Sunday, September 25, 2005
Poisoning pissheads in the park
In which Bee emerges from own innards just for a brief candlelit moment, being sufficiently assured of the real meaning of the word 'random' and her ability to utilise it correctly.
1) Work is good, but I am bad. I am behind. Some people are taking the piss ever so slightly, while others are being so meek and acquiescent that it makes me guilty. But it's OK.
2) The only thing more daunting than the backlog (oh, and the advertising debt) (ah, and my tenuous grasp of the state of my own finances full stop) is the New Big Project. Having met with him, pored over his documents and pictures of him of the sort that you normally only see on the news, in a situation from which few emerge alive - I'm pretty sure he's for real. I'm going to try and find him an agent, and then essentially ghostwrite what is a story that needs telling. I have little idea what I'm doing. But I've had enough lessons in seat-of-pants aviation, I think.
3) I realised afresh the other day how marvellous, and yet how brimming with oomska, the internet is. Having seen one of the most horrific and manifestly genuine pieces of film I've ever come across, I went from being sure I couldn't find its origin, to finding masses of information on the 1987 feature from which it was clipped, in about five minutes. Amazing. Unfortunately, spread liberally over the masses of information was the gluey paste of misinformation, by idiots.
"...clearly faked... corn syrup... it was drugged... they were just licking.... it was just playing with them... "
I was inclined to roam the pages, creating accounts, logging in and posting "You are all intensely stupid in a way that makes me quake for the future of mankind - although perhaps that was in fact the point the filmmaker was trying to make with this otherwise needlessly sensationalist scene about which he still refuses to comment. Yes, he may well have anticipated a slew of twits discarding their logic and dismissing the scene as staged, thus neatly demonstrating how willing we are to take leave of our senses in this dangerous, denial-of-intellect fashion. He may be a sadistic bastard, coward and megalomaniac, but I'd still rather have lunch with him than any of you hopelessly deluded lobotomy casualties. Even if he also refused to comment on what exactly I was eating."
But then I realised that that would be bailing out the Adriatic with one of those tiny coke spoons that they used to have attached to tiny bottles with tiny chains. And I suppose I was grateful to them for allowing me to have a little thinky: the last few years and the internet have fostered this new kind of inverse gullibility, whereby people believe wholeheartedly in the validity of nothing. They come up with the most incredible, convoluted alternative explanations for the most clearly, viscerally, baldly real things. The fear of being seen as credulous evolves into an actual pride in being seen as uber-cynical. It's usually couched in smug, superior terms, as if they've evolved beyond the need to question anything, or rather the need to believe the evidence of their own eyes (see also: Republicans, fundamentalist Christians, etc). I suppose it's the same mode of thinking as conspiracy theorising, but although it's about smaller and less significant things, it's somehow more troubling. It suggests this very basic and deliberate disconnection with reality - it's not the same as trying to make sense of something that gives you reason to doubt, it is an outright and offhand denial of the watertight.
I don't know, maybe I'm just particularly stung by that sort of idiocy because I need to justify my own occasional gullibility. Or in this case I was annoyed by the twatty revisionism because - well, it wasn't corn syrup.
4) Speaking of mindless violence - Romero's Land of the Dead was fairly worthy. It was a bit polished (and somewhat bowdlerised, apparently, only a 15 certificate) but clearly his work, something no one else could really pull off. It must be hard to invent/define/subvert a genre all at once, and then come back to it after everyone else has done a load more subverting. I do like zombie films, though, there's something so basic about the idea that there's only so far you can subvert it. It's nearly irony-proof. So there was the fat streak of comedy - outright and straight, not backhanded or clever-clever or smugly knowing or referential - and inventive ickiness and social satire. (I think 28 Days' Later's go at this irked me, because while British films want to avoid doing the Hollywood thing of over-simplifying and showing all the workings and asking "Do ya geddit? Do ya? See that? Do you see?", I think they manage to fall into that exact trap by trying too hard to avoid it. Maybe British films that fall short annoy me more than Hollywood ones that do, because British films have more to prove. But my gosh, don't they just know it? Note to self: write one, fall into all same traps, and then weasel out of it by claiming it was satirical. Fiendish.)
