Lemme 'splain... 
  corner   



Nobody knows, What kind of trouble we're in. Nobody seems to think, It all might happen again. [guitar solo!]


HOME

ARCHIVES

EMAIL



ThisishowwideIwantit

My Overflow

Altercation

Tapped

MaxSpeak

Atrios

CURSOR

Ted Barlow

Electrolite

Calpundit

Orcinus

This Modern World

Talking Points Memo

The Onion

Snotglass

Tbogg

Sisyphus Shrugged

Digby

The Poor Man

Nobody Knows

River Tech Review

 

Saturday, November 20, 2004

 
To every dumbass in the world...

ATTENTION!!!

When George W. Bush says he wants "unity" he means he wants everyone to do exactly what he wants.

See, "unity' means "do what I tell you" to George Bush. So, media dumbasses, instead of writing "Bush calls for unity" write "Bush wants nations to follow his lead".

For everyone else, unity is not "doing what W says", OK? Unity, in political context, means "consensus". Look it up you dumb fucks because I'm tired of W proclaiming what's what, the rest of the world saying "hey, that's a bad idea", and then you stupid fucks saying "all them nations don't want unity". Fuck you, OK? America is not the center of the Universe, and George W. bush sucks my ass.

whew. angry man.




Friday, November 19, 2004

 
I don't know nothin' about nothin'.

I wish I knew about movies or music or sculpture or furniture or some crap like that. I dunno, it'd just be kind of cool to really know about one thing or another. Like, last night I'd say "oh, Nells Cline has worked with Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of Minutemen fame, he's big into sort of the prog rock thing". "Oh, Carla Bozluich? She's from that alt-punk-country outfit The Geraldine Fibbers, she also..." blah, blah, blah. Wouldn't it be great to be able to bore the shit out of people with encyclopediac knowledge of something? Actually I'm interested in movements and connections and schools of thought/art, whatever, but good gord, who has the freaking time to do that shit?

I make little shorty films and I see fewer movies than most everyone I know. I've never seen any Fassbinder or Cassavetes or plenty of other of them types, and I'm trying to make movies? I don't know shit about nothin'.

But I think maybe sometimes that's a good thing. Like last night. Let's say I was into the Geraldine Fibbers (highly likely I could have been, cool looking chick with dark features plus decent punk?), if I was one of them sorts I'd probably be following everything since somewhat uncritically having already given my respect to the artist, which would mean last night I would have thought that crap was good.

well it t'weren't.

I just don't have the time to watch a whole boatload of Fellinni to "get it". I watched three of his films and didn't really care for any of them (La Strada wasn't one of them). And the thing is with sort of historical avant-garde, punk, whatever artists is you sort of have to be familiar with the context to appreciate it. So you need to be familiar with their contemporaries, both popular and avant-garde, you need to be familiar with the different artists movements of the time, the societal context, and you need to start from the beginning of their work to see the progression. Then, then you will understand how and why whomever was an important artist.

Shee-it.

I still don't know what the fuck Bauhaus is. I look it up once in a while and it was a design school, but I don't get it as a reference or a context when it's used that way. You say Bauhaus I think German, right angles, and Black. That's it.

So I'm not very cool. When the hipsters start talking DeStigl I can't keep up. I can drop a few DaDa/Surrealist names only because I took a class on Surrealist literature in college (where we watched an Annie Sprinkle video complete with 10 minute organsm or something. Yep, cesspool of immorality alright), but that's about it.

So I'm the intellectual lone wolf maybe. Or maybe I'm just not nearly as smart as I think I maybe might be. Or maybe I'm just lazy and can't resist cartoons. Yeah.


 
Depression, No?

I saw Wilco last night at the Wiltern (here in LA, not too far from my apartment) and now I’m depressed. It was so super-awesome everything after is a damn let down.

I’ve seen them about 5 times, saw them back with the “old” band, the Being There/Summer Teeth/Mermaid Avenue band, which was cool, and the two bands since then. They were always awesome (except once when I saw them at UCLA, they didn’t seem too happy to be there), but last night they were super awesome. They rocked, so hard. Seriously the bad was so tight it was just amazing. Most of the songs were done as supah-dupah rocked-up version of what’s on the album. So very awwwwwwessssssooooooooommmmmmmme. So now I’m depressed.

Here’s a word of advice for concert goers who hope to ingratiate themselves to their favorite band somehow: Don’t assume you “get it”.

