ParappaTheDapper

It is weird, and kind of a bummer, how nobody ever seems to get that Kafka is, first and foremost, a fucking hilarious writer.

I am lately back from Vancouver which, in mid July, is very like Santa Barbara only with way better Indian food.  Doubtless my absence has been lamented.  Here is a clip of Bowie in his prime performing one of my five favorite tracks ">" target="_blank"> to make up for it.

More impressive feat:  Bobby Fischer winning US Chess Championship at age 12 with a queen sacrifice, or Kanye making Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj sound good on Monster?

Please don't watch Daybreakers.  I know you're thinking "But Willem Defoe and Ethan Hawke together in a vampire movie must be awesome," but it isn't.  It isn't!  It's terrible!  I know you're thinking "But it can't be that bad," but it is!  I promise!  Don't watch it, okay???

Hukkle:  A fairly confusing film, even when compared with other experimental Hungarian films!

If I had my hair buzzed crazy short, I wonder if I'd discover I have those blood vessels on top of my head that kind of pulse and throb out when I get excited like some dudes do.  Those things are awesome!  To be candid, I'd always tacitly assumed that I'd start losing my hair sometime in my 30s (one of the many hazards of being a WASP) but my hair is still as thick and lustrous as ever!  

Decompressing after a bit of a grueling four day period by watching Hellraiser IV, eating some strawberries and drinking some brutally strong green tea!  You know what?  Hellraiser IV is definitely the most watchable fourth installment in a horror franchise I've seen in years!  Though parts of the timeline become somewhat baffling as I have a difficult time telling semi-effete dudes in powdered wigs apart!

Discussed Venus in Furs last night with a dude who had pretty clearly never read the book.  Tres frustrating!  What clicked with me most though as I was trying to school this particular chump is how many people who profess an admiration for the work either never knew or quickly forget that the narrative is a frame story, told by Severin, a super-sensualist who was cured of his masochism through a series of bitter humiliations at the hands of Wanda, a woman he groomed to be his tormentress.  By the time Severin has grown into the narrator of the frame story, he has also grown into a highly aggressive patriarch whose hand lovingly embraces the whip handle.

This raised two questions in my mind.  First, is there a kernel of misogyny at the heart of the classical masochistic mindset?  Second, is masochism a kind of disease that one eventually gets over?  Is it merely an emotional fever dream full of perplexing puzzles and half-glimpsed solutions that finally amounts to nothing when, at long last, the fever breaks?

The overlap between dudes who care deeply about Middle Earth and arguments over how best to quantify the stats of Firefly characters for the purposes of roleplaying games and dudes who self-identify as dominants is really entertaining to moi!  I wonder what percentage of guys who have accounts at various sites as big scary dominants also own a replica sword collection and/or at least two (2) shirts with big ferocious dragons on them.  I'll bet it's high!

Note:  I am totally not hating here!  Just enjoying history's mad parade as it comes through town!

Had a few drinks with friends and we decided it would be a gas to watch House of 1000 Corpses.  First time I've seen the movie in years and omg how did I totally blank out the fact that Dwight Schrute is in that film!

Reading through some old essays by Gore Vidal.  "One thing that strikes me is that everyone who knew me back then remarks in their memoirs upon how handsome I was.  But no one ever thought to mention it to me at the time.  It would have made my life far more interesting if they had."

Ironically drinking Perrier while my DJ Roomba vroooms amiably around the room, playing old Pet Shop Boys tracks.  Gee the 21st century is terrific!

Finally watched a couple of tracks from the Duran Duran concert David Lynch directed and was pretty impressed.  Considering that everyone involved is like 100 years past their prime, it was awesome!

Spent a rainy Saturday awash in nostalgia for the days when we were all wearing Hard Rock Cafe shirts from various cities to...you know...prove we'd been to those cities!  The days of flannel and angst and grunge when we all had so much unrealized potential!  Remember when unrealized potential was a badge of honor, not shame?  Oh man, the 90s.  Digging through a bunch of old tracks and found the most 90s lyric of all time, courtesy of Helmet, "To die unsung would really bring you down!/Although wet eyes would never suit you!"

Pouring a little of my 40 oz out for all my homies from the 90s.  And by 40 oz I mean, you know, Merlot.

