#139 - documenting genius.

since i'm a genius myself, i feel like i'm qualified to say that the best part about being one is that if you end up going off the rails at some point, there's a good chance that folks will just chalk it up to you being an eccentric, madcap intellectual & just let you be your babbling, holes-in-your-shoes self. my favorite type of insane genius is the mad, musical type, so over the past week i checked out two films that document the lives of two such geniuses--wesley willis & lil wayne.

the first film--wesley willis's joy rides--came out on dvd last week & to mark its release, pitchfork had it available for viewing all last week, so i checked it out. the film gives us a glimpse into the life of wesley willis, the late artist from chicago. willis, who was known as much for being a for being a 300-pound schizophrenic as he was for being a prolific artist, released hundreds of songs in his lifetime. they're all simple pop songs with simple, humorous & sometimes obscene lyrics that almost always end with a company's tagline. there's "northwest airlines," which ends with "american airlines. we mean business in chicago." there's "oprah winfrey," which ends with "johnny rockets. it's the original hamburger." there's his biggest hit--"rock n roll mcdonald's"--which ends with "wheaties. breakfast of champions." obviously.

in addition to his musical output, willis also did countless ink pen drawings of chicago as he saw it, usually in extremely intricate detail. the filmmakers speak with him a lot & it's obvious that he was troubled, consumed by demonic voices that "shouted profanity at him" & as he described it, took him on "hellrides." still, until he died of complications from leukemia, he was known as a jovial guy & a prolific artist & the film does a great job of capturing both that & his mental troubles.

the second film--the carter--came out on dvd a few weeks back. it follows lil wayne around during the time that his last album (the carter III) was released & is directed by adam bhala lough, whose 2002 film bomb the system focused on nyc graffiti & won some festival acclaim. he does a good enough job telling the story of lil wayne. i'm only familiar with wayne based on his prolific output over the last few years & although i like what i've heard, i've never been able to understand what all the hype was about. it was that sense of "seriously...why is this guy so huge?" that made the carter an interesting film for me.

from what i've heard of his music, his beats are kind of boring, but the dude has a ridiculously intelligent lyrical vocabulary & carries a recording setup with him wherever he goes. from what i've heard of his lifestyle, dude's smoking blunts & rapping 24-7 & artists who are never sober but still manage to be both good & prolific intrigue me. the film opens with a disclaimer that lil wayne refused to do a proper interview, but regardless, after 90 minutes of seeing him in hotel rooms & on the bus, i was left with the feeling that he really thinks that he's the best rapper alive & until somebody else puts as much passion into rapping as he does, i'm not going to argue with him or fault him for smoking blunts 24-7.

so why did i enjoy these two films so much? it's largely because i'm obsessed with music & a lot of what i enjoy is made by mad musical geniuses. although the documentary i recently watched about him was totally boring, pink floyd's syd barrett & his descent into LSD insanity both make me sad & curious. when i watched the devil & daniel johnston, i was more interested in why daniel johnston has become a disturbed cult musician than in his music. artists are generally off by nature & when i get to see what makes them tick, i can't help but think that if they were "normal," it just wouldn't be the same.

#139 - documenting genius.
snack: mcdonald's grilled chipotle bbq snack wrap
drink: dixie blackened voodoo lager



in honor of the late wesley willis & his undying love for rock n roll mcdonalds, tonight i'm snacking on a mcdonald's grilled chipotle bbq snack wrap. since wesley died in 2003 & the snack wrap wasn't introduced until 2006, he never got to sample the wonder of the mcdonald's snack wrap, but i'm sure he would've wrote a sweet song about it if he'd had the chance. it'd be all like "mcdonalds snack wrap. you are healthy to the max. i like to eat you. you go good with the rock" with his signature keyboards behind it. it'd be way better than any song mcdonald's has ever used in any of their ads.

the grilled chipotle bbq snack wrap...as a snack, it's aight. i've eaten a ton of them in my day & if i had to choose a favorite snack wrap, the grilled chipotle bbq one would definitely win. since it's built back on the mcdonald's assembly line, it never comes out looking as awesome as it looks in their ads & signage, but they slather it in bbq sauce & i can easily be distracted by the right amount of bbq sauce. on top of that, they put it in a wrap. if you've been following the trends of the past decade, you know that that means that it's exponentially healthier. as far as chicken goes, the meat's pretty white & essentially acceptable, although i just saw food inc this past weekend & i'm pretty sure that the chickens that gave their lives to make my snack wrap didn't enjoy a life of struttin' in the meadow.

