Hurtling Ever-Deeper into Decadence

12 DISNEY PRINCESS GIFS THAT CONVEY THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING {AGE}

8 WAYS 90S KIDS ARE FEMINIST

17 CORGIS RUINING NOT ONLY THE INTERNET BUT LITERALLY THE FUCKING CONCEPT OF WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

50 MINOR DC CHARACTERS WHO COLLECTIVELY EXPLAIN SUBATOMIC PHYSICS

THE FALL OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN 19 GIFS FROM WILL FERRELL MOVIES

WHAT IS MY FUCKING LIFE AS DEPICTED BY 93 CATS STANDING IN FRONT OF TABLES

1000 ACCIDENTALLY RACIST THINGS YOU ALREADY SAID TODAY AND WHY THEY ALSO MAKE YOU A RAPIST

THIS MAP OF MY DICK WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

WOW! VAN GOGH’S STARRY NIGHT AS A MOSAIC OF SERIAL KILLERS’ MUG SHOTS

IF ALL DISNEY PRINCESSES WERE REPLACED BY BEYONCE

(this one literally exists)

YOUR REACTION?

HEART SPLENDID LOL BLIMEY WTF BONER MALAISE

HASHTAG #MURDERMEMURDERMEMURDERMEMURDERMEMURDERME

Brad of Steel

or,

The Zack Snyder Complex

"GUYS I LOVE MY FAMILY OK KIDS FAMILY BABIES KIDS FAMILY LOVE" - Brad Pitt [photo via an usweekly 'here's a trailer for a movie, yall' article]

There are many things one can fault the very loose World War Z adaptation Brad Pitt has finally shrugged his shoulders at and surrendered to inevitable, inexplicable profit-and-sequel-generating theatrical release for, a brief list of which follows:

1      it is a zombie movie rated pg-13

(1a   I get that when a film costs $200 million to make it has to be pg-13, but if your movie is about the zombie apocalypse maybe it just can’t be the summer tentpole you might wish it could be. Just saying.)

2      a theoretically major character falls over and accidentally shoots himself in the face in a moment only a fart noise away from self-parody

3      another character has her hand hacked off, and the camera proceeds to avoid the wound in ever-more-hilarious-and-maddening Austin Powers-style ways (see point 1)

4      Brad Pitt’s film children—“o hay dad so I know there are zombies killing [but not devouring; see point 1] most of humanity but I WANT MY BLANKET I WANT MY BLANKET MY BLANKET AAAAAAA”

5      In the last third, where they visit the budgetary black hole that is Cardiff and it turns into a pretty standard zombie movie, the likewise standard ~brutal killz~ Brad dishes out all happen off-camera with the ‘Indiana Jones punching a Nazi’ sound effect (see again point 1). It’s a small thing, but a good, juicy smashing-a-melon-with-a-hammer noise would go a long way towards making the entire third act feel satisfying.

All that aside, I found myself enjoying World War Z almost despite my-and-itself, because it’s really fun. Good? No, certainly not. Not as a zombie movie, at least. But it’s a light summer romp with big, impressive action sequences and brisk pacing; the plot duly resolves itself, seemingly advancing with its own confident energy. Given that no less than five people have writing credits, that’s something of a minor miracle—or perhaps no surprise at all; writing-by-committee may not provide coherent vision nor striking artistic statements, but usually neither do $200-million-budgeted movies, Batman aside.

That Nolan reference is not accidental, and not just a rule-proving-exception. The other day, I was trying to figure out why I liked World War Z even as I recognized its many flaws, and I realized something kind of shocking:

Man of Steel, a movie depicting Superman’s origin story and first big adventure, was infinitely more horrific than World War Z, a movie about the literal end of the world.

Zack Snyder has a very particular style, and like most artists he only becomes more like himself as he, well, matures isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. Develops. The terrified, awestruck shakycam and the icy-instagram palette and the grim, explosive bombast were perfect for, say, the Dawn of the Dead remake, but nonsensical for Superman. I’ve seen various people critique Man of Steel as essentially what every 13-year-old boy in the world “would totally do if I were Superman”, only saving the couple people he knows personally and actually likes while throwing trains at his stupid, boring hometown, God, mom, I’m like, Superman, okay, and punching The Bad Mans so hard they like fly through a building full of screaming innocent civilians pow crash argh BOOM crunch pow. 

