“WHAT?! Halloween is this weekend? I had no idea! What am I going to do? I’d better get my big stupid head out of my big stupid ass!”
Guess who that was. Give up? It was you. I know, I’m really good at impressions.
So you haven’t picked out a costume yet and you’re afraid it’s too late? Never fear! I have compiled this list of cheap and easy costume ideas for those of you who waited until the last minute. Feel free to use any of these. All I ask is that you send me a check for five dollars, or at least tell all your friends that I am handsome.
A good costume to wear in these hipster times is Ironic You. This is someone who dresses exactly like you, but does so ironically. Put on your favorite sweater and say, “Isn’t this sweater lame? It’s so bad it’s great.” Talk about movies you like. “The Royal Tenenbaums? That’s the worst. That makes it the best!”
Another great costume is Person Who Ignores Everyone Because She’s Listening To Her IPod. Wear headphones that lead into your pocket. Cut in line at the keg. When someone taps you on the shoulder and tells you you’re cutting, make a gesture that says, “I can’t hear you. I’m listening to my iPod.” Smile and nod at everyone. Tell people how much you love Matt & Kim.
Everybody wants to be a sexy something for Halloween — like a sexy vampire or a sexy umpire — but you know what I think is sexy? TAKING A STAND AGAINST DOMESTIC ABUSE. So, do something with that, maybe.
Whatever you do, DON’T go as Zombie Michael Jackson, because no matter how much work you put into it, there’s going to be five guys at the party in better Zombie Michael Jackson costumes. Remember last year how every guy was the Joker and every girl was either Sarah Palin or Sexy Sarah Palin? That’s what it’s going to be like this year with Zombie Michael Jackson. It’s going to be like that scene in Being John Malkovich when Malkovich goes through the tunnel and ends up in a restaurant full of Malkoviches. It’s going to be like that with Zombie Michael Jackson. “But in the Thriller video—” Yeah, I know, I get it. Listen: do yourself a favor. Go as Zombie Bea Arthur instead.
Go as the person who’s too cool to dress up for Halloween. Make fun of other people’s costumes as viciously as possible, then say, ”I don’t really feel that way; I just have to stay in character.”
Wear all one color. Maybe red or yellow. When no one’s watching, surreptitiously sip a large glass of water, and keep the water in your mouth. Go to to a large group of people having a conversation and quietly join the circle. When the timing feels right, spit out your water on someone. Yay fire hydrant!
Or wear all brown and proclaim, “I’m a Hallo-weenie!” If people do not laugh at your joke, say it again, louder. Maybe they didn’t hear you the first time. Maybe they are deaf. Say it in sign language. If they still do not laugh, they probably just don’t get it. Man, this party’s full of losers.
Go to a Halloween party in normal clothes and say you’re a surfer dude. If someone asks why you aren’t dressed for surfing, say “Why would I go surfing in October? At night? At a halloween party?” Then say, “Idiot.”
Here’s a similar idea that really packs a wallop: go as a member of the KKK when not at a rally. Again, this requires no actual costume aside from what you’re actually wearing that day. Someone might come up to you and say, “What’s so scary about that? You look just like anybody else.” Reply: “You just answered your own question.”
Or you could be a robot from the future trying to pass as a twenty-first century human. Dress in normal clothes and talk like how a robot would think a person would talk. Or don’t! Whatever!
Here’s something: take a trip down memory lane and put on some clothes you haven’t worn for weeks. Say, ”I’m September Me. I’m just like Now Me, except I happened a month ago.” Pretend you don’t know anyone that you’ve met since September. Make lots of cultural references to September, like, “Don’t you love that Patrick Swayze’s still alive?” or “I haven’t given up on Glee yet!” or “I’mma let you finish, but September is the best month of all time! OF ALL TIME!”
Go as your roommate! This is super easy; just ask your roommate if you can borrow some clothes. Then after the party, he’ll say, “Hey, can I get my clothes back?” and you’ll say, “Yeah, I’m just going to wash them for you,” then NEVER GIVE THEM BACK! Ha ha, suck on that, roommate.
