by David Cross
—(Huh?) check out University of Blunts’ Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty Dirty. It’s like a 505 Groovebox as designed by someone who reads only Braille. Actually, to clarify, only if that same designer got caught in a transformer with Brindle Fly and decided to travel fifty years into the future and bring back what might have sounded retro thirty years from now if the future takes it’s more than lugubrious, predictable course. RATING—4.001
7. Hey, are you reading the review to the Mountain Goats CD The Sunset Tree—
As one would hope from a songwriter as smart as Darnielle, “The Sunset Tree” comes from a 19th-century religious song, “The Tyrolese Evening Hymn.”
—why not have the latest Wittgenstein’s Mistress CD playing in the background? On Gift Code, WM’s latest offering, we find flutes aflutter, strings a stringin’, and melotrones a melotronian. In what is likely to be remembered more for its chorus of “Get on the bed, bitch… now!” then it’s subtle and rich tapestry woven (most likely by candlelight) and suffused with an undercurrent of malaise and ennui, the titular track bends, breaks, and ultimately regenerates into a malevolent whirlstrom of angst and twee. RATING—Four Point Six and One Half
8. Trying to make sense of the review of Autechre’s Untitled? It’s a one-act play that starts with:
(Sitting in the dormitory room just after class on Thursday, Achilles changes into his gym clothes as his roommate Tortoise bursts through their door in a fit of happiness.)
Tortoise: Achilles, have you seen this?
Achilles: What?
Tortoise: Do you see? Yes? I’m referring to the object, though small in size, quite interesting in stature, I am holding in front of you now.
Achilles: It’s a CD.
And ends with:
Achilles: And my point is, if it’s driven by form, it’s a pretty messy, lazy form—certainly no more structurally sound than any other software wank music. On top of that, if I’m supposed to “feel” this, to pick up on some obscure metaphysical in-joke, I’m not—isn’t it the job of a good artist to make that shit clear? Either way, it fails for me. Autechre decided to go their own way, fine, you know, just don’t expect me to call them “geniuses.”
Tortoise: [Sigh] Alright, Achilles, I can see we’re going to have to agree to disagree. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.
Achilles: Oh don’t worry, dude, just wear headphones when you play that stuff.
(With all apologies to Douglas Hofstadter and Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which I’d send you if I had an extra copy.)
Why not give a listen to Pillow Logic’s new disc, Treason to Live, a wiry concept album that gives new meaning to the phrase “Now, I’ve seen everything!” Ostensibly about a young girl who loses her shoes in a cockfight she mistakenly attends during Thanksgiving of ’59, it’s really about the universal themes of loss, angst, candy, and damp clothing. Taking its cue from the early commercial work of Deloite and Hughey and filtering it through the “I cut myself shaving” piousness of Throm Tillson, Pillow Logic reworks early sock hop chop flop and allows people like me to enjoy enjoying it. RATING—Two T-Shirts and a cup of jizz
9. Slogging through the review of Emperor X’s Central Hug/Friendarmy/Fractaldunes (and the Dreams That Resulted)—
The aesthetic of Emperor X’s recording belies its craft. Homemade and sometimes grungily recorded, the latest record by Chad Matheny’s one-man band delivers jitter—and indie pop that practically gnaws its own arm with excitement.
—to try to find out if you might like it? Then don’t listen to ThunderPussy, When The Wild Birds Sing. You can only shine a turd so many times before it gleams as bright as a six-year-old girl’s ass cheek on Christmas morning. ThunderPussy answers the question, “How many times does one need to shine a turd before it gleams as bright as a six year old girl’s ass cheek on Christmas morning?” The answer according to ThunderPussy is twelve. Twelve is the number of tracks on this CD, each one of the same song, “Star Wars!” And they all suck except for the last one, which shines just like a six-year-old girl’s ass on Christmas morning. It’s true. RATING—4.Point
10. Enjoying the self-referential Franz Ferdinand review, which includes the following?
“Ryan, that cow is dried up. It’s Gordita meat. I’ve even done the I’m-not-going-to-do-a-concept-review-anymore concept review,” I said.
