Author: Guy Bergstrom

Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot.

1 PUMP LOTUS will never sell out

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A conversation with Tyler B., bass guitarist and lead singer.

Question: Why did you get into punk rock?

Tyler B: Listen, this isn’t just a rusted ’83 VW van packed with second-hand amps and people who haven’t showered for 72 hours. This is a vehicle stuffed with music, dreams, and truths that you’ll never get from Corporate Rock, which should be illegal. You know, a class B misdemeanor or whatever.

Exhibit 1 is Nickelback. The People rest, your Honor.

That’s why we will never sign with a label or take paper money of any sort. Barter, man. Barter all the way, because banks are just one more way they try to control your life with debt and paperwork.

For playing a gig, we only accept the following: bags of burritos, liters of tequila, and gallons of diesel for the van.

Question: I listened to your demo tape, and hear your first real single will debut soon. What can you tell us about that?

Tyler B: Yeah, DECAF comes out this Friday and we’re doing it live at Hunter’s graduation kegger. Still tweaking the lyrics, though I can give you a taste.

The Devil drinks decaf

He’ll fill your cup

Eight ounces of nothing

And you CAN’T WAKE UP

We’re deconstructing pop music, see, like starting with the chorus. Then I do this spoken-word interlude with Tyler B. just plucking a single note:

I see you all. I know you’re always tired and sleepy as hell. Working two jobs and still can’t pay the rent. Ask for a raise, boss tells you to get bent. Everybody told you to keep your head down, work hard, follow the rules. But the game’s rigged, you can’t win, and all you want to do is scream.

Imma tell you something: you gotta focus on the little things you can control. Like what you put in your body. No concoctions from Dow Chemical, or any of that random herbal shit in Red Bull nobody understands.

You need coffee, black and beautiful. Maybe a little brown sugar and cow goodness.

But that’s it. Screw artificial sweeteners and that coffee creamer powder nonsense. Who even knows what’s in there?
And decaf? That’s just a liquid lie.

Then we blow up the chorus again. No melody whatsoever, no bridge. Chorus and spoken-word all the way. Okay, except for the drum solo. That’s a banger.

Question: I see there’s a Tyler A. listed as lead singer, and you seem to have a Tyler theme going on. What message are you sending by choosing those stage names, and who picked them?

Tyler B: Our mommas. Not a joke, okay? Those are our real names. Half the kids I grew up with are named Tyler or Hunter.

Also, after the thing at Mount Hood last weekend, we are searching for a new lead guitarist, unless the park rangers find him first. If you can play three chords, you could be in. Hit me up.

Go the to theater and see EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, then see it again

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Listen: I am not an easy mark, or the kind of fanboy who’s read all the comics and would love a three-hour Marvel movie that got super deep into what kind of shopping list Deadpool would have and whether he’d buy organic fruits to be ironic or not.

Nor do I embrace the easy nihilism that everything sucks, though we all go through that phase.

I can like things, love them, hate them, or be completely ambivalent. I AM MULTITUDES.

Yet some movies are like your true love. You just know it. There is no doubt, no caveats, no wishy washy bullshit whatsoever.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is one of those movies.

Here, watch the trailer and we’ll talk smack.

This movie will surprise you, make you laugh, surprise you more, make you cry, and do the impossible trick of making you want to see it again.

Seriously, there is a short list of movies I’d happily watch again & again. Bet you have a short list, too.

This one makes that list.

Some interesting bits without throwing 583 spoilers at you:

  • It’s directed by the Daniels (two men both with the first name Daniel) and my only regret is they couldn’t get Daniel Ratcliffe in here to go full Daniel.
  • The budget was only $25 million, which I did not believe at first.
  • You’ll recognize the male lead’s voice from THE GOONIES and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
  • Damn near everybody in this movie deserves Best Actor nominations, they did not hold back, they owned this thing.
  • Bagels with everything are the bomb.

I want to say, up front, that giving the Daniels a budget of $250 million would not have improved the movie. The special effects were great when they wanted them to be great and entertainingly cheesy when called for. One of the best scenes features two rocks, I kid you not.

Also, a budget of $250 million would mean studio execs and preview audience nonsense killing half of the insane and absurd parts that makes this movie stick with you so much.

