finding jesus

Since Sufjan Stevens has pretty much made it acceptable and cool to be Christian again, i've decided to find Jesus, myself. I originally planned to give this playlist to a certain somebody, but then i thought, what would Jesus H. Christ do? That is to say, he would share it with everyone. You will note the many obvious and subtle references. Also take note that every playlist i've made for others in 2006 included at least one David Bowie and/or Mogwai song. This one contains neither. If you get a message that you need to sign up in order to download this, don't come bitching to me. Just sign up. It's free. Free. Praise be to Jesus.[sorry, no cover this time]

FINDING JESUS

1. BIG STAR - september girls
2. SPIRITUALIZED - won't get to heaven
3. THE ROLLING STONES - salt of the earth
4. EUPHIO 6 - ???
5. YO LA TENGO - today is the day
6. THE POGUES - tuesday morning
7. HÜSKER DÜ - celebrated summer
8. JETS TO BRAZIL - chinatown
9. THE VASELINES - slushy
10. AM/FM - getting into the sinking
11. LEONARD COHEN - sisters of mercy
12. SPACEMEN3 - lord can you hear me?
13. GRAM PARSONS - in my hour of darkness
14. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - what goes on

this is how we keep wu-tang money all up in the family

if you know my family at all, you probably know that the three other people in the picture from my previous post are married and/or have kids. those are my cousins chris, who has a son and got married this past summer, marissa, who just yesterday (january 5) had a son she calls jack, and branden, who is married and lives in maine. my brother also has a kid, and my cousin jen, branden's sister, is in a serious relationship, whatever that means. i'm more or less the loser in my family of this particular generation, seeing as how i haven't had a real relationship in ten years, and that one thankfully seems less and less real with every passing day. i have, however, had a few ridiculously drawn-out situations that didn't really lead anywhere, but might have worked out in a parallel universe, perhaps where the UFO that flew over O'Hare airport back in November live.

i stopped thinking of creative ways to off myself long enough to take a phone call from my grandmother. she's 72 years old, was born in brooklyn, grew up in guangzhou, china and moved back to the US in the 1940s. guangzhou, china circa-1940 was not the guangzhou, china of today. in 1940, guangzhou was occupied by japanese troops, largely rural (this will become important in a paragraph or two), and it wasn't until 1949 that it began to become urbanized with the arrival of communist influences. it's very close to Hong Kong, which also lead to rapid urban development. today, it has one of the top economies among chinese cities. but back to my grandmother's phone call: she was calling to hook me up with a girl. i'm guessing my history of floundering so badly on my own was out of the bag, and she had a lady for me. i have good news, she said. she had the phone number of a girl who, conveniently, lives across the williamsburg bridge from me, in nyc's chinatown. she's my age and chinese, which is good since all my cousins and brother totally blew it by marrying and/or had kids with a bunch of honkies. that's another post. i was a little tipsy when my grandmother called, so i was kind of going along with the hookup, even though i clearly remember the last time she tried to hook me up...

aside (and this warrants an aside): i was probably 20 the last time my grandmother tried to set me up with some ladies. they were two sisters, the daughters of the man who owned chopsticks restaurant on elkton road in newark. at first i was stoked on it, but after i met them i quickly realized they were among the dumbest people i'd ever met. i continually ignored them as they squawked about all the white boys they were into back and forth like a couple of now-extinct dodos with lazy eyes. i can't recall another couple of girls who sounded more like dumb shit valley girls straight from satire.

anyhow, i was drunk when my grandmother called me and halfway entertained the idea of actually calling this girl. she lives with her parents, which was a minus in my book. i can't really speak chinese, which is probably a minus in her book. i'm also a scumbag, which is probably a huge minus in her book. but then my grandmother said something that negated the whole visualization process anyway. "she's my sister's granddaughter," she said. uh... huh... i said. doesn't that make us kinda related? yes, she said, she's your cousin... second cousin. oh. ok. well, that's rather prescient of her to realize that i must be doing that bad that i need to be hooked up with my second cousin. like i wrote to bobby su, i guess there's some redneck in my family after all, and if not, there might be some in the future. i'm thinking of getting together with her, maybe just to spite the family. i haven't gotten drunk enough yet to do it, though; i keep fallling asleep before i am drunk enough.

in other news, i'm building up a new bike that i'm pretty excited about. it's my mom's schwinn suburban from 1977 or so, which she rode once. i'm stripping it and making it into a single-speed freewheel that will be amazing for cruising in the summertime. i already have some mavic cxp22 rims laced to formula hubs, i need to get some decent vintage-looking cranks and a few other cool things like cork grips and pedals, but should be pretty fun to fix up.

can it be that it was all so simple then

when did it all go wrong for #12?

scumbags

Today's word is: scumbags. Scumbags have hacked Dennis Cooper's blog site—probably one of the best blog sites out there. The author of Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period (collectively, the George Miles Cycle), The Sluts, and, most recently, God Jr., Cooper maintained a blog that was one of the best sources of information on the the whole J.T. Leroy blow-up last fall, which I followed pretty religiously as I traveled back east on I-80. Hopefully blogspot's servers have a temporary backup of his information and writings (of which there was a ton), but for now, he's rebuilding his blog at dennis cooper-the weaklings.

the tyranny of distance

update: 11.15.06
Pretty much all day today I've been getting these angry Myspace bulletins from my friends in San Francisco about this WTO press release and its proposal to introduce a form of what it calls "compassionate slavery" into Africa. The release is based on a conference held by WTO representative Hanniford Schmidt at the Wharton Business School in Philadelphia, and its contents range from the outlandishly insulting to the absolutely ridiculous. Among the notable quotes:

"Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.

"Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he [Schmidt] said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care. With each life valuable from start to finish, the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."

Each time, he [Schmidt] noted, the trade has brought tremendous wealth to the West but catastrophe to Africa, with poverty steadily deepening and ever more millions of dead. "So far there's a pattern: Good for business, bad for people. Good for business, bad for people. Good for business, bad for people. That's why we're so happy to announce this fourth phase for business between Africa and the West: good for business—GOOD for people."

"This is what free trade's all about," said Schmidt. "It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."

After reading the article I could see how quick the left would be to jump on this. Of all the evil organizations to rail against, the current Republican administration, pharmaceutical companies, the automobile industry, and the WTO are in the top five. And with WTO reps making comments like the last one above ("It's about the freedom to buy and sell anything—even people."), it becomes an even easier target, a figurative untapped oil well to fuel the hatred of corporations for left-wing reactionaries, peace punks and anarchists. But one quote is key here:

One conference attendee asked what incentive employers had to remain as stewards once their employees are too old to work or reproduce. Schmidt responded that a large new biotech market would answer that worry. He then reminded the audience that this was the only possible solution under free-market theory.

There were no other questions from the audience that took issue with Schmidt's proposal.

The quote, while pretty mild in terms and relations of the other outrageous proposals in the press release, should be significant as a red flag. On the one hand, it shows that the WTO's prominence and authority over trade and its ambition over control of the world's industries cannot be questioned. Intelligent people in the audience didn't seem to find any problem with a proposal of formal slavery in Africa, the idea of helping third-world countries by, in a sense, giving people (i.e. corporations) in first-ones an ability to feel "empowered" by doing so.

To some people, it should have raised another red flag—one more akin to a corporate wink and nod. There's a group called the Yes Men who have, in the past, impersonated representatives of the WTO at various high-level conferences in Europe, proposing equally ridiculous ideas and garnering similar response (one proposal in Geneva was to outfit corporate managers in a gold lycra suit, with vibration sensors on the ass to monitor employee morale, as well as this big phallic projection that extended from the crotch of the suit with a monitor at the end facing the wearer of said suit, presumably to watch employees over closed-circuit surveillance) from the audience. That is, very little. Some murmurs, some concealed giggling (at the revelation of the suit [underneath a tear-away business suit]), some note taking, but no questions. It's possible that the audience was so baffled they didn't know where to start, but part of the Yes Men's M.O. is to show just how far organizations can go without being questioned as an authority. The other part of their M.O. is this: "Identity Correction: Honest people impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else." (Quote taken from their site.)

[Aside, the Yes Men have a movie: The Yes Men Movie. And here is a pic I stole of the suit:

End aside.]

On the other side of that are the fooled, in this case, the left wing. On the one hand they were so quick to pounce on the WTO and its ridiculous propositions that lines like, "Those who don't like whaling can purchase rights to specific whales or groups of whales in order to stop those particular whales from getting whaled as much," failed to register as satire. The same way that very-intelligent backers of free trade were exposed by the Yes Men's antics as WTO representatives as passive and unquestioningly supportive of the WTO, no matter how fucking retarded their claims were, the November 15 press release showed a lot of otherwise intelligent lefties as visceral, and sometimes naive, reactionaries. They read the outrageous proposals and their hearts raced and blood pressure jumped. They also took what the WTO says at face value. I'm no fan of the right or corporations, but this time, the joke is on the left.


you've been had guys. sayonara.

random notes: check out the similarities of the pages

real WTO page

Yes Men page

also: i just realized i've entered the real world of blogging. which sucks. blogging has ruined the writing market. everyone who has one of these thinks they're a writer. i just helped put myself out of a job. there's no money in writing anyway. top picture: image i made for a mix-tape. photo from a cross-country airplane shot on chrome with yashica t-5.

have you seen this man?

come back scottie. come back and skate. i'll lend you that 25 cents you wanted. oh yeah, why do you look like donnie darko in your mugshot?

K.H.

run motherfucker run.

people gettin' married

edit: updated 10.29

my boy brian got married this weekend to his girl juliana and it was a hell of a wedding. man i had a shitload of fun and so did brian because he was tearing the shit out of that dancefloor. i'm drunk now, and gotta go to work in a few hours, but i'll post up more pics as i get them. congrats to those two.

ps. my boy ben got married last weekend but i don't have any pics of that. hooray for ben.

pps. i have more pic of brian's wedding, but i'm too drunk to upload them right now... so tomorrow i'll hook up more.

here we go:

oh snap, bronco on the loose

danny d rockin out

anthony and tyler outside the church

joey and laurie outside too

me and ben outside smoking... trying to steal a free limo ride

rahmer burning it down on the dance floor

zack getting down while waitng for tyler to ask him to dance

laura and the sex panther aka billy

brannon and some broad he brought; i don't know her name

me drunk and ernie having a ball...

until joey sends me flicks, that's it...