Will Hines Dot Net

I’ve lived at five different addresses in NYC since 1996. Since I diligently avoid cooking, I can do most of my shopping at corner delis and bodegas. The one item which I have never seen carried at said delis and bodegas? Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats (bite-sized or otherwise). I can get sushi at 4 in the morning delivered to my door, but Mini-Wheats I apparently have to smuggle in from Westchester County Pathmarks.

This was not true in Boston, Cape Cod or in Danbury, CT. So I would put the lack of easily-accessible Frosted Mini-Wheats as one of my top annoyances with NYC. And here is the complete list:

Top Annoyances With NYC:

• No Frosted Mini-Wheats
• Slowly-walking people
• The N/R line
• Chance of unspeakably violent crime occuring at almost any street corner
• Subpar radio stations

I’m sorry, by the way, to reduce this blog to Andy Rooney-level griping, but the lack of this cereal brand is a genuine and persistent frustration to me. As you were.

This week, Entertainment Weekly explains “Why Charlize Theron Isn’t Afraid Anymore.” I’m glad, because I worried about Charlize. After all, the only weapons she has to fight life’s obstacles are wealth, beauty, fame and successful careers as a model and movie actress. A tough road.

This continues a long line of questions that desperately needed answering:

• How will Halle Berry succeed as a movie actress despite being completely beautiful?
• Will Albert Einstein ever achieve anything in the realm of physics despite having an incredibly high intelligence?
• How will professional basketball players deal with the challenge of being good at basketball?
• How will trees handle the daunting, near-daily task of photosynthesis?
• How will dogs ever manage to take their next shits?

• ESPN.com has a hilarious article about gaudy baseball uniforms of the 70s and 80s in our of our current World Series participants, the White Sox and Astros.
• I’m trying to make a place where I read all my friends’ blogs at once. Here’s my attempt at that so far: The Grey People. (edited: now it’s My Fellow Jerks)
• May God forever bless Rubber Soul, even its remakes. Any album that can make “You Won’t See Me” seem like a good song is a work of genius.

Edited: The name “The Grey People” is too confusing. So instead it’s called “My Fellow Jerks.”

I walked into a deli — not my usual one — to order a ham and cheese sandwich, with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise.

“I’m out of tomato,” the guy said.
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ve got lettuce,” he offered.
Then neither of us said anything.
“I got the mayonnaise, too,” he added.
Nothing again.
Then I said “I’ll come back some other time.”
The guy shrugged his shoulders.
I said “I’m sorry,” and left.

I wasn’t really sorry. I just didn’t know what else to say.

• Eliza and I finished watched first season of Lost. I predict this show will be a hit.
• I put some more pictures up.

• Can I marry The Cardigans? Because I’ve been listening to their album Life and it makes me want to. I’m not even talking about just lead singer Nina Persson. I mean the whole band, the sound they create.
• Entertainment Weekly has done an article looking back at The Watchmen. I love that book too, but can someone please write about comics without ever, even once, mentioning that “comics aren’t just for kids anymore?” We know. We’ve always known that. Just talk about the story!
• Had a very funny discussion with Primal Bias last night before our show at The Project: Could you win in a fight with Albert Pujols if he were fighting only for pride, but you were fighting for your life? In other words, would the raised stakes be enough to make up for his obvious physical advantage. Cragg’s response: “I could take him; I don’t need the raised stakes.”
• Almost done with Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds. And I thought I was wasting my life!
• I’m trying hard to connect with my deli guy but the language barrier is making it tough. He’s arabic; I don’t know from which country. He had been out sick. Upon seeing him return, I said “Omar, welcome back!”
  He said “Sank you, man.”
  I said “What’s the best sandwich to order?”
  He said “Sank you, man.”
  I think he thought I said “You make the best sandwiches?” Or maybe he wasn’t listening. I just got an egg and cheese and headed out.
• Ordered more coffee from the best place.

So while Eliza and I wait for more DVDs of Lost to arrive, I’m watching Seasons 1 and 2 of Moonlighting. I’m pleased to learn that I still love this show, and shouldn’t regret how in 1986, at the age of 15, I purchased Ray-Ban sunglasses, a copy of “Limbo Rock” (on cassingle) and Billy Joel’s The Bridge in an effort to be more like Bruce Willis.

But the main thought to occupy my brain as I watch has nothing to do with the snappy dialogue, 40s movie references, unconsummated sexual tension, or simultaneous talking. What I mostly think about while watching Moonlighting seasons 1 and 2:

“Wow. They had no email OR cell phones.”

So that’s where I’m at.

John Reynolds turned me onto Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix. I love them. They are making me laugh very much.

Er, they’re horrible, by the way. Lots and lots of dick jokes, gratuitous violence — disproportionately but not exclusively towards women — juvenile obnoxious characters (Wad the joyful neighbor with hairy man-tits that lactate flesh milk is a mild example).

