I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.
Spanish translation (en Español). French translation (en Français).
This is a common misconception. A variation being that a Linguistics program will not accept you unless you are a polyglot, and certainly will not if you are a monolingual.
Many older people even think the word "linguist" is a synonym for "polyglot."
I have a Master's in Linguistics, and I only speak, read and write only one language well - English. My Spanish is ok, but it's not really fluent or even near-native. I know a bit of Italian, French, Portuguese and Chukchansi Yokuts* but my Spanish is far better than any of those.
You don't need to know more than one language to be a linguist. For instance, I got about 1/2 way through a dictionary and phrasebook of Chukchansi Yokuts, but the Hell if I can speak that language. I simply acquired the data, organized it, analyzed it, and made it into a lexicon and some learning materials.
My program did not require you to even be bilingual to enter the program. There were lots of monolinguals in our program. True, there were lots of foreign students too, but they were all getting ESL degrees to teach English as a Second Language overseas.
All we do is study languages. You don't really need to learn languages to study them. A lot of people can't seem to figure that out for some reason.
It's definitely true that lots of linguists do speak, read, write or have knowledge of more than one language.
A linguist joke, see if you can get it (you might have to think a bit):
They say that Roman Jacobsen, the famous linguist, spoke Russian in 17 different languages.
*A California Indian language.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Blacks Couldn't Even Build a Boat to Madagascar
This is yet another in our series of very tiresome lies that White nationalists tell about non-Whites, especially Black folks.
Some of the others are that Blacks never even developed agriculture and that Blacks never acquired iron technology. The upshot is that Blacks were "living in the Stone Age" when first contacted by Europeans. It's not true, but it doesn't stop WN's from saying it.
It's well known that Africans had not developed a very high level of civilization, but it's certainly not true that they were living in the Stone Age. Who was living in the Stone Age? How about our very exalted American Indians?
Let's look into the claim that Blacks never even figured out how to build a Goddamned boat to float to Madagascar, which is "just a few miles away from Africa." A better way to phrase this claim is, "Niggers* are so stupid, they couldn't even figure out how to build a boat!"
Truth is that Madagascar was settled by Austronesians, probably from Indonesia, around 200-500 AD.
Based on ethnographic research and Malagasy legend summarized by Roger Blench, the Mikea hunter-gatherers were already on Madagascar before the Austronesians arrived. The earliest inhabitants were a Pygmy-like people called the Vazimba. The Vazimba were probably related to the Mikea. They obviously showed up via boats.
Also, Madagascar is not "a few miles off the coast of Africa." It's 250 miles away. That's pretty far! By 1600, the Falklands, 300 miles off the shore of Argentina, were not well-known to the natives of South America at that time either.
Further, it is clear that the Africans who left Africa 70,000 years to populate the rest of the world did so via the Horn of Africa and must have left by boats. The very earliest out of Africa peoples already knew how to make seaworthy vessels, so they must have learned that back in Africa.
To be honest, African cultural development upon European contact was not at a very high level. One would think that if White nationalists were interested in insulting Black folks, they could just look at the historical record.
It seems pitiful that they feel such a need to denigrate even the rather modest cultural achievements that the Africans did make. It's as if the WN's don't even want to grant the Africans the most meager of accomplishments.
How sad is that?
*Used sardonically
Some of the others are that Blacks never even developed agriculture and that Blacks never acquired iron technology. The upshot is that Blacks were "living in the Stone Age" when first contacted by Europeans. It's not true, but it doesn't stop WN's from saying it.
It's well known that Africans had not developed a very high level of civilization, but it's certainly not true that they were living in the Stone Age. Who was living in the Stone Age? How about our very exalted American Indians?
Let's look into the claim that Blacks never even figured out how to build a Goddamned boat to float to Madagascar, which is "just a few miles away from Africa." A better way to phrase this claim is, "Niggers* are so stupid, they couldn't even figure out how to build a boat!"
Truth is that Madagascar was settled by Austronesians, probably from Indonesia, around 200-500 AD.
Based on ethnographic research and Malagasy legend summarized by Roger Blench, the Mikea hunter-gatherers were already on Madagascar before the Austronesians arrived. The earliest inhabitants were a Pygmy-like people called the Vazimba. The Vazimba were probably related to the Mikea. They obviously showed up via boats.
Also, Madagascar is not "a few miles off the coast of Africa." It's 250 miles away. That's pretty far! By 1600, the Falklands, 300 miles off the shore of Argentina, were not well-known to the natives of South America at that time either.
Further, it is clear that the Africans who left Africa 70,000 years to populate the rest of the world did so via the Horn of Africa and must have left by boats. The very earliest out of Africa peoples already knew how to make seaworthy vessels, so they must have learned that back in Africa.
To be honest, African cultural development upon European contact was not at a very high level. One would think that if White nationalists were interested in insulting Black folks, they could just look at the historical record.
It seems pitiful that they feel such a need to denigrate even the rather modest cultural achievements that the Africans did make. It's as if the WN's don't even want to grant the Africans the most meager of accomplishments.
How sad is that?
*Used sardonically
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Ok, I'm Definitely a Child Molester Now
I was just talking to someone my age who said that no man our age should want to have sex with any woman under age 25. He averred that if he were rich, he would try to have sex with women all the way down to age 25. "But I'd draw the line at 25," he added, nodding his head wisely.
I raised my hand.
"I'd draw the line at 18," I chirped perkily.
He scowled, shaking his head. "Well, you're definitely a child molester then," he allowed.
"Really?" I asked hopefully.
"Yep, well as far as more older guys, yes. And as far as all women, especially older women, for sure. One thing they hate is older guys going after young women. That proves you're a child molester right there.
"One thing, though," he noted. "Sure you can have sex with her. But how can you possibly have an intelligent conversation with an 18 year old girl?"
"What do you mean?" I asked. "How can you have an intelligent conversation with a women our own age?"
He had to agree. I had a point.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Flynn Effect in North Africans/Turks Migrated To West Europe
From an article by Philippe Rushton, hereditarian, a revelation about yet another instance of skyrocketing IQ increases in the second generation born in the West after migrating from the less developed areas.
Previously, we noted that the children Jamaican immigrants to the UK (IQ = 71) have IQ's of 85-86, typically within a single generation. That is a gain of 14.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. Hereditarians have offered many rationales for this. The usual is that the Jamaican immigrants were already very bright anyway (as we will see with Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands, this is not true).
Another is that Jamaicans in the UK are very heavily bred in with Whites to the point where they may be only 1/2 White. This is not true - UK Jamaicans are only 12% White (Jamaicans in Jamaica are 9% White).
The children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the UK (IQ = 81.5) have IQ's ranging from 92 (Rushton) to 96 (a figure I prefer). Call it 94. This is a gain of 12.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. The counter-argument here once again is that this group is self-selected.
Taken together, the children of Jamaican and East Indian immigrants see rises of 13.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. It is true that beyond the initial jump, we are not seeing more rises.
However, a strong initial jump is perfectly consonant with a hyperinjection of massive intellectual stimulation, good health care, proper diet, etc. This is probably all related to a higher standard of living. Higher standards of living seem to be somehow translating into long-term rises in IQ. The mechanisms can be debated, and we have done so on this blog.
Education, a massively-stimulating environment (computers, cell phones, TV, movies), proper nutrition, good health care, and myriad other things have been suggested, but the mechanisms for the rises are still somewhat mysterious.
Now, via Rushton, we have yet more evidence of a Flynn Effect in immigrants to the West. First generation Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands had IQ's of 81. This is low. The Moroccan norm IQ is 84 and the Turkish norm IQ is 90. So, contrary to the argument that only the very brightest immigrants are going to the West, it seems instead that the less bright immigrants are arriving instead.
The second generation has IQ's of 89. 89 is around the Turkish average, but it is 5 points above the Moroccan average. At any rate, it shows a Flynn gain of 8 points simply by migrating to the West. Rushton tries to explain this away somehow, but he doesn't do a good job of it.
The evidence for massive IQ gains in second generation immigrants to the West is now becoming overwhelming and it is going to be harder and harder for hereditarians to explain this stuff away.
Comparison of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants to the West and the resulting Flynn Effect gains, apparently solely by being born and raised in the West. The common factor behind rising IQ's in the West may be related to rising standards of living.
Previously, we noted that the children Jamaican immigrants to the UK (IQ = 71) have IQ's of 85-86, typically within a single generation. That is a gain of 14.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. Hereditarians have offered many rationales for this. The usual is that the Jamaican immigrants were already very bright anyway (as we will see with Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands, this is not true).
Another is that Jamaicans in the UK are very heavily bred in with Whites to the point where they may be only 1/2 White. This is not true - UK Jamaicans are only 12% White (Jamaicans in Jamaica are 9% White).
The children of Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the UK (IQ = 81.5) have IQ's ranging from 92 (Rushton) to 96 (a figure I prefer). Call it 94. This is a gain of 12.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. The counter-argument here once again is that this group is self-selected.
Taken together, the children of Jamaican and East Indian immigrants see rises of 13.5 IQ points merely by being raised in the West. It is true that beyond the initial jump, we are not seeing more rises.
However, a strong initial jump is perfectly consonant with a hyperinjection of massive intellectual stimulation, good health care, proper diet, etc. This is probably all related to a higher standard of living. Higher standards of living seem to be somehow translating into long-term rises in IQ. The mechanisms can be debated, and we have done so on this blog.
Education, a massively-stimulating environment (computers, cell phones, TV, movies), proper nutrition, good health care, and myriad other things have been suggested, but the mechanisms for the rises are still somewhat mysterious.
Now, via Rushton, we have yet more evidence of a Flynn Effect in immigrants to the West. First generation Moroccans and Turks in Netherlands had IQ's of 81. This is low. The Moroccan norm IQ is 84 and the Turkish norm IQ is 90. So, contrary to the argument that only the very brightest immigrants are going to the West, it seems instead that the less bright immigrants are arriving instead.
The second generation has IQ's of 89. 89 is around the Turkish average, but it is 5 points above the Moroccan average. At any rate, it shows a Flynn gain of 8 points simply by migrating to the West. Rushton tries to explain this away somehow, but he doesn't do a good job of it.
The evidence for massive IQ gains in second generation immigrants to the West is now becoming overwhelming and it is going to be harder and harder for hereditarians to explain this stuff away.
Comparison of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants to the West and the resulting Flynn Effect gains, apparently solely by being born and raised in the West. The common factor behind rising IQ's in the West may be related to rising standards of living.
1st 2nd Gain
UK Jamaicans 71 85.5 14.5
UK East Indians 81.5 94 12.5
ND Moroccans/Turks 81 88 7
Average 78 89 11.5
The Black Education Money Hole
And other White nationalist lies.
I love to take on White nationalist nonsense because unfortunately there is so much of it in this movement. This line is a classic. From the comments, a classic rendition of this endlessly repeated line:
The argument takes two forms. First, it blames Blacks for "screwing up" as this commenter puts it, implying that it's all their fault, and they could easily catch up if they tried. But at the same time, there is almost always a hereditarian argument running here that says that Blacks are hereditarily inferior in intelligence to Whites. This would mean that failure is not their fault at all.
Implicitly, the White nationalists say first that it's genetic and nothing can be done, and then blame Blacks for being the victims of the genetic dice. It's a most cruel argument, but so are most White nationalist arguments.
I'm not aware that the US taxpayers have spent any extra money trying to help anyone catch up. We spend money on education, it's true, but we educate everyone from low IQ to high IQ. Could someone please show me how and where we have poured money into Black schools in a wild effort to close the achievement gap? The evidence seems to be lacking.
This is one of the big lies of the White nationalists - that the government has spent all of these billions and billions on Blacks to help them catch up, and it's all failed. But they haven't.
Let's go through this one more time. The government spends money on education.
The government doesn't spend any extra money on Blacks or other lower IQ groups to try to help them catch up. Where did you ever get that idea? All the state does is educate kids. All kids get educated, White to Black, smart to dumb. I'm not aware of any efforts made in any recent era to pour money into low performing students to move them up. How exactly would this money manifest itself?
Let's look at this line from some other points of view. If this were true, we would expect ghetto schools to look like the Upper East Side. Since the government is pouring so much money into trying to move Blacks up, they must be scrimping on Whites. It's nonsense.
You go to White schools and they are stocked to the hilt - I've taught in many of them. You go to ghetto schools and they often look like Europe after WW2. The schools are wrecked, they are falling apart, there are not enough tables or chairs, there are hardly any supplies, often there are not even enough books and those books that do exist are very out of date and falling apart.
Now think about this real hard. Does it really sound like the government is flooding these ghetto schools with cash? I've taught in these schools. I taught there for years, in Compton and LA. Trust me, the government isn't "pouring money into trying to bring Blacks up to everyone else." Forget it. The state is barely even educating them in the most basic way.
Despite all of this, another aspect of the White nationalist argument is false - that there has been no progress. This is not true either. Wikipedia notes that Blacks have closed the gap in math, science and reading by 1/3 over 30 years - no small achievement.
I suppose in a way it is true that we are spending more on educating Blacks than we did in the pre Civil Rights Era. Black schools, especially in the Deep South states like Mississippi, were truly horrible. It's amazing that anyone came out of there learning anything.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and especially after Brown v. BOE, there was a lot of litigation pushed trying to promote the notion of equal educational opportunity for all races at public schools. Due to the fact that schools are paid via property taxes, education in the US is still very unequal.
Truth is, White taxpayers probably pay little money to educate Blacks. The people who pay to educate Blacks are probably Black homeowners in the ghetto. Overwhelmingly, White tax money goes towards educating their own White kids in the local schools. That's how property tax funding of neighborhood schools works.
I think what the White nationalists are really getting at is they don't think that many or most Blacks should be educated at public expense at all. They consider most Blacks to be ineducable, and figure we shouldn't even make the effort to even give them the most basic education.
Either that, or they want to go back to pre Brown vs BOE days.
Recall that the years 1954 (Brown vs BOE) and 1964 (Civil Rights Act) are marked as Years of Infamy by almost all White nationalists.
Nice people.
I love to take on White nationalist nonsense because unfortunately there is so much of it in this movement. This line is a classic. From the comments, a classic rendition of this endlessly repeated line:
I don't see much point in this. The fact is, the US taxpayers have spent so many billions of dollars trying to help these people catch up, yet they keep screwing everything up. Just let evolution roll the dice and let it land where it wants to.This is the one of biggest White nationalist lies of them all. It works on various levels, and it's internally contradictory, like most White nationalist stuff. First of all, the taxpayers have been devastated by endless spending since the 1960's to help Blacks catch up to Whites (particularly as far as the Achievement Gap goes) and it has all been for naught.
The argument takes two forms. First, it blames Blacks for "screwing up" as this commenter puts it, implying that it's all their fault, and they could easily catch up if they tried. But at the same time, there is almost always a hereditarian argument running here that says that Blacks are hereditarily inferior in intelligence to Whites. This would mean that failure is not their fault at all.
Implicitly, the White nationalists say first that it's genetic and nothing can be done, and then blame Blacks for being the victims of the genetic dice. It's a most cruel argument, but so are most White nationalist arguments.
I'm not aware that the US taxpayers have spent any extra money trying to help anyone catch up. We spend money on education, it's true, but we educate everyone from low IQ to high IQ. Could someone please show me how and where we have poured money into Black schools in a wild effort to close the achievement gap? The evidence seems to be lacking.
This is one of the big lies of the White nationalists - that the government has spent all of these billions and billions on Blacks to help them catch up, and it's all failed. But they haven't.
Let's go through this one more time. The government spends money on education.
The government doesn't spend any extra money on Blacks or other lower IQ groups to try to help them catch up. Where did you ever get that idea? All the state does is educate kids. All kids get educated, White to Black, smart to dumb. I'm not aware of any efforts made in any recent era to pour money into low performing students to move them up. How exactly would this money manifest itself?
Let's look at this line from some other points of view. If this were true, we would expect ghetto schools to look like the Upper East Side. Since the government is pouring so much money into trying to move Blacks up, they must be scrimping on Whites. It's nonsense.
You go to White schools and they are stocked to the hilt - I've taught in many of them. You go to ghetto schools and they often look like Europe after WW2. The schools are wrecked, they are falling apart, there are not enough tables or chairs, there are hardly any supplies, often there are not even enough books and those books that do exist are very out of date and falling apart.
Now think about this real hard. Does it really sound like the government is flooding these ghetto schools with cash? I've taught in these schools. I taught there for years, in Compton and LA. Trust me, the government isn't "pouring money into trying to bring Blacks up to everyone else." Forget it. The state is barely even educating them in the most basic way.
