My hobby of collecting obscure music in droves took a new twenty-first century leap thanks to my friend Daniel, who has worked with me the last two days teaching this non-technology inclined moron how to download entire discographies at one time. Dinky's computer just informed me that I have just now finished downloading all 23 Halo's of the Nine Inch Nails discography. In just a short amount of time I will be able to recover most all of the music I remember I have ever owned, and not only this, but quickly accumulate all the new stuff I get addicted to every other time I turn around.
I had spoke with Daniel a few weeks back regarding plans for creative endeavors, and as it turns out, his musical interests and my own are very similar. Not only this but I am slowly learning the language of this musical taste I have had for so long but was unable to define. Apparently it has roots in "Acid Jazz", "Trance Techno", and "World Music". I had clues that was the track I was on for a while, but never knew for sure what someone (such as Daniel) that really knew about this stuff would call it. Now the present goal is to find a drummer and a singer for this project of Daniel's so he can go forth. I am very excited about the possibilities here!
In our most recent discussions Daniel exposed me to some of his musical influences, and I have to say, they are terrific. Shpongle and Hallucineogen are apparently trance groups fronted by the same guy and that specialize in different aspects of trance music. Supposedly trance is going out of style in favor of "House", and still I don't understand the distinctions of the different genres of techno (in my head techno has always had to fight for it's area of legitimacy to start with, much less deserving of other subgenres---like present day "Metal"---even though I have been a fan of Lords of Acid and God Lives Underwater for a decade or more, and whole-heartedly believe the "Deconstructed" album by Bush to be the most underrated album of all time). I don't care about the subgenre's. I know what I like when I hear it. That goes for all types of music. Mediski Martin and Wood is an "Acid Jazz" band that I have downloaded extensively in the last couple of days, and I look forward to chilling out to the double-set live concert I downloaded where they cover Jimi Hendrix songs entirely. This will be a treat! I also stumbled across a song by Fedde Le Grand called "Put You Hands up For Detroit", and the Shprongle song I'm listening to right now just seemed to bust into the same bass/drum groove (heavily chopped and altered) in the song that is playing now on my turntables ("A New Way To Say Horray"). Awesome since I was going to next talk about this song anyways. Oh, and I also downloaded the entire discography of Nirvana and Beastie Boys in the last twenty-four hours. I'll be occupied for months now.....
A moment I have wished for for at least a week happened today when a couple friend-girls challenged me to whip it out in front of them so that they could rank me amongst whatever it is girls judge them against. I mean I know what they are judging it against but it's like a test you take on friday and find out if you passed on Monday. This is a test as far as I know I have never really failed, but a passing grade in this case is not binding obviously since neither female is really available as far as I know, or in my league necessarily.....The reason I had been wishing for this moment (more than the usual tendency for a red blooded american male to desire to whip it out often) in particular because of a snippet of conversation I heard about a week ago where some girls were talking and comparing the size of various guys they knew. I wanted to be included in the National Title Conversation. I think I got the goods to go the distance, or at least, to deserve to be in the hunt.......The problem for me was that I was so ready to ablige I didn't have a second to stall and work up a semi or anything so it was basically in it's "sleeping" form (although not George Constanza "post-pool" crippled). Oh well now that I don't have that going through my head anymore I may proceed to newer, higher level obsessions, such as the meaning of life, love, and everything else...........
[......or as I just discovered in the restroom, probably haunted by the feeling every time I see it for the next week I'm going to think "why couldn't you have been that big at that crucial moment last saturday"....]...
A word that fellow half-ass Minnesotean Laurence "Kool Aide" Maroney (inadvertantly I believe) and I are trying to MeMe into the cultural conciousness right now is "Construda", which is basically a modern adaption of the late-90's word "Quan".
Do you remember the movie "Jerry McGuire"? For years I had been perplexed by the very obvious guy anti-bias to this movie and the almost universal female adoration of it. It was not until tonight while pontificating that it became clear to me----Jerry McGuire is a chick-flick disquised as a sport's movie. How obvious! How did I not see it before? Probably because I am a hard-core american male who is secure with his sexuality and who supremely loves the odd and rare chick flick (don't get me started on "While You Were Sleeping"). Sometimes I will take my chick flicks heavily disguised ("Meet Joe Black") or super violent ("The Long Kiss Goodnight".........."What?!?", you may ask, "didn't The Long Kiss Goodnight feature more Samuel L Jackson bleeding than almost any other Samuel L Jackson movie ever made, which is a highly impressive and bloody feat for ANY movie to aspire to?"...........the undeniable truth here is any movie that has a female as the main protagonist is automatically a chick flick.....I'm a sexist, so what?.......Even that movie where Demi Moore shaves her head to become a Marine [and technically any movie where a woman shaves her head]is very clearly lesbian soft-porn......the closest a female protagonist has ever come to not being the star of a chick flick was Meg Ryan in "Courage Under Fire" and maybe "Domino" since I haven't seen it yet.....). Even comic book movies about girls being badasses are really chick flicks (even my almost favorite movie in the world, "Tank Girl"). So what? Are you secure in your manlihood? Does it frighten you that "Resident Evil" is a chick flick? I don't care, you don't need to watch that stupid bullshit anyways.
