Whatever it is, I bet it's gonna be REAL GOOD

Wait!

Not to denigrate Twitter!  Without it, how could I have read the Greatest Tweet EVER Composed (TM)?:

Tom Cruise playing the lead in "Lunar Park" is going to win him the Oscar. Period. Good night.

Ominous!

When I was getting the trash can in from the alley yesterday, this was laying by the trash can (it was not something we had thrown away):

Very Lost Highway.  Unmarked.

Guy paid 10,000 for it/I'm scared to play it but I probably will, etc.

Um, who didn't?

Hello, Bret

Return of the Jedi?  Definitely post-Empire.

Was Bret Easton Ellis in front of our house last night?

Had he watched me sleep during that time?

Had he?

Drink and drown

If you are under twenty-five and are reading this, I pity you. Find something better to do. If you are still here, you are likely atop a purple podium, waving your hands in the air to new-fangled "rave" sounds as last night's cocaine flakes fall from the walls like snow. Ah, youth!

I was thinking about my own distant, distant past, which twinkles at my memory like light from a long-dead star. What I cannot get my mind around is the concept of "drink and drown," which would take place at a local dive called the First Stop, where I also played many of my early rock shows (Beastie Boys' "She's On It" cover, "Working Man" into "Another Bites the Dust" medley, that sort of thing)...

Drink and Drown (the entity) took place on Thursday night and anyone who paid the cover ($3? $4? Possibly five bucks, but that seems a lot in 1986 money) could drink as much draft beer as they wanted. Especially stellar is that one could get in with ANY i.d. And I mean any. A typed piece of yellow card with a name and phony birthdate would work.

Now, I was a total wuss and did not go out on school nights but my then-girlfriend and her cronies would...what baffled me then and does moreso now is that things were so lax (drinking age for beer was 19, though that would change the following year) that the cops (who were perhaps paid to ignore it) would not swoop in and close the place down! And that no one I knew dies specifically from D&D related car-through-pole accidents.

Now, by the following pre-college summer, I was fully on my way to full-on drunk dumbass lifestyle, and so would drink anywhere and with anyone. I remember, when my first little fledgling band was still extant, getting a late night call from Dick B____, the owner/manager of the place, asking if we wanted to be "house band" for the rest of the summer Drink and Drown nights and, he made it clear, we did not necessarily paid in money (sniff, sniff). THAT would have worked out well.

The whole point is my high school years were more Less Than Zero than I thought at the time.

I guess that's the point?

"Save 42% at Amazon.com on The Rules of..."

That's where the subject heading preview stopped.

At last!, thought I, daring to dream the impossible. The Rules of Attraction II!

Wasn't, of course. Life can be so unfair!

Brettt

So, wait - Bride is at a doctor appointment for le bebe, and I am hoping that some gum-snapping 23 year old nurse doesn't absent-mindedly let go with the news of baby's gender. We don't wanna know! We have names picked out for everything, barring a hermaphrodite.

That said, will venture that if we have another baby at some point it will be a boy, and, in deference to my refreshed obsession with Suede (thanks to re-issues, of which more next week - you can't wait!) and the fact that we are going to Virginia for the 4th as we do every year and that it was around last year's trip that Imperial Bedrooms came out (and was so very lousy, in the best possible way!), I say we name a boy Brettt, with three t's. Can't decide between the single Bret as in Ellis or the two as in Anderson.

The Bride's going to set me on fire when she reads this, so maybe there will be just the one.

Shite miscellany

1. I have been trying for days to think of a way to encapsulate my misery/joy caused by the Bret Easton Ellis think piece on Charlie Sheen [remember him? Seems an earthquake and a war ago !] a couple of weeks back in the new Tina Brown-helmed Newsweek...but there is just no way to summarize such glorious vapidity. Go find it and look it up. You''ll be sorry you did! Also, new paperback covers for all the BEE oeuvre, including this one, which is really good, actually (the cover, not necessarily the book)...: 2. Ian had a good idea for Motel Beds to cover "Shocker in Gloomtown," then shoot a video wherein both GBV and Breeders peep into Kim's garage watching the band play. Genius! 3. This would be a terrible start to a novel:

After he died, she remembered how he had tried to get them both to call fish sauce "name plates," because the Vietnamese name, nam pla, started the same way as "nameplates."