It’s TMOPMO Tuesday! (Click on image to read full size)
I wrote this comic when Olde English first got hired to make comedy videos for the now defunct Super Deluxe. (I like to think they went under solely because they gave us an obscene amount of money which we didn’t deserve, which put them at a deficit no amount of Jack Link’s Beef Jerky ads could ameliorate. (Double parentheses: Similarly, the year we went to Aspen for the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival was the last of the festival’s existence, and it’s fun to think we killed that too. (Last parentheses, I swear: When we got hired by ChangeToWin to make three Anti-McCain videos — only one of which they ended up using — we told them proudly, “We want to do for John McCain what we did for Super Deluxe and the Aspen Comedy Festival!”)))
This has always been one of my favorite TMOPMO strips, mostly because of Lisa’s stellar illustration/coloring (check out the lovingly detailed illustration of her future boyfriend in panel five), but also because it describes two feelings that are constants in my life, things that I am in fact feeling right now:
1) The crippling fear that Nothing Good Lasts. I’m right now working a job I love — I’m teaching Bay Area high school kids how to write plays. It’s rewarding, and enriching, and immediate — it’s certainly better than my last job which was Not Having A Job. But more than just beating the hell out of sitting at Starbucks each day, banging my head against my keyboard, trying to write things I’m not sure anybody will ever see, more than that, I actively enjoy it. It’s the first time in a long time that I would describe my happiness as more than just the absence of sadness.
And yet, these feelings of warmth make me nervous. I get self-conscious when I’m happy, like it isn’t a good look, like I’m wearing a suit a couple sizes too big. People call me on the phone and they say, how are you, and I try to play it down, not because I don’t think they’d be happy for me, but because I don’t want to look foolish when it all comes crashing down around me, which I’m so sure it will. (See above parentheticals.)
2) I ate too much candy. I don’t know why I never learn.
Sad Song Saturday: Josh Ritter - The Bad Actress (Acoustic) (download)
Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
Sorry this song is late. I am in the midst of a VERY IMPORTANT PROJECT THAT I WILL NOT TELL YOU ABOUT BUT WILL INSTEAD SPEND SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS HINTING ABOUT VAGUELY. Enjoy.
One day you might discover that you’ve written something. And you might send it to your manager, with a note attached that says, “Hey, is this something? I don’t know; it might be nothing.”
And your manager will call you and say, “Oh yeah, this is something. But maybe it could be a little more something. This is going to sound crazy, but hear me out. What if… instead of three friends… you make them triplets?”
So, you’ll write another draft (about triplets this time), and then another one, and after more notes from your manager, and from your friends, you’ll write more drafts, and when your manager thinks it’s ready, he’ll send it to his boss, and then he’ll give you notes and you’ll make more changes.
Then maybe some studio will read the something that is now about ten times removed from the first something you wrote, and they’ll say, “Hey, we kind of like this. We might want to make this something. But we don’t know yet. What if we gave you enough money to make a short something that’s kind of like this other something so that we can get a taste for it?”
This would be very exciting. So, you get started writing a short something that’s kind of like your original longer something, but it’s difficult because by this point you’ve kind of forgotten what was funny or interesting about the something to begin with. But the studio has hired a producer and a director and they’re giving you lots of great notes and locations are being scouted and actors are being hired, so there’s no turning back now!
And you might start to think, well this is an awful lot of other people’s time and money being spent on this stupid little something that I wrote. You might wonder to yourself, is this is all a set-up? Am I the victim of an elaborate prank? Or am I the perpetrator?
Because secretly, you’re not even sure the thing you’ve written is all that good.
In a few weeks, you’re flying down to L.A., and you’re still several drafts away, and you said you’d get them new pages a few days ago, and everybody’s waiting on you, and you’re so so sure that no matter what you do now, the whole project is doomed, it’s going to be a disaster, but there’s nothing you can do now to stop this runaway train, and worst of all, this is exactly the kind of opportunity you’ve been hoping for. All this attention, and pressure, and anxiety — this debilitating terror — this is what it is. It’s not going to get any easier than this.
And you might discover that success is much more terrifying than failure, because of all the grander future failures it implies.
