Guilty Pleasures
One is honest about oneself
either with a sense of shame
or with vanity.
​
- Nietzsche
Chopper Chicks in Zombietown
​
Thelma and Louise go to Night of the Living Dead.
​
The Seven Samurai, but they're rebel women on Harleys
fighting off the undead with dynamite and staple guns.
​
Deeply satisfying anarcho-feminism,
campy, joyful metaphor for capitalism and Resistance
​
The first time I saw this at the Castro Theater in SF,
I got straight back in line for the next show.
​
Some dude ahead of me asked the ticketseller
"what's this movie about?"
​
WHAT ABOUT THE TITLE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?
Ticket to Heaven
Jamie and I force everyone
we know to watch this with us.
​
"How do you like it so far?"
​
"This is the part I was
telling you about."
​
"You know we wouldn't
leave you alone."
​
YES FATHER!
Stoner Physics Films
The legalization of cannabis may have interesting effects
on the course of scientific thought.
Psychologist Arthur Kleps:
“if I were to give you an IQ test and during the test
one of the walls of the room opened up
giving you a vision of the blazing glories
of the central galactic suns,
and at the same time
your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye
like a three-dimensional colour movie,
you would not do well on the test.”
Powers of Ten
Charles and Mary Eames' short film
zooming out from a Chicago picnic
to the Known Universe,
​
then zooming inward
to subatomic quarks.
Whoa, this is some logarithmic shit, man
​
This one is
the same concept
for the history
of the Universe
​
The sound effects
alone are worth it.
​
I learned so much!
General Tso's Chicken
​
This entree is problematic on so many levels.
​
According to WebMD:
"Named after a Chinese war hero, this fat-laden dish won't help you win any weight loss battles. The breaded, fried chicken is smothered in a sugary sauce. One order clocks in at around 1,500 calories and 88 grams of fat, and it delivers more sodium than you should get in a day."
​
Chinese restaurants use this trick
to make you forget this:
​
They serve it with broccoli spears,
so you think it's healthy, right?
which is like giving someone an aspirin
to go with their heroin
Then there's the broader problem of cultural appropriation.
​
Imperialism typically ruins the cuisine of colonized people.
Curry and kebab shops in the UK,
for example, make a grotesque parody of Indian and Arab food, obliterating nuance, overusing spices, dumbing the food down into a cartoonish imitation for the English (whose own culinary tradition leaves something to be desired).
So I'd argue that
General Tso's Chicken isn't exactly
Western theft of Chinese tradition,
​
but an elaborate joke
that the Chinese themselves played
to lampoon the childish tastes of the West.
​
Maybe General Tso's Chicken
is supposed to be eaten
with a side dish of guilt,
both for the calories and the imperialism.
​
Mmmmm, sweetness and shame
It doesn't help that the actual General Tso
Zuo Zongtang or å·¦å®—æ£ , was a war criminal.
​
He specialized in crushing peasant rebellions
against the Qing Dynasty, including
the Taiping uprising (1864),
the Nian revolt (1868)
and the Dungan mutiny (1875).
​
It's like going to Olive Garden
for Mussolini Carbonara,
or Benihana
for Tojo-style Teriyaki
But sometimes cultural appropriation starts as a prank that non-Westerners play on the colonizers.
​
General Tso's Chicken was invented by
emigre Taiwanese cooks to appeal
to the sugar- and fat-addicted American palate.
​
In 1972, Mao had his chefs copy it,
to reverse-engineer Kentucky Fried Chicken
so that Nixon would feel at home
when he visited Beijing.
Plants vs. Zombies
Jackson turned me on to this game,
from George Fan, maker of Insaniquarium.
​
For a while I played it furtively.
​
A grown man shouldn't be addicted
to a video game marketed to children.
​
But after a while I gave in
​
a Zen meditation
on life vs death
​
Fuck, here come the bucketheads
"As I write,
highly civilised human beings
are flying overhead,
trying to kill me."’
​
Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (1940)
Battle of Britain
(July-September 1940)
I'm a little embarrassed that
I have never outgrown
my childhood obsession
with the Battle of Britain.
​
War fantasies are problematic.
​
A grownup lawyer shouldn't still have
models of Spitfires on his desk.
​
But I've had this recurring dream
since I was eight years old
​
where I'm flying in the air
defending my city
against Nazi death machines
​
North Korean sitcoms
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea
has a Youtube channel where you can watch
comedy shows posted from Pyongyang.
​
Like O Youth!: five daughters trick
their goofy parents into accepting
a Taekwondo champion as their brother’s bride. “Daaad! Dear Leader says we can play sports!”
I know I’m supposed to watch this with hostility: “This white-washes the power structure!
It uses self-deprecating schtick to promote obedience to the State!”
​
But I get exhausted by all this critical theory.
Come on, lighten up!
Mr. Pak is such a doofus!
Look at the funny trouble they get in!
I watch them the way
Jackson watches MTV reality shows;
​
ironically at first, but then you just give in
​
Once he insisted we watch
Are You The One?
where a house full of horny millenials
have to figure out who the computer algorithm
has selected as their Perfect Match
​
At first I refused.
Then I agreed to watch it
only as an Orwellian exercise
to study what our Robot Overlords
are planning for us.
​
But by Episode 4
we were both shouting at the screen;
"Come on Brittany! Dylan's a user!
He's not good enough for you, girl!"
​
Dear Leader is so funny.
Romanian punk covers
of classic rock
What a drag it is getting older.
​
So it's deeply satisfying
to find Romanian teenagers on Youtube
making punk anthems out of classic rock.
Then in its infinite wisdom
the Youtube algorithm sends me
this Irish Elvis impersonator who does AC/DC covers
And then OMIGOD, his Elvis cover of the Sex Pistols Pretty Vacant!
Then this South African cover!
Zulu women singing Sex Pistols!
​
I know I'm supposed to hate
the omniscient social media algorithms, but how well they know me.
​