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Topical Runoff Just what it sounds like. Should be updated more often than it is. New (or check out Archive for earlier stuff) 2009: Well… what did you expect?
Scientist/professor Barry Schwartz says the key to happiness in life is low expectations, and with that in mind I think it’s safe to say that ‘low expectations’ is the only filter in which to look at 2009 and call it tolerable. Of course, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and it’s clear that much of the world went through a rather nasty re-learning curve of the above prescription for happiness in the last four quarters. The fact that US President (and current representative for hope in the world at large) Barack Obama was expected to change not only America but the world in a couple months can be seen in his winning of the Nobel Peace prize for not much at all. (but then, let’s not make the award seem too wonderful. After all, Kissinger has one) Obama talked of realistic views on war in his acceptance speech, defending his country’s right to go to drop bombs on Afghanistan, with fingers crossed that it will blow up the few thousand al Qaeda and Taliban supporters, and not the millions of innocent citizens there. War is hell, but only for those who have to deal with its most basic qualities on a daily basis. For the rest of us it’s merely an occasional newspaper headline and flag draped coffin. This is miserable news to the left wing people around the globe (read: a third of America, most of the developed world, an unspecified portion of the developing world that wishes politics in their own country can be as bland as right and left talking points). Apparently Barack Obama isn’t a political messiah, but rather only a mostly-centrist democrat who has to battle with his own political party to get middling reforms passed. And that’s if you’re looking at it from this ‘supposedly extreme’ leftist perspective. If you’re on the right of the political spectrum then the US president is a dark-skinned Stalin. Middle ground is clearly for suckers. Change doesn’t come easy in this fast paced modern world, as notions of speed and advancing technology are seen mainly in our fancy new cell phones. As for changes on how we live in regards to global interdependency, eh, apparently that’s not so important. Reforms for international trade, poverty and pollution are moving at snails pace. In fact the only important thing that is changing quickly is the global climate itself. What impedes this call from the margins of the masses for change? Are you ready for the same, blasé answer you’ve heard countless times before? No? Then I’ll just keep going as if I had said it. If you need conclusive proof that the American government is run by huge corporations, you needn’t look any further than this misbegotten attempt at health care reform. Forget the details congress has been squabbling over the last several months. The whole thing was ready to become a giant turd-burger the moment the health insurance companies were promised that wouldn’t take a hit financially no matter what kind of bill passes the house and Senate. (they were assured this over lunch in July by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel himself) It’s business as usual, with a much more effective mouthpiece (no ‘is our children learning’ cock-ups from Obama). People who defend the current ‘free world leader’ from the ever growing critical left by saying concessions and compromises – whether it be health care reconstruction or financial regulation – is the reality of modern politics are missing the point. Compromising with the established political spectrum does not excuse shitty policies that have the ability to cripple your society in years to come. Even the administration before didn’t let the watering down of their ideals happen. They steamrolled their reforms under the banners of freedom, flag and fetus. Outside of their actual ideas, the lousiest legacy that the Bush administration has left on not only American but global governance is the constant redefining of political victory. When the facts are getting in the way of your stated goals, redefine your goals, backtrack with doublespeak, and declare new and improved victory. This can be seen in the endless debate on climate change, because…well…fuck it. It’s not a matter of believing in it anymore, and the problems aren’t the deniers, but the governments and corporations who will acknowledge there is a problem but then go on to explain that gee golly this really isn’t the best time financially to invest in the future. What with the fake economy still dragging down the real economy and all. As George Monbiot has noted, one of the worst things about climate change is that the people who are being immediately affected by it are some of the poorest people on earth. Those in Europe and North America can deal with extreme flooding or extreme drought. (or at least afford – via their country’s infrastructure – to live with the ramifications) People in sub-Saharan Africa cannot. The incessant labeling of all political things as ‘victorious’ – including this pesky green monster of a problem – was seen on a worldwide scale in what was supposed to be the most important conference of the year, the Copenhagen environmental talks. (really, does anyone really pay attention to the annual G20 meetings, other than protesters who just want to pretend they’re at a Rage Against the Machine concert?) Wealthy countries immersed in corporate ties were reluctant to make the required changes to emissions and embrace green technologies, while poor nations – namely the African ones, who are feeling the brunt of the climate upheaval – begged for scraps. And the US and China butted heads in the end, and agreed on a watered down, statement of facts that called for no changes. It was framed as a step in the right direction. And if you’re a poor country that doesn’t agree with this byline, good luck at getting your hands on the money being offered to fix these problems (which isn’t nearly enough). Reactions to Copenhagen have ranged from indifference to vitriolic rage, depending on how much you care about the future. But no matter where you sit on the climate change spectrum, what makes it a perfect encapsulation of this year as a whole is seen in the idea that the increasing disenfranchisement and antipathy towards the rulers is the only thing uniting the planet. The only ideas bringing us together are the ones concerning the possibility of splitting us apart. Everything else is fragmenting into thin strands and niches that cover the earth like a spindly, drunkenly fashioned web. A globalized society doesn’t mean you’re learning about customs and traditions on the other side of the planet, or becoming a more well-rounded and tolerant person. Sometimes it just means that the other side of the planet is where your computer’s tech support comes from. Or, in China’s case where you buy and sell absolutely everything. Globalization isn’t necessarily friendly. In most cases, it’s just business. 2009 was the great cusp, when the turning point reared its head for the first time. The next year or two will only speed up the trend of China and India supplanting America as great economic powers. But even these countries are made of disparate regions that don’t easily merge with the central doctrine the rulers of these nations like to trumpet. Tensions between fragments of society across the globe are going to be the new challenges of the next decade. And this splintering is not only in how we live our daily lives (read: politics, economics, terrorism, etc.), but how we consume our current manifestations of fun. Culture – what once was a universal quality that could be said to reflect the state and beliefs of a society – is shattering into smaller and smaller nooks and crannies. Very rarely – maybe once a year, but I cannot think of one for 2009 – do we get a single product (movie, music, tv, book) that everyone has consumed and can recognize. Choice has exploded, as everything is being dumped onto the world at once. Via cyberspace everyone has accessed to every new song, movie, and TV show all at the same time, although no one can consume them all, meaning the persona and traits you fashion from these influences will be unique and perhaps understood by a small group of like minded people (who, thanks to the internet’s reach, could be anywhere around the globe). The main problem, of course, is that the traditional exchange of these services/products has fallen apart – namely, paying for them – so it’s traditional form of dissemination has run into a ditch as well. We watch TV when it’s convenient to us, no longer coming together to watch a program at the same time on the same channel. The newspaper continues its fade into irrelevance, replaced by online news sites that cater exclusively to people’s individual political bents. It’s becoming impossible to follow music as a whole these days unless you’re a full-time music journalist, and thanks to an ever-hemorrhaging press industry, there’s a hell of a lot fewer of them around these days. Broad brushstrokes of consumption can be determined by a few simple questions, but after that everything gets more difficult. Who defined your 2009? Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga or Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear? These two camps could exist comfortably with no overlap at all. Finding music that crosses borders and genres can send you searching from the Top 40 to obscure folk metal bands who play in empty bars. The most hook-filled and interesting song of the year was Sufjan Steven’s You Are the Blood, which appears on a charity compilation, Dark Was the Night. Heard of it? And what does it say about you and the culture of you have or haven’t? Maybe that’s the saddest thing about Michael Jackson’s passing. He was one of the few cultural icons left that EVERYONE knew about. It’s almost certain that Thriller will remain the best selling album of all time, as even if there is an artist that somehow reaches that level of popularity, there’s no reason why tens of millions of people will pay for their music. Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want tip jar for 2007’s In Rainbows revealed that some people will always pay for what they consume, but at the same time others never will. The future of culture will entail some sort of quasi-patronage system, where wealthy bankers – and banker’s kids – will finance sonic and visual experiments of future artists. Us the rabble will exist in a trickle-down culture world, where we get virtual tours of mansions and recording studios to see and hear the latest work of our favourite creative people. At least the movie industry is staying afloat, although there seems to be a wider gap than ever between the films that yield high box office returns and the ‘films that don’t suck’. The party line is that the highest grossing films this were escapist-based, which reflects our desire to forget the utter crappiness of the world around us. Okay, but that doesn’t mean these films are good, does it? That they have ‘repeat value’? Four films off the top of our heads that did 2009 a great service: The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Up, and Where the Wild Things Are. Films about Iraq, the airline/outsourcing industry, escaping the modern world via balloon, and the death of childhood. It looks like we are preoccupied with our current predicament. A good thing, sure, but pointless if no concrete change comes out of it. It feels like everything is ruse. A really cheap one, too. Abstract ideas like change, hope, and reform have returned to being just that, abstracts; and if there’s a popular sport out there, you can be sure either the players are cheating with performance enhancers, or the game itself is fixed. In some ways it’s reassuring that these qualities are seen in these large communities and groups, from politicians to athletes. Similarity is our perception’s bread and butter. It makes the world easily to navigate and understand. It’s just a horrible shame that these qualities that are seemingly universal are so negative. And tolerance for this is not too surprising. After all, these changes so far are gradual for most of the people in the world who have some semblance of power in their daily activities. (read: the developed world) Changes have come in a much more violent and disorienting and desperate form to the people who have either no power or not much at all. So, uh, what do we do? We being the people who have a chance to vote every couple years and rant politely in semi-agreement with relatives at all the Christmas and Christmas-related gatherings at the end of every year. To mix metaphors horribly, power is a slippery maze on a seesaw. Every so often the ball is communally shared by the majority of the people, and that’s when… something happens. But that’s when everything gets hazy, because there are now millions of little groups angling for the conch. The alternative we have sentenced ourselves to is relying on the elites, who aren’t really the elites, but just people like us ‘in charge’, which means that our responsibility for holding up a working society is shifted to them. And we have to share the blame for their ineptitude, as we are the ones who trusted them in the first place. You know that old phrase that a recent ex-president mangled, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’? That can apply to voters, too. When our fingers get burned with inept governance, and we gripe and complain about how awful things are, how do we go back to that naïve state and get all ‘yes we can’-like? Why do we think ‘it will be different this time’? Is charming rhetoric and a chance to make history enough to blind us to the reality of our current global situation? A knock against Obama? Sure, why not, everyone’s taking their shots, right? But the left can’t get too angry with him for increasing the troop levels in Afghanistan. It’s what he said he was going to do as he campaigned (a US presidential candidate on an explicitly peacenik platform will be attacked mercilessly for ‘not understand the reality of September 11th’). And the right has to stop being sore-losers and work with the president. But this is something that is the same in every country, whether it be Canada, France, China, the UK, or Japan. (what a thing to have in common. The inefficiency of bureaucracy) Opposing political parties sharpening their battlements for a public relations war when real problems are either taking point fodder or relegated to the sidelines. Such empty words to describe our current state of affairs. Nothing is this simple, right? Asking people to just shake hands is naïve and idealistic. Look at the one thing that desperately needed to be addressed this year – climate change – and you’ll see the convoluted interdependency between the economy and everything else under the sun. Important issues can only be addressed if there’s some serious profit in it (and that won’t interfere with the profits of current corporations). 2009 was a year when the idea of money – and the lack of it – just wouldn’t go away. Greed, wrath, and sloth came to be seen in many forms of the majority of the headlines that dominated the last twelve months. Only our vices were the universal qualities that defined 2009. Hopefully in 2010 the virtues will win out.
Michael Jackson versus Robert McNamara Guaranteed Ways to Have a Bad Trip on Hallucinogens The Internet is Making Me Hare Democracy 2008 Year in Review: Clusterfuck Commentary for a Clusterfuck Year A Pothead's Guide to Children's Television Burn After Reading / Burn the Mythologized Narrative Prepared by the Media After Reading Shut the fuck up pollsters! Admit you don't know anything! Diary Extracts from History's Greatest Bastards The Secret History of St. Patrick's Day Christmas in Iraq, in Washington, and In Rainbows A conversation between two abandonedstation employees that may or may not have happened Virginia Tech Shooting: Two thoughts Archive 2006 (on a whole separate page, too!)
“I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere I go,” Professor Gates said. “We — all of us in the crossover generation — have multiple identities.” -New York Times, July 27/09
Don’t sell the rest of us short, Professor. You don’t have to be part of the crossover generation – what Gates defines as the period in the nineteen sixties and seventies when minorities were integrated into the American education and political system – to have multiple identities. For today’s generation of youth-ish type people, it’s not only expected, but mandatory, regardless of your race, creed or culture. Say what you will about the internet (feel free to blog your opinions to the masses), but you have to admit that it has opened up some pretty bizarre and interesting doors that wouldn’t be possible only twenty years ago. In terms of accessing information and entertainment and your friend from third grade who now lives on the other side of the world, everything is now available on this series of tubes. Including the new you, tailored to your exact specifications. Don’t like your face? Don’t show it. Or get a computer generated one, called avatars (James Cameron has a movie coming out soon about this idea of representation, so it’ll become a more common place word by next summer). Invent a fake name, an address for your non-corporeal (also known as electronic) mail, and you suddenly have enough proof of existence to say whatever you want in your little corner of cyberspace, play a ridiculous amount of online games, and watch enough pornography to make your eyes bleed. And if you don’t want these pursuits to overlap and be attributed to the same ‘person’, invent a new one. Or several. Now to be fair, I’m not using ‘multiple identities’ in exactly the same way as Professor Gates used them. He was referring to them in physical terms, namely the parts of your identity that are unchangeable. In fact, in the rest of the above quote, Gates notes that it is his black identity that is still at the forefront of how the public sees him. I’m going to get a bit deeper, and look at the term identity when it refers to your personality, not your physical appearance. While these two concepts doubtlessly influence each other, the personality is certainly something that can be tweaked and altered much more quickly than the colour of one’s skin. Multiple identities used to take quite a bit of effort to get off the ground. From the standpoint of the state, one is not only enough, but it’s all you’re allowed to have. Otherwise tracking you would get rather confusing. Hence, the aspect of criminality that surrounds one’s attempts at trying to be more than one person as far as your government is concerned. Welsh hash smuggler Howard Marks lamented the difficulty of finding people to give up their passport to him and doctoring government papers (despite the setbacks, he managed to set up over forty fake identities for his profession). And you certainly can’t simply kick your feet up once you’ve escaped the confines of having only one set of official papers. Con men have to be ready to call up alternative names and histories at the snap of a finger. The same was necessary on the other side of the law, with undercover cops risking life and limb by immersing themselves in a criminal underworld (see: Brasco, Donnie). Of course, on another level, everyone has always had at the very least two identities. It used to be you and your reputation. The former was you yourself, and the latter the part of you that people would talk about when you weren’t there. Your reputation was based on what these people remember of you when you were around. The more often these people interacted with you, the more accurate your reputation – when handled by them – would be. There would be Bob, and the milieu of people who knew Bob and thought that he was an asshole. Those were the only two social spheres Bob had to navigate between. Who he was, and who people thought he was (reputation). But that doesn’t exist anymore. For as long as one can remember, Bob couldn’t really be anyone else other than that Bob. When Bob engaged in social interaction, people saw all of Bob, his virtues and vices, and his attempts to show one and hide the other, to varying degrees of success. And Bob’s reputation was an echo of ever-changing quality of real Bob (depending on the quality/sobriety/history of mental health found in Bob’s associates). It was a decent enough system. Not perfect, but what system is? Today, however, Bob has a dizzying amount of choices to tailor his reputation to his exact liking. When Bob can become slayerrocks46 and never has to show his face to engage in conversation and other cyber-social situations, Bob can pick and choose what aspects of his personality he wants to show to and wants to hide from this brave new digital world. Goodbye vices! Or hey, hello vices! Lying has become easier, but it’s not done for criminal enterprise or financial malfeasance here, but just for the sake of social interaction. Your best foot forward has been taken to the extreme. Imaging what you want yourself to be and then making it happen has become easier because the internet allows for such a quick fix. If you’ve becoming too ‘you’ in your words and deeds on facebook or a message board just delete your profile and start again. Accountability for the last version of you has been thrown out the window. Perhaps stored in some computer hard drive outside of Seattle or in the bowels of Silicon Valley, but the association with you can be considered long gone. No one is being dragged up into the public square and demanded to justify the comments they made under the name hotchikfrombstn. And that’s a mixed blessing, veering wildly towards the more-bad-than-good argument, as accountability, responsibility, and a hope for proper spelling is left on the shoulder of the information superhighway. For years prior, people shaped who they were – either consciously or unconsciously – through the trials and tribulations of dealing with all sorts of people in all sort of situations. And while the internet can certainly be a place full of said people and said situations, the tough, humbling lessons could be ignored in favour of creating the same ‘new’ personality whenever the last one ran into trouble. To six thousand people on a U2 website you’re a laidback doctor from Antigua, and to a couple hundred on facebook you’re the twenty three year old, short-fused college dropout you’ve always been. Both are right until the walls start caving in and one or both facades have to go away. But instead of doing some sort of emotional stockpiling – ‘what the fuck am I doing with my life?’ – you can just dust yourself off and be a laidback doctor from, say, Bermuda now, on a different website. It’s not a genuine change in yourself; it’s a doctored reveal of your current state. We’re like old houses, and instead of doing the much needed foundation repair, we’re just putting wallpaper up over our cracks. Everyone knows where this analogy ends. Under a pile of rubble. But that possibility on a grand scale seems distant and far off. There are just too many places to get lost within online. Few can remember a time when Facebook was only available to those from a list of post-secondary institutions (the secret’s in the name). The idea that it would be so exclusive boggles the mind. Somehow it has been decided that the sharing of everything – whether real or ‘real’ – is unquestionably good (for some reason I feel reality TV programming should take some level of heat for this). And beyond the general social networking sites, there’s the hundreds of thousands of message boards for every little quirk or cultural epoch under the sun, plus a little website called YouTube. No, there’s never been a better time to be either a better or more disgusting version of yourself. And some people (ahem, ahem) take the easiest way out and don’t bother using their real name at any point. An unborn, undying ghost in the machine. No attachment to earthly delights. Their god and mother are digital switches, ones and zeros. The delete key is the only bullet to the head. The extreme stories are the ones where people kills themselves – or each other – over what is written about them and their shadow people over the internet. The personality they built up had grown too big, exposed too much of the real person, or became more important than the person who designed and walked within it. Some people can take it. Some can’t. But that’s how everything is. (how’s that for a reductionist comment on human civilization in totality?) The real problem can be seen in the changes to the vast majority of people for whom the gossip on the internet isn’t something to kill yourself over. A kind of superficial control bestowed upon them for their digital selves has created unrealistic expectations for the real world as well. If you can be anybody and anything on the internet, why should you be restricted when you step away from the computer and walk down the street? Suddenly Bob doesn’t like the way he and his reputation are being handled, and decides to make some changes that – while are simple and effortless to do in the digital realm – are a wee bit disturbing otherwise. Sure you can’t change where you were born and whether you were bullied in elementary school, but you can take a bunch of pills to act like it never happened. Finally that ironic detachment to the situations around you that came so easy on the internet (because you had five minutes to fashion a witty, cool response) exists in real life. And changes aren’t limited to your personality. Plastic surgery is a popular high school graduation gift. Dieting is an obsession in the Western World, even though waistlines have been steadily grown for the past half-century. The internet – while pushing the same type of sex-obsessed ad banners and ideas the advertising media have always utilized – has reminded us how nice it is not to have to worry about needing your body… until you log off and actual look at it. So we have an entire generation of people socializing more than ever before in short bursts across the globe, building and shedding personality traits by the day to fit in with whatever fad sweeps the tiniest fractions of corners – popular culture will be a relic term in five years – while the physical body falls into one of two categories to match ideals of image found in cyberspace: good and bad. Who are we? It seems like we’re moving too fast to answer that question.
