Fascism is Misogynist First

You can imagine a fascism without misogyny.  Many have, especially misogynist fiction writers in the 20th century – see the alien world where men have been enslaved by vixens in silver lamé.  Leaving aside that frivolous example and just daydreaming, you can see it, right?  Not from Shitler.  Maybe his sidekick, Couchfuck McBeardnazi, could in some world in some way be totally respectful to women, keep them close in his counsel in the tower of Mordor, march arm in arm with them to burn and oppress.  In practice, it never happens.  Misogyny is a first principle of fascism, in spirit and deed if not always in word.  As it happens, we also have it in word here.

As primary caregivers under patriarchy, women are primary authority figures over children.  To keep peace, rule one for the unruly kinder is “be nice to each other.”  Don’t hit people, think about their feelings.  Basic liberalism born of practicality.  To forge a brave new world without mercy, where violence can be wielded without restraint by the cool sexy stormtroopers, we must first remove the authority of anyone who would tell you to play nice.  We must chain mom to the house and beat her if she dares to speak.

Maybe that’s it?  Maybe not.  I’m sure you can find dozens of essays from antifascists like Umberto explaining the principle, or even writing from fascists telling on themselves.  I wonder if, in some unrealized golden future where all prejudices and bases of oppression are falling away one by one, misogyny may be the last one to fall.  Far more than racism, antisemitism, transphobia, etc, it has traitors within the oppressed group lining up to enforce its agenda.  Misogynist women are the fucking pits.  Not that there aren’t racist members of oppressed races, antisemitic jewish people, and transphobic trans people, because there are.  It just seems like a worse issue with women’s rights.

I haven’t been perfect on feminism by any means, especially the deeper you go into my foolish past (pre-blogging), and am not trying to pose like a saint of the practice.  Just pointing some shit out.  The real meaning of “woke” is “maintaining awareness of oppression, especially for self-defense.”  I want the world to wake up to the insidious omnipresence of misogyny and do some real shit about it.  We persist in our fascist coma.  Big sigh.

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Discolology: Nirvana II

This is the second part of my track by track review of Nirvana’s discography.  See the first here.

According to Kurt’s letter, he didn’t feel like writing or performing music, hated it, and thought that faking it was a disservice to the fans.  That’s interesting he felt any obligation to us at all.  We didn’t know him; he didn’t know us.  What does an artist owe to the people who consume their art?  How does that math change if the artist is toiling in obscurity like our FtB writing man William Brinkman, versus selling platinum records?

I don’t know.  Certainly no artist owes anybody their life.

–

Incesticide (1992)

When I reviewed the discography of The Dead Milkmen, I had to omit a dozen self-released tapes, to avoid spending a year on the subject.  Likewise, with Nirvana I chose to not even look at most singles and compilations.  Big exception made for this one.  I didn’t even know it was a compilation.  To me, this was the album in between Nevermind and In Utero.

It makes sense that Incesticide was a compilation.  It is, overall, weaker than the other albums, and has more cover songs.  Even so, I listened to this one a hell of a lot, way more than Unplugged.  When my oldest niece was somewhere between one and two years, she used to “dance” to this album by running in circles in my bedroom.  She called it “The Ducky Song” because we flipped the CD insert rubber ducky side out.

That young lady went through a lot of hell, and was a conservative christian last time I looked.  I hope she isn’t hurting anyone, and I hope she’s OK.

Classics

***** “Been A Son” returns to the unintentional trans undertones from “Negative Creep.”  This one could be read transmasc or transfemme, tho leans hard toward the former.  “She should have stood out in a crowd, she should have made her mother proud, she should have… been a son.”  Well, what if she turned out to be a son?  Wouldn’t that be just as shitty of an experience for the child in question?  In the transfemme version, the song isn’t misgendering our heroine.  She shouldn’t have become a daughter, she should have remained a son, right?  Neither of these interpretations was remotely intended.  It’s a basic early ’90s male feminist track, and that’s cool.  Thanks for trying to be a good boy, Kurt.  Still, if anybody wants to feel trans about this song, nobody’s going to stop you.

***** A Devo cover, in my grunge album?  It’s more likely than you think.  “Turnaround” somehow totally works with the Nirvana treatment.  I never would have guessed this was a Devo song in a million years, as much as I might have guessed it was a cover, eventually.  I never did guess -I found out- but it is unusual enough that I might have.

***** “Molly’s Lips” is the second of three cover songs in a row on this album, and they’re all bangers.  After Devo we get two songs written by The Vaselines, this and the next.  The Vaselines are like, how do I say this?, dark twee.  They are excellent songwriters.  Their original songs are brilliant, but like I always say about a well-written tune, they cover well.  Nirvana made these rock, and that rules.  Similar theme to “Sliver” (see Good Stuff below), but the druggy teenager version?  I don’t know if it’s romantic or infantile or diseased.  Cool.

***** “Son Of A Gun” is romantic with no trace of darkness in sight.  Nirvana deserved to have at least one song like that, even if it had to be a cover.  Again, The Vaselines low key improved by making it rock.

