July 31, 2013

Christmas List in July

This is the last day I can post this, because apparently "Christmas in August" isn't a thing. This is my wish list of gifts you can't buy in a store or even with Amazon Prime, but I don't think MasterCard would call them "priceless" either.

1. I wish Chris Christie would gain weight, grow a beard, and start wearing hats. His views on the issues? Meh. No one who shares my views on the issues would ever run, the issue of choosing to serve in political office being chief among them. So to me, politics, especially presidential, are sheer pageantry. Eisenhower was the last POTUS to wear a hat, only outdoors of course, and Taft was both our last bearded and corpulent Commander-in-Chief. I've always had my finger on the pulse of the times, and I don't know any American who wouldn't vote for a guy who looked like this:

And imagine if he were wearing a hat!

2. I wish Rick Rubin would start a clothing line. Russell Simmons (right) did it, and as the other founder of Def Jam records, Rick Rubin (left) can expect similar success. This is a corollary to the Chris Christie/Brian Blessed Principle. Who wouldn't want to look like this?


3. I wish Bryan Cranston and Michael C. Hall would star in The Odd Couple. I don't care if it's stage or screen. Both their shows are ending this year, and Walter White and Dexter would make a perfect couple. Imagine how great it would be to see Walt's meth lab spill into Dexter's pristine living room. Dexter would get all mad: "I'm a very neat monster!" Walt would remind him that he always politely knocks on Dexter's door. They'd fight over where to park the Pontiac Aztec and Ford Explorer. And at the end of the day, they're united by a mutual interest in not getting caught for their misdeeds— and tons of sexual homicidal tension! 

4. I wish Edward Snowden would focus on remaking The Terminal. He's been stuck in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport for a month now because he can't go back to the United States. Tom Hanks's character was stuck in New York's JFK airport because he couldn't return to his fictional Soviet bloc country. It's just a simple Russian Reversal! I think even hard-nosed government agents would be totally won over by Snowden's heart-warming, culturally illiterate antics. Maybe he'll even fall in love with Catherine Zeta-Jones and build her a fountain. For that, though, Putin would probably lock him up for vandalism.

5. I wish Scott Aukerman would change his name to Scott Spivakerman, to fuse the worlds of farcical talk shows and postcolonial studies. I think people would find concepts like subalternity, the double bind, and supplementing Marxism as a means of realigning pedagogy towards the aesthetic more understandable if they were presented in the format of Comedy Bang Bang!. Critical interviews with Thomas Friedman or Fareed Zakaria, and typical puffed-shirt celebrities, would really be enhanced with the musical oddities of sidekick Reggie Watts.

6. I wish Before & Afters would be respected for their inherent cultural value and rewarded financially. These aren't just wordplays for Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! This is serious business, just like crimping. B&A strings merit serious scholarly study, literary canonization, and concurrent renumeration at least as much as Lucky's rambling monologue in Waiting for Godot.


"Kermit the Frog in my throat" is a good start, but what about "French Vanilla Ice Pac 12 Angry Men in Black Album"? Or even "The King of Queens of the Stone Age of Consent to Kill Bill, Volume One is the Loneliest Number Theory of Relativity Media res ipsa loquitor"!

7. Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Goodreads or OKCupid should improve their recommendations. Then you would have been spared from all of this.