Epic Rap Battles of History living proof there is talent to be found in 'You' after all

If I'm going to admit that I spend some (a little) time searching for 'entertainment' on YouTube, I feel some clarification is in order: I do discriminate, avoiding at all costs the obvious, witless or destructively corrosive. I generally pass on babies doing cute things, people's weird fixation with their pets, or with themselves, 'Jackass'-style stunts, all drunk videos, flash mob dance-offs in bus stations, videos where someone doesn't want to be recorded (or worse, doesn't know they are) and anything involving violence for the sick, greasy fun of it, whether that's bums on railroad tracks, middle school girls in locker rooms, or drunken dust-ups at Denny's at two in the morning.

For better or worse, that doesn't leave a hell of a lot left. Some tornado videos, a train video here or there (a sure sign I'm getting old...), fishing video now and then, a half court trick shot, and lots of old news footage and commercials because I find that kind of stuff fascinating...but that's really all YouTube has to offer the likes of me.

Never has anyone who is actually attempting to entertain me with a 'channel' kept my attention beyond a half-baked and mostly skeptical chuckle. It's no secret that YouTube is largely responsible for turning the Internet into a lamentable place, where random people do something merely because they can, giving little or no thought to whether they should, or, as my brother has observed, whether they really can. People have an unprecedented opportunity to find a world-wide audience, grab for that fame they so covet and view as a birthright, and usually manage to score at least a smattering of 'likes' and other forms of approval merely for their effort, or for one creatively lucid moment that went viral - but then rarely possess the inclination, resources, drive or raw talent to keep it going, to legitimize themselves.

Worse than that even, is the Internet's  'open source' crowd, the tired and creatively barren people plagiarizing copyrighted works in the name of 'fandom', posting their GIF mash-ups or animated interpretations, or re-posting them, because they 'can.'...calling it 'creativity' under the auspices of the personal empowerment Apple and Microsoft enjoy dangling in front of our faces like a carrot. For these people, authorship means nothing.

An especially offensive example of this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/02/calvin-and-hobbes-animated-short-video_n_4193957.html

On the subject of the former, I don't know what's worse: the lame animation itself, or The Huffington Post's predictably irresponsible approval. But put bluntly, if I were Bill Watterson, I would be off my fucking rocker to put a stop to it, even knowing it's ultimately a futile fight.

But I digress.

The Internet sensation Epic Rap Battles of History has in the last three years proven that there is talent - real, legitimate talent (not just someone taking advantage of the creative blank check technology now provides) - to be found in 'You'.

I first discovered it about two years ago, when I typed 'Bill O'Reilly' into the search window.  I was looking for two things in particular: his meltdown as anchor of Inside Edition from the early 1990s, and his inflamed argument with Geraldo Rivera over immigration, which happened on his current show a while back.

What I found instead was someone impersonating O'Reilly, pitted against someone else impersonating John Lennon. The two 'celebrities' were slinging insults at one another in musical verse, and doing so in both a compelling and funny way. Over in the search list, I discovered there were more of these: Abe Lincoln versus Chuck Norris; Lady Gaga versus Sarah Palin; Justin Bieber versus Beethoven, where Beethoven becomes hilariously enraged. In the two minutes and thirty seconds it took to watch that one, I became a devoted fan.

Since then, Epic Rap Battles of History has not only never disappointed, but gotten steadily better. Its creators and primary performers (the Lennon and O'Reilly I initially stumbled across) are YouTube stars Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd. Unknown to me before this, it's become apparent, and in no uncertain terms, these two have the chops to make use of this new medium in the way Microsoft and Apple like to tell us is possible, and in the process, have created something completely original, their own unique brand.

ERB is the perfect assemblage of razor-edged satire and silliness for the sake of silliness. It's politically incorrect and raunchy, but never loses a certain childish joie de vivre, which enables it to get away with just about anything. And it does. The visuals are relatively simple (sometimes just clip art floating in a green screen background) but sport an attention to detail that requires numerous viewings to fully appreciate, to catch everything going on.

The songs themselves are as catchy as anything on the radio. Never exceeding two or three minutes in length, just enough time to build tension, their arrangements are usually designed to reflect something about the combatants (Beethoven's Fur Elise embedded in the beat; a watery descent of violins, a la Mozart; a squealing digitally-woven rhythm as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates square off), and tightly meshed with remarkably smart lyrics:

'I'm on the leader of your limp-dicked Luftwaffe!' Darth Vader growls in his (second) battle against Adolph Hitler. If you know Star Wars at all, and have some knowledge of World War II, you'll know why that's exceptionally clever. And the ERB song book is full of such gems:

'I'm more powerful than you when I'm wearing women's pants!' - Freddie Mercury bellows.

"I didn't lose any chocolate, I just added vanilla!' - Michael Jackson cries with a grab of his crotch.

"You'll be nothing but a skeleton messing with the fellow in yellow who will be pedaling like hell up in the peloton!" - Lance Armstrong

''You'll find that the ex-KGB is the best MC in the ex-CCCP!" - Vladmir Putin.

It helps that Epic Lloyd and Nice Peter are both strong impersonators, drawing from the art of body language, facial expressions and voice modulation (in tandem with make-up/costume) to wholly transform themselves. And when they can't do it, they bring in people who can. Usually other YouTube stars (Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Marilyn Monroe, among others, have all been represented with startling accuracy), but actual celebrities have begun showing up as well. Snoop Lion's appearance as Moses (versus Santa Claus) was significant on numerous levels, and Dubstep maestro Skrillex stepped up to take on Mozart at the end of last season.

Most impressive, and memorable, has been their foray into historically significant (but still outrageously funny) battles: Thomas Edison versus Nikola Tesla, Babe Ruth versus Lance Armstrong, Ghandi versus Martin Luther King Jr. Each retains that charming 'silliness for the sake of silliness', but with unmistakable intelligence, a 'knowing things' at play at the same time.

'How many dictators does it take, to turn an empire into a union of ruinous states?!' Rasputin snarls to Joseph Stalin.

You have to 'know things' to come up with a line like that.

