face full of black soot

i think a bunch of people watched the mtv vma's last week, but i'm kinda out of the pop music loop, so i missed out. sucks to be me... not. even though i didn't tune in, a ton of people kept sending me text messages telling me to "check out britney spears' performance" from that night on youtube. well, i kinda don't give a shit about what or who britney is doing or not doing, so i haven't watched it. but here's a link if you wanna check it out. basically i heard she kinda puts no effort into it, and she lacks any stage presence. wait, how is this different from her entire career so far? riiiiiight. and, hey, america? there's a reason her initials are "b.s."

so anyway, i was at work, doing cool shit, when someone mentioned the vma's (which is unusual since we're all so cool, hip and indie that anything mainstream is usually shunned with waspy quips and a curled lip), and britney's performance was the topic of conversation. my ADD was kicking in and i started to zone out, when i heard that some kid from the middle of nowhere basically filmed himself having a meltdown 'cos people "won't leave britney alone." i'm always more than interested in people making complete assholes out of themselves on youtube, so naturally, i checked it out:



i love it when emo doucher kids freak out over pieces of already been chewed bubble gum pop princesses. i may wear a lot of black eyeliner, have pale skin, and a general disdain towards humanity, but i don't even remember the last time i cried, and i haven't purposefully tried to hurt myself for a while, so guess that means i'm outta the running to be an emo kid.

moving on from shit, i've been listneing to a lot of cool music recently. one of the dudes i work with turned me onto a cool group called the troggs. i dig their 60s garage rock monotone voices. anyway, you've heard 'em at least through their hit song entitled "wild thing" that the jimi hendrix experience famously covered. you may also recall that hendrix had more success with bob dylan's "all along the watchtower" than the actual songwriter himself. don't get me wrong, hendrix was wicked rad, but i like dylan loads more, so i kinda feel all geekily protective of his original version.

but anyway, back on the troggs, check out this awesome promo video for "night of the long grass" circa 1967. these guys did a lot of short films to their tunes (music videos?) before music videos were even really around... it's not as groundbreaking as the d.a. pennebaker's visual companion to dylan's "subterranean homesick blues," but it's still pretty rad:



the troggs are fucking awesome.

i'm gonna be in washington starting next tuesday for a week. i really don't know what else to say about it, so i'll just leave it at that. let's just say it's gonna be a loooooooong week. e-mail me if you wanna hang out and do cool shit. i'm open.