Wall Crickets

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

The crickets chirp at all hours of the day. They were born in between the walls. Trapped. They live inside the walls until their death. Unable to get out. Unable to tell what time it is because of the perpetual darkness, so they chirp at all hours of the day and night and day. The outdoor crickets wait until sundown to sing and communicate. The wall crickets are trapped for their eternity, singing the blues at sunrise and sunset, and all hours in between. Sometimes it's as bad and disjointed as a Scritti Politti record, other nights it has the anger yet potent complexity of a Charlie Mingus symphony.

What would happen if there was infinite darkness? Eventually humans would evolve to see in the dark. Like cats and other nocturnal hunters that adapted for millions of years.

The promotional machine is a hungry creature. Constantly starving yet purposely drowning us in sensory overload. The vanity empowers those on the fringe of the culture. The undercurrent is a toxic stream of desire and uncloaked greed masking as ambition.

What is the cultural function of the media again? Wasn't it supposed to be the watchers watching the watchers kinda of thing?

It used to be the watchdog that protected the people from any nefarious doings by the powers that be. These days, the bulk of the media is owned by the powers that be, which is why the majority of what passes as "news" is thinly veiled celebrity gossip and very little concrete information that keeps the public informed about what's really going on.

The who, what, when, and how no longer apply to the deeds of politicians, rather, it's to fill in answers to vapid questions like who is fucking who. What drugs is the starlet du jour taking. When is the next hyped film coming out. And how much longer do we have to wait to get devoured by yet another celebrity scandal.

The primary objective is something out of Sun Tzu or Machiavelli. Most of what I see coming out of the media pipe is nothing but noise to confuse and intimidate us by overloading on fearful things or sentimental things. Sometimes they press the proper buttons -- fear of losing something sentimental.

Some day the masses won't be shy anymore and finally wake up. At least, that's my sincere hope that these doldrums finally pass. And like the crickets banished to life in between the walls, our only choice is to sing anyway in the perpetual darkness. Some day, we'll come together as a unified and animated front and unmask out true emotions. That will be the day when the entire culture breaks down what seemed to be impenetrable barriers that the charlatans constructed to keep us as far away from them as possible.

All and all, we're just another cricket stuck in the wall.

Obey. Consume. Watch TV.

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Jonathan Lethem wrote a book about the cult classic film They Live. It was as though Lethem live-blogged the film, but in book form. The book is short but we get his take on John Carpenter's film -- scene by scene -- because it's layered with tons of symbolism both overt and covert. I was kind of cool experience to read a few chapters, then watch the film for a few minutes, and go back and read a few more chapters and watch a little more of the film, etc etc etc.

My brother and I were huge WWF fans when we were kids. Roddy Rowdy Piper was billed as the bad guy and every Saturday morning we'd see some of his douchebaggery. The best moment? He beat up Jimmy 'Superfly' Snuka with a coconut. We were excited to see a movie with a wrestler in it. This was still the late 80s before wrestling really blew up and it helped propel their top stars like the Rock into the real big leagues -- Hollywood. The Rock was able to become a true crossover star from deflecting metal chairs to his head to carrying a big budget Hollyweird film. But with They Live, Roddy Piper was able to get top billing in a B-film that flirted the line between cult sci-fi fantasy and campy straight-to-video fodder. We watched it a bunch on videotape and thought it was a cool flick about aliens featuring a favorite wrestler.

Watching They Live as an adult is mind blowing because the cheesy factor of the plot (not to mention how bad it really was) really covered up the incendiary subversiveness of the film. Simply put, according to Carpenter we've been brainwashed by the powers that be. As a result, we're a nation of TV addicts, which is we're either slaves, sheep, zombies, doped up, or sleepwalking through life. The glowing box in the living room is truly the opiate of the masses and we're all complicit by participating in the culture of consumption, even though we want to break out of that dreadful cycle.

