2 girls and 1 song
I had to google “Ke$ha,” and now I know she’s a singer, and that “Tik Tok” is a song of hers. Amy is really pretty and sings the song relatively well, lending a folkly sensibility to a hip-hopish song. In the comments, guys say they love her, and that she’s really beautiful. Katie, conventionally speaking, is pretty ugly, and doesn’t sing the song that well. Due to her weight problem, she speaks and sings in that “fat” way that sounds like gasping for air. I’m not trying to be mean, or exploit Katie. I’ve just been obsessed with these two clips for awhile. I want this post to be about how deep down inside Katie is a great person and how deep down inside Amy is some bitch, but that would be presumptuous and unfounded. You might want this post to be about how I see beauty in Katie, perhaps even a humane fumbling truth, but I don’t. We all want songs to sound good, and for people to look good. The videos are “related,” so many of the guys who said they love Amy were also really 2x mean to Katie in the comments. One guy even said his dick fell off. I once had dinner with a friend, among other friends, and she said how attractive everyone was, not in a flirty way, but a self-satisfied way. I remember being disgusted by that comment, and felt sad for this world. I know I sound like god damn Holden Caulfield right now, but I think I’m frozen at age 17, save my hair line. Everything I’m saying is obvious. I’m a hypocrite. I like James Joyce and hot chicks. I guess I’m saying I wish I weren’t shallow. And dare I say, I wish you weren’t shallow either. I wish I liked Tom Clancy and Thomas Kincade. I wish the dollar symbol wasn’t “cool.” I wish we’d all stop trying to fuck hot people. I hate sexy, and I’m starting to hate sex. But Morrissey ruined celibacy for me. I hope Katie is a happy person. This post has depressed me.
Love will tear us apart cover
I found out from wikipedia today that Ian Curtis hung himself. Sorry I did not know this earlier. He was the singer of Joy Division, named after what Nazis called a special area designated for all the attractive Jewish girls to rape. Because I’m morbid, I often think about how bad it would feel being slowly herded towards my noose, seeing that circle from afar, that apathetic rope just hanging there. When you’re young and sad, maybe you gravitate towards Joy Division, and then in high school art class when the teacher asks you to draw something, you draw Ian Curtis. You draw it with paint or pencil, filling in your self-made lines like a coloring book, fleshing out the shading in the name of a human. And maybe when you hear “love will tear us apart” in that robotic monotone, you think of that boy or girl you really like, and how you’ll never be together, how love — that soft word oft used to describe, oddly, the pit in your chest those sacred moments they pass in the hall — has failed to tear you apart. It only punctured you. And you remember these people forever, each syllable that made up their name, until the past becomes the present in f , and each facebloat is a little bloated older, a little less mind-photoshopped as you remembered, and here we are.
Quiet City by Connor O’Brien
Quiet City, a wonderfully designed collection of stories by Connor O’Brien, is available for purchase, or, provocatively, pay-by-tweet or -facebook, where the PDF is made available after tweeting/facebooking it. O’Brien, in our correspondence, says:
The book is a bit of an experiment in selling literature online (it actually doubles as a test case for my PhD thesis on publishing) […] the online editions use social networking as currency: you pay with a tweet or facebook post. As a happy coincidence, the title story imagines a world in which social networking stats have superseded cash, so there’s a bit of an interesting tension there — the fiction creating the reality.
Skullfuck’d diary
Every morning I pass a paint splatter that makes me think of the Misfits, but in my version the man had syphilis, an affliction which eventually corrodes the skull. I don’t like punk, or at least I don’t understand it; feels bourgeois almost, like not wearing a shirt and screaming seems like a privilege, and if you still have food at the end of the day, then thank you Safeway and why you bitchin’? When I was 17, it was a pretty bad year. I was listening to hair bands, reading Penthouse letters, and testing my small yellow middle-finger for the first time.
What you don’t see are decaying leaves on the pavement, as I cropped them for aesthetic reasons. So a long time ago on Tennessee and 22nd st. in the “Dogpatch” area in Potrero district, a painter spilled some white paint on the sidewalk, maybe even accidentally stepped in it, then walked away; he was a contractor probably, who just painted a house he didn’t live in so it didn’t really matter. Maybe that’s god, some guy who painted skin on us, then walked away.
