jaci’s guide to subway etiquette.

1. do not, under any circumstances, step into the car and fail to move in / stand fast in the middle of the doorway like the great fuck wall of china. the center of the train is not made of quicksand; don’t be afraid to move in and make room for the other fourteen hundred people that would also like to arrive at their destination in a timely fashion.

2. do not EVER lean against the pole, making it impossible for one to grab on to it without having to touch your back fat through your windbreaker. it must feel amazing to have that cool steel wedged in between your butt cheeks, but just. don’t.

3. if you’re hugely fat and/or are one of those selfish scumfucks who likes to ’spread out,’ don’t sit down. go stand over there in the corner unless you want holes bored into your head by the eighteen people whose seats your thighs are taking up.

4. when you exit the train, it is absolutely not permitted to do any of the following: stopping immediately in front of the car door to figure out which way to exit; stopping right in front of the turnstile to figure out if you should exit on the NW side or the NE side; stopping either in the middle of the stairs or at the very top of the stairs and consulting your phone. all of the above may be punishable by unannounced firing squad.

5. on an extremely packed train car, such as is the L train during rush hour which makes a can of sardines seem about as sparsely populated as the state of wyoming, doing any of the following will result in swift and immediate incarceration without bail:

– [in the event that you are standing by the door] failing to step outside of the door so people who are farther in the car can exit.

– listening to loud reggaeton on your headphones. no one else wants to listen to king of kings — why bother with headphones? additionally, do not sit there and blare music out of your tinny cellphone speakers while you lounge trying to look casually unaware. why not carry a boombox on your shoulder? you self-centered shit.

– staring. the ads in the subway are placed there more for your convenience than anything else. not only are they great for trying to place a product in your home, but they are there to give you something to look at so you don’t have to stare uncomfortably at the person next to you. study the shit out of that ny lottery ad like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen in your entire life.

6. NEVER in any circumstance try to get into the car before everyone has exited, or stand right in front of the door staring through the window into the eyes of people who need to get out like you’re going to start a wall of death. are you stupid? you warrant an elbow to the throat for that.

7. are you currently in the possession of: a giant unwieldy cardboard box? four large shopping bags, each stuffed with a california king size comforter? skis? a set of spindly dining room chairs? more than three children? an upright piano? stay the fuck out of the subway.

8. speaking of children, do not step into a crowded train and gustily announce that you have a small child in tow and expect people to make way. nobody gives the slightest shit.

9. do. not. eat. on. the. train. mixing any food item with the closed interior of a subway car would make even your own mother’s cooking smell like the inside of a nauseous asshole.

10. pick up your slovenly ass and offer your seat to pregnant women and old people. this is about common courtesy, which people have none of these days. and if you had any, you wouldn’t need subway etiquette guidelines, now would you?

a dozen flours.

this is probably the most touching and romantic idea i’ve heard of in my entire life.

‘dream water.’

i was in duane reade this morning and up at the register was a small display that had little 2 oz. bottles of something called ‘dreamwater.’ and of course i was like, ‘what in the fuck is that!?’

i immediately wondered first if it was something you drank right before you fell asleep to have vivid dreams. if this was the case, i’d buy this shit by the truckful. i was tempted to buy a bottle, but at the last moment decided not to. an impulse purchase by nature is usually stupid, but that was kind of crossing the line into inane territory.

curiosity piqued, i visited their website as soon as i got to work. it was nothing more than a splash page that had a picture of the product and ‘coming soon.’ so i googled the product name and found the following article, which was more informative than the brand website. here’s what’s in it and what makes it work. it’s not nearly as interesting as i had hoped.

Dream Water’s sleep and relaxation beverages taste great, have zero calories, no preservatives and feature a proprietary formula of time-tested, all-natural active ingredients to help consumers relax and fall asleep, including GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid) to help one relax, Melatonin to help induce sleep, and 5-htp (Tryptophan) to help improve the quality of sleep. It is recommended one drink Dream Water about 20 to 40 minutes prior to desired sleep time or a long airplane flight.

all right, fine. it’s like a sleeping pill in water form. it comes in the following flavors: ‘lullaby lemon,’ ‘i dream of kiwi…and plum,’ and ‘snoozeberry,’ which is my favorite. this crap sounds like something out of willy wonka’s chocolate factory.

all retardedness aside, what had drawn me first to the bottle was the design. i read the name and then read what it was, and the first thing that hit me was that it did not in any way look like a product that was supposed to induce relaxation and sleep. the logo is blocky and ugly. some of the letters have sharp, alpine points, and others have cutesy rounded forms; it’s the combination of this contrast and the awful kerning which makes me feel frankly uncomfortable. i usually prefer clean, minimal backgrounds, but on the bottle the white feels too clinical, almost default. the color palette consists of muted brights, which i just don’t think works at all. i do appreciate the stab at the wispy, dreamcatcher-like forms — with a little bit more work on execution, it could have been a really nice design element, but it looks sloppy. and if that weren’t enough, the designer hits you over the head with a visual sledgehammer by putting an actual dreamcatcher icon next to the flavor. yeah. we get it.

curiosity is probably going to get the best of me and i’m going to buy one of these things and try it. apparently, they are test marketing this product only in the five boroughs of new york city. i’m going to drink this, and then get brain cancer and swiftly die. i’ll let you and the rest of the country know how it goes.