So: go see this thing at theaters while you can. Bring a friend or three and share a giant tub of popcorn, which seems like a great deal because it’s only 50 cents more than the itty bitty Medium bag of poporn, though that’s an economic illusion due to the overpriced and bullshit nature of that Medium popcorn.

You’ll be able to see the Dr. Strange movie later, and the Thor movie, and all the other comic book movies that cost more than the Gross Domestic Product of Paraguay to create.

See this movie in a theater while it’s still around. Maybe you’ll simply like it. My bet, though, is that you’ll love it, and we need to support indie movies that take big risks like this.

Elizaveta sings a Ukrainian folk song and yes, crying is okay

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Usually, I will (a) find an obscure and bizarre music video, (b) make fun of famous bands with famously bad videos, or (c) delight in the discovery of something musical that is unique and amazing.

The world is too crazy right now. Making fun of things, even when it is deserved, doesn’t sit right with me today.

As a former journalist, I still love the news. The only stories I want to read right now are about Ukraine, in the hopes that they defend their country and can rebuild and live in peace again. (Some of you know what I’m talking about: liveuamap.com, the Kyiv Independent, and understandingwar.org)

So I’m running into video after video of music from Ukraine, by ordinary people and soldiers, that moves me far more than any bazillion dollar extravaganza by whatever diva or boy band is hot right now.

This is the one that I keep watching.

What do I like?

I like how it starts as simply and slowly as you can, one woman singing alone, no music whatsoever.

I like how the other people come behind her and join in, and how the power of the chorus grows.

I like the feeling behind the words in a language I don’t understand.

And I like these people, fighting for their home, and for democracy.

Slava Ukraini.

Shuba hits us with a double-whammy and a twist

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Okay, this video stands on its own as funny. Watch it:

Now here’s the twist–the person in the video above isn’t lip-synching to a pop song.

This is the actual singer, and here’s Shuba’s full music video.

VERDICT: 11/10 total points for creativity and guerilla marketing. You got me to watch the video.

Well played, Shuba, well played.

Even better: a bonus video where she sings I’M A SAVAGE in all these different voices. Absolutely perfect.

Woman accused of having billions in stolen Bitcoin also made the Worst Music Video of All Time

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Which crime is worse, the digital money or the music video?

I report, you decide.

Here’s the deal: A married couple in their early 30’s may have stolen up to $4.5 billion in Bitcoin, and the FBI recovered a bunch of it.

They are accused of trying to launder 119,754 of the crypto coins, stolen back when those digital things were worth $70 million and such.

But the value went way up. Way, way up.

Before I dive into how these two jokers truly screwed up after pulling this off, let’s get to the music videos.

The woman’s name is Heather Morgan and she sings under the name Razzlekhan.

Her videos on YouTube went private after the arrest.

HOWEVER: you can’t defeat the interwebs when millions of people around the world have the motivation and skills to keep treasures like this alive. WARNING: bad words, bad lyrics, bad dancing, and bad singing ahead.

Is this the biggest heist of all time? The FBI puts it at No. 1 for seizing illicit monies.

There are all kinds of other famous heists, like the Great Train Robbery, that only brought in $3.4 million or so. Though I am trained as a journalist, and write the speeches, and did not major in mathematics, I’m pretty sure that $4.5 billion is larger than $3.4 million.

But is VERSACE BEDOUIN that the Worst Music Video of All Time? Maaaybe.

The competition is tough.

FRIDAY is pretty bad and comes to us from a professional singer and a professional production crew.

For amateurs, RED DRESS is high on the list because you’ve got decent camera work and all that for an amateur production but everything just seems off. Especially the singing. It’s the uncanny valley of bad videos.

Now, here’s where she and her husband went wrong–if they did what they’re accused of: Bitcoin is a silly thing to buy, a silly thing to hold, and a silly thing to steal.

If you rob a bank, there’s no natural trail. That’s why they have cameras, and vaults, and marked bills, and dye packs. The banks and the folks with badges and handcuffs have to work at creating a trail to whoever steals the money.

