To the best Alex and I can work out, "I Want Pussy" off of Ol' Dirty Bastard's Nigga Please is the song where a main part of the beat is ODB fucking a girl on top of a bass drum.

My paper for class... it's not a review, but the teacher got the impression. I make the argument that it's the apex of hip-hop. This is a controversial view, because the album's rather offensive, and others might prefer something more politically conscious. My stance is that 'conscious' hip-hop is frequently boring as fuck and I am infinitely more amused by people just talking about themselves and how awesome they are. The point of my paper is that the reason that an ODB album is able to be the apex of hip-hop is because hip-hop is really fucked-up.

The record's also hilarious. I don't know how much of the hilarity is intentional, but it doesn't matter. It's never unintentionally hilarious because the music is bad. The music is pretty fucking solid, the beats accompany ODB's flow (which is insane, but GREAT and listenable) well. I don't know how much of what is being said is jokes and how much is just straight-up real ODB bragging. "Girls want to fuck me when they smell my underarm?" I don't know. "I take the cocaine, it cleans out my sinuses?" That's not true at all, but I still don't know whether he means it or not.

But yeah, good record. If you see it in a used bin (and you might... it had a hit single, but it's fucking weird, and most people are dumb) buy it. I'm pretty sure it's a party record but I am not a partier. Maybe play it at a party where you don't know everyone there. It can function as a conversation starter, while also making it seem like there's a crazy drunken crackhead in attendance at your party, i.e. spicing it up.

Oh yeah, and the original title was The Black Man Is God, The White Man Is The Devil. It also probably could've been released under the name Big Baby Jesus, as ODB had announced that's what he was switching his alias to before the release of the record. That's a lot of religious imagery for an album predominantly about fucking.

The election's in less than a week. I am alternately filled with dread and exhilaration.

This is great:http://www.salon.com/news/letters/2004/10/27/youngvoter/ It's at Salon, so you have to watch an ad, but... it's very encouraging. It's a letter from a black 21-year-old. The giveaway that he's a liberal might be that he's at Salon, but... he's also young, and he's black. So there's no way he's going to support Bush. It's a great piece, and I'll just quote a good bit from early on: "I saw Ann Coulter on some show where she was literally speaking for black America. Being that she is an aging white chick with poorly dyed roots, she obviously got it wrong. Those polls saying how Bush will get 16 to 18 percent of the black vote are just wrong. To quote ODB, "Nigga please."

There's other, more encouraging things. That quote just makes me smile. Because it's about politics and it quotes Ol' Dirty Bastard. I wrote a paper on the album Nigga Please for class. It's a pretty fucking great record, for many reasons.

There's other stuff on Salon, and elsewhere, about the GOP's plan to shut down the black vote. God, I wish that news would break.

So yeah, swing voters: Yes, they're dumb. But what's funny is the idea that they're waiting for something. Waiting for one of them to do something amazing, or maybe to eat a baby or something. And the funny thing is... That could totally happen. If the news I just mentioned broke? God. Of course, the mainstream media totally isn't covering shit like that, shit that will henceforth be referred to as "important news." They're covering campaign stops instead. And the Red Sox.

Oh, yeah, so the election night drinking game. It requires two kinds of liquor. For every thirty electoral votes that go to Kerry, take a shot of happy alcohol, whatever that might be for you. Like it's a party. For every thirty that go to Bush, take a shot of something else, like you're drinking to forget. I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'm going to say rum for Kerry, whiskey for Bush. But it depends on your preferences.

So in between all the politics shit... I'm in this class that isn't very good. My teacher doesn't particularly like me, I figure, but I arguably bring it on myself by making my distaste for the class known. The class is just wrong and based around bad ideas. I don't want to seem like I'm just casting myself in a rebel fuck-all posture because I think I'm so bad-ass, but... I mean, fuck, I disagree. No one else speaks up. Story of my life? You know, maybe.

Also: I saw some movies. I Heart Huckabees, Team America: World Police, and Shaun Of The Dead. Three relatively different movies. They have a few things in common. One is that they're all mainstream enough that I can see them in shitty-ass Olympia, even if I see them later than other people. The other thing is that they're all comedies, and they're all funny. Yeah, I Heart Huckabees is a bit pretentious. But it's funny. And Team America's overall position is one I disagree with. Shaun Of The Dead... is pretty fucking solid, nothing wrong with it. Not all the jokes work, but I definitely laughed a good deal. Of course not all the jokes in a comedy are going to work. But all these movies had enough jokes that did work that I can recommend them as comedies.

There are times when I'm at a movie and I'm laughing at shit no one else is laughing at. You know what I think is key to enjoying comedies, to knowing whether you have a good sense of humor regarding comedies? Show up early at the movie, watch the pre-film programming. This includes the trailers and the stuff before the trailers... Either big expensive shit, like you're watching TV type stuff, or the ads on the screen and an unrelated pseudo-radio broadcast. In all of these things you should find things to laugh at. If you can find anything unintentionally funny, you are smart enough to judge comedies. If you can't, than you don't get irony, so I don't know what you're doing seeing the movies I just recommended. I know that most people reading this get the idea of unintentional hilarity. I'm just sharing my litmus test with you.

