Last week my spirit-brother, DELICIOUS MCCUNE, took off his shirt and put on his sunglasses and leather jacket and braved hell’s hot breath for all us sinners . . . by which I mean he bore witness to the newly-released four-hour cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE live and in technicolor for the whole world to see.

When he informed me of his commitment to perform this miserable ritual, I said, “Man, you wanna watch that thing again? It almost lobotomized us the first time!” McCune was torn asunder when I said this, because he had completely forgotten we had, in fact, seen it together with our spirit-brother Swampy Kerwin back in 2017 at the Alameda Theatre & Cineplex on the island of Alameda in Oakland, California. We had gone, the three of us, out of pure self-loathing. We had felt like punishing ourselves for some reason, and decided to brave those godless waters together. It is the only movie I’ve ever seen in a theater where I just gave up and pulled out my phone and started texting people until the lights came up. McCune fell asleep at some point but I know he at least saw the first hour. Thing is, I only really remember the drive there and back again . . . the movie itself, as McCune has descrived such things, is “anti-memory”. A good movie is generous and it gives you things. These types of movies, the ones that induce anti-memory, only take things away from you, never to return. What they leave behind is agony.

Up until last week, I had mercifully forgotten about the existence of JUSTICE LEAGUE altogether, so powerful was its ability to destroy itself inside my mind. To hear those words again recalled only the particular sadness I had felt as we left the theater that night in 2017. What had actually occurred in the film, what was at stake, the dreams and motivations of these characters and their ultimate fates . . . these are things I would not be able to recount even if I stood before a grand jury facing the death penalty. They had been swallowed up into the eternal darkness of mind, if they had ever even existed to begin with, and become anti-memory. All I knew was that I would rather eat part of my own neck than fall dick-first into a four-hour-long version of this god damn thing. But I did not want my brother to bear the wilderness alone, so of course I tuned in out of solidarity. It was sheer misery from beginning to end, but we had us a good ol time anyway.

I took some screenshots:

Man, just the most embarrassing trash you could ever lay eyes on. And like, it’s not just that it’s insultingly stupid, or whatever . . . it’s that it doesn’t actually contain even the simplest, most barebones elements of storytelling?? Were these guys out to lunch the day the rest of the class learned what a basic fucking story arc is??? Yes, this is a movie made for children and adults who wish they were still children, but even as a thing you Look At and are supposed to be Entertained By, it fails to thread scenes together coherently, and is thus this tedious slog of meaningless images we, the audience, are incapable of finding compelling. It almost feels totally random what order anything is in . . . like it doesn’t even matter. Even a bad movie can achieve a sort of internal logic, but JUSTICE LEAGUE is incapable of even this. You start to feel sick gazing upon this thing as you realize that they spent $300 MILLION DOLLARS to say ABSOLUTELY NOTHING over the course of FOUR HOURS. This movie cost more than the GDP of like every country in South America, and, behold, it is the film equivalent of cereal. It exists, I guess, for the sake of existing. That’s pretty pathetic dude!!!

And why would we intentionally watch something so heinous and hatefully empty? Something that was obviously created out of pure contempt for its own audience? The most charitable way I can describe our intentions is that we wanted to better understand Whatever The World Is Now. You gotta know who the enemy is, man. At least to some degree, the kind of entertainment a society produces is a lens through which we can view society itself. Right?? If we produce and consume sick entertainment / art / whatever, then maybe we, as a society, are sick. OK??

lol

Anyway, I transcribed some of McCune’s musings that, to me, represent a grand summation of this strange shared experience:

We’re watching something that, in real life—this occurs. People die, but they’re part of horrific accidents. Parents lose children, children lose parents, they wallow in suffering for sometimes days at a time before expiring. And we’re watching this inside of a comic book movie where you feel nothing for these terrible incidents that actually happen, because they are used like a condom to fuck a story. Well really, to penetrate your mind, to pull the trigger in the audience’s mind, that this is serious. They use it to make you feel engaged with it. They use your humanity against you to facilitate their poor, disgusting, weak, and quite frankly, pathetic “works”. Makes me sick, man. It makes me sick.

