The Darkness.. well here's the thing. If you'll refer to Buddyhead, who I get all of my musical opinions from? no not really, but they do have great influence over me surely even tho i read them probably once every six months anymore.. if you go here: http://buddyhead.com/music/bestof2003/ you'll find that The Darkness is on their "Worst of 2003" list, among many other bands you kids fancy, (but it's only because they don't like you as PEOPLE and nothing to do with the quality of the music so no need to seriously critically evaluate it or anything... you know sometimes snobbiness just erupts out of me) and here's what they have to say: "Can we cut the irony bullshit already? Enough with the whole, "I'm dressed like a total fucking clown, isn't it hip?" crap. There's nothing cool about velcro shoes, stupid haircuts, and wearing a pink Journey ringer tee three sizes too small. We're looking down the barrel of a very large gun pointed directly at you Brooklyn and Silverlake. Ten years into this, "I look like how my mommy dressed me in 1985" garbage, and you knew it was only a matter of time before the whole irony shtick was full blown. Yeah dudes, I get the joke... mullets, bad solos, falsetto, posturing... NOT FUCKING FUNNY. This glam cockrock pose was stupid 20 years ago, and it's worse now because we SHOULD know better."

so ok. how am i supposed to feel kindly toward them after that? i know that makes you mad. the music wasn't all that enjoyable in the first place, it was just kind of like.. "hm.. i don't know.. hmmm uh, eh, yeah..." so that's not a strong enough platform in the first place and buddyhead knocking it down is maybe just like shooting a dying animal or something.. it is a little catchy, and it's not nearly as murderous to my ears as, say, evanescence, but that doesn't mean we should praise it. our standards should be higher than that. btw, i'm revisiting my pumpkins greatest hits cd lately, thanks again for that. and billie holiday and old at the drive-in (in/CASINO/OUT, v.g. album).

I HATE CENSORSHIP. gaaahhhh bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit why do we let them push us around? fascist fucks. if i were janet i'd say "fuck you, i'm not sorry, it's a boob, get over it". and then i'd flash my vagina!! let them stew over that a while.

speaking of stewing, my humanities professor, Dr. Jaeger, doesn't know shit about grammar and she keeps taking points off of my papers because she thinks i screwed something up when i actually didn't. jesus! tell me if i'm right or if i'm right or if i'm right.. "there is still AN enormous amount of things.." she wants that changed.. wtf.. "But who, outside of cartoon madmen, GOES out looking.." she wants that changed.. wtf... "but it bears nearly only its title as a similarity with the novel" is that such "awkward sentence structure"? you'd think she was a moron, but she's not, so why does she act like one while grading papers? "Gods and Monsters, which beautifully portrays the imagined last days of James Whale's life, shows that he was an eccentric and openly gay man who had a bittersweet experience with first love on the battlegrounds of World War I" - she wants "shows that" changed to "showing how". that's not grammatically correct! what does one do in this situation?

i love astronomy. did you know that if we were to scale the universe down so that the sun was the size of a basketball sitting in a UCF classroom, the nearest star to it would be in Hawaii? that's fuckin incredible. i love astronomy.

so in preparation for our Dali museum trip we were handed this essay of George Orwell criticizing Dali as basically a great painter but a deplorable human being. did you know he kicked his sister in the head when he was young, threw a boy off a bridge when he was five, emotionally tormented a young girl who was in love with him when he was a teenager for five years and then left her? he was psychotic. and maybe a sociopath. and Orwell gives this great biting paragraph that i loved:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as antisocial as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it."

i wonder, how extensive is your knowledge of his work, all you kids with his paintings plastered on your walls? i've never seen the gruesome stuff he describes in this essay, but i will in a couple of weeks! this is a criticism of Dali's autobiography, so find that and read about his sordid life and look at his disturbing pictures and then tell me what you think.