Long Road to Nowhere: Oren Rosenberg and the Invisible Career

I've decided to re-brand this blog. Instead of my aimless musings about anything that happens across my mind, I've decided to make it about my eternal quest to find a job that pays more than 7 dollars per hour. This came as a result of a suggestion from my mother, who calls me several times a day to remind me that her checkbook is slowly closing like one of those stone slab doors in one of the older Indiana Jones movies (fuck Crystal Skull).

So today I had a wonderful interview. It involved myself and about 60 other individuals of every race, religion, age group, and sexual orientation standing on the back patio waiting for our number to be called like cattle to a slaughter. When my number was called (#7, I got there 20 minutes early) I was the proud recipient of probably the shortest interview all day.

The man that interviewed me was an elderly person of probably Eastern European origin who, though polite, was host to a thinly veiled streak of contempt for me. Me, a recent college grad with no experience is sitting here in the basement of HIS building, next to HIS dusty pool table and HIS second-hand art-deco furniture asking for a job. It's enough to make an elderly immigrant sick.

I have no idea who this man is, or even his first name, but I am going to invent his life story anyway. As a young Jewish child fleeing happy Germany in 1938 with his older sister, he came to the United States with not a nickel in his pocket. His first work was hocking papers on the corner of 53rd St. and 5th Ave. in Manhattan. One day, a wealthy oil magnate walked up to him, threw a dime in his tin jar, and asked his name. The next day he was offered a job at Bell Aircraft, which that year had just gone public.

He started on an assembly line fitting ball-bearing joints to P-59 fighter jets, slowly moving up in the organization until he became VP in charge of Media Relations. During this time, however, he had managed to accrue a few enemies at Bell Aircraft, and was forced into early retirement in 1989 at the age of 55. He used what money he had to buy up property in Los Angeles near the UCLA campus.

And here we are, from VP in charge of Media Relations to having snot-nosed kids write about him in their blogs. Life's a bitch, ain't it?

Stay Classy, San Diego: Nerdcon 2008

Just got back (a few days ago) from the San Diego Comicon. What a spectacle of nerdity. If you've never been there, let me explain it to you: it's the size of half a dozen Costco's filled with booths ranging from those that sell comics with paid bimbos dressed as Princess Leia in slave outfit to attract the attention of adolescent boys, to those that are promoting a new movie/video game/TV show with paid bimbos dressed as sexy zombies to attract the attention of adolescent boys. So all in all it's like Jesus' second coming if you believe in that sort of thing.

Also there was a lot of time spent with my friend who's trying to get money for his startup (http://www.reble.fm/), so I had a lot of rich old men buying me dinner. And not in exchange for sexual favors this time, which is a part of my life I'd really rather put behind me.

And lastly, swimming in the pitch-black ocean when you have had a few too many drinks is incredibly fun, but also probably incredibly dangerous and ill-advised. Whatever, we all dodged the bullet this time. Until next time, my faithful reader, vaya con dios.

Thank You, Corporations! If it weren't for you, I'd still be able to drink out of the river near my house.

There are a lot of blogs out there that deal with marketing, organizational behavior, and other subjects that are of great interest to sycophantic corporate social-climbers. I'm a bit of an expert on these people since I went to business school. I also wrote a 30-page manifesto on blogging and corporate culture, which will never be read by anyone for about the same reason that no one ever pours lye in their eyes: it's painful and senseless. At least it got me a C.

But back to these blogs. They are marvelous, aren't they? It's kind of like that game where a bunch of guys jerk off onto a cookie, and the last one to finish has to eat it. Except in this metaphor the semen is money and the semen-covered cookie is an anti-trust lawsuit. Or something. I think I lost myself. What is that game called again?

And I think this is the point in the blog where I should point out that some material may not be suitable for children or elderly people with conservative dispositions and/or pacemakers.

But yeah, more on corporations later. Now I'm gonna go see Dark Knight. RIP Heath Ledger, you sexy Aussie, you.

If high art and a filthy prostitute had a lovechild, it would be named Hollywood

So I Just moved here to Los Angeles, California, and got into a conversation online with someone in the entertainment industry. I basically spouted all of the negative preconceptions I had about the movie industry, and thusly alienated this person and made them not like me. It was a fun conversation for me, at least.

But in an effort to say something positive about American film, it really is undeniable that Hollywood has made, and continues to make, a significant contribution to the history of art. Being able to produce a film (virtually) without any concern for the cost, as is the case in big Hollywood pictures, requires an amount of capital that only this town can muster. And once in a while, in addition to being expensive, these also movies end up also being good.

When you think about it all art requires an investment. A painter requires paint and canvas, a writer ink, a musician an instrument or some bribe money to force people to listen to you sing. Films require midgets, trained beasts and drums full of napalm. Not quite as easy to round up as a ball-point pen.

So as easy as it is to make fun, sometimes Hollywood gets it right. That is when it isn't knowingly producing total garbage because it makes more financial sense than putting in an effort. Or when, as some famous Hollywood philosopher once said (more or less): When they try to make a piece of excrement, and by accident it turns out to be worthwhile.

Chris Martin is a Fruit Tart

First Post!

I wanted to start this thing by talking about something timeless and important like religion or philosophy, but I got sight of the Rolling Stone cover with Chris Martin on the cover, and now it's all I can think about.

For the life of me I can't find a picture of the cover anywhere, but it's the lovable Chris Martin, staring up and to the right of the camera, with his eyes wide the way a deer's are when someone in the vicinity loads a pump-action shotgun. He's wearing that train-wreck of a jacket that makes it look like he is in an all-colorblind marching band. All in all, the image screams "I'm a joke." If only he had a quality album to use as an excuse for his farcical self-importance.

I loved Coldplay's first two albums, Parachutes and A Rush of Blood to the Head, but lately Coldplay seems to be a caricature of the sappy but engaging band it was during those first two albums. Amelie Gillette of the AV Club does a side-splitting send-up of Martin's philosophy in naming his children in her blog here:

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/82506

Martin and the rest of the boys in Coldplay really seemed to be onto something with those first two albums, but lately it seems like the time is right for them to throw in the towel for a while. In interviews, Martin has circuitously suggested that he isn't totally happy with Coldplay's output of late, and for good reason. Unlike Coldplay's sometimes muse Radiohead, who continues to thrive by moving the goal posts, Coldplay started out with a good sound, gathered up a little momentum, and went headlong into a ditch.

Martin was a talented songwriter, but sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes you have to be a good songwriter and stay hungry. Martin should spend some time reflecting on what made his previous albums good, and maybe cut himself off from his Gweneth Paltrow-fueled life of Hollywood excess. I'm not holding my breath that he can return to the form of his first two albums, but stranger things have happened.