DSK Prefers Golden Showers Over Golden Parachutes

Dominique is another monster worth noting. He lothes poverty, loves money, and loves taking scattered ass more. Puffed up on power and influence, he allegedly ambushed and raped an unsuspecting housekeeper at a posh NY hotel. Please note the use of the word, "ambushed" in the previous sentence. What would make a man with so much influence, status, and money strip down bucked-naked (bucked naked?!?), surprise the housekeeper, and assault her with his pale-wrinkled penis (allegedly)? Well surprise, surprise. I just told you, he was "puffed up on power and influence” (i.e: full of ego and that new flavor of kool-aid we all know and love, homoeconomicus). He is a motherfucking monster.
Key point of interest here: it was in. his. own. room. No one decides to rape a housekeeper in a hotel on a whim (particularly in the room that you bought and paid for). Talk about being charged for incidentals. So, did he raid the minibar and decide that having spent so much money in his room he should get some complimentary pussy? Where do they do that at (no, really. so I can mapquest it)? Only an individual drunk on power or the sweet nectar of insanity would be capable to conjure up such a scenario, or maybe she’s lying. Or, maybe he’s done this before and believed that once he told her exactly who he was and what he could do (or pay) that she would clam up.
Me and one of my monster friends upon hearing of the situation instantly knew how that conversation went. It sounded something like this:
DSK: Bitch, do you know who I am?

DSK: Bitch, I bring entire nations to their knees! What makes your knees so special?

DSK: With the stroke of my pen I make or break economies for cities, regions, nations, entire CONTINENTS! So how could my stroke not be good enough for you?

Notice how in our scenario, she didn’t say anything. That’s the point. He never heard her say anything (such as, “no”, “stop”, “fuck you, I’m going to the police” (allegedly). Again, is it surprising that married men are the most monstrous of all? Ha. Don't answer that.

Green and White is the Color Of My Parachute

I guess I’m having what some would call a mid-life crisis. Yes, this summer I’ll be forty. No, I’m not looking to buy a sports car, or fuck a platinum blonde who’s half my age. Not that there’s anything wrong with those two things. But I’m having a mid-life crisis because at 39 and ¾ years, I’ve discovered that the philosophy that I’ve been living by is just, well, flat fuck wrong.

Let me tell you what I mean.

I grew up poor. Not ‘working class’. Not ‘at risk’. Fucking poor. Now that’s not to say I grew up in poverty. I had a big-wheel when I was little. And a bike when I was older. My clothes were never threadbare, nor dated. And when I was nine, my mother nagged the shit out of my father until he went in with her on a house. But being poor isn’t only about deprivation. For me, being poor wasn’t just a condition, it was a state of being. It was a continuous experience that I could never be free from. Being poor was going to your best friend’s house after school and keeping an eye out for cockroaches so that you didn’t bring any home with you in your backpack. Being poor meant knowing what store the poor people frequented when they were feeling particularly poor, and knowing by your mother’s pace through that store whether it was worth it to try to ask for an extra candy bar, or pack of gum. Poverty is a living, breathing thing. Like a virus, it has its own scent on a body, and whenever I smell it today on a person I avoid them like they have the fucking plague. The most ironic thing about being poor for me was that it didn’t limit my socio-economic aspirations (as theorized by so many social scientists) as much as it tamped down my material desires. For me, being poor was about learning not to want those $115.00 Air Jordan hi-tops, no matter how badly my father wanted to buy them for me to show everyone on the block that we weren’t poor. Those red and black masterpieces would have looked as out of place on my feet as bowling shoes on a fucking groom. And since I knew that I couldn’t sustain the discourse of the Air Jordan-ness throughout my whole wardrobe, I simply learned to un-want them. I know what you’re thinking; there’s nothing revolutionary in not wanting something you can’t have, or what’s more, feel you don’t deserve. But you have to understand, I made an art form out of the kinds of rationalizations necessary to remain spiritually intact through the process of rejecting nearly everything that one desires. Music lessons? Those were for my sister; I got the gift of a full set of World Book Encyclopedias instead. Cool clothes in high school? “Polo is WAY overpriced bro’, and that Bennetton…who wants that shit!”  Study abroad in Europe? “Why would I pay a bunch of fucking money to go see MORE fucking white people… you talk about a RIP-OFF!” Again and again and again, I found a way to make the repudiation of the trappings of wealth and privilege cool. Like I said, nothing new there. Poor kids have been doing that shit for ages, and some of them have even made a pretty good living telling jokes about their experiences. But here comes the turn: here and now, at age 39 and 3/4 , I fucking love money. FUCKING LOVE IT! When I go to sleep I think about money. When I wake up, I think about moving the shit around, about how I can get more money, or make my money go further. Hell, I’d even consider blowing a hundred dollar bill if the sonofabitch came in tens and twenties. And if I stop and think about it, I’ve always been this way. Always wanted those Air Jordans. I just was never able to face how much I hated poverty because I knew somehow that it would mean acknowledging how much I hated myself, my mother and father, my impoverished grandparents on both sides, my poor ass aunts and uncles, those broke motherfucking neighbors who lived up the street and would come to our house once a month for dinner. And I especially hated the way all of us would come together on this holiday or that holiday to cheerfully celebrate our poverty through "good food, fellowship, and song". FUCK THAT BULLSHIT! Today for the first time I understood that the cure for poverty isn’t the material aestheticism that I’ve been strictly practicing since the third grade; not logotherapy it’s simply NOT BEING FUCKING POOR!

