STANLEY CUP FINALS - CALGARY, TAMPA

THIS IS ACTUALLY ABOUT THE STANLEY CUP FINALS.

I've been to both Calgary and Tampa, and both places seemed kind of soulless. Calgary I'd been through a couple of times on tour (you didn't see me there, because Fast Forward magazine ran an incoherent and rant-heavy interview where I basically said that people should only listen to Leonard Cohen and drink in their own houses, which may not be the worst thing you could say but it won't endear you to the locals. I was new to the whole being-interviewed thing, but they didn't care when I came back through the next year even enough to spell my name right in the small print listings. Fuckers), and the impression I had was that they rolled the streets up at about 9:00 at night, and if you took a wrong turn more than 400 feet from the river, you'd get stuck in a huge labyrinth of neighborhoods where every house on every street in the whole city was identical.

Seriously. It felt like Houston without summer. Some people apparently like that.

Tampa, on the other hand, was not much better. At least there there were lots of Cubans, so the music was good and there was the benefit of waking up and having those greasy ironed ham-and-pickle sandwiches and thick sweet coffee in the morings while the old men got out of the neighborhoods and off to their jobs before the fratfucks and their cheergirlies rolled out of bed. I don't mean to stereotype, but really, between about noon and three in the morning, there wasn't anyone else on the streets of Ybor City, where I happened to be hanging out. (I didn't know any better.) It was all the wretched fuck-you excess of New Orleans with none of the attendant culture to make it bearable.

Still, the beaches were nice, and I got to see major league baseball in a large warehouse with all the character of a freshly-looted Wal-Mart.

As of this writing, the Stanley Cup Final is tied at one game apiece. Based on my personal experience of the two cities involved, the series is going to degenerate into a soulless free for all, with otherwise colorful goons from both teams dragging the pace of play down to a glacial crawl, making the goaltenders, Nikolai Khabibulin and Mikka Kiprusoff, solid players with very little English-speaking ability between them, into unlikely heroes unable to deliver decent soundbites to the average xenophobic American sports goon.

The series will hinge on whether Jarome Iginla can resist the temptation to beat the living tar out of every Tampa Bay Lightning player who shoves their stick in his face. I really like Iginla. He seems like a great kid with a solid head on his shoulders. But I fear that he's being forced to learn too much too fast here, and come his next contract negotiation he'll get traded to the New York Rangers and never be heard from again. (Can we maybe get Theo Fleury out of detox and up there to convince him otherwise?)

Last night, Kiprusoff played about as well in the net as I do on Saturday mornings, letting in shots that no self-respecting five year old would have allowed past, while the rest of the Calgary Flames in front of him played as if they'd rather have been watching the American Idol finale. I know it's not Baseball or English League Soccer, but don't these guys make enough to afford a Tivo, for pete's sake?

My point being, unless the Flames find some energy in the raucous home audience they're now going home to, this could be a mercifully short series. I hope for Iginla, Vincent Lecavalier or Martin St. Louis to be the deciding factor, because that would mean that talent would carry the day. But I'm not optimistic. The Lightning will win this in six ever-more-boring games, and the league will lock everyone out next year, and no one (aside from myself and Adam and maybe a few scattered others) will really notice until after the NFL season ends.

God bless sport, the last best opiate of the masses, capturing the imagination of Gomez and Morticia Q. Public in ways that old standards like politics and popular music can only dream of.

I'm off to bed now.

Ego-Ideal - towerbrave

WHAT? WHAT?

While I'm pushing my offline spatial perceptions around like Val Kilmer in the desert, check out who's back with a new art blog. Towerbrave makes wonderful stuff out of household items, and sells the illustrations all over the place. Her repository awaits your perusal.

morgan spurlock has a blog (doo dah, doo dah)

GOING NUGGETS FOR McNUGGETS!

Morgan Spurlock (the director of Supersize Me, a movie that allegedly does for McDonald's what All The President's Men did for Nixon) has his own blog.

