Tuesday, January 22, 2008
I Never Thought You’d Be A Pervert Because Deviance Is So Passé
Eating shit, in Pasolini’s Salo, 120 Days in Sodom, is the central consequence of totalitarianism—“we fascists are the only true anarchists.” There is no waste or excess, nothing escapes the system of control. Only the absolute authority of the law enables absolute transgression: only a fascist with 18 sex slaves can make all his dreams come true.
It is very reassuring to know that the shit in Salo is actually chocolate and marmalade. In self-defense, I assured myself that shit-eating was always a clever special effect. A little research quickly woke me up to the truth. There are full-fledged coprophage communities. The act is called “recycling,” and you can meet interested parties by subscribing to a magazine called Jack’s Number Two. They are mainly lawyers and accountants.
These days you no longer need to be a sadist or part of a marginal sexual subculture to be a pervert. You just set up a digital camera, get a few friends together, look up a video with a name like 2 girls 1 _____, SWAP.avi, or Church of Fudge, and giggle as everyone pretends to be shocked. There are 9,490 reaction videos on YouTube for 2 girls 1 cup alone.
Friday, January 11, 2008
The Care of the Self
One of my favorite internet activities is reading articles which explain how the most banal decisions of everyday life can become part of the perpetual refashioning of my self. A real winner is Men’s Health.
To emphasize the importance of building "protruding pecs,” the experts point out: “Guys tend to measure themselves by three criteria: income, sexual prowess, bench press.” I guess it’s one of those things that is so obvious you have to have it pointed out to you.
The attention to detail is truly spellbinding: "sleeve-busting muscle" is linked not only to the size of your sleeves, but also the “visibility of your cephalic vein, which crosses your biceps… To make this vein pop, you need to drop your body fat below 15 percent.”
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the delectable nutritional advice is just about fat. Sandwiched between the disgusting recipes, which usually involve boiled chicken breasts and lowfat milk measured down to the half-teaspoon, there are quasi-scientific tributes to secretly transformative grocery-store treasures. For example, from a top ten list of “superfoods”:
Of course, the best of the online advice experience is the girl magazine, Cosmopolitan. I have never had the time to look at their advice on fashion, careers, or fitness, because I have always gotten lost in the vast collection of sex tips. Again, it is the attention to detail which makes everything worthwhile:
NOTE: This entry exceeds the world limit due to the citations. The first two entries were exactly 199 words. This initial rigor compensates for the excess of the current entry.
To emphasize the importance of building "protruding pecs,” the experts point out: “Guys tend to measure themselves by three criteria: income, sexual prowess, bench press.” I guess it’s one of those things that is so obvious you have to have it pointed out to you.
The attention to detail is truly spellbinding: "sleeve-busting muscle" is linked not only to the size of your sleeves, but also the “visibility of your cephalic vein, which crosses your biceps… To make this vein pop, you need to drop your body fat below 15 percent.”
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the delectable nutritional advice is just about fat. Sandwiched between the disgusting recipes, which usually involve boiled chicken breasts and lowfat milk measured down to the half-teaspoon, there are quasi-scientific tributes to secretly transformative grocery-store treasures. For example, from a top ten list of “superfoods”:
Prunes contain high amounts of neochlorogenic and chlorogenic acids, antioxidants that are particularly effective at combating the “superoxide anion radical.” This nasty free radical causes structural damage to your cells, and such damage is thought to be one of the primary causes of cancer.Wow! How totally incomprehensible yet strangely inspiring. I am sure that equally magical properties are hidden in Milky War Bars and cigarettes. Hurray for nutrition!
Of course, the best of the online advice experience is the girl magazine, Cosmopolitan. I have never had the time to look at their advice on fashion, careers, or fitness, because I have always gotten lost in the vast collection of sex tips. Again, it is the attention to detail which makes everything worthwhile:
the next time you're going at it with your man, let him know just how bad you want him by making the first move downtown. Confidently kneel between his legs and grip his shaft firmly. Then take him in your mouth and slide your mouth and hand up and down his penis in tandem, periodically gazing up at him or moaning with pleasure… First suck him for a while, then slowly lick all the way up and down his shaft, then use the tip of your tongue to titillate the supersensitive tip of his penis, and so on.An appropriate climax is provided in a response to a reader with ingestion anxiety:
Another way to send him into orgasmic bliss: Let him come on your chest. Start pleasuring him orally, and when he's close to climax put his penis between your breasts… Then, place your palms on either side of your breasts and push them together as he slides his shaft back and forth until he peaks.Who needs porno when we’ve got Cosmo?
NOTE: This entry exceeds the world limit due to the citations. The first two entries were exactly 199 words. This initial rigor compensates for the excess of the current entry.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Funky-Ass Shit Nearly Every Single Day
"I like this shit." It is impossible not to love Snoop Dogg just a little bit more as he bobs his head along to the banjo and sings along to a bluegrass version of his own song, the immortal "Gin and Juice" cover by The Gourds.