TOP BLAH BLAH METAL BLAH ALBUMS DECADE WHATEVER.

so basically right now everyone and their mother is compiling lists of anything and everything you can think of because the end of the decade is nigh.

a lot of top metal album lists of the decade that i’ve seen so far include albums that i personally think have no right to be anywhere in a list either online or in print, but then again, differing opinions is what make the world go ’round. i mean, thank goodness there’s someone out there that loves fat chicks, right?

two lists of note, though, is the list on invisible oranges, and the top 50 albums of the year, a serious and thought-provoking undertaking from therockblogger.com.

additionally, rolling stone had some ‘celebrity guests’ write in their top 25 songs and albums for the decade. metal sucks posted tom morello’s choices, as well as three out of four metallica member’s choices. U2 was sprinkled throughout all of them and that fact makes me so fucking mad i can’t see. you can read the charts here. lars ulrich, already 98% suspect, cemented himself in eternal faggotdom by listing ‘pink – get the party started’ as his 18th favorite song.

i decided to buy the decibel top 100 greatest metal albums of the decade out of curiosity, figuring i’d disagree with most of it. surprisingly, there were a lot of albums on the list that i was happy to see included, or that i didn’t think would show up. gojira – from mars to sirius definitely belongs on it; decibel writer jeff treppel describes their music as ‘…the space whale. The sheer weight that this music exerts must be what it would be like to have such a massive leviathan pass overhead…’ i can’t think of a better way to depict this album. i love this band.

mare – EP was on there as well, as #24. it took me a little bit to get into this band but once i did, i couldn’t stop listening to it and i put ‘they sent you’ on basically every mix cd i made for probably two years. they kind of fell off the face of the earth and then sadly disbanded a while later without releasing anything else but a melvins cover for a tribute album. click their name above and go to their myspace to check them out if you haven’t heard them yet. highly recommended.

other stuff i was in agreement with: agalloch – ashes against the grain, #20;witchcraft – s/t, #36; two electric wizard albums, and some jesu. all solid choices.

something i was surprised as shit to see on the list was system of a down – toxicity. also andrew wk – i get wet, which isn’t so much metal but it’s just an awesome fucking album. how can you not include that on this list?!

there’s a bunch of other predictable shit on the list, like every mastodon and converge album, a heap of pelicaneuroisis, the red chord, pig destroyer, etc etc.

#1 wasn’t a surprise, and no, i’m not telling you who it was. support the dying print industry and buy the magazine.

after finishing the list, it made me wonder what albums were my favorite of the decade. people’s favorites can range widely over a course of time as long as a decade. note: i do not mean the best albums in terms of musicianship, and not the most musically groundbreaking either. this is just about my favorite albums.

these are some of the albums i consistently love, never getting sick of them no matter how tirelessly i listen, or how long it’s been since i’ve picked it up. and in no specific order:

as the sun sets – 8949.

agalloch – of stone, wind and pillor + the mantle.

electric wizard – let us prey.

tool – lateralus.

mare – s/t ep.

the black dahlia murder – unhallowed.

3 inches of blood – advance and vanquish.

red sparowes – at the soundless dawn.

swarm of the lotus – when white becomes black.

asmegin – hin vordende sod & so.

the samuel jackson 5 – easily misunderstood.

the abominable iron sloth – s/t.

isis – oceanic / celestial / panopticon.

cephalic carnage – anomalies.

sunn O))) – 00 void / black one.

dragonforce – sonic firestorm.

what are some of your favorite albums from this past decade?

