I like to think I'm the Midwestern Bukowski

bye bye bye

2010-04-02T18:59:00.001-05:00

2010-03-30T14:16:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I know, I was supposed to blog every day in March. Shit happened and once I took off for spring break all my motivation just went out the window, so I've been reading books instead. However, I will give the challenge another stab starting April 1st, and this time, it'll happen. For reals.

In the meantime, here's audio of Lyndon Johnson ordering some Haggar pants.

Those are some big pants.

2010-03-11T11:40:00.002-06:00

If life begins at conception, then shouldn't your citizenship be determined by where you were conceived, rather than where you were born? And that means that Birthers REALLY should be demanding evidence of where Obama's parents had sex instead of the birth certificate they've already all seen.

2010-03-10T00:38:00.001-06:00

YES!

we expected something more

2010-03-09T11:30:00.009-06:00

I'd just like to take this opportunity to register my complete and total disapproval of a certain aspect of the Obama administration and the Democrats in general: their record on the nexus between national security and civil liberties.

One of the biggest and most valid complaints about the Bush administration was that their obsession with preventing another 9/11 scale terrorist attack caused them to take measures that gave the Executive unprecedented powers - who else remembers the PATRIOT Act? The warrantless wiretapping? Indefinite detention in "black sites" in countries that, while being our allies, do not give a flying fuck about human rights? These things aren't going away. Quite the opposite - President Obama has doubled down on many of these policies, even asking Congress for action codifying the Executive's right to detain individuals who have been charged with no crime (in military or civilian courts) for as long as they want, as long as they're suspected of involvement with terrorism with absolutely no oversight, Congressional or judicial. In some respects, he's gone farther than President Bush had, best exemplified by the exposure of a list of targets approved for assassination that contained U.S. citizens, most notably the American-born radical Yemeni cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki very well may be an active and enduring threat to American lives, but when our only source of information about him is what one branch of government tells us, how can we be absolutely sure? Last time I checked, a person's American citizenship can't be revoked, no matter how odious and treacherous they are. Why is the Executive branch allowed to order the military to deliberately hunt down and execute American citizens abroad? Why do the other branches simply take their word for it that they're terrorists? We know for a fact that more than a few Gitmo detainees did nothing wrong, and the people kept there were supposed to be the worst of the worst.

Where is the outrage, on the left or the right? Every day, Glenn Beck tells his audience exactly why they should live in fear of the growing power and intervention of government on domestic policy, but where is his chalkboard diagram detailing how the government can abduct you, send you to a foreign country to be detained and possibly tortured without any access to a hearing or a lawyer, or even summarily executed if they simply say "we think you are a terrorist"? Now, I don't live in fear of the Obama administration, or any administration, Republican or Democrat, hunting me down. I do believe these infringements are for the most part contained to the realm of the "war on terror"*, and most likely will remain there, but this doesn't change the fact that it allows the possibility of wider abuse. A door has been left open, and it needs to be closed even if we have no plans to walk through it. Civil liberties aren't something we can simply take for granted, they must be endlessly protected.

The President may have promised to close down Gitmo, something that I do believe would be done if it weren't for Congress stonewalling, and banned the use of brutal torture techniques, but what kind of country are we if we take "we don't drown people anymore" as good enough? Besides, Guantanamo Bay and torture (I die a little inside everytime someone uses the pseudo-Orwellian phrase "enhanced interrogation") are merely symptoms of the larger problem - a willingness to let fear of terrorism undermine our commitment to the core values that make our country great. Benjamin Franklin said it best, that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." The United States deserves both. This is an issue that should and must transcend partisanship, and no action on it will ever be taken as long as both parties are forced to care about it by their constituents. And from now on, I plan on being as loud and obnoxious about it as possible.

*quick footnote: if this is a war, who are we at war with? Where is their territory? Where is their army? The current policy has it both ways - we're at war in the sense that the President has unparalleled powers and civil liberties must be curtailed in favor of security, but we're not at war in the sense that we're not sacrificing for the military conflict as a nation and we don't have to treat prisoners of war humanely under the Geneva Convention. They get around that by claiming that terrorists are "illegal enemy combatants" because they don't wear uniforms or abide by the Geneva Convention themselves, but none of them do. Where are the legal combatants? Wars need to be able to be won by one side or the other. Wars need to end.

I'm a loser

2010-03-08T22:29:00.003-06:00

Who is this asshole and why is he writing for the Washington Post?

oh, that's right, it's a former Bush speechwriter who likes to pretend he's a national security expert. Between him, George Will, Krauthammer and the countless other neocons on WaPo's editorial pages, why is it that the paper has a reputation for being liberal?

the basement of my brain

2010-03-06T22:18:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, there's a news story that was just made for me.

at the risk of sounding like a 14-year-old girl: "EEEEEE!!!!"

The National AND Godard? Sweet!

every day I write the book

2010-03-05T23:35:00.002-06:00

Last month, I started carrying around a little cheap notebook wherever I go, including more than a few nights of going out drinking. This has met the qualifications of being labeled "a fucking great idea". Here's a few highlights, most of which I don't actually remember writing:

we need to bring back mercantilism
"...but the Greeks were all gay!" "That's still not what Platonic means!"
note to self: Dayquil + Pitcher = semi-hallucinations and deja-vu
if my life ends up like Harry Chapin's "Taxi" I will be incredibly pissed
Riff - marry a woman named Peggy with fat ankles
Perfection is not only overrated but necessarily impossible. Remember that 0.999... = 1

And then there's this one, which I wrote after I woke up in the middle of the night last week.

Man is half divine and half material, half god and half animal. Our heads are in the clouds even while our feet are in the dirt. We look out on our world and imagine it as it is not, and more often than not can remake our surroundings to fit this image. We can exercise our will on nature, but remain perpetually subject to it. God said "let there be light". Edison ran electricity through tungsten.

I really have no idea what is going on in my head most of the time.

where wise men never go

2010-03-04T23:03:00.008-06:00

I'm really, really busy with studying for my Comparative Constitutionalism midterm, so this'll be sort of a cheat blog entry. Promise there won't be too many of these.

I was looking for "Fools Gold" on iTunes and noticed something really strange. For some reason, I have not one, not two, not four, but THREE versions of "Fools Rush In". There's the Rick Nelson version (I'm not sure where the hell that video is from), another by Ol' Blue Eyes, and finally, the King. I remember downloading each of these individually, but I never connected the "I have this song already" dots. And, like most things in life, Elvis did it better than everybody.

My Elvis Presley education began kind of late - my parents weren't really huge fans so he wasn't really present in my rotation until I got into Johnny Cash's earlier work at Sun Records and I checked out the other stuff that studio was doing at time. I'd recommend "Elvis At Sun" to everybody, it's a collection of some of the best stuff he was doing right at the beginning of his career, including my almost favorite song of his, "That's All Right":

What's my favorite? "A Little Less Conversation". It's one of the few songs that are simply perfect - it's slick, energetic, and so catchy the Center for Disease Control officially considers it a pandemic. Enjoy, motherfuckers.

lord forgive him, he got them dark forces in him

2010-03-03T23:20:00.002-06:00

Satan gets a pretty bad rap, although there's a pretty compelling argument that he deserves it. Originally the most-loved of all of God's creations, his fall from grace, his rebellion against God and banishment to Hell is among humanity's greatest archetypal stories, most brilliantly recounted in the epic Paradise Lost. Interestingly, despite being the antagonist of the poem, Satan is a somewhat sympathetic character. Sure, he's arrogant, hostile and self-pitying, but he's also extremely eloquent, independent and paradoxically optimistic, declaring that "It is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." He's very human.

Last semester, me and a large group of students were having a shouting argument with the fundamentalist Christian who hangs around on campus standing on a ladder playing guitar and reading Scripture, and ended up sitting down and talking with a real, no-foolin' Satanist. Not LaVeyan Satanism or First Church of Satan or any of the ridiculous Goth "Dark Mass" ritualistic pretend Satanism, all of which are really just atheism, hedonism and, as this guy put it, "borderline retardation with a pentagram on it." He worshipped Satan because he truly believed that the popular conception of Satan is the result of a deliberate propaganda campaign on the part of Yahweh. Through constant repetition and the threat of damnation, God has the world convinced that He is infallible and all-powerful, and uses that power to force us to do his bidding, shoving all the blame for the world's ills onto a convenient scapegoat. For him, Satan is the freedom fighter, the rebel who wanted to break God's tyrannical hold over all of us and was exiled for daring to assert his independence. He's the Trotsky to God's Stalin.

It's an interesting thought. One of the consistent features of totalitarianism is the reverence of a God-like Leader, infinitely wise but stern. I had never considered that the comparison could go the other way.

you say you want a revolution

2010-03-02T22:15:00.005-06:00

The more history you read, the clearer it becomes that certain events, even ones that have no tangible effect on most, have the power to radically alter how humans look at themselves, and by extension the world. The French Revolution was one of these watershed periods, demonstrating the best and worst of human nature, how lofty idealism can collapse into abject horror.

But I mostly like it because it ushered in the first national adoption of the metric system. And when I mean metric system, I mean metric SYSTEM. The revolutionaries were so determined to purge any aspect of the old regime, they threw everything out the window, replacing anything they considered outdated or illogical or religious or royal. They actually took the kings, queens and jacks off of playing cards. They even started calling queen bees "lady bees", so it's no wonder that systems of measurement based around the length of a king's foot were simply unacceptable. But they didn't stop with the meter, the kilogram and the liter. They decimalized time itself.

This is a decimal clock, representing the day according to French Revolutionary Time. The length of the day is divided into 10 decimal hours, each of which consists of 100 decimal minutes, which are 100 decimal seconds long. For those of you keeping score, that means day is exactly 100,000 decimal seconds long, each of which is exactly 0.864 standard seconds. And yes, I did that math in my head.

This is nothing compared to what they did with the calendar. Shockingly, they settled on the year being 12 months long, which must've been hard for anyone who secretly dreamed of a uniformly decimal universe. C'est la vie. To step away from the religious nature of the Gregorian calendar (half the months are named after gods), they named each month according to whatever the weather was like in Paris that time of year. Seriously. Starting the year with the autumnal equinox (September 22 or 23), the months went as follows, translated from the pseudo-Latin the French were making up words in:

Grape Harvest
Fog
Frost
Snowy
Rainy
Windy
Germination
Flower
Pasture
Harvest
Summer Heat
Fruit

I prefer the satirical British version: Wheezy, Sneezy, Freezy, Slippy, Drippy, Nippy, Showery, Flowery, Bowery, Wheaty, Heaty and Sweety. And as stupid as the names are, they're still better than the days of the week, which were just "Day 1" through "Day 10".

