Tod Goldberg

The Number Of Jews In Texas Will Double On January 6th

 

The 8 Days Of Lists: And One Christmas Song To Rule Them All

The 8 Days of Lists: The One Book I Talked About More Than Any Other (And, Consequently, The One Author I Sort Of Geeked Out About When I Met Him At The LATFOB. So, Yeah, That Was Nice)

1. Columbine by Dave Cullen. 

The 8 Days Of Lists: Top 5 Obscure Music Videos From The 80s I Suddenly Had An Urge To Watch In 2009

1. "Best Adventures" by Thinkman: This is one of those songs that in 1980-something I loved for about the length of time it was on Night Flight -- which is to say, you know, about five minutes. I vaguely recall stealing the Thinkman cassette from The Wherehouse only to find that it was essentially a guy on a drum machine talking through a series of songs about obscure formulas and conspiracy theories, which is not unlike what I would have recognized had I watched this video closely prior to stealing said cassette. I mean, really, what's up with all the black vans and shit? The preponderance of key-tars and permed mullets is also rather distressing, but then it's not like in the 80s I was rocking the best hair either. 

2. "Baby Ran" by 54-40. There was a period of time where I was pretty sure this was the greatest song ever made. That time was 1985, I think. Maybe 1986. I then recall seeing the video on maybe Richard Blade's old show MV-3 and thinking not only was this the greatest song ever made but that clearly this was the greatest video ever made. The energy. The emotion. The hair. Apparently, whenever it was that I first heard this song or saw the video was a period of my life when I wasn't aware The Replacements existed because this song sounds like one of those great old 'Mats songs that comes on in the middle of a drunken night and I -- or someone like me -- proclaims that they'd spend any amount of money to see the Replacements live again, provided they didn't play anything from Sorry, Ma since that would just be too darn loud. Anyway, I now think this is maybe the 10th greatest Replacements rip off ever, after, you know, all the songs on All Shook Down.

3. "Jesus Came Driving Along" by The Leather Nun. For a long time, I thought this song just existed in my mind. Was there really a song about Jesus driving around in a car making people stars? Was it sung by Swedish people? Norwegian? Or were they Slavic people? Was this song from the period of time in my life when I was constantly trying to convince people I was into a band called Fur Bible? I don't remember how I heard this song, only that I heard it once and liked the band's name enough to begin telling people I was really into them. Upon watching this video, I suddenly recalled another song of their's that mocked John Cougar Mellancamp's "Pink Houses" where the singer is stuck in a John Cougar Mellancamp video. Lo and behold, a two-fer:

As happens, the Jesus song is crap, but the Pink House song is actually kinda catchy -- they even name-check the Moral Majority:

4. "Lightning" by The Humans. The Humans were a band from Santa Cruz, as I recall, and they used to periodically get played on The Quake when I was a kid in the Bay Area and the video for this song probably appeared on this dreadful video channel called the California Music Channel. I remember these details specifically because I have a cassette tape that I made from the radio that has this song on it. For the last 25 years or so I've looked for this song since the version I had on the cassette started off about 30 seconds in and included a bunch of DJ banter at the end. I still don't have a copy of this song as an mp3 because I can't figure out how to record stuff internally on my laptop, so, yeah, if someone wants to send me an mp3 of this, I could be convinced to send you, you know, signed books and stuff. 

5. "My Philosophy" by Boogie Down Productions. This isn't exactly an obscure song -- in fact, it might be one of the greatest rap songs of all time and one of the most sampled ("it's not about a salary, it's all about reality") but I don't think I'd seen this video in at least twenty years. It's a treasure trove! Top-loading VCRs! Actual records! KRS-1! The amazing thing about this song is that KRS-1 was already complaining about the dumbing down of rap music in 1987. The really cool thing about this video is that it was probably made for about 50 bucks and it still looks pretty good. 

