Hey Jason,

Kudos to posting one of the most viewed Youtube videos in the history of the tube encouraging the public to “you” themselves; we just think you might be at risk of beating this whole Kony thing to death… might be.

We get it! You love Joseph Kony – and who can blame you – according to your video tribute he’s incredibly charismatic; I mean you’d have to be to wrangle in all of those kids. I did my research, and statistically he’s the most successful foster parent in the world (in sheer volume).

We get it! You felt compelled to introduce Kony to the general public; you clearly feel it’s your duty. I mean we had never heard of him before you. News outlets like CNN and Democracy Now! had certainly never spoke of him before.

We get it! You want to promote Kony’s Type-A personality. With all the cyber bullying and astronomical teen suicide rates in the United States, what better a role model!

We get it! You have longed to be a celebrity, after all, you certainly look like one (notice the photo above which shows Russell modeling a lady’s wig). And now with the support of such self-esteem promoting role models like Rihanna and Chris Brown, you’ve finally made it!

We get it! You’ve changed the world by showing home footage of you explaining Kony to your four year old who clearly understands such concepts. Again, Kudos!

And I think we can all appreciate your focus on how this is of course the United State’s fault. After all, it’s apparent that no other country besides the United States is capable enough to handle their own cultural, socioeconomic, and political conundrums. Those idiots.

Keep up the good work!

As of late, since occupying my new home city of Fort Collins, interested parties have asked me what the Lowbrow Sophisticate is all about: what is a Lowbrow Sophisticate? Are you born one? Can you become one? And how does lowbrow sophistication translate to a website such as this one? To be completely truthful, the chosen title took no time at all to arise, and as much as I would like to take credit for its profundity, it was a label adorned upon me beneath the prosthetic snooty guffaws of a graduate school professor of mine, escaping from behind a yellow ivory fence of crooked British teeth as he leaned forward, polishing our Bruce Wayne-sized seminar table with the sewn on tweed elbow patches of his corduroy blazer. I forget his name.

For the sake of storytelling, I had just given my quiet opinion on a now forgettable Shakespeare sonnet while surrounded by a dozen trustafarians who tried far too hard to present themselves as poor and wrongfully broken and not nearly hard enough to come across as relatable, let alone likable in any way whatsoever. My answer (also forgettable), whiffed around the room like an off-putting cologne – perhaps a bit due to my mealy-mouthed southern Wisconsin drawl – and was received with quiet condescension. The aforementioned professor made sure I was looking right at him before making the proclamation in the form of a question, “Mr. Monroe, has anyone ever told you that you are quite the lowbrow sophisticate?”

My initial reaction of course was, “Fuck you, professor,” but by the time class had ended and I was sitting in my Jeep shot-gunning my usual post class snack of Miller High Life before my next seminar (an hour and a half slot the rest of the graduate class used to sit in the cafeteria waxing the complexities of Aristotelian Metaphysics and its correlation to the Evil Dead series or who would win in a fight: Noam Chomsky or pre-homosexual Bertrand Russell), my feisty anger had been replaced with a peculiar sense of pride. I was a lowbrow sophisticate and the rest of those pinheads would never even come close.

So that’s where it came from, but what does it mean? Now assuming Professor Assface meant his label to be an inferiority complex-causing kick in the intellectual nuts, his biggest misstep was forgetting the sophisticate attribute of the insult. The “Lowbrow” aspect explains itself: we lowbrows like our drink, we like our tobacco, we like to love, and we most certainly like our diverse range of expletive language, but the “Sophisticate” aspect strengthens its predecessor by the very nature of its meaning. The sophistication in us gives our tastes value; we’ll drink our High Life and Pabst in the same sitting as we sip our favorite crafts such as Ommegang’s Three Philosophers, Delirium’s Tremens, Hofbrau’s Dunkel, and Trippel’s Trippel Karmaliet. We value our lovers and our truest friends because to know you are better when you are with the ones you love is to understand the vitality of community. We are skillful and can handle wit; enough to quote Socrates and Nabokov, but real enough to match it with the words of Bill Hicks and Woody Allen. We value knowledge and understand that as gruff and blue collar as we may appear, we transcend that due to our incorporation of thoughtfulness and compassion; the things that give the lowbrow his or her sophistication.