So, yes, it will inevitably disappoint both hardcore Romero purists and new audiences who can't understand why the hell a zombie would be trying to play a trombone, but I thought he acquitted himself very well. Managed to miss the Wright/Pegg cameos, but then they were covered in muchos gunk. (How I wish I had good pictures of myself from the two days doing the pub scene in Shaun - heh, 'Shaun', dahlings - they airbrushed purply necrosis and collapsed veins all over my face and arms and decolletage, and God help me, I thought I looked purdy.) Oh, and John 'evil yet hunky pocket Mexican' Leguizamo got his shirt off and did a little light chinning, which was such a pleasant sight that I forgot to even berate myself for not doing anything to tone up my own arms. (Maybe I should start lifting the dog. He makes a very funny groaning noise when you do it, which is incentive enough to knacker my back further.)
5) I'm in Scarlet this month, looking very pale and fuzzy and talking tosh about sex toys. Well, I stand by it, the Rabbit is rubbish. There's a picture of one on the site at an angle that really makes it look like it's giving two fingers to the world.
6) P's spawnlet is a bit worrying. I can hear him screaming now. He does that a lot. He is two, and I understand that this is a 'difficult age', sort of like a dress rehearsal for the years of puberty all crammed into a few months and turned up to 11, but kid ain't right. He bites. He nuts. With intense focus, apparently. Right in the face. I've never seen him smile or laugh. Note to self: remain committed to childlessness and own selfish drives for cash and fun and taut skin. (I knew there was a reason I chose to adopt a potential baby-eater and exercise tool. It's about time my subconscious stopped trying to sabotage my every chance of contentment and started looking out for me.)
7) There's an amateur porn site and forum, favoured by US military, that started a while ago to accept pictures from Iraq in exchange for free access to the T&A sections. There's a whole section - necessarily, really - for gory pictures. So, kind of, gore-for-porn. That isn't the express purpose, but that's how it comes out. Surprisingly, most of the US media hasn't covered it.
From one angle, it's just too perfect - demonstrating that for the grotty little oiks stomping about in US desert gear, there's little difference between laughing at an eviscerated Iraqi and wanking over some readers' wives. Sex - violence - ersatz imperialism - fetishisation - wanking. All of human life is there, and all that. In fact, there's one shot that manages to combine the two most basic drives - half-naked woman, leg blown off by landmine. Great. But then from the other - well, they have to make jokes to get through the traumas for which they have not been prepared (or which they've been trained not to even acknowledge, having been nudged into states of kill-em-all psychosis), and yada to infinity. And of course the Public Has A Right To Know. I think war supporters should probably have a good look at what's going on, just as I'd gladly submit to looking at films from abbatoirs and face up to the fact that what I'm eating was once living, but ultimately that's neither here nor there nor anyfuckingwhere. But certainly it's not going to do a lot for the image of the Americans in Iraq, nor for the faint hope that most of them can or will differentiate between innocents and insurgents.
Although from what I gather, it doesn't take a lot to turn one into the other - the people are pissed off.
8) Yep, story definitely needs telling. At least I know I have the stomach for it, if not the knowledge - although that's not what I'm needed for, he needs me to work on the raw material until it's readable, which is what I'm good at. For some reason I can look at almost anything that the likes of Rotten have to offer and, while I'm by no means beyond shock and similar reactions, I haven't seen anything I've had to look away from yet. If you don't count the bit in Land of the Dead where one zombie crushes another's head under his foot. Ridiculous. And shameful. But I started to dare myself once, probably after being forwarded something by some ohmigod thisissoooosick merchant, to look at real nastiness, and found that I could handle it - I think it's partly because of that constant writer-brain that detaches itself and observes voraciously. The morality hardly comes into it for me - although if it does, that becomes subject to the same scrutiny. Is it wrong for me to look at this head on a fence which really looks faked but apparently isn't? Why? Discuss. Worraworraworra.
Of course if you're a medic - or in the military - then this detachment transfers itself into real life. (I'm sure I'd run puking and screaming from a broken arm, let alone a corpse.) And if you don't have the writerly fascination and inquiring mind, maybe your brain does just say "right, the area you want to process and store this in order to retain mental stability is this one - Node 392, controls humour, ball-scratching and winding spaghetti around fork with use of spoon". Writers wouldn't be much use in Iraq. But I must continue to question the implications of sending nationalistic, binary-minded thugs to a wounded country where it's hard to tell one shifty-ass Haji from another.
