Dave White Knows

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You put on your pointy silver shrug and giant feathered helmet and you go out and do your job.
I went to a record-listening party yesterday. People bring records and force each other to listen to them. I brought recent obsessions Necrofrost and Belong. I also brought older obsessions The Shadow Ring and Hatebeak. And a LaBelle record. It was a good time. Xtreem Aaron told me no one would like The Shadow Ring but he was wrong. Everyone at least pretended to enjoy it.

This is Hatebeak. Metal with parrot vocals. It's not a video, just someone playing the exact 7-inch I brought to the party. It's a novelty record, of course. But I like it all the same.

There's no Shadow Ring or Belong clips or mp3s that I can find to share here. And I've already posted Necrofrost twice here, I think, so here's the LaBelle song I played for the party. It's called "What Can I Do For You" and it's my favorite song by them. There are two versions here. Version one is from the 70s TV show "Midnight Special" and it's amazing and they're dressed like space ladies.

The second version below is from what seems to be from one of Cher's TV shows from the 70s because the camera is always close-up on Cher. The other funny thing about the version they sing with Cher is exactly what you'll read if you go to YouTube and see what the guy who posted it said, that Cher is keeping up with LaBelle but is clearly exhausted by the end of the song.

Diane von Furstenberg's Googly Eyes
That is the title of this week's "Project Runway" recap now playing on Advocate.com, written by me, with excellent commentary help from

elysesewell,

moroccomole,

garycotti and Xtreem Aaron...

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid60807.asp

clue # 1
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=623912186

i get it now. i'm supposed to give you a link to my facebook profile.

too many dave whites out there...

uh...
i'm on facebook

now what do i do?

Kick-Ass.
Do you hate all those shitty Nicolas Cage movies?

You only think you do.

I wrote a piece about him and his artistic choices for MSNBC.com

It's up right now...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26514888/

West Hollywood, Rock City
We've had this for a while and decided to sell it. It's the Marvel KISS comic book. Bigger than a comic book, in fact. It's the size of a magazine with as many pages. And it was printed, as you can see at the bottom of the cover, with real KISS blood. I don't know how but that's what they claim.

I went on eBay to discover that not only does it always sell for no less than $50 it often goes for as much as 150-175.

Which is nuts.

So, because you're my LJ friends, and because LJ Garage Sale is proving way easier to manage on my small scale than eBay, I'm selling this for $40, including the cost of shipping. That's less gouge-y, right? It's near mint and in really excellent condition. Comment here or email me at DLelandWhite@aol.com and it's yours.

L_____ & G________ T__ F_______ S_____
I did not write the following. Another person on LJ did. Does he want his name associated with it? I don't know. If he does he'll comment and then I'll provide attribution.

Either way, I stole his entire post and put it here. Because it's important. If you understand the next paragraphs you read then you know what this is. Go to Amazon and get it before it's too late...

So, let's do this annoying cutesy gossip-rag style:

It seems an odd-toed ungulate made a deal with a certain majestic mountain to provide access to a piece of entertainment that was previously believed to be ALL WASHED UP! This deal was supposed to include the ability to purchase the harmonic chanting sounds of Looters and a Lawnboy; in fact, there was word written at the back end of a trailer confirming this.

Well, with literally days before these tribal noises were to reach the public, the mountain reneged on their agreement and said oh noez, not evarrr! "CONNED AGAIN!" I guess they were worried something about this would STAIN their reputation. The ungulate did their best, even showed them a "ROAD MAP OF MY TEARS," but anyone who has dealt with an immovable object knows it's a "WASTE OF TIME."

However, it seems the dot com of one-breasted warrior women did not get the memo that said DON'T PUT OUT. So, for as long as nobody goes telling to the mountain, you too can purchase these FABULOUS recordings. And you don't even need to "BE A PROFESSIONAL" to do it.

So wherever you're LANE or whatever you're DERN, hurry up and buy these tracks for a small FEE!

Oh and PS:
When you're buying, remember that the visual component is not the endgangered species, just the aural aspect. The latter is soon to disappear, not the former.

This weekend's most exciting destination was Target.
1. Today's LJ garage sale item is...

Hertfordshire's favorite daughter, Posh. Mint in the box. Ready to tour without Ginger in 98!
Someone on this list needs her. Comment here or email me at DLelandWhite@aol.com and let's make a deal. And by deal I mean any offer is going to be a good one since all the greedy ebayers want 30 bucks for her and no one's biting.