“Hear me out. I’m seeing a comeback for one of your zany characters,” Ryan said, making stupid TV-producer gestures with his hands. “I’m seeing the interpretive dancer Santa Schultz, the Revolutionary War soldier Ham Grass, advice columnist Professor Rok, Diapers the glam-loving lab monkey, Justin Davies the bass player of The Hold My Coat, The Bummelgörk, Kelly the Masseuse, Volodrag the Yugoslavian sycophant, Paul Bunyan, Wolfie. Besides, you promised me the Franz Ferdinand review months ago.”
Then don’t listen to Thar She Blows, the terrible new CD by the Original Apple Dumpling Gang. If you like shitty, regurgitated slop as evinced by the over-lauded production team of Dr. Snagglepuss and Oppressor, then you’re gonna love this. Daring to delve into his worn-out bag of used tricks, Dr. Snagglepuss turns to his old SugarSnaps partner, TreacherousFace ZombieHead, and spits out beats that sound like two dying frogs farting in your face. If that’s your idea of an aural good time, then you’re probably the kind of person that likes early Faust meets pre-post-op Neutron Bitch also meets Blunder (with a nod to Iceland’s Achilles Healed) but then a fight breaks out and DNA Groove comes over and separates everybody and quickly escorts Neutron Bitch out through the service entrance, where they make love on a pile of day-old lettuce (like in the movies). Either way, T.A.D.G. do themselves a disservice by trying to milk some more milk from an AIDS-infested cow called “their old music.” All in all, it’s a big disappointment, but then again, if you like AIDS milk, then I guess this is for you. RATING—2.shit
Hi, everybody! The following is a letter I wrote after picking up Git-R-Done: The Larry the Cable Guy Story (ghostwritten by Susan Sontag). I have to warn you that this letter is nearly nine pages long. But I think it’s chock-full of life lessons for all of us, and if you’re not careful, you just might learn something!
An Open Letter to Larry the Cable Guy
HELLO, LARRY. IT’S ME, DAVID CROSS. RECENTLY I WAS SHOOTING something for my friends at Wonder Showzen (the funniest, most subversive comedy on American TV at the moment), and when we were taking a break one of the guys on the show asked me if I had seen some article in something somewhere wherein you were interviewed to promote your new book Please-Git-R-Done (published by Crown Books, $23.95 U.S.) and they asked about your devoting a chapter to slamming me and the “P.C. Left.” Since I stopped following your career shortly after you stopped going on stage wearing a tool belt with cable wrapped around your neck (around your appearance at “Laffs ’n’ Food” in Enid, Oklahoma, Aug 23–26, 1999?), I said I wasn’t aware of the article. They went on to tell me that you said basically (and I am not quoting but paraphrasing their recall) that I could kiss your ass, that I’ve never been to one of your shows (true), and that I didn’t know your audience (untrue).
So, I went and got your book Gitting-R-Donned and excitedly skimmed past the joke about that one time you farted and something farty happened, on past the thing about the fat girl who farted, and finally found it—Chapter 5, Media Madness. Well, needless to say, I farted. I farted up a fartstorm right there in the Flyin’ J Travel Center. I fartingly bought the book and took it home with an excitement I haven’t experienced since I got Bertha Chudfarter’s grandma drunk and she took her teeth out and blew me as I was finger banging her while wearing a Jesus sock puppet in the back of the boiler room at the Church of the Redeemer off I-20. (I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.)
Anyhoo, I got home and read the good parts. It seems that you were pissed off at Rolling Stone magazine, and I can understand why. You made some good points in your argument as well. I agree that there is an elitism and bias in the press, and too often a
writer will include asides to show the readers how smart he or she is and how “above it” they are. But come on! Surely you can’t be surprised, or worse, hurt or offended, by this. You even say in the book that you knew what you were getting into (Rolling Stone being all “lefty” and whatnot). Certainly I’m not surprised that they took a ten-minute phone conversation with me and chose to print only the most inflammatory paragraph within it. That’s what they do.
