So my last few posts have been pretty heavy, full of angry political nonsense. I thought it would be a nice change to just take a minute to list off a few things that I think are awesome and that you should also think are awesome.
1.) Rottweilers
Rottweilers are just awesome. They are big stupid animals that don't understand how big and stupid they are. If raised properly and treated well they are wonderful cuddly companions wholly undeserving of their ferocious reputations. People who train rottweilers to be mean should be shot. I like rottweilers a lot.
2.) Corn Dogs
I don't know who invented the corn dog, no one does, but that man or woman is a wonderful illustration of the genius that's possible with a simple idea. Take a sausage, put it on a stick, dip it it in corn bread batter, deep fry. Genius. Now granted, like many people I generally treat the corn dog as a delivery system for a variety of condiments, primarily hot mustard. But even as such a device, the corn dog excels. Mr. Anonymous corn dog inventer, I salute you.
Seattle's Hat and Boots service station and the Twin Teepees restaurant are long gone, but at least The Pink Elephant, The Space Needle, and vast stretches of Aurora Ave. North are still representin' old school. If you've only ever seen this stuff after it's fallen into dilapidated disrepair, it's likely you don't know how wonderful this stuff is when it's well maintained. Do yourself a favor and keep an eye out, every now and then some far sighted property owner will restore some mid century wonder to it's full on neon, chrome, and aquamarine glory and you will suddenly be baffled about why we stopped building stuff like that in favor of the lame Brutalist and Postmodern nonsense from the seventies and eighties.
Some day I will have money and when I do, I will have a Googie house built somewhere that it will totally piss off the neighbors. I will paint it aquamarine and the driveway will have neon lights that strobe like a landing strip.
4.) Pop Surrealism
Glenn Barr, Scott Musgrove, Frank Kozic, Camille Rose Garcia, Todd Schorr, Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Elizabeth McGrath. THere are so many others. They are geniuses and they make life better. And you can get prints and posters of their work pretty cheap still because most of them are still alive and working. Buy now before they start kicking off and the prices go through the roof.
5.) The American Underground
Once upon a time, music was dominated by 6 major labels. These major labels insisted on churning out crap. Throughout the seventies and eighties, they pushed out endless variations on arena rock, southern rock, and MOR pop music that's only key feature was that it was uniformly terrible. By the early 1990s when the industry had hit a brand new low with the foisting on an unsuspecting public the aural violation that's come to be known as New Jack Swing, the listening public finally let the majors know that it had had enough. And all of a sudden out of the woodwork came all this amazing stuff by people that no one had ever heard of before and that nobody was sure where it came from. It seemed to just emerge out of the pages of CMJ ex nihilo. Except it wasn't. Because no matter what is going on in corporate america, the American Underground has always been there to provide something else to listen to so long as you know what to listen for. It's always been there and the great thing about it is that the worse that mainstream MOR releases are, the better the stuff going on in the underground is. It's the American Underground that produces acts like Husker Du, The Replacements, and Devo. It also produces acts like Botch, Neurosis, and Angels of Light and everything in between. And it will always be there because whatever is being played on corporate radio, or MTV or getting into the TV machine or the Movie box, all of that stuff for the most part nine times out of ten is completely horrible. The Underground is there to give you hope. et it do that.