Genre confusion 1: Green day

Green Day are said to be chiefly influenced by The Clash, and Stiff Little Fingers I would add to that list: Ramones, The Pogues, The Sex Pistols, and Bad Religion the fact of the matter is that they add very little to that mix. This does not however justify the argument that they are not a Punk band clearly they are, clearly they make Punk music. This argument is based primarily on the fact that they are not only very popular but that they also despite the fact that they’ve been around for something around fifteen years attract a mainly young audience that is for the most part un-aware of the length breadth and history of Punk Rock and thus have a somewhat over inflated view of the bands importance within this history.

Curb my agreement?

I have for quite some time found myself in agreement with Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm and I just have some questions;

is this normal?

Is there something wrong with me?

Should I be worried?

I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m often excruciated by his behaviour and find myself at a loss to understand the reasoning behind it [particularly when he makes up horrible lies rather than be honest] having said that, I more often than not have the same reaction to other characters in the show. In any case I think a great number of the things that he does are perfectly reasonable and I get the feeling that most people would act in the same way were it not for the taboos of social convention.

Is this nothing more than a monstrous act of solipsism?

Am I simply trying to justify my agreement with this strange character by suggesting that really 'you all think the same as me and you’re just to scared to say it'?

Racists use this sort of justification all the time, and I can assure you that I’m no racist.

Having said that this sort of solipsism is actually quite common, one sees it all that time, and its actually quite disturbing when you think of how many people must be using it to justify totally abhorrent behaviour and how many of them would not have allowed themselves to do this were it not for that justification.

This has gone rather off topic but then I can’t think of anything else to say on the topic, I do however find that writing this has been rather therapeutic, I find my fears and worries subsiding, besides I’m sure you're all thinking the same thing anyway.

Here's a question i asked on Yahoo answers.

Did Nine Inch Nails re-invent industrial music?

Some aditional information.

industrial music was a genre invented in the mid seventies it is not a sub genre of anything else allthough it does ocasional cross paths with many other genres but its not a part of any of them.

One of the answers i received.

I don't really think of NIN as industrial. It's heavily influenced by industrial, but it's a whole other animal. Pretty Hate Machine was more synth-pop type stuff. It's closer to late 80's Depeche Mode than it is to "industrial." (That's a compliment.) Broken was the most industrial sounding IMHO but it was heavy on guitar (and that's not really industrial.) Reznor made his own genre really. He combined elements of synth-pop, industrial, speed-metal, classical, drum & bass, and ambient (among others.) I've never really liked the "industrial" label much though because it doesn't mean anything. It's usually used to describe music that incorporates a lot of ambient noises and sampling (stuff like machines) for instruments and percussion, but the music over (or underneath) those noises is what's really important. Groups like "Skinny Puppy" rarely even had a "song" mixed in with their chaos. NIN mixes some chaos with what are generally full melodic songs. Almost all NIN songs could be performed with an acoustic guitar and/or piano. That's not really the case for what I consider "industrial."

And my response to it.

This is definitely the best answer i've seen in a long time allthough having said i don't agree with it the term industrial does mean something its bassically a statement against the music industry [look at that word 'industy']
"heavy on guitar (and that's not really industrial.)" the original and some would say only true industrial band throbbing gristle used guitars as did and do ministry, as with any ellement of industrial music its not so much what you use as how you use it. "Reznor made his own genre really. He combined elements of synth-pop, industrial, speed-metal, classical, drum & bass, and ambient (among others.)" all electronic genres of music including synth pop and drum and bass have some level of debt to industrial music
the music of the original industrial pioneers particulaly NON beers some resembalance to the experimental 'neo classical' music that was being made in the 50's and 60's.
ultimetely reznor probably has wed experimental industrial music to the idea of actual song writing and pop sensibility but its hardely a new genre.

Feminism through film.

Certain conventions of filmmaking state that men must fight men, and women must fight women, if a man has to fight a woman then he must either be soundly thrashed by her and if not then he must be a bastard to be hated. He can’t be a ‘good guy’ because no one, woman or man will see him as such.
When the ‘good guy’ beats the ‘bad guy’ its victor and vanquished but if the ‘good guy’ beats a girl even if she is the ‘bad girl’, then it will always be a case of victim and victimiser.
Women are seen as weak creatures to be protected both in movies and the real world. Feminism rather than destroying this perception has fostered it, creating a case of ‘double think’ whereby women are scene as both equal, and in needing of protection not afforded to men, in some cases this is extended to ‘triple think’ whereby women are seen as superior to men, equal to men, and in needing of protections not afforded to men.