Pitting luminaries past and present against one another in something so ridiculous as a 'rap battle', and somehow getting it to work time and time again, is not an easy task. Often these things become a group effort, with lots of people contributing ideas and talents, and I'd be surprised to learn that's not the case here. But if Epic Lloyd and Nice Peter have at all remained a consistent factor in the creative and conceptual force behind ERB (and there's no reason to think they haven't), they're pretty damn inspired, and if the tens of millions of views that each new installment receives is any indication, we can rest assured that there are lots of people who are not content with regurgitated GIF mash-ups and the tired, loud and witless filling our dead air; plenty who still expect to be truly entertained by our entertainers.

All this being said, I would hate for the franchise to take things to the next level, become too mainstream, too many celebrities involved, picked up by E! or Comedy Central, for instance, sponsored by Pepsi and generating six-figure pay days. That might be precisely what Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd want (it's what I would want, surely...), but I think if that happened, its rawness would have to be reined in, or more carefully (too carefully) thought out. Hipness, rather than cleverness, would eventually overshadow all other considerations, were it brought to a 'national' audience. It happened to Saturday Night Live a long time ago, was the reason why Mad TV, which concerned itself primarily with being funny, became vastly more so in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

With the launch of Season 3 on October 7 (notable amidst this new round of brilliance is 'Pablo Picasso versus Bob Ross'...) ERB is right where it should be - with hundreds of millions of viewers, but still the Internet's best kept secret.

The time may be at hand to reconsider the Washington Redskins

I've never been one for the perpetuation of political correctness. Though well intended in its infancy (conceived to help break through immovable, and undeniable, barriers foisted upon minorities in decades past), it has, since its mainstream rise in the 1990s, taken its charge a bit too far down the path of righteousness, and become a pejorative used to describe someone - or something - that is too sensitive, too uptight, too reserved, at the expense truth, or worse, humor. Humor is a big factor in the universe unfolding as it should, and also largely what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. God forbid we ever all stop laughing.

But while that's all very true, it's also true that I'm a white, Midwestern heterosexual male who, all things considered, has lived a charmed life. I have never been openly discriminated against. Never felt the burn of distrustful eyes cast on me simply because I walked into a public place. I've never had my ethnicity used against me, or watched as the color of my skin, or the habits or traditions of my forefathers, got turned into a punch line. Doubtless many of my own ancestors, at least on my dad's side of the family (which, for reference, probably looked something like Fiddler on the Roof) suffered at some point, but I, personally, never have. Have I encountered (reverse) racism; yes, certainly. Some people in every race and creed are going to act like morons. That's not the same as facing institutionalized discrimination.

All the talk lately about the prospect of changing the NFL team Washington Redskins to something different, something less offensive, has got me thinking about the late great George Carlin, who once said that we think in language, so the quality of our thoughts can only be as good as the quality of the language we speak.

He's right, we do think in language, and a move on Washington's part to change the 75-year-old team name would not be unprecedented. Other high school, college and professional sports teams who have come under pressure to change their insensitive names have either complied, or attempted to shift the meaning of the word in question. My beloved Atlanta Braves, for instance, trotted out a new motto this year: Always Brave. I don't know where that came from, or whose idea it was, but it seems to be an attempt to distance the franchise from anything Native American. Brave is a state of mind, the motto suggests, not an ethnicity.

The Atlanta Braves have been my team since the early 1980s. They are the Atlanta Braves, deeply rooted in three decades worth of my psyche, and it would be hard - not impossible, but hard - to adjust to a new team name. It would be like following a whole new team. This would be equally true if they stayed the Braves but moved to a different city, became, say, the Jacksonville Braves. In my mind, they're not the Jacksonville Braves any more than they're the Atlanta Spirit, or Atlanta Big Blue...they're the 'Atlanta Braves'....Words mean things; names mean things, which is why you don't name a kitten unless you're sure you can keep it. I learned that the hard way when I was eleven, devastated as my dad and I drove Clubber - a stray I'd found in our garage - to the animal shelter.

The brass in the Atlanta organization cleverly figured out a way to mitigate any  negative connotation associated with 'Braves' by drawing on a positive attribute that is inherent in the word, even when it remains racially motivated. It is a bit of a stretch to suggest  'Braves' just means brave, as in courageous, what with the 'Tomahawk Chop' helping to galvanize the Atlanta crowd over the last twenty years (with drum song playing in the background, no less). But if enough people read 'Always Brave', and enough time goes by, eventually that will become what people think of.

Words mean things. Good or bad, they have a way of getting into our blood.

Unfortunately, it's not so easy for Washington. Bob Costas' two-minute editorial on the issue during Sunday Night Football last month was right on the money: there is simply no way to regard the word 'redskin' as anything but a slur, no way to reinvent it to mean something else. And frankly, the fact that the city in question is Washington D.C., the fountain from which much heartache for Native tribes has flowed over the last 200 years, makes it especially awkward. 

Then there's the Redskins logo, which seals the deal as far as I'm concerned. It's an Indian caricature only slightly less offensive (or would be, if I were Native American...) than the Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo. There's at least a kind of nobility evident in the Redskins logo. 'Wahoo' is a wide-toothed entity sporting an exaggerated shit-eating grin and - literally - red skin, with a feather stuck in his head.

Every fiber of my being wants to dismiss it: It is what it is, I want to tell myself, as I do so much else in life. Relax! It's just baseball! It's not inherently racist. It's funny. It's cute. It's a cartoon. Don't take everything so seriously!

But that's because I am a white, Midwestern heterosexual male. I'm not a Native American. I don't have to look at that grotesquely disproportionate visage and think I see myself in it, or that a vast majority of people in this country see me that way.

To speak nothing of the word 'Wahoo' itself...

Political correctness can run amok surely, and should be practiced by degrees. I think we can do this. I think we are smart enough as a society, as a species, to discern what is legitimately offensive and what's a ludicrous tilting at windmills, like calling that thing in the road a 'personhole cover' (thank you, Mr. Carlin...) or the animal rights group PETA petitioning the town of Fishkill, New York to change its name to something that doesn't suggest violence toward fish. That actually happened in the 1990s, and in my opinion was a flagrant waste of good letter stock paper, an abuse of time that could have been spent more productively sleeping.

We are clever enough to know when it's time to re-think the way we think. We are clever enough to control, by degrees, the quality of our thoughts as they are expressed in our words. And given what's been going on in Washington lately, any number of relevant replacements for 'Redskins' abound:

The Washington Shutdowns?

Washington Gridlock?

The Washington Big Fail?

