Music Video of the Day: Enrique Iglesias, "Tonight I'm Fucking You" [NSFW -- Not Safe For Anything}

You know I get it. Dude's been making these subtle videos his whole career, and the point's been lost on us. I mean is Enrique into fucking hot girls or not? Question answered.

Pathos

In the past, I have expressed some amount of rage about pathos-laden cartoons. Pixar is down the street, so I really shouldn't say this, but I don't give a shit about anything they do, and this opinion, informed in some part by the few of their movies (Cars, the one with the balloons) which I watched, is mainly informed by the fact that I am an adult interested in the complexity and gamut of human emotions. So fuck cartoons. Cartoons are for kids. Now that that's out of the way, Hollywood made a 3d Yogi Bear movie? What the what? And the actual animators involved with the movie did a painstakingly well-crafted fake ending for it, parodying the near-ending of the incredibly awesome and criminally underwatched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Except the parody is actually just a faithful rendition of that haunting scene and is a total pathos fest. The eyes of these two bears -- holy shit. And when it's all done Yogi gets turned into a rug. Everything that's happening in this parody is better than every movie nominated for the NAACP Image Awards Golden Globes, says the guy with a newish baby who has been to one movie in the last seven months.

How to Lose Your Shit in 10 Days

This video is called "Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit," but what's weird is that the only one (thing) losing his (its) shit is the Yale Drama School, which is obviously going to have to go out of business now because there is no point trying to teach people how to act anymore. Nicolas Cage just straight shows fools how it's done.

Anyway, sorry, I'm still busy turning his blog into a Tumblr. Happy Thanksgiving, home skillets!

ps -- We actually have a "Nicolas Cage" label. I love our blog.

Here's the Fetus

VH1 TV Shows | Music Videos | Celebrity Photos | News & Gossip

Look, if we're going to turn this blog into some kind of Gawker Twitter feed, I say, full fucking turkey.

this is what a north korean press release sounds like

it's short, so i'll just copy & paste in its entirety. from where else? north korea, bien sur.

Match between DPRK and Brazil

Pyongyang, June 16 (KCNA) -- The league match of the 2010 World Cup between the DPRK and Brazil took place at dawn (Pyongyang time) on Wednesday.

From the outset of the match the two teams fought a seesaw battle. The DPRK footballers created good shooting chances, not losing their confidence even after losing two goals.

At about the 88th minute of the match Jong Tae Se headed the ball before passing it to Ji Yun Nam who powerfully kicked it into the rival's goalmouth, scoring a goal.

The DPRK team will meet its Portuguese rival on June 21.

the wall street journal reads my mind

fffwhat???

November Drizzle

Right before the Thanksgiving holiday, I went into a temp agency in the hopes of securing some contract work, but emerged burdened anew. Mo money, mo problems? Afraid not. There I met with a cheery young woman with a large Chinese character tattooed on the top of her foot and who was under the impression that business dress remains business even when it leaves nothing to the imagination. No doubt her recently completed college career was full of serious study, but she was now tasked with something even more challenging: sorting out my life. I have seen these last several weeks as an extended lesson in humility, but I was shocked in that moment by how much there was still for me to learn. With troubled and liberally mascaraed eyes she reviewed my application, announcing, It says here you're interested in work as an attorney or associate or lawyer...Um, would you consider other categories, like, legal assistant? You don't have any certifications, do you?

Now I am not above being a legal assistant. I am not above doing good and honest work, but the truly humbling aspect of her proposal was this: Say, I swallow my pride, take on a temp job as a legal assistant; what happens when it comes out that I don't know how to do an electronic filing or type fast or bluebook properly? What happens when I get fired? I don't know, but that would have to be a bridge to be crossed later. Yes, I said. Yes, I would consider being a legal assistant. And no, no I have no paralegal certifications. I thanked her for her efforts on my behalf, prayed my application would not get lost amid all the Jaeger bombs she had planned for the weekend, and marched out into the cold November rain.

