Zombie Abortions

I have the rare, unfortunate virus that is so baneful, I had to call in reinforcements. Therefore, I am in the thrall of the Big Fuckin’ Q and feel as sedated as a suburban housewife.

Everyone knows that after a good Nyquil coma, there is a waiting period before you regain the use of your arms and legs. The coma last night was exceptional. I woke and lay there waiting for a sign that my head was still attached to the rest of my body. It was then that my spirit animal, a Circus Midget named Johnson Puppethammer, came to me in a vision and led me on a journey that finally unraveled one of the greatest mysteries of the ages: Where Nyquil Really Comes From.

Somewhere, there is a heavily guarded compound where zombies have been genetically altered so that they can breed. The zombie women are impregnated and after 8 months, they are herded into rooms and distracted with the arms and legs of undocumented Guantanamo Bay inmates who failed their Water Board exams. Then the doctors, who are genetically engineered hybrids of my psychotic third-grade teacher and Dick Cheney, extract the zombie fetuses.

The fetuses are hastily whisked away to an enormous room that is maintained at a constant temperature of at 37º C. After being deposited in either green-death or cherry flavored media, the fetuses are left to decompose. After a few days (we didn’t have time to get into a discussion about decomposition variables), all that remains is a thick sludge that is siphoned into large vats, mixed with Holy Water, bottled, packaged and shipped to thousands of convenient locations near you.

Lewis Carroll had the Green Fairy. I have Zombie Abortions. I think I win.

I Want to Throw Up on Kimya Dawson's Shoes

Having just seen Juno and having loved it, I am pissed off at having to accept I can never watch it again because the music is just so fucking annoying. Kimya Dawson, whose music (both solo and with the Moldy Peaches) is featured vomitously often, is one of those chicks you just know owns "Play-Doh" t-shirts and thrift-store underoos. Beneath the 'fro and multi-piercings, I sense she's just another half-assed indie chick who likes to dress her voice as a little girl to earn the neo-pedophile dollar. Nice market to corner in such a subversive way, isn't it, Kimya? Twice the credit for getting your music in a film about a pregnant teenager. You just can't ask for a better synthesis of product/target-audience marketing, can you?

I miss Junkie Courtney Love. She was chugging Oxy's and Jack before Kimya Dawson used her first organic cotton tampon. She would beat Kimya up with her own acoustic, steal Kimya's ginseng cigarettes, and sell them back to her at twice the price Kimya paid for them in the first place.

When did indie chicks stop being bad asses and all turn hybrids of Patsy Ramsey and Suzanne Vega? When are the barbed-wire, watch-me-bleed types coming back?

Post Haste

The Washington Post has a lovely little database that allows us folkses to see for our selves who voted when, on what, and how.

This is as handy as a midget with a broom. And I ain't lyin'.

Click for The U.S. Congress Votes Database. Also, if you find yourselves wondering who is paying to get their gal/guy in the Big Chair, you may want to check out the kick ass little site known as OpenSecrets.org.

Screamin' Genitals, Martha, My Pants Are on Fire!

Let us pause for a moment and reflect upon the joyness which is Jhonen Vasquez. His wit is the sandpaper on the tender skin of the people toward whom it is directed, it's mean spirited and often petty, always articulate and original, and is pretty much my favorite under-ten-buck thrill.

So now there's Jellyfist, his new project with an illustrator named J.R. Goldberg whose own major hootie-ha appears to be this book, thus far. There is a series of frames on a series of pages, much like the comic books of old, except this is the first one that I've read that has commentary. I love reading Mr. Vasquez dancing verbally (I like to think it's like Pigpen from Charlie Brown) around Ms. Goldberg, only to have her swat him away like an annoying fly every ten paragraphs. He DO like to talk a lot and she apparently does not, at least to her audience. Goldberg also has an enormous flair for the grotesque, a point that will be addressed later in this post.