Oh, apparently some of 'our boys' from Lancaster are being posted out there. On it goes.
9) I don't have a 9.
1) Work is good, but I am bad. I am behind. Some people are taking the piss ever so slightly, while others are being so meek and acquiescent that it makes me guilty. But it's OK.
2) The only thing more daunting than the backlog (oh, and the advertising debt) (ah, and my tenuous grasp of the state of my own finances full stop) is the New Big Project. Having met with him, pored over his documents and pictures of him of the sort that you normally only see on the news, in a situation from which few emerge alive - I'm pretty sure he's for real. I'm going to try and find him an agent, and then essentially ghostwrite what is a story that needs telling. I have little idea what I'm doing. But I've had enough lessons in seat-of-pants aviation, I think.
3) I realised afresh the other day how marvellous, and yet how brimming with oomska, the internet is. Having seen one of the most horrific and manifestly genuine pieces of film I've ever come across, I went from being sure I couldn't find its origin, to finding masses of information on the 1987 feature from which it was clipped, in about five minutes. Amazing. Unfortunately, spread liberally over the masses of information was the gluey paste of misinformation, by idiots.
"...clearly faked... corn syrup... it was drugged... they were just licking.... it was just playing with them... "
I was inclined to roam the pages, creating accounts, logging in and posting "You are all intensely stupid in a way that makes me quake for the future of mankind - although perhaps that was in fact the point the filmmaker was trying to make with this otherwise needlessly sensationalist scene about which he still refuses to comment. Yes, he may well have anticipated a slew of twits discarding their logic and dismissing the scene as staged, thus neatly demonstrating how willing we are to take leave of our senses in this dangerous, denial-of-intellect fashion. He may be a sadistic bastard, coward and megalomaniac, but I'd still rather have lunch with him than any of you hopelessly deluded lobotomy casualties. Even if he also refused to comment on what exactly I was eating."
But then I realised that that would be bailing out the Adriatic with one of those tiny coke spoons that they used to have attached to tiny bottles with tiny chains. And I suppose I was grateful to them for allowing me to have a little thinky: the last few years and the internet have fostered this new kind of inverse gullibility, whereby people believe wholeheartedly in the validity of nothing. They come up with the most incredible, convoluted alternative explanations for the most clearly, viscerally, baldly real things. The fear of being seen as credulous evolves into an actual pride in being seen as uber-cynical. It's usually couched in smug, superior terms, as if they've evolved beyond the need to question anything, or rather the need to believe the evidence of their own eyes (see also: Republicans, fundamentalist Christians, etc). I suppose it's the same mode of thinking as conspiracy theorising, but although it's about smaller and less significant things, it's somehow more troubling. It suggests this very basic and deliberate disconnection with reality - it's not the same as trying to make sense of something that gives you reason to doubt, it is an outright and offhand denial of the watertight.
I don't know, maybe I'm just particularly stung by that sort of idiocy because I need to justify my own occasional gullibility. Or in this case I was annoyed by the twatty revisionism because - well, it wasn't corn syrup.
4) Speaking of mindless violence - Romero's Land of the Dead was fairly worthy. It was a bit polished (and somewhat bowdlerised, apparently, only a 15 certificate) but clearly his work, something no one else could really pull off. It must be hard to invent/define/subvert a genre all at once, and then come back to it after everyone else has done a load more subverting. I do like zombie films, though, there's something so basic about the idea that there's only so far you can subvert it. It's nearly irony-proof. So there was the fat streak of comedy - outright and straight, not backhanded or clever-clever or smugly knowing or referential - and inventive ickiness and social satire. (I think 28 Days' Later's go at this irked me, because while British films want to avoid doing the Hollywood thing of over-simplifying and showing all the workings and asking "Do ya geddit? Do ya? See that? Do you see?", I think they manage to fall into that exact trap by trying too hard to avoid it. Maybe British films that fall short annoy me more than Hollywood ones that do, because British films have more to prove. But my gosh, don't they just know it? Note to self: write one, fall into all same traps, and then weasel out of it by claiming it was satirical. Fiendish.)
