Artistic Brevity / Critical Blathering

Critically acclaimed and respected actor Laurence Fishbourne … know what he was doing in the ‘80’s? I do. He was a cowboy on PeeWee’s Playhouse. I made this disturbing discovery last night while flipping channels at my parent’s house (I watch TV religiously when I go home, since I do not bother paying for cable at The Palace). Here I was, meandering through the various channels that occasionally show things I can appreciate, and suddenly coming to two creepy revelations within seconds. 1st – Adult Swim on Cartoon Network now shows PeeWee’s Playhouse every night at 11:00 for reasons that currently escape me. 2nd- well, you already know. The bit about Laurence Fishbourne. Quite a road he traveled, I suppose. After getting work at only 14-years-old in Coppola’s classic “Apocalypse Now,” he wound up in his mid-20’s dressing like a flaming cowboy with deep-fried, still-dripping long black curls. Fast forward nine more years and he is starring as Othello in the Shakespeare masterwork, and ultimately gaining international superstardom as the brazenly cool Morpheus in “The Matrix.” Highs and lows, I suppose.

My letter to the Buffalo News Sunday Sports Letters (they better publish it!):

After the thrill and excitement of this past season, it saddens me to be forced to declare shenanigans on the entire Buffalo Sabres front office. Yes, the whole lot of them, Golisano included. I will cite the past year as indisputable evidence, which includes the Zhitnik mistake, the goalie monster, the Noronen trade that has left us without a backup and forced to keep Biron, the use of a draft pick acquired in exchange for a goaltender to select a goaltender, and the refusal to bring in a defenseman at last year’s trade deadline.

But it is their most recent inaction that will be the crux of my case against them. Free agent season was not even days old yet, and already two key contributors of the soundest intangible contribution were gone from the Sabres' roster despite pleas from fans and players alike. This continues a disappointing trend of scorn and contempt that has marked Sabres' management throughout the Regier and particularly the off and on again Quinn years. I think the jury should have little trouble deliberating on this.

I realize the serious nature of the charges, but I believe they will be found guilty of shenanigans nevertheless. Hopefully we will then have the foresight to bring in a committed group of administrators who can exercise fiscal discretion, but at the same time show some commitment to the team and community rather than simply focusing on turning a small profit on Golisano's investment.

Mike Sherry
Buffalo, NY

Unsolicited Album Review:
The staff of Dominion of Cool is proud to present you with our big-talkin’, bat-swingin’, babe-bangin’ review of Tom Petty’s latest, immaculate solo album – “Highway Companion.”

Stop reading this review before you even hit the period at the end of this sentence. In fact, there was no need for me to even finish that sentence because by the time you got to the word “this” after “stop reading” you should have been out of your chair and motoring your way over to the local album distributor with an apprehensive (yet unnerving) grin on your visage. So let me start over … Stop reading this. I’m waiting patiently. I’m expecting that you’ve already gone and got the album, listened to it several times through, took notes, compared it to previous Petty efforts, taken it in consideration alongside recent albums from Petty’s contemporaries for context, and read all the history and research and previous reviews associated with the album for entirety of understanding. Which you’ve completed by now if you’re reading these sentences, so I’ll push on.

This album fires Petty into a whole new stratosphere of disturbing awesomeness. We know he hit a zenith of his artistic creativity in the years from ’89-’94, peaking with his indescribably brilliant masterwork “Wildflowers.” Since then it’s been a downhill slide – ‘96’s “She’s the One” was a half-assed soundtrack. Good, but not spectacular, nor was it meant to be. ‘99’s “Echo” was an inconsistent record with a garage feel. Good, but especially half-assed given Petty’s unfortunate psychological melancholies at that time. ‘02’s “The Last DJ” was a strange, poorly produced, and crabby effort. Good in some respects, but bogged down by too much bitter hostility and ranting from a man who has always embodied the heroism of the optimistic blue-collar underdog. So, essentially, ’95-’05 was a decade of disappointment – bones of mediocrity thrown to the eternally hungry dogs who stood by their master regardless.

