We are a celebrity-obsessed culture. We care more about Michael Jackson’s skin color and the love lives of Britney and Justin than about the war. I don’t have a problem with that, honestly. I want Britney to find happiness. Maybe she should hook up with Joe Millionaire.
With a culture so fixated on the people on the screens of our TVs, it is stunning how little we care about them. We would be just as happy to see our stars torn apart, (note Michael Jackson and, well, Britney) as to see them celebrated. So when we loose them it’s not a big deal. While a few hundred stoners never really got over the death of Jerry Garcia, very few people are still are upset about Burgess Meredith’s passing.
For almost all famous people we don’t actually feel anything more than passing affection. The reason for this is it never really feels as if they like us as an audience, no matter what they say as they receive their Grammies, Oscars, and Golden Globes. Even more importantly, I don’t care about most famous people because most famous people don’t really care about ME.
So in the last thirty-six hours, it has been amazing to see the sincerity of handmade shrines, the long personal stories, the op-ed pieces, the expensive video montages, all dedicated to the late Fred Rogers.
I think that everyone who watched the Neighborhood felt that Mr. Rogers was speaking directly to her or him. We all thought that he cared not only about us, the audience, but ME. I still, on some level, genuinely believe that. So, in contrast to our relationship with nearly every other famous person, I and we actually CARED about him.
So now, I guess than many of us are at a real loss. We know we need to say something, but what?

This American Life sent two stories in memory of Fred Rogers. The first was an episode of the show about neighbors with a segment with Davy Rothbart meeting with Mr Rogers.
The second was a story written for today's NY Times Op Ed page about the same meeting.

Go Here and watch this.
Or you can read a transcript here.

Here is a photograph of my mother's great grandmother's family, or something. What ever the relation is it involves a whole lot of repetions of the word great.

This morning I had a pre-interview phone call with these folks. I have an interview a week from yesterday!

So today Rev. Fred McFeely Rogers died after a short battle with cancer. I saw the closing minutes of an episode today and felt really sad. I still don't know how to react. I guess that this is one of those tough parts of growing in to adulthood. Damnit!

Well, PBS has a website for parents and teachers of mourning children that is somewhat comforting here.

I really don't know how to express my sadness.
It's such a good feeling to know you're alive.

I don't think that it got the press that it deserved, but Jimmy Sturr and his Orchestra recieved their thirteenth Grammy Award. Even Arlo Guthree is on the award winning album!
I may be wrong, but I think that he looks strangely like Will Ferrell.
JK Rowling is going to be on the Simpsons!

The Posies are playing on the first of March somewhere in West Seattle. Jon Auer and Braden Blake are doing a show on March 25th.

Finally, I have added a Media Page, though I haven't put anything other than the new Media Page Photo and the old links to photo books.

In the week since I made a blog, I have been updating it WAY TOO OFTEN. Every bowl of cereal gets mentioned. Every amusing thought earns a write-up. In the seven days since its creation, my blog has become the largest web - anything that I have ever made. In addition to the annoying wastes of space that I posted, mostly for my own amusement, I think that there are not-so-annoying wastes of space that could amuse others. These specially selected blog entries will be reprinted weekly here.
Now, my blog may just be suffering form "New Toy Syndrome" where in I play with anything new, a nintendo, a dvd, or a paper shredder WAY too much for the first week and rarely if ever after that. If that is what happens to my blog, then this page, along with the one that you are viewing will be abandoned like my old website which still says that I am going to go to The Evergreen State College this fall, or my live journal, the third and final entry of which was written while slightly drunk on New Year's Eve 2000.


By the way, Nick Hornby, author of of About a Boy, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch was on this last week's episode of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Okay, Tatu,* my very favourite pop band in the whole wide world right now, (barring OkGo) was just on Lenno. During the obligatory make out session during the insturmental break in All the Things She Said the camera cut REALLY FUCKING QUCIKLY away from from Yulia and Lena's face lock for an akwardly long shot of the guitar player looking bemused. Americans are funny. We have hours on end of "Who wants to buy Sex with my Mom?" (not to say that I have anything against reality TV) but the world's biggest pop are just too damn edgy for us. Jay informed his audience that this was their first US television appearance. I wonder if this is going to set the precident on how American TV responds to TATY.

