I wanted to get out to Smorgasbord LA today since it was the last one of the year. Despite trying to recruit some people to come with me, I ended up just going by myself. Which I guess was ok since I did get some Xmas presents.
I can’t believe it’s almost the end of the year. Work has been pretty shit, but it’s been my first year with my babies. I don’t have any plans these next few weeks, so I guess it’s more decompression from Europe.
It’s funny how things are framed. It looks like the Republicans are going to win a slim majority in the House from the Democrats, and the narrative is that the Republicans were eviscerated. I guess being a midterm election with a relatively unpopular President, the opposition party should come away as the big winners. I just thought it was funny that even though the Dems lost the House, they were seen as the big winners of the election.
Locally it looks like Karen Bass will be the new mayor, so it will be status quo. The county will have a new sheriff, but ACAB, right? I don’t know. As you saw in my last post, none of this gets me optimistic. Whatever.
We don’t get any time off before the 2024 presidential elections thanks to the fucking Cheeto announcing that he’s running again. Fuck us. Ugh.
On a totally different topic, I’ve been making artindeepkoma.com into a place for my photos. You can also click on “Pictures” on the header menu to see it. See? Pretty! I’ll be leaving for Europe next week, so I’ll be putting up some pretty photos on that site. I guess I’m trying to get away from social media.
I just don’t know what the hell is going on anymore. There is one party that has become so blatantly fascist in their rhetoric that it even makes asshole clench when I think of them taking power. Then there is the other party that wants to say that they are fighting for the people but still take their marching orders from the multi-billion dollar corporations.
Just watch. Come January we will have a senator from Ohio who wrote a book about the plight for poor white folks but was funded by the ultimate venture-capitalist supervillain from Silicon Valley. We will have a senator from Georgia who doesn’t have any comprehensible thoughts but does know how to spread his seed. We will have congresspeople, governors and state officials from all over who believe in the most far-flung nuttiest conspiracies that make Robert Anton Wilson chortle from his grave.
And things ain’t no picnic here in California and LA. I think the biggest issue we face in this city is the homelessness crisis, and even though we have democrats up and down the leadership and executive roles, fuck all has been done about it. These spineless weasels are busy lining their pockets with money from developers, so much so that building a single toilet facility in a park in San Francisco costs $1.7 million! Here in LA, the former city councilman for my district was ousted being implicated as the ringleader of a corruption ring in city hall with developers by the Feds. My current city councilman refuses to resign after being a part of some racist-ass power grab bullshit that was caught on tape. And the choices we have for mayor are a real estate developer/mall builder/USC president and a congresswomen who got a scholarship for a masters program at USC by questionable means.
So you see why I stocked up on alcohol not only to prepare for election night and the new era of batshit crazy conspiracy-laden fascism that will surely come. Maybe my upcoming European vacation at the end of the month will truly be a search for a new home?
This past Friday and Saturday brought the Susbtance 2022 festival to the Los Angeles Theater a convenient two blocks from my apartment. A two-night gathering of different nostalgia acts like the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Chameleons, Miss Kittin and the Hacker and Clock Dva mixed in with current goth/industrial/darkwave/weirdo acts like Kanga, Youth Code, Linea Aspera and Kaelan Mikla on three different stages.
These were the first shows I’ve been to since the pandemic, and hence, since I moved to Downtown. And it was for shit like this that I moved here, to be able to just stroll over to the venue, get wasted and then crawl back home safely. Okay, so the getting wasted part didn’t really happen. Neither did the crawling really. But it was nice to be able to just stroll right back home at 2 am and not have to worry about driving amongst the drunks, or paying for parking, or whatever.
One thing that Sara Taylor of Youth Code said during their set on Sunday was how great it was to see folks come out and support these bands and the scene. And it wasn’t just old fucks like me who used to go to Perversion, Das Bunker and all the other goth nights back in the 90s heyday. There were tons of kids and other age-appropriate folks dancing to the old groups like Jesus and Mary Chain (AND singing along to “Head On” as well!!!) while dancing their asses off to all the more current acts like MVTANT, Lustsickpuppy and Light Asylum. It was also cool to see that while the scene historically has mostly been a white and Latin scene, I saw more black folks than I expected which filled my heart. The more voices we have in the scene, the better.