Despite all of this, another aspect of the White nationalist argument is false - that there has been no progress. This is not true either. Wikipedia notes that Blacks have closed the gap in math, science and reading by 1/3 over 30 years - no small achievement.
I suppose in a way it is true that we are spending more on educating Blacks than we did in the pre Civil Rights Era. Black schools, especially in the Deep South states like Mississippi, were truly horrible. It's amazing that anyone came out of there learning anything.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and especially after Brown v. BOE, there was a lot of litigation pushed trying to promote the notion of equal educational opportunity for all races at public schools. Due to the fact that schools are paid via property taxes, education in the US is still very unequal.
Truth is, White taxpayers probably pay little money to educate Blacks. The people who pay to educate Blacks are probably Black homeowners in the ghetto. Overwhelmingly, White tax money goes towards educating their own White kids in the local schools. That's how property tax funding of neighborhood schools works.
I think what the White nationalists are really getting at is they don't think that many or most Blacks should be educated at public expense at all. They consider most Blacks to be ineducable, and figure we shouldn't even make the effort to even give them the most basic education.
Either that, or they want to go back to pre Brown vs BOE days.
Recall that the years 1954 (Brown vs BOE) and 1964 (Civil Rights Act) are marked as Years of Infamy by almost all White nationalists.
Nice people.
Bush Suffers Shoe Attack in Baghdad
A reader just asked me whether Bush was attacked with a shoe bomb, a shoe phone or just a shoe when he was in Baghdad the other day. The answer is that an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at Bush when Bush was in Baghdad at a press conference yesterday, December 14, but missed.
He also yelled, "This is a farewell ... you dog!"
As security personnel wrestled him to the floor, he screamed, "You killed the Iraqis!"
Calling someone a dog is a horrible insult in Arab culture. Dogs are considered low, dirty animals, and while people do keep them as pets, they usually are not allowed in the home. They have to stay outside.
In Arab culture, throwing a shoe at someone, or hitting someone with a shoe is the ultimate insult. Anything having to do with the feet or shoes is terribly insulting. You are not supposed to point the soles of your feet at anyone either - that is a serious insult.
This has to do with the notion in many cultures that the foot is the lowest, filthiest, most inferior part of the body, and the head is the highest and most exalted part of the body. It's common in many cultures. I'm thinking SE Asia (Cambodia and Thailand) for starters.
He also yelled, "This is a farewell ... you dog!"
As security personnel wrestled him to the floor, he screamed, "You killed the Iraqis!"
Calling someone a dog is a horrible insult in Arab culture. Dogs are considered low, dirty animals, and while people do keep them as pets, they usually are not allowed in the home. They have to stay outside.
In Arab culture, throwing a shoe at someone, or hitting someone with a shoe is the ultimate insult. Anything having to do with the feet or shoes is terribly insulting. You are not supposed to point the soles of your feet at anyone either - that is a serious insult.
This has to do with the notion in many cultures that the foot is the lowest, filthiest, most inferior part of the body, and the head is the highest and most exalted part of the body. It's common in many cultures. I'm thinking SE Asia (Cambodia and Thailand) for starters.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
A Couple of Challenges to Rushton's Theories
We have thrown out this challenge before, but it's time to throw it out one more time.
IQ's of NE Asians in the US were behind those of US Whites until the 1970's or so, when they gradually surpassed them. How does a hereditarian theory of IQ make sense of this?
* After renorming. Pre-renorming, the scores would be 105 and 100 for NE Asians and Whites respectively. The actual gain was 7.5 points for NE Asians in the US.
Their genes didn't change one bit. One happened? Keep in mind that all hereditarians say that IQ differentials between races are 70% due to genes. If this is so, the initial set of figures from pre-1970's NE Asians vs. Whites should have been should have been "intractable" as Rushton suggests, since 70% of that difference was due to heredity.
NE Asians should only have been able to move up a point or so against US Whites. Instead, they not only bridged the gap, but surpassed it. The new data, according to Rushton, is once again 70% genetic, and Whites should never be able to gain more than 1-2 points of that gap, and NE Asians should not be able to lose more than 1-2 points of that gap.
Note that each new gap automagically becomes 70% genetic, since Rushton says that all racial gaps in IQ are 70% genetic.
The facts of the NE Asian IQ change in the US over 60 years are impossible to explain according to Rushton's theory. Conclusion: Rushton's theory must be wrong.
Rushton notes that Whites have larger brains than Africans and that this proves that the difference in IQ between Blacks and Whites is hereditary and intractable. Further, he implies that the head size variance lines up with the IQ variance. But that does not make sense.
If brain size always lines up with IQ, explain this:
Note that Ugandans (IQ = 67) have larger brains than S. Europeans (IQ = 97). Vietnamese have some of the smallest brains on Earth, but their IQ's are 99.5.
The head size = IQ theory needs a lot of work.
IQ's of NE Asians in the US were behind those of US Whites until the 1970's or so, when they gradually surpassed them. How does a hereditarian theory of IQ make sense of this?
Pre-1970's:
IQ
US NE Asian 96.5
US White 100
1970's-present:
IQ
US NE Asian 108*
US White 103*
* After renorming. Pre-renorming, the scores would be 105 and 100 for NE Asians and Whites respectively. The actual gain was 7.5 points for NE Asians in the US.
Their genes didn't change one bit. One happened? Keep in mind that all hereditarians say that IQ differentials between races are 70% due to genes. If this is so, the initial set of figures from pre-1970's NE Asians vs. Whites should have been should have been "intractable" as Rushton suggests, since 70% of that difference was due to heredity.
NE Asians should only have been able to move up a point or so against US Whites. Instead, they not only bridged the gap, but surpassed it. The new data, according to Rushton, is once again 70% genetic, and Whites should never be able to gain more than 1-2 points of that gap, and NE Asians should not be able to lose more than 1-2 points of that gap.
Note that each new gap automagically becomes 70% genetic, since Rushton says that all racial gaps in IQ are 70% genetic.
The facts of the NE Asian IQ change in the US over 60 years are impossible to explain according to Rushton's theory. Conclusion: Rushton's theory must be wrong.
Rushton notes that Whites have larger brains than Africans and that this proves that the difference in IQ between Blacks and Whites is hereditary and intractable. Further, he implies that the head size variance lines up with the IQ variance. But that does not make sense.
If brain size always lines up with IQ, explain this:
Note that Ugandans (IQ = 67) have larger brains than S. Europeans (IQ = 97). Vietnamese have some of the smallest brains on Earth, but their IQ's are 99.5.
The head size = IQ theory needs a lot of work.
Dope Makes You Act Intoxicated
Reduces your performance in every way, is incapable of enhancing performance, and other lies.
This is one of the biggest lies of all about dope, and it needs to be challenged head on.
Most, if not all, non-users believe that all drugs make the user obviously intoxicated and reduce performance in all areas. I've tried to explain to them that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are stimulants, and hence don't make you "fucked up."
Instead, in the short term, they improve mental and physical performance. If you take a test on meth or coke, you will probably do better. The jury is still out on physical performance, but for at least some things, you will do better on coke or speed.
In the Valley here, farm workers are using meth to help them do their jobs. They're able to work harder, pick more crops faster and work longer before they get tired on meth.
I've never driven a car on meth, but I have driven a car on amphetamine tablets. Works great. You can drive just fine on cocaine too. I don't see why it's illegal to drive under the influence of these drugs. Might as well make it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee.
Non-users only experience with drugs is with alcohol. Alcohol makes you obviously intoxicated as a general rule. But the other drugs don't necessarily. Non-users find this clear fact almost impossible to comprehend.
I decided to ask Doperman about this:
Hi Bob, Doperman here. Thanks for letting me post here. Every time I took psychedelics (LSD, LSA, psilocybin, peyote), I assure you I knew completely what was going on.
I even drove a car once for 15 hours on a nice straight highway on a head full of acid. Another time I drove to Mexico with my brother, went to Tecate, cruised around a bit, and went back to the US and stayed at Cuyamaca State Park.
On the 15-hour trip, I don't think I was normal, because I drove by the Owens River, and there were all these guys fly-fishing there, and they all looked up at me driving by like "What the fuck is with you man???!!!"
I went into stores a few times and bought stuff, and at the end of the voyage, and stopped and got a motel room near the Nevada border at 1 AM. All flying on a head full of LSD.
I can act totally normal on any of those drugs.
Problem is you get these huge saucer eyeballs and it's verging on a bust right there to be walking around in public. But people on acid don't necessarily act all that different. You can't even really tell that they're on a drug if you see them. They're not obviously intoxicated.
I once threw a party and at least 200 people showed up. At least among those who showed up at the beginning, a lot of them were on LSD. At the start, there was a house full of people high on acid. It wasn't really obvious, and no one acted really weird or did anything crazy or stupid. Only a relative few LSD users act stupid or crazy or have to be hauled off by the cops. Most of them make it through the trip acting fairly normally.
Coke is the same way. The coke user is not obviously intoxicated either. You can't even usually tell if someone is high on coke, because people don't act all that much different when they are on it.
I don't think people act all that different on speed either. I've seen a lot of people on that stuff and they typically don't appear intoxicated.
It's often the case that you cannot tell when someone is high on marijuana.
In my mid-20's, I was living at home and getting a teaching credential. I was stoned out of my mind every night. I lived in the basement and had a separate entrance and a separate phone. My living at home included unwritten contracts stating that I could smoke pot and drink all I wanted to, and have visitors over until all hours of the night.
The folks were sleeping two floors up, so we had to turn down the music late at night. I didn't have the right to fuck women at home, but I fought hard for that one. My Mom wouldn't budge on that one. I used to violate it anyway. I had a separate entrance, and could sneak women in no problem.
My Mom even heard about the women I sneaked in and fucked, and if they were knock-dead gorgeous (some of them were) she was quite proud of her son in a perverse way. I'll never be able to match Sexmaniacman (Who can?) but I did my best.
But my Mom could always tell when I was stoned, and she hated it. So if you're around it a lot, maybe you can tell.
I'm an experienced pot smoker for 35 years off and on, and I typically don't have the faintest idea if someone is stoned or not. How can you tell anyway?
This is one of the biggest lies of all about dope, and it needs to be challenged head on.
Most, if not all, non-users believe that all drugs make the user obviously intoxicated and reduce performance in all areas. I've tried to explain to them that drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine are stimulants, and hence don't make you "fucked up."
Instead, in the short term, they improve mental and physical performance. If you take a test on meth or coke, you will probably do better. The jury is still out on physical performance, but for at least some things, you will do better on coke or speed.
In the Valley here, farm workers are using meth to help them do their jobs. They're able to work harder, pick more crops faster and work longer before they get tired on meth.
I've never driven a car on meth, but I have driven a car on amphetamine tablets. Works great. You can drive just fine on cocaine too. I don't see why it's illegal to drive under the influence of these drugs. Might as well make it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee.
Non-users only experience with drugs is with alcohol. Alcohol makes you obviously intoxicated as a general rule. But the other drugs don't necessarily. Non-users find this clear fact almost impossible to comprehend.
I decided to ask Doperman about this:
Hi Bob, Doperman here. Thanks for letting me post here. Every time I took psychedelics (LSD, LSA, psilocybin, peyote), I assure you I knew completely what was going on.
I even drove a car once for 15 hours on a nice straight highway on a head full of acid. Another time I drove to Mexico with my brother, went to Tecate, cruised around a bit, and went back to the US and stayed at Cuyamaca State Park.
On the 15-hour trip, I don't think I was normal, because I drove by the Owens River, and there were all these guys fly-fishing there, and they all looked up at me driving by like "What the fuck is with you man???!!!"
I went into stores a few times and bought stuff, and at the end of the voyage, and stopped and got a motel room near the Nevada border at 1 AM. All flying on a head full of LSD.
I can act totally normal on any of those drugs.
Problem is you get these huge saucer eyeballs and it's verging on a bust right there to be walking around in public. But people on acid don't necessarily act all that different. You can't even really tell that they're on a drug if you see them. They're not obviously intoxicated.
I once threw a party and at least 200 people showed up. At least among those who showed up at the beginning, a lot of them were on LSD. At the start, there was a house full of people high on acid. It wasn't really obvious, and no one acted really weird or did anything crazy or stupid. Only a relative few LSD users act stupid or crazy or have to be hauled off by the cops. Most of them make it through the trip acting fairly normally.
Coke is the same way. The coke user is not obviously intoxicated either. You can't even usually tell if someone is high on coke, because people don't act all that much different when they are on it.
I don't think people act all that different on speed either. I've seen a lot of people on that stuff and they typically don't appear intoxicated.
It's often the case that you cannot tell when someone is high on marijuana.
In my mid-20's, I was living at home and getting a teaching credential. I was stoned out of my mind every night. I lived in the basement and had a separate entrance and a separate phone. My living at home included unwritten contracts stating that I could smoke pot and drink all I wanted to, and have visitors over until all hours of the night.
The folks were sleeping two floors up, so we had to turn down the music late at night. I didn't have the right to fuck women at home, but I fought hard for that one. My Mom wouldn't budge on that one. I used to violate it anyway. I had a separate entrance, and could sneak women in no problem.
My Mom even heard about the women I sneaked in and fucked, and if they were knock-dead gorgeous (some of them were) she was quite proud of her son in a perverse way. I'll never be able to match Sexmaniacman (Who can?) but I did my best.
But my Mom could always tell when I was stoned, and she hated it. So if you're around it a lot, maybe you can tell.
I'm an experienced pot smoker for 35 years off and on, and I typically don't have the faintest idea if someone is stoned or not. How can you tell anyway?
Lies About the Drug Burnouts
This is one of the staples of the anti-drug line, and it appears that the vast majority of Americans have bought into it, including most drug users and former users.
I think it's utter nonsense, so I'm going to take it on head-on here in this post.
Simply put, I don't really think that "drug burnouts" exist anymore than "alcohol burnouts" do. The notion comes from the idea that illegal drug use damages the brain. Hence, after years of use of this, that, or various substances, the brain is permanently damaged, and the person is odd, strange, weird, bizarre, permanently spacey, "permafried", crazy, nuts or mentally ill in some way or another.
The theory is very appealing in that unfortunately, it is starting to look like most of these drugs, at least in heavy use, are capable of damaging the brain. The jury is still somewhat out on cannabis, but even that does not look really encouraging for heavy long-term users.
The theory is typically used to abuse users of hallucinogens and psychedelics, probably because these are the most feared drugs of them all. There is a serious problem with the "fried brains acidheads" line: the hallucinogens are one of the very few drugs that look pretty clean as far as brain damage goes.
When you come out and say that LSD does not cause general damage to the brain, as I am doing now, people tend to get really upset. After all, if anything damages your brain, it must be LSD! After all, if acid, the ultimate evil drug, doesn't mess with your brain, then surely nothing does.
The truth is much more strange. It's now clear that the most popular drugs of all, like cocaine and methamphetamine. can damage the brain, often pretty quickly.
Cocaine begins to cause demonstrable brain damage after as few as 12 uses (constriction of the arteries of the brain). After a few grams a month for a few years, clear brain damage shows up on the P300 test (a general slowing of the EEG). There is now evidence for serious changes in white and gray matter with heavy cocaine use.
Meth is much harder to pin down, but heavy current users often appear scattered and damaged. After 1.5 grams a week for 1-2 years, clear signs of damage start showing up. I believe that damage is also starting to show up on white and gray matter tests.
I can't emphasize strongly enough what bad news these white and gray matter tests are - they indicate destruction of the neurons themselves and the connections between them.
The damage from meth seems to be to dopamine neurons and their connections and is observable with brain diagnostic imaging tools. Whether or not damage occurs at lower doses over shorter periods of time is not known, but meth is starting to look like nasty stuff for your brain.
I still say you can take meth at least a dozen times or so (and possibly much more!) without any permanent damage. At some point though, you are going to start damaging your brain, and we don't really know what that point is. Want to try to find out when the damage begins? Don't bother!
Ecstasy or MDMA, formerly up in the air as far as brain damage goes, is looking worse all the time. The best we can say now is that one dose probably does not cause damage. More than one dose almost surely does, and the damage is cumulative. The drug damages serotonin neurons in certain parts of the brain by killing the connections (axons) between the neurons. The neurons themselves are not killed.
It is a common falsehood about drug abuse and the brain that "drugs kill brain cells". In truth, actual neuronal death is hard to pin down for a lot of these drugs. Instead of killing brain cells outright, drugs often just damage them so they don't work quite so well. With MDMA, the serotonin axons grow back, but they do not grow back correctly.
I never did MDMA - it was after my time.
Even heavy cannabis use is looking suspect.