As I unlocked my bike, I tried to think out of the proverbial and hateful box: Take that kinda-sorta job offer in DC and have a long-distance marriage? Try to substitute teach? Lightning didn't strike. The clouds did not part. The sun did not peak out from over the hills. No, none of these things happened. But then my phone buzzed. It was a former colleague, offering me contract work on the case I was once the junior associate on. A reprieve, not a solution, but something.

Mutton on the Sides, Marley on the Chin

This is a picture of Drew Gooden, aka The Big Drizzle (his words, not mine, and not anyone else's). He used to have a soul patch on the back of his neck. Now he's just going overboard with the sexy. You thought you knew how to grow a beard, but you've been doing it wrong.

Up, Up, and Sideways

Things are looking up.

I went on some job interviews this past week. While a job interview is not the same as a job -- and while none of those interviews has yet to result in a job -- I know this is the Era of Hope and Change, and having job interviews means this week was better than last week, when I had nothing.

On Friday, I interviewed for a position, the details of which I will deny you because I live in fear that this blog will find a tenth reader and that reader will expose my sins to the world. So please, indulge the vagaries. I will note this though: it was a public interest position, and I had high hopes that it would represent the end to my corporate ennui. I arrived at the interview with maybe a minute to spare, and performed a reverse Clark Kent on the sidewalk as I jogged into the building. As I did I happened upon the bow-tied gentleman who was to interview me. His look informed me that in his view one dresses not only for the interview, but also for the trip out to the interview. Nonetheless, I put his raised eyebrow reaction out of my mind and marched straight into elevator small talk. Things proceeded pleasantly as we entered his office. He then picked up his mail, opened it, and stood silently as he became engrossed in something. I was a bit flummoxed, but stranger things have happened to me in job interviews, so I took a seat and waited to be addressed. Eventually, I was. With this question: Tell me about yourself, and start 100 years ago.

Now I like Tristram Shandy as much as the next guy, but what can you say to this? I began, haltingly, to talk of my immigrant roots, about my parents and about my grandparents, wondering the whole while if I was really meant to answer this question literally or if I had missed something. My interrogator interrupted me, opined here and there, and led me on several diversions. At one point, in response to a stimulus, I said this: Americans long for a monarchical system. This is why we returned a second Bush to the White House, almost elected another Clinton, and are obsessed with Princess Diana.

Whether or not my wild displays of intellectual plumage, all completely bullshit, all intended for a man who knew muck and mire and yearned for it, whether or not it did the trick is a moot point. About one and a half hours into my job interview, I was very suddenly asked the most straightforward question I could be: Why do you want this job?

I offered my canned answer, rather elegantly I thought, but was informed over the course of about half an hour of excoriation that I was wrong. Now I should say in the course of this job, I would be representing some very unseemly people, and according to my interrogator, I should want to serve them not because justice demands that I do so -- which I more or less said -- but because humanity is debased and nihilism is the answer. This is literally what he said to me: I am a nihilist.

Where do you go from there, but out the door and very far away?

I left the interview feeling quite strongly that I had been subjected to a very particular kind of psycological examination, and feeling also that I would never again return to the site of it. I would not be asked to of course, but even if by some miracle I were, I would decline.

The balance of Friday I was out of sorts, but that evening I went to a friend's house for poker night. Now I don't much about the game. I had to be taught, and I had to refer constantly to my cheat sheet listing the hierarchy of the hands, but my naivete, my genuine lack of a strategy, managed to confuse everyone at the table, and they nakedly tried to bluff and bully their way into my pot. I saw through them. I cleaned everybody's clock and went home with $100 in my pocket.

Things are looking up indeed.

The Slow Descent

Tomorrow or the next day, I will addend this post with photographs, but for now I will try to say with words what corporate carnage mine eyes have beheld these last several days.

October 15, 2007 -- My first day of work.

October 15, 2008 -- I am now officially the senior ranking attorney on my floor. A law firm in dissolution may still be a law firm, but a law firm in dissolution without attorneys is something else altogether. Virtually everyone else has left for greener pastures -- all pastures are greener than the barren slate gray of capitalism's unvacuumed carpets. Some of us have no pastures to leave for.

