Point Taken, First Random Song of the Day (& Also: Thanks for Fucking Freaking Me Out with Your Psychic Powers)

hey
guess it's a matter of sensation
but somehow you have a way of avoiding it all
in my mind
i have shot you and stabbed you through your heart
i just didn't understand
the ricochet is the second part

cuz you can't hide what you intend
it glows in the dark
once you've thought
about love revenge
there's no way to stop and the more i try to hurt you
the more it hurts me

strange
it seems like a character mutation
though i have all the means of bringing you fuckers down
i can't make myself
to destroy upon command
somehow forgiveness lets the evil make the laws

no you can't hide what you intend
it glows in the dark
once we've become the thing we dread
there's no way to stop and the more i try to hurt you
the more it backfires

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Cake is to Phlebotomy as Pwned is to Owned

So I looked up wtf "pwned" means finally, and apparently it's smack-talk for destroying someone or "owning" them, you destroyed them so bad, etc.

But this is my favorite part:

"Pwned" is pronounced "Owned" and "Pwn" is pronounced "Own."

What?!!

I think we should do this more often with words, the more I think about it:

"Cake" as pronounced "phlebotomy," for example.

On paper, I'd be all, "Bitch, can I have a slice of that cake?"

But outloud, it'd be all, "Bitch, can I have a slice of that phlebotomy?"

Imagine what a mind-fuck that would be. Especially to, say, folks at a poetry reading or something.

Eh?? EHHHHH??!?!

Loving it.

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Brain Hijack

Does anyone else dream while they're still awake?

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, all of the sudden I had images of a middle-aged dude with this big bushy beard on some sort of court television and he started foaming at the mouth and then sobbing about something that was going on with the court drama. And I was tired. But I wasn't actually asleep.

And this seems to happen often when I'm trying to fall asleep. I'll be awake (not even really in that half-sleep state), but it's like my brain starts to click into dream mode and so it just begins doing whatever it does when you're dreaming, kind of just jumping behind the steering wheel of my brain and driving off with it.

Freaks me out a little, so I found myself wondering if it's just me or wtf.

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Kitten-tastic

I finally got the stray kittens outside to play with me yesterday. For like 30 minutes. Sheer squee-therapy for sure. They even are starting to trust me enough to let me put my camera in their face. Granted, it's more difficult to take a BAD pic of a kitten than it is a good one. But still: these photos are priceless.

(Click on any of them to take you to the set)

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I Can Usually Only Take So Much Jack White for Whatever Reason...

But I'm really kind of digging on this (thanks, Mo!):


(Click to go listen)

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You ever look at photos that make you really wish you were color?

Jesus these are them: Phil Sharp's NYC set.

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What Up, Insanely Good Mood of the Past Two Weeks?

Made these mixes for one of my friends who just broke up with his girl, but the second one is so good that I'd sort of feel like I was depriving all of you lovelorn folks out there if I didn't share it with the rest of the world.

So enjoy.

This is the "pulling the band-aid off slowly and tortuously" mix, the one you play over and over for like two or three weeks post-breakup to maximize your self-pity and wallowing until your friends can't stand hearing it anymore and you suddenly realize you're being ridiculously pathetic:


Click to listen


This is the "finally just ripping the motherfucking band-aid off with a gasp and a smirk" mix, the one you play once you've wallowed so hardcore that you decide life isn't going to end after all but is, in fact, all spread out new and glorious in front of you and you really need to be out there fondling the SHIT out of it:



Click to listen

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In the Universe Where 3 = 1 = 2

When the response to your email complaint to the USPS about your mail consistently being misdelivered to the wrong apartment* starts off like this:

"Thank you for contacting us about misdelivery in your area and you have place the mail back for the carrier deliver to the right unit. An you are concern if you are getting all of your mail"

you know you're pretty much fucked.


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*including an incident where the postal worker SCRATCHED OUT THE UNIT NUMBER ON THE ENVELOPE and put it back in your mailbox so they wouldn't have to redeliver it to the front unit

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More of "More Inexplicable Google Searches that Brought People to This Blog"

• defective and addiction of fair and lovely



• "human fire hydrant" stephen king



• ran braless



• will the rotting bird carcass in my apartment bathroom for 3 months make me sick

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Sam Rockwell? Or Sam HOTwell? (Ok, Yeah, Sam ROCKwell)

Sam Rockwell is one of those dudes who, with the right haircut, is fucking adorablesmokinghot.

He also is a damn good actor--one of the better ones out there nowadays, in my humble opinion.

