Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Saturday, December 08, 2007)

Just got back from my birthday party-slash-Retributioners launch party in the East Village and it was a swelligant gathering. I want to thank everybody who came and ordered me my favorite not-so-manly drink. You know the one. And thanks for supporting the Retributioners.

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(Originally posted Thursday, December 06, 2007)

As MySpace has told you, it’s my birthday. We are all getting up there. And I am really getting up there. A person at my age is hopefully a little bit more defined, has spent some time figuring out who he is and what he’s made of. He knows his strengths and weaknesses. He hopefully knows what accoutrements and effects he needs and what he doesn’t need to live in happiness and blessedness, and hopefully he knows that to need less makes him more of a person. I think it’s harder to buy presents for anybody as they get older, because as we grow, we each become more unique and particular and our deepest inner workings become more of a mystery, even, dare I say, to those who know us best.

Having said that, here’s what you could get me for my birthday if you wanted to buy me something:

–*Errors & Omissions Insurance

–*A Steadicam

–*A Cleopatra costume for a music video I’m planning

–*A $3000 Roland keyboard

–*A high end professional digital video camera. Or a real Arriflex film camera

–*A plane ticket to Istanbul

–*A plane ticket to Nicaragua

–*Thomas Pynchon’s phone number

–*Financing for a feature film with a budget of $100,000

–*Time. I could always use more time

In lieu of all these expensive or impossible things, you can just do one thing for my birthday: Watch “The Retributioners.” Tell your friends to watch it. Hey! It’s my birthday, after all!

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(Originally posted Wednesday, December 05, 2007)

A list of compliments no one ever wants to hear:

“You’re beautiful, except when you smile or talk.”

“You have a great laugh aside from the stupid things you laugh at.”

“You don’t sweat much for a fat person.”

“You look just like Julia Roberts would look if she weren’t as pretty.”

“Your acting in that Chekhov play was delightfully vacuous. I mean, you really do vacant and blank well.”

“You seem really well adjusted for someone whose mother tried to raise him as the opposite sex.”

“You read a lot for a Baptist.”

“Your presidential candidate seems awfully plain-spoken and refreshingly simple.”

“You seem very rational for a person who waves around an embryo in a plastic bag during protest marches and spits blood.”

“You’re so witty, if not really funny.”

“Your lack of book smarts is refreshingly unself-conscious.”

“Your Web show seems to have a very selective audience.”

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(Originally posted Wednesday, December 05, 2007)

After a lot of hard work, the Retributioners Web series is LIVE as of midnight Wednesday. The show stars my wife Stephanie in a semi-autobiographical role as a New York actress seeking out people who have wronged her in the past to get revenge on camera. The following is the prologue and Episode 1: The Virginity Pact.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, December 04, 2007)

George W. Bush said today that the U.S. must continue to bring international pressure to bear on Iran to end its ambitions to create nuclear weapons, even though a national intelligence assessment found that the country had halted its weapons program four years ago. Here are some other international initiatives that President Bush says we should be taking:

–*Continuing to put pressure on the no-longer existent Soviet Union

–*Ending South African Apartheid, which ended in 1994

–*Continuing to fight Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico

–*Continuing to fight Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Crimea

–*Putting down the Boxer Rebellion

–*Helping Great Britain in its fight with the South African Boers

–*Fighting the Mormon settlers in Utah

–*Putting down Shays’ Rebellion

–*Defeating the Confederate rebels at Spotsylvania Court House and Antietam

–*Continuing to work on creating a Jewish homeland

–*Driving the communists from Vietnam

–*Dismembering the Ottoman Empire

–*Protecting the Hanseatic League

–*Helping Justinian reconquer the Italian Peninsula

–*Driving the Moors from Granada and engendering a widespread Inquisition of the unfaithful

and finally,

–*George Bush thinks we should lay siege against Troy

Because George Bush knows history. He just doesn’t know when it has ended.

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(Originally posted Monday, December 03, 2007)

A new assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies, the National Intelligence Estimate, says that Iran halted work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003, contradicting the report two years ago that said Iran was moving to build a bomb as soon as possible. This is the same report whose flawed conclusions helped justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Here is a list of findings from the newly hedged National Intelligence Estimate:

–*Iran may ultimately be seeking nuclear weapons, or they may just be bluffing, since they are in deathly fear of a much larger world power that does indeed have nuclear weapons and has, in fact, used them on smaller Asian countries

–*Iraq may still have nuclear weapons, but we’ll never know, because they have likely been buried under a Babylonian burial mound that we respect too much to violate

–*Iraq may have tried to buy nuclear weapons material, including aluminum tubes for enriching uranium from a Chinese company, but we must also in the interest of fairness say that these could have been parts for a theme park water slide.

–*Over 50% of the population of Iraq was under age 15 at the time of the U.S. invasion. But that number has likely changed since everybody’s dead.

–*Venezuela may be a country under the thumb of a despotic left-wing oppressor. Or not.

–*Israel has been siphoning off our nuclear weapons intelligence for years and has been flouting restrictions we place on other countries in the region on nuclear weapons capability. But in the interest of political expediency, we’ll just say that it hasn’t been.

–*In the 1960s, there was a rumor that musician Paul McCartney of the Beatles was dead. The National Intelligence Estimate believes now with 85% accuracy that this is not true.

