Will Dâm-Funk ever get “Best New Music” on Pitchfork?

                No, probably not. Damon G. Riddick might have had his moment pass back in 2009. Back then every type of music began to sound excellent. Pitchfork popped “Best New Music” every other day. Even then Dâm-Funk managed to get only an 8.2, nothing terrible but just a few points shy of that coveted score. 

                Of course Damon did a few things to ensure a good score on Pitchfork. He did a remix for Animal Collective. After that he managed to get a sweet blurb in the taste-making newspaper “The New York Times”. Those in the “New York Times” foresaw great things happening to the Professor of Funk. Using his remix and NYT article he maneuvered to open for Animal Collective in Prospect Park. Everything was falling into place. 

                Watching him open in Prospect Park felt like seeing all those people from the Titanic flail about due to a lack of lifeboats except somehow more heart-wrenching.  Everyone around me looked in disbelief as this man choked up pretty hard. In the beginning he told people what year a record was made to try to get cheers; by the end he was reduced to saying “Cheer if you like being alive”! Not many people cheered, they felt cheated by his utter lack of charisma and annoying long-windedness. 

                His ultimate statement came out towards the end of 2009 called “Toeachizown”. I stayed away from the release for a while, remembering my awful experience with him at Prospect Park. The lame performance turned me away from his music for a long while. Only after I saw he did remixes of virtually anyone who had ever released a song did I begin to let my guard down. With his kind of remix release schedule I figured he made roughly three remixes a today, one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner. 

                I wonder what Dâm-Funk’s average day is like. I imagine most of his day consists of finding puns off of his name. As he’s driving down the road looking at the empty California landscape he sees someone dressed in a Pepé Le Pew costume he says to himself “Damn Skunk”. While he watches TV and a character does something ridiculous on his favorite USA Network show he laughs “Damn Monk”. Going to his day job as a head of a recycling plant he thinks about everything people throw away and mutters “Damn Junk”. Performing at The Smell, a famous venue in Los Angeles, California, he sees someone vomit on a shorter person’s head and screams out “Damn Drunk”. 

                Perhaps 2011 will recognize the huge amount of work this guy does. Sure, his live show is a bit empty but what do you expect people’s reactions would be to retro slow-moving funk? Now I realize the Animal Collective concert might not have been the best way to reach out to potential fans. Animal Collective and Dâm-Funk aren’t that compatible. Plus releasing an over two hour debut is a tough thing for anyone to handle. Yet I have respect for someone who follows his muse this hard for this long. Before Damon goes to sleep I’m sure he reads roughly two to three funk history textbooks. He needs to in order to keep his professor position at a local community college over the weekend. 

                Thursday marked his partial re-habilitation into the indie-sphere. Since the Animal Collective fiasco he’s kept a lower profile, releasing some old tracks and one EP. Remixes have been his only new material. After coming out with his remix of Ariel Pink’s song “Fright Night” it is time for him to emerge out of the darkness and into the light. Finally he came out to Bonnaroo. How he did I do not know days after the fact. What I’m going to ask is unusual: anyone cognizant enough please advise me how well he did in your own words. I want to know. Thus far I’ve only found gearheads checking out his equipment. Gearheads aren’t people they are machines. 

                Bonnaroo isn’t even that great a music festival. I’d probably put it down as a third-tier festival, after Coachella and SXSW. Each one of those festivals is real. They are held in states that people generally hold favorable opinions of. Tennessee is gorgeous, beautiful really, but the middle of nowhere Tennessee doesn’t hold quite the same charm of desert fun in the sun or Austin’s Hipster Paradise. Appearing at Bonnaroo is a good first step, but Damon will need to improve his festival game for next year if he wants to tap into a buzz vein. 

                Dâm-Funk I want you to tutor me in the ways of the funk. Failure to do so would be tragic as I’ve dedicated roughly 800 or so words to you. Don’t damn the funk.

Guide to Modern Saturday Night Live Disappointment

                Saturday Night Live is such an abject failure it’s not even funny. I know it goes through stages of relevancy but this is ridiculous. Nothing it has presented lately has left a lasting impression on my mind. At the end of it I only have one thought in my mind: “Why”. Why did I decide to stay in on a Saturday night when I could be out living it up, singing Karaoke, drinking, going to a concert, joking with friends, going to bed early, writing blog posts, clipping my fingernails,  literally anything is a better use of time than the succubus of time Saturday Night Live. 

