The Superfluous Man

Post undergrad part 4

2009-11-29T17:33:00.000-08:00

Everything from things as trivial as when he used a separate quote in two different stories in a Journalism class, from the time he made a Nina cry when he told he didn’t love her and was incapable of doing so. The guilt and unease circled through his brain, and he started to question the meaning of happiness.
He lay in the room, it was dark, and the movie was coming to a close. He had forgotten that he ordered pizza, and wondered when the hell it was going to be there. He looked at the clock. It was 2:45 in the morning, he had fallen asleep at some point.
“Damn,” Milton said to himself in a hazy mutter, “I coulda gone for that fucking pizza.”
His minds were clearer than hours previous, and he made a strong decision to lay off on the grass for the time being, it was doing no good for him. He noticed the red blinking of his cell phone and saw that he had two messages.
The first message was from his “editor,” who was in fact a family friend and could give a fuck less about anything he wrote, much less actually believe in the words that he was trying to express.
“Hello Milton, wondering how the writing’s coming along, I have lots of publishers lined up willing to read your work.”
Milton thought the suggestion absurd; she had never even read his fucking work.
Another message came from his father, the usual bullshit. His father was proud, misses him, etc.. In fact his father was too holed up in his girlfriend’s apartment and his financial woes to actually truly care what he had been up tp.
Milton felt uneasy, all he wanted was some comfort. He took a bottle of Beck’s and swigged it down fast, the cold metallic taste hitting curdling his stomach. He decided he would need something stronger.
He walked outside into the cold darkness, the streets were deserted, and he knew it would be awfully hard to get a cab. He made a call to his usual guy, Ritchie, who could him a drive down to South Boston where he could get a couple of Xanax.
The drive, though only 20 minutes, seemed long. Milton’s thoughts became no less negative, he was lonely, and confused, and felt as if he might be experiencing some sort of final stage of puberty. Everything was changing, except unlike the 12 year old woes of nocturnal dreams and pubic hair, he noticed it was the world and his life that was changing, while his body, and his soul, remained ever the same. They seemed to hit every street light on the drive, the yellow lights kept telling him to slow down, but he knew that that was exactly what he had been doing wrong. Speed limit read 35 mph, no one in this country drives at such absurd speeds, no baby we’re at 60 on the freeway at least, and fuck who ever thinks they can stop us, he thought. People don’t think, they just go, whether on green, yellow or red, but Milton, he wanted something else.

Post-Undergrad part 3

2009-11-29T17:32:00.000-08:00

Milton was not living the bohemian existence that he had at once envisioned for himself.
He was a lowly failing novelist and no luck journalist, and he had trouble identifying himself as a writer at all anymore. He remembered himself as a young man of 19 (he was only 23, yet he didn’t feel any youthful exuberance) having daydreams, more like delusions, of himself as a cutting edge underground artist. Maybe playing in an obscure art-noise punk band that got rave reviews by all the hip reviewers on their blogs, or perhaps writing scripts for new abrasive television shows that would only have a chance of being played on HBO if anywhere, or a writer, writing great pieces of literature that only a few would understand and even less would love. He was beginning to accept his mediocrity, and his impotence in the face of becoming what he truly desired to be.
Instead he was nothing more than a civil servant, 1/10 of what he used to be. He had been through so much in the last few years. He had loved and lost, picked up and kicked drug habits and graduated school with a decent bit of honor, and yet he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that he was in some way a coward, the opposite of the great heroes of literature that he admired.
“Hamlet I am not,” he thought, nor Ulysses, nor Atticus.
He was bored and had some extra cash on him from the weed he had been selling. Though he loathed the idea, he called up Bob and asked him if he was interested in heading to a strip club he knew of in Brockton.
To his astonishment, Bob had a date.
“A date,” Milton said, “That’s great,” barely hiding his disgust at the idea.
Milton slammed his phone back of the hook without bidding his friend farewell. The heat rose in his face and a dip pit had formed in the most compact area of his bowels. He felt for a minute that he was going to violently vomit.
He paced around the room with magnificent exasperation, literally working up a sweat as his worked his way up and down through the monotonous repetitions of step. How was it that Bob, fucking pizza boy Bob, has a date? Was he lying? No, Milton thought, for all his defects of character, Bob was not a liar.
Milton tried to calm down, he ordered himself a pizza and opened up a bottle of Beck’s. He through on a movie, some trash with Lindsay Lohan that was on the television, and felt himself compliantly tuning in as if to fill the time. He rolled up some weed into an empty hollowed cigarette and quickly puffed away.
The joint had not offered him solace and comfort as he expected. Instead, his thoughts of paranoia became more apparent, Bob’s potential for sex all of a sudden a metaphor for his entire existence.
Flashes of guilt and hard memories raced through his mind.

Athletes v. Academics at UA part 2

2009-11-26T07:01:00.000-08:00

C.A.T.S. offers athletes a study table, in which athletes are taught time management and prioritizing, and even obliges athletes to maintain study calendars to keep up with what school work that needs to be completed on a given day. Men’s Tennis player and Family Studies junior Geoff Embry said, “Not every athlete has study hall but the ones who do are in it for six to eight hours per day with a mentor. It’s awesome to be able to get your work done and not have that much to do when you get home.”
“When student athletes arrive to school in their first semester, and I think this is generally true of most students coming into college, their study habits are insufficient for the college workload,” said Meade.
C.A.T.S. also offers content tutoring with tutors that specialize in certain challenging subjects, such as Math, Economics, Foreign Language and others. They even have a satellite writing team trained by the writing program but working out of C.A.T.S. for athletes, who can’t find time in their schedules to make it down to the Writing center, said Meade.
The C.A.T.S. Life Skills program is designed to help athletes become more active outside their academic and athletic work. Associate Athletics Director and director of Life Skills Becky Bell said, “We want our athletes to be “life champions”. We want them to get more involved and take more initiative for a broadening university experience.”
Life Skills encourages athletes to get involved with internships, volunteer in the community and do things that go beyond the normal athletics and academics requirements to ensure a better resume come graduation.
“Do a little overtime and you’ll be prepared when you graduate,” said Bell.
Athletes involved in the Life Skills program have received numerous awards over the years, including three this year. Lacey Nymeyer of the women’s swimming team was awarded NCAA Woman of the Year, Craig Sheedy of the men’s swimming team has been awarded with the NCAA Walter Byers Award and freestyle swimmer Justine Schluntz has been given the University of Arizona Senior’s Award.
The Woman of the Year award is the third of its kind awarded to a University of Arizona student since 1994; no other Pac-10 school has any, according to Bell.
Many students on campus seem to believe that student athletes have it easier than non-athletes. Classes like History of Rock and American Popular Music have many athletes in them, but this is most likely due to the fact that athletes get priority registration and are able to sign up for classes first. This class in particular is not seen as an “easy A” but instead a class that generally all students on campus are interested in. Embry said other popular classes include Astronomy, Oceanography and Nutrition, none of which are traditionally “easy” courses.
Meade said, “There’s a perception that athletes get more perks than other students. But, they have demands placed on their time. The glamour of being a college athlete is not what it is perceived to be. They have three hours of practice, weights and by the time they shower and have dinner by 7 p.m. they still have not even gotten to their school work.”
“I don’t like the fact that students think athletes have it easier academically then other students,” said Embry, “It’s not like there’s any professor who’ll grade us easier because we play sports.”
Athletes are given priority registration because they need to plan their school schedules around an already rigid sports schedule.
When asked about the stigma of athletes having an easier time than other students, Davis said, “Yeah, we get it. But it doesn’t bother me because I know we work hard, when our grades are poor we can’t play.”

Athletes v. Academics at UA story part 1

2009-11-26T07:00:00.000-08:00

C.A.T.S, or Commitment to Athletes’ Total Success, consistently tries to raise standards for academics among athletes through the offering of tutoring and advising that better allows athletes to manage their schedules.
Despite a poor rate of graduation among athletes that was reported on in the Wildcat earlier this year as being the fourth worst among athletes who entered school during the years of 1998-99 and 2000-01, academics among athletes on campus seem to be improving. C.A.T.S. institutes a number of programs to help improve academics among athletes for the future.
“Our mission is to ensure that student athletes handle the transition from high school to college and that this transition is as smooth as possible,” said director of Director of C.A.T.S. Academic Services for Athletes Mike Meade, “We wish to provide athletes the tools and resources needed given the taxing time demands split between academics and sport.”
C.A.T.S. no longer reports to the University of Arizona’s athletic department. Instead, C.A.T.S. reports to the Division of Student Affairs. Meade says this allows for more academic support on campus outside the athletics department and maintains communication between the athletics and the academic sides of the University.
According to Meade, the reports of low graduation among athletes were for students who are “long gone” from the school, and since then, the academics among athletes has improved.
There is a new measurement for athletes’ academic success since those reports have come out, the Academic Progress Rate (APR). The report, instituted in 2005, measures teams based on athletes’ academic progression from semester to semester, retention of athletes within a given program and the graduation rate after 5 years, according to Meade.
“It’s a better indication of how athletes are doing,” he said.
According to NCAA, collegiate teams that fail to achieve an APR score of at least 925, or a 50 percent graduation rate, can be penalized. A perfect score is 1000.
The University of Arizona’s Men’s Cross Country team posted a perfect score of 1000 in the APR report posted on May 1 of this year, earning them the Public Recognition Award. However, men’s football received a score of 924 in the same report, one point shy of what was needed to pass.
Mike Meade is optimistic for the coming APR report in May, 2010, saying, “We’re looking healthy in the classroom.”
C.A.T.S. utilizes methods to maintain academic success among athletes. They monitor the academic progress among athletes on a regular basis, and professors of athletes are required to give updates on student athletes at least twice during a semester.
“C.A.T.S. is a huge help,” said women’s Soccer player and Physical Education junior Alex Davis, “For freshman and sophomores there is planned and scheduled study hall and it really helps you prioritize when you get to college. The advisors are awesome, and we get both educational and sports advisors and it’s good to get opinions from both.”
“Student athletes are held to higher standards and require close attention,” said Meade, “So if a student dips (in grades) we know about it before things get beyond repair.”

The madness of college football

2009-11-23T04:19:00.001-08:00

College football is madness. Yesterday was the “game of the year”, with even college game day in toe, but when observing the scene, one has to wonder if most of the people there truly care about the result of the game, and the game itself, or the fact that perhaps it’s just another excuse to get deliriously wasted on alcohol and drugs. As far as I can tell, it would have to be a combination of both.
Thursday night, two nights prior to the actual game, is when the debauchery starts. The bars are packed, fraternities are stocking up, and undergrads scour the streets in search of house parties. They claim that binge drinking can be classified as more than 5-6 drinks per night for a man and 4-5 for a woman, which in turn means that seemingly more than 90 percent of the drinking crowd on campus is of the binge drinking persuasion. Are people actually excited for the game? Or are they generally just excited to drink? And sex of course, can’t forget about that, as everyone who goes out partying always has that somewhere in the course of their minds. We are after all, human. So much of our behavior is directed towards the ultimate goal of sex, and the loosening on inhibitions through alcohol and whatever illicit substances are popular on campus at the time are a clear cut example of this.
The party continues through Friday night. Everyone was excited to make it to the ESPN college game day showcase on Saturday morning, but I for one knew my friends and I would be out until at least 3 am, and sure as hell weren’t going to make it out of the house by 4:30 am.
So, you sleep for maybe 4 or 5 hours tops, get up, and instantly start drinking off the previous night’s hangover. Was anyone celebrating the fact that the so called “biggest football game in Arizona history” was going to be starting at 6 pm, or were they generally just content to drink and be with their friends all day. Three bottles of wind, lots of cheap beer and hard alcohol, sitting by the pool; enjoying the fact that for that very moment no essays were due, no tests were to be had and no deadlines were upcoming.
The actual games rolls around at 6 pm, but we had to leave at 4, a total drag to be sitting in the stadium for that long. Arizona played well, though ultimately lost. I was unfortunately of the persuasion to run down to the field way too early, with approximately 30 seconds left in the fourth quarter. When the game was inevitably lost, I was certainly disappointed, if only momentarily. See, these games have no real bearing on my personal life, and it seems absurd to let something so futile bring me down. Instead, I go out, get a drink and enjoy the night regardless of football or not. Am I in the minority? Or am I in the secret majority?

Post-undergrad part 2

2009-11-22T12:53:00.001-08:00

Milton ordered himself an espresso. He didn’t feel like staying very long, and hoped to maybe find a story that he could freelance to the Boston Globe for the following Sunday paper, though the paper had already rejected everything he had ever written previously.
“Do you ever think about going back to school, Bob?” Milton asked.
` “I think about it, fuck, sure I think about it. But I can’t even payoff my debts to undergrad school unless I save up some more, but yeah, the hell is an architect without a master’s these days?”
“Yeah, me too. I just don’t know about being a reporter, it sounds like a right boring thing to be,” Bob said, “I think I want to go back into maybe creative writing courses, so I can play with language more, not to mention I can’t stand these deadlines anymore.”
Bob nodded, trying to feel sympathy for his friend, but he knew at his heart that his friend had no right lamenting to him when he had to go in for a 9 hour shift at a motherfucking chain pizza restaurant within the following hour.
Milton drank his espresso down with haste; it was warm and soothing, and cheap. He sat around for a few more minutes, staring into his friend’s blank eyes. What had happened to them was so obvious and yet so pathetic, he could barely stand to look at him.
Bob asked Milton if he’d like a sandwich, to which Milton politely declined. Though he did want a glass of water. He drank the water and bid his farewells to Bob, who still had an hour before he had to go to work.
He left the coffee shop and walked out into the cold streets. Boston felt colder every year, he thought to himself.
Early November and the leaves that were at once colorful and vivacious were now fallen to the ground, browned and decaying. He walked through the Harvard campus and felt nostalgic. All these students with so many bright futures, it had only been a year since he was one of them, and in that year he had lost any sense of himself that made him like them.
His college girlfriend, Jane, had already moved onto medical school, and naturally she fell in with a young and talented doctor, or at least this was the version Milton had envisioned. He did not truly know why she left him, but it terrified him to think that he had simply become “boring”.
It was three months after graduation when he got the message, a fucking message, no real goodbyes.
“Milton, I can’t see you anymore, please don’t call back, it’ll just make it harder.”
He was aghast as he listened, for 30 times in a row. For months afterward all he thought about was her, and the blood boiled in him as he knew she was out there living her life and he was stuck doing the same things every day.
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Post-Undergrad part 1

2009-11-22T12:51:00.000-08:00

Milton was having trouble finding work, and all the ensuing trouble that generally follows a fellow who can’t seem to find his way. He had graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism a year prior, but the idea of living a life filled with constant deadlines nauseated him. He didn’t know if he wanted to continue his education further, and he wasn’t quite living the bohemian existence that he had in his early youth so envisioned for himself.
His days generally started at around 9 am. He set his clock for 6, but when the buzzer inevitably went off he couldn’t help but groan and flail his weary arms about to shut it off and get another few hours of sleep. He would then look in the want ads. Some jobs certainly appealed to him, such as record store manager, or book store employee, but he never actually made an attempt to get such a job as a result of his own intellectual vanity.
He went jogging in the mornings. It was quite possibly the only time he enjoyed himself, and the only thing that gave him a sense of self worth. While most of his college buddies were already living a dreary existence of marriage of junk foods, he still retained an essence of youth that was most prominent in his physical appearance. He was a lean 6 feet 160 lb, and he was running miles in 5 minutes when he wanted to, as fast and healthy as he was in high school. He caught the attention of women rather easily, though he also lost the attention even more so, especially considering he was dead fucking broke.
He would eventually make his way down to the coffee shop in Cambridge and meet with his friend, Bill. They had graduated together, albeit, from different majors. Bill was into architecture, but the recession left very few people with the cash to build anything, leaving him jobless. He took a job at a local Pizzeria Regina, where the cuisine was adding an excess of fat to his waist, covering up his formerly wiry and toned torso. He noticed this more and more as the days went on, and it had been months since he had a decent lay, let alone a girlfriend.
Bill was already sitting at their usual table outside when he got there. He was drinking his favorite, a child cappuccino, and as per usual the foam was permeated throughout his thick red beard. He was reading a book on architecture with a look of loathe, as if he felt he had to read it as opposed to him actually wanting to read it.
Milton observed his friend for a moment, chucked and sat down.
“What’s on the agenda today, there, Bob?”
“Well you know, got work later, might go see that new Coen Bros movie.”
Bob went to more movies than critics, sometimes he’d even pay his money to see movies he knew he wouldn’t like, just to distract himself from his dreary and dull existence.

