Brainjackin: Francis Bacon Good

All cultures are an instance in a continuum of cultures stretching into the past and future as far in each direction as the term culture can be used to describe what was or will be happening there, and they flow into and out of each other geographically as well.  Parisian urban culture circa 2025 is not the same thing as Parisian urban culture circa 2022 (to the extent you can even draw a line around what constitutes Parisian urban culture).  Close, but not exactly, and the more years pass, the more different those instances become.

Why did I feel the need to open this article with that pretentious shit?  It’s preface to say that art students from one decade to the next will be enamored of different artists from their own past and present, but you can point to any given class and say “those guys sure loved (Artist X).”  Back when the fascist Futurists were saying they hate Goya, you could feel, in that hate, just how popular Goya must have been with the art students around them.  They were being contrarian, and what they chose to be contra must have been well-loved.

I’m told that in the late 80s – early 90s, Francis Bacon was huge with art schoolies.  I’ve seen some evidence of that in the works of my college professors and of my older cousin Dave.  What was going on there, with that moment of Bacon Love?

This artiste du jour thing may be less true of the 21st century, where culture has become much more balkanized.  Can’t think of specific artists that reigned over the schools my husband and I attended.  At the commercially oriented one where we met, possibly the biggest artistic influence was Jhonen Vasquez, but there were lots of people that were not on that page.  My husband also attended a fine art school in the same city, with a lot more rich kids.  What were they into?  I’d term it “contemporary urban art” – the kind of shit you’d see in Juxtapoz and High Fructose magazines – and again, I can’t think of one specific artist with outsized influence.

Shit, where was I going with this?

Fuckin’ Francis Bacon.  Not that one, this one.  I never would have become familiar with his art if not for my husband.  Not because my husband was in art school when I was in high school, but because he has always sought out intellectual enrichment, even as a child, and started learning about fine art way before he actually reached college.  That guy downloaded Eraserhead on a 14.4 modem before I bought my first computer.  (To be clear, we didn’t know each other until later, when he was an adult.  I’m not that creepy lol.)

So my husband knew the works of Francis Bacon.  I might have glossed over them in magazines and textbooks on rare occasions in the years before we met, but the memories never stuck.  His work did not fascinate me, because while I am attracted to goths, I am not quite a goth myself.  Flash-forward to the early days of our relationship, 2005-2006.  We were sharing the things we love, and I was properly introduced to this great artist.

Francis Bacon – seriously stop thinking of that one right fucking now – was an Expressionist in a time of Postmodernists.  Maybe not philosophically – I’m much less familiar with his words than with his visual creations – but in practice, he painted emotion with intensity and a Symbolist nod to the classic.  This was how the original late 19th century Expressionists worked.

If you see the writhing horror of his art, you might imagine it was painted with an torrent of quick brutal strokes.  My husband has seen one of these works in person and says this is clearly not the case.  His canvas is evenly covered.  Someone who attacks the canvas like a method actor will leave exposed little white dots of fabric, or have thick impasto with dubious structural integrity.  Mr. Bacon had a furious vision of his subject matter, but a controlled hand in rendering it.

This might be the only time some of you see his work, so I should choose something to put the best foot forward… eh, my work alarm goes off in seven and a half hours, so this’ll have to do.  His most famous painting, after a Velázquez pope portrait:

Scream all you want, man; no one here gets out alive.

I came into this article imagining I could find lovely hi-res pics of his work all over the internet and was sorely disappointed.  The availability of such things on my bookshelves was misleading.  Maybe someday I’ll upload some pics from the art books we have.

Anyway, if you need an perfect visual representation of your pain, and haven’t found the one artist who will make you feel understood, give this boy a look.  Francis Bacon good.

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The Convenient Fiction of the Self?

When I look inside myself I see nothing there.  I don’t do it often.  Even as I compose this, I’m giving my inner “self” a sidelong glance at best.  The reason I can’t usually achieve such a moment of clarity is that my life is too busy and filled with distractions and duties, which are external things.  In those times there’s an assumption of selfhood that makes everything easy.  I like this, I don’t like this, I must do this, I can’t do that.  The more accurate version would be “this moment’s instance of the various senses and processes of this pile of organs is compelled toward this or away from that.”

