#481

Interesting--maybe I don't really mean interesting, the way Socrates didn't really mean it when he told a motherfucker "hmm, maybe you're on to something there!"--that all types of people are adept at reducing all other types of people to the absurd, and to behave as though the people they like and admire--people like themselves in key ways, as they see it, typically--are unimpeachable zenith beings.

Not to include myself in this would be bullshit, of course. Might could even be fairly leveled that I am something of an expert, because the technique reaps incredible benefits: you settle on a moral high ground that you can live with, or try to, and you tell yourself that you have found this place to live and be due to your inherent validity and worth, and that most other ways of being are why the world goes to shit. You can see this very easily, from where you are, their venality and hubris.

Naturally, the person over there on their own moral plateau is pointing at you and making very similar noises. And it is deadly difficult to understand, harder to remember, and most grueling of all to make yourself care, in the face of what your entire lived experience tells you to the contrary, they see you as the problem and have just as much right to think so. 

If we all chose to be and live as I am--we say--there would be no such problems. Those poor wretches! They know not what they do. Those bastards! They'll be the death of us, if we don't do something.

This is such, such human all-too-human shit that I don't really know what to feel about it, honestly. Just perhaps that if we solved this riddle of perspective, collectively, we would make such a quantum leap in sociopsychic evolution that we might need a new name.

Usually what happens is war breaks out instead.

*

Ok! Now, the promised Spongebob.

*

It has been proven out over time that it is possible to animate eleven minutes of absolute perfection.

Listen to me, because I am being serious. Perfection has been achieved by our frail, nigh-doomed species: in the execution of the eleven-minute cartoon. 

In that, in so far as we have grasped theoretical mathematics, and in nothing else.

*

The eleven-minute form for the cartoon exists because it has to--but it works because it does. And in these eleven minutes, multiple teams have made multiple perfections. I can think of six perfect Adventure Time cartoons off the top of my head--selecting one that I can use as an example later--Dungeon. 

Band Geeks is one of a few perfect Spongebobs, and it is an exemplar of the perfect eleven minutes.

One of the particular accomplishments that takes eleven minutes into the realm of perfection is to waste absolutely no time, but rush absolutely nothing.

A particular masterclass in showcasing this property is--Dungeon! Dungeon has the sass to bring up the fact that it is going to do what it's about to do before it does it (using precious seconds! but the payoff is huge--many perfect cartoons are metareferential, including Band Geeks), and proceeds to tell three stories, each chock-full of jokes and inside jokes and clever references, great action, magic, horror, human vs. self stuff, the power of love, some other tight ideas I'm forgetting to mention. Very advanced stuff here, a sophisticated play--one of the reasons Adventure Time would still matter to a degree even if it had only made one season: that season established a huge chunk of the thesis, which is to take six or seven genres and key points of reference, explode and invert them, combine them into a surging colloid that has never been seen before and which launched a thousand toons, explored the scope, grew its garden, set things up for the future, and executed several perfect episodes right away. I mean, this is how you do it. There are many ways the whole enterprise was and continues to be completely revolutionary--more on that another time.

Band Geeks is merely a perfect story that essentially doesn't stop being funny or good even for a second, and when the real payoff hits, it's not just funny anymore, though it continues to be funny--it is a power and a glory so huge that tears may come to my eyes as I type. I can tell you that the reason I wanted to write all this in the first place is that watching Band Geeks a few days ago made me weep salt tears into my lunch and left me feeling like things were gonna be ok.

A hallmark of the perfect cartoon, this: the sneak attack, the undoing, and the sustaining.

To break it down too completely is like cutting up a chicken until there's just a pile of wet tissue, a bleached wig. There must be something left to cook, so, you know, couldn't hurt you to find a way to watch Band Geeks and determine for yourself.

I will simply say this: to take a character that you have used up to that point as a strawman, a foil, the butt of the joke and the recipient of physical and psychic slapstick, mercilessly as punching bag, portayed as a base unfortunate, sometimes outright cruel, cynical, misunderstood, arrogant, putting on of airs, apathetic, lacking in knowledge of the self--Squidward is several types of the kind of dude Jewish folks have a less-than-flattering word for all vying for primacy in his tentacled frame. His bulbous head contains multitudes of shortsighted, self-satisfied, completely ineffectual idiots.

But! He does sometimes surprise us, rising to an occasion. The end of Pizza Delivery, another perfect Spongebob relying heavily on Squidward's personality, is the outstanding example. 

