istickboy's Friends
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends View]
Below are the most recent 17 friends' journal entries.
| Thursday, May 24th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
11:39p |
Back into the valley
So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses. For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes. I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see... |
nihilistic_kid
|
8:14p |
My Father vs Katy Perry
Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name. According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors: |
| Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 |
faustfatale
|
10:57a |
Butch Hunt 2012
 Attention butches, studs, AGs and all Masculine of Center readers: Think you’ve got what it takes to play two-fisted dyke dick Butch Fatale? I’m gearing up for my next Butch Fatale novel, and I want to put together a sexy video teaser trailer. All I need is YOU! Here’s what you need to do: Post a video (any length) on YouTube containing each of the following components: A) Introduce yourself and tell us why you should play Butch Fatale. (NOTE: You DO NOT have to look exactly like the cover illustration or match the written description! I welcome entries from all ages, shapes and types, including butches of color, fat butches, and anyone else who thinks they’ve got what it takes. Cocky, sexy ATTITUDE is the key here, not looks.) B) Read the following excerpt from DOUBLE D DOUBLE CROSS: “When the tattooed tomato walked into my shabby Echo Park office, I had no idea if she was gonna kiss me or slap me. I was hoping for the former, but betting on the latter. Her name was Diversity. Back when we first met, she’d been this waifish hippie chick fresh out of UC Berkley. A second-generation granola dyke whose homespun, organic hemp exterior hid a multi-O dynamo that wouldn’t quit. We had three tempestuous months together before it ended badly. Can’t say I was surprised. She was the type who got all juicy over the idea of slumming with a rough and tumble blue-collar butch like me, but couldn’t stop lecturing me about how I was internalizing patriarchal oppression because I cut my hair like Tony Curtis. In the years since we’d parted ways, I hadn’t changed all that much. I’ve been 5’10” since I was fifteen and walk around at a fit 150. Muscular arms, broad shoulders and big, solid tits that I gave up hiding years ago. Never been pretty, but I’ve grown into handsome pretty well. Still cutting my hair like Tony Curtis.” C) Include some extra footage of yourself hamming it up for the camera. Seduce me. Sell me your sexy swagger. Stand out from the pack and charm me right out of my panties. D) Include this URL in your YouTube post http://amzn.com/B0076OEOG4E) Email me a link to your post at christafaust AT gmail DOT com The rest is up to you. Get creative. Use props and costumes if you like. Be as slick and polished or raw and gritty as you like. Be unique. I will post links to all the videos received by July 1st 2012 here on this blog and all my readers will be invited to vote for the winner. That winner will be the star of the new Butch Fatale teaser trailer. Good luck, and may the best butch win! |
| Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
8:53p |
|
nihilistic_kid
|
8:59a |
The Presidential primary season is heating up!
What? The primaries are getting hot? Well, if you live in California and actually believe in peace and freedom*, they are. Kinda. PFP is a California-only party right now with national aspirations, so there's some push and some pull. For the upcoming election, this means that the party's Presidential candidate will necessarily be cross-endorsed by parties active in other states. So, here are my choices for the primary next month: * Stewart Alexander, nominee of the Socialist Party U.S.A. * Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson, nominee of the Justice Party * Stephen Durham, nominee of the Freedom Socialist Party * Peta Lindsay, nominee of the Party for Socialism and Liberation Three of the four will appear on my ballot. Lindsay was struck from the ballot by the state of California because she's not yet 35 and thus too young to win the Presidency. As if too [fill in the blank] to win really means anything for this party's nominating slate. Anderson appeals to, I imagine, the "practical" PFP voter. As the one-time mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, he's the only formal former officeholder. Of course, that's also the problem. He's a Democrat who hit the ceiling of his influence, so went into business for himself. Party is also a major issue for Lindsay—PSL is an odd split from Workers World, a strange Stalinoid party with Trotkyist roots. There's been no public comment on the split between PSL and WW, and nobody's managed to suss out a political difference by reading their publications and comparing the two. So the whole party smells like a trap to me. Then we have Durham of the Freedom Socialist Party, which I know primarily through their feminist front Radical Women. They're not