I enjoy a good laugh, but nothing is funny when a piece of shit gets treated like a freshly cracked geode. Why can’t my father respect that I treat film as individually as he does? I’ll make fun of whatever I want. He’ll enjoy whatever. Everyone’s fine, yeah?

No. Let’s go apeshit. Any excuse to take out our frustrations on our son will do just fucking fine. You steal our lives, you make existence a struggle, you take and never return, you selfish little shit, and insulting overpaid talentless teenage hacks is the last goddamn straw.

In this world, is it so terrible take pleasure in disliking? Fuck you for being so self-centered. A film doesn’t magically get spit out of a god’s anus and land in DVD boxes, father. There is an art, and it is being insulted, scarred, perhaps even destroyed, by meaningless indulgences like the “Twilight” franchise, and I couldn’t possibly live with myself if I saw all of this happening with serious eyes.

Your points of view aren’t even your own. You listen to those people on the internet talk, and you want to think just like them.

That’s a joke. It has to be. I would not be so passionate to defend the ideas of other people, would I? It breaks my heart when I hear people slander Terry Gilliam, though I actually enjoyed few of his films. My world was turned upside-down when I learned it was possible for someone to dislike “West Side Story”. I didn’t think I’d wake up the next morning, it was so terrible. When I think about the viewing habits that I’d grown up with, I stop breathing, because I know that for so long, I’d denied myself the self-respect that comes along with appreciating what empassions me. Watching mediocre comedies and Disney movies never satisfied anything. I only laughed when I thought I was supposed to laugh.
Nothing can make me angrier than thinking of what an idiot I used to be, and how my parents encouraged this delusional frame of mind.
Supposedly, this is all a false point of view inspired by the words of respectable film critics. Fuck you, dad. You think you’ve ever had an original idea in your life? because I’m pretty damn sure you wouldn’t accuse me of anything that YOU have done with your own life, out of the fucking blue. Get a therapist, you asshole.

Fuck no, dudes. Barack Obama, whose name is not yet accepted as an American English proper noun, has to fight to prove his citizenship? That’s absolutely ridiculous. Those who put him into a position to be elected by majority don’t care, but just to be fair, he would not have gotten through the earliest preliminaries otherwise, and those with power who really wanted a black president would get one, no questions asked. The masses demanding to see a birth certificate and the manipulated press giving airtime to these demands are just tools of the men behind desks, the men who want the American citizens to be confused about every aspect of their political figureheads to draw attention away from true controversy, like where the orders are really coming from and why saving the dollar is more important than saving the homeless. These conspiracy theorists are so fucking muzzled up in the odds between each others’ crackpot ideas that the truth can only be uncovered one generation at a time, just slow enough for the corporate monster to come up with more ideas to knock the credibility of those crackpots down day by day.

Instead of being a united consciousness, this monster, birthed at the landing of the first Anglo Saxons’ arrival to this continent, raised on the income of war and the fragile stock, fueled by the unquestioning proletarians and hidden from them with a cleverly long lasting illusion of government and justice, this monster, is America. We allow it to come in and rule us? Yes. We are rewarded with the sweet, un-tampered media, with songs and film from the intelligent, and literature from the brave, and so many more things… do I complain? Not about my precious arts, which have also been kept alive merely to keep the populace wary of crackpot theorists like myself, but I complain that I must endure the babbling of idiots with the capacity to understand the fallacy of the political ring and refuse to. Shit, man, I wouldn’t change much, I just want people to stop filling my beloved internet with propaganda that neither benefits me or interests me. This place is not just another gimmick, people. This is something we need to respect, the internet, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be kept quiet about being redirected from my favorite porn sites!