The 8 Days of Lists: Top 6 Guesses About Who -- Or What -- People Are That I Am Friends With On Facebook But Who I Have Never Heard Of

I mean no disrespect here, people in question, but sometimes I log onto Facebook and wonder, you know, who the fuck you are. At some point I made a conscious choice to accept your friendship and now here we are, boats against the current and all that, and I have no idea who or what you are. So, at random, I've picked six people or entities that I am friends with on Facebook and based solely on your most recent status update and photo I will attempt to figure out who or what you are.

1. Mikael Covey. Oh, this is a problem. You don't have any status updates readily available, so I'm going to base my assumption on the last wall post left by one of your friends. Okay, let's see...oh, well, this isn't good, either: Someone named Maria Martinez wrote "It is a pleasure to meet writers from around the world. I write historical romance and romantic. Thanks for the friendship. Greetings from Spain." This indicates to me that you don't know Maria in the same fashion I don't know you, but, nevertheless, I'm going to guess that Mikael is a writer who lives, uh, somewhere in the world and that in that place in the world they sometimes meet romantic Spaniards. I imagine that Mikael drinks lots of wine and sometimes, late at night, reads poetry and wonders about her dad. (I am not entirely certain if Mikael is a he or a she, so, you know, no disrespect, I'm just bad with names and sex.)

2. Patry Francis. Name sounds vaguely familiar, which makes me think initially that I went to high school with Patry, but I think if I went to school with someone named Patry I'd have some awful memory of making fun of her name and would now be feeling terrible guilt about it all, which, oddly, I do not, so I don't think we went to high school together. Her last status update is from November 25 and carries some clues: "One more pie to bake and one more page to right. Then I can go to bed and dream of turkey!" Well, clearly, Patry is a writer of some kind. You can tell because she misspelled "write" which is something I do on a fairly regular basis, too. The pie baking and the dream of turkey tells me she's not writing a memoir about her fight with adult onset anorexia, so that's nice. I'm going to say Patry writes crime novels about a tough as nails PI who is as great on a case as she is in the sack. And just as violent.

3. Edward Nudelman. I love this guy's name. Every time it has popped up on my page I've thought that somewhere Woody Allen was kicking himself for not coming up with it. His most current status update answers all questions: New Poem: "On Christmas Morning." Not your average Christmas poem. Find it here: http://www.edwardnudelman.blogspot.com. Clearly, the man is a poet. His profile picture is of himself taking a photo of himself with his cell phone, which makes me think that in addition to being a poet he is also one of those guys who isn't so sure he likes this whole cell phones as cameras business but, dammit, he's gonna give it the old college try or die in the process from the alien radiation. 

4. Kelly Cline. Hmmm. Another name that sounds like someone I maybe went to high school with. Photo doesn't look familiar. Most recent status update: "This really was a WONDERFUL year for me....looking forward to all the FUN that 2010 has in store.....Can't wait! LET'S ROLL...Okay, the preponderance of ALL CAPS and unequal numbers of ellipses indicate to me that Kelly is likely not a writer, as if there is one thing I can tell you about being a writer, we're persnickety about ellipses (it's three or it's nothing) and no writer anticipates FUN per se. SADNESS and DESPERATION? Sure. The LET'S ROLL also indicates to me that this is a person who, if they knew me in real life, would probably be upset with my pinko Commie liberalism.

5. Charlee Compo. Another great name -- I love all the Es and Os and Cs. The photo indicates real estate agent or teacher, but probably means writer since who else other than writers and real estate agents and teachers have posed photos at the ready? And since I think the majority of the people I don't know in the least are either avid readers or writers, it feels to me like Charlee is a writer. Her status update offers some clues: "$2000.00 to get a single shot in order to do my stress test. How sick is that? Tell me big business isn't making money!" Charlee has to be a writer. Only a writer needs a test to tell if they are under stress and only a writer would divulge the cost of a shot on their facebook, thus essentially publishing it, and thus getting to use the 2k as a tax write off, but also, in one status update, you get your own mini-story. Money! Shots! Stress! A big business conspiracy!