Pictured: HEROISM [photo via an entertainmentweekly 'box office preview']

David Goyer, Christopher Nolan’s screenwriter-of-choice, has said in most of his Man of Steel interviews that the point of the movie was to depict “what it would be like if Superman really existed, in our world. How people would react, etc” (a paraphrasing). Leaving aside how boneheaded it is to put the primary-colored symbol of Truth, Justice, and the American Way into a ‘gritty and realistic’ world, the answer he came up with seems to be that if Superman ‘existed in our world’, he wouldn’t be Superman, but a cape-wearing sociopath with a puréed fossilized baby skull lasered into his genes and no respect nor concern for the lives of mere mortals.

There essentially is no ‘Clark Kent’ in Man of Steel’s version of the universe, just Superman when he’s not wearing the suit. In large part this is down to the film's characterization and treatment of Kevin 'Not My Real Dad' Costner as Jonathan Kent: rather than the basically good, noble, and kind man who teaches his son that it is one's responsibility to use one's gifts to help one's fellows as best one can, he is presented as a basically reactionary, terrified misanthrope so concerned about 'fitting in' that he forces said son to watch him die a ridiculous and easily preventible death, just to prove some incomprehensible point about... something. Goyer, Nolan, and Snyder's Superman is a traumatized outsider, an eternal victim frightened of his own potential (and rightly so, to be honest, based on how he resolves his fight with Zod), rather than a representation of 'what is best in us,' an ideal to be aspired to.

The one appearance the classical Clark--the doofy, sweet kid from Smallville, Kansas--makes is in the final scene, and even there he’s a cute in-joke shared between Superman and Lois: “hahaha, wouldn’t it be silly if I were a human being with human flaws and emotions.” The Man of Steel Superman is unreservedly and overtly the version of the character Tarantino has David Carradine present at the end ofthe second Kill Bill movie: a smirking alien demigod who sees us as helpless worms, to be protected or destroyed as suits his unfathomable whim. Zack Snyder has made Lex Luthors of us all.

Me, watching Man of Steel [photo via a businessinsider article about the 2nd trailer]

 Contrast Man of Steel’s deeply offputting and alienating ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Kal’ tone to the very traditional Hollywood ‘Ostensibly Everyday Normal White Dude Fixes the Apocalypse so he can Hug his Kids’ story Damon Lindelof turned World War Z into, and the relationship between this year’s biggest selfconscious blockbusters becomes clear: while both films misinterpret their source material to an absurd degree, World War Z remembered that people go to big, expensive summer movies to see pretty people do exciting and impossible things—in other words, to have fun. And extremely stupid though it may be, ‘humanity’s last, best hope’ tripping as he steps off a plane and blowing his own head off is also extremely fun to watch.

Autre Ne Veut - Anxiety review

7.5

If you aren't already a fan, drop that score a couple tenths; me myself I was so looking forward to Any new Autre Ne Veut that the moment I heard his Voice again I was signed on for the rest of the record. The higher fidelity and slicker production on Anxiety actually do suit the mainstream rnb tendencies which have always obviously underlay Arthur Ashin's music, but they Also manage to turn one of his previous strengths into a limitation: the unhinged, about-to-disintegrate song structures, vocals so overwhelmed by emotion they verge on uncontrolled shrieks, in the context of 'a proper debut into the mainstream/"big leagues" of indie' limit conveyance of content. You can tell he's upset, excited, feeling deeply (eg the old track 'emotional'), but not quite Why or what About. Where previously even if the Implications of his words weren't clear, at least the vocals Themselves were at the heart of each song, on Anxiety the dense production overwhelms even verbal intelligibility; this is a record about its Songs in the broadest sense, rather than its lyrics.

This divergence between aesthetic and content dogs the record; the songs all Sound good, but only a select few are memorable out of context. It took me til the last few tracks to reason it out, but suddenly I saw: there are no Hooks in these songs. On his selftitled the most striking Thing is the immediacy of the melodies, that nearly every track feels like an old classic the first time you hear it, whereas here it feels as though he became so concerned with making the songs Sound Perfect that he forgot to Write them in the first place. It becomes an effort to get at his precise Meanings, and often enough, if reached, they aren't compelling enough to have warranted said effort. Where before it felt as though he wrote the Hell out of Every song, straining for alternate-reality chart-toppers at each at-bat, Anxiety feels a bit loaded with filler, even at just ten tracks.