The whole thing was one gigantic mess. They were missing five days from the year and had to insert in five festival days at the end just to keep the damn thing accurate (six on leap years!). The French were probably pretty happy to have those days off, though, because with the new decimal week they had to work nine days in a row instead of six before getting to their sanctioned day of rest. And then, there was the fact that they couldn't decide on what would be considered Year One - 1789 (the year of the Revolution) or 1792 (the year the Republic was formed) - so no one was quite sure what year it was.

It's a mystery that it never caught on.

I think decimal time is emblematic of the problems revolutions or any huge social upheavals run into - you just can't remold every little detail of society to your grand design. It pisses people off.

fire in the sky

2010-03-01T16:56:00.005-06:00

Look at this shit. Look at it.

I'm going to ignore the lowest of the hanging fruit here and only say that Cavuto is completely out of line to suggest that because President Obama hasn't successfully quit smoking (despite being in great health otherwise), he shouldn't be pushing for health care reform. Personally, the only problem I have with Obama smoking is the same problem I have with all my friends that smoke - I don't want people I care about getting lung cancer. But that's the only problem. President of the United States is the most stressful job in the world (well, there's one exception), and I figure you do what you've gotta do just to get by every day, and that includes indulging the occasional vice. I want my Presidents to be relaxed and clear-headed, no matter what they've got to do in order to get their minds there, which is the main reason I'm a fervent supporter of establishing an official White House "massage parlor".

But here's what really gets me about this clip, something Media Matters overlooked. Listen to that woman's argument again. It boils down to this: because no one would pay attention to an overweight person pushing health care reform, we shouldn't listen to the President because he smokes (who is this supposed overweight person who isn't being listened to? It's never said.) She goes on to explain that she can't get health insurance because she's obese despite the fact that it's not her fault, it's a metabolic syndrome. Fair enough, but did anyone point out that this is exactly the kind of problem that both the House and Senate bills would solve? Making it so you can't be denied insurance because of a preexisting condition?

music makes me lose control IV: the man comes around

2010-02-28T15:00:00.007-06:00

I wanted to do something to challenge myself in the month of March, so I bet Joe a month of being straight-edge that the Saints would win the Super Bowl, since losing a bet is possibly the best reason to give for not drinking and the like. That didn't exactly work out, so new challenge: I will blog every day in March. It won't always be substantive or well-written or well-thought out or even entertaining, but it will be there. To start off this little experiment in the field of "Dan not being a lazy bastard", here's a super-short sample of what I've been listening to lately.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND

Vampire Weekend's bouncy and unapologetically indie self-titled debut album grabbed me at the first few notes and instantly found a warm and cozy place on my regular rotation of the essentials, but I was wary of their planned follow-up. As much as I love the Stone Roses and their monument of a first album, they'll always be tainted by the crap they churned out afterwards, in the way that all bands who peak early and then decline are. It makes their earlier stuff feel almost like a fluke, a lucky accident instead of the result of talent and effort.

I shouldn't have worried. As one writer put it (in an analogy I wish I had come up with), if Vampire Weekend was Rushmore, Contra is The Royal Tenenbaums. They've maintained their distinctive energetic and intelligent style and took it to the next level, proving that great bands don't use up all their good ideas the first time around. Plus, they got Jake Gyllenhal in stripper pants in their video.

OPETH

What the hell? Is it 2006 again? The last time I seriously sat down and listened to Swedish progressive-death metal was back when I was convinced that the more convoluted the name of your genre, the better you must be. However, setting aside the silliness of the waist-length hair, the corpse makeup, the Cookie Monster vocals screaming about death masks, and the complete insanity of the entire scene's fanbase, Opeth is actually objectively pretty awesome. I've grown up to the point where their epic, 18-minute tracks are starting to drag a bit, but the clean vocal stylings and composition of "Face of Melinda" show that they're a group capable of complex and emotional songs underneath the trappings of typical Scandinavian metal.

One more thing: when I saw Opeth in concert, between songs Mikael Åkerfeldt screamed "DO YOU GUYS LIKE FLOWERS?! FUCK FLOWERS!!"

FLEET FOXES

Now, I'm a big lyrics guy. For me, a truly great song can stand alone as poetry, which makes me incredibly intolerant of shitty, lazy lyrics (I'm talking to you, post-Pinkerton Rivers Cuomo). However, in "Quiet Houses", the Fleet Foxes make poetry out of "lay me down", "don't give in" and "come to me" repeated infinitely, providing more depth and sophistication with those words than any given asshole with a rhyming dictionary.

has the light gone out for you because the light's gone out for me?

2009-12-28T15:37:00.003-06:00

I got my license renewed today.

If you're an organ donor, congratulations. If you're not, please consider signing up.

have you heard the news? THE DEAD WALK!

2009-12-18T13:45:00.003-06:00

I guess I've done enough posts lately about real shit (also known as things that are the least bit interesting) to allow myself to indulge in an all about me update. at this point I'm pretty much just typing to keep my brain from shutting off, so if I begin to ramble or misspell words it's not because of a brain tumor, or at least not as far as I know. I worry about that sometimes, although not as much since two Thanksgivings ago Dad took me to the medical college and got me a CT scan, then we hung out in the doctor's lounge drinking bad coffee and looking at my brain in slices. No tumors, but I do have a larger sac of cerebrospinal fluid cushioning my brain stem than most people! It's still within the standard deviation and doesn't make a damn bit of difference, but it's nice to be above average.

the last week or so has been kind of a big ole fucked up blur, starting with the severe insomnia on Tuesday night, severe celebration from rockin' my political psychology final on Wednesday night, and a severe all-nighter "this is my last paper of the semester oh god let this be over" writeathon last night, meaning that over the last 72 hours I've spent about... five, maybe six hours asleep. And now I'm waiting around in the library drinking coffee like I was in Nightmare on Elm Street because I stupidly agreed to squeeze in one more custodial shift today from 3:30 to 8. I honestly have no idea what I was thinking. Given my continuous torrid love affair with procrastination, the possibility (otherwise known as "the certainty") that I would pull an all-nighter really should've entered into that equation. Oh well, live and don't learn. However, thanks to the legally-prescribed magic of a 30mg Adderall XR taken about 10 hours ago, I am currently as energetic and erudite as a zombie on meth!

anyway, here's what I wanted to share in the first place before I wrote all that nonsense. One song. Two music videos. It's a song that gets stuck in my head a lot when I'm sleep deprived.

this one's the official video that they won't let me embed for some reason. If you're already putting your shit on youtube for people to watch for free, why bother limiting its ability to spread? Anyway, I just straight-up love the way this is filmed - every close-up looks like it's pulled out of this amazing and delightfully surreal Spanish movie I watched in my Opposing Cinema class freshman year. What was it called? The Glass Beehive or something like that? It definitely involved bees. It's one of those movies where if you're not paying close attention none of the actions of the characters seem to connect with anything else, but it had the best long shots of people's faces. You honestly don't even need subtitles, the dialogue is sparse and relatively meaningless, because the faces tell the whole story.

the other one I came across while clicking through political blogs, literally right afterI started humming the song to myself. It was all sorts of weird. I really like this style of amateur videos, even if this one feels a little too much like an overly cute Apple commercial. I can't really see it catching on beyond just illustrating songs or demonstrating the capabilities of Google Wave, though.

time to getmore coffee.

ain't there nothing I can take to relieve this bellyache?

2009-12-07T13:05:00.008-06:00

I FREAKING CALLED IT!

I'm trying not to brag here, but I've been saying for MONTHS that the polling on health care reform has been absolutely fucked. The standard question has always been some variation on "Do you approve of the health care reform plan currently being considered in Congress?", and the results of these polls are always, always, ALWAYS below 50%, sometimes even below 40%, numbers that the conservative portion of the media have been repeating ad nauseum. It's always "The Obama administration is shoving this down our throats" or "America doesn't want this" or "Government takeover of health care is being rejected by the American people."

However, they're missing a large portion of the story; namely, that I don't approve of the health care reform plan currently being considering in Congress. Why?

It's not single-payer.
It perpetuates the expensive and inefficient system of employer-provided insurance.
The public option in the House bill is completely weaksauce. Not only is it opt-out, it's not tied to Medicare rates and would only cover a small portion of the uninsured. Everything that makes the public option a good idea has been stripped out because it's not powerful enough to provide real competition and drive down costs.
Despite there not being an affordable public alternative, there's still an individual mandate.
The Stupak amendment, barring abortion services from any plans that receive any federal funds, arbitrarily forcing the entire cost of a legal medical procedure onto women who need federal subsidies and therefore are least able to afford abortions. Unless they buy separate abortion insurance. But who the hell plans on getting an abortion?

So yeah, I don't approve of the legislation, but in the polling my opinion is lumped in with all the dumbasses who think Obama wants to kill Grandma and ration care just for the hell of it. I'd still rather have the legislation than not have it - the Senate version has some surprisingly good cost-containment measures, Medicare will have a lot of waste stripped from it, the deficit-reduction is nice and in general it's pushing us in the right direction. And I feel like a lot of liberals/progressives must feel the same way, something that is not reflected in a overly simple yes/no poll.

Until now. Once again, FiveThirtyEight proves itself to be an extremely valuable resource:

Ipsos...did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn't go far enough?

It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan -- or about 12 of the overall sample -- did so from the left; they thought the plan didn't go far enough.

Ipsos also asked a parallel question of people who supported the plan: did any of them support the plan because they oppose health care reform and thought that the plan was sufficiently watered-down so as to "keep health care reform from happening"? A small number of people picked this response: about 10 percent of those in favor of the plan, or 3 percent of the entire sample.

One way to look at this: 43 percent of people favor health care reform, whereas 38 percent oppose it (20 percent are undecided). But the actual plan under consideration gets numbers that are more or less the reverse of that -- 34 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed -- because a significant number of people think the plan doesn't go far enough.

