The Record Store Clerk is Dead! Long Live the Record Store Clerk!

Record stores are dying, and with them the record store clerk. Who else will make us feel like complete morons?

When the record store finally goes the way of the dinosaur, a pop culture cliché will go with it: the record store clerk, immortalized in the film High Fidelity. He is ugly. He is patronizing. And even though he earns only 8 bucks an hour, he makes us regret every decision we’ve ever made.

When the record store dies, who will fill this vital role in our society? Some possibilities:

Sushi Chefs

Sushi Chefs have hundreds of unwritten rules of behavior when you sit at the sushi bar- what to order, what to put wasabi on, what to put soy sauce on, how to drink saké. Ask for a fork and they laugh at you. Answer your phone and they look at you like you're a child molester.

And don't even think about substituting. "Can I get cucumber instead of guacamole?" If that look they’re giving you is familiar, it’s the same one you got when you bought an R.E.M. album at Amoeba.

iPod Genius Bar "geniuses"

First, they’ll keep you waiting for a half hour. Then they’ll ask you a hundred questions. Finally, they fix the problem. Instead of being gracious about it, they treat the problem as a personal deficiency of yours, like when you didn’t know that Nick Drake was in the folk section. The asshole at the counter just had to point out that you were only buying it cause you heard Pink Moon in that Volkswagon commercial.

(Note: the Mac geniuses, on the other hand, are quite helpful. They’re more like doctors, who keep you waiting but then save your life.)

That Long-Haired Asshole at Cinefile

I don’t know if that guy still works there, or if he’s the owner. Maybe he got a haircut, I haven’t been there since I moved to Hollywood. What an asshole that guy is. I mean, you’d think I’d get a little respect for renting films by Werner Herzog and Hal Ashby. But no. I’m just some dilettante who doesn’t know his Ozu from his Ozon. I thought the French guy’s name was Ozu, ok? It’s an easy mistake to make.

[Editor's Note: I once wanted to pick up a quick shot there for a no budget viral video thing. The dickhead manager at Cinefile actually wanted us to give him $100. Instead we went to Blockbuster, strode through the front with a camera, stole the shot, and walked out.]

Nickariah: You Too Can Have a Train Wreck Marriage of Convenience

Everyone loves a train wreck.

So, Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon are the latest celebrity sham marriage pairing a legit star (with issues) with a hanger-on seeking fame and fortune. Whitney and Bobby. Britney and Kevin. Tomkat. Kim Kardashian and everyone. If it weren't obvious from her perpetual doe eyes and grade school obsession with butterflies, Mariah needs Nick to fulfill her desire to feel young; while she fulfills his desire to have the paparazzi know who the hell he is.

I don't fault them, though. In fact, I think a lot more stars could benefit from such an arrangement:

Ian Ziering and Ellen Page: He needs people to know he's still alive. She needs people to think she's straight.

Haley Joel Osment and Jennifer Aniston: He needs her to revitalize his career. She needs him to not sleep with Angelina Jolie.

Haylie Duff and Owen Wilson: He needs her to prevent him from slitting his wrists. She needs him to make her nose look normal.

Pamela Anderson and George Clooney: She needs him to feel classy. He needs her to annul the marriage.

Tara Reid and Shia Labeouf: She needs him to clean up her image. He needs her to score him some blow.

Dustin Diamond and Natalie Portman: He needs her to comfort him at night when he wakes up in a cold sweat from the recurring nightmare of being sodomized by A.C. Slater. She needs him to make her feel less Jewish.

Bobby Brown and Eddie Murphy: Bobby needs Eddie's money for child support. Eddie just likes dicks.

Aaron Carter and Barbara Walters: He needs her for legitimacy. She needs marrow to stay alive.

Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus: Self-explanatory. Already in the works.

Judging a Book by Its Cover: Stori Telling by Tori Spelling

She isn’t fake. That’s just her hair and boobs.

First, do you get the joke? Stori Telling?

See, she changed the ‘Y’ in ‘STORY’ to an ‘I’, so that ‘STORY’ becomes ‘STORI’, just like her name. Get it? It sounds the same but now its got added meaning. I believe ‘wordplay’ is the technical name for it.

But wait, there’s more.

Tori bravely confesses that her boobs are fake. Fake! I was stunned. Still am. But get this: that’s just what we learn from the cover. You can only imagine how many other body parts she’ll admit are fake in the actual book.