So woot to the fact that he's sporting the right haircut in his new movie (below).

And woot to the fact that he's pretty much the only person in it.

For those reason and others, I cannot wait to see it this weekend.

It looks fricking creeps and awesome:

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Bane is Not so Much a Bane After All

So I was flipping through a massage-supplies magazine last night, and (as some of you know) it got me thinking about Bane of My Existence.* And I realized how much I really fucking miss the dude.

(This post is going to be rather fragmented, but bear with me if you will. And if you won't, well then: suck it.)

Anyways, all uber-ridiculous post-pubescent crushes aside (and believe me, I'd had many many sex-fantasties about the dude**), I really really adored BoME. I hated him SO MUCH when I first started school (as in, my body would physically burn with anger having to sit through one of his classes). But by the end of my stint there, I realized he was hand's down THE best teacher I'd had in all 8 years of my post-high school education.

The dude was fucking WICKED smart. Like scarily wicked smart. And as I was reminiscing about him last night, I realized why I adored him so much, and why he was such an AMAZING fucking instructor. And it's that he was SO IN LOVE with what he was teaching.

Fart Fart Plop Plop. How very Dead Poet's Society, I know.

But I don't mean "in love" in just some generified sense of "let's stand up on a desk and make our students want to fuck Walt Whitman."

He was in love with what he was teaching in such a way that, really, I think he taught not because he wanted US to fall in love with these things as well but because he just wanted and needed to shout to the world, Oh my god can you believe all this?!? Kind of like when you're reading a book, and you stumble across some amazing fact, and you just can't NOT text or call like five different people just to say, Oh my god: listen to this.

I wish you could've seen him teach: The way his eyes lit up and the way he'd get gripped by this child-like enthusiasm whenever he was imparting upon us a particularly fascinating tidbit about something physiology-related.

His teaching came across as an inability to contain his amazement with all things anatomy and physiology. And really: I don't think he cared whether or not he got us to feel as enthusiastic about these things as he did. He just needed to shout to the world about them because it would've destroyed him to know such amazing and awesome things and to just sit there quietly.

And really: it is a powerful thing to bear witness to such love.

THAT is why I adored the man so much.

This in turn got me thinking about the fact that I also really really adored the two years I spent studying massage therapy, moreso than any of the other studying I've done. (If you were a regular reader of ye ol' massage blog, I'm sure you already realize this.***) And although some of it had to do with what I was learning (A&P rocks out), I also think a lot of it had to do with the challenge itself. English & philosophy: I can sort of cake-walk it, bullshit my way through things if need be. But there's no way to fake A&P knowledge. You either know it or you don't. And I didn't. But I had to learn. And I really loved the challenge of that. When I'm learning something new, when I'm fucking gnashing my teeth into amazing information, I feel the same enthusiasm I felt emanating from BoME. I think I would be happy just taking endless classes for the rest of my life for this reason. I love the stimulation that comes with a good challenge. And I don't find that in other places.

This in turn got the whole "what the fuck do I want to be doing with my life" question rolling, and it of course took me forever to fall asleep in the face of this.

In the past few months, I've been gripped with a certain sense of panic about what I'm doing with my life. Much of this is a good thing. We should find ourselves questioning these things so we don't stay static. My life is undergoing huge changes right now (namely the fact that in about 6 months, I will be without a job and facing a new future that I must pound out for myself), and that's part of the reason for the questioning.

But some of the panicked questioning was not so good, and these were the moments in which my questioning came from being confronted with criticisms about what I value in life and about whether I am, in fact, doing nothing useful and wasting my precious time here on this planet. (And in retrospect, I can say that at least I'm not wasting my time sitting around judging and criticizing what other people choose to value and how they choose to live their lives. THAT is for sure a waste of our precious time.)

The truth of the matter is: I have no fucking clue what I want to be doing with my life. OTHER THAN the fact that I know I want to squeak happiness out of every square inch of it and I want it to be brimming with love.

I was watching House the other night, and (as always) there was a patient dying of a mysterious disease, and one of the doctors said to her (and we all know if someone on tv said it, it's GOT to be worth repeating): "I always worry on my deathbed I'll think: I didn't do anything really important." And her response was: "You're going to spend one day of your life on your deathbed. The other 25,000 are the ones we should be worrying about. Go to bed happy tonight."

