Friday, October 21, 2005

Hiatus? Probably not.

I don't really post too often, because to be be quite honest, I don't owe you anything. But now, I will probably be posting even less because I am going to be doing a spate of comedy writing. I am going to be doing some stuff, I hope, with my friend Brady working on his scripts. I am a punch-up man, which is to say that I work on an existing script and add jokes and make Brady's awful writing funny. Brady is even willing to give me a small part in one of his films, the part of some Indian guy. It will be a bit of a reach for me, a tall strapping Swedish man, but that's what actors do. We pretend. On top of this, I am going to join the NYU humor magazine, The Plague, also with Brady. Failing that, he and I are going to start our own guerilla magazine, because we are too damn funny not to have our sparkling genius not shared with you, the philistines of America. So deal with it.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Yes , I did. Now get out of here!

Today in the library I was sitting in one of the group study rooms with my roommate Bryce. At NYU's library, the group study rooms on lower level II are the best places to study, because they have big tables, white boards, and are private rooms. The room seats about 8 people, and there were only three of us (my friend Raj was in attendance as well) in the room. As we sat, me studying for Economics and Bryce writing for his Varieties of Conservatism class, a girl comes into our room, unannounced I might add. It was disruptive and rude. The conversation went as follows:

Girl: Do you mind if I take a chair?
Bryce: No, go ahead.
Girl: (upset and indignant) Did you tell me to go away?
Bryce: (shocked and confused) Uh, no. I said, 'Go ahead.'
Girl: Oh. Ok.

The girl walks calmly out of the room, and Raj and I burst into hysterical laughter. This girl was actually willing to fight Bryce over a chair. In the library.

How utterly pathetic.

Friday, October 07, 2005

The Click Who?

In many ways, I am a huge snob. I make fun of the New York Post for being tabloid trash, and I read The Financial Times because on top of having the word 'Financial' in it, it is British which means it is instantly more highbrow than the Post or the Daily News. The Economist also satisfies this property quite nicely. I mock people that watch shows like "7th Heaven" because it spouts boring wholesome platitudes, is crushingly derivative, and is on the WB. I prefer comedies that are satirical and avant-garde (according to The New Republic) like "Arrested Development." I also cut down girls who read "Cosmopolitan" and "The Devil Wears Prada" for reasons should be obvious by now. By all accounts, I turn into an enormous tool when I see your coffee table and whatever is on it. Strangely, one area where I am shockingly tolerant of the mainstream is music, evinced particularly well by the fact that the song "Just The Girl" by The Click Five is on my iPod.

To preserve some dignity, I should say that I don't like all music, either. I hate emo music like Dashboard Confessional and other guys who cry for 30 minutes and call it a song, and Linkin Park sounds like a domestic disturbance incident on a CD. So you would think that for the same reasons I dismiss "Bridget Jones' Diary" I would attack The Click Five with an amount of rancor usually seen only by Mets fans, but I am nothing if not inconsistent. They both target the same audience; stupid 16 year old mallrat girls from the suburbs who have no exposure to anything that doesn't include extra cheese or a DVD tie-in. So why do I like this song?

It's kind of hard to say. I heard it once when I was watching "My Super Sweet 16" on MTV (a show I enjoy immensely in a Ignatius Reilly-like way that defines a lot of my taste.) The line that got me was, "she can't keep a secret for more than an hour." For whatever reason, this kind of behavior is endearing and kind of cute. The lyrics are atrocious, but the pop beat gets me. There is something so deliciously manufactured, so perfectly contrived about the beat. It's like cotton candy; you know it's wholly unnatural and pretty crappy, but you like it anyway. And just like cotton candy, it costs almost nothing and provides fleeting satisfaction. Despite myself, I find my fingers clicking it on my iPod.

I have to listen to a lot of Vivaldi to cleanse the palette, but for now, I'm going to loop it.