I just read in Roger Ebert’s review of Time Traveler’s Wife, and there are some points in the science that bother me. I haven’t seen it myself, and I realize that this is a drama fueled by a single aspect of science-fiction. It’s supposed to be cute, it needs to be sad, it must drive our emotions, but avoiding scientific principles to do so with an element of science fiction is like using a newspaper praising Spider-Man’s heroics to kill radioactive spiders. There’s nothing more than human drama to distract me from the time traveling, right? The only thing that keeps me from accepting the film’s rules as truth for the movie’s sake is that I’m following two people whose lives keep getting interrupted and shit, yeah? Well, damn it, that’s not enough, is it? I’m okay with LOST and the first season of Heroes. Why? Because I don’t give a shit about about disproving something that I willingly accept and take for granted on my own.

I’m not being fair.

When a person jumps forward or back, it is the living being taken to and fro, not his or her clothing, because that would be ridiculous! Why would non-living material be brought through a vortex created and sustained within a living thing? Following this logic, which I could without the upcoming flaws, wouldn’t dead cells stay behind? The man would be shaved bald, nail-less on fingers and toes, without bodily fluids… he would come into a new point in time needing immediate medical attention, just to justify why his clothes stay behind when he flashes away. That’s a big risk for a mindless summer romance. One that wasn’t taken, so why should I give two shits about a movie that doesn’t give any about me? Well, I don’t, now, and you can predict that this film is very low on my list of “need to see”.

Listened to George Lopes’ latest special, last night, while my folks were watching it. There was a long joke about how kids today have stupid names, and I recognized instantly that he was using material that George Carlin had. I’m not complaining, he seemed to put more thought into the logic and direction the jokes went, but a little pocket of disappointment resides somewhere in the visual metaphor that I’m too out-of-it to describe surrounding Lopez. He’s a good guy, a funny guy, (his masturbation jokes were hilarious) but this tiny little ounce of doubt may prevent me from enjoying his future material as much as I could’ve.

It’s like my realization that Carlos Mencia had run out of material after the end of his show’s first season, and when I found out that Denis Leary was a comedian. Just not as infuriating.

Now, I’ll return to my comical happy place, where Eddie Murphy can’t sign on for as many films because his touring gets in the way, and George Carlin gets an HBO special every couple of months, and Bill Hicks has a podcast for his comedy routines, and Dennis Leary never got onstage, and a new ethnicity emerges from our dormant mutation catalysts hiding in our DNA every week for Carlos Mencia to make fun of, and George Lucas’ science-fiction phenomenon didn’t sell quite as well as it could’ve and he moved on to projects closer to his heart while the rights to the Star Wars franchise found their way into Stanley Kubrick’s hands, and Harrison Ford died young at the top of his game, and Mark Hamill tours cross country all year long with Kevin Conroy to record freshly written Batman episodes live in front of a studio audience, and Bill Cosby doesn’t give a shit about being kid friendly, and somebody proofread the Rock and Rule script before it underwent animation, and Stephen Spielberg and Frank Cho buy an unpopulated island to fill it with dinosaurs and giant apes and tribes of fully trained camera men to capture the pure beauty of it all, and I have sex with a beautiful girl who loves me and earns money at one of those job-things. What a wonderful world I live in.

Being a follower of Scott Kurtz’s PVP, I’ve subscribed to the comic’s site and I view everything Kurtz posts. The motivational speaker whose video is featured on his site, now, had some interesting ideas to bring forth, in a round-about way of proposing the idea that the collective human subconscious is more responsible for creativity than any individual, which goes along with my understanding that we are all connected with everything around us in ways we refuse to acknowledge, generally speaking, as a society.

http://www.pvponline.com/2009/08/03/elizabeth-gilbert-on-nurturing-creativity/

This society of men and women who turn away from our connections to the Earth, Sun and moon, find no bond between the human individual and the human collective, and see everything around themselves in relative to its shorthand uses and hindrances is what we’ve allowed humanity to be ruled by, within our own minds. It isn’t difficult to see through the conventions that this novelist used in her speech to relay the ancient and enticing idea that I take for granted as truth: creativity is not a product of the individual alone. These conventions of “spiritual connections” and “divinity” that she alludes to is the same set of misguided conventions that invented beliefs in embodied deities, who were all once just poetic expressions of the source of life (the Sun) darkness (forces polar-ly opposing the natural occurrences that kept us alive and healthy) health (a connection and understanding of our origin from combined elements and conflicting energies) and the mind itself. She is very well onto something, but harnessing that something and cutting it free of its fatal confines within a religious perspective will benefit the human understanding, and bring it closer to the truth.