Ten years ago this month, Fight Club was released. It was an overt criticism of commercialism and a lament for the powerlessness of the modern man. It also featured Brad Pitt pissing in people’s food and making soap out of liposuction fat. And talking penguins. And a shit load of images and ideas concerning castration. And Helena Bonham Carter smoking cigarettes so sexily you know it’s totally worth the cancer. Critics liked it for the most part, but the audience didn’t really materialize at the cinemas. But like many great films, Fight Club became a cult hit on DVD/video. The people who liked it, liked it a lot, and forced a lot of friends and acquaintances through drunken rants to take a chance with the film themselves. The rules of Fight Club (or should I say, the listing of the rules of Fight Club) have been parodied incessantly, giving it a shelf life as a separate meme. An action movie with an anarchic heart, it sits restlessly on your DVD shelf, representing either your complete lack of faith in the corporate super-culture that has overtaken the globe or your favourite Brad Pitt performance. And while in the last decade the world has gone through a series of political hiccups and rainstorms, it has only been in the last year or so with the economy exploding that the depressing notion of the majority of humanity as being nothing more than a financial statistic to the powers-that-be has become a constant preoccupation of many. Unrestrained greed is an easy thing to rally the minions from across the political spectrum around. Finding out that the people ‘in charge’ sat back allowed this to happen have made the proles of the world restless, seething as they hear about bank CEOs spending tens of thousands of dollars on a wastepaper basket. The ‘All singing, all dancing crap of the world’ murmur angrily in the backyards and bars. Now – thanks to the shedding of several million jobs in the last eight months – with nothing to do from nine to five. So what if Fight Club was released now? What kind of reverberations would it send through society? In 1999, the controversy surrounding the film was its violence (paltry compared to the torture porn of Hostel and the Saw series), but today it might cause pundits and watchdog groups to question whether it’s a call for armed resistance against the very pillars of Western economics. To throw off the shackles of a capitalistic society that inundates the masses with the demand to define themselves by their credit card purchases. It was a two and half hour threat to the status quo. After all, you could do a lot of crazy shit with a bit of soap and a year’s paid salary. Tracking the passage of time isn’t Fight Club’s strong suit, but it doesn’t seem to take long for the guys to stop beating each other and instead focus their anger on anarchy pranks and commercial terrorism. The anger that simmers throughout Fight Club has tumbled out of the celluloid and onto the streets and driveways of our modern world. While no one is blowing up the headquarters of credit card companies, public outcry has forced the American government to legislate a series of rules that curtails much of Visa and Mastercard’s power in adjusting interest, and demands much more customer friendly fine print section. Regulation is being thrust upon the financial corporations that encouraged an economy of mindless acquisition without thinking of the consequences. But oh, if only our sole problem was with credit and credit cards. Sadly, the world is falling apart in a way no one really understands. Several floors above Main Street, banks losing faking money are being brought to their knees and the aftershocks rumble through towns from Midwest America to mainland China, which is finally getting a taste of materialism on a much larger scale. The problem lies beyond politics. A very fiber of our being – maybe the neural synapses found in the opening credits of the film currently being debated – seems to have no problem with fucking over the very concept of evolution itself. Humans seem to be ruining everything life offers us. The house the two protagonists live in would make a fine environmental allegory for our own planet. The water and gas turn on and off intermittently, the basement is flooded, there’s trash everywhere, and from someone walking by, it would appear to be the archetypal haunted house. The yin and yang of humanity searching for meaning in a dilapidated house left to rot by the indifferent world around them. All these layers are symbolically wrapped up perfectly, but ten years after the fact it seems to have more a desperate appeal for common sense. The Narrator’s wants drove him first to numb unfulfillment, followed closely by insanity. The unrelenting, endlessly consuming post-modern id in all its glory. But in 2009, Ed Norton’s Narrator/Jack character wouldn’t lose his belongings in a suspicious condo fire. He would be laid off and pawn it all to pay the mortgage, but then find himself booted out anyway because the whole building is being sold to a wealthy Chinese developer. And then he’d catch the swine flu. In Fight Club, we at least had the designer products and furniture to try and instill meaning into our desolate urban/suburban lives, but now we don’t even have that. We can’t even afford the products we don’t need. Pitt’s character tells his followers that he knows they are all disappointed and disillusioned. That they were lied to by their televisions. These devices and magazine ads didn’t just promise that everything would be okay, but took it all a step further and promised everything would be absolutely incredible. And as Durden notes, we are now all very, very pissed off. Random anger is the most dangerous kind, if only because it’s so susceptible to influence by Tyler Durden-types. Scapegoating becomes popular, but with only a fraction of it deserved at the proper people. Death threats to AIG executives aren’t appropriate but at least they are the right ones to blame. But in desperate times the crazies come out of the woodwork and shoot up Holocaust Museums because they think the US president is in league with a Jewish conspiracy. A spat of work (or lack of work) related shootings suggest the strength in imitation and – bizarrely – in unity. There is a wariness of how the media covers shootings and other violent events, as in some cases it’s been known to inspire copycat crimes. The news is feeding itself, inspiring horrible news stories by reporting horrible news stories. The men who did these things worked in cubicles, factories, and publishing (the crazy old racist wrote some…er, interesting… material). Nothing that remarkable about them on first glance. Just the kinds of people that Tyler Durden assures the police chief are members of the Fight Club that the officer of the law promised to apprehend. God help the leaders if the masses ever organize under a charming anarchist. The power they have has toppled countries in the past, riot control and manipulation of the media be damned. But Fight Club is saved from being considered a Triumph of the Will for the 21st century because on top of being anarchic, it’s funny. Really, really funny. I mean, the world may be falling to pieces, but Bob’s bitch tits and inserting porn frames into children’s matinees is still fucking hilarious. Humanity has that odd that quirk of black humour, and it’s cropped up everywhere from 9/11 to the holocaust to the recent financial scandal (t-shirt in Palm Beach: ‘I invested with Bernie Madoff and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’). It’s a coping mechanism for when it is time to confront the truly horrible (a nice one liner: ‘other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?). Fight Club uses the comedy sugar to make sour medicine go down easier. The message: Anarchy is fun, it’s the sign of a clever mind, and as a bonus, you get to fuck Helena Bonham Carter. The only real casualty is Meatloaf’s character, Bob ‘bitch tits’ himself. Unfortunately, the fantasies of the film don’t translate well to the real world. If only the anger we feel was being manifested in the form of prankster-ism with a weak anti-capitalist philosophy behind it. Instead it’s random shooting sprees by broken people fed up with a broken system. Change is not in the air, only desperation. A hand not stretched out asking for guidance or help, but a hand clenched in a fist. When the broken and beaten down people in society get together and start counting heads and realize they aren’t the minority, what happens to that society? Everyone in the banking world has been trying to lie low, because how do you tame a beast you’ve been robbing blind for decades? Blowing up the credit card companies so humankind can start again doesn’t really work, even now. Excising corporate influence from our lives is not possible, because we make up these corporations now, even passively. The corporate world is like a necessary organ outside of your body. And in this globalized super body where we all dwell, things are falling apart, but they haven’t fallen apart completely, and that’s actually a huge difference. We may be teetering on the edge of precipice, fingertips dug in tight, but even here the corporate world will tell us that they are the solution, selling us what they call levitating powder, or something like that. And right beside them will be Tyler Durden, selling a revolution that doesn’t seem very possible, either. The question is, what is Fight Club attacking? Modern society, or humanity’s tendency to get caught up in absolutely anything, whether it be modern society or impassioned ranting against said modern society? Tyler Durden’s words seem to be illuminating and revelatory, but in the end the result is blowing shit up. He talks of reducing yourself to nothing and building yourself back up, piece by piece. Durden is Nietzsche’s uber-man with a movie star grin, but he doesn’t tell anyone what we should build ourselves up with. If civilization began with throwing pointed sticks and ends with the iPhone, what do start again with? What is the ultimate plan B? The problem with displaced anger is that throwing pointed sticks is the most obvious thing to do, and look where that got us. Fight Club in 2009 would have made for an incredibly powerful wake up call, but it doesn’t necessarily offer a guide for the brand new day. That’s fine, after all, it still addresses important questions about society that most forms of media never would… and there’s bitch tits.
Michael Jackson versus Robert McNamara
Note: My last blurb about Michael Jackson was how his life and death meant very little to Gen Y-er like me. I was touched neither by music or his celebrity. This column is about the media fixation over Jackson’s death, especially when one compares it to the coverage of the more recent death of Robert McNamara, former Ford President of the 1950’s and the US Secretary of Defense during the 1960’s.
I am listening to Mariah Carey blandly belt out ‘I’ll Be There’ at the Michael Jackson Memorial at the Staples Centre – where the Lakers play basketball – and I can’t help but shed a proverbial tear for Robert McNamara. McNamara died on July 6th, a week and a half after Mr. Jackson, but he has already been pushed out of the headlines in favour of the memorial for the pop singer that is attracting around the clock coverage by all the major networks, news or otherwise. Anyone who has ever interviewed Jackson has come back in front of the camera to explain how he changed American and world culture. Thousands are mourning in public spaces across the planet. Nelson Mandela had his letter read at the service by Smokey Robinson, praising Jackson for uniting the people of the world. Al Sharpton suggested that Michael Jackson opened the doors for white people to accept a black man as being popular figure, paving the way for one named Barack Obama. All this for a man who sung a bunch of popular songs in the 1980s and danced with zombies. By contrast, Robert McNamara was the President of the Ford Motor Company in the late nineteen fifties, the first person to hold that post and not have the company’s name as his last. Under his watch he dismantled costly errors like the Ford Edsel and revitalized the brand by introducing the Ford Falcon and improving the Lincoln Continental. He was best known as a safety advocate, demanding seat belt and rigorous crash-proof standards for all Ford vehicles. Not long after this he was chosen by Kennedy to be Secretary of Defense, and it was under his seven-year watch that he oversaw the escalation of the Vietnam War. He defended his actions with the Domino theory of communist expansion. He fought the war as a businessman, creating the model of policy analysis, believing that superiority in numbers and technology would be enough to overthrow the Viet Cong. Years later he would admit mistakes in the planning and execution of the war, whose ramifications without question dictated American foreign policy for the next several decades, and still does today to some degree. The large-scale fiasco forced America to focus on missile superiority and the clandestine undermining of supposed communist states from within to combat the Soviet Union. It demanded that American politicians and military commanders take a serious second look at their role in dictating the global superstructure. Additionally, running the Pentagon as a corporation influenced a man named Donald Rumsfeld to do the same under President Bush II. For his difficult and demanding job, McNamara himself – essentially the bureaucratic face of the Vietnam War during the 1960s – was once assaulted on a ferry for his attempts to stem the tide of Communism, with a concerned citizen attempting to throw him overboard. As if this were not enough, after stepping down from his position at the Pentagon, he was appointed the President of the World Bank, where he remained for thirteen years, overseeing its growth into an institution that attempted to supply the third world nations with the means to climb out poverty, including basic food and aid. For good or ill this man had his hand in some of the most powerful public and private organizations in the world, at a time when the Cold War was at its height. Even in his twilight years he was still part of contemporary culture, being the subject of an Oscar winning documentary – The Fog of War – and retained a post as a political and economic trustee with The California Institute of Technology. All of this is compressed to a minute long clip not only the nightly news but on CNN as well. On the date of his death – July 6th – the vast majority of the media was focused on the upcoming Jackson memorial. The King of Pop may have meant more to the people of the globe, but unquestionably Robert McNamara had a greater effect on how these people’s lives were led. America, Southeast Asia, and Africa are the most directly affected regions by McNamara’s actions, and because of the importance of these regions, the rest of the world felt the effects as well. Of course, you would never guess this from watching television – or surfing the internet – in the last three or four days. What does this say about the state of the media in the Western World? Besides McNamara, right now there is continued turmoil in Iran, ethnic tensions in Western China, US troops exiting Iraq, and an ailing economy that may not have even bottomed out yet. And even these pressing issues had to fight for space between political infidelity and President Obama’s expertise at killing flies. Of course, they covered all these hard stories very poorly – thirty-second interviews, superficial talking points – but at least they were covering the right things. Until the King of Pop died one Friday afternoon, though, at which point everything else went on to the back burner. Jon Stewart has done more to mock the asinine, over the top, and just plain stupid coverage of Michael Jackson’s death than I ever could, but most disturbing is the amount of content itself. Hours upon hours devoted to a pop icon. A man who, yes, entertained people, but did little more than that. No one seems to want to admit that the world is bigger than the luxuries afforded to the few by living in a developed country, like buying an album or seeing a concert, which is what Jackson gave the world. While Michael Jackson rightfully has a place in music’s upper echelons, he’s not the Vietnam War, but just try telling that to CNN or Fox News. No entertainer – of any race, creed or culture – should be so obsessively pored over by the public and media like Jackson has, whether for good or ill. The media’s ace in the hole is that they are just giving the people what they want. They study ratings, they bring in test audiences, and they try to adjust their news programming to what the majority of the citizens want to see. Apparently the wall-to-wall coverage of Jackson’s death is exactly what we want. So the real question then – and the much more damning one – is what does this say about us? The world we live in today has been shaped much more by Robert McNamara than Michael Jackson, even if only a fraction of its citizens know the former’s name. There’s not much criteria to compare the two on directly, but even when it comes to charity, McNamara has Jackson beat. His chief legacy as President of the World Bank was that at the end of his tenure he began steps to alleviate poverty in some of the poorest nations by building schools and hospitals and encouraging wealthy nations to increase aid. Michael Jackson created many charities, but most became severely impaired and underfunded when Jackson’s own financial difficulties began in the 1990s. But none of that is conventional wisdom, which is disappointing. Where a citizenry invests its focus and attention is no smaller matter. The success of democracy hinges on the participation of an informed populace, and it feels more so than ever that this intense focus on the death of pop star is a sure sign that we have lost our way. We choose the frivolous, disposable, and easy things over the complex and important. Imagine what kind of world we would live in if the same amount of people who bought Thriller read Halberstam’s account of the Vietnam war, The Best and the Brightest, or simply watched the McNamara-centered documentary, The Fog of War. The public’s awareness of the costs of war and the military-industrial complex that it requires can change a nation’s policy in more ways than simply through the ballot box. But it’s simply not here in 2009. Arguing about Michael Jackson’s legacy – whether solely his music, or his music coupled with his legal, financial and personal issues – is beside the point in so many ways. We’ve pulled up the rug from under ourselves in obsessing over the merits of celebrity. Meanwhile, the perilous and manipulative worlds of politics and finance operate all around us. Not paying attention to debates over climate change, financial reform, and humanitarian crises around the world is nothing to be proud of, and even Jackson – who stressed the importance of caring for the world’s children, albeit naively – would demand that we make the appropriate changes to our lives for the sake of future generations. Robert McNamara may have never received the public fawning and attention like Michael Jackson, but he was one of the men-behind-the-curtain that shaped our world. Jackson merely sang and danced in it, and if we continue to have difficulty distinguishing the two and which is truly more important, then the troubles that plague our society as a whole won’t be going away any time soon.
