Pretty Goes with Pretty

High Desert Test Sites

Last year was our first chance to check out High Desert Test Sites since moving to Los Angeles, and it's coming around again May 12–13. My brilliant wife and I had a great time, even if we spent more time in the car than seeing the art, and when we did see the art, guess what—it was hot outside! But it was fun nevertheless, the community spirit of it all. Strangely enough the highlight was doing laughter yoga with a bunch of art snobs. It was a nexus of lame cliches somehow coalescing into a lot of fun. It was almost like we were initiated into California once and for all.

HDTS, if you don't know, is put on once a year in Joshua Tree and Andrea Zittel is one of the organizers. One of the best parts of HDTS is that you get to roam around her property—and if you know anything about her work, you know that that is her work. Her show, currently up at MOCA, is terrific; but it's even better in person.

Last year involved something like twenty or thirty artists or groups, spread miles apart. We therefore missed most of it because we tried to cram it into one day. This year purports to be "more like the early days," with fewer artists (including Zittel, Ann Magnuson, and David Shrigley, among others). Check the site for more details. If you're in Southern California then you should make the trip. For the art, for the fun, for the outdoors, for the sake of getting out of town for a day or two.

My brilliant wife has begun blogging again, I'm happy to say, and if you haven't browsed her blog, upon which I piggyback, take HDTS as your opportunity. She's got a whole smattering of suggestions for hotels and campsites in Joshua Tree.

And if you're thinking about traveling anywhere else—really, anywhere else—you may do well to check in and see if she's got some suggestions for you.  Croatia? India? Kentucky? Madrid? Seriously, she has some suggestions for you.

No One Ever Talks about the Real Heroes

Maybe you heard about this bizarre story: two dolphins at a theme park in China were choking on some plastic, and vets at the aquarium did not have a way of reaching far enough into their gullets to get the plastic out. So, they called the world's tallest man, because his arms were long enough to reach inside the dolphins and pull the plastic out.

A completely ridiculous story—perhaps, some might say, ridonculous. Yet while the "mainstream press" can only focus on the tall dude, leave it to my brilliant wife to look for the real story.  "What I really want to know," she said,  "is who the troubleshooter at the aquarium was that said, There's nothing we can do. Unless... unless! Sally! Get me the yellow pages... we need to find the tallest man in the world. Because that's the kind out-of-the-box thinking that deserves some props. Someone get that guy a raise."

Hey, Leave My Brilliant Wife Out of This

File this post under "vain bloggerism."

A few weeks ago I posted about the insipid Angels & Airwaves song "The Adventure." Surprisingly I've gotten a lot of traffic from that post, all from people googling "I can't live, I can't breathe." As the weeks went by the google searches didn't let up, so out of vain curiosity I googled it myself—to find that my post appears in the top ten hits for that phrase (actually, top three). I must admit I get a lot of pleasure out of the idea of some fifteen year-old, fresh from swooning over this epic song on the radio, rushing to the internet to google the lyrics and find out who pierced his or her heart with a thousand darts of sincerity—and finding my post.

In my heart of hearts, I can only hope that my post opens for these people the magical world of Peter Cetera. In reality I'm sure my post is not what they're really looking for, and they probably spend all of a minute looking around here before finding another website that soothes their souls and coos in their ears. Which leads me to a personal milestone: my first hate comment!

What a retard. I'll bet u anything this jerkoff can't play anything that resembles an instrument. Think about what it takes to even make an album, let alone form a band, u shit for brains. And he tries to woo us by interlacing the "my ever brilliantly astute wife"- That doesn't even make sense Spicoli. What a loser, let me guess, she's good lookin too...

And it's the best kind of hate comment, attacking me for not making sense while simultaneously not making sense himself. (If anyone else was wooed by my references to my wife, please speak up!) But for the record, my wife is brilliant, she is always brilliant, and she is certainly astute (hence the category). So, nothing nonsensical there. And since you asked, she is good lookin, too. Please keep the hate comments coming but leave my wife out of it. Thanks!

