in other news, some words of wisdom. 

laura kipnis. and clothes.

i think i'm in not-love with laura kipnis.

anybody who hasn't read against love, needs to. this is imperative. i am stoked on this book for a few reasons.

a) it justifies my roiling distrust of monogamy, in so many smart, funny, and incisive ways.
b) it is so necessary. the cover blurb pretty much says it all, but isn't it kind of ridiculous that love is the one hegemonic power that can subvert all dissent? and that nobody has even pulled a chomsky and pointed out this fact? until this book, of course. ms. kipnis is the noam chomsky of love.

so yeah, read it. i'm not much of a book-report type, so i don't want to say much else. but do it, for fuck's sakes! if you're a cynical fuck like me, you can feel all tingly and redeemed inside, almost like you're actually capable of love. and if you subscribe to coupledom, well, you deserve a little constructive deconstruction.

moving along. in any case, this book led me onto an interesting train of thought whilst i was riding the bus home the other night.

how many of our neuroses, how many of our trembling whiny little human wants and needs stem from our naked hairlessness, which climate drives us à suppléer avec clothing. maybe alot.

my rationale is rather rambly and manifold. keep in mind that i'm not proposing anything concrete here, just thinking on paper. errr... virtual paper.

in a way, the struggle that is implicit in our clothedness is microcosmal of the greater human struggle. we want to be independent, we want to be self-sufficient, but the harsh realities of temperature mean that we have to repress that which is natural. our nakedness must be clothed in order for us to survive. therefore, from birth, we are dependent. the world is our enemy. we require mediation in order to survive.

note that this requirement enforces itself upon us much more strongly in cold-as-shit places like here en ontario right now. perhaps this is why nordic peoples tend to be more reserved?

even as we try to emancipate ourselves from other-directedness in many ways, we cannot escape this dependence. even as we try to escape dependence on material goods, clothing is a necessity. not for bullshit moral/ethical reasons, but simply because we haven't got a nice layer of blubber or fur to keep us happy and warm without assistance.

so why did this have anything to do with against love? well, i'm not too sure. truth be told, i'm rather disappointed in how lame this post turned out to be. definitely a step up, lameness-wise, from the majority of my lame-assed lameness that i digitally shit all over this fuckin page. it was a really interesting baked tangent that my brain went on while i was on the bus the other day, like i said. and now it's a couple days later, and i'm trying to recapture it without being baked, and it's just not working. but hell, i figured i hadn't written anything on here for a while, so i should just turn out some dreck to keep the ol' neurons firing.

btw, thanks for reading my blog, anyone that does. comment! comment! comment! make fun of me, i don't really care. so long as somebody makes a halfassed attempt to wade through this shit. and tell people about this silly nerdy blog that you know, and how they should come make fun too.

ok, that's enough.

awful!

ha, ha, ha.

oh, dear.

read!

dear andrea dworkin...

if pornography hurts the cause of women...
then romantic comedies hurt the cause of men.

sure, maybe porno demeans women. so maybe it puts men into a position of power yada yada and the objectified gaze of the male other blah blah all that deal. but these are merely instatiations of the larger problems created by film as a whole.

if the simulacrum that is pornography portrays a mythic universe in which all women are sitting around open-legged waiting for male consumption, that's shitty for women.

but nobody ever comments on the fact that the simulacrum that is the romantic comedy, (or rather the entire genre of romance) portrays a mythic universe in which men all fit into this pattern of greased-up pitiuary-retard loverboy, plein de confiance et joie de vivre. well, i'm a fat, cynical asshole nerd with no idea how to be all seductive and woo-ing-ish. and i'm sick of being held to an unrealistic standard.

so if porn needs to be made illegal, andrea, so does all romance.

and so does all film.

the thing that you miss, andrea, is that it's not pornography itself that causes problems. film is just one facet of the larger culture of simulacra that subsume us into the reality of their representation. so yes. porno might hurt the cause of women and hold them to an unrealistic standard. but men aren't exactly all hung like donkeys, either, nor can they all fuck for hours and hours on end without chemical assistance. and romance might hurt the cause of men and hold them to an unrealistic standard. but women aren't all sitting around waiting for some greasy Fabio type to come along and sweep them off their feet!

and we're not going to fit into your shitty notions of what men (or women!) should be!

fuck you, andrea dworkin!