To take that character and bless him with the emotional arc presented in Band Geeks is more than simply generous and clever. There is something immortalizing and sublime about redemption that fucking costs something. Boromir is one of if not my very favorite character in Lord of the Rings, which is my Favorite Thing Ever, the gleaming spire on the diadem of my obsessions, so that should communicate something about my psychology.

Squidward pays and pays, and it is rare like hen's teeth but sometimes he gets paid, even if for no other reason than the misdirected generosity of others, and because of how the creators were careful with him up to that point, because of that little bit of fresh background at the beginning of the episode that set the whole thing up, the feeling when he wins, when he wins, and they make him a nonsense song about winning just to get him the fucking win--

Yup. Just made myself cry.

--JL

#478

The thing that sets Halo apart from every other shooter ever produced is the actively moral and speculatively historical context the setting grants your inhabitance. They capitalized powerfully on this as they built their galaxy and its beyonds, wisely using books as the true foundation-stones. Halo runs so deep as to be profound; the accomplishments of Karen Traviss and Greg Bear in the space by themselves mark Halo fiction as essential learnings, in my opinion. I am saying please, for yourself--read their Halo trilogies. Eric Nylund is, of course, the Godfather of Halo--he wrote a genius book under the wire, and the world was improved. His subsequent contributions are also excellent, especially his biography of Vice Admiral Preston Jeremiah Cole, which was a tall fucking order and turned out to be more dope than I could have imagined.

The strength of the hook--the clean and simple moral situation which underpins every action you take--is that humanity is under threat of species genocide, and the technologically advanced beings who wish to enact that genocide are doing so on the basis of their faith. So, holy war was declared on all human persons, and whole worlds are being murdered and destroyed--their very crusts basted in fiery plasma till they are lifeless marbles. Our own Terra is under threat, and every innocent life it supports as well as its physical surface. This lets me pull the trigger without the feeling that accompanies me through most other shooters--that I not only could, but should be doing something else.*

Now, you play as a bioweapon produced at terriffying, manifold costs, encased in the most advanced piece of technology ever built by human hands, aided by an AI so powerful it is unclear exactly what her limitations might be, and all this was designed to put down insurgencies on human colonies, protecting the hegemony of the military wing of a single world government.

Well, they might have retconned the AI part a little bit. Not relevant.

So, the moral lines break along two pretty distinct, uh, perforations. Plus, war is always a complex morass of moving pieces, events interrelating, moral tensions stretching and warping at scale, and all for the highest stakes--it's why we play so many games modeled around war. The heart fairly leaps to the throat even at the concept.

The reason I bring this up is since existential threats brought about by our own machinations and behaviors don't seem to register in a way that leads us to chaging those behaviors, now would be a pretty convenient time for an exo-threat to manifest, so that, like in Halo, all peoples of every color and creed can shelve their shitty stupid ugly BULLSHIT and PULL TOGETHER for like TWENTY CONSECUTIVE GOD DAMN MINUTES so we can NOT GO EXTINCT.

Just an idle thought. Not even that invested, honestly. Shit goes extinct all the time; we're not special.

Here is a little thing I made for that humanities class, not so involved as that Marcus Aurelius "interview".

*

I often think of the Flavian Amphitheater, which I have had the great privilege of visiting in person and assessing firsthand—to have been made small by it and the weight of time and death it ensconces. It is reasonable that I should so often have cause to reminisce, since in the course of my daily life I frequently must drive past a similar man-made monument—indeed, one which takes some trouble to emulate the Colosseum: Michigan Stadium.

Due to my inborn nature, I have through care and diligence managed to avoid entering Michigan Stadium itself. Had the Flavian Amphitheater been in working order—that is to say, had it been an operational organ of state propaganda with no special historical significance—I would have avoided it as well. The scent of blood does nothing for me. Being surrounded by roaring crowds, intent on the consumption of transmitted glory, actively distresses me. Therefore the purposes of the buildings and my own are crossed—the State, in the case of Rome, and the Institute, in the case of the University of Michigan, wishes to increase its prestige through appealing to the popular appeal inherent in violent spectacle and asserted dominance, and I would like for the State, and the Institution, to apply the allocated resources for the material betterment of its protectorates instead.

Of course, I understand that my position disregards the acumen that statesmanship dictates to itself due to the pressure of a simple truth: power is maintained through visibility, and prestige has a mass psychological effect that supports and justifies that power. However much I might personally detest it and many of its corollary effects (notably, a culture of drunkenness and normalized sexual assault, to put it bluntly) the prestige that Michigan Stadium and the games played and won within it by its sports teams grants the university prestige, which translates to immediate fiscal benefit (ticket sales, apparel, etc.) and related benefits (alumni donations, corporate sponsorships, political influence) both for the institution and the city it occupies, and supports the academic endeavors it performs which I do consider worthwhile. The economic benefits of the stadium’s spectacles alone make them, in a sense, indispensable. 

