out of spiritus mundi

The angry bro guys in their huge trucks. The nervously ironic hipsters, giggling endlessly about pop culture. The self-satisfied middle-aged white guys explaining the world to each other with phrases from talk radio. The impossibly strict radical activists lecturing each other with phrases from Cultural Studies classes. The sullen, slow moving underclass teenagers. The very, very quiet Mexican ladies working menial jobs. The subculture kids piling on makeup and leather and making new schisms of nothing. The armies of couched people in front of televisions, pounding beers and watching us rationalize to each other. We're all nervous as hell.

Everyone knows it. This thing is ready to blow. We're all watching a cigarette ash grow long, far longer than it should. When is that damned thing going to drop?

I remember standing in the middle of the street at midnight, on Ventura Boulevard, in the middle of the L.A. Riots. There was a curfew on, but the cops were all down south. Greg and I walked down the center median of an empty street. "Do you think it's the end?" he asked. "No," I said, "More bullshit yet to come."

This time I can't smell smoke, and we didn't have to drive through an angry armed crowd. No troops on the streets.

It feels like 1992 again though. The economy is teetering, about to slide, taking the lower middle class down to the bottom again, exposing all the inequities, pushing people past their limits. There's a hell of a lot of wealth around me every day but it's clearly fake. If the Chinese ask for their money back or someone cooks off a suitcase nuke in Chicago, or maybe even some little moth's breath of fate happens to tip things over, something impossibly tiny... Suddenly we'll see what we've been living.

I feel like I'm in a bar full of angry drunks lately. All it will take is one elbow bump, and we'll find out what shits we were all along.

a leni riefenstahl production written by torquemada and starring charlton heston

A long time ago, when I was a journalist, one of my colleagues was the excellent arts writer Ernest Hardy. Looks like he's still doing it. Google shows him writing about film for the L.A. Weekly.

Around that time the movie Soul Man came out. This wasn't just a bad movie. This was a vile movie. The whole thing rested on the wacky humor of "reverse racism" in which a white guy tries to be black in order to get a full scholarship to Harvard. That's painful to think about for 10 seconds; imagine it as a 90 minute movie.

Ernest gamely went off to review the thing. I wish I still had his review around. The part I remember is that he said another audience member summed up the film perfectly about 10 minutes in when he yelled "THIS SHIT AIN'T FUNNY!" to the general murmured approval of the audience.

I've been thinking about that review a lot lately. Every day I read something here, or in a news source or something, and I find myself yelling the same thing at the screen:

THIS SHIT AIN'T FUNNY!

It isn't, none of it is. And it's far worse now than in 1986. We're going fucking backwards in time.

Wretched hive of scum and villainy

Our local spaceport has a squatter dilemma. Via LA Observed.

robot nazi lizard satan pig serpent HAARP tastykake

last nite my niece was murdered exactly like my other brother¥s daughter.. hit from the side in a car crash... she was a straight A student studying law.. i believe it was the filtered photos of whom DIANA called a ROTWEILER that provoked them.. apparently they do NOT like to be known for their LIZARDNESSSESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!

I had forgotten about this person. His Her photoshop filter research reveals many, many things. Apparently if you solarize or posterize world figures you can see the eeee-vil. Me, I think Henry Kissinger looks like an evil space lizard already.

http://www.wiolawapress.com/

I shouldn't have looked. Ugh.

I just spent about an hour going through Vice Magazine's website, after reading a bit about it on other peoples blogs. What a piece of shit.

They've scoured the planet's trendy nightclubs for the most privileged young people they can find, told them they're special, and put them in a magazine to giggle in an oh so sophisticated way at the lesser beings below them. Every bad trend is there: pointless snark, kitsch, racist humor, rich hipster elitism, shitty trendy taste in music, yet more racist humor, and that awful self-satisfied sneer of the half-educated writer who's never read anything longer than a cereal box.

If you took the meanness of the old Spy, the vapid trendiness of the old Details, the neocon triumphalism of Wired, and the masturbatory self-congratulation of Interview, you'd almost have this one. Maybe needs more Maxim to get the recipe right.

I can be this big of an asshole too, but I don't go to work and put out a magazine about it, it's just something that happens to me after 2 beers when I get thoughtless and mean.

Fuck you, Vice.

(no subject)

I found a theme for this year so far! I'm going to have it made up into a big red and blue banner with tassels hanging off it, as for a high school dance, and put it on my house and a t-shirt and a bumper sticker and maybe one of those suburban mom house flags. It will say:

I THOUGHT WE WERE ON THE SAME SIDE!

playing with others

I have a tragicomic history with subcultures.

I'm a joiner, and ought not to be. I get a crush on a new one, go on a couple of dates, start to get really into it, go steady, and then there's a loud messy breakup or maybe just a slow tapering fade into failure. The groups I've been through with since about junior high school age include (in no sorted order):

• Gamer dork
  
• Punk
  
• Amateur radio
  
• Evangelical Christianity
  
• Left wing politics
  
• Gun nuts
  
• Car nuts
  
• SF geeks
  
• Music scenesters
  
• Entertainment people
  
• Computer geeks
  

There may well be others I've blotted out. It never works, you see. There's always some dealbreaker, something about the subculture that drives me nuts, and it's not going to change. My choices are to bug out or flip out, and I go insectoid. If you look at that list, once you stop giggling, you'll see why. The geeks and dorks can't see out of their fanboy worlds, and are socially retarded. Scenester-hipster-entertainment types are self-absorbed social climbers and users. Both the Christians and the radical political crew demand ever-strict adherence to a code of thought and conduct which eventually becomes insane in either the Stalinist or ultramontane way. The only partial successes in that list are punk and cars, because you can always yell FUCK YOU at a punk, and you can back slowly away from the person who's obsessed with mopar and go hang out with the Subie crowd for a bit.

Usually people list the groups they've failed as badges of pride. My identity is so strong, they say, that I can't compromise for anyone so I'm a lone gun! They tried to tell me what to think, but I'm a rebel, etc.

I think it's a failure, though. Something about me needs not only for the entire world to love me unconditionally, but for all my groups and circles to get along with me and each other, harmoniously, forever. I am that despised moderate liberal intellectual softy who wants to find the common ground everywhere, and ends up pissing everyone off. Goddamn Menshevik. If I had more balls I'd be able to tolerate the local craziness of groups, maybe, and not get all twitchy and leave.

I sure don't miss the music scenesters, though. Yecch. Give me a good honest gun nut any day over that.