Allow me to get Personal

My boss is on vacation for two weeks. That means I can drink liquor at my desk in the morning then go pass out in my car for the rest of the day.

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Fantasy Island '06

Famed television producer Aaron Spelling passed away this weekend. He will be remembered as the most prolific producer in television history. Just reading through the names of programs Spelling created (The Love Boat, Dynasty, 90210...) has been shown to kill brain cells. Singular among Spelling's vast canon of stupid shows is Fantasy Island. Like a blinding white diner jacket, Fantasy Island stands alone as his most implausible creation.

A new movie entitled Fantasy Island '06: Final Fantasy, due to be released this fall, attempts to catch up with the original show's main characters, Mr. Rourke and Tattoo, in the present day. Reprising the lead role is none other than Sir Anthony Hopkins. Playing the part of ethnic man-gnome, Tattoo, is fabulous newcomer Virginia Madsen of Sideways fame.

The movie opens to Rourke and Tattoo filming a series of shoddy infomercials to air on late night television in between magic hair loss pills and ads for phone-sex. Their once stellar reputation has all but been demolished in the wake of lawsuits over the often disturbing nature of fantasies recently experienced on the Island: One plaintif recounts a defective fantasy in which his deceased father came back to life as an aerobics instructor prone to making light of the homeless. Another tells of a champion downhill skiing fantasy in which she suffered through hours of uncontrolable urinating in her snow suit. Finally, soaking and cold, the poor woman had no choice but to compete in her race while hooked to a catheter. She fnished last.

Members of Mr. Rourke's staff had been warning their beloved leader about the Island's diminishing reserves of Montalbanaloid Crystals-- the essential element in producing Fantasy Island fantasies--for years. Crippled by bad investment decisions, Rourke chose to ignore their warnings and press on with his work--and now it may be too late...

Early in the film, in a scene that young children are discouraged from viewing, Rourke (Hopkins) is shown extracting what is revealed later to be adrenal fluid from Tattoo's magical gnome-glands. The fluid is a powerful supplement which allows Rourke to conserve more of the Montalbanaloid Crystals and continue, reluctantly, to run his business and make child support payments to his many ex-wives. The unnatural mix of mystical body fluids and powerful space crystals results in the defective fantasies as well as the ultimate demise of Mr.Rourke and Fantasy Island.

OSCAR WATCH-
Extracting the fluid leaves Tattoo (Madsen) in weakened state; with spongy, grey skin, and only a few wispy hairs atop his head. In an Oscar worthy performance, Virginia Madsen spends the entire second half of the film shivering in a tool shed, muttering the show's famous catch phrase, "de-plane boss...de-plane." to no one.

Blog

I woke up today a little less tired than usual. I can't believe the day I have in front of me. When did life become so hectic? I sure hope my sister does well at her new job in Raleigh. I told her to call me from the airport. Well, that's all for now...

Daily Asides: Have you noticed all the drug commercials on tv lately? The side effects are worse than the disease!?!?!

:)

WordPlay: A Daydream Vaccination movie review

Wordplay is a charming documentary about the blah, blah, blah--snore. Anyway, one of the interviewees featured in Wordplay is Bill Clinton. During Bubba's interview, you can see, peeking out just under one of the cuffs of his very formal and classy suit jacket, what appears to be, a hemp charm bracelet.

Now, there's a ninety-nine percent chance that the story of the bracelet's origins is a wholesome and endearing one. If asked, I'm sure the Former President would gladly tell the story of Mrs. Ribinowitz--89 years young--from the assisted living facility in Tampa who made him "such a lovely piece of jewelry" while convalescing after a long and painful hip surgery: "She inspahrs meh...she gehvs meh strinth". Hillary has heard about Mrs. Rabinowitz several times: "I don't care what her name is Bill. Listen to me now. Chelsea is grown-up.(long, menacing pause) If you fuck-up my run for office with another one of your bimbos, I will not hesitate to have you both killed by anonymous drifters. That's a promise."

Yeah--I like to think he got it from an intern. A twenty-year old intern, fresh out of undergrad and considering law school. He hasn't fucked her yet, but they're becomming fast friends--a surprise to her, considering their age difference. She made him promise not to take the bracelet off until the end of the next moon cycle. He forgot about his commitment to appear in the crossword puzzle movie, but no biggie. It's just a bracelet.

Honk if You're Over it

A Lexus SUV, so sleek and pristine as to appear cut from a single, massive, block of obsidian, drives, hugging the curves along Route 105, bound for the West Hampton shoreline. The sun-bleached-white outline of a "Support Our Troops" sticker is set against the pitch black, tinted rear window.