It would have been worthwhile for Rome, as well. Despite its cost in blood, the psychological effect on a Roman citizen in simply entering the Colosseum—a piece of engineering entirely unprecedented in world history, in sight of a lavish viewing box in which the emperor himself could be seen and therefore shared amongst the community and tied to the event itself, witnessing feats of bloodsport on a scale that could not be rivaled—would be enormous. To view an event in the Flavian Arena would be to acknowledge one’s rightful position at the zenith of civilization.

Basic functional knowledge of the engineering at play would only heighten this sense of particularity, of being among those of a select, of transmitted glory. To see all three Greek orders on display when approaching the structure from the outside, heralded by the huge imperial statue and showcasing more statuary within the arches and above the main entrance. The organizational skill and foresight that went into the design of the seating, from crowd control to ventilation, would be evident merely from finding one’s seat and later leaving the Flavian Arena, even for a first-time attendee. To see the velarium raise and retract, the production of fresh beasts and fighters from the hidden hypogeum almost as if by magic, the thrill of a mock battle reproducing a national victory, the punitive release of a public execution—every element, every instance, every moment highlighting the power and glory of Rome. 

Similarly, knowing that Michigan Stadium is the highest-capacity and largest stadium in the United States, and even the Western Hemisphere, and ranking third worldwide, would be a point of pride and awe to any member of a stadium-filling crowd. Such a crowd would be clad head to toe to match the colors prominent in the stadium’s façade and interior, as well as across much of campus—the maize and the blue—and at various points during any given event, a song will be sung in adulation of victors, and their valiant qualities, which is understood to compass all those sporting the aforementioned colors, in celebration of a feat of physicality performed on the high-tech plastic turf of the field below, starting with the teams entering the field of play for all the world armored like gladiators to do ritualized combat. On top of all of this, before one enters the stadium, one can take in rows of arches realized in brick, which, while lacking statuary, evoke the Flavian Arena itself. 

This last point of special interest. American Neoclassicism has ever sought to borrow the grandeur of Ancient Rome and the refinement of Ancient Greece in the architectural spheres, to marry them whenever possible and to add a native touch of bleached minimalism, perhaps to do with our puritanical roots, which have proven to be so deep-sunken. In the spheres of domestic and foreign policy, too, we have emulated Greece and Rome in form and function—distinct confederations which make up a union sometimes so uneasy it must go to war with itself, and a global empire founded on military protections over economic interests fueling cultural exports. The mass psychological effect our buildings and our institutions have produced qualities in American life and political affect which could very aptly grant us the title of New Romans. And like the Ancient Romans, despite the diversity which has always been our strength, despite our great administrative abilities and renowned military power, we seem to lack that most enviable quality of Ancient Egypt: stability. Conflict, corruption, and the threat of tyranny are endemic, and it may be that we are headed towards a national collapse. 

It may be that this raising of monuments to reify ourselves, to see ourselves as somehow elevated and glorified by public violence and tribal dominance, does not after all, despite the short-terms gains, have quite the long-term effects that we should seek from our institutions and our public affairs. 

*

Guess this piece sort of pinpoints me geographically, after all this time spent standing just over to the side of that information. Whatever. Who even cares. I don't even know why I put so much effort into remaining amorphous and oblique, except that I am inclined to think of effort as virtuous and anonymity as not only safe, but courteous. I mean like who cares where we live. This is internet; we ought truck only in concepts, ideas, information; all the meatspace shit can stay in meatspace. I have always felt this way, and have resented very, very much all the importing of absolutely eschewable nonsense from physical space. It's a good reference point, and it's a good topic--but it, itself, need not exert its cruel gravities here. 

Though of course it does, and has so long that there is probably no going back. 

Eh, there's never any going back anywhere. Take a deep breath: you're not gonna take that particular one again till the universe resets and comes back around. Every moment on this merry-go-round of  existence is a brass ring you have to wait an eternity to seize again.

