Ariana's Recent Posts

Dash Shaw just sent me the link to the prelude of his webcomic BodyWorld.

It’s fascinating stuff. You really need to go and read this. Here’s a piece of it:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

"Martha Stewart? Yeah, I'd hit that, if for no other reason than you're going to have a fabulous breakfast the next morning."

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For consideration: also, never been with a vampire before, might like it!

1964 French documentary on Bunuel, subtitled in English. Featured interviews with friends and collaborators, including Max Ernst:

Mike’s on fine form with this ill-tempered short history of everything related to books, libraries, fiction and culture since 1960. Notable in regard to recent thoughts here:

In my view we should not merely be seeking new markets for existing forms of fiction, such as the short story. We should be seeking personal forms of expression taking risks equal to those of electronic publishers who present us with the means of reaching a growing popular public. It would make sense that among the first publications to achieve this revolution, and seriously threaten the power of the bookselling and publishing corporations, should be those with their roots in the genre which got its first start as an independent form when Hugo Gernsback, using his own money and the cheap and popular medium of the pulp magazine, launched AMAZING STORIES some eighty years ago.

Target Corp, known for its innovative marketing, is staging a “model-less” fashion show in Manhattan next week that will feature holograms strutting down a runway in its merchandise instead of size-zero models.

Susannah Breslin:

In this post-feminist era, some sex pundits have promoted the idea that “porn is good,” but what some pro-porn post-feminists have failed to do is discern between porn the product and porn the industry. As long time readers of this blog know, I have spent some time around the adult movie industry. A decade ago, I entered that world with the same assumptions as the pro-porn post-feminists. Over the years, my attitude changed. Eventually, I began referring to the porn industry as a meat grinder for the human condition. In my opinion, it is a lot to ask someone to get fucked in the ass for a living. Shalom Auslander has put it thusly: “I have never had a day as bad as a woman named ‘Cloey’ had the day they shot the video that appeared on that [Web] page — that is to say, I have never had a day where someone wrote the word ‘Cockwhore’ on my forehead with lipstick, tried to shove their entire fist down my throat and then ‘choke-fucked’ me with their penis until I barfed on their testicles.”

“A German businessman plans to launch the country’s first television channel dedicated to funerals and mourning, complete with death announcements and documentaries about cemeteries. The channel, which will be called Etos TV, is meant to inform people about funeral practices and act as a counter to a growing trend in Germany to be buried anonymously…”

I haven't been to the town library for years. In fact last time I went it was housed in a completely different building. The old library was Victorian and full of people who didn't wash (sorry, that sounds snobbish and I suppose it is). The new library is full of daylight and bright, young, unemployed men sitting at computer terminals; also it seems to contain fewer books- not that I counted. 

It was Ailz's idea that we should join again. I was sort of dragging my feet. I remembered the old library as a depressing place- the sort of place that used to give me a migraine. But I'm glad I let her win.  It's delicious to go round picking odd things off the shelves. It's not like going to the bookshop- where budget restrictions mean you have to pick and choose with extreme care. Instead you can be promiscuous, daring, irresponsible. I wound up with a graphic novel by Alan Moore, a biography of the Victorian spirit medium Daniel Dunglas Home, a big Taschen picture book about Luis Bunuel, and a pamphlet by the poet Geoffrey Hill. If I don't like them I can whizz  them all back and replace them- as indeed I shall whether I like them or not. I used to have this rather grim thing about wanting to own every book I liked; not any more; I've worked out- and it's taken me long enough- that I can't take them with me.

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

At some point the tide shifted and goth became sort of cool again. I don't mean in 'reality' whatever that is, I just mean in the churning ever incestuously devouring sea of popular culture goth somehow slowly shifted from being interesting, dangerous, scary, sexy to nerdy and dorky and something like a dirty little secret to being "cool nerdy" like yeah so what! kinda cool nerdy and back around to - gasp, hmm - being sort of cool, being something that many people and bands and films might actually claim to be a part of, whether or not they had anything to do with "goth."

I'm being abstract because this is only a half-formed thought, but I'm an obsessive peruser of toy stores, art and design magazines, furniture catalogs, fashion magazines and all that assorted cultural ephemera, and I can tell you right now, my lonely wanders through the pages of Lucky and Blueprint have rewarded me with the striking return of black and neo-Victorianism and lucite paperweights with insects trapped in their light-catching centers, the fetishisation of all things John Derian and kabinett-o-curios-esque; my sleuthy stalking down the aisles of Urban Outfitters and anthropologie has uncovered black opaque glass goblets and mismatched plates with reprinted etched illustrations and long bell-sleeved garments, the return of cheap velour and deep purple, the triumphal wallpapering of everything in sight with dark damask and hell--even the return of dark wallpaper.

I should have known all this was coming when I spotted those black latex stockings in ANOTHER MAGAZINE in '04. This goth-creep has been going on, slowly, for a couple of years. (AM is always ahead of me.) I've been sort of perplexed and amused all the way at both the popular perception of "goth" and "freaky" and a tinge annoyed at the appropriation of what I kinda sorta felt was my own style but not really and more than a tinge happy to find really neat cheap china with black flowers on it at Target.

But the thing is-- the music. It was always about music. I blinked and suddenly there are bands who do not sound "goth" in the slightest--like this one for example, being pushed as "goth shoegaze" today on myspace--bands with nothing at all to link them with "goth" except for their art direction. MCR also comes to mind as a band rather successfully appropriating "goth" and making boring poprock, as if somehow elaborately costumed music video clips could make up for the utter lack of drama in the music itself. The result is unintentional self-parody. Kids today.

All these years of ridicule, of cape jokes, of vampire jokes, of sunlight jokes, of fat goth internet picture memes. I'm caught between well-of-course and wtf. When did goth become something to pretend to be?

Also: I just noticed this entry is incredibly pretentious. Sorry. I used to be goth.

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

trixiebedlam posted a photo:

If you are unwilling to participate in obeying traffic laws, get the fuck off our roads.

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For consideration: I used to feel bad when I saw news stories about bikes being hit by cars, until it became clear just how few bicyclists are actually concerned about their safety; not quite strong enough irritation for the "hate" tag

Just a reminder — all site commentary has been moved over to http://telepho.ning.com/.

Emusic has it, Bleep will have it:

Steve is an engineer and he can't get work. "It's all these Poles," he said. "Eh up," I thought, "Here we go- the Daily Mail editorial." But I didn't jump down his throat and I'm glad I didn't because he went on to explain how he'd gone  to an interview and been up against all these Eastern European kids and the Eastern European kids had been hired- well some of them- and he hadn't. So he wasn't parroting something he'd heard down the pub, he was reporting his own experience. 

Middleclass, leftwing intellectuals like myself are wired to go off like alarm bells at the merest hint of racism. Which means we tiptoe round the subject, which means we can be blind to the facts. Steve isn't a racist- he lives in an Asian area and seems happy enough with his neighbours- but economic migration is something that impacts on his life. The Polish kids will work longer hours for less, so the native-born workman can't get a job and hangs around the house all day, drawing benefit and feeling worthless. 

The mass migration of labour is one of the spin-offs of globalisation and globalisation is unstoppable. It's a great leap forward- like the industrial revolution- and when the dust has settled we'll probably all agree that it was a very good thing. In the short term it's certainly a very good thing for the money men who can now pick and choose their workforces. But for the poor, bloody, English working class- for blokes like Steve- it's a disaster.   And ain't that always the case?

“The “Hot Carl,” apparently, is where a mentally ill man loosely stretches cellophane across the open mouth of a mentally ill woman and then –”