Ten Best Time Magazine Covers

Courtesy of the Time Magazine archives, here are my favourites:

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Nothing's There

The film "I'm Not There" reminded me of everything I hate about the sixties: faux-zen emptiness spouted as deep wisdom, self-absorption as folk religion, the fetishization of black people as markers of authenticity, the humourless preaching of a small-town church with even less prospect of redemption. Allegedly a film about Bob Dylan, he is portrayed at various stages in his life by superficial archetypes ranging from a black child to a white woman, each doppelganger more grating and hackneyed than the last. Cate Blanchett in particular is unwatchably successful in revealing the petulant twelve-year old girl in Dylan's psyche, whining for her cake while slovenly eating it too. Each characterization shows Dylan in various stages of a search for a model of authenticity to imitate, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud to James Dean to Billy the Kid to Jesus Christ to an earlier version of himself, increasingly contemptuous that no one calls him on his bluff. If this was an intentional attempt at character assassination, I applaud the filmmaker's sublimely subversive way of going about it under the cover of idol-worship; if not, perhaps this inadvertent defamation is all the more revealing of the dismal qualities we assign and expect of our cultural heroes. Their narcissism writ-large inspires awe in our culture of narcissism writ-small.

In case you didn't know, this film makes assuringly clear that: Dylan wears masks, takes on different identities, is enigmatic and open to interpretation. Besides this hammering of the nail of the obvious, there is no pathos to be found here, no insight to be attained into the reasons behind the masks or how they interacted with the flesh-and-blood person grafted beneath; he/she/it's greatest trouble seems to be dealing with the apparent soul-rendering difficulties of being almost universally adored. This is a common Hollywood trope, a recurrent sign of its self-mythologizing: that there is something noble and sad about being paid attention to the world over. That having scribes present to record your every vapid uttering, being photographed as if the most banal moments of your life had meaning and attending parties full of people eager to physically or socially give you fellatio is an endless horror-show. Unlike non-musical actors, Dylan actually had the talent to justify some of the attention. Yet this film, accurately or not I cannot say, shows him to be the prototypical celebrity narcissist: his legacy not the fulfillment of a rural American tradition of folksy crypto-meaning, but the unsettling disappointment of a charlatan who gets exactly what he wants.

Exclusive Details

Suri's Birthday Weekend:

Buy a pack of squares
Arrive at the apartment
Confront the investor
Explain the situation
Have him sign the documents
Bind him to a chair
Handcuff him
Place him face down on the bed
Shoot him once
Remember gloves
Scan apartment
Kill the dog, kill the dog, kill the dog, evidence
Kill the dog, kill the dog, kill the dog, evidence
Kill the dog, evidence, kill the dog, evidence
Kill the dog

Lyrics courtesy of Big Black, inspired by a piece of evidence in the "Billionaire Boys Club" trial. The original list was allegedly composed by the defendant, Joe Hunt.

Music & Sex: The Rhythm Of The Ineffable

"When words leave off, music begins."
- Heinrich Heine

"Sex begins where words end."
- Georges Bataille

Modern Love: A Primer

Myth has it that there is someone, somewhere out there who is right for you. Out of the billions of people on this Earth, one is perfectly compatible in every way, the missing piece to fit your puzzle. Magically, they are likely to live within your local radius, speak your language and share your socio-economic background. This is a belief usually acquired in youth through unconscious osmosis. And it is bunk. Who you surrender your freedom-cum-isolation to depends not on shared interests, but shared, or shared aspiring, social status; not serendipity, but accident of birthplace largely dependent on one's ancestors' socio-economically driven migration patterns. Partner selection has been elevated to such a high socially constructed level of meaning because it serves a pseudo-mystical function for the otherwise faithless. The search for God may be unfashionable, but the search for Mr. Right remains the Homeric Odyssey of the bourgeois female.

It is secular blasphemy to say that who you end up making babies with is not the most important thing in the world. Close proximity generally creates enough co-dependency to make for at least an acceptable facsimile of love. We love our brothers and sisters because we experienced so much together and saw them all the damn time. Co-habitating with a stranger, within broad limits of compatibility and given the necessary sexual combustion to transcend brotherly-sisterly feelings, is likely to produce equally effective bonding/hidden resentment. Most women and many men are enough in love with the idea of love to "fake it till it's real"--until a baby pops out--and the ensuing sense of shared parental obligation does the rest. It's not romantic perfection, but it's worked well enough to keep the species going up till now.

