The Birthday Inquisition–The Corporate Shill Edition

The Corporate Shill’s birthday is April 21st. In honor of this momentous event and in order to keep Tiny Cat Pants full of things that could, at any moment, go horribly awry, I’m enacting the first ever Birthday Inquisition.

Here’s the deal. I come up with ten questions aimed at the birthday person. The birthday person has until the date of his or her birthday to answer the questions. If any questions remain unanswered on the person’s birthday, I’ll open it up to everyone else.

Then–and this is the crucial part–we all agree to accept the made-up answers as the truth.

So, say I ask, “Who would you rather find in your bathtub–Bill Clinton or Tipper Gore–and why?” and the birthday person is like, “Fuck if I know. I’m skipping that one,” then, say, the Butcher answers “Birthday person would rather have Tipper Gore, because Tipper knows filth when she sees it,” then we all pinky-swear that we will, from here on out, believe that this is the answer the birthday person would have answered.

Any resulting fights will be an added source of merriment.

Okay, here goes nothing.

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Corporate Shill,

1. Is Britney Spears self-aware?

2. Would you rather be in US or Entertainment Weekly?

3. If you had become a movie critic, would it have pleased you more to give out consistently negative reviews that made you a media darling or consistently positive reviews that were often used in promotional materials?

4. For some reason (I can’t think of a good one), you are forced to give your first-born a “trendy” name. You can choose between Clementine, Payton, and Jasmine, if it’s a girl, and Ashton, Brooklyn, and Reagan, if it’s a boy. Which do you choose?

5. Hypothetically, would you be more or less likely to fuck Ted Nugent if he were the president of the NRA?

6. Would you be more or less likely to join the NRA if Ted Nugent were president of that organization?

7. Say that Kenny Chesney is about to release a song about a brief affair the two of you had right after college. Do you tell your loved ones that it’s about you or do you just hope that, since they and their friends don’t listen to country music, they never hear it from someone else?

8. If you had to change your first name to anything other than what it is now, what would it be and why?

9. If you could switch places with anyone you know for one day, who would it be and why?

10. For what reason would you ever move to Kansas City?

Psst…

Y’all I should be working, but I’m totally listening to the blues on KDHX out of St. Louis, which is home of our very own Steve Pick. I’m typing emails to folks who are really working and pretending to read. But anyone who looked too carefully would notice that I’m typing in time to the music.

In honor of it being Thursday, I think we should all shut our office doors and listen to the blues out of St. Louis.

If only I had a cold beer, too. . .

I Give Props to Those Who Deserve It–The All Girls Edition

Red kicks ass and takes names. I often don’t agree with her (for I am a hippy dippy liberal and she’s no softy), but, if there’s ever a feminist tag-team rasslin’ cage match, I want her in my corner.

Peggasus could totally be our manager, wearing these kick-ass shoes.

Astrid is up to something over here. Go check her out. Extra points if you corrupt her or cause her to choose English as a major (those may be the same things).

And, last but not least, there’s some other blogger here in Nashville and she’s funny and snarky. What the fuck?! Did people not get the memo? I am the funny, snarky Nashville blogger. Sure, I don’t have the recognition of the Nashville Scene or the legitimacy that comes from leaving the house every once in a while, but whatever. Saucy Librarian. Pbthbhth.

Speaking of wrestling, maybe I could wrestling the Saucy Librarian for the title of “Funny, Snarky Nashville Blogger.” I’d have the upper hand, based on my brief, incredibly lame affair with an amateur professional wrestler.

Yes, when I first moved to Nashville, I dated an amateur professional wrester. “Why?” you ask? America, I did it for you. There are just some things that a girl’s got to do when the opportunity presents itself. Letting a professional wrestler too short to crack the big leagues buy you some meals and teach you how to take a chair shot is one of them.

Here’s the two things he taught me about wrestling. One, use the front side of the folding chair. Two, cut your forehead open before your match and then seal the wound shut with Vasoline. That way, you don’t have to get hit too hard with said chair in order to bleed dramatically.

Here’s the one thing he taught me about life: If they never want to go to their house, they have a spouse. Hmm. It’s a truism in a rhyming couplet.

The funniest thing he ever said to me, upon discovering that I would not want to continue seeing him once I discovered said wife: “But I talked to my pastor about this! Jesus has forgiven me. Why can’t you?”

The Nashville Film Festival

So, I left work early, scared the shit out of the Professor by honking at her as I sped away from the office, and headed out to watch documentaries all evening.

I saw two: Lomax: The Songhunter and Cowboy Jack’s Home Movies.

The Lomax movie was really weird. On the one hand, I didn’t like it because it was this glowing paean to a guy whose legacy isn’t as unambiguous as this movie portrays. And there’s a lot of bullshit about how record companies have ruined “untainted” folk music by commodifying our cultural productions and selling it back to us.

(I don’t believe in a clear separation of high culture from low culture, so if some guy in Spain wants to sing the songs his grandpa taught him with an operatic style borrowed from Italy, more power to him. And so I don’t believe that record companies, try as they might, can dictate the music that people will love for all time.)

On the other hand, I don’t really care for Lomax, but the movie made me feel really bad for him, spending the last years of his life fried from strokes and stuck having people read his own articles back to him and making him listen to work he did 50 years before.

I don’t know. Maybe he enjoyed that.

There were some hints that he was kind of a crude asshole and some suggestion that he was a bad dad and a hard man to be married to. Still, you got that he was vital, energetic, committed to filling his days capturing every last bit of music he was convinced was going to be lost.

So, seeing him weak and unable to communicate and forced to listen helplessly as he was reminded of his past exploits seemed a little like the movie would have been better titled “Alan Lomax in Hell.”

Cowboy Jack’s Home Movies on the other hand was marvelous. I don’t know what to say about it except that you will cry over the Johnny Cash stuff, marvel at how sensual Waylon Jennings was and wonder how you never noticed that before, and you will want to move to Jack’s house.

He loves Shakespeare and he recites the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy and he takes Will’s words and sets them to music.

It’s funny and weird and you will love it.