Drinking more than two drinks a day over a period of time causes shrinkage of the brain. The shrinkage increases as the drinks per day does up. Periodic heavy drinking depresses brain cells for up to two years, and chronic heavy drinking actually kills neurons.
At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn't a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain.
Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie party drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn't seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn't believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.
Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that, that they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an
"addict." But if you know anything about coke, you know that 16 grams over 13 years is nothing more than dabbling, and it's not really serious cocaine use at all.
Now on to the psychedelics. The hard facts are that we do not have good evidence that LSD, peyote, psilocybin and similar drugs damage the brain in any way that would that reduce your intellect, make you odd, strange, weird, bizarre or crazy, or effect your ability to think and feel rationally.
It is true that LSD, psilocybin and MDMA are capable of causing HPPD. That is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. The result is visual aberrations persisting into the period when one is not using the drug. LSD seems to be the worst offender, but some cases are caused by psilocybin. Until a cure or prevention is found, HPPD is an excellent reason to avoid using psychedelics, LSD in particular.
There is a board on the Net for HPPD sufferers, and if you go there and tell them that you are still using acid, they are going to give you a piece of their mind. They aren't anti-drug ignoramuses or holier than thou moralistic types. They've just been there and done that and don't want to see you in the same boat as they are.
No one has any idea what is causing HPPD, but a Dr. Abraham in Massachusetts has the notion that it is related to damage to the visual system. All LSD users show damage to the visual system. It's not apparent to most of them, but it shows up on tests. It has to do with how fast you can adjust to from a totally light environment to a totally dark environment. LSD users do poorly on that.
It's interesting to note that although all of the tests for LSD and brain damage in animals were negative with the exception of very high doses that would be about the equivalent of 1,000 50 mcg. hits at once, LSD was shown to be hypotoxic to the optic nerve in the bird.
These negative findings for brain damage and LSD go back to the 1950's. We now have over 50 years of negative tests for LSD and brain damage in animals as well as humans.
LSD does some pretty bizarre things to animals. If you give it to a cat and put the cat in an enclosed area with a rat, the cat will cower in terror of the rat, which it normally would try to kill. Strange.
All tests of intellectual function damage for LSD users have come up negative. Some suggested temporary damage on visual function tests (the Trail-Making B Test), but as the HPPD data above suggests, LSD may indeed damage the visual system. Even this finding cleared up one year post-drug
Damage to the visual system would logically cause HPPD. Would it make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, insane and stupid? Why would it? The visual system effects vision. It doesn't effect psychological stability or the ability to think or feel in a normal way.
That said, there is anecdotal evidence that very heavy LSD is somehow bad for your brain. It seems to go away if you quit, but it's there nevertheless. There are reports on the net of users who used LSD very heavily - several hits, several times a week, for a year or so. Afterward, they had symptoms of brain damage.
They could no longer do the intellectual work that they could formerly do, and they had a hard time reading. After a year or so off the drug, their intellect seemed to return. The users were not mentally ill at any time.
The notion of mental illness from the use of LSD is very controversial. It seems almost impossible to understand how a drug that has no permanent brain effects outside the visual system could make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, crazy, nuts, insane, or mentally disturbed in any way at all. Surely, if it did so, the etiology could not be from actual brain damage but must be in purely psychological terms: psychogenic.
Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of mental illness after LSD use.
The most frightening to me are reports of mental illness after very heavy use. We have reports of individuals who used LSD very heavily (several times a week at high dose) for a year or two. After that, they became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a hospital. They got better and were released and seemed OK on the outside. But then they got into heavy LSD use again and had to be readmitted.
There are other reports of folks in their 40's and 50's who used LSD maybe 2,000-3,000 times. They are reported to be mentally ill to some degree or another.
We don't yet have any good theory to explain cognitive problems or mental illness in extremely heavy LSD users, but nevertheless, based on anecdotal evidence, one ought to avoid this sort of high-risk behavior.
Timothy Leary probably used LSD between 1,000-2,000 times. I have to admit he looked pretty fried the last few times I saw him on TV. He also used all sorts of other drugs.
As a good general rule though, I haven't met one person yet who is "permafried" from any kind of drugs. My perception has been that if you quit using, after a while you become normal again. Most of the so-called permafried types are still using drugs heavily. It seems to me that no matter how damaged people seemed, if they quit and sobered up, they seemed to be quite OK once they were clean.
I've met some folks who seemed damaged from very heavy dope use, but in the one case I can think of, he wasn't really strange or weird. He could be socially inappropriate, and his basic problem was he didn't give a damn about anything. You will find this personality syndrome in a lot of very heavy users that otherwise function pretty well - they seem like they don't care about much of anything.
He couldn't hold down a job because he was so damaged that he couldn't even make change. Yet I was at a party with him once and he picked up this gorgeous young blond ten years his junior and fucked her brains out that night. How nuts can you be if you can pull off something like that?
I met another fellow like that on the streets of San Francisco 15 years ago. Smart guy, Masters Degree from a good university, lived off a trust fund, traveled the world, partied his brains out, in his 40's.
He had that "I don't give a fuck" attitude, but I don't consider that mental illness. Hell, I don't consider most stuff mental illness! He wasn't ready for corporate America, but he didn't want to be either, and I didn't consider him mentally ill in any way, shape or form.
But then I think the whole notion of "crazy" is horribly abused against people who aren't even nuts at all.
I've known many individuals who used drugs heavily for years who are now more or less sober, although some continue to use cannabis. For the life of me, I can't see how even one of them has been permanently damaged by their drug use. I haven't met a permafried person yet, but I guess there's always a first.
I keep meeting people who used cocaine very heavily for 5-10 years, or so heavily as to have to go into drug treatment, or took LSD up to 300 times or so, or have been smoking pot for 20-30 years and still are, now heavily, in their 40's. For the life of me, I can't see anything wrong with them now. Some of them have very good jobs and make $100,000/yr or so.
Despite a lot of theoretical support for the "permafried" notion (in that many of these drugs are now being found to actually damage your brain), I haven't seen much of it in my life. If anyone knows any "permafried" individuals who are now clean and have been clean for a while, let me know in the comments.
Until then, I think the whole notion is ridiculous.
I think it's utter nonsense, so I'm going to take it on head-on here in this post.
Simply put, I don't really think that "drug burnouts" exist anymore than "alcohol burnouts" do. The notion comes from the idea that illegal drug use damages the brain. Hence, after years of use of this, that, or various substances, the brain is permanently damaged, and the person is odd, strange, weird, bizarre, permanently spacey, "permafried", crazy, nuts or mentally ill in some way or another.
The theory is very appealing in that unfortunately, it is starting to look like most of these drugs, at least in heavy use, are capable of damaging the brain. The jury is still somewhat out on cannabis, but even that does not look really encouraging for heavy long-term users.
The theory is typically used to abuse users of hallucinogens and psychedelics, probably because these are the most feared drugs of them all. There is a serious problem with the "fried brains acidheads" line: the hallucinogens are one of the very few drugs that look pretty clean as far as brain damage goes.
When you come out and say that LSD does not cause general damage to the brain, as I am doing now, people tend to get really upset. After all, if anything damages your brain, it must be LSD! After all, if acid, the ultimate evil drug, doesn't mess with your brain, then surely nothing does.
The truth is much more strange. It's now clear that the most popular drugs of all, like cocaine and methamphetamine. can damage the brain, often pretty quickly.
Cocaine begins to cause demonstrable brain damage after as few as 12 uses (constriction of the arteries of the brain). After a few grams a month for a few years, clear brain damage shows up on the P300 test (a general slowing of the EEG). There is now evidence for serious changes in white and gray matter with heavy cocaine use.
Meth is much harder to pin down, but heavy current users often appear scattered and damaged. After 1.5 grams a week for 1-2 years, clear signs of damage start showing up. I believe that damage is also starting to show up on white and gray matter tests.
I can't emphasize strongly enough what bad news these white and gray matter tests are - they indicate destruction of the neurons themselves and the connections between them.
The damage from meth seems to be to dopamine neurons and their connections and is observable with brain diagnostic imaging tools. Whether or not damage occurs at lower doses over shorter periods of time is not known, but meth is starting to look like nasty stuff for your brain.
I still say you can take meth at least a dozen times or so (and possibly much more!) without any permanent damage. At some point though, you are going to start damaging your brain, and we don't really know what that point is. Want to try to find out when the damage begins? Don't bother!
Ecstasy or MDMA, formerly up in the air as far as brain damage goes, is looking worse all the time. The best we can say now is that one dose probably does not cause damage. More than one dose almost surely does, and the damage is cumulative. The drug damages serotonin neurons in certain parts of the brain by killing the connections (axons) between the neurons. The neurons themselves are not killed.
It is a common falsehood about drug abuse and the brain that "drugs kill brain cells". In truth, actual neuronal death is hard to pin down for a lot of these drugs. Instead of killing brain cells outright, drugs often just damage them so they don't work quite so well. With MDMA, the serotonin axons grow back, but they do not grow back correctly.
I never did MDMA - it was after my time.
Even heavy cannabis use is looking suspect.
Drinking more than two drinks a day over a period of time causes shrinkage of the brain. The shrinkage increases as the drinks per day does up. Periodic heavy drinking depresses brain cells for up to two years, and chronic heavy drinking actually kills neurons.
At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn't a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain.
Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie party drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn't seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn't believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.
Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that, that they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an
"addict." But if you know anything about coke, you know that 16 grams over 13 years is nothing more than dabbling, and it's not really serious cocaine use at all.
Now on to the psychedelics. The hard facts are that we do not have good evidence that LSD, peyote, psilocybin and similar drugs damage the brain in any way that would that reduce your intellect, make you odd, strange, weird, bizarre or crazy, or effect your ability to think and feel rationally.
It is true that LSD, psilocybin and MDMA are capable of causing HPPD. That is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. The result is visual aberrations persisting into the period when one is not using the drug. LSD seems to be the worst offender, but some cases are caused by psilocybin. Until a cure or prevention is found, HPPD is an excellent reason to avoid using psychedelics, LSD in particular.
There is a board on the Net for HPPD sufferers, and if you go there and tell them that you are still using acid, they are going to give you a piece of their mind. They aren't anti-drug ignoramuses or holier than thou moralistic types. They've just been there and done that and don't want to see you in the same boat as they are.
No one has any idea what is causing HPPD, but a Dr. Abraham in Massachusetts has the notion that it is related to damage to the visual system. All LSD users show damage to the visual system. It's not apparent to most of them, but it shows up on tests. It has to do with how fast you can adjust to from a totally light environment to a totally dark environment. LSD users do poorly on that.
It's interesting to note that although all of the tests for LSD and brain damage in animals were negative with the exception of very high doses that would be about the equivalent of 1,000 50 mcg. hits at once, LSD was shown to be hypotoxic to the optic nerve in the bird.
These negative findings for brain damage and LSD go back to the 1950's. We now have over 50 years of negative tests for LSD and brain damage in animals as well as humans.
LSD does some pretty bizarre things to animals. If you give it to a cat and put the cat in an enclosed area with a rat, the cat will cower in terror of the rat, which it normally would try to kill. Strange.
All tests of intellectual function damage for LSD users have come up negative. Some suggested temporary damage on visual function tests (the Trail-Making B Test), but as the HPPD data above suggests, LSD may indeed damage the visual system. Even this finding cleared up one year post-drug
Damage to the visual system would logically cause HPPD. Would it make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, insane and stupid? Why would it? The visual system effects vision. It doesn't effect psychological stability or the ability to think or feel in a normal way.
That said, there is anecdotal evidence that very heavy LSD is somehow bad for your brain. It seems to go away if you quit, but it's there nevertheless. There are reports on the net of users who used LSD very heavily - several hits, several times a week, for a year or so. Afterward, they had symptoms of brain damage.
They could no longer do the intellectual work that they could formerly do, and they had a hard time reading. After a year or so off the drug, their intellect seemed to return. The users were not mentally ill at any time.
The notion of mental illness from the use of LSD is very controversial. It seems almost impossible to understand how a drug that has no permanent brain effects outside the visual system could make a person weird, strange, odd, bizarre, crazy, nuts, insane, or mentally disturbed in any way at all. Surely, if it did so, the etiology could not be from actual brain damage but must be in purely psychological terms: psychogenic.
Nevertheless, we continue to get reports of mental illness after LSD use.
The most frightening to me are reports of mental illness after very heavy use. We have reports of individuals who used LSD very heavily (several times a week at high dose) for a year or two. After that, they became mentally ill and had to be admitted to a hospital. They got better and were released and seemed OK on the outside. But then they got into heavy LSD use again and had to be readmitted.
There are other reports of folks in their 40's and 50's who used LSD maybe 2,000-3,000 times. They are reported to be mentally ill to some degree or another.
We don't yet have any good theory to explain cognitive problems or mental illness in extremely heavy LSD users, but nevertheless, based on anecdotal evidence, one ought to avoid this sort of high-risk behavior.
Timothy Leary probably used LSD between 1,000-2,000 times. I have to admit he looked pretty fried the last few times I saw him on TV. He also used all sorts of other drugs.
As a good general rule though, I haven't met one person yet who is "permafried" from any kind of drugs. My perception has been that if you quit using, after a while you become normal again. Most of the so-called permafried types are still using drugs heavily. It seems to me that no matter how damaged people seemed, if they quit and sobered up, they seemed to be quite OK once they were clean.
I've met some folks who seemed damaged from very heavy dope use, but in the one case I can think of, he wasn't really strange or weird. He could be socially inappropriate, and his basic problem was he didn't give a damn about anything. You will find this personality syndrome in a lot of very heavy users that otherwise function pretty well - they seem like they don't care about much of anything.
He couldn't hold down a job because he was so damaged that he couldn't even make change. Yet I was at a party with him once and he picked up this gorgeous young blond ten years his junior and fucked her brains out that night. How nuts can you be if you can pull off something like that?
I met another fellow like that on the streets of San Francisco 15 years ago. Smart guy, Masters Degree from a good university, lived off a trust fund, traveled the world, partied his brains out, in his 40's.
He had that "I don't give a fuck" attitude, but I don't consider that mental illness. Hell, I don't consider most stuff mental illness! He wasn't ready for corporate America, but he didn't want to be either, and I didn't consider him mentally ill in any way, shape or form.
But then I think the whole notion of "crazy" is horribly abused against people who aren't even nuts at all.
I've known many individuals who used drugs heavily for years who are now more or less sober, although some continue to use cannabis. For the life of me, I can't see how even one of them has been permanently damaged by their drug use. I haven't met a permafried person yet, but I guess there's always a first.
I keep meeting people who used cocaine very heavily for 5-10 years, or so heavily as to have to go into drug treatment, or took LSD up to 300 times or so, or have been smoking pot for 20-30 years and still are, now heavily, in their 40's. For the life of me, I can't see anything wrong with them now. Some of them have very good jobs and make $100,000/yr or so.
Despite a lot of theoretical support for the "permafried" notion (in that many of these drugs are now being found to actually damage your brain), I haven't seen much of it in my life. If anyone knows any "permafried" individuals who are now clean and have been clean for a while, let me know in the comments.
Until then, I think the whole notion is ridiculous.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Dope Sucks
At the time I was into getting high, roughly 1973-1988, there wasn't a lot of good information that most of that stuff was bad for you, or certainly that it was bad for your brain. There was a lot of information that said that drugs could be used recreationally in moderation without problems. That was the spirit of the age. It's dead and gone now, maybe forever.
I keep thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gotten into drugs as much as I did. The drugs all seem so much worse now because our information is greater. My use was really a product of an era as opposed to just some general degenerate tendency of mine.
Cocaine.
Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie party drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn't seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn't believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.
Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that; they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an
"addict". But if you know anything about coke, you know a little over a gram a year is nothing more than dabbling, and it's not really serious cocaine use at all. Further, of course you can do coke for 13 years without getting addicted. I did so myself.
But just about everyone I knew who got into coke at least to the extent that I did turned into an addict. Sooner or later, sniffers move on to smoking or shooting, because it's simply a more economical way to take the drug.
I'm convinced that cocaine is a great big drag. For instance, I'm such a dabbler that I would actually save up coke. I'd get some out for the evening, lay out of a few lines for everyone in attendance, then sit back and drink Heinekens with everyone else. Coke is such a stupid drug that you can't just give people a little bit of it and then put it away. If you do, you're risking a riot.
After an hour or two, they start bothering you for more. You tell them that you're saving it for later. Now they start getting belligerent.
I've had people swear right to my face that they were going to come back when I wasn't home and steal my coke. The very idea of "saving coke" from one night to the next was considered to be the ultimate in stupidity, and they were going to punish me for being a moron.
