Dude.

Did you ever just stop to think about the nature of the infinite? I'm going to write an update about that. Maybe tomorrow or Wednesday. Right now I'm just going to ponder it and get my thoughts in order.

Spoon - The Way We Get By (website)
Afroman - Because I Got High (website)
Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (a picture of the Cheshire Cat)

Everything Is Nixon's Fault

The Monsanto House of the Future

Tomorrowland at Walt Disney World has undergone several facelifts over the past couple of decades, flirting with Jules Vern steampunk (a flop; that sort of brass-and-verdigris theming is simply incompatible with the lush semitropical setting) and currently (to my knowledge) settling for white plastic à la Buzz Lightyear, WALL-E's Eve, and Apple products. Compared to the original Disneyland Tomorrowland's style, it feels rather flat to me.

The problem doesn't lie entirely with Disney, of course; since the late '70s our society has simply failed to have a unifying concept of Futurism at all. The Cold War lasted too long; the western world couldn't sustain its visions of constant shiny progress when it was obvious that we weren't making any progress against the Russians. The threat of war and nuclear annihilation and climate changes and the degradation of the world were too depressing and made for a society far too pessimistic to maintain belief in the raygun gothic ideals of the previous decades.

There were always those who held that Futurism was rot to begin with, of course, rejecting it as too pat and perfect, naive and conformist, but that segment of society moved from an iconoclastic subculture to the overwhelming majority as the years went by. The Future used to be bright, shiny and full of flying cars and Googie spires; nowadays it's dark, grungy, and really just more of the same old same old war and poverty and depression, only this time it takes place on a spaceship (which is also dark, grungy and depressing).

I personally choose to reject the modern form of small-f futurism and embrace the old big-f Futurism! (punctuation sic). We need more chrome, more giant lasers, more villains who want to take over the world to get rich instead of blowing up buildings for their vision of religion. We need spy-fi and Lalo Schifrin and motherfucking rayguns.

You can keep the flying cars, though; I don't trust most people on the road in TWO dimensions, much less three.

The Most Serene Republic - Present of Future End (myspace)
Jared Mees and the Grown Children - Bees (myspace)
Wolf Parade - California Dreamer (myspace)

Southern Gothic

Big Cypress Bayou, Caddo Lake, Texas

There's something in the water in the Deep South. Maybe it's moonshine, maybe it's poverty (how, exactly, poverty gets in the water is a question that would fall beneath the purviews of your conundrums of philosophy). Maybe it's both of those, plus the heat and the constant sense that the goddamn Yankees are still keeping the Confederacy down; maybe it's some wild romantic streak inherited from the Cavaliers who settled the place two hundred years ago; but there's SOMETHING going on that makes the imagination as fertile as the plantation sod, growing something dark and twisted and bitter...

Louisiana is especially good for it, its neighbouring Mississippi nearly as rich. Horror grows like kudzu, a lush bayou setting for monsters or magic or the deeper and subtler horror of simple humans. It's a hint of the macabre, with a hint of humour that makes it all that much more terrible. It can be vampires, zombies, voodoo, murder, racism, the hell of other people in small towns where public opinion is better currency and harder-won than pure gold; something great and Lovecraftian crawling out of the Spanish moss or something quiet and insidious creeping through the neighbours' hearts.

It's been put in writing by William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Preston & Child, and dozens more. It's spawned murder ballads by the score. And for art you have only to look to the setting itself: aging brick and wrought-iron in Louisiana cities that saw their best years before the Civil War, dilapidated mansions being reclaimed by the swampland, old men sitting on the side of the road in broke-down hats, historic markers for the death sites of Depression-era outlaws.

Even a transplanted Northerner can't help but feel it, sinking into the soul with the weight of the humid air.

Charlie Robison - Magnolia (website)
The Builders and the Butchers - Bottom of the Lake (myspace)
Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue - Where the Wild Roses Grow (website)
Murder By Death - Shiola (website)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Television (and print, but they've been cut off by the layout of the blog for some reason) reporters take a statement from a police information officer at the scene of a shooting. Photograph by Justin Baker

"With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms." - Hunter S. Thompson

In any journalism class, from the one I took in high school on up through university level, the idea that you have to STAY OBJECTIVE gets hammered in with the force of a Mack truck plowing over a poodle. Use neutral language! Avoid bias at all costs!

