Inspired by this nostalgic-seizure inducing post by the oft-hilarious Kevin Babbles, I am compelled to talk about the ridiculous summer playlist I put together this year.
It’s like… 70% flashback 90s/00s music (mostly rap, hip hop, and pop), 10% awful dance music, 10% indie bullshit, and 10% newer but still outdated rap and hip hop.
A sample of the randomized, 467 song playlist:
Some of my favorites:
L’Trimm, “Cars with the Boom” — 1. I love how similar this video is to JJ Fad’s, “Supersonic” and how fucking awful and great they both are. I have way too many memories of hearing this song blasting from my sister’s bedroom growing up and hearing her and her friends laughing and talking about dudes and generally allowing me to grow into a hateful, resentment-filled pain in the ass. Bitches.
Vengaboys, “Boom Boom Boom Boom” — What horrifies me about this song is that I have this really distinct memory of singing and dancing to it at a slumber party at my house and I always though, “LOL SIXTH GRADE” until I looked it up and this didn’t come out until June of 1999. I was FOURTEEN. What the hell? My shame, let me show you it. Second, what the actual fuck is happening in this video, man? Gay cowboy! Blue lipstick! All those horrible outfits! Titties everywhere! Drunk bros! Ejaculatory champagne! Rampant lesbianism!
Come to think of it, that explains a lot about why I would have been into it at fourteen.
Sarai, “Ladies” — This is the EMBODIMENT of my trip to Las Vegas after high school graduation. I still remember rolling down the strip in my BFF’s dad’s Explorer Sport Trac SCREAMING this song at everyone on the street.
Like this.
Oh, to be eighteen. Additionally, watching this, I do not understand how I didn’t figure out I was a lesbot earlier. I MEAN, COME ON. Also, watching Sarai rap is like watching my BFF talk. We call her DJ Xis.
Khia, “K-Wang” — THIS WAS THE DANCE. I remember watching one of my BFFs (Bryce) teaching DJ Xis how to do this shit in front of the big screen TV in my living room. Their dance was closer to this version (although people are CRAZY adamant that this is NOT THE RIGHT DANCE in the comments) but they disabled embedding because the world hates me. Better version of this TERRIBLE SONG here.
Mr. C, “Cha Cha Slide” — I wasn’t going to embed this one because, seriously, line dance hip hop is so god damn terrible, but this is every dance I went to in high school. Gym full of uncoordinated white kids being led by all the black kids. Diversity at work, y’all. And the video is just spectacular.
Edvard Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King (Techno Remix)” — Also a high school dance thing. Just a representative of the terrible, terrible techno remixes that plagues the late 90s/early 00s. See also: Tetris Techno Remix, Super Mario Bros. Theme Techno Remix (not the one of my youth, but close). I listened to a lot of god awful techno in the early days of mp3.com, OKAY. Don’t judge me.
Monifah, “Touch It” — Bringing the troops joy since 1998, girl.
Eminem, “Role Model” — Every white person I am friends with knows every word to this song. I don’t know what that means, but it’s nice to roll down all four windows of my 2010 Honda Insight and blare this motherfucker with a bunch of white girls in the car. Oh wait, awkward, I meant awkward.
So Molly Lewis wrote a blog about the closure/redesign of Star Tours and while I think it’s sweet and engaging and an example of all the things I love about blogs — memories! nostalgia! complainery! — it’s also the kind of thing that makes me sad.
I love Disneyland. I love it beyond the ability to put it into words. And I love Star Tours. I think Star Tours is one of the best rides Disneyland has ever or will ever see. I loved it before I had ever even seen a Star Wars movie. Like Molly Lewis, I know it by heart and I recite it when I ride it and I once had a joyful ride with a strange kid on it. (When Captain Rex said, “I’ve always wanted to do this,” this bright and happy kid yelled, “MEEEEEEEEE TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” My girlfriend and I have stolen his line ever since.)
But I’m not going to complain about the rehab or the changes or the podracing sequence or about George Lucas (even though I could, for days) or how Disney just can’t leave things alone because that’s not what Disneyland is about.
Watch out, I’m throwing down with a Walt Disney quote right here:
“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
Maybe you and I hate the Star Wars prequels and all the too-noisy, hyperactive, CG scenes (and if you do, blame Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park — no, really), but there is an entire generation of kids who loved them and a whole new generation who will ONLY know Star Wars in chronological order (this blows my mind, but as an entirely separate thing) and it’s their turn for the memories.
