I was a dick when I was 12.

We used to visit the States every summer, and because I had absolutely no friends here, I’d spend the vacation months hanging out in comic book stores or sitting in front of my grandmothers’ televisions watching what I thought were totally hip and mainstream American shows like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Highlander.

Yeah… so my mom sent me to a few summer camps. She thought it would help acclimate me to American kids and the lifestyle should we ever have to move back. The logic is sound enough — but unfortunately for both of us, my mother was in a deep, deep denial as to what a tremendous asshole of pre-teen I was, and all of her endeavors to integrate me into what she thought was US youth culture were pronounced failures.

One of the camps was designed to help kids with lousy grades feel more motivated and self-confident by making them sleep in the same rooms with total strangers and do ropes courses and catch each other in highly dubious “trust falls.”

In retrospect, I recognize the camp as a place for kids afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder or Hyperactivity or, you know, Stupidity. I suffered from none of the above. I liked school and everything, but like I said, I was an asshole and just didn’t do my homework

Anyway, I’d long forgotten about that silly place until sometime last year, when $unny or one of the Ladies was talking about guys with terrifyingly small penises.

It was 1992 or so when I attended that camp, and as you no doubt recall, baggy clothes were the style of the day. Shit was baggier than even now, really, with that ridiculous Looney-Tunes-in-da-hood apparel being particularly popular amongst the posertronic white kids. 

One such person was in my camp group, and to this day I’ve never seen someone wear his clothes so baggy. I remember him for two reasons. Firstly, he was a bully, which was kind of strange because he was a ginger and quite short. Secondly, his shorts hung so low that during one of his Hyperactive shit-talking performances in front of the whole group, his penis stuck out over the top of his pants. It was sticking straight out at a right-angle, fully erect, yet was smaller than my 12-year-old little finger. 
Everyone exploded in laughter, and he just danced around saying things like, “Yeah, so what? You saw my dick! So what?” like he didn’t even realize how startlingly small his penis was. It was one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever seen. 

I digress — sort of. See, MySpace justified its existence once again yesterday, when I received the following message:

Did you ever attend a summer camp at the Claremont Colleges when you were younger?

I wasn’t there, but my sister Holly was a camp counselor. I remember she told me her favorite camper was a little boy named Andy Khouri from Singapore. It’s a bit odd I suppose, but I liked your name and it stuck in my memory. Thought of it today quite randomly.

Holy shit, right? That’s incredible! And later that night, the camp counselor herself signed up for MySpace and wrote me a letter!

You were 12, so you may not remember much of camp. I was one of your counselors…

You had a crush on a pretty blond girl … I think her name was Meghan? She may have been your girlfriend for all of five minutes. Much drama!

Mostly, I remember our group going to a ropes course and catching Joey, an, ahem, portly kid, when we did trust falls. I’m pretty sure you were making freaked out jokes that Joey was going to crush us all. And I’m pretty sure I told you to shut your little trap.

Your hair looks pretty much the same as it did at 12, ha!

Naturally, it’s thrilling to hear you are a writer. I’m glad to hear my fav camper is alive and well.

O_o

Even weirder, my counselor Holly ended up living in Idyllwild and reporting for the local newspaper, but left just before I moved there to start boarding school! Amazing!

Naturally, this whole thing is easily one of the most flattering things anyone’s ever said to me, and of course my mother was very pleased to hear about this development. Stepho was very impressed, too. However, both were disappointed to learn that at 12-years-old I was still saying things like, “Watch out or that fat kid will kill us all.”

::sigh::

New York Comic Con 2007.

In case you were unaware, I’m in New York and have been since last Friday. They’ve got a pretty big Comic Con out here, so here I am. This has been my first trip to NYC during which I did not become violently ill. Previous visits occurred at times when I was violently ill in general; deeply depressed and vulnerable to psychic attacks. None of that this time.

I spent minimal time at the Comic Con and most of it hanging out with my oldest friend Kendall, who I’ve known since we were 6th grade Boy Scouts at the Singapore American School (or SAS, as it is known). Kendall’s lived out here for a few years, working for a highly dubious “import/export” company, one that doesn’t actually have internet access at the office. Also, it is run by Germans, and overtly racist ones at that. Today is Kendall’s last at the company, and when he’s done drinking all the beer in the city tonight he is becoming a partner in a film/post-production company and continuing his sketch-writing work at Upright Citizens Brigade, something I am hugely envious of. Kendall’s always been one of if not the funniest and most talented people I’ve ever known, so that he was spending any amount of time at all in an internetless office facilitating god knows what for racist Germans is basically a crime against nature.

