Imbalanced Humours

Life has gotten too raw for me. Since about this time last year, I’ve been feeling too real. When I’m mad it’s the maddest, when I like something I’m more likely to be hyperbolic about it, I don’t know. I’m a mess.

So from the depths of my cranky and miserable last post, I go on to expressing my hyperbolic love for something.

This is quite possibly the perfect music video. I love every frame. I watched it twenty times in the last twenty-four hours. Dig it, and then allow me to explain:


“Love Removal Machine” – The Cult

A music video is meant to convey a sense of the feeling of the song. For rock, that’s gonna be a lot of movement. The camera hardly sits still and neither do the musicians. It feels exultant. Then the guys do all that rock shit – twirling drumsticks, bellowing at the mic, trotting around the stage like fancy horses. The lead singer is like the fancy prancey lil bro of Glenn Danzig and just super cute in the video, but the other guys got charisma too. They have all the tropes of butt rock fashion plus frilly blouses and mesh shirts because they (improbably) came out of the post-punk scene in Britain. Even the patently bad things in the video – making literal reference to the lyrics, jumping through stacked cans like the Kool-aid Man at the end – are corny fun. I love it.

I’ve also watched this video for Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood five or six times recently. The song is less rockin for me, but the video. Damn, what a wild scene. Trigger Warning: There’s some stuff that could look non-consensual and remind survivors (probably rather abstractly) of badness. Other than that, this video gets me in da pants. Everyone in the video is hella sexy to me except for the tiger. It just ain’t right. I should also note here that this isn’t for everyone and don’t say I didn’t warn ya. If you feel the need to say you find anyone from this video (or anywhere) ugly, don’t expect to see your comment get through moderation.


“Relax” – Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Hot.

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Read Ania

Ableism, classism, all the ism. Do you have any idea how much it sucks to be poor? How about poor and disabled? An appropriately sad and horrific post on the topic, if you can deal:

Yes, this again

My household could use some disability income, but like many in “first world” nations, we try to get by without it. Why? “Fiscal conservative” policies aimed at eliminating all social services, by increments if necessary, have led us to this place where even getting a miserably inadequate disability check from the government becomes a full time goddamn job.

Seriously, all fiscal conservatives can get hanged. I have nothing but the bitterest contempt for that shit. You keep us on a razor’s edge of the abyss, you straight up drive us to death, because you think tax money is better kept in your pockets, in the Bahamas, in anything but help for the needy.

And as I see my people suffering, even dying for your ideology, your life becomes less and less important to me. If the poor ever strike back in this class war you’re waging, no amount of cruelty or violence from us should surprise you. Indeed, it could never come close to balancing the scale of history.

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TWD: The Misanthropocalypse Continues Apace

Spoiler Alert for The Walking Dead

As I explained in this post about morality in fictional universes, many entrants to the post-apocalypse genre of story telling express anti-human morals. I don’t fuck with that. I said there,

I cannot watch these shows anymore (TWD and FtWD), as compelling as the perpetual danger and lovely actors may be. I just started watching them in early spring 2015 and quit fall of the same year. It took an embarrassingly long time to do so, but I figured out what was bothering me about them. Both shows have the exact same moral, playing out the exact same way, over and over and over again.

If it was a moral I agreed with, that might not be a problem. But I disagree with it powerfully. It’s the underpinning of so much of what’s wrong with America – trust no one, everyone’s trying to get over, fuck them before they fuck you. Some of you might disagree that’s what they’re communicating, but it really is.

The show, just like America itself, makes exceptions for those close to you, based on closeness. Trust no one (except your family), and so on. On the show it’s the people you know the best – your enclave / faction / posse, whatever – that can be trusted, and everyone else is wrong, dangerous, deluded, or even a cannibal. IRL America, it’s your family first, and everyone else is trying to steal your tax dollars or make your children gay or whatever. And if you must stand in solidarity with someone outside your doors, it’s your race or gender first, everyone else is out to take your jobs, or trick or rob you, or terrorism on you, or try to reverse the situation so that white menz become the most oppressed group evarrrrr.

This plays out in our economy as a situation of total desperation, just a gigantic pile of everyone screwing everyone, the Hobbesian war of all against all. It hurts us emotionally and physically. It’s felt the most by poor people, but can be seen clearly at every level of our society if you know what you’re looking at. It really doesn’t have to be this way; it’s just the same overwhelming fear of the Other that drives the plots of Walking Dead shows along their inexorable crappy path.

In another post on Tumblr (“The Walking Dead to Me“) inspired by the Glenn Rhee fakeout death (I wasn’t hip to the feint yet), I wrote:

…The show is just too bitterly misanthropic… Basically, any generosity toward humans outside of your immediate tribal unit is punished by painful horrible death, because people can never be trustedddddd.  The writer is no doubt a rethuglican gun fondling jingoist piece of trash.

And yeah, now the entire Asian-American population of the southeast USA is extinct, so, bleeahhh.  Fuck those writers right in their filthy conservative necks.  Their brand of edgy “moral courage” is the kind of banal evil that passes for virtue in mainstream amurrica and I’m so tired of it.  I’m gonna sleep on the show now (& its spinoff), and kindly advise all good people to do the same.

Now that Glenn has actually met the fate he suffered in the comic books (killed by yet another white “alpha” male – apparently the most naturally dominant form of human life in lieu of law), that post is once again completely accurate.  I don’t know though, I’m not actually watching the show.  Any other Asian characters in sight?

I feel like I had something to add to this thesis but it eludes me.  Just, right now, on the eve of Trump‘s more-narrow-than-it-should-be defeat, this worldview has a louder mouthpiece than usual.  The place I work for sells fascist propaganda from convicted election fraudster Dinesh D’Souza and others.  Ideas that belong on the outer fringe of human thought are packaged by billionaire-funded haters and sold through mass market outlets.

But the excesses of contemporary right wingers are just tapping into something that’s already there – the rotten core of the american dream.  All I have left for this subject is exhaustion.  G’night.

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… … …

Oh, what a day.

Have to start it and end it with conservative bullshit all up in my cut.

It’s OK tho. I’m getting used to pain. It’s kinda got me miserable all the time, but in a low key way. You never know how you’ll react to trouble until it’s on top of you. I think I’m doing well. How about you?

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