I have to give Jellyfist a thumbs up for a few things (and do not continue from here if you don't want spoilers):

1. The She-Car: A talking car that turns out to be a real woman who was transformed into a car by a weird guy who can ostensibly turn people into machinery that he can use. Another illustrator probably would have turned her into a robot lady. Cool looking, but ultimately cliché and boring. Goldberg makes her look truly...painful. The body of the car looks like a huge, pale, squishy meat plug with wheels. It lacks the shades of wry that would suck the "fucked" out of the up that is the She-Car. Also, as the car-out-of-woman maker drives her around, she can only look down at the pavement passing beneath her. It reminded me of "Gummo" in the slimy way it made me feel. A+, J. Goldberg.

2. Lesssseee....oh yeah, ha ha, bees in a guy's head. It's very strange and freaky and reminded me of a movie called "Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees". Bee heads are one of those archetypal things I don't understand, so they're fun to watch.

3. I love the landscapes in this. The characters are usually out in the middle of a post-apocalyptic kind of place with ice-cream cones and the like. I was watching Bugs Bunny with a kid the other day when she turned to me and said, "Where does he keep getting those carrots?" I'm like, "Dunno..." This is kinda like that.

The problems are few: It is colored in the manner of easter baskets and grandma dresses. Everything (in retrospect) seemed too mintily green. Secondly, the surrealism is often cut off at the knees by the Vasquez' self-congratulatory narrative about his creative process. Again, fun reading but ultimately distracting and pulled me out of vibe.

Two cents. It is what it is, yo.

James GandolFuckYou

A friend loaned me a DVD of an HBO special called "Alive Day" featuring the stories of Iraq war vets who'd suffered severe trauma. Nothing is more embarrassing and stupid as when someone uses shocking imagery to illustrate a political point that they're afraid to come right out and say. It wasn't even clever ambiguity, it was just splattered guts and half-assed attempts at self-righteousness. You know the movie "Total Recall"? It wanted, at some point, to be an action movie with some clever dialogue in the "Die Hard" tradition. Then one day, they were hammering out the script and (I imagine) someone said, "You know, fuck this. No one is going to care about dialogue if we make blood squish out of a guy's bullet holes like a human blood sponge." Probably some other guys nodded tiredly and that was that. I'm not sure what ideas that they gave up on for "Alive Day" but I'd imagine it had something to do with dignity. I went to a friend's grandma's funeral once and one of the priests was picking his nose (in full view of everyone) during the service. This reminded me of that except it wasn't as classy.

Here are some prime examples of the Alive Day suckage:


The first time we see a soldier cry during an interview, we see a long shot of James Gandolfini handing the soldier a tissue. Ok, they put the box of tissues next to Jimmy boy so that they could get a shot of the tissue hand-off. James, you're a big weiner for that.

A creepy, creepy mom who has been coaching her extremely brain damaged son in what to say when people ask questions. Ok, get this, she coaches him through a rendition of The Marines Hymn, his eyes, lacking focus, shift about the room as he makes lewd gestures that she's interpreting as expressions of happiness and love. This is the most disturbing of the interviews, at least to me. It was a prime example of every shitty way of thinking that got us into the war (e.g., willful ignorance, blind faith, nationalism) all condensed into a freakshow chowder of Oedipal proportions.

A young woman who fears her children may not love her as much if she can't hug them with both arms...the camera lingering on her face while her tear filled eyes nudge the fog of the present aside to get a glipse of the (perhaps tragically lonely?) future. Oh and the topper of that segment is the half-hearted rendition of "Proud to be an American" that she is singing with the rest of her family. Sheesh. That made me shudder almost as much as Marine Mom.

Americans know what's going on in Iraq, they just don't give a fuck. This makes any attempt at scaring us with blood and arms and dead things a completely futile waste of time. What a misguided attempt at scaring up some copy for Gandolfini. Please, dude, next time, bang Lindsay Lohan or something. This other thing was just plain eww.

