Great Shows with Nowhere to Go

HBO’s Westworld and SyFy’s 12 Monkeys. I’ve liked those shows a lot. Westworld was laughably edgy at times, seemed like it was trying to reach a quota of F bombs and tiddies in some episodes, but had several excellent to truly great things about it. 12 Monkeys played with a lot of sketchy mental illness tropes, had all the time travel related foolishness you might expect, and used a child as a character motivation in a way that felt emotionally dishonest and a bit ridiculous to me. And the lead actor looks like a tired otter. But it had a bad-ass two-fisted style and some sweet moments of plot payoff. I love the first season twist ending about The Power of Friendship, and Kirk Acevedo is sexy in a way that I find hard to explain. Plus the lead actress (as usual) does all the heavy lifting on the show, and does it well.

I’ve liked both of those shows a lot, but I have such big doubts about future seasons that I’m unlikely to tune in unless I get very positive spoilers. The places they left off promised nothing good. Spoilers below the fold. Anyhow, do you ever get like this? Find yourself bouncing on a show because you can’t imagine it sustaining the same quality going forward?
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Edgie Comics: on TV

Content Warning: Statutory Rape, Homophobia, Biphobia, Eating Disorders,
Fatphobia, let me know if u think I should mention anything else…

Social justice score: 1 out of 5

So Archie Comics got hella weird in the Nü Millennium, with attempts at maintaining relevance by reaching different audiences. One of those tacks was to make a series of serious adult-ish comics with edgy elements written by Mark Waid. Now adult-ish edgy Archie is on The CW and to kill a minute I’m watching the first episode. Thoughts as they come…
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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.

–

Cool Gay Heat

Man. I wanted to share with you the awesomeness of Judas Priest’s gayest rock video ever – “Hot Rockin'” – but just since I watched it last week, it has been removed from youtube on copyright grounds. So instead, I’ll just have to describe it to you.

It opens in a weirdly side-lit gym, where the members of Judas Priest are workin’ the weight machines. Young Rob Halford, cool gay rocking man, rises into panel shirtless. He’s totally doing pushups and singing at the same time. So. He sings about how he’s working hard, working out, and he deserves some release for his manly energies. What will suffice?

Hot Rockin'

rob halford has done his share, he’s workin’ out

Only one thing. The camera cuts to the showers, and the guys are each in a shower stall of their own, looking at the camera. It points at the first guy, he says he wants to go. Pan to the second guy, he wants to go. Pan to another guy, and what do you know? Everybody wants to go. Hot rockin’!

the showers
i wanna go i wanna go i wanna go

Anyhow, next there’s a road at night and motorcycles, I don’t remember that part too well, and then they’re at a concert with like zero women, and they’re rockin’ so hard everything catches on fire. Hot. But if the video is still blocked when you see this post, you’ll just have to imagine it – and wish you were there.

Rob Halford is still super cute when he sings,
tho lo, years have been hard. Much love, dude. <3

–

EDIT: it’s back, babey!

Your J-Horror Messiah

I made this from a bad video capture off youtube plus photoshopping to look like an inspirational bumper sticker. It probably helps to have seen the movie Ju-on 2. If you can handle horror, it’s a terribly spooky good time. The ending is mean-spirited to the point of hilarity.

Toshio is my Co-pilot

Image from Ju-on 2 of ghost boy Toshio taking the wheel.

 

WTF Product Placement

Remember these guys?

white hair metal guys with puffy perms and glam pseudomilitary fashion

Autograph – Turn up the Radio

“Autograph” as far as I recall were a one-hit wonder from my childhood / the 80s, who performed this crowd-pleasing jam:

I was just perusing the good old days on youtube when my eyes beheld a surprising sight.

puffy-haired metal guys behold a cool pencil

Autograph – Turn up the Radio
Mechanical Pencils – Papermate

This video was paid for by Papermate mechanical pencils. Because as my partner quipped, “Graphite is forever.” While that is a pretty cool pencil, I just can’t handle it right now. I bid you good day.

