Video Bizarre

Attention video junkies, psychotic maniacs, gore freaks, exploitation mavens, and cult covetists: come check out and join, and contribute to this great new community over at Video Bizarre. Destined to be a haven for the aforementioned characters. You know, people like me give or take. Regardless, it's an exciting little pocket of the internet I have recently found, and I'm just doing my part to fill it out. See you there.

Renunciation

I've grown stupid and obsessed chasing this mythic thing called art. It doesn't exist! There is no art! There is no genuine. There is no valid. There only is. The rest can be accounted for by taste. The time has come to stop taking "non-art" as an affront to my existence. Nothing I do is art. Nothing I enjoy is art. What then am I chasing? Happiness? Everyone I despise has already found that in the things that I hate. Meaning? When there clearly is none? I'd given up on meaning before the candles were out on my eleventh birthday. There is nothing, just alternate periods of fucking and getting fucked for no good reason in particular. Where is it genius? I haven't done anything because of "it." Sat for years in my room and on the couch paralyzed because it might be out there somewhere and I hadn't found it. It has made me hate everything real because I have become obsessed with this thing. Why have you forsaken me? I grew up believing in you. Believing you were possible; within reach. Turns out you're just a bedtime story for dreamers. I wish I had never heard of you. You've ruined my life, stolen my joy, stifled my creativity, smashed my images; you paralyze me with what you purportedly do. I renounce you art. Nothing is art. Everything is nothing. Experience, now there's a god worth praying to.

Late Night (Early Morning) Quotations No.22: Literacy

"The only function of literacy is to attract illiterate girls."
-Jacob Cholak

Late Night Quotations No.21: Custom

"Custom is the law of fools"
-Vanbrugh

Come on People Now

Here's an excellent but of inspiration via Cinema Blend via BoingBoing. I saw Sicko in the comfort of my own living and it inspired similar sentiment, to (proportionally) the same amount of people. I devoted the night to action. I have been temporarily thwarted by technological and financial constraints, but hope to overcome soon. In the meantime, we need more stuff like this. DIRECT ACTION. Everybody get together. Let's change this thing. The Health Care giants want us to believe that our society will crumble and fall in their absence, but they are not the foundation of this society, WE ARE. We can change this right now! Let's do it. Look like Texas has a head start. Everyone watch this movie, and everyone do something. You'd better believe something will give.

From Cinema Blend:

When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what.

Torrent Links. I don't know which ones are good or not, and I hear the Weinsteins have some fake sites out there that grab your info, so be careful, but watch this movie anyway you can.

Virtual Tax

I just heard today the China is going to begin taxing real world transactions in environments like Second Life and Worlds of Warcraft. What strikes me as particularly irksome about this is that those "virtual communities" are actually "real" communities. They are autonomous worlds complete with their own rules, customs, laws, and economies. I'm not trying to say that Worlds of Warcraft be declared an independent nations, but Second Life, maybe. If we fall under the control of our governments in realms beyond their boundaries, then all opportunities for autonomy are truly closed. They forget that we can mount our own armies in these worlds. Second life could easily attack a government mainframe. Digital warriors bringing the computers of the strongest nations on Earth to their knees. Of course, all they have to destroy would be the servers hosting that world. We'd have to take down the whole country. But regardless, worlds like Second Life allow us to transcend the boundaries of our own nations. They allow us the freedom to be whatever we want and create whatever we want, to be a true member of a global community not an American, or Chinese, but whatever you CHOOSE. Keep taxes out of our virtual existence.

In Defense of Myself

There's been a lot of muck being hurled about lately harshly criticizing the explosion of user created web content, blogging, self-publishing, and the like. Admittedly many of the content on the web is mediocre, middle of the road, unimaginative, and unoriginal; perhaps well intended but poorly executed. But isn't that the majority of us human beings? We're trying our best, doing what can and saying what we feel. Not everyone can be on top, and not everyone can be on top all the time. Case in point, the major media networks. Take a moment to think what type of interest they might have in slamming bloggers, and hurranging Web2.0. They're threatened. And thank god! People are turning to blogs not because people are idiots, but because the networks are doing an inadequate job. Media was established as the fourth branch of government, but they have put down their arms and made comfy homes in the pockets of Washington. Say what you will about blogs, but they give Politicians and Networks reason to keep on their toes. Poorly written, reactionary, biased, or false, some blog somewhere will catch you. It will get out and you will hear about it. The blogosphere is dynamic, it is flexible. You know what you're getting into with a blog, and everything is peer reviewed constantly. They attack Wikipedia for being the product of amateurs, that "real" encyclopedias should be the be the one true authority. But on what grounds? Some anonymous group of people unelected and unverified telling us what we should accept as truth? Much better that we know who's hand it is that moves the pen, and are free to update, correct, reference, cite, and edit the entries at will. Collective expertise. And besides, it's probably not some high-school student from Muncie updating the Wiki for the USS Indiana, but it could be. He could have found some bit of information that no one else had put up. And he doesn't have to be told that he's too young, or too black, or has too many visible piercings, or not accomplished enough to know that. The point is, it's not disinterested unstudied people doing any of this on the web. They may have leagues to go in writing style, they may have years to go in research, but the people creating content on the web, shaking things up for all those who have sat in their nice seats of power for the last 100 years care about what they are doing, and most of them aren't getting a cent for it. Which is a way better indicator of expertise to me than any of the big checks being handed out to reporters and politicians these days.

(For clarification, I know very well that I am not above any of the loving criticisms I have hurled at the web in the preceding diatribe.)