terrible. I like that Durham talks about his running mate a lot. The Socialist Party is a** daughter party of the classic party of Eugene Debs, and their candidate is an automotive sales consultant? Is that a used-car salesperson? I could get behind that! So, Alexander or Durham. Obviously, the question, ultimately, is which campaign is not just trying to raid Peace and Freedom, and which would do more for ballot access for a left alternative. I'm leaving toward Alexander in this, as the SPUSA will probably be on the ballot on eight states by itself, and PFP would make nine, but I am still contemplating. One wouldn't want the SP to swamp PFP either! See, being a "swing" voter is hard! Aren't you glad all of your decisions have already been made for you? *Am I saying that Californians who are members of other parties are interested in war and slavery? Yes, yes I am. **They would say they are the daughter party, and I am inclined to agree. |
| Saturday, May 19th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
10:57p |
The Avengers
The Avengers is an above-average movie of its type, thanks largely to Joss Whedon's ability to write for and block ensemble casts. This is very handy as in the third acts typical of superhero films, the big CGI battles are about as enjoyable as watching someone else play a video game. But no so here! Not everything is so promising. The first line of the film is "The tesseract has awakened," which is right up there with "The neutrinos are mutating!" from 2012, and the transdimensional baddies hang out in the same desolate rocky crag thingie as evil Transformers. When the action comes Earthside, stuff is a bit better, though if I never see a Russian thug in a leather coat or Indian people living like American hillbillies again it'll be too soon. Then when Loki shows up, Stellan Skarsgård shouts, "The brother of Thor!" Thanks, asshole. And stop stealing all the roles Randy Quaid was born to play! Anyway, the tesseract is a glowing blue MacGuffin and SHIELD has it and Loki wants to hand it over to Mysterious Space Baddie #1 so he can have his diva moment messing with Thor and the other heroes. Much of the first big action sequence of the film is based around an exceptionally stupid idea SHIELD had of trying to make an aircraft carrier fly. Oh yes, and the SHIELD helicarrier also has a Magic Disco Ball effect to make it reflect the clouds and render it invisible. An incredibly noisy, hot invisible that kills entire species of birds as it zips around, surely, and the bad guys find the stupid thing easily enough anyway. More interesting and more true to the comics are the intrahero fights—"clash of champions" sorts of turns are very popular in superhero stories because there is very little suspense in a comic otherwise. We know the villain will lose, after all. On cue, there is the turn from bickering to teamwork, which is essential for every hero-team story. Most of the hero characters are very well-drawn. Thor still feels like a stock Ren Faire character, but Robert Downey Jr. is consistently great, Chris Evans was actually quite good as the boy scout—he has a nice line about God that felt believable—and ScarJo finally spit the marbles out of her mouth. She was terrible, and her character useless, in Iron Man II, but she's very interesting here. Black Widow's clever interrogation skills, which involve making herself seemingly vulnerable and confused to exploit the tendency for arrogant men-in-movies to brag to women, is very smart. One is reminded of Clarice Starling, who profiled Buffalo Bill's kidnap victim in order to come to a conclusion about the killer, rather than profiling the killer himself. (One also sees that BW is more of a thriller/horror character in one of her interactions with the Hulk, which comes right out of any werewolf/mummy/Frankenstein-type movie.) Speaking of, Mark Ruffalo finally gets Bruce Banner/Hulk right, partially because he has a fleshy ethnic face that makes the Hulk look good. See?  Compare this to Eric Bana's ridiculous pinch-nosed babyface:  (Admittedly, there is also a nine-year gap in CGI technology.) Just because every person in comics had to be a WASP back in the 1960 isn't a reason not to let Southern Europeans in now. Ruffalo is also good because in a film full of fan service, he gave the Rocky Horror-types something special. Here's what you do when you watch this movie, if you wear glasses. Whenever Ruffalo takes his glasses off as a form of punctuation, you do the same. It's hilarious! It happens like twenty times. Speaking of fan service: Iron Man and Hulk are super-gay and Thor and Loki are also super-gay. One of the interactions between Thor and Loki was shot like an evening soap opera from the 1980s—the kind of scene where the woman says "Bastard!" and slaps the man, and the man says "Bitch!" and slaps the woman, and then they start making out. Instead Loki stabs Thor with his penis knife. The only bum note was Hawkeye, though even this was okay as his role was the role normally reserved for a female character—getting captured, doing bad stuff, being redeemed