So, really, coke sucks. It's no fun. Even if you can somehow stay a dabbler like me, everyone else turns into an addict, and when they do, they're actually dangerous to be around.
The addict idiots would come over, excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, and then shoot up in there for the next thirty minutes. We'd be out in the room steaming away. When the guy came out, we'd confront him and tell him to quit shooting up in the damned bathroom, but they never would quit. Addicts don't take no for an answer.
Other coke addicts stole from me, then had the nerve to blame it on the coke, then told me flat out the money was never coming back. No problem, as long as you stay the Hell away. But they wouldn't. They rip you off, then they keep knocking on your door and coming around.
I kept banning the worst ones,, but they would come back, like males who batter their wives, bearing gifts and apologies. Soon they were back into their abusive manipulative addict game again.
One of the reasons I moved to Central California was to get away from some of these morons. I'd banned them over and over, but they kept coming back. I'd known them for many years, and they were still friends with all of our friends. Sometimes to cut yourself off from these idiots, you might just have to pack up and move away from them.
The addict has a personality. The personality is that of a callous, manipulative prick. There are some decent or classy addicts out there, but those are mostly dealers who deal to afford the habit. If they're not doing that, they're hungry for cash and all sorts of other stuff all the time, and probably mooching off or using others. The addict is a user. He doesn't care about you or anyone else. The only thing he cares about is dope.
Speed.
Speed has got to suck even worse than coke. I did meth around three times in my whole life. When I tell this to non-users, they get a snarl of contempt on their face. But I'm comfortable with it. Three times is basically nothing; it's experimental use. Why should I feel guilty about it because some annoying Puritan shit wants me to be?
The reason I only took it three times is because that's how long it took me to realize it's one of the most awful drugs on Earth. The high is excellent. You're smart, in control, sane, happy and confident. You feel warm and friendly and talk all night with your wonderful friends. You don't act wild or crazy or insane or anything like that. Your mind is sharp as a pencil and your emotions are controlled. It lasts a good 18 hours.
The next day you feel like you got hit by a freight train. First it feels like your IQ just dropped 10 points. The stupid feeling gradually goes away after about a week. Your body feels like a sack of bones. It feels like someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked all the energy out of you. That lasts a few days too.
So 18 hours of high is followed by up to one week of crash. Who needs this?
PCP.
PCP is a really strange drug, and I took it about a dozen times, mostly unwittingly. When I tell that to non-users, they get this wild, horrified look in their eyes, but it's no big deal. A dozen trips is experimental use and I don't regret a thing.
Back in the 70's, scumbag PCP users were common. They were evangelizing, and they way they did it was to pass PCP joints around masquerading as pot joints and not tell you.
You could always figure it out real quick due to the bizarre minty metallic taste, but you were still mad at the dusters for being so dishonest. The first time was out of this world; the rest of the trips were unremarkable. I've certainly heard of people doing strange things on the drug, but I've never seen it much myself.
I remember once I was at a party in downtown Huntington Beach in 1976. There was a band playing, then people started passing joints. At some point, the dusters sneaked theirs in too. By the time I realized it, I was flying, so I just kept taking hits off the PCP jays.
This was a party of around 20-30 young folks, most around age 18, and everyone was high on PCP. Not one person was acting weird in the slightest. Non-users don't get it. Even crazy drugs like PCP typically don't make most folks act nuts.
LSD and psychedelics.
Acid and all the other psychedelics suck because just about everybody on Earth despises them and the people who take them. We were never in the stage of psychedelic acceptance when I was using them from 1974-1988, and I'm not sure if we ever will be.
Nothing strikes terror, rage and disgust into the heart of the non-user like the word LSD.
In truth, psychedelics are probably my favorite drugs of all. I took them about 40 times and never really had a bad trip.
Once on mushrooms on got on a bit of a bad trip - sort of an anxiety - awkwardness - nerd trip where I suddenly felt like the biggest geek on Earth. I was with a tripping partner and he wasn't cool about me being transformed into Ultra Nerd.
So I turned the trip around. There were bad nerd vibes with strange deep blue colors and energy fields running through my body like waves of electricity. Those were the shitty nerd vibes. The rest of you might refer to them as an emotion. The fascinating thing about psychedelics is the way your feelings actually become extremely electric and even colorful. Joy has one color, sadness another, on and on.
Well, I decided I was going to turn this trip around. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was able to do it. I took the bad nerd electricity, changed it from blue to red and changed its direction. It was going from my skull down all through my body and out my feet in a big fat blue-purple electric drag feeling.
I changed it by reversing it. A new red electricity feeling would start at the toes and go up, fighting the perennial 18 year old vibe in a sort of battle of the feelings. It took me a good 45 minutes to get the good feelings going in an excellent flow that didn't hang up on the bad stuff on the way up. Then the trip was turned around and a really crappy trip was turned into a fantastic trip.
You know that, you bad trippers? A lot of you can do that. You can change your trips, turn them around, make them go this way and that way. It's just a drug. You're still generally steering the ship you call your mind.
I often would buy a hit of LSD and just keep it in my drawer for months or even years until I felt that I was ready to take it. I would wait until a period in my life when I was feeling happier, more together and more mentally healthy and centered than I had in a while. Sometimes I might have to wait a while until I felt my head was ready for it.
That's really the only way to take LSD. Never take it when you're out of sorts in any way at all, in a bad mood, or in a bad, down or stressed out phase in your life. That's how bad trips happen.
I haven't taken a psychedelic in 20 years. I probably won't take one ever again.
You really don't get any credit for being a casual, recreational or responsible doper. It's hard to do with most drugs anyway, but you can do it with pot and possibly psychedelics.
But you don't get any credit. If you take a hit off a joint once a year, you're the same as some guy slamming a gram of coke a day. The non-users hate all dope and all dopers, and that's one of the sad rules of the game.
With booze, people are pretty sane. If you drink lightly, say no more than 1-2 drinks a day, most non-drinkers are sane enough to recognize that that's not a problem.
Not so with dope. If you don't use, you hate it, and you hate people who use it. I'm not sure if I've ever met a non-user who was tolerant towards any kind of kind of drug use. Ex-users are pretty much the same way. I'm not sure if I've ever met an ex-user of even marijuana who was willing to tolerate it in anyone else. Once they put on that ex-doper crown, they get up on that high horse and never get off.
It's for all of these reasons that I think dope sucks.
Drinking is fun in part because it's socially acceptable. Things that aren't socially acceptable are a drag. You're always paranoid about who to reveal your drug use too, and you're always running into morons who think that heroin and weed are one and the same.
Not because dope is bad for you or you're evil or immoral if you use it, but more that the whole scene around it, and the ridiculous non-users, is a great big gigantic drag. If even pot ever gets to the point where non-users can accept it the way they accept social drinking, maybe it might get fun again.
I keep thinking that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have gotten into drugs as much as I did. The drugs all seem so much worse now because our information is greater. My use was really a product of an era as opposed to just some general degenerate tendency of mine.
Cocaine.
Towards the end of the period, cocaine had turned from the Yuppie party drug into the Evillest Drug of Them All. A lot of us were still using it, because we couldn't seem to make sense of how this drug had gone from White Status Symbol to Black Slum Drug. I guess we just didn't believe it. We still thought we could use the drug recreationally.
Over a 13 year period, I probably did about 16 grams of cocaine by myself. Most non-dopers are horrified when I tell them that; they assume that anyone who used for 13 years is automatically an
"addict". But if you know anything about coke, you know a little over a gram a year is nothing more than dabbling, and it's not really serious cocaine use at all. Further, of course you can do coke for 13 years without getting addicted. I did so myself.
But just about everyone I knew who got into coke at least to the extent that I did turned into an addict. Sooner or later, sniffers move on to smoking or shooting, because it's simply a more economical way to take the drug.
I'm convinced that cocaine is a great big drag. For instance, I'm such a dabbler that I would actually save up coke. I'd get some out for the evening, lay out of a few lines for everyone in attendance, then sit back and drink Heinekens with everyone else. Coke is such a stupid drug that you can't just give people a little bit of it and then put it away. If you do, you're risking a riot.
After an hour or two, they start bothering you for more. You tell them that you're saving it for later. Now they start getting belligerent.
I've had people swear right to my face that they were going to come back when I wasn't home and steal my coke. The very idea of "saving coke" from one night to the next was considered to be the ultimate in stupidity, and they were going to punish me for being a moron.
So, really, coke sucks. It's no fun. Even if you can somehow stay a dabbler like me, everyone else turns into an addict, and when they do, they're actually dangerous to be around.
The addict idiots would come over, excuse themselves to go to the bathroom, and then shoot up in there for the next thirty minutes. We'd be out in the room steaming away. When the guy came out, we'd confront him and tell him to quit shooting up in the damned bathroom, but they never would quit. Addicts don't take no for an answer.
Other coke addicts stole from me, then had the nerve to blame it on the coke, then told me flat out the money was never coming back. No problem, as long as you stay the Hell away. But they wouldn't. They rip you off, then they keep knocking on your door and coming around.
I kept banning the worst ones,, but they would come back, like males who batter their wives, bearing gifts and apologies. Soon they were back into their abusive manipulative addict game again.
One of the reasons I moved to Central California was to get away from some of these morons. I'd banned them over and over, but they kept coming back. I'd known them for many years, and they were still friends with all of our friends. Sometimes to cut yourself off from these idiots, you might just have to pack up and move away from them.
The addict has a personality. The personality is that of a callous, manipulative prick. There are some decent or classy addicts out there, but those are mostly dealers who deal to afford the habit. If they're not doing that, they're hungry for cash and all sorts of other stuff all the time, and probably mooching off or using others. The addict is a user. He doesn't care about you or anyone else. The only thing he cares about is dope.
Speed.
Speed has got to suck even worse than coke. I did meth around three times in my whole life. When I tell this to non-users, they get a snarl of contempt on their face. But I'm comfortable with it. Three times is basically nothing; it's experimental use. Why should I feel guilty about it because some annoying Puritan shit wants me to be?
The reason I only took it three times is because that's how long it took me to realize it's one of the most awful drugs on Earth. The high is excellent. You're smart, in control, sane, happy and confident. You feel warm and friendly and talk all night with your wonderful friends. You don't act wild or crazy or insane or anything like that. Your mind is sharp as a pencil and your emotions are controlled. It lasts a good 18 hours.
The next day you feel like you got hit by a freight train. First it feels like your IQ just dropped 10 points. The stupid feeling gradually goes away after about a week. Your body feels like a sack of bones. It feels like someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked all the energy out of you. That lasts a few days too.
So 18 hours of high is followed by up to one week of crash. Who needs this?
PCP.
PCP is a really strange drug, and I took it about a dozen times, mostly unwittingly. When I tell that to non-users, they get this wild, horrified look in their eyes, but it's no big deal. A dozen trips is experimental use and I don't regret a thing.
Back in the 70's, scumbag PCP users were common. They were evangelizing, and they way they did it was to pass PCP joints around masquerading as pot joints and not tell you.
You could always figure it out real quick due to the bizarre minty metallic taste, but you were still mad at the dusters for being so dishonest. The first time was out of this world; the rest of the trips were unremarkable. I've certainly heard of people doing strange things on the drug, but I've never seen it much myself.
I remember once I was at a party in downtown Huntington Beach in 1976. There was a band playing, then people started passing joints. At some point, the dusters sneaked theirs in too. By the time I realized it, I was flying, so I just kept taking hits off the PCP jays.
This was a party of around 20-30 young folks, most around age 18, and everyone was high on PCP. Not one person was acting weird in the slightest. Non-users don't get it. Even crazy drugs like PCP typically don't make most folks act nuts.
LSD and psychedelics.
Acid and all the other psychedelics suck because just about everybody on Earth despises them and the people who take them. We were never in the stage of psychedelic acceptance when I was using them from 1974-1988, and I'm not sure if we ever will be.
Nothing strikes terror, rage and disgust into the heart of the non-user like the word LSD.
In truth, psychedelics are probably my favorite drugs of all. I took them about 40 times and never really had a bad trip.
Once on mushrooms on got on a bit of a bad trip - sort of an anxiety - awkwardness - nerd trip where I suddenly felt like the biggest geek on Earth. I was with a tripping partner and he wasn't cool about me being transformed into Ultra Nerd.
So I turned the trip around. There were bad nerd vibes with strange deep blue colors and energy fields running through my body like waves of electricity. Those were the shitty nerd vibes. The rest of you might refer to them as an emotion. The fascinating thing about psychedelics is the way your feelings actually become extremely electric and even colorful. Joy has one color, sadness another, on and on.
Well, I decided I was going to turn this trip around. It took me about 45 minutes, but I was able to do it. I took the bad nerd electricity, changed it from blue to red and changed its direction. It was going from my skull down all through my body and out my feet in a big fat blue-purple electric drag feeling.
I changed it by reversing it. A new red electricity feeling would start at the toes and go up, fighting the perennial 18 year old vibe in a sort of battle of the feelings. It took me a good 45 minutes to get the good feelings going in an excellent flow that didn't hang up on the bad stuff on the way up. Then the trip was turned around and a really crappy trip was turned into a fantastic trip.
You know that, you bad trippers? A lot of you can do that. You can change your trips, turn them around, make them go this way and that way. It's just a drug. You're still generally steering the ship you call your mind.
I often would buy a hit of LSD and just keep it in my drawer for months or even years until I felt that I was ready to take it. I would wait until a period in my life when I was feeling happier, more together and more mentally healthy and centered than I had in a while. Sometimes I might have to wait a while until I felt my head was ready for it.
That's really the only way to take LSD. Never take it when you're out of sorts in any way at all, in a bad mood, or in a bad, down or stressed out phase in your life. That's how bad trips happen.
I haven't taken a psychedelic in 20 years. I probably won't take one ever again.
You really don't get any credit for being a casual, recreational or responsible doper. It's hard to do with most drugs anyway, but you can do it with pot and possibly psychedelics.
But you don't get any credit. If you take a hit off a joint once a year, you're the same as some guy slamming a gram of coke a day. The non-users hate all dope and all dopers, and that's one of the sad rules of the game.
With booze, people are pretty sane. If you drink lightly, say no more than 1-2 drinks a day, most non-drinkers are sane enough to recognize that that's not a problem.
Not so with dope. If you don't use, you hate it, and you hate people who use it. I'm not sure if I've ever met a non-user who was tolerant towards any kind of kind of drug use. Ex-users are pretty much the same way. I'm not sure if I've ever met an ex-user of even marijuana who was willing to tolerate it in anyone else. Once they put on that ex-doper crown, they get up on that high horse and never get off.
It's for all of these reasons that I think dope sucks.
Drinking is fun in part because it's socially acceptable. Things that aren't socially acceptable are a drag. You're always paranoid about who to reveal your drug use too, and you're always running into morons who think that heroin and weed are one and the same.
Not because dope is bad for you or you're evil or immoral if you use it, but more that the whole scene around it, and the ridiculous non-users, is a great big gigantic drag. If even pot ever gets to the point where non-users can accept it the way they accept social drinking, maybe it might get fun again.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Immigrants are the Lifeblood of the Western Economy
And other lies. Via whom? Via the corporate media, Canadian Israel Asper version in this case.
I am curious about something. Why is it that all of the elites in the West insist that all Western nations must perennially flood their nations with immigrants? Did not the East Asian NIC's and Western Europe rise to the top of the world's economic heap without flooding their nations with all of these brainy professional types?
Did Japan need to flood its nation with immigrants in order to be successful? Japan flooded its nation neither with brainy cream of the crop immigrants "for the brains it did not have", nor with bottom of the barrel dregs cheap labor immigrants "for the jobs no Japanese would do." They did it all with their own people, who are called the Japanese, and are not only bright but willing to do all sorts of work.
This whole steaming pile of manure called "we need floods of immigrants or the economy will collapse" needs to be called out as the pile that it is.
A clue is in the article. According to this corporate hack, the success of the US dot com boom of the 1990's was created by having a labor force made up of 90% "cheap labor, can't code to save their lives" immigrants from India.
These same immigrants produced a Mount Everest of garbage code all through the 1990's, almost all of which had to be recoded by the few American coders who were not forced to train their replacements and then fired.
These same immigrants destroyed the entire US IT industry and took millions of highly skilled IT workers with them. Decades worth of intellectual knowledge and skills built up in the minds of millions of our best and brightest workers were MOAB'd at the altar of cheap labor.
Furthermore, these same Hindu 1-B job thieves were never even immigrants in the first place. Instead, they were "non-immigrant guest workers".
Someone run this by me one more time. The Hindu 1-B American Skilled Worker Destroying Device was "necessary" in what way now? The US economy would collapse without this massive job destroying machine how now?