In addition to seeing Kendall , I finally got to hang out with Brendan on his home turf and meet some of the NYC Delphi crowd. Brendan, J-Love, Sam, McCardle and I bounced from joint to joint in truly heroic fashion, stunning everybody with our enormous hyphocity levels. We landed for a moment at a club called Stereo, one of those shiny, snobby places you see in films and TV shows about New York. Brendan’s Uncle Joe is an investor in the place, affording him the right to get in anyone the hell he wants. Still, we were met with tremendous static from the doorman, the most odious little fuckbitch I’ve encountered in years.

This guy looked like an Edward Gorey drawing. Short, fluffy black coat, scruffy beard, bowler hat with a fucking playing cardstuck in it. Are you fucking kidding me? He’d ignore us for several minutes at a time, but even when he would talk to Brendan, he wouldn’t look him in the eye. After about twenty minutes of this guy’s flak, denying there was a list, refusing to check with anyone about Brendan’s uncle, Brendan rightly decided that we were getting into this club no matter how bad it sucked or who we’d have to bother.

Unfortunately, the person we had to bother was Brendan’s 91 year old grandmother. Uncle Joe was visiting her, you see, and his cellphone was off. We stood out there in the cold, called Grandma McFeely, got Joe on the phone, and within a couple of minutes someone came out and cut us in front of the few dozen people in line — which I have no problem admitting always make me feel something like .05% of an orgasm. Gorey Lookin’ Fucktard tried to stop us, saying, “You can’t come in.”

The other much taller club guy put his hand on Gorey Bitch’s feathery chest and said, “Yes they can.”

PWN3D.

Gorey Bitch had to give each of us a little blue ticket before we could go in, but as he still wasn’t making any eye contact whatsoever, I refused to take the ticket when he handed it to me. I stood right in front of him and stared down into his shitty little eyes for — I swear to god — fifteen seconds before he finally stopped moving his head around and LOOKED AT ME. Then I took the ticket. 

Naturally, the club sucked and we bolted for parts unknown to me, losing Sam and McCardle somewhere along the way, and ending up finally in the Meatpacking District, in a sub-level stairwell illuminated by a blood-red light. Walking passed us on that stairwell were some of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen, too bad their attitudes were so nauseating. It was around 4:30am by that point and my bones were starting to liquify, so I said goodnight to Brendan and J-Love and ascended to street level. There I ran into Alana, with whom I’d been playing phone-tag most of the night. 

Alana and I met up on another night, in the Hudson Hotel’s beautiful bar, which is decorated in a bizarre collection of styles. The spacious bar is lit from beneath, the chairs are either plastic or cushioned, there is even a very large log to sit on, and the ceiling features some kind of hand-painted masterpiece. I don’t know that it’s actually a masterpiece, but I liked it. The drinks were inexpensive, the staff hot and the music good. Brendan, Kendall and Alana’s friend Meghan joined us, and from there we went to Decibel, a tiny, dark basement sake bar in what I think is the East Village. There we stayed for hours, killing numerous and freakishly large bottles of sake while telling stories about my ridiculous father.

Those in school or employed with proper jobs retired for the night, while Sam, his friends Corey and Marlo, and I hiked to a nearby sports bar to drink more booze and talk more shit. I can’t remember exactly why, but the focus of much of the conversation was on pubic hair maintenance, particularly the LA variety. There’s a phenomenon in Los Angeles, you see, of being able to go years in the city without ever seeing any pubic hair at all on a woman. 

I’m not hatin’, I’m just sayin’.

Last night was a marvelous get-together with a lot of the SAS survivors. Kendall, his girlfriend Camille, John, Ryan andPriya met me at dive bar Blue & Gold for a long night of remenicing, laughing, and — you guessed it — drinking! Talking points included superhero movies, arranged marriages, the kama sutra, the hormones in meat, psychopaths and zombies. I put four dollars into the jukebox — 12 songs — only one of which actually played (“River Deep, Mountain High” by Tina Turner [or by Ike & Tina Turner if you want to be an pedantic prick about it]). I didn’t notice the jukebox controls were sticky, and I was entering the wrong numbers without realizing it. I recognized little of what did play, so I put another dollar in and predictably selected New Order’s “Temptation,” Underworld’s “Born Slippy NUXX” and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” 

It’s always good to hang out with SAS kids. That we all live in the US now after spending formative years in a foreign country nobody else really understands creates in us a kind of bond, I think. Even though I hadn’t seen some of those people in four or five years, we still got along as well as we did then. It’s a shared experience thing. You know, like the holocaust survivors. 

