Also!

Make sure to submit something for the HiFlowdown pOmO contest! The winner gets to be Kate for a day!

The Gayest Thing

I was at Publix, and I saw this really buff guy in a tight silk shirt. He had a really expensive looking haircut, nice sunglasses, a fake tan, and his hair bounced slightly as he walked.

While he walked past me and down the aisle, he also passed a fucking sailor----white hat, bell bottoms, and all! right there at Publix!---who was cartoonishly chewing gum with his mouth open. The sailor looked him up and down for a few seconds with what appeared to be a mixture of disgust and desire, before shaking his head and dismissing the attractive, overly manicured man.



Back to finishing finals!

Taco Bell Loaded Nachos

holy shit

This is basically just every ingredient that Taco Bell has in its fridge, thrown into one thing. Plus, it's HUGE. There are even some beans that you don't see until you reach the bottom. and! you can order it with jalapenos. They'd probably pour some Baja Blast over the top if you asked nice enough. I'm really really excited.

UPDATE: I had another one of these, and it tasted like one or more ingredients (the shell maybe?) were rotten. Loaded Nachos, you flew too near the sun.

I just posted about Jandek . . .

but it showed up down the page under "Tuesday" because that's when I started writing the article. You guys should read it. It's good, I swear!

What's Wrong With Slate?

These guys seriously need an election to write about again. Seriously. They have no idea what to say about Barack Obama, and they're too caught up on trying to be funny to think of anything. This is a little better than the "Barack Obama should pick really smart people to be on his cabinet" article from right after the election, but they're still flaudering. I'm just saying.

woah, where was I when this happened?

So, my extended family just discovered the Internet, I guess. They all just got myspace and facebook, and they send me chain emails all the time now. I don't know who told them about the Internet, but I'll have to find out-----so that I can thank that person properly. Anyway, it gives me a chance to keep up with some of the weirder people that I'm related to, which is generally pretty funny. They've been passing along one of those "answer these 20 questions!" emails to each other for about a week, and, I have to say, what I've found out about them is troubling.

() Gone on a blind date
(x) Watched someone die
(x) Been to Canada
() Been to Mexico
(x) Been to Florida
() Been on a plane
(X) Been lost
() Been on the opposite side of the country

() Gone on a blind date
(x) Watched someone die
() Been to Canada
() Been to Mexico
(x) Been to Florida
(X) Been on a plane
(X) Been lost
(x) Been on the opposite side of the country

(x ) Gone on a blind date
( x ) Watched someone die
( X) Been to Canada
( ) Been to Mexico
( ) Been to Florida
(X ) Been on a plane
( X ) Been lost
( x) Been on the opposite side of the country

( ) Gone on a blind date
(x) Watched someone die
(X) Been to Canada
(x ) Been to Mexico
(x ) Been to Florida
(X ) Been on a plane
(X) Been lost
(x) Been on the opposite side of the country

What's the one thing we all have in common? Wait, seriously? You've ALL watched someone DIE? What did I miss? What kinds of stuff did you guys all go out and do before I was born?

Also:

25. Favorite smell? newborn babies

I give up.

I'll take your nothing, and infuse it with my LOVE

So, I didn't get to take any pictures of Jandek on Monday. -I- should have expected it, I guess. Since he can be a bit camera shy.





Anyway, the show was great. Basically, for those of you who don't know, Jandek is a man who doesn't exist. He's put out, like, 50+ records since the late 70's, and, until 2004, no one had ever even seen his face. People have done a little bit of looking into the financial records of his record company, Corwood Industries (they only put out Jandek records, btw), and have found that his real name is probably Sterling Something-or-other, but it's never been confirmed. He only recently started playing live shows, and they're generally one-offs that, I can tell you from personal experience, no one shows up to.

Generally, his music is recorded solo (although he's done collaborations before), and bears a passing resemblance to country or folk. Really though, it's utterly alien, inaccessible, and possibly unenjoyable. It's a big aesthetic lump, with no entry point and no relation to culture at large. These records are around, but they have no signature, event, nor context. There's no author, and no regard for the audience. One gets the distinct impression, in fact, that these albums would continue to be recorded whether or not any one were listening.




......Going into the show with these expectations, I wasn't prepared for what I saw. My friend and I had just finished making the three and a half hour drive from Sarasota to Gainesville, passing the world's largest Confederate flag on the way there (awesome). We left early, and stopped for pizza in what I believe to be Marion County. Really, I didn't know where I was, and I'm not entirely convinced that Marion County isn't more of a mimetic tendency than a physical place. Everyone in that pizza place looked exactly the same---I'm serious, it was weird.

Anyway, there were maybe, MAYBE, 35 people at this show. There was no pre-show playlist, and Jandek didn't come out until about 45 minutes after we got there, so there was a lot of time to sit in silence and think about how miserable I wanted Jandek to make me. When he finally came out, he never acknowledged the audience, never looked at anyone but the guitar player, and, for the entire two hours that he played, he never said a word that wasn't sung. After his set, however, while he had his back to the crowd, he did allow himself a fleeting half smile. He'd earned it.

But yeah, the music itself was entirely different than what I'd expected. Jandek played bass, while a guitarist and drummer played really clean, compentant psych/kraut rock. It was really beautiful actually, and really accessible on a certain level. He's clearly expanding his Jandek idea, by framing it differently, and smashing the only framework we had to understand his work (inaccessibility). The results were incredibly rewarding, and indicative of a musician that is moving forward. Also, and this is just guess work, but my friend could see the set list, and it looked as if the whole set was meant to be understood as one big, very planned, composition. This would lead me to believe that the more "musical" things being played by the other musicians were probably written, at least partially, by Jandek himself---indicating some very serious traditionally musical talent.