This development really needs to become part of the broader health care discussion. Tell your friends.

oh yes we do

2009-12-02T18:06:00.003-06:00

I love you, Wonkette, and I swear I felt that way even before I found out you were founded by the extremely hot Ana Marie Cox:

It’s amazing how efficiently Republicans get their shit together when there’s an opportunity on the horizon to act like jackasses. But hey, that’s their prerogative! TO ENSURE THE DEBATE IS THOROUGH BEFORE THEY DECIDE THEIR VOTES.
Good luck, Harry Reid! Yeesh. Too bad the Democrats can’t bring Lyndon Johnson back from the grave to guest-spot as Majority Leader for a few months. He’d somehow hear that Republicans were planning to pull this crap weeks before they had even thought of it or knew they could, then appear in their dreams, slap each of ‘em on the back, grin, and threaten to publish obscene Polaroids he’d obtained of them fornicating with Negro waiters in their fraternity houses, which is maybe illegal.

God, it's like if The Daily Show had a blog. And was founded by a foxy and insightful redheaded political analyst.

One day, I will work there.

2009-11-23T10:19:00.003-06:00

Things it's impossible to say out loud honestly:

I'm asleep.
I'm mute.
I'm a crypto-fascist.
This sentence is a lie.

huh

let's try not to figure out everything at once

2009-11-19T16:26:00.008-06:00

random thought:

Teddy Roosevelt wasn't really a great environmentalist, he only established national parks so there'd always be places where he could kill things. Kind of like how Lincoln wasn't really an abolitionist, he just wrote the Emancipation Proclamation so that the South would have less slaves fighting for them. And how Lyndon Johnson actually hated the poor and supported the Great Society to eliminate poverty so no one would ever ask him for change again.

I made that last one up, but LBJ was five different flavors of asshole, so I wouldn't exactly put it past him. It's interesting how he's probably the biggest dick (and had the biggest dick, if you believe the legends about "Jumbo") to ever sit in the Oval Office, but that made him an incredibly effective executive. He was notorious for "The Johnson Treatment," how he'd compliment and flatter you one second, then apply the pressure by getting right up in your fucking face.

And I mean right up in your face. He knew the power of the office and used it like no President before or since. I mean, Nixon used the office to apply pressure, but using federal agencies to exact personal revenge is kind of a different situation.

Like Jon Stewart's said at least once, I wish our current President was more of an asshole. Maybe it's just my inner short-sighted uberliberal, but goddamn it would feel good to hear that Obama got all up in some dude's shit to try and get a vote. I want him to threaten to personally castrate Joe Lieberman and vow revenge on Ben Nelson and his children and his children's children.

I guess you can't really get away with that anymore.

hey hey, we're the monkees, people say we engage in complex economic behaviors

2009-10-22T13:20:00.004-05:00

To preface; NPR's Planet Money podcast is one of the most mind-bogglingly interesting and relevant things I spend my time listening to. You know those episodes of This American Life where they explain, in plain English, the causes and mechanisms behind the financial crisis? It's like that three times a week, except it's not completely depressing. They focus on the ways economics impacts our everyday lives, talking about tariffs, financial regulation, lending practices, and the way industries deal with changing economic environments.

And sometimes they do stuff like exploring the economic interactions between monkeys.

I'd recommend listening to the whole thing, but the jist of it is that researchers took a very hierarchical troop of wild vervet monkeys and taught a low-ranking female to open a box containing apples. They found that very soon after she gained this new power of control over a highly sought-after commodity, the amount of time she spent being groomed by other monkeys skyrocketed to a level comparable to the strongest and most dominant alpha monkeys. However, once they trained another low-ranking monkey to open another box of apples, her grooming time increased to about half of the first monkey, the exact amount that the first monkey's grooming time dropped. The monkeys basically use time spent grooming as currency, which makes perfect sense when you think about it - what is money, if not a physical substitute representing manhours of labor? When you think about it in those terms, you see that when the supply doubled, the price dropped by half, just like anyone who listened to the first ten minutes of Econ101 would tell you.

But... they're fucking monkeys! They have no language, no ability to negotiate, no concept of math beyond the ability to recognize that five apples is less than ten, and the market worked anyway. This means that, far from being a product of human ingenuity, basic economic behavior is something that comes naturally to us, like breathing. Or being adorable for the camera.

Also, male vervet monkeys have bright blue scrotums. This has nothing to do with their ability to form an ad-hoc economy, but it is hilarious.

while weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save

2009-10-16T00:30:00.005-05:00

Happy Sesquicentennial, John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry!

That's right boys and girls! 150 years ago today, hardcore abolitionist John Brown took 20 men, a broadsword and a dream and brutally murdered his way into the annals of history, all in a valiant effort to spark a gigantic revolt to end slavery. Brown's plan was to start by capturing the town of Harpers Ferry, then arm every slave in the nearby plantations, whom he expected to join his raid enthusiastically, along with pro-abolition whites. Unfortunately, things did not exactly go according to plan, and soon after capturing the armory and killing a handful of people, Brown was surrounded and trapped inside the town's engine house, where he held ground for two days, long enough to see both his sons killed in the crossfire. Then Robert E. Lee (yes, THAT Robert E. Lee) showed up with a company of Marines and coordinated an attack on the engine house, using a wooden ladder as a battering ram and ending the raid. All told, 17 people were killed, including 10 of Brown's men.

John Brown was captured, tried and found guilty of murder, conspiracy with slaves to rebel, and treason. During the trial, he had a few words:

"...had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment....I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"

On December 2nd, 1859, John Brown refused to be ministered to by a pro-slavery clergyman and was executed on the gallows. A little more than a year later, the Civil War began.

John Brown, American Badass.

2009-10-06T09:05:00.001-05:00

I love this song. I actually performed it once at an open-mic night my freshman year.

in every captain there's a Kidd now, in every chaplain there's an id now

2009-09-29T16:19:00.006-05:00

When I was leaving Japanese Film (this week, Rashomon) today, a guy in my class mentioned offhand that he felt like starting a riot. It's not that he was mad about anything in particular, but in his words, "sometimes you just want to throw a chair through a window." I know the feeling. It has less to do with destruction and more to do with just DOING something. Something that has a physical impact on the world around you, even if it's a negative one. Something that can irrevocably change the course of the rest of your life.

I find myself thinking about that kind of thing every now and then. Here's a short list:

stealing a car
covering a big blank wall with graffiti
setting off an M80 in a trash can
punching a cop
smashing a TV with a sledgehammer

The last one's my favorite. There are pretty big (40" or 42") flat-screens on the walls everywhere on campus, and they are offensively useless. Half the time, they're off. When they're on, they display information no one needs. It's one thing to build a $300 million stadium with my tuition money, that's at least pleasantly wasteful, but to drop at least $30k to outfit the University with banal bulletin boards in HD? Smashy, smashy!

oh, and here's my new roommate, Lisa's kitten (who, as I'm typing this, is purring contentedly on my lap).

He likes to hide under the stairs and attack my pants when I come down to the kitchen. Playing with a kitten after a long day of classes or work is definitely the best stress relief ever.

say "here" as in "here I am... rock you like a hurricane"

2009-09-26T12:23:00.002-05:00

I finally remembered one of my dreams again, the first one in a while. For about a month, every time I've closed my eyes it feels like my alarm goes off right away, which really has not helped the whole "being tired all the time" situation. However, not two hours ago, I was dreaming my balls off. About big fucking scorpions. Attacking me from under my bed. And all my ex-girlfriends were there.

I saved us all, but not in a cool "I'll take care of this" dashing way, but with less creative thinking and physical dexterity than Woody Allen trying to get lobsters in a pot. I think I just smacked them with a shovel. But there were dozens of them, skittering around with a gross clicking noise and every time I got them all, I put my feet on the floor and another five came out from under the bed and then I had to start all over again. The girls were no help at all. As a result, I woke up with the feeling that although I would definitely do my best to save any one of my exes from scorpions, I'd be pretty pissed off if I died in the process. Especially since none of them had the common decency to turn into a sex-starved Megan Fox. It's my dream, is that really too much to ask?

Normally, being attacked by scorpions in one's head is not a great sign of robust mental health, but in this case I'm just glad that I'm getting back to something approaching normal sleep.

2009-09-10T23:34:00.004-05:00

Tim Kreider is one of my favorite people alive. He's a cynical, misanthropic, tragically talented cartoonist who draws the most incredible facial expressions, and also happens to be an extraordinarily talented writer. He's one of the contributors to the NYTimes "Happy Days" blog, which I also highly recommend, and wrote this piece for the anniversary of 9/11:

‘You Are Alive’

I experienced 9/11 the same way almost all Americans did — on TV. And I reacted the same way a lot of them did — by going temporarily insane.

I like to think that most people who got caught up in that bellicose hysteria experienced the attacks as a spectatorial event, as unreal, and so their reaction was also unreal — like the “payback-time” montage in an action film or the impotent revenge scenarios we play out in our heads. It wasn’t until I actually went to New York City a week after the attacks that I understood how empty and inappropriate an emotion anger was to bring to the circumstances; it was like picking fights at a wake. New Yorkers, who had been so profoundly wounded, hadn’t given in to rage; what they were, mostly, was sad.

I hesitate to say this, but that was not only a ghastly time; it was also it was a beautiful time, in the same way that a friend’s funeral can be beautiful. New Yorkers seemed to have had their shells torn off, the gelid stuff of their inner selves exposed and flinching at the air. Jealously tended hierarchies temporarily evaporated, and the worthless currency of human decency reacquired street value. Strangers made eye contact and got too choked up to speak. I heard about a wave of tender and desperate spontaneous sex — it would be the opposite of the truth to call it “casual.” Graffiti appeared that actually spoke instead of just marking territory, like the overheard murmurs of a city talking to itself or fitfully dreaming. I saw a spray-painted message that would’ve seemed trite or sentimental a week before: YOU ARE ALIVE.
Sept. 11 came at the end of an idyllic but somehow flaccid decade when a half-century’s threat of mass immolation seemed suspended, and the single biggest news story in the U.S. was not Kosovo or Rwanda but an act of fellatio. Suddenly seeing the same people we sit in traffic or ride mass transit with dying horribly may have made some of us take leave of our reason, but it also restored things to a truer perspective. It reminded us, briefly, that life is real.

—Tim Kreider

Damn right.

all apologies

2009-09-09T22:39:00.001-05:00

sorry for not updating for four months, I had a thing

I wanna fuck you like an animal

2009-05-25T12:44:00.007-05:00

I've only known Isabella Rossellini as the epicenter of David Lynch's insanely dark and surreal Blue Velvet, the practical upshot of which is that whenever someone says her name I inevitably picture Dennis Hopper huffing amyl nitrite and smacking her around.

