Category Archives: Thoughts

Walking Towards the 8-bit Horizon

by

0

After two years without glasses, I finally managed to see an eye doctor a few months ago. I promised myself I’d be honest on the eye exam, unlike my last trip to the DMV when I memorized the sequence of letters before reading them back to the woman at the counter.

I knew my vision was bad, but not third-line-unintelligible bad. After I failed to read virtually all the letters, the doctor slid through various lenses until we settled on a set that brought the world into focus. For the first time in two years, I started to see what I had missed.

Two months later my glasses arrived. Since then, I have been amazed at the things I have seen:

Every light emanating from a house after dark is generally a wide-screen television that is big enough for me to see what they’re watching. I feel like I’m being invited into the homes of my neighborhood every time I drive to the store. Scratch that. I feel like I’m being strong armed into their living rooms to watch shitty CGI family films, MMA championships, and football. There are no refreshments served as incentive for me to feign interest. I’m grateful that the speed limit doesn’t allow for prolonged exposure to their programs, because I would probably watch out of curiosity and subsequently be bored to fucking death.

When I was a child, one of the most compelling elements of gaming was that there were these elaborate backgrounds that the player couldn’t explore. I wanted to hike in the mountains of Ninja Gaiden II. I wanted to go to a theater in Double Dragon II’s skyline. The virtue of 8-bit gaming wasn’t what I could do. It was what I couldn’t do and that limitation’s ability to spark my imagination. I don’t see that in games as much as I used to.

The houses in my neighborhood are the same way. Before I got my glasses, I saw nothing but a blur in the neighborhood windows. I had to imagine the source of the blur. Perhaps it was a fluorescent light used to breed some obscure species of moth that my neighbor was using as his murder signature. Maybe it was a light box and someone in my neighborhood was inking his/her magnum opus: a graphic novel.

Now I see the source of these lights. There’s enough detail to ensure I’m not compelled by what I see inside. The anonymous throng of people who make up my town could easily be a ubiquitous clone of the same person placed in house after house. They’re going through the same motions, watching the same screens. And if you drive long enough, you start to notice patterns, just like you might in 8-bit games or old cartoons like Tom & Jerry where cat and mouse run past the same fridge time and time again.

For some reason all of that disappoints me. Yet I am in complete awe as I stare up at the sky, watching the same stars and the same moon traverse the same pattern every night. Glasses or no, that black canopy above me evokes the same feeling of wonder. No matter how well my sight is, no matter what magnification I view the stars through, I’m mesmerized. I notice patterns there too. Some stars radiate with the same intensity, or waver rhythmically as if the entire universe dances to the same song. But I can’t travel there, which inspires me to imagine what might be if I could. One look up at night and I become a child again. I’m staring into a 32″ screen wondering what it’d be like to walk among the green-tinted wreckage that scrolls through the background of Journey to Silius. My sense of wonder is rekindled, and sight once again inspires wonder instead of apathy.

I want to lay on the rooftop of one of those abandoned buildings and stare up at that green intestinal tubing sky.

In my short time on this planet I have watched so many people who see things clearly become disillusioned. I have fallen into that trap in the past. But from now on I’m following the things that inspire imagination and wonder when I see them clearly. When clarity reveals intricacy instead of simplicity, that inspires me to seek understanding.

When clarity reveals simplicity, perhaps it is a delusion. Something lurks beneath the surface of even the neighborhoods where every 60″ television is switched to Sunday-night football. Sometimes I think simplicity is a personal construct, a horse blinder we create for ourselves to avoid being overwhelmed by the natural intricacy that exists even in repetition and ubiquity. Then again, maybe everything can be boiled down to repetitious actions on a repetitious template. If so, many of us seem to be perfectly fine with retracing our own steps and repeating our own actions.

Speaking of which, anyone remember this video that used to air on Cartoon Network?

Three Things Less Violent and Absurd than Black Friday

by

3

It’s Black Friday, which means most of the people I know will be sitting at home watching YouTube updates featuring this year’s horde of idiocy plaguing Wal*Marts across the country. World Star Hip Hop already has a few uploaded. In one, folks create a mosh pit in the electronics section, brutally choking one another with packaging plastic so they can get . . . TracFones?

What the fuck? Good thing Apple is too cheap to cut substantial amounts of their retail prices, otherwise we would have had a chance to watch hipsters beat the partially digested tofu out of one another. THAT would have been a spectacle.

