dave grohl is a N.E.R.D
What’s the deal with Dave Grohl and the Neptunes? I can’t drive five miles without hearing a song on the radio from one of these two artists. Man those guys must be getting P.A.I.D. Grohl has no less than four projects running around the billboard top 100 right now. You got the new foo fighters record, his drumming on the single for the amazing Queens of the Stone Age, you got your newly released Nirvana record and then you got all the old Nirvana songs that pepper the airwaves continuously. That’s nutz. Then you got The Neptunes (a.k.a N.E.R.D), who besides getting some mediocre rotation for their N.E.R.D album have the production credits for just about every artist on the airwaves right now. The Justin Timberlack song with the sweet drum break in towards the end? That’s the Neptunes. My favorite part of that song is when the sensitive Justin whispers something like, “Don’t worry, I ain’t going to hurt you baby, it’s just me – Justin.” That’s classic. I also really like the “You know, I used to dream about this when I was a
little boy…” bit too. That song got it all, including the call out “Now, everybody dance” commanded with about as much soul as Al Gore. The ‘tunes are also responsible for the new Nelly song, the new No Doubt song, Mystikle, Jay-Z, N’SYNC, Ludacris, Busta Rhymes. Chances are, if your groovin’ to it, then The Neptunes produced it. So It only makes sense that if I was some head commercial radio guy, it would be a forgone conclusion that the only logical step to secure the airwaves from anything new getting through would be to have The Neptunes and Dave Grohl just start writing songs together and only those songs would make it on to the radio. Radio entropy – it’s only a matter of time.

in defeat…a victory.
Oh cruel country. Defeat is a horse pill to large to swallow this morning. Last night, when all the cards were shown, and our opponents arm swept across the table to pocket all the chips, it appears, we democrats were bluffing. And now, we’ve handed over the keys to our home AND our lake cabin to the great elephant. Painfully, we must live in the shit piles our giant guest will leave around our home.

So what does 2004 look like and how do we get there? Can we find a new breed of candidate? The old school democrats, our pasty white big names and family name successors, lost big yesterday. Mondale, Humphrey, both down in a blaze of glory. Will we settle for old names (H. Clinton or A. Gore) in 2004 or can we breath some new raw energy into this mess?

Can we organize better? Can we come correct with a clear and poignant message? Can the message have new ideas? New fashions? New hats?!? Can we start today? We’ve won with optimism before we need to stick with optimism today. You can be the record or you can be the DJ.

Technology laws and the lawmakers who support them.

voting for Columbine and Jam Master Jay
Take the whole day off and go get your vote on. Shuck all that Republican intimidation, get to the polls early and help others get there too. The Packers won last night and I think that’s a good sign for a “November Surprise” today.

Denver. I had no idea that Marilyn Manson was such an articulate gentleman. After watching his interview in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, I thought that guy should be on an election ticket. I bet he could debate the pants off people. Marilyn Manson for President in 2004! He really missed his calling. I think he’d be a much better politician than musician. The South Park cartoon, available for viewing here, will go down as a classic. Brilliant!

Salon has a nice tribute write up on Jam Master Jay.

I have a swanky wedding coming up in New York in a couple of weeks and I have nothing to wear. Hee. No really. It’s true. The gig is a black tie optional affair and sadly my closets lack the essential “Big Boy” clothes required by the codes that rule over occasions like these. My Plushy Puma track suit wont cut the cheddar and my elbow padded professorial corduroy digs don’t make the grade neither. So it was that I set out today to right my fashion wrongs and add to my coffers the cool cut of a new suit. One that would make me the classiest of cats and the coolest of county men.

In a trek that spanned three vast corners of our ever expanding sprawl of a metropolis, I combed countless racks and enlisted the fancy help of the gentlemen crowd, to spin me a suit, cut form the finest silks in all the land. But the tailors were not please, “your body is misshapen and your proportions are not normal”, or “we don’t carry your size” or simply “you might want to try one of our other stores”.

And so I did! But alas, the victory was not in the cards today. Nothing synched. A three button jacket fit just right but the pants were all wrong. The pants made my butt look like a firm peach, ready to be picked from the tree, but the jacket made me out to be an evil David Byrne impostor — or worse…a David Spade impostor. Oh no you did-ent…Oh yes I did!

It was all an exhausting process that made me want to cry into the lapels of the nearest Prada parka. Angry conclusions were thrown about that basically, the worst fashion atrocity ever pushed on the gentleman crowd has to be the invention and proliferation of the pleated pant. What an abomination. What an ill-fitted construction on the holy proportions once laid out so clearly for all designers by the late great da Vinci. Who looks good in pleated pants? No one. They’re awful. They make as if one has apples and large foreign currency floating around in ones pockets. Make them go away.

