#476

A meditation: I'm weird about Stuff, stuff like, as two useful and always-perennial examples, I am capital dubya Weird about Star Wars and Batman. This is a fact so robust as to be indisputable. Other stuff too, but these are good. Zelda! Ok, I'm done.

Now. I am weird about Star Wars in my way, and older people are weird about Star Wars their way. Right? These are clear delineations. I was born in 1989. My dad did not take me to the premiere in 1977  when I was eleven, and I did not get a job at Lucasarts in 1991. Right? Some things are only possible in a certain context. Now, that old fucker has no concept what is to grow up in the nineties right alongside the Expanded Universe, devouring novels featuring Young Jedi Knights and the OG Witches of Dathomir and shit, not to mention a body of comics containing some of the best one-shot storytelling and universe-building I've read in my life--and through it all, the Star Wars Encyclopedia you keep checking out from the library nestled safely at your elbow like a fully armed and operational battle station. 

Because of this, and other similar factors, we absolutely did not see the same movie when we all went and saw The Phantom Menace. Right? That is an agreed-upon truth in this fandom. I think. It can be hard to keep track.

This is specifically to get away from saying that one of these things is better than the other, but they each have their own textures, and that texture is born from a context of a time and place and person's being-in-time-and-place. Right? Yes? We are nodding along with one another, dear reader? 

It's the same with Batman. A movie like Batman and Robin may not have made any sense to the viewing public and the critical apparatus it had the misfortune to be misapprehended by, but to the kids it was actually made for--me and the boys--well, it made us who we are. It served us on its own merits with massive aplomb, and primed us for the Nolan trilogy, which would take us from nascent pubescence through to our early twenties, and now, dudes our age are playing Batman and the Riddler. Paul Dano was also born in 1989.

I was thinking about my style of Star Wars and Batman in relation to like ancient decrepits for whom Adam West is the only "real" "real" Batman; and my father, who was old enough to take himself to Star Wars in 1977, and people like him, for which those theater experiences comprise the main of the canon. I was thinking of them with a certain tenderness because I am this way with at least one thing I am Weird about, and dear reader, you may have already identified it by its absence: Pokémon. I am a Mark I, fully first-generation, Camp of the Ancients, Grizzled Adventurer type Pokémaniac with a very specific way of doing and thinking about things; a creature very much on the order of a Sage: I may not be one of those freaks thrashing children on the global stage with my trick 'mons and my three-thousand dollar card collections--but I have been there since the beginning, and I possess much knowledge and craft that lies disused and forgotten, though no less powerful.

All this to say: kids, who are not weird, will become weird about their shit one day. That's all I was thinking about, I guess. I am kind of weird. I was also thinking a lot about the nature of time as it relates to culture and the reflective lens which bounces it all around as it distorts it, even as it creates it, and destroys it. Again, kind of weird.

*

Wrote the following as a response to a reading assignment in a class about diverse children's literature and what that is and means. A great class. She let me write however I wanted, but I didn't take enough advantage of that--except, maybe, below.

*

There may have been a time when I was having experiences that were not colored by gender expectations and my almost uniform failure to conform to them on at least some level, but I cannot remember that time. It must have been formative, though, because one of the biggest and most forward-facing facets of my experience of gender and my thoughts about gender in society has always been “is this even real? I have some serious problems with this model as presented.”

My father claims not to remember the following anecdote, but my memory is a polished scimitar and his is a moth-eaten blanket, so we’re going with my perspective. As a very young person, perhaps four years old, after a bath, I was wearing my towel up to my armpits—not around my waist as is proper for a man—and my dad asked me if I was a girl, to be wearing my towel up so high. I answered “no” mostly out reflex in response to his tone, but of course, the main effect was to make me think about the question, constantly, for the rest of my life. There are thousands of such anecdotes, featuring my father, other male progenitors, and of course, my peers. These kinds of events demand responses, and mine has typically been a measured verbal aikido: non sequiturs applied in the matter of brutally efficient transfers of kinetic energy. It may surprise some people, people who don’t grade my papers, but I’ve always been more of a “fights with words” type of individual. 

