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Saturday, April 29, 2017
Thoughts on Games and Books "Middle class" sensibilities
I sit here today imagining what sort of MMORPGs the future could possibly unleash.
Personally, as a person who has often drifted rather carelessly between both reality and the irreality of the MMORPG games over the years, I tend to find that I often seem to have a slew of ...well, lets just say, very, very strange ideas, when it comes to exactly where the gaming world - and particularly the MMORPG gaming world -could go in the future. I really want to see it all become that much more immersive and realistic, and in order for it to accomplish that goal, I personally believe that it has to also accept a certain element of plain old rudeness. I think that a lot of the games right now -- once you forget the shooters -- are almost painfully polite, and it annoys me to no end. Even the shooters ,in fact, I could argue are too polite, since they tend to paint war as though it is a cartoon one can easily win, rather than a vicious and terrifying slaughter fest of anxiety and horror etc.
In truth, I think my view on gaming -- and remember, MMORPGs in specifci -- is really quite similar to how I am with my books or my music: I tend to find the "middle class" and/or "median" product to be a bit too tame and 'family friendly' for my own tastes. I feel like it lies about the world. This means to say that I generally enjoy what is pretty much a more adult spin on almost anything I tend to want to do or partake in. When it comes to my own stories, they are generally pretty extreme, I would imagine, by most peoples standards. In a way it is sad, because I admittedly do find some of my stories to be too extreme to want to send out to any agents (whom, of course, I find prude) but, at the same time, they are the stories I enjoy writing....so how, exactly, am I supposed to stop? I think I tend to look at myself as a sort of modern Marquis de Sade really....
And its because, put simply, in my most inspired moments, I typically like to write about rather hardcore sex, murder, slavery, hangings, war, so on and so forth. I like to make rather evil characters. My topics are never typical. It's hard for me to write about a pleasant marriage, or even a typical divorce scenario that is rather "clean" or "Acceptable". I get bored quick. Someone always winds up dead. A husband suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to chainsaw the wife to death. Another one decides to sell his as a slave out to vicious lunatic kings on a" boonie rat planet" light years away. Its a book and it isnt real, and no one (at least no one physically "real") is actually getting hurt or sold: I therefore cant help it. I do ridiculous things. I am silly. I am mean. I am anything but boring in my stories. If my characters are real in some galaxy far, far away, I am terribly sorry for them. I have been a terrible God.
A lot of my inspiration for my weirdo writing comes, of course, from things I have seen on film. I don't find any shame in admitting this because I think that film is a crucial part of our lives today, and I also tend to think that it is quite fun to pplay around with film type ideas on the page, where it starts to look all quite a bit different. In fact, I often write stories where my main character will be doing nothing other than sitting and watching a film, and usually the film is something unbelievably grotesque and strange, etc etc. In other words, a middle class character who, through a screen, is exposed to a horrible outer world.
What I often find so odd, however, I think, is the way that fairly popular film tends to give me a lot of my most vulgar inspiration and yet .... when you look, again, at the world outside of film, like to the world of, yes, video games, MMORPGs, books, or even music, you start to see that the so called extremes that film has gone to have actually never been met, more or less, in any of these other mediums.
All of this stuff of course is essentially just echoing a reality that slips **immediately** into recorded form, often totally unedited and unscripted, and it is clear to me that millions upon millions of people are watching it all - if not everybody -- and yet, still, when you look at all of our art forms or our games, you'll see that it is all, still, no where to be found. We basically insist on maintaining this middle class polite vision of the world when it comes to our art, and personally, at this point in the worlds history, I cannot understand why. Years ago , when TV didn't exist, when computers didn't exist, I suppose it made sense. Now it makes no sense.
Of course this is not to say that we have not had little tears in the fabric from time to time. A video game like Grand Theft Auto, for instance, was definitely a tear in the fabric and a major break away from middle class values that shocked people, but still, when I look at that game now, it looks pretty tame to me, and it also looks sort of plain, too. Grand Theft Auto has no real fantasy element to it. It's essentially just the real world cities twisted into a rather cartoonish video game . It was also, last I heard, never really that great of an online multiplayer game. What I am looking and hoping for instead with the future of the online multiplayer games is something that will rather ingeniously mix the real world vulgarity of a game lik Grand Theft Auto with the rather "absurd" high fantasy of a franchise like World of Warcraft or Game of Thrones.
I think I essentially want to see a sort of dirty, disgusting prostituted world of drug addicts, criminals, sex freaks, goths, and slaves come to life in an MMORPG, but I do not want the game to be set in our reality, like Grand Theft Auto is, but rather another reality, that is filled with the elves and the wizards and so on. I want to see a sort of EverQuest or World of Warcraft that actually becomes truly adult. I want to have the option, say, to begin a character who is not simply a "high elf wizard", (which is of course the case now) but rather a high elf or a dark elf etc whose function in the game world will be to, yes, sell herself as a prostitute, or work as a slave, or a murderer, or a seller of slaves etc. I want to see something that will bring the dirtiness of reality -- particularly our ancient, pre Christian reality-- to these fantasy games. And how it has not yet happened is, quite frankly, perplexing to me. But of course I then think: this is always the way of the world and innovation, isn't it? Everthing that always seems so incredible and even adult at the time of release, like the MMORPGS initially did, often starts to seem strangely tame and prude in the years to follow.
EverQuest (I always go back to it) is really the perfect exampe to use for all of these reasons and more: At the time it came out, it seemed like such an adult oriented world in its own way, and to a degree it even sort of seemed quite dark. I can remember playing it as a teenager and thinking that some of the storyline behind the evil races were particularly dark. Many Marilyn Manson type goths were heavily into EverQuest and still are. These worlds of magic and sorcery have always had one foot in the "weird goth" world, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular has been linked to all sorts of real world strangeness since the 70s. EverQuest even got linked up, in the early 2000s, to a sort of Judas Priest style "suicide cult' that people thought it was inspiring. Middle class values were somehow, in the beginning, threatened by this game.
This all sounds absolutely preposterous of course because now I look at it, and I can already see just how people might interpret it in the future, if not already, and I honestly think they'll look at it sort of like we look at something (and I know it will sound odd) but sort of like the Andy Griffith Show or the Brady Bunch: It will be seen as this game that was good and innovative and set things forward in terms of the mechanics of the engine, but that, in terms of storyline, and what you could or could not do (or say) in game, was absolutely ridiculous, and trying **way too hard** to be 'family friendly' rather than real.
The future EverQuest or World of Warcraft, I have absolutely no doubt, is going to go far, far beyond this sort of thing. The developers and the storywriters and even the players themselves: They are not going to want to be bothered trying to hide 'harsh realities' like the developers of EverQuest, etc, were forced to do. The evil races in the future games are going to be truly evil. The good races, perhaps, truly threatened by them.
Its easy for me,again, to imagine a game where one will perhaps start out as a struggling dwarf wizard, just like you 'sort of' do now , but who is then captured by other actual players, and sold into something vicious and confusing, all before even really getting out of the starting zone. I can imagine the storylines getting more and more "horrific" and "strange", certainly more complex. The specific zone maps, of course, will get darker right along with them. And I can also imagine the storylines becoming more and more permanent and longlasting, which seems to have been something that EverQuest Next was looking to do before it crumbled: A slave trading character will build some sort of enormous tower (filled with slaves and brutalities of course), and that tower will outlive him , even long after the particular character has logged off the game. Essentially, you see, everything is going to take a more 'real world' spin, and as a result, the manner in which everything is family friendly in our time...will quickly crumble.
---
l0gging off
thoughts
Friday, April 28, 2017
Twitch game streaming
As an old EverQuest fan, I find the concept of the Twitch gaming site, where it is possible to actually sit and just watch a game, as though you are watching television, to be absolutely fascinating.
Back in the day, like, say, in 2006, this would have obviousy been completely unthinkable...and until I found the Twitch site itself, it had never even really occurred to me, so much as a single time, that anyone could possibly find the concept of sitting and watching **someone else** play a game, all that interesting. Of course, after spending some time on Twitch watching other folks run through EverQuest as well as a few other games now,I'm beginning to feel quite differently about the entire affair. In fact, in truth, I am, as I said before, downright fascinated.
I'm also almost a bit concerned, because I can't help but wonder: Will an engine like Twitch, once it is truly mainstream and popular (which I would say, right now, it is not) ultimately be better or worse for gaming? A lot of people might think, automatically, that it will only make gaming **better**, but then one has to remember: By watching Twitch, actually buying the game yourself almost becomes sort of ... well, not necessary. For example, for the past 2 weeks that i've been aware of Twitch, I have not really found it necessary to log onto EverQuest like I used to. I now just log onto Twitch and watch, and what do you know...I've gotten my "fix" , my "dose". Previously without the ability to watch a streamed live copy of someone playing the game, getting my fix was totally impossible without actually logging on myself. This was especially the case back in the original EQ heyday, pre-2007, when not even an engine like YouTube existed. Now, theres nothing to it however: I can get my fix from either Twitch, or I can even watch old successful, and massive raids, on YouTube. And I cant help but wonder: What will this seemingly small detail mean for the far off, or even close, future, of gaming?
Personally, I think we only have to look towards other things that have become "spectator sports" to understand what it will mean: Just like football, baseball, or especially like acting and music, gaming seems like it is going to eventually turn into something that will, first, get very popular for people to tune in and watch, just like those other things, but that will then, eventually, turn into something so professionalized and complex that, I fear, it will intimidate people to the point where the commoner will no longer feel its something that they ought to be bothered with, even as a simple pastime. This is, of course, what the commoner already, in my opinion, sadly does, with most of the other things that are already accessible through the TV: He or she sits on a couch as nothing more than a spectator, forever and obsessively watching, but never thinking about actually **doing**.
I perhaps have some personal experience with this story of the sad, non participatory commoner, beucase I myself was originally a gamer, who then began to try my hand at being a musician, and I was forever astounded (and still am) by the way that so many people I have met in my life, have seemingly never once really met a truly decent musician ... outside of their TV, or even off of a simple stage. Iti s something I have been saying for years: For most people in the modern world, music is an incredibly 'plastic' and 'artificial' thing. It is something that comes solely through the speakers for them. They never see musical instruments. They never touch them. They never hear them live. They dont know the first thing about them.
Watching someone do something that is common for a guitar player, like, say, stringing the guitar up, or tuning it, is a somewhat perplexing and fascinating ordeal for them. And don't even get me started on an instrument like the piano that is, at this point, seldom used in pop music: I can remember once siting down in a community college classroom that had a piano in it, and playing it (just simple little chords) and the students were looking at me as though I was taking off on a spaceship, rediscovering some lost ancient art. It was incredible to me to see just how horrifically disconnected these average people were from something like the sound of an actual piano, in the same room as they. It was actually almost ridiculous, and definitly sad.
These same people of course listen to more music than anyone on the Earth ever did previously; but they are as disconnected as can be from thinking that *they* could actually themselves participate. Everything for them, even something like singing a chorus all together, is always supposed to be for someone else, not they, never they. This is because these people have often seen the most majestical and enormous musical performances imaginable through their TV. They have seen the greatest players do the greatest things. They have watched all the famous archived clips of what the New York Times and that now somewhat insufferable Rolling Stone magazine assures them were the 'greatest bands of all time'.
As a result, they try to pick up a guitar themselves, and the only thing they can think is: This is hopeless. I am so far from the end game, it is hopeless. We thus, in my opinion, lose a huge sea of potential great players. I have forever believed that one part of the reason the 60s was so phenomenal in terms of rock music was because normal, everyday people who did not, initially, seem all that skilled or incredible, like Jim Morrison (whose voice was not particularly good) or even John Lennon, began to dream enormous musical dreams, and one part of the reason they were dreaming them is because, back then, it was somewhat impossible to see the musical end game , unless you yourself reached it. In John Lennons teenage years, for example, full length 750p DVDs of great rock concerts, or even music vidoes forthat matter, did not exist. I feel this made all the difference in his early maturation and growth as amusician: He was forced to come up with his own songs and create his own fun. I always remember the old Dylan line : "They ask me why I write my own songs. I tell them: because no one else can write the exact songs I want to write." What would a modern Dylan think, however, having an engine lik Spotify available to him, where he can find literally one million artists to choose from? It might have taken him a little longer to realize,maybe, that no one else can write just like he himself can.
And as disconnected as this all might seem from something like gaming, I personally do not think it is disconnected at all, because , again, I can already see it happening in terms of my own desires and wants. Again, one must think: Years ago, when I was a kid, if I wanted to see an actual full length raid in EverQuest, I had to somehow finagle my way into a real one, and the truth is that, when I was a kid, I never actually managed to get that far in EverQuest, but you better believe that each time I logged on, that was what was really the motivation in the back of my head: I have got to reach a raid, and see what it looks like..I have got to see the legendary thing that I have only heard about from other players, I have got to reach the end game and see for myself. The goal was, really and truly, not all that different from chasing a dream in reality: It was hard, it was mysterious, and it was challenging. Now, however, what has happened? Ill tell you: I log onto YouTube, and again, I can see the greatest raids that have, apparently, ever happened. Beyond that, I can also just watch the guy on Twitch as he goes about playing the game in a skilled manner that I can't imagine pulling off. And honestly, as happy as it makes me to see others enjoying the game, it also makes me just sad, too, becuase I can already imagine the day when the first teenager will sit down with a new unboxed video game in his hhand, one that he has already spent 700 hours watching on the future nationally syndicated Twitch, and his sniveling little, mean friends next to him will start whispering into his ear: "You might as well just throw it out the window, becaus you will *never* be as good as KingKytus887. You'll never be as good as him. Hes the best. Youre just a sucker! So why bother?"
And yes, its true, I know, some teenagers will be motivated by this sort of harassment and competition, and I know some of you out there love to hear of these little sniveling ultra competitive psychotic mind abusers, because you think competition makes "everything better", but the truth is that,quite frankly, I do not think it does. I think it makes it all **worse**. I think it rips the spine out of a culture and makes people not want to participate. It keeps people quiet. It ties their hands up and tells them "just sit and watch, do not try."
I think that a culture like music has become so outlandishly competitive with spectator shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Bimbos that it has actually almost been entirely destroyed, because the cheap little trick that obsessive competition hides from you is that it always comes jam packed with uniformity and conformity as well.... and this is the thing , you see, that frightens me most. Itcomes jam packed with the idea that there is a "superior" way to do something or enjoy something , which everyone starts blindly copying, even though there is not. People start to believe, even when they can't themselves see it, that one way of doing something is better than another. Derek Jeter, even on a bad day when he has no hits, is for some reason "ultra superior" to the random minor league guy who hits 6 home runs in a single 9 inning game...
For instance, I personally could care less whether I am watching a baseball game of the New York Yankees, or the Lowell Spinners, a minor league ball club, because I cannot really see the difference between who is better or worse. I'm not an expert of ball, I am only an untrained eye. I cannot see the difference that some 40 year scout can see. I cannot see it. To me the games look more or less exactly the same, save for the enormous crowds that are or are not there. I have enjoyed minor league games **more** than some World Series games, in fact, that I have watched from TV. I just like to see the game itself. I cannot see this enormous difference that other people insist on telling me is there.
I also tend to not be ableto see the difference between musicians who sing to me in a bar and the ones who play in the arena, and oftentimes, in truth, just like the minor league ball clubs, I have found the musicians in the bar that much more entertaining. I have also found my own self to be that much more entertaining as well, and I would even go so far as to say that I **prefer** my own self, to anyone else, even though I am not famous or known for my music.
The other people in this world, of course, who never cease to stop reading Rolling Stone magazine or the New York Times, as I said, and who lkisten to every new record literally the very second it has been unleashed, and then read 50 reviews about it from critics who apparently know all there is to know, insist that the man in the arena is infinitely more enjoyable than the man in the bar, even though they cannot explain precisely why, beyond "he has more eyes on him". And they insist so seriously on this that, as I keep stressing, they have shut everyone else out of the gates, in favor of paying homage to this one lone guy , who is a "star" and a"titan" to be endlessly obsessed over.....
And like I'm saying: I can already tell.... this is probably going to be the future for gaming, and I dunno...but I 'spose I find it all quite sad.. ----
Back in the day, like, say, in 2006, this would have obviousy been completely unthinkable...and until I found the Twitch site itself, it had never even really occurred to me, so much as a single time, that anyone could possibly find the concept of sitting and watching **someone else** play a game, all that interesting. Of course, after spending some time on Twitch watching other folks run through EverQuest as well as a few other games now,I'm beginning to feel quite differently about the entire affair. In fact, in truth, I am, as I said before, downright fascinated.
I'm also almost a bit concerned, because I can't help but wonder: Will an engine like Twitch, once it is truly mainstream and popular (which I would say, right now, it is not) ultimately be better or worse for gaming? A lot of people might think, automatically, that it will only make gaming **better**, but then one has to remember: By watching Twitch, actually buying the game yourself almost becomes sort of ... well, not necessary. For example, for the past 2 weeks that i've been aware of Twitch, I have not really found it necessary to log onto EverQuest like I used to. I now just log onto Twitch and watch, and what do you know...I've gotten my "fix" , my "dose". Previously without the ability to watch a streamed live copy of someone playing the game, getting my fix was totally impossible without actually logging on myself. This was especially the case back in the original EQ heyday, pre-2007, when not even an engine like YouTube existed. Now, theres nothing to it however: I can get my fix from either Twitch, or I can even watch old successful, and massive raids, on YouTube. And I cant help but wonder: What will this seemingly small detail mean for the far off, or even close, future, of gaming?
Personally, I think we only have to look towards other things that have become "spectator sports" to understand what it will mean: Just like football, baseball, or especially like acting and music, gaming seems like it is going to eventually turn into something that will, first, get very popular for people to tune in and watch, just like those other things, but that will then, eventually, turn into something so professionalized and complex that, I fear, it will intimidate people to the point where the commoner will no longer feel its something that they ought to be bothered with, even as a simple pastime. This is, of course, what the commoner already, in my opinion, sadly does, with most of the other things that are already accessible through the TV: He or she sits on a couch as nothing more than a spectator, forever and obsessively watching, but never thinking about actually **doing**.