Big Green?

LEAVE MILEY ALONE!!!!!!! (Lol...sort of...)

I don't know why exactly, but I remember where I was when I heard Miley Cyrus had been born. I was driving along Ondossagon Road in Bayfield County, Wisconsin one evening in late autumn 1992; it was half-snowing and half raining, the day was sinking into a deep dark oblivion like it tends to at that time of year. But maybe it seemed so dismal because I was 20 years old, and totally embroiled in some personal drama (the details of which, interestingly, I can't remember). The announcer came on the radio and said 'Country music superstar' Billy Ray Cyrus had 'welcomed a baby girl into the world!'

Equally fresh in my mind is my reaction. Not exactly a fan of country music at the time, and certainly not Achy Breaky Heart (which all that year had been lending 12-year-old girls, grandmas and a few town simpletons - the kind who like to bust a move by themselves in the corner of the bar near the jukebox - a new dance) and reeling from whatever personal trauma was going on at the moment, that over-exuberant announcement launched me into a ferocious spate of mock jubilation, a concentrated concoction of David Spade and Adam Sandler that maligned Cyrus, his wife, his new baby and the announcer bearing the glad tidings, to which the girl I was driving with, and arguing with, rolled her eyes and (rightly) muttered, "Don't be a dick."

Touche...but a little dickyness was (is) warranted. I hate the propagation of the 'American royalty' concept, which we assign to our leaders and stars in lieu of actual royalty (itself an anachronism in the modern age). I cannot abide the habit of celebrity babies being hoisted up with the expectation that I should contribute a moment of my day to share in the joy or acknowledge them as more significant than any other baby. I like babies, I like Life, it's always a miracle and all that jazz, but it isn't about the babies themselves or Life on the covers of OK! or People magazines, it's just about celebrity, truly 'fill up our troughs and watch us swill' time... and it's never anyone good, always the worst celebrities, least deserving of being 'celebrated', who make the most headlines for the simple and totally unimpressive act of procreation. I'm sorry, I just do not give a crap about North West, or Baby Snooki...and I don't care about the children of celebrities I admire either. Good for them; I wish them (all) well. But I do not care, and if the end of the world came in a howling wall of wind and rain, none of them would get so much as a passing thought from me.

In any case, little did I know twenty years later Miley would be around and her father wouldn't (so much). In the last year, she has gone to great lengths to reinvent herself, forging a completely opposite persona from her days as a Disney darling. It started with the release of her single Party in the USA, which, despite her stripper pole performance of it at the Nickelodeon awards in 2010, was still kind of innocent, a suitably subtle and appropriate transition from Hannah Montana to Miley Cyrus.

But then, some video of her smoking something surfaced (Salvia, she claimed), and not too long after, photos of her smoking pot were released (Pot, she claimed). This was followed by the inevitable foray into a largely naked existence, short shorts and mini-skirts and half-shirts in public places. Then she chopped off all her hair in an act of defiance (which, just my opinion, wasn't her swiftest move). All of that would seem to have been a build-up to the roll out, this summer, of her single, We Can't Stop, and it's 'shocking' video.

I'll skip the obvious indictment - the poor quality of the song, the clumsy syncopation, weak vocals dependent on autotune, forced lyrics providing the requisite assurance - so prevalent amongst youngsters these days - that everything's okay, they are not to be judged and there will be no consequences (Miley holding court...) - and go straight to the video.

My God, that video...the most absurd assemblage of disconnected and meaningless imagery ever revealed....intended to be shocking, edgy, but just sending coffee through my nose in a spurt of laughter. There is of course the requisite booty shaking (twerking, though that word makes the whole process pretty un-sexy), a lot of doe-eyed kids lying around looking hot, er, something...and Miley snuggling up happily against her shirtless man, presumably at the end of a night of partying...because that's certainly how most nights of partying end up.

(Insert sarcastic fart sound here).

And then last night she performed the song at the MTV Video Music Awards, pretty much re-posted all the ridiculousness of the video on a live stage. She also got bleeped by MTV censors for (yikes!) her use of the word 'Molly' in place of 'Miley', 'Molly' being slang for the drug Ecstasy (though seriously, I cannot believe in 2013 we're still bothering to be afraid of words. Shouldn't that have ended with John Denver's Rocky Mountain High?)

All this being said, though, Miley Cyrus has to be regarded, and criticized, realistically and honestly. Granted, she's pretty annoying, and possesses neither the presence nor the sense of humor of even Kesha in her pursuit of stirring the (already heavily stirred) pot, but she really isn't doing anything different than what any 20-year-old girl - 20-year-old kid - does. Freshly flung into the adult world, she's on a mission to explore everything - her creativity, her identity, her sexuality...and she's posing; it's all a carefully considered pose...not that different, when you get right down to it, from Rebecca Black's Friday. A hell of a lot sleazier, but just as laughably forced and inorganic. She is 'overkill' to all four points of the compass, and yes, it's rough to look at, especially since it would appear she is to pop music what her father was to country music.

But it's normal, normal to make a jack ass out of yourself at that age, and for better or worse, if she didn't have a long history as something so squeaky clean (and for that, equally as annoying) as 'Hannah Montana', we might not bat an eye. Some people would like her, some wouldn't, but nobody would be thinking twice - about her twerking, her furries, or her Molly. In fact, they might accept it, as they do Lady Gaga. As it is, there are more than a few people I've talked to who actually like the song...if not Miley singing it.

It's only by the super-saccharine standard of the Disneysphere that we judge Miley so harshly. And perhaps that is the vulgarity. Maybe Disney, et al., is the problem. Maybe as a society we should stop churning out Hannah Montanas, stop constructing child stars out of spare parts in an effort to squeeze as much money as we can from the grubby little hands of 'tweens, building them up into superstars, then holding them accountable when they grow up and have the temerity to actually want to become adults.

Maybe our children should be completely off limits, what do you say? Let's start with Toddlers and Tiaras, and work up from there.

Man oh man...what kind of world do we live in that Miley Cyrus has made me start appreciating Kesha!?


--------------------------

From YouTube, this says much more, about things, than might be intended, I think. ;-)

On yet ANOTHER exotic pet tragedy...