to pay tribute to lil wayne, i'm washing down the snack wrap with a bottle of new orleans' own dixie blackened voodoo lager. i was planning on trying out drank, the "relaxation beverage" that helps you "slow your roll" & is named after the cough syrup & soda concoction popularized by rappers like lil wayne. i stopped into hundreds of bodegas & corner stores over the past week trying to locate a can of the stuff to no avail, so i picked up a bottle of the blackened voodoo instead. it's made by the dixie brewing co, a brewery that has been around for just over a hundred years but is in bad shape these days because of what katrina & the successive looting did to the brewery. apparently their website got looted too.

i first tried the blackened voodoo just after college, when i was living with this guy named dave who was a mad genius in his own right & one of the first people i knew who picked up six packs of good beer. at the time, i was more of a "twelve-pack of red dog" sort of guy, but dave would occasionally come home with six packs of stuff like the blackened voodoo & offer a few up while we sat around & talked about the mysteries of bog butter. i remembered the blackened voodoo being a lot darker & blacker, but it's actually a dark brown sort of color & is smoother than i remembered. i'm probably just remembering it that way because i like to think that my past was darker than it actually was though. after all...a dark past is a sign of a true genius.

#138 - the limits of my patience.

a little over a decade back, i was a plucky, naive & young boston university film student without a care in the world. growing up in NH, the pinnacle of film for me was a few good men, but soon after i arrived at school, i discovered that there were a million films out there, independent & otherwise, that were much better than a few good men. i'd thought that i loved film, but it was during that time that really fell in love with film. it was also during this time that i came across the films of the man who became my favorite director, jim jarmusch. he has this style of storytelling where it's about the characters & not the story, where he doesn't beat you into submission with the plot. often, there isn't even a plot to speak of in his films. instead, there are beautifully shot scenes where characters who always seem to be on the move drive the film forward through dialogue. i eat that shizz up & to me, his films are a perfect example of film as art.

about a week back, i finally checked out his latest film, the limits of control, which came out on DVD back in mid-november. it stars isaach de bankolé as "lone man," a criminal on an undefined mission in spain. a lot of critics hated it. it's definitely the most minimalist of all his films & i have no doubt that it's a difficult film for the average movie goer to handle. i even had to go back a few times this week & watch it again to fully understand what he was going for. still, it's definitely SLOW going. you can count the lone man's lines of dialogue on your two hands & throughout the entire film, we're not even clear as to what his objectives are. all we know is that he's in spain & he keeps meeting people (none of who have names) at cafes, where they exchange matchboxes with pieces of paper in them that appear to give him the next steps in his vague mission.

jarmusch has always enjoyed meditating on repeated imagery & scenarios in his films (see 2003's coffee & cigarettes) & in this film, he meditates on this cafe matchbox-swapping scenario, pairing a dead-silent de bankolé with a host of characters played by such folks as john hurt, tilda swinton & gael garcía bernal. each character he meets has their own personality & through comparing these personalities & the lone man's reactions to them, we get some idea of who the lone man is. that's the central device jarmusch uses in the film. since he's paired the lone man up in one-on-ones with a cast of characters, the lone man doesn't even have to speak for us to get a sense of his character. in addition to the cafe scenes, there are appearances by paz de la huerta (who plays "nude" & is totally true to her name in EVERY scene she's in) & bill murray (who appears late in the film).

every shot in the film is artfully constructed, which, along with the fact that you never quite know what's going on, helps to give the film a dreamlike feel. jarmusch was definitely going for a dreamlike feel. in the dvd extras, there's a "making of the film" documentary that opens with jarmusch walking the streets of spain, talking about what is essentially his motivation behind the film. he says that he likes music, so he knows a lot about music. he also knows a lot about the history of movies. although he knows about & enjoys those things, he is more fascinated by all the things that he doesn't yet know about. in the limits of control, there are a lot of things that you don't know, but if you're okay with that, you'll enjoy it for what it is...a film that's not his best but is still a work of art.

