Mount Morah Revisited

Allah said to Ibraham, "Kill me a son"
Ibe says, "Inshallah, thy will be done"
- with apologies to Bob Dylan

Song Of The Day

Points for discussion. The only realistic love song? Is "in a bar that's always closing" the saddest line ever written? Why does Emo bother to exist after this song (see also: "No Time to Cry")?

My favourite bootleg by this band is Floorshow, performed 1985 in Long Beach, California. The band's disdain for the audience comes through in lines like "Thank you for that whatever that was" (following scattered applause), "Sometimes people ask us why we're so gloomy, really they do, and we tell them, we're not, except when we have to play here" and my favourite, "This country is a banana republic. I want to go home."

True goth rock fans don't wear black. We walk among you like normal men, dreaming of hara-kiri.

The Sisters Of Mercy - I Was Wrong

You say "stay and never leave"
You say "meant forever"
I could believe you, but I don't
You say we're almost all alone together
All alone
You say
You say you will
I know you won't

CHORUS:
I was wrong
I was wrong to ever doubt
I can get along without
I can love my fellow man
But I'm damned if I'll love yours

In a bar that's always closing
In a world where people shout
I don't wanna talk this over
I don't wanna talk it out
I was quite impressed until I hit the floor
Isn't that what friends are for?
Pain looks great on other people
That's what they're for

Great Big Thing Crawlin' All Over Me

Older generations found the vocabulary to describe the supra-rational in the Bible. I find it in song lyrics. A line from Big Black's Steelworker describes depression as I've known it: "great big thing crawlin' all over me." Depression crawls through the brain sticking its tendrils into your every thought. But enough melodrama. I can hardly compete with Down in It by Mr. Trent Reznor and Failure by the aptly named Swans.

Medication defangs depression, but a defanged animal can still keep you awake at night. Depression exaggerates, but it still has its point to make. I interpret its point as follows: "do more with your life: exercise, talk to other human beings, change the world, find somebody to love." Valid, I reply, but why do you have to be such an asshole about it? Let me read a book or watch a TV show without sticking your tendrils in.

Alcohol and writing are temporary panaceas for depression. Ultimately however, the only cure is to thine own self being true. By "self" I don't mean id and ego with their cries for instant or slightly extended gratification. I mean that better nature you sometimes hear squealing from under the avalanche of psychic noise. Call it the divine spark, Atman or some less poetic neurological equivalent. Perhaps, "that thing beneath the great big thing."

Kim Kardashian's To-Do List

When all of this started a couple of years ago, my mom and I sat down and wrote a list of all the goals we hoped to accomplish with the show. And so far every single one of them has come true.
- Kim Kardashian in Entertainment Weekly

1. Leak sex tape.
2. Fuck a small army of mandingos.
3. Spawn uglier, mutant clones.
4. Hitch uglier, mutant clones to coattails.
5. Retroactively justify the Armenian genocide.

The Fall Of The Multicult

Ezra Pound called artists the antennae of the race. You don't need to be a master artist to notice a premonitory scent in the Western air. Let's call it anti-multicult. In Toronto, a fat white guy who dared say "diversity is not my priority" during a forum held on diversity is leading the mayoral race in Toronto. Toronto! The self-proclaimed most diverse city in the world! Here's what his opponent says:

Mr. Smitherman said, going ahead, the race comes down to two clashing sets of values. “Ford’s values are about going backwards, cutting the city down in a reckless way,” he said. “Our side is about bringing people together and building on Toronto’s strength.”

“The city of Toronto’s motto is diversity is our strength. If Rob Ford is elected mayor, the first thing that will need to be done is change the motto.”

As far as I know, changing the asinine motto of Toronto is not part of Rob Ford's platform. But if it was, I bet a lot of people would support the change. That Smitherman uses the thought of any change as a threat shows how out to lunch old-school elites are. Most people believe unity is our strength: in the Canadian case, unity under Anglo-Saxon and in Quebec, French, law and values. Diversity within that framework is fine (we all love Chinese food and hot biracial girls), but when the multicult's objects of worship try to impose sharia law or import foreign conflicts, the monocult asserts its primacy.