2. I ate a butter burger yesterday for the first time. We saw them on TV once on this special about freaky hamburgers and have been talking about making them for almost two years. You take ground beef and cook up a burger. Then you put a slab of butter on top and let it melt into the meat. That's the only condiment you need. And I plan to now eat one annually. As in once a year. Because I think two of them in a year would make me die. I felt actual fear while taking my first bite and followed my one burger with an enormous heaping plate of salad with lemon juice for dressing.

3. After like seven or however many years of ownership, our Swiffer has disintegrated. Pad falling off, stick breaking down, grippy parts that hold the Swiffer cloths losing their grippiness. This angers me. I wanted to grow old with my Swiffer and believed I would. So I went to Target (on a Sunday morning at 10--which is a bad move and will remember now to go only right at 8 when they open--and got the new Method "Swiffer"-like thing instead. It's all eco and comes in a mulchboard box and uses cloths made of corn fiber and this other cloth that you wash when it's dirty and is way sturdier than the Swiffer ever was. So eff-u Swiffer because I'm green now.

4. Oh yeah, I forgot to say this in my Texas entries but one of my mom's ambulance guys recognized me. Not one of the EMTs who brought her to the ER. This was a guy who was her transporter back from the hospital to the nursing home when they released her. He goes, "Are you famous? I know you from somewhere." I assured him that I was not famous and then we figured out that he'd read my reviews on Movies.com. So that was weird but nice.

5. Perhaps you missed this, what with it being Labor Day and all, but my "Project Runway" recap was posted over the weekend on Advocate.com. You didn't want to do any actual work this morning anyway, so go read it even if you don't watch the show:
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid60287.asp

itunes anti-arch

moroccomole is asking me if I've tried Pandora radio online, the one where you enter a band name into the search and it pulls up a comparable playlist of other bands that are like the one you entered. I had not tried this so I typed in Bathtub Shitter to see what came up. What came up was a bunch of bands that sound just like Bathtub Shitter.

Here's Bathtub Shitter, for your convenience in case you aren't aware of their sound. I think I posted this once before one time:

Anyway, I don't want to listen to an hour of the same thing. After Bathtub Shitter I want to hear Everything But The Girl.

And as i finished writing that sentence MM just said, "But you can shuffle your Pandora stations."

So he's right. In fact, he just yelled from the dining room table, "Aww yeah! Mel & Kim!"

But anyway, I got iTunes at the moment...

anti-fade - chrome
anti-klan, part 1 - the dicks
anti-klan, part 2 - the dicks
anti-matter (w/mf doom) - king geedorah
antichrist television blues - the arcade fire
antmusic - adam & the ants
ants - blank dogs
ants invasion - adam & the ants
ants on parade - the homosexuals
antwan - bear vs shark
anxiety montage - carl stalling
any day now - the soul stirrers
any day now - chuck jackson
any love - luther vandross
any major dude will tell you - wilco
any second now - depeche mode
any way you want it - ramones
anymore (4 anymore mix, faster pussycat kill kill mix, nino's liquid steel mix) - sarah cracknell
anyone can be somebody's fool - nanci griffith
anyone who had a heart - dionne warwick
anyone who had a heart - dusty springfield
anyone will do for a heartache - billie ray martin
anything but strong - eurythmics
anything that way - buffalo tom
anything to say you're mine - etta james
anywhere like the moon - flare
anywhere out of the world - dead can dance
apathy disease - the ex
apathy - ld & the new criticism
ape thanks lamb - boduf songs
apeman - the kinks
aphid war - workbench
aprhotalk - jbp
the apocalypse through sound - behead the prophet no lord shall live
apolitical - big boys
apollo amateur - jawbox
apologies to insect life - british sea power
apparently nothin - young disciples
appetite - kicking giant
appetite - prefab sprout
apple - cibo matto
apple juice kissing - deee-lite
apple tree - erykah badu
apples & strawberries - strobe talbot
apples on the lilac tree - patience and prudence
approaching pavonis mons by balloon - flaming lips
apres ski - cinerama
april 8th - neutral milk hotel
april fools - aretha franklin
april in paris - rosemary clooney
april in paris - thelonious monk
april in portugal - esquivel
april showers - sugarland
april skies - the jesus & mary chain
apron strings - everything but the girl
aqua - eurythmics
aqua regis - coil
aquamarine - the gray orchestra
aquarius - harvey sid fisher
aquellos ojos verdes - nat king cole
arabian knights - siouxsie & the banshees
aral muny - raushan orazbaeva
the archetypal man - judee sill
archist - simon fisher turner

the project runway recap is up and ready to be loved
my latest 'project runway' recap is up on advocate.com so go read it...

