Postings from Rockapella - 1999

Broodings from Bear
02/06/99 | 05/01/99 | 07/29/99 | 08/08/99
08/24/99 | 11/20/99 | 12/08/99

12/08/99 - Maybe it's just a guy thing

The power. The majesty. The sweep. The magnificent, arching parabolas. The absolute structural perfection, multiplied by a hundred, limned in the blinding network Kleigs. Watching the Rockettes rehearsing for the Macy's parade - from the back - is one of the awesome marvels of our nearly buttoned down century, for my buck. Bigger than the computer, the phone, the automobile, the thermos. Or maybe it's just a guy thing.
What am I saying? Who do I think I'm kidding? Of course it's a guy thing. I don't feel the same way watching the Jets line up for a scrimmage, say, or watching the Tour de France climb a steep hill. No, it's different. It's like the sensation I get right before I chow down on a big, juicy T-bone, or the extreme rush of two-wheel top-gear powerband roll-on with the throttle whacked wide open. Definitely a guy thing. So let's march straight back to floats and balloons.
In our spiffy pre-parade celeb bus we talked shop with Wild Orchid, Kevin Bacon, MiniMe, Team Fluff, the sickeningly hunky stars of some new cop show, and mused on the Groundhog-Day-like quality of the morning, the funereal weather threatening to drench us yet again, legions of high school bum and droogle corps in garbage bag ponchos, and Ol' Rip waiting to haul us ignobly through the cop-lined urban chasm of Broadway.
The soggy crowds thronging the Great White Way were bedraggled but spirited, and some of them even knew who we were. Here and there in the sodden mass of humanity were cadres of well-wishers, holding up limp placards and chanting, 'sing, sing, sing!'. We didn't. Finally, after doing our little bit on the telly, and making the big turn off Herald Square, there was one last, brave battalion intoning the now-familiar phrase, and again, we didn't. I guess they had high expectations and leaky raingear, because as we passed, mute and lip-synching, one disillusioned humbugger yelled, 'you suck!'. Ah celebrity.
Minneapolis, suck o'clock morning drive show. The DJ offers to donate a hunnert bucks to our favorite charity if we'll go (on the air) into a large, chain-run coffee establishment and sing The Jingle. We say, 'ok, make the check out to Save the Children, and we're there. Rather than being sprayed with cappuccino and pelted with day-old muffins, we received a rousing ovation from the counter workers, who obviously felt no loyalty to their own brew.
Getting to the parade rehearsal was one of our classic travel nightmares. We were flying back to NYC from our coffee-commando stunt in Minneapolis, but Zool must have been gunning for a trunkful of gold stars, cuz we ended up cooling our booties on a runway in Syracuse. Perfect. Ol' Zool must have spent all day over a hot cauldron, brewing up an unpierceable fog, so all the New York scareports shut down. Nothin going in, nothin coming out. I ask the captain of our skybomb, who's just informed us yet again that he doesn't know anything, if we can send out for pizza - our schedule doesn't allow for incidentals like nourishment - and I finally glimpse the Domino's delivery truck pelting down the runway as we seal the hatches for takeoff. I can't help wondering what the poor shmuck's gonna do with undelivered pizza for 150. After circling in one of those hurlfests they call a 'holding pattern', we limp in about five hours late, and slug our way into midtown through choking holiday traffic, past cops and barricades, cursing, honking cabbies and legions of burbo's white-lining it in their posh SUV's.
Ya know, I'm starting to think that 'SUV' should be ordained as an adjective. It's a repellent state of mind and a style of antisocial behavior, sanctified by an assault vehicle with leather seats and climate control. Who really needs the damn things anyway? I mean, for most SUVer's, going off-road means pulling into a rest stop to polish the fog lights. So next time some bloated pocketbook runs up your ass with his brights hovering over your trunk and his monster truck tires climbing your bumper, instead of the knee-jerk flip-off reflex, just smile, nod, and say, 'how very SUV of you'.
The Commercial is garnering raves across America. When it debuted, it scored higher (how do they score ads, anyway?) than any spot since Folger's started hawking java. I'd like to say, 'of course', but that would be insufferable hubris, something of which I may be guilty but dread accusations thereof, but hey, I have broad if somewhat slopey shoulders.(They match my simian brow line)
I apologize for raising any alarms with my little tale of the mixing board that went nuclear. It seems that some of you darlings were anxious that my little meltdown was going to push back the due date for our nuevo cd. No problemo. Because of my mighty and prodigious PC, I don't need no stinking board. But the really nice folks who made it are fixing it for me anyway. I haven't a clue as to when they'll return it, but they promised it sometime in the next century. I'm comforted. We've pushed the delivery date for the pristine, slamming masters to mid-January, but I'm still feeling kinda jammed. I lost two weeks down the sluice of Floyd and the cacophony of contractors, and making up the downtime is cutting deep into my football season.
The absolute weirdest thing about this holiday season is not being seven thousand miles away, for a change. I feel like I should properly be in Nihon, ducking through doorways, sleeping on expensive floors and eating sushi. I am, in short, disoriented.