Arsenio Hall, who was another guest DID, by the way, come on stage after the performance to french kiss Jay.


*the website used to have the entire russian 200 Kmp/h in the wrong lane available for download, but they don't anymore. I would recomend that you go visit the site now before they take the music videos down!

My whole neighborhood, from the safeway all the way to my house smells like natural gas. I hope that it is not the terrorists. If it is, and I am dead along with the rest of Queen Anne come sunrise, maybe this blog entry can serve the same function as those phone calls from people on the 9-11 flights. Maybe you can lie and say that I wrote something heroic. Better still, maybe you can hack in to my blogger and write something heroic for me.
And to think, I laughed at all of that duct tape.

As I am sure all of you know, I am a big fan of the tv show Dawson's Creek. The teeny-bopper soap opera, coded, um, written in the post-ironic voice of Scream writer Kevin Williamson is coming to a long deserved, yet saddening retirement. One of the plotlines of the show, as it spirals to its end has dealt with a band that several of the female characters have formed called Helles Belles.
One of the many wonderful features of the Dawson's Creek website is a section called Ask Jason in which you can send an email question to a writer. It will become clear in a moment that the Ask Jason section is not being ansered by Jason, but by Script Coordinator Joe, which really doesn't matter.
I sent questions every few months for years, but finally today one of my questions has been published and answered!

Finally, something I wrote can be on the INTERNET!

JOSEPH B: I was wondering if in naming the band Hells Belles the DC writers were giving a sweet tip of the hat to the late-great world's best all girl all AC/DC cover band of the same name.

JOE: Good call Joseph B. We have something in the office here that we like to call Tom Kapinos, and Lord knows he likes the rock! Most of the satanic kitsch and metal references in the show this year were influenced by him, notably the Tenacious D t-shirt that Bob wore on the road trip. Kapinos trivia: Teenage Tom was once in a metal band called “Mysstery”. Not a typo… that’s a double ‘S’ there kids. Wha-wha-what… Reunion tour…?

My friend Andrew wrote the following to me in an email today.

"In The future when our friends ask us how we're doing we will be able to say

'Check the Blog asshole.' "

This reminded me of an episode of This American Life from a couple of weeks ago. The subject of the first segment of "Time to Save the World" was the elimination of small talk.

I can do one better than just the blog, I thought to my self. A stupid web site with weather and news for the seattle area! That would eliminate the need for weather and news small talk!

Later.

Well, I was offered a job correcting standardized reading tests from 6th graders in ohio. There are two major problems with this job. The first is hardly a problem at all. The length of the job is pretty shakey. Who knows how long this will last? It could be 4 weeks or it could be four months. In just a few months I want to be moving to Tacoma, if, as yesterday's interview would have indicated, those nice Tacoman's hire me.
The other problem, and here is the kind of big one, is the fact that they offered the same job to my mother.
On the one hand, I have no money, no job, and very little to keep me feeling productive. I can't really afford to turn down a job that is offered to me. On the other hand, I wonder if I would be at all happy working with my mother. It could be the best experience ever, it could be disasterous.
I wonder if we would be able to share a workspace.
Damnit. I get offered a job after 4 months looking and wonder if I can do it.
I think that I will try though. I need new glasses, the new Atom and his Package CD, a handful of dvds and a reduced Mastercard debt.

As of last night, I officially like Foo Fighters again.

Once again I have an interview this morning, but unlike yesterday morning, this isn't big or life changing. This is just a chace to whore myself, and with luck get some small amount of cash for booze and glasses.
Look at all of the cool toys that I can make with this internet!

"That was disturbingly good."
I don't know why I said it. Andrew, the keyboard / guitar player from OK Go looks strikingly like my friend Marcus, more so when he is playing than at any other time. He was also the only member of the band who wasn't engaged in conversation with a small crowd of pre-pube girls as I was leaving the Spend the Night tour.

So I shook his hand and told him that the show was disturbingly good. What did I find so jarring? Was it the striking difference between the mood that seems to be all the fuck over the television and the mood of the thousand people, there in the Showbox? Was the heartbreaking joy of a pop concert a physical shock to someone so used to thinking about war and duct tape and poverty and joblessness?

