I was going to post this a long time ago. But I didn’t. But Carter’s little foray into online customer service with AT&T reminded me of my little tet a tet with Comcast upon moving into my new apartment. Also, it reminded me how hard I’m getting dicked by their pricing scheme. I don’t even understand what possible reason they would have to force me to get tv too.
Click to enlarge.
Actually, after re-reading this, I’m not entirely sure that there’s not a sophisticated cyborg operating the other end of this. Using its synthesized emotions to toy with mine and lulling me into an all too common organic sense of camaraderie and security. I must remain vigilant. If you’ll excuse me, I think “Jolie” is going to be getting a house call from Dr. James, Humanologist and Bounty Hunter.
In light of this shocking development/realization/statement of fact, I would like to propose that we expand this delicious holiday to twice or (dare I say) THRICE a year. Let’s be honest, turkey is scrumdiddlyumptious, stuffing may actually be better than turkey, and that cranberry shit that comes in a can? Well, let’s just say it could be can-shaped cancer and I would still be smearing that shit on EVERYTHING. So, we’re all in agreement, Thanksgiving is awesome. Your family gets drunk enough to be tolerable, you eat your face off, drink too much and yell at the football game, and then comes the best part. THANKSGIVING DAY-AFTER SANDWICHES.
Holy Crap. I can’t wait for later today, and February T-giving and then June Thanksapalooza. Seriously people, the world is going to end and not even John Cusack can save us.
Sidebar: In the trailer for 2012 when they get in the plane, why doesn’t anyone pull up? To avoid certain disaster on the ground, the air is a natural choice AS LONG AS YOU FLY ABOVE SEA LEVEL. God, even Baloo new that and he was a fucking BEAR.
Ok, Japan, you’ve got two ways out of this one. Either you admit that you cheated evolution by accepting help from some benevolent alien society that visited Earth preceding WWI** or you’re Robots. I mean how else could you, a relatively small island nation, actually begin to take over large sections of the globe and assert your dominance as an international pow- note to self, investigate England for signs of Robots. Anyway, do you actually expect us to believe that you went from being a pre-industrial civilization for 7 CENTURIES to being a power player on the international stage in just 60 years? Wait…. Note to self, investigate US for signs of Robots. Wait, is it possible that Commodore Perry was in fact the Mastermold and Japan was colonized by Robots at the turn of the 19th century interrobang!? Either way, Japan, who suspiciously leads the world with desire for robot servants and has an unnatural obsession with giant city-destroying robots and robot sex and pretty much all things transforming, also has NINJA WARRIOR. Ninja Warrior, in case you aren’t familiar, is a show with a lot of crazy ass obstacle courses. And it’s not like American Gladiators, there aren’t pads and cages, there’s just a pool of muddy water under this cyclone of possible sprains and dislocations. Almost no one has ever finished the final stage, it’s a goddamn joke. It’s steel mountain covered in six inches of fresh pain. Remember Paul Hamm, that American super gymnast from the olympics with the crazy high pitched voice? Yeah, watch him get wrecked here. Then who’s the guy who comes up after him? A FISHERMAN. Japan, the case against you guys being robots is not good.
Ok so we’ve got that, but at least Makoto Nagano is pretending to be human, like a good Japanese person. Now if you watch more of this video, you realize that most of the people on it are menial workers. A gas station manager, a fireman, office dude etc. These are people who comprise the bulk of society. They are the kind of jobs a superhero takes when they want to keep a low-profile. So if we’re looking at the mean physical aptitude of Japanese society, WHAT IN GODS NAME IS THE UPPER ECHELON DOING. Space research? Time travelling crime fighting? OR, plotting the robot insurrection? Now, I’m not suggesting that Japan is NECESSARILY spearheading the secret robopocalypse (pronounced ro BOP ocalypse) but otherwise, what are they doing with all that physical talent? And why don’t they have an army? Oh, the self defense force established by the post-WWII constitution? Sounds pretty suspicious to me. If I had THIS GUY on my team, I’m not sure I’d let any piece of paper dictate my ability to defend freedom wherever I wanted.
Be afraid fellow Americans, be very afraid.
**
The Setting: Japan 1894
The Players: Japan and Aliens (not Ridley Scott aliens)
Aliens: Attention People of Earth, we are here to make grant your desires and improve your world with advanced technologies, artificial intelligences and tiny keychains! We offer you, UTOPIA!
