Scorpio Man

May 17, 2014March 17, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

The next time I’m in the office elevator with some concerned citizen asking for my date of birth, I’m just going to lie. I know it’s wrong, but I’ve just grown tired of the fear I see in their faces, the non-verbal shrieks, and the attempts people make to hide their kids, and purses, and the not-so-subtle attempts they make to get away from us after learning where the Sun was positioned at our time of birth, during Pluto’s transiting influence. Scorpio Men are people too, with all of the same hopes and dreams. We want to have friends, and people who care about us, but those of you in the twelve other sectors of the ecliptic have created a climate where the only way we can feel comfortable in our celestial phenomena is to just lie about our Sun’s positioning.

“I mean you no harm,” I want to say, as if that would do anyone any good at this point. “I honestly don’t want to hurt you,” I do say, at times, when I see how badly shaken they are by my revelation.

Rather than go through that all that, yet again, I’ve decided that I’m just going to start telling anyone that asks that my date of birth happens to fall under a Virgo Sun, and that my Zen cannot be disturbed even with an Aquarian Mars coming down on me hardcore. If they continue to question me, stating that they can smell the darkness on me, I’m just going to say I’m a Pisces, because they can be whatever the hell they want to be.

I’m just so tired of the prejudicial reactions I receive after telling people that I happen to be a man, born of Pluto, the god of death and mystery and rebirth that lying about the essence of my being, and all that I stand for, is now preferable. Is that really what we want? It appears as though we do. I’ve thought about fighting it. I’ve thought about telling concerned citizens about all of the peace-loving Scorpio brethren that litter history, but that’s an unwinnable war at this point.

Some of you, and you know who you are, have decided that it’s perfectly acceptable, in this age of supposed of acceptance, to call Scorpio men a dark force. A dark force? I’m sorry, but that’s a pejorative term that my people have dealt with since the Hellenistic culture exerted its influence on Babylonian astrology, and just because a few bad eggs have gone rotten since that point does not mean that the whole basket should be thrown out. In this era of enlightenment, one would think that we would all make a more concerted effort to see past whatever constellation the Sun happened to be in at the time of our birth.

Even those of us who have undergone extensive, and expensive(!), training to achieve the evolved state of a Scorpio man, still get that look from you troglodytes who happen to have crawled out of the womb under another, superior positioning of the Sun, when you suggest that we “Can be total trips sometimes.” Then to have that air of superiority that comes from some of you (I’m looking at you Cancer Sun women!) who know that we will either get murdered (statistical samples show that most Scorpio males may get murdered in their bed) or murder (statistical samples state that Scorpio males “Can be most high rated criminals (sic?)” And just because we tend to be serial killers who “Thrive on power and control because they [Scorpios] are so insecure, and if they loose (sic) that power or control they go crazy” does not mean that it’s going to happen in those moments immediately following the revelation of our birth date, on that particular elevator ride we’re sharing with you. We don’t know when it’s going to happen, if you want to know the truth, and some of us have been able to control our Scorpio man impulses thanks to extensive and expensive “Scorpio man” evolvement courses.

It’s obvious you don’t care about any of that though. You’re not even curious enough to ask. You can say you are, but we all know what you say about us when we’re not around. We know you think we’re “Sadistic in our ability to bring out the worst in others.” We realize that no matter how hard we try to prove that we might, might be exceptions to these rules, you’re still going to say things such as, “There may be exceptions to this [Scorpio man] phenomenon. Would not want to rule out that possibility, however, they are rare.”

It’s this kind of talk that has led even us tweeners (those so close to other signs that we may share astrological characteristics with another sign) who are now taking classes to diminish the power of our dark half, to decide that we’re just going to lie about our date of our birth from this point forward. We didn’t want it to come to this, and our intention is not to deceive you, as most of us are quite proud of the position of the Sun in the constellation at the time of our birth. The climate you have all created, with your prejudicial reactions, is now so toxic that it’s become almost impossible for some of us to live normal lives, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just easier for us to conceal that aspect of our identity that was, at one time, such a proud heritage to some of us.