Questions about my gender and sexuality, even friendly ones, have always exerted an uncomfortable pressure on me, and to delineate a firm response has, to me, always felt like a losing position. I hate, hate, hate labels, hate being put into a box—to ask me, aggressively, to put myself into a box be a cultural norm and something that happens at least every other week and sometimes multiple times a day has made me feel and on occasion actually take the position that culture, all forms of it, and perhaps even human interaction at a base level has been a fundamental error. We should never have come down from the trees, etc. I had to settle on Queer and will defend the usage of the terms until I die because “weird person” isn’t a gender even though it’s my actual gender. But again, who gets to decide these things? Why are we all subject to some kind of shadow board, which confers legitimacy sight unseen? I understand it, like everything else on the human continuum, is decided in a discursive forum, but I find it tyrannical. I find all “nonconforming” groupthink tyrannical, and language generated by consensus one part utile, two parts ephemeral, and one part searing brand pressed into the psyche, just like straight people have. It never ceases to amaze and wound me to witness fellow queers deny legitimacy to gender identities or expressions for whatever social set of reasons happens to be important to them because they have attained some form of power thereby.

I prefer amorphous to delineated; I take the concept of a nonbinary continuum very seriously, even though I find it very comfortable and convenient to exist as a “man”, and to problematize and redefine masculinity thereby. I am a quantum liquid within and without masculinity which corrodes and nourishes at the same time. I attach no special significance to organic mechanisms except from a healthcare perspective, so primary and secondary sex characteristics cut zero ice with me as far as gender goes. Behavior as a gendered concept is frankly impenetrable as such; the scaffolding on ancient monuments whose legibility was always questionable and whose continued existence amazes me. What I like, what makes sense to me, is retaining an open conceptual space for every individual I have ever encountered and may ever encounter for them to define themselves as they are, whether they want to use one of two readymade templates on the ancient binary, or identify as a plant, winged wolf, transmasc lesbian with rolling pronouns, or radiant photonic being. Indeed, a rejection of gender altogether is relatable. To be confronted with something entirely new, something I have no interpretive toolkit for yet, that is exciting—who am I to say what a person is or isn’t? It is for them to tell me, to change their minds about it whenever they need to, and to be treated how they want to be treated around it, and to still have to live in a world where people make the case that a person is not a person unless they are a 1 or a 0 and are able to secure legal support in favor of this position to the material detriment of anyone not a 1 or 0 is frankly incredible. Like a joke, but the least funny joke imaginable.

Well, there are complementary terrible jokes involving variable melanin levels and dominant/recessive phenotypes among genetically identical organisms.  

It would be a simple matter to go on for pages and pages and still not scratch the surface of everything I want to say around this particular topic. Perhaps we have enough to go on, even though I feel I have barely communicated. So! When Aidan Became a Brother was wonderful, and as the oldest of three, the excitement around a new baby was very relatable; being a good big brother is one of the cornerstones of my identity. Older sibling is probably a better fit. Certainly, “not fitting”, even when you have a lot of sympathy and empathy and love for what you’re not fitting into, has powerful parallels with my lived experience. 

Once again, a main takeaway from “Why Are There So Few Girls in Children’s Books” revolves around the strange warping influences of economic and viability concerns around the production and dissemination of literature. Can it truly be that our fear that we will not sell enough books or that boys will somehow become illiterate as a population if we have a few more girl protagonists determines the wholly misogynistic nature of an entire publishing edifice? This is the kind of thing that sets my teeth on edge. It is absolutely fear, not function, that is the determining factor here, and that is unacceptable. We need more of everything and everyone in all literature, and that is guaranteed to strengthen literature and literacy. On this point, I am confident. The idea that more girls in literature will weaken literacy is concussed and craven.

Tate and the Pink Coat has some pretty strong ideas for creating gender-inclusive classroom spaces, and I would certainly want to utilize the kinds of aesthetics and concerns they’ve outlined in building and stocking a classroom, though I also think there is a case for retaining some “gendered” objects in order to allow for the subversion of their use. For some, expression making use of the genderedness of certain artifacts is an important avenue for selfhood, whether to their traditional ends or to the “opposite” of those ends. The important thing, I think, is the openness and support provided by the educators themselves, which ties the whole concept of physical expression together and grants the explorative aspect of interacting with the physical and social space the safety and approval that it needs in order to nourish the participants.

Three things to remember about nonconforming gender and children’s books:

• They are getting easier to find, which is miraculous, but also being pushed back and even censored, which is troubling—but the reason they are being censored is they represent the potential for a radically new and more inclusive world, which is very scary for people who farm the misery generated by the world we have in order to satisfy their psychic vampirism. The books are more powerful than they are, though, and they know it.

• They provide help and relief to children having experiences for which the dominant culture provides almost no handholds.

