The idea of New Year’s Resolutions has become a cliché and a joke. We, cynical yet honest, know it is just people making empty promises while faded after a night of hard-drinking. Still, isn’t a good idea to take some time to reflect upon our lives and try to better them?
What follow are my 10 resolutions for 2010 – Give me two weeks and I’ll be back to my old ways:
Stop Having Tawdry Affairs with the Wives of Prime Ministers that Scandalize the Prime Ministers and Force Them to Resign
Did a Prime Minister snatch my second wife away from me while we were on our honeymoon in the Eastern European country he governed? Yes. Have I been relieving the pain caused by that Prime Minister by having affairs that I allow to end badly with the wives of any Prime Minister I can? Yes. But how much longer can I hold a grudge against some smug head of government with tennis star good looks and a somehow endearing beet-stench? That was twenty-two years ago! And did I even really love Wife Numero Dos? She didn’t think the California Raisins were positively enchanting! They’re blues-singing dried grapes! I mean, c’mon!
Eat After Midnight
My brother slipped up after one too many eggnogs this Christmas and revealed that I am in fact not a Mogwai. Apparently that was just a family practical joke perpetuated since I saw the film Gremlins over twenty years ago. Also not true: that Mogwais look just like regular human beings and were made to look like cute and cuddly little furballs for the movie. They really look like Gizmo. Anyway, once my anger subsides, I’m totally eating a bucket of fried chicken some night at 12:01 AM.
Expose More People to WigShop
WigShop is a work of video art by Amber Martin. I witnessed most of the piece at BOFFO’s Objective Affection exhibition where I was checking out a lovely piece by Junko Sugimoto and have now received a copy of the video as a gift. The setup for WigShop at the gallery was simple: a large television played the video in a loop surrounded by mannequin heads in wigs and masks of Martin’s character, an operator of a wig shop. The video itself is like some deranged public access show starring Martin’s character, in Tammy Faye makeup, big, 80’s metal hair and a black, crystal-studded bodysuit that reveals her pale sternum and stomach. It’s very much like an awkward and strange sketch on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, lengthened yet still funny. Martin’s character brushes her wigs, speaks to them, contorts her face comically, talks to unseen customers and takes phone calls in front of a fake backdrop of more wigs, with a soundtrack of bubbly scat, groovy whistling and detours into a Gordon Lightfoot album and Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog”, which also involves a shot of a huge pyre. It’s an odd, fun piece. Martin’s ability to create characters – she’s done so in various performance art pieces – will maybe one day allow her to create her own insane variety show.
Get into the Cloud Computing Game
I’ve nearly finished work on the “Cloud Computer”. It is super simple to use: just point the device at the sky and press the “Snap” button, the device will then take a “Photograph” of the sky and a “Calculator” will then “Compute” the number of “Clouds”. It’s truly an amazing product! I’m going to be so “Computer Savvy”! Haha, yeah!
‘That’s not what cloud computing is. It’s “a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet”.’
‘It’s what?’
‘It’s a virtual server over the Internet.’
‘…Oh. Damn.’
Give More Things A/Another Chance
In 2008, I gave a third chance to Guided By Voices and it was definitely the charm. I also found out that year that Stereolab had a lot more than future-lounge to offer, and Lost, a show I had dismissed for years as being too popular to be good (What kind of reason is that?) was one of my favorite television shows.
In 2009, I re-listened to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and, despite its refined production, quieter moments and the “dad-rock” tag, things that usually turn me off, I have grown to really love the album. With Embryonic, my favorite album of 2009, I’ve begun delving into the Flaming Lips, a band I thought of as innocuous purveyors of sickly-sweet optimism, though ones with an amazing live show.
I had not read anything by David Foster Wallace at the time of his tragic death in September of 2008, and actually thought of him, along with writers like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen and the others of what I thought of as the “McSweeney’s Set”, as a bunch who were hip but lacked substance, despite having not read any of their works. But when the news broke that DFW had died, I found myself deeply shaken, as if I had read and loved his work and thus knew him in a way. I began reading some of the short fiction and nonfiction pieces that Harper’s and The New Yorker were offering up online. I was immediately hooked. I then went on to read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, The Broom of the System, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Girl with Curious Hair and Infinite Jest. DFW is now one of my favorite writers and his death is even more upsetting to me, especially with how well he seemed to understand the human condition in our times, offering hope, only to succumb to that “billowing black sail”. His insights, ability to capture absolutely everything with his joyous prose, pain and humor will always be with me.
