Watching The Twilight Zone
A few weeks ago, the lymph nodes along my neck suddenly swelled up. I had a doctor check it out and he determined I had strep throat, and then a week later, added mononucleosis to the diagnosis. Sort of a one-two punch of undergraduate illness. I didn’t feel that sick, and suffered little symptoms other than the inflamed globules along my jugular, but it became clear to me, getting drunk off three beers and exhausted at 5pm, that I should probably take it easy. My regular leisure, after school, work, and whatever other responsibilities I’ve lined up for myself on a given day, is to kick back with a few-to-several beers and do things on the internet. The doctor recommended I avoid this, so there was only one viable solution to passing time at the same rate and pleasure level: watch TV. I am one of those lucky enough to have acquired a password to my friend’s Netflix Instant Watch account, and, after watching The Larry Sanders Show, Archer, The Stand miniseries, My So-Called Life, and The League in their entireties, I noticed that The Twilight Zone original series had been recently added to the queue. Though perhaps the most referenced and acclaimed cult series in history, I must admit, I’d never seen one episode. I resolved, then, it would be my next big tackle in my imperial takeover of internet television.
Ow, Howl
I upped a new entry into my top 10 worst films of all time, the absolutely stank rendition of Howl, starring J. Franc. I’m not even a Franco-hater, his wanting seems nice, and I was rooting for him, and it’s not really his performance that blows the dog (though it’s certainly often cringey: don’t know why they didn’t get David Cross after his performance in I’m Not There).
Mostly, whoever wrote this script is a dingdong. I mean, they literally present animations that act out trippy renditions of a full reading of the poem, complete with bros on the rooftops of the city shooting up and howling. The rest is just an interview with Ginsberg in Franco style, and a milky version of the obscenity trial for the book. The guy who plays Kerouac looks like a game show host. Jeff Daniels hangs out.
I can’t think of many good movies about writers: it’s not exactly food for wow. Naked Lunch was good. I like Wonder Boys for some reason, and Barton Fink. I didn’t like Barfly though I’m sure there are some hounds here. I’m sure I’m blanking on some others. What you got?
There is no explicit meaning
From the NYT obituary of Osama bin Laden:
Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.
“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”
Words will always be words. I can call something whatever I want and it doesn’t mean a thing until it is validated by power (in whatever form) and then by people because of power. Everyone keeps “rejoicing” and the only people I see or hear questioning that celebration is the people. I’m sure it’s coming in small ways from the left but the President has not denounced it, let alone spoken to it so far as I have heard. If I remember correctly, people were pretty upset about this:
Gopher gaze
This is what I know about sex, there is a hole, there is a stick, and it all works out in the end, and occasionally “in the end,” if you know what I mean. And duh, sometimes two sticks and/or two holes can get along just fine, I went to college. The idea of penetration can only exist because we feel outside of things, but what if we are put inside, a gopher hole maybe, or in a gallery peaking into a room made to make us feel inside a hole. What if aesthetics is humanity’s commercial, something to seem better than it is. Duchamp’s cunt is shaved because Courbet’s used up all the hair. We all know about the male gaze, but the gopher gaze didn’t get a thesis written about it, until now, well not exactly.
On Esoteric Interests & The Pain That Follows*
I’ve spent a good portion of my life listening to people tell me that my tastes are pretentious, or that I only like the “stuff” that I like because nobody else likes it, or the I intentionally look for the most obscure shit possible to obsess over, etc. etc. etc. This is bullshit, of course. And I mean, whatever, I don’t have anything to prove and that’s not exactly the point of this post.
Califono
Califone is a band to get bent with – a stethoscope to the picked over cloud country, a mason jar of one eyed mermaids drink from. Good beauty, if you can get it.
For a time now, poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Solan Jensen have been making a long anticipated film about the ramshackle blues crew. They’ve just now come back from the darkroom with their own 68 minute dream, Made A Machine By Describing A Landscape. Shot between 2004 and 2008, the film follows the acclaimed indie-rock icons on the road and in the studio with “an exploratory, intimate, and at times experimental take on both creative process and performance.”
Out now from Indiepix Films.
Western speech is like badgers & birds: free.
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade. — Julian Assange