To read the next to entries of the Scorpio Man, follow these links:

Scorpio Man II

Scorpio Man III

A Review of David Cross’ Review of Music Reviews

May 15, 2014June 14, 2014 RilalyLeave a comment

If you had informed me that a cynical wit, the caliber of stand up comedian, and writer of the incredible Mr. Show, David Cross (aka Tobias Funke) (aka the Chicken Pot Pie guy), was going to mock the verbose, wordy, prolix, grandiloquent, garrulous, and logorrhea found in most music reviews, I would sing, “Hot Dog, Hot Dog, Hot Diggity Dog!” Like most comedic ideas, however, the ambitious idea of what the essay Top Ten CDs to Listen to While Listening to Other CDs portends is much more enticing than the actual results.

As anyone that has tried to sell the artistic merit of “challenging and difficult” music to a friend knows, describing music can be a difficult and challenging thing to capture. The effort that those of us —that know little to nothing about the complexities involved in music creation— put forth usually results in us saying something nonsensical along the lines of: “It kind of sounds like a cross between the second side of Led Zeppelin III and the first side of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.” When our listener’s express varying degrees of annoying confusion, we usually end up saying, “I don’t know, here, just listen to it.”

Those of us that regularly read professional music reviews, regularly skip the time-consuming, flowery verbiage of music reviews, to their summation of the particular songs on the album that lets us know that This is the best song on the album, and that we may want to check out the propulsive, crunchy beats on That, but that the song “…And the Other Thing!” doesn’t quite accomplish what the band had probably intended it to. We then listen to the samples of This, That, And the Other Thing to make an informed decision on the album based on what the reviewer has stated is a decent representation of said album.

If the reviewer really enjoys the album, however, and I mean really enjoys it, you will usually finish their review with the belief that this latest offering from Quiet Riot could lead you on a spiritual journey not seen on this planet since Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days and forty nights in a desert.

As Cross writes of the website Pitchforkmedia.com:

It is a site that basically reviews music but in a very, very precious and often overly verbose way.”

In the essay, Cross mocks the idea of these tediously verbose music reviewers by writing his own fictional review, of a fictional band’s, fictional album, using an equal measure of verbosity to capture the essence of the particular review he lines up for the reader. The idea behind Cross’ indirect mockery is that most album reviews are overwrought and probably intended to either feed into whatever collegial relationship that the writer presumably wants to have with either the material, or the band, by lending it exaggerated weight, or that the writer of said review can find no other venue for showcasing his writing abilities and extensive vocabulary.

When Cross reprints the reviews, such as the unintended comedy Dominique Leone provides in his review of Animal Collective’s album Sung Tongs, for Pitchforkmedia.com, laughter ensues:

(The song) “The Softest Voice” layers clear-toned guitar figures upon each other, as (singers) Tare and Bear whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic “Visiting Friends” gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees. The constant strumming moves alongside the voices, helping to keep them afloat, but never suggesting they should organize themselves into anything recognizable or predictable. It’s windy, and if it rains they’ll get wet and continue to play.

Again, it’s difficult to find the perfect verbiage to describe music, or the seemingly ethereal vibe of Sung Tongs, but some of the times the authors of these reviews get so carried away with their use of language that one can’t help but think that the reviews are intended to impress upon the reader what an adept writer they have before them. A reader finds themselves wondering, a thousand words in, if this review is so concerned with showcasing their ability to write like Faulkner that their attempts at sharing an appreciation for music becomes secondary. Either that, or Dominique wrote this particular review in the hopes that he might receive a call from Animal Collective’s Avey Tare that communicated a collegial respect Tare had for Dominique’s ability to capture the ethos of his album, in a manner a less adept writer would’ve struggle with. “You got it, Dominique, you really captured the essence of what we were trying to do with this album! I like you! I really, really like you!”

Cross then provides his thematic review of his fictional group, and their fictional album, in the same overwrought themes Leone used in his Sung Tongs review:

—why not listen to As I Became We by “Tishara Quailfeather.” The virulent and hermetically sealed pinings of the world’s only triple-gold-selling Native American artist living in an iron lung. It’s as if newly dead, and thus still pure angels, reached down into the Virgin Mary’s throat and gently lifted out the sweetest and more plaintive sounds man will ever hope to hear in his life. RATING—7.17

Again, if you’re anything like me, you would’ve rushed out to the bookstore to purchase Cross’s book I Drink for a Reason the minute you heard that this comedic legend attempted this particular spoof, in essay form. If you’re anything like me, you thought that these self-indulgent music reviews —done by writers that can’t get read anywhere else— are an untapped goldmine of material that probably should’ve been tapped long ago, but no one had the guts to do it to a reviewer that might be eventually be reviewing your material at some point, down the line. If you’re anything like me, you thought it was such a clever idea that you were just dying to laugh at all ten attempts Cross made in this essay, and if you’re anything like me you eventually ended up thinking that the idea of doing it was so much better than the finished product. It’s kind of funny, in that Cross successfully matches the theme of self-indulgence these reviewers engage in, but it’s David Cross’s maybe not as hilarious as this David Cross fan expected it to be.

