"MICHAEL...MICHAEL...MICHAEL..."

I saw a pretty strange spectacle that I feel I have to report on.

So Michael Jackson died.
I heard about it late. I hadn't heard about it until late Friday afternoon when I saw the news playing on a little screen inside the train.
It really made me sad. Regardless of Jackson's transformation into a third sex ghoul, and his alleged, and very probable, molestation of Culkins and kids with cancer, it made me sad.
Mainly because I have so many memories of listening to "Thriller"with my brother when I was a kid. (the album, not the song, because the song scared me)
It bummed me out when I heard the news, and I mailed my friend Sato, and he told me he thought that Michael Jackson would never die. I know what he meant.

So on Saturday night I was drinking with my friends in Yoyogi park.
After the sun went down we decided to leave, and ran into a large group that was holding a candlelight vigil for Michael Jackson. All of the people there were just milling around with stunned expressions on their face. Someone had made an impromptu shrine which had candles spelling out "MJ", and various computer printouts of Michael Jackson album covers set up around the candles. Some people were holding candles and their faces were under-lit and spooky looking. Everyone was basically silent, or whispering.
The whole thing was pretty disorganized. Somewhere "Remember the Time" was playing from a tinny speaker. There were three Japanese Michael Jackson impersonators. One was dressed like Thriller era Michael, another like Bad era, and a third in all black. It seemed like they had all just showed up and were eying each other.
Everyone made a circle as if something was going to happen. But nobody got into the circle except for a toddler who wandered in, and then a bunch of women from the crowd remarked about how cute the kid was.
Eventually the MJ impersonator in all black entered the circle and started to dance. All of a sudden, disparate voices in the crowd started singing "Billie Jean", but very self-consciously, in mumbly half whisper. It was apparent that none of the people who were singing spoke any English, and it was pretty touch and go until the chorus. It sounded like "she was...beauty queen... scene... ra ra ra".
Even stranger that far away in the dark the little speaker was tinnily playing Dangerous-era songs. And the Michael in black was saying "ooh" and "hoo!" as he spun and danced. When I got closer I could hear that under is breath he was saying "Michael...Michael...Michael" to himself.
Hearing him saying this to himself creeped me out really bad.

EARLY NINETEEN NINETIES NOSTALGIA IS STUPID SHIT FOR IDIOTS

I have found myself at a few events recently where there are a bunch of Europeans in neo-1990s clothing. Everyone is wearing shitty clashing cross-color shit and neon plastic garbage.
I don't understand if this is IRONIC or not. And I don't care.
The early 1990s was shit.
And I stand by this.
Yes there was some great music.
But for the most part it was garbage. And I present this as evidence.

Saw a dude dressed like this last Friday.
Fuck you.
Go the fuck back to Helsinki.

WALL OF DEATH

Wall of death - The funniest movie is here. Find it

SUMMER BALLAD AS OF JUNE 10th 2009

Somebody's Daughter:

THE WHITE MAN IS BEING OPPRESSED IN 2009, DID YOU KNOW?

Pat Buchanan's race baiting on Sotomayor. Jump to 1:20 for the this gem: "What is happening now, to white men right now, is exactly what was done to black folks for years...".

This is the same Pat Buchanan whose presidential campaign video featured a man choking, calling 911, and having to wait through the Spanish instructions, and ultimately dying. The point being argued that America is endangered by having people who speak different languages(?).

Via mediamatters.

A DEAD MAN YOU KNOW FROM SOMEWHERE

"And in a dream in a valley of Daghestan
She saw a familiar corpse stretched on the sand;
The steaming wound grew darker in his chest,
And the flowing stream of blood grew cold"

So of course she had seen that dead body around town and knew it well.

But anyway the best Lermontov quote is:
"I am stupidly made... I forget nothing...Nothing!"

FUTURE DEAD PERSON

I'M YOUR DJ NOW, PRINCEY

So I think I irrevocably have fucked up my sleep schedule.
It doesn't matter how much I sleep, exercise, etc. I just can't sleep.
I may never sleep again.

(Related video)
(Video unrelated to the title of this post)

R. KELLY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ANCIENT LIBRARY

So this is old news, but I read this some time ago and it cracked me up:

"To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which
tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit
an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Mr. Cameron
or Fox.

