REMEMBER MASHUPS? It's two things you know made into one thing, which is a new thing. Then we like it for a day or two and then it's as if it never existed and that's probably for the best. So here we go with this one. This is going to be stupid. This is beautiful. This is ok I guess. This is beautiful. This is stupid. I'm not sure what this is. I still don't know. At times it made me like :(, then other times it made me like :/. It almost just works. It almost just fits, perfectly. But it doesn't, does it? And it never will. 

PS: Fuck that Whitney Houston isolated vocal track from a couple weeks ago that everyone was crying over. Listening to Morrissey's track for "This Charming Man" taken out of context here is giving me the real chills. Video below.

Davey Jones of The Monkees is dead. True story, the first music concert by a music band I ever went to was The Monkees. Weird Al opened. Beat that, losers.  

Don't be too sad about his passing though. It's all part of Leap Day William's plan to trick children into shedding more tears so he has an excuse to give us all candy! Which is kind of a roundabout way of saying I WATCH 30 ROCK TOO YOU GUYS.  Rest in peace old buddy. Rest in peace all of us.  [video after the thing]

Leo Crowley went to my high school. I hope he isn't talking about me in this piece about potential serial killers we all knew in school, because if so he is so fucking dead when I get my hands on him.

In my ongoing attempt to read the entire internet, I stumbled across this article, My Friend Dahmer yesterday. That's the only explanation I can offer for having read an article on CNN's blogs page. For those of you who lack the attention span to follow the link (pretty much all of you), it's an article bout John Backderf, aka Derf, a somewhat famous comic strip writer who happened to be high school chums with the much more famous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, a profession only slightly less respectable than "comic strip writer." The headline and the subject matter piqued my interest, and it's always thrilling to live vicariously through someone else's brush with depravity, right? But one quote in particular set my mind a'spinning:

Cross-posted on the Boston Phoenix

Here's another one of my music posts that no one reads and no one cares about. The new album from Canadian (probably) blogwavers Memoryhouse "The Slideshow Effect", whose title is a reference to how much slideshow galleries on websites make me want to [x] the fuck out of there and smash the first person I see in the tits, comes out today on Sub Pop. And like everything else on the internet, it's free for you to listen to because you hate art and creativity you ungrateful little shits. I'm too sick today to write anything about it at length (OR AM I?), so let's just assume it's really pretty and frail and gossamer-like, and sounds like a sundress swishing in the faded sunlight. Check out the video for "The Kids Were Wrong" . Does it make you wistful for your own wasted youth? Does it make you sad to think about how you're going to die someday? Does it make you feel like you're twenty damn years old and holding hands with someone wearing a similar style of coat as you on the way to get tea is the axis upon which the entirety of firmament rests? It does. 

I have always been the least homophobic dude I know, except whenever I was trying to communicate with kitchen dudes, at which point I somehow transformed into Rick Santorum in a metaphoric sombrero.  It's a dilemma that any self-flagellating liberal who's ever done time in a restaurant can relate to.  For some reason every single Mexican or Central American dude I ever worked with over my many years in the industry were really interested in finding out if I liked hombres. Probably because of how tight my pants were? Do they have skinny jeans in Guatemala? Is that racist? Is this whole post racist? Anyway,  Bronan the Barbarian knows how it is. Here's his guide to essential kitchen Spanish. 

Is oversharing online going out of fashion? One person on one newspaper's opinion page thinks so, which is what counts for a news hook when it comes to blogging these days, and I just so happen to disagree, so I came here to the internet to share my feelings on the matter. 

As Alexandra Petri writes in the Washington Post piece The end of the age of overshare? "The long era of shouting noisily into the Internet may be at an end. So much for the era of overshare, the heyday of TMI."

