03:53 pm - "A Beautiful Death"
Working at a game store in Arkansas offers the rare opportunity to formulate and test a hypothesis in the course of an afternoon. Supposedly backward places like the center of the United States provide a clear division in groups, a division blurred in places were the cool is just that much more available or the chameleons of chic are better evolved.
Recently I've taken to analyzing people who come in to pawn off $60-70 purchases almost within hours of the release of the purchase just so they can get another game they think they should also be playing. With such a rapid return rate it makes me question the value of games these days and the values of the people playing them. There are two types of gamers who come into the store, the children of Walmart employees who come in and drop $200 at a time on games but make a point to tell you that they get a discount on systems at Walmart, and the lower-class white people this state is so full of.
Alarmingly both groups are clamoring to purchase grossly over-priced games the moment they are released then return them only to complain that their trade in value is not the same as the purchase price 24 hours later.
The games are not Acme Arsenal or Bee Movie. the most hyped games of the year, the games that are shamelessly promoted to change the world. I've not played every game but I doubt you can get the full potential out something while you rush through it just to move on to something else.
There is pressure on the gaming community to play everything, own everything, and play it all as quickly as possible. The days of a kid gazing on at an old game commercial, as goofy as they were, and wanting the latest game for years after the game has stopped being an issue, is dead. Within the lower-class families these sentiments still exist but are focused on obtaining the game systems over the games. Children gaze on at 360s, PS3s, and Wiis and want those and the power they supposedly give, and pay little attention to the downfalls of each system.
I'm not suggesting that console wars are a very recent thing. I remember being one of the SNES kids longing to play Sonic. By the time I got to play Sonic the Saturn was failing miserably and I then moved on to the PS1. I wanted an N64 but never got one. So I guess this serious console problem started around the time there were three obvious options for gaming, each with a better footing around the world than the 16-bit systems did.
The console competition is directly responsible for less memorable games. Sure there are still games that remind us of just how amazing Metroid and Super Mario Bros were when they first appeared, but the element that made those games so lasting was not the progression of graphics. The game play was engaging, although incredibly frustrating, and entertaining. Now games are pretty and perhaps entertaining, but more effort is put into making a game look better than everyone else's game than making that game more playable than the last multi-million dollar project. The emphasis is on selling a system that can support the latest graphics rather than selling a game for the system you have that is fun and will continue to be fun cosidering that you've spent $50-80 on the game to begin with.
Do graphics make constant consumption worth it? Would a game with value not be a better investment than one that boasts of having the most advanced engine to date?
I don't understand the constant pursuit of graphics while sacrificing the actual playability of the game. Assassin's Creed does look wonderful but the game play is severely lacking, Bioshock is stunning and manages to have replay value but is considered to not be a quality game because of the consistency of graphics rather than making everything so crisp that is pains the player to look at it.
But the last bit is simply me having a hard time focusing on high definition graphics with freaky light sensitivity and a slowly dying right eye.
Current Location:Rapture, Medical Pavillion Current Music: Downloadable Content - The Dangers of Exposure
08:54 am - The Ballroom on Mars Last week was a very good week as far as I am concerned. My ability to get what I want out of life increased, and that is always a very good thing.
But what has changed? I can finally drive. I've felt horrible being unable to drive and needing to go so many places. If Rogers was kind to bike riders and if Fayetteville was not so far away, a bike would have been my alternative. But that doesn't matter now that i can drive.
What is really making me happy at the moment is that I am now a DJ.
The Ballroom On Mars is the current name for the show I will be doing from 10 to Midnight every Friday night starting next week.
I am very excited.
Thursday I drove to Fayetteville for an interview with the Programing Director of KXUA, the University of Arkansas student radio station. I was nervous about driving there and about if I would be hired to do the Genre show I wanted. I was afraid I would get hired and then be stuck doing rotation. Rotation, although not horrible, is three hours of not thrilling.