story i wrote again

2009-11-19T11:13:00.001-08:00

Ward 3 residents employ alternative water harvesting practices such as rainwater harvesting to restore natural beauty and reduce pollution in the area.
The Ward 3 council came together with Watershed Management Group in 2006 to start a number of water harvesting programs that would teach and allow residents to re-use rain water as a means of making the area greener and more beautiful. These programs are becoming infinitely more popular in Tucson, especially considering the growing concerns with Tucson’s natural beauty and a large environmentally conscious population.
“The purpose of rainwater harvesting is storm water management and taking advantage of a renewable resource,” said Ward 3 council aide Holly Lachowicz.
According to Agua Solutions, rainwater harvesting is simply collecting, storing and purifying the naturally soft and pure rainfall that falls upon your roof. The collected rainwater can be used for domestic purposes such as laundry as well as for non-domestic purposes like irrigation. Rain water harvesting proves particularly effective in areas like Tucson where water is scarce and sometime polluted. There are numerous benefits of using collected rainwater, but the most beneficial is the fact that it is free to those who use it.
Watershed Management, according to spokesperson James McAdam, practices two different types of rainwater harvesting. The first is active rainwater harvesting, which, “Captures run-off rainwater into a cistern to be preserved and used to enrich the soil,” McAdam said. The other is passive rainwater harvesting that consists of shaping the Earth in such a way that the runoff rain water sinks back into the ground as opposed to running off into the streets and polluting the environment.
“Passive harvesting is directing the water directly towards plants,” said Nature Conservancy of Arizona’s director of operations Jim Cook, “Active requires the installing of gutters and cisterns for the storage of rainwater for later use.”
According to Lachowicz, the Watershed Management group is involved with numerous projects in the Ward 3 area including water harvesting renovations to the Glenn Road corridor and to neighborhood associations like Samos neighborhood association and the neighborhood at Campbell and Grant.
The most interesting of these projects is that in which Watershed Management works with the Samos Neighborhood Association, a Ward 3 neighborhood, in what would be considered a passive rainwater project, said McAdam. The project is called “Green Streets – Green Neighborhoods” and seeks to show that right-of-way harvesting features that promote native street trees throughout the area. McAdam said the project was funded through a grant from the Arizona Forestry Division.
“The right-of-way harvesting technique consists of altering roads and sidewalks that will make rain water re-usable and beneficial to the environment, as oppose to running off and becoming polluted by things like car oil and dog poop,” said McAdam.
McAdam says that the massive interest in water harvesting techniques can largely be attributed to one man; Brad Lancaster is a Tucson resident and has written the two foremost important books on water harvesting, “Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Lands and Beyond, Volume 1: Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape” and “Rainwater Harvesting for Dry Lands and Beyond, Volume 2: Water Harvesting Earthworks”.
In an interview with students from Santa Barbara City College, Lancaster said he became interested in waster harvesting during a trip to Zimbabwe where he met a subsistence farmer that taught him the ways the ways that rainwater can be used to promote life and the environment, and when he related the water problems of Tucson to the subsistence farmer, the farmer told him that he must go back and help solve these problem.
According to Lancaster’s bio page, rainwater harvesting can be used to grow, “Food-bearing shade trees, abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape incorporating wildlife habitat, beauty, edible and medicinal plants and more.”
The Nature Conservancy of Arizona located at 1510 E. Ft. Lowell Rd. is used as the structural example to the rest of the city for how to use rainwater harvesting effectively, according to Cook.
“We were approached four years ago by a small loose network of individuals with the group Tucson Catch Water who are dedicated to explaining the benefits of rainwater harvesting to the community,” said Cook, “They wanted to see if we’d help apply transitions to our landscape to use our site as example displaying rainwater techniques.”
Cook says that the Nature Conservancy of Arizona has assisted in the building of three water harvesting-designed buildings, including the University of Arizona’s dance center. He added that by 2010, a new Pima County ordinance requires commercial property owners to have their buildings equipped to provide irrigation through captured rainwater.
With so many worries about energy conservation and retaining geographical beauty in Tucson, rainwater harvesting techniques are becoming a popular method to conserve water and provide irrigation to the lands throughout all of Tucson, with many residential neighborhood associations, businesses and buildings at the University of Arizona applying the techniques to buildings on campus.
“Living in a desert of low rainfall with a growing population,” said Dorothy Boone of the Nature Conservancy of Arizona, “We need every drop of water we can get and to put it to the very best use. The water is so crucial to our lives, and water harvesting is an inexpensive way of using every drop.”

Wildcat FarmVille story

2009-11-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

Casual gamers and social networkers at the University of Arizona and around the country can’t get enough of FarmVille.
Created by Zynga, a video game developer based out of San Francisco, and offered as an application through Facebook, FarmVille is the most popular gaming application on Facebook with 65 million users registered, according to the game’s Facebook page. The game’s popularity is ever present on the University of Arizona campus, with kids everywhere from the ILC to UA libraries to home on their laptops being seen playing the game. The game’s popularity refuses to subside, even despite controversies of advertisement scams being implemented through the application.
The extremely fast rise in popularity surprised the game’s developers. Zynga’s lead developer Amitt Mahajan said, “The (developing) team estimated that the game would attract maybe 6,000 users in the first weekend. We were blown away when tens of thousands of users had signed up by the end of the weekend.”
Many students use the game as a casual way of blowing off steam during a stressful school day. David Kim, a University of Arizona computer engineering softmore and FarmVille enthusiast said, “For me, the game is a stress reliever, a distraction.”
Zynga, which is also responsible for other Facebook game applications like Mafia Wars, Café World and Texas Hold’ Em, first introduced FarmVille to Facebook in June of this year. Mahajan said, “We were mad about creating social games, and we were attracted to the idea of a farm. There have been online farming games before, and we wanted to give it our own unique twist.”
The game utilizes the program Real Time Simulation, which according to Graduate Research Assistant of the University of Arizona’s computer science department Wesley Kerr, allows the user to tend to their crops digitally on a lifelike human time frame. Real time simulation is not new, he said, having been utilized in role playing computer games as far back as 1999. Kerr said that FarmVille and other Zynga games are the first games that utilize real time simulation to be marketed to crowds of “casual gamers”.
While some professors on campus seem to be concerned about games like FarmVille distracting students from studies and class work, advocates of the game claim it is not too much of a problem because of the minimal time it takes to play. Kim says he plays FarmVille no more than 10 to 20 minutes a day and would never use it to avoid work because, “Once you harvest (the crops) there’s nothing more you could do with the game during that session.”
However, some users/students use the game during class. Mike Crane, a senior majoring in Psychology said, “It’s a good way to kill time during class, it’s simple and entertaining and doesn’t require any strategy.” Though he also added the game doesn’t interfere with his work as he never plays more than 30 minutes in a day.
“It shouldn’t be too disruptive,” said Kerr, “It only takes about 5 minutes to play. It’s not much different than checking your E-mail, except you’re tending your farm.”
There is no doubt that FarmVille and other Zynga games’ (Mafia Wars and Café World are the second and third most popular gaming applications on Facebook, according to an article recently published in the New York Times) popularity directly relates to the games using social networking sites as their medium. Kerr said, “Facebook is a good medium to market games (like FarmVille) to the casual gamer. Facebook is the current online hangout spot. As Facebook’s popularity grew, so did these gaming applications.”
Controversies and accusations of advertising scams surround FarmVille. FarmVille offers the gamer to play the game more efficiently through the exchange of real cash for “virtual cash”. According to an article recently published in Time Magazine, advertisement offers for things such as NetFlix give the user the opportunity for more digital cash to buy crops to be used in the game, and other less legitimate advertisers offer digital cash in exchange for the user taking an IQ test. Once the test is completed, the user is asked for a name and a cell phone number, once the name and number go through the user has unwittingly signed up and will be billed for a service they most likely never wanted.
Kim said he has seen these false advertisements for IQ tests, but says they’re “pretty obvious” when he sees them. Crane agrees that the advertisements were easy to identify, saying, “When they (the advertisements) ask for a credit card it should raise a flag that the advertisement is bogus.”
The Zynga staff acknowledged these false advertisements and is trying to erase them from the FarmVille application. Mahajan says he wishes they were more careful about policing the application and its advertisements when it was launched, and that Zynga is working to rid FarmVille of advertising scams, “We’ve removed all the offers from the game. The only way to now get digital cash is directly through credit card payments.”
Advertising scams or not, there is little question that FarmVille is a massive success at the University of Arizona and throughout schools in the nation. Unfortunately, the figures that would indicate the number of FarmVille users on a given campus are not available, according to Mahajan. Nevertheless, one needs to go on their friend list on Facebook to see how many of their friends are using FarmVille and the implication should be obvious; FarmVille’s popularity is through the roof and still increasing.

Mandatory Blog 3

2009-11-10T02:21:00.001-08:00

Logos refers to the logical or rational proofs found within a piece. Aristotle believed there were four logical methods used to help people make their arguments clear and powerful when faced with complex issues. All four types of reasoning begin with a “premise”, or any statement assumed prior to the argument. Scientific demonstration consists or arguments beginning from premises that are true or that the “experts” accept as true, i.e., these are the facts used in one’s argument. Dialectical reasoning consists of arguments that are less sure of the truth of the argument’s premises, but nevertheless the premises are accepted by people who are generally considered to be exceptionally wise, such as if referring to the fast rise and falls that are inherent to the United States’ economy, one could quote Nathaniel Hawthorne’s infamous, “Families are always rising and falling in America,” passage. Rhetorical reasoning has premises that are drawn from widely accepted beliefs of a community. Rhetorical reasoning can often consist of commonplaces that aren’t necessarily true, such as members of the Aryan brotherhood thinking unanimously that the white man is the Earth’s dominant and most astute species. The fourth, false reasoning, is just as it sounds, starting the argument form a false premise, something that is measurably not true. The ancient rhetoricians always began their argument from the premise that is most widely accepted as true, and moved to those that were less so.
In the essay, “The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poor Women, Power and the Politics of Feminist Representation”, Vivvan C. Addair uses a logical argument that consists of both her personal experiences with poverty in the United States, as well as addressing some of the commonplaces surrounding poverty-stricken women that she has faced, to create both dialectical and rhetorical reasoning.
She talks of her decision to enter community college to receive her GED in order to win her away from poverty and create a better life for herself and her daughter. She tells us that in the year she entered college, 1987, there were 350,000 welfare recipients entered in college. But, in 1998, congress instituted the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act”. In a scientific argument in which she presents us the facts of what happened to welfare reforms, she tells us this law, “Gravely curtailed the ability of poor women to garner authority and to rewrite their own stories through education in a way that positively altered the trajectories and conditions of their lives.” The law apparently created inhibiting forces against those that accept welfare, such as highly strict work obligations that cut into peoples’ ability to receive a higher education.
In her rhetorical reasoning, she addressed the commonplaces of women on welfare. She refers to legislators and witnesses making references to “welfare queen” stereotypes, “Women who deliberately avoid both work and marriage; spend their welfare checks on liquor, drugs and fast cars; and produce large broods of children so as to qualify for even a larger government dole.” She then contrast this image with hardworking and respectable women with herself, who clearly doesn’t fall into this stereotype, and breaks down the commonplace.

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Alternative mental care part 2

2009-11-08T15:12:00.000-08:00

Hardy said, “All behavior stems from childhood trauma before the age of eight. Bad relationships, anger, sadness, depression and other health problems are all treatable by hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy allows the person to get in touch with repressed problems and allows them to address them so they can heal faster.”
One of the benefits of hypnotherapy appears to be the potential for very fast results, “Three two-hour hypnosis sessions can yield the same results as six months of therapy, it’s almost like healing backwards as we identify the underlining problems first, then work the individual through it,” Hardy said.
Ruddy, as stated previusly, works in multple forms of alternative therapy, but is noted for her work in neuro-linguistic patterning. According to Ruddy, “NLP is a light trance in which the patient is still conscious, a sort of mini-hypnosis. It strives to understand that every individual receives information differently and by tapping into the unconscious and then using linguistics to talk the person through his/her problem, healing can begin.”
Despite many individuals who have used NLP to work through emotional issues, it is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, devoid of any empirical evidence supporting its claims. Because of this, it has had little to no support from the scientific communitty, and has no impact on mainstream psychology.
Despite this, practitioners like Ruddy and Hardy argue NLP as an effective therapeutic treatment.
A University of Arizona senior, Zachary Roughan, recently tried NLP and hypnosis to combat a case of stress-induced insomnia. Roughan was previously prescribed to a sleeping pill by a psychiatrist, but disliked that he wasn’t able to sleep without it.
Roughan did three sessions of hypno-therapy and NLP while home over the summer.
“It wasn’t miraculous, but I did end up sleeping better,” he said, “I learned that because of my older brother who was heavily into drugs and screwing up, that I feel pressure to make my parents proud. The stress was getting to me and manifesting as insomnia.”
Whether the scientific community is buying it or not, there is no question that these alternative therapies have become very popular and in many cases yield results.
Dr. Lila Flagler, who practices alternative therapies like homeopathic medicine with her husband Dr. Samuel Flagler out of their private clinic at 6737 E. Camino Principal, simply explains the trend.
“People are dissatisfied with drugs and are looking for something that digs deeper into the individual,” she said, “Drugs like Prozac mask the issue instead of allowing the person to confront the issue and heal. The drugs suppress the symptoms, but the the disorder is still present.”

Alternative mental care

2009-11-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

Tucson residents looking to improve their lives and mental health opt for alternative methods of therapy over conventional therapy, a trend that holds true to all of the United States.
According to an article recently published in the New York Times, there are more than 80 million people in the United States using some form of alternative medicine, and because of this, scientists research these alternative methods of health care more empirically than before.
According to data gathered by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Center for Health Statistics, 38 percent of adults and 12 percent of children use alternative therapy in the United States. True to the growing industry in alternative health, there are over 200 private alternative therapy clinics in Tucson; some of which use various forms of alternative therapy in the field of mental health.
One such clinic is Counseling Concepts, LLC, located at 336. E. Ft. Lowell Rd. The clinic is run by founder Dr. Jo Ruddy and Jodi Hardy. Ruddy worked in the field of traditional therapy for over 20 years, but eventually became interested in using metaphysics after becoming disenchanted with conventional forms of therapy.
“In traditional therapy, you’re diagnosing the patient by their “mental illness” like it’s a disease,” Ruddy said, “When using metaphysical techniques it’s about hope, it’s not about being sick it’s about getting well.”
Counseling Concepts, LLC uses a number of different therapies, all of which are practiced in accordance with the individual being treated and their particular problem.
Ruddy is a “Metaphysician”. According to Ruddy, this term is comprised of the word Meta meaning “beyond” and physics, therefore it refers to something beyond what we can prove is real.
“Say I have a couple come in who have been disagreeing about everything,” said Ruddy, “Metaphysical counseling will allow the couple to go beyond their own normal perceptions and find out how their unconscious minds are tapping into one another and making each other tick.”
In addition to holding a master’s degree in counseling and doctorate in philosophy of religion, Ruddy is a certified practitioner in Neuro-linguistic Patterning (NLP), hypnotherapy, Reiki, Psych-K and Holistic Life Coaching. She specializes in the study of the unconcious mind, “The unconscious mind holds the cycle where emotions, memories and addictive behaviors are held,” Ruddy said, “Through metaphysical healing we seek to connect peoples’ unconscious minds to their bodies and once they tap into this they are more acutely aware of their problems and more likely to heal.”
In the poor economy, counselors are seeing more patients come in with severe bouts of depression. Ruddy believes this new tendency towards a preference for alternative mental care stems from the whole globe being, “Worried about mortality and the world.” Two of their offered treatments, hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic patterning, show effectiveness in the treatment of depression.
Hardy holds a master’s degree in counseling and received her hypnotherapy certification from the Wellness Institute in Issaquah, WA. She practices both traditional talk therapy and hypnotherapy at Counseling Concepts, LLC. She claims hypnotherapy is effective in the treatment of any presenting problem, including depression and problems stemming from depression.