6. Mikhail Iossel. The photo is of a modern man perched against the railing of some ancient building. The last status update says: "uniform pc screensaves in nairobi hotel's business centre, on blazing-hot afternoon: wintry taiga forest as far as eye can see. endless expanse of pristine snow..." This man is clearly a spy or some kind of assassin. He must be stopped before the eagle departs the perch at midnight. I fear that this man is friends with me on Facebook only because he made a blood oath to his father to take down every member of my family subsequent to my grandfather escaping Russia in 1919. I fear that one day I will awake and he will be sitting on the foot of my bed, sipping a cup of tea, petting my dog, caressing an AK-47 (in my fears, he has three hands) mumbling in broken Russian that he will restore the motherland to greatness and that Red Dawn shall be avenged! 

Or, he's a writer. One of the two.

The 8 Days of Lists: Top 10 Awful Oakland Raider Quarterbacks I Have Invoked While Watching JaMarcus Russell Play

1. Jesus fucking Christ, at least Donald Hollas managed to hit the open man once or twice a game!

2. Somewhere, Vince Evans is skull fucking a JaMarcus Russell voodoo doll. That can be the only excuse for that throw.

3. Yeah, yeah, Marc Wilson was terrible, but for the love of god he didn't wear a fucking ski cap on the sidelines during the summer!

4. JaMarcus Russell makes Rusty Hilger look like a sober Ken Stabler.

5. Oh, for fuck's sake, someone wake up the corpse of Tee Martin and get his ass into the game.

6. Todd Marinovich should make JaMarcus his prison bitch.

7. How old is David Humm these days? Does he still have an arm? 

8. Is that fucking Aaron Brooks out there?

9. Jeff George can't be busy right now, can he?

10. Jesus Christ, did JaMarcus Russell just throw a fucking TD against Denver to win the game? Who is this brilliant player? I love him!

The 8 Days Of Lists: Top 5 Things That I Did In 2009 That I'd Never Done Before

1. Went to a Presidential inauguration. I've been voting for 20 years but never felt compelled to go to an inauguration. When Clinton was first elected, I was in college and would only have attended the inauguration if someone had made official Sigma Phi Epsilon t-shirts to go along with the event or if a Tri Delt had invited me. When Bush was elected and reelected, I didn't have a real desire to go freeze my ass off in DC just to cry and gnash my teeth and beg god to take me from this mortal coil, so, yeah, I just stayed home for those two shining moments. But when Obama was elected it seemed like a foregone conclusion. I don't even remember any real discussion about it -- he got elected and we agreed we were going and then, two months later, there we were freezing to death on the Mall for 16 hours.

What I remember most about that day? All of it, really. It was one of those days that already felt like a memory as it was happening, from walking zombie-like from Adams Morgan with droves of other people at the literal crack of dawn, to the street vendors which proliferated the closer we got to the capital, to hugging the military men who surrounded the Mall, to the greatest mug of hot chocolate I've ever had, to the stone silence that fell on the crowd as Obama spoke, to wandering lost for hours only to find ourselves at the very top of the parade route just in time to see the President drive by and wave at us, to the greatest Chinese food I've ever eaten, followed by the greatest Krispy Kreme donut, followed by all of us falling asleep on the floor while re-watching the inauguration on the news, and, of course getting to share it all with my wife Wendy and our good friends Rider & Alex. 

2. Appeared in the liner notes of a Jane's Addiction album. Pretty much the coolest thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. Turns out that if you wait long enough, eventually your favorite band of all time will recognize just how important you were to their success and then they put out a box set and choose that auspicious moment to recognize   your contribution...or, uh, your friend Mike ends up working in the music business, is charged with putting together the Jane's box-set and remembers that you and many of your friends followed Jane's around rather obsessively from 1987 onward and that you just might have some cool stuff to add to the box-set, like pictures and set lists and the like. Whichever, really. It's still the coolest thing in the history of the world.

