We Love the Spanish Spring

We wish we were in Puerto Del Sol right now, drinking beer with our friends, singing revolutionary songs, beating up fascists, and stealing their would-be-converts out from under them...

Spain is just so great and REVOLUTIONARY SPAIN, as I can only imagine, would be even better.

Sorry for not posting a lot this weekend

I was really bummed about the Macho Man and I rewatched a ton of old matches and learned all about Elizabeth being beaten to death by Lex Luger and watched interviews with him and was generally bummed about really Randy Savage and Elizabeth.

It was fun watching old matches, but man how fucked up. I really wanted to find for you this interview with Bret Hart by Terry Gross about his book. I haven't read it but Bret Hart is super smart and interesting and if you ever get to hear that interview I highly recommend listening to it!

Guide to Sabra Hummus For Hipsters

So yesterday they were giving out this Israeli hummus that we are all supposed to be boycotting.

I said to the person I was walking with (PIWWW), "I think we're supposed to be boycotting this."

PIWWW: 'yeah but its free.'

True. It was free. I took it too. But then I realized that as the arbiters of culture and cool we couldn't let the other people see us with the hummus. We hid it.

Later... PIWWW happily eating the hummus.

Me: dude put that away. We are the coolest people here. Everyone's going to think its ok to eat that hummus.

PIWWW doesn't ask for an explanation, doesn't say, 'why would all these yuppies think we are cool?'

PIWW carefully puts the hummus carefully away.

On Justice Scalia

Careful readers of TrendingVampire will know that Scalia is obviously not a vampire.

This is obvious for several reasons. In covens, putting Vampires 'to ground' is reserved for very serious offenses, done carefully, thoughtfully and well seriously. We humans clearly don't do that with our criminal underclass. Its probably because when we put people to jail we use them as slaves, but when vampires are put to ground, or left floating in the bottom of the ocean, they aren't used to advantage their captors.

Scalia's dissent in Brown-v-Plata reads like a bad queer romance novel, where the justice dispensed by a glistening, ripped former
inmate, requires the Supreme Court Justice be chained in the basement waiting to take his punishment.

A new vampire (or Dexter) would obviously welcome this new segment of the non-innocent population, and all regular (100+ year old vampires) would probably be like 'What the fuck! Humans are 'mortal'. It's pretty fucking sick to leave them in jail for their entire lives!'

Oh no!

The Macho Man died. This is so horrible. He was so awesome and I loved him so much.

He was so great. Oh this is horrible.




I loved Randy Savage the way most girls loved (Top Gun era) Tom Cruise. What a crucial and important guy.

The whole match. Well worth watching!

From the mailbag

Sasha writes:

This post was really helpful.

Are vampires anti-misogynistic, or do they just like the blood?

Thanks.

I wish I'd been clearer in that post, Sasha. I do apologize. Vampires, having been 'othered' for centuries, really understand intersectionality. They 'get it'. They kill, but they do understand oppression. They have a keen read on misogyny, (and racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc.) and they really don't care about menstrual blood. Like it's just not a big deal to them. They like blood, and they like their victims, so they don't care what stage their victims are in their menstrual cycles. They aren't like worried about what you look like either. They care about the person inside you.

It's often been hundreds of years of hunting human prey, so they've had time to think about the differences and similarities in all of us. I really think that it's not that they are anti-misogynistic, they've just lost a lot of their judeo christian hangups. You know? They're not like some 18 year old boy who is experiencing this for the first time. By now, they've learned that it doesn't behove them to be racist. Why would it? Why be like that? They also have had time to think about how racism, sexism, etc. affect all fo us, how it manifests in each of their victims. They've worked through, unpacked, broken down a lot of their shit.

on hipsters and anarchists, again.

So I was thinking some more about this and the thing is:

Do you remember when chumbawumba released that ridiculous song 'tubthumping'? Of course you do! So I was watching the View one morning, its the show with a bunch of ladies sitting around talking about Tom Cruise, and Chumbawumba was performing on the view and they sang that song, except instead of the chorus they said, 'Free Mumia Abu Jamaal'. See Chumbawumba was trying to inflitrate hipsters! That's what they were trying to do. It failed miserably. It was so totally pathetic. Watch Timebomb! It's so great


So anyway - what they did was they tried to make themselves even more palatable and hip. They stopped being crazy, or wild or live vital anarchists, in order to bring Anarchism to the View. Someone asked them what anarchism was on the show and they politely explained it, but at that moment they ceased to be relevant because they ceased to be anarchist. You can like allow the legions to love you, but once you cross some line of dumbing yourself down to gain acceptance their scorn will burn.