Our Mother of the Clown Car Vagina

If only this breeder cow and her pasture mate understood how their attempts at reinforcing the "miracle" of life actually made reproduction seem about as mundane (and American) as a grilled cheese sandwich.

How long d'ya have to wait after childbirth to kick someone in the cooter?

World War Z

If you get the chance, read World War Z.

I have never cared for movies featuring zombies due to an overzealous, horror movie loving mother who dragged me to see pretty much any movie with scary stuff. Zombies were the worst because back in the seventies, those were pretty much the only ones that had a lot of blood and violence.

The point is, there is a metaphor behind the idea itself and I think that it is only lately, with seeing so many people behaving like zombies, that I can appreciate the subtext.

Great, great book.

Parannoyed

Here is an interesting article about a truck ad that uses Rosa Parks, 911, Martin Luther King, and the Iraq War to stir the fires of patriotism from within our tiny, Grinchy, jaded hearts. What I enjoy about it is that it's taking advertising to an entirely new level with entirely new points of view. I know I'm a tiny voice in a cacophony of screaming salesmen. This is total proof. Check it out:

1. Big trucks are no longer symbols for men who can't stand having tiny penises. I'm pretty sure that's part of it, don't get me wrong, but the primary urge is (of late) far more insidious. It seems that not buying an enormous truck makes you un-American! Sweeeet. My search for anti-suburban, anti-stupid, nihilistic iconography ends at my front door!

2. Icons of passive resistance should be used side by side along pro-war propaganda because most Americans are so completely clueless that they only know that MLK and RP were good Americans. They only know that because someone made movies out of 'em. However, they only saw the covers of the movies at the Blockbuster before they passed them over for "Armageddon" and maybe "The Great Mouse Detective". But what is important is that these colors DO NOT run. Especially if they're magnetically merged with the bumper of a truck that could house a small band of rogue pygmies.

3. John Mellencamp sucks balls. I'm pretty sure no one will argue this point with me.

The thing I'm beginning to love (at a distance) about advertising is that it is so completely shameless. We are the ambulances and they are the chasers but they have pie-charts and data on their sides, knowing what we want to buy at exactly what time, and worse, what we're trying to forget when we buy it. I wonder if they're honest with themselves about what they're doing? Do they come right out and say that they're going to work these bitches for all they're worth or do they nod knowingly at one another and allow the heavy air to settle on their souls vowing to some day, dust them off and take them out to the park? Is being human something they forgot to finish like an art project? Do they care that Americans are eating their shit up like a dollop of ice-cream on a piece of apple pie?

God this is going to be a good show when people wise-up. I say that laughingly. If people tuned into reality and stopped being a bunch of relativistic fuckheads abusing the perspective privilege, they'd be so depressed at what pathetic jerk-offs they are that they would probably commit mass suicide. And that would be bad for the economy I suppose. Unless you sell Kool-Aid.

Scars Are the Art of Chaos

jewish people driving german cars
what the cock is that shit?
but maybe it's like take back the night
maybe it's like how bleeding hearts grow old and swing to the right...
maybe it's like patty hearst siding with her kidnappers
maybe it's like south african miner killing diamond wearing gangster rappers

Sarah Silverman (from Jesus is Magic)

I do not understand the public outcry against Günter Grass. The depth of my disgust when I read that people were demanding that he return his Pulitzer and revoke his citizenship for Gdansk (Danzig) was immeasurable. He'd admitted (years ago) to being a member of the Hitler Youth and he has written extensively about the stupidity in which he and his countrymen participated in World War II. Obviously, being drafted is a far cry from actively seeking a position with the Waffen SS. However, we're talking about a 15 year old kid living in the heyday of the Nazi propaganda machine. We're not talking about a guy like say, James Frey who got famous and then infamous in the span of a year through an elaborate hoax. Grass joined the army when he was little more than a child and was later forced to march through a concentration camp, which freaked him out badly enough to change into a person who fought to prevent the kind of behavior that leads to things like concentration camps.