But no more! Rossellini is the writer, producer, director and star of Green Porno, a series of short films on the Sundance channel exploring the sexual behavior of various animals. Part biology seminar, part performance art, and part subtly satiric commentary on sexuality in general, Rossellini dresses up as the animals themselves to explain their mating behaviors, the bizarreness of which clashes hilariously with the goofy foam-rubber and cardboard costumes and sets. Season 1 focused on insects, Season 2 has been strictly marine life thus far, and Season 3 will make the jump to farm animals.

It's honestly something you just need to see in order to get, and I'm glad someone has the guts to go out and, without any sense of embarrassment or shyness, explain the importance of species-specific genitalia while surrounded by gigantic paper-mâché penises.

Educational, hilarious, and pro-female!

we can work it out

2009-05-19T17:15:00.000-05:00

I loves me some PBS, and you should all watch this. Bill Moyers interviews Daniel Goleman, who explains how increased awareness of the "life cycle" of products through green advocacy and things like GoodGuide can result in using the structure of our consumer-oriented society for the good of the environment. Because I'm a trendy motherfucker, I got the GoodGuide iPhone app and now reserve the right to look down my nose at the rest of you plebeians.

"Interview" isn't quite the right word to use for Bill Moyers, because what he does on his show isn't a series of questions, but instead an extraordinarily in-depth and nuanced conversation. Actually, there's usually two, and Moyers always does his homework, asking tough questions and expecting intelligent answers, which his guests invariably supply. In his own way, Moyers is even better than PBS's other two gems, Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley (sorry, Joe), because their shows are somewhat personality-driven. They focus on the people themselves, while Moyers focuses on the issues. That being said, Charlie Rose is the greatest interviewer on Earth and his show should be required viewing for American citizenship.

This is a show that simply wouldn't be possible on a for-profit channel. It's absolutely inconcievable that any 24-hour news channel would devote 20 uninterupted minutes to a one-on-one conversation on one topic with someone who nobody's ever heard of, no matter how relevant the topic or crucial the information. It really highlights how the purpose of news channels is simply to entertain, rather than inform.

The things we consume, the shows we watch, they all matter. How we spend our leisure time is one of the things that defines us as people, and so much of it is simply wasted. Time is a non-renewable resource, and all of us (ESPECIALLY me) need to use it better.

the wind beneath my wings

2009-05-12T09:05:00.000-05:00

I'm typically described as being pretty damn cynical, something that I don't do much to discourage. I try to take a realistic view of things, and often that means expecting the worst of people (I'm also a political science major in my early 20s and therefore practically required by law to be jaded and bitter unless I have kids and start voting Republican). Deep down though, I'm an optimist, and I live for the times when something gets past my shields of misanthropy and genuinely touches me. The things that do it are weird, like cute cardboard robots or an introspective and emotionally honest rap song, but they help me to cut through the worries and stresses of everyday life. Here's a few more of those things:

Henry Rollins

Holy shit! I just realized, as in literally as I was putting his picture in, that this is who drove the Jeep during Off-Road Tattoo in the first Jackass movie. Awesome.

Henry Rollins embodies everything I want to be. He sang for Black Flag, helping to create and shape American punk music and helped to inspire countless other bands to take their music in different, groundbreaking directions. He was set, it would've been easy for him to just keep doing punk music where he found something close to mainstream success, but he started doing spoken word and stand-up comedy. He campaigns for gay rights and tours for the USO (which shouldn't be unusual). He hosted The Henry Rollins Show (currently on hiatus) on IFC. Henry Rollins is badass, cool looking, brilliant and hilarious, and most importantly, he did this:

It's like he found the words to describe what I felt deep in my heart but could never say.

more to come later, I've got finals I should be studying for.

clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

2009-04-27T10:27:00.000-05:00

I usually explain my opinion on 24-hour news channels like this: MSNBC is on the left, Fox News is on the right, and CNN fucking blows. I used to call them the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but then Anderson "The Silver Fox" Cooper joined CNN and somehow replaced Wolf Blitzer as the most handsome man in cable journalism.

Wolf Blitzer - the most exciting name, the most boring man

Today's New York Times article outlining how and why CNN is getting royally screwed in the ratings pretty much comes as no surprise, but (even though it doesn't come out and say it) it brings up a few points as to why 24-hour news channels are inherently polarizing. Some claim that there isn't enough news to justify all-day coverage. This couldn't be less true. There just isn't enough interesting news to fill 24 hours. Cable news channels are profit-driven entities, and their business model relies on drawing in the largest audience possible, something that is made much easier by sensationalizing your content. It's simply more profitable to focus on horse race, health scares, celebrity exploits and missing photogenic white girls than it is to report on things that actually matter. Polarizing editorial content to fit certain political demographics also substantially increases ratings. As a result, Fox News has found great success catering to conservatives, MSNBC has found less success catering to liberals because we tend to fucking read, and CNN's in the toilet because cable news doesn't lend itself well to neutrality. Truly fair and balanced coverage isn't inherently exciting, so it's no wonder that CNN's highest rated shows feature the heart-throbbing (~*~*Anderson*~*~) or the heart-palpitating (Lou "if it's brown, flush it down" Dobbs). And even Lou Dobbs is steadily losing ground, because if someone wants to watch a mentally unstable xenophobe rant about illegal aliens, they're probably already a big fan of a certain other channel.

Fox News - where the discerning man gets his crazy on.

Even if CNN goes under, it's not as if we're actually losing anything. No matter how much they love to whine about it, CNN doesn't do a much better job presenting the news (and I mean straight news, not editorial content) than their two competitors, and a much worse job than network news, print and online newspapers, high-profile blogs, and certain Angelfire sites. 24-hour news is a blight on American media, and the less of it we have, the better.

Although that hologram thing on Election Night was hilarious.

It sure is.

2009-04-17T18:33:00.000-05:00

Anderson Cooper rules.

digital love

2009-04-10T17:42:00.000-05:00

Meet Tweenbot.

Hi Tweenbot!

Tweenbot is a social experiment and/or artistic statement - which one depends on your point of view. The little anthropomorphic cardboard robot's goal is to get from where it's dropped off to the place written on the flag over its head, like from the northeast corner of a park to the southwest. However, it can only move in a straight line, so in order to reach its destination, the people who encounter it need to help it, whether that means simply shifting its direction slightly, directing it around obstacles, or helping it out when its stuck.

Tweenbot's creator built them as simply and cheaply as possible, since she assumed most would be destroyed when she unleashed them upon a callous and uncaring New York City. However, each one reached its destination completely unharmed, as the people guiding it purposefully made sure it avoided danger. One man even turned the robot around, saying to it "You can't go that way, it's towards the road."

I love stories like these because they help confirm my suspicion that humanity, as a species, isn't complete shit. There are people out there willing to take time out of their day and help, even if all they did was nudge a little robot with their foot. Even better, there are people who are willing to play along with whatever little games life presents them, even when there is no reward or even a tangible result.

I told you...

2009-04-09T13:25:00.001-05:00

2009-03-30T21:30:00.000-05:00

I don't have a whole lot of experience with digital photography; in fact, the entirety of my far-too-short photographic career has been with film. So, although I have no idea how to actually edit digital photos, I'll be damned if I'm not gonna try with the rudimentary tools I have at my disposal (iPhoto, the blunt rock to Photoshop's scalpel).

original:

retouched:

what I did:

Rotated and cropped the image so that the frame of the mirror creates a vertical line.
Bumped up the contrast. I like higher-contrast images in general, but increasing contrast also helps to define Anna's outline on the left.
Increased saturation in order to let the flowers, the red wall, and Anna's pretty face pop.

I still don't like how grainy the image is as a result of increasing the contrast, but that's an issue with the camera settings when the picture itself was taken. Also, the glare of the overhead light in the mirror is distracting and I wish I could get rid of it. Overall, though, I feel like it's much stronger and more evocative.

More to come.

the ken burns effect

2009-03-30T19:24:00.000-05:00

Ken Burns bores me to fucking death. I can't fault someone for spending his entire career trying to take history and make it accessible to everyone, but it doesn't change the fact that the man is essentially making the same movie over and over again. He takes the same basic ingredients - archival photographs, fawning historians and biographers, endless violin music and narrators with vaguely mid-Atlantic accents - and just churns out films like sausage. Mind-numbing, hagiographic, sepia-toned sausage.

Maybe when he finally keels over dead in the middle of a zoom-and-pan on an old photograph, they'll collect all of his works into one DVD box set large enough to crush a small horse. And it will be called: Ken Burns Presents, the Entirety of Fucking Civilization.

Dan gets off his ass and takes some photos, film at 11

2009-03-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, but there's more stuff I've uploaded here. Click for full resolution and keep in mind I haven't retouched any of these yet.

goodnight

2009-03-03T15:40:00.000-06:00

I didn't know Maddi, but her death has stirred up some feelings in me I wish would go away. I know a lot of people who have had their lives irrevocably damaged by drugs, although I've had the good fortune of never losing a friend. How long that will last is anyone's guess, since we're all still so goddamn young. Not as young as Maddi, though.

Should she have known better? Of course. But we all do risky things despite the fact that we should know better. Remembering some of the incredibly fucking stupid things I've done makes me cringe when I think about how easily the roulette wheel could've landed on me.

Philip K. Dick, one of my favorite authors and no stranger to the horrible consequences of drug abuse, wrote an afterword to A Scanner Darkly that I can't help but dwell on:

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.
...
These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The ‘enemy’ was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

We need to learn from the mistakes of others. Now go call your mother and tell her you love her.

2009-03-01T23:06:00.000-06:00

The following songs are hereby banned from my mp3 player:

Thriller - Michael Jackson
Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Kill Bill theme)
How Deep Is Your Love - The Bird and the Bee
Run's House - Run DMC

For the following reasons:

I can't do the Thriller dance, and even if I could, I shouldn't be trying to do it on the street.
I almost punched someone's head off when they tapped my shoulder from behind.
It makes me miss Anna.
My Israel professor has informed me that his classroom is not Run's House.

these shoes rule

2009-02-10T10:21:00.000-06:00

I told you guys that shoe-throwing is catching on as a form of protest.

oh my god, shoes

2009-02-02T19:53:00.000-06:00

I know I'm supposed to be paying attention in class right now, but some guy in the UK threw his shoe at the Chinese premier. I can only hope that this indicates that shoe-throwing is catching on as a universal sign of protest, because it's got such a great feel to it. It's violent, but it can't really hurt anyone, and it's basically impossible to stop someone determined to do it. What are they gonna do, take everyone's shoes?

And you should all read Al Jazeera.