At some level, maybe I was wondering to myself, "are you ever going to make a thousand people this happy, especially nightly for 2 months? Didn't think so."

On another level I was surprised by the fact that I was enjoying OkGo, and even the Donnas, a band built around almost pure kitsch at an un-ironic gut level. Where am I, I wonder, without irony? I breathe ironically for fuck’s sake!

In any case the concert was disturbingly good, and maybe it is haunting Andy that someone was disturbed by the high quality of the rock show. Well, if he is asking I hope that this offers a bit of an explanation.

Well, that went really very well!

ring, damn you phone, RING!
While I am waiting for this potentially MAJOR LIFE CHANGING phone call, I think I will direct you to another good reason to move to chicago.

I have quite a lot to write about today, but I am not going to do it right now. In an hour and a half I have a telephone interview with these fine folks.

Say, do you like pop-up advertisements? Well, if you visit my new tripod hosted photo album you can see one. You can also see a hip wedding 'tween Dianna and Janessa at the 24 hour church of elvis. Here is an interesting story that I found on the internet about the 24 H. C of E.
I'm not sure if any non-Andrew people read this, but if they do they should know that andrew's entropop blog is being updated regularly now with interesting things to read.

Hi! I made up a list of interesting LINKS. Someday soon I am going to actually ad a LINK to my LINKS page! Yeay

Turkey is a fucking whore.

1. Okgo, who you may remember from my post at 8:54 this morning is playing a free, in store thing at the same store as the donnas, who, again you can referance the previous posting to learn about! I think that I am going to go ot the bottom of the hill store afterall.
2. My freind and former art teacher Dianne is opening her first Seattle show tomorow. Read about it Here, Here and Here!
3. Christopher Walken and Foo Fighters!
4. Finally, I have posted the photographs of my Eagle Scout ceremony thing. I don't imagine that anyone would want to see them, but I didn't have any other digital photographs and I wanted to make a photo album. "Wow", I sez to myself I sez, "Wow I certainly did have long hair!" Sez I.

"Ok go okgo okgo okgo, donnas donnas donnas donnas." I guess that it would be silly trying to argue that I have anything else running through my mind. The rock and roll show is tomorow, which makes me ever so happy. I put links on this post to the official band websites because Andrew, who said that I should get one of these told me that that's what us bloggin' folk do!
So the donnas are doing a signing event at a record store at the bottom of the hill upon which I live tomorow afternoon. I should go, I guess. I don't think that I have anything for them to sign though. I had a pin and I still have a key chain from a concert that I saw at the graceland a few years ago with their picture. I had 1999 Rolling Stone calender with their month open and on the wall for over a year, just because I thought it was cool. I just never got around to actually BUYING any of their records. Further, since they were on Lookout! Records, they always had their entire catalogue availible online for emusic's low monthly subscription fee, which I have never been able to afford.

Okay, so I guess that another thing on my mind is the new, yet to be released Don Delillo novel.

On the one hand, I should never read reviews of a book to which I am looking forward, but on the other hand, the last two Don Delillo books blew me away, so if this new Cosmopolis isn't as good as The Body Artist or Underworld I will be able to cope. Further, this book took half the time that The Body Artist took to come out and it is easily three times the length. But I guess that girth's never the way to judge a book.


By the way, CNN has put together a little site to remind a forgetful American public who Great White were.

The formats are nearly identical, so why do Letterman and Lenno's shows really really suck while Conan's show is kind of good sometimes?