If you buy Bitcoin, and lose the key and such, poof, your money is gone. There’s a man in the UK who did that and has spent, I don’t know, a year of his life digging through the city landfill looking for his old hard drive with the Bitcoin info because he lost everything, the big dummy.

If you sell Bitcoin, or purchase something, there’s a record of that on the blockchain.

And if you steal it, yeah, there’s a still a record of purchases and sales. Which means it’s a lot easier for the police to start following the built-in trail that you can’t avoid. If you read the stories about this heist, they went nuts trying to launder the Bitcoin through all sorts of accounts and such and it Did Not Matter.

So don’t rob banks, don’t steal Bitcoin, and don’t buy Bitcoin in the first place. Buy some index funds, hold them, and forget about it until you retire.

Back to the music video. I’m going to give Razzlekhan the double win here: biggest heist and worst music video ever.

She gets the win because every single element is amazingly bad. The lyrics, the attempts at dancing, the singing, the camera angles. Everything.

Do they let you make compose and shoot music videos in federal prison?

Not sure. I believe we may soon find out.

Paris, Part 2: Trains, planes, and taxis

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Time starts to lose all meaning when you fly overseas, because unless you’re going to the South Pole, the time zones blur and send you way forward in time (or backward, equally weird).

Compounding things: driving to the airport means two hours, plus three hours early for international flights, so tack on five hours to that twelve-hour flight. We took off in the afternoon, so by the time it was wheels down in Amsterdam to switch planes, it’d been 24 hours without sleep.

And in Amsterdam, the line for customs was INSANE. It stretched for kilometers, since miles don’t exist here, and got so long that the airport police freaked out. I kid you not. They all showed up, took a look at the line stretching to Denmark, and did some kind of Dutch magic on the bureaucracy to make the customs line absolutely fly. I still don’t know how they did it.

The Air France flight to Paris was not screwing around, with a male flight attendant happily arguing with passengers about proper masks. No cloth masks, only blue surgical ones, and they handed them out if you only had cloth.

I sat next to a television journalist from Paris on the flight, a man who’d covered wars in Africa and the Middle East, and it’s always wonderful to talk to somebody from the news world.

Trains are wonderful, except when they are not

The train from Charles de Gaulle to Paris started out fine. With every stop, more and more passengers got on until the thing was insanely crowded. All the travelers from the airport with giant suitcases started getting stink eye from commuters simply trying to get to work.

We formed rival gangs, and since The Jets felt natural for the airport people, locals went with The Sharks, and we had a dance-off with switchblades, except nobody got cut because they were too busy singing.

Once in Paris proper, it took another train to get close to our hotel, up by Mount Marche, then a hike because we were too groggy and sleep-deprived to figure out which third train to take for the station right next to our hotel.

It does not take long, when dragging your luggage after 36 hours or whatever of travel, to learn you don’t want to haul that luggage another mile or two. We grabbed a taxi. Best decision ever.

TL;DR – When you arrive with the luggage, get a damned taxi, even though trains are great. Kthxbai.

Nothing is better than dinner outside on a busy Paris street

There’s something magical and unique about eating at an outside table and watching street life in Paris.

It never gets old, no matter how many times I’ve done it.

We were absolutely sleep-deprived, and common sense said to unpack and sleep. Nope. Having a good meal, outside, put a capstone on the Getting to Paris part of the trip.

I believe this should be the law. You can’t crash at the hotel right off. Getting a good dinner, or even a snack, along with a drink–that is required.

Next post: I hear there’s some art in this town

Paris, Part 1: Let’s fix the annoyances of air travel and make it joyous again

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Day 1 of any trip overseas involves waiting in lines, taking your shoes off, and strapping yourself inside a metal tube full of explosive liquids.

Note: yes, you could technically go all Young Bruce Wayne and trade coats with a homeless person before sneaking aboard a cargo ship, and yes, there are people who’ve rowed across the Atlantic, but we are talking about getting to Paris before 2028.

So how can we fix airports and flying?

Here are a few ideas.

Idea # 1: Trains, trains, trains

Nobody likes driving to the airport at oh-dark-thirty, paying for parking, and taking a shuttle to the actual airport. How could we make this suck slightly less?

Trains.

Take your luggage and hop on a train that takes you directly to the airport.