America, Fuck Yeah

2009-01-26T20:29:00.000-06:00

In class tonight, listening to a tedious back-and-forth about America's status as a "Christian Nation," I got bored. Real fucking bored. So bored that I mentally substituted "fucking" for "Christian". Highlights:

"I don't think anyone can deny that America was founded on fucking values!"

"There's a whole lot of fucking people in this country, but there's still a whole lot of people who aren't fucking."

"The Founding Fathers were all fucking."
"They were not!"

I know, I am twelve years old. But it got me thinking. We're not a Christian Nation. We really ARE a Fucking Nation! Look at our history:

Colonization - Fuck you, we're gonna be pious as all fucking hell over here and if you don't like it, the fuck are you gonna do about it?
Revolutionary War - Fuck you, England. Fuck you and your motherfucking tea tax!
Philadelphia Convention - Fuck these Articles, we're writing a fucking Constitution.
War of 1812 - Fuck you too, Canada!
Civil War - "Fuck you, I'm leaving!" "Fuck you, no you're not!"
World War II - Fuck Fascism
Cold War - Fuck Communism*
War on Terror - Fuck Terrorism

*In Vietnam, an entire squad of Marines got Zippos with "Fuck Communism" engraved on them.

We are a nation founded on one simple guiding principle that, like all good philosophical statements, can be summed up by Rage Against the Machine lyrics: Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. The magic of it is that you don't have to do what I tell you either. America's just fucking cool like that.

please stand up, please stand up

2008-12-22T12:03:00.001-06:00

Apparently, I own and publish a New Jersey alternative weekly newspaper. I'm also, apparently, a complete tool who's more concerned about getting people to look at his "beautiful, full-page ads" than producing something that reaches the largest number of people, which is the reason he refuses to put his paper's content online. I can understand the reasoning behind it as a business model, but why even bother making a newspaper if the point isn't to get people to read it? At this point, he's admitting that the primary purpose of his publication is to advertise and the columns are just the lure to get people to look at the ads. I am such a dick.

I'm also an award-winning South African writer and Professor of English. He's Jewish, he's prolific, and a few of his works have been adapted for the stage. One even ran on Broadway for about six months. I like this me. This me lives in London.

Finally, I'm also a senior at Arizona State University who got bored one day and decided to friend every other Dan Jacobson on Facebook. I don't write on his wall or look at his page ever, I don't really give a shit what's going on with his life at all, but I keep him as a friend for one very specific reason. Every now and then, he'll update his status and it'll show up on my news feed, but it happens rarely enough that something strange always happens. I'll see something like "Dan Jacobson just bought a new car!" or "Dan Jacobson is hung over" and a weird part of my brain gets tickled. "When did that happen?" is invariably my first thought. It appeals to the part of me that eternally suspects I'm in a Philip K. Dick story or an episode of The Twilight Zone. In a small, bizarre way, it keeps me on my toes.

I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late

2008-12-18T02:05:00.000-06:00

sleepy halos can't sink on beehive heads
cocooned in polyester blends
boiling ice-blended blood
like a Starbucks mocha frappe
that costs too much
and doesn't come in small

leaden eyelashes forced apart
like magnets
or a man who just can't sink
into the sweet warm depths
of unconcerned dead seas

music makes me lose control, take two

2008-12-05T23:30:00.000-06:00

First of all, iPhone!

I completely do not need, do not deserve, and did not earn this awesome little device, but you just don't turn down a free iPhone. It couldn't have come at a better time though, because ever since my iPod finally up and iDied a few months ago, my outside-the-apartment life has been lacking a soundtrack. However, it only has about 6 free gigs of storage. So, after throwing on the entire discographies of Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles (you know, the essentials), and Weezer (shut up), I was forced to make some tough choices. Here's who made the cut:

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
Bomb. Repeat. Bomb.

As everyone who knows me is probably tired of hearing, my cousin Chris played bass for Chisel, Ted Leo's previous project. I've been listening to Chisel (and therefore, Ted Leo) for almost a decade now, so it's completely inexplicable that I didn't start listening to the Pharmacists until a few months ago. This song's off their latest album, Living with the Living, and it just kicks your ass right from the opening riff, screaming out in protest against the inhumanity of aerial bombing, the most effective and least empathetic method of conducting war. It's hard to write good lyrics and even harder to write smart ones, but Leo, with a finely honed sense of irony, crafts a evocative image of the Top Gun-inspired flyboy blowing the fuck out of BrownPeopleistan, and goddamn it's a fun ride. Besides, how many rock songs get you thinking about the emotional disconnect between a bombing crew and the people they're bombing?

Man or Astro-Man?
Inside the Atom

Man or Astro-man? was a fucking fantastic band with a hilarious gimmick - they pretended to be aliens sent to Earth for the sole purpose of playing surf rock, and answered only to their stage names (Birdstuff, Star Crunch, Coco the Electric Monkey Wizard, and so on). Their sound's been described as sort of a surf/punk fusion, but I like to think of them as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 of music - relying heavily on electronics, sound effects and audio samples from horrible old sci-fi movies, and having the audience in on the joke. Unfortunately, grinding out 9 or 10 albums in seven years seems to have burned them out for the time being, they haven't been in the studio since 2000. This reunion set was filmed at their label's 25th Anniversary festival in 2006. Apparently, they're the kind of band you haven't actually heard until you've heard them live.

Killdozer
Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)

It's actually been a while since I listened to Killdozer regularly, but they belong to the same record label as the Pharmacists and Man or Astro-man?, so I felt obligated to include them as well. Operating out of Chicago, Touch and Go Records is maybe one of the ballsiest indie labels around, signing artists with handshake deals and a 50-50 split on all profits. It's also currently owned and run by Corey Rusk, the bass player for one of the label's first bands. If every record company was run by a musician, we'd all be much better off musically.

Killdozer (coming from Madison of all fucking places) was one of my first forays into non-mainstream music, and serves as a pretty good barometer as to the state of early '90s punk. I wouldn't call them extraordinarily talented musicians, and most of their songs start to sound alike after awhile, but the reasons why I will always love this band can be summed up quite easily:

Their break-up tour was called Fuck You, We Quit!
Their reunion tour was called Fuck You, We Reunite!
They wrote a song about a dog who entertains the elderly and takes a bullet for a retarded boy, from whose perspective the song is sung.
They put that song on an album titled The Uncompromising War on Art Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
They dedicated the aforementioned album "In Loving Memory of Burl Ives" and Burl Ives wasn't dead.
They covered American Pie.

Christ, that must've been a fun band to be in.

Vampire Weekend
Oxford Comma

I've been listening to this band for literally less than 12 hours and I'm already in love. I hadn't even heard of them until last week, when over a couple days they came up no less than five separate times. Figuring it was fate, I got hold of their self-titled debut (and so far only) album and threw it on before leaving for class this morning, and I was hooked by the time I got on the bus. I wish I could go more in-depth about them, but I do blogs off the top of my head and I haven't read anything about them yet. Oxford Comma is a particularly good song - catchy and simple, even if I have no fucking clue what it's about, plus the music video looks like a Wes Anderson movie.

Oh, that's a good thing.

Fountains of Wayne
Hackensack

The problem with one-hit wonders is that sometimes they're not. Most people have only heard Stacy's Mom and the pretty hilarious music video, but Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers (2003) is one of the best pop albums in recent memory. Hackensack is a sweet, straightforward love song about a guy stuck in his New Jersey hometown pining for a famous actress he went to high school with. Unlike a lot of love songs, it doesn't come across as sappy or saccharine, but refreshingly honest.

A quick note to Fountains of Wayne: Welcome Interstate Managers really could have been four tracks shorter. Obviously I love it, but those last four songs are the weakest, and 45 minutes is still a respectable album length. Most importantly, Fire Island is just a PERFECT closing track, to the point where I changed the track numbers in iTunes so it's at the end. Just saying.

The Clash
Ghetto Defendant
the video is footage from the movie Rude Boy.

The funniest thing about this song is that Allen Ginsberg probably tried to blow Joe Strummer while they were recording it. Ginsberg, THE beat poet, the man responsible for the fucking masterpiece that is Howl, not only collaborated with The Clash on their lyrics, but recorded the fucking sweet spoken-word dystopic imagery, AND FUCKING TOURED WITH THEM IN NEW YORK. This bears repetition: Allen Ginsberg toured with The Clash. There are very few things that are as fucking sweet as that.

I'll end with a copy/paste of a conversation me and Alby had about a month ago about this song and Ginsberg:

1:40:42 AM Alby: ginsberg loved punk rock
1:40:43 AM Alby: haha
1:40:53 AM Me: "do the worm on necropolis/slamdance cosmopolis/enlighten the populace" is one of the coolest fucking things i've ever heard
1:40:55 AM Alby: he performed with the black holes at UWM
1:41:51 AM Alby: who actually aren't a band anymore
1:42:10 AM Alby: this song is awesome haha
1:42:16 AM Alby: good find
1:42:48 AM Me: i downloaded Combat Rock a month ago and this is the only song on it that i hadn't heard before that actually grabbed me
1:43:09 AM Alby: awesome that they have ginsberg reading his poetry
1:43:15 AM Alby: and it works some how
1:43:18 AM Me: yeah
1:43:38 AM Me: i'm not really sure how they pulled that off
1:43:54 AM Alby: Ice probably brought them more than just Patron
1:43:57 AM Me: hahaha
1:44:20 AM Me: it's like they were just chilling with him and he was reading a poem and they just busted out a bass line and took it from there
1:44:29 AM Alby: haha probably
1:44:39 AM Alby: he probably tried to fuck them all first
1:44:42 AM Me: the other vocals are pretty sweet too
1:44:52 AM Alby: ginsberg wanted to sleep with everyone
1:45:00 AM Me: god i would not want to hang out with him
1:45:04 AM Alby: hahaha
1:45:17 AM Me: like, fuck
1:45:19 AM Alby: horny jew poet
1:45:19 AM Me: have some standards
1:46:08 AM Alby: he got caught fucking himself with a broom handle in Russia
1:46:16 AM Alby: in a public restroom
1:46:36 AM Alby: russia or cuba
1:46:43 AM Me: russia's funnier
1:46:47 AM Alby: yeah
1:46:55 AM Me: somehow it's even more ridiculous if it's cold out
1:47:39 AM Me: there's such a thing as being way too comfortable with your sexuality and i think he found the line and jumped over it
1:49:06 AM Alby: where's the rotten people archive?
1:49:15 AM Me: rotten.com/library?
1:50:23 AM Alby: http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/authors/beats/allen-ginsberg/
1:50:46 AM Alby: "Ginsberg is probably best known for his close relationships with Beat legends Jack Kerouac (blew him), Neal Cassady (blew him too), and William S. Burroughs (and him)"
1:51:18 AM Alby: neither cassady or kerouc were gay
1:51:49 AM Me: ok, still can't imagine a situation where i'd let a dude blow me unless i was in prison and i needed to establish some cred
1:52:14 AM Alby: your comment about being overcomfortable with sexuality was good
1:52:15 AM Alby: haha
1:52:22 AM Alby: though it doesn't really scare me in the same way
1:52:25 AM Alby: I just think it's funny
1:52:29 AM Alby: and NEAT
1:52:35 AM Me: OH THAT'S SO INTERESTING
1:52:37 AM Alby: by the way, you should blow me
1:52:49 AM Me: fag
1:52:54 AM Alby: HAW HAW

If this man were alive, he'd try to fuck you.

