Signifying Nothing

By in ohferfucksake, world football No Comments

Liverpool have never won away from home in Europe against an English team, they have scored only twice in four previous Champions League games at Chelsea and they have not scored three goals there in 20 years.

And Liverpool will have to create history by becoming the first visiting side to ever score three times at Stamford Bridge in a European match.

That is the measure of the task facing Liverpool with everything stacked against them as they face their 300th match in European competition, and their 169th in the European Cup.

I don’t watch any other sports, so I don’t know if this is the case for announcers and commentators anywhere you go, but jesus, I’m so fucking sick of hearing irrelevant statistics and trivia passing for informative commentary.

All that matters is what these particular 22 to 28 players do on this field on this date. The rest is just gravy for people with far too much time on their hands. As often as players change clubs, it doesn’t make a frisky fuck’s worth of difference what Liverpool teams from five years ago did, let alone teams from the late ’80s. It has absolutely no predictive potential for this game. None. Zero. Zilch. Liverpool will either win or lose, and it will be because of, again, what the two teams do on the field, not because of what players representing the same club did when today’s stars were still in elementary school. You could flip a coin and have just as much chance of predicting the result as any of these data-hoarding pack rats will. Anybody remember that helpful saying, “Correlation, not causation”?

I was ready to firebomb my tv last summer during the Euro championships, having to listen to incessant yammering throughout the last half of June about how Spain hadn’t won the Euro title since 1964, how they didn’t win often when wearing their mustard-yellow away jerseys, how they had never won a game in Switzerland when the temperature was below eighty degrees while fielding a team in a 4-4-2 formation with a striker born with his sun in Aries and his moon in Aquarius. The fact that absolutely none of that ultimately meant the slightest fucking thing won’t matter. I’m sure by next year, in South Africa, they’ll be babbling about how Spain has never gotten past the quarterfinals at the World Cup, how they don’t do well against France, and on and on.

Watching the FSC anchors – the worst of the bunch – try to make predictions from goat entrails, tea leaves and numerology couldn’t be any more mind-numbingly stupifying. Maybe, to some extent, it’s the same problem as it relates to regular news and cable — with 24 hours of airtime, you gotta talk about something. But oh, how I wish people could just refrain from talking when they don’t have anything worthwhile to say.

Not just during a televised soccer game, but during life in general, for that matter.

Memento Mori

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion, the big sleep No Comments

Head, meet desk. Head, desk. HeadeskheaddeskheaddeskjesuswhatafuckingMORON.

If you only go around once, then the main thing is to have fun. If you start by admitting that from cradle to tomb it isn’t that long of a stay, then life is a cabaret, old chum, and so, by the way, is Wall Street. There is a bumper sticker favored by some of the recently rich that proclaims “he who dies with the most toys wins.” This is indeed the moral philosophy of those who believe that death is the final closing bell. Materialism, hedonism and Stairmasters are what people do until the clock stops ticking.

Hey, fuckwit, ever heard of Epicurus?

Back to our wretched economy. We are in this sorry state because those managing our production and our wealth are in many cases free from moral constraint.

Sort of true, but not in the way he means. Actually, we’re in it because of thirty years of deregulatory fever,which, though bipartisan (thanks for repealing Glass-Steagall, Bill!), was primarily sponsored by the party that prattles on endlessly about, um, morals and values and Jeebus. If you want to argue that they aren’t really true Christians because they don’t interpret an ancient book of fortune cookie sayings the same way you do, if you want to put on your Grand Inquisitor robes and go root out all the impure people corrupting the faith, well, then go on with your bad self already! If you need me, I’ll be over here not giving the faintest fuck.

When people believed in heaven and hell, there was no doubt as to the preferred destination. The point of life was to build a stairway to paradise. Which doesn’t mean that everyone behaved perfectly. The world was a very cruel place. But most people did treat others better than they might have, especially as they grew older, because they really did believe in a Judgment Day.

Wait, “most” people did treat others better than they “might have”? Where did this specifically vague assertion come from, other than somewhere far up your colon? It sure wasn’t from history. And let me make sure I have this — monotheism gets the credit for humans not existing purely to murder and torture each other for fun? Animals don’t have religion either, you stupid motherfucker, and they don’t even act like that. And are you aware that “belief in the afterlife” is by no means a simple thing to summarize?

