BaRou is the New Bklyn

Friday Roundup: grody, gallant, parsimonious and faux-Sapphic edish

This is so narsty. Read this before lunch if you're trying to lose weight.

From BoingBoing comes possibly one of the most disgusting sentences I've ever read:

A curator at NY-MOMA had to euthanize a living leather jacket made from human mouse stem-cells -- the art-work had grown out of control and threatened to overflow its containment unit.

Only enlarge this photo if you dare.

This brings to mind the New York Times article about Peta offering $1 million prize to the first person who invents commercially viable in vitro meat.

Technology is getting out of hand--don't they know this is how horror movies happen?! That curator may think he euthanized the mouse jacket. But now it's crawling out of some Dumpster outside the MoMA, and it's not happy. Working title: My Mousy Jacket Euthenasia Gone Wild. Also, how exactly does one euthanize a mouse-meat jacket, if it doesn't have a central nervous system, heart or brain? Chop it up? Hope it's not like starfish!

Friday zone, early Thursday edition

Hey all, sad times over here. Since I have my Friday post mostly ready to go, I'm posting it now. I'm going to have some CoKane time, then I'll post about today later.

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I feel better this week. Im busy, I have lots of ideas that I'm acting on, and getting results. And great things are in the future, like travel abroad! I actually feel grateful that I can work from home watching and listening to the outdoor animal clownshow all day. (According to our bird feeder which looks like an attack scene from The Birds, we throw the best bird party in town.) The tree in the view from here seems fuller than I've ever seen it and it's a pretty time of year.

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The independently-owned record store, like the independently-owned everything else, is under siege in this time of big-box stores and ever-consolidating retail chains. But it's especially an issue for the category of music sales, what with all the new ways to get music that cut out the bricks-and-mortar middleman. And here's a story about how the last record store in Chapel Hill--CHAPEL HILL, you guys--closed. Schoolkids Records, RIP.

So, in celebration of the good old record store, Saturday is Record Store Day. I thought I'd open up the comments to the theme of record store memories: do you have a favorite? Did you work at one? Stalk a cute guy at one? (Not me! Never!) Baton Rouge has a shop called the Compact Disc Store that I've only been to once or twice but which has a comforting authentic record store vibe to it. i.e., a bunch of dudes standing around talking about music. Is anybody reading from there?

I worked for the bad guy, a chain called Sam Goody in the Livingston Mall, at the beginning of college. (Goody got it!) Yes, Goody had it, if by it, you meant Ace of Base. They did a land-office business in bad music. Literally every customer for about 6 months purchased The Bodyguard Soundtrack. This was also in the time of longboxes. For you younguns, when shops transitioned from vinyl to CD they found themselves with bins that were too deep for CDs, so in an extremely wasteful move by the music industry, CDs grew boxes that were three times their height. Those were replaced by the also-wasteful plastic adapters, and then the shops eventually updated to display cases that were made for CDs. Actually I should leave this up to former Goody coworker Therese, she remembers the era much better than I do. (She's on vacay so it'll be awhile.)

Schlitz n Giggles Friday

In an ideal world, I should be the editor of Cheese Magazine--cheese as in cheesy, but hopefully this title would also get me many free samples of gourmet cheeses. Or, if Tom Scharpling decided to make a magazine themed around his term Awfulsome, I would ideally be a writer on their staff.
On the cheesy and awfulsome note, BFF/commenter Meanie T made my week by introducing me to the Utah filmmaker Stephen Groo. Some of you know of my obsession with Tommy Wiseau of The Room fame. But tragically Tommy has only made one full film and one totally bizarro trailer for a TV show. Groo is much more prolific, with more than 100 works under his belt. According to Meanie T, these films are dead serious, not ironic, and they often utilize fresh-faced local Mormons as actors, including numerous Mom-jeaned wholesome younger women.