Mandatory Blog 2

2009-11-04T14:50:00.001-08:00

Chapter 2 of “Ancient Rhetorics” has to do with the dilemma that comes to a rhetor when he/she realizes that no two rhetorical situations are ever the same, because every rhetorical situation, “Presents its own unique set of challenges.” Because of this, every rhetorical situation occurs in a time and place that is singular and cannot be repeated. Rhetors must wait for the perfect time, in which the audience is fully attentive, to deliver a rhetorical argument. The right rhetorical moment was known to the ancient Greeks as “kairos”.
According to the text, the Greeks had two conceptions of time. The first was what we are used, linear and measurable time. The Greeks called this chronos. Kairos on the other hand, is a situational kind of time, or an “opportunity”. Kairos has little to do with duration of time; moreover it refers to the right circumstances that bring on a certain situation that allows for an argument to be made to the right audience. The text reads, “Kairos draws attention to the mutability of rhetoric, to the ever-changing arguments that can be found in connection with a particular issue.” Meaning, this term, the situational notion of time, shows that rhetoric itself is a living and changing organism; no rhetorical argument every stays completely the same, but it changes within the situations that it presents itself in. This happens because the people who are paying attention to the issue being argued will often change their minds, beliefs, ages, locations, communities, identities, jobs, and other things.
Because of its mutability, kairos-based arguments cannot be set in stone prior to the delivery of the rhetoric because the rhetor has to constantly sharpen his/her speaking in order to attune to the various audiences and places he /she might be speaking too. The rhetor must understand the history of the issue, and also why the argument was poorly received in various settings and audiences. He/she must be able to identify with the opposing argument and be able to combat it even without a set of rules to guide him/her.
Kairos can clearly serve as a means of invention, because it is the, “Art of discovering all of the arguments made available by a given rhetorical situation.” You must always understand the interests of an audience, and also why these interests might interfere with your rhetorical presentation. You will need to challenge their interests, and subsequently, their beliefs, in order to rhetorically persuade them of your argument.
A chreia is a brief saying or action that immediately makes a point. It was one of two progymnasta used by the ancients, the other being tale. These were used to offer short and catchy lessons that were easily-identifiable by the reader. They allow a rhetor to amplify a theme, that is, make it more pronounced and easy to understand.
Proverbs are common sayings that any member of a certain culture knows. These terms include things like, “Be careful what you wish for.” These terms are “persuasive or expository”, meaning they are either to persuade the audience to do something, or dissuade them from doing something. They are very useful in engaging the reader and grabbing attention.

A slightly better story I wrote (cont)

2009-11-04T06:46:00.001-08:00

The Auto Service Association says the auto repairs business will stay alive through focusing on training, especially with the influx of hybrid vehicles into the new market place, “It’s very hard to find good mechanics,” said Stephens, “I can’t hire right now anyways, but I’ve been able to keep a core staff (of well qualified mechanics), I put in 12 hour days, and my guys put in 10 hour days.”

It is the independently owned used car sales dealers that are reporting stable sales, and these businesses are doing this through implementing programs that make it easier for people on low incomes to buy decent and affordable cars. “They (used car sales) are emotional sales, and those companies are very good at customizing affordable deals for people who need them the most,” Johnson said.

Weiss Guys Auto Sales, a family owned used car dealership located at 2976 N. 1st Ave., has been very successful at bringing in customers through programs designed for people who under most circumstances couldn’t buy a new car. They use a lease to own program that allows people to return their leased vehicles at any time as long as they don’t exceed a monthly mileage maximum and if the car is still in decent shape, said Paula Weiss, co-owner of Weiss Guys Auto Sales for six years. “We all use an outside finance company, Austin Titles, which finances people with bad credit (to buy a new vehicle), they charge a rate of 18 per cent as opposed to the usual 29.9 per cent,” Weiss said.

People also seem to enjoy the friendly service that is offered by privately owned family businesses such as Weiss Guys Auto Sales. They’re friendly appeal is often attributed as to why they’ve been rather successful in the face of economic recession, “(I just use) southern charm, that’s all there is to it,” said Mike Cocoer, the lot manager of Weiss Guys Auto Sales, “people like to interact with someone that’s genuine.”

Though independently owned car businesses in Tucson have been relatively successful, they are not recession proof. Because the automotive industry is in such disarray, keeping up stock of good vehicles has proven difficult, said Cocoer. Cocoer said that used car dealerships such as Weiss need to find new methods to bring in more cars and customers, “We need to be more focused on marketing, we need to advertise more to reach customers, air time and radio,” he said, “the more you’re out there, the more people see what you got”.

To stay alive in the economy, Johnson had advice for both small businesses and corporations. She said that small privately owned dealerships need to “scale down’, while the corporations need to innovate. She said that if the auto sales industry is going to survive, “it needs to allow itself to fail.” She continued, “We all want safety nets, but bails outs aren’t conducive to innovation, short-term solutions won’t facilitate a permanent solution.”

A slightly better story I wrote

2009-11-04T06:44:00.000-08:00

The automotive sales and auto repairs shops in Tucson are doing very poorly in the current state of economic woes, but many privately owned used car dealers report stable sales due to programs targeting low-income buyers.

In times of economic despair, people are far less likely to buy new cars, and in 2008, car companies reported decreases in sales in all types of cars, from 14 per cent for smaller cars to 50 per cent for large SUV’s, according to the American Automobile Association. Strangely, auto repairs shops’ numbers are down as well, with many in the Craigin-Keeling area of Tucson reporting profits falling over 20 per cent from last year.

The auto-sales industry is doing extremely poor and Tucson is not unique to that fact. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, motor vehicles and parts dealers are reporting sales down over $20 billion from 2006.

Experts attribute the decline of the automobile industry as they do much of the fallen industries in the economy, to the rising unemployment and scarcity of jobs. Professor Cathleen A. Johnson of the University of Arizona economics department said, “This is an “economic winter”, countless jobs are being lost and the problem with that is that they can’t be replaced, the economy will come back at some point but the recovery could take five years.”

Johnson also believes that much of the automotive industry’s troubles stem from poor decision making in the executive offices accepting bailouts instead of trying to work out long time recovery plans. “I am tired of bad-thinking executives,” she said, “The more intervention (from the government) and the swing backs will be moderate and not real.”

In states of economic hardship, auto repair shops tend to do better than auto sales companies, and nationally this seems to be the case. According to the Auto Service Association, in times of recession people are more likely to hold onto old vehicles, and in 2008, 51 per cent of shop owners reported increases in profits. Yet, some of Tucson’s auto repair shops in the Keeling area are reporting falling profits.

Mike Stephens, who has owned Sports and Imports Auto Repairs on 30 E. Jacinto St., for 11 years, said that his profits have fallen 25 per cent from last year. “Those numbers aren’t unique,” he said, “All shop owners in the area are doing badly, people are holding onto their money.”

Stephens has even had to refuse people service unless they absolutely need it, having seen problems with people not being able to make payments on basic repairs.

Stephens said that he is keeping his shop alive through accepting alternative methods of pay, “We’ll start seeing more bartering and exchange of service,” he said, “If an eye doctor comes in here I’ll give him free service because I need an eye-check.”

A very poor story I wrote in Journalism

2009-11-04T06:42:00.000-08:00

This is a product of the journalistic dilemma of people not wanting to talk to you:

Helen Keeling Elementary School historically scores poorly on standardized testing, and because of budget cuts and other issues, the scores continue to drop.
Keeling Elementary is a small kindergarten to 5th grade school made of a student body of 482 located at 2837 N. Los Altos Ave. and part of the Amphitheater Unified School District. There are 37 teachers on staff, making for a student-teacher ratio of 13.1, which is actually smaller than the rest of Arizona’s 21.3 student-teacher ratio. Despite small class sizes, students still seem to be struggling on standardized testing, which is indicative of the vast amount of other problems the school faces.
Keeling Elementary saw drops in their percent passing rating in all categories on Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, AIMS, in 2008. According to the Arizona Department of Education, the school fell from 68 percent to 64 percent passing in math, from 58 percent to 55 percent passing in reading subject and from 64 to 62 percent in writing. This is far below Arizona’s state passing averages in 2008; 74 percent were passing in math, 69 percent were passing reading and 70 percent were passing writing.
In a state that is according to the U.S. Census 49th in the country for passing standardized tests, these passing ratings at Keeling Elementary are alarming. Budget cuts are much to blame for Keeling and the rest of Arizona schools’ lack of success, and Arizona legislature passed budget cuts this year that will see nearly $133 million taken away from K-12 education. Arizona is already last in the nation for spending on individual students, and this statistic is not deterring legislature, who are hoping the cuts will lessen the $1.6 billion state deficit, away from making more cuts,
“There isn’t enough money in the budget to get the things I need to do my job,” said Keeling Elementary health assistant Helen Sunstedt, “My good thermometer broke and they replace it with some ancient thermometer that takes me 10 seconds to get a read on a child’s temperature, we’re losing the basic necessities.”
Keeling Elementary is located in the Keeling neighborhood association, one of Tucson’s most drug-ridden and violent areas. According to Tucson police, the area has mean drug arrests and violent crimes that are from 4 to 6 times the mean of Tucson’s. Because of this, the school can’t help but see the area’s criminal aspect, especially among the parents. School Administrative Assistant Michelle Howard said, “There is a huge lack of parental involvement among our students, some parents just don’t seem to help kids at all.” This lack of parental guidance could partly account for the school’s poor scoring on standardized testing.
The school has also seen problems with substance abuse among parents, and has had to take action against the parents on separate occasions. Kellie Rogers, the school’s Educational Assistant and clerk, said she sees the crime problem’s effect on the school “constantly”. She said, “The kids seem to know way too much about it (drugs and crime), we’ve had parents who’ve come in intoxicated, and of course we can’t allow them to take their children home on account of the children’s safety. I feel I have a sense of when people are under the influence because I’ve seen it so much while working with the parents here.”
The school also has problems with behavior, but due to the budget cuts, classes that were formerly put into place to separate children with behavioral problems from the attentive students have been cut, creating a disruptive class environment that is not conducive to education. Rogers, who was formerly a teacher in one of these classes, said, “They (the classes) were very draining to work in, we had three teachers for 15 kids all of whom has behavioral issues. Even worse, the parents seemed uninvolved and unwilling to work to create a better education for their child.”
The school also had to lay off its school resource officer. Sam Molina lost his job at Keeling Elementary due to the budget cuts, making the school lack a strong authoritative presence to ensure the students don’t get out of hand.
The language barrier makes it difficult to deal with the parents. The Keeling Elementary student body is made of 71.6 percent Hispanic students, many of who have parents that do not speak English. They only have two Spanish-fluent members of their administrative faculty; the behavior monitor Oscar Bernal and the bilingual translator Sandra Aquino. With so many Spanish-speaking parents it proves difficult for the school to communicate student problems to parents.
To improve education and boost standardized test scores, Howard said they received a 21st Century grant to institute an after school program called “Achieve” that is designed specifically to help kids focus more and do better on standardized tests. Still, Howard doesn’t see the point of measuring a school’s success on standardized testing, “If you’ve passed the state’s school curriculum standards, than that should be your only measure,” she said, “some kids just don’t perform well on standardized testing.”

The Long Road Home; pt. 8

2009-11-03T16:22:00.001-08:00

He was re-invigorated. Eyes were all gazing upon him, and the lights of the cars forming an incandescent and impenetrable sight of vision. He saw the bodies being carried away. It was so familiar to him. And the woman, who was at once so beautiful and full of life, was now cold and blue, nothing emanating from her aside from a deep and foul stench that sickened the air. He knew this somehow. He had experienced this before, but from a different perspective.
He looked at the man carried next to his wife, their love carried into the afterlife. Or did it? Would they even be able to remember such a thing if there was an afterlife? The man’s body was decimated beyond recognition.
The air was stale and filled with death, yet still cool and refreshing. He walked backed to his vehicle in a state of deep self-reflection. The déjà vu was disturbing him. He couldn’t draw a connection between this occurrence of brutality and his previous experiences. The more he thought the more he realized he couldn’t comprehend time and its implications. He could have experienced this a million times and possibly have not remembered. But nevertheless, he felt whole and happy that he was able to be with the woman during her last breaths, to offer her comfort. Therefore maybe her journey would be easier and less mind numbing than his.
He turned the car on. There was a light shining on far down the road, and he felt drawn to it, he knew it was his destination. He had no idea what lay beyond the flash of white that was but a spec on his ray of vision, but he knew that wasn’t important, what was important was only that he get there.
He drove into the black, with the light at the end. No more stops, except for smokes, was what he vowed to himself. The amphetamine was running out, and he no longer felt the need for it. The excitement and anticipation was enough to keep him awake for eternity. 110 mph down the freeway. He felt free for the first time since he couldn’t remember, if he could remember at all.
He thought of the women at the hotel and the road. They seemed to be connected somehow, two different sides of his persona. The woman at the hotel was almost a manifestation of his inner guilt and trauma over something he didn’t remember (of course) experiencing. The woman on the road meant he still had heroism in him left, that he had kept his promise to the man at the hotel, he had kept hope. For whatever reason, he still felt hopeful in a world bereft of meaning and passion. He saw the point of soldiering on down that deep black road and into the beautiful shimmering white light. The ward grew warmer as he grew closer, like his blood was elevating in temperature as the miles progressed. So close, he could feel it.

Why I Love Lester

2009-10-25T16:29:00.001-07:00

his natural ability at getting a possibly difficult person such as Eno to just casually talk, “The person I did meet that day was relaxed, gracious, and, to use his favorite word, one of the most interesting conversationalists I'd run into in some time.” To establish his good moral standing, Lester demonstrates in the article that he was fully able to put his usual hedonist tendencies aside and act as a real writer and journalist, meticulously cataloguing a notoriously shadowy figure of pop culture, and is then able to demonstrate to the audience that even though he has his reservations about Eno and electronic music, his research proves that Eno is a serious musical mind, whatever medium he may choose to create his art.
Lester uses intimate distance in the article to acknowledge both his love of the work of Brian Eno as well as the overall importance of the man’s music in the modern era, thus arguing that electronics are a new and exciting form of popular music. His language illuminates the importance of Eno’s work and his place in society. He offers two opposing views of Eno’s work, one that his work is cold and distant, too depersonalized to be music, and the other than his music is more about spirituality and Zen-like qualities than it is melody and tone, thus a legitimate musical form. He writes, “Eno's work might be the ultimate sonic sartorial for the depersonalized, narcissistic sophisticate of the present and immediate future. But this refusal-- or inability-- to ultimately commit to anything in particular may well be what could ultimately prevent it from being great art. We live at the first time in human history when the basic humanity of a given piece of art might be considered suspect.” He then says that despite his or anyone else’s reservations, that Eno’s ability to create spiritually inclined music that is derived from technology will ultimately help people come to terms with technology easier, he writes, “Maybe he will ultimately help us all to make a more complete (and uncompromised) peace with all these machines which he perceives as machines of loving grace, as perhaps anyone as individualistic as himself would have to be repulsed by life in the hive. In a strange way, his music raises these issues in spite of itself; in the final analysis, not only Brian Eno's whole career but what might even be his real contribution to the human future could prove to be one huge happy accident.”
By using rhetorical methods, Bangs sheds light on Eno’s interesting character and unique contributions to music and art. He ultimately proves to the audience that whether they like technology or not, that technology will only advance and it naturally will affect music and art as well. He presents himself as a bold critic and social witness to the technology boom, and relates it directly to his love of music of which is becoming mechanized in the modern world, and uses the legend of Eno to prove that this isn’t a terrible occurrence.

Why I Love Lester

2009-10-25T16:28:00.001-07:00

In his essay, “Brian Eno: A Sandbox in Alphaville”, Lester Bangs, arguably the greatest Rock n’ Roll writer of all time, uses ethical methods including doing the homework, establishing good character, and intimate distance in an attempt to demystify some of Brian Eno’s legend, and argue for the importance and place of electronics in modern music. Bangs conducts massive amounts of research and extensive interviews with the legendary producer, musical philosopher, and creator of the ambient music genre. Though at this time he was already the most respected critic in his field, Lester still uses some of the classic rhetorical means of establishing ethos in the essay.
In that way, he uses both forms of ethical proof: invented and situated. His situated ethos is the fact that at this point in his career he had already established himself as a unique and singular vision in the landscape of rock writing, and had to say little for people to take his opinion as gospel when it came to contemporary music. But, in the essay, Lester actually uses invented ethical proof as well. He used extensive research, cataloguing Eno’s music and career, as well as conducted numerous interviews with Eno himself; in an effort to the have the audience see him and the work from a true journalistic perspective. His extensive knowledge of Eno’s life and work as well as the casual dialog he developed with the man give credence to the face that though he was writing only about music, Lester was still a serious writer and social critic.
Lester clearly adheres to the rhetorical school of thought that a writer can only present themselves as intelligent through demonstrating that they have put in the time of doing the homework and the research. He presents himself in the first paragraph in the first person, meticulously listening to Eno’s music, even describing some of it and how it sounds to him, as well as meticulously researching the man.
Lester says, “The other day I was lying on my bed listening to Brian Eno's Music For Airports. The album consists of a few simple piano or choral figures put on tape loops which then run with variable delays for about ten minutes each, and is the first release on Eno's own Ambient label. Like a lot of Eno's "ambient" stuff, the music has a crystalline, sunlight-through-windowpane quality that makes it somewhat mesmerizing even as you only half-listen to it, Listing all the projects he's been involved with in his career so far is a bit like trying to enumerate the variegate colors and patterns on a lizard's back.” Lester continues on with a detailed description of Eno’s career to that point, and it is clear to the reader that he is more than familiar with the man’s music and his place in popular culture. One of the most fascinating things about Lester Bangs’ writing was that he never assumed. Though he could usually safely believe that he was often “preaching to the choir” when it came to his music essays, he always took the time to give the best, most concise, and least biased view of a musician that he could demonstrate (except when it came to Lou Reed evidently).
To further his credibility, Lester talks of the extremely casual and likeable relationship that he and Eno established through their interviews. By showing the audience that Lester, a man of infamous glutton and debauchery, could talk humbly and interestedly with Eno, a man of considerable prestige and academic appeal, he proves that he is both a common man and a man of intelligence that is truly interested in the issues at hand. He even admits his reservations to interviewing a man as prestigious as Eno, “I had been following his work for years, and just wanted to find out what kind of guy he was. I didn't expect much, really, or rather what I expected was either some narcissistic twit or more likely a character whose head was permanently lodged in the scientific/cybernetic/conceptual art clouds. Somebody who might be nice enough but was just a little too... ethereal.” But ultimately demonstrates

Birthday.

