Vansanity

Where to begin? This week proves I'm not on vacation. I'm not productive in a socially acceptable sense, but I'm also not unproductive. The side view mirror saga came to a head and required I replace it with a cheap plastic piece of crap from Autozone. At least this one does not rattle and vibrate so bad I can't look at it. And the old one was so big that when I wanted to see if any vehicles were coming from the left I had to lean forward to look around the mirror. It was a hazard. This one is low enough that I can actually see to my left.

Side View Mirror

Then I decided to use some metallic pearl leather paint to put a Jim Morrison quote on my boots. I don't know why. I was sober. I have no excuse. Jim Morrison once asked, "Where is your will to be weird?" And I guess my answer is my side zip cowboy boots with these custom tooled concho boot straps and a tribute to Jim.

Jim Morrison Lives

Leather crafts keep me busy, so I bought a sheep skin rug and made an urnrelated coin purse....

Chicken Bus Fever Part VIII Capital Bound

I read a travel passage from Thomas Wolfe after watching the biopic movie Genius (2016). Wolfe is one of my favorite writers and for at least a month in the '90s I thought if I could memorize the dictionary and drink heavily and live in a Cleveland slum or a Baltimore public housing then I would type a novel capturing my tortured artist soul and thus exact my revenge on the many N.Y. editors who rejected my manuscripts. Fuck them! I had the fire, like Wolfe, and merely needed the right combination of events to ignite the words that hammered for release from my schizophrenic brain. I even read a dramatic passage about growing up from The Web and the Rock to 9 year old campers when I was a counselor one summer. Man, I was going to throttle them with impressive imagery and the magnificence of life! Well, the recent movie is another topic, but it led me to read some of a piece of travel writing Wolfe published back in 1937. It was about his trip through Germany and I was curious how he tackled the nuts and bolts of travel writing. Maybe I could learn some tricks. 

Email to a Friend Concerning David Lynch

"Hola, It seems Mulholland Drive was voted the best movie of the last 16 years by critics. Not just in the top 100, but the actual #1 best movie for critics. And I remember that movie chiefly because you and I watched it during a 'Summer of Movie Rentals' in Arcata. Maybe 2001 or 2002? I forget. It was the summer I was crippled by the spine infection and I fell down on the bridge and you carried me to get donuts downtown. And I taught you how to play Black Boys on Mopeds by writing out the rhythm in chalk on the sidewalk. 15 year ago! But I like David Lynch and we watched and appreciated Lost Highway...but this movie really didn't work for me and I remember you made a face like you just eaten a shit sandwich and said, "What the fuck?"  

Maybe we made the mistake of watching it among lots of other generic mainstream movies. Remember I did a Footloose, Flashdance and Xanadu marathon and the guy at the rental store did a double-take when I returned them? I know that would influence my perception because Mulholland is a mess, but it is a David Lynch mess, which is better than Tarantino on his best day, and Lynch really jumped through a lot of hoops to make something. So I was in Guatemala and Mulholland came on the television and I watched most of it and I still did not like it. It was in Spanish but I got the general idea. Visually it is pretty and there are some attractive scenes that are artsy in their own right, but the entirety still seemed like a cut and paste. And we later learned it was indeed a cut and paste of rescued footage from a cancelled television series. So, I know Lynch had to paste these scenes together and I know some of the scenes don't actually contribute anything to the plot. Like the lesbian make-out scene. What the fuck? It's like Lynch thought he could not have these two pretty women together without asking them to kiss, even if it makes no sense. It's a 'statement' about pornography, but it's also Lynch simply being pornographic in a slightly more tasteful way than Larry Flynt. Is there a big difference?  Sure, the cameras Lynch used are more expensive than the ones on the Barely Legal Cheerleaders set. It is still two women kissing and showing some nipple for no reason other than sex sells. But Lynch gets applause because he's astute enough to mock gratuitous nipple shots? Uh, I think that's simply low-hanging fruit...pardon the pun. He's no artist because he mocks nipple shots and lipstick lesbian fetish. It's not even a good tease.

