Remember When MTV Played Videos 3 - Time for the 'Poccyclypse!

It's 2012 - time to revisit what I said about the Mayan calendar prophecy end-of-the-world hoogedy-hoo!

But, people say, the I-Ching points to 2012, and the Mayan Calendar, and also the Freemason Illuminati Crop Circle Visitor Area 51 Art Bell!  To which I can only mostly respond with completely dumb silence, but really ought to start pointing out that in 1999, I was paid a middle-class wage to go into an office for eight hours a day and install the Windows NT Y2K compliance pack so as to ward off the horrors of approaching digital Armageddon.  

On the morning of January 1, 2000, life continued as normal: with a massive hangover and someone else's underwear in my mouth.  Nothing happened, and it seems likely that a lot of our preparations were just so much voodoo.

But really, nothing could have prepared us for this album.

The question, asked by nobody, is: do I feel any different now that the dread year is upon us?  Do I think that, maybe, it's time to start preparing for our heavenly ascension to the sky realm of the feathered phallus serpent?

No.


What I can tell you about is a particularly American sort of Orientalism - one which lionizes indigenous persons to god-like status while seeking to mine them for ancient wisdom, and also do absolutely nothing to ease their plight.

Oh sure, you say, every time you buy a turquoise bracelet, you're giving money to tribal such-and-such and also making harmony with earth mother Gaia- bullshit, I say: want to do something for the red man?  Give him your back yard.

I digress.

 In 1990, Gunnar andMatthew Nelson released the album "After the Rain" on Geffen records.  Per my earlier taxonomy, the video for the titular single is a "story"  video.  In fact, I mention it by name when describing this type of video as one which stretches a three-minute song into a seven-minute narrative.

One year later, we were all dressing like the drunk dad

Our video begins in a trailer which is itself assailed by an improbably lightning-struck thunderstorm.  A drunken father stumbles between the kitchen and the sitting room, chewing up scenery and berating his eighteen-year old son for lazing around all day and listening to tapes.

Yes, tapes.

He calls the son a "worthless dreamer" who will "never amount to anything," which is 1990s shorthand for "about to change the WHOLE WORLD with his guitar and just maybe get that special girl, the only one who understands him - the only other person in the whole of his joyless, one-horse town with the courage and the spirit to listen to Nelson - on tape!" 

"At least by the time I was your age I had my own chin"

Chinless puts on his Walkman headphones, and is transported through a magical Nelson poster through a purple vortex into a magical spirit realm with an ancient Indian guide.

Go ahead, read that again.

Chinless finds himself sitting around a campfire inside a cave with the Nelson twins, getting some Wordless Indian Wisdom (tm).  The Indian makes two magical orbs appear, and then disappear, conjures up a magical feather, which makes the Nelson twins disappear, and then leads Chinless to the mouth of the cave.

The Indian changes from magical-crystal-coyote-howling-dreamcatcher-mystic garb into some sort of more sinister battle array.  He holds out a magic feather to Chinless, but *gasp* vanishes before Chinless can take it.

Gunnar...is that your hand? 

Chinless leaves the cave, stumbles through a sepia-toned wood, and finds a Nelson concert in what appears to be either an abandoned bear habitat, or the same set they used to shoot the caveman-themed Crucial Taunt video in the movie Wayne's World.  The two need not be mutually exclusive.

Anyway, there are more extras in this video than there ever were attendees at an actual Nelson concert, so Chinless duly makes his way into the thick of the action, eager to watch Gunnar and Matthew cavort about in...okay, it's going to take a minute to conduct this wardrobe analysis (especially since both brothers are indistinguishable from one another to the naked eye):

This screen capture is bringing up a lot of uncomfortable erotic questions for me

 The one I'm deciding to call Gunnar has a reasonably appropriate outfit- shiny skin-tight black leather.  My guess is that since they are the same size, he raided Lita Ford's closet before going on stage, and so his outfit is otherwise unspectacular.

Matthew, on the other hand, looks like an albino vampire.  He's wearing a calf-length paisley velvet overcoat and a peasant's blouse.  You can buy one just like it at Kohl's for about 27.95, or shop online at kohls.com for a "fancy pirate costume" - you won't be disappointed.  Your father might be.

Nice going, Wayne - you screwed my career

The one-song concert concludes, and Chinless finds himself laying on his bed, watched over by his dutiful and inspiring huge life-sized Nelson poster. In what I must presume to be a symbolic flourish, the sun is shining.  It seems that Chinless dreamed the whole thing - or did he?  There is a ceremonial eagle feather on his night stand - Chinless has completed his spirit quest, and is now a true warrior of the soul.