Anyway, here’s what we DO get to see:

I’m not sure what the fatality and injury count is yet, but while we’re waiting for updates, I thought I’d share a few things that-given the way Black Friday has been handled this year-are less violent and absurd than this ritualistic shopping spree that generally gets christened by someone being trampled to death:

1. Splinter to the eye in Fulci’s Zombie:

Why is it less violent than Black Friday: First, we’ve come to expect violence from zombies. It’s how they do. Conversely, there’s something incredibly disturbing about watching your aunt or grandmother crush other women underfoot to get 40% off 50 Shades of Grey. That. Shit. Will. Scar. You. For. LIFE.

2. 50 Shades of Grey

 

Why is it less absurd than Black Friday: Many people swoon over this book and act a fool when they get into the “hot spots” this book has to offer (like the infamous tampon scene) but most of them have the decency to do it in the privacy of their own homes, rather than on the tiled floor of their local shopping center.

3. The Atheist’s Worst Nightmare is a Banana

Why is it less absurd than Black Friday:  It isn’t. Nothing is more absurd than this jackass and his not-so-thinly veiled declaration of idiocy. But you haven’t experienced the dregs of society until you’ve watched this. You’re welcome.

 

 

The Physics of Talking Shit

by

4

Light travels at approximately 299 792 458 m/s. It has been hypothesized that, if we travel faster than the speed of light, we will travel back in time. While this hypothesis remains in part unproven, it’s always struck me as solid. Primarily, it strikes me as solid because as soon as you act like an ass hat and give someone reason to talk shit, it can undo everything you’ve built up in a matter of moments. That’s because shit talk (ST) moves faster than the speed of light. It’s a simple formula we all can live by, and the basic elements are below:

ST = Shit Talk

c = velocity of light

Therefore

vST > vc

The movement of shit talk is relative to the atrocity that fuels the shit talk, however. Depending on the community, the atrocity you commit, i.e. AoA could make the velocity of shit talk grow in a cubic, linear, or exponential fashion.

AoA = Act of assholism

So, using the formula for exponential decay, in which the variable x = vST and r = AoA + community variables, we get:

Case Study

Let’s take a look at Michael Jackson’s career using this formula. His act of atrocity was arguably grand. Therefore, r = AoA + community variables.

It took Mr. Jackson over two decades to acquire his billion dollar fortune. But, upon rumors of his alleged perved out interactions, his empire was reduced to rubble within two years.  So for each year after AoA and subsequent shit talk, Michael Jackson’s career and his accomplishments were undone by ten years. Thus, in our previous formula, r = 1,000%? I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. But it’d be something like that.

My penultimate conclusion here is that if vST  = c as is evidenced by the case above, with exception to the shoddy figures (let’s think about this on a general qualitative level rather than quantitative) Then by acting like an ass we can travel back in time! Unfortunately it only results in cubic, linear, or exponential decay.

Bummer

The only way around this is to do as Thrasymachus suggested in Part I of Plato’s Republic, and commit an atrocity so great that even shit talk cannot send s/he who commits the atrocity back in time. That requires having direct power over the people who would otherwise talk shit about you. Then you are safe from society’s wrath and time-travel capabilities.

. . . of course, simply not being an asshole works too.

Art, The Friendly Parasite

by

0

In a recent Scientific American article, Stephen Hawking made the following observation, which you can find online HERE: “I think computer viruses should count as life. Maybe it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. Talk about creating life in our own image.”

The premise of this observation is based upon the basic criteria for life. First, a living entity must be equipped with a way to sustain itself, a preconfigured guide relative to our genetic programming. Second, it should have the means to adhere to the parameters established in its “genetic programming.” This is all covered in the Hawking article as well.

I’ve always thought of art as living, even though it doesn’t fully adhere to the stipulations set forth by science. It doesn’t have a genetic predisposition. We sustain it through creation, distribution, and consumption. Art doesn’t really have a way to keep itself alive either. That also hinges upon us and what constitutes “good” art, or art worthy of sharing and passing on.

Like art, ideas are alive. They feed off of our energy. We make them tangible, accessible to those around us. Ideas, like art, grow and spread, or they wither and die.

Some artists choose not to have children because their art replaces that need to procreate. Their work becomes like their children. But by no means does this constitute asexual reproduction. Instead, art is sort of like immaculate conception. The mind grows fertile from interaction with the world and eventually births innovation.

What if the story of a messiah born from virgin birth is actually an allegory, detailing how our only salvation is ideas, the byproduct of mind’s interaction with the universe?

Bringing art into the world and sharing ideas, it’s a high road in many respects, but I can’t help thinking about the legitimate concern found in dystopian films like Idiocracy. What if we reach a point someday at which the people left on this earth can’t appreciate the art that’s been left behind?

