The eclipse of the mind and the heart that occurs when one comes across Extra Long Twizzlers for the first time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Inner Child: OOOH, look at those!

Person Wearing Ball and Chain of Reality: Good grief, these.

IC: They’re as long as I am tall!

PWBCR: On the big list of Things I Need, I’m pretty sure “three pounds of extra long Twizzlers” doesn’t rank.

IC: I could tie them all together and throw them out the window and climb down and run away from home!

PWBCR: A package of strawberry licorice whose width occupies an entire shelf? Hats off to you, America.

IC: And once I’m on the ground, I’ll tug the whole thing down and attach a grappling hook to the end.

PWBCR: So how about some fucking fruits and vegetables?

IC: And I’ll shoot bad guys, pew pew pew!

PWBCR: Whatever, my prescription’s ready.

IC: Grab this rope and waterski behind the Kawasaki Om-Nom-Nom-a-tron 3000, where we’ll show you the best gingerbread mansions ever, the most drawn-out Lady and the Tramp reenactment ever, the most delicious hair extensions ever, and so much more!

PWBCR: Shut up dude the pharmacist thinks you’re weird.

IC: CAN I SIGN THE CREDIT CARD MACHINE?

PWBCR: Fine.

MEOW?

I don’t know if “the jig is up” is even an appropriate phrase to use here, it’s kind of one of those Jason Stathamisms I end up barfing out at all the wrong moments, but WHATEVER, it’s fucking happening:

Shoemaker Crocs widened its loss in the first quarter, sending shares plunging more than 20% in after-market trading.

During the quarter, the company recorded a loss of $22.4 million, or 27 cents a share.

Quickly now, moms; put all your terrible Crocs brand extension products on eBay while you still can! That includes the dog bed, the boots, the mary janes, the cell phone holder, the key chain, and the “garden kneeler” (whatever that is — doesn’t it look like it’s meant to hold two breast implants? Why would you ever want to do that?)

That is so much terrible.  How did we let this happen?  I’m already having this horrible image of Starvin Marvin & co. receiving a giant shipment of multicolored Crocs bullshit after the company goes bankrupt, and a bunch of I Love the Millenium people being all “Remember that? boing boing boing!”

There’s only one answer, and that’s to melt down all the Croc rubber-foam-eco-whatever, eliminate any evidence that such a phenomenon (or should I say, phe-mom-enon? No, I mustn’t) ever occurred, and remold it into a really big waterslide that dumps out in Tijuana.  Wouldn’t that be an exciting ride? I’m ready to accept pitches for VC funding, but you’ll have to get down on your last garden kneeler.

Do something stupid: Listen to this bullshit.

A spectre is haunting the American consciousness – the spectre of Asher Roth. All of the powers of old hip-hop have entered into a wretched alliance to promote this beast: XXL Magazine, MTV, and college DJs across the country. Two things emerge from this: One, that Asher Roth is considered an MC with legitimate skill, and two, that hip-hop heads should stamp their fear of whack MCs and reach out to promote this blonde-headed bellwether of eras to come.

In Cuba, there was one hip-hop Revolution, in the 1980s. It came to us in the form of breaking, which, like a child passing through several stages of growth to become a man, became a vehicle of expression and vigor. It was not at the behest of Imperialists and Capitalists that would make it commercial. American hip-hop, through collusion with Capitalism, lost its teeth, becoming a shark with no fins, a bird with no wings. The radicalism ideology that had infused it with such power became diluted by the bourgeoisie seeking to make a profit off such vitality. How do you talk to this bourgeoisie? Do you condemn its behavior? Do you pull your fingers into a fist to smash its existence? Or, is it less painful to let the transformation continue?

This transformation has culminated in the rise of Asher Roth. His victory of radio domination with the wretched retard babble of “I Love College” was not a causal event. It was not a matter of luck on his part. His victory over American culture was forged through the battle on moral decency. The fortune of his record label and the destiny of his ascension to the MTV Video Music Awards is not simply a matter of musical technique. It is clear that through his rhymes, Roth envisioned a complete destruction of the long-gone Revolution. Complex sentences and particular diction are gone, now replaced with drunken chants of “I LOVE DRINKING / EYYYYYYYYYY.” This vehicle of expression, now completely destroyed.

The Imperalists have never been morally bothered by murdering legit MCs. While fraternity brothers like Roth are allowed to succeed, other artists fail behind him. Of course, all artists are heathens, but some know how to make a beat ride. I would sooner enter a war with America then let someone like Dr. Dre play a concert on the shores of this country, but even I must admit that P-Funk sounds great. Roth’s music, on the contrary, has the sonic quality of a boar being stabbed in the throat with a ruby-encrusted sword. The song is a dogfight between abortions and date rape, a testament to the deafness of the typical American consumer. What is happening twenty years after the advent of Public Enemy? What are they thinking? Do they not thirst for revolution? Do they not want change? Of course not.

