True Story: In my sophomore/1st junior year of college, I took an upper-level photography class. I had taken the intro course, learned the nuts and bolts, and decided to continue on, in the hopes of getting laid. Because that’s what art is for.

Second year, my classmates became significantly distilled. Earlier, we were just a disparate group of people, basically paying to be taught a hobby. Now we had weeded out the tourists, and everyone’s artistic personalities were allowed to flourish, for better or for worse.

It was a colorful bunch, most notably the guy I thought of as ‘Dark Jimmy’. He had the brooding artist rap down cold. I remember him to be quietly intense, always jotting down notes about f-stops and who knows what in his stupid moleskine (full disclosure: I like moleskines now. Back then, my 19-year old skate punk brain was like, ‘Ugh. Get a legal pad, faggot.’). He was one of those people that instantly annoyed me based on nothing more than the way his face worked, and I never found reason to think otherwise. Vindication came with our first portfolio assignment. This guy’s turn comes up, and he sets up a series of black and white photos of cold cuts, arranged to look like vaginas, nailed to pieces of driftwood. He tucked some hair behind his ear while half-muttering some lame justification about feminism and commercialization and other bullshit he made up, and while our professor nodded in acceptance, the class dominatrix (yup) gathered her photos of herself in Victorian dress posing in a cemetery (yup),  walked up to Dark Jimmy, said ‘fuck you’, spit on one of his photos, and walked out.

Years later, I would see a photo of David Foster Wallace for the first time and be struck by his resemblance to Dark Jimmy. The same stringy long hair wrapped in a ridiculous doo-rag. The same wire frame glasses. Basically, the whole stupid face complete with that awful week-beard. Far be it from me to hold one man accountable for another man’s terrible taste and lack of ability, but… I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.

I have tried to understand why everyone has such a hard on for Wallace, oh Lord how I have tried! My experience in trying to read Infinite Jest was as though Wallace was jacking off the English language and blasting me in the face with 1100+ pages of word jizz. I thought perhaps I was biting off more than I could chew, and an earlier book would prove to be the Rosetta stone I needed to understand just what the hell this goofball was saying. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men had its’ moments, but on the whole, seemed no less indulgent or incomprehensible. I’m just not part of the tribe.

It seems like Wallace is the sort of author ‘kind of’ smart people like, because he provides them with the illusion of being ‘very’ smart. The same way certain dudes listen exclusively to Captain Beefheart demos, or the entire concept of molecular gastronomy, Wallace’s books have the effect of creating a wholly separate plane of cultural elitism wherein you don’t enjoy so much as you accumulate XP. It’s just another example of this bullshit intellectual brinkmanship that’s ultimately responsible for creating authors like Wallace and his post-mortem, Mad-Libs-in-a-duffle-bag book and its’ Jonestown jack-off cult of apologists. It’s a vicious circle that has metastasized into a self-sustaining organism that has apparently learned how to cheat death, Wyld Stallyns-style.

My wife (rapidly becoming my favorite critic) put it wonderfully: “I majored in literature. I’ve read a lot of great literature by great authors. This (Wallace) ain’t it.” Seventeen words, cutting through the bullshit like a diamond made out of lasers. And here it’s taken me just over six-hundred just to tell you I’ll never read The Pale King.

Wakka Wakka. You ass.

SCORE: The Pale King gets a 0 out of 5, based on purely moral grounds.

Appearance: Tony Danza yellow, with loose head that disappears almost immediately

Smell: sweet wheat, with hints of Belgian malt fruitiness

Taste: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

Mouthfeel: slightly thicker than your average lager, still pretty thin

Drinkability: decent

Hey Shiner, we need to rap serious for a minute. I’m a big fan of yours, and I’m sure you appreciate all the money I’ve given you over the years. But lately, it’s become a real chore to keep being your bro. You square-head weirdos need to get your shit together.

Here’s the thing: outside of the basic Shiner Bock, only every fourth or fifth seasonal beer/special edition is worthwhile. At this point, they might as well change their name to Danny Ainge Brewery.

HEFASSWEIZEN

And I LOVE Shiner Bock. It’s so ubiquitous, I almost don’t have a choice, but beyond that, it really is pretty excellent. I think really good, local(ish) brewing is often taken for granted, but it’s actually rather exceptional that we’ve got the option of a Shiner at literally EVERY bar in the state. And I’m really stoked that they’re willing to experiment and turn out so many specialized varieties. But I’d be infinitely more stoked if they knocked the schedule down by even just two beers, and used the extra time to make sure they were putting out a consistently great product.

