According to the L.A. Times today an Iraqi cult known as Heaven’s Army is trying to wreak chaos all over Iraq. The goal is to cause a rapture-esque event where the saint Imam Mahdi, a descendant of Muhammad, will come down to earth and throw a party. But they need as many suicide bombers as possible and unlike oil they are not a renewable resource. So they need lots of dudes and lots of bitches, mostly bitches to hump all the dudes and keep them stoked on blowing shit up. Abu Jassem said he could join and would get cash-money, but he had to let the other dudes sleep with his wife, daughter and sister. A foursome sprinkled with the zest of incest, no less. Hell yeah. And a woman named Iman was approached by a friend who said, “Listen girl, you want Imam Mahdi to come back? Then you should hump my husband.” Swingers! If your sex life is not up to code then join Heaven’s Army. Sounds heavenly humptastic to me!
So we all know contemporary art is boring. At least we all know that thats how most people feel about it. In addition to boring, other adjectives commonly used to describe the segment of cultural output are pretentious, masturbatory, self-serving, narcissistic, and, today’s key word: offensive. Art’s been pissing people off for centuries, and that is a big reason why I like it. People in general annoy the crap out of me, and even though art’s a limp-dick kind of gun, society just hates being conceptually tea-bagged by weirdo art-fags, while, for me, few other events can evoke the same feelings of bliss & joy from the depths of my depravity.
So recently we’ve been hearing a lot about that guy who starves dogs to death while socialites stand around watching, drinking wine and eating cheese. This seemed to piss people off pretty good, as it seemed i could not log on to myspace or Aim for several days without some horrified dog-lover forwarding me the story…and then came the petitions: “Stop this dog murderer before he strikes again!”
As I sit here (in blackface) with no pants on, greasy unkempt hair reaching for the heavens like the branches of some odious sweaty tree, I am thinking about the entertainment industry in all of its forms. As an employee of the dying record producing industry, this affects me directly, but I don’t really care because I am young and I do not own anything of value (i.e. a business). Perhops this is sacrilegious to dispute the things written below me in a blog I am supposed to be a “part of,” but if all tangible media is going the way of self-produced-consumer-generated-and-controlled-garbage and Mayan hellfire is on the horizon, I don’t really have anything to be afraid of. Read more »
Well, another shuttle is launching and no one cares. Only the Japanese media. This is because the Japanese are the last people on earth who care about technology. Not just rockets and experimental space modules but they make robots. Robots that dance. Robots are awesome. Especially ones that dance.
This is a press conference full of Japanese reporters and ZERO Americans. Also no Canadians even though they have just as big of an impact on this mission as the Japanese. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, also had another very significant contribution to space this month. SPACE FOOD. I’m not talking about dry neapolitan cubes. I’m talking about sushi and noodles!
The space station becomes ever more international with it’s Canadians and Japanese and Russians and of course, our dear Americans. As of now, space is just full of a bunch of peace loving hippies. And they are all speaking english and eating Japanese space food. It’s exactly as I would expect a new colony in space to be.
Remember that Simpson’s episode where Homer goes to space, and they had an ant colony to sort tiny screws? Well they actually have that! Maybe not to sort screws but they have ants and grain and mice and fish. Gold fish. In water.
I saw the inside of the life size model of the experimental module and the fish were in a container that seemed to have gravity. But how would a fish tank work without gravity? If you took that gravity away, the fish would have to float in their container, in water globs. I wish I had a picture of that. But i don’t.
power=technology=space missions=space food=taste
What are taste and power and what the fuck do they have to do with each other? What happens when they collide? For the purposes of resolving these riddles, I will be defining taste as “the sociological concept of expressing preferences deemed appropriate or inappropriate by (or for) society” and power as “the ability by a group or individual to make choices or influence outcomes bigger than it/him/herself.” To have both is to control what other people like, usually without them knowing. To have both is to be both the gatekeeper and the keymaster.
