The Sound Of One Jaw Flapping

My Evil Twin?

2006-06-27T23:42:00.000-05:00

Holy Crap!

email me direct at
(soopersecretbackwardstypingmode - engage!):

moc.eerpsgnillirht@cul

and if that don't work -

moc.liamg@cul.evets

Where you been?

Anonymous in LA

2006-06-26T19:22:00.000-05:00

(Boy doesn't that sound like a Modern Lit title... something that Salon.com would recommend as the voice of an up & coming young author who then flames out spectacularly in a cloud of drugs and plagiaristic scandal...)

Apparently I have a doppelganger that likes to ride the bus in Los Angeles... said observer feel like kicking me a note and filling in the details?
Maybe that was the old me... a tulpa instead of a doppelganger?

As I've recently decided to move back over to this thing, I'l be backfilling it with some stuff that I recently had posted over on RupertSpace, so if'n ya'll have been following that as well... you could consider it a greatest hits... or most pretentious rants... whatever suits yr fancy.

Revisionist Theirstory

2006-06-26T19:13:00.000-05:00

"I think, in time, he'll regret what happened"...

Said about yours truly regarding a set of circumstances,which, at the outset, all involved parties agreed that it was a condition of mutual culpability.
I've accepted these things, and have tried to rectify my contributing faults and generally move on.
(Barring the occassional relapse of guilt/despair, but that we can write off in part to a Catholic upbringing.)
As time has trudged on, however, it's come to light that the entire narrative of said circumstances is being re-framed to other parties' interests/prejudices so that I am cast as the villian. If this is necessary for the mental/emotional well being of said other parties, so be it.

Too bad I don't get the cool volcano hideout and league of jumpsuited henchmen.
But again, it takes two to tango, and three or more to create a lynch mob.

And then there's the matter of cowardice in such things where 3rd party spectators to past events are apparently unwilling to ascertain my perspective on this re-framing. So here it is anyway, in semi-cryptic elevated language which hopefully is restraining the level of general "whatthefuck"-edness this is instilling in yr humble commentator.

But, no one ever asked Frankenstein's monster for his viewpoint.
(Well, the novel did, but I was referring to the film and Karloff's protrayal of the monster as an innocent.
Lumbering, terrifying, and dangerous, but innocent nonetheless.)

Add the snide irony quotient of the circumstance:
Where a rigid belief in a forgiving redeemer apparently doesn't mean forgiveness and redemption are the repsonsibility of that believer.

Anyhoo... again, the answer comes in the form of popmuzik lyrics:

"Daddy,
What does regret mean?
Well son,
A funny thing about regret is
It's better to regret something you have done,
than to regret something you haven't done...
And when you see your mother this weekend,
be sure and tell her:
SATAN!"

Oh yah, you betcha.

Once again back, it's the incredible...

2006-06-18T14:21:00.000-05:00

New toys for the Mac Dashboard... seeing if it works the way it says it should.

Truth And Booty

2005-07-18T23:24:00.000-05:00

Truth & Booty
(The subjective nature of reality as an excuse to not really work when at work)

Things that have occupied my brainspace today:

Man, us talking monkeys are an interesting bunch.

There was a a link on BoingBoing (a directory of wonderful things!) a few months ago (which I'm too lazy to go and search through their archive for) that was talking about a new theory of how come us humanzes have bigger brains than our cousin primates.

Apparently, back when we were shorter, hairier, and lived near the water, we needed to have bigger brainmeats to be able to throw rocks better. I'm a little hazy on the details, but it was something like we needed all the extra meat to conceptualize distance and angle and velocity and whatnot.

So a couple of million years of unabated evolution later, we've got this amazing skill called abstraction that most other primates have little or no facility for. And we still like to try to figure out angle velocity and whatnot... don't think so? Who's the smartest person in the world?

You were thinking either Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, weren'tcha?
See what I mean? Both of them are famous for being physicists.

(I would have also accepted Nils Bohr or Schroedinger)

(And "Uhm..I dunno his name - but that frizzy haired science guy, or the one science guy in the wheelchair".)

Another Example - you ain't really reading my thoughts, but instead symbols of them... abstract representation of the electrochemical reactions in my headspace that wonsaponnatime, occurred just to figure out how far I needed to throw a rock so I could either eat or sleep safely that night.

This rather anthrocentric observation is based on research from extended conversations with other primates taught American Sign Language - reproduced here for your edification:

{transcript of a conversation between primatologist Dr. L Grebovnic and Koko, a 13 year old mountain gorilla who has been signing ASL for 5 years}

Dr. Grebovnic: (signing) Koko, many people believe that the current state of world affairs extends directly from an oversimplified reduction of the fundamental tenet of dualism, i.e. that existence can be reduced to the binary relation of good/evil - spirit/body - right/left etc. Since there is no room for variance in such a simplistic worldview, understanding breaks down when an individual is presented with a viewpoint that would ostensibly fall into the opposing side of the dualistic divide -

Koko: (signing) Koko love kittykat

Dr. Grebovnic: (after taking notes, continues signing) Yes, Koko, the kitty is very nice... Now, opposing this viewpoint, we have the idea of "gross materialism" which at it's core states that there is nothing more to existence than what is perceived by our senses, and anything else is in a sense a form of delusion, if not outright pathology... but, again, applying such an oversimplified view point to existence would indicate that if we define an entity simply by it's material representation... say that if a man had no legs, or your kitty had no legs, then it would not be a kitty, but something less. AS you can see, this would lead to numerous moral issues... but the materialist would argue that since the idea of "morals" is non-material it is in and of itself a non-argument.

Koko: (pauses... then signing) Koko love apples. Koko love Kittykat. Kittykat apples.

Koko then went on to dictate a dissertation titled "Kittykat Apples", discussing in extensive detail that all cats are indeed apples which are made of meat. The materialists see this as an irrefutable confirmation of their position.

