Top Ten Reasons To Live.

10) No library fines until March 4

9) I still have to watch The 40 Year Old Virgin about 20 more times

8) I found out that I can extend my haircut past six weeks by switching the "part" (not really a part, just a...direction)

7) I always like to see how things turn out?

6) The bag of money might be about to drop out of the sky

5) The power of language, which can filibuster us through to the next reason

4) I want to read the Wu-Tang article in the old issue of the Voice I got from my neighbor

3) The Bee Gees (feels like a cop-out, only because it's so a given, but there you go, if it's a given, it might be the most solid reason on my list)

2) Well, since there's two of them left... Hi Barry, Hi Robin! You're my numbers 2 & 3!

1) To continue being the awesomely optimistic type of person who makes future-greeting lists like this

If Anyone Deserves To Be Purchased For $50,000, It's Me.

It's not like we didn't already know Vincent Gallo is a performance artist.

However.

If you have a publicist.

If you have some celebrity to sell.

Or if you have some celebrity to upgrade with sudden exposure, you don't need the $50,000.

I (also an artist), on the other hand, am one who could use a grant of $50, 000 to release me from service to the day job that only yesterday produced in me (once again) suicidal feelings. In order to more completely perform my other job, which includes, but is not limited to, telling jokes about ridiculous things like Vincent Gallo.

Not that I don't enjoy your antics, Vincent Gallo. But come on. I need one of your endowments a lot more than I need the other. You give me the cash, and I'll take you out for fish and braised vegetables (and we can talk about whether I'm interested in your other endowment), then I'll quit my job. If you want, my "performance" could be not even calling in to quit, or going there and making a scene, of your devising if you wish. Your choice.

The only thing that really bothers me is the "avowed Republican" part. Not even so much the Republican part (although that is always jarring to hear), but the "avowed." I wouldn't expect Vincent Gallo to be claiming to be an avowed anything, so I bet it's a carefully chosen part of the act.

Look, I said on myspace that I wanted to meet him, and that was before all this mess. Maybe Vincent Gallo sits around in his underwear Googling himself and will find this, and consider doing something truly good for humanity, and take me up on my offer.

Stay tuned for my web site with the donate button.

And now, before this blog becomes the Vincent Gallo Watch...

Vincent Gallo's Knob-Polishing Scene Can't Make Me Not Love Him & My Peculiar Brand Of Movie Review.

Just a few things, Jeff Mac and the rest of you:

It may seem that my movie reviews are stale, because I tend to write them long after the movies in question have been released. This is because I feel I can really dig in and explore my feelings about them only after the hubbub has died down. Also, perhaps laziness.

It may also seem that my movie reviews are b.s. because sometimes I like to review movies I haven't seen yet, or movies that I saw only long ago and maybe didn't even pay much attention to. This is my peculiar brand of review. Let's just say that sometimes what you have to say can be more pertinent when you don't know what you're talking about. If you believe that, I love you, don't ever leave me. For more on this, see the footnote to my Rauschenberg review.

I have not yet seen The Brown Bunny, but I have seen its x-rated knob-polishing scene on the Internet. (Sorry, no links to p*rn on my blog. Google it yourself. I'm already worried about the cretins I'll attract from having typed "x-rated" and "knob-polishing.") The movie is currently jockeying for a top-three spot on my netflix queue, and I look forward to watching it. I loved Buffalo '66.

I consider Ye Olde Knobbe Scene to have been an artistic misstep for Vincent Gallo. I don't have to see the whole movie to know that if you are going to have a scene like that, you can expect viewers to be violently ripped away from whatever narrative you have established, to be dragged down instead into prurient wonder about what the actors, not the characters, are doing, about whether it is a prosthesis, whether he really finished his bidness, whether she swallowed, et cetera and ad infinitum. This kind of brouhaha should be beneath Vincent Gallo (instead of Chloë Sevigny's head). His prodigious talent suddenly gets demoted to prodigious endowment.

The fact that Chloë Sevigny is his ex-girlfriend makes it slightly less icky, but it was still a mistake.