And herein lies the underpinnings of the crisis. Because if I could just have acknowledged that fact when I was younger, faced up to the reality of the sum total of what I wanted even back in high school, I could have set myself on a different path and not ended up where I am today, someone with the spirit of Alex P. Keaton trapped within the life of Kwai Chang Caine. I want a new job. I want a new life. one with a whole lot of fucking money in it. So I’m here reading the latest version of ‘What Color is Your Parachute’ hoping that it tells me how to get more of that green and white, or travel back in time, or something….

...Worth a thousand words

Part white-supremacist, part misogynist, part narcissist…100% Gotdammed Monster. By now we all know that Arnold cheated on his wife. We know that Arnold had a kid with his mistress and that he employed her in his household for over a decade. We also know that this guy has always been out of control. Of course there's also a lot that we don't know, as the devil tends to be in the details (or so I've heard). It's hard to wrap your mind around the implications of these actions or his mindstate, which allowed him to orchestrate these events over the last decade (and change). The average person (by this I mean non-monster) could not begin to conceptualize the coldness and emotional vacancy that the man has to possess in order to sleep at night. Arnold is not to be idolized. He is not to be celebrated. Here at Monsters' Inq we don't have any intintions of aligning ourselves with him or making him the posterboy for our continued campaign into grown monsterhood. However, that does not mean that there isn't a lot to be learned from the spectacle that this man has made of his life. This guy makes my monster look like elmo. There's a lot I can do with that last sentence in reference to his past but I'm going excercise some restraint and leave it right there. Surely we'll pick this up in a more well thought out fashion in the near future.

The Weeknd - What You Need (Official Music Video)

Wicked Girls & Glass Table Games

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about posting a couple of paragraphs up here about something that I read or a discussion that I had. However, that rarely happens, but I am not the only one to blame. That is neither here nor there, it's family business.

Evidently, today is special. Today, I wish to play a little game of show & tell. I shared a musical interest with someone special this morning and during the course of our conversation about it, I realized how selfish the two of us were being by keeping this our little secret. So, with no further ado I present to you the music on my mind: The Weekend's 'House of Balloons'.