I've only scratched the surface of the collection, available here on the website, with categories like Drama, Sci-Fi, and Horror, but here's some brief notes on a few I have watched. Some of these works are music videos, such as "The Boys of Summer," which when it says "nobody on the road" depicts nobody on the road, and ditto for the lyric "nobody on the beach." Now, I haven't been to music video school, but I would guess that literal translation of lyrics might be the first thing they tell you not to do. I'm not saying I don't break rules here and there...just saying Groo is a risk-taker. And although there's a comedic thread through other films, there's only one entry in the Comedy category, the perplexing work labeled on the site as "Gardners," which has a minute-long scene depicting Groo inhaling helium. Turns out when you inhale helium, your voice gets all high and weird! Oh, you've known that since you were five? Just sit tight, because the clip then becomes a campus-wide singalong to "She's Got the Look." That's comedy!

There are even parallels in a few movies to my main man Tommy Wiseau: Dialogue from the trailer for Challenge of Faith: "I got a promotion." "What's your new position?" "President." Only it looks like things don't turn out quite as expected...!

Anyway, welcome to a magical wonderland of time-wasting amusement. Thank Meanie T! Her sister went to school with that guy. 

Friday blase roundup

In Baton Rouge, it's pretty when you don't mow the back yard! This place encourages you to be lazy at all turns.

Sooo, I haven't commented too much on the BR scene lately not just because I've been traveling, but because I'm more accustomed to it. I get it: every month there's some new holiday/season/festival with different traditions than I'm used to and weird foods I haven't tried yet. The latest now that Easter's over, according to props and context clues at the supermarket, is crawfish season. Anyway, I'm sure I'll try crawfish dumped in a pile on a picnic table with corn and spice or whatevs they put in there, at some point. And the colors of items I own such as bicycles, minivans, lawn chairs, refrigerator magnets, and hair will continue to fade faster in the stronger sunlight. And I'll still miss my friends and the city. And life will go on.

Along with my not needing to blog as much, is my needing to not blog for free as much. (Unfortunately, since I enjoy the community of blogging immensely.) So I'll still post a few times a week, but you won't be seeing any epics like that last post for awhile.

Friday tidbits and Internet stuff, after the jump.

Road to nowhere, part two

And now to sum up the rest of the past few days of this ongoing visit. I had planned my every-two-months-sanity trip this time to coincide with my mom's birthday and my friends' wedding. I call it a sanity trip because it is so reassuring to be around folks who I don't have to refer back to a blog post for the shared memories we have...there are no blog posts for these decade(s)-old memories, just the right catch phrase or look is enough to bring hilarities back.

The wedding on Saturday was in PA with the Jersey gang of friends I've been through high school and college with (and in some cases middle school, grammar school, and even little-kid-hood) and have traipsed around Europe with. We've had so many good/bad/ugly experiences together, and at this wedding two of us had another first together: oyster shots. It looked like this:

I had to run to the bathroom because the oyster got stuck in my esophagus. It was like doing a shot of phlegm.

(I am classy.)

Radio Radio

Last night I joined the hostesses of the grrrly rock show Valley Girl Intelligentsia on KLSU to talk about all my wacky career happenings and play some music. Back when I was on WSOU, a friend and I wanted to start a similar show called Girl Germs since it was prime riot grrrl era and at the time the station seriously only had like three women in their entire music collection, but we never did, so bravo to these ladies.

I mentioned a few times that I felt like an old lady because I was struck by how much had changed since I've been on college radio, back in the 90s. Now you can just burn every song you want to play on your show onto a CD. Why, in my day we had record libraries where the DJs would get into written comment fights on the comment labels on the records and CDs (they were like precursors to blogs) and we played PSAs on these things called carts that looked just like 8-tracks, and we had tricks for playing damaged vinyl, and our old sound board looked like it should be on a rocket ship in a sci-fi movie from the '30s, and it had huge dials called potentiometers or "pots." And we didn't have no "Internets." We had a big old desktop computer with the AP news on it.

I had to admit, though, it was really convenient to be able to find a song on the Internet last night, burn it onto a CD, then play it the same night. So that was fun, and the ladies invited me to come back again.