Japan: Sweet. We’ll take it.
Aliens: Now, can you point us in the direction of other human societies so that we may seed this world with our benevolence?
Japan: Uh… no actually… we’re it.
Aliens: Seriously?
Japan: Yeah, we’re all the humans.
Aliens: Why do you live on this small island?
Japan: We like to fish and…beachfront property…major plus!
Aliens: There’s a fair point. Farewell Humanity, we hope that you may see the light!
Japan: Goodbye Aliens! Ok, cool, now let’s put this stuff in a secret lab so no one knows we have it and then go invade Russia and China! Sweet deal!
UPDATE:
So upon closer inspection, and actually paying attention this time, the robot destroying the course at the end of the second video is the same fishmongering robot that humiliated Paul Hamm in the top video. Now, how could someone feasibly go from being in what appears to be peak physical condition (at 134 lbs mind you) to being THAT MUCH MORE IN PEAK PHYSICAL CONDITION? Ladies and gentlemen, presenting Robo-Fisherman MARK II. That’s right A BRAND NEW MODEL. It’s the only reasonable explanation.
Watch this first, otherwise we have no basis for conversation.
Ok, so something else you should know, is that I spend most of my time dwelling in the nebulous, schismatic anti-world that exists between performance art, highbrow postmodernism and good ol fashioned theater. It is a hellish slum of a place populated by performers displaced by the mainstream, artists who have eschewed the mainstream and people who just couldn’t find the mainstream despite the fact it has a big glowing sign that says “THIS WAY TO A NORMAL LIFE.”
We’re going to kind of blow past the “Is it art” question right here, because it’s a useless thing to ask anymore. Art is a reality tunnel more often than not. Since our infatuation with non-representation, abstraction and deconstruction began we have begun to question, in a broader sense, intent and integrity. By which I mean, does it want to be art, and if so, what other art is it in dialogue with? Now this is also useless in a certain way, due in part to our cultural preoccupation with the current and the next. Cultural paradigms of the 20th and 21st century shift like the position of Zeno’s Arrow so that what we crave is not understanding as much as it is the power to signal “This is the now right now” and “This is going to be the now tomorrow” and be right on both counts. It’s a byproduct of our new ontology; one that does not necessitate that beings be grouped, or categorized together but rather is a celebration of complete individuation and atomization. The most successful that an art object, or any object for that matter, can be in the new ontology is to be itself completely. A kind of non-literary hermeneutic circle.
Now, where in God’s name does Lady GaGa fit into all of this? Let me begin with an anecdote about the first time I watched this video:
My sister came over and I showed her some of the adorable videos put together by Pomplamoose who are totally adorable and have a LOT of instruments in their tiny recording room. So then, my dear sister is like “oh that’s great”, have you seen the video for Lady GaGa’s new song? Carrie, how in heaven’s name are you getting from A to B here? Seriously, cute couple in SF making music in their apartment…oh let me show you this terrifying latex crown wearing, polar bear burning shitshow.
So anyway, I’m watching this thing, trying to figure out how they made her eyes so big, and how they did that thing with her spine/hoping it’s not real, why the polar bear, the list goes on, when it suddenly occurs to me that I should be liking this. It’s a cogent vision, almost Bacon-esque in its treatment of the human form, dramatic costume changes, butts, it has a lot of the trappings of performance art but there seems to be something lacking. Something that makes it self-assured, something that makes it…good. Maybe it’s because all Lady GaGa songs are tailor made for narcissistic gays to hit the clubs and go “This is my song!” Maybe it’s because Lady GaGa has an outstanding voice and for reasons passing understanding decides to mumble and monotone her way through 90% of her oeuvre. Maybe it’s because while so much of this is striking, so much of it also reeks of Damien Hirst concotions of Warhol grade self-importance. Is her outrageous behavior A) Brilliant Marketing B) 47 Cards Short of a Full Deck C) Childhood Neglect? I just don’t know anything about this video. It’s self contained, fractured narrative structure begs me to come inside despite how scary it is (cause it is fucking scary and uncomfortable), but the thinly veiled references and metaphors of success external to the world violate the established parameters of this context.
Maybe she’s telling us everything when she’s walking around in that gigantic gold sequin number. “Walk, walk fashion baby work it move that bitch car-azy” By which I would hazard a guess that she means, “Don’t read into it to much, it’s fashion.” This makes sense, fashion is an experimentation with human style, it does not need to rely on anything else other than the body in space. It has influences from other art forms on a sliding scale, willing to take and forsake at a moments notice. So if that’s what’s going on here, why is she singing?