Guaranteed Ways to Have a Bad Trip on Hallucinogens Mushrooms, acid, and peyote aren’t the typical party drugs. Vilified by squares in the 1960’s as harmful chemicals that make you jump out of windows because you think you can fly, hallucinogens have gotten a pretty bad rap. They aren’t coke or ecstasy, or even the good old dependable marijuana. Those are the chemicals and herbs that widen or narrow the situation in front of you. It can intensify or deaden the feedback the senses are receiving. Psychotropic drugs are a bit deeper, a bit stranger, and include a lot more uncontrollable laughter. The changes aren’t from the outside in, but the inside out. The mind is goes a thousand miles an hour, not the world around you. It’s therapy in fungi form (mushrooms are, well, mushrooms, peyote comes from cacti, and LSD is procured from moldy wheat). Lousy trips on the typical powder/pill drugs are a dime a dozen (just read the bio of any famous musician of the last forty years and you’ll find abuse in some form that leads to harrowing moments in cars, planes, or onstage). They’re generally about being wasted out of your mind and then having to deal with some sort of obstacle or ordeal in the outside world. Bad trips on psychotropic drugs are another matter entirely. They’re rooted where the trip is rooted. Deep within the chemical reactions that incessantly bubble inside the human brain. Here are some guaranteed ways to have a bad trip on hallucinogens. It almost goes without saying, but avoid if possible:
Take them after an emotional tragedy Hallucinogens aren’t feel-better-by-feeling-nothing drugs. Hallucinogens get inside your head and make you explore and question random decisions you’ve made and events that have occurred since you popped out of the womb. If dead gramps, or cancer ridden Mom, or ex-girlfriend since yesterday is weighing heavily on your mind, guess what’s gonna looming large over your six to eight hour trip. (a good example of this is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when Duke ruminated on the possibility of seeing your dead grandmother crawl up your leg with a knife between her teeth after one has ingested LSD) Now obviously your freak out might not be in the form of having to deal with an imagined physical manifestation of your deceased or former boots knocking bud that’s full of murderous intent. Instead, it could be a massive feeling of guilt ravaged self-loathing. Kind of like living a black hole chock full of powerful negative emotions for an hour or two. Perhaps your future suddenly appears to be a quick road to hell instead of having a quiet, understated breakfast the next morning. Or maybe you’ll just cry for awhile in the fetal position, clutching a baby blue blanket that is oh so, so, so soft, remembering that the great moments of your life are all behind you. Of course, if you’re glad gramps, Mom, or Alice is out of the picture, in which case, all the power to you, maybe your trip will be all the better for it. The important thing to remember that despite the mind expanding, lightheaded exuberance-ness, you alone are in control, no matter how often it may feel like the exact opposite. Just as the sober human mind has a tendency to wander, it can do so under the influence of crazy plants and fungus, only it may sprint...to a rocket… and take off in that. And in this case, it may seem like being able to rein in your thoughts may be completely impossible, but it’s not. Just stare at your hand. Then flex your fingers a bit. Amazing, huh? But a lousy mood is a lousy mood, and hallucinogens aren’t fixes, they’re resonators. If you ain’t feelin’ quite right that day, maybe you should stick to the traditional route and drown your sorrows in several belts of scotch.
Listen to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music or anything by Swans Music stops being background on ‘shrooms and LSD, and it begins to fuse itself to your mind. While 90% of music can only be a good thing on these trips (Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Animal Collective), there are a handful of hellish soundscapes out there that will force you to peel of your skin and feed it to a vending machine coin slot to make the noises stop. Lou Reed is actually a pretty awesome choice for tripping (even the uber-intense Venvet Underground album White Light/White Heat), but his record industry nose thumbing, sixty four minute Metal Machine Music is just a very dangerous thing. Nearly unlistenable when sober, it’s an ear piercing nightmare for people who just want to float away on the rippling ceiling. Unrelenting guitar squeals and endless loops of feedback for over an hour. To relate it to first example above, Metal Machine Music is the audio equivalent of an emotional tragedy. Senseless and painful with no end in sight. And while MMM is a one time, drugged fueled ‘mock’ album (Reed himself has said that, ‘anyone who gets to side/track four is dumber than I am’), another bunch of arty New Yorkers – Swans – have managed to create an entire discography of unsettling, loud gloom. Allegedly having played so loud at sparsely attended shows that it caused audience members ears to bleed, the Swans have somehow made a wall of crackling static and slow pounding drums over wailing vocals and sound clips about addicts jacking off for drug money an extremely depressing endeavour. Sometimes the best part about hallucinogens is that it can open up ideas and memories that you’ve never thought of or have previously forgotten, but with the wrong music, it can be like opening these things up with a rusty can opener.
Snort coke You know that funny little rhyme about drinking: ‘Liquor then beer, nothing to fear, beer then liquor, never been sicker’? There isn’t one of those for combining coke with hallucinogens because doing so just isn’t funny. On rare occasions is the combination of drugs a good thing. Weed and practically everything else, for example, as weed in this case will only accentuate the main drug you’re currently on. But taking drugs that pull you in two different directions can be catastrophic, perhaps fatal (think speedballs, or sleeping pills plus a bottle of wine) Coke is a superficial social powder while mushrooms and LSD are deep spiritual mindfucks. Even if you’re in what seems to be a good headspace for the ‘shrooms, that doesn’t mean your pulsating brain can adequately fit any more chemical stimulation. The resulting mix (at best) is you babbling excitingly but incoherently to anyone who might accidentally catch your eye or (at worst) screaming at a hallucination with manic energy that no one can convince you doesn’t exist. You may try to attack it with a broom.
Be around a lot of sober (read: not on hallucinogens) people in a small area Sartre said hell is other people, but only under the influence of psychedelic drugs can you actually feel the flames lick your brain. While Bill Hicks claiming that taking mushrooms was like ‘squeegee-ing your third eye’, there is no discernable proof that taking these naturally grown fungi gives you any type of sixth sense. But trying tell that to the unlucky tripper who has to engage in normal conversation with people who aren’t about to collapse into a fit of uncontrollable laughter for five minutes. People talking about their day at work instead of the colour of the floor. The awareness that for the moment these people are not on the same wavelength as you is complete telepathic, uber-ESP mindfuck. Their minds are either closed off completely, or you are absolutely positive that they are thinking the most disappointing, headshaking thoughts about you. Psychedelic drugs are all about running with a thought to its most extreme, illogical conclusion, and sadly, in groups of people not on mushrooms, the thought that is constantly re-enforced is: ‘there is no way I can relate to any of these people right now’. Having at least one fellow tripper trapped in a straight-laced crowd will alleviate the pressure somewhat, but deep down you still feel that crawling on the floor and giggling will still be seen as a social faux pas, which is a damn shame, because it probably would just be a whole lotta fun. Plus you can’t spend twenty minutes in the bathroom staring at yourself in the mirror because other guests need to use it, and they’re rarely willing to share the space. The nerve of some people…
Answering the Phone Turn it off or leave it in a drawer. And if you still have on those good ol’ land lines, either unhook it before you start to trip or have other people promise to tackle you if you attempt to pick it up when it rings. It’s nothing but a ticking time bomb. First off, you have a 99.9% chance the person on the other end of the phone is not on hallucinogenic drugs, and going back to the previous point, you now have to crawl out of the wonder bubble you’ve made for yourself and converse with real people about real issues. This is an incredible amount of focus, if only because only one of your five senses has to be attentive to the speaker. Your other four – notably, your eyes – can wander around the room while you are supposed to be listening and force you to mull over that painting of the sea at the far end of the room and then you wonder what it would be like to live on a sailboat for a couple months and whether you would try to catch fish every day or rely mostly on food brought from the shore. And while doing this you’ve missed the last couple sentences, plus the person repeating your name and asking if you’re still there. More important than the actual requirement of attentive back and forth conversation is the fact that the call might contain bad news. Horrible, soul crushing, life changing news. Suddenly, you aren’t taking mushrooms after an emotional tragedy, you’re high as shit while said tragedy is occurring. Panic will pounce upon you like [fat famous person] on a [unhealthy food]. And even if it’s not bad news, it still may require some effort on your part. Do you really want to have to take a message by finding a pen and paper and scrawling an illegible message about a dentist appointment confirmation on drugs? Voicemail has become universal, so use it to your advantage. So don’t answer the phone. ‘But what if it’s an emergency’, one may ask. So what? You think you’re in any type of condition to deal with an emergency? Even if, say, a relative is dying, do you want to: a) find out about it while you’re tripping; and b) have to go to the hospital and see a bunch of family members while high? Of course not on both counts. While it sucks balls missing an important personal event, you will have a better trip, and your great aunt won’t have spend her last remaining moments seeing you clutch onto her hospital bed as if the tile floor beneath you was turning to quicksand.
At first glance, it seems like you cannot compare the two. One is a location that – depending on your belief system – may not exist at all. Another is a slang term for feces of all kinds. But if you start to peel of the layers (hopefully wearing gloves), you’ll find an intense discussion of epic biological and metaphysical proportions. Both of those things are bad in the general sense, although there are a few pluses for each, to be sure. Yes, hell is a great impetus for people to avoid doing bad things, and people do feel better believing that evil people will be tortured forever, but with dogma being what it is, for the most part, hell is pain and suffering incarnate. Blacker than the darkest black and beyond the boundaries of time and space. Hell is bad. Same with shit. Shit is bad. While the droppings of some species are extremely valuable to the planet (manure, guano), and the process of depositing bodily waste is essential for almost all organisms to remain healthy, by and large, getting it on your shoe is a fucking awful experience. With the exception of a couple fetishists, no one likes to touch, smell, or eat shit. The improper disposal of shit – a huge problem in many African nations – can result in sickness and disease, leading to death. So shit is bad. An inconvenience at best, a killer at worst. But what’s ultimately worse? Hell is supposed to be that very thing to a t. A ‘lake of fire’ – as referenced in the Book of Revelation – is perhaps the tamest description. Most tortures seen in depictions of hell are physical. Many of these images are based on the lengthy poem by Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno. The poet himself is escorted on the grand tour of hell by the dead Roman poet, Virgil. He sees people being tossed in endless cyclones, trapped in flaming tombs, and whipped by demons. There are even folks there who are forever encased in… take a guess…shit! But certainly hell can be a bit more complex than that, right? Religions the world over – who are the certainly the biggest promoters of hell – teach that the body is the temporary home of the soul, which is immaterial and eternal. So what’s with all the focus on bodily torment in hell? Is it because that’s the easiest stuff for us physical beings to understand? As if the sales pitch for hell was, ‘hey you know how snake bites and fire suck? Imagine that happening to you forever and ever! That’s hell.’ They seem to be ignoring emotions, which in many ways can gnaw at the very soul of a person much better than a sharp pair of demon teeth. Guilt, anguish, shame, loss, despair, these feelings could be pumped into your mind in the nasty pits below. Imagine feeling like you’ve just found out about the death of your parents – or your child – for all eternity. Flaming tombs ain’t got nothing on that shit. (although to be fair, I’ve never been burnt to a crisp for any length of time, and my parents are still alive) Hell is still a handy bit of caution for much of the world today. A ‘fire & brimstone’ speech remains a popular form of evangelical proselytizing. Deterrence of immoral activities via punishment (as opposed to eloquent speeches asking for good morals to rule the day) is practiced in every country in the form of the penal system (and hey, prison is a place where you can be brutally beaten and raped repeatedly for the length of your sentence, so there’s definitely some similarities between that and Hades). So at this point, hell has shit on the ropes. Shit is pretty straightforward. There’s not much you can add to shit to make it more repulsive, except for maybe having to pick up after your Great Dane on a hot summer’s day. And even that, if you have a baggie and are quick about it, it’s no big deal. There’s not much literature devoted to crap. Even in Africa, shit isn’t the real problem. Lack of infrastructure is the problem. If you’ve got people, you’ve got shit and you’re going to have to deal with it, end of story. But there are other ways to evaluate the two terms. If we consider language, the words shit and hell are interchangeable for situations that are very far away from their initial definitions. Shit in any language means bad or useless (‘that sounds like shit’). Hell can be referenced to experiences that were filled with extreme difficulty (‘moving day was hell’). Without question, however, shit is a much more versatile term. People can be ‘shitheads’, lies are ‘bullshit’, and it can make a fine adjective: ‘you’re shit out of luck’. Even if you want to use the word as an antonym, you could say that good things are ‘the shit’. Shit is good now? What the hell’s up with that? The problem is, if we’re going to try to be as scientific as possible for this (admittedly) ridiculous comparison, we have to address the fact the hell is nothing but hearsay. Plenty of historical documents make reference to it in its many forms and several legendary religious institutions have made it a part of their theological cornerstone, but that don’t impress 21st century scientists much. The scientific method comes up with…poop… when attempting to look for proof of hell. On the other hand, shit – while being easily disposed of and avoided by the developed world – definitely does exist, in which case the argument should be over and done with. I mean, hell’s never killed anyone. Hell is the metaphysical playoffs that you might never get to, while shit is a very real part of the regular season we’re all toiling in right now. The definitely real triumphs the possibly real, right? But our minds don’t necessarily work that way. Abstract thought can do a lot to a person’s perception of the world (hell, we’ve come up with the concept of hell even though no one’s ever seen it). In fact, our projections of what we want to see in our future are in many ways what makes us human. Forget limiting ourselves by just collecting enough nuts for the winter season, we create cities in our heads years before ground is broken. Look at the Space Program, relying on technology to get us to Mars that doesn’t necessarily exist yet. Possibility is the engine of the human mind that endless recreates civilization. But possibility is complicated. Compared to it, reality – where shit resides – is extremely easy. Shit is what it is, with very little mental extrapolation required. The immediate reactions of the five senses pretty much tell the whole story. But possibility is endless – for better or for worse. The future can be a technological utopia, or an apocalyptic war zone. Hollywood and the entertainment industry seem to be leaning towards the latter, but that may only be because conflict and difficulty make for much better stories than endless peace. It’s true for Dante as well, as he wrote three parts to his Divine Comedy, but everyone ignores the Purgatory and Heaven sections and focus on Inferno. And in that dichotomy one can also see how the concept of heaven and hell is treated in society. Sure, heaven is where everyone wants to go, but it’s gotten a lot less ruminations and pieces of art devoted to it when compared to the hellfire below. If endless possibility means keeping all options on the table, we certainly haven’t skimped on planning out in great detail the worst of the worst fates. It’s as if we’ve been preparing for the worst for a very long time, just in case it might – possibly – be true. So what is the verdict? Possibility is making this much more complicated, but thank god for possibility as it’s given us the society we have today. Unless everything in the end goes wrong (or…right?) and we’re correct about hell. Or perhaps finally experiencing unrealized possibility by finding out there is no hell is just about the perfect example of hell there is. So let’s say that for reality’s sake, shit wins, and everyone ought to be thankful for that. Now watch where you step.
The Internet is making me hate democracy Recently, social networking has become the most popular activity for people to engage in online, displacing pornography for the first time since the mid nineties. I’m already missing the good old days. Have you been on the internet recently? Of course you have. What kind of question is that? You’re on the internet right now. Unfortunately, a lot of other people are on the internet right now. People who aren’t necessarily there to read this essay, peruse a wikipedia article on moose diseases, comment on a friend’s picture of them taken when they were drunk, or jack off to Put It In My Ass 4. Some people are there just to be jackasses. See, now that it’s no longer all the rage to own a computer and an internet connection but mandatory, you get the dregs stumbling down the hallowed halls of cyberspace. I don’t mean the hackers. They were always an integral part of the information superhighway. If the nerds built and maintained the internet, it was the hackers who tore up the pavement and robbed unsuspecting, naive travelers, which forced the nerds to work harder and upgrade. No, the people I’m referring to now are the equivalent of those who drive slow, load up on bumper stickers, and drive to walmart to pick up a plastic lawn chair and sneakers with lights on them (thanks, George). The rabble, in other words. The latecomers. Not the party crashers, but the ones who got lost and showed up late because they forget the directions on the kitchen table. All those people are now on the internet, clogging up bandwith just like they clogged up the fast lane. And they are faceless and anonymous, lurking on myspace, facebook, blogger, perezhilton, and every other lowest common denominator digital sinkhole. You can track their movements en masse via Digg, and Reddit like the slow heard of bison they are. The internet has become a crossbreed of a high school locker room and Entertainment Tonight. But the crown prince without question is YouTube. Where the rabble comes to play for hours on end. When you give the public free reign on creating and uploading their handiwork, this is what you get: someone gleefully lip syncing to a top forty song, or someone illegally uploading the official music video of said top forty song. Of course, the gulf between sponsored and original content is widening. If you check out the all time most watched videos on the site, you’ll find the top dog is an atrocious little ditty by Avril Lavinge called Girlfriend, which has been viewed over 116,000,000 times. There are rumours that Lavinge fans ‘boosted’ its position by constantly reloading the page to increase the hit count. The number two – the people’s champion – is a guy doing a variety of dancing styles at some sort of comedy show, earning 114,000,000 hits. The rest are Top 40 music videos officially uploaded from the record companies, including a handful from the ex R&B couple, Rihanna and Chris Brown. And those are getting frequent viewings these days not because of the video or the music directly, but because the comments section below the video has become the forum for discussing their recent, violent breakup. Which leads to the inherent problem with the internet, democracy and humanity in general. Now, this claim in itself suggests that the internet is not blame for its shortcomings – humanity itself is – but my argument in this essay/rant is that it is within the bowels of the internet where this problem is so glaring and painful. The internet has gone from information to opinion. Objective (as objective as possible, anyway) to subjective. The comment section, the message board, and the blog, this unholy trinity has drowned out interesting discussion and debate in favour of mindless sniping, uninformed remarks, and constant miscommunication. But the problem isn’t that these exist – they are inherent to the imperfect system that is human experience and understanding – the problem is how fucking many of them there are. Every form of discourse should be included in any society, real or digital, but when an inordinate number of them are completely pointless, would a bit of quality control be too much to ask? Some examples: A guy on YouTube is cutting, pasting and posting a short message that begins ‘Barack Obama is a socialist’ under as many pro-Obama videos as possible. Is that what political canvassing has been reduced to? Comment bombing videos and articles you disagree with? Of course, at least this message was spelt correctly and was grammatically accurate. While I quietly pray that 95% of the people who post on YouTube are drunken thirteen year olds, even that suggests that we are raising a bunch of kids who have gone beyond relying on spell check and are simply typing with their blind fists and misguided feelings. In comments for M.I.A. video ‘Paper Planes’ we get: ‘no afense mia but i have heard better lyrics from my 5 year old sister's remix in twinkle twinkle little star! ‘ and, ‘but i thought all niggers and latinos suked dick?’ Should I be glad or concerned that the latter could at least spell the racial slur correctly? But then, even properly spelled comments frequently veer off topic. When I looked at the popular video, ‘Don’t Mess With Keith Richards’ (627,000 users have watched him guitar attack a guy who jumped onstage during Satisfaction in 1981), the most recent comment was simply, ‘They found no child porn on any of his computers’. Odd. Looking down at the first ten comments, you see this is a response to an earlier comment: ‘Yeah, when I think of cool, Pete comes to mind right away. Along with his comuter [sic] full of child porno.’ So the first comment was a response to Pete Townshend’s legal matter regarding him searching for child pornography while researching his autobiography. Granted, I only know this because I’m familiar with The Who. Anyone who wasn’t would have to trawl even further back to find the initial comment that mentioned Pete Townshend. This disjointed form of dialogue is typical on some of the most popular sites on the internet. Myspace and Facebook – while typically more genial – suffer from the same problem. So not only do people offer poorly spelled, insipid comments, they do so not being aware of the mangled dialogue that is taking place. Even in The Onion’s AV Club – the entertainment section of the satirical newspaper’s website – you get mindless firefights from people complaining that ‘The Deer Hunter’ wasn’t included in a recent list of 15 Gearshift Movies. There’s nothing wrong with the argument, of course, but then ‘BajingoHound’ offers this intellectual nugget: ‘Deer Hunter??!!! Give me a fucking break. Could you possibly be any more of a fucking 'tard moron.’ Is that necessary? When was the last time you discussed movies at a party and called someone a ‘fucking tard moron’? Combine indifference to presentation, near anonymity, and contextual difficulties that exacerbate the problem, and you are left with the internet, now the equivalent of watching a two dimensional rock fight by people confined to wheelchairs. And I don’t want to sound like the cranky old man who rags on the younger generation – mainly because I am part of this generation – but just as sure as I am that everyone deserves an opinion in a democracy, I am sure that the builders of our eleven-dimensional string universe didn’t want us all to be writers. Enter video blogging: for those who have nothing to say, as well as being too lazy to type. You don’t need a keyboard to mangle the English language. When it becomes too easy to do something, quality begins to buckle. The internet was originally heralded as a much needed improvement over television, which was a unilateral assault on the senses. Finally the world would have a medium where its citizens could engage with the material being presented to them, even create material themselves. It was the dawning of a great new era in technological communication and human interaction. But then other shoe drops, and you find it’s filled with someone else’s hacked off foot. For every person that had a unique, worthwhile opinion on politics, culture, or anything else under the cyber sun, there were ten people who saw the keyboard as a glorified remote control and offered up the posit, ‘this fukking sux!’, as often as possible. Suddenly the concept of paying for culture became an option that many people opted out of. Print media and its original nemesis, television, are feeling the pinch of internet users getting whatever they want, whenever they want. On the internet, your words are your eternal first impression with the people who stumble across your comments. If we are to judge people they way the present themselves in a YouTube forum, not only do I have dismal hopes for the future, but I find myself wondering if every cynical thing said about the public as a whole is true. Give the masses enough rope, and they’ll hang themselves with a completely oblivious look on their faces. What’s scary is that these people vote. Everyone gets a vote. Not everyone is created equal. Everyone deserves equal treatment by society, but it doesn’t mean everyone has the same tastes, abilities, and feelings. It’s even your right to remain ignorant if you so choose. As much as it is your right to not participate in the democratic process, it is just as much your right to take part in an election you may not completely understand. It is also your right to not take part in the political process at all. Soon you’ll be able to not do it while surfing the internet, as voting is making a shaky but determined stab at going cyber. I think of these basic tenets of democracy reflected in every butchered word and unenlightened negative comment the world wide web produces. Forgive my naïve optimism, but at least ten years ago you could believe that most people were inherently civil and thoughtful; at least half the population. But the internet has pulled aside the curtain and shown that even if people are both those wonderful things, they see no reason to show that side of them in cyberspace. And it feels like saying half is much too generous. So often it feels like no one gives a rat’s ass. As if the internet is an excuse to act mediocre, when without question it’s going to be the most important communication tool in human history since the printing press (interestingly enough, one of the early criticisms of the printing press was that it was going to give everyone a chance to read or write, including many who would just abuse the privilege: ‘The pen is a virgin, the printing press is a whore’, was how one early critic put it). I’d always been suspicious of polls suggesting that people feel we were more polite ten or twenty years ago, that we’ve become ruder, but now I’ve got proof that they’re right. We’re either rude or we don’t give the internet as a whole the respect it deserves. Especially since the solution is so damn obvious: Think before you speak. Sure, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but are we really letting the shit sink to the bottom as quickly as it should? Some parts of the internet need to be moderated simply because too many hairless apes got a hold of computers. And not just for racism or libel, but now mainly irrelevance and punctuation. If you’re comment makes you sound like a drunk or an illiterate jackass, it’s going to be given the same treatment it gets on the street. None. But as words yelled on the sidewalk flutter away into nothingness seconds later, the words on the internet are permanent stains of pointless stupidity. And once again, a bit of moron-speak is an important reflection of daily life, but it shouldn’t seem to define it at every turn. Just like in real life, you’d think ‘don’t kill’, ‘don’t lie’, ‘don’t steal’ would be pretty obvious to all as three damn fine rules for a civilized society, but we need policemen and a justice system threatening punishment to ensure these rules are followed. We can’t rely on the public as a whole to take care of this problem. Just a couple hundred (thousand?) programmers with good heads on their shoulders. I’m not sure if I’m advocating cyber fascism – although the title of this piece suggests I am – but just like democracy, assuming that we’re all equal and can take care of each other with little to no oversight and regulation can get us into a mess of trouble.
