Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way.  Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dr...

It's fall again, so that means that the music around here slows down and gets decidedly folky, if not more rootsy. That's not to say there isn't plenty of metal and rock and roll on the playlist, but some of the slower songs get priority. Hayden's Everything I Long For is one of those singer-songwriter records that pulses anew on each listen. His simple guitar playing and everyman gruff vocals lend a veracity to his simple tales of love, loss, and boredom. While he has grown as a songwriter since its 1995 release date, the simple power of his unadorned vocals and aching lyrical approach make Everything one of his greatest artistic statements. His song craft has improved, but he has never bettered the album's timeless exploration of pain. Many people remember the single "Bad As They Seem," which put the Canadian singer on the map, an exploration of the narrator's hopeless unrequited love for the women he can't ever date -- a sixteen year old gir...

One of the most obnoxious things I have ever done was on Halloween, perhaps in 1995 or 1996. I was sixteen or seventeen years old. Dressed in cheap store-bought monster masks, wearing old jeans and sneakers, my friend Bill and I prowled the streets of my hometown. We terrorized churches, children, and old ladies. We were equal opportunity in those days, relying on our innate sense of indecency. We creepy-crawled that town. Like that scene in Pink Flamingos , when the furniture ejects people because of the sheer badness of  Divine and her twisted family, we meant to be as evil as possible. We ignored the comments that we were too old to be trick or treating. It did not matter that both of us were over six feet tall and Bill weighed over two hundred pounds. We just wanted more candy. We weren't going to take no lip. Forget about the razor blades in the candy, bub. I don't want any more sweet tarts. The mission was fraught with peril. Weirdness abounded at every corner. We gri...