#138 - the limits of my patience.
snack: r.w. garcia organic veggie tortilla chips
drink: maine root root beer



to keep myself busy the first time i watched the limits of control, i snacked from a bag of r.w. garcia organic veggie tortilla chips. r.w. garcia's a san jose-based company who's been making "premium tortilla chips since 1982." they're relatively primo, i suppose. the veggie ones are tall-natural & organic & gluten free, so they've got the healthy snack thing going for them. with the veggie ones, you get three flavors--spinach & garlic, red beet & onion and carrot, tomato & sesame. out of the three, i preferred the red beet & onion ones, but the flavor in the chips is baked in & subtle, so i didn't notice a huge amount of difference between the three.

according to the bag, they're "for more than just salsa" & although they are pretty good just on their own, i ended up eating them with a number of different salsas over the past week. it's mostly because i've been growingly increasingly obsessed with fruity salsas recently, ones made with peaches & raspberries & such, so i had to indulge that obsession. the veggie chips made a nice complement, especially since they're a firm, crunchy chip that you can scoop a good amount of salsa on to. like i said though, you don't need salsa. maybe you're a communist & you hate salsa. you can still enjoy these chips & i'll try to avoid questioning your twisted motives.

for my beverage, i went with a bottle of one of my favorite beverages of late, maine root root beer. it's brewed out of scarborough, maine by two brothers who formed the company four years ago. they started it after one of the brothers, who worked at a portland restaurant & was sick of the sub-par root beer selection there, began brewing his own root beer. four years later, they're brewing a ginger brew, a sarsparilla & blueberry, lemon-lime & mandarin orange sodas in addition to the root beer. they even have a pumpkin pie soda that they brewed a batch of for the fall, which i can say from experience is pretty damn good but also pretty damn sweet. they're available all around the country & if you've got a whole foods near you, you'll find their stuff there.

as for the root beer, it's one of the best root beers that i've tried to date. it doesn't have an overly carbonated makeup like you find in commercial root beers like a&w and barq's, so when you pour it, it settles nicely in the glass, with a head & everything, just like a draft beer would. when you drink it, it also has the same smoothness as a draft beer. if you're used to drinking commercial root beers, the flavor of the maine root root beer's very similar, but with less carbonation & syrup mucking up the flavor, making for a much more enjoyable beverage. it's made up of all-natural ingredients like extracts of wintergreen, clove and anise & overall, it's just a cleaner, better drinking experience. as far as root beers go, it's a work of art.

#137 - you down with ODB?

i'm not sure how many of you are aware of this, but in order to enter the wu-tang, you must bring the ol' dirty bastard type slang. it's true. ODB said so on "da mystery of chessboxin'," off the wu-tang clan's debut album enter the wu-tang (36 chambers). if you're looking to bring the ol' dirty bastard type slang, all you have to do is put some marbles in your mouth & go on an offbeat, occasionally sung rant. the rest will take care of itself. ODB, who died of a drug overdose back in november of 2004, would have been 41 this past sunday. in honor of his birthday, i spent a good part of the day hanging out at my apartment whilst blasting his two solo albums from my tiny apple speakers & doing a bunch of head boppin'.

his 1995 debut album, return to the 36 chambers: the dirty version, is my favorite of the two, with tracks like "shimmy shimmy ya" & "brooklyn zoo." on it, you get a bounty of half-sung, half-rapped lyrics like "cause I create rhymes good as a tasty cake." there's even a song with him singing the chorus to "somewhere over the rainbow." obviously. over four years later, he released his second album, nigga please, with plain white album art featuring nothing but a photo of him jheri-curled up like rick james. it's a funkier album at times & features two neptunes' produced tracks. the first is a sweet cover of rick james' "cold blooded," which is perfect for ODB, who loves to get to warblin' every once in a while. the second is "got your money," which was the album's only single & also helped introduce the world to kelis, who we've since forgotten about.

by that second album, he was getting into a lot of good ol fashion trouble, which led to the four year wait between albums. we're talking arrests, gunshot wounds, drug possession, life as a fugitive, jail time...all that good stuff. in 97, he took a limo to the welfare office to pick up his check, all while an mtv crew filmed him. remember the 1998 grammy awards, when he took the mic before shawn colvin gave her acceptance speech, rambled for a bit & declared that "wu-tang is for the children?" that was awesome. it was like my generation's "imma let you finish." that was around the same time when he starting calling himself "big baby jesus," just one of many pseudonyms he used over the years. so yeah, his rapping was epic but his behavior was too...sad but entertaining.

his legacy lives on. this past tuesday, a new, posthumous ODB album entitled message to the other side (osirus part 1) came out on money maker entertainment. the record was created from the wu-tang vaults & features a ton of guests, including the RZA on a quarter of the tracks. it even comes with a bonus DVD. i'm extremely skeptical of posthumous albums. they're often culled together from existing material, which is often sparse. plus, i'm of the opinion that wu-tang productions have declined in quality over the years, so there's a good chance that the album could be absolutely awful. hopefully it's not though. ODB doesn't need some lame posthumous album sullying his reputation like that.

