Saturday, Jun. 26, 2004 - 12:54 a.m.

Ewe Too

First off, The Jester has completed his rap album, Love Apocalypse. I’m amazed by it. From the first line, “If you’re tired of eating corpses and supporting military forces, well, there are courses of action to leave behind the fascism…” I was in love with this album.

It’s far from polished. The rap isn’t always in sync with the beat. The beats themselves aren’t always in sync with the tempo. The sound quality is very inconsistent. But all this is all perfectly in sync with the style of the album: sullen and self-deprecating like Beck, but also quietly militant, spiced with some hilarious obscenity a la Eminem. The biggest surprise for me was the rapper name he gave himself: Diarrhea. It’s consistent with his over-the-top shock humor: “I’m glad my ass burst/ Though I do feel bad for that nurse/ He stinks now like fast food managers/ I’m damaged fats/ And I know this ain’t real rap.”

Several months ago, The Jester called me to invite me to submit some of my rap to be included on the album. I heartily accepted the invitation, and then waited for My Very Busy Friend to get his recording technology set up for me, and after a while I forgot about The Jester’s album until it was too late. When Diarrhea raps, “guest rappers stand my shit up, say they have the hiccups,” he might have been referring to me. Not getting on this album was surely the greatest mistake in my hiphop career.

What I like most about this album how it immerses the listener in a consistent point-of-view: endless paeans to the pathos of Portland, insouciant acceptance of the sadness of life, mischievous rudeness, David Icke-inspired diatribes against global control by satanic, reptilian extraterrestrials, a modest spirituality of the immanent (“surrender to cheesy spiritual funk”), and an earnest plea for people to love one another. With 18 guest artists, it feels like a real community production, maybe even an underground movement.

The Slug Queen now has her own blog. I’m impressed by the quality of her writing. And just for clarification, I don’t call her the Slug Queen because she has a hideously repugnant appearance or personality, as some readers have erroneously assumed. Much to the contrary, she is the 2002 Slug Queen because she won a local countercultural beauty pageant.

I closed the bubble tea shop on May 16. I gave it a good try, but in the end I was working over 50 hours a week and only netting around $0.90/hour. Though I had repeat customers, there just weren’t enough of them. It was fun and independent, but it just wasn’t worth my precious time. I was shocked and amused to see the shop open again three days later. One of my former customers got talked into being the new manager, and she didn’t mind only getting $0.90/hour.

I just started a new job, doing telephone surveys again. I promised myself I would never go back, but now I have, because I was confident I could get this job, and I was downright ill at the thought of looking for work. I applied to a handful of places, but it felt like pulling my own teeth, I was so immobilized by depression and anxiety. This was the reason I jumped at the chance to do bubble tea: I couldn’t bear to put energy into searching for a job I didn’t want. The considerable downside of having a radical critique is that virtually every available choice seems unethical. I was able to keep my spirits up by singing and writing my book, but those activities weren’t getting me any closer to making money. Just working a job, even a shitty job, is a hell of a lot easier for me than looking for a job. I hope my guilt at bothering people doesn’t get in the way of me doing my job, though I hope that guilt keeps me from staying at this job too long.

I made a resolution to give up worrying. It kind of worked, but not well enough, so I put a sticker on my computer that says, “Surrender. Be happy.” This is going to require cultivating a faith that everything will be alright. That’s one skill I never developed, so this is uncharted territory for me.

I have several of the parts I need to construct a vendor cart from which to sell bubble tea. The profit margin and flexibility are potentially much higher than when I ran the shop, but I decided to wait until I save enough surplus money to buy flavors and a vendor license.

I got tired of watching Amy Goodman on Real Video, as the distortion often made her appear to grow a black eye, or a beard, or start to resemble a cast member of Cats. Now I just listen to the audio. If you haven’t seen Independent Media in a Time of War, you can watch the streaming video.

Moovies

There’s a new Deception Dollar out to promote a new movie called The Corporation by one of the directors of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. The latter movie made me laugh out loud during the scene in which the Nightline producer Jeff Greenfield says that Chomsky’s ideas are from Uranus, and then they suddenly cut to a spacecraft landing on Uranus, and an astronaut approaches the camera, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. I had to cover my mouth for the next half hour, because I couldn’t stop howling. So I expect to enjoy this new one, despite its lack of radicalism.

The Yes Men are coming out with a movie this summer. I can’t wait to see it. Check out those photos. But what I found truly shocking was the lack of reaction generated by their antics. They inadvertently made some unsettling points about the power of herd mentality.

And, of course, Fahrenheit 911 opened today. It was sold out, but I bought an advance ticket for the show at noon tomorrow. I have both high and low expectations for this one based on the last one. Bowling for Columbine blew me away with its wit, style, and solid emotional punch. However, I was unable to confirm his statistic about 11,000 annual gun-related deaths in the United States, by researching documents at the US Department of Justice website and the US Center for Disease Control website (they keep stats on non-criminal deaths as well.) Right order of magnitude, but that’s about it. Also, his international comparisons were extremely misleading, citing low gun deaths in Canada, Germany, and Japan, while ignoring Mexico and Estonia, whose gun deaths were much higher than gun deaths in the US. And some astute critics noticed that the film’s line of argument repeatedly aims toward one conclusion only to suddenly lurch toward another, ultimately arriving nowhere, first stating that guns aren’t really the problem (just look at Canada, Moore says), and ending up agreeing with Chris Rock that what we need is strong bullet control. I fear that Moore will blame September 11th solely on Bush and Saudi Arabia, neglecting important questions such as, “where was the Air Force?” (unless you believe that 19 hijackers fresh out of flight school just got lucky, happening to pick the right day to take advantage of national security “failures”), and, “why did WTC7 collapse for no reason?” I fear that Moore will imply that everything will be fixed if we vote Bush out, willfully ignoring all of Kerry’s promises to keep the Empire on it’s present course. And it’s not as if Bush isn’t digging his own grave in the eyes of the public already without needing Moore’s assistance.

I saw Supersize Me, and enjoyed it tremendously. It’s done in the style of a Michael Moore film, but it’s better, due to the absence of Michael Moore. Actually, It's the one film Moore could not have made, because the all-McDonald's diet is his normal routine. No baseline from which to compare and contrast.

I made sure to eat before going to this film, because it could have made me ravenous. I was actually jealous of Spurlock for being able to eat so much McDonald's. It's so expensive. These days, I can't justify such an indulgence more than once a month.

And was it just me, or did one of his doctors seem to be Alan Rickman?

The statistics in this film are meticulously gathered. I guess the whole thing is a bit anecdotal, there being only one test subject, but I guess you could call it a longitudinal study. The only bad science I noticed was when Spurlock surveys children about which images they recognize, the test was not double-blind, and the sample was too small—only 3 kids. Also, the Spurlock’s sexual dysfunction could have been a placebo effect reinforced by his girlfriend’s disdain for his diet, rather than a symptom of the diet itself. For a control group, I would have liked to see what happened to Spurlock if he ate 3 meals a day at his girlfriend’s vegan restaurant. Is her food as healthy as she purports it to be? Was I the only one who noticed that one possible conclusion that could be drawn from this movie is that one won’t get fat eating Big Macs every day, so long as one foregoes the fries? Anyway, I love any film that makes mainstream corporate America look really, really bad. And that brings me to…

The flag is at half mast at McDonald’s. And everywhere else. For three weeks now. For fucking Reagan. With notable exceptions (like 9/11), when the flag is at half mast, I smile, because what’s bad for the American government is usually good for humanity. I’m lovin’ it!

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