“Highway Companion” sees Petty back at work as a master of the rock medium once again, putting to bed any notions that his time was over, he’d spent his creativity during the first 20 years, and all that was left was very occasional sparks of something interesting. This album is beyond interesting … it is an exercise in art as thematic brevity. Yes, it is a brief album, but it does not need to be longer – it is a self-contained work of sonic unity, a consistency of sound that works just as well for this album as variance and versatility did for “Wildflowers.” Petty has taken the acoustic cleanliness of The Traveling Wilburys/Full Moon Fever/Into the Great Wide Open era and brought it back to life as an older, more mature, more beautiful entity. He kicks it off with an upbeat, bluesy rocker (“Saving Grace”) reminiscent of ZZ Top’s “Le Grange”, but after that it’s mostly acoustics – mellow, mid-tempo gems of moving and sentimental magnificence.

The album is a surprise for it’s poetic quality as well. Long known for his blunt forwardness and uncomplicated statement of feelings/intentions, Petty has suddenly found it in his pencil to write abstract imagery (Green and gray and auburn / sliding down the sky / the devil winks an eye), wisdom (Can’t sell your soul for peace of mind), and personal reflection (Living free / is gaining on me / can’t keep ahead of my dreams). And, naturally, while these new strengths dominate the album, he still hasn’t lost his gift for the candid (I love you so deep, but you can’t understand) nor the skill of the storyteller (Lazy Jim / took a bottle with him / tried to flag down a train) nor the ever-present Petty humor (impress all the women / pretend I’m Samuel Clemens / wear seersucker and white linen).

Moreover, Petty is in great voice. In “Echo” he often sounded a little depressed or tired or distracted. In “The Last DJ” he just sounded old. For the first time in ten years, Tom Petty sounds like Tom Petty.

For those who like thematic albums, this one has got a lot of fun stuff about driving (duh! It is named “Highway Companion,” isn’t it?) and time – namely that it passes and doesn’t last forever.

So, bottom line, this is easily one of the top three albums of Petty’s career. I don’t think it has the overall versatility and scope of “Wildflowers,” but, like “Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers” (’76) or “Damn the Torpedoes” (’79) or “Full Moon Fever” (’89), this is an album of sonic consistency – meaning they are all of a similar nature (an audio theme of sorts), yet different enough to make each song stand on its own. No song, no arrangement, no lyric is wasted, and none are a disappointment. There are twelve songs, and twelve of them are damn good. And, quite honestly, this is perhaps the single most sonically gorgeous album of Petty’s career. A lot of beautiful chord progressions that give you the chills on their own, let alone considering the personal and moving nature of the lyrics.

Well, I’ll be listening to this album over and over for the next week. So don’t bother me. Just leave messages.

A Presto

Mike

Exquisite Torture

It is no secret that I love the word “donkey.” I call everyone and everything a donkey, even if only for the most mild and passing of annoyances. So why is that? I think the following “Ten List” will help you all to understand how I view donkies, and why I think they are such an appropriate metaphor for so many Americans, and indeed America itself.

So without further adieu, The Staff of Dominion of Cool is proud to bring you …

Ten Ways in which American culture is a donkey:
1. It is stupid
2. It is ugly
3. It can do a lot of the same things as a noble steed, but it is still, quite obviously, a fucking donkey.
4. It is hard to take a good long look at it without laughing.
5. The laughing reflex is partially because the sheer stupidity of the animal’s appearance is humorous, but also because laughter is often a defense mechanism against things that scare, depress, creep us out, or otherwise horrify us.
6. It stinks.
7. It emits all sorts of irritating, obnoxious, and totally unnecessary hawing.
8. Its greatest aspirations are to the lowest rungs of what passes for mediocrity on a good day.
9. It defecates wherever it feels like defecating.
10. Despite all of the above, it is easy to develop a strange and inexplicable affection for the animal. I call it Howard.