Seriously though: I can think of no truer words. I may perhaps spend the last 3-, 24-, 48-, 297-hours of my life wondering if I should've done this, why did I do that, did I do things correctly, etc. (Or--even worse--death may just sneak up and blindside me.) But those are a mere 3-, 24-, 48-, 297-hours of self-doubt in the face of so many hours of actual amazing glorious living. And I want those living hours to be as chock full of happiness and love as possible. It doesn't matter in what form. It can be the love and glee of seeing a hummingbird regularly appear on my roof every night. It can be the enjoyment of getting a thrifted waffle-maker. It can be a deep and complex love of something I'm reading. It can be the bliss of creating.

Who cares what the source of the happiness love is as long as there's happiness love? Who is someone else to judge whether what's making me happy is useful or worthwhile or valuable?

Really, even if it's sitting in front of a television for the next 37 years of your life, if it makes you happy, WHO THE FUCK CARES?

It's your life. You'll be the ultimate judge of whether or not you felt it was a good one. If you're concerned about whether other folks are going to deem it a valuable one, YOU SURE AS SHIT AREN'T GOING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT IT ONCE YOU ARE NO LONGER HERE TO THINK ABOUT IT. So all there is is you.

I sometimes find myself wanting to argue that I need to be doing something bigger, that I need to be leaving some sort of legacy behind or that I need to be out there teaching other people The Way. And maybe I WILL do some of these things. But really: if I'm doing them just 'cause it's something I feel like I'm supposed to be doing and I don't feel love in doing them, WHAT GOOD ARE THEY? And really, if you're doing these things begrudgingly and aren't happy in your doing of them, you're not doing anyone else any good either.

You do things because you love doing them in the moment and because they're making you happy NOW. If you're always doing them for just some "down the road" sense of fulfillment or acknowledgment, what if that never comes? If you're saying, "Well, this sucks right now and I'm not enjoying it at all, but the reward is that in 5 or 10 years, perhaps someone will notice this and then I can finally feel that happiness I was hoping for," what if that never happens? Or what if you're not around when it does? THIS is why you need to love things in the moment and be happy NOW.

I don't mean to discount the value in doing things for the larger picture or the greater good. Because there is indeed value to this. And I know all this is oversimplification, and perhaps a week from now I'll find myself rolling my eyes at everything I just said. [Even now, I'm realizing I want to go back and replace most every instance of "happiness" with "love." So perhaps I will.****]

But really, even so: There is one thing I know for certain, and it's that I want my life to be filled with the same electricity, uncontrollable enthusiasm, joy, and love I saw in BoME on a regular basis. I don't give a shit where it's coming from as long as it's there.

Fucking negativity be damned. Fucking judgment be damned. Fucking criticism be damned.

Fucking waste of time is what all that is.

Do what you do because it makes you happy and because it fills your life with love. And do it because it's doing so for you RIGHT GODDAMN NOW.

And if you're unhappy with what you are choosing to value right now, maybe you should be questioning why.


The End.


And now I need to go track down BoME and finally make sweet sweet brilliant-headed love to him. I suspect he won't object.



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* For those of you behind the times, Bane of My Existence was one of my instructors when I was studying massage therapy a year+ ago.
** Many many many.
*** Sadly, I allowed the blog to dwindle out with no posts about the culmination of all my studies. This is I still sort of regret. But ah well.
**** The reason for this change: "Happiness" seems to be more passive. "Love" seems to be more active. "Happiness" is the appreciation of, whereas "Love" is more engaged in the making. I want to actively be amazed and joyous in all the things I do and see. (But also appreciative too, I guess.)

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What up face?

I realized today that the whole notion of facial-recall is slightly fascinating to me. Mostly because it seems kind of paradoxical in nature. Unfortunately, my google skills suck today, and I can't find any fascinating articles to verify this, but what seems so strange and paradoxical to me is this:

• In all other areas of memory, the more you exercise the memory, the longer it seems to stick around.



• When it comes to being able to recall a face (not RECOGNIZE a face, but recall a face from out of the thin air of memory), it seems that the more often you try to visualize it, the less the memory sticks around.

I suspect it's something to do with the visual aspect of the memory and the brain-mechanisms involved and the fact that you don't actually call up the visual face like a cue-card in front of your eyes but moreso an idea of the face, or a "sensation" of it perhaps. Other memories are allowed elements of vaguery: when we recall having the shit scared out of us by a clown when we were 12, for example, we don't typically visualize ourselves in physical specificities or even the clown in physical specificities. But recalling a face requires just that.

Even stranger is the fact that often all the other puzzle-pieces of the face fall into place if you can recall one certain specific, like a particular shit-eating-grin expression or the way the voice sounds (strangely) or the hair against the nape of the neck.

