Bruno Mars at it again

I’m back on the Bruno Mars beat!  I like Bruno.  I think he’s a great singer, up there with Sam Cooke or Stevie Wonder.  But his songs are unsatisfying.  Now that you’ve heard my band you can discount my opinions as those of a hack, but I’m going to put my opinions out there.  I like my lyrics.  I’ll put them next to anyone’s.  But enough about me.

…

I like the melody of this song.  I like Bruno’s vocal performance, it’s brilliant.

But as usual, the lyrics are dumb.  So dumb.

My wife and I were listening to this and she asked me “who could relate to this?”

No one.

That’s not true.  Bruno’s song is sung from the perspective of a man who has been dumped and his girlfriend has moved on.  Fine so far.

Here’s the meat of what he got dumped for:

My pride, my ego, my needs, and my selfish ways

Here’s how he illustrates this:

I should have bought you flowers

And held your hand

Shoulda gave you all my hours

When I had the chance

Take you to every party cause all you wanted to do was dance

Uh huh.

I wish there were a word for it, but Bruno is engaged in the time-honored act of saving face by conceding that he screwed up but then finding examples that aren’t really all that embarrassing.  That is relatable.  If Bruno wrote a song that was consciously playing on that idea, that would be pretty clever.  I don’t see that happening here.

Does anyone get dumped for not buying flowers?  Not in the real world.  Men get dumped for things like cheating, acting like a slob, ignoring their girlfriend in order to hang with friends (he makes a nod towards this), being clingy, being pushy, being controlling, etc.  The list is long.  It has never included not holding hands.

We listen to music because it helps us understand the world or understand our own feelings.  Bruno is letting us down.  I love the way the guy sings, but someone’s got to tell him his lyrics aren’t cutting it.  Bruno needs to dig deeper.  Bruno knows why he got dumped.   Or he should.  He should write that song.

My Band’s CD is Done!

Just a short EP, check it out.   Lots of bad words, so maybe don’t blast it in front of your kids/boss

Film and Television : Hall Pass

Hall Pass

Directed by: Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly

Why?  Becuase I had time to kill and I like Jason Sudeikis.  Result?  It wasn’t funny.  Also, Owen Wilson really delivered some Owen Wilson (which is to say he sucked).  This movie is fucking stupid, captured most clearly by the big black dick/small white dick visual gag toward the end of the movie.  The Farrelly brother’s seem to have missed the gross mark on this one as well which makes me want to go back and watch Kingpin to see if I have changed or if they have.

Off the top of my head I would say they should stick to films where the relationship isn’t the main subject of the film.  They do just fine with it when it is ancillary to Jim Carrey’s split personality as Charlie Bailygates/Hank Evans, or Jack Black’s shallowness in Shallow Hal, mostly because the character’s are the joke.  In Hall Pass Owen Wilson and Jenna Fischer have too real of a relationship, leaving the Farely Brothers to make jokes around them rather than of them.

While the film does a good job of making single life look worse than married life, the writing of each is a caricature at best.  Ultimately the Farely Brothers are better at making caricatures of people than caricatures of life, and when they try to make caricatures of life the base, sophomoric, and insincere nature of their comedy is hard to watch… and I like fart jokes.

I don’t want to win powerball and I won’t join your office pool

So powerball is up to $650000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 dollars now and inevitably there is the office pool.  $2 to join.  I didn’t join.  I don’t care.  I don’ t want to win.

When I feel like being a prick I bring up the fact that no one is going to win.  Not you, not no one you know.  Never.

Sure, maybe one of you might have a distant cousin or maybe you won yourself.  Still, doesn’t disprove the fact that the lottery is a tax on the innumerate.

I can’t do math beyond a junior high level (if that) but I know that a 1 in a billion chance is not a good one, no matter how great the potential payoff.

But anymore that’s not really why I don’t play.  I don’t want to win.  Here’s why:

I’d have to get all new friends.

It might have been cool if I had won back when I was younger, and could somehow buy my way into the celebrity LA class, but right now I am part of the working class/middle class.  And that wouldn’t work because:

Being the smartest, the richest, the coolest, the most talented sounds great, until you actually are.

Do you like being surrounded by dummies?  I don’t.  If you’re on a team, do you want to feel like everyone around you is worse than you?  Hell no.  So why would you want to be surrounded by poor saps?  I wouldn’t.  Right now I am smack in the middle of earnings of my friends, and that’s great.  If I were rich I’d be like-

Let’s go get steak, followed by cocktails at the blah blah blah fancy place, followed by a trip, by limo, to the titty bar, I’ve got a room at the W, you guys can crash there, if I don’t get lucky

And all my friends would be like, “are you buying?”

And that might be fun, for a while, but eventually, they’d want to go to regular old places.  But I wouldn’t be satisfied with them, and I’d wonder if they were just hanging out with me because I’m paying.  No one wins.

And even regular conversations would be fucked.

“I’m really bummed man, my car broke down.  I may have to sell it and get a new one”

“Dude, totally, I just got a new Lambo”

“Uh yeah.  And I think I might be getting laid off”

“OH RAD, now we can HANG OUT MORE!”

This is how you become THAT GUY.  And don’t even get me started on all the new employees, AKA your suddenly very extended family, you have to keep happy.