Merry and Happy

Luv,
Bear

 

11/20/99 - Totally, Hopelessly Lost

Dear Ones,
I know, I know. I'm so stinking inconsistent, but then art mirrors life, right? And besides, I have a bone fide excuse. We have been very very very busy, if you know what I mean. That's a lot of very's. And crazy in a way unique to our groupitude. So like - no time, ya know. Over in the "like I really needed this in my life" department, now that life is slowly settling back into routine frenzy after the kind attention of Floyd, other stuff happens. I leave the BassMint for five stupid minutes, long enough to get a fine mug o' burly joe and a whiff of rotting leaves. I walk back in, already a shipwreck from a pavane of way early morning radio shows, concerts, interminable coach-class yoga days, and late-nite uncontrollable secret-sin revolting-food-combination hooverfests, and my mixing board has gone kaflooey. Fried. No smoke, but no sound either, except for some real annoying ticking. Oh great. In the middle of an album and blammo, no mixer. Boy was I pleasant.
Mercifully, I had to walk away from my techno-meltdown, but not before I'd immolated the last shred of my nearly nonexistent patience anxiously hanging on terminal hold for tech support, hearing over and over and over how important my call was. Plus I was getting all jammed up cuz I had to throw show togs, roadwear, gym stuff, toys, tunes, tinctures, and many bags of protein powder in a sack and split. It was time to rumble down the Midlantic and no time for tweeks.
We got lost, again, trying to find the theater in Wilmington, which was cunningly disguised as a warehouse, set among similar blocky, ubiquitous hulks, on a street you wouldn't go down if you knew better. We're beginning to get superstitious about these frequent and lengthy detours, and without our cel phones, we'd probably be lost right now. They save us when we are in that directionless black hole where maps become relativist abstract art, street signs cringe inside their poles, and all roads lead to the Bermuda Triangle.
Picture this: Suck o'clock, predawn downtown Buffalo; two rentacars orbiting in concentric circles, searching desperately for a tv station. We're supposed to go live in a few ticks and we don't even know where we are. Cels are melting, and somehow we end up on-air on time. No, not 'somehow'. We drove past the station by accident and Kev caught it, at the same time as we watched our hapless buds flailing off for another lap around the inner city. The rest of the day wasn't any better. I hope that by the time every rentacar is equipped with GPS, we won't be driving ourselves around. It's truly pathetic. Every trip we take now has a 'Lost In America' sequence in it. It's always the same, a recurring collective nightmare, and every twist is accompanied by a chorus of tinny little robotic warbles. We always take The Wrong Turn, spend eons in The Seedy Part of Town searching for The Onramp. Then we find The Right Road and run into The Construction-caused Traffic Jam. When we finally near our objective, The Right One-way Street gets real important. We miss it, of course, and end up on The Onramp heading back the way we came, and the Next Exit is twenty miles away.
Some of the intercar communiqués are memorable: "...Well, I told you to go over a gray bridge. It's not really a bridge, see. It's a railroad trestle, it's brown, and you go under it. And then, where I told you to turn left, you don't. Go straight. Actually you'll veer off to the right at the fourth light after the third traffic circle. The venue is a big place with a bumpy roof. It's opposite a gas station. You can't miss it. It has a sign..."
OK, I think I've blown off enough screed to settle into the good stuff, and there is a lot of it to go around. First off, there's the record deal. Heh Heh Heh. We inked the contracts moments before hitting the stage at Town Hall, and popped the finest vintage bubbly after the show to celebrate. Look for the first opus in the Spring of 00, and unless things come entirely unhinged, the second will be a Christmas treasury which we plan to pop out next year as well.
We've theorized for a long time about the type of personality it would take to make the Quixotic commitment of signing a vocal band to a recording contract. The honcho of J-Bird records (the 'Jay' in J-Bird) is, as we suspected, unique. Aside from his daring vision, cultural savvy, and his aggressively cutting-edge move in swooping us up, he rides a Harley and he still talks to me. On the flip side, he wants to come to our recording sessions, which is a little demented. It's like wanting the flu.
We're gonna be in the Macy's Parade again. Listen - I told Keith that he had to get us into the parade. Had to. It was either that or I spend Thanksgiving in Detroit with the in-laws. Had to. And lo, it was done. And the New Commercial is set to roll out during the parade. Now that's sweet.

