WIDNOON

Horn jerk

Tue, 15 May 2012 22:40:14 -0500

Peter Evans and Travis LaPlante show tonight was amazing. A horn is a penis. I love penis. Thanks Tony and Craig for making it happen.

broken updates

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:49:50 -0500

If possible, the dumbuntu release party was even worse than advertised: 1) it lasted four days 2) kitty went all Let the Right One In on me. Serial surreal - he totally did.

This story feels related to my in chains post a few days back. I was also reminded of the time Nixon’s car was attacked when he was in Peru. This feels related too.

Ubuntu 12.04 Release Party

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:23:38 -0500

Me & Steve & Kitty are having an Ubuntu release party!

- Come get our cat drunk!

- Pin the tail on the Pangolin!

- Purple and orange party favors!

- Grape soda laced with crystal meth!

- Watch Steve’s computer get positive in the freedom dimension!

- Neural damage!

- Bitch about GNOME!

- Bitch about Gwibber!

- Bitch about OpenShot!

- Naked nerds guaranteed!

Yeah fuckface. I’ll bring the gasoline.

In chains

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:44:00 -0500

A few days ago I nearly tweeted my mild surprise upon reading an interview with trans pornstar Madison Montag in Huffington Post. The tweet was going to read “Surely, this is progress?” It is progress that a transgender sex actor gets interviewed on a forum as mainstream as Huff Post, right? Not only does the site get thousands, if not millions, of hits a day but when asked how she identifies sexually Montag unequivocally responses, “I identify myself as a straight woman.” This is something America needs to hear transpeople say. The interview was conducted by Jincey Lumpkin, who just won a feminist porn award for her clip Boutique. Her previous interview on Huff Post was with primarily submissive BDSM performer Madison Young. Young is a buxom strawberry blonde. When asked how she sexually identifies she responds, “I identify as a kinky, queer, femme feminist.” This is also something America needs to hear, especially coming from someone that looks like Young looks and does what Young does.

Missing from Huff Post that week was any meaningful coverage of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Columbia. An event heavy enough to require the presence of both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. I was not surprised that Aljazeera did provide meaningful coverage. Take aways: fascism as usual. The United States refused to budge on the issues of Cuba’s exclusion from the summit and reform of drug laws. Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales both walked out in disgust. Fernandez’s particularly peeve: the non-acknowledgement of Argentina’s sovereignty of Falkland Islands. It must be 1982: unions are being busted, women can’t get birth control, and imperialism stands proud like a lion against a backdrop of setting sun. Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela all sat out the Summit in protest of the Cuba issue.

Despite the open diplomatic discord and lack of progress on any issue, Huff Post had the audacity to publish this headline on their blog “Summit of the Americas: Despite Political Arguments We Are Getting Closer As A Hemisphere.” In there defense, their “blog” does not necessarily represent original content - a distancing technique also utilized by Fox News. Lumpkin’s interviews with sex workers were published on the Huff Post “blog.” Any original reporting on Huff Post about the Summit was focused on the fact some Secret Service agents got into fights with prostitutes. I’m not sure how I should interpret this incident or how it was reported. On one hand, its pumping in the American news cycle was clearly to distract from the (lack of) substance at the Summit. On the other hand, isn’t the entire incident just public fuck off to the United States? I can’t help reading it as “okay USA, you might come here and dictate your terms to an entire fucking continent but we are going to make it hard on you.” Huff Post didn’t offer that kind of analysis.

Back to sex workers on Huff Post “blog.” Madison Montag describes herself on her twitter as “Your Best Kept Secret. Teen Dream. American Heartthrob. Guilty Pleasure. Barely Legal. Mannequin. Princess. Doll. Sweetheart. Lover. Model.” So, permitted are primarily cisgender-associated patriarchal fantasies which though previously censored have fueled the West’s sexual imagination for centuries. What is NOT permitted: talk of inclusion of communist nations at the diplomatic table or legalization of drugs.

I am forced to ask again: is this progress?

Queer to the Core: the oral history of queer punk

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:48:07 -0500

Queer to the Core: the oral history of queer punk

The Showdown Over Liberal Education at Yale

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:57:53 -0500

The Showdown Over Liberal Education at Yale

know your role Fans line up outside the apple store!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:07:00 -0500

know your role

Fans line up outside the apple store!

End of the porn golden age

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:58:44 -0600

End of the porn golden age:

“golden age”? 16-19? 12-15? 51-21? 91-61? “end of porn”

An Interview With Jiz Lee

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:43:19 -0600

An Interview With Jiz Lee:

Awesome interview with performer and sex positive activist Jiz Lee.

It is great that Genesis P-Orridge and Lindsay Lohan are slowly...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:38:00 -0600

It is great that Genesis P-Orridge and Lindsay Lohan are slowly morphing into one another.

