http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:08:52 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. 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Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/12/18/210852.php Melisande LunaAs another negative-outlook member of the oh-so-cynical-yet-looks-way-cool-in-Corporate-Logowear generation of X-ocity mallratness, I find myself resenting the Hell out of the very notion of New Year's, or, "Arbitrary Earth Revolution Day," as if there's a giant space turnstyle that we go through every January 1st, the measured turning of which we celebrate with "International Amateur Night," where hordes of normally sober people don lampshades en masse, litter the planet with squares of colored foil, blow annoying plastic kazoos all night and indiscriminately swap herpes simplex strains with strangers all while gleefully committing felony DUIs like a colony of lemmings cliff diving. Fun in tha hizzle, fo' shizzle. But, my little Bonsai Buckaroos, what's even more hee-hawlarious than a county jail drunk tank packed with rednecks, even better than nursing a hangover while watching a precession of dead flowers roll slowly across the tv screen for 17 hours straight, is the annual tradition of compiling year-end top ten lists. Ah so! And what an abundant Crap-O-rama this year's events have left us lackluster listmeisters to wallow in. Word.Books and movies are pushing overdone, chums, let's get our lexicons on off the pestilent carcasses 2004 washed up in a tsunami of flyblown stink that left the world fouled by the sociopolitical viscera of master debaters, players and haters. And, as we flounder around (a euphamism for drown) in an increasingly toxic cultural pisspool, where our only recourse against the sepsis of the system is to compile completely irrelevant Top Ten lists and publish them on our blogs, let's not overlook the grace inherent in creating such instant Top Ten classics as: Top Ten Hypocritcal Christians lists; Top Ten Corporate Crimes and Criminals lists; Top Ten Domestic vs Foreign Political Scandals lists; Top Ten Reasons We're Glad That The US Elections Are Over, Even If Satan's Party Won lists; Top Ten GW Bush Shitforwitticisms lists; Top Ten US Military Death lists. The potential list of lists goes on, and I'd list them, but; why belabor a subject I don't want to research for the sake of introducing forced redundancy to an already inarguably forced and redundant essay?And stop agreeing with me, you assholes!Listless, inarticulate, repetitious, and unempirical rants aside, this year's potential for shitlist bliss is boggling, and thank the anonymous deity of personal choice that some pioneering Top-Ten visionary set the standard limit of list items at ten, because the Vegaslike smorgesorgy of skank ho beotches waiting to be list smacked already confuses The Melisande; add that confusion to the stress and strain of having to manipulate quantities comprised of numerals not centered around the good old Roman multiples of ten thingie and I'd roll over like Bohr's oval rover, *SNAP* which, judging from my last nervous breakdown, probably would send me into a chronic state of convulsive brainpain -- emphasis on the chronic -- to which I'd likely react by retreating into a broken Utopian state of Stoned Slackerdom, elements of which include flannel, Doritos, horizontality, Thorazine, and at least one remote control.But not this time, OGs, cuz Homie don't wanna play that game no mo, I'm fully gonna let you thugs compile tha dopest drama momma disyou lists -- and they best be ten items or less express, too, yo -- and be contemporaneously dishin' tissues on timely issues, pimpin 2004, without resorting to being so totally yesterday, or something, you know, and I'll -uh- get right on reading those blogs, fo' shizzle, dudes, or um, . . . like, totally later, after this phat rerun of Futurama is over . . . and stuff.Now, fuck off -- or, "gag me with a spoon," rather, and put ice cream on it -- I've got top ten lists to slack. Culture23415@blogcritics.org Sat, 18 Dec 2004 21:08:52 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/12/07/181247.php Melisande LunaAs an Xer raised by a Boomer I was constantly fed rhetoric about how great the summer of love was, man, and how the people stood together against the man, man, and it was groovy, man. Of course, our parents were never home, man, because they were off looking for truth or Zen or some platform shoes or some such seventies pap that preceded the Yucky Yuppie era when they apparently found themselves (oh, there I am!) and discovered that ideology was a shit sandwich without a BMW and a nice big house in a gated community on the white side of town to wash it down with.Groovy. Summer of love, peace, man, tune in, turn on and drop out; you were always a bunch of followers and will always be nothing but followers. My only curiosity now is what were you idiots smoking that made you all think that you were so originally profound and where can I get some? Or explain to me, if you will, why a group of people who said they didn't trust anyone over 30 is suddenly espousing how great it is to be 50, and why suddenly, they can't seem to hear anyone under 30 (or 40), or even let us