God bless 'em. To compromise the aesthetics of a vehicle of that caliber takes a powerful conviction. You get the feeling though, that the driver has either, a strong aversion to soap and razor blades, or there's something that he's holding out for?

How about this scenario: Three years ago, a son of obscenely rich parents graduated highschool and it was agreed upon that (now a man) he needed a car of his own. Since there was no way the parents could justify buying him the Porche he had his eye on, and anything less than a BMW was forbidden in their garage, they, all three, compromised on a 2003 Lexus fuck-you-wagon. "This way, Mom can use it to run errands on the weekend." Everybody wins!

Because it was so obvious to him and the rest of the outside world that he could not afford it on his own, Son felt the need to personalize his new car. What better way than a sticker. Mom and Dad would have been fine with a window sticker of Son's college had he been accepted anywhere decent but it was agreed that there was no reason to boast mediocrity. There were some Dave Mathews stickers that he thought tasteful and stylish but he knew without asking that the answer would be no. Then, on line at Seven-Eleven one afternoon he spotted a red, white and blue sticker in the shape of a ribbon. He knew about the contention over the war and that not all his friends felt it was a positive thing. Even Mom and Dad had their doubts about Bush's bold decision to overthrow Sadam. But as he held the $2.99 glossy sticker in his hand, a feeling welled up inside him that it was time to make a conscientious, adult, decision to take a stand.

One sliver of the immigration issue

I caught a snippet of some congressman on a news show last night saying that it is "immoral" for the U.S. to consider granting amnesty to illegal aliens. For decades now, American politicans and buisness lobbyists have been knowingly complicit in allowing illegal immigration from South America to go unchecked. They wrote and passed immigration laws with loopholes which made them unenforceable. The result has been a steady flow of cheap labor and an ever-increasing, and undue, strain on social services, schools and hospitals.

Another by-product has been increased racial tensions. Videos of men jumping over fences along our desert borders, that have been a staple of evening news casts since the seventies, get aired and are never put into any truthful context. So, they feed into the country's existing predjudice. U.S. citizens get the message, straight from Washington, that the good will, once so honored and cherished by our grandparents, has been made a mockery of by these johnny-come-latelys from Latin America.

If the U.S. ever wants to get a handle on illegal immigration it will have to first admit to some level of culpability in creating the problem. The whole thing could be resolved in a year if congress would willingly fine and prosecute the U.S. employers hiring illegals. Instead, in this election year, old laws will be shuffled around and renamed, leaving the same loopholes in enforcement. And the attention of the country will continue to be diverted as much as possible to the criminal outsider.

Memo:

Have you ever thought to make innapropriate use of the memo line on a personal check? I used to do it with my freshman roommates in college. Messages like, "Kenneth is a pussy" and "Blow Jobs for the month of April" added a touch of youthful rebellion to paying the gas bill. It's funny the first few times but, quickly, you realize that no one at the gas company or the bank ever reads what you wrote, or, if they do, they don't care. Plus, the only decent punchline for a personal check is the 'Blow Jobs for the month of' one.

I hadn't thought about messing with the memo line again until yesterday. I was paying a ticket I got in the mail for running one of those camera-monitored traffic lights. It was just so smug. To get to the actual ticket I was required to look through pictures, from four different angles, of my guilty little Dodge Neon breaking the law. It felt like I was being blackmailed. Then, two more pages all about the "state of the art" cameras that caught me and how utterly absurd it would be to even consider contesting my ticket in court in the face of such damning evidence(See pg. 1 Photographs).

I went to make my check out to the New York City Police Department but saw at the last minute that it wasn't them taking my money. It was the exquisitely bureaucratic "Red-Light-Monitoring Finance Branch of the Department for..." whatever.

Fuck You.

That's what I almost wrote in the memo line.

Yellow Legal Pad

I am having one fabulous doodling day. This Spock-like character I'm drawing is something I think people everywhere will want to have in their homes. My completely spontaneous decision to put him in a smoking jacket really pulls the piece together...a "smoking jacket". Where did that come from?!?! Man--but when it's flowing like this I've learned not to question it.

My experimental work with triangles has yeilded these strutting peacock figures. About 3x2" in size, they are truly majestic. Though they have proven to be fickle subjects, I have nailed a few today that I think rate among my best work. I'm most proud of my straight ahead profile of an african elephant. Employing a modified "Hello Kitty" technique, I've been able to add a double line, creating a "blurry" effect. I have titled the vollection: Vibration Elephant.

