ManManManManManManManManManMan

Man Man's set at Webster Hall a sort of mock-primal ritualistic front for just banging out some soul music on a good, old-fashioned Fender Rhodes. The band performs in a kind of clump - which I approve of, though main Man Man Honus still sits front and center, though drummer Chris Powell faces him directly, daring the front man to send the drummer to be back of the stage. That's part of what makes Man Man fun on a more cerebral level - the breaking down, or ignoring of, certain boundary lines - instrumental hierarchies (vocals of central importance, then guitars, then drums, then bass) dissolve - the band performs in a mass, the members switch instruments, bang on tire rims, cans, bang on the stage, scream, writhe, and babble. You get the feeling they would play the audience if they could - they're painted up like some generic tribe of somebodies, red and white lines under their eyes for virility, I guess. And given the showiness of it all, it's seems like it would be easy to cry irony and dismiss. But it's not, the frenzied atmosphere on stage, the falling-all-over-the-instruments and jumping, whooping, the seemingly unnecessary double-saxophone honking, it's not ironic at all. It's spontaneous and cathartic and all of the things rock and roll was supposed to be decades before you were born. Except it's not that either, because they're so tight that you come to realize that it's all rehearsed. Which, if that undercuts the ecstasies, well, fine - it's still a hell of a show.

Product Review: Sparks Plus

I got a promotional can of this stuff - a paltry 10 ouncer. In retrospect, downing it all in a matter of minutes was an act of hubris. Just that much was like an all-night binge compressed into about an hour. First you feel a little tingle. "Hey," you think, "it's like someone added bargain bin gin to my Kool-Aid. Outstanding." Then everything kind of kicks in at once and it's like you're thinking clearly for the first time in your life. This is the best (only?) rave you've ever been to and it's inside your head. "Why," you ask yourself, "do I ever NOT drink Sparks Plus?" Then things start to get a little out of control. Your stomach starts to curl up and you can feel little balls of flavored drink mix clogging up the blood vessels in your brain. A headache comes out of fucking nowhere and your blood sugar level plummets. This is when you should have stuffed a cookie in your mouth and tried to keep dancing, but you lose momentum and wake up an hour and a half later sprawled out on the floor with your cat licking your eyelids. Thanks, Sparks Plus, for a wild afternoon.

Death-Blogging the Ephemeral

Ok, so now all of your just-trying-to-make-it-in-NYC dreams and barely-scraping-by-but-yes-its-romantic dreams collide violently and explosively, and smoldering like that Troll that Willow zapped in Willow, and, just when you turn your back from the smoking meat heap that was your workaday-but-gosh-I'm-gonna-make-it-someday tableau emerges the THING I FUCKING WORK WITH RIGHT NOW.

It's four-headed, four-bodied, it loooooooves comedy (esp. hearting Joe Rogan and motherfucking Lloyd Bridges [his later work, natch]), it talks to itself incessantly and it is the only thing in the room with me besides computers and your mp3 player. It has red hair, brown hair, a goatee, chops, a giggle and a chortle and something like a chiggle, and it is desperate to reenact scenes from Hot Shots, Part Deaux for me. Between being flattered and trying to stab it to death with my mind, I deal with the fact that I am now being underpaid to work for probably one of the more monstrous of Big Fucking American Corporations, so I have the sweat of America's sub-poverty night-shifters on my conscience. Not that I'm complaining - I could have walked away from the job. I didn't, so goodnight punk rockers, one more white wine spritzer and I'll be hell in the morning. I could miscode very important data!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But really, you know more psychical violence has been justified with Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" than real violence has been with Nietzsche's quaint little chestnut:

"A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!...Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment."

Seriously, all the world is not literally a stage. That shit is an extended metaphor (and, incidentally, a rewriting of the Riddle of the Sphinx). Accordingly, not everybody actually wants to see a performance at all times. So when you, my four-headed friend, go around like a fucking TiVo stuck on the Spike channel, or "just can't stop" quoting Seinfeld (inaccurately, I might add), I'm not inclined to applaud, or laugh. All I can do is sit and wonder, awestruck by the sprawl.

We Fingertip Our Tarantella

No, it's not the actual work itself that will kill you - it's the people. Temping is like playing a part in an open-ended run of No Exit, where you become committed, by necessity, to your part because it may never end. Art / Life being equal (even in terms of sheer man hours - I worked 12 of them yesterday) it makes no difference if the character is walking down to the corner buying a pack of smokes, or if the man is himself onstage in front of some other audience that starts to feel like everyday tinitus - always present, alien but internal, ringing humming buzzing. But of course, when you start to notice it (the tinitus or the people) it becomes strange, multi-layered - the buzzing isn't just a pure sine wave - overtones ring out and curve to fit the shape of the room. Same with temping with other people essentially - their Temp Sounds just kind of pop out. No conversation for hours, then suddenly heartbreaking talk of career number three and a caesura between long term, monogamous relationships, and age slowly creeping beyond the point of marketability, and a less-than-adequate grasp on the fine points of Excel - and it's like you've entered the Temporary Unconscious, all archetypes acted out specifically and precisely according to themselves. These people that I temp with (and here it's not like I've got some totalizing knowledge of their lives that they themselves lack - if they could see the conversation as a conversation and not an interested sad-life-story agon, well then they'd come to the same conclusion, or rather be presented with everything in all its bare self-evidence), they have the trashed marriages, and the BA but somehow no prospects, and the bad computer skills, and come overdressed for a job that doesn't really even require a tie, much less a full-on suit. And the whole thing is fairly heartbreaking - a) because it's happening right in front of you (or really in your peripheral vision, because you, like me, cannot bring yourself to take your eyes off the screen and actually watch the conversation happen) and b) because inevitably you must ask, and you are a deficient human being if you don't, "WILL THAT BE ME."

It already is.