But it’s also SUPER FUNNY. I don’t know what makes the difference for me. Some people are funny when they get crude, and some are just annoyingly angry. I do NOT mean to overintellectualize it, but I think it’s that some people have a poetic sense of being ridiculous — the stories make a surreal sort of sense. Thinking out loud here, but I believe the formula for making juvenile, obnoxious things funny is to have:

1) an evident self-hatred, so you can sense that the author is harder on himself than anyone else,
2) a surreal logic to the stories — each crazy event does somehow follow the event that preceded it,
3) as many happy characters as there are angry ones,
4) lots of exclamation points. Seriously, that works for me.

Speaking of horribleness that makes me laugh out loud, I’m still waiting for the next issue of Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo.

I’ve updated my notes on my “call for albums” thread. Thanks to Garret, Cragg, Tanouye and Jarrett for getting some music to me so I can whittle down this list.

http://www.willhines.net/albums.html

Also, I told some improv classes I was teaching that I’m looking for new music. A guy brought in a disc with 252 songs! Awesome! But also: daunting! I forgot that we live in a time where that can happen — where a piece of plastic can hold days and days of music.

In defense of my friend, he asked me first “Do you want a LOT of songs?” And I said “Yeah! As many as you can fit!” But now that I’m plowing through this catalog, it prompts the question: What is the appropriate number of songs to put on a mix CD, folks?

I threw out almost all the jewel cases and liner notes for my CDs recently. I think it was a mistake, but that’s another story.

What I’m happy about today is that among the very few liner notes I kept where the ones for the Rhino Records re-issues of Elvis Costello CDs. Elvis wrote these himself, and they are just like him: funny, pretentious, honest, self-mythologizing. I already had all of Elvis Costello on CD but when the mood strikes I’ll buy the Rhino version just for these notes. You can read a sample of them at The Onion’s A.V. club.

So last week, Get Happy! arrived from Amazon. Besides being a fantastic album — the original crammed 20 angry breakneck songs into one album — the liner notes are amazing. This album was the first that came out after EC famously referred to Ray Charles and James Brown as “n-words” in a bar fight with Stephen Stills’ band in Ohio. It’s amazing to me to hear him discuss this incident.

1) He does not want to belittle the wrongess of what he did. You can lob a lot of legitamate criticisms at EC (he’s arrogant, precious, egomaniacal) — but “racist” is not one of them. He said what he said because he was a drunk, arrogant punk rocker who liked saying obnoxious things to prove how “dangerous” he was. But he knows he screwed up big.

2) It was one mistake, a long time ago. He is mad — very mad — that still he has to apologize for it. He’s mad at himself for doing it, at his bad luck, at people who refuse to give him any leeway for being young, stupid, full of himself and drunk.

So here, more than twenty years later — he find that he must address it once again. I love that he doesn’t avoid the topic. And I love that he’s an honest enough writer that you can feel his anger and guilt coming right through.

One would hope that it is evident in the many of my song that I understand dignity to be the right of all humanity, whether one’s ancestors walked in chains in Rome or were put up for sale in an American market place, or were driven from their homes by the duel oppressions of fanaticisms and poverty. Nevertheless, in every encounter with an African-American musician, I have to wonder whether this distorted and obscure fragment of my biography will have filtered through unexplained. I have also found that guilt is a burden without any statute of limitations.

There’s a lot of pride and regret in that paragraph. Then two paragraphs later, almost as if he’s got residual anger he just needs to let go SOMEWHERE — he rips apart Rolling Stone magazine for giving the headline “Elvis Costello Repents” to his first big American “post-n-word” interview circa 1982:

As far as I am aware, none of the editors of Rolling Stone were at that time priests or those with a direct connection to the Holy Ghost or anyone else involved with the forgiveness of sins.

Like anyone with a long career, I have had my share of regrets about commercially motiviated misjudgments. However, this rag has, over the years undergone a remarkable transformation from an organ of the supposed counterculture to a shallow pop-culture shop window for starlets and acrobats while funding their efforts with generous amounts of Big Tobacco advertising revenute and offers of penis enlargmement to easily deluded teenage boys. I can only hope that those responsible continue to sleep untroubled by the illusion of moral superiority that laid me so low in a dark Holiday Inn bar in 1979, the consequences of which I suppose I will carry all of my days. For now, I have done explaining.

Can’t you feel, dear reader, how much more comfortable he is while ripping someone else apart than while sounding regretful for something he believes should be forgotten? It’s like the Fonz, who after sputtering out a hesitant “I’m sorry” has to quick-like kiss the Kapuski twins to make himself feel like himself again.

That could be the dumbest analogy I’ve ever articulated.

Anyway, I wish more people would wear their hearts on their sleeves. And be willing to do it with an ambitious vocabulary.

My car: 1987 Honda Accord 4-door, approx. 190,000 miles

Current flaws:
–air conditioning broken
–vents leak heat onto driver and passenger’s faces, even in the summer
–thing that sprays wiper fluid on windshield long since broken
–driver’s side door can’t lock from the outside
–driver’s side window opens and closes slowly
–passenger’s window closes slowly
–top of windshield leaks onto driver’s and especially passenger’s seat
–battery loses charge if headlights are left on for over 2 minutes
–fails to start 1 out of 30 times
–parking brake might not do anything
–no spare tire or jack
–horn sounds like a sad animal moaning far away

Pros:
–engine seems solid
–decent sound from stereo
–new tires cost only $40 each

Someday I wll try to sell this car.