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Compos mentis
Dec. 23rd, 2004 12:45 amPeople! Walter Benjamin had unlimited hashish and an island in the Mediterranean. I have hard-won Vicodin and a Kafkaesque relationship with American Air. There are (self-dissolving?) stitches in my mouth, stitches! And I wish they would self-dissolve already because I feel like my gum grew alfalfa sprouts. But I do the best I can.
1. I called my dad and he told me that
a) he saw my pictures of the Schrodinger's Cat T-shirt (dad has reading privileges of this journal, mom does not)
b) He had just finished rereading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea
Then he said a lot of stuff about the idea of "reasonable immortality" and "the matrix of memory" as found in literature from Lem to Borges, and the nature of metaphor as topological transformation (he argued that poetic metaphor, structurally speaking, is transformation that preserves essence, in the same way that a circle can be twisted into a figure 8 without breaking it). Somehow this led to Jesus (via transfiguration). Jesus was integrated with my T-shirt thusly:
"Why was He resurrected in three days? Where was He for those three days? Why three? If it's just paying homage to the historical symbolism of "three" in the Bible, that's boring! And if it's for believability, then it would have been more believable if He had been dead for a week. So why three? And more importantly, where was he for those three days? What was He for those three days? It seems to me that for those three days Jesus was like Schrodinger's Cat."
2. This is completely unrelated, but I had access to a scanner today and among other things I scanned in the picture of myself and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
totalvirility (that yes, I lug with me around the world, along with pictures of mom & dad) from an ersatz prom party our senior year of college; he is always wanting a copy, so here it is.
( it's cute, I know )
3. American TV is fucked-up and Vicodin has helped me realize it. Take Fear Factor for example. Seemingly, all they do is eat bugs. Seriously. They eat spiders, roaches, worms, things with dangly long legs, things that slither, and things that bite their mouths as they cry. When they are not eating bugs or lying in glass coffins filled with bugs (with ear plugs to prevent the bugs from crawling into their ears; I guess nostrils are less of a liability since they lead to the esophagus, rather than to the brain), they are walking on glass, bobbing in blood, diving under near-solid ice and spending time in a contraption called The Tarantual Torture Cell. No wonder Americans are so blaze about Abu Ghraib--thanks to FF the visual semiotics game is over! As I was tellingapropos last night, the images that are supposed to evoke, like, concentration camps, instead pale in comparison to the nightly Fear Factor. There is some kind of primitive hierarchy where Bugs Are Worse Than Dogs so this is like a crosssection of a channel-flip:
See what I mean? And if you don't, here is an excerpt from an interview with a dude on Fear Factor whose "challenge" was to get gassed:
Fear Factor contestant Billy Cain gives the civilian perspective on entering an actual police training chamber and withstanding a room filled with CS gas.
BILLY CAIN: I was a little shocked, but I thought I was ready for it. I was hoping that it was going to be an eating stunt. I know some of the other contestants were kind of hoping it would be the torture cell type of thing, where they put something in there with you -- ants, animals, whatever. But I was hoping for an eating thing, to be honest. I thought that would be my strong point...The pain you feel when the gas actually hits your eyes and nose is like having rubbing alcohol poured on a wound, times ten. And then it expands even more than that when it actually gets in your lungs. Then you get this panic feeling. And your body just wants to get out of there.
FEAR FACTOR: What was the worst part of being in the confidence chamber?
BILLY CAIN: The worst part of it, through the whole event, was about five seconds after I had taken my deep breath. Because that's when it settles into your body and your body's trying to push it out. It was as if somebody had poured hydrochloric acid inside my body.
Now, let's talk about Elimidate. Compared to the utterly surreal shit of the dating shows now those 90s shows like Singled Out seem retro like American Bandstand. Retro and sweet. Even the sadomasochistic Change of Heart seems at least...unconvoluted in comparison.
Here is my impressionistic review of Elimidate: the object of the catfight that is the real metaobject of the show is That Guy, you know, the one who in high school was too much of a pussy to ask you out, but tried to feel you up on the bus during field trips while pretending to be asleep, the one who grew into the guy who thinks his cheesy pick-up lines work. The guy who plays the smarmy best friend of the cad on every insipid sitcom cancelled mid-season. So he is on a date with a bunch of hoes who are all decked out on pink tops. One of them is not a ho, actually, she is "alterna" but she's like, a dominatrix with tattooes, and there is just no room for her in this discourse, so she gets booted quickly, leaving behind Bland Ho, Exotic Ho (like me she is Multipurpose Ethnic and decked out like she be Salma Hayek playing a gypsy in a Soviet production of Zorro) and Barely-A-Ho (she is kinda shy and obviously reads a lot of self-help books). Did I mention that That Guy brought along a wingman? Yes indeed, also present on the date is his best friend (the cad! he seriously is much better-looking, although also in a guido kind of way) who earnestly tells the camera: "I am here to hook my best friend up. My quality is his quality." Throughout the show the two lads all but sit on each other's laps and engage in near-constant phatic-function male grooming, like those special guy handshake and affirmations that they are, in fact, bros. (also see Ungay: The Dialogue)
The three remaining pink-topped hoes proceed to duke it out and ALL take turns making out with That Guy. That Guy gets to ask them questions designed to let him get to know them. Their answers are kind of inexplicable. That Guy asks Barely-A-Ho what the ultimate thing she has done for love. Barely-A-Ho proceeds to describe what sounds like an emotionally abusive relationship and explains how she stayed with the guy for two years while he destroyed her self-esteem, which is a weird answer to that question unless you are explicitly an emotional masochist and that's, like, your thing. That Guy eliminates her, then poses the same question to Exotic Ho. She says she clocked a guy. I cheer. Bland Ho calls her a manbeater. Verbal lashings follow.