2009-10-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

22 on the 22nd! It’s like a dream come true!

Well, actually, I just feel older, more worried that I am not doing anything with my life, and even more worried that teenaged apathy is spreading to my young adult years. I had a nightmare last night that my wonderfully thick and full hair magically fell out over night, the anxiety is killing me!

All in all things aren’t too bad. Been having lots of fun, writing a lot, listening to good music, blah blah. Checking the facebook all day to see who has written me happy birthday posts, I guess I am a text book narcissist, are most writers vein? I should ask a psychologist.

Extremely tired and ready for the week to be over, too much internship hooplah and journalism deadlines driving me over the edge. I need a drink, or something. My father will be in town tonight and he’ll be treated me and some closer friends of mine to dinner and booze. Do Americans, actually, do people, ever celebrate anything without food and booze? I can’t imagine turning 22 and not having a drink, which probably speaks volumes about my character, good thing I’m writing in on my internet blog where the entire world can see it!

I wish there was a concert I had desire to see tonight. Something loud, yet tuneful, no obscure noise or anything. I actually think Metallica would be an ideal birthday band, just do shots and listen to the amps blare “For whom the Bells Toll” would surely make me feel fulfilled for the year. I wonder if Hetfield or Lars has actually read “For Whom the Bells Toll”, they should, they might actually like it, got lots of nice violence. That Hemingway sure did have one dark conception of humanity.

I love how people always seem to care more about others’ birthdays than the actual person whose birthday it is. So many calls, the entire same thing, “22 on the 22nd!”, or, “Feeling old?” “No I’m not feeling fucking old I’m only 20!”, is generally what I’m thinking, but I generally write it off with a polite thanks. And the social networking sites are ridiculous! People wishing me a happy birthday that I haven’t talked to or thought of in years, and others who I flat out have never talked to! The only thing I’m thinking about is that I’ll be thirty in 8 years, and considering 14 doesn’t seem that long ago, I am truly not looking forward to it. I can almost guarantee that at 30 I’ll still wear Nike Dunks and Black Flag shirts, pathetic really. Hopefully then I’ll be a published writer, either that or I’ll have gotten my big break in the acting business, starring in the upcoming film version of “Blood Meridian” as the Kid. Oh, how I do love fantasies.

I just don’t want to lose my hair.

The Long Road Home; pt. 7

2009-10-21T12:51:00.001-07:00

He walked into the car, it was freezing, and the windows were clouded with fog and ice. He was hungry, and tired. It had been months since he had a decent night’s sleep. Well, he wasn’t actually sure how long it was.
The ignition was shot. He spent what seemed like hours trying to chug the engine along into starting, the noise was starting to nauseate him. Finally, it started, and the warmth of the car heater brought peace to his mind and hearth to his body. He made his way off the exit, and onto the road. It was dark, and his lights were dimming out. He could barely see, and yet, he went on.
He popped some more amphetamines, all though the feeling of slight euphoria they gave him did not amount to the guilt he felt over taking them. He was tired of such a useless routine, and longed for something new. He drove forward, and sideways, the only sign of hope being the occasional traffic light, or an animal crossing the road.
About 100 miles down the road he stumbled upon a horrific accident. There were two cars; one was a large black sub that was sitting on its side in the middle of the road, and the other, a white convertible that had flipped onto the snow towards the left side of the road. There were not yet any police on arrival, and not an ambulance to ensure these people’s fate. The decision was his and his alone.
He saw a woman trying to escape from her window of the SUV. Her hand was severed, most likely from the broken glass of the windshield, and the blood loss was immense, spraying the black SUV with its effervescent glow. He leapt out of his car to help her.
“Please, help me sir,” she said, “My husband, he is stuck.”
He gazed inside the gar, and to his horror saw the man’s head sticking through the glass, pieces of it broken off and lodged in his exposed brains. He fought the urge to puke and gained his composure. The amphetamines turned out to be not such a bad idea after all.
“Listen Miss, we need to get you to a hospital,” he said.
“My husband,” she cried, “We’ve been married for 33 years, he can’t die.”
“I know, I know,” he said, “but please let me help you.”
He dragged her from the car as she shrieked hysterically. He removed his prized leather coat and used it to clot the blood flowing from the woman’s left wrist. He ran to his car and retrieved a bottle of vicodin, a fifth of vodka, and a first aid kit.
“Here, please take these, it’ll numb” the pain,” he said, “both kinds.”
She lay back, and he fed her three pills, and had her tilt her head slightly so he could use the booze to wash them back, she made a distasteful gesture with her face as the harsh warm vodka warmed her and calmed her.
“Thank you,” she said, “you’re kind, you might now know it yet, but you’re kind.”
The woman’s face was losing color, and it was then he noticed a far more serious wound in her belly, a large piece of glass that had wedged itself between her ribs. He tried to dress it up with gauze. It was too late. The woman coughed blood and her eyes rolled into her head, and she sat there in his arms, lifeless, and at peace.
The man saw headlights coming into his vision. He had forgotten about the car on the side of the road, but it didn’t matter.
A large man stepped out of the ambulance, and approached him. He looked at the lifeless woman sitting in his arms.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he said, “But this woman will be eternally grateful for what you tried to do.”
Then, he cried.

Mandatory Blog 1

2009-10-19T15:20:00.001-07:00

We, writers, are familiar with the ancient rhetoricians and their belief that an argument is not complete unless appealing to ethos, the speaker’s credibility, or logos, the issue itself. But as Aristotle states`, there is a third intrinsic proof, pathos, the appeal to powerful human emotions. As English speakers, we think of the term “pathetic” as a grand insult for the most pitiful of behaviors, but taken strongly, the term literally means to arouse powerful emotions.
Aristotle stated three specific criteria for emotional appeal to be used as intrinsic proof within a piece. First, one must understand the state of mind of people who are angry, indignant, or joyful; second, they need to understand who is capable of arousing such emotions within people; and third, they must understand the reasons for which people become emotional. In his essay “Under the Influence” of which details the powerful effect a father’s alcoholism has on his son, Scott Russell Sanders adheres to all three criteria and creates a powerful essay that is sure to leave a lasting impression on even the most passive of readers.
He begins his essay with, “My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food-compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because my father quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer.” Clearly, without even really making a solid effort to do so, Sanders elicits a strong response in the reader. It is clear that the writer’s father and his voracious drinking had lasting psychological damage on him. By just evoking painful memories, we are able to sympathize with a man who isn’t directly asking for our sympathy.
Clearly he demonstrates the ability to understand human emotions, and because are emotions are generally affected by direct stimuli, it is known that those we care about, our friends and more so our family, have more bearing on our emotions than others. Sanders is talking about his father, the man that arguably shapes the young adult male (in many cases) more than any other person, and the debilitating psychological baggage that his father’s binge-drinking brought on. Sanders writes, “I lie there hating him, loving him, fearing him, knowing I have failed him.” He details the complex and confused emotions that occur from such a difficult experience as watching a loved and trusted family member destroy himself with booze. His father’s drinking was able to simultaneously make feel angry, helpless, and guilty, all while still being able to project love onto his father. These internal conflicts of facing a plethora of emotions brought on by a single event can relate to any human being as we are all faced with conflicting and confusing emotions, thus, he is able to directly relate to the reader even if he/she might not have any experience with alcoholism.
By appealing to the reader’s emotions, Sanders is able to make a highly convincing argument against alcoholism. By telling his own story of his father’s booze addiction he is also able to establish ethos, as a known talented writer and a man with personal experience in the matter, he clearly is able to come off as someone well-versed in the issue. Just to strengthen his argument, he even offers statistical numbers as to the vastly high rates of alcoholism in the United States. By using such grand emotional appeal, Sanders successfully elicits a strong response from the reader and makes a highly powerful statement of the social dilemma of alcoholism and its effect on the children of alcoholic parents.

The Long Road Home; pt.6

2009-10-18T19:44:00.001-07:00

He re-entered the lobby with the intention of checking out.
He approached the register, and the hotel manager was sitting in his chair, ignoring a phone call, and clipping his toenails.
“I need to head out,” said the man.
The manager looked up and raised his left eyebrow, revealing a glass eye, hollow and white.
“You most certainly do,” said the manager, “but I don’t think it’s quite your time, you have a long ways ahead of you before you ever escape.”
“Escape?” said the man.
“I meant head out,” replied the manager, “In any case, its only 25 dollars a night, and since you haven’t stayed here but three hours, it’ll be 25 dollars anyways.”
The man reached into his back pocket, it was empty, no wallet, no cash, nothing. He realized he left it in the woman’s room, and he was damned if he was going to make that visit ever again.
“I, uh, I seem to have lost my wallet,” said the man, “is there some form of collateral I can offer you?”
The manager’s glass eye was gleaming, and his hardened face momentarily tensed, before giving way to his generally calm veneer, “Well, I generally only accept hard currency, but there are some exceptions for those that I find……., intriguing.”
“Intriguing?” he asked, before realizing what it was about him that made him so, he re-focused on the task at hand; getting back to the road.
“Well, what kind of promise do you require?” said the man.
“You must promise to keep hopeful,” said the man, “hope is the only power you have left, and without it you will never again know the beauty of love or the magic of passion,” said the manager.
The man had no idea what this kind but strange manager meant, and he made very little effort to decipher the meaning. He stood for a moment trying to read the manager’s facial expressions. The manager was staring directly into him, he knew him.
“I can do that,” said the man.
“Do what?” said the manager.
“Remain hopeful.”
“Promise me feller; promise me that you will keep hope.”
The man, true to judicial fashion, raised his hand, crossed his heart, and said, “I promise that I will remain hopeful.”
The manager nodded approvingly, and reached out to shake the man’s hand. Their hands met, and they stood there in silent cordiality. As the man was ready to turn away, he noticed a tear streaming down the manager’s left half of his face, but paid little attention to it, and finally broke free of that miserable existence of a motel.
As he walked out, it was dark. He made his way to his car, and felt something of an epiphany. He realized that prior to his encounters with the woman and the manager, he had no hope, he was drifting through this false reality of a life, but his conversation with the man re-invigorated him with hope and passion, and he was ready for something new. He knew he was almost there, but the question was how would he get there?

Top 5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature pt. 5; Iago

2009-10-13T15:23:00.001-07:00

Save the best for last indeed.

Iago is till this day, what I consider the greatest villain in all of literature. He is in many ways the very first portrayal of, or at least the best earliest of the most remembered, a classic psychopath in literature. He is Shakespeare’s most sinister villain, only rivaled by Lady Macbeth and Edmund from King Lear. Iago is a Machiavellian schemer and liar, expertly manipulating all the characters in the play, and most notably Othello himself, while maintaining his reputation as an honest and decent advisor. His cunning is very little rivaled in literature. He is even referred to in the play as “Honest Iago”, denoting that not only do other people believe his lies, but they often think of him as the person most worthy of their trust. Shakespearean critic A.C. Bradley has said, “Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago.”

For those of you whom aren’t familiar with the play, well first off, get familiar, to me it’s his greatest achievement, a massive entangled web of lies and hatred all stemming around the relationship between Othello, the novel but corruptible soldier, and Iago, the manipulative and sadistically jealous advisor. Iago and Othello are longtime soldiers who have fought together for years. At the beginning, Iago tells the audience he has been unfairly passed over for promotion to lieutenant to Cassio. Iago plans to have Othello demote Cassio, and eventually cause Othello’s total destruction. Iago does have an ally in Roderigo, a dim-witted and easily-fooled insignificant, who helps Iago under the false pretenses that once Othello is gone, Othello’s wife Desdemona will be with Roderigo.

There is no one able to lie so masterfully as Iago in all of literature. First, he sets into motion a drunken brawl that ensures Cassio’s demotion, and begins on his real scheme. He will leas Othello to believe Desdemona is sleeping with Cassio. He cons his wife, Emilia, into stealing a handkerchief that Othello had given her, and tells Othello that he had seen it in Cassio’s possession. Othello suitably flies into maddening jealousy, and Iago tells him to hide behind the curtains while he talks to Cassio. He leads Cassio into a rather explicit conversation about Cassio’s mistress, Bianca, but leads Othello it is about Desdemona. Othello is stricken with grief, and orders Iago to murder Cassio. Instead, he lets his ally Roderigo fight Cassio, and murders Roderigo while Cassio is only wounded. Iago’s plans imminently succeed when Desdemona is murdered by Othello. Nevertheless, Iago’s wife brings his treachery to light and he is arrested at the end of the play.

The most study of Iago has had to deal with his motives, and why he felt such need to wreak such horrible havoc on the other characters’ lives, and many scholars felt he did this for no real reason other than that he good, making him a classic misanthropic sociopath. Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Iago’s motives as “motiveless malignity”, meaning he sought to destroy the other characters for no personal gain. In Act 1, Iago presents his motives as bitterness over being passed for promotion and his racist hatred over Othello, a black man, being with Desdemona, a white woman. But, many would seem to find these excuses to little more than classic sociopathic rationalizations and his real reason is his supreme confidence in his ability to destroy Othello and escape arrest or suspicion. Iago only presents his true evil nature in his asides to the audience, and presents himself as charismatic, witty, and charming to the other characters, also hinting at a sociopathic nature. He even offers sound advice to both Othello and Cassio. In any case, there are few characters like Iago, and he is very much a metaphor for the destructive nature of jealousy itself. We are never told what Iago is like before the play, and due to his status as celebrated soldier he was most likely heroic, but his ambitions turned to human destruction driven by petty jealousy. He is without guilt, and revels in the mayhem he has caused. Some say that he is a representation of the darker side of Othello himself, that little voice in the back of our heads telling us that our lovers don’t really love us. He is a manifestation of human hatred and malignity, and this is why he is the greatest evil in all of literature; he is an evil we all can identify with.

Top 5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature pt. 4; Mr. Hyde

2009-10-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

Robert Louis Stevenson's "the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is to this day the greatest fictional portrayal of split personality disorder ever written. The story is particularly frightening because Dr. Jekyll is a kind and benveolent man noted for his numerous good deeds, and it is because he tries so hard to live up to this good persona that an absolutely malevolently evil and sadistic persona forms within that same personality, essentially with Mr. Hyde taking over Dr. Jekyll completely. The book is left ambiguous, and we are never explicitly told what Jekyll does when he becomes Hyde at night, though it was certainly something of a depraved and immoral nature. In my mind, I always felt Stephenson was trying to hint at a bloodlust for prostitutes. The fact that Jekyll takes the potion to become Hyde also hints that he feels that as Hyde he is allowed to engage in immoral activities that a doctor of his stature would never be able to get away with freely. It is most likely that Dr. Jekyll has this evil in him at all times, but it is the potion that only gives him the courage to do something that he feels constantly a need to do, such as when he killed the benevolent Sir Danvers in the streets of London for no other personal gain than the thrill of the kill.

Freud believed that our unconcious repressed thoughts have massive influence on our concious thoughts. Dr. Jekyll was trying so hard to repress his evi side, or his bad self, that all of us have within us, that an actual seperate and malevolent personality was formed to act out these darker urges. If someone repressed all thier dark urges to the unconcious mind than these urges can manifest unconciously, thus creating a Mr. Hyde like dual personality. The book is terrifying because Dr. Hyde/Mr. Jekyll is a representation of both pure good and pure evil. The failure to accept the tension of duality between good and evil is related to Victorian Theology in that Satan was banished to hell for failing to accept that he was a created being and not in fact God.

Top 5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature pt 3; Alex DeLarge

2009-10-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

Alex from Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange" is one of the most entertaining and charming psychopathic charachters ever to be put to written word. He is sadistically violent, portrayed as someone who murders, robes, and rapes for little more than personal bemusement. For him the kill is the motive, hurting someone is the end. Ironically, he is also the protagonist of the book, acting as somewhat of the perfect anti-hero. He is the novel only 15 years old and already very seasoned in delinquent behavior. He leads a small gang called the Droogs, and he is the youngest member of the group, though he is portrayed as far more intelligent and vicious than his buddies and comes up with the majority of their sick tirades. As an intellectual, he knows his actions are inherently wrong, though because of a deep seeded need to destroy he doesn't feel any real remorse over his actions. He is most definitely a classic psychopath.