So anyway... here we are with this amazing ability to think abstractly... or, more succinctly - the ability to lie to ourselves. After all - abstraction is (in some sense) making something up that ain't in front of you, ain't it? And look at all the fun it causes in the world...

Like Gawd.

We're primates, right?
(For those of you who would prefer to think of us as separate from the other monkeys on the planet, the exit is over there, and please make sure to pick up a comment card on your way out.)
The aforementioned whole lotta evolution behind us has hardwired some behaviors into us... such as the need to have some sort of authority structure in our social order.

To put it simply, here's a mashup of Howard The Duck (the best comic book ever written) and George Orwell:
"All hairless talking apes are created equal, but some are more equal than others."
Looking at Xianity (interchangably called fishtians as well throughout the course of this rant), we see the ultimate expression of this.

Okay, to ratchet it back a bit for those of us out there who fall asleep watching Animal Planet...
Almost all of the higher apes who live in social structures (Gorillas, Chimpanzees) where there's an Alpha Male who rules over the whole tribe.
Yeah, I know the bonobos don't have this, but since they also engage in recreational sex a lot more than our society... the analogy I'm going for here is better served by the Gorillas and Chimps. On yer bike then.

So where was I? Alpha Males... right.

Okay then... in Gorillas, this male who winds up on top is called "The Silver Back" as the authority position seems to trigger some sort of pigmentation change (or maybe it's that combined with relative age) ... and said ape's entire back becomes covered with silver hair. So let's look at good ol human society... leaders are often times the older members of the tribe... with what? Yup grey hair.
(I know I know - that's more often to a loss of pigmentation as aging occurs, and that there is no direct correllation between postitions of authority and hair pigments change in humans... it's called poetic license.)
And then here in Murrika, we have one ape to rule them all (and in the case of the current administration try to bind them), our (usually) democratically elected president.

If you look back through human history ~ more often then not... you'll see the same kind of thing once a society gets under way - there's typically some sort of power sturcture set up with an older male at the top... or a younger male who tries like hell to stay in that position until he's an older male.

So... being that we've got this amazing thing called abstraction... and we're also observant little monkeys,
(thankfully hardwired in when our super-distant forebears were scurrying around in the bushes trying to avoid being et up by dinosaurs)
we start noticing the world around us... and out of this power of abstraction, we try to come up with solutions to why things happen that we can't make happen. Lightning & Thunder for instance. Well... what else are we going to do but apply a known model to an unknown situation:

"Rain... Light in Sky...WOOO! Loud Roaring Noise! Roar sound like leader of tribe when he mad... must be a Bigger Leader of Bigger Tribe! To make Roar that Loud Him Must Be BIggest Leader of ALL! Why all the water though?"

And thus, out of fear and cold water, God Was Born.

{For all you Goddess worshippers out there... I'm more preferential to worship the idea of the mysteries of regeneration and the creation of life... but I'm applying a satirical eye to existing society here. Sorry. Though... think how different the world would be if everyone went around with little "Venus of Willendorfs" on their necks instead of the most heinous torture device ever invented. Church would be a whole lot more fun too!}

John Lennon figured this out when he went through Primal Scream Therapy before recording "Plastic Ono Band" but most folks just get hung up on the mommy issues there.

Which kinda leads into my next riff about abstraction... thinking about boinkin. Send the kids outta the room, cuz it's time to talk about the nasty.

Two quotes to fork from...

One from the Greatest Living Short Story Author, Harlan Ellison:
"Love ain't nothin' but sex mis-spelled."

Which segues into a good observation by one Frederick Durst of Miami, Florida:
"I did it all for the Nookie!"

So let's look at the facts again... sex is for the procreation of the species. Really, that's it. Just so you can find a (willing) partner and make more little yous. Or more specifically - so your DNA can bind with their DNA and make yet another variation on the common theme you share, being a talking hairless ape.
Evolution has again given us a neat little incentive package here for sexual reproduction in the form of the wunnerful, wunnerful orgasm. And you wimmenz got the better end of the deal... multiple orgasms! I guess it could be seen as a payoff for all the pain that childbirth can cause. DNA makes sure you want to keep on keepin' it on by making sure that for a while after you attempt to do so
(keep the DNA flowin, that is)
you feel the best you ever have. So what do we monkeys do with this?

Again, abstraction fires up and we come up with all sorts of crazy stuff about rubbing body parts together to exchange genetic materials. We think about it, talk about it, sing about it, write about it, paint about it, dream about it, figure out various ways to improve it, simulate it, make games out of it, blame it for problems, say it's what makes life worth living, confuse it with death and just generally associate almost everything we do in some form or another with it. Just so that - from a cosmic view point - little tiny chains of 4 amino acids can get rearranged all the time.

And jumping back a bit - we even have our abstractions form more abstractions on top of our abstractions about it:

"Gaaawd-uh Says-uh That-uh (INSERT NAME OF SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE SEXUAL PRACTICE HERE) is A SIN-NUH!"
(said like all crazy TV evangelists when they're on that blood and thunder riff.)

One would think that if the great big Alpha Male Domesticated Primate In The Sky didn't want people makin' whoopie except in specific ways, He woulda wired us to have horrible things happen if we tried... like body parts exploding when inserted incorrectly, or having pieces that fit in one specific way or summink. Of course, it could be argued that originally, this wasnt necessary, as:

"Animals, being innocent, do not engage in perversion. That is to say, recreational or homosexual sexual practices."
(This was actually said to me by an acquaintance of the fishtian persuasion - nice application of the abstraction "innocence" right there...)

Uhm... nope - sorry. Dolphins and The aforementioned bonobo chimpanzees have been observed to engage in both types of non-reproductive activity.

But wouldn't this undermine the whole abstraction argument? Since it might be implied previously that any type of sexual activity that wasn't purely for propagation of the species is somehow the result of this astraction crap you keep ranting about, Steve?