What if, despite all the beauty in the world, our genetic legacy leaves us with nothing but reality programming and ‘baitin?

Sometimes it seems like the information age has been reduced to the age of meaningless input. A collection of lists and meme’d slogans placed on e-cards, overlapping pictures, attributed to various dead celebrities. Popular culture is giving birth to something never seen before, and as a washed-up, middle-aged man, of course my value judgment is going to be negative, my outlook on the future dire.

But I guess that doesn’t matter, because the entire premise of this entry was to challenge Hawking’s assertion that humans only create destructive forms of life. We’re hosts to a strange living entity: Art, our friendly parasite, the brain’s symbiotic partner that keeps the mind healthy and inspires further generation of art.

Something like that.

A Game of You: The Internet’s Effect on Identity

by

0

How many variations of you exist?

“Just be yourself.” It’s one of those loaded catch phrases that people throw around without being cognizant of how difficult it actually is to “be oneself” at all times.  Where does this notion of the genuine self stem from, and why do some people take so much stock in it? So much value is placed on the genuine self that some who meet with success are said to have sold out. But what if appealing to the masses is genuine for a person and their desire to do so is so great that selling out is an integral part of who they are? As Trey Parker and Matt Stone once said, selling out “was the whole idea” when they created South Park. And I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of other people as well.  We want to be happy. As social beings, that entails being validated by others, especially for folks in performing arts.

When it comes down to it, we’re all performing to some degree. Most people negotiate a multitude of social frames, and act different in each one. Maybe they’re Dwarf-o the great in WoW, grandma and grandpa’s good little target for inheritance money at the family reunion, the kindest guy/girl in the world to friends, and a total self-centered dick in their professional lives. We operate in a social landscape such as this by negotiating the multitude of selves so we can meet all of our needs. We need validation of our self worth in many, sometimes conflicting, arenas.

There are exceptions to the rule, two of which are pretty goddamned tragic when you get right down to it. First, the predominantly white, middle to upper middle class American lifestyle, which features multiple social frames, most of which are homogenized into a bland, viscous milk where not only everyone is expected to act the same, but each person acts the same in most social frames or communities of practice. Work, home, school, out on weekends: it’s all the same person, probably the same participants.

The second is the small-town, lower-class lifestyle in which social frames become homogenized through self-imposed segregation. I think of my hometown in particular, which people sometimes refer to as Neverland because nothing changes and few people leave. Those who do leave generally don’t come back. Those who remain generate and sustain a hierarchy that does not extend beyond community walls. You can change your position on the hierarchy, but no matter which sub community you’re a part of in that small town, you generally don’t move far, and your reputation always follows you.

Today we live in a disposable society, especially due to the internet. Don’t like one group of people you hang out with? Just toss out the old group and find another one. The internet has done for the small-town inhabitant what the city has allowed since its earliest days. If things don’t work out with the old crowd, you work the same routine with a new crowd. Thus the confidence man finds a comfortable living and the scam artist bullshits through life.

Pictured above: the trashcan of an asshole who just “can’t find a group or forum that fits his unique personality type.”

Few of us are strangers to this phenomenon. We’ve all had run ins with itinerants, whether online or in the real world—people who disappear and crop up in new groups or forums, pitching the same line of bullshit they have pitched elsewhere. It’s annoying and generally harmless, unless they’re stealing work from authors or making promises they can’t keep.

But you don’t see this as much in small towns. Well, you do. The only difference is that in a small town you can start running on empty after a while. Once your name gets around and your reputation precedes you, people seem to be more willing to listen to warning.

But online people can change their entire virtual identities. This makes it harder to regulate dangerous social aberrations.

On the other end of the spectrum—the end already established being the ability to dispose of a social frame and find a new one to reinvent yourself—there is Facebook, where social frames come together, sometimes with disastrous results. It’s particularly apparent during election season, when you realize your old pals from high school have become neo conservative Christian fundamentalists, or realize someone you respected as a colleague is prone to fits of rage and delusions of grandeur.

While seemingly paradoxical, I love what Facebook does to relational identity, but I also love the fact that we have the opportunity to experiment with our identities online. Facebook is important because we can identify problem people by noting their interactions with others. Maybe you’ve been bitching with Billy by the water cooler             about your job. You trust Billy, until you see that on Facebook he weaves an intricate web of he said/she said with his family members. Better watch what you say around Billy.