Someone held up a sign near the end of the 2nd encore- end of the concert- that said something about CA being a blue state, probably something like “welcome to a blue state” or something like that. Anyway, the head Wilco said (paraphrasing pretty closely) “it’s nice to be in a solid blue state like California” (cheers) “but I don’t believe in that red state, blue state bullshit. We’re purple, at best, and what we need to do is talk to each other and how are we supposed to do that if we divide ourselves up into red and blue? No one likes sending people off to die and dropping bombs on people’s heads. What we go to do is talk to each other.” Then something about politicians divide us up and they’re distracting us “how can we keep them from doing things we don’t want them to do when we’re too busy fighting each other? The people have the power”.

It might sound a little dopey but it was actually pretty articulate. He’s a witty, articulate guy, it turns out, and that’s not just the super-fan talking. Anyway, the sign sort of pissed him off, and sign-boy didn’t win any famous rocker friends last night.

Don’t assume you “get it”. Don’t assume you’re in on it with your favorite band, author, actor, whatever. That’s my so very fucking useful advice for the day.

As far as Jeff Tweedy’s plea, he’s right, but at the same time I think that’s a bit naïve. I seriously think about ¼ of the nation is completely and utterly lost from reason. It’d take a generation of work to create a majority who at least checked in on reality once in a while. This country isn’t divided by opinion, it’s divided by perception: those who perceive something akin to reality and those who perceive something else entirely. There’s no building bridges with the reality-deprived, rather you got to fight them for the next generation in line.

Anyway, awesome concert.

The opening act sucked though. Carla Bozulich, whom I’m learning is one of those much-admired, long lived, never-made-it-meanstream, “true artist” types. Well she’s got a great voice and looks really cool but she can’t write a song to save her life. It brought me back to the opening acts I used to endure when I’d go out to small clubs in Seattle. Dumb lyrics, pretentious, moody music, the whole slurred-words-over-real-sparse-instruments-and-then-explode-with-everyone-banging-the-shit-out-of-everything-like-it’s-more-meaningful-than-a-decently-written-song-that-isn’t-derivitive-of-everything-ever stuff.

She covered Willie Nelson’s “Red-headed Stranger” album and got him to sing on three of the tracks. I love Willie Nelson. She’s down with Willie and can’t write a song that doesn’t remind one of bad thirteen-year-old girl poetry? One of them “artists’ artist”. Like they all really love her because they appreciate her voice and tenacity so much but can’t step back and realize “shit, maybe she shouldn’t be opening for us cuz… well her songs sort of suck.”

Anyway…



Wednesday, November 10, 2004

 
Predictions for the next 4 years

These were wrote November 3rd for somewhere else online:

Predictions (realistic):

Social Security is dismantled. Some sort of super IRA replaces it, maybe current seniors will get to keep their SS annuity, but everyone else will have their money funneled to money managers. Not being a guaranteed annuity, the "safety net" disappears and SS essentially becomes another tax break for the very wealthy.

Public schooling shrinks due to most (80% or so) of public schools being listed as "failed" according to NCLB rules. The federal government takes administration of the schools over (that is a provision in NCLB) and essentially sells off every public school it takes over to for-profit education outfits and in some cases religious outfits.

ANWR is opened up for drilling.

Some sort of "tort reform" bill is passed which will essentially take away citizens' most powerful tool with which to fight power- the freedom to litigate.

The EPA continues on its current path and essentially becomes a placement agency for corporations who want to rape and pillage protected land.

The tax scheme flattens even more, and capital is no longer taxed at all. Essentially meaning only labor (poor and middle class people) really gets taxed. Rich people will make most of their income from capital, which will mean no growth for the bulk of the nation, while the wealthy just get more wealthy. We'll have the largest disparity between rich and poor in the entire world. Keep watching Cribs!

Air and Water purity laws are weakened so it'll be cool to have mercury in your water system. Makes it cheaper for private water companies to deliver the stuff and easier for other corps to dump into them.

More people are going to die as a direct result of this administration's incompetence, hubris, madness.

2, possibly 3 new supreme court justices are appointed. The racist Pickering is one of them. The court will then have a majority of radical conservatives and:

Abortion becomes illegal

Secret searches, wiretaps, monitoring, etc., become perfectly legal.

Detention without charge or access to trial becomes legal, destroying habeus corpus (which is pretty much gone anyway, right now).

Segregation could possibly become legal again. Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia interpret the constitution as it stood pre civil war, pre civil rights. Get 3 Pickering type guys in there and it's very possible "seperate but equal" could become perfectly legal.


A word on the realistic predictions: For the last 50 years we've been living in FDR's America, a New Deal America. Every decent social contract we have either sprung directly from the FDR administration or is a bi-product of its legacy, enacted by other administrations. Prior to FDR we did not have SS or unemployment insurance or Medicare or Medicade. All of those things could disappear- concervatives have been trying to do so since day one. Prior to FDR there were no laws regulating dumping and polluting. Prior to FDR there was no regulation of markets, the SEC did not exist. Prior to FDR racial discrimination was legal. Prior to FDR the country was for all intents and purposes a plutocracy.