It's like if I write a long essay and a paragraph is nice, but doesn't work at all in the essay, so I take the paragraph and throw it into another essay full of paragraphs that don't add up. does that make me a genius? I guess if each paragraph is pretty spectacular then people will try to imagine there is some bigger message, but really it was all cut and pasted and I fooled them, like a drunk Bob Dylan. It's like the critics fooled themselves into thinking they needed to do more work than David Lynch to invent a plot for his movie. I guess that's true; a movie with no independent value will make the audience work hard to find value, and Mulholland wins the top spot in movies with little independent value, but are open to interpretation. Who would go through so much trouble to get some pretty women to kiss one another without a bigger motive? Add some Oscar Hammerstein lip-sync and it's genius...??

I accept that the movie is pretty and the scenes are watchable, but the mystery is not intentional, rather it is a result of having all these unrelated scenes to paste together. The diner scene, the man in the wheel chair, the cowboy at the corral, the box, the lip-sync concert, the movie the director is trying to make...none of it is intentional and none of it adds up, nor should it. The only thing is the blonde who has gone crazy and thinks she is an innocent newcomer to Hollywood but is actually a washed up junkie dying in her own bed and hallucinating that she meets a brunette with amnesia. I get that part (especially since it accurately predicted my future in L.A.), but what the hell does everything else have to do with it? nothing. it's all pasted from footage for the television show and so unrelated that movie snobs think they are superior if they invent a connection. But it's voted the best movie since 2000? I don't get it. Am I slipping? Am I becoming too old to see quality in movies? please advise."

I later received this response:

"I need to watch it again, but I remember it being my least favorite Lynch movie. 

I have tiny frogs in a glass box. 

I filled an aquarium with plants and rocks and water, J put fire bellied toads in.  

The toads fuck and sing all day long.  It's really kind of horrible. The female frog tries her hardest to get away.  She wriggles and swims close to rocks to try to scrape him off her back. I thought we had all males, and that the males were raping each other. But one day we came home and I saw tadpoles swimming around.  The internet told us to separate the adults from the babies because they eat their young, so we are breeding cannibalistic infanticide rapists.  

The tiny frogs are really cute.  We have two babies. They are smaller than my pinky nail. 

I wonder when they will start raping each other. Then we will have cannibalistic Infanticide incestuous rapists."  

My Response:

"Sounds like a David Lynch plot."

 

Chicken Bus Fever Part VII Lost and Sick

San Juan Del Sur is sometimes called the Hawaii of Nicaragua and Rio Dulce felt like the Hawaii of Guatemala. I don't know where these families with cars come from but the area was very popular. Maybe they drive from Livingston. I sincerely don't know where so many upper class Guatemalans were hiding. Maybe Puerto Barrios. The bridge over the river from Fronteras to El Relleno had big signs prohibiting parking on the bridge and these signs were ignored by absolutely everyone until it became a congested, one lane bridge.

Park Anywhere you want!

Tourist buses stopped on the bridge, taxis, cars, motorcycles. Food carts stopped to sell refreshments to people taking selfies while traffic honked to clear the way. The bridge, I suspect, is one of Guatemala's engineering marvels. In all my travels I don't remember ever crossing another bridge and maybe this is because I mostly lived in the southern Earthquake-prone region where a bridge would not last even long enough to be completed. But Rio Dulce was not close to the Subduction zone in the Pacific to be threatened by shifting plate tectonics so it survived and was probably the tallest man-made structure outside of the capital city. To my eyes, it was nothing special and I have no photos of it, but Guatemalan tourists drove long distances to park next to a no parking sign and take a picture of themselves with the river in the background.

A Century of Spin

Battle of the Somme: 100 years ago.

