I King

Abril 28, 2004

I Teefed Dad's Weed

I stole weed from my Dad the other night. I've been living with him for several weeks following the demise of my relationship, and the other night I stole drugs from him. I knew he had dope because I gave it to him for Christmas. He only had a little bit left and I took it all, the rest of it. For a relatively conservative older man he really plowed through the bag. I mean, he must be smoking at least a joint a week, although there was one already rolled in his secret box where he keeps his drugs, and it was a fatty -- so maybe it's a joint every week and a half. Either way, he's been pretty vocal with me about my drug use, which reeks to me of hypocrisy, even though as I daily user I can quickly estimate that I smoke at least ten times as much as he does.

It was strange the other night because he found a joint in the basement -- the night after I smoked the rest of his weed. I mean, I know I smoked his weed that night, so it must have been another joint that I was unaware of. But he returned it to me. He just left me a note that said: "I found this in the basement." I wasn't sure what he was feeling when he found it or when he wrote the note because all he said was "I found this in the basement" So I wrote back three or four different notes of my own, each one confessing my theft of his chronic..."Dear dad, technically this is yours because I stole the rest of your dope last night, love your son." But they all sounded wicked cheeky and whatnot, so in the end I just threw away his note and smoked the joint, and we haven't spoken about it since.

Posted by King at 04:26 PM | Comments (5)

Abril 26, 2004

In Europe, where the history comes from, right-wing politics are one degree removed from comedy.

What about this? Enh?

Posted by at 12:46 AM | Comments (5)

Abril 25, 2004

ZIP!

I got a book full of photos by this guy. I think he is the greatest photographer. The monkey in the backseat of the car with the airbrushed t-shirt looking at pornography next to the Pac-man stuffed toy stands as my favourite artistic achievement of the last half-century.

Posted by at 10:28 AM | Comments (2)

Abril 07, 2004

Everything Loses its Lustre

Everything loses its lustre after a break-up. Beautiful things don't seem quite as beautiful. Dancing isn't the same, not that I ever danced that much. Music is great, but only if it addresses your own subjective experience directly. This happened to me with Dylan's great break-up album Blood on The Tracks and with the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds a little bit. It's sunny out, but I can't say the weather's been great-- others may disagree. The bird that sings outside my window each morning seems off-key. Maybe he just broke up with his girl too. Weed does the usual. Drinking is not as fun. Masturbation provides no pleasure, whether the fantasy is a hopelessly romantic lustfest, or hate sex with the ex, it's no use. Everyone says it will pass in time. It will pass in time. Just give it time. Time heals all wounds. Even from experience I suppose I know this is true. But I wouldn't say Time is the one doing the healing. In this case, and most other times too, Time is a fucking asshole.

Posted by King at 06:55 PM | Comments (1)

Abril 04, 2004

The Prosaic Male Swagger...

ÿ was talking about this a while ago. There's a bravado or a machismo about blogging that manifests itself as efforts in stylism, affected and detached sneery tones, prioritizing neat-o internet links over genuine sentiment and other sorts of things. ÿ evidently feels uncomfortable about this stuff and seems to have tried to counter this tendency with pictures of dogs and people, talking about himself in a real-life sort of way (not all navel-gazey, more contemplative) only to be called "extremely" solipsistic. That sort of sucks. Most of the blogs I look at suffer from this overwrought compulsion towards asserting oneself textually or stylistically and most of them are written by men.
I don't know what else to say about it really; I've just been recognizing it a lot lately. These tendencies are all-pervasive, and men everywhere try musk up sexless or traditionally feminine domains and disciplines with an air of surrogate machismo. It's what made saggy Harold Bloom think he could put his corpulent, sack-like hand on a young Naomi Wolf's leg. It's what makes real estate agents say "Booya". It's what makes 30-year-old comic book store clerks all aggressive and snotty. In the very extreme, it punctuates all this "New Man" primping and preening and slathering.
The obvious answer is that the gender precedents of overtly male behaviour, with the sweat and gas and cursing and scratching and ignorance, is not allowed anymore but that the masculine character is so insidious that it can't be throttled under any circumstances and can even manifest itself in the act of applying moisturizer. This is probably not entirely true but I think the consistency in all of this is that all of this behaviour incorporates something predatorial or aggressive or at least assertive. I don't like it all that much. It's why I feel gross about Phil Roth and Saul Bellow, it's why I like Chantal Akerman better than Jean-Luc Godard. I'm sick of dicks everywhere. But I'm also pretty sick of vaginas too. Genitals get in the way.
I want to know what eunuchoid pop music would sound like and what gender-panic cinema would look like. I want to see women's blogs that don't just feel like approximations of what the boys are doing. Either way, I want people to recognize that male-geek-angst/hate is just as awful and cult-of-the-male as a football team daisy-chaining because both give off the whiff of territoriality and entitlement that's about as appetizing as tainted luncheon meat. Right? Am I full of shit?