New York wasn’t all pizza and booze, though. I had to write a few CBR articles during Comic Con, and during the weekdays I was hard at work just like everyone else. The sweet hotel suite Sam hooked us up with has a separate room with a desk and sofa, which became my de facto office for the week. With a great view of Times Square in front of me, I got a lot of work done for my various clients, which now include Helio. No, I did not write the “Don’t call it a phone” slogan. If any of you do use a Helio, though, I’d appreciate you letting me know so I can scan your brain about it. 

This whole transcontinental, mobile office, clients callin’, wifi stealin’ world is making me feel like a real grown-up, and I’m not sure I like it. I have to talk on the phone a lot, I have to get up early, I have to go to meetings, and the parking is enormously expensive. Not to mention airfare. I missed my plane again in LA last week, thanks to a fatal accident on the 405 that closed all lanes. Los Angeles was so sad to see me leave for any amount of time, it was literally killing itself. 

I managed to get a later flight, but it meant sitting in LAX for four hours. During that time I decided to apply for a job withAnticlown Media, the company behind sites like The Superficial. They required that I make up something on the spot, as if I were blogging for them and not just submitting something I’d written somewhere else. This is what I came up with:

Understanding the History of the Bush Administration Through the Prism of Britney Spears’ Baby Rat, part XLII in a Series.

Britney Spears exists; mostly harmless = Texas governorship.

Britney marries K-Fed, nauseates planet = 2000 election scandal.

“Fuck a wife”; planet <3 Britney = 9/11.

Britney <3 Paris; planet ablaze = Iraq.

Rehab-o-rama = World War III?

We Talk Shit — You Decide.

Well, I thought it was funny after four hours alone in the airport.

I was fortunate enough to upgrade to First Class at no additional cost, but that baseless feeling of superiority didn’t last long. “Passenger Amin,” I heard some woman squaking over the PA. I went up to see what the hell she wanted and it was to ask me if I’d mind giving up my First Class seat to an elderly peasant woman with diabetes, so that she and her similarly ancient husband could sit together. 

While I knew it’d make such a great story if I told that woman to take a long walk off a short pier (you have to speak to them in “lingo” they can understand), I agreed to let her take the seat. Luckily there was another seat for me, although a really shitty one way in the back. I felt I’d done the right thing, but decided to consult the various oracles in my life; my collective moral compas, just to make sure.

4:01 a.m.

A little while ago I made a promise to the universe to start blogging more in 2007, and here it is more than halfway through January and I’m only just now making my first proper entry of the New Year.

Typical.

For quite a long time, I didn’t believe in making promises. Plans either. It seemed as though every time I said out loud or in writing what my intentions were, I would end up disappointing others and myself with an unfinished result — if I even got around to putting my plan into action at all. Self-imposed deadlines, promises, schedules, timetables, lists… all of it was, I thought, based on my experiences, a formula for failure. So, I just stopped talking about what I wanted to do, whether it was about finishing a project, pursuing a girl, or even just reading a book. I actually believed things would get done when they got done, and that making an actual plan to do something would magically render it not done or unfinished into infinity.

As such — and I’m sure this will come as no surprise to the many sane people reading this— the last few years have seen me get practically nothing done. My brilliant plan to avoid making plans has proved to be the quickest route to oblivion, and with my early-twenties long gone and my mid-twenties barely visible in the distance, I’m forced to make a course correction.

I was in a much deeper hole once, not too many years ago. Really, it was a pit. Immense, dark and terrible, and for a time I couldn’t imagine my life being any different. Again, this is something that most of my readers and friends are only vaguely aware of, if at all. That you don’t know is, I think, part of the problem. 

I’m nowhere as deep as I once was. Despite the tone of this entry, I’m truly doing okay. I’m usually very busy, have a beautiful girlfriend, cool friends, a nice home, and a cute pet. But there is a feeing of stillness that is familiar, and if this is anything like what happened before, it’s a prelude to disaster. 

I feel as though I’ve accidentally wandered alone into a smoky, unfamiliar dance club and discovered that a psychopathic yet irresistible ex-lover is somewhere inside. The doors are locked behind me, and I’ve got to find another way to escape before I run into her and become trapped in a spiral of dysfunction, complacency and regret. 