Reading the news today is like a test to see how much frivolous bullshit one can tolerate. CNN has adopted a habit of posting random, anonymous Twitter comments instead of interviewing real people on the street. We all know how Twitter brings out the best in us. That allows CNN to cherry pick the most infantile or dramatic or clever or literary quote to fit their rotten article. It got me thinking, "How would these illiterate fuckwad journalists who graduated from some diploma-mill like Brown write about events from 100 years ago?" I really am curious how someone who scours Twitter for snarky remarks about totally irrelevant events in 2016 would write about almost identical international news a century ago. 

Now, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 1,000,000 casualties over 4 months (yes, one million) so it's pretty high on the list of insane human events, but are events of 2016 much different? I think not. The 1916 Summer Olympics were scheduled (by some idiot) to be held in Berlin so they were cancelled because of an active war zone. Today, Rio, Brazil was deemed safe enough to hold the Olympics but Russia is militarizing allies for a land grab, Syria is in a Civil War, refugees are fleeing Africa by inflatable raft to countries that immediately criminalize their religion, America has been occupying oil production territory in Iraq and Yemen while ignoring blatant civil rights problems in distant barbarian cities such as Chicago and obviously dire flooding in other foreign lands not protected by the Constitution, such as Louisiana, while paying some $2 Billion to Iran for an arms deal that was intended to keep the despotic Shah in power back in 1979, but never happened because he was overthrown, but Iran had already paid for the arms so even though the 'buyer' from 1979 died a year later the U.S., for some reason, feels obligated to pay this money back, with interest, to a completely different terror supporting band of lunatics who now claim it is owed to them, the same people who tried to kill the original buyer whose goal was to squash the rebellion led by the parents of the people now demanding the money back. Makes sense. In 1916 a campaign was building to end alcohol production because it was an obvious health scourge and in 2016 there are more Heroin overdoses than births* But Heroin is already illegal because that law empowers municipalities to attempt to profit from suicidal, broke, drug junkies. Pretty smart!

Here is a list of actual events from 1916 - combined with generic spin from a modern day fuckwad journalist a'la CNN or Breitbart.

• Battle of Verdun is fought - A Pop singer in N.Y. complains that her summer house in Belrupt-en-Verdunois has been destroyed. Demands restitution.

• Mexican Rebel Pancho Villa attacks town in New Mexico - Woodrow Wilson claims this is proof that we need to build a wall between America and Mexico.

• Easter Rebellion in Ireland put down by British troops. - 10 Irishwomen in Boston refuse to wash any clothes manufactured in Britain for a week. They are denounced as Atheists. User #RemembertheMaine@'98 comments on Twitter "A Chink can wash clothes as good as any potato famine Cat-lick whore."

• Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control in the United States. - Goldman is uniformly considered a slut but a small group defend her. She later accepts lucrative offers to pose nude.

• Voyage of the James Caird: an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean (800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi)) undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition following the loss of its ship Endurance - Lurid rumors of homosexual orgies plague expedition. Financial sponsors flee.

• United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic - Florida rejoices as Banana prices plummet!

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America - Conservative pundits say this demonstrates failure of American family to perform first duty of preparing sons for war.

• In San Francisco, a bomb explodes on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 injuring 40. (Warren Billings and Tom Mooney are later wrongly convicted of it) - Billings and Mooney were identified by web sleuths who later delete their accounts.

• U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation creating the National Park Service - Liberal Pundits announce this will lead to high price of admission at previously free parks. 

•  Mary, a circus elephant, is hanged in the town of Erwin, Tennessee for killing her handler, Walter "Red" Eldridge - "Pachyderm Lives Matter" activists boycott Tennessee. #JusticeforMary

• Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic - Men nationwide breath a sigh of relief in private but denounce whorish behavior in public.

• The first 40-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of Western New York - 11-year old Derek "Nine-finger" Sullivan says he prefers the new hours. "It's like working half-time," says a smiling Sullivan from behind his bench.

I couldn't resist an insulting modern day meme.

*none of this is fact-checked