April 03, 2006
THE BIG BLEG
For 2 years now, BA has been offering up sledgehammer wit,
leaden humor, & just poor taste, absolutely free. However, we're in a
moment of transition - I hate transition - & times are
precarious tight, so if the
spirit moves you, you can express your gratitude by hitting the button below
hard. Thanx, Jeff
Posted by Jeff at 06:34 PM | Comments (7)
July 05, 2005
TIME OUT
Posting on Beautiful Atrocities will be MUCH reduced over the summer as I take time to focus on a couple of writing projects. And frankly, I'm SICK of politics. In the meantime, read the blogroll & watch Passions, where Sheridan is about to recover her son, who was stolen at birth when Beth kept Sheridan in a basement pit for months. Oddly, this only happened last year, but the child is now 6 years old...
Posted by Jeff at 11:19 AM | Comments (31)
June 03, 2005
SOMEWHERE IN THE DEEPEST, DARKEST MIDWEST...
In honor of my one-year anniversary of shoveling it blogging America, I am on vacation at an undisclosed location for the next week. One of my lackeys will be monitoring spam & changing the sheets every now & then. Have fun, & remember: if you can't change the world, change your hair color...
Posted by Jeff at 12:08 AM | Comments (18)
April 29, 2005
LIFE AT TRADER JOE'S
15YO CHECKER: Hey dude, you know you look like Jon Stewart?
ME: Oh? [Eff off, you effing little fetus!]
Posted by Jeff at 07:57 PM | Comments (14)
April 15, 2005
Signs of incipient Alzheimers: you finally find that celery you've been looking for - in the freezer. I wouldn't recommend using it at this point. FYI popping it in the microwave to thaw will only make the situation worse.
Posted by Jeff at 11:43 AM | Comments (11)
February 15, 2005
NEPHEW: Psst, hey Uncle Jeff, I know the B-word!
ME: Really?
NEPHEW: Bitch! I also know the S-word!
ME: Really?
NEPHEW: Shit! And I even know the C-word!
ME: (spits up coffee) You do??
NEPHEW: Crap!
ME: Oh. THAT c-word.
Whew.
Posted by Jeff at 11:56 AM | Comments (6)
February 13, 2005
MODERN TIMES, or HOW I $PENT MY SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Posted by Jeff at 08:50 PM | Comments (16)
February 10, 2005
I HATE WHOLE FOODS
So I thought I should do something about my resolution to eat healthier. Nothing drastic, like cooking. My friend suggested protein bars. I HATE protein bars. "Well," he said, as if talking to a child, "they would make a better breakfast than cigarettes & croutons."
So I drove to
Berkeley's Whole
Foods. I HATE that store. They should call it Weird Foods,
because
there's not a single brand you've ever heard of. The cereal aisle is a phreakshow of
Nutty Date Clods & Jet Puffed Millet Meal & Fruity Leather Gobs.
They don't carry Soap Digest
or Weekly World News, you're
expected to stand in line & browse Algae or Afterbirth or
Yoga Triathlon, or just watch the slovenly workers, who sport more metal than an Iron Maiden CD.
The worst are the patrons. One twit was actually asking for vegetarian flax oil. I'm like, "Would that be different from the free-range flax oil??" She said flax oil came in gelatin capsules derived from animals. GET A JOB. So I asked where the protein bars were.
Check it out, protein bars have arrived. They have their own section, like a
little amphitheater. I stood there surrounded by protein bars,
protein bars in raked tiers, receding to the misty distance, in shapes & sizes & flavors I'd never heard of. I
went mad. I grabbed the Turducken bar & the Miso BBQ & the Green
Goddess & the Chianti Snap & the Praline Yuck & the Double
Teriyaki Taffy & the Cran-Tomato & the Turtle Pie & the No-Carb
Gluey Chocolate Sludge & the Spirulina
Pepsi Swirl—
And they all tasted like crap. Anyone got a light?
See also Craiglist rant WHY I HATE WHOLE FOODS: "Could all you people that shop & work there maybe occasionally take a f*cking shower?"
Posted by Jeff at 08:00 AM | Comments (56)
January 16, 2005
Whenever I'm feeling down, I go to the Safeway produce section & sit on a bushel of Babette baby carrots or Royal Riviera pears, & listen to the soothing fake thunderstorm sounds of the automated produce mister.
Good for your complexion too.