11/13
After having been totally, hopelessly lost at least twice a day for the past several, El has decided that our road manager is actually Zool, henchman of the Dark Lord, and Zool gets a gold star in his book every time we get lost. So he, Zool, gives us gibberish directions which strand us in the bardo of beltways, strip malls, and interstates. It's become a depressing given that when we get in the car, we will end up marooned and cursing Zool.

luv,
Bear

 

08/24/99 - I Am Humbled

Dear DieHards;
I am humbled. I have discovered the writer who makes my little fustian forays seem like a benediction from Mother Teresa. He is the ScheissMeister, the Monarch of Mean, the Satrap of Satire. Hamstrung as I am, writing for a PG audience, I can't plumb the bathos of my soul as freely as this man, this billious eilitist who makes the best fun of the worst that our pathetic pop culture has to offer. Joe Queenan, I love you.

DisContinued:
We just can't seem to win. The media war against Rockapella and the forces of light drags on. There we were, on live TV in Denver, the longest day of our career still in it's matinal infancy, launching into our second show of the morning all smiles and handpumpings, and the second-string anchor, fresh from his remedial elocution lesson, is introducing us. Out of his capped, powdered grin comes, 'Here they are, that OLD group, Rockapella'. We know what he meant to say. He really wanted to say that we were established, that he'd followed us for a long time, that he enjoyed our copious oeuvre, that we had been on tv more times than he could enumerate. But no. Our little media-imp jiggled his neural net just as he was trying to formulate a coherent thought. So out plopped the ort-like scintilla, 'old'. Just what we needed. We did our best not to react, of course, but it probably looked like we were somehow trying to grin through a brutal proctological exam. He tried several times, unsuccessfully, to get his lips around 'San Diego', but got hinked up somewhere in the tricky elision between the 'n' of 'San' and the 'D' of Diego, making it sound like a kid with a mouthful of half-masticated taffy. Our facial rictus' firmly in place, we sang and hoped that the song would stick in people's minds longer than the interview.
Cel Hell continues unabated. I can't mention the company without having my butt kicked from pillar to post by a battery of rabid, amoral suits, but their acronym is a simple agglomeration of letters, several in number, with the first being the alpha of our bet. Hey, they had a good deal, everyone jumped on it, and now it's a mess. My flashy little red phone has become an albatross that dangles from my pocket and occasionally rings when someone has the extreme good fortune to be able to get through to me. It's become a knot in my gut and a pain in my wallet. The first thing anyone says to me when they finally connect is, "I've been trying you for the last four hours but your line was busy the whole time, or I got a message from some stentorian gasbag actor telling me that I should try to place my call again in 2001". Their tech support has been a real help, too. I told them that I was having more and more trouble placing calls from my home, and they told me to go somewhere else to make my calls. Fine if you live in a trailer. They said, "Well, it is a MOBILE phone, right? You got it so you could make calls from anywhere, right?" I guess there are some anywhere's that just don't work. Truth in advertising: Now you can make your calls from (most) anywhere. Just not this one....aargh. They've promised me that it will get better, but they aren't saying exactly when....Does anyone really know when the 'near future' begins?
Steamboat Springs is beautiful, idyllic. Way high up in the Rockies, megabuck ski chalets sprouting from the mountainsides, toney shops, SUV's with a purpose, skunks out of control and unafraid, porcupines the size of land mines waiting on darkened roads to pop your tires. We even saw the spectacular seasonal meteor showers lighting up the sky on our late-night, white-knuckle exodus to Steamboat from Denver. After several hours of my colleagues begging me to slow down and me begging them to lean with me in the turns (I have no patience with the boring physics of these stodgy four-wheelers), we made a brief pit-stop on a winding mountain road, and looking up, saw the Milky Way splayed across the firmament, it's face strafed by particles of space dust burning up as they hit our atmosphere. As I stood transfixed by the spectacle, Kevin dashed behind the wheel and said, "I'll take it from here, Mr. A.J. Foyt." I didn't think Kev scared that easy. Heck, I thought he kinda liked cornering on two wheels. Scott slept through the whole thing - he can sleep in places and positions that would have me begging for the lethal needle in five minutes - and El just let out the occasional 'oh geez'.
The capper was our super-deluxe condo/morgue - mirrored jacuzzi in the foyer, big brass samovar in the kitchen, antlered deer head in the entryway, and the coat racks, ah, the coat racks. Pathetic rows of little deer hooves pointing heavenward. Those dainty little pieces of deer that had once pawed delicately through mountain forests, now forever separated from their owners, giving the Bambi-finger to all who entered this overpriced row house. Then there was what once had been a merry pheasant, now stuffed and mounted, glassily eyeing the dining area. Perhaps the owners, hunters I would guess from the decor, meant it to be a stimulant to the appetitie. It did echo the predatory theme mercilessly hammered home by the faux-classical motel-grade hunting scenes depicted on the various vapid canvasses hung around the room. We ran out of towels trying to cover these various reminders of our Paleolithic heritage, while we gave some serious thought to joining El as vegans-of-conscience.