It's mostly a lot of talk about the frenzy of the press junkets and aw-shucks of being a first-time filmmaker whose flick is getting some fairly serious buzz, but it's fun to read how little he expected of the hype he's getting.

NOT ONE FOR THE GREATEST HITS COMPILATION

NOT ONE FOR THE GREATEST HITS COMPILATION

Some housecleaning:

It might not be the best week for the kind of aggressive back-&-forth you've come to no longer expect daily from this space, as I'm making a feeble attempt to look for work while getting outside in this glorious muggy new New York summer. (I know. I have more money than Google, loftier goals to pursue, and time is the one thing I can't buy more of. Well, maestro, that's where you're wrong. I'm working on a deal with Kronos his own self for a deal that would end the passage of time forever, thus assuring immortality for anyone who wanted it. Again, you're welcome. Maybe then I'll get the movie made.)

Besides, Jon's off hiatus. So that takes the pressure off the rest of us. Show the man some love, quick while he's still all aglow from the odd chemical reactions in his belly and you can find him in the dark.

The next Area 52 song will go up tomorrow. My voice is a little messy, and it hasn't been a priority today.

I know, I'm not making sense. Hey, look! A trippy hand trick!

PROPS WHERE THEY ARE DUE

THE GIANTS WHOSE SHOULDERS ON WHICH I AM STANDING

Thanks to Candee, who knows more about this stuff than any human should and who I really should link to just because, I found out today that the gorgeous painting from which I shamelessly stoleded the above detail is called Tiki God, by Mark Ryden. The rest of his stuff, it turns out, is just as pretty.

That's Mark Ryden. Buy something from him if you got the dough, and tell him you saw him here first. Unless you seen him before.

I don't know, I just find shit. People send shit to me.

I have shit.

(Blogspot seems to be having issues today. Try reloading it a few times.)

YOU CAN EAT OFF MY FLOOR ANY TIME, BABY

YOU CAN EAT OFF MY FLOOR ANY TIME, BABY

You know, it always goes one way or the other when you lose a job. Either the grand panorama of possibilities open up like Anna Nicole Smith on her wedding night and all the things in your life that you haven't been paying attention to become possible again, once that 40-plus-hour yoke is lifted from your back and you can sniff the sweet, sweet air of midday freedom. Or shit just fills up your day and even though on the face of it you're less busy, you look up at the clock and go "Son of a bitch. Is it really 4:30 again? I should shower. Nah, it's only Tuesday."

Anyway. I'm proud to announce I've not watched a minute of daytime TV yet, I've been drunk before noon only once in the last three days, and my house is spotless. I know, you care. I know.

Well, to bring you up to date: aside from recording and drawing, oh yeah and stalking Marisa Tomei (where does the day go?), there's not been much. Oh, but I have been working on setting up my life a little better.

So have you seen the great return of Dong yet? Apparently he's joined the cool patrol and is officially fourth in line to marry Julia Roberts. Move on up, brother. Cash them alimony checks. And welcome back.

If you want to get out of the house (this goes for New Yorkers only; for everyone else, the house arrest remains in effect) I'm hosting trivia at Dempsey's tonight. I think it's time for another round of "What's That Smell?" Get those olfactory senses running. I've started eating the cheeses already.

DECAPITATION IS ALMOST NEVER NOT FUNNY

I know there are some of you who have visited this page looking for that video of the cat getting decapitated by the car. (I'm not linking to the ad. You can find it in the article I link to below.) Yeah, I saw it, and yeah, I think it's funny. But I don't get the outrage.

There are two things here. One is that it's advertising. Never mind that Ford disowned it, they commissioned it in the first place. The ad is doing its job, and reaching more people than anyone ever dreamed. They even got me to link to it, and I've been resisting for literally months by now. (This commercial is ancient in internet years. Please don't go somewhere else and tell more people about it. They already know.)

That said, this rant is a spot-on assessment of how people react to the damned thing.