Afterthoughts: 

What we're calling the 2012 phenomenon is nothing new -  white people love the idea that brown people know something super-secret, something that's hidden in plain sight, something that we could see if only we bought enough crystals or smoked enough peyote.  For what it's worth, people have been mitigating their "world is going to end" messages into "world is going to change" messages, but this is also crap - superstitious nonsense tempered with a pretentious attempt to not be completely 100% wrong.

Thus, to come back around to the point of this post:  Party at my place on December 22nd!  Does anyone have a copy of "After the Rain?"  Because we could totally bump that track.  On tape.

I think I know what I'll tenderly stroke with THIS later...

Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

It's been a week, right?  A week-ish?  Okay, three weeks?  Right - this should have gone up within days of my last post (concerning the Occupy movement), but then, you know, fuck you.

Anyway, despite Time Magazine's naming of "The Protestor" as "Man of the Year," the Occupy movement is no longer quite so newsworthy since it is holiday shopping season, and the American populace, on average, has the attention span of a moth in a light bulb factory.  Like electricity, the public's attention follows the path of least resistance, and it's much easier to think about buying little Skyler a new copy of Battlefield 3 so that he doesn't have to share with his sister Meegan, than to ponder the deleterious effects of corporate-statism on our culture. 

Fucking Meegan, she only ever plays so that she can hog the controller when I want to play!

But what I said about being willing to die for fundamental rights and knowing what is true and good and right and all that other shit is still, to me, gospel.  Occupy made some noise, and things seem to have quieted down for now, but there are still significant problems in this great paradoxical mass of collected individuals called Western Society.

Number One:  Big Smother


I've said, twice, that the Occupy movement is quieting down.  Apparently, some people haven't gotten the message.  There is still significant Occupy activity from coast to coast - where's the media attention?  In the words of Sal, the ABC Warehouse spokesdago:  fuhgeddabowdit.  Most American's media access is controlled by a few corporate gatekeepers with a vested interest in so being.  Continuing to cover Occupy with real earnestness might grant the movement the sort of validity that comes from careful study, coverage, and analysis, which in turn might perpetuate the anti-corporate message behind a lot of Occupy mumbling.

Plus, it's Xmas - the time of year when you're supposed to shut the fuck up and consume.  Fucking hippies.

I bust out SCIENCE  for my blathering internet rants!

Number two: A Kilogram is Better than a...damn we've got a lot of people in prison

I don't really care HOW we got into this giant, asinine drug war, but it's absolutely time to stop. You want me to consume something, producers?  Want me to get that consumer confidence back up to 1990's levels?  Let me buy a bag of weed, a carton of twinkies, and all three seasons of Metalocalypse on DVD, and in three hours you'll have one eager consumer ready to buy a new guitar, amplifier, effects pedals, and also another bag of weed and another carton of twinkies. 

Ah man, bro...heh...like...murderface...and ... what?

Here we have a perfectly legitimate consumer product for which people are going to prison under the thin guise of protecting health, social structure, and family structure.  Dear government: If I want to kill myself, I don't need drugs to do it.  If I want to be a shitty parent, I don't need drugs for that either.  If I don't want to participate in society, well...okay, in which part of society am I supposed to participate?

Number Three:  We are the 10% (or 30% if you factor in people who have stopped looking)

In a capitalist society, you're not participating if you're no buying or selling.  I mentioned in last year's Xmas post that Americans have two votes: ballots and bucks.  Since nobody bothers to vote anymore, that leaves us influencing the policy of our corporate overloads with our purchasing choices - it stands to reason then that if you have no purchasing power with which to make purchasing choices, you have no influence in world affairs. 

COMRADES!

I'll admit that I might be a little bit socialist while at the same time being, paradoxically, anti-statist.  Fucked up, right?  I mean, how could I possibly pretend to enforce any manner of wealth redistribution if I don't think the state should do it?  My philosophy doesn't go much farther than realizing that trickle-down economics don't work, and that income inequality eventually leads to radical social instability, but also that taxation and regulation stifle innovation. So how to reconcile all this? Well fuck if I know, I graduated from public school, which leads me to point...

Number Four:  Hey, General Electric in Partnership with Nabisco, leave them kids alone

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's Joker:  Our educational system needs an enema.  K-through-college needs a good flushing out, and NOT of teachers.  I know, yes, it's me (full disclosure, a teacher) saying "oh no, don't cut teacher pay - how am I going to afford weed and twinkies and Metalocalypse and this new Marshall stack?" - but as I have said again, and again, and again, money is only part of the reason I teach.  I teach, and so do most educators, because we love opening up brains.  It seriously makes us happy to see little Skyler and Meegan setting aside their video games in order to learn something about global conflict and military force as opposed to just watching a cartoonish re-creation of it's viscera. 

