POP PUNK, OLD LADIES, and BODY ODOR

Pardon my inexcusable lapses in updating. Now that I’m not entrenched in a snow fortress, desperately attempting to thaw by consuming only hot toddies and ramen, I’ve been (thankfully) spending less idle laptop time.

I have three new stories up on VICE from the past week or two:

We Talked to the Legendary Pop Punk Producer Who Left Music for Donuts

If you had told me when I was 15 years old that I would be casually chatting on the phone with the guy who made Dude Ranch, Bleed American, and everything else I viewed holy as am emotional, “alternative” adolescent with a penchant for drum fills, I would have just about died oh my gawd. Let alone that the same dude was the drummer of Drive Like Jehu, a post-hardcore band that is oft-lauded as “seminal” amongst us “-core” miscreants. But even as a 27-year-old, I definitely felt a massive rush of nerdy satisfaction from hearing Mark Trombino casually mention, in his own voice, that he produced those albums. Anyways, now he makes awesome donuts and I interviewed him primarily about that.

Some of dude’s tongue-in-cheek donut creations.

Old Ladies Have Dominated the History of Weed Brownies

For this sucker, I dug deep into the academia of marijuana brownie history to get to the root of how little old ladies became the prominent icons of weed treat ‘lore, starting with Alice B. Toklas and finishing with San Francisco’s own folk hero Brownie Mary.

Your Diet is Making You Smell Weird

This one was a little old thing called an assignment, though no complaints other than that body odor issues will now be forever Google-associated with my name. And now even worse since I just typed that out on my own blog. But anyways, broccoli and garlic and meat might be making you stink, but you should probably keep eating broccoli and garlic and stop eating red meat because obviously and now even the UN says so.

Thanks for reading and I’ll have more to say soon than just links, links, and more links. My brain is crowded. Honest.

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NOW YOU’RE GONE AND I’M ALONE: THE RETURN OF THE DESCENDENTS

I finally have a chance to see the Descendents. Firstly, I will say that no matter how much I could ever want to see them play live, I could NEVER watch them open for  Rise Against, as they will be doing in LA on April 7th. Yeah, LA’s close, Bad Religion is also playing, whatever, NO. FUCK that. It would be like if the Misfits reunited and opened for My Chemical Romance. When terrible things like this happen, I immediately visualize some chortling obese exec smoking a cigar in his throne and reading over a report, pausing at the end and scoffing, “Sure, these old losers can open as long as they don’t interfere with our Hot Topic/Pepsi promotion” before sticking his face in a mountain of cocaine and splashing his scalding coffee in the fact of his assistant. The Descendents playing a role of subservience to Rise Against is straight up insulting. However, they will be headlining a show in Las Vegas at the end of May, and I am seriously tempted to attend.

The Descendents have somehow eluded backlash and ridicule in spite of the fact that the majority of their fan base discovered them while between the ages of 11 and 15. To this day, my Descendents shirt gets the most props and thumbs-ups of any item of clothing in my closet. It’s hard to believe that in 1982, when they were making their most seminal album, a) the top single was Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and b) I wasn’t born yet. Almost all of their songs are about either being pissed off at your parents or being pissed off because a cute girl in your biology class is dating a mongoloid jerk, and from the band’s incarnation -> 1998 -> the present day, NOTHING has changed about how much those things suck to a disgruntled adolescent. I mentioned 1998 because that was the year I was 12, I got a skateboard (never learned to ollie), I developed a crush on a guy who went to a different school and liked NOFX, and I was starting to really hate stuff. When I heard the Descendents and Screeching Weasel, I was like, this shit is gold. Here’s the thing though: you would expect that as I matured (at least to the slightest degree), started getting along with my parents, and got at least a basic grasp on the opposite sex, I would outgrow the angsty cafeteria anthems from Milo Goes To College or at the very least would start regarding them with the “guilty pleasure” shame that I now harbor for Refused and Lagwagon. But I didn’t. When I hear the opening riff of “Hope”, I still feel like Milo and I are on the same page.

originally posted on Deaf Forever, 3.2.11