This groups' 9 track mixtape just simply appeared on music blogs all over the place a little over a month ago. Much of their notoriety and legitimacy is due to their project being linked to a certain mainstream emo-rap hipster that shares a hometown and penchant for moody soundscapes with them. A quick listen to any track off of "House of Balloons" should quickly remind the listener of the tone to songs like "Bria's Interlude", "Cece's Interlude", and/or "Paris Morton Music". But that isn't to say that the HOB mixtape is overly emotional or sensitive about anything. It doesn't make a grown man want to go shave his legs and slip into a pair of skinny jeans. It also doesn't inspire whining about social privilege to some other overly sensitive bastard who is too afraid of hurting your feelings to tell you, "do yourself a favor, go kill yourself." No, this is Monster music.

That is the very reason that I am posting about this music here. We're quite the musical bunch, though you wouldn't know it by reading our past blog entries. The music offered here declares itself deviant and embraces alienation in a way that I found particularly refreshing. In a market-driven medium that leaves little choice for artists other than to pride themselves on being in the "in" crowd, this group walks a fine line without ever crossing over it. The main vocalist sounds at times like the Dream, or Trey Songs, or maybe Frank Ocean;but he doesn't talk or behave has they would. Over sparse, electro pop and r&b melodies, The Weekend's songs embrace scandalous sex acts, and drug culture. Their songs sound of the deliberate act of throwing caution to the wind, without rage, angst, or regret.

This is the soundtrack to my scotch-soaked Port Tuesday after party. When played continuously it creates a soundscape to lusting after someone you shouldn't, and yet you remain undeterred. This is Monster music to creep to (*do you see what I did right there? nice). So start with track #1 "High for this" and let it ride. I'm not going to post links or anything for it. Simply google "House of Ballons" + mediafire and a link will magically appear for you to download the album & enjoy just in time for the Monster's ball.

Pissing Excellence in the Wind

Today (March 7^th, 2011) is the day that Prodigy of Mobb Deep is released from prison. I’m happy for him and his family. Prodigy is one of my favorite MC’s. That’s not to be confused with being considered one of the best. Wu-Tang has always been full with great MC talent, anyone of them who could conceivably maintain favorite status. However, only a couple of the noted rhyme slingers out of the Wu-Tang camp would ever be considered one of the best to ever breathe on the mic.

On the other end of the spectrum, an artist like Jay Z would probably easily gain a consensus of opinion that he is one of the best ever. This consensus would be achieved easily amongst both his peers and music fans alike.

However, this doesn’t mean that Jay is one of your favorite artists. At least in my case this is true. As I’ve grown older I have been able to greater appreciate Shawn Carter’s vision and approach to his craft. With that said, there are many other artists that I enjoyed much more than the Jay Z songs that came on the radio and many of my friends listened to incessantly.

Case in point, the Old Dirty Bastard. He wasn’t even the best MC/artist in the Wu-Tang Clan, but he was hands-down my favorite. While everyone was fixated on Method Man & his clever wordplay early on in their career, ODB was the one who I was listening for. Old Dirty had this ability to verbalize the sounds in his head and use inflection to capture his sentiment perfectly without the use of actual words. For example, one classic ODB line goes: “I’m cherry bombin’ shit, BOOM, just warming up a little bit, VROOM-VROOM.” Before Old Dirty, no one was crazy enough to even attempt a line like that without the fear of intense ridicule and career suicide.

Back to my point, Prodigy, one of my favorite MC’s comes home today. It makes me feel good to both publicly welcome back to this side of the “G wall” and to be able to use his work to make a valuable point today. Mobb Deep’s music (particularly the “Infamous” album) sonically captured the feeling of many youth on the violent streets of urban centers across America. In the song “Survival of the Fittest” Prodigy rapped, “There’s a war going on outside, no man is safe from. You can run but you can’t hide forever, from these streets that we done took, you’re walking wit your head down scared to look. You’re shook, cause ain’t no such thing as half-way crooks.”