So, yes, it will inevitably disappoint both hardcore Romero purists and new audiences who can't understand why the hell a zombie would be trying to play a trombone, but I thought he acquitted himself very well. Managed to miss the Wright/Pegg cameos, but then they were covered in muchos gunk. (How I wish I had good pictures of myself from the two days doing the pub scene in Shaun - heh, 'Shaun', dahlings - they airbrushed purply necrosis and collapsed veins all over my face and arms and decolletage, and God help me, I thought I looked purdy.) Oh, and John 'evil yet hunky pocket Mexican' Leguizamo got his shirt off and did a little light chinning, which was such a pleasant sight that I forgot to even berate myself for not doing anything to tone up my own arms. (Maybe I should start lifting the dog. He makes a very funny groaning noise when you do it, which is incentive enough to knacker my back further.)
5) I'm in Scarlet this month, looking very pale and fuzzy and talking tosh about sex toys. Well, I stand by it, the Rabbit is rubbish. There's a picture of one on the site at an angle that really makes it look like it's giving two fingers to the world.
6) P's spawnlet is a bit worrying. I can hear him screaming now. He does that a lot. He is two, and I understand that this is a 'difficult age', sort of like a dress rehearsal for the years of puberty all crammed into a few months and turned up to 11, but kid ain't right. He bites. He nuts. With intense focus, apparently. Right in the face. I've never seen him smile or laugh. Note to self: remain committed to childlessness and own selfish drives for cash and fun and taut skin. (I knew there was a reason I chose to adopt a potential baby-eater and exercise tool. It's about time my subconscious stopped trying to sabotage my every chance of contentment and started looking out for me.)
7) There's an amateur porn site and forum, favoured by US military, that started a while ago to accept pictures from Iraq in exchange for free access to the T&A sections. There's a whole section - necessarily, really - for gory pictures. So, kind of, gore-for-porn. That isn't the express purpose, but that's how it comes out. Surprisingly, most of the US media hasn't covered it.
From one angle, it's just too perfect - demonstrating that for the grotty little oiks stomping about in US desert gear, there's little difference between laughing at an eviscerated Iraqi and wanking over some readers' wives. Sex - violence - ersatz imperialism - fetishisation - wanking. All of human life is there, and all that. In fact, there's one shot that manages to combine the two most basic drives - half-naked woman, leg blown off by landmine. Great. But then from the other - well, they have to make jokes to get through the traumas for which they have not been prepared (or which they've been trained not to even acknowledge, having been nudged into states of kill-em-all psychosis), and yada to infinity. And of course the Public Has A Right To Know. I think war supporters should probably have a good look at what's going on, just as I'd gladly submit to looking at films from abbatoirs and face up to the fact that what I'm eating was once living, but ultimately that's neither here nor there nor anyfuckingwhere. But certainly it's not going to do a lot for the image of the Americans in Iraq, nor for the faint hope that most of them can or will differentiate between innocents and insurgents.
Although from what I gather, it doesn't take a lot to turn one into the other - the people are pissed off.
8) Yep, story definitely needs telling. At least I know I have the stomach for it, if not the knowledge - although that's not what I'm needed for, he needs me to work on the raw material until it's readable, which is what I'm good at. For some reason I can look at almost anything that the likes of Rotten have to offer and, while I'm by no means beyond shock and similar reactions, I haven't seen anything I've had to look away from yet. If you don't count the bit in Land of the Dead where one zombie crushes another's head under his foot. Ridiculous. And shameful. But I started to dare myself once, probably after being forwarded something by some ohmigod thisissoooosick merchant, to look at real nastiness, and found that I could handle it - I think it's partly because of that constant writer-brain that detaches itself and observes voraciously. The morality hardly comes into it for me - although if it does, that becomes subject to the same scrutiny. Is it wrong for me to look at this head on a fence which really looks faked but apparently isn't? Why? Discuss. Worraworraworra.
Of course if you're a medic - or in the military - then this detachment transfers itself into real life. (I'm sure I'd run puking and screaming from a broken arm, let alone a corpse.) And if you don't have the writerly fascination and inquiring mind, maybe your brain does just say "right, the area you want to process and store this in order to retain mental stability is this one - Node 392, controls humour, ball-scratching and winding spaghetti around fork with use of spoon". Writers wouldn't be much use in Iraq. But I must continue to question the implications of sending nationalistic, binary-minded thugs to a wounded country where it's hard to tell one shifty-ass Haji from another.
Oh, apparently some of 'our boys' from Lancaster are being posted out there. On it goes.
9) I don't have a 9.
