Today's a St. Etienne day...
"I should've told you
To lose that girl
I should've told you
That's not your world"
Well put, Sarah.
In fact, as I was sitting there listening to "Lose That Girl" at the cafe this afternoon, I got to thinking about how the nature of my little 1-gig iPod Shuffle has changed quite profoundly in the last six months, because of starting CCLaP and now needing a constant influx of new music to feature at the center's podcast; how like before, I still have about half my iPod's memory dedicated to music (or 500 megs, or approximately 125 songs, with the other half dedicated to the latest podcast episodes I keep up with), but how about half the songs of those 125 now are brand-new ones I've added in the last six months, versus before when they used to almost all be album songs from the '80s and '90s. And in fact, not only is half my hard drive brand-new music now, but with almost all of it being now isolated singles from a wide variety of different bands, not half a dozen songs from the same artists as it was before. And then the capper to it all, that I haven't paid a dime for any of this music in the last six months; and far from illegally stealing it, this is all music that the bands themselves have given out for free online, as a way of promoting their full albums and upcoming tours.
Whenever I bother to stop and think about it, I find it amazing that in a six-month period, I've managed to convert about half the music I listen to on a daily basis to brand-new stuff from brand-new bands, all of it gathered for free just by checking into the websites of college radio stations and the like. Because first of all, it confirms something that I've been arguing for years, that all acts of artistic creation have inherent value, that even the simple act of sitting down and writing a three-minute pop song is worth something to a lot of people, is something worth at least symbolic currency if not actual money. This age we're moving into, this age where we think of music in terms of songs versus albums, helps support this idea, helps more of the general public understand the inherent value in each and every creative act that is done in the world. And then second, it helps more artists I think understand something I've been arguing for with them for years too, which is the benefits behind thinking of Creative Commons and copyleft as artistic "tithing." That, say, for every ten songs one writes and records, one should be released for free with no DRM or whatever, to let their fans download and cut up and remix and whatever the fuck else they feel like doing with it, as a thank-you for these people financially supporting these other nine songs. If every artist did this, did this with just one song for every album they released, then all of us would have perpetually full iPods, crammed for free with the latest music, with us then free to pay $10 here and there to those artists we particularly like the most, and wish to own their entire albums.
I love the fact that we're moving into an age where more and more people get this, and where the mere act of doing these things hold more and more of an inherent financial value on their own. It's one thing to release a song or story or photo for free on the web; another thing when you see millions of people pay a dollar for such a thing, and understand the real power behind releasing it for free instead. Of just how profoundly you're respecting your fans by doing just that one little thing, once the little thing is multiplied by a thousand artists and a million fans.
Enh, anyway. New Year's Eve has me in a very contemplative mood today, I have to admit.
I've been spending the afternoon at a cafe, where I've come to the awful realization -- that for the first time this winter, I've crossed over from "on the cusp of being sick" to "legitimately sick." And on New Year's Eve, too, I swear to God! Fortunately I didn't actually have any plans for New Years, which then gives me a convenient justification for not feeling guilty about not going out; "Hey, I'm sick, I'm just looking out for myself!" Unfortunately, though, it means I'm sick, which is never much fun; I feel achy, worn out, like I have no energy, and with a million little symptoms driving me crazy (runny nose, persistent cough, etc). Ugh! I'm telling you, if it ain't one thing it's another.
Pictured: The freaky low-level fog we're experiencing here in Chicago on this utterly shitty gray cold day.
I swear to God, people, I'm not making this up, I swear to God...
I had a dream last night that my little watchbot at Technorati noticed a new blog entry that had recently referenced me, with a specific title of "I would take it up the ass for Jason Pettus." So of course I click over to see what it is, and it's like literally my little nerd version of a Penthouse letter; some blog entry from some sassy 22-year-old undergraduate girl in some obscure semi-hipster collegetown in Ohio or whatever, intensely intelligent and self-aware, who has developed a crush on me through my online writing but is self-aware enough to realize that it's a crush based on her idealized version of me as she defines it, which makes it both a legitimate admitting-your-crush blog entry and also an ironic comment on the futility of having online crushes in the first place. And how in reality it's actually this very creative personal essay about herself, using me just as a pop-culture item to explain her real point, how she just realized recently that she has at least another year of school, and is feeling bored and restless and like an old woman at 22, and hates that she's in a place that makes her feel like an old woman at 22, and how it's really all these specific things going on in her own specific life that's making her react to my online writing in the particular intense way she is.
