The Lord Giveth...

Friends,

Before I get into this too deep, I want to say that it appears that mustachedom is getting somer serious heat. Our newfound friends over at the American Mustache Institute have gotten worldwide media exposure for their declaration that they will help anyone who has been unjustly discriminated against because of their mustache. Not only was their declaration mentioned in a British newspaper (not the Guardian, but the other famous one they got over there), and it got a mention on Harry Shearer's news/satire program called Le Show. Shearer, while not having a surname that really appears to be pro-shaving, was the only mustachioed man in Spinal Tap, so he knows a thing or two about being in the mustache minority. And check out that mustache he wore in Spinal Tap (yeah, probably fake, but I don't doubt a man like Harry Shearer could grow a sweet one...hell's he's also the voice of on of the Simpson's better mustaches, Ned Flanders...so he's responsible for some of pop culture's most iconic mustaches).

As for other news, let me tell you a story as to what's it's mostly been like to be Stache Guevera these past few weeks.

Months ago, I had my mom contact this loser cousin (yeah, it's harsh, but he's 38, still living at home, not paying rent, so I have a little bit of a right I think) of mine to try to hunt down this bootleg version of The Band's Last Waltz. I didn't expect him to find anything, but figured since Loser Cousin is into bootleg music collecting, he should be able to find what I wanted, which was, according to my research, a CD set from the soundboard of the entire Last Waltz show. Flash forward, my mom calls me to let me know that Loser Cousin, despite all odds, has gotten a bootleg version of the Last Waltz somehow and will be mailing it to me. I was thrilled to be getting it because, well, he's Loser Cousin, I figured he would have smoked a big stinky cereal bowl of weed and forgotten about it. However, my mom tells me that it's a "black and white DVD of the concert." Now, I'm surprised again because I didn't think such a thing existed because you think Scorese would have really been careful about allowing bootleg video considering the movie he made, and I wanted audio, so I could put it on my iPod, but nope, I got what I wanted, but not in the format that I wanted, but that's kind of cool because I didn't even know this existed. So I'm happy and disappointed all at once.

Couple days later, boom, DVD arrives. Nothing funny about the packaging, thank goodness, so I immediately throw the disc into the DVD player, and lo and behold, it is exactly what I was told, black and white bootlegs of the Last Waltz. Hot damn. Emily and I watch the first couple songs, skip to The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, watched it at full volume, and she sees that they played Evangeline and wants to skip to that song next, which is towards the end of the show sometime. We skip forward...DVD freezes. Just locks up big time. "Cocksucker!" says I, and keep fiddling with it, but it keeps freezing at the same point, right when they bring out Neil Young to play Arcadian Driftwood with them and Joni Mitchell. On the DVD Robbie says, "Let's bring Neil out for this one," then everything pauses. We tried playing the disc upside down, nothing. We peeled the label off the thing, just in case Loser Cousin is dumb enough to put a sticker over part of a double-sided DVD, tried playing it again, nothing. However, under the label, I discovered something.

Right there, on the disc it says, "playable only in DVD-R, Dual Layer players" Well, shit. I don't have one of those...but the campus does. So I take it to campus, slip it into a laptop with a DVD-R drive, and the disc has no issues, and plays right on. After a moment of sadness, I'm happy all over again. Then, without warning, right in the middle of one of the jam sessions, the DVD stops, and goes to the menu screen. "Cocksucker!" decries I. I flip over the DVD box, and while i didn't notice it before, the disc ends with "Jam Session #1," and the way the DVD ended, I only got about half of the Jam Session, if that much. But I do know that if you've seen the movie version of the Last Waltz, how it opens with the last song they play as a band, I don't have that on this apparent "complete" Last Waltz. So I'm disappointed again that Loser Cousin came through for about 7/8 of a bootleg. It's still more than I had seen before, but not the whole thing, as promised.

I still want to watch this thing at home so I decide that I need to burn this incomplete Last Waltz onto normal DVDs, not this dual layer shit. So I go to Best Buy, pick up a sleeve of DVD-Rs, and with a borrowed computer from campus, I tried to burn the Last Waltz, assuming that the DVD drive I used to play the disc should be able to burn it as well. Well, well, I was wrong again. See, the drive I had played the disc in was a DVD-RW drive, and when I tried to information to non-dual layer, regular ass DVD-Rs, the computer didn't like that, so I couldn't. "Cocksucker!" yells I. I was thwarted again by this cockamamie DVD.

Since then, it's been sitting on my desk mocking me with it's promise and frustration all rolled into one. That's what it's been like. Whether it's school work, the thesis, the goddamn St. Louis Cardinals. Promise and frustration, balled up together into a greasy wad. Good times.

VIVA EL MUSTACHE!