HEY BUY A T-SHIRT ABOUT A BLOG THAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET. I DUNNO, LIKE $20 I GUESS? PLUS A DOLLAR OR SO FOR SHIPPING. THAT SEEM REASONABLE? SUPPORT YOUR OLD BUDDY WHO SLAVES ALL DAY OVER A HOT CONTENT STOVE. IF YOU AREN'T GOING TO BUY ONE BECAUSE IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE YOU CAN HAGGLE WITH ME BUT I'LL PROBABLY THINK YOU'RE A PUSSY, FAIR WARNING.

EMAIL ME IF YOU WANT ONE AND WE'LL SORT OUT THE DETAILS. . 

THEY ARE PRETTY SWEET, SOFT T-SHIRTS, KIND OF AMMY APPY STYLE. I HAVE MEN'S MED-LARGE AND WOMEN'S SMALL-MEDIUM. THEY'RE  MADE BY THE FINE FOLKS AT AUDIO COTTON. DESIGN BY JOHN BROOKHOUSE. PROBABLY GOING TO GO FAST SO DON'T FUCK AROUND.

Our old buddy Arv has never been to SXSW, but why should that stop him from explaining exactly how it works based on his trip to Texas -- this is the internet after all. Check out Arv's site here. His last piece on PTSOTL was Why You Shouldn’t Pay a Cent More for College (If You Attend a Public University).  

SEE ALSO:  A couple of punters head to Texas, where ghosts exist

As the title should have made clear, I’ve never been to SXSW. Each year, before I even have a chance to realize that it’s a thing that happens, my friends start bitching about how all the hotels in Austin are booked. So I write off SXSW again -- until the week after, when everyone who attended starts posting pics on Facebook. You know the kind: people stark drunk and suffering from heat stroke; piles of Taco Cabana and Whataburger wrappers; people passed out on shitty motel floors and strangers’ couches. Every year, those photos rekindle the desire to be there in the pit, the bar, the mob. And then I forget again.

 

Everything is the most thing ever today, like this new video for "Kissing Taste" by Sweden's electro/neo-disco/chill-wave/indie-dance/laptopfart Lo-Fi-Fink (via Stereogum). Some other Swedish things I've heard of: Me. Skinny dudes with their shirts off in the snow. Pretty blond girls in a dude's shirt and she looks at the camera for a minute, like, maybe she's looking over here. Is she looking over here? Nah, probably just a skinny Swedish dude playing drums on the porch like usual. Frozen swamps, probably. That one vampire movie that was pretty good. Porn star Puma Swede. My grandmother's cooking. Vampire Eric. Other things. 

I like to think of my conceptualized installations as approximate inventories of fragmentary consciousness (via meaninglessness), ie, found objects, photographs other people took, paintings I don't understand, photographs I would have taken if I was there at the time, and consumerist refuse. They are improvisational in as much as the constructed vis a vis the deconstructed, the ready-made and the never-should-have-been-made align, come together, regress, push and pull, in and out, just like that, not so hard though, sorry I'm just kind of tired I guess, can we try again later. My parameters are schematizations, investing in the viewer a sense of movement through texturized, space, historicizing within that space a disgusting townie who smokes too much on his dirty back porch, for example. Alientation and aesthetics, minimalism and maximalism together at once.  It's a sort of poetry of seduction of the unreal, a commentary on consumerism, but also a pile of shit. 

Bad news, hipsters, you're all going to fucking die. Well, obviously, yeah, we all are, probably miserable and lonely, but you're dying right now as we speak, unless you're reading this naked, which is weird, but I can sort of vibe to that. 

It's a condition that super serious medical science is calling "sudden onset ball squishing syndrome" unless I misread this piece in The Wall Street Journal Tight Ties, Killer Heels: Clothes Make the Fashion Victims.

OK, never mind, maybe an army bro gunning out pushups to Nirvana at the State Fair isn't the most American thing I've ever seen, as our man Patrick Kay helpfully pointed out in the comments to that last thread. Instead we've got this slice of Americana folk art, or f-art for short.  I have watched this 6 times in a row and counting. It's pretty old, but there's a reason the classics stick around.