Even Sweden, beloved by socialists the world over, is in the midst of an anti-multicult backlash. Right-wing commentators often talk of Europe becoming Eurabia, but I think a resurgence of soft (i.e. more or less democratic) fascism is more likely. Europe needs migrants to replenish an aging population, but eventually one of their "Christian Democratic" parties is going to want to preserve Christian democracy by restricting the migration of Muslims. Maybe they'll even, God forbid, try to integrate Gypsies into the workforce instead.

Rancorous white nationalists will never take power in North America. The reason is as much inbuilt Christianity as inbuilt liberalism. There is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ/Uncle Sam. America always leaves room for Sammy Davis Jr. in the rat pack, Mr. T in the A-Team. We are the Borg. We assimilate you, you don't assimilate us. Today's conservative American Muslim parents are giving birth to the reality TV/porn stars of tomorrow. I speak not of right and wrong here, but of simple fact. In ten years the burqa will be modified into exotic lingerie sold at Walmart.

I don't know about Europeans. History shows they are capable of anything. Akhmahjinefucker wants Israelis to go "back" to Poland and Germany. A forced population exchange of Israeli Jews for European Muslims is possible. (I'd love to see the look on the anti-Semitic Algerian's face when he is forced to move to Palestine and give up his French home to a Tunisian Jew.) Liberal assimilation camps are possible. (Muslims locked into chairs with their eyes pried wide open, ala A Clockwork Orange, forced to watch reels upon reels of gay porn and Sex and the City reruns.) Who can predict the future? All I know is my antennae are tingling.

No Sympathy For The Beautiful

Much blather lately about attractive people complaining that their attractiveness (which, naturally, they accentuate) elicits a reaction. I have a general rule of thumb: no sympathy for the beautiful. They, more than whites or men, are the privileged caste of our society. They get unearned attention, sex, deference and job preference. Who do political parties want for candidates, who do companies want for spokespeople, who do directors want for stars, who do designers want for models, who do you want to be seen with, who do you want to fuck? The beautiful. The least they can do in return is let us ogle them without bitching (or suing!) about it. If you don't like being the "object" (ooh, objectification!) of mass adoration, wear a burqa.

We humans are a sympathetic bunch, but we have limits. We give money to Haitians hit with an earthquake. We let Pakistanis hit with flooding flounder. Why? Because Pakistanis, thanks to their support for terrorism, retrograde cultural practices, religious bigotry and oppression of women, are unsympathetic. We worship dogs and exterminate rats. Why? Because rats, thanks to their scurrilous ways, are unsympathetic. As the Buddha observed, life is suffering. Except for the rare Christ figures, we can't sympathize with all suffering creatures or we'd never be able to get up in the morning. I for one, abstain from sympathizing with beautiful people, dastardly animals and barbaric nations. For the most part, I don't actively wish them ill. But my Noah's ark of pity ain't big enough for three.

At The Risk Of Seeming Ridiculous

With the coming school year, many university students will be purchasing posters like the following:



Unfortunately there will be no posters emblazoned with my favourite Che quote, "We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing."

Ecclesiastes 2.1

The title bar of this blog contains an image of the Fool's Cap Map of the World. Strange Maps has a useful exposition on its background:

The archetype of the Fool, presented here in his incarnation as the court jester, is a first indicator of the map’s deeper meaning. In previous ages, the Fool was a court figure allowed to mock majesty and to speak truth to power. These were rare and useful correctives to the corrupting absolutism of the monarchies of the day. But criticism of this sort was only possible if it was de-fanged by the grotesque appearance of the Fool - preferably a hunchbacked, slightly loopy-headed dwarf, i.e. someone not to be taken too seriously.

All of this would have been common and current knowledge to the people viewing this map, in the late 16th century. The uncomfortable truth told by this map is that the world is a sombre, irrational and dangerous place, and that life on it is nasty, brutish and short. The world is, quite literally, a foolish place.

This is underlined by the mottoes of biblical and classical origin, dotted across the map. The legend in the left panel reads: “Democritus of Abdera laughed at [the world], Heraclitus of Ephesus wept over it, Epichtonius Cosmopolites portrayed it”. Over the cap is the Latin version of the Greek dictum, “Know thyself". Across the cap’s brow, the inscription translates as “O head, worthy of a dose of hellebore”.