Don't get me wrong, Play By Play is a fucking Monster of a song, but that's just it: its soaring earworm of a hook makes it the exception that proves the rule. In the harsh light of the blatant singles the 'album cuts' seem wan and bloodless, interesting but not Instant Classics of the sort he seemed to toss off before. The only other track that approaches that immediate sing-to-oneselfability is, ironically, the closer, World War. Midalbum blurs together a bit in the absence of distinct hooks and melodies, with the notable exception of Gonna Die, which captures quite well Another key component of his unique voice: the ability to state selfevident, almost pedestrian philosophical or personal notions (again, "I've got feelings in my heart/ that set me apart") and somehow have them bear the full weight of their deepest implications.

Anxiety is Autre Ne Veut's 'difficult second album', without a doubt, with all the songwriting trouble and artistic-directional confusion that term implies, but that by no means makes it a failure. It brings to mind that second Twin Shadow album that came out last year, which Also had a perfectly reasonable aesthetic and was acceptable as 'this artist's new record' but whose individual songs clearly were just not quite as immediate and memorable as those on his debut. That said, a gifted musician with a unique and valuable voice  performing weak tracks is Still a gifted musician, and this is indeed the second Autre Ne Veut album.

On turning twenty one

On turning twenty one and being twenty one evermore or at least for the next year:

An honest and genuine appraisal is what is called for, but maybe that’s not what I want. Maybe I’d rather pretend that I’m not precisely as I am, in the interest of a theoretical construct, an ‘image in the mind’ of some being that might or might not exist now or ever have or will.

Shambolic, overstewed, overstuffed, over. Eros and mechanical operation, contraposed against…sure, spiritual, supernatural drives and choices one cannot as such simply say ‘no’ to.

There are special classes of jadedness, and as ever must always be the case, the youthful is the purest, kindest, most beautiful, most correct. I think I am old enough now to be young in the old way. Youth and age interact, they slide back and forth within and along. Opacity is mocking, almost cruel but for its own inscrutability; that inscrutability makes it as divine as any deity can be—the impassive smirk, the withdrawn sneer, the elevate snarl: these are manifestations of an existence outside ‘existence’. I have transcended for so long in my heart and in my mind; this is a concrete good. Transcendence is perhaps the highest good for me in the world I inhabit.

In the slackening of all things, the humanizing duality—not, pointedly not, a wholeness—I perceive more clearly what and where. (‘I’ must fall away from most of my phrases regarding myself because perception deserves self-blindness, oblivion—has earned them)

An aura of detachment, a stepping-back-from-oneself. I know my parameters and characteristics, my bounds and tics and phenomena, but they are present. They define and determine, accompany and inform, limit and direct. I am I, and that means something, I suppose (I decree? I recognize? Recognize.)

Speaking in riddles, lionizing and ‘setting-on-high’ the inexpressible and unconveyable. Being. Yes, as simply as that: being! There are turns one can take, flips pulled, machinations and conceptions and theoretical utiles, but ‘truth’ is simultaneously not the good it ought to be supposed, and the silent duty to be borne.

Commonplaces, terms at the fingertip, means of interpretively framing or marshalling to order so as to contain and incorporate, internalize, process. Like a larger type of word; a symbol, a grammatical tic, a particularity. The shadings of one-ness: solitude, isolation, even iconoclasm in the development I’ve embarked it upon (words’ genealogies are useful or determinant only insofar as they are). Recognition of a necessity, treaty negotiations with stalin. Nations and cultures as organic crystallizations of ‘human drives’ as mingled in particular combination, as much un-intentionally now as necessarily—though the application of necessities to ‘national characters’ is one of the most charming and enthralling (intoxicating) vestiges of the world-enframing certitude of ‘the age of heroes’, as well as the well-meaningly self-blind, self-ignorant ‘pursuers of biological truths’.

This is the state of the state: as masked, as freely universal, as needlessly ordering even as recognizing needlessness. Living at a strange time; a new century is still just a century, change is nonsense and continuity is dominant to absurdity—is causation really this unimaginative? And of course it is. One can stare deeply into oneself forever, and eventually only end up seeing oneself staring back—because that’s all that was ever there! To be is to be as oneself, and that is neither here nor there.