by love, then running a support role. There's another inversion of the classic tropes as well. I speculated that this film would have a final fight taking place over a hole as is so common these days when I talked about The Cabin in the Woods, but no, Whedon does something entirely different—the fight takes place under the hole. Fucking sweet. There was some generic swelling music when the Avengers finally assemble and the characters put on their supersuits and grab their weapons. Banner/Hulk had been separated from the rest by this point, and was found, naked, by Harry Dean Stanton in a nice little cameo. I'd hoped that after the shot of Captain America brandishing his shield, Hawkeye his bow, Iron Man his helmet, and Thor his hammer, there'd be a shot of Bruce Banner and Harry Dean eating a hamburger together one thousand miles away at a roadside diner, but nooooo. Maybe in the DVD extras. Anyway, there's a long fight and midtown Manhattan gets trashed in the utterly bloodless way typical of Marvel Comics. There's really only one dead body in the whole movie, and it's the rough equivalent of the neighbor's yappy dog getting killed in the first thirty minutes of a horror flick. Amazingly, the Internet tells me that people cared about Guy In Suit #1, which is shocking. Aaanyway, the Avengers win, and there's some fun stuff there. There's enough talking, and actual facial expressions, and everyone doing their little thing (also like the comics—there's big baddies for the powerful heroes, scrubs for the normal human athletes with super-gadgets) for the final fight choreography to be interesting, and it's all good. Even eleven years later, I was a little shaken up by the channeling of 9/11 in the post-battle news sequence though. Maybe few people care anymore, but I still frequently think of all those desperate "Missing Person" flyers that went up in the days after the attack. Perhaps it's different for people who didn't live in or around New York at the time. It was a good movie. Afterward I wish I carried a straight razor. In the bathroom, Neckbeard Alpha was explaining to Neckbeard Beta that in the comics Hawkeye was involved with a hero named Mockingbird, and only hooked up with Black Widow later. WHICH IS WRONG AND A LIE!! Had I a razor, I would have whipped it out and shaved him right there, to amish-nerd shame him! Hawkeye and Black Widow were involved back in the 1960s!  Nothing's worse than an incompetent geek. Whedon's a competent one, so the movie was quite fun. It wasn't a work of genius. I mean, the credits featured something like thirty "Depth Artists", but it really wasn't any deeper than: friendship good, states treacherous, ambitions poisonous, teamwork crucial. I hope you all knew that already. |
| Friday, May 18th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
11:24a |
May 18
On May 18th, 1980, student protesters against martial law were attacked by paratroopers in the South Korean city of Kwangju. This led to a generalized uprising, the repulsion of the troops to beyond the city limits, and several days of radical transformations of urban society—collective meals in the parks, the formation of a people's militia called the Citizen Army, the creation of new newspapers and organs covering both daily life and the establishment of defenses against the military. The new military government responded by sending in Special Forces troops trained to invade North Korea, and the Kwangju Uprising became the Kwangju Massacre. Amazingly, the Wikipedia entry isn't terrible. Also not surprising: the US, of course, had a role in martial law and even the crackdown—the ROK 20th Infantry Division, which had a major role in the massacre, was part of the US-led Combined Forces Command and required US approval for operations.
Over a decade ago now, my friend Kap and I translated and edited a survivor's memoir of the uprising and massacre called Kwangju Diary. It's out of print now, but will soon be available again, thanks in part to the city of Kwangju itself. More news on that soon. At the risk of tonal whiplash, here is another bit of 5/18 history. Ninety years ago today, Proust and James Joyce met for the first and only time. There are many accounts of the meeting, but here is my favorite:"I’ve headaches every day," Joyce announced. "My eyes are terrible." Proust replied, "My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once." "I’m in the same situation," Joyce said. "If I can find someone to take me by the arm...Goodbye." " Charmé," said Proust. "Oh, my stomach, my stomach." |
nihilistic_kid
|
1:16a |
Nearly there.
The page proofs of Bullettime have been keeping me up till 1 or 2am every night for the past four, but now they are done. See?  One more pass, after these corrections are made, ought to do it! |
| Thursday, May 17th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
4:25p |
And now...
Black Tiger Penis Whip Staff. Tiger Penis Whip! PENIS STAFF! |
nihilistic_kid
|
1:43p |
|
| Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
10:03p |
|
nihilistic_kid
|
2:26p |
Anthony Giangregorio—beware, for real!
