stoneunhinged

Pictures of our dog Ben April 18, 2010

The decline and fall of MTV September 8, 2008

When did MTV become so uncool?

I remember the first time I ever heard of MTV.  I was an intern in Washington D.C. (this would have been 1983, I think) and some young attractive non-intern women asked me and a friend if we wanted to come over to their place and watch videos.  Aside from the obvious answer to the invitation, it was unusual because we didn’t know what MTV was (neither of us had cable).

And it seemed pretty cool to us.  Maybe that’s because we were so young.  But maybe not.

So today I’m reading the local headlines, and Germany is pretty excited because Tokio Hotel won some kind of award.  And I thought, “Hey…but they are so uncool!”

And I go over to MTV’s website and see this list:

http://www.mtv.com/ontv/vma/2008/winners.jhtml

BRITNEY won at least three awards, including BEST OVERALL VIDEO.  Pussycat Dolls won something.  And there it is:  Tokio Hotel wins best new artist.

How shameful.

Now, I haven’t watched MTV for at least 15 or 20 years, so I got to wondering:  when did it become so uncool?  I remember it getting pretty uncool back when it started introducing too much non-video stuff.  But maybe it was already uncool.

Maybe it was just a matter of taste all along.  Maybe that Whitesnake video with Tawny Kitaen was uncool.  (So why did I watch hour after hour hoping to see it again?)

The last time I saw MTV was back in November of 2006, on the day of my Gettysburg fiasco.  I watched maybe three videos and turned channels.  One of the videos I saw was a Britney Spears video where at the end she was on her knees in a black box wearing black panties and doing hip thrusts, and I thought, “WHOA!  That’s just obscene!”  Tawney Kitaen she was not.  It wasn’t erotic; it was vulgar.

Back to Tokio Hotel and the recent MTV awards:  MTV should be cancelled.  It has run its course.  The internet has replaced it as a video outlet, and it was never good for anything else anyway.

Is there some way we can declare it dead?  A petition or something?

jj

High School August 15, 2008

My nastalgia trip—the one which began with my contemplation of the meaning of death—has led me on an interesting path of discovery in the last six months. One, which I’ll write about later, has to do with Christina. But the other has to do with high school.

I was an asshole in high school. It wasn’t really my fault. I’m not an asshole by nature.

But I was lonely—the kind of lonely which defines some people, a loneliness from which there seems no escape and which colors every other aspect of one’s existence, a loneliness which people who have never experienced it cannot seem to grasp. When you’re that lonely, you spend most of your time fighting for some kind of self-esteem or recognition, anything that keeps you from dissipating into a little spot of gray.

So I did things I hated, and hated things I did, and I was unhappy and depressed and just bided my time until things got better.

They did. I went off to college, and within a month or two the sun shined, and I made real friends and found my place in the world. That is one reason—perhaps the main reason—I have spent the better part of my adult life in college as either a student or a teacher. University life is the ocean that I was meant to swim it.

But back to high school:

I went to a really, really small school. In my graduating class there were eleven of us, as I recall. I could be wrong. I don’t have a yearbook and my memory is faulty. But I remember: Anne, Anna, Lisa, Carla, and some blond girl who just spent the last few months with us, so I can’t remember her name; David, Aldo, Randy and Rusty, and Dan. (If I left anybody out, please correct me.) I went out with Anne for a month or two, dated and then married Carla, and hung around Dan quite a bit. Otherwise most of these people were strangers to me. You’d think we’d have been real tight, being such a small group. But after Anne and I stopped going out, I was embarrassed by the rejection and—in some kind of stereotypical, lonely 17 year-old assholiness—treated her like shit, and she cliqued up with others and I pretty much went into “double life” mode: put on some kind of show to pretend you are some kind of normal person in public, and in private live your REAL life. I don’t recall what kind of show I put on. It was all fake, anyway. The only REAL Jeff was the private Jeff, the one immersed in books and music and biding his time until leaving the island so he could live a real life with people who understood him.

Did I say “island”? I did. Yes, I graduated from high school in Hawaii, just like Barack Obama.

100% of all the people who ever find out I went to high school in Hawaii say the same thing: cool, or wonderful, or wow that must have been great. They cannot see the lonely boy suffering on the weekend, waiting for something REAL to happen in his life. So they don’t seem to understand it when I say that I hated it, that I could care less if I ever visit Hawaii again, that it has beautiful weather but can be potentially very ugly to those who don’t fit in (like 16 year-old haole nerds who have cried themselves numb and have stopped seeing the beauty around them).

But I’m no longer 16, and I’m old enough to stop being embarrassed for who I was, and now I am increasingly curious about those I went to school with. I have, within the last six months, come into contact with four people who knew me back in high school: Penny and her cousin Dan (Hello and love and kisses to both of you!), and Dan from my graduating class (hey, let me know if you ever read this), and Anne (hello and love and kisses to you, too!)

The feeling is quite odd. Can one be redeemed from having been an asshole in high school? Maybe not. Maybe most people who knew me then would prefer to remember me negatively. In the end, all of us have grown up, have become middle-aged decent people who are probably much prouder of their children than of themselves, and understand that life is something that should be celebrated every day. By “all of us”, I mean those I’ve mentioned here. It could be that we’ll find out that someone we went to school with became a mass murderer or something. I hope not, but it could happen.

The point of this post is this: it feels good, even GREAT, to have contact with people from so long ago and not have them say, “Jeff, you were and probably still are an asshole, so leave me the hell alone.”

jj

Rusty August 15, 2008

Man, I’m really rusty from not blogging.  It’s been over six months, and WordPress has made some changes.  The most obvious change you can see in the post below:  I posted a whole “gallery” of pictures into one post.