Government has no place in education, nor does the MIC.  The tax dollars supporting public education have come with a lot of strings, most notably No Child Left Behind- but NCLB is a symptom, not a disease.  It's time to explore alternative education.  No, not charter schools (half the education, twice the fees), but I'm not opposed to a community-school model

Adventure one: shut up and help mommy find her scotch

Number Five: Hack the Planet into smaller, more manageable pieces

Localized education is pointless without some sort of access to global information - otherwise, you get a "Children of the Corn" / "M. Night Shyamalan's The Village" effect in which small, isolated communities stumble around in inbred ignorance, pooping in their drinking water and discussing what kind of dinosaur Jesus H. America rode to church on Easter.

The internet (said the internet writer) is probably the most important educational tool invented within the last 100 years.  I'd like to say "the most important tool period," but I really think water desalinization and vaccines might have it beat.  Regardless, while I've written about generalities up until now, I would specifically argue for a free and unfettered internet, and for unrestricted access to so-called "intellectual property" in general (so true Net Neutrality, no SOPA, no PROTECT IP, etc).  Ideas are the currency of thought, and nobody should get to horde that wealth.

Oh political cartoons- you are the last refuge for the desperate blogger

***

As much as anything, it's orthodoxy that's gotten this culture to where it is today:  the orthodoxy of big business, the orthodoxy of governmental regulation, the orthodoxy of traditional morality.  The whole thing has gotten too big and too unwieldy, and in the spirit of full disclosure, world affairs are, have always been, and always will be, too big and too unwieldy.  

Thus, there's no solution for the global Western blues except to leave the whole thing to implode upon itself.  You can get involved if you like, but the machine will probably chew you up and spit you out.  I think there's a nobility in that, but you know what nobility gets you?  A cup of coffee if you've also got two bucks. 

Which war?  The fucking CULTURE war!

But ironically, abstaining may also be the solution.  All that hippy shit, like "buy local" and "homeschool your kids?"  Starting to sound like increasingly better ideas right along with "buy a gun" and "be prepared."  America, to paraphrase the rhetoric and cliches, was founded on principles of freedom and self-reliance.  Our America will have less of everything to go around than a generation before, and that's not necessarily a bad thing for you or I so long as it fosters within us a ruggedness that inures us to hardship, and a resilience that readies us for adversity, so that when we emerge from our current climate of crisis, we will, each of us individually, have a new appreciation for what we can make.

Or we could riot in the streets and burn this bitch down.  I'm cool either way.

This Blog Throws Itself on the Gears of the Machine

Let me begin this post with a picture:

You'll want the big version, duh

The top half of the image exemplifies my only real problem with the Occupy movement, but thankfully it's not really that big of a problem because I don't think the view posited in the image, to wit: that protesters believe it's the government's job to "solve the problem" of rich people, is the widely held view.

Clearly, some OWS protesters would like Uncle Sam to step in and bust up the 1%, presumably to redistribute their wealth and capital back among the 99%.  Yes, it's socialism - I don't think anyone's pretending that it isn't, so let's get over the notion that, yes, Virginia, there are socialists in the OWS movement.

But there are others, a growing plurality, that realize that the whole thing is rotten - big banks, big government - your public servants have been bought off, and are no longer beholden to your interests or principles.  The fact that our government even considers something like SOPA or Protect IP while protesters are being beaten bloody in the streets proves that our grasp on fundamental liberty and individual dignity is tenuous. Something has to give, and someone has to make it - and these are the people with whom I strongly empathize.

No, it's not real. Stop forwarding it to me.

America is starting to, pardon my French, fucking suck.  By fucking suck, I mean fucking suck for middle-class college-educated white males.  America has always kind of fucking sucked for minorities, the poor, and women, but now it's starting to fucking suck for me, and obviously, I'm important.

We, college-educated middle-class white males, believed the big bullshit story, and shame on us.  We believed that there would be cushy jobs waiting for us so long as we graduated high school, avoided prison, and made some sort of token effort at going to college.  Hell, we had those cushy jobs not ten years ago, but now "job creators" want workers who are educated, motivated, experienced, and willing to suck shit through a straw for sixty hours a week.  

The fact that we were very obviously wrong-headed for believing in the American Dream is, however, beside the point.  The point is that now there are a bunch of unemployed college-educated middle-class white males, and they are pissed!