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid60287.asp

My friend Lien writes this. And she captioned the photo. I laughed.
And by "the photo" I mean all of them. But specifically the George Clooney one. I suggest reading her...

http://hollywoodbff.com/

I achieved rock success.
What happened during my DJing time at MJs:

1. Watched Danny, the guy who co-hosts the night, which is called "Dirty Sailor," skillfully mix two screens of video stuff together, clips from "He-Man & Masters of The Universe" and vintage male model wrestling footage over "Querelle." I enjoyed that a lot. Meanwhile on the third screen on the booth monitor, but not shown on the big screen that the customers could see, was a super-sick National Geographic Channel special about people experiencing ecstatic religious rituals where they impale their faces with long needles and spit up blood and everyone beats on drums. I gotta TiVo that, whatever it was.

2. A go-go dancer gave me advice on what music I should play. So helpful, that dancer.

3. I didn't keep a set list because I was too nervous about destroying their complicated board. I'm used to simpler Eagle equipment. This booth was like being in the "Way Way Out" space capsule and I was Jerry Lewis. I was given a crash course in using it and it seemed easy enough but I was constantly checking and double-checking myself to make sure I wasn't ruining everything. But I know I played: Big Black, Void, Stooges, Suicidal Tendencies, Bad Brains, Eat Skull, Jackyl, Crime, Carcass, The Fucking Am, Cave In, Liliput, Mars, Converge, Germs, Abruptum, Fitz of Depression, Cocksparrer, Bathory, Boris, Conflict, Dead Moon, U-Men, Royal Trux, Accept, A-Frames, Dim Stars, Pussy Galore, Circle Jerks and... I forget what else. More.

4. Some guy in one of those tilty little hats the gays all love to wear now came to the booth and asked, "When are you going to play something good?"

I said, "That's going to be the next song."

beneath the valley of the ultravixens of surgery
I'm not saying they're as good as The Spice Girls or anything, but:

I saw this first on

smrtmnky's page. Now I am showing it to you. I respond to this not because I am a homo, but because it is awesome.

And the only way this video could be better would be if they'd taken out the guy's kidney and left him in a bathtub full of ice.

Incendio Fulminis Telis, gays...
I have a new DJ gig. At least for one shot anyway. I was approached by a guy named Case, one of the MJs guys, to play music for their brand new "Dirty Sailor" night that they just started on Wednesdays. All punk and metal is what they want from their DJs so I said yes.

Anyway, my first night is tomorrow, Wednesday August 27th from like 9 or 10 (I'm not sure which yet) until 2.

So I think that you should come out to hear me be the first person (I'm just assuming that I get to hold that title) to make Abruptum to bleed out of the MJs sound system.

Today is a blue stripe day
I'm back in Los Angeles.

My mother is back in her nursing home and resting and on pneumonia drugs.

I learned two things from my family yesterday. One is that the former guy from Christian band DC Talk, who now records under the name Toby Mac, wrote a song called, I believe, "The Granny Song" or something like that. And it has a series of muh muh muhs in it. This makes my four year-old nephew and six year-old niece laugh a lot and they think it's about their own granny. They enjoy singing the muh-muh-muh part a lot.

The other thing I learned from my nephew and niece is that my underwear is hilarious. Apparently the waistband of my old-man boxer shorts was peeking out of my jeans and they both squealed and shrieked, "WE CAN SEE YOUR UNDERPANTS!"

So now I'm home and i'm on the bed and that's where I plan to be for most of the day, because I'm wiped out after 10 days of chaperoning my mom to various activities and then spending an anxious weekend in a hospital room after her sudden detour to the ER.

And here is a glimpse of:
1. My underpants
2. Flannel sheets.
3. A scar on my left knee that was the result of falling off a bike at age eight.

Oh good, "Charmed" is on.
And it's her favorite thing to watch in the afternoon. And the fact that she still slips in and out of painkilling drug haze probably doesn't matter too much. The ambulance is due to arrive here between 5 and 6pm. So it's a lot of me hanging out and goofing around online and doing as much work as I possibly can do (which, this month, is mostly about the proposal for book # 2--I had a dream about the unnamed, unfinished book the other night and 'Entertainment Weekly' reviewed it and gave it a C+).

Oh, and in all the distraction I forgot to post my link to the last "Project Runway" recap on Advocate.com. Here it is:

http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid59800.asp

And the "leave Keith alone" comments continue. What they don't get is that I AM leaving Keith alone. Way more than he deserves. Hotness is not enough!