This is how “I’ve” thought of “myself” for some time now (alright no more quotes), but it’s not completely accurate.  This article is an attempt at refining the idea.  Yeah, I’m making it up as I go.  We’ll see how that turns out.

Within that pile of organs and processes aforementioned, there is one function that could be reasonably termed a self.  It is a program constructed over a lifetime of experiences and ideas.  What is it?  An idea of entity, of unity – that all the mess that comprises this body and mind are a singular being with inherent properties of desire, distaste, will / agency, etc.  Functionally this is true, which is why I don’t see too egregious of a contradiction in using personal pronouns (possibly more often than I should).  Factually, I don’t think it is true.

It’s the word “inherent” up there.  Every desire or distaste and the will that chooses how to act on them, these are separable from the concept of entity, aren’t they?  Simple artificial intelligences are told how to react to stimulus ahead of the stimulus being encountered.  If this happens, then do that.  We don’t think of those AIs as having a self, and we’re right.  But who’s to say we have a self either?  Let’s say my desire and distaste are like the roomba’s instructions to move toward this and away from that, and my will is the roomba’s programmed way of acting on those inputs.  Where is the entity in this analogy?

I got meat like a roomba has plastic.  That is a singular locus where all the sensations and imperatives that comprise me reside.  That’s an observable self, and meets a reasonably basic definition of such.  My problem is self as the ghost in the machine.  I ain’t feelin’ it.  Yes, one of the programs within me habitually acts the role of the self, constructs a narrative of entity out of disparate extremely destructible and mutable elements, but it seems so fake…

I don’t know if, in the course of writing this, I’ve gotten any closer to pinning my problem.  Let me keep trying for a minute…

Naw.  I’m running out of sauce for daily posting.  Certainly, I’m out of queue.  Let’s just see how much longer the pile of organs can keep this baloney rollin’…

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Some Dream Girls

Had a dream this morning I wanted to remember but failed to write down.  All that remains is some broad strokes that don’t sound all that interesting.  But still, this dream had characters, and characters are worth noting if you’re a writer.  I might need those at some point.

There were two young white ladies, one blonde and one with medium brown hair, driving somewhere.  I was in the back seat, along for this ride.  There was an exchange between them where the blonde was feigning incompetence to get the brown-haired girl to do something for her, but I knew it was an act because we were in the blonde’s car, and it was modified like the millennium falcon – her own handiwork.

Very vague, not very useful, but it puts me in mind of a few things.  One, I like millennium falcons, even if idgaf re: space shooters™ anymore.  The car was a drab grey four door sedan, kinda 1980s lookin, with an almost 1960s style interior.  Everything was grey and the area under the dash was exposed, her modifications visible there – extra gizmos.  We were on bench seats.  A millennium falcon, to me, is a junky badass of a vehicle that is also, at least sometimes, your home.  It’s a fantasy -winnebagos are a bad fuckin’ idea- but I like this in the realm of imagination.

Two, I like wacky ladies.  They were probably directly inspired by my drive-by impressions of the sitcom characters from 2 Broke Girls, and I remember little about them, but it could be a seed of something more elaborate.  I’m thinking of Stella Star from Starcrash – a very successful adventurer while also being a goofy fool – hans olo if he dressed like vampirella.  Like the anime girls from Gunsmith Cats maybe.  I dunno.  It’s a seed.

That’s all.  A quick note to my future self.

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ERposting

composing this in “hall bed” at emergency room, drankin saline solution thru stigmata.  was weak all day and slightly short of breath.

not lookin forward to the bill.  the way the insurance tango works i might not know the final tally for months, or might find out in a week.  that is to say, i might come to y’all with hat in hand again at some point in that time frame.

fun how so few people here wear masks.  minimizing my household’s exposure to crud by having no company in here.

i’ve queued this post so if it goes live with nothing after this point, you can assume i’m dead or otherwise unavailable.  be concerned if the rest of my queue starts rolling out one day at a time, posts with titles but no text other than a hasty note to myself or a keysmash.

i’m sure it won’t be like that, but this is a weird one for me, and who knows?  will it be better for them to discover nothing or for them to find out i have something annoying or expensive to treat?

will i contract covid in here?  will the visit be worse for my health than muddling thru without help?

will check in later…

nothing!  they found nothing.  i don’t think they ran the most expensive tests so i’ll probably be coo.  just gotta get up the gumption to stop smoking my sick leave.

yeah, back home, had dinner, feel better – if a bit frail.  what will i feel like tomorrow morning?  stay tuned lol.

