In Defense of a Dusty Old Relic

What better way to dust off this weird old corner of the internet called blogging than to use it as platform to defend a tiny little venue that could.

I went to see a taping of a podcast on Tuesday.  Because that's a thing that people, myself included, do now.  We do it with such a passion that I am flying into LA in two weeks to see one of the stars of said podcast do a taping of another podcast at a tiny theater called Largo in LA.  Largo is pretty magical and I have flown to LA five times in the past year to see shows there just because I love the place that much.

Which brings me back to that podcast.

I want to make it clear that the aim of this is not to call anyone out.  The people who make the podcast in question has given me thousands of hours of enjoyment and the fact that they came to Dallas was a really special moment for a lot of us in town who have waited a very long time to see them.  We gave them a standing ovation.

That said, they made a lot of cracks about how dilapidated Texas Theatre was. They opened the Austin show the next night by calling Texas Theatre a shithole. And it's certainly not in the best shape. Buuuuut...

I know the owners of Texas Theatre and a little background: because a) it was a part of the worst day in Dallas history and b) because Dallas likes to bulldoze anything old and build a Chase bank on top of a CVS, the Theatre was left to rot in the early 2000's. It was the first theater that Howard Hughes built and has original frescos by an important Texas artist. It's important and in a different city, perhaps a civic arts group or the actual city would decide to put money into it to help save it.  Alas, Dallas isn't that city.

So a group of very poor filmmakers and musicians did what the city wouldn't do and they, along with a community group, bought it and turned it into a very rough around the edges DIY performance and repertory theater space. They are so invested that the owners were the guys making popcorn and refilling the ice behind the bar at the podcast taping. To say that they have a shoestring budget is putting it mildly.

The theater also serves a low income Hispanic community and acts as their cultural center and hosts community events. In short, people move to the area around the theater (myself included) because we have all ponied up money to try to do what the city won't do and not bulldoze history.

The community in which Texas Theatre operates is a community which has been left behind by the city and it's through the local residents that the Oak Cliff Foundation fronted the money to buy the building and save it from the wrecking ball to have a little space to be weird and put on shows and be creative.  I got to see Goblin live playing the soundtrack to Suspiria as it screened behind them there, a show which no one else in Dallas was going to book.  I saw The Sonics there.  These are shows that Dallas wouldn't have gotten unless this ragged little building still stood.
 
Again, this doesn't really matter because it's all fun and jokes and I know the cracks were definitely not meant to be taken too seriously. 

So there it is. I love this podcast so much but I also love my poor artist friends who have made it their personal mission to try to save a little cultural island in a sea of suburban sprawl.

As a follow up to the Dallas Morning News write up on the newly opened Truck Yard, I would also like to express my displeasure at my recent experience at the Lower Greenville establishment. *

* sarcasm

So I went to Truck Yard on a Monday afternoon.  I say afternoon but it was actually 11am.  Rudely, I was told that they did not begin serving food and beverages until the ludicrous hour of 11am.  I think this is very shortsighted on their part and discriminates against all the graveyard shift workers who just want something simple as a Philly cheesteak sandwich and an ice cold Lone Star beer at 6:30am.  Way to know your target demo, Truck Yard.

As I sat down at 11:01am in gloriously perfect weather, I was immediately struck by the lack of full service teppanyaki grills with fully trained chefs flipping grilled shrimp into their hats, capable and ready to create an onion volcano on a moment's notice.  It also bears noting that my birthday was last week and not a single member of the oblivious wait and bar staff took the time to either wish me a happy birthday nor had they even take a cursory look at my Target gift registry.  

Now this place is an outdoors place and is supposedly dog friendly.  Which is fine and all until I brought my friendly furry companion, D'Artagnan, with me.  Sure they had water bowls available.  Yes, they even let me take ol' D'Arty off the leash if I promised to watch him.  But not once did they offer to expel his anal glands nor did my server once offer to perform a doggie DNA test on my mutt to confirm my suspicions that he is a Malamute/Dachshund mix.  I mean, what is the point of telling people that they can bring their dogs when you clearly are not dog-friendly by not offering these basic canine services?

I had worked up quite an appetite by this point, what with all the unjustified rage coursing through my veins.  Time to eat.  What's that?  You only have two food trucks literally ten paces from where I am seated?  And one of them is sponsored by some sort of food company?  Listen, I'm not here to be fed your queso blanco propaganda by the Big Cheese lobby.  

The other truck available was the Ssahm BBQ Korean taco truck.  Now that might sound tasty but what they failed to note was that I've totally eaten at that truck once before and my culinary whims didn't blow in that direction on this particular day.  In a town with no less than 75 food trucks covering one of the largest and most sprawling metro areas in the country, I feel it isn't too much to ask that a selection of at least a dozen different cuisine options are placed feet from me.  

I know the owners may respond with something about how a truck is a big object and only a certain set number of large objects can fit into a confined amount of space.  So why didn't they have the forethought to purchase entire blocks of highly contested city land so that they could ensure that diners like me would never have to make the gut wrenching decision of choosing between the available options that were on offer on a particular weekday?  

Then someone reminded me that there is a permanent Philly cheesesteak window from which I can also order.  If I were a vegetarian, they even have a meatless cheesesteak option.  That's fine and all but what they didn't know is that my great uncle, twice removed, was once a trainer for the Dallas Cowboys and was hit by a D cell battery concealed inside a snowball during a particularly vicious Cowboys-Eagles matchup in the Jimmie Johnson era.  To be so callously oblivious to my family's history and the pain we still suffer when faced with vague references to the city of Philadelphia just goes to show that the Truck Yard does not care about its' customer base.

As I walked out in disgust with D'Artagnan tugging at his Juicy Couture leash, desperate for the bi-hourly steak tartare feedings to which he has become so accustomed, I passed by the Carnival Barkers ice cream window.  Ice cream...served from something that is not mobile in any fashion?  Well, that's just rich.  As rich as I'm sure the rice krispee ice cream sandwiches that they serve are and about which I have heard many people rave.  

But sadly, I'll never know.  I walked out, dazed and hungry, with the bright autumn sun and gentle winds mocking my pain.  Sure, there's a Trader Joe's across the street.  And there's Mudsmith right across the street in the other direction.  But who could ever find the courage to eat or imbibe after the trauma that I just suffered?

Sorry Ted Cruz, But You Lost

Hey Ted,

I know you’ve had a rough 24 hours.  You stood on your feet and argued for something that was going to pass anyways.  I can’t imagine where you could have possibly gotten that idea from.  The only difference between your filibuster and Wendy’s is that she was harassed and threatened when she dared to veer ever so slightly off message while you took a good 30 minutes to read a Dr. Seuss story to kill some time.

But the bottom line is that you lost.  Even those in your party distanced from you.  But I’m not here to gloat.  Ok, I’m here to gloat a little.  But more than gloating, I’m here to share with you what your defeat means to me personally.

I recently became self-employed.  How did I do that, you ask?  Well, here goes.  I had an office job that I loathed with a company that was dubious at best.  Every single day, I contemplated fantasies of how I would one day be able to leave that office and never come back to it again.  I got called names and had to put up with sexism and rampant disrespect.  And I took all of it because it provided me with one (and only one) thing that I couldn’t provide for myself:  health insurance.  

I had clients reaching out to me, asking me to take them on.  And I did.  In fact, because I could not be available to them during the majority of their working hours, I had to turn down work.  All so I could have insurance.  I’m lucky enough to not have any major health problems but the prospect of being left penniless if I were to get into a car accident or have a health issue was enough of a fear that I kept that job.  And hey, I could always use that insurance to treat the ulcer I had developed from the stress of being belittled every day at work.

What I really wanted to do more than anything was to be my own boss and to be an entrepreneur.  Surely you remember the entrepreneurial spirit that made our country the kickass place it is, Ted?  Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and Bill Gates?  Those dudes?  People who took an idea and made it into a viable business plan and then employed hundreds of thousands of people to make that dream a reality.  

I am lucky enough to know dozens of absurdly talented creative types who can write their asses off, who can take a few scattered thoughts and turn it into a visual masterpiece, who can code like their lives depended on it.  And you know what?  Most of them are working at jobs where they are underpaid for their skills because they made the horrible mistake (jokes!) of starting families and wanting to do silly things like provide their families with basic health care coverage.  