Posted by Jeff at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)
December 24, 2004
Okay guys, I'm geared up & ready to start my Xmas shopping! If I never post again, it's cuz I didn't survive the crush at FAO Schwartz. Merry Effing Xmas! — Jeff
UPDATE: Check it out, there IS no FAO Schwartz in San Fran anymore! When did THAT happen?? No one ever tells me anything. Thanks for the heads up, guys, I just love wandering around Union Square asking directions from stupid tourists who don't know Cow Hollow from Nancy Pelosi's ass. SHEESH
Posted by Jeff at 06:33 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2004
MORDREN GRANGE
"She stepped down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and extermination..."
So begins my latest story, Mordren Grange, just out in Minnesota Review. It's a postmodern Gothic, in which the author of a Victorian pastiche comments on his work even as he's composing it:
"I will set it in a Victorian manor house. This is a trope so filtered and distilled through modern entertainment that it feels archetypal, seems to spring from the collective unconscious. I will utilize the usual cues: fogs, butlers, parlour maids, arcane constructions, narrative props as alien to your waking life as they are embedded in the genome of popular culture."She stepped down from the hackney, into a vapour of snowflakes and extermination...
"This, a reference to the ill-gotten nature of the Mordren fortune, the particulars of which I may only hint at, ambiguity - though hardly characteristic of Victorian literature - being a particularly contemporary malady."The Victorian gothic is a myth, a fabricated past, a harsh world which nevertheless seems innocent in the gas-lit haze of nostalgia. It's a decadent, late-phase fantasy that appeals because it portrays a society that for all its rigidity and shortcomings seems predictable and well-ordered in a way that modern life is not. It has the faux-atavistic appeal of Tolkien. The well-dressed 19th Century characters seem noble, in that they are by definition innocent of the unimaginable crimes of the 20th Century; they inhabit a steamy, well-tended conservatory where the serpent of relativity still waits among the palm fronds to lisp E=mc².
In case you just popped in from Atrios or Maureen Dowd, and are baffled by the well-written prose, this story is narrated in an arch, self-conscious manner in which the style itself a character. It's a technique that can smother a novel but works well in short pieces. Masters of the craft are Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Rikki Ducornet, Cormac McCarthy, & Gabriel Garcia Marquez. You can read more of Mordren Grange here, or you can buy the Minnesota Review - a great, chewy journal edited by Jeff Williams, full of art & ideas - here.
Speaking of Garcia Marquez, my story Angel Moreno will be out this month in Caribbean Writer. It's a pop satire about the Elián Gonzalez fiasco,in which the Supreme Leader selects a Cuban delinquent to make an Elián-style trip to Cuba, with surreal results. It's also the first story published in a university journal to feature a cameo by Garcia Marquez as Castro's lapdog. I'm sure that will garner me just oodles of invites to chic Manhattan cocktail parties where lugubrious literati like Sontag & Doctorow make plangent repartee comparing America to Weimar Germany, that sort of thing. Can't wait! You can read a sneak preview here.
Posted by Jeff at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2004
I WAS AN ACCESSORY TO A SEX RING
So I ran into two leggy cupcakestrying to wrestle a couch up the torturous stairwell of our 100-year-old building. They were going about it in a particularly stupid way, so I offered to help, since otherwise they'd probably still be there and I'd have to use the fire escape every time I wanted a pack of cigarettes.
The couch was about 40 feet long but it was Ikea, so it only weighed about 14 pounds. It wasn't easy, but with my expert engineering skills, I managed to get it into her unit (no comment). I mentioned it to my neighbor, who said he'd run into her doing laundry - where she was doubtless bleaching her industrial-strength sheets - & she'd cheerfully announced she was a stripper.
I was alarmed, cuz I'd just seen on Ricki Lake that 99% of strippers were prostitutes. I already know from Howard Stern that 99% of prostitutes are lesbians, so u do the math. I certainly wouldn't have helped the skank move her couch if I'd known what she intended to do with it.
Altho if she's shopping at Ikea, she obviously hasn't clawed, schemed, or murdered her way up to Head Girl, unless she has an Ikea Econopass, & buys a new couch every month after the old one becomes unspeakably soiled.
She invited me to her housewarming, which should be a pleasant affair filled with pimps, ho's, crackheads, gangsters, wanton women, assorted vermin, & cheap Scandanavian furniture. Probably one of the tawdry trollops will be looking meaningfully at me because she's a Croatian sex slave who was smuggled into the country in a steamer trunk & wants me to help her escape a criminal gulag of Yakuza, Russian mafiosi, & vicious Filipina madams with razor blades in their pompadours. Shit.
Posted by Jeff at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)