However, this faux pas cannot make me not love the man who cycles around the city, practically singlehandedly made Buffalo '66, and said this:

I don't trust or love anyone. Because people are so creepy. Creepy creepy creeps. Creeping around. Creeping here and creeping there. Creeping everywhere. Crippity crappity creepies.

Forgiveness is very satisfying. I can get on with my life now. I adore you, Vincent Gallo.

It's Time You And I Had A Little Sit-Down.

I'm a little disappointed in you. I had hoped for something more from you. Not much more, but yes, I expected just a little bit more from you.

Yes, YOU! Stop glancing over your shoulder! If you have any doubt about who I am talking to in here, it's YOU! Oh, did you think nothing was ever going to be expected of you? Are you like this with everybody? Mute, nonparticipatory, and quasi-anonymous?

Are you even there? I know you are, but I only know that through a third party.

You're just so quiet. So opaque. It feels chilly in here, and one-sided. I don't even get spammed in here.

Who are you?

Look, don't worry. I swear I won't be clingy. This isn't one of those confessional blogs where if within 24 hours no one responds with two of my best characteristics I will have to be peeled off the floor and deposited in Bellevue. If I wanted a blog like that, I'd be on livejournal doling out friend access like it was my last handful of Vicodins.

But absolutely, by all means, if you are stopping by here and you wish to tell me anything at all about yourself, about your hopes, dreams, fears, as they relate to bloggystyle, please do so.

It appears that I've been a fool for thinking it could have been different. I'm listening to Patsy Cline now until somebody says something, and stops teasing and torturing me.

"'Art' 'Review'": Rauschenberg: Pretentious Failure Or Heroic Nutjob?

I just caught the show at the Met, Richard Rauschenberg: Combines, a series of hybrid paintings/sculptures. It's like stuff glued on stuff with paint. "Combines" not only describes the type of works but is also a good title because it vaguely evokes farm equipment.*

There were recurring objects. There were precipitous wooden planks, there were birds or parts of birds, shirt cuffs, and things dead or incarcerated. Mostly, there was junk.

So much junk, glued this way and that. It made me think my grandmother could have done it! What a way that could have been for her to pass the time! She was a depressed packrat living in Maine with the tv on all the time. She had loads and loads of junk, in the house, in the shed that she built out of the other junk. She could have glued it on canvas with paint to make herself feel better!

But I don't know if that's what was going on with Rauschenberg. I haven't bothered to research him yet, so I have no idea. And that is what is tricky about needing to know more about art before evaluating it. Because now it seems to matter. I didn't really like it much. It seemed to me to be awkwardly arranged, ungainly junk clusters. But someone else could see it entirely differently.

Verdict: If Rauschenberg was some hick doing it for therapy, I support him. If he was a pretentious fuck trying to do something new, he failed. Except now I'm thinking I like him just for making me think of my grandmother.

My date said that it seemed to be aiming for the macabre, but missed. He gets five points, for using "macabre"; Rauschenberg zero, for not achieving it.

*I don't know anything about visual art, and I kind of like it that way. I can invent reasons why it happened, and I can go with my gut. This in turn creates an art form blending ignorance with pedantry, which I'm told equals bullshitting.

Two Kinds Of People In This World.

We can each be classified as one of the following:

Those who think Amelie is just the most enchanting French flick.

Or those who think it is a shockingly vomitaceous bile-pile.

I'm sorry, Friends Who Like Amelie. I know who you are. I've read your Myspace and Friendster profiles. When I read that you liked Amelie, I froze, caught as I often am between disbelief and disdain. I briefly wondered if you might be a cyborg and I hadn't known it all this time.

Please let me know if you're just a cyborg.

Amelie is an insult to life itself. Life is dirty, you saucer-eyed kewpie! Not polished to a fairy-tale glimmer, with you skipping around Paris like a benovolent scheming imp. Paris wasn't meant to be used that way!

Amelie, you are vacuum-packed and sexless!

This is a movie en Paris? What a long, sad road we've traveled from Brando's backdoor butter.