Well, yes and no. Look at it this way. You scratch a dog's belly, it enjoys it. You rub yer cat's back, it starts purring. It's now being muttered in some scientific circles that critters who ain't domesticated primates like us, may have some sort of analog to our very own emotional states. So wouldn't it follow that perhaps they also got lucky enough to have the "feel good when I put this there" wiring? Since the aforementioned examples are both mammalian (though only one is an ape-cousin), mebbe they were lucky enough to get the same nooknook wiring we got.

And what I was meaning before ain't that non-reproductive sex is a result of our ability to abstractificate... it's all the other stuff we do in the name of the Voltron-like forming of the beast with multiple backs.

Okay... so let's all take a cold shower (some of you might even get to do this together - lucky you!) and then we'll talk about abstraction + sex some more... more succinctly - riff offa Mr. Ellison's comment above.

Okay - so... sex. Erm... and Love. Well, here we got a case of abstraction making a mountain outta a molehill. Again, when you take the super long view, all it's really about is making sure that yer genentic code gets passed on down the line... much like a cosmic-scale version of the game telephone, since the information keeps getting manipulated with every iteration of the process. Whatever monkey started the "call" way back in the day sure ain't gonna recognize the message if he were around to "hear" it.
So what do us talking monkeys do with it? Since part of bios (bbwahhaaa get it?) is to make sure that we attempt to make more little us's, and at the same time - try to stick around so that the little versions of us can eventually grow into bigger versions of not-quite-us... We make the making and training of said little us's into this situation that defines us... (see above laundry list of all the things that we do for/about/because of sex, and then think about it in more "socially acceptable" terms) i.e..

Love.

The greeks defined 3 or 4 kinds of love... the love between friends, the love of family, erotic love, and love for your fellow man...
(I say three or four cuz we've all heard the stories about them greeks... so the last two here could be one and the same in some circumstances...)
and we've pretty much followed this model ever since.

I mean, yeah there are subsets of each of these: from afar, unrequited, etc etc. But it still comes down to you either wanna

hang with them,
be nice to them,
protect them,
or boink them.

Think about that flutter you get in yer heart when you see a pretty someone... or maybe that flutter occurs elsewheres.
(tee hee)
Or how when you hear about good news or bad news affecting someone you care about, you actually feel a physcial reaction. Abstracted representations of the instincitual urges to share DNA with them; or an additional layer of abstraction in your relationship with them and have some sort of emotional/psychological committment to their well-being.

And all that boiling up out of the electrochemical stew that makes you you.

Let's riff on the more diverse versions of lerv fer a moment...

One that's been fascinating of late is the stylee called by the poets "Love Unrequited".
The one thing everyone learned in high school, The Crush.

You know someone... and you try to know as much about them as possible.
Your every waking hour is spent to some degree or another consumed by thoughts of them.
(It could be said that Love is a flesh eating virus.)
And yet for all you know, they don't even know you exist.
Is this wrong?
Nah. Not really.
Is this healthy?
Well, except for those few instances where said love festers, goes septic, becomes obsession, and those people turn into stalkers, I would think it's all part of being human. True, it can be painful for the unrequiter, and awkward for the unrequitee... but still, at least you know that the capacity for such emotions (and abstractions) exist, and therefore yer not some sort of sociopathic monster where people are only victims to be destroyed or tools to be used.

And hoo - boy is that one ever an abstraction.
After all how often are these formed on someone that maybe you have a limited (if any interaction) with? So which one are you ACTUALLY crushing on? The one that exists in reality outside of yer head/heart? Or the one that's inside?
Perhaps "crushing" on someone could be a variation of what Tim Leary called "confusing the map with the territory"?
But on the flipside - let's say that it's someone you come in contact with fairly frequently... and "the crushing" still happens.

{Henh... "the crushing" like when all horror movies were gerund titles of some sort or another... Mad Magazine even had the "novelization" of one called (wait for it) "The Gerunding".}

Ahh... lit geek humor.

Anyway - so you know them, you hang out with them, and you gots a jones for them. It burns in ya like something you ain't felt in a while... everytime yer around em... it gnaws at you and makes you feel all squidgy in places yer bathing suit covers. You lie awake at night, engaging in mental or meatspace mastubatory exercises involving said person... building up a further layer of abstraction as to what "the act" might actually be like with them. But again, I ask you... which one are you really crushing on? Is it the map, or the Territory?

Really - who knows? Sometimes - these things can develop into something else, say if yer braqve enough to actually make an overture to the object of said crush, and it's reciprocated... and then grows into a relationship. But it ain't all happyjoylovelove once that hurdle has been cleared. This introduces the issue of the reality trying to measure up to the myth. Like said before - abstraction can also be called "lying to yerself". And if say you try to persevere through the constant friction of the myth conflicting with reality
(lateral thinking side note - for a great example of this in the realm of TV Westerns, watch Deadwood - a TV show that actually gets "HOW THE WEST WAS WON" closer to the probable truth.)
and wind up married - what happens if/when things reach that point of falling apart?

Then we get into another adventure in abstraction... the gradual death of the entity "Meyou/youme" and the resurrection of the creature "memyselfI".

That's probably best left for another rant.

So... grdually veering back onto topic, look at how much we get ourselves twisted up because of four little letters applied to a big bunch of nebulous things that we share across the gulf between each other.
Thanks to a brain function that originally (it is theorized) formed to allow us to throw rocks better, we can now see someone, develop this entire world where they and we have this wonderful, meaningful, fulfilling relationship together, spawn, raise wonderful offspring that carry your genes into the future be it dark or bright, and then die together happy and content... And by the same token, it can all come crashing down the minute they ask you:"You want fries with that?"

Awright - I've blathered enough... time to define the title? Okay sure...

Truth. An abstraction... but since abstractions are all thats in yer brainspace, that ain't so bad I would think.
Booty. A reality... except when you can't get a date. Then it's the biggest abstraction of them all.