On Monday, I returned from my trip back east to find that my neighbor no longer exists, at least, no longer exists in the form that I knew her to. We were friendly, but a post-it note attached to the boxes sitting outside her door and mine informs me that she has accepted a position at another law firm.

Today, the vendors in charge of coffee seized the coffee machines. They took with them the cups. The packets of sugar. Apparently, also the hand soap. The fridge remains stocked with unopen half-gallons of milk, but the expiration dates are marked for Friday. Perilously close, and I am lactose intolerant.

Yesterday, other vendors seized the printers. I sent documents to be printed, but the request dissipated into ether(net).

At noon today, our key cards stopped working, along with the elevators, and we were all seized with panic. When you've finally made peace with being locked out, it's a little funny to find yourself locked in. A few minutes later the cards started working again and so did the elevators. We noted the dark humor of all this.

I took a walk just now around the deserted landscape of the 32nd floor. Through the windows of the corner offices that were once everyone's envy the clouds burned amber over the Golden Gate Bridge, sailboats lolled in the Bay behind the TransAmerica Building. Things I thought to be immutable--furniture bolted to the walls, for instance--have been removed. In their wake are massive holes in the dry wall. Many offices are strewn with detritus. Many more are empty, save for an orphaned plant. Their leaves fulvous and forlorn. All were once occupied by people; in their place now are their identification cards, turned face up, beaming and full of hope, turned face up on curt letters of resignation, addressed to partners who also no longer work here.

I happened upon the office of one particulary malapert attorney. Her office decor, amusingly orientalist, replete with smiling Buddha, has given way to the hollow left behind by movers. On her desk, a resignation letter, her identification badge, and her business card, inverted with the following words inscribed in green, yes, but inscribed in a sad and unsteady hand:

"To whom much is given, much is expected." -- Luke, 12:48

like a lion riding a horse...

so are the days of our lives.

After the Reckoning

I left you, dear readers/shy commenters, a bit in the lurch on Thursday. Indeed I--and my colleagues--were haled into a meeting in the main conference room later that day. The chairs had been removed, ominously, to fit all the people. We packed in, and spilled over to the smaller rooms nearby. As I stood amidst the nervous chatter, I looked around and saw, with great embarrassment, how many people work at the firm I had never before laid eyes on: IT people, kitchen workers, mail room guys emerged from the lower floors and stood shoulder to shoulder with attorneys to hear the formal news of their termination. I suppose when the executioner's blade falls, there is no class, there is no creed, that separates us. The chairman appeared and wasted little time in announcing that the firm was taking steps to dissolve (with a formal vote for dissolution scheduled for the next day).

The news was greeted with a mix of stunned silence and bitter smiles. Something can be a long-time-coming, but still knock the wind out of you. Soon, the smiles began to vanish, the silence turned to sighs, and as the San Francisco office's managing partner delivered his eulogy, a slow dirge about the venerable firm he joined before I was born, the sighs turned into tears: the same secretaries who had been sobbing at their desks before passed out tissue paper and hid their eyes behind sunglasses -- perhaps that is not remarkable. What is remarkable though, at least to me, is this: scores of grown men, luminaries in their field, weeping in the arms of any who would have them. I have seen nothing like it before.

I continue to work. A law firm in dissolution is still a law firm. Business winds down, and euthanization is set for November 28th. I work on cases that will find new homes elsewhere. I work hard for people whose good opinion will have no bearing on my career. I receive emails from partners about job leads. I trip over boxes, heading to the men's room. I sit at my desk as representatives of potential sub-lessees poke their heads in to my office, sizing up the space, but ignoring the human being seated before them. I will be at work tomorrow morning, but yesterday I was having some problems with my computer and called the IT helpdesk, only to find I had reached a disconnected number.

These are strange times.

"One Day We Will All Look Back at This and Laugh."

Today at 1 PM I expect to be fired.

Okay, laid-off.

