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.

Pop comfort

"You don't feel at all sorry for Britney?," Joseph asks the teenage girl sitting at our table on the first day of Coachella.

"No!! Why? She messed herself up. And she didn't donate anything to help out after Katrina."

Joseph nods--a nod of acceptance rather than agreement. The girl doesn't know that this is Joseph Kahn, someone who helped shape Britney's pop image in her heyday.

I do feel sorry for Britney Spears.

It's less a mere case of her abandoning her fans than it is of her fans turning their back on her product. Everybody needs somebody to hate. It's a fool's version of self-worth. Celebrities are prime targets because it's easy to not look at them as real people. Those with success are the easiest targets of scorn. When the world's impotence gets directed at Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, of course it makes them lose their minds. They're built as products by the people, and destroyed with even more glee.

If I walk down a busy street in Halifax, maybe 1 in 100 people will let me know they recognize me from that drawing in The Coast where I look like a stoned Rabbi. Everybody in the world knows who Britney Spears is.

You're also responsible for killing Anna Nicole Smith.

As I wrote in my review of Vacancy, our Culture of Celebrity is also a Culture of Death.

After the Britney Spears chat at Coachella, we got up to see Peeping Tom, Mike Patton's most recent musical act. Peeping Tom's CD is ok, but on stage they're really on fire. Patton's variation of cooing, barking metal, and Jim Carrey elasticity is backed up with a female chorus and Dan the Automator.

"You guys want to hear a funny joke?," Patton shouts into the crowd. "The Arctic Monkeys!"

But this represents a troubling pop attitude as well. Speaking as a Patton fan, and someone who 8 years ago would identify as a big Patton fan, I'm troubled by the tendency to place the artistic value of one brand of pop music over another, based on its compatibility with a person's taste. Patton is a master at what he does, but the artistry involved calls more attention to itself than what Kelly Clarkson does. It's the whole Spielberg-dilemma: The filmmaking mastery is often invisible, so dull critics assume it isn't there.

Just as it was necessary to digitally adjust the size of Clarkson's booty in a video, Mike Patton delivers to an audience that expects a certain thing. It's a hard style of music to catch on to, but once you manage it becomes comfortable. A real challenge for Patton's listeners would be to give them a song that could make them cry.

The same goes for Bjork, who headlined that night. First stepping out on stage wearing a dress flowing from a white, spotted cushion hat, that made her look like a cross between ancient royalty and the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man, she got the crowd into her weird trance with her new single "Earth Intruders."

Surrounded by a sea of people, I looked around me to see what other Bjork fans look like. I was expecting something weirder; they're the general Coachella population. Bjork was giving us our anticipated dose of Icelandic quirk... exactly what we want from a Bjork concert.

After certain songs she would enthusiastically intone into the microphone a too-cute, "Zhank you!!"

It was a great performance, but I was more challenged trying to make my way out of the crowd to get an early start on the parking lot exodus than I was by anything on stage. (A plan which turned out to be completely futile, since finding where you parked at Coachella is the reason Al Gore invented the needle in the haystack analogy.)

It felt like a half-mile walk out of that crowd. The three most difficult factors with trying to squeeze out of a festival performance early are the assholes who will do anything to not let you by, not knowing how frequently you're expected to say "Excuse me," and avoiding the stoned people that think it's smart to lie on the ground at night. Girl I stepped on: I'm sorry, but you're stupid.

The music from the stage was a strangeness that felt much more comfortable.