Even though he is a sadistic killer, the reader at times finding themselves enjoying Alex's many quirks, and in some ways it wouldn't be surprising if the reader would at some point come to like Alex. He speaks with a strange dialect created by Burgess called Nadsat, teenage slang based on some English and Russian words. He is enormously witty. He likes to drink milk that is laced with various stimulants, most likely methamphetamines, as well as psychedelics. He has a passion for Classical music, especially Beethoven. There is a scene in the book where he passionately listens to Beethoven and goes into deep and detailed fantasies of torture and rape, bringing him to the point of orgasm.

When Alex is eventually sold out by his friends to the police (they got sick of his arrogant manner), he is sentenced to a unique form of aversion therapy. Alex is injected with a drug and becomes violently ill, and then exposed to scenes of rape and murder. He is then not even able to fantasize about hurting people without experiencing the same symptoms. He is let out of prison, but still wholly unable to integrate himself back into society. He runs into old friends and enemies, all who mercilessly beat him, with Alex not even able to defend himself. The climax comes when Alex runs into the writers who's wife he had raped, the assault of which resulted in her death by some unnamed illness. The writer is able to make this connection after hearing Alex sing, "Singin in the Rain", the same tune he hummed when he raped his wife. The writer drugs Alex and locks him in a room, making him listen to the ninth symphony, the sound of also makes Alex incredibly ill. Alex attempts to commit suicide by jumping out of the house, but instead wakes up in the hospital, with the illness apparently subsided. He instantly reverts to his evil self, fantasizing of torture and murder. The novel ends on an ambiguous note, with a 21 year old Alex working a government job and fantasizing about starting a family. Alex represents the futility of trying to reform violent criminals, as his nature is deep rooted and unchangeable. The end of the novel shows that it was only boredom that was able to make Alex grow out of his psychopathy, but even then he is left with sinister urges.

The Long Road Home; pt. 5

2009-10-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

He was tired. For so long he had no where to go and no idea where he was going. She took her clothes off, and sat on the bed. The room reeked of alcohol and bad sex. He noticed dried blood on the wall beside the television set. He felt disturbed, but the scenario seemed all too familiar too him.
“Uh, maybe we can just get some coffee, or something,” he said.
She looked at him with a cold and castrating glare, “You drag me all the way up here and you’re not even going to get it done.”
He felt emasculated. He noticed a fifth of whiskey on a sink at the side of the room. He poured himself a drink. The warmth and comfort of the alcohol soothed his mind, and he decided to go through with the act.
He approached her at the bed, and kissed her. She pushed him away, “None of that,” she said.
He didn’t understand her hesitance. She did not want any emotions; this was purely for satisfaction, or even comfort. He had no problem with this, and he took his time taking his pants off.
“Do it,” she said.
He slid his hands between her legs. She was undeniably sexy, skin smooth and milky, like an actress in an old Film Noir. She remained silent, and he wondered if he was doing it right, it had been a while. She grabbed his penis, making him painfully aware of his total lack of an erection.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said.
He was humiliated. His face wore a color of red generally associated with blood. He simply couldn’t feel. He wanted to be alive, to give this strange and exotic woman comfort, but he lacked the courage and fortitude to be fully engaged in the act of love. Or maybe, there was something else to the situation.
She kicked him out of bed and he swiftly put his clothes back on. She put on the television, flipping through the channels, and stopped when she noticed “Casablanca” being played on AMC.
“Life is never like this,” she said.
“It can be,” he said, “some people can live like that, but we are of a dead generation.”
“Don’t get fucking philosophical on me,” she said, “I can’t even get a decent lay out of a useless prick like you.”
He felt suddenly violent. He wanted to lunge at her, but she was of such inconsequence to him that the feelings of hurt vanished as if they were never there to begin with.
“Get the fuck out,” she said.
He walked towards the doorway, and looked at her one last time. She lay there, mouthing along to Humphrey, “Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”
He opened the door, and gazed into the abyss. Then, he walked back into the darkness, and made his way to the road.

5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature pt. 2; Lady Macbetj

2009-10-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

This article is referring to Lady Macbeth in the first two acts of the play, but mainly the first, as she eventually takes her life out of guilt, displaying at least some kind of remorse for her actions.

I've always found Lady Macbeth to be one of Shakespeare's most fascinating characters. She is in many ways a Femme Fatale, the way she tempts Macbeth to commit the heinous act of murder for her own personal gain and Macbeth's eventual destruction, but she is also kind of de-sexified. Many critics have talked about her being an "anti-mother", especially for the part in the play when she asks to be de-sexed and of course the infamous line about wanting to bash in the brains of the baby who sucks from her breast. These lines were particularly hideous for early Modern England, a country with mother issues anyways (they still have a queen yknow). She wants power, and wants to take it with dominance usually associated with males in Shakespeare. But, she her power is still maternal, acting as a guide for Macbeth's tremendously powerful ambition. She brings us images of motherhood, but they are evil and destructive images. When she wants to be un-sexed, I have always felt she was asking to have the rotten feelings of human compassion stripped away from her, as those emotions are usually associated with maternity.

Many critics say Lady Macbeth is a classic witch. Critic Joanna Levin defines a witch as a woman that succumbs to satanic force, a lust for the devil, and who, either for this reason or the desire to obtain supernatural powers, invokes (evil) spirits. Lady Macbeth conjures the evil spirits, "the three witches", that show Macbeth his path that leads him to murder and eventually self--destruction. She uses her lust for supernatural power as a means of getting ahead of Macbeth, and also attacks his masculinity, making her the dominant force in the relationship. Her desire is absolute power, and she seeks to attain that goal in a single minded fashion. To me, Lady Macbeth is act one only is beaten by Othello's Iago (I'll get to him soon) in terms of Shakespeare's most sinister characters.

Correction

2009-10-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

The previous article is about "Judge Fowler" and not "Judge Archon" as I repeatedly called him. I was tired and wrote the article in a hurry and was thinking about the end of the article when I argued that Fowler could be a sort of gnostic archon. In any case, very sloppy, my apologies.

5 Most Evil Charachters in Literature; part. 1

2009-10-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about whom are the most evil charachters in all of literature are. It took me a while to narrow it down, but here's what I came up with.

Number 5

Judge Archon from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is one of the most disturbing and unabashedly evil characters from all of literature. For those unfamiliar with the novel, in the bulk of it depicts a real historical gang of scalp-hunters who raped, robbed, and massacred Native Americans through the Mexico-United States borderlands in 1849 and 1850. Judge Archon, also a real historical figure, bands the man of the Clanton Gang together and leads them on a journey of despicable torture, sadism, and murder.
Judge Archon acts as the leader of the gang along with John Joel Glanton. He at first appears as a very mysterious character. He is massive, well over 7 feet tall and capable of welding a battle cannon as if it were a simple rifle, he is also totally pale and completely bereft of body hair, giving him an inhuman appearance. He is described as unscrupulous and violent, and is totally devoted to conflict and the destruction of innocent life. Throughout the novel he kills countless people, including children. He is extremely intelligent, and has what seems like a supernatural level of knowledge and skills, yet doesn’t seem to exude any sort of formal education. His skills are seemingly self-taught, and he uses these skills to weld dominance over other humans. He claims in the novel that his only goal is total power; he wishes to weld this total power in a world where there are other powerful men.
Judge Archon is a manifestation of pure evil, an embodiment of everything wrong with the human condition. He has no motive other than the destruction of innocence. He kills in cold blood, and gets more than just a little satisfaction out of it, for him the kill is the only satisfaction. McCarthy also implied in the novel that he may be a pedophile. Aside from the children that he openly kills, there are also scenes that depict him enticing young children with sweets, and many times in the novel children go missing when he is in the area. His murders of children to him resemble the ultimate destruction of innocence. He is not a typical psychopath as is portrayed in modern cinema and literature. He doesn’t have any interest in appearing to those around him as cunning or charming, he makes no bones about what he is. He is a ruthless killer devoid of any conscience. Even scarier is the fact that he is not insane; he is clear and concise in his motives, if there are any.
Throughout “Blood Meridian”, many might start to wonder about Archon’s stance as “human”. Whereas the other members of the gang seem to age, Archon doesn’t, his appearance remains the same throughout a whole 30 year span. The novel’s “protagonist”, the Kid, begins to feel horrible guilt for the vicious crimes he committed throughout his tenure on the Clanton gang. The Judge feels no guilt, and in the final scene with the Kid, he talks about almost missing those days. His speed, strength, and stamina all appear to be superhuman. Indeed, towards the end of the novel, Archon is described more explicitly as superhuman, maybe even a demonic entity or the concept of evil personified.
In his essay "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy", literature professor Leo Daugherty argued that McCarthy's Holden is, or at least embodies, a Gnostic archon, a kind of demon. McCarthy has often been viewed as a Gnostic writer, Gnosticism believing in one divine being or creator, basically God. The Archons are entities who act to separate humanity from god, while mirroring humanity itself. Many Archons are likened to Christian angels, pure good, while the others are Christian demons, pure evil. Judge Holden is one of the most fascinatingly evil characters throughout literature, as he stands as something more than human while mirroring humanity’s darkest aspects simultaneously.

The Long Road home part 3

2009-10-07T11:45:00.000-07:00

They walked upstairs to the long lonely stairway corridor. The stairs winded for what seemed like an eternity, and he felt as if they might be stuck in the upwards vortex for all eternity, yet he didn’t seem to mind. He looked at her from behind, following her; she was beautifully shaped, long legs and firm hips, a midsection made for love. And yet, he couldn’t smell her, and he barely even longed to taste her. He didn’t understand the point of following her, and yet he continued to do so. He felt rats skitter under his feet, startling him, almost making him fall backward into the abyss he felt as he had spent his entire life trying to climb out of. Maybe this was all there was. There was the stench of death in the air, like burning jasmine leaves through a mid summer’s drought, beauty lost. And beauty was lost. As he looked at the beautiful girl he was following he didn’t recognize beauty, only a hallow shape of a well endowed female.
They finally reached the top of the winding stairs.
“Cmon,” she said, “My room is just up the way.”
He noticed the wallpaper coming off the walls, the humidity causing the cheap brand paper to lose its stick; it smelled something awful, like a sweaty obese man refusing to take a shower. And yet, he followed. He wasn’t sure if he was following her for sex, for love, or for no reason at all. He didn’t remember what love felt like, and he was sure he remembered that he liked the feeling of sex, but he felt as if he didn’t deserve such bodily pleasures. He tried to remember the feeling, but his mind was blank, he had tried to forget himself for so long that he didn’t know the difference between consciousness and sleep. He was in a state of drift, drifting through life (was he alive?) and drifting through death, a no man’s land through the ugliest depths of the human consciousness. The hallway seemed longer than the corridor, and as he walked past the rooms every sound revealed its own ugly scene. He heard screams in one room, and laughs, a woman pining her way for freedom against a ruthless assaulter. He put his ear to the door, and heard the vicious cracks of bones and the maniacal laughter. He wanted to help, but he didn’t see how he could. He heard sniffs and sighs in one room, and then nothing in another. He was clearly not alone in this cruel existence.
“We’re here,” she said.
“Where are we?” he said.
“Here, yknow, my home.”
“You live here?”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it living, would you?”
He was bewildered by the question, and yet he thought he instinctively knew the answer. Hesitantly, he followed her in to the tight doorway, and shut the door behind him with a powerful thud.

The Long Road Home; pt. 3

2009-10-03T16:05:00.000-07:00

He gazed at the room with bewilderment and yet a curious sense of wonder. He felt more whole in this shady dive than he had for years in his own home. Anonymity was something he strived for. He took a sip from his cold perspiring beer and took in the enchantedly lifeless scene. He saw her across the bar. He felt enthralled; she wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but nevertheless she exuded mysterious sensuality and her very presence felt seductive. He ordered two shots, one for liquid courage, and another for luck. They hit his empty stomach hard, the bile almost peaking to the surface, but only held down by the knots in his stomach, making him aware of emotions he’d long forgotten how to feel.
As he approached her he became aware of the wild pattering rhythm of his heart, giving life to a dead organ. This is life. As he stood beside her, he could not catch even the slightest hint of acknowledgement or emotion on her face, suggesting she too had been on the road as long as him, or she was just illustrating a carefully constructed persona. Her hair was long, down to her middle back, and jet black, darker than the room itself. Eyes of ice; crystal blue, penetrating and alarming, and lips so red and full he thought they surely could not exist.
“Im, uh…, can I buy you a drink?” he said.
“I already have one, you can clearly see that?”
She clearly was in disdain of the courting rituals as much as he, though she had gone on to abandon them all together, in favor of cold and distant relations that seemed so much real and human to the both of them. The modernist world does not require romance, in a cold and distant world the only rational behavior is to also remain cold and distant, unchangeable.
“What’s your name?”, he said, clearly aware of the futility and pointlessness of the question.
“It doesn’t matter what my name is, and I don’t want to know your name either,” she said, “Names do not have relevance in this dimension that we exist in, but I can see you’re attracted to me, so if you like, you can sit here and drink with me.”
“Ok, what are you drinkin?” he said.
“Dry gin”, she said, with her face resembling lady liberty, unchanging and stone.
They sat there and did not talk much, and when they did speak, they only spoke of the road. Their life previous to the road only held significance in that it eventually brought them to this long and never-ending cycle. Were they even human anymore? He dazed off and imagined the silliness of the word “human” being explicative of emotion and passion, as nearly every human he came across was a creature with no emotion or passion, just drifting through the days. St. Augustine thought purgatory was bad, but he clearly had never lived in the post-modern era.
“Many are freed from the prison of hell ... through the good works of the living and the Church's prayers for them, most of all through the unbloody sacrifice, which is offered on certain days for all the living and the dead.”
She looked bored, she gazed into him and evoked the chills he felt when he first saw someone dead.
“You’ve been good, we can go upstairs if you like.”

The Long Road Home; pt. 2

2009-09-30T08:42:00.001-07:00

He walked through the tight hallway corridors, the walls seemingly closing in on him by the time he made it to the stairs. There was a strange smell in the air, not bad per se, but certainly alarming. The smell of years of whores and johns and killers and thieves and scoundrels making their presences known throughout the tiny rooms of the dingy hotel. This was an unholy place.
He walked downstairs to the bar. Cigarette smoke clouded his being, to which his only response was to light another cigarette. He made his way to the dingy and dimly lit bar. There were an assorted group of individuals there that night. He sat at an open stool next to a biker gang. They had equal length of hair, and they smelled something awful, the result of old leather and days on the road at the time. He looked at the girl and noticed that at one point or another she might have been attractive, but years of abuse (both from thy self and from others) have left her run down, and beat up, not even a shadow of her former self, but a different entity all together. The life of the nomadic American.
He ordered a Bud Light. It tasted acidic going down his cotton-mouth ridden throat and his stomach was having trouble accepting it. The speed was running down finally and he was left with an unpleasant sweat and jitters in his muscles. He looked around the bar. So many lost and wandering souls all gather to places like these. A refuge for those without refuge; taking comfort in the familiar feeling of an alcohol buzz and a nicotine rush.
After the first beer went down, the rest seemed far easier.
“Have I been headed here my whole life?” he thought.
He took out a picture from his wallet. Her shimmering gold hair and full and protruding lips seemed miles away from him now. He didn’t know the person she once loved any longer. He felt cold and distant. Emotions seem so scarce on the road.
Someone put a Van Morrison song on the jukebox, and the music soothed him to an extent. He tried to contemplate how he had gotten to his hotel, this bar, this place, and with these people. Was he one of these people? Though the thought terrified him, he really couldn’t seem to care.

Are we all useless?

2009-09-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

A stereotype that young students are constantly faced with is the fact that elder generations feel that we are nothing more than lazy, substance abusing narcissists who have none of our priorities in order. Of course this cliché is very hard to combat considering the portrayal of young college kids in film and television. The characters are generally over-drinking womanizing fraternity brothers and submissive and vain sorority sisters. And the fact is, many times those stereotypes hold to be true. We, and I am certainly included, are holding on to our last breath of youth before we have to enter the real world and be faced with the same complex issues that we have seen our parents bare since we were born. Many of us do not want to face the world, but I’d say more of us are trying to enjoy these four years prior to them being over, and when living amongst a culture where alcohol and even drugs are so commonplace, there are of course going to be casualties.
The fact is, students today are clocking more studying time and working hours than any generation prior to us. The elder generation can raise their nose but the fact is, those of them went to college had far less competition than we do today. They also seem to ignore the fact that this is their future generation; we will be the ones holding this ultimately damaged country up long after their gone, so why continue to write us off as lazy underachievers when they will one day rely on our accomplishments? Four days a week I leave for campus at 7 a.m, and generally do work until 7 at night. My mind is constantly exhausted and yet I am still able to produce quality journalism, as well as even create short stories that seem to be improving by the day. And yet I am looked at with disdain for wanting to drink beer and smoke grass on the weekends? Is this something that makes me a bad person? Hardly. It makes me a normal person. The mind can only take so much stimulation before it needs to kick back and enjoy these twilight years of my youth.