                I have come up with a way of charting the decline of the average episode. Obviously this isn’t true for all cases, but for a majority of their recent output. Without a breakout star, there isn’t anything drawing you to it. Rather, people watch it out of a mindless obligation, like moths to the light. Each time people watch it hoping “Maybe it will be good tonight”. Such thinking is hopeless delusion. Perhaps some time in the future it may regain its marbles and begin to offer biting satire. Until such time, it continues to get smoked by “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” despite having an entire week to write it. During that week period, the writers work diligently to water down jokes to a point so bland it could be served as airplane food. 

                Below is the breakdown:

1.       Cold Open – This usually is an extremely weak political sketch taking on some relevant topic that’s been blaring loudly on the front page of the New York Times for about a month. If the open is anything other than a spoof on a current event (cultural or political) it will be a particularly weak show. 

2.       Guest Monologue – Whoever the guest is gets a chance to ramble on for about 5 to 15 minutes. Generally speaking since the writers don’t write it this happens to be one of the funniest moments of the show. Those who are ‘flash in the pan’ popular fail at this segment, resorting to childish skits. Better guests bode well for a better show. Exceptions do appear but as a rule of thumb it is fairly solid. 

3.       Immediate skits following the Monologue are more enjoyable than what comes later. Saturday Night Live front-loads the quality of the program knowing how old its target audience is getting. Writers know as a fact how hard it is to stay awake until 1 AM for people above the age of 50. Thus, these skits tend to fare better than the rest of the show. 

4.       Andy Samberg Sketch – Andy Samberg is Saturday Night Live’s token young person’s comedian. Most of the sketches mock things the elderly would find funny (Vincent Price, Communism Jokes, William Howard Taft jokes). These are called “Digital Shorts” and vary in quality. What Andy tries to do is create something ‘meme-worthy’ where he consciously knows people will share it on their friends’ Facebook Walls. Digital Shorts with a song involved have a better shot of accomplishing this goal. Laser Cat episodes fail in this attempt. But all Andy Samberg sketches try to create the false illusion that Saturday Night Live is a cool, hip show intended for relevant twenty something viewers. 

5.       Weekend Update – Weekend Update inspired comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to create their own successful shows. Now Weekend Update consists of those shows’ rejected jokes. In the off-chance the material is good; the Weekend Update person makes sure the delivery sucks to completely kill the joke. As a side note, this segment can be funny if they make fun of local New York politicians. I’m not sure why, but they have a knack for eviscerating any New York based politician. To be fair though, New York politicians make jokes about them too tempting and easy.

6.       Last Half Hour in the Program – If you’ve made it this far you’re pretty tough or a masochist. This is the dregs of the show. No matter how good the program has been this is truly terrible. You know how people bring magazines with them into the bathroom? Well, in this case, the writers bring a blank notepad with them whenever they use the restroom. Whatever they write in that couple minute period becomes a full bodied skit. It is generally about as good as the excrement those writers pumped out of their bodies. 

7.       Final Ten Minutes of Saturday Night Live – These ten minutes wish they were as good as human excrement. You should probably turn off the TV before this happens. 

My hope is you learn from these basic steps. I don’t want people ruining their Saturday nights for such nonsense. Even Wednesday afternoons in college in between classes watching recent repeats on Comedy Central sounds like a true waste to me. Perhaps one day I’ll see a change in this, in how Saturday Night Live gets better writers and better material. Who knows if that will happen, though I’d like to be one of the ones who finally bring the franchise back to greener, funnier pastures.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

 

 

     After so many years of radio silence, they came roaring back at the Masonic Temple. I really missed them. For a longer while than I’m willing to admit, their music helped me along, pushing me forward. Even the sheer fact they existed for so long as a near-anonymous collective who played 20 minute plus long songs is short of incredible. What’s even more incredible is how all of their New York shows sold out in about 3.5 seconds.

    Naturally I was thrilled to see them live for the first time, having missed their concerts when they were together due to laziness and general forgetfulness. Their venue choice of a Temple felt additionally fitting. Seeing a packed audience, I wanted to take a picture of the place and send the photography to Glenn Branca, politely asking him to quit writing doom-laden Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times. I wanted him to see his idea of an orchestra of rock did not end with him, but continued on in the spirit of a bunch of Canadians, who removed even ego from their music.

