..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Sunday, April 18, 2004

“In the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
- fortune cookie (or was it Bazooka Joe?)

"Anyone can be a non-drunk. Being a drunk takes endurance."
- Barfly


so what the fuck happened with the second "Kill Bill" movie? if you haven’t seen it i’m going to ruin stuff right now so skip down a paragraph or two if you have to:

first off, is it just me or did she NOT KILL ANYONE IN THIS MOVIE?

Bud gets bitten by a snake (yawn), Elle gets her other eye snatched and squished between some toes (very cool) and left in the corner to think about her evil ways...and Bill? well, he gets dealt the “Five-Fingered Exploding Heart Technique” otherwise known as....“A Quiet Nap In The Grass.”

i have never in my life been so disappointed by a set-up like that. when they first mentioned the possibility of the Exploding Heart i sat back up thinking “you better show that shit” and i figured Tarantino would because he finally showed how a main character loses an eye, instead of just using an eye-patch on a character to make them look cool
("Escape From New York" and "Escape From LA" are the biggest culprits, there is NO excuse for Carpenter not to have at least told a story about how Snake lost his eye, he had two goddamn movie to think of something...anything) so i thought sweet, we’ll see something explode like “Fist of the North Star!” (dude walks away, hero says, "sorry you're already dead!” SPLOOOSH!) but nooooo. instead we have the “Five Fingered Gentle Sleepy Time Technique.” what the fuck? i already put up with Bill slowly making sandwiches (???), talking about goldfish funerals (??????) and more lame comic book crap, so i thought there had to be some kind of decent payoff coming, right? right? nope. and c’mon, are we really supposed to believe that Bill reads Spiderman, Superman and Batman comics? i used to think the most idiotic use of Tarantino dialogue was in “Crimson Tide” when poor Denzel Washington was forced to blather on about Star Trek and the Silver Surfer while dealing with a Russian sub attack on the brink of WWIII:

“Sir, we are at Def-con 2.”
“Beam me up Scotty!”
“What?’
“Nothing. What the situation?”
“Sir, two torpedoes in the water.”
“Okay, i’m Spiderman and you’re kryptonite, now shoot some gamma rays into that radio
and get us back in the ball game Scotty!”
“Sir, i don’t understand....”
“Goddammit boy! you ever hear the saying “what would Jesus do?” well, i’m asking
you, what would Batman do! get it done!”
“Uhhh, what?”
“Never mind. Float the buoy...”

actually, the comic book references were more intrusive than that. same thing with this one. and if Tarantino is really such a comic book fan, why does he read only the shit ones? that’s like saying your a music fan but only if it’s on Billboard’s top 10. and i just heard that he’s working on a part 3 and 4 or whatever. he says it’s going to be like his "Fistfull of Dollars trilogy? troubling. it’s like what happened to Stephen King and that Dark Tower bullshit. now everything he does has to be part of this long complicated mythology and we’ll never get a decent self-sustaining movie out of him again. i don’t know. there was some good stuff i guess. since he asked for it, here’s a “Fistfull of Dollars” type synopsis:

The Good:
-the eyeball
-Michael Madsen (although the only reason he was such a sorry bastard was because that fat Elvis looking motherfucker wasn’t going to do a single weekend of sword training for this flick. did anyone believe it for a minute when they hinted that he was a master swordsman back in the day? no wonder he slipped on a banana peel and died to avoid a silly looking fight. wait, i’m sorry, he got bit by a snake)
-that punching practice (although you can also see it in Karate Kid 3)
-the escape from the coffin
-the 70s kung fu music
-the trailer fight with the chick from Splash
-uhhh, the eyeball...