So my search continues. 44 long, three button jacket with pants that have no pleats. I will settle for nothing less. Stay close to this story as it develops…

the week that all my heroes died
Hell. What a dark and sad week it has been. Last night, Jam Master Jay was shot dead. Jam Master Jay from Run DMC was a galactic pioneer on the decks and was my introduction to the world of Hip Hop just as Paul Wellstone was my introduction to Minnesota Liberal politics. I remember like steel the summer between seventh and eighth grade, when my friend Joel and I took a silly job cleaning the foul lockers of the school we were attending. For Eight hours a day we moved like machines down the dark deserted hallways of our school on little swiveling office chairs, moving from locker to locker, scraping off the dried gum that a fourth grader had left behind as his educational totem or cleaning out the well worn trapper keepers left by the careless seniors. It was a thankless task. But our one saving grace that summer was a boom box that was never more than ten feet away. On constant rotation: Run DMC’s Tougher Than Leather and Ice-T’s Power. When those tapes were rocking, it didn’t even seem like we were working. At times, i think we imagined we were cleaning the subway cars in NYC and Run DMC was putting on a show in the park across the street. Jam Master Jay had plugged his turntables into a light post nearby and was cutting up a breakbeat by a washed up hair rocker band that everyone had forgotten about.

let the campaign begin!
mondale sign

Charged after the memorial/rally last night, I searched high and low this morning for a Walter Mondale for U.S. Senate lawn sign. No luck. So I made a little temporary one until things at the campaign become “official”. If you’d like a copy here is a pdf version (500kb).

wellstone memorial
Heading off to the Paul Wellstone memorial. I hope to drive by the Wellstone campaign headquarters as I haven’t seen that display yet. I’m happy that this amazing outpouring of grief and support has been organized. Interesting that Dick Cheney has been uninvited, I’m not exactly sure what that’s supposed to mean. I think this will be a great event that will both give space for grief and serve to galvanize Wellstone supporters to charge forward in the last week before the election. Although I will rally around “Fritz” and it will be nice to have an elder statesmen in office, I can’t help but mourn the fact that I won’t ever have had the chance to cast my vote for Paul. I was too young to vote for Paul the first time he ran (seeing those old advertisements for that campaign are great aren’t they?) and I was living (and voting) in Portland Oregon when he ran for re-election. This was going to be my first time casting for the “unabashed liberal” and I was warming up my number 2 pencil and counting down the days.

James Lileks has a nice bleat on Wellstone as does Slate. The NYTimes Obituary for Wellstone is good too. His book is still available too. More on Wellstone.

OSX rules my morning
I’m sitting here in a conference room of a major software company in Saint Paul, waiting for the guy I’m supposed to meet with to show up. One of the reasons I’m here is to look at the intranet site of this company. No less than four people have been putting me in front of PC’s and huge workstations trying to get something to work so that I can see their stuff. Nothing seems to be working. Monitors don’t work, connections can’t be established. Intra-company passwords are being ignored. Pure comedy. So I decided to school all these players on the power of Mac OSX. I took out my lap-top that had been gently sleeping in my bag, and jacked it into one of the ethernet cables that was protruding from the conference room table and within seconds of taking my machine out of its bag I was online and looking at their system. Needless to say, all were amazed at the simple power of the Jaguar! Hee.

I got here really early (8AM) for no reason and killed time in the Starbucks that is conveniently located in their lobby. I overheard the following conversation/flirting which was too much to take at this early hour. It went like this:

Customer: Hey, man how was your weekend?

Barista: O.K.

Customer: Did you get arrested?

Barista: No. I’m an angel. An angel with broken wings.

Customer: Hmmm…that implies that you once had wings…you devil.

(long uncomfortable pause…and then the customer leaves)

The whole arrested thing really threw me for a curve ball. Yuck. I just hate it when I overhear stuff like that. Really obvious flirting just makes me cringe. People, it’s just too early in the morning to get your flirt on.

the jackass got lost
Today I went for a long walk in my new city and got hopelessly lost. I can’t quite figure out how it happen exactly. Started walking around the lake, turned to take what I thought was a parallel road that would take me back towards the general direction of my dwelling and ended up on the wrong side of another lake. Harriet I believe. Everything kinda looked the same with the fall colors being what they are and I ended up taking one too many wrong turns. Haven’t gotten lost like that in a while. It’s funny, you could drop me anywhere in Saint Paul and I could get you home, but there are huge chunks of Minneapolis that still remain a quite mystery to me. Luckily, I was able to get some direction back when I interrupted a man in the midst of his archery practice. I swear he gave me directions in some Olde English dialect. Odd people in this town.

I laughed till I cried watching the Jackass movie Saturday. Snorting wasabi made me weep with laughter. My only complaint with the movie is that it seemed really short. I think it could have been four hours longer. Oh shit, I’m laughing just thinking about it. Laughing is good.