Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

Last week I found myself at Safari Sam’s, a club in the malt liquor-enhanced urban transitional zone between Hollywood and Silverlake, watching Daisy play keyboards for Phantom West—click the image above for a photoset. You could call them electro-gaze, but the night belonged to the goths, as nights often do, and the line-up culminated with a performance by Teutonic Depeche Mode simulators De/Vision. One gent played his Powerbook while the other sang and barked orders in German. I assume he was telling the crowd to liven the fuck up.

The goth scene has appropriated trance from a decade ago. The color’s been desaturated but the cut is the same and the beats are identical. I drew a few skeptical glances when I pointed this out at the show, but DJ Jonas reported that members of the Stormriders crew (responsible for the phenomenal Dune and Caladan desert parties of my misguided youth) described exactly the same thing.

Pod Chocolates, Rock Band, redesigned photo galleries and actual deserts are in the pipeline. More soon.

Kumar has suggested I’ve launched a meme. As of this writing there are 4 gamer doodle nostalgia posts on Kotaku, but I suspect this is counting one’s chickens before they’ve hatched. Or posted. 2.0. Whatever: No meme this, no All Your Base or aforementioned frenetic mingling of peanuts and jam. A quasi-meme perhaps, a proto-meme even. But should yours truly, crusading luddite, be held responsible for birthing a mature, blue-blooded meme, the only remedy is a roundhouse kick to the face.

I am typically more self-effacing, but I was really tickled that Kotaku’s Eliza published my submission in its entirety. She’s even dubbed this burgeoning sub-genre of nerdom Kotaku Fridgu. As in, Momma Eliza will put your drawings on the Kotaku fridge. With magnets.

Let’s regress further with more selects from my 2nd grade journal, circa 1983-84. Go here to see images from the original post. Many of my entries were jokes:

What do you call a sleeping bull? A bulldozer.
What kind of house weighs the least? A lighthouse.
Knock, knock whos there, Arthur, Arthur who?”

My teacher enthused, “Arthur who? Tell me the rest!”

Arthur any moore cockies for you.

I was working a little blue. This entry is dated October 8, 1983:

Once upon a time I was walking in the Dark Lands and I saw He Man and Skelitor fighting. Then mur man came to fight to. But then Ram Man came to fight with He Man. then Cyclops came on the Panther. But then Man at arms came on the attack track and Skelitor was finished.

Pretty much every entry involves me walking somewhere once upon a time. This from December 14, 1983:

Once upon a time I was walking in the woods and I saw a Cougar fighting with a lion. Then the lion’s friend the Tiger ran behind the Couger and ate him up. The lion thanked the Tiger for helping him and they lived forever in paradise.

This entry, from April 1984, is a study in youthful boy-on-boy anti-climax:

One day my friend Jeff and I were walking in the forest and we saw a forest fire! I called the fire dept. and Jeff called the police dept. They came as fast as light. They gave the fire all the water they had! It didn’t work! While the firemen fought the fire Jeff called a police heliocopter full of sand. It flew over the fire and got some out, but not all. It seemed useless. Finally one of the firemen thought of something. He said if we all use all of our heliocopters and hoses we might, I reapeat, we might be able to get the Whole fire out! So, the cheif fireman called all the police heliocopters, firemen and firetrucks they had! So, Jeff and I went over to a road so we wouldn’t get hurt and watched go out. When it was all out we went back home and had a little fun.

Final entry, dated May 17, 1984:

From August 6 to August 27 my mom and I are going to Hawaii! We are going to do lots of fun things like: go to two Islands Maui & Oahu. We are also going to McDonalds, SeaLife Park, Castle Park. I know I’m going to love it. Good luck, Ben!

Mahalo from the Golden Arches. I don’t think we actually visited a McDonalds while on vacation, but—no joke—I vividly recall playing Burger Time in an arcade on Waikiki beach.

Huzzah! I’ve been published on Kotaku, that irrepressible chronicle of Sony bashing, moe, and Tingle fetishists, though not in the way you might expect. Turns out the brush was mightier than the pen.