The Bad:
-Bill making sandwiches
-Bill cutting the crusts off the sandwiches
-Bill playing with toy guns
-Bill talking about comic books (i swear, when he started babbling about “truth serums” i thought he was going to start talking about Wonder Woman’s magic truth lasso)
-Bill telling the goldfish story over the course of about a half hour (i felt like i spent a week with that drowsy bastard)
-Bill waiting for her to put the kid to bed
-Bill doing dishes
-Bill baking a cake
-Bill cutting one of those construction paper snowflakes
-Bill drawing a turkey with the outline of his hand
-Bill running down to Home Depot for some shower curtain rings
-Bill deciding not to hit Bed Bath and Beyond because there’s “not enough time.”
-Bill not fighting for shit
-Bill curling up in the grass to die in his sleep after being hit with the “Slow Motion Snooze of Death Technique”
-that spooky little girl (did she give anyone else the creeps when she said “mommy?” i thought the little girl in the Bad Seed seemed for sincere)
-the hundredth time they said “Hanzo Sword,”
-the day at work i spent with Bud (okay he got fired, and he cleans up shit. and then a dog pissed on his leg, then a car hit a mud puddle and got his all wet etc. etc. okay we get it, he’s a loser) but hey, at least spending the day with him was some time spent away from Bill.

The Ugly:
-the bitch with the freaky lip. what the fuck was that?

anyway, i’ll still probably buy “Kill Bill (With Kindness)” once they edit it back together. hopefully all the Bill stuff will be in the middle and the fighting will be at the end. you never know. chronologically Pulp Fiction ended in the middle too. so maybe there’s hope? yeah right, the collector’s edition will just have more Bill. it’ll be called Special Edition: “Kill Bill: Maximum Bill! Learn To Make Bill’s Favorite Cookie!” and i’ll still waste my money and buy it.

hey, off topic but what's up with all the virgins in Pittsburgh? i'm talking about the dudes?!? i've never met, or heard tales about so many twenty (even thirty) something virgins in my life. what's going on around here? hell, by the time you're twenty you could have tripped and stuck your dick in something. c'mon my brothers! move here! we can rule this tiny planet! or, to use an allegory that Tarantino would understand, it's like that Star Trek episode where there's those tiny people that build a statue of the spacemen, and the one gets drunk with power and smashes their city like he's Godzilla (or Calvin and Hobbs). i'd smash a tiny city so fast, i wouldn't even have that long space-madness breakdown. i'd do it the first day, making Godzilla noises the whole time. wait, maybe that was a Twilight Zone episode.

speaking of wasting money on "Kill Bill Collectorzzzzzzzzzzzzz Edition," listen to how stupid i am...i bought the new Limp Bizkit cd because the radio won't touch it and i needed to hear what was so awful that even those lunkhead Durst fans have abandoned him. the horrible reviews got me thinking that it might be good or interesting in a car wreck/end-of-a-band sort of way and boy was i wrong. sounds like Creed. look at how nice it flies out my window though. whee!

however, i also got a new Kottonmouth Kings cd to ease the pain. i'm all about the rap/rock meathead bullshit right now. must be the warm weather. i have no excuse, i’ve never pretended to have good taste in music. anyone can listen to “good” music. bad music, however, takes endurance. steve, you out there? okay you don't like Boy Hits Car but i would HIGHLY recommend Kottenmouth King's “High Society.” it's everything that Limp Dizkit and every other rock-rap group should have been doing. the rapper that you hated (Saint) the one that you said “sounded like he had a mouthful of mashed potatoes," is gone and there's still like nine of them left. they’re like the Slipknot of rap, it's fucking great. and they ramble on about what white dickheads should be rapping about, like, what they find in their couch. Instead of trying to be all hard. just like white boys singing the blues had better be singing about the shitty score they just got on the SAT instead of "The Man."

::: david - 3:44 PM [+] :::
...

"Keep your earplugs handy, the constant collective moan of the undead, a sound that will persist at all hours for as long as the siege continues, can be a deadly form of psychological warfare."
- The Zombie Survival Guide

my cat is a chip off the old block. check him out.

he can't get enough of those car chases. just like his old man.

watched "21 Grams" just now. all the heart talk makes me uneasy, considering the the fact that the images from the MRI showed that i don't have one.

hey Moscow! you get my package yet? hope you didn't already have that cd. if you do, maybe you can trade it for some cigarettes. wait, that's prison. you aren't in prison. are you? see you on leave bro.