The previous obstacle — the pit — was eventually overcome by changing my lifestyle in the most tremendous and difficult ways I could think of. One of those ways was putting myself out here, on the internet, somewhat like I’m doing right now. The rewards were profound, particularly in the way of new friends. Some of the people I met in person and online during that phase are still friends now. Many of them are just friendly. Sadly, many of them are now just acquaintances. Tragically, many of them are now I-don’t-even-know-where. Many, many, many people gave me their time, encouragement and friendship, and when I thought I was all better, I allowed those relationships to fade and in too many cases disintegrate completely. It wasn’t something I meant to do and I didn’t even realize it was happening. I hope it’s not too late to reconnect with those people who supported me more than I ever properly thanked them for. Hopefully, some of them are reading this now.

It was a goal to come back to Los Angeles and be a writer. The majority of my income comes from writing. In the years since returning, I’ve written a lot about music, comics, movies and other things for a number of employers, all of whom you’ve heard of, and for a good chunk of change. Still, I find myself feeling that stillness.

I love making a DJ mix that makes my friends dance, writing an article or review that makes someone buy a comic or a record, posting a picture that someone decides to save, or writing a book that someone decides to read. But while all that is nice, what I love most of all is the feeling of making something that I don’t think completely sucks. I wrote more than three-hundred pages of a book, posting chapter after chapter online as I went, with what must have been a thousand photographs to go along with them, not really knowing if anyone was even reading the thing. I’ve never been paid to do anything remotely that difficult or aggravating, yet I’ve never had so much fun in my life. 

For some reason I stopped doing anything like that. I thought I was better. But here I am, halfway into January 2007, feeling annoyed, regretful that I haven’t done anything in years I’m really proud of, and missing friends.

E-mails I write at work.

I’ve just seen the Daft Punk large for next week and it uses artwork from a very well known, previously released album. Enclosed is the proper artwork for this new release, so please fix.

Additionally, and I know this is very nerdy, but both James and I agree this is worth addressing. The LCD Soundsystem “Introns” artwork you’re using for the promotes is the iconic album artwork for the artist’s ultra famous debut record. As such, using it for this remixes and b-sides collection makes us look like n00bs. Our last highly dubious (and n00bious) intern couldn’t be bothered to find more diverse assets, which is why this happened. If this product ever comes up again, I’ll probably send new assets.

Yours in deep nerdery,

andy khouri
music department / sony connect

X-mas memories and Underworld.

The office xmas party was fun but weird. The boss kept feeding us tequila shots and while I expected people to fall over themselves and slip on each others’ puke, the evening remained pretty tame. The party was at the Mayan, which I haven’t been to since a warm summer night back in 1998, one of the best nights of my life.

I was 18 and living alone (pre-cat, even) in an apartment in Valencia, just hanging around waiting for school to start in a couple of months. I spent most of my time back then just driving around Los Angeles in the middle of the night in my then-new car and talking into a tape recorder. I happened to hear on the radio that my favorite band ever, Underworld, would be playing a show at some place called the Mayan and that it would be one of just three US dates they were playing to test out material from their forthcoming album. Also, the show was to be that night.

After one navigational and logistics obstacle after another, I got my tickets and made it to the Mayan in time, but only to be horrified by the fact that the best standing room was in the 21+ area. As you are probably aware, the Mayan’s ground floor is split into two levels, the upper of which being more ideal for concert-viewing and is accessible by two stair cases— which were both protected by large menacing security guards. As I was at the time really nerdy and didn’t like to dance (as opposed to now, where I am merely just really nerdy), the thought of being stuck in a crowd consisting largely of fat ravers and unable to see the band I loved so dearly filled me with a nameless dread. I decided I would not — could not— go down like that.

I hovered around the staircases for thirty or so minutes while the DJ played and the mutants danced, and when one of the security guards glanced in the other direction — possibly to kick someone out for trying to stab someone else in the eye with a glow stick — I stealthily dodged behind him, slid up the stairs like a ninja and found myself a comfy spot against the railing in remarkable Batman-like fashion. 

I say this with all seriousness: at the time, I definitely considered myself to be one of the coolest men to have ever lived. 

I was standing next to a gorgeous girl who like me was able to recognize what songs Underworld was playing in spite of their dramatic but glorious live improv/remixing. Tragically, she was with a boyfriend who clearly wasn’t into that kind of music and just sort of stood behind her and patted her hip every now and then to show everyone he was hitting it. I still remember precisely what she looked like, and I occasionally fight the urge to post a Missed Connections ad on craigslist about her. But I digress. 

Underworld were amazing. I’d never seen or heard anything like it, and what solidified in me was an almost spiritual understanding that even after leaving LA almost two decades before and living and traveling around the world, the city itself was welcoming me home. My true home. I mean, god, it was magnificent.

Last night at the Mayan, at the Sony xmas party, an ’80s cover band played. 

They’re called the Spazmatics. 

Yeah….