This Place Smells Like Shit: Pratice Space

Most civilians [read: ‘people with real goals’] aren’t familiar with the general maladies of rehearsal space availability and quality in this town, or any other for that matter (Denver being the only other town I’ve had practice spaces in). Bands in San Diego don’t have the option of using a basement like bands in Denver luckily do. Though the spaces in Denver were bigger, they were a lot more sketchy. The space(s) I used in Denver could have been used as locations for raves, paintball, fight clubs and as headquarters for serial killers and satanic book clubs. Dark and dingy and usually in really bad neighborhoods or formerly bad neighborhoods like Five Points (gentrification anyone?).

This is essentially a mash up of actual conversations and comments I’ve heard or uttered as a person who has been in bands – in essay form.

Guys, this place seriously smells like shit. Yeah. Human fecal matter. I’m not sure what it is about this place but every time I walk through the door I gag with every breath. Its disgusting. You’d think the property manager would at the very least take out the trash. Its full of puke and cases of empty beer bottles. There are more flies inside our 8×8 room than by the dumpster near the tattoo shop across the alley. That homeless guy doesn’t even ask us for change anymore. How is that possible?

It smells like someone murdered an Indian man (dot, not feather) stuffed him with curry and cabbage then hid him in the wall right next to the managers office.

Hey dude, beer me that flesh turd, we’ll use it to mask the carrion-anus scent wafting through the rap metal bands door. Wait. A flesh turd is a baby right? You guys are drunk…But a baby would smell better than this hallway.

We pay our rent on time (sort of) but then of course the motherfucking air conditioning has been broken for the entire summer. Man the heat and the flies.

Is this like what those kids in Schindlers List smelled when they hid in the latrine? I mean I know it was a movie but I’m talking about the real kids that that story was based on. This is like walking across the bridge to get to Revolution in Tijuana when your drunk from Boones farm and MD 20/20 from the trolley ride and you’re on the way to the donkey show and you get that San Diego river smell. You know – that is where you can actually ‘smell the border’ like some wine aficionado’s can smell what time of year the grapes of their wine were grown or whatever. But instead of autumn and grapes it smells like burnt fetus and the inside of a Taun Taun.

This place smells worse than Scolari’s when Cattle Decap plays with all those crust punks there.

There’s some B.O. from that fucking hippie band that practices down the hall. Someone smokes cigarettes in their fucking room. Patchuli and GPC cigarettes. Are we practicing in fucking Berkely or Boulder. What the fuck? No consideration at all.

There is that amazingly lame 90’s alternashit band. I swear those guys are smoking crystal meth in there. And how many times do they have to play that fucking song? Theres no way they’ll win that opening slot for Godsmack. That alternashit band plays for hours, drinking beer. So where does their girl bassplayer piss? I never see her come out of that room. That may explain the piss smell. Maybe they have a bucket in their room for pee pee and poo poo.

These shit eating rooms don’t even have ventilation. Someone should hang that troglodyte manager from razor wire and shoot his dick with a paintball gun and those paint balls should be filled with lime juice or something super painful.

There’s some ass in here too. Smells kind of like that dive bar ass. Like a lot of old men farting and sweating on cushioned seats, seats that absorb ass and chode sweat. Theres some rancid foot dipped in sick in here too. So I suppose this place doesn’t just smell like shit. It smells like a bunch of other things too. Wow!

Consumption Junction: The Cultural Significance of Britney’s Ass

I caught this post on Tech Crunch and in light of the hilarity of the 2007 VMA’s recently I thought it’d be appropriate to expound my opinion on a couple of things (btw, my opinion is awesome). I’ll first address the Arousal Industry’s latest blundervestment: making ringtones available on CD and selling them as ‘Ringle’s.’ If you haven’t followed the rapidly declining sales of the dinosaur-wearing-gucci-industry into the rabbit hole of failure you’ll know that these gentle giants and habitual employment curtailers are scrambling for the next best thing to supplement their bottom line. For that they have thought long and hard while on the toilet, squeezing out a seared ahi and quail egg champagne shit as the collective stone was passed from urethra, chinking on the porcelain, inspiring the latest money maker – The Ringle.