If we do not accept that people can improve themselves, we must simply accept that genocide, wars, and racism are a part of human nature. This is, to me, absolute bullshit and just an excuse for being a bunch of lid flipping entitlement whores.

Nice going, assholes. Why don't you go ahead and shake the hand of the nearest Nazi for sticking with his guns.

I like his scars and I like that he bares them to a world that obviously hates itself enough to disenfranchise him simply for admitting that he is human. He leads by example and I have to stand back and applaud that. Of course, not everyone agrees with me.

Charlotte Knobloch has decided that Grass' admission negates his work or that he's just working our tits to try to sell more books. The first scenario is pretty fucking stupid. Anyone who reads Grass knows how he feels about the war and it's not going to change a fucking thing just because he busted a few more balls. The second scenario actually makes sense at first until you realize that if being a Nazi was a selling point, we'd have fewer crosses and a lot more swastikas.

Most importantly (I'm going to catch all kinds of hell for this) Jewish Halocaust outrage is becoming a boring cliché. Stop whipping the horse, bitches. I can't sit through movies about it and barely got through "Night" because the idea that people do this kind of shit to each other tears me the fuck apart inside; the very fucking idea of hearing people complain about the mass genocide of their own while simultaneously bombing the shit out of civilians in Lebanon makes me want to puke all over them. Of all the people in all the world who could be setting an example, all I see is a constant barrage of "...the world owes me something". Somehow, concentration camp pain (unless it's Japanese "internment camp" pain or "trail of tears" pain; then it's pretty easily forgotten) is somehow more sacred than that of others. Unlike Günter Grass and say, Viktor Frankl, you've failed to set any kind of example of experiential based empathy for other human beings.

Oh that's right, genocide is ok when you're doing it.

P.S. bite my ass

Onward Christian Wehrmacht

For the socially conservative, watching the marriage amendment fail must be like listening to your favorite song die of cancer. On top of that, in a funny, feeble attempt at pandering, President Bush encouraged immigrants to learn English and history because it (somehow) allows us to remain “one nation under God”. It makes one wonder where he’d stand if people from South America and Asia spoke in tongues, eh? It is becoming obvious that Bush is screwing the proverbial pooch, sans duct tape (because no one believes in that anymore either), and glad-handing his way out the door.

Now, we must turn our accusing eyes toward the guy that is beginning to carve a really good, lasting niche: Michael P. Farris. Of the many socially conservative people I’ve heard over these past few years (because I really wanted to hear what their problem was, exactly), this guy is by far the creepiest. People get pissed off about Ann Coulter or Bill O’Reilly, when really, they’re just the loud shirts that distract you from finding Waldo. Farris is not the short-bus blitzkrieg that will be the (temporary) downfall of the Christian Right. This guy is intelligent, serene, and is calmly urging his Christian soldiers forward. And it’s working. This is the thing: when I was listening to him speak, he began to make sense. Then the Tin-Man woke me, the Lion, and the Scarecrow up and I couldn’t believe how good this guy really is. The problem here is that he’s so calm and reasonable that it is difficult to counter him properly until you’re far enough away figure out what the fuck that thing was. He's a believer. No, really.

Here is his interview with Terry Gross. I urge you to listen because he broke her balls six ways to Sunday. Pun infinitely intended.

The Ten Thousand Babies Award Goes To...

If someone at the RIAA had this kind of foresight and genius, they wouldn't be the hated institution that they are today, I may have bought a CD that wasn't from an independent label in the past few years, and a lot of people who don't own computers might actually have the money to buy 'em.

Soderbergh's ideas may never be implemented simply because the film industry could likely do exactly what the RIAA did and refuse to believe the fact that their days of easy money are simply over. Either way, I deeply admire people who are lucid enough to suggest new strategy when they see that the end is nigh.