Archive for 2010
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Skidoo The Movie: Like Jackie Gleason On Acid
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 24, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010Because, well, it IS Jackie Gleason on acid. If you like 60′s films like The Party, The President’s Analyst, Barbarella, or Head, you’ll love Skidoo. Good luck finding a copy though.
  Strangely, the poster is available on Amazon |
It had been a long time since I had thought of the game Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. That is, until a friend recently turned me on to a production starring (among others; more on that further on) Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Cesar Romero. Sounds like an episode of the Batman TV series, right? Well if you add Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his final appearance in film, you have Skidoo, creating one of the weirder nexuses possible in the six degrees game. I have no idea how I managed to make it this far in life without having seen this star-studded masterpiece of late sixties psychadelic wackiness. It’s like Jackie Gleason on acid, because, well, it stars Jackie Gleason – on acid. Along with just about everyone else at one point in the film. The cast alone makes this flick worth watching, but you’ll especially enjoy it if you’re into other movies from 1967/68, a couple of years when it seems someone must have been pret-ty busy running around Hollywood spiking the punch and baking brownies. Movies like Head
We Are All Prostitutes – Everyone Has Their Price
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 23, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, August 23rd, 2010And ours is pretty low. Learn how you can peddle influence and curry favor with Dissociated Press for as little as five dollars.
 This is not a prostitute. This is a Hooker. |
We talk a lot about the demise of journalistic integrity here on Dissociated Press. We in fact probably contribute to it daily with our shoddy writing, weak fact checking, re-purposing of content, and lack of an actual editor. In spite of our concern about this issue, that doesn’t mean we don’t like making money, which is why we’re launching a funding drive. In the interest of transparency and serving the public good, we’ve created some donor levels so that you can know exactly where your donations are going, and feel good about them. This whole scenario could of course have been avoided if more people would show support for our sponsors by clicking on their links once in awhile, or buying the amazing things we recommend on Amazon
, but no. Our content is our gift to the world that didn’t ask for it. Unfortunately, as our traffic grows, our hosting company’s bill is their gift to us. Learn below how easy it would be to rent, own, or pwn us. Read the rest of this entry »
Understanding Rap Music
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 22, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010You can learn about a lot of things by researching them on the web. Rap music isn’t one of them. But GoogleRaps is here to help.
 Google Rap Maps. Is there anything Google can’t do? |
When someone asks me, “do you like rap music?”, I’m never quite sure what to say. Do I try to clarify their question by saying “You mean those audio recordings of rhyming rhythmic monologues about killing, misogyny, drug deals, narcissism, sexual organs, racism, and egoistic persecution complexes?” To which the answer would be “Um…no.” Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of rap, so if you say “Sure, I like rap” then you risk being pigeonholed as someone who hates women and thinks shooting people is a noble way to resolve a dispute. And if you’re white, you’ll be subject to the additional assumption that not only do you approve of these behaviors, but you do so by co-opting the values of an oppressed subculture. My actual answer to the original question is probably something like “Yeah, I like rap music. GOOD rap music”, going on to explain what a useless term “rap” is. Using information from the internet does nothing to clarify the issues at hand. Wikipedia has a dry description of rapping that suggests that “rap” may be etymologically derived from “repartee” and then goes on to talk about things like the early influence of The Memphis Jug Band, but the term “rap” redirects to “hip hop”. Which in my opinion muddles the definition beyond belief, since the page itself defines rap as being merely one of the four “key stylistic elements” of hip hop. Yeah. Whatever. There are also a lot of sites that attempt (and mostly fail) at meta-ironic humor based on “whitefying” the meaning of rap lyrics, like SnacksAndShit.com or Underground Hip Hop For Dummies . One example: Lyrics from Krizz Kaliko’s Get Cha Life Right – ” I ain’t trying to be Bill Gates, I’m trying to be the nigga Bill Gates hates.” Translation – “Here’s one goal which is impossible and another goal which is not that hard and wildly unambitious”. There’s a much more elaborate form of this in a special Intellectualize Rap forum on SomethingAwful.com, but the problem here is that if you had a deep enough knowledge of the songs being referenced, you probably wouldn’t find any of the Demotivator-style images funny. For the best laugh, you could try linkbait-tripe-posing-as-actual-content like EzineArticles.com’s Understanding Rap Music, which informs you straightaway – in self-unaware deadpan hilarity – that “Many rap songs are fast-paced. It can be tough to tell exactly what is being said“. Thank you, underpaid content-farm hack Val McQueen, for the insight. And then there’s the “Yahoo Answers” of rap lyrics, UnderstandRap.com, which takes easily-decipherable lyric snippets and deciphers them for you. Probably the only resource we found that was both informative and funny was Rapgenius’ ne feature The Rap Map, which offers extensively annotated Google Maps of rap. With a little tongue in cheek. Know of any good resources for useful or amusing rap facts? Read the rest of this entry »
I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk Part I
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on August 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, August 21st, 2010How Gutter Punks, Crusties, and Travelers represent a conformist and freedom-motivated lifestyle “brand” that isn’t Punk at all.
