The Mitchum Man ads in the New York subway stations are not new. It seems they first went up in 2005, amid some controversy , and were taken down, I believe, almost solely due to their inherent poor taste. They said things like 'If G is your favorite kind of string, you're a Mitchum Man' and 'If hammering something is your way of de-stressing, you're a Mitchum Man'. Do you know who else likes G strings? Guitarists. And who else hammers at something to relieve stress? Chimpanzees. Ergo, Mitchum Men are chimpanzee guitarists. Dammit, if only that were true! then this blog would be praise-filled instead of just an aggravated rant.
So, these ads are back with a vengeance. Only now, instead of promoting a deodorant for violent misogynists they promote a deodorant for lazy slobs. It sort of epitomizes a greater trend in post-modern conceptualizations of traditional manliness (e.g. yesterday's Archie Bunker is today's Homer Simpson). Anyway, I have this theory that this ad campaign could only have been created by a bitter woman who hates both men and the company she works for. That's the only way it makes sense to me. I went all the way to their annoying website to get some actual examples of the new ads. For some reason they are rife with the older ones*, but not so forthcoming with the new slovenly ones. I clearly remember one being 'If you have chili stains on your shirt, you're a Mitchum Man.' I'll get more soon, as I am about to get on the subway. But honestly, I know several awesome dudes, and none of them really enjoy intentionally staining their clothing. So, who is like "aw, fuck yeah! Chili stains! That's so me!" It's sort of like admitting "The last woman who stared deeply into my eyes was my optometrist" or "I still live with my parents, it's whatever!"
I mean, dudes, shouldn't you be offended by this? This is apparently how the fat cats on Madison Avenue view you: as dumb-dumb heads who eat too much. Now, Mitchum also has a Mitchum Woman deodorant, and I wonder if the same degrading generalizations would work for a sister campaign... Let's see, it needs to be about the "Average Jane"... Hmmm...
"If you married him for the money, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If you constantly need male attention, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If you're a bad driver, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If you're no good at math and/or science, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If you like fruity drinks, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If your life will never be complete without a husband, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If the last thing you read was a Pottery Barn catalog, you're a Mitchum Woman"
"If you constantly compare events in your life to those which happened to a lead character on Sex and the City, you're a Mitchum Woman"
I have only one more thing to add to this subject. On the Mitchum Man web site there is a "Man Test" or somesuch nonsense. By answering almost completely truthfully I scored 85%. I was awarded a cyber-certificate of dudeliness which was inscribed to "Callie 'The Dragon' Enlow: The Duke of Dunk, Pimp of the Party and (personal favorite) Brother Like No Other".
*Including one television ad which says "If you convinced her the photos were for your private collection, you're a Mitchum Man." Way to go! I wanted to link to this complex-creating (for me) ad, but wasn't able to. Instead I present you with the hot chick who hosts the Man Test on the web site. It's a present from me to you. Also, I'm really only posting it for the uber-creepy last 6 seconds.
So, the below post was sort of, vaguely, not really at all related to how the pop culture is possibly destroying womens' self-esteem at increasingly younger ages. Guess what? You buy your daughter a doll named Yasmin who wears a halter top and comes with a boyfriend on a motorcycle, and she may turn into kind of a hoe herself one day.
Are you a parent? Have you already bought said Bratz doll? First of all, shame on you. You have better things to be doing than reading a blog. And since the only people who read this are my unemployed friends, GET A JOB AND GO SUPPORT YOUR SECRET CHILD. Why was I never asked to be a Godmother... Buster, Ian, Josh? Jeeze, I thought ya'll was my friends and here you are hiding children and stuff from me. Dang...
Secondly, I'll tell you one nice way to counteract the inevitable fall to hoe-dom: take the hoop earings off your 4 year old and slap some earphones on her. Then play some of the following bad ass women musicians, in no particular order:
1) Peaches. This oughta do it:
2) Not appropriate for a 4-year old? Oh, right... On to Kim Gordon, the de facto coolest woman in rock.
