Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Thursday, October 09, 2008 )

As I get older, I stop feeling very enthusiastic about milestones. But having said that, I find myself feeling very chuffed that my film “S&M Queen For A Day” recently reached 100,000 views on YouTube.

Maybe it’s just because the letters “S” and “M” are in the title that it’s so popular. Maybe it’s that I’ve found myself the inadvertent darling of some BDSM/fetish communities. But I don’t care. After two years, I’m still very proud of this little existential short piece–which is not merely a film about bondage but about people coming to grips with their identity when they don’t know who they really are. This short launched my foray into a new medium. Two years on, I still think I did good. I hope you agree.

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(Originally posted Wednesday, October 08, 2008 )

A live blog from tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee.

–*McCain immediately comes out and starts scribbling something on a note pad. A camera close-up reveals what it says: “You are running for president, John, and this guy is your opponent. You cannot trust him.” Just like the guy with short-term memory loss in Memento.

–*McCain chides Obama for admitting out loud that he would make cross-border incursions into Pakistan. “I promise to do everything Obama is doing, but I wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell you,” McCain says.

–*McCain starts an anecdote about an old veteran he was talking to, but trails off and starts talking about something he was putting together with a glue gun.

–*McCain puts a hip spin on one of his patronizing “My friends…” intros with a new one: “Wassup my homies and beaaatches…”

–*When it comes to the almost impossible situation in Pakistan, where crazed fundamentalist Muslim terrorists have more power than ever and are regrouping in the safe bosom of an unstable nuclear power, both candidates promise to hide from you the horrible horrible truth about how it is now practically impossible to get Osama Bin Laden. Better to lie and tell you how hard they are going to try to get Osama Bin Laden.

–*The Obama Doctrine is laid out: It is a critique of the Bush Doctrine and pretty much nothing else. But it’s still better than the McCain Doctrine which is a full-throated approval of pre-emptive American ultraviolence.

–*McCain gives a shout-out to Israel by promising no new Holocaust. His brave stand against long-dead Adolf Hitler is a slam dunk with shitheads.

–*Tom Brokaw asks a zen koan: Who are you and how do you know for sure that’s who you are? It’s an impossible question to answer, but McCain tries: “The surge is working.”

–*McCain introduces a new puppet character: “John McPlatitude.”

–*McCain says that when we drill for oil offshore in the United States, the knowledge of greater supply will make the prices go down. Given that world oil supply is what affects world oil prices everywhere and that there still isn’t enough we could drill here that would dramatically change the world balance, it’s probably better to instead fall back on an earlier quote from the straight-talking McCain: “The issue of economics is something that I’ve really never understood as well as I should.”

–*The two candidates stood in front of Tom Brokaw’s teleprompter, blocking it for a moment and rendering him wordless. Then they accidentally kicked out the wire that plugs Tom Brokaw into the wall and makes him function.

–*Both candidates try to break the debate rules, including a prohibition of meaningless and disingenuous subterfuge like “America only fights for good.”

–*McCain says there are some things health insurance shouldn’t pay for. Like taking care of sick people.

–*McCain says the way to help regular people during the financial crisis is to stop the spending spree in Washington and buy up all the bad mortgages. Which is like saying “Let’s save all the polar bears and let’s kill all the polar bears.”

–*Still, McCain was sounding pretty socialist with that mortgage idea there. Raise taxes on the rich to Reagan-era levels and you might actually have something.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, October 07, 2008 )

Daisy Whitney at TV Week covers everything related to the online video revolution from Web shows, to the way people consume regular media on the Web to the way advertisers are creeping into the space. She recently became a fan of the “Retributioners” and has both mentioned us on several occasions and interviewed Stephanie a couple of times.

Her latest blog is about how a celebrity can raise the profile of your Web video, and “The Retributioners” got a shout-out for Keri Setaro’s turn in Episode 7: The Walk of Shame.

You can check out the story here.

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(Originally posted Tuesday, October 07, 2008 )

2 CBS
The U.S. presidential debate. John McCain accuses Barack Obama of fraternizing with terrorists.

4 NBC
The U.S. presidential debate. Barack Obama accuses John McCain of being part of the Keating Five.

5 ABC
The U.S. presidential debate. Nobody gives a shit, guys. The economy’s in a freaking tailspin if nobody noticed.

5 ABC
On “Dancing With the Stars,” Misty May -Treanor takes a bad step and tears her Achilles’ tendon in what is obviously a psychological cry for help as neither of the presidential candidates will stop discussing stupid shit and focus on the Dow Jones plunging by a quarter this year and wiping out May-Treanor’s savings.