And so - tragically, horrifically, infuriatingly -  another senseless death involving someone's exotic pet has taken place, this time in New Brunswick, Canada. Two young boys were found dead, smothered by a 14-foot African rock python that had no fricking business whatsoever being anywhere other than amidst a pile of rocks somewhere in Africa, but due to recklessness was brought over or bred to be someone's pet, and due to carelessness, managed to escape its enclosure, slither into the building's ventilation system and fall into the room where the boys were sleeping.

I could go on and on about this tragedy, but it really comes down to this:

Enact and/or enforce exotic pet laws.

If it hasn't been habituated to humans for at least 10,000 years, it has no business being kept as a pet.

Those interested in reading me going 'on and on' about this subject, click here:

http://www.westboundthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/02/seaworld-tragedy-reminder-theres.html

Third time NOT a charm: latest Vegas trip proves what happens here, happens everywhere; it's just a whole lot more depressing in 'Sin City'

I'm in Las Vegas, and once again it's not really my doing. In '07, I arrived as part of a group vacation someone else had thrown together. In 2011, we treated my parents to a trip down the Strip. Now, I'm here on business, attending a corporate convention: four days of self-congratulatory speeches, awards and workshops designed to get us pumped up, and I've got to admit, it's done its job; I feel excited again about the work I do. No small feat, considering the work I do bears no resemblance to corporate anything.

I like Vegas, all things considered, but this is my third time in six years. I'm not really much of a gambler, and the glitter gets old pretty quick unless you are looking to really immerse yourself in the scene. If you're just strolling around sight-seeing, biding time until the next open session or workshop, or until you're tired enough to get to sleep, Vegas wears thin. I've done a little gambling, a little drinking, because that's what you do when you're here...but for the most part, meh. I've seen this already.

What's more, something feels different about this place, this time. The tourists, especially the first-timers, racing across their consciousness in an all-out gallop as they take it all in, have never been easier to spot or more annoying, the deeply troubled lurking (and sleeping) in the dense shadow of all the frivolous fun never more difficult to ignore, and the distinction between the two, the line between those for whom what happens here will stay here and those who are just stuck here, never more glaring.

This time, Sin City has not only bored me, it's left me with an ill-at-ease feeling.

Day 1:  That glaring hard line between haves and have-nots is established in no uncertain terms during the first open session in the casino convention center. A series of guest speakers, mostly from our corporate headquarters, take to a stage trimmed with soft-textured accent lighting, and with the impact of their words aided by the projection of their faces on three enormous JumboTrons, welcome us to Las Vegas. They set in immediately talking about motivation and the entrepreneurial spirit, about effective leadership and looking toward the future. It's been a good year in our business, they declare. Here's to many more, they cry, pumping their blue-suited fists. We're all well-dressed too, business casual at the very least, and with our heads still swimming in the excitement of having just arrived, we applaud, as much for ourselves as for what they're saying, digging into our open session lunch in all that clean-smelling, well conditioned air.

At that very moment, there is a shirtless dude pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the casino. He's got an unpleasant look on his face, like he just got a taste of something bitter, or whiff of something foul. His eyes are blinking a mile a minute, creasing his temples as they go. He's holding a sign that says, 'Kick me in the nuts for $25.' 

Maybe that's why he looks unpleasant; maybe he's had a few takers recently. Maybe his jewels are screaming bloody murder on account of some drunken frat boy from Springfield, Illinois who, treading up to his chin in 'what happens here stays here', laid down his money with a hearty hell yeah and really put his back into it.

I don't know, though...this dude's short, but pretty buff for one so desperate, a compacted, sinewy mass of muscle, a bear trap waiting to be sprung, and his impressive form is littered with tattoos - a fiery assemblage of blood and knives and claws and skulls and teeth and naked chicks with long nails, all conspiring to tell a story - his story - of chaos. The very way he moves is chaotic - pacing nervously back and forth along the wall separating sidewalk from street - and it is this nervous-dog-on-a-leash bluster that first welcomes us to Vegas when our taxi pulls up, before any of our scheduled guest speakers even hit the stage, thus setting the stage for what I would come to remember about this trip.

Day 2: I get up early for breakfast in one of the many restaurants surrounding the casino floor.  The place I choose is still mostly empty, and the clean-smelling air has a note of coffee and cinnamon. I am seated beside some kind of decorative rubber plant, beneath a soothing trompe l'oeil sky. It's quiet enough I can hear music being played over the speakers. Yikes, I think it might be John Tesh. What starts as a simple lonesome piano melody gets whipped into a world music froth of smashing garbage can lids. It doesn't complement my mood all that well, but that's okay, it'll do. I snap open a gloriously un-thumbed Vegas newspaper and, feeling very much like 'Mr. Glovsky', take my first tentative sips of coffee. Casino workers scurry about, tending my every request - more coffee, extra napkins, some orange juice, some water - with a briskness that nearly convinces me they really care. I smile, nod my head approvingly, wink at one, even, I'm in such a damn good mood, doling out dollar bills to ensure their continued prompt service. I have an hour and a half to kill in this fashion before the morning's open session.

Life is good. I'm happy to be here.

Outside, a man sits with his back up against the wall of a skywalk spanning the Strip. He's dressed in tattered khakis and a Chicago Bulls tank, and his grime-ridden face heralds the difficulty of his life, just as 'Kick me in the nuts...' guy's tattoos spoke of chaos yesterday. He too holds a handmade sign in that same creased brown cardboard scrawl, though his takes a humorous tack:

'Why lie? I just need a beer.'

He was there when I took a short walk earlier, panhandling by dawn's early light, and I thought at the time (to try making light of what amounts to a tragic situation) that at least he's up early, catching the early worm. That's something, isn't it? Hell, he's being more productive at six in the morning than most people. And that sign is clever, isn't it? If he could just translate all that gumption and wit into something positive, who knows? They might one day love him at the convention! People can turn things around. I really believe that; believe in positive thinking, in drawing strength from optimism, which perhaps is why this corporate convention, cheesy as it can't help being, is resonating with me to the extent it is.

But then I realized he probably wasn't up early, wasn't go-getting anything. He'd probably been sitting there all night, keeping the soft schedule of one for whom time has dissolved from a necessity into a mere novelty until sleep came, and staying in an upright slumber until a bright needle of light from the rising sun creeping between the two casino towers directly east of the skywalk happened to wake him up to circumstances unchanged.