After talking about how I like Glam Rock, and explaining what it is, I was swiftly hired to do a Glam Rock genre show, in the time slot after Cameron's show The Twilight Garden. The show will focus on real Glam released in the 70's, but will include a lot of neo-glam and heavily Glam-influenced bands I think are good enough to play.
It should be awesome, so people should listen. 88.3 FM, or listen online at www.KXUA.com
09:31 am - Found Objects I've recently become very interested in sculpture, and particularly that consisting of found objects.
My interest in any form of art tends to change depending on the amount of time I have at my disposal, and now that my time is quickly being consumed by the first paying job I've had in my life and college, it is only natural that I would get a fantastic idea to start making things out of found objects. Of course I am desperately wanting to distance myself from the hippies living in the woods around me with their sculptures that represent their hatred of society and their choice of living conditions that leaves them without an air conditioner and with piles of hubcaps attached to one another in supposedly inspired ways. I have a problem with shapelessness to that degree, just attaching things together and not being entirely sure what it was supposed to be. In some instances it is fine, but most often the allure of the trash look is lost on me.
As is the symbolism of dolls heads. I've seen far too many art school collections featuring doll heads roughly held together with wire and nails, their eyes blacked and mouths torn apart. Sometimes barbed wire and the bodies of toy dinosaurs or action figures are worked into the expression of the macabre, and somewhere you know they were encouraged to express some deep hatred of their parents or of their childhood through deforming an already creepy object into something unsettling. If unsettling is the goal, they do achieve it, as the last time I saw anything like the aforementioned in public, several nightmares followed. And a brief period where I collected dolls, just to somehow get over the fear I had of their dead faces punctured by metal, pencils, wires and any other thing you could possibly force through a latex head.
I like the idea of using objects to create a new object, the most readily available example of this being robots made out of old sheets of tin and unused pots and pans. Manipulating objects to serve a new purpose is where the real art come from, as it takes more planning and in many instances the skill of welding to turn bike parts into a cello, or a collection of metal bowls and glasses into a chandelier.
I am also neglecting the more simple, tasteful collections of objects that may or may not go together. Collections are fascinating, and most often more interesting than a disgusting mass of dirty objects that are there to convey how disgusting reality is. The odd thing is that I always find time to make myself look less filthy than their version of reality suggests.
Found objects should not be mounds of filth, much as art should not be about the incorporation of human waste. Any attempt I make will be an attempt to streamline randomness, and not about forcing a bullet through the cheek of an already malformed baby doll.
12:23 am - Blades of Death: Sharks on Wheels, Shark blades, you choose. I've spent a inordinate amount of time dreaming of doing something great someday. It started off with that childish dream of wanting to save the world or be a rock star; but those two occupations really do not sync up, despite efforts of windbags worldwide. Over the years it morphed into a rapidly changing idea of what would be interesting, fun, and ultimately make me lots of money.
This is what has happened since that thought first entered my head: I have written and re-written the same novel countless times over the last 5 years, ventured into dubious musical partnerships, designed clothing for myself but have failed to fully master the art of sewing, sought to revitalize dead movements in art and music, decided acting was my best talent, and started writing screenplays. Out of all of the things on this list, three things still fully interest me, and those are music, writing, and screenplays, only screenplays has morphed into directing. Directing itself has morphed into creating B-movies, and B-movies stuck.
Until now, I've remained fairly quiet about my desire to direct, outside of turning part of the Plague Daemon section of Herbert West - Re-Animator into a one act, but it is true. With this deep-rooted passion I've abandoned the dream of someday making lots of money with it, and instead want to make movies I like, in cheap, interesting ways with the worst materials I can get my hands on. I want to bring a little part of the 60's and 70's into my life, a part that needs to be preserved.
What the B-Movie of today lacks is the passion and work of their predecessors. I'm not at all fond of the incorporation of technology with horror films, or really any kind of film. The effort to make something look awesome by hand is cut when a computer can do all that work for you. Now I still enjoy movies even with their computery components, but my favorite of the bunch are those that look so obviously fake, where the CG fails to be as seamless as people would like it to be, and the acting cannot match up with the monster that is nothing more than a tennis ball. I am not saying that everything is done this way, but such cheap crap is being churned out because it is no longer Frighteners expensive to make a ghost seem like a ghost.