After I’d finished watching her speak, dad asked if I knew anything about what she’s written. I haven’t the slightest clue who the hell she is, let alone what she’s written, and it baffles me why any of that should impose on my desire to listen and learn from my fellow human beings. It feels like he’s so fucking deluded to the value of communication and expression. These are things that our souls thrive on! (That is an easy way of saying that without communication and expression between humans, its race is doomed to fall short of its potential rapidly. I’d love to take the Peter Joseph route on this point, and refer to a story about a king raising isolated children who died without human interaction, but I can’t remember it very well and I don’t feel like going through the trouble of finding anything more than its synopsis, which is more than enough to voice my thoughts.)
No offense to Miss Gilbert, but I really don’t care who she is, and that’s perfectly fine as long as the message she gets out is listened to. Hunter Thompson never had that kind of luck, with so many people caring more about his public image than his public message, man. This is a more substantially justified fear than not being noticed at all: being noticed for the wrong reason.

Listening to an illegally downloaded Madonna song wearing shitty headphones, while mom scribbles in a Sudoku book and dad’s gawking and repeating all of the events playing out on re-runs of Punk’d on the TV Guide Channel. Re-runs of MTV and VH1 programming that I can hear more clearly from behind me than slow techno beats thumping in my ear.

Only moments ago, I sat through a re-run of Real Time with Bill Maher, while dad interrupted my only vaguely reliable source of news to make cheap jokes of his own or explain punchlines to mom, who diligently stared at numbers on a grid.

Before that, I was watching a Rifftrax coverage of the first Fantastic Four movie. The humor started picking up when I realized that they really did know how bad the movie was.
This only sours the opinion of my parents that I’ve accumulated over the years, remembering how they don’t give a shit whether actors can act or jokes are funny, they’ll be entertained by anything that distracts them for more than a few seconds, like goldfish chasing an idiot’s finger on the other side of the glass, or even more accurate, like the idiot showing the fish his finger just to watch them chase it. I know that this is very critical of me to say, and I know how they’d react if they ever find this commentary I’ve made of them, but I don’t think I can manage much more. I’m remembering why I enjoyed staying awake only at night. It was to avoid them, if you’re too stupid to figure it out on your own and you actually give a shit about the unimportant little things that whack away at the inside of my skull. On the outside of my skull, I knock with a fist, every time they suck on their teeth like apes, or overly exaggerate stupid habits, like stomping their feet in overplayed shock for the comedic benefit of the audience watching their every move, and the whistle in their snore, the childish giggling at stupid “jokes” that they tell each other every night while “flirting”, or the generic universal grunting when they fuck, and the limited playlist of three songs that dad can ever whistle.
They make me cringe and gnash my teeth, and squint until I give myself a headache.

Over half a dozen comments I’d never known about popped out of nowhere, responses to stuff I posted last year. What the fuck is up with that? “Keep up the good work” and “I love this blog” are not spam, are they? Do comments like that really intend to steal or corrupt? Anyway, I’d like to apologize to those who’ve not been recognized appropriately, and it’s a really good feeling to see that I have people actually interested in my well-being and ideas despite my often occuring fits of manic depression.

BOOK:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I haven’t touched a book from the series since the only plot-driven, plot invested, plot oriented, and, frankly, entertaining character in the series died by falling behind a black curtain. You can imagine my outrage to find that the woman writing these books expects me to invest my time in following an adolescent ass hole who thinks himself hot shit, when the only well developed character with dependable behavior dies so soon after taking my affection. Perhaps that is her way of pushing the main character’s internal conflict into my own mind, making me come closer to relating with him. Whatever, point is that I’m listening to the audio book, and it ain’t quite as thrilling as I’d hoped it’d be, so far.