Whenever I call this stuff baby food—that is entirely accurate. Because baby food is a ready-made substance to be digested for early lifeforms, as to not aggravate the digestive system, but supplying them with an adequate amount of nutrition. In this case an adequate amount of nutrition for a movie is something to look at. The easily-digestible part is just, in this case, is nonsense. So you can just see it and it’s just like, “Don’t worry, turn your brain off, just enjoy, like, the weird images.” Unfortunately I’m the incorrect sort of person where it’s like—I would like meaning in my art and my images because that’s the only reason that they’re worthwhile being engaged in.

Man, you know what I really hate? I really hate when I read doughy idiots talk about, like, “Comic books are just like what the Greeks used to do, which is create a pantheon of gods that then they told stories about, and then passed down generations of wisdom—uuooHHH—through myth—uuooHHH.” Are you kidding me? Don’t you dare insult the forebears of fucking Western Civilization and the current world we live in, by pretending that this stuff has in any way, shape, or form—the interest, heft, symbolism, or meaning of Old Myth. OK? Seriously. I don’t know why I’m watching this dumbass story. I’m so upset.

I am shivering with fear about the generations of humans that find this stuff engaging.

If you wanna watch the whole thing: here it is! I cannot imagine it would be much fun to watch not-live, because of course part of whatever we got out of it (???) came from the camaraderie of hating it together. But if you got four hours you want to toss into a screaming black hole, have at it. All I can say is . . . pack a diaper before you honk on down to Baby Town!!

You ever look up at the moon and wish it were forested, and had a smallish ocean and streams and rivers and lakes, and is oxygen-rich and has earthlike-gravity, and on and on?? And hell, maybe its own unique animals, all of them herbivores, cuz why not. That would be so cool to look up and see that, and know that it’s up there etc. I think about that all the time~

The inevitable downside to such of thing is that of course there would be fucking strip malls and oil refineries and waterfront condos for millionaires and whatever else toxic bullshit . . . really any human-made travesty you can imagine. Hah!

Well! It is just a dream in my mind, so I envision it as a peaceful utopia. Sue me!!

🥺

love those aliens days!!!

my gf and me

I went out walking again tonight, and I thought about what my life had been before the darkness came to swallow us up, and felt sad that it was gone. Reckon that’s a universal sentiment right now, though hell, it still felt rotten to me—rotten all over again even, no less painful than it had felt any of the other thousands of times I have done such thinking in the last year. What can you do anymore, really, other than think about all the alternatives to this, which of course means to remember The Time Before. And for some reason, in all that ruminating, I remembered The Girl From Estonia, whom I had met when I was living in Berlin last winter. I met her through Jess, my friend from Chicago who also moved to Berlin when I did, though I don’t know how she knew her, and maybe neither did she. AT MY SUGGESTION, we all met at CAKE in Kreuzberg, and hung out in the back room smoking rolled cigarettes and drinking cheap cocktails. Being in the back was also my idea: I was attempting to avoid the accidental gaze of the French bartender, because I was in love with her, and I didn’t want her to be able to figure that out by looking at me. I imagined it had to be plainly obvious, and I was lying low that night, on account of my company. There was no sense making them bear witness to my puppy-dogging.

Anyway: The Girl From Estonia was so cool. She was really funny too. Mostly I talked to her while Jess talked to this other girl we were with, who I remember had a huge bag of cocaine in her purse (lol). And so TGFE and I had a good ol time together, and she was cryptic and psychic in the way those Eastern Bloc types are, which is why I like them so much. She was surprised I knew anything at all about Estonia, which I guess I kinda did, though not much. They have really good healthcare and colleges . . . all of which you access through this Citizen Card issued by the government that does absolutely everything. In a country that small, something like that almost sounds quaint. I knew that much at least, cuz I’d watched some documentary about Estonia when I was living in absolute misery in Portland. I said: “There are only like a million and a half of you, which is wild.” And she told me there weren’t even that many Estonians. TO WHICH I REPLIED: “Whoa.”

