Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Canto 4: Menswear

Published
by
kevin
on November 9, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I’m going to go ahead and assume that you wear clothes. Not that you’re wearing clothes now, of course; you are, after all, reading this on the Internet, and if you’re anything like me you like to read political news, watch cat-intensive videos, and compare appliance prices while wearing as little as possible. It’s one of the wonders of the modern world.

No, I’m assuming you wear clothes during the sort of general situations you’re in every day: Going to work, seeing a movie, meeting with your local chapter of the Ron Paul Second Amendment Patriots Against Government Tyranny, whatever. And you have to buy those clothes somewhere, right? And unless you’re some filthy, scheming, Goldman-Sachs-type wealthy executive who can afford to shop at the higher-end clothing stores when you’re not too busy formulating a plan to raid the Toys For Tots general fund or forcibly remove breast milk from new mothers, you’re relegated to the middle- to lower-end stores: Your Lane Bryants, your Gaps, your TJ Maxxes.

The worst of these — and I mean “worst” in its most pathetically downtrodden Dickensian sense — is Ross.

Have you been to one of these stores? It’s as though some mad alchemist, in a lab overflowing with arcane texts and bubbling flasks and salamanders struggling against the mud-streaked glass of their aquarian tombs, somehow managed to condense every form of economic despair and depression into the least stylish pair of casual women’s slacks in the history of the world. And then he hung those slacks carelessly on a rack labeled “Men’s Activewear.”

Such is the nature of Ross, with its Ace-of-Base-era fashions and its narrow aisles and its ephemera strewn so randomly about the floor that there absolutely must be a pattern to it. Ross is like some dread horror described only in a lost book of the Bible, the clothier of the damned, and seriously you guys this one time I swear I saw Virgil leading Dante through the front doors, past the two Security Douchebags with LOSS PREVENTION printed on their jackets, past the racks of Huge Puffy Sneakers, and into the swinging rear doors into the Seventh Circle of Profligates and Usurers.

Dante had briefly looked at a grey hoodie with a wildstyle graffiti pattern on the sleeves, but put it back when Virgil pointed out that it was missing a zipper pull, and anyway they only had it in XXXL.

I know, I know. You’re thinking: Good lord, what a classist spongebrain. Ross may only sell factory-second hand clothes imported from 1992 via Emmet-Brown-style time-traveling freight train, but they’re cheap, and low-income people need cheap clothes. But you know what? The low-income people don’t buy the clothes either. The low-income people stick to the housewares, which in comparison look like the kind of sleek Danish stuff Cindy McCain keeps asking for John’s permission to decorate the carriage house of their hovering ski chalet with. Hell, I actually bought a hand-crank pasta maker there once, which works pretty well despite the fact that it’s in all likelihood haunted by the vengeful, waterlogged ghosts of neglected Japanese children. Seriously, this is the kind of stuff you buy at Ross.

So what happens to all those clothes? I don’t know. I’m reasonably sure a very small percentage is purchased by low-level Armenian gangsters, but the rest… I’m loath to hypothesize. I’ve been in the homeless shelters on Skid Row, so I know it’s not there. I can only imagine there’s a huge glut of it somewhere, hidden carefully from Al Gore, waiting to be exposed as a more pressing catastrophe than Peak Oil or global warming. And on that day, we’ll be forced to wear it all. We can’t burn it; doing so would poison us all and probably piss off God a great deal. We can’t use it for fuel; the resulting economic boom would destroy our carefully constructed neo-feudalist system (also the poison/angry god thing); and launching it into space would cause an immediate and devastating invasion, after being regarded as aggression by a race of very style-conscious, Details-reading aliens. No: We’ll have to wear it.

So if you ever run across a doomsayer who claims to be from the future, and who offers an apocalyptic picture of things to come, believe him. Particularly if he’s wearing an iridescent-chrome Chess King shirt with two buttons missing.

Love Among the Triscuits

Published
by
kevin
on November 2, 2009
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

I suspect “supermarket public-address system music” is probably one of those problems that only I think is a problem, like comma underuse and my girlfriend’s tendency to wipe her mouth after I kiss her. But no, seriously: It’s a big deal. It’s ruining America. It’s turning us into sodden, fish-mouthed lumps of intellectually sessile mystery meat. Or, you know, more so.

Think about it. When was the last time you heard a song in a supermarket that wasn’t an adult-contemporary song from at least 15 years ago? When was the last time you were shopping in a big chain supermarket and even heard a song that you liked? Probably never, unless you happen to be a fan of Quebecois Provincial Embarrassment Celine Dion, in which case it’s too late for you, and you should go look at Precious Moments figures on eBay or whatever the hell it is you people do when you’re online.

The rest of us have to stand there and endure, our lower jaws bunched in defiant Churchill crumples, as we try our best to decide between Wheat Thins and Tomato Basil Wheat Thins. Most of us wisely choose to ignore it, or, more likely, have completely lost the capacity to notice all of the little things that go on in the backgrounds of our personal dramas — things like television commercials and institutional racism. I used to hold people like this in contempt, wondering what purposeless baubles they traded their souls in for, until I realized they were simply stunned into vapidity by the endless whistling void of adult contemporary music, which pervades nearly everything we do.