With all of the easily obtainable quick fixes for a monster or, as Blade showed us, poorly animated blood, you do see a lack of passion in what is being produced. Bruce Campbell's eventual hero replacements will never tell stories of tubes of nicotine being run up their pants leg, or how their shirts shattered because of all the corn syrup blood soaked into the cloth. Last April I met a few guys from Graveyard Pictures, the producer of Dog Soldiers and one of the special effects guys who worked on that film. They brought in posters and copies of Boo and Dog Soldiers (I walked off with an unfortunately unsigned copy of Boo), and some of the fake body parts and heads used in Dog Soldiers.
I was stunned, not just by the fact that the producer of Dog Soldiers was from Arkansas and decided to return, but by what they did by hand. I was not really supposed to be in the room with them at the time, but a guy who was knew I was in to horror and snuck me in the back and told me to stay out of sight. Well, I refused to stay there and worked my way to the front, where I stared at the amazing detail of a bloody wax head laying on the table as if it had fallen there. I learned how much of the work done in these films was really done by hand, and how proud they were of their amazingly life-like pieces. The head had been hand-sculpted by the man standing to the right of it, and he would grin at anyone who looked at it for too long and offer to let you touch it before explaining the hours of work that went into it. All for about 10 seconds of scene where a guy gets his head cut off.
Though this sort of thing does happen on big budget films, where there are whole teams dedicated to the process, this one piece fascinated me utterly. Graveyard Pictures is not exactly high dollar, but that head was brilliant. It was the embodiment of hard work, and had unfortunately suffered a great deal of damage during and after the shooting of the scene it was intended for.
I want do to that, but on a less well funded level. I want to go back to when Herschell Gordon Lewis was roasting a mannequin arm on a spit and trying to pass it off as real, where puncture wounds were poorly disguised packets of blood covered by a thin layer of almost stage quality latex. Hell, I want to go back to when the dead to spit up whatever the director and friends could find at the local super market because it was there and they had $20 to blow.
I want horrible film quality, bad acting, and unrealistic effects and props that were slaved over to reach even that level of quality. I want to make the most horrible thing you will ever see but something you will step away from saying "Jesus! You know, I think I want to see it again." I want some guy who has never acted before to scream "This man's uncanny!" far more passionately than he should and for the scene to keep rolling. Bring on blurry cameras and weird angles, bad sound effects, chainsaws, missed lines and stutterers, and of course unexplained characters that somehow are relevant to the plot but only marginally.
But, back to the point, I want to do this because of the sense of accomplishment of having made something through hard work, and that I will have made something I like to watch and in a way that does justice to all those people who were really just out to make a quick buck out of the people they knew would go see something sensational. I don't care about being sensational, I don't even care if what I make is considered to be the worst thing since Ed Wood. I will have spent hours making a wax head for 10 seconds of scene, know I did it and be so happy when that scene keeps the next generation of directors up at night for its unexplainable frightening quality.
Out of all of the goals I've set for myself, I feel that in the long run this is the most obtainable because it is not set up in terms of success, but in terms of fulfillment. It is personal, and has been in me since the day 11 years ago I realized how awesome the original 13 Ghosts was, and finally was allowed to come out 6 months ago when I saw my first real exploitation movie.
Oh, if you are wondering about the title of this post, this is what caused it:
05:15 pm - Earmworms I have a terrible case of the earworms.