voice our concerns in a legitimate venue.God forbid that we aspire to career-track jobs while laboring under an opportunistic boomer who'll gladly use (read: steal) our creative outputs to bolster their flagging intellectual facilities, then toss us away faster than a BIC lighter at a crackhead's house. This is a generation that is so busy protecting their own self interests that they've never hesitated to annihilate anyone from the ranks who represented a threat to their continued existence on the top of their respective dunghills.Generation "Me" brought us divorce; plastic surgery; air pollution; water shortages; Michael Jackson; rampant narcissism; pop music; drugs and wars on drugs; latchkey children; AIDS; herpes; Pac-man, prison culture; corporate logos on our clothes; savings and loan scandals; bad movies; worse TV; political correctness; Prozac; sobered-up soccer moms; SUV's; declining SAT scores; media blowjobs; Bill Clinton; a "C" student president who -- quite frankly -- has the IQ of a bush; cornball nostalgia; youth worship; and a flip-flop hypocrisy so blatant we are left with no doubt that Senator Kerry is, indeed, a Boomer. This is a generation that bridged the gap between Beat Intellectuals and Beavis and Butthead. Good going, man. Oh yeah, boomers were cool, still are. Like Joe Cool or James Dean. Imagine a whole generation that was so intent on looking cool they forgot how to be cool. Far out, man. Why don't you all go to a reunion rally and spit on some veterans for old times' sake, eh?And then there's the youth who, having narrowly escaped Amerikkka's draconian prison culture and, while in between shifts at McDonald's, get our widdle heads patted by patronizing boomers like we were still their kids, like THEY aren't the most immature, egocentric, greedy, self-indulgent generation on the planet, like this bunch of Peter Pan I-won't-grow-up Fairies have the right to pat anyone on the head, and say, "Oh, isn't the angry little X generation funny? They wanna be like us."No, we don't want to be like you. You're a bunch of GOP voting, tax cut grubbing, narcissistic, self-interested, whining, immature, hypocritical, deficit-driving SUV whores. We want your fat, old, thieving asses to retire already; or better yet, die, and stop perpetuating the lies of a pathetic culture that facilitates your arthritic last clutch at our purses. And don't even think about sending our little brothers off to a war that your fucking president started, we already have to pay for it for the rest of our lives. I guess we should thank our elders, since at the ripe old age of 35 many of us are still allowed to live at home, because our predecessors priced the home market out of our reach with their hoarde of interest-only loans and 30-year second mortgages that their grandchildren will be left to pay off; we have no health insurance; no job prospects because we still have to compete with their tired, incompetent, stoned asses; and we're making a dollar or two over minimum wage (which has been so generously raised all the way up to still below poverty level).To add insult to injury, school was virtually free for their generation, and now that they're in charge we can't fucking afford college (because our Pell grants paid for our elders' tax cuts), yet they want to tout how much more educated their generation is than everyone else. Big fucking deal, most of the Boom boomed off to college to avoid the draft. We're a significantly smaller generation than our predecessors' generation; why can't we have free community college? Oh, that's right, it's because the Rubber Baby Boomer Bogarts were done with college, so, obviously, nobody else needed any education. And, while I'm on the subject of education, my bogus little Boomers, you've made really lousy mentors to us, too. Saved by Zero, indeed.And now they want our social security? Just because this generation of spoiled little wrinkled-up kids are in hoc up to their nipped and injected jowls to pay off the lease on their Escalades, Barbie-Doll boobies, Viagra copays, coke parties, trophy wives, American Express fees, and the second mortgages on their bubble-economy condominiums doesn't mean that X's retirement pittance should be made available to finance their endless supply of narcissism.Even our fresh, young art has been forced into subservience to the Boom's antiquated crap. Carlos Santana whores out shoes at Nordstrom's, from somewhere beyond the stratosphere Jerry Garcia's corpse pimps his primitive prints on upscale neckwear (as if Deadheads actually shop at Macy's) and, if I see one more overhyped reunion tour of ancient rockstars dressed in tight leather pants gyrating their stuffed scrotums around on my TV screen -- when I'm done puking -- I'm going to embalm Keith Richards because, and I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but, Keith's corpse is getting a little flyblown.Our day will come, my Boomer friends, and your bar tabs are going to be marked "pay in full." I envision poorly funded state hospices and ubiquitous rows of paupers' graves. And then finally we'll be free of the yoke of Boomer's pseudo idealism, classic-rock radio, sugar-frosted nostalgia, instant gratification, feminist backlash, bellbottoms, lip