The Once Halibut Theory

I've been cooking with habanero peppers lately. The habanero is the third hottest chili pepper in the world. It is so hot that if you don't wash your hands after handling one, your hands will start hurting in 20 minutes. And if you don't wash your hands and then have to go pee, you will begin to envy the monotony of female bathroom technique like never before.

Now, the reason I'm doing this isn't to defy Joseph Kahn's insistence that white people prefer food with no flavour. In truth, it's because I'm rather impatient and don't want to waste consumed calories on foods that are "subtle." I have a right to flavour-experiences. I will live in the extreme.

I try to eat a lot of fish. Fish have Omega Supreme Transformative powers, as well as the extraplanetary potential of Mercury Poisoning, and they're good for your skin or something. If you want to conquer Earth and shit diamonds, eat a lot of fish.

The problem is that some fish doesn't have much taste. I encounter this problem mainly with halibut. My mom claims that she remembers halibut used to pack more of a punch than it does these days. I won't vouch for the accountability of someone else's memory, but this got me thinking...

As a survival mechanism, wouldn't it be beneficial if species evolved to lose flavour? I mean, sure, we're several inches taller than the people our age were in the 1940s, but if we're ever in a plane crash with a bunch of rugby players in the middle of nowhere, something should have to protect us as soon as the fattest guy gets hungry. Those that would be picked to get eaten last would be those that evolved to have tasteless flesh. Like halibut.

From what I know about animals (speaking as an owner of a black lab, who knows enough to know that saying "My dog is black" is a poor way to win race relation disputes), I don't believe that animals are ever naturally spicy. One time I was at a party and some dude brought a tray of bison sausage, and I thought, damn, no wonder those bison got shot, they're spicy as hell. The guy informed me that those spices were artificially added later. This makes sense. It's also techniques like this that make it integral for beings to evolve to taste like as little as possible.

Having no taste makes survival easier.

How else could I have been thrust into a 9-month long Twilight Zone episode where people keep coming up to me and telling me that the movie Once introduced them to the concepts of Art and Humanity? There's one explanation: People are evolving to like boring shit. Don't try to be all open-minded by denying it. Be truthful, and admit it. Fans of Once display a scary passion where they'd kill for it.

If Once Lovers lived on an island commune, and I visited that commune, they would burn me in a Wicker Man.

In a way, I understand this passion. Raised without religion, the movies I love inform my identity. I'd rather talk in-person with people about movies we agree on than get in fights over ones where we don't. Some films are just too integral to one's identity. So when you say, Blue Velvet sucks, you're insulting me. I know what that's like.

It's also why it's so puzzling. What is it about Once that makes people look at it and think, "Yup, that's me"? When I watched the movie, I found it mediocre. I didn't hate it, but considered it too inconsequential to even be worth reviewing. Now that people in their 20s are losing their shit for it, I'm sort of embarrassed for them.

Nothing that makes movies incredible is contained in Once. The Irish drama stars Glen Hansard as a musician/vacuum cleaner repairman who falls for a girl played by Marketa Irglova. They record songs together, so the movie becomes a naturalistic musical--only director John Carney has not studied musical setpieces or short form videos, so his music and images create no emotional thrust.

The handheld camerawork doesn't leave room for thought-out compositions. And the songs themselves are dead-eyed indie rock boilerplate. Movies don't get more hermetically and stereotypically white than Once. It's anti-matter--a movie for those who wish to be manipulated, but in a naturalistic way so they don't realize it's happening, and who wish to define themselves through musical fashion, but try to steer away from rock star personalities. Did modern indie rock fans have any fun in high school, or did they listen to the mid-90s equivalents of City and Colour and Coldplay back then? Maybe they listened to the Fresh Prince and gangsta rap in junior high like I did, then they moved on to Soundgarden, KMFDM and White Zombie. Then it was Robbie Williams in their college years. Then Death Cab and the Once soundtrack. Tomorrow Yanni. That's not just a softening of musical style: Some of those acts are real artists.

Certain people evolve to tastelessness when they grow older. It's easier, I guess.

But I want to live.

I don't mean to pick on Once fans so much. It's just that they're fucking everywhere. When you review movies people you don't know always want to tell you about awesome movies they just saw. I recently did a year-end radio show where this was the whole premise for an hour.

As one of two guest critics, I was in the reverse-spot position of having callers tell me about the best movies of 2007. I like doing this show, but something was in the air that day. I knew it was gonna be a long hour when the first caller was raving about Mad Money. Other recommended best movies of the year were Shooter and A Beautiful Mind (which came out 7 years ago, but I let it slide.)

But the amount of people talking up Once eclipsed any other title. Even my perfectly sane co-guest was gaga for it. Genuinely curious (and determined to be polite), I responded to callers' raves with, "What did you like about it?" The answers would be along the lines of, "It was so beautiful. And when they're in the studio together, recording that song, that scene is just, ohh myyyy..."

OK.

Then last week, Sarah Riley, who usually has some of the best movie taste of anyone, just had to write me about Once.



"I cried like five minutes in. It's a beautiful film."



"Not you too!," I wrote back. There goes another one.




This much is clear. The movie Once does not care about me, for it has caused me much confusion about Darwin and halibut. For that, I cannot support it.


Never back down.