I've declared my intentions to talk more about the dark corners of pop culture on this blog, but I feel that I needed to make an exception here. Sometimes I want to talk about someone who's working outside of a pop framework entirely, although maintaining a certain artifice of identity. I think it mirrors my own dissolution as a person in the face of multiplicity, but for opposite reasons. I won't get into it, just because I don't think it would make for fun reading, but I do want to justify my departure from pop. Also, this concert was totally good.

----This weekend, I'm going to Art Basel---to witness a moment when art is foricibly turned into pop. Should be good, but don't expect any pictures from that either. I'm pretty sure it's not allowed.

In This Universe and the Next

dusty springfield might be completely alone


Like an angel in hell, like the girl in your radiator, like the last image on earth. watch her dance in and out of your life----just like that.

I'm going to see Jandek tomorrow, so you guys should check back (late night) to see some pictures.

Another Saturday Night Alone

This was my dinner tonight.

I'm Going to Kill God

__So, I've been playing this video game, Spore. As I'm sure many of you know, it was a pretty big release just a few months ago. Critical reception was kind of mixed, considering the build up, yada yada yada. I didn't think it was that bad. Mostly, I really like the last level of the game: Space.
__Basically the game is a simulation of evolution, with the player completely in charge--like an intelligent design sort of thing. You can design your creature, the society that it builds, and, in the last and most extensive stage of the game, you go to space. You can colonize uninhabited planets, establish a trade empire, or start wars with other races. My spaceship is pictured to the right. You'll notice that it looks like a dragon. This is intentional.
__The game goes to great lengths not to tell you what to do, to just let you do whatever it is that you feel is the most fun (the game was designed by the mastermind behind The Sims, Will Wright). There is, however, one exception----In the "Goals" section of the "Spore Guide": Will you perhaps seek out deeper meaning in a quest to the center of the galaxy?
__To fully grasp what it means to "go to the center of the galaxy" in Spore, I'm going to have to show you just how fucking big this game is. The picture on the left is of the planets that I've conquered or made alliances with. It includes numerous intergalactic civilizations, and hundreds of inhabited and uninhabited planets big enough to be explored individually, at length, and dozens of different creatures, both sentient and non. It's an area that's already cumbersomely large, falling apart within 5 minutes if I travel to some other part of the game.
__Now the picture on the right is the entirety of the "galaxy" in Spore. That little speck right near the top of the swirl (the one marked by the "home" icon), is the area that we saw in the previous picture. At this point, it's so small that one can't make out any of the individual stars systems. Without the upgrades in transportation that one can buy later in the game, it would take, in real time, days to get to the center of this galaxy--not to mention a few hundred thousand "Spore Bucks". It's seriously an enormous undertaking. PLUS, once you get near the center, you find out that there's a secret civilization that populates the entire middle of the map ("The Grox"), that you have to make war on before you can proceed to find out the secret at the center of Spore.
__It's a terrifyingly large simulacrum-----large enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Large enough to make me refer to doing missions as "working odd jobs", large enough to have made me miss a week of school work two months ago. Large enough, in fact, to make me a little bit scared of finding out what's at the middle of the galaxy, actually. At this point, I would say that there's a bit of selfhood that I lose every time I play this game; at least temporarily.
__I've been at an impasse for months now. I decided that I wanted to find out what lay at the center of the galaxy sometime near the middle of October, and yet I still haven't done it. Part of my hesitation is purely practical. I have schoolwork to do, and waging war on the Grox seems like it would take at least an entire day, maybe two. But I have deep sort of angst about what I might find there, after I'd ignored all of my responsibilities to beat this game. What sort of thing would I find there? What's the ideological centerpiece of the game that I'm allowing myself to be swallowed by? __Well, I have my suspicions: __Every culture that you run into in the game is assigned a philosophy---and nearly half of the aliens that you meet are religious zealots who worship someone named "Spode". The hints start piling up at some point, and you're finally led to believe that no one less than God Himself is at the center of the Spore's galaxy. ---------Frankly, if I'm going to meet Him, I want to be prepared. Recently I found out that, if I eradicate the populations of 50 different planets, I'll earn the "Conqueror" level 5 badge, and gain access to a bomb that can destroy an entire planet. I'm at 23 planets right now. Once I get the chance, I'm going to buy two of them. In Spore, my mission from now on is to kill the Almighty.
Whatever it is that I find at the center of that swirl is going to be the "message" of this video game. It might not be God, in the theological sense, but it's the force around which the rest of the game's action revolves. If I want to destroy the simulacrum's ideological heft, I'll have to absorb myself in it completely.
__.....anyway, consider that a sort of a thesis statement for what I want to do with this blog. To really get a handle on the outer limits of discourse, or pop's permeation, you kind of have to love it. So, like in Spore, the only way to kill the god at the center of culture is to soak it all in. Movies, TV, journalism, poetry, junk food, bad tatoos, weird video games, philosophy, comic books from the 60's, Kanye West. Let's talk about all of it! We'll share in the terror and vice of modern culture together, and you can watch me slowly lose the ability to form an original thought. Sex On Christmas is a reference to a Beat Happening song, by the way.

This is the first thing I want to tell you, Internet

This song is totally good

More to come later.