4. Quite enjoying the new Veils e.p. 5. It's weird having enough clothes. 6. Oh, excellent juxtaposition just now: Deftones "Change" into Style Council "The Blue Cafe."

Imperial Breakfast

We had decided to go to brunch with Gabe and Caitlyn. We went to Butter, a new restaurant on Brown Street.

Talk centers on Gabe's return from Europe, how Brussels was "rad." Things start off okay, but then my crab cake sandwich tastes like Stove Top stuffing, and the Bride's chai tea french toast is supposed to come with mascarpone but they are out of it and there's a sign on the unisex bathroom door that says PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and the caffeine is making things disoriented, confused. Then we gather our checks and, I guess, it's time to pay.

And I remember how this one time when I called some friends and say "You guys wanna see a pig?"

No one believed me at first, that, there, right there in our bombed-out city, could there be a fucking pig living in someone's yard. It was too hot out, too abstract. Once I even took Caitlyn for a ride to see it, but she, who hadn't believed the various reports and cell phone pictures, couldn't deal, couldn't handle it. The idea blew her mind. She just shook her head and quietly said "That's a dog."

So we get in our cars and follow Gabe's Jetta down Warren to Oak and pass Morton and I see a cat that looks like one of my old sponsorees and we pull up on Nathan where the pig lives.

And we all get out and look at the pig and the pig rolls over and fucking grins at us. And Caitlyn, shocked, defeated, mind blown again, has to admit it's not a dog, that it really is a pig and the blue sky is painfully bright while we all decide what to do. Gabe says something about needing to go to Target, and how I should roll Caitlyn's change for them to go to Cape Cod and the Bride says she needs to work on her tan and I take a nap and when I wake up, confused, not sure it's evening or morning, it's almost time for a meeting and now I'm typing this.

It's HERE!

Nixon?


Anyway, here's this:

I lean over the duvet in the bedroom. I run my hand over it. It
smells different.

See, in addition to everything else, Bret can SMELL THROUGH HIS FINGERS!

Happy "Imperial Bedrooms" Day!

The plethora of negative Amazon reviews just gets me more excited about the coming (heh) of Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero sequel, which should be on my doorstep upon my arrival at home.

IT'S GONNA SUCK SO BAD!

I cannot wait for the pointless, soul-crushing banality!

Love/hate

I aim for a sort of fresh banality around here, one that runs along a Jeff Koons/Bret Ellis axis. Had you noticed? Time not wasted is time wasted, is my motto. Hey! I just made that up!

Anyway, Gawker had this pic of some drones working on a "new" Koons painting:

Now, my first thought was "Betty Page? Really?" Who CARES? Along with the fact that he's already done Popeye (pointlessly) into the ground and the dolphin thing was, what, 2002? I hate it!

But then I take a step back, pause in my venting and realize, No, he's just getting more and more frivolous and that is the point! Compositionally it's as uninteresting as a gift bag. Brill!

Bonus points to the guy wearing my friend Joe's mom's coat from the 80's.

Say what you will,

this cover is TOUGH:

WRONG, Gawker

They're saying that James Van der Beek (probably mis-capitalized) had a crappy decade 2000-2009. But I would ask Nick Denton: did you read the audiobook of Lunar Park?

Well, DID YOU?

Guess line 2!

Hey! The first line of Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to Less Than Zero, is:

They had made a movie about us.

But what will be line two?

It was called Harry and the Hendersons.



Then we went to a McDonald's in Sunland for a Coke.



You can catch it on a your local CW affiliate on a Sunday
afternoon.



It should of [sic] been huge.



It was just like what is was really like - with fewer sconces.

Write and submit yr own!

Warpaint

Have only heard two songs from these and like both a bit more each time I hear them. The exciting part is one of the girls herein was the suicide bathtub girl in The Rules of Attraction! I'd prefer that they sound more like, say, Enuff Z'nuff (sp?), but one can't have everything. Not sure they don't verge into "the new Stevie Nicks" territory pioneered by Bats for Lashes. But what the hell?

Also on my to-do list

is order that copy of Imperial Bedrooms that is available for a measly 16.50 from Amazon in advance of its June 2010 release. 16.50 for all that awfulness! CANNOT WAIT!

Bar none, the absolutely best thing in the history of mankind (Stupidity Division)

I mean, sometimes words fail:

http://gawker.com/5303416/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-the-hills-is-a-modern-masterpiece