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Life List: Common Pheasant

I’ve surely seen these before, in a zoo collection filling out a mixed flock of more exotic poultry.  The common pheasant is what you think of when you hear “pheasant” – green head, white ring neck, weird red lappets on the face around their eyes, spots and stripes in a motley of earth tones, long sweeping tail.  That’s the male, females more drab as usual.  I don’t remember a specific instance of seeing them alive.  They’re not from here, introduced as they were around the world.  There’s a different introduced species of fowl one sees far more often, despite it being more showy and likely having smaller numbers globally: peafowl.

Pheasants were put on this continent to shoot.  Whatever, colonizers.  Now they’re here, out in fields, doing whatever it is that a chickenish wild creature does.  I can only remember seeing them in the wild one time.  It was some kind of game farm, or game farm adjacent plot of land where the unwise go to look at birds.  On the way in, we passed a ditch with a pile of dead birds, submerged in yellowish murky water.

At first I thought they were hawks.  It was hard to make out individual details, but they were stripey and not too small.  My brother was with me and considered calling the authorities – killing hawks is not allowed, right?  But we figured it out.  Shot for the sake of shooting, and left to rot.

I don’t get the pleasure of killing.  Seems like the behavior of sick creeps.  One might point out that predatory animals get a pass, right?  It’s how they live.  Alright, but their behavior does little to dissuade me from the idea that hunters are sick creeps.  The most intelligent predatory animals are legendary for their cruelty – for playing with their food.  Cannibalism, particularly of cubs, is widespread within Carnivora.

The conduct of white hunters in particular is doing their reputation no favors.  Every time you look up a hoofed animal no matter how tiny, meatless, or rare, you will see a white man posing next to a dead one.  I swear, I saw a pic of a mouse deer where the proud hunter was posing over it with the tiny peashooter he had used.  Famous politicians who hunt have also been puppy murderers, or blast from helicopters, or use assault rifles.  Losers.  Get a spear and put your ass on the line like a real hunter.

But I do eat meat, and when the soup goes down, you will see me hunting as well.  You will not see me making a game of it or smiling.  I guess it’s no big deal if it ain’t endangered species.  You’re not doing anything a dog wouldn’t do, and we’re all supposed to like dogs, right?  Fine.  I’m not going to say no.  Especially since you assholes killed all the wolves and somebody has to keep the deer numbers down.

But pheasants.  They look alright.  And they probably taste like chicken.

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The Lowest White Person

I recently had an injudicious rant about racism, chiefly that against latinx immigrants in the united snakes, and the very day after I composed that, I ran into a living example of the old LBJ quote “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”  OK, not the entire quote, just the phrase “the lowest white man.”

At the same bus stop where I once met a friendly narcoleptic dude, on another hot shitty day, there were two random things of note.  On the bench, a very well-groomed man was reading a tablet.  I took him for Middle Eastern but he could have been from anywhere medium-toned, as far as I can tell.  The other thing of note, a girly purple backpack sitting in the street, where the bus would be pulling in.

When you see an unattended bag, you might reflect on post 9-11 warnings about explosives.  It did cross my mind; was a bomber sitting in a car with tinted windows nearby, waiting for a crowded bus to pull into view before hitting the remote control switch?  Not likely.  I decided it was randomly dropped there by a drunk or high homeless woman.

Coming down the hill from the overpass, I saw two white people approaching.  The lady could have been conventionally attractive at that distance – thin, tan, whatever.  But a healthy person would have no reason to be in the neighborhood of that overpass.  I knew they were unhoused.

They reached the bus stop and she went straight for the backpack, adding it to the bags she was already hauling.  Up close, she was hard-lined, had a few witch warts, and had the expression of a pit bull that had eaten too many babies and was now bored with the experience.  She had pissed her pants, the wet area centered on the crotch was the size of a dinner plate.  This made enough of an impression I didn’t clock as many details in the man she was with.  He also had too much sun on his skin and was hauling a backpack or two.

