Actually, DON'T explain her appeal to me

Recently while replying to a dear friend's blog post, I went on a (somewhat off-topic, I'll admit) rant about the sorry state of commercial radio.  Contrary to their claims that they provide invaluable exposure to new artists, I retorted that mainstream radio plays only those acts hand-picked by the music industry at large as potential platinum-sellers.  This involves playing styles of music which, by and large, I regard as at best irrelevant and at worst unlistenable.  Further, I made the claim that I hadn't heard any musician I liked and subsequently followed on the radio for the first time since I was nine (likely either Nirvana or Guns and Roses, judging from the age).  This last was, of course, an exaggeration and an infamy.  I was probably closer to twelve.

As my long-time readers (all six of you) have doubtless noticed, my tastes in music run somewhat to the extreme and eclectic.  This is, however, a relatively recent development--not until I by and large renounced mainstream radio for more inclusive sources of information (chiefly the Internet) did I discover such artists and musical styles.  As an example, allow me to present Godflesh.



Fronted by Justin Broadrick, this English industrial-metal band was active between 1988 and 2002, recently reuniting for several European festival dates.  Though not my favorite band by any stretch (I do not, at present, own any of their albums), I like them quite a lot.

Think about this for a few moments.  This band formed in 1988, released seven full-length albums (including one remix album), seven EPs, two singles, and three compilations, played innumerable concerts and festival dates, then broke up in 2002 in a not-unspectacular manner, with Broadrick suffering a nervous breakdown and canceling a tour at the last minute (financially ruining himself in the process).

And, until about 2007, I knew not a thing about any of this.

Before you ask--no, this band was by no means obscure.  By the time of their dissolution Godflesh had acquired a formidable international reputation, with many bands (both very good and very, very bad) citing them as influences.  Glenn Danzig attempted to recruit Justin Broadrick as a guitarist.  No less a personage than Kirk Hammett declared Godflesh to be "the heaviest band in existence".  They appeared on the soundtrack of a really shitty wide-release movie.

And yet not once did the tiny men in my mom's car radio see fit to play one of their songs.

You might be tempted to argue "C., you sheltered twat, clearly you weren't listening to the right stations!  Godflesh might have been big-ish, but they were never Top 40 material!"  That's a good point, actually.  Why, was I not listening to the stations geared to this sort of music?  I can't think of a single reason--oh, right, there fuckin' weren't any.  Not out in the redneck hellhole where I spent the bulk of my formative years, at least.  (Funnily enough, my family was actually friends with the family who ran the local radio station.  Decent people, but they wouldn't have known an eclectic musical style if it bit them on the collective ringpiece.)  This is getting back to the problem of commercial radio only playing the sort of music they think will make them money.  "The free market has spoken!" they say.  "Lowbrow pop and corporate rock is the best music in the world, because people listen to it!  More Ke$ha singles for all!"

Well, balls to that I say.  Much as I hate to turn this into a political/economic rant, it's becoming more and more clear that a free-market ideology is no way to run an economic system, so why the almighty hell would you use it as a gauge of artistic merit?  Nothing is more subjective than musical taste--there's a reason the "pop" in "pop music" stands for "popular" and not "good".  My theory is that many people are, by nature, somewhat uncultured and desperate to be seen as "fitting in", so by and large they listen to/buy what people around them are listening to/buying.  For every diehard, true-blue Lady Gaga fan (and can one of those people explain her appeal to me?  I ask in all seriousness, there must be something I'm missing) there are ten copycats trying to look cool, and those copycats then get copycats of then own...you get the idea.

Noticing this, the blind idiot god Mainstream Media proceeds to pump out even more product (at this stage it can no longer be fairly called music) similar in style to that of the profitable artist.  "One Lady Gaga makes money," it thinks, "so ten Lady Gagas will make ten times as much money!"  It never works quite that well, but well enough for the industry to do it over and over and over.  This phenomena is by no means confined to the music industry, of course, but to go into any more detail than that would make this already-too-long post even longer.

