Month: February 2006

Who wants to get ripped off?

The Job Service With Monkeys has provided my name to a number of potential employers who have contacted me. Some seem to be scams of the variety that involve me promoting illegal or unethical products, such as no-fee life insurance for old folks (we lend you money at a high interest rate, you spend that money on crappy insurance from us, then when you die or default, we own your home!) Some seem to be scams of the “business opportunity” variety.

One is a sales job with an apparently legitimate financial services company. One that advertises on national TV. An applicant would take the Series 7 exam, wear a suit, and sell financial services by telephone. The thing is, I know someone who worked there once, who tells me that everyone spends the day with cocaine, cold-calling, and sexual harrassment. Since she wasn’t into doing coke or being sexually harrassed, it was basically just telemarketing hell in fancy clothes.

Mmmm, fancy clothes.

Update

Nat IM’d me last week to persuade me to join him in a trip to Tremblant, about an hour and a half northwest of Montreal. I didn’t have any snow gear, I hadn’t been snowboarding in six or eight years at least, but on the plus side the ride up would be free and I didn’t exactly have any obligations for the weekend. So, I went.

The theme song for the weekend turned out to be “Jenny”, from The Mountain Goats’ album “All Hail West Texas,” and its defining line “900 cubic centimeters of raw whining power, No outstanding warrants for my arrest. Hi diddle dee dee! Goddamn! The pirate’s life for me.” The lyrics, vocals, instrumentation, and production quality are all decidedly low to absent in that song, but it’s evocative of freedom and fun. Most importantly, it’s hilarious, especially when seven people sing it out loud while rolling down the windows in their overstuffed SUV as they pull up to the Canadian border in a snowstorm.

I guess you had to be there.

A doormat is good honest work– only the bored and the wicked rich don’t know that.

After three months of candidacy, I’ve gotten a final answer from my two favorite job prospects. And that answer is no.

The other position that’s called me back recently is through Americorps/VISTA, which is basically like the Peace Corps but domestically and for one year instead of two. I’d spend the year working for a local charity coordinating its volunteer efforts: duties would be mainly phoning, scheduling, and conducting orientation sessions, plus some heavy lifting and light praying.

It pays $900/month.

Sure, it’s volunteer work with a stipend, not a salary. But I nearly laughed out loud when they told me. Then I nearly laughed again when they told me that some of the students who typically do Americorps/VISTA actually qualify for food stamps.

When I was a child, $900 would have seemed like all the money in the world. Even when I was fresh out of college, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable compensation for a month’s work: $300 for rent, $300 for food, $300 for fun, clothes, savings, and emergencies. When did I get so greedy that $5.67 an hour seems like not enough?

Perhaps when I moved to a state where the minimum wage is $6.75.

I feel very conflicted about this. If I really cared about social justice, wouldn’t I leap at this opportunity?

I’ve been flickering

The Somerville Community Path covers old rail lines between Alewife Station and Davis Square, and then on towards Cedar St. There, it stops, and the old rails lie rusting. I saw them and I thought, anyone can tell you there’s no more road to ride.

But then I took some other pictures, and they seemed to tell a completely different story. It begins with hey, we can go down behind the old factory near Murdock St. We can be alone back there, make out on that old sofa my aunt threw out, drink some beers I stole from my dad’s fridge. We’ll ride there on my new moped.

Hub Man Injured in Atom Blast

For awhile, I thought that the terrible Globe website was a strategy to drive more people to the print edition, but by now I’m pretty sure it’s just incompetence. For crying out loud, I don’t ask much from a newspaper. Bad reporting, bad website, bad books section, the abortion that is the Sidekick section…. and we still got the Sunday Globe, mostly for the crossword. But this… this is absurd: the idiots accidentally distributed the credit card information of a quarter million subscribers along with the Sunday Worchester Telegram and Gazette. Insane.

Rolling Stones vs. Britney Spears vs. Cat Power

I’ve mentioned before how much I love cover songs, the way that they add additional layers to an existing cultural touchstone. For those of you immersed in literary theory, it works on the same principle as Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. My recent favorite is a version of the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” performed by Cat Power.

The original lyrics by the Stones, for those of you unfamiliar with the song, conflate the unfulfilled promise of advertising with the unfulfillment of sexual rejection. It’s one of those songs everyone has heard at least a few times, and therefore ripe for a cover version.

The Britney Spears version drops the lines about sexual rejection and becomes a straight-ahead critique of how advertising and media demand conformity and inspire dissatisfaction with the self. It’s a wholesome independent-girl message, which is probably why it also skips the line about cigarettes (despite the fact that Spears is rumored to smoke two packs a day). In this song, the advertisers don’t hold out a promise, but dictate to the listener “how tight my skirts should be.” This version, I’m afraid, really does the opposite of what a good cover does: it strips away layers of meaning, creating something simpler and less interesting. I suppose that’s what to expect from Spears and her team.

The Cat Power version, which is obviously my favorite, drops the chorus, but keeps all the verses. Also, crucially, it keeps advertising as a metaphor rather than a literal focus of the song. In fact, this version intensifies the focus on unfulfilled sexual promise, adding layers of longing and romance to it. The key change in lyrics turns it into a lamentation rather than a cry of frustration: Where the Stones sing about being rejected by a possible sexual conquest (“trying to make some girl / who says baby better come back next week”), Cat Power vocalist Chan Marshall is begging for the return of a lover (“trying to make some boy / baby baby baby come back”). Then, instead of ending by rocking out about not getting laid, she returns to “I’m tryin’, and I’m tryin’, and I’m tryin’…”

Wikipedia has a whole history of the song, plus a list of other cover versions, including one made for Sesame Street called “I Can’t Get no Cooperation.”