Time to ring the changes again….

Like a hypersensitive claustrophobe in a stalled and crowded elevator at a perfume convention with a Mexican buffet, I just cannot seem to get comfortable. I’ve gone through a couple of name changes already, and looks, and once again its time for a change. For those who have me bookmarked it really doesn’t affect you; you’ll just see a different banner spring up. And with the format, though I was enjoying the black background, a certain photographs looked great against it, the template cropped pics severely and I found that more than a few lines of text weren’t really all that fun to read. So we’re back to an older, friendlier, though more sedate format.

Keep hearing Madonna’s Like a Version going through my head…”like a version, being read for the very first time”…ouch, and I really don’t like having her anywhere near my gray matter. Kind of like Mr. Michael Jackson.This is the 25th anniversary of Thriller and as plentiful as the penis enlargement entreaties in my email are the plaudits proliferating about this supposedly seminal work. Some might even go back to his critically acclaimed Off the Wall when he first was revealed as a young black man.It wasn’t to last.We know he went white, and the man bit seemed to flee as well, as he not only seemed to get younger, to become a boy, but I swear he actually got smaller. Why anyone liked this record in the first place I don’t know. The across the culture praise for this record has always been another clue that my tastes are not everyone’s.They call it groundbreaking but consider that this came after Prince (he was already partying like it was 1999). And it wasn’t as though 1982 had nothing else to listen to; Elvis Costello released his masterpiece of both song and lyric Imperial Bedroom. We already had punk and rock and roots and blues and all sorts of alternatives to mincing about like frightened cats in a bowling alley.Really.

And you know I hate the music, not the man (did I say man?). Though I did enjoy Jarvis Cocker disrupting the Brit Awards (an clear argument against the British having taste (yes, plenty of great artists, but their mainstream taste is among the worst on the planet; could it be that they have so many artists because the amount of shit they have to swim through?)) when Michael was trying to do his Jesus with the small children diorama. You see, for me looking at him, I believe its quite possible that he really does just want to literally sleep with children; seems rather asexual to me. The man is a freak but that is not why I have problems with his pap; its just bad. Even the picky folk at Pitchfork in their review of the best albums of the 80s liked the cd:

I don’t care what kind of music your promo bait covers; any 80s list without Thriller is kidding itself. Thanks to a twenty-year campaign waged by Jacko to completely incinerate his artistic integrity, revisiting Thriller is a revelation, cutting through the tabloid baggage with its crisp, sharp-edged Quincyproduction. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is sweltering dance-floor Afro-funk highlighting Michael’s abhorrence for personal criticism; “Billie Jean”’s paranoid bass and hiccup histrionics are still cooler than its video’s illuminated sidewalks; the breakdown in “PYT”, with its ecstatic call-and-response and sultry panting, remains the funkiest goddamn thing since James Brown’s “Hot Pants”. Though the audio equivalent to Star Wars in that it can be held responsible for inspiring perhaps more crap than any other release of its time, Thriller permanently ziplocked the sound of era so that it might forever remain as fresh and vital as the album itself. –Rob Mitchum

Don’t agree but hey, what do I know.

And speaking of sexual ambiguity, I just became aware of Lady Jaye and Genesis. Have you heard of these two?

The one on the left is Genesis. They are a couple whose relationship has become a kind of performance art. Undergoing surgeries to make them look more and more alike, more him going over to her, as in this taken after their breast implants. (He has retained his bottom bits). They got the same size of implants but the result was off because his wider shoulders skewed the proportions so he went back to get larger ones.
She recently died of a heart condition which may have been related to her ongoing battle with stomach cancer.
What I find interesting is the more you resemble each other, what is it like to look in the mirror? And now, with her gone, is that the face he wants to see, or will he now be a living memorial to her? Most of the body mod out there has the opposite purpose of futher distinguishing yourself from others. Will we eventually see a Borg type group emerge?

So still with me here? The name, the name.

I’ve considered a number of dog related monikers and now with Revenge of the Castanets being up there for so long, I’ve got a bit of a tilt toward Mexico as in Sombreros for Everyone!

Or the Broken Pinata. Or The Blind Man and the Pinata. Then there is the Wandering Agoraphobe or Flyless in Gaza or Stop Me Before I go Blind. So many names and so little decision making apparatus at hand. Bunuel’s Dilemma? Dreaming of Reykjavik? The Golden Compress? The Honest Masseuse? (If anybody out there really wants one of these, for the price of a link and attribution, its yours.)

Have to just grab the easy one and think about changing again later. So the Andalusian Hound it is.

For now.