COMICS:
Blackest Night seems cool. Really dig Red Robbin’s costume, and he’s okay for a start, but should he become a permanent character, he should at least find some inner conflict that drives him outside of his lost-father complex. Half of all the folks ever met Batman have that now, and he’s got potential to be a very disturbed, very tragically flawed figure. Dark Reign is okay, too. Bringing a gun to dinner may not make sense within the context of the story, and it might even stunt the progression of the story, but Nick Fury certainly is entertaining, and I forgive that the whole world stands still just for his romantic conflicts, as long as it’s a very grueling and ugly world waiting for his return. Of course, I’m very late in continuing to follow him and Dark Reign. And everything, for that matter.
Introduced the Luna brothers’ Girls to Nathan, who responded very positively to it.

MOVIES:
Rifftrax
These guys really improve any movie. Alex, if you’re reading and you haven’t heard their commentary on Spider-Man 3, I think you’ll find it isn’t all that bad of a movie with them to guide you through it. Same for Crystal Skull.
Audition
Didn’t like it.
3-Iron
Kim Ki-Duk continues to dazzle me with amazing cinematography, and with a story deserving of such dedication. The visuals, every sound and even the dialogue seemed mathematically arranged to equate the nearest value of perfection. To some, it may demand attention, and that may annoy those people, but it’s captivating and constantly peeking interest for me.

Speaking of Asian films, I had a doozy of a past-blast, to the days when I was a kid and Cartoon Network had incorporated Japanese imports to prime-time television, over here. A program idiotically called Toonami stole my attention, and everyday after school, I’d wait for the moment to watch gimmicky shows for impressionable little kids like myself. I’ll probably never go back to watching Dragon Ball Z, if that’s what you’re thinking, and if you’re actually reading and care about what I’m typing, no. Yesterday, I sat through the first run of episodes from the Tenchi Muyo franchise, recalling how much I’d loved the show, noticing that the plot shifted to match the comedic or dramatic liking of the writer(s), and hating, once again, how cool visuals met with not-bad vocal talent completely won me over without a hint of tangible plot development. Of course the plot exists, and it’d be idiotic of me to say that it wasn’t planned out, but it suffered from something that all captivating child-targeting series do so from, and it has something to do with predicting the kinds of things that grab a kid’s attention. I never noticed how stupid it was for the villain to show up unexpectedly to kidnap the demonic space-pirate just long enough to lose control over her and vanish to his organ keyboard-powered labyrinth spaceship and await the arrival of the only person who can kill him patiently, because I was distracted by the lightsaber fights, the slight comedic moments, the cute rabbit-thing, the “I’m your granddad, and you’re the savior” drama, the spontaneous love triangle and so many other things. As probably the first animated series to capture my emotional investments, when I was a lonely little boy without friends, the show still has a very special place in my heart, despite its failure to respect my intelligence.

Except the two who hardly jack in until once every who-gives-a-fuck. (I know, I bullshit a lot, but really, some grade-A golden literature may be born of the ideas you’ll’ve read by the end of this entry.)

I want you to think of the only thing in your life that could be the last redeemable trait, should you find nothing else of value in the world or in yourself. The one thing that could be your saving grace, a last hope in days when your name is the last of your worries, and why you can’t remember it.
Yesterday… afternoon (?) I woke in a lazy daze, where I’d slip in and out of consciousness, but so frequently that the few things I was aware of slipped into the dream I seemed to have been having. I had the most fear-inspiring nightmares of abandonment, and the last thing I could ever count on, my writing hand, had disappeared when I needed it most. It was a dead hunk of meat hanging from my arm, stiff, rotting and heartbreaking. Of course, I thought it was dead because I’d slept on my arm, making it go numb, so the half-hour nightmare was just that, but it was terrible. In such a mental state, I couldn’t tell the difference between being paralyzed within the dream and wishing for suicide awake. It’s difficult for me to explain, right now, in my current state of mind, but it really fucked me up.
Incorporating water in my diet and pissing without agony. My sleeping’s gone erratic: waking in early morning, waking at noon without remembering falling asleep, trying not to pass out in the afternoon, waking at midnight… fuckin’ shit, man.
I must be two days ahead, now. It still feels like the day after Sunday, which for me was Tuesday morning, and looking at the digital calendar thing, it’s… Thursday! Shit!