One more thing. Read this bit of corporate bird cage lining closely. According to the lunatic rationality of capitalist thinking, the fundamentals of the Indian economy are healthier than the fundamentals of the US economy. Therefore, if you're a capitalist, you need to put your money into India and not the US.
Wow, capitalists really are evil, aren't they?
India, one of the worst countries on Earth, a nation where 50% of the population is malnourished, where half the population is brain-damaged by iodine deficiency, where 200 million (20% of the population) sleep, eat and I guess shit and piss on the streets, on a subcontinent where 14 million people starve to death every year, where the starvation figures, year in and year out, are as bad as North Korea (Is anyone in the world starving but the North Koreans? Answer us, corporate media?) was in the single worst year of its famine in 1996.
This 1 billion strong train wreck of a society is healthier than America?
Than America, where no one starves, where relatively few (Certainly not 60 million!) are homeless, where malnutrition and iodine deficiency brain damage barely exists?
In what crazy capitalist alternative universe does that make sense?
I am curious about something. Why is it that all of the elites in the West insist that all Western nations must perennially flood their nations with immigrants? Did not the East Asian NIC's and Western Europe rise to the top of the world's economic heap without flooding their nations with all of these brainy professional types?
Did Japan need to flood its nation with immigrants in order to be successful? Japan flooded its nation neither with brainy cream of the crop immigrants "for the brains it did not have", nor with bottom of the barrel dregs cheap labor immigrants "for the jobs no Japanese would do." They did it all with their own people, who are called the Japanese, and are not only bright but willing to do all sorts of work.
This whole steaming pile of manure called "we need floods of immigrants or the economy will collapse" needs to be called out as the pile that it is.
A clue is in the article. According to this corporate hack, the success of the US dot com boom of the 1990's was created by having a labor force made up of 90% "cheap labor, can't code to save their lives" immigrants from India.
These same immigrants produced a Mount Everest of garbage code all through the 1990's, almost all of which had to be recoded by the few American coders who were not forced to train their replacements and then fired.
These same immigrants destroyed the entire US IT industry and took millions of highly skilled IT workers with them. Decades worth of intellectual knowledge and skills built up in the minds of millions of our best and brightest workers were MOAB'd at the altar of cheap labor.
Furthermore, these same Hindu 1-B job thieves were never even immigrants in the first place. Instead, they were "non-immigrant guest workers".
Someone run this by me one more time. The Hindu 1-B American Skilled Worker Destroying Device was "necessary" in what way now? The US economy would collapse without this massive job destroying machine how now?
One more thing. Read this bit of corporate bird cage lining closely. According to the lunatic rationality of capitalist thinking, the fundamentals of the Indian economy are healthier than the fundamentals of the US economy. Therefore, if you're a capitalist, you need to put your money into India and not the US.
Wow, capitalists really are evil, aren't they?
India, one of the worst countries on Earth, a nation where 50% of the population is malnourished, where half the population is brain-damaged by iodine deficiency, where 200 million (20% of the population) sleep, eat and I guess shit and piss on the streets, on a subcontinent where 14 million people starve to death every year, where the starvation figures, year in and year out, are as bad as North Korea (Is anyone in the world starving but the North Koreans? Answer us, corporate media?) was in the single worst year of its famine in 1996.
This 1 billion strong train wreck of a society is healthier than America?
Than America, where no one starves, where relatively few (Certainly not 60 million!) are homeless, where malnutrition and iodine deficiency brain damage barely exists?
In what crazy capitalist alternative universe does that make sense?
Conformism Versus Non-Conformism
In the Y B Normal comments, Perry notes:
Allow me to differ here.
As far as hippies, OK, we had a group, but straight society treated us like serious shit, the older generation especially. I seem to recall I lost a number of jobs over being a longhair and suspected doper, and there was no end of warfare with my folks, all of their friends and all of my older relatives. It was generational war, but we had to get jobs from these older assholes, and they seemed to delight in firing us just for who we were.
There was no way to be a member of serious, normal, straight society when you looked like that. It was like one rejection after another, especially in the workplace.
I refer especially to dope. There was never a time when dope was accepted by straight or mainstream society, especially older folks. It did get close there for a bit around thirty years ago, but then Reagan came in, the War on Drugs hit, and it was out in the biggest way.
I can't tell you how much endless rejection, hassle and general crap I got for being a doper, and all I was was a pot smoker. Vast numbers of people, even my own age, were just flat out not into it. Especially as you got to the university and then into good high-paying jobs in offices and whatnot.
Nowadays, dope is more condemned than ever. The honeymoon is over. A lot of kids hate all dope, and the older generation truly despises it.
A very large # of folks even my age never got into it and seriously look down on you if you did, even if it was years ago. God forbid if you still get high. This is especially true in the medical and psychiatry fields. Doctors won't tolerate pot at all, and therapists and p-docs will all try to blame all your problems on it, even if it was 30 years in the past. It's like a guilt trip that never goes away.
At this point, straight society seriously rejects dope in all forms, and I do include pot. I'm not talking the working class here. I'm talking older folks, and especially once you get into proper and respectable society, older folks who dress up for work, wear jackets and ties, make good money, work in an office, etc.
All dope is seriously out with that crowd, even past use. If you talk to most folks like that, even my age, they deny all current use and as far as the past, well, they smoked a joint once.
You can't discuss dope at all in public (you're liable to get tossed out of the establishment) other than to condemn it. You can't even mention past use. At work, it's pretty much off the table and it's probably reason for firing.
Even a past history of drug use is thought to make you unqualified for many jobs. I speak in particular of education, as I was a teacher for years. If any of us told our classes that we so much as took a hit off a joint once, legions of parents would march down to the office and we would probably be fired.
The glam scene was not popular at all at the time and people who were into it were really treated like shit by most ppl for it. It was a fringe thing.
Disco was popular, but walking around with 4-inch blue platforms, velvet pants and silk scarves was not. People who did that really got hammered a lot, mostly people calling them queer.
Sure, punk is pretty normal now, but back then we were really outsiders and rejects. Most everyone really hated it. As an example, almost all of my old friends hated punk and weren't impressed that I was into it. Punks got treated like serious shit all the time. It was serious fringe stuff. We also got called queer a lot.
I don't remember the goth scene well, but in the early days, it wasn't really normal to be into that stuff. Just one more reason for most everyone to think you were a fucking weirdo.
Furthermore, all of these were countercultural movements that were at odds with mainstream society in a serious way - but disco much, much less so. If you were into them and it was obvious, you got stared at a lot, pointed to a lot, and got treated like a general freak. You got called names like weird, strange, creep, etc all the time.
You had your sanity questioned all the time and it was just assumed that you must be mentally ill in some way. In most cases, you also got called faggot a lot for some reason. I guess to the macho straight society idiots, any nonconformist is automatically a "fag".
I recall my father nearly punching my lights out one time for having long hair that according to him made me look like a fag.
No sane person went into any of this stuff to be accepted. Sure you got some acceptance by the scene people, but even for all of these, they were a serious minority. They'd be like 5% of the people, and the others (mostly haters) would be like 95%. You'd have to be a moron to go into most of these things to make gain acceptance. It was like hitching a ride on the Rejection Express.
And none of these things was "the dominant cultural strand" at the time. It's not like nowadays, when punk, goth, hippie and whatnot are all mainstream aspects of youth culture. In the beginning of all these things (except disco), the first people really were outsiders.
More importantly, all of us got used to constantly being called weird, strange, bizarre, freaks, not normal, creepy, crazy, nuts, psycho and all that stuff. So if someone calls me something like that, that's like a compliment.
Now how many normal society types get called stuff like that all time? And how many of them take it as a compliment to be called something like that?
So I'm not buying your argument.
Your description of your youth - hippie, glam, disco, punk, goth etc - doesn't strike me as 'not normal' or 'fucked in the head'. Not an outsider, a reject or outcast.
Rather, it is the trajectory of the Ultra-Conformist, always clinging to the dominant cultural strand. What is called culture and 'counter-culture' are like the twin strands of DNA revolving around each other. If you can't escape that, then you are cattle. You say you followed and adopted each culture, but then say 'I never want to fit in, be normal or be accepted.' That's exactly what you wanted.
Allow me to differ here.
As far as hippies, OK, we had a group, but straight society treated us like serious shit, the older generation especially. I seem to recall I lost a number of jobs over being a longhair and suspected doper, and there was no end of warfare with my folks, all of their friends and all of my older relatives. It was generational war, but we had to get jobs from these older assholes, and they seemed to delight in firing us just for who we were.
There was no way to be a member of serious, normal, straight society when you looked like that. It was like one rejection after another, especially in the workplace.
I refer especially to dope. There was never a time when dope was accepted by straight or mainstream society, especially older folks. It did get close there for a bit around thirty years ago, but then Reagan came in, the War on Drugs hit, and it was out in the biggest way.
I can't tell you how much endless rejection, hassle and general crap I got for being a doper, and all I was was a pot smoker. Vast numbers of people, even my own age, were just flat out not into it. Especially as you got to the university and then into good high-paying jobs in offices and whatnot.
Nowadays, dope is more condemned than ever. The honeymoon is over. A lot of kids hate all dope, and the older generation truly despises it.
A very large # of folks even my age never got into it and seriously look down on you if you did, even if it was years ago. God forbid if you still get high. This is especially true in the medical and psychiatry fields. Doctors won't tolerate pot at all, and therapists and p-docs will all try to blame all your problems on it, even if it was 30 years in the past. It's like a guilt trip that never goes away.
At this point, straight society seriously rejects dope in all forms, and I do include pot. I'm not talking the working class here. I'm talking older folks, and especially once you get into proper and respectable society, older folks who dress up for work, wear jackets and ties, make good money, work in an office, etc.
All dope is seriously out with that crowd, even past use. If you talk to most folks like that, even my age, they deny all current use and as far as the past, well, they smoked a joint once.
You can't discuss dope at all in public (you're liable to get tossed out of the establishment) other than to condemn it. You can't even mention past use. At work, it's pretty much off the table and it's probably reason for firing.
Even a past history of drug use is thought to make you unqualified for many jobs. I speak in particular of education, as I was a teacher for years. If any of us told our classes that we so much as took a hit off a joint once, legions of parents would march down to the office and we would probably be fired.
The glam scene was not popular at all at the time and people who were into it were really treated like shit by most ppl for it. It was a fringe thing.
Disco was popular, but walking around with 4-inch blue platforms, velvet pants and silk scarves was not. People who did that really got hammered a lot, mostly people calling them queer.
Sure, punk is pretty normal now, but back then we were really outsiders and rejects. Most everyone really hated it. As an example, almost all of my old friends hated punk and weren't impressed that I was into it. Punks got treated like serious shit all the time. It was serious fringe stuff. We also got called queer a lot.
I don't remember the goth scene well, but in the early days, it wasn't really normal to be into that stuff. Just one more reason for most everyone to think you were a fucking weirdo.
Furthermore, all of these were countercultural movements that were at odds with mainstream society in a serious way - but disco much, much less so. If you were into them and it was obvious, you got stared at a lot, pointed to a lot, and got treated like a general freak. You got called names like weird, strange, creep, etc all the time.
You had your sanity questioned all the time and it was just assumed that you must be mentally ill in some way. In most cases, you also got called faggot a lot for some reason. I guess to the macho straight society idiots, any nonconformist is automatically a "fag".
I recall my father nearly punching my lights out one time for having long hair that according to him made me look like a fag.
No sane person went into any of this stuff to be accepted. Sure you got some acceptance by the scene people, but even for all of these, they were a serious minority. They'd be like 5% of the people, and the others (mostly haters) would be like 95%. You'd have to be a moron to go into most of these things to make gain acceptance. It was like hitching a ride on the Rejection Express.
And none of these things was "the dominant cultural strand" at the time. It's not like nowadays, when punk, goth, hippie and whatnot are all mainstream aspects of youth culture. In the beginning of all these things (except disco), the first people really were outsiders.
More importantly, all of us got used to constantly being called weird, strange, bizarre, freaks, not normal, creepy, crazy, nuts, psycho and all that stuff. So if someone calls me something like that, that's like a compliment.
Now how many normal society types get called stuff like that all time? And how many of them take it as a compliment to be called something like that?
So I'm not buying your argument.
Y B Normal?
Someone on another blog said that, after reading my blog, he thinks I'm "fucked in the head."
Well, good Lord, I certainly hope so!
I’m one of those people who is actually proud to be fucked in the head.
Keep in mind that I grew up on the beach with a bunch of surfers, hippies, potheads, acid heads and dope dealers, later getting into the glam rock scene and the disco scene, later moving on to the early LA punk rock scene, the LA lit crowd, the very early LA goth scene and the LA art crowd.
In a lot of these scenes, most everyone was crazy, weird or creepy in some way or another.
In the glam and disco days, I was wearing four-inch blue platform heels with velvet pants and silk scarves. Fine, so call me a fag.
In the punk days, I wore leather studs, a beat up old leather jacket and a permanent snarl.
So I don’t particularly consider it an insult to be called crazy, weird or creepy. To me, that’s a compliment. I would start to worry if people stopped calling me that stuff.
Truth, we never wanted to be accepted by society, and a lot of us still don’t. We were outsiders, rejects and outcasts then, and a lot of still want to be. I want to be an outcast, reject and outsider in this society forever. I never want to fit in, be normal or be accepted.
Keep in mind that I don’t use words like crazy, weird, creepy, or whatever, to describe other humans. Those are just insults to describe people who mostly can’t help being what they are. Using them is like calling Black people niggers. I’m into Weird Acceptance.
Instead of saying something stupid and retarded like that, I would be specific: I would say that such and such person is either cold, unfriendly, shy, extremely shy, neurotic, borderline, goes off on tangents, up and down or all over the place emotionally, overemotional, borderline, out there, paranoid, narcissistic, depressive, nervous, anxious, has nervous habits, mercurial, self-involved, distracted, difficult, sociopathic.
In a lot of those cases, I’m going to go beyond a single word to describe the person’s behavior in a lot better depth. To just say someone is weird or crazy without going into specific reasons for insulting them that way is the definition of shittiness.
I don't think I have ever described another human being as "creepy". What the Hell does that mean, anyway? What does a creepy person act like? I've never met one.
In other words, be specific. When someone gives me a weird, disdainful look and snorts, "So and so is weird!" or "So and so is crazy!" I just look at them like, "OK, so? Now why should I not associate with this person?"
Those words don't mean a damn thing. Using them is just a way for the silly boring "normal" people to feel like they are superior to those of us who have moved way outsides the confines of normalness and boringdom into some truly revolutionary ways of thinking, feeling and living.
Now, if you were to describe the person in such a way that that appellation actually makes sense (usually to me this means that the person is really mentally ill in some serious way), then I might listen to you.
You'd be amazed at the stuff that doesn't warrant a DSM diagnosis. Being a space case, being out of it, being trippy, being self-involved, being distracted, having weird nervous habits, having a weird look in your eyes, none of that stuff in and of itself warrants a fucking thing psychopathologically.
You go to a psychiatrist, and if that's all that's the matter, the doc will be forced to check "no mental disorder." Assuming that's all that's the matter with you, I say, "Come on over, freak!"
Furthermore, an obsession with the notion that everyone "act normal" shows that one has a limited imagination and an unadventurous mind and spirit. Just as an example, many of our greatest geniuses, thinkers, writers, artists, etc. were pretty damn out there people.
So what you're saying is you wouldn't want to have anything to do with the greatest geniuses that have blessed our species. Fine, you just proved to me what an asshole you are. So I say screw you.
I saw Ray Bradbury on TV once. I don't know how to describe him, but he had that typical artist personality. Other people would say he's "odd", but I don't use weasel words like that. One thing I'll tell you flat out is that the guy wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in any US corporation. And this means what? He's a loser. Fine, fuck you. I don't want you in my world.
Long live the weird!
Well, good Lord, I certainly hope so!
I’m one of those people who is actually proud to be fucked in the head.
Keep in mind that I grew up on the beach with a bunch of surfers, hippies, potheads, acid heads and dope dealers, later getting into the glam rock scene and the disco scene, later moving on to the early LA punk rock scene, the LA lit crowd, the very early LA goth scene and the LA art crowd.
In a lot of these scenes, most everyone was crazy, weird or creepy in some way or another.
In the glam and disco days, I was wearing four-inch blue platform heels with velvet pants and silk scarves. Fine, so call me a fag.
In the punk days, I wore leather studs, a beat up old leather jacket and a permanent snarl.
So I don’t particularly consider it an insult to be called crazy, weird or creepy. To me, that’s a compliment. I would start to worry if people stopped calling me that stuff.