This isn't real music

Remember last week when the session drummer from Jack Black and Juliette Lewis' TV bands went on the Grammys and said all that racist shit against DJs right before performing with Deadmaus5? Awkward. A couple days ago he put out a pretty funny, lengthy, and charming apology, in which he said, in part  “I don't know how to do what Skrillex does (though I fucking love it) but I do know that the reason he is so loved is because he sounds like Skrillex, and that's badass. We have a different process and a different set of tools, but the 'craft' is equally as important, I'm sure. I mean.....if it were that easy, anyone could do it, right? (See what I did there?)"

Pinterest is for girls, you guys. Haha, good one. Girls can't use the internet, can they? They're all, let me talk about my day at work first for five hours, then they step into a mop bucket and get their foot stuck and fall out the window and you have to go help them parallel park. Or maybe I'm wrong, at least according to this woman-splaining piece on Clever Girls Collective about how pervasive the sexism in writing about Pinterest by the male-dominated tech writing world has been. 

Not sure how anyone could've seen this one coming, aside from all the other melees that have broken out there over the years, but one of Dorchester's most notorious bars, Ups N Downs, has gotten knifey again. You'll all surely remember my last trip to the bar from my book, , which you've all bought already by now, right? (And which just went on sale at all the Urban Outfitters in the area this week in case you haven't). 

I've posted the entry on Ups N Downs from the book below if you want a taste. First one is free.

As I've long said, (like in this old piece on Street Carnage on why it's pointless to talk politics at the bar), "every single conservative asshole you have ever met is a self-loathing homosexual who wants to kill you." It's a fact of life so self-evident it barely even needs to be repeated. The problem is, these fuckers keep repeating it for us with their political chicanery and tiny rainbow-colored boners. Meet Sheriff Paul Babeu, who, according to his website, is the 2011  “Sheriff of the Year as selected by his colleagues in the National Sheriff’s Association." He's also placing pretty high in the 2012 "Cliche of the Year" awards as selected by me.

A big part of the appeal of dubstep, or any controversial sub-genre of contemporary pop music, is that old people are confused and threatened by it.  I wrote about that a bit more in depth here. This perpetuates the endlessly renewable pattern of the musical generational divide wherein kids can carve out a unique, inscrutable identity from their parents, and the old can continue to remain scared shitless by the obnoxious little fuckers. Skrillex, no dummy, understands that, which is why it was the underlying metaphor of his "Equinox" video. Kids be scary, y'all. 

In his new video "Bangarang" he goes back to that well once again, with another reminder that teenagers are monstrous little demons who will fuck you up and make off with your shit the first chance they get their sticky ice-cream'd hands on it. 

Should've remembered to use Vagifresh Balls

It's been a confusing week for women's concerns with a new PETA ad that endorses domestic violence getting a lot of attention. Even worse is the news that all of your black-magic riddled spider cave vaginas are going to have to go back to being filthy and shameful, and not just because Rick Santorum is doing so well in the Republican primaries. 

My buddy and colleague Chris Faraone of the Boston Phoenix has been on top of the Occupy movement since the jump off, a phrase I use there because it sounds vaguely hip hop, a subject he also covers with gusto. His work typically outshone anything coming out of the more mainstream press. Catch up some of it in the Phoenix here. 

Sensing something rotten in the air, Faraone took off around the country to take the temperature of the movement, or to be more accurate, snap on a pair of latex gloves, and tell the world to bend over and cough.

The result is his new book 99 Nights with the 99 Percent, 224 pages of the real story from someone on the ground while it unfolded. Buy it here at UndergroundHipHop or on , or pick one up . From the book's press blurb:

Remember when you were in college and people would come by and you'd make them look at your high school yearbook? Do people still do that? Do they even still make yearbooks? (serious question). Do people still "come by"?  Now that everything you do, from your first blowjob party to your first dozen experiences overdosing on adderall and molly, usually around 8th grade by now I'm guessing, is on your Tumblr and Facebook wall, yearbooks don't really seem necessary anymore do they? 