I perhaps have some personal experience with this story of the sad, non participatory commoner, beucase I myself was originally a gamer, who then began to try my hand at being a musician, and I was forever astounded (and still am) by the way that so many people I have met in my life, have seemingly never once really met a truly decent musician ... outside of their TV, or even off of a simple stage. Iti s something I have been saying for years: For most people in the modern world, music is an incredibly 'plastic' and 'artificial' thing. It is something that comes solely through the speakers for them. They never see musical instruments. They never touch them. They never hear them live. They dont know the first thing about them.
Watching someone do something that is common for a guitar player, like, say, stringing the guitar up, or tuning it, is a somewhat perplexing and fascinating ordeal for them. And don't even get me started on an instrument like the piano that is, at this point, seldom used in pop music: I can remember once siting down in a community college classroom that had a piano in it, and playing it (just simple little chords) and the students were looking at me as though I was taking off on a spaceship, rediscovering some lost ancient art. It was incredible to me to see just how horrifically disconnected these average people were from something like the sound of an actual piano, in the same room as they. It was actually almost ridiculous, and definitly sad.
These same people of course listen to more music than anyone on the Earth ever did previously; but they are as disconnected as can be from thinking that *they* could actually themselves participate. Everything for them, even something like singing a chorus all together, is always supposed to be for someone else, not they, never they. This is because these people have often seen the most majestical and enormous musical performances imaginable through their TV. They have seen the greatest players do the greatest things. They have watched all the famous archived clips of what the New York Times and that now somewhat insufferable Rolling Stone magazine assures them were the 'greatest bands of all time'.
As a result, they try to pick up a guitar themselves, and the only thing they can think is: This is hopeless. I am so far from the end game, it is hopeless. We thus, in my opinion, lose a huge sea of potential great players. I have forever believed that one part of the reason the 60s was so phenomenal in terms of rock music was because normal, everyday people who did not, initially, seem all that skilled or incredible, like Jim Morrison (whose voice was not particularly good) or even John Lennon, began to dream enormous musical dreams, and one part of the reason they were dreaming them is because, back then, it was somewhat impossible to see the musical end game , unless you yourself reached it. In John Lennons teenage years, for example, full length 750p DVDs of great rock concerts, or even music vidoes forthat matter, did not exist. I feel this made all the difference in his early maturation and growth as amusician: He was forced to come up with his own songs and create his own fun. I always remember the old Dylan line : "They ask me why I write my own songs. I tell them: because no one else can write the exact songs I want to write." What would a modern Dylan think, however, having an engine lik Spotify available to him, where he can find literally one million artists to choose from? It might have taken him a little longer to realize,maybe, that no one else can write just like he himself can.
And as disconnected as this all might seem from something like gaming, I personally do not think it is disconnected at all, because , again, I can already see it happening in terms of my own desires and wants. Again, one must think: Years ago, when I was a kid, if I wanted to see an actual full length raid in EverQuest, I had to somehow finagle my way into a real one, and the truth is that, when I was a kid, I never actually managed to get that far in EverQuest, but you better believe that each time I logged on, that was what was really the motivation in the back of my head: I have got to reach a raid, and see what it looks like..I have got to see the legendary thing that I have only heard about from other players, I have got to reach the end game and see for myself. The goal was, really and truly, not all that different from chasing a dream in reality: It was hard, it was mysterious, and it was challenging. Now, however, what has happened? Ill tell you: I log onto YouTube, and again, I can see the greatest raids that have, apparently, ever happened. Beyond that, I can also just watch the guy on Twitch as he goes about playing the game in a skilled manner that I can't imagine pulling off. And honestly, as happy as it makes me to see others enjoying the game, it also makes me just sad, too, becuase I can already imagine the day when the first teenager will sit down with a new unboxed video game in his hhand, one that he has already spent 700 hours watching on the future nationally syndicated Twitch, and his sniveling little, mean friends next to him will start whispering into his ear: "You might as well just throw it out the window, becaus you will *never* be as good as KingKytus887. You'll never be as good as him. Hes the best. Youre just a sucker! So why bother?"
And yes, its true, I know, some teenagers will be motivated by this sort of harassment and competition, and I know some of you out there love to hear of these little sniveling ultra competitive psychotic mind abusers, because you think competition makes "everything better", but the truth is that,quite frankly, I do not think it does. I think it makes it all **worse**. I think it rips the spine out of a culture and makes people not want to participate. It keeps people quiet. It ties their hands up and tells them "just sit and watch, do not try."
I think that a culture like music has become so outlandishly competitive with spectator shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Bimbos that it has actually almost been entirely destroyed, because the cheap little trick that obsessive competition hides from you is that it always comes jam packed with uniformity and conformity as well.... and this is the thing , you see, that frightens me most. Itcomes jam packed with the idea that there is a "superior" way to do something or enjoy something , which everyone starts blindly copying, even though there is not. People start to believe, even when they can't themselves see it, that one way of doing something is better than another. Derek Jeter, even on a bad day when he has no hits, is for some reason "ultra superior" to the random minor league guy who hits 6 home runs in a single 9 inning game...
For instance, I personally could care less whether I am watching a baseball game of the New York Yankees, or the Lowell Spinners, a minor league ball club, because I cannot really see the difference between who is better or worse. I'm not an expert of ball, I am only an untrained eye. I cannot see the difference that some 40 year scout can see. I cannot see it. To me the games look more or less exactly the same, save for the enormous crowds that are or are not there. I have enjoyed minor league games **more** than some World Series games, in fact, that I have watched from TV. I just like to see the game itself. I cannot see this enormous difference that other people insist on telling me is there.
I also tend to not be ableto see the difference between musicians who sing to me in a bar and the ones who play in the arena, and oftentimes, in truth, just like the minor league ball clubs, I have found the musicians in the bar that much more entertaining. I have also found my own self to be that much more entertaining as well, and I would even go so far as to say that I **prefer** my own self, to anyone else, even though I am not famous or known for my music.
The other people in this world, of course, who never cease to stop reading Rolling Stone magazine or the New York Times, as I said, and who lkisten to every new record literally the very second it has been unleashed, and then read 50 reviews about it from critics who apparently know all there is to know, insist that the man in the arena is infinitely more enjoyable than the man in the bar, even though they cannot explain precisely why, beyond "he has more eyes on him". And they insist so seriously on this that, as I keep stressing, they have shut everyone else out of the gates, in favor of paying homage to this one lone guy , who is a "star" and a"titan" to be endlessly obsessed over.....
And like I'm saying: I can already tell.... this is probably going to be the future for gaming, and I dunno...but I 'spose I find it all quite sad.. ----
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
More anti-prohibition songs
We're gonna ruin the whole country
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
I don't wanna see folks smile
I only wanna see them frown
And I wanna see every city
Crumble to the ground
There's gotta be a prohibition on walking
A prohibtion on smiling too
Let's prohibit whistling and singing
I'll make a criminal out of you
I'll make a criminal out of you
We're gonna ruin the whole country
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
I wanna see street gangs a blazing
I wanna see em fight the cops!
I wanna start a war on all of the poor
And I never want it to stop
Oh it's gonna be so beautiful
It's gonna be so fine
Plus don't you know I'm gonna make a million
Selling illegal wine
We're gonna ruin the whole country
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
I don't wanna see folks smile
I only wanna see them frown
And I wanna see every city
Crumble to the ground
There's gotta be a prohibition on walking
A prohibtion on smiling too
Let's prohibit whistling and singing
I'll make a criminal out of you
I'll make a criminal out of you
We're gonna ruin the whole country
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
I wanna see street gangs a blazing
I wanna see em fight the cops!
I wanna start a war on all of the poor
And I never want it to stop
Oh it's gonna be so beautiful
It's gonna be so fine
Plus don't you know I'm gonna make a million
Selling illegal wine
We're gonna ruin the whole country
It just might take a little time
The first step to making everything so much worse
Is to make everything a crime
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Moves like Jagger: a short piece
Anyone who says Mick Jagger couldn't dance is .... not so much a moron, but rather just someone who has probably been too enamored with what wound up happening to modern culture **after** Mick Jaggers heyday .
The symbolism of Jaggers dance is really completely integral to what rock and roll was in its prime: a rather chaotic style of fairly masculine and aggressive music, that combined itself rather ingeniously with feminity, whilst at once obeying **next to no rules** or "organized moves".
Dancing in an organized planned out style like we now see Beyonce do or Michael Jackson etc, would have been antithetical to the entire rock and roll movement, becuse those dances that those artists do are actually , in some sense, almost like GOOSESTEPS were for the nazis. It's all about moving absolutely in time, doing the same thing that all the other dancers are doing, having everything planned in advance, etc. Beyonces dances are cohesive and, again, almost militaristic. Jaggers moves are not at all in this vein, which is why people like to say he "couldn't dance". Jagger was able to dance just fine. He just didn't dance in line with others. He was literally all on his own.... With Jagger you have to really look at it more as someone , basically, whose suddenly breaking out of some sort of very tight and constricted cage, and they're completely ecstatic about their escape. Go back and watch some of the original Rolling Stones performances, for instance, in the middle of the 1960s, when it was still being shot in black and white, and you will start to see just how long it actually took for Jagger to finally reach the style of dance, that he has now been made even more famous for, with the Maroon 5 song "Moves like Jagger".
It's actually incredible when you really watch it, and to me it has always stood for MAN finally breaking free and adopting a sort of curvy , feminine "looseness" for his musical expression that , in previous decades, (and even now, believe it or not) is still considered rather off limits for him. Jagger in my opinion did a great deal for the feminine liberation movements that followed, but of course he's never acknowledged by any feminine movements becuase he's considered the man side of it all. But he was essentially, in some respects, one of rocks most "female' performers, of that rather constricted time period. In Keith Richards autobiography a young Mick is described as having practiced his dance moves in front of a mirror, "pretending to be Marilyn Monroe". He had feminine heroines at a time when few others did. I see him as an early transgender icon almost, myself. The Rolling Stones are often compared to the Beatles for instance, as though they are one in the same, but the truth about the Beatles is that they were dead by the time the 70s hit, and the 70s is really when Jagger actually hit, completely, his wild boy dancing prime. The Beatles were good musicians, but they weren't sexy, and ....well, they certainly had no "moves' like JaggeR"...... - end
Dancing in an organized planned out style like we now see Beyonce do or Michael Jackson etc, would have been antithetical to the entire rock and roll movement, becuse those dances that those artists do are actually , in some sense, almost like GOOSESTEPS were for the nazis. It's all about moving absolutely in time, doing the same thing that all the other dancers are doing, having everything planned in advance, etc. Beyonces dances are cohesive and, again, almost militaristic. Jaggers moves are not at all in this vein, which is why people like to say he "couldn't dance". Jagger was able to dance just fine. He just didn't dance in line with others. He was literally all on his own.... With Jagger you have to really look at it more as someone , basically, whose suddenly breaking out of some sort of very tight and constricted cage, and they're completely ecstatic about their escape. Go back and watch some of the original Rolling Stones performances, for instance, in the middle of the 1960s, when it was still being shot in black and white, and you will start to see just how long it actually took for Jagger to finally reach the style of dance, that he has now been made even more famous for, with the Maroon 5 song "Moves like Jagger".
It's actually incredible when you really watch it, and to me it has always stood for MAN finally breaking free and adopting a sort of curvy , feminine "looseness" for his musical expression that , in previous decades, (and even now, believe it or not) is still considered rather off limits for him. Jagger in my opinion did a great deal for the feminine liberation movements that followed, but of course he's never acknowledged by any feminine movements becuase he's considered the man side of it all. But he was essentially, in some respects, one of rocks most "female' performers, of that rather constricted time period. In Keith Richards autobiography a young Mick is described as having practiced his dance moves in front of a mirror, "pretending to be Marilyn Monroe". He had feminine heroines at a time when few others did. I see him as an early transgender icon almost, myself. The Rolling Stones are often compared to the Beatles for instance, as though they are one in the same, but the truth about the Beatles is that they were dead by the time the 70s hit, and the 70s is really when Jagger actually hit, completely, his wild boy dancing prime. The Beatles were good musicians, but they weren't sexy, and ....well, they certainly had no "moves' like JaggeR"...... - end
Why I love Queers
I feel very badly for people who cannot abide by homosexuality and who think it is the worst thing to ever happen to the world, because I think these people don't realize what they are missing. This isn't to say that I feel bad for them for missing out on gay intercourse, because I've never had gay intercourse, and so I wouldn't know what it was like, but it is to say that I feel bad for them because I think they are, quite frankly, missing out on a little thing called innovation. Yes that's right: innovation.
My interest in the homosexual community and the so called "queer rights" movement has very little to do with the actual sex aspect of it, and everything to do with the element that I have often found to coincide with the queer movements, which is, as I said, innovation and progress. For, it seems to me, after reading and studying , for years the history of the world, that homosexual "movements " or cultures tend to pop up not when things are going wrong (as so many in the religious community would like us to believe) but rather when things are going beautifully right, and well. In fact, just one quick look over the course of history and all its particularly good and progressive spots, and you're going to quickly find that homosexual seems to be almost integral to literally every progressive and innovative culture that ever was.
Many unbiased people who know what to look for, I think, tend to notice this in the modern day, because it's pretty clear to see that a lot of the LGBT movement is centered all around the various universities where people read in great depth, and also around the nations richest and healthiest cities , but a lot of these same people I've noticed, when I talk to them, don't seem to realize this integral fact about homosexualitys past history, either. There is an enormous idea floating around, in fact, that the entire practice almost has no past whatsoever.,
And personally as an "historian" I think that's quite a shame, because once one really sees just what a role homosexuality seems to have played in the past, I believe one also starts to see that all the arguments against it , as an "abomination" etc , are quite ridiculous. They don't make any sense. They aren't true. In fact it's all really quite the opposite. Homosexuality does not stand for the end of time like many religious people say it does. If anything, it often stands for the beginning of time. Good time. Healthy time. Inventive and productive time....
Yes, I know of course , these obnoxious claims about homosexuality should look ridiculous just from the get go, people shouldn't need to have homosexuality "justified" , they should understand it without help, just as it is , standing alone without any context , but it still doesn't hurt, I don't think, to display to people just how frequent homosexuality was in history, either. I find this especially to be the case in the United States, where many people seem to be utterly convinced--even gays I have met!-- that homosexuality being accepted, anywhere at all, Is brand new. There is really an enormous and very erroneous idea in many circles here in the USA where many people truly seem convinced that homosexuality, cross dressing, and yes, even transgenderism are brand new, and something that "just began" in the 1960s or 1970s etc.
They aren't . They're all as old as the sun. Including transgenderism, once you exclude the new surgeries and operations that have been figured out of course. In fact, there are 2-3,000 year old statues from Egypt and Greece, of Transgender people, and some of them (well, all of them I suppose) are in some of the greatest museums currently around on Planet Earth. Indeed, I always say: if you know someone whose got a real big problem with transgender folks and queers and the like in the modern world , you better make damn sure that person don't open up any deep history books, because they sure as hell aren't going to like what they find. Especially if they like modern medicine or art or science or writing or anything even remotely "complex" like that. This is because queers invented a whole bunch of all of that.
Ancient Greece is probably the best and, to a degree, most well known example, of a very complex and intelligent society where a certain type of homosexuality was lovingly tolerated (middle aged men with young men) whilst various very huge leaps in knowledge were occurring all around it. The Greeks gave us enormous advancements in basically every field one could think of, from politics to the arts to astrology and philosophy et cetera, and, basically, single handedly created the idea of a modern western democracy with fully functioning cities , all the while being rather gay. In fact homosexuality was so tolerated in Ancient Greece (in comparison to here) that even Achilles himself, the famous mythological Greek warrior and ultra masculine hero (now a tattoo for many queer hating homophobes, I've found ) was and is widely said to have been a bit of a queer himself with a character named Patroclus. In the famous American movie with Brad Pitt Troy, where he plays Achilles, Patroclus (who is an integra part of the myth) is introduced simply as the prized cousin of Achilles. In the text it reads differently: Patroclus was his young gay and beautiful lover , and when he went and accidentally got himself killed in battle, Achilles went insane with rage and, in the name of Patroclus, went ahead and slaughtered Hector and hectors army ET cetera. Patroclus gave us Achilles as we know him, is one way of putting it. And Achilles is basically the shining star of what we take Greece to have been: an incredibly complex and well developed, highly civilized society that was able to rather ingeniously mix the masculine and feminine traits of mankind into one beautiful pot of progress. The Greeks were essentially just as good at fighting as they were at love making , philosophizing, doing astrology etc . The scales seem to have been tipped in a very good direction in Greece. It wasn't too masculine, wasn't too feminine. To this day it remains one of the most remarkable civilizations to have ever been, and after she fell (as even the best places always inevitably fall) it took a very, very long time for the western world to come around and find the same combination of intellectual and combative glory again. Rome, for instance, which is essentially said by many to have been an "exact copy" of Greece, and which was far more obsessed with upholding an idea of "straight"masculinity than the Greeks were , was an absolutely fantastic place when it came to fighting , but literally did next to nothing in terms of advancement in many other respects. It was unbalanced. They essentially threw all their energy into combat, and it could very well perhaps be said that this was the exact reason they ultimately fell. They were utterly blind to a number of very important fields. They had a problem with femininity and this caused them to stumble.
Most of what the Romans knew, for example, about things like medicine, astrology, story telling, statue making, painting, anything at all like that, they basically stole from the queer Greeks. This even - believe it or not-- includes their style of fighting in their sword and shield military, which was the phalanx, and which the Greeks created. The phalanx is widely known to have been one of the key reasons Rome was able to go and conquer so much as they did when they did. For the time period, it was an intellectual and organized style of fighting. It prized the cohesion of the group rather than the lone strength of one single manly combatant. Ruthless masculine barbarians with arms of steel who stood as tall as a tower, many of which remind me of the modern masculine men in town here who hate queers and never cease to say they are "abominations" , were literally and gloriously slaughtered and murdered like sheep in the face of the queer Greek phalanx.