6) X. I can never spell her name off the top of my head, but hopefully you know of whom I speak. Front woman of excellent L.A. punk band X. She's still around and kicking. I have audio of her, I know it. But I can't find it.
7) Janis Joplin. Also not the best role model. But I do have audio!
8) The Raincoats. I am so into them right now. They're this all girl group. Kurt Cobain really liked them. I'm sadly ill-informed otherwise. I'm listening to this song right now - it kicks so much ass. It's so appropriate.
10) Le Tigre. It's maybe harder to get more fun and feminist than Kathleen Hanna's latest group. I went and saw J.D. and the other chick (sorry other chick, I forgot your name) d.j. a week or two ago. They played a lot of really good music.
So, my friend just sent me a link to the preview for the Bratz movie, along with a link to an article reviewing said movie, under the title "Are you stoked about this movie or what?" The answer is - OMG! Like, totally! Woooooooo!
Actually I have two major problems with this movie. The first is that I am not in it. They had some sort of deal where you could make a video of yourself and send it in for a shot at getting a cameo. You'll never know how desperately I wanted to make that video. I came up with a lot of really ridiculous scenarios (Aside - this mainly happened at work, in boring meetings, and it almost always ended with me desperately trying to stifle the giggles, and then just grinning like a maniac as my boss and coworkers haggled over how to get Andy in financing to put a rubber stamp on the newly approved blah blah blah...) But alas, I had more important things to do with my time, like move to New York.
Second, it's not so much the movie but the whole Bratz phenomenon I have fucking issues with. The movie looks pretty innocuous. I have to say that. One, because I need to use 'innocuous' more, and two because I watched Clueless over and over and over and over when I was about the same age as the Bratz movie target audience. So, I can't talk any shit. I had a brief Cher-worship, totally wished that Christian guy wasn't gay, and really wanted a dead mother and an absentee father so that I could shamelessly put myself in credit card debt before I could legally drive to the mall. And look at me now. I went to a women's college. I learned all about feminism and I blame the patriarchy and I've pretty much nixed marriage and kiddos from my future plans. The Bratz movie even seems to have a message about being true to yourself and not taking any shit from girls who throw theme parties, and I'm down with that. Plus 'rad-itude' is a word which I've not heard used outside the preview for this film, and I'm totally stealing it.
What I'm not down with is that Bratz are some kind of awesome, empowering alternative to Barbie. Look, Barbie is sort of the Anna Wintour of the toy world. She weilds enormous power over an entire industry, wears clothes that no one else could ever pull off, and has made a living off of making women of all sizes feel fat. We all know this. And some of us would prefer that our little angel babies not play with something that will lead to an eating disorder ten years down the road. But, ummmm... Bratz are better? For serious? The dolls are brought to you via a kindly Iranian businessman who insists his dolls will make girls' self-esteem rise. And we all know from Reading Lolita in the Tehran that Iranians are all about empowering women. I know they are supposed to be "multiethnic", but they also dress like the freaking hookers in Bushwick. And they have fucking stripper names! Cloe, Jade, Sascha, and Yasmin. Argh. Their proportions aren't exactly realistic either:
So, there is this wonderful new noise ordinance put in effect by no-funnick Mayor Bloomberg about noise violations. So now ice-cream trucks can't play their haunting, lonely little songs while luring kids and desperate pot heads (hey, it happens in the outer burroughs) and bar patrons have to be inside a bar by 10 p.m. on weekdays and midnight on weekends. Also, you can't play your music with the door open, be you club, bar, Callie, or Puerto Rican. Theoretically this would make the tiny, cramped quarters of this city a little less raccauos. Except, this ordinance apparently does not affect the car alarms which go off aproximately every half hour. I'M SERIOUS! Or my across the street neighbors who appear to be a whole family of anger-management cases waiting to happen. They scream at each other loud enough for the whole block to hear. I believe it's mainly women, though shrieking like that crosses the identifiable gender lines at some point.
I don't know why, but of all the many, many love songs I've listened to in my life, this one really strikes a chord. (And then I ruined a sincere blog with an awful pun, my bad ya'll)
Christ almighty. Holey Moley. It's gawddurned hot up in this piece. And by that, I mean my apartment. Which has no a/c. I am getting copacetic to having a greasy sheen of sweat on my face at all times. But does this keep me laying in a tub full of ice cubes all day long, like some poor victim of an urban legendish organ-stealing crime?