The verse from “Survival…” is a classic. More importantly, the sentiment that it communicates is powerful and represents a turn in the genre where artists began embracing “reality rap”. Whether or not it was truly Prodigy’s first person narrative, he wrote in the voice of a young urban outlaw in one of the most dangerous areas of New York. He spoke to the mentality of youth entrenched in urban warfare, a game of survival of the fittest. Most importantly for the purposes of this writer & this blog he embraced his deviance as normative, he embraced his monster.

Sure, Mobb Deep is predated by the likes of N.W.A, Ice-T, and Kool G Rap. However, what makes them different is that their music wasn’t about them being “the guy”, the dope man, the quintessential gangster. Their music was more on par with a slice-of-life perspective of the low to mid-level everyman.

Here’s where things take an interesting and most unexpected turn. One must keep in mind that although there is a grain of truth to what is being communicated through Mobb Deep’s music, it’s still only entertainment. That monster music is there to entertain individuals with truths, half-truths, exaggerations, critical omissions, and flat out lies for art’s sake. Not even Mobb Deep is Mobb Deep (See Jay Z’s summer jam performance from 2001: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay-Z_vs._Nas_feud). Prodigy (legal name, Albert Johnson) went to jail for losing his sense of balance, for letting his monster roam free without rules, for letting Prodigy overrun the will and conscience of Albert Johnson. Basically, he was imprisoned for going Charlie Sheen (the verb, not the proper noun).

It took my muse recently to direct my attention to the spectacle that is Charlie Sheen. It seems that everyone has developed an opinion one way or another about what has widely become recognized as his media meltdown. Up until the last few days I purposely looked away figuring that this had no bearing on me, or how I live my life. However, mark my words when I say that there is something that we can all learn from the grand unmasking of Charlie Sheen.

Charlie Sheen is not only a monster. One worthy of not only our acknowledgement but our full, undivided attention. He is a samurai without a master and no rules of engagement. He is THE monster, his deviance is unrivaled, his candor unmatched, and his filter, nonexistent.

We know that Charlie (CS henceforth) has lived a privileged life, and that’s putting it mildly. CS is the flesh & blood embodiment of Ricky Stratton from “Silver Spoons”, never having wanted for anything. He grew up to work in an industry where his career path is determined by his awesome talent of being born the son of a famous actor. There is no real reason care about the man as a normal human being one way or another.

But wait, as he grows older he begins to diverge from his path of normalcy in privilege. We would be remiss if we didn’t note that normal is a relative term and is most likely an unknown in this equation. So, we’ll equate normalcy with common perception given our socio-cultural metanarrative on what we should assume an upstanding well-to-do man to behave like.

CS has been berated, less for his lifestyle choices and general position in life than for his language and attitude of superiority. Surely, knowing what we know about CS up until this point in time, should you poll all Americans on if they would trade places with CS today, at least 80% would (and I consider that a low figure).

The man has fame, wealth, family, lives a rock star lifestyle, has an open relationship with two women (“the goddesses”…who also allow him to have orgies with porn stars), and just got fired from a job that is required to continue payment to him of millions of dollars. The man has tiger blood coursing through his veins. He is a miracle of science. He is right. That is winning. The media and the court of public opinion seem to disagree, but I don’t know that they should.

What his critics contend is that CS has lost sight the fact that it was not his reckless and deviant behavior that achieved his present lifestyle for him. The monster & drug that is CS is not perceived by the public as either virtuous or meriting his extravagant behaviors and attitude. In fact, common knowledge would indicate that it was the meticulous balance of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by his father that secured him the opportunity to embrace the monster’s ball that he calls life. The monster unchecked is a dangerous thing. No one can go all “monster”, all the time.

Nobody likes the monster to walk amongst us unabated, and even fewer condone his/her selfish indulgences in theory. No one wants to acknowledge its existence though we all have intimate knowledge of its whereabouts and how it moves through life. His (what the astrologer would call) “off the record” behaviors have become the CS narrative in its entirety. I personally think that it’s all a well choreographed act. Nobody during the course of one conversation drops that many priceless quotable statements. Dave Chapelle couldn't make up such an outrageous persona (Wayne Brady was good...but come on). No matter what, the material that he’s producing is of the highest quality. Either we are watching the epic self-destruction a solipsistic hedonist or maybe as CS says we should just, “sit back & enjoy the show.”

