Politics 3: Open letter to my friends, the hippies and the fascists

I'm always ending up defending right wing viewpoints to my many socialist friends and acquaintances, not because I enjoy it, but because they often have absurd views. The opposite happens when I'm with my right wing friends and family members. Whereas I'm a socialist black sheep with them, everyone I know from college tends to put me squarely on the privileged rich bastard side. Actually, I believe in neither. The older I get, the less use I have for defining myself or others as left or right wing. Conservative vs. progressive is a workable dichotomy, it's an axis you can stake a place along, for every subject even. But left vs. right? Les extremes se touchent. The amount of times a conversation about politics has lead me to argue against a friend or family member with an absurd point beggars belief.

As a shorthand: You can't fix the economy by privatising everything, or nationalising everything. Freedom of speech applies especially to people you don't agree with, also to people who don't agree with freedom of speech. Immigration only adds more different people to your country, this is a totally neutral process, they should adapt enough to function and eventually (a century or so) will be indistinguishable from other inhabitants, i.e. will probably be anti-immigration themselves. It's not even remotely feasible for everyone to have all their basic needs taken care of, without a dynamic capitalist economy to pay for that, and even then some injustice is inevitable, unless we build an economy not based on money, like on star trek. It's stupid to start wars, but when you have, it's your responsibility to fix the country you invaded. Saving the environment is so difficult, we should make it the driving force behind fixing the economy. Governments should govern, businesses should do business, when they work together just as many good things happen as bad, but they are both entirely ineffective without individuals, who should have as much say in anything they do together as reasonably possible. Most of the people on the planet do not live in the U.S. or Europe, it's completely fair that they should have a bigger say in the stake of the planet then we do. Since the vast majority of the problems we have to tackle in the next hundred years are completely global in nature, it's our responsibility to use the advantage we have to get a result we can all live with.

I guess that makes me a romantic.

The future of fashion is the past.

This is way less ridiculous than you might think. Just look at the guy's outfit at the end and realise that every webmaster you know looks like this, except all the gadgets are smaller. That's how the thirties envisioned the neckbeard they knew was coming, instinctively. Women in shiny, metalic dresses? The same outfit throughout the day? These guys knew exactly what was up. There's way to much pointing out of the obvious failures. We forget that the reason we don't have rocket cars isn't because we don't want them, it's because they're too expensive, ridiculous and unsafe. So many of these things are more cyclical than we'd like to admit. Imagine sitting in the sixties movie version of H.G. Wells' time machine and looking only at beard fashions from circa 1880-2010: Seeing unkempt muttonchops degrade to pencil thin mustaches, to clean shaven, to hippie hair, degrading into sideburns, back to mullets and 'taches, on to gelled tops and goatees, to resurgent neckbeards and permastubble.

Superhero fashion critique!

Wow. You may know who this guy is, if you ever change channels and hang around on one of those fashion shows until you hear a bitchy comment and get all sassed up for the day. Which is why it's weird to see him turn up here, but even weirder is the term 'semiotics' popping up and the general high tone of the discussion. Who knew the gems you could get out of having some fashion professionals look at this stuff? This could be a feature length documentary and wouldn't get tired of it. This should be standard practice when designing a superhero costume. Get a fashion designer to look at it and give you an opinion, first. Just think of the awful costumes that could have been avoided, the great costumes that would have been left alone. This video comes by way of toplessrobot.com, which you probably should read

celebrity news is becoming too mundane.

It was always banal, but the recent crop of celebrity news stories is just terrible. That 24-hour news cycle is wreaking havoc on the bland little dramas playing out on the airbrushed canvases that are supposedly real lives. How are we supposed to get excited about the same old stuff when you hear bout it every five minutes? Every time the cheryl cole song comes on the radio there's a joke about her failing marriage. I've heard so many jokes, it feels like I'm divorcing here. It's almost like they've caught on. Only reality stars surprised by the burgeoning popularity of their show are still caught out. There's a whole industry of publicists and other random media jockeys defusing, editing and just crushing the life out of every scandal before it even breaks. A friend of mine gets press-releases about impending 'spontaneous' flash mobs regularly. I never really bought all that stuff about the media being controlled, but then I've never been this bored by the low-rent shenanigans on T.V. Cheating, divorce, Micheal Jackson's death still mysterious? I'm beginning to think these people don't matter at all.

Superior pop songs

There's a dearth of songs like this in the hit parades, in fact, it's more or less what hit parades are for, deliciously sweet, sentimentally encrusted caramel lattices of music covering a gooey center of asinine teenage emotions. It fizzes, pops, it's cracking. It has all the style and chops missing from those dour representations of teenage misery or inexplicably awful rapper bullshit that pervades the rest of the charts. So why is it missing so often? My theory is the total unwillingness of record executives and artists to venture into this area without ironic quotation marks, lest heartbroken teenagers dismiss it as uncool. In the scuffle for some kind of general relatability to the public, mediocrity tends to triumph in the most surprising ways.

Jihadists were cool once

I remembered this video vividly, like a lot of 80's videos (they were on after the cartoons), but never in a million years would I have connected it to a classic goth band like sisters of mercy. Their early stuff is exactly the kind of thing you'd toss into the faces of progrock enthusiasts who hate everything made after 1978. But apparently they later succumbed to the cheese and did a bowie. Not that I have anything against that, but this might be a bit too on the nose. White suits, reflecting shades, Afghan freedom fighters? They were the coolest oppressed minority there was for a while. The classic desert palace set really takes the cake, though. It really makes me wonder what other fond memories I can disinter for the lulz.

Heaven knows I'm miserable now.

This is the first thing I play whenever I'm depressed, and it always cheers me up. I know I'm not exactly unique in this regard, and I hate most Smiths/Morissey fans on the Internet at least. For that matter, what I know about Morissey, I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire... unless he promised to get back together with Johnny Marr, that is. I think it's exactly that quality of self-serious, but clever goth poetry set to relatively happy, complex music that Makes snap out of any funk. At no point can you take your own problems seriously when you listen to someone describing the teenage woes of artistic souls this sarcastically. I love it so much, I can't even articulate it as well as someone whose music I unreservedly hate:

Gaga for Giger

This is a weirder video than usual for Lady Gaga. That whole bathhaus of Gaga thing is a dead give away that something is up. The whole decor, the storyline, Gaga patched up and sold to an affluent businessman with a gold chinstrap(bidding with wii nunchucks, I think). In some kind of resort with lots of steam. Everything is so Swiss. There is an insistence on her spine as well. I think it's an elaborate tribute to H.R. Giger. The spines, the costumes in the beginning: latex bodysuits? This may just be how my mind works, but the fact that you can see her forehead for the first time is the real Giger connection in my mind. Check out this pic of the original alien head.



There are human eyes underneath that plate, just as I always suspected with Gaga.