All the ways life has basically been for the last 50 years, everything we've become accustomed to having around and having stay pretty much the same no matter who's in charge, all of that is not a product of circumstance. It's not simply "how things are", it's how people made them to be. We've been living a pretty good life in a country built by progressives, we've been living in a Democrat nation. All of that could go away. Every bit of it, having repurcussions that are difficult to imagine and frightening to contemplate. We're very simply living in a new and different country now. This isn't the America we've had for the last 50 years, the America we've had for the entirety of the modern age, so far.

I'm fucking scared. You simply can't expect things to stay pretty much the same because all the things that have made the last 50 years "pretty much the same" are about to be attacked and dismantled right before your eyes. It's going to become much uglier to live in this nation. Dog eat dog as a badge of integrity and patriotism, here we come!


Predictions (slightly paranoid):

We invade Syria, Iran, or both.


Predictions (really paranoid):

The North Korea paranoid thing from a few posts ago.


I'm always hoping someone wiser than myself will explain to me how I'm pretty ignorant and off the mark, because it would be really nice to think my predictions are just paranoid feelings of someone who's ill-informed, rather than an extrapolation of what I've been seeing for the last 4 years.


Here's one thing I know will come true:

Bush will continue to suck ass.







Wednesday, November 03, 2004

 
I'm all wrote out

I've been, uh, discussing the issue with some people on a message board. for some reason I'm an arrogant asshole for saying half the country is fucking idiots.

Whatever. I'm not being literal, of course, but calling half the country stupid for voting for Bush is like calling... uh...

Listen I'm really tired. Let me just tell you that I'm fucking freaked out, yet at the same time sort of not surprised in the least.

My predictions for America, 2008 later.




Tuesday, November 02, 2004

 
Update

According to Yahoo News, as of 9:33 Pacific time 11/2/04, there are currently at least 44,905,797 complete fucking idiots residing in the US.


 
Paranoia

Gonna let it take over for a moment:

Bush wins. The question is "what to do with North Korea?" We launch a strike on NK, built on some bullshit pretext of course, conventional, nuclear, whatever...

They launch all the nukes they have, say 1-6, at the west coast. Our new missle shield doesn't work, of course (because it can't work- physics ain't contigent upon belife, people), and LA and San Fran and San Diego get taken out, let's just say.

Horror, horror... "we need to stay the course"... "god bless america", etc.

NK is gone, much of SK, so is CA. What does that mean? Republican majorities for... well, perhaps forever. A new reality would be created- the world would become a place where any day of the week a city, a nation, a people could be wiped off the face of the earth simply because things were so fucked up. We'd make it that way. And of course if this country is stupid enough to elect Bush again in this environment, they'd be stupid enough to do whatever the GO would want them to do. All it takes is the balls, let's say, to accept the deaths of millions of people in NK, SK, and quite probably the largest west coast cities.

Do you think these guys don't have the balls to accept that? Fuck, they already have. They've already invaded a country for no good reason. They've already accepted the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Iraqis and certainly thousands of US soldiers...

What's scale to people who have already made the commitment to madness? Just logistics, that's all.


What are we going to do if he wins? Life won't be the same as it usually is. We won't be able to just muddle along and expect things to be basically OK. These people aren't good. They're not competent. They're mad. Mad.

And they run our country. And all of us fat, selfish, stupid Americans let them run it.

Holy fuck I'm so freaked out.

 
Please.

I'm going to cry if Bush wins. Cry like a little girl.

I can't even fucking contemplate it.

We're so very fucked if he wins- that's 2 or 3 supreme court judges, drilling everywhere but your forehead, breaking SS and medicare...

We're fucked if he wins and, frankly...

Fuck, it's just really staring me in the face now: the possibility. If he wins, what the fuck am I supposed to think about this nation? About people I know that voted for Bush? Are we really that insane?

Please George Burns, do me a solid.




Monday, November 01, 2004

 
My dream

My dream is on the day when W is vacating the white house I could be out there, across from the area he's gonna pass by, an area he's gonna see, holding a giant sign- we're talking huge, people- a giant fucking sign that says:

DON'T LET THE
DOOR HIT
YOUR ASS ON
THE WAY OUT,
ASSHOLE.


I guess I'd have to have A#@ and A#@hole or something but that's my dream.

Buy me and my wife a plane ticket and I'll do it, man.





This page is powered by Blogger.