Archive for February, 2010
This should help a whole new generation of teenage boys discover poetry, broodiness, and box lambrusco. When I was a lad all we had was Oliver Stone’s movie, and that was an abomination. Have you watched it lately? G-A-Y. No wonder the remaining members of the Doors hated it. So lame, in so many different and enormously over-literal ways.
This doco looks good though. Start growing your hair, Junior.
Read the rest of this entry
Today I actually bashed out a hopeless screed about how much I hate winter, and how I’m moving to Laurel Canyon as soon as I can afford it and blah, blah, here we go again. It was so typically fantastic. I posted it for 30 seconds and then took it down.
So now, on a really amazingly snowy Friday, I’m posting these photos I just found, of a really cool birthday present my buddy Riley gave me years ago. It’s a tiny little writing room, with donuts and Canadian Club (two of my favorite things) and a little picture of Morrissey. How awesome is that? I was so stoked when I opened this. Nice one, Riles.
Next winter I’m going to buy a 1955 Porsche Spyder and drive from New York to my bungalow in sunny Laurel Canyon. Non-stop, blasting the Doors all the way. It’ll look almost exactly like this:
There’s not enough hours in the day.
We’ll see you cats tomorrow… or monday..
Thank god fashion week is over. We didn’t go to too many parties or anything like that, in fact, we didn’t go to any parties… no one invited us. Whatever. It’s over.
Actually, we did go to one party, the Last Magazine party at Pravda. It was like any other fashion party: loud music, free booze, everybody was at least a foot taller than your average six-foot person (me)… It was fun though. I did blow off Alexander’s Wang! With Kate Bosworth!
Moving right along…
I’ve just spent 15 minutes staring at myself on Chatroulette trying to decide if I want strangers to see this head that God gave me. Has anyone of youse guys done it? Gotta be super weird… not really into it… looks like it could be predator paradise.
Jeez, didn’t you all get excited about that dog show story! There’ll be more from the Zanimal soon. Stay tuned. I’ve got a feeling we might get something from Matt Griffin soon too. Possibly something from that Chatroulette thing. We’ll see.
Anyway, we found a new intern! Her name is Taryn Harrington and she’s a little dynamo. That’s her in the picture below.
Just look at her! She’s awesome. She actually looks a bit like my little sister, but that’s not why she got the gig.
We had a “meeting” a few nights ago and decided it would be a good idea to have three interns going at once, like when we have room. We’re expanding for real this year, no point otherwise. We’ve had our collective balls in the waffle iron for way too long now, and it’s stinking up the curtains.
Something has to be nutted-out this year, or we dig it a hole, ask it to get in the hole and see if it’s a very good hole…
then we shoot it. Bye-bye annoying magazine side project.
What else, I’m rambling more than ever now…
I know!
BOOK CLUB! BOOK CLUB! BOOK CLUB!
Right now I’m reading Joan Didion’s ‘The White Album’ and it’s fookin’ brilliant like. Three times I’ve had this book recommended to me, and three times I went, “Oh yeah? Joan Didion you say? I’ll have a look.” But I never did. Actually, I did check out ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’ which was fiction, and it didn’t really grab me. ‘The White Album,’ however, has really just grabbed the shit out of me. It’s nonfiction, essays, and perhaps that’s what she’s better at? Or maybe it’s just what I prefer… me, me, me. What do I think? I don’t know! Let’s ask me!
‘The White Album’ by Joan Didion: Two big thumbs-up and a gold star. Really good. Check it out!
In other news about what I think, how brilliant is Joe Jackson by the way?
Our good buddy Riley has a show coming up and you should go if you’re in that neck of the woods.
It will be megawesome.
We met Brendan Fowler the other day; super nice guy, and now we’re waaay into BARR… four years too ooo late.
So good. And now here’s yet another episode of ‘Everybody loves Melrose’!!!
So I guess we have a wildlife correspondent now…
If you’re not a big fan of ‘cute’ you may want to skip this post. However, if you are a cute-ist then this post is for you!
Thank you, Zanimal! And thank you, me, for laying it all out like a pro in photoshop.
It’s snowing heavily here in NY… again… so I’m indoors, planning my spring look. You may remember last year I wore cut off denim shorts, a ratty old t-shirt, and Vans without any sox. You may also remember that ensemble from the previous year, and maybe even the year before that. Well, this year I’m shifting the whole “Undercover Agent on Venice Beach” look into second gear.
Let me run you through it, top-to-toe.
Hat.