As for the personified El Dorado of modern love, that perfect specimen of looks and responsibility and status and (non-threatening) intelligence, he/she does not exist and is likely too good for you anyway. Most attractive people aren't smart, most smart people aren't assertive, most assertive people aren't compassionate, most compassionate people aren't fun, most fun people aren't responsible, etc. As noted romantic Immanuel Kant said, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." You're going to have to pick and choose the qualities you desire most in a partner, or simply bumble along until someone chooses for you. I'd say the bumble approach is the most common, and certainly it saves effort better spent on more productive matters, like writing jaded missives to a limited audience.

I am not a hopeless romantic, as you might tell. I think the communal matchmaking of most cultures of the world (and ours in times past) was probably a better use of resources and created more lasting, loving matches to boot. But then sex--the divorcing of physicality from metaphysical meaning--and the city--mass urbanization and the resultant anomie and loss of deeply-felt community--happened. Where once people asserted God is love, now they believe love is God. It demands worship through oaths of fealty, fits of delusion and the ritual recitation of platitudes. The benefit of substituting love for God is that love can seemingly take the form of real people, whereas only one man allegedly took the form of God and he's long gone. Plus orgasm is easier to attain than religious ecstasy. The drawback of substituting love for God is that love can seemingly take the form of real people, and real people specialize in disappointment.

We create images of gods and goddesses in our heads then find someone who can be molded to fit the form. Instead the previously conceived image is molded to fit their form, and we retroactively assume that was our ideal all along. Perhaps the process is beautiful for and not in spite of being an illusion. Maybe, but I still believe there are more beautiful illusions to be found and made. Preferably ones that don't require living up to a false ideal propagated on television and in magazines that purport to show what happiness looks like. It doesn't look like me, and it doesn't look like you either. If it exists, it is as likely to be attained through disenchantment as enchantment. At the very least, strict disenchantment forces enchantment to take on impressively gargantuan forms for it to attain victory. Until that big love comes, let freedom-cum-isolation reign.

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

I am a figure of fun:
Obsessive, deadpan and moribund.
- Figure Of Fun, The Birthday Party

The Protocols Of The Youth Of Orange County

The Political Will and Testament of Lauren Conrad:

I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During my struggle for power, Heidi and Spencer primarily received with laughter my prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of American popular culture and thereby of the entire youth and then, among many other things, achieve a solution to the Heidi problem. I suppose...the then resounding laughter of Heidi and Spencer in the Hills is now choking in their throats. [applause; Lauren coughs]

Today I will be a prophet again: If Heidi & Spencer within Orange County and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into war over Spencer's sister, then the consequences will not be the release of the sex tape into the world and therein a victory of Heidi and Spencer's terrifying obsession, but on the contrary, the destruction of Heidi and Spencer in the Hills. [applause]

It is clear to us that the war can only end with the destruction of the Orange-Skinned peoples or the disappearance of Heidi and Spencer from the Hills. On September 3, I already announced in the offices of Teen Vogue (and I am careful not to make rash prophecies) that this war would not develop as Heidi and Spencer imagine, namely that the Orange-Skinned peoples will be destroyed. Instead, the result of this war will be the destruction of Heidi and Spencer. For the first time others will not bleed mascara alone. For the first time the genuine old Laguna Beach law will be applied: "A powdered eye for a powdered eye, an artificially whitened tooth for an artificially whitened tooth!" And the more this war spreads, the more anti-Heidism will spread, the more my friends will finally speak out. This may be said to Heidi and Spencer. Anti-Heidism will be nourished in every shopping mall, in every spray-on tanned clique of BFF clubbers which must be informed why they must sacrifice to the bitter end. And the hour will come when the most evil world enemy of all times will have played out its role for perhaps a thousand years at least.