And she goes on in this blog entry to explain how this crush is sometimes so intense, she sometimes idly fantasizes about going to Chicago sometime, either for a legitimate reason or maybe just because it's just a $40 train ride from her collegetown or whatever, as an elaborate excuse basically to formally "offer herself" to me for sexual pleasure, since of course she obsessively reads my journals and knows the weird place I'm at these days with the whole subject, how I haven't had sex in a long time but have no friends around these days I can have casual sex with, and am in no position right now to be traditionally dating. This 22-year-old sassy erudite female blogger in my dream, then, has this ongoing fantasy these days about going to Chicago and basically offering herself to me, because she's in a position to do so and knows that it's something I would be really grateful for, and in her fantasy it's of course just the hottest sex she's ever had, because it's been so long since I've had sex and I just end up going really crazy. And how in her fantasy of this idealized Jason, the one who just happens to be all the exact things that she loves the most about men, who is giving her the most intense sexual experience she's ever had, she's of course so turned on that she would easily take it up the ass for me in that situation, which is in a very funny and roundabout way how the title of that entry came about.
And of course this blogger in my dream has a Flickr account (of course), so of course I go check it out, and of course she's just this idealized version of a sexy little 22-year-old Nerdy McNerd, the kind of woman I used to actually have sex with all the time when I was 22 myself; you know, some pale little "Buffy" fan who always wears an elaborate goth outfit to Halloween each year, because she understands how hot she legitimately looks in an elaborate goth outfit, but who also understands that to wear such outfits all year would dilute the effect, which is why she only does it on Halloween. Oh, you know!
And then I woke up!
Goddamnit!!!
Man, I'm telling you.
P.S. I think I figured out where this dream came from, too, by the way; because yesterday I watched Woody Allen's 2005 British crime noir Match Point for the first time. And one of the most striking things about that surprisingly great movie, as those who have seen it can tell you, is the character played by Scarlett Johannson, one of the juiciest roles that this amazing young actress has been yet given, and one that she just completely nails -- of a beautiful young actress who understands that most of her fame is coming from being so physically sexy, that almost all the men around her at any given moment have sexual fantasies about her on a regular basis. Her character is so intelligent and has been living with this for so long, she simply accepts the reality of it; she understands that it's what got her out of her Colorado white-trash background, but also understands that it's a double-edged sword. It's really remarkable, the preternaturally jaded and bitter way Johannson manages to pull off awareness of being the object of random people's random fantasies, and understanding that she has very little to do with what their fantasies consist of; the whole subject got really stuck in my head because of it being handled so well and with such nuance in Match Point, and is undoubtedly what inspired the dream I had. Ooh man, quite an erotic dream nonetheless, even if one I'm so ashamed of. Seriously, I'm ashamed of myself.
The Sound of Music is on television tonight, which reminds me of the very first time I tried doing a live drunkblogging of something on TV; because for some reason I never ended up seeing The Sound of Music even once as a kid, and in fact didn't see it for the first time until in my mid-twenties in the '90s in Chicago, which I faithfully chronicled in my then-new online journal while drinking beer all the way through. And I remember how shocked I was to find out how much Nazis were involved with the storyline of The Sound of Music, which then became a running joke at my journal for several years -- "Who knew there were so many Nazis in The Sound of Music?"
Anyway, maybe I'll liveblog it again tonight, as I'm sitting here, maybe not; I guess you'll just see, based on how many notes are below. And technically I'm actually 420blogging tonight instead of drunkblogging, and sick as well (yeah, I know) so might not make it all the way through the four-freaking-hour running time before konking out. Hmm, so I guess we'll see.
That said, I forgot that this is the musical that contains the song "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" Which as I was just reminded of a few minutes ago (it's the first song of the movie, besides the overture), is basically a whole song about how Julie Andrew's character is this terrible disobeying whore nun who doesn't fit in with her Bavarian surroundings. How to solve a problem like Maria indeed!
NEXT MORNING: Crap! I fell asleep before the Nazis showed up! Oh well, I guess that's what you get for watching a four-hour movie while on cold medicine and smoking dope. Sigh.
2:20: "Goodbye, Maria. I'm sure you'll make a very fine nun." Bitch!
2:11: Okay, it's official -- if I ever have kids, I'm going to force them to learn an elaborate bedtime song and dance number, so as to entertain evening party guests just like the freaking von Trapps. Now that's some good use of child labor!