The Long Road Home, pt. 1

2009-09-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

He looked down upon that long winding road, knowing where it would lead, but still excited about the way he’d get there. Possibilities seemed so infinite, and yet, time was running out. He couldn’t any longer tolerate the complacence of common life, he needed something more; danger, passion, love, hate. He wanted it all.
There were no good-byes. In fact, there were no greetings either, not even names, only faces. The faces of all shapes and sizes, some beautiful and some ugly, some quite enchanting. One back alley bar after another, he experienced the world, but a world different from the one 9 to 5ers live in. The world he lived in was one of mysticism and unknown, every road a dream, every dead end a spectacle. And oh how there were dead ends. Everyone met them at some point.
“When will I meet my dead end?” he thought.
He had been driving for days, no sleep necessary thanks to the amphetamines he picked up at a truck stop some time back. His heart rate was jacked, and he could feel sleep pulling at his consciousness’, begging him to give in and close his eyes. He noticed a motel and a bar to the side of the road. He no longer remembered, or cared, where he actually was or where he was going. The destination was obsolete; it is only the journey that matters, for the destination can not ever be measured.
He walked into the hotel. A seedy place; he could smell the past of the joint. Violence, sex, and death were emanating from all corners of the packed in lobby. He noticed an old couple in a chair eating fried chicken; they looked so content. Contentment to him was just a nice word for boredom. He didn’t like this place.
“How long will you be staying?” the bellman said.
“Too long,” he replied, “I guess just for the night.”
He brought his things up to his room, and lay for a bit in the hard cold mattress. He felt he should miss his home at times like this, but he didn’t. Not even her. He was heading to his real home, and what is the illusion of home compared to the real thing? He tried to sleep but the speed was flowing in his blood stream strong, and his heart was so elevated he could see the hairs on his arms sticking up straight. He decided to get some drinks.

I think I already have the Flu

2009-09-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

I arrived home at 11 p.m. I was extremely fatigued and did nothing to enhance personal hygiene and instead only made efforts to satiate myself by collapsing on my bed. I lay there for minutes until realizing I am completely congested and the aches were surging through my body, a reminder of the bacteria's effects on it. I got up and thought, "Please not now."

I retrieved Benadryl from my cabinet, believing that the fatigue created by the drug would somehow lull me into a state on non-consciousness. The pills had no effect, and the queasiness and pain began to grow more intense. Lying there in the dark, focused on nothing other than the malicious bacteria infecting my otherwise healthy body, making me weak and fragile. I noticed I could no longer make a full fist, and began to worry this was more than the run-of-the-mill Cold.

"What I really need is Valium," I thought.

I lay there until 5 a.m, restless and depressed at the mere thought of illness. I look upon myself in a mirror and notice I already look pale and gaunt, the circles under my eyes a sign of disabled state. I watch the news awhile, an activity that could never bring one to a state of peace. Fluff stories about cats in trees followed by stories of horrific crimes followed by biased political reporting all lend an heir of mania to my already sleep deprived and addled mind. I somehow manage a shower and walk to campus. I am a zombie, I need a doctor, I need to feel healthy, it's too damn hot, why now?

Awake, pt. 6

2009-09-28T08:59:00.001-07:00

He so desired to have a companion that could rival his own blood lust, his own lust for cruelty and brutality, that he almost mistook the feeling for general loneliness. A ridiculous idea he though. He looked through the prison records, but he could already here the riot degenerating around him do to him having murdered every correction officer within the facility. He heard the chaos and it gave him a feeling of glee.
There were many promising candidates on the list of thieves, rapists and, murderers. Still though, if he was going to travel the darkness with another man, he knew it would have to be a man capable of pure unadulterated evil, as the sexual gratification he received from Lilah would no longer come into play. He didn’t care about sex anymore anyways; he still liked it of course, but couldn’t disassociate it from violence. Sexual tendencies just seemed too human to him. Then, he found him. Gustav Zapotek, responsible for the rape and murders of 7 women before being arrested in Prague and sentenced to death, of which was going to be carried out within days. His psychological profile described him as, “intelligent but not overtly so, single minded in his approach to murder, incapable of forming real relationships, major sexually sadistic tendencies.”
Caligula made note of his appearance and cell and went to track the man down amongst the rioting. He stepped into the holding section of the prison and witnessed mayhem. Men all fighting for their freedom; killing and snapping and burning and cutting. Caligula felt intoxicated from the fear and confusion that pervaded his vision, and joined into the mayhem. He killed every prisoner that crossed his path, though he felt no real desire to feed off a bunch of mangy scoundrels. He mostly cracked necks, beat them to death or his favorite, ripped their throats out. Then, he saw Gustav. The man, short in stature, no taller then 5 foot 4, young, with Aryan blond hair and blue eyes, but with a deadened face, cold and emotionless, he was already devoid of humanity, and Caligula was jubilated with the thought of the Vampire that this man would make. Gustav was cutting a man’s neck with a piece of a razor, apparently for no reason other than to make the man suffer.
Caligula sped forth with blurry intensity; he had grown very fast and strong. He ripped Gustav’s victim from the predator’s knife and finished the job, biting into the man’s wound and drinking his surprisingly fruitful blood. He looked at Gustav, and for the first time in centuries, noticed the man felt no fear from Caligula’s presence, and his icy body felt warm from the realization.
Gustav looked at him, raising his knife, as if baiting him. Caligula grabbed him by his beck, and beat into his jugular vein, tasting the man’s evil as his blood flood from his neck. He let go, and threw Gustav on the ground.
“You feel no fear, you feel nothing?” said Caligula.
“I feel like I am dying, what are you?” said Gustav.
“You don’t have to die. You can come with me, and you can kill and rape and lust and take forever. No jail, no consequences, I can take out the pain and give you a new eternal life, all you must do is walk with me.”
“And if I saw no?” said Gustav.
“Then I leave you for dead, or to be butchered by these other rapists and criminals.”
Caligula noticed Gustav’s acceptance in his expression, and lunged his fangs forth and drained the man until his heart began to slow. He then cut his wrist with his fang, and fed Gustav. Gustav started hesitant, but seemed to enjoy the sheer bizarreness of the experience, and soon began to drink the blood like an alcoholic does whiskey. He died. But he would soon awake.

English 306 Writing Prompt; Persuasion

2009-09-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

In my community, one in which there are hundreds of thousands of opposing views, the only way to change someone's mind to counter arguments with cold hard fact, dynamic speech patterns, and a whole lot of charisma, but even when delivering an argument perfectly, I still highly doubt the mind of the unchanging modern American can be changed. People in America are stuck in their ways, we are bred to think our views our right, and when we cross lines into opposing views, are loyalties are called into question. If I was arguing the pros of a universal health care system with someone say in the conservative media, I could offer the most dynamically perfect argument in history, and still be met with nothing but fear mongering and forthright hostility. Logical reasoning appears to be a dead art when I put on these debate shows on CNN or Fox News and all I am presented with is fully biased opinions. This lack of contextual debate is bad for democracy and bad for our country as no reconciliation or plan ever seems to emerge from them.

The other night, well morning, it was about 3 a.m., I was with about 15 other people after a party was winding down. For whatever reason, a young girl there, clearly extremely Catholic in her religious upbringing and far to the right in her political beliefs, wanted to discuss religion. I couldn't help but think this absurd considering how pointless theological debate ultimately becomes when you are in a room of so many people from all parts of the world. Then the girl shocked everyone in the room. She asked a Muslim student, a friend of ours in the room, to deliberate on his views on Jesus Christ, totally singling him out. She then went on to talk of how wrong it is that people couldn't think of him as God. The other people in the room, some Christian, some Jewish, many Atheist, then all started shouting at each other all their personal beliefs and ideas. I couldn't help but think what a drag it was, so I simply stood up, spoke in a witty and dry tone, and said, "Listen, there are 15 people here all from very different backgrounds, there is absolutely no way we can achieve a unanimous opinion in this matter therefore we might as well shut up and go back to having fun." Everyone in the room seemed to agree, even the girl, who had already proved nothing but ignorance and intolerance to those around her. I didn't convince anybody of anything other than that some things we can't convince one another of and therefore they are fruitless to debate. For this reason, I feel I was successful.

Awake;pt. 5

2009-09-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

The year was 1918.
It had been over 100 years since Caligula had killed his creator and for some time he loved the single mindedness that came with having no one or no thing be able to hold him back. He simply desired, and took. Immortal life was so simple. Caligula began to become bored with the complacence, simplicity, and effortlessness with which he took innocent life. For the last century he had tried to elevate murder to an art form, but slowly realized that mass slaughter came so natural to him, he couldn’t help but become a tad hackney in his ways. He was rather off put by this. He put himself in situations that were dangerous to try and re-discover his former lust for eternal life. In Prague, he murdered the family of a wealthy merchant, and then purposefully and with cunning allowed himself to be taken into police custody. When in questioning, he could feel his blood curdle with excitement as the young detective looked upon him with disgust at the sheer evil of the act.
“I know you murdered those people, what were those neck wounds?” he said, “Those two twins girls were seven years old, and you killed them, and their mother, and the father is insane because of it, do you realize how sick you are.”
Caligula stared blankly into the detective’s face, showing not a shred of guilt or remorse.
“I know no sickness,” he said.
Caligula quickly snapped his hand cuffs with ease and ripped the throat out of the detective, blood spurting from his neck as water does a faucet. Caligula stared at the mangled flesh and smirked. Seemingly every officer in the building came before him, armed with guns and rifles. They unloaded shots into Caligula, the pain reminding him of what the point of his existence is. The officers were shocked to see the bullets made very little damage upon Caligula’s medium built frame. Caligula laughed blood and stared them all in the face, half of the officers were dead before the others could blink, and then they were dead before they could blink again. Caligula looked at the carnage and reveled in it.
“That was easy, but fun,” he thought.
Caligula made his way to the records, realizing the potential for a new companion that could be found in prison was enticing. Thieves, scoundrels, rapists, and murderers. These were men that were already without remorse, who killed to feel, as Caligula did. Caligula proceeded to go through the records and to find a particularly brutal new friend, one that he could gift with the powers to kill freely of society’s standards and rules.

Awake, pt. 4

2009-09-22T13:15:00.000-07:00

30 years passed and Stephen became legendarily feared. He adopted the name Caligula, after the particularly brutal Roman emperor. Caligula and Lilah terrorized through London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Amsterdam, and countless small villages, always on the move. Caligula had lost count a of the amount of innocents he had slaughtered along time ago, and was beginning to feel bored with the endless routine of never changing, never growing older, hunting and feeding and torturing and killing. He grew stronger with every kill, every live snatched by his own hand made him feel more superior, an eternal mark of the dominant on the weak. And yet, he never felt the sheer satisfaction from the kills that he felt that very first night, murdering Anabelle and Frederich. He was drawn to murder like an addict is to his drug; he spent all his time chasing that first high but never fully achieved it. He came close of course, quite a few times. His massacre of a wedding ceremony in Paris was particularly fruitful; a massive Catholic wedding, he risked massive exposure from this act, and the first thing Lilah taught him was that a Vampire must always avoid an angry mob. Yet, when he looked at the contentment on the beautiful Parisian couple’s faces, he could not resist. He entered quietly; the ceremony was just after dark, his favorite time to hunt. He moved with such grace and speed that he was able to lock every conceivable exit prior to the mass murder.
When the groom and bride both made their vows, he knew the time was perfect. He leapt from the balcony, landing on the podium. People were quite surprised and confused, as Caligula did not break his legs or even acknowledge pain.
“Sorry for interrupting,” Caligula said, “But weddings are such happy times, so happy, that I very much so desire to murder every single person in this room.”
The priest was exasperated, but had no time to acknowledge the situation before Caligula grabbed his neck and snapped it as if it were kindling. Fear and panic broke out into the church, the guests scrambling to the doors like ants from a dissembled hill, helpless to escape, helpless to do anything but wait for the ugly death coming.
The groom made the effort to protect his beloved, but Caligula with almost no effort ripped his arms from their sockets, and the man laid there, blood spurting from his shoulders like geysers, in too much pain to scream. Caligula took great satisfaction in this, and made it a point to suck the bride dry during the groom’s last excruciating minutes. He noted how particularly sweet her blood tasted, virgin blood of the best kind. He had never seen so much fear, and the sense of it made his blood curdle. He did not leave one man, woman, or child alive in that church. He loved murdering in a church; God, should such a being exist, was staring directly at him, scorning him, but Caligula knew that no god, heaven, or hell could touch him, he was immortal. He left the heads of the couple just below the cross; an eternal signifier of one of his finest cruelties.
He punched through the church’s back exit, and ran at full speed back to his lair, to meet Lilah. Lilah was home, feeding on a streetwalker. Caligula, though only a Vampire for some 30 years, couldn’t help but feel he had surpassed his sire. Night after night, year after year, she stuck to the same routine; she’d make herself pretty and draw stupid heinous men in with her sexuality, leaving them dead very fast. Caligula was not impressed by this, it was too easy, and if they have that much power than they surely should elevate their acts of evil beyond that of a mere malicious human. While thinking this, he noticed a fire-lit bottle of grain alcohol into their lair. He had attracted a mob, his massacre of the wedding so clearly not just the result of plain human malice.
“You bloody fool!”, said Lilah, “You’ll have us staked and burned by dawn.”
Caligula was bored with Lilah, she had lost something since his creation. He felt remorseful in a way, she had made him, but not remorseful enough to prevent him from doing it.
“Well, Lilah,” said Caligula, “While you were here eating this filthy bastard I was out laying waste to and drinking from half the women and children in Paris, you are no longer the Vampire you claim to be, and I shall release you from your complacence.”
“What?”, she said, “I made you, you have no power over me.”
At this mere statement, Caligula attatcked her at full force, he needed a weapon, Lilah was stronger than him. Lilah through him into the wall, making him feel pain for the first time in decades.
“This is nonsense Caligula, you are my eternal,” she said.
“I am no one’s anything, I am Caligula, though very young I have surpassed some of the greatest Vampires in the world, and that includes you my love.”
Caligula gathered his composure. Lilah charged at him one more time, so fast Caligula forgot she was there at all. And then, Lilah appeared, but Caligula, through a tremendous act of intensity, caught her at the right angle and grabbed her at the throat, she pleaded with him. After all the pleas and cries for help he had heard in his existence, none sounded as pleasing as Lilah’s, to carry the life of something that powerful in your hands and make it beg is so empowering Caligula felt akin to God, or perhaps beyond a God. With one gesture he ripped Lilah’s dead throat from her 575 year old corpse. The blood seeped on to the floor, and she tried to scream. She was shocked, she thought Caligula loved her, but Caligula only loved death. Caligula grabbed his sword and cut off Lilah’s head, he thought to himself it came off rather quickly considering it was removed from the neck of an immortal. Lilah lay there dead, for the second and final time, and in moments crumbled into dust.
“I have killed my sire, and yet, I don’t care,” Caligula thought, realizing that killing another vampire, let alone one’s maker, was one of the only things looked down upon in vampiric culture, but Caligula felt he needed no laws or rules, he was now free.
By the end of the realization, Caligula’s lair was totally up in flames. He saw there were about 500 men outside waiting to kill him, some were soldiers carrying weapons; guns, arrows, stakes. They knew he wasn’t human, and he was going to prove it to them. He crashed outside of his lair onto the street and emerged before the mob. An arrow flung and Caligula caught it in mid air, avoiding it piercing his heart. Caligula looked up, and knew they would all be dead within minutes. He smiled to himself, and decided he would find a new companion, one whose lust for murder could rival his own.