’sketchy’ metal.

i was reading metal sucks today, and they had an interesting link to an article on the village voice, entitled pelican’s sketchy metal, by stewart voegtlin. he says:

“…a shameless glitz-and-tits approach to faux-anthemic blockbuster melodrama masquerading as elite-approved Art for Art’s Sake—plagues “metal” these days, as decidedly “un-metal” folks play “headbanger” by night in a host of dunderheaded critical darlings with banal commercialist tastes: Baroness, Mastodon, Torche, and especially Pelican.”

clearly someone stayed up til 4am furiously thumbing through a thesaurus as he smashed the living shit out of those bands. [i'm probably showing my ignorance here, but at one point, he says in reference to AC/DC and motörhead: 'But those bands radiate a feral authenticity, with orgiastic crowd-pleasers that double as dry-hump soundtracks and arguments against geometry.' what the FUCK is an 'argument against geometry?' is that perhaps a poetic way of saying they fucking rattle the walls with rock til they fall down? jesus christ, man.]

after reading the article, i think that i agree with him, for the most part. yep. except for torche, which i will touch upon in a second.

i never got into baroness. just saw pelican recently, and they blew. i saw mastodon recently, and they blew. why did they blow, you ask? i wasn’t engaged. i wasn’t into it. no energy from either band — just nothing. a band, particularly a metal band, has to have that certain something that grabs you by the throat and makes you bang your head ’til it fucking hurts. even earth-shatteringly loud, i couldn’t feel either mastodon or pelican force my toe to start tapping in that way that you can’t help. at it’s most elemental, metal is an extreme form of music and there is usually a strong emotion behind it, regardless of what it is. it’s visceral [god, how unoriginal is it to call metal 'visceral'?] and that’s why i love it so much.

i am no musician; i can’t appreciate the subtle nuances of guitar picking and boards full of pedals and i have absolutely no idea what makes a good drummer, so basically what makes me really like music is the way it makes me feel. neither pelican, mastodon, or baroness makes me feel anything. i’m not sure if it’s because the music is too smoothly produced or there’s just no raw emotion behind it. it’s boring, and i’m not interested.

voegtlin bashes torche by saying they  “…often sounds like Looney Tunes composer Carl Stallings tearing through Helmet’s late oeuvre in double-time.” the description is hilarious, but i think that torche is actually a lot of fun. in my opinion, i don’t think they try too hard and their live shows are amazing and really energetic. i think they know what they do, and they do it well, which is an honor that voegtlin seems only able to bestow upon bands like AC/DC and motörhead. i’m curious to see what metal bands he actually champions.

even though verboten voegtlin did so with utmost levels of pomposity, he voices an unpopular opinion, and for that i applaud him.

the amazon kindle.

this morning, i saw someone reading something on an amazon kindle on the subway.

at first glance, it’s kind of cool looking from a gadgety perspective. and it must be nice to be able to carry multiple books with you at once. but after casually watching her click something in order to advance a ‘page’ and continue reading the bitmapped text, i kind of started to wrinkle my nose in disgust.

as a print designer, i will forever love and cherish the feeling of holding a designed and printed object in my hands. running my fingertips over the tactile quality of the paper. the tense feel of the binding holding the pages together. that extremely specific, poignant smell of a library book, and the crinkle that the clear plastic dust cover makes when you crack it open.

from a larger perspective, the amazon kindle also completely removes the designer from the book equation. gone are the carefully chosen typefaces with tiny serifs that are engineered to advance the eye smoothly from word to word. goodbye leading and kerning, the half title and title pages. au revoir to the colophon. the rich and colorful endpapers? later. and perhaps one of the most important elements [regardless of what that tired old adage says] a colorful, appropriate and eye-catching cover design is rendered obsolete.

something else that will fall by the wayside, and indeed has even fallen off the page[har] in modern times, is the page layout. this is something most people don’t really even notice, but when you open a book, and the text block has proper margins around it to rest your thumbs, and a nice amount of white space for the eye to rest, it’s a magical thing. in the middle ages, they used to use the golden section to carve out a beautiful page ratio; this is something i used to do religiously when i did page layout in college. the results were incredible.

in the interest of saving page count and trees, most novels today unfortunately use as much of the page real estate as possible. this usually creates a really poor reading experience because your thumbs cover up part of the words on the edges, and the lines are too long, making it difficult for your eye to find the next line down.

as you can see, there’s a lot of careful thought, concepts, designing, and even math that goes into a really beautiful, functional page layout & book design. all of this is ripped away from you when you tear the essence of a book out and digitize it.

the kindle is just another example of how our constant and tireless search for ease and convenience in every aspect of our lives ruins, well, a lot of things. i’m not sure how the kindle will affect the print industry in the long run, or if it will ever become a widespread replacement for printed books, but i’m slightly apprehensive. all i know is, i will always choose a book over some stupid gadget that might break one day, and i will happily lug my printed pages around with me on the subway, no matter how heavy or cumbersome.

below is a video by a book cover designer who smashes the shit out of a kindle, office space style. pretty awesome.

i’m a liar.

yesterday, i had a roast beef sandwich for lunch.

this may not seem like a big deal to anybody, unless you know me well.