I found myself at a crossroads where I don’t have dependents who will have to just ride out colic, frontier-style, without health insurance.  I had the freedom to be able to take risks.  And by risks, I mean finding a way to monetarily provide for myself and better my own future instead of coming home from a job I despise, crumpled and defeated, to weakly crawl into bed and wake up and dance the same limp, half-hearted dance the next day.  

I can’t promise I’ll be the next Bill Gates or Mark Cuban but I can promise one thing.  That bill you so valiantly tried to stand down, the Affordable Care Act, means that I can be self-employed and start my own business while paying less than I did at my day job for health insurance coverage.  I don’t know what you have against Texans like myself, your constituents, becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own small businesses that might one day employ other creative and talented Texans.  But it seems to run completely perpendicular to your Tea Party “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” schtick.  

In short, I’m pretty happy you lost.  

When the News is More Than Just News

I am a news junkie.  Always have been since I was a little girl.  I can't remember a single evening where my mom and I didn't sit down for dinner and watch the evening local and national news.  I loved reading old Newsweek and Time magazines for fun.  There are certain niche stories that capture my attention which are probably not of much importance to other people.  But then there's the big ones. 

As I navigate my way through a thorny patch of my personal life, I watch the news as I always do.  Which is why, after hitting another patch of rough seas personally, hearing about the bombing in Boston on Monday hit me pretty hard.  Seeing pictures of an 8 year old boy holding a sign pleading for peace, knowing he was killed by ruthless cowards drove me to tears.  Just as they did everyone.  They'll find the people that did this, I told myself.  Though, if I'm being honest, I don't know that I believed that 100%.  They could be out of the country already.  And how do you track down such a human needle in a haystack?  I just had to trust in justice and fate.

Then I heard Pat Summerall died.  Being a Dallas Cowboys fan is at the core of my being.  Pat Summerall was an NFL commentator but he was our guy.  You knew that, no matter how impartial he had to appear to be, he secretly wanted the Cowboys to win.  He was older and it wasn't completely out of the blue but it was another rattle to the cage.  I was glad that he had found sobriety and got to live 20 more years with a clear head, able to help those who sought solace in the bottle just as he had.

Next was ricin-laced letters being mailed to elected officials, including to the White House.  To be completely honest, that story barely pinged my radar.  I heard the guy was an Elvis impersonator which, considering no one was hurt by his actions, seemed like a perfectly good waste of comedy material on a week like this one.  Any other week and we could all roll out memes and hasty Photoshop jobs.  But it's hard to laugh at something so ridiculous when there is so much tragedy swirling around for no apparent reason.

Then came West.  If you had asked me if the week could get any worse than seeing the graphic pictures of a young man with his legs blown off for the crime of attending a marathon to support his girlfriend, I clearly would have said no.  But when the first reports of "fertilizer plant fire in West" started popping up on Twitter, I knew that this week was not the week of false alarms and narrowly averted disasters.  I watched social media morph from jokes about the Czech Stop being okay to seeing the horror of reality slowly wash away the sarcasm.   This was not the week to tempt fate with comedy.

I heard the early estimates about casualties and I prayed they were wrong.  Luckily, they were.  But that doesn't change that people did die and a small town will never be the same.  It also made me incredibly proud to be a Texan, though not by birth.  As corny as it sounds, I knew that when someone in Texas is hurting, there's millions of Texans ready to do what they can to help.  It take the edge off the pain to know that West is currently asking that people donate money if they want to help because they were immediately inundated with supplies and donations.

By last night, like most of you reading this, I was just ready to crawl in bed and hope that either quick Armageddon was finally here or something would turn this whole thing around.  When I woke up, I heard the news of the overnight standoff in Boston and learned that an MIT police officer was killed for merely sitting in his car and being a police officer.  Another transit cop, only a year older than me and father to a 6 month old, was badly wounded.  One of the bombing suspects was dead and the other was on the loose. 

I honestly didn't know if I could take another day of this stuff.  Being a news junkie seemed like the fast track to pure heartbreak at every turn.  I didn't care about the pictures of cats that people posted as antidotes.  I wanted news and I wanted some goddamn good news at that.  So I was glued to the Boston police scanner and to Twitter all day.  At 5pm CST, the Boston police seemed to be waving the white flag.  I put a load of laundry on and braced myself for whatever the next wave of atrocities would be.

Then I heard something on the police scanner.  They were rushing to a boat.  My first thoughts were that the guy was on the water and trying to escape and probably just offed himself.  We wouldn't ever know how this whole terrible chain of events started.  And we still don't know that we will ever find out.  But at 7pm this evening, I was sitting on my couch just listening to the police scanner.  It seemed excruciating to hear the police, wisely, inch up on a suspect who was seriously injured and perhaps armed to the teeth.  If only we could end this week with some glimmer of hope.  If only Boston could sleep easy tonight.  If only we can prove that bad doesn't always win over good.

Then I heard it.  "Suspect captured."  We still have no idea what shape the guy is in or how all this will shake out.  But after this week from hell, the entire country needed to hear something good.  They needed to know that we, as a country, took him in alive and will give him a fair trial because we are cool and democratic and fair like that.  More than anything, we needed something good to happen.  The town of West has the entire state of Texas behind it.  And Willie Nelson, don't forget him.  Boston can hit the bars hard tonight, knowing there are no longer two maniacs on the loose.

Next week will be better.  Let's just forget this one ever happened, ok?

Let's All Take a Moment to Look Back and Laugh at How Clever We Thought We Were Once (and How Wrong We Were)

This has been a rough week.  Finding out a dear friend of mine, who seems far too young to be dealing with news like this, was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma and then hearing of the passing of Roger Ebert within a 24 hour time span will really do a number on you.  But it also got me reading and ultimately writing.  Which, for better or worse, is why what you're about to read now exists.

Let's rewind the tape a little bit.  Back when I was a snarky blogger (as if there is any other kind) and had just gotten my first ink and paper column, I told anyone who would listen about the genius of Will Leitch.  I watched friends breathlessly praise Chuck Klosterman and what I considered his backdoor humblebrag approach to pop culture writing.  But Leitch was my guy.  As time has softened my stance on Klosterman, my appreciation of Will's writing never waned.

A few years ago, for reasons I can't remember and probably aren't all that anecdote-worthy, I got in touch with Will.  We had a mutual friend, a successful record label owner turned sports writer whose identity could be revealed in a five second Google search.  Well, scratch that.  More like I know someone who we both admire but who also may have become one of Will's earliest and most vocal critics.  Like a kid with sweaty palms and shake-voice standing in front of a hastily slapped together Science Fair project, I wrote him to introduce myself and send him a link to a piece I'd written about why he was better than Klosterman.

He wrote back.  Nothing earth shaking, just some complimentary notes on what I'd written.  He was gracious about the fact that the man who brought the world Pavement (the band not the concrete stuff we walk on) hated him so much and how weirdly flattering that was.  Then he mentioned that he was responding in between trying to bang out chapters for a new book.  To use a very lazy sports analogy, that was as huge to me as Tiger texting (sexting?) you between holes at the Masters. 

We didn't have any further contact and life and job stress has largely kept me from being as current as I'd like to be with Will's output.  But I've never lost my starry eyed admiration of his work.  In fact, I gave SMIMLWSNBN (Special Man in My Life Who Shall Not Be Named) copies of Life as a Loser and God Save the Fan for Valentine's Day.  Yeah, I really know how to bring on the romance.

So when Deadspin re-ran an old piece that Will wrote about his correspondence with Roger Ebert in the wake of Ebert's passing, it gave me pause.  It's certainly worth reading the whole thing but if you aren't a fan of extra homework, here's the deal:  after a few years of back and forth correspondence with Ebert, in which he offered nothing but support, Will got sucked in my the siren song of snark.

He wrote a piece about how Ebert was the old guard and was tarnishing his writing legacy by selling out to the devil that is television.  This understandably hurt Ebert, who emailed to say as much.  It seems that time healed (or at least bandaged) the wounds but, as you might imagine, it's a moment that Will Leitch regrets to this day.  And that reminded me of something.

