A Clear and Present Danger

Remember when Harrison Ford was playing an action thriller man, who got annoyed with the president and was all like, “How dare you sir?!” in a scene that may have been inspirational to Keith Olbermann’s punditry career?  That was in Clear and Present Danger, right?  The one with the bazooka attack that was used without permission by a TV show?  I don’t care enough to look it up now.

Anyway, now Harrison Ford is playing the president.  I think.  I only saw the trailer once and didn’t care enough to look it up.  He’s taking over for William Hurt in portraying General Thunderballs McDickFuck for Disney’s Marvel’s The Cinematic Universals, but now he’s been promoted from generalisimo to presidente.  Who cares?  He’s el jefe, and now he’s turning into comic book character The Red Hulk.

The Red Hulk debuted in print like fifteen years ago, if I’m not mistaken.  I was hemisemidemi paying attention to comics at that moment.  He was like the green hulk but even angrier and more radioactive.  Could he breathe fire?  I forget.  Now he’s the final boss of the new Cap’m Amurrical movie.

I would have been sooo there for that shit several years ago.  Black Captain America vs. overpowered villain.  At this point, I don’t trust Disney not to use this movie as an excuse to shit on antifa (like they did with their cap spinoff streaming show) or otherwise suck trvnfk’s gnarly scrotum.  I’m still half-hoping irl one of the gun-havers who have sworn to defend the constitution is going to recognize a clear & present danger to it, perform a military coup, and leave Vance with a choice – stop the over-reach or join your bosses in hell.

Can you imagine if our current nightmare nazi deathclown president could turn into an orange hulk?  Ew.  Half the fanart of him kinda looks like the transformation is beginning.

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Minphis Don’t Play

U might not be aware, but several US cities have rap scenes with a lot of local pride.  One particularly infamous local rap scene which intrigues people to this day: Memphis, Tennessee.  Or as people with that accent call it, “Minphis.”  When I say “Minphis don’t play,” I’m quoting a random loudmouth I overheard on the bus a very long time ago.  As I recall, he also claimed that city invented pimping, for what that invention is worth.  I’ll accept this as truth.  Moving on…

I’ve mentioned the biggest success story from the Memphis scene a few times, The Triple Six Mafia.  And what did that success bring them?  A great number of Memphis rappers, famous or otherwise, are dead from drugs or violence.  Bad times, but maybe that has something to do with the intrigue.  For some reason, hipsters out for the “realest” music have latched onto the Memphis scene as Tha Source.

Why I am I fucking with it?  Isn’t rap homophobic and misogynistic and glorifying of violence and irresponsible use of chemical recreation?  True.  Some of it is worse than others.  Well, Memphis tapes are about as bad as any.  Call it a problematic fave.  I won’t justify it to you and you don’t have to justify yours to me.  I’m not the world’s biggest Memphis rap fan, but hipsterism hath perked up my ears to it.

I think it’s funny because this could just as easily been any city and any genre.  In my hometown of Auburn, Washington, we had a number of punk bands with moderate local success.  Some of them put music on CD, cassette, even vinyl.  Where are those albums now?  Will they ever receive this kind of love?  I really would like to see all the art of the world given that respect, no matter how pathetic or retrograde or disposable.

I’d love to see the internet become a true archive of the whole breadth of human experience, and of art, which was the cry of some nowhere people against the void – I matter right now.  Hear me make music about it.  But we can’t.  You literally can not find everything on the internet.  Even very recently created art has been lost forever.  As everything ultimately will be, so it’s not a cosmically big deal.  But it is kind of sad.

We don’t even have all the Memphis tapes – and mysteries abound.  Check out this blog post wherein a guy was researching the strange story of how one rap dude released some tapes with his voice pitch shifted, playing a lady rap persona seemingly inspired by an ex, and never copping to it.  Why did he do it?  Maybe we shouldn’t push the question, knowing one possible explanation is being trans, and you don’t want to push people out of a closet – especially now.  But that doesn’t seem likely to be the case here.  It’s just kind of funny seeing a guy named Skinny Pimp release a Chipmunk-styled song called Where the Big Dicks At?, then duck when people ask him about it later.