This is because , again, the phalanx relied on a dash of intellect, organization, tight camaraderie, and maybe even a bit of "poetry". The "ultra masculine" fighting style that the big armed beer swilling barbarian used against it - a fighting style which was chaotic and followed no set plan ---was essentially worthless. Even the biggest warrior that the barbarians had couldn't really hope for much against this style, and so he was defeated. For the Romans, conquering much of the barbarian world that was to the north of them was very much as easy as it was for the English to conquer the Indians with the cannonballs many, many centuries later. It didn't matter who was manly or not, in a sense. It just mattered if you followed the phalanx; again created by a queer tolerant Greek society....
All the same: Even the Romans , however, with all their problems regarding femininity and not being able to admit that they had stolen a style of fighting invented by a rather gay civilization , didn't necessarily hate gays like the modern "roughneck" American men often do. Did they like them? No. They didn't. Was the same style of homosexuality tolerated as it was in Greece? No. They insulted the legends of Greece and called them "boy lovers" and sissies et cetera..//
But did they go all out in an insane and psychotic war like we often see today against them and hang them on fences and refuse to bake cakes for them like our current Vice President "Pence the Imbecilic Stupid Donkey" seems to want? Did the Roman politicians Even sit there endlessly acknowledging the gays , from a negative angle, like our current worthless and moronic Vice President does? No, they didn't, and this was because the Romans of course had a wide array of very colorful and different gods who essentially would allow you to get away with anything....so long as it wasn't hurting someone (and even then it would allow you to hurt someone, who was an enemy of Rome of course!) . In comparison to our own society today, Rome was in some aspects surprisingly tolerant. Many Wealthy Romans, including those in power, probably had queer sex with one another with no real shame. They absolutely had drunken Orgies, in honor of the very famous wine God "Bacchus". Yes:Just like they didn't go on an all out crusade against queers , they didn't shame alcohol , and if they had drugs around, they probably wouldn't have shamed those , either. They would have sold them and realized they could boost the economy.
But of course, just like Greece before it, Rome eventually hit its bursting point and came to an end, and when it did it gave rise to a new period of the world , a period that saw all the old gods who had been around, for all of time until then, suddenly fall, and be replaced by one God all alone. A God who said he was gonna free slaves and give to the poor, but who also very much despised queers, and even , some would certainly say, women. He was also a God who seemed radically opposed to literally all of the philosophy and Medicine and art that had been being advanced upon up until that point. In fact he pretty much seemed to hate everything about the world in general. The one Christian God is perhaps one of the most cynical and pessimistic gods that's ever been created in human history : he supposedly offers eternal salvation in Paradise...but if you look at what he actually says about this world , he hates it flat out. The Greeks didn't see things this cut and dry, and neither really, did the Romans. Did they think the world was a bit vicious? Yes. But they also saw it as having redeeming qualities. The Christian God does not see things like this.....
This period of course , when the Christian God first starts to get a leg up, is a little more well known in our own time than the ancient culture of Rome and Greece etx, and it's called the Dark Ages. In my opinion, there are essentially two reasons it's called the Dark Ages: one is because a whole lot of knowledge was accidentally lost when this period began (replaced by Christian superstition) and two, it is because the idea of a democratic Republic (which was , again, Rome and Greece and now the US) was suddenly replaced all over again, like real old times, by the wretched and god awful world of kings and queens and dictators , et cetera. The dark ages were a hard time to be alive in this world--- Greek elegance and medicine began to become a fond memory/-- and , not surprisingly, the homosexuals seem to have essentially disappeared all throughout it, no where to be found. So too, of course, as I stress, did art and progress and medicinal advancement disappear with them. Many absolutely terrifying diseases were unleashed upon the (western) world during this period , and they were diseases that no one seems to have been able to figure out and solve too quickly , mostly because everyone was illiterate again (like old times) and had no idea how to do what would have been, in the Greek time, even sort of "basic" problem solving. Lifespans during the dark and midle ages wre horrifically low in many places. Progress was halted. Life was muddy and miserable. The gays seriously vanished . In many places, Men began to grow out their beards and fight in bad , disorganized styles all over again. Chaos began to rule. Cities fell into disarray and disrepair, sort of like many modern US cities. Women found themselves with a boot on their head, trapped in miserable situations that weren't just repressive but also just downright hideous (for the women's fashion styles of the Dark ages simply do not compare with the beauty that was often a Roman or Greek).
But then one day, many hundreds of years later, something suddenly began to happen again, and the queers started, bit by careful bit, to move out into the light of day again, and this particular thing (as far as the west is concerned) all began to culminate , not surprisingly, in Italy yet again, and just a hop and a skip from Rome, in the northern Italian city of Florence. This period is of course known as the Renaissance, which in the original Italian is Rinascimento, and which translates literally as "REBIRTH". Put simply, the Renaissance Is seen as a rebirth period because it's when the little society in Florence Italy began to, for reasons I can't explain at length here, rediscover all of the old knowledge that had essentially been lost since Greek times, and when the Florentines discovered it all , they didn't do what the Romans did and just copy it, they actually went ahead and started to, finally, improve upon it and advance upon it, etc. For example, if you look at the statues the Romans occasionally sculpted, you'll see their literally carbon copies of the Greek ones they had found. Look at the statues that were made in Florence, and you'll see they definitely learned from the Greek statues --- but they also improved upon them, significantly.
It's thus the case that The Renaissance period gave birth to a number of unbelievably notable figures who would, I can assure you, be regarded as "effeminate queers", in this sad modern queer hating United States. Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti, for starters, *were* queers. DaVinci is to this day known as not just one of the greatest painters who ever lived with the Mona Lisa, but also as one of the most innovative and advanced minds to have ever walked the earth. DaVinci was experimenting with ideas of flight , submarines, new musical instruments, science, medicine, and even new war machines to help protect his city of Florence, at the time, from enemy city states like Rome and Naples, etc. Florence was , in that time period, and even Venice for that matter, sort of like San Francisco or Manhattan is for us now: though it wasn't ever made official, it was considered a rather "queer" place. Gay people of the time period, more likely than not, flocked to it....perhaps in hopes of having their naked portrait painted or sculpted by an artist like Michelangelo or Leonardo or Rafael, and....trust me...all three of those artists would have been more than interested in sculpting it. In fact, the ironic truth about both the Italian Renaissance period and then the Greek time , is that the male body was prized far more than the female one, especially for sculptors. A sculptor like Michelangelo would have been far more excited to see a naked and "hot" masculine man in front of him posing for his statue , than a naked woman. This fact is of course why we have the naked David still standing in Florence, rather than a woman.
The other thing about the Renaissance is that , as it was making all of these cultural, medicinal, and astrological advancements, and also while it was having some gay intercourse and painting naked posing men , it started to see that Christianity was not so much of a blessing as it was an inhibited curse. The Renaissance is more or less the first period in history where a bit of a major war began between the Church and science and the people, etc. This war is still very much being waged in our own time of course, and if you look very closely, you're going to see, just like I said in the opening paragraph, that all the people who are queers or who are aligned with the queers in this current time period, in *extremely rich and technological* cities like San Francisco and so on, are also the same people who , just like DaVinci and Michelangelo were in their time , are aligned with the further progress of science, and medicine, and technology. Not too surprisingly, the people standing in total psychotic opposition to the LGBT movement, also seem to be the same people who know nothing of technological industries, are often illiterate, and who often seem to reside in or outside of cities that, unlike San Francisco, are absolutely in ruins, with no real industry or innovation or anything at all for that matter.
Which is why I say again, just like I said in the beginning: I really feel bad for people who hate homosexuals like the conservative psyochotics in this country currently do, because it seems to me that all of those people, throughout all of time now, live in absolutely horrific places. Too bad for them I guess. It's their loss. Literally.
------ LOGGING OFF
My interest in the homosexual community and the so called "queer rights" movement has very little to do with the actual sex aspect of it, and everything to do with the element that I have often found to coincide with the queer movements, which is, as I said, innovation and progress. For, it seems to me, after reading and studying , for years the history of the world, that homosexual "movements " or cultures tend to pop up not when things are going wrong (as so many in the religious community would like us to believe) but rather when things are going beautifully right, and well. In fact, just one quick look over the course of history and all its particularly good and progressive spots, and you're going to quickly find that homosexual seems to be almost integral to literally every progressive and innovative culture that ever was.
Many unbiased people who know what to look for, I think, tend to notice this in the modern day, because it's pretty clear to see that a lot of the LGBT movement is centered all around the various universities where people read in great depth, and also around the nations richest and healthiest cities , but a lot of these same people I've noticed, when I talk to them, don't seem to realize this integral fact about homosexualitys past history, either. There is an enormous idea floating around, in fact, that the entire practice almost has no past whatsoever.,
And personally as an "historian" I think that's quite a shame, because once one really sees just what a role homosexuality seems to have played in the past, I believe one also starts to see that all the arguments against it , as an "abomination" etc , are quite ridiculous. They don't make any sense. They aren't true. In fact it's all really quite the opposite. Homosexuality does not stand for the end of time like many religious people say it does. If anything, it often stands for the beginning of time. Good time. Healthy time. Inventive and productive time....
Yes, I know of course , these obnoxious claims about homosexuality should look ridiculous just from the get go, people shouldn't need to have homosexuality "justified" , they should understand it without help, just as it is , standing alone without any context , but it still doesn't hurt, I don't think, to display to people just how frequent homosexuality was in history, either. I find this especially to be the case in the United States, where many people seem to be utterly convinced--even gays I have met!-- that homosexuality being accepted, anywhere at all, Is brand new. There is really an enormous and very erroneous idea in many circles here in the USA where many people truly seem convinced that homosexuality, cross dressing, and yes, even transgenderism are brand new, and something that "just began" in the 1960s or 1970s etc.
They aren't . They're all as old as the sun. Including transgenderism, once you exclude the new surgeries and operations that have been figured out of course. In fact, there are 2-3,000 year old statues from Egypt and Greece, of Transgender people, and some of them (well, all of them I suppose) are in some of the greatest museums currently around on Planet Earth. Indeed, I always say: if you know someone whose got a real big problem with transgender folks and queers and the like in the modern world , you better make damn sure that person don't open up any deep history books, because they sure as hell aren't going to like what they find. Especially if they like modern medicine or art or science or writing or anything even remotely "complex" like that. This is because queers invented a whole bunch of all of that.
Ancient Greece is probably the best and, to a degree, most well known example, of a very complex and intelligent society where a certain type of homosexuality was lovingly tolerated (middle aged men with young men) whilst various very huge leaps in knowledge were occurring all around it. The Greeks gave us enormous advancements in basically every field one could think of, from politics to the arts to astrology and philosophy et cetera, and, basically, single handedly created the idea of a modern western democracy with fully functioning cities , all the while being rather gay. In fact homosexuality was so tolerated in Ancient Greece (in comparison to here) that even Achilles himself, the famous mythological Greek warrior and ultra masculine hero (now a tattoo for many queer hating homophobes, I've found ) was and is widely said to have been a bit of a queer himself with a character named Patroclus. In the famous American movie with Brad Pitt Troy, where he plays Achilles, Patroclus (who is an integra part of the myth) is introduced simply as the prized cousin of Achilles. In the text it reads differently: Patroclus was his young gay and beautiful lover , and when he went and accidentally got himself killed in battle, Achilles went insane with rage and, in the name of Patroclus, went ahead and slaughtered Hector and hectors army ET cetera. Patroclus gave us Achilles as we know him, is one way of putting it. And Achilles is basically the shining star of what we take Greece to have been: an incredibly complex and well developed, highly civilized society that was able to rather ingeniously mix the masculine and feminine traits of mankind into one beautiful pot of progress. The Greeks were essentially just as good at fighting as they were at love making , philosophizing, doing astrology etc . The scales seem to have been tipped in a very good direction in Greece. It wasn't too masculine, wasn't too feminine. To this day it remains one of the most remarkable civilizations to have ever been, and after she fell (as even the best places always inevitably fall) it took a very, very long time for the western world to come around and find the same combination of intellectual and combative glory again. Rome, for instance, which is essentially said by many to have been an "exact copy" of Greece, and which was far more obsessed with upholding an idea of "straight"masculinity than the Greeks were , was an absolutely fantastic place when it came to fighting , but literally did next to nothing in terms of advancement in many other respects. It was unbalanced. They essentially threw all their energy into combat, and it could very well perhaps be said that this was the exact reason they ultimately fell. They were utterly blind to a number of very important fields. They had a problem with femininity and this caused them to stumble.
Most of what the Romans knew, for example, about things like medicine, astrology, story telling, statue making, painting, anything at all like that, they basically stole from the queer Greeks. This even - believe it or not-- includes their style of fighting in their sword and shield military, which was the phalanx, and which the Greeks created. The phalanx is widely known to have been one of the key reasons Rome was able to go and conquer so much as they did when they did. For the time period, it was an intellectual and organized style of fighting. It prized the cohesion of the group rather than the lone strength of one single manly combatant. Ruthless masculine barbarians with arms of steel who stood as tall as a tower, many of which remind me of the modern masculine men in town here who hate queers and never cease to say they are "abominations" , were literally and gloriously slaughtered and murdered like sheep in the face of the queer Greek phalanx.
This is because , again, the phalanx relied on a dash of intellect, organization, tight camaraderie, and maybe even a bit of "poetry". The "ultra masculine" fighting style that the big armed beer swilling barbarian used against it - a fighting style which was chaotic and followed no set plan ---was essentially worthless. Even the biggest warrior that the barbarians had couldn't really hope for much against this style, and so he was defeated. For the Romans, conquering much of the barbarian world that was to the north of them was very much as easy as it was for the English to conquer the Indians with the cannonballs many, many centuries later. It didn't matter who was manly or not, in a sense. It just mattered if you followed the phalanx; again created by a queer tolerant Greek society....
All the same: Even the Romans , however, with all their problems regarding femininity and not being able to admit that they had stolen a style of fighting invented by a rather gay civilization , didn't necessarily hate gays like the modern "roughneck" American men often do. Did they like them? No. They didn't. Was the same style of homosexuality tolerated as it was in Greece? No. They insulted the legends of Greece and called them "boy lovers" and sissies et cetera..//
But did they go all out in an insane and psychotic war like we often see today against them and hang them on fences and refuse to bake cakes for them like our current Vice President "Pence the Imbecilic Stupid Donkey" seems to want? Did the Roman politicians Even sit there endlessly acknowledging the gays , from a negative angle, like our current worthless and moronic Vice President does? No, they didn't, and this was because the Romans of course had a wide array of very colorful and different gods who essentially would allow you to get away with anything....so long as it wasn't hurting someone (and even then it would allow you to hurt someone, who was an enemy of Rome of course!) . In comparison to our own society today, Rome was in some aspects surprisingly tolerant. Many Wealthy Romans, including those in power, probably had queer sex with one another with no real shame. They absolutely had drunken Orgies, in honor of the very famous wine God "Bacchus". Yes:Just like they didn't go on an all out crusade against queers , they didn't shame alcohol , and if they had drugs around, they probably wouldn't have shamed those , either. They would have sold them and realized they could boost the economy.
But of course, just like Greece before it, Rome eventually hit its bursting point and came to an end, and when it did it gave rise to a new period of the world , a period that saw all the old gods who had been around, for all of time until then, suddenly fall, and be replaced by one God all alone. A God who said he was gonna free slaves and give to the poor, but who also very much despised queers, and even , some would certainly say, women. He was also a God who seemed radically opposed to literally all of the philosophy and Medicine and art that had been being advanced upon up until that point. In fact he pretty much seemed to hate everything about the world in general. The one Christian God is perhaps one of the most cynical and pessimistic gods that's ever been created in human history : he supposedly offers eternal salvation in Paradise...but if you look at what he actually says about this world , he hates it flat out. The Greeks didn't see things this cut and dry, and neither really, did the Romans. Did they think the world was a bit vicious? Yes. But they also saw it as having redeeming qualities. The Christian God does not see things like this.....
This period of course , when the Christian God first starts to get a leg up, is a little more well known in our own time than the ancient culture of Rome and Greece etx, and it's called the Dark Ages. In my opinion, there are essentially two reasons it's called the Dark Ages: one is because a whole lot of knowledge was accidentally lost when this period began (replaced by Christian superstition) and two, it is because the idea of a democratic Republic (which was , again, Rome and Greece and now the US) was suddenly replaced all over again, like real old times, by the wretched and god awful world of kings and queens and dictators , et cetera. The dark ages were a hard time to be alive in this world--- Greek elegance and medicine began to become a fond memory/-- and , not surprisingly, the homosexuals seem to have essentially disappeared all throughout it, no where to be found. So too, of course, as I stress, did art and progress and medicinal advancement disappear with them. Many absolutely terrifying diseases were unleashed upon the (western) world during this period , and they were diseases that no one seems to have been able to figure out and solve too quickly , mostly because everyone was illiterate again (like old times) and had no idea how to do what would have been, in the Greek time, even sort of "basic" problem solving. Lifespans during the dark and midle ages wre horrifically low in many places. Progress was halted. Life was muddy and miserable. The gays seriously vanished . In many places, Men began to grow out their beards and fight in bad , disorganized styles all over again. Chaos began to rule. Cities fell into disarray and disrepair, sort of like many modern US cities. Women found themselves with a boot on their head, trapped in miserable situations that weren't just repressive but also just downright hideous (for the women's fashion styles of the Dark ages simply do not compare with the beauty that was often a Roman or Greek).
