Hanoi Ed Rocks!

April 18, 2003 / / 1 Comment

Ed has said some interesting things about the latest conversation we find ourselves blogging our way through, including this :

Given the peremptory perception of a post and the false sense of importance behind an entry, people are loath to actually express what is on their minds. Popular weblogs are disinclined to state anything about politics or war other than the neocon hard line, something else that can be filed under the rubric of “oblique” commentary. And thanks to the extension of our cult of personality to weblogging with terms like “A-list,” referrals, the intricate brownnosing and insularity seen at events like SXSW and Fray, it has now expanded to a level that sometimes negates the socializing and collective innovation that these events are supposed to be about. The Leo Buscalgia-like need to be liked, linked, or befriended, to be noticed as if the whole personal writing gambit or sense of weblog being was some spineless, drug-free answer to Studio 54 and the strange Bush-NATO idea that “an attack on a person’s writing is an attack on a person” (tell that to a libel expert and he’ll laugh you out of his office), causes people to pull punches or take things far too seriously. And it corrupts honest expression.

which is excellent and with which I agree quite emphatically, but to which I must reply ‘Not the wonderchicken, muthaf–ka!’

Promises

April 16, 2003 / / 3 Comments

I have promised, in roughly chronological order, to write about

(apologies to anyone I missed.)
I’m not sure how many of these, if any, I’ll get to, but I’ll try. I suck at digging out from under the results of my own laziness.

Stop The Madness, Darn It

April 14, 2003 / / 6 Comments

Now I know the Patriot Act (quite possibly to be extended indefinitely, is the word on the streets) is Bad, and the Bend Over And Feel Our Power Act (also known as Patriot II – The Second Coming) is Worse, but this, friends and neighbours, this is Insupportable.

In Fairfax, VA to be precise. The police there have decided that getting drunk in a bar is an arrestable offense worth enforcing. You don’t have to be starting trouble, getting in a fight, or climbing behind a wheel — the simple act of drinking in a bar gives them enough probable cause to harass and subject you to tests. And if you actually have the gall to have more than a couple beers while in that bar, you’re going to jail and getting fixed up with a nice criminal record.
[more…]

Courtesy of the excellent Modern Drunkard Magazine.

Whales

April 12, 2003 / / 3 Comments

My mother recently found one of the journals I kept during my wanderings in the 90’s, buried at the bottom of one of my old tin trunks that had been sitting out beside the woodpile at the lodge for a few years, and mailed it to me. Reading it has flung me back into the sweet mad whirl in which I lived for so many years, and brought back a peacock fantail of good and bad memories. Here’s an excerpt :

December 28 1992
Latitude N 21°50.51
Longitude W 105°52.89

After an overnight cruise south from Mazatlan, the shakes from the exhaustion after 2 or 3 hours sleep are chased away momentarily with a little caffeine.
At sunset, we had 5 sails up in a vain attempt to catch what little wind there was – jib, stay, main, mizzen staysail (which was actually the old chute from Taiping), and the mizzen. We must have looked magnificent in the fading light. But as the sun went down, the flukey light winds said ‘f–k it’ and went to bed. We dropped everything except the main and mizzen, tried in vain to get some speed, then gave up and sheeted them in tight and turned on the engine.
About three in the a.m., orange dots began to show up like measles on the radar. A veritable flotilla of fishing boats, all overlapping their nets in continuous lines miles long, raking everything alive out of the water. Miserable bastards. No running lights to speak of, of course, and the few there were obeyed no patterns, so we had a few tense hours winding our way amongst the boats, hoping like hell that we wouldn’t hit any of their nets. At least the sun-bright squid boats with their spidery armatures of lights pointing down into the water were easy to avoid.
Michael retired before we were through (a little worse for the beer I suspect) but we managed, Dale and I, to steer us through. Iron Mike, the autopilot, did most of the work – but we watched damn close, adjusting every minute or two. Came within a few hundred feet of a couple of them, which out on the open water felt close enough to smell their farts.
sh-t! Whales – I almost forgot. Not only was there a humpback in full breach not 200 feet from us as we approached Mazatlan a couple of days ago, which was my first glimpse, but shortly before sunset last night, while I was steering under sail, two more humpbacks surfaced and blew about 100 feet off the starboard beam. Curious, they turned to approach. The sheer size and majesty of those magnificent bastards terrified me. They came within about 20 feet of the rail, then, sounding, dove. Michael worried aloud that they’d ‘fall in love’ with the boat and bump it a little, rub against it some. They do that sometimes, he said. Maybe he was just messing with me. But they were at least as big as us, and we’re 71 feet LOA. I was all over the compass, heart pounding.
The whales surfaced again about half a mile off the port beam, having dived beneath us, then turned north and headed towards Mazatlan. We sailed on, slowly, sniffing for winds.