At the same time, our feedback—perhaps manifest as “unfriending,” or confrontation–gives others a chance for self-correction. People have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, or to alter their behavior in one community to get the pleasing results they find in another community. But this rarely happens. What I see is what I mentioned above. People go to a new community and act like dicks once their old community exiles them. They don’t change, they just change friends. Instead of bad personality attributes being disposable, the entire community becomes disposable to salvage the wounded pride of today’s scam artists, confidence men, and general douche bags.

I can’t get no respect . . . I guess I’ll just try being a dick on a different MMORPG. Yeah, that’ll work!

The good news is that, once we peg someone as an ass, we don’t have to deal with them anymore. Speaking of which, have you ever seen those memes and Facebook statuses that read something to the effect of “ooh, you blocked me. That’ll show me.”

something like this, but with “Facebook page” or “Myspace account” instead of “number.”

They’re indicative of the ego that people who frequently get blocked exhibit, and the general mentality that it’s all about them, and someone blocked them to establish dominance or get the last word.

Maybe they just blocked the person because (s)he’s obnoxious and they don’t want to deal with his/her shit anymore.

On a separate note, have the memes coupling Willy Wonka with shallow “nailed it” slogans completely ruined Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for anyone else?

There’s Some Crazy Shit Out There

by

0

It has only been about fourteen years since my first PC. We bought it exclusively for the purpose of using the internet. It was an old Packard Bell with a 4 Gig hard drive. Sonic CD made the damned thing run slow, and between the shitty RAM and the dial-up connection we had at the time, video was not an option.

It has only been fourteen years, and I feel like the cliché grandparent talking about the good old days, when people died from lead poisoning before the advent of aluminum cans, when you had to walk uphill both ways to get to school, and you had to shame women into buying feminine hygiene products.

I guess some things never change. Even today’s feminine hygiene ads play on the idea of the product as liberating and empowering, as if the menstrual cycle is something disempowering, something to be remedied and controlled.

I find myself talking about the good old days online. Back when people were exploring the possibilities of the internet. Back when people were still naive enough to believe their psychotic websites wouldn’t be the target of ridicule. Those were the days.

Luckily, some of the shit that used to muddy up the waters of the information superhighway is still floating around on the surface. Today I’d like to dredge up some of the shit I used to love and share it with all the folks who visit my blog (You know, the folks looking for shots of Taylor Lautner’s crotch and Frankenpenis).

1. Time Cube: Apparently this shit is so popular that there’s a Wikipedia page detailing the site’s creation and public reception to the site. And I thought I was the only one who read this ramshackle theory with more holes in it than my underwear.

At the time, I really admired this guy’s work, not because I thought it was intelligent. It was just different, and the authority with which this guy spoke made everything he said even funnier. Seriously, he calls for the death of educated adults at the hands of children who adhere to cube time and reject notions of unity for the sake of quadrant thinking . . . or some shit like that. Good show!

2. Picture Mommy Dead (the band): What the hell happened to this band? They had a decent e-presence back in the day. Were they good? No. They were listed on a cheesy goth site, and the only song I remember from them was about how Christopher Columbus was a racist piece of shit. They wore makeup like the Insane Clown Posse. They went by PMD, but now there’s some other group or artist that goes by that. It’s virtually impossible to find anything about these guys online. It’s like they just disappeared from cyber space. But there’s a little bit of shit I dug up on WayBack Machine. Follow this link to check out one of their songs, “Love in a Casket”

Love in a Casket

Could this be the lead singer of PMD today? It is possible.

3. Loompanics: man. I really enjoyed this publisher. In grad school I started a manuscript for them in my professional writing course. They went out of business right around that time. There’s a Wikipedia page listed about them: HERE

They had books on dumpster diving, hacking, chaos religion, all sorts of great shit. Apparently you can still get many of their books from Paladin and a handful of other publishers. They had some interesting titles. Not all delivered what they appeared to promise at first glance, but they were worth checking out nevertheless.

Sacrifice: How we Negotiate the Messiah Mythos in Anime, Comics and Masochistic Fiction (be warned: I didn’t say good masochistic fiction).

by

2

Whether spiritual, physical, or emotional, sacrifice seems to carry different values depending on the context. Motifs featuring sacrifice have evolved quite a bit over time, resulting in tales of pseudo sacrifice and martyrdom in which the martyr gets to live to see the result of his or her own sacrifice.

I think most recently of 50 Shades of Grey. This story is particularly interesting because there’s a pseudo sacrifice remediated with a contract. The domination, the power dynamic, is based on a false premise. The woman is ultimately always in control via the contract, yet she “submits” to the man’s whim on some level. It seems like the only level on which she succumbs is during the initial agreement, and even then there is negotiation.