A woman slapping a man that’s all par for the course, and we all know he deserved it, even if she kisses him afterwards, I mean that’s passion baby; but a man slapping a woman well that’s unusual, I mean it happens but its just brutal, even if he does kiss her afterwards, did she deserve that? Was that passion?

Picture Angela Lansbury in the original version of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ I mean her character is just about scariest most evil character ever committed to celluloid but now imagine the character’s long suffering much put upon and manipulated son [Lawrence Harvey] beating her………..

Isn't it funny how......

saying someone's a lady's man means that they let us say greatly enjoy the company and suduction of the female gender, but saying that someones a mans man doesn't mean that they enjoy performing similar actions with members of the same gender.

Strikes me as a tad homophobic wouldn't you say.

The path from man to god.

A man is born; and he shows great bravery, tales are told of his bravery and, with the bounty of his deeds he buys the acceptance of followers and, with the bounty of his followers he becomes king.

As king he performs great deeds and, tales are told of his greatness and the previous tales are brought up to match the new ones and he becomes great and with the bounty of his greatness he becomes magnificent the tales are brought up to match his magnificence and with the glory of his magnificence he becomes glorious and the tales become glorious his deeds become legendary and he becomes a legend, he dies and tales are told of his death and life and they are made to match his legend and he passes into legend.

The tales are made to match his greatness and his becomes a great legend.

The tales are made to match his magnificence and his becomes a magnificent legend as he passes into myth.

The myth is told to match his glory and his becomes a glorious myth and with the bounty of the glory his followers buy him virtue and with the bounty of the virtue his myth becomes not the story of a great or even a man of glorious deed but the story of a god ascending to his heaven.

Story is the key; The first tale is of bravery the second is of great deeds the third is of death the forth of life the fifth and final tale is also the first tale, a tale of the birth of a god.

The UTO certified dictionary.

Some of the time
Pity = Sympathy + Hatred.
but more often than not,
Pity = Sympathy + Disgust.
And the disgust leads to hatred and the sympathy leads to self hatred.

AVAST ME HEARTYS. This be no deviant furnace!

Upon receiving a E-mail marked "deviant furnace" I was devastated to note that this was not infact a ranty Christian evangalist trying to convince me that those who diviate from cultural and sexual norms end up in a furnace of somesort but just someone trying to sell me something. However I did learn that someone called "Carter prays with rabbis angered by book ." and that "Aruntx appreciates your patronage and look forward to serving you for many years to come." and that this Aruntx be he person or creature is ion the buisiness of "thanking your best customers for their loyalty." and that "Upon arrival there everybody gets a pair of great wings in exchange for pain and grief." we also learn that "One who drives an automobile too fast, especially as a habit." whatsmore "Warning: Heavenly New York is a Chick Christian mystery." and in further strangeness "The word of the day is leadfoot." and "Kitty Kelley to write Oprah biography ." apparantly.

Heed my word! And go hence were I tells thee!

And lo it was on that day that I having remembered a good episode of the Simpsons placed upon my url space the address misterx.com hoping for further news of mayor quimby and yet i came instead to this www.vaughnsphotoart.com a far more supiriour supiriour product and one that i fully recomend having fully understood all aplicaple laws of recomendation rule.

The war is over, who do we fight now.

Hazzah the war on Christmas is over, the evil Wallmart have finally caved in and are now no longer wishing their customers happy holidays [oyvai I can barely say those words] but [joy of joys] merry Christmas, won’t Wallmart’s Jewish customers be so pleased that wallmart no longer wishes them to have a happy holiday. This battle against the tyranny of political correctness [don’t they know we don’t want to be correct] has been won by the good guys, but just as it ends another one begins. Even as I speak homosexual spies are infiltrating our institution of marriage, and so begins the war on marriage.
This was brought to you straight from the pages of right conservative fantasy land, If you wish to subscribe simply begin watching Hanity and colmes and the other guy, for added benefits you may wish to join the republican party. Unfortunately this offer is only open to citizens on the United States of America, but frankly everyone else is just glad that these wars only exist in the minds of wing nuts like Sean Hanity, cos frankly enough bombs are falling as it is.

Land of six wars.