The Big Lebowski and Philosophy II

May 13, 2014November 17, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

[Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part review of the subject matter discussed in The Dude and The Zen Master. Part one can be found here.]

All wars, all conflict, can be resolved, and redefined, through interconnectedness—

“You might think it would be wonderful if we could go in and extract all the evil people out of this world, like we extract cancer out of a body,” Jeff Bridges says in the collection of philosophical anecdotes The Dude and the Zen Master he made with Zen master Bernie Glassman. “But as Solzhenitsyn says, evil runs through all our hearts, and who wants to cut a piece of her own heart? We are part of nature and nature uses violence and war to make its blade sharper and sharper.”

Bridges expands upon this theme by describing cells and magnification, and how the magnification of a cell reveals that every cell involves two parties fighting for survival, and that those parties are both essential components of the same cell. “They are,” in his words, “an interconnected whole fighting for the same thing.” Bridges states that there is order within the perceived disorder of that cell, and if we were able to disrupt that order to such a degree that we were able to kill all of the germs, viruses, and bacteria in our body, we would cease to live. Germs have a right to live too, he concludes, –which when taken to Bridges’ extended analogy between the internal skirmishes that occur within a cell and the wars of human history– reminds one of Rosie O’Donnell’s line: “Terrorists have children too.”

Bridges then speaks about how the fight that occurs within a cell is equivalent to the fights between good and evil that have occurred throughout human history. Within a cell there is the constant division process that occurs in which the organisms fight, and who is right and who is wrong is less important than the fight for survival. When you alter the magnification even more, he says, you could equate that cell to the Earth, in which humans are fighting in the same manner, and each parties believes he is right, and when you alter the magnification even more, you have Space, where the simplistic differences between right and wrong are negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Taking such an analytical overview of humanity is a wonderful notion, if everyone agreed to debate the topic in that forum, planet earth would be a wonderful place to live in. Unfortunately, we cannot get some people to agree to that premise. They have petty grievances, team mentalities, and a stake in their own quest for power. If we took that premise and twisted it just a little to incorporate time, could we change perspectives even more? Petty grievances, both personal and geopolitical, often look even more petty over time. One of the reasons some writers refuse to write timely articles now is that we’ve looked back at those articles and realized not only are they not evergreen, what seemed so urgent at the time that we devoted days of writing, rewriting, and perfecting, seems silly now. It almost feels like we wasted two days of our lives. Team mentalities also seem silly in hindsight, in the “I didn’t say that” when they did. “I wasn’t that extreme” when they were. Killing other people, be they soldiers or civilians, over property lines, also seems not only horrific and a waste of human life, it also seems silly in hindsight.

We have to live on the sphere we call Earth, because no other sphere we’ve found thus far will have us. Doing so requires that we accept the realities of the place where we live in, and it also requires us to do everything possible to maintain livable conditions.

Bridges states that setting that forum to make planet earth a more wonderful place to live in should be the whole idea. He says that we don’t have to accept the realities of the place we live in, and that we can alter it. “Anyone that questions this,” says Bridges, “should look at how President John F. Kennedy set the course for landing a man on the moon. He said that at one point in our nation’s history, sending the man to the moon seemed a far-fetched idea, until the president changed the conversation by informing the nation that it would be done. After he did this, the conversation centered around how it was going to be done, not if it was going to happen. ”

Bridges general approach to war, conflict, and his specific approach to the attacks on 9/11/01, is that we should try doing nothing to see how that works. On the subject of 9/11/01, Bridges states that he was all for doing something to those responsible for that act, but that he didn’t agree that that something should involve such a global war on terror. He says that we should’ve spent more time examining our role in 9/11/01, and that we should’ve apologized for our role in making them angry. As anyone that has read the history of terrorism vs. America knows, we did try the tactic of holding those responsible in criminal courts, after the first World Trade Center attack, and al Qaeda saw that as a sign of weakness. They called us a “paper tiger” and decided to explore the idea of doing something more. We have tried apology tours to quell the animosity the world is purported have for America, and humanity has also tried appeasing the evil intentions of those that plan to do us harm. These procedures have not worked. We should, of course, continue to try every method at our disposal for maintaining peace on our planet, and just because one measure did not work, with one lunatic, doesn’t mean that it won’t with another, but there is a point where Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity comes into play, and Bridges fails to incorporate that definition into his line of reason.