I’ve almost completely been overtaken by an interest in Japanese animation, which ain’t bad, but it’s surprising, still, after my “anime’s for losers who follow gimmicks blindly” phase.
Gotta say, British attempts at animated features in the 70s and 80s have some great art and alright vocal acting, but the lack of enthusiasm for the projects really show, and the overall product suffers.
When the Wind Blows had the chance to have a long-lasting impact on me, if it’d tried to stop being so goddamn subtle in its message, which is kind of an unexplored one. There was a lot of potential for it to kick my ass, to really tug at my heart, but all it wanted to do was pose some interesting ideas without finishing them for me.
Watership Down was easy on the eyes and heart, as well, since I felt a presence behind the characters, but the dramatic elements weren’t fully realized, with the artists trying to show more of what was going on in a physical sense, than trying to make me feel what was going on. That music video in the middle of the damn movie also pulled out of it, because it was way the fuck out of place and not a very good song anyway, as well, the seagull character seemed to be treated more like a Disney comedic character than what he was obviously supposed to be: a crafty foreigner, with crafty foreigner ways of getting shit done.
The only thing that The Plague Dogs had going for it was the beautiful artwork. I could’ve invested more in the characters, if they’d been a little more steriotypical of their tropes, since I was forced to look for complexity in characters who’d started out being more interesting with single dimensions. The wiley Scottish fox was a great character from his appearence, but he turned out to be the expected deus ex machina for several lack-luster confrontations and the sacrificial hero, which is the archtype that the troubled smart-guy was set up to be from the very beginning. I didn’t want two-dimensional characters in an epic, because all two-dimensional characters within epic stories turn out to be all good or all evil by the conclusion, and that’s no fucking fun at all. The rogue, of all characters, should be expected to save his own fucking hide by the end, because that’s what ALL audiences want from their rogues! That’s what made Desert Punk such a great character in the Japanese show/comic (you guessed it) Desert Punk. That’s also why I felt such a loss from seeing Han get frozen in carbonite (which isn’t a metal at all), because I knew, deep down, that a self serving rogue like Han would only care about himself, which made the depressed mood amongst his friends even more tragic. I knew hat Han didn’t care about them, and if the last movie’d been handled my way, I’d make it very clear, without ruining any of his setups, and it would have been a much more dramatic production.
Imagine a film picking up where Han’s friends have rescued him, and he ducks out, like he’d planned to before the attack on Hoth, without a notice, and we focus on Han’s friends feeling betrayed after everything they’d done for him, Luke feeling abandoned by his father, his masters who’ve passed away, his best pal, and his sister who leaves the rebellion to look for Han. Academy, Hugo, Pulitzer and Eisner all wrapped around a single script (and its various adaptations), motherfucker! Just say it, I’m a genius.

I am a student and an artist, so I am expected to have many traditionally idealistic views on matters of the aesthetic, so the poetic moment that all of my friends and acquaintances expect of me every now and then emerges, but do they see the sincerity behind the words?