***** I have a feeling many of you have never heard “Aneurysm,” the last track on this album.  It is one of Nirvana’s best.  I wonder if I can find a good cover…  How about these very sweaty dudes?  I think they’re Indonesian.  The laziness fits the spirit of the song well, the way he just doesn’t bother with bits when he’s taking a breather.

Good Stuff

**** “Dive” ain’t the power kickoff of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Blew,” but it is a really good song, and sets the mood for this album.  It’s a compilation album, yes, but it hangs together extremely well.  This song kinda manages expectations.  You know it’s not going to be an album of big bops or aggressive speed, more of a fuzzy grind to soothe your grungely spirits.

**** “Sliver” is like my big poasts about childhood bullshit; it is an acknowledgement of the sickly confusion and social bondage that all human larva must experience.  It feels like Kurt’s take on a Vaselines song (see Classics).

**** I have no idea what “Stain” is about, but it rocks well.  “He never bleeds and he never fucks” reminds me of “I don’t piss I don’t shit” from a Dead Milkmen track, but has no relation, I’m sure.

*** “(New Wave) Polly” just speeds up “Polly” and amps the drums.  Like the original, I recognize this is a very good song, but don’t enjoy it as well as I could have.  Give me themes of self-destruction, not destruction of another.

***** “Downer” has some ingratitude toward god, which I always appreciate, and includes the lyric “don’t feel guilty masturbatin’,” which is also agreeable.  Cranky little teenage man of a song, but excellent.

***** “Hairspray Queen” don’t make a lick of sense and may well be even more diseased than “Mexican Seafood.”  I fucking love it.  A favorite.

**** I don’t know what “Big Long Now” is about, if anything, but it feels important, miserably soulful.  Well placed near the end of the album, and right before an epic rocker – “Aneurysm” (see Classics above).

Filler

***** “Beeswax” is pure nonsense, pukey delivery, good rock.  I like it a lot.

**** “Mexican Seafood” is probably a racist title by intent, pukey delivery, and a sicker flavor of rock than its fellows in mid-album ignominy.  “It only hurts when I pee, It only hurts when I sing.”  Mexican seafood is pretty cool actually.  Maybe Kurt always got his from the worst gagwagon in Tijuana.  Still, it’s a fun song.

*** “Aero Zeppelin” ain’t bad at all.  The album benefits from this trip downtempo, still I can’t help but rate it less than the rockity rock.

Garbage

Nothing!  No garbage.

–

In Utero (1993)

Part of what made Kurt’s death so shocking and disappointing was that this album was fucking amazing, and that was it.  No more.  That’s a venal thing.  Of course it was a terrible thing for the usual, human reasons.  One cannot help but wonder, as good as this was, what could Kurt have achieved with a full life?  I wonder that, but more I just feel bad that another victim of depression lost that fight.  It’s personal for me; lot of at-risk people in my vicinity.  Also, his death happened when I was seventeen, so I went through the stages, y’know.

Classics

***** “Scentless Apprentice” did not feature Kurt in a writing credit, but these lyrics really feel like his.  Maybe he just wanted his name off of it for some reason.  Had to be some sour experience with the process, or just that artist’s temperament.  The pounding drums, the ill lyrics.  This could also provoke trans feels of a non-biney nature, despite the he/him pronouns – “he was born senseless and sexless.”

***** If you had MTV at the last gasp of its withered worth, you remember the video for “Heart-Shaped Box.”  Epic song, strong visual art.  One of a number of songs on the album sharing the theme of human reproduction as corrupt and diseased, as a biological process that embodies exploitation and abuse.  Is that cool with you?  One could take it as misogynist, but that would be facile.

***** “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” introduced me to the story of that young actress who was railroaded into confinement and mistreatment in the psychiatric system.  I saw a small part of a biopic about her randomly on AMC one night, had to do some chore or go somewhere before it was over.  Anyway, “She’ll come back as fire to burn all the liars, leave a blanket of ash on the ground.”

***** “Dumb” is one of those alternative songs that refer to inhalant abuse as heavenly.  “My heart is broke, but I have some glue.  Help me inhale, mend it with you.  We’ll float around, hang out on clouds…”  Compare to The Dead Milkmen’s “Would you like to come and sniff some glue?  We’ll fly to where the skies are blue.”  This reminds me of an article I read in a Seattle weekly newspaper about gas huffing from a former huffer.  It reminds me there was a second-string alternative band in the 1990s called Gas Huffer.  It reminds me of how I heard street kids in the Philippines huff rubber cement, and how I heard there was a documentary about the plight of indigenous people in Canada that included a scene of reservation kids huffing and screaming about how they want to die.  It reminds me of selling a homeless dude a can of compressed air when I worked at walmart, and how I watched him take turns with his friend going into the bathroom to inhale.  My husband used to sit at the lunch table with boys who went from gas station to gas station huffing until they got kicked out, then going to the next down the block.  Reminds me of my old home boy Try-Anything-Once-Todd doing a game where you make yourself pass out, how he collapsed like death and his sinuses instantly drained.  I’ve never done these things, but I feel this song.  It’s beautiful, even if it’s up to no good.