6 CW
Gossip Girl’s 529 college fund is wiped out by the stock market fluctuations and 40 point swings on the VIX volatility index and she writes her final gossip blog, which says: “Gossip Girl’s downing a bottle of Drano now. I’ll see you in hell.”

6 CW
90210: In an economic fear world of privation devoid of philosophical imperatives and absolutes, all the rich Beverly Hills teens turn to the joys of incest.

7 Univision
Telenovela: “No Tengo Dinero”

8 Bravo
One of the fundamental philosophies of Hegel was that a man can stand outside of himself, reflect on his actions and through a series of contradictions and negations, move toward some higher unity of thought. Somehow, this never works on “Real Housewives of New York.”

8 Bravo
“Real Housewives of New York” have to divorce their husbands, whose hedge funds are now unable to work because nobody will lend them stocks on margin.

8 Bravo
Real housewives of a Palestinian refugee camp

9 CMT
“20 Greatest Redneck Moments.” Showcasing irritating redneck self-consciousness. Which lays out an important ontological question: If a redneck knows he’s a redneck, is he still a redneck?

10 Discovery
A show about raking asphalt, which we will pretty soon all be doing under the auspices of new WPA type Depression-era programs

11 Cinemax
Max After Dark: “A Different Kind of Hedge Funding,” if you know what I mean

12 Prayer Network
Jerry Falwell now able to broadcast from heaven. He still wants money.

13 Fox News
Bill O’Reilly keeps your mind off catastrophic economic news by blaming the downturn on a jailed Guatemalan immigrant named Chuy.

14 Hallmark
Perry Mason doesn’t need to think much on this particular case. He’s pretty sure OJ did it.

15 IFC
Henry Rollins makes a grilled cheese sandwich and makes a lot of contradictory points about the bank bailout.

16 CNBC
Crisis On Wall Street: “Is Your Money Safe?”

17 Bloomberg
Crisis On Wall Street: “Is Your Money Even Money?”

18 Crosswalk
Barter Your Household Corn!

19 Bio
Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Tonight, Believe it Or Not: Your financial institution may be insolvent.

20 MTV
Cribs. No really. People are going to be living in real cribs.

21 We
Transgender Pre-ops In Prison Find Love

22 We
Transgender Pre-ops In Prison Ask For All Their Money Back From Lehman Brothers

23 HBO
Entourage

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(Originally posted Monday, October 06, 2008 )

What things are 8-year-olds repeating that they don’t understand?

“I don’t love you the way I love her.”

“Sometimes you’ve just got to let him go.”

“We were just using each other.”

“Our Congress has failed us.”

“This isn’t my war.”

“No blood for oil.”

“I’m getting more in touch with my feminine side.”

“We can’t say for sure what causes global warming.”

“Better dead than red.”

“Mom, stop smothering me.”

“I have to be my own man.”

“We need to clean up Washington.”

“We have to take the war to the terrorists.”

“Our enemies define themselves.”

“We’re tired of the old politics as usual.”

“You don’t have the courage to stay and fight for this marriage.”

“Mom, I’m gay.”

“John McCain is a real maverick.”

“You’re either for me or against me.”

“Not tonight. I have a headache.”

[Insert just about anything Sarah Palin said during the vice presidential debate here.]

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(Originally posted Monday, October 06, 2008 )

Just reminding you, in case you like the ragged glory of rock ‘n’ roll made in a basement, I have my own homemade tunes up at ER Salo Deguierre’s page.

Because of “The Retributioners,” I haven’t had time to record any new songs lately, but pretty soon, as Robert Plant sang, the levee will break and Salo will burst forth with new offerings. Until then, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least remind people that the music was there. If you think your friends would like it, please tell them! If you think your enemies would like it, that’s OK too.

Fan favorites include “The Names” and “Cleopatra.”

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(Originally posted Sunday, October 05, 2008 )

–*Your mom and pop will likely have to liquidate all their short positions and sell equities at a less than optimal value and move into a trailer with aluminum siding and compressed fiberboard floors.

–*Your aunt Maybelle’s futures contracts may cause her to lose money if her contango curve changes to backwardation and she will have to burn her house for the insurance money.

–*It’s very probable that your Uncle Ernie is going to have to short the S&P 500 by selling futures, but will likely be roaming the streets naked like a homeless veteran addled by lithium if the market becomes discontinuous and sees a wild swing upward.