In other radio nerd news, WFMU is holding their annual pledge drive marathon all this week and next. As my friend Tom Scharpling said about the station in the recent article about the fund drive in the New York Times, “This is the kind of place that shouldn’t exist but somehow does.” This one drive is how they make their entire operating budget for the year, and this unfortunately is one of those years where they need help more than ever. Tom raised $40,000 in one three-hour show Tuesday night (!!!) but they can use any help they can get, so if you have ever listened online or on terrestrial radio, you can pledge any amount by clicking the WFMU banner on the left side of this page under all my links. 

New Orleans puts the fun in funerals

On February 12, John Brunious, the trumpeter and band leader for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, passed away.

As a newcomer to the region, I was introduced to the legendary New Orleans band via this incredible video by Clint Maedgen (via Cajun Boy, as I'm sure he'll point out if I don't link him) which converted me to instant fan of Clint and the band.

I think you'd have to be a robot for that to not touch you in some way.

So I'm bummed that I never got to see Mr. Brunious lead the band. But I did get to see some of the royal sendoff New Orleans gave him at his jazz funeral on Saturday.

Procrastination Station Friday

So many little items to share this Friday, many involving ways you, the reader, can waste time, which is what you're supposed to do at work on Fridays. First, about that Hallmark holiday yesterday.

Neither the fiance nor I could care less about Valentine's Day, but we each do a token gesture for the other one, because it's just nice to do that anyway, and to be honest I would get annoyed if he didn't and he knows that. I decided to make cookies, and because I needed to procrastinate, it had to be something more elaborate than the usual blobs of dough on a cookie sheet. I would make those homemade versions of the best Girl Scout Cookies of all time, Samoas, that I'd seen on Amanda's blog. More on that in a sec.

I needed a few supplies, so I  walked to the four-corner intersection where three corners are occupied by drugstores. Let's call it CVS Crossings. I was surprised to find that at just before 4 pm, it was a complete shitshow. Mayhem. Packed parking lots, cars queuing in the street to get into the lots, longer lines than I've ever seen in Walgreen's.

All for this:

How did it become a tradition for grown men to buy stuffed toys (with lopsided eyes, stuffed with rags) for grown women? If that's supposed to be something women want, they may have to designate a new gender for me.   

Sure, it used to be cute when a courting couple would go to the boardwalk and the guy would win a teddy bear for his gal. But none of the people buying these looked like courting teenagers.

Look at these ravaged shelves. It's like the Valentines' zombies came through. Braaaaach's! See you in the landfill, stuffed bulldog made in a sweatshop!

I totally saw Van Halen on Friday

Some things that no one told me about growing up: that those horror movies I loved to get scared by would give way mostly to gorefests that are more revolting than scary. That the special Christmasy feeling I cherished would no longer appear, perhaps never to return. And that I'd stop going to rock concerts.

That is, until last Friday, when the fiance and I went to see Van Halen. By concerts, I mean those huge affairs in arenas and stadiums, where everyone knows every song and sings along and pumps their fists in the air. Sometimes you don't realize you haven't been a certain situation in a long time until that situation returns. This was one of those times: Oh yeah: THIS is a concert. Everything else is just a show.

A whole new ball game

I'm going to be Captain Obvious and start off by stating: People in Louisiana know how to party.

The fiance and I went to the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Ball on Saturday. My social benefactor, let's call him Bill K., or better make it B. Kelley, had invited us to the ball back in November, and I was ready for the new experience, but was less psyched about the $30 ticket price, especially since the ball would happen right after Christmas and traveling expenses. But he and our table organizer Rebecca eventually persuaded us to go.

At first we weren't sure what the hell we were supposed to wear...formal stuff? There was some talk about flamingos and wearing pink, and maybe Mardi Gras colors (purple green & gold) as well... But after meeting up with Rebecca to shop, my confusion about the affair began to turn to enthusiasm. This was like Halloween! I love Halloween!