I want to hurt you, but only if you’ll sign this form of consent. And if you won’t, that’s ok. We just won’t do that. We can like, go dance on rainbows and shit. But seriously, I’m really bad ass because I say “fuck” and get enraged about virginity. And I’m really aggressive about veganism. I’m like the Morrissey of sadomasochism or some shit. Grrr.

Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs featured full self-sacrifice. The contract entailed giving one’s life over to the dominatrix, acknowledging that she could kill him at any time. Yet, as a masochist, the protagonist took pleasure in this decision. He was in control of the sacrifice on some level through consent, just as the protagonist in 50 Shades of Grey is in control of her debacle through her consent to the acts.

Some would argue that once Masoch’s character signed the document or consented to its contents he succumbed to the control of another. There’s a diachronic variable inherent in the contract, sure. He does not know when, or even if, his master will decide to kill him. Additionally, there’s the question of how his death might occur. Nevertheless, the protagonist consents also to these variables. He becomes a potential martyr to his own vices.

But that’s all trivial categorization and context. What’s important is that the predominant undercurrent in sacrifice mythology is control and power.

One of the most popular manifestations of sacrifice in fiction is the inevitable sacrifice, in which something happened in the past beyond a character’s control. That something then comes back to cause the protagonist to lose someone dear to him or her because they chose to live a “normal life” regardless of the danger they present to the “normal” people around them. All I can think of off the top of my head is the Wolverine series, where he loses the important people around him as his past returns to haunt him. Even though Wolverine chooses to try to live a normal life, he knows he places those around him in danger. He consents only to the possibility of loss, and perhaps delusion of grandeur makes him think he can reduce this possibility.

In Wolverine’s circumstance, there are two interpretations I’d like to offer. In the first, loved ones die due to his will to satiate his desire for companionship. In a strange way, his humanity becomes his vulnerability and his strength. His choice to engage in intimacy, his will to love, is a strength, a form of consent. His choice to neglect the danger of this decision is his weakness.

In the second interpretation, the desire itself is seen as the character’s vulnerability. For this interpretation, the character is thought to have no choice. He or she simply succumbs. The character’s weakness becomes a form of purification through innocence.

Regardless of the interpretation, the character is rendered invulnerable. If morally ignorant and unable to resist desire, it is humanity’s folly that purifies the character. They are not responsible for the sacrifice or loss of a loved one because the character has no choice but to move towards his or her desire.

If the character is seen to have the will to choose desire, especially in the case of most heroes, the consequence is deflected to the object of desire and the protagonist remains safe, able to see the repercussions of the sacrifice made for his or her decision. So, the hero is either morally exempt from judgment due to ignorance/innocence or physically exempt from consequence if portrayed as experienced or powerful.

Heero Yuy from Gundam Wing is an interesting variation of the phenomenon mentioned above. He is supposed to be the perfect warrior, which seems to require a sociopathic bent. One must be able to unflinchingly destroy the enemy, after all. But he is in love with Princess Relena. Even she knows that his love for her will be his undoing. So she outright requests that he kill her. The demeanor and tone in which she asks is even more disturbing. She shouts, “Kill me, Hero. Kill me now,” in an almost pornographic, submissive tone, the same you’d likely hear someone utter “fuck me. Fuck me now.”

I wanted to cite The Legend of Overfiend in this post as another story where the female protagonist begs her male counterpart to kill her so as to save the world. He can’t bring himself to do it either.

But he can’t bring himself to do it. Is it because of the responsibility factor? Would Relena have been better off following Heero and dying inadvertently by catering to his need for love instead of initiating the sacrifice ritual before he, or someone else, did? Did this somehow ruin the power dynamic necessary for sacrifice to function in its traditional capacity?

Popular hero tales today suggest that fans want to be Christ sans the beating, martyrs sans self-sacrifice.

Heero’s dilemma is symptomatic of a general problem with sacrifice. The act necessitates submission to some force in exchange for something in return. Through the act, glory is acquired in stories of self-sacrifice. The solution seems to be to find ways around the initial submission in stories of self-sacrifice, so the glory can be acquired without the suffering and submission. This “solution” is what causes the variations in sacrifice myth mentioned above. Ultimately all sacrifice stories, even ones in which another person dies in the stead of the hero, are attempts to regulate the messiah mythos.

In the story of Christ, for example, his knowledge of his own death, which is pre-ordained, is one way in which we can acknowledge his strength in vulnerability. He consents to death at the hands of mankind. A messiah’s birth presupposes this consent to possibility of death, so he shouldn’t have to announce the knowledge of his inevitable demise, but anyway.