service, hip-hip-hippie-hypocrisy, fashionably tragic flower-children, hearing about The Haight, Robert Plant solo efforts, self-help books, male-pattern balding mixed with ponytails, and the rest of the soul-sucking corpulence that is the Boom generation's ultimate legacy. But have no fear, our Boomer Babies'll leave their droolmarks on the world yet: a mass of silicone titties and hair plugs rotting in every grave.Oh, yeah, you changed the world and now it's great to be old. Lie to us, baby, but shitcan the cognitive dissonance act, and pass the Vioxx.tick . . . tick . . . tickOh, and PS, for a more in-depth and considerably less hostile viewpoint on the subject of generational interactions, read Strauss and Howe's most excellent books, The Fourth Turning, and Generations. Books23025@blogcritics.org Tue, 7 Dec 2004 18:12:47 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/12/07/162421.php Melisande LunaWhen I was a teenager, my mother had some strange ideas about punk rock, namely that it was somehow "evil" or some shit, I don't know exactly WHAT she thought of it, but she was very much against it.I didn't understand punk rock too well myself, what I did know at the time was that I generally liked punkers, but because my mother was so dead set against it, and because I was deathly afraid of my mother (she hit pretty fucking hard, after all), I didn't explore punk rock much beyond the prefunctory Suicidal Tendencies album, which, after hearing "I Saw Your Mommie (and Your Mommie's Dead) my mother smashed all to shit, along with Motley Crue's "Shout At the Devil."Now, at the time, the Motley Crue album represented the greater loss to my somewhat limited LP library. Yes, I was a metalhead, no, CDs didn't exist yet, but unlike my metalhead/LP cohorts -- many of whom still attempt to live "back in the day" -- I grew out of that shit, and now I consider the era to have been one of the worst eras musically that has ever, or is likely to ever, exist. My apologies to Rush, the only exceedingly excellent rock band from "back in the day." Rush, along with AC/DC and the occasional Iron Maiden are the only long-ago favorite bands of mine that I can still listen to today without feeling vaugely stupid for having worshipped them. All of those other bands suck ass, which brings me to my mother's fallicious dislike of punk.Of course, I can't go off on the subject of punk rock without mentioning politics. I, along with a vast number of my politically apathetic generational age mates, never really understood punk, at least not until after 9/11 and we all suddenly sought to gain deeper understandings of the political processes and dealings that has left the US such a disliked country worldwide.What I didn't know was that punk rock is intelligent, political, relevant. My age-specific friends admit the same ignorance. I listen to old school punk now and I think, "Jesus, they were trying to tell us something." I listen to punk rock now and I wish I had been listening to it all along because I fucking LOVE it. I wish my mother hadn't been so close-minded regarding punk music and the punk subculture, or I might have gotten into punk a lot sooner, and probably would have been better off for it. I mean, come on, the music I was listening to, what most of us were listening to, was all about promoting a mysogynistic culture dedicated to pointless hedonism., to say nothing of those fucking cornball hair-dos 80's rockers had!Big Bad Hair bands and shitty mainstream music aside, the 80's brought us punk, and thankfully, today punk is not only witnessing a resurgence among newly political Xers, but is gaining almost mainstream popularity among the younger set as well, and I hope their parents aren't as lame about it as our parents were. From the Dead Kennedys to NoFX, from Black Flag to Anti-Flag, this is one genre of music that most assuredly won't suck twenty-five years down the road.My only regret now is that I'm too old for a blue mohawk. Music23019@blogcritics.org Tue, 7 Dec 2004 16:24:21 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/12/05/012637.php Melisande LunaStoned Slacker aka Blogcritics stars - 4½Being the sort of stoned slacker that just loves fake news from the Daily Show, and eager to get my fake history on, I naturally ordered America, A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction from Amazon.com. And, being the stoned slacker that I am, I accidently clicked on the audiobook version, and thank GOD for that, because moving my eyes left to right, left to right, over and over again while simutaneously turning all those fucking pages would have been a real chore for my poor stoned slacker brain to handle, especially considering the subsequent prescription for Oxycotin I was issued, ok well, I wasn't issued it, I stole it (if illegally obtaining prescription narcotics is good enough for the moral luminary, Rush Limbaugh, it's good enough for me).America, A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, mocks the orgy of democracy that has flowered (and/or floundered) through the historical time of those ass-sex lovin' Greeks right up to our own contemporary ass-sex amending geeks. If you're looking for a book that dismisses thousands of years of history in a headlong rush to