1: Tasteful Power – Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
Tolstoy was a count who didn’t give a fuck. He was born in 1808 into one of the wealthiest noble families in Russian history, with plenty of power and no taste. This bothered him. His mother, father, grandmother, and aunt died when he was 2, 9, 10, and 13. This didn’t bother him.
When he was 19 he inherited his 4,000 acres and 350 serfs. This sucked, so he moved to Moscow, got drunk, and blew all his money gambling. He slowly sold land and slaves for years to pay his debt, and eventually had to cut down his forests, tear down his house, and even sell his watch. Legend has it that he didn’t give a fuck about money. He went to school at St. Petersburg to study law and Oriental languages. College sucked, so he quit. He volunteered in an artillery unit. War sucked (possibly even moreso than college), so he quit. He tried to free his serfs in 1851, a whole decade before the cavemen in control of Russia got the idea. His serfs didn’t take his offer because they thought it was a trap. (Note: slaves are stupid. Tolstoy started a school for his slaves’ kids a few years later to try to fix this.)
So Tolstoy travels all across Europe to see what it’s like, and realizes it’s a bunch of bourgeois pseudo-intellectual dooshbags. He starts to write the world’s most amazing stories about rich assholes dying. Then he freaks out because he can’t stop gambling and having sex, so he magically devises a new form of Christian anarchism, gets a bunch of disciples, and they start traveling around calling themselves Tolstoyans.
He threw away his financial power and slave-owning power and got a bunch of religious power and literary power out of thin air. The man had good taste, and knew what kinds of power mattered. He owned land, riches, bodies, and labor, and didn’t care. He wanted souls, and he wanted to control the world of literature, so he snatched it all up. Even King Pimp Dostoyevsky called him the world’s greatest living writer, and Nabokov called him the greatest writer in all of Russian history. And his religious works famously influenced Gandhi and MLK’s doctrines of nonviolence.
Also, he wrote into his will that anything he wrote before 1881 would be copyrighted by his wife and family, and anything afterwards would have no copyright whatsoever, and one time he shot a bear point-blank range in the fucking face. THEN he learned to ride a bike at age 67, was excommunicated at age 73, and died at 82 with thousands of peasants at his funeral in the middle of the woods. He invented ballin’.
2: Powerful Taste – Food that Tastes You Back
People need to eat to live, so controlling food means eternal riches. Australia is aware of this, while America is not. (Note: America is stupid. Maybe Tolstoy should have started a school over here to fix that.) From 1992 to 2003, Australia exported 20% of the world’s beef and veal, and America and Brazil were tied for 2nd place at 18% (or 1.1 million metric tons) each. Over this period, U.S. beef exports grew 85%. Then in 2003, something magical happened.
One Canadian-born cow in Washington state had mad cow disease, or as we call it on the streets: bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Most of the world immediately banned U.S. beef. Most of the world doesn’t want mad cow disease. 90% of U.S. beef was bought by Japan (the world’s largest beef-importer), South Korea, Canada, and Mexico, which all banned U.S. beef. Wuss countries like Canada and Mexico changed their minds soon and allowed poison meat into their homes. Japan, however, took this opportunity to finally get revenge for the uranium-fission and plutonium-implosion bombs of yesteryear and banned all beef that didn’t follow their new import laws. No beef would be allowed into Japan unless data was readily available regarding where the cow was born, where it died, every single place it lived, everything it ate, and every cow it lived with at every single location. America thought this would cost too much; Australia did not. American beef exports dropped from 18% of the world market to 3%. American beef exports dropped to 17% of their 2003 level. With one swift move, Japan handed over the world’s beef market to Australia (and to a lesser extent, Brazil). If you want health-guaranteed madness-free beef, go to one of those countries. If a country’s beef is good enough for Japan, it’s good enough for anybody.
To further demonstrate how hard America fucked itself in the meat wallet, American cow tongue (the tastiest part if you’re a burrito fan like myself) went for $4.25 per pound before the incident, and as of July 2004 was down to 70 cents per pound, for a loss of $12.43 per cow head, as calculated by the U.S. Meat Export Federation. In Japan, cow tongue can fetch over $20 per pound. They cut it into thin strips and grill it in teriyaki sauce Korean BBQ style and it’s heavenly. If you find yourself in Japan, eat it. They call it gyutan. It’s Japanese for “cow tongue.”