    Eric Chenaux music didn’t express any form of humility. As I heard his opening set, I kept on trying to think of reasons why it wasn’t good. Could it be due to the acoustics? No, I heard him alright. Perhaps it might be a bit intimidating for anyone opening up for a giant band with a devout cult following, and here you are some guy they’ve never heard of, and you have to wow them. For a moment I thought this might be true. John Fahey did solo guitar work too but after most of his live shows his record sales decreased. But no, mostly Chenaux’s set suffered from obsessive self-indulgence. That struck me as particularly disappointing, as he had some extremely interesting sustained tones and drones underneath aimless guitar strumming. Had he simply stripped away the show-off nature of his playing, and instead focused on the quieter aspects of the sound, I might have enjoyed his set much more. When he ended, I think several people around me murmured “Thank God” through insincere applause.

    GYBE didn’t disappoint. As they started up, I wondered what might have convinced them to take such a long hiatus from doing shows. Sure, they had a million side projects (Fly Pan Am, A Silver Mount Zion, Set Fire to Flames, the list continues) which took up some time. Perhaps the sound they explored might have tired itself out. Their last album got universal praise, but their style got co-opted by countless less talented musicians. Criticism (lazy criticism) began circulating about their over-reliance on crescendos and constant builds.

    While crescendos were in place for their performance, they explored some of their quieter pieces as well. Moments in the performance it grew so quiet you heard only a single violin accompanied by four film projectors. The person responsible for the projectors did a fantastic job, it was really amazing the looping and gradual evolution. Seeing images match the music so well was doubly nice, as a band which adamantly refuses soundtrack work, it was good to see how carefully hand-picked the images were.

    “Lift Your Skinny Fists to Heaven” ended up being their major reference point. As “Sleep” started up, the crowd went wild. If a 20 plus minute song could ever be a hit, this was a hit. The Coney Island speech in the beginning is fantastic as well, and works on multiple levels in New York. Sleep ended. “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls” came up. What made me so appreciative about this track was they played the whole thing. After the initial blast, it is a fairly quiet song. The build is extremely patient. It didn’t hurt that the projectors showed off certain flair as well, with an almost unsettling focus on pure garbage (literally). Most of the films seemed to be a way of focusing your eyes off of the band members, who played in darkness. Keep in mind as you see them that they aren’t all which meets the eye. I saw a few members playing even behind the doors of perception in a little nook beyond the line of vision from the stage.

    Thankfully they are going to be around doing show for the next two months. Perhaps the live setting might encourage them to re-start the project.

Are Blogs Waning: A Report

                  Recently the New York Times had an article which hit a bit too close to home: blogs were declining in popularity. I sat there, reading up, tears welling up in my eyes at the horrible news. That draft I had been working on my blog might not be as significant anymore or remotely significant. Wondering if this was true all over, high-tailed it over to Hipster Runoff. After seeing Carles’ absolutely pathetic and sad meta-joke on the entire online hipster community ‘The Mainstreamer’ I thought they might be right. 

                Composing myself, I realized the New York Times hasn’t been right about a lot of things. Maybe there was something more than news compelling them to write such vicious material. The writers of the New York Times must know their days of being a newspaper are limited. Who are they to report on blogs and the state of blog affairs? Why can’t we have the President of the Blog-O-Sphere come out and reject such slander in her state of the Blog Address.

                “The State of our Blog has never been stronger. We produce more Memes than any other country on Earth.”

                While some people have turned exclusively to twitter and Facebook, most use them as supplements, rather than full-on platforms. In other words, you have to have tough skin for the internet. Michael McDonald, the young man they profiled in their extended piece, clearly didn’t have the guts for what blog life is all about. Rather than expand his blogging presence through dubious tweets and so on, he went all lame on it. Using the gripe of ‘not enough people visited my blog’ he closed up shop for good.

                If I were this kid’s friend, I would have told him to stick with it. Blogging takes a long time; it is more of a slow burn than a flare up. Simply posting stuff up doesn’t mean you’re going to get noticed, you’ve got to be creative. Create a Facebook profile whose single purpose is trolling other sites, implanting your blog presence elsewhere. Begin to connect with other bloggers, write something people want to read. Technical blogs don’t do so hot; you have to inject some truth and understanding into there at some point. Stating ‘all the people I want to reach are on Facebook’ it is clear he wanted positive feedback rather than constructive criticism (I’ve been able to accept constructive criticism due to my arm’s length approach to this doodad).