But I liked the wit of his sign, or maybe its jet black humor, so I threw him a dollar, and with a disarmingly warm smile, he looked up at me and said, 'Thank you. God bless.'

The convention picks up momentum on the second day. More guest speakers, many of them financial analysts, trotted on stage to pick apart the numbers. And those numbers are good, baby. Sales are up; costs are down; against all odds, our business remains healthy, and we have managed to outpace our competitors. Against all odds, even in 'this economy', we have grown.

'This economy'...that is, the fall-out from the financial crisis of five years ago. It's sucked for a lot of people. It's sucked for me, in a variety of ways, but I've managed to keep it together. Should someone slap the sign out of that guy's hand and throw him an application, rather than money for a beer? A dicky thing to do, surely, on the surface, but he's not defenseless. He's got humor on his side; he's making light of his situation, at least. Maybe a little drill sergeant treatment would help. Or maybe he's just perfectly okay with his situation; maybe he doesn't want to change...in which case, should the City of Las Vegas be as tolerant of his panhandling as they seem to be? Should something be expected of him? There was at least a kind of Jackass-caliber spectacle to 'Kick me in the nuts...' guy...this dude's just sitting on his ass begging for money, and the warm smile with which he accepted my donation suggested he doesn't have to be.

When the conference has ended for the day, my group and I check out downtown, 'old' Las Vegas, Fremont Street, Glitter Gulch, with its array of classic casinos that used to show up in all the old movies - Binions, Golden Goose, Golden Nugget, Las Vegas Club. There's less action here these days. When people come to Vegas, they head for the Strip first and foremost. But downtown, while struggling, is still giving it all she's got. It's been closed off to traffic for almost twenty years, turned into a pedestrian mall, which lends it a more leisurely feel than the Strip. There's an impressive overhead light show, more sanctioned street performers (sanctioned meaning supposed to be there, part of what's called the 'Fremont Street Experience', not just some guy standing on the corner banging a drum), and a much higher concentration of impersonators, it seems, all milling around, waiting for someone to stumble up with a level of excitement and inhibition generally spurred by drunkenness and have their picture taken. From Roman gladiators to Rocky Balboa, Darth Vader to Mario and Luigi, Marilyn Monroe to the classic Vegas showgirls, they lurk at every turn, hoping to catch your attention, sometimes actively pursue your attention, and expect to be tipped for the privilege of a pic. An actual impersonator is worth a buck or two, I guess, if they pull it off believably, but someone dressed up like Hello Kitty, having not lifted a finger to create the look other than sliding into an enormous costume, not so much.

Are all the impersonators sanctioned by the City of Las Vegas? Could 'I just need a beer...' guy save up a few nights of donations, buy one of these costumes and hit the street? Is it that simple? Should someone expect him to do something?

Downtown seems to have remained very much 'old' Las Vegas. Whereas the Strip strains a hamstring trying to perfect a certain upwardly mobile hipness, downtown still clings to the kitschy and ridiculous. The sex is still there, of course; if anything, it's seedier downtown. There's more sex on display, more apparent gentleman's club, and girls dancing on open-air bar-tops. The Strip is carefully prescribed, finely tuned to the mainstream audience it knows will go there first.

Downtown is still gaudy for gaudy's sake.

A woman, forty if she's a day (although maybe she's just 25 rough-fought years), has had too much to drink. She stumbles out of a casino (or perhaps was removed), and squats down beside a souvenir kiosk. Steadying herself with one outstretched arm, she urinates on the sidewalk beneath a shimmering drape of key chains, shot glasses and glitter-covered flasks. The crowd watches, unable to turn away, and she seems to know she's being watched, smiling slyly as she evacuates her bladder. The liquid appears from underneath panties stretched between her thighs like a tightrope, and runs dark over the dimpled concrete on its way to the Pacific Ocean. She's this way for about five seconds, before the cops descend on her (also a heightened police presence downtown, I notice,  don't think it's my imagination...), when her sly smile disappears and she turns into something I really believe would give 'Kick me in the nuts...' guy a run for his money. She's petite, slender, but ready and able to tear it up, and it takes four cops to bring her down.

Meanwhile, I cast a quick-moving shadow on the street as I shoot overhead at 35 miles an hour. For $20 you can zip-line nearly 800 feet of Fremont Street, descend down on Glitter Gulch hanging by a string. I have never been much of a thrill seeker, but I go into this with a 'screw it, I'm forty' attitude, and I'm glad I do. It's exhilarating. It takes four cops about ten seconds to bring that woman down into a puddle of her own urine. It takes just seven seconds to bring me down from 65-foot scaffolding, and amazingly, I don't piss myself.

We both get our picture taken.




WEEE - As I zip-line the length of Fremont Street (looking like a wind-burnt dub, and more terrified than I actually was, damn it!), a woman squats down beside a souvenir kiosk and urinates, the dark liquid setting out immediately for the Pacific Ocean like a newly hatched duckling. It takes four cops to bring her down. Vegas, baby...

 

LIKE ZOMBIES - Celebrity impersonators, some more impressive than others, lurk around every turn in Vegas, sometimes actively pursuing a picture with you and expecting a tip for the privilege. Psy and Rocky Balboa? Not bad...not bad at all. Hello Kitty and Mario and Luigi...nah. Not impressed.

My room at the casino is nice - big bed, comfy, all the accouterments in their places, a separate tub and stand-up shower. The air conditioner turns the hellish heat outside into a kind of dairy creamer on my skin. If I could tip this machine for its tireless service, I certainly would.

I fall asleep quickly tonight, dream of jumping off the center of the Hoover Dam, zip-lining down into the rushing Colorado River on its way to the Pacific Ocean.

Day 3: Up early again, another breakfast by myself, a fresh newspaper, fresh cup of coffee, the music of John Tesh the rickshaw in which I am carried into my day. Back at the convention, the enthusiasm is reaching a crescendo. We are congratulating ourselves even more, dissecting our success, learning new ways to optimize sales, control costs, protect the brand, and getting a big thumbs up from some bonafide (if second tier) celebrities. Today it's winners of reality shows and authors of books on success being trotted on stage to bolster our enthusiasm. I'm happy for the sense of community I find at this convention, happy just for a livelihood. It may not be glamorous work that I do, I do not wear a suit and tie and shit gets under my nails, but I can pay my bills. I have a place to live. I have a car and a retirement percolating...finally.

