Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes
by Sun Kil Moon

Richard Ramirez died today of natural causes. He got amped up on speed and broke into houses, bludgeoned people to death, wrote shit on their skin and left them. They finally got him and he went to San Quentin. His last murder was south of San Francisco. A guy named Peter Pan, from the town of San Mateo. The little girl in the tenderloin was his first, and in the laundry room he took a dollar from her fist. His last free days were at the Bristol Hotel. I was reading “Nightstalker” when I went and rang the bell. The doorman buzzed, said, “You’re just like them all.” He gave me a key and a black cat led me down the hall. I had a flight today from Boston to Cleveland. Got a death in the family, gotta do some grieving. Lost my baby cousin and it’s eating me up. And I’m achin’ real bad and I need a little love. Richard Ramirez died today of natural causes. These things mark time and make us pause and think about when we were kids, scared of taps on the window, what’s under the bed and what’s under the pillow. And the Jim Jones massacre got in our heads and the TV headlines, “Elvis Presley’s Dead”, and the Ayatollah Khomenei hostages and Ronald Reagan dodging bullets. One day I’m gonna stroll through the old neighborhood. Rick Stan’s my age, he still lives with his mom when he’s not in jail from menacing and stalking, writing bad checks and cocaine charges. Mark Denton had such a beautiful smile, always sat on the porch passing the time, and drinking a beer and smoking a pack until one day poor Mark had a heart attack. My friend Ben’s got a good job as an electrician, his sister married the pool shark Jim Evans. And my next door neighbors whom I love so, and they love me too, but they passed long ago. And if you walk just a few blocks down Stahl there’s a house that was the scariest of them all, a cute little palm with a sign “For Sale”. For those Sexton’s kids, life was Hell, and I’m telling the truth and if you don’t believe it, pick up Lowell Cauffiel’s “House of Secrets”. Had to fly from Cleveland to SFO. I got 3 months off until my next show. Gonna spend time with my girl, make a record this summer, fix my kitchen up and hire a plumber. The headlines change so rapidly. Today I came to the studio to work on something pretty, then I saw the news on James Gandolfini while I was eating ramen and drinking green tea. The “Sopranos” guy died at 51. That’s the same age as the guy who’s coming to play drums. I don’t like this getting older stuff, havin’ to pee 50 times a day is bad enough. I got a naggin’ prostate and I got a bad back, and when I fuck too much I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack. I woke up today, I saw the headlines, an airline crashed and 2 people died, and I’m at a barbecue in San Rafael, and everybody’s drunk and feelin’ pretty well. At 53 years Richard Ramirez died but in ‘83 he was very much alive. He was the scariest killer in the band. He had a pentagram in the center of his hand. And everybody remembers the paranoia when he stalked the suburbs of Southern California and everybody will remember where they were when they finally caught the Night Stalker. And I remember just where I was when Richard Ramirez died of natural causes.

 

“What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to a perfect garden and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand?  Ah, what then?”

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817

The Oatmeal Version of a Moist Harry Potter

1.  I seem to have become obsessed with eating oat and oat-related products.  It’s no big secret that I’ve been on a big oatmeal kick on and off for a few years now (although the kick has now been “on” for about 8 months and shows no signs of slowing) but I recently starting branching out into even bigger and better oat products.  I discovered Muesli and, in a trick almost nobody saw coming, I actually put it on my oatmeal.  I also eat it dry, right out of the bag.  In addition, I now buy granola, of all kinds.  I also have been known, like the sly fox I am, to put that on my oatmeal.  Then yesterday I found this new hot cereal, “brown rice farina hot cereal”, which my genius girlfriend immediately identified over the phone as being “basically a gluten-free form of Cream-of-Wheat”.  I haven’t had it yet, but it looks delicious, and I look forward to throwing some other form of grains on top of it.

2.  I have been playing an awful lot of this hip new app game, Trivia Crack (yeah, do I hate that it’s named after a crippling and deadly addictive drug?  I sure do), which is just a trivia game you can play with your friends.  It’s mostly horrible and is a huge time waster, but yes, it IS highly addictive.  Now, any time one plays a trivia game, one is bound to have complaints about the nature of the questions eventually.  Even the best version of Trivial Pursuit eventually shows a weakness of some kind.  But can I just say, I am sick to death of Harry Potter questions.  Seriously, I get it, it actually is a pretty big event in our culture.  One should have at least a small passing knowledge of Harry Potter.  But it seems as though this app wants us to have approximately one-eighth of our general knowledge of human beings to revolve around Harry Potter.  It’s kinda sorta a little enraging.

