I don’t wish to over-hype this video, nor do I wish to under-announce its subtly-played, comedic attention to detail. It is basically a fine and funny dissection of how to produce your bog-standard (that is, every kind) of television news report.
If you’ve ever been to a journo school and learned how to do this stuff for a fee: you’ve wasted your time and money. This is all you need to know, right down to the uselessly expressive hand gestures and lazy and pointless vox pops.
Quality live footage of my favourite Ghosts track (by NIN) has arisen. It’s a groovy, synth based number, and easy to clap along to, it would seem.
Live, it has a more emphasised piano line. The recorded version is a bit heavier, but I think the live version brings across the rather nice entwining of instruments and textures, steady beats, and a subtle-ish but satisfying progression (largely carried out through timbre, which is interesting enough).
From Life comes this list of well-known booze-hags and addicts. It kicks off nicely with Charles Baudelaire (pictured), addicted to booze and opium, and credited with the marvelous quote:
“Always be drunk … Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk.”
I have requested they add one of my favourite authors, Raymond Carver. Wikipedia puts it like this:
“Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s. Carver stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. After being hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his ’second life’ and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977.”
Let me talk for a few self-indulgent sentences about The Catcher in the Rye. This is memory talking, too, and not a fresh mind after a recent reading. But my thoughts right now are thus…
It’s not just a teen angst novel, not just a novel about a drifter, a loner or misfit. It’s never so boring as that. And it’s not just a coming of age story, it’s not just about a young man finding himself. (I’m not sure he really does by the end. Or I can’t distinctly recall such a conclusive ending). It was so remarkable to read and so fascinating, recognisable, and immersive, because it described everything around these typical threads. It was perhaps the first novel I ever read that concerned itself with the mystery of being nowhere as though nowhere was no absence but a real, physical place in which one wandered and touched the walls and met the people there. It was your insides turned inside out and picked over, like tea leaves, where meaning was thick and dripping but still elusive. It treated the existence it spoke of with such lyrical veracity that it made the distinctions between poetry, life, drama, documentary, fiction not just impossible to discern, but irrelevant.
Or, in short, it was the first book I ever read that, once I’d finished it, I had to re-read it again immediately.
Ninety-one years is a good innings, Mr JD Salinger. Though I’ve not read anything more of yours – although I plan to – that one life could produce such a singular work as Catcher is remarkable enough. Even if it skyrocketed you into self-seclusion. What a thing to give.
Yeah, I’m feeling sentimental. But why shouldn’t I?
.. And it is not enticing or alluring, and it does not give off any other sort of provocative yet attractive signals. It is just icky. But I am getting ahead of myself here…
I have gone through a bit of a weird trajectory with Lady Gaga. She might like that fact. At first I became familiar with her because of Poker Face. It was fucking everywhere. It pounded from clubs and from car doors where early-teen girls sang along in the passenger seat beside their mothers who held out a similar resistance to my own. Did they cave as I caved? I mean, I held out for a while.
‘This is really fucking banal, annoying shit,’ I would say, and others would nod and slug back their drinks in agreement.
‘When can we put something else on, something decent,’ somebody would say. Probably it was me, reaching for a Jane’s Addiction CD.
But then it began to catch in my head. Po-po-po-po / Po-po-poker-face. The beats, the rhythms, the various moments of catchy head-fuckery in each song began to snag on my brain like rusty hooks in deep-sea seaweed. It wasn’t long before I realised the bitch was actually clever musically, and ironically – in the actual sense of real irony. She was self-aware, and aware of her industry, and aware of what she was doing, and aware of the need for a shifting persona, of how to exploit her shifting persona and how to shift it further. We were never talking about Lady Gaga. We were talking about a creation, created by some woman who’s real name I still can’t remember, and perhaps therefore we were never even talking about that woman. But who knew which was which?
Then other songs came, and they snagged sooner, faster, harder.
Then there was Bad Romance. And the chorus in which the words ‘Ga Ga’ appear distinctly. And I thought, You’re just pushing your agenda a bit too far, you dirty whore. My gut feeling was even more drastic. I wanted to break something. Why? I can’t quite explain it. But I felt sold out by a woman I’d never wholly bought into in the first place.