***** “Very Ape” fucking rules.  It does have Kurt being snotty about fame, which is a bad look for rock stars, but the rocking is so good.

***** “Milk It” might be my favorite song by Nirvana.  I don’t know.  It again hits the theme of biological relations as corrupt and nightmarish.  But, y’know, “DOLL STEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAK, TEST MEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAT.  Look on the bright side is suicide, lost eyesight I’m on your side, Angel left wing right wing broken wing, Lack of iron and/or sleeping, Protector of the kennel, Ectoplasma ectoskeletal, Obituary birthday YOUR SCENT IS STILL IN MY PLACE OF RECOVERY!”

There is probably a beautiful and amazing cover of this song, but instead check out this sweaty freak.  He’s a really good dancer.  I recommend keeping a hand on the volume slider for when he starts singing.  In fairness, his vocals might be less yikes with good mixing.

***** “Tourette’s” opens with one of the dudes (Krist?) saying “moderate rock” in a pharmacy DJ kind of voice, before erupting into bargling pandemonium.  Great shit.  I don’t understand one word of it.

***** “All Apologies” is the last song of the last album, really.  You probably know the “MTV Unplugged” version better.  A gentle groan, an emotional crescendo, a goodbye vibe.  Completely classic.

Good Stuff

**** “Serve the Servants” is the opening track and it’s excellent, but this album’s strongest songs don’t do it any favors, in one to one comparison.  A lot of great lines, and you can actually understand them, so that’s cool.  One in particular could be the theme of the album: “Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old.”  But, y’know, in a best-album-of-all-time kind of way.

*** I don’t love “Rape Me” because of the subject matter.  I know; I go in for other edgy content he sings, so why not this?  I don’t know.  I recognize it’s a strong song, just can’t rate it better.

*** “Pennyroyal Tea” is folk abortion medicine.  This is a first person song about giving yourself an abortion, and seems to be judgmental against our heroine.  Or is it?  I dunno.  Feels preachy in a way that is successfully uninteresting to me.  But I recognize it’s a very good tune; YMMV.

***** “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” is a great fast-paced rocker from late in the album.  Really shows off Kurt’s mastery of using guitar like a necromancer.  “What is wrong with me?,” he asks.  In the middle of this hard rock, he makes me sad.

Filler & Garbage

Nothing.  No filler!  No garbage!  This album is too good.

–

MTV Unplugged in New York (1994)

I have never been any kind of fan of live music, so I avoided this one – except for the tracks you can’t get elsewhere, the covers.  I don’t mind the rest of the album at all.  Maybe it’s the motherfucking MTV branding that pushes me away.  I don’t like that shit, or the fact this was released a few months after Kurt died.  Feels scummy.  But it is essential listening.

Classics

***** “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam” is a Vaselines cover, bringing the Nirvana’s Vaselines cover total to three.  Big influence for Mr. Cobain, it seems.  The original of this song has bitter gay energy that lends it power Kurt doesn’t quite possess, but it’s still a very worthy cover of a great song.  It’s what it says on the package.  Jesus doesn’t like me.  Fuck him.

**** “Dumb” is a great song.  This version is alright, but I ding it a star.  Some people like the off-kilter fragility of live tracks like this.  It can work on me, in the right mood, but usually I prefer the original version.

***** “Plateau” is the first of three Meat Puppets covers in a row on this album, and they had a genuine Meat Puppet or two on hand for the performance.  None of these are better than the original songs, but if you want Kurt’s voice, accept no substitute.  The Meat Puppets were clearly a huge influence on him.  Check them out if you like Nirvana.  The bands have much more in common than Nirvana has with the other big grunge names.

***** “Oh Me” is my favorite of these three Meat Traxx.  Just desolate.  Perfect sadness.

***** “Lake of Fire” is the showiest of the three Meat Traxx, with fancy guitar licks and an edgy, ambling, witch-house spirit like a Fleischer cartoon about hell.  If the abrahamic faiths are right about the afterlife, the world is even shittier than it looks from our current and deeply shitty vantage point.

***** “All Apologies” is bringing up the end here like it did on In Utero.  Did they do the standard concert fakeout where they leave the stage then come back for one last song?  I don’t remember, not looking it up, just noting there’s one more song after this on the album, tho this one was played with a note of finality.  The frailty works well on this track.

***** “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” is what they call a standard – a song with no clear origin, tho the earliest known recording is likely by Lead Belly.  An essential Nirvana track, only available on this fuckin’ MTV branded album.  Get haunted tho.

Good Stuff

**** “About a Girl” leads off the album, which is cool, because more casuals got to become acquainted with the song.  You know Cibo Matto did a cover of this?  The Japanese accent is intense on it, haha.  Anyway, original Bleach version still the best.

**** “The Man Who Sold the World” is a David Bowie cover.  Kurt said, “I will fuck this up,” then he did, but it was alright.  It’s a good performance but worse than the original.  Still, if you prefer Nirvana to David Bowie, you win here.