                Children 12 to 17 saw a 50% decrease in the amount of blogging. Good, what the fuck do tweens blog about? I don’t really care about how hard you have it in Middle School, in High School. I’m sorry lunch today was applesauce, lasagna, and cornbread, but just eat it. You have to go through some serious stuff, some interesting stuff before you can write turgid, long-winded posts like the ones better bloggers have. 

                Showing a decrease in the amount of bloggers doesn’t bother me in the least. Thinning the ranks a little bit can be a good thing. Having become familiar with other blogs, I’d say there’s always better and better stuff coming out. By staying around longer, you can ‘hone’ your ‘blogging chops’ and do a better job. Writing doesn’t come naturally to me; I had to work at this kind of work. Hopefully I’ve become a little better of a writer through various amounts of criticism. 

                Blogs offer a certain amount of conversation. I enjoy speaking with other bloggers. We help one another and form a community which is strong. Sure, I think the opinionated tag works for a lot of blogs, but those tend to be more political blogs, something I try to avoid on here. Besides, in case you’re more interested in the visual arts, Tumblr offers a great way of showing off your skills, probably much better than Blogspot does.

                Don’t let the New York Times lord over you. Stay strong fellow writers, bloggers, Google Bombers, Flarfers, and whatever else exists exclusively on the internet that I haven’t mentioned. Together we’ll make these Chains of Love.

The City Mouse

                 Christian, one-time child actor and retired MTA employee, gazes longingly at all the young kids waiting for the L train. Oh, how youth is wasted on the young, he says to no one in particular. It is Friday night, they’re all probably going to their cool parties to do cool things, things I can’t do anymore.

                I tried my best. My kids moved out, found new places to live. Yet here I am, still living in the Big Apple, wondering why I’m doing it. Williamsburg wasn’t always like this, it used to be tougher. Now Duane Reade’s moving in. That park hosts free Flaming Lips and other relevant bands, but I don’t listen to that stuff. Nah, back in my day I listened to progressive rock and hippie freak-out music. 

                That’s how I met my wife. Man, we have to get out of New York. Move to somewhere warmer, somewhere that won’t tax my city pension. Hold on, I have to scurry underneath the platform, the train’s coming. Look at that, a cute out of town person pointed at me. I feel important, appreciated, terrifying for no obvious reason. 

                All my kids moved down south. Maybe I need to do that, go to North Carolina; they wouldn’t tax my pension there. Some of our friends, people I worked with at the MTA say North Carolina’s great, especially Asheville. The jerks I worked with went to Florida, so I can’t go there. I don’t want to be an old New York mouse going down to Florida’s, that’s like where New York mice go to die. Either that way or freaked out people throwing shoes at them, shrieking hysterically.

                 We have to get the rat hole in order, get it on the market. Yeah, the housing market isn’t doing that well, but we have an ideal location. That counts for a lot, perhaps some young yuppie couple into yoga or Whole Foods might like it. I don’t know, I eat most garbage people drop on the ground, but that’s not for all mice. Some prefer eating only organic food found on the ground. Each Sunday I read the New York Times Book Review section, looking for books about mice, but there are usually gross misrepresentations of what we’re all about. I mean, we’re not monsters. If anything, humans are monsters. They are bigger, louder, and much more intoxicated, at least around these parts.

                Bummer, I have to help move all this stuff into storage. We got a sweet spot to store our stuff to make the rat hole appear bigger. I spent the past week repainting it to an inoffensive shade of white and beige. Neither one of us knows what’s trendy right now, so we went with a full wood look. Sadly we don’t have brick exposures or hardwood floors, those things are hot right now.

                 Guess I’ll steal some of the leftover bits of pizza the kids dropped. It is time to get some sleep, watch repeats of stand-up routines on Comedy Central and dream of the warm pure North Carolina sun. A rat can dream, a rat can dream.

Mameshiba: The Science of Cuteness

                 Mameshiba are not your ordinary advertising campaign. When Dentsu advertising agency unleashed this level of cuteness upon the world, we were not prepared. Without having anything to sell, they instead focused on having the bean dogs (Mame means bean, and Shiba means dog) mention random tidbits of trivia. They’d pop out of whatever you were eating and dispense such pearls of wisdom as:

                “An ostrich’s brain is smaller than its eye, so it quickly forgets what it just learned” – Lentil Bean.