Oh, It's All So Icky

April 8, 2003 / / 11 Comments

So I heard some people are averting their eyes, avowing that they’ll Blog No More about all the War and Death and Ugliness and Ickiness; telling us that they feel they must disengage from the angry and divisive back-and-forth bayonette to the guts wartalk flying back and forth across the blogosphere lately. It’s just so taxing. Too much, too wild, too real, too damn disruptive to quiet contemplation and coffee consumption. The voices who shout out against war are all but indistinguishable in their stridency from the voices who cheer the Forces of Freedom, darn it! I thought all that fact-checking of their asses would be fun! It’s all so easily parsed, too obvious – I know the forces of Good are the Forces of Evil, sometimes, silly, and the Evil Doers are still there, darn it, and the Doers of Good are semi-plus unbad, well, at least sometimes, and I weary of explaining it all to my loyal readers, and besides all this typing is making me tired already, especially when some random Googlenaut winds up at My Personal Website with a search for “America Number One” +pussy -cheeselogs and leaves a comment that makes me feel like my carefully chosen words are all pearls-before-swining themselves, and I just can’t do it any more, I need to find my happy place….
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m thinking you can go f–k yourselves, you lame sh-tmorsels. Grab some anger [mp3 – 2Mb] and ride it into the dirt, or step the f–k back.

(If this is unfair to those who have made a firm stand against making a firm stand, well, tough sh-t is all I can say to you this evening, my friends.)

Tuggin'

April 7, 2003 / / 11 Comments

Out of nowhere this evening, I remembered one afternoon many years ago when my friend Rick’s and my paths had crossed – in New Zealand I think it was – and he asked me what I’d been doing for the last couple of years, expecting one of my 6-beer-long monologues.
I paused, said the first thing that came to mind : “Tuggin’.” He laughed.
Deliberately dumb, that exchange became a shorthand ritual in later years when our travels would bring us back together in the same place for a day, or for a week.
“How’ve you been?” he’d ask. “Tuggin’,” I’d reply, and that would be that.
It was our code to signify that it didn’t really matter how long we’d been apart, that the thread of our friendship could be picked up again without missing a beat, no matter how long the time intervening, that we were more often than not men without women and not too worried about it, and that the telling of tales could always wait until we’d had a bottle of wine or three.
I remembered that this evening, and then I remembered that it wouldn’t ever happen again, because he’s dead. God damn it.

Awareness Matters

April 5, 2003 / / 3 Comments

Linguist George Lakoff talks again about the metaphors that have been and are continuing to be used to sell this war to the public, the very same metaphors that were used back in Gulf War I (and many other times as well).
He also has some points to make about the anti-war movement, which echo what some friends in the neighbourhood are discussing at the moment, and in which they may well be interested.

…
I think it is crucially important to understand the cognitive dimensions of politics – especially when most of our conceptual framing is unconscious and we may not be aware of our own metaphorical thought. I have been referred to as a “cognitive activist” and I think the label fits me well. As a professor, I do analyses of linguistic and conceptual issues in politics, and I do them as accurately as I can. But that analytic act is a political act: Awareness matters. Being able to articulate what is going on can change what is going on – at least in the long run.
This war is a symptom of a larger disease. The war will start presently. The fighting will be over before long. Where will the anti-war movement be then?
First, the anti-war movement, properly understood, is not just, or even primarily, a movement against the war. It is a movement against the overall direction that the Bush administration is moving in. Second, such a movement, to be effective, needs to say clearly what it is for, not just what it is against.
Third, it must have a clearly articulated moral vision, with values rather than mere interests determining its political direction.
[more…]

[via Mefi]

Erections Are Sometimes Quite Pleasant

April 4, 2003 / / 3 Comments

Spring has sprung in Seoul, and the last few days have averaged about 10 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for this time of year; the prevailing winds from the East, which are unusual and have not only encouraged the blossoms to open but have cleared away some of the smog to which I have reluctantly become accustomed, well, those warm, cheek-tickling breezes have also made me hornier than a three-peckered billy goat, as my colourful character of step-father is given to say.
Perhaps it’s just death that has me tumescent. Apparently that happens, sometimes. Regardless, sex. Mmm, sex.

The Winner and Still Cham-peen

April 3, 2003 / / 2 Comments

Yay! We win! Seoul has the worst air quality amongst all cities in OECD countries. Yes, it’s worse than Rome, worse than Mexico city even.