But a number of enthusiasts who have been swapping notes on the
message boards at IMDB.com claim to have already seen the movie -- in
their dreams. "The special effects were mostly drawings and cartoons,
but they looked 3-D still," wrote one "planetshane," whose particular
dream involved a pirated copy of an early version.

"It was the best movie I had ever seen," the post continued."

:
via The New York Times, full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/movies/25avatar.html?_r=2

So this is about some enthusiastic fans discussing a movie they have not seen, pushed to a level of obsession at which they are seeing the movie, and describing this dream to other obsessives on the Internet.

I thought about this today because I was thinking about a similar incident I witnessed.
I was attending a certain liberal arts college (to protect the innocent let's call it "Bard College") and was attending a lecture given by a certain famous American poet (who we will be calling "R. Kelly" after "The World's Greatest").
I don't remember what the theme of the lecture was, or why I was there, but it wasn't a class and was held in a large auditorium. Perhaps there were other lecturers. Perhaps I was there to impress a girl or to have something to talk to a girl about afterward. I don't remember.
Anyway, at some point R. Kelly got behind the lectern and started giving some kind of speech.

In the speech he was describing a dream he had, in which he had witnessed the burning of the Ancient Library of Alexandria. (The largest library of the ancient world, purportedly burned by Julius Caesar, though this is contested)
R. Kelly gave a rousing speech in which he described the horrified feeling of watching those ancient texts vanish, never to be read again, disappearing into the fire and falling columns.
I looked around the auditorium and saw that everyone was transfixed. R. Kelly described waking up in tears, thinking of how close he was to all of those lost texts, and the tragedy that he witnessed was beyond his description.
It was absolute maudlin bullshit. But I looked around and everyone seemed to be totally taken in by it. There were almost audible sighs, and people wiping tears away from their eyes. Maybe I am exaggerating.
But I had the overwhelming feeling that R. Kelly was lying. That he had indeed not actually had this dream, but had made it up.
I don't know if I was justified in this feeling.
Maybe it was because at the time I felt entirely opposed to the pretentiousness and ridiculous solipsism of academia at "Bard College". I was annoyed that I had been locked out of two majors. I was pretty pissed that I was expected to have an opinion about Jacques Derrida. (I was nineteen years old.)
I also hated R. Kelly despite not knowing his work. (I still haven't read anything by him)
Regardless, I felt deeply, as if by some kind of instinct, that R. Kelly was lying. He never had a dream about the destruction of the library in a dream, and he was lying about it.
And I think I know why I felt that way when I think about it now.

R. Kelly was attaching himself, via the semi-supernatural act of dreaming, to a historical event (which, by the way, might be apocryphal, because some archaeologists contest that there is one single event which destroyed the library, nor is it in Roman records)

Then again, maybe R. Kelly was not lying about the dream. Maybe Planetshane really did get a sneak preview in his mind.

I once watched five episodes of the Sopranos in a row and had a dream which vaguely had something to do with the Sopranos. I remember having a dream about The Legend of Zelda as a kid.

Nah, fuck it, I still feel like he was lying. Not only was the content of the dream too pretentious to be true, his maudlin delivery was totally suspect.

THE LOST

-Everyone left behind (via Left Behind)
-All of the Greek heroes sighing in Elysium (via Dante)
-the 60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens (via the O'reilly Factor)

OBAMA DREAMS

Has anyone else been having dreams about our president?

I have had at least four dreams in the past week in which Obama showed up.
He was never the focus of the dream, he was just kind of hanging out.

At one point me and Obama were in a train station and he was talking to me about some kind of new cell phone he wanted and just wandered off.

THIS RACISM IS TEARING ME UP INSIDE

I was at this birthday party this weekend and the DJ threw on all of this early 1990s J-pop and everyone went nostalgia-crazy over it, but I wasn't down because I didn't know any of it.

Then a white dude jumped up on stage and grabbed a mic and started rapping along to it. A Japanese dude turned to me and said "Are you going to do the next song?"

. . .

Later, a drunk girl pulled out some of my chest hair and laughed. It hurt pretty bad so I slapped her (lightly).
Later, the drunk girl's friend told me "I think she likes you".

Later, I went home.

SATAN IS REAL, WORKING IN SPIRIT