| i guess the honeymoon is over |
[07 Jan 2009|04:05pm] |
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music |
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the clash - wrong 'em boyo |
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LiveJournal lays off 80% of its workforce. I guess fandom really was propping them up.
With a couple of exceptions, if you're on here, I can find you elsewhere.
I have had nothing to say for some time, and I can't see it changing anytime soon.
The userpic is a fragment of a signal from SETI. Signals decay.
Time to turn out the lights.
Goodnight.
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| 200th Annual* Horror Movie Review Roundup |
[07 Jul 2008|04:15pm] |
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music |
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bad religion - you |
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*(not actually the 200th)
Lately, I've been watching a fuckload of horror movies. I have no idea why - maybe undergoing something terrible inures you to lesser horrors like those on a movie screen. Maybe it's just been awhile. Either way? Fuckload of horror movies. Here's what I've got so far...
BORDERLAND - Stupid American fratboy tourists go to Mexico and mostly end up dead or dismembered for their trouble. Good premise, execution ends up inert. Samwise Gamgee shoots some people. Based on actual killings in Matamoros, Mexico. Rated "Meh."
THE RUINS (UNRATED) - Stupid American fratboy tourists, their girlfriends, and a couple of other guys go to Mexico and wish they got off as easily as those jokers in BORDERLAND. Although it's not nearly as much of a character-centered slow burn as the novel, it strikes a nice balance between supernatural goings-on and a bunch of people in a naturally hostile environment completely losing their shit because they weren't prepared for it, which is what I liked so much about THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. There are also some nice notes of moral ambiguity, especially considering the ending. It's not too many movies where you find yourself wishing people didn't survive.
HALLOWEEN (Rob Zombie remake, unrated version) - I have no idea why this has attracted so much hate. It's not like the original is no longer available for viewing. This is an actively hostile movie. It aims to make you uncomfortable and succeeds. This is a good thing. Every death scene in this movie looks like a crime scene photo, messy and horrible in its banality. When Rob was making THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, Bill "Otis" Moseley expressed some discomfort at one particular scene in the motel (no points for guessing which), and Rob said to him "art isn't safe." Fuckin'-A right. See it.
FRONTIERE(S) - On the other hand, I'm not sure why this one has gotten such great reviews. Sure, it's bleak, harsh, uncompromising and nihilistic, but it's also messy, unfocused, and suffers from uneven pacing. Nazi cannibals? Really? Aren't regular cannibals bad enough? There are a couple of good, tense sequences that do a good job of conveying the protagonists' desperation and fear, but also some decent-sized plot holes (are Nazis really going to settle for an obviously Arab woman for breeding stock?) and some interesting ideas that don't get explored (there's a big buildup about the "children" living in the tunnels, but it never goes anywhere). The whole movie feels rushed. Overrated.
THE ABANDONED - Ahhh, a good old-fashioned haunted-house movie. Woman goes back to the family home in Russia, and regrets doing so almost immediately. Of course, meeting your own (horribly drowned) doppelganger will do that to you. The plot's a little thin and the pacing suffers at points, but there's a metric fuckton of atmosphere to make up for it. Check it out.
MASTERS OF HORROR: CIGARETTE BURNS - John "I Directed THE THING, Motherfucker" Carpenter manages to take one of my favorite conceits and screw it all up. I am a sucker for the "searching for a rare piece of art made under dubious circumstances" story, and here we have a movie so disturbing that the premier audience went insane, and of which only one print survived. Should be layers of creepy mystery, but major plot points are given away early on, the nature of the film's influence is never really made clear, and there's this really muddled metanarrative that ends up making no sense at all. Dude, please. THE NINTH GATE did it better.
MASTERS OF HORROR: SOUNDS LIKE - On the other hand, Brad "I did SESSION 9 and THE MACHINIST, Now What, Bitches?" Anderson came up with a great, tightly focused story of tragedy, loss, and derangement built around one conceit: The protagonist has incredibly sensitive hearing. Much more of a psychological thriller than straight-up horror, I still found it very effective. You really don't want to know what that sounds coming from behind the bedroom door is. See it.
SUNSHINE - Not really horror either, more like tragic science-fiction, despite some plot holes, this movie captures some of the same adult, non-histrionic sci-fi vibe that still makes ALIEN so effective 30 years later. A lot of people criticize the last third of the movie, but I found the general idea plausible. Mostly a low-key, thoughtful thriller. Sort of like EVENT HORIZON if it didn't suck.
