cigfran

i've been trying to understand what mccain - and now palin - mean when they invoke "change" and "reform" in their speeches, given that they are members of the party that has been quite solidly in power for nearly eight years.

and it finally dawned on me that for this party - the party whose chief strategist openly worked for a "permanent majority," and who have made it clear that they perceive every agency and policy of government as an instrument of party ideology - reform must mean the final dissolution of democracy, the total removal of meaningful opposition, the final entrenchment of their own righteousness as the sole measure of civil society.

that they have become so blatantly, sinew-in-the-teeth evil over the past couple of decades should surprise me. but it does not.

i grind my teeth so much that some of them are faceted, like ivory prisms.

"he's definitely showing signs of senility."

"well, then maybe he should reduce the salt in his diet."

by grabthar's hammer, you'd think the damned suits would learn.

blade runner is, among my crowd at least, probably the most famous victim of Executive Meddling... the voice-over and fake ending being screwups so universally loathed that any sane person would have reason to expect a certain degree of circumspection on future projects of similar scope and genre.

oh, but no. according to tvtropes (quickly becoming a house-favorite website), one of the things that always bugged me about the matrix turns out not to have been a wachowski fumble at all, but yet another instance of the stupid beancounters apparently believing that the real audience for the work would be just as stupid as them:

In The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers had wanted to have the machines use the humans plugged into the Matrix as a gigantic neural network computer. However, executives thought that the audience wouldn't understand this, so they changed it to using the humans to generate electricity, even though this violates the laws of thermodynamics and creates several plot holes.

we are familiar with the sanctimonious handwringing that accompanies any ill-conceived or malicious act performed by anyone with a taste for underground/alternative culture. recently, music and video games in particular have been singled out as especially and dangerously causal, and the air has filled with the tremulous yawps of the same establishment that once thought itself edgy for its surreptitious pleasure in elvis' pelvis.

this week, we learn that the man who decided to kill a few liberals by storming a church was a consumer of widely-read rightwing hate literature authored by well-known - and well-paid - media personalities, all of whom are for some bizarre reason considered "mainstream," and who are given immense channels through which to project their burning spite.

will they be taken to account? will they be brought before congress to answer for the social worth or intellectual merit of their speech and writing? will warning labels be slapped on their books, alerting the consumer to the moral hazards that lurk between those covers?

of course not.

in (post)modern times, one may not be yet be "hardcore", but perhaps be taken as "getting serious about this," when one purchases and enjoys their opera in mono, because of the quality of a particular performance.

in my cd tray today: the 1953 furtwängler Don Giovanni.

what i'm discovering is that the music really is everything... despite this recording's technical flaws (or idiosyncracies, depending on your tastes in live recording), i find myself completely immersed in the nearly perfect performance and balance. and i'm not really that big of a mozart fan.

alison:

One scientist is developing something called a respirocyte -- a robotic red blood cell that, if injected into the bloodstream, would allow humans to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath or sit at the bottom of a swimming pool for hours at a time.

Man from Atlantis, here we come!

me:

wow... i wonder how close we really are to nanotech self-mods.
very cool.

alison:

i can't wait until the day comes where i can split morty's personality off into his own separate distinct entity, and control his EndoMotiveMorty body. Kinda like Johann Krauss.
HAHAHAHAHAHA

me:

great. a little diving suit powered entirely by angst.

just in cased anyone was wondering

(what an oddly pathetic phrase)

work is a horror show right now, has been for a while, and will continue to be for weeks to come. too much riding on too much to do in too little time. i barely have time to eat and shit, let alone create, think, write or play.

in the background, there is incremental progress, about which i'll write in a bit. even this little note is little more than a placeholder for myself, so that i don't let certain channels entirely atrophy.

Die Hard totally nuked the fridge with the "riding the jumpjet" sequence.