Boom, no driving, no parking, no hassle.

SeaTac does have a train to the airport now. Though I live in a one stoplight logging town far away, it would be seven separate flavors of awesomesauce to catch a ride to Olympia, hop on that train, and hit the airport.

Sorry, parking lot barons. You provide a useful service, but trains would eliminate a major annoyance.

Idea # 2: Make boarding less silly

Right now, how do you get on the plane? IT IS THE CHAOS.

Let’s make this infinitely smoother by boarding window seats first, back to front. You go, Window Warriors.

Next up, middle seats.

Last to board should be aisle seats and first class / VIP people. Having them get on first slows things down. What’s the great thing about getting on first and waiting longer for takeoff? Feed the people holding special expensive tickets some special and expensive champagne while they wait and get them on last.

Idea # 3: Seats that fit

We have the numbers: average number of people who are tall, short, whatever.

Make seats on planes reflect real people instead of a mythical average, so anybody over six foot doesn’t have their knees shoved into the seat in front of them and average to shorter people get a break on price for taking up less space. But if we’re making prices reflect reality, average it all out to cost the same as now instead of overcharging tall folks.

Idea # 4: The adorable screaming bebes

Hey, I’m a father, and I get it. You want your pookie to see the world, or visit grandma.

HOWEVER: Itty bitty babies and toddlers don’t do well on long international flights, and by don’t mean well I actually mean a 10-hour flight often includes a free 10-hour chorus of screaming and inconsolable babies.

Babies and toddlers won’t remember a trip to Paris or Tokyo.

Multiply the age of the pookie by TWO and that’s how many hours the kid should fly. A baby can do two hours, a two-year-old can handle four, and so on.

Idea # 5: The Kiosk of Dumb Questions

At the Brussels train station, helpful staff stood at a kiosk to guide confused travelers to their train.

Airports around the world should do this. Otherwise, sleepy passengers wander the airport, staring at screens and asking random people questions in languages they don’t speak.

VERDICT

Traveling by plane is more annoying than it should be, but we can dream. What would you do, if you could wave a magic wand and fix it?

A short list of magical items for sale

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Listen: just like you, I have boxes in my basement that haven’t been opened for years. Stuff taking up space and time, and if you let it, all that junk will play some Marvin Gaye and start multiplying until you can’t walk down the hallway without tripping on a violin from 5th grade.

So I have things to hock, and I am a motivated seller.

Vorpal Typewriter of Infinite Weight

It’s an Underwood from around 1930 that used to live in my office in a mini-shrine to word machines of all kinds. Like a relic.

The keys no longer work. The ink is dry.

That doesn’t matter, because what you do is place a blank piece of 8.5 x 11 paper on top of the Vorpal Typewriter of Infinite Weight, cut your thumb as a blood sacrifice on the keys, and words begin to appear as long as your blood is O-positive.

The typewriter has specific tastes.

It isn’t portable, unless you have a F350 with the extra tow package, because at the heart of the typewriter is a miniature black hole, pulsating with power.

Thor once lost his hammer, Mjölnir, which nobody can pronounce, and he tried to pick up the Vorpal Typewriter as a temporary replacement, but he couldn’t lift the thing.

Today, the typewriter lurks in the basement and to plot its revenge. It will not be ignored, though it will serve as a boat anchor if necessary.

Price: $50 or a pint of O-positive blood.

Matched Pair of Professional Bongo Drums

Admit it: you’ve always wanted to play the bongos. Real ones, not those cute little drums they sell at tourist traps for thirty bucks. Those are toys, and you are not a child.

These are four-foot-tall monsters. If you have musical talent and technical expertise with amplifiers and such–as you should if considering playing professional bongo drums–you could hook these things up to speakers and shatter windows in a three-block radius.

Metal bands are old and busted. The new hotness is heavy ska, and you can’t do that with a traditional drum kit. You need ginormous professional bongos, my friend. YOU NEED THEM.

Price: $100 or a working manual transmission Yugo.

Note: technically, these are conga drums, but technically, I don’t care.