30 DAYS OF NIGHT - Finally, a vampire movie that isn't total ass. I haven't seen one of these since Coppola's take on DRACULA. The vampires are not pretty or elegant or sensual, people die horribly, and there's not much of a happy ending for most of the characters. I actually liked this much better than the comic upon which it is based, and I hope they never make a sequel because subsequent stories start to get too much into the sort of mythologizing so overdone with vampire stories. An image early on of the vampire's advance man, walking across the ice away from the monolithic black silhouette of the vampire's ship, still haunts me.
EDEN LOG - This is getting a lot of good press and got selected for the Toronto International Film Festival, but again, I think it's hype propping up a flawed movie. The protagonist wakes up in a cave, which seems to connect to some kind of massive underground facility which appears to be in the late throes of some horrible disaster. We basically discover what's happened as the protagonist does, which is effective up to the point when the protagonist catches up, realizes who he is and everything gets entirely too complicated with too little work to set it up beforehand. It's made well for a low-budget movie, and reminded me a lot of TETSUO: IRONMAN visually. Unfortunately, the ending piles a ton of crap on (not helped by inexpert translation for the dubbing) and what should have been "Ohhhh" is just "What? What the fuck?"
PRINCE OF DARKNESS - Haven't seen this in ages, but finding cheap copies of THE THING and IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS on DVD have me on sort of a John Carpenter kick. Giant ancient cylinder full of glowing green goo discovered in a secure vault underneath an abandoned church. Cylinder leaks, very bad things happen. Apart from some heavily dated special effects (and even more dated sexist dialogue), it holds up pretty well for the most part. Plus, it's got one of those patented John Carpenter endings that leaves everything pretty much up in the air. Ah,. those were the days.
Anything else I should watch?
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| uncle cranky's pop culture rant, part 1 (get off my lawn, bitches). |
[03 Jul 2008|03:58pm] |
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music |
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pailhead - man should surrender |
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Achtung, you snotty little fuckers. I speak Truth to you now.
1) "Scene" is not an adjective. Usage as such will be met with flamethrower.
2) By all means, continue to use Internet slang in real-world conversation. It's like protective coloring on plants, except that instead of "this plant is venomous", it says "this person is a total douche."
3) Get a fucking haircut. You look ridiculous. No, it's not that I don't understand - you actually look ridiculous.
4) Girl jeans are called that because girls wear them, not because wearing them will get you girls.
5) Getting your earlobes gauged and your neck tattooed is not going to seem quite so fucking awesome when you hit forty. Trust me.
6) The Strokes were just rich kids with passable record collections. Nothing more.
7) If you profess to like "emo" and have never heard of Rites of Spring, then a hearty sack-punching is on its way.
8) If you profess to like "screamo," then there's no hope for you at all. If you do, and you've never heard of Gravity Records, then you will be set on fire.
9) Vampire Weekend is what happens when Paul Simon's "Graceland" album gives people the wrong idea.
10) That "1,2,3,4" song by Feist is awful enough to be considered a hate crime. If you disagree, it is a sign of mental illness on your part. Lobotomy is on its way.
11) Nobody ever did or ever will talk like Ellen Page's character in "Juno."
12) "Juno" is the "Reality Bites" of the new millennium.
13) Everything that is cool now will be stupid in 20 years.
14) In 20 years, you will be me.
Sleep tight.
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| Doctor Whomeme |
[30 Jun 2008|12:14pm] |
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music |
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ted leo & the pharmacists - the high party |
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As instructed by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mama2jude...
"No second chances. I'm that sort of a man."
Now go post a quote from Doctor Who on your own LJ/blog/Intertubes Communication Portal.
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| "that's DOCTOR Fuckhead to you!" |
[05 Jun 2008|12:32pm] |
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music |
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gorgoroth - carving a giant |
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Today, I both got a year older and successfully defended my dissertation. Just need to do some minor rewrites on the doc, and that's it. I'm a PhD.
It's still sinking in.
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| Happy birthday to... |
[09 May 2008|01:56pm] |
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music |
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John Cameron Mitchell - "Tear Me Down" |
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mama2jude. So which anniversary of your 29th birthday is this? ;-)
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| that don't make no sense |
[09 Feb 2008|01:57am] |
Exchange with my sisters during their recent visit:
THEM: "You're the golden child as far as Mom's concerned. Everything one of our kids does, she finds a way to connect it to you."
ME: "What? You all have kids, you're homeowners, you still live in the same state...and I'm going to be up to my eyeballs in debt for the rest of my life, will never be anything but a renter, and ran as far and fast from home as I could when I turned 18...and I'm the golden child?"