i was talking to a friend who's baby had the hiccups today. watching the babies faces between spasms we wondered if maybe the baby was forming all sorts of complex thoughts and ideas and the hiccups were distracting her from realizing some deep truths (or at least what a baby might regard as a deep truth). it's like that story "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut where there's those bells and buzzers in your head to distract you if you're smarter than everyone else because they need everyone to be equal. and if you're stronger, you'll have to carry around these weights to slow you down. of course these things just make you stronger and that insures an uplifting surprise ending right? wrong. read it, it's only like three pages tops. it'll make you hate people, but in a good, creative way.

am i growing up or what? i eagerly purchased the new Korn, Cypress Hill and Slipknot albums and i can never remember to listen to them. it's depressing but maybe i just can't go back. what the fuck am i supposed to listen to then? blues? jazz? classical? it seems like just yesterday i was in a loud conversation defending my shitty taste in music with:

"they got THREE drummers duuuuuuuude!"

and this was interesting. i got an email from someone who wanted advice about actual spiderbites. sweet. i always wanted to be ahead of actual spiderbites links on search engines but to mistaken for one? hell yeah. that's some sort of accomplishment right? right? here it is:

"hello, a couple of weeks ago I believe I was bitten by a house spider. after the bite the skin area that was bitten turned into a bruised area and a punture wound later. I felt the area numb (?) and I would scratch but no sensation. later the area was not only numb but now I felt pain such as a burning and very sensitive to touch... I am curious to know if this was due to a spider bite. My daughter had one bite on her stomach, later bruised and pain occuring. Have you heard of this?"

-Isabel

my response:

Isabel,

"These injuries were not from a spider. your daughter bit you. maybe while you were sleeping. then she bit herself, i think. be nicer to her."

-djk

::: david - 11:01 PM [+] :::
...

“You don’t exist when I don’t see you.”
- Sisters of Mercy - "I Don't Exist When You Don't See Me" (The Bucketmen remake)

watched a girl rescue a worm from a parking lot.

that was a good day.

saw a teenager spit on the ground about five feet in front of me when i walked past. that was a bad day. i spend about half of every day imagining myself throwing people up against the nearest wall with my hand around their necks.

just bought "21 Grams" and i’ll be watching it tonight. pumped since this dude’s first movie "Dog Love!" is tied with "Fight Club" as my favorite movie of all time. ("Here's to Ben!" - Blue Velvet)

hey, anyone that needs a book recommendation, check out “Pastoralia” (i think that’s how you spell it) by George Saunders. holy fuck was that first story funny. anyone that likes Sedaris will eat this shit up. i promise you. you’ll put mustard on it and eat it up. i hadn’t laughed out loud since “Naked” and i laughed more than a few times during this. plus there’s some serious stuff in it too, for the college types out there that need that kind of thing.

earlier i was listening to someone quote a movie and i was reminded how tragic it is when someone doesn’t recognize the dangers of over-quoting. or even under-quoting. this guy was just going on and on and on and on, and he was picking lines that weren’t that funny, just obviously easy to remember. so i think i need to come up with some rules:

1.) when you quote, you should only be saying ONE character's lines. you should never quote both sides of a conversation because then you might make that cringe-worthy move of trying to change your voice so they recognize the other character. just don’t do it. if it’s a quote that doesn’t make much sense without the entire conversation, then you just have to be on your game and wait for key words from the movie's conversation to pop up then BAM! you throw down your quote and look like the most movie-savvy motherfucker there ever was and no one needs to know that you waited all week to bust out those lines. example:

all sly, you let your phone ring for six hours until someone finally wanders over...

co-worker: “phone’s ringing dude.”
you (whipping out the Lebowski quote like a veteran gunslinger): “Yes, thank you Donnie!”
and they never suspect that you’ve been waiting to say it all day. slam dunk when you time it just right.

2.) don’t make the quote too short. because then nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about. example:

Easter dinner, your grandmother walks in the room and something about the scene (the lights, the music, the band-aid on her head) reminds you of the part in "Pulp Fiction" when Bruce Willis enters the bar. you can’t help but exclaim:

“My nigga!”

and you quickly discover that, out of context (maybe even in context), racial slurs are almost always a mistake.