--JL

*like, me personally? I don't give a fuck if terrorists are doing shit in Las Vegas, or if they're doing shit in Eastern Europe, or wherever the fuck the producer of the game says terrorists come from and what they do where is terrorism or what. That's not my problem now and I don't want to make it my virtual problem, either. I don't care what mercenaries do in a desert because superpowers want to make sure petroleum flows, but we call it something else. I mean I care, but I don't want to devote my leisure time to simulating it. What is the victory in this wretched context? We get the same world we live in now, except now I have murdered hundreds and hundreds of people in its name. Wow. Fucking aspirational.

#412

Going hard with collecting rocks, yes. This basically involves theft. Almost everything does, so it's all about who has the most muscle to back up their justifications and rationalizations. I live in the modern empire that proves this par excellence, having learned its lessons well from its mother colony. Each of its citizens is an expert at excoriating the part of the empire they don't like and protecting the part that they do. None of them affect the smooth function of the whole machine, which runs as designed, year in, year out, feeding its masters.

I put a rock in my pocket. Maybe it "belonged" at the edge of someone's garden, or was "part of a parking lot". Maybe I prise it out of hardening mud in a yard or field which does not belong to me, or take it from the thousands of rocks a construction company put at the side of a huge square brick warehouse-style building as opposed to grass or woodchips. Maybe the rock was on some woodchips. This can often be the case.

In taking the rock, I am taking something that does not belong to me. But I do not recognize that it belongs to the person that would assert that claim. I'd return it, or give it to some third more legally backed "owner" if asked, or told to. Why not? Then I'd steal it back, plus two more. Something to occupy my time. 

Who gives a fuck? Some Swiss piece of shit that works for a bank and is seen as a productive and moral member of his nation and community is counting the money that making arrangements to transport one million slaves across six borders netted him. It is more money than I would accept as recompense for saving the world. I have a rock in my pocket. He has that. The world keeps on spinning.

Only God can do the math. So it goes.

*

What am I doing with these rocks? Building an illegal castle? Art project? A boon to "my own" "property"?

No. Just havem. Just gottem. Just put them on shelves, or generally around. Look at them and think about fractals, about time, about our miraculous planet. Hold them in my hand, feel their texture and weight, consider their molecular composition, their structure, their relative hardnesses and densities. They're rocks. I'm me. We are in the same world, made of the same stuff. I consider this, in the time I have before I die.

 

--JL

#411

With civil war bearing down upon us, we dutifully trudge to the cineplex en masse and consume a movie entitled Civil War. 

Well, if that isn't just too fucking perfect and complete.

Have heard that this film asserts that journalism is our only hope. Jesus, can that be true? It plunges into my stomach like a depth charge how unequivocally fucked we are if so. Unless the thesis of the movie is that a nontrivial percentage of the citizen body should transform themselves into a renegade verifiable information supply chain, here in the times of the tail wagging the dog openly and without artifice. Guess I should watch it and see. One should not talk too much about what one don't know.

Just wanted to point out in that first paragraph how utterly, completely steeped in Modern Americanism this situation is. We wouldn't believe it was possible or even desirable to go to the moon until Walt Disney said it was ok. It's just how we are. 

People don't need porn to fuck nasty, but movies tell us how to act nonetheless. Art reflects life, which can only reflect art. Indeed, I have met many people who seemingly constructed their identities and based their speech patterns on a loose mix of perennial and recently perused films. I myself borrow from fiction in these ways--it's only human. But it is always possible to be a little too human. 

*

Lately I have been seized in philosophical and ethical paroxysms that can only be called fits or perhaps fevers of anarchy. Never have I perceived more clearly its allure as a basis for action. 

Because why should we hew and cling to this stability we have enjoyed? To nurse at its teat is to drink a black poison, and all our choices are tainted by our demanding the ability to pay good money for our best lives while existing as the justification and topsoil for corporate and political vines which strangle and destroy our human dignity and the life of our planet. We aid and abet it no matter how much we make noises of outrage or legally protest or whatever, because we are convinced we can have our cake and eat it too and guess what, fucks? The cake is a lie. Always has been.

If we want to enjoy our nice sunny days, it might serve everyone better if we did it without having governments and companies that are literally Ahriman. There is no better way of illustrating it. Maybe we'd get sick and die a little more, maybe there won't be a whole eleven billion of us. Maybe that's ok.

I don't fuckin know, though. I didn't make this world. I don't get to decide these things, or know if my feelings are right. I get stressed out and fight response just from seeing and hearing this motherfucker down the street from me run a gas lawnmower. I can't set policy. I'd collapse every economy on the planet in under a week and many hundreds of millions of people would die. Is that worth saving the world? I don't know. I'm not likely to find out.