*** I don’t like “Pennyroyal Tea.”  The arrangement on the live version works well for the song but still, it’s not for me.  I recognize the qualities others may appreciate more than I do, so it’s on Good Stuff list.

Filler

*** “Come as You Are” does nothing to improve the Nevermind version, feels like it’s just here because it’s one of their classics.

*** “Polly” likewise, and I didn’t love the original.

*** “On a Plain” likewise.

**** “Something in the Way” is a song about being broke down and sad as hell, so a live performance is a good way to communicate the feeling.  More than that, this gets props for not being any kind of hit, just being something they included because they wanted to.  Artists know what’s important in their material.  Still, I’m not sure it works for everyone.

Garbage

Nothing!  No garbage!  Everything I’ve ever heard from Nirvana was at least good, if not great.

–

I wonder why, in reviewing the works of Nirvana track by track, that I found less fault than I had with the worse tracks of The Dead Milkmen.  Perhaps it’s because the punk rock novelty act of the latter just opens them up to more failure – something ventured something lost, bravery is sometimes rewarded with booboos.  Nirvana, as out there as they may have seemed compared to mainstream rock circa 1991, were still making music that was about the music, not about the lyrics.  I rate the few Nirvana songs with shitty lyrics (that I could understand lol) more highly than DMm songs with the same weakness, because the music was the larger part of the experience.

Even adjusting for that, it’s interesting to be reminded that yeah, I really love this band.  Nirvana was great.  Kurt didn’t have to be a genius to have a beautiful voice and a beautiful guitar style.  Might not be the beauty most seek, but if it works for you, it really works for you.  You don’t have to say requiescat in pace because there’s no afterlife, but you feel the need to say something.  We loved you, dude.  Good night, again, from a million unthinkable ridiculous years in the future.

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Discolology: Nirvana I

Herein I’m going to breeze through the discography of Nirvana.  I’m ashamed to admit that the first time I heard them, I didn’t get it.  I’d come out of conventional rock.  Nirvana is remembered as the first big grunge band, but they were easy for me to ignore for a minute – Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden were all successful by the time I first heard a Nirvana song (all had major albums drop in 1991!), and they all seemed like a straightforward evolutions of rockity roll.  Soundgarden was like Sabbath by way of more psychedelic rock; Pearl Jam was like a no-homo version of that romantic eighties UK post-punk, by way of a drug-affected bar band; Alice in Chains was the bar-bandiest of the big boys, but like, a bar band that discovered heroin and forgot sex and booze exist.  What the fuck was Nirvana then?

I still don’t know how I’d characterize them exactly.  Grunge was an artificial label for a range of styles that didn’t necessarily overlap.  Nirvana was more punk descended, with a big influence of some very underground eighties alternative bands, mostly from the UK or SST Records in the US.  Who were these people and what were they doing, and what did Nirvana do with that influence that set them apart?  I dunno.  I’m no expert.

Clearly they were not unprecedented, just unprecedented in popular consciousness.  They just hit the right balance of doing what other punk descendants around the world were doing, hit the right radio and TV stations at the right time to explode.  It wasn’t going to be The Meat Puppets or The Vaselines or The Violent Femmes, as beloved as those bands are to the people who know them.  Maybe it had to be Nirvana.

Back to my experience, of not getting it.  I didn’t know anything but the radio dial, and even then, not its darkest recesses.  That meant Nirvana was a radical realignment of my expectations of what music could be.  Once I started giving them a chance – I feel like that only took a few months – I found that they were murdering Pearl Jam in my esteem.  AiC and Soundgarden were unharmed by the realignment, but PJ could not survive.  They were too maudlin and conventional, and kept pushing in that direction.  I used to love Pearl Jam so much, what even happened there?

Nirvana is more real, speaks to the world as I know it.  Indignity, piss, shit, vomit, mold and moss.  Everybody is tainted, everybody fucked something up for somebody else, fucked something up for themselves.  Love and relationships are for guilt and humiliation.  Looking at humanity is looking a giant pile of mutant meat that thinks it’s a prom queen.

And it’s rock and roll, so that’s always nice.

–

Bleach (1989)

Nirvana’s debut album was from 1989?!  I didn’t remember that.  I’m with the literal millions of people who didn’t hear a single song off of Bleach until after Nevermind blew up, when we were wanting more.  It’s very recognizably Nirvana, but more punk rock, less experimental than Nevermind.  Since a major appeal of Nirvana is their reality, their primal energy, a more primal version of their sound has complete merit.  I wouldn’t want to be in a world without their evolution, without the way they sounded in the end, but I like that we have this as well.

Classics

***** “Blew” kicks off the album with hot grindy energy.  “If you wouldn’t mind I would like to breathe…”  Perfectly constructed, no part I dislike, and it ends strong.  I have no fuckin’ idea what he’s talking about.  It makes for a mood, but I’m not going to try to put that into words.  The band already has me struggling.

**** “Floyd the barber” is one of the few Nirvana songs with a narrative, a plot.  The cast of The Andy Griffith Show rapes and murders Kurt while he feels too humiliated to move.  Kinda graphic.  The death blow is the worst, some Marquis de Sade shit.  This has to be a dream, of course.  But what kind of life would cause one to have a dream like this?  It’s an edgelordly good ronk song, but it also provokes some sympathy in me.