So here’s the 102, the latest anniversary beer. Each year, to celebrate the brewery, Spoetzl throws a new style out there for a few months, and then it’s gone forever. Every so often, they may tweak the formula, and re-release it as a another special edition (like Shiner Black), but essentially, when it’s gone, it’s gone. The 102 is a double wheat pale ale, which I immediately got a big boner for. I was certain this was going to be the one to break the trend of lackluster anniversary brews; I haven’t found one I really enjoyed since the 96.

Disappointment set in instantly. The 102 pours up a pale, translucent yellow color, the same as your run of the mill frat beer. For a beer claiming to be double wheat, I should have chunks of Wonder bread floating in my glass, but for some inexplicable reason, the 102 is a filtered wheat beer. It smells pretty good; lotsa wheat for sure, but also some high fruity notes. Take a drink-it’s a total wheat bomb. Nothing but wheat. Wheat in totality. All holes filled with WHEAT. And not in a hefeweizen way, where there’s a latent sweetness, and citrus-y hops balancing things out, and lots of depth and character and all the other things that make you want to continue drinking. The 102 is basically a super wheaty, slightly chewier Budweiser.

The bottom line is this: the 102 isn’t awful, but who gives a shit? Why in the world did they filter this? Why didn’t they build it off the back of their hefeweizen? Why won’t they release the Kosmos on it’s own instead of making me buy the awful beers in the family reunion pack to get it? WHY WON’T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU?

SCORE: Shiner 102 gets a 3 out of 5.

FOR THE NERDS:

Appearance: dark, motor oil black, with a dense mocha colored head

Smell: smoky dark chocolate with molasses underneath

Taste: 70% cacao dark chocolate, mellow malt undertones, resolves to coffee notes with a dry finish

Mouthfeel: viscous and syrupy without being too heavy

Drinkablility: ultra-high

SHIT GETS REAL:

TOTALLY AMAZEBALLS.

This thing is absolutely astounding. A few years back, taking a trip to London, I got to taste some U.K. Guinness. Granted, it still wasn’t 100% native Guinness, but it was pretty damn close. I thought I was hot shit. Turns out, I didn’t know dick about fuck when it comes to truly fantastic stouts.

The Abyss comes in a standard size bopper, sealed with black wax. A total pain in the ass to get into, but please believe that it’s more than worth it. Once you pry the wax off, you’re rewarded with this:

To be honest, my first taste was a little underwhelming. My expectations were set high from my bro Charlie Fingers about this thing, so I went in anticipating a highly religious experience. First impression: good, but not magical. Second impression: LOOKS LIKE IT’S TIME TO TAKE MY SHIRT OFF AND SING ‘NIGHT MOVES’.

If I had stupid cash to burn, I’d have no hesitation trying to cook this down into an ice cream topping. Imagine Hershey’s syrup, except with booze in it, being squirted into your mouth out of a unicorn’s horn. It’s slightly thicker than your average stout, without being too syrupy or a chore to try and drink. It hits you off the top with an intense, smoky dark chocolate that gives way to a slightly sweet espresso taste that finishes dry in the center of your palate. They age it for about a year in oak barrels, which seems to be turning into a trend lately. Most of the time, I find the wood to be too upfront, but perhaps because of the craziness happening in this beer, the oakiness slips right into the undertones of the flavors, and turns out really, really wonderfully. A little bit of the alcohol pops out on the back end (this fucking thing is 11% ABV by the way), but it scoots off pretty quick. I was shit-hammered halfway through, so this is not a beer to be taken lightly. Supposedly they brew this with licorice, but I couldn’t taste it. And since I can’t stand licorice/anise, consider that my highest endorsement.

All in all, with no hyperbole, I can say that this is one of the top three beers I’ve ever had in my life. Deschutes has released this once a year since 2006, and I look forward to this upcoming year’s batch, because this shit is GONE right now. If you do manage to find some, buy as much as you can. Consider prostitution.

SCORE: The Abyss gets a 5 out of 5.

I can say without qualification that Reach is one of the best console games I’ve ever played. The single player campaign is another compelling story told very well, the prequel to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. Not only does it look amazing and have a really, really good score, but mission types vary between objectives and style, so while there’s plenty of running and gunning, there’s also some vehicle stuff, including a space-fighter level that is completely tits.

The really shiny parts are on display in the multi-player. All of the old favorite game types have made a return, and many of the new maps are callbacks to old favorites. The ranking and matchmaking systems are much improved, despite having already been very effective, and you can even go so far as to pick the kinds of people you play with – if you would rather not play with 13 year olds that shoot you in the face 17 times in a row and then call you a fag, you don’t have to.