But then one day, many hundreds of years later, something suddenly began to happen again, and the queers started, bit by careful bit, to move out into the light of day again, and this particular thing (as far as the west is concerned) all began to culminate , not surprisingly, in Italy yet again, and just a hop and a skip from Rome, in the northern Italian city of Florence. This period is of course known as the Renaissance, which in the original Italian is Rinascimento, and which translates literally as "REBIRTH". Put simply, the Renaissance Is seen as a rebirth period because it's when the little society in Florence Italy began to, for reasons I can't explain at length here, rediscover all of the old knowledge that had essentially been lost since Greek times, and when the Florentines discovered it all , they didn't do what the Romans did and just copy it, they actually went ahead and started to, finally, improve upon it and advance upon it, etc. For example, if you look at the statues the Romans occasionally sculpted, you'll see their literally carbon copies of the Greek ones they had found. Look at the statues that were made in Florence, and you'll see they definitely learned from the Greek statues --- but they also improved upon them, significantly.
It's thus the case that The Renaissance period gave birth to a number of unbelievably notable figures who would, I can assure you, be regarded as "effeminate queers", in this sad modern queer hating United States. Leonardo DaVinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti, for starters, *were* queers. DaVinci is to this day known as not just one of the greatest painters who ever lived with the Mona Lisa, but also as one of the most innovative and advanced minds to have ever walked the earth. DaVinci was experimenting with ideas of flight , submarines, new musical instruments, science, medicine, and even new war machines to help protect his city of Florence, at the time, from enemy city states like Rome and Naples, etc. Florence was , in that time period, and even Venice for that matter, sort of like San Francisco or Manhattan is for us now: though it wasn't ever made official, it was considered a rather "queer" place. Gay people of the time period, more likely than not, flocked to it....perhaps in hopes of having their naked portrait painted or sculpted by an artist like Michelangelo or Leonardo or Rafael, and....trust me...all three of those artists would have been more than interested in sculpting it. In fact, the ironic truth about both the Italian Renaissance period and then the Greek time , is that the male body was prized far more than the female one, especially for sculptors. A sculptor like Michelangelo would have been far more excited to see a naked and "hot" masculine man in front of him posing for his statue , than a naked woman. This fact is of course why we have the naked David still standing in Florence, rather than a woman.
The other thing about the Renaissance is that , as it was making all of these cultural, medicinal, and astrological advancements, and also while it was having some gay intercourse and painting naked posing men , it started to see that Christianity was not so much of a blessing as it was an inhibited curse. The Renaissance is more or less the first period in history where a bit of a major war began between the Church and science and the people, etc. This war is still very much being waged in our own time of course, and if you look very closely, you're going to see, just like I said in the opening paragraph, that all the people who are queers or who are aligned with the queers in this current time period, in *extremely rich and technological* cities like San Francisco and so on, are also the same people who , just like DaVinci and Michelangelo were in their time , are aligned with the further progress of science, and medicine, and technology. Not too surprisingly, the people standing in total psychotic opposition to the LGBT movement, also seem to be the same people who know nothing of technological industries, are often illiterate, and who often seem to reside in or outside of cities that, unlike San Francisco, are absolutely in ruins, with no real industry or innovation or anything at all for that matter.
Which is why I say again, just like I said in the beginning: I really feel bad for people who hate homosexuals like the conservative psyochotics in this country currently do, because it seems to me that all of those people, throughout all of time now, live in absolutely horrific places. Too bad for them I guess. It's their loss. Literally.
------ LOGGING OFF
Saturday, April 15, 2017
Mi sueno
Yo y mi perro sentado en la oscuridad de nuevo, mientras que obtener la pluma y tratar de escribir en español una y otra vez.
Sigo leyendo libros de 100 años y tratando de operar con Burroughs en español. Sigo escuchando extrañas canciones de rap y canciones de trompeta y canciones de guitarra, mi cabeza girando como loco. Ya no veo el norte ya no veo el sur, no veo una habitación ni una ventana, solo veo arena .....
En mi sangre de la cabeza está goteando como mi perro grita a mi lado ....
Tomo una guitarra y una pistola y una bala y acabo de escribir
Salvaje ---- porque soy el muchacho salvaje desnudo - el muchacho salvaje del poste 1980s --- Soy el nuevo siglo soy el jodido - soy el jugado --- soy el nadador y el soñador, soy El escritor y los dioses, yo soy las almas y los lobos y los perros -----
Flotando en el extranjero
En África profunda
con
Fotos de hombres masculinos colocados por toda mi pared y por la noche en la oscuridad real, la oscuridad profunda .....
¿¿¿¿Lo que pasa???? ¿¿¿¿Lo que pasa???? Mujeres gritando en mis oídos, mujeres que me controlan, mujeres con máquinas, mujeres con agujas ... "Dame la morfina rosa jaja dame la morfina más rosa jajaja soy el soñador dame la morfina rosa soy la perra la perra da Yo el jajaja rosa "
Extraños poemas sacan saliva de mis dedos sobre el viejo Marruecos y el viejo tánger y miro a los hombres En la pared y los hombres me llaman nombres Me gusta que me llamen. Me pongo la falda y bailo y corro y me balanceo. Me acuesto en la cama, con mi cara hacia abajo en la almohada, y me agarran el culo y lo golpean ---
"Hey bebé nunca dije que era un ángel y nunca dije que era bueno"
Sigo leyendo libros de 100 años y tratando de operar con Burroughs en español. Sigo escuchando extrañas canciones de rap y canciones de trompeta y canciones de guitarra, mi cabeza girando como loco. Ya no veo el norte ya no veo el sur, no veo una habitación ni una ventana, solo veo arena .....
En mi sangre de la cabeza está goteando como mi perro grita a mi lado ....
Tomo una guitarra y una pistola y una bala y acabo de escribir
Salvaje ---- porque soy el muchacho salvaje desnudo - el muchacho salvaje del poste 1980s --- Soy el nuevo siglo soy el jodido - soy el jugado --- soy el nadador y el soñador, soy El escritor y los dioses, yo soy las almas y los lobos y los perros -----
Flotando en el extranjero
En África profunda
con
Fotos de hombres masculinos colocados por toda mi pared y por la noche en la oscuridad real, la oscuridad profunda .....
¿¿¿¿Lo que pasa???? ¿¿¿¿Lo que pasa???? Mujeres gritando en mis oídos, mujeres que me controlan, mujeres con máquinas, mujeres con agujas ... "Dame la morfina rosa jaja dame la morfina más rosa jajaja soy el soñador dame la morfina rosa soy la perra la perra da Yo el jajaja rosa "
Extraños poemas sacan saliva de mis dedos sobre el viejo Marruecos y el viejo tánger y miro a los hombres En la pared y los hombres me llaman nombres Me gusta que me llamen. Me pongo la falda y bailo y corro y me balanceo. Me acuesto en la cama, con mi cara hacia abajo en la almohada, y me agarran el culo y lo golpean ---
"Hey bebé nunca dije que era un ángel y nunca dije que era bueno"
Diary Abrile
diary ----- april 12th ----- landings on the new w0rlD
I never seem to feel well anymore these days. I am starting to become a hypochondriac, it seems, which is something I really have not been for many years. I seem to be utterly convinced tha every little problem is something a thousand times bigger. I suppose my fear of death is beginning to increase. Its a very terrible feeling. I don't like it. Of course not. I imagine myself on a bed sucking in air reaching out my hand pleading "help me help me i dont wanna die not yet not yet". Its so frightening. But it keeps coming to me. Its so petrifying. Life is so scary......
I just want to be on a beach somewhere in beautiful swimming trunks waltzing around smoking a bone with a bottle of golden Corona in my hand...waving to good girlies.... I don't want to feel this god damn Bull... I dont want to imagine LIGHTS OUT.... come on... its too early ..... I have so many more poems to write.... so many more adventures ... but the hypochondria, its terrifyingly real.... and in fact its even, i am beginnig to see, starting to extend to my dog. Yesterday for example i stared at the dog for three hours convinced I would turn around and shed be dead. I saw myself digging a grave on hands and knees in the backyard screaming. The hypochondria is too real. Muy RE'AL.
Years ago I never really felt necessarily "healthy', and I certainly was never at a peak of any sort but I also never felt ...well, I never felt bad. Essentially I always felt inconquerable. This is now no longer the case. I look at things, even at my own skin for that matter, and I can see now how it's going to one day defeat me and the idea is beyond mortifying. I imagine myself with horrific infections bleeding and then I start weeping. If I could afford a therapist maybe I would see one but I bet they wold make it worse. They would terrify me like a disease....
Still in the end I do not really think this world is so bad as people make it you know, and I think that idea -- believ eit or not --- is where my fear is coming from. In the beginning of my life I often did not like life. I was not one j of those children for example who very much enjoyed life from the beginning.I always thought i was in hell.
In fact as a child I was often suicidal and quite prone to sickness, I had some pretty big scares as a kid. But then as I got older I became a bit like, you might say, a 'fine wine': I gradually began to enjoy life, and to find more to enjoy about life, the more and more I aged. For many people in my life it seems to have been the exact opposite, unfortunately ,but for me no. I always felt like I kept finding more and more to like about my stay on earth....i often in fact felt like I was an actual alien visitor of some sort who was gradually adjsuting to the climate and the planet; and I think, frankly, that this is where the fear is coming from:
Since I am finally sort of actually at peace with myself and since I finalyl feel I understand this planet - at least to a degree-, could it be that now I am beginning to let go again? In much the same way that I was perhaps letting go in my very early childhood chapters, when I 'hated' myself and a lot of my life? Could it be that ultimate Peace actually winds up bringing the same result as ultimate Hate? I wouldn't be surprised. I do not feel ready to go however. I am not quite done with my tour of this earth. I have more things to see or at least to read. Of course I don't feel done! Shit! I am still young, not even yet 30. I do not actually have much on this earth but what I do have I appreciate and besides I perhaps know enough now that I can find a way to get lucky. Maybe it is the place that is finally trying to kill me? Hard to say....
I'm not sure why I am writing this of course, other than to get it out of me and my System and perhaps to cast a plea out to the Gods that, god damnt Gods, I am not yet ready to die, and here is my prayer, do not strike me down right now and do not -----please do NOT --- fill me with horrendous worries that spoil the fuck out of my every single day. For I still have some more tales to tell my dear Gods and I cant deal with this and dont wan to deal with this.....
SO THERE IT IS.
I SAID IT--
I never seem to feel well anymore these days. I am starting to become a hypochondriac, it seems, which is something I really have not been for many years. I seem to be utterly convinced tha every little problem is something a thousand times bigger. I suppose my fear of death is beginning to increase. Its a very terrible feeling. I don't like it. Of course not. I imagine myself on a bed sucking in air reaching out my hand pleading "help me help me i dont wanna die not yet not yet". Its so frightening. But it keeps coming to me. Its so petrifying. Life is so scary......
I just want to be on a beach somewhere in beautiful swimming trunks waltzing around smoking a bone with a bottle of golden Corona in my hand...waving to good girlies.... I don't want to feel this god damn Bull... I dont want to imagine LIGHTS OUT.... come on... its too early ..... I have so many more poems to write.... so many more adventures ... but the hypochondria, its terrifyingly real.... and in fact its even, i am beginnig to see, starting to extend to my dog. Yesterday for example i stared at the dog for three hours convinced I would turn around and shed be dead. I saw myself digging a grave on hands and knees in the backyard screaming. The hypochondria is too real. Muy RE'AL.
Years ago I never really felt necessarily "healthy', and I certainly was never at a peak of any sort but I also never felt ...well, I never felt bad. Essentially I always felt inconquerable. This is now no longer the case. I look at things, even at my own skin for that matter, and I can see now how it's going to one day defeat me and the idea is beyond mortifying. I imagine myself with horrific infections bleeding and then I start weeping. If I could afford a therapist maybe I would see one but I bet they wold make it worse. They would terrify me like a disease....
Still in the end I do not really think this world is so bad as people make it you know, and I think that idea -- believ eit or not --- is where my fear is coming from. In the beginning of my life I often did not like life. I was not one j of those children for example who very much enjoyed life from the beginning.I always thought i was in hell.
In fact as a child I was often suicidal and quite prone to sickness, I had some pretty big scares as a kid. But then as I got older I became a bit like, you might say, a 'fine wine': I gradually began to enjoy life, and to find more to enjoy about life, the more and more I aged. For many people in my life it seems to have been the exact opposite, unfortunately ,but for me no. I always felt like I kept finding more and more to like about my stay on earth....i often in fact felt like I was an actual alien visitor of some sort who was gradually adjsuting to the climate and the planet; and I think, frankly, that this is where the fear is coming from:
Since I am finally sort of actually at peace with myself and since I finalyl feel I understand this planet - at least to a degree-, could it be that now I am beginning to let go again? In much the same way that I was perhaps letting go in my very early childhood chapters, when I 'hated' myself and a lot of my life? Could it be that ultimate Peace actually winds up bringing the same result as ultimate Hate? I wouldn't be surprised. I do not feel ready to go however. I am not quite done with my tour of this earth. I have more things to see or at least to read. Of course I don't feel done! Shit! I am still young, not even yet 30. I do not actually have much on this earth but what I do have I appreciate and besides I perhaps know enough now that I can find a way to get lucky. Maybe it is the place that is finally trying to kill me? Hard to say....
I'm not sure why I am writing this of course, other than to get it out of me and my System and perhaps to cast a plea out to the Gods that, god damnt Gods, I am not yet ready to die, and here is my prayer, do not strike me down right now and do not -----please do NOT --- fill me with horrendous worries that spoil the fuck out of my every single day. For I still have some more tales to tell my dear Gods and I cant deal with this and dont wan to deal with this.....
SO THERE IT IS.
I SAID IT--
Cardi B the Femme Rapper
The latest Cardi B release "Red Barz" is, hands down I think, one of the greatest rap songs combined with a video that i think I've literally *ever* seen and I've seen quite a few of them.
I'm not totally sure if it's because of the manner in which I first listened to it , when I used a large screened kindle to watch it with headphones (something I never do and which made it particularly intense) or if it's just because it's actually that serious and good all on its own. I think it's the latter of course--it is that powerful --- because it was probably about half a year ago when I first found Cardi B, on just a little iPhone with a cracked screen, inside the video for "Foreva" , and even though that iPhone had not just a cracked screen but also horrific speakers , I can remember being nearly just as amazed by her as I was last night with "Red Barz". "Foreva" was a pretty shockingly good find for me at the time, I remember.
This latest April 2017 release is particularly phenomenal however , particularly passionate, and also, quite frankly, unlike anything I've ever seen before, from either a female or a male rapper. I'm a pretty big fan of AZealia banks for instance, and I've tried to write about her numerous times, but even Azealia, sad to say, simply cannot match the absolute firey intensity that is present in both the Cardi B videos I've seen now. The attitude was and is just....otherworldly. Cardi B brings, in my opinion, a strength to the female rap world that I feel we haven't really seen pretty much since what I personally consider the heyday of female rap which was Lil Kims and Foxy Browns peak.
A lot of people might think that Minaj arrives to the table with this same sort of rage but the problem with Minaj is that she almost plays a cartoon character & a parody of a rapper rather than an actual rapper. This song by Cardi B on the other hand goes to show that the aggression is still actually there....at least in some circles. In fact as I think of it now it's almost like she's a bit of a femme DMX, or an angry Tupac, because the entire sensation of the "Red Barz" video really was *that* vicious. It was also of course insanely fast paced. Every time I get done watching the thing I'm so entranced that it's like I just got done having an insanely fast paced work out....
Cardi B basically offers me exactly the sort of stuff I like to dose on most when it comes to the rap world, which is very powerful , very enlivened , very engaged and angry/ vulgar female energy. I am a man and a relatively straight acting one, so I suppose most heads who saw me in public wouldn't think I like femme rap most of all when the Doors are closed (especially because my favorite band for years was the Doors and Zeppelin) but I prefer powerful femme rap to dose on in my solitude, when I'm in that sphere, mostly just because I find it so absolutely different in scope as well as extremely evocative of the "future", which is something that as a "science fiction" Star Wars type writer I am quite passionate about.
And characters like Cardi b sell me this type of futuristic && never before seen sensation, which I find so inspiring for my writings, in a way that literally no one else can -- literally no one ----and that's what is so absolutely Engaging about it: Women in our time period are not necessarily always heard from, and that is particularly the case when it comes to a field like rap, so when you do find a complete "Queen of the hill" like Cardi B , and when you also see that she's really powerful in every sense of the word, both on camera and off, it actually, as Eve once said years ago with Gwen Stefani in another classic for me, "blows your mind". It's something I also said about Azealia Banks, I will admit, but it also applies equally if not , in some sense, even more so to Cardi b: instead of being a blast from the past --- which is what most people often yearn for in songs (and is somewhat problematic)--- Cardi is an absolute blast from the future. As far as I'm concerned we are seeing a style play out with her and others like her that won't really reach full "peak" still for another 10-15 years, in the 20s or even the 30s....
Yes she is a throwback in a certain sense because she does remind me of Foxy and Kim but she's far more futuristic than them in a way too -- a big way--because , quite frankly, I think she's a far better rapper than they ever were. I know it's sacrilege to say but , as far as I'm concerned, I've always felt that Kim and foxy, as much as I enjoyed them, often dull in comparison to male rappers of the same time period . I'd often admittedly rather just listen to biggie in place of Kim or Jay Z in place of Foxy et cetera , if I'm going to even be bothered at all with rap that old. With Cardi b however I can't stress enough: she's not just standing on the same platform as the male rappers of this time period (who I personally find, like many, to be grossly underwhelming) but she is also actually superior to them. She's a better rapper than 9/10 of the males currently out there. She's faster. She's crazier. She's fiercer. She's newer....