My Tiny Kingdom of Dust and Ashes

2005-05-20T14:35:00.000-05:00

Man ain't been in here in a while....

Yes it's true.
I'm weird.

Weird in ways that destroy normal people's minds.

SO weird in fact that I live in a hyperbaric chamber filled with the gases from my home planet, because if I were to step out of it and into the polluted miasma that passes for atmosphere on this world, I would explode like deep sea fish brought up too quickly.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories about me... but never published them for fear he'd be locked up.

My sarcasm rends souls, my cynicism cleaves hope in two, my snideness makes your underwear feel too tight.

And my weirdness spreads like a fungus across your mind.
Soon you shall know the depths of weird.
Or you won't.
My time has come.
Or it hasn't.

Either way I can't be bothered.

Those Were The Days? (The treachery of memory and the creeping dread Of Nostalgia)

2005-02-14T16:01:00.000-06:00

Dictionary.com has several definitions of Nostalgia... one that stands out is:

"A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past."

While another that runs a close second is:

"A wistful or excessively sentimental sometimes abnormal yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition."

So we shall take this as our springboard...

Let's look at society at large... right now in music - there's a resurgence of "80's sounds" on the somewhat jagged edge of the music scene... I bleev it was called Electroclash or somesuch by the hipsters... I just noticed that the big fat analogue synth sounds that were so cool back in the early 80's were suddenly popping up again. Now this is cool as I've always harbored a secret love for out-of-sync oscillators fighting for dominance of a waveform (that's sorta how synth's work dontchaknow) but is this forward motion for culture?

And then there's our current shift towards conservativism politically.
I can't remember where I read it, but someone once said that conservatism looked towards the past for strategies of dealing with the present and/or future. To me this seems to be an inherently bad idea... since if those strategies worked back then... how come we're still not using them?

But on a less general scale... talking about nostalgia in the personal sense.

Think back to a wonderful time from your past. Say...oh, 10 years or more back. Try and remember it as clearly as possible...Got it? Now quick, write it down exactly as you recall it.
Now, if you're lucky enough to still be in touch with people (other than family) from that time in your life... contact one of them... and bring up that time. See how much your memory corresponds to what they remember.

Go ahead I'll wait...

Okay - so probably about 60 ~ 75% of it you and that person both agreed on as indisputable rememberances of what happened, right?

So then. What about that other 40 ~ 25% ? How do you account for the variance there?

That's the nostalgia... IMHO.

So let's twist this little footpath a little further...

Say there's a person in the past... one that's gotta lotta fond memories wrapped up around them... And you somehow reconnect with them...

So here you are, a different person than you were 10 years ago... and yer trying to re-establish contact with this person, where your entire frame of reference is built on data that is at best, 10 years old.

Awkward to say the least.

So... how does the person you are "now" talk to the "now" version of that person, even though both of you are working from the "then" versions of each other? DO the same reference points still work? Are shared private jokes still valid? Mutual memories still fresh and pristine in one another's mind?
Hopeless Romanticism aside... Is there that much in common?
Are there embers of whatever fire sparked the friendship/romance/relationship still smouldering?
Would it be worth fanning them? Or perhaps applying just enough of a breeze to let the embers grow into a different sort of fire?
Or has there been such a radical change in you and/or them that while the thought of maintaining contact is nice... the stark reality of it is that who you were then ain't who you are now?

Our cultural signposts of movies books and music all make it sound like picking up where you left off is an easy thing... and that all the time inm between will seem to have been as naught or some such poetic folderoll... seems to me the truth of the matter is far more difficult. After all, once you get past teh polite comments about each other's current positions in life... what do you talk about?

Fat Guys Named John

2004-08-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

I dunno how many people out there have ever had philosophy... but there was this thingh that was brought up in an intro to philosophy book I was reading - the Platonic Ideal... something about how in a cave at the center of the universe exists this cave which has the perfect form of everything... like there is the platonic ideal of a "chair" and so forth.
So at sort-of cross purposes to this is the archetype as popularized by Jung and also in the works of Joseph Campbell.
Interestingly enough - archetypes and sterotypes often seem to get confused in popular thinking... So anyway... where this is leading to:

It's been my experience that comic book shops, seeing as they are gathering places of a certain subcultural type here in Murrika, have their own archetypes of those who work in said stores...

You've got the surly owner who used to love comics, and decided that that would be a great way to earn aliving, but has since become so cynical and embittered with the buisiness side of things that he holds any and all who still love the medium and the culture in severe disdain.

Then you've the got the skinny sorta spastic guy who is usually typified by either having very strange hair, facial or coiffure... this is the guy who can engage you in a three hourlong conversation about whether Wolverine could kick BAtman's ass and do so with the same passion and intensity as a well paid trial lawyer.

And finally you've got the fat sarcastic guy (usually named John) as exemplified by the character on the Simpsons (even though he isn't named John, he's the perfect example of this type of guy).

The Inevitable Return Of The Great White Dope...

2004-07-29T16:27:00.000-05:00

Hi. How've you been? How're things? Good. Good. You're looking well. Did you loose weight?

This post's title is from the Bloodhound Gang, off the Hooray For Boobies! Album... which made all of our lives a little bit nicer with the pleasant sounds of the song "Discovery Channel" for weeks on end in the Halcyon days of the late 90's.

Ah... the 90's. It was a different time then, kids - the internet was still in the process of being renovated into a shopping mall, so the parking (and pr0n) was better and mostly free... MP3's were legal, and the X-files still had the original cast and some semblance of direction with the plotline...

Why it almost seems like another age. Especially when viewed across the yawning chasm of time that is filled with the detritus of the past 5 years. Wow! That's almost an epoch! I do believe there are Geological periods that are shorter!

5 years ago. Surely that's long enough for VH-1 to do one of those "I (heart) the..." Shows!