In summation: This bitch is making my head hurt, but I must understand what the hell is going on here.
Stuck in a car with his parents driving to a family wedding in Vermont, a very close friend of ours wrote the following in an email:
ll be in VT this weekend at my cousin’s engagement party. Ill be with my parents so unfortunately it will be very difficult to bang her hot friends unless I carry out my business in the barn her father built with his bare hands.
After inquiring about said barn, we were sent this:
My uncle erected a barn. I’m driving up with my parents right now and my dad told me about the first time he met my moms family at the barn raising.
He went up to visit mum for the barn raising and found a huge crop field full of pot (maybe an acre), with a few rows of corn plants as cover running the perimeter. My grandmother thought they were just ‘weeds’ and shrugged it off. She was probably drunk.
There is little doubt that my uncle, now a well-regarded woodworker, inlay expert and published hand-plane authority, was a very successful pot dealer in middle VT when he was our age. He’s on his third wife. He is also missing part of his left ring finger. It is assumed that he chopped it off on a table saw while woodworking, while stoned.
Clearing the bar previously set by Glenn Beck talking about hip hop, Kirk Cameron is the new jump off for Unsettling Today. Honestly, it’s almost as though he was shooting to make this list, with his freaky intens-o eyes staring directly into your soul and whispering over and over again: “Sinner, everything you know is a lie” until I get a restraining order and a can of mace. Giant disembodied eyes prosthelytizing in the desert of my soul make a pretty good target for pepper spray there, Mike.
But seriously, surrealist imagery and Growing Pains references aside (the latter only temporarily), what I find most unsettling is the profound sense of indignation he has about education growing more secular in America. “61% of professors of Psychology and Biology are atheists!” Wait, seriously? Only 61%? Because I’m relatively sure that those fields involve a survey of organisms and phenomena in nature that relies on empiricism and not an almost Calvinist sense of predestination in intelligent design.
Honestly I don’t even know where to go from here. I mean the linking of Hitler to Darwin, the statement that students should be allowed to see the correct answer and then make up their mind, the way they’re trying to sell the book as a great edition of Origin Of Speices. I just can’t rail against it all, it’s too much, it’s too much crazy. See for yourself.
Today’s Robot is brought to you by the awesome band Autolux, whose concert we attended last week. After much thought, I have decided that Carla is a robot. It was difficult to arrive confidently at this assessment, as she plays with two other musicians who are, ostensibly, human. Why would a robot engage in any helpful activity with humans? She should play by herself, and play like 6 instruments at the same time, like a one man band, but not like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, that shit was chaos and totally not cool.
Back to my point, does this then imply that those other two people who I didn’t watch at the concert, are also robots? Are they just sneakier about it? There are so many questions and so few answers. It was hard to think at the Williamsburg Music Hall as the powerful waves of awesome lashed at my face like a pissed-off, pretty effeminate octopus (go on, think about it) until the whole of my faceplace was melted into a gooey puddle and served in a panini at Sweetwater (human face is a delicacy, that restaurant is awesome). Wait, what was I talking about?
Oh yeah. Don’t trust the robots, except maybe Carla. Check the video for proof.
Also today I would like to break a bottle of cheap champage (there’s a recession on you wastrels) over a little feature I would like to call Robots Among Us. This should not be confused with the Incubus album Fungus Among Us which has no bearing on anything, least of all the career of Incubus. All not that funny jokes aside, this is a serious column dedicated to finding and rooting out the most dangerous threat to all of humankind. No, I know what you’re thinking and it’s not H1N1, nor is it Corporate Greed and an out of control Wall St., neither, my compatriots, is it a impeding socialist revolution led by a racist who duped the public into electing him to the highest office in the land…no
…..it’s fucking robots.
All of the bluster over the “Economy” and “War In Iraq” and “Swine Flu” and “Health Care Reform” is a smokescreen. These nonesense issues are distracting us from what is actually important.
FUCKING ROBOTS PEOPLE.
For the inaugural posting, I will expose one of the most high profile robots masquerading as human: Roger Effing Federer. In the video below, please watch carefully as his gyroscopic stabilizers and carefully calibrated servos deliver the finishing blow to some poor, unsuspecting, eastern european human. The robots are out there people, let’s be vigilant.