They made their way to an empty stretch of parking lot nearby, to rifle through their stuff and make sketchy plans, then hobbled back to the bus stop.  I was listening to my headphones, but lifted them just long enough to fit the N95 over my face – the bus was arriving soon.  In that one little moment, I heard the lady say a racist slur against Mexicans I haven’t heard in years.

Man, I do not thank Satan often enough that I have the privilege of not being around nazis every day.  Thanks, Satan.

Was she referring to the well-groomed guy?  Some other random people she had encountered in her miserable day?  Didn’t matter to me.  I was just thinking, this slang term is based on a sense of disgust, yes?  How can a person living at the outer limits of what normies find disgusting devote her hard-won life energies to feeling disgust for anyone else?  Does that shit help?  Personally, the more I become disgusting to normies, the more convinced I am that disgust is not a value I want to base my own perceptions and judgments upon.

Lady, I get that every day of your life is hateful and desperate.  Everything you own is stolen by your fellow homeless people about as often as you steal everything another homeless person owns from them.  Pleasures are thin on the ground and largely poisonous; pains are constant.  Nobody loves you; I’m sure you don’t love yourself.  But still.  I wish you didn’t let that own your mind, change the way you treat others.  Shit’s a fucken mess.

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Life List, Supplemental: Chill Geese

Every damn time I see this post’s title in my queue I think “grilled cheese?  What did I want to write about grilled cheese?”  It’s chill geese.  Chill geese, I swear!

I had to go on a long journey by bus and by hoof, on a hot shitty day.  I despise summer profoundly.  There were a few nicer stretches, though I didn’t have time to enjoy them.  The apartment complexes on 1st Ave had shade trees and grass near the road, which were a good environment for canada geese.

There were a few small flocks on this day.  I wondered that they might be mixed flocks because some of the geese were much smaller than the tallest adults, but I realized they had just recently come into adult plumage.  Stray bits of down stuck to the surface of those feathers like they’d been caught in a dandelion’s orgasm.  The white and black on their head weren’t quite 100% contrast yet.

Geese have a big rep for hostility and violence, but I’ve never experienced it myself.  The ones closest to the sidewalk, closest to me, were the youngest – of whom you’d think the largest ones would feel protective.  Nobody threatened me.  They all looked very peaceful and sweet.  I could have busted a professional wrasslin’ move and collected a goose dinner, but they felt no danger from me.  They got my number.

I just love beautiful animals, even if they muck up the sidewalk.  They looked so pleasant, like this was paradise, despite the proximity to the asphalt and speeding cars.  I look one way I can see the endless train of people going places, the other and it’s goose elysium.

Thanks, geese.

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Kein Mensch ist Illegal

It’s easy when an issue is outside your direct experience to see it more broadly, to feel its impact less personally.  I dunno, these words are excuses for the fact that while I was always on the better side of the issue of immigration, I wasn’t passionate about it.  Recent events have changed that, which is good.  Of course, it feels bad.

My husband had a boyfriend once who was racist against Mexicans, and when that came out, my dude didn’t even process it at first.  How can you hate those guys with the oompa music and straw cowboy hats?  What did they do to you, rat-faced little creep?  I had a friend who emerged from the methed-out trailer park to become an itinerant goth queen, very cool, but one time she likewise exposed a racism against Mexicans that shocked me.  I imagine she has moved and improved since then.  Unlike my husband’s shitbird ex, my goth friend had decent values in the broad sense, was amenable to change.  And I did understand what was happening to call it out when I saw it, so she had a learning opportunity.

Now where are we?  I’m on the phone at my day job, full time talking to the breadth of amuriKKKa about the difficulties of obtaining and maintaining benefits of various social programs.  I had a front row seat to the effects of rethuglican propaganda, as late 2023 through the whole of 2024, there was a significant increase in the number of fools randomly blaming “the illegals” for the barriers they were experiencing.  Motherfuckers, those barriers were set in place by racists like you, who are convinced with zero evidence that there are a zillion little brown people getting buckets of welfare cash.  You are literally voting to make life harder for yourselves.  They did, and now my rate of fucked-up tragic phone calls where I can’t do anything to help a person has increased, because of this shit.  Cause and effect.