I have no influence over American culture and would never want to. I can only oversee the control of Cuba, and as such, I will never let Roth’s music be played here again. In this way, year after year, the number of Cubans which detest this music will be greater and greater. We, the revolutionaries, must always think of tomorrow. A tomorrow without Asher Roth.

THE WOZ gettin' Wozzy on a bitch

I may have been all huffy about teen/tween trends, but now I am a changed woman (sort of) and my sarcasm has washed away (sort of!) As it turns out, we don’t all have to live a lonely, awkwardly clueless life on planet Miley Cyrus — not when there’s this season of Dancing With the Stars.  I realize the show’s been around for a while, but this is the first season that’s really hit home for me, and it’s practically life-affirming in the face of shit like Tokio Hotel.

It didn’t dawn on me to tune in until I realized that the generational misunderstandings go both ways: it’s not just that I’m clued out on the tween hotness, it’s that they don’t get me either.  These days when I reminisce on my favorite childhood shows of yore, young kids have no idea what I’m talking about and I’m left twitching in frustration until I have an inevitable, explosive outburst, in which I violently sprout fifteen extra hands and speed-slap them all like I’m reading them a 3D flipbook about feeling pain.  I’ve had many a conversation with youngsters that have gone like this: “You mean to tell me you’ve never heard of Blossom?  But it’s Blossom, noob child! BLOSSOM! slllllapslapslapslapslapslap Ugh, where’s my pipe?”

All it takes is one interaction with children to reveal how little entertainment content you have in common — and that right there is the first hint that you might love Dancing With the Stars.  It boils down to this: the longer you’ve lived, the more TV you’ve watched.  The more TV you’ve watched, the more celebrity boom-and-busts and downward fame trajectories you’ve witnessed, and naturally, the higher the likelihood that you’ll recognize and fall back in love with one of the aged leftover sitcom/boy band/pro-sports/talk show downfallen that are so often spray tanned and packed into flamenco leotards for shows like this one.

And who would I want to see in a flamenco leotard more than Steve Wozniak? When the opening credits roll, I get the same tingly, ecstatic rush as when I arrive at Au Bon Pain just as they’re tossing the day’s ever-hardening muffins into clear plastic trash bags.  It’s like, cha-ching, relative jackpot! I could just wait in the alley until the bags have all been brought out and do a snow angel right here in these very muffins! We’ve all been there. Just look at this cast:

Lil Kim

Film credits seriously include: Juwanna Mann, Dr. Doolittle 2, She's All That, You Got Served, Moesha, oh, don't stop!

Steve-O

Steve nut-stapling O! They got a tux on this guy!

Shawn Johnson

While I think it's almost certainly unfair to allow a nubile 17-year old Olympic gymnast compete against entertainment has-beens in anything vaguely athletic, I can't help it, she's darling! And probably smokes less pot than that pesky no-gooder Michael Phelps. Not in my house! Stay away from my daughter! Wait, what?

Denise Richards

Have always wanted to touch the heinie.

Holly Madison

Ditto, whatever!

David Alan Grier

Chocolatey!*

*not racist because his show is called Chocolate News.  That was close!

STEEEEEVE WOZNIAAAAAAAAK (That’s the WWE announcer voice)

Multiple-simultaneo-gasthma-ttack! Did you know this guy wrote a book called iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon? I'm gonna download the Woz app for my iWoz! Woz > Fonz, am I right?

…aaaaand a few others I’m still too young to appreciate! All riiiiiight!

A Gentle Disclaimer: there are no trained actors in this video, so don’t get judgey.  Also, I’m aware that the smugface is among the most unflattering faces I’m physically capable of making, and similarly, I suspect Jeremy is aware that his smugface is not a far cry from his normal expression.  Anyway, don’t let that stop you; onwards!

Taintbrush presents: SMUGFACE from emmy blotnick on Vimeo.

What is it that makes these shoes so special, so intricate, so Wu-Tang?  I sat in on the board meeting to develop and market these sneakers back in 1999 when they were released, and the pitch was so persuasive Don Draper would’ve rolled himself into a giant blunt wrap and had himself express delivered to the Rza. 