There’s a lot of talk going around at the moment about the war in Iraq being lost, ‘the war’ which war? What’s more out of all of the various armies in the country, which is losing it? After all there’s ‘the coalition of the willing’, but there’s also French and German troops and they certainly aren’t part of that, and what about the Iraqi army?
From what I can tell there are currently six wars going on at the moment, they are:

1: The war against Islamic terrorist ‘insurgents.’ [no matter what victories we {yes I’m using we I didn’t want to but I’ll think I’ll have to give in} have against them, they seem at liberty to attack any time they want, we are most definitely losing]

2: The war against terrorists insurgents loyal to Saddam, previously called The war against Saddam [ditto]

3: The war against ‘terrorist’ insurgents neither implicitly Islamic nor loyal to Saddam. [ditto]

4: ‘The war for hearts and minds’ yes this is a war, if ‘The war on terrorism’ can be a war then so can this, besides we talk about it enough it must be real. [seeing as we spend a great deal of our time blowing them up I don’t think we have any hope of possessing them, Losing with a capital L]

5: The war against the people of Iraq, we don’t like to talk about this one but we’ve killed enough of them that it becomes pointless to argue about intention, pointless to argue about what we did and did not plan. [we’re actually winning this one.]

6: The civil war [we were fighting to prevent this one, we didn’t, we lost]
[this is by the way a most interesting civil war in that it is a three way, a war fought between three parties all of whom are fighting each other.]

So there you have it, The coalition and all of its unwilling allies are fighting all of these wars, and losing all but one, the one that they……… we.. are fighting against non aggressors, civilians.

Chick flick??

Just watching ‘Jack and Sarah’ it’s billed as a ‘chick flick’ but it strikes me that it is more about men than women, a man learns to survive as a female role taker in a mans world, and a man in a woman’s world, it also teaches us that butlers don’t grow on trees they grow in skips.

Not long ago, on a TV screen.......

I sit here [at my computer] watching the extras on ‘Star Wars Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith’ and it strikes me that it is the best in the entire series, possibly even the best that George Lucas has ever directed although having only seen five out of the seven movies he’s done I cannot say this with any great level of certainty. ‘Episode 4, A New Hope’ is a brilliant popcorn movie, a crowd pleasing masterwork, an action adventure flick with an incredible depth and soul….. but it’s not exactly challenging. Really and truly though it has the potential to do this it does not make you think, it is brilliant, and far more complex than it would at first seem but this complexity is lost in the near complete lack of subtlety and ambiguity. This lack of subtlety is corrected, and brilliantly so in ‘Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back’ the depth and soul of the first movie is elevated as the story comes top greater complexity in this the undeniably darkest and best of the original trilogy. ‘Episode 6, Return of the Jedi’ is somewhat a return to the [even] greater lightness of the original but with a greater richness of story and action and for better or worse a nearly Spielbergian level of schmaltz on its own it would be a good movie it only becomes great when put together with the previous two. The less said about episodes 1 and 2 the better but ‘Revenge of the Sith’ is a truly brilliant, terrifying, heart wrenching, thought provoking, tragedy in the true Greek sense of the word, it has a terrible complexity and ambiguity to it, it will twist your head in a million different directions from sympathy to revulsion and back again you will shed real tears and feel real emotions, only true art can do that to you and ‘Episode 3’ is more real than any of the others, it is the one resounding, final clinching piece of proof of Lucas’s genius, and yet Lucas himself sees the series in the simplistic shades of black and white, good and evil, his view of it is bereft of the finer tastes of the deeper, more shocking and mocking ambiguitys of near paradox.

Delights of the Inferno.

Life’s little disappointments can, in your mind grow to monstrous proportions, if not offset by any sort of triumph, so it is with that in my mind that write this in an attempt to find something worthy of such an offset. I find nothing except……..

Interestingly the week began with a triumph, not such a monumental one but still…..

I was watching a movie; a movie called ‘Hellraiser’ subtitled ‘inferno’, the fifth in a horror series that began with ‘Hellraiser’ written and directed by the brilliant Clive Barker, the erstwhile ‘future of horror’ [a quote from Stephen King made a few years before Barker turned his pen to exclusively writing dark fantasy works such as Arabat] based on his own novel ‘the hell bound heart’. However, despite this pedigree [as well as the recommendations of friends] I held little hope for the movie reaching the lofty heights of the original, as Barker had, feeling that the series had run its course, not had any involvement with the movie.
To cut a long story short, I was wrong. ‘Inferno’ capitalises on many of the better aspects of the previous films as well as well as Clive Barkers more subtle and psychological film ‘lord of illusions’ [written and directed by Barker based, as all three of his movies are, on one of his own stories]. Where the original movie was perhaps the last true classic of ‘classic’ horror, ‘Inferno’ is a modern horror classic, a psychologically terrifying Lynchian, Cronenbergian, Barkerian masterpiece.
I implore you to watch this film.

P.S. The other film that Barker wrote and directed was the now seemingly out of print ‘Nightbreed’, based on his novel Cabal.

My week got better then it got worse then it got better.

After logging off on Thursday of last week, I went out to take back the mouse that did not work and get a new one. I was pleased to note that the new one stated on its packaging that it was compatible with Windows 95 [the week gets better]. However, upon getting it home I found that it provoked the exact same response from my computer, as had the previous one [the week gets worse]. Having said that my week was greatly improved when on Saturday after having sent them off five days ago my DVD’s finally arrived.

