From The Grand Dreamboat, the Effervescent and Always Pleasant Ms Kitta. You’ll notice this is the 304th post on both of our blogs. OMG! (And if you’re bored, read the previous post - it’s way better.)

5 Random Tunes:

This is hard - I’m not at home with my collection. I’ll give it a go:

* Cream - Prince
* 100% - Sonic Youth
* Build Me Up Buttercup - The Temptations (?)
* I’ve Got a Hermit Crab Up My C**t - Service Station Youth
* Ride On Shooting Star - The Pillows (the FLCL closing credits song)

Currently Reading:

‘Meaning and Sense’ from Collected Philosophical Papers by Emmanuel Levinas.

Last Film I Saw:

The 1994 classic S.F.W. 5 stars. Double-yay awesome underrated film of all time. “Joe Dice: a man so mean he once shot a guy for snoring.”

Last Clean Film I Saw:

Haw haw. If you count swearing as unclean, I don’t recall seeing any clean movies…

The Next Victims:

I won’t specify. Partly from not wanting to hassle anyone (it’s been a memey week) and partly because of fear of failure.

Meet the Bonobo, Pan paniscus. Bonobos are like little Chimpanzees. In fact, they belong to the genus of Chimpanzees but the Common Chimps took the name for themselves exclusively. Even though they are a minority in the Chimpanzee world, Bonobos are higly intelligent. Research suggests that they are even smarter than the Common Chimp, which you have to admit is pretty smart for a hairy little jungle-dweller. Bonobos also way better behaved - just ask Wikipedia.org:

Bonobos were discovered in 1928, by American anatomist Harold Coolidge,… though credit for the discovery went to the German Ernst Schwarz, who published the findings in 1929. They are distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal and egalitarian culture, and the prominent role of sexual intercourse in their society.

While Common Chimps are relatively nasty little fuckers, Bonobos have forged an idyllic society based on mutual respect and cooperation. Except for occasionally being beaten up for their lunch money by gangs of delinquent Common Chimps, they live in peace and harmony. They are all devout readers of New Scientist, which they don’t quite understand but feel looks good on the coffee table. Also, like human nerds, they are obsessed with sex:

Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation, and a favor traded by the females in exchange for food… This happens within the immediate family as well as outside of it. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with partners.

The last time I tried to use sexual intercourse as a greeting it was taken completely the wrong way. Bonobo society is way better. Did I mention that they are also largely vegetarian?

Unlike Common Chimpanzees, who have been known to hunt monkeys, Bonobos are primarily herbivores, although they do eat insects and have been observed occasionally catching small mammals such as squirrels. Their primary food source is fruit.

There you go: Bonobos are socially conscious, sexually liberated, and trying earnestly to be vegan. Where has it got them? On the endangered list, that’s where. Due to human pressures, there are only a few thousand left. That’s barely enough to get Mark Hamill to come out for their annual science-fiction convention. Some are calling it ape genocide, which I think is totally appropriate. We must save these little critters, for they are truly the Nerds of the Jungle just as we are nerds of the human world. How? I dunno. Donate some money or something.

Stuff that doesn’t suck: the Crying While Eating website. You can even send in your own clip.

There are a million and one energy drinks on the market, but not one with a sedative in it. Nor a good antidepressant. Except beer, but that’s not really what I meant.

Drink Dead Bull^TM! Now with 25% more Xanax!

From Gypped:

I didn’t actually have anything in the fridge, and he nearly had a fit. I do, however, have takeaway menus for eleventeen million different places magneted to the front of it though. When I’m hungry, I don’t look *in* my fridge, I look *at* it.