Thoughts Between Stations

I've been called a "splendid specimen of neutrality" but I prefer nonchalance. Usually when I feel a heavy emotion it's a matter of slow and steady build-up that takes its time to erupt. Elvis Costello provides some sage words for the meantime: "I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused." That hardly means I'm amused all the time but some goals, even or especially if unreachable, are worth pursuing. Whether or not Nirvana exists, the process of seeking it can reduce people's suffering. The same goes for me and peace of mind. I know neurosis and melancholy come easily to me, so I strive in the other direction: seeking not to escape myself, because that would be impossible, but to balance myself. Writing for me is as much about self-correction as self-expression. I don't begrudge those with a hard-on for a grudge, but when I vituperate it is to purge and release. If I say my piece to satisfaction, it is finished and I can move on to the next inevitable turn of the spiral.

When I do wallow in the mud and blood with all the other pigs, my Super-Ego, residing in a silver spring somewhere to the south, rebukes me. I know that when you grapple with bullshit you get some on you. I know that if you constantly define yourself in contrast to something else you become tied to that something else. I know this but I am human and sometimes define, contrast and grapple anyway. When I'm done I wash myself in the silver spring seeking purity again. I feel the urge to shave my head and escape to a mythologized California. Yet this California only wants me if I'm passionate, and if I open myself up to passionate emotions some of these passions will be evil. Without the occasional flaring of hatred love will not flare so bright. Love is disappointed by my hate, hate is disappointed by my love: the heat of California and Brazil is fled for the icy but steady nonchalance of Canada, my true home and native land.

I don't know how it is for most people but for me it's extremes, one end of the map to the other. Transcending that recurrent shift is utopia: literally in the Greek, nowhere. Nirvana, paradise, peace of mind, the unattainable state we must nonetheless reach for. Truly, as David Byrne says, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." We try to get there not to reach it - we cannot even if we wanted to - but to stay one jump ahead of the ever-encroaching borders of Hell. Demons taunt me as a coward, fleeing my true nature; angels scold me as a failure, unable to live up to their image of what I should be. When I appear nonchalant it is because these forces are in stalemate, and rather than feel love and hate - passionate emotions - I am forced to choose between disgust and amusement, their lesser cousins. I try for the latter because it makes me feel less corrosive to all that is good in the world. Hate and love make for the best songs; I know this, Leonard Cohen knows this. But in between, in that vast middle ground, I must have my respite. While it lasts I ask your patience, for it like all things is temporary.

Londominion

The purpose of this post is to inform readers that the "webmaster" of Head Wide Open - Ben, Benjamin, Benjaminion, Benito Jaminolini, Ben-ana-na, Benladash, Bengerman, Ben J. Amin (no relation to Idi Amin), ¡Benjaminista! - will be off to London (England) today for a five-day trip. If a plane crashes in the mid-Atlantic, please fondly pray that I'm not on it. Otherwise, I will return shortly with possible stories, anecdotes, love-letters or hate speeches regarding England and the English. The title of this post, "Londominion," is a merge of London and "Dominion," the nation I am a citizen of, Canada, being a former "Dominion" (deluxe colony) of the British Empire. It is also a reference to the song "Dominion/Mother Russia" by English band/solitary misanthrope-romantic Sisters of Mercy. If I do die in a plane crash/bombing please regard one of the previous posts as my last will and testament, not this one. And to radical Islam, if I do die in a terrorist attack: Touché brothers, touché.

Man By Way Of Machine

Technology is traitorous. Radiohead were right about the world becoming Planet Telex, where "Everything is broken." Any video game system above Super Nintendo is a needlessly complicated black hole of time and effort. The iPod is a farce designed to break down so you must constantly buy the newest model, thus negating any money supposedly saved from not buying CDs and giving nothing instead of next to nothing to the artist. Printers never know how to eat paper right, despite my feeding it and feeding it and feeding it a feast of frustration. The load of the computer is rarely worth bearing. All the data in the world won't buy back the soul you never had. There is no ghost in the machine, no master node to the network; only indestructible sterility for terabytes on end.