PS. I haven't read a single post on my friends list in like 10 days because of this trip. So if you had a question for me that you just posted in your journal or if you wrote about something that you think I totally need to know about or would be interested in, please link me so I can see it. Because there's no way I can go backtrack through all of that stuff. And there's like a thousand of you.

Her room has free wi-fi. I take back everything I ever said about the American health care system.
I mean, except for the part about it not being completely socialized and free.

Anyway, good news. She passed her stress test this morning and the word is that she may be able to go back to the nursing home today. The doctor is currently talking about all this to the cardiologist and it seems as though none of the tests given her over the weekend indicate any cardiac problem at all.

This is confusing because something DID happen. I was there to witness it. But it wasn't a heart attack and even though they still don't exactly know what it was, there is most likely no other reason to keep her in the hospital. Especially since it's right next door to where she lives with a round-the-clock nursing staff and daily doctor visits anyway.

So now we just wait to hear what the cardiologist says and then

UPDATE: WHOO-HOO! It's just low-grade pneumonia!

Apparently she has a touch of lung stuff going on and it was making her breathe crazy or something and causing the pain. However that works. I don't know. They've given her the meds and she's going back to the nursing home today. She has to rest for about 10 days on these meds and then she can roll around again. And I get to leave her where I found her instead of in a hospital.

In case you don't read LJ on the weekends, my mom stopped by the hospital while you were gone...
She spent the weekend coming in and out of morphine, being monitored for blood pressure, having a CT scan, and being looked at by a cardiologist. Today there's going to be some kind of stress test that they induce while she's lying down.

We're assuming that she's going back to the nursing home today. If not today then tomorrow. I fly back to Los Angeles tomorrow no matter what and my brother and sister-in-law will handle this without me. They've done this in my absence before, back when she kept on having the T.I.A.'s (mini-stroke-like things), so it's not like I'm essential.

I chewed out hospital staff yesterday because no one was giving me the same information twice in a row. It's like the nurses play the Telephone game on shift change and come in to her room and ask ME questions or give conflicting reports. I ask them, in my least hostile sounding voice, why they're asking me about whatever it is when shouldn't it be in her chart already and why don't THEY know about it yet and does anyone write anything down and then does anyone else read it afterwards? I ask these things while trying to keep in mind

moroccomole's words about my surly Apple Genius Bar behavior. So now I'm sure I'm on her chart as Difficult Son, To Be Avoided. Except my younger brother is actually more hot-headed than I am. So when I leave late today they'll be getting him.

Do any hospital staff people--doctors, nurses, anyone--read this? Can you help me understand why this kind of thing happens? Is this normal? I tried, genuinely, not to be a dick yesterday, even though I was getting kind of freaked out. And, to be fair, it did get better once I complained to her doctor that I felt like I was being misinformed by misinformed people. Later in the day they were much more willing to double check on questions I had.

But DANG.

Yesterday's silent/low-volume movies on TNT or TBS or whatever channel the TV was on included "Predator," which is awesome, something with Jean Claude Van Damme and Roseanna Arquette, and the barfy "What Women Want." I hoped I'd never have to listen to Helen Hunt, playing a high-powered ad exec whose mind is being read and professional ideas being stolen by Mel Gibson, who can magically read lady-thoughts, have to choke out this line of dialogue again: "Nike wants to empower women." This is followed later by a full-length, full-screen-sized Nike commercial right in the middle of the movie.

I remember having to review that movie when it came out and remember writing something about how if Nike wanted to empower women they could skip Helen Hunt and her pals and start with the 8-year-old girls who make their shoes. I felt clever.

Today's cardiology moment.
So it was not just an extreme panic attack. It's something cardiac but also something probably, hopefully treatable. She rested in her room all day. I visited for most of the afternoon. She was partly awake and partly not. We watched some kind of Riddick movie with Vin Diesel on TNT with the sound off. Based on this silent version, I can say that Thandie Newton did more acting with her face than everyone else in that entire film, whatever it was.

She had some chest pains again. They gave her more of something that begins with "nitro" and I want to say was called "nitroglycerin" but I've always thought of nitroglycerin as something used to explode bank vaults on cop shows. So that's confusing.

She saw a cardiologist who ordered more tests. They keep taking her blood pressure. Yesterday it was crazy high. Today's it's too low. I have

moroccomole on email and phone duty with his entire family (there are seven doctors in the Duralde clan--no joke) to find out more information about what this might all mean.