Perhaps the answer is a leader who speaks to our shared values. We are individuals, but if we can also see ourselves as part of a whole, we can put down our toys and concern ourselves with that whole, which will go on forever.

Hey, fuckwit, ever heard of Buddhism? Or even Taoism?

Anyway, what this idiot seems unable to grasp is that this absurd caricature he uses, this image of a guy furiously rutting at orgies every day while trying to jab a syringe into his arm without dropping the turkey leg he’s frantically devouring, is based in fear. Someone who acted anything like that would be betraying a fear of death that probably doesn’t apply to people who have thought long and hard about God, the universe, and the nature of consciousness, only to conclude that there is no “you” when the brain shuts down and the heart stops beating, and that your thoughts and feelings don’t exist independently of the brain and sensory organs that gave rise to them to begin with. The only reason for someone to worry about death would be for the sake of any dependents they’re leaving behind. And as the previously-mentioned Epicurus knew thousands of years ago, immediate sensual gratification is not the only kind of enjoyment, and maybe not even the best kind. Scintillating conversations with good friends, contemplation of art, and yes, even the inherent pleasure in helping others and making them happy – unrelated to any self-serving ulterior motive, such as the desire for a reward from a deity – are all good enough. What a pathetic, shallow, limited mind someone must have to not understand that.

Frankly, I’m always glad to hear from these people who automatically assume, like Dostoevsky, that “without God, everything is permitted!” I like to keep one eye on bastards like that, because this transparent projection tells me that the only thing keeping them from indulging those barbaric appetites is fear of cosmic retribution, so should they ever lose their faith, make sure to never turn your back on them.

Farther, My God, to Thee

By in religion, science, the big sleep No Comments

This doesn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t it be a given by now that the people who talk the most about their faith (or whatever their hobbyhorse is) are trying to convince themselves of its validity more than anyone else?

There are lots of books to read dealing with the evolutionary roots of religious faith, or more broadly, our conceptual ability that allows us to have abstract ideas about invisible men in the sky who want you to behave a certain way. One thing I’ve taken away from all those is the suspicion that deep down, there’s some part of the brain that just refuses to buy into whatever conceptual fantasies the cerebral cortex dreams up. No matter how much we can dazzle ourselves with our own bullshit theories, we know somewhere underneath it all when we’re just pulling ideas out of thin air and adding a lot of wishful thinking. Obviously, in the ancestral environment, the ability to accurately perceive empirical reality and react to it would have been absolutely necessary, and I imagine this is what kicks in when faced with life-or-death situations. When believers find themselves hooked up to tubes with a heart monitor beeping nearby, suddenly all that blithe talk about heaven and Jesus doesn’t have the same hypnotic power anymore.

The Right of the People to Deliver Roundhouse Kicks Shall Not be Infringed

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

Apparently all those Chuck Norris jokes have driven the man insane.

During an appearance on the Glen Beck radio show he promised that if things get any worse from his point of view he may “run for president of Texas.” The martial artist/actor/activist claims that Texas was never formally a part of the United States in the first place and that if rebellion is to come through secession Texas would lead the way.

He continues; calling on a second American Revolution; “…we’ve bastardized the First Amendment, reinterpreted America’s religious history and secularized our society until we ooze skepticism and circumvent religion on every level of public and private life.

How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?

Personally, I think we should sell Texas back to Mexico before this happens (it’s something we should do on general principle anyway; this just makes it more imperative). Let Mr. Skintight Jeans fight the drug cartels for his independence.

Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun

By in extraordinary popular delusions, jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake No Comments

It’s funny seeing comments on a liberal blog like Digby’s that buy into the idea that a bunch of beer-bellied yahoos with hunting rifles are going to fight off the government when they come to round us all up for re-education camp for whatever reason. Not as funny as hearing Wayne LaPierre (wonder what the NRA rank-and-file think of that Frenchie name) remix Mao’s famous slogan about power and the barrel of a gun, but still funny nonetheless.

