mahiwaga

There are certain parts of the year that seem to get me down. That perception may simply be apophenia. A meaningless confluence of stimuli that cause me to believe there is some sort of pattern. Like listening for voices on blank cassette tapes. Or seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of tree bark.

It hasn’t always been this way, I think. But there is a trend [2001][2002][2003][2004][2005][2006]

I think I just need to stop.

Time to stop holding onto things I have no reason to hold on to, and time to find the paths that are worth treading.

But the whole reason why this popped into my head is because of this mashup of Joy Division and Missy Elliot entitled ”Love Will Freak Us” (rediscovered via the Hype Machine on Timedoor), which is naturally composed of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Get Ur Freak On.” Missy’s infectious hit broke out that summer of 2001 (another hit by Timbaland, who’d’ve thunk it?) reminding me of sultry, sweltering nights spent in Manhattan, but I didn’t find this mash-up until around 2004, I think. I have this isolated memory of wandering around the Loop and the Mag Mile in Chicago with my iPod on. I don’t even remember where the hell I was going.

I could spend hours scour the net for mashups and other bullshit. Who needs a life when you’ve got an internet connection?

I just finished watching ”Sand Pebbles” which stars Steve McQueen, and it’s a brilliant, intricately subtle anti-war movie that has excruciatingly painful relevance to the present day absurdity of the continued occupation of Iraq by the U.S. “Sand Pebbles” chronicles the tribulations of Jake Holman, an engineer in the U.S. Navy assigned to a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze. The setting is China during the tumultous revolutionary era, as Chiang Kai-shek attempts to oust the warlords whom the western powers support. The specter of Soviet involvement looms large, and so the U.S. characteristically sticks its nose into something that they probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved in other nations’ civil wars seems to be a pretty bad idea if you ask me.

Steve McQueen plays a cynical, somewhat anti-social engineer, who cares for nothing except for taking care of his machines. But the politics and racial dynamics quickly interposes itself into his life, starting with his interactions with the hired Chinese labor, and soon encompassing the tenuous political situation in which the captain of the ship is obsessed with how America looks to the world, caught between the rock of preserving American lives and the hard place of not providing fodder for the Communists to use as propaganda against the U.S.

This movie was released in 1966, anticipating the fervent anti-war movement in the U.S. against the very parallel American involvement in a civil war in Vietnam. The last lines of the movie capture the painful absurdity of American lives lost for causes not our own. “What happened?! What the hell happened?!?!”

The Domino Theory was bullshit in my parents’ day, just like the Unending War on Terror™ and the Fly-Paper Strategy is in ours. And so we grease the wheels of Global Capitalism™…