2008 Year in review: Clusterfuck Commentary for a Clusterfuck year – PART ONE AND TWO COMBINED The Year in Three Quick words: Obama, Obama, Obama The 44th President of the Whole Fucking World: A Primer -Half black, half white, all man. -Cool, calm, collected. -Christian Double Agent (appears to be Muslim only to his enemies) -Three H’s: Hawaii, Harvard, Historical Figure -Four-cigarettes-a-day man (working towards Churchill level of perpetual cigar smoking) -Can tell real words from made up ones (unlike other presidents we can name)
Election years are long ones. Politicians die one thousand deaths. There seems to be one thousand hours of political coverage a day on CNN. And there are one thousand instances where the average citizen across the post-American empire world screams at their form of medium communication device to ‘stop fucking talking about bullshit! Just tell me their policies already! Argggggh!!!’ Every four years the way we learn about what happens in the world decides to devote itself almost solely to the glorious democratic process that only sixty percent of America takes part in and all its minute details. Remember all those stories that had the lifespan of a mayfly? Obama and Huckabee pull off upsets in Iowa. Hillary Clinton finds her voice in New Hampshire, while McCain uses it to solidify his comeback. Rudy gambles on America’s wang. Crazy Reverend Wright. Law and Order grandpa stepped up and down in. Huckabee tries to use Chuck Norris on the campaign trail… as a selling point. Super Tuesday closes one lid and opens up a massive, horrible can of worms labeled ‘Liberal Nightmares’. Clinging to guns and religion, getting shot in Bosnia, Bill Richardson as Judas Iscariot, Bill Clinton shooting his mouth off, ‘You Betcha!’, makeup for barnyard animals, suspending the campaigns… the list goes on. All these stories faded away. They were breaking news on the cable networks and the people made magazine covers. But now they are withered and old. In less than a year. As far as late December 2008 is considered, there are only three American politicians: the departing Bush, the arriving Obama, and the please-just-resign-already Blagojevich. Even Sarah Palin has been relegated to Tina Fey impersonator. And poor John McCain was stuck holding a broken political party that hypothetically he should have been leading for the last eight years (hell, if Bush was able to ‘beat’ Gore in 2000, McCain could have throttled him). McCain glaring strength was his glaring weakness. He was a maverick, but a maverick that had to do several un-maverick things to appeal to the conservative base. You couldn’t blame him for lack of trying. At the end of August it was a pretty close race, and while some would suggest that the more we learned about his running mate sunk McCain, the truth was what Bill Clinton said in his 1992, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’.
Oh yeah. While
the presidential election sucked up TV time and newspaper space like an
American Idol season with health care reform initiatives, the real story
for 2008 as far as the world is concerned was that economy was more or
less imaginary. Credit default swaps – also known as insurance on crack –
were estimated to be worth $70 trillion non-existent dollars. No one knows
for sure, as the market was completely unregulated, which was problem
number one. Also, people are selfish liars. And when people are allowed to
make money appear out of thin air for the purpose of financial reports,
they It’s certainly an oversimplification to reduce this economic Armageddon to a matter of human greed, but you’d be surprised how often it explains so many actions taken, whether it be complicated financial transactions for housing loans you don’t know are good or bad or setting up a $50 billion dollar pyramid scheme. And it’s the average automaton across the planet who feels the pinch. The story of human civilization, I suppose. Perhaps the only real historical movement of note in the last ten thousand years was the emergence of the middle class. Everything else has been kings in various guises looking over the masses of proles from their mountaintop chalet and having them fight for god, land, and resources. (I apologize. This wasn’t supposed to be a call for anarchy. Or communism) So it’s a worldwide recession. The first in, well, not that long, really. The last one was in 2001. Of course, statistics are being flung around like worst since 1982, 1974, 1969, etc. Nothing can really compare to the depression of the thirties, where up to 25% of America was unemployed (they are currently hovering around a 7.5% rate). And all it’s gonna cost them to fix is $700 billion dollars (fun fact: the credit card debt for all Americans is currently $983 billion), even though the country’s debt is so big the trillion dollar sign in New York City has to be expanded to fit the new number: $10 trillion And the auto industry might die. Ah, well. Nothing says opportunity like crisis. As long as we have enough on our plates and heat the first world will be fine. Wait, there were food riots across the planet this year? Including Italy? Fortunately, for every stupid, hair pulling, apocalypse-suggesting thing that happened this year, there was always something that suggested we as a species were more than parasites with iPhones. That Obama thing. That big supercollider under Europe didn’t blow up the earth. China sucked less than ever. Uh… the new and improved iPhone? Maybe I’m reaching… But maybe that’s what so aggravating about 2008. No forward movement. That pot of gold always still just out of reach. 2008 is the year cyberspace won an election, but it’s also the year where money that only existed in computers went up in smoke. As soon as insanely expensive oil seemed to herald a new era of cars running on green resources, the prices plummeted and you could afford to drive three blocks away again. And just to remind us that the concern of technological alienation and confusion that started in the late nineties hadn’t gone away, Radiohead toured the world. Huzzah. In Rainbows sounded better live, even though the album was already the best of 2007. The record opened with the line, ‘how come I end up where I started? How come I ended up where I went wrong?’ Two appropriate questions for a world that just can’t seem to get ahead. America replaced a dumb leader with manageable problems – even I’ll admit that Iraq was and still is doing better – with a smart leader with goddamn-near impossible problems. Canada had an election and nothing changed. The conservative party – noted by Jon Stewart as being the American equivalent of Gay Liberals for Nader – retained it’s minority status, and the year ended with the leader Stephen Harper shirking away from the other parties ganging up on him and dissolving parliament until 2009. Zimbabwe also had an election where nothing changed, but we need a big fucking asterisk beside that (like: *). Mugabe has been running his country into the ground for the years, but suddenly with the threat of being kicked out by the will of the people, he seemed to kick his not-giving-a-shit about-the-masses policy into high gear. And think of all the great words that can become newsworthy events just by adding the word China in front of them: China earthquake, China Tibet crackdown, China Olympic torch attacks, China tainted milk scandal, plus the China Olympics (psst! While Phelps won gold after gold, Russia invaded Georgia). Terrorism in Mumbai. Pakistan and Afghanistan continue their implosions. And apparently there are problems in Israel-Palestine. Sure innocent people dying has been a regular occurrence since we crawled out of the muck, but try asking someone who lost a loved one to these events to look at the big picture. Suddenly every citizen is expected to make that switch from doing what’s best for friends and family to what’s best for the starving millions half a world away. The world is getting bigger and smaller. Half of America did not celebrate Obama’s victory while ninety percent of the world did. Castro stepped down and his less charming brother stepped up. And somehow we have to worry about pirates again (what’s next? Viking hordes?). Going forward and going backward at the same time. Grinding those gears and kicking up smoke. Continents full of people, rainforests full of animals and glaciers full of ice are dying, burning and shrinking. It’s not chaos, and it’s not harmony or balance. It’s all of these things mashed together. I’m sure the Germans have a perfect word for it. But just as Harry Lime tells us in Reed’s The Third Man, great culture can emerge out of confusion and chaos. As economies and foreign policies are becoming more and more interdependent and sometimes paradoxical, so too are the artistic interpretations of this society. One of the best films of the year is a rags-to-riches love story set in India called Slumdog Millionaire, where a poor kid gets his shot on that country’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? What’s his goal? To impress a girl. And the film is in English, shot in Mumbai, directed by a Brit, and praised the world over. It’s not a clash of cultures and film archetypes, it’s an embrace of them. Even the biggest film of the year – The Dark Knight, a continuation of the re-invention of the Batman franchise – didn’t give us any easy answers. ‘You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain’, was a line uttered several times in the movie and became its uneasy mantra. The movie was philosophical treatise on how to truly overcome evil, complete with car chases. Then there was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a Brad Pitt vehicle where he is born as an old man and grows younger and younger through the twentieth century. There is no why. There is only dealing with the problem as best one can. Synecdoche, New York – Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut – made barely a ripple in the public’s consciousness, but that’s to be expected from the most challenging film of the year. Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays a theatre director that stages a play of his life in a giant warehouse so he can sort all his problems out. First he gets actors to play the people around him, but as they spend more time around him, he gets people to play those actors playing others. It snowballs from there. Forget looking at yourself in the mirror. Here you’re looking at yourself every time you move your head. Kids winning big money, comic book heroes turned upside down, people aging in reverse, and a film about the world as a play. This is what we get when the world outside isn’t advancing when it needs to. A state of arrested development (still a shame that show was cancelled, by the way) in some of the biggest and best films of the year. Responsibility and understanding the element of chance is not a give in, but something to be earned. And sometimes after all your hard work to attain those things you come up with nothing, which in itself is another quandary to wrestle with. What if nothing works out? What if everything we worked for in every field under the sun bites us in the ass in the end? Even if we aren’t asking ourselves these questions, the movies are. And in the midst of all this, Fleet Foxes’ self titled debut album comes from woods untouched by man. The music is lighter than air, and Robin Peckhold’s vocals belong somewhere between the stratosphere and the moon. Bluegrass, folk, and rock come together in a melting pot of serene hymns. You can’t picture this music being made in a world like this. Ditto the Department of Eagle’s new album, In Ear Park. Another album that feels like the closest computer or electronic device was miles away from the recording space. In our world where we have at least two electronic devices in our pockets at all times, this music is the antidote. Both of these records garnered critical acclaim but not much sales and no spins on the radio Top 40. More so than any mainstream artistic medium, music has become the most disposable. While the economy as a whole went belly up this year, the music industry has been dying a slow death for years. Illegal downloading is the main culprit, but more and more artists – both established and underground – are spurning the corporations for a more Do-It-Yourself approach. Everything big is falling apart, but it is being replaced by something smaller and more efficient. Darwin is laughing from grave. Again. Compared to the yawn fest that was 2007, 2008 – for better or for worse – had more highs and lows than an acceptable roller coaster metaphor. There was hope for the future when we really needed it as everything in the present seemed to lurch forward with a wheeze and then explode. But that’s big picture talking again, which is the observation we imagine people writing history books five hundred years in the future would use (ahem, if there is one). Between the lines of the handful of sentences that will be permitted for 2008, a million little worlds exploded onto the scene and quickly died. One then the other, sometimes six at a time. The speed at which these gears shift into new topical waters isn’t alarming anymore. It’s normal. The pendulum from great to garbage swings faster and faster until it’s spinning like a centrifuge. Accelerated culture. I can be argued that there is nothing new anymore. Only new ways of presenting old things. The two biggest TV shows are 30 Rock and Mad Men, the first is a behind-the-scenes look at a Saturday Night Live-type show and the other is drama following the misogynistic escapades of an advertising agency in the nineteen sixties. Anything that will keep the world outside at bay will do. Displacement, whether it be in our entertainment or our move to smaller houses because the ones we bought four years ago ended up too big for our bank accounts. We’re dogs chasing tails, always moving but nowhere to go. We don’t know what we need, let alone what we want. Unless it’s everything. We want that. We want the world at our fingertips, whether it’s videos of riots in Greece, Japanese food, cheap clothes made in Indonesia, or cell phones that call us ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’. We want cheap gas and green power and SUV’s and sleek hybrids. We want it all at same time, and the ‘we’ is growing faster and faster. Sure, only 10% of India having living standards that meet western levels, but that’s over 100 million people, bigger than any country in Europe. China is bringing more people out of poverty faster than any time in human history and all it’s costing them is their environment. The Western dream is coming true across the world at an expense we cannot afford to pay. Even when it comes to mindless entertainment, we want everything under the sun. Critics praised the gritty, Bourne-like James Bond reboot in 2006’s Casino Royale, but then they lamented this year’s similar Quantum of Solace for losing the gadgets and punch lines. We want happy endings in all our shows and films, and then roll our eyes and complain about the clichés when the two lovers walk off hand in hand or the disaster is averted. We wag our finger with a hint of accusation at the record companies that didn’t embrace the internet in time to save their business, and then moan that it’s too hard to find good new music. And this wanting everything is just the purest form of greed. The exact same thing that sunk stock markets and investment banks worldwide this fall. It’s the one thing former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said he never took into consideration in his continued support of the deregulation of the financial system. A math whiz not acknowledging human emotions. Oh, the clichéd irony. So. 2008 was a staging area. We’ve either hit a sort of bottom and will begin to climb out of the cave, or this is the final gasp before the stage explodes and we tumble into the orchestra pit completely (I think the multiple metaphors in this sentence are appropriate). But maybe that’s what it’s been every year, every month, every day of our lives. Maybe the only difference is that we’ve finally opened our eyes to the reality of our precarious situation. That we understand that change has to come not only in the very big world of politics but the small world of what we need as individuals in our communities. The two aren’t just linked. They are the same thing. We’ve had a crazy jolt to bring this to the forefront of our minds and realize that it’s time for solutions. And if that’s the case, then thank god, and I deem this year a success by a slim margin. It’s been long, exhausting, fun, annoying, stupid, ugly, fucked up, strange, lipstick-y, lewd, Obama-y trip. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I sure as hell don’t want to do it again.
Here’s to 2009. Or else.