3. Graduated from a prestigious East Coast university with a fancy degree. This is notable for several reasons. First, I graduated from Palm Springs High School with a 2.36 GPA. You gotta work to get a 2.36. You gotta ditch a lot of classes, you gotta drink Natural Light in abandoned housing developments in the afternoon, you gotta spend an inordinate amount of time wooing girls at the Hot Dog on A Stick at the Palm Desert Mall instead of studying, you gotta look like the asexual keyboard player from The Cure and mean it and then, later, you gotta sort of channel Andrew Ridgley of Wham! circa the "Club Tropicana" era inadvertently, and then you gotta morph into the prototype backward-baseball cap wearing frat boy you were born to be...all while not really ever cracking a book. I graduated CSUN with a 2.6 GPA and that was done mostly by, you know, sitting next to smarter sorority girls during Western Civ and then writing really derivative short stories in writing workshops all while primarily majoring in beer and freak-dancing in the Sig Ep garage. But now you must call me Master, regardless. And I have photos of me sitting in Adirondack chairs to prove it all. 

4. Imitated former Poet Laureate of the United States Donald Hall in front of former Poet Laureate of the United States Donald Hall. This was not something that I really wanted to do, but he heard that I did a good imitation of him and he asked to hear it. This brought on a bit of performance anxiety, as you might imagine, the kind which I have not experienced since, you know, 1986 or so at a drive-in theater in Palm Springs. Astonishingly, Donald Hall liked my imitation and then made me do it again, but this time in front of even more people, which was a bit more performance anxiety, but thankfully he again laughed and didn't try to, you know, shank me with sonnet. In a related event, I introduced myself to Michael Silverblatt, who I also do a good imitation of, and he, uh, didn't seem pleased by the experience and oddly I was not invited to appear on Book Worm. It was not, seemingly, a transcendent experience that reminded him of the poems of Rilke, the comic strips of Schultz and the music of Lil Wayne.

5. Plucked a gray hair from my eyebrow. For fuck's sake.

  

The, Uh, 8 Days of Lists: Five Things I Realized I Hated in 2009

Usually, I do a big 12 days of lists series here on TodGoldberg.com, but I've been off at the lovely UCR-Palm Desert residency for the last 10 days and realized, just now, that it's the middle of December. I also just realized that I haven't blogged in something like three thousand days, but such are the rigors of an author on tour, which I've also been doing since, jeez, the beginning of January? September? Something like that. A long time. All I can recall is crazed Ambien sex with Las Vegas cocktail waitresses, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Laura and Gore Vidal that, inevitably, ended up devolving into me reading aloud from my story "Walls" and making everyone cry before dumping another 10 or 11 Ambien down the old gullet.  

[Just a little note here to Tiger Woods: how do you do anything on Ambien but sleep? I took an Ambien recently on a red eye and literally didn't remember getting off the plane in Chicago, walking across the airport, eating a hot dog and then getting on another plane and landing in New York. Only the receipts in my pocket alerted me to my presence in Chicago at all. Well, that and the burning feeling in my colon, as apparently a Chicago dog is not the breakfast of champions where internal organs are concerned.]

At any rate, I am now on my list horse and prepared to discuss at length, and in numerical order, some of the most important things that happened to me this year. First: 5 Things I Realized I Hated in 2009:

1. Hearing other people's dreams. Now let me qualify this. If you're related to me or married to me, I actually kinda like hearing your dreams. It's fun to know you've been visited by our dead dog Sam, or our dead dog Sassy, or our dead dog Roxanne, or other dead relatives I liked. Mostly I like hearing about our dead dogs, though, since I think that means they are all alive in dog heaven or something. Not that I believe in heaven, of course, but I like to believe my dead dogs are somewhere pleasant in the afterlife, which I don't bother to break into heaven and hell, but rather something like, say, Disneyland and California Adventure. Or, essentially, awesome and just pedestrian fun. But anyway...hearing other people's dreams makes me crazy. Typically people try to set their dreams up in some way that might be easy for you to understand -- like, say, "Have you ever had a dream where you're in a pool?" -- but it's such an innocuous set up that of course you say, yeah, yeah, of course I've been in a pool, and then they say, "Well, I had the craziest dream last night about being in a pool," and then they tell you the dream, which of course makes no sense at all. I've also found that people who tell you their dream are also prone to telling you the entire plot of television shows you had no interest in seeing. Like, "Did you see the episode last night of [some since canceled medical drama]?" And when you say no, they say, "Oh, man, it was crazy. This lady shows up with [usually an odd object stuck in her head] and the doctors are like, wow, how is she alive? And then, it turns out, there's this part of the brain that can be pierced and nothing even happens to you, except you have a more acute sense of smell, but only for certain nuts and spices! Weird!" That said, one in particular dream story stuck with me this year, because it came in an email from a complete stranger and makes about as much sense as, you know, any other weird fucked up dream. Here it is, in full: 

