now playing: sega sunset by lorn
my new flat has a tv.
i didn’t put it there. it was there when i got here. watching. waiting. an obscene hole hanging off the wall, like malevich’s black square. slightly overhanging actually. ugly. arrogant. distainful. hungry. a maw. a void. a zero point. a minimalist techno-futurist tapestry depicting the decline and fall of man in the twenty first century.
our eyes met.
and several subjective years and islands deeper into my random internet shit odyssey, i came across [this] AMV (anime music video) for the song sega sunset by lorn. it’s a cool song. i’m into that distorted, deep, bass-heavy drone thing. it’s moderat-esque, in a good way.
the accompanying visuals though, the animation – that shit blew my mind. they’re taken from yoshiaki kawajiri’s running man section of the 1987 sci-fi anthology neo tokyo.
i absolutely love this old-schooly virtuoso animation style. the lines. the colour. the texture. the frenzied energy. the galloping gonzo madness. the dismissive sniffing-at of the so-called rules. of life. of logic. of physics. of good taste. here, where i’m sat, when a head explodes, it just explodes. bright red and messy. like a gelatin cast filled with latex scraps and leftover burgers blasted from behind by a shotgun.
which is good’n’all, but with animation you have total freedom. you can strip a skull from skin, to bone, to brain, to neurons, to atoms, to the fabric and structure of existence itself. and then you can loop back around. zoom so far in and so far out that the infinite and the infinitesimal become one and the same.
i love all that. all the manical mondo weirdo wildness. the eyes and teeth. the shattering glass. but most of all, i think, the humanity. and i say that as a rampant misanthrope. animation like this just oozes humanity. it squashes up like so much mud between the barefoot toes of its being. this is a product of human minds and human hands. by humans, for humans. you can feel the realness. it is luxuriantly, loudly, luminously human in a way that feels increasingly important every day, as we forget, more and more, what it is that we actually are.
and so.
this is a post about ranting
but this is not a rant.
it’s sunday morning.
i’m drinking rooibos green tea with the windows wide open and scottish indie folk on the speaker.
i am building myself a bubble of calm.
and all that rage
all that foaming at the mouth and gnashing of teeth
just seems sort of pointless
so schoolboy
so here it is.
sometimes a simple fuck that shit suffices
sometimes it doesn’t
sometimes you find yourself being force-fed another bullshit bp or shell advert about how we all need to be doing our bit because they’re super busy saving the planet and stuff
or a google promo about how everything is just fine and so far there’s been zero unexpected issues with the internet and the information economy and that there definitely won’t be any for ai either so we should just let them get on with it and anyway they know better than us and they know what’s better for us and we should just shut the fuck up and focus on buying shit
sometimes you’re told that if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear
and that by continuing to exist you agree to the terms and conditions
sometimes you’re face to face (or ass to face, or face to ass) with a self-cleaning public toilet, and you realise that designers don’t just hate humanity – they have no idea what the fuck it is
sometimes you’re presented with wall-to-wall media coverage about how the ex-queen was some sort of paragon, perfection personified, a lately-living saint, and absolutely, definitely not just an unwanted anachronism, a morally turpid heriditary asshat with a mountain of money and most likely an actual lizard
sometimes you remember that it’s ok to choke people in porn but not ok to smoke weed in porn, and they label you crazy when you point out the complete insanity of it all
sometimes you’re introduced to a new improved user interface, so compellingly shitter than the old one that you can only assume that the whole thing is a sick joke, or some sort of stamford-prison-style experiment on a few hundred million human lab-rats
sometimes it feels like this
but what would that look like in words?
like this maybe
YOU CUNT
YOU FUCKING CUNT
YOU MOTHER FUCKER
YOU DILDOBRAINED NOBCARPENTER
YOU TWISTED DISCOFUCK PIECE OF SHIT
YOU ASSHOLE
I HOPE YOU GET FUCKED IN THE FACE WITH A SAMURAI SWORD
I HOPE YOU DIE
I HOPE YOU DIE AND BURN IN HELL
I HOPE YOU’RE THERE ALREADY
(I’LL SEE YOU LATER)
it lacks subtlety though.
i can do better.
which brings me to this. here is a rant i wrote earlier. it’s a rant about a man i met at the kielder marathon. a man with power. a man with a title. a race marshall.
to paraphrase lord acton – power corrupts, absolute absolutely. some people are constantly teetering on that edge. give them anything – anything – any sniff of a smidgeon of a position of authority, and they’ll fall.
in this case, all it took was a hi-vis vest. drunk on fluorescent yellow power, this monumental prick decided that we were not allowed to walk along the marathon route. that we’d have to divert at the next available turning, return to the road, and go home. he told us.
i told him to get fucked.
ok, i didn’t, because i avoid conflict at all costs. but obviously we ignored him. the sum total of our interaction was him pretending to be a traffic cop and us going ok, ok, whatever, bye. but something about it really fucking infuriated me. if this sort of thing had happened in london, i could cope with it. i’m used to knobhead police sergeants screaming at me to get off my bike and walk the entire length of the mall solely so some pointlessly important rich fuck can cosplay in cape and crown in a parade two weeks from now. this was so unexpected though. we were just enjoying a walk out in nature and this one guy had to shit all over it.
fuck that guy.
and if by some fantastic twist of fate, by some miracle, you reading this – you’re that guy, that marshall – this is for you, my man.
i like to pretend these sorts of people have had hard, painful lives, filled with mediocrity, missed chances, death, physical trauma, disappointing sex, disappointing careers, unfaithful partners (or involuntary celibacy), money problems, eczema, degenerative hearing loss and blindness, piles, impotence, baldness, backpain, ungrateful moneygrubbing children and grandchildren, unsightly birthmarks, severe acne, arthritis, internet connectivity issues, headlice (before going bald), public lice (subsequently), body odour, incontinence, expensive home repairs, homelessness, food allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine headaches, hair in their restaurant food, and parents murdered by recreational walkers.
when I consider what they’ve presumably been through, i can forgive them. otherwise, they’d just be massive dicks, and i’d be forced to hope that they get hit by a coachful of marathon runners on the way back to the car park, and forced to watch the next race from a wheelchair. fortunately for that fuckface marshall, the whole route is wheelchair friendly.
That’d be petty though. I hope they just die instead.
2022.10.02