To answer the most intriguing of the questions: “Are you born a lowbrow sophisticate or can you become one?” Let me say this: Buddha has a notion that we are all born Buddhas and the means to reveal our Buddha nature is around us always, waiting for – perhaps even expecting us – to use them to help us realize this innate nature. I am not so naïve to infer that all sentient beings are lowbrow sophisticates chomping at the bit to lift the veils of obscurity to excuse their smoking, drinking, cursing, and loving wild, but what I will say is being cool, likable, and excellent is not mutually exclusive from being intelligent, thoughtful, and articulate. I proclaim to you all, much like my Shakespeare professor did to me, whether you label yourself as a lowbrow or a sophisticate, you can be both! My words are proclaimed with no air of condescension, silliness, or dare. Think of it rather as an evolution into excellence and satisfaction. A fellow lowbrow sophisticate, Charlie Darwin was on the right track when he said:

“In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

Living in Fort Collins I have quickly learned that we are in the beer capital of the United States; surrounded by countless, glorious craft houses that serve the most amazing beer I have ever tasted. My particular favorite is a quaint craft house down the street from Colorado State University, just on the cuff of Old Town, called The Tap and Handle. As far as beer goes, it is quite literally the best bar I have ever been in.

The Lowbrow Sophisticate is starting a new series this week called The Wet Writers which celebrates the most genuine of the literary lowbrows whose over indulgence, and dare I say passion, for inebriating libations may have contributed to their deaths, but most have most certainly contributed to their art. I wanted to kick off The Wet Writers with The Tap and Handle and what better writer to pair it with than Dylan Thomas, whose, as some of you may or may not know, favorite vice was the golden, frothy post-mead Hoppy Diety called Beer.

So check in next week – it’s going to be a hell of a good time.

Hello All,

I understand that I have been less than consistent this 2012, but that is all about to change. Lowbrow’s founder and his lovely wife are moving to the beer and bicycling capital of the United States: Fort Collins, CO.

Upon arrival, LBS will be back in action with a new layout as well as some new business. We’re heading back to the beginning; celebrating all things literary, and with the help of our new hometown’s brewers, I’ll be bringing you all the what’s the what on the outstanding beer in Fort Collins – I hear it flows like wine there.

So sit tight and prepare yourselves for a sophisticated, albeit lowbrow 2012, full of brilliant writing and drunken snifters.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been going on for a month now and it has found its way to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I’ll be covering the protests this morning and I’ll be back this afternoon to report on today’s events. Keep your fingers crossed that I am not poked in the eye by one of the three prongs on a Tea Partiers hat.

As a one-time registered socialist (note that it has been nearly seven years since my name has had a red inked star scribbled next to it), I am all for the collected organization of citizens with the purpose of standing up for their constitutional beliefs, whether it bubbles up from a well of laws they disagree with or from that of a socio-emotional stance – as long as its means are compassionate and peaceful. As a matter of fact, even as a liberal, I beamed a bit with American self-indulgence as I watched the Tea Partiers march in Washington toting signs that clearly established their distaste for an Obama Whitehouse (albeit I completely disagreed with their message and their uncompassionate means – I do not care what your political affiliations may whisper to you as you drift off to sleep, people, Barrack Obama is in no way comparable to Adolf Hitler), which may sound outrageous and could possibly put me at risk of having my Lefty Card swiped from my pocket, I thought to myself, hey, at least they’re organizing, at least they’re doing something – so one can justify my feelings of pride when the left began their weeks long protesting of our financial institutions and their practice of systematically eradicating households below the one million dollar mark.

I was planning on handling the Occupy Santa Fe protest in the same fashion I handle most political demonstrations, by not participating. But it was not until I watched Anne Coulter spew her typical fire-poker dialogue on Fox News earlier this week that I decided to get involved here in our own town. Ms. Coulter found it necessary to say that the Occupy Wall Street movement was “just how, with a few slight differences, the Nazi Party organized.” Ms. Coulter also found it necessary to not define these “few slight differences” in her diatribe to the audience of the most watched news network in the United States. The Nazi Party? Really? I have become quite adept at ignoring most everything that comes out of Anne Coulter’s mouth, and that of the rest of the Fox News Team, but this was a bit too outrageous for me to say nothing. Let me explain how the Occupy Wall Street Movement has nothing to do with the Nazi movement. For the sake of time, and our readers’ intelligence, I will not be explaining the bullet points of the Nazi Party manifesto, but rather pointing out why these protestors are upset, and exactly what it is they are speaking out against:

The American Financial Crisis starting kicking our ass in early spring of 2008. Subprime mortgages began going under faster than we could handle, and then Bear Stearns, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, failed in March of 2008. Lehman Brothers, a bank of the same breed followed suit in September. The US Government came up with a fairly simple plan they named TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) in October of 08 and gave nine of the largest banks $125 billion dollars (that’s billion) with the purpose of getting our big banks back on track so they could start lending money again to the real majority of the American population: the middle class – the end game being that the mind-numbingly large banks we gave money to (remember, this came out of our taxes) would pay us back once everything was back to Clinton-era normalcy. But, as most people saw at the time, giving banks this money did nothing to address the actual problem with our financial system, it just bought the banks some extra time; basically postponing what would eventually happen; what IS happening now. Imagine the banking structure of the US as a large ocean liner with a ton of holes in it that is making the ship sink very slowly – TARP plugged those holes and now the ship is sinking again, only this time faster.

TARP wasn’t enough for Bank of America, and in 2009 they finagled another $20 billion out of the government; money they used to set aside for colossal bonuses they could give their top execs, a very perplexing point that the government and the media quickly brushed past. By spring of 2009, the US Government announced that more than half of the nation’s largest banks had enough capital to survive another recession; they even had enough to survive a Doomsday scenario, the worst possible economic slip. Bank stocks took off again, and within a couple months the bailed out banks started repaying their TARP money. Believe it or not the banks actually wanted to get rid of that money – hanging on to that kind of cash was seen as a sort of scarlet letter, a black cloud, giving the banks that retained the money a sort of a pariah position. Banks began to profit again. Goldman Sachs made a profit of $13 billion in 09, up from a mere $1.5 billion just a year earlier. This rise in their bottom lines gave the banks the ability to pay the government back, but some say they paid it back too soon. Much of the banks new money they documented in 2009 and 2010 were through earnings and stock prices and they used these numbers to make their capital look lucrative. Great right!? Not so much. The problem here is that the banks made all their money back and were boasting ridiculous gains without lending money to us – which was the whole point of taking the TARP money in the first place. The banks were paying themselves in order to manage their own stock. In simple terms – that is not real business. They were not making money through lending to American citizens, so when the money ran out, which it did, the banks were right back where they started because there were not receiving any money from loan payments. Their profits, in a sense, were false.

Now, financial jargon aside, why does this suck? In 2008, before the top five banks were bailed out, their total executive compensation was $96 billion dollars (hard to believe as it is, that’s normal). What sucks: In 2010, it was $130 billion. The financial crisis continues and depending on who you ask (myself included) it is getting worse, so if the banks are in as much trouble as they were three years ago, how come their profits are nearly doubled? Because they are not lending money to Americans and they continue to fire their employees by the boat load. Last month Bank of America laid off 30,000 employees. But hey, Ken Lewis, BofA’s CEO made $100 million dollars this year. Him. Just him.

There has always been economic disparity between the top 1% of the American population and the rest of us, but now, during a time of bleak financial crisis, and after the banks that caused it received billions of dollars to fix their mistakes, the gap is bigger than ever before and it is the leaders of these institutions that tell us straight-faced that it is our problem and maybe we’re just not working hard enough, and this is why so many Americans are flocking to their states capitals and financial districts to let them know that they are not okay with this any longer and that they will no longer accept it. I encourage you all, as always, to check my facts, but I think it goes without saying that this movement is more than slightly different than the organization of the Nazi Party.

WHAT: Occupy Santa Fe
WHERE: Roundhouse Capital Building – Downtown Santa Fe
TIME: 9am
WHY: Because the Über -rich and phasing out the rest of us so they can buy a yacht and a fourth home.

 Use the new button on the left side of the page to follow us on Twitter.  Its like having a vending machine full of your uncle’s jokes!

As our loyal fans are aware, we here at the Lowbrow Sophisticate recently acquired grant and fellowship funds from a couple major literary think tanks. We had to present a proposal describing what it is we planned on doing with the money if we were to receive it, which we did. We all have burned out stars close to our hearts, actors, writers and performers whose light has dimmed over the years making our chest cavities feel cold and sleepy. Well, the Lowbrows are here to change all that.