Turning on the TV I see that they have.
I certainly seem to have my finger on the pulse of the pop cultural zeitgeist!

It's nice to know that other than the guys at modern humorist -(who seem to be slumming on this one)... VH-1 has a work release program for 3rd rate celebritoids to be snarky and bitchy about stuff that had more of an impact on popular culture than they ever will. (I'm looking at you Michael Ian Black) It's so nice to see a bunch of botoxed and personally trained imbeciles from L.A. rank out on fashions they were just as slavishly following back then as the ones they slavishly follow now.

And poor Liz Phair... having to comment on the hunky guys of the 90's.But then again, it's more airplay than her last single got. Probably shoulda saved the "blowjob queen" song for a later album.

Apologies and All

2004-07-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

But the rantwell has had a bit of a drought as of late.

More when the muse decides to spank my bottom again.

More Old Dirty Laundry That I would Like to Share... (Ignore the Skidmarks!)

2004-06-25T13:38:00.000-05:00

So here's something I spit out on Friendster a while back, in the heady days when Social Networking Software was something interesting, and not just the booty call network. (A bit of sour grapes there...)

Almost a year on I find everything I wrote here to still be true. Especially the parts about the umlauts.

Hair Metal and Mortality

So it finally hit me.
The ugly truth that yes indeed, I'm getting older, and will one day stop being/existing/breathing/getting unsolicited telemarketer calls.
I have always been rather painfully aware of my mortality, the receding hairline, the constant battle to fit into the jeans that fit just fine 3 years ago, the fact that some of my sartorial choices garner snickers from the kids in the record store... but none of this has ever really bugged me.
At some level, I was inside a little bubble of stasis, "existential amber" to be kinda intellectual about it... floating along at a certain mental position in life while the rest of the world continued on it's
merry way, and I could occasionally reach out of my bubble and grab things from the "trudge to
oblivion" that appealed to my worldview. But even with all that, underneath it all I was still the same.

Then came the hit. The universe finally decided to send me the wake up call: "Hello mister Luc - you are
indeed getting older, and here's the solid proof."
But I didn't get mine in the usual manner. No near-miss car crash, No recovery from some almost fatal disease, not even an "almost happened" meteor strike... I guess I wasn't on the budget for the big showy reminder.
No, I got mine in a much more subtle and nefarious manner, by way of my watermarking events in my life according to the music that I was into at the time.

Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil" is 20 years old.
Which means that since this was a big album to me when I was 12... add 20 to me and that makes me 32... in comparison, it has weathered the score of years better than I have.
That isn't to say SATD has withstood the test of time either, but I sure as hell ain't getting a "Specially Remastered 20th Anniversary Edition" of anything I've done released. So I figure I can
kvetch if'n I want.

Think about that for a minute...
Shout At The Devil.
20 years old.
Hair Metal is almost drinking age.

20 years ago, 4 doofuses from LA brought pentagrams, big scary hair, and bigger scarier codpieces to the masses. Sure, if you lived in one of the coastal burgs, you were hip to all this, but for an alienated
dork into Dungeons and Dragons and Horror movies living in Suburban Oklahoma City? This was the A-bomb of Strange, Scary and "Satanic".
Yeah Ozzy Osbourne was always around, but I figured he was a one man show, ya know? Riding the wave of the "Exorcist in England" imagery of the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover. And there was that Alice Cooper guy, but how scary could a dude with a girl's name be? "School's Out" ain't exactly the kind of music you think the Devil is going to listen to.
But the Crue? For proof look no further than the pictures on the cover. The band photos are all Snarls, more leather than in "The Road Warrior" and mysterious hand gestures (Nikki Sixx doing the "Hook Em Horns" thing - later immortalized by Bloom County's "Billy and The Boingers" as the "Secret Devil Sign"). This Combined with all the flames in the background, the psuedo gothic lettering and of course the
pentagram was to my warped little mind "the-book-of-revelations-has-come-to-pass" apocalyptic
America... and these guys were the soundtrack.
(For all you music snobs... just remember that this was while Metallica was still just hitting
stride and making waves in the underground... but for Shopping-Mall-As-Cultural-Mecca MidSouth America - the Crue as fed by MTV to our young and impressionable minds was the Shit.)
Most importantly - these guys had little dots over their name.
Little Scary Dots.
Over the "O" and the "U".
(Many Sooner fans were noted to ponder if perhaps the LA based minions of Satan were Big Red fans... and the rumour that the music played in the background of "In The Beginning" was "Boomer Sooner" played backwards on a pipe organ.)
To my sheltered worldview - nothing was more "satanic" and guaranteed to cause friction with my parents than those terrible terrible little dots.
They just oozed evil.
Of course, two years later in German class when I learned they were called "umlauts" and the
function they played in pronunciation, I couldn't help but pronounce Motley Crue as "merhtly chruu"
as the umlauts would inflect it.

So - yeah... the album... the music. Nowadays, I find the whole Hair Metal thing of the 80's laughable and embarassing, but back then, "Looks That Kill" was the song that rocked my little preteen universe. "In the beginning" ? Man, this was the opening scrawl for the end of the world... and yes, the hair on the back of my neck still tingles a little bit when I hear the opening riff of the title track. The other tracks all blur together for me now, but one time recently I found myself humming "Ten Seconds To Love" -
(well okay more like tunelessly going babababumbum TEN SECONDS TO LOVE! and then giggling maniacally) I still have the same cassette tape I borrowed and never returned of this, and I have an MP3 of "looks that kill" somewhere that I'll throw on a mix CD for the smug ironic "gosh can you believe we thought this
was cool?" track, but I dunno if I could consider it the cultural milestone that garners a special "20th anniversary re-mastered edition" including bonus tracks and extensive liner notes...

