Jung, Music, Suicide and Heroism (Reviews)
subtitle: "waking up at midnight feeling hungry and angry"
In the interests of this post not being filled with heavy political comment that neither my Socialist friends nor my Liberal Voting ones will enjoy-- and which will simultaneously bore/irritate/turn-off all my apolitical friends. *ahem* In the interests of avoiding said, I'm going to do the thing that everyone can agree to hate on: blog posts about dreams.
Think of it as a Jungian version of the classic diary entry of the form that begins "I love John so much..." (allusions intended.)
After this positively terrifyingly personal digression i'll tell you about three awesome things i saw today.
So, "Waking up at midnight feeling hungry and angry" ... i had a nightmare where i was protecting a lake in a pristine island hideaway from the construction of a series of cascading tailings dams for a iron ore smelter they were building at the holiday resort (to support and subsidise the eco tourism of course - god only knows why my dreams contain so much spin at this time of year) But also from some kind of evil flying dophin-swordfish-dinosaur thing that had the power to levitate and skewer us all to protect it's investment interests.
I woke up just before the action started. It's always like that, and it blows: you get all angry, and then the adrenalin knocks you back into reality. Which sucks because I was really looking forward to fighting the flying dolphin investor. Anyway the psychological preparations for battle left me hungry, so i had to eat- and woke up feeling hungry.
I'm not going to decode it, thought it's obviously an expression of my political thoughts and feelings. And for those of you that know me a little better-- something a little more immanent that is clashing with them.
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Hope you all have a nice day, wish me luck with the postering, I think I've either scared off, insulted, or not-been-cool enough for someone in the grand old process of it all.
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I also thought these three things were cool today: interestingsouth and encyclopaedia dramatica and this short story
goodbye, blue thunder. A seminar, a wiki and a short story respectively.
... the first is a meeting that I off-the-cuff described elsewhere as:interestingsouth is... a meeting ... about a bunchy of interesting things presented in an ad-hoc nerds and genii. Think modern art and wifi, free hugs and electronics ... because they met on a Web2.0 site. Interesting? yes. Me going? yes.
... the second, Encyclopaedia Dramatica i found because a dangerously pretty semi-genius nut I know called Wei-Jing posted StumbleUpon link to a humour site (nobody likes onions) that had a link to it ... which is quite curcuitous, but hey, that's why they call it 'surfing the internets' i.e. it has the logic of stoned dudes with bits of foam whose greatest dreams involve falling down 20 foot walls of water at (preferably) insane speeds towards skin scraping fingerknives of coral. Surfing. *ahem*
Think of it as the inflamatory, biased, frequently libelous and defamatory version of Wikipedia, compiled by a bunch of genY kids that express themselves with all the shrill delight of net culture (often at all that is awful and wrong in net culture) and do it all in IM-- i.e. with the frantic verbal ranting that makes up MSN-english. I think it's fucking fantastic. I also things that it's a fine espression of netculture, and the generation that has always been wired's mindset and humour. More simply: GenY at it's best. Encyclopaedia Dramatica ... the page that i'm linking here is a net tragedy, and an example of how ... well, i could say something about how young people process their own tragedy, but you should probably just read it. Also check out the page on the "An Hero" (sic) Kurt Cobain which begins with:-
"Formed sometime in the 80s by hack, no-talent wannabe punk pussy Kurt Cobain, Now more commonly known as Kurt Go Bang. Nirvana epitomized the "alternative rock" and "grunge" movements of the 1990s, making them directly responsible for most of today's shit bands. Cobain was dirty, smelly, wrote horrifyingly terrible songs, and sounded like he went over his voice box with sandpaper every night. Naturally every teenage stoner moron adores him. He also killed himself, becoming the VH1 equivalent of Jesus Christ, after spending an afternoon getting drunk alone and listening to King Crimson. As for the other members, who the fuck were they?
"It's better to burn out than to end up a failure like that Kurt Cobain." -Neil Young.
Like i said, fncking gold.
... thirdly, and not straying far from the topics of Music, Suicide or Heroism, here's a short story "goodbye, blue thunder" ... a tragedy about teenage rock dreams executed with withering and hilarious honesty. Check out the author's comics about "Gary and the Gay Iron" ... this story should probably have gone first, because it's easily the best.
And if you will forgive the following bold type (i can't seem to remove it) ... then again, maybe it's serendipitously appropriate. Because this is probably the most authentic thing in this post ... the author, James c. strouse, of 'occasional planet' also, i believe, the writer of Lonesome Jim, a Steve Buscemi 'comedy about futility' which i saw last christmas while i was busying myself being .extremely.fucking.depressed. in the presence of my family's extreme happiness in the most plastic place on earth. It got me throught those dark days and no doubt it will put a smile on most peoples faces.