Some boring party, you have no choice but to converse, with one of the usual undesirable characters—the lightweight indie-rock pussy with the All-Star shoes, the brain-dead jam-session freak who never goes out without a guitar and a copy of Bringing it All Back Home, the macho white rockist who thinks Led Zeppelin invented rock n' roll.
"What kind of music have you been listening to?" As if you didn't already know, but it's the kind of question that should be worth asking.
"Oh, I like ALL kinds of music! Except country and rap."
As this moving video clip shows, those cultural fundamentalists are right to place country and rap in one category. They are the genres which best represent the real meaning of the term "popular music": music produced and consumed by people. Real people, not the walking cartoons who wear music like an accessory. Those dipshits can buy a fucking Prada bag.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Childhood Memories
As I bit into my madeleines this morning I remembered a picture of a man holding his asshole wide open.
Actually, it was madeleine-flavored ice cream. According to a very bored dude, the madeleine’s structure prevents it from crumbling the way Proust described it. The ice cream is closer.
When you are a young male virgin enduring the varied humiliations of middle school, the dark and hypnotic world of internet perversion can come to represent the anguished sigh of the wounded human spirit. In instant messenger you send your acquaintances a hyperlink—invariably goatse.cx. After cringing like you did the first time, they look for something worse to send back to you.
In high school, I knew a boy who was excited to no end by goatse.cx. He had a remarkably creative mind, further stimulated by Ritalin, and he would loudly rave about the website during lunch. Once I encouraged him to watch a documentary about Noam Chomsky and he became equally excited.
Last I heard, he is in prison. He bought some cocaine for his girlfriend’s birthday, two days before his probation meeting. If his girlfriend had been born a week earlier, maybe he would be somewhere else.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
A User's Guide
At birth I was plugged in to the machine.
Since then I tried, in varying ways, to sever the umbilical cord, only to quickly realize that this cable was in fact a new extension of my brain and body. Somewhere I developed an urge for knowledge of self, and I studied the long history that preceded me in search of excuses, for the means to deny my body and become a human being again. But I only learned that knowledge is a function of the machine, and after tracing the evolution of its programming languages I discovered agency in the synapses.
As I struggled to reckon with my discovery a new node of communication surfaced, transmitting itself from the margin into the center of the network: the blog.
The blog was an excessively democratic form. Every anachronistic bohemian who had dreamed of writing a novel could now publish on a daily basis, everyone with a half-formed political opinion could broadcast empty analyses of all the current journalistic spectacles to the world, every teenager with a secret diary could now realize the ultimate dream of the diary writer: to have one’s secrets read by everyone.
The downfall of blogs is the failure to realize that new forms demand new styles. Blogs are frequently written as conversations: “This morning Jordan told me that Katie didn’t like my performance in the play.” Other than Jordan and Katie, who gives a fuck? Call your friends on the fucking telephone. Blogs are often written with a somewhat nauseating, industrially produced language of interior emotion: “I am SO not going to stop going to the gym. No way. Not when I look like this.” A blog is not a record of personal life. It should not speak of a life held to be separate from the universe of the blog. It should not be written with the language of an irritating everyday conversation, even if its content is valuable. “Last night I saw the latest Alien film. You guys have to see it!” This is unacceptable; it betrays a lack of imagination. A blog registers a flux of experience which understands the media of its own writing at the same level of interiority as the sexual life of its writer. “Last night I saw a YouTube video” is okay. Sometimes academics (worse, aspiring academics) write blogs about philosophy: "In the next entry I will try to show that Adorno's notion of regressive listening can illuminate the problematic contradictions of cultural studies." If you are writing about Adorno in your online blog, you are seriously fucked up. Quit lying to yourself and get an advertising degree, you miserable piece of shit. Then maybe you will do something useful.
An ideal blog would sever itself from all these regressive tendencies, and instead embody the tendencies activated by its technological form. The blog of the future would constantly shift between subject matters, between genres and styles, and in a utopian society, between languages, media, and technologies of dissemination. This dynamism is not a symptom of a declining attention span, but rather the capacity of the human brain to simultaneously process greater and greater quantities of information. The whole machine of modernist style—today used as a tool of repression by the central ideological state apparatus, the educational system—is now rendered obsolete by the blog. The very form of the blog demands neologism, shifting points of view, fragmentary narration, self-referentiality; the blog is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. Of course, that was only one half of modernist art; the other half was the fucked-up aspiration to be separate from—elevated above—everyday life. The blog is nothing more, and nothing less, than everyday life itself. Proust, Baudelaire, Beckett, Joyce, Mallarmé, even Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, whichever fucking names you like to drop, have all been superseded; anyway, their styles were not historically relevant due to any kind of personal genius, but rather because their work was a reflection of (and sometimes upon) certain technologies of everyday life that were already in motion, which have developed exponentially today. Finally, writing is available to everyone: an ideal blog is universally legible, and even if it is not, its spirit is one of translation.
Following is a set of rules, which outline the correct ideas for the production of a blog. If I have not followed any rules in this entry, it is only because, as the Little Prince put it, “Grownups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them.” I am only going to explain myself once, after that, you can go get fucked.