Just watched Jim Henson's adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Jumpin' Jesus on a pogo stick do I ever love Jim Henson!

I am trying to decide whether to grow a beard.  These are big decisions!  If I do grow a beard, I may grow my hair long again too, although that takes so long!

I Saw The Devil (directed by Jee-woon Kim) is a macabre, gorgeous, bloody, fucking exhilarating movie.  If you liked Kim's The Good, The Bad, and the Weird then this movie is not to be missed!  Solid "A"!

 I was thinking about that the other day. For some reason, like, hetero-American guys have this cloying need to impose their own issues on any kind of female empowerment, especially if it leads to aggression/cruelty.   Like a woman can't do something silly/cruel/funny/human because she wants to, it has to be a manifestation of some kind of damage and that's such an achingly dull way to view the world. Apparently hetero-American dudes for the most part are just jaw droppingly scared of girls.  In the immortal words of Kim Gordon (echoing Chuck D) "Fear of a female planet!"

I think tomboys are wicked hot.  I won't apologize for that!

You know, I'm really going to miss not watching Oprah.  It was just nice she was around, somewhere, somewhere I wasn't watching,  being Oprah.  I'll miss that.

Hiltons always have these rad rowing machines in their weight rooms that make me feel like it's 1985!  Like I straight up feel as if I should be wearing a pastel Izod tracksuit and sipping a Perrier when I use them.  Actually, if I had a pastel tracksuit I'd probably wear it every day.  Or like, a whole closet of pastel tracksuits.  That would be sweet.

Absolute Beginners is a fucking rad movie, and it's Bowie's third best film role (behind The Hunger, Labyrinth)!

How did Brandon Flowers turn ugly?  Is it just aging or what?  I keep tying "What happened to Brandon Flowers' face" into Google but have yet to receive a satisfactory answer!

Corben Bernsen is an inspiration to aging ex-preppies everywhere.  Duder is totally hotter looking now than he was in his 30s!

OMFG Archer is my favourite show since The Venture Brothers!!!!

When I play video games, I play them on "Super Easy," if available.  Otherwise I use cheat codes out the wing-wang. I don't play games for the challenge--I play for a totally artificial sense of accomplishment and the electrochemical euphoria of being a badass bigshot in a digital simulacrum!

Today I am playing through Fallout 3 again, and then going off to play some basketball.  It's basically just like being back in the frat house.  And that is in no way sad!!!

Guys, I know late REM is lame and everything, but I just want to go on record saying Michael Stipe is wearing some sweet-ass pants in that video for The Great Beyond!

Age is taking its toll!  I am rather enervated from adjusting to Central Standard Time after being on the West Coast for just a matter of days.  Time's ruin and the seven laws indeed!

Tonight I plan to sip a ton of margaritas while watching Incubus, that old b&w horror movie Shatner made in Esperanto.  OMG what if the commentary track is also in Esperanto?  How amazing would that be???

Current musical obsession:  Into You Like a Train, Jawbreaker cover version.

It’s odd how rarely men, even submissives and masochists, are able to accept that they’re attracted to women who are capable of capricious cruelty.  Though there is much noise made in praise of the Sadistic female, at the end of the day a queer desire to trace the etiology of the sadist’s malady, to tame the beast, to civilize the savage, always seems to appear.  At the end of the pageant of cruelty and debauchery, the woman is expected to shuffle out humbly and declare, like Prospero at the end of the Tempest, “Now my charms are all o’erthrown/And what charm I have’s my own.”

Polo shirts are so mysterious.  Why do some look awesome while others make me look like a middle management meatball on his way to a golf outing?  It is a mystery!

I'm so ambivalent about Clive Barker!  His short fiction is crisp, spooky, and delightfully decadent.  It's nearly ideal aeroplane and waiting-on-a-train type reading.  But his longer fiction, though quite lovely in spots, is also awash in self-indulgence and dimestore profundity.

This has me thinking about how discrete  the skill sets of long fiction/short fiction/essays really are.  Other than David Foster Wallace, I can't really think of any writers who did all three brilliantly.

Wilde said that all young men who aspire to write cast themselves as either Faust or Christ.  I've been rereading Venus in Furs and it's becoming evident to me that the classic masochistic persona is a weird and glorious hybrid between Faust and Christ.

