oh it has begun

Things are coming to a boiling point right now and it’s really eerie to be in the middle of all of this as part of the most sought-after demographic in a city rattled with infastructure needs. This morning, the news reported horrific lines at minority-filled voting places and this afternoon, I received no less than five large flyers in my mailbox for various propositions and measures.

Here’s a few other political things that came across my radar today (because a bulleted list is the least amount of effort I can put into something right now to still get these things down):

• Shenanigans on electronic voting! If you’re having problems voting already, Wired Magazine wants you to know you’re not alone. They’ve set up a country-wide reported-issue map and need your contributions to see where the problems are occurring so hopefully, come Tuesday, votes won’t be getting flipped on electronic voting consoles (since someone out there wrote the codes and therefore, someone out there–who probably has a lot of GOP money in his bank account–knows how to re-write the codes).
• An artist on the Brooklyn Art Project’s website uploaded his word-cloud renditions based off candidate-website RSS feeds. Though it might not really be art (not much “art” from Brooklyn ever really is), it is interesting to note that McCain’s most-used word is his own last name and at some point in time, Obama used the word “slattery.”
• The Smoking Gun (which is a treasure trove of celebrity mugshots and world’s dumbest criminal police reports) got a hold of an anti-Obama flyer distributed in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood. Put out by the League of American Patriots, the “Do You Want a Black President” photocopied piece of paper has botched photos of Obama with a cigarette and a turban and then makes the claim that when Haiti and South Africa have bad crime rates because of their black leaders. Oh, they also spell it “Barak.” Do your homework and stop making me laugh so hard, fuckwads.
• And in case you thought Obama would be the first black president, you thought wrong. There are five others who have been proven to have African ancestry and now, DiversityInc has put them all (Barack included) on a “historical illustration” that is yours free with a subscription to their magazine. Now you own a significant piece of America or a novelty item that will bring laughter to all who see it framed in your living room so no matter who wins, you do!
• BUSTED!

countdown: one week

My future sister-in-law sent me a photo of her Obama o’ lantern

In one week, Obama pumpkins will be strewn in the streets and, according to every news source out there, the real Obama will be in the white house.

It almost puts me back to the late 90s when they were making all of those end-of-the-world-from-a-comet-asteroid-or-other-space-object/creature movies and Deep Impact featured President Morgan Freeman telling Americans too much information about experimental government asteroid route-deflection procedures and we saw it and thought, “wow, that black president thing is a long way off,” but it’s not because it’s here. The time is now and Obama is way more capable than President Freeman (no offence, Morgan) so in case you’re a retard and weren’t planning on it, this is the home stretch and I hope everyone votes the fuck out of November 4th.

copycat

My issue of Newsweek came in today and had a full page about “male-voter malaise,” sparked by Obama’s XBox Live ad campaign and they even use my adjectives and it’s really quite eerie. Either I’m a plagerist or I need a job application. But, seriously, what the hell, man?

begging for the youth vote

No matter how many times NOFX rocked against Bush or Paris Hilton was seen wearing a Rock the Vote t-shirt, the young voter turnout in 2004 sucked. And despite printed-on-sample-ballot warnings of crowded auditoriums and convalescent-home lounges for this November 4th, much of our generation remains as uninformed as ever, forcing this year’s candidates to capitalize on our apathetic lifestyles by spoon feeding us political activism through the lowest of brow’d mediums.

Starting with rumored sightings and confirmed by a spokesman last week, Barack Obama’s campaign has done the most ingenious thing to boost our interest in the presidency since the blowjob—Xbox Live in-game subliminal advertising——which includes (so far) early-voting reminders placed on billboards in Burnout Paradise and stadium banners in NBA Live ’08 and Madden NFL ’09.
It’s the first marketing campaign of its kind and with its employment comes the ultimate manifestation of our McDonaldized culture. It’s disgusting that the valuable demographic of young adult males is so passive about their democracy that a candidate will buy out eighteen video games just to remind them what month it is.

But when we—as the future of the country—are unwilling to alter our lives for these elections, the elections have no choice but to alter for our lives and present candidates not as politicians but as products, advertising a prospective president as if he were the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy or a new ACDC album..