Please pass the bagels.

yrz,
Bear  

08/08/99 - It finally happened

Dear DieHards,
It finally happened. We discovered a place that surpassed even the Tampa Mold Project for unabashed funk, exotic stench and terminal putrescence. Chateau Le Stank, otherwise known as the laughably ostentatious Broadway Manor Inn in otherwise lyrically poetic San Fran, takes the grand prize so far for motel misery. The carpet in my room was a living, seething, roiling thing, with a fine sheen of mildew and reeking with overtones of canine despair, rendered in a remorseful poo sienna. After the fifty-minute flight up the coast from LA, which took a mere six hours due to the famously fickle San Francisco fog, our hearts sank as one when our sorry little caravan rounded the corner and we caught the first sight of our lodgings. I mean, from a block away this place radiated a pestilential malignance that I thought could only be found on horror movie sets.
After an agonizingly long night filled with sirens, jackhammers, the wailing's of smashed salesmen and neglected tots, and the fearful eldritch screaming of aged, substandard plumbing in five-channel surround sound, we huddled in our limo in the gray early-morning drizzle and made an Executive Decision. Shortly after a live TV remote from the dazzling Sheraton Palace (the place where Michael Douglas took a swan dive through the glass ceiling in "The Game"), we were snug in our snazzy rooms there. So Much Betta... Kudos to Cranky Phil for using his Sicilian wiles to spring us from our contract with the rancid rancho.
It took most of the next day for us to crank our morale back up to concert pitch. Our show in Petaluma had been cancelled at the last minute - not by us - so we bonded over movies and buckets o' Cheezy Poofs at the flashy new Metreon (a mall by any other name).

The Media DisContinues -

So far, we've been introduced on live TV as 'The Rockapellas", "The Rockabillies", "98 Degrees", and a few other misguided monikers I don't care to enumerate. Why us? What is so damn tough about "Rockapella"? I mean, the WBA is swamped with singularly named teams, and nobody seems to have trouble with that. I guess it's just one of those many little glitches that seem to pop up on our strange, elliptical trajectory. Maybe when the little red light blinks on, some odd axon goes pop in TV folks' brains and our clever label gets shunted off to some dead-end neural sidestreet, where it ends up in the ignominious dumpster of short-term memory loss and repressed impropriety. Sorry, that's the best I can do on the theoretical end of it. How else to explain our skewed Karma?
Yeah, I know. I prattled on about all the good stuff happening to us, and how I was taking it in and trying to live happy and proud and all that other raucously joyful jazz. It's still true. But. Consensus reality has it's own unique way of impinging on my feeble attempts to get a firm grip on the slippery rungs of the ladder of ecstasy, and I find myself desperately clinging, at moments, to the bottom most slat, kicking for a toehold and praying that the brute strength of my thick, clumsy digits is sufficient to carry me through the darker hours of our careening career.
Then there are moments like the show in Huntington, LI, a couple weeks back, when five thousand folks showed up on a damp stew of a night to sit on blankets and lawn chairs and cheer us through a great evening. What can we say but 'Thanks'.
luv,
Bear

 

07/29/99 - I have plenty of time to brood.