The point is, that shit was boring as a bag of boring dicks. Here's me in, like, an old and funny looking shirt, you'd say.  I wouldn't wear that particular style of shirt in this day and age, you'd laugh, and hope your friend would silently but outwardly be admiring your bold sense of self at such a young age, not to mention your handsome friends and myriad successful excursions in the world of MEANINGFUL HIGH SCHOOL activities, or else the exact opposite of all those things depending on your proximity to the prevailing cultural identity norm at the time. I was such a loser! I was so popular! 

I bring all of that up because that is exactly what I'm about to do here. Turns out they've been digitizing all of the yearbooks from my high school, (SILVER LAKE REGIONAL HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 1995 YO) and I'm pretty excited about it, solely so I can figure out who all these bloated weirdos in vaguely familiar-looking alien skin suits that talk to me on Facebook are all the time. 

In today's Globe I've got a pretty big story in which I try to trace the evolution of the Boston cocktail revival back to its start, and a family tree style graphic that traces its path through the best bars today. Anyone who doesn't find that sort of thing interesting should promptly skip this post, because it's pretty nerdy and soooo long I can barely even process it.

In the interest of space in the paper we had to condense and streamline a lot of the data, because your average person probably doesn't need 15,000 words about which bar begat who and which dude worked with this other dude and where. I happen to find that sort of thing fascinating, so I've included all of my notes and interviews below, including lots of the people we had to edit out of the Globe piece. If you care about Boston bars and bar history, this is for you.  Many many typos to follow. 

I was working on a Valentine's Day story for the Gl0b3 about the crazy things people do for love, but then it wasn't that great of an idea, and it fell apart and I didn't do it. Most people I asked (I asked a lot) were like "Eh, nothing really", or "I can't share that shit in a newspaper."  

I was just going to let it go, but here I am without anything to write about today, and you've got to feed the content monkey, so... Below are a couple of the halfway decent responses I got. These four are all from women, because ladies be tripping, right fellas? All sorts of potions and shit in their bathroom cabinets. 

What did you do for ♥ that you're embarrassed by? SHARE IT IN THE COMMENTS MAYBE?!

I live-blogged the Grammys last night You didn't miss much. Here's my post-live-blog-live-recap-blog-wrap-up. Always good at writing one-liners about pop music, if nothing else, they'll say. Absolutely nothing else, sure, but still.

It's been a whole two years since Karmin's chief songwriter Chris Brown mercilessly and repeatedly smashed his little munchkin fists into the beautiful face of his girlfriend Rihanna -- who was probably asking for it considering the way she was dressed, right -- and yet everyone is still making a big deal over it now that he's set to lip sync in front of the nation on the Grammys tonight. 

Bumping this post from the other week because Karmin is on SNL tonight and everyone is probably going to be hating on them all over the internet tomorrow. Gawker has all yr jellie bases covered with their Hater's Guide to Karmin, but I think there's an interesting question here about how acts are generating internetty buzz through cover songs lately. For the record, I like the Karmin version of the Chris Brown song better than the original, but I have no idea what I'm talking about when it comes to anything.

As we did before with the Metal, Goth, and Brit Pop issues, my colleagues and I at the Boston Phoenix have compiled an issue this week dedicated to the Top 100 Emo Songs. Warning: if you are over 30 never wore eyeliner/girl jeans (via being a girl) you are going to be MAD. 

Personally, I am just as into the power ballad pop era of commercialized emo as I am the tr00 early r00ts of emo (via DC hardcore), so I'm OK with our pop-friendly list. Could've used a little more Mineral/Boy's Life/Lifetime in my opinion, but I'm honestly just excited to have been able to mention Texas Is the Reason, The Anniversary, The Promise Ring, and American Football in a news-paper in the year 2012. 

I wrote a few of the blurbs for the top five songs. Check them out below, then go read the rest of the list here. Check out the Spotify playlist here and dig the articles All emo is local ; A punk phenomenon grows up; and Emo: it might as well be a four-letter word.