Luddism is not a viable or coherent ideology but it would be primitive carthasis for hammer to say hello to CPU. Machines break down and are discarded like deformed Spartan babies. The rate of obsolescence exceeds the rate of mindful absorption. Simple, sundry books wear and tear but last. As they are passed down to a diminishing few their preciousness only grows. Formats change so fast our cutting-edge media will be unreadable to the post-digital archaeologists of the future. The public record that is the Internet won't have a gramophone to play it. By trying to be in advance of the future we short-circuit ourselves out of the timestream. At least Ozymandias left a statue; our desert of 1s and 0s will leave no simulacrum of life to inspire poetry, if poetry is still around.

High-definition surround-sound cocoons all advertise themselves with the same implicit slogan: "Leave your home without ever leaving your home!" Well I want to leave my home! I want to have to go places to get things! I'm not a dripfeed-sucking amorphous mouth attached to a stomach defecating meta-content to be fed again, I'm an ape with all appropriate parts attached, and sometimes I like to swing from trees. Despite what the hyper-modern three-fifths of me says, I need sex, not computer porn; human contact, not virtual interaction; physical movement, not Nintendo pantomime; birdsong, not lifeless hum; experience, not television; live music, not memorex and player pianos. I may not live up to my ideals but I have them, and though I communicate them through machine I yearn to sear them in my flesh.

Even Heroes Have The Right To Bleed

Devoted father, Rotarian, lady-pleaser and community patron Dennis Farina on charity mission to darkest Africa with nunnery.

From Reuters:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Dennis Farina, who was arrested on Sunday at Los Angeles International Airport for carrying a loaded gun on his way to board a plane, has apologized for the incident.

The 64-year-old former policeman who built a Hollywood career playing detectives issued a statement saying he was embarrassed by the arrest.

"I apologize to anyone and everyone that I have caused any embarrassment or inconvenience to," Farina said. "It is my own stupidity to find myself in this embarrassing situation. I'll be spending the next few days kicking my own a--. No one is more embarrassed than myself."

Head Wide Open accepts his apology, and recommends you do the same.

Between Mother And Justice

Condemning the terrorism of the FLN (National Liberation Front) in their campaign for an independent Algeria, Albert Camus outraged the anti-colonial French left by declaring: "I have to denounce blind terrorism in the streets of Algiers, which might one day strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I'll defend my mother before justice." In choosing his flesh-and-blood mother over the abstract ideal of justice, Camus proved himself not just to be a good son--one of the few remaining meaningful roles left in a post-God world--but a true humanist. Sartre may have written that "Existentialism is a Humanism," but for him human beings were less important than the fashionable causes they were killed in the name of (though extreme principles necessarily lead to extreme hypocrisy, and it is certain that for Sartre some people, like himself, were less worthy of sacrifice than others). To be a good Communist party member was to put Party before all else, certainly before such a historically negligible element as one's mother. To do so would be scientifically (remember that Marxism was once seriously considered a "science") absurd--and few intellectuals besides Camus took the centrality of absurdity to life seriously. Perhaps the suspicion that most left-wing intellectuals would indeed put justice (or egalitarianism, or solidarity, or multiculturalism, or whatever the sacralized word of the moment may be) before their mothers is what makes many, including the lower classes they aim to speak for, look askance upon them. If a man can't be trusted to put his mother first, how can he be trusted at all?

If the concept of mother is expanded to motherland, we can see exactly how and why the internationalist left failed so spectacularly in the twentieth century. The concepts nationalists use in their rhetoric--blood, soil, community--are much more tangible than abstract notions of international worker solidarity. International socialism failed precisely in 1914 when the workers of the world chose their physical neighbours--their fellow citizens--over their imaginary neighbours--their fellow workers in distant lands. It was the floating threat of internationalist rape of the motherland--by communists, by Jews, by global finance--that allowed ultra-nationalists to expand conservative ideals like land and blood into counter-revolutionary sacralized abstractions of their own. The irony is that by elevating the concept of motherland to a holy signifier, ultra-nationalists were equally as guilty as the communists in putting unreachable goals before actual people. "Between my motherland and my mother, I choose my mother," would be just as much a heresy in a national socialist milieu as "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother" was for Camus in an international socialist milieu. The autonomy of the family is a threat to any totalitarian system, and due to the primordial loyalty they inspire and the unregulated cultural and moral values they impart, perhaps mothers are the greatest anti-revolutionary threat of all.