#137 - you down with ODB?
snack: dirty chips funky fusion flavor
drink: arrogant bastard ale



since sunday was ODB day, i chose to snack on a bag of funky fusion flavor dirty chips while i listened to his albums. the funky fusion flavor's one of a few new flavors that dirty chips just put out (along with smoky chipolte & pesto parmesan). according to their website, which appears to have been designed some time back in the nineties, the funky fusion flavor "defies description! a little sour, no, a little sweet, no, a little salty, no, a little creamy, no, a little tangy, no........just enjoy!" dear dirty chips. your use of punctuation is too radical even for my tastes. NINE commas in one sentence? what is that? a triple ellipsis? seriously though, unless the owner has a thirteen-year old daughter & she's writing copy for the website, you should probably watch it with the punctuation. thanks.

since i'm a professional, despite dirty chips' claim that they defy description, i'm going to attempt to describe them. i figure it's the least i can do, so here goes: they taste sort of like a spring roll from a thai restaurant. see? that wasn't so hard. they definitely have an asian flavor to them & in classic dirty chips style, that flavor is in abundance. there's a lot going on with them. it's like an EXPLOSION of funky fusion. as for the texture, you can't beat the crunch of a dirty chip. still, even though they're kettle cooked & all natural, they're slightly greasy & full of a bunch of fat & sodium. health concerns aside, i definitely enjoyed them though.

to complete sunday's ODB tribute, i had a 22 oz bottle of arrogant bastard ale along with the funky dirty chips. the arrogant bastard's made by stone brewing co., who brews out of sunny san diego. a little known fact about san diego (home of the padres & ron burgundy): discovered by the germans in 1904, they named it san diego, which of course in german means a whale's vagina. i guess that the devilish dude on the front of the bottle is the arrogant bastard. he's kind of a lil bitch. in order to access his website, in addition to certifying that you're 21, you have to certify that you're "not a fizzy yellow beer drinking ninny here under false pretenses." according to the front of the bottle, i'm not worthy of drinking it. screw you arrogant bastard devil mascot. you don't know me.

the arrogant bastard's beer is decidedly less arrogant than his website & bottle. the ale pours with a dark reddish-orange color & a rich, hoppy smell. with the abundance of hops & all the bastard's talk about arrogance, i was expecting a harsh taste, but it's actually pretty smooth & drinkable & it's definitely something that i'm going to return to in the future. i'm pretty sure it's not something ODB would have drank, but i wasn't really in the mood for a 40 oz of old english this weekend. forty ounces are more of a summertime thing for me. anyway, at least it's brewed by someone who believes in carrying on the good bastard name. i think that'd make ODB proud.

#136 - momma's boy.

let's hear it for moms or at let's at least hear it for the non-psycho moms, the moms who don't drown their kids in lakes. the moms who care about their offspring & have to because their ovaries tell them to. my mom's one of the good ones. to use a term a college friend often used, she's a "good egg." even growing up, when i was supposed to be at odds with her, i was cool with her for the most part. heck, she bought a few of us a sixer of our favorite beers one snowy christmas break night in college, when we were at the house & still pre-21. after seeing the way many parents treat their kids here in nyc, i realize that i had it pretty sweet. when i was born, my mom was 21 & my dad was 23 & while they were young & not without fault, they sort of figured out how to raise kids. they met at kate's, a now defunct bar in boston's now-mallified kenmore square. she was a young girl out of westboro, mass, the worcester county town that's famous for being the birthplace of eli whitney. cotton gin, bitchez!

you can never truly tell what'd gone on in a person's life unless you ask & i tend to not ask much, but this is the impression i've formed in my head about her pre-me existence. she lived in a small massachusetts suburb, the oldest of three kids born to two of the genuinely nicest people i've ever known. they were friendly neighborhood folk who went to church every sunday. my mom's always had asthma, so i think that led to some sheltering by her parents, but in her high school yearbook, there's a quote that says something like "she may look quiet, but look again." scandalous! i mean, it makes sense. she can be quiet, but she can be jokingly hilarious as well. i like to think that much of my sense of comfort around other human beings comes from her.