Fuck no, peeps. I do stuff.
For instance:
Friday night: Free (ahem, "pay what you will", so, yeah, free-ish) museum night. Cameron and I went to the Whitney. We went cuz I'm all hot for Rudolf Stingel . You wouldn't believe it but their other special exhibit, Summer of Love , actually blew Stingel out of the water. It was just a lot of psychedelic stuff from 69 and early 70s. But, it was really fun and interactive. I recommend for an early eve some Friday.
Then Cammie and I went bar hopping. The Trash Bar was by far the lamest place I've been to in Brooklyn. And our beer was the most expensive. Fuck the Trash Bar, even if they do have free tater tots and fries sometimes
Saturday: Big Day. Block party with a lot of country-ish bands. I went for Jeremy Yocum and the Last Rounders. Yes, half the band is from Denton. Yes, Jeremy happens to tend the bar around the corner. But, hell, I'd like them anyway. There's some seriously talented people in that band that seem pretty intent on not being serious.
Then the Boredoms 77 drummers thing. Wish I could say I saw it, but I just waited in line for an hour and left cuz I had to hurry back for the Cat Power/ Built to Spill show. Cat Power is doing so well! I am so happy for her. Although her band this time around was not as soulful as the one we saw at ACL 06. Built to Spill was not as jammy as expected. I may love BTS fans more than the actual band. Those fans seriously rock out. It's inspiring.
Then by a series of pretty serendipitous events, I ended up shutting down the bars with Claire, Fowler, Cameron, Kyle and Jill.
Sunday: Somehow I managed to wake up and go see this thing called the Giglio. It's this big Italian street fair where they build a giant statue of a saint. Then they build risers on to the statue for a brass band. Then 20 or so Italian men surround the statue and pick it up on their shoulders. Then another statue of what I believe is a representation of a Hun pirate ship comes out of nowhere. It also has a brass band and a crazy man in a turban waving a sword around. Then the ship and the saint stand in front of each other and sort of jiggle toward each other. Like a Godzilla/Mothra land fight. Then the bands play the Rocky theme song and I start laughing uncontrollably. Then I eat some donut type things.
Also, pool party at McCarren featuring my two new favorite dance-yr-pants-off dudes, OCDJ and Dan Deacon. I'm too lazy to link right now, but maybe I'll change that. Dave and Oz meet me at the pool party and we hear of an after party at a warehouse featuring our two new heroes. We go. Man alive was it hot and sweaty! Think two little rooms with no ventilation and about one hundred hipster kids dancing like maniacs. We stuck it out and also enjoyed the fine tunes of Foreign Islands. Dan Deacon is fucking insane. Not like, 'oh that dude has mad skills, he's fucking bonkers' but like, he babbled about eating tiny spoonfuls of cold cream and staring at coins on the floor. He also looks like he could teach remedial math as a day job. Image search him, you won't be sorry.
OK, enough procrastinating/self-indulgence. If you've actually read this: as always, I thank you from the bottom of my big ole lazy heart.
You know what's great about America? Lots of things: freedom, trans-fatty acids (sorry New York City), sloss furnaces, the justice system, the Simpsons, country music, and the cheap and efficient postal system which helps disseminate vital information for an informed and vibrant democracy.
Recently I've been having all these hyper-realistic dreams. Night before last I had one that my roommate was casually implying one of us should clean the bathroom. Last night, some one told me I had bad style. Or was not too stylish. Something like that. The real bummer is that recently I haven't been dreaming at all. So, for my dreams to come back to me, but only as 20 second vignettes about remembering to close the windows in my apartment, it's kind of sad.
This is the road journal. Did I leave anything out, Buster?
