If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

It's been a trying week of overall ick. On the national front, the inaugaration to smack down the other half of the country with a flex of stalinist muscle and security to boot; on a private front, close friends separating after years of marriage. Ugh. My heart is breaking (more on the latter than the former, [although with Bush it's more of heartburn and 4 year acid reflux]) and I am only hoping the best for them at this point. Nuff said.
Back to the national...
Protesting an event like this seems counterproductive. There will be more fuel for the fire to come I'm sure and it's easier to get people behind outrage at either new or current non-ending wars... (and plus, non-events like this gives the other side yet another a photo op to tag the "freaks n hippies" dragging out the signs and scary oversize puppets.)

I got the below photos from this website here. Of course I'm laughing my ass off at both for different reasons... the Brad n Jen one is wonderfully irreverant and reminds me of a friend back in the first gulf war who's slogan was "Make cake not bombs"....

Whereas this left-baiting crank is almost Joycean in his description of a liberal's day. I almost see this as his own confession of how he lives from day to day... (Some of this is actually how I live day to day, give or take the employment part).

In other news - Norwegians (including my Scandinavian relatives) fear that Bush is into Death Metal and is giving the high sign to satan.

Art and Costco on Special

Art and CostcoCostco did something rich and strange on their website. They apparently decided to go high-end and sell an original Picasso for $40k. Of course - it's not Guernica or anything, but it does bring into question the whole sacritidy of art when not being sold through Sotheby's or some other contextually accepted market. Of course this is "Art" with a capitol A, and has a the brand name of big brand names on it... Not that we could have a time where a Costco would have aisle for selling conceptual peices by Jeff Koons, or maybe even dilute the whole commercial/pop-culture distinction and commision figurines by Superflat artists like Nara...

Death as an unkind way of saying "Change"

Death as an unkind way of saying "Change"

Out of desperation, I've reinstalled earthlink 56k dialup for a month while I try to get broadband... The pages load incredibly slow, and I'm afraid there will be no pretty pictures to look at as the load time on the server will probably take all night.
I saw a few movies over the weekend that I'm a month behind seeing ("A Long Engagement" and "Closer")... Per the latter, it was a subconsciously violent movie (where as the former was a subconscious love story amid a violent wartime movie)... Something occured to me today as I was walking to work was how interchangeable London and New York were. Given that both the female and male leads were probably adapted from the british stage and that Mike Nicholls probably added a cross-atlantic flair to it (I'm just guessing - I haven't really seen the play that it's based on, just making assumptions)... But it got me thinking about the similarities - per some similar rants on some blogs I've read - how materialistic both cities have gotten (loss of that fabled struggling creative spirit that everyone moved there for in return for high-end chain stores and status items)... I then started on the warpath - how did we get to be so materialistic? Why are people willing to forgoe a housing payment for designer denim (which invariably looks like shit no matter how you try to wear it)... Why do we think that our notoriety will be seen in our iPods? I then realized the source of all our anguish - Marketers and the fact they let GenerationY dictate what was "street", which is stuff you could not afford in the ghetto or suburbs, but dreamt about regardless. Labels became again the new gods, and Hip Hop moguls could design BMW's and sell the twentyset, but GenX was a lost cause because of our abundance of irony and trying to keep up with it all. I shouldn't go after GenY, however... As much as I'd like to see them as doey-eyed pawns of a bigger game, we're as much to blame for pushing the "New Sincerity" agenda of indie-rawwwch. Ok - this is complete shit and I hate articles like this. I really do... Slow on the take and years behind schedule, the NYT gives us this tripe on Conor Oberst, 24yroldwunderkind with a shaky voice and soft melodies that we've not heard before (uhh, Galaxy500, any twee band from the mid90's). I guess I hate the fact that it's plugged on bling-concsious shows like the OC and One Tree Hill where they use it to bridge poorly written dialogue spoken by teenagers portrayed by people in their 20's. I also hate that a long standing tradition of Keep-it-Simple-Stupid has been touted as the new strategy to sell (and sell out). No wonder the indie kids are running to intentionally bad hip-hop parodies (Har Mar Superstar, etc) and baroque karakoe buttroque... I guess it's all labels baby. Oh - I show my age, bitter and old, clutching at my out of print vinyl and staring out to sea...
Speaking of - I started to think of death as I walked home in the rain (to change the tone/subject). I was feeling the ghosts move around the city... Change, Transformation... Histories as small as microrevolutions that won't be seen for centuries until someone finds a document somewhere. Death is a harsher way of saying change... Change is a kinder way of saying Death. Regimes come in and out of power... Yet things stay in the picture, Ghosts hide behind buildings and won't let you look away. I think that I should go easy on my contempt for changes, it's invariable and inevitable and leaves me no contemporaries. Plus I'm as much a slave to ridiculous vehicles (as a friend once put it) as the next kid (of any age), so bring on silly details that make us feel woefully inadequate and unwilling to sit still.