Honestly it sounds like a nightmare.

I know, if my coworkers all win and quit en masse, I’ll probably be bummed.  Oh well.

Growing up in a small town

My hundredth post!  How the times flies since… January.

My blog partner and I grew up in a small town in rural Southern California.  Rural Southern California?  Is there such a thing?  I can assure you there is.  As crowded as the coastline is (and really, having lived in Japan, it doesn’t feel that crowded) there is a whole lot of empty space just to the other side of the coastal ranges.  We lived in one of those.  In a town of approximately 5,000 people, in a county of less than 100,000 people.

This was in the 80′s and there really wasn’t much in our town.  There was a park right in the middle, with the town hall, mayor’s office, and a playground.  Across the street on all sides were rows of commercial buildings, with a pharmacy, a 7/11, the local paper’s office, a dentist, a small general store*, a bank, and some other stores that came and went.  One of them used to be a small movie theater, but that had long been closed down when I lived there.

Down the street to the north was another park that was home to the city pool, a baseball field and some racquetball courts.  To the east was the largest of the two or three grocery stores.  Someone opened a Pizza Hut, but it closed after six months or so, the red roofed building remained vacant for as long as I lived there.  There were a dozen or so churches; elementary, middle and high schools; and some large warehouses that the farming businesses used.  A handful of very shady motels and not terrible Mexican restaurants.  A truck stop.  And there were tree lined streets with small houses.  That’s a pretty solid inventory of the town.  Our town was too small to even merit a stoplight.  I’d be surprised if it has one now.

Winters were relatively mild.  Summers were brutally hot.  Almost everyone living there was involved in farming in one way or another.

I lived there off and on through high school, after which I left, never to return.  My parents moved out shortly after, so I rarely go back there.  It’s been at least four years since I’ve been back there, an probably five years before that.

 

*that makes it sound like we lived in the old west, but I can’t think of another word for a small retail shop that carries everything from stationary, clothing, household goods.

Bands my bands have been on a bill with Part 3

Probably my final installment of bands I have been on the bill with because most of the other bands we’ve played with either I can’t remember, or I don’t care, or I can’t find them on Youtube.

The Fast Takers

Or they’re no longer active.  We played with these guys twice when they were visiting from Portland.  Their singer Hernan is an old friend and a great frontman.  Rad AC/DC style rock

I just heard today he’s in a new band called The Last 45′s, but I can’t find them on Youtube.

Dead on the Wire

These guys are rad street punk/pop punk and super cool guys.  Hopefully we can do some more shows with them.

Devi’s Weapon

I haven’t heard of anything from these guys since last fall, so I’m not sure if they’re still around.  They were rad, this video doesn’t do them justice

Chango Rey and His Broken Heart Beat

Rene is another old friend (at my age if you’re playing rock and roll and you don’t have old friends to play with you’re probably an asshole, or you forgot your friends, or you never had them).  Rene does a great one man act:

He’s also a great DJ and an all-around funny guy.  And he’s always got some other bands together but I can’t keep up with them!

Shiraishi Hidenori

Ok, so I couldn’t find anything from my Japan days- that was now nearly 7 years ago and I don’t think people were posting their stuff to Youtube back then.

I didn’t play with this band because it yet didn’t exist.  The singer is my good friend Hidenori and we played together several times before, mostly in separate bands, but on occasion I was talked into doing acoustic songs before an audience with him (NEVER AGAIN!  I DO NOT PLAY ACOUSTIC!) and we jammed at lots of parties, mostly with me singing mangled Blue Hearts tunes. He’s one of the best singers I know and a really nice guy.  He even played at our wedding.

That does it, I guess.  Hopefully we’ll have more to add soon.

Takin’ my kid to the skatepark

My friend has been asking me to go skating with him and his son for months now and I’ve been blowing him off because I am in a band, and I don’t want the guy who can’t make practice cause he hurt himself.  My friend should know because he was that guy when we played together.

But we don’t have  a show booked for a few more weeks and my guitar playing on the demo is done, so I said, sure, I’ll go skateboard.  And recently my son has decided to start riding the skateboard that my cousin gave him for Christmas 2 years ago.  He’s just learning to push around on it, but he’s excited to go.

Part of the problem though is finding a park that won’t be murder for a small kid.  Or me.  Some of the parks here are too hard-

This park looks great… for someone who doesn’t have a family that expects him or her not to die.  We found one that was a lot easier.

The park’s not the only danger.  There’s also other skateboarders.  Most other skaters are pretty courteous but if a place gets packed enough it doesn’t matter- boards and people are going to be flying everywhere.  I tell my son, remember the words of Mad Eye Moody- CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

We had a good time, just cruised around for an hour or so.  He’s just learning so he spent move of his time rolling around.  I tried to remember the tricks I used to be able to do.  Out of nowhere an elementary school kid asks me to play a game of S.K.A.T.E.- the skateboard version of the basketball game H.O.R.S.E.  Maybe he thought I’d be a good mark.  There was no winner because the park shut down, but we were tied, so I’d say I held my own.

It’s fun that my son is at an age when we can start doing these things together.  I don’t want to push him too hard in skateboarding because I’d rather not having him come home with lots of broken bones.  But he’s a cautious guy (like I am) so maybe it’s not a big deal.  So far it’s fun.