Expose Yourself to Children

"We watched Shopgirl."---Jacob Stewart
"Was it good?"---Alex Daboub
"Well, Steve Martin is the Lord of the Pit, he's the Devil."---J.S.
"So, not good."---A.D.
"No, no listen, he's the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws"---J.S.
"Sounds OK."---A.D.




The other day I noticed one of Hunter's old posts which read:

God, it's so weird to find out when bands are right-wingers. I mean, I know this happens from time to time, but it's still a bit disconcerting nevertheless. This is particularly egregious, however: playing a party for Tom DeLay? WTF?? It certainly doesn't dissuade me from my stance that "All Star" is the Worst Song Ever Recorded.

I then wrote Hunter a response by electronic-mail on my machine which read:

smashmouth, ha. i think the general impulse to play music originates in a fascist part of the brain so denoting which bands are right-wing is redundant. some bands may be liberal in their off-stage lives, but the desire to play music on a stage is right-wing to begin with. fascism and conservatism are generally anti-intellectual by nature, as is rock and roll music. maybe i'll blog about it.
alex

And I did. My ideal rock and roll show involves me standing on a stage with a guitar. I plug it in and stuff, and then I take a screwdriver and painstakingly, methodically dismantle it piece by piece. I put all of the pieces in a plastic bucket as I take them off. Then I slowly put all of it back together again. Someone could do a performance art thing like this, and the NY Times would give it a hundred boners in a review.
The other thing is that GG Allin was sort of a genius in an accidental, demented sort of way. He took what most musicians pretend to do and took it to the absolute logical limit. Some rock and roll pretends to be out of control and dangerous. He just gave up on playing music and physically assaulted the audience. He was also an absolute idiot and genuinely insane. At least he wasn't pretending though.

"Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"---Still watching it.

A. Daboub Covers Current Events

"Pirates could be seen roaming on the upper deck of this vessel with guns and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers."
---Some Officials


What's the big deal about letting U.S. car companies go out of business? It's ridiculous to give these A-holes money. American cars are the absolute worst. I hate them. They take 1 million gallons of gas per mile of driving car-driving for cars driving. Hmmmm.

Would it be so terrible to not have 5,000 Ford Tauruses everywhere you look? I think American cars are uniformly trashy, even though my Mom drives them exclusively. There is a reason for this though: it is a remnant and sort of tribute to my grandfather's policy of refusing to buy Japanese or German cars. Japanese cars were out because he loved whales, and Japan continues to fight anti-whaling laws and all of that. Plus he was around during all of that WWII stuff; whatever that was. German cars were out because he was Jewish, and there was some minor conflict between the Jews and Germans at some point in the 30's and 40's. I think it was a dispute over who likes sauerkraut more. One time my grandparents were flying to Italy, and they had a layover in Germany. My grandmother steadfastly refused to step foot on German soil and wouldn't get off the plane at all. What a hard-ass.

So I say fuck American cars. Let them go out of business. Maybe all of the factory workers can get jobs at Jamba Juice. Or maybe they can become pirates.

I heard about these Somali pirates who captured a tanker ship full of oil. Pirates! How exciting is it that there are pirates, fucking pirates, in the world in this day and age? That is so awesome. I hope they get away with it. Maybe they could just keep the oil tanker. It has like 100 tons of oil or something. I want a boat full of oil.
Wow, this is like my current events day.

"Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"--- I am watching episodes of this show, and I have decided that I'm going to read some original Sherlock Holmes stories because I never did as a kid or whenever it is you're supposed to read them. I was shocked to find out that Holmes is some crazy junkie. In the story The Sign of Four, Watson comes in and Holmes is shooting speedballs.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel- piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

I had no idea. The show is really good so far. Greg says that besides myself there is literally no one else who rents these British mystery shows other than old ladies. I don't know how I feel about that.

Encounters at the End of the World

"The sea continuously jerks off."
---George Battaile



Someone was talking about having stocks, or something. I really don't want to miss the boat on getting a lot of money for no reason. There are 2 problems, though.

1. I don't have any money to invest. Will they take like 3 dollars a month? Or 200 one month and then 25 cents the next? I feel like in order to make any real money you have to invest in really risky companies or sketchy semi-illegal guys who have slaves in India that carry big rocks up hills, or something.

2. What if I invest a bunch of money and then the Mad Max scenario finally hits? It's going to be like 200,000 people lined up outside of Wall Street demanding their money, but their money doesn't exist anymore, and there are tons of little pieces of paper-bits flying around everybody in a tornado-thing.