I guess I too was, in some small way, part of the new wave of bloggers turned actual journalists.  I was rewarded generously every time I could write something so incendiary that page views spiked and people, love it or hate it, felt so compelled by what they read that they re-posted articles.  Negativity and cattiness always "sold" (provided you are pretty flexible with actual definition of what selling is) and I was fed hatebait like 1950's studio starlets were fed uppers and Benzos.  I was young and was told that I was good about being really mean about stuff.  Works for me. 

One day, I was assigned to write the cover piece for the Mavs season preview for that year.  As being a basketball blogger was what originally put me on the map, this seemed like a full-circle kind of moment.  I went to shoot around and got to talk one-on-one with Rick Carlisle and Shawn Marion and a VERY petulant Brendan Haywood.  Then I asked Mark Cuban if I could email him some questions to include in a sidebar interview.  He said sure.

Cuban and I had emailed back and forth over the years.  He's never been anything but generous to me even when it was clear that I could offer very little in return.  I pulled together a list of questions that I thought were on-point and fired them off.  Much to my surprise, he responded with something along the lines of, "Jesus, can these questions get any more depressing?"  Then he called me the Edgar Allan Poe of sports writing or something to that affect. 

The snark switched had been flipped many years before and I didn't even realize it was on constantly at that point.  At first, chalked it up to a team owner only wanting softball, feelgood questions about his team's chances in the upcoming season.  But Mark Cuban isn't really a feelgood pull-quote supplying kind of guy.  So I re-wrote and then re-re-wrote the questions again, just for good measure.  I re-submitted them to him as my "new and improved Norman Vincent Peale persona."  He gave me good answers and told me he liked the Norman Vincent Peale version of me a lot more than the Poe one.

The Mavs won the championship that season, which has absolutely nothing to do with the season preview that I wrote.  But as they came closer to the title with each win over the Heat, I thought about how glad I was that I shed the snark and stopped writing just to tear things down and watch them burn.  Of course, it also put a nail in my career as a sports blogger but I'm okay with that.  Today, I will watch the Rangers home opener with nothing but positivity.  Okay and maybe a slight wincing regret that Yu Darvish was two batters away from the earliest perfect game in baseball history on Tuesday night. 

Snark is a vile parasite capable of making writers turn on their heroes.  The fact that the last words Roger Ebert sent to Will Leitch were "I hope you're well" gives me some weird sort of peace that Ebert almost certainly understood that better than any of us ever will.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go put the finishing touches on my column for this week, tentatively titled "Will Leitch Poops His Pants Almost Daily."  Just kidding.  I think.

Girls. Oh, Girls.

Why must you cause the internet to become such a twisted-panties wasteland?  You're not appointment television for me, primarily because I am not rich enough to be able to pay for cable.  More on that later.  So I must watch you in the way that most people of your viewing demo do, on the internet.  Which leads right back into my first problem.  Watching you on the internet causes me to read comments about you on the internet.  And while they don't affect my opinion of the show, it definitely doesn't make me want to watch it regularly.  Or pay for cable.

In case you spend your time on the internet doing noble things, let me catch you up to speed.  Girls is a TV show created, written by and starring Lena Dunham.  People get very passionate about the show, both negatively and positively.  The gist of the entire show is privileged hipsters with zero self-awareness trying to "find" themselves in their 20's in the wild jungles of….gentrified Brooklyn.  No hate on that.  If you're a kid with some money (or more likely, parents with some money who live in Manhattan), Brooklyn is where you're supposed to be.  Which leads to the first big criticism of the show that I can't bring myself to refute.

The minute that a character's struggle is juxtaposed with the knowledge that, upon graduating from the liberal arts college of choice, they are living off the teat of their parents while they do this soul-searching introspection, you lose me.  I'm not trying to get all "Toby Keith's I Love This Blue Collar Comedy Bar and Grill" on you but semi-serious introspection is a lot easier to hyper-focus on when you don't have to get up for work, go into a job you hate and worry about keeping the lights on.  If the point of Girls is not desperately praying their parents cut them off and they all have to go work in a call center or donut shop, then I am watching for all the wrong reasons.

What's that you say, Girls apologists?  The characters aren't necessarily supposed to be sympathetic or relatable or even bearable?  No, no I get that.  And trust me, the only truly redeeming current-ish TV character I genuinely like is 30 Rock's little Kenneth Ellen Parcells from Stone Mountain, Georgia.  My favorite TV character from the past 10 years is probably Kenny Powers, who is the literal antithesis of redeemable, likable or even occasionally decent.  I don't need the characters in Girls to be flawless, unselfish humans.  I just need the characters to not be exalted for how relatable and authentic they are because they are only authentic if you are a very sheltered and incredibly self-centered human.  

Which brings me to the show's creator, Lena Dunham.  I don't dislike her at all.  I think she's a genuinely funny, self-deprecating and intelligent woman.  The one thing I will defend to the death about the show is Dunham's choice to show her naked body in all of its chubby, panty lined realness.  And anyone who uses Dunham's looks as a critique against the show can go kick a million rocks, as far as I'm concerned.  If anything is genuinely authentic about the show, it's that few of us have model's bodies or features and despite that, many of us think we can pull off harem pants or romper suits or whatever splatter-painted hell jeans H&M is currently churning out.  

But that one redeeming feature, along with some ocassionally good zings and one liners, isn't enough to distract from the fact that the show completely ignores the privilege of both the main characters and the actors who play them.  Enough has been said about the showbiz/moneyed background of the four leads.  If you're not familiar, Google that shit.  What  the fuck do I look like, Ask Jeeves? 

If you've ever been a writer, musician, comedian, actor or creative-type person, do this right now.  Find your first blog.  Find a video of your first few open mics.  Listen to your first demos or a notebook of your first lyrics.  They're pretty fucking awful, right?  You thought you were a lot more clever and deep than you really were, didn't you?  That's ok, it happens to the best of us.  I'll refrain from cracking open this notebook (with a homemade collage of Camus quotes on the first page) that served as the 2003 thought vomit trough of 22 year old Amanda Cobra.  But trust me, that shit is terrible.  And I probably thought I was saying some real next-level, real-time shit when I was writing it.  But that's what your 20's are for, thinking you're way more important than you are.

So once the characters from Girls all lose their parental assistance, have to go figure out how to pay for their brownstone apartment on the $300 a week they get from writing spam ads and realize that they are not the precious little deviant daffodils they believe they are, I'm on board.  Until then, I'm afraid we're going to have to agree to disagree the show's supposed greatness.

The Guy From Camper Van Beethoven v. The Intern Girl v. The Internet v. Me

You've probably seen some form of this point-counterpoint on your Facebooks or your Twitters or, who knows, maybe someone took a screenshot of it and ran it through some "scratched Polaroid effect" filters and put it on Instagram.  To save you all those precious minutes you would have to spend reading the original piece, the rebuttal by the guy from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven and then the counter-counterpoint by some guy from The Dismemberment Plan, I'm writing this. 

(Editor's note: I have no dog in this hunt but I would like to point out that David Lowery from Cracker teaches at my parents alma mater, University of Georgia.  Go Bulldogs!)


Intern Girl -

"I'm 20 and have never known a world of either buying a physical product which contains music or paying for the digital dots in the sky also known as MP3s.  From Napster to Spotify to YouTube to torrenting to Rdio, I have never needed to actually purchase music I wanted to hear.  So there's that."

Cracker -

"You and all your generation are wallet raping artists and you don't understand how much blood, sweat and tears go into making an album (not to mention you would have to double that amount if the album in question is a Blood, Sweat and Tears album) and you just steal it because you feel you're entitled to do so."

The Dismemberment Plan -

"I like making mix tapes."

Ok, that's perhaps not the most accurate representation of all sides but you really should try to be less of a lazy fuck and go read the three pieces. 

I get all sides of this thing.  I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating that I personally suffered from the collapse of the music industry.  And by suffered, I mean that I no longer rode the gravy train of free dinners and trips and shows and never having to pay for music or tickets or having to sit with the unwashed masses.  I kid (kinda) but the industry was out of fucking control by the late 90s/early 'aughts when I started toeing into the water. 