I really do hope this festival turned a profit just so that it will continue. It was great to be absorbed by the music and letting it wash over me. I really do like these newer musicians and excited to see what they come up with in the future.
Originally published in 1998 in Japan and first translated by Stephen Snyder in 2013, Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is a collection of 11 short stories that are linked together in curious ways. The stories range from whimsical to outright dark and teach us that we should never fuck with women. As much as men want to belittle them, women have the capacity to fuck you up right. Well, not fucking you upright, but I’m sure they can do that as well. As a platinum gay, I’m not quite sure about the mechanics.
As great as it was reading this, whenever I read translated material I always have something gnawing at me in the back of my mind: Is this really how the author intended that sentence to read? When I hear people talk about what a great translation a certain publication is, I wonder how they know. Unless you are fluent in the original language, how do you know if this is a great translation? I hear YouTubers say this a lot, and I just wonder if they’re just echoing from a press release or what they hear other people saying.
I don’t know how true to the original this translation is, but it was a quick fun read. Perfect for this Halloween season.
Yesterday the LA Times reported on a recording made a year ago that found LA City Council president Nury Martinez, fellow councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Kevin De Leon and LA County Federation of Labor president Ron Herrera making fun of and using racist comments targeting fellow city councilmembers Mike Bonin (and his adopted son), Nithya Raman, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Oaxacan community and the black community. LAist has a good non-paywall writeup of everything that is involved.
Well, guess who is a constituent of Kevin De Leon? And guess who wrote an angry email telling him to resign? I already have a low view of the city council as a whole with their impeccable handling of the homeless crisis. But anyhow, here is the quick note I sent off to his office:
As one of your constituents in Downtown LA, I was shocked to hear your voice on those recordings the LA Times reported about yesterday. While my esteem of the council is already very low especially with the way the council has handled the homeless crisis in the city, this in-fighting that only serves the very powerful few just furthered sank my opinion of the council. And with you as a part of this conversation, I do call on you to resign for the sake of the city.
It’s easy to make councilwoman Nury Martinez the scapegoat here since she spat the majority of the venom that was exposed on the recording. However beyond the racism and the epithets uttered, the blatant power hungry motives that surfaced show that all involved are not interested in making the city a better place to live. I mean, I’m not so naive as to not think there are ambitions of power, but for it to be so blatant is quite sickening.
You can apologize, ask us to judge you on future actions like councilwoman Martinez did, however you broke the trust. I don’t trust you to make the decisions to make the city better and specifically to make Downtown LA a better place to live and do business.
As your constituent and my representative on the city council, I ask you to resign.
That’s it. We’ll see what happens. We have elections for five of the districts coming up, and Cedillo already lost his primary and is on his way out. But you know what? FTP.
“Money…”
That’s how William Gaddis’s 1975 masterpiece J R begins, and that is probably as concise of a thesis statement as ever was written in Western literature.
I first picked up J R sometime 2007 or 2008 at Skylight Books based on a small employee recommends card on the shelf in the fiction section. I had never heard of Gaddis before this, and evidently the recommendation was enough for me to take it home. As easy as it was to convince me to pick it up, reading it was a completely different matter.
Who the fuck writes a book in unattributed dialog? Even more using European standard for notation of dialog using the em-dash rather than quotation marks? Over 90% of the book is in dialog, and there are transitions in between scenes that are… Well, let’s just call it poetic for lack of a better term. This makes everything so jarring and disorienting for the uninitiated that you have no other option that to put it away after trying to gut it out after 100 or so pages. You don’t know who’s talking, where they are talking or why. It’s like reading a play with just the words, no character listing, no italics for stage direction – just everything jumbled together.
I’ve attempted this book many times over the last 15 years or so never getting farther than 150 pages. So what made this different? I decided to say fuck it and read this as slowly as I needed to. It didn’t matter that it took me an hour to get through 25 pages. I was going to do what I needed for these 726 pages (in the edition I had) of words to imprint in my brain.
And imprint it did.
This book is a scathing satire taking aim at American laissez-faire capitalism, the commodification of the education system, the waning impact of the arts in culture, gender norms and more all in this symphony that culminates in a fucking chaotic entropic mess. Among the players:
There are so many other characters here, that it is impossible to make a complete list. But you can see where it is going.