Seoul’s air pollution is the worst among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Environment Ministry said yesterday.
The capital’s particulate matter (PM), which can cause various respiratory problems, was measured at 71 micrograms per cubic meter at the end of 2001, the ministry said.
The figure is the highest among OECD countries, surpassing the 60 micrograms reported in Rome, Italy, and 53 micrograms for Mexico City – cities that are both notorious for severe urban air pollution.
Moscow recorded the lowest pollution level in terms of PM with 10 micrograms, with cities such as Paris and Auckland also significantly lower than Seoul with 24 and 25 micrograms, respectively.
The density of nitrogen dioxide in Seoul was 0.037 ppm (parts per million), ranking third after Moscow with 0.058 ppm and Bratislava, Slovakia, with 0.047 ppm. Excessive exposure to nitrogen dioxide can exacerbate pneumonia and bronchitis.
[more…]

The prize? Well, let’s just say Korean can-do spirit extends to cancer, too. I sometimes wonder why I bothered to quit smoking three years ago (except for my occasional cocktail-time cigar). Now I can relax in the knowledge that any tumors that develop will be Someone Else’s Fault. Comforting, that.

Pee

April 1, 2003 / / 8 Comments

From the three years or so I recently lived in Sydney Australia, my primary olfactory memory is of stale pee. At least twice a block, on my daily walk downtown from my apartment in Surrey Hills to my job at Town Hall, my tender nostrils would be assaulted by a cloud of piss-reek so terrifying, so staggering in its ability to claw its way up into your sinuses and perch giggling behind your eyeballs… well, let’s just say it was pretty damn whiffy. This stink would taunt me, mock me, appear and disappear willo-the-piss, then turn a corner and pow! there it would be again.
The odd thing, though, was that although there was an almost constant smell of downtown pee, I almost never saw anyone actually, well, doing it. A city of ghost-whizzers.
Here in Seoul, it’s almost impossible to walk down the street in the evening, particularly on a Friday or Saturday, without spotting two or three teetering drunks fumbling at their little weiners and tinkling on a wall or car or doorway or small child too slow to escape. One particularly enthusiastic gent a while back was on the subway platform at about 5 pm, canted at a 60 degree angle or so, pants around his knees, squeezing out a sadly unimpressive stream toward the opposite platform, where I was standing. It was difficult to tell for sure, but I was under the impression he was trying to hit me, and was frustrated that he was falling short by a good 50 feet or so.
But for all the determined urban micturation here, I almost never smell pee. It’s odd.
I have concluded as a result of this painstaking scientific study that the urine of Korean men does not smell. Your mileage may, as they say, vary.

Deeply Weird

March 31, 2003 / / 7 Comments

The Samsung ladyphone : just one of those occasional excrescences of Korean weirdness into English, not just cognitive dissonance-inducing mistranslation, but a brief glimpse into the whirling void of cluelessness that yawns at the core of this nation of loveable doozers.
There’s more than just those 32 chips of cubic zirconia (wow, that’s class!) and a built in make-up mirror. Much, much more! Check out these just-for-her features!

Features for Women
– Biorhythm
– Fatness Index
– Calorie Calculator
– Pink Schedule
– Menstruation

Excellent! A phone with Menstruation and a Fatness Index! I don’t know what a Pink Schedule is, but I want one! I’m in gadget heaven, and I’m not even a woman!
Yikes.

Whatcha Gonna Do?

March 28, 2003 / / 9 Comments

While reading this post from Burningbird, this song from one of the greatest punk bands of all time (and one of my all-time favorites) Vancouver’s DOA, was playing on Winamp, appropriately enough. Not poetry, far from it, but good political hardcore rarely reached such lofty heights way back then, 20 years ago and more, and we rarely noticed, as busy slamming and pogoing and sinking oceanic quantities of cheap beer as we were. I do recall taking very seriously one of the band’s many mottoes, though: TALK – ACTION = ZERO.