Yeah, yeah - women and minorities too

Four months ago, I proclaimed that we probably wouldn't see riots as a force for social change in America anytime soon.  While I don't think I was wrong, I think I'm not quite as right as I could have been, and here's why: First, OWS isn't a riot.  OWS is a protest that could turn into a riot, or series of riots, given the proper initiating catalyst.  Second, there's not been an initiating catalyst - as Harvard Sitkoff points out in "The Struggle for Black Equality," the Civil Rights movement had Bull Connor and prime-time news coverage of protesters being beaten, sprayed with fire hoses, and knocked down by snarling dogs.  OWS isn't there yet.

But two things are rapidly lining up to make this a full-on rage party:  first in this camp is solidarity. I don't keep mentioning white males because I'm some sort of racist - I'm mentioning them because they make up the power demographic. Speaking through the filter of the American socio-cultural-historical narrative, if things don't happen to white males, they don't happen.  Additionally, we are seeing increasing police brutality, albeit not anywhere near enough.

It's fascism, essentially.

When Mario Savio called on all people of conscience to "...put [their]bodies upon the gears...," he wasn't speaking metaphorically - well, okay, the gears are a metaphor, but the bodies aren't.  Misery, real, corporal misery beyond what the occupiers now suffer will be the mechanism for change.  There's much hand-wringing over Lieutenant John Pike's egregious pepper-spraying of peaceful UC Davis students, but fuck that.  He did the movement a favor that will only be eclipsed when the cops finally manage to kill a  protester.

You, reader who may be considering some sort of protest action, need to know what you are in for:  you will be courting death.  You will literally attempt to provoke the machine into killing you in the hopes that your death will be avenged through legislation or revolution.  This is what it means to protest - it's not the signs, it's not the slogans, it's not the blog posts or pictures - it is blood and flesh, bullets and bone, misery and suffering distilled out of malaise and angst into a raw tincture of provocation.

This is why I empathize with OWS - many of their mumbling points ring true: too much money in government, too much corporate greed, overwhelming evidence of a corporate-statist conspiracy, etc, etc - all that stuff is what is making America fucking suck: NAFTA, Citizens United, etc.  We all, at some level, know this, but only now are people doing the only thing that matters.  Only now are people taking to the streets and showing with their flesh, their blood, their very lives, that there will be a real change.

I don't know that OWS will be the sabot that destroys the machine, but I am very, very happy that Americans are throwing shoes. 

Today, I talked about the problem - tune in next week-ish when I ruminate over the solution!

This is Not a Post!

But you may be wondering where the posts went.  Well - there haven't been any.  I burned out.  I bit off more than I could chew, and next thing I knew, all non-essential tasks settled down to the bottom of the to-do list, and so "Update SSS" came in right under "Drink gin and stare wistfully out the window" and right above "Finish novel and seek publication." 

But: I am recovering, and happily my next semester is nowhere near so demanding as this one, so I feel confident in making this anouncement:

SSS will return in December, though I will update at least once before then.

This is on the for real - I miss this type of writing, the impromptu funny (or serious) stuff with pictures and snarky captions.  I'm taking it back up.  I won't make three updates a week (try one, as mentioned previously), but SSS lives again as of December 2011!

For now, a trip through the ol' archives wouldn't hurt you.  I'll rejoin you with fresh content in just a few short weeks. 

The Deplorable and Joyous State of My Affairs

Skipping updates, weak content...it's pretty evident, dear readers, there's a problem with SSS.

My first entry, posted 10-7-2009 was a tenuous exercise - I was barely employed, and looking to improve my writing regimen and my online presence.  Well shit, mission accomplished there!  I've got readers on every continent, and I've generated well over 1000 pages of typed text over the span of two years.  I've touched on topics as diverse as survival, literary criticism, pop music, bad movies, good books, and the stagnation and decline of Western socio-politics and culture.   It's obviously all been one big chuckle!

Regrettably, I haven't written a whole lot else. 

Novel?  Queried, but unfinished.  Short stories?  Nothing really new in over 5 months.  Screenplays?  One treatment written seven months ago, rejected, left to wither. 

Rather than enumerate all my reasons, know for now that I have them, and that they have contributed to my decision to turn SSS into an occasional blog.  This means two things, starting immediately:

One:  Anything posted on SSS is going to be excellent - proofread, revised, coherent, clever, insightful, and stylish.  Recollect, if you will, your favorite entries - they'll all be like that. 

