You won't feel so alone...

I love discovering new voices. Never mind that he sold his soul on American Idol. Voici David Cook. This is the kind of soft rock I listen a lot to when I think or draw. When he goes "...and you don't know how bad it feels" I get goosebumps all over. Lovely. =)

I have a new favourite artist...

..and her name is C.L Martin. I can't remember the last time I was this excited about someone's art work; apart from Manson's. She's spectacular and I'm in complete awe of what she does. This shows just why I don't ever want to call myself an artist. THIS is art. Compared to this, I'm an amateur at best. Her work is disturbing but I love it, the sculptures in particular are fantastic. Wow...just wow.

Quote of the day

"An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. It’s passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be."

~Ludwig Von Mises~

Overrated "entertainment"

Friends. What a fucking shit show it is. Seriously. Just look at their stupid faces. Hearing people praise it like it's the best production on earth makes me want to tear my hair out. Once and for all: it is NOT good, it is NOT funny and it's anything but well written! It's a banal piece of crap that dumbs the world down. Someone actually told me today, after going "they're so funny!" that she wishes she could live like them. Jesus.Christ. If you actually look at the dialogue in written form and ignore the canned laughter machine telling you when they funny part is coming so you know when to laugh, it's even more evident how badly written it is:

Monica: You don't like the game, because you suck at it.
Chandler: I don't suck at it. It sucks. And you suck.

Joey Tribbiani: [after smelling potpourri] Well, this is like summer in a bowl!


Monica: Rach, it's the Visa card people.
Rachel: Oh, God, ask them what they want.
Monica: [on the phone] Could you please tell me what this is in reference to? Yes, hold on.
[to Rachel]
Monica: Um, they say there's been some unusual activity on your account.
Rachel: But I haven't used my card in weeks.
Monica: That is the unusual activity.


Rachel: Hey, you guys wanna go see a movie?
Ross: Yeah, sure.
Rachel: How about you, Phoebe?
Phoebe: No, thanks, I've already seen one.

For the love of God.

Some last words on the matter...

I will try to make this my last post on the subject of the media frenzy surrounding the death of Michael Jackson, so bare with me if this ends up a little long.

On a personal level, is till can't believe his gone. I was a fan when I was ten, and even though I was too young to understand the meaning of some of the songs, it didn't matter. I didn't know Billie Jean was about a mentally ill woman claiming him as the father of her child, I didn't know "Dirty Diana" was about cheating on the person you love and I didn't know "Beat It" was an anti violence statement. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter because I felt the music and whatever Michael had wanted to say through that specific song, he still managed to communicate simply through the mood of the music and the melody. That's why even as a ten eyar-old...I got it. I miss him incredibly and I've always, always felt for him. I always will do.

Putting my personal emotions on the matter aside, it's really interesting to just take a step back and observe the tornado whirling its way through the world right now. 12 people have already killed themselves since finding out about his death, and I'm pretty sure it will be reflected on the newborns within the next couple of years as well, with the name "Michael" rising in popularity -remember where you heard it first.

Despite what the family had wanted, Michael will not be buried on the premises of Neverland. Instead, there will be a memory ceremony -not unlike a concert- in L.A's Staples Center on Tuesday where, believe it or not, you have to buy a ticket to gain access. I need not point out the obvioys distaste of this as it should be obvious to anyone with half a soul, but what baffles me is that people are going for it. The concert promotors; losing millions and millions on the 50 O2 Arena shows now not taking place, I'm guessing are now seeing their chance to get some of that money after all. That's hardly surprising, as money is what they're about. But the fact that people that are supposedly mourning him will buy the tickets and not realize that they are helping to contribute to making not only his life, but now also his detah, a freak show...really need to sit down and think.

They may argue that they "just want a chance to grieve properly and let go for the sake of closure", but looking at the big picture it is all about their selfishness. They need to go their to grive, they need to have closure, without caring about the fact that they're taking part in something that made the person they claim to miss and respect absolutely msierable. And, most of all, they just want to be able to say that they were there. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, when the story books have been altered and history re-written in his favour and people have lett heir selective memory alter the life of Michael Jackson and all that is left is people's stories, they want to be able to tell their grandchildren that They Were There. Promoters being what they are, the memorabilia printed for the "This Is It" tourwill now be sold at the memory ceremony. And all of a sudden, those words take on a much more distrurbing, much more litteral and bizarre meaning.

For God's sake, people. Don't go to this freak show thinking you're showing any respect, thinking that you're doing it for the person who's died and who will supposedly be put on lit de parade in a cascet while people pay to go up to it for one last look. Because you're not. You're doing it because you're proving once and for all how the media can manipulate emotion and get entire populations following the masses without questioning. Meanwhile, the papers can sell some more copies. The ceremony at Staples Center is said to be a tribute, in memorial. But why, then, is the view on him and who he was being so filtered already? We're not remembering him as he was, we're remembering him as we WISH he was, and we're being incredibly selective. When he was alive, no one craed about the music and focused all their energy on his surgeries, financial trouble and bizarre life. Now that he's dead, everyone's dfoing a complete turnaround going "oh yeah, he was unhappy but let's focus on the music".

I say, let's not. I say let's have the fucking balls to finally SEE him for who he really was: including his surgeries, including his happiness (and unhappiness) and including everything that made up a person, just like you and me. Acknowledge his accomplishments but acknowledge his pain, too. No one-sided stories; good nor bad. Just see HIM. See Michael. That's all he ever wanted.

The Cinema Of Transgression

So, I finally got my computer ordered the other day and I'm really looking forward to getting it. Most of all I think I'm excited about all the films I'll be able to actually get that don't seem to be available anywhere else, like those of Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noé for example. They both do films that belong to the "Cinema Of Trangression" genre; where the purpose, I suppose, is to shock. What's shocking, though, is subjective I suppose although I hear they're both violent and sexually expolicit (along the lines of "Baise-Moi", if anyone's seen that one), some of them made with an 8 mm camera and in black and white. In other words; something I might like. The "Cinema Of Transgression" had a manifesto about what they do and who they are as a group of underground film makers, which really really awakens mycuriosity. It reads, as follows:

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possessed the vision to see through this charade. We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over.

All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema. We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.

Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves".

Need I say I have to check this out? :) They continue to say that "...any film which doesn't shock isn't worth looking at" which is, of course, utter rubbish. Shocking for the sake of shocking is too simple. But still...I'm excited.