I walk a lot of lines. Often unsuccessfully, but I know that everybody smells an unpracticed impostor a mile away. Hipsters crave our legitimacy and our secrets. They don't crave a bunch of has-beens trying to rekindle a lost childhood in their playground. In order to make revolution palatable it needs to be glamorous and sexy. Cool kids know the difference. They smell your weakness and your posturing. They don't like it.

Maybe you don't care and you are tired and you want to rest with your louis vuitton shades you claim to have dumpstered. That's cool. Lots of anarchists go to die among the hipsters. It's easy there. It's so fucking easy to be a hipster having navigated our terrain. It's easy but it's boring; if that's where life's brought you I understand. Just man up and own it dude.

The fucking queen is in ireland!

So a million years ago there were these Irish people who fought for self determination. Anyway there was a super sad hunger strike and Maggie Thatcher with her iron fist or whatever let them all die. It was the subject of a great book, Ten Men Dead. I think you should go out and get this for your kindels tout suite (Sp?)!

Anyway so like the world has the history of a flea and even Irish people, who've been fighting a war of occupation for approximately 1200 years forgot I guess, and allowed her majesty to come ashore in an emerald green suite and practice her Irish. I write this to let you know that there is about to be a hunger strike at Pelican Bay State Prison, right here in California, on July 1, 2011! I ask all the Trendsters to get rid of the SHU, and support these incarcerated people as though they were your favorite freedom fighters!

Here is some more information:

n July 1, 2011, between 50 and 100 prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), Corridor D, are going on an indefinite hunger strike. The D corridor (also known as the "short" corridor) has the highest level of restricted incarceration in the state of California and among the most severe conditions in the united states. The rules of their confinement are extremely harsh in order to force them to "debrief" or offer up information about criminal or prison gang activity of other prisoners. Most inmates in the SHU are not members or associates of prison gangs, as the PBSP staff claims, and even those who are put their lives and the lives of their families and other prisoners at risk if they debrief.

Using conditions of severe mental and physical harm in order to force prisoners into confessing is torture! Many debriefers simply make up information about other prisoners just to escape the isolation units. This misinformation is then used to validate other prisoners as members or associates of prison gangs who in reality have nothing to do whatsoever with gang activity.

This widespread hunger strike has the potential to become the most significant event in California prison reform in the last decade. Public support is crucial. Outside support work will be coordinated by California Prison Focus and other groups.

Laura Branigan is as Beautiful as any Vampire

on roaches

if you are going to have roaches (and you probably are at some point) you should follow the following rules:

1) Try to have only one species of roach

2) Try to keep them on or near the floors, or at the very worst, the sink

3) Don't try to kill them. Contrary to what you learned in biology class they actually multiply when smeared.

Do Vampires Like Menstrual Blood?

You know, its funny. Because according to christian mythology and some other mythologies we here at trending vampires are less familiar with, menstrual blood is unpure, and icky, and women can't be priests, etc. So you would think that vampires would be against menstrual blood. Because you, you puritan you, are against menstrual blood. That would be you imposing your misogynistic cultural norms on vampires, now, wouldn't it?

Vampires have generally had centuries to shake themselves of their cultural baggage. While just a few years ago you may have encountered a woman - not in porn - who had her period, and perhaps you were bummed, or frightened, or horrified when she started writhing on the floor in pain, or throwing up, or fainting or what have you, well, anyway vampires have been dealing with girlfriends with their periods for quite some time. And well as we all know - well - Sasha (see comment below) knows anyway - we ladies (who aren't vampires) are blessed with the ability to forget, each and every month, just how bad our periods are. Vampires, however, don't forget how other peoples' periods are, because they are blessed with superior memories and powers of perception!! They are like our long suffering boyfriends who deal with the bloody mess and have no ability to forget. So anyway vampires like periods. They don't give a fuck where the blood comes from! They like sex and periods and they aren't bothered by your trivial petty human misgivings!