3.) when you quote a movie, make sure it’s from a movie the other person knows, or right afterwards you’ll end up mumbling “uhhh, you know, from that scene when the dude shits out the quarter? you never saw that?”

this will effectively steal your thunder. it’s kinda like knocking over the register and quitting your job all dramatic, then realizing that you have to wait an hour for a ride home. embarrassing for everyone involved.

at work we had way too much down time and we started rambling on like a goddamn Kevin Smith movie. i introduced my theory (or was it Schroedinger’s?) that none of them existed until i looked at them. then, when i drove away at the end of the night, they just blinked off like one of those scenes where they show a blackout sweeping through the city. could happen. hey, i still haven’t been proven wrong. one dude tried to explain that the things behind me could NOT cease to exist every time i turned around because he would notice this just by looking over my shoulder. and i sighed and slowly explained that it was like those videogames where things blink into existence every time you get closer. and they don’t know they’re stuck in a game. see what i’m saying? me neither. ("can you kick this fork into my head please" - Threesome)

you know what? i can’t believe that they didn’t stumble upon the only sure-fire way to prove me wrong. it’s easy. the old gag where someone gets down on all fours behind you and the person in front of you shoves you over their back.

just thought of something. maybe i have been proven wrong. because, when i wasn’t on this site, some of you were still here. thank you.

::: david - 12:12 AM [+] :::
...

“I hates fucking rabbits! Look at his little faggot bunny ears! Check his pockets...”
- Gummo

“You know why a dog licks his own balls?”
“Because he can?”
“No, because, have you ever tasted a dog’s balls? They’re delicious!”
- Poor White Trash

happy Easter. apparently, out here in Pittsburgh, some Church set up an Easter egg hunt and had a dude ride in on a Harley dressed in a bunny suit and the adults acted like they were beating the shit out of him with nerf baseball bats or some shit so that they could show the kids that Easter is all about Jesus and that the Easter Bunny don’t exist. hmm. i think there's a moral to that story. it reminds me of a Cypress Hill song:

“How I Could Just Kill a Man!”

seriously, if you could kill one self-righteous fuck, and know for sure that you’d get away with it, wouldn’t you just have to do it? how about a whole Church load of them? imagine mowing down a whole field full of screeching zealots swinging nerf baseball bats at a motorcycle riding man-rabbit. actually, just add some 70s music and i have that dream every night.

oh shit, i forgot to talk about my Nemesis and Arch-enemy! and i kind of forget that Esquire article at this point. well, i’d have to say that my arch-enemy is that prick that broke my nose (and my arm) when i wasn’t looking and taught me the all-important lesson of the suckerpunch. here’s to him! i’d put his head through something if he was around but i'd still thank him for successfully getting me through every violent encounter with every drunk asshole since then.

drunk asshole: “what the fuck are you looking at!”
me: (squinting and looking past him at something in the distance): “huh? sorry, i just can’t believe that girl is doing that with all these people....”
(dumbshit turns to look)
POW.
me (running out the door): “Scooby Doo!”

so yeah, he’s my nemesis because (i’m remembering more of that article now) i wouldn’t want him to NOT exist. and if he was going to be killed, i’d have to save his life. the world is more interesting with him in it to hate. or something.

now the arch-enemy is a different story. you want that fucker to pay for his idiocy and crimes against humanity every single minute or every single day. and i guess my arch-enemy was named Doug. he was the brother of a good friend when i was growing up and he was a complete fuck. this douchebag was always challenging me to some kind of physical contest (keep in mind that he was like 3 years older. at least) and i would school him every time. when it came to Doug i was like the opening credits of the Six Million Dollar Man (“stronger, faster, smarter”) but he wouldn’t shut his fucking hole. i would hand his ass to him at every turn but, for some reason, my friend, who could recognize any other evil in the world in zero point two seconds, thought his big brother Doug was the fucking MAN. he would defend him no matter what moronic observation flew from his mouth, and he would pout whenever i would explain that leaving a pubic hair in the fridge to see if it would keep growing was a stupid thing to do. actually, now that i think about it, Doug’s pubic hair experiment might have been his finest moment. a few instances stand out in my mind:

once he shoved one of my other friends through a screen door for getting cookie crumbs on the floor, then laughed about it with his friends. once he was listening to Bob Seger “Main Street” at a skull-crushing volume and i told him to turn it down and he came over and started talking shit so i shoved him backwards over a reclining chair and he pulled the curtains off the wall. ha ha. once he tried to show us all how to suck a dog’s dick. okay, i made that one up. oh yeah, at this friend’s wedding, where Doug was the best-man, he started talking shit with me on the steps outside the hall and i turned around to respond and got man-handled by like five people even though i did nothing.