You remember yr boyuns Riff Raff. We been had done posted about that fool a little while back.  Pretty much the hands down consensus for the nadir of contemporary American culture right? He's from MTV I guess? I'm not sure because I'm only half retarded so I can't keep track of all this shit. But now he's collaborated with Action Bronson, aka the coolest fat guy I know, in a song that's actually pretty good. I don't know what to think anymore. And wait a second, who's homeboy in there chilling with them? That one dude that used to be on MTV? What the fuck was his name? Rex something? He was like the 9tz version of a Channing Tatum character, but real. Anyway, nothing makes sense anymore, up is down, black is white, and Riff Raff managed to not embarrass himself on a track with a legit talent. I'm going home for the day.

The Metro is a widely read news-paper I write for some-times. Thought Catalog is a widely read web-site I am kind of surprised I have never written for, because I'm both exceptionally vapid and yet really pleased with the sound of my own retarded inner monolog at the same time. 

As I've just learned, the paper  , in an article on the paper's website about a new that serves the same purpose as the aforementioned Tumblr, namely, taking the piss out of Thought Catalog, which I am referencing here on my own blog, in a post in which I intend to also contribute to the overall theme and then the snake sucked its own internet dick and why are people stupid now oh my god who cares. Quoth the Metro:

Just watched the trailer for the new Bob Goldthwait film "God Bless America" which is essentially "PTSOTL: THE MOVIE", except if words were bullets, but you could squish the words really hard together and pack them into actual bullets and shoot people in the face with them, metaphorically speaking, because murder is wrong.

I've been so distraught since I stumbled out of that random time paradox where the Patriots lost the Super Bowl in the exact same way to the exact same team as they did the last time they were in it the other night that I haven't been able to think straight. I didn't even remember important stuff I was thinking about during the happy parts of the game, like how I bet if I looked up that one online I could find pictures of her naked. 

And here we are two days later, and my brain is slowly piecing itself back together, and I'm starting to remember that no matter how irrationally emotional you get about the waxing and waning fortunes of the millionaire sportsball bros who go to work in the same geographic region that you do, there are certain things in the world that outshine that. Like how you'll never know what an Italian fashion model smells like. 

PICTURES BELOW NSFW
(via wherever people steal photos to masturbate to from)

And you thought Japanese vending machines selling used school girl panties, vegetables, or fluorescent skeletons taking a dump were weird, but that's nothing compared to what they're selling in vending machines at one Pennsylvanian college: dead babies. Basically dead babies. 

The Associated Press reported today that students at Shippensburg University' "can obtain the 'morning-after' pill from an unusual source — a vending machine at the campus health center."

Disgusting lesbian probably thinking about disgusting lesbian sex here

"The world of hip-hop is notorious for being a haven of misogyny and homophobia," says The Daily Mail. "But hotshot rapper Azealia Banks is standing up to the prejudice by publicly admitting to being bisexual. The much-touted star, whose celebrity fanbase includes Kanye West, spoke out about her sexuality in an interview in the New York Times." 

Looks like she was speaking literally when she sang "I guess that cunt's getting eaten." 

And no one was ever homophobic again, because if there's one thing that the stereotypically homophobic rap world just can't stomach it's the thought of hot young women having hot young woman sex all over eachother's hot young woman bodies. 

Never thought I'd be in a position to have an opinion on Bon Iver, but the group's frontman, whose name is actually Justin Vernon and not Bon Iver as it turns out, is the realest mafucka in the game. The group, who was nominated for [look up what Grammy they were nominated for later] have declined an invitation to perform at the ceremony. 

Some other things to read from me this week for your nerds. 

I wrote about the most quintessential Boston cocktail, spirit, and beer to drink for "tomorrow's big game!" (isn't it weird how you're not allowed to refer to the Super Bowl in advertistements?) in today's Wall Street Journal.

I interviewed one of the best bartenders in the country, Jim Meehan of PDT in NYC, about his new book in the Globe.

I like this new bar jm Curley because, among other reasons, they, have a rule on their menu that says "don't be a douchebag."