since i'm slightly obsessed with music, i often identify her by the music she listens to. i know that she saw a very early aerosmith show at some boston club. back in the eighties she used to occasionally go dancing with friends. the first time i heard appetite for destruction was from her copy of it. on cassette! there was a period of time where she listened to joan jett a lot, but that has to do with one particular song & that's a whole other topic that i'd rather not get in to. she liked the traveling wilburys for a while & from that, i learned of roy orbison, tom petty & dylan...although at the time, i only knew of them as the members of some old guy supergroup. i'm not sure what she listens to these days, but i'm assuming it's at least something rocking. is there even anything new & rocking out there? she can't be listening to japandroids.

so yeah, she's not entirely perfect, but i think she's lived through whatever she's lived through & come out on the other end as a pretty respectable person. she's worked the same job (at a nursing home) for almost thirty years now. she still goes to church & in my mind, embodies what religion should be. she's roman catholic & enjoys church for the sense of morals & community she gets from it. she's even got my dad to start going & he's ten times more relaxed & part of the community than he ever was during my childhood. according to my sister, momz sometimes reads this here blog & i'm sure my sister will notify her about this particular entry, so i might as well get this out of the way...mom, forgive me for the use of "bitchez" in describing your hometown. it was all in the interest the funny. eli whitney...inner city slang...funny! see?

#136 - momma's boy.
snack: david's dill pickle sunflower seeds
drink: schweppes ginger ale



about a month back, my sister was home visiting & she was at some windham-area store with my mom. they were totally thinking of me because my mom sent me a text message (she text messages & emails now!) that read "we got you dill pickle flavored sunflower seeds." it was accompanied by smiley face clip art. a week or so later, i got a package in the mail with that bag of david's dill pickle sunflower seeds & my childhood stuffed animal, george (who will soon become blog famous if my plan comes to fruition). as for the seeds, it's a 5.25 oz bag, which if you're keeping score at home, is a TON of sunflower seeds. like, if ALL the chickadees & sparrows in my childhood backyard enjoyed the sweetly sour taste of pickles, this bag could feed them for at least a forknight.

i got a lot of use out of them for a while. i was trying to cut down on my smoking (mom wasn't happy to learn i'd started back up), so sunflower seeds are the perfect snack for filling that oral fixation. like most sunflower seeds, these particular ones are all about the salt, but there's also that natural dill pickle flavor in the mix, so they're extra sodiumtastic. i was digging them for a while & got in the habit of bringing them back & forth from work with me, often devouring them at such tremendous rates that between the saltiness & the jaggedy shell cracking, i actually burnt the roof of my mouth a bit a few times over the course of the last few weeks. i've cut back on them over the last week or so, so there are still a bunch left. they'll be around for a while. hell, i'm assuming i'll be munching on them the whole ride home to nh for T-day.

growing up, whenever i was sick my mom would pour me a glass of ginger ale & stir out the bubbles. from what i learned, it's good for an upset stomach. i'm not sick or anything, but i am ten days caffeine-free & at the beginning of a foolish venture into caffeine withdrawal, so i picked up a bottle of schweppes ginger ale to try to fill the void. i've been cutting back on my soda intake for a while, so i figured that i'd work on the caffeine intake first. cutting out soda's just not a realistic goal. maybe i could handle cutting out soda with HFCS in it, but i can't cut out soda altogether. it's too damn tasty & fun to just kiss goodbye.

along with canada dry, schweppes' ginger ale is what i think of when i think of ginger ale, which is like all the time! not really. sorry, ginger ale. i really only think of you when i'm trying to run away from caffeine. overall, you're not the most exciting soda. you go well with cranberry juice & many mixed drinks & whatnot, but by yourself, while you can be refreshing, you're a decidedly unflashy soda, just a few rungs above club soda. at least 7-up has limon. still, i see a lot more of you in my future, so i guess i'd better get used to you. you're nice & all, but seriously, i don't want to hear you complain when, to avoid drowning in your boredom, i start buying a mess of cranberry juice to drown you in first. it'll be carbonated murder! oops. sorry about joking about murder too, mom.

#135 - abstruse adjectives.

monday marked the octennial anniversary of a grand day in our great nation's history, that historic day back in 2001 when the crucial USA PATRIOT act was signed into federal law by the best 43rd president we ever had, GWB. since that stupendous day, this terrorist-preventing bill has remained strong. i mean, has there been a horrific terrorist attack in the good ol u.s.a. since 9/11? not that i can recall, so today, we're going to celebrate the two day-old anniversary of that momentous bill signing with a grandiloquent display of out of sight adjectives. it's going to be scrumtrulescent!