At a time when technology wasn’t much more advanced than cannons and muskets, it made sense for a young, weak nation with hostile natives on one side and an angry empire on the other to see value in the idea of citizen militias where every able-bodied adult knew how to use a gun (though the idea that ordinary people could perform just as well in actual battle as trained soldiers didn’t last very long). Two and a half centuries later, though, if the state wants to annihilate you, well, you’re as good as dead. Sorry, that’s just how it is. Maybe you Wolverines-wannabes should stop stroking this apocalyptic death wish fantasy of yours where you have to live in caves taking potshots at army troops while stockpiling first-aid kits, 55-gallon drums of rice and beans, and bartering with rolls of toilet paper, and just keep on working with the imperfect system we have to keep things from ever getting to that point.

Besides, get the fuck real. Why would it ever come to that? Why would the government ever feel the need to crack down in such a heavy-handed way? We are talking about the same sedentary, bovine American populace here, aren’t we? Is someone planning to outlaw beer, porn, potato chips and cigarettes? Because there isn’t a whole lot else that would ever get this nation off the sofa and marching down the street with pitchforks. We just learned what kind of tyrannical administration we had been living under for the past eight years, and this news was greeted with a collective…yawn. Like Matt Taibbi said about the 9/11 Truthers, this kind of thing would only be necessary in a nation where the people were actually a threat to govern themselves.

Unintended Consequences

By in books, education, unintended consequences No Comments

Okay. Obligatory disclaimers:

I am all in favor of reading for challenge as much as contentment and escapism. I wholeheartedly concur with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. Turn off the tv, the computer, and go read a book, preferably one that gives you a new way of looking at or thinking about the world.

However.

Yes, they sure did read some subversive material back in the sixties. And what good did it do? The hippies turned into the yuppies. David Brooks’s BoBos. The fucking New Agers, for fuck’s sake! I see a lot of smug back-patting about stopping a war that they didn’t really stop, but I don’t see a whole lot of lingering influence from those incendiary authors among today’s graying boomers. Didn’t we hear about how the world would be different once they started running things? Yeah, um, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the two boomer presidents. Stick that in your bong and smoke it.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans — those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents’ dismay?

He then — unwittingly, apparently — answers his own question.

A new survey of the attitudes of American college students published by the University of California at Los Angeles found that two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as “middle of the road” or “conservative.”

The hell you say. Kids who grew up listening to their boring old parents, aunts and uncles droning on about Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury found that the best way to rebel was by becoming…conservative? Who’d’a thunk it? Has anyone thought to make a sitcom based on this idea yet?

I do agree with the professor quoted who sees this sort of pedestrian mentality in students as being reflective of growing up during the years of conservative backlash from 1980 onward. Really, why should they care about reading for its own sake? What good is that going to do them in the “real” world? Don’t we all know successful businesspeople who are just plain dumb? And don’t we know intelligent, well-read, creative people who scrape by on minimum-wage jobs because no employer gives a shit about that liberal arts degree? I mean, of course I wish it weren’t so, but this is the logical end result of a Puritan culture that only cares about practical, lucrative results. It’s not today’s students’ fault that they’ve internalized those lessons all too well.

Today’s toddlers and infants, though — those little tykes should be very entertaining in a couple decades.

Saturday Shuffle

By in music, saturday shuffle No Comments

  1. One Day as a Lion – Wild International
  2. Kyuss — Demon Cleaner
  3. The Future Sound of London — Slider
  4. The Dead Milkmen — The Thing That Only Eats Hippies
  5. Salt — Beauty
  6. Supreme Beings of Leisure — Never the Same
  7. Yoav — Club Thing
  8. Wino — Silver Lining
  9. Meshuggah — Entrapment
  10. Martha Wainwright – I Will Internalize

Awesome. I just downloaded the new Wino record this past week. That and Kyuss have me feeling like busting out all the stoner rock I have. Just feels like springtime music to me.

Yoav is an interesting artist. Born in Israel and raised in South Africa, he developed a unique way of playing guitar:

“It was summer solstice and I’d gone with my guitar and some mushrooms into Central Park. The plan was to zone out and lose myself in my playing. For some reason, I started banging out rhythms on my guitar and I got really into it. There was this school field trip of 7 or 8 year old kids walking by and they suddenly started dancing to what I was doing. I was playing these crazy drum ‘n’ bass rhythms and they were whirling around me like trance hippies. It was incredible. I felt like I was DJing with my guitar.”