***** Broadly considered one of their best, “About a Girl” feels romantic but abusively so, like a bad courtship.  As I’m going through these songs in order, it is their only song I can think of that comes at all close to expressing love.  Isn’t it?

***** No recess!  No receeeesss.  No recess!  “School” is another song dreamlike because it says “You’re in high school again,” which we do dream about, don’t we?  For those who hated high school, is there ever really an escape from that version of society?  Aside from hermitage.

Good Stuff

**** “Love Buzz” … Wait another song about courtship?  I forgot.  It features an orientalist riff, to no thematic end I could discern.  Stands out as different from the rest of the album… because it’s a cover song?  I didn’t know that until the cursory googlage just now.

**** “Papercuts” is the first trip downtempo.  Very dark vibe.  Not a clear meaning.  Main lyrics I can pick out are “They come with flashing lights and take my family away,” and “My whole existence is for your amusement.”  Feels like somewhere I’ve been.

**** “Negative creep” brings the tempo back up, and has a hammering repetitive refrain of “Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more.”  Based on everything I know about Kurt and his scene, there is zero reason for a transgender interpretation of that.  It’s an old euphemism for losing virginity.  But if a trans dude wants to see himself in the grimly begrunged song?  I’m for it.

**** “Gimme back my alcohol,” Kurt demands in another chorus that repeats a mantra until it loses meaning.  “In your eyes, I’m not worth it…”  “Scoff” is essential Nirvana.

**** Skipping ahead, “Big Cheese” is about office politics.  Nirvana belongs under a bridge or in a firebombed flophouse huffing mold spores from a discarded papier-mâché Easter egg.  The juxtaposition of who they are with the subject matter is meaningful.  Kurt sounds a little like he’s about to vomit as he sings, “Mike says call the office.”

Filler

** “Swap Meet” doesn’t have a plot but does have characters, and it’s fine.  I just don’t care about these particular boomers.

*** “Mr. Moustache” rocks but I can see being annoyed by it.  I have no idea what it means.

**** “Sifting” was originally the last track on the album, but the version I’m most familiar with ends with “Big Cheese.”  “Wet your bed; wouldn’t it be fun?”  Again, no idea on meaning.  The music makes specific meanings or interpretations less important.  It’s a reasonable end of album vibe.  Retire to your bedchamber with a miserable defeated yowl, and fade away.

Garbage

No garbage!  This band was too fucking good.  I once had a cheesy friend who said, shame about Kurt, but if he hadn’t died, would we have the much better Foo Fighters?  Mademoiselle, that was deeply wrong.

–

Nevermind (1991)

1991 saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and then… This album, which erased my ability to love Pearl Jam’s Ten.  That’s still a trip to consider.  Anyway, Nevermind is broadly considered one of the best albums ever, and if you were ever in a position to know it, you know it.  These are just my extremely come-lately styled reactions to them.

Classics

***** “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a perfect lead off track, lead single, lead of a revolution in music.  I feel like I enjoyed it less for a few years after it came out, like I always used to skip it and a few other tracks that got excessive radio play.  But I’ve long since returned to listening to the whole album in sequence.  SLTS is rock and roll and it’s a joke at rock and roll’s expense.  I love it.

**** “In Bloom” has great music and ok lyrics.  Wait, wait… I’ve said a few times in this review so far, I don’t know what it means!  The song is a diss track aimed at my asshole!  Better than SLTS, they establish the band’s main themes on the album, and their oeuvre in general.  It just got a tiny bit overplayed for my taste.

*** “Come as You Are” takes it down a notch and has a real unusual style.  An excellent song, really, just not something I want to listen to very often.  “Memoria,” he says.  What’s it mean?

***** “Breed” is another romantic song, similar to “Fast Car” in that it’s about love as a dubious escape route, tho that is the end of similarity.  Is epic.

***** “Drain You” establishes another recurring theme which will get deeper on In Utero.  It’s interesting that someone who seems so disgusted with breeding A) bred, and B) had a sorta anti-abortion song on a later album.

***** “Stay Away” … One time my homeboy TryAnythingOnce Todd decided to yell edgy nonsense out the window of my shitty apartment, and opened with “I Am God.”  The punchline of this particular Nirvana track is “god is gaaaay” and it was on the mind, so we were like, say “god is gay” next.  He did, only clocking immediately after that he had called himself gay.  All in good fun, but the time in his life that I liked him the least, he was angrily protesting the idea.  I do think that he’s straighter than I ever would have been, good for him, but he bothered me with that shit at least once.

Joke rock novelty act Green Jellö put out a VHS tape of videos for their debut album, which was a fun time for edgy suburban white boys.  I have a dim memory of a few honest moments later on the tape.  There was a high angle shot of the cast and crew on set, burned out, laying on the ground, but banging their heads groggily to this song.  Green Jellö were the embodiment of fakery in rock, of the unreal, of Hollywood laughing at itself.  But they were musicians, and the opposite end of music from them – of reality, of catharsis – that was what moved them when they weren’t wearing papier-mâché titties and singing about Fred Flintstone.