I’ve carefully come close to saying exactly that a few times, and the response from xenophobes is a surly nuh-uh, or silence, or whatever.  Doesn’t matter.  What’s really making them mad is that we can’t explicitly make a whites only pass for welfare programs.  When the revolution comes (if shit comes to that) I will shoot these people in the face.

The mobilization of the genocide machine has begun.  Of course it’s starting with immigrants.  Saw a comment at Mano’s that “people will die because of this situation.”  I regret to inform you they are certainly dying already, and had been under Biden and Obama as well.  It’s just going to get worse now.

Talk about “the illegals” has never been about the rule of law, or protecting your people, or whatever they imagined.  It’s the seed of mass murder.  Zero tolerance for that talk wherever you encounter it.  Fuck the motherfuckers.

Let us stay furious, block the bastards, be as proactive as we can be, protect those who need protection, and not sleep on a single instance of this ongoing horror.  I say that but I know it’s already too late for a full account of the fallen.  So many of those ghosts will never be named.

No more ghosts, no more genocide.  Fuck the USA.

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Dreamposting: Annihilation

Been having apocalyptic dreams again lately.  A while ago I had a dream that alien colonizers had annihilated nature and enslaved all of humanity.  Was it conventional slavery or some kind of mind control?  I no longer remember, but I do remember it was at a preposterously cosmic scale – stars being arranged in rows.  I was in a spaceship, but I don’t recall if I was planning some suicidal resistance gesture or just trying to survive for a few minutes.

The newer dream was more of a supernatural apocalypse.  The entire world had corroded away under something like a super fungus, including rocks, earth, water, all physical substance.  Left in its stead was a sloppy approximation of the annihilated world, populated by sad and confused ghosts that were trying to convince themselves that there was still some kind of concrete reality that they could live in and depend on.

I was in a room where part of the floor had corroded away, and people were discussing what could be done to repair it.  I knew that was futile, that the place was on the verge of dissolving forever, but I let them have their plans.  Is it better to have a false hope or a hopeless truth?  It probably depends on the situation, but my dream self was leaning toward the former.

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Does Bébé Want to Fvck Glenn Danzig?

This article is patently facetious.  Of course it’s problematic – imagine such an article written by some bro about a woman and that is apparent – and of course the person in question is a real and entire-ass human being with thoughts and feelings beyond his public persona, and of course he is to all appearances not interested in getting with fat middle-aged queers, and this fat middle-aged queer is married and also not interested in getting with people who are not interested in getting with them.  Proceeding with these facts in the back of the mind…

There are important questions we must ask of ourselves in this life, to prepare for all eventualities and exigencies, no matter how unlikely.  Given the outsized presence the music and persona of Glenn Danzig have in my life, one may reasonably assume I am a fan.  And as a fan, that I might come into contact with the old man in some way, someday.  And if that should happen, would I want to fuck Glenn Danzig?

Consider, if you will, the appeal.  Danzig is a blues man, part of the long tradition of howlin’ about your supernatural sexual prowess and affinity for death and the devil.  Said Bo Diddley, “I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a cobra snake for a necktie, I got a brand new house on the roadside Made from rattlesnake hide. I got a brand new chimney made on top, Made out of a human skull. Now come on take a walk with me Arlene, And tell me who do you love?”  Said Glenn Danzig, “Come wrap my love in your house of ice, Melt you down more than once or twice, Make you shake till worlds align, See your body tremble with the blood of fire.”

Danzig is buff.  I used to draw musclemans when I was a child, inspired by toys and images in cartoons.  That was the body of the cool and powerful.  Once upon a time, comic nerds strongly favored Glenn to play Wolverine.  The fact he is short was a note in favor – comics canon Wolverine is short and thick.  But I lost interest in muscles, especially the more I realized I wanted to get with men.  Some bi people want mans to be buff and womans to be soft, but I’m more like, everybody be soft now.  Still, it doesn’t necessarily repulse me, as long as they’re not popping every vein like they do on muscle magazines.

The main thing is the Dark Sexual Majesty.  Brooding intense guy will own you body and soul with his grand satanic gifts.  Get destroyed and do so gladly, to experience and to serve a lust more powerful than god.  Realistically, no way he’s that good at fucking.  People get a limited number of talents and he’s already got his share before the bedroom door is opened.  The idea, however, can itself serve as foreplay – prime one to enjoy something more than they otherwise would.