                Besides giving out this sort of information, each bean dog has their own specific personality. Some are smarter, more willing to travel than others, whether it be by shell or pod. A few dabble in poetry and learning new things. Each one (or collective group in some cases) has their own mini-feature on their own website:

Mameshiba!

                According to Atsushi Higashiyama, their success is an unexpected surprise. They are everywhere in Japan. On the internet people have made their own tribute videos to the successful bean dogs. While the penetration into the American market has been somewhat limited (they showed up at the San Diego Comic Con, to give you an idea of the audience) they do have a certain universal appeal, even if their cartoons are still in Japanese. The subtitles help, and a few times they have put the cartoons fully into English, such as the case for the Jelly Beans.

                What I wonder about as I see them is the science of cuteness. What makes us react almost uniformly to certain cues? Even Dentsu the creators stated they were shocked by the surprise, yet were confident enough in their creation to allow them to exist as characters first before selling any product. That’s considerably different from most advertising campaigns, where we bond with the character after knowing the product, like the Flo girl (from the Progressive commercials, another form of cuteness). 

                The New York Times had an article about the science of cute in 2005 (Article). According to the Times article, the cues of cute display extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need. Somehow we are wired to take care of the most pathetic and lowly. Originally this wiring was due to taking care of offspring, but the wiring is so strong that anything resembling extreme youth, whether panda bears, kittens, etc. can trigger this reaction. 

                Dentsu incorporated these images of vulnerability by using the beans. The beans come out food, out of soups, and are about to be eaten. You worry whether or not they are about to be eaten, and their tenuous situation after dispensing their information. Usually the recipients of said information are taken aback, as shown by black lines and drop-out of color. 

                Corporations increasing rely on this imagery to soften things up. Artists use it too, to get a more gut response to their work. A few artists I know explore the science of cuteness with very specific cute materials, such as knit teddy bears placed into various playful poses or hand puppets. Both of these examples use materials we’d recognize from our youth to form a greater bond with the art than would otherwise be the case.

                I’d strongly suggest to anyone to see these absolutely adorable clips. Each one shows off a certain flair for short story-telling.

Person of the Year: Julian Assange

If this guy does not get that person of the year thing in Dentist Office Magazine Time, I’ll be shocked. Glenn Beck has nothing on this Australian-born, white-mopped Albino. Single-handedly he created an absolutely new way (for better or worse) of dealing with corporate and governmental interests. Say what you will about the validity/danger of what he does, it ought to be obvious the guy is the first internet folk hero, existing primarily in cyberspace.

                He looks pretty good too considering he’s almost 40. With his accent and white hair, he could be a cosmopolitan evil doer. Perhaps the James Bond franchise should use him as a template for their next villain, pairing him with a white cat to stroke as he wreaks havoc on international security. My hope, they put him in the Fallingwater house outside Pittsburgh. Something about Frank Lloyd Wright’s design works well with Julian’s supposed temperament: urbane yet fragile, like the house ought to just collapse, yet it fails due to its inner power.

                Cast as a villain in a Bond movie would still portray him in a more flattering light than what the media has given him. Among some of the grosser accusations are of rape (and he’s being questioned, not being sentenced. You’d think otherwise though according to the spin), causing the death of innocents (when his work actually gives concrete numbers of how many people have been killed in endeavors), and coming across rather haughty (the last one is his own damn fault). His treatment, though poor, pales in comparison to what Bradley Manning (alleged source of the leaks) has faced. Reading the New York Times article on him, he got dismissed as someone desperately seeking acceptance rather than focusing on why the leak was important. Mr. Assange got this as well, being asked about his son and divorce, but nowhere as extreme (Manning doesn’t have the option of letting an organization speak on his behalf). 

                Basically, the focus on Julian appears to be a ruse to focus away from the leaks. The leaks themselves range in terms of how much they shock, and much of it isn’t very surprising, excluding the juicy parts about Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Had the US Government simply ignored or laughed off the leaks, perhaps there might not be the outpouring of support for this guy on the internet, along with the various DOS (Denial-Of-Service attacks) that such support entails. In short, the response to his work was bungled. Having  Newt Gingrich and others calling for his assassination proved stupid as well, along with those calling him a terrorist saying how he should be hunted down like Osama (Julian’s response that since he’ll be treated like Osama, he has about ten years of freedom yet, was a particularly effective barb). 