I hate that the Country Bear Jamboree is gone and it kills me that they took Mr. Toad’s out in Florida. I miss Circlevision sometimes, or more accurately, I miss getting dizzy staring upward for such long periods. I miss the Mary Blair murals in Tomorrowland and the PeopleMover. I miss the Fantasyland Autopia and how much fun it was to drive before I had to. Until VERY RECENTLY I missed the shit out of Captain EO. I miss Tom Sawyer Island when the settler’s cabin burned and there weren’t any pirates. I miss pre-Captain Jack Pirates of the Caribbean. Hell, I miss the Submarine Voyage and the parking lot. I even miss the Rocket Jets and the Skyway even though they both scared the living shit out of me.
But part of loving Disneyland is loving what used to be there, remembering, knowing for sure and certain and 100% that it was better when you were young, when this was there and that wasn’t, before everything changed.
What we didn’t realize then, as kids, was that things were changing all around us, all the time, at Disneyland, at home, and in the world at large. But we were young and change is often incremental and we were too busy having fun and playing on the teetering rock on Tom Sawyer and listening to our parents talk about A tickets and E tickets and how you used to be able to ride a real live pack mule where Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is now and how it used to be different, simpler, better.
Molly Lewis’s nostalgia is right, her love is perfect, her adoration commendable and so fucking right on the nose for me it isn’t even funny, but she’s still wrong.
“Disney tends to function in the way that Apple and Facebook do by which I mean that they will decide to change things that absolutely did not need changing, and you’re only left to assume that it’s for your own good.”
Star Tours is almost twenty-four years old. It’s had an incredible run, thrilling and delighting and creating memories for thousands and thousands (millions?) of visitors, but up until the last week and one random summer day last year, I never once in my dozens of visits saw the queue for the Endor longer than ten or fifteen minutes, even on peak days and times. And while that’s a great thing for visitors, it’s a death knell for Disney. And while I’d rather believe Disney was revitalizing a ride for the guests, it all comes down to the dollar.
Regardless of their motives, Star Tours 2.0 promises to create brand new memories for the next set of Disney fans. And, god forbid, I someday have a child, I’ll be there with him or her, talking about how when I was a kid there was this pilot droid named Rex and how he’d taken us on his first flight…
I just started screwing around with film again (I don’t think I’d shot a single roll since my first quarter of college in 2003) and since 120 is SO EXPENSIVE for such hit-or-miss shots with the Holga, I thought, “Dang, I’ll buy twenty bucks of 35mm and dig out my Pentax!” So I did. And I shot a couple of rolls, including some old ass film that was buried with that Pentax! SCORE. And then I started wondering if Costco still developed film because it used to be super cheap! So I started googling. Then I came across that nutjob up there.
Like, look, man, I understand that your comfort bubble was busted wide open with the advent of digital cameras, but they’ve been around since like… 1991 basically. It’s 2010 now, CALM DOWN. If you are THIS UPSET about the idea of digital photography and the accompanying digital files, you should probably just quit the real world and live like a hermit. And if you are ALREADY living like a hermit, it’s time to give up the internet too.
1. Who is leaving all of their digital files on flash storage or SD or whatever? The majority of digital shots are at least getting moved to hard drives and shuffled forward through technological advances.
2. I love “DISPOSABLE SOCIETY”!! So much damnation in two words!
3. I had to google “basura” before I realized he was using the Spanish word for garbage. Dude misspelled so much shit in there, I could not even tell he was using another language.
4. “Now” we can just “click a button,” he says. What kind of fucked up camera rig has he been using all these years with his film? Does he Rube Goldberg every shot so that he can feel like he fucking earned that picture of his cat?
5. What the fuck is going to happen to our DISPOSABLE SOCIETY in 100 years that’s going to require we be DUG UP?
6. “IT TAKES NO MICROPROCESSOR TO INTERPRET, OTHER THAN THE ONE THAT EACH OF US HAS BEEN ENDOWED WITH BY THE CREATOR OF OUR BEINGS.” FILM IS BETTER BECAUSE MY GOD-BRAIN NEEDS NO COMPUTER TO SEEEEEEEE ITTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.
7. Dude? Is intense.
I can tell with 70-80% accuracy whether or not a picture is to my liking on my dSLR’s screen and if it isn’t, I pop off a few more, sometimes a couple dozen if it’s a hard shot. That luxury is basically non-existent with film unless you’re insanely wealthy. I am not, nor have I ever been, so I only shot the same thing twice if I was at least 90% sure that I’d just fucked up my first attempt and I’d still consider it pretty thoroughly, weighing whether I could really afford to waste the frame. I like film still because I like surprise. It’s FUN to pick up prints and flip through seeing what came out and what didn’t. THAT IS THE JOY OF FILM. The joy of digital is the joy of experimentation and repetition and adventure and trying new things.
