November 12, 2010

in Culturology and TV

. 7 Comments

I got back to America in time for two things:

1) The mid-term elections.

2) Conan O'Brien's new show on TBS.

And boy did they both suck!

I've written before about late night television, and tuning back into Conan's new show confirmed the conclusion I came to back in Culturology #55:

One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved).

There's obviously something spurious in my continued need to state that I don't care about something anymore, since clearly I continue to care just enough to keep bringing it up (and, Norm MacDonald should still have his own talk show, and I would watch that). So maybe this is the last time that I bother with Conan, since he's just getting more and more boring. In a way, basic cable is safer for him, since there can't really be any ratings demand.

Speaking of the mid-term elections, I don't think there's a better insult available in my repetoire right now then "You are a Republican!" So, now that Conan isn't funny anymore (now that I'm not 17 anymore), I feel like he must be a Republican. Jon Stewart stopped being funny, what, five years ago? Republican. Does your television show involve sitting at a desk? Republican.

I think Teabaggers probably hate and distrust most not-totally-obviously-insane-and-bigoted television personalities, but I think, basically, if you're on television, than you're a Republican. Even if you're a Democrat, or "liberal," or whatever, if you're on TV then you're basically a Republican. There was some thing on the internet the other day about some Republican-minded survey group releasing a list of what shows Democrats watch versus what shows Republicans watch. But, sorry kids, all TV is right-wing TV.