Hey, Y'all
I have plenty of time to brood. I don't have plenty of time to write about it these days. But that's only part of the skewed equation. There've been so many good things happening lately that it's difficult to maintain a sufficiently dark visage, one that's properly gothic and conducive to fine, savage brooding. So I'm faced with the reverse process - i.e., taking in all the good stuff that's going on and risk life as a happy person. How frightening. It's a thrust to the heart of my inner Eeyore. I gotta be real careful with this happy crap. It could make me miserable.
Let me dispose of the biggest hunk of good stuff first. A fresh new Rockapellet has arrived! The stork laid a big one on El & Debbie last week. Zowie! A fine, strapping son who looks so much like El, he's calling the babe "Mini-Me." Goatee and everything. Mum's peachy and El is walking into walls and falling asleep in corners. I predict the possibility of coffee in El's future. Which segues me awkwardly to:
We are getting set to jet to the frozen North next month to shoot another commercial for the abovementioned beverage, but I guess that until we get there and start doing it or something I'm not supposed to say for sure for legal or other paranoid reasons. The spot is rumored to have a Holiday motif. Is that cool or what? I know this ain't a helluva lot of skinny. Hey, I ain't dumb. More when they untie my hands. One of the consequences of us maybe doing this thing is that we will most probably find ourselves once again riding a float in a certain televised, ritual pageant which takes place on a particular American day of observance on which a flightless, luckless fowl is sacrificed, carved up and devoured en masse, and folks occasionally ruminate on what, if anything, they are Thankful for.
How'm I doing with the good stuff so far? Not bad. I do feel a little twinge now and then from maybe a microshift in the massive tectonic plates of my persona. A mere bagatelle. I can still brood on cue.
And how about some new tunes? How about a new record, already? Yeah, that too. We're mobilizing for what promises to be a furious froth of rehearsing and recording. I'm not supposed to say for sure about this one for the same reasons yada yada yada but the label's name is comprised of a single letter and an avian. We're also looking forward to releasing DTMYD, the song, to radio in September.
Geez. I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted. I don't think I can go on slogging through this unfamiliar land without taking a short lam back to my 'hood, the land of make-bereave.
The National Endowment for the Arts is under attack again. No air raid sirens and no, I'm not gonna roll out my usual spiel. We all know what's going on. Not all art is beautiful. Some people find some images deeply shocking and repulsive, and that, too, is one of the uses of art; to make people think, to stimulate a very profound feeling and in a way enable them to examine it. There are those who seem to believe that all art must only tickle the sensorium with champagne bubbles, and they are seeking to abolish the Endowment because in several instances it, the Endowment, was somehow loosely associated in a vague and disconnected way with the creators of this "offensive" art. Isn't that an attempt to control and legislate art? What does that remind you of? Duh. It's interesting to live in a society that fiercely defends the freedom to own a gun but tries to squelch the freedom to make up one's own mind about something truly dangerous - art......'don't look at that, it's loaded!'
OK. I got my mojo back. Jeff wants Scott's Tag. I gave my Doughboy to Phil. Jeff brought Brian (ya know, Mark and Brian ) a Spoon from Japan, since he had ogled and drooled on Jeff's. Elliott can't find his Tag. Kevin has a very sharp Breitling, but mine's the only one with a depth gauge. Kinda figures, no? It's the only way I can keep track of how deep I go. I bought it for Scuba diving, but it works just as well in concert.
Stupid Bass Tricks: I locked myself out of my own studio. I couldn't believe it, yet paradoxically it seemed fated to have happened to me. Unable to face the mortification of having a locksmith make a numbingly expensive house-call to bust me into my playroom, I picked the lock. It's frighteningly easy. BTW gotta new name for the sanctum: The BassMint.
Hey, listen. Now and then I get carried away with a certain opulence of penmanship when we're signing autographs, and I put a little bass clef sign next to my name. IT IS NOT A SAD FACE. Thank you.
luv,
Bear