I would have loved to see a cost efficiency consultant walk through any of the regional major label offices.  Let me go ahead and state this as an almost-guaranteed fact:  the thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of food, drinks, perks and swag that labels funneled towards me as a music writer almost certainly never increased the sale of any given record by even .01%.  Don't get me wrong, it was fun.  But they probably would have been better having the "street teamers" stacking bills in a pyramid and KLF'ing the money into a towering inferno of wastefulness.

The labels sold a good story to artists.  Think of how many iconic black and white images you've seen of bands signing their big record label deal.  Obviously, signing a deal meant that you were only a few radio adds from Led Zep mud shark sexytimes.  Only, you know, that never actually happened to any bands other than, like, three. 

You'd have to sell millions upon millions to recoup and be in the black, according to major label math.  That studio time wasn't free.  That bus wasn't a gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The major labels were the biggest bunch of payday loan sharks out there, with their soul patches growing darker and more defined with each band they signed.  I bet it's a real swell feeling to sign on the dotted line as an affirmation that the music you make has been deemed not only good but marketable.  But bend over, Abigail Mae.  It won't end well.

So unless you are just a nostalgia buff who longs for the simpler times of segregation, your doctor smoking Lucky Strikes during an examination and record labels never paying artists anything, stop acting like those were the Halcyon days.  They weren't.  They just seemed cooler because you were a kid and those people got to be on TV and fly on private planes with their names on them.  Anyone who was actually on a major label in the heyday of rock and roll would probably tell you a much different story.  Go down to Austin and ask Ian McLagan about that.

Guy From The Dismemberment Plan notes that way before the mean ol' internet caught on, there were mixtapes, dub clubs and (my personal favorite) taping off the radio.  There was even a darling, adorable (said in an extremely condescending tone) movement called "Home Taping is Killing Music" lead by the industry. 

So GFTDP (Guy From The Dismemberment Plan) has a point that this "they're stealing our musics!" hysteria is far from new.  Sure, the internet might allow kids in remote villages better access to the modern version of home taping.  But how many independent mom and pop record stores are being forced to close because some kid in Belarus really wanted to download all the Bloodhound Gang's back catalog?

Which brings me to my main issue with GFC&CVB (Guy from Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven) and his argument.  A musician friend of mine, when posting this article on Facebook, mentioned that he instructed folks working the merch table to give anyone who was on the fence about buying his music a copy for free.  I like his style.  At the end of the night as you're drunkenly trying to Tetris cases into a van, are you going to be thinking about how awesome it was to a) sell 10 vinyl copies of your stuff or how awesome it was to b) give 40 people who expressed some interest a shitty burned CDR copy of your music?

I can't imagine anyone answering A, to be honest.  While they might recoil at the perceived insult, there's an egotist in the core of every musician.  I don't mean that in a bad way.  But you have to be self-assured that the music you're making is so one-of-a-kind and awesome to even have the balls to play it live or commit it to tape (hard drive?).  So it's a no brainer that they would choose the option where more people hear them, thereby increasing the chances of getting that soul stroking email about how awesome their music is. 

So why do I get tiredhead when I hear musicians hem and haw over how iTunes/Bandcamp/Uncle Shady's Sweatpants and Digital Download Distribution LLC have ripped them off?  Because they're still stuck on the part where you make money from your music as a product, full stop.  Guess what?  The guys in Goldmine didn't make money hand over fist from RCA and you're not going to either now in the digital age.  But don't go David Carradine-ing yourself in a Thai hotel.  You've actually got it better than they did, delicate little musician flowers.  Dust off your pantaloons and come with me on this mathematical journey:

Everyone before you had to, as we've already discussed, recoup expenses.  Therefore, if you can pay out of pocket (pick up extra shifts at the massage parlor or whatever) for studio time, producing and mixing, you are already ahead of the game.  You literally have a better financial outlook than Masters of Reality-era Black Sabbath did, not to mention there's a pretty good chance you still have all your fingers, unlike Tony Iommi. 

So now you tour.  Again, that tour bus that you think is the iconic symbol of having "made it" (not realizing that in reality, it is a rolling sweatbox full of dirty laundry, tense phone calls, the same 5 DVDs and humans who are holding in bowel movements on pain of death) is being loaned to you at a steep cost.  One that you will discover much later, unlike your phone charger, all your socks and most of your dignity which all managed so escape somewhere in the deep, sticky vinyl folds of the bus.

So you tour in a van.  You pare down the number of breathing, eating, shitting, phone call making humans you need to make the music you want to make to the quality you can make it.  And by that I mean, unless you're the Happy Mondays and he's Bez, leave your roommate who plays two finger keyboard parts back home.  Now you're touring and you're paying for gas and lodging and food but any money you make is going straight back into your pocket.  Not to mention the incalculable value of spreading your music around to people who might come back to see you and bring their friends. 

Then there's the big one.  There's licensing songs.  Ok, we're all over the "ewwwww, that's dirrrrrrty" thing about licensing songs, right?  We know that it's how you eat these days.  And there's nothing wrong with hearing your song pop up as they remove the maggot ridden corpse on CSI or hear your music used in the background as the girls from Girls walk around Greenpoint talking about how great it is to be a spoiled, self-centered boil in human form, right?  Well think about it this way, all your heroes back in the day had much less control over those things.  Sure, in theory, they had a label to shop their music around for those opportunities.  But you also got little say in whether or not your song would be used to sell fungal cream or whatever. 

So what's my point?  Jesus, you should know by now that I rarely have a point and tend to just ramble incoherently.  But if I had to brass tacks it, it is this.  No more essays about how "stealing music is wrong!"  Please.  Music is an umbrella under which reside many cottage industries, all of which are supported by as many people as possible knowing said music exists. 

All the fall of the music industry did is make it hard to be lazy and successful.  It was WAY easier to get signed, do blow and let publicists worry about the legwork.  Now the hustle's all on you.  If you don't have the hustle in you, then learn programming languages, make bank and form a band that plays on the weekends at places called Captain Racks.  Just please, please, please stop writing essays about how people are stealing your music.  It's murdering my soul.

In Preparation for Tonight's Jesus and Mary Chain Show

I was 17 years old and the album Munki had just come out. I was beyond obsessed with the album and played it constantly. Then the band announced their US tour dates and they were playing Fort Worth at a long-since closed Caravan of Dreams. My best friend Chrissy, also a devoted fan, did what any music loving teenager in the pre-internet world. We lined up at Albertson's to be the first to buy our tickets at 10am the day they went on sale. Sometimes I miss the tenacity involved in loving music before the internet made everything painless and easy.

Not satisfied with just seeing them once, and hearing talk of this being the infamous FINAL TOUR, I bought a plane ticket to Atlanta to see the show after Fort Worth. I remember talking to my dad on the phone, breathlessly explaining how this was the greatest month of my 17 years on the planet because I was going to see my two favorite bands, Jesus & Mary Chain and Spiritualized within weeks of each other. My dad told me he was glad I was finally listening to Christian rock. I never bothered correcting him, lest I break his small-town heart. I was a pretty feral teenager.

Chrissy and I planned to hang around the venue all day. In the decade since that show, I've met more famous people than I care to count. Some were cool, some were not. I certainly lost the stardust feeling when I met a musician I respected somewhere around age 25 or so. But this was before all of that and I was going to meet my idols, Jim and William Reid. Only one problem. The brothers had one of their infamous brotherfights and William had left the tour. Secretly, I always liked Jim better and since he was the cuter of the two, I felt no huge sense of loss. Chrissy and I wandered around Sundance Square for hours, pretending to shop for knick knacks and taking pictures of points of local interest. Of course, what we were actually doing was a very innocent version of stalking. We were harmless.

As show time neared, I found myself crestfallen that we had yet to have a single sighting. We finally gave up and got in line so as to be the first in the venue. Now's probably a good time to mention that Chrissy was one of those people who would run to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and inexplicably return with a story about running into the entire reunited cast of Cheers. And they were always true. So obviously, Chrissy went to the bar to get our non-alcoholic beverages and returns 30 minutes later to let me know that she was now friends with two of the guys from Mercury Rev and they had invited us to join them at a bar down the street after the show. We'll ignore the part where they were inviting 17 year old girls to sneak into bars with them because this was a much simpler time. This was 1998.