It went like this:

Ghostface Killah: I wanna set one thing straight, everybody: The Wu-Tang brand is about subtlety and nuance.  It’s not just about getting crowds to beat the fuck out each other and yell “WU! TANG! WU! TANG!”
Miscellaneous Wu-Tang Members: WU! TANG! WU! TANG!
Ghostface: You see, it’s about keeping the mystery mysterious, like wearing fine lingerie under your business suit.
Misc. Wu-Tang Members: WU! Tang? (a singular stray punch echoes from the back of the room)
Ghostface: The Wu-Tang Dunk is about always having a little magic up your pant leg. (Ghostface takes off one shoe, uncaps a Sharpie marker and draws a small W on the outside heel) This is it, y’all.
Misc. Wu-Tang Members: Yo that’s tasteful.
Ghostface: I know.
Advertising guy: Well, we’ve never done anything like this before.  Who would you say is your target customer?
Ghostface: All those Sean Paul-lookin’ dudes that are always lining up outside unmarked garages at 9 AM in the rain.
Advertising guy: I think you’re really tapping into the right niche market here.
Ghostface: Meeting adjourned, everybody.  Go home and play with your vocoders.
Advertising guy: (calling after them on their way out the door) But wait, we didn’t settle on a price point!
Ghostface: (as the elevator door closes) FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS!
Ol’ Dirty Bastard: AND ONLY MAKE MY SIZE MOTHERFUCKER! 11 AND A HALF!
(Elevator door shuts.)

And so it was.  The five thousand dollar Wu Tang shoe, available only in mens’ size 11.5.  It should be noted that this year marks the sneakers’ tenth anniversary — drop out of college so you can afford your pair here.

So you’ve been drinking for like, TWO HOURS.  You’ve got a burning itch (not the burning itch) and you know it’s time to text a loved one, or maybe a former loved one if you’re desperately horny, or maybe Paul Janka if you’re feeling date-rape-victim-y.

The thing is, even at the most obnoxious and graceless nadir (zenith?) of drinking, you can still manage coherence in a text message.  Perhaps you’re the kind of drunk who can crap out enough focus and effort to get it right on your own, but more likely you’ve got autocorrect transforming your every word with its omnipotent fairy wand of spelling.

The blessing is that, hey, the beloved receiver will be able to read and understand what you’re saying! The curse is that, fuck, they’ll be able to read and understand what you’re saying, not to mention that you’ll both have written transcripts of your late-night caprice.  Whereas in a drunk dial the dialogue might get dismissed or forgotten, the drunk text confronts you like waking up spooning Janet Reno or seeing yourself in a Girls Gone Wild commercial.  Given that the impulse to fire off drunk texts is such a common one…

The question: Does the iPhone facilitate drunk texts?

Taintbrush investigates just how far can you stray from the letters of the word “drunk” before autocorrect stops working.

The answer: PRETTY FAR.

Evidence as follows:

Exhibit A: Really? Deunm?

Exhibit B: Gettin' drynj in the club.

Exhibit C: Too seunk to fuck.

Exhibit D: Get frunj, y'all

Exhibit E: Thrown in the drubj tank

The moral of the story, kids, is that the iPhone is an enabler! Proceed with caution.

What with y’all groanin’ about the economy so loud I can hear you from here in my dorm room writing chamber, it’s time I let you in on a little something.

Yes, the recession is disastrous, but often it feels like the answers are staring right at us.  Bitches and fellas, this answer is staring right at you  in 7-Eleven: AriZona Tallboys.

While it might not replace the thou’s you lost in Ford stock and Circuit City gift cards, these 99 cent, 24-ounce mega-cans will do double duty, saving you from both dehydration and poverty.  Also, you get the added burst of joy that comes with claiming something awesome before hipsters do.  When you’re clutching one of these bigguys, they’ll violently spasm with envy that even in the wake of Sparks they didn’t think of it first, and you’ll be like, “must those hipsters hipster-dance here?”

But forget about them, because you don’t need hipsters nearby to enjoy a ‘Zona.  A little known fact is that they come in a crap mound of flavors and span nearly every beverage taste imaginable; it’s like if the seats of the House of Representatives were filled by drinks, and justice.  To give you a taste (figuratively, unfortunately) of the versatility of AriZona tallboys, peep the flavor assortment pictured above.  The manufacturer may be known best for its iced tea, but Mount Rushmore be damned if that’s where a day’s work ends in the state of ‘Zona.  No, when they’re not coming up with new flavors, they’re building a new coliseum where tallboys are pillars!

That’s false, but I can’t emphasize enough how terrifically cost-efficient these drankrockets are.  For the price of a song on iTunes you can have three servings of fluid heaven!  And oh, my God, “fluid heaven” sounds like a nostalgic catchphrase about anonymous sex in the 70s!

In the last 24 hours I’ve dropped $7.96 trying different tallboys.  I want to be able to say I love them like my children and can’t pick a favorite, but just like in families with too many kids, that’s not true–the raspberry tea tastes like cleaning products, car air fresheners, and morons.  Other than that, you can’t go wrong!  Now go!  Imbibe!