                Travelling across the world like a digital nomad, lacking any real home, makes his odyssey that much more interesting. Continually attacking Julian is so incredibly stupid, it is like when people engage somebody trolling: by giving them attention, you only encourage this kind of behavior. How our government fails to understand how free speech (and treason) works is beyond stupid. It is actually embarrassing to have a government that so poorly comprehends the internet besides knowing it’s a series of tubes. 

                Person of the Year usually needs some controversy to make it stick. I’ve yet to encounter two people with the same reaction of the guy. Going between the extremes of Ron Paul (who adores him) and Sarah Palin (who unsurprisingly misses his point completely), he’s garnered a huge amount of attention.  Rather than focus on his leaks and ask how we can stop him, maybe a better question is to ask how are we doing? I mean, this material is leaked to him by those within the system itself and are dissatisfied enough to bring this information to his organization we should be trying harder. People are always going to be unhappy, but not normally to Bradley’s level.  If we’re hiding this much anyway, maybe we should ask ourselves why? As Ron Paul eloquently put it:

““In a free society we're supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”

                I may not always agree with Mr. Paul on most issues but he sort of hit the nail on the head with this. His nine questions are here as well, as further ruminations on what Wikileaks means:

9 Questions, kind of like Skidoo 23's 7 songs

                While Julian continues to have this information released, maybe the US can re-evaluate where we’re heading. Is the creation of a paranoid semi-police state really a good idea? Right now it feels like this whole year has been about questioning ourselves and which way our country is going, either with the Tea Party, the Left’s dissatisfaction with Obama, or the abysmal economic growth we’ve been experiencing. Julian basically tore all that away to ask the absolutely fundamental question:

“Are we happy with ourselves?”

                I wonder what will be next for him and his Wikileaks organization. There are a few things left he can do in order to raise money for his cause:

1.       Leak Nude Pictures of Julian Assange.

2.       Get together with Ron Paul and start a buzzband.

3.       Find out where Panda Bear’s album is, leak that onto the internet.

4.       Host “The Soup”

5.       Move to Brazil (via the Brazilian President’s love for him. Plus, extradition rules from there are a bitch).

6.       Arrange to leak the documents on Myspace, finally get people to visit Myspace again. I feel that getting corporate sponsorship might help.

Is suing four year olds for negligence a lucrative business model?

This is a question we really need to ask ourselves as a nation. How much are four year olds worth? I’m assuming millions in terms of potential future earning power. Or you could simply just take away their toys and go “nah-nah-nah” to their faces, which might have the same benefit for some people.

Justice Paul Wooten of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan has decided that yes, suing a four year-old is a lucrative business and in fact legally sound. Citing previous cases from as far back as 1928, he’s determined that this four-year old will pay for acting in “an improper manner”. Really, she was just three months shy of five; maybe it is time that she grew up. Thus, being almost five made her a prime candidate for a lawsuit. Of course, it will be up the jury to decide if she’s guilty or not.  Perhaps this now five year old should have acted with ‘due care’ while she was racing her bike with a friend on East 52^nd street in Manhattan.

It was a normal day in April, 2009 for the 87 year old Clare Menagh. She walked outside her apartment and was brutally hit by one Juliet Breitman, who was being watched by her mother Dana Breitman. The hit was hard, Clare needed hip surgery. Juliet’s training wheels on her bike couldn’t have prepared her for this. She rode on the sidewalk with these training wheels, which is technically legal for anyone under the age of 14 to do in New York City. Since Clare was 87, the chance of her surviving that sort of surgery was slim and she passed away three months later.

After Clare passed away, Clare’s estate got in touch with Juliet Breitman, informing her that they were suing her four year old daughter. This case exemplifies America’s evolution. Previously Clare’s estate might have said “Listen, we understand it was just an accident and it wasn’t intentional. We forgive you.” Now we have a far superior system that legally allows them to say to Ms. Breitman “We’re suing your four year old daughter for all she’s worth. I hope you can find a good lawyer! She’s going to wish she was never born, which wasn’t that long ago anyway.” So clearly we have improved ourselves as a country. 