I'm the type of person who daydreams often about the faces of crushes or significant others, and the whole act of doing so seems very much akin to rubbing a stone between your fingers: the more and more you worry it, the less defined it becomes, the edges warming and folding and smoothing out beneath your fingers.

There's something sad and yet awesome in that.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies : The Classic Regency Romance -- Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Seriously. I don't even care if this book is good. I just feel it is my responsibility as a human being to read it.

*on order*

PS. The title of this post actually IS the entire title of the book. Ha ha ha. Brilliant.

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Just Sayin'.

Last night I watched yet ANOTHER American remake of a Japanese horror flick. This seems to be the trend nowadays--Americanizing Asian horror flicks. (See also: Dark Water, The Ring, The Grudge, just to name a few)

And it got me thinking about what annoys me so much about our (suddenly) rampant need to remake Asian horror flicks, and mainly, it's that we're not so much AMERICANIZING them, per se, as we are just taking the (for example) Japanese imagery and placing it in an American film, essentially co-opting the culture's fears and iconography but placing it in an Americanized environment.

Let me explain.

The film I watched last night was One Missed Call, a remake of Chakushin Ari. I've not seen the original (I've got it on order), but the American version is undeniably hyper-Americanized. AND YET (as with other films like The Grudge or The Ring), the spirits/specters have been plucked straight out of the Japanese films as is (in all their cultural iconography) and placed into the Americanized film with no changes. So here we have hugely Americanized movies whose ghosts and specters nonetheless APPEAR TO BE JAPANESE (and if not physically Japanese, at least possessing the characteristics of the Japanese yurei).

And upon writing this, I am--of course--unable to find any actual stills from this particular film to post as examples.

So let's use some of the other Americanized Japanese remakes I mentioned instead.

The Ring:







The Grudge:





Either the ghost-characters themselves are Asian (The Grudge). Or the ghosts have the visual appearance of a Japanese ghost--the Yurei or Onryo (The Ring):

Traditionally, the yurei is portrayed with messy unkempt black hair. This is a traditional Japanese reference to the Kabuki theater that has been prevalent in Japan for years. In Kabuki theater, the evil characters are usually considered to be insane. A symbol of insanity in Kabuki theater is unkempt hair.

The yurei is almost always in white clothing. This refers to the fact that the traditional funeral garb in Japan is white. The Japanese ghost is seen in the last bit of clothing that was worn before traveling into the world of the dead.

(from here)

(ASIDE: Researching this a bit today is where my Toshiro Mifune/Kurosawa ramble got reignited. If you've never seen the witches/spirit women/mediums in a Kurosawa film before, you are SERIOUSLY missing out on some creepy-ass shit, my friends.)

And here's the thing: what's so damn cool about horror flicks is that above and beyond the average movie, they really do kind of offer us an anthropological look at a culture and its fears and anxieties.

Yeah, I know I know. They're also trash. And they're also entertainment. And yeah, I may be trying to justify my horrible taste just a little. Blah blah blah.

But truly:

When did the rise of the slasher film (which is characterized by "punishment inflicted upon its sexually promiscuous characters") take place? Right around the time we were finding out about AIDs and the fact that sex can be really really unsafe.

What are some of the most common themes in Asian films in the past few years? Technology (Chakushin Ari, Ringu) and confined spaces (Odishon, Three Extremes).

It really is kind of fascinating.

And here's where my disgruntlement lies. In these recent (and original) Japanese horror films, we see a culture. We see its ghosts and traditions. We see its folklore and history (i.e. ghosts visually snagged from Kabuki imagery). And--I would argue--we see its fears and anxiety: Technology. The claustrophobia of a large population crammed into a small space. Etc.

And here WE are taking this culture's "language," these icons that are not culturally our own, and we're adopting them for entertainment purposes. And in my opinion, these things that we're appropriating don't read well when placed half-assedly into our own cultural language. They don't have the same history/cultural trail to them that allows us to read them as they would be read by that culture's audience in the original films. I mean, there's a huge disparity between the over-Americanization of a film like One Missed Call and the Japanese-esque spirit-images placed in it. And it makes it read very strangely.

But even as I'm saying this and criticizing our horror-makers for doing this, I must admit, it also seems apropos. It tells its own sort of tale about our culture. And what do these Americanized remakes of Japanese horror flicks SAY about us? That we're co-opters of other cultures. And as anyone who listens to music or watches films or has ever looked at art work knows, this is undeniably true.