As the catfight progresses, That Guy confesses to the camera: "This is not working. We are sitting on a stoop, eating marshmellows, I'm like, let's get sexy, it's not working. I'm getting sexy. They are fighting. I'm getting sexy, they are not." (that was verbatum, by the way). Bland Ho makes out with That Guy again. Exotic Ho makes fun of her for getting sloppy seconds. Bland Ho points out that she made out with That Guy first and accuses Exotic Ho of being bad at math and a wifebeater. Exotic Ho elevates herself in my eyes by taking herself out of the running, leaving Bland Ho to suck face with That Guy, which is actually kind of perfect. Happy Ending!
Wifeswap, on the other hand, is totally awesome and the most insanely Marxist show on TV. Why Marxist? Because the role of the wife is completely desexualized and All About Labor. The wife as an economic institution and the swap showcases the variations on the mode of production. (Okay, maybe more Engels than Marx, but really, for all intents and purposes the two are metonymically interchangeable). It's great in the same way that Martha Stewart is great: she "does" the normative 50s female gender/housemaker trope as a cold scary commodified production on a mass industrial scale, which is feminist a weird-twist-on-Stepford way.
4. My friend A. is coming to Quito next week! For New Years we are planning a trip, to Montanita, a fishing village/awesome beach which is about 3 hours from Guayaquil on the Western coat of Ecuador. The week after that our itinerary mainly involves shamans.
5. As I am sick of yogurt and potato leak soup, I have regressed to a food I greatly enjoyed as a child: take a french baguette, break off a piece, pour coca-cola over the soft part of the bread (you have to pour, you can't just dip, that ruins both the soda and the bread), scrape it out of the crust with a spoon and ingest. I want normal food, though. And also more Vicodin.
1. I called my dad and he told me that
a) he saw my pictures of the Schrodinger's Cat T-shirt (dad has reading privileges of this journal, mom does not)
b) He had just finished rereading Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea
Then he said a lot of stuff about the idea of "reasonable immortality" and "the matrix of memory" as found in literature from Lem to Borges, and the nature of metaphor as topological transformation (he argued that poetic metaphor, structurally speaking, is transformation that preserves essence, in the same way that a circle can be twisted into a figure 8 without breaking it). Somehow this led to Jesus (via transfiguration). Jesus was integrated with my T-shirt thusly:
"Why was He resurrected in three days? Where was He for those three days? Why three? If it's just paying homage to the historical symbolism of "three" in the Bible, that's boring! And if it's for believability, then it would have been more believable if He had been dead for a week. So why three? And more importantly, where was he for those three days? What was He for those three days? It seems to me that for those three days Jesus was like Schrodinger's Cat."
2. This is completely unrelated, but I had access to a scanner today and among other things I scanned in the picture of myself and
totalvirility (that yes, I lug with me around the world, along with pictures of mom & dad) from an ersatz prom party our senior year of college; he is always wanting a copy, so here it is.( it's cute, I know )
3. American TV is fucked-up and Vicodin has helped me realize it. Take Fear Factor for example. Seemingly, all they do is eat bugs. Seriously. They eat spiders, roaches, worms, things with dangly long legs, things that slither, and things that bite their mouths as they cry. When they are not eating bugs or lying in glass coffins filled with bugs (with ear plugs to prevent the bugs from crawling into their ears; I guess nostrils are less of a liability since they lead to the esophagus, rather than to the brain), they are walking on glass, bobbing in blood, diving under near-solid ice and spending time in a contraption called The Tarantual Torture Cell. No wonder Americans are so blaze about Abu Ghraib--thanks to FF the visual semiotics game is over! As I was telling
apropos last night, the images that are supposed to evoke, like, concentration camps, instead pale in comparison to the nightly Fear Factor. There is some kind of primitive hierarchy where Bugs Are Worse Than Dogs so this is like a crosssection of a channel-flip:See what I mean? And if you don't, here is an excerpt from an interview with a dude on Fear Factor whose "challenge" was to get gassed:
Fear Factor contestant Billy Cain gives the civilian perspective on entering an actual police training chamber and withstanding a room filled with CS gas.