Maybe Minphis do play, after all.

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Bad Arterfinger

One of my favorite albums ever is Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger.  Musically, quite excellent.  Some of the B sides are fairly B sides-ish, but the majority of the album lives up to the band’s name.  It creates a garden of sounds that carry you emotionally exactly where you want to be.  Break your rusty cages and run, little grungers.

I don’t want to piss on Chris Cornell’s grave.  From what little I know of him, he seemed like a lovely guy.  I hope any people who feel suicidal find some way out from under it and don’t follow after the late lamented grunge icons.  Please take this critical look at his music in the same way you would if he was still with us – just art criticism, not an attempt to besmirch anyone’s character.

There is a politically conservative streak in this album that I don’t love, and it’s hard to know without deeper research into the man’s life whether or not it was even intended.  If it was intended, that sucks.  I hate finding out some art I enjoyed was the bellicosity of my political opposites.  If it was not intended, it was a failure of artistic aim.

This album predates our polarized times.  The ’90s were kinda polarized, just nothing on where we are now.  Call it the halfway point; getting the strong impression from where we stand now that Reagan was the real “beginning of the end” for liberty in the US.  Back in the ’90s, conservative jokes about political correctness were laughed at by most liberals.  Feminists were dismissed as too shrill, but with a chuckle instead of a two hour youtube diatribe and gun polishing.  Causes of social progress were not in better shape than they are now, in terms of their acceptance by society at large (obviously it’s worse in the halls of power now, and increased awareness of the existence of trans people means increased hostility to us from haters).  If Chris Cornell had any conservative inclinations, he also had lyrics sympathetic to class struggle, native rights, and environmentalism.  There would not have been an obvious contradiction in that, to the average thoughtless amurrican joe circa 1991.

A common feature in the genre of grunge was nonsense lyrics, meant to evoke a feeling more than to say anything real.  It’s possible then that any political meaning to the words was “vibes” and not a well-considered expression of intent, though that read gets pretty dubious on some tracks.  Nonetheless, it would be right to say there is a lot grunge nonsense on the album.  What is Rusty Cage even about?  A jailbreak?  A revolution?  Atheism?  I dunno, but I do like “god’s eyes in my headlights.”

The big questionable tracks are Slaves & Bulldozers and Jesus Christ Pose.  The former is the better song – truly one of the all-time greatest tracks in the history of heavy rock – and the more overtly problematic.  What does Cornell mean when he invokes slavery, as he does on other tracks and other albums?  What does he think about black people?  I don’t know.  The refrain of this song is that the singer feels he is being mocked, manipulated, and exploited by those who are seeking sympathy, culminating with “bleed your heart out / there’s no more rides for free / bleed your heart out / I said what’s in it for me?”  Remember the phrase “bleeding heart liberals”?  Talk about moochers on social programs?  Welfare queens?

If he’s expressing a conservative feeling in earnest, how far does it go?  Does he think tha blacks have gotten too uppity?  That welfare and food stamps are reparations for slavery that are undeserved?  If he isn’t expressing a conservative feeling, is he doing a character?  Is he writing from the imagined viewpoint of a conservative, to illustrate how they are bad dudes?  If so, the problem is that the song is too fucking good!  The singer is lofting with righteous fury, tearing the world down with his voice.  Giving that quality to the performance ennobles the words that are being sung, which means that if he was doing a character, this was fundamentally bad art.

Cornell defeated his own point.  You don’t listen to Kill the Poor by The Dead Kennedys and wonder if Jello Biafra really wants to kill the poor.  That’s good art.  It communicates itself.  You don’t listen to Gin and Juice and wonder if Snoop Dogg is actually satirizing the gangster lifestyle.  He likes that shit and is letting you know.

That is assuming he wasn’t earnestly banging on about how the real problem is poor people, which is a contradiction to Limo Wreck on the next album.  That album has a song called The Day I Tried to Live which seems to be about doing all the wrong things sociopolitically and realizing you suck, again, through a heavy filter of grunge nonsense.  Back to Slaves & Bulldozers tho, tl;dr:  bad beliefs or bad art, on a good song.  That’s a shame.