2009-09-20T15:59:00.001-07:00

Stephen spotted Anabelle and Fredrich leaving the tavern together. He followed them lurking behind the shadows, the anticipation was boiling beneath his icy skin, and his mind was totally attuned to the task at hand. He watched from outside as Frederich and Anabelle made their way to bed together, totally unaware of the future horrors at hand. He then felt, no, he knew, it was the right time. With incredibly intensity he leapt from the street to the young couple’s second story bedroom, and with a flare for over-dramatization, he crashed himself through the window, as making a statement was not nearly enough. The couple screamed and leapt their fully exposed bodies out of the bed, shock and fear permeated their faces, and at this very expression, Stephen felt elated, stimulated, thirsty.
“Stephen, you’re supposed to be dead, we buried your body!”, said Anabelle.
“Oh my love, sorry to disturb you, Stephen is dead, and only that is left is I, what stands before you.”
“Stephen you sound crazy, I don’t understand what you are saying,” said Anabelle as she quivered, the terror was like an aphrodisiac for the young vampire, he could feel her fear and he craved more.
Frederich grabbed Anabelle and they tried to escape downstairs, only to their astonishment, Stephen was already sitting at the kitchen table, smoking some of Frederich’s tobacco.
“This tobacco was far tastier when I was alive,” he said.
He leapt forward at such speed that neither Anabelle nor Frederich could see him, and there he was right next to them, his face was altered somehow, his eyes gleamed with ferocity and he bared fangs, exuding a mark of viciousness of his expression.
“You see Anabelle, I hate Stephen as much as you did, and only more because of the fact that he let himself be seduced and courted by a whore so low in her morals she would betray him for a faggot like Frederich,” he said laughing crazily.
Stephen grabed Frderich by the neck and through him as if he were a pebble into the wall, cracking his arm in the process. Frederich was unconscious.
Frederich awoke to find himself tied to a chair, as well as Anabelle tied to the bed, naked, at the mercy of whatever Stephen had become. He was shaking with fear, and knew what was coming, the very thought of his death at the hands of such a monster infuriated him.
“You bastard Stephen, let her go, let us go, there is no point to this,”
Stephen leapt across the room, and inserted a knife into Frederich’s thigh, “The point is there is no point Frederich, you are pathetic and meaningless, and your exit from the world shall not be remembered; now watch as I take what you took from me.”
Frederich was delirious with the pain, and he felt the blood flow from the wound like a grand waterfall onto a lake, he was helpless to him or Anabelle.
Stephen approached Anabelle silently, she sat bound and gagged on the bed in the position that Stephen arranged for her, the tears streaming down her eyes and the dead white of her skin exhilarated Stephen until no end. He had felt lust for her as human, but this was a lust of primal ferocity, carnal lust.
“Would it shock you if I said I still wanted you?” said Stephen.
She could not respond, which Stephen liked, as he wished this to be a singular experience. He then began to violate her mentally, sexually, and physically, he couldn’t believe how natural this act of despicable evil came to him. He penetrated her and cut her and bruised her, with every scream emanating from her tiny mouth leaving him only more blood thirsty. The brutality went on for hours, and he only stopped when he realized he could no longer hear Frederich’s puny screams and pleas for mercy. Realizing Frederich had bled out and was dead, as a doornail, he felt it was time to finish this act of murderous artistry.
He stroked her beautiful curly blond hair for one last time, and looked into her eyes, staring through her. She looked at him, she had already been beaten into nothing, and her will and her strength were already depleted. She saw his long brown hair and his prominent jawline and deep brown eyes and it was Stephen, but it wasn’t, there was something in him.
“You are my first Anabelle, I shall not forget this.”, he said.
He bit into her with such intensity she could not scream. Her blood flowed from her neck into his body, making him warm, and full, the flavor so sweet than no human could ever imagine it. He drank from her and he drank more, until she lay there lifeless, and cold.
Lilah walked in the room, and was taken with the carnage. She laughed and crashed into Stephen pinning her to the ground
“Congratulations my dear,” she said, “You have severed your ties to humanity, you are mine forever and together we will bring waste to the masses of innocents.”
Stephen felt empowered, and alive. He ripped Lilah over and penetrated inside of her cold and lifeless form. They laughed and made love and went out, excited for a fulfilling eternity of sadism and torture.

"Awoke" pt. 2

2009-09-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

As he laid on the outside of his grave beside her, his murderer, he noticed that he did not feel anything, except lust, and thirst.
“Who the fuck?”, he said, “Who wha, what are you?”
“I’m your savior, but I believe you already know what I am, and what you are,” she said, “but I have been called Lilah for over five centuries now.”
As much as he wanted to deny the possibility of his new Vampiric nature, he knew she was telling the truth. He knew she was his master, his lover, his mother, and his companion for all times, and he knew he would already be fiercely loyal to her, but he also knew he couldn’t ever love her. And she knew that too, for their nature was one of masochism and sadism, and love was a word not within their realm of emotion. Nor was hate in fact, Stephen didn’t hate Anabelle, but he wanted her to suffer, he wanted to see the fear and the panic in her face as he ripped her insides out onto the floor. He took pleasure in the very fact.
“Anabelle…”, said Stephen
“Yes, Anabelle hurt you, she will be your first won’t she, my love?”, said Lilah.
“I want her to die painfully, to snuff her out with my very hands, to smite my former human self as much as her.”
“Yes, yes, yes!”, she said, “You have the power now, take what you want, any which way you want, I will teach you everything and you shall be a glorious vampire.”, she said.
They went out into the dead of the night together. As they walked through the streets of London, Stephen felt powerful, and predatory. These humans, these pathetic creatures spilling their emotions out into the world like slaves, he had nothing in common with them anymore. Oh how he desired his first kill. He could feel the pulses of those in the streets around him coursing inside of his lifeless body, offering temptation so powerful that he’d be denying his nature not to indulge. He could smell their blood, some more tempting than others, and the women he once sought to indulge and cherish he now viewed merely as prey, and oh how he wanted them all.
“So my sweet boy, do you feel it, the need to kill?”, Lilah said, “Do you feel the power you possesses, we are perfect killers my darling, free from restraint of the human conscience and the laws of society, no one can stop us dear, certainly no humans.”, she said
“I feel it, I want to take them all, I want to see the expressions on their face as I brutalize them,” said Stephen in a way that surprised him, he would have never said such things in life, but in death, the mere mention of the slaughter of innocents was enough to bring him to joy. In death, he was now free to really live, free of a bourgeoisie society’s restraints.
“I must find Anabelle, and that pathetic, effete bastard Frederich, I wish to make them watch each other die,” he felt this was appropriate.
Stephen and Lilah were out for a couple hours already. Lilah had already killed three humans that very night. One was a john looming the street for streetwalkers, Lilah in all her wickedness appeared to the man a lovely entrancing prostitute, and told him what a wonderful night she could offer. She drank him dry, and Stephen laughed as the man screamed for mercy and tried clawing away with all his might from the rather petite woman. Lilah had been doing this for a long time. She offered him blood, but Stephen wanted Anabelle to be his first drink. Lilah was very appeased by this; she knew she had created a monster of pure malevolent evil, one that can rival her own thirst for blood, torture, and destruction.

"Awoke", Part 1

2009-09-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

He awoke.
Never had he seen, experienced, felt such darkness. Pure blackness; not a shred of vision within his periphery. He tried to move, but noticed that he was somehow solidified in his position. After trying to sort his thoughts for a moment, he struggled to move around. He was stuck within a small box like structure, and he panicked. He shot his hands forward with great force, and to his fascination, his hands penetrated the thick wood with ease, he was imbued with an unexplainable strength that was beyond his imagination.
His momentary epiphany was interrupted when pounds of soil and dirt and all the life that hibernates within the depths of the Earth came pouring into his prison. He closed his mouth to avoid suffocation and with tremendous fervor began to climb his way out of this strange and dark oblivion. It came a surprise when his long climb out of hell brought him almost no physical fatigue, in fact he felt like he didn’t even need oxygen. The confusion was remarkable, but he felt different; stronger, dominant.
He felt his hand reach the surface, the cool air bringing him relief and comfort. He slowly dragged his way out of his cell, and entered a new world. The world was the same, technically, but in his mind he new it had been inalterably changed somehow. He looked around while lying on the ground, the sky was as dark as it gets, he figured it must have been around midnight. He looked to his left, to the hole he had emerged from, and noticed a stone, no, a grave, right behind it. It took moments for his eyes to clear and his vision to sharpen, but when they did, he saw things more vividly than he had ever previously. The grave read; “Stephen Caine: Beloved Son”. “Is this death?”, he thought. He heard someone approach him from behind.
“You wanted to see my world, now you’re in it,” said a female voice.
He remembered.
It was just last night when he beloved Anabelle made the revelation that she could never truly love a man such as him, that Frederich was the one who could give her what she needs.
“I have grown tired of your childish ways, there are plenty of fellers in London that choose to drink and brawl every night, I need a man that can take care of me.”, Anabelle said.
He pleaded with her to stay with him, but it was clear the decision had been made. He was devastated, and made his way to the tavern to drink himself blind.
He drank a liter of whiskey, and his consciousness was suspended between awareness and oblivion. Frederich entered the bar with his mates, and Stephen decided now was the time to confront the motherfucker.
“So mate, you been plunkin’ my sweet Anabelle behind my back?”, he said.
“Listen Stephen, I don’t want any trouble, you’ve been too drunk these past years to satisfy a woman as graceful as Anabelle,” Frederich said.
Stephen was furious, he smashed his pint of beer over Frederich’s head, leaving a mighty pool of blood.
“You little bastard!”, Frederich said.
Frederich and his mates proceeded to drag drunken Stephen out to the alley and beat him into a merciless pulp.
“You stay the bloody hell away from Anabelle,” Frederich said.
Stephen had never felt so beaten. The bruises and cuts were only outweighed by the mental anguish. He almost broke into tears, and yet, then she appeared. He immediately was taken out of his misery and taken with this strange beauty approaching him in the alley. She had deep brown hair, highlighted by the full moonlight shining down upon the locks. Her eyes were an ice blue, fierce and haunting, she looked right into him, and he looked back. Her skin was pure white, and smooth, and he wanted it.
“Now I dare say, what kind of night could bring a man of such beauty and distinguished appeal to tears?”, she said.
“It’s nothing, um, what’s your name love?”
“Do not mind that yet. Are you satisfied with life? Or has it become stagnant, meaningless, does you anger and your guilt outweigh your happiness and contentment?”
“Well, uh, likes, everyone has problems my lady, mine just seem rather massive at the moment.”
“What if I told you I could show you a new world, a world in which those plaguing feelings of guilt, anger, and sadness could never touch you, a world without consequences and without regret, is that a world you could see yourself living in?”, she said.
“Well it sure as bloody hell sounds better than this one,” Stephen replied.
“So will you come with me, will you walk these nights, and be by my side, always?”, she said.
“Yes”, said Stephen.
Her face of delicate beauty and mysterious appeal then morphed into something awful, her eyes became fiery and focused, and she bared two razor sharp protruding fangs. Before he could see her coming, he felt her teeth sink into his neck. He tried screaming for help, but his blood, his life force, was leaving his body and nourishing hers. He felt his heart began to stop, and she let go. She cut her wrist.
“Now drink, drink and live forever”, she said.
Without a moment’s notice, her blood was entering his throat. His life hanging in the balance, a new sixth sense, a lust for blood, had entered his being. The blood tasted sweeter than life itself, suffusing his being, giving his near lifeless body animation.
She pulled away, laughing maniacally. He then sat there, his heart beat was slowing, his life seemed so far away, and yet a new one seemed so close within his grasp. His eyes closed, and the last thing he saw was Anabelle, only his love was now replaced with maliciousness, a need to destroy. And then there was nothing.
And then, he awoke.

Maths Balance Volumes-Lower Forms (self released cd)

2009-09-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Maths Balance Volumes has bewildered and interested me for the past year or so, as they have been releasing records on labels like Dylan Nyoukis' "Chocolate Monk". Their sound is true junk/dada electronics, and the bizarre sounds that emanate from their records are unique and wierd even in the scope of DIY junk noise bands. Lots of white noise and tape hiss and sounds that I am not familiar with to identify, Volumes create a whirlwind of fiery and agonizing tape hiss as well as some true psychodelia industrial that even the most seasoned noise vets might have trouble letting thier ears adjust to. The album is 100 percent homemade, and the hiss on the recordings comes off as a legitimate layer of filth covering many more layers of filth. The "songs" contained on the record are all soundscapes built on layers of murky feedback and waves of strange hissing sounds as well as a healthy use of tape loops. When listened to stoned, the album is liable to bring you into a lull state, shifting between states of conciousness, getting lost in the alarmingly bizarre sounds. The vocals are processed and come off as inebriated chants, in fact at one point I thought I was listening to a recording of voodoo rituals. And I feel that these images of horror archetypes are not unique when listening to this type of music. In any case, Maths Balance Volume have come up with a noise sound that is startingly original in the face of a scene that has become increasingly watered down by over-release and too much hype, and for this fact alone I think they are worth and interested listener's attention.

Cultural Amnesia "Enormous Savages Enlarged" Cd

2009-09-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

One of my absolute favorite compilations I've heard this year, UK Post-Punk/Industrial Act Cultural Amnesia have re-issued this formerly import-only compilation and added five unreleased tracks to this impressive set. The band have long been known for their ties to other UK Industrial acts such as Coil and Psychic TV, but to me they have a sound that goes far more sonically diverse than the previously mentioned acts, as well as much of Industrial music in general. Their sound is rooted in the dark and menacing electronics of groups like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, but with a decidedly funky punk edge with grooves emanating from the influence of the Pop Group and even some of the rhythms of Gang of Four. The songs collected on the compilation were all recorded from 1980-1983', and the tracks are far less noisy and abrasive that one would expect from Cultural Amnesia, with the songs taking on the form of very abstract pop and mega-skewed punk. Most interesting is the five unreleased tracks on the record were all recorded in this past decade, and they show Cultural Amnesia playing less with synthesizers and electronics and embracing a more straight ahead and almost anthemic rock n roll sound, with markedly clearer production. It's nice to see that Cultural Amnesia has let their sound grow instead of sticking to the same f-ed up electronics and tape hiss quality of their early records and become more or less a classic UK Post-Punk band. Some songs swagger like the fall at their best while others pummel your senses into nothingness like Neubauten, but in any case, if you are at all interested in 80's underground UK you must track this compilation now.

Weekend Tedium

2009-09-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

It is strange how the school years seem to roll together into one long singular experience. Week ater week I find myself faced with task after task, accomplishing them as best I can, one at a time. Weekend after weekend, faced with nothing but drinking and whoring and not sleeping. These weeks of constant work followed by two days of constant play seem to drag on after a while. I feel very lucky to be in school, but nonetheless, there are times when the tedious grind of study becomes very tiresome to me. So tedious that on weekends, acts of debaucery idiocy are the only things that make sense. It's almost being like suspended in this fantasy world between childhood and adulthood, during the weeks accepting my more mature responsibilities, and on the weekends totally rejecting them. I feel that college kids in general are concsiously holding onto thier youth, knowing that in four or six short years it'll be over. The urge to binge seems to be such a common thread among young twenty somethings that it almost seems normal to see kids puking, fighting, taking drugs, and acting like fools, as much as it's normal to see them reading and studying in a library. Is this how we're supposed to act? Do people ever really break free from this period of suspended growth, or do we just accept our lives for what they are, and try and take the good and bad throughout all life. As I sit here, with three hours of sleep since Thursday, I question my intentions in life. It seems that at times partying and drinking and drugging are quintessential experiences to young life, and yet, there is a part of me which almost feels that this sort of lifestyle isn't experience at all, but instead just a distraction, meant to keep us complacent under the weight of our lives and responsibities. And yet all of me remains complacent to not care, as I surely wouldn't live any other way at the moment.

the Watchmen: the Film

2009-09-13T12:59:00.000-07:00

After initially being very dissapointed wth Zack Syder's adaptation of "The Watchmen" when seeing it in I-max upon its release, I have since become rather dazzled with the movie upon giving it further viewings on DVD. Of course the amazing graphics and CGI effects and brutal fight scenes left me smitten upon firt view, but I simply could not help but compare it to the imcomparable comic book was adapted from. Now I realize that "The Watchmen" was almost unfilmamble, and the fact they were able to create such a cohesive and memorable plot from such a complex narrative is astounding. As I'm sure people know by know, the film/comic is a re-creation of American history in which masked vigilante super heroes are known to the world, the Cold War with USSR has reached its absolute peak, and nuclear holocaust is seemingly totally imminent. The film begins with the murder of Edward Blake, a.k.a., the Comedian, a former super hero turned super soldier. He is thrown out a window by an unknown assailant. The film then follows the 5 other super heroes trying to discover the truth behind this Mask killer theory and then unwittingly unveil a plot far more diabolical and letal.