So while you metal faithful out there get your bonfire ready I'll close up by saying this:
Motley Crue nowadays are a bunch of has-been yutzes who garner all the derision that being on a VH-1 behind the Music entitles them to.
Yes, Tommy Lee IS a great drummer, but since he's more known now for his acting than for his music...HAS BEEN.
Vince Neil wears a bandanna all the time to hide his receding hairline (David Lee Roth Level Has-Been), Nikki Sixx spends more time talking about how drugs f**ked up his life than about his music (perhaps he knows where his talent lay after all) (talentless Has-Been)
and Mick Marrs is even uglier without the makeup (Mutant Has-Been).
But at one point in my life - they were the beginning of the end of the world. And that was cool.

I see that on Amazon they're selling a box set of all their stuff, as all bands are wont to do nowadays. I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing annual summer tours outta them like we did for the Beach Boys back when we were kids and our parents were our age... Big Quadruple Bill Tickets with RATT, whoever is still alive from WASP, and perhaps Poison, if Bret and CC can ever bury the hatchet.

Man, I need to stop watching VH-1 when I'm bored.

The Lemony Fresh Scent Of Pure Evil

2004-06-25T09:58:00.000-05:00

So building maintenance has reloaded the "Let's hide the poopy smell" air freshener in the restroom at work. This is all fine and good, cuz there may be some truth in "everyone loves their own brand", but god(s) knows I don't wanna smell what your GI tract did to that Whataburger you scarfed down yesterday. Anyway - not meaning to branch off into scatology or anything... this deoderizr thingie exudes a smell that is supposed to be lemon. To cop a riff from Douglas Adams this stuff smells "almost, but not quite entirely unlike" lemon. But you know it's lemon-y because all the artificial lemon flavoring/scenting that we've been exposed to since the advent of "artificial colors and flavors".

So - being the lateral thinking kind of guy I am... I started thinking about stinks, and evil. The general conception is that bad things smell... well, bad. Horror stories (the kind I like to read) often use adjectives like "putrescent", "sepulchural", "open grave like", "rotten" et cetera when discussing the Damned Thing that is menacing society (yeah, I like's me some Lovecraft)... there's a few exceptions to this, but even those (I'm thinking of the virus in Peter Straub's Floating Dragon here) have an underlying hint of something nasty to them, like it might smell like lillies, but there's a tinge of decay in the scent or whatever. Or somehow the smell is overpowering and therefore goes out the backend of "pleasant smell" into the realm of "overload of scent" and therefore bad.

I'm thinking, rot and decay are part of the world, it's only natural. And granted that they still smell unpleasant, but they're still part of the circle of life and all that. So why should we associate these smells (of death) with things that are horrific?

Reading critical discussions of Horror (like Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature or King's Danse Macabre) both of these talk about what separates Horror from Terror. Terror is just fear turned up to 11. Horror is defined by things having a sense of "wrongness" to them. What made Frankenstein's creature so horrifying was that he was outside the natural order, being created and not born, and was as smart as a "nautral" man. An imperfect reflection of an already imperfect thing.

So - if we've got this sense of wrongness going on in "true" horror, as opposed to terror, then the kinds of scents monsters exude would be akin to the deoderizer smell in the men's room. Zombies shouldn't just smell like dead rotting meat, but rotting meat mixed with that grape flavoring that they use in grape bubble gum. Or vampires smell like strawberry quik. After all, these things are unnatural and outside the order of things... just like those artificial flavors.

For my money - the devil won't smell like sulfur and brimstone, he'll have the lemony scent going on, naturally. And hell will smell like the bathroom did. For all eternity.

Satan, God, Bugs Bunny and Me.

2004-06-21T12:07:00.000-05:00

Okay - I ripped off this post's title from an album by the industrial band Cassandra Complex. Well, I dunno if you could call them industrial - more like insano.. though All Music Guide calls them "Industrial Dance". All I know is when I bought the record back in High School, I was looking for a record that would scare people, but was well... funny...This one had that in spades. Then I got Ministry's Land Of Rape and Honey, while not funny, per se... definitely had the scary thing down. Guess who won that battle of the bands. I think CC had the better title though.

So... THis weekend I watched the Disinfo.com DVD which I heartily suggest all go out and purchase, if for no other reason than to immerse yerself in a couplafew hours of Supreme HIgh Weirdness. Usedtowas back in the day, you had to send an SASE to some strange little P.O. Box listed in Ivan Stang's "High Weirdness By Mail" to get yerself exposed to this much... freaky outthere-ness, but not anymore. Gods bless the Digital REvolution! Now you too can share the joy of "Uncle Goddam!" and the Mind boggling strangeness of Recovered memories of the Brainwashed CIA Trained Sex Slaves of Bob Hope! I always knew he was some kinda twisted sleazo pervert...(You think I'm kidding, don'tcha?)Buy this DVD. It will make the brainmeats quivering with delightfulness!

Moving on. The real highlight of this (For Me, anyway) was the second DVD filmed at Disnfocon2000. Mostly this was speeches from various "counter cultural icons" including Douglas Rushkoff, Grant Morrison and Of course, the man who first helped me have fun with my mind Robert Anton Wilson. All people who I not only really dig what they have to say but would love to one day sit down and share a drink or a joint or whatever and just talk about shtuff with them. Sigh.

So, the thing is that this was all done back in y2k - the wild and woolly days of pre 9-11 millenial weirdness. The overarching ideas from lotsa the speakers there was how the world was getting ready to change to "our" (the "counter culture" 's Viewpoint) and it would be an interesting time to live in... well. As the old curse goes. Interesting times indeed. Seems to me 4 years on we're at more of a return to mid 80's "Us and Them" thinking. We got the big baddy of "Islamofacism" as the right wing asspieces (since they sure ain't talking out of their mouths) like to call it. Much more "hands on" bad guy than the soviets were, that's for sure. I wonder what they're thinking about the state of the counter culture now.

