FuckYeahCringeworthyLyrics
Because... Marilyn Manson ate my girlfriend. Satan consumed her mind, and he may do it again. Marylin Manson ate my girlfriend. She once believed in the truth, now she belives in sin. She denies God when she has the chance to live for him. The thought of it makes me cringe. Her future looks dim. She'd rather gaze in Satan's eyes than on a steeple. I'm really starting to despise beautiful people.
Relient K - “My Girlfriend”
FuckYeahCringeworthyLyrics
I got nasty habits, it's a fine line, so many girls and so little time When love rears its head, I wanna get on your case Ooh baby, wanna put my log in your fireplace
-Kiss, “Burn Bitch Burn”
Slow day at work
It must be time for…
FuckYeahCringeworthyLyrics
Trite advice before I hit the sack
If you can’t beat them at their own game, change the game. You probably still won’t be able to beat them, but the new game might be more fun to play.
Deafening
Bloggers: so hot right now
On the bus near Logan Circle:
Guy: “Did I tell you? I think that my man-crush of all man-crushes, Ezra Klein, rides my bus in the morning.”
Girl: “Who’s that?”
Guy: “Oh, he blogs about healthcare and policy and stuff.”
Girl: -silence-
Boss Hog - What the Fuck.
Yeah, what the fuck. No wait, what the fuck?
(Confession: The only thing I would have done differently if I were in Kevin Seconds’s shoes is actually jack-off to the t-shirt before I burnt it. And you know I would have blogged about it, too).
h/t SFT.
Speaking of the ol' Orgone
I see there was another mass shooting today — or, at least, an attempted one. It happened in Florida. The gunman was apprehended after killing one person. A reporter asked him why he did it, and he replied, “Because they left me to rot.”
If you use your imagination, it becomes clear that going out in a hail of bullets and leaving heaps of bleeding corpses in your wake is a rather lousy cathexis. Killing indiscriminately achieves nothing 1, and you’re not going to feel any better afterwards, if indeed you feel anything at all. You’d be ten times better off just dropping out of the rat race and spending your time with dogs.
I do recognize that’s often easier said than done. I’m locked in my ego cage the same as anyone else, and I know the ache of shame, the throb of anger and the fever of misanthropy that follows a major failure or misfortune. It does demand relief.
Still, it seems problematic that a society which prides itself on its wealth of lifestyle choices and personal freedom would produce people who feel so trapped by their overall situation that they have to kill to escape it. I’m not implying that we face a spree killing epidemic that demands immediate attention, but I also don’t think we can’t dismiss every instance of spree killing as mere psychopathology. This seems just a way to avoid the question of what drives a person to make such a self-defeating and morally insupportable choice.
1 Do I maintain, then, that consequentialism should guide one’s decision to commit murder? Of course, though I will freely admit that I have no idea how to square this with the rest of my liberal commitments, and, speaking selfishly, I’d rather that the people who would want to kill me be deontologiststs.
(via drunkenbutterfly)
The Rabbit’s Orgone Energy is on E. Hell, it’s below E. The Rabbit is driving on fumes. A barefoot pagan ritual in the snow is just what the doctor ordered.
Looks like I’d need a redheaded priestess. I actually kinda know one. I did profile of her a while back. But you know, the mundane reality of pagan rituals really kills the fascination for a skeptic such as me. I’d better stick to the pretty Tumblr pictures.
MANIMAL is pleased to announce the signing of Sacramento quartet, SISTER CRAYON.
(via manimalvinyl)
According to wikipedia, “Manimal Vinyl is a Los Angeles based record label founded in 2006 by fashion stylist, Paul Beahan. They are known for releasing underground and experimental pop music.”
Other bands on the label are Warpaint, Bat for Lashes and Rio en Medio.
Saudade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via feralnostalgia) (via ontheborderland)
Also, the name of some floor-sitters from Portland.
And a beautiful song by Love and Rockets:
If you don’t like Saudade and wish to have no more of it, then this bossa nova song is yours:
The Smiths — Frankly, Mr. Shankly
It’s time for another Delphic update about my life!