THEM: "Yep."
ME: "That's fucked up."
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| people who've died |
[09 Feb 2008|01:39am] |
When I'm bored or distracted or nostalgic (and bored and distracted), I Google people with whom I've been connected in the past. I wonder what became of them after our paths were done crossing. The results have been interesting.
My abusive ex-girlfriend, good Catholic girl, is married, Wiccan, bisexual and polyamorous in the Midwest. She also has multiple sclerosis. That's kinda fucked up all around.
My first girlfriend ever is a Wiccan priestess (is there a pattern here?) in the Mid-Atlantic. She's married too. Has a blog. Doesn't seem like she came off the rails like the girl above did, but she's really religious and spiritual. My atheistic, rational self is amused.
The girl to whom I lost my virginity is also married (although not Wiccan), and active in the SCA (which is about one step away from being Wiccan, now that I think about it). I think she was active in the Unitarian church, too (ibid.)
Of the people I knew in college, a couple are married to indie rock musicians, one put on a fuckton of weight and does a show for NPR, one lost a fuckton of weight and works as a reporter in the South*, another works as a reporter in the Midwest, one's a photojournalist who's been shooting the Iraq war, and one tried running for office in the Midwest and got nailed on, I think, low-level corruption or something. Fuck him anyway, he was a dick.
*(he emailed me a few years ago to get back in touch, and it only took the one message for me to remember why I fell out of touch with him to begin with)
This girl upon whom I had a crush ended up in the Southwest and I don't think she's married. I always thought of her as the one who got away, although "the one whom I drove away by being a spectacularly horrible person" might be a touch more accurate. A friend from high school is serving in Iraq. I think another friend from high school ended up in the Pacific Northwest. Yet another friend from high school survived his tour in the Gulf during the first war and I think works as an animal control officer now.
Another friend got remarried after I went with her to her divorce. We had a falling-out before my own wedding, and while she was the first girl I think I ever loved (unrequited, natch), we haven't really spoken in about 6 years. It doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would.
A girl I dated (awkwardly, unsuccessfully, briefly - was it a bad sign that our second or third date was going to see "In The Company Of Men"?) is attempting a stand-up comedy career on the West Coast. Huh. I think of another girl I went out with briefly before meeting my future wife. She was like a deer in the headlights, and to this day I wonder what the hell was going on in her head, but I don't think I even ever got her last name.
The denizens of the Usenet group I used to frequent are scattered to the four winds. Probably better that way.
People meet, they grow apart, spiral away and back together and away again.
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| perfect sound forever |
[09 Feb 2008|01:23am] |
Everything decays, everything dies. For some reason, I find something incredibly sad about links to web pages which no longer exist. Nothing is permanent, everything disappears into the mists of time, except where it hasn't (yet) and you see a snapshot of the world as it was for a moment, of people as they were at that time. And you wonder where it all went. Or you know exactly where it went and how it got there.
Once upon a time, I was a decent writer. I think that graduate school has about beaten that out of me. I haven't written a poem in five years. And the first thing I've wanted to write was an elegy to my dead sons. Which doesn't bode well for my creative health. I wonder sometimes what I've given up.
I love what I do, honest. Maybe I'm getting older, and that need to burn up a page isn't there anymore. My writing was getting more spare and minimal anyway. Trying to convey more with less, with simple language. That's harder than reams of flowery language.
I'm not a huge fan of Hemingway, but he wrote the perfect short story. Six words...
"For sale: Baby shoes, never worn."
I would love to be able to do that. Maybe one day again I will. Right now I'm not so sure.
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| the comedy of hate - join me, won't you? |
[09 Feb 2008|12:38am] |
Some time ago, I pulled out a bunch of books by Re/Search Publications - books of counterculture that, pre-Internet, were one of the few decent collections of unusual information. I was re-reading the Industrial Culture Handbook, interviews with Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Boyd Rice - none of this faux-angry disco garbage. And, going on 10 years since I'd purchased the book, something struck me...
These people were assholes.
I don't mean in a stick-it-to-the-man way, I mean in a pretentious, narcissistic, mean, callous way. At the time, many of them would have been written off as delinquents and sociopaths. And that's because that's exactly what some of them were - just delinquents and sociopaths who could wrap themselves in the cloak of Art. At best, many of them were incredibly ineffectual. Their response to decay and depression was to spout Rimbaud, watch obscure films, and talk about how much more important those things were than anything else. There were bits of gold here and there - for all of their pretensions, I think Cabaret Voltaire were onto something with the idea of an "information war", and Mark Pauline of SRL is still blowing shit up even today, and if you look at things like Battlebots and "Mythbusters", it makes a little more sense why this stuff keeps bubbling up out of San Francisco. But mostly it's a bunch of seriously maladjusted people trying to justify doing really mean, horrible shit, cloaked in nihilism and self-righteousness, validated by syncophantic interviewers who are just as pretentious and shallow as the people they've deified.