Bull. Shit.

Humans are biased creatures. Everything you see gets interpreted through a lens of your own past experience and everything you think gets filtered back out through the same. True objectivity is a simple impossibility.

"But shouldn't we try? Is it not a noble goal?"

Fuck no it isn't.

Everything you do and say and write is going to be biased. Every choice you make about what is newsworthy and what facts are worth putting into the article and what photo is best to accompany it is being biased by your personal filter and by the filters of your editors and publishers and the business as a whole. No matter how carefully you choose neutral words to express your thoughts, the thoughts themselves are not, and can never be, neutral themselves.

Misleading yourself into thinking that you're some kind of bastion of integrity and journalistic objectivity is bad enough. Misleading the public into thinking that journalism is objective is even worse. When "Objective Journalism" is deified and believed in with the fervency of a Born-Again who thinks Jesus Christ Himself is actually literally present with him in his bed at night when he's piously keeping himself from masturbating, the general public starts to think that every news source - or even just the ones they like the best, which is as bad or worse - is Actually Telling The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth. They think they can trust the news to get The Whole Story. In cases where the bias is evident - Fox News' obvious right-wing slant, for instance - the tendency is to think that the one the viewer agrees with is Objective and the others are Bad Journalism.

It's ALL Bad Journalism, if "Biased" means "Bad."

You can't keep yourself unbiased and pretending you are is a disservice to yourself and the readers. What the industry needs is an open acknowledgement of it. Let there be right-wing news and left-wing news and libertarian news. The people with tiny little brains who can't deal with opposing viewpoints can just read the one they agree with; the people who want to actually try and figure out what's really going on can read all of them and form their own idea of what constitutes The Objective Truth that way.

And I dare say you'll write better and enjoy it more if you're not constantly keeping yourself on that self-imposed leash of impossible goals.

Now get the fuck out there and write what you believe in. Write what you're angry about. Write what you feel. WRITE, you fuckers.

Don Henley - Dirty Laundry (website)
New Pornographers - The Fake Headlines (website)
Spoon - I Turn My Camera On (website)

If it's not love then it's the bomb that will keep us together

I've never been a big fan of Tom & Jerry, and Chuck Jones' time with the series is apparently considered to be its weakest period, but the above cartoon encapsulates everything I love in one compact six-and-a-half-minute package. Being a Chuck Jones cartoon, the art direction is of course absolutely delicious. I'm an incredible sucker for good mid-century space-age commercial art, and this is a great example of the genre.

The setting is exactly what I've always pictured as the ideal moon base, with curving hallways lined with windows to give a beautiful view of outer space and architecture designed to tickle us all right in the "where is this future that was promsied me?" spot of our post-postwar-generation brains. The colours are spot-on, and couldn't you just die for all those Googie details?

The cherry on top of this delicious 1967 futurism sundae is the ending, a visual pun for the Cold War. They've literally bombed each other back to the Stone Age.

And of course, feline (human) nature being what it is, the peace that results afterward is short-lived, and they're right back to chasing each other around at the end of it. Slightly pessimistic, I suppose, but things tended to be during that era of cautious, line-toeing not-quite-détente.

(Incidentally, the end of the cartoon also illustrates what I consider to be the big flaw in Adrian Veidt's "brilliant scheme" in Watchmen, but that's spoiler territory and we won't get into it here.)