Not my normal style, but I’ll leave it—as an eternal example of my negligence.

Ive got some stuff to write, so check back over the next few days.  We’ll see how long I can go before getting bored again.

jj

As long as I’m in a religious mood…part 2 February 1, 2008

OK, sorry for so many posts in one sitting. It’s more fun for my readers if something new comes every day, rather than several things at once. I suppose I could just save them and post them later to make it looking like I’m blogging regularly. But…nah!

My nastalgia for old time religion is not new, and about six months ago I lost at least four or five hours to this web site: Chick. Then I lost another hour or two fascinated by other web sites about Jack Chick. It would seem that there are quite a few collectors of original Chick tracts. There are also a number of Chick imitators. And it’s all available to anyone with an internet connect.

As are the tracts themselves. You see, the Chick people, unlike the Thief in the Night people, apparently aren’t concerned with making money saving people’s souls. They offer a stupendous number of tracts online, which you can either read to get saved yourself or print out to make your own tracts.

The most interesting thing is that the high regard for Jack Chick is not coming from Christians but from admirers of his style of art and presentation and storytelling. They are high kitsch—shock and awe cartoon evangelism—which is also highly original. (Which is why you can lose a couple of hours reading them.) Add in just more than a wee bit of goofy conspiracy theory stuff (read this, for example) and the nastalgia of having read them when you were a kid and you’ve got something of real cultural value, I think. I seriously doubt any of you will be angry at me if you click the link—unless it’s because you ended up losing a couple of hours of your time.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

jj

As long as I’m in a religious mood… February 1, 2008

…I might as well post a link to my favorite YouTube video of all time.

(Well, if you don’t count videos with the phrase “cheerleader panties” in the search criteria.)

Here it is:  Benny Hinn.

Now, regardless of what you believe, Benny Hinn is the most impressive faith healer I have ever seen.  (And I’ve seen a few, folks.  Watching televangelists has been one of my main hobbies my entire life long.  When I was a teenager I used to do an imitation of Earnest Angley that just killed everyone at parties.)  I mean, most require some kind of contact.  Even Earnest used to ask us to put our hands on the TV screen.  But Benny Hinn just waves his hand and entire rows of people fall.  Sometimes (not in the above clip, I’m sorry to say) he completely surprises people, too.  He suddenly turns around and waves his hand and the person just falls like they’re made of jello, and they weren’t even expecting to be next.

And while I don’t really think it’s God doing the knocking over, I also do not believe it’s faked by people.  Benny Hinn waves his hand, and people—even entire rows of people—just black out.

He also does it with incredible style.  He switches between Gandolph and Bruce Lee, one time flicking his arm like a magic staff and the next time sweeping his arm forward in a kung fu move.  He shows great footwork, too.

Benny Hinn is simply the best at what he does since the invention of television.

It’s a power I neither envy nor admire, but I do respect it.

As for the video, it’s just one of the coolest ideas anyone ever had.  I’ve watched it at least 20 times or more.

LET THE BODIES HIT THE FLOOR!

jj

No beer tonight… February 1, 2008

…or for the next 29 days.

I hate leap year!

jj

Buffalo buffalo February 1, 2008

I ran into this today:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

is a grammatical correct  English sentence.  Think about it first.  If you don’t get it you can look up “buffalo” in a dictionary.  If you still don’t get it there is a Wikipedia entry here:  buffalo.

Don’t say I never told you anything useful.

jj

A thief in the night… February 1, 2008

…will take $22.95.

Today I showed a film to one of my classes. I showed “Hometown Legend”, a current example of “Christian” cinema. The new style Christian cinema is to make a family film rather than one that evangelizes. So “Hometown Legend” is just a nice story. (They even throw in a couple of naughty words to throw us off track—you know, to fool us into thinking it’s not a Christian film at all.)

It lacks balls.

Well, there are footballs…but you know what I mean.

(Well, actually, there is a scene about balls–it’s one of those “throw us off track” scenes.  And they don’t say “balls”, because that would be too vulgar.  They say “nuts”.  But I don’t want to ruin the movie for you.)

Back in the day, Christian films were slap you in the face until you accept Jesus as your savior kind of films. And the best of the best was “A thief in the Night”. What a film!

So I on my way home I got to thinking, hey: these days it’s probably on YouTube, or at least somewhere on the internet. I’ll watch it tonight for some warm and fuzzy memories.

But when I looked for it, I found this: A thief in the night.

Let’s get something straight here: I have absolutely nothing against making money. And I suppose twenty bucks for a “tool” to convert people quickly and efficiently is a bargain of sorts. But you’d think they might consider saving people for even less. I mean, I’d buy the film at Walmart for $5.99. Wouldn’t you? But I ain’t gonna cough over $74.95 to get the Thief in the Night COLLECTION. Well, not today anyway. Might change my mind, I suppose.

I still might find it online. Someone out there must believe that saving people’s souls is worth a copyright violation. If I find it I’ll post a link.

jj

UPDATE!

Well, I guess I should have googled before writing the above post, but I’ll let it stand. Google found the movie and listed it on the third or fourth link or so. You can watch the movie (in poor quality) here: Thief. If I find it in better quality, I’ll post it again. (Now if Icould just find all the old Jamie Summers movies for free….) I also found an excellent review of the film, here: Thief. And just to top off (or bottom off?) this post, here’s a youtube video which uses the original Larry Norman version of “I wish we’d all been ready” here: wish.

jj