2:07: Hitting on a nun! Shame on you, Captain von Trapp!
1:43: "You never told me your children are so charming." Er, that's 'cause they weren't so fuckin' charming even up to just a week or two ago. By the way, just learned some trivia over at the IMDb: that the mansion used in this movie for the Von Trapp home was in real life owned by actress Hedy Lamarr.
1:10: It's undeniable, by the way, Julie Andrews is a smoking fuckin' hottie in The Sound of Music, all mid-twenties and tight and muscular and healthy and even with that sexy short haircut and everything. It's something about enjoying the movie that never seemingly gets mentioned.
1:06: Oh, I forgot this is the musical with "A Few of My Favorite Things!" Dude, this musical has so many great songs in it! No wonder so many people consider this the best movie musical of all time.
0:52: "Oh Rolfe, give me a telegram! A hot, hard, throbbing beef telegram! I am sixteen going on seventeen! I'm old enough to fuck, Rolfe! Don't you get what I'm trying to sing to you, you stupid dense Bavarian messenger boy!?" Seriously, Liesl, you're a fucking whore for Bavarian cock.
0:39: "I'm Friedrich! I'm fourteen! I'm impossible!"
0:36: Oh crap, I had forgotten how funny this movie is...
"I hope you will last longer than the last governness, Fraulein Maria. She only lasted two hours."
"What's wrong with the children, sir?"
"There is nothing wrong with the children! Only with the...governnesses."
I was reading a year-in-review article this morning from futurist Matt Webb, and learned that #3 on his list is very similar to a theory I cooked up a couple of years ago myself, but which I realized I've never really explained at any of my blogs. So while I was thinking of it, I thought I'd stop and mention it...
Basically, the theory goes that when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early '90s, it also marked the collapse of the US as we knew it as well, something that as a country we've still never gotten around to acknowledging, which has led us directly to Bush and Iraq and torture and all the rest. Because basically, for a little over half a century now we have primarily defined ourselves as one half of the Cold War; one of the only two superpowers that matter, with a society that has to be run the way it is so as to stay even with the theoretical capabilities of our cold enemy, the Soviets, called a "cold" enemy because we know they'll never actually attack, but only because both sides are so evenly matched. And you can compare this to, say, the 75 years between the Civil War and World War II, where the US primarily defined itself as mostly an isolationist state, happy to do nothing but to grow and expand, to create a better and better infrastructure and educational system, and to let all those crazy kings in Europe fight their crazy wars that were always causing a million dead here and a million dead there. There's a reason, after all, that we rarely remember the names of US presidents from the late 1800s and early 1900s, all those Tafts and Rutherfords and the like; and that's because in peacetime, in "nation-building" times, the people in charge live mostly unremarkable lives.
This all changed with WWII; not only did Europe manage to almost drive itself extinct with that one, but most of its smartest citizens ended up moving to the US and never going back, plus with the US essentially walking away from that war with not a single bit of damage to its own physical borders. And this led to the shining period of American history from 1945 to 1965, when we had not only the smartest and prettiest and best-educated people on the planet, but the richest and most innovative as well, a veritable walking billboard for how freaking great the United States is. But the problem is that once you take on a superpower/empire role in world affairs (and just ask the Brits for confirmation of this), you can suddenly no longer concentrate on what made you so strong in the first place; instead of continuing to pump in the money necessary, for example, to fund the world's best educational system (something you could argue the US legitimately had back in those days), more and more money had to be diverted to the military, the military, the military, because as one half of the Cold War we were now expected to effectively become half the planet's police, with the Soviets being the police of the other half. And thus did things like the Korean War and Vietnam happen, essentially US/Soviet Cold War skirmishes that used these pawns' homelands as personal battleground sandboxes, much like how the European kings used to use Western Germany back in the 1700s and 1800s, before the 20th century when they almost annihilated each other for good.
So since the '90s, then, the US has been faced with this real dilemma; that we still have a military structure in place appropriate for the Cold War, appropriate for being half the world's police, but with an enemy that no longer exists. But this military structure has become so huge and pervasive at this point, after half a century of the US being a superpower, that it's not just a matter of saying, "Okay, let's just cut the entire military budget in half" -- it makes up so many billions of dollars now, affects so many tens of millions of lives, has its tentacles so well-entrenched in so many non-military aspects of our society, that the entire system would collapse if you were to just arbitrarily start hacking away at it. Not to mention, profoundly changing the very definition of a country is a traumatic thing, something like I said that we haven't done in the US for half a century now, and that last time took a good 30 years or so to completely redefine. Now that most people are so comfortable with the system that's in place, they don't want anything to come along and upset that system, much less an entire society-changing new paradigm that will ultimately cause the disruption and loss of hundreds of thousands of military/industrial-related jobs that are no longer needed in a post-Cold-War world.