Truth, we never wanted to be accepted by society, and a lot of us still don’t. We were outsiders, rejects and outcasts then, and a lot of still want to be. I want to be an outcast, reject and outsider in this society forever. I never want to fit in, be normal or be accepted.
Keep in mind that I don’t use words like crazy, weird, creepy, or whatever, to describe other humans. Those are just insults to describe people who mostly can’t help being what they are. Using them is like calling Black people niggers. I’m into Weird Acceptance.
Instead of saying something stupid and retarded like that, I would be specific: I would say that such and such person is either cold, unfriendly, shy, extremely shy, neurotic, borderline, goes off on tangents, up and down or all over the place emotionally, overemotional, borderline, out there, paranoid, narcissistic, depressive, nervous, anxious, has nervous habits, mercurial, self-involved, distracted, difficult, sociopathic.
In a lot of those cases, I’m going to go beyond a single word to describe the person’s behavior in a lot better depth. To just say someone is weird or crazy without going into specific reasons for insulting them that way is the definition of shittiness.
I don't think I have ever described another human being as "creepy". What the Hell does that mean, anyway? What does a creepy person act like? I've never met one.
In other words, be specific. When someone gives me a weird, disdainful look and snorts, "So and so is weird!" or "So and so is crazy!" I just look at them like, "OK, so? Now why should I not associate with this person?"
Those words don't mean a damn thing. Using them is just a way for the silly boring "normal" people to feel like they are superior to those of us who have moved way outsides the confines of normalness and boringdom into some truly revolutionary ways of thinking, feeling and living.
Now, if you were to describe the person in such a way that that appellation actually makes sense (usually to me this means that the person is really mentally ill in some serious way), then I might listen to you.
You'd be amazed at the stuff that doesn't warrant a DSM diagnosis. Being a space case, being out of it, being trippy, being self-involved, being distracted, having weird nervous habits, having a weird look in your eyes, none of that stuff in and of itself warrants a fucking thing psychopathologically.
You go to a psychiatrist, and if that's all that's the matter, the doc will be forced to check "no mental disorder." Assuming that's all that's the matter with you, I say, "Come on over, freak!"
Furthermore, an obsession with the notion that everyone "act normal" shows that one has a limited imagination and an unadventurous mind and spirit. Just as an example, many of our greatest geniuses, thinkers, writers, artists, etc. were pretty damn out there people.
So what you're saying is you wouldn't want to have anything to do with the greatest geniuses that have blessed our species. Fine, you just proved to me what an asshole you are. So I say screw you.
I saw Ray Bradbury on TV once. I don't know how to describe him, but he had that typical artist personality. Other people would say he's "odd", but I don't use weasel words like that. One thing I'll tell you flat out is that the guy wouldn't have lasted ten minutes in any US corporation. And this means what? He's a loser. Fine, fuck you. I don't want you in my world.
Long live the weird!
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
The LA Punk Rock Scene - Why Are These People Still Alive?
Did you know the Germs got back together and are playing again, and there is a new movie about them? They're like 50 years old (my age)! Still up there playing like kids. Weird. Lorna Doom and Pat Smear look fantastic too, like they spent the last 25 yrs in a health spa (check this pic).
They look healthy (mentally and physically) and happy. Check out this pic and great interview. At 50, I've concluded that there's no alternative to those three.
No way can you keep up that lifestyle for long. Don Bolles had a hard life with drug addiction and alcoholism, but he's doing OK too. Darby Crash is dead, but they've got some famous actor, Shane West, to take his place. I was into that early LA punk rock scene, and I saw the Germs live on the last day of the 1970's at the Hong Kong Cafe in downtown LA.
The lead from 45 Grave, Dinah Cancer, is back playing again, and she looks great too (photo from 3 years ago), although she was on heroin for about 12 years as I recall. She must be 50! 50 years old and still running around all dressed up like a ghoul. Haha, Morticia, here we come.
She got married a couple of times and had a kid. I knew her husband Paul Cutler (he played in 45 Grave) - nicest guy you've ever met. I also knew Darby Crash a bit and my brother knew Don Bolles (he said Don was a really nice guy).
What's weird is a lot of those really insane, craziest of the crazy hardcore punk rocker maniacs were really nice people if you got to know them. A lot of them were on star trips - they could be like, "Who are you? I'm a rock star! Why should I say hi to you?" But if you could get past that, most of them were really cool. They weren't mean, cold, nasty, unfriendly, arrogant, or anything like that. Their fans could be real idiots though.
Lorna Doom (she is really lovely in this pic) is really famous for opening the way to females in punk rock music. I also knew Ann DeJarnett and the rest of the band from Mnemonic Devices, who later went on to release a couple of albums solo.
I also know John Doe and Exene from X and Gina and Jane from the Go-Go's (That was before they were hugely famous!). Jane was a really friendly, spirited, spunky, mischievous girl - feminine but not submissive, playful and happy. She looks good in a recent photo too. She's into straight-lacing, and some people think she plays at being dominatrix. The woman I met didn't seem like the type, but who knows?
Gina was kind of an anxious introverted type at the time, but she was really nice though. She still looks good today.
Both Jane and Gina, have gone on to acting careers and the Go-Gos still play around. John Doe of X has gone on to a very successful movie career. Exene still looks good too, and X still tours. Back in the day she looked like this, and this. Live, X was out of this world! I saw them at the Whiskey a-go-go.
I saw them in 1980 at the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa and they were already getting huge in that scene, but they were not on MTV yet! I was backstage with the Go-Go's at that show. They looked like this at the time - beautiful young women!
I also knew Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag when he looked like this.
Black Flag was a big second wave LA punk band, and at that time, the scene was getting dangerous - especially Black Flag concerts, because that really brought out the morons. I remember everyone crowded around while some teenage moron "did the worm" on broken glass on the floor." You did the worm by rolling around on the ground like a worm. If you did it on glass, I guess you got cut. I certainly never did anything that stupid!
Later that nite, I got into a fight with five idiot Nazi punks at once. Obviously, they started it. All I remember was flying in the air and coming down with a Heineken bottle in my hand. One of the scumbags was lying on the ground, the beer bottle was in my hand, and damned if I wasn't going to hit him in the head with it. Lucky for him, he kicked up with his legs and send me flying again. Being a 22 year old Peter Pan type, of course I landed on my feet.
Chuck's a great guy; really friendly, and he's quite intelligent. Last time I saw him, he was sitting outside a laundromat in Hermosa Beach reading Marquis de Sade. Haha! This is how he looks now. He looks pretty good too (new band), and he's a father with four kids. That's hard to believe.
Honestly, I was into that scene from early 1979-on and I can't believe any of those people are still alive. The whole scene seemed almost suicidal.
Hell, I can't believe I'm still alive. I drink two glasses of wine a day, and my only vice is coffee. I've pretty much given up dope, except I smoke weed once in a while (but haven't in some time). I work out, I'm a health food maniac, fast regularly, take supplements and herbs, etc.
They look healthy (mentally and physically) and happy. Check out this pic and great interview. At 50, I've concluded that there's no alternative to those three.
No way can you keep up that lifestyle for long. Don Bolles had a hard life with drug addiction and alcoholism, but he's doing OK too. Darby Crash is dead, but they've got some famous actor, Shane West, to take his place. I was into that early LA punk rock scene, and I saw the Germs live on the last day of the 1970's at the Hong Kong Cafe in downtown LA.
The lead from 45 Grave, Dinah Cancer, is back playing again, and she looks great too (photo from 3 years ago), although she was on heroin for about 12 years as I recall. She must be 50! 50 years old and still running around all dressed up like a ghoul. Haha, Morticia, here we come.
She got married a couple of times and had a kid. I knew her husband Paul Cutler (he played in 45 Grave) - nicest guy you've ever met. I also knew Darby Crash a bit and my brother knew Don Bolles (he said Don was a really nice guy).
What's weird is a lot of those really insane, craziest of the crazy hardcore punk rocker maniacs were really nice people if you got to know them. A lot of them were on star trips - they could be like, "Who are you? I'm a rock star! Why should I say hi to you?" But if you could get past that, most of them were really cool. They weren't mean, cold, nasty, unfriendly, arrogant, or anything like that. Their fans could be real idiots though.
Lorna Doom (she is really lovely in this pic) is really famous for opening the way to females in punk rock music. I also knew Ann DeJarnett and the rest of the band from Mnemonic Devices, who later went on to release a couple of albums solo.
I also know John Doe and Exene from X and Gina and Jane from the Go-Go's (That was before they were hugely famous!). Jane was a really friendly, spirited, spunky, mischievous girl - feminine but not submissive, playful and happy. She looks good in a recent photo too. She's into straight-lacing, and some people think she plays at being dominatrix. The woman I met didn't seem like the type, but who knows?
Gina was kind of an anxious introverted type at the time, but she was really nice though. She still looks good today.
Both Jane and Gina, have gone on to acting careers and the Go-Gos still play around. John Doe of X has gone on to a very successful movie career. Exene still looks good too, and X still tours. Back in the day she looked like this, and this. Live, X was out of this world! I saw them at the Whiskey a-go-go.
I saw them in 1980 at the Cuckoo's Nest in Costa Mesa and they were already getting huge in that scene, but they were not on MTV yet! I was backstage with the Go-Go's at that show. They looked like this at the time - beautiful young women!
I also knew Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag when he looked like this.
Black Flag was a big second wave LA punk band, and at that time, the scene was getting dangerous - especially Black Flag concerts, because that really brought out the morons. I remember everyone crowded around while some teenage moron "did the worm" on broken glass on the floor." You did the worm by rolling around on the ground like a worm. If you did it on glass, I guess you got cut. I certainly never did anything that stupid!
Later that nite, I got into a fight with five idiot Nazi punks at once. Obviously, they started it. All I remember was flying in the air and coming down with a Heineken bottle in my hand. One of the scumbags was lying on the ground, the beer bottle was in my hand, and damned if I wasn't going to hit him in the head with it. Lucky for him, he kicked up with his legs and send me flying again. Being a 22 year old Peter Pan type, of course I landed on my feet.
Chuck's a great guy; really friendly, and he's quite intelligent. Last time I saw him, he was sitting outside a laundromat in Hermosa Beach reading Marquis de Sade. Haha! This is how he looks now. He looks pretty good too (new band), and he's a father with four kids. That's hard to believe.
Honestly, I was into that scene from early 1979-on and I can't believe any of those people are still alive. The whole scene seemed almost suicidal.
Hell, I can't believe I'm still alive. I drink two glasses of wine a day, and my only vice is coffee. I've pretty much given up dope, except I smoke weed once in a while (but haven't in some time). I work out, I'm a health food maniac, fast regularly, take supplements and herbs, etc.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Blog Status Report
Blogger locked this blog due to violation of the Terms of Service Agreement and the Content Policy. An investigation was undertaken and it was determined that while this blog is, like a lot of us, offensive, it, like most of us, does not yet deserve to die.
I guess some poor sensitive souls complained about the blog and a lot of people started crying, saying it was offensive.
There were people crying everywhere, all over the country and even in some other nations, all because of Robert Lindsay. A lot of people couldn't go to work because they were too tearful, and traffic even got held up in some major US cities because of all the people crying. People would go into work and start crying and they would have to go home.
"Men" would come to read Robert Lindsay and start crying. Then they would go home and try to have sex with their girlfriends and wives, and halfway through the act, they would start crying again, lose their hardons, and curl up in a ball of tears next to their diabolically cackling women.
Robert Lindsay was starting to effect the economy and sex life of the nation itself.
Health experts warned that pretty soon some of these emo tards were going to start cutting themselves, burning themselves, acting out in Borderline ways, and even committing suicide on the Internet. All because of Robert Lindsay. It was a Goddamned public health issue, and Blogger had to do something quick.
Complaining about Robert Lindsay? That's like complaining about the sky for being blue. The whole purpose of this blog was to be offensive. It was the spirit of Tony Clifton, Wally Gator, Lenny Bruce, the Sex Pistols, the Germs and the /b/ section of the Chans transmuted into a blog-shaped form.
Now you have to click through a content screen before we let you in here to be eternally scarred and corrupted.
I guess some poor sensitive souls complained about the blog and a lot of people started crying, saying it was offensive.
There were people crying everywhere, all over the country and even in some other nations, all because of Robert Lindsay. A lot of people couldn't go to work because they were too tearful, and traffic even got held up in some major US cities because of all the people crying. People would go into work and start crying and they would have to go home.
"Men" would come to read Robert Lindsay and start crying. Then they would go home and try to have sex with their girlfriends and wives, and halfway through the act, they would start crying again, lose their hardons, and curl up in a ball of tears next to their diabolically cackling women.
Robert Lindsay was starting to effect the economy and sex life of the nation itself.
Health experts warned that pretty soon some of these emo tards were going to start cutting themselves, burning themselves, acting out in Borderline ways, and even committing suicide on the Internet. All because of Robert Lindsay. It was a Goddamned public health issue, and Blogger had to do something quick.
Complaining about Robert Lindsay? That's like complaining about the sky for being blue. The whole purpose of this blog was to be offensive. It was the spirit of Tony Clifton, Wally Gator, Lenny Bruce, the Sex Pistols, the Germs and the /b/ section of the Chans transmuted into a blog-shaped form.
Now you have to click through a content screen before we let you in here to be eternally scarred and corrupted.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Video Shock: Pariolini Russi Massacrano un Barbone
This is an Italian translation of Human Beasts: Massacre in a Russian Forest.
The translation is by Paolo from Trieste. The title is translated as Shock Video: Russian Pariolinis Massacre a Bum.
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, Telegu, Thai, Indonesian and Tagalog. Email me if you are interested.
This post has been translated to other languages. French translation here (en Français). Spanish translation here (en Espanol). Polish translation here (w języku polskim). Hungarian translation here (magyar). Portuguese translation here (em Português). Norwegian translation here (på norsk) Dutch translation (in het Nederlands).
This video is very disturbing, and many adverse reactions have occurred, including serious reactions such as fainting and seizures. If you think you are going to have a serious reaction, do not watch this video.
Watch this video at your own risk only! Persons under age 18 may not view this video!
The title recalls a famous massacre in Italy, the Circeo's Massacre. In this case, the killers were from the Parioli Zone in Rome. Parioli is a very wealthy part of Rome - think Beverly Hills in LA. In Italy, the word "Parioli" implies extreme wealth, wild sex, drug and alcohol orgies, etc. The killers were Italian Mussolini-type fascists.
They kidnapped, raped and tortured two local girls, and one of the girls died. The other miraculously survived only by the grace of God. This case is still very popular in the Italian imagination - think the Tate-La Bianca Manson killings in Beverly Hills in 1969. Rome is full of fascists, and they are certain to be upset by the title of this video equating them with thrill-killers. The man who was killed was not a bum; instead he was just a middle-aged guy suffering from cancer.
Questo è un video che stà facendo scalpore nel Web.
La rilevanza del caso ha fatto sì che unitamente alle cronache in lingua russa si siano aggiunte ulteriori informazioni in Inglese. Nell'estate del 2007, tre 19nni ucraini hanno brutalmente seviziato a morte un povero barbone. Sono conosciuti come i Maniaci di Dnepropetrovskwent. Dopo i primi esperimenti e sevizie sugli animali, questi maniaci hanno fatto il salto di qualità...cacciare la preda più ambita: l'uomo.
A tutt'oggi sappiamo che hanno fatto almeno 21 morti, uomini, bambini, donne, senza distinzione di sesso, età e status sociale.
E' triste sapere come in Russia i senzatetto (e in futuro anche i poveri?) siano oggetto di caccia spietata. Neonazisti, giovani annoiati dalla monotonia della vita, psicopatici...assassini di tutti i tipi si stanno accanendo su poveri esseri umani. Tranne casi eclatanti, come questo, il ritrovamento di cadaveri non fà nemmeno più notizia. I russi amano bere molta Vodka, ci sono tanti ubriaconi in giro...
I serial killers hanno avuto la bella pensata di immortalare le loro gesta...sono 7 minuti incredibili...siamo in un bosco e si vede un barbone disteso tra le piante; sembra stia dormendo o è ubriaco.
Il 'commando' si avvicina ed inizia la 'festa di morte': il primo 'eroe' gli spacca la testa a martellate, il volto della vittima è completamente sfigurato e sanguinante, ma respira...respira ed allora interviene il camerata che inizia la tortura con un cesello (o un cacciavite)...ha la pancia scoperta: perchè non infilzarlo, perchè non colpirlo dappertutto, penetrare sotto la pelle e sbudellarlo, divertendosi un mondo??
Sì, sono eccitati, l'odore del sangue li eccita...una faccia da bravo ragazzo (quello del martello) sfoggia un bel sorriso al 'cameraman', il terzo si stà divertendo un mondo...e tutti ridono felici...maledetti!!!