i’ve been a quasi-vegetarian now for just over two and a half years. i say quasi because i renounced all meat except for seafood, which i didn’t even eat that often. technically, the term for this is ‘pescatarian,’ but that’s even gayer than, well. two guys making out. so i never referred to myself as that.

for some reason, i find that a lot of people give me shit about my dietary habits. i have NO idea why, but people would get upset and all disorderly when i told them what i did and did not eat. they’d get even more upset when they asked me the reasons behind my decisions. health? sure. was it for the animals? no. any other questions were usually met with a shrug. people have preconceived notions of what a vegetarian is, and if you don’t fit right into that, they get all bent out of shape.

bottom line is that the grey area was where i found myself happiest. i didn’t really have hard and fast rules for what i ate, only guidelines. i broke them every so often, like the time i went to las vegas and had the opportunity to eat an in-n-out burger. you bet your sweet ass i took that.

i’ve decided to say, fuck labels. i’m not an anything anymore.

i’m probably going to continue to eat a mostly vegetarian diet. but when i want meat? yeah, i’m going to eat it.

it’s all about making myself happy. and god dammit, that roast beef sandwich was amazing.

371. If you have the right of way, TAKE IT.

GTFO

today i was directed to a blurb on new york magazine, which was an excerpt from mad men creator matthew weiner’s stint at yesterday’s new yorker festival mad men panel.

he said some kind of shit, but the last paragraph really kind of hit me. he kind of just went off on the internet:

“When I look at digital, the dark side of it for me is the physicality that’s being presented alongside the Internet. I think about that movie The Matrix, and about these bodies that are human batteries that support computers. I met this guy who was creating software where you could watch Mad Men and you could chat with your friend while you’re watching it, and things would pop up, and facts would pop up, and I said, “You’re a human battery. Turn the fucking thing off! You’re not allowed to watch the show anymore. You’re missing the idea of sitting in a dark place and having an experience. Are you just like sitting with your phone and you’re kissing your girlfriend and saying, ‘I’m kissing my girlfriend! This is so great, we’re having sex!’” EXPERIENCE THINGS!”

i love it when i am feeling something that i can’t quite put properly into words, and another person expresses it perfectly and articulately. thank you, matthew weiner.

i was going to type some long stupid shit about how he’s totally right, but that would mean someone would be sitting here reading my dribbling drivel rather than logging off the computer and going and doing something better.

GET THE FUCK OFF THE COMPUTER AND GO EXPERIENCE THINGS.

the internet[s].

i’m beginning to feel like i’m being left in the digital dust as far as the internet is concerned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

currently, i’m still on myspace. i’ve had the damn thing since it first started. however, i’m starting to realize that it’s kind of like purgatory. there’s shit and nothing going on there. the only thing that’s left that makes it worth it are bands.

now, facebook: for a while, i haven’t had one, as i deleted it some time ago. this was around the time it was discovered that any media or information you uploaded became the express possession of the site. it was also difficult to shield the world from your information, as the privacy filters weren’t as comprehensive as i hear they are today. anyone could google your full name and come across your facebook page. they’d be immediately able to find out what schools you went to, where you live, and they’d be able to see the 452 awful pictures of you that have been tagged by your friends.

i understand that today it’s easier to screen what information strangers are able to see, but even knowing that, facebook still makes me uncomfortable. i’ve complained about it before, but status updates make me a lot angrier than i should probably admit. i hate that people i barely know from high school or college will try to be friends with me. we never talked at school — the hell makes you think i want to talk to you now? i hate that if i post something, someone might click the little thumbs up thing that means they ‘like this.’ why the fuck is that even a feature? what good does that do? more importantly, who cares?

don’t even get me started on twitter.

complaining aside, the larger point is that i’m not as connected as i used to be. the bottom line of these social networking sites is that you’re in touch, all the time, with your friends, with whatever community you may be a part of, with artists and bands and companies. i wonder if my pure disdain for social networking sites is getting in the way of me being more involved in….stuff.

i have to say, though. i kind of like not being a part of all of it. i like that all the aspects of my life are not spread out on a website, and that way i can retain some semblance of privacy. i like that there’s only a few sites that i check daily, and when i’m done i get off the computer and go read or go outside; i don’t feel tethered to anything. i know facebook completely reels you in and gets addictive as shit, and i like having one less thing to draw me into this chair. i want the internet to bore me, so i am forced to go do something better.

so right now i’m vacillating between giving in and joining facebook again, or staying old school and kind of being left in the dark.

i’m sure i will provide an update when i eventually make a decision.

as for right now, please chime in with any thoughts or opinions of your own.

[image via quoteskine. great stuff, check it out.]