Live Evil: Psychic TV at the Berlin Atonal Festival, 1983

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:50:30 -0600

Live Evil: Psychic TV at the Berlin Atonal Festival, 1983:

I pretty sure this is what people think Throbbing Gristle is.

After US v. Jones, FBI Turns Off 3,000 GPS Tracking Devices

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:07:14 -0600

After US v. Jones, FBI Turns Off 3,000 GPS Tracking Devices:

It is interesting that FBI cannot track people via GPS without a warrant, but people freely let themselves be tracked in such a way via cell phone provider / social network / opportunistic-vampire-marketing-software-gimmick-start up of their “choice.”

Sad, dangerous, dystopian nightmare we have arrived. We have freely given the private-corporate sphere access to space previously so sacrosanct it is still inaccessible to the state.

Dunitude

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:32:52 -0600

Not sure how I missed this, but here is Andrew Stimpson’s reevaluation of Dune found in the Quietus (a great blog by the way). The occasion was BFI’s Lynch retrospective. Maybe they felt bad about including it at all and needed some justification? Not really. As Stimpson points out, Dune is all Lynch all the way. His analysis is surface and even then he ignores some of the worse (any of the “love” scenes), but in toto (ouch) he is spot on.

I see no reason whatsoever why Dune should be enjoyed any less than the director’s other, even more unfathomable but still outlandishly brilliant works. As a Lynch fan it affords a heaven-sent opportunity to see him grapple with massive sociological themes, shoot futuristic visuals on 70mm and coordinate the talents of cinematographer Freddie Francis on altogether grander vistas than the tightly focused and claustrophobic The Elephant Man. For the discerning viewer, one unconcerned with mainstream appeal and hungry for sensation, David Lynch’s Dune is a glimmering, idiosyncratic success. And Jack Nance is in it.

He also links to the Quietus’ previous feature about Jodorowsky’s failed Dune (in case you haven’t heard that story already). The one part I just don’t get is Stimpson’s complaint that, “I’ve been waiting a long time for a high quality release and, sadly, I’ll be waiting a lot longer for a super-duper director’s cut, packed with documentaries explaining the numerous mysteries surrounding the first complete production based upon Frank Herbert’s densely plotted masterpiece.” I thought “extended edition” DVD that came in the metal case a few years back did just this (some purists insist nothing is as good as the French laserdisc). Of course, Lynch refused to have anything to do with the special features, but when does he ever do that? Who does have a lot of screen time is the Raffaella De Laurentiis, the person primarily responsible for many of Dune’s failures and to her credit she is brave and unashamed.

Other rad happenings:

This year a feature length doc about Jodorosky’s failed production will be released.

The entirety of Toto’s underrated score can be streamed on Grooveshark. This includes many tracks not included in the official soundtrack release.

Thanks to the awesome folks at duneinfo.com for keep me informed!

Photo

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:38:56 -0600

Photo

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:36:35 -0600

A follow up: Upper Big Branch Report

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:48:38 -0600

A follow up: Upper Big Branch Report:

Long overdue follow up to something I was writing about before. Takeaways:

1) A lot of songs have been written about the worth of a coal miner’s life. Today that is apparently $1,500,000.

2) “…citing ‘corporate culture’ at coal giant Massey Energy Co. as the ‘root cause’ of a catastrophe…”

"20 years" of sexual insecurity

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:30:52 -0600

I had a thrilling, enlightening dream about my high school girlfriend Laura. I was going to record it here, but decided not to.

Bolano, King of Avalon Hill

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:55:59 -0600

War games on the beach.

Adventures of a slack jawed bafoon; or, How I became a feminist

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:35:01 -0600

As a teenager I had a long commute to high school via a rural school bus route. At over six feet tall, I could barely fit in the seat. I used to read The Portable Nietzsche, the thick volume wedged between my cramped knees. (Take a second to think about that sentence.) It gave me the oppurtunity to fimiliarize myself with Top 40 country music. In a way, I was lucky it was not a right wing talk station, but isn’t Top 40 Country just the musicalized version of right wing talk radio? Think about Nietzsche. I came to realize that all the songs by female artists were about males, in particular lamenting the loss of a male or pining for a male. What completed the subjects in all these songs were males. It was like women didn’t count unless they were in a relationship with a man. The only way they could be validated was via a man. I thought, well, that is really kind of sick. I wondered what sort of example this was setting for young girls. I wondered how this was effecting girls unconsciously. This is also the first is instance when I realized that popular culture was a vehicle for capitalist ideology, but I wouldn’t have framed it those terms at the time. There was an unambigious message: girls were being told to settle down, get married, and have kids. After these small (maybe large) revelations, I started listening specifically to the lyrical content of songs by male artists. A lot of songs were “love” songs with same lamenting-loss / pining-for dichotomy of the songs performed by females. But the male artists were also permitted other songs: songs about guns, beer, tractors, trucks, and sports. The luxury of an objective self was not permitted to female artists. The male artists were allowed to have hobbies, interests, and thoughts not related to “love.” Often too this privledged zone of thought was defined in opposition to females or stereotyped female interests. In short, within this entire genre of popular music women were denied personhood. I felt that was disturbing and disgusting.