(I have never and would never buy any one of her CDs – or download any tracks, if that’s less outdated than purchasing Compact Discs).
But it was a bit like being castrated moments before full and proper copulation. In a subtle way, with a quick flick of the knife, while she grinned, flicking her tongue like a snake and also like a sexy, expensive hooker.
Without the make-up and those extravagant and artful outfits I believe she is very plain to look at.
And then there was this year’s Grammy’s. I saw one photo of her dressed like an outer space Barbie, and I thought, Wow! that whore bitch castrating she-devil might just lure me back into her day-glow cave, built from bricks of melted-down prosthetic limbs and mortared with ultra-refined pop sugar. Then I saw another photo and noted more certainly the distinctly mocking way in which she posed in parody of both her genre, the occasion, and her own (shifting) image, and I took another step toward that cave…
But then I saw this picture of her performance on stage. (I really don’t want to view any video footage, in which things move, move, move…). And I thought, This is the most disgusting piece of fish-mongering I have ever seen. She’s even wearing the scales to suit. I could smell her sad flange through my PC screen. Beyond my duty as a gay man, I was repulsed (and it was not just my duty as a gay man. It was my duty as human – no sexism intended – to be revolted).
But I am also strangely, weirdly, allured. It’s provocative but considered. Is it? It’s daring. Foolish? Hideous! But, again, daring! And again, it is a middle-finger to you filthy fuckers (yes, me too) judging from your safe and dull armchairs. And probably a middle-finger to you pre-, early-, mid-, late-, post-teens still buying into the shifting, ironic aesthetic of whatever you want to see.
But whence will arrive the crash, the big end, the mighty fall, the day that Gaga goes gaga?
Gagagaga / Gagagagaga.
I saw Avatar last week. I plan at some point to write a review… though whether I actually do remains to be seen.
In the meantime, here’s a reasonably funny look at how to become a N’avi in 10 seconds (assuming you are already wearing a blue-wash body suit)…
CAUTION: contains spoilers.
That video rather reminds me… Comparisons have been made between the Smurfs and the N’avi, but I think there’s another source of inspiration also to be taken into account…
It’s probably a fad, but I’ve been very into puzzle books of late.
Not specific puzzle books, like those dedicated to Sudoku, logic puzzles, or crosswords. But those that offer a plethora of puzzles to puzzle over.
To be honest though, I do enjoy the easier puzzles – for a time. But I then crave something more challenging. And then – something simpler again. It’s a reasonable cycle of puzzlement, I think. Crosswords offer a format that can attend to all degrees of difficulty in a single match.
My favourite ‘puzzles’:
Do puzzles keep the mind sharp? Probably.
Do they sharpen it more than reading a good book of poetry? Probably not. But also yes, in smaller but more varied ways.
Do they make every day feel like you’re on holiday somewhere? On a deck chair (even if you’re really sinking into a rough-springed and sagging sofa), in the sunshine (even if it’s really cloudy or pouring down), with all of time to spare (even if it’s really Sunday afternoon and there is the overwhelmingly depressing fact of work in less than 12 hours, including those lost on sleep)? Yes, they do. They make you feel like you’re on holiday.
Aesthetic question though – why do the covers of mixed puzzle books all feature an irrelevant picture of a dizzy blonde or brunette smiling like they have brain damage and their teeth were spread on with a cheese knife?
Meet Stinky the Grump. He’s just your typical garbage bin puppet teaching kids all about the facts of life. The real facts, that is. And he does so through the wonderful medium of song. In particular, a little ditty called Fuck It.
I believe this featured originally on Chapelle’s Show.
Yes boys and girls, it has come to pass that Amazing Horse has been covered. We may thank The Nerd Follia for their brave effort. The original could never be surpassed, but the attempt is a fascinating beast of its own. Even if it does break the devilish pleasure of an endless loop.
Because of this post, all about how amazing water is, I’ve been getting more than a few search hits from those out there interested in the HOT HOT HOT act of…
… Water Fu*king.
Keep it up guys, and I’m sure you’ll one day find a river / lake / ocean / urine stream beyond your wettest dreams to settle down with.