I'll probably go down to SOHO over the weekend with what I've done today and get a buzz going at some of the largerer galleries. If I stay at my current pace I should have two pages of a yellow legal pad filled with all first rate shit by lunch time. This might sound glib but, when I look at my days work, I know in my gut that I have a RESPONSIBILITY to quit my job and devote my life to ball point pen drawing.

It'll be strange at first, not having to hold down a day job. I think I'd like to work in New Guinea. I find it to be a magical place. The people there posess a spiritual wisdom that I have witnessed first hand in various films and magazine articles, which continues to feed me as an artist.

Drunken Coeds in Space?

The visionaries at Girls Gone Wild have taken the world of reality porn to new and dizzying heights--boldly sending young men and women into the stratosphere to pop out of their tops and loose their bottoms in zero-gravity! It sounds great, doesn't it?

GGW would have you believe that taking the party to space is just the next step in the natural progression of the series. From beaches and night clubs, to dorm rooms, to naked obstacle courses, and now to SPACE? Come on GGW, what's really going on here? We've all seen the lear jet painted with you're logo and, it's true, you got Snoop Dog on board for an episode. But isn't it also true that sales of GGW Down Under have been less than stellar? And now with Mini-Me in rehab, and Hurricane Katrina crippling the Spring Break industry, isn't it true that GGW is feeling the pinch financially? Isn't it true that this "zero-gravity porn" is just a cheap stunt, a panic move, to stimulate sales!?!?

Well, the good news is you haven't jumped the shark just yet. You've resisted going "to Camp" (I excpect for legal reasons, more than anything else), and you haven't done to a single "best of", clip-show--thank god. There are down-times in the eveolution of every show but you must persevere and protect your integrity. In these trying times I implore you to remember the original premise on which an empire was built: A shaky, Radio Shack hand-cam, capturing the regrettable behavior of over-sexed, drunken, barely post-pubescent females to be distributed at a criminal mark-up. Keep the faith.

Daydream Vaccination: The Future pt. I

In the future, there will be no more user names or pass words. User identification will be done by means of a DNA scan. An invisible laser will pass over the face of the mouse, shaving an infintessimal layer of the users index finger off to be at once examined and oxidized. Our children and our children's children will react with shock and wonder upon hearing about the old days when people needed to carry around big clunky codes in their heads, just to survive.

When our generation dies off it will not be uncommon to see usernames chiseled into gravestones.

Double-D's

I went to Dunkin Donuts last night and spied an overflowing tip cup next to the cash register. At some point in the last five years, it seems that cashiers everywhere got it in their collective heads to peel the tattered UNICEF label off the coffee can and let it be known that theirs too is a vocation deserving of gratuity. Well--this is the land of the free and if they can get people to tip, I think it's A-OK. I got in my car, carefully deposited my ninety-seven cents change into the change holder, and thought about what would possess a person to tip so robustly at Double-D's. Then I remembered bar tending.

It's a fact that the best tippers are the afternoon drunks that make you their second family. They can cover up their habit from everyone execpt you, and they need your non-judgement as much as the alcohol itself. So why would it be any different for the box-of-a dozen/four-times-a-week crowd? They've been waiting their whole lives to be able to be able to tip the baker.

I just pray to god the pizza guys up the block never catch on.

Shaving Sucks

I forgot to shave for work this morning. Allright, I didn't forget exactly. I sort of convinced myself that I could get away with it and now I'm screwed. It's nine o'clock in the morning and I would say I'm rocking about a TWO o'clock shadow. The plan is to dodge anyone important until at least three oclock when, I'm hoping, my facial hair will be on par with that of some of the swarthier gentlemen in the office.
I swear--I would wear a three piece suit, patent leather shoes and a monocle to work everyday if it meant I didn't have to shave. It's always comes down to a trade off: eat a quick breakfast or shave; hit the snooze button or shave; I don't want to say the third activity by name but it's like the Olympic Luge, only stationary. And i would much rather do that than shave.
And God forbid you're stuck with a dull blade when it comes time to shave. You feel like Marathon Man. Worse still, is when you honestly do FORGET to shave until halfway out the front door. You don't want to be late but if you walk into work with stubble it wont be long before rumors start flying that you're bi-polar, alcoholic, or you're marriage is falling apart. What's the last thing they say about a guy before he gets fired? They say he's been "comming into work unshaven" and they're "just concerned". Yeah well, save it.