My memory of Mercury Rev and JAMC's sets seem to have faded into one huge bright light and a constant buzz saw sound. Like a near death experience in noise rock purgatory. But I mean that in a good way. After the show, I begged Chrissy to give it one last try. We just HAD to meet Jesus and Mary Chain. She said we could wait for a few minutes outside, then we were going to have to go meet up with Mercury Rev. Because the last thing you want to do is disappoint Mercury Rev. So we waited. Nothing. I must admit, I was a little heartbroken. So we turned away and started walking towards a bar we were not old enough to get into and whose name we were pretty sure we were remembering incorrectly.

As we were walking across the street, far enough from the venue to be considered semi-deserted, we saw a backlight group of large men coming towards us. Before we knew what was happening, the large men in the matching shirts were picking us up and literally dragging us away. Somehow in the melee, I got a look at their shirts with the Welsh flag on them. Yes, we were being abducted by the very drunk Welsh rugby team, who were in town for some sort of goodwill games. I decided that the best way to ensure our safety was to try to talk our way out of it. I said, "You're from Wales, I know Wales!" They looked at us with disbelief. What they didn't know is that Chrissy and I were quite possibly the only two Welshophiles in Texas. Yeah, we were weird kids. One rugby player asked me "What do YOU know about Wales?" I meekly replied, "Cardiff?" and the entire team cheered loudly, grabbed us by various limbs and continued to cart us away.

I had, up to that point, never had to devise a strategy for escaping an abduction by a rugby team. That's when I heard Chrissy's voice. She was in the fray somewhere behind me, also swallowed up in a sea of Welshness. "Oh fuck!", Chrissy screamed. "What, is Jesus and Mary Chain across the street or something?", I joked. "Yeah. They are." You know those stories of mothers who harness superhuman strength to lift cars off their own toddlers? Chrissy and I somehow summoned a similar inner strength and broke away from our captors, with them following hot on our heels. We ran up to Jim Reid and Ben Lurie, who are not what anyone would consider physically intimidating men, and spit out some combination of the words, "Big fan" and "Kidnapped by this Welsh rugby team".

Then it happened. Without skipping a beat, Jim Reid put a protective arm over my shoulder and Ben followed suit with Chrissy. In a scene that would not be out of place in some 1950's greaser movie, Jim informed the rugby boys that they might as well forget it, we were with them now. There was a little back and forth about each group's respective countries and then, like that, the Welshmen turned tail and left. Once we were safe, we remembered that we probably should thank Jesus and Mary Chain. They told us that we could repay them by helping them find their hotel. It was a long walk. We walked past a karaoke bar where a drunken frat boy was warbling a Radiohead song. Jim Reid talked some trash about Radiohead, with his primary diss being his impression of Thom Yorke which consisted of him saying, "Hi, my name is T-H-O-M York. With an H. I'm a knob." It was a pretty good impression.

With the adrenaline still pumping, I realized Chrissy and I should probably try to sound smart so Jesus and Mary Chain didn't discover that we were two teenage dorks from the suburbs. Chrissy commented on the architecture of one restored 1920's building as we walked past it. "I think that's considered Art Deco" she told Jim Reid. "It's crap is what it is" was Ben Lurie's response. Zing!

So we safely escorted these men who just hours earlier, we had been staking out like a bad 70's cop movie. As we walked into the lobby, the guys invited us to join them at the hotel bar for a drink, turning to the night desk clerk asking for directions to said bar. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the night desk clerk was John Lithgow from Footloose and tersely told us that there was no hotel bar. Jim Reid inquired on the availability of a mini bar in the rooms. I don't think the clerk even dignified the question with a response, more just a grimace. We took that as our cue to leave. We repeated our thank yous and left in a hurry. Oh and of course, we had forgotten the name of the bar at which we were supposed to meet Mercury Rev.

Two days later, my naive and trusting father dropped me off at the venue in Atlanta. I told him the whole tale of the night before and he probably only understood every fifth word out of my mouth. A cab pulled up and dropped off Jim Reid. I told my dad that was the man who rescued us on that dark street. My dad, a large man well over 6 foot tall with a deep, booming Southern voice, got out of his truck to shake Jim Reid's hand. I think he told him something like, "Thank you for looking after my little girl the other night." Jim Reid cracked a smile, patted my dad on the back and replied, "I couldn't bear it if she'd been chopped to bits." With that, my dad got in his truck and drove away. That night, after the encore, Jim Reid came up and placed a guitar pick in my hand.

I met my friend Tommy that night when he was the local opener and we're still friends to this day. I accidentally left the pick in a cab. And for the record, Chrissy has since moved to London, gotten married and become a mom. Oh yeah, and her husband is Welsh.

(mildly clever title TBD)

(The blurry Blackberry picture I took of the tunnel at AAC; I didn't want to get busted in all my dorky glory so I didn't use the flash.)

I have a confession to make. As you may have read on this blog, I was a music journalist in the past. I loved music. I went to shows every night. And then, after a few years, I became bitter. I felt like I had been there and done that. No one could impress me. I basically existed just to rip into bands and hand them their aspirations on a plate.

So I stopped doing it. Then I started this blog. I loved sports. Specifically, I loved the Mavs. I would write about them even if no one read it, which was the case for many months. Then I started getting a little attention. Not much but just a little.

But with that attention, also came that feeling that ripping into teams and athletes and shaming them for actual losses or perceived failures was the key to personal success. And guess what? It sucked the fun out of sports for me again. My sense of Dallas sports fan entitlement told me that if my team “only” made it to the playoffs then got knocked out in the first or second round, they were losers. Burn down the stadium. Sell off the team.

So I stopped blogging about sports. In the meantime, I became a columnist for Quick. A nightlife columnist, if you want to get specific. And through that, I was offered the chance to write the 2010-2011 Mavs Season Preview. You will be able to read that preview on October 21st.

Today I went to Mavs team practice to interview players and Coach Carlisle. Like a kid from a high school paper, I stood outside the Mavs office during practice with clammy hands. I looked over my list of questions approximately 12.5 million times. Which ended up being fruitless since my questions pretty much went out the window the moment I opened my mouth.

Now all of this would have been an undeniably awesome sports moment for someone who started a Mavs blog out of sheer fandom room four years ago. But as the other members of the press and I waited to be given access to the players, we all huddled around a small TV to watch the Rangers game. I know it’s fashionable to downplay ones enthusiasm and to apply a liberal coat of indifference to writing about things like this. But you know what? It was fucking awesome. Waiting to talk to the team I have loved for decades while watching a team I have grown to love? It was a moment I probably won’t forget any time soon.

Then we were ushered into practice. I’ll save most of that for the article. I hope that it wasn’t too obvious that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I remember looking down at my recorder while Carlisle was talking and realizing that there were still beads of sweat across the screen from my nervous hands. I am as noob as it gets. It probably showed. My voice didn’t crack, as far as I remember.

I know I should be cooler about this. I should have asked some sort of hardball questions of the players. I should have been the young, snarky blogger who was there to call someone out. But it never crossed my mind. I’m a fan and I will give this Mavs team a chance and enjoy the basketball they give me and any games I am able to attend.

Because as I sit here at my desk listening to the Rangers play their first playoff game in 14 years (and lead it 5-1), I am just about as sports happy as a girl can be. If the Rangers can make it to the playoffs after all they’ve gone through this past decade, anything is possible. Losing my grip on sports cynicism is almost certainly a detriment to my career as a blogger. But the world needs one more cynical, armchair quarterback blogger like…….well, like the Lakers need one more ring.

Why I Love the Sport, the Franchise and the City But Ultimately Hate This Team

I love the Cowboys. No, wait scratch that. I am in a relationship with the Cowboys. I committed to them, for better or worse. It was a long time ago and there’s no way that I can switch allegiances. I used to feel sorry for people who grew up without an NFL franchise in their town. They never got to meet that perfect team. They never got to go through the courtship that is a Super Bowl season. I did. I do. I have the Dallas Cowboys and they’re my team and like a good Catholic, I’m stuck with them. Shackled to them for eternity, left only to offer excuses for them when they fail and explain away their shortcomings.