Underwear - Pulp
Is It Because I'm a Pirate? - Momus
Holocaust - Placebo
Tiny, Little - Tub Ring
Shipwrecked - The Gothic Archies
Clowny Clown Clown - Crispin Glover
This Boy - Franz Ferdinand
Velvet Goldmine - David Bowie
I Refuse to Die - Momus
Oh You Pretty Things - David Bowie
16 Military Wives - The Decemberists
Dishes - Pulp
Allergic (To Thoughts of Mother Earth) - Placebo
Hairstyle of the Devil - Momus
So 1950's - Cherry Vanilla
Wig Wam Bam - The Sweet
Reinforcements - Sparks
The Slider - T.Rex
The South's Gonna Rise Again - Pleasant Valley Boys DAMN YOU HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS!!!! (The song featured in 2000 Maniacs)
Common People - Pulp
Pygmalism - Momus
Rocket Cathedrals - Be-Bop Deluxe
Mr. Soft - Cockney Rebel
National Express - The Divine Comedy
Needle In The Camel's Eye - Brian Eno
Bitter's End - Roxy Music
Emily Kane - Art Brut
Gentry Cove - Dirty Pretty Things
The Penis Song - Momus
The Earworm is nothing more than a simplified term for that song that is stuck in your head. As you can see, I have several, and am guaranteed to have one of the listed songs stuck in my head at any time. Out of curiosity, and being disgusted by the constant looping of songs, I looked into what causes this problem. I'd like to know why the voices of people I will never meet have such an effect on my brain.
A seemingly popular suggestion, in my short search, is that the songs enter into the Phonological Loop.The Phonological loop is part of the Baddley's Model of Working Memory.
This is that bit of the brain that rehearses information, and my brain seems to think that Jarvis Cocker not being Jesus but having the same initials and, wanting to be shipwrecked on an island is information I need in constant rehearsal. There are other less humorous and considerably more frightening examples in the list above, and if I had some explanation I would offer it now.
Do earworms have a cure? The best anyone can do is to disrupt the rehearsal pattern with other, more engaging information in the hopes that it counters the earworm, and does not become an earworm itself. In most cases this fails miserably, and the song you thought would combat the earworm tends to blend in with the other creating the mega earworm that destroys all will to continue.
For people who cannot escape the constantly looping lines "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" and"Oops I did it again," there are suggested cures. In extreme cases of earworms, medications for obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety are used to disrupt the phonological loop, much the way OCD medication effects compulsions.
Are earworms compulsions? For the sake of my sanity I would like to think not, and suggest they are more of an attachment to sounds we enjoy. I am drawn to moderately deep male voices, or really just clearly masculine ones, which keeps my music tightly bound. Sometimes peculiar female voices enter in the mix, and results in the Kahimi Karie version of a song Momus wrote getting stuck in my head rather than the Momus version. (Pygmalism is the bane of my existence at times because of this.) When a likable voice is mixed with extremely likable music (or extremely annoying in the case of H.G. Lewis' choice of movie theme), the mixture creates a key that molds to fit your phonological loop. This idea has been applied to methods of acting as well. The now deceased Jeremy Whelan devised the Whelan Acting Method to help actors learn their lines much the way someone learns the lyrics to a song; by constantly hearing it. Though the lines are not often caught in the phonological loop, it does promote mental rehearsal, and familiarity. Earworms and motivational acting methods wiggle their tails with the same cruel magic, only one is more malicious than the other. The Whelan Acting Method, although I have praised it, did leave me hearing the line " in various positions of the Kama Sutra" running through my head the day after I sat through a demonstration.
12:33 am - Vulgarity Last Saturday I went to an art show at Uncle Gaylords, a showing of new art by local artists.
Like the last show I went to, which was in Eureka Springs and held in a poorly ventilated house of a local artist, I was left wondering what has happened to the artistic world. There has been an obvious departure from what could be considered classical, and a leap into the pool of vulgarity.
Vulgarity changes from decade to decade, and what was considered vulgar a century ago is now common practice for most artists, and indeed the behaviours of the art crowd. This new vulgarity comes in the form of "meaningful art," and I wonder when it becomes trite to morph a penis into the face of a bitterly hated politician? I'm sure what seems to annoy me now is overlooked, and in time will be what is used to classify this moment in art, but presently I stand against this flood of tasteless, opinionated slop.