Look, Patrick Lewis, I hate that every teenager with a Canon Rebel thinks they’re a photographer too, but that doesn’t mean I think Canon should be demonized for making it possible.
I am currently formulating a brilliant, serious post about how the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot and The Big Bang Theory have somehow convinced me to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and how I am spending scorching days in bed, blazing through the discs like FIRE and complaining that they’re not on Netflix Instant (UNACCEPTABLE) and shouting about what a MASSIVE BAG OF DOUCHE Picard is and how the internet has not yet brought forth PICARDICKERY.COM.
But whatever, it is 92F (33.3 C) outside and I am not mentally capable of putting together a string of coherent sentences because my BRAIN IS MELTING, so instead I am going to talk [AND LITERALLY RIGHT THIS SECOND THE POWER WENT OUT UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SUCKS. ALSO, IT WAS OUT FOR ELEVEN HOURS. ELEVEN HOURS. FUCK YOU, SOCAL EDISON, FUCK YOU IN THE ASS WITH A BARBED WIRE WRAPPED BASEBALL BAT.] about how Geordi La Forge is a gaymo and I LOVE IT SO MUCH.
Or, okay, I am going to show you a whopping three screencaps from an early season one episode since that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
So in the episode “Hide and Q”, Q, the first and most obnoxious villain introduced in TNG appears to mess with the crew of the Enterprise and then gives Riker all of his powers. He can control time and space and bring back the dead and change all kinds of shit. And he promises Picard that he will never use his powers again (after saving the whole bridge crew) except for how he and Q come in and Riker’s like, “Heeeeeeeey, I’m gonna grant ALL YOUR DEEPEST WISHES” and everyone is like, “NO DON’T DO IT” basically.
So Riker chooses young Ensign Wesley Crusher as his first victim/recipient and he’s like, “I KNOW WHAT YOU WANT” and Wesley makes the same hapless, joyful face he makes 90% of the time and his mom is like, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” but then it’s like this:
And then:
And everyone is AGHAST because Wesley is ten years older oh noes! WESLEY JUST WANTS TO BE A GROWN-UP OKAY. And Riker smiles rakishly and is delighted and then Geordi La Forge is all, “Hey, Wes, not bad” and makes this lecherous face:
And I was all, YEEEEAAAAH, Geordi La Forge, YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH.
And yeah, so, I love this awful, wonderful television show. I’ve only watched the first three discs of episodes and the whole time I’m doing it I keep thinking, “I should be doing something with this. I could be doing something hilarious. COME UP WITH SOMETHING BRILLIANT” and then I write a post like this and realize that anything I came up with would just be me screaming, “GAYMO LA FORGE, WESLEY CRUSHAAAAH, RAKISH RIKAH” over and over again and for real, no one wants that.
I have most of my brilliant ideas/thoughts/words/sentences in the two most inconvenient places for someone who has a memory terrible enough that if she has three thoughts in her head she has to write them down IMMEDIATELY because the instant a fourth one pops into existence one of those three turds of brilliance will be GONE FOREVER: the car and the shower.
Like, I am a good driver and all, but I am not good enough to just knock off some detailed notes in the middle of the 210 freeway while I am driving 85 miles an hour on my way to my afternoon class that I almost overslept. (It’s an evening class, if I’m honest, but I’m not, so…) Generally, I unlock my phone, fumble around blindly trying to remember which god damn page (folder now, THANKS STEVE JOBS!) I put the voice recorder on/in (OH I NEVER USE THAT, LET’S HIDE IT) while trying not to crash the car AND keep track of whatever idea prompted the suicide recording mission in the first place. IT NEVER GOES WELL.
Having a brilliant idea in the shower is like suddenly having to shit while you’re in there. You either admit defeat and get out, sit down on the toilet soaking wet and get toilet paper stuck all over your damp ass (writing equivalent: finding a notebook and pen while running naked through the house, then dripping all over it) or you finish the shower and shit when you’re done, basically defeating the entire purpose of the fucking shower (writing: lose the thought somewhere between getting shampoo in your eyes and accidentally douching with Dial). There is no in between, but 90% of the time I opt for the naked sprint. The other 10% of the time I just convince myself that the idea was fucking stupid anyway and should immediately be forgotten.
I also get excessively emotional in these two places way more often than should be even remotely possible. Like, sometimes I’m just showering and it’s a pleasant enough experience and I am suddenly like, “DAMN, no one is ever going to hire me for even a menial position after I’ve invested all this money and time into getting my MFA. GOD DAMN I FUCKED UP.” and then I start crying a lot and it’s gross and basically looks like one of those awful post-regrettable-sexual-experience scenes in bad movies. Not cute.