...so the amazingly heroic USA PATRIOT act. thank almighty god that our gracious government came up with it. it's always working hard to keep us hard-working u.s. citizens safe with a solid, balanced diet of law enforcement enhancements, terrorist-thwarting legislation & unprecedented data collection, with some occasional messy fingerprinting mixed in. a little-known fact about the glorious PATRIOT act: there's a special section in there where if you make tasteless light of the infallible bill on your radical left-wing blog, you'll be whisked off to the southeastern edge of a tropical communist island within twenty-four hours. true story.

hold on a cotton-pickin' second. i just remembered something. in michael moore's award-winning documentary farenheit 9/11, there's an eye-opening scene where the crafty filmmaker is in washington d.c. & he catches a couple of u.s. senators basically saying "we don't actually read the bills. that would take too long." i sort of wish they would have at least read the freedom-altering bill instead of rushing it through in a knee-jerk bluster, especially since it gives our curious government & inquisitive law enforcement officials some pretty awesome powers.

you know what? now that michael moore has made a totally bold statement & in the process, made me think about it, the controversial USA PATRIOT ACT is pretty much the most injudicious piece of governmental legislation that the unrepentant bush administration gave us. a whole bunch of orwellian provisions in this satanic bill are set to expire on december 31st of this quickly-fading year, but i have scant faith in anything changing. i mean, we can't get rid of the PATRIOT ACT, right? if we did, crafty terrorists, determined to undermine our precious freedoms, would instantly begin flooding our preeminent cities with muslim bombs. if we were to let the shining sun set on those wide-sweeping provisions, well that'd just be plain unpatriotic. it'd be a downright flag-hating act.

#135 - abstruse adjectives.
snack: zesty tomato terra chips
drink: arizona mucho mango



when searching for an ambrosial snack worthy of PATRIOT act day, i was looking for something with a tantalizing name, something that made me want to go on an intrusive "sneek & peek" or tap into an innocent person's mobile phone. i found that pined-for snack in zesty tomato terra chips. these tasty treats aren't your everyday chips. they're exotic vegetable chips made from taro, ruby taro, sweet potato, yuca, batata & parsnip. it's a very healthy, chromatic mix of chipified veggies seasoned with tomato, worcestershire & celery. basically, you could toss some vinegary horseradish & a few hefty shots of top-shelf vodka in with the zestily-spiced chips, swirl everything around & you'd have yourself a fernand petoit-approved bloody mary.

my absolute favorite of the vivid vegetables is the ruby taro. it's mellifluous & flavorful & the chip version of the festive ruby taro drove my middle-aged mouth wild with repressed excitement. for a while, i singled a privileged bunch of them out from the sorry rest of the plebian chips because they were clearly too good to be in the lowly company of those other inferior vegetables. that's not to say that i didn't enjoy the other ones. since i got 15% MORE CHIPS FREE in the bag & they have NO TRANS FAT, i eventually went to the proverbial town on all the chips equally...just because i could. i'm loco like that.

i felt that it was muy importante that i found a refreshing beverage that reminded me of the refreshing USA PATRIOT act. the arizona mucho mango definitely fits that bill. it's named for the state where both aging senators love the PATRIOT act & it's MUCHO & made with 5% juice. wait. that doesn't sound like MUCHO mango. hmm. if you visit the arizona beverage website, you'll come across a totally hip music player featuring rocking, cutting-edge musical acts like this blue holiday, laser blade & a rag-tag bunch of other no-name bands. while you're there, you should head over to the smoove AZ lounge. it's like a graffiti wonderland! you should check it out if you want to be boss.

the mucho mango is mucho sweet, basically because the second ingredient after filtered water is high fructose corn syrup. i guess there wasn't enough mango puree or pear juice to make it taste sweet, so the inventive folks at arizona decided to go all the way. on a serious note, i had to take a brief break part way through drinking it. i felt like my train-wreck teeth were buzzing from the herculean amount of HFCS. it could just be a microscopic listening device implanted in my unsuspecting incisor by the nefarious government while i slept, but i want to be an unwaveringly-true patriot, so i'm just going to grin & bear it, like i did with the sacchariferous arizona mucho mango.