Sucker that I am I joined the PunkRockSoc. Free customised badge from the Punk Rock Society fundraiser says, at my instigation, ‘pointless ironic badge’ and I’m bizarrely distressed that I didn’t write it neatly enough. As a person I have a talent for remorse. At the end of every conversation and every party there are things I wish I’d done (not specifically, but a vague notion of what they are) and I’m struck by an urge just to go back and keep talking or find someone else and talk to them. I don’t know what this would achieve even when I’m wanting to do it, like now: go back and make a neater badge, say hi to the Prez of the punkrocksoc and chew on my sandwich standing next to the stall. Pure craziness; not at all the calm demeanour of me here at my desk c/w ergonomic keyboard rest. Still, at all those times I am scared and wondering how the work of our few minutes together will look from a distance. Like a painter in search of proportion. A musician ready to improvise an ending. Never content to let anything imperfect or lop-sided lie, as if it simply happened there.

I can never part without a perfect goodbye.

My hot water heater is broken. Don’t be alarmed - I’m not asking to come over and use your shower yet. I’m just letting you know. The problem is the blasted thing’s got a leak. It’s dripping water into the disgusting copper tray at the bottom, which likes to fill up and spill onto my kitchen floor since the hot water heater is located under the sink. Luckily it’s only a small drip that fills up the tray every day or so, or things would be extremely not that good.

Still I’m waiting for the people who own the place to come and have a look at it, which will probably take weeks and weeks until the thing actually does explode. Dickheads. In the meantime the only thing to do is scoop the disgusting roachy water out with an old glass and pour it down the showerhole. (Did I just invent the word ’showerhole’?) It’s not any fun, but do you think the landlord wants to know about it? Nup.

Let this be a lesson to install your water heater in a position where the anode can be easily changed. Then check the anode regularly (every year or so) using a shifter or a large socket wrench and replace it with a suitable part when it looks really creepy and corroded. Be careful not to strip the thread on the anode when putting it back, or things will turn out even worse than they already are.

Nighty-night :)

From Wegglywoo:

1. Total number of books I’ve owned:

Well, it’s not that many. I’ve known people with enormous libraries - mine’s only a hundred books or so, but on the increase.

2) The last book I bought:

I have to divide books into ‘work’ and ‘fun’ categories. The last book was a work book called Deleuze: the Clamor of Being, by Alain Badiou. It’s a bit over my head, but I think Badiou is on the right track. The last fun book was Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. It was alright, nothing special.

3) The last book I read:

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s a pretty good book. It’s funny to read the bits of dialogue that look genuine in the movie but in the book have one person lying to the other or just saying whatever the other person expects to hear.

4) 5 books that mean a lot to me:

Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot. I know T.S. Eliot isn’t very hip nowadays, but I’m an old-fashioned kinda guy. His sense of emptiness and disconnection is radical in its own quiet way. Prufrock is a big thing for me because it sets the intellectual standard for everything else. (I only just learned that he was American and a virgin until the age of 26. Odd.)

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. Girl finds boy dead on kitchen floor after gruesome suicide. Girl refuses to deal with it and goes to work. Later, girl goes on holiday. One of the strangest and most disturbing books I’ve ever read.

Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche. All of Nietzsche’s books are good, except for The Antichrist. This one is very readable as well as being deceptively complex, and has great sections on women, science, art and morality.

The Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This series was inestimably influential to me. Adams’ sense of humor, his imagination, his love of the random and the outrageous are somehow just perfect. I’ve always felt like Arthur Dent and I’ve always wanted to be Ford Prefect.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This was Lee’s only book. She said she didn’t have anything else to say after writing it, and it stands as a great testimony to the book and to the woman that this statement rings true. If everyone read To Kill a Mockingbird, the world would be a better place.

I only wish I’d put an Australian book in here. I’m sure there must be a good one out there somewhere.

Last night I left work on the bus, did a little bit of shopping and then went home. After that I turned on the television but was disappointed by Big Brother running outside its timeslot and played some mp3s instead. Then I made a dinner of pasta and some leftover sauce that was sitting in the fridge mixed with vegetables that I had just bought at the shops. I was in a funk about not eating enough vegetables, so I drank a couple of glasses of vegetable juice that I had also just bought at the shops before eating the meal. After that I watched television, had a shower and put my pyjamas on, watched some more television including an old episode of The X-Files and then went to bed. I woke up at about 2 AM and had a glass of water, then again at 7:42 when my alarm went off.