So when September 11th, happened, the Bushists were able to very very smartly sell this in Cold War terms to the general public -- that this wasn't an issue we're talking about, like poverty is an issue or human rights is an issue, but an enemy we're talking about, like those dirty godless Soviets. You remember the dirty godless Soviets, right? And this suddenly made millions of Americans finally feel a bit more at ease with the reality of the world as they know it to work; that as long as we still have a global enemy, as long as we still have a war to fight with this enemy, we can go ahead and continue just the overwhelming percentage of our national budget that currently goes towards the military/industrial structure. And seriously, this is one of the biggest problems right now with the US, is simply that the majority of people here have no idea what a ridiculously high percentage of our national budget goes towards the military each year, versus the relative percentage numbers of almost every other country on the planet. We've lived with this military structure in place for so long now, it doesn't even seem strange to most citizens anymore, and like I said with so many of these citizens' jobs dependent in one way or another on this military/industrial system that most people don't even want to contemplate the alternative.
I didn't mean to make this so long, but I think I got my point across; that things are never going to change in the US, never going to get better, until we acknowledge all the things mentioned above, that the US as we knew it died the same moment the Soviet Union died, way back almost 20 years ago, and that a new definition for us needs to be created, one that starts with dismantling the overwhelming military/industrial system we currently have in place. And in the meanwhile, there have been just so many countries going through their own "nation-building" periods of their own, in these 50 years that we were running around being the world's police; just look at southeast Asia for an excellent example, who for half a century have been very quietly shipping millions of their kids off to America for educations (whereby they were mercilessly mocked for years for being fun-free nerds, as the Americans around them blew off all their classes for yet another beer-bong party), very quietly coming back home afterwards and increasing their own educational systems by leaps and bounds with each decade, very quietly starting to steal more and more jobs away from all those sad-sack American college loafers who are now all a bunch of inept American inefficient middle-managers. As we sit around snorting at "The Office" and laughing at our own idiocy, places like India have been slowly creating an internal infrastructure that is starting to far outshine the US in certain respects; it's only a matter of years now, not decades, before that part of the world will be the new center of finance and culture and entertainment, bypassing us as quickly as we bypassed Europe in the 1950s.
All this is coming, and it seems sometimes like I'm the only fucking American who actually sees it. It's nice to sometimes come across essays like Matt Webb's and to realize that other people get it too.
How randy am I feeling tonight? Randy enough to walk down to the head shops at Belmont and Clark to pick up a bottle of rush, a sex aid left over from my swinging days and which I hardly ever use anymore. Confused? Its chemical name is 'amyl nitrate,' and is also known as 'poppers' among other slang names, basically very similar in makeup to paint thinner, illegal in certain states and certainly not a thing smiled upon in the legal ones. It's basically a very cheap high ($5 to 10 for a little bottle, enough for a hundred or so sniffs), a chemical high which severely scrambles yr brain for about 20 seconds, then quickly dissipating. It's usually known as 'rush' when it's used in this context; when it's mostly known as 'poppers' is when it's used by gay men and group-sex couples during sex, a remarkable erotic aid especially when combined with other sex-friendly drugs like pot and coke. It really scrambles your eggs if you do it too much, which is why I hardly do it anymore; it's just one of those Saturday nights, I guess.
Pictured: The mysterious silver building that's been going up all year at Belmont near the el stop, which was recently revealed to be the new location of legendary punk-clothing supplier Belmont Army Supply, across the street from the head shop where I get my 'stuff.'
Spotted at Broadway and Irving Park Road, Uptown, Chicago.
So, regular readers know that I've been spending 2007 trying to make some pretty radical changes to my life, and for the most part it's been going swimmingly well -- I've now been cigarette-free for almost 10 months, for example, ended up bicycling a grand total this year of somewhere around 750 miles, and a bunch of other stuff along those lines. In fact, the only place where I've been having big problems is with my weight; which is ironic, I know, because unlike most other people dealing with weight issues, I'm actually trying to gain weight this year instead of lose it. See, for my height and body type, my ideal weight is somewhere around 165 pounds; but I've only been at 165 once in my whole life, right at the end of high school, with my weight eventually slipping down into the 150-155 pound range during college and pretty much staying there throughout my twenties and early thirties.