I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting classes

2008-11-18T13:34:00.000-06:00

We've all been really bad at updating lately. Let's work on that.

stomach fire
burning and twisting
and welling up to an
esophageal holocaust of
projectile poetry.

my street schizoid
slows his stuttering salvos of sick sensibilities,
briefly breathlessly captivated
but barely contained.

dead-end alleys hide dead poets
robbed mute
the mugger slows after a block
panting and smirking
pockets full of words
that he calls his own.

The gold it's in the...

2008-10-29T16:49:00.000-05:00

I've had this song stuck in my head all day.

Come on, my friends,
Let's make for the hills
They say there's gold, but I'm looking for thrills
You can get your hands on whatever we find,
'cause I'm only coming along for the ride

Well, you go on your way and I'll go mine,
I don't care if we get there on time
Everybody's searching for something, they say
I'll get my kicks on the way

Over the mountains, across the sea
Who knows what will be waiting for me?
I could sail forever to strange sounding names
Faces of people and places don't change

All I have to do is just close my eyes,
To see the sea gulls wheeling in the far distant skies.
All I want to tell you, all I want to say
Is "Count me in on the journey,
Don't expect me to stay."

I think the best word for what I'm feeling is "Fernweh." Jessi can translate that one.

yeah I know, he's a pretty good read

2008-10-20T15:43:00.000-05:00

I thought I had mono, so I sold my blood to a study for a $20 gift card. Figuring that this was one of the world's most pathetic and low-class ways of making money, I took it and finally bought myself a volume of poems by Charles Bukowski. Felt appropriate.

millionaires

you
no faces
no faces
at all
laughing at nothing -
let me tell you
I have drunk in skid row rooms with
imbecile winos
whose cause was better
whose eyes still held some light
whose voices retained some sensibility,
and when the morning came
we were sick but not ill,
poor but not deluded, and we stretched in our beds and rose
in the late afternoons
like millionaires.

the veryest

here comes the fishhead singing
here comes the baked potato in drag
here comes nothing to do all day long
here comes another night of no sleep
here comes the phone ringing the wrong voice
here comes a termite with a banjo
here comes a flagpole with blank eyes
here comes a cat and a dog wearing nylons
here comes a machine gun singing
here comes bacon burning in the pan
here comes a voice saying something dull with authority
here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds
with flat brown beaks
here comes a woman carrying a torch
a grenade
a deathly love
here comes victory carrying one bucket of guts
and one bucket of blood
while stumbling over the berry bush
and here comes a little lamb
and here comes Mary at last
and the sheet hangs in the window
and the bombers head east west north south
get lost
get tossed like salad
all the fish in the sea line up and form
one line
one long line
one very long long line
the veryest longest line you could ever imagine
and we get lost
walking past purple mountains
we walk lost
bare at last like the knife blade
or the electric shock
having given
having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed
as the girl at the call service
screams over the phone:
"don't call back! you sound like a jerk!"

I wish I could write like him, but I don't want to go through what he went through in order to get there.

I'd rather be happy than brilliant.

face to face with the man who sold the world

2008-10-14T12:12:00.000-05:00

Holy god almighty, I'm currently reading the most incredible thing ever written.

It is not Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (although the book is awesome).
It is not Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
It is not The Great Gatsby.

It is not a book. It is, however, fiction. Fan fiction.

Political fan fiction. American politics meets Lord of the Rings.

A few exerpts:

We followed the Ronpaul’s trail for fifteen days, from Joplin to Springfield to Peoria, until we were down to our last drum of corn-whisky, and Abigail’s turbines were smoking hot. We passed the days with tales of the Beltway Lords, and their incessant warring. Barrister was our navigator, and kept the ship’s logs, and he knew every Fed-yarn there ever was. He sang of Lord Gore: how he gained the power to speak the language of beasts by killing the god of werewolves, and how he called the last seven living griffins to him, and harnessed them to a chariot, and flew to the moon. I have been assured that he lives their still, in a city of silver and marble, and that all that dwell there are immortal, but cursed never to know laughter or joy, and there is no music allowed but Air Supply. He sang of Romney Three-faced, the Great Salt Pope, who wields the spiked and golden miter of Moroni and has twelve thousand brides, all fashioned, through surgery and sorcery, to look like Jessica Alba. He sang of fey Kucinich, who loved the queen of Faerie so much that he ceded her the great redwoods of California in which to make her court, and went to dwell there with her, and put up a girdle around the forest so that no man who enters can ever leave. He sang of Dame Hillary, and how she summoned up Old Man Coyote, and tricked him into wearing a manacle on his paw, and refused to release him until he taught her the secret of Skinchanging. The trickster-god denied her until she killed all his seven and seventy mistresses, and cut off his tail, and starved him for forty seven years.

...

The Ronpaul was in possession of the second largest gold reserves in the world, following only upon the heels of the Elder-Wyrm Thompson, who lay sleeping, his scaled bulk curled around the shattered halls of Fort Knox. He rolled over in his sleep from time to time and shouted angrily for bourbon and chewing tobacco.

...

We pointed mutely at the corpse and, I swear, I saw a single tear trickle down his face. He wiped it away and I gasped, for I suddenly understood why the Ronpaul wanted him dead; his hand came away gilded with dust, for Obama cries tears of molten gold.

Goddamn brilliant

I can take or leave it if I please

2008-10-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago, a 90-year old woman was being evicted from her foreclosed house when she shot herself twice in the chest. She's alive, but in critical condition.

"I just thought she may have fell or couldn't get up or something," he told WEWS. "I didn't know [she had shot herself] until I got in there. And even when I got there, she was breathing, but she wasn't saying anything to me. I knew she needed help then."

Dillon said he saw blood when he put his hand on Polk's shoulder.

"There's a lot of people like Miss Polk right now. That's the sad thing about it," said Akron City Council President Marco Sommerville, who had met Polk before and rushed to the scene when contacted by police. "They might not be as old as her, some could be as old as her. This is just a major problem."

In 2004, Polk took out a 30-year, 6.375 percent mortgage for $45,620 with a Countrywide Home Loan office in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The same day, she also took out an $11,380 line of credit.

Over the next couple of years Polk missed payments on the 101-year-old home and in 2007 Fannie Mae assumed the mortgage and later filed for foreclosure.

Deputies had tried to serve Polk's eviction notice more than 30 times before Wednesday's incident, Sommerville said. She never came to the door, but the notes the deputies left would always disappear, so they knew she was inside and ambulatory, he said.

The question no one's asking: who the fuck gave an 86-year-old woman a 30-year mortgage?

and the law won

2008-09-30T09:02:00.001-05:00

That is all.

you never give me your money

2008-09-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

Because I don't understand economics and because economics is very low on my list of things I intend on understanding, I have no idea whether or not this $700 billion bailout is a good idea, other than just mistrust of Henry Paulson, since it's apparently his job to make sure this kind of shit doesn't happen. He, along with the chief of the Fed, want to push the bailout bill really, really quickly, and I've got a feeling that he just doesn't want anyone to look too closely at it. But that's this dark, horrible little area where politics and finance intertwine in a very convoluted and twisted way, and that's an area I like to stay far away from, lest I be eaten by a grue.

Not pictured: Grue

However, while sort of researching what the hell was going on because the idea of being completely ignorant is painful, I came across this, a story of a man in Spain who has borrowed almost €500,000 (hell yeah I know how to make the Euro symbol) from 39 banks spread out over almost 70 different loans obtained with false information, with absolutely no intention of paying any of it back. It's his own expression of civil disobedience, and I think it's pretty fucking sweet.

I read "deutsche bank" as "douche bank" and giggled because I'm four.

He's not keeping the money for himself, but rather giving it to groups and causes that are fighting the same fight as him, working to keep the economic system from robbing us blind. He argues, and it's not a horrible argument, that the current system could eventually lead us to fascism, not in a sudden wave, but gradually as large industry snakes its way into government.

He's not hiding, he's not running, he hasn't changed his name and he fully expects to be arrested, charged and detained for his crime. According to him, the Spanish courts would most likely charge him with at least one count of greater fraud, for which he could be in prison anywhere from 2 to 9 years. Not to mention he'll never be able to get a loan ever again, or maybe even have a savings account at any of the banks he's defrauded. He's committed economic suicide, or maybe economic kamikaze. Actually, fuck that, he's the economic equivalent of that monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War.

He's this guy. Are you this guy? No. You're not.

I have a lot of respect for this guy. I honestly don't agree with his anti-capitalist views, but he's figured out a way to both make his political statement and financially support groups that share his ideals. And that's badass.

hold me closer tiny dancer

2008-09-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

I fucking love my new laptop. Meet the EEE PC 1000H - 10-inch screen, almost full-sized keyboard, 7.5 hours of battery life and just generally freakin' sweet.

Hah-HAH! Ten inches... And speaking of Harvey Birdman:

So small... so very small...

awwwwwwwww yeeeeeeeah (chigga chigga...)

2008-09-15T18:11:00.000-05:00

The weekend is over along with my break from politics!

Staying optimistic is good for your health, apparently.

music makes me lose control

2008-09-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

I'm taking the weekend off when it comes to politics. Lately when I've checked Obama's poll numbers it gives me the same uneasy feeling I normally get when I'm crossing the road and an oncoming car doesn't stop until the last possible second. No one should be that influenced by numbers on a screen.

If I can avoid it, I don't go anywhere without my headphones. Maybe it's ADD requiring constant novelty and distraction, or maybe it's pure love of music, but I can't handle my long walks/bus rides across campus without having my entire collection on hand. Here's what's been on my playlist lately:

Nirvana - The Man Who Sold The World

I got over Nirvana being the best band ever something like twenty minutes after my balls dropped, but goddamn I love this song. It's a David Bowie cover that, like all good covers, has improved on the original in every imaginable way. Bowie's good, but nobody does angst quite like Kurt Cobain.