The advantages, of course, are great—increased voter turnout, more politically involved youth, the ever yearned-for “cool” factor, etc—but they are ephemeral.
The problems—and the long-term social message—are much greater. Long after 18-34 year-old slackers take advantage of early voting registration and Mitt Romney’s e-strategist dies in vain, our democracy—or as I like to call it, our democrazy—will forever be pandering to our malaise.
The precedent this election is setting will ensure that in 2012, being able to friend a candidate on Facebook and conducting an interview in a virtual world will be the norm. All of our debates will be conducted with video questions submitted on YouTube and anyone who is indecisive can set up a website where people sway his opinion with their own ignorant opinions because the only thing people will have heard about the candidates came through a video game.
Candidate websites will be neon, flashing keywords to hold our goldfish-length attention spans long enough to convince us to vote for them, which we will do as long as we don’t get distracted by something shiny on our way into the polling booth.
From here on out, status and lineage won’t matter because the winners will merely have implemented better, more effective, more persuasive marketing strategies and in the end, our vote will be worth the same amount as a purchase of a CD or a count towards a Nielson rating.

Although my description of the prospective future is exaggerated (and, granted, McCain probably doesn’t know what a website is), we are definitely being sold to. In order to keep up with this trend, however, Obama devised a way to inject information without knowledge, opinions without wisdom and votes without questions; it’s scary to think people are going to vote for president as if it were a decision about which upcoming movies they’d like to see.

We have become so disseminated from our democratic process that instead of being proactive about our political-information intake, the only way we can feel engaged with what is going on is to turn an unappetizing photo of McCain from the third debate into a Photoshop contest (where the winner is a gif of the two in a sexual position).
So instead of trying to sell themselves through our mind-numbing escape mechanisms, candidates should inspire us through art, reading and real, actual, in-person human interaction (just like the old-fashioned times!). Like Shepard Fairey’s already-iconic Obama posters—wheat-pasted like movie bills across the city—or community-organized discussions so we can engage with our neighbors IRL (in real life).
It’s alright if a candidate calls it “The Myspace” or if they give high fives as awkward as my father’s because video games and social networking sites are no place for presidential elections. These things are popular in the first place because they help us avoid responsibilities, not guilt trip us into acknowledging them and, boy am I glad it’s election week because don’t think I can handle the real world infiltrating my pop culture cocoon for much longer.

pwnd

It took months to mobilize troops for the war in Iraq, a week to mobilize efforts to save the economy, but only 36 hours to mobilize an internet community to Photoshop the crap out of an embarrassing picture of John McCain from Wednesday night’s debate.

Thanks Reuters for posting the image under the description of “McCain reacting to almost heading the wrong way offstage” and thank you America for capitalizing on life’s little moments, you know, the things that count.

the 401-keg plan

If you bought $1000 worth of stock a year ago, you would now have:

$91.28 if you bought Washington Mutual

$37.50 if you bought Neomagic

$21.29 if you bought Freddie Mac

$20.79 if you bought Fannie Mae

But, if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the recycling REFUND…

You would have $214 in cash.

So the best investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle the shit out of the evidence.

*as borrowed from a chain email received late last night.

d.u.i.

You know how it’s soooooo cool to be a greasy hipster and wear vintage plaid button-ups and a beanie and buy $3 pints of Pabst Blue Ribbon at some dive bar in Echo Park (Little Joy, much?)? And you know how it’s also cool to ride around on the simplest bike form known to man with no brakes and no coasting, just mashing the hell out of the city streets and living the urban velo dream? Well, Traitor Cycles has come up with a way to cross these two cultural cool-factors into one seamless statement for the scruffy fixie kid in all of us: the officially-licensed PBR Ringleader.

Traitor is the only company in the history of the beer to ever be allowed to use the PBR logo and is the only product aside from the company’s own promotional gear to bear it. And they’re only making 75 of them, so even though it’s the alcoholic’s equivalent of putting a ROOR sticker on your truck’s rear window, when the cops see your blinking light swerving down the street, at least you’ll go out in style.

zach and miri make an inconsistent marketing campaign

I hate to hate a Kevin Smith movie before it comes out (although I wish someone would have told me that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back wasn’t worth it), but this whole Zach and Miri mumbo jumbo is really starting to get obnoxious. First, I see this poster at a bus stop:

And I think, “another Seth Rogan movie with weed, sex and fat jokes. But this time, there’s so much nudity that they can’t even make a real poster for it!” Man, I’m already excited because watching Katherine Heigl give birth to an unwanted child in Knocked Up was so not enough to conjure eternal mental images of Seth Rogan having sex.