But I want to address some of the things you write about me in Git-to-Gittin’-R-Done. In response to the Rolling Stone article, but first let me say this: you are very mistaken if you think that I don’t know your audience. Hell, I could’ve been heckled by the parents of some of the very people that come see you now. I grew up in Roswell, Georgia (near the Funny Bone and not far from the Punch Line). The very first time I went on stage was at the Punch Line in Sandy Springs in 1982 when I was 17. I cut my teeth in the South, and my first road gigs ever were in Augusta, Charleston, Baton Rouge, and Louisville. I remember them very well, specifically because of the audience. I remember thinking (occasionally, not all the time) “what a bunch of dumb redneck, easily entertained, ignorant motherfuckers. I can’t believe the stupid shit they think is funny.”
So, yes, I do know your audience, and they suck. And they’re simple. And please don’t mistake this as coming from a place of bitterness because I didn’t “make it” there or I’m not as successful as you, because that’s not it at all. Since I was a kid I’ve always been a little oversensitive to the glorification and rewarding of dumb. The “salt of the earth, regular, everyday folk” (or lowest common denominator)—who see the world, and the people like me in it, as on some sort of secular mission to take away their flag lapels and plaster-of-paris Jesus television adornments—strike me as childishly paranoid.
But perhaps the funniest (oddest) thing in your book is you taking me to task for being P.C. Have you heard my act?! I’ll match your un-P.C.ness any day of the week, my friend. I truly believe, and have said onstage amongst other things, that Orthodox Jews are, bar none, the most annoying people, as a group, that walk this earth. I absolutely refuse to say the term “African American.” It’s a ridiculous and ill-applied label that was accepted with a thoughtless rush just to make white people feel at ease and slightly noble. I also believe that in the right setting that, as unfortunate as it may be, retarded people can be a near constant source of entertainment (fact!).
Larry, whether Northern, Southern, straight, gay, male, female, liberal, conservative, Christian, or Jew, I’ve walked them all. It didn’t matter if it was a roomful of “enlightened” hippie lesbian Wiccans at Catch a Rising Star in Cambridge, MA, or literally hundreds of students at the University of St. Louis (a Jesuit school) or a roomful of the cutest, angriest frat boys in Baton Rouge all threatening to beat me up, I un-P.C.’d the shit out of them. That’s another thing that bothers me, too. I honestly believe that if we had worked a week together at whatever dumb-ass club in American Strip Mall #298347 in God’s Country U.S.A. and hung out that week and got good and drunk after the shows, that you and I would’ve been making each other laugh (I imagine we would have politely disagreed on a few things). But not only would we be laughing, but we’d often be laughing at the expense of some of the audience members at that night’s show, and you know it. I’ll address your easy, bullshit sanctimonious “don’t mess with my audience” crap further on. But for now, let’s “Gittle-R-Ding-Dong-Done!”
Okay, here’s what I said in the RS interview: “He’s good at what he does. It’s a lot of anti-gay, racist humor—which people like in America—all couched in ‘I’m telling it like it is.’ He’s in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I’m-just-a-straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel, selling-ring-tones-act. That’s where we are as a nation now. We’re in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.” You took umbrage at my calling a lot of your act anti-gay and racist and said that “according to Cross and the politically correct police, any white comedians who mention the word ‘black’ or say something humorous but faintly negative about any race are racists.” Well, first of all, your act is racist. Maybe not all the time, but it certainly can be. Here, let me quote you back, word for word, some of your “faintly negative” humor, and I’ll let people judge for themselves.
Re: Abu Ghraib Torture
“Let me ask some of these commie rag head carpet flying wicker basket on the head balancing scumbags something!”