I am sorry to write you out of the blue since you do not know me, but I read your Burn Notice books and really enjoy them and so I found your email address on your website and thought you might get a kick out of this! [Note: whenever I get weird emails from people, they always include a lot of exclamation points!] Last night I had a dream where I was watching Burn Notice and reading your book and then all of a sudden the book became the show and so as I watched the show and read the book they melded into one thing and then I became a character on the show, too. It's hard to explain but it was like I was both reading the book and watching the show and also playing a role in the show! I wasn't Fiona or Sam or Michael, but someone else. I know I'm not making sense now, but I had to tell you about it because I got such a kick out of it!

2. The weird book promotion company BookWhirl. I get emails from these fucktards on a pretty frequent basis, so I decided a couple of months ago to respond to one, just to see what would happen, since, of course, they told me they could get my book in front of 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 people. Here, in full, is the exchange I had with the lovely Betsy Sanchez of BookWhirl:

Hi Tod Goldberg,

A  pleasant day to you.

I’m Betsy Sanchez, a Marketing Specialist of Bookwhirl.com.

I do believe you are the author of  “Other Resort Cities”.  We are interested to promote it and we’d like to help you reach out up to 5,000,000 individuals and let them know about you and your work.

If you are interested, please give me a call at 1 877 207-1679 ext 313 or you may reply to this email. I’d be grateful to give you more information about this.

Hope to hear from you soon and have a nice day. You may also visit our website www.bookwhirl.com

Sincerely yours,

Betsy Sanchez

Consultant

Marketing Services - BookWhirl.com

Toll Free: 1 (877) 207-1679 ext 313

Fax No.  : 1 (800) 852-4249

Email    : BSanchez@bookwhirl.com

Info@Bookwhirl.com

www.Bookwhirl.com

From:

Tod Goldberg [mailto:todbg@msn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:48 PM
To: Betsy Sanchez
Subject: RE: Other Resort Cities

This sounds fantastic. Please let me know how I can reach these 5,000,000 people as soon as possible.

[Betsy followed up with a boilerplate email that informed me of my pricing options for, essentially, spam mailing people, to which I replied the below]

From:

todbg@msn.com [mailto:todbg@msn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 2:59 AM
To: Betsy Sanchez
Subject: Re: Other Resort Cities

 This sounds like a great deal. Just a mere $528 to send out an email. Can you give me a list of reference authors who have used your service and the amount of books they've sold as a result?

From: Betsy Sanchez

Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 12:09 PM

To: todbg@msn.com

Subject: RE: Other Resort Cities

Hello Tod,

Thank you for your reply.

Please visit our website for you to be able to check some of our authors who took advantage of our services.  I just want you to know that we do not guarantee book sales, however, we guarantee 100% exposure of your book to targeted book buyers. No one will guarantee book sales, let’s expose and promote your book first to the reading public who are interested with the category of your book.

Should you have any questions please feel free to ask me.  Our website,  www.bookwhirl.com

Regards,

Betsy Sanchez

From:

todbg@msn.com [mailto:todbg@msn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 3:46 AM
To: Betsy Sanchez
Subject: Re: Other Resort Cities

 I've looked at the authors on your website and 99% of the books are self-published or published by vanity presses like PublishAmerica and AuthorHouse. If you get all of this exposure for your authors, why wouldn't more authors, like myself, for instance, who are with major publishers, use your services? Why do you think BookWhirl could help my book when all of the books you publicize aren't actually selling? I feel like you're asking for a lot of money for not a lot of return. I'm not sure you can actually guarantee 100% exposure to targeted book buyers since, really, who can tell who these targeted book buyers are and who can tell if they'd want my book vs. Why I Believe in God by John Doe by Herman Brinkmeyer which is currently ranked #5,860,402 on Amazon. He's one of your testimonials of excellence and his book is currently ranked about 5.6 million places behind a book of mine that came out ten years ago. That doesn't seem like a very good investment return at all. I can be #5 million for free, right?