It might seem inappropriate in an article about a femme rapper, but the great Beatle Paul McCartney once said, somewhere or other, that he always believed, deep down somewhere, that music can heal not just the spirit but also actual wounds and maybe even sicknesses. As a musician myself I have often believed this, since it has often been during my most musically inspired moments when I have often felt my healthiest and most prepared. Well, with Cardi B, that's really thing I see so much on display with videos like "Red Barz": it's as though there is a hidden , behind the scenes energy capsulized In these songs and these videos which is so powerful that it could probably resurrect the dead. Its so pumped up with energy and i really just can't keep stressing enough now the vibrant energy that's on display in these style songs here simply cannot be found elsewhere. It's ashame but it really can't be. Cardi B Is pretty much one of the only ones out with a product this good. The Iggy azalea release from this month , for instance, "Mo Bounce" (right now at 27 million views after 3 weeks online) absolutrly pales in comparison. I'll admit to digging some of Iggy's past tracks ("Iggy SZN " for some reason had me captivated for a month a year ago) but "Mo Bounce" doesn't even come close to what is in "Red Barz". It's actually almost pathetic how lacking "Mo bounce" is in comparison.....
So all in all I am very much hoping I'll get some more of what Cardi is selling...as I might just be fully addicted now ....
I'm not totally sure if it's because of the manner in which I first listened to it , when I used a large screened kindle to watch it with headphones (something I never do and which made it particularly intense) or if it's just because it's actually that serious and good all on its own. I think it's the latter of course--it is that powerful --- because it was probably about half a year ago when I first found Cardi B, on just a little iPhone with a cracked screen, inside the video for "Foreva" , and even though that iPhone had not just a cracked screen but also horrific speakers , I can remember being nearly just as amazed by her as I was last night with "Red Barz". "Foreva" was a pretty shockingly good find for me at the time, I remember.
This latest April 2017 release is particularly phenomenal however , particularly passionate, and also, quite frankly, unlike anything I've ever seen before, from either a female or a male rapper. I'm a pretty big fan of AZealia banks for instance, and I've tried to write about her numerous times, but even Azealia, sad to say, simply cannot match the absolute firey intensity that is present in both the Cardi B videos I've seen now. The attitude was and is just....otherworldly. Cardi B brings, in my opinion, a strength to the female rap world that I feel we haven't really seen pretty much since what I personally consider the heyday of female rap which was Lil Kims and Foxy Browns peak.
A lot of people might think that Minaj arrives to the table with this same sort of rage but the problem with Minaj is that she almost plays a cartoon character & a parody of a rapper rather than an actual rapper. This song by Cardi B on the other hand goes to show that the aggression is still actually there....at least in some circles. In fact as I think of it now it's almost like she's a bit of a femme DMX, or an angry Tupac, because the entire sensation of the "Red Barz" video really was *that* vicious. It was also of course insanely fast paced. Every time I get done watching the thing I'm so entranced that it's like I just got done having an insanely fast paced work out....
Cardi B basically offers me exactly the sort of stuff I like to dose on most when it comes to the rap world, which is very powerful , very enlivened , very engaged and angry/ vulgar female energy. I am a man and a relatively straight acting one, so I suppose most heads who saw me in public wouldn't think I like femme rap most of all when the Doors are closed (especially because my favorite band for years was the Doors and Zeppelin) but I prefer powerful femme rap to dose on in my solitude, when I'm in that sphere, mostly just because I find it so absolutely different in scope as well as extremely evocative of the "future", which is something that as a "science fiction" Star Wars type writer I am quite passionate about.
And characters like Cardi b sell me this type of futuristic && never before seen sensation, which I find so inspiring for my writings, in a way that literally no one else can -- literally no one ----and that's what is so absolutely Engaging about it: Women in our time period are not necessarily always heard from, and that is particularly the case when it comes to a field like rap, so when you do find a complete "Queen of the hill" like Cardi B , and when you also see that she's really powerful in every sense of the word, both on camera and off, it actually, as Eve once said years ago with Gwen Stefani in another classic for me, "blows your mind". It's something I also said about Azealia Banks, I will admit, but it also applies equally if not , in some sense, even more so to Cardi b: instead of being a blast from the past --- which is what most people often yearn for in songs (and is somewhat problematic)--- Cardi is an absolute blast from the future. As far as I'm concerned we are seeing a style play out with her and others like her that won't really reach full "peak" still for another 10-15 years, in the 20s or even the 30s....
Yes she is a throwback in a certain sense because she does remind me of Foxy and Kim but she's far more futuristic than them in a way too -- a big way--because , quite frankly, I think she's a far better rapper than they ever were. I know it's sacrilege to say but , as far as I'm concerned, I've always felt that Kim and foxy, as much as I enjoyed them, often dull in comparison to male rappers of the same time period . I'd often admittedly rather just listen to biggie in place of Kim or Jay Z in place of Foxy et cetera , if I'm going to even be bothered at all with rap that old. With Cardi b however I can't stress enough: she's not just standing on the same platform as the male rappers of this time period (who I personally find, like many, to be grossly underwhelming) but she is also actually superior to them. She's a better rapper than 9/10 of the males currently out there. She's faster. She's crazier. She's fiercer. She's newer....
It might seem inappropriate in an article about a femme rapper, but the great Beatle Paul McCartney once said, somewhere or other, that he always believed, deep down somewhere, that music can heal not just the spirit but also actual wounds and maybe even sicknesses. As a musician myself I have often believed this, since it has often been during my most musically inspired moments when I have often felt my healthiest and most prepared. Well, with Cardi B, that's really thing I see so much on display with videos like "Red Barz": it's as though there is a hidden , behind the scenes energy capsulized In these songs and these videos which is so powerful that it could probably resurrect the dead. Its so pumped up with energy and i really just can't keep stressing enough now the vibrant energy that's on display in these style songs here simply cannot be found elsewhere. It's ashame but it really can't be. Cardi B Is pretty much one of the only ones out with a product this good. The Iggy azalea release from this month , for instance, "Mo Bounce" (right now at 27 million views after 3 weeks online) absolutrly pales in comparison. I'll admit to digging some of Iggy's past tracks ("Iggy SZN " for some reason had me captivated for a month a year ago) but "Mo Bounce" doesn't even come close to what is in "Red Barz". It's actually almost pathetic how lacking "Mo bounce" is in comparison.....
So all in all I am very much hoping I'll get some more of what Cardi is selling...as I might just be fully addicted now ....
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
Cabin in Space
The scene is a remote cabin flying in the middle of Outer Space with 4 people in it hanging around, all of them totally unawares that when they look outside the window they won't see the neighborhood they think they live in, but rather Outer Space.
To them its just another normal night in the cabin...drinking a bit of wine..smokin a little bit of puff.. watching TV and eating potato chips and pizza...shootin the shit.
The man Donovan, who is going to be the first character in the play to discover that they're floating in space, is in the kitchen heating up pizza in the microwave, the girl Trish is in the bathroom, on the toilet, more than a bit stoned, reading the National Geographic, the young boy Johnny is in the spare room of the cabin playing football on the TV, and finally there is the dude Arnold, who is on the couch in the living room watching an old black and white film drinking wine.
They've been in the cabin all day,as it was raining most of the day, and the cabin itself was, in fact, sitting in its normal spot in Reality, until about 5 PM...when a fierce thunderstorm began and .. zapped it (becasue I, the Lord your God, wanted it to be zapped) out of the regular suburban reality it had sat in 150 years since being built in approx. 1867, into outer space.
The inhabitants of course, our beloved characters, they did not hear the blast, they did not at all take note of it, and the first one to notice is going to be Donovan, as said, because he's going to realize that the trashcan is full, and he's going to wrap it up, tie the bag in a knot and go to take it outside, and the moment he swings open the back door he's going to of course notice immediately that...well...nohing at all is out there, except dark empty SPACE, with absolutely nothing at all in it.
Fortunately he's going to take note of the fact that nothing at all is out there , before he takes so much as a step outside the back door. Our character Donovan is going to notice before stepping out there to his death because I like him and, as his God, I don't want to kill him in that way. I in fact may even want to help him, but not the others, escape the cabin, and get back to Earth.....
But what if I decide not to? What if I decide to ruin these characters? What will happen once they realize that they are all trapped in a cabin floating in outer space? Will they...maybe..kill each other with the only weapons available in the house, those being steak knives - as a result of losing their minds? Will they get down on their knees and begin to worship Me, God, begging to be saved and sent back to their everyday lives, as they had been before, on that residential street ? Imagine how much you would yearn, dear reader, to look out of your window and see everything normal again, if you woke up one morning and looked out your window and saw it was just....boom..."blank empty space". Hence I can't imagine what our-my- characters, willdo....
Will they maybe start screaming and yelling and trying to figure out just how it wound up happening, hoping that they can come up with some solution ? (I won't permit that to happen). Or maybe they will descend into that area of the human psyche where , of course, they will perhaps not believe that it is in fact happening, but that it is instead just some sort of illusion or a hallucination they are having? How or what could perhaps be done here , and inserted, in order to make the inhabitants of this cabin floating out in space realize that what is happening to them is very real? Ah! I, the Lord their God, suddenly have an idea! Should I perhaps insert and/or throw some strange character outside the house (yes, a character simply floating in space) and have him/her knock and bang on the door, or maybe it even blow it open with a bolt action shotgun? A villain! Of course! Should i maybe make that character look 100 percent identical to Donovan or Trisha or Arnold etc? So a sort of strange paranormal twin phenomenon starts to play out - where they start to see themselves , talking to themselves, or maybe some person who walks in an out of the mirror, screaming , their skin on fire, with some strange lizard mask on their face? Should I make the character who breaks into the house decidedly not human? Say, some sort of monster, like a flesh eating alien, or a Tyrannosaurous rex, or a witch, a wizard??
Should I be mean to these 4 people I've created and, as of yet, written no back story or history for?? Or should i be kind? I suppos I could , if i were so inclined, considering I am omnipotent and everything, take the cabin and plop it down somewhere else ... not space..not earth...but somewhere beautiful .. like a rainforest planet, where I'll then force the 4 characters to live (for eternity, of course) or an Underworld planet , where they'll be forced to fight demons and flaming warlocks, for a thousand long years? Or...better yet...what if I just start doing absolutely horrifici things to the characters once they realize that the cabin is definitely in space? For example, I might decide to start making Donovans head shrink, or have his skin turn from white to black to dark red, to then havin strange green pus shoot of his ears ... and then he gets a terribly horrific headache and falls to the kitchen floor, pounding his fists down upon it and screaming "HELP! ANYONE HELP ME! HELP ME! I DONT WANNA DIE!" as all of the other characters watch in abject horror until...BOOM!
Donovan's big fat body suddenly explodes , and his brains and his blood and guts explodes all over everything in the kitchen and, lo and behold, one moment after that, what the hell is happening to Donovan's brains, blood, and guts!? Little rapidly multiplyign insects, ants, lizards, and even strange miniature wolves are popping up out of it and now chasing everyne around the house!
The audience will watch and laugh with glee as the girl Trisha gets both her arms torn off by a feisty, hungry grey wolf, and someone will literally choke to death with laughter on buttery popcorn (for now this is all being filmed and broadcast on FOX) as they watch the kid Johnny crash through one of the living room windows, as a wolf chases him, and though he floats in outer space for a few minutes after he crashes through the window...he will then find himself, moments later, at the bottom of a deep dark l ake, a lake which has been frozen over, and it is there I will trap him, until he drowns, frantically, and desperately. As for Arnold, the last one living, I will make him walk over back to the kitchen , where of course those steak knives are kept on the counter, and he will grab the biggest one and .... you will be on your couch watching screaming "ARNOLD NO!" but .. of course, you have no omnipotence here, only I ... and so Arnold will thrust the biggest steak knife on the counter right through his throat, and somehow he will even manage to decapitate himself ... the FOX audience will watch in horror as his decapitated entirely sheared off hits the floor and .... what then? What happens then? I'll tell you, but promise me you won't be too surprised, or , depending upon your religion, shocked and offended: The door to the kitchen will swing open and Jesus Christ will come in,, dressed in the robes he's always dressed in, and he will kneel at the side of Arnolds destroyed, mangled, and bloody corpse, and he will do the sign of the Cross, mumbling in old and very guttural Arabic...he will say the "Hail Mary", and when he gets done saying it, and stands back up, guess what?
Arnold will be alive again, standing there in the kitchen as though nothing at all has happened, he will not see Jesus because Jesus will scurry off to the backroom and disappear (after taking a quick leak in the toilet and stealing a blunts worth of weed from a drawer) and Arnold will then, for a second, think he had a terrible nightmare (where he thought his cabin was floating in outer space) and...what then? Here's what: when he goes to look out the window, his heart beat skipping for a second, thinking he'll see nothing but blackness, he will instead see a little kid with a clown mask on, honking a bicycle horn, passing his car on the front lawn, with a bit of rain drizzle coming down. He will hear a fire engine siren go off in the distance and he will realize that "it was just a thought arnold, just a weird, paranoid thought, now you're fine..". He will then plop himself down in front of the Computer and bring up Microsoft Word and .....
He will start writing this exact story, that I have already written here, except he will write it - where - but over there.... and therefore Arnolds fat little white hairy fingers will slowly begin to type, into the Word terminal:
The scene is a remote cabin flying in the middle of Outer Space with 4 people in it hanging around, all of them totally unawares that when they look outside the window they won't see the neighborhood they think they live in, but rather Outer Space.
To them its just another normal night in the cabin...drinking a bit of wine..smokin a little bit of puff.. watching TV and eating potato chips and pizza...shootin the shit.
The man Donovan, who is going to be the first character in the play to discover that they're floating in space, is in the kitchen heating up pizza in the microwave, the girl Trish is in the bathroom, on the toilet, more than a bit stoned, reading the National Geographic, the young boy Johnny is in the spare room of the cabin playing football on the TV, and finally there is the dude Arnold, who is on the couch in the living room watching an old black and white film drinking wine.
They've been in the cabin all day,as it was raining most of the day, and the cabin itself was, in fact, sitting in its normal spot in Reality, until about 5 PM...when a fierce thunderstorm began and .. zapped it (becasue I, the Lord your God, wanted it to be zapped) out of the regular suburban reality it had sat in 150 years since being built in approx. 1867, into outer space.
The inhabitants of course, our beloved characters, they did not hear the blast, they did not at all take note of it, and the first one to notice is going to be Donovan, as said, because he's going to realize that the trashcan is full, and he's going to wrap it up, tie the bag in a knot and go to take it outside, and the moment he swings open the back door he's going to of course notice immediately that...well...nohing at all is out there, except dark empty SPACE, with absolutely nothing at all in it.
Fortunately he's going to take note of the fact that nothing at all is out there , before he takes so much as a step outside the back door. Our character Donovan is going to notice before stepping out there to his death because I like him and, as his God, I don't want to kill him in that way. I in fact may even want to help him, but not the others, escape the cabin, and get back to Earth.....
But what if I decide not to? What if I decide to ruin these characters? What will happen once they realize that they are all trapped in a cabin floating in outer space? Will they...maybe..kill each other with the only weapons available in the house, those being steak knives - as a result of losing their minds? Will they get down on their knees and begin to worship Me, God, begging to be saved and sent back to their everyday lives, as they had been before, on that residential street ? Imagine how much you would yearn, dear reader, to look out of your window and see everything normal again, if you woke up one morning and looked out your window and saw it was just....boom..."blank empty space". Hence I can't imagine what our-my- characters, willdo....
Will they maybe start screaming and yelling and trying to figure out just how it wound up happening, hoping that they can come up with some solution ? (I won't permit that to happen). Or maybe they will descend into that area of the human psyche where , of course, they will perhaps not believe that it is in fact happening, but that it is instead just some sort of illusion or a hallucination they are having? How or what could perhaps be done here , and inserted, in order to make the inhabitants of this cabin floating out in space realize that what is happening to them is very real? Ah! I, the Lord their God, suddenly have an idea! Should I perhaps insert and/or throw some strange character outside the house (yes, a character simply floating in space) and have him/her knock and bang on the door, or maybe it even blow it open with a bolt action shotgun? A villain! Of course! Should i maybe make that character look 100 percent identical to Donovan or Trisha or Arnold etc? So a sort of strange paranormal twin phenomenon starts to play out - where they start to see themselves , talking to themselves, or maybe some person who walks in an out of the mirror, screaming , their skin on fire, with some strange lizard mask on their face? Should I make the character who breaks into the house decidedly not human? Say, some sort of monster, like a flesh eating alien, or a Tyrannosaurous rex, or a witch, a wizard??
Should I be mean to these 4 people I've created and, as of yet, written no back story or history for?? Or should i be kind? I suppos I could , if i were so inclined, considering I am omnipotent and everything, take the cabin and plop it down somewhere else ... not space..not earth...but somewhere beautiful .. like a rainforest planet, where I'll then force the 4 characters to live (for eternity, of course) or an Underworld planet , where they'll be forced to fight demons and flaming warlocks, for a thousand long years? Or...better yet...what if I just start doing absolutely horrifici things to the characters once they realize that the cabin is definitely in space? For example, I might decide to start making Donovans head shrink, or have his skin turn from white to black to dark red, to then havin strange green pus shoot of his ears ... and then he gets a terribly horrific headache and falls to the kitchen floor, pounding his fists down upon it and screaming "HELP! ANYONE HELP ME! HELP ME! I DONT WANNA DIE!" as all of the other characters watch in abject horror until...BOOM!
Donovan's big fat body suddenly explodes , and his brains and his blood and guts explodes all over everything in the kitchen and, lo and behold, one moment after that, what the hell is happening to Donovan's brains, blood, and guts!? Little rapidly multiplyign insects, ants, lizards, and even strange miniature wolves are popping up out of it and now chasing everyne around the house!