That new Alexander Payne thing doesn't look very good at all. Sideways? God, the commercial even has a bit of "naughty girl, might have to be spanked" dialogue. What the fuck? Does anyone think that's edgy? Does anyone think that's funny? Has anyone not heard this a million fucking times before? Granted, it could be a matter of the funny jokes being too offensive for TV. But... God, that shit is just played out. It's fucking played out. And then when you see the actual trailer about the plot and shit... It looks like it's for boring old men. But the criticism has been made than About Schmidt is for boring old men, but I thought that movie kicked ass.

The Life Aquatic looks awesome though. Oh my god. Maybe a bit more jokey than previous Wes Anderson movies, but that's probably all down to editing, right? The trailer for Royal Tenenbaums had some obvious jokes that read subtle in the actual movie. But even if it is more jokey... I like jokes. It just looks fucking great. It opens on Christmas. I hope my brother and I live up to our Jewish heritage and leave before the Christmas dinner to see it.

So sometimes I think about the Pitchfork best of the 90s list, the second one. I always think about best records lists, but that's the one closest to my tastes, most reflective of what I like. And I mentally formulate my own list. Tonight I made an attempt to write that list down. It's awesome in that it really betrays me as a guy who only likes like five bands. It's also great in how quickly it falls apart... By the time it gets to Archers Of Loaf, it is abundantly clear that I am talking out of my ass and don't know anything about music at all. There's three Flaming Lips records in the top twenty, and Zaireeka is really just there in theory, because I only heard it once. It's hard as hell to make lists like this, because you ask yourself "Do I (a) more than (b)? Yes. Do I like (b) more than (c)? Yes. Do I like (a) more than (c)? Well... depends on my mood." And it falls apart as an exercise rather quickly.

So I just realized that people seem to be upping the number of fists to express new levels of awesomeness. Three-fists, four fists... The current peak is five fists, found in the title of an upcoming Matt Fraction comic.

Dude.

All you need is two fists.

I've got some viruses on this here computer. They can't be removed by anti-virus software, and I can't find the actual files yet. This could be a problem. So far the only thing I've been experienced was my computer wanting to show me gay porn... Not the most effective virus in terms of the large percentage of the population that wouldn't be bothered.

So when you do searches for files in Windows XP, the default setting involves a cartoon dog looking through a book. It is rather disturbing. It can probably be turned off, but I'm torn about whether I really want to do such a thing. Sometimes the dog looks up from the book to stare at you with big wide eyes.

So bizarre.

I should really be asleep.

Two words which will define the future: Gorilla Foundation.

Don't try a Google search. It's not on the internet yet. All in my mind. I'm writing it down because I sometimes forget the "foundation" part.

I like hanging around drunks because it drunks up my thoughts.

No essaying today, kids. Just some notes on the quick.

So a while ago (a week maybe? Probably more) my computer's hard drive died on me. It got replaced. But all the music I had on that old hard drive is now gone, as is a lot of writing. Beginnings of novels, journals of ideas, that kind of thing. So what can I do now, but come up with new ideas? The failure of the laptop led to my thinking about the failure of technology we nonetheless depend on, which brought to mind an old idea, which I then fleshed out, and long story short: my mind is a constant spring of disturbing imagery.

Class is okay. I disagree with the teachers in regards to several of the principles the class is based around, but in discussions I can make my fellow students drop their jaws. (I've done it to two separate students on two separate instances, and both times it was fucking amazing, because you can control your jaw, so there's no reason for that to ever really happen.) So there's that.

Oh, and the current goal of dorm J208 is to beat Sonic And Knuckles all in one go before October 19th. For that is the ten-year anniversary, you see. We realized this once one roommate (John Samson) put in some Dreamcast game compilation. While playing it, I made an offhand reference to 1994. Alex said he thought the game came out in 1996 or thereabouts. So he looked online and found out it came out on October 19th, 1994. This led to the decision to beat the game before then, and a lot of remembrances of the past ten years, growing up and shit like that.

I bought a belgian waffle iron and it is the smartest investment I have ever made. Or at least it will be until it breaks, which hopefully will never happen.

So the new Pixies songs... they're rather good indeed. Not the shock of the new, and they won't save music or anything, but it's one more good band in the world. They're still a good band. Their first new song has the chorus "bam thwok, oh, love, bang, wakka wakka wakka"which sometimes runs through my mind at times of intense joy. It's the joy of the fact that the Pixies are making music again, you know? It's nice. The Warren Zevon cover is good too, but it's not an original song with the chorus of wakka wakka wakka which means it's a lesser song than Bam Thwok.