Apparently, it's going to be a banner year for crickets!  Ugh.  I have this deep, existential terror and this visceral revulsion toward crickets.  They seriously freak me right the fuck out.

The Informers:  Terrible movie.  Great hair.

Album of the moment:  Supreme Clientele.  <3 Ghostface

So I've been watching Cheers on Netflix Instant, and I'm legitimately befuddled as to whether Kirstie Alley was ever hot.  There was this weird interregnum that fell post-Yuppie but pre-grunge in which, between the bland fashion and the shampoo commercial style hair, most women look terribly unappealing to me.  I also can't tell how Ted Danson remained a bigger sex symbol than Woody Harrelson during this period.  Strange days, strange days.

I remember as a little kid, I used to think Phil Collins was the most punk rock dude ever because he wore sneakers with a suit.

My favorite movies of the 80s:  Earth Girls Are Easy, Blue Velvet, Howard the Duck.

There is like a 60, maybe even a 65% chance I'm going to buy a fedora today.  I will keep you updated!!!!

I have a hard time understanding all the people sipping the haterade with regard to money Dommes.  Some of them are some trifling, unimaginative little tarts to be sure, but a lot of the money Domme types I've met have been pretty chill.  Not saying it's my thing, but you can't hate on a girl for getting her grind on that way, you know?

Bored, waiting around to do a conference call, I did 137 consecutive push ups!  A new personal best!  And this in a shirt and a totally dope gold tie with little navy blue whales on it!

I need a new suit.  I'm always tempted to get something double breasted with chalk stripes, and a gaudy Ted Baker tie to complete that Ronnie Kray look.

Catalogues for Urban Outfitters and Vineyard Vines arrived today.  Rather unsettling how difficult, at first glance, it is to tell them apart!  Strange times, strange times.

"You should make sure to have cupcakes.  I'm one of the few people who can look hot while eating a cupcake."  Kelley Kapoor

I decided I really needed a new way to waste time, so I have started playing 2nd Life.  I have no idea what to do!  How do I level up??? 

Jay Z lyric of the day:

I lost 30 million so I spent another 30

Coz unlike Hammer 30 mil can't hurt me

Thanks to Netflix on Demand, I can watch every episode of Wings, EVER, without even needing to leave my couch.  What an age we live in!

When Jay Z says years after his feud with Nas "Had the Illmatic/On bootleg/Shit was so ahead/Thought we was all dead," it reminds me of a line Nietzsche had about Plato to the effect that as much as he loathed Plato he had a soft spot for him because some of the ancients claimed that his favorite play was secretly Clouds and that he slept with a copy of it under his pillow.

All dudes should own three pairs of sunglasses.  White Wayfarers for just chilling, black Wayfarers for more formal and somber occasions, and a pair of mirrored aviators in case Shit Goes Down and they have to kick it into adventurer mode.

The award for "The most 90s lyric ever" goes to Helmet:

To die unsung would really bring you down

Although wet eyes would never suit you

I have been nibbling on the same Vosges Haut Chocolat Black Pearl bar (dark chocolate, wasabi, ginger) for roughly a week now.  Decadence in small doses!

Never understood Hugh Laurie's appeal to women until I started watching Jeeves and Wooster.  God, that man could wear a vest!

Great corny jokes from postmodern novels:

Three statisticians go duck hunting.  The first one aims at a duck, misses a foot high. The second one aims at the same duck, misses exactly a foot low.  Third statistician starts jumping up and down shouting "Great shootin' boys, we got him!"  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

I believe in an unbroken succession of Jewish mothers going back to Eve.  Eve was the first Jewish mother.  "Come inside," she said, "have a nice piece of fruit." T. Pynchon, V

Who says maximalist hyperintellectual postmoderns don't have a sense of humor???

Tales From The Hood is one of the most criminally underrated horror movies of its era.

When Severin referred to himself as a "super sensualist" he was making an allusion to Goethe's Faust.  I think that was one of the most prescient insights ever offered into the masochist's mindset.  My own masochistic urges definitely vibe heavily with the audacity of the Faustian pact.  It's an urge to transcend the mundane through transgression.