A Pothead’s Guide to Children’s Television Classic Howdy Doody -this is a classic 1950’s variety show for children, featuring marionettes, clowns, and cowboys. It does not have a hint of malice; it treats its audience with pleasant condescension, and espouses the values of the American nuclear family with a noble Western theme. In other words, it’s just too damn creepy for the modern day, post-ironic toker. The sincerity wears thin after ten minutes, and the only acknowledgment of temporality is that it is, in fact, ‘Howdy Doody time’. Besides, the clown is clearly evil. (Maybe the show explains John Wayne Gacy) Captain Kangaroo -let’s get the obvious disappointment out of the way: He’s not a real Kangaroo. Love the ping pong balls bit, though. -And the moose. When it comes to sassy puppets, we should respect the moose. The Mickey Mouse Club -Proof the Hitler Youth wasn’t stamped out in 1945. I don’t know if it’s the mouse ear hats or the sweaters with the kid’s names right below the neck or the adults decked out in the exact same clothes, but it feels like the first gear of an impenetrable propaganda machine. Plus, it’s common knowledge that with the exception of a handful Chip and Dale-Donald Duck clips, Disney cartoons sucked. And sucked hard. -Checking the wikipedia article, creepy host Jimmie Dodd never got busted for anything, but he certainly played his part on the show like an overcompensating pedophile. -In other words, the show is great as documentary of cultural totalitarianism, but no one wants to watch that after ripping a bong hit. Looney Tunes -dude, why’s the rabbit always dressing in drag, munching on a carrot, and French kissing the bald hunter? Is that how repressed homosexuality and crossdressing tendencies were explored in 1940’s and 50’s America? It’s like the Kinsey Report with talking animals. -Speaking of the acme catalogue, why the hell is the Coyote still ordering all that deficient technology from the same company? And you know if he ever catches the roadrunner, the meal’s not going to be worth the effort. Still, stoners will always love the gravity segments. Dawning realizations of horror is hilarious when it’s not happening to you.
Retro Sesame Street -some of the letters and numbers shit gets predictable. Big Bird is always annoyingly upbeat, but that contrasted well with Oscar. People are insufferably kind. All of them. Maybe ‘Sesame’ is some kind of mood elevator. Interesting musical segments. Watch out for the large invisible mammoth. Highlights: Proto-Pat-Sajak TV host Guy Smiley and the only one that could kick Superman’s ass – other than Doomsday - SuperGrover. HR Pufnstuf -this was and still is a benchmark in high television. Ordering candy by telephone, octopus people, long nosed witches, orange spiders that look like eight legged cats and a tree named after Boris Karloff. And a wisecracking flute. The laugh track is switched on and off at random. And Pufnstuf is certainly the nicest what-the-fuck-is-that-thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of squinting at through my bleary red eyes. Wait, he’s a dragon? Get outta town. What’s with the flying saucer shaped head? You only have to watch five minutes before it will feel like the show has been a part of you since you were born. Scooby Doo -pure garbage. Do I need the regurgitated stereotypes of my own high foibles thrown back at me in a green shirt and bell bottoms? And do I need to watch this figure always shamed and embarrassed by his upstanding, straight arrow nemesis Fred? And is it always some crooked businessman utilizing the fear of the paranormal to solidify his financial concerns? Mix it up a bit, writers, I’m high, not senile. And what’s with the retarded dog that can only kind of talk to Shaggy? He’s either a talking dog or he’s not. This is a cartoon. Fuck the middle ground. Redhead’s not bad, though. Definitely an eight. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids Man, that guy is fucking fat! And what’s Dr. Huxtable doing giving commentary? Isn’t there a sandwich he should be giving birth to? It’s worth watching an episode of this show on YouTube just for the 1970’s hairstyles and fashion. That Rudy sure dresses cool, but man is Fat Albert fat… Definitely the funkiest opening theme song in the history of television.
Modern Anything Disney – Ducktales, TaleSpin, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, Goof Troop, etc. -a dismal, bland format of action adventure with talking animals that made all the classic, reinvented cartoon characters too, too human. Plucking ‘toons from the wealth of Disney mediocrity and have them solve mysteries or try new job after new job. I preferred Chip and Dale when all they wanted was nuts. And Goofy has a son? Who fucked Goofy? What fucked Goofy? The only bright spot is one of the few original characters, Launchpad McQuack. And that’s ‘cause he’s accident-prone and crashes vehicles all the time. He’s like a NASCAR Driver you can truly depend on. Watch a Louie-centered episode of TaleSpin, the Goof Troop episode when he becomes a fireman, and the Chip and Dale roadkill show. Then flush. Barney & Friends -if you’re high, the ‘I Love You’ song has a lifespan of four listens. After that, it does become suitable for interrogation. -Barney’s gotten a bad rap. Its fun picturing him eating a kid instead of teaching the little brat the alphabet. And maybe that’s why Sesame Street deserves so much credit. Sure the preschool education bits drag the whole thing down, but in almost every show that’s come after it, the education fucking ruins the show completely. -the triceratops is named B.J. So that’s worth a chuckle or two. Batman: The Animated Series -not the current version of Batman, but classic Batman, but not that sixties live action shit. It was on in the early nineties and was pretty damn dark for a kids show. There’s not much to explain. It had Batman kicking ass everyday. The difference was the production value. Great dialogue and vocal performances, Gotham had a 40’s gothic feel to it and was bathed in near perpetual darkness. And do you know who notices the production values of children’s TV programs? Potheads. -Bonus: Luke Skywalker does the voice of the Joker. No, really. Teletubbies -Okay, take Barney and Friends, right? Then smoke a hash joint all to yourself. That’s how you get Teletubbies. It’s slow like molasses, but that gives you the time you need to ponder important questions like, ‘televisions in their stomachs?’, ‘only one of them is gay?’, ‘do you think they’d taste like candy? And would their colours correspond to, like, lemon, cherry, grape, and…uh…green?’ -Skip the live action sequences. It’s just filler to waste time between the Tubby-Toast and the Baby-Big-Brother-Sun. Spongebob Squarepants -ah, the piece de resistance. A stoner’s dream under the sea. The opening song merges clutch cargo and sea shanties. How I can watch this show without wanting to punch the hyperactive yellow protagonist in the face is a glorious mystery. The adventures range from trying to get your boating license, to getting your snail to take a bath, to trying to avoid your neighbor by stepping into an alternative reality. This program crystallizes the great cartoon archetypes to its essence. The bubbly hero, his dumb friend, his uptight neighbor, and his crush, a squirrel in a 1950’s diving suit. Spongebob is a gleeful child in an absurd piece of theatre that is the town of Bikini Bottom, a village that that has everything a pothead would need. A fast food joint, a cinema, an entertainment venue, jellyfish fields, and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Wonder Showzen -a delightful romp. A kids show not at all for children. If you park them in front of this, they will probably warp like a wet board. You, on the other hand, will kneel before your new god, Chauncey the yellow puppet, who in one episode witnessed God’s suicide and proceeded to eat the corpse. He also humped a box full of Mother Nature’s lady bits.
Burn After Reading / Burn the Mythologized Narrative Prepared by the Media After Reading
Burn After Reading is an excellent film, but it’s being marketed wrong and many a film critic are buying the story hook line, and sinker. It’s not a zany comedy as the trailer and TV spots suggest. It’s stark drama with seriously narcissistic, broken people. The plot does become farcical as it spins complete out of control, and the CIA supervisor played by JK Simmons does conclude the film with genuine guffaws, but it never has a moment akin to John Goodman smashing the hood of car screaming, ‘this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!’ The Coen brothers are being hammered into a media narrative where they make an intense dramatic film, then follow it up with a zany comic farce. The prime example for this is the Academy Award winning drama, Fargo, which was complimented by the ‘Shut-the-fuck-up-Donny-ness’ of The Big Lebowski. It was also done with their earlier films, with Blood Simple being followed by Raising Arizona and the satiric The Hudsucker Proxy tailing Barton Fink’s gloom. So based essentially on these examples, the film marketing industry and critics have already sewn the newest patch onto the Coen Brothers’ career quilt. Burn After Reading is supposed to be No Country For Old Men’s side splitting chaser. But it’s not. Trying to squeeze expectant comedy from Burn is like trying to get blood from a stone, which is what many mainstream critics and the marketing campaign are trying to do. This is not The Big Lebowski, but it’s not supposed to be The Big Lebowski. There’s not a heartwarming, laidback Dude-like protagonist anywhere. No hip radio-friendly soundtrack. It’s a serious film where people’s careers, relationships, and lives are falling apart. It attacks the Washington bureaucracy, internet dating, and overpriced sex machines. It’s fucked up, but it’s not ha-ha fucked up. In other words, it’s in every way closer to Fargo than The Big Lebowski. Seemingly easy sinister plans unravel into bodies and cover-ups. Idiots are given jobs that should have most definitely be left in the hands of professionals. While there’s no wood chipper in Burn, we get a drunken ex-CIA agent hacking a mild mannered gym owner to pieces with an axe. In his driveway. Meanwhile, the only death in Lebowski is the tame passing of lovable Donnie, who even gets a eulogy on the California coast before the credits roll. We were set up for this supposedly ‘Lebowski’-ish feature while still the shadow of No Country for Old Men last Christmas. Empire magazine called the film ‘gleefully ridiculous’ in December 2007. Strange, since watching the lonely Frances McDormand walk down a busy park path in search for her humorless internet date is somber, bordering on outright depressing. It is somewhat akin to the scene in Fargo where William H. Macy is being belittled by his father-in-law over the handling of some future investments by the both of them. They are both losers, trying to find contentment in a world that is too big for them to understand. I doubt the Coen brothers will care much about this mislabeling, as it seems that the reactions to their films from the world at large is as interesting to them as which one we think is Joel and which one is Ethan. They have, however, reach the rare status in the artistic community where their work is looked at not as independent pieces to be consumed and pored over separately, but as a whole, as if each notch in their film bedpost is part of a grand plan that is constantly refining itself as their career progresses. And it’s no surprise. In every type of artistic analysis and review there seems to be a need or urge to categorize and mythologize the creative arc of the creator. And while sometimes there are clearly patterns and systems deliberately followed by the artist (Picasso’s blue, rose, cubist periods, etc. comes to mind), ascribing such a rigid set of rules or steps to every artist is overreaching, ridiculous and lazy, especially when said artist is not even dead and still creating work. Certain filmmakers have been given one or two word descriptions that are expected to sum up their careers when it comes to both interpreting their newest work and writing their eventual eulogy. Martin Scorcese gives us ‘gritty, violent’ films. Spielberg tells child bedtime stories on an epic scale. Some directors have disappointed for critics for so long that their tagline is that haven’t made a good film in decades and so every film is always half-assedly compared to their past masterpieces (Coppola). Kubrick made so many films that defied easy description and were wildly different from each other that it just got to the point that he was expected to give us the unexpected. This was shortened to him just being ‘eccentric’. Actors are pigeon holed for the roles that made them famous (action star, comedy star, porn star), and if they try to chaff against this tag, this attempt becomes part of the story of an actor ‘stepping outside of his/her comfort zone to prove their range’. This framing of the actor’s life emerges in every new round of press interviews and articles done by said actor to promote their upcoming project, and is gently tweaked depending on whether the project in question is a small art house film (‘…tackling a unique and challenging role…’) or a major studio blockbuster (‘…returns to familiar explosions and car chases that made them…’). This can also be applied to well known filmmakers. Spielberg successfully broke out of his ET/Indiana Jones reputation with the success of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, so now he’s an artist who bounces back and forth between these two types of films (fun versus serious). Certainly he’s much more than that oversimplified dichotomy, but you wouldn’t know it reading anything about him today. These ‘stories’ permeate other forms of art and entertainment. In music especially do we get the ‘comeback’ album story. Metallica has had it applied to them twice in the last ten years. With the release of 2003’s St. Anger, the party line was that this album that would satisfy those long time fans pissed off with the bands lighter, alt-rock influenced releases Load and Reload. It’s recording also brought the band closer together, as they’d recently lost bassist Jason Newstead and spent months in group therapy (chronicled in the doc Some Kind of Monster). But the album received tepid reviews and only two songs from it were played on the ensuing world tour. So here we are, five years later, with Death Magnetic, an album being hailed as a recording that will finally satisfy the long time pissed off fans and a vast improvement over the clunky St. Anger, which suffered because of lineup changes and group therapy. A lovely revamp of history, a rewriting of the books. What was once strength is now weakness. The same thing has happened to Radiohead and the story of their illustrious career. Their 2003 Hail to the Thief – while still having an overall rating on metacritic.com of 88% and being praised upon it’s initial release – has now been labeled the scattershot album within the praise that was lavished upon their 2007’s ‘comeback’ record, In Rainbows. In both cases, the media has simply rewritten history for the sake of the present. Apparently the only thing worth praising is novelty. But it’s the ‘story’ for this time around. ‘This time’ being defined as the period the media machine generates press to promote the new material. Just like Burn After Reading, In Rainbows was offered to the press as new meat, who consumed it and shat it out in such a fashion that it sits snug within the revised history of the artist. This can be done by twisting the new material around the artist (as was done in Burn After Reading by making it The Big Lebowski 2 when it isn’t) or by twisting the artist around the new material (as was done with In Rainbows, by making it an improvement over an album that wasn’t bad). More so than most archetypes, the Comeback album/artist story is universal and needs very little explanation. Band makes it big, gets indulgent (either in recording newer, more challenging material that the critics/fans are less than enthusiastic about, or go through personal anguish and turmoil like break ups, meltdowns, and rehab), then returns to the formula that made them popular in the first place. Sometimes decades could go by between ‘band makes it big’ and the ‘comeback’. Or it could be two years, if we look at the obscure pop singer Britney Spears, whose head shaving, child ignoring antics have so devastated the economy that the music press had no choice but to hail her non performance appearance at the recent MTV Video Music Awards as proof that she is, for lack of better word, ‘back’. Speaking of Ms. Spears: Without knowing or wanting it, she has ushered in a completely new era of media manufacturing. Suddenly the work of the artist isn’t always the main story. For a selected few, it’s been overtaken by the ups and downs in the life of the artist or celebrity. Paris Hilton crystallizes this point perfectly, since while Britney did start as a recording artist, she – despite dabbling in music, TV and film – is still most famous for simply being Paris Hilton. Why have a fictional character – either in the form of a book, TV show or movie – go through a series of trials and tribulations and eventually overcome them – when you can have the same thing with a real person? Granted, even the word ‘real’ here is as appropriate as the term ‘reality TV’, but since everything in the media is about perception and appearance, why can’t this be the next step in entertainment for the masses? Why have Hollywood screenwriters pull stories out of their asses to amuse us all when we can have legitimate, authoritative journalists bundle truths and hearsay into a heartwarming tale of sin and redemption about genuine, flesh and blood people who actually have social insurance numbers? Doesn’t their success and failure hit you that much harder knowing that you breathe the same air as them? Why look at an artist’s work when you can look at them lounging by the pool of an expensive Caribbean resort? In closing and reiteration, this article is a protest of the increased and constantly narrowing categorization used in the assessment of work in the artistic realm. While in the world of math and sciences (whether it be economics or physics) a strong hierarchy is not only helpful but necessary, applying a similar kind of analytical structure to works in the artistic world does more harm than good. In the case of Burn After Reading, we are presented with a quandary that mimics that most basic tenet of empiricism. Because of patterns seen in the Coen brothers’ past, it is assumed the newest work falls into that pattern immediately, despite the evidence that it clearly does not. In the career trajectory of move stars and celebrities we see their story being tailored and trimmed as if it was not an individual’s life but a film. In a celebrity obsessed world, the actor becomes the art. And not even good art. It is a hollow, condensed-at-the-expense-of-truth, movie of the week. With a handful of career high-low bullet points, the nuances of a musician’s or group’s career can be reduced to half a page of text. I’m not going to end with a warning or dire prophecy that this approach to the world of music, film, and literature is going to come at the cost of the quality of said music, film and literature, because it won’t. It just sucks that we are shoving round pegs in square holes. We are forcing a form of thought (artistic expression) that ideally should be open to endless interpretation and personal reflection into two or three pre-fabricated story molds that usually have more to do with a superficial psychoanalysis of the artist than the work itself. The final irony of course is that while assessing the career of Britney Spears or commenting on the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy can be done in broad strokes and platitudes, the high quality, complex material produced by respected artists such as Coen Brothers, Radiohead is subject to that same superficial and misleading analysis. Wait, are we talking about plans and ideas that unravel into superficial confusion and cover-ups? Are idiots given jobs that should have most definitely been left in the hands of professionals? In this case, I can recommend a perfect movie…
Shut the fuck up, pollsters! Admit you don’t know anything! You know how they say that getting there is half the fun? The vultures endlessly circling over the stumbling corpse that is the American electoral process marching towards November 4th is the exception that proves this rule.
