meghan mcain

I know Meghan McCain is just a patsy for the Republican party’s attempt to modernize its image, but I can see through all the needless television appearances she’s been making lately, and respect where she’s coming from. Maybe her lunches at The Ivy with McCain-supporter Heidi Montag were a bit over the top last year, but otherwise, she has proven herself to be an eloquent, practical good new-fashioned moderate Republican and just because she was raised spoiled as hell by an ice queen with a new-money hubby doesn’t mean she can’t turn out moderately in-touch with reality.

A few nights ago she appeared on the Colbert Report and answered questions about her Twitter, her blog and her plans to lick Colbert’s face. She described herself as “pro-sex, pro-life and pro-gay marriage” (which she explained is not a contradiction) and seems like a regular college-aged girl trying to find her allegiance in a sea of dysfunctional ideologies. Of course her father’s conservative ways had some influence on her, but after some careful venturing into the real world of responsible beer-drinking (ahem–Bush twins) and safe sex advocacy, she decided that there’s no reason you have to be Democrat to support a reassessment of the status quo.

So Meghan McCain has a foot tattoo, doesn’t date people that like her dad, updates her Twitter with thoughts on Jeff Buckley (“Only the good die young.”) and thinks that old people should get off our social networking sites (plus, she’s hotter than Chelsea Clinton). Her recent talk show tour and recently-announced book deal (and songs of the day from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and 3OH!3) are clearly hopes to attract more young people to the Republican party (proving that it can be molded to fit your needs, I guess) but despite her impressive, thought-out progressive banter done on both her personal blog and The Daily Beast, Meghan McCain is still that friend you agree to disagree with.

You’re on the same page enough to invite her to your birthday party (and you’re into the fact that she’s the only McCain photographed hugging the adopted Bangladeshi sister, Bridget), but if you end up missing you’re period, she’s not the one you call for a ride to the clinic (which, I guess, can be seen as one big metaphor for the Republican party).

summer vacation

a fakebadtaste composite (french models may not appear exactly as in real life)

Since summer has come in screaming like a goddamn 100-degree banshee, I decided to take my first amount of vacation time and hit the road. Long story short, I ended up hitting the 210 without air conditioner, adding more antifreeze in Beaumont and rattling my little jalopy out to the Palm Springs Viceroy where I hung out by the pool with European models who are surprisingly not robots, sipping grapefruit juice and Bombay gin cococtions on am empty stomach while telling every New Yorker on a raft about this whole “medicinal marijuana” concept. After getting suntanned on only one side of my body, the Grazia Magazine photo crew (the photographer, makeup artist, hairstylist) and I drove around the desert trying to find the perfect vantage point for a cochella valley sunset. Ryan took a spectacular photo of an Alaskan malamute–which may get him some more work for Dog Fancy–and all the old people could tell we weren’t from around there. We almost went to the Salton Sea because I bragged about how it looks like the future where everyone is on meth and the entire landscape looks like Children of Men and I tried to decribe the pictures I took the time I was in Bombay Beach filming a friend’s music video but there is no way to describe the squalor and desolation humans are capable of creating when left unsupervized in a desert. Currently, my camera is hopelessly broken, so all I have is mental images of my time at the Viceroy, but I assure you that the entire day was spectacular.

I’m making a to do list for summer that doesn’t include paying any bills or having responsibility to anyone else but meeeee. Downtown Long Beach feels alive in a way that is more crawling than teeming and I’m not sure I missed it. Also, have I mentioned how fucking hot it is? And the fact that even after driving straight from Palm Springs to my favorite beach and soaking in the infinite number of sea breezes available, my bones are still filled with the lethargy of heat.

all star

K.I.T.!!!

Smash Mouth don’t change

Sarah Bennett
Wed. May 13

Smash Mouth has always been like that guy from high school who never grew up. At first it’s a little weird that he’s stoked to still be bagging groceries at Stater Brothers a decade out, but about halfway through a shared 24-pack in the parking lot before the 10-year reunion dinner, his still-spiked hair and ultra-narrow chin strip become so endearing that it’s futile not to party like it’s 1999.

Reappropriating ’60s mainstream electronica riffs for mid-’90s third-wave ska revival keyboards, Smash Mouth burst onto KIIS FM sister stations and took 1997 by storm. I was barely in middle school then—prime age for Smash Mouth acceptance—and thought “Walking on the Sun” was the mature 6th grader’s answer to Less Than Jake’s “We’re All Dudes.”

After I traded the Good Burger soundtrack for Fush Yu Mang, the San Jose foursome pumped out nearly three years of retro-pop jams that I happily bought into, waiting until the end of the Can’t Hardly Wait VHS for their synchronized prom dancing music video (oh, Steve Harwell’s pink hair days) and voting for “All Star” as my soccer team’s playoff theme song.

Then the second millennium came, and I started high school. And like that hand-me-down cutoff shorts with matching scrunchie set I got from my cousin in South Carolina, Smash Mouth was not helping me look older. So, while I was taking AP classes and having my heart broken by young love, Gwen Stefani stole Harwell’s pink-hair phase, Uncle Kracker became the new round-faced male white singer to watch, and Smash Mouth was left making a Monkees cover for Shrek and redoing a Sherman Brothers song for the should-have-been-straight-to-DVD release of The Jungle Book 2.