Hence, a pop-culture Ouroboros is formed, with the serpent's head of the Music Industry swallowing the tail of the Mass Market.  Or is it the other way around?  No matter, I suppose the metaphor works either way.  Meanwhile dozens of legitimately original and talented artists, foolish enough to view a major-label deal as their "big break", wither and die, unnoticed by all except those true fans not cool enough to attract sufficient hangers-on.


I suppose in the end, I mean this post as a love letter to the Internet, possibly the world's first and only form of disinterested mass media (for the moment, at least).  Without it, I never would have known Godflesh--or any of Justin Broadrick's other musical projects, for that matter.  Most people alive today still equate "listening to music" with "listening to the radio" in their minds, and yet it wasn't until I got the hell away from radio that my musical tastes started to develop a unique personality.

Curious, no?

Charlton, The Trigger-Happy Ghost

I don't ask a lot of my Facebook friends.

I know they're not all like me, and to be frank this world would be a rather scarier place were there more than one of me.  I realize they're all from different (in some cases radically different) walks of life, brought together on my profile by the common thread of myself--a tenuous thread indeed in some cases.  Accordingly, I realize all these people have their own unique tastes and viewpoints.  That's fine.  I'm not going to agree with all (or even most) of it, but then I'm into some pretty weird shit myself.  They can put up with me, I can put up with them.  In fact, there's really one thing I ask of my Facebook friends.

Don't be a fucking imbecile.

Allow me to explain what brings this on.  Until rather recently I had a certain fellow on my friends list, a guy I had known casually in high school.  This man, whom I shall refer to as "F.H." (short for "Fuck Head"), had managed something I very much had not and found a niche in the sedate redneck milieu of our mutual alma mater.  Reconnecting with him hadn't been something I'd planned--his name had popped up on my recommended list, I remembered not completely hating him and clicked "Add".  Nor, for that matter, did we ever directly communicate--his posts appeared in my news feed, vice versa, and that's as far as it went. 

At first I noticed only two things about F.H.'s posts--his atrocious grammar and his apparent all-consuming obsession with firearms.  Both of these, however, are pretty par for the course in that part of the world, so I didn't fuss about it.

But it wasn't long before F.H. gave me something to fuss about.

As you may have heard, the proposed plans to build a mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks has aroused something of a furor amongst the more reactionary elements of this country's political landscape.  Aaaaaand right away you can probably see where I'm going with this.  Or rather, you think you can see where I'm going with this.  I've heard enough xenophobic fear-mongering over the past nine years to harbor the foolish belief that nothing could surprise me anymore.  Man oh man oh man was I ever wrong.

 So what were F.H.'s proverbial two cents on the subject?  He was...in favor of the mosque's construction.  Not for any of the typical, sensible, sane reasons, you understand.  No, F.H. approved the project for one reason, and one reason only...

Now, before I continue, I must insist that you, as a passive participant, make certain you are physically and mentally prepared for what I am about to relate.  I am not one to worry overmuch about the well-being and/or sensibilities of my potential readership.  I take it as a given that any reader of this blog knows what to expect, or failing that simply finds the subject matter not to his/her tastes and departs in disinterest/horror, never to return.  Problem solved either way, right?  Still, this is a bit outside the norm by TIP standards.  I just want to make absolutely certain this is understood.

So.  Seated comfortably?  Any sharp objects stored safely out of reach?  Not suffering from any ailments potentially exacerbated by shock?

All right then.

F.H. stated it was his belief the Ground Zero mosque should be built so that it could be haunted by the restless spirits of those who died on 9/11.

Yeah.

No...no!  I'm not fucking making that up.  He actually said that.

YES, F.H. is real!  This isn't some kind of incisive satire of the American right!  This is something a real, living person, one whom I have personally met, said and presumably believes!  No, I don't think he was joking!  Even if he was, it doesn't really help 'cuz it means he's really, really, really bad at telling jokes!

I mean...Jesus.  From this point on, every time I think I'm being a wee bit harsh in my estimations of my erstwhile hometown, every time I consider the idea I missed a prime opportunity to learn how to make the best of a bad situation, every time I entertain the notion I'm just a pretentious, elitist snob...I'm going to remember F.H. and what he said. 

So congratulations, Mr. Head.  You've made my already pretty abysmal childhood memories even more miserable.  It's like you printed them out, stuck them on a target (next to pictures of Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama, no doubt) and chewed them to bits with dozens of MP5 rounds.  I do hope you're pleased with yourself. 