But I’ve come to realize that I secretly hate the Cowboys. Of course, I want them to win. Mostly for my own selfish, debauched reasons. I don’t even want them to win for themselves since I learned long ago that in the pantheon of things important to the Cowboys, winning comes in five spots behind ticket sales, sandwiched somewhere between cheerleader calendars and paper towel and charcoal product licensing. The greed doesn’t surprise me. You don’t become the NFL’s most valuable franchise without caring first and foremost about butts in seats and pro-shop merchandise. But at some point, you told me that you, quite frankly, didn’t care about me any longer.

You built a new stadium that has all the soul of a Roomba gliding along a taupe linoleum floor while Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music plays in the background. And when you announced the price point for tickets, you patted me on the shoulder and told me that you were sorry that I wouldn’t be able to attend any regular season Cowboys games while firmly guiding me to the exits. I didn’t take that too well. I’ve had to deal with the sideways glances and ridicule that comes with being a Cowboys fan for two decades now. And the whole time I stood my ground because you did care that I gave my time and attention and support and meager paycheck to you each Sunday.

Now, you’ve done it. I don’t know how I can look at my friends and say that I support you or your behavior. You apparently thought you would ingratiate yourself to the public by telling them a story about how Dez Bryant took the team out to a steakhouse and spent $55,000 on dinner for them. All of this to make up for some perceived rookie slight towards Roy Williams that everyone had already agreed was not actually a big deal. The whole thing was over and done with. Sure, Dez could have still taken the team out to dinner and the rookies could have paid for the team to dine lavishly. But wouldn’t you try to keep the story quiet, something just between your players and your front office.

Instead, this story has hit the media complete with quotes from team sources and Tweets from players, mid-gorging. So you’re proud of it. While you didn’t encourage it, you aren’t discouraging it either. Before you start giving me reasons why this is not that big of a deal, let me tell you that I think those reasons are, at best, weak and at worst, absolute bullshit of the highest order. You say that plenty of NFL players have had to pay up on bets or promises of steak dinners. You say that it is his money which he is free to spend as he chooses.

But unless your PR department is run by the same brain trust helming the BP PR department over the summer, you should know that you must immediately include a comparable donation to a food bank or charity of some kind to offset the gluttony and wastefulness of this gesture. Perhaps if the rookies were the ones who picked up the tab, the veterans can match that amount with a donation to Austin Street Center, the North Texas Food Bank or the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance?

But that’s not my real problem with this story. My real problem is that someone somewhere in the chain of command or amongst the players should have known that $55,000 is a lot of money. Money that the people who watch you on TV, buy your t-shirts and save up to attend your games would love to have lying around. There’s a pretty good chance that they don’t have it lying around though and because of that, they have had to give up certain luxuries once the economy took a nosedive. Luxuries like Cowboys games. So what you’re saying to Dallas Cowboy fans who fantasize about what a difference in their life $55,000 would make is essentially, “Sucks to be poor. Let us hear from you when you’ve got money again.” It’s a slap in the face and don’t think for a second that I won’t savor every morsel of news I hear about the team being broke.

Speaking of the team, I don’t blame Dez entirely for this situation. I blame the team’s mentality as a whole. You took a chance on drafting Bryant, a kid whose upbringing you would be generous to describe as “rough” and you told everyone to watch what a disciplined, good guy you believed him to be. And what lessons on character and values do you have to impart on him? A source says that, “Players ordered basically everything on the menu and even took home bottles of wine.” What kind of Latrell Sprewell-ian lesson is this to teach a kid who is young and impressionable? Grandiose displays of gluttony are apparently more important than discipline and humility. How utterly unoriginal that the team that plays in the most tacky and over the top stadium in the NFL encourages such displays.

Let me put it to you this way: you’re a 1-2 team going into the bye who hasn’t managed to get your mange-y, excuses-filled collective asses into a NFC Championship since Justin Bieber was learning to walk. Your second-in-command/coach-in-waiting is Jason Garrett, an offensive co-coordinator who squandered his choice of head coaching opportunities before his talent was discovered to be not much more than a momentary fluke.

Maybe it will take a losing season and empty seats and mounting debts for you to learn that $55,000 steak dinners eaten off the backs of the ever-dwindling number of lower and middle class fans who have the means or enthusiasm to support you don’t taste nearly as good as wearing a Super Bowl ring feels.

I Drank the Internet Kool-Aid and Now I Feel Queasy

Confession: a few years ago, maybe mid-‘aughts, I was that kid on a Hoverboard telling people who didn’t get behind new media that they were olds who were in denial and they needed to get on the Hoverbus or get left behind. Nice printed newspaper, Nonagenarian! You want a Werther’s Original with that copy of Newsweek? Here’s a nice crocheted shawl to keep you warm as you curl up with The New Yorker.

I would tell anyone that asked, not that anyone asked but I would volunteer my thoughts on the matter loudly like any cocky mid-20’s person would do, that instant news is where it’s at. The overhead is lower, the writers are hungrier (quite literally) and the ability to turn a story out quicker and scoop your competition all signaled the New World Media Order.

I’m a fucking moron. Ok, I get the majority of my news online, as do most people I know. But as I’ve found out in the past few months, weeks and days, the list of online sources you can trust seems to be dwindling. It turns out that not every asshole who can think of a “clever” URL to reserve at Blogspot (see above) is the undiscovered Walter Cronkite of their generation.

Maybe it was the finality of words being immortalized in print and the money that a libel suit against a major publishing company could garner that made print journalists more diligent and trustworthy. It’s easy to get a hot head and think you’ve got something so incredibly clever to share with the world that, editing and self-censorship be damned, you’re going to just hit that Publish button and let everyone soak in your genius. And if it turns out you’re wrong about the whole thing or people don’t exactly lap it up, you can always go back and edit. Or even better, you can deflect any criticism by picking apart your critics.

I wrote about the Chief Brown kerfuffle yesterday. It’s a pretty good example of when emotions, vitriol and bias get in the way of pesky things like facts. Interpretation is a slippery slope when publishing doesn’t involve multiple editors and printing presses but a few taps on an iPhone screen. And now Deadspin has leapt at the opportunity to prove why, despite occasionally dressing the part and keeping up in the conversation, they don’t deserve to sit at the grownups table.

You can go here and read the entire thing. The synopsis is: girl tells acquaintance, we’ll call him “AJ”, who works at Deadspin an anecdote about Brett Favre leaving her voicemails and sending pictures of his man places. AJ says he’d love to get her on the record, in case you weren’t fully convinced that Deadspin is less worried about breaking worthwhile news stories and just concerned with trying to take rich pro athletes down a peg by embarrassing them. Girl declines offer. Favre retires (or doesn’t, which you would think would be the story they would be chasing down here) and AJ decides that they need to strike while the iron is hot. He remembers the wiener picture story.

This is where a story about cell phone pics of dongs and Crocs manages to get sleazier. He shoots the girl an email informing her that he would be running the story and if she’d like to get on the record with it or send those pictures along, that would be great but this story is just TOOOOO hot to pass up. Needless to say, she’s upset. It almost certainly could endanger her career and livelihood. Also, there’s the minor issue of the fact that he had a verbal contract with his source to not reveal her identity without her permission. But I guess when it comes to sports news that will shake the earth to its’ core, pesky things like promises and character should never get in the way. The good news for him is that AJ doesn’t seem to ever risk going to jail for not revealing his sources. In fact, just give him a slow news day and he’ll cough up names faster than Hedda Hopper. You wouldn’t know her. That was a reference for the olds.

The joke here is that Deadspin anted up its small pot of credibility it had with a story that is remarkably meh. So I’d like to offer up this open letter to Deadspin:

Dear Deadspin,

First off, you have my full permission to reprint any or all of this blog entry for whatever use you see fit. I know you find that an unnecessary step but it makes you look a little less like a multi-level marketing scheme run out of a PO Box and more like a real publication.

I saw your post about Brett Favre sending pictures of his ding dong to a cute girl and leaving her flirty voicemails. Now maybe my moral compass is way off but I default to an assumption that any rich, male professional athlete has done one of or both of these things. Multiple times. Married, divorced, widowed. Doesn’t really matter.