Two: But with less frequency.  Once a week is probably where I'm at, and if I'm really pushing it - nada.  While I know I said not two paragraphs ago that I wouldn't enumerate my reasons, well: other writing projects, painting projects, physical fitness, gun store, class lectures, grading, grad school preparation, blah blah blah.  The time, it gets sucked away. 

I'll continue to announce new posts on Facebok, and eventually through other social media as they develop.  Similarly, this site will be an announcement board for my other literary / scholastic endeavors.  If I'm on your RSS feeds, you'll still see my updates as usual.  In the meantime - I hope you are not too terribly disappointed, but if you are, you may as ever go pound sand.

Your friendly neighborhood writer,
Vytautas Malesh

Life is What Happens When You're Trying to Make Art

Got busy, got forgetful, ran out of time, no blog today - come back next week!

Take a Look, it's In a Book

Last week a student put me on the spot and asked me to name good books.  This question makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons. 

Reason number one: I sound like a pretentious ass for rattling off high-brow reading material.

Reason number two: Of the hundreds and hundreds of books I've read in the last decade or so, only a few dozen were published within that decade, meaning I'm not exactly the king of contemporary literature.

Reason number three: There's absolutely no accounting for taste.

So when one of my students mentioned that he enjoyed Star Wars novels, we fell into chatting about titles and characters, and I announced my rather extreme dislike for Truce at Bakura.  I read that book probably about 16 years ago, and though I don't remember exactly why I didn't like it, I just know that I didn't.  In part it had a lot of '90's sci-fi tropes:  hyphenated bad-guy name (only apostrophes are more 90's) and clumsy man-machine cyber-type stuff being the two most obvious - at least it avoids the 2000+ pitfall of abusing the word "faction," but more on that later.  Anyway, I didn't like the book.

This guy did, and we were left with a conversational impasse - thus it is with extreme trepidation that I ever recommend a book to anyone, but it dawned on me today that I ought to at least rattle off a quick top five for anyone looking for recommendations.  Additionally, revisiting the tone and content of some old favorites helps to keep my own reading habits vigorous as I entertain the notion of stumbling on a new book that matches my old favorites for quality.

I'm leaving off rather obvious stuff that you should have read anyway - if you haven't read 1984 sometime in your teens or twenties, you may be too set in your politics for it to do much good.  The same goes for most of the shorter, didactic works of Western Literature - Fahrenheit 451 makes its impression best when you read it in your teens. 

So without further ado, and in no particular order, here's a quick top 5 list - books I love, that I think any interested reader will too.

1) The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Here I was just decrying how pretentious I sound when I say I like reading classic literature, and then I start this list off with Pynchon.  Anyway, CL49 is thin, but it is dense! Pynchon shows you exactly how much you can fit on a page.  The plot, described frequently as "labyrinthine," weaves intricately from word to word, and culminates with an ambiguous and unsettlingly abrupt climax.  Pynchon has since tried to distance himself from this book, but guess what, Tom- fuck you.


2) The Blithedale Romance - Nathanial Hawthorne

Apparently I'm just fixating on the weird today.  I like BR naturally for its rich prose and quick, trotting pace, but also because it's one of the more honest time-capsules I've had the pleasure to read.  One criticism of BR suggests that it's actually pretty non-fictive for a work of fiction, and that most of the characters and setting are based on Hawthorne's own observations.  I say: fine!  I can think of no other book that marries plain-spoken English and efficient detail so aptly as to bring real vitality to the past.

3) Absalom, Absalom!  - William Faulkner

Yup, feeling weird.  This is Faulkner at probably his most Faulknerian.  The Sound and the Fury gets all the attention, but for hypnotic rambling verbosity, AA is where its at.  Interestingly enough, if you want to hear verbose rambling, you should go to AA, meaning Alcoholics Anonymous, but also you should read Absalom, Absalom!  It goes in circles, it hints, it alludes, it states plainly all the wrong things, and you have to absorb every word to know what happened, where, how, and when, but it's beautiful and ugly all at once. 

4) In the American Grain - William Carlos Williams

Nowhere near enough is said about this book, which seeks through narrative to explore America's founding and infancy up until the time of Lincoln - that time which is called pre-bellum.  For the casual reader, you'll find the first half an adventurous thrill-ride compared to the second, which begins to plod a bit.  William Carlos Williams, or as I like to call him "Big Bill Bill," devoted a significant portion of his work to exploring American culture, attempting to swim upstream from his contemporaries, who were busy calling America a vacuous void of trashy consumption (in so many words). 


5) Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

Just fucking with you - Twilight sucks.