I don't want to bore with all the details of the film and narrative because the philosophical overtones of the film should be experenced by the individual, but I would like to discuss the implications of the scene's final climactic scene. Superheroes Dan, a.k.a., Nite Awl, and Rorshach, discover that the conspiracy, including Blake's murder, as well as other acts of savagery and evil, were perperated by Adrian Veidt, a.k.a. Oxymandias, a former super hero that was the only one to reveal his identity to the world. During a scene at Veidt's pyramid in Anarctica, he reveals his plot to Dan and Rorshach. Veidt tricked Dr. Manhattan, the movie's only true super being with the powers to bend matter at will, into creating a machine recreating Manhattan's under the pretense of creating unlimited power.Veidt asserts he took Mahattan's power to create a nuclear explosion that would destroy several of the world's largest cities, making it look like Manhattan was responsible. To the audience's surprise, Veidt pulls this off. He then, by murdering millions, actually ends the nuclear threat, while the Soviet Union and the United States end the cold war to unite agaist the new common enemy, Dr.Manhatan. Veidt, in an act of evil truly despicable, actually saves the world in a way, "killing millions, to save billions." The scene is truly affecting. If the world did come that close to Nuclear War, it is true that this apocalypse might only be prevented by an act of evil, such as Veidt's. To save the world, there must certainly be sacrifices. The movie/comic the begs us the question, is peace built upon false pretenses and lies still preferable to mutually assured destruction? I am most certain we would all agree it is. Three of the four super heroes then even vow to keep thier silences about Adrian's crimes, due to the fact exposing his evil would only re-doom the world to nuclear war. Adrian Veidt is a highly ambiguous charachter, he is clearly brilliant, sinister, and even deluded, but he did in a way save the world, just in a very morally questionable way. The movie implies that it might take a being as morally loose as Veidt to save the world from such a disaster and to make that impossible decision.

"Suspended"

2009-09-09T12:04:00.001-07:00

Joy Harjo’s “Suspended”, is a brief but powerful recollection of an author trying to decipher when she exactly became aware of a specific stimulus that would prove to be important to her later in life. In this case, she describes being a child, still very young as she says, “Once I was so small that I could barely peer over the top of the black Cadillac my father polished and tuned daily.” She uses this allusion to give an idea just how young and impressionable she was, wanting to see everything but not being able to understand the things she desires to see. She describes music as her introduction to language. She describes her sudden revelatory moment of discovering music as a singular and powerful moment in her life, “My concept of language, of what was possible with music, was changed by this revelatory moment. It changed even the way I looked at the sun.”
She makes the distinction that this moment wasn’t even noticeable to her parents driving the car, proving the singular importance of this moment on her life. She claims she can’t remember the destination she was traveling to, but she remembers the sensory details of the experience vividly, “I don’t know where we were going or where we had been, but I know the sun was boiling the asphalt, the car windows open for any breeze as I stood on tiptoes on the floorboard behind my father, a handsome god who smelled of Old Spice, whose slick black hair was impeccably groomed, his clothes perfectly creased and ironed.” She claims she loved the radio at this point, but she hasn’t yet had that one true revelatory experience.
She refers to the moment as a “loop in time”, an interesting phrase used to describe that momentary feeling of time standing still, being in that moment for what seems like an eternity. She says she became completely aware of the sound emanating from the speakers, a sound she would now properly identify as Miles Davis. She wasn’t able to verbally utter the feeling that the sound gave her, but was still totally aware of the sensation it created. She even pities her parents for not having been able to share the moment with her.
Harjo writes, “My rite of passage into the world of humanity occurred then, via Jazz.” She credits Jazz as giving her first feeling of being truly alive, truly human. She refers to the listening experience as a bridge, possibly the bridge between ignorance and knowledge. She sees jazz as tapping directly into her African and Anglo-Saxon heritages, as Jazz is basically European methods of composition and improvisation applied to African tribal music. She recognizes this moment, and all moments, as transcending language. These moments of being as more than just mere expression of an idea, they become the idea incarnate, true living.

Uncertainty

2009-09-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

Uncertainty has to be one of the worst of all human emotions. Here I am, so close to graduating from a University and I am still not even sure what course my like will take. Coming into college I had no idea what I wanted to do, I knew what my strengths were but I couldn't decide where to apply those strengths to. I initially joined the University as an undecided major, which of course seemed like the most appealing decision for someone who had never considered what to with life after education. I spent my freshman year taking a variety of courses that could possibly lead me into the right direction. After a full year as an undecided major, I knew writing and reading were my strengths but I also enjoyed keeping up with the world. Therefore, journalism is what I chose. Immediately when I entered the journalism major, I felt constricted by the tight rules that apply to journalism writing and didn't not like being free to right in a fashion that I felt was best suited for myself. What I really would like to do is music criticism, rock n roll writing if you will. Music has been my passion since I was a young child, and what I have lacked in sheer musical talent (I'm only a moderately good guitar player" I have made up for in sheer exuberance and ear for all sorts of varied and weird musics. Unfortunately, the University of Arizona doesn't seem to treat this type of writing as actual journalism, and I have been left to do these sorts of things on my own time. I stuck with the journalism major because I figured it will allow me some sort of breathing room when I graduate, but I have no clue what to do when that time comes.

True Blood; This Show Got Me

2009-09-07T09:40:00.001-07:00

Finally, after having mixed feelings toward the show during its first season, I can fully say that True Blood has been blowing my mind. I have always loved the supernatural, and Vampires especially, the idea of an all-powerful, night stalking, sadistic and predatory creature preying in the innocent always makes for a truly entertaining experience. But Vampires in True Blood are of a truly different nature, with series creator Alan Ball using the show's supernatural themes to comment on true human issues; sex, hatred, intolerance, and violence. The characters, natrual and supernatural, are all of a highly complex and fascinating nature. Anna Paquin is brilliant on the show as Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress. Her relationship with 173-year old vampire Bill Compton (played by real life fiancee Stephen Moyer) is a gripping affair. Plagued with the ability to read minds, Sookie finds natrual love with Bill because she can't read his mind, as Vampires on the show don't project thier thoughts. Their love is alluded to much as a standard interracial relationship in the south would be; they are constantly judged and harassed untill more or less the town's people of Bon Temps except that Bill's love for Sookie is pure. There was a fantastic scene in the first season in which Sookie's accepting grandmother recruits Bill to deliver a lesson on the Civil War, as before he was turned he fought for the Confederacy, and this decision earns the grandmother both scorn and praise. Bill himself is fascinating. Previously enjoying a century of sadistic murder and torture, Sookie comes into his life and makes him feel human pasion for the first time in over a hundred years. Bill refers to Sookie as his "miracle" and loves her completely. Excellent in this season was the entry of Lorena, Bill's maker and a representation of the darkness within him. A flashback is shown of Bill and Lorena in the 1920's sadistically torturing and murdering a couple, with Lorena holding down the husband as Bill rips the wife's larynyx out, the man says, "Why are you doing this?", to which Bill retorts in very exuberant manner, "Because We CANNNNN!" The scene was disturbing but alsop emphasized the show's focus on redeption, showing how hard and far Bill had to come to restore his own humanity. I sometime's can't help but draw parrallels to tv's last supernatrual human/vampire relationship between Angel and Buffy, but the show's graphic nature is able to represent in it in a far different fashion.

The show seems to display a belief that there is neither evil nor good in the world. Charachters who at times seem ireedemably evil are prone to showing signs of human weakness and compassion. Eric,1,000 year old Vampire sheriff of Louisiana, is at times portrayed a sadistic and mericless killer, totally devoid of human emotion. Best example obviously when he held Lafayette in a basement and tortured him for two weeks. But, he has often displayed signs of strong devotion and loyalty to the charachters. He treats other Vampires with respect, even Bill whom he clearly doesn't like. When his 2,000 year old Vampire sire/maker Godric lets himself be burned by the sun, Eric breaks down into tears. The two male vampires clearly had a strong love, platonic but it was also strongly hinted at as sexual as well. Eric also shows strong affection for Sookie, going out of his way to save her life on a few occasions throughout season two. The Fellowship of the Sun, an anti-vampire Church are extremely ambiguous. Steve Newlin, leader of the church, is portrayed as the show's most hateful and wrathful charachter since last season's homicidal and misogynist Rene Lenier. He seems to be at times ireedemably evil, but Godric tells Eric that when he was held by the Fellowship, he was treated fairly, and that most of the members were, "extremely holy".

Mary Ann is perhaps the show's only ireedemably evil charachter. She is a maenad, an immortal being derived from Ancient Greece an high priestess to god of Wine and fertility, Dionysius. From the beginning of the show she displays a will to create nothing but chaos. Her powers are also wierd and awesome. She starts fluttering during sex and chants and channels the power of Dionysius to create wild and violent orgies. She grows massive claws that exude a powerdul neurotoxin that can kill basically any creature. Her perhaps most despicable acts are her powers of mass hypnosis, she has coaxed innocents into murdering and taking the hears from thier victims. She also force feeds humans these hearts to create powerful mass spread violent chaos. The writing for her charachter is just phenomenal. It is even hinted at that Mary Ann was nothing more than a bored housewife in Athens who's husband was sleeping with 14 year old boys, as many wealthy Athenians did. Therefore Mary Ann started engaging in wild sex and debaucery and discovered the ways of the Maenad. She became so psyhcologically bent on the fact that she was this immortal being that she actually became the powerful immortal that she is on the show. Because of her ireedemably evil nature, the last two episodes saw all the various charachters coming together to defeat her. In the final episode, all vampires and humans will be joining together to defeat this one gigantic evil and thus restore the natural order. True Blood isn't about good or evil, it's about the good and evil that emanates from all beings.

Van Morrison-Astral Weeks

2009-09-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

There have been few records so have such a vast impact on my life as "Astral Weeks". My father, an avid music fan who's love for rock n roll rivals mine, first played the cassette of the album in the car when I was a young boy. Instantly I was blown away, just something so pure about the way Van sings is astounding and made a lasting impression on my being. What Van Morrison may or may not lack in sheer lyrical prowess he makes up for in powerful emotional delivery. There is no voice on Earth that sounds like his, so full of human expression, mourning, pain, loss, love, and life. The album has followed me through some of my post painful and happy experiences.

As I got older and more into music my love for "Astral Weeks" didn't subside, but only grew due to my new understanding of what a deep and complex record it really is. Released at the end of 1968, critics and listeners were all immediately blown away by the complexity in the lyrics and the arrangements but also by the sheer listen-ability of the album, even in the face of some very dark subjects and themes. The rhythms and string arrangements are very un-traditional and even frenzied for Pop music (possibly due to musicians from free jazz whiz Eric Dolphy's crew coming into lend some horn and reed work), but the beauty that emanates from them is tremendous. Van's lyrics on the album are better than his lyrics on other records; he wrote in a strange and evocative style that promotes images as opposed to narrative arc. The songs, even the saddest ones, evoke strong images of hope and in a few cases, redemption. The very first lines off the record's first track, "Astral Weeks", read, "If I ventured into a slipstream, between the viaduct of your dream, would you find me?" Two of the record's most famous tracks, "Cyprus Avenue" and "Madame George" are written in a stream-of-consciousness style that is very hard to decipher the text, but the themes of the song still resonate with the listener in a vivid fasion. And it really is all about Van Morrison's voice when talking about his music. He has the most unique voice of any white-male vocalist I've ever heard, with such a powerful understanding of human emotion it's phenomenal. He howls and the listener weeps, or smiles, or thinks. Easily one of the greatest emotional rides in the history of recorded music, and an album so full of human emotion and range that it remains truly timeless.

Dan Melchior und das Menace-Obscured by Fuzz

2009-09-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

England's Dan Melchior has been forging his own unique brand of raw and dirty punk rock and soulful and swinging blues since the early 1990's. His second album of the year, "Obscured by Fuzz" seems to take thing in a different direction than his acclaimed double album, "Thank You Very Much", that was released earlier in the year. While that record saw Melchior playing around with some of the classic UK art punk influences he's already embraced numerous times in his career, such as the Fall and Swell Maps, as well as the psychedelic drug-blues of artists like Syd Barret and Roy Harper, "Obscured by Fuzz" is a far more traditional, though no less exciting, record. The songs are all romp and fury, throwing back to the Killed by Death compilations with crunchy power chords topped by lots of nice fuzz and feedback. The lyrics, as always, are on point. The songs detail some of the more depraved aspects of pop culture; tales of Hollywood violence, Janet Jackson's exposed breast on the super bowl, a Werewolf named simply 'Glen, greedy vegan farmers, and the jaded hipsters that pervade the "scene". The album is downright anthemic and angry in tone. The album largely ditched the most obscure psychedelic stylings of Melchior's previous albums in favor of a straight ahead punk fury. Stand out track is "Smut", a Stooges-influenced garage dirge anthem with a lyrical narrative I'm sure your mind would let you imagine. Dan Melchior is a seasoned veteran who is making the most pure rock n roll in music right now. Well Kurt Vile comes close, but he gets a little too far out to apply, perhaps?

Circuit des Yeux-Sirenum

2009-09-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

After blowing my mind last year with her limited run lp "Symphone", Haley Fohr, a.k.a., Circuit des Yeux, returns with her first wide release LP. "Sirenum"is a true homedade psychedelic record, recalling the best records of these types from mid-90's Siltbreeze catalog. The sounds are made up of a plethora of instruments; guitars, pianos, drums, and fx all come together to create a swirling collage of eerie psychedelic tones. Her vocals have gotten even more far out and bizarre; continuing on in the vocal eerieness of US Girls and pushing them in to the outer realms in which chanting and drum circles are as prevalent as guitars and feedback that the ESP-disk catalog used to be known for. The most abstracted tracks on the records apply feedback and drones to the haunting melodies, coming off as 80's synth-goth as re-envisioned by one of today's psychedelic noise nuts, and the combinations couldn't be any more refreshing. The tracks on the album are dark, but not in a disturbing way. These are very emotional songs, love songs if you will, but re-imagined as true pieces of psychedelic head fuckery. One of the best records I've heard this year.

August 31: Current Listening

2009-08-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

Ganglians-Monster Head Room
Mayyors-Deads 12" EP
Van Morrison-Astral Weeks
Dan Melchior und das Menace-Obscured by Fuzz
Little Claw-Human Taste

note: I will ocasionally post reviews of new music on here as well as random thoughts and observations.

Entry August 31

2009-08-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

What an excruciatingly long week it has been. I have been mentally and physically exhausted for weeks now, and it seems as if everytime I have the chance to collapse on my bed, my thoughts run with wild abandon. About two and a half weeks ago, while still at home in Massachusetts, I stopped taking pain medication that was prescribed to me for a rather severe shoulder injury. The medication stopped working anyways and I surely do not want to choke down pills for the rest of my life. About two days after ceasing the medication, I became rather violently ill. I certainly knew what was happening, as I knew the risks of high potency opioid pain medications and thier countless negative side effects. It was certainly withdrawl. The feeling can be alikened to an extreme case of the flu, though in my mind I knew the flu would be cured had I taken some more of my pills. All the pain in my body seemed to pervade my system ten fold, I was too tired to be awake, and yet too sick to sleep. Two weeks later and the sickness has subsided, but I still can't sleep and have an overall sensation of wierdness that has been clouding my thoughts. This made me think of the deplorable drug situation in my town. If I am feeling this nasty over the withdrawl from controlled prescribed medication, there is no wonder how kids using these types of drugs on the streets can become so addicted so fast.

These severe symptoms lasted for about five days. It infuriates me that doctors so freely prescribe such dangerous and habit forming medications. Surely a year ago, just after my shoulder surgery, Morphine was a neccesarry evil. But as the medication flooded my system and the pain stayed the same, my doctor would just prescribe me more of the medication. I feel practices such as these are more prevalent than people realize. My home town of Sandwich, Massachusetts has a massive problem with kids abusing prescription drugs. The state itself has become a joke among clinicians for its rampant abuse of narcotic based drugs. There are approximately 136,000 people in the state that abuse prescription drugs, and there certainly has to be a reason for that. For one thing, the multiple ports in the state are constantly responsible for the bringing in of Heroin and other illicit substances, thus making availibility quite simple.

There are also lots of doctors willing to write faulty prescriptions, such as my former family clinician Dr. Michael Brown, a.k.a. "Dr. Feelgood". Dr. Brown was arrested in 2005 when he was reportedly prescribing a third of the state's legal Oxycontin. Authorities said that he would prescribe them to patients and then buy them back from them for his own use. My town, Sandwich, on the other hand has far too many kids, young and stupid, doing these hard substances. We are from a small town of slightly well-0ff backgrounds, and the boredom and apathy during the winters becomes unbearable. Of course kids experiment with drugs under these circumstances, but it is when these types of narcotics are so readily availible that it becomes problematic. Teenagers as a general rule are stupid. Though, lacking intelligence isn't the kind of stupidity I'm referring too. This is the type of stupidity when being faced with people that are bored and apathetic. These kids are doing these drugs because they make them feel good, they make the mundane a little less so. The problem is, Oxycontin (High doses of Oxycodone on time release) is a highly addictive substance, on par with Heroin and Morphine. Oxycontin also has outrageous street prices in Mass, with an 80 mg tablet costing 80 dollars (more expensive by weight than gold). Kids run out of money fast, and then of coure the compulsion to use Heroin, the cheaper of the chemicals, to chase that same high. I have seen more than a few of my friends chase that high and drop out of schools and ruin thier lives. This is a problem that simply needs to be addressed, as Sandwich, Massachusetts is a growing community, and no longer just a beach retirement town. The elders of the town can't just watch the youth decay.