That’s how became a feminist.

I have to go beat a faggot with a bat now. Thanks Nietzsche. Slack jawed bafoon.

Emperor in bad jeans

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:06:31 -0600

A recent article by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in the New York Times about why iPhones are not manufactured in the United States is getting a lot of buzz lately. It is essential reading in the same way that Kafka is essential reading. It would be hard to find better examples of Orwellian double-speak or the ubiquitous penetration of capitalist ideology in the symbolic order. But I’ll give you some of the best nuggets. President Obama once asked Steve Jobs why iPhone manufacturing jobs couldn’t be brought back the United States. Jobs told the President that wasn’t going to happen. That pretty much sums things up. Now we know who wears the pants in the American oligarchical family. But the articles goes on to tell us why this wasn’t going to happen.

Reason 1: The Chinese workforce is more “flexible.” After Jobs carried around an iPhone prototype in his pocket for a week, he decided it needed a glass screen as not a scratchable plastic one. Factory workers at the Foxconn plant in China were awakened in the middle of the night and ordered to begin making this massive shift in industrial production.

Reason 2: The Chinese workforce is better educated, possessing more than a high school education but less than bachelors degree.

Reason 3: Chinese factories have government support in securing large international contracts. If a factory needs to make a massive change to land a contract, the government will quickly step in the provide the R&D and the capital to make it happen.

Let’s examine each of those with the mildest of critical gazes. Reason 2, possessing more than a high school but less than bachelor describes every industrial worker in the world; every factory worker, every bus driver, and every janitor. Every person has to be trained to use the equipment at the factory. This argument is just a patent falsehood. Arguable too, you don’t have to high school diploma to do these jobs. You just need the technical/vocational training. With a massive boom in public “universities,” community colleges, and for-profit colleges and the government giving low interest loans to anyone to attend them, it is not true we are not educated enough. Even this is over reaching as you can always be trained on the job. If, if, Reason 2 has any truth to it it is because American high school graduates are graduating from such a poor public education system to begin with, often not knowing how to read and definitely not knowing anything about math or science. If this is the case, the argument should be our public education system is poor. It doesn’t produce enough factory workers? That’s what the problem is?

Reason 3 is a bit more tangled. It would appear our government does not support corporate R&D in sectors outside of military interests to the same degree it did in the past. The one party system in China which is universally lampooned in the United States as being immoral and unjust does has its procedural advantages. Partisan bickering often hinders the quick injection of capital funds in the United States. (Not to a mention capitalist jousting as to who actually owns the resultant technology. If the government funds a pharmaceutical companies research, who owns the results?) The Republican governor of Florida recently rejected $2.3 billion in federal funding to build a high speed train on ideological grounds. So much for jobs and so much for infrastructure. Steve Jobs never thought of telling the President, “give me a massive capital injection to make this factory create the glass iPhone screens.” Assuming that such funding could even be released quickly enough within our bitter partisan two party system it really wouldn’t have mattered much because of Reason 1, but I’ll get to that later. The two industries our government is willing to pump massive funds to is military R&D and farm subsidies. Lord knows that corporate farms need subsidies to keep the producing corn at below market cost to make ultra-cheap high fructose corn syrup and give an entire generation Type 2 Diabetes to keep pharmaceutical companies strong. Yeah, that makes sense. What we don’t need is affordable, high speed, public transportation.

Reason 1 is the most sinister. A more flexible workforce is a euphemism for an army of slaves. Working conditions in China do not conform to labor standards in the United States. Labor standards earned with blood, sweat and tears. Labor standards get in the way? Outsource your manufacturing to a country with more lax standards. Foxconn’s official line is that is workers were not awakened in the middle of the night to accommodate Jobs’ order for glass screened iPhones as this would violate the company’s own labor rules. Anonymous sources, fearing for their jobs, contradict this claim. So what exactly are working conditions like at a Foxconn factory and what rights to workers have? Well, the only negotiating tool they seem to have is threatening mass suicide.

Is it so painfully obvious to suggest all workers have rights? There is a reason the anthem of communism is called the Internationale. Communism has been “discredited” in lieu of what? Worker exploitation and income disparity? Capitalism has won the ideological war. Now there are people in the streets, permanently camped out in protest. Congratulations capitalism. In American, we are free to do that. In China, we may be lucky enough to have a job, locked in a corporate dorm, building iPhones on 12 hour shift.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of Duhigg and Bradsher article - even the President of the United States of America does not have wherewithal to tell the emperor he has no clothes.