Sure, some may say that perhaps the Justice Paul Wooten has a sort of bizarre name, and that it sounds kind of made up. Even more might argue the purpose of sending a five year old through our circuitous legal system will only speed up the evolution from idealistic young child to cynical teenager. Maybe by the age of nine Juliet will be a jaded teenager who believes in nothing. But I argue that Justice Paul Wooten decision doesn’t go far enough.

Children are being born each and every day. Our legal system has no way of dealing with these potential troublemakers, who cry loudly in supermarkets, retail outlets, and any other location where people might congregate. Suing children when they are born seems a bit too late. What Justice Paul Wooten should have done is use this opportunity to stem the tide of trouble-making before it begins. 

That’s right; we need to have all those thinking of being parents to pay a fee. Whenever any couple gets married they think about either having children or adopting some. As soon as any couple marries they need to immediately fill out a questionnaire. Most of it will be perfectly innocuous, like asking what their favorite TV show is, if they like dogs, favorite soda. But then there will be the following question:

“Do you plan on having or adopting children and raising them as your own?”

If they answer “yes” to this question, fine them! That’s right, in order to better protect our society, we must pre-emptively fine anyone who plans on having children in the future. By doing this, we will be able to avoid these kind of lawsuits in the future by just referring to the fine. It doesn’t have to be a particularly large fee, only about $10,000 or so. 

Before you pass this off as ridiculous, simply remember that we’re the country who regularly sues restaurants for having their coffee too hot and not warning us about it. We’re the country that needs to explain to people that contents may be hot for fear of being sued.  

So yes, we’ll see just what happens with this Juliet Breitman case. The jury might decide that suing a four year old is “insane and a total waste of everyone’s time”. Maybe it is time for all of our young children to grow up, to learn how to take responsibility for their actions, to learn the alphabet, to learn that Santa Claus isn’t real. America doesn’t allow for children to be children anymore, there’s no more innocence left.

How can Preschoolers be depressed? Should they have spent some more time in the womb chilling?

Preschoolers all across America seem to be suffering from long-term depression, according to a recent article in the New York Times. This leads to the great question:

“How can Preschoolers be depressed?”

What could possibly be depressing about having zero responsibilities on Earth? Basically, every need you could possibly have has already been met. Did your preschool not have enough play dough? Did the wooden blocks used to make fictional cites not appear realistic to you? Are Legos just some giant Danish scam meant to drain parents’ wallets and destroy vacuum cleaners?

I wonder whether this is just another ploy to drug up kids earlier, to prevent them from thinking for themselves. Any basic interaction with their surroundings can now be muted by a few simple drugs, allowing them to become perfect little kids. Huxley might have been right; perhaps we are on our way to drugging ourselves (with pharmaceuticals) into some sort of stupor, unable to realize that the world is dramatically changing around us, by people more cognizant than ourselves.

The article discusses ways you can tell whether your child has a “depressive episode”. Lately The Times has been going further and further into childhood, from twenty-somethings to kindergartners to now preschoolers. What is next; will we hear about embryos hanging out in the womb, not contributing to our society enough? Should embryos create “hypnagogic pop” to wax nostalgic about how their life was before it existed?

Depression seems to affect everyone, according to the article. Depression can be caused by environmental stimuli or genetic factors. That makes sense, but worrying about it means that it has the potential to be abused. Look at how much anti-depressants have invaded our lives; it feels like we’re constantly medicating ourselves into feeling better, rather than doing something a bit less dramatic. How about making a cabinet, fixing something in your home, writing, making music, biking, swimming, watching TV, reading a book, breeding hamsters, designing cover art for mix CDs, performing your one-act play about the life of General Custer? Essentially, it seems by not keeping ourselves busy with some creative outlet, we’re just dooming ourselves to crippling depression.

Maybe instead of subjecting your children to interviews with puppets, maybe there’s another solution. Instead, try communicating with them, exposing them to cool bands you liked before you became a cool mom or dad. I do not doubt that some preschoolers may exhibit traits of depression, but depression in general seems to be something the US gets overly fixated on compared to other countries. I mean, look at Franz Kafka. He worked at various boring office jobs but still found fulfillment despite having such a deranged sense of humor.

The New York Times may have been speaking about preschoolers, but they might have been talking about everyone regarding depression. Doctors who worry about a possible over-diagnosis of depression may want to think about the fact that perhaps many who claim to suffer from depression simply need to find their muse.