And this is the problem. Years and years of listening to “What a Fool Believes” and the Peabo Bryson/Regina Belle version of “A Whole New World” have rendered us unable to even care about the myriad of tiny things that happen in our personal atmospheres each day, and whatever hunk of brain-meat our all-knowing Intelligent Designer has seen fit to charge with Observation and Attention to Detail has crusted away into a dry and scabrous nub, like the bit of desiccated mustard you pluck from the nozzle before dressing your hot dog.

(And I defy you to tell me what in the holy name of Freya’s twat Michael McDonald is singing in “What a Fool Believes.” You can’t tell me, and you’ve heard the song thirty thousand times. You may have heard “What a Fool Believes” more often than you’ve heard your mother tell you she loves you, and other than the actual name of the song you cannot repeat any of the lyrics. Nor, I suspect, can Michael McDonald; he sings like a gelded howler monkey in hopes of masking this. But we are on to you, Michael. We are on to your trickster’s ways.)

And it’s easy to know where to point society’s collective accusatory finger: Square at the sunken, man-boobed chests of the supermarket industry’s masters. As if it’s not bad enough that they ply us with nothing but factory-farmed, corn-based impersonations of actual food, they further weaken us by offering our ears an equivalent contranutritive slurry, this time not in the form of Archer Daniels Midland Simulated Comestibles but post-Miami-Sound-Machine Gloria Estefan.

“But Kevin,” you’re saying. “They need to play bland and inoffensive music because every other kind of music is too polarizing. What do you expect them to play? Hip-Hop? 80s New Wave? Juno-Award-winning supergroup Broken Social Scene? Adult contemporary music is something we’ve all sort of generally agreed fits the basic definition of music, and, while boring as hell, isn’t really difficult to listen to.” This is what you’re saying, right? In your head? Right?

Well, first of all, stop defending these bastards. They’re raking in the billions and still charging four dollars a jar for salsa that probably isn’t as organic as its label claims, so you don’t need to do their dirty work for them. You wouldn’t defend Dick Cheney, would you? Unless you would, in which case, brother, are you in the wrong corner of the Internet.

But more importantly, the supermarkets don’t need to play this music. We assume they do this because everyone can pretty much accept that it’s basically OK. The only thing everyone agrees on is that adult contemporary music is like getting stuck in a traffic jam: Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but not really terrible. Not like the apocalypse or something. Right? It’s just a traffic jam! It’ll be over in a few minutes! It’s just “Sussudio!” It’ll be done with soon enough!

And that’s where you’re wrong. WRONG. Ha! There’s ANOTHER type of music everyone likes. Are you ready to hear what it is? Are you sitting down? Because it’s going to change everything about the way you see the world. It’s going to uplift you to a higher plane of intelligence, like at the end of your more nakedly intellectual science fiction films. You’re looking for music everyone can enjoy while they load up their carts with bleached paper products and ethnic foods deemed suitable for consumption by suburbanites? Well here it is, Sucka:

Wedding music. You know, the kind of music the DJ plays at the wedding.

Seriously. With the exception of your Arcade-Fire-listening hipster friends, who are assholes anyway, everybody loves wedding music. What troglodytic fun-phobe can’t get down to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout?” Who, other than deeply closeted Republican legislators and megachurch moralizers, can’t shake at least a portion of his ass to “YMCA?” What heartless terrorist motherfucker doesn’t like “Love Shack?” Tell me where he lives.

Think about this. Think about it the next time you’re in Ralph’s or Kroger or Giant or Shaw’s or Food Mammoth or whatever regional grocery chain exerts its chokehold on the local economy even as it sponsors its pee wee football teams. Think about what the greatest number of people would rather be listening to: The O’Jays’ “Love Train?” Or some post-”Summer of ‘69″ Bryan Adams song? Which will it be, sir? “Benny and the Jets?” Or Benny Mardones? “Lady Marmalade?” Or “Lady In Red?”

So I encourage you to call the site manager of your local corporate grocer, and demand that he pass your suggestion on to the regional manager. And demand that he inscribe this suggestion in his very day planner, until such time as he has the opportunity to bring it to the attention of whoever he reports to, I don’t know, maybe some kind of vice president or commissar or something. Demand that your voice be heard, lest you choose to relocate your food-gathering efforts to a competing big-box grocer, who will no doubt take your suggestion under advisement and perhaps forward a condensed version of your concerns on to someone with the power to maybe write a memo or something. Go! Go! Sally forth, my fawn-eyed apostles, and carry like a blinding torch that with which we will change this world! Go! Go! You have nothing to lose but the hopelessness that binds your wrists and your souls! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Tear down this world, that we may build a new one!

Also get me some Hot Pockets. I prefer the ham and cheese but if they’re all out I also like the pepperoni pizza.