It seems that the only way to properly express oneself is to be as vulgar as possible, and preferably in the most blatant ways. Subtly is cast aside as statues are covered in the feces of their creators and militant feminist art strikes back at the world through the use of menstrual blood.
What I fail to see is why this has become such a vital part of expression. (This, and its companions of flashy and equally as unpleasant imagery.) I do not believe that art should always be a pretty, useless idea, but I would like the meaning to be more than "I despise your faith" and "All men are evil." You would be shocked to discover how those simple statements fuel so much of the art that the authorities condoning this practice seem to hail as revolutionary. Meaning is meaningless, and if you pretend for a second to have a meaning, or think that the cause of your bad day is worth being played off as a meaning, you have the raw material for art.
I support meaningful art if the meaning is worth viewing. So much of the art I've viewed is fueled solely by the need to be shocking, and only later has some vague idea thrown at it when the artist is questioned for upsetting that section of the population that would have them called a pervert.
I call for a reevaluation of artistic motivation, and certainly for professional help to those supporting the onslaught of horrific images, crude works designed to enrage nearly anyone who views it, blood, feces, piss and hair. It is the duty of the artist to interpret the world according to their view of it, and all I can deduce from this new breed of art is that we are all seeing the world as a filthy, slanderous place, and if most of those who can see the world this way do in fact see this, then is it not pointless to bombard them with the sight and smells of their lives?
Or does this modern artist want to force the common viewers of his art to reevaluate their wretched world from what the art gives them? Unlike the Theater of the Absurd, which was graced with an amount of subtly as to be effective in some cases, the images presented are too radical to serve this purpose, if it was ever intended to do more than anger.
I am in no means prudish, but the value of this display of complete outrageousness as art must be questioned.
"Has the tomb of Jesus been found?" The TODAY show seems to think so.
It is unfortunate how the TODAY show is structured, at least for people with lives. Since the scribbling of this topic starter, the story has been addressed, but in the setting of a dim living room on a particularly blustery Monday morning in late February, let us imagine it has yet to be more than a blip on the general headline wheel.
The Jesus story is most likely unfounded, but falls under the category I like to call "Shit people will hang around to watch." And that is how it is used. Rather than news or fake news/morning entertainment shows delivering anything efficiently, wild claims are made, hooking the average viewer and transforming the television into a news stand, one overflowing with tabloids. The TODAY show excels in this psuedo-informative, largely exaggerated practice, and 20 minutes in, this world-changing report on Jesus has yet to be mentioned again. Anna Nichole Smith and the perfectly planned surprises at the Academy Awards are a much higher priority to the claim that the tomb of Jesus may or may not have been found,and the idea that Dan Brown is not just a novelist, he is partially prophetic. I left at 7:30, and still no mention.
I doubt there ever was such a story, just a misleading announcement to keep me viewing as they decided to parade human interest stories before me. So television has resorted to "Meteor fells Pope!" tactics to desperately hold on to the attentions of a world in motion. And for a moment, I was weak to it.
I don't think anyone is truly capable of escaping the powers of media persuasion, as eventually something will be said that has us paying attention long enough to be terribly disappointed with the end. Especially when the ground-breaking story is 5 minutes long, or a paragraph surrounded by ads for cosmetic surgeries and fast acting, over the counter medications.
What is troubling me though, aside from the misleading journalism and the practice of catering to the jaded television viewers, is what if this tomb is another case of misunderstood art? The Pope Felled By Meteorite is actually a wax sculpture named 'The Ninth Hour', made by sculptor Maurizio Cattelan, and the center of a lot of unneeded controversy that ended in the resignation of a gallery curator in Poland, and undue hostility from the Catholic church. Will this be the same fate for the tomb of Jesus? Is it a man's idea of a joke, based off of a film no one saw?
The world is full of enough bastards to do such a thing. Not that I have anything at all against the bastards willing and able to do such a thing.
