1001 Recipes for Sour Grapes

(April 07, 2002)

So I got into this spat with Joe Coughlin, on The Noise message board of all places. It was minor and already over before it began, but still. Public laundry-airing. Oooo, my favorite. You'd think we Noise peeps could be a little more supportive of each other. It makes me so mad-- I'm so often defending Joe's off-the-cuff writing style and grim humor, and what happens? He goes and starts in on me. I shouldn't even reply when Joe posts shit on the board that pisses me off. But there's a limit to how much of his passive-aggressive crapola a person can take. It's not even what he says, it's the WAY he says it. He uses this behind-the-hand style of commentary to insult you, and then when you respond he acts like YOU'RE the one with the problem. Or sometimes it's a "HA HA, you're so stupid you took my bait" kind of thing. What's the point? Is it fun to anger and insult people who're minding their own business and have nothing to do with you in the first place?

All that happened this time is, Joe didn't like the way Baldino wrote the Bound.4.Venus interview in the last Noise. Yes, it was a silly piece. But are people reading it? Yes. Are people talking about it? Yes. Does the band like it? Yes. Oh, but JOE doesn't like it. Stop the presses, the Style Tsar has spoken. Here's what he doesn't like about it: I happened to go to the B4V show that night, and on a whim Baldino pulled me into the interview too, which took place in the handicapped bathroom. Things got totally silly. We were in a small room with a TOILET in it, we all have a South Park kind of humor thing, and we were all drinking. Of COURSE things got silly. At one point Gene Dante (one of my top ten picks for sexiest guys in town by the way) looked at me mock-haughtily and said, "I'm bummed because no one asked me about MY vibrator." Gene was referring to my Cynthia von Buhler sidebar in the last issue, where my mini-interview with the inimitable visual and performance artist got into a whole "sex toy" milieu.

Needless to say, the final article in The Noise turned out to be one of those off-the-wall pieces, like when Kier took the Hip Tanaka guys on a thirteen-bar bender and asked one question at each beer. Or like when I mimicked the Tiger Beat teen-sensationalism style for my Bleu story last year. For Bound.4.Venus, Baldino hit on probably the only poetic device that would have gotten anybody reading the damn thing. B4V weren't even on the cover, yet that's the only article being talked about every day on the board. Pretty good press, I'd say.

Baldino has some kind of Popularity Fairy helping him out. People just love to talk about him. There's something new every week. And golly gee Mr. Peabody, could THAT be Coughlin's real problem?