The Latin quote just above the map is from Pliny the Elder: “For in the whole universe the earth is nothing else and this is the substance of our glory, this is its habitation, here it is that we fill positions of power and covet wealth, and throw mankind into an uproar, and launch wars, even civil ones.”

The reason for so much trouble and strife is explained in the quote below the map, from Ecclesiastes: “The number of fools is infinite”. Another quote from that most depressing of Bible books, on the jester’s staff to the right, intones: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. Inscribed on the badges adorning the shoulder belt are a few sayings in line with this cheerful message: “Oh, the worries of the world; oh, how much triviality is there in the world”, “Everyone is without sense”, and “All things are vanity: every man living”.

I'm a believer in the Hermetic doctrine of "As above, so below." In its essentials, what goes on in my head corresponds to what goes on in the world. To map one is to map the other. Greek wisdom and Hebrew wisdom agree, because wisdom is one. Whatever their deficiencies in understanding the scientific details of the world, ancient wise men understood its metaphysical essence because they looked deeply within themselves. To most moderns, blessed by the good god Progress, they are fools. Who better to speak truth to power?

How Much Longer Must We Tolerate Mass Culture: The 2010 MTV Video Music Awards

I used to watch the MTV Video Music Awards to gauge the temperature at which Babylon is burning. I watched it again Saturday night. Some thoughts:

Rock is dead:
30 Seconds to Mars won Best Rock Video. Although not hipsters, nor are they rock n' roll in any meaningful sense of the term. The danger, the grandeur, the cthonic energy, is gone. Probably forever.

White malehood is dead:
Related. The black male continues to be the paradigm of cool manhood. Cool whites are only so by virtue of aping black male styles: Eminem, Justin Timberlake, even Justin frickin Bieber. I'm really disappointed in the way this race has well, abandoned the race.

American womanhood is undead:
Except Taylor Swift. She's cute and legit.

Lady Gaga is a symptom, not a cause, of Kali Yuga:
As such, I find her unrestrained decadence admirable. Truly, as Baudrillard said of America, "the finished form of the future catastrophe."

Linkin Park have become the mainstream emo KMFDM:
Not a bad transition.

It Doesn't Take Sun Tzu...

If you want to win hearts and minds, send apostles. If you want to win skulls and fingers, send soldiers. If you want to lose a war, confuse the two.

The Coming Of The Artificial Vagina

Via local liberal rag:

Barss: Pornography profits are plummeting because porn is so easily available. So people are saying maybe that’s it.

There’s also less resistance to new technology today. Before, you really had to push people to adopt something like the VCR, but now you can invent a new device like the iPhone and people will adopt it more readily.

But for 40,000 years this has been going on; I don’t think it’s done yet.

I think there are new technologies coming that people will be uncomfortable with.

For example, almost all of the communications technologies either communicate sound, picture or both. Haptic technologies communicate touch, anything from temperature, texture, vibration. It’s a very different kind of communications technology and in some ways a lot more intimate and invasive.

Some of the initial haptic applications are coming from the pornography industry. So what some of the pornography companies are doing is that they can essentially connect an actual physical machine, a vibrator or, more likely, an artificial vagina, to a movie that’s encoded in such a way that what’s happening on the screen happens to the watcher.

Star: Oh, that’s so sad.

Sad? I don't know. Seems to me the advent of the artificial vagina would decrease rates of STDs, rape, prostitution and adultery, for a start. It would also level the romantic playing field. Bars would have to start offering "men's nights" to lure us away from our e-ginas. Even then, a large swathe of society will choose to stay at home, always.

This is the direction our society, with its great cities of solitude, is headed in. I predict a future of jacked-in cyborgs seated on designer toilets, dicks in artficial vaginas, ears listening to two different songs at the same time, one eye on a video of a live execution, the other on tentacle porn, intravenous serotinin boosters on max.

We're what, a quarter of the way there?

Bibliolatry Of The Highest Order

Regular readers of blog will know that I like books. A beautifully mustachioed pastor in Florida is planning to burn a bunch of copies of a single book, the Koran by one Mohammed. Now I haven't read this Koran, but by all impartial accounts it's a knock-off or, more politely, spin-off of the previously published Torah and Gospels. Not high on my reading list. I'd rather read the 1001 Nights, really (why isn't that a sacred text?).