1) A blog entry will never be longer than 200 words. An incomplete sentence is preferred over exceeding the word limit.
2) No two consecutive blog entries will be about the same subject. (No “to be continued…”—you hate it when they do that on TV, don’t you?)
3) A blog will be easy to read.
4) A blog will never conduct itself as an autobiography, a set of scholarly notes, a series of reviews, or any one thing; it will combine the maximum amount of genres and styles possible, preferably within each individual entry.
5) A blog will not be a simulation of a conversation; it will adopt the alienated and impersonal language of the internet, even if it engages in a personal dimension.
6) A blog will comprise as many media as possible. Not simply as a recommendation of cool links—it will really be constituted by the different forms of matter which exist in its network.
7) A blog will address everyday life in content and in form.
The final rule is that is my blog, and I will do whatever the fuck I want.
Stay hard.
Asad
Since then I tried, in varying ways, to sever the umbilical cord, only to quickly realize that this cable was in fact a new extension of my brain and body. Somewhere I developed an urge for knowledge of self, and I studied the long history that preceded me in search of excuses, for the means to deny my body and become a human being again. But I only learned that knowledge is a function of the machine, and after tracing the evolution of its programming languages I discovered agency in the synapses.
As I struggled to reckon with my discovery a new node of communication surfaced, transmitting itself from the margin into the center of the network: the blog.
The blog was an excessively democratic form. Every anachronistic bohemian who had dreamed of writing a novel could now publish on a daily basis, everyone with a half-formed political opinion could broadcast empty analyses of all the current journalistic spectacles to the world, every teenager with a secret diary could now realize the ultimate dream of the diary writer: to have one’s secrets read by everyone.
The downfall of blogs is the failure to realize that new forms demand new styles. Blogs are frequently written as conversations: “This morning Jordan told me that Katie didn’t like my performance in the play.” Other than Jordan and Katie, who gives a fuck? Call your friends on the fucking telephone. Blogs are often written with a somewhat nauseating, industrially produced language of interior emotion: “I am SO not going to stop going to the gym. No way. Not when I look like this.” A blog is not a record of personal life. It should not speak of a life held to be separate from the universe of the blog. It should not be written with the language of an irritating everyday conversation, even if its content is valuable. “Last night I saw the latest Alien film. You guys have to see it!” This is unacceptable; it betrays a lack of imagination. A blog registers a flux of experience which understands the media of its own writing at the same level of interiority as the sexual life of its writer. “Last night I saw a YouTube video” is okay. Sometimes academics (worse, aspiring academics) write blogs about philosophy: "In the next entry I will try to show that Adorno's notion of regressive listening can illuminate the problematic contradictions of cultural studies." If you are writing about Adorno in your online blog, you are seriously fucked up. Quit lying to yourself and get an advertising degree, you miserable piece of shit. Then maybe you will do something useful.
An ideal blog would sever itself from all these regressive tendencies, and instead embody the tendencies activated by its technological form. The blog of the future would constantly shift between subject matters, between genres and styles, and in a utopian society, between languages, media, and technologies of dissemination. This dynamism is not a symptom of a declining attention span, but rather the capacity of the human brain to simultaneously process greater and greater quantities of information. The whole machine of modernist style—today used as a tool of repression by the central ideological state apparatus, the educational system—is now rendered obsolete by the blog. The very form of the blog demands neologism, shifting points of view, fragmentary narration, self-referentiality; the blog is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. Of course, that was only one half of modernist art; the other half was the fucked-up aspiration to be separate from—elevated above—everyday life. The blog is nothing more, and nothing less, than everyday life itself. Proust, Baudelaire, Beckett, Joyce, Mallarmé, even Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, whichever fucking names you like to drop, have all been superseded; anyway, their styles were not historically relevant due to any kind of personal genius, but rather because their work was a reflection of (and sometimes upon) certain technologies of everyday life that were already in motion, which have developed exponentially today. Finally, writing is available to everyone: an ideal blog is universally legible, and even if it is not, its spirit is one of translation.
Following is a set of rules, which outline the correct ideas for the production of a blog. If I have not followed any rules in this entry, it is only because, as the Little Prince put it, “Grownups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them.” I am only going to explain myself once, after that, you can go get fucked.
1) A blog entry will never be longer than 200 words. An incomplete sentence is preferred over exceeding the word limit.
2) No two consecutive blog entries will be about the same subject. (No “to be continued…”—you hate it when they do that on TV, don’t you?)
3) A blog will be easy to read.
4) A blog will never conduct itself as an autobiography, a set of scholarly notes, a series of reviews, or any one thing; it will combine the maximum amount of genres and styles possible, preferably within each individual entry.
5) A blog will not be a simulation of a conversation; it will adopt the alienated and impersonal language of the internet, even if it engages in a personal dimension.
6) A blog will comprise as many media as possible. Not simply as a recommendation of cool links—it will really be constituted by the different forms of matter which exist in its network.
7) A blog will address everyday life in content and in form.
The final rule is that is my blog, and I will do whatever the fuck I want.
Stay hard.
Asad
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