The ad, it's a bit of a litmus test. It's a bit of a smack upside the worldview. I love animals. I would never harm a single one, no matter what a wicked commercial depicts or how many hundreds of canned tame domesticated pheasants the vice president slaughters in an afternoon of sucking up to Antonin Scalia. Then again, I also eat organic, free-range meats. Frequently. Life, it be messy and absurd and contradictory.

I might be the last person in New York City who doesn't have a cat -- I hate the little fuckin' things -- so I saw the thing, chuckled, thought "they had to release this on the net, no one else was going to ever see it," and went on with my day.

And still, every week, someone else discovers it and goes apeshit about it. Why can't you let the ad just die? It's obviously fake (You ever chopped the head off a cat? There's a lot of blood), so why the big to-do?

Oh right, the second thing. It's called outside. If this ad really bugs you, you might want to try going there. See how real people act, see cats not getting mutilated (much), see flowers blooming and people yelling at each other and other people falling in love and eating street pretzels and cabs honking at jaywalkers and indecisive people clogging the stairs to the subway. You know, reality. It's a gas.

IT'S ITS OWN PEDANTIC LITTLE WORLD

I'm coming clean here again: I love commas. I have never, in my life, had an editor, of fiction or journalism, who told me to insert more commas into my sentences, no matter their length, number of needless prepositional phrases, or, to be frank, if I may, clarity.

Many people are hardcore grammar nazis, and I respect their fundamentalism and unwavering belief in the importance of rigidity in the wielding of language. But I'm of the opinion that languages are living, breathing things, and the point of language is, above any other, to get your message across the divide between one brain and another. As long as you do that, if someone throws an extra comma or misplaces an apostrophe somewhere, then the fabric of the language is not destroyed.

I'm glad the New York Times, that standard-bearer of linguistic propriety, has seen fit to address this continuing sea change in how people -- not just writers or pundits, but sign painters, e-mailers and other people who haven't actually won Nobels or Pulitzers -- use punctuation and syntax:

When The Times opts for CD's rather than CDs, it's considered house style. But if a shopkeeper mislays an apostrophe, the kind of people who worry about whether anal-retentive has a hyphen are quick to criticize.

I have one friend who is irked by grammar and punctuation errors to the point of distraction. His constant gripes make it easier for me to not worry so much about following the Chicago Manual of Style to the absolute chapter-&-verse fucking letter, and simply concern myself with getting the point of what I'm saying out onto the page (or screen, whichever).

The person on the street in 2004 talks differently from a similar person in 1954 or even 1984. That's how it's supposed to work, and to deny people their right to mangle the language is to deny progress. Sic transit gloria fucking mundi. Of course, if you can't understand what someone has written, then that's bad language. But a sign in a window that says "CARROT'S 89 CENT'S" isn't going to bring society to its knees. Stop pretending it will, okay?

HUH! I'D LIKE TO MEET HIS FATHER

Two links about Eli glory:

* At Kerryoke.com, which is pro-Kerry but about as guileless and they-can't-be-serious-can-they as you'd think, they're organizing karaoke parties for The Candidate at which people sing parody lyrics of various songs. This is fine, but they only have 17 songs they've rewritten (even though one of them is a Warren Zevon song, but those lyrics redefine ham-handed), and on that list is, let's see, "Santa Claus is Coming To Town," "Bring Back My Bonnie To Me," "Woman from Ipanema" (I've never heard that one. Did someone who's never heard the original PC that title up?) and some song from "The Dobbie Brothers." The original composition really shouldn't count, as it defeats the whole point of karaoke. You're supposed to know the song in advance, at least a little bit. (I break this rule every Monday night.)

Sadly, no New York Kerryoke functions are planned. Bummer. I guess the gorilla suit stays in the closet this election cycle. It's your loss, America.


* Also, apparently, Elizabeth Wurtzel got accepted into Yale Law School. Has she ever succeeded at anything in her life, aside from convincing publishers that her incoherently pathetic junkie-slut ramblings were saleable? I'm sorry, I'm hating the playa, aren't I.

Yes. Yes, I am.

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