C'è un povero cristo che viene letteralmente umiliato, massacrato, lo prendono a calci, continuano a sbudellarlo, viene spietatamente infilzato ad un occhio, urla, urla di dolore...(le urla non si sentono, per fortuna), ma è ancora vivo!
Mi pare di sentire una delle loro voci: ''Vieni,'bravo ragazzo' dal sorriso smagliante, vieni a finirlo con il tuo glorioso martello, sei come Thor adesso...finisci quel miserabile! Prendi bene la mira, mi raccomando, tre belle martellate sono sufficienti? Quel porco è ancora vivo? Fà niente, andiamo via, ragazzi!''
La camera si allontana, il prode giovanotto pulisce l'arma in una pozzanghera, ha l'acqua in una bottiglia di plastica per 'decontaminare' il suo martello dal sangue dell'impuro, si lava la faccia, le braccia, le mani...e la sua coscienza? E la coscienza di suoi camerati? Come potranno mai pulire la loro coscienza?? Ma hanno una coscienza?
Dopo aver filmato un'altro omicidio, il 'cameraman', temendo di essere scoperto dalla polizia, ha abbandonato i suoi amici. Gli assassinii sono continuati, uno stato di delirio di onnipotenza si è impadronito dei due pazzi facendoli commettere l'errore di presenziare ai funerali delle vittime per fare foto delle esequie.
Fortunatamente, proprio in quelle occasioni sono stati individuati da esperti detective russi, muniti a loro volta di macchine fotografiche!!
Sono stati arrestati e la polizia ha trovato questo video, prova sciacciante della loro colpevolezza. Sono in prigione e sono tutt'ora in attesa di giudizio. Recentemente ho visto una foto degli assassini in cella...impressionante! La faccia, lo sguardo di uno di loro è spaventoso...è il volto di un demone uscito dall'inferno (ndt in originale il testo menziona Ghoul, che sarebbe un mangiatore di cadaveri...).
Apparso ieri per la prima volta nel sito TheNYC.com, questo video è stato ritirato immediatamente.
Nel mio sito c'è spazio per la politica, per l'informazione, la cultura, l'umorismo e la satira. Posso pubblicare immagini e commenti di vario tipo, mi piace il dibattito, il contraddittorio. Talvolta vi ho presentato filmati estremamente violenti, brutali e sconvolgenti per denunciare fatti e realtà del nostro mondo contemporaneo.
Questo video mi ha fatto star male, ho pianto, mi sono sentito impotente davanti a tanta ferocia, ho urlato il mio odio per quelle belve.
Avete mai sentito parlare del famoso caso Leopold-Loeb? E dei film di Orson Welles 'Frenesia del delitto' e 'Nodo alla Gola' di A. Hitchcock tratti da quella storia? Beh, come vedete In America abbiamo avuto casi simili.
Non potevo non inserirlo!!
Non è un fenomeno isolato!! Non posso dimenticare i diversi attacchi ai senzatetto, ai poveri emigranti, agli emarginati avvenuti in questi anni in alcuni paesi dell' Unione Europea. Come non ricordare le molteplici aggressioni ed i roghi avvenuti in Italia? Quanti campi nomadi, alloggi di extracomunitari sono stati dati alle fiamme? Quanti sono stati veramente accidentali?
Chi ha dato fuoco al barbone polacco di Ostia?
E questo ?
E il barbone di Genova?
E per finire, cosa ne pensate del tentativo di bruciare vivo il barbone ADREA SEVERI? Non era mica un negro, un cinese o un mussulmano o... era un ITALIANO!!!! E chi sono gli indagati che hanno ammesso la colpa?
Quattro giovanotti di circa 18 anni, di buona famiglia (e sicuramente di idee fasciste)!! Hanno dichiarato di aver provato a cacciare il barbone altre volte, di averlo schernito e maltrattato, alla fine han voluto fare il fuochetto...e perchè? Mah, si annoiavano, non c'era nulla da fare...ed allora olè, bruciamo il barbone, che bello, che divertimento!!!
Sexmaniacman On Borderline and Schizotypal PD
I am looking for translators to translate this post into German. Email me if you are interested.
A commenter notes on the Personality Disorders post:
Hi Bob, this chick was so nuts, man, oh man oh man. She had a dx of "Borderline Schizophrenia" and was a serious acidhead.
She proudly said, "I've always been crazy." Her Mom was schizophrenic and had tried to stab her in the back and kill her when she was 4 years old. Her life was desolate, and she would move back and forth between all these different personalities that you could not keep track of.
She lived in Hollywood, was a fag hag and was always getting picked up by guys and abused. She let groups of guys gangbang her and all sorts of crazy shit. She was always telling stories about guys or groups of guys picking her up, tying her up, torturing her, having sex with her, and threatening to murder her.
The stories seemed almost too weird to be true, but she was an extreme submissive who obviously was giving off "hurt me" vibes that a lot of sicko dudes might have picked up on and acted on.
She was also a bit bi and had sex with women sometimes. But she liked young girls, like 14 years old! Whoa! She also liked young boys, like 13 years old, and she loved to entertain me with stories about breaking in 8th graders. She was an old pro at this. I thought it was just plain weird.
We were going to go a lesbian bar in Hollywood and try to pick up a girl to take home with us (that was real easy to do in LA, which is full of all kinds of gays, bis and swingers), but she was so weird, I figured we would never be able to pick up any decent women.
Her idea of a good time was going to a gay bar and hanging out there all nite. I said pass.
She literally ate acid by the handful, five or eight hits at a time.
I took her to a Cure concert and for some weird reason, all these Goth chicks were grabbing me and trying to molest me the whole time at the concert, even when I was with her. While we were walking around, while we were sitting at the concert, the women just wouldn't leave me alone. The whole thing seems like a hallucination now. It was 1983. She was flying on a handful of acid.
I took her to see Pink Flamingos , we watched Divine eat dog shit off sidewalk, and she thought that was hilarious. We went to see The Story of O, which I thought was weird, but she insisted was the story of her life.
She kept wanting me to inflict pain on her in all these different ways (A LOT of women are into pain! Is that weird or what?) but I wasn't really into being a sadist too much. I did inflict some pain on her, but I didn't really enjoy it. She sure did! Damn right! But it was the weirdest joy, a joy in a bottomless sadness. I couldn't relate.
We went at forever, and she was a real screamer. One night she turned me in the middle and said, "You know what, Sexman?"
"What?"
"You're a good fuck." She repeated that a few times.
I'd just been turned into a complete sex object by a woman, and I didn't even care.
I'd leave her place at the end of the weekend. Her Hollywood apartment complex was full of all these Guatemalan and Mexican illegal aliens. It was 1984 and the invasion was well under way. I guess the guys had been listening to her sexual opera performance all weekend because as I walked out, the Hispanic guys would all stand up and start clapping for me and raising their beers.
Cheers to the Master Fucker! She would drink, take acid, smoke pot, do speed, and then grab a bottle of antidepressants and start taking pills and downing them with a glass of booze.
"Whoa!" I said. "What do you think you're doing!"
"You don't know the pain I'm in Sexguy," she whimpered and started crying. "You have no idea what it's like. I need this, Sexdude."
I shrugged and hoped she didn't die on my watch. Who wants to deal with a dead chick and cops?
She was schizotypal in that she used language in really weird ways, and even though she insisted she had all these friends, she seemed really isolated. Plus she was just flat-out fucking weird in a way that Borderlines simply are not. Like she was on another planet, an alien. Invariably, she accused me of being a fag too for some reason like all of her faggot friends, and that pissed me off.
I will say she had more insight into my personality at the time than most other women have ever had.
She used to regale me with stories about her gay friends. Her gay friends were all these seriously weird masochist dudes into the leather scene.
Her eyes got really wide.
"My friend Jim, he's not satisfied until the welts are this big."
That's one of her sicko masochist gay friends. Every time she talked about them, I told her to shut up as she was grossing me out.
She stretched her fingers to make about a one inch measurement. In her eyes, she was trying to shock me and I know it turns her on. She wanted one-inch welts too. Obviously. Like Hell you're getting 'em from me, you sick bitch, I thought.
She called me one time but I wasn't home. A woman I knew was over at my place in my absence and answered the phone. "Tell Sexman it's just me," she sighed wearily into the phone. "It's just me. Just V." Her self-esteem was 80,000 leagues under the sea under an anchor. The woman hung up the phone.
Later the woman said: "That's the woman you're dating, Sexguy?"
"Yeah," I sigh.
"Wow, she seems like she thinks she's the biggest zero on the face of the Earth. How sad." The woman shook her head, and an incredible sadness came over her face too, a hundred years' worth.
"I know."
I broke up with her.
"Can...you...at least...give me a reason, Sexcat?" V. whimpered into the phone.
"You're just too nuts for me. I mean, I'm nuts, but I'm neurotic. You're way more crazy than I am, and I just can't deal with you. It's like dealing with someone from another planet. I can't handle you. Good luck in the rest of your life."
She called me a few days later, crying.
"After you broke up with me, Sexbro, I put my fist through a wall, I was so mad. Now I have a hole in my wall."
"Over me? You did this over me? Why? Don't bother, V. Don't smash walls over me. I'm not worth it. Smash walls over someone else...Look, I can't handle this, this is way too nuts."
I got a new girlfriend, K., pretty soon, and V. had given me VD like most sluts do, something called Trichomonas with no symptoms in the male. I immediately gave it to the new girl, and it causes four days of misery in the female. The new woman was pissed.
I said the only thing you can say when you give your girlfriend VD.
"Hey, don't ever say I never gave you anything."
I thought that was pretty funny.
She sure didn't. Icy eyes shone at my across the room.
"That's not funny, Sexman."
"Yeah it is."
"No it isn't."
I saw V. again two years later. She came down to visit me, an hour's drive. I saw her on my porch like a lost poppy, the most forlorn thing you ever saw. We went inside and had some wild sex for a couple of hours. She got pissed at the way it ended and left in a huff.
I never saw her again.
I assume she's dead, probably long ago. The way she was, she couldn't have lasted long.
A commenter notes on the Personality Disorders post:
Schizotypal was always the odd-man-out personality disorder -- both literally and figuratively.Sexmaniacman thinks he had a gf once who was both a Borderline and a Schizotypal:
Hi Bob, this chick was so nuts, man, oh man oh man. She had a dx of "Borderline Schizophrenia" and was a serious acidhead.
She proudly said, "I've always been crazy." Her Mom was schizophrenic and had tried to stab her in the back and kill her when she was 4 years old. Her life was desolate, and she would move back and forth between all these different personalities that you could not keep track of.
She lived in Hollywood, was a fag hag and was always getting picked up by guys and abused. She let groups of guys gangbang her and all sorts of crazy shit. She was always telling stories about guys or groups of guys picking her up, tying her up, torturing her, having sex with her, and threatening to murder her.
The stories seemed almost too weird to be true, but she was an extreme submissive who obviously was giving off "hurt me" vibes that a lot of sicko dudes might have picked up on and acted on.
She was also a bit bi and had sex with women sometimes. But she liked young girls, like 14 years old! Whoa! She also liked young boys, like 13 years old, and she loved to entertain me with stories about breaking in 8th graders. She was an old pro at this. I thought it was just plain weird.
We were going to go a lesbian bar in Hollywood and try to pick up a girl to take home with us (that was real easy to do in LA, which is full of all kinds of gays, bis and swingers), but she was so weird, I figured we would never be able to pick up any decent women.
Her idea of a good time was going to a gay bar and hanging out there all nite. I said pass.
She literally ate acid by the handful, five or eight hits at a time.
I took her to a Cure concert and for some weird reason, all these Goth chicks were grabbing me and trying to molest me the whole time at the concert, even when I was with her. While we were walking around, while we were sitting at the concert, the women just wouldn't leave me alone. The whole thing seems like a hallucination now. It was 1983. She was flying on a handful of acid.
I took her to see Pink Flamingos , we watched Divine eat dog shit off sidewalk, and she thought that was hilarious. We went to see The Story of O, which I thought was weird, but she insisted was the story of her life.
She kept wanting me to inflict pain on her in all these different ways (A LOT of women are into pain! Is that weird or what?) but I wasn't really into being a sadist too much. I did inflict some pain on her, but I didn't really enjoy it. She sure did! Damn right! But it was the weirdest joy, a joy in a bottomless sadness. I couldn't relate.
We went at forever, and she was a real screamer. One night she turned me in the middle and said, "You know what, Sexman?"
"What?"
"You're a good fuck." She repeated that a few times.
I'd just been turned into a complete sex object by a woman, and I didn't even care.
I'd leave her place at the end of the weekend. Her Hollywood apartment complex was full of all these Guatemalan and Mexican illegal aliens. It was 1984 and the invasion was well under way. I guess the guys had been listening to her sexual opera performance all weekend because as I walked out, the Hispanic guys would all stand up and start clapping for me and raising their beers.
Cheers to the Master Fucker! She would drink, take acid, smoke pot, do speed, and then grab a bottle of antidepressants and start taking pills and downing them with a glass of booze.
"Whoa!" I said. "What do you think you're doing!"
"You don't know the pain I'm in Sexguy," she whimpered and started crying. "You have no idea what it's like. I need this, Sexdude."
I shrugged and hoped she didn't die on my watch. Who wants to deal with a dead chick and cops?
She was schizotypal in that she used language in really weird ways, and even though she insisted she had all these friends, she seemed really isolated. Plus she was just flat-out fucking weird in a way that Borderlines simply are not. Like she was on another planet, an alien. Invariably, she accused me of being a fag too for some reason like all of her faggot friends, and that pissed me off.
I will say she had more insight into my personality at the time than most other women have ever had.
She used to regale me with stories about her gay friends. Her gay friends were all these seriously weird masochist dudes into the leather scene.
Her eyes got really wide.
"My friend Jim, he's not satisfied until the welts are this big."
That's one of her sicko masochist gay friends. Every time she talked about them, I told her to shut up as she was grossing me out.
She stretched her fingers to make about a one inch measurement. In her eyes, she was trying to shock me and I know it turns her on. She wanted one-inch welts too. Obviously. Like Hell you're getting 'em from me, you sick bitch, I thought.
She called me one time but I wasn't home. A woman I knew was over at my place in my absence and answered the phone. "Tell Sexman it's just me," she sighed wearily into the phone. "It's just me. Just V." Her self-esteem was 80,000 leagues under the sea under an anchor. The woman hung up the phone.
Later the woman said: "That's the woman you're dating, Sexguy?"
"Yeah," I sigh.
"Wow, she seems like she thinks she's the biggest zero on the face of the Earth. How sad." The woman shook her head, and an incredible sadness came over her face too, a hundred years' worth.
"I know."
I broke up with her.
"Can...you...at least...give me a reason, Sexcat?" V. whimpered into the phone.
"You're just too nuts for me. I mean, I'm nuts, but I'm neurotic. You're way more crazy than I am, and I just can't deal with you. It's like dealing with someone from another planet. I can't handle you. Good luck in the rest of your life."
She called me a few days later, crying.
"After you broke up with me, Sexbro, I put my fist through a wall, I was so mad. Now I have a hole in my wall."
"Over me? You did this over me? Why? Don't bother, V. Don't smash walls over me. I'm not worth it. Smash walls over someone else...Look, I can't handle this, this is way too nuts."
I got a new girlfriend, K., pretty soon, and V. had given me VD like most sluts do, something called Trichomonas with no symptoms in the male. I immediately gave it to the new girl, and it causes four days of misery in the female. The new woman was pissed.
I said the only thing you can say when you give your girlfriend VD.
"Hey, don't ever say I never gave you anything."
I thought that was pretty funny.
She sure didn't. Icy eyes shone at my across the room.
"That's not funny, Sexman."
"Yeah it is."
"No it isn't."
I saw V. again two years later. She came down to visit me, an hour's drive. I saw her on my porch like a lost poppy, the most forlorn thing you ever saw. We went inside and had some wild sex for a couple of hours. She got pissed at the way it ended and left in a huff.
I never saw her again.
I assume she's dead, probably long ago. The way she was, she couldn't have lasted long.
WTF Is the Matter With You? Part 2
That question is directed to Thistle Harlequin.
I won't upload the movie, and I think it's copyrighted anyway. It's pornographic, and we don't host porn on the site. Rarely, we link to it, if there is some artistic or political reason. In this case, it's more art or performance art than porn per se.
It's called Putrid Sex Object, a movie performed by Thistle Harlequin (adults only, and don't watch unless you want to be horribly grossed out).