We all ended up at this former underground Soviet bank vault that had been converted into a club, because of course it had, what with it being Berlin and all. I stuck close to TGFE while Jess and Cocaine Girl danced in the depths of the pit. It was loud, so we had to speak into each other’s ears. She told me she lived close to my apartment, and we agreed to hang out sometime, because Why Not. And then we went into a dark room lit only by a red light which shone through two square windows on the black doors. Inside everyone was lying on these pleather foam pads, and so we did too. I told TGFE that the United States was a nightmare and that I never wanted to go back. She listened for a while as I uttered mountains of space trash about god knows what. And afterward, as if gazing into a crystal ball, she seemed to guess at an unassailable truth about me, some grand totem of my existence, and it sent a black streak of terror straight down my spine. I told her as much and she laughed. I won’t say what it was she guessed, though man, she sure did read my dumbass brain like a god darn book. I thought: “Yeah, this girl rules.” And then I took this picture to remember her by:

I never saw The Girl From Estonia again. I had to leave the country a few weeks later, on account of covid and visas and all that shit. Sometimes I wondered what had happened to her. Tonight I did something about it, and I sent her a message. I said she was cool and that I wish we had gotten to hang out, and that I will soon have an EU passport, and that we should meet up in some other former underground Soviet bank vault again sometime, whenever and wherever that may be. She replied immediately from many timezones away:

Wow! That’s just about the best reply I could have hoped to receive. And I had never seen that picture of Jess and me before . . . we look like siblings. A little memory!! Aw.

Well. . . .

TO BE CONTINUED

sometimes at night when i’m trying to fall asleep, i’ll start thinking about all the cool t-shirts i’ve lost or had (accidentally) stolen from me by Overnight Guests and i get kind of upset, because i’ve had so many cool shirts vanish from my life!

i can’t believe i did this, but i left a DUFFEL BAG full of black band shirts in the storage room of my apartment complex in baltimore the day i left the city forever to move to austin, and oh my god, it was stuffed full of incredible shirts i’ll never get back. they’re irreplaceable: they were all printed on that heavy 90s cotton and faded from hundreds if not thousands of washes. the vast majority of my teenage stockpile! if i dwell on it too long i’ll start to cry.

i should do a post about my favorite shirts. i still have a bunch of really good ones. i’ve had this one rolling stones shirt since i was 13, and it is incredible that it has survived. the cotton is so soft. i’ll bet it’s been washed 4,000 times. i even had my ex-girlfriend and then laura rokas do some repairs on it to keep it alive. it is obvious this shirt is ancient and it looks so cool. i wore it to work one time, and this girl was like, “wow, do you never get rid of your old shirts or something?” and i was like, “um, no way!!”

yeah ok i’ll do a shirts post soon~

i’m mulder

ALSO: sorry i haven’t been writing much . . . as you know, NOTHING IS HAPPENING, we are creating no new memories and experiencing no new experiences, and so what is there to say, really

also i’ve just been kinda sad

but i’m working on stuff!!!

how do i get my hands on some opium?? i wonder

it’s for research!!!

My best friend Dante turned 13 years old on Sunday. Here he is in the Oakland Hills lounging upon his snowflake blanket, which he’s had his entire life. Whoa!

I found Dante in Baltimore back in 2008. I had just gotten back from Tokyo and wanted a cat. I chose him because he was the runt. He cost me all of $40. Worth every penny!!

He has since lived in five different states and even a whole other country. I think Dante probably flies more than most people I know. . . .

Though yeah: Happy birthday, Dante! I love you!!!