The new gang of four sounds kind of like the new wire

The new gang of four sounds kind of like the new wire, and both remind me some of that newest david byrne/eno thing which leads into ‘wall street two: the new gilded age closes out’. David bowie could come back right now, but it wouldn’t be quite comfortable for anyone I don’t think. There’s nothing wrong with it—every generation has to age, and a unified cooldad front is kind of funny, particularly in this the post-lcd soundsystem world, but it begins to toe a line and raise a hackle on a kill your idols style animal, etc. what do we owe them now, reeeaallyyy, if we really think about it? I mean, again, not bad per se, just need to be appraised in and as their own things in their own rights. And honestly, that seems to have mostly happened: the pfork review bears this out

Their voices aged a little too much. So much of postpunk was the youngman’s mechanical automation and nervous energy. To have actually lived a life, particularly in the face of the apocalypticism and grey world windswept [subjectivity]hellscape sort of undermines what was going on. You cant have learned too much because

I think these post post postpunk bands oughtta aim more for edwyn Collins style sketchy warbliness. Seems p reasonable as an aim to me. Yeah! especailly cause dude literally had a fucking stroke and his new album sounds more vital and immediate and contemporary and straight up young than theirs. Partly its because he never went for coolness, so he never had to shift or age, but just the energy in the band puts him across.

Beets sound like growlers or nodzzz or black lips—conspicuous pseudo pseudoanti ‘hipstar situationzzx’

Reading rainbow kind of like heavenly. Also pfork closing line about comfort and joy in the face of witchhouse and icy dubstep is dece writing because it justified this album to me beyond being instantnostalgic or tired in a post bestcoast world. Welp laid, sars!

[2/6/11; also, i cleaned up some typos and inserted pertinent links when necessary for understanding]

[it's fucking weird to see stuff i wrote for myself because i wanted to record my thoughts published on a blog. not sure how i feel about it. gonna call it a day and come back to it--reappraise the impulse--later. think certainly i would need to reprocess my content more heavily if i were to make a habit of publication: add visual interest and soforth. might be more hassle than it's worth, and i begin to squirm a little when i'm universally appraisable--i mean, that's not to suggest i think anybody would read or pay attention, but all the same, once it's out there it's out there]

George w bush and ape symbology as a fear of losing our cultivation

George w bush and ape symbology as a fear of losing our cultivation? Protofascist authoritarian vs overcultivated immoral slow stodgy inefficient futurism. Competing science fictions, rejection of the next generation’s federation. Then he didn’t do anything because a stupid ape has no need to address the economy of technology imploding, then springing into brutal grim Christian action of pretense to burn away the corruption in the inexplicable and foul east. We will crush out this filth, it has assaulted our core, our soul, our symbols.

The inversion of generation x; they could hardly be relied on as a countercultural force because they were trained into nonexistence and apathy, fading into references and implacable early-internet ‘coolness’. Y as the response to x’s quiet conservatism and growing-upness. More extreme nihilism with cool quietude via the potential and ease for overexpression and showmanship on the internet. Gaudiness writ titanic, aesthetic nothingness. Minimalism and breadth, effortless and unnecessary information, unspoken obviousness in all facts and things, a mere check for the same bullet points. The absurdity being, of course, that it works. This is just the most efficient way to develop our collective subjectivities; end-stage individuality/ism.

[2/14/11]

okay so

i haven't posted anything on here for like nine months, preferring instead to keep all my 'useless and pointless knowledge' to myself in an ever-expanding library of word documents i scrawl into with inexplicable verve when the muse possesses me. seriously, like i could sustain a blog for months with judicious rationing of my extant content alone.

the issue, though, with my writing is that i overauthor, that i cannot separate my Self from my work, that otherwise impersonal concepts become inextricable from the deeply personal thought processes and neuroses that framed and generated them.

what i'm gonna do, though, i guess, is post at random intervals things that i've written that i'm comfortable with making universally available. i think i'll probably make a note of the date of composition, so as to place the work within my human timeline.

don't know if i'm gonna stick with it, but i happened upon a brief piece i wrote a week or two ago that was fairly impersonal and self-contained while still providing 'valuable insights' into 'things', and i figured i may as well 'blog that fucker'.

a note on my style: overdense, difficult to read through, sometimes willfully obtuse or obscure, so caught up in finding the intuitively perfect phrase or word that it often makes sense only to me or remains unfinished, the lightning failing to strike.

i have a longstanding metaphor of creativity as masturbation--which is both insightful and offputting--and that honestly helps frame the way i write. alone, often in the dim, possessed by a need or desire that seems deeper than the mind, that springs from an almost biological truth...
and you start to see why the metaphor is so attractive and ubiquitous to me.


anyway, republished content follows in three, two,