Yoav had stumbled upon his new direction. “As a songwriter, the guitar limits you to strumming or picking. It’s very different if you can write something to a beat. I tried to translate dance music to guitar. I started pounding it, learning what I could do with it, using it as my decks. You can get an assortment of kick drums and snare drums by hitting it in different places or a synthy sound by playing with feedback. The more I did it, the more possibilities I found. It became all-consuming for me.”

 

Supreme Beings of Leisure are basically Morcheeba with slightly more world music influence. Not terribly original, but still enjoyable.

Two bands from Sweden, Salt and Meshuggah. One alt-rock, the other extreme metal.

I love Martha Wainwright’s voice. I’m torn as to whether I should start stalking her or Beth Orton first.

This Is the Sort of English Up with Which I Will Not Put

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, language, samesecks, writing No Comments

Thanks – I think – to Scott for reminding me how mortifying yet sublime it is to see Doug “I Am All That is Man” Giles have his way with the English language. This column isn’t even his “best” work, but it reminds me that I need to check in with the Metrosexual Ted Nugent more often.

I was going to make a crack about how he mixes metaphors, but then I thought, no, “mix” can’t really do justice to what it is Giles actually does. After all, doesn’t “mix” seem pretty harmless, or even beneficial? Don’t you think of things like CDs or recipes, where mixing different ingredients leads to something even better?

No, this is something far more malevolent and sinister. It’s like…Doug is the fog on the information superhighway that causes fifty-metaphor pileups. He should call his column “Giles Mountain” with warning signs telling you to turn on your lights and watch for slow-moving vehicles. Besides, a mountain has a vaguely phallic image about it, and we all know how much Doug loves to stress what a heterosexual, macho, non-gay, 100% U.S.D.A. red-meat, un-swishy, predatory testosterone factory he is.

Smack My Bitch Up

By in macho macho men, psychology No Comments

Don’t repent to a bruise
He says that he still loves you
Tell me why does he hit you?

— VAST

I seem to know a lot of fucking assholes. I guess I’m just lucky.

Anyway, I had read a few different articles about the whole Chris Brown/Rhianna situation, and I was struck by something that was reinforced by my conversations with different acquaintances when the topic came up — it’s strange how quickly people look to express their anger and frustration at her for putting up with his abusive behavior. “If she’s too stupid to leave him, the bitch deserves what she gets” being a common sentiment.

Deserves? Maybe if you use it in the sense that yes, her failure to do something to end the abuse will predictably lead to more beatings until she’s in a coma or the morgue, but obviously they mean it in the sense of a moral judgment, as if the victim is just as contemptible as her attacker. I just don’t get that. A minute ago, she was an innocent person minding her own business as far as you knew; now it’s only fair if she gets beaten repeatedly for not reacting the way you want her to?

I don’t understand why people like this act as if their sympathy is a precious resource that must be conserved as much as possible. Why is it so hard to recognize that the psychological aspects of people in abusive situations isn’t quite so cut-and-dried for them as it is for an outsider? Why isn’t the reaction more along the lines of just hoping that her friends and family can help her through this? I’d personally rather be angry at the fact that nice, easy-going people get taken advantage of and victimized by worthless sacks of shit like Brown than to be angry that not everyone walks around with a hard-as-nails attitude, ready to fight at the drop of a hat.

Of course, to be generous, it could be a form of self-protection itself — when people feel powerless to affect a situation, it’s probably easier for their peace of mind to wash their hands of it and walk away than to continue to feel upset about it but helpless to stop it. Still, blaming the victim is a pretty cowardly and shitty thing to do.

All Your Books Are Belong to Us

By in augean stables, books, technology No Comments

Wow. This kind of techno-gadget triumphalism makes Thomas “Moustache of Understanding” Friedman look like Ned Ludd. Kind of reminds me of the glory days of the mid-nineties when people would gush about how the Internet would allow ordinary people to access the Library of Congress, when, as it turns out, it just gave most of them more convenient ways to jerk off to porn and stay au fait on all the latest inane jokes.

