Ration Reality

Today we’re going to talk about two delicious treats that have made me fat and happy, like Wellbutrin.

First up: Seitan. Pronounced say-tahn, this remarkable and effing bizarre food stuff is made up mostly of compressed wheat protein. This is achieved by “washing” flour which gets rid of all the pesky starch… have I lost you yet? I know, sounds grosser than gross but I swears that this shit is the real deal. Once the starch is rinsed away you knead it up nice and well, compressed and season it however the fuck you want. Then you can shape it into whatever you want, transform it like Manimal or… Mystique.

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This fuckin’ cutey-cute-cute ball of cuteness is one of my favorite songs. The accompianing video elevates it higher than James Brown on an interstate police chase. It’s by hometown favorites, Grandaddy (if your hometown is Modesto-Fucking-California). Sadly, they are no more, due in part to drugs, alcohol and madness… and drugs. They reached such great heights for a band so strange and unsuited for mass marketing and commercial success… and they’re from Modesto, the town that turned out George Lucas and my father, two of the most colossal disasters in modern history (sorry dad). Read the rest of this entry »

 …or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Bomb

 RationReality continues our probe into the minds of modern musicians with examinations of two highly regarded bands: Wilco and Nine Inch Nails. Although they may seem like unlikely bedfellows they are both part of a phenomenon we’ll refer to as manic confusion. This phenomenon has multiple sources. It’s only known cure is Ration Reality Intelligence.

NIN and Wilco have transformed themselves many times. I suppose it was inevitable that this would take a bad turn somewhere along the line. The issue at hand is their latest incarnations. Both acts have stripped away what they saw as artifice in favor of a leaner, less complicated sound, forgetting in the process that their complexity and avant garde tendencies are what got them to where they are today. Both bands began their careers with bare bones type records, Wilco’s A.M. and NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine. A.M. barely caused a ripple when it was first released in 1995 and is almost universally regarded as their weakest album. 1991’s Pretty Hate Machine was a much greater success but in retrospect merely a precursor to much more critically and commercially successful albums.

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Dear Diary,

When I was in eighth grade, Metallica’s “… And Justice For All”  ruled my and nearly every other adolescent within spitting distance of me’s life. Girls, boys, black, white, Catholic, Jew, Zoroastrian, you name it. Kids who weren’t even real Metalheads clung to their cassette tapes like priests at the apocalypse. Our school was overtaken by the epic, crushing riffs, solos, double kick drums and wooden yelling that make Metallica, well, Metallica. I myself had merely dabbled in the Metal arts at this point. In sixth grade I discovered Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” along with every other junior hescher at PS 159 in New York City’s Bayside, Queens. This city/hood/borough was left behind for supposedly greener pastures on the strong and Long Island.

There I was introduced to Slayer, more specifically what is still one of my favorite Metal songs, “Angel of Death“. But on the reals, I hadn’t really dove in head first into the deep end of the Metal swimming pool. “… And Justice For All” was the first Metal album that I took into my heart and gut. I felt it deep down in a funny place. I digested it whole and absorbed every Metal nutrient I could find in the rich and powerful fibers of it’s being. I truly believed that this was as close to perfect as a record could get. Living in Alaska as I did at the time, the pervasive darkness, the desolate nature of things and the ever present sense of doom weighed so heavily upon me that I, at age 13, was sure I would die. “… And Justice For All” came out just as I was about to lose the fight. Waking up to the creeping, sinewy guitar lines that are the intro to “Blackened” seemed to give me the strength to continue the fight. I fought on and eventually triumphed over that frozen nightmare, a task that seemed next to impossible when I arrived wide-eyed from big, bad New York. Now I’m grown and I want to examine this record, this document, to see what it was that I saw, what inspired me to engage in open warfare with such a hostile enemy.

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First of all, let me say this: FUCK YOU ALL. (Except for The Bagel of Everything who is not only the h.b.i.c., but also a conscientious objector to The Sopranos).

Was I the only one who watched that horrendous fucking mess of shit, blood and cum that preceded that totally debatable debacle of an ending? Chase’s attempt to tie everything up with a little yellow ribbon was like a rape joke at an open mic night on a Sunday in the fucking Vatican.

You know what woulda satisfied me? A.J. getting blown by the teenybopper and both of them being subsequently BLOWN UP IN THE FIREBALL to the throbbing bass line of Outkast’s Bombs Over Baghdad. Take that you whining fuck! You and your yellow Nissan Xterra! How is it that you’re clinically depressed and suicidal but you have perfectly groomed Prince-like facial hair? Huh? How? Fuck you, you fucking twerp. You could have been a gangster but you turned into a gayer Al Gore, but with way less charisma, but now your dead and both environmentalists and Detroit automakers rejoice. I’ve been praying for your death since the first season. If David Chase had any balls, sense of justice or true talent, this would be the grand prize for eight years of viewership.

Next, Carmella’s spec house is picked up by a tornado which sends it twirling through the air only to crush her and her stupid Porsche Cayenne (aka the gayest car ever), leaving her tacky acrylic nails hanging out from underneath. Janice finds this seeming disaster and eats a dozen canolli’s from Ferrara’s (best in town, trust me), then takes a huge candy-coated shit in Carmella’s cold dead hand to the strains of Whoomp! There it is! by Washington, D.C.’s own, Tag Team.

Then we have sweet, sweet Meadow… sweet, charmed, spoiled stupid, stupid, stupid Meadow… go to med school, go to law school, go to taxidermy school for all I fucking care, so long as you die a slow, painful and gruesome death. Something Coen Brothers… something with a garden tool… like a weed whacker! That’s the one! She goes to home depot to get glass rods so she can hand blow herself a new dildo and she runs into Phil’s nephew’s daughter’s step-son’s S.A.T. prep coach’s assistant pencil sharpener who recognizes her from Cum Catcher Weekly and asks for an autograph. Meadow is annoyed but begrudgingly obliges. But it’s not enough for the intrepid young pencil sharpener known to his close friends as Puke Skyhooker. PS lures the dimwitted Soprano into the garden supply aisle and whips out his newly acquired cordless weed whacker. The plodding, awful beheading begins sending screams throughout the airplane hanger-like mall of tools. The staff pursue the sound but when they arrive to see PS’s artistry, they applaud and give him an orange vest.

Then, the sound fades away and the screen goes black…

Cut to Tony skipping down the street and whistling Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

The End.

-jody

Indeed I am the one and lonely J. Eugenius Wilson. I like snakes. I’m 32. I’m a Cap. I love to love to love love…

None of that is true. Except the two in the middle. The truth is I’m evil. I’m habitually sarcastic, cynical and just plain mad.

I’m a Musico, as they say in Mejico. I’m double jointed. I’m a DJ. I’m DJ Double Jointed. I do Bat Mitzvahs. Exclusively.

I live in the greatly over-rated northwest. Don’t come here. It smells funny. Like burnt oatmeal cookies.

I’m under exclusive contract to Ration Reality.

We’re like Foreigner. But way less sucky. Despite what your hipster fuck friends might say…

I love you all like every good Jewish boy loves his mother… angrily.

-Jody Eugenius Wilson