There's a documentary called They Live We Sleep, which is a much more tin foil hat version of Lethem's book. But it's short (thirty minutes) and an eye opener.


They Live We Sleep is a nice companion piece to Lethem's book and the actual film. At this point, whenever I watch the film, I'm purposely looking for different pieces of hidden symbolism. Sort of like those maniacal fiends who comb through Kubrick's films frame-by-frame.

The Seinfeld Sci-Fi Tangent and Futuristic Grey Overalls

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Seinfeld joked about uniforms in the near/far future. How all the sci-fi books and movies envisioned post-dystopian humans clad in a drab jumpsuit or some sort of other bleh uniform. Like out of 1984, or something that makes everyone look like a mechanic at Pep Boys.

The way the job market is going in America, by the time the "Roaring 20s" roll around there will be zero media jobs available (news anchors will be replaced a naked pornstars reading Tweets). So we'll all end up a slave to the Man and stuck in the service field humping a horrible min-wage McJobs at McDonald's or Starbucks or IKEA. Unless you want to work the oil fields in the Dakotas, you're shit out of luck and stuck asking shithead customers if they want to supersize their order or add whipped cream. At those McJobs (pick any fast food joint or big biz coffee chain like Starbucks or Coffee Bean), the "uniform" includes some sort of polo shirt with a big-ass logo to make you feel like a loser and to remind you who is the real boss. Oh, and how could we forget about the humiliating name tag? Just in case the laughable pay and the never-ending line of surly customers and the awkward-looking clothing did not drag  you down to the lowest rung on the self-esteem ladder, they have a giant name tag to finish off the job. The name tag is to confirm the fact that you really are a cashier at Starbucks which some of the more successful classmates and kids you grew up with has suspected but wasn't 100% sure because you ignored their FRIEND request on Facebook.

Whenever I see someone with a name tag, I have this weird compulsion to use their real name as quickly as possible during the interaction. Part of me wants to humanize the transaction, instead of it being impersonal and ice cold. There's a percentage of workers who appreciate the fact that someone in the real world is recognizing them as a person instead of a min-wage flunkie. At the same time, I'm sure I pissed off an even greater number of service workers who went apeshit bananas whenever someone tried to call them by their name from the name tag. Sure, they might be polite and shine it on, but underneath it all they are cursing you under their breath and secretly plotting how they can drop a couple of boogers into your Iced Mocha.

The universal uniform could be cool in the future because it eliminates the difficult decision-making process of trying tof igure out what to wear. The older I get the more paranoid I get that I'm going to lose my edge in the fashion department and that my clothing style and wardrobe will stop evolving and become frozen in time for the rest of my life. It happens to everyone old guy, which is why old dude in Florida are wearing Leisure suits and Members Only jackets. The grey jumpsuit will eliminate a daily struggle that I have... what will I wear? This is problematic as a freelancer who does not have to get dressed up to work in an office-like setting. For me business casual is putting on cargo shorts instead of free balling it.

Since I'm on a Seinfeld sci-fi tangent, I'm waiting for every household to get its own robot. Sort of like Rosie from The Jetsons or Twinkie from Buck Rodgers or CP30 in Star Wars. Except I would program mine to crunch spreadsheets and sports stats so I could have a live-in sportsbetting guru, who runs a million simulations a second. I already have a special spreadsheet that spits out a projected outcome for almost every major pro sport, but that is like using counting blocks for 3 year olds compared to a computer system on board a  NASA rocket.

So the jumpsuits... they come in one size fits all?

Apple TV: More Cult Hype or the Future of Home Entertainment?

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

 
So the big deal with Apple TV is that you're able to watch Netflix on your TV instead of your laptop? Am I missing anything else? I guess that's worth something, especially if we rotate the small device between the living room and bedroom. Watching Netflix in bed is a lot easier with the TV instead of a searing-hot laptop sitting awkwardly in the middle of your bed.