 

3.  How is it that every winter I refuse to acknowledge how badly I need to moisturize myself until winter is half over?  Granted, it wasn’t something I ever had to think about as a younger man, but now it’s pretty evident.  Sometime at the beginning of December I start to notice the skin on my arms getting ashy, and then a few weeks later some spots of my skin actually begin to hurt.  At this point, I know my skin has become dramatically dry and is in need of moisture, and yet I soldier on, taking long, hot showers–often two a day–and spending plenty of time outdoors.  I have plenty of lotion that I simply ignore.  Then, usually sometime mid-January, it gets to the point I can no longer ignore it, and I break down and just lotion the whole body up.  And EVERY YEAR, I just freakin’ love this.  It feel like a new man!  And every year, I say to myself, ‘Geez, why weren’t you doing this all along?  Next year, we’re gonna start moisturizing right away!’  And yet, here I am, having just moisturized for the first time last night.  It has seriously affected my whole day, in a positive way!  I feel incredible!

 

 

 

 

Stop Harshing My Groove

1.  Am I, potentially, the only person in America who said to themselves this morning, “Looks like it’s time to buy some more blank CDs!”?

2.  What do you think it would take to get this zany country of ours to do away with this whole “move the clocks back” thing?  Everyone hates it, and even those who have a full understanding of why we do it, even they don’t understand why we do it!  In a country that seems to be waking up from centuries of backward thinking (yay gay marriage! yay legal pot even though I don’t personally smoke it! yay even bigots hate Westboro Baptist!) you’d think we could find a way out of this dark-at-noon bullcrap.

3.  Those of you who are aware of the trend of men wearing fancy socks, I’d like to get your thoughts on it.  Part of me really wants to jump on that train and thinks it is very much me, and the other part of me thinks that is the opposite of me and that I should be very opposed to it.  And please, suggestions like you should do whatever you feel like are pretty pointless since I just told you I’m conflicted!

4.  I’m getting sick of dust.  I mean, when will dust just give up?  Aint nobody got time for that!

5.  Who knew there was an abandoned section of Asbury Park, New Jersey, that seems to border on “ghost town” status??? Not me, and I’ve freakin’ BEEN to Asbury Park!  Brian, why didn’t you ever tell me about this?  Geez Louise, this is right down my alley! (thanks to the lovely Karla for filling me in!)

6.  Boy howdy, do I ever freakin’ love the holidays.  I’ve blogged about this before, but I just don’t understand people’s hatred of the holiday’s “starting early”.  Oh, what’s that, you’d rather not begin feeling a kinship with your fellow man too early in the season?  Too soon for warm nostalgia, quality 50s music (that’s basically what our Christmas songs are, but mostly, as songs, they’re REALLY GOOD), eye-popping decorations, and a general air of joviality?  What is wrong with you people?? Stop harshing my groove.

Some Things I Like

Some things I like include, but are not limited to:

Dreams about dinosaurs.  Gel pens.  When fog actually rolls.  Itches you can scratch.  Falsetto.  Twine.  Cheesy films about the struggle for civil rights.  Pepperoni pizza.  A Prairie Home Companion.  Long, slow things that almost hurt.  Pointillist paintings.  My own long shadow dancing in front of me on dying summer afternoons.  Loud guitars.  White-out.  Bobbleheads.  Bubble baths in the dark.  My own horrible Jimmy Stewart impression.  Musty smell of books and basements.  Gallagher smashing watermelons.  The pop and hiss of old vinyl records, and the absence of the pop and hiss on new vinyl records.  Things that just barely tickle.  American cheese.  Cheddar cheese.  New socks.  Neil Young.  When lightning strikes again and again and again really fast but far away.  Plays by Luigi Pirandello.  Socially brazen stray cats.  Funiculars.  Regional history.  Keith Olberman. Those Easter Island statues.  Pandora Radio.  Russian nesting dolls.  Cola.  When pimples pop themselves.  Early Streisand films.  O Canada.  Major League Baseball’s National League rules.  Women wearing fingerless gloves, or who put their thumbs through self-made holes in their hoodie sleeves.  Also women who wear shower caps.  The charming and endearing music of Henry Mancini.  Cheese crackers.  The moment when you know you’re dreaming, but you’re still dreaming.  Lightning bugs.  Unexpectedly making a roomful of people laugh.  Backscratchers.  Dave Eggers.  French kissing.  A good game of hide-and-seek.  Hanging things on walls.  Sporks.  The New York Times.  Lava lamps.  Peeing when you had to pee so bad.  Those pull-down ladders that let you into crawl-space attics.  Polaroids.  Campfires.  Q-tips.  Shoe horns, although I’ve never used one.  Snuggies.  Drum solos.  Red Bull.  Sweating.  Owls.  Notebooks.  The WWII poetry of Randall Jarrell.  Text messages.  Blistex medicated lip ointment.  Umpires who scream every single strike call, all game long, and point emphatically.  Secondhand clothing.  Airplanes.  The Revolutionary War.  Summer, as hot as possible.  The United States Postal Service.  Protein shakes.  Riding my bike.  Skylines.  What people in the past thought the future was going to be like.  Kate Winslet.  The Appalachians.  Discover magazine.  Recently stained wood.  Looking up television commercials from my childhood on YouTube.  Coffee.  Those station wagons with wood paneling.  Anderson Cooper.  Pictures of my parents when they were children.  The Beatles.  Salt.  The Philadelphia concert venue The Electric Factory.  Hotel rooms, and showers in hotel rooms.  Cleveland.  The moment when you know they are bringing your food to the table.  Multi-colored thumb tacks.  The Philadelphia 76ers.  Brita filtered water.  80s movies about small, strange monsters.  When you can see the clouds overhead moving so fast, so fast.  Pennsylvania.  The free purple-ink pens that Planet Fitness gives out.  President Obama.  Flannel.  Escalators.  24 (the TV show).  Yogurt-covered pretzels.  “Boyshorts”.  Dueling pianos.  Postcards, both current and vintage.  The Johnstown Flood.  Big League Chew.  Those moments when you understand life is just life and enjoy a slice of peace.  Aaron Burr. Skinnydipping.  Hiking.  The moment the lights go down in a movie theater.   Black and white photography.  The ACLU.  Advil.  Instant mashed potatoes.  People playing instruments on the street for money.  The Golden Girls.  Pistachio-flavored anything.  The film scores of Hans Zimmer. Craft stores.  Meatloaf.  Roku.  The Philadelphia Inquirer.  Vermeer.  Putting lotion on my feet.  My mother’s lasagna.  The Erie Seawolves.  The ocean.  I’ve never been to the Cape of Good Hope, but I like it.    Netflix.  Elephants.  The Fourth of July.  Kitchen-cut green beans.  Snapchat.  Early-to-mid-90s Marvel Comics.  The Christmas music of Mariah Carey.  Ten minute naps.  Deep dark secrets.  Mall food courts.  Actually just malls in general.  FORA.tv.  Stoppage time.  Planned Parenthood.  Post-its.  Mirror Balls.  Women wearing anklets or makeup with glitter in it.  Amusement parks, even though I don’t ride rides.  Sundae bars.  Waking up four hours before your alarm is set to go off and contentedly drifting back to sleep.  Stretching.  The best poem I’ve ever read and imagine I ever will read, “Aubade” by Philip Larkin.  Sugar plums.  Newville, Pennsylvania, and its “Fountain Festival”.  The Mullica Hill Amish Farmer’s Market, of South Jersey. Gremlins, one and two.  Moments when I think I might have it all figured out.

Why don’t you get mail from me?

I enjoy sending mail.  Yes, physical mail, via the United States Postal Service.  Postcards, letters, little booklets or artsy fartsy projects I make.  It’s mostly pointless, meaningless nonsense, or rambling run-on sentences.  There’s just something I love about people I like or care about receiving something tangible from me, even if I’m not really saying much.  In this era of our culture, when all communication is electronic and all looks alike and is compressed and abbreviated and utilitarian, I get a kick out of harkening back to an older time, and connecting on a different level.

Over the years, I’ve built up a sizeable “mailing list” of freinds and family members who I mail these assorted missives to.  Looking over it, it comprises a fantastic cross-section of my life.  Folks from all eras of my past, as well as my present, and from a fantastic geographic array are represented.  So I ask you, dear reader, why the hell don’t you get mail from me?