And if all this happens to you, and you feel lost and confused and humbled and anxious and pretty much just about worthless — well, if that happens and you need some advice, you give me a call, because maybe by that time I’ll know how the story ends.
Sad Song Saturday: John Lennon - Grow Old With Me (download) (submitted by Kevin A.)
Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
Kevin says: I’ve always loved John Lennon. His ideology is inspiring and timeless, his antics are amusing, and he’s a fairly well-known musician. He wrote this song with Yoko in 1980, one of the last songs he wrote before he was killed. Behind his political views and outspokenness, Lennon only truly wished to live a life full of love. The lyrics speak for themselves: “Grow old along with me Whatever fate decrees We will see it through For our love is true God bless our love”
I say: You know what makes me sad? (Besides the obvious fact that John and Yoko did not in fact grow old together?) All the vitriol and hatred still leveled against Yoko Ono by supposed fans of the man who loved her more than anything.
If you love John Lennon and you hate Yoko, not as an artist, but as a person, I think you’re — and I’m sorry, but there’s no other word for it — kind of gross.
It seems a little bit selfish, like you don’t want to share John Lennon, or like you love the idea of John Lennon more than the man himself — the perfect, ideal John Lennon is better than one who gets insecure and needs approval from others and needs love and gets restless and outgrows the Beatles. It’s like how you might get mad at Liz Phair for making her albums more shiny and accessible because that’s not Liz Phair, or Of Montreal for rewriting one of their best songs into an Outback Steakhouse jingle because, come on, guys . However, if you can’t see how much love Yoko brought into John’s life, how much she challenged him and inspired him and filled him with joy, then I would argue that you don’t really love the idea of John Lennon at all.
I can take a hint. In fact, I take hints all the time. For months now I’ve been checking my mailbox, seeing if you left any hints for me. At first I thought my electricity bill was a hint, but then they turned off my electricity and I realized, oh, that was actually the bill.
Then I realized, you not responding to my letters WAS the hint. Yeah, that’s a really great hint, jerk, real original.
Oh, you probably think anybody can do what I do. You’d probably just take To Kill a Mockingbird and make it into To Kill a Macchiato-bird. Okay, actually, that’s pretty good. What about To Caramel a Macchiato-bird? Now you’re pushing it.
I know what you’re going to say: why would you hire a jerk like me to write a bunch of stupid fake movie titles on your marquee? Well, guess what, EINSTEIN, it didn’t have to be just the marquee! You could have made fake movie posters, or buttons, anything. You could have even put out a book, like The Best of the Starbucks Movie Titles. Maybe some Hollywood guy would have seen it and actually wanted to make one of the movies! Now who’s stupid?
Anyway, I want to keep this professional, but you are a flaming pile of buttholes and your coffee tastes like crap and Seattle sucks and you know what, I’m glad Kurt Cobain killed himself. He probably did it so he wouldn’t have to drink any more of your terrible coffee.
Love (NOT),
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
P.S. If the cute barista who works there (Katie? With the braces?) doesn’t have a boyfriend, will you please give her my number? I wrote a really good song I think she’d like.
Burning Down the House by Tom Jones & The Cardigans originally by Talking Heads
Tom Jones, you are a crazy man and I love you.
I can’t get over how expressive he is throughout this video, and Nina Persson as well. Look at their faces!
Tom Jones is all like, “What?! Why am I covering the Talking Heads? This is completely outlandish! I am a maniac! You never know what to expect! Crazy! Crazy!”
And Nina Persson is like, “I know, right? My last name is Persson. Isn’t that craaaaazy? It’s like Person, but with an extra s, like a sssssnake!”
And Tom Jones is all like, “What?! Why am I collaborating with the Cranberries? This is insane!”
And then drummer Bengt Lagerberg is like, “Uh, we’re the Cardigans.”
Sad Song Saturday: Rilo Kiley - The Good That Won’t Come Out (download)
Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
I don’t have much to say about this song except that it’s one of my all-time favorites, by one of my all-time favorite bands, off of maybe my all-time favorite album, The Execution of All Things, which pretty much got me through my freshman year of college.