A philosophical inconsistency later arises when Bridges begins speaking on the subject of slavery. He states that when we were forming our Constitution, it was a difficult chore for our Founders to find unity on the many subjects before them, but the issue of slavery proved to be so divisive that it threatened to end the proceedings, so they decided to shelve it for a later date. They decided that all of the other aspects of our founding were so important that they couldn’t be derailed. This, of course, came back to bite the nation in the butt, and Bridges believes that if the Founders had tackled this issue at the time, there may not have been the sense of disenfranchisement among blacks that lives on to this day. All of this is true, of course, and if we could go back in time, we might do that very thing. What Bridges doesn’t account for here are the intractable Founders, those who wouldn’t budge on the issue of slavery, and those who threatened to bring down the proceedings over this one, very sensitive issue. Hindsight shows us now what a grave mistake putting the slavery issue aside was, but The Founders probably believed, as former president Ronald Wilson Reagan later did that you try to get 80% of what you want now and worry about the rest later. Again, we do not intend to diminish the error, and the ramifications felt for the next three hundred years, but The Founders thought by laying the foundation of freedom, the people would eventually seek to have freedom for all.

If peace could be attained in a manner where all the good guys had to do was view the human characteristics of their opponent as nothing more than an organism that wants to survive, and that that opponent would then appreciate that acknowledgement so much that they sat down at a peace accords table to engage in a serious and genuine discussion of their grievances, the Earth would be a more wonderful place to live on. Everyone wants to live in that world. Viewing this world through that lens, however, neglects the irrational component of evil people. Why would anyone want to set out hurt another person? They do. It’s irrational, but they do. Yet, it appears that ridding the world of evil, in this manner, would be like cutting out a piece of our heart out.

The danger of viewing evil people through such a simplistic lens occurs when we believe those humans, who happen to be evil, are evil. The thoughtful approach suggests that we view these people as people too when they enter into a Munich Agreement. It’s simplistic to view the individual that just wants Poland and Czechoslovakia as evil, and it’s much more thoughtful to pare back our forces and draw down our defenses with the knowledge that peace is the solution. The danger occurs when that evil person leaves that peace accord, and joins their generals at the planning boards with the knowledge that they acted their part so well that we’re now a little more vulnerable to their forceful persuasion.

In a certain magnification of the historical lens, everything Adolf Hitler did may have been evil, but in another setting, say his, they could be viewed in another manner. Did Hitler wake up in the morning and think, I’m going to do something evil today, or was he eating apple fritters and drinking cocoa with his wife and dog? Hitler was a person too, and he had a quest for survival that was similar to the quest of germs, viruses, and bacteria. They aren’t evil, and they don’t invade our body’s cells with evil intentions. They just do what they do. If we happen to get cancer, as a result of their victory over our white blood cells, we may consider that a bad thing, but if we alter the magnification, and attempt to view it from their perspective, we could view it as their victory.

Modern day evil people may go home at the end of the day to watch Happy Days reruns, and laugh with their kids bouncing on their knees, but that doesn’t change the fact that the actions they engaged in that day left their streets littered with dead people, homeless people, and a greater portion of their population starving than there were the day before. If we view that from a different magnification, an objective view that accounts for their definition of these actions, we could see the mass slaughter of civilians as a victory for their cause. It’s all relative.

If you’re one that lives with the relative notion that murdering an estimated eleven million people is a bad thing, or that a leader’s policies led to the mass starvation of his people, then you have to be willing to set a course of actions in motion that will, in a temporary fashion at least, set aside the fact that these evil people are just humans, with kids, for at least as long as it takes to either contain their evil, or to set a precedent in the minds of evil men that their evil acts will no longer be tolerated.

Some peaceniks did not abide by the methods of achieving peace that The Dude did. His method alluded to the idea that the best way of achieving peace was through strength, and his record proved to be more successful than The Dude’s, Neville Chamberlain’s, or any other theoretical attempts at achieving peace in our time. We won’t talk about that person though, because he was icky, and his actions portend that there are icky, evil people that require alternative methods.