–*The NIE has found no evidence to support the urban myth that the girl who took Spanish fly died pleasuring herself on a gear shift. But we promise to keep looking.

–*American women don’t like it when you hit on them all the time. However, sometimes, the NIE must admit, they do like it.

–*We’re still betting that Biggie killed Tupac

–*Islamic terrorists have become more battle hardened and experienced on the ground in Iraq after fighting for four years, and this will better prepare them for deployment against Westerners elsewhere. We figured this out by watching all their videos on YouTube.

–*The president of Iran says there are no homosexuals in his country. Our intelligence report finds that this is because most of the gay hangouts have been taken over by spoiled teens from the suburbs with their goddamned SUVs.

–*If 50 blustering, grandstanding politicians are going on TV saying a country is armed with nuclear weapons, then we’ll just say “ditto.”

–*The NIE believes that Saddam Hussein was willing to have his country run the risk of being nuked to oblivion or invaded — or for himself to personally be attacked, deposed, tried, defenestrated and executed — all for the remote possibility that he could bomb just one American city. Because bombing just one American city would make his own personal annihilation worth it. Yes, we here at the NIE think that makes sense and that the American people think that makes sense and that they would not base their decision on total hysterical, wide-eyed psychotic fear.

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(Originally posted Friday, November 30, 2007)

American Beauty: The Trial

Titanic: The Search For Jack

Leaving Las Vegas: Another Round

Breaking The Waves: Bess’s Revenge

Fargo: Far Gone

A Streetcar Named Desire 2: SND2

Fiddler On the Roof: Back to the Shtetls

Goodfellas: Another Blast to the Face

Brokeback Mountain: No More Yodeling In the Gully

Do the Right Thing: After It’s Too Late To Do the Right Thing

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(Originally posted Thursday, November 29, 2007)

How are we not in any way shape or form succeeding in instilling the proper respect for the Prophet Mohammad in the Sudan?

–*Caning

–*Bastinado

–*Scourging

–*Cat o’ nine tails

–*Lapidation

–*Rustication

–*Larruping

–*Fustigating

–*Cudgeling

–*Garrotting

–*Keel hauling

–*Horse whipping

–*Tar and feathers

–*Administering the lash

–*Breaking them on the wheel

–*Hanging them on a gibbet

–*Impaling

–*Decollating

–*Flaying them alive

–*Cobbing

–*Flagellating

–*Iron maiden

–*Rack and screw

–*Waterboarding

–*And lastly, we’re not instilling respect for Mohammad in the Sudan by throwing English schoolteachers in jail for 14 days for naming a teddy bear after him, an action which would be a direct assault on reason and logic and the Enlightenment.

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(Originally posted Wednesday, November 28, 2007)

Remember when you did your hair up like Flock of Seagulls back in the ’80s? Ick! What were we thinking?

Remember when you begged your mom to make your hair big and buy you stone-washed jeans? What could possibly have been going through our minds?

Remember when you thought “Flatliners” was the best movie of 1990? Eww! What were we thinking, man?

Remember when you used to drunk dial an old boyfriend from a bar and he’d hang up on you and so you’d go home with a stranger and catch a raging case of the syph? Arg!! What were we thinking?

Remember when you got your genitals pierced and they started weeping pus? Not just regular pus, but kind of a red-whitish-gray kind of pus? What could we have been smoking?

Remember in Honduras when we drank that home-made aguardiente laced with radiator fluid and went blind? What could we have freakin’ been thinking about, Ese?

Remember when you thought you could save your marriage by going on Jerry Springer and instead you got into a fistfight with your wife’s new boyfriend and he kicked your punk ass on television while a chorus of nimrods yelled “Woo woo woo”? What was running through our heads?

Remember when you ignored all those smart, rational and dependable women because you wanted to wait for Uma Thurman, even though she was already married and not anywhere close to being in your league? Did somebody hit us with a stupid stick or what?

Remember when you borrowed home equity to buy a plasma screen TV as big as a swimming pool when at the same time you couldn’t be bothered to put $80 a month into a retirement plan that would generate double-digit compound returns? Were our heads just glued to our asses or what?

Remember when you smoked cigarettes through all nine months of your pregnancy and the baby came out all super-tiny and asthmatic? Ecchhh!! What could we have had running through our noggins?

Remember when you thought Ronald Reagan was so nice and wanted to help the working man, and now after 25 years in this pro-corporation enviroment he’s created, workers have no defined benefit pensions and no job security and no decent public schools and their income is lower than gerbil squat, so they have to work three jobs if they have a family? What kind of calculus were we doing on that one?

Remember when the U.S. had all the creole pigs in Haiti killed because of an irrational fear of African swine fever, wrecking the peasant economy in the process? What were we sniffing?

Remember when we thought 9/11 justified anything we did to anybody? Were we smoking crack?

Remember when we thought George Bush seemed like an easygoing guy, a real mensch, just like the rest of us, even though he was actually a rich, upper class privileged prep school scumbag twit who, very much unlike the rest of us, has spent his entire life being rewarded every time he makes a mistake, much like a toddler who is being toilet trained? Was there acid in our water supply or something? What were we thinking?

Remember the last time you did something smart? I don’t either. The smart things we do are never quite as memorable. Sigh.

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