Posted by at 11:21 PM | Comments (10)

"God Bless Harry Truman"

Another thing I learned about the States recently is how great NeoCon Talk Radio is. You never hear people use words like "retard" or "dirty Mexicans" on Canadian radio. In New York State you can spin the AM knob on your car radio and chances are you'll end up with a hateful white man with a generic "working-class" accent shouting at you about foreigners, liberals, bombing things or people, terror (always pronounced "Terrahh!"), terrorists, terrorist states, bioterrorists, abortion (abortion is also known widely as Roe V. Wade, as you know, but they say it like RoveeWade, or they say "killing little baby fetuses"), abortion-as-terrorism, foreigners as bioterrorists and other stuff. It doesn't really matter what they talk about, it just matters that they shout. SHOOOUUUUTTTT!!!!! They repeat themselves a lot too; I think the American Right, en masse, tend to associate familiarity with conviction so that the more they hear something said, the more they believe that they agree with it and that it is the morally superior stance. I know none of this is new to anybody and that Al Franken and Michael Moore both have bestselling books about this sort of thing but I'd never heard American Talk Radio outside of that garbage Bogosian movie. You gotta hear this guy actually talk. His website is pretty fucked and everything but you have to imagine that this man has a 3-hour primetime radio show that can be heard EVERYWHERE in the United States.
The advertising is fucked too; lots of people advocating the liquidation of "risky" investment ventures in order to put all your money into GOLD BULLION. You know who can't touch your GOLD BULLION? The JEW-RUN MEDIA can't touch your GOLD BULLION!
Holy Shit.
I just checked out Air America Radio and, unfortunately, it seems pretty boring. They've got to get angry if they want to compete with guys like Michael Savage.
Start SHOUTTTTTTTTTINNNGGGG!!!!! about shit, I don't think it matters what. People love shouting on the radio. Instead you've got Chuck D, a very exciting shouter, actually whispering and humming and hawwing and uttering very sober and well-considered statements about reparations. YOU GOTTA FUCKING SHOUT ABOUT REPARATIONS, DAMMIT!!!! I THOUGHT YOU WERE ANGRY CHUCK D!!!???!!!! THIS IS TALK MOTHERASSING AM RADIO, YOU'RE ALLOWED TO SHOUT!!!! YOU'RE ENCOURAGED TO SHOUT!!!!!! PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SHOUT IT OUT!!!!!!!
Franken and Gareafalalafaalloelloelo are only going to reinforce the Right's notion of liberals as snide and smart-alecky. Franken shouts a bit, I think, but I don't Middle Americans like sarcasm very much. They sure as shit love shouting though.

Posted by at 03:12 PM | Comments (0)

No-neck border guards have a soft spot for Fandangos....

I recently found out that the surest way to ensure a smooth border-crossing is by playing "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum (preferably off the Big Chill soundtrack) at a really conservative, just-audible volume.

Posted by at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)