Whew...

In front of the Bellagio, where the water dances and great care was taken to create a stunning botanical garden, there is an elderly man, late sixties/early seventies, who I'm guessing never got a retirement percolating. He's asleep on the sidewalk, baking under the desert sun. Tourists walk past him, around him, over him, on their way in and out of the casino.

This man is not in trouble; he is not drunk, hasn't just collapsed onto the pavement. He is not trying to get anyone's attention by being cute, clever or hostile. He has no songs to sing, no one to impersonate, no self-effacing wit to offer as a buffer to his situation. He's not seeking tips or donations. He's done percolating, no longer has the wherewithal to even sit up and beg. He's simply asleep on the sidewalk - there when I walk into the Bellagio, and there when I come out. When I pass him that second time I notice someone has left two bottles of water for him, placed them carefully on the sidewalk near his head so he'll see them when he wakes up. I honestly can't say if this simple, moving gesture makes me feel better or worse. He's still asleep on the fucking sidewalk, and we are all still stepping over him to watch dancing fountains and piss away money on futile odds.

Ooh, look! they (we) coo in amazement, pointing out at the reflecting pool. Is the show going to start soon? How do they time the water to the music like that!?

SOMEWHERE UNDER THE RAINBOW - The Bellagio fountain show is impressive, both visually and from an engineering point of view. But on the other side of the pool, literally the other side of the rainbow being created by the jet-propelled water, there is a homeless man asleep on the sidewalk, cooking under the desert sun.

At the corporate awards ceremony on the final night, we get a chance to really bathe in our greatness with a black tie dinner. Casino workers are still moving briskly, conscious of every move they make as a precursor to a tip. They bring us our wine, our salads, our main course, our coffee, our dessert. They are never moving slowly, never ambling along, never stopping.

Is that the key to success? Just keep moving? I've heard that before, read about it, written about it myself, even. It's got to be the answer, but since being in Vegas this time around, I've starting wondering just how thin the line is between moving and not moving.

The dessert is nothing short of fancy schmancy. I pick at first, not because it all doesn't look delicious (oh, don't I love me some fancy-schmancy...!), but because I always have to worry about hidden nuts, which could kill me. Satisfied by both the fork and the sniff test, which I've been employing since I was a kid, I take tentative bites, then more voracious chomps, happy to be here. Love me some fancy-schmancy indeed, and these chocolate delicacies are not merely dessert, they are food art.

FOOD ART - Looking pretty spiny and angular for dessert, these food art delicacies turned out to be delicious, once I had determined beyond a reasonable doubt (and as much to my astonishment as delight) that they were nut-free.

Afterwards, I'm out walking around again; it's our last night in Vegas before heading back home, back to reality. Everyone else is tired, heads to their rooms, early flight tomorrow, but I'm driven by the mysterious impulse to see it all one last time, somehow will myself out of the funk into which I've sunk by ascertaining Vegas has not turned as ugly as it seems to have.

It's a mistake.

In front of a themed restaurant not far from my hotel, there is an utterly ferocious-looking woman - squinty eyes, pug nose, short and razor thin, sporting a funky shaven hairdo, the kind that makes the singer Pink look hot, but just makes this woman more terrifying. As she saunters down the street, minding her own business, someone heckles her and she responds by whipping around, pulling her pants down right out on the sidewalk, and proceeding to finger herself in a wanton display of aggression. Her lower lip is tucked angrily beneath her teeth. She lunges up and down in a kind of squat thrust dance, inserting two or three fingers into herself at a time, punishing herself, eyes full of fury, face mashed with rage, shrieking obscenities, not just at the people who provoked her but everyone within earshot. Like 'Kick me in the nuts...' guy two days before, it's evident she's hopped up on something. She has to be. This is not - can't be - a normal response.

What has set her off I honestly do not know; I didn't hear anybody say anything really. I just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so much so, that for a fraction of a second I think she's directing her wanton display at me, and I replay the last two seconds over in my mind, trying to recall if I looked at her the wrong way or failed to give her space as we passed one another. But it quickly becomes clear she's focused on a very specific table of partiers sitting in an open-air bar above the sidewalk. She succeeds only in getting them to laugh at her, taunt her more mercilessly for the frailty inherent in her uber-aggressive posture. There's a moment when it seems she might climb up into the bar section and turn the altercation physical, but then she ceases her vulgar display as abruptly as she began it. By this time, everyone in the immediate vicinity is laughing and jeering, except me. I find no humor in the situation. That sort of behavior is either artificially produced by shit nobody should be putting in their bodies, or arises from torment and emotional instability we should all be lucky if we never have to endure. Whatever the response should be, laughter isn't it.

She turns and disappears into the unnaturally hued darkness, and so do I, in the opposite direction. Unable to sleep, I wander the Strip alone for another hour. All the enthusiasm of the convention, of 'protecting the brand' and 'best year ever', and 'happy to be here', of simply being in Vegas, on vacation, has been depleted like ozone.

Then, in a final slap in the face, I return to the casino around 1 a.m. only to discover a new panhandler out front. This time it's a veteran. Vietnam, he claims. It might be a sham, at least the Vietnam part. There's plenty of shamming going on here at any given moment. But maybe I just want to believe it's a sham, because the alternative is pretty heart-breaking.

He's the right age for the conflict, early to mid-sixties, balding and graying and confined to a wheel chair that clearly serves as his permanent home. He's got both legs, but one is languished, and the photographs he has taped to the back of his chair in a museum arrangement serve as irrefutable proof that he was, at the very least, a veteran somewhere once, and that he was young and strapping, with a place to go and a place to sleep and something to eat.

If he really is a veteran, this is unconscionable. Did he fail himself or did we fail him, and where does the line get drawn? How do we allow someone who served our country - who, in indirect if not direct ways, secured my freedom to zip-line down Fremont Street without fear of being run down by military tanks - to wind up panhandling at one in the morning?

And why it is upsetting me more than usual? That's the real question. It's not like I haven't seen this before. It's not like bad things haven't been happening to good people since the dawn of time, nor has fate ever proven herself to be anything other than a cruel mistress.