This is part of what my artist brother calls the new art - "that gross, sick, fag shit." He says this is the new thing in art, because everything else has been done already.
Examples include Aliza Shvarts' abortion jelly exhibit where she gave herself repeated miscarriages via morning-after pills after inseminating herself and then filmed the miscarriages, bottled them and exhibited them in an exhibit. Except the whole exhibit never came off, but that was part of the performance.
Our very own Who Dares Wings is an artist in Seattle who makes Disasterware and something called Spone Funerary Ware - granulated calcified human cremains (cremated bones of dead people) over a porcelain slip in a riff on the time-honored tradition of bone china, which was made in part with ground human bone.
He also makes things like porcelain vases and teapots with Hitler's face on them with things like "Forgiveness" inscribed below.
There was a guy in New York who was doing some of this art using dead embalmed bodies. He would take the bodies and then pose them in all these weird positions and then take pictures of himself intermingled with the dead bodies. The cops finally had enough of the publicity and raided the guy - I guess what he was doing was illegal. He was getting the bodies from Mexico.
Along the same lines are Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine.
There is another fellow, Hermann Nitsch, who takes cow carcasses, slits them open, then makes himself look like a crucifix with the cow carcass as a "cross" background. He ends up covered in blood. His friends stand around him and they all get covered with blood too. There's blood all over the ground and they shoot a photo of the whole thing and wa-la, instant art!
Women are bottling their own menstrual fluid and using the blood to make blood paintings. It's called menstrual art.
Along the same lines, in Putrid Sex Object, Thistle Harlequin, a gay man, plays a woman who is wandering through a haunted house at night getting more and more frightened. Finally, she comes into a room where they are some severed cow's heads on the floor.
She falls to her knees, starts licking the cow's head and then starts playing with it, getting blood all over her body. Then he pulls out a penis and it turns out it's just some fag drag queen. He then puts his penis in the cow's head and fucks it for a while, pulls out, and jacks off while covered with cow entrails. That's it.
That's called art I guess.
Wow, we really are reaching the end of civilization, are we not?
My opinion on all this sick art is much the same as my brother's. I'm not impressed.
This is just gross, sick, fucked up stuff. Art is supposed to make you react, and in a way, it is supposed to be "beautiful." It's not supposed to be ugly, sick, repulsive and nauseating. Yes, we are all familiar with shit, puke, wet farts, mucus, snot, piss, blood, dead stuff and dead people, menstrual fluid, on and on. Why frame it up and call it art? Color me confused. Plus it's not even funny; it's just gross.
Truth is, modern art has just clean run out of ideas. There's nothing left to do. This is all that's left, pushing the final boundaries. After this? I have no idea. Kill people? Kill yourself? Who knows.
Seriously, there's nothing left.
Buy a famous sculpture, call the cameras in, gather around you and your artist friends, and smash it to bits? Done. The Surrealists were doing this stuff back in the 1930's.
Duchamp made a sculpture of a toilet and then he shipped it to a museum. He called it "Toilet" or something dumb like that. Along the way, it got partially destroyed via shipping. The museum called him up all apologetic and said, "Oh, we are so sorry that your sculpture got so messed up."
He rushed over to the museum, looked at his ruined sculpture and said, "NO! This is perfect! Better than the original!" It went on to become a famous sculpture. Surrealism was always a bit of a joke. The destroyed sculpture is better than the real one - OK, that's funny.
The Surrealists would run out in the streets of Paris in the 1930's and assault priests walking by in their habits. Assault them, with fists and kicks. No one got seriously hurt, but the Surrealists called that Performance Art - assaulting a priest in habit. OK, that's funny too.
There are artist - musician types out there now who hold "concerts" where they show up on stage and then lower these sound speakers from the ceiling. The speakers dangle about ten feet above people's heads, just out of reach. Then they turn up the speakers really loud with this extremely annoying noise playing right out of reach of the audience.
The audience gets more and more angry while the performer stands up on stage, laughs at them and insults them. OK, I have to admit, that's pretty funny.
I believe there are similar artists out there who will schedule a show and advertise all the cool stuff they are going to do during the show. They cover the stage with all these props and it looks like a good show is going to happen. The theater fills up with suckers who shelled out $20/ticket.
The performer's not there.
After a bit, someone comes out and says that the performer was delayed but will be there shortly. This goes on for a bit, and the big gag is that the performer never shows up. On purpose. The audience slows drifts away angrily over about an hour demanding a refund, but there will be none. That was show. No artist. You got burned. Performance art!
I have to admit that's pretty humorous. Man Ray would have looked at that and said, "Two thumbs up."
I saw the Germs at the Hong Kong Cafe on December 31, 1979. It was Darby Crash on vocals, Pat Smear on guitar, Lorna Doom on bass and Don Bolles on drums.
Joanna Went, performance artist, opened for them. She came out looking totally nuts, all made up like a clown, wearing some stupid outfit. Shrieking, "Catatooooonic! Schizophreeeeeeenic!" (that's all I remember), etc. etc." with these really wild eyes.
She had on what looked like a football jersey on top with what looked like shoulder pads. She tore open the shoulder pads while screeching incoherently. Inside, the shoulder pads were packed with vast quantities of shredded cheddar cheese. Then she started to throw it at us, the audience. We threw it back at the bitch.
I went to the bathroom.
Darby Crash came in, saw me, and asked in this totally gay faggot voice, "Heeeey, you got any Tuuuinols?" Tuinols are a depressant pill.
I thought for a second, looked up and said, "No, but I have some Tuinol cigarettes. Want to buy any?"
He got this sneering smile on his face, and snorted, "Tuinol cigarettes!?" and walked away.
That was my only encounter with the famous Darby Crash.
Pretty soon, the Hong Kong Cafe was full of flying shredded cheese and you could hardly even see anything. Through it all, Joanna was screeching away. OK, that was pretty funny.
The Germs played next. They all wore black leather jackets with a blue circle on the sleeve - that was their emblem. They were out of this world, of course.
Darby Crash was crouching at the back of the stage with a sneer on his face. Everybody was throwing stuff at him - that was the idea - throw stuff at Darby. We took the ice out of our drinks and threw ice at Darby Crash. He crouched down at the rear of the stage like a tiger, loving the abuse and singing like a maniac.
Germs (GI), produced by Joan Jett, is one of the best albums I have ever heard. There's also a great cut, Lion's Share, recorded by Jack Nitzsche, on the soundtrack to the movie, Cruising (1980) - good movie, starring Al Pacino and directed by the great director William Friedkin. The Cruising soundtrack is a great album, too. Reformed band, The Germs Return.
Don Bolles turned into an alcoholic and goes to AA meetings with his alcoholic girlfriend. He has a long history of drug abuse and run-in's with the law. Darby killed himself (see below). Pat Smear went on the form the Foo Fighters.
Lorna, Don and Pat reformed the band, with actor Shane West as the new Darby Crash, and they go on tour. Here's the new band, and Lorna is as beautiful as ever. Myspace page. They must be pushing 50 now. Punks til death. Heck, why not?
Later, Darby Crash deliberately OD'd on heroin as part of a suicide pact with some idiot punk chick. I never hung around with these nuts, but some people I know did. They would do stuff like get drunk and hit people over the head with beer bottles - supposedly Pat Smear did that once.
Great article on the Germs from the Orange County Weekly.
We were leaving the cafe at 2 AM. The LA punkers, drunk and menacing, were outside the cafe throwing beer bottles against the wall and watching them smash. We moved away quickly.
We were walking through an alley back to the car, drunk and stoned. Someone came reeling behind us, walking very fast. We turned around. There was a young man about 25 years old. He had glasses on, but he had been hurt somehow. One of the glasses lenses was smashed over his eye.
He was holding his eye with the smashed glasses lens, and there was blood pouring out of the area around his eye as he reeled drunkenly down the alley. We didn't know if he had gotten beat up while drunk, or if he was really drunk and had fallen down, but he was in bad shape. We got out of his way before he would have crashed into us. He moved past us, careening back and forth down the alley, dripping blood all the way.
"Let's help him," I said.
"No way!"
We looked at each other and both said, "Wow! Let's get out of here!"
We hurried to the car and drove home on the empty LA freeway, dodging the drunken vehicles along the way.
It was the end of the Seventies, but it may as well have been the end of the century.
I won't upload the movie, and I think it's copyrighted anyway. It's pornographic, and we don't host porn on the site. Rarely, we link to it, if there is some artistic or political reason. In this case, it's more art or performance art than porn per se.
It's called Putrid Sex Object, a movie performed by Thistle Harlequin (adults only, and don't watch unless you want to be horribly grossed out).
This is part of what my artist brother calls the new art - "that gross, sick, fag shit." He says this is the new thing in art, because everything else has been done already.
Examples include Aliza Shvarts' abortion jelly exhibit where she gave herself repeated miscarriages via morning-after pills after inseminating herself and then filmed the miscarriages, bottled them and exhibited them in an exhibit. Except the whole exhibit never came off, but that was part of the performance.
Our very own Who Dares Wings is an artist in Seattle who makes Disasterware and something called Spone Funerary Ware - granulated calcified human cremains (cremated bones of dead people) over a porcelain slip in a riff on the time-honored tradition of bone china, which was made in part with ground human bone.
He also makes things like porcelain vases and teapots with Hitler's face on them with things like "Forgiveness" inscribed below.
There was a guy in New York who was doing some of this art using dead embalmed bodies. He would take the bodies and then pose them in all these weird positions and then take pictures of himself intermingled with the dead bodies. The cops finally had enough of the publicity and raided the guy - I guess what he was doing was illegal. He was getting the bodies from Mexico.
Along the same lines are Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine.
There is another fellow, Hermann Nitsch, who takes cow carcasses, slits them open, then makes himself look like a crucifix with the cow carcass as a "cross" background. He ends up covered in blood. His friends stand around him and they all get covered with blood too. There's blood all over the ground and they shoot a photo of the whole thing and wa-la, instant art!
Women are bottling their own menstrual fluid and using the blood to make blood paintings. It's called menstrual art.
Along the same lines, in Putrid Sex Object, Thistle Harlequin, a gay man, plays a woman who is wandering through a haunted house at night getting more and more frightened. Finally, she comes into a room where they are some severed cow's heads on the floor.
She falls to her knees, starts licking the cow's head and then starts playing with it, getting blood all over her body. Then he pulls out a penis and it turns out it's just some fag drag queen. He then puts his penis in the cow's head and fucks it for a while, pulls out, and jacks off while covered with cow entrails. That's it.
That's called art I guess.
Wow, we really are reaching the end of civilization, are we not?
My opinion on all this sick art is much the same as my brother's. I'm not impressed.
This is just gross, sick, fucked up stuff. Art is supposed to make you react, and in a way, it is supposed to be "beautiful." It's not supposed to be ugly, sick, repulsive and nauseating. Yes, we are all familiar with shit, puke, wet farts, mucus, snot, piss, blood, dead stuff and dead people, menstrual fluid, on and on. Why frame it up and call it art? Color me confused. Plus it's not even funny; it's just gross.
Truth is, modern art has just clean run out of ideas. There's nothing left to do. This is all that's left, pushing the final boundaries. After this? I have no idea. Kill people? Kill yourself? Who knows.
Seriously, there's nothing left.
Buy a famous sculpture, call the cameras in, gather around you and your artist friends, and smash it to bits? Done. The Surrealists were doing this stuff back in the 1930's.
Duchamp made a sculpture of a toilet and then he shipped it to a museum. He called it "Toilet" or something dumb like that. Along the way, it got partially destroyed via shipping. The museum called him up all apologetic and said, "Oh, we are so sorry that your sculpture got so messed up."
He rushed over to the museum, looked at his ruined sculpture and said, "NO! This is perfect! Better than the original!" It went on to become a famous sculpture. Surrealism was always a bit of a joke. The destroyed sculpture is better than the real one - OK, that's funny.
The Surrealists would run out in the streets of Paris in the 1930's and assault priests walking by in their habits. Assault them, with fists and kicks. No one got seriously hurt, but the Surrealists called that Performance Art - assaulting a priest in habit. OK, that's funny too.
There are artist - musician types out there now who hold "concerts" where they show up on stage and then lower these sound speakers from the ceiling. The speakers dangle about ten feet above people's heads, just out of reach. Then they turn up the speakers really loud with this extremely annoying noise playing right out of reach of the audience.
The audience gets more and more angry while the performer stands up on stage, laughs at them and insults them. OK, I have to admit, that's pretty funny.
I believe there are similar artists out there who will schedule a show and advertise all the cool stuff they are going to do during the show. They cover the stage with all these props and it looks like a good show is going to happen. The theater fills up with suckers who shelled out $20/ticket.
The performer's not there.
After a bit, someone comes out and says that the performer was delayed but will be there shortly. This goes on for a bit, and the big gag is that the performer never shows up. On purpose. The audience slows drifts away angrily over about an hour demanding a refund, but there will be none. That was show. No artist. You got burned. Performance art!
I have to admit that's pretty humorous. Man Ray would have looked at that and said, "Two thumbs up."
I saw the Germs at the Hong Kong Cafe on December 31, 1979. It was Darby Crash on vocals, Pat Smear on guitar, Lorna Doom on bass and Don Bolles on drums.
Joanna Went, performance artist, opened for them. She came out looking totally nuts, all made up like a clown, wearing some stupid outfit. Shrieking, "Catatooooonic! Schizophreeeeeeenic!" (that's all I remember), etc. etc." with these really wild eyes.
She had on what looked like a football jersey on top with what looked like shoulder pads. She tore open the shoulder pads while screeching incoherently. Inside, the shoulder pads were packed with vast quantities of shredded cheddar cheese. Then she started to throw it at us, the audience. We threw it back at the bitch.
I went to the bathroom.
Darby Crash came in, saw me, and asked in this totally gay faggot voice, "Heeeey, you got any Tuuuinols?" Tuinols are a depressant pill.
I thought for a second, looked up and said, "No, but I have some Tuinol cigarettes. Want to buy any?"
He got this sneering smile on his face, and snorted, "Tuinol cigarettes!?" and walked away.
That was my only encounter with the famous Darby Crash.
Pretty soon, the Hong Kong Cafe was full of flying shredded cheese and you could hardly even see anything. Through it all, Joanna was screeching away. OK, that was pretty funny.
The Germs played next. They all wore black leather jackets with a blue circle on the sleeve - that was their emblem. They were out of this world, of course.
Darby Crash was crouching at the back of the stage with a sneer on his face. Everybody was throwing stuff at him - that was the idea - throw stuff at Darby. We took the ice out of our drinks and threw ice at Darby Crash. He crouched down at the rear of the stage like a tiger, loving the abuse and singing like a maniac.
Germs (GI), produced by Joan Jett, is one of the best albums I have ever heard. There's also a great cut, Lion's Share, recorded by Jack Nitzsche, on the soundtrack to the movie, Cruising (1980) - good movie, starring Al Pacino and directed by the great director William Friedkin. The Cruising soundtrack is a great album, too. Reformed band, The Germs Return.
Don Bolles turned into an alcoholic and goes to AA meetings with his alcoholic girlfriend. He has a long history of drug abuse and run-in's with the law. Darby killed himself (see below). Pat Smear went on the form the Foo Fighters.
Lorna, Don and Pat reformed the band, with actor Shane West as the new Darby Crash, and they go on tour. Here's the new band, and Lorna is as beautiful as ever. Myspace page. They must be pushing 50 now. Punks til death. Heck, why not?
Later, Darby Crash deliberately OD'd on heroin as part of a suicide pact with some idiot punk chick. I never hung around with these nuts, but some people I know did. They would do stuff like get drunk and hit people over the head with beer bottles - supposedly Pat Smear did that once.
Great article on the Germs from the Orange County Weekly.
We were leaving the cafe at 2 AM. The LA punkers, drunk and menacing, were outside the cafe throwing beer bottles against the wall and watching them smash. We moved away quickly.
We were walking through an alley back to the car, drunk and stoned. Someone came reeling behind us, walking very fast. We turned around. There was a young man about 25 years old. He had glasses on, but he had been hurt somehow. One of the glasses lenses was smashed over his eye.
He was holding his eye with the smashed glasses lens, and there was blood pouring out of the area around his eye as he reeled drunkenly down the alley. We didn't know if he had gotten beat up while drunk, or if he was really drunk and had fallen down, but he was in bad shape. We got out of his way before he would have crashed into us. He moved past us, careening back and forth down the alley, dripping blood all the way.
"Let's help him," I said.
"No way!"
We looked at each other and both said, "Wow! Let's get out of here!"
We hurried to the car and drove home on the empty LA freeway, dodging the drunken vehicles along the way.
It was the end of the Seventies, but it may as well have been the end of the century.