Something Old, Somethin' Somethin' Somethin'

2004-06-16T10:19:00.000-05:00

(This is a little bit I did a while ago for a teamblog I was involved with around this time last year. As it seems that blog has gone the way of Dodoes, Carrier Pigeons, Quality Children's Television and Critical Thinking... I present it for amusement and/or revilement purposes)

The Cheapness Of Nations (A Rebuttal)

While it has long been alluded that the French are indeed cheapskates, this, when applied to their drinking, is patently False.

The great existentialist author - Albert Camus - was often known to stand the entire discussion group a round when debating the pointlessness and futility of life. His reasoning was that since there was no inherent meaningfulness to existence, other than what you made of it - you might as well be drunk when you decided to give your life meaning.

Sartre, on the other hand, was regularly witnessed to beg off when it was his turn to buy, claiming he had to leave due to "Nausea". When this was later revealed to be the title of his manuscript - he was permanently banned from several taverns and cafes the exitentialists met at.

Toulose LaTrec, famous for his diminutive stature, predilection for ladies of negotiable affection, and the fruit of the grape, was also known to be an excellent tipper. While he was often too poor to leave monetary compensation for the amount of alcohol he consumed (and the service efforts of the staff of the establishments at which he indulged), he would often leave paintings and sketches as payment. Once even going so far as to paint the office of the owner of the Moulin Rouge with portraits of his favorite dancers as seen from his unique perspective. In later years, this was recognized as the first underwear catalogue ever created.
(Picasso would later steal this idea to eat for free all over Spain)

It is conjectured in Gastronomic Service circles that the origin of the French's reputation as poor tippers was an outgrowth of the feud between the Futurists and the Surrealists in the early 20th century.

The Futurists were often known to take over a restaurant, make exorbitant demands of the kitchen and waitstaff, and then leave hastily drafted political manifestoes outlining the frivolity of monetary compenstation in the coming workers paradise as exemplified in their artwork.

The Surrealists, whle acting in much the same manner, would leave hastily constructed tableaux as compensation - usually involving fish in derby hats, sewing machines draped in pasta, and rotten fruit impaled on railroad spikes.

When asked later as to which they preferred, the waitstaff invariably sided with the Surrealists, citing that you could at least eat the fish, even if it did in some odd way remind you of your mother.

The Futurists released the manifesto: "The Surrealists Are A Bunch Of Cheap Bourgeosie Jerks" in retaliation, and the Futurist Sympathizer Editor of the Food and Beverage section of Le Monde, the Parisian Newspaper, enabled the seeds of slander to be sown for the future.

The Surrealist rebuttal to these accusations: "Erotic Examination of an Umbrella" was only released in a limited folio braille edition and subsequently fell on deaf ears.

As time moved on, the Futurists fell into disrepute and the Surrealist movement gained recognition outside of France. As they began travelling abroad for the press junkets for the Surrealist Exhibitions, the negative image of the Surrelaists as laid down years before by their now-gone opposition preceded them.

One English Art Crtitic - Hawthrone J Windbloom, a failed Modernist sculptor and Futurist Sympathizer, managed to obtain, translate and release a revised edition of the accusatory manifesto, under the new title - "Unsettling Things Observed In Surrealist Art, And No, I Never Felt That Way About My Sister, Why Do You Ask". The central thesis being updated to the following:

The Surrealists (and henceforth ALL French) were rude, demented perverts, and also to cheap to paint good proper English things for the subject of their art.

Since England - even in the waning days of the Empire - set the standard for world opinion, the damage was permanently done to the French Reputation.

The French, with typical Gallic aplomb, then took it upon themselves to point out the stupidity of the gross generalization by proceeding to act as much like that as possible, hoping that the ironic intent of their actions would point out the fallacy of this accusation. Unfortunately - the subtleties of the French satire of their stereotype was misinterpreted by the world as the truth being revealed for all to see.

And the rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

Historians and Sociologists have recently announced findings that indicate that the cheapest people on earth when it comes to ANYTHING are in fact, the Dutch. It is now theorized that Amsterdam was created and is still maintained with the money that the Dutch saved by stiffing most of Europe on Tips and rounds of Drinks between 1460 and 1907.

Happy Bloomsday!

2004-06-16T07:27:00.000-05:00

Today's the day immortalized by James Joyce in Ulysses! Over in Dublin they were doing readings, people were going on tours of Dublin ala the path that Sidney Bloom took, etc etc etc.

So the Christians have the stations of the cross, the Muslims have the Haj, and Lit Geeks have the Blooms Day walk I guess.

The Flexidisks of Extraordinary Gentlemen

2004-06-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

So... futzing about on the internet for things to diminish productivity during lunchbreak, I came across mention of "The Sinister Ducks" over at The Alan Moore Store ... (where I was teasing myself with purchasing some piece of Mr. Moore's work that he had been kind enough to scribble his name upon...) and I found mention of an issue of Critters that included a flexidisk by a band featuring Mr. Alan Moore. Said band? The Afore Mentioned Sinister Ducks.

(Biographical Interlude)
For a while there I was mad for the Flexi's - while some of my collector nerd friends wanted vinyl of every color in the rainbow, I decided I wanted nothing but flexidisks.
(clumsy segue from biography into on-topic rambling)

Also from the comic book world - I got Tim Truman's Scout issue 19 (MISSY ROCKS!) with the "Blues Crusade" flexi, and subsequently bought the Tim Truman and The Dixie Pistols album "Marauders" when it came out....
{Comic Geek Interjection - GRIMJACK is Coming Back w00t!}
Somewhere I have a flexi of the Flaming Lips doing a cover of Bowie's "Life on Mars" that sounded like it was recorded under an overpass in Oklahoma City while 18 wheelers blaze by. I later found out this was due to my record player slowly dying.
Then there was the flexi of the reunited Bad Brains from some guitar mag in the early 90's (which was menh at best)...
And the at-the-time-Cream-of-the-Crop - 4 songs from Man Or Astroman that had only been released on a flexi that came with a B-movie/Surf Music fanzine (well, until their rarities CD came out).