Day 1 – 6/1/07
Buster’s Chevy Tahoe is about to explode. Literally, there’s not a cubic square inch that doesn’t contain a box, bag, piece of furniture, Buster or me. We wake up at a reasonable hour, which is impressive since Buster had spent the night before fulfilling Life Goal #47 by hanging out backstage at a GZA show. I had been up saying the real last goodbyes, which is always a little bit surreal. So, in the morning we get enough breakfast tacos and coffee to stare down the highway for eight hours or so. Buster drives most of the time. Occasionally his backpack, which is shoved precariously just behind and above the head of the driver’s seat, will topple down toward his head. I have taken to throwing my arm across the back of our seats whenever we break suddenly, because the possibility of some sort of errant backpack-induced concussion & car wreck seems all too real. From Austin we take 71 East to the I-10 in Columbus, TX. 71 is a beautiful road, and you can actually see the change from Hill Country to wet grasslands. I-10, not so scenic, but it’s fast, dammit, and hardly any traffic. We pass through Houston. The most notable thing about it is a giant super store by the highway called “Party Boy” whose billboard says “Come check out our Luau section!” Luaus are certainly making a resurgence in pop culture, or so “Party Boy” would have you believe. Other than that, it’s a town that looks just like Dallas (from the Highway), but with more rap stations on the radio. I mean, like 20 stations full of nothing but sizzurp-swilling, booty-shaking, blunts-smoking awesomeness. And then, about an hour or so later, we pass through the hometowns of Janis Joplin and Clifford Antone. We cross over into Louisiana, and the culture line is palpable. What a weird state. It’s hard to explain, but Louisiana sort of seems like the land that time forgot. It’s 20 years behind the times, fat, and unintelligible, yet still loves to party. Think Roseanne Barr crossed with Britney Spears. Or just think Britney Spears in like, 2 years. In Lake Charles we pass a sign that says “Liberal Rules” in reference to a casino. I’m pretty sure that’s the only place in the state where that phrase applies.
We also stopped at the most Cajun truck stop ever, in hopes that maybe we could score a margarita for me (not driving). Turns out the drinks are only available in the video poker lounge. Yeah, that’s right, video poker in a truck stop, for those times when you just have to pull-over, down a margarita or five and blow your paycheck advance, before completing your post-work commute, Buster is horrified at the amount of little black face figurines that they sell here. I’m horrified at this insane candy advertisement.
Eventually we get into Katrina territory. I had heard that as recently as last year, there was still abandoned shit all over the sides of the road. A friend who was on tour last summer said he felt like he was entering a war zone the closer he got to N.O. I’m happy to say it looks like the region is finally emerging from it’s post-huricane hangover. Still, it gives you a funny, sinking feeling when you come across homes blown off their foundations, trees stripped of their leaves, not to mention the Superdome.
Our hotel was pretty rad, for the price. It’s called the Queen and Crescent and it’s in downtown, fairly close to the French Quarter on Camp and Poydras St. The beds are super comfortable and they lock your car up at night, which is key, especially when it contains 80% of your tangible possessions. For dinner, we cab it uptown to a place called Franky and Johnny’s on Tchapatoulis and Arrabella. Buster remembered it from when he last visited the Big Easy 5 years ago. He said it was a ‘real deal’ type of place. I say if you remember a place 5 years later, it’s worth revisiting. It was good old no-frills Cajun food. We both had gigantic po-boys (and they were the small size!) and some seriously awesome onion rings. We drank Abitta Purple Haze brews, which are local and pretty good. We were so full after eating that we decided to walk around a little bit. Normally, I might not walk around after dark in a city known for it’s crime rate, but Buster is a pretty big guy. Plus I think he could do a really convincing angry Magyar impression. Oh yeah, and he’s a prolific head-butter.
So, anyway, the neighborhood we chose to walk around in was actually really nice. I love all the eclectic architecture of these bungalow-type homes. And then we turned up Magazine Street and it got even nicer. We stopped at a bar called Monkey Hill, which was sort of a classy sports bar type place, but which had monkey furnishings and décor at every opportunity So, that made me happy. Also, there was a little party right next to us at the bar; apparently one guy was going to be on the news. At some point we heard all of them cheer; we turned around and looked at the t.v.: It featured our local celebrity as a fat man wearing a beer helmet in some football stands. Hmm. We also heard one of this guys’ buddies greet another by saying “Hey Chris! Haven’t seen you since the emergency room!”.