EDIT TO ADD:  Seven years after this post, Todd in the Shadows released a video on the same subject.  It’s a hoot.

Guest Post: The Carmex of Music

I will occasionally be posting for my guest blogger. He doesn’t want a wordpress account so he won’t be making these directly, but I’ll label them as “Guest Post” and put his blurb at the bottom.

(art by Al Columbia)

Don’t hold out on me, Bruh.       (art by Al Columbia)

I told G.A.S tonight that I shouldn’t be allowed to listen to the Pixies with my headphones on. Invariably, I will slowly turn up the volume until it’s maxed out and my brains are dribbling out my ears. This is something unique to this band, and whatever hearing loss I have now I blame entirely on them. It must be some arcane musical wizardry, along with the way their songs always seem to end too early, no matter how many times you listen to them. I liken this phenomena to that of Carmex lip balm.

Once in middle school an outbreak of Carmex addiction hit the seventh graders hard, I among their sad, chapped numbers. If you were unfortunate enough to leave your denim jacket on the back of a chair, you’d come back to parched junkies digging through your pockets for a dip into that little yellow pot. Many the Trapper Keeper and Peechee were edged in medicinal grease after a tube released all over the bottom of a backpack.

I went cold turkey, and to this day I yearn to feel that uncanny burn on my lips. Snopes claims this is a hoax, but they’re obviously in the pocket of big balm. So, I say that the Pixies are the Carmex of music, damaging to your physical health but delicious and addictive. But I ain’t giving that shit up, and they never ruined any stationery.

drawing of the Beast from Seattle, a blue devilG.A.S. told me to write this as a blog entry, so here it is as introduction to me, the Beast from Seattle. I’m a big-time lurker so I normally never comment anywhere or even as much as write on Facebook. I wrote a term paper defending lurkerdom, but I will fight my natural tendencies and write something here once in a while. About me: I was born in the ’80s, am a big queer goth weirdo, and the kind of person who’ll break their keyboard trying to get every last cat hair out of it.

 

Levitate Me

What Else Is There? – Röyksopp ft. Karin Dreijer

This is a repost from my writing elsewhere.

Trigger warnings? Things that could bother people: the dark mood, time lapse photography of mold (eww), depiction of dead ducks that may or may not have been real, images of buildings falling apart in stormy weather.

This spooky jam is sung by Karin, who is not the lip-syncing floaty model in the video, but rather the tight-lipped weirdo in the ruff collar.  You probably know them from The Knife and Fever Ray.  Music is by Röyksopp.

I’m posting this because levitation.  People sometimes experience a feeling of floating in altered mental states.  Whether you’ve experienced that or not, there’s something about the feeling of it that resonates with a primal part of the mind.  It shows up in a lot of art – song, visual depictions, writing.  I found the use of it in The Lost Boys especially evocative.

I feel like the way an animal learns to move is by willing itself in the desired direction and flailing its body that way until muscle learning catches up to  desire.  In order to want to move the body at all, there has to be an inherent feeling in the mind that movement is possible, which exists before any knowledge of how to make movement happen.  (As always, I could be very wrong.)

Essentially, we’re all natural born levitators.  The only thing keeping us from being able to float towards our desires is physical constraints.  That’s no small limitation – psychic levitation isn’t real or possible, as far as anyone knows.  But the feeling is there.  And maybe the limits of our bodies are the reason evoking that feeling can be so eerie, melancholy, or abstractly powerful.

And on an entirely different note,

Float On – The Floaters

This song is the equivalent of a video personal ad for the singers.
I challenge you to invent your own additional verse for the tune.

 

Morality in Fiction

What’s the moral of the story? It’s a question you probably left behind in high school, sometimes because the morals are obvious (“well I’m all broken up about that man’s rights“), more often because that’s not why you came to the story in question (“there is no spoon“). I didn’t pay it much mind for years, but recently it’s been getting my attention. I’ll just lay out the thoughts in their own paragraphs, whether they reach a conclusion or not…
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