The Sabres have finally gotten rid of that oversized tit Taylor Pyatt. The fact that they got a 4rth round draft pick for him is a steal. A blessing. How did they convince anyone to want a million-dollar oaf who is completely without impact on a game in the first place – let alone to actually give something up to get him? The 4rth round draft pick won’t play in the NHL for six years, if he ever plays at all and he probably won’t. But if he does sneak in six years down the road, and if it is for the Sabres (which is against all odds), he has about a 2% chance of being even slightly more valuable than Pyatt. That’s just the nature of the NHL draft. But there is the most infinitesimal of odds that he turns out to be one of those late-round studs that comes on strong in their late teens and is suddenly a major prospect. Even if the odds of this are fractional at best, that alone is more than we could have hoped for in exchange for shipping that million-dollar wart the shit out of our organization.

Less pleasant news: we signed Roy to a one-year qualifying contract. You saw it here first … Roy will have a terrific season and become a legitimate 2nd-line center on any NHL team at the age of only 23. Even if we keep him beyond this year, his time here, like everyone else’s, is a short ball of yarn that will only stretch so far. Then he’ll vanish and we’ll brag about how we have younger, cheaper players to replace him who will be good in a few years. We’re perpetually “about to be good” here in Buffalo.

Alright, now I do a lot of complaining and reprimanding and mocking and just generally being a cynical ass. But I’m capable of being positive sometimes, and usually about the least likely (or at least expected) of things. That’s what I’m about to do here. You should have been able to figure that out. It’s called an introduction, and if you’re careful you can see clues regarding what is about to follow, which in this case is an unsolicited pitch advocating for the use of MySpace.com by everyone with a computer.

I know what some of you are thinking (it’s “whaaat!!??”, right?). But hear, or rather read me out. I once thought as you do. Simplistically. Scornfully. Skeptically. Suspiciously, and a lot of other “S” words with negative connotation. I dismissed MySpace as the equivalent of that horrid “Village Youth Center” that everyone swore was so cool in Junior High. In other words, it was a stupid place – a place where people went to say irritating and cliché things and try to be popular. I thought MySpace had no place for a mildly intelligent, barely cultured, somewhat independent, vaguely authority-defying, kind of non-cliché, superhero such as myself. “What is this pompous, soap-operatic website that would think to disturb my individual integrity with its garbage?” I asked on more than one occasion.

But hang with me here, chums. Where I’m going with this is that it’s not entirely like the Youth Center. It’s more like a high-school or college house party in the sense that, yah, there’s probably 95% meat heads and donkies and indefensible human mediocrity, but there’s some potential there too. You can always be the kid who turns Jay-Z off of the stereo and pops in Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. You can always push your way into a shallow-end-of-the-pool conversation and inject some creativity or color into it. You can dance, yell, flirt, steal things, do keg stands, fight, or just kind of stand off in the corner with your beer, striking James Dean-like poses, and just generally being content with how much cooler you are than everybody else (I personally like the latter a lot).

Where I’m going with all this is simple. It’s a community - for better or worse. I do these blogs on blogspot.com, but I get no more than ten readers, tops. Why? Because doing a blog here makes you like the guy who goes to the campus library to study on Saturday night. You might run into a handful of people you know, and maybe you guys sit down, crack your books, have some pleasant conversation while at the same time gearing yourself up to get a good grade on a crucial test that will effect your class grade, and therefore your semester grade, and therefore your overall GPA, and therefore your future. There’s something redeeming in that. But guess what … you missed your chance to go out, get drunk, meet people, and have a generally more memorable experience. MySpace is easy to dismiss as a cheesy little thing for creeps and tools and geeks and lame-o’s. And it is for the most part. But it’s an opportunity at least. I got in on it to keep a more condensed, more frequent blog and see if more people checked it out. So far I’ve done 22 total blogs, short little things, a paragraph, maybe two. I’ve had my blog viewed 419 times. That’s an average of 19 views per post, and I’m a terribly unpopular MySpacer. I’ve got 20 friends. But I’m not on their searching for people and trying to network – I just want you to read the ridiculous things I write. At almost 20 views per two-paragraphs of my thoughts, I’d say it’s worth my time and effort.