Photojournalists line the internet, helping to fuel the capitalist machine with images that sell, with men and women removed from their natural divinity (I find very little more appallingly disgusting than separating that which I naturally find attractive as a human from that which I love unconditionally as a human, and women, god damn it, are more than fuck orifices) and, with the help of modern technology, turned into monstrosities. I must admit, some breathtaking artwork can be accomplished when celebrating and uniting (for example) a woman’s visual beauty and elements of what we consider ornate or elegant to make a statement or to entertain, and is well in such for the aesthetic, but to use it as a tool to convey what constitutes “beauty” is human negligence to the self and the race as a whole.
These people who try to portray the beauty in some subjects have women wearing suggestive clothing, which is neither fully offensive nor complimentary to the individual, hiding their faces in thick creams and goos and dusts that are meant to reshape the structure of the subject’s face to photographer’s liking. I haven’t gone very far in my journeys with photography, I’m not a fan of art for the sake of sale alone, I have never modeled to portray an idea outside of my own, and I’m not much of a performer of any scripted material than that within my own mind, but I can’t help but think that there is something perverse in the nature of those who use photography and alter humanity’s appearance solely for his or her [the photographer's] own expression, if it is truly his or her own expression being relayed by such imagery.
I don’t think I’m being clear. I focus on women, of course, because I am a male who is attracted to females, and I tend to set my attention to what grabs it most often. A woman is beautiful, and can use makeup and set amongst an atmosphere that captures such beauty without the integrity of it being damaged. A woman is not beautiful with a black stripe dragged across her face, hiding the perfectly sculpted brow, nose, and eyeline. Her hair grows and falls naturally from her head, but why should it be plumed like a shrub to decorate an already desecrated face? This is not my branch of art, and being fair, I’m probably being far too critical, but when am I expected to draw the line for myself as to what must be acceptable?
The nose is a wonderful physical trait. Why do cats with Photoshop blur it the fuck out of existence? Truthfully, all of this frustration comes from having gone through a few pictures of my favorite actresses’ photographs for practice-sketching material, and having come across Jennifer Connolly represented in such hideous ways, as of late. They are to compliment the photographer’s attempt to be chic, when the awe-striking figure from my childhood is graffiti-ed by eurotrash art movements that dehumanize our sense of art and respect.

Mister Joseph’s podcast is interesting, and inspiring, and though he uses it to speak for the Venus Project, I’ll keep taps on his bi-weekly cast while distancing myself from the Project itself. Learning Zeitgeist’s stance over time and observation is definately more beneficial than unquestioningly subjecting myself as a follower, for now.
He certainly seems to believe in his message, and only time can tell me whether he’s worth investing my trust, which is a thing he says is unnecessary for such an evolved form of humanity, and I’d like to agree with him.

The connections between the Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project are presented outright by the message of the second Zeitgeist release, as Peter Joseph apparently serves as the coordinator of the active branch of Fresco’s futurist project known as the Venus Project. The outright denouncement of money’s value and corruption is something that I admire and accept with open arms, but this message seems to clash with the “store” section of the Venus Project site, which allows visitors the option to buy Jacque Fresco’s books and DVDs, though the same material can be viewed online for free. Am I to accept that these acts of charity are merely that, or can I safely assume that something is out of place?

I’m still fresh in my investigation, and I want more than anything to believe that Fresco’s intentions are to the benefit of the human race, altogether, but a single doubt can lead to larger and bolder divisions between visionary and activist, which seem to have been the same divisions between representative and banker, in their own infancy. This is not a connection that I feel comfortable implying, so believe that my doubt is as heartfelt as the pride that I’d found after having seen both Zeitgeist films.
No matter what I find out, and decide on the matters of futurist Fresco and his propaganda, know that I am still on humanity’s side, which is my own side, your side, and the side of everyone I love. It doesn’t matter what individual person or organization I support, the only matter of importance is that I support the values that I see great and admire about humanity as a whole.
It’d feel damn good to know that I can be supported by those with a great following, but it’s nothing when their goals contradict my own: our own.

Had he not informed of the existence of these films, I would be in the dark over whether or not my “realizations” on the seat of power in the world today are shared by anyone else alive. My ideas have always been sketchy, and in the constant presence of those who argue the invalidity of my ideas, have been incomplete. Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist documentaries have given voice to thoughts that I thought unspeakable. When I enter conversation on the subject of our role as humans in the world, I’ve been scoffed at, looked at in awe, and insulted in the most demoralizing ways, and I always play into the role of the failing revolutionary, giving all of my friends and family the benefit of living their lives without asking a single question about the importance of their own submission, and the harm they cause everyone else by this…