Joseph Kahn Hates Sandwiches

Seriously! What kind of shit is that?

A sandwich is a compact, portable food that can encompass all 4 food groups within one convenient food item. It can employ limitless taste combinations and sensations with the fresh ingredients of one's choosing. Plus, sandwiches are historical. Did you know that Leprechaun was the first R-rated film to have tie-ins at a fast food joint? That fast food joint was called Subway. The invention of the Internet directly followed.

I'll tell you what this is really about. Despite everything I just said, Joseph thinks sandwiches lack flavour and are white people food.

To illustrate, here are some pictures of white people eating food.
























Now, it's true that Mexican, Thai and various other food types are spicier than the average tuna on rye. And in a weird way, I know and agree with where Joseph is going with this. I just don't entirely believe his sandwich dismissal. My friend Mike Gillis is terrified of pies to the point where he won't be in the same room as one. It's much different than Joseph Kahn's anger at sandwiches.

I suspect I was just challenged by some mixed messages I was struggling to interpret. Joseph once told me that I have more soul than any other white person he knows. Then, when sitting in class last week, he told me that I should embrace my whiteness more through the way I dress and act. I never realized I was denying it.

This isn't to say that certain races are prefered over others, just that it's taken as a sign of confidence when people comport themselves to their own station in life rather than to someone else's. I'm opposed to this thinking for several reasons, principally because I'm not sure how it applies to me. But then, I hope I don't come across like Fergie either.

"Look," Joseph explained, "I'm a Korean American. When I was growing up, I had no idea how to get girls until I reinvented my look as an Asian rock star. But it put me in a position where I noticed what kind of white guys girls go for. I know more about what it takes for white males to score than white males do. Trust me on this. I directed 2 Janet Jackson videos, 2 Britney Spears videos, and 2 Eminem videos."

If you look around in LA, the trendiest white guy hairdo is something we'll call Extreme Bedhead. This goes along with collared t-shirts, and five o'clock shadow. In other words, to be the most desirable white guy one must look like actor Ryan Gosling.



So I did it up.








The next step in my white identity project was to buy some indie rock. Joseph was in Seattle for his cousin’s wedding, but left me to look over his Hollywood home for the weekend and gave me permission to his car. If Joseph saw the Dana Carvey epic Opportunity Knocks he would know this was a terrible idea. But anyway, I drove down to Sunset, parked and began walking to Amoeba Music. The plan was to get the trendiest indie rock possible.

It seemed like a stupid idea at first. But then, walking out of the store, I noticed Mary Elizabeth Winstead, star of Death Proof, Live Free Or Die Hard, Sky High and Final Destination 3. It’s hard to recognize celebrities immediately because when you see them in person their facial characteristics are in check, but they’re slightly differently proportioned than how they look on screen. Actors have giant heads because they’re easier to light that way.

This was definitely her, though. She’s cute as hell. And my mission was validated when I noticed her hand-in-hand with a white boyfriend who is clearly uglier than me. (This isn’t just the ego of the world’s best-looking film critic talking. It’s observed fact.)

Winstead looked at me, in my new sell-out get-up and hair-dew, and smiled. It didn’t matter that my soul crushing make-over made me feel like an absolute dork. In that brief moment she totally eye-fucked me.

There were a lot of people in Amoeba Music that day. I decided to just stand in line at the register to ask for assistance.

“Can I help you?, a white woman with dreadlocks asked.

“Yes. I’m wondering what the hippest indie rock CD is right now?”

“Hmm. Have you heard the latest TV on the Radio?”

“No. I need something more white?”

“Excuse me??”

“I’m trying to impress this girl who thinks I’m racist against white music, which is a thoroughly untrue and inappropriate supposition for her to make, but still I’d like some help.”

“There’s The Arcade Fire. They’re a collective without a real group leader. Like the white Wu-Tang.”

“That’s not white enough.”

At this point, the true silliness of this race based presentation exercise was starting to hit me again. Taking interest only in the small piece of the world one's born into has always seemed ignorant to me. Yet this is how so many people choose to live. I rail against xenophobia a lot in my writing because life is about the experience of branching out—understanding yourself, your situation, and others’ by taking interest in the world around you. Almost as annoying to me as outward racists are people who think they’re combating racism simply by ignoring it altogether—denying its presence in everything.

More specifically, where are the people complaining about Superbad? Sure, it’s just one in a long line of teen movies to relegate adolescence to an all-white experience. But in 2007, this view is reflective of nothing. The only black character in Superbad is the liquor store cashier. The only Asian is Evan’s male cooking class bitch. There’s a substantial number of white kids for whom this media fabricated view is their embraced reality. Check out the movies and music on many 20
-something caucasians' MySpace pages for proof. It’s a sickness of hegemony—a subliminal racism wherein the non-white world just doesn’t exist. And I’m not trying to come off as righteous. It seriously bothers me. Who casts a movie with only white people, and then sees nothing wrong?



Let me make this much clear: Joseph Kahn has nothing against white people (he likes some of them more than I do), though his sandwich-hate is perhaps unconsidered. He simply has an outsider-understanding of how white America works and wants to let me know that game can be played to my advantage if I want.

Which brings me to the next topic. The most cruelly discriminated against group (by the educated elite, no less!), with the least support from anyone, isn’t a race at all. It’s The Stupid. Next blog.