In the last several years, though, as I've dealt with persistent unemployment and persistent poverty, my weight has taken a dramatic downward turn as well; at my lightest, in fact (roughly a year ago at this point), I was actually down to 135 pounds if you can believe that shit. And that's why I added weight-gain at the beginning of the year to the rest of my "radical changes to succeed at in 2007" list that I've been working so hard at, because frankly 135 pounds is just a dangerous point for me to be at as far as overall health. But it's been tough, much tougher than the other things on my list, because of still being just as broke this year as I always am, plus now adding six miles a day of bicycling to my routine and all the rest.
Anyway, I'm down in St. Louis right now, celebrating Christmas with my family; and this morning I weighed myself and learned that for the first time in years I'm at least back to my normal 150 pounds. And that's good, that's very good, and makes me happy and optimistic about putting on the rest of the weight in 2008. And now combine that with the fact that I ultimately ended up succeeding at just about every other resolution I made last New Year's, and you're left with a very happy Jason indeed.
Christmas is going okay, by the way; it's a bit of a weird one this year, in fact, in that I only came down for three days this time, in that we were going to celebrate Christmas in January this year, in that this was the only time my brother and sister-in-law were going to be able to make it to town. (Alas, they've ended up having to cancel even that; this tech start-up my brother works for is running him ragged these days.) Plus, I'm reading this book for CCLaP right now called Three Fallen Women, by a Chicago author named Amy Güth, which has ended up affecting me in this really strange way that I'm finding hard right now to describe; this sorta intense connection that I'm having with some of the characters, but for a reason I wish didn't exist, just...well, it's complicated, and like I said I'm having a hard time describing it. I'm sure I'll be able to hash out a decent review for the CCLaP site by the time I'm done, but for now I'm just going through some really strange emotions while actually reading it. Anyway.
Bleh. This entry didn't come out right at all. I can never write anything fucking decent at my parents' place, what with the TV constantly going and people constantly running around and cats constantly bothering you and the like. I swear, I don't know how the hell authors with families ever get anything actually done.
Pictured: Me at three years old, hanging out with our family dog at the time, a photo of which is hanging on the wall at my parents' place. Just thought you'd get a kick out of it.
So here's the problem with the Chicago transit system -- that it is so unreliable at this point, for any important trip you need to make you have to leave according to the maximum amount of time it might possibly take to make that trip. So for example, on a bad day it can take up to an hour and a half to get from my place in Uptown to Midway Airport (including the walk to the station, the transfer downtown, etc), which means that I had to budget that time into my trip today; but then the trip in actuality only took its normal amount of time, 50 minutes or so, which put me at the airport a full two hours before my flight. Sigh. Plus my flight has already been delayed at this point for 20 minutes, which means it's more like two and a half hours at this point until we take off. Double sigh! In reality, though, two hours at the airport is not much different than the two hours I spend each day at a cafe; I'm just going to sit here and read a book and do some people-watching, like I always do in such situations. More Christmas updates later!
Okay, so here's how my reading list is looking, going into the Christmas holiday; and yes, as you can see, I've gotten sick of constantly missing the return dates for all the various books I have out from the library at any given moment, which is why I now tag them with Post-Its as soon as they're added to the stack. For those having trouble making out the details, the books shown (in the order I'll be reading them) include...
--Three Fallen Women, by Amy Guth;
--Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis
--The Night Climbers, by Ivo Stourton
--By George, by Wesley Stace
--Petropolis, by Anya Ulinich
--Halting State, by Charles Stross
--The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta
--Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo
--Bad Lands, by Tony Wheeler
--The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold
--and On The Road: The Original Scroll, by Jack Kerouac
Not pictured: Jeremy Shipp's Vacation, which I am reading and reviewing electronically (via PDF). Oh, did you not know that I accept electronic review copies of novels, and not just paper ones? I do! Anyway, I overloaded on books over Thanksgiving and then didn't get through any of them, so this time am only taking two with me, Guth's and Shipp's, and am not even planning on making it through those. I'm just keeping things nice and simple this holiday, and have been working overtime this week so that I can simply relax and enjoy myself this Christmas.