I had the worse day at work today, and I’m not certain I’m going to have a job soon.
My writing keeps upsetting people. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? And should I learn to be more politic in my remarks now that people are reading what I write?
I’m happy, because my wife and my bro Joni both got my back. Thank you, Jesus, for making women.
Tokyo, Conde is in our group. Man, Sac is a small world.
Next Monday works for me. Email me where and when.
Toyko, i’ll be @ the temple on S tonite @ 7. Swing by if you can.
Stoner Thought #10
I have a new nephew. He cries a lot, as all babies do. My first thought about all this crying was something like, Man, it must be a drag to be a baby. Upon further reflection, it occurred to me that the cycle of agitation and calm is more or less constant throughout the human life span. Growing up just means that one learns to regulate the cycles and fit them within routines and habits. From these routines and habits, we derive pleasure, at least, ideally. Getting hungry becomes an opportunity to feast. The occasional depressed mood gets transmuted into nostalgia and introspection. Etc.
Movie notes.
Mean Men
Over the weekend I got into bed and watched The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly on my wife’s laptop. As it happens, this was a good pairing, though I had picked them at random from the movies offered for instant viewing on Netflix.
On a superficial level, at least, the two movies are essentially identical: a gruff, mildly sadistic (“When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.”) antihero, who loves nobody but his Girl Friday, gets himself mixed up in an occulted quest for a MacGuffin, which ends badly for everybody involved. The protagonists in the both movies are amoral, self-centered and cynical, though an extremely understated code of honor guides their actions. The arch-villains in both movies are women who pretend to be damsels in distress in order to manipulate the protagonists. One difference between the two protagonists is that, whereas Lily plays Mike Hammer for a fool, Sam Spade never really buys Brigid’s act as a helpless waif. Nevertheless, he has a soft spot for her, so he plays the role of her knight in shining armor in any case.
It goes without saying that the The Maltese Falcon is the superior movie, and it is equally obvious that Kiss Me Deadly has had the greater influence on subsequent filmmakers. For instance, is there any element of Kiss Me Deadly that Q. Tarantino hasn’t appropriated for his own movies? One is surprised that Tarantino hasn’t yet robbed Aldrich’s grave in order to grant his corpse a cameo appearance (or did he actually do that in Pulp Fiction?) I suppose The Maltese Falcon is not much imitated or quoted because it is not a movie easily cribbed from. Ford employs none of heavy-handed camera angles and lighting effects of the noir genre. In fact, the setups in the The Maltese Falcon are so meticulously inconspicuous that an careless eye might accuse the movie of having a bland mise-en-scene. No single shot stands out in my mind, yet, all of them working together, they make up an indelible whole.
In American pop culture, the hard-boiled detective is of less of a trope than a franchise, but these movies take the personality type to the extreme. These dicks are dicks, which would seem to place them beyond the pale, surely, of a popular art like Hollywood cinema. In general, unsympathetic characters are a hard sell within narrative fiction. Story tellers spend a lot of effort humanizing characters whom, were we to meet their type in real life, we would classify as “no good bastards” and simply shun.1
Why don’t we shun Bogart’s Spade and Meeker’s Hammer? Why do they make convincing protagonists?
Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe in Sam Spade’s case, his wisecracking eloquence sweetens his bitterness. Much of The Maltese Falcon is made up of verbal duels between Spade and the film’s many villains (one characteristic of film noir: a superfluity of villains). In Hammer’s case, the guy acts seemingly without volition. He manhandles women, takes grinning pleasure in smashing a guy’s hand in a desk drawer, brawls with the “cannons” — but all this is sheer, unmotivated id. Maybe it is bad intentions that we revile, and if we feel that an action was not entirely willed then we are less apt to feel negatively about the person who committed it.
We have Mad Men these days, but not too many mean men. Why is that?2
1 Characters that the story teller is unable or unwilling to humanize often come to a bad end, so the audience can derive a modicum of pleasure from watching them fall. Uriah Heep comes to mind as the quintessential example of this type of character.
2 I got tired of this post sitting in my draft folder, so I posted it. Obviously, it’s not finished.