I would like to poke out the eyes of detractors with toothpicks

Lierre Keith is cooler than any of you.

Birdman

When you see a competitor you have to put both hands over your eyes in an eagle formation and thereby 'get' them. You can block such action by doing an OK sign over your right eye. If you 'get someone' they have to put the back of their head on the ground. Then that person is back in the game. You can leave the game, but you can never return. To play you need to get shook in by a current participant.

anarchists can't infiltrate hipsters

Hipsters want to be anarchists, but they lack the sophistication and intelligence. They aren't at the apex of social culture, they're a couple steps down, right near artists. Anarchists are at the top. They've always been at the top, even before there was anarchism. It's because we are funnier, more perceptive and understand social and political dynamics better.

They've always appropriated our fashion, our culture, our neighborhoods.* They are keenly aware that we exist, and they think we are awesome. You my sucker friend put on that white belt last year to try to become them, but they've noticed your friends sporting straggly beards and flannel. The hipster isn't at Union Pool in Wiliamsburg listening to you DJ what you think he likes. He's trying to buy drinks from Sam at the Tip Top in Bed Stuy.

You quit anarchism and relevancy late in 2009, but anarchism didn't quit being relevant.

What's a hipster now? Ray LaHood and his bike culture that we made popular? Does he dumpster now that we made that popular? You've thrown away what you are to try to get into him, but he's moved past you trying to get to where you would have been. Pseudo primitivist organic ad locally sourced meats at The Farm?

"Hipsterism is the submission of culture to commodification, right down to its rebellious tendencies and internal customs. Hipsters don't live in squats. They sell each other "artisanal" things."

-- mobunited

To be a hipster is to be a poser in a constant state of cultural crisis. To be an anarchist is to be in control of your life.

Are you really just appropriating their fashion?

* We in turn appropriate those things from black people, which I would address more fully if this wasn't a vampire blog and an already annoyingly long post about something not relevant to vampirism, except perhaps that vampires would be unattracted to me while I wrote something so boring.

Do Vampires Swim?

The vampire is beloved because of his fleeting times of vulnerability. He might slaughter generations and villages, but he NEEDS PEOPLE TO SURVIVE. He kills, but he loves; that's what makes the vampire more alluring than say a zombie. Anyway duh, Vampires can't swim. You know how I know this? because I've read hundreds of thousands of pages (ok maybe 100) about vampires traveling by sea, eating rats in whatever the basement of a boat is called. Don't you think they would have swam that if they could have? It's so dumb that Twilight ignored this, but whatever. Half of Dracula is devoted to making provisions for Dracula's safe passage to England. The voyage demonstrates just how dependent Vampires are on us humans. The same thing with Interview with a Vampire. It's all about the voyage at sea. The oceanic trip is an important vampire trope. Traveling is frightening for Vampires because of the control that they necessarily have to give up. Control they have to give to us, their delegates. (Lawyers are very important to the life of a vampire. They make all things possible.)

Anyway all this to say that the vampires of Southern Louisiana are definitely feeling the opening of the Morganza Spillway.

The whole thing is just horrible. It sucks. Nobody needed this.

black jeans have been de rigeur for soooo long

A POOLHALL FULL OF FRATBOYS

me: i'm still an anarchist, you know.
old friend will: i've still got the tattoo...

Will, like most punks has been wearing skinny jeans for a long time. Prior to their availability and even the existence of American Apparel, punks found tightish jeans and resewed them to be skinny jeans. Then fashion designers, knowing that whatever punks, do hipsters follow, decided to make them available to the masses.

Depraved ramblings

God I love this city so much. I want to roll around in its soot and grime until its dirt covers my hair and its polluted waters flow out of my mouth.

my posts are gone

they are so ephemeral, and yet important! I broke all that shit down for all my readers.

Titicut Follies

Sometimes we have these brown bag movie sessions during work hours, which is cool! Usually they are about something moderately depressing, and there was an uplifting one recently about changes made to the LA police department.

Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies made me want to throw up. I felt like I was trapped in middle school all over again. A naked prisoner was taunted incessantly about keeping his cell clean, and I felt my temperature rise and kept my hands clenched so that I didn't run up to the screen and punch the guard myself. That prisoner had some kind of self restraint.