The audience will watch and laugh with glee as the girl Trisha gets both her arms torn off by a feisty, hungry grey wolf, and someone will literally choke to death with laughter on buttery popcorn (for now this is all being filmed and broadcast on FOX) as they watch the kid Johnny crash through one of the living room windows, as a wolf chases him, and though he floats in outer space for a few minutes after he crashes through the window...he will then find himself, moments later, at the bottom of a deep dark l ake, a lake which has been frozen over, and it is there I will trap him, until he drowns, frantically, and desperately. As for Arnold, the last one living, I will make him walk over back to the kitchen , where of course those steak knives are kept on the counter, and he will grab the biggest one and .... you will be on your couch watching screaming "ARNOLD NO!" but .. of course, you have no omnipotence here, only I ... and so Arnold will thrust the biggest steak knife on the counter right through his throat, and somehow he will even manage to decapitate himself ... the FOX audience will watch in horror as his decapitated entirely sheared off hits the floor and .... what then? What happens then? I'll tell you, but promise me you won't be too surprised, or , depending upon your religion, shocked and offended: The door to the kitchen will swing open and Jesus Christ will come in,, dressed in the robes he's always dressed in, and he will kneel at the side of Arnolds destroyed, mangled, and bloody corpse, and he will do the sign of the Cross, mumbling in old and very guttural Arabic...he will say the "Hail Mary", and when he gets done saying it, and stands back up, guess what?
Arnold will be alive again, standing there in the kitchen as though nothing at all has happened, he will not see Jesus because Jesus will scurry off to the backroom and disappear (after taking a quick leak in the toilet and stealing a blunts worth of weed from a drawer) and Arnold will then, for a second, think he had a terrible nightmare (where he thought his cabin was floating in outer space) and...what then? Here's what: when he goes to look out the window, his heart beat skipping for a second, thinking he'll see nothing but blackness, he will instead see a little kid with a clown mask on, honking a bicycle horn, passing his car on the front lawn, with a bit of rain drizzle coming down. He will hear a fire engine siren go off in the distance and he will realize that "it was just a thought arnold, just a weird, paranoid thought, now you're fine..". He will then plop himself down in front of the Computer and bring up Microsoft Word and .....
He will start writing this exact story, that I have already written here, except he will write it - where - but over there.... and therefore Arnolds fat little white hairy fingers will slowly begin to type, into the Word terminal:
The scene is a remote cabin flying in the middle of Outer Space with 4 people in it hanging around, all of them totally unawares that when they look outside the window they won't see the neighborhood they think they live in, but rather Outer Space.
Democrats, Thom Hartmann, an Image dilemma
I want to thank the news broadcaster Thom Hartmann for delivering good news in this strange time period. He has essentially become my only go to source when it comes to liberal news, and of course i only really shop on the Internet when it comes to that.
For a long time, and in fact, for most of the time, during the actual 2016 campaign, I followed the Young Turks and a site called Secular Talk pretty religiously when it came to my US news. The Young Turks is sort of like the evil Infowars to me (ironically enough) because it is run by relatively young people and most definitely ggeared towards young people, and the same can be said for Secular Talk....and yet, after the 2016 election wrapped up, I actually found myself not all that comforted by the Young Turks crowd, for whatever reason (mostly I think because of the character 'Jimmy Doherty', who to me actually seems like a Republican pretending to be a liberal). I still like the Young Turks, I think Cenk Uygur is fantastic, and I liek Ana Kasparian loads too, but it's just that one dude Doherty bothers the Hell out of me and I honestly...well, now since I never know when he's gonna pop up on me I can't watch it anymore.
Thom Hartmann does not seem to have as much of a following on the Internet as the Young Turks, perhaps because he's older, but he's easier to mesh with because it's often just him, and the whole message of the show he puts on seems...I don't know quite how to put it, but I suppose I would say that it seems a little more serious. I am not sure why. He has written books and seems to have traveled around a good bits, I suppose, I'm not sure. Thom Hartmann just seems like a very good presenter. He cuts right to the chase. He isn't there to supply laughs or jokes or any of that, there is no playing to some "crowd of youths". He's just there to give news, hard cold terrible news. Which is the way it ought to be and which to me, in a country like this, is surprisingly the way that seems to work... (just look at the success Bill OReilly after all).
To me I think that the Young Turks kind of get a bad rep you see because they get presented and also seem to present themselves as "radicals" (they often use vulgarity for instance, or make 'radical' style jokes) and , quite frankly, I think this radical presentation is what has destroyed the liberal party in this country.
I really hate to say this, because I myself am actually, I am a heavy metal musician and a long haired tattooed weirdo with huge ear piercings and what not, but I am pretty convinced that if more Democrats would just take what I guess you could call a "clean cut" approach to the **presentation** of the politics (and pull out the stuff that seems to be 'radical') that they would have already experienced some success. This is, in fact, why Thom Hartmann works so well, at least for what I need him to do (which is that I often send his videos to older conservative family members to pursuade them to go Demo).
Unfortunatley of course there aren't that many Democrats like Thom Hartmann around and a lot of the famous hosts seem to be people who, I am so sorry totell you, no one in the circle of so-called "deplorables" will ever actually lend an ear to.
Rachel Maddow and the guy Anderson Cooper --the Democratic heads actually on the TV---are unfortunately two prime examples of this ...dilemma. Now I want to make it very clear that I am not against either of these characters, for me they are just fine, they don't bother me *personally* at all, you could have a guy with a barbell through his nose and a mohawk on there and *I'd* listen to him, **but** you know, it's kind of obvious to me (even as an actual 'freak) that nobody in the Republican constituencies, who are the people that the Democrats have, for some time now, needed on their side, are going to listen to someone like Maddow or Anderson Cooper say anything about..well, anything. And yet Maddow, who has her hair cut like a boy, and Anderson Cooper, who for some reason we all needed to know was a queer, are the prime characters on the TV when it comes to the Democratic alliance. Well what did y'all think was going to happen? In my opinion it's almost as though it was all done on purpose, to further pull down the 'respectability' levels of the Democrats in the eyes of the Republicans who just might occasionally swing t o the left.
In my opinion, someone who is political should be wise enough to realize that politics are almost always, as a rule, 40 years behind popular culture and whatever is happening with it. This means to say that, if girls getting crew cuts became popular in, say, the early 1970s, some female in the highest end of the political sector (like the president herself) ain't gonna be "allowed" to have the crewcut until 40 years after, and maybe not even then, in fact. Recently we saw something like this play out, actually, when it comes to Satans little helper "Paul Ryan", also known as the guy trying to steal grandmas Medicare.
He appeared one day, I think it was last year at some point, with a fully grown (but trimmed) beard,and everyonemade a huge fuss of it, saying that he was the first man on the Senate floor or wherever he was, to have the beard, in 100 years since the 1800s. Well, Paul Ryan was just stealing something in the 2010s that hippies had started doing and making acceptable again back in the 1960s. But of course because Ryan is a politician it actually **took that long** for the beard to reach that sphere of soceity, and as we can see with our presidents, it might not reach the highest sphere for , who knows, another 20-30 years still. Cultural trends travel very slowly and always have. They typicalyl go from bottom to top. First the marijuana is accepted in the poorest neighborhoods, then it becomes middle class, and then finally you see people on TV smoking it and after that you got a president who can come out and admit he once got stoned (just like ours can admit they got drunk).
The way this ties in with the Democrats of course is because, as you can see, they are, in some respects, maybe pushing a little too hard on some of these cultural changes, at the expense of other ones, which I would consider far more important. Myself for example, I align with the Democrats mostly for three core reasons: 1. I want to see the War on Drugs come to an end, and they seem to be the party most likely to end it due to the marijuana policies 2. I want to see a public healthcare system like Canada or Europe has implemented here, and I believe it is URGENT and 3. I want universities opened up and made publicly accessible in the same way that European universities are publicly accessible.
In America at the moment, those three views are often considered 'radical' but, of course, theyre not nearly as "radical" as the LGBT movement or the Transgender movement and all of that stuff. Bill O Reilly, obviously, he won't listen to a single one of those ideas (public uni, public health, war on drugs or LGBT) because he's the top boss of the Republican constituency who is just gonna bark their one dogma alone ,but the "swing voter" Republicans, who sometimes swing Democrat every now and again, **will** actually listen to those arguments, at least a little bit, and they'll listen to them far more than they will listen, for example, to the LGBT argments.
Swing voters in my personal experience, which means to say my experience just talking to regular people who do not obsessively align with one party or the other, tend to often agree that the War on Drugs ought to perhaps end, and that public healthcare would probably be decent, and also that universities should be opened up. I've talked to many people who seem like swing voters to me and gotten very positive responses about all three of those things. These same people of course, the second I throw out the LGBT card, often become like wild and insane pitbulls . "I dont wanna hear it I dont wanna hear it! Those people are LUNATICS! I don't like that lifestyle! I don't like no transexuals! Thats scary!" One only imagines that these people probably ultimately pull the Republican lever at the end of the day for this exact reason.... not even caring about the other prominent issues....
Therefore, in my opinion, I am almost of the belief that the Democrats have, quite frankly, allowed themselves to be smeared by just how much they have taken to the LGBT movement and their desire to be presented, like Cenk Uygur perhaps wants to be on the Young Turks, as 'free living radicals', and I do think they're idiots for it in a way because, speaking from the sidelines here, and please wait a minute before you flip out and get angry and call me some sort of homophobe , but I think it's pretty obvious that the real resolution for the LGBT movement is to simply have a more highly educated populace, (which means access to public university!!) because it seems to me that the more highly educated a populace is, the more likely they are to accept the LGBT movement and not get up in arms about it. I have traveled in European cities and the Europeans don't seem to have nearly as much of a problem with queers as Americans do. Berlin is essentially a queer mecca, and Milano is certainly a comfortable city for a queer. You know why?? It is because the people in those cities are more likely to be educated, since college is publicly accessible, than the average Americans in some place like Kansas City or Baton Rouge or somewhere, who are all locked out of college unless they want to pull some bankrupting loan. They're also healthier than the average Americans and not as stressed out about this absurd healthcare debacle.
In other words one therefore sees, in my opinion, that the LGBT thing almost sort of falls into place, after a significant number of people have been adequately educated, or at the very least, made prosperous and comfortable. This is of course why the LGBT argument often springs to life on the wealthy and coastal college campuses in this country that are filled with people who read things and so forth. Out on the streets, however, beyond the campus walls, life is a tragically different story for many Americans: They're hungry, they're angry, they've never met anyone who is a queer, and they certainly could give less than a shit to be told how to vote by someone who looks like a queer or who talks constantly in favor of queers, and then insults church goers, etc, on the Television. I for one, having never stepped foot on a college campus, was sort of brought initially , years ago, to the entire LGBT argument by Bruce Springsteen. " You see how it works???? You see you educated liberals with PHds?? This is how ideas get introduced to the working class.
Just imagine, for example (though of course he's deceased) how many people a figure like Johnny Cash would be able to bring to the LGBT side, if he suddenly appeared on TV tomorrow in full support of it. Many, many people would , I suspect, experience a radical change of heart as a result of someone like that saying it. This is of course the same effect with Bruce Springsteen but to a slightly lesser degree. Yes, many people will suddenly go against that artist as a result of suddenly supporting this "out of character"t hing-- but many others will also suddenly 'see the light' and follow their favorite artist. It is human nature. There is no shame in admitting how powerful these figures are.
Hence we see that the truth about Democrats is that they have an absolutely fantastic set of ideas, and on paper I agree 100% with the party, but for some reason, they have an enormous image problem that they just can't get rid of. I suppose thet ruth about the Democrats is that they're simply **too open ** and ** too honest**. With the Republicans it is exactly the opposite: They send out a guy who talk like hes working class and pretends like hes working class, and that hes gonna fight for the working class, and then the second the TV flips off he flashes a switch blade and cuts the throat of the working class, and when everyone comes to find the body with its throat slit, he throws the knife into the Democratic pocekt, and says "it was him, that weird queer. He did it. " And of course everyone believes him because, well, they have not been educated enough, as a result of the Republican lockign them out and making sure they would never be educated, to see what has just happened.
It is in fact executed quite perfectly, and I think the Democrat would be able to get beyond it if only he would realize that, unfortunately, and I know it is sad, but he unfortunately **must wait** to do one slightly "radical" thing before the next "radical" thing. Thom Hartmann, this is exactly why I like the guy, because this is exactly what he does. He's as liberal as can be, but you can send him into the "respectable" pit of the suit and tie straight boys, and he blends right in. This is veryi mportant unfortunately...
In fact, my advice to the Democratic party as a whole would be: why not think of the game sort of like the Beatles and their history ? The Beatles are an extremely interesting phenomenon because, if you look at what they did, you're going to see that the original reason they were able to sneak underneath everyones door and become 'a part of the family' is because they dressed like conservatives in those suits, and they sang 'conservative' style sonsg as well (to a degree, doing some traditionals) and then the next thing you know , what on earth was happening, they were walking around in odd "hippie" outfits and tellling everyone to smoke pot and dream of walruses etc. Had the Beatles come out and presented themselves initially , from home plate, as the hippies, nothing would have ever happened for them at all, moer likely than not, and they would have lost, and lost bad.
They would have never been able to grab the ears of the people who mattered, you understand. But instead they curated an image with these suits and these nice boy faces and this "folks next door" thing, they sang some songs to make "Daddy" happy, got under the door, and the second they were in, and knew that they had cemented it, they revealed the next 'radical' step, and turned Daddys beloved daughter into a hippie flying a freak flag smoking reefer. The Beatles were a success because they worked in increments and music and literaturea nd film, the whole 9 yards, has essentially been working in such increments ever since.
In fact, this little increment game is visible in many artists taht might otherwise shock the reader, and even Kurt Cobain did the same ting to a degree: From an old persons point of view, Cobain was obviously always a little loony (all rockers are) but , within the rock circle of his time period, which was close minded in its own way, he had presented himself initially as a pretty straight forward rocker, even as a pretty masculine figure in some respects (the songs on his two opening albums being very aggressive) and then suddenly, the next thing everyone knew, they were showing up to his live concerts and he was standign there behind the microphone cross dressing with a pink tiara on his head. Freddie Mercury maybe even could be said to have done the same thing as well. These artists roped people in, made them fall in love, and then once they wre in love, they sent out the smoke grenade of quote unquote "real tantalization". Had Cobain prsented himself as a cross dresser at his first show, he could haev perhaps been killed. He certainly wouold have been rejected. He had to go in increments. Unfortuantely, that whole aspect of his act had to wait. It could not be presented before the other elements had been.....
The publicly presented Democrats, however, do not seem to totally fathom this incremental thing, and as a result of this they have now essentially screwed us and left us with 4 , or "God" help us, maybe even 8 years, of an absolutely ridiculous Republican regime, and every time I look at it, I just do not understand: Why in the hell couldn't they have sent someone like Joe Biden in? WhY? Why on earth did it have to be a battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, both of whom were, in their own ways, clearly going to be considered too radical by the Republicans who might just swing left? Why do they INSIST on having someone "radical" (again, radical in the eyes of the Republican swing voter) as the face of the party? Why can't they just present someone who wears the conservative suit... and who looks conservative... but who, deep down, on the written piece of paper, is not at all conservative? How is this character so hardt o find?? It makes no sense to me.
Remember: This is exactly what the Republicans are **already** doing! Their method is ridiculously simple to see through, the second you actually read something, but just from the TV, you would think that they were for the working class, because they pretend to be, with their public characters. They show up to stupid parade and make toasts to the working class and talk in the "language" o the working class, and then, as I said before, they shut the lights off the second they are elected and slit the throat of the working class.
So what the hell? Democrats shoud simply take the same approach except backwards: They should simply *pretend* that they are going to somehow play to Republican conservative interests, they should *pretend* that the main face they send out is a conservative or 'sort of conservative' , just like the Beatles did, and then..boom, the secnod they are under the door, switch into the hippie, LGBT outfit and do what they want.
How is this that challenging/???
--LOGGING OFF
For a long time, and in fact, for most of the time, during the actual 2016 campaign, I followed the Young Turks and a site called Secular Talk pretty religiously when it came to my US news. The Young Turks is sort of like the evil Infowars to me (ironically enough) because it is run by relatively young people and most definitely ggeared towards young people, and the same can be said for Secular Talk....and yet, after the 2016 election wrapped up, I actually found myself not all that comforted by the Young Turks crowd, for whatever reason (mostly I think because of the character 'Jimmy Doherty', who to me actually seems like a Republican pretending to be a liberal). I still like the Young Turks, I think Cenk Uygur is fantastic, and I liek Ana Kasparian loads too, but it's just that one dude Doherty bothers the Hell out of me and I honestly...well, now since I never know when he's gonna pop up on me I can't watch it anymore.
Thom Hartmann does not seem to have as much of a following on the Internet as the Young Turks, perhaps because he's older, but he's easier to mesh with because it's often just him, and the whole message of the show he puts on seems...I don't know quite how to put it, but I suppose I would say that it seems a little more serious. I am not sure why. He has written books and seems to have traveled around a good bits, I suppose, I'm not sure. Thom Hartmann just seems like a very good presenter. He cuts right to the chase. He isn't there to supply laughs or jokes or any of that, there is no playing to some "crowd of youths". He's just there to give news, hard cold terrible news. Which is the way it ought to be and which to me, in a country like this, is surprisingly the way that seems to work... (just look at the success Bill OReilly after all).
To me I think that the Young Turks kind of get a bad rep you see because they get presented and also seem to present themselves as "radicals" (they often use vulgarity for instance, or make 'radical' style jokes) and , quite frankly, I think this radical presentation is what has destroyed the liberal party in this country.
I really hate to say this, because I myself am actually, I am a heavy metal musician and a long haired tattooed weirdo with huge ear piercings and what not, but I am pretty convinced that if more Democrats would just take what I guess you could call a "clean cut" approach to the **presentation** of the politics (and pull out the stuff that seems to be 'radical') that they would have already experienced some success. This is, in fact, why Thom Hartmann works so well, at least for what I need him to do (which is that I often send his videos to older conservative family members to pursuade them to go Demo).
Unfortunatley of course there aren't that many Democrats like Thom Hartmann around and a lot of the famous hosts seem to be people who, I am so sorry totell you, no one in the circle of so-called "deplorables" will ever actually lend an ear to.