Too paranoid to ever make a difference in any way, shape, or form, you see. Can't trust anyone far enough to throw them, let alone enough to coordinate anything. How can I commit to action under conditions which have driven groups of people to act inhumanely since time immemorial? It's a guaranteed way to compromise your ethics, and then, you have to keep going. If you find yourself fighting a war, you have already lost more than half the fight, and the rest is seeing how quickly you can put an end to it or get out of it or die for it--how grave the loss and how compromised you will be before the end.

Plus ultimately I am more interested in expanding my rock collection and playing video games than I am in actually holding myself or anyobody else accountable for anything.

There's your moral high ground. Like all other systems that tempt a human being towards irrational and irretrievable actions which help no one, anarchy is not lucid or explicative. It cannot feed or clothe you. It will not help you make decisions that are more moral or efficient or superior in any way than choice-paths supplied by any other ideologies, systems, worldviews, or hybrids or adaptations derived from existing sets. 

It's all just a lattice we set in front of our eyes in order to try and see an incomprehensible infinite vastness as limited and quanitifiable. All our mistakes start there, because it isn't.

Action is absurdity. The sacred infinite cares not. We are dust motes falling chaotically through time; fixed points on tesselations; fractals made of fractals made of fractals all the way down and all the way out.  

*

Have a nice day? 

Fuck that guy mowing his lawn. Seriously. I hate people acting like anything we've done this past century is something we can just keep on blithely doing till the sun falls down. We need to change everything. Why the fuck are people building houses? Stop it! We have to stop! Stop mining shit, stop making new shit, stop fueling evil tech with massive energy costs! Goddamn it, this other fucking bitch just started in with an even bigger, louder lawnmower! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

--JL

#353

Oh shit! From a Monday to a Tuesday, Factually Pointless updates. Been a while! Someone must be excited about

FACTUALLY MUSICAL GODDAM FUCKIN TWENNY TWENNY FREEEEEEEE

today we get going immediately. Strap the fuck in.

*
Debating over whether this post should shoulder the issue of morality as it relates to the consumption of music, which is of course the conversation as it relates to not only art but every sphere of human activity for some fucking reason. 

But like do we realize yet how truly catastrophically fucked up morality is yet? Can't we see, even though the examples play out daily on our little screens? Music is a great example, filled with examples and counterexamples.

Jesus, I guess we're doing this. 

*

Some people disagree off the bat that every person has a right to life. I hold the view that all do, as well as everything that exists has a right to exist as close to the expiration of its natural durability as humanly (myself being human, ecce homo indeed, all that) possible. Naturally, we kill and destroy just to survive, just to draw the next breath. That's strike one for this kind of broadly understood "killing is wrong" morality that everyone pretends to agree with but ignores, which is fine because we have to kill to live. And over and over, as history and its functions destroy billions and the empires that spawned them. 

Anyway some people would think that it is correct and natural that a certain percentage of human beings are born bad and wrong and irredeemable, and that because we are good, we can have wars against one kind of bad person and imprison and enslave another kind of bad person and keep a third and fourth and fifth or however many bad people in society but lower down where they belong, and then better people to manage things, and the really good people who deserve it on top.

Sound good? Guess I hope it does, cause that's every stupid childish fucking agricultural society that's ever existed. They were almost all bad, and they have all collapsed eventually because they were stupid like this about morality. They built their shit with it, and it grew up big, but they built it with stuff that goes moldy and degrades and they built on shifting sands and the whole fucking thing was doomed from the start. Get me? 

Alternately, it may be that there is no good and evil, and we are all the same, and we have no right to try to harm each other or fuck up the world. Because knowing that we are imperfect and natural, we have the opportunity to be careful in the real sense; conscientous in our ignorance and power and the tension between life and destruction. And we keep making societies and people lead amazing lives despite everything within them and around them and benath them because life is life and life goes on and even saying a society was bad is fucking nonsense because it was just set dressing and variable conditions for the human condition, which is glorious and perfect in its horrible imperfection. A process, a cycle, a remixing, a recomposition of elements, themes, structures, repetitions, crescendoing and decrescendoing and fading into silence to start up again.

Yes, music is like that too, that is my point, thank you, yes. Do not pat me on the cheek or back, thank you.

People, maybe, are complicated kinds of songs, playing out a symphony for some unimaginable mind.

*

So we decide to stop listening to music because it turns out a person is bad, or we defend our music to the death because a person is good, no matter what.

Look, I'm gonna do the hard, fast, gross, and maybe kind of mean version of this, because I've just realized that despite having been up since four and fed cats twice and washed the dishes and played pkmnViolet version for a couple hours, sure, I have not had breakfast.