On a biographical note, I may be among the youngest group who remembers the Cold War as a viable threat. I was born in 1983, and it was really over for all intents and purposes by the time I was old enough to count as human and have reliable memories, but in 1988 and 1989, in kindergarten and first grade, I and my classmates were called into the library of our long, low, vaguely-International-style primary school (built of cinder blocks and coloured aluminum wall panels in 1963) to watch "Duck and Cover," the filmstrip that taught you how to tuck your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye with the help of a friendly turtle named Bert. Then we filed out into the playground for recess, which was ended by a siren: we were carefully taught the difference between the fire alarm, which meant assembling outside in the yard, and the SIREN, which meant assembling inside and proceeding to the fallout shelter in the basement. Having absorbed this information into my impressionable little mind at such a young age, I don't think I realized that the Russkies weren't actually going to bomb us at any minute until I was in my teens.

The Shortwave Set - Replica (website)
British Sea Power - Atom (website)
Tiger Army - Atomic (website)

It's A Hard-Knock Life

Today I went to a travelling carnival that had set up in the parking lot of the local mall. On the way out, I stopped to talk to one of the carnies. What follows came from him. (Parentheses indicate editorial insertions.)

(Two children come up to the side of the ride - the Yo-Yo, one of those rides with the swings - shoving tickets at him.) The door's over there. *point* Go wait by the door. (The ride is still running; they push through the door and come UNDER THE RUNNING RIDE to shove tickets at him.) WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THE RIDE IS GOING! THE DOOR IS OVER THERE! *points, ferries them out* Man, I've seen the stupidest fucking people out here. Coming out while the ride is going, damn! Sometimes you get people - ok, I'm not the brightest person, right, but when I see a swing, and I see a strap hanging from the bottom of the swing, and it's got a hook on it, and there's a loop on the bar on the top of the swing, I don't go "durr" and wrap the strap around my leg. But these people do. No common fucking sense. I've done some stupid shit myself, of course. Once the ride was going and I had to duck under my tarp (the base of the ride has a tarp wrapped around it) and when I come back out the swings were coming down and one of the buckles hit me in the head. Knocked me out cold. They had to send some guys in to pick me up, and I came to right when they picked me up. I was like "Aaah, I gotta go turn off my ride!" (The ride stops and he lets his passengers off. The two kids from earlier and a very large woman who was nowhere to be seen when they were running around earlier try to get on. He goes to take their tickets and strap them in, and comes back.) She didn't fit. Too fat. It's funny, I've fit some fat-ass people on this ride. Usually what I see is women with very large chests. Once I had a lady, and I was trying to strap her in - I was like, "look, ma'am, if I have to touch your chest, don't get offended, ok?" And she was trying to get the chest strap hooked, but it wouldn't go. So I was like "I'm gonna have to touch your chest," and I like, basically lifted her tits up and strapped it underneath, and she was like "Oh!" Yeah, common fucking sense. Oh wait, people don't HAVE that.

See that guy over there? He's an asshole. I kicked his ass last week. That's not the best fight I've been in, though. The best fight we've had this year - I was in it, but I wasn't in the best part of it - was this new guy, it was like his first week, and he didn't know how to shut up. He kept running his mouth off at the guy who runs the Sea King, so everybody basically kicked the shit out of him. I mean, we thought we KILLED this guy. And afterward we're all in the bunkhouses - I mean, we're tough love, this is tough love out here. We'll kick each other's asses - most of these guys have kicked my ass a couple times, but it's ok, because I know it's because they're looking out for me. So if you get your ass kicked, you go back in the bunkhouse, you shut your door and go the fuck to sleep, right? But this guy, he didn't know how to shut up, so like five minutes and he's going RARR RARR RARR again. He ends up running out and he's up at the midway office building. Now, the lady who lives in the midway office building, she carries a gun because she can't defend herself. And we all thought she was in there, while he's banging on her door at 2, 3;30 in the morning. So we go after him, and he's up on the stairs, and he's banging away and yelling, and I tell him, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to kick your ass harder than the rest of the guys ever did." And he turns around and goes RARR RARR RARR, and I just cannonball him right above the belt, and he just curls up on the ground. We get some good fights here.