05/01/99 - Fer Joy, like

Fer Joy, like. Tomorrow we all get to struggle out of bed at suck o'clock to shag our silly butts out to the wintry hinterlands for a morning radio show. We did the exact same thing last cold rainy Friday for the station that's right across the hall from the one we're buzzing tomorrow. It's OK. We do it all the time. It's fairly easy for me, being the bass. Early morning shows for me are a cakewalk, vocally speaking. I mean, it doesn't take a hero to sing bass parts at 7am. Anybody can do it. Now, my bandmates, on the other hand, pull a minor miracle out of somewhere in their thongs every time we do this, and that's frequently. One of the good/bad things about being a vocal group is that we can sing anywhere and people ask/hope/expect for us to, and we do - at anti-vocal hours. I am perpetually amazed that we get away with it.
Our nouveau disc has spawned numerous requests from radio stations large and small for station i.d.'s, little jingles and ditties from Da Boyz. So there we were, the five of us huddled around a mic in Scott's one-man studio, trying to fulfill everyone's expectations. As the day wore on, the atmosphere in the room went from close to fetid to funky and we just had to quit when Kev tucked his shnozz inside his shirt and declared that he could no longer breathe our commingled manly scents without barfing.
I'm having a hard time adjusting to having a record available through normal retail channels. I think you understand. Ya know, all that time with the near-deals, the dashed hopes, the crushing disappointments. I was kinda used to it. It wasn't comfy, but it was home. So now it's out there and I forget all the time. Not so with The Commercial.
The Commercial has, for the moment, altered my life. The waitress at my habitual Westside diner doesn't ask me if I want coffee anymore. She slides me a mug and some attitude, and says, "How about some FOLGERS . Every head in the place turns, and now all focus is on the mug sitting empty in front of me, intense concern creasing busily masticating faces. I can't refuse. Sweat beads my upper lip. I nod, she pours, and heads turn back to their more mundane conversations. Everyone knows that I love coffee in all it's gacky incarnations, but what if I had wanted a Pepsi One? Ah well. The price of fame is freedom. People don't say hello any more. I get "love The Commercial". My kids call me Coffee Dude.
Things could be worse.

Mine is kinda purple. Kevin's is greenish in the right light. Scott's is robin's-egg blue, El's is metallic eggplant, and Jeff's going for that high-tech see-thru look. They're otherwise identical, so we can't play 'mine's bigger'. Matching cel phones. Yee ha! No longer are we wind-sprinting to a lone phone booth at every other gas station. No more the anguished cry "Where's Rockapella?". No more Paper-Scissors-Stone to see who gets the first call. Yesterday we were riding to a D.C. FM AC Top40 radio gig in the longest limo yet ('bout a half a block, I'd say), and realize that we're all talking at once to people who aren't there. More on this bizarre development later.
So there we were on live TV in LA at the now-customary suck o'clock am, and the weather dweeb introduces us with a peppy "now here they are, 98 Degrees!". And this is after talking with us for a few minutes. Duh. We're all in 'what the -' mode and Jeff croaks 'Rockapella' before digging into the intro to Moments...We make it through the song, all the while wondering if we aren't in some alternate evil universe. The guy comes back blushing through the pancake and blusters our name like eight times. Someone musta told him.
I can't believe that I found a few secs for musing. I've barely had time to cleanse the fundament. We got so jammed last week that we had to take a Leer jet from LA to Vegas. It was like teleporting, and it was so Rock. The limo to the jet to the limo to the biggest damn hotel in the world to sing in their arena. Yeah. Rock. Then we flew back not on the Leer jet and did two gigs for the greater glory of J-Bird and ours truly, got up the next day stank-early and again labored mightily before the mic. But we are breathing the crazy nitrous of acclaim and early morning radio fizz and we're made out of steel and we never sleep. So it's just another day in the bizz.