My brother and sister-in-law and my four year-old nephew arrived and visited her for a while. I got into a five-second snippy "who knows best" face-off with my brother over moving her up in bed. I was against it and said to let the nurses do it. He was for it. He did it. He won. I checked her tubes. He had not upset them at all. So he still won there, too. This sucks for me, of course, because I've built a lot of my internal self-image on being righter than everyone else about everything.

I took more Xanax.

My brother just grilled a burger that he wrapped in aluminum foil first so that it turns crispy outside but keeps all the juice inside. It was amazing. Tomorrow I go back to the hospital and sit around some more.

Hey guess what? Yesterday my mom got rushed to the emergency room.
My mother is fully entubed, rubber-finger-pulse-monitored, oxygenated through her nose holes, pee-bagged, pain medicined, anti-nausea-syringed, cathetered with five different color plugs, and blood-pressure squozen every ten minutes. This is because I’m currently in the ER with her while we wait for her room. She’s been admitted to the hospital for the entire weekend and I’ve postponed my trip home to Los Angeles until Tuesday morning because of it.

It was all swell until about 2:45pm this afternoon. We’d gone to the Dallas Arboretum and rolled around in the hotness enjoying happy flowers. Then we had lunch. Then we went to Dollar Tree and she bought some totally necessary Reese’s Cups for her room. Then I brought her to Massage Envy, this new chain of relaxation massage places that are all suburban and cheery and economical and lavender. I’d brought her there before and that first time nothing went wrong. In fact, nothing went wrong this time for any Massage Envy-related reason at all. The massage hadn’t even begun. I rolled her into her appointment room, I transferred her from her wheelchair to the hydraulic table, I undressed her, helped her lie on her back, covered her with a sheet and then, without warning, she began to hyperventilate and got a panicked look on her face. She kept hyperventilating and touching her chest and began to cry. I righted her to a seated position and let her recline on me and yelled for the Massage Envy lady and said, “I think you need to call 911. I don’t know what’s happening here.”

In about five minutes there were approximately nine EMT guys in the room all asking me questions and hooking her up to stuff. Then they stretchered and loaded her into the ambulance. Happily, we were about five minutes away from the hospital, which in turn, is right around the corner from the nursing home where she lives. Her records were brought over and she was admitted and given blood work, an X-ray, an EKG and I don’t know what else.

She was freaked out and crying and going “MUH MUH MUH MUH MUH!” which isn’t incredibly informative, but is at least a type of communication, which means she wasn’t having a heart attack and dying on the spot. An hour later she was calmer, morphined to Sid & Nancy levels and dozing. The doctor or nurse, one of them, I can’t remember, came in and said something about chronic heart failure, which may or may not be what’s wrong, and which is also a confusing term to a non-doctor like me because “chronic” and “heart failure” don’t seem like things that should go together. One’s an ellipsis and one’s an exclamation point. But it seems to mean something like that your heart doesn’t work properly all the time and high-blood pressure (which she’s had for years) is a contributing factor in this non-working situation. If that’s even what’s the problem at all.

UPDATE:

It’s now Saturday morning. All that other stuff was yesterday. And yes, I sat in the ER next to her bed and wrote an LJ post because other than staring at medical equipment and a half-konked-out old lady they don’t have Activity Time in that place. And then being stuck doing all that nothing for five hours and then another 90 minutes to get her transferred to a room while waiting around for her nurse, who, seriously, is Marlee Matlin, to give me the 99 questions which must be asked of all lucid patients, gave me plenty of time to compose this. It was a wacky health history Q&A between her and my mother, by the way, and kept me co-translating for the duration.

Nurse: AAHHV EWWW EHHV DUHH COCAYY?
My mother: [confused face]
Me: Have you ever done cocaine?
My mother, laughing out loud: MUH MUH MUH MUH MUH!
Me: No, she’s never done cocaine.

Everyone says she’s going to be fine and that once they get her blood pressure back to normal and a stress test done and a cardiologist looks at her then she can go back to the nursing home, probably Sunday, maybe Monday. For all we know right now all she had was an extreme panic attack.

So I’ll be home Tuesday instead of today. After two hours in the ER she was waving me away and telling me to go home. Then after she got in the room she did the same thing. So I’ve promised not to haunt her hospital room all weekend. It was all stressful of couse but I don’t feel too freaked out. And I’ve got so much Xanax in me right now I’m floating in a sea of tranquility and dolphins are trying to have sex with me. They do that, you know. They try to have sex with people. I read that somewhere.