Ah, the media. The 4th estate, now an enterprise wholly owned and operated by the 2nd estate. How lovely it is to feast on the incessant tidbits of information that rolls off the table of the haves. Latest bit of ad nauseum: Apparently John McCain and Barack Obama are almost neck and neck in the polls. Bullshit. ‘But…but look at the research!’ the media sputter. Get that shit out of my face. What does that mean? ‘If today was two months into the future, which candidate would you choose right now?’ What kind of hypothetical, time traveling question is that? There’s only one poll that counts, and it’s the one on the first Tuesday of November, 2008. Everything else is nothing but wank. There are dozens of factors that all come to a froth when each citizen steps into that little booth and pulls out the curtain, and thinking that phone or internet polls can take all that into consideration on a random day in late August is absolutely ridiculous. ‘Yeah, we know that’, the media and pollsters reply. Really? Do you? Are you sure? Let me turn on CNN and see what’s going on. Oh, wow. I guess I’m wrong. They’re covering the Gustav hurricane. Incessantly. There’s three reporters in mall parking lots getting soaked. Oh, wait- now we’re seeing how this is affecting the Republican Convention in Minnesota. Not because of weather problems, of course, but just so it doesn’t look like the GOP is fiddling while Rome burns. Again. Also, GOP veep pick Sarah Palin is gonna be a grandmother as her seventeen year old has a bun in the oven. I can’t wait to see the poll results for questions regarding this development. And that’s the worst thing about this incessant need for quantifiable information: There’s not just one poll. Not just, ‘will you vote for John or Barack in November?’, but dozens of others that break down this race into strategic cutlets that must arranged and absorbed by the candidates’ handlers (yeah, they have handlers, just like dogs). Who do you trust more the economy, is experience the most important factor, is Obama an elitist? On CNN’s website, they have something called ‘the poll of polls’, which tracks the day-to-day changes in how America will apparently vote in November in polls from multiple sources. Why people were 3% more likely to be ‘unsure’ on August 21st than on the day before will have to be a question answered by American historians in 22nd century. ‘How well is Obama connecting to working class Midwestern voters?’ ‘What can he do to connect with them if he isn’t?’ Is not answering this question through two more months of reckless speculation really necessary? Isn’t ruminating over this query supposed to be the painfully boring drivel that the Obama campaign has to worry about in some shitty cubicle in Iowa, not the breaking news yakking points for a handful of talking heads that meet the multicultural rainbow requirements in a TV studio in Atlanta? Why not look at the issues that matter to Midwestern voters in detail, instead of asking about strategy to court them (and no, they aren’t the same thing). The best part of the report, though, is when they go get feedback from – in this case – working class Midwestern voters, asking: ‘Why won’t you vote for Barack Obama?’ That’s when you can flush any credit we give the television news networks down the toilet. They parade five or six trailer trash archetypes before the camera that let loose on their high-school-dropout-ignorance-patched-up-with-political-rant-leftovers-from-their-preacher diatribe: ‘I believe he’s a secret Muz-lem’, ‘I’ve had enough of Husseins!’, ‘I just…don’t trust… his kind, I’m afraid.’ And it’s not so much the disappointment that are this kind of sentiments are held by many average Americans, but that the whole framing of the story reeks of the idea that one TV producer had of showing nothing but the lowest and smallest minded comments he could find. You mean to tell me that there’s not one person they could interview who disagreed with Obama’s economic policy? CNN seemed to go out of its way to ensure that blue state Americans hold the same kind of ignorant stereotypes on red states that red states have regarding blue states thanks to Fox News. At least it balances out, I guess… The mostly forgettable mid nineties film, The Paper contains the following line from the New York Sun managing editor: ‘We only have to be right for one day.’ And boy howdy, do the media today take that axiom to heart. The amount of speculation on how Obama is blowing it or how McCain is seesawing back and forth from gaining ground and looking ancient will be swept away come the results in November, just like the presidential primaries are now studied as if they are fossils (remember when Guiliani was focusing on Florida? Exactly). Going back to the quote, accountability has seemingly been tossed out the window in terms of covering news stories. Accurately informing the public has lost out to the battle for ratings (translation: battle for advertising revenue) as the chief goal for news programming and networks. This means that easily digested sex scandals and patriotism challenges take the place of a debate over the feasibility of universal healthcare. And while sensationalism has always been part of media coverage (the 1884 election focused more on Grover Cleveland’s ten year old affair that resulted in a bastard child than on any real issues), today it is all encompassing. Now political gossip is breaking news, not beltway small talk in a DC bar. The amount of information that is absorbed then discarded is mind boggling. Sure, the corporations that own the papers have always controlled to some degree the stories and information that go into them, but today there’s so much information poured down the public’s throat it’s hard to pick out the gold from the shit. So with this hazy focus of what the issues really are, nobody wins. Not the public who are trying to be informed and not the people polling the public on said information. You don’t know how 1/3 of America is going to vote, pollsters, admit it. And that’s why this election is completely up in the air. You can’t ask independents who they’ll vote for in August and expect it to stay the same for the next two and half months. That’s why they’re called independents. If they were truly swayed by one candidate now, they’d change their status to Republican or Democrat (if not on the voter registry, at least when defining themselves when taking part in a poll). Then again, the 24 hours news networks have to say something, right? They have a hell of a schedule to fill, so a lot of the time speculation is all you can drum up. I wonder what Ted Turner was thinking when he started up CNN back in the eighties. Did he think that WWIII was imminent and that there would definitely be a need for twenty four hour news? I mean, the only time we needed a constant streaming of information in the last twenty five years was September 11th, and you didn’t even need CNN for that as all the major networks became round-the-clock news factories, anyway. But CNN must be doing something right. Their ratings are higher for this election than any one previous. The only question is, are Americans buying it? Is CNN gospel? Are they deciding the outcome this possibly extremely close election thanks to their coverage of it? The executives who pay for the advertising space – and to a large degree, also own the networks the commercials run on – don’t seem to care as long as Americans buy the products that are being flogged. Then again, when it comes to spending money, this time of year, the average American’s budget is luaghable when compared to the money burning efforts of the presidential candidates. Combined, McCain and Obama will suck one billion dollars out of the pockets of American citizens and corporations (mostly corporations, I’m afraid) and spend it all on TV ads, hotels, pizzas, signs, and crowd control barriers. And polls. It’s the circle of life.
“Haven't we had enough of this cigar-smoking shit in this country? When are these fat, arrogant, overpaid, overfed, over pampered, over privileged, overindulged business criminal asshole cocksuckers going to put out their cigars and move along to their next abomination? White, pussy businessmen sucking on a big, brown dick. That's all it is. That's all it ever was. A big, brown dick. Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Oh, yeah? Well sometimes it's a big, brown dick with a white collar business criminal asshole sucking on the wet end of it. But the news isn't all bad for me, you know the good part? Cancer of the mouth. Good, fuck 'em. It's an attractive disease, it goes good with a cell phone. So light up, suspender man, and suck that smoke deep down into your empty suit and blow it out your asshole, you fucking cocksucker!” Carlin is dead. Long live Carlin. He lives on in books and youtube. He lives on in the countless comedians – the few good, the many bad – who pinched and borrowed not only his material, but his style. Carlin was the first last angry man. And he didn’t start off angry. Sometimes you have to start on the other side of the fence. Carlin entertained the buttoned down nineteen fifties Midwest husbands and wives in Vegas for most of the sixties, and grew disgusted with it. Then he went to the counterculture side and started poking holes in how we looked at and operated in the world. By the eighties he wasn’t poking holes so much as blowing wide open huge chunks of what was wrong with modern society. An accidental social critic, and certainly the only one who could open with, ‘How’s everybody doin’? Good, well fuck you!’ But now he’s dead. His soul is on the roof, never to be retrieved. Even praying to Joe Pesci won’t get him back. So smoke one from your Toledo window box baggie, and lay back and remember why cowboys fuck sheep over the edge of the cliff (answer: so the sheep will push back). He told that joke in 1999, when he was sixty two years old. Clearly softening with age was not part of the man’s personality. But Carlin was never sick without being smart. While not every joke was deep and thought provoking (how could it be, and who would even want it?), an hour with the man onstage included ruminations that most comedians even today wouldn’t attempt. The existence of God, the environmental movement, and philosophically rationalizing the excitement of people dying by the truckload were all fair game for George. And now that he’s gone we get one final bit of irony that he himself would have grinned and rolled his eyes at: while every newspaper obituary mentions the 'seven words you can't say on TV' bit and the fact that Carlin was labeled obscene and controversial, they can't back their statements up with any direct quotes or examples. Hell, George Carlin won the Supreme Court case regarding the supposed profane material, but clearly there hasn’t been any real change regarding this in the mainstream media decades later. Apparently we still have to be treated like children when it comes to words. Imagine how much editing it would be take for the cigars bit above to get into a daily newspaper. It's like taking a razorblade and neutering the material. And much of Carlin's material dwells on these quibbles about language. What words are offensive? What ideas are offensive? And while he concurs that our reality is based on language and how we use it, he demands that there's no reason we should be stupid about it. 'They are only words', he reminds on Parental Discretion Advised, while ruminating over a plethora of racial slurs, ‘it’s the racist assholes that are using them that you gotta worry about.’ On the same disc/performance, he suggests that rape can be funny, and provides the image of Elmer Fudd raping Porky Pig as an example. What was great about Carlin the performer was – like all great comedians – he made you feel like you belonged to that special club of the enlightened. When he was railing against the idiots that cover the earth, it felt like he meant everyone else in the world except his audience. As if the theatre was the secret meeting place for all the people who truly understood how the world worked, and where it was safe to let our hair down and listen to our prophet. It’s how he is able to get the crowd to cheer him on when he suggests that the true problem with America is that the American public at large sucks. Carlin’s seventies material was almost benign compared to his eighties and nineties output, but there was still great material from this earlier period. Individuals own foibles were taken to task, rather than the institutions that push society forward. Even something as ambiguous as ‘stuff’ could be deconstructed into a hilarious analysis of rampant consumerism. But after three heart attacks and twelve years of Republican rule, Carlin became the last angry man who was pissed off enough to leave every stone overturned and shat upon. No sacred cows. His charity case coloured ribbon: brown, for ‘EAT SHIT MOTHERFUCKER!’ The environment – Fuck you, we started killing the earth and now it is killing us and we deserve it. Politics – The last time he voted was when they had the chance to kick out Nixon in '72, even though: ‘the shit they shuffle around every fours years? (farting noises) Doesn’t mean a fucking thing’. Another winning phrase that would make Franklin or Jefferson proud: ‘if you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to have selfish, ignorant leaders.’ Overall, he made rather general observations about politics, as his example of topical humour is wondering whether Dan Quayle has to fuck his ugly wife ('god help him, I wouldn't fuck her with a stolen dick!'). Carlin reminded us that America was founded on bullshit principles ("all men are created equal. Yeah right, except for Indians, niggers, and women."), and to expect anything to improve after starting off on such a hypocritical footing is delusional. Children – They aren't special. They are like every other cross section of people: a few winners and a whole lotta losers. Golf – an elitist, racist game that takes up too much land, all of which should be given to the homeless. In his introduction to his first book, Brain Droppings, he tells us that while he has little hope for society in general, he finds joy in friends, family and individuals while having disdain for groups, societies or anything that could be classified as herd behaviour. Contrasting this thought with the change in his comedy styling, it was as if George Carlin died in the late nineteen sixties and watched humanity from afar with a pair of binoculars, chuckling to himself, 'what dumbasses...' He seemed to have realized that the individual can't win in a group. And George never portrayed this as a bad thing, or something to wallow over. Instead, it's a freeing mechanism which allows the individual to watch the chaos from a distance. The goal in life is to find happiness within yourself, not through the material world that surrounds you, as all of is becoming more and more temporary every day. George Carlin died two weeks after playing what became his final show. He went out doing what he loved, telling us what he hated with a perfect blend of truth and humour. The world has been sick for a long time, and we’ve just lost one hell of a doctor.
‘We’re all fucked. It helps to remember that.’ – George Carlin
Diary Extracts from History’s Greatest Bastards Adolph Hitler (Nazi leader) March.1911 Man, Vienna sucks this time of year. I’m having awful gas here. On the tram I try to just tilt my cheek instead of lifting it right off the seat, but then the pressure is greater and the sound is twice as loud. Some woman made a face, but she was totally faking it, it was all sound and no smell. It’s hard being a vegetarian in a country where bratwurst is its own food group. The only thing I have is sauerkraut, and that is just cabbage soaked in vinegar (barf!). My dream is to be minister of foodstuffs. Then I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! I drew a picture of a clown today. He is crying because the commie Jew bastards are taking over everything. Jan.1933 Omigod! You will NEVER believe what happened in parliament today! I was, like, sitting in my usual seat making eyes with the minister of defense, ready to make my way cool speech on the Necessitation of a Radical Government Shift in this Ideological Mediocre Faux Democratic State when guess who showed up! It was the Chancellor and boy did he have big news for me! He wanted me to be…omigod, omigod, omigod… the new Prime Minister! It was sooo cool. But I, like, kept my calm and yelled that I accepted, and now I’m prime minister of Germany! Totally bitchin’! PS- I had my opposing political party members rounded up and shot this afternoon. They were soooo last month, and what they thought was cool was, like, completely weak. July.1937 I think Himmler is making fun of my mustache behind my back. I swear, if he wasn’t such a good leader of the SS, I’d have him find two thugs and make them break his own glasses. And as if his mustache was such hot shit. So neither of us is Clark Gable. I’m okay with that. He’s the one with the self esteem issue not me. I’m totally fine with myself. I’m in the zone. I call it the A-pad. Sept.1939 Usual day. Declared war on Poland. They were so bitchy about it. I was like, “you know the Danzig corridor is ours”, and they’re all like, “nu-uh!”, and I’m like “uh-huh!”. So now we’re duking it out. Oh! Oh! Gobbels told a great joke today in the war room! What are the two biggest lies in Poland? Give up? The check’s in your mouth and I promise I won’t come in the mail! Ha, ha! Hess almost spilled his stein when he heard it.
Jeffery Dahmer (serial rapist/killer/cannibal) September 13, 1990 Took the cat to the vet. Doctor said the medicine for worms was $50 and it just blew me away. I said I was already trying to feed Huckle the bland, tasteless dry food that is supposed to clean his teeth (don’t even bother asking me how it works), and now I have to shell out fifty more dollars? And I mean, I love that cat. I’d do anything for him. But when you start to put a dollar amount on things it really puts things into a realistic perspective, especially when you’re pretty much living from paycheck to paycheck like me. Looking back, I really shouldn’t have blown $150 on the fancy industrial strength locks. Their hands are so small and weak, they couldn’t open a mayonnaise jar, let alone pry apart two inches of steel. They’re drunk anyway by the time they know what’s going on. And that’s another thing! One stumbled across the room and smashed into my coffee table! Broke the thing in two. It was my grandmother’s, for christssakes! $150 locks. I’m such a sucker. Oh well, no sense beating myself about it now. A little overkill never hurt anybody, yuk, yuk, yuk…
Caligula (unhinged Roman emperor) October, 39AD Caligula overdid it again. Sweet ambrosia, sweeter pussy, and salty semen. At least Caligula thinks it was semen. After twelve mugs of wine everything starts to taste a bit like piss. Or maybe it was piss. Caligula’s teeth are yellow… Caligula has a headache. Everyone needs to shut up for a minute. SHUT UP FOR A MINUTE! Caligula needs a new statue for his horse boat. But first, Caligula needs a horse boat. February, 40AD So Caligula was banging this chick. Not too shabby body, real tight in the cooch, but just as Caligula starts really going to town she started yakking to the girl next in line, and Caligula’s like, ‘bitch, do you know what Caligula’s gonna do to you if you don’t put your heart into this? Caligula’s gonna set your heart on a plate and make you eat it. Except you can’t, ‘cause you’d already be dead.’ Well, that shut her up. Then Caligula poured wine on her back and tried to lick it off, but instead fell off the table. Everyone in the senate tried to help Caligula up, but damn it, Caligula’s a big boy, Caligula can do it myself. And later than night at the orgy, Caligula swears some tall guy gave Caligula the evil eye, so anyone taller than Caligula had their throats cut. Then we tossed the bodies in a big pile and started fucking and vomiting on top of it. That’ll sure show him. And Caligula thinks the guy whose butt Caligula was violating righteously and seemed passed out was really dead. It’s nothing Caligula’s particularly proud of, but at least in this case he won’t be spreading any stories.
Plato (Greek philosopher) 402 BC Why can’t he just shut the fuck up? Who fucking cares why sticks don’t all look the same? Oh no, someone killed a slave, what’s the ethical thing to do? How about just not kill slaves?! Pious this, the gods love that, why the fuck can’t you think like a normal fucking person for once, Soc? One day he’s gonna ask the wrong person what truth is and that person is gonna stick a knife in his chest. I’m tired of being called a lazy bum. I’m tried of wandering from town to town and converting people to nothing at all. But Apollo be damned, I hate the thought having to be a farmer even more.
399 BC He’s like a gadfly you can’t kill. Buzzing around your head, not really hurting you, but just being damn, damn annoying. And now he’s the wisest man in the world according to some Delphi oracle. You’d think he’d cash in on that somehow, but no. ‘Let’s just go talk to the people of Delium, Plato’. Whatever you say, Professor Jackass. How do you know money doesn’t buy happiness? You’ve never even had any. I’m totally ratting this guy out next time we’re in Athens. He’s liable to get us all killed if he asks a Spartan why he bothers fighting.
Anthony Higgins (19h century British longshoreman) May 14, 1885 Woke up, got drunk, stumbled out of bed. Pushed the kids next door down the stairs. Slapped wife. Drowned puppies. Stole from blind man’s tin cup. Farted in church. Shat on a doorknob. Shortchanged prostitute and gave her the clap. Broke doctor’s glasses. Tore pages of out of books in library. Told policeman to get stuffed. Stuffed policeman. Loaded boxes at the dock. Broke half, stole half. Sold half the half I stole. Ate a meat pie loudly in restaurant, trip waitress on purpose. Walked to slowly down a busy street. Spooked a cartload of orphans. Broke two horses’ legs. Incited race riot in Chinatown. Threw fish guts at nobleman. Threw fish guts at penniless widow. Put penny on train tracks. Peed in the Thames river. Peed on the man beside me as I peed in Thames River. Beat up man beside me after I peed in Thames River. Put a Jew in headlock. Kicked a gypsy in the shin. Pinched the hell out of a talentless French painter and punched a hole in his paintings. Ate bangers n’ mash over a pint or six. Skipped on bill and stole a pint glass. Pretended to me a ghost in the backyard of a miserable old miser’s house. Quietly snuck back into the house late at night and slapped wife. Good day, all in all.
Elizabeth Bathory (16th Hungarian countess who tortured and killed up to 600 children) July 15, 1602 What a beautiful day! Hello sun! Hello birds! Hello world! Oh how great it is to be alive and healthy on a warm summer’s day! I took a walk through the gardens, had a delightful nibble at noon and then it was off to the dungeons to burn and mutilated the genitalia of all my lovely prizes! It’s not the nicest place, but you’d be surprised how much a bouquet of flowers in every corner is able to brighten the place up! Big smiles girls, I’m doing you the greatest of favors, removing these dirty naughty bits from you. Big smiles, ladies, you can do it! Big smiles! I said BIG SMILES! Don’t grin, let’s see those pretty teeth! YOUR TEETH ARE PRETTY SO LET’S SEE ‘EM! Don’t make me rip ‘em out so I can keep them on my table and look at them all the time! Don’t make me do it! Don’t make me- YOU MADE ME DO IT! MURDERER! LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO TO YOUR HEAD! LOOK AT THAT! IT’S ON THE FLOOR NOW! NOW KATALIN HAS TO COME IN HERE AND CLEAN UP YOUR MESS! I MEAN BRAINS! Where are the fucking birds? I want to heard goddamn birds. Can’t we lock up some sparrows in here or something? February 4, 1607 If you don’t wash behind your ears you don’t deserve them, sweetie, and I’ll just take the pair and make a necklace out of them. December 2, 1608 Christmas season is upon us already! Such a special time of year. The snow across the fields makes everything fresh and new. And with the chilly weather the statues in my garden just seem to crack and crumble so I’ve tossed out some of the less impressive girls into the fields at night. By morning they’re almost frozen and perfect replacements for stone. If you can’t seem to curtsy with any soul I, nay, the world, has no use for you…
The Secret History of St. Patrick's Day St.