Plus you get to constantly reject friend-requests from "girls who just want to meet for some fun sex." As tempting as that sounds, it seems more likely, and also given that they have 300 myspace friends, that they're an advertisement for a porn site and I take great pleasure in clicking "DENY!" It's a feeling of power. Fight the corporate machine!!

Anyways, do what you want. We here at the Dominion of Cool are unconcerned with your choices. We just like to throw our two cents around as if it was a valuable chunk of change when we know damn well it isn’t. But what we do care about is that your read our other blog, which is significantly shorter, and usually less preachy than this one: myspace.com/ilprimopazzo. See you there, friends.

Leave comments.

A Presto

"No More Singing in my Chains" and "The Crazy Diamond Shines No Longer"

Out with the old and in with the vaguery and nothing in particulars.

Today I am quitting my job as a raw materials peddler, or more to the point a "scrap dealer" - though my bosses enjoy referring to the position as a "sales trader" and I will certainly employ that description on my resume because it sounds a little nicer. So, at any rate, on to greener pastures?

I used a question mark because I have no plan at this point. I have several options, but no plan. And I'm strangely okay with this because I'm generally a person without focus who likes to drag things out and drag things out and then suddenly explode in one direction or another out of sheer desperation. It's a nervous and irritating way to go through life, but there we are. At any rate, there is one thing that is inescapably clear beyond all else, and I've decided to stop running from it and putting off the inevitable - namely that I HATE WORKING AT SHUMAN PLASTICS, INC. MORE THAN I CAN EVEN BEGIN TO DESCRIBE EVEN IF I HAD AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF WORD PROCESSORS THAT I WAS BEING GIVEN AN INFINITE AMOUNT OF TIME AND SPACE TO DEVOTE ENTIRELY TO THE TASK OF DESCRIBING HOW MUCH I HATE THIS DEVIL-WORSHIPPING, WHORE-MONGERING, DRUG-ABUSING, BABY-KIDNAPPING, BIKE-RIDING-IN-TRAFFIC JOB!!!!!!!!! (*It may surprise some to see the latter most abomination mentioned in the same sentence as the ones that proceeded it. Nevertheless, I stand by it. It is an excruciatingly irritating habit that benefits no one and brings all of society down a few notches)

So that's where I'm at. I'm the vicious little animal that got backed into the corner. No, not really. I guess I'm more like that nervous little bird that takes excited little hops as you approach, and then finally fires itself into the atmosphere in a sudden rush of terror. All of which is simply to say, I can't do it anymore. I cannot spend one more day coming into this decaying building (*an account of mine stopped by today to drop me off some samples, and seeing the building for the first time he said that it indeed appears like an abandoned dump save for the cars parked outside of it) I cannot spend one more day coming into this decaying building, walking through the dust and grime of the filthiest warehouse on god's polluted earth, up to the "offices" which are nothing more than windowless rooms with a few seven-foot-tall cubicles, and sitting down to spend the rest of the day fending off wealthy and savage hebrew bosses who are like creepy little animals that just keep coming at you and trying to gnaw at your ankles no matter how many times you spray them with Windex and say "shoo!"

Bottom line, that.