Do whatever the fuck you want. The whole thing is corrupt and irredeemable. The process of recording music is evil in and of itself for the resources it consumes and the cultural production and monetization of art is tied into everything from sexual slavery to state propaganda. There is no way to be good in this life. You cannot be good. I am not good. The president and the pope are both not good. Jesus was not good. Your mom and dad are not good--this one might not be so much of a shocker--but the big reveal is that they couldn't have been good even if they were a million billion times better than they were, because existing is a crime if morality is real. You don't have to defend or attack anyone, and it's no one's business what you fucking like, really.

Also, the extent to which the whole song and dance is gossip and how massively quantitatively and qualitatively persuasive yet patently false evidence can be easily generated should make everyone profoundly suspicious of everything they see. Maybe the only real thing in this life is the actual music coming out of the actual speakers at the end of the malignant process and criminal act that is the generation of those sounds and the materials that produced them, that send them over a network over which fentanyl is sold and populations, subpopulations, and economies are destabalized and attacked, on which child pornography is distributed and where predators of every imaginable description trouble the waters every single second of every single day.

Maybe it's kind of stupid to wonder if it makes you a worse person, listening to Kanye West or David Bowie or Prince or Beatles or whatever. Reading a play by Artaud. These fuckin dudes. Anyway a lot of people are ready to say you are bad for looking at homosexual erotica and for being homosexual--does that track, or are there some problems with what we think, as a society, makes people good or bad? Maybe the problem is with those two categories in the first place?

Not saying it shouldn't fuck with you. Not saying anything shouldn't bother or outrage or trigger or arouse disgust in you that is righteous and correct, and I'm not saying anything agaist anyone protecting themselves from harm however they can, must, and need to. I say Do It. Boundaries and distances and hard passes and getting rid of shit completely are tools and they exist for a reason, there to be used. What I am saying is, gotta kill to eat, gotta eat to live, and everyone has a right to life. I'm saying, not a single one of us knows enough about anyone else's life or how the world works to truly understand anything even about our own lives, our own pasts, our own selves even and maybe especially deep down. I'm saying, there's no way for me to be better than anyone even if they've done terrible things I haven't, or don't believe I have, or don't believe I would, even if they're so outrageously opposed to what is tolerable and excusable to me personally that I cannot countenance them or let them go unopposed. That doesn't make them bad, or me good. 

There is no good and evil. The world is much more difficult than that fun storytime shit.

A better question maybe, in a direction more hopeful--and hope is, after all, life itself, fight me--would relate to the possibility and veracity of redemption, of growth, of values transforming and the transformation leading to cascading transformations. A better question has more to do with protecting and healing and communicating openly than with punishing and silencing and building walls. But I'm too hungry to go that way right now. Another time. 

*

Missed Kaki King's 2020 album but now I have listened to it last Friday and finished it this morning and to me it is the best thing in that particular discography. I loved every moment of every song, which makes this my favorite of her albums. A steady builder of her powers and the craft itself, is Kaki King, with some powerful friends sitting in on the record that really push it radically beyond previous albums.

That's today's Music Opinion, brought to you by Factually Musical 2023. 

Peace out, I'm delirious (sick drop crashes over the audience, people go buck wild, dance mix continues)

--JL

#251

If a human being makes an honest attempt at formulating their decisions with an eye towards eliminating hypocrisy in their existential process, they will find their field of action severely limited. Depending on a variety of contexts, and depending also on the individual's ability to detect manifold contradictions, this may even mean that no action is possible, ever, anywhere. 

Similar is the human being who attempts to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A lifetime defined by silence, broken only by the most pitiful banality and gross utility.

Ethics: the art of saying and doing as little as possible. 

Morality: the art of civilization; the best lie, the greatest hypocrisy.

*

Can't stop yourself from drawing breath, can't command your internal homeostasis to just halt, your heart muscles do how they do, you piss and shit, you answer to what you're answerable for.

Who is "good"? Who is "bad"? Jesus Christ, was a question ever so fundamentally beside the point? No one knows what they're doing. No one knows what they do. 

You literally cannot describe even a tiny part of reality without lying. In its distortion of Truth, every truth is a lie.

You literally cannot exist for a single second without killing, without snatching resources from others who need them just as much as you do, and every lie you make up to justify or obscure this truth is hypocrisy and the root of more hypocrisy.