(yeah, i know, ms. dworkin probably hates romance about as much as she hates porno. i just thought it'd be a fun way to frame this post.)

while walking to wendy's....

there is nothing more heart-rendingly sweet than an old man with a bouquet of flowers. it helps if said old man is wearing a top hat of some sort. the only thing that might possibly be more special, more precious and pathos-inspiring would be to see said old man actually pick out the flowers.

awwwwww.

haha. i've got such a soft spot for old people.

see, even i have the odd flash of emotion. what can i say, nobody's perfect.

le sigh.

well i haven't had much of anything to say for the better part of a week now... hmmmmm.

stupid school....

in any case...

check this "isolated incident." i'm glad that the government has cleared this all up. i think that the brevity of this story is just ridiculous. why doesn't anybody care about such blatant propagandizing?? it must be because of that damn Liberal Media.

something to consider.

what possible conclusions could one draw from the consumption of dissociative anesthetics (ie. dxm, ketamine, pcp) in terms of the psychoanalytic model? since these drugs are in effect dissociating given portions of one's brain, could they not have some kind of particular effect on the primacy of given aspects of the psyche, eg. conscious, unconscious, and thus have some form of applicability to psychoanalysis?

and what are hallucinuogenic drugs, really, but DIY psychoanalysis?

a huge bitch.

ha, ha.

oh, this really will be a huge bitch of a post. i think. i'm baked and i've got lots of spare time at the moment. unless i get really distracted. and it ended up being short, in which case, then i'll probably have edited this bit out and changed the title. so, you, Hypothetical reader, will not be reading this text in that particular parallel universe.

so, i had kind of a long introspective think as i was hitting the bong on the back porch, and i'm telling you, Hypothetical (potentially non-existent) Reader, that what an introspective think it was. first, some backstory, and ... i don't know what to call it. apocrypha? random mumblings? (definitely not apocrypha).

the fact that i did this while getting baked and whilst working out some musings in my mind (implicitly, for potential bloggage) made me engage in a couple of (i'm about to think of a name for them now!) tangential meta-ponders.

first, that anyone who thinks that drugs can't be a worthwhile pursuit, is just plain foolish. though it should be noted that this post is also reflecting the darker, more rambly confused side of high-ness, these are all intriguing lines of inquiry for the nerdy little pseudo-intellectual. as such, i am glad that they got thunk about (yes i know that's bad grammar, fuck off. i could say it differently if you'd like.) par moi! it should also be noted that this train of thought has gotten seriously derailed by this rambly hunk of apocrypha. (as i write these bracketed sidenotes, i really wish that they were footnotes. their length is becoming more footnote-ish, so let's hope i have time to figure out how to do that. this is perhaps again one of those temporally confused non-statements that might disappear in certain eventualities. though i guess all statements in a word processor are in such a state of limbo. end the footnote, goddamit!)

second, that i am glad i write on this thing with relative frequency. why? well, of course, snobby little pseudo-scholar that i am, i have a theory! it is that in order to develop thoughts organically, one must systematically expound them in language. i feel that this is a theory which has, a: perhaps probably been expressed, and b: probably not difficult to justify. why? because since thought is really shaped by language, in order to develop thought, it must be linguistically constructed. and this is not something that is generally done, right? we might think in the realms of language, but in order to think critically, we have to push the bounds of the expressible, attempt to express new concepts, and generally work within the linguistic paradigm to develop language and by association thought.