But that’s all fine. I’m only bothered by the, well, Friedmanesque way she just blithely burns tons of working-class jobs on the glorious altar of FutureProgress (even uses the line about the world getting flatter in there somewhere). I suppose those lucky duckies can just take out some exorbitant student loans and go back to school to learn some useful skills, after all, like how to speculate on trillions of dollars of imaginary money. But I digress:

Why go to Barnes & Noble when the digital download will always be pristine and Kindles on the same account can read the same book at the same time? Households of multiple Harry Potter fans, sorry, those are still not available in digital format. There would be less mail through our postal service, fewer delivery drivers of many flavors, the people who run the giant printing presses and sawmills will find themselves out of jobs. The demands for water, wood pulp, and oil would drop and a great deal of our quasi-recyclable trash would disappear. An argument for smaller home footprints could even be made, for as the iPod decimated the need for a home CD collection, the home library would also disappear.

I have an iPod and I love it for its convenience. Yet I still have a huge collection of CDs, which I use to loan to friends as well as pop into the CD player when I’m working, and I always still buy the actual disc when my favorite bands release new material. The only real advantages to downloading for me are the instant gratification (which any adult can admit is a fun luxury, hardly a necessity) and the ability to perhaps find old, out-of-print music that isn’t considered worth putting out in new disc form — although it’s often just as likely that no one will bother putting those recordings on iTunes, Napster or eMusic, and you’ll have to find it on LimeWire where someone has uploaded it from…an actual CD. I remember one thread on a music site about downloading where a woman talked about how her CD collection was her equivalent of a trophy case, something to show off and take pride in. I feel the same way — I like the actual, physical look and presence of my wrought-iron CD rack with hundreds of discs lined up. It’s just not the same thing to scroll down in iTunes over thousands of mp3s.

I suppose if you have a severe reductionist attitude that sees books as merely serving a utilitarian purpose of transferring information from point A to point B, then a more streamlined, faster way of doing that would seem like an improvement. But for me, the whole “book” experience is much more than that with so many intangibles involved that form a greater whole. I like to go to Barnes & Noble (and almost any bookstore, really, especially little hole-in-the-wall stores specializing in old, used books) just to browse and enjoy the atmosphere. I love the smell of the coffee bar, the sound of the classical music playing, and the sight of thousands of books lined up on shelves. Even a misanthrope like me can feel a sense of kinship among other people there for the same purpose, or even enjoy vaguely overhearing people chattering to each other about this author or that series. I love the smell of brand-new books and old, musty ones at a library basement sale. And, of course, I love the sight of my own books on their shelves in my house. I could see possibly owning a Kindle one day, though I have no burning desire to get one now, but as with the iPod, it would supplement, not replace the existing format.

The author had to go to the publishers; they had the presses, the publicists, and the access to the public via television appearances, contacts with wholesalers, etc. The new digital stores, a relatively unknown author can get his/her work before the audience quickly. They can self-publish on a Web site or contract directly with a store and be instantly available to e-readers around the world. Now the publishing houses own some very expensive scrap metal and logos.

Sigh. Yes, they certainly can publish a blog or even a book through a place like Lulu.com, but as anyone who has toured the blogosphere knows, there’s a whole lotta nobodies out there with a whole lotta nothin’ to say (and I certainly include myself in that description). Nobody has the time and patience to sift through the oceans of misspelled and poorly crafted essays and novellas online, just like nobody sits and listens to countless thousands of mp3s of various garage bands online. Anyone who does will be quickly begging for editors, publishers, anything to force some sort of Spencerian survival of the fittest into effect.

But again, that kind of optimistic “behold the power of pure, undiluted democracy” rhetoric is more amusing than anything else. The thing that eats at me is the relentless speeding up, the need to cram as many objects and as much action as possible into the shortest possible time and smallest possible space. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many times again, but I really wish people had a wider perspective that would allow for things and activities to be enjoyed for their own sake, not as means to an end. It shouldn’t always be about the bottom line. Enough already with the incessant, obsessive drive to make everything sleeker, faster, shinier, more efficient. As shopworn as the saying may be, oftentimes half the fun is getting there.

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