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| UnconventionalI've decided I'm going to do a very West Coast remake of "O Brother Where Art Thou", but instead of being three white guys from a chain-gang in the South, we'll have three black guys escaping from a prison in Los Angeles twenty years ago and getting on wacky adventures (rather than Depression-era references, have Eighties-era madness) in their attempts to elude the law and simply make it out of LA alive.
And I'm calling it "Nigga, Where The Fuck You At".
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| Re-TardisMy recently re-acquired obsession with Doctor Who is preventing me from posting. Every time I have another brilliant, long-winded idea about some bullshit or other (possibly relating to the subjects of California, a medical condition that convinces me I'm Nancy Sinatra when I lack coffee, or a slow return to the internet), I realize there's still that copy of "The Five Doctors" for ten bucks floating around at Amoeba and IT WILL BE MINE. Or I realize that one episode with Christopher Eccleston I never got around to watching because I'd had to go off and go to work is still on pause in the DVD player. Or that weirdo Peter Cushing movie where the Doctor isn't even a Time Lord is sitting about in a box somewhere and how I hoped (oh, how I hoped) Peter Davidson would go beat him around the head with a big stick made of future. Or...well, you know, you get the picture.
Anyhow, as soon as I get all the Who outta my system, I'll be back.
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| TrippedHenceforth, I've decided whenever I take a trip out of San Francisco to a different part of California, I'm going to make sure that I know I can actually get back home without devising some massive, inordinately complicated scheme involving stealing Cylon Heavy Raiders and a vat of tapioca, or wasting my money buying a ticket the next day.
Make it so.
Meanwhile I did make my way down to San Jose the other day, which was one of those experiences that I treasure, partly because it was my first trip out of SF since I got here, and partly because I spent the majority of it yelling at people or selling my body for drugs, money, and more tapioca. I don't know why the tapioca keeps coming back up, other than the Singapore Syndrome, but trust me when I say you totally don't want to know what that is. It's like AIDS, but for pudding.
San Jose was three things I immediately noticed; spread apart, not very crowded, and fucking hot. When I saw on the gas station thermometer that slowly swung giant glowing red numbers around in a gentle circle that it was a hundred and eight degrees, I decided that wearing a three piece suit might not have been the wisest of decisions. Which ended up in me taking a couple of mile walk, getting horribly lost in the suburbs and stumbling upon a friend of mine while looking like some high-class Manhattan manwhore in a state of undress and dishevelment...which he of course took pictures of.
If I had any friends who weren't bastards I'm not sure what I'd do about it. Other than not be friends with them. Problem solved!
Still, I got hauled off by Bekka to see a library that seemed to have some sort of wing entirely devoted to the weirdest books about Jews humanly possible, including Two-Gun Cohen, who is now my fucking idol. Someday I'll make a movie about him and Ed Koch...saving the world. From something distressingly annoying, like teenagers with opinions, fat chicks desperately seeking conformity, or Berkeley people. Anyway. Spent a chunk of the afternoon hanging out with Bekka and also explaining the fine points of the new Ultimate Hellsing to her boyfriend like he was a nervous rich girl and it was a fine gentleman caller. And by fine gentleman caller I mean fucking bad-ass. More bad ass than the middle segment of The Signal, which remains a perfect example of how black comedy and mind-control-murder-zombies can mix well, if you don't fuck it up. Also I realized that simply far too often I end up discussing how fucking different the East and the West are and how I'm still adapting. Though I'll write about that later. We also got hopelessly lost after awhile, which was amusing in a "goddammit" kind of way.
Eventually I ended up at Adam's, watching Star Wars and discussing porn and Dr. Who and the Jewish compulsiveness to mention their Judaism every five minutes, also known as the Woody Allen Disorder before his place started getting crowded with a crowd that was as scurvy a bunch of scalawags as you'd never want to clap eyes upon, though most of them I had mild internet interactions with over the years. Also I met Sheldon, who I've often heard Adam go on about in his plans to completely destroy Sheldon's self-esteem and psychological well-being, and after meeting Sheldon I can only say I'd lend my full support. Sheldon, if you're reading this, you're an asshole. Also met Salty, who I explained to that I'd had to quit theatre because I had an undocumented disease that made me hear the word "character" as "anal". And I'm not the only one. Zero in every four theatre majors has to drop out because they're fucking strange bastards and hear the word "character" as "anal", and this is a problem that goes mostly ignored because it doesn't actually exist. Then Mujah came over, we got burgers, there was some sort of gay orgy in a car while zombie techno was playing and Mujah had a boob for an eye-patch and referred to himself as the Tit Pirate. There was also the given thousand times shouting he was a damned dirty sand nigger, dune pounder, etc, because without my overdose of racist expletives, Mujah gets nervous.