The best part of Halo is that the game never gets in the way. Because of the level design and community aspects brought about the evolution of the Forge and bungie.net, a real virtual society has built up across several generations of fans, and you can pretty much play around inside the Halo universe in whatever way you please, with as much or as little variation as you like. That’s a rare experience with any digital entertainment, and this edition’s sales and reviews indicate perfectly how well Bungie managed to pull it off.

I like to think I’m a bit of an expert on breakfast cereals.  It sits on the shortlist of things in this plane of existence that I truly love, and ever since I was young, I have cultivated what I consider to be quite a discerning palate.  Now, I’m not one of these jags who knows the intimate history of when they went from 60′s Trix Rabbit to modern day Trix Rabbit, and other assorted breakfast ephemera, but I did spend many years in a state of mild apoplexy because no one I knew seemed to acknowledge the existence, much less the clear superiority of Boo Berry to the other monster cereals.

Suck my sugar bear, you gay zombie nightmare.

As I get older, my tastes invariably have moved away from the ultra-sugary syrup clusters I preferred in my youth towards more old-mannish fare, but every once in a while, I’ll get a bug up my ass to take it back to ’88 and get something totally devoid of nutrition and heavily glazed.  Here’s the thing:  I work in a hippy-dippy grocery store, where we don’t carry name brand anything, unless you consider Crunchy Jimmy’s Beet Soda to be a brand name.  Since I don’t like to carry a change of clothes in my car to go grocery shopping, 9 times out of 10, I will just pick stuff up as I leave work.  This works out okay for most things, but cereal is not one of them.

One of the most important life lessons you ever learn (usually in college, when you are dirt-ass poor) is that some foods are just fine to buy as a generic brand, and some are just NOT.  Ketchup needs to be made by Heinz, american cheese needs to made by Kraft (or possibly Velveeta), and virtually any cereal outside of shredded wheat needs to be the proper brand name.  Otherwise, shit just ain’t right.  At work, I often don’t even have the option to get something ‘like’ the cereal I want.  It’s logical that Hole ‘n’ Oats will be at least a reasonable facsimile of Cheerios, but if I’m in the mood for Lucky Charms, are Gorilla Dribblers going to satisfy me?  Unlikely.  It is at this nexus of realities that I found myself a couple of weeks ago, longing for Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch and making my best educated guess that Peanut Butter Puffins would do the trick.

Peanut Butter Puffins are decidedly NOT Peanut Butter Crunch.  Not.  Even.  Close.  The first thing I noticed about them:  each individual Puffin is (approximately) the size of a testicle.  These things are huge.  And pointy, which admittedly, is not something you usually hear about testicles.  So the first hurdle to overcome with Puffins is a basic size-to-mass ratio problem.  Once you get them in your mouth, you discover there’s not much peanut butter flavor, and in fact, not much flavor at all.  Puffins are very lightly sweetened, which is not a bad thing at all, and are also wheat-free/corn based, also not bad in and of itself.  But most if not all of us have grown up on super sweet corn and/or rice based cereal, so when you get hold of some shit where you can actually taste the base ingredient, it’s off-putting to say the least.  Finally, and perhaps most damning, no amount of time sitting in milk will ever soften up a Puffin.  These things will remain crispy shrapnel long after your body turns to ash in the mouths of our future cybernetic conquerors.

In all seriousness, the thing that motivates me to get out of bed and begin my routine most days is the anticipation of my morning bowl of cereal. I look forward to it the way some people look forward to their first bump of cocaine of the day.  I ended up throwing out almost half a box of Puffins because I couldn’t face the bottomless hellscape of gnashing through yet another goddamned tureen of these misery nuggets.

Thanks for nothing, retarded penguins.

Machete makes a coherent argument against the anti-illegal immigration zealots using the normal arguments – that America is a place for people to get a shot at a new life, that people are people, and that a great deal of work is done in our country for costs well below what they should actually be. Film director and writer Robert Rodriguez also paints an unflattering picture of politicians, Mexican cartel drug lords, and hyper-conservative border militiamen. This is a film with an agenda, a story that gives you the good guys and the bad guys in clear, certain terms and then makes sure that justice is served.

This movie is solidly built, well-edited, well-paced, and has a good score. The screenplay is well written. My favorite part of the whole deal is probably how happy everyone in the cast seems to be. For a movie that grew out of a joke trailer in GrindHouse, Rodriguez got some real talent for his picture, not the least of which is Robert De Niro, who in excellent work as the corrupt Texas state senator is afforded the rare opportunity to be something other than a tough dude from New York.

