The second audio track of my conversation with Gord picks up after a short pee break and a refreshing of drinks. If you’re lost, you can check out the first part by clicking on my name and scrolling down. But chances are, you’ll be lost anyway.

Gord: Okay, where was I? Uhhh…brainwashing! Back in the day, World War II or I or whatever it is, thay studied exactly how to manipulate an individual’s brain, so they can make them do whatever they want them to do.They studied it. I don’t remember learning what the outcomes of these tests were, but I do know that some of those tests were successful. There’s lots of different methods of brainwashing individuals. When you look at a commercial, it’s filled with lots of nice, bright shiny pictures, they last for 30 seconds, and what it’s trying to do is get you to buy the product. How do you sell the product? To sell the product you have to convince the person to purchase that product. You have to cater to the lifestyle they want. You have to show them a lifestyle that would suit them. So you make a car commercial that looks like the lifestyle that they would want. When they buy that car it makes that individual exude the lifestyle that they wish to portray to the rest of the world.

H: Right.

G: So they buy the car, they spent the money. The companies get that money. That’s brainwashing. It’s people being brainwashed is what commercials are all about.

H: And the people never realize that their lifestyle hasn’t changed at all. They just have a car.

G: Exactly, all they have is a goddamn fucking car. Maybe it has bells and whistles. Maybe it runs better than this other car, but big fucking deal. It just meant that their advertising budget was bigger.

H: Yeah, and the thing is there’s more levels to it than that, too. You have some people that are less susceptible to it than others, obviously. But those people who aren’t susceptible to it are susceptible to other things like peer pressure, for example. They go to school, and everyone they know is wearing the Gap clothes and all of a sudden, they find themselves as an outcast because they’re not wearing them.

G: So the trick to capitalist culture is to be able to infect a certain percentage of individuals that are susceptable to a particular form of advertising. Once they’re infected and they purchase the products, then..

H: It spreads like a virus.

G: And the smallest percentage of people are the ones who don’t have TV’s and don’t give a shit what they look like.

H: Yeah.

G: And they’re fully content to live without these said products.

H: It’s always really been fascinating to me, because I’ve never really given a shit. I’ve always…uh…It’s so…all these companies portray a lifestyle, and they try to sum it up with a slogan. “Everybody in Gap.”

G: “Drivers Wanted” by Volkswagen.

H: “I’m Lovin’ It.”

G: I love driving! (laughs) And “I’m Lovin’ It,” exactly. Or “Just Do It.” (adopts fake look of stupidity in his eyes) Yeah, yeah, that’s my attitude.

H: (adopts same) I’m totally a “Just Do It” kind of guy. One time, I went rock climbing. I’m a wild man.

G: That’s my attitude, so I’ll buy that product.

H: I’ve actually seen people, and I’m sure you have too, wtih the Nike “swoosh” tattooed on themselves.

G: I’ve heard of it, and I’ve seen people like that in Adbusters.

H: I can’t believe that anyone would…it just seems so ludicrous to me.

G: I know. That’s good advertising. Good advertising is manipulation.

H: Yeah, absolutely.

G: I’m all for manipulation, it’s just that…

H: (laughs)

G: It’s like this, I used to think that the world is messed up and it needs to change the way that it thinks, because it’s full of sheep. North America is full of sheep and that’s just it. That’s where I was going wrong, I was trying to convince people not to think that way. You can’t convince people not to be sheep. You’re either a sheep, or you’re a leader. So, if you can think outside of that box, you’re not going to be able to