Enviga. This shiny-canned beverage is the result of a few years of hoping, and added proof that the feeling of being watched is not entirely paranoia. Enviga is a carbonated green tea drink that has nothing but air in it apparently, air loaded with 5 calories and a lot of delicious taste. I have only had the original, and berry, but do not look forward to peach. The Berry was that kind of sweet that leads to more gagging than anything else, and tastes almost exactly the same as old Strawberry Shortcake dolls smell. This is not the sight of a delicious smell.
I look forward to the future of drinks like this. I have long believed that carbonated tea would be much better than the caramel-colored liquid cocaine most people guzzle down daily, and hope that his drink is not slaughtered before it is allowed to become popular. Its only downside is that it is being marketed as an energy drink, and will not find its way into the places it needs to be, (school vending machines) where the target audience is constantly spending money on junk. Perhaps we will see more tea drinks, ones without extra flavor bits that detract from what you really want, the taste of tea.
These are size 8 ladies platform shoes from the 70's. I've watched them for a week, and thanks to having the most wonderful person ever in my life, they are mine. I like the shoes, but I like the man who purchased them even more. Right now he is a bit unsettled about things, and I want to be able to fix that, but will start by saying how much I love him, here, where I vowed to not mention such things that would detract from the new goal of the journal. I love you Cameron, and not just for the shoes.
11:52 am - The American Comedy Today I thought we would examine something that means very little, but says a lot about our culture. The American brand Comedy, and how it is a completely unwatchable train wreck. And for train wrecks to become unwatchable means that we are slowly spiraling into oblivion, or have simply seen too many.
I've watched as show after show is paraded before me on Comedy Central and insert-major-network-name-here prime time, praised to be the funniest thing since someone put a costume on a dog and find every single one of them lacking in some way. I've thought that my tastes have changed, that I am no longer as up on the times as I thought I was, and that generally the country's perception of what is funny was beyond me. What I realized is that the entire society is changed, and trying to capitalize on the elements of not expressly funny series such as the British Office, or numerous Britcoms that emphasize strong characters over immediately humorous situations.
But my quarrel comes from shows such as Dog Bites Man and the Sarah Silverman Program. Dog Bites Man had a funnier marketing scheme than show idea, and was building on the popularity of Christopher Guest's Films as well as The Office. Where Dog Bites Man differs from Christopher Guest and the original Office, other than lacking the comical genius, is that it targets in on the now fully developed appeal of being as offensive as possible, and to a degree that obliterates the feeling of realism that the humor should revolve around. A successful version of this concept is Reno 911!, that shakily started off as just another docucomedy and ended up displaying the over the top and sometimes offensive humor that really cannot be reached by a show that did not have to slowly develop these traits, and instead tried to play to the supposed trend right off the bat. Humor is not something that someone can announce, no matter how good your marketing scheme.
The Sarah Silverman Program is an unfortunate progression to all of this, stepping away from disguising the offensive intent in a documentary format and realism, to following a mediocre comedian through staged situations and asking the audience sit through her less than shocking, overly insulting comments at every turn. There is nothing wrong with a frankly speaking character, but a continued stream of this becomes tiresome and is ill-fitting, and does not ride up, or ride down, or do anything at all with wear.
It has become too easy to pass off petty insults and vulgarity as comedy, rather than finding something more intellectual to exploit in a similar fashion. It shows what has become of the American intellect, how the more brightly colored and vulgar a subject is, the more likely we are to be captivated. The more drug references and sexual innuendo worked into a script, the better, and the larger the words, the less attention is paid. The American Comedy has fallen into a poor state, where inspiration is dead, and we are constantly recycling the same reality show idea over and over in hopes something new will come from it. Even the shows that are not associated with the docucomedy format or even reality television have fallen into a sad state these days, but they are left for another day.
I hope for the day when shows become as entertaining as the commercials in between them, such as this one.
11:38 am If you ever enter into a discussion about music with me, that is to mean that you are actively wanting to discuss music rather than telling me how glorious your tastes are when they are compared to mine, I will at some point bring up Dark Cabaret, and you will either say "Oh, the Dresden Dolls," or look at me blankly.