I re-read the interview with Boyd Rice, and it occurs to me that you never see anyone but white men advocating social Darwinism. I re-read the interview with Monte Cazzaza, and it occurs to me that a fascination with serial killers doesn't seem as...edgy...as it did back then. I re-read the interviews with SPK and Z'ev, and I have to remind myself that once upon a time, pounding on oil drums and layering samples over electronic squealing was considered shocking. For fuck's sake, SPK's Graeme Revell is a prolific soundtrack composer now.
And I kept having the same thought over and over: I fell for it. I bought into it. I believed it. And where are they now? Where did that all get us? What was the point? Jesus, what was I thinking?
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| it's beginning to and back again |
[08 Feb 2008|11:48pm] |
Horrible shit and late nights and dark and quiet have a way of stirring up memories. This writer I like once said "Night time is the hardest time to be alive. Four AM knows all my secrets." And that's kind of what it feels like right now.
This may be a little stream-of-consciousness.
Every now and then, I am struck by the urge to look back at who I was and think about who I am now, and see if I can trace the steps that lead me from there to here. It's often embarrassing, wince-inducing, awkward. How could I have thought/said/done that? Shit, sometimes I look back at the person I was only a year before and wince. HL Mencken, in his Devil's Dictionary, defined "achievement" as "the death of endeavor and the birth of disgust." Sometimes I think "maturity" could be defined the same way. I think I once defined "maturity" as "the process of learning that everything you thought was true is actually a lie."
I'm pretty sure I was, like, 19 or something when I said that. I could have used a little more maturity at that age - even maturity as I defined it. A lot of what I thought to be true back then turned out to be a lie, much to my relief, actually.
Somebody once asked me why I got tattoos. I told them it was so I would never forget who I used to be. You get older, you start caring about different things than when you were young. Which is only right and natural. Leave being young for young people. But at some point I think I was so afraid of going so completely into some bland, mediocre existence - I so didn't trust my own head - that I needed a permanent reminder. Which is okay, I don't regret the tattoos I have, and I want more. But I want them for different reasons now.
I remember getting up one day, probably when I was around 27 or 28, looking at myself - my Doc Martens, my ripped jeans, my Garment District-purchased thriftwear, and thinking to myself "you're not going to be able to pull this off much longer, you know." And I was right. I had turned the corner from wanting to broadcast who and what I was to the world to being content with what was in my head as the measure of my person. Being surrounded by 18-21 year olds all the time helps, too. A constant reminder that time marches on, and that I am no longer young. Instead of intensity and unreasoning passion, I have perspective. I have a sense of how many of these private dramas will eventually turn out. It's not a bad feeling. I'm okay with being an adult. I have earned it.
So now that I am here, and that I know I am here, I can look back at what was with the wisdom I didn't have then. Which isn't to repudiate who I was or what I did, I'll own it and even if I can't be proud of it (and I've certainly done things of which I am not proud, and more than a few), I can at least understand how it happened the way it did.
The 90s were, in retrospect, kind of fucked up. I spent entirely too much of the 90s looking for external validation, trying to be cool because I didn't especially like myself, had no self-confidence, and didn't, deep down, think I was worthy of good things. I let the culture define me, and I settled for less than I should have. And I was probably a histrionic, self-absorbed prick a lot of the time. I wasn't very mature, emotionally, and I acted appallingly sometimes.
Just how far down does the rabbit hole go?
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| another one bites the dust |
[07 Sep 2007|03:44pm] |
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music |
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m.i.a. - las vegas |
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Well, this sucks. A Wrinkle In Time is one of my favorite books from childhood. I credit it with teaching me that mindless conformity is bad, and that it's okay to be who you are, however strange that is. Not an untimely passing necessarily, and from all accounts she wasn't as good and perfect as her books, but still.
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| once more into the breach. |
[24 Aug 2007|04:12pm] |
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music |
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h2o - helpless not hopeless |
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Well, that was quite a summer.
Survived my comps, went to an awesome 2-week training institute (summer camp for psychology grad students, basically), and come back to a faceful of 8 hojillion studies to run, a dissertation to produce, teaching a new (advanced) class, and what feels like only 3 hours a month to do everything in. So while I'm not the most talkative motherfucker under the best of circumstances, I'm going to be downright impossible to find for awhile. Busybusybusybusybusybusybusy.