Of course, it may seem that I am trying to give myself a little more credit than is due, since I’d just seen the films, and they are very easily treated as propaganda. To this frame of mind in the reaction to my statements, I say:
It doesn’t matter if I came up with my ideas before or after viewing accused propaganda, the point of realization is that it was my decision to make, as it is anybody’s, and the only imposition being made by thinking of me as a victim is the harm done by those who think they’re doing good by thinking of ANYBODY as a victim who believes in the decisions being made by an individual who thinks openly, freely, and without consequence…
I’ve yet to investigate Peter Joseph’s movement, so I cannot say whether the propositions of his films for said movement’s success are beneficial to a minority, but I am certain that despite the true intentions of his movement, the message of his films are very clear, and can easily be detached from any organization posing as what it is not, and used as a guide for a movement for equal benefit to all of humanity, seeing as I can draw the same conclusions as Mister Joseph, my American History teacher, and every assassinated government leader and literary revolutionary who ever died to oppose that which destroys the value and progression of humanity, and as long as we are all capable of reaching these conclusions, then it is beyond a single man’s role in getting the message across. Before even considering joining this movement, I know, right now, that I am supporting the fundamental rights that humanity owes itself by acknowledging that I have these ideas, showing them to others, and letting people know that they are much more to me than the physical power that they can provide a dying system, as I expect the same degree of respect and love from others.

I recommend that everyone view these films. Take in the message, and decide for themselves. I’ve offered to do this by voice, many times, in class rooms and public locations, but it seems that Mister Joseph’s voice is preferred than mine. That’s fine, as long as you recognize what I am telling you through his words. These are words I tell my dearest friends, who look at me in pity for not following the same pointless routines that they do, my teachers, who defend their ideas like children defend a toybox from bullies in another class, my parents, who think that there is something for me to lose in choosing to agree with anybody but themselves, and to me, who was a damn fool for ever thinking that I was alone, and felt so powerless to the things that look so big from far away, who sometimes contemplated suicide as the only escape from the immense depravity that everything that I love can be seen struggling under the weight of, and…

I’m getting a bit emotional. Few of you read my blog. Those few of you may not recall my zealous rants in person. To those who do, I recommend viewing, once more, so that you understand my frustration without hearing my message escape in a cracking voice. I love you all, despite what you may think, because of the behaviors I’ve adopted in anger, but I do.

Recently, my curiosity’s tossed me onto a course to discover the appeal of a single Japanese series known as Oh, My Goddess! I am thoroughly thrilled to discover as much as I can about the culture surrounding me, and though I am a nerd, and nubile in my status as such, I know little more than nothing about it, though my collection of trivia is staggering against many others who allow such a multi-faceted thing slip right by their existences. Growing up after the introduction of anime and manga as a part of popular culture in America, I developed interests based on American companies’ distribution, and when I became more comprehensive, I found that most of the Japanese imports lacked something very important, logic. These were all, of course, things that were brought up over the years to sell things to children, which I’ve come to understand is called “shonen”. The writers and artists of such stories can’t anticipate a universal interest, so the possibility that logic in story-telling is lost-in-translation intensifies the frustration that came with trying to find quality entertainment in anime as a youth, when I am an American boy being sold Japanese stories intended for Japanese boys. Other youths who accepted these shows and comics in America are growing up to be what the Japanese call “otaku” in their own culture, but with the limitations at the time, there are stronger followings for individual series, as there once was a particularly strong following of Star Trek fans who never kicked their obsessions, called “trekkies”. As the budding brilliance of Japanese wealth forms over here, there are more and more “trash-culture” facets coming into view.