It comes sporadically.  Sometimes you might get one piece of mail from me a year, sometimes two things in one week.  It depends very much upon my whimsy.  But if you’re reading this, chances are I wouldn’t mind sending you some thoughts or artistic claptrap occasionally.  You should probably give me your address.

Leave your address in the comments here (you don’t have to register to comment on this blog), or if you’re not comfortable with doing that, send me a Facebook message or e-mail me at sdellinger1978@gmail.com, or if you have my cell number you can text it to me.  I mean really, who doesn’t want mail?

 

I Told You So. Even Though You Didn’t Care Then, and You Don’t Care Now.

About two years ago, I posted this.

And now (in case you didn’t see this particular news snippet) this has happened.

More proof that the New York Times is better than your newspaper:  the lead-in to their article on the winners of the stupid-huge lottery thing that just happened:

“What is $640 million divided by three? More math than jackpot winners in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland will ever have to do again.”

 

From this week’s TIME magazine:

$25:  cost of purchasing Plan B., the morning-after pill, from a vending machine at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania;  it’s the only known such machine in the U.S.

OK, I thought it was cool when we made Saturday Night Live, but TIME magazine!  And last year, Carlisle High School was in TIME!  (remember, for having sheep mow their grass?)

Something someone said to me tonight, while the song “Love You Like a Love Song” by Selena Gomez was playing:

“Things I hate, in order:  1.  The devil.  2.  My ex.  3.  My ex’s new girlfriend.  4.  “Human Centipede“.  5.  This song.”

Reading the latest issue of TIME magazine, I was intrigued by an article about YouTube, and was so blown away by some of the stats (and some of the writing, which in a few sentences manages to encapsulate what would take me a paragraph; let’s hear it for journalists!) that I felt the need to share it here.  This is two small excerpts from an article by Lev Grossman:

For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.  You can turn that number over in your mind as much as you want; at no point will it stop being incredible.  Sixty hours every minute.  That’s five months of video every hour.  That’s ten years of video every day.  More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by the Big Three TV networks in the past 60 years. 

There’s never been an object like YouTube in human history.  It gets 4,000,000,000 page views a day, which adds up to 1,000,000,000,000—that’s a trillion—a year.  It has 800,000,000 users who watch 3,000,000,000 hours of video a month (that’s 340,000 years).  Human civilization now generates massive quantities of video footage simply as a by-product of it’s daily functioning, much as some industrial processes generate toxic slurry.  Before YouTube there was no central catchment for all that video; now it drains into a single reservoir, where we as a species can pan through it and wallow in it endlessly.

 

Mexico City video project

You may remember just a few posts ago, I had become enamored with the band Mexico City and had made a video for their song, “The River Followed Me”.  Well, I had so much damn fun making that video, and was so happy to be able to get the song out there for the rest of the world who may be looking for some of their music online, I have decided to make a video for each song on the band’s most recent album, Brown Bird.  (there is one previous album, Black Comedy, which I haven’t even heard yet).  I will make the videos in the order of their tracklisting on the album, each in no particular or set time frame.  They will be posted to my blog but not other places like Facebook.

Allow me, as I always do, to state that this project is in no way indicative of me thinking I have any skill as a filmmaker or anything of that sort.  I am certain the quality of the videos will do plenty to prove I am no Spielberg.  These exist only because I have a ton of fun doing them and my desire to get Mexico City a web presence.  Certainly, most of the videos will have pretentious airs, but that’s just who I am.  I am hilarious in person but I rarely create light-hearted art (or art-related projects).  So be it.

Although I would like to posit one caveat: I would very much like these videos to be better than they are.  For three distinct reasons, my visual subject matter is limited. These reasons are:  1.  My camera is very basic.  2. I have no video editing software. and 3. My closest non-work friend or relative lives 2 hours away.  These three factors prevent me from doing things like pulling my own focus, speeding up or slowing down the film, and having another human being in the shot doing what I tell them.  And so, because of these limitations, most of the videos will be of essentially what I am able to point my camera at, but even though this limits the ideas that come into my brain, I accept it as a challenge to make interesting videos nonetheless.  And anyway, it’s more about all of you being able to hear these really great rock songs.

I shall now “tease” you with the tracklisting.  I already have the video for the opening track, “I Raised an Empire” completed and I will be posting it shortly after this post.  In addition, I will be making another video for “The River Followed Me”, as the first one I made was essentially just slapped together.