Mostly the movie feels a lot like mentalhealthspoitation. It felt awkward to film and was awkward to watch. I looked away for entire segments. I HAD TO. Anyway here is like this actual review by somebody thoughtful, not just a vampire blogger:


By Gregory J. Howard

"Why do I need this help? You're ruining me!" So begins a dialogue between a bundle of nerves prisoner and a short, Germanic man, apparently of letters, who controls the prisoner's fate. Standing in the desolation of the institution's yard, the authority figure attempts to convince the prisoner that if he were "sent back to prison today, [he would] be back to Bridgeport today or tomorrow." As if to emphasize the point and to garnish it with an air of legitimacy, the authority figure, who would appear to be a psychiatrist, asserts, "If you don't believe me, you can spit in [my] face." Pressing the matter still further, the prisoner asks, "How do you know that I am a schizophrenic- paranoid?" to which the doctor retorts, "Because you had psychological testing."

And so goes the absurdity captured in the theatrical revue of a mental institution called "Titicut Follies." Examining the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, an institution for the criminally insane, Frederick Wiseman chronicles the daily lives of the prisoners and staff in "cinema verite" style. Granted access to the institution for 29 days of filming, Wiseman captures images and interactions that are both macabre and revolting. Whether it be guards badgering a prisoner for voiding on the floor of his cell, a doctor telling a prisoner "to chew" his food as he is force fed through his nose with a tube, or an interaction between prisoner and doctor as described above, Titicut Follies is a powerful and disturbing examination of the world of a mental institution which, among other things, questions the traditional boundaries separating the deviant from the conformist.

More subtly, Wiseman also makes problematic the common assumption that mental institutions are founded on a bedrock of rationality and order. Of course, the medical model adopted by these institutions in the twentieth century makes an explicit commitment to the[End page 2] logic of the scientific method-- the driving force of positivism --, yet Wiseman deftly and ironically presents the institution as a place of chaos and absurdity, despite the regimentation and extraordinary control that it exudes. Careful and clever editing results in the presentation of disembodied images, taken out of context, which make the functioning of the institution seem incomprehensible. The lack of order conveyed in the film and the inability to distinguish readily between the guards and the guarded leads one to question whether the institution has any greater purpose than the systematic degradation of human beings-- both prisoners and guards.

Of course, painting the institution as a place mired in degradation and exploitation is ironic given Wiseman's own use of the prisoners and guards as his "subjects." In using these people as the vehicles for his polemical attack on mental institutions, Wiseman has been accused of doing to the prisoners what he condemns others for doing. In fact, it was this point which resulted in a series of court cases, dating from the 1967 release of the film, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared the documentary obscene and exploitive, banning it from public viewing. Only after 24 years has this restriction been lifted, allowing the film to be aired on public television for the first time in early 1993. Nonetheless, while the legal entanglements have apparently dissipated, the moral quandary still remains, and it tugs hard at those who partake of this film.

Named after the annual talent show held at Bridgeport in which both prisoners and staff participate, Titicut Follies is a highly charged polemic that, by necessity, moves its viewers both intellectually and emotionally. The documentary would be a useful addition to classes which deal with punishment, deviance, treatment, ethics, and possibly even research design because it raises basic questions concerning the identification and control of individuals deemed deviant by the larger society, or at least the criminal justice and mental health systems. In addition, it forces viewers, albeit not intentionally, to consider the moral and ethical boundaries which pertain to the observation and study of human beings.

When does one cross the line from a reasoned and informative examination of the human condition to a systematic exploitation of individuals aimed at[End page 3] rattling one's own ideological saber? On what moral basis do we and should we determine who shall be the kept and who shall be the keeper? Are there readily identifiable characteristics which distinguish the two? These questions and more need to be explored, and this film provides a useful mechanism for making them more salient to undergraduates and professionals alike. Given its rich theoretical content and the power with which it speaks to the audience, this film is a fantastic pedagogical tool. Accordingly, it receives four gavels on the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture's esteemed rating scale and comes highly recommended.

further pithy musings

Burning Man Meetups are like fang banger conventions.

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE!!!

musings

i can see why the irish love this place with all the misery and green...