get to compelling instances of Thomas Jefferson's progressive shitting in a bucket, George Washington's syphillitic honesty, Ben Franklin's burgeoning crack habit, and why Warren G. Harding was the suckiest president ever, this is the book -- or audiobook, rather -- for you.Yes, from wicked retahded English monarchs, to that crazy motherfucker Karl Rove and all the political whackjobs, electile dysfunctions, itty-bitty-titty committees, huge dicks, deficit chickens, soulless grayfaced bureaucrats, jewish homosexual leftists, unfuckable cheerleaders, fillibusters, gerrymanders, douchebags, witch hunts, knowing pornography when you see it, lunchtime abortions, interpretations of the word interpretation, Canadians, genital references, token black people, absent Native Americans, passive conduits, minstral shows, historical footnotes, omnipotent superheroes, hand puppets, rim jobs by Jane Mansfield, Smelt It v Dealt Its, indiscriminate fellatio, peeking under robes, mushroom clouds, closet cases. puppy sodomy, Texans, and transgendered monkeys in comas in between, this book -- or audiobook, rather -- has it all.As Thomas Jefferson said regarding America, A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, "Funny. Not John Winthrop's 'A Comparative Treatese On the Most Unusual Distinctions Twixt the Fairer Species and Her Masculine Counterpart' funny, but funny." I agree.Equally priceless is Jon Stewart's raging diatribe leveled against the modern media which more than pays for the price of the book, or audiobook, rather. Just buy it, you cheap fuckers, and if one of you stoned slackers accidently happens to get the text version, I'll trade ya the audiobook for it. Books22909@blogcritics.org Sun, 5 Dec 2004 01:26:37 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/12/02/215207.php Melisande LunaLike many members of my generation, I'm really very politically apathetic. Call it a combination of my education in the hard sciences and the academic idealism that touts the stance that we scientists are too important to lower ourselves to political involvement; a real-world cynicism gained from the entering the world post-Kennedy assasinations, in the height of the Vietnam war protests and being innudated with Watergate broadcasts; and my inherently rebellious nature against authoritarian bureaucracies.Whatever combination of the above factors may have contributed, the result is yet another politically apathetic Xer who, before 2004, never voted; and who might never vote again. I believe I will drag myself to a voting booth in the future anytime I hear a candidate tout his belief in God, because that whole God & Government thing has always scared the shit out of me, but other than that, I have an ingrained belief that all politicans are lying sociopaths and that any good person who ever entered the political realm for the purpose of trying to fix this broken piece of shit system has either been corrupted or conspired against. And so the song goes.Recently, I've spent a large amount of time researching politics and history, and some of the texts that I have found most valuable to understanding today's political climate are texts written previous to about the 1940's. We all know that Machiavelli, Moore, Plato, Marx, Descartes and Jefferson are required political reading but one would do themselves no favors by ignoring the brilliant political analyses of men such as Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain and HG Wells, the latter who penned one of the most thorough world history outlines it has been my pleasure to read.These men were free thinkers born before the machine of compulsory education brainwashed over this land, and their overarching and multi-topical analyses demonstrate just how thoroughly a person can comprehend a subject without the aid of school masters and professors. When one compares the sort of common sense logic and multifield tasking utilized by these long dead intellectuals with the specialization and jargoning mumbo-jumbo of today's academic intellectual, the facade and specialization mission of modern education begins to crumble.Is it good for fields to have specialists? Surely so; but why does the academy seek to limit understanding of a certain field to its specialists while also seeking to limit what its specialists may learn outside of their field? The time has come where we need to begin reassembling our vast knowledge, not fragmenting it further.Given that this fragmentation is pushed upon the academic class, one wonders at the motivation for doing so. One wonders at the motivation of the individuals who claimed scientists were above politics. Modern scientists might view themselves about politics but they certainly don't view themselves as above corporate whoring, so what the fuck?Conspiracy? Blindness to one's own bullshit? Who knows, but that's why I'm politically apathetic. Well, that, and the fact that I KNOW most people are dumbfuckers. Dumbfuckers who tend to make a martyr of those who attempt to show them the truth. So, I just shut-up and don't get involved.Plus, I'm a stoned slacker and I'm not doing shit while the Daily Show is on. No Spin Zone that, unwatched Fox beotches! Culture22844@blogcritics.org Thu, 2 Dec 2004 21:52:07 EST