From: Betsy Sanchez

Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 12:24 PM

To: todbg@msn.com

Subject: RE: Other Resort Cities

Hi Tod,

We help self-published authors for the promotion of books.  We have our Research Team who did a survey already for email recipients with different areas of interest.  I do understand your point, and you have the right to express your own point of view.  Authors who took advantage of our services were already informed about the exposure of their books and plainly promotion of their books online. We do not guarantee book sales.

This will surely help increase the popularity of your book and at the same time you as an author. 

Thank you very much and hope to hear from you.

Regards,

Betsy Sanchez

From: todbg@msn.com

Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 2:45 PM

To: Betsy Sanchez

Subject: Re: Other Resort Cities

If your authors are ranked in the five millions on Amazon, I don't understand how BookWhirl could possibly increase the popularity of my book or me as an author. If the people who are writing testimonials about your service are completely unknown and their books aren't selling in the least, how can BookWhirl help me? I'm not trying to be antagonistic, I'm just trying to figure out how your advertising proposal to reach 5 million prospective buyers via email and Internet marketing has the ability to produce fruitful results when the very authors you trumpet on the website are, categorically, abject failures in terms of sales. I also don't understand what you mean below regarding the research team, nor what you mean about the exposure of the books and the "plainly promotion" you speak of. I'm interested in getting the most press possible for this new book and if I am to consider your publicity service I need to understand just what you might consider success from a campaign when, to my eyes, there isn't anything on your site that suggests anything near the level of success one might generally expect for the fees you charge.

Surprisingly, Betsy didn't respond to this final email. Though, last week, she did write offering me a holiday special on BookWhirl's services, so that was nice.

3. Any song by Daughtry. I wouldn't know the members of Daughtry if they came to my house and raped my cocker spaniel. I'm not sure if Daughtry is a last name -- like, you know, Dokken -- or a condition -- like, you know, Graves' -- or a place -- like, you know, Kansas. I only know that whenever I'm in my car for a long drive and listening to my SiriusXM, inevitably a time will arise when at least half of my presets are playing songs by Daughtry. Coffee House? Check. Spectrum? Check. Pulse? Check. I think I even heard them on Shady 45 one day. I don't know the names of any of the songs, but they all contain a chorus that goes roughly like this:

I sound vaguely like Eddie Vedder/I'm fooling you with that/My song is about by emotions/I hate you dad.

I'm also feeling a lot of anger toward Colbie something or other. And all the weird versions of old punk & goth rock songs I hear being sung by lilting voiced women who turn my teenage angst into something brittle and powerful and filled with hope.   

4. My Volvo S-40. Now here's the thing: I used to love my Volvo S-40. It was the perfect Yuppie mobile. Comfortable. Good gas mileage. Leather seats. Nominally booming system for the days when I need to bump rap music to feel young and virile again. Good trunk. Looks snappy in traffic. And then, just as the warranty began creeping to a close, it started breaking down in some terribly expensive, but also sort of resentful, way. At first it was just an engine light here or there. And then new tires started to deflate. And then the battery shorted out. And then something weird happened with the wiper fluid line. And then the engine light came back on. And then it went off. And then we accidentally crushed a pint of half-n-half with the drunk door and half-in-half poured into some unreachable part of the car and began stinking like there was a dead, lactating human stuck somewhere in the electrical system. And then that smell went away one day, which was nice, but then this piece of plastic by the door sort of lifted off and I hammered it back down and now it's in place, but I'm aware that it suddenly popped the fuck up. All of this and it has under 50K miles and has been serviced regularly. I'm thinking I'm gonna get an SUV again just to spite the fucker and to reinforce my conspicuous consumption desires.  

5. Fucktards. I mean this now more than ever.