–*Your aunt Clara will more than likely see money from her merger arbitrage strategies erased by a ban on short selling and she will have to cut open and eat her dog Jessiepoo.

–*Your uncle Ralph will likely find that his portfolio has been laden with risk from toxic credit default swaps and he will have to suckle a homeless, infantless mother in the streets like the guy in that John Steinbeck novel.

–*Your grandfather will likely have had his brokerage accounts permanently frozen by Lehman Brothers and he will have to eat himself, starting with his feet and working his way up, hopefully being able to stop by the time he reaches his own head.

–*Your grandmother’s ill-fated turn into junk bonds will likely turn out to be a catastrophe as she was too early to reach that important thousand-point spread over Treasurys, which means she will likely have to take up an opium habit she had left behind in the 1940s.

–*Your sister will likely have to unwind her leverage by paying $3 million to Wachovia bank by tomorrow for outstanding margin lending she was doing to fund a highly sophisticated asset-backed securities scheme, and then she will have to fight with a homeless man named Stewie over the property rights to an abandoned Frigidaire refrigerator packing box.

–*Your brother will likely have to pull the plug on his computer program that does automatic pairs trading for him, and he’ll probably go crazy and start shooting people while wearing the proud aegis of the U.S. Postal Service.

–*Your cousin will have to pull his naked shorts bets–a practice in which you sell shares you haven’t even bought–which will leave him millions of dollars in debt and force him to sell his internal organs without the luxury of having even died yet.

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(Originally posted Sunday, October 05, 2008 )

There’s another “Retributioners” coming around the corner in the next few days, as Stephanie and I feverishly race to finish editing “Episode 9: Revenge of the JAPs.”

One of the guest stars of this Webisode is Jessica Arinella, who is also the star of her own Web series “The In-Betweens of Holly Malone,” a really funny serial that you can check out here.

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(Originally posted Friday, October 03, 2008 )

…about Sarah Palin, now appearing on YouTube:

You can link to it here.

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(Originally posted Friday, October 03, 2008 )

What were the highlights of the vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden?

–*In the spirit of Alaska, Palin bit off her own hand to get out of a snare of microphone wires.

–*Joe Biden sat down on the stage and sang a song to Elmo about the troubled environment. Elmo shot back that Biden was patronizing him.

–*Palin said she wanted to expand the executive authority of the VP to be overlord of the fish and the beasts and heaven.

–*Palin said she was more supportive of the middle class than Joe Biden because she keeps making new middle class people in her belly.

–*Biden tried to be folksy like Palin by talking about some unemployed steel workers he met, but the story wasn’t really going anywhere until he got to the anecdote about the steel worker who was also an aspiring flash dancer.

–*Palin says she refuses to play “the blame game” about who failed to prosecute war in Iraq, who caused the Wall Street meltdown, who caused man-made global warming, who killed Nicole Brown Simpson, who broke into Watergate and who shot who in the face.

–*Palin asked Biden if she could call him “Joe.” After disarming him with this charm, she then blindsided him with the joke about why blondes wear panties.

–*When Biden cornered Palin on the issue of her lack of Wall Street knowledge, Palin answered: “So they can keep their ankles warm!”

–*Palin said she was confident that we could remove our dependence on foreign oil shortly after opening all the oil taps in Alaska and then discovering three more Alaskas somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

–*Biden said he was for gay marriage if by “gay” you meant happy.

–*Palin said that she was against gay marriage and that her gay friend Elmo was in complete agreement with her.

–*”So you can take her home like a six pack.”

–*Biden said that he and running mate Barack Obama would support a bailout plan for Wall Street as long as it had clear oversight measures that didn’t reward financial firms for taking on more risk or overleveraging themselves. Palin responded by saying she would personally drive a wooden stake through the heart of anybody who was greedy.

–*Palin says she believes a woman should have an abortion only in cases where she is raped by the mother.

–*Biden believes that we should make incursions into Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda in cross-border raids, even though this is possibly an infringement on the sovereignty of an unstable nuclear power. Palin’s cue card says we should not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.

–*Palin’s cue cards mainly, though, say “hockey mom,” “As we like to say in Wasilla….” “Maverick,” “I know what you’re sayin’ there,” and “Doggone it, people like me.”

–*After the debates, the pundits say both candidates rose high above expectations. Biden showed his far-ranging knowledge of foreign, economic and social policy and thumped his 35 years of public service. Palin finished her sentences.

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