I’ve been ill, of course, still combating all sorts of demonic physical manifestations, exhaustion, anxiety, and fear. All the while I’ve been taking stabs at a few imperious, essay-length blog posts, but this had proven very difficult so I dug through some of my old material—like really old—to see what might be worth recycling. I re-discovered my 2nd grade class journal and the imagery within. The rest is Kotaku history. Or was. Internet stardom is fleeting; my post was top-of-page for all of half an hour. Confound you, accelerated blogotime. I’ve seen transuranic heavy metals with longer half-lives than your average post. Oh snap, indeed.

Anyway, check out Ben’s Donkey Kong-Riddled Diary. Thanks to Eliza Gauger for publishing.

I’ll be cribbing a bit more from the journal before I’m done. Non-sequiturs from the mind of a 7-year old kid are absolute gold. Mrs. Abramowitz told me so.

From the millennial amusements file. Here’s a fake newswire story I wrote after a scandalously real incident that occurred in New York City where I was staying with friends over the Y2K holiday. I edited a smidge but yes, this is a six-and-a-half year-old joke. On to the sub-head:

Local residents aghast as partially nude woman induces hysteria in visiting nerd.
AP Newswire — January 2, 2000

A tourist visiting friends in the West Village section of Manhattan over the New Year’s holiday broke a desk chair in what was mutually agreed on by onlookers as nothing short of a ” frenzy to look at ass.” The incident occurred at approximately 10:30pm on January 1, 2000 while residents and guests in the apartment were screening Jon Water’s seminal gyno-angst crime drama Female Trouble.

Despite the alarming amount of ass present in Water’s film, the tourist, Los Angeles resident Ben Calderwood, sprung from his chair to view the ass in question after another apartment guest, Lance Known, announced its presence in an apartment window across the bustling Lower Manhattan thoroughfare. “Look, there’s ass!” Known reportedly exclaimed after sighting a woman disrobing in the neighboring apartment. This exhortation prompted Calderwood to leap from his chair in a desperate bid to see the ass for himself. Before he was able to get to his feet, eyewitnesses indicate the chair spontaneously collapsed, due in no small part to the force exerted upon it by Calderwood in his anticipation of pending ass-view. The young man was left stunned on the floor amidst pieces of shattered furniture.

Those present in the room marveled at how swiftly and soundly Calderwood’s apparent lust for ass destroyed the chair. Manhattan native Marissa Miller, one of the apartment’s permanent residents, recounted the incident to authorities: “It was totally a frenzy to look at ass. Totally. I mean, that chair was completely fucking obliterated. Did you see it? It was in six fucking pieces for Christ’s sake!” When questioned as to the nature of the ass in the window across the street, and whether it was substantial enough to warrant destruction of personal property, Known replied, “Oh yeah—that was definitely ass.”

The owner of the desk chair, resident Adam Felder, was reportedly gracious to the houseguest after the chair’s expected demise. In an interview with NY1 News, Felder stated, “There are times when a guy just has to look at ass. This was one of those times. So what if now I have to sit on the floor amidst a litter of gay porn and Diana Ross records. I’m really ok with that. That chair went out in blaze of ass-induced glory. And I’m glad that Ben was finally able to catch a glimpse of something he desperately, desperately needs. Good old-fashioned, unadulterated, USDA-approved ass.”

When questioned about the incident, Calderwood initially denied the chair’s destruction was in any way related to a “frenzy to look at ass.” “That had nothing whatsoever to do with ass,” said the houseguest. “Sure I got up to take a look, but in an altogether casual fashion. I had none of this brow-flecked-with-sweat desperation that Miller and Felder are trying to tar me with. The collapse of the chair was an unfortunate coincidence. The structural integrity of the thing was questionable to begin with. It failed. That’s all there is to it. Besides, she wasn’t even that hot.”

Calderwood’s remarks clearly contradicted the testimony of eyewitnesses. Confronted with the evidence, the young man later amended his statement. “OK, you’re right,” said Calderwood, “It was all about the ass. Nothing but ass. A frenzy to look at ass. I’m so sorry.” The fate of the chair remains in question. Felder has given no indication whether or not he intends to replace the furniture. The ass was unavailable for comment.