But see because I had never gone through the process of realizing this Truth, it had never occured to me why my metaphores relating to "Jerry McGuire", especially to other guys, were falling flat. So let me start with "Quan", then I will do my best to describe what Kool Aide Maroney ("bout time we got some construda in dis mothafucka") has been too unintelligible to describe clearly for the American Public.
Quan is the idea that success is a combination of many different elements of your life that need to be in harmony to make the greater whole worthwhile. One of the plot angles of Jerry McGuire was that we need to align our personal character strengths and flaws to better atune ourselves to the harmony of the Quan we might already have, or to better achieve the Quan we want.
Construda is the word we are going to use for this for now on. The reasons are simple. One, no red-blooded american male (namely me) can relate lessons and insights from the movie Jerry McGuire (even if we are both closeted fans of the movie, Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr, or even god-forbid Renee Zellweger) to one another without crossing what is a very well-defined guy boundry.
Sure, we might have watched the movie "Fried Green Tomatoes" with our mom and loved it, but we can't say that to another guy without possibly invoking the Mercy Killing Rule. It's like "Dacing with the Stars", or anything on MTV in the last most of the decade. I mean, I can and sometimes apparently do (like right now), because while I am aware of this boundry, I was not informed on how far the vast woman-wing conspiracy was willing to go to take this shit over. This is why I am just getting used to (and excited about) the fact our next president is Hillary. I hope she is. Do you remember growing up in the Clinton Utopia? I do, and I want it back. All my reservations of being under the power of a woman be damned.
So I've been thinking about my Construda. What I've got; not a whole lot of possessions and absolutely the opposite of any sort of status symbol at all at this point (despite there being credible eye-witness testimony available that I used to have such things in abundance), but a whole shitload of really cool ass friends, a life-time of awesome experiences from which to draw wisdom (even more important wisdom than figuring out how the mass media is slowly castrating us with a rigamarole of feminist and homosexual brainwashing), street cred (big time), a car (sometimes), money (less and less frequently), the possibility (although abstract at this point) of one day being in love or having sex and maybe even both together at the same time or in that order even is cool with me, being on my way to achieving lifegoals that are almost as old as me......What more could someone want? I mean, other than a blue-water sailboat, a porsche (again), a badass condo or impressive place to live (again), a bigscreen tv bigger than rhode island (again), money in the bank (a distant memory, but again), and impressive wardrobe of clothes and in fact the daily dressing ritual of Peter Dragon (was up to watches last time)............and then look at it----do you see it??, is it coming through to you now?----The posessions we desire due to social, marketing, or experience conditioning, even in their absense the desire and idea of ownership and possession causes us to be owned BY THEM, not to mention the responsibility and anxiety (and possibily the deflating dissatisfaction) of the reality of actually having such things to maintain and protect..................how many times have you gotten exactly what you wanted just to be let down?.......................so I think instead about the stuff that would REALLY make me any happier than I am now, not inconsequential material goals that either vicariously replace the spiritual completeness of a fulfilled life or distract us from our God-guided quest for upper level self-actualization.....so I think tonight about things I would REALLY like for myself...... a hot girl to lay in bed with at night, Brain Greise getting his ass lit up tomorrow and Rex Grossman coming in to beautifully blow the game for the Bears, the Vikings maybe winning, having even just a hottie being interested in me more than any other guy in particular and vice versa, maybe even miraculously the Falcons winning, seeing the Pacific Ocean one day, being full-size or real close when I whip it out for a girl for the first time next time, going significantly west of the Mississippi River, seeing long-seperated family and friends again, travelling the world and being a semi-piss-poor represenative of straight-edge American culture but a very very awesome example of underground counterculturalism and being a seeker of the Divine Moments of Truth. My Construda will never have to be checked at the Airport Baggage Claim. Hurricanes won't destroy it (although could threaten the immediate comfort of that night in bed with Mrs. Future). It cannot be stolen or taxed. It is a currency that is unique to us all individually, while we share in it with all of each other forever. My wealth is in my relations with other people and the experiences we have shared, and will share together in the future.