The haves and the have-nots are everywhere. In my own small Wisconsin city, barely 65,000 in population, there are homeless people, living along the river in the summer, creeping out of the bottom at night to forage in our dumpsters, forever (as in, year-round) standing in the entryway to the Wal-mart parking lot with similarly hand-scrawled cardboard signs (looking suspiciously as though all homeless people get them custom-made from one single supplier), at once requesting and imploring help, usually invoking God in some way.

It's also certainly true that fate is not always being a bitch. Often there are choices involved, wrong choices that beget consequences, which in turn lead to circumstances. There are plenty of people who are offered every encouragement, two helping hands for every one of their challenges, and still fall to bad choices, regretful courses of action, awful behavior in public places. Alcoholism. Drug abuse. Some people can't be helped. Won't be helped.

But there is something about seeing human beings suffering against the cartoonish backdrop of Las Vegas that makes it especially distressing. Most Midwesterners of average, everyday stock will attest to a certain feeling that they're suffering themselves. Faced with perennially rough job markets, never-ending financial turmoil and spartan resources, there is a sense where I come from that the homeless and broken in our midst are simply a few rungs down on the same rickety ladder.

But in Vegas, in Sin City, the destitute population bottom-feeding the excrement of our excess is a more stark and painful reminder of what should matter in life and what shouldn't. Here, the deeply troubled don't make me feel more thankful for what I have, they do just make me feel guilty, ashamed on behalf of everyone, myself included, swaggering and staggering around amidst all the neon glitter, pissing away time, energy and resources on absurd impulses, consuming with a ruthless bluster, while all around there are people with nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, nowhere to go to the bathroom. This itself is not a new idea about Las Vegas; nor am I meaning to begrudge people a good time. People work hard. They deserve some recreation. They deserve to be entertained. But man, when you are here and you see the disparity first-hand, it makes an impact.

It's very possible that Vegas isn't what's different; maybe I'm different than I used to be. Maybe I can't ignore this like I once could. Maybe 'screw it, I'm forty' has - or should have - a deeper meaning, a more meaningful application.

And maybe it's time I start seeking it out.

Day 4: We're leaving, and I don't get up early for breakfast. Instead, I sleep right up until it's time to go to the airport.

On the way, the taxi driver strikes up a conversation, as they all do, looking for tips, tapping deep into 'personality' in hopes of squeezing out a few extra charitable dollars. I'm never charmed by this, or at least never fooled. This guy doesn't give a flying fuck where I'm from, or whether I'm a Packer fan. But I indulge him, mostly because I happen to be riding shotgun.

"You enjoy your stay?" he asks, switching lanes briskly as he transports us to the airport. On the radio is more of that world music, and someone singing who sounds like Diana Ross.

"Yeah," I smile and nod politely, like I always do when I don't care. Smile and nod, smile and nod.

"You win big?"

"No, lost."

"Too bad," he said, "but you had a good time, anyway, right?"

"Oh yeah."

"Hard not to in Vegas, right?

"I could get used to this life."

This is a pure falsehood, designed to throw this guy a bone, indulge his knowing smile. Really, what am I going to do, be brutally honest?  Cry to him about how depressing it all was? That's just bad form. I tell him what I think he wants hear.

And he responds:

"Yeah, well, you stay here long enough, it all disappears."

I am stunned by this remark, this admission, this stray from the typical tweaking of my baser instincts in a gossamer attempt to get us relating, to turn us into brothers, to pretend that he too routinely avails himself of Sin City just like he assumes I have. I can't say if it it's sincere, or if he's just reading me, taking note of something on my face, a pensive tone in my voice, and responding accordingly. But I need to hear it, and am glad I do.

I'm not paying for the cab ride; it's a company expense, and the tip is taken care of. But unbeknownst to my group, I tip this guy an extra five dollars. Not sure why, exactly. Perhaps merely for the singular connection he has no idea he's just made.

He looks at me like I'm nuts, but accepts the gift, and says: 

'Thank you. God bless.'

Ke$ha is, for better or worse, the voice of a generation, and proof that they really don't write 'em like they used to

The lyric was a relatively insignificant hiccup amidst the white noise of 'hideous sounds' - as Bob Dylan once said - that my radio makes:

"Momma's tellin' me I should think twice...!"

It was a line from the Ke$ha (uh, yeah...about that...) song 'Your Love Is My Drug', to which I replied aloud, without thinking really, "There's no fricking way that girl ever had a momma."

When I did, one of the people I work with - barely eighteen - gave me a perplexed, and a moment later fairly dirty, look.

Three years ago, the exact same thing happened with another Kesha song (sorry, just can't do the dollar sign)... This time the song was'Tik Tok', and the line, chanted similarly: 'When I leave for the night I ain't coming back!'

To which I replied, again out loud, and without thinking: "Okay... so who's watching your kid, then?"

That time, a different individual, a bit older but still hopelessly young, snapped, more defensively than I'd have thought my remark (and Kesha) deserved, "That's not what the song is about!"

To which I was moved to reply, 'In a real world scenario, that's what it WOULD be about!'...

Trenchant. Irrefutable. But you have to choose your battles carefully as you make your way through this crazy world, so I kept my mouth shut. Still, it has now been revealed to me twice not only that Kesha is here to stay (as opposed to a one hit wonder), but some kind of hero apparently amongst young people, particularly young girls. She just might be, *gulp*, the musical voice of this generation; moreso, I'd say, than Lady Gaga or Rihanna (for instance), who each has her own unique thing going on (Gaga especially), and a modicum of talent with which to forge artistry, and in spite of this, or maybe because of it, doesn't hit the nail on the head as squarely.

And Britney...well, she'd have gotten my vote once. But she's old news at this point. I'm talking about the generation on the doorstep of tomorrow, barely out of their teens or still in their teens - the ones who were born the same year as Google, who don't know why we say 'dial' a phone number, who absolutely don't see - or have - a need to learn penmanship in school.

Kesha had better hit a nail squarely, because she has little in the way of discernible talent, either as a vocalist or a musician. She reportedly writes her own songs, but a cursory listen reveals not much in the way of creative energy being expended. Her hooks are simplistic, her lyrics are trite, her vocals a bland mix of chanting and warbling, not unlike a karaoke singer at about 11:17 Thursday night, who's one or two shots past not caring that she has to work tomorrow. Kesha has only a contrived showmanship, mostly shock value to barter with. 'We running this town just like a club!' she chants with an artless lurch of her hips, glitter makeup smeared across her face like war paint. She dresses unattractively down, Tweets naked pictures of herself, makes a bra out of human teeth (sent in by her fans) and of course makes sure it winds up being reported somewhere by someone. All of this carefully prescribed 'craziness' is followed by an equally calculated shrug of her shoulders, as though she just can't figure out what everyone's problem is.