In addition to consent, Jesus also benefits from returning from the grave to witness the product of his martyrdom.

Many other sacrifice myths try to emulate this by deflecting sacrifice of the hero to another, thus allowing the character to live on and experience being the world’s savior without dying. These various renderings are ultimately ways to render a character a messiah while also catering to the selfish desires for glory in us all. The hero consents to the possibility of death or self-sacrifice, overcomes that possibility and experiences rebirth through the death of another who acts as sacrifice in the hero’s stead. Finally, the hero gets to experience rebirth and glory after the sacrifice, just as messiahs in our most classic mythology. As an added bonus to the hero, and to bolster the reader’s empathy for the hero, the motif I’ve outlined here allows the hero to act as messiah while also keeping his or her humanity in tact. This final element is important because it allows for ambiguity in character motive, which can be interpreted as innocent/ignorant or strong/willful.

If anyone checks this out, I’m wondering what kinds of stories you’ve watched/read that feature messiah mythos or sacrifice. There’s so much I’ve glossed over here, so drop me a line in the comments section!

Has the Internet Killed Merchants of the Bizarre?

by

0

I remember my senior year in high school, rummaging through anything I could online to find weird materials to share with my friends. One of the things I slipped up on was a VHS tape called “Weird Cartoons.” Most of what I found on that VHS is now found on “Johnny Legend’s Complete Weird Cartoons,” which appears to be available on DVD.

When I found this VHS tape, it was for the most part unheard of in my area. Before the Internet was predominant, only a handful of people had personal computers, and cable television was virtually non-existent in the North Country. We had a few network stations and that was about it. If you saw what by today’s standards qualified as a “weird cartoon” it was probably because one of the older network television stations let one of the racist cartoons slip through the censors. That wasn’t the good kind of weird. That was just awkward, especially in retrospect.

But the Ladislaw Starewicz stop-motion WAS weird. “The Devil’s Ball,” which apparently was part of a longer film known as “The Mascot,” really got me excited about the underbelly of history that I’d missed in the textbooks and on network television. I had been exposed to very tame art in elementary and junior high, but watching The Devil’s Ball–in which a drunkard stabs Satan in the gut and rips a gold coin out of a monkey’s throat right before it is about to rape a ballerina–I discovered that there was a time where art existed before the censors did. Scroll forward to around 8:55 in the video below to see what I’m talking about:

I became a merchant of the obscure and bizarre in my hometown. I didn’t want money in exchange for what I introduced my peers to, however. I wanted notoriety. Even on a microcosmic, local level, that’s all I wanted. I just wanted people to acknowledge that I had access to the weird, that I knew where to hunt it down and find it.

At first, when I was one of the few people in my hometown to have cheap dial-up, that trend continued. I remember the day I found “shit eaters” online after I typed “eat shit and die” into my browser after a rough day at school. I had never heard of coprophagia before that moment. And I never looked back . . . incidentally, neither did any of my friends. Sure, they looked away. But they could never “unsee” what they saw on that fateful day.

Things are changing. Starewicz is on YouTube, and his work has a fair amount of views. It’s there for the folks who want to see it. The value of the junk collectors, the collectors of the rare and obscure, has been lost to the predominance of free-access information on the internet.

And maybe that’s a good thing. It’s just going to take a while for us folks who took pride in being merchants of shit, and merchants of the rare and obscure, to accept our fate. We’re becoming obsolete. We don’t mean as much as we used to.

Now, just as I’m coming to terms with this, everything is changing again.

The sad thing is, most merchants of the bizarre were happy with barter. But information, no matter how obscure, is being integrated into the corporate mechanism that has taken over our world. The golden age of free information online is gone, or it will be in the near future. With the barter system of the merchants, recipients never had to pay anything out of pocket. Simply by viewing, by being influenced, they inspired the merchants. That was our payment.

I think everything gets commodified one way or another, but when money gets involved, that’s when things get dirty. When some corporate entity expects people to pay for what the merchants offered for little to nothing, it’s a true shame.

It’s strange how in American culture, there is this element of ownership inherent in dissemination of information. I told one of my students about Westborough Baptist Church a few weeks ago, and he decided to do some research on the group. He won’t forget that I exposed him to that. I become the source of his search knowledge in a particular vein, and my occupation as teacher, as one who imparts knowledge, is thus validated.

So maybe merchants of shit are not as obsolete as we thought. The information is there. We become, like we always were, crossing guards, street lights that guide the folks down the information superhighway, towards information that appeals to them. But we’re not the only crossing guard, so we have to be the best at what we do if we hope to draw people in and acquire validation.