***** “Something in the Way” is the one.  This is where Kurt lays down at the end of the night, at the end of time.  Underneath the bridge.  Big PNW homeless mentally ill teenager energy.  Black Hole.

Good Stuff

**** “Lithium” is a generic “im this crazzy guy” song, in that sense a cousin to “They’re Coming to Take Me Away.”  The music is hella good.

*** I recognize that “Polly” is an excellent song, but it’s a torture ballad like some songs be murder ballads, and I’m not into it.  Reportedly two shitty dudes raped a lady while singing this song at her, and Kurt took to the liner notes on the following album to tell those guys they’re a waste of life.

**** “Lounge Act” is about some kinda iffy relationships.  If we went hunting for a Kurt Cobain song that was about romance with no hints of a dark side, hm, that would have to be “Breed.”  Or would it?  Are they all miserable?  Whatever, this song is great too.

**** “On a Plain” is a good solid tune, decent penultimate track, winding down.  “I love myself better than you; I know it’s wrong, but what should I do?”

**** “Endless, Nameless” is a secret track, appearing after minutes of silence at the end of the album.  Nirvana was famous for intentionally making feedback happen before it was cool.  This is the noise art to make up for how listenable the rest of the album was.  Good job.

Filler

*** “Territorial Pissings” is real fun aggressive music, but the lyrics kinda suck ass.

Garbage

No garbage!

–

to be continued…

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Another Goddamn Tapout

I was working on my lotto ticket this month.  I have a lot of stories to tell, gonna do some up proper eventually.  Self-publish, most likely.  The lotto ticket?  Not like the others.  I was going to omit queerness, make the main characters white, and follow a conventional thriller outline – sell out, maximize appeal to stodgy industry scum.  It was to be the last thing I bother trying to pitch, but I couldn’t hack it this month.  My brother came over for a big visit with his kids.  More than one person in my life is getting pressed by mental illness.  I just don’t have the time right now.

But man, I wanna get this done.  Any of it.  I’m tired of only going part of the way.  And as far as lamestream publishing, I need to try at least once.  I needs loot.  I’m sure the advances ain’t anything like they used to be, when they happen at all, but who knows?  That’s why it’s a lottery ticket.

I gotta pay off this fucken mortgage before the chaotic nature of this dystopia ruins my life, and the lives of the people that depend on me.  If it wasn’t for shitler, I’d feel a lot safer in slow and steady, but it ain’t like that anymore.  The job security I once enjoyed is a distant memory.  The evergreen advice of the Wutang Clan somes to mind again, “You can’t just get by anymore, you gotta get over.”

Man, FtB was dead as hell yesterday.  Wonder what it’s looking like as this post comes up? … …

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Delicious Monster Salad

A “fruit salad” to amurricans is a pile of fruit flavored gelatin or whipping cream with a bunch of random bite-sized fruits or fruit chunks within.  The gelatin version, like all the gelatinous culinary horrors of yesteryear, were a kind of display food.  The ideal was a shining mound of shaped gelatin, within which you could see delicate wonders suspended in an aeternal faerie danse.

There are images in art that evoke this visual to me.  Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and other works in that genre, the design of tanks at aquariums, the hordes of winged babies in El Greco and other baroque art, the hordes of ghouls and skeletons and yokai in horror comic art or that “Night on Bald Mountain” part in Fantasia, toy and candy vending machines, sets of action figures and dolls… You’ll notice this getting away from art into the artificial.  Piles of trash, gardens, tide pools, roadside puddles or culverts with floating litter…

When I was a child I’d dream sometimes of what it would be like to be underwater.  Can’t swim, can’t breathe, gonna die.  I know I’d visited a aquarium or two and I believe I was around eleven years old when I read Jaws.  Of course there were fish everywhere, and some of those fish were sharks.  They would eventually eat me alive, or dead if I’d been lucky enough to drown by that point.

There was a time around age ten when I would be awake half the night imagining monsters into every ambiguous shape of laundry or toys on the floor, seeing the Twilight Zone airplane gremlin in every rainy window, imagining a tall movie monster in the closet or any given hiding space.  I was living in a gelatin salad of monsters.

I suspect it was precipitated by watching cheap scifi and horror movies and TV shows.  I do not know what managed to end it.  Maybe whatever parent had to come give me the business managed to humiliate me hard enough that it broke the spell.  I don’t even know how long that was happening.  Was it weeks?  Months?  Pretty sure it was less than a year, in all.

Anyway, it’s all in good fun now.  Let Halloween never end.

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Birthday Foolery

The weekend of my forty-ninth birthday, my brother brought his young daughters to visit.  They have very high energy and we have degenerative disc disease, so they get away from us.  How do you yell at them to prevent reckless injury without sounding too angry?  I pulled it off, but was on the whole much less successful at reining them in than other adults with similar aged children in their charge.

It was bad enough that the morning after they left I had a dream about failing to keep up with one of them.  Don’t get squished, kids.  Don’t get squished.