Plus, she has enough good-judgment and common sense to show a little cleavage. Tori knows that nothing screams integrity quite like duct-taping your boobs together. Take note fellow lady writers: the best way to earn a reader’s trust and respect is to slap a photo of yourself on the cover with your rack pushed up to your chin.

And, she’s like, humble. She points out that the jewelry she wore to a red carpet event were loaners. See, she’s not mega rich. She’s just rich. Want to know why? It’s called “disinheritance”. Fascinating, huh? Well, I bet you can read all about this injustice in her memoir too.

The train doesn’t stop there. She also smartly scribbles these truths all over the cover with a giant pink marker. This alone tells me that her stories about summer camp in Malibu and her really fast metabolism are told with enormous depth and weight.

So if you’re having a craving for realiti (ha-ha), give Stori Telling a read. Tori is so fake, she’s real.

Your Half-Baked Tattoo Idea Will Not Fly With Your Grandkids

One day, you'll have to explain to your grandkids why you got the Tasmanian Devil inked on your calf.

Everyone with a tattoo has their bullshit reasons behind it; You always want to live by a religious philosophy you briefly learned about in your eastern cultures class, you want to honor that guy you spent a fateful spring break with, you want everyone to know you're hard to touch, hence the barbed wire on your bicep.

While none of us want to admit it, most of the mental preparation done before getting a tattoo is figuring out what you're going to say when people ask you what your ink symbolizes. You want to be deep. You want to be profound. You spend months crafting the beautiful soliloquy that will give insight to your masterful epidermal tapestry.

But most of us are dumb and only profound in the way that a Zach Braff movie is profound. Every tattoo explanation I've ever heard (including my own) comes off as a cover story for the real reason we get tattoos: they are awesome. You can philosophize all you want, but deep down we know that the reason we brave ridicule from our friends, lectures from our parents, and potential inker's remorse is so we can look cool in a tank top.

But few people will admit this is the case. Most stand proudly by their tattoos and their vague, cryptic, undertones. The trickiest part of this whole equation is that we're all getting older, and that one day we're going to have grandkids asking about the muddy purple spots on our forearms and lower backs.

Just take a second and imagine your own grandmother, just finishing setting the table for a delicious Thanksgiving feast, saying that she got Death tattooed on her shoulder blade because she always wants to remember that the Reaper's on her back, man. Now imagine your grandfather, sporting Bermuda shorts and an oxygen tank, saying he got this piece done on his chest because Fall Out Boy is "fucking awesome."

Hilarious right? Gaze into your future, American youth.

My iPhone Makes Me Cum

Yes, I love my iPhone. No, I don’t care that it doesn’t have ‘cut and paste’ or that I can’t “voice dial”. Okay, sure, cut and paste would be nice, but my iPhone does things that no other cutting and pasting smartphone can. My iPhone makes me cum.


Okay, so technically it has only made me cum once. But the fact of the matter is that my iPhone was responsible for bringing me to orgasm. How many people can say that about their lame ass BlackBerry? I don’t care if you have BBM and a tactile keyboard. I’ve got a sex toy in my pocket that plays 2000 of my favorite songs, oh and I can also use it to call my mom.

See my iPhone has iBrate, the 3rd party iPhone application that unleashes the vibrational power of the iPhone and turns into a sleek $399 pocket rocket with data roaming (or $599 if you were an early sucker, I mean adapter, like myself.).

Yes, you have to “hack” your iPhone in order to add iBrate, and yes, Apple says this will void your warranty, but that just makes it all the more dangerous and exciting. The iPhone isn’t just a pocket rocket; it’s a lawless h4x0r love machine!

For almost six months I had iBrate on my iPhone, but I never used it except to show my friends “look what my iPhone can do!” Then, one night, stranded out of state without a Rabbit or a date, I consummated my relationship with my iPhone.

Like many first times with a lover, it was a bit awkward and it took a little longer than normal. The iPhone isn’t really the best shape for a vibrator and its actual vibes aren’t very powerful. But in a jam, it worked and eventually I got off.

So stop hating the iPhone. You’re just mad because your fingers are too fat for the keyboard. Oh, and my iPhone has been places your fat BBMing fingers will never go. Vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv. Ohhhhh yeaaaaaahhhhhh.