No matter how I try to make sense of the problem, it always comes back to the issue I raised in Uncle Sam. Either we introduce the old to a new audience, or we create something new for the old audience. One thing I never factored in was the fact that if something bigger or better is doing our job more efficiently, our efforts don’t matter either way.

For some reason, the more avenues by which we can access that once-thought rare information, the more demoralizing this all becomes to me. The fact that exposure is quantified on websites like Youtube, that I can see the fact that 50,000 people have watched “The Devil’s Ball” is discouraging. The fact that “Coprophagia” yields thousands of results on Google rather than just a handful like it did ten or fifteen years ago, is disheartening. Someone already did my job, faster and more effectively than I did.  And in the near future, it’s likely going to go corporate.

The bizarre, the rare, the obscure, the pulp, it is making the transition to mainstream. I wonder what our place in tomorrow’s world will be when the underground is ripped from below and thrust above ground. Will it die a quick and painless death as so many trends before it? Or will a new underground movement sprout from the current trends?

Stone the Penis & Burn the Breasts! An Argument Against Conservative America’s Flawed & Oppressive Morals

by

2

I agree that this is symptomatic of a series of problems in our society. But is it "dirty?"

After the release of the 2012 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, I was reminded of how much resistance this annual gets, particularly when it appears in grocery stores on the magazine rack. There are hundreds of justifications for not supporting the swimsuit issue, many of which I can get behind.

It perpetuates the objectification of females, and further instills our culture with the notion that female perfection only comes in a few shapes and sizes, most of which require surgical enhancement, exercise, not to mention a hell of a lot of waxing and plucking. It sends the message that only a few avenues of social power exist for women, and advocates beauty over brains.

One objection some have to this magazine that I can’t get behind, however, is the argument that images of females who are scantily clad or naked are “bad” or “dirty.” One of the most disturbing quotes I saw on Facebook discussed how . . . oh fuck it. Here it is:

On another website, Gofatherhood.com, the author called the magazine “pornographic,” and said he threw it away in lieu of letting the magazine come into his house. To each their own . . . speaking of which:

I have never been able to understand why the female body is considered “bad” or “dirty,” or why nudity is dirty, for that matter. I see this shit all the time. Women are taught from a young age to feel shame about their bodies. On one end of the spectrum, they’re taught to be ashamed if their bodies don’t meet the aesthetic standards of our society. On the other, they’re taught to be ashamed if their bodies do meet the standards, because they’re “seducing” with their physique or “being dirty” if they reveal too much of their body. There’s still this sense of accountability, this idea that it is the woman’s responsibility to veil her body to squelch the desires of others. It becomes the woman’s fault, for some reason, that her body prompts a certain response from others.

Whenever I start thinking about this, my mind always turns to looners*, those folks who are sexually attracted to balloons. The same people who consider the female body “dirty” approach fetishism from the opposite end of the spectrum, i.e. when a man is attracted to a nude woman, the woman is dirty. However, if a man is attracted to a balloon, he is dirty, not the balloon. I don’t need a Facebook update to prove this. Show me one person who calls a balloon bad or dirty because a person is sexually attracted to it and I’ll stand corrected. The accountability changes for some reason.

So maybe it is a matter of intent. If the female intends to arouse an audience through wearing little to nothing then that is dirty. Since the balloon has no intention of arousing the looner, the looner “perverts” the balloon’s aesthetic value to fit into the looner’s sexual desires, thus the looner is at fault. I don’t agree with this evaluation, but I can see the logic behind it. Unfortunately, there are so many circumstances in society that contradict the rationale that intent is the factor that provokes some people to dub nudity and scantily clad “bad.”

Countless works of art, which celebrate the human body and have no implication of sexual intercourse, have been destroyed and censored throughout the ages. Venus de Milo was convicted, fucking convicted, for nudity in the mid nineteenth century. Adding to the absurdity, as most of you already know, is the fact that Venus de Milo was a fucking statue. Michaelangelo’s “David,” both the original and reproductions, has been stoned, maimed, disfigured and censored throughout the ages. These instances, as many others mentioned on THIS WEBSITE show it doesn’t matter if sexual provocation is the intent or not. The problem is that the sexualization of nudity, coupled with the moral estimation that sex is wrong, has resulted in some pretty conflicted and repressed individuals.

What is the first thing you think of when you look at this image? If it is "stone the penis!" then you'd fit in perfectly with the residents of Florence who saw this in the early 16th Century . . . and probably the Westboro Baptist Church.