• They provide a humanizing touchstone for children not having these experiences and growing up in a culture that otherwise amply rewards them for ostracizing and villainizing the children in the above bullet point. 

*

Hey, who the fuck knows. Who the fuck cares.

As before: did not reread except so far as to determine viability. And with that, RDF4CoF, or,

RAW

DOGG

FUXXX
4

CHEEP

or

FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

--JL

#445

Whoo! Got-damn, shit, and HELL FUCK. 

Silence has invaded this space, never a thing I like to let stretch out, but the times demand what the times demand. Typing that made me itch to segue into current affairs, but I'm not going to do that. Commentary on this planet and its human doings has never been easier or less necessary. Necessary isn't exactly what I mean, but I didn't want to say pointless, because then that would sort of make it my job.

What I mean is that in the current moment, everyone knows what is wrong and why, and no one can do a single thing about it that's going to affect our sinister momentum.

We are but spectators, trapped in a garish, filthy arena which constantly extracts a toll we cannot refuse to pay; our untouchable criminal overlords ensconced in a crystal bubble set above it all, gurgling and fondling themselves as they roll around in a reeking paste of champagne, melted butter, and various illegal meats. Anyone pretending otherwise is part of the toll-extracting process, their perverse ambitions driving them towards that lofty perch I was just describing. 

Our only autonomy, indeed, our only ability, is to stop paying attention, try to enjoy each day as much as we can fashion ways to do so, and let whatever is going to kill us kill us in its own good time. This peasant wisdom is all that remains.

For my money, the expectation is to be killed by a drone. Accidentally or on purpose and designated an accident, or finally on purpose for a specific reason but the stated reason being something completely different and probably defamatory. Does it matter? I've decided that it doesn't at all. Drone, wild animal, heat, zombie, plague, explosion, impact, bullet--who gives a flying fuck how it happens and what people say afterwards if they even notice. Drown me. Choke me out. Defenestrate me. Fire me into space. Put a plastic rifle in my hands and send me out against ten million desperate, starving kinsmen  you call my enemies. I'll chuck it off to the side and wait for it to happen. I'm not fighting anyone about any of this. Can't bother with feelings about it anymore.  

RRRRRRANYHOW, reason I haven't posted since the last post is no longer that I am too tired and still adjusting to all the change--adjustment does continue, but at least my energy is rising nicely--but that I actually have too much to say. It has been difficult to approach the text field with confidence that I could walk away from it without making a massive dirigible of a post ten topics deep, thousands of words per topic.

I'll just talk about some culture today. I mean, now that I've already talked about all that other shit.

Culture! Love that stuff, and there's plenty to tell.

*

Ezra and I have been watching Star Trek all the time, maybe I mentioned it. Been going on awhile. A few episodes of the original series, most of The Next Generation, and now Voyager. We'll be watching Star Trek for a good minute, I expect. It's good! It's way better than Trekkies made it out to be. No one makes Trek as unappetizing as its evangelists. 

But it's good. Good as fuck, actually. There can be no settling of this debate, but naturally I am of the opinion that it's no Star Wars, though that is not the fault of Star Trek, as nothing can be. Frankly, it's not even a good comparison. They are in fact extremely different animals.

*

I have sometimes mentioned about movies I have seen here, but never anything even remotely approaching the exhaustive record-keeping I apply to the books I read. Even with the books, there are probably at least fifty or even more I have forgotten to mention. In fact I watch a lot of movies! Happens all the time.

However, the tenor has changed. My most intense period of watching movies--multiples in the day and night--was in my early twenties, and my rough estimate is about five hundred movies in a two-year period. I have gone through several more periods of a movie or two every day since, the last one being in 2019 and 2020 when I wasn't recording much of anything. Sometimes I don't watch any at all for long periods, or only occasionally.

Beginning before I started at the theater to two nights ago, I was watching cartoons and concentrating on other long-form stuff. The only movies I've watched all year were all the Star Wars movies, though I did those at least twice each.

Now that I am at the theater and now that I am done rewatching all Adventure Time and Steven Universe materials, I am ready to watch ten million movies again and shall endeavor to mark them down as I do the books, except I'm not going to bother with directors or anything, Titles only, man. Lionizing directors is not a thing with me, though I respect the role as much as anyone. Movies are everybody that made them though, and if you're interested, find them, watch them, and read the credits clear through to the end.

Wise Blood

Tuesday

Janet Planet

These movies were all excellent.