I don't need that. So you either just give your money to a bunch of imaginary guys in suits or you spend it all now and bet on the end of the world. You could always try to prepare for the Mad Max apocalypse, I guess. You could invest strictly in gigantic jugs of gasoline and stock pile them in a fort and buy a bunch of metal spikes for your post-apocalyptic jacket outfit. It's hard to know what to do. Plus, do I need to get metal-spike outfits for the cats? These late 2000's are fraught with peril.

"Encounters at the End of the World"---New Herzog documentary about the end of the geographic world Antarctica, and a little bit about the other kind of end of the world as well. Not much about the end of the world actually, it was pretty subtle. Good movie. It was like a lot of his modern day documentaries with long shots of nature accompanied by ethereal droning music, and interviews with eccentric scientist types. Some highlights:
Herzog wondering why chimps or other animals of higher intelligence haven't learned to exploit lower intelligence animals. We see a painting of a monkey riding off into the sunset on a goat. (Did he commission a painter to paint a monkey riding a goat?) He also says he can't stand the feeling of sunshine on his skin. Sweet! I give it millions of stars.

Painting the White House Less White

"I am writing this under appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes my life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the sQualid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death."
---heavy shit from the man H.P. Lovecraft


So every black musician in history has one song about painting the White house black, right? Well, that Obama fellow better do it on his first day or there's going to be Hell to pay. The other thing: why is Barack Obama black? He's just as white as he is black. His mom was whiter than I am. She's from KANSAS. She was English, German, and Irish or something. But everybody says he's black. Let us refer as we always do to a Public Enemy song:


Fear of a Black Planet

You have to get to :54 to hear the Quote from guy that goes:

Black man, black woman, black baby
White man, white woman, white baby
White man, black woman, black baby
Black man, white woman, black baby

Who is this that they sampled? I can't figure it out. Anyway, Public Enemy rules. That was the first tape I ever bought, and I listened to it 1,000 times.

Last night I worked on a thing for Arthouse at Broken Neck. It is film footage for an art installation about punk rock by some English guy. I was in back loading film all night, but I heard the music. Loading is insane, my hands hurt from repetitive motion. Everything was going great until the very end when the 2 cameras caught up to me and I got the panic fear. One camera was without film for a couple minutes, but no one seemed to mind. I was set up in back and they had runners continuously running mags to and from the cameras to me. That's a crazy job.

"Up the Yangtze"--- Good documentary coming out on DVD Tuesday. I liked it a lot. It's about how they dammed up the Yangtze River in China, and how it caused millions to move out of the impending flood plain. The movie follows one family thus affected who send their daughter to work on a luxury cruise liner that is taking a "farewell cruise" up the Yangtze. It is crazy to see her dealing with the culture shock. Neither of her parents read or write, and she is learning English to cater to the tourists on the boat.

Sorry

"An attempt has been made on her life by the skeleton, Aith"
--M.P. Shiel


I didn't write for some time owing to not being able to locate the E button on my keyboard. I found it under an urn in the West Garden, and so now all is as it should be.

I have nothing much to say, actually. I have been watching a lot of movies and trying to edit some video footage for fun. Bah, nothing to say.


"Tell No One"--- French movie I saw with Greg , Hannah, Mike Wachs at Dobie. I (what?) liked? it? (huh?) Improbable, yes. Impossible, no? I don't usually like modern-day French movies all that much. Not modern-day thrillers either. This movie was pretty great-ish. It was all exciting and stuff, and not stupid. And in this French way, there were a lot of "fuck you's" to the police. It was charming. Fuck the pigs, man. Right? There were only a couple of really annoying things. One was when this guy was drowning his sorrows with a big glass of vodka, and the soundtrack at the exact instant was a Jeff Buckley (Tim Buckley? eh, who fucking cares.) song with the words, "I drink too much," all heartfelt and stuff. It was embarrassing. They're French, what can you do?

"The Red Shoes"--- Whoa. This was one of the best movies I have ever seen. No shit. It even made me think that the Ballet is cool. What is happening to me? My grandparents would be trying to give my Hannukkah gelt right now just for saying that. That might not make any sense, but I'm tired, and there's a cat on my good typing arm. This movie has this character Boris Lermontov, who is like the one of the coolest guys of all time. And I have to give credit to Isaac Mizrahi in Unzipped for pointing out how baddass this movie is.

"Porcile"--- Passolini movie, good stuff. One guy likes effing pigs, one guy likes eating human flesh. We all win.

Happy Black Guy for President Day

"Sometimes I think of all the places I don't wanna go. Then I think of all the things I never wanna do. I think of all the people I never wanna meet. I close my eyes and go to sleep"
---NOFX


Well, all the white people of Hyde Park are celebrating. They are out honking their horns, and shooting fireworks, and shooting speedballs into their arms, and drinking the blood of the Republicans in West Lake, all because their cool black friend is president. I have to admit that I'm happy too, although I tend to get nervous when I'm in agreement with the liberal fagéts of Austin. Everyone thinks they're so progressive for voting for Obama, well I did one better. I voted a straight negro ticket. Anyways, mazel-tov everybody. We have shown the whole world that less than half of us are retarded hillbillies who routinely talk to the Jesu Monster on the telephone. We can be proud.