Jesus Christ Pose is more broadly problematic.  There Cornell describes somebody loudly pretending to be a victim, and how he doesn’t care and wants to see them gone.  My husband says it sounds a lot like he’s complaining about an ex-girlfriend.  True, but how much political conservativism is just a reaction to hating “bitches”?  Women are not mentioned, so you could see this as a stretch, but it is a very common complaint from the “male” side of bad relationships.

The song isn’t wrong about this – some people do moan loudly about their struggles in order to manipulate, even abuse others.  See complaining about people at work to your nine year old child, see convincing your lady you couldn’t help but hit her because you have it sooo bad.  But this is very comparable to a concept in Laveyan Satanism of the “psychic vampire” who must be violently repudiated and shut down.  As spelled out in The Satanic Bible, you can see that point of view.  You know people who take and take with their bitching and moaning, slowly draining your emotional resources and never giving anything back.  However.  It is no coincidence that large parts of the book were copied almost verbatim from an antisemitic, eugenicist, white supremacist screed called Might is Right.

Even if some people are bottomless holes of need and will never be able to give back to the world what they take from it, those people did not ask to be born.  They were forced into the world by the recklessness of breeders, and don’t deserve to die in misery because of it.  And most needy people are not like that at all!  Here is the sleight of hand pulled by The Satanic Bible in making that point of view seem reasonable – say that it’s cool to help people in need as you can, dismiss people who need a lot as psychic vampires, and then allow you, the reader, to decide how much help is too much.  If you’re a callous greedy shit, anything at all is too much.

Jesus Christ Pose is about somebody whining they are being martyred, and about how they can fuck off with that shit.  Maybe it is inspired by the kind of person who really should fuck off with that shit, but who’s to say?  Legitimate beefs have been written off with such attitudes, especially by conservatives.

Anyway, call this a nitpick.  I’m going to lean into the idea it’s grunge nonsense and doesn’t mean anything while I continue to listen to the album, but this does take it down a notch for me.  Off topic, some of my fave songs on there are Face Pollution and Drawing Flies.  That’s all.

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Fat Middle-Aged Genderqueer ASMR Unbagging Reaction: Trader Joe’s Crispy Dried Watermelon Chips

Need one o’ them there meridian responses?  Like unboxing and reaction videos?  Product reviews?  You like slow paced grainy video where the loudest sounds are packages rustling and fans whirring?  If ya want my body and ya think I’m sexy, come on baby let me know.  Sorry for rod stewarting at you there.  Point.

I referred to an inanimate object as crazy, in violation of my ableism policy, but I don’t know how to bleep it.  Enjoy this little walk on the wild side.  And go to sleep!

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Superhero Violence

Sure is fun when superheroes punch.  Nobody gets brain damaged or killed by it.  Biff bam boom.  This is less true when you get into edgier edges of the genre, like martial arts films where the punching goes on for hours and eventually some people get killed.  But if Captain America is punching a guy?  Spiderman?  Batman?  They just fly away and bounce, knocked out.  Beddy-bye time.

This was my problem with R Batts, as much excitement as that revisit to batmannery generated.  The initial trailer showed him beating on a guy to the point where IRL he’d be looking like Emmett Till, emphasizing that by having the other dudes in the gang watch the violence in mute horror.

This comes up in my dreams.  Last night I dreamed I was Spiderman, and I had to beat these super-powered bad guys.  But when does a beating stop?  In comics and movies it stops with the KO.  In my dreams, much like in real life, a person isn’t necessarily going to lose consciousness before the point where they become crippled or die.  So I punch this guy until he’s at a disadvantage and he’s still tusslin’.  Then I push his head against the ground hoping he’ll black out.  Instead his superpower finds final expression when he phases through the ground all the way to hell.  I said, damn, tell me he didn’t die!  I don’t want to kill people!  But his girlfriend was like, no, he’s dead.

The dream followed him into hell then, where he woke up feeling refreshed, the damage of violence falling away.  But he was in hell, so more tussling ahead.