Nevertheless, the idea of burning books, even shoddy books, rubs me the wrong way. (I was bemused to see on a news report that some of the Korans the pastor is planning to burn are Dover Thrift editions. Cheap bastard!) Common consensus has it that Muslims will take to burning people in response to the burning of their sacred text. This rubs me in a wronger way. Are not people, according to my God and theirs too I think, made in God's image? Are books made in God's image? Isn't valuing a book over the image of God idolatry or, if you will, bibliolatry of the highest order?

Still better to worship a book than a TV set, I suppose.

Anyone Want To Go On A Date?

"Emerging adulthood" is the new term for young people like me delaying immersion in bourgeois mediocrity. Why the delay? Because we don't have religion and nationalism ("go forth and multiply," "propagate the race," "as God intended"), or even romanticism (Sex and the City has perhaps permanently discredited male idolatry of the female, not to mention pornography) to make it seem like more than bourgeois mediocrity.

We know we are superfluous. (When I say "we" I am extrapolating from "me.") The West wants migrants because for them, for now, material success is novel enough to satisfy. They can be the first member of their family to graduate university, to be a doctor, to be an engineer! White people go into the humanities, Asians go into the sciences. Why? Because white people are looking for meaning (they won't find it), and Asians are looking for success. The disillusioned, half-white children of Asians will go into the humanities, and the new batch of Asians will replenish the sciences. What a beautiful system!

I've dated upwardly mobile people. I'm a downwardly mobile person. My parents achieved the heights the upwardly mobile wish to achieve. There is nowhere for me to go but down, and no reason for me not to go down, because I no longer buy into their scale of up and down. I don't care about keeping up with the Joneses, I don't like the Joneses, the Joneses don't even like the Joneses. Let the Wangs take over. Let the Smith-Wangs take over. Darwin was right, but "gaming" is no reason to live.

Life, Being What It Is

We, the lonely, can glorify solitude all we like. The fact remains, we are animals bred for company. If we don't obey our human nature we suffer. I try to make my suffering creative by writing about it, but there's nothing original for me to say. I'm simply reformulating what Kafka said, who in turn was reformulating what the author of Ecclesiastes said. I lack the pretensions of the author of the Koran, who claimed to be "correcting" sacred texts when he was merely running roughshod over them in service to his ego.

In Darwinian terms, the parlance of our times, there's only one reason to write: sex God sex. I had the opportunity to fuck from words, but chose invective instead. Why? Because I am ill-bred. I can't hunt. I can only be witty. Wit is a means but for me it has become an end.

I'm too lazy to pursue the opposite sex. I talked to a friend who had been introduced to the "game" approach to women, but there was sadness in his voice. Sensitive souls like us aren't built for modern romance. Or even ancient romance. We are built for love of God, but born in a time when God is dead.

A wise man once said: women seem wicked when you're unwanted. Women aren't wicked. I am such a genetic failure that I actually respect women who've made better choices. I think in advance, "it would never work, why intrude on someone else's life with unnecessary complications?" I'd have to be a lie for it to work, and I don't want to be a lie or a liar.

"Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!" Céline said that. A brilliant writer, but a hateful abortion of a man. He's an extreme case, but aren't all brilliant writers abortions of men? Men don't write, they hunt. Money, pussy, gadgets, cars, etc. Eventually they grow weary of the chase and settle for love.

We are superior. We have our dignity. Noble sentiments but bullshit. There is no infinite but love! "We" are the failures! Kafka had no children, no lover lovely enough to lift him from his subjective depths.

Love may be an illusion, but it is an illusion supported by instincts bred into our soul. I don't know if I even have the proper instincts. I'm too ironic, detached, meta-meta-meta (I hate postmodernists because I am one). I'm tempted to end with this line: "I will die alone, and a good thing too."

But realistically I will settle for love like any other poodle and quit writing, or at the very least quit writing things like this. I am so pessimistic I am pessimistic about my pessimism!

Take Me On A Genocide Tour

The war criminal President of Sudan was recently invited to visit Kenya. Kanye West once said George Bush doesn't care about black people. True or not, the bigger problem is that black people don't care about black people.