So to summarise and make the final tally
1 disappointing trip to the job centre [disappointment rating 1/5]
2 disappointing computer mice [rated 3/5 for the first one and 5/5 for the second]
3 disappointing days without DVD’s [1st day 4.5/5 2nd day 5/5 3rd day 1/5]
Weekly disappointment rating [19.5/30]

If there’s anything, I missed out then frankly good riddance to it. I’ve already written two pieces about my disappointing week, so I don’t want to dwell on it anymore than I already have.

Search and you will find.

These are anumber of the recent Google searches that have brought people to these hallowed grounds.

Check em out and see what company I'm keeping.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hizbolah&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N
http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=pointless
http://www.blogger.com/told%20scooter? people search?hl=
http://www.google.ca/search?hl...
http://www.google.co.uk/search...l=en&safe=on&q=pointless
http://www.google.com.au/searc...q=pointless
http://www.google.com.au/searc...l=en&q=milan
http://www.google.com/search?q...r

Ok most of these appear not to work but if you are interested then just click on my site meter and go to referrals and you should find some that do.

Today is turning out to be soooo pointless.

oooh I am sooo annoyed, and disappointed too

My movie stream has fallen from grace or perhaps the royal mail has not that they have ever been in grace atleast not during my life time or atleast not during the part of my life time so far in that I would have been using them, too reiterate............Well lets just start again.
I'm signed up to my movie stream [an online DVD rental service] .......... You no what this is just so pointless surfice it to say that I was meant to receive my rentals [king Kong and another inderterminate film] on Wednesday, I did not nor did I receive them today, I have just found out that they have only just today received my previous rentals which hopefully means that I will receive the new ones on Saturday however seeing as they two days longer than usual to get there this seems unlikely. What is more likely is that I will receive them on Monday meaning that I would have had no rentals this week whatsoever. The fact of the matter is that the royal mail is almost certainly to blame for this...... And what's the solution well I'm usually against privatization but in this case I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of the royal mail having a little competition and thus giving the public some choice.
Other disappointments this week on Tuesday I got a new optical mouse for my computer and it didn't work, the last optical mouse I brought also did not work. Also on Tuesday I signed on at the job centre and that cannot ever fail to be disappointing, well that's pretty much been my week just one disappointment after the other, it only has two days to improve.
Roll up roll up, place you're bets.

Anybody else get this spam?

'Good afternoon many have machines which not insuranced,
you have a unique opportunity only today to receive insurance the machine free of charge'

God it sounds dumb.

Eliminating racism, or "'meddling scientists playing god' tabloid nightmares".

Considering how racially mixed the average white person is, it seems to me that the solution to racism, at the very least racism on the part of white people, is to have DNA tests. If for instance a young English skinhead were to find out that actually he’s…. say…… a quarter Asian then its likely that his sense of racial aggression will at the very least be diluted if not removed completely or more likely ‘almost’ completely. Of course there is quite a large chance that really hardened racists will simply refuse to believe the results of the tests, thinking them perhaps some part of some sort of global Jewish conspiracy. What’s more I suppose some people might suggest that saying to someone that they can’t possibly be a racist as they are themselves so racially mixed, brings about in that persons mind, and the mind of anyone who hears this argument, the idea that it would be perfectly reasonable, and acceptable to be a racist if one were less racially mixed. This would be disastrous. Ultimately I suppose that I am one of those ‘some people’. One should never put one’s faith in magic bullets nor should you keep all you’re eggs in one basket. Racism must be attacked on all fronts. Its logic must be attacked and minimised [for racism does have a sort of logic to it]. Its psychology must attacked and treated. And if there be a genetic component, then that to must be attacked though how I don’t know, I suppose eliminating a gene or two would be the way for that, but it is likely that there would be consequences to that. The other two points are in their way easy enough, but genetics……… genetics are….. murky…. unknown, one never knows quite what might happen if you were to eliminate one gene, another may go haywire, it may take its place, human life as we know it might change…….. and other such ‘meddling scientists playing god tabloid nightmares’.

Stupid, Pointless, Badly told joke. [S.P.B.J]

Those Pakistanis, I tell you they must be terrible Islamaphobes they actually have a place called ‘Islam a bad’ obviously they haven’t quite grasped the finer points of written English as they clearly meant “Islam is bad” but it is after all their second language so one shouldn’t hold it against them.

I suppose I should make a new blog for all of these stupid jokes, as to make them not clutter up the otherwise pristine walls of this here blog……..perhaps another time.