I'm a great lover of nonsense and absurdity.  Absurdity and farce are the most liberating kinds of comedy for me and so it's natural that my psychosexual urges tend strongly toward the absurd.  The image of the stern, matronly, task mistress cracking her whip and barking orders holds no appeal for me.  I like my sadists with wicked senses of humor.  I love the notion of the sadistic top as a wisecracking bully who is glibly amused by discomfort and suffering.

Started reading Coldheart Canyon by Clive Barker.  Barker is such a guilty pleasure--God knows his prose is self-indulgent and preening but he punctuates his luxurious narrative style with just the right combination of wonderfully filthy decadence and brutal insights into the strange hedonist backroads of our consciousness that it's impossible to keep from getting immersed in the flow.  He has a knack for dissecting the secret sources of self-destructive impulses and offering up catalogs of human frailty that make me say "Oh, wait.  I can actually see myself making exactly that same mistake for exactly that same reason, under the circumstances.  Yes, yes....even knowing what I know now I might *still* choose to summon that demon just like the poor schmuck in the book...."

In schlocky horror there is always the distance between character and reader that comes from the reader being able to shrug and say "What a moron," as the character runs back into the haunted house one last time.  Barker is able to plausibly remove that distance by connecting willful recklessness to the kind of lust and greed that I know perfectly well might overcome me too in the same situation, and by removing that distance between the character and reader he manages to write some of the only really moving and disturbing horror of the 20th century.

The fact that he is deliciously perverse is just icing.

I pricked my finger while sewing a button back on my favourite vest.  Now I'm pretty definitely going to get gangrene and die.  :(  And I always had so much potential!  Last chance to say goodbye! 

Went for a long run this morning to try to obliterate a pretty severe hangover (partial success!  but still queasy!) and for no apparent reasons my thoughts drifted back to a television show I saw one time 20 years ago.  In the last scene, this ginger woman had put a friend of hers in a straight jacket and then, giggling, she waved goodbye to him and said she was going out for dinner.  I love gingers, and I love straight jackets, but it's confinement combined with giggling, jeering abandonment that really nuked my libido. Strange how the convergence of the natural concupiscence of mid-spring, plus an errant memory or two (brought on by what?  who knows!) can madden the senses.  Spent the last mile uncomfortably and rather embarrassingly tumescent.  

Actually scratch that--Bowie has better hair than Wittgenstein.  If Bowie counts as an historical figure.  And I'm pretty sure we all know he does, he does!

I'm pretty sure Scott Fitzgerald had the worst hair of any historical figure I've ever had a crush on.  Wittgenstein had the best.

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank/Crank 2) should make a short film based on Plato's Symposium.  I would pay so much money to watch them direct the scenes where Alcibiades busts down the doors and starts perving on Socrates.  Hotttttt.

Reading Bright Lights, Big City for old times' sake (I'm a nostalgic dude!) and this part made me crack up....a note left for the narrator by his preppy-from-hell-best-friend-forever, "Have fixed you up on a date with my cousin.  Described you as a cross between F Scott Fitzhemingway and a young Wittgenstein, so please dress accordingly.  Your pal, Tad Allagash"

If I could live inside of any video game it would be Grand Theft Auto Vice City, hands down.

Lee Majors Come Again is the Beastie Boys best track in years!

I am not ashamed to admit that Michael's last episode on The Office is making me weep openly at times!

I had crushes on both Julie Browns (the redheaded valley girl and the mixed race British socialite) simultaneously while growing up.  So that was my childhood.

There is a dude who lives in the house behind me who comes out several times a night to walk his tiny dog in his tiny back yard.  I can see the entire scene clearly from my window.  He is out there right now, as I type these words.  Every time he goes out with the dog, he is wearing a suit and tie.  It's surreal.  There is literally no reason for an unmarried dude in his 40s to sit around his house in a suit waiting to walk his dog!  It's like something out of Magritte, man; exactly like something out of Magritte!  I want to buy the dude a gray bowler and black umbrella and see if he will wear the bowler and carry the umbrella when he comes out to walk his dog!  I want my life to be as Belgian and as surreal as the waffles I chomp down on every morning.

For exuberant arrogance, unapologetic conspicuous consumption, and addictive hubris, I am in love with Kanye.  My favourite Kanye lyric of the moment:

The day that you play me will be the same day MTV play videos

That was a little joke....VOILA

All praise to the most high Allah

All praise to the most fly Pra-dah