I Rate This Amazon Review 5/5

In the dregs of summer television, my wife and I have become—well, not addicted to, but regular viewers of—So You Think You Can Dance. Last week one of the pairs had to dance in the style of '80s Disco. My first thought was that this almost doesn't even make sense; what, dance like Molly Ringwald? Of course my wonderful wife did her usual thing—took what I was thinking, said it out loud, only much more astute, brilliantly so. "If they really want to do a good '80s disco dance routine, they should just do the climax scene from Girls Just Want to Have Fun, step for step." After demonstrating some of these moves (trust me, it'd be on YouTube if I had a camera—for visualization purposes, it was something similar to whatever it is Sarah Jessica Parker is doing on the VHS cover, above), she got nostalgic and wondered if the soundtrack was available. To Amazon!

Lo and behold, Amazon has ONE copy of the soundtrack for sale. On CASSETTE.

Also, for NINETY-NINE DOLLARS AND THIRTY-NINE CENTS.

Seriously, a hundred benjies for a cassette tape? My wife paused—this couldn't possibly be worth it, could it? Unsure, we checked the reviews. All reservations were removed:

This rare and totally awesome soundtrack from the movie is well worth purchasing it has all the good up tempo classics that contributed to the feel-good factor of the movie.

Come On Shout: this song was in the opening sequences/credits of the movie, when Dance Tv started. I rate this song 5/5.

On The Loose: when Janey sneaked out to dance with Jeff at the court. I rate this song 5/5.

I Can Fly: this song was playing when Janey and Jeff are rehearsing, Jeff finally does a sommersalt and dancing is co-ordinated. I rate this 5/5.

Dancing In Heaven: this song was played during the contest finals. I rate this 5/5.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun: played when Janey, Lynne and Maggie distributed bogus invites to Natalies ball, I rate this 5/5 as good as Cyndi Laupers version.

Dancing In The Street: This was playing when people were up on stage trying out for the Dance tv contest,I rate this song 5/5.

Too Cruel: played during Janey and Jeffs first rehearsal session. Rate this song 5/5.

Technique: played during the dance off between Natalie/Ben and Janey/Jeff. rate this song 5/5.

Wake Up The Neighbourhood: Played when the Ball at the Country Club was Gatecrashed. rate this song 5/5.

Could it be that the Girls Just Want to Have Fun soundtrack is the greatest collection of songs ever produced? It was beginning to seem like it. I advised my wife to make the purchase. This could be the next Beatles' Butcher album. Purely from a collector's standpoint, it just seemed silly not to buy the $100 cassette.

I Can't Live, I Can't Breathe, Unless We Do It For the Glory of Love

Have you suffered the new single by Angels & Airwaves yet? This is the new band from Tom DeLonge, the whinier of the two Blink-182 singers.  God, but it's the funniest/most horrendous thing I've heard in a long time. For a laugh, check out the wikipedia page for these guys, in which the band claims:

It sounds like it has the conceptual depth of Pink Floyd, the anthemic architecture of U2 but with Tom from blink writing all the melodies.... The music sounds angelic. Every song gives you the chills and you feel like you want to cry but you're conquering the world at the same time. It sounds like stadium rock done by a band that's meant to be the absolute biggest band in the world.

Yeah, sure, Pink Floyd, okay. But on a recent drive to the beach, the song came on the radio and my ever-brilliantly astute wife made the far more accurate call:

What is this, fucking Peter Cetera?

You can go on and on about Bono and Roger Waters all you want, dudes, but I think you've been listening to "You're the Inspiration" a little too much.

Here's another great quote, from their bio on their website:

We would literally shut the blinds, dim all the lights, put Stanley Kubrick's 2001 on the flat-screen TV and take these Stephen Ambrose World War II books, with these two-page spreads of cities burning and people dying, and we'd paste them all over the wall. So on one end of the room, you'd have the endless hope of space, and on the other end you'd have the worst of humanity, and then in the middle, we'd write a love song.

Later, when asked to describe the last sequence of 2001, DeLonge said "You mean the part where Ralph Macchio tries to do the crane kick but his Japanese nemesis doesn't fall for it? Yeah, that was really gripping. There's a really great song that comes on just after that scene."

[thanks again to the Last Plane to Jakarta forums for pointing me to the press release]