What also fuels this book is the absurdity of it all. In the beginning, the kids of the J R’s school are rehearsing Richard Wagner’s “The Ring Cycle” at a Jewish Center. Then you have the school who messed up installing their closed-circuit television system for school learning and made it open-circuit allowing anyone to watch the programs. How horny all of the men are.
Sure this book required my full attention, took me a month to read, confused the hell out of me at times. But it was a fucking masterpiece and rewards everyone who can push through.
We are all such insufferable tits.
First we have the obvious assholes, the fascists we call the republican party who are trying to turn this place into a combination fundamentalist Christian theocracy, a Ku-Klux-Klan utopian wet dream and the Fourth Reich. Then we have their counterparts where every perceived cultural slight and sin must be condemned by stripping all means of sustainability of life and forever be branded with the scarlet letter, where there is no room for growth or forgiveness. On one side you have the Hitlers, on the other you have the Puritans. Germany 1939 or Salem 1692?
There’s no wonder why I prefer the company of my cats to getting outside the confines of my apartment.
I don’t have an answer to this, because I don’t have any faith that people will calm the fuck down. Who knows? Maybe we’ll all burn in a Schopenhauerian hellscape where I just sit in the middle of it all roasting marshmallows. Or it will be the death of a thousand papercuts which, if it’s done correctly can be arousing. I mean if it’s going to be over, might as well have a hard on, right?
These are just some thoughts I had this week. I have been busy reading William Gaddis’s J R. A book that is almost entirely unattributed dialogue, I’ve tried to read this several times before never getting past the first 120 pages. But I’ve changed the way I read getting rid of all distractions including music, and most importantly allowing myself to read slowly. And by slowly, I mean I can only get through about 25 pages in each sitting. It’s taken me three weeks to get through 3/4 of the book. THE END IS IN SIGHT!!!! And I have to say the hype of how genius the book is is I think justified.
I can’t believe it’s already October. I’m in Europe late next month to the beginning of December. Then it’s 2023. Fuck.
I can’t believe it’s taken me nearly 43 1/2 years, but I finally own a fucking fountain pen! A FOUNTAIN PEN! Look at it!
Granted this is a cheap version of a fountain pen, a Pilot Metropolitan Collection with a fine-point nib available for purchase at chez Amazon for only $17.50. But in the weekend I’ve had it, it hasn’t ripped through any paper or had any ink accidents. It is brass and not plastic which makes it feel a lot more permanent. And of course it is refillable which does, in a sense, make it permanent and not disposable.
I bought this because I wanted something to help me start reading again, and doing it a bit more seriously and critically. As anyone who follows me on Goodreads or StoryGraph, you’ll see that I finished the following books since the start of the month:
And that I have started JR by William Gaddis again.
I wanted something to help me jot things down, converse with books, and the pretention of a fountain pen I thought would be perfect. Yes, I realize I am saying that I bought a fucking pen because I thought it would help me read better. And yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds. But of all the things I have bought impetuously, this is probably one of the cheaper things I have purchased. It’s not like I purchased 15 books or anything. Um…
Over the weekend I started watching Yes Theory and Drew Binsky travel vlogs, especially the ones that showcased “dangerous” or “hostile” countries. What struck me was how welcoming the people in those countries are and reinforced the notion that the governments of the countries are not the people of the countries.
We all know that politicians are no better than scum on this planet, so why do so many people lose their heads over them?
Look at all the dumbasses gathering around Mar-a-Lago after the FBI raided Trump’s estate. And look at all the Hillary Clinton acolytes cry when she lost in 2016. Why do people keep putting their hopes in these scumbags when all they do is disappoint? Seriously, they act like a bunch of mental defects frothing at the mouth over whatever version of reality they believe in.
These fuckheads get off on dividing us, on stoking Civil War. And we’re letting them do it to us. Like KMFDM said in their 1996 song “Dogma”: “We don’t run Washington and no one really does/Ask not what you can do for your country/Ask what your country did to you.”
I fucking hate politicians. I hate the people who idolize them. I hate people who can only talk politics. We can do better than this.