Maybe it is a matter of context. The nudity is ok behind closed doors, but not in a public setting, not on the shelves of Wal*Mart stores or other “family-friendly” retailers.

Here’s where I start to understand the “dirty” mindset a little. I remember watching films with my parents and being bombarded by unexpected sex scenes. That shit was awkward, incredibly so. I wouldn’t want to walk through a store or a city street and see people fornicating all around me, especially if I was walking into town with my kids. But if there was a marble statue depicting a nude woman or man, that would NOT be a problem. Subsequently, if someone sees a nude statue and gets aroused from it, that is also not a problem. If said person begins to fornicate the statue in public or masturbate, then this might be a problem. But we can’t control the responses people and objects elicit. But we can control how we act upon feelings of arousal.

I feel like the folks who want to censor Venus de Milo, David, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition don’t trust their ability to control their responses to potentially arousing stimuli. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway. But there’s a high likelihood that the moral estimation that sex is wrong or dirty has, for some, caused a reaction that prefigures arousal. The nude, rather than a depiction of aesthetic beauty or an arousing image, becomes instead a conduit through which the viewer becomes tainted.

She has breasts! Let's tear her arms off, put her on trial, cover her nipples with tape, and destroy all reproductions! That's obviously a much healthier response than getting an erection!

Internal obstacles pertaining to moral climate transform the plowshares that sow personal fulfillment and satisfaction into barbs against the self. In the circumstance outlined above, the obstacles keep people feeling shame instead of autonomy. The obstacles control. Anyway, nothing R.A. Wilson and thousands of others haven’t said before.

* – to learn more about looners, visit the following website, created by Mr. MotoX aka Northwestlooner: 
http://www.blow2pop.com/wp/?paged=2&tag=hug-pop

Is Expression A Hopeless Endeavor?

by

3

The description I give could easily be interpreted as an, albeit weak, attempt to emulate in words what was done in image here. But what I'm experiencing right now is way more beautiful than this picture, which makes my description even more disappointing.

The wind drives clouds across a black canopy punctuated by stars. The breeze coming in through my living room window stings like winter, tastes like spring, and smells like summer. Trees dotting the horizon across the river are still dead, so the lights from my distant neighbors stutter inconstant through dancing branches. This is rural to the extreme, but the song that best encapsulates how I feel is called “Suburbia” by Matthew Good:

It’s not the lyrics. When I actually focus on those, this song is about something entirely different for me. But the music reminds me of all the things I describe above in a multitude of contexts. It’s a two-way phenomenon too. Sometimes I see, feel, or hear something and it reminds me of the song. Sometimes I hear the song and it reminds me of something I saw, felt, or heard in my past. “Suburbia” reminds me of the years I spent in nearby towns during the transitions between seasons. It reminds me of the subtle scent of cow shit, which you acquire an appreciation of when you come from the north country. It reminds me of the sun setting on distant bodies of water, and the fascination with nature my friends and I could afford when we were younger. It also reminds me of the nights my friends spent driving along the back roads in Gouverneur, or walking through the graveyards, picking up the plastic Virgin Mary statues that other kids our age scattered about. There was something incredibly tranquil about that.

What I’m getting at–by taking the longest route possible apparently–is that it’s weird how sounds, smells, sights, etc., accumulate connotations. It’s something we seem to just ride with. It’s part of what keeps life interesting. You throw on a CD or in today’s case an MP3, and it can take you in one hundred different directions. They say our taste buds change every time we eat something, I think the same can be said of any input we encounter. It changes our senses and perspectives.

The whole chain of thoughts also gets me thinking about how a single experience, consisting of all senses and a combination of emotions, can never be conveyed through art or any form of expression. Multimedia will never be able to emulate human experience, not in the foreseeable future anyway. Boil it down to a series of 1′s and 0′s. The code won’t mean shit to me. Every stimuli carries with it a vast array of connotations. You splice those together with other senses, emotional connotations of sensory input, the words we try to formulate to express that sensory input and emotional output . . . then the connotations of those words . . . The only equation I can come up with is that all of this = isolation. We’re completely alone in this world and all we can hope for are shallow intimations of full connection. But I think that’s the curse and blessing that drives artists forward. We’re hoping to find that perfect phrase that encapsulates a particular human experience or the perfect image that encapsulates how we feel about something. At best I think we find a means of expression that speaks to us as creators and viewers, but it likely speaks to the creator and the audience in a different way.

Worst case scenario, we continue to strive towards forging connections with others. How can that be a bad thing? Art is a win/win situation. Once you consider the inevitable element of loss and futility inherent in creation, you can begin to accept the blessing of ambiguity that expression affords us.