If I know a half dozen people in my small group of friends who have received that sort of picture, it seems to be a pretty common occurrence. Therefore the law of averages back up my assumption that a pro athlete, a man whose profession includes appearing hyper-masculine and showing off, is likely to participate in this behavior.

So you told me that one did. He didn’t have a love child, didn’t kill a stripper, didn’t do blow off the carcass of a bald eagle. He sent a girl he thought was cute a picture of his business. This is not news. This is not shocking. Please try harder next time.

Sincerely,
Deadspin reader

And so now I’m left with my sad realization that new media is maybe not the great youth revolution that I had previously claimed it would be. A lot of times it’s more of a party line with wild rumors and unsubstantiated un-facts being tossed around. The good news is that Deadspin has given fair warning to anyone who might want to give them a story or a tip that any promises of confidentiality are as non-binding as Favre’s retirement promises.

I feel cheated.

PLEASE COME JOIN ME IN BURYING THE PUTRID CORPSE OF COMMON SENSE. IN LIEU OF FLOWERS, PLEASE BRING YOUR OUTRAGE

Let's go ahead and get one thing straight here. Is rape a crime committed by rapists? Yes? Ok, good we agree. Are rape victims in any way to blame for the fact that they were raped? No. Ok, good. We agreed again. We're on a roll here. Well, now that we've gotten that out of the way...

As you might have read on Unfair Park, FrontBurner or Jezebel today, the Dallas Chief of Police David said something that was controversial. FrontBurner seemed to handle it best by presenting Bethany's take on the whole thing while also offering up a link to the video allowing readers to come to their own conclusions. Only the problem is that, before video of his actual quote surfaced, what he said was purportedly something along the lines of, "Women, ya'll are getting date raped more frequently than you were last year. Wise up, ladies! Don't be going out and drinking that firewater around a bunch of men who can only respond to their natural, biological rapey urges. Geez, wominz. Come on! Help us out a little!"

The headlines summed up his quote as, "Dallas Police Chief tells women to not drink so they won't get raped." Now obviously, that would be grounds for immediate dismissal followed by torches and pitchforks. But would Chief Brown say that? Surely not. I mean a lot of public figures have said a lot of dumb stuff in their time. So it's not outside the realm of possibility.

Oh, but it turns out he didn't say that. In fact, what he said was:

"A little bit of known offenders. Date rape primarily. Where alcohol is involved. We're needing to create a message to the victims of these types of crimes, on a prevention kind of component, related to you know, first date, second date, someone you don't know that well, but you're at a club, you've had a little bit too much to drink, having friends or someone help watch you, and maybe have someone that doesn't drink in the group."

"We're finding that these are people that you may go on a date with, and have a little bit too much to drink. You don't know them that well. And it ends in a sexual assault. We're needing to do quite a bit of awareness education campaign to that victim's group. That's causing this spike."


To report that quote as the Chief in any way victim blaming or slut shaming is wholly irresponsible in my humble little blogger's opinion. The analogy has already been made dozens of times that, "This is like saying to not leave valuables in your car and to lock your car. If your car gets broken into whether you took these preventative measures or not, you are still the victim of a crime, you did not bring this upon yourself and you are in no way a guilty party." And they're right.

But let's use a different scenario, since car burglary is not a violent crime unless you consider inanimate objects potential victims of violence. Let's say that instead of the inflammatory topic of rape, this had been a meeting about people, specifically women, getting jumped in parking lots near bars after closing time. They are beaten, robbed, mugged, threatened. It's a bad scene. Now let's say that Chief Brown advised potential victims of these attacks, specifically women who are probably physically smaller than their attackers and therefore more likely to be attacked, to try to be more aware of their surroundings. Maybe being drunk dulls your reflexes or allows you to let your guard down, right?

Now the Chief should not have to preface that reminder with, "But before I say this, let me ease your fears by reminding you that we do still consider aggravated assault and burglary illegal and even if you are shitfaced, that doesn't mean it's your fault. You still should not have been attacked in the first place." We're all adults and know what is legal and what is not. Ergo, I know that Chief Brown is not insinuating that me having too many kamikazes at karaoke night equals open season on me for any predator, criminal or violent offender to attack me and go unpunished.

The idea that anyone is implying that the Chief Brown is only concerned with chastising women for going out and having fun is so absurd to me, I feel like it's been written for a sketch comedy show. So when people say things like, "he should be worrying about preventing rape instead of telling people how to avoid it", my response is: and how exactly does one, in a city council meeting, introduce a "don't rape people, rapists" initiative? Suggest mandatory talks between parents and their sons about how not to rape? Pass out "How Not to Raise a Rapist" literature at PTA meetings? Maybe, though that seems as absurd as the original, hysterical reporting of the quote that started this whole thing.

Should he have prefaced his quote with a long list of the initiatives and steps that DPD is taking to make sure that they catch rapists, a plan to get the funding to process the backlog of cold case rape kits, a reminder of the jail time a convicted rapist faces or a display of some newly updated sex offender database website that the public can access? Sure. But it seems like he was answering a specific question that was asked of him about the rise in rapes, which are increasingly date rapes.

You can report this story one of two ways: you can use common sense, which seems to be the boring mousey blonde stepsister of the much foxier journalistic angle, SHOCK! HORROR! OUTRAGE! My common sense tells me that you don't become Chief of Police by not knowing that rape is a crime perpetrated upon a victim not enabled by one. My common sense also tells me that a Chief of Police with a rising number of rapes on his watch isn't cool with treating the people who are committing the assaults with kid gloves.

Chief Brown is right. As a woman (and I might add, one who has more than one friend who has been raped), I know that he's talking some sense. My parents taught me to not get in cars with strangers, to not leave my house unlocked, to watch out for myself. If anything bad happens to me, they know that I am the victim even if I forgot to lock the door or accepted that ride. And no, I've not always followed my parents sage advice on these matters. But I also don't begrudge them for teaching me those lessons, whether or not I choose to adhere to them, because I know that they are trying to help keep me safe.

Sharp upticks in page views are awesome for any publication. National exposure is pretty great as well. But twisting a completely innocent comment into something sinister, misogynist and offensive is not cool. That's sensationalism and while it is what seems to get the most eyeballs on the story and garner the most comments, it's anything but right.

But you can be the judge:

The original reporting of the quote and the context and the defense of the way it was originally reported, post-video and post comments from the council member to whom he was speaking (A WOMAN!) which deny that the quote should be seen as inflammatory or degrading to women.

The video

Get in on the Ground Floor on This

My good buddy Aaron, along with his friend Jordan, have a pretty kickass blog called Good At Internet. On it, they utilize their mad Photoshop skills and boredom to create little nuggets of genius.

Now why am I just getting around to telling you about this? It couldn't possibly be because I got credit for coming up with the name on this one, could it? Of course it is. I don't like to wait and let the game come to me.

So go over and eyeball rape their art. And tell 'em Amanda Cobra sent you.

Liveblogging Self-Indulgence

You Go Live in Utah has decided to make a rare return to the world of actually writing about basketball because the most ridiculous thing to ever happen to basketball since someone said, "Seriously, don't worry about guarding this Wilt guy because he's probably harmless" has occurred tonight. Mind you, it wasn't good. In fact, it was ridiculously bad. And unlike an out-of-the-blue 100 point game, we all had time to take our Dramamine before this mess hit our television screens tonight. So without further ado (which is far more than I can say for both ESPN and LeBron James), I bring to you the You Go Live in Utah liveblog coverage of Brawdo Presents ESPN's Boys and Girls Club of America's Night in a Gym with the Owner of the Fewest Number of NBA Rings: LeBron James.

(It should be noted that I actually turned it on 20 minutes into the whole thing because a) I was cooking dinner and b) I figured that they had to get read off all the sponsors and show the highlight reels of him throwing powder into the air thousands of times so I had a good 15 minutes to burn off before I needed to tune in)

8:22pm: Stuart Scott tells me that "we've been waiting for it for almost 7 years and it's about that time". Hold the fuck up. As far as I was aware, this season's free agency did not start back in July of 2003. I don't remember the summer of '03 being the summer that I marked in my calendar as being the one where I could finally start anticipating that I would one day sit on my couch and watch some drawn out ESPN jerkfest where some uncomfortable looking kids squirmed around looking bored while LeBron James gave non-answers to softball questions for 60 minutes. Hell, I don't even think I had a TV in 2003. And if I did, I sure as hell wasn't using it to watch Sean Salisbury's creepy ass.