Patrick's Day was created by a crafty Prussian businessman in the midst of
a semi-religious hallucination in 1673. Two years earlier, Fredrick
Blucher was exiled from his hometown of Cologne and found himself in what
he believed to be Ireland (in actuality, it was France). While avoiding
the cannibalistic Huguenots at every turn, Blucher befriended a similarly
exiled senile Irish landowner who was deeply enamored with the Prussian’s
filthy, adults only version of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.
This list was difficult to assemble, as it’s rather difficult to define ‘loophole’. And sometimes a loophole isn’t really apparent and glaring until a host of movies use the exact same one. Loopholes are devices to get around things that would usually occur in real life. And sometimes they’re just used to make the film more interesting. Movies in general exist in a state of willing disbelief from the audience, but sometimes we are shown things that are so ridiculous we have to sit up from our seats and go, ‘oh come on!’ At least we used to. Loopholes today are so common place that we just don’t question them anymore. Loopholes can be the reason for a crazy cool car chase or a way to shorten or extend your film by ten or fifteen minutes. Contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily found in bad movies. Good – even great – films have loopholes; they just use them in an interesting or unique way. A good movie makes you forget you’re seeing any at all. Bad movies lift up their shirts and jiggle the loopholes right in your face. And here are seven examples of them. 7. Impossible Fireball Explosion from Die Hard 2 – Okay, to be fair I’m starting off with a popular example of the most generic of loopholes for action movies: The defiance of the laws of physics for the sake of, ‘ohhh, cool!’ In Die Hard 2, terrorists take over Washington-Dulles airport so planes can’t land, meaning they are circling the airport and quickly running out of fuel. After some low-rent attempts at overthrowing them, the terrorists punish Sen. Fred Thompson, Dennis Franz, and Bruce Willis by flying a British Airways plane – so low on gas the passengers are ‘choking on fumes’, according to the pilot – into the ground. A massive, massive fireball ensues, despite us hearing just before that there’s no gas left in the plane to ignite said fireball. Later Willis fights the head terrorist on the wing of a jet plane about to take off and gets kicked (literally) to the ground. Fortunately before that he was able to open the gas tank on the wing, letting gallons of petrol spill out and leaving a nice tidy trail of the stuff on the runway. Then he blows the plane up with his bic lighter. That’s worth a promotion, isn’t it, Lieutenant McClane? Another favorite: A scene revolving around the ever-shrinking number on a two minute timer on a bomb that takes ten minutes to play out. Come to think of it, that kind of thing was in Die Hard 2, as well! When all the terrorists threw grenades into a military plane cockpit that Willis was trapped inside (he got out thanks to the ejector seat), it took a hell of a lot longer than ten seconds to explode. They blinded me with science. 6. Communication Breakdown from The Blair Witch Project – You gotta hand it to horror films. They’ve been able to keep pace with technology in an unfortunate way, as every single gadget humanity has developed for traveling and talking to others has a horrible knack for not working at the most inconvenient time. The car starts to break down so you stop at a spooky motel. Or the car you try to use for your escape doesn’t work at all. You free yourself from the clutches of the creepy kids in the abandoned village (or the axe murderer in the bad-part-of-town) and run to the phone booth to call the cops only to find it out of service. And now that we have cell phones, suddenly battery life and signal strength are never more tenuous and in doubt (and signal strength can be the ultimate loophole, because once the evil dude is dead, surprise! Your phone works again!). But I chose The Blair Witch Project here because they kicked it old school. Instead of having a car or cell phone to lose or break, they had a map. Just a good, old fashioned, helpful map that can’t really ‘stop working’. And the guy threw it away in anger. Nice move, pal. You’re trying to find a witch in a giant forest. You couldn’t just kick your water bottle around when you lost your temper? 5. Why Don’t You Believe Me? from Fight Club – Ah, the wonderful world of law enforcement! Ready to protect its citizens unless said citizens are delusional fruitcakes who believe androids from the future are trying to kill them. Nothing’s worse than for a protagonist from loophole #6 to finally get through to the authorities only to have them laugh in your face or write you off as a prank caller and hang up. Or that your story of having messianic, soap-making alter ego who plans on blowing up dozens of office buildings, is as likely as it sounds, a la Fight Club. With the cops no longer an option, our leading man/lady/talking chimp can finally go and finish off the evil killer themselves. Or who knows, maybe the cowardly friend who ran away earlier comes back and helps at the pivotal moment. You can never tell these days… NOTE: I don’t include movies where ‘why don’t you believe me?’ isn’t just a loophole device, but the plot itself. This includes The Lady Vanishes, The Fugitive, and The Lady Vanishes for the new millennium, Flightplan. All of these films are about the protagonist trying to correct the world’s view of them from beginning to end. 4. Love in the time of Cholera. Or World War II. Or an alien invasion. From Atonement – Have you realized (hopefully before beginning the film shoot) that all you’ve got on deck is a typical romantic comedy/drama borefest? Spice it up by having it take place at a tenuous time and/or place in human history (just keep in the mind the costume budget). Suddenly there’s a smattering of things that can keep the lover’s apart! In Atonement we have lover’s pining for each other in the ever-extending shadow of the Second World War: ‘Sorry baby, I just got called up. Time to go fry some krauts.’ ‘But we were just about to say how much we love each other!’ And why stop at the chance of being blown to bits by a German tank? There are so many other things that can go wrong! Disease (Love Story), racism (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Jungle Fever), time travel (Kate & Leopold), neurotic Jewish comedians (Annie Hall), the supernatural (Bewitched), aliens (The Astronauts Wife, My Stepmother is an Alien), and, to a lesser extent, sharks (Open Water, Jaws 4). All of these situations take your typical guy-meets-girl and adds just a slight twist. And it doesn’t have to make the movies that different. Most of the movies I mentioned above are just as bad as regular romantic dramas and comedies. NOTE: It’s not just limited to young insanely attractive people in love. Sometimes love can’t keep a family together because one of them is a robot (A.I.). 3. 'The reason I brought you here...' from The Matrix: Reloaded - Is your film getting sluggish, or is the plot too complicated? Enter the MAN. You know, the white haired guy in a smart suit with a cane and a smile you just can’t help but want to crack with your fist. If you need exposition in thirty seconds or less (or in The Matrix’s case, many more seconds with the added bonus of watered down philosophical musings), this is the guy. Maybe he’s the old police chief in the small town (‘thirty years ago, crazy ol’ Joey Jones killed six kids in that church. Some say his spirit still haunts the place today…’), or an evil government doctor (‘we trained you in 1997, erased your memory in 1999, and we had you assassinate the ruler of the Congo in 2000…’), or a kindly old ghost (‘thirty years ago I killed six kids in this church, some say I still haunt the place today…’). He gives the answers, so you can get back to car chase without thinking too much. Sometimes he gives too many answers and you end up treating your audience like five year olds, but- ooh! Impossible fireball explosion! Cool! In a lot of ways exposition is the truest sense of cheating, because it’s here where you can treat your movie like putty, condensing an hour’s worth of plot into, ‘my brother was trying to do the same thing you were, but somebody killed him and we never found out who’. 2. The lingering camera from Raiders of the Lost Ark - Look at all these people walking around in that street scene! It’s almost too much to take in. Who's the enemy agent tracking the spy? Who's the hotel employee that will tell the hero who walked into the hotel late last night? Who's the girl that's obviously going to be killed after she sleeps with Nicholas Cage? (still talking about the film here, folks) Don't worry you're pretty little head about it, audience. The camera will tell you as it’s at slow or stops on it’s pan through the bar, lobby, or airplane fuselage. Look for a striking woman, or a particularly grimy looking passenger, or – if it’s an action thriller – a person of color. To nail the point home, there will probably be that can’t-miss 'turn of the head towards the hero' move. And in Raiders of the Lost Ark, just in case you can’t pick it up through cinematography, they give the guy who stares at Indy just a bit too long an eye patch. Thanks, Mr. Spielberg. Now that I know that I can run to the concession stand for more licorice before the next fight scene. Bonus camera crap: Just as the movie’s ending, a final pan to a scene or object… that changes the entire plot of the film! I’m looking at you, Basic Instinct…
And finally, number one. It happens quite often in movies that, well, don’t pay attention what happened just five minutes earlier. The best example of this can be seen in one movie, and that’s what I’m going to focus on. So without further ado… 1. Contempt for Logic / Order 66 from Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith – Yeah, George Lucas has always maintained that these movies were for children, but the only kids who didn’t pick up on this glaring gulf of a narrative probably thought Jar-Jar Binks was hilarious to boot. So the Jedi Knights were fighting alongside the ordinary Republic army against the evil clones. But then the evil Senator/emperor/melty faced Palpatine decrees to the army commanders to institute ‘Order 66’, which involves many soldiers wordlessly obeying the command and killing the Jedi Knights fighting beside them, all of whom seem to be taken by complete surprise. Remember Jedi Knights? These were the Navy SEALS of the far away galaxy from a long, long time ago. You mean to tell me that mind-reading super warriors never bothered to pick up the codebook for the massive army they were fighting alongside? The Republic army, representing the Republic that the Jedi’s were sworn to defend? Everyone knew exactly what to do with Order 66. They didn’t have to look it up. It was drilled into these soldier’s heads. But the Jedi’s didn’t do anything. They barely fought back. They were each killed essentially by a handful of stormtroopers! Remember stormtroopers? The guys non-Jedi knight Han Solo slaughtered by the thousands in the first three films? Stormtroopers/republic soldiers come off so dumb in these movies you can imagine them running down the corridors reciting their orders in their head. And that also means that the Jedi’s would know what the hell is going on because they can read minds! But instead they were swatted away like pesky flies. Yoda escaped because, hey, he’s Yoda. Sorry, coneheaded bearded dude and girl with the elephant trunks sticking out of her brain. That’s how loopholes work, I’m afraid. Now certainly that’s not the only film guilty of shooting itself in the foot, but if you can find another that does it with such glaring stupidity and contempt for it’s audience, drop me a line.(and B-movie sci-fi like Plan 9 From Outer Space doesn’t count, I’m afraid…)
Christmas in Iraq, in Washington, and In Rainbows
2007 is winding down, and the only two bits of good news to come out of the last eleven and a half months is the decreasing violence in Iraq and the new Radiohead album. And while violence in Iraq flares up after we get a report or news article on how violence is on the wane, suggesting that the war-torn country is still simmering and shaky (al qaeda seems to have adjusted to the news cycle of The New York Times), the new record from the Oxford quintet is consistently ace and is not a problem at security checkpoints, no matter how much you paid for it. The war in Iraq. Right now the best the Bush administration can say is, ‘See? We told you it wasn’t going to become Vietnam!’ And while that certainly looks true, and you have to be a real cynical Bush-hating asshole to say the surge hasn’t helped, this oil-rich desert nation isn’t out of the woods quite yet. They still have a government so broken and corrupt it makes the US house of representatives look good. And a year of quasi-peace isn’t going to fix the six hundred year rift between Sunnis and Shiites. And although you don’t hear this much on CNN, but somehow – even though this isn’t why they went to war – the US ‘owns’ the Iraqi oil fields. Despite that, prices for oil at an all time high. Forcing democracy on a nation seems just as successful as forcing any type of government on a nation, be fascist or totalitarian. 1% of the population strikes it rich, and the rest barely scrape out an existence. In Washington, the lame duck president vetoes almost everything that comes from the House of Representatives and the Senate, both of which are barely controlled by the Democratic Party. The Republicans – bitching and whining about the Democratic filibusters that blocked and slowed legislation when they were in power – have pulled out more filibusters in this one year than ever before. Nothing is happening in the most powerful nation on earth, and as the old saying goes, when America gets a cold, the whole world starts sneezing and coughing up phlegm. Everyone else becomes slaves to this inaction. And this time the economy is only one the world’s many concerns. We are becoming more and more aware of the real problems confronting humanity, but are seeing less and less being done about it. Pollution, dwindling natural resources, Africa continually teetering on the brink, nothing seems to be working in these early days of the 21st century. Solutions seems paltry to the biggest problems. A small reduction in CO2 emissions? Ethanol to replace gasoline? And as for internal strife in Africa, even though some of Hollywood’s biggest, least stupid stars have spoken up, the governments of the developed world have seemingly thrown up their hands in indifference and told the dark continent, ‘You’re on your own.’ So…how do you cope with brokenness? With paralysis? With nothing working like it’s supposed to? What if you forget what ‘supposed to be’ even is? And not even in the socio-political sense of how the world works, but on a much more personal level. How do you live your day-to-day life of working, commuting, and socializing with friends as everything slowly crumbles around you? This is where Radiohead and In Rainbows comes in. Not for the solution to the world’s problems of course. Sending guitarist Ed O’Brien to the UN is not what I am suggesting. But as far as feeling comfortable in one’s skin in today’s world, there are few bands that can make alienation so understandable and soothing. The first song on their first seminal album The Bends acknowledges in the refrain that, ‘Everything is broken’. And singer Thom Yorke doesn’t seem the least bit disappointed. In fact, he seems to wallow in that fact with ecstasy as he croons. The music of Radiohead creates atmospheres and moods from ‘psychedelic soaring majesty’ (think Fantasia) to ‘unsettling bleak horizon’ (think Fargo), while the puzzling, cryptic lyrics of alienation and dread can be analyzed in the same fashion of Dylan’s mid sixties output (with less clever rhyming on Thom Yorke’s part, admittedly). OK Computer, the band 1997’s album that cemented their reputation as one of those most creative and original bands on the planet, married these two concepts in a mesmerizing look at a world full of cubicles, commutes, and information overloads. In his book Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck Klosterman proposed that the band’s 2000 album Kid A as a soundtrack of sorts to the September 11th terrorist attacks, noting that the songs are chronologically in step with the events and our reactions to that day. While focusing for the most part on the lyrics, he occasionally indicates individual musical points in the songs that can evoke these analogous moments (ie, tower two is hit when the horns start blatting in The National Anthem, the instrumental Treefingers is the moments after the towers fall, when there is nothing literally to say). That album’s closer, Motion Picture Soundtrack, ends with the line, ‘I will see you in the next life’, which with they way Thom Yorke sings it, is about as an appropriate summation for September 11th as everything else that’s been said. The rock press pretty went to great lengths to remind us all that the band’s 2003 project Hail to the Thief was – according to the band – NOT a political album, then proceeded to wrench some 1984-esque doublespeaks from the lyrics, anyway (not hard to do when the opening song is titled ‘2+2=5’). The band is known for its leftist leanings, performing benefits concerts for Amnesty International, a free Tibet, and climate change awareness (a particular important topic for Yorke). They have also been outspoken critics of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Despite that, Hail to the Thief was apparently a reference to political scandal from 1888, not 2000. But then, this is Radiohead, where a song whose title is the name of disease that kills rabbits (Myxomatosis) has nothing to do with rabbits. Much like the world we live in, Radiohead gives out the easy and hard answers simultaneously. And now it is the end of 2007, and In Rainbows was dropped into our laps as a ‘free’ digital download only ten days after its completion was announced on October 1. Is the album directly speaking to the situation in Iraq, or in Africa, or anything making headlines today? Of course not. No more than Kid A has any relevance to the events of September 11th (especially considering that Kid A was released nearly a year before, in October 2000). But it is an album that embraces the act of watching the news with a sense of helplessness and disconnect. Much of In Rainbows deals with paralysis, either by choice or having it forced upon us. Toward the end we see questionable attempts to change, but as to whether they are for the best and will succeed, well, that’s for a future Radiohead had no interest in answering. The album begins with 15 Step and Thom is asking, ‘How come I end up where I started, How come I end up where I went wrong?’ Things are already looking down. ‘You used to be all right, what happened?’, is the second question posited. These two queries come to define the tensions found across the entire album. The lyrical images of being abandoned and eventually mowed down are contrasted with a Latin-favored dance beat, infectious handclaps, and children singing along. They don’t add up. The music lures you into a sense of fun and excitement, but it’s really, ’15 steps, and then a sheer drop’. In the end you aren’t going anywhere at all, expect perhaps straight down. The second song is Bodysnatchers, which is probably Radiohead’s heaviest guitar track since Just, off of The Bends. It’s a song about, well, body snatching. Watching yourself do something you do not want to do: ‘I do not understand, what it is I've done wrong, Full of holes check for pulse, Blink your eyes, One for yes Two for no, I have no idea what I am talking about, I am trapped in this body and can't get out.’ You are not only helpless, but you are partaking in activities that you find appalling. An out-of-body experience that shows you what the world is really full of. Thom is speaking for (or to) all those in the developed world who seem ignorant to the fact that their life of luxury is coming at the expense of the poor across the globe. You are an automaton, going through the motions that you barely comprehend, acting that way because your neighbor or co-worker was doing it first. Your supposedly insignificant actions have consequences that you can’t see. The song also contains the most politically pointed line on the record: ‘Your mouth only moves with someone’s hand up your ass’. It’s just another reminder that you are helpless puppet, the strings being pulled by those with much more political clout than you’ll ever attain. ‘Nude’ follows. A love song or an anti-protest song? ‘Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not going to happen’, it begins. Paralysis directly confronted. Thom sings about the protagonist never being happy, whether it is with a lover, or painting their house white (a dig at consumerism?). Anything you want to do will not succeed perfectly. Happiness is a slippery fish always changing shape just out of your grasp. You can’t nail it down, can’t catch it, and that means you’re stuck. Like 15 Step, though, the music doesn’t match this dire situation. A tender ballad with soaring strings and vocals, Thom Yorke has rarely sounded more emotional and exposed. The hopelessness seems to reach its full boil in Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, when the need to escape the situation at hand finally emerges: ‘why should I stay? I'd be crazy not to follow, follow where you lead.’ In this case we are being tempted by a lover or a leader to pursue one’s immediate emotions and instincts. The music swells as quickens as Thom decides that it’s ‘my chance’ and follows this person to the bottom of the sea. But it is all an illusion, the music stops on a dime, and Thom admits, ‘I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes’. Is it more methods of control? Is it ‘Bodysnatchers’ redux, where we are being manipulated by forces beyond our control, and taken to our doom? Beyond this is ‘All I Need’, a straightforward plead for companionship. But even here, it’s twisted to be a more sinister desire: “You are all I