My husband never liked superheroes because he identified more with the kind of weirdos they fight against.  The late Wesley Willis was not consistent about this, but it did come up a lot in his poetry.  Fighting with superheroes, not thinking of yourself as the person they would save.  This was not my point of view growing up.  I could be a superhero in my imagination.  I’m starting to feel it tho.  The idea one can punch this fucked up world into making sense is absurd on its face.  The face you’re punching.

Now we have Watchmen, The Boys, Damage Control, etc., looking at the other side of superheroics, with varying degrees of success and varying degrees of horror content.  I’m not really into those either.  I’m just pointing out a thing, not making any case for a way to address it, or saying it needs to be changed.  In the vast realm of comics I haven’t read, there is almost certainly one that would make me say Yeah, that’s it, but I’m not enough of a comic fan to be all that curious about it.  Feel free to drop recs anyway, or just talk about related subjects.

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Slices of You

Things are easier to cook when they’re thin.  You don’t have to cook them as long, so there’s less risk of overcooking if you watch what you’re doing.  And more importantly, less risk of some shit being burnt on the outside and raw or cold on the inside, which is an absolutely vile result.  I’m willing to bake or nuke something that comes with simple instructions, but otherwise it’s slicin’ and using a frying pan.

It’s also cool because you can get more of that crisp element of frying.  The outer edges and surface get crisp, and the thinner what you’re cooking is, the more of each bite that will posses that quality.  If it’s a vegetable I’m cooking, thin slices.  I don’t like the crunch of veggies, and thin veggies get soft faster in the pan.  Soft veggies for flavor, crisp meat or cheese… That’s the goods.

Even when cooking isn’t a consideration, I cut thin.  I got the idea from David Lynch.  Not to sound like a freak; feel like I’ve been mentioning him too much recently.  Some years ago I was watching an episode of Twin Peaks where Joan Chen was being tormented by (spoiler), losing her mind in the kitchen.  Her mental state was illustrated by having her slice an apple.  In America we almost always slice apples in wedges of roughly equal dimensions, but she was slicing it thin, like cheese or deli meat.

The scene had a sensuous quality, but maybe I just imagine that because Joan Chen is too beautiful.  Surely, she wasn’t supposed to be seen as erotic or romantic in that moment, not exactly.  But she can thin slice me any day, I tell you whut.

There’s an Electric Six song called Slices of You, and it’s not one of their best.  It’s fine.  But I think of this part from the breakdown, sometimes when I’m joanchenning an apple: “Everywhere I go, people ask me Valentine, what’s your recipe for love?  And I always tell them the same thing.  Cook the hell out of it, and SLICE IT.”

Anyway, I think about this often enough that I wondered if I’d already written a blog post on the subject, and I searched the archive here.  You know how many occurrences of the word “slice” there are on this blog?  I haven’t written about this exact subject before, but I’m starting to wonder if I have a problem here.

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JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Spoilers

Been watching yewchoob horseshit on the TV downstairs when I’m in a living-room-adjacent chore.  By default when I first turn the smort teevee on, it’s in this app that has a variety of channels.  One is “Anime All Day,” which has often been showing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.  JoJo has a wacky concept that the main character – the titular JoJo – is a different person from one season to the next.  This cursed family always has members whose names start with Jo, Joe, Gio, etc., who are destined to fight evil.  Of course there are superpowers and whatever whatever.

So there was a season a few years ago which is seeing a lot of play, where the JoJo duJour was trying to join the mafia in Italy, to become a “Gang Star.”  There have been a few things that jumped out at me as fun or noteworthy or weird about this show.  This be spoilery, but you aren’t going to watch this junk anyway, are you?

One.  People act surprised when somebody has superpowers, even tho superpowered people always wear wild-as-hell, very queer clothing.  But they’re all hetero?  Or not especially interested in boning down, that I’ve seen.  Ace?  But they dress like it’s always Mardi Gras.  What’s especially funny is they showed the childhood backstory of the supporting character Bruno Bucciarati, and his queer clothes were shown to be growing up with him!  Like, baby Bruno had a simpler version of the design, which added more details as he aged.  He always had hair like Louise Brooks, even tho he waited until he was a mob enforcer to add the little girl barrettes.