That is, I expect to be another one of those faceless drones who volunteered to have his hopes and dreams shredded for the advancement of Corporate America (and the advancement of my own pocketbook), but who never expected this.

Over the course of the last one and a half weeks -- the hospice period for the dying firm at which I work -- I have asked myself, David-Byrne-like, how did I get here? But there are few answers. I had a wealth of choices, and I thought I chose wisely, but alas...

Law firms can fall victim to the whims of the economy, it is true, but it is rare for them to dissolve outright. There is a larger misfeasance at play here. Now, I have my own thoughts about management, about greed, about out-sized ambition, but this is not the forum in which to share them. I am angry, yes, I am confused about what lies ahead -- never in the last 25 years have I not been enrolled in school or employed -- but, my election posts notwithstanding, I am an optimist, and I expect that this too shall pass. This job, this strange 11-month odyssey, was in some respects a charade. It's not what I'm meant to do, I know, and maybe now I will be forced to think hard about what it is that I want out of my professional life.

Don't feel sorry for me. Just two weeks ago I was sitting in a financial planning seminar, organized by the firm, listening to a pleasant lady talk about the best strategies for buying a second house or financing private school for your kids. I remember sitting there and having one of those moments of clarity that exist only in facile television programs. This is all just, just so wrong. Then, a weirder thought -- one probably better suited for HBO -- gripped me: If the revolution gathered on the streets below, spilled forth through the lobby, up the elevator, and slaughtered us all, it would be justified. No one needs to be talking about second homes. No one needs to send their kids to private school. When this becomes your everyday reality, maybe, just maybe, you have forfeited that which makes you part of a common humanity. But I digress...

The above quote has become sort of a mantra here. It's the only appropriate thing to say to people who are sharing in this experience with you. I have heard it from many colleagues, but right now, there are secretaries, who have spent 20, 30, years toiling here, but can't manage to find a private place to cry, so they sit at their desks, with tears streaming down their face, trying to check headings on somebody's motion to dismiss. When I look back at all of this, that -- more than anything else -- will be what I remember.

ps -- Should you feel compelled to comment, please do not mention the name of The Firm at Which I Will be Working for a Few More Hours.

The Jerk Store Called...

So, yesterday I was coming back from the Mission, somewhat late (for us fourth-decaders anyway). The train was pretty empty when I sat down, and I pulled out my book and got to business. Now, I was sittting in the seat closest to the train door. This is just a habit of mine. I like to be near the exits. What this says about me I'm not sure. Of course on trains, buses, and other modes of public transport these seats are designated for the disabled and elderly. Now, I was raised right. If the train is crowded, I get up and offer my seat--no matter where I'm sitting--to the infirm or impregnated. In this way, I am like Jesus.

Anyway, I'm sitting in my seat, kind of engrossed in my book, and I don't notice that the train has started to fill up and in front of me is a pretty old lady talking with two of her friends, themselves in the designated seats directly opposite me. My head in my book, I feel a rough poke in my shoulder and I look up to a 30-something guy with a "what the fuck" look on his face, pointing to the old lady and then pointing to the the sign printed above my seat. My immediate reaction was embarrassment: I apologized. To the guy. And he still didn't say a word as I got up and moved. But here's the kicker. The guy was himself sitting in a seat five feet away from me, one not designated for people with special needs, granted, but one that was no less convenient for that old lady than mine--meaning, instead of offering his seat to the old lady who was standing equidistant from us both, he thought the best course of action was to shame me in a public train, and smug in his good citizenry, reassume his comfortable chair, as others stood around him. As I relocated, I noticed the train really wasn't totally full, and there were three or four other seats I could sit in. I took up one of them and stewed. I turned around, and saw that the old lady didn't sit down in the seat I'd abandoned.

I spent the next fifteen minutes to MacArthur thinking about what I'd say to the asshole good samaritan as I exited the train. Something like this: "You know, I'm the kind of guy who gets on an empty train, sits down and gets caught up in his book, and doesn't realize there's an old lady who maybe needs a seat. You're the kind of guy who can't be bothered to give up his own seat, but violently pokes strangers and embarrasses them for not following the letter of the law. Between us, who's the bigger asshole?"