When Kesha first arrived on the scene, I thought she was a joke. Seriously, I thought she was great satire, like the 'Drunk Girl' bit on Saturday Night Live back in the day, a musical snipe at every 'drunk girl' in every bar in every town in America on any given night, laughing all the way to the bank. But no...Kesha is serious. She really thinks she's running this town just like a club.

:-/

And yet, the reason Kesha's longevity surprises me isn't because she assaults the senses, it isn't because she does no female generational 'voice' before her - from Aretha Franklin to Janis Jopin to Stevie Knicks to Madonna to Alanis Morissette - any justice, but rather because I don't buy it. There's something about Kesha that doesn't convince me. I think she tries way, way too hard to be whatever it is she tries to be. 'The party don't start til I walk in...' she groans restively, as if struggling to place the assertion in a spot where it's most likely to be seen. All of her songs are a battle cry to defiant behavior and hard living, the party lifestyle attendant to youth, and while nothing about that is new to pop music surely, Kesha carries it out with an overly-compensatory certainty and affected accent, an absurdly stylized combination of Valley Girl and Ebonics, that serves only to get me thinking she'd be the one tagging along at parties rather than holding court.

I'm surprised kids don't see through that.

And I could be wrong, I guess. I am old and lame, I tend to overthink things, and by Kesha's own admission, they 'r who they r'. When you think about it, from an artistic point of view, she's the perfect songstress for the inorganic times in which we live, perfect 'voice' of the generation that has been overly fed, overly sheltered, overly coddled, raised on constant reassurances of greatness (if only to counterbalance their parents' feelings of inadequacy): she is fatalistic and forthright about everything, choosing to believe she's keeping it real, merely reporting the news through her art, but mostly being faux and vulgar.

Later that very same night, I was cruising around YouTube, and I came across Pink Floyd's 'Live at Pompeii', and in what felt like a stinging slap in the face I realized I was watching nothing less than the anti-Kesha, and realized further, that Kesha - the artist - is not something people who know better should just throw their hands up in defeat over. Truth be told, it is to weep, helplessly and bitterly, for these kids that she is the songstress who feeds their Zeitgeist.

Most music historians will agree that the fire died out of Pink Floyd in the early 1980s; some music purists might argue it happened in the mid to late 70s. But I've been a fan for a long time, singing the praises of Pink as a) pioneers of the prog rock movement b) another example of Britain's astonishingly fertile creative ground, and c) in this particular 1972 concert film, as they perform Echoes, a musical outfit with a sound as thin, sharp and deadly as piano wire.

"When you think about it, from an artistic point of view, Kesha's the perfect songstress for the inorganic times in which we live..."

And there is a point in the performance when they launch into an extended jam, where, whatever you think of them in general, their musical craftsmanship cannot be denied. As the camera pans slowly across the four of them, in a fittingly slow sideways scrape of the sunlight, their genius is encapsulated thusly:

Four skinny Brits with stringy hair and bad teeth, absolutely killing it.

In 1972, that's all they had to be, all anyone had to be: Four skinny Brits with stringy hair and bad teeth, absolutely killing it. No need for image or spectacle as the first consideration.

There was, of course, bubble gum pop back then, pretty faces for the sake of pretty faces, and Pink Floyd themselves would get into plenty of 'spectacle' in coming years. But their spectacle never eclipsed their musicianship, and they would proffer philosophical lyrics as part of the deal, complex and sweeping arrangements that were as savage as they were spacy, intelligent as they were sad, frightening as they were soothing. They produced a body of work that got the listener thinking at the very least, transported him to a higher plane in the best moments.

Never could it be said Pink Floyd were wearing teeth around their necks merely for attention, some half-baked push to stay in the limelight.

Today, pop music is devoid of this type of luster, or grandeur. Kids throw around the word 'epic', but there really isn't much epic going on anymore. As a means of artistic expression propelling the listener to that higher plane, it has all but ceased operations. An allusion to celebrity, perhaps, serves as the 'higher plane' (it's certainly the predominant story being told), but that is (can't help but be) image-conscious and restrictive, offering little latitude for personal interpretation. That is, offers no comfort. No succor.

Is innovative music being made? Are the Pink Floyds out there? Sure. But they are marginalized, exist in an ephemeral 'alternative' world that must be sought out and never gains enough traction to really make history, and that is the point: Pink Floyd was a Top 40 band, emblematic to the 1970s. Songs like Time and Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb occupied slots on the same 'countdown' that now hosts We R Who We R and Blah Blah Blah.

And Pink Floyd is just one example, my go-to example. It speaks nothing of the other groups that once fed a generation: the Beatles, the Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Supertramp, Queen, Zeppelin (could a song like Stairway to Heaven even exist on modern radio today?). And for that matter, let us not forget the myriad singer/songwriters - your Jim Croces, James Taylors, Carole Kings and Jackson Brownes, or the Suzanne Vegas and Tracy Chapmans in later years (lest anyone think I'm championing a particular era rather than chronicling a descent into barrenness), more recently Tori Amos, Sarah McLaughlin - all of whom, for a while, achieved that rarefied nexus of artful expression and commercial appeal. Where the hell did they go?  Why do they live on the periphery these days?

The last dying breath of mainstream (musical movement) artistic outrage just may have been in my generation: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, progenitors of 'grunge' all shrieking out collectively that something wasn't right, not just in music, but society, that something had changed, or was in the process of changing. Rocky shoals ahead.

And they were entirely correct. Something was changing. Something happened, man...somewhere, sometime, I think we ran aground.

The day rhythm eclipsed melody as the primary concern in the construction of a pop song, the day fitting the suit became more important than singing, the day singing  (that is, one's ability to hit outrageously high and powerful notes or shriek in some melismatic orgasm) became more important than what was being sung, and the money starting coming in uncountable denominations, was really the day the music died.

The Millennial generation doesn't appear to know this. And they're not really supposed to, I guess. And perhaps they shouldn't. They'd want their money back for sure.