Yes, I’ll be wearing a hat again this season. Possibly a masonic fez. No one else has the nuts to sport one of these upturned flower pots, so it may as well be me. I’m not afraid of the freemasons.
Shades.
So long symmetricalness. Set the coordinates for Awesome. Zow! While you’re all marching to the beat of the Ray-ban Army, I’ll be kiiiiiiiiiilling it all summer in these sweet lopsided shits.
A mother-fucking cape.
Lakers Jersey.
Oh no you didn’t wear a Lakers jersey in Knicks town! Oh yes I did… or will. Just wait and see how many cats get on Ebay now and try to score a vintage Magic Johnson tank. They’re all gone, fool. I boughts ‘em. Larry Bird too.
House Shorts.
Also known as “cut-offs.” Hey, if it aint broke- don’t fix it, and when you’ve got pins like mine, it definitely aint broke.
Awesome belt buckles.
I’ll be wearing all three of these simultaneously, with one really long, hand-tooled leather belt, that describes my life story in pictograms.
Shoes: No Shoes.
Back to nature… and possibly guinea worm. If it’s good enough for Cat Weasel, it’s good enough for me. If it gets too gnarly, I’ll just score a pair of these “Jumbo Gory Feet.”
So that’s my summer outfit all worked out. As you can see, I’m going to look pretty amazing, and not a little bit insane. But this is New York City! If you can’t dress like an alcoholic magician here, then where?
Thanks Andy, for this picture of you enjoying yourself somewhere really sunny, while we freeze to death.
Happy Presidents Day.
I started Wooooo years ago for fun. I went to my friend Andre and said, “I want to make a zine with just interviews in it; silly interviews like they have in Big Brother.” He said, cool, he’d lay it out. So I set about gathering the interviews. The first person I interviewed was Michelle Williams. She ate her breakfast everyday at the café where I worked, and she also lived across the street from me in Chinatown. I told her what I was planning and asked if she’d be down for an interview. She said yes, so we went out, got drunk, and I asked her some dumb questions. It was great. Then I approached one of the guys from Blonde Redhead, the lead chick from the Donnas (remember the Donnas?), and a bunch of other interesting people for interviews. Months later, the first little issue of Wooooo came out and I started to believe I was a writer. I obviously wasn’t; I was an interviewer. Transcription is not writing. Nevertheless, I did more interviews and worked hard at cultivating a “journalist” type image. Eventually I found myself doing legitimate, paid magazine work and I thought “This is all right! I might just quit the service industry!” And I did. I became officially freelance, or, as we freelancers like to call ourselves, “poor.”
Now, two hundred years later, I’m still doing interviews and I’m over it. I’m not over-it over it, but I really hate the sound of my own voice when it’s not coming directly out of my face. I interviewed a guy today– an artist– and he was super nice, just the nicest dude you could want to talk with on the phone, but at around the twenty-minute mark in our conversation I thought, “Shit. This will take forever to transcribe.” Then I remembered: I’m not transcribing anymore! Someone else is! So instead of cutting our chat short, like I normally would, I leaned back, put my feet up, and just kept my lips and ears flapping for another half an hour!
Genius. Thanks new intern who I haven’t named yet. You rule.
Look at this picture of Leo Romero doing a backside this-and-that. Don’t you wish you weren’t old and fat?
Winter sucks so bad they should just call it “Suck.” Spring, Summer, Autumn, Suck.
Here’s a picture of our friend Sterling’s bicycle under a great white pile of suck. Ha! Suck it Sterls. Lucky for me, my bike got crushed by Chinese lorry drivers months ago. It was chained up on the same post you see below, but somehow it found it’s way into the gutter where it was destroyed by jealous Chinese lorry drivers. I’m not making that up; Chinese men, driving lorries, destroyed my yellow bike. No, I didn’t see them, but I’d bet my balls on their Chineseness. It was Chinatown, after all.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Chinese. I lived in Chinatown for five years and they were very cool with me. They spat a little more than was necessary, and, yes, I contracted a vicious case of pigeon-eye, but Chinatown was great; my neighbors bbq’d on their roof all summer long, and hurled scraps to me on my balcony, I was only called a “white devil” once the whole time I lived there, and the nights were very tranquil in Chinatown. No one made a ruckus. You don’t mess with the Chinese in their hood; they’ll fix you up good.
Now! Here’s episode 2 of your new favorite show: Everybody Loves Melrose!
