Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Walking Dead


"Modern" "Family" . . . My gosh, do folks actually watch this thing every week? And now in re-runs too!

Guess so. It's the number-one viewed American "comedy" show and the winnah of the last five Best Comedy Show Emmys. Really? The program -- and never before has that word been more applicable -- is like something created by the Stepford Wives or Donald Sutherland after the ending of Body Snatchers. The lighting and colors are the lighting and colors contained within every suburban shopping mall ever entered. While every possible identity-politics "character" moves through the zone of sterility like the zomboid he/she/it is. And such fresh ideas! The idiot dad. The over-sexed grumpy grandpa. The kids who are always smarter than their parents. The spunky soccer mom. The always-more-sensitive-than-the-straights gay guys. The crazy koochie-koochie-koo woman who gets all her laughs by not being able to pronounce correct English. The "realistic" whining direct into the camera. And no blacks or working-class stiffs to upset the stomach. The series reminds me of those movie shorts produced by Goebbels in the mid-1930s showing happy, beautiful, industrious, healthy Germans. Watching this corporate narcotic, one would never know that the US has been taken over by the military and the police, that it's conducting aggressive war all 'round the world, that everyone is spied upon, that every American-made product is a piece of shit, that corporations have their fists up everybody's bums, that half the country is unemployed or underemployed, and that most every citizen is a meth or a coke addict.

'Course the same hypnosis can be said to be laid on the self-regarding office posers and social parasites who feed off neo-liberal hate-fests such as House of Cards, Game of Thrones, or Seth MacFarlane's latest bowel movement. Ladies and Gentlemen -- your New Golden Age of Television!

Monday, December 29, 2014

Welcome to Pig City

Flags flying half-mast all over the Apple for names such as Ramos and Liu. Yet no lowering of anything official -- EVER -- and never prosecutions -- for murdered names such as Akai Gurley, Amadou Diallo, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Abner Louima, Tamir Rice, Timothy Stansbury, Nicholas Heyward, Ousmane Zongo, Iman Morales, Darius Kennedy, James Young, Shereese Francis, Shem Walker, Ramarley Graham, Anthony Baez and many others.

Patrick Martin on the latest descent into class war.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Breaking Santa?

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Oh, What a Life It Was!


TimeWarner in partnership with Google (we're definitely heading toward a place where we'll feel perfectly fine saying things like "My baby was born, in partnership with Google" and "I went to the bathroom in partnership with Google" or "I got my girlfriend off last night in partnership with Google" and "My mom was buried yesterday in partnership with Google") --

Where was I? TimeWarner in partnership with Google has released the entire Life Magazine Archive from 1936 - 1972.

Politically, the issues are a Cold War mess, but still. Looking at these covers and words and images (and ads!), one can only ask: "What happened here?"  Where is this vivid, colorful, funny, masculine, confident, feminine, stylish, warm, sexy, youthful, bright, completely self-involved yet still modest nation?

How did we get so old and so stupid so fast?

Sunday, December 7, 2014

This Girl is a. . .


Happy 10th Birthday
to the
Best Daughter in the World!

Friday, December 5, 2014

White

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Black

Black days have a history as long as the calendar, and attach to many events, but they have one common attribute: reversal, subversion, undermining. In modernity it has attached itself to financial collapse, natural disaster, terrorism, and military defeat. In the Roman calendar, a “black letter day” was one marked with charcoal on the wall calendar, one to be waited out with circumspection. By the time "Black Friday" stuck in the eighties, it had acquired a new meaning that cemented it. It was allegedly the day that retailers finally “went into the black” — made a profit — and shopping thus acquired a civic and patriotic dimension.

In response to duty — to the alleged abandon disguised as duty — Black Friday has developed as the sly alternative. The activity is, by its very nature, as anti-Thanksgiving as you could get. Thanksgiving is, after all, a subject, even an abject celebration, in which one acknowledges submission to the whims of a distant God. Its role is in part to balance out Christmas and the practice of giving to children, in which non-reciprocity is celebrated: the child receives gifts without any expectation of reciprocal action on its part. The child’s role is simply to be. As adults we take our joy from that — Christmas Day without children is worthless and sad.

In that respect, Black Friday has a mutant aspect to it. It has taken the cornucopia effect of Christmas, and applied it to adults. It is, or was, a release from the duty of giving thanks, into a day of infantilized desire. Everything about Black Friday in its high phase acquired a ritual meaning: the drive to the mall, the lining up in the snow, the fist fights, the local news crews there for the fist fights, the rush as the doors opened, the carting away, the staggering under the weight of seventy-inch plasma screens.

The actual utility of the discount goods really functioned as a McGuffin for the activity of acquiring them. What possible improvement in viewing could a seventy-inch plasma screen offer that exceeded the sheer joy of carting it away at a major discount? You enacted the Dinoysian ceremony, but then all the shit stuck around, silting up your house. Black Friday participants, if they had any sense, would buy their goods, leave the store, and dump them straight in waiting garbage cans. They would never feel as good in their adult lives.
Go here for the rest of Guy Randle's very important essay.