Here is an inside joke

So far the death toll has hit 95. I hear that it keeps climbing. Last night’s club fire in Rhode Island had the unfortunate honor of being the second horrific nightclub tragedy in under a week.
The first incident, the stampede in Chicago following a burst of pepper spray was terrible. But the blame could easily be placed on the negligence of the club operators.
This time around, the blame is spread out more. The band that was playing the nightclub, Great White, has had the finger pointing at them since this morning. The club, which was not permitted to have pyrotechnics, now claims that the band didn’t tell them that pyrotechnics were going to be used. A club that the band played last week is saying now that the pyrotechnics came as an unwelcome (if less deadly) surprise there as well.
So does the blame rest on the shoulders of the band? Maybe. Time will, of course, tell, and I don’t want to write anything that I will regret later. Someone might read it and laugh at me.
The immediate reaction to this horror was to find BLAME, before the death toll is compiled. Not only before people have stopped crying, but before people have found out if they have to even start crying, the blame is being placed on “Nightclubs” A poll on Netscape’s website this morning asked visitors, “Should public officials do more to ensure nightclubs are safe?” Of course, with a question phrased like that the results, as of about three this afternoon were, “Yes, too many clubs ignore safety violations. 83% / No, most clubs are safe. 17%”
This worries me for a few reasons. The first is a question of the accuracy of this, and any of the other similar surveys that will be shown to us in the coming days. How many survey takers have been in a nightclub recently?
Honestly, if nightclubs were so horribly unsafe, why would the rare tragedies be international news for days in a row, when, say, deadly car crashes rarely get local TV blurbs?
But my biggest worry about the potential for rabid series of campaigns to “make nightclubs safer” is based on similar campaigns of the past. “Making Night Clubs Safer” has, historically been code for the targeting and closing of primarily black clubs. Once again, a haze of well intended energy has the potential to cause racist action.
Personally, I think the reason that this tragedy happened, if not its specifically liable parties, lies somewhere else. Great White had its 15 minutes. They were huge for a few months! To this day, nearly everybody who was listening to the radio at the end of the 80s remembers “Once Bitten . . . Twice Shy.”
They toured, I imagine, with a pretty impressive stage show. When you are on the bill of a stadium show, or even a thousand seat theater, you can really use a bit of fire. I guess that that was their genre, big, explosive, and famous as all fuck and gonna stay that way! The socks-in-pants pomposity was much more important than anything that they ever sang. Even when they could no longer fill a 300-person capacity Rhode Island club with people, they still wanted to fill the town with pre-Nirvana rock theatrics. All it took to bring them there, setting the stage ablaze, killing at least a third of their audience that night, was one hit single. After that, they couldn't go back. Sure, the clubs were shrinking; the records weren't really selling so well...
But at least the show could feel like a stadium, even if it were in grandma’s living room or an old wooden building.
The blame for this could fall on any number of people. It could fall on the club, on the band, on the band’s management... That’s not really important, at least for me, here, now. I think that the puckish fickleness of fame may have played its own vicious little role.

Here is an exchange that i had over the INTERNET in AOL's popular messenger program. She didn't know that by asking me what this avril business meant would result in a long, and mostly pointless internet monolouge on my part.

C: one of my co-workers called me avril because I wore a tie to work
C: you know about this avril?
C: what does it all mean?
J: Here is the explanation
J: at, like, 11:50pm several months ago, nearly a year ago, I was watching mtv and I saw this SUPER catchy video. I called up Erika and told her about it, she knew which it was. Then they slowly started incorporating the song in ads for shows on the WB
J: Before anyone knew anything about the artist behind it, lots of people were in love with the single
J: As it turned out, the song, Complicated was the product of a 17 year old fake punk rock canadian girl with eye liner of black and a heart of gold
J: ... or something. She wore black tank tops with plaid ties and had a group of guys that could have been a boy band, but that they had punky hair and played real insturments to back her up
J: So I went out, got the record on the day that it was released and memorized each and every song on it. So did every pre pube in the world.
J: She was JUST breaking when she was schedualed for the KISS 106 summer stadium show, so she was, like, the third of 6 or 8 acts to play, but the reaction to her demonstrated in the time since planning the show she had become the REAL headliner
J: But she hadn't broken in England QUITE yet, so I went to see her in a smokey club in london 2 weeks later.
J: which brings us to today. She has a handful of grammy nominations, a stadium tour, one of the biggest albums this year...

and the Hot Topics are selling outfits to look just like her
J: sorry for the excess of information. It was more than you asked for, but you hit a vein of Avril Lavigne information

Okay, so I just watched an entire episode of Jay Lenno's TV program. John Travolta was on and talking about airplanes and cars and stuff. He was boring and obnoxious. Then there were quintuplets, who were supposed to be cute, but were more, um, boring and obnoxious.
The only reason that I watched was for the Interpol performance promised at the end. The show was so bad that it hurt, but Interpol was SO GOOD that it hurt. While the first 55 minutes of the show felt like fingernails on a chalk board, the last 5 felt like being a middle-schooler and trying to talk to girls.
I think I like Interpol.