But today, the band is no longer the eternal bag boy I once thought. After a Surreal Life appearance, a shelved studio album and several-year hiatus, Smash Mouth left Interscope, started their own record label and self-released 2006’s cover-free Summer Girl. Finally doing things their own way (and returning to the catchy song formulas that made them famous), the “ultimate true-to-life California party band” is riding their own ’90s coattails into post-high school life, bringing their new batch of independence to a headliner spot at this weekend’s Pride Festival, and proving that, unlike scrunchies, nostalgia never goes out of style.

SMASH MOUTH WITH KAT DELUNA, JAZMINE SULLIVAN AND SARA BAREILLES LONG BEACH LESBIAN & GAY PRIDE CELEBRATION | SHORELINE DRIVE BETWEEN PINE AVE AND OCEAN BLVD | 9PM | $20

predators: how the east was (not) won

While watching 60 Minutes for the first time in at least 5 years at my grandma’s house last Sunday, I was presented a story about “America’s New Air Force”—Predators and Reapers, the military’s new breed of unmanned aircraft that fly over Iraq and Afghanistan while being controlled by “pilots” in front of a computer screen at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Reporter Lara Logan tackled the subject how any South African-accented journalist covering American military advancements would—with a War on Terror’s-worth of naivete. See, when I watched Logan’s “unprecedented access” to the only air force base that exclusively flies planes with no one in them, instead of seeing the bright, risk-less future of war she wanted to present (look how progressive we are in our forward-thinking technology!), I was brought back to the past, to the incident that sparked this whole war in the fucking first place.

I don’t know how to say this without coming across like a total conspiracy theorist, but I’m a total conspiracy theorist. And when I first did some research about the obvious misinformation regarding the attacks on 9/11, I realized that the “OMGZ we had no idea this was going to happen” claim was total bullshit and started seeing that the “we have technology and power of information on our side–let’s do this” mentality was far more likely. So aside from the fact that the World Trade Centers fell in a planned demolition and the plane crash on a former CIA agent’s farm in Pennsylvania was more likely a missle (or bomb), the issues of what flew into the tallest buildings in the New York skyline and smashed a hole in an “under construction” area of the pentagon remains unanswered. Some eyewitnesses (and the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report) say they were commercial airplanes, but others said the planes bore no markings or windows and others still called them out as military transport planes.

Since the flights reported to have been hijacked were actually secretly rerouted through a tangle of untracable orders, the aircrafts that were visible in the final moments had to be the government’s planes that swapped identities with the commercial flights and after eight years of speculation as to what kind of military plane actually did the damage on 9/11 (and making martyrs out of the non-existent passengers of flight 93), 60 Minutes finally shed light on the USAF’s unmanned plane operations, telling me they’ve been going on since the mid-90s and unknowingly replacing my kamikaze air force pilot theory with the “planes that look like Boeing 737s that can fly 8000 miles in 22 hours while being controlled by someone on the ground halfway across the world” liklihood.

Poor Miss Logan thought it was a wonderful advancement that we can use these planes to keep a watchful eye on our ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq (she even asked the hard-hitting questions about what it’s like to be in battle from a computer chair in Nevada and then go home to your family) but had no idea that she was fueling conpiracy fire by definitively placing our unmanned aircraft technology into the endless field of 9/11 “could haves” and forcing me to explain to my sweet grandmother why our government would want to be its own fear-mongering terrorists.

what the fuck: HULU

Part of an ongoing series in which I ask various people and entities: “What the fuck?”

What the fuck, Hulu? First you give me all the free TV shows I want and now you’re letting networks pull their stuff off because they’re scared I’m not watching as much TV? Well, for one thing, they’re right. When my cable bill went up to $160 a month, I cancelled it and turned to my wide collection of VHS tapes for entertainment. But once in a while, when I was jonesing for an old school episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or someone dropped a 30 Rock joke, I Hulu-ed it up and never thought twice. But, the networks have caught on and like my stepmom discovering that I was sneaking out of the bedroom window, Hulu is being forced to install some depressing “security” bars.
But what the networks don’t realize is that to pull their shows off of a service that is so widely used and—whether they know it or not—very ingrained into the way in which people as busy as me watch “TV,” is to, for lack of a more politically-correct phrase, be a goddamn Indian giver. Don’t get all huffy because we actually used what you gave us!

At least when Metallica sued a bunch of 11 year-olds from Long Island for downloading their riffs, it wasn’t counter to the fact that they posted them on Napster in the first place.

I understand that the media outlets are worried about their declining viewership, but removing our free online TiVo might be removing the only way we watch the television at all. Just because content gets pulled from Hulu doesn’t mean I’m going to reinstate my overpriced cable service, watch shitty versions of the shows on YouTube or show up at my grandma’s during primetime because, to be honest, I don’t care enough. And whatever ounce of shit you conned me into giving with your hilarious Alec Baldwin superbowl commercial went out the window with all your talk about “rethinking the wisdom of sharing content for free.” Instead of scooping out mushy rotten banana brains with a melon baller as planned, the networks are angering a legion of solid-brained fans, driving us even further away from the old norm of media loyalties.

Don’t you guys get it? We’re post-postmodern consumers. We run the Internet like Veruca Salt ran her daddy’s pocketbook and our apathy for your low numbers is higher than Miss Salt’s nasal bray. If you build it, they will come and if you tear it down, we are going to get pissed off.