To act as a DJ: to play, cut, mix, and blend recorded music.

Really, how better can you define what Girl Talk does?  What else do you call someone who doesn’t play any live instruments and makes their music from preexisting music?  This t-shirt is annoying on more levels than can be expressed on another t-shirt in block letters.  What is it about DJing that gives dudes such a sense of entitlement?  Approximately 95% of the time it’s a hobby, not carte blanche to act like a Cash Money Millionaire.

Greg Gillis apparently thinks he has surpassed the genre from which he was borne, as though there is some sacred ideology behind his laptop software.  It takes a pretty pompous, handjob-hungry dude to peddle something like this to his fans.  You’d think that with Stephen King likening him to Ulysses and Slate’s Jody Rosen comparing his style to Finnegan’s Wake he would feel critically justified enough to focus on something else, like using his groupies for practice at unhooking bras.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Night Ripper is fun as hell, and it’s telling that this t-shirt didn’t exist then.  This t-shirt was created in the wake of Feed the Animals, the album that made his novel recipe for “fun as hell” as straightforwardly available as Toll House cookies.   Shit got lazy, which is problematic given that The Ironic Mega-Mash-Up only ever had a split-second shelf life to begin with.

Behold the Girl Talk formula: black people words, white people music.  To systematically dilute rap with Journey and Pat Benetar minimizes the risk of discomfort and the need for effort on the listener’s part, like putting bumpers on a bowling lane.  The technique serves to neutralize racial lines and provide faux-access to the culture of rap and hip-hop, one that might otherwise seem intimidating or unappealing.  Repurposing that music into a smattering of friendly catchphrases cheapens it for everyone; it’s an instance of the DJ privileging his own objective over that of his source musicians, and so rarely is his objective worth the while.

Anyway, Mr. “I’m Not A DJ” DJ, I’ll calm down when you calm down.

Thom Yorke & Pitchfork Media engage in some role reversal.

Like most people in the real world but almost no one in the blogosphere, I don’t give a shit about Pitchfork Media.  They have solid news coverage but what else do you expect from a website that has pushed itself as the number one authority on the indie music scene over the last ten years?  Every band goes to them first, they get to choose what and what not to run, and every other website gets the runoff.  Of course they’re going to have interesting stories.  Like any website or publication, sometimes they have good reviews and sometimes they have bad reviews, blah blah blah, snoooooooore as music nerds bitch and moan about whether or not some record deserved to be in their Top 50.

Unforgivable, however, is their bias for some bands, like Radiohead and Animal Collective.  They’re a privately-owned company; of course they have the right to be as un-biased or biased as they want, but the Pitchfork guys seem to fall over themselves trying to clean Thom Yorke or Panda Bear’s testicles with their mouths.  This is not a new thing, or an occasional one; it happens all the fucking time.  For example, from their coverage of some new book coming out about Yorke:

Thom Yorke is one of the most important musicians in modern culture. His influence is vast. He deserves a legitimate, engrossing, authorized biography. Thom Yorke: Radiohead & Trading Solo is not that biography.

Way to be objective, you chump.  I get that Pitchfork’s edge as a website is that they inject humor into their news bits, but the article reads like a press release from the official Radiohead fan club (which is named Pitchforkmedia.com, har har har).

The nut guzzling continues when it comes to Animal Collective, a band so amazing that Pitchfork reviewers were already comparing other 2009 releases to Merriweather Post Pavillion a mere day after it was released (“while it’ll be surprising if we get a better record than Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009″ – amazing).  Check this interview with the band, in which amazingly hard-hitting questions were lobbed, one after another:

Is the new record “Merriweather”?

Whoops.  Oh, wait, here’s some hard-hitting journalism!

Having “Brother Sport” at the end really does snap you back into something. It’s not very typical to have a track of that quality closing it out, which, to me, is interesting.

Gulp gulp gulp.  If you read the interview, all of the questions are either horrible generic or not questions at all.  The interviews, as a result, are pretty much just glorified press releases: Questions designed to make the band talk about something obvious that they wanted to talk about anyways.  They’re meeting in the middle of the road with this boring Q&A bullshit, and the only way I can fathom anyone giving a crap is if they have Animal Collective’s name tattooed on their chest.

None of this compares to that infamous review of Radiohead’s Kid A, in which the writer compared the act of listening to the songs to getting blown by a magical unicorn.  However, making fun of that is like shooting retarded fish in a barrel, and I think the writer was fucking with us.  Still, I’d rather read Pitchfork’s attempt to troll music dorks then their attempt to be so smugly objective about such subjective things, like whether or not Thom Yorke is the messiah (for my money, he is not).  I wish they would try harder.