 Has Anarchy Become A Brand? |
That’s not only a song by The Tubes that I really don’t care for, it’s also a simple truth. It was all kind of an accident really. In 1977 I didn’t mean to be a teenage punk. I just had the misfortune of having a British hairdresser and a predilection for buying my clothes at resale shops at the same time that bands like the Sex Pistols were first making a splash. Suddenly, and for almost a decade, I was “punk”. Which was annoying, because the fact was that in spite of my appearances in the early eighties, I HATED most punk bands, and just about everything else that was officially punk. My friends and I were just arty types who liked drugs, had weird haircuts, wore a lot of black clothes and makeup, and didn’t want to be Ronald Reagan’s suggested version of a young adult, i.e.: a YUPPY. All of which is why I have a sort of anthropological fascination with contrived American urban tribes and subcultures like Gore Lolitas and Juggalo Furries, body modders, self-cutting emos, and most recently “Gutter Punks”. You may have noticed more of these kids lately; while they’ve been annoying people in hipster havens like Williamsburg or the Haight in San Francisco for quite a while, they’ve more recently been invading more middle American towns as well. I was actually spending time with a few of them recently to write an in-depth piece, but got tired of being stood up by them over and over, so have shelved the idea for a while. Which was kind of a relief in a way. Because although some of the kids I talked to were witty, reasonably intelligent, and had some interesting things to say, they really, REALLY smelled awful. And I’m not the kind of person that needs everybody to smell “Zestfully Clean” or anything; I’ve been around all kinds of people who don’t have the same hygiene standards as an urban American. The natural smell of a healthy human really isn’t unpleasant. But almost every crowd of these kids I’ve spent time with smells like some horrible collision of urban grime, petrol, beer, patchouli, urine, feta cheese, and Cool Ranch Doritos™. Not necessarily in that order. That may sound superficial, but try spending an hour with it. In any case, what I really find intriguing about this kind of “tribe” is that these kids have made a serious lifestyle choice, and usually possess refined hoboing, trainhopping, and grifting skills that are all wrapped up in a hybridized cookie-cutter countercultural brand that borrows from beats, hippies, punks, and rastas to create a new lifestyle that is “off the grid” and seems rebellious, but is ultimately based on conformity. It’s like “anarchy as a brand”. Which is why I cracked up when I learned that there was a The Decline Of Western Civilization: Part III for sale on Amazon for 200 bucks
The Biomethane Industry Is Booming
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 20, 2010 by admin in Clean & Green
Friday, August 20th, 2010Toilet powered Volkswagens, dual fuel trucks, and refugee camps powered by porta-potties. If we could just get all the politicians that are in the pocket of big oil to pull their heads out of their rears, we could double our alternative energy resources.
 This little baby gets about 143 MPT (miles per toilet) |
When I was in grade school, I would – as I know many young boys probably still do – joke about how if we could just harness my friend’s seemingly never-ending compulsion to break wind, the world’s energy problems would be solved. As I grew older, this joke found new life in reference to the hot air of politicians who promote the myth of hope for America’s energy independence (see Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies