The Dead Hear No Eulogies

So Whitney Houston dies and suddenly everyone gives a shit about the foghorn-voiced cokehead who gifted us with the only vocal performance more oppressive than Celine Dion's Titanic theme. How sadly predictable; how pathetically mawkish. Why does everyone rush to recall their Edenic first impression of a once-formidable talent once that person has crashed, burned, and kicked the bucket? Is it the public's way of absolving their own guilt for having used the fallen celebrity as a feeble punchline for the final decade-plus of their life? Despite the fact that some of us had problems - both aesthetic and political - with the woman from the very start?

Please. I really like some of Michael Jackson's records and I still didn't give a shit when he died, for reasons I'll let Kat Williams elaborate upon. Oh, and dig the bonus swipe at the cadaver du jour.

Like Flies

Well, the second-craziest despot to rule a third-world autocracy has become the newest member in Ozymandias' Infernal Big Band. That is, he's dead. Neither will he be missed, nor will anyone hesitate to celebrate his demotion to mere worm-meal as Jong-Il's death is unencumbered by gruesome criminal circumstance. Good ol' fashioned natural causes as opposed to, say, occupational hazard.

That being said, given that no one has the slightest notion what North Korea's contingency plan was once Dear Leader slipped this mortal coil, I'm suddenly very happy to be exiting the Orient for the next few weeks...

Making a Killing

Death, it's been noted, is no surprise. And on a planet packed with 123 people per square mile, the numbers dropping by the day are dizzying. Still, it feels like I wake every other day to find some globally-important figure has slipped - or been shoved off - this mortal coil. A Saudi prince here, an asshole billionaire there. But I was thoroughly unprepared to begin Friday being gawked at by Qaddafi's droopy kabuki corpse-maw. Put me right off the strawberry yogurt I was eating for breakfast.

Surveying the online reaction, I was pleased to see the relative restraint across social media, as braying gaiety over Qaddafi's death was kept to a minimum. Given that Qaddafi was directly, provably responsible for more deaths & acts of international terrorism (cf. the Abu Salim massacre, Pan Am flights 103 and 73, UTA Flight 772, the 1986 La Belle bombing) than Osama Bin Laden was, I'd like to think that everyone had sobered up since the bloodlusty celebrations of Bin Laden's murder. Oh, I'd like to think that, but let's not be naïve - fewer people remember, and fewer still care, about Qaddafi's towering bodycount.

What jubilant chest-thumping there was came overwhelmingly from the liberal media - that is, the meager 10% of the media that actually is liberal. Most visibly, Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart attacked Republicans for refusing President Obama any credit for Qaddafi's demise. Of course, Olbermann & Stewart are correct that when, for example, Marco Rubio applauds the British & French for leading the charge into Libya, the GOP are playing politics by cynical omission, rather than giving credit where it is, in fact, due. But for men who built careers lambasting the illegal brutality of the last administration, Olbermann & Stewart - not to mention their acolytes - are unnervingly comfortable with the fact that their Nobel Laureate President's greatest legacy may very well be, in Stewart's own words, "his ability to rain targeted death from the sky." I can only imagine the righteous tongue-lashing Olbermann & Stewart would have given Bush when he signed Executive Order 13477, which restored the Libyan government's immunity from pending & future terrorism-related lawsuits. But in the mafioso logic of American exceptionalism, there's always room for another murder, as long as our guy is pulling the trigger.

It's this smug, fickle partisanship that makes our elected leaders so depressingly fungible. Meet the new boss...

Same as the old boss.

iCame, iSaw, iConquered

Come December, I'll be curious to see whose death ends up earning more year-in-review ink: that of Osama Bin Laden or Steve Jobs. For now, I just feel bad that Bert Jansch was robbed of his last moment in the spotlight.

The only thing I feel about Jobs' sudden passing is surprise at how quickly it followed his resignation as Apple's CEO. Perhaps this is another instance of how intimately entwined are sense of purpose and will to live. Jack Layton, for example, took the New Democratic Party of Canada from a marginal parliamentary presence to the official opposition in a single election and was dead within a couple of months. Even T.E. Lawrence - a man whose feats of endurance & military daring read like pulp fantasy - was scarcely two months into his retirement when he met an ignominious end in a minor traffic accident.

Beyond that pseudo-philosophical chinstroke... so what? Can't say I particularly care. But judged by the online tsunami of farcical grief, I am starkly in the minority. So maudlin & wracked is the tenor of the bereaved I'd have thought that all these people were personal friends of Steve Jobs, that he'd brought them chicken soup on a cold November night, that he'd awarded their kids college scholarships, that he'd given sight to their blinded-by-moonshine great aunt.

But no, they are not a one his friend. They aren't Steve Jobs' acquaintances, they're his customers, his consumers.

Lest we forget that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose liquidity exceeds that of even the world's largest national economy. Lest we forget that Apple is a technocratic Goliath which dodges corporate taxes and whose idea of "healthcare coverage" extends to suicide-prevention nets but barely any further. Unlike his oft-maligned doppleganger, Steve Jobs is not a philanthropist - he's a corporate padrino whose brilliance lies less in innovation than elaboration & refinement - making borrowed ideas better. Apple's very first personal computers (the Lisa and the Macintosh) were little more than liberal imitations of the Xerox Alto. Similarly, Jobs did not invent a GUI platform to (re-)distribute digitized music, but he did figure out how to monetize one.

The true genius of Jobs was his aestheticization of appliances. He transformed utilitarian machines into the fully syntactic symbols of a lifestyle; his public-relations alchemy made technological amenities into elite totems. Between his products & his customers, Jobs fostered not just a relation but a relationship - a transubstantiation presented literally in those anthropomorphic "I'm a Mac" TV ads.

At least the UK got to watch the guys from Peep Show make smug pricks of themselves.

Anyway, this explains why Jobs' death is a big deal beyond the business section. A man like Philo T. Farnsworth arguably had a more revolutionary effect on daily life, but Steve Jobs was a man with whom people felt they had a personal relationship, a friend who had enriched their lives & enabled them to unleash their expressive potential. It's no exaggeration to say Jobs' death has elicited a despair whose scale and substance are equivalent to - perhaps even greater than - the passing of the Pope. Within a mere hour of the news, floral tributes were piling up outside Apple stores the world over. Social media was more choked with endless inspirational quotes than a Deepak Chopra book. The grief was so sensational it would've been considered too stagy for a Broadway musical.

Against this backdrop, the latest essay on Adam Curtis' blog made for some serendipitous reading: in his endless trawl of audio-visual archives, Curtis has managed to trace the evolution of demonstrative emotion on TV. Within barely a generation between the '50s and '70s, spilling one's guts on air went from being anathema - "shameful agony" - to the necessary signifier of human authenticity. This sentimental overflow has become a carved-in-stone commandment not only of broadcast media, but of western social relations in general. However, Curtis warns that this hysterical style of emotional "authenticity" may actually be anything but:

There is a creeping sense of someone pretending to have the emotions that are expected of them. And in this way hiding their true feelings even further below the surface. Or maybe the truth is even more disturbing - that there are lots of things that people live through and experience that they just don't have emotions about.

As irrational psychic ephemera, emotions are difficult to understand and even harder to reproduce convincingly - particularly positive, sympathetic emotions. This is why tearful confessions & expectorating fist-fights became mainstays of daytime television far earlier than the joyful hug-orgies & triumphal backslapping of more recent shows like The Amazing Race or American Idol. So how did gushing exuberance become part of the public's expressive mode? Curtis points to the rise of "self-help" and collaborative craft shows like Trading Spaces and its British counterpart, Changing Rooms:

I think the man that really brought the hug into British television in a big way was the producer Peter Bazalgette. His genius was to spot that the idea of transforming yourself as a person could be intimately linked to transforming the things around you - starting with the rooms in your house.

I think the first real hugs of these kind began in the series Changing Rooms in the mid 90s.

The original revolutionary idea had been that by changing yourself emotionally as a person you would then change society. Bazalgette created an easier and quicker variation. By simply changing the physical things around you - you could then change your inner feelings and became a better and more expressive human being.

Wallpaper as redemption.

Steve Jobs understood this perfectly. By emphasizing his products' artful design, and by casting them as tools of creative composition, Jobs enabled his consumers to feel they were more fully-realized, expressive individuals thanks to him.

What I find disturbing is that, by surrounding themselves with beautiful expensive objects that encourage a melodramatic solipsism, people are encouraged to construct & occupy their own private fantasy wherein the crueler aspects of reality are not allowed. No one wants to feel bad. No one wants to struggle with criticism, dissent, violence, or acrimony. This relentlessly positive self-regard creates the illusion of a cozy but false consensus: by engaging only with the familiar & agreeable, we diminish our ability to cope with difference. Think different, but not so different that it unsettles you.

This is why there is no such thing as a "Dislike" button.

Adieu to the Bon Jack

A sad day for Canada as the country loses its finest politician & a genuinely decent human being aside: rest in peace, Jack Layton.

Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi: still not fucking dead. Where indeed is the justice in this cockamamie punchline of a world.

Just One More Thing...

Generally, I'm suspicious of people who are diligent in cataloging the birthdays & deaths of the better-known among us. It betrays an insipid nostalgia and a cloying, desperate hope that they themselves will one day be remembered fondly & eulogized flatteringly. Death: get over it, eh? But at the risk of hypocrisy, I can't allow this to slip by unnoticed...

Fare thee well, Peter Falk. I can't convey with any dignity or elegance how much I genuinely fucking love Columbo. I've not been so mortified since Patrick McGoohan's passing.

Oh Noooooooo-ah!

Even if not one single other soul vanishes today from this earth, this proves that the Rapture has indeed come. Give God the ol' figure-4 leg-lock for us, Randy!

Own It

As much as I've tried to mediate my media intake since Monday, the consensual tenor of American liberals has been unmistakable: unity! Now is not the time for partisan bickering, point-scoring, or revisionism. Now is the time for America to reclaim its sense of divine purpose, to see its pride bloom phoenix-like, and to (again) nail shut history's coffin! Everyone wave your copy of Team America: World Police in the air like you just don't care!

It's all, of course, disingenuous as hell: liberals are more than happy to engage in the kind of hawkish dick-swinging and self-aggrandizing revisionism for which they've long maligned the right-wing. So great was Obama's coup sans grâce against Bin Laden that much of the American left is gloating that they've beaten the Neo-Cons at their own game.

But chest-thumping machismo isn't a good look for liberals, nor one they're accustomed to, and so there's been the perfunctory lip-service to civil liberties, common dignity, and the rule of law. This in turn produces an aneurysm-inducing level of cognitive dissonance - hypocrisy & self-serving sanctimony so impenetrable that, for example, a single NYT editorial can proclaim that torture "violate[s] the law and any acceptable moral standard" while simultaneously asserting that "the battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation."

After a decade of having been defamed as cowards, pinkos, pantywaists, apologists, and traitors, and especially now that their guy is in office, American liberals are desperate to occupy the first-person plural within "We killed Bin Laden!" Are they sure they want to put themselves at the center of the story? There is a way for liberals to indulge their id-inflamed glee while distancing themselves from the decade-long horror show preceding Bin Laden's demise. If instead of "we," they said that "a military-mafioso squad of anonymous assassins, operating outside international law, killed Bin Laden," then they'd be mere apologists (as opposed to patrons) of state-sponsored murder.

But that won't do, will it? Claiming Bin Laden's head as a trophy is an all-or-nothing proposition. If liberals are going to wear the broad-shouldered suit of the authoritarian Alpha, then they've got to own it, and I mean all of it: Guantánamo Bay, "enhanced" interrogation, Maher Arar, Abu Ghraib, the Haditha massacre, the Mahmudiyah killings, $1.2 trillion dollars, and at least 919,967 dead. Whoever claims authorship of the Osama Bin Laden's bullet-riddled dénouement signs their name to the whole, gory narrative.

Hope it was all worth it, you bloodlusty exceptionalists.

All Shook Up

Well, I'd have a lot more to say about this if there weren't still aftershocks rattling my apartment. Watching live footage of tsunamis wipe whole towns off the map in Miyagi prefecture. Absolutely terrifying. (Roland Emmerich really is a fucking pornographer, isn't he?)

8.8, they're saying - larger than the Great Hanshin Earthquake of '95, one of the largest in recorded Japanese history. Carl, hope all is well down your end of the country.

This planet is bullshit, man.

Gip, Gip, Hooray!

In (dis)honour of what would've been Ronnie's centennial, please take note of Tim Kreider's reflections upon Reagan's passing in 2004:

If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt.

Actually, you only live once...

John Barry's passed on. Now, the fear is that Morricone can't be far behind him, after whom we'll have lost every forward-thinking modernist film composer. Seriously, we'll be stuck with the likes of Rota plagiarist Danny Elfman and Hans bloody Zimmer, whose most impressive contribution to the art of film scoring boils down to BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHM!

At least Barry left us with an endlessly entertaining body of work.

Suicide Invoice

Given that you can almost set your watch to the latest Wednesday Chuo-line jumper, it's no surprise that Japan marked the sad milestone of 13 straight years of over 30,000 suicides. This infamous statistic has prompted countless studies & strategies, to little (if any) avail. I personally think that being on the bleeding edge of technology - that is, submitting to the coercive power of nonliving objects - is one of the problem's deepest roots. This is also the diagnosis offered by Azusa Hayano, a geologist who volunteers his time to come the hallowed Aokigahara forest for suicides:

Face-to-face communication used to be vital, but now we can live our lives being online all day. However, the truth of the matter is we still need to see each other's faces, read their expressions, so we can fully understand their emotions to coexist.

Of course, weening hoi polloi off their glowing rectangles requires nothing short of societal re-engineering, so more modest means of discouraging self-murder must suffice for starters. If the public can't be coaxed off their iPhones for a little tête-à-tête, they can at least spend more face-time with themselves.

Suicide-prevention mirrors are common sights in underground & enclosed train stations. The idea is that literal reflection becomes figurative, encouraging despondent commuters to take stock and (hopefully) count blessings. A lovely notion, but apparently the mirrors are insufficiently cheering: Japan Rail recently upped the ante by also installing blue LED lights above station platforms to soothe potential suicides.

I think blue lights are as pretty as anything incandescent, but as one Keio University psychologist opined, "If you showed that [curing suicidal behavior with coloured lights] was possible, you would probably win the Nobel Prize." Besides, I think the mirrors' efficacy is given short shrift because of their half-assed implementation; three simple steps are all it would take to make a huge tactical difference. First, make them bigger. Look at the above photo: the mirrors are barely full-length and are at least four meters away. How could someone appreciate their personal worth when they can barely make themselves out in a grimy stainless steel slab across the tracks?

Second: maintenance. As a good friend pointed out, years of wear from inclement weather have started to warp the mirrors into grotesque fun-house distortions, which hardly seems conducive to self-esteem.

Unless perhaps you're also shooting enough smack to finance the Afghan economy.

Finally: product placement. Japanese train stations are festooned from stem to stern with all manner of advertisements. The Shinjuku station Sobu line suicide-prevention mirror is bookended by billboards, one of which seems perennially plastered with a Peach John advertisement. Yes, this Peach John, manufacturer of ladies' ornamental undergarments.

So imagine you're a working stiff in an ill-fitting suit, struggling through the anthill throng of the world's busiest train station after another 60-hour week at a job that breaks new ground in the synthesis of ineptitude, sycophancy, and bureaucracy. Work affords you an apartment the size of the monkey cage in a Victorian zoo, and your social life is limited to binge-drinking in chain restaurants with your androidal co-workers. Squeezed to the precipice of the train platform, your gaze glosses from your rain-streaked steel reflection up & over to this...

The coy, conceited grin of that Venusian ideal that most men well never bed and most women will never resemble. "You can never have me," she seems to whisper through those pixel-brushed lips. Then you hear the hiss & groan of the train approaching at full speed...

This seems distinctly unhelpful.

Straight To Hell

Yes, I'm going to Hell. Literally: I'm trekking northward towards Osorezan, traditionally regarded as the Japanese gates of Hell. Here's how famed hiker Alan Booth assessed the place:

Osorezan is the most disquieting place I have ever visited. Of course the temple and the lanterns and the eyeless figures were shaped and placed here for a human purpose. We know their dates and the names of the priests who built them, and we know the uses to which they are put. Still, this easy knowledge is belied by their power to intimidate and to awe. Like the yellow stream and the Pond of Blood and the silent trees on the road over the mountain, they are awesome because there is an old god in them - a dusty, crouching, terrible god who does not often reveal himself in the world.

There are places infinitely more disquieting that Booth hadn't visited, say Liberia or the Aral Sea. But coming from a man who put one of the planet's most geographically diverse countries underfoot, such superlatives wouldn't come unearned. In fact, Booth's three-page description of Osorezan's ashen solitude was the primary inspiration for my trip. Whether you're gothy pseudo-nihilist or post-New Age Ouroborosian, any place styled as the underworld's welcome mat sounds damned intriguing. And the Pond of Blood? Talk about awesome! Sounds like a Cannibal Corpse song title. My morbidly-curious inner adolescent is already throwing devil horns in the air.

But it's a damned long train ride up to Aomori from Tokyo. I've already got my reading material sorted (cheers, Ben & Michael!) and have patched together a playlist that complements the rhythmic thrum of the rails, as well as the foggy sense of expectation when having a wander. Hopefully, this will make up for the conspicuous silence of the next two weeks. Enjoy, and click on the mix title to download.

Bulldozer Market

1. Circle - "Andexelt"
2. Serena Maneesh - "I Just Want To See Your Face"
3. Suicide - "Girl"
4. Wirtschaftswunder - "Patre Del Mondo"
5. Moebius & Beerbohm - "Subito"
6. Mayyors - "Ghost Punch"
7. Sonic Youth - "Tremens"
8. Mort Garson - "The Unexplained"
9. Fantastikoi Hxoi - "Na Exeis Ta Panta"
10. Boredoms - "San"
11. Laddio Bolocko - "As If By Remote"
12. Electric Sandwich - "China"
13. Scorpio Tube - "Yellow Listen"
14. Polvo - "City Birds"
15. My Bloody Valentine - "Bilinda Song"
16. The Oscillation - "Respond In Silence"
17. The Stranglers - "Meninblack"
18. The Fall - "Fantastic Life" (Live)
19. The Brian Jonestown Massacre - "Origin of Love"

Tangential Postscript: Desperate for more of my acerbic bon môts while I'm away? I've got a new article (about an old complaint) up on the Mute Magazine website, filed vaguely inappropriately in the "news & analysis" section.

The 27 Club

Of which I can now never officially be a member.

Don't worry, we've still got Keith Olbermann, right?

You will be missed, Mr. Zinn.

The Circle of Life

Were you to indulge an interest in poorly-written English-language far eastern news publications and check the Japan Times right now, you'd see the following above-the-fold stories stacked neatly on top of one another:

• Police arrest Ichihashi in Osaka: Tatsuya Ichihashi, the only suspect in the 2007 murder of a British woman, was arrested Tuesday after managing to elude police for 2 1/2 years.
• More body parts of college student are discovered: The torso and part of a thigh bone of a beheaded female college student from Shimane Prefecture have been found on a mountain in Hiroshima Prefecture near the site where her head was found last week, police said Monday.

And the great cosmic Rube Goldberg machine spins & whistles along its merry way! I'll not indulge in the prejudicial speculation about whether or not Ichihashi will be (a) beaten to death with a spiked, LSD-drenched bat because he murdered a foreigner, or (b) slapped across his backside and sent home because he murdered a foreigner. Instead, I'll just remind myself how lucky I am to live in a city that doesn't see an average of 270 of its citizens killed every year, and where my wife can walk home alone at night without a can of mace & six months of aikido lessons under her belt.

Of course, this presents a timely opportunity to examine the strange nature of crime in Japan - which is to say that, to the infinitesimal extent that it exists, it is spectacular and grotesque. The average national crime rate (33.7 per 1000 people according to the UN) is a full 50% above the Japanese overall crime rate (19.177 per 1000 people), but that's nothing compared to the stupefying fact that the average national murder rate is twenty times that of Japan (a near-nonextant 0.00499933 per 1000 people).* Yet, when a murder does occur, it's a horror that could've sprung from the imagination of Wes Craven on bad methamphetamines: children chopping each other up, young nightlife workers defiled & dismembered by men, men dismembered by despondent spouses, knife-wielding lunatics lashing out at anyone within arm's reach, or deformed, cannibalistic shut-ins butchering little girls. Absolutely unspeakable.

But a timely opportunity to examine the strange nature of crime in Japan though it may be, I'm damn tired and haven't the stomach to ruminate at length about the above atrocities right before bed time. Besides, attempting to either legislate around or prepare for psychopathologically-driven assaults is like trying to do the same for lightning or earthquakes.

*Discussion of the fact that Japan, on the other hand, has more than double the average national suicide rate will likewise have to wait.

Tikkanen

Ghouls In Tweed Jackets

"Highly respected" cultural theorists tossing around pentasyllabic abstract nouns or not - cashing in on celebrity death is still cashing in on celebrity death, you smug opportunists.

Botox-addled Extraterrestrial Approximation of White Woman Dead

Whoops! Wrong pic. Just a sec...

Damn! Sorry, I know I've got it around here somewhere...

Oh, fuck it.

Meanwhile, Iran is on the precipice of a revolution, eight people died in Iraq on Thursday, Kim Jong-Il is still totally batshit, and China arrested Liu Xiaobo. Until that zombie is poppin' and lockin' on my street, there are bigger fish to fry.

But with the various rumours or doctors, criminals investigations, and chronic addiction to synthetic opiods, I'm calling it right now: assisted suicide. Any takers?

The Satire of Death

Living abroad, the small-talk niche usually occupied by the weather or local sports team is filled by two questions:

• "So what brought you to [Name of Country]?"
• "When do you think you'll be moving home?"

Though initially an exciting chance for some minor self-exposition, these eventually become as rote & dull an anecdote as talking about, well, the weather or local sports team. People develop routine replies that can be rattled off in a single sentence and earn a few laughs while they're at it. My stock wisecrack involved a global prognosis so doomy that I would never move back to the States, if only because when the shit really hit the fan, I didn't want to be in a country where everyone was armed to the teeth.

Which is all well & good as a gag in casual conversation, but is chillingly underscored & stripped of any satirical overtones by the disturbing events of the past couple of weeks - doubly so because this is The Inevitable we've been waiting for. Now those with blood on their hands and a well-publicised bloodlust are somehow claiming not only that they've been painted red by their nemeses, but that their hands are clean. This is the sociocultural equivalent of "fixing" the financial crisis by pouring what little money remains back into the corrupt corporations who fucked us over in the first place.

They say that amateurs discuss tactics while professionals debate logistics, but the answer isn't simply a matter of gun control. There is, for example, an arguable link between gun ownership in the US (50%) and Canada (29%) and their murder rates (8.40 and 5.45 per 100,000 respectively). But this correlation isn't consistent: Finland has more guns per capita than any other European nation, yet their murder rate is a blessedly miniscule 1.98 per 100,000. Russia, meanwhile, has a only handful of firearms but a murder rate exceeded only by (in ascending order) Venezuela, Jamaica, South Africa, and Colombia.

So from whence spills this violence in the American character? Is it inherent, founded as it was by a genocidal venture capitalists and religious fanatics? Is America, in the words of National Lampoon's Vacation, "all fucked in the head"?

Fears Of Gun

1. Fumio Hayasaka - "Stray Dog"
2. Jimpson & Group - "The Murderer's Home"
3. Scientist - "Blood On His Lips"
4. The Clash - "Guns of Brixton"
5. Lungfish - "Oppress Yourself"
6. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "The Curse of Millhaven"
7. Michael Yonkers - "Kill the Enemy"
8. Butthole Surfers - "Graveyard"
9. El-P - "Deep Space 9mm"
10. Brainbombs - "Stupid & Weak"
11. The Birthday Party - "Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)" (Live)
12. Swans - "Beautiful Child"
13. Grails - "More Extinction"

Update: I'm not the only one to have noted that it's just been a spiky, unpleasant kinda week...