Human beings exist in two worlds--the physical world, and the symbolic world that gives the physical world meaning. Symbols are made real through actions in the physical world. Thus communism was certainly a real phenomenon, as real people lived, killed and died for it--but it was them, not the symbols, that made it real. Thus Stalin was as much a legitimate representative of communism as Marx. Humans are symbolic animals and can no less rid ourselves of the urge to create abstractions than the urge to defecate and eat. Camus discussed the meanings of many important abstractions in his work: freedom, justice, revolt, exile. This is what makes him a philosopher and an intellectual, like his countryman Sartre. But unlike Sartre, unlike the ideologically dogmatic left, Camus was not willing to sacrifice his physical world of flesh-and-blood ties for symbols that are ultimately only as meaningful as the meaning we put into them. If the meaning we put into symbols involves the sacrifice of kin, these symbols are instrinsically anti-human. The swastika is anti-human, though surely Heidegger claimed to be deeply concerned with the human condition; the hammer and sickle is anti-human, though surely Sartre and the rest of Stalin's apologists claimed to be humanists. To be an intellectual requires an active mind, but to be a human being requires more than that. It requires, at the very least, loyalty to one's mother before any abstraction. Unlike so many intellectuals, Camus was more than the sum of his symbols: he was a true human being.

Encyclopedic Vanity

Facebook is Wikipedia for nobodies.

French Culture-Wars: Céline Vs. Céline

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Genre: Modernism
Influenced: Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William S. Burroughs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles Bukowski, Samuel Beckett
Famous Works: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre)
Political Controversy: Released rambling antisemitic pamphlets before onset of Second World War; convicted in absentia as collaborator with Vichy regime
Romantic Interests: Whores, dancers, the abyss
Themes: Nihilism, nausea, misanthropy, the underworld, urban squalor, familial discord, bodily discharges, mortality
Pet Peeves: Petit bourgeoisie values, modernity, mercantilism, Jews, the decline of the west
Other Activities: Doctor, veteran of the Great War
Critical Reaction: "Movement toward adulthood—into the world, that is—becomes equated with progressive disassociationism, submission to the disintegrative process; and adulthood itself becomes, as it were, the inevitable end product, metaphor for decay in the entropic universe." - Alvin Greenberg
Quotable Quote: "I could hear the stampeding herds trampling the flowerbeds . . . The numberless legions of thirst . . . They were battling to lick the bottom of the pond . . . sucking mud, worms, slime . . . They’d plowed up the whole place, disemboweled the earth . . . a chopped-up crater for three miles around, rumbling with disaster and drunks."


Céline Dion

Genre: Adult Contemporary
Influenced: Mariah Carey, Seal, global anti-Francophone sentiment
Famous Works: D'amour ou d'amitié (Of Love or of Friendship), Tellement j'ai d'amour pour toi (I Have So Much Love for You), My Heart Will Go On
Political Controversy: In response to the American government's slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina, asked "How come it's so easy to send planes in another country, to kill everyone in a second, to destroy lives? We need to be there right now to rescue the rest of the people."
Romantic Interests: Older, bearded, cherubic bald men
Themes: Love, the heart, saccharine romance
Pet Peeves: Papparazi, anything that stands in her way
Other Activities: Established a restaurant, released a line of eyeliner and perfume, gives to charity
Critical Reaction: "[Dion's] sentimentality is bombastic and defiant rather than demure and retiring....[she] stands at the end of the chain of drastic devolution that goes Aretha-Whitney-Mariah. Far from being an aberration, Dion actually stands as a symbol of a certain kind of pop sensibility—bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true." - Keith Harris of Rolling Stone Magazine
Quotable Quote: "I missed my family and my home, but I don't regret having lost my adolescence. I had one dream: I wanted to be a singer."