So what did I do after he posted this comment?  Well at first I thought it important not to overreact; I merely hid his comments on my feed.  A day later I thought better of it and removed him from my friends list.  I briefly considered making this blog entry a name-and-shame exercise, but decided at last on an unflattering pseudonym, partly out of a desire not to alienate other high-school acquaintances still on my friends list, but mostly out of a desire to avoid being shot. 

The deed done, I found myself having twinges of something resembling second thoughts.  Had I just proven myself a hypocrite?  Was I not punishing F.H. for speaking his mind, something I myself have always insisted on doing?  Wasn't he entitled to his own dumbass opinions, just like me and everyone else?  And it's not like I'm any sort of virtuous paragon--I mocked a former Senator mere hours after his death, for fuck's sake.

In the end, I decided the expression of the opinion itself wasn't what bothered me, so much as the completely and utterly balls-out retarded means in which it was expressed.  Invoking the tragedy of 9/11 is a tasteless rhetorical device at the best of times, but turning it into an episode of Tales From The Crypt is sinking to a downright chthonic low. 

Hence, the banhammer.  Entitled to his opinion F.H. may be, but he's not entitled to my goddamn Facebook page.  

Travelling through time at the speed of time

I turn 28 this Sunday.

Not a very momentous age, I'll admit.  Apart from being a divisible of 7, there's nothing all that remarkable about it.  It's not like, say, 18.  Or 30.  Or 50.  Or 100.

Thing is, I don't feel a year older.  By that I don't mean I'm "only as old as I feel" or some other bullshit I got off a coffee mug (if only because I don't drink coffee).  I mean I have mental difficulty grasping the idea that a year of time has passed between this birthday and the last one.  It feels more like, I don't know, four months.  Maybe six.

Most people feel like time goes by faster as they get older.  Not me.  Time's sprinted past me with nary a hello as far back as I can remember.  This is a a large element of my memory problems: I can remember specific events from my childhood, to be sure, but often I couldn't tell you precisely when they happened.  Ask me about a specific year and, more often than not I'm pressed to think of a single memorable incident.  There are exceptions--1992 sticks out to me, for some reason.  I'm not one for nostalgia, but it's one of my favorite years, if only because that's the year Crystal Pepsi came out.

But that's not my point.  My point, in the most literal sense, is--where does the time go?

My theory is I just haven't been paying attention.  Certain predispositions have led me to find the most comfort with my head lodged firmly up my own ass--or at least in a book.  I spend so much time off in a world of my own while the "real" world (whatever that is) TiVos past.  It'll take care of itself...right?  Relaxing as this sounds, it does tend to grow dull after the first couple decades or so.

And now the frigging "Skip Ahead" button is stuck...

I do have methods for counteracting this, but I don't have much in the way of fine control.  I find if I anticipate some future event, the time leading up to that event slows to a crawl.  BUT!  Once the event comes, time goes by even faster, so it passes in the near-literal blink of an eye.  And once it does pass, depending somewhat on how much I'd been looking forward to it, I may go through an odd mental state where I feel as if the event never happened and I imagined the whole thing.  Then I get depressed for a while.

Something like this happened just last weekend--something I'd been looking forward to enough for me to go through all the above steps.  More often, though, it's something as simple as looking forward to the weekend or the end of the workday.  Those are frequent enough occurrences that I at least avoid the subsequent dislocation.

Another thing that helps--waking up early.  These days I wake up much earlier than I did previously.  You get up at 7, the day races by--and you look up and notice it's still only 10.  Only problem with this is, this has got to be the laziest fucking big city on the planet--good luck getting anything done when nothing opens before 10 am.

And another thing--for the first time since I was about 6, I don't live in the middle of fucking nowhere.  No longer needing to leave everything for the weekend and no longer needing all afternoon to run the simplest errands does wonders for one's schedule.  The closer you are to stuff, the less you miss out on.

Of course, it might also help if I didn't spend every morning and evening either on the Internet or playing X-Box...

But, you know, no sense sacking Rome in a day.  Baby steps and all that.