Everybody does something. Weed, cocaine, alcohol, whatever, everybody does something out here. But we don't like crack, we don't like meth - we don't like the BAD shit, y'know? I used to have a little magnetic pipe and I'd load it up with pot and just keep it stuck right here inside my control box. Start the ride, do a hit, pop it back in with those magnets. I had a little pipe that looks like a cigarette, and I'd walk down the midway smoking that. Real cigarette in one hand, little cigarette pipe in the other. Had a lady stop me once - "I smell marijuana!" I just said "I don't," and I wasn't even lying. I don't have much of a sense of smell anymore.

I've gotten hurt a ton of times. I've fallen off the sweeps - the arms the swings are on, we call those sweeps - fell all the way down to the ground, broke my arm in two places, I was still back here the next day. I've hit my head on the swings, I've fallen off of shit, I used to have a suicide plate - one of the plates in the base there, those all move and come out so the ride folds up into its own trailer, you know? And one of them, I fixed it this year, if you stepped on it wrong it would slide open. Suicide plate. I stepped on it wrong and it slid open and I fell down inside and then it slid back. Caught me right in the chest. Cracked three ribs. I've busted my hand, dislocated my thumb - think I've broken this thumb too - broke my foot, twisted my ankle tons of times, I've gotten pretty beat up. Always come back to work the next day, though.

I've been doing this since last year - my first time was right here at this location, actually. I came in to do tear-down, and I started travelling with 'em. Your first season, you're considered greenwood, and if you make it through that first season, you get to be a ride operator. Last season I tore this entire ride down. I mean TO THE BONES. I had to unscrew every single lightbulb, rework every socket, strip it down, repaint everything and then reassemble it, all inside of a week. And people wonder why I EARNED this ride.

Her Space Holiday - I'll Believe In Anything (website)
RIAA - Runnin' With The Devil Bunnies (website)
The Fratellis - Chelsea Dagger (website)
Man Like Me - Carny (Punks Jump Up Goes Bass remix) (myspace)

All We Wanna Do Is Overanalyze Your Brains

Lately, playing far too much Left 4 Dead and rereading Stephen King's Danse Macabre (not, mind you, at the same time; it's hard to process prose while shooting digital zombies in the face), I've been inspired to get back into my old hobby, Putting Completely Unwarranted Amounts Of Thought Into Things. (Maybe someday I'll post about Owl's Unified Post-Apocalyptic Theory of Indie Rock.)

Look at the difference between the "classic" zombie movie and today's popular zombie movie/video game/etc. The first obvious difference is the speed. Old zombies used to shuffle at you, slow and decrepit and yet completely unavoidable. They were terrifying because they were inevitable: you might be able to outrun one, but eventually the horde would get you. Nowadays, shuffling zombies just don't do it for us. Modern zombies are fast zombies. They come out of nowhere, and when you think you're safe because there's a fence or a boarded-up window between you, you find out they can climb and smash through the boards. They're terrifying because you can never see them coming.

So clearly, slow zombies are the Cold War and fast zombies are terrorists!

Honestly, horror movies always - usually subconsciously - relate to the real-life horrors present in the nation when they're made. That's part of why a movie that was scary 20 years ago may not be as frightening today - beyond the question of special effects, there's the simple fact that we are not the same people as the moviegoers of 20 years ago were. Our collective subconscious has changed. There are and were lots of other things present in the symbolic layers of zombie films (example 1: many of the classics came out in the late '60s and the '70s, when the zombies themselves may have symbolized the assimilation and "rot" setting in as the counter-culture kids grew up and joined suburbia; example 2: modern "fast zombies" are often caused by a mutated strain of a virus - usually rabies - which is both scientifically plausible [a necessity for suspension of disbelief among today's nitpicking public] and provides a convenient bad guy - usually the rabies is being mutated on purpose in a government-funded lab, making our own government ultimately the enemy).

Anyway, back to the subject: Slow zombies are the Cold War's threat of nuclear apocalypse, a death you could see coming a long way off but ultimately can't avoid at all. Fast zombies are terrorists, a threat that comes just when you least expect it. The end.

Zombina & the Skeletones - Nobody Likes You When You're Dead (website)
Tilly and the Wall - Nights of the Living Dead (website)
The Horrorpops - Walk Like a Zombie (myspace)