But when my stop rolled around. That guy wasn't sitting there anymore. The train had pretty much cleared out (at 12th Street-Oakland), except for a few stragglers. Including the old lady, who was still standing, contentedly, as I left.

Music Video of the Day: Scar Jo, For Your Derision

E, I miss you. This bicoastal thing really gets in the way of our cynical banter. So, here's Scar Jo's new video. Leave your unadulterated bilious remarks in the comments section.

Also, why is Salman Rushdie nuzzling her neck in this video? This question follows in a long line of Salman Rushdie-related questions: For instance, why is Salman Rushdie playing the obstretician in Helen Hunt's new movie? Why is Salman Rushdie in Bridget Jones' Diary? Why did Salman Rushdie write the most outsiderly and hilariously inexpert account of New York City ever committed to print? Why is Salman Rushdie hanging out at Bungalow 8? How did Salman Rushdie land Padma Lakshmi? Why did Salman Rushdie get an eye lift? Why did Salman Rushdie turn away and run from me at that Breyten Breytenbach reading a couple of years ago? The answer to some, though not all, of these questions is this: because all your heroes will eventually sacrifice their innate gifts and become vain, fame-whoring parodies of themselves.

res ipsa loquitur

yes, these are real covers.

i've been wondering this very thing

the nostagiathon continues. i think this might be a sign that the times has one too many blogs...

but huh? what is the conclusion here: I think that Alex might just be ready to take a chance. I can picture him stepping into the voting booth, closing the curtain behind him, taking a deep breath and then for the first time in his life putting his hand up to the Democratic Party lever. He’d touch it tentatively, trying to get comfortable. Take his hand off. Put it back. He’d grasp the lever firmly. Squeeze it. And as he was about to pull, we FADE OUT.

lunchables

i was in montreal recently visiting my sister (and renewing my visa - did you know that you can transport a banana from canada into the US but not an orange (or any citrus fruits)? oh the things i learn from customs officers), who introduced me to this website.

now, i'm all for a nutritious lunch, especially one that is visually pleasing. not to mention that i start to salivate every time i go on this webpage. nonetheless, doesn't this seem a little psychotic? my sister seemed very inspired by it, which surprised me. i half-joked to her that she's setting her daughter up for disappointment bc that little girl is going to realize one day that eggs are not actually shaped like cartoon characters and that seaweed comes in rectangular sheets and not shaped like cartoon cutouts. then i thought, am i crazy for thinking this is a little indulgent? is my sister right? maybe this is just a way for a mother to show affection for her daughter and feed her well?

who knows, but as my korean friend said, "i never thought my cheesy korean side would say this, but making things tiny only becomes cute until a certain point. " amen to that.

anyway, in her defense, the woman running the website primarily uses leftovers, but just packages them to seem more palatable. and look at this lunch! jeebus.

Happy Armageddon!

Hey, I need to blog again. I know. Parents were in town Christmasweek, and then 'Pockets and I flew back east for a wedding in Pittsburgh/to see if my new niece/nephew had arrived on the scene, but that's no excuse: Benazir was assassinated/bumped her head; Pakistan devolved into a riotous and blood-spattered free-for-all (which led to the destruction of, among other things, my aunt's car...while she was driving it); The Wire season premiere dropped On Demand; Mike Huckabee became the would-be-nominee for a bit, then started to talk about things not related to our Lord and Savior/love handles; Giuliani became irrelevant; and Will Smith secretly converted to Scientology (which makes him still more electable than Romney). Also, Happy New Year! Here's to hoping that nuclear holocaust/impending Chinese colonization/bird flu/Britney-LiLo-Winehouse's inevitable group overdose and-or suicide pact decides to put off plans till '09 at least.

it's gettin' gettin' gettin' kinda hectic

in the blogosphere. c4ts, can we possibly compete with a blimp? stay tuned...