Re: Having a Muslim cleric give the opening prayer at the Republican Convention
“What the hell is this the Cartoon Network? The Republicans had a Muslim give the opening prayer at there [sic] convention! What the hell’s going on around here! Is Muslim now the official religion of the United States!… First these peckerheads (ironically, “peckerhead” was a derogatory word slaves and their offspring used to describe white people) fly planes into towers and now theys [sic] prayin’ before conventions! People say not all of ’em did that, and I say who gives a rats fat ass! That’s a fricken slap in the face to New York city by having some Muslim sum-bitch give the invocation at the Republican convention! This country pretty much bans the Christian religion (the religion of George Washington and John Wayne) virtually from anything public, and then they got us watchin’ this Muslim BS!! Ya wanna pray to Allah, then drag yer flea-infested ass over to where they pray to Allah at!” End Quote. So… yeah. There you go. This quote goes on and on, but my favorite part is when you say toward the end, “now look, I love all people (except terrorist countries that want to kill us)….”
There are numerous examples, and I don’t think I need to reprint any more. You get the idea. Oh, what the hell, here’s one more: “They’re dead, get over it! Poor little sandy asses! I’m sure all them dead folks’d they’d killed give 40 shekels or whatever kinda money these inbred sum bitches use, but I’d give 40 of ’em whatever it is to be humiliated instead of dead!”
About being anti-gay. I honestly take that back. I do not think that you are anti-gay; I didn’t choose those words wisely. Your stuff isn’t necessarily anti-gay but rather stupid and easy. “Madder than a queer with lockjaw on Valentines Day.” That’s not that funny, I don’t care who you are. It’s just sooo easy. I mean, over half the planet sucks dick so why gays? Why not truck stop whores, or Hollywood Starlets or housewives? Because when you say “queer” you get an easy laugh. End of story.
Okay, Larry the Cable Guy, I will ignore the irony of a big ole Southern redneck character actually using “inbred” as an insult, as well as the fact that a shekel is currency from Israel, the towel heads’ sworn enemy. But at least you’re passionate about what you see as inhumane injustice (not on a global level, of course, but on a national level) and the simple black and white of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s kinda like you’re this guy who speaks for all these poor, unfortunate souls out there who wear shirts with blue collars on them, work hard all day to put food on the table for their family (unlike people who wear shirts with white collars or wear scrubs or T-shirts or dresses or costumes that consist of flannel shirts with the sleeves cut off and old trucker hats), and pray to the American Flag of Jesus to protect them from the evils of Muslims, queers, illegal immigrants, and the liberal Jews who run Hollywood and the media. I guess one could say that you’re “telling it like it is.” And considering the vast amount of oversimplification you employ to describe with sweeping generalizations all of America and the world that “don’t make no sense to you,” as well as your lack of sensitivity and second-grade grammar, one might be led to think that you are somewhat proud of not appearing (or being) too intellectual. Combine that with your sucker appeal to the knee-jerk white Christian patriot in us all who would much rather hear 87 fart jokes than hear a joke in which the president (the current one, not the last one), or the pope, or Born-Again Christians, or Lee Greenwood get called on their shit for being the hypocrites that they are, and I think we’ve go
t a winner!
As for being a multimillionaire in disguise, that’s just merely a matter of personal taste for me. I do not begrudge you your money at all; it is sincerely hard earned, and you deserve whatever people want to give to you. What sticks in my craw about that stuff is the blatant and (again, personal taste) gross marketing and selling of this bullshit character to your beloved fans. Now look, if someone wants to pay top dollar to come to one of your shows and then drop a couple hundred more on “Git-R-Done” lighters and hats and T-shirts and windshield stickers and trailer hitches and beer koozies and fishing hats and shot glasses etc., then good for you. I just think it’s a little crass and belies the “good ole boy” blue collar thing you represent. But that’s no big deal.
Now, as for the last statement that “We’re in a state of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride.” Well, I think that’s true. When you can rally the troops (so to speak) with a lazy, “latte drinking, tofu eating” generalization of liberals and “black ass rag fags” to describe Arabs, then, yeah, I think that falls in the “ignorant” category. I think that with even the slightest attention to the double standard and hypocrisy of both the Left and the Right in this country (if not all of the Christian Extremists as a whole) coupled with the bullshit they lazily swallow and parrot back while happily ignoring the gross inhumane treatment of those that aren’t them so that we may have cheap sneakers and oil and slightly less taxes (although I’m sure the bracket you’re in now gives you a ton of tax money back), then you could maybe see my point.