And really, is it something worth criticizing? I don't know. I mean, we ARE the cultural melting pot, an amalgamation of a huge number of different cultures, so maybe it makes sense. And yet, I'm still annoyed that we do so in such an absent-minded way. As in: "Hey, these ghosts are SPOOKY! Lets snag the imagery" with no real sense of the history or folklore behind them.

Its this vacuousness in our horror films that is disturbing. The absent-minded appropriation. The remake and 53rd sequel 'cause we can't think of anything new. The hollow Rob-Zombie violence that, when the gore is stripped away, has nothing underneath it to actually hold the film up.

And maybe THAT's what I take issue with.

I want our horror films to reveal something other than the fact that we're a co-opting, deflatingly uncreative, vacuous culture.

Do you feel me?

I'm pretty certain I'm being overly-reductive though, so: arguments please.

(And yes: I do realize that it was just yesterday that I was cheering for vacuous zombie gore, but suck it.)

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Seriously, the dude IS fucking dapper

Toshiro Mifune. Forgotten celeb-crush.

Jesus, I can't even remember which film was my fav of his, it's been so long. I'm thinking The Seven Samurai or Yojimbo but can't be certain.

NO NO NO! Throne of Blood, my friends.

Kurosawa Man-Lust.

If you've never seen Kurosawa (and, by proxy, not seen Mifune), get the hell to the library.

Mifune's like the Japanese Hugh Jackman, all bristling manhood and sweat and "yeah, you just saw me take on twenty guys by myself, what."



Goddamn:








Twenty guys, what.






Sweaty & nippular:





Yeah, that's a man-purse, but I could gut you in two seconds flat, so you wanna say something about it?






And he of course rocks the beard:






Growr.

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It Was Awesome Enough That It's Worth Reiterating

So Ving Rhames is the big, sweaty-muscled, gun-toting, bad-ass hottie protagonist (with a sensitive side) in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. And I both heart that movie and his character quite a bit.




So you can only imagine my delight when he popped up in ANOTHER zombie flick last night: the remake of Day of the Dead.

And now I can't decide which one I heart him more in, 'cause he may have been loin-quiveringly masculine in the former, but... GAH!!!!! He-turns-into-a-legless-zombie-within-the-first-30-minutes-of-the-latter!! And HE EATS HIS OWN FRICKING EYEBALL.

In case you didn't hear me the first time:

HE IS LEGLESS AND EATS HIS OWN EYEBALL.

If I am EVER in a zombie movie--and god help me I WILL be--that is sure as fuck the way I'd want my zombie shit to go down.


(Seriously: at 8:17 it begins and at 8:32, an eyeball is eaten. Oh yes.)



Ving Rhames: You are the shit.

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How Can You NOT Like a Song that Sounds Like They’re Doing That Thing Where You Pull Your Straw Up & Down in Your Lid Just to Get That Noise?

And also it's in French.

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Fetishes R' Us

and/or More Inexplicable Google Searches that Brought People to This Blog

• Bruce Campbell wear toupee


• Neighbor's orgasm


• Dr. pepper vagina


• An obscene organ of brute pleasure


• household glove porno fetish movie clip


• earwig bite orgasm

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Inexplicably Creepy Clip-Art from the Annals of Ms. P

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A Triumvirate of Randomnesses (+ a Bonus Track)

1. Quote: "She was still thinking about Mauricio Babilonia, his smell of grease, and his halo of butterflies, and she would keep on thinking of him for all the days of her life until the remote autumn morning when she died of old age, with her name changed and her head shaved and without ever having spoken a word..." (One Hundred Years of Solitude)



2. Favorite new word:
   
   FORMICATION (noun)--Pathology. An abnormal sensation as of ants creeping over the skin. (@ Words of Wallace)



3. The dissociative brain: humble servant sent to rescue and protect, regardless of need or want. Steps up. Packs everything into tight boxes. Ships it all off to dark and musty storage spaces. Good memories--more painful than bad--sent away as well. And so the struggle: the desperate attempt to hold onto the good, the sacrifice of holding onto bad to do so. Scrambling fingers with no grip. But always: memories shelved and stored away, a dewey-decimaled Eternal Sunshine but with no card catalogue--the brain slips it all away on shelves, and then returns to the circulation desk to wait for the next.



4. BONUS TRACK: My new chiropractic remedy is to tie a scarf really tightly around my chest above my tits and walk around all night with it there. Terrible fashion, but it keeps my shoulder blade from migrating forward as it likes to do. I have not told Chiroman about this though as I suspect it will result in a swift punch to my temple.

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