Another interesting thing about the movie is how plausible some parts of it are, despite how ridiculous the whole package is. With some of the political animosity flying around these days – and considering how the truly crazy only seem to be rewarded for increasing their levels of insane rhetoric and bullshit – I can absolutely see some things from this story ending up as news headlines.

Also, living in Texas for most of life, it is pretty fun to see things like a battalion of low-riders, en route to war with militiamen, rolling and grinding down the streets of Austin directly in front of the Capitol. I liked this movie quite a bit.

Let’s be honest: you either love Rush, or you totally hate them.  I have never met anyone who thought they were ‘okay’, and if I did, I would kick them in the butthole for lying to my face.  Thomas Dolby is ‘okay’.  Molly Hatchet is ‘okay’.  And Wings will always be superior to the Beatles.

Me?  I love Rush SO HARD.  I also love music documentaries.  This movie is basically Jewish Christmas for me.

I don’t know what that means.

This is a really well produced flick.  It packs a surprising amount of footage and information into it’s two hour(ish) running time.  You get a really good rundown of their career with all the major albums (2112, Hemispheres, Moving Pictures, etc.) and their lesser (everything post-’81, Caress of Steel) getting comparable attention.  It also gives a good overview of their personal lives, being raised by wolverines in the Canadian wilderness.  The most inexplicable and fascinating piece of footage is an archival film of Alex Lifeson telling his parents about his dropping out of high school.  I don’t know why in the world this was being filmed, but it’s a lot of fun to see one of the blandest rock dudes ever as a petulant 17-year old.

Lots of random rock dudes pop up to talk about how rad the band is, and it’s kind of cool, but I don’t know that I buy Billy Corgan creaming his pants over Fly By Night.  Most everyone else has some sort of logical link through their music, though.

Like most docs of this ilk, it serves mostly as a fluff piece, made for fans, but it also could function nicely as an introduction to the band if you or some other guy you know want to explore their ouevre.  Because chicks hate Rush.  That’s a fact.  The only women who like Rush are their mothers and wives, and this movie almost goes out of it’s way to reinforce that.  But honestly, I wouldn’t want to date a girl who was totally into Rush.  Or Slayer.  I know dudes who would/do, and it’s not a good scene.

I caught this on cable, but it’s also available right now as a DVD and Blu-Ray, with something like 2-3 hours worth of extra performance and footage, and I bet that’s pretty tits.  The main flick is so good, it even makes a case for mid-period/new wave Rush, that even the dudes in the band don’t like.  All in all, a totally worthwhile movie.

SCORE: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage gets a 4 out of 5.

This piece of hardware presents a similar opportunity, because it is unbelievably awesome with no downsides.

This is the best keyboard I’ve ever used. Period. They have some crazy Precision Delicious technology for the keys and they feel amazing. No ghosted keys, great response. The backlighting is so awesome. The hotkeys and Logitech management software are wonderful.

In short: I came. I saw. I came.

We also weren’t sure what the name of the place was, since everyone seems to call it something different. Mr. Frosty’s? Frosty Root Beer? For future reference: Frosty Drive N.

Frosty Drive N is hell of quaint and yes old dudes talk to one another over the lunch counter like one of them just bought a steamer trunk for good old George Bailey.  The burgers are totally decent and anything fried is delicious. It also seems as if the last time they adjusted their prices was about 1989. At something like three bucks for burger combo, this stuff is priced to move.

Diana had some steak fingers the last time we went and they were way more well built than you normally find with an item like that. Even 20-30 minutes after we got our food, the steak fingers tender, not greasy, and still hot. The fries are good. The onion rings are terrific to the point of being unlike any onion rings I’ve ever had, and I eat an onion ring pretty much whenever I get the chance.

The real showstopper here is the root beer, though, and from what I can tell, they make their own. They serve it in frozen mugs made of thick glass, and everything involved gets so cold, the root beer freezes for a while. Not into a slush and not into a sheet. The root beer freezes into its own ice cubes.

Let me repeat that: The root beer freezes into its own ice cubes.

How the hell do you even do that? How do you plan the physics or the hydrodynamics of a process like that? Like it isn’t enough that this is bound to be the best root beer you’ve ever had. The family secret just happens to be some sort of delicious soft drink alchemy.

Diana tells me that when she went for the first time a few weeks ago, the owner told her about how his family has owned and operated the place for three generations. I think that’s cool. I like a meal with a narrative.

Score: Frosty Drive N gets a 4.5 out of 5.

Fuck all 20 of you.

Seriously, it’s 2010.  Get your shit together.

SCORE: Having a vanity license plate gets a 0 out of 5.