I get it, he’s overweight and irresponsible and still gets laid but do we really have to bring Kevin Smith into this? Maybe he relates to the overarching message of Rogan’s films: that the heavyset guy that can make me laugh is better than the dreamy guy that is good in bed (which is false because what every girl really wants is the middle ground: a moderately attractive guy that makes me laugh while we’re in bed and smokes weed in moderation).

Anyway, the poster I saw enticed me with stick figures and the claim that the movie is so “titillating” that they can only show me stick figures acting out the filming of a porno. That whole elusive marketing campaign where you sort of know what it’s about but not really so you want to go see the movie thing might have really worked out for Zach and Miri if they hadn’t sponsored FX’s primetime lineup last night.

While trying to catch up on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (“Who Pooped the Bed?“) and realizing how much I hate their new show, Testees, commercials for the above-mentioned movie came on at least 20 times. And I wish I was exaggerating. They played the preview that they play in the movie theaters that’s really long-winded and only really gets to the point at the end when it all comes together and then you get to whisper if you want to go to see it or not before the next one comes on. Then, right after they played that one, without even a Billy Mays buffer commercial, they played an entire scene from the movie with no movie title, motion graphics or explanation. Just Zach and Miri at a bar drinking and deciding how they’re going to make rent money when Miri suggests they make a porno and Zach takes her seriously.

I saw so many different Zach and Miri commercials last night that I am not going to go see it because I already know what happens (Zach loves Miri but she doesn’t know it and so when they go broke and decide to make a series of pornos, they end up doing the acting themselves and after a hilarious cast of sexual freaks–Traci Lords, Jason Mewes, Justin Long–help them on their adult-film quest, the two main characters end up doing it for real and fall in love). THE END.

IRONY ALERT: Instead of not being able to show me anything about the movie, as your poster claimed, I’ve already seen the whole thing. So now that you’ve forced me to spoil the plot for everyone, here’s the poster that got banned in America that led you to come up with stick figures and an ad campaign based on false secrecy:

C’mon, America. Scared of a little blowjob?

presidential debate #2: a tally

This time around, I watched the whole thing and an hour and a half of by the minute commentary would have been pretty boring, although hilarious when making fun of people stuttering over their own questions.

The evening’s final markings:

Questions actually answered by Obama-10
Questions actually answered by McCain-3
McCain shit-talking Senator Obama’s “record” instead of answering the question- 15
McCain bragging about his “record” and “judgement” instead of answering the question-21
Times uncommitted women Ohio voters’ positive vibes went off the chart for Obama (if you were watching CNN)- 16
Awkward shoulder adjustments, elbow flaps and finger waggings from McCain-35
Dubya-esque “heh hehs” from McCain-5
Times in American history that candidate-hugging blocked Tom Brokaw’s script-1

Keywords of the night!

“Holocaust”-3
“hair plugs”-1
“middle class”-6
“home loan-buyout” -3 (McCain)

Fun facts:

• There was so much bald in the room and I occasionally had to look away and let my eyes readjust.
• McCain also called everyone “my friends” an astounding 16 times! Go McCain!
• Two of the questioners had heavy Southern accents. One was black.
• Tom Brokaw had to continually remind the candidates to watch their time limits.
• There is a star-shaped non-hair growth on the back of Obama’s head. Is it a sign from God or his hairdresser?
• The town hall meeting-themed presidential debates exist exclusively to make people REALLY uncomfortable about their democracy. Because we still technically run on the government that we fought like blimey hell to instate, but one of the only ways to make actual use of the system—to, literally, have your voice heard—is one of the most embarrassing thing to do and painful things to watch.
• Obama “won”!
• Everyone is pissed about the economy.

the sky is falling

While you were all watching Sarah Palin shoot herself in the foot with her bigot rifle, I was having a birthday on the beach with expensive lobster dinners and indigenous peoples’ history. There was even a cake with my name on it in a dive bar in Silverlake and party cups were everywhere.

But seriously, how about these accusations that Obama is anti-American? I could go on and on about how the “guilt by association” tactic is a slippery slope of pandora’s boxes, but, really, before she opens her mouth about baby Obama canoodling with a “terrorist organization” that “murders policemen,” Miss RVPC (Republican Vice President Candidate) should make sure she and her husband weren’t members of a “fringed, seccessionist movement” that rallied for Alaskan independence. Someone with a TiVo and–a lot more time than I could hope to imagine–filled in all the gaps with this nice little montage:

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And while our candidates are taking turns sissy slapping each other, our economy is swirling further into the toilet of former superpowers (even Canada is laughing). Also, the governator needs 7 billion dollars. kthx.