need It's all wrong It’s Thom Yorke on settling down, and then on stopping completely. A love song about being ‘trapped in a hot car’, and ‘lying in the reeds’ (lying there for what?). The situation is going nowhere, and that’s fine. It’s beyond good and evil, as he alternately admits it’s all wrong and all right. The situation just is. He admits that ‘there are no others’. In other words, there is no real choice here. He is here for lack of anything else. This is the only road. Faust ARP is a two minute whirlwind of guitars and strings and quick lyrics. It’s the end of something that was once very close: ‘I love you but enough is enough’. It’s the tough decision of breaking something off. Thom pleads for action: ‘what you ought to, what you ought to, reasonable and sensible’. It’s a story of failure and attempts and ‘what you feel’ all at once. It’s hard to take in all the lyrics in one sitting, it’s an overload of words. And Thom even sympathizes with this impossible attempt: ‘You thought you had it in you but no, no’. Another song about trying and failing. This is where the turn begins. A quick foot race of song, only two minutes is a length, which kicks off the turning point that changes this album from desperation to wary but hopeful change. At this halfway point in the record, it’s a good time to note that a surprising change with In Rainbows is how clear Yorke’s vocals are. No longer buried in the mix or accentuated with electronics, Thom seems to make more of an effort in pronouncing the words as well. I only had to go online for guidance once. And this is all the more important with the rest of the album. The latter half of In Rainbows deals mainly with acceptance. Acceptance of flaws, and the understanding that, despite them, we must continue. In Reckoner, Radiohead extend their sweep of consolation and well wishes to everyone, singing, ‘Dedicated to all you, all human beings’. A song of forgiveness, the first step to personal spiritual fulfillment. ‘You are not to blame’, Thom tell us. Whose fault it is remains unanswered. Chalk it up to the great beyond. The original subtitle of the original version of this song was ‘Pulled apart by horses’, and although almost everything from the first incarnation has been jettisoned, the lyrics, ‘because we separate like ripples on a blank shore’ echo that same parting of ways, albeit more peacefully. Even the Reckoner has become less violent. And the term ‘Reckoner’ is the key. A slight biblical reference to the final judgment during the Apocalypse, but in terms of the rest of the song, it seems that we are all getting a pass to the great beyond. The soft ballad House of Cards is about starting over: ‘Forget about your house of cards, and I’ll deal mine’. We are being asked to change our ineffective value system, our old way of doing things, for…what? The exact same thing? Just another ‘house of cards’? Perhaps, but what is important is the change itself. Change has to happen, because in the end, ‘the infrastructure will collapse’, like it always does. Most revolutions ultimately fail, but that doesn’t mean people won’t stop starting them. The world, in whatever states it’s in, must continue. And Thom answers the idealists with a one word refrain: ‘Denial…denial…’ You can say that your solutions to the problems are iron clad, that the world can change for the better, but the fact is that history has not been kind to idealists. Which seems to be what Thom is reminding us of, although in probably one of the most soothing, romantic ways possible. It’s a love song reminding us all that you can’t be sure of anything, even the beautiful utopia you are promising to yourself and everyone else. The album is about the choosing to reach for the impossible after being disgusted and manipulated by the world around us. To compare it to another Radiohead recording, In Rainbows is like Street Spirit from The Bends, but ten times longer and deeper. The first half of the album is the disappointment of what is around us, and the second half is an attempt for redemption at almost any cost. But what is scary is the uncertainty of this 'beautiful world' that seems to be our goal. Can we really know it's there? Can we, ahem, catch that gold at the end of the rainbow? The penultimate song, 'Jigsaw Falling into Place' isn't full of answers: 'there really is nothing to explain', Thom sings. Beyond that closed door... is it just a dark room, or even worse, a shitty disco in Oxford? It’s a chance meeting a bar between two people that is a momentary respite from everything else around them: ‘before you run away from me, before you’re lost between the notes…come on and let it out’. The only goal here is to, ‘wish away the nightmare’. A temporary fix, harkening back to the unfulfilled moment of Nude. But the song is an up tempo rocker filled with pretty guitars, nothing resembling the feedback laden howls of Bodysnatchers, either. A clean, direct song about a final exegesis, the last night before the metamorphosis, before the change. At end the lyrics is just the title over and over. Everything is set, everything is as it should be. We see the final change ready. And
then it’s Videotape, the goodbye with sadness but with no regrets. The
only real future left after all the attempts and failures to improve one’s
self in this temporal state. Now it is only the great beyond. Done with
hope but without perfect clarity. And the last moments on 'In Rainbows' is
all about looking back, not looking ahead. He holds his life all recorded
on one simple cassette. It is, ‘one for the good old days’. All we have is
uncertain, haunting piano and strange drumming. The day that this happens
on, the day he makes the change from broken to 'fixed' is the greatest day
he's ever seen. The destination remains unanswered, but the journey has
begun. It is the change for a better future, even if it is not in this
life. He has shed whatever problems and limitations that plagued him in
the first half of the album. It’s all different now.
Happy Christmas War is over…if you want it!
A conversation between two abandonedstation employees that may or may not have happened:
(one comes to the other and hands them a bottle of beer) -I love Labour Day weekend. -How can you say that? It’s the end of summer. -Summer lasts too long. According to television commercials it begins in goddamn April. -Well, thanks to global warming, it pretty much does begin then. -Oh, you’re one of those people, eh? -You mean you’re not? You don’t believe that the planet is right fucked? -Nah, we’re fucked. The planet’ll stumble on, but everything that us people are involved in is going to hell in hand basket. -So then you do believe that something horrible is happening. -Well yeah, but I’m not limiting myself to thinking it just being an environmental problem. There’s war, famine, viruses, economic collapse, a whole bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with car exhaust and not recycling. To think otherwise would be small minded. -I dunno, we’ve done pretty good so far at avoiding nuclear war and plagues and stuff like that. Society is doing okay for now in that respect. -Yeah? Go talk to an African and ask how he’s doing. -Look, I’m just saying that the environmental stuff is going to catch us asleep at the wheel. We keep putting off making real changes to how we live our lives and one day we’re not going to be able to breathe the air and half the world’s coastal cities will be underwater. -Or maybe it’ll all come through the door at once. Everything will go spectacularly wrong at the same time. Floods, famine, war, and all that… -Sounds like a 2012 conspiracy theory. All because the ancient Mayans choose an exact date for the world to end. -Hey, don’t rag on the Mayans. Their calendars were more advanced than the Gregorian one. And they didn’t have to worry about those annoying leap years. -So what are you going to do? Plan to have everything wrapped up in your life by December 21st, 2012? -Wrapped up? No, I’m going to go on a crazy spending spree in the months leading up to it. I’ll live like a king and watch the world end from a five star resort in the South Pacific. -People have been calling the end of the world for years. Pat Robertson promised everyone it was going to happen three different times in the early nineteen eighties. -Yeah? Why the hell do people still give him money then? -Because people are stupid. You never hear that enough from politicians- -Mainly because they are trying to get these people to vote for them. -Yeah, but everyone forgets. A lot of people are just goddman dumb, and swallow whatever easy answer they are given. That’s the problem with democracy. By giving everyone a voice, you give it to people who really should have had their jaws wired shut at birth. -You sound like a fascist. -And maybe that’s what we need. Some kind of benign fascism. Two or three nice, smart people calling the shots for the rest of us. Democracy just gives us a bloated bureaucracy where only the top people get rich. -Like regular fascism. -Hey, it was just an idea. I mean, look at Sweden. -The government or the bikini team?. -Their income tax rate is, like, 60% for the highest tax bracket. That amount of money put into the government subsidizes almost everything from day to health care to garbage pickup and transportation upkeep, with enough to grease the palms of the inevitably corrupt government officials. -Inevitably corrupt? -Hey, it happens in every government. You can’t be too naïve to think otherwise. Either it’s outright stealing or it’s wasted on bullshit vanity projects. The Swedish model taxes people enough to take this problem into consideration. The American ‘democratic’ model doesn’t. The politicians swoop in, take what they please, and leave the scraps for actual government spending like social security and health care. -And I suppose with a fascist model there’s less politicians to get their grubby hands on the money. -Exactly. I mean, yeah, the fascist dudes in charge will have a whole group of people around them to keep living in luxury, but in the States its four hundred representatives from the house, one hundred senators, and the judicial and executive branches all feasting for themselves and each of them has their own group of friends to feed. It’s awful. -Maybe it’s easier in Sweden because there’s only six million people there. -Exactly. A centralized government caring for three hundred million people just doesn’t work. They need to slice up the country. And not into fifty individual states, but like, six or seven completely autonomous regions. Everything would flow so much more smoothly. -Or maybe it’ll become civil war. -Now you’re the one who sounding the doomsday siren. -Fine we’re both realists who have our fingers crossed that somehow the people in charge will adapt our perfect solutions. -I’ll toast to that. I’ll carve up states, and you put them in prisoner camps if they don’t switch to hybrid cars. -Why does every solution have to use the fist? -Not ‘fists’. That sounds bad. Half the war is propaganda. Think of us as the sheepdogs or shepherds for the wandering flock. -Nice biblical imagery. -Exactly. -So we will be the upstanding, glorious leaders of tomorrow, right up there with those masters of change, Stalin, Mao… -I don’t need banners of my face unfurled over buildings. Just a clean bathroom and a footnote in the history books is good enough for me. -You’re a bastion of modesty…for now. -You think I’ll get corrupted by the power? -You? Oh god, yeah. -Thanks a lot. -Hey, I would, too. It just sort of happens. -I think I’d do okay, actually. Sure, it would be a good life, but I wouldn’t be starving the peasants with my private army. -That would be my job. -See, as long as it ‘looks’ like you’re one with the people, you’ll do okay. Even today, all leaders, in every country, live head and shoulders above almost all of their citizens. And the people are okay with it to a certain degree. They tolerate the idea that the person in charge should represent the country in a dignified, wealthy fashion. -Look at you! You’re already rationalizing your cult of personality. You’ve become a classic evil fascist, and we haven’t even finished our first beer. -That’s not a problem. Glaring hypocrisy is what brings down a country. You’ll be surprised how long the public will actually stick with you if they think you’re trying your hardest to do the right thing- -And maybe that’s because as we’ve mentioned, they’re mostly stupid- -But as soon as you say one thing and do another, they’ll be at your door with pitchforks and a noose. -But look at some countries today where you’d think that because the level of hypocrisy is so high that it really has become time for a regime change. And yet, nothing. Hypocrisy isn’t enough. People also have to be completely in fear of their life or of losing their way of life. It took years of bread riots for the French revolution to move beyond just being an idea of a bunch of pissed of intellectuals. -Well maybe we’re on the edge. The things that are happening now is what happens when society begins to go belly up. Hypocrisy becomes so commonplace you’d think the world was run by schizophrenics. And perhaps it is. Behind closed doors the leaders essentially doing exactly the opposite of what they told the populace they would do. -It seems like almost anything can become political these days. -Exactly. ‘I wasn’t hitting on the guy in the stall beside me, I just have a wide stance when I take a dump’. How the fuck is that a political issue? It’s like something you’d see on Seinfeld. And now it’s come define a political party in the world’s most powerful nation. -It’s all PR. -Do you know why Bush doesn’t throw out the first pitch at baseball games? ‘Cause his handlers don’t want the world to see him booed by forty five thousand sports fans. -And Bush once had some bullshit job with the Texas Rangers. I bet it eats him up just a little bit that going to a baseball games is suddenly considered PR suicide. -Think he’ll make it to the end of his tenure in early ’09? -What, like he’ll be impeached? -Yeah. -Nah, he has a better chance of choking on pretzel again. -Fuck, I completely forgot about that. -Lucky for him most people have. It was when his approval rating was in the eighties. -Those were the days. -I’m getting another beer. Want one? -Please. (one gets up, the other lights a cigarette)
The End of Harry Potter (no spoilers, just an opinion piece)
‘and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make’ -Paul McCartney
That’s what this whole series is about, right? Love? It’s what has helped Harry cheat death several times in the first six books, and will most likely be a key factor in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to be released scrupulously at midnight this Friday, and is being released unscrupulously as we speak, quickly leaking it’s way across the internet (I crossed paths with it already, as some horrible person posted random spoilers in a Radiohead messageboard).
Perusing any Harry Potter fansite
these days and you will be reminded of the many loose threads this final
book is supposed to tie up, not including Harry’s final showdown with Lord
Voldemort. Is Snape a super-duper-triple-agent? What about Lily Potter’s
eyes? Is Longbottom going to have his moment of glory? What’s up with Ron
and Hermione? How can the guy not see what’s right in front of him? And
don’t give me any of this ‘Victor Krum’ crap.
I was reading the last hundred
pages of book six last night as a kind of mental prep for the 21st ('oh
right! They bumped off Dumbledore. Completely slipped my mind'), and one
thing that’s sprung to mind about Half-Blood Prince is how could you not
know Dumbledore was gonna get whacked. Where before he was an enigmatic,
central-but-on-the-peripheral-type character, in book six he was giving
Harry heart-to-hearts eighty pages in. This overload of Albus throughout –
including a lengthy dissertation of what exactly Harry must do to defeat
Voldemort – should have struck warning bells for every reader.
A couple notes on the shooting at Virginia Tech: 1) On www.ratemyprofessor.com, the slain instructors have been given fives across the board by students (?), with comments such as: 'god bless you' and 'RIP'. Never mind if they were good teachers or not. Ignore completely the point of this website. I'm sure the professors would love to know that their careers are being rewritten because of a unfortunate event that cost them their lives. How sad it is to be remembered not for your life but for your death. 2) Two short plays written by the shooter Cho-Seung-Hui have been published online (http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays/). I have read both, and they are piss-poor excuses for writing. The best part of 'Richard McBeef' - which details an argument a young man has with his stepfather - is the title, as it would make a good porn star name. I suppose one could argue that the stepfather Richard is an allegory for America, and his difficulty connecting to his stepson represents the problem with America's foreign policy, and the fact that the stepson holds Richard responsible for his real father's death in a bizarre boating accident may represent the difficulty in the transfer of leadership in government, but that doesn't mean I can overlook lines like: 'Let me guess you have a pet named Dick in Neverland ranch and you want me to go with you to pet him, right?' The other play, 'Mr. Brownstone' involves students sneaking into a casino and bitching about their teacher, who they claim 'ass fucks' everyone in class. Around the end they sing all the lyrics to the Guns n' Roses song of the same name. Poor Axl. I'm sure he never wanted to get caught up in all this... 3) Guns laws? It's not about gun laws, it's about people in general. If you want to live in a country with liberal laws regarding firearms, that's fine, but you have to factor in the fact that this increases the chances of people getting a hold of guns who really shouldn't be allowed to. Crazy loners ruin everything. Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007: A Remembrance
Kurt Vonnegut was no William Faulkner. One of the recurring images in his
novels was a photograph of a man having sex with a horse. He opened
Breakfast of Champions with a crude drawing of an asshole.
Vonnegut himself wore his defects on his sleeve, proudly admitting that
his chain smoking was killing him, and talking candidly about his
depression and suicide attempts. He wrote himself into a great many of his
novels, critiquing the book as the story moved along. ‘This is a very bad
book you’re writing’ he tells himself in Breakfast of Champions,
and he quickly agrees.
Well we've finally got an astronaut scandal, and if you ask me, it's about damn time. For those of you who try to focus on just reading 'real' news, allow me to fill you in: A female astronaut drove to her lover's house with the intention of kidnapping and killing his wife. She was arrested and is now charged with attempted murder. NASA is considering reviewing it's psychological evaluation process. That's about it. Okay, one, I think that being an astronaut is not all it's cracked up to be. Obviously the spacewalking stuff is a huge perk, but it seems like you have to live the life of a scientist mixed with the life of a priest (or maybe I'm wrong, and they get involved in orgies all the time). It's one of the few professions left that still have an aura of respect and ability surrounding it (thanks for lowering your job's prestige, Dubya), and the pressure to make sure you don't die from some minor technical malfunction is pretty heavy. You're a boring engineer while also being an American hero. So there's always the possibility of cracking (I believe the medically diagnosed term was 'space crazy' in the film Armageddon). And maybe that's what happened to this woman. It was all just too much. She fell in love with a married man and at the same time was freaking out over how to get ants to sort tiny screws in space. There really is no major problem here. A poor woman just fell through the cracks of an otherwise stable organization. That's how the boring, sympathetic, rational part of my mind is thinking. The fun, crazy part of my brain is encouraging this type of behavior and is going to send a letter asking NASA to do away with the psychological evaluations altogether. See, it's not necessarily a good thing that we all look upon astronauts as super-moral engineers and military pilots. That's aiming too high for most people. If we're ever going to explore the solar system and live amongst the stars we're going to have to bridge the gap between astronauts and regular joe's, and instead of raising the bar for all of us, we should just lower the bar for them. We cannot all become astronauts until they become more like us. People who make stupid decisions once in a while and don't always use proper English. We need white trash in space. Heck, tons of space garbage is already circling our planet, why not send some hicks up their and call it their backyard? Today's astronauts should drink and drive once in awhile, or go on a meth binge. Not only would it relieve their stress, but think how many people would read that and think they could do better. Or imagine this lover's triangle came to a head during a shuttle mission. Now that's a merging of science and entertainment. Jerry Springer in zero gravity. By not being so goddamn perfect, think how many more people they could inspire. Bottom line: We cannot conquer space until Neil Armstrong molests an eight year old boy.
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who was the funniest disciple, and did Jesus
appreciate it?
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