Rachel Maddow and the guy Anderson Cooper --the Democratic heads actually on the TV---are unfortunately two prime examples of this ...dilemma. Now I want to make it very clear that I am not against either of these characters, for me they are just fine, they don't bother me *personally* at all, you could have a guy with a barbell through his nose and a mohawk on there and *I'd* listen to him, **but** you know, it's kind of obvious to me (even as an actual 'freak) that nobody in the Republican constituencies, who are the people that the Democrats have, for some time now, needed on their side, are going to listen to someone like Maddow or Anderson Cooper say anything about..well, anything. And yet Maddow, who has her hair cut like a boy, and Anderson Cooper, who for some reason we all needed to know was a queer, are the prime characters on the TV when it comes to the Democratic alliance. Well what did y'all think was going to happen? In my opinion it's almost as though it was all done on purpose, to further pull down the 'respectability' levels of the Democrats in the eyes of the Republicans who just might occasionally swing t o the left.
In my opinion, someone who is political should be wise enough to realize that politics are almost always, as a rule, 40 years behind popular culture and whatever is happening with it. This means to say that, if girls getting crew cuts became popular in, say, the early 1970s, some female in the highest end of the political sector (like the president herself) ain't gonna be "allowed" to have the crewcut until 40 years after, and maybe not even then, in fact. Recently we saw something like this play out, actually, when it comes to Satans little helper "Paul Ryan", also known as the guy trying to steal grandmas Medicare.
He appeared one day, I think it was last year at some point, with a fully grown (but trimmed) beard,and everyonemade a huge fuss of it, saying that he was the first man on the Senate floor or wherever he was, to have the beard, in 100 years since the 1800s. Well, Paul Ryan was just stealing something in the 2010s that hippies had started doing and making acceptable again back in the 1960s. But of course because Ryan is a politician it actually **took that long** for the beard to reach that sphere of soceity, and as we can see with our presidents, it might not reach the highest sphere for , who knows, another 20-30 years still. Cultural trends travel very slowly and always have. They typicalyl go from bottom to top. First the marijuana is accepted in the poorest neighborhoods, then it becomes middle class, and then finally you see people on TV smoking it and after that you got a president who can come out and admit he once got stoned (just like ours can admit they got drunk).
The way this ties in with the Democrats of course is because, as you can see, they are, in some respects, maybe pushing a little too hard on some of these cultural changes, at the expense of other ones, which I would consider far more important. Myself for example, I align with the Democrats mostly for three core reasons: 1. I want to see the War on Drugs come to an end, and they seem to be the party most likely to end it due to the marijuana policies 2. I want to see a public healthcare system like Canada or Europe has implemented here, and I believe it is URGENT and 3. I want universities opened up and made publicly accessible in the same way that European universities are publicly accessible.
In America at the moment, those three views are often considered 'radical' but, of course, theyre not nearly as "radical" as the LGBT movement or the Transgender movement and all of that stuff. Bill O Reilly, obviously, he won't listen to a single one of those ideas (public uni, public health, war on drugs or LGBT) because he's the top boss of the Republican constituency who is just gonna bark their one dogma alone ,but the "swing voter" Republicans, who sometimes swing Democrat every now and again, **will** actually listen to those arguments, at least a little bit, and they'll listen to them far more than they will listen, for example, to the LGBT argments.
Swing voters in my personal experience, which means to say my experience just talking to regular people who do not obsessively align with one party or the other, tend to often agree that the War on Drugs ought to perhaps end, and that public healthcare would probably be decent, and also that universities should be opened up. I've talked to many people who seem like swing voters to me and gotten very positive responses about all three of those things. These same people of course, the second I throw out the LGBT card, often become like wild and insane pitbulls . "I dont wanna hear it I dont wanna hear it! Those people are LUNATICS! I don't like that lifestyle! I don't like no transexuals! Thats scary!" One only imagines that these people probably ultimately pull the Republican lever at the end of the day for this exact reason.... not even caring about the other prominent issues....
Therefore, in my opinion, I am almost of the belief that the Democrats have, quite frankly, allowed themselves to be smeared by just how much they have taken to the LGBT movement and their desire to be presented, like Cenk Uygur perhaps wants to be on the Young Turks, as 'free living radicals', and I do think they're idiots for it in a way because, speaking from the sidelines here, and please wait a minute before you flip out and get angry and call me some sort of homophobe , but I think it's pretty obvious that the real resolution for the LGBT movement is to simply have a more highly educated populace, (which means access to public university!!) because it seems to me that the more highly educated a populace is, the more likely they are to accept the LGBT movement and not get up in arms about it. I have traveled in European cities and the Europeans don't seem to have nearly as much of a problem with queers as Americans do. Berlin is essentially a queer mecca, and Milano is certainly a comfortable city for a queer. You know why?? It is because the people in those cities are more likely to be educated, since college is publicly accessible, than the average Americans in some place like Kansas City or Baton Rouge or somewhere, who are all locked out of college unless they want to pull some bankrupting loan. They're also healthier than the average Americans and not as stressed out about this absurd healthcare debacle.
In other words one therefore sees, in my opinion, that the LGBT thing almost sort of falls into place, after a significant number of people have been adequately educated, or at the very least, made prosperous and comfortable. This is of course why the LGBT argument often springs to life on the wealthy and coastal college campuses in this country that are filled with people who read things and so forth. Out on the streets, however, beyond the campus walls, life is a tragically different story for many Americans: They're hungry, they're angry, they've never met anyone who is a queer, and they certainly could give less than a shit to be told how to vote by someone who looks like a queer or who talks constantly in favor of queers, and then insults church goers, etc, on the Television. I for one, having never stepped foot on a college campus, was sort of brought initially , years ago, to the entire LGBT argument by Bruce Springsteen. " You see how it works???? You see you educated liberals with PHds?? This is how ideas get introduced to the working class.
Just imagine, for example (though of course he's deceased) how many people a figure like Johnny Cash would be able to bring to the LGBT side, if he suddenly appeared on TV tomorrow in full support of it. Many, many people would , I suspect, experience a radical change of heart as a result of someone like that saying it. This is of course the same effect with Bruce Springsteen but to a slightly lesser degree. Yes, many people will suddenly go against that artist as a result of suddenly supporting this "out of character"t hing-- but many others will also suddenly 'see the light' and follow their favorite artist. It is human nature. There is no shame in admitting how powerful these figures are.
Hence we see that the truth about Democrats is that they have an absolutely fantastic set of ideas, and on paper I agree 100% with the party, but for some reason, they have an enormous image problem that they just can't get rid of. I suppose thet ruth about the Democrats is that they're simply **too open ** and ** too honest**. With the Republicans it is exactly the opposite: They send out a guy who talk like hes working class and pretends like hes working class, and that hes gonna fight for the working class, and then the second the TV flips off he flashes a switch blade and cuts the throat of the working class, and when everyone comes to find the body with its throat slit, he throws the knife into the Democratic pocekt, and says "it was him, that weird queer. He did it. " And of course everyone believes him because, well, they have not been educated enough, as a result of the Republican lockign them out and making sure they would never be educated, to see what has just happened.
It is in fact executed quite perfectly, and I think the Democrat would be able to get beyond it if only he would realize that, unfortunately, and I know it is sad, but he unfortunately **must wait** to do one slightly "radical" thing before the next "radical" thing. Thom Hartmann, this is exactly why I like the guy, because this is exactly what he does. He's as liberal as can be, but you can send him into the "respectable" pit of the suit and tie straight boys, and he blends right in. This is veryi mportant unfortunately...
In fact, my advice to the Democratic party as a whole would be: why not think of the game sort of like the Beatles and their history ? The Beatles are an extremely interesting phenomenon because, if you look at what they did, you're going to see that the original reason they were able to sneak underneath everyones door and become 'a part of the family' is because they dressed like conservatives in those suits, and they sang 'conservative' style sonsg as well (to a degree, doing some traditionals) and then the next thing you know , what on earth was happening, they were walking around in odd "hippie" outfits and tellling everyone to smoke pot and dream of walruses etc. Had the Beatles come out and presented themselves initially , from home plate, as the hippies, nothing would have ever happened for them at all, moer likely than not, and they would have lost, and lost bad.
They would have never been able to grab the ears of the people who mattered, you understand. But instead they curated an image with these suits and these nice boy faces and this "folks next door" thing, they sang some songs to make "Daddy" happy, got under the door, and the second they were in, and knew that they had cemented it, they revealed the next 'radical' step, and turned Daddys beloved daughter into a hippie flying a freak flag smoking reefer. The Beatles were a success because they worked in increments and music and literaturea nd film, the whole 9 yards, has essentially been working in such increments ever since.
In fact, this little increment game is visible in many artists taht might otherwise shock the reader, and even Kurt Cobain did the same ting to a degree: From an old persons point of view, Cobain was obviously always a little loony (all rockers are) but , within the rock circle of his time period, which was close minded in its own way, he had presented himself initially as a pretty straight forward rocker, even as a pretty masculine figure in some respects (the songs on his two opening albums being very aggressive) and then suddenly, the next thing everyone knew, they were showing up to his live concerts and he was standign there behind the microphone cross dressing with a pink tiara on his head. Freddie Mercury maybe even could be said to have done the same thing as well. These artists roped people in, made them fall in love, and then once they wre in love, they sent out the smoke grenade of quote unquote "real tantalization". Had Cobain prsented himself as a cross dresser at his first show, he could haev perhaps been killed. He certainly wouold have been rejected. He had to go in increments. Unfortuantely, that whole aspect of his act had to wait. It could not be presented before the other elements had been.....
The publicly presented Democrats, however, do not seem to totally fathom this incremental thing, and as a result of this they have now essentially screwed us and left us with 4 , or "God" help us, maybe even 8 years, of an absolutely ridiculous Republican regime, and every time I look at it, I just do not understand: Why in the hell couldn't they have sent someone like Joe Biden in? WhY? Why on earth did it have to be a battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, both of whom were, in their own ways, clearly going to be considered too radical by the Republicans who might just swing left? Why do they INSIST on having someone "radical" (again, radical in the eyes of the Republican swing voter) as the face of the party? Why can't they just present someone who wears the conservative suit... and who looks conservative... but who, deep down, on the written piece of paper, is not at all conservative? How is this character so hardt o find?? It makes no sense to me.
Remember: This is exactly what the Republicans are **already** doing! Their method is ridiculously simple to see through, the second you actually read something, but just from the TV, you would think that they were for the working class, because they pretend to be, with their public characters. They show up to stupid parade and make toasts to the working class and talk in the "language" o the working class, and then, as I said before, they shut the lights off the second they are elected and slit the throat of the working class.
So what the hell? Democrats shoud simply take the same approach except backwards: They should simply *pretend* that they are going to somehow play to Republican conservative interests, they should *pretend* that the main face they send out is a conservative or 'sort of conservative' , just like the Beatles did, and then..boom, the secnod they are under the door, switch into the hippie, LGBT outfit and do what they want.
How is this that challenging/???
--LOGGING OFF
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Privatization
I don't think I would hang around with Americans who had Ph.D's even if I had the chance, honestly. I have often thought about it and this is the ultimate conclusion I have come to after years and years of dwelling on it: I do not think I would hang out with you USA Ph.D boys and girls even if I had the chance, mostly because something just does not sit right with me about you.
It isn't to say...well..no..you know what, it is to say that I definitely have a *problem* with you, and I'm annoyed by you, and you leave me quite upset. Mostly, I think, because you are just so ridiculously removed from all the rest of us. Like, honestly -- who are these people?? I not only do not know any of them, but I wouldn't even really, in a certain sense, even know where they are to be found, anyways.
I have often wondered how bizarre the perspective of a glorious Ph.D recipient must be when it comes to a country like this, where education has been absurdly privatized, because in my opinion (and I was trying to write about this another time) but in my opinion I honestly think the view of the Ph.D individual, again in a country of extreme privatization like this, has actually got to be, more or less, just as "marginalized" as the view of the person in the ghetto or the prison, et cetera.
This is , in fact, the entire problem that I think the educated class of Americans is having when it comes to trying to reach the working class, as they do, through, apparently, the Democratic line: We are sort of in a hole right now , as a result of the fact that 'you guys' (meaning you Ph.D educated sorts) seem not just distant from the working clas.s..but you also seem like radically different , and yes, even obnoxious, creatures. The sense of being removed is so extreme that...well, for a regular 'little ol' person, it's almost impossible to want to listen to you. And this is honestly all because of privatization. The average person quite frankly has been so dramatically locked out of your privatized world that they not only do not understand the first thing about it, but they also of course start to resent it and then ignore it.
It's very simple really and yet no one ever says it: The privatization of the American higher education system, and even the high school and elementary level, has marginalized the educated crowd in much the same way, again, that the ghetto perspective or the woman perspective is marginalized.The reason no one seems to realize this of course is because, well, to put it simply, the people at the top with the Ph.D's are living such comfortable lives that they don't, I think, notice just how marginalized they actually are from the regular every day perspective. The idea right now floating around (in the upper class of course, where such things are discussed) is that marginalization is only something that happens to poor delinquents, etc etc. But marginalization can, in fact, happen to anyone, and as far as I care to tell it, it has most definitely happened to the educated Americans...and the worst part is that they did it to themselves, by locking themselves in these private institutions, which do not really have much to do with American life at large.
In a way, I think that the Ph.D people are (and don't get angry) but I think they are sort of like rappers are for the black folks, because rappers tend to (i am sure many liberals have noticed) utterly dismiss the fact that black people are marginalized as a whole. Some people might remember, for instance, that around the time the Black Lives Matter movement began, Lil Wayne the rapper came out and said that "I have never experienced racism, I don't even know what they're talking about.." etc etc. In my opinion, and I understand it might sound perplexing, but I think the educated class in this country basically is suffering from the same sort of disillusionment as Lil Wayne. They are convinced that, because they write for the New York Times, or because they have a job as a "political analyst" (I honestly don't even really know what that is) that they're 'doing something', and of course they are doing something...but the truth is that what they're doing is **only reaching a very specific set of people and no one else**. As far as I am concerned, most of the great journalists or writers I've had a chance to read here are just writing for the choir....
This is of course the same exact case with Lil Wayne and his rap songs: He thinks he's ultra famous, and he thinks he is so respected, and he is respected in that one crowd...but the second he tries to move out of that, and do literally anything else at all, he's going to get crucified. In fact, Lil Wayne's marginalization was so severe that, even when he just tried to make a move as a guitar player and appeal to a white rocker crowd , he almost lost his entire career as a result of it.
That is essentially a text book definition of marginalization in my opinion ...and it's **exactly** what is happening to the educated in this country, believe it or not. Working class people seem to be utterly convinced that educated people are somehow "pulling secret levers of deception" in this country, and I am sure that many of them are doing that, because there is definitely something horrifically funky going on in this country; but there is also, it is clear to see, a whole other world filled with very highly educated American people, who it is clear to me to see, just from following them on Twitter even, that they are very passionate about trying to help the working class, and get aid for the working class, so on and so forth, yet what I find so odd about this is that, well, these Ph. D people seem just as powerless as me at the end of the day, and just as screwed , and voiceless. Nobody seems to be listening to them or heeding their advice.
DT won after all and the educated boys have been thrown out of the room yet again. They have all these fancy degrees, Ph.D's and Bachelors and Masters degrees hanging all over the walls...they write for the New York Times and show up to work in, I would imagine, a suit, with nice slacks and polished shoes. And yet they seem to have just as little of a voice as I do, with no college degree and the majority of my childhood friends not even HS graduates.
Which is really absolutely mind blowing and doesn't make any sense --- how on earth could that be?---until, of course, I then remember to remind myself about the privatization epidemic that this country has unfortunately suffered.It has unfortunately, in my opinion, split the cohesion of this country to such a degree that, frankly, the USA isn't so much a "country" in my eyes, as it is a collection of privatized places where very different people hang out and pass all their lives, whilst never really participating in America at large.
This means to say basically that, for me,an institution like Harvard is not so much a symbol of United States culture as it is a symbol of just, strictly, Harvard culture, and personally I think most Americans would agree with me when I put that idea out there. Most Americans, I think, would never say that Harvard is a defining aspect of US culture, in the same sense that, say, the Grand Canyon, or even Hollywood is, in fact, and the reason that Harvard gets left out of the "real American pile" is not at all because it's wealthy (Americans dont actually have a problem at all with merely wealthy) but rather because it is privatized. There is a big difference to me, between someone who is independently wealthy, and then a huge, wealthy institution that is keeping itself locked off from everyone else .... .
The problem of course is that Harvard and other institutions like it want to eat both cakes, as they say: It wants to remain entirely privatized and tuition based and lock its doors and keep 90% of us out, whilst at the same time constantly trying to stick its foot in the door and tell regular Americans what this culture is supposed to be about or even what their voting habits ought to be...and in my opinion, this has created an enormous blowback of resentment where we now see that the working class masses have hurled this grenade, and they essentially seem to think that they have hurled it at the educated "elites", though they have really only hurled it at themselves.
The fact that they hurled it at themselves ,however, is almost irrelevant because they thought they were knocking out "educated elites' with it. In other words, they thought they were knocking out and angering privately educated individuals from institutions like Harvard, or Princeton, and other such places by throwing the grenade, and it seems as though there was apparently nothing that they wanted more. They in fact, it seems to me, don't seem to have listened to so much as a word of what you various privately educated individuals were saying to them, and...of course... still aren't listening. At all.
And so what you see here is , again, a classic example of so-called "marginalization" because, just like Lil Wayne having "black rapper" attached to his name has meant that many folks will blatantly ignore everything he says, so too, in fact, does having "Harvard" attached to ones name and credentials, mean that one will be - intruth - blatantly ignored by the overwhelming majority of the American people.