But to have a sampling of Alan Moore's early musical output? (Since I'm too cheap a bastard to pay the eBay-o-riffic rates for a copy of The Emperors Of Ice Cream, if someone were mad enough to put it on there)
This would've been the dream of dreams. I've got a copy of the Highbury Working, which so far has been the only Alan Moore Music/Performance CD that my local comic shop saw fit to stock. But here he was (back in the day) working with David J of BauHaus!!! How cool would this be?

Well... thanks to the wonders of the internet, and the star-power clout of Neil Gaiman, The Sinister Ducks was made available to all recently. And what a wondrous thing it is.

For your listening pleasure:
March of the Sinister Ducks

This has replaced 1,2, cha cha cha as the song I constantly play at work to drive my colleagues slowly, frothingly insane.
That's been moved to my alarm clock song.

Diary of a Book Fiend

2004-06-03T23:44:00.000-05:00

Some people can go into The Gap or whatever is the hot clothing chain (as seen on TV!) this week... And drop a couple hundred bucks on clothes. Others can destroy their credit ratings and run out of storage space with an afternoon surfing on eBay... Me? I can't resist the books. The printed word. Hardbacks, paperbacks, trade paperbacks, magazines, comics, folios, coffee table books, dustcovers, slipcovers, ripped covers, remaindered, returned, reprinted, misprinted... you name it baby, if it's somehow a book... I want it. Gimme them little squiggles on the page. No romance novels, please. The polite name for it is Bibliophile, or bibliomaniac... something like that.

Hi, my name is Steve and I'm a book junkie.

This past weekend... Half Price books was the target of opportunity. The Parents were in town. Dad and WSM and little bro... we rolled up on Half Price Books, a crack commando team of readers. Our assault was quickly initiated, but slowly resolved. 2 hours and 500 bucks later (I dropped a hundred myself, I know Dad made at least three trips) the back seat of their minivan was a guerilla bookmobile bringing the printed word to the poor starving literary appetit- er addictions of the four of us.

So I picked up a bunch of these graphic novel-esque books called "Introducing (Insert Subject Here)" Wide ranging topics covered in these... the subjects I will be introduced to over the next few days/weeks include Eastern Philosophy, Derrida, Chomsky, Chaos, Evolutionary Psychology, Existentialism, Quantum Theory, Mind & Brain, Relativity, Consciousness... I've already read ones on Semiotics, Foucault, Culutral Criticism, Linguistics, Einstein, and Freud.

I can feel my brainmeats growing with every one of these I read.(Wiggles finger from middle of forehead as if pineal gland has popped out ala "From Beyond") It's...So...Beautiful!!!

Soon I will need to trepan my skull, I will be so overflowing with the knowledges.

The thing I dig about these is their jam-packed fulla info, but done in a graphic novel style. Not comic booky - since that brings to mind spandex and sound effects for most, but a blending of Graphical and Textual Information... Cut and Paste and Line Drawing and Photocollage along with good old written info. Spend a few hours with one of these books and you feel like you just took a pretty decent introduction/survey class to that topic at your local college/learning annex. And of course, Excellent Bibliographies in the back as well... fuel for the fires of my addiction...

Another treasure from our expedition -"Can such things be?" a collection of Ambrose Bierce's short fiction. Alla you cynical hipsters awash in Irony cuz yer favorite webzine tells you it's cool? Try reading Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" and some of his short fiction to really see what cynicism and irony are about... all wrapped up in a lovely littel package of such utter bleak misanthropy, you'll think G.G. Allin was a really fun guy in comparison. You may remember him (Bierce, not Allin) as the author of the story "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" or at least had skimmed the Cliff's notes on it... or maybe even saw the Twilight Zone episode.

Also just finished "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester. Damn fine book. Easy to see why it's considered one of the greatest Science Fiction novels ever written. Written nearly 50 years ago and yet it's got ideas and concepts in it that some other writers have been squeezing entire careers out of thrown away as single sentences. Wish I could write like that.

Gonna talk smart "...destination" tomorrow, me. Oh yes.

The Wrath of Something-Or-Other

2004-06-02T23:28:00.000-05:00

Standing out on my front porch, smoking a cigarette as the second round of storms rolled in... The north texas area got pummelled last night. Headlines and Websites said the usual: "Thousands without power" "clean up crews working overtime" etc...and tonight was the encore. Pretty sedate comparatively speaking. No golf ball size hail or anything like that. All in all - nature kinda struck out on the sequel, IMHO.

Except...

I think that somehow Cartoon Network or I have angered some obscure weather god.

Twice now Aqua Teen Hunger force was interrupted by the storm being too dense for the satellite signal to get through. Last night and then again tonight. All through the storm otherwise, signal was fine... made it through VH-1's Most Metal Moments with no problem (potato chip television at it's finest!) Futurama and Family Guy came through in DVD clarity. ATHF starts up... and the signal fries out - first the sound starts to stagger... then the video artifacts then - The thrice damned "SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL" came up.
So once again, I was denied ATHF, until I get my lazy ass down to the video store and buy them.

you can't christen a thing with box wine

2004-06-01T18:50:00.000-05:00

And I ain't about to hit my computer with a bottle of champagne.

A statement of purpose is in order I guess. Yet another blog on the internet. But this one is mine, mine, ALL MINE!!! well, the content is anyway... but I have a BLOG! Cower before me, puny mortals and witness the power of my...bloggishness!

Um... yeah. So anyway. I gots me a blog thingie. A place to spill my guts, to rant about whatever comes to mind, to mistype song lyrics that I feel are applicable to my mood... to generally whittle away the hours on my keyboard. Hell, beats climbing up in a bell tower with a rifle. (kidding, kidding)

Stay tuned for more rambling semi-coherent fun!