one particularly odd and pomo example of this is that sentence that i just typed which i have colored green for future reference. basically all i wanted to say was that in order to think one has to expand upon thoughts linguistically, which is essentially what rambling is, right? but in typing that particular exemplary sentence, i felt as i was typing the intriguing possibilities of the syntactical relations of the second clause. it seems as though that sentence also includes an interesting statement on the fact that the development of language is parallel to development of thought, therefore in order to expand possibilities of thought we have to expand the possibilities of language. to me this feels like an intriguing justification of linguistic development (read, what some scholars like to call 'perversion'). think of the beatniks here ... through manipulation of form, denial of aristotelian unity, etc., they expanded the bounds of what was expressible in language and thus allowed us to, bluntly put, think more things.

i intended that sentence to justify one thought, and in doing so it led me onto another line of reasoning. the fact that it did so is an implicit justification of my initial thesis - by expressing what i thought to be a justification of one thought in language, i was led onto a line of reasoning at which i would not arrive had not my thoughts been worked out in actual language. indeed, the whole fact that this line of reasoning exists is because i started expressing something in language, ergo writing in my blog. this ramble would not have existed, had i not set out to write something. i ended up writing something else, completely opening up new possibilities for thought - not in a universal sense of course; but in an entirely personal sense.

but, in an intriguing reversal of fortune, this baked ramble cost me the memory of the initial thought that sparked me to write this blog in the first place. see, i intended those two thoughts above to be merely brief thoughts which would precede a quasi-transcription of this long, back-porch existential think-a-thon. if i remember right, it had something to do with how my hatred for couples was related to my disgust for nomenclature... and, you know what, my little dorky hypothesis has been proven once again, cos i kind of remember where it went now that i wrote that last sentence. this is stemming from a discussion with my mom about how i should to have a girlfriend, etc. etc. blah blah promiscuity is bad, or something like that. honestly, i was baked, and i stopped listening and went off on my own little tangent... i'm not too sure where it started, to be honest; winter is really dating season, i think. it's probably cos it's cold... i bet there's some deeply evolutionary roots to that; i'd say that it's probably safe to say that neanderthals who shacked up over the winter probably survived alot better than ones that didn't.

in any case, i was kind of revisiting those thoughts while i was smoking tonight, and am doing so again right now, because i've long since stopped trying to remember what i was thinking earlier and am now once again charging headlong into new territory. if i remember right, the original thought was much more linguistically-oriented, while this one is about to take on a distinctively more sociological flavour that definitely wasn't there before. see, i think that my problem with couples really stem from the terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" and from the associated mythology of the couple. really, what function do these labels actually serve? they're a hell of a lot more hassle than they're worth. without a fixed, named, and socially determined ideal of the "couple", the whole concept really loses what i think are its worst aspects. by attaching these labels to a given relationship, they're essentially subjecting them to social determination. the ideology and the label are indivisible. by the power of social influence in its legion manifestations, once these labels are slapped on, the parameters, boundaries, and forms of the relationship are pulled from the hands of its only rightful owners (i.e. its participants), and placed in the hands of others. the power of that social influence was obvious enough to me as i was sitting listening to my mom....

don't get me wrong, she's a great lady. she's just a little heavy on the monogamy. i blame my dad.

i hope that didn't come off too weird and detached. the whole fact that i wrote that paragraph really kind of sucked all the fun out of the whole idea. this blog is like a fun vacuum. ummm ... as always, i had a lot further to go with that baked ramble. this is evidenced by the fact that this post is indeed a huge bitch, even though it only consists of what were intended to be tangential musings and a preface to a long discussion about derrida and some other shit, which i now totally forget.

in any case, i've got the munchies...

feel free to not have read that, if you didn't like it. just get blackout drunk and you'll probably forget how much of a dork i am.

ha!