DOA – Whatcha Gonna Do?
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha wanna do?
Whatcha gonna be?
Well if you’re thinkin’
That you’re nothin’
You already are
Yeah, you already are
You need some takin’, not just thinkin’
You need some takin’, not just thinkin’
You need some takin’,
Just quit your talkin’.
You’re sittin’ thinkin’
About your sinkin’
Around on down
You wanted everything
But you took nothin’
So now you lie
About the way that you tried
So whatcha gonna do
about what you do?
Whatcha gonna do
about what you do?
Whatcha gonna do
about what you do?
‘Bout the way that you tried?
So quit your talkin’
Okay.
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha wanna do?
Whatcha gonna be?
Well if you want
Whatcha really want?
You need some takin’
Not just fakin’
So whatcha gonna do ’bout what you do?
Whatcha gonna do ’bout what you do?
And whatcha gonna do ’bout what you be?
Gotta be somethin’
Hey.
I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know

I used to know the answer to that question, two decades ago, when I first heard this song, or thought I did. I marched in protests, I talked to everyone I could corner in bars and hallways, I told them to fight the wave of corporatist christian contrakiller bullsh-t flowing out of America and lapping around our ankles.
Today, I don’t know the answer anymore. I am almost certain that there is no good answer, actually, no answer that’s any damn good at all, other than the one that comes by following the urgings of your own sense of right and wrong.
So I’m going to go get drunk, and be nice to some people, and try and avoid getting in any fistfights with Americans. Not much, but it’ll have to do, you know?
Like Joey sh-thead said, you gotta know who your enemy is.

Frolicking at Mt Paektu

March 28, 2003 / / 2 Comments

Kim Jong Il’s livejournal [via El Filtro] is just what I needed this morning, as the Land Of The Morning Calm chaos gets all in my face once again. People are dying over in Iraq, I know, I know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a chuckle at the expense of a funny looking Korean despot, right?

3:39 am Dear diary. Bush still doesn’t ‘get it.’ I tried making my feelings clear but he’s too busy ignoring me, he is such a jerk. Everything in his life is just Saddam, Saddam, Saddam and I am sick of it.
On the plus side, I think my hair looked pretty good today. Also I went frolicking at Paektu Mountain and the rainbow came out again. After dinner some of my subjects sang me a song because I invented Outer Space.
[more…]

Also, I am victorious!

Free

March 25, 2003 / / 10 Comments

[Note in Big Friendly Letters for the Intelligence Impaired : The piece below was recently reproduced in toto (which is intensely annoying in and of itself) at Indymedia by someone, and characterized as actually being in support of this corporatist misadventure of a war. It’s not, damn it, and that might have been clear if my unknown copy-and-paster had actually bothered to read beyond the first paragraph, or scrolled down a post or two. Disappointing.]
—
You know, I’m starting to get behind this whole War thing. I feel it in my belly now, I feel the twist down deep in there, down where the root of my cock would be, if it had a root. I feel the warm throb with each heartbeat thrum and flash of ordnance.
It gets me hot.
I’m getting excited about the killing. I wasn’t too thrilled with it at first, you know, cowardly america-hating lefty cheese-eating appeaser blowhard anti-warblogger f–kwit that I am. I was tremulous and girly, but now that the blood is flowing, and the guns are shouting their wordless chants, I’m starting to like it. I want to see more! I want the news to turn bad and then worse. I don’t want your brave boys or mine to come home, wrapped in glory and squinting through a cake of Euphrates dust – I want them to stay and fight and die, for me, yes for me, and for glorious freedom. I want them to stand there arch-backed and unbowed in the sand with the grieving sun behind them – erect – and clutching a flagpole, with old glory streaming out behind. And then I want to see them blown to pieces.
I want a conflagration! Firestorms! God damn it, if it’s war then let it be war! Let’s rub our noses in it, roll in it like a dog in its puke, let’s stare at ourselves red-eyed in the mirror and think about what we really are, and what we love, and who we fear. Let’s take it to the next level! Let’s roll! No pain no gain! Just do it! Semper fidelis! Give me the shrieks of the wounded, the gentle Protestant sobbing of heartbroken heartland mothers, and the keening of those strange burkha’d women gathered around the corpses of their sons, too.
I like this war. I want more of it. I want Iraqi Freedom now, and I want it without pickles or mustard, you minimum-wage retard. I want Iranian Freedom too, with some Freedom Fries on the side, and then I want some goddamned Korean Freedom, served up sizzlin’ hot, with kimchi-fart afterburners switched on as the walls fall down around me. Free the world, George! Free us all! We want to be free! My huddled masses, they yearn for some down-home, Texas-style freedom! Freedom from care, freedom from want, freedom to shop, freedom from thought, freedom from life. Free us from our lives, America, free us all. Fight for peace, because peace is almost as good as freedom!
Void where prohibited by law.

Reruns

March 22, 2003 / / 4 Comments
“Then we send a few guys downtown to rent all of the war movies they can get their hands on. They also buy a hell of a lot of beer. For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of those damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging.

[…]

Now is my time to step into the newest combat zone. And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherf–kers.”
–excerpt from ‘Jarhead – A Marine’s Chronicle’

I said this, before :

KILL

KILL!