Trailer Trash: Mama Mia!

Movies with an exclamation point in the title are always good except for Moulin Rouge! Oklahoma! Oliver! And Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

This trailer came on in the theater when I was seeing that George Clooney football movie, and thirty seconds in I was seized with an urge to light myself on fire in order to dull the pain. But I was on a date and thought it might send the wrong message.

Meryl Streep's daughter (the kind-of-hot daughter from Big Love) is getting married. The bride-to-be doesn't know who her father is because Streep was fucking three guys at once: the second to last James Bond, the neurotic British guy that's not Hugh Grant, and the gay professor from Good Will Hunting. For some reason, they’re all British, except for maybe the Good Will Hunting guy, who I guess is European or something (who am I, Rand McNally?) In order to figure out who the real father is, the three gents are invited to the wedding in order to participate in a horrible train wreck of homosexuality.

Not only is Mama Mia a musical, but it’s a musical based on the music of ABBA, making this the gayest movie since El Paso Wrecking Corp. I thought we had all gotten together and decided that disco music was a big mistake and should be stricken from the public consciousness, like Minimalism and Abu Ghraib.

From the looks of the trailer, Mama Mia! appears to be 70% dancing, 20% wise cracks about what a slut Meryl Streep’s character used to be, and 10% of these two ancient British women gasping or doing something else British. Oh, and I guess there’s bound to be a lot of singing too, but they don’t show that in this trailer probably because they want people to actually go see this thing. Smart guys, these trailer people.

(Oh wait, there’s a new trailer of them singing here. I can’t watch the whole thing, it’s too painful).

I know that I'm not exactly the target audience here, but c'mon, couldn't the filmmakers have thrown my demographic (straight males- there are quite a few of us!) a bone here? Besides the daughter from Big Love? Couldn’t second-to-last James Bond get into a karate fight with the groom, or shoot someone in the head? Something? Anything?

The Most Generous Guy in Town

Or what would Jesus do if he made way too much money producing bad TV...

So I was invited to dinner at the Palm with a guy who may or may not produce this pilot I wrote which may or may not ever get made. We were to “meet” with this huge TV producer whose name I won’t reveal on the off chance I ever get anything approximating a career. He brought his son, or as I will now refer to him “the luckiest-graced-by-birth-no-talent-son-of-a-bitch on the planet or ‘TLGBBNTSOAB’” for short.

Huge TV Producer held court, “The thing is, and it doesn’t make any sense to buy a Gulfstream (for the uninitiated, The Gulfstream 450 carries 8 passengers and 3 crew and has a maximum range of 4,350 nm. A 2009 will cost you about 44 million). See, unless you plan to fly at least 350 hours a year you’re better off renting. Then it’s only like $5700.00 an hour plus whatever added expenses. That’s why I ended up selling mine.”

The conversation moved onto politics of course. I’ve always suspected that Hollywood was full of closet Republicans. Guys who publicly support the Democrat du joir but once inside the voting booth, it’s all about whichever Republican will protect their cash. Though Huge TV Producer drives a Lexus Hybrid and was flawless in his blowhard rendition of the entire lexicon of liberal talking points, something was off. “It’s time for Hillary to admit that she lost the nomination two months ago. Don’t get me wrong; I gave her money-” TLGBBNTSOAB chimed in, “I thought you gave Obama money…” “Yeah, him too…”

The check arrived: $627.00. That’s $73.00 more than an Indonesian factory worker earns in a year. As we headed out, a homeless man stood just outside the door. He spoke directly to us, “please can I get a little change? I haven’t eaten in a while.” I gave him all the change in my pocket. Walking away, I turned to see Huge TV Producer as he strolled right by Mr. Homeless, big smile on his face…just the nicest guy in the world.

How to Really Tell if I'm Human

The uncrackable CAPTCHAs.

So, depending on how close you have your supple finger to the clammy, trembling pulse of the internet nerd community, you may have heard that a couple of months back a group of enterprising young anti-societals finally cracked Gmail's CAPTCHA system. CAPTCHAs are those squiggly little sets of letters and numbers that usually appear whenever you’re doing something like registering an e-mail account or so much as considering logging onto Myspace. They’re supposed to help websites tell the tax-paying, air-breathing human beings from the bloodless, hulking towers of metal and circuits that spew ads for “Ulltra no-risK Roy@l N1gerian C0k pi11s” 24 hours a day without rest or surrender.