I ended up missing my train out of there, which meant I ended up spending further time in the company this brigade of unsavory San Josers and crashed on a couch with a cat sleeping on my jacket and a whole bunch of other stuff I really don't have the energy to describe. I'm now out of coffee. But to finish this all up, I caught a spot of cash to get on the next train, arrived back home after a noir-esque ride safe and sound and discovered that Bekka and boyfriend had left a copy of Dead Rising in the Hellsing DVD case and accordingly, my copy of Hellsing was still back in San Jose.
Guess I'm going back next week. | | |
| Tinker, Tailor, Blogger, SpyApparently there's yet another Xanga popularity contest going on, which is yet another one of the devoutly unsubtle attempts to drive mass amounts of voter traffic in the direction of the "genius" who set it up, thereby dragging up his numbers one by one until there's almost mastubatory amounts of self-congratulation all around.
Though in the case of this popularity contest, there's probably going to be a lot of masturbation, both implied and done, since it's some sort of twisted, backwardsly narcissistic beauty contest that has the shallow hotties crawling out of their holes by the pound in hope of some more re-assurance that yes, they are beautiful. Because as you all know, beauty isn't truly appreciated unless it's maxed out, put on display, and then sharpened up with enough angles and photoshop and seen by presumably virginated geeks on the internet who vote in droves for "ur hawt" and probably took most of their classes in the basement cutting out construction paper shapes, and will skip this entry in hopes of finding one with pretty pictures and less big words. Yes, I have a vocabulary. You should have one too. It comes from some mysterious thing called reading. Sometimes it's even called not being a thick-headed twatmonger with all the intellectual interest of a very dull rock and the perceptive acumen of a horny and juvenile teenager.
For some reason I signed up to be a judge in this travesty, perhaps because some masochistic part of me knew that as soon as I'd do something judging-edque people would liken me to Simon Cowell en masse, because originality is really a dead concept and people draw parallels like Japanese perverts draw enormous breasts, which is to say they're too rounadabout and distinctly overused. Not that I'm actually anything like Simon Cowell when you give it a moment's thought, but then people enjoy familiarity and pigeon-holing me into some digital archetype makes any interaction with me more comfortable, like I'm some angry sofa that curses at you and knocks over your beer and frightens the neighbors when you have them over to watch Sergio Leone movies on the blu-ray hi-def you just paid out for. And though while I watch Sergio Leone movies like they're my lifeline to westerns, I never watch American Idol, because that amount of shallowness and hackneyed talent passing itself off as the new Star Search makes my teeth itch. So your pitiful modern references are lost on me, fuckfaces.
In the meanwhile, I'm not sure what this judging thing actually entails, other than deferring to the headmaster of the fucked-up classless circus and his ideas on how to make posting about good looking women get him more subscribers, and dealing with various messages from the strumpets a-plenty looking to cash in some sort of favor for my vote, or find a way to get into my good graces. The interesting part is that I'm only in it as a judge because a good friend of mine texted me about it, and I in return rolled my eyes at yet another transparent attempt to create popularity through contests, and advised her not to enter because if she won, most of the traffic would be from the creakingly understimulated freaky shits with little-to-no typing skills and far too much libido for their craniums who crawl around Xanga looking for a photoblog to ravish every now and again for the good ol' spank bank, or hipsters just hoping to be acknowledged. But she went ahead and did it anyway, because no one ever listens to good sense anymore. So I said fuck it, she enters, I'll become a judge.
No one saw that shit coming.
Now being an official judge is kind of weird for me, typically I write some verbose and profane grumble pointing out the inherent flaws in this (like that it'll quickly become less about beauty and brains [supposedly brains are important in this one, I don't think fucking anyone is falling for that line of bullshit] and more about who can turn into a bigger sell-out whore for the sake of a brief popularity spike and who has more friends to vote for them. Believe me, it's how I won a good handful of contests because I'm an enormous sell-out whore and I come with plenty of backing) and make plenty of enemies with insights and friends with conformist non-conformist countercultural bloggers who all write the same kind of entries, but now I'm all...official and shit. What the fuck.