Dan Warren - The Scientist
Dialing it down from angst to frustration, Dan Warren's The Scientist (off album of same name) has grabbed me for some reason. I like songs that tell stories, and this is a simple one of a weary scientist who realizes that nothing in his life is interesting anymore. The rest of the album is decent, but this is one of the few songs where Warren's blatantly untrained voice aids the overall feel of the song instead of just being distracting. But there's nothing not to love about those lyrics (the kids'll act like freaks/and when he finally gets to sleep/he'll be appalled to find just how much his own dreams/have come to seem familiar). Another good one off the same album is "Parallel Universes," a bittersweet little tune about how he hopes that in one of the infinite parallel universes, everything's alright. It's a comforting thought.

Pink Floyd - Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II (as played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra)

Ignore the stupid video, it's the only place I could find this version. This is from the album "Us and Them - Symphonic Pink Floyd" which was in a big batch of Pink Floyd albums I got sometime last year, but didn't notice until a few weeks ago. It came up randomly in shuffle, and since I've got tons of classical music, I didn't give it a second thought until a few minutes in, when it slowly dawned on me that I've heard this before. Recognizing it as Another Brick in the Wall was one of the coolest feelings ever.

Iggy Pop - The Passenger

It was only after I named my dog after the guy that I really started listening to him, and this song's quickly become one of my favorites. It's vaguely well-known as the theme song to Morgan Spurlock's show 30 Days and has been on a few commercials. A bouncier, upbeat departure from Iggy's usually heavier style. Great driving song.

The Bird and the Bee - How Deep Is Your Love

Ok, fine, I'm a sucker for a good cover. The Bird and the Bee is a relatively new indie duo and their EP Please Clap Your Hands, of which this is the closing track, has been on my playlist since it came out. The Bee Gees wrote this one originally and it was pretty good, but having a woman singing instead of three hairy guys adds an element of sweetness to it that was sorely missing. Love songs are hard to write and even harder to pull off, so I'm happy to find a version of this song that doesn't make me think that the Gibb brothers were singing it to each other.

Weezer - My Best Friend

I don't really have an excuse for this.

money can't buy me love

2008-09-05T17:10:00.000-05:00

In May of 2008, Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, did something rather unexpected.

This is from a man who quite literally owns the bulk of conservative media in the United States - the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and, notoriously, Fox News, alongside approximately five-fucking-billion small newspapers throughout the United States and Australia. And he loves Obama.

"Man, I bought so many fucking newspapers today..."

Let's talk a little bit about Fox News to begin with. In 1996, Rupert decided that a 24-hour news network was the right investment for News Corp, and called in a man named Roger Ailes. Ailes made his start in television starting with The Mike Douglas Show, rising to the position of executive producer (and winning a few Emmies in the process). While working in this position, he met Richard Nixon, who appeared as a guest, and Ailes worked as Nixon's media advisor during the 1968 election. From there, he became a prominent Republican consultant, most notably for coaching Ronald Reagan for the debates against Walter Mondale.

Roger Ailes, in jowlier times

Although it's fair to describe Murdoch as a conservative, I really think of him as a capitalist more than anything else. Seeing a market for a conservative news network, Rupert let Ailes run the network as he saw fit, leading it to the juggernaut of conservative editorial content we know and love today. Both Ailes and Murdoch deny any bias in the channel's coverage, because that would shatter the illusion.

Unsurprisingly, the network has taken every opportunity to blast Barack Obama, spending more time than any other network covering anti-Obama stories (Rev. Wright, William Ayers, etc.), both in strict news reporting and editorial shows, such as Hannity & Colmes and The O'Reilly Factor, the latter of which Barack Obama has just sat down with for an interview. On the wake of this, Bill O'Reilly's latest column is downright respectful and neutral concerning the Democratic candidate.

"Fuck it, we'll do it live."

Where did all this civility come from? Murdoch. Apparently, he set up a meeting between Ailes and Obama in order to smooth things over, the direct result of which has been a downright fucking cordial Bill O'Reilly. The attack dogs have been leashed in, as far as I can tell, to make sure that Fox News will still have access in the extremely likely event that Obama wins the Presidency.

Now Rupert's comments on Obama begin to make much more sense. He's just hitching his wagon to the right horse.

caribou

2008-09-01T12:01:00.000-05:00

As everyone and their senile grandmother have heard by now, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin is McCain's pick for Vice President. My opinion: An experience candidate bringing in a pretty face smacks of a desperation move. Not to say it's not a smart one, Palin's relatable with firm conservative credentials (pro-life, NRA member, wants to drill in ANWAR, supports teaching creationism in schools, etc). However, a candidate's VP selection says a lot about what kind of administration they'd have if elected. Biden's an old-school career Senator, he knows how the system works in Washington and has the connections to get shit done once he's got the VP clout behind him. Palin, on the other hand, doesn't know what a VP does. McCain's sacrificing the effectiveness and integrity of his future administration in a gamble that Palin can draw in new voters/disgruntled Hillary supporters, and energize his base. And it might pay off.

Look in her eyes and know the fear.

And as you're gonna hear, her 17-year-old daughter's got a bun in the oven, which is made more hilarious by the rumors over the last couple days that Palin's fifth kid (born earlier this year) is actually her daughter's, and that Palin was covering for the pregnancy. Like Jack Nicholson, except with politics and Down's Syndrome. I also love how they insist that Bristol WILL ABSOLUTELY BE MARRYING THE FATHER.

Screw Romney, this is more than enough to get the Mormon vote.

Oh, and the final irony? Palin's an avowed supporter of abstinence-only education. The massive amount of willful ignorance it must take to keep up that view when your daughter gets herself knocked up is staggering.

Wouldn't it be great if this whole thing was party of the Republican game plan? Like they're trying to recreate the Lynn Cheney debacle?

Have indefensible position
Have daughter who makes said position even more indefensible
Wait for opponent to attack you on said position
Accuse opponent of attacking your daughter
Refuse to argue position anymore
Declare self winner

Avoiding the issues is how Republicans have been winning elections for decades, why the hell would they stop now?

death don't have no mercy

2008-08-29T23:57:00.000-05:00

Electronic Tigers is a horrible comic about an ethnically diverse group of fucking idiots. There's the large-breasted Asian girl who maintains her virginity because of supply and demand (once the product's out there, the value goes down) and the nerd who argues that she should vote for McCain because he is old and therefore wise like her grandfather, but my favorite character is the rebellious "freethinking" black guy who's a hardcore conservative and wears sunglasses all the time because everyone knows sunglasses are cool all the time.

See, it's ok because it's a black guy dreaming about killing a Presidential nominee.

(Comic's written by a white guy. Shhh...)

again and again and again and again

2008-08-19T14:28:00.001-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Glenn McCoy!

Classy, Glenn. Real classy.

conquerers and concubines

2008-08-09T12:12:00.000-05:00

It figures that two of the biggest stories of the year broke the same day as the Olympics opening ceremonies. Matt Drudge probably still has a hard-on.

John Edwards. Not pictured: Terminally ill wife he cheated on.

First off, John Edwards got caught (by the goddamn National Enquirer) having an affair with a filmmaker who was formally on his campaign's payroll. You can tell it's a Democratic scandal because the filmmaker in question is a woman, but I digress.

I could talk about the morality of it, how horrible it is given the condition of his wife, blah blah blah, that I don't really care about. I'd be more surprised to find out that any given politician doesn't have house accounts at multiple brothels. Edwards is and always was a fucking snake who used his good looks and charm to make up for his lack of substance, which made him perfect V.P. material in 2004. However, what makes him a spectacular asshole is beginning a run for the President right after having this extramarital affair exposed (but by the National Enquirer so no one believed it). This ain't 1960 anymore, Presidential candidates can't chase every piece of ass that comes by and get away with it because the press loves them. The information was out there and he still chose to run. Democrats of America are very lucky he is not the nominee.

Russian tanks blowing the fuck out of something

Second, and much more important than where one man's dick has been, RUSSIA IS AT WAR! That's right boys and girls, Russia is attacking the Republic of Georgia, or at least that's how it's being presented. Really, it's a complex issue, but this isn't simply the actions of a bloodthirsty Russia, despite Georgia's progressive nature. It was Georgia who broke the ceasefire and attacked in order to retake South Ossetia, an area which is almost 90% Russian and Georgia has little claim to, which somewhat justifies Russia's response. This isn't a war where one side is obviously in the right. Georgia has a right to keep her country whole, and Russia has the right to defend her people.

Putin's still a dick, though.

Oh, and Bernie Mac is dead. So it goes.

there is a place in hell reserved for me and my friends

2008-07-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

Jesse Helms, former five-term Senator of North Carolina, is dead. So it goes.

It disturbs me when people celebrate the deaths of people they don't like - especially when they use language like "they had it coming" without any irony. Jerry Falwell's death last year is a good example. I can't count the number of times I heard "finally!" as a knee-jerk reaction. Sure, he was an insane fundamentalist who blamed 9/11 on feminists, gays and pro-choice advocates (and pagans, but that's more confusing than offensive), but the guy was a evangelical pastor. You're practically bound by contract to say crazy things. The worst thing he ever did, as founder of the Moral Majority, was unite groups of like-minded people in order to effectively wield political power. It's hard to fault someone for encouraging people to participate in politics.

That being said, when I heard this morning that Jesse Helms had died of cardiac arrest during the night, I couldn't help but smile. The sun is shining a little brighter, the birds are singing a little sweeter, the grass is growing a little greener, and the world is just a little better off than it was yesterday. We "lost" Jesse Helms the same way we lost smallpox and polio.

Let's take a brief tour of the horrible life of Jesse Helms. Join me, will you?

"Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."
"Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches."
"There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."
The government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct."
"Atheism and socialism -- or liberalism, which tends in the same direction -- are inseparable entities. When you have men who no longer believe that God is in charge of human affairs, you have men attempting to take the place of God by means of the Superstate."
"The New York Times and The Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves."
"All I know, is that [Robert] D'Aubuisson is a free enterprise man and deeply religious."
"The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."
"All Latins are volitile people."
"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

However, here's my favorite Helms story. In 1993, he was using an elevator at the Capitol, when Carol Moseley Braun, who had been sworn in earlier that year as the first female African-American senator ever, got in. Helms turned to Orrin Hatch, said "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." And he did it. He sang a song about how great it was to be a slave to a fellow senator.