Remember the other day, when new writer Mandy DeGeit found her story substantially rewritten, with errors introduced, by a small press editor/publisher Anthony Giangregorio, who proceeded to act very unprofessionally when DeGeit complained about the added bestiality and outrageous introduced copy errors (e.g., the story is now called "She Make's Me Smile")? Well, another writer, Alyn Day also came forward to describe a story she had placed with Giangregorio being substantially rewritten and retitled without her permission or even awareness.And apparently, Giangregorio is upset enough about these revelations to invite himself over to Day's house. A Facebook screencap-you'll see that the conversation begins last year, and was updated 22 hours ago:  Is there a way to read this as something other than a threat against Day-especially as Giangregorio had previously told DeGeit that he would only communicate through lawyers? I tend to think not. Please spread the word. |
nihilistic_kid
|
11:50a |
(Character) Class and The Game of Life
John Scalzi has a good post comparing life to a video game, in which being a straight white male (SWM) is akin to playing a video game on the "Easy" setting. Being of color, queer, a woman, etc. is like playing on a harder setting. There are many many other variables of course, including class, which he touches on by writing "If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed." I think this is both a factual and rhetorical error, and that class should be fully integrated into Difficulty as opposed to stats, to make the analogy more apt. (For those who don't know, a "dump stat" is the stat where you only put the minimum of points. It's not like you're "dumping" extra points into that stat, but that you dump your lowest score into it.) The error, I think, can be seen in the comments to the post—and all the usual disclaimers about reading the comments on any Internet posting apply here, double. Two of the recurring themes are as follows: 1. SWMs complaining that their low class/socio-economic status/wealth means that their lives aren't so privileged after all. 2. SWMs who appear to be better off who a) want to know why they should act against their own interests by critiquing their advantages regardless of the origins of those advantages, and b) like expressing their ownership of and stake in the system built by previous generations of SWMs, and distaste for all those awful black African Jewish lesbians in wheelchairs who want to take over. So, we have a group that feels it doesn't have a stake in the system, and is feeling the harshness of competition, and a group pleased with the rules of the system as they stand scoffing at the activities of their social inferiors. Clearly, there's a significant break in SWMdom, and it's along class lines. This plays out in the real world in several ways that demonstrate to me that class is fundamental and thus part of "difficulty setting" in Real Life: Dragons of the Murderdome, or whatever you want to call it. Back in the 1970s, Albert Szymanski studied income and race and found that, of course, black workers made less than white workers. However, he also found an interesting regional difference—white workers in the American south made less than black workers in the American north. While the white workers in the south made more than their black co-workers in the south, they were underpaid compared to both blacks and whites in the north. So, while whites were better off in a region of greater racism and thus greater race privilege for being white, most of them would benefit along with black workers in a region with greater equality. White privilege was paying white workers an extra dollar to keep from having to pay both white workers an extra five dollars and black workers an extra three dollars. (Clearly, we've not yet gotten any numbers from a truly equal society with no race privilege.) What explained the difference? The north had integrated labor unions; the south, thanks to segregation, had many fewer labor unions (and those that existed were less powerful). Basically, white workers did not benefit substantially from racial discrimination, not even relative to blacks in another area with less explicit racist laws and social policies. Greater benefits would have accrued had they fought against their privilege, and in solidarity with black workers. Victor Perlo has found similar dynamics existing even today, a generation after the end of Jim Crow laws. Sure, plenty of SWMs did benefit—managers, the highest tier of (almost invariably white) workers, factory and mine owners, people who play the stock market, etc. And sure, there is an important "psychological wage" white workers are paid— at least we're not black!, but psychology is even easier to print and inflate than fiat money. And yes, poor whites are less likely to have to deal with police harassment and the like. But they both get it worse in an environment where police are allowed to run rampant as a tool of keeping neighborhoods segregated and the property of landowners and businesses safe. Basically, the greater the race discrimination, the higher the inequality among whites. There are similar analyses that have been done as regards gender discrimination, discrimination against gays, etc. It's not a cookie-cutter sort of thing—queer issues often have to do with the "nature" of the family itself and the need to protect certain kinds of families and eliminate other forms of families, for example—but in general there are lots and lots of SWMs that don't benefit materially from racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or national chauvinism, etc. Of course, many white people, regardless of their own class "stat", accept racist ideas. Their perceived interests and their actual interests are two different things. Some confusion emerges when SWMs for whom racism (or sexism, or anti-queer sentiment, etc.) is beneficial declare themselves spokespeople for all the poor put-upon SWMs are who are the outrageous victims of Affirmative Action, or too many black ladies with dreadlocks being cast as wisecracking judges on TV, or women who won't have sex with the "beta males." And when discussions of intersectionality and oppression take class as a secondary issue*, the rhetorical floor is ceded to people with a material and ideological interest in racism, etc. to recruit the rest of SWMdom. Low-SES/working class/poor SWMs end up siding with billionaires who make the correct-seeming noises about "liberal elites" and competition from blacks and women and gays. But when class is fully integrated into an understanding of the difficulty setting of the Game of Life, I think the arguments get much clearer. The question: "I'm a poor white guy; should I fight against systems of privilege?" The answer: "Because you'll benefit from it. The more equal things are, the better off you are." For rich white guys who ask the same question, well, they're clearly on the other side, so they don't need an answer. *Class actually is complicated when it comes to intersectionality. Very few people believe that the best solution to sexism is the elimination of men, or that the best solution to racism is the elimination of whites. And yet, many people do believe that the best solution to class division is the elimination of the bourgeois class. And yet, when so many theorists of intersectionality are themselves bourgeois aspirants with privileges of their own to protect... |
| Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
5:06p |
|
nihilistic_kid
|
8:40a |
Buy me! THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE out today.