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| nothing brings me out of the woodwork like a music meme... |
[20 Jun 2007|09:26am] |
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music |
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new bomb turks - shoot the offshoot |
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...and you have radio_redhead to thank for this one.
List seven songs you are into right now, no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.
Mine are:
1. Blank Stare - White Corpse
2. The Horrors - Count In Fives
3. Amy Winehouse - Rehab
4. Fucked Up - Baiting The Public
5. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists - A Bottle Of Buckie
6. Eve (with Swizz Beatz) - Tambourine
7. Boz Scaggs - Lido Shuffle
Tag your ownselves!
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| two cents |
[04 Jun 2007|10:16am] |
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music |
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really red - entertainment |
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I'll be honest - I'm really not as worked up over the recent LJ censorship hoo-hah as some are. It doesn't affect me much. That said, I do have a few observations...
1) How does it not occur to you that a group with a name like "Warriors For Innocence" might not have - oh, I don't know - an agenda? And might not be wholly reasonable or moderate in their approach?
2) Painfully Obvious: I think denying pedophiles the means to congregate and network is a good thing. I think using existing means to spy, collect data, and then sting them would have been better*. I think denying rape, molestation, and incest survivors the means to congregate and network is a bad thing. I also recognize that sifting through potentially thousands of journals to determine which is which is an onerous, damn-near-impossible task. Once set in motion, there was no way this aspect of it was going to resolve well.
3a) I'm unsure about where I stand on the fantasy/ageplay journals. Part of me thinks what the hell, it's not like you can't find every other fucked-up fetish on the Internet, and many of them on LJ**. As long as it's consenting adults, I'm not comfortable passing judgment. I may think it's completely twisted and wonder how healthy it is, but that goes for all kinds of things. Part of being an adult is having the leeway to do the wrong thing and make mistakes. So I may be repulsed, but given the above qualifications, I don't know how far out to draw the line, were it even my line to draw.
3b) On the other hand, pedophilia is that special case where fantasies and ideation are enough to get you red-flagged. So when is "ageplay" or incest fantasy simply exploring roles, and when is it rehearsal? When is it a substitute for what you really want? I mean, are you getting off on an adult acting like a child, or are you getting off on the child? Again, not the easiest to tease apart logistically or morally. It's not even just that LJ aren't the brain police, they can't be the brain police. It's not feasible, and their ham-handed tactic of getting rid of anything even remotely related proves that.
So there's no good answer to this one either.
4) Finally - it seems like one group of people who've been really, really up in arms about this has been all the various permutations of fandom - specifically people who write fan (and slash) fiction. I know some people will see this as horrible, but I'm having a hard time mustering any sympathy for them. I have friends who write professionally, and they make a living with their books and their characters. When people reappropriate those characters for their own purposes, standing on the shoulders of the original creators, well, that seems icky to me. When those people then get all huffy and victim up because their means of expression has been taken away, well, guess what? You don't have a right to piggyback on other people's creative work. If they tolerate or ignore it, it's a privilege at best. The whole debate over whether or not making up stories where Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy fuck each other*** is or is not aesthetically bankrupt is something else entirely. This is entirely personal, I know not everyone shares my distaste toward fanfic and slash, but when what you do is legally dubious on the best of days, you don't get to whine about not getting to do it anymore. Not any more than I get to yell at the cable company for figuring out that I've been getting free cable for the last six months.
And those protest banners for "Strikethrough '07"? I think they're hilarious.
*(Of course, with a name like "Warriors For Innocence", subtlety is probably not a strong suit.)
**(The day I stumbled across images of Thor engaging in vigorous anal sex with the Hulk, I think I died a little.)
***(Oh, how I wish I were joking.)
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| just to make sure we're clear on this... |
[17 May 2007|04:56pm] |
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music |
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therapy? - heartbreak this |
] |
Rich people receive better treatment than everyone else, whether they deserve it or not.
Celebrity heiress
Paris Hilton will only be jailed for 23 days of a 45-day sentence for a driving offence and will be held separately from other inmates, officials said on Thursday.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has decided it will cut the 26-year-old's sentence after reviewing the case and giving her credit for good behavior.
Spokesman Steve Whitmore said she would also be kept in a special needs housing unit.
"This was decided because of her high profile," Whitmore told Reuters. "She will do fine if she follows the rules."
Any guesses as to how anybody else would get treated when busted for DUI? Yeah, that's what I thought.
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