wait, this is good. one time we were all playing basketball (or our version of it called “Animal Ball,” where tackling was allowed) and Doug decided he had to play because he wanted to push us around. and after about an hour of this i got so frustrated that i bounced the basketball off my friend (Doug’s brother’s) face, sending his retainer flying out of his mouth and into the sky. i was sorry about that but dude, you wouldn't stop yapping and you sounded just like him and, when i looked up, all i could see was your brother's mouth.

hold the phone! the best incident was when Doug and his friend Bob challenged me and my friend Dan to a fight in his front yard (Doug never understood why challenging kids three years younger (at least) was such a no-win scenario for him. someone should have grabbed his head and explained, “moron, listen to me, if you win you look stupid, if you lose you look stupid, so quit talking shit.”

so anyway, Bob squares off with my friend Dan who was in perfect shape at the time (ran a Triathlon in Hawaii, set some sort of swimming record, worked out to Queen’s greatest hits like everyone should) and Dan quickly rolls him up like a treasure map and rubs his goofy face in the grass. me and Doug slap at each other's hands for a while, then i shove him into a row of bushes and punch him in the top of the head about two hundred times. he eventually climbs out and sulks over to where Dan is sitting on Bob’s back and laughing. he mumbles some nonsense about how i supposedly hit him in the nuts and that’s why he couldn’t get up and put a stop the cartoon onslaught of rabbit-punches to his cranium. they both walk away picking leaves and grass out of their hair and Dan and I ride our bikes home singing the Queen theme to Flash Gordon. and that should have ended it right? nope. for some reason my friend can’t believe that his big brother got whupped by one of us and me and Dan get so frustrated re-enacting the hilarious fight with Star-Wars figures or french fries or whatever is laying around, that we get the video camera from the theater department at school to film a rematch. for some reason that never happened though. i forget why. anyhow, last time i saw Doug he came in the bookstore i was working at like 10 years ago and he had this stupid 6th grade looking mustache on. he walked around the info-desk i was at like 5 times (he always walked too fast, talked too fast, i swear that faggot was fucking exhausting to be around) until he got up the courage to come over and say hi. he holds out his hand and i go to shake it and he squawks, “hey, don’t squeeze so hard dude! what are you trying to prove!” i shake my head in disgust and poof, he’s gone. just a memory in the air, like a whiff of Taco Bell squeezed out my ass into my car seat two nights earlier. and when i think back, i think the worst thing was the fact that my friend, Doug’s little brother, could never see what a fucking walking calamity, what i complete and utter fuckwit his bro was. i wonder if it ever came to him later in life, if he ever figured that shit out. maybe like one day when it's all quiet, he looks across the table at some family function and realizes that Doug wasn’t just feeding the dog under the table, he was actually trying to get the dog to lick HIS balls and BAM! everything i’d ever said suddenly makes perfect sense.

anyway. yeah. fuck him. i got fifty more stories about that cocksucker. sometimes i even use his name for computer passwords when i’m at a loss. so maybe i do miss him. just like Ben! anyone remember Ben. wait, now that i think about it, it can't be Doug. Ben. yes, Ben. He gets to be my arch-enemy because he got the last word.

i’m in a great mood though. you know why? i overheard this mom and dad talking to their tiny little daughter and they said, “you don’t want to be the flower girl in the wedding? don’t you want to be the flower girl in the wedding, honey?” and the little girl, about the size of a cricket, said:

“No. I want to be a dragon!”

::: david - 8:44 PM [+] :::
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