Wow, so I thought I was going to spend all weekend riding around on mopeds and being stupid, but some fancy L.A. lady called today about a job. I am actually a little mad that I have to make money instead of going and having fun, but I'm so ridiculously broke that it's a fucking shame to the Jews. So I have no choice, goddamn it. How dare someone offer me a job. It's some reality show, that's all I know so far. Oh well, what're ya gonna do.


"NOFX - Ten Years of Fucking Up"---I took this home just because I have been feeling nostalgic for my high school punk rock days. It was a little disappointing actually. The whole fun of NOFX is that they are funny on stage and ridiculous. The video was just live footage with the studio songs laid over them, totally defeating the purpose. It was fun anyway. Goodnight my fellow Negroes.

Monday Night: Poo York and stuff

" I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before -- the unwhisperable secret of secrets -- that fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life"
--H.P Lovecraft

Hannah and her band are going to Jew York to play 5 shows in 5 days. I have been hearing from a few people who live there that New York sucks now. I don't really want this to be true because I have a soft spot for the place. Basically I heard a lot of things about how safe and boring and predictable it is now. From what I can tell, it is now a New York themed amusement park with a Whole Foods in Union SQuare that all of the yuppies got giant boners about. I think people are possibly just caught up in this whole mythology about themselves living in this place so they end up trying too hard and being unbearable. I mean, you get a bunch of people from all over the country (including Iowa) who are like "I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna move to New York. See ya' later DubuQue." I moved there too, ya know. But it was way back in 2002 or some year like that. Plus I didn't try very hard to do anything but buy drugs in Tompkins SQuare Park. Woops. I have no point to make yet, I'm just a ramblin'man. I need to gather more information from the field.

Today, I went to Vulcan and pushed all the dvd's forward into the other room to make room for more dvd's so I can push them forward again later. Gratifying work.

"Lady in White"--- Hoe-lee shit, man. This is supposed to be a kid's movie I think, but it was by no stretch of the imagination a thing a kid should see. Right? Am I too protective of my kids I don't have? Maybe it's good for kids to see little girls strangled and thrown off a cliff? I don't know. Prepare them for upcoming Mad Max scenario around the corner? It was a good, scary, ghost story, and I don't usually like kids movies or fantasy stuff that much. It was charming and scary and good, ok? And there were a lot of Italians in it.

Sunday

"The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus."
--- Georges Bataille


Hmmm, what happened? Tonight Greg and I went to Fiesta to see about getting some bad movies for 1 dollar. I bought a movie made in Czechoslovakia about a cat wearing glasses that make him see peoples' true selves.












See? Earlier in the evening Hannah, Mr. Shiv's, Greg, Mike Wachs and I went out to the suburbs to see the new Jonathan Demme movie at the Arbor. Man, I'm really spoiled by Alamo Drafthouse. I forgot how weird it is out there in the real world. Also, it was irresponsible to spend money on a movie ticket given how I have no money at all. Bah! I even spent 10 dollars on some migas at Trudy's afterwords. I'm dumb.


"Rachel Getting Married"---New Demme movie. Getting great reviews. I hated it. This movie made me sQuirm around in my seat a lot. It was super melodramatic, and everyone was always crying and freaking out. I just wanted everyone to shut up. Plus, a lot of it was like watching the boring wedding video of someone you don't know which includes all of the bad sappy jokes and heartfelt toasts to people who don't exist in real life. I kept mouthing the words "The End" to myself over and over again. One ridiculous thing about the movie was that the wedding party looked like a United Colors of Benetton ad or something. It was a white girl marrying a black guy, and all of the friends represented every race on God's Green Earth. It was inexplicably an Indian(India) themed wedding where the bridesmaids all wore sarongs, and everyone ate Saag Paneer. There was an excessive amount of time devoted to people dancing together at the wedding party, but don't worry because every culture in the world was represented musically by the DJ. While everyone was booty-dancing and joyously smiling together, suddenly a group of salsa dancers busted in (to everyone's delight) and did a little show. Yay! How fun! It was like the fantasy world of some middle aged, NPR listening white man who lives in Vermont or something. Yeesh.
For the record I listen to NPR whenever it's on for 5 seconds in-between the 15 hour stretches of white men playing the blues on KUT.

Please Kill Me...
Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories-H.P. Lovecraft...
Herzog on Herzog...
A´ Rebours-JK Huysmans...---This is for my own record keeping purposes, don't pay attention if you don't wanna.