Cel Phunnies: Jeff calls me from all the way across the ubiquitous Grand Ballroom to tell me how spiffy I look. I'm thrilled that I got a call 'til I realize that Jeff is waving at me from across the room. I'm walking down the street with Keith the Manager, his cel welded to his head. I'm trying to get a word in between calls. Finally give up and call him. We walk down the street yakking. He realizes that he's talking to me on the phone and I'm right there. He hip-checks me into the gutter. All five phones go off at the same time during a tv interview, and they're all playing different irritating tunes. It sounds like a Pokemon GameBoy on acid. Lots of scrambling, beeping, throat clearing. El's cel is ringing and he's frantically pawing through his backpack, suitcase, jacket, wallet, date book, and pockets looking for it. It stops ringing before he finds it. He says, "hey Kev, call me again. I'm getting close....".

 

02/06/99 - There's a Thong in the Air......

Please try to understand. I've been begging my fingers not to do this. I've sat on my hands for the past week, making my stumpy digits twist and get all pruney, but they still twitch with unresolved psychic malaise. I can't let them get near the keyboard. Can't. So I'm pecking out the letters with a good ol' Eberhard Faber #2 clenched between my incisors.
Back from Vegas and still sentient. I think you're supposed to check your wits and your humanity in the hotel safe when you check in, but I kept mine stashed in a safe, albeit somewhat repugnant site, if you get my meaning. A toilet with lights, a boil on the ass of the Almighty, a town put together by a prurient five-year-old on acid; Viva LV. Slots, sluts, and saps. I prayed on the plane all the way there that the deity wouldn't laughingly bat us out of the sky simply because the room-temp I.Q.'s on the flight still hadn't figured out that they were about to get fleeced. No, they were out for a Good Time; losing money, consuming immoderate amounts of booze and watching the passing thongs.
Now there's a gem: The Thong. Invented by Rudi Gernreich, apotheosized by Ken Starr, and worshipped by millions, it spawned a whole world of buns-a-plenty work out gear, brought down a government, and before Y2K bashes us back to pre-Cambrian crudity, it may well fly as the standard before a legion of testosteronially brain-dead. Show a man a thong and he'll follow it anywhere. Not to mention it's impossibly abbreviated cousin, the G-string. I know you're wondering how this uncomfy bit of buttfloss got it's name. When males see a female all dressed up in one, the most intelligent thing they can utter is "gee...".
I know, I know. I'm running on. Not that there aren't good, decent folks in LV. There are. I just don't know what they're doing there. And there WE were, on the Penn and Teller Sin City Spectacular for Fox TV, pumping out Zombie Jamboree, surrounded by smoke, lights, and a bevy of Vegas' hottest showgirls in, yeah, thongs. Penn is a true giant of a man, larger than life and much bigger than moi. As one of our diehards suggested I might actually be able to see eyeball-to-eyeball with the guy, I told him as much. He smirked a large, grinchly smirk and said, "I could eat off your head." The green room hubbub was at least as exciting as the on-camera antics. I had the pleasure of going all mawkish over Gordon Clapp, one of the stars of "NYPD Blue", got to meet "The Enigma" (a most pleasant fellow, tattooed blue and growing a fine little set of horns on his forehead), and briefly ogle whats-her-name, the 'most downloaded swimsuit model on the 'net'. She was quite cornucopial, spilling out of her little black dress, her tawny upper thigh in the fierce grip of her hawk-eyed, proprietary hubby. Can't say I blame him. And fyi, Teller is not mute. He speaks in the dulcet tones of an angel.
So enough, already, with the bad attitude. Each day brings us closer to February 16th, The Day The Record Comes Out. Even as we speak, DJ's around the country are starting to spin it, and big trucks full of our digital juice are rumbling to rendezvous with your nearest music supplier. Just think of it as a slightly tardy valentine.
And speaking of valentines, we wouldn't be quivering on the cusp of greatness if it weren't for you, my darlings. All these years of slaving, with our greatest rewards being your fierce and uncompromising loyalty and encouragement, your single-minded devotion, your frequent flier familiar faces, have left us no doubt that we have the BEST FANS IN THE WORLD!!!! A huge, lace-encrusted, chocolate-filled, syrupy sentimental valentine to all of you who have journeyed so far and so long with us. You make this improbable endeavor worth all the angst, doubt, and fast food.
Love,
Bear

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Broodings from Bear - 2002
Broodings from Bear - 2001
Broodings from Bear - 2000
Broodings from Bear - 1999
Broodings from Bear - 1998
Broodings from Bear - 1997

Last update: December 8, 1999
Created and maintained by Bob Parnes
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