I want to go to cheap trick. They are playing a casino in tacoma, which could be a really bad thing. Will it be a really fun evening or will it be a reminder that I will one day, not too long from now, get old and die?

So here are some hilarious things that I wrote in the last couple of days on a different internet journal thing. Laugh away!

Thursday, February 20th, 2003
3:12 pm I have recently been on a rampage through all of my books. I have been trying to put a bookplate in each and every book I own. I guess this makes some sense. Some of my favorite books, (and records and movies for that matter) were lent out years ago, never to be returned. So I guess that it isn't a STUPID thing to do. If it prevents the accedental theft of a book or two, then it was all worthwhile.
This whole event began around christmas. Dianna's middle sister gave me a package of home made bookplates. They were a perfect gift, I went to work putting book plates in all of my books. About a week ago I ran out of them though, so I started using Antioch Bookplate Company bookplates and ones that I made myself on the computer.
So this may seem sensible. In theory it does. It is just that I have been digging through boxes trying to find books left un-plated. I have been putting bookplates in books that already had my name written in them. I have been putting bookplates in books that NO ONE will EVER borrow from me, much less steal! I am talking about 3rd grade level music books from the fifties and sixties. Teachers editions of grade school text books, again from the fifties and sixties and outdated books on technical theatre that even I haven't read are also now labled as my own. Books about the end of the world by right wing, homophobic Evangelical types that I bought for the sake of irony? "Ex Libris Joseph Warren"
I guess that I should get started on movies and records now.
(Comment on this)
12:06 am I was just wondering about the terrorists. Mostly I was wondering if any of the terrorists are ninjas.
No, hear me out. Wait!
Okay, so the ninjas were the most totally deadly assassins ever. Their loyalty rivaled anything that the 9-11 folks had going for them, and their training was such that it would put the "tahrrests" to, just total fucking shame.
Even more important is the fact that they would be completely unexpected. There was a time, about ten years ago when we were prepared for ninja attacks. There they were in every movie, on every TV show.

"Jerry, Elaine! I'm being chased by ninjas"
"Oh no, Kramer, we had better run!"

You flip the channel

"Yo dude, ninja toss me some ninja pizza!"

Go to the movies and, like, the Muppets are fighting ninjas.

Then, almost immediately the ninjas became unpopular. It was just like when we forgot about Australia, the funky bunch, perfect strangers or hippies.
The outcome of America's uncanny ability to abandon trends more quickly than we take them up as a country could prove deadly. Duct tape on the windows won't stop one of those throwing stars, because they are made of metal. The glass will break; the tape will come off the cracks. There will be broken glass everywhere, which never looks good, and the paint will peel because it was stuck to the fucking duct tape. Everyone will drive past your house and say, "they must be poor. Look at the unkempt manner in which they keep their house."
Then the ninjas, the most efficient and deadly killers that the world has ever seen will come in and efficiently kill you and your loved ones.
And EVEN IF THEY DIDN'T, the window would be broken so the anthrax and small pox can come in and kill you anyway.

I guess that I am a little bit scared.

Well, I am hoping to get this to work. Will I fail?

From my former blog...um...live journal

Wednesday, February 19th, 2003
4:52 pm Tootsie and Victor Victoria came out in the same year.
Gender is just funny I guess.
(Comment on this)
3:51 pm Once again I am trying to convince myself to write. A couple of times a day I find myself trying to explain something that I think is hilarious to Dianna or my mother, or occasionally my high school freshman cousin.
"Why not" I sez to myself, "keep one of them private journals?"
"What a plan", I replied. "I think that I will do that."
"But why not put it on the internet?" I continued to myself. "You live in the age of John Ashcroft. It isn't as if anything you said, did, wrote or thought was private anyway. You have a nearly forgotton Live Journal anyway. Might as well use it, right?"

So here you see the beginings of the result of this. In the coming days expect to see short essays on deoderant, movies, job hunting, poverty, my vanity, politics and maybe, if you are the sort of person who reads this, YOU!