It even happens to me, as I said in the beginning of the article, and I am generally someone who is, or who would like to be, pretty respectful of folks, whether they were much "luckier" than I, or not at all lucky. Yet even I, in truth, probably would never feel comfortable having, say, something like a favorite author who was Harvard or Yale educated, or a favorite actor, or a musician, etc. Would I read a single book by someone with those credentials? Certainly I would. But would I call it my favorite? No, I wouldn't. And, in truth, I would probably be rather disappointed if I found out my favorite author had gone to Harvard. I would not like them anymore, I don't think, because it would leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I would feel like, I don't know, I suppose I would feel they were "marked' by the experience. Basically I think I would always be sort of suspicious that they were trying to sell me Harvards opinion, rather than their own opinion. I would never feel motivated by them, because it would ultimately lead me to think a number of possibly untrue things about them.
This is very dangerous when you think about it, and I cannot help but think that the vast majority of Ameriacns seem to have the exact same idea as I do, somewhere in the back of their heads, when it comes to something like this. It is a problem because it really is like a sort of cattle branding. The Harvard experience elevates someone to this "elite" pile... but when you get in that pile, you also get kicked out of so many other very very important piles..... piles that can make or break the culture at large. This is bad bad bad. I mean, just really try to dwell on the implications of what I am saying, when I tell you that I wouldn't choose someone from Harvard as my favorite author, just because they went to Harvard. I'm kicking the person right out of the room. And I promise you ... I know it is what the other American people are doing ...even if only in the back of their heads.. not totally "conscious" of it. You pick up a novel, you read it, you get to the end, you see "and he was educated at Harvard..." and then you throw it out of the bus window. "Fuck that guy, I aint readin him no more, the pompous dick!" "Oh Johnny Depp went to Harvard, did he? Eh, he can go fuck himself!"
This at first might seem , naturally, horrifically close minded.... until of course you realize that, when you look over to West Europe, I don't have the slightest 'problem' with, in truth, even the most highly educated people upon that continent, as a direct result of the fact that no university name in West Europe is at all similar to Harvard or Yale etc, since the vast majority of them have no tuition for the citizens of the countries and are instead tax based and completely free, and have thus escaped the "brand name' syndrome. Versace is brand name in Europe. And I hate Versace . But the universities? I don't know the first thing about it, beyond knowing that they're all tax based and free . I thus read the educated people of Europe under a totally different light than I read the educated US Americans. The European educated people seem very elegant to my perspective I suppose, I know they sip wine and I know they go to posh restaurants and all of that, and yet they don't seem like snobs to me, either. They don't seem like "penny loafer" people, or "preppies" or any of this. In fact, many of them often seem to be able to switch between a number of faces. They do not seem like snobs. They don't seem to represent something beyond themselves....
They are not, in short, branded, with a tattoo on their face....
The perspective has thus changed entirely, because the educated "elites" of Europe are, of course, more INTEGRATED into the actual society at large. They are not in a privatized 'ghetto' of sorts, living on the outskirts of Europe, on these immaculate campuses that no one has ever seen and only ever - for the most part - heard about. They are not stamped with a brand name. They are not hidden behind locked doors. And, last I heard, in many European colleges, **there isn't even an application process** ....so they are also not at all like, you know, a MAFIA to which you have to be accepted . The whole culture is unbelievably different as a result of this.....
And all of this is to say that, you know...whatever gains the privatized universities think that they have made here in respect to the European universities , as a result of being privatized (because I would imagine that the American privates think they are better in some sense) the truth is that all those gains (if there even were any gains, which personally I do not believe there are any) were completely IN VAIN , because you have received them at a pretty steep cost...and the cost has been that the American people have not only utterly disregarded the educated elites, but even pretty much anyone who smells even slightly "educated", completely. In my opinion, and maybe I am a lunatic, but that seems like a pretty steep cost, and it also seems pretty lousy, and definitely lonely. Harvard sounds like a great place I guess --- until you realize that it is a prison and a ghetto all its own, and that having that little "he went to Harvard" asterisk next to your name, is gonna automatically get you disregarded by, probably, 90% of the American people, depending upon what the Harvard graduate pursues.
I suppose if I were a Harvard graduate, I would probably want to do something in this country that didn't at all involve contact with the wide public , because it cannot be stressed enough that, the second the public is involved, the Harvard guy is often immediately stripped , disregarded, and thrown off into the distance to be utterly ignored, insulted, made fun of, and essentially laughed at. So basically, for a Harvard guy, being a doctor in the shadows would work wonderfully, or a writer for very specific academic magazines that nobody besides other people from Harvard read; but when it comes to a profession where one has to truly integrate with a mass of people, like political people have to do, these Harvard boys and girls have both their legs broken and no arms to write with , because everything they say just goes in one ear and out of the other, and, I can assure you, it always shall, until the universities are made public, and taken off of the private road.
Until that day, all of you Ph.D people with your private educations, you will ultimately mean nothing to the American people, and everything that you try to do, and all the politics that you try to put upion them, and all the remarks and comments that you try to make, will be routinely ignored , insulted, denigrated, twisted, turned around, and used against you, over and over and over again. You might think that having the IvyLeague or private university name attached to you makes you look good for the American public, but the truth is that it just makes you look like, well...an absolute asshole, and "there go your arms Jack, there go your legs".
It is kind of ironic really, when you think about it, but institutions like Harvard and Yale suffer from the same thing they say they hate Trump for, or that they say they feel bad for black rappers like Lil Wayne for: They got a big tattoo of a brand name stamped right on their fucking forehead, and we all walk by and throw shit at it and laugh at it and kick dirt at it, no matter what it is saying, or what song it is singing, etc etc etc, and this entire situation, of this privatization epidemic, has created quite the political circus.......
It is really bizarre... and certainly sad...but of course this is why privatization isn't good. At all.....
Keep the wolves locked out. The wolves rip things up you know....
--LOGGING OFF
It isn't to say...well..no..you know what, it is to say that I definitely have a *problem* with you, and I'm annoyed by you, and you leave me quite upset. Mostly, I think, because you are just so ridiculously removed from all the rest of us. Like, honestly -- who are these people?? I not only do not know any of them, but I wouldn't even really, in a certain sense, even know where they are to be found, anyways.
I have often wondered how bizarre the perspective of a glorious Ph.D recipient must be when it comes to a country like this, where education has been absurdly privatized, because in my opinion (and I was trying to write about this another time) but in my opinion I honestly think the view of the Ph.D individual, again in a country of extreme privatization like this, has actually got to be, more or less, just as "marginalized" as the view of the person in the ghetto or the prison, et cetera.
This is , in fact, the entire problem that I think the educated class of Americans is having when it comes to trying to reach the working class, as they do, through, apparently, the Democratic line: We are sort of in a hole right now , as a result of the fact that 'you guys' (meaning you Ph.D educated sorts) seem not just distant from the working clas.s..but you also seem like radically different , and yes, even obnoxious, creatures. The sense of being removed is so extreme that...well, for a regular 'little ol' person, it's almost impossible to want to listen to you. And this is honestly all because of privatization. The average person quite frankly has been so dramatically locked out of your privatized world that they not only do not understand the first thing about it, but they also of course start to resent it and then ignore it.
It's very simple really and yet no one ever says it: The privatization of the American higher education system, and even the high school and elementary level, has marginalized the educated crowd in much the same way, again, that the ghetto perspective or the woman perspective is marginalized.The reason no one seems to realize this of course is because, well, to put it simply, the people at the top with the Ph.D's are living such comfortable lives that they don't, I think, notice just how marginalized they actually are from the regular every day perspective. The idea right now floating around (in the upper class of course, where such things are discussed) is that marginalization is only something that happens to poor delinquents, etc etc. But marginalization can, in fact, happen to anyone, and as far as I care to tell it, it has most definitely happened to the educated Americans...and the worst part is that they did it to themselves, by locking themselves in these private institutions, which do not really have much to do with American life at large.
In a way, I think that the Ph.D people are (and don't get angry) but I think they are sort of like rappers are for the black folks, because rappers tend to (i am sure many liberals have noticed) utterly dismiss the fact that black people are marginalized as a whole. Some people might remember, for instance, that around the time the Black Lives Matter movement began, Lil Wayne the rapper came out and said that "I have never experienced racism, I don't even know what they're talking about.." etc etc. In my opinion, and I understand it might sound perplexing, but I think the educated class in this country basically is suffering from the same sort of disillusionment as Lil Wayne. They are convinced that, because they write for the New York Times, or because they have a job as a "political analyst" (I honestly don't even really know what that is) that they're 'doing something', and of course they are doing something...but the truth is that what they're doing is **only reaching a very specific set of people and no one else**. As far as I am concerned, most of the great journalists or writers I've had a chance to read here are just writing for the choir....
This is of course the same exact case with Lil Wayne and his rap songs: He thinks he's ultra famous, and he thinks he is so respected, and he is respected in that one crowd...but the second he tries to move out of that, and do literally anything else at all, he's going to get crucified. In fact, Lil Wayne's marginalization was so severe that, even when he just tried to make a move as a guitar player and appeal to a white rocker crowd , he almost lost his entire career as a result of it.
That is essentially a text book definition of marginalization in my opinion ...and it's **exactly** what is happening to the educated in this country, believe it or not. Working class people seem to be utterly convinced that educated people are somehow "pulling secret levers of deception" in this country, and I am sure that many of them are doing that, because there is definitely something horrifically funky going on in this country; but there is also, it is clear to see, a whole other world filled with very highly educated American people, who it is clear to me to see, just from following them on Twitter even, that they are very passionate about trying to help the working class, and get aid for the working class, so on and so forth, yet what I find so odd about this is that, well, these Ph. D people seem just as powerless as me at the end of the day, and just as screwed , and voiceless. Nobody seems to be listening to them or heeding their advice.
DT won after all and the educated boys have been thrown out of the room yet again. They have all these fancy degrees, Ph.D's and Bachelors and Masters degrees hanging all over the walls...they write for the New York Times and show up to work in, I would imagine, a suit, with nice slacks and polished shoes. And yet they seem to have just as little of a voice as I do, with no college degree and the majority of my childhood friends not even HS graduates.
Which is really absolutely mind blowing and doesn't make any sense --- how on earth could that be?---until, of course, I then remember to remind myself about the privatization epidemic that this country has unfortunately suffered.It has unfortunately, in my opinion, split the cohesion of this country to such a degree that, frankly, the USA isn't so much a "country" in my eyes, as it is a collection of privatized places where very different people hang out and pass all their lives, whilst never really participating in America at large.
This means to say basically that, for me,an institution like Harvard is not so much a symbol of United States culture as it is a symbol of just, strictly, Harvard culture, and personally I think most Americans would agree with me when I put that idea out there. Most Americans, I think, would never say that Harvard is a defining aspect of US culture, in the same sense that, say, the Grand Canyon, or even Hollywood is, in fact, and the reason that Harvard gets left out of the "real American pile" is not at all because it's wealthy (Americans dont actually have a problem at all with merely wealthy) but rather because it is privatized. There is a big difference to me, between someone who is independently wealthy, and then a huge, wealthy institution that is keeping itself locked off from everyone else .... .
The problem of course is that Harvard and other institutions like it want to eat both cakes, as they say: It wants to remain entirely privatized and tuition based and lock its doors and keep 90% of us out, whilst at the same time constantly trying to stick its foot in the door and tell regular Americans what this culture is supposed to be about or even what their voting habits ought to be...and in my opinion, this has created an enormous blowback of resentment where we now see that the working class masses have hurled this grenade, and they essentially seem to think that they have hurled it at the educated "elites", though they have really only hurled it at themselves.
The fact that they hurled it at themselves ,however, is almost irrelevant because they thought they were knocking out "educated elites' with it. In other words, they thought they were knocking out and angering privately educated individuals from institutions like Harvard, or Princeton, and other such places by throwing the grenade, and it seems as though there was apparently nothing that they wanted more. They in fact, it seems to me, don't seem to have listened to so much as a word of what you various privately educated individuals were saying to them, and...of course... still aren't listening. At all.
And so what you see here is , again, a classic example of so-called "marginalization" because, just like Lil Wayne having "black rapper" attached to his name has meant that many folks will blatantly ignore everything he says, so too, in fact, does having "Harvard" attached to ones name and credentials, mean that one will be - intruth - blatantly ignored by the overwhelming majority of the American people.
It even happens to me, as I said in the beginning of the article, and I am generally someone who is, or who would like to be, pretty respectful of folks, whether they were much "luckier" than I, or not at all lucky. Yet even I, in truth, probably would never feel comfortable having, say, something like a favorite author who was Harvard or Yale educated, or a favorite actor, or a musician, etc. Would I read a single book by someone with those credentials? Certainly I would. But would I call it my favorite? No, I wouldn't. And, in truth, I would probably be rather disappointed if I found out my favorite author had gone to Harvard. I would not like them anymore, I don't think, because it would leave a bad taste in my mouth, and I would feel like, I don't know, I suppose I would feel they were "marked' by the experience. Basically I think I would always be sort of suspicious that they were trying to sell me Harvards opinion, rather than their own opinion. I would never feel motivated by them, because it would ultimately lead me to think a number of possibly untrue things about them.
This is very dangerous when you think about it, and I cannot help but think that the vast majority of Ameriacns seem to have the exact same idea as I do, somewhere in the back of their heads, when it comes to something like this. It is a problem because it really is like a sort of cattle branding. The Harvard experience elevates someone to this "elite" pile... but when you get in that pile, you also get kicked out of so many other very very important piles..... piles that can make or break the culture at large. This is bad bad bad. I mean, just really try to dwell on the implications of what I am saying, when I tell you that I wouldn't choose someone from Harvard as my favorite author, just because they went to Harvard. I'm kicking the person right out of the room. And I promise you ... I know it is what the other American people are doing ...even if only in the back of their heads.. not totally "conscious" of it. You pick up a novel, you read it, you get to the end, you see "and he was educated at Harvard..." and then you throw it out of the bus window. "Fuck that guy, I aint readin him no more, the pompous dick!" "Oh Johnny Depp went to Harvard, did he? Eh, he can go fuck himself!"
This at first might seem , naturally, horrifically close minded.... until of course you realize that, when you look over to West Europe, I don't have the slightest 'problem' with, in truth, even the most highly educated people upon that continent, as a direct result of the fact that no university name in West Europe is at all similar to Harvard or Yale etc, since the vast majority of them have no tuition for the citizens of the countries and are instead tax based and completely free, and have thus escaped the "brand name' syndrome. Versace is brand name in Europe. And I hate Versace . But the universities? I don't know the first thing about it, beyond knowing that they're all tax based and free . I thus read the educated people of Europe under a totally different light than I read the educated US Americans. The European educated people seem very elegant to my perspective I suppose, I know they sip wine and I know they go to posh restaurants and all of that, and yet they don't seem like snobs to me, either. They don't seem like "penny loafer" people, or "preppies" or any of this. In fact, many of them often seem to be able to switch between a number of faces. They do not seem like snobs. They don't seem to represent something beyond themselves....
They are not, in short, branded, with a tattoo on their face....
The perspective has thus changed entirely, because the educated "elites" of Europe are, of course, more INTEGRATED into the actual society at large. They are not in a privatized 'ghetto' of sorts, living on the outskirts of Europe, on these immaculate campuses that no one has ever seen and only ever - for the most part - heard about. They are not stamped with a brand name. They are not hidden behind locked doors. And, last I heard, in many European colleges, **there isn't even an application process** ....so they are also not at all like, you know, a MAFIA to which you have to be accepted . The whole culture is unbelievably different as a result of this.....
And all of this is to say that, you know...whatever gains the privatized universities think that they have made here in respect to the European universities , as a result of being privatized (because I would imagine that the American privates think they are better in some sense) the truth is that all those gains (if there even were any gains, which personally I do not believe there are any) were completely IN VAIN , because you have received them at a pretty steep cost...and the cost has been that the American people have not only utterly disregarded the educated elites, but even pretty much anyone who smells even slightly "educated", completely. In my opinion, and maybe I am a lunatic, but that seems like a pretty steep cost, and it also seems pretty lousy, and definitely lonely. Harvard sounds like a great place I guess --- until you realize that it is a prison and a ghetto all its own, and that having that little "he went to Harvard" asterisk next to your name, is gonna automatically get you disregarded by, probably, 90% of the American people, depending upon what the Harvard graduate pursues.
I suppose if I were a Harvard graduate, I would probably want to do something in this country that didn't at all involve contact with the wide public , because it cannot be stressed enough that, the second the public is involved, the Harvard guy is often immediately stripped , disregarded, and thrown off into the distance to be utterly ignored, insulted, made fun of, and essentially laughed at. So basically, for a Harvard guy, being a doctor in the shadows would work wonderfully, or a writer for very specific academic magazines that nobody besides other people from Harvard read; but when it comes to a profession where one has to truly integrate with a mass of people, like political people have to do, these Harvard boys and girls have both their legs broken and no arms to write with , because everything they say just goes in one ear and out of the other, and, I can assure you, it always shall, until the universities are made public, and taken off of the private road.
Until that day, all of you Ph.D people with your private educations, you will ultimately mean nothing to the American people, and everything that you try to do, and all the politics that you try to put upion them, and all the remarks and comments that you try to make, will be routinely ignored , insulted, denigrated, twisted, turned around, and used against you, over and over and over again. You might think that having the IvyLeague or private university name attached to you makes you look good for the American public, but the truth is that it just makes you look like, well...an absolute asshole, and "there go your arms Jack, there go your legs".
It is kind of ironic really, when you think about it, but institutions like Harvard and Yale suffer from the same thing they say they hate Trump for, or that they say they feel bad for black rappers like Lil Wayne for: They got a big tattoo of a brand name stamped right on their fucking forehead, and we all walk by and throw shit at it and laugh at it and kick dirt at it, no matter what it is saying, or what song it is singing, etc etc etc, and this entire situation, of this privatization epidemic, has created quite the political circus.......
It is really bizarre... and certainly sad...but of course this is why privatization isn't good. At all.....
Keep the wolves locked out. The wolves rip things up you know....
--LOGGING OFF