Riding the Bus to TV Land
Ah, the infomercials, with their
informing informants, like an
infomat of information, on the bus.
the lady, she speaks, at home is
where she made her millions. see?
see how her teeth glare as she...
she finishes saying to the riders.
"This is the one website you have
to visit.-----"
How I'd love to bear my teeth and
sink into her flesh to see if
it comes off like the flesh of an
asian pear, like she is shaped,
and is just as rosy-----
Webmaster of theformer.net and inhabitor of the "dijonaze" site on MySpace.com would like to post a partial retraction in regards to the post entitled "15 Things to Do in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, If You Live There." As some readers may have guessed, it has to do with item number seven. The clarification is this: I did not mean to suggest that Milwaukee's music scene is bad. Some of it might be in some reader's opinion, and I tend to prefer some to other of what it has to offer. I attended numerous shows in Green Bay, Wisconsin in the late ninties, and thought most of it f'n rocked despite limitations on equipment, or adherance to musical theory--which is what I will get at next. I was really referring to lofi productions, which is not a requisite for "shitty" music. The music can be fabulous, amazing, and fantastic without sounding studio-par. I respect the dedicated musicians of this city who play open mics, and small venues. I am one of them, and if anyone's music has been deemed shitty or great by taste, or is lofi and terrible sounding, it is my own. Please, take the post as tongue in cheek, and save me a black eye. Thanks for visiting, enjoy the show. And, about the comment in number nine. I am going on personal experience, and it was just kind of filler. I don't mean to criticize. If the reader can't tell by now, I was feeling a little guilty when I wrote this. Thanks again.
1. Sit around with friends and bitch about how the steel sunburst piece obstructs the architectural genius of the winged art museum as you are driving up Wisconsin Avenue.
2. Wonder if you would be lucky and be killed instantly if the megametropolis to the south, Chicago, fell under nuclear attack.
3. Do one fun-filled, exciting, educational brewery tour a week until that lame-ass, boring excuse for a thing to do runs out.
4. Visit the Milwaukee Art Museum and stand in front of each painting and sculpture while every molecule of your body is screaming to get the fuck out and go to the Grand Avenue Mall downtown. (Stolen nearly word for word from an Onion article.)
5. Following preceding, enjoy an Orange Julius at the Grand Avenue Mall, like you could in any city of comparable size, but by the smell in the air there just might be yeast and grain alcohol in your smoothie.
6. Drive by the Milwaukee County Zoo every day and realize that five out of ten times you pass you wonder about the psychological state of the live, some ferocious, animals in capitivity. Realize one out of the other five times you are considering they somehow do actually have real live dinosaurs like on all the banners.
7. Go to basement and dingy club shows and see shitty bands play shitty music and rave to your friends about how fantastically shitty the last band you saw was live. Start an underground zine about the fabulously shitty music you listen to and distribute it to the other people in Milwaukee who listen to this amazingly shitty music. Give the zine a mysterious, coded name, and interview artists on their completely schnazzy shit.
8. Take each first date to the Milwaukee County Zoo, or at least suggest or peculiarly insist on it with them.
9. See a larger name act at the Rave and wonder where they got the sound sample of a Yugo trying fruitlessly to start, until you realize it's a guy with a guitar and a really boring pedal.
10. Make use of the Cathedral Square Park wi-fi hotspot, and go home almost immediately where you don't have to contend with insects, sprinklers, and pricks asking for money while you look at sparkling incest pics--bros DOIN' IT for money!!!
11. Get the bends of culture shock bar hopping in the city's most segregated area within the Calico ghetto of Riverwest.
12. Enroll at the overpriced for men to women ratio, Milwaukee School of Engineering, and hatch a secret senior project for creating a fleet of nerd-serving electronic-erotic robot volleyball girls.
13. Throw yourself off the U.S. Bank dwarf skyscraper on finals week once you realize you'll never be able to create a dense enough transistor matrix in order to achieve the artificial intelligence needed for preceding Senior project.
14. Take the Milwaukee Transit System bus each morning. It's onboard television displays will recap last night's infomercial slew on how to make millions from home and regrow hair in places you never dreamed culinary courses could take you.
15. Pay an ungodly amount of money for an eight-ounce cup of domestic beer at Summerfest, which gets entirely spilled on both your Ron-Jon's Surf Shop tank top that barely fits, and your sunburned girlfriend's breasts. Blame the incident on the guy standing next to you on the picnic table, and get more beer splashed on you by your girlfriend as she tries to thwart you from bashing the guy's face in. Through this, try to have some consideration for the nearby concert-goers who paid to hear the Violent Femmes play from a mile away. (This is a true story, adapted for an alternate perspective.)