*

Been reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, by Stephen Apkon. Fun stuff to read in tandem, trying to balance nonfiction and fiction more closely by consistently being reading at least one of each.

*

What movie will I watch today? I'll find out, and you'll hear about it in good time.

*

Musicwise, been sharpening my knowledge of and rabidly consuming cartoon soundtracks, game soundtracks, chiptunes, vaporwave, African folk (especially Malinese, my favorite), exciting jazz records minted in recent years, oddments and explorations here and there. Albums and other recordings of note inclide Deltron 3030 and the Deltron 3030 instrumentals, new extended recordings of the soundtracks to The Lord of the Rings movies by Howard Shore PLUS a six-movement orchestration of the music from all three films also by Howard Shore--the new choral arrangements in particular are amazing.

Heard belatedly that John Frusciante was back with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and they cut one with Rick Rubin, which has resulted in true greatness in the past, so I listened to part of that endeavor before getting bored and doing something else. I guess maybe they should finally have made an instrumental album if they wanted me to care. Anthony was once one of my icons, but now he's like my dad--lovable, worthy of respect, but needs to get the fuck out of my way. It's funny because they were born the same year, and I sure did rely on both of them to grow up. But one also grows beyond; it is the way of this world. I am more than they, as they were more than their fathers. I still need them, too, but on different terms and different timelines, for different things. Anthony keeps doing the same thing, though. 

Maybe I'll like that record in a couple of years, or their next one right away. Hope so. I like liking stuff, put work into enjoying stuff. It's an important thing to bring to culture, to criticism, to how you live your life. It's easy to hate, simple to excoriate. No flex at all, just gunpowder, and gunpowder is weaksauce. Loving something, seeing something beyond yourself and the power you get from tearing it down, is hard work, but essential. That's where the growth comes in. That stregthens the heart and the eye and the mind and the stomach. 

Not to say some shit doesn't need tearing down. Just that it should come after a great effort to love and understand deeply.

*

(Kermit the Frog voice) 

That's probably the correct note for my exit.

PEACE YOU MAGNIFICENT BITCHES 

(end Kermit)

--JL

#442

Hey, have a post-1:00 a.m. post! That might have to happen consistently. It's a whole new life. We'll see, though. It is possible that I might reclaim part of the morning for writing. But then, it is morning.

*

Well, maybe I would have written a post, if the blind cat hadn't chosen one of her times to go absolutely electrically bugshit for pets and scratches. In this mood, she requires the most exhaustive and complete full-body workover that a cat can get, rubs and smushes and scritches everywhere but her forelimbs down and knees down. In this condition she also allows me to clear her eye sockets of dried gunk, which lowers the chance she'll get a deep itch and harm her eye area scratching away madly. 

Now she's licking her paws and forelimbs and the rest of her own business, completing her process thereby.

*

Hey, look at that, I have a cat. Cats sure are a thing.

*

Friends, I point towards the completely farcical, absolutely criminal stupidity on display with these AI suggestions on search queries, and I allow myself to quote Ian Malcolm: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time."

This exaggeratedly gross and unseemly preening is a fool's joke I'll allow myself as a seque into saying my actual point, which is that literally everything Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick said was happening/would happen was and did and is right now, and far from giving a fuck, the web-fingered gnomes who get their money from greed-blind inhuman lunatics and their gasping, flopping acolytes work harder every day to do every single thing, to the letter, that these men strove to postulate would be absolutely disastrous, materially and spiritually, for our species and its societies. 

The improbably complete fuckups and pratfalls we are bearing witness to? The even crazier, more dangerous shit that I am reading that people are actually getting ready to try?

Literally Terminal Man out there. Literally Westworld. Literally A Scanner Darkly. Literally Jurassic Park. Literally The Minority Report. Or a fake/sanitized/extremely marketed version, which is equally scary because it culminates the same.

Fucks out here don't even have the excuse of not wanting to read a book, because they made good movies out of every single one of those and more besides.

Know motherfuckers watch movies. Sell them tickets these days! I can now attest, all kinds of people watch movies.

Anyway, hubris. The only cure is mortal agony. And too often in our benighted times, those whose hubris wracks our shared realities are never consequenced with so much as actual discomfort, let alone pain enough to humble or suffering enough to teach,

*

Well, that's my bad shit for the day. On a good note, people still go out and pay money to see Star Wars movies in a movie theater, even though they're fifty years old in some cases, and even though assholes say the ones that aren't are bad. It doesn't seem to stop people who love Star Wars, and I say that this is a good and a noble thing, a cause for hope; one small thing to celebrate.