Track list of Brown Bird:

1.  I Raised an Empire
2.  Baby, You’ve Changed
3.  Are You Spiritual?
4.  Ghetto
5.  Sometimes I Wonder
6.  Trick of the Light
7.  Damn Shame
8.  Apparition
9.  The River Followed Me
10.  You Aint Free
11.  I Had a Dream Last Night

I saw a UFO once.  I can eat a whole lot of plain white rice.  What’s with people pronouncing the “day” part of a day as “dee”—like “Mondee”?  I just can’t bring myself to dust things.  You can’t talk me out of taking multi-vitamins.  I’d spend the night with Barbara Walters.    Underrated:  Brazil nuts.  Sometimes I wish my middle name was Balthazar.  I probably couldn’t live without Q-tips.  The three camera sitcom is cool again, in my book.  I’ve never liked fancy bookmarks, which is unfortunate, as they are a frequent gift I recieve.  Is there a future for dry erase boards?  Stop telling me that women like gray hair; I’m not worried about that, I’m just not ready to die.  I’m pretty sure Pennsylvania is the best state in the union.  What the heck is seaweed?  Denim sucks.  I have Emily Osment’s autograph.  I love opossums.  I’ve always wanted to go tobogganing.  This weatherman needs to stop saying “washout”.  I love when women can rock a baseball cap.  I just keep buying Sharpie markers—you can’t stop me.  I’m really good at mopping floors.  I pretend to like “Office Space” more than I actually do.  What’s the deal with flat paint?  I want to learn how to fly a kite.  I’m a surprisngly good swimmer.  Oh, and I’m a fast as hell runner.  Just not a distance runner.  But you aren’t beating me at the 50 yards.  Nope, not even you.

The Tree of Life

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Overheard at work today:  one of my servers trying to offer a guest a top-off of coffee, accidentally combining the words “smidgen” and “pinch” and asking the guest if they’d like a pigeon of coffee.

Oh, ad execs.  Sigh.  “A phone to save us from our phones.”  Ahem.  Fuck you.

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

I’m glad Aaron Burr won that duel.

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

Robert DeNiro was never really that good.

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

I really like the idea of Communism.

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

Assisted suicide should be 100% legal.

What I keep finding very interesting—and I’m not sure what kind of interesting, but it’s interesting—is how in every article I’m reading about the nuclear crisis in Japan, you can practically hear the journalist trying so hard not to say “This could be almost as bad as those two times we nuked them.”

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

I like veal.

Thursday’s Controversial Opinion

The board game Monopoly is no damn fun.

For those who were at all intrigued by my dual free newspaper situation:  it got a little more interesting this morning.  I went down to get my paper, and there was only one there.  It did, however, seem awfully heavy.  Upon opening the bag, I discovered there was both a New York Times and an Erie Times News in the SAME BAG.

Today’s Oscar blurb:  my pick for Original Screenplay:  “Inception” by Christopher Nolan.

Today’s Oscar blurb:  my pick for Best Documentary feature:  “Exit Through the Gift Shop”.  All the nominees are excellent but I tire of war/ Africa/ atrocity docs.  Call me a heathen, but there was something very refreshing about a documentary about guerilla artwork.

Modest Mouse album titles, with Bill and Seth

Bill: “There is Nothing Daring About Winning”

Seth:  “Waking Up From the Coma Very Slowly and Then Immediately Getting Revenge”

Today’s Oscar blurb:  my pick for Supporting Actor from the men nominated:  John Hawkes for “Winter’s Bone”.

I’m going to once again sing the praises of the New York Times.  It really does make a difference what newspaper you read.  The NYT treats it’s articles like small pieces of literature.  I was just reading their review of the current season of “American Idol” (the article is written by Jon Caramanica) when I was blown away by this description of Steven Tyler—a description other media outlets would not have even bothered to attempt:

“Mr. Tyler’s face alone is worthy of a weekly show, loose skin slippery over a distant skeleton.  He’s a Claymation figure come to life, all elasticity and wrinkle.  He dresses like a shaman, a time-traveling dandy or a runaway hippie teen.  His grin is wide, like the Joker’s, and when he’s laughing, really he’s braying.”

Today’s Oscar blurb:  my pick for Best Actress from the women nominated:  Jennifer Lawrence for “Winter’s Bone”.