Baboon Palace

Arts & Letters Daily linked to this screed about the countless horrors Sony has unleashed upon the world with their portable audio devices, (also known as portable SATAN devices).

CRIME: The Sony Walkman has “physically wrecked” the ears of a generation.

What?

CRIME: The Sony Walkman has “devalued magnificence” with its plebian ‘convenience’.

Because you can’t fully appreciate a Mahler symphony while brushing your teeth. Who wears headphones while brushing their teeth? Nobody, that’s who.

I don’t buy the assumption that music is inherently sacred, or the corollary that anything which isn’t sacred — music with a “crump-crump rhythm” for example — isn’t really music at all. By the way, I’m going to start using the phrase “crump rhythm” as a synonym for “phat beats” from now on. I suggest you all do the same. YO THAT BE SOME CRUMP RHYTHM, DAWG. It’ll be big crump.

CRIME: The Sony Walkman promotes “autism and isolation” by allowing people to enjoy music privately, in public.

This is exactly what I love about the walkman. When I walk down the street or go shopping or, god forbid, ride the bus, I can wear my headphones and be completely free of any potential requirement to connect with my fellow humans. I don’t want to interact with the public. I hate the public.

CRIME: The Sony Walkman (and the iPod) have taken music out of any context in the world, making it as banal and ubiquitous as lint.

Up until the first years of the Common Era, the scroll was the medium with which one communicated important words. Scrolls were a huge, unwieldy devices which could only be enjoyed in the context of the temple or the court. The codex, a small bound square of folded pages, made it possible to carry literature wherever one travelled. Those anti-social louts who embraced this new technology could be seen shamelessly reading words, which they carried around in their filthy packs, right in public in front of God and everybody.

These sketchy characters were, of course, the early Christians, and it was their adoption of this new portable form of literature which was (more or less) responsible for the rapid spread of their little mystery-cult, (for better or, more likely, worse.)

Blessed are the shameless, they inherit the future! (Did Nietzsche write that? If not, he should have.)

Me neither.

There is, apparently, a cultural backlash againt ‘emo’, which I had thought was a genre of music but, if you are a hip New-Yorker, is actually a personality disorder. Symptoms include crying, petulance and writing pitiful, shallow poetry about oneself (cf. LiveJournal, Conor Oberst). The New York Observer has had enough: “Stuff It, Emo Boy!”

In an article so sassy that it took three people to write it, Rachel, Sheela and Anna declare the whole “guys who are total pussies” fad to be like totally five-minutes-ago. It’s like reading gender-essentialist cultural criticism from bizarro-world where, instead of men complaining about how those bossy feminists should realize that they’ll never land a good husband if they don’t shut up and make with the dinner, women are complaining about how men should shut up about their feelings and be more stoic.

“He’ll sound sensitive. He is sensitive—but often more sensitive to his own emotions than to those of the woman sitting across from him at dinner.”

So in other words he’ll act like a woman.

One popular explanation for the phenomenon of male emotional accoutrement is that it’s an adaptation to feminism, or its “collateral damage”, as Constance Wyndham (!), a 24-year-old “art critic”, calls it. Constance continues:

“The emo archetype is actually a French man—ambiguously sexual, creative intellectual types, tortured poets, they might say, who are actually deeply misogynistic and harbor the most archaic notions of femininity or male-female interaction. They have a terrible penchant for public displays of affection, listening to Robbie Williams, but also for anal sex—which is more or less the only way men see they can dominate women fully and aggressively.”

The ambiguously-sexual, assfucking Frenchmen archetype! Biggity-burn! This reminds me of that Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face . There’s a scene at a cafe in Paris where this French couple is having an argument and the woman is talking non-stop in this shrill nagging tone. The guy sitting across from her just hauls off and slaps her across the face. She looks shocked, then says “Je t’aime!” and then they make out. The lesson here is that even the French know that there are more ways for men to dominate women “fully and aggressively”, (which is, of course, what women want), than just buttsex. It’s just that anal penetration is the only exercise of male-on-female power acceptable in the modern urban post-feminist culture. Outstanding!

I really do sympathize with the authors. It must be emotionally draining to want so desperately to date fashionable hipsters and yet be completely turned off by their personalities. It’s an awkward situation for everyone, I’m sure.

Mad props to Dong Resin for the link.

 
 
 
that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind
 
 
 
 

the mind is exactly this tree that grass
without thought or feeling both disappear

 
 
 
 
don’t hesitate get laid that’s wisdom
sitting around chanting what crap
 
 
 
 
 

men are like cows horses fuck poetry
look at your hand read it

I was at the S******** at school; It’s one of those self-serve deals, where you grab a paper cup and fill it with your choice among several evocatively-named blends of burnt-acidic caffeine. I don’t like S******** coffee much, but walking all the way across the building was out of the question. So I’m waiting at the counter to hand over my $1.75, and there’s no one there. So I went over the the condiment stand to add milk, unwrapped five tiny thimbles, poured the dribble of questionable milk into my cup and lined the empty plastic containers in a row along the countertop. Still nobody at the register.

So I left. I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere.

Was that morally wrong? Do I have a >:( moral oblication >:( to pay S******** a dollar seventy-five tomorrow? I say: no.

Funny stuff.

Any comic that makes reference to Barbapapa, Warhammer, and bonghits is inherently and objectively hilarious.

The family next door is working on their roof. They’re installing aluminum panels and styrofoam insulation, amidst much banging and buzzsawing. At eight in the morning on a holiday.

My windows are at exactly the same height as the neighbouring roof and there are three burly chinamen looking in at me while I eat my toast. Now I can’t look at porn or smoke dope in privacy.

Maybe they’re doing it to spite me. I step out onto their roof sometimes to smoke.

Happy Canada Day!