As Whitney’s songwriter said, I believe the children are the future.  Teach them jeezis and tell them don’t be gay.  Er, however that went.  But srsly, having children at this spectacular turn for the worse in politics, in the environment, in human rights…  That’s a fuckin’ mess.  The only way I’m going to have to care for a child again is if a freak accident kills my brother and sister in law both before their children turn eighteen.

I think about love and obligation.  My family was black sheep plus black sheep, and love was far from our experience of family.  What does it mean to love those children?  To even love my brother?  It feels so remote, like the sort of feeling you won’t understand until it’s tested – and then you better hope you pass.  I probably will?  I feel bad about that question mark, like, to what extent did I inherit the Antisocial Personality Disorder from mom?  But I don’t feel very bad about it, so don’t cry for me.  Just puzzling out my feelings.

I went to the beach where they filmed Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” but those tall beach grasses that Eddie Vedder was standing around in were nowhere in sight.  I think they got choked out by invasive blackberries.  Terns screamed and dove for fish, herons waded and spearfished.  The closest heron was surprisingly fussy, walking around with a fish, washing it in the water, waiting minutes before swallowing.  I saw the largest crabs I’d ever seen alive in the wild.  Not remarkably large, but still nice for me.

My husband made a very good cake.  My homeboy brought his kid around and he helped keep the wild girls occupied.  My brother didn’t have a breakdown.  Coulda been worse.

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Bucket o’ Frogs

Darren Naish is zoologist famous, and I follow his Tetrapod Zoology blog from time to time.  There he’s talked about his hobbyist efforts at increasing the population of frogs.  Since his own pond reached a point where it produced a surplus of tadpoles, he thought to donate those taddies to other people, carrying them hence in buckets.  This had a miserable failure rate, often 100% mortality in transit.

David Cronenberg’s movie ExistenZ featured virtual reality units that looked like a pulsating frog that plugged into your spine via a tooth on a string of intestine, if I’m remembering that right.  These were assembled in a shoddy factory with little conveyor belts of biological chunks.  That movie debuted in 1999, but I had almost the exact same imagery occur in a dream I had around 1987.

I was headed into a factory to observe things for some reason.  To work?  To gain entrance, one had to squeeze a woman’s naked breast one time.  I was about eleven years old at the time, you know what interests were percolating, but this was a cold and impersonal situation.  Was the woman even alive?

Inside the factory, there were conveyor belts of mutated and mutilated bodies and chunks of fish and amphibians, being used for I don’t know what.  The conveyor belts broke down and emptied into five gallon buckets half filled with water.  I looked into one.  I remember almost nothing else about this dream.

This one story factory did not have an especially high ceiling, and was also similar to the one from ExistenZ, but with less bamboo.  Me and my siblings had to walk long distances sometimes in Seattle, which meant passing many faceless little utility buildings that could hold any kind of business.  Maybe they were full of Daredevil ninjas distributing heroin for The Hand.  Maybe they had a bunch of scamway victims paying off their losses with light day labor, threading spiral binding into pamphlets for other pyramid schemes.  The one story faceless warehouse near you – what lurks within those doors?

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Platonic Inversion

My husband and I were discussing some issue he has relating to other people intellectually and he arrived at an idea that is not necessarily original, but was new(ish?) to us at the moment.  Hence this is something of a “brainjackin’” post, but I’m mainly using some of my go-to Philo 81 vocabulary to explain it.  My dude had initially spoken of it in terms of semiotics, which is a field I’ve been petulant about learning, because I have the same prejudices as the bitch that “citation need”ed the shit out of the semiotics wikipedia page.

My man said that it seems the most foolish people are often thinking in the most abstract ways, which is an inversion of what you’d imagine foolishness to be.  You would think foolery derived from simplicity in thought, but that it often comes from an advanced human ability to categorize.  For example, how would a deer feel about a bear?  It would recognize that as a dangerous animal and run away.  How does a human feel about a bear?  We immediately think of cultural images, which could well supercede our animal sense, and endanger our lives.  A bear will eat you regardless of how you perceive it, and I’m not saying every person eaten by a bear thought they were pallin’ around with Yogi or Gentle Ben, but some certainly have.  Even those who didn’t see the bear as friendly were still seeing it as a symbol rather than as a flesh and blood creature that will kill you on a lark.

When tapped for jury duty recently I had to watch a video giving a cursory review of unconscious bias, so I was in mind of it.  Unconscious bias is how we categorize people and other things we experience as a shorthand for judging everything and everyone we encounter on an individual basis – an ability that is literally prejudice but does have some practical utility in preventing us from feeling overwhelmed by the world.  Cultural icons and received wisdom can be direct sources of our biases.

What those videos don’t get into, because it’s unnecessary for their purpose, is that we can have biases about almost everything we do or experience.  Routines that save us the effort of thinking can get to the point where they replace practical thought completely.  If you know exactly what to say or do with every experience you encounter, sunrise to sunset, how prepared are you going to be for something outside your experience and understanding?