8:22pm: Jim Gray uncomfortably asks LeBron if he's ready to go, smacks his hands together, throws them in the air and asks, "Where's the powder?" Le Bron dryly responds, "Left it at home." That's the kind of banter we've waited 7 years for, folks. Gray's follow up question is borderline performance art: "So what's new? What's been going on with you this summer?"

8:23pm: "You weren't able to be recruited because you went into the NBA straight out of high school. So have you enjoyed this free agency process?" Are you asking a man who has given himself the name KING JAMES, a man who is currently sitting in front of you lording over a ONE HOUR PRIME TIME PRESS CONFERENCE if he is enjoying finally getting fawned over? I think he might be. It's a hunch.

8:25: "When did you decide?" "I think I decided this morning. I mean I wake up one morning and it's this team. I wake up one morning and it's this other team." This is the only part of the press conference that makes me like the guy. Say what I really want you to say, LeBron. "Let me level with you, Jim. I have and will continue to make more money than most humans ever. I have more power than most humans should ever have. My ego has fed daily from the hummingbird feeder of press attention that I receive with each day of free agency that passes. Life really can't go wrong for me no matter who I pick. So let me give it to you straight. I hung a bunch of dart boards up in my garage, backed the Bentleys out, put a blindfold on, spun around and just threw a gold-plated dart about an hour before I got here. Truth."

8:25pm: "So the last time you changed your mind was yesterday?" "Uh, the last time I changed my mind was in my dreams." LeBron went on to say that he dreamed that he went to the Nuggets and he had to hear Chris Anderson explain each and every one of his tattoos and how they corresponded to a line from a particular Crazy Town song and how sometimes even when he's on the court he still feels really alone out there. LeBron concluded the story by saying that he woke up screaming and crossed Denver off the list of franchises he keeps written in a Snoopy notebook on his night table.

8:26pm: "So does the team you're going to, do they know?" "They just found out." Mark Cuban is yelling at everyone in his house to stay off the phone. Jay Z isn't even bothering to look at his phone because I imagine he's as annoyed with LeBron as I am. And just to be safe, that guy who owns the 76ers is chasing people away from all the pay phones outside of the Wells Fargo Center.

I just fast forwarded. I skipped over the part where LeBron said that winning is important to him. And he listened to his family. And he likes to help his teammates. To win. We all caught up?

Oh no wait, he also wants everyone to remember that you never know if you're going to win until you go out there and play the game. So just remember that. Unless you're Biff Tanner and you find a discarded sports almanac from the future in the trash. In which case, you probably already know LeBron's decision.

8:27pm: "This fall, and this is very tough, I'm going to take my talents to South Beach."

OH MY GOD. LEBRON IS RETIRING TO LIVE THE LIFE OF A CAREFREE BEACH BUM, TROLLING OCEAN BOULEVARD'S WATERFRONT BOUTIQUES FOR COUTURE AND LIVING THE GOOD LIFE! NO MORE BASKETBALL!

Well, you heard it here first. Dwanye Wade and Chris Bosh will be playing for the Miami Heat there next season so maybe he can get some season tickets and take in some games in his down time. Good for you, LeBron. Long live the King! You've earned it. And way to get out on the top of your game. Sure, the people of Cleveland would have loved a title and all of this drama you've put them through was sort of humiliating. And yes, they should probably hate you. But take those talents to South Beach. I'm sure you'd make one hell of an inline skater. Godspeed!

WATCHING YOUR STORIES: THE AUGHTS EDITION

I watch horrible TV. So let’s just acknowledge that nothing that I am about to write is going to be written from the haughty perspective of someone who is really getting into Breaking Bad or someone who has written a thesis about the socioeconomic moirés of The Wire. I would probably watch America’s Farthest Poo Flingers if they showed it. That’s only a slight exaggeration.

I get that television can be a perfectly respectable and wonderfully artistic medium and all that jazz. For me, television is the glowing thing that is on in the background when I clean house or write a column. It’s the thing that gives me recipe ideas, tells me what the weather is going to be like or brings me the new episode of Top Gear. It just isn’t a medium in which I put tremendous faith or importance. I like it but it’s pretty dumb.

And this is why I feel like I am missing an important strand of DNA which most of my fellow humans possess. Each time I hear or read someone who genuinely expresses some sort of concern, anger or really any actual opinion on the situation between Jake and Vienna of Bachelor fame, a tiny little corner of my mind is blown. Now I’m not talking about people that I know who watch the show for the sheer absurdity that it dishes out.

I’m talking about people who have taken this show as a real-life soap opera. They’ve assumed that the fiendish pilot Jake has woefully mistreated his bride-to-be Vienna. Because the TV told them so. And it’s reality TV so it REALLY HAPPENED (apparently)! There’s no shame in getting wrapped up in these shows like a housewife gets wrapped up in General Hospital. But it baffles my mind that people are allowing the tag of reality TV to supersede things like, you know, facts.

The fact that none of these people actually, um, get married might be your first red flag. But there’s no reason to be bitter about it. And I’m not. You or I would do it. Go on a show, go on fake dates, get real alcohol, get some fake action or maybe some real action. Get roses or maybe a ring. Show up in public places. Do photo shoots. Develop plots and follow them accordingly. I’d even play the villain role. The whorish woman who ran off and broke the Bachelor’s heart and left him at the chapel. He’ll be in tears in the reunion special. He’ll come back for Bachelor 38: This Time It’s Love and I’ll go on Celebrity Apprentice as the assertive bitch character who makes Weird Al cry. All the time, we’re both cashing checks and the cycle continues.

And the only part of this that confuses me is why we don’t just acknowledge that it’s all, to a huge degree, a set up and that’s ok? Is it because Bachelor viewers can feel intellectually superior to frumpy stay at home moms in their stained sweatpants who watch soaps because when they watch their shows, the performers use their real names and not character names? So there’s still an outside chance that it’s all real? Is it because people who watch the Bachelor so desperately want romance novels to come to fruition that they’re willing to suspend all logic just to watch sunset beach picnics and balcony serenades actually happen? Is it the feminine equivalent of professional wrestling wherein we want an obvious villain to boo and hiss and at which to vent all our pent up anger? They need Jake the Jerk to be their Iron Sheik, so to speak.

Now what’s the big deal about some dumb TV show and so what if some people get really into it? Really, not that much in an isolated setting. Except I think the ever increasing erosion of what fame and reality has brought us to the point where, when reality actually happens it causes intense vertigo. The plane starts to dive, the shaker stick starts to shimmy violently and the next sound you hear on the black box recorder is the ground proximity warning alarm. And if I’m talking about a plane crash, I am of course referring to Lindsay Lohan.


When reality television can make it so easy to fool the public, it can also enable someone in the public eye who has severe issues with narcotic abuse, obviously shitty parents, a tremendous sense of entitlement and a history of pathological lying and self-delusion. So when they crash their car into bushes while drunk and coked up, abandon the car, lie about that, get arrested, bail out, hijack a car with two occupants held against their will while again drunk and high on cocaine, blow through red lights while chasing another car, lie again, refuse to adhere to the terms of probation which was mercifully offered to her, leave the country on the eve of a court date, fitted with a SCRAM bracelet yet continue to drink then show up to court to face all these charges with “fuck u” written on her middle finger….there’s still a sense that in this reality show world that things will just work out.

Surely there’s an edit that can be made. Surely there’s a rewrite that can be done. Can’t her part be recast? Even with her 90 day jail sentence ending up being only 23 days, can’t that shoot be rescheduled? Can’t it be done on green screen back in LA on the Paramount lot?

If that doesn’t work, try the Amnesty International Manic Tweeting Route of comparing your much-needed three weeks in LA County jail followed by even more sorely-needed rehab to International treaty on torture and legislation dealing with federal crimes, of which you are not charged. Sometimes reality is best not dealt with until absolutely necessary.