"don't look at the dogs, just work the lock."

magnum squats by the car he's breaking into while two dobermans are bearing down on him, willing his attention to the problem and not the threat.

i sit at my desk and work through my tasks while deadlines and demands snap at my heels, willing my attention to those things i can control and away from those racing fears.

don't think about the consequences of failure, just concentrate on what you're doing.
ignore the threat, just get it done.

don't look at the dogs, just work the lock.

Fantasy is popular because, since heroes and villains don't exist, it's absolutely necessary to our survival as a species to invent them.

- k.j. parker

When all is lost, spite will get you through the hard times. If not, at least you'll have the satisfaction of inconveniencing your antagonists with your last breath.
—ectoplasmosis

a friend of mine once declared that if you're crossing the street and a quick glance reveals a looming car taking high-speed aim at you, the thing to do is lay out sideways in midair as it strikes, making damn sure that they'll have a hell of a time picking pieces of you out of their ruined grille.

has anyone noticed that this is actually the same topic as this?

i used to write long essays that took a reader (and myself) through a complete train of thought. i don't anymore. i tend to write the observations or the understandings, but infrequently together and even more rarely with full connective tissue.

i'm not sure why. it's certainly due to a more hunkered life, in which i really don't have time or energy to be so self-indulgent. partly it's because i've given myself over more and more to the fragmented, disjoint nature of my thinking and awareness. without question, simple impatience plays a part, as well.

but it makes it harder to get certain things across, that i think are important... or that at least are interesting to me.

i feel myself moving to a mode where i stop trying to weave altogether, and just toss a bunch of ideas into a box like half-polished pebbles, give the box a shake and hand it over to someone like a mandala, asking "do you see?"

entropy always wins
and i like to be on the winning side.

tranny: emits nonconformant behavior
cissy: "you freak"
tranny: "i'm not a freak, i'm a cripple."
cissy: "oh, well that's all right then."

the problem with the idea of GID is that it authorizes "objective" assessment over subjective experience.

recently, i tried to get someone to see the difference. consider for a moment the possibility that the "classic narrative" is true in a sense... not to the degree that we really are "women trapped in men's bodies" (or men in women's) but simply that we are what we are, and not delusional or maladaptive. is the disorder that we think we're something we're not? or is there a subjective disorder... that internal sense of disconnect or disharmony which becomes our negative compass? "this isn't right... go that way."

she didn't get it. she replied with a laundry list of kinks, quirks and frustrations and conceded that, yes indeed, she must be disordered and they may as well toss her in the nearest rubber room. she had capitulated to the objective, to the objectifying.

i let it go. i've had too many of these conversations with too many people - most of whom are comparatively intelligent - who cling to their boundaries and their language.

in any case, the objective sense is the sense that is so easily (mis)communicated when trying to tell others who we are. the distinction is subtle, the common sense facile, and it's easier to be pathetic than, well, strange.

it's a truism to the point of cliché that we live in a culture of fear. but we tend to divide ourselves by the classes of things we fear, calling others fearmongers and ourselves enlightened.

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the backlash against post-modernism is the reaction of normative authoritarianism, the dismissal of narrative in favor of categorical assertion.

i saw recently that tom delay has said of obama, "that unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist."

and setting aside for the moment the ludicrous have-you-beaten-your-wife-recently backwardness of such a sentence, the thing that really strikes me is:

what the fuck is this, the sixties (or worse, 1917)? marxist? marxist? who the hell are they anymore? does anyone in 2008 really believe that there is such a thing? hell, even the fucking chinese aren't marxist, let alone the so-called "marxist rebels" that skulk in various undergrowths, eating bark and pissing on the borders of one country or another.

the last american marxists are vegans living in communes in the pacific northwest. they're nobody. they're not even cool anymore. no berets, no bongos, no obnoxious poetry... just tediously earnest self-absorption.

gimme a break.

well, the original version didn't work, for reasons i really just can't be bothered to go into.
so i've rebooted the "other" domain's blog under a different title, and this time as just me.
i keep looking to create the wrong things out of insubstantial material like hope. i think i'll just stick to more tangible media for now.
same drill. if you want the URL, let me know. i'll send it anyway to the few regulars.