 

To the uninitiated or layperson, basically the ‘Ringle’ will, “contain three songs: one popular track, a remix, an older track from the same artist and a ringtone.” The distro method will be a “CD with a slip-sleeve cover.” If you’re smashing your balls with a meat tenderizer right now (or if you are a female, feel free to smash your nipple or equivalent in a desk drawer) in light of that news, well, you’ve been paying attention to the comings and goings of the music industry. If not, don’t despair. This can still be considered one of those ‘what the fuck’ moments. The first of those will be a single from recently re-celebritized Britney Spears, her song; “Gimme More” is already testing really well in the major markets. Sony and Universal are going to pump titles into the stream this fall and they’ll be available at your favorite wallet raping store. The propensity for continued revenue loss in the face of continued bad decision making isn’t as appalling as the fact they’re going to sell singles by CD. CD??? Or is Britney’s gunt more appealing packaged as a pitch corrected ringtone. I dunno.

 

Okay.

So now that your brain has come to a nice simmer and your eyes are bleeding a bit, drool slowly congealing somewhere on your shirt or blouse, hands limply at your sides, legs prostrate beneath you, a jolt of pop narcotic will bring you back. A shot to the jugular with a syringe full of excitement – a glass pipe filled with potent crystallized entertainment – a tincture of attention drawing, edge of your seat mayhem filled with blinking lights, celebrity and pageantry. For the kingdom of your brain we present the 2007 VMA’s. A nightmare ride into The Palms casino/hotel in Las Vegas for an amalgam of hyper stylized vampiric pop-lust orgy of coordinated chaos – presented by Chevrolet. That’s right. America’s car company. The company that brought you the Tahoe, and the tagline “An American Revolution.” AND John-fucking-Mellancamp leaning his jackboot on the fender of a truck while a montage of ‘life style images’ flood the screen. Look! Some sepia toned portraiture of African Americans that look doggedly low income smiling bravely for the high paid photographer, middle-American white folks ‘eating’ hot dogs, and team sports! Yes. Chevy has now taken it upon themselves to sell us cars by insinuating that this whole “save the world thing” is a punch line for some smog breathing fat cats with pockets full of cash.

 

Those genius marketers at MTV and Chevy teamed up for what they’re marketspeak calling a, “…Superserve Key 12-34 demographic with creative integration and multiplatform innovation campaign.” Essentially, they’ll use the power of their marketing muscle and advertising budget to sponsor something that MTV knows is well worth every penny for hooking new consumers. So they show a series of seemingly Eco-friendly spots. The spots are kinduh irreverent, edgy; MTV’s demo will totally jibe with this posish. (WOW 30MPG on highway! I can hear dolphins singing as baby seals swim in crystal clear water and unicorns shit rainbows).

 

This is part of MTV and Chevy’s “Break the Addiction” campaign, which sadly promotes the benefits of Flex Fuel or E85 and touts their continued development Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology. Want to know about E85? Click here.

 

MTV has always been the bane of my entertainment consumption. They’ve had some good shows and of course they used to play those dinosaurs of the entertainment dietary pyramid, THE MUSIC VIDEO but if the fact they’ve been dictating youth cultures taste in music doesn’t make you vomit your righteous indignation instantly, these commercials will. One example in particular is a scene of a young woman with dyed hair, fairy-winged, and glossy eyed. Hers is a character meant to exemplify some green friendly tree hugging marijuana addict blowing a tune into some plastic bottles strung together while a voice mockingly says something like “You can still save the environment without having to drive an ugly car you little sheep.”

 

And this brings me to Britney Spears ass. It has always been a shining example of slutty suburban chicks everywhere. Her ass is insignificant. Her music represents an industry’s reliance on tone corrected voices. It is robotic. She is ubiquitous. You could interchange her with Rhianna and only by ear you’d never know the difference. The reason she and Rhianna lip synced their shitty songs was because in the fantasy world MTV has made for viewers and the public, they’ve instituted a zero tolerance policy on imperfection. This is smoke and mirrors. It’s no wonder Viacom’s ad agency shares similar tactics as the US government’s agency that handles all of their “Be Army Strong” campaigns, or Chevy’s highly insidious and clever “Break the Addiction” campaign.

 

Britney Spears showed us all that you can sound like a robot, dance like a star in a giant production but if you gain just five pounds you can lose all credibility. She also showed the world our addiction to perfection through her socially imposed imperfections. Break the addiction of what? Oil? Bad performances and MTV? Soon we’ll see teen stars, weighing 90 lbs., chain smoking Marlboro Reds, eating a leaf of ice burg lettuce a day, while a Ringle from Mastodon plays “Holiday in Cambodia” on my sweet new iPhone. Chevy and British Petroleum will be champions of the Green movement and George Bush will go down in history as one of the most thoughtful presidents in history.

 

This isn’t science fiction.

 

This isn’t the future.

 

This is the perpetual “What the Fuck?”