Welcome home Prodigy. I hope that you get a chance to check out the drug that is CS. No matter how you slice it, he’s winning. As Prodigy could tell you better than anyone else, life is a game. It is, “survival of the fittest, only the strong survive”...and all CS more than surviving, he's winning.

Enter: Alistair Cookie

As a youth, I was a big fan of Sesame Street and the Muppet Show. Of course I was. When I was around ten years old it was normal for kids my age to watch and enjoy those shows. Naturally, kids would be drawn to different characters and we would argue over our personal favorites. But I had a particular interest in the monsters that were featured on these shows. I enjoyed that the characters who were monsters had a tendency to “go monster” from time to time. The same case could be made for the characters that were animals (think “Animal” from the Muppet Show), aliens, and weirdos.

I think that what caught my attention and imagination most was that being a monster as performed on the shows meant being deviant or “bad” sometimes (and not necessarily at other times). Sometimes being a monster translated into being uncivilized or giving into “primal” or base urges. Such behaviors weren’t condemned but they did serve the purpose of reminding the other characters and viewers that they were monsters (and that’s what monsters do). There was a certain element of chaos and recklessness that for instance, Cookie Monster, could deliver but other intriguing characters like Ernie or Fozzy Bear could not.

My absolute favorite skit was the “Monsterpiece Theatre” bit from Sesame Street. The Muppet Show may have offered more nuanced themes and matured humor, but for some reason the “Monsterpiece” sketch resonated with me the most. For those unfamiliar or in need of being refreshed, Monsterpiece Theatre was a parody of the popular 70’s – 80’s program “Masterpiece Theatre”. The PBS show was well noted for its refined English host (Alistair Cooke) would introduce segments of an ongoing miniseries filled with drama and mystery. On Monsterpiece Theatre, Cookie Monster played a monster playing the part of a refined host (Alistair Cookie) of a television show, but prone to outbursts and erratic behaviors.

So, I would just fall out every time I caught the show. Here’s this monster in a silk robe and ascot, seated in a high-back chair, and smoking a pipe while talking broken English, slowly. I loved every minute of it. In fact, I probably love it even more now. In a certain light I relate to that character. Yeah, I said it. I relate to an imaginary, puppet-monster character mocking the performance of an aristocratic English gentleman. How is that so different from what I do now? I’m an invisible man who code-switches so as to not only be acknowledged, but embraced by a community that thrives on its ability to keep others like me (and sometimes me specifically) invisible...or at very least, a puppet. In some ways, the monster in gentleman’s clothing is how I see myself. To take the relation a step farther, the opposite is probably equally as true, I can also be a gentleman in monster’s clothing. That is surely an entirely separate entry however (tie a knot around that point and we’ll come back to it at a later date).

Since I was a youth I would watch personalities like Alistair Cooke (not Cookie), teachers, politicians, etc., and be amazed at how well they performed their identities. I would wonder if one could always stay in the moral, upright, dignified character. I would wonder who they were when they were “off the record”. I couldn’t believe that Alistair Cooke could be the Masterpiece Theatre guy at home and behind closed doors. What a bore he and others with similar performances must be if those characters were their totality (kill yourself Alistair Cooke...not "Cookie").

I am Alistair Cookie. I live in a small library and smoke a pipe. I am a cookie-eating monster posing as a refined gentleman with an innocent milk mustache. I am a man predisposed to erratic, monster-like behaviors. I am sure that the ‘Masterpiece’ host was too. It’s just that at some point I decided to own up to the fuzzy, wide-eyed monster hiding under the silky robe. 2011 is the year of the monster within. Reporting live from inside a couple single malt highballs, somewhere deep in a thick fog of pipe smoke, planning your untimely demise.