3: Tasty Power – YMO and Beer
The best way to tie all these concepts together in a way you MTV/ADD-generation heathens can follow, is through an audio-visual example. I read that somewhere. Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of the tastiest groups to ever bless electronic music from 1978 onward, recently reformed (again) to rock out a commercial for Kirin Ichiban, one of the world’s tastiest beers, and my personal ex-favorite. (I quit drinking beer last year, in Japan. I’m so rad.) Watch as with the perfect match of fashion-taste and music-power, YMO control the dance floor, and all our hearts.
Alright, so I could spend plenty of time drawing the line from Cab Calloway and big band jazz through Chicago over the span of 50-70 years to the birth and apex of ghetto-house, juke music, and footworking (footwurking), but instead I just want to share these two puzzle pieces. And yes there are references to sex and drug usage but this is one of the less dangerous Betty Boop toons…trust me.
Even though a lot of things have been said about me, and some of the worst things really have been proven, I think you all should remember something. If you could just see past that, see a sort of funny place where we fit just right, like a clowny-clown town, where things’d go just how they’re gonna go, and a slippery street, on a tilt, and everything in the town’s gonna slide where it wants to, and some of the people that live there have a little meeting and they say: “well there it is, proof, this town’s goin in a way I like or that I dont like.” well-l-l-l I’d be that other guy that stands up, says “yeah, they’re right, ‘cept if it’s gonna go that way, lets fight fire with fire, lets slide so often down the streets of this town, that we weigh it back down, crush that tilt that’s been wedged in there, let’s grease up, go faster!” EVERYBODY WOULD AGREE!….. THEN after some time goes by, the folks that brought up the point in the first place would start to say “Hey this phun is getting boring, the tilt we were on isn’t there any more, and w’ere all still covered in gunk slippin’ and slidin’ all over the place, just stop all this clowning around! there’s no call for it anymore! Let’s just bury all this clowning we’ve done, dig a ditch outside of town!” Then I wouldn’t really be able to say anything about it ’cause the tide would’ve turned back around , and some more time would pass with everything just going fine for everybody…but the more serious and fine everybody got, the more the memory of the slick sliding days would come back, and then it’d be a story I’d just tell to my kids, and then there kids, and then one day they’d wanna find all that clowny gunk and phun they’d burried, and that’s the day when you’d come back to my kind, that’s the day when I’d be able to defend myself to all of you.
Langer’s Deli at the corner of Alvarado and 7th in MacArthur Park perfected pastrami. Hands down, the best in Los Angeles. However, Gourmet Magazine ranked it at a mere #2. My colleague and I discussed its rating over lunch and we can’t even make up something that is totally absurd that would make it better. If it was served by a naked Jessica Alba with an Iggy Popp waiter it would still carry the same prowess of Earth’s Mightiest Sandwich. It’s like the realization of the Rosetta Stone, invention of the tin can, and discovery of Santo Domingue all-in-one. It is the finest achievement of Western Civilization. Christmas and the fork bow to the Pastrami at Langer’s. And then there is the perfectly frosted mugs that make a Bud Light to a Langer’s Pastrami sandwich what the Roosevelt Corollary To The Monroe Doctrine is to the Monroe Doctrine. But seriously, the rye bread tastes like it is made from the Emperor’s private grain stash, the Cole Slaw oozes with a Russian Dressing that Rasputin used to revive himself time-and-time again, the Swiss Cheese tastes like the Alps look, and the Pastrami is prepared like a Blitzkrieg. Except it loves Jews. And I love it.
I’m going to seek out this #1 deli in L.A. and I guess lose weight eating it because that’s the only thing that could make it better. And then I’ll ride a unicorn over to God’s House and hurl Iraqi WMDs down at Langer’s in sole allegiance to #1.