*

Let us strike this bargain with ourselves, I say, incorporating a hypothetical in order to feel less alone: ethics are personal, subjective, inviolate and complete unto the singular, but inevitably and mainly rely on and are deviled by compromise with morality, the public ethic, the inherited good, the perceived health of that thing, society, on which our luxury to consider our ethics and the basis for discarding them both rest equally.

*

The whole thing really is profoundly fucking stupid, and we all have to pay for the right to exist to boot. So whatever, fuck me up, see if I give a damn. As an act of faith, as a singular and personal choice, I do my best to hew to what I think is right and honest, and even though there is no good or truth, I hold myself answerable to my understanding of the concepts and accept their problems thereby; answerable to my own idealized social contract, to a purely theoretical, even fantastical society: a kingdom of heaven. 

Existence is a dark glass house, a palace of horrors and wonders--all illusions. We won't see the actual color of the light, or what is really being illuminated, until we step outside. Or further in.

--JL

#211

Finished Cell just a couple hours ago, a very good King book, one of the short ripcords, like Cujo. This is to speak well; While It is without question my favorite, I've read Cujo many more times. My girlfriend's favorite may be, besides The Stand, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, another snappy one and a pretty fucking incredible book. At the end of the day, we bow to the inexorable nature of King's sprawlers, but given the choice during the day, more often one reaches for the ripcords. Cujo can be read in couple of hours; the book radiates the cocaine energy with which it was penned.*

Anyhow I am glad I did not read Cell when it came out. As it was, I could not be convinced to own a cell phone till I was past eighteen, whereas my peer group had them grafted to their bodies** by the time we were twelve. Almost all of them. If I had read Cell at a more formative time in life, never would I have put one of the fuckers to my ear, guaranteed.

*

Well, if you'd like to read Cell and haven't, this is where I warn you to skip to the next section; what I have to say constitutes spoilers. I mean it; I am going to give away a huge part of the book in one sentence, and most of the rest in the sentence following. I try to never spoil things in this blog, can't remember how decent I am at it, but when I go there, I take it all the way. Another warning I guess I can say is that these ruminations get macabre. So it goes.

Probably it is not helpful in a critical sense or a practical sense--practical in terms of really truly learning something useful from what you are reading, no matter what it is--to say exactly what you would do differently than a protagonist or set of protagonists for the simple reason that you cannot really know. You cannot know for true and real how the group dynamics, weather conditions, how your last meal is sitting in your stomach, or any other good-as-infinite combination of factors might ramify into your thought process or affect your decision matrix. The safest way to think yourself into situations is to attempt to keep your reactions open and not get married to your big-ass brain figuring shit out so much better than the characters, said brain after all sitting extremely safe on its biscuit with a book in its paws. 

That said, really putting yourself in those kozmic othershoes is why we are here, and seeing how they fit teaches us pretty important shit, and it does this by tricking us into dealing with it, by making us believe not only that it could happen but that it is happening now; a good book puts you there, which is magic, and then compounds into a miracle: really good books can do it again. Some will do it every time you read them. That is some fucked-up shit.

So, you read and you live and you work on hitting your skill ceilings in your desired proficiencies, grind adaptability and what you consider to be the virtues, and you find yourself in many situations, real and imaginary. The characters in Cell use fire to destroy part of the a hive mind that has invaded a huge portion of the global human population through a signal broadcast simultaneously through all cellular communication devices; that is to say, human beings whose minds have been for all intents and purposes replaced by something parahuman. For this they are marked as insane and untouchable, and the book concludes with a repeat of their transgression on a yet larger scale.

Question. Would you have used fire on these bodies, which were once people?

It is, as I have said, sort of pointless to say that I wouldn't, because you never truly know, not when you're really in the corner. I've known a corner or two, done enough things I didn't think I would do, been the kind of person I never believed I would or could be. But hey, I would not do that thing. 

Using fire on another living thing is something I find really abominable. It is in a way the very worst of humankind, that we use fire on each other, on other creatures while they're alive. To take the gift of Prometheus and turn it to such a purpose is the essence of a Fall, definitely Capital, Mortal type deal we're talking about. At the juncture that the group of protagonists were deciding how best to kill these not-people (but are they not people? It is a question), before they thought of fire, I thought of the knife--for you see, these not-people were sleeping, and would not wake. 

Using fire was expedient. Fire was easy and got the job done with aplomb and extra credit. Expediency was certainly the keystone of the endeavor, that human drive to be as efficient as possible, doing the most with the least, twitch a finger, watch a man die a mile away, press a button, watch the missiles fly on perfect target every time. 