(final note: existentialist that i am, don't read this as a condemnation of the institution of the couple comme tel. perhaps it's much, much better for some people to be 'boyfriends' or 'girlfriends.' but it's not for me... and after all, isn't that what this blog is all about? me? feel free to subject yourselves to the authority of language and hegemony, couples of the world! i sometimes wish i could bring myself to bear it again. but not often. though i'm sure you all sleep much better at night.)

vice magazine says, "fuck you, political economy of media!"

some thoughts on vice magazine.

the fact that it's free: let's face it, vicemag is full of advertising. it's not exactly a reasoned rebuttal to the creed of the commodity-fetishist religion. it's encouraging product consumption, just like everything else does. but it's free. vice breaks the illusion of the sovereign consumer. the price tags on magazines are meaningless, but a tiny fraction of the publisher's revenue. basically they're a symbol telling us that we are privileged to be subjected to scads of juicy ads. (why do i always rhyme unintentionally? it's like i'm channeling pope.) by shattering this stupid illusion, i feel like vice stakes itself a position of semi-ironic detachment. why? because of

the content: this content is the kind of shit that you just don't see or hear in corporate media. this is stuff that would make howard stern blush; and the fcc would brew up a shitstorm. so what the fuck, how is it here, in the middle of all kinds of *gasp* .... advertising!?!? it's like a big 'fuck you' to noam chomsky. let's look at this month's issue, for example. it's critical of unoriginal corporate-shitbag design whores. it glamourizes non-consumption (or perhaps ironic postconsumer accumulation?):"They don't buy any magazines or make any money and their place looks like a magical blowjob made of shit" ('magical blowjob made of shit' is probably my favourite expression ever). and, as always, the do's and don'ts are delicious parodies of corporate-shill fashionistas and their changing buy-new-stuff trends. vice's trendiness is, i think, one of the mechanisms of its relative freshness in the face of corporate co-opting. vice's edgy content can survive by simultaneously creating and participating within a cliqueish entourage of designers and labels and media. instead of having to run to corporate scumbags for advertising dollars, they're getting it from joey the tweaker from the apartment above the takeaway whose t-shirt label suddenly blew up. ads create more revenue for these semi-alternative advertisers, thereby encouraging further investment in these edgy media. then when joey gets bought out by a major corporate distributor, he becomes passé and mocked without mercy. thereby allowing the magazine to avoid co-opting to some extent let's face it, people love buying stuff.

commodity-fetishism, the inescapable religion: no matter how much marx i read, i still like to buy things. socialism might sound nice in terms of citizen-welfare, but a whole nation of malnourished comrades wearing eating and believing the same thing just doesn't sound like much fun. and dammit, if some little third world children need to starve for my commodity-lovin' fun, so be it. that's how the proverbial cookie crumbles, OK? vice is in many ways the perfect participant within the corporate media and the corporate model as a whole. it shows me, the vaguely sovereign consumer, all kinds of cool shit that i can buy. it doesn't really make any serious taste judgments on my behalf, unless i'm stupid enough to take the "do's" seriously. and unlike a tired old cow chewing the cud that is television, i've got some distance. print ads might be pretty, but that doesn't matter much if i choose to turn the page. (note my careless shifting between first and third person. note the general disjointedness and frivolity of this post altogether. i've got fuck all to do, seriously.) the communications theorist who doesn't recognize the differing powers of ideological indoctrination inherent in print versus broadcast (push/pull if you will maybe?) media, is the communications theorist who doesn't know what he or she is talking about. but at least vice is straight-up about its commodity status, honest about the fact it's shilling all kinds of different shit to you, pulls no punches, and is just plain funny as hell. so, like i said, it's not exactly a reasoned rebuttal to the capitalist mode. but that's not the point.

um, that's about the end of that train of thought. what is the point, you may ask? well, uh... that's for you to figure out.

to belabour the train analogy, it's more like the train of thought that i was on had a malfunction, and a whole shitload of the cars came off the end. because i think there was a bigger point to this post but i kinda forget it.

ahhhhhh.

all is well.

rethought:

all is never well, but its failure to be well is merely a facet of its greater wellness.