This image is ripe for mockery.  Some rude indie comix nerds made arguably homophobic hay with Henry & Glenn Forever, a series featuring Glenn and Henry Rollins as gay lovers.  Reportedly Mr. Danzig is not amused.  I hope this article, should it find his attention (do not bring it to his attention plz), does not hit him the same way.

Would I mock his arch-macho posture?  Never.  Maybe a wee bit.  Let’s talk about that bassist from Hole, Melissa Auf der Maur.  She bought the act, and cut an extremely cringe-inducing duet with him.  The plot is about how cowboy bad boy Glenn shot her dad, but she’s cool with it, because he’s too sexy.  Like The Quick and The Dead, if Sharon Stone gave up on vengeance and boned Gene Hackman instead.  Does Melissa always sing like that, or was she trying to play the role of a pubescent girl?  Glenn played the part fine, if the part existing in the first place could be considered fine, but I dunt know what in tarnation Melissa was doing there.

So it works!  I could suspend my disbelief for it.  What other considerations are there?

Age.  He is now seventy years old – about my father’s age.  Looks a bit like Donald Rumsfeld with a facelift and chronic depression.  But I’m feeling my age and have always been cool with much older partners, so no prob there.  He once had a song about how he doesn’t want anybody to bar his entry to the afterlife when he’s “tired of being alive.”  Let’s hope he isn’t tired yet.

Height.  Some guys are smol, and try to make up for it by getting swole.  The bodybuilding can’t help but look napoleonic, as did his practice of escrima.  This seems Italian to me.  Glenn is Italian as hell, despite stagenaming himself after a place in Poland.  In college I had two professors of visible Italian heritage with Italian-ass Italian surnames.  One looked more northern, with the gold blond hair and impish lil’ napoleon face.  The other looked more southern, dark skinned and prominently schnozzed.  Cute fellas, but tiny.  Didn’t see them pounding HGH flintstones chewables, but different people get by in different ways.  This doesn’t bother me.  Nonetheless, his old drummer Chuck Biscuits could probably chuck him for distance, and it looks like that bothers him.

Erotica.  Glenn puts his erotic imagination into the world for all of us to see.  Part of the blues thing, but he goes farther.  Weird stuff.  He wore black vinyl kitty claws for one music video, a gimp suit for another.  Didn’t he have a video where he drooled on a lady, like we were supposed to think that was hot?  I think he did.  It’s been a minute.  This is all fine.  Sex nerds are fine.

But he also publishes erotic comic books.  I dunno if he has written or done art for any, but he publishes them.  This led to a wacky situation in my life.  Early in my relationship with my husband, he and his mother felt the need to get me christmas gifts that I’d enjoy, something personal to me, even tho there’s not many material things I want at all.  They knew I liked Danzig, so they got me Danzig things.  My husband crocheted me a Glenn amigurumi that was truly epic, while his mom just bought seemingly random shit from his online stores.

That included two comics, one being a Devilman translation / reprint, and the other being a kinda disgusting erotic comic.  The dudes all had summer sausage schlongs and no balls.  I get it; people who aren’t attracted to men often think of balls as disgusting, but their absence was felt.  My mother in law is christian.  She did not look at these gifts before wrapping them, and I did not show them to her after I opened them up.  (holy hell he actually made a movie out of that foolery, looks terrible)

High school Bébé wasn’t over the “musclemans is cool” thing yet, and bought his image.  Long black hair, elvis sideburns, and giant meat titties.  What’s not to love?  I sometimes drew rpg characters to look like that.  The songs can still work for me.  Dude is a very good songwriter.  The Misfits without him were such a bad joke that they found jeezis.  Disturbing.  But yeah.  I was totally into Danzig, at the same time I was going big for grunge.  There was room in my heart for earnest heroin boys and meaty satanic posers alike.  I contains multitudes that I would be down to fuck.

And where am I now?  If I accidentally’d into the boudoir of His Satanic Majesty?  Yeah, I’d hit that.  But I’d probably end up on top.

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I keed, I keed!  Is joak, da?  By the way, If the title of this post made you remember something from Blue Velvet, congratulations and apologies.  Have a nice day.

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