These works, along with 30 Rock and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, were ones I gave a/another chance to and enjoyed. But there were also works that didn’t/still didn’t work for me. Bands like Fleet Foxes, Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, and Vampire Weekend, who had highly-praised albums, offered me at best a few decent songs. Gossip Girl, How I Met Your Mother and SNL, a show I grew up loving, aren’t doing it for me either. But I gave them a/another chance. I didn’t let Internet hype/lack of, the maintenance of a guise of cool, petty grievances, or any other juvenile reason make up my mind for me. It’s ridiculous to me now but I did this and many others still do. A fear of being wrong or unhip? Who needs that business. I’m so glad that I was wrong about DFW and GBV. So glad. In 2010 I won’t mind being wrong about something else.
Cease Building My Woodrow Wilson President-Bot
This nostalgia regurgitation needs to be left behind in the 00’s. President Barack Obama hasn’t done everything we thought he would do so far but he has done some things with the steaming shitpile he’s been handed. …Right? So my plan to bring back the glory days that were the 1910’s by making and getting elected a Woodrow Wilson robot to run the country, bringing us back to the good times of the Titanic, Bolshevism, ballroom-themed music, Prohibition, and World War I, needs to end.
‘Sorry, Woodrow Wilson President-Bot.’
‘How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping—TRRCKITCH—These petty barons, some of them not a little powerful— TRRCKITCH —But. I. Love. Youuu-uuu-u-u— TRRCKITCH -ZHUUUM.’
Embrace My Russian Ancestry
I’ve recently learned from my family that my heritage is not German with a bit of Welsh, Russian and Scottish. I actually have almost as much Russian as German. So how will I bask in all of my once-dormant Ruskieness? Dostoevsky and Tolstoy scholar? I do believe Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov are the two greatest works of literature, but no. Commie? Nyet. Diet of vodka and caviar? Double nyet. I need to do something or become something that is as big and mythic as Mother Russia herself. I need to become someone like Rasputin.
Da, I am going to model the rest of my life after Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a man who many Russians believed to be a great prophet and healer…with a supernatural penis. Rasputin was a living legend that influenced the Tsar and was a saint to his people. And had a supernatural penis! What does that even mean? Who cares! It must be awesome.
However, upon further reading, Rasputin seems to have been a manipulative, power-mad drunkard who was poisoned, shot in the head and drowned, so maybe this isn’t such a great idea. Even with the supernatural penis.
Adapt a Videogame into a Musical
Beginning in the 90’s with Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, continuing through the 00’s with Tomb Raider, Max Payne and Resident Evil, and showing no signs of stopping in the 10’s with Warcraft, Halo, The Sims, Metal Gear Solid and Castlevania, film adaptations of videogames is one hell of a racket. But it’s a new decade and we need something new and fresh. Film adaptations of videogames are so passé. That’s why I’m adapting the classic NBA Jam for NBA Jam: The Musical!
The world of musicals has been adapting films for years now and that too is getting old. But musicals of videogames? That’s the future! And I’m going to become a point guard of the future, slam dunking us into a new age, by adapting the super-popular arcade basketball game.
The musical will consist of actors playing the stars from the ’93 – ’94 NBA season. Players like Michael Jordon, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Dikembe Mutombo, John Stockton and, of course, Bill Laimbeer will be singing soon-to-be Broadway classics based on the game’s commentary: “He’s Heating Up”, “He’s on Fire!” and “Boom-Shaka-Laka!” Twice a month special guest stars will take part in the showings as “The Unlockables”, players like P-Funk, Warren Moon, Air Dog and Bill Clinton. What will the plot be? Do musicals have plots? No! It’s just singing and dancing and now, super dunks!
‘What about that “nostalgia regurgitation” you were talk—?’
‘Shh! Or I’ll slap you with my supernatural penis!’
‘Now that’s just ghastly.’
‘Sorry, Grandma.’
Get in a Video for Lady GaGa
I know there’s going to be an opening for the role of “The Evil Acrobatic Dentist from the Land of Crystal Prisms” in the next video by Lady GaGa. As you can see by my penchant for somersaults, collection of dental mirrors and color display spectrum, I was born for this, GaGa. Let’s get insane together!
Write More, Write Better
My life’s goal is to express myself fully. This year, like the last few, and all years until I perish in a cross-country hovercraft race against sadistic, adrenaline-loving aliens, sacrificing myself for our plucky, now-mutated human race, will be devoted to that. I still have a lot to learn and thus a way to go before getting there. But in 2010 I’m gonna Keep on Chooglin’.