We ended up walking through an uber-ritzy neighborhood by Newcomb college and then out onto St. Charles by Loyola. We hopped in a cab back to the French quarter, ended up in Bourbon Street, though we had both sworn to avoid the area. Here’s why: we went to a bar called Jean Lafitte’s Absinthe House, which was o.k. However the bar across the street was called ‘The Frat House’. After a nasty drink called an absinthe frappe and a ridiculous bar patron who demanded free drinks for his pal, Lief Garrett, we took a quick cruise of Bourbon St. We saw a lot of people fall over in drunken stupors (it was all of 11 p.m.) and Buster opened a pack of smokes for a diabetic and then we got the hell out.
We ended up back down St. Charles, on the other side of the highway @ a local bar. I’m not positive the name, but I think it was ‘Lucky Igor’s Laundromat, Bar, Games, and Poker’. They had pool and video poker and photo hunt. We probably could have ended up somewhere hipper, but this place was a serious DIVE in a good way. The bartender was a real sweetheart named Karen. She and her brother John told us about how they evacuated to NYC after Katrina. We put some soul songs on the juke box, and then the place really got lively. We must have been pretty good because this guy name ‘Stormin’ Norman: the little general’, gave us $5 more to keep playing because he said he “liked what we played”. We also met a deaf-muter named Mr. Jules who was really nice. He was sitting at the other end of the bar from us, and I’m not sure how he did it, but we managed to have a very informative conversation using nothing but hand jestures. He was really worried that we were going to drive home and wanted us to stay at his place. We respectfully declined and assured him we were getting a cab. At some point I got trapped in a conversation with a really old man who told me about some country music players in Branson Mo andf his down-syndrom daughter. Before we really started getting into trouble, we went back to the Queen and Crescent and called it a night.
Day 2
We woke up and got beneigts and café au laits at Café Du Monde in the Quarter and had breakfast by the river. Now, you’ll probably notice that the journal entries get a lot shorte. That’s because there’s just not a lot to mention. We drove on to Mississippi where the only thing notable was a strip club named Scuttlebutt’s and he beginning of an ever increasing number of Cracker Barrels. We stopped at one and bought some Mad Libs be cause, frankly, MS had shit else to offer. We also do as much of the crossword as we can, though, guess where you can’t find a copy of the NYT to save your life? Basically anywhere between New Orleans and Northern Virginia. Local papers can be really entertaining though, I highly recommend picking one up next time you are in somewhere like Las Cruces, NM, or Pierre, SD. The front page of the Tuscaloosa Times had a story exposing that the famouns 1,100 lb wild hog was farm raised: moreover, it had been a Christmas gift for one farmer’s less-than-thrilled wife. Tuscaloosa, AL is purgatory except for the Full Moon Barb B Que. I highly recommend you go there if you have not eaten in three days, or are looking to give yourself a heart-attack. They have excellent pie, and bill themselves as “the best little pork house in Alabama!”. Georgia smells bad. We were there for about 30 minutes and it stank the entire time. Tennessee is still the most beautiful state, second to Utah, but we pushed on until Bristol, Va. We passed out at some Super 8 motel, which was pretty decent.
Day 3
We were so tired from yesterday’s 5-state. 13-hour trek that we slept in a little bit. That’s ok, the only place we had to stop was a sandwich place in lovely Lexington, Va. called Joyful Spirit. Again, this was one of Buster’s random raved-about restaurants. I highly recommend you go and be sure to get there before they run out of the red pepper and smoked gouda soup that gets Buster so excited. It rained the whole day and we got stuck in some majorly frusterating traffic. So, it wasn’t the best day, but I have to hand it to Buster, he never once really lost it, and he drove the whole time. Were I in his position, it’s very possible I would have turned into bitch of the century. As it were, I caught a fly in the car Mr. Miyagi-style and tried to come up with a seven letter word for “Japanese Warrior” (hint: that’s easy, the real ones were much harder).
Bye Bye!