Take your pick of them. They matter just as much as all the sad infiuriating bullshit that gets rammed down our throats.

Bears repeating, and I'm always pleased to type a little more: whatever gleam of light you can see in the great and indomitable darkness of this universe is real, and not just real. Those small joys, those everyday comforts, are worth everything. The reason we hope. The reason we pray. The reason we want to be okay and the way we get there. 

Hold the things that make you happy to your lips like a glowing coal. They are worth hoping for, worth protecting, and when you speak through them, you speak in the voice of love, the voice of God.

--JL

#434

Currently reading Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka. Pretty good so far. Pretty apt.

As is the time-honored, factually pointless way, we present books I have read since last I spoke of it:

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, by David Rooney (this book was GENIUS, extremely should-read stuff)

Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy: II: Greater Good and III: Lesser Evil, by Timothy Zahn, Last Shot, by Daniel José Older, Shadow of the Sith, by Adam Christopher, Alphabet Squadron: II: Shadow Fall and III: Victory's Price, a High Republic comic storyline I forget about (not the story or anything, just the deets of provenance--this is the problem with library books as opposed to gathering everything unto yourself like a crazed magpie), Master and Apprentice, by Claudia Gray (without question one of the number-one Star Wars book I've ever read) probably more Star Wars books that aren't springing to mind at the moment. Dang.

Still got some of the comics I had checked out from the library plus a couple more books, those will all be next. Yes, at least one of them is a Star Wars book.

*

Let me just say that these new Star Wars books are fucking great. Fucking awesome. Some are better than others, the adultification of a couple are a little uneven and just slightly cringe, but all of them are inventive, fresh, daring, beautiful, fun, and fucking awesome. The Thrawn origins and the Alphabet Squadron trilogy were the absolute cream. 

Master and Apprentice was unbelievably pleasurable, I could barely breathe for joy reading that mother. It was pure love letter to everything I adore about prequels-era Star Wars and Star Wars as a whole (except Rebel stuff, evidently), and Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi have been my favorite Jedi for the longest time. Kanan Jarrus, Ezra Bridger, and Ahsoka Tano have more recently risen to these great heights in my heart; Legends Jedi are a whole other tier. My relatonship with Luke has always been complicated, though his greatness in both Legends and Canon is undisputable. Shadow of the Sith was an excellent bolster to his new pedigree, and I loved him in Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. He's somehow never been my favorite, but they have accomplished something remarkable with Luke Skywalker, not to mention Leia's unbridled dopeness.

Anyway! Claudia Gray's Qui-Gon is a masterpiece. A virtuso inhabiting of the character that was some of the most solid, believable, gorgeous, human writing I've ever been struck by. 

Blessings! Blessings, all of you! Dang. Gotta read 'em all, man. Gotta get my own copy of Master and Apprentice. 

*

Ok cool sure yeah I love Star Wars so much WHATEVER BYE

--JL

#432

Had a nice shift. Once again, totally human. The first couple hours took too long and made me feel a little claustrophobic, but as time passed I relaxed.

Spending time alone is something I crave and treasure, but it may be time to reckon with the fact that too much of it makes me strange in my head. That will involve admitting that there is such a thing as too much alone time, rather than the mindset I have always tended to exist in, which is that there is never enough alone time, that it is a precious resource to be fought for and safeguarded.

Well, it is. But meeting people and talking at their faces and having your face talked at is actually important.

Have to admit it. Aloud, too. Repeatedly. As a matter of some long-term urgency.

*

Kids really are incredibly great. They are the point of it all. Yesterday was May the 4th, Star Wars Day, a shining beacon to my people. The theater was running Phantom Menace, and some families came out with their progeny. Man, that was so fucking great to see. That gave me so much life. These kids were losing their bananas about seeing Star Wars on the big screen. I was their age when Phantom Menace dropped. It was a huge blessing to see them get to do the same all these years later, and their joy was as my joy. I also got some undecided customers to see Phantom Menace, so I have already used this position to do some public service--some good in this existence. 

Have to admit it. Have to admit it. It is important to be among people. To have encounters and relate.

To remember what this is all actually for. To keep myself sane, even if people drive me batshit a lot of the time.

*

Kinda burnt out on painting, but it's not the kind of project you can just stop. Kinda gotta finish.

Ok, ok, then. Here we go! 

Final note: ONE PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUNCH

--JL