Is it weird that every morning for the past three weeks, I’ve woken with a fictitious cowboy song in my head, about a rootin’ tootin’ gun-slingin’ fool by the name of Dick ‘n Balls Jones?
It’s just the chorus really: “Dick ‘n Balls Joooooooones.” That last bit you have to howl like a dog.
It’s easy to be this honest when your audience doesn’t have a face… wait, here’s face-
Dear Mr. Crombie:
As a long-time fan of your magazine and (especially) blog, it would be an unqualified honor to pluck from the ether those words which you and an undoubtedly auspicious interview subject choose to bandy about in a bar, rec room, or telephone line, and set them down on paper for all to read and enjoy.
You will find that I meet many of your qualifications. For example, I have no problem with working from home; in fact, it will be a necessity as I do not live in the New York City area. I am versed in the art of transcribing interviews on the fly from my time as an intern for a little-noticed (now defunct?) environmental awareness group; I conducted a number of the interviews myself, interviews with strange yet heroic men who had been monitoring water purity and salinity in their area for over 25 years. My tasks and role at my current job have familiarized me very deeply with the lot of the pushed-around, so assuming this same position at Wooooo Magazine should be a cakewalk!
I have uploaded a resume and a photo of myself at an Elks Club meeting so that you know with whom you are dealing. If you’d like to familiarize yourself with more of My Work, you can visit my barely sustained blog at teendreem.blogspot.com.
Thanks and Happy Valentine’s Day,
Robert Hershorn
Freakishly (and gratefully) enough, we’re still getting about five of these letters a day. It could be a couple of weeks before we name the new intern(s).
Robert, you’re up there in the top 3%. Thanks for writing.
Now, I watched that movie “Say Anything” last night, and the whole thing, from start to finnish, was totally scripted. Seriously. No one actually said “Anything” at all. I expected John Cusack to come on screen and say, “I’m off to bugger a turtle in the pantry,” or “The postman’s wearing a quiche g-string,” but he just read from a script! They should rename the movie “Say What The Script Tells You To Say.” What a rip-off.
Thin premise for a joke? Shut up. You’ve said stupider stuff.
In the 90′s everything was much better than it is today. Music was better, fashion was better, even TV was better! You know that show Sienfeld? It comes from the 90′s. So does Friends. The movies were way better in the 90′s too. Reality Bites, Singles, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (Spoiler Alert: His mom was mega fat)… The list of good movies from the 90′s is longer than a typical 90′s penis (penis’s were longer in the 90′s).
Man, did we ever have some good times in the 90′s. Beer was practically free it was so cheap, and cigarettes were way less expensive than they are these days, AND they were much more delicious, AND they hadn’t killed nearly as many people as they have now. Also, in the 90′s, there was almost no such thing as reality television; half the untalented arseholes that grace the pages of today’s tabloids were just plain old arseholes like you and me. Yes, even Taylor Swift.
In the 90′s there weren’t that many cell phones, so if you left the house to go buy The Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full Of Kryptonite, because you liked the ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong’ single, you couldn’t call your friends on the way to the store and warn them that you were an arsehole; they’d find out the next time they came over to smoke bongs and watch the X Files.
Man, do NOT get me started on how good the 90′s were… Girls were better in the 90′s! They had nose-rings, and rough dye jobs, and they listened to NIN. They were all messed up and drank too much, had holes in their clothes, hated their parents. They broke down in public when Kurt died, screaming “Why! Why! Why!” and then they ditched school to have sex with you in the afternoon…. Don’t get me started on the 90′s, dude-nuts…
(We’re still sorting through the intern applications. It’s kinda bananas how many of you want to be girl-fridays. We should have done this ages ago.)
What about a Swiffer ™ ball?! Like a ball made out of Swiffer ™ that you kick around the house to collect all the dust and pubes. You can just give it an idle boot every time you walk by. Urban tumble weed. Genius.
You can have that.
We received a shit-load of letters from people that want to transcribe interviews for fun, and we’re sorting through them now. So, sit tight; you’ll hear from us soon. Incidentally, the guy that wrote: “Fuck yeah! I’ll do that!” and nothing more (not even a name), will not be hearing from us soon. You are very ridiculous, Sir.
If you’ve no idea what any of this is about, read the previous post.
Can’t wait to meet you, future-intern. We’re gonna have fun! I’m going to show you how to smoke opium! Just kidding. There will be no drug use at the future-office.