So, anyway, I give them my two weeks today and I'm interested to see how that affair goes. My gut tells me it will go just fine and I will feel like the Titanic would feel if it suddenly resurfaced and hummed a happy sailing jig to itself while reading in the newspaper that global warming is driving the ice burg to extinction (I realize this is not the case, so environmental types just please leave this as a hypothetical and push on). Even the slightest and very least informed of my observational faculties are astute enough to see that my bosses will not recoil aghast and in total surprise when I tell them. My committment to this job has been questionable (shall we leave it at that? There are probably better words for it, but let's not get too negative here) for months now, and being that I regularly roll my eyes blatantly and argue with my sales manager, and given that I generally loaf around refusing on point of honor to pick up the phone and call anyone (which is what I'm paid to do), and being that the rumor around the office during my trip to Bonnaroo was apparently that I was really at a job interview and that I would be coming back with a letter of resignation (deep breath, this is quite a run on I have going) - given all of that, I think they will probably say to themselves something along the lines of "Damn, I lost a hundred bucks betting that you'd be here at least another week."

***

This is now the post-quit report. It was, as I expected, a thing of relative ease. I was thanked for my contribution, had my hand shook, I was wished well, and now it just remains to see when my last day will be. With my vacation time, I should be able to rip out of here Thursday and never come back.

So are you interested in any of this? Probably not. But you will be interested in this next feature, something I'm calling "Sherry's Potential Paths Down Which He Could, In Theory, Take a Walk and See What Happens." The name needs work, granted.

So without further adieu, and presented in

*~*~*~ SPPDWHC,IT,TAWASWH!!!*~*~*~

1. Sell my mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles for a lot of money which I will then use on heavy mallets which I will distribute to an army of homeless people that will work for cheap, scowering the earth to crush and kill every frog they encounter. It'll be one of the more memorable mass extinctions in earth's history, or certainly at least one of the most unique.

2. Pursue a career in teaching English, either by going back to get certified, or high-tailing it to the South.

3. Spend every waking moment writing fan mail to Jaleel White.

4. Take up skeet shooting, except use Christina Aguilera rather than discs, and quit as soon as I get bored and she's dead.

5. Pursue a career in Marketing by picking up some entry-level gig and firing myself upward from there (this may also require moving).

6. Devote years, if not decades to the task of mathmatecally calculating the number of rhino slugs fired at what speed and from what distance it would take to bring down the great beast ... Oprah.

7. Go back to school and take some Marketing classes. Or go back to school for my PHd. Or go back to school for something cool like creative writing or film.

8. Try out for the part of Gordon on Sesame Street.

9. Write a long dissertation with the goal of publication - a paper that deals with the history of the word "chuck" and how it came to mean "to throw an object."

10. Kill myself in a cruel and horrifying manner, and make my last words something really confusing like, "Finally the gate of chuck will be opened and gordon shall be unleashed upon the mortals!"

Well, in far more depressing news ...

It seems Syd Barrett has finally died. Granted, the dude's been living a kind of life in death for the past 35 years, but it's sad to see him go nonetheless. They more or less predicted this a little while ago when they reported that he had diabetes and that it was questionable whether or not he was taking his medication and doing anything about it. It's ironic to think that it was just last summer when they did Live Aid and Pink Floyd reunited with Roger Waters, and the band admitted they had toyed with the idea of bringing Syd Barrett onstage. This would have gone down as a landmark in rock history - shattering a silence and invisibility that had lasted without exception for over three decades. But it was not to be, and probably for the better. All reports make it sound like Syd would have freaked out and not done it anyway. It's a shame though. I always held out hope that there would be some last, fleeting public appearance from the Crazy Diamond. The briefest of magazine interviews, or a short documentary in which he appeared for a few moments to talk about his memories. Something.

But, let's be honest. Syd Barrett died around 1970 the same way Michael Jackson died in the late 80's. The genius of his talent exploded and conquered for about one year - like a supernova. But it was snuffed into a vaccuum just as quickly, and even if the body has been physically the same, the mind and the spirit are someone(thing) else altogether.

I think I'll see if I can buy one of his paintings for cheap on eBay. He may not be the most prolific person of the 21st century, but he is easily one of the most fascinating.

Weird that he died on the same day I quit my job. I'll remember that.

Leave comments, chums. And check out the briefer, more frequent blog at myspace.com/ilprimopazzo.

A Presto.