Through all of this I did not see ANY of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Didn’t even glance at it or hear any of the soundtrack. That is because I could not be bothered going to a movie theatre. A further part of the reason is that the prequels I have seen were both very, very bad. George Lucas is a not a good filmmaker. It’s that simple.

Yes, I know I’ll go and see the movie sometime. Probably soon. But I just wanted you all to know that I didn’t see it today and I’m not that fussed about it. I’m, like, indifferent. How did it come to this? Like Ross, I partly blame the lack of Han Solo.

An email to my mum yesterday afternoon:

> —– Original Message —–
> From: “Mark”
> To: *******************************
> Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 16:40
> Subject: eggs
>
> how long should I boil an egg for? wait, I’m on the internet, I
> should be able to figure it out for myself.
>
> okay, four or five minutes.
>
> that’s all,
> seeya
>

Sometimes I feel like a waste of space.

Here’s how to boil an egg, in case - like me - you’re a little bit unclear on the process.

Now it is time (11:55 on a Saturday night, good time for anything) to delve into that searingly beautiful yet much unappreciated masterpiece ‘Take Me Out’, by the often grossly maligned band Franz Ferdinand. I think you’ll find that it expands your mind; renders you a much more hip and relaxed person, as Journeys of the Soul often do.

So if you’re lonely,
You know i’m here waiting for you,

This ‘love’ song begins with the traditional ending of a love song, a vow of fidelity, thus raising the question “Is there such a thing as living ‘happily ever after’, or does every love song end with the beginning of a sad song or murder ballad?”

I’m just a crosshair,
I’m just a shot away from you

Again, the character’s repressed longing for violence surfaces in the juxtaposition of courtship and firing a gun. It is reasonable to assume some amount of sexual arousal is derived from the image of the loaded firearm.

And if you leave here
You leave me broken shattered alive
I’m just a crosshair
I’m just a shot..then we can die

The lines ‘You leave me broken shattered alive’ and ‘then we can die’, dependent on the subject’s willingness to submit to the speaker’s anarcho-phallic discourse of sexuality overcoded with homicide, shows the fractured nature of life and modern world-alienation. Only death, the shot of the rifle, can reduce people to a plane of mutual corporeal immanence. This idea of death as the final and limitless communion of souls echoes the writings of Maurice Blanchot.

Ooohahhhhh

I know I wont be leaving here with you

The narrative changes from hopefulness to fatefulness as the speaker realises his powerlessness and the illusory nature of his free will. Yet, paradoxically, he continues to speak:

I say don’t you know
You say you don’t know
I say… take me out
I say you don’t show
Don’t move time is slow
I say… take me out

Radically isolated to the extent that language can no longer bear one person’s meaning across to another, speakers drift in a milieu of senseless and asignifying language. ‘Reality’ gives way to pure simulation. ‘Take me out’: only the death and sex drives, mysteriously intertwined, remain tenable as common ground in this confusing un-world.

I say you don’t know
You say you don’t go
I say… take me out

I know I wont be leaving here (with you)
I know I wont be leaving here
I know I wont be leaving here (with you)
I know I wont be leaving here with you

With no possibility of reaching ‘beyond’ language, the speaker drifts in an infinite regress, slowly realising that the object of his desire is nothing more than a product of his imagination; and that his imagination is not his own, but belongs to the meaningless cultural flow that transfixes it.

I say don’t you know
You say you don’t know
I say… take me out
If I move this could die
Eyes move this can die
C’mon…take me out

I know I wont be leaving here (with you)
I know I wont be leaving here
I know I wont be leaving here (with you)
I know I wont be leaving here with you

Reduced to nothing more than a phallophilic Oedipal construct, the speaker asserts the groundless statement of his inevitable fate. He is trapped inside the text, and no new meaning can be conceived since the concept of ‘originality’ has been deconstructed. The song ends, for no other reason than songs need to have ends. Nothing is solved, nothing is okay, and nothing can be done about it except to await death.

Tune in next week as we read Michael Jackson’s classic: ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’.