Showing posts with label singular concerns.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label singular concerns.. Show all posts

Sunday, November 9, 2008

What I'm Listening To Now

Word of Warning: A cursory glance of the videos featured here suggests a repressed sexuality that escapes in the form of serial killings. I am not aware of this being the case.

I would very much like to write a story that depends solely on "The Queen is Dead" for pop culture reference. It is rich. And it gets that "The king died... the queen died..." nod for all the CreatWritrs.
"The Queen is Dead" is not easy to come by. It was recently reissued on CD, which is just groovy, but "Rank" has a most excellent live copy that I, and maybe you'll, prefer.


Do you hear tympani in this song? I see no tympani in the video and yet it's like listening to thunder. Thunder and Agony. "Jack the Ripper" was a B-Sides and Rarities find for me. Someday I'll find a copy of "Henry's Dream," because the electric version is way better.


Totally thought "Get Your Rocks Off" was a new but good Rolling Stones song when I heard it. Thought the time-space continuum had split and maybe I'd have some closure on my "Beast of Burden" hang-ups. I love how shiny this video is. Makes everything look wet, or "sweaty" if you prefer.


I can't believe that I didn't notice "Police on My Back" was in "Knocked Up" until the third "screening." I guess these things happen. Lethal Bizzle has sampled it in a new song by the same name. It is "Okay". These things happen.


The really great video that goes along with the sweater song can't be embedded from youtube.com. I am cunning enough in my use of html to provide the picture you see below, but to watch it you'll have to use what I'm assuming is the Swedish version of internet tv. (The second one.)
Remember when Weezer was good and didn't just rap about drugs over ridiculous bass guitar? Remember when you could listen to a CD and have this strange experience that resembled vicarious emotional telepathy? I went to Kroeger yesterday. "Undone" was on the radio. I ended up smiling for a while.




My friend Brian thinks telepathy is the next step in human evolution.
"I mean, she wishes I shared my feelings right?" he said, "My honesty would be tacit, inevitable, and complete."
I could have said a lot of things. Since we've had this conversation, I've ruminated over what the "cost" of telepathy would be. It's occurred to me that certain animals, perhaps all of them, may have "beaten us to it" and the only proof we have that this is not the case is science. 2 It occurred to me that the evolution of vocalization parts may have been necessitated by some chimp/human co-ancestor not being able to share its feelings. It also occurred to me that language, as a part of tool culture, is pretty screwed in the telepathic human species. We imagine talking into the brains of others. I reckon we'd send feelings (warm waves of joy coming at you) and the occasional image (pineapple, my belly, sensation of hunger... you get the idea) but how do you communicate the complexities of spear-building via image-flashing? I'm sure there are a couple of people who would get really good at teaching others how to make spears. Maybe they'd even remember the whole experience of figuring out how to make a spear for the purpose of teaching others to do the same. So maybe language is a necessary invention independent of communication, but I can also see how it was easy for non-telepaths to kill telepaths with their superior weaponry and inability to feel brain-death.
I asked Brian how he felt about his girlfriend having an all-access pass to his brain. He suggested that telepathy would be a universal "deal-breaker."
"It's not like we're dishonest with eachother, but there's got to be stuff in here she doesn't like," he said, pointing to his temple, "Whats a non-issue and whats a lie of omission, I dunno, but there's definitely a reflexive property to consider. I'm still trying to resolve the fact that her poop smells like something other that jasmine and butterflies. We'd have the 'other-shoe' fight and either we pluck eachother's eyes out or we say 'well I guess that's everything."
I can't imagine that happening, right away, with every person of the opposite sex I meet. I can't hypothetically shame myself into no longer imagining what everyone looks like naked. I will probably inaugurate the dawn of humanity's collective oneness with a personally administered lobotomy. People might ask what tortured me so much about communion with the overmind, so I will have to leave a note:

this looked like it would be a lot of work.
hearts and stars,

-E


My only hope is that, sometime before telepathy is forced upon us, the floating house is an option. (It occurs to me that I (a) watch too much science fiction or (b) have always had a secret desire to own a house boat.) A space station would be nice, but I expect some degree of societal collapse. I'm an optimist.
Seriously:
I hope people like telepathy so much they can't think of anything else but people-watching and buttsex. I expect the rate of idea-development to increase. It'll be like computers x 10. I just hope people don't like it too much. It'd be a drag if people stopped keeping track of stuff. (like they said would happen with computers/the internet.1) I'm willing to assume that if one telepath knows something then the next fifty telepaths, say within five blocks, know that same thing. I suppose memory, then is dependent on associations. And as excited as I am about the repercussions that has on identity and infectious thought, all I really want to know is "can anyone really forget anything if everyone around them knows it?"
I think plane rides would be exciting.
I just don't know what else we'll do re: work. I often tell people that if x gets us closer to a culture of artists and philosophers it is inherently good, even if we're putting our brains into needle-filled jars.
And if that's what happens when humans grow that organ, brain wrinkle, or gland, I promise I will be glad. If it means that we have to reorganize the mechanics of communication, then I'll probably be happier with my lobotomy.