Two.  Bruno is the underboss of his lil squad of supergangsters, and is showing JoJo around.  One of the gang tries to prank JoJoJo by pissing in a teacup and handing it to him.  Now, this shit aired on TV in Japan, I imagine in an adult-oid-esque-ish time slot somewhere somehow, so there was no dongling on display.  They just showed a stream coming out from behind his hand, splashing in cup, steaming.  Then, “You have to drink this tea because I have offered it.  Don’t be rude.”

JoJoJoJo impresses the guys by drinking the whole mug.  They’re grossed out and amazed but surmise, correctly, he used a superpower to avoid swallowin’ that juice.  But here’s the thing.  That shit passed your lips, man.  You inhaled the vapors.  I don’t care if you transformed your teeth into jellyfish that could hold it until you spit it out later.  That’s just weird.  At that rate, you might as well swallow it.  I don’t know.  Maybe he had gout.

Three.  Trish Una is cute and cool.  The mob boss’s daughter.  Trish and Bruno are the obvious standout characters of the season, both looking way cuter and cooler than the JoJo.  Megan Thee Stallion did a cosplay of this character once, so you know she’s a winner.

People with superpowers have an inhuman projection of that power called a “stand,” which makes them “stand users.”  The stands are usually (if not always) named after rock or pop songs or bands.  Trish’s stand is called “Spice Girl.”  This gives me a Trish connection: Bébé Mélange is a joke off “Baby Spice“+”The Spice Melange.”  I can give more history on that in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Four.  The stands are named after music.  This shit would not fly in the USA, and good for Japan, frankly.  JoJo’s stand is named after Prince’s album The Gold Experience, Bruno’s is named Sticky Fingers after a Rolling Stones album, a character named Mista has a stand called Sex Pistols, and the big bad guy’s stand is named King Crimson.  One of the bad guys is ノトーリアス・B・I・G.  I’m tripping.

Five.  The best moment of the season (that I watched only in snipped moments) was when Bruno is taking Trish to see her father the mysterious mob boss.   They have this moment of tender melodrama, where she’s afraid of how it will go, and he’s reassuring, and she tries to act tough.  They hold hands as the elevator ascends.

Suddenly, Trish is gone.  Serious expression – what happened?  Then it’s revealed Bruno is still holding her hand – which is severed at the wrist.  It spews blood everywhere while he yells NANI?!! NANIIII?!?! with his eyes bugging out and wiggling.  The comedy, which I’m pretty sure was intentional, came from the contrast of the quiet, brooding, intense moment of dignity, of characters asserting their self-possession and humanity, contrasted with home boy losing his shit anime-style.

“Bizarre Adventure” living up to its name.  I’m down.  But still… Stop me before I weeb again.

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Make Your Own

There’s this song by Triple Six Mafia called Bin Laden Weed.  It’s actually got some emotional heft to it, for a rap song.  Usual content warnings for rap: misogyny, violence, self-harm, drug abuse, homophobia, some of those worse than others.  Anyway, I listened to this like a thousand times before I realized the recipe is right there in the chorus.  You too can make your own Bin Laden weed!

It’s “three types of weed grown all together,” and those types are “hydro … light green … bobby brown.”  How do you grow them together?  Just the same soil?  Grafting?  If you graft, what precise arrangement mingles their properties to produce this stuff?  We don’t have specifics, but we do have ingredients.  And I think at least one guy from this band is still alive, so maybe he can let us know.

Let us know!

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Igon and the Joy of Overacting

There’s a guy in the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree named Igon, who is just deeply hilarious.  The first time you become aware of him, he’s yelling and moaning in the distance.  As you approach, you find a crippled guy laying in a heap, alternating between over-wrought sobs and wailing about his agony, and thunderous self-righteous rage at the enemy who has laid him low.  CURSE YOU BAYLE!  oh, take mercy upon my broken body, do not savage me so.

Overacting is really good for a laugh.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I was drowning in it; I only see it occasionally.  This clip from the old cartoon Home Movies illustrates:

What can I say?  Me like funny voice.

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Jimmy Carter

it’s time.  electric six, the cheesy sex jokester band of early millennium, was moved by bush II to write a few political songs.  the spirit feels more appropriate than ever, of course.  clown band song for clown world.

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