Ginormous and Powerful Nikon D3100

It hurts me to say this: full-frame digital cameras with mirrors and such are too big and bulky. They’re great, and take wonderful photos. I just hate lugging them around when there’s a slim little device in my pocket at all times that takes pretty damn good photos that automatically upload into the cloud and such.

This Nikon is amazing. It’ll do your taxes and turn a random man in a mustache into Tom Freaking Selleck.

But, my old beautiful camera, you are too large and bulky. It’s not you. It’s me. I found somebody far lighter, huggable, and modern, a Sony A6000, and we are planning to stay together forever and ever.

Price: You can’t put a price on memories.

Update: SOLD.

Portable Typewriter that Actually Types Boring Words

This isn’t an heavy and adorable antique. No, this typewriter is portable, comes with its own carrying case, and actually works.

You need ink and paper and quick fingers to make words on this machine, doing the job it was designed and built for back in the 1960s, despite it being the 2020s. The portable typewriter abides.

Kinda boring, really. I like you and all, Portable Typewriter, but you’re too competent and normal to be interesting. Give us some drama. Grow little mechanical legs and scurry around the garage preying on mice or something.

Price: Whatever, have fun typing away.

Starplus Command Module

This relic has strange wires and indecipherable buttons. My current theories are (a) Strategic Air Command used it the ’70s to launch nuclear bombers, or (b) alien visitors with a hankering for antique human tech used this to let their starship commander call down to engineering and such. “Bring us back to that delicious Waffle House, warp seven!” Hell if I know.

Price: $5, unless you know how to work it to launch nuclear bombers or summon alien ships.

White Monolith of +10 Paper Consumption

This beast has a huge internal stomach meant to hold paper and a thin maw where it feeds. There are no teeth, so I believe it ate pages whole and had a method of digesting them. It has a tail that ends in a wide head packed with tiny metal teeth, like a snake.

The control buttons include a lightning bolt to summon Thor, a down elevator, and a smiley face without eyes, which is creepy. There’s also a symbol of power–and upside triangle inside a circle–and an emergency rhombus button, to bring forth the helpful rhombus fairies.

Price: A cheap bottle of bourbon or an expensive bottle of gin, which I will use to trade for a medium-priced bottle of bourbon.

Why was FREE GUY fun but unfulfilling?

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Yes, my name is Guy, and I watched FREE GUY the second day it hit theaters, as required by Guy Law.

Is it worth watching in a theater? Sure. This is a fun summer movie. But that’s not the most interesting question.

The acid test for a movie, even a summer action film or comedy, is simple: Would I watch it again?

And listen, we can make that test far more accurate and meaningful. Here’s how:

  1. How much would I pay to watch it again, and again?
    versus
  2. How much would you need to PAY ME to watch the thing one more time?

There are plenty of films that are worth watching once and never again. The movies that are rewatchable are golden nuggets of cinema worth treasuring forever.

Here are two examples, both somewhat similar to FREE GUY:

BOSS LEVEL is worth watching again and again, because I have literally watched it five-point-seven bazillion times.

Why is it worth two hours of your life, repeatedly? Because it mixes action with comedy so well, and has moments–like the sword training and fight scene–that never get old.

Similarly, THE EDGE OF TOMORROW is a movie that you can watch again and again. The more you hate Tom Cruise as an actor, the more you like this movie, seeing how you get to watch him die a ton of times in a war zone before he redeems himself. Also, Emily Blunt is a total badass in this thing.

FREE GUY is thankfully an original script and not a movie based on an actual video game or ancient board game like BATTLESHIP, which they actually got Liam Neeson to do a movie about, for the love of all that is holy.

Yet despite being fun, there’s something missing when you walk out of that theater after watching FREE GUY.

Here’s what I think that missing thing is: you can’t buy the ending, no matter how much bubblegum ice cream they pile on it.

Spoilers galore from here out.

So the key relationship is between Guy and Millie, with Guy not realizing he’s in a video game and Millie looking like a supermodel inside and outside the game.

In the end, they do NOT get together, because Guy is just an AI with a pretty digital face, so Guy becomes single and Millie gets together with…Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Listen, this doesn’t work on a number of levels. The audience WANTS Guy and Millie to get together for real. They do not, in any part of their popcorn-munching bodies, want Millie to hook up with Annoying Tech Dweeb.