KILL!

You f–king primates. Kill each other until you’re all dead, grind each other’s bones to make your bread. Swing the infants by their heels and shatter their tiny skulls on the doorjambs of your hovels. Kill! Hate! Let it never end! Swear blood feuds, and carry on the senseless slaughter of your fathers’ fathers, and their thick-fingered simian fathers, too. Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that’s it, ethnically cleanse. If there are any women left alive, don’t forget to rape them, and rape them hard. Slitting their throats after you’ve spilled your filthy warrior seed is optional, but recommended. Kill! Lay waste! Wreak havoc! Defend the honour of your people, sink your hands deep into the warm entrails of those you would destroy as they cough out their last curse! Kill!

Just hurry it up, already. I’m waiting to dance on your unmarked graves, you cheeseheads.

…
I’m too f–king weary to get as worked up as I was when I wrote that little rant about some-f–king-war or other, so transliterate if you must, my friends. Turgid, purple and mildly embarrassing, sure, but better than nothing, right?
Better than embarrassed, embattled, uncertain silence. Better than a sad and defeated realization that no matter how intense the outrage born from a meaningless commitment to steer one’s course by what seems ethical and right, the stupidity and hatred and killing will just keep rolling on.
Let’s Roll™!

Death Rulez, d00d

March 18, 2003 / / 8 Comments

I am often inclined to think, all Sturgeonesque, that 90% of everything is crap, and that goes double for poetry. Which would mean, of course, that 180% of poetry is crap, which may be overstating the case somewhat, but that feels like a comfortable number to work with, so I’ll let it stand.
A case in point is this Harold Pinter poem rescued from a slightly-less-than-customarily-dumbass (at least recently) Metafilter thread. Harold Pinter is apparently some Poet of Significance, about whom I know very little, as I ain’t got me mucha that there book-larnin’. Anyway, have a read :

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America’s God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn’t join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who’ve forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America’s God.

Now, I don’t disagree with the sentiment expressed here, as you might guess. Yes, America and their God are doodyheads supreme, and a force for death and evil in the world today. That’s a given, isn’t it? And, hey, I like the loping metre – badum badumdum boop. It’s bouncy, yet martial! Just right, as Goldilocks might exclaim.
What amuses me is that this Great Author’s Poem falls in quality somewhere between lame old Satan-cheering Iron Maiden lyrics, say, and a quote from Cannibal Corpse [warning : rather icky, but may assist in understanding American culture] . You know, I wouldn’t take issue if Pinter’s tripe weren’t meant to be Art, High and Holy. No one listens to Cannibal Corpse (or at least, I wish no one did) expecting a literary artgasm, I don’t think. But oor Harold?
Well, stuff like “The riders have whips which cut. Your head rolls onto the sand Your head is a pool in the dirt Your head is a stain in the dust” goes quite nicely alongside other stuff like

Slaughtered enemies scattered
Trail of death they walked
Drenched in their own blood
A sound of thousands fills the sky
A death that comes so clear
When the rain of fire falls
Flames that will consume
A boiling death appear
The last second alive

Quick now, was that Harold, or the merry pranksters from Vomitory? And does it matter? Admittedly Mr Rundqvist, Vomitory’s wordsmith, has a few problems with getting those nice bumpedyboop rhythms going, and may in fact have a few problems with english as a second language, but I’m willing to bet there are a whole lot more people chanting his songs than dear old Harold’s.
Which may not be the point. You tell me. 250 words or less, due by Friday. Heh.
I wonder, as an aside, how many of the foolish young soldiers going to risk their lives for f–king nothing in Iraq listen, teeth gritted, to mutant scum like Cannibal Corpse and their grindcore ilk? That might be an interesting statistic.

On Second Thought

March 18, 2003 / / 8 Comments

Thanks for the help with the redesign candidate a few days ago, friends, but true to contrarian form (well predicted by Fishrush), I think I like this brand spanking new idea I’ve been fiddling with even better. Even though it looks best on IE (transparency is a wanky but purty) and at resolutions higher than 800×600, it still looks reasonable on the latest Mozilla and doesn’t totally derange Opera, at least.
That said, I may well change my mind again tomorrow, but it’s bedtime for now and my eyes hurt. Comments are welcome as always. But please keep in mind that this is an early prototypy thing, and I am aware that it imposes some limitations as a result of design decisions (like supporting 800×600). I’ll probably end up just implementing the skinning doodad I was working on a few months ago as monica suggested, so you’ll be able to choose your (persistent between sessions, with cookies) look and feel thanks to the Magic of PHP, this current design included.