--------
1Incidentally, this is how a portion of computers were sold, and probably still are sold. To people who have kept track of their sales/taxes/random business concerns with rooms full of green paper notebooks, computers were the exciting accountant-in-a-box. And yet, my dad often complains about how much more paper he has now. Mostly because he has an accountant-in-a-box and feels encouraged to use it.
2 Which is just words anyway.
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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Whatever Man

I was not accepted into Teach for America.
No, we would not like your free teaching skills.
I am not that worried. I am not less optimistic about grad school. I do not wish I knew why my application sucked so well. I am not faxing my resume to every credit card, bank, and insurance agency that advertises on the internet. I am not learning how to trap, gut, and deflesh the small mammals of various ecosystems. I am not learning to make fire from stone and leaf.
I do not care.


I am over it. Right now, I'm wondering why I think the Governor of California is a killer robot from the future and not a barbarian with bad hygiene whose name keeps getting honor and fear heaped on it by people who are, in a word, ridiculous.
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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Nature/Nerdure

I woke up with this in my head and I don't know whether to develop it more it/see how long I can keep it up or just post it as "funny" but, you know, time eats things from your brain:
I need my moisture-bar/light-saber to fight dry skin/the Sith and restore water/balance to the stratum corneum/Force. (edit:Aug 6, 08- I watched a force unleashed promotional today. Looks like fun)

My roommate in high school moisturized. Cocoa butter, as well as, (on top of) Vaseline Intensive Care Moisturizer, the large bottle, with the push-down spout. I, you know, admire his strength, or conviction, or something. Having moisturizer, without the requisite poster of Tyra Banks or Yasmine Bleeth or a black-and-white photo of two women you didn't know making out on a bed was basically admitting, "I jack off when you're not here" to anyone who came in our room. Ez and I, of course, had extensive discussions about his dry skin. I was cool with it. Sure man, whatever. It's not, like, an elephant in the room at all. Semper Fi, Mac.

You remember Singled Out? There's only one authentic episode on Youtube. The rest are UK Channel 5 recordings. Maybe there're some episodes on Hulu.* I started looking for more and I found this: Singled Out: Blah-Blah-Blah--a new -ism to discuss--Blah! So. The reviews are funny. I don't think I'd read the book. The reviews, I suppose, make a case against it's purchase. By reading it in public, I am at risk of being perceived as single, which in case you didn't know, means over-sexed, sad, miserable, lonely, self-centered, and (as a man) messy and likely to rape the first unsupervised child or woman that comes around. And I really can't handle that. It's summer, I want to read in the sun. I bought a hat specifically for these occasions, I'm not going to buy a book just to render that hat obsolete.** I do think it's great that I have another stereotype to stammer around.


Over-sexed is a funny word. (Funny=Strange, Funny=/=Laugh) Kenning? Hyphenated thing. In the past six months I've seen it used to describe the portrayal of black men in films, heard it used to describe a Muslim man's perception of Muslim women, and now I'm seeing it again, describing a very broad group of ~M. (M is Married) Typically, I'd spin this off into a graphical representation, but I think I need to know what old married Eurasian men think the baseline of sexuality is before I parody it. Research...


On the subject of purchases, I called my mom the other day to talk about dry skin.*** She recommended, you guessed it, the Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. I bought Vaseline deep conditioning body lotion with cocoa butter, which came with a little bottle of intensive rescue moisture locking lotion,**** along with some apples and Mike-Sells Salt & Pepper potato chips, at the self-check-out. I wonder what Ez would have bought, or if he's found some eternal moisture font. Perhaps he only ever needed to change his diet and now he enjoys days free of fear from perspiration and showers.


*There aren't any.
**I have other books, and especially not this hat.
***My mother's been on a cruise with my sister and my grandparents and her sisters. (my aunts, whatever(she grew up with four sisters. I call them "her sisters" as consistently as possible solely in recognition of that)) She got back yesterday. I called her while she was sleeping. Conversation with almost-lucid-mom is awesome. She described her flesh peeling, bubbling even, as a result of the no-fluid policy. I think I would only have gotten, my skin peeled, if she been more awake. It's possible the peeling/bubbling was really uncanny.
****no caps on small bottle. Perhaps caps are put too much pressure on the intensive rescue lotion? Conversely, maybe it is such a cool and collected rescue lotion it didn't care about the capitalization fiasco, as a much more pricey, perhaps Suisse, lotion would, and instead said, whatever, i got skin to save...
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