The idea is that the nightmare machines shouldn’t be able to read the letters and numbers (because of all the squiggles) while the humans should. But here’s the problem: letters and numbers are a computer’s whole thing. Expecting them not to figure these things out someday is like tying Lindsay Lohan up in a room alone with an oil drum full of blow and expecting her not to eventually gnaw through the ropes.

We don’t win by trying to beat the computers on their own turf. We win by playing the right game: by engaging them on subjects that no computer has any idea about, but any live human being knows almost instinctually. Here’s what I mean:

Click the items that a person might "hit":


Click only on Michael Jackson's self-image:


Click the items that would pump up the average bro:
Click only the "cool" animals:

William Morris Will Pass

But not more than twice.

Not too long ago my girlfriend and I met one of her old high school friends, Dick Hamb, at a Starbucks in Santa Monica. They both had a smattering of mutual friends back in the day, so now that he’s an assistant agent (this is comparable to a penile extension, minus the aesthetic benefits) at William Morris, it seemed like a good idea to hand my director’s reel off to him.

Yesterday’s good ideas are today’s smegma infections.

Let’s bump back about six years in time. I was a soon-to-be college graduate, and my first attempt at depth and profundity, a one act stiflingly titled, “Waiting to be Exiled”, had just run at the American Collegiate Theater Festival – better known as, The One Week Drinking Binge at a Hotel in Bellingham, Washington for Theater Shits. A recognized playwright saw my play and we struck up a friendship. Over the next few weeks I rewrote the crap out of that pile of crap in the hopes of fame and riches not known to playwrights since David Mamet first wrote the word "Fuck."

The play, along with other stuff, wound up in the hands of a penile extension at William Morris, Max Roman. He promptly read and/or discarded what was my life’s work and proceeded to never get back to me with so much as a verbal shrug.

Fast-forward to present day. Dick calls me up to say that my stuff is good and blah, blah, blah. He says that I haven’t quite figured out what kind of a director I am yet, and that this is exactly where I should be in my career right now. He says that “making it” in this industry is like running a marathon, which I guess is supposed to be both inspiring and admonishing. I restrain myself from suggesting to this 23 year-old assistant to a piece of shit that he ought to run a few laps before waxing philosophic on my ass about marathons.

As for William Morris: Reject me once, shame on me. Reject me twice, um, uh…you’ll never reject me again.

This Woman's Take on Sex and the City

There are a ton of things I do not understand about popular culture and Sex and the City is one of them.

For all I can tell, it’s about a horse-faced hag that has problems with men, but her consolation prize is she has some pretty chic, if not bizarre, outfits to prance around in NYC regardless of the fact no writer can afford $3000 Marc Jacobs cocktail dresses. I do not care about this stupid show (and now movie, I'm sure a comic book or Saturday morning cartoon is on its way) because I’m not its intended demographic. It is marketed to boring housewives who are trying to live through other women over thirty-five who’re not stuck with the social-life-suicide known as marriage.

I want to try and like the show, but it’s hard when the biggest advocate has been my 60-year-old married aunt who says things like, “This is the best show of my life.” Uh, sorry, but I know for sure there have been better shows in the last sixty-years. And I bet not many of them were centered around a woman so repulsive that there’s a website dedicated to how she looks like a horse. Which brings me to the first reason this show ever became a hit. Sarah Jessica Parker is hideous in a way that makes it easy for women to think to themselves, "I am just as, if not more, attractive than this chick."

Although Sex and the City didn’t invent the “Cougar,” it has made it socially acceptable. Way to go mom, make sure you bring condoms to the bar with you. Fucking gross. I am not sure when the memo stopped being passed around, but the oldest you can get away with being a slut and not turn into an automatic tragedy is thirty-two tops. Thanks to Sex and the City, recently divorced soccer moms everywhere now feel it is their God given right to invade bars with their sagging tits and faces so tight and expressionless, you might as well be banging a mannequin.

I guess you could make the argument that I’m being hypocritical considering I’ve been known to partake in shameless after-hour activities akin to the likes of these characters. All I’ve got to say is that I am sure your mom, as well as mine, are also going to watch this film and having one night stands with strangers is the last thing I ever want to have in common with them. This is one movie I (and hopefully my mother) will never see.