But then one time I was twenty years old and driving home from college for the weekend and I was REALLY INTO LED ZEPPELIN at the time and I was jamming and then “Stairway to Heaven” came on and look, okay, this is my mom’s FAVORITE SONG OF ALL TIME since she was like… sixteen or some shit and I grew up hearing it ALL THE TIME and I know that someday when my mom dies she wants this god damn song played at her FUNERAL she loves it that much, but I had this moment where it was like I heard it for the first time and I started SOBBING UNCONTROLLABLY and there was snot and it was so bad I had to pull to the side of the freeway and have a panic attack.
I WAS THIS FUCKING MOVED OKAY.
And that’s some serious bullshit! No one should ever cry at Led Zeppelin unless Zeppelin IV was playing while you watched your entire family murdered. It’s just unacceptable.
So whatever, anyway, my car and my shower are basically my two most important creative outlets and I spend a lot of time thinking in those places and sometimes some brilliant shit comes from it like some of my favorite lines/moments from the in-progress first novel and the idea for the second novel which I am not even allowed to think about until the first one is done and a couple of pretty boss academic papers and a poem or two and a short story and a lot of really great music mixes… and whatever.
I think about a lot of stuff while I am occupied by menial, ordinary tasks. THAT’S HOW THE HUMAN BRAIN WORKS. And it’s probably one of the only normal ways in which my short-circuited mass of brain cells does work.
So anyway, I’ve been like this for my whole life, essentially, and at some point (I think in college, but this revelation has become so much a part of me that I can’t even remember when it happened. It was like realizing my body breathes without me telling to do it!) I was in the shower and I was washing my hair and I was like, “DANG, someone in the world’s favorite band is Eve 6! That shit is crazy!”
I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal and it’s not even really interesting and it was a fucking long road to sow to get to this point and it’s a weak point, I admit, but COME ON. There is someone out there in the world who is REALLY into Eve 6. There are probably multiple people who, when asked “What kind of music are you into?” actually say, “Well, I listen to everything, but my favorite band is Eve 6.”
I think it really boils down to like, the world is SO FUCKING BIG and there are SO MANY PEOPLE LIVING IN IT, that SOMEWHERE OUT THERE is a person whose FAVORITE BAND IN THAT GIANT WORLD is EVE 6.
How is your mind not blown right now?
Bob Dylan or the Beatles or the Ramones or Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber or Elliott Smith or Tom Waits or Black Eyed Peas or the Black Keys I can accept, but somehow EVE 6 is the one that blows my mind.
My in-depth research for this post (lurking this message board, basically) I even found the one thing that could further blow my mind.
AN EVE 6 TATTOO.
This dude HAD an Eve 6 tattoo, possibly one that he got when they were marginally popular on modern rock stations in 1998 and then he got a great big angry jester tattoo many years later in a place that would allow for a PERFECT COVER-UP of that Eve 6 tattoo, but instead, his love for Eve 6 is still so strong that he instead incorporated it into his new piece. That’s love, guys.
FOR REAL, in the world RIGHT NOW in 2010 there are people walking around in the world with Eve 6 ephemera indelibly inked into their human meat! There are enough people to keep an Eve 6 internet message board semi-active! THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO FREELY AND PROUDLY ADMIT THAT EVE 6 IS THEIR FAVORITE BAND IN THE WHOLE WORLD! STILL! NOW! IN 2010!
Anyway, I am NOT mocking these people. Korn was my favorite band for like eight years. And, had my parents let me have my way, I would have an ugly, faded reminder of that fandom somewhere on my back to mock me EVERY SINGLE DAY OF MY LIFE.
Ugh, I am so glad I will only have been a teenager once.
So, seriously, not mocking, it is just mind-breaking to me in the way that the size of the universe and the infinity of space is.
Anyway, FINALLY, I would just like to point out:
“I would swallow my pride, I would choke on the rinds, but the lack thereof would leave me empty inside. Swallow my doubt, turn it inside out, find nothing but faith in nothing. Want to put my tender heart in a blender, watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion. Rendezvous then I’m through with you.”
Lyrics to Eve 6’s “Inside Out”. The song which launched them to temporary stardom in the late spring of 1998. All typed straight from my memory. The same shitty memory that cannot keep track of birthdates, the locations of my keys or wallet, more than three thoughts at the same time, or whether or not I put on deodorant before I left the house.
SOURCE!