Shit, I Don't Like Penmanship Anymore.

I'm only writing in this because I like typing now much better than longhand.

I like typing now much better than longhand.

I didn't say I liked that fact.

So I'm not posting to post, but only to write a private journal entry. I believe those belong in ink in books. Because when am I going to go back and read my blog entries? Well, how often do I go back and read my paper journals? Aside from when I'm reconstructing my life's timeline like it was freaking Ancient Egypt.

What is safer, apocalypse-wise, paper or the Internet? That's silly. If there is an apocalypse, it all goes, but we don't know what will go first. I'm betting on paper lasting longer.* The Internet will be gone before my personal possessions. Unless there is a terrorist attack.

Anyway, I don't care about that. Really, it just bothers my slight OCD that journaling is now bifurcated. It's too messy to have my diary in different places. It also bothers me that I just used "journal" as a verb. Well, a gerund, actually. I had been really against that usage. I'll try to keep up the fight.

Sometimes I start to crack, grammar-wise.

"_______-wise" is a horrible construction, so horrible that it may be used to excess for effect. If you use it unselfconsciously, sorry. No offense. Besides, I just did the same thing.

If all I had was a paper journal, I wouldn't have written this entry.

*I need to follow up on this. There is a market where people make money betting on exactly stuff like this. Betting on future possible events like what will be destroyed first in the apocalypse. It's all legal and stuff, too. I kid you fucking not. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Why I Want To Be A Star, And A Plug For An Expired Event.

Isabelle Huppert, hot French actress of a certain age, was the subject of a photography show. She is a) ravishingly beautiful and b) old enough to be a great-grandmother in Maine. I am sure the purveyors of beauty secrets bury her in an avalanche of freebies to help her preserve her hotness.

This brings us to the reason I want to be a star. I don't have the time or the resources to find the best products. I want to make it in showbiz just enough to help my anti-aging efforts. When you are a celebrity, spa people start coming out of the woodwork.

I'll bet Isabelle Huppert complains about all the free products and spa people that clutter her hot French life.

Hangin' With The Conspiracy Theorists.

I went to the most incredible party the other night. I hung out with all my new best friends, the conspiracy theorists.

The party was held in a former squat in the East Village, one of the six squats that was squatted so industriously, safely, and passionately that it won special legal squat status and was not senselessly destroyed by Giuliani's wrecking ball.

It was nice to see that squatters can live as well as rich people. The capacious former squat was lovingly appointed with a piano, a giant stained glass disc, an aquarium, pretty cabinetry, and more. The party was appointed with many intelligent, well-dressed, well-spoken apocalypse enthusiasts.

It's kind of racy to be enjoying cocktails and munchies in an attractive, well-lighted environment while catching snippets of possibly foreign-accented conversation, such as:

"Where you gonna be when the shit hits the fan? You got a plan?"

"Well, it's not like they haven't framed me and put me in Rikers before."

"I'm thinking about Canada, or Hungary. How can I get a passport?"

DVDs debunking 9/11 were traded. Emails were collected to facilitate arranging protests at city hall. The powers-that-be will be taken down, or we will exile ourselves somewhere. Heavy-duty.

I'm leery of hanging with conspiracy theorists not because I think they're full of it, but because I think if I learn what they know I will have no choice but to become one of them. And then I would have to commit to the overthrow of the government. And I'm just so busy already. Their parties are great, though. I'll keep going to those.

I Was Totally Wrong About Jamiroquai.

I've done some research, and everything I thought about Jamiroquai is wrong. In the most completely humiliating ways!

First, it is a band, not a dude. Second, they are British (why ??? did I think they/he were/was French?!). Third, Jamiroquai is derived I guess from lead singer Jay Kay's name and Iroquois, a Native American tribe whose philosophy he "identifies" with. Yes, those were quotation marks of derision.

Thanks for so thoroughly showing me up, Jamiroquai. I hate you more than ever.

Just kidding. I'm so, so sorry I completely wasn't paying attention to what you are all about. To prove it I might illegally download some of your music.