BILLY CAIN: I was a little shocked, but I thought I was ready for it. I was hoping that it was going to be an eating stunt. I know some of the other contestants were kind of hoping it would be the torture cell type of thing, where they put something in there with you -- ants, animals, whatever. But I was hoping for an eating thing, to be honest. I thought that would be my strong point...The pain you feel when the gas actually hits your eyes and nose is like having rubbing alcohol poured on a wound, times ten. And then it expands even more than that when it actually gets in your lungs. Then you get this panic feeling. And your body just wants to get out of there.
FEAR FACTOR: What was the worst part of being in the confidence chamber?
BILLY CAIN: The worst part of it, through the whole event, was about five seconds after I had taken my deep breath. Because that's when it settles into your body and your body's trying to push it out. It was as if somebody had poured hydrochloric acid inside my body.
Now, let's talk about Elimidate. Compared to the utterly surreal shit of the dating shows now those 90s shows like Singled Out seem retro like American Bandstand. Retro and sweet. Even the sadomasochistic Change of Heart seems at least...unconvoluted in comparison.
Here is my impressionistic review of Elimidate: the object of the catfight that is the real metaobject of the show is That Guy, you know, the one who in high school was too much of a pussy to ask you out, but tried to feel you up on the bus during field trips while pretending to be asleep, the one who grew into the guy who thinks his cheesy pick-up lines work. The guy who plays the smarmy best friend of the cad on every insipid sitcom cancelled mid-season. So he is on a date with a bunch of hoes who are all decked out on pink tops. One of them is not a ho, actually, she is "alterna" but she's like, a dominatrix with tattooes, and there is just no room for her in this discourse, so she gets booted quickly, leaving behind Bland Ho, Exotic Ho (like me she is Multipurpose Ethnic and decked out like she be Salma Hayek playing a gypsy in a Soviet production of Zorro) and Barely-A-Ho (she is kinda shy and obviously reads a lot of self-help books). Did I mention that That Guy brought along a wingman? Yes indeed, also present on the date is his best friend (the cad! he seriously is much better-looking, although also in a guido kind of way) who earnestly tells the camera: "I am here to hook my best friend up. My quality is his quality." Throughout the show the two lads all but sit on each other's laps and engage in near-constant phatic-function male grooming, like those special guy handshake and affirmations that they are, in fact, bros. (also see Ungay: The Dialogue)
The three remaining pink-topped hoes proceed to duke it out and ALL take turns making out with That Guy. That Guy gets to ask them questions designed to let him get to know them. Their answers are kind of inexplicable. That Guy asks Barely-A-Ho what the ultimate thing she has done for love. Barely-A-Ho proceeds to describe what sounds like an emotionally abusive relationship and explains how she stayed with the guy for two years while he destroyed her self-esteem, which is a weird answer to that question unless you are explicitly an emotional masochist and that's, like, your thing. That Guy eliminates her, then poses the same question to Exotic Ho. She says she clocked a guy. I cheer. Bland Ho calls her a manbeater. Verbal lashings follow.
As the catfight progresses, That Guy confesses to the camera: "This is not working. We are sitting on a stoop, eating marshmellows, I'm like, let's get sexy, it's not working. I'm getting sexy. They are fighting. I'm getting sexy, they are not." (that was verbatum, by the way). Bland Ho makes out with That Guy again. Exotic Ho makes fun of her for getting sloppy seconds. Bland Ho points out that she made out with That Guy first and accuses Exotic Ho of being bad at math and a wifebeater. Exotic Ho elevates herself in my eyes by taking herself out of the running, leaving Bland Ho to suck face with That Guy, which is actually kind of perfect. Happy Ending!
Wifeswap, on the other hand, is totally awesome and the most insanely Marxist show on TV. Why Marxist? Because the role of the wife is completely desexualized and All About Labor. The wife as an economic institution and the swap showcases the variations on the mode of production. (Okay, maybe more Engels than Marx, but really, for all intents and purposes the two are metonymically interchangeable). It's great in the same way that Martha Stewart is great: she "does" the normative 50s female gender/housemaker trope as a cold scary commodified production on a mass industrial scale, which is feminist a weird-twist-on-Stepford way.
4. My friend A. is coming to Quito next week! For New Years we are planning a trip, to Montanita, a fishing village/awesome beach which is about 3 hours from Guayaquil on the Western coat of Ecuador. The week after that our itinerary mainly involves shamans.
5. As I am sick of yogurt and potato leak soup, I have regressed to a food I greatly enjoyed as a child: take a french baguette, break off a piece, pour coca-cola over the soft part of the bread (you have to pour, you can't just dip, that ruins both the soda and the bread), scrape it out of the crust with a spoon and ingest. I want normal food, though. And also more Vicodin.