You meet somebody at a party that can easily talk with anybody about babies and relationships and work, but whose eyes glaze over when you mention music or art or filing for unemployment or how gender is a thing they are currently experiencing, or that you could go look in the corner of your bathroom right now and see a spider if you were so inclined, I dunno.  If you’re even slightly unconventional in any way, and you go among the banal, you will find out the limits of their ability to think real fast.

My dude tried to run a book club once, and all anyone had to say about any given story put in front of them was the same shit.  They sought the parts of the stories that matched certain expectations and hammered that button.  One person, after reading Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? said “It’s a modern retelling of the Persephone myth” like prose is all about simple answers, and didn’t bother contributing much after that.  The less people attended, the more pointless the book club felt, but the more people attended, the more superficial the treatment of the reading.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposed that what we observe directly before us was less than real, that it was all debased shadows of the perfect concepts of what is and what can be.  That bear is a shadow of the ur-bear, the ideal bear who embodies bearness most perfectly.  One could take that as an early striving toward scientific understanding, that he was really saying we experience only a fraction of bearness and that one could understand much more deeply by using science not yet available to him – dissect the bear, measure its bones, compare them to the bones of relatives living and extinct, overlay the results from osteology with a tree derived from genetic characters, place that bear in its evolutionary context, run cognitive tests on it, compare its gut flora to those of coyotes and deer, etc etc.

I think it would be more accurate to say he was getting at a mystic view of the world, where abstract concepts were more significant and important than the reality that is in front of you – reasoning more important than empiricism.  But humans have a remarkable ability to devise cognitive shorthands that give us license to walk through life in zombie mode.  Those cognitive shorthands are abstractions of observed or communicated reality, ignorant of the specifics of what is actually there and even superficially apparent.

It might be that Plato was, in a thinky way, reaching for the simplicity of walking through life freed from thought.  If you have determined the ideals of how things are and should be, shadows can be dismissed as unimportant.  Now, thousands of years later, we’ve perfected that art of abstraction.  It turns out there is no truth to be found in ideals.  The realities that abstraction helps people ignore are the exact places where the world is burning; the abstractions are where the memedog sits saying “This is fine.”

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Brainjackin: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Good

Hey remember J-horror?  Japanese horror movies?  Who cares at this point, right?  There was a long-haired lady ghost, maybe a well, a video tape, a tiny boy in his tighty whities?  I dunno.  On the back of viral success of a few imported movies, Hollywood decided to milk the genre for a few bucks.  Attempt one was pretty successful, followed by nothing but suck.  Probably the coffin nail was the last iteration of hollywood’s the grudge.  Ill.

When this was going on, I became aware of the genre, but knew about the same as anyone in amurrica.  However, very early in my relationship with my husband, we shared our favorite movies with each other, and I discovered more.  There was a standout among Japanese horror directors that does not get much love in the USA, save from the extremely hip.  That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Did I say Akira Kurosawa?  Is that what you read?  Go back and reread that name.  It’s worth remembering.  Kurosawa means something like Blackmarsh, and is a fairly common name.  It ain’t like the highlander; there can be more than one.  Kiyoshi thinks of himself primarily as a horror genre director, but his work has so much virtue that he keeps getting tapped to direct arthouse movies, like Bright Future.  That film is fine, but lets allow the boy to do what he wants.

My husband’s favorite film by him is Cure, but a few others hold special places in his esteem as well.  Retribution is the first and unfortunately only one we saw in the theater.  Pulse is excellent and had a shit hollywood adaptation filmed in like, a community college in sarajevo after it closed for the night.

The guy is a feminist.  I don’t know how common that is in Japan, but the themes of certain other famous j-horrors are sometimes low key misogynist, so it stands out.  He doesn’t use the word, but in movies that are otherwise full of subtlety, he will sometimes stop the proceedings to underscore that women are full-on human beings whose lives do not depend on men, and whose lives matter.  Retribution features a scene of dark humor at the expense of a traditional-minded male character, Guard From Hell ends with the male and female leads shaking hands and parting ways.  He drives away in his car, she walks to the bus.  He was once tasked with making a titty film called The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girls and made it without titties, getting into trouble with the studio, blacklisted for years.

That’s just one example of the ways he stands out from the crowd.  How do I describe what the movies are actually like?  He’s just one of the best movie directors in the world.  Sometimes his subject matter will keep you away.  Sometimes budget or other constraints have caused weakness in a project, like on Charisma, so I can’t say he’s perfect.  But when it’s all working right?  Easily as excellent a director as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, John Carpenter on his best days.

His movies don’t invade your space, hammer you with what they’re about.  They are quiet and reward paying full attention to the screen.  They make it hard to look away from the screen, drawing you in with something more than just suspense or drama.  It’s hard to characterize the art of making film out of sight and sound, out of medium and edit, of coordinating the work of others to create a single coherent story that transcends its subject matter to get right into your head.

My personal favorite was Retribution.  I hope someday a lot more of his older stuff becomes available in the west.  It’s hard enough to make the time to give a two minute song your full attention these days, and I’m asking you to watch two hour movies, so…  Make of this all what you will.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa good.

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