Nicky dropped $99 for Apple TV, which is not a TV, but a tiny little black box. It's a state of the art gizmo that I'm convinced Dick Cheney and his cohorts at the NSA uses to spy on everyone. She'll probably use 99% of it to stream Netflix and Hulu. I will probably use the other features more than her, such as access to MLB.TV and NBA Season Pass. I have subscriptions to both services, so I have an added bonus of streaming games on our TV without hooking up my laptop. I previous watched baseball games on my laptop and once in a while I'd hook up my laptop to the TV during NBA season, usually if I had two or more games I wanted to sweat. The quad box (displays four simultaneous games) should be renamed the "sweat box." It is a fucking amazing invention and it's one of those advancements in technology that gamblers adore.

We finally embraced Apple TV after Nicky used some birthday money to buy it. That's the future right there. Netflix and Hulu (or a new streaming site like those) will eventually dominate the entertainment market and become bigger than TV companies and film studios combined. That's a scary prospect, but it's theirs to dominate so long as they don't fuck it up.

Like radio, conventional TV is dying off. In a decade, we'll be watching all our TV shows on demand via the internet. Only old people will still be watching the TV to get their news. With the exception of sports or any sort of national tragedy, there's no reason to watch TV in real time unless you want to be bombarded with commercials. Of course, if you live in LA, then you get every car chase broadcast on local TV. Some day there will be a special station dedicated to live police chases from around the world. There's a Twitter feed devoted to live car chases and they send out a tweet whenever there's one on TV somewhere in America. In the last few months I watched chases from Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, and somewhere in Kansas.

Movie theatres will never die off because there's something exciting about the big screen experience. More indie films are being made and big studios are making fewer films, but those few films are raking in most of the dough.  In the next decade or so, we'll have ginormous thousand seat mini-coliseums to see Fast and Furious 16, or they'll be tiny little theatres for low-budget indie flicks that cater to the artsy fartsy crowd.

Today, you have the plenty of options to see a big budget blockbuster (think 3-D flicks or sequels), whereas unless you live in a hip city, you have limited options to view indie flicks. Theatres are either a multiplex a part of a corporate chain, or its super tiny indie theatres that are relics of the past. When we lived in San Francisco, our apartment was around the corner from the Vogue, tiny neighborhood theatre that opened in 1910. Holy shitballs, it was a small one screen theatre and the seats were stiff and uncomfortable, but they changed films every week and it was awesome to walk around the corner to see a flick. I caught over a dozen movies in the short time I lived nearby. A couple of times I was one of three or four people in the theatre.

I wish I had a similar theatre here in LA, but instead I have to go to a fucking mall to see a flick (either Century City or The Grove). When I was a kid growing up in NYC, I had access to two different theatres -- The Dale and Riverdale Twin -- neither of which are around. One was turned into a porn theatre for a brief stint in the 1980s before it became a bingo parlor. I saw Rocky IV at that theatre. I also smelled weed for the first time in that theatre. The local hoods would sit in the balcony and blaze up. The Twin was shutdown due to lack of customers. I hung out there a lot and saw Ferris Bueller and Wargames like a dozen times at that particular theatre.

Nicky and I dropped our movies package on cable. We had everything, but barely watched those channels. Like we had a hundred versions of HBO, Cinemaz, SHO, Starz, etc. We trimmed our cable bill by 1/3. I love being able to stick it to major corporations, especially ones that profit off of other people's boredom. Let's face it... fucking Time Warner is not going to miss my $50 a month.

But shedding those extra movie channels comes down to not giving into the fear that you'll miss something (FOMO) and reducing the amount of time you waste watching cable. It's hard not to find something to watch on those superfluous channels (like I have a theory that one of the Matrix movies or a Robert DeNiro movie is playing at any given time on cable). But sometimes you get sucked in and its a dangerous drug and you cannot turn away and the next thing you know it... you wasted six hours getting blazed while watching Pineapple Express and one of the Bourne Identity flicks for the 237th time.