You could throw a dart at the lyrics of this album and chances are you’d hit one of my all-time favorite lines. There’s a line in this song that I find particularly frightening, when I lie in bed and listen to this on repeat, when I stay home instead of going to the big party, when I don’t call my friends back, when I don’t do the things I say I’m going to do, when I say to myself, “Today I’m just not going to try. It’s going to be one of those days.” When I sulk and fall into myself, when I create playlists of sad songs, and post a new one on my blog every week, lines like the following give me pause.
“You say I choose sadness, that it never once has chosen me.” And the follow-up, tossed off quickly between verses: “Maybe you’re right.”
No. No. No no no no no. I do not want to watch the first issue of your exclusive Web Comic. Thanks, but no, thanks, but also, no thanks.
I went to your website because I wanted to watch a music video. THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO BE. I know it’s a cliche at this point to complain that MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore. I know it’s also a cliche to complain that MTV2 — the channel created specifically to show videos to appease all the fans who complained about MTV not showing videos — MTV2 also doesn’t play music videos anymore. But you, MTVMusic.com, the website created to show the videos that can no longer be seen on MTV or MTV2, somehow I thought you would be different.
No one is asking for you to diversify. You’re not google; you don’t need to do everything. Just music videos. That’s it.
Don’t think I don’t appreciate everything you do. The way your front page highlights videos both new and old. Your powerful search capabilities. Your archive of pop up videos. But you could still be doing more. There are more videos you could get. You could compress them less, make them look better. But most of all, you could not waste my time by trying to be something you’re not.
Oh, wait, am I being punk’d? Is this Punk’d? Is someone punk’ng me right now? No? I’m not? Then stop wasting my God damn time by making me read your God damn banner ad for your dumbass webcomic. Hey, you know what? I made a webcomic once. You know where I put it? On its own God damn webpage. I didn’t put it on some website for people looking for holiday recipes, because I know that people looking for holiday recipes are NOT INTERESTED IN READING MY WEBCOMIC.
God damn it. All I want to God damn do is watch the God damn video for Miley God damn Cyrus’s Party in the U.S.A. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?
Sad Song Saturday: The Mountain Goats - From TG&Y (download) (submitted by Sarah B.)
Send your sad song suggestions to Raizin(at)gmail(dot)com.
Sarah says: I am just writing to let you know that you need to put the saddest of sad songs on your blog. What is the saddest of sad songs you might ask? Why, it is from TG&Y by the mountain goats. In fact, it might even be too sad. You see, it is definitely about a kid who wants to run away from an abusive home, since it is about John Darnielle when he wanted to run away.
I say: When Dan asked me if I wanted to go to the Mountain Goats concert with him, I didn’t know what a big fan he was. I didn’t know that we’d get there early and stand in the very front, surrounded by other super-fans. I didn’t know that everyone around me would sing along with every song and cry and clap and scream, that John Darnielle would hold the microphone out to us and everyone would shout every lyric with perfect memory and I would hold out my arms and shrug.
I didn’t know that I would spend the rest of the night flirting with a girl with a funny name who played the autoharp, who, for that night at least, claimed to be thinking about quitting her day job and breaking up with her boyfriend. I didn’t know that I would go to see her play and that I would make Dan come with me and that together we would make up exactly half of her audience and I would look suspiciously at the other half and wonder which of the two of them was her boyfriend. And then the bar would kick me out because I didn’t have ID. And then that would be the last time I ever saw her.
I didn’t know that years later, writing this blog post would make me go to her webpage, that I would read her About and I would read her Press, and that I would get excited for no reason that she might be touring California this winter. That my heart would hiccup and I’d spend the rest of the day thinking about her. About how I might see her (I won’t) and all the things we might talk about (or not), and all the days we’ll never spend together.
I didn’t know I would lie in the hammock in my parents’ backyard and stare at my shadow-speckled hands and think about all the things that maybe, if I were a little more this, or things were a little less that, could have almost but ultimately didn’t. I had no idea that I’d waste a whole day, all because I went with Dan to the Mountain Goats concert.