Today is the official release date for The Future is Japanese, an anthology I co-edited with Masumi Washington for Team Rocket! It sure looks neat, see?  It's the first Haikasoru title with original content by both Japanese and non-Japanese writers. That is to say some of the stories are appearing in translation before they appear in Japanese. Plus, we have new stories from Bruce Sterling, Catherynne Valente, Pat Cadigan, David Moles, Ken Liu, Ekaterina Sedia, Rachel Swirsky, and the triumphant return of Felicity Savage! Our Japanese authors include Hideyuki Kikuchi ( Vampire Hunter D!), Project Itoh (PKD-award citation winner for Harmony), Issui Ogawa (of the Haikasoru books The Last Continent and The Lord of the Sands of Time), Toh EnJoe (whose collection we're releasing soon), and TOBI Hirotaka, whose story I think has serious award potential. You should buy this book. Partially because I want to do another one. Partially because it's awesome and has a cute cover with an actual Asian person on it. And if you are a bit short this month, you can enter my latest giveaway contest on the future of the short story. We're giving away four copies and will hip anywhere in the world, so get to it. |
| Monday, May 14th, 2012 |
nihilistic_kid
|
2:33p |
|
nihilistic_kid
|
8:37a |
Won't Something Happen Already?
It's been that sort of month. A "We'll Get Back To You Soon" sort of month, where soon means after all the staples are stapled and then removed, the Post-it notes alphabetized and a special memo sent around for explaining how to integrate blank Post-Its into the alphabetical files, and then someone forgets to pay their own phone bill so they certainly can't call you back. But a few things have been happening. Here's me, on the cover of Locus:  I was the second interview. The magazine's been out for half a month, and except for one Twitter comment and some talk of the appealing(?) cover ("The new romantic comedy Thought Experiment, with Nick Mamatas as 'Webs' McGee...") nobody has said anything which is just further proof of what I always expected— Locus subscribers just skim the table of contents to see if their own work is reviewed, then give the magazine a flip to see if there are any photos of them inside, then put it away. It's like the society pages, for people who think it's acceptable to wear two fanny packs at the same time. My latest Writing Salons class started on Saturday—I decided I wasn't going to beat the drum to publicize it anymore, and miraculously got eleven sign-ups. When I do spam you poor innocent people who aren't even anywhere near California, I usually get six. A fair fraction of people signed up thanks to some positive word of mouth from former students; I also allowed two repeats to take the class again, after warning them that the jokes wouldn't be updated. I do get on a paid per-head basis, like a hairdresser or psychotic serial killer, so that's good. Speaking of classes, I'm undergoing some excruciating training for my forthcoming UCLA Extension course, which is to be taught online. I had one person marvel at my ability to create hyperlinks already, and I got to rewrite my already-approved syllabus according to a rubric that would be very useful were I teaching Fuctionalizing Utility Platforms for Social Media Leveraging Derivatives 101: The Bullshittening. Anyway, if you're one of those people who asked me if my writing class would ever be online, here it is. Online. And what's the news? Looks like the left will make further gains and the Nazis experience some decline in the Greek elections next month, which is good. (Though there needs to be more Nazi-crushing going on.) Greece will certainly end up out of the euro, which is fine. At the very least, the examples of Argentina and Iceland will be instructive. But will Germany just buy some US drones and solve the "problem" of their clogged-up vacuum cleaner the hard way? (Or is that the easy way?!) Domestically, is gay marriage news? Obama is in favor of it now, in some odd and theoretical way that will certainly have no impact on the many states that have barred gay marriage—in this he is just like Dick Cheney, but eight years behind. And Romney led a gang of sweatervest-wearing goons to shave someone's head in a homophobic attack fifty years ago. Of course he did, and of course it was leaked right now. It just goes to show that parents raising pre-teen psychopaths need not worry. So long as they're already rich. Well, other than all that, what have I to say except aaaaaaarrrrrgh won't something happen already! |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
istickboy's Friends Page