Speaking of ridiculous, Keifer called and we’re going for appletinis at the Gramercy tonight. I suspect he wants to reclaim the ‘choke-fight’ crown. I’ve been breathing into my diaphragm while simultaneously strangling myself since I put the phone down. He’s not getting the title back, and I don’t care if that means flatlining him (nyuk nyuk). Arm-wrestling? Arm-wrestling is for prawn-cracker bitch-men. Choke-fighting is the only true test of a man’s mettle, and the best place to really choke it up is over appletinis at the Gramercy. I’ll be in the Rose bar at around 10PM, choking the shit out of Keifer Sutherland’s big purple head.
Come say hi!
Here’s a great moment in cinema.
Probably should have mentioned that we’re looking for an interny type person who’s happy to work from home and never, ever meet the people she/he’s working for. Is that you? Did you just move here from the midwest? Are you easily pushed around? Do you mind getting out of bed at 3AM to help me up the stairs? Would you like to see your name next to the word ‘Intern’ in upcoming issues of Wooooo? Do you wanna help us get more than AN issue out each year? Do you mind terribly that we haven’t got an office right now (it’s coming)? Would it be okay if you addressed me as “Mr. Crombie” when my friends were around? Can you get shit done like a mother-fucker? That’s the most important thing: Getting it done like a champion. That’s why we sort of want a girl. They just seem to get stuff done better and faster. Sexist, no?
If you can get shit done, and you like transcribing interviews, and you’re not a dumb “Dude, I was so wasted last night, dude” type, holler at us.. We want you. Bad.
P.s. If it’s okay with you, I look like this. But you’ll never meet me, so who cares?
I’m kidding. We’ll meet. I’ll take you out for appletinis every friday.
Do you like transcribing interviews? We don’t. It’s lame. Listening to dumb conversations you already had is very, very boring. But, if you enjoy listening to other people prattle on, and you know how to type, please holler at us HERE.
Heterosexual males need not apply. Why? Because you’re lazy and unreliable. It’s true. You are.
I just finished reading Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style. Bad move. Now I know how much I suck.
It’s not nice to suck this bad; frankly, it sucks. And it really sucks when you realize how much you suck so late in the game. My sucky words have been in print for years. How many grammatically and stylistically lamentable passages have I been responsible for so far? Hundreds? Thousands? All my editors must be illiterates. Bastards. Why didn’t anyone stop me and say: “Brevity begets forcefulness,” or “Don’t write anything you wouldn’t actually say,” or “Don’t coin your own verbs by adding ize at the end.” I’ve been inventalizing my own verbs the whole time!
Christ. There’s something to be said for getting an education. Autodidact? Autodickhead, more like it. This sucks.
I know, I know. Where’s the next issue?
You must be tuned into our glacial publishing schedule by now. If you’re not, here’s how we cook:
Firstly, we do very little. Then we stir in a pinch of apathy left over from the 90′s and let sit for twelve months. After that, we coat the whole thing liberally with ennui, sprinkle with a little dissonance, strain through a tennis racquet made of hate, and then off it goes to the printers.
I don’t know what to tell you. It’s winter and we’re in a recession. It’s 28ºF here. That’s -2º celsius. It’s not uncommon to see burst fire hydrants frozen in mid flow, eyelids frosted shut, or pigeons modeling dead rats as stoles. And I’ve had to get a real job! I’m toweling off the upholstery at Scores on 59th Street. It’s okay. The girls give me bumps when I feel tired, and George Clooney said hello to me again last night, so that was nice.
Maaan, we are working on a new issue. It’ll appear when you least expect it. Possibly at your 30th wedding anniversary, but It’s coming.
Shut up.
Now, let’s talk about a more pressing matter of tardiness: Why haven’t I.D. Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Giant Magazine, Metropolitan Home, Gourmet, Cookie, Southern Accents, Vibe, Portfolio, Blender, Best Life, Travel & Leisure Golf, Hallmark Magazine, Domino, Teen, Wondertime, Plenty, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Country Home, Atlanta Peach, PC Magazine, SI Latino, Cottage Living, O at Home, Men’s Vogue, Radar, CosmoGirl, or Playgirl released an issue lately? Huh? I’ll tell you why: ’cause they’re fucking lazy. Apparently they don’t even turn up at the empty space where their offices used to be. Terrible.
Today is Groundhog Day, and, because we’re awesomely busy doing other stuff, we’ve decided to post up the best scene from the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ and the DVD cover with the really bad picture of Bill Murray. How did that get past the people who decide what does and what doesn’t accurately resemble Bill Murray?
See you tomorrow… down at the store, or whatever…
Speaking of Kells, here it is again.