All of this makes me envision a day when Xanga might actually have an interesting contest, one actually dependent on intelligence and wit and charm, rather than tits and ass and lots of pseudo-internet allegiances, but then I remember that'll never fucking happen because people are cretinous wastes of oxygen and internet, and often so cliche about their posts they're a walking (typing?) fucking punchline to an online columnists joke about bloggers and their silly urge to be recognized for having something more than a far-too-high opinion of themselves and way too much free time.
But I got my black belt in insults and I have to use it somewhere, dammit!
So the long and the short of it is, and don't stick your head in the sand for this part, contestants, because I'm probably talking about you to some small degree, is that I'll actually not just be judging you on how many times your blog has been featured or how many people you can get to message me saying SO AND SO IS THA GRATE STUFF U SHUOLD LIKE VOTE FOR THEM A PLUS NUMBER ONE SUPER TIME VOTE OR DIE HARD, but just how interesting you really are and the sort of intelligent, cleverly put-together shit you can come up with inbetween begging for votes on other sites.
And, of course, titties. | | |
| Jesus LubeLife, for most of us who aren't boring shut-ins, is often full of strange moments of sheerly iconographic irony, prone to illustrating the fucked-up dichotomy between the separate and subjective realities that most people believe in, or if I scrap the pretentiousness for a second, just showing how fucked-up the world is.
So on my stroll through the United Nations plaza on my way to go into the depths of this city, I stopped to spit on France on the little globe etched into the ground (as is my custom) and then when I look up, I see two things that this planet has in an absurd abundance scattered around; a used condom lying in a sticky latex puddle of itself, and a cast-off pamphlet for some religious group, culty "believe now or die in sin!" or otherwise.
I mean, talk about fucking strong symbolism.
It almost perfectly sums up the disturbingly two-faced American attitudes relating to faith and sexuality, and that conflicting battleground between them, trying to balance what we supposedly want as opposed to what we supposedly believe.
Admit it. Sometimes those creepy old men in cheap suits holding placards reading "Jesus Christ Loves You" bombarding you with scripture quotes while trying to hand out cheap environmentally unfriendly pamphlets about how we're all taking the highway to Hell unless we make a quick turn at the Savior off-ramp (or just tiny little Bibles with incomprehensible print) have a disturbingly alike feverous pitchman's quality to it, like they really don't give that much of a fuck about their Lord, they're just trying to sell him to as many people as possible...and they're matched oddly evenly by the greasy guys in ugly suits with creepy facial hair handing out fliers for All Night All Penetration All Girls All Toys implying you'll experience the most overwhelming hard-on of you life if you shell out some bucks to watch a bored girl with implants shimmy up and down some frighteningly oversize accessory. If you switched their products, you think they'd both sell the reversed boobs and Bibles with that same snake-oil intensity? Is ideology so important as making the sale? Soldiers for Christ and People For Larry Flynt fighting for the contents of your wallet.
It'd be a lot more showing of the strength of human nature if they were actually fighting for what they believed in rather than endless scourging out the last strips of cash from people's lust for flesh or salvation, but since half the PTL club seems to be caught in some scandal involving a lot of lube and a stacked secretary straight outta Christ-Camp and there's so many priest molestation references in today's culture that both sides have their own sexcapades and seem to have experienced a bit of terminal fucking overlap.
Soon the only people who will be seeing God will see Him because they picked up something nasty in a brothel in the middle of nowheresville.
But while the gray area remains mostly shady, for the rest of us nothing's ever subtle in being caught in this propaganda duel to control the biggest billboards and most posters that flood our eyes every time we step back into culture. Where not only does Mr. Crown-Of-Thorns-though-that's-very-last-season Jesus Saves, but Members Save Half Off and whatever inappropriate creation of filth they're saving half off of, Jesus seriously disapproves of. Paraphernalia loosely related to religion and sex toys clashing in the market while adult superstores are built next to churches. Guerrilla warfare starts upgrading to trenches and demilitarized zones of people who don't have the money to support. Not long before they start firebombing each other or trying to annoy the hell out of each other with that endless submission of proselytizing recruitment or just the power of sales, sales, sales! | | |
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