Winner/Loser: Tout le monde

Romancing The Aztec

Still of Hernán Cortés wooing Aztec princess from Mexican film La Otra Conquista

Anti-Anti-Anti-Communist Manifesto

After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Marxistentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre decided to hedge his political bets by claiming to be neither communist nor anti-communist, but "anti-anti-communist." In a similar spirit of Gallic prevarication, I declare that I am neither communist, anti-communist nor anti-anti-communist, but rather anti-anti-anti-communist. I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of McCarthyism (or Birchism or Hooverism or Bunkerism) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of Sartreism (or Fanonism or Frankfurtism or Meatheadism). As applied to modern politics, I consider myself an anti-anti-anti-Islamist, anti-anti-anti-Bolivarian and anti-anti-anti-socialist (as well as being anti-anti-anti-social). I prefer to primarily use the all-encompassing title anti-anti-anti-communist, however, as it rolls off the tongue more easily. And so in these days of post-communism (and post-post-communism) I simultaneously loathe the idiot populism of post-McCarthyist Cheneyism (or Limbaughism or Foxnewsism or Elephantism [though I like elephants]) and the useful idiot crypto-elitism of post-Sartrean Chomskyism (or Saidism or Berkleyism or Nologoism™ [though I dislike logos]). Sartre wanted the freedom to bash the vulgar defenders of freedom without being called a Stalinist, and I want the freedom to bash the bashers without being called a reactionary. As an anti-anti-anti-communist I am so progressive I give progressives vertigo; their tunnel-vision prevents them from seeing the tunnels I've dug beneath them to get ahead. From this dizzying position I declare: anti-anti-anti-communists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your opponents' ability to know exactly what you're uniting against without pausing for several minutes to think!

Natural Antidotes For Depression

• Motion
• Sunlight
• Work
• Communication*
• Stories
• Laughter
• Bonfires
  
• Lobotomization*
• Visual Stimulation
• Pie
  
• Immersing Your Soul in Love*
• Waterfalls
• "Hurry Hurry Super-Scurry"
  
• Endorphins
• Nirvana
• Fruit
  
• The Outside World*
• Dogs
  
• The Mediterranean Sea
• Meditation
  
• Lists
• War*

* Last resorts

The Basis Of Metaphysics

"There exists a great background, vital and wild, which matters more than the people who move upon it."
- D.H. Lawrence

Metaphysical justification for mass murder in bold.

Personal Disclaimer

I am not punk rock, hip-hop, country, fashionable, jet-set, folksy, pacifist, violent, chaste, lascivious, placid, hyperactive, Buddhist, Christian, atheist, faithful, socialist, capitalist, level-headed, psychotic, communist, fascist, salt of the earth, cosmopolitan, Anglo-Saxon, visibly minority, revolutionary, conservative, super-human, subhuman, American, anti-American, self-sufficient, communal, objective, hot-blooded, saintly, demonic, popular, outcast, sociable, anti-social, cutting-edge, orthodox, multicultural, monochrome, zen, rational, at war, at peace, consistent, schizophrenic, in demand, undemanding, the life of the party, as good as dead, down with the sickness, the perfect picture of health, suburban, ghetto, pious, sacrilegious, hate-filled, free of hate, progressive, reactionary, proletarian, aristocratic, scene, indie, mainstream, domesticated, wild, perfect, engaged, completely disaffected or unaware of the fact that listing things does not make them so.

Autopsy Of A Dead Hedonist

The fluctuating capacity to have a good time depends on avoiding the urine spray of reality. Watch out for who stands next to you, but not too closely or it's creepy. Failure rears its beautiful stallion head and the voice-over says "ride." Actors take their place without the artful direction of art or a director. Oscillating fans are orchestrated by technically dead composers. The hum of power is an effortless melody but the efforts of sycophants discord the harmony. I don't have a gun but I have cold dead fingers. They itch for a warm hole to gather in and move on from. I promise you disappointment, a promise I will disappoint. The less we try the more success we come to regret. Stuff your face in cake, fat western world. Wrap yourself in blanket robes and tower over quavering rats with half an erection. That is the social life, friends. Smiles are unmistakably grimaces in the right light. A party is an orgy without the intentions admitted. I need a French duet to spit in the eye of love, Serge Gainsbourg and a corpse in vogue. Anything but a habit please. What is more deflating than lust no longer lusted for? Your fantasy life is neither. If you've gotten this far I'll read between the lines for you: I had an okay time last night. The problem with hedonism is the morning after.