Colonel D. Jean Mustard, PTSOTL's hardest working Dunkin Donuts correspondent is stoked about this can't-lose deal from the evil marketing geniuses at metro-Boston's favorite local-identity-based-branding huckters. That's probably his thumb. Nice thumb, loser.

I like this because it's like saying "HEY ASSHOLE WANT TO SAVE LIKE 75 CENTS? [how much is a donut actually, someone check] THEN GO FILE THIS PAPERWORK, TRANSFER THIS THING ALL THE WAY BACK OVER HERE IN YOUR CAR, THEN BUY SOMETHING ELSE AND THEN YOU WIN THE PRIZE!"

Says Mustard: "It's like, what is your personal/marketing profile/email address worth to you?  We're willing to offer you a donut as compensation." 

Personally, mine is worth zero. Zero dollars. Zero anything. I'm getting my donut, then I'm going to sit here and finish my coffee. We're talking about basic freedoms. 

 

Every so often one of the places I write for tries to get me to take pictures to go along with the words I make with my word-hands, and let's just say I'm not filling it. Mostly on account of being a horrible photographer with a shitty camera. Every now and again I like to remind people of that fact, just so they'll leave me alone.

With the Patriots in the news so much this week leading up to the Super Bowl, I was trying to think up an excuse to re-post my piece from last year on Why the "blue collar" New England Patriots are really the NFL's Most Republican Football Team, and really, really hoping I didn't have to update it in order to do so, because that would require a modicum of effort. Fortunately, the New Yorker has arrived with a news peg I can use to make it seem timely. 

Writing about the daily grind in the sports reporter Super Bowl beat limbo, they picked up on a throwaway joke from Brady today about his relationship with his father, who followed him around the country throughout his early career. 

Joshua Hagler, aka the only visual artist I've given more than half a shit about in the past couple years, has been a favorite on PTSOTL for a while now. I interviewed him here at length last year about his work. 

He's got a new exhibition "The Imagined Chase" opening next month at Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco with a reception March 1st from 5 to 8pm. He's been kind enough to share some of his recent work with us again, like the centerpiece of his new work "The birth (in three acts)," a recent triptych, none of which is very 'funny' per se. It is, however,  unsettling, and a little spooky, so that counts well enough for our purposes here. 

Mike Eide may be a despicable Giants fan from New York, but other than that he's alright by me. He writes in with this PRO TIP on how to dress up your shitty swill beer in one simple step, just in time for the Super Bowl. 

Sorry wild man, but Buddy Weiser, Dickie Pabst and that Schafer jerk are the worst. Those goons offer you nothing but a generic, flat-ass taste that dips off somewhere into the metallic. Gag, son.

That hoo-er is a fucking skank.

I'm just as sick of all the tired, old Masshole Boston accent videos as the next guy who spends 15 hours a day on the internet in Mass., whether it's , , or the latest, , which is great because it takes that one thing everyone knows and makes it a little different so other people who recognize the references can get in on the same fresh joke. 

"We don't even sound like that," most of my friends say. I know, these things are so far off it's not even funny. The reality is so much worse, like in this video below that Evan K. just unearthed from a local news report. I present to you, the most Bostony Boston accent I've ever heard. Shit is retarded. Here's how you make an authentic Shit Massholes Say video: wait for someone to get stabbed, then turn on your camera. The end. 

Patrick Kay is some kind of international man of mystery, and I still don't think I understand where he's from. London? Singapore? Australia? Not-America is the point.  Today he talks about how the little lies inevitably catch up to us. His last piece for PTSOTL was I never learned the value of money.

Cyril was non-specifically exotic. He could have been a sleek Moroccan, a particularly patrician light-skinned Sri Lankan or even a fine-boned Guatemalan. He was actually half Chinese and half Malay; his parents were from Singapore. Cyril’s younger sister, the same age as my younger brother, was notorious for having tossed off her boyfriend on the tube underneath a jacket spread over his lap.His family ran the best of several fish and chip shops near my house.