Honestly, real-life Millie is beautiful enough to get pretty much any man she wants. It’s not believable that she settles for a man she ignored for years despite his blatant crush on her.

How could we fix the ending and the movie?

First, we don’t need three Tech Gurus — Annoying Tech Dweeb, his sidekick, and Millie are all coders.

You need one coder in this movie, and that’s Millie, so we can safely axe the other two characters. I mean, put a gun to my head and I cannot remember either one of their names. THAT IS A SIGN, RYAN REYNOLDS AND SCREENWRITING PEOPLE.

The other stakes were whether Millie and Annoying Tech Dweeb won their intellectual property battle with Korg, and listen, I didn’t not care about that at all.

Second, there’s only one true romantic question built up in this movie, and that’s whether Millie and Guy get together.

Third, how do we give the audience what they want–Millie and Guy actually getting together–in a way they don’t expect?

Here’s how: you go MATRIX or TRON LEGACY.

The MATRIX path has Neo take the right pill (I don’t know if it’s red or blue and do not care, sorry) and enter the Matrix so he can hang out with Trinity.

If he stayed in what he saw as the real world, there’d be no future with her. Zero. None. Nada.

The TRON LEGACY option means going the opposite route and taking somebody (Olivia Wilde!) from the digital world to the real world.

So let’s pick one of those options: you make Guy a real Guy or bring Millie into the digital world.

Turning the digital Ryan Reynolds into a real-life Ryan is the easy and expected choice. The more surprising and deep thing would be making the stakes more real for Millie and going digital for her.

Give her a ticking clock–a deadly cancer, say–and have her desperately needing the servers and such to upload her consciousness into FREE CITY to survive.

High stakes now, right? And that would be an ending that stuck with audiences.

Is RED DRESS by Sarah Brand intentionally going for Worst Music Video of All Time?

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In the old days, back when MTV actually played music videos, it took some doing to shoot, edit, and release a music video. You needed a serious film camera, an editor, lights, an actual band, and a platform where people could see it. Thus, MTV.

In the ’80s–and even today–there are music videos shot by Hollywood directors and budgets in the millions.

Yet these days, we all carry supercomputers in our pockets, and fool with an iPhone can shoot a video and edit it on their laptop.

That doesn’t mean they should, or that it will be good.

Which brings us to RED DRESS by Sarah Brand, which is dividing the musical world. Is it horrible, intentionally horrible, or disguised brilliance, with the singer trolling us to boost her name ID before she releases her real music?

There are comments in the YouTube that try to explain this is “microtonal music,” and amazing, while vocal coaches and other smart people say that’s nonsense and that when she was asked what key this song is in, Sarah replied, “All of them.”

Here, watch this thing so we can properly discuss and dissect it.

What say you?

I believe, deep in my soul, that the evidence clearly points to Sarah Brand as being deadly serious about this, and not trolling us at all.

This wasn’t a quick little joke.

She composed, sang, directed, and edited this video. There’s a bit of a blooper real at the end. And it’s clear she recruited every friend in sight to be in it.

But hey, I’m not going to beat her up for trying. She’s not asking us to buy concert tickets at $100 a pop. There’s no link to buy T-shirts or anything.

Sarah wanted to make a music video and did it, and the Series of Tubes is a much simpler way to share it than trying to get MTV execs to play the thing.

Is it bad? Yeah. HOWEVER: there are tons of pop stars who sound great in the studio and terrible live.

Just like anything else creative, the editing and polishing means everything. Writing, photography, painting, whatever.

Here’s an amazing look at how much editing can fix. Same raw material, same voice.

VERDICT

I’m not going to do the easy thing and hate on this, or the hipster thing and try to claim this is microtonal goodness that regular people just don’t understand.

My point is this: art is hard. Yes, some geniuses like Dave Grohl can play all the instruments on an album they make in their garage for kicks and accidentally give birth to Foo Fighters, and some filmmakers can shoot and edit a film with a skeleton crew of themselves, their dog, and Neighbor Kid Walter to fetch Taco Bell when the actors get hungry.

But those are the rare, rare exceptions. Every artist is better when they have a team of professionals behind them.