If you get busy, though,and know what you're about, if the throats are real close together as they were in the situation, you can slit probably four or five jugulars a minute for stretches at a time, and pacing yourself, get maybe two thousand sleepers in a night. If there are four of you, as there were in the situation, so much the better. It's old-school, it's messy, it's not really better than fire, but it's not fire, and that makes a difference. It makes a difference to do it with your hands, to touch and feel, to make the decision each time and see the features and maybe say you're sorry it had to be this way a few thousand times, till your throat bleeds maybe. These things have to make a difference. If they don't, what the fuck are we, anyway.

Fire is life. We cook on fire, and cooking makes us more human than killing. The least of what we build with fire is worth more than every method we've ever developed in order to destroy with it. The sun is the head and center of the life-fire, all the stars in the galaxy burn, the universe is kindled with fire, which is light, and light is the core of all being, the weave of what is, the first and last Word, and what we choose to do with it means something. It is significant, it is the most significant thing, for fire is the first Sign, and it in its light that all other Signs can be Seen.

Definitely never burn a person. You can't do justice that way. The book asks and answers and leans on this question a few different ways, and I don't think there is a wrong or right answer to the question--perhaps you are familiar with how much I have problematized justice for myself, should you have had the misfortune to dwell long on the questions I raise in my own books--in the end I have no objection to what the protagonists chose to do, for something did have to be done. 

That's the fucking problem. Something always has to be done. Justice. Christ alone knows, in most cases. Maybe all. Yet something must be done. 

Although in this case, was killing even necessary? Should I be glad I thought of the knife, like I'm supposed to feel better than another or good about myself given this detail? I would say not. I have always tried to live by the idea that the further you can go in distinguishing yourself from murderers, the better off you're likely to be, so I hope I can learn to better think beyond the knife. I am not a good protagonist in the plot-driving sense. Too often I answer "no, probably we can come up with something else--something less risky to our bodies and our own immortal souls."

Ha, but the actual lesson is, as it always is, that nothing, nothing, nothing, can really prepare you in the slightest for the actual situation.

*

One of the things that makes Stephen King brilliant and true, is the elementality and honesty with which he plies his foremost and strongest symbols, of which there are three: fire, blood, and shit. Three lenses through which perfection can be glimpsed. Formes of Red, White, and Black. Fire's destructiveness is part of its perfection, just as one is water and cannot be without water and can drown in and freeze in and be poisoned by water.

Nothing is anything, morally speaking. It takes us to make evil. Shitty but true. And even our evil, which is the most despicable thing we can see in the universe, is a perfect element in a larger perfection.

*

Never played Minecraft, but from observation it seems like that game has somehow captured that very literally.

*

Watched Hell or High Water last night. That shit was fucking perfectly made from tip to top. Perfect fucking western. Maybe my favorite ever. God damn flawless. You can break it down and build it up from zero. One sloppy cut, too close. That's all. Perfect otherwise. Everybody did such a job that no teacher in the world would mark them down a single point. I can't stop thinking about this movie.

Another incredible western that I love and have even mentioned in this blog (I think?) is The Proposition. That movie was scored by Nick Cave, and who should have been on the score for Hell or High Water but the Caveman himself. Also Warren Ellis. I don't listen to these dudes myself, but the music for both movies is exquisite magnificence, perfectly chosen and boldly composed, masterpieces of restraint and release. The correlation is established: if Nick Cave worked on the soundtrack for a western, I will watch that movie with no further information. 

Advantage number two for Hell or High Water was a cast composed of two dudes who I'll watch anytime in anything if the other factors balance. This is Jeff Bridges' most believable and, I think, truly patiently and lovingly realized character in a western to date, though I may have missed some. Ben Foster is phenomenal as always and reminds me that I need to watch Hostiles. Also Galveston. I like crossed sets of data points, movies are really good for that. Chris Pine had thus far failed to make me care about him but he did as good a job as anyone else, super damn good, and in one moment of brilliance enacted some of the best physical performance I've ever seen in my life. 

*

Next post, a list of other things I have watched in the last while. I don't remember if I've made a list like that. The vacation seems to have stripped me of my "blog awareness". Or, pretty tired. Purty tarred.


--JL

*I have never tried cocaine. That stuff seems like it fucking sucks. A drinking problem doesn't need that kind of company, and I am super lucky to be wired this way.

**they didn't really. I only clarify because in this the year 2019 I believe we are pretty close to that reality, maybe three years out from the iImplant and its counterpart, the Android Be, with the brave little Google Chip bobbing in their choppy wake. I might even be right about one or all these names, which would suck a lot, but we'd get used to it.