With our grant and fellowship money, we have been able to resurrect some of these fallen heroes’ careers by coaching them ourselves and landing them a role of a lifetime and who better for us to follow up Edward Blatchford than with Mr. Vincent Ventresca.

You may remember Vinny best as Fun Bobby: the lovable and giggle-inducing inebriate who played Monica Gellar’s better half on Friends. After his stint as Fun Bobby, Vincent got the deal of a lifetime playing The Invisible Man for 45 episodes and then the fun pretty much stopped. Vinny got a couple gigs here and there playing forgettable characters on The Mentalist and Shit My Dad Says (a real turd sandwich canceled before its first season was complete) and now… nothing. Well, we’re going to change that.

We have been working night and day with Vincent and have landed him in what is being discussed as the next great super hero series: The Green Dummy. We cannot give much away here, but we can say that a mint green Vespa is the source of his powers and he may not be that big of a dummy! So stay tuned for The Green Dummy airing Novermber 24th, 2009 on Antartica’s most watched station, KFB Channel 2 – The Penguin!

Hey Loyal Lowbrows – you can now catch founder of lowbrowsophisticate.com writing words about words and literary art forms at D.R. Monroe’s Word House on Santa Fe’s premiere entertainment website www.thesantafevip.com

Come read Monroe’s words and support local websites! http://www.thesantafevip.com/about/the-santa-fe-vip-com-team/d-r-monroe-writer/

Hello, Everyone

Just a quick plug for fellow Lowbrow, D.R. Monroe’s new short story, Resurrection Men, which is up for sale on Barnes & Noble.com – If you have a Nook or a Mac you can read it for only a dollar. A DOLLAR! Some of our more die-hard patrons will remember the series before we went “Full Comedy” on Lowbrow. So, if you liked it then, you’ll figgin’ LOVE it now.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Resurrection-Men/DR-Monroe/e/2940011926877/?itm=1&USRI=resurrection+men

Thanks and Happy Krampus season!

Jack Grabber was waist deep in the biggest trouble he had ever been in; it wasn’t just the possums that had infiltrated his tank, it was the heat wave – 119 degrees fahrenheit outside the tank – 130 inside and Jack Grabber knew better than anyone that there was absolutely nothing worse than a tank full of hot possums. Grabber remembered that he kept a taser underneath the captains chair he was now stuck on but as he reached beneath his bottom his hands weren’t hands at all, but rather BoLo Bounce Back Paddle Balls so Grabber did the only thing he knew how: he fought back. Grabber remembered a small prick of training from long ago, training that reminded him that possums hated rubber balls smacking them in the face more than anything – so Grabber bounced away with his paddle hands but no matter how hard he paddled the possums seemed to multiply like Gizmos eating after midnight. This hissing was deafening. It was if they were silently screaming, “GRABBER” … “GRABBER” … “GRABBER”

“Grabber” … “Grabber” … “Grabber, wake up.” When Jack Grabber came to, it was not the cold hard green and gun metal interior of a tank that surrounded him, but rather the soft inviting warm white tones of his bedroom. Everyone knew never to wake up Grabber by yourself. Everyone knew that you had to use a long stick from a safe distance of about twelve feet if you were brazen enough to wake him up at all. Naive of this, Grabber launched his eleven-year-old nephew clear across the room, but luckily the young Grabber-gened child landed softly on an over-sized teddy bear that Grabber’s good friend, ex-Republican Guard, Samir Godot had given him for a completely non-romantic anniversary the two shared a couple weeks earlier.

Grabber sat up calmly, rubbing his eyes. “Alexandrus, are you okay?”

“Yes, uncle.”

“You know you’re not supposed to wake me without the stick.”

“I know uncle, Jack. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, it’s this damn cold. I hate colds. I have the strangest dreams when I get a fever.”

Just then, there’s a knock on the door. “Don’t open the door, nephew.” But it was too late, Alexandrus opened the door to an all too familiar hissing sound. Just then, Grabber’s nephew was pulled through the door frame in an instance, followed only by the shrieking “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” of the young boy’s uncle. Grabber shot up, removed the thermometer from beneath his tongue and whispered, “The Possum Pasha.”

From time to time we’d like to share some of the more intersting search terms that people have used to end up on our site to give you a little flavor of what our fans are like.  Todays highlighted search term is:

Bow Wow Genital Warts