Bill Hicks had a great bit about Jesse Helms:

... 'cause you know, like Swaggart, anyone that far to the right is hiding a very deep and dark secret. You know that when Jesse Helms finally dies - he's gonna commit suicide, first of all, in a washtub out back underneath a pecan tree. He's gonna slash his wrists and he's gonna write in blood, "I've been a bad boy." But you know they're going to find the skins of young children drying in his attic, swarms of horseflies going in and out of the eves, and on CNN, over and over, his wife going, "I always wondered about Jesse's collection of little shoes..."

Fuck you, Jesse Helms. You left this world a little worse than you found it, and the only people who should be more ashamed of themselves are the people who re-elected you five fucking times.

i should be sleeping like a log

2008-06-21T04:46:00.001-05:00

Can't sleep again. My new policy is to update when normally I'd be staring at the ceiling thinking increasingly depressing thoughts.

Rashomon is one of my favorite movies for a really weird reason. It's an exceptional film, one of Kurosawa's best, and features a performance by Toshiro Mifune only topped by his turn in (guess who?) Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, not only the most awesome title for anything ever, but the greatest reimagination of a Shakespearean work since A Midsummer Night's Rave. I definitely rank it higher on my list of personal favorites than the "classic" Kurosawa, Seven Samurai, beloved by cinephile wannabes the world over. Don't get me wrong, Seven Samurai is a truly epic piece of cinematic history and deserves every last bit of praise it gets, but it's three and a fucking half hours long. Sadly, I put it in the same category as Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - great, groundbreaking films that you can't just sit down and watch. Watching them is totally a thing. Rashomon, by comparison, runs just under an hour and a half. That's cake. You can handle that without going to the bathroom.

Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood, shortly before death by approximately a million arrows.

Rashomon is the story of a single crime in the woods, told multiple times from differing viewpoints. All we know of the incident initially is the outcome - a samurai has been murdered and his wife raped. A bandit (Toshiro Mifune, obviously) has been arrested for the crime, and a hearing begins, with four testimonies - the bandit, the samurai's wife, the samurai (contacted through a medium), and a woodcutter who witnessed the incident. However, none of the stories match up. The film relies on the intelligence of its viewers to decide whose version is most reliable. Kurosawa provides the dots, but it's the audience's job to connect them.

The samurai's wife, hot in a "what the hell are those things on her forehead?" kind of way.

Oh, but the reason I really love Rashomon is that a reference to it in The Simpsons made me laugh so hard I almost passed out:

Marge: "Come on, Homer, Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon!"
Homer: "That's not how I remember it."

I love that reference for the same reason I love Futurama's little science in-jokes (Farnsworth's reaction to a horse race's finish determined with a quantum microscope: "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"), it's the willingness to throw caution to the fucking wind and make a crack based on something that would take an investment of at least an hour and a half of your life in order to understand. It's kind of masturbatory, I know, but I like it when my entertainment respects my intelligence and worldliness.

Or at least pretends to.

every silver lining's got a touch of grey

2008-06-18T17:19:00.000-05:00

On June 12, 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have the right of habeas corpus, the right to question the legality of their detention in court.

Cool, so those people who have been held for years without charge can finally have their cases reviewed for validity. The people who are being arbitrarily detained go free, the people who have evidence against them might actually get charged with something, world keeps on spinning, right?

"THUR LETTIN' TERR'ISTS FREE?!"

Fucking idiots...

all aboard the night train

2008-06-13T04:50:00.000-05:00

My insomnia's back and overstaying its welcome.

I slept like a goddamn rock at school, so I'm having a little trouble blowing the dust off all my old techniques for dealing with the bastard. It doesn't help that my memory isn't running on all cylinders right now, for obvious reasons. This constant shifting weather, sunny to rainy to stormy to cold to hot while always being moist is what's most irritating. The trick to getting my brain to slow down and doze off has always relied on consistency and comfort, two things that I'm lacking at the moment.

Functioning on five or six hours of sleep over three (four?) days is hard to describe. Fight Club had it partially right that everything seems to be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. I don't know how everyone else experiences it, but for me, it's like looking at the world like a Holga camera would see it through a fish-eye lens - fuzzy, distorted, but vaguely unreal and disconcerting. I constantly find myself doing double-takes, especially around other people. I think they're moving extremely slowly.

I really, really hope this passes soon.

"come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm"

2008-06-06T19:33:00.000-05:00

I hate it when I can feel the bad times coming, almost as much as the bad times themselves.

Storm's a'brewin'.

you gotta fire your guns

2008-05-27T23:08:00.000-05:00

Being a cinephile is tough these days, especially when you notice that the number-one movie in America is another unnecessary sequel, and ESPECIALLY when that sequel is from a franchise that had been satisfactorily ended almost twenty years ago.

It's rare that a sequel is made that even justifies its own existence outside of box office revenue, and even rarer that it matches its predecessor in quality. However, now and then the next installment improves on the first in every way possible, and one of my favorite films is a perfect example of this.

I am not talking about The Godfather Part II.

I'm talking about Death Wish III.

Charles Bronson, seen here taking aim at God

The Death Wish series of documentaries follows the trail of mayhem left by Charles Bronson (referred to as "Paul Kersey" in the films for some reason), finally captured on film in his natural state as the killer of all men. Every film follows the same basic format, beginning with someone close to Bronson getting killed or raped (or both!) by a gang of degenerate thugs. Where lesser movies would have the protagonist searching through the seedy underbelly of society to exact revenge, Bronson reacts by unflinchingly slaying every criminal who crosses his path. Oh, and sometimes there's a love interest who gets murdered halfway through, giving Bronson another excuse to pull out his gun. That's it.

Bronson's struggle in the third installment is against a surprisingly organized and racially diverse gang responsible for both the murder of his friend Charlie and the continuing oppression of the worst neighborhood in New York City. Like a crew of pirates, the gang rapes and pillages the good people, and the cops only show up to issue parking tickets and confiscate guns from elderly Jewish couples.

An older Bill S. Preston, Esquire. Not pictured: Ted "Theodore" Logan.

I could write a fucking novel about why I love every individual frame of this film. The absurd violence, the wooden acting, the unrealistic dialogue, the inappropriate all-synthesizer soundtrack, I love it all. My favorite scene, however, happens when Bronson decides to set up his own mugging by a sprinting giggly Hispanic gang member by walking down the street literally swinging around an expensive camera:

missing segment - townspeople applaud the murder of a human being

How does the gang react?

Truly, one of the great moments in cinema.

Say it ain't so

2008-05-23T13:05:00.000-05:00

I'm going to slap Rivers Cuomo in the mouth. Then I'll tell him I'm sorry and give him a hug.

This is the music video for the first single off their new album, Weezer (their third self-titled, this one dubbed "The Red Album"). Do yourself a favor - when you hit play, hide the video. Don't watch it, just listen to the song, then replay it with the video.

It's a quality song, has only gotten better the more I've listened to it, and makes me look forward to their new album, something that I thought I would never do after the clusterfuck that was Make Believe. But that fucking video... Yeah, I'm surprised that they got the Numa-Numa guy, but all this shit was overplayed and annoying years ago. Even the concept of getting them all together is overplayed - it was a goddamn South Park episode!

Honestly, the problem with internet memes is shockingly similar to the problems of pop music. It's hard for me to even listen to some of Weezer's old hits (Undone, Buddy Holly) because they were fucking everywhere. I heard them so much that I wasn't even sure if I liked them anymore. I don't think I'd want to listen to a Weezer's Greatest Hits album.

I really hope that THAT'S what they were thinking about with this video, but apparently they just asked the internet for help. Next time, ask Spike Jonez again.

I wanna be your dog

2008-05-14T23:03:00.000-05:00

I have a new puppy.

Meet Iggy. He's about two and a half months old and more of a mutt than Lenny Kravitz - part Poodle, part Cocker Spaniel, part Bichon (Iggy, not Lenny). My parents were here this weekend to pick up my stuff and, to my eternal gratitude, brought the little furball along for the ride just so I could meet him.

Mom just sort of went out and got him almost on a whim. Ever since Hershey died, she'd been a lot less joyful, because something so integral to her day-to-day life was gone. I felt that over winter break, actually. Even sitting around watching TV is different without Hersh wandering around, his collar jingling. The house felt empty. I miss him a lot, but Mom needs a dog more than she needs me or Sarah at this point. Iggy isn't a replacement, but there's no doubt that we'll love him just as much, just in a different way.

However, she's insisting that this time, he's MY dog, which is why he's named after the goddamn Godfather of Punk. I've always had this idea of "my" dog, a goofy, scrappy mutt who loves to sleep on my lap, growls at people I don't like, humps other dogs at the park, and is an AWESOME chick magnet.

He'll do just fine.

I've been drivin' all night / my hand's wet on the wheel

2008-05-08T03:16:00.000-05:00

It's 3:20 AM and my body's gently reminding me (although it feels more like nagging, the hateful cow) that any change to my normal sleeping arrangement brings back my insomnia something fierce. I can't stop thinking about photography, for whatever reason, so here are my two favorite pieces that I've done so far.

This style of photography is called "Proof as Image", where you shoot off an entire roll of film in order to form one cohesive image. It was a lot of fun finding ways of doing this that were at least somewhat original. Click for full-resolution.

The outline of this image was taken on one side of an arch, while the inner nine were taken on the other looking through, which took a good amount of planning. Fortunately, I only screwed up once (see if you can spot the mistake!). The idea came when the phrase "on the outside, looking out" popped into my head.

This one I did in six minutes while waiting for the bus. Art doesn't always require thought or even talent. Sometimes, it just happens.

Who would want to be such an asshole?

2008-05-07T17:02:00.000-05:00

If you judge a person solely on the words they write, Charles Bukowski is the second worst person who has ever lived (Number 1: Ayn Rand). He was a deranged, lazy alcoholic who posed as a Nazi when he was a teenager in the years before WWII. He was a man who, by all indications, never gave a fuck about anyone but himself.

I love everything he ever wrote. His poetry is one of the few things that actually shocks and offends me.

my god

you know that little girl
who used to play
on the lawn across the street?

look what happened
overnight:

new breasts
round ass
long legs
long hair

eyes of
blue fire

we can no longer
think of her
as before.

now she is
15 years full of
trouble.

When you read too much of his work in one sitting, you start to feel bad about yourself. Imagine how much you'd have to hate yourself to write it.