Now I do not disagree that The Dresden Dolls display that heavily piano-driven sound that defines most Dark Cabaret music, but I do disagree with the place they have been given within the genre. I blame Projekt's A Dark Cabaret for most of this argument, as the first track on their compilation of Dark Cabaret was that wholly overused Dresden Dolls' song, Coin-Operated Boy. Coin-Operated Boy is relatively atypical to their usual style, as is the song Missed Me, which to me fits the idea of Dark Cabaret more closely than anything else they have done. But for the sake of song popularity I can see why Coin-Operated Boy was chosen.
I think what bothers me about this is that people who have listened to The Dresden Dolls and put any sort of research into what others have classified them as, stumble across that little phrase, Dark Cabaret, and proceed to devour the lot, finding none of it to be particularly similar to their favorite Dresden Dolls songs, and either dropping or bashing the genre, or wanting to include other things into it that fit what they have come to expect. In this sense, The Dresden Dolls are an unwelcome catalyst, and should quickly be reassigned to something that has the words "piano" and "gut-wrenching female vocals" attached to it. But annoyance aside, I listen to the Dresden Dolls, I simply do not see them as being particularly important in the long run, or not as important as others rank them.
But, this is a bit more confusing and angry than I would like for it to be. Current Music: Boys Keep Swinging - David Bowie
10:02 pm - Obscenity defined. Sometimes in an utterly bland subject, in this case American Government, the bland is momentarily cut by an amusing, yet moderately frightening idea of dictated morality. The moment in question is the 1973 Supreme Court case, Miller v. California.
The case involved the unwanted distribution of pornographic (obscene) materials to families in California. They were unwanted in the sense that the defendant, Miller, was mass-mailing fliers. In most cases it was most likely not entirely unwanted, but it takes even a less than moderate amount of American conservatism to start a fight over something that could potentially harm someone, and bring about 15 minutes of fame along with a settlement.
The case itself is not important, as Miller was predominately in the wrong for thinking everyone was a buyer, but the standard set of guidelines by which materials will be judged are. This is known as the Miller Test.
the average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law; and
the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The Miller test was instigated to grant states the ability to better crack down on the sellers of adult materials, specifically, but since when has this sexually explicit material, in any form, contained an overbearing amount of scientific value? The great mysteries of anatomy have otherwise been solved...
For the implied progression of many first world nations' flight from Puritanical morality, this does not go far to clear America of the heathen reputation it has gained in the eyes of other progressive nations. I in no way support the public display of crude pornographic images, but I do feel that this test is evident of the reformed Dark Age the world finds itself in. This is not a new development, as Victorian morality ushered in a new low for the freedom of human expression, but it signifies the clamping down of intolerance that can span to cover all aspects of culture that do not pertain to the ruling class' particular views. The culprit is once again religion, but it has departed from Catholicism, and has instead taken shelter in the modern Evangelist.
Evangelistic ideas are more obviously operating the Government Machine these days, and in time will most likely be more oppressive than we have ever known them, and rulings at all similar to Miller v. California will ensure that what a majority of the non-religious population sees as entertainment, or really just vital to life, will be deemed illegal, or at the very least indecent. The Puritan never really went away, it simply disguised itself in a friendlier form and set about waiting for the time true protestant values are allowed to march across the nation they founded. We have allowed ourselves to slowly spiral back into an era of repression, as the law is heavily stacked against self expression and any suggestion of change, and legal precedents have opened the doors for harsher regulations.
For those of us who are not at all in a position to change anything, and will make a mild attempt to reclaim our gore and bad pulp novels, we can only see what newer descents into oppression will bring. I,for one, am looking to incite riot when I am handed burlap.
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vitiosuslepros's journal
sidering that you've spent $50-80 on the game to begin with. 
collected dolls, just to somehow get over the fear I had of their dead faces punctured by metal, pencils, wires and any other thing you could possibly force through a latex head. 
A seemingly popular suggestion, in my short search, is that the songs enter into the Phonological Loop.The Phonological loop is part of the 
This is not the sight of a delicious smell. 