By “trash-culture,” I am referring to a phrase that I invented to help me understand my own perception of entertainment in multiple cultures, as well as our own. There are many different idols of trash-culture, and such a complex culture like our own breeds them every decade, as the Japanese do. The link: trash-culture, for example, can include Elvis movies, which were made to sell Elvis Presley through movie theatres, and have formed followings that block out the cruel truths behind the mediocrity of such idols of trash-culture. Exploitation films are trash-culture. B-movies are trash culture. Pulp comics are trash culture. “Trash-culture” is not intended to be used as a negative term, though the misuse of such power over an audience is a greater offense than many that I’d refuse to forget in a Lifeboat situation, if you catch my drift. I am a huge fan of trash-culture idols, like films released in the eighties and nineties that put teenagers through steriotypical situations that have died out long ago, and are being written about today, because the nerds in the 70s don’t knkow what it’s like to be nerds in the 90s… did that sound like ranting? It shouldn’t. It defines our culture, and as a cultureless-culture, as Americans have been described, there is nothing more important than another man’s trash: hence the term “trash-culture,” a modern treasure to people like myself.

Unaware of the importance of trash-culture, I’d reached teenage years with the mind-set that all Japanese imports are for little kids, because of the tight leash that American industrialists held for the products coming in. This was before I’d seen Ghost in the Shell, which helped me become more aware of just how many limitaions I was setting myself up for. Also, around the very end of this time, for me, I’d become completely devoted to movies, and comics were, like Jap culture, something to visit for kid-nostalgea. My complete immersion into film was slow, I couldn’t have gotten very far being limited to HBO and Blockbuster. Netflix hefted me into the history of Searchlight and Miramax, indie films opened my understanding of genre and integrity, and the acceptance of mediocrity for the sake of entertainment. Trash-culture filled everyone’s existence, as John Wayne for my father, primetime television for mother, and I was still exploring the millions of niches that the information age had created within and for itself.

I found a great confusion come about me, when I noticed the trends forming in fanboys and fangirls in America, who attempt to mimic the stereotypical otaku behavior. It’s the niche, I see, that they try to fill in order to pay back, respectfully, to the creators of their trash-culture idols. On close inspection of Oh, My Goddess! and similar other titles, the similarities made my confusion greater, to see a bunch of American kids worshiping plagiarists, until I realized that such stories follow a set of expected events, which have become staple within otaku trash-culture. The nerd gets a woman who loves unconditionally and has magic powers: this may be a familiar premise to Europeans and to Americans, but to the Japanese, this is a genre. An entire genre is based on a single common fantasy. It amazed me. This is the cycle of the “meme,” which develops naturally within a culture as a part of our evolution as humans. When I conducted this research I’d spent time reading American comics that aren’t necessarily recognized universally, but within the brotherhood of comic fans as must-reads. Bill Hicks, Pynchon, Raoul Duke and Hunter Thompson, George Carlin… these are all idols of a sub-culture that extends beyond the “one man’s trash” idea, and formed followings based more on their legend than their work as human beings. (This idea is thoroughly explored in a comic series called Transmetropolitan.)

The genre, the sub-genre, the idol, the sub-culture, scenes, memes… they all occur and coexists, like the millions of species of plant-life growing off of the husk of our information and entertainment. The living thing that culture is, thrives and reproduces, with its masters, the writers and artists, their worshipers: hipsters, nerds, geeks, fans, listeners and viewers, readers, true believers, otaku and anorak, we are all a part of this massive, gigantic artery of information in the body of the human race, and it is at a moment like this that I feel like the only person who sees it all. Like all the beatniks and trainspotters should find something in me to envy, like children looking up to the stiff-lipped gunslinger strolling through town, like a monolith on legs. What makes me so much more important than others? Richard Dawkins wrote these same principles down, more thoroughly, mapping down his thoughts and interpretations in a manner that allowed his own literature on the subject of memes to become a meme itself. In my mind, I see a map of all of these things I’ve collected in my research, and I’d swear it resembles diagrams of the human brain, but when I try to convey my understandings, the more scrambled I become, trying to find the words to describe my connections as five more are created. Every instant not spent on the next, new thing, is thrown into oblivion, as far as I can understand, and just sharing my ideas makes the entire endeavor to learn unravel.

Fuck my memory! I have been such a fucking idiot! I walk around, talking about shit, casually, and nobody even thinks of correcting me when I’m FUCKING WRONG! What the fuck?