Handsome Boy Modeling School - White People

Review -- As you know by now, I approach anything by Dan the Automator the way that smelly girl Sheena, from fourth grade, approached tater tot Fridays. Left hand over mouth, right briskly fanning myself. Ohmygawd, ohgawd, ohgawd, raspy and high-pitched, trying not to hyper-ventilate. Since the first time Peter Murray popped Dr Octagon into his player freshman year of college I've been hooked. I heard the first Handsome Boy Modeling School album soon after and the two albums, taken in tandem, unveiled to my hickish, malformed teen brain the possibilities of hip-hop as a destination art form, rather than merely something to listen to when you got tired of your Bad Religion albums.

HBMS is a team-up with Prince Paul, a fairly seminal DJ in his own right. In high school, his work on Gravediggaz' first album helped break the rap stranglehold WuTang Clan had on my tape deck since freshman year.

So there's that, the three of us share a lot of history [known only to myself], and I credit them with much of the open-mindedness I possess today. Gravediggaz made me scared when I was brave, Deltron 3030 made me feel space-aged even in my vintage wrangler shirts, Dr Octogon made me laugh at poop and pee when I thought I was over that sort of thing, and HBMS reminded me that personal grooming is important, even if you never talk to any girls.

But I'd heard really, unequivocally bad things about this new album, White People, so I avoided it the way Cure fans avoid Blue Sunshine. Then, in Seattle this past weekend, I came across a used copy of their first album and bought it again [I lose CDs at a rate of 3 per hour], which meant I obviously also had to buy their new CD as well. Which meant I also had to buy a handful of non-rap CDs so the guy with the devil-lock at the register wouldn't think I was trying to date a black girl or something.

White People is bad--real bad--but, contrary to what I'd heard, not unequivocally so. By now I'm just about sick to death of hearing HBMS mainstay Del tha Funky Homosapien rap over an Automator beat, but the first album's strength was the eclectic collaborations Prince Paul and Automator willed into existence. This time, like last, while the usual suspects burnish tired flows, the guests shine like new dimes. White People has John Oates [yeah, of Hall and Oates], The Mars Volta, The Rza, and even schizophrenic indie diva Cat Power. The result is spotty at best. On I've Been Thinking, the latter brings her sad, frightened croon to lyrics Coolio gave up on ten years ago.

You can slide slide slippity slide/you can hip hop, and don't stop

She sounds really uncomfortable saying such things. It's hilarious.

The Greatest Mistake, with John Oates, is all fuzz-wah guitar and trite lyrics delivered with that crappy Jason-Mraz-style white boy funk thing. It will play well on college radio.

The most fully executed track is the simple drum beat, Bee Gees violin and dirty riffs of A Day in the Life. It's a good compliment to Rza's marble-mouthed kung-fu growl.

We collect antique ammunitions and plus we got them big guns you only see in science fictions

The chorus is supplied with the usual operatic decadence of Mars Volta's Bixler and Rodriquez-Lopez.

How many times have you let your tongue go slip from the grin in your teeth and the cracks of your lips/ I never heard such nerve before, but your vanity'll spill slowly through the cracks in my pores/Just to please you honey

But then, after that, they replay a Tim Meadows skit they'd already put on the first album. Tacky.

So here, go to iTunes or whatever and get those tracks [not The Greatest Mistake], then write a letter to The School, reminding them of their pedigree and asking them to clean up their act and fly straight.

Read the full thing here.

Into the trite, I commend thee

Or: Things Constantine taught me that I already knew

Here are the first 16 that came to mind . . .

• Anything with a cross on it kills demons [and vampires].
• Anything blessed by a priest kills demons [and vampires].
• Demons are a lot like vampires.
  
• Hell is Los Angeles after a hydrogen bomb.
• Spoofing comic book cliches while also slavishly exploiting them isn't hip or tongue-in-cheek or post-modern.
• Smoking is risky.
• You don't have to worry about plot holes if your source material is dogmatic tradition.
  
• Committing suicide is risky.
• You don't have to worry about plot holes if your hero is always running.
  
• "There's no 17th act of Corinthians"
• Suggesting the Bible has missing chapters no one has ever seen is a great way ease your guilt over all those damn plot holes.
  
• The nice-guy-is-a-crazy-villain twist ceases to be a twist if every movie has a nice guy who's really a crazy villain.
  
• Gavin Rossdale is in league with Satan.
• The William Shatner cadence delivered by any one else still sounds like William Shatner.
• Gavin Rossdale dressed up like Morrisey still sucks like Gavin Rossdale.
  
• The Earth bar where Satan's minions kick it plays adult contemporary rock--just like Gavin Rossdale.

. . . also the actual number of chapters in Corinthians.

Bonus: no one on the internet grasps the difference between commend and command.
Also: lots of people on the internet liked Constantine.

Read the full thing here.

Hunter S Thompson remembered, by proxy

or Judge a man by his acolytes? Why sure.

I didn't know him in any meaningful way, so I think the best way to eulogize a guy who recently ate a bullet, but who had previously been a fairly influential writer--nay a pop-culture juggernaut, the god-head of a self-indulgent one-man literary movement--would be to map out the effect he had on my life and the lives of other people I know. Frankly, other than two pretty decent movies based on his life, there's not much good to report.

I liked his writing well enough, and he's anti-Bush, but he just didn't grab me by the any of the meaningful places his work often seizes others by. The friends [only one really] who have done most of the drugs Thompson listed, chronicled, and re-listed are dubious about just how good a time he was having while on them. "That's just bullshit, you don't feel like that" I believe, was that friend's reaction. For other friends [still only one really], too scared to actually do any of the things Thompson did, but still possessed of a pointless malaise and an addictive personality, Thompson's effects were more disastrous--mostly on my pocketbook and my personal stash of cheap booze [remember: letting people see where you stash your booze defeats the purpose of having a stash at all].

So my run-ins with Hunter S Thompson will really be recollections of one moronic friend [K] who, somehow, identified with the man despite sharing none of his experiences or predilections above the passing desire to be a journalist. I've always assumed he wants to be a journalist because his other favorite author is Hemingway. More likely he enjoys seeing alcoholism romanticized by productive people.

I rented a house with K right after coming home from a year in Italy. He'd spent his in a shithole towneshippe south-west of London. This house was to be shared with three other people, one of whom K'd dated briefly many years previous and whom he still carried a torch for. Soon after moving in, it was clear that this girl had no intention of getting back together with K, despite his best efforts. Before the last of his things was even moved in, he'd set about moping and ho-humming and acoustic-guitaring Clash songs. He buffered all of this with staggering amounts of drink. Self-defeating as it sounds, I knew these acts were thematically encoded transmissions to the girl, letting her know that he still liked her and that life without her just weren't no good. She responded in similarly oblique fashion: she started sleeping with K's brother for a while.

Just about then, give or take the day he ritually destroyed all of his books [and a few of mine] and broke that innocent but hopelessly-out-of-tune guitar, he set about cobbling together a costume that allowed him to more closely mimic the man whose books he'd left in tact. From then on, with crusher and boat shoes, a pipe empty of tobacco, aviator sunglasses, Rum Diary and Hell's Angels tucked into trouser pockets, K set about making my life utter goddamned hell. I suppose he made everyone's life hell, but I'd been stupid enough to put all the utilities and what not in my name, so my hell involved real earth dollars, not just purloined alcohol and cigarettes.

Hell was five of us in an old house with a crumbling foundation in a bad neighborhood full of methamphetamine and intimate partner violence. The back yard was large and supported roughly a hundred thousand rosebushes that [magically] bloomed almost 10 months out of the year and added a fake austerity that somehow transcended [for me personally] the cat-piss reek indoors. The whole situation would have been more than manageable, the rosebushes were high enough and dense enough to keep the neighborhood out, mostly, unless we wanted to let it in--to go slumming--and watch our neighbors kick and scream and stab each other while we, behind bushes and barred-windows, watched with giddy terror. But the false-bottomed sanctity of that rosey wall was obliterated when, less than a week into our tenancy, K took root on the stoop, swaying and cussing daily, from six in the morning until whenever the booze ran out.

From there it was all stumbling off to sleep in neighbor's yards, crashing their graduation parties, passing out in a Honey Bucket at Hoopfest, getting mugged then felt up in Mission Park and, eventually, the DUI that probably should have come much sooner.

K displays a little hurt still, when talking about the mugging and mild sexual assault, that he'd come to me at 4 in the morning scared and piss drunk without a wallet or a clue about what to do, and I turned him away. I locked my door. Then I get a little sad too, but just for effect, then tell him to go to hell.

I found a job by late June, about a month after I got back. He found one in September. That is, I had my parents cash in some favors and find a job for him so that I wouldn't have to drive him to the blood bank or hold him down while he called his parents and asked for money or sleep with my wallet. Slowly, after he got the job and the girl moved out--kinda--and he started paying his bills, the costume went away and he became, more or less, the K of old, who was still a walking scandal and a unrepentant thief and a goddamned sad sap, but he wasn't drinking as much, and he'd put those damned books away, so it was okay to be friends with him again.

I still sleep with my wallet.

So that's my view of Hunter S Thompson. People who know about drugs think he was a little optimistic about them, people who don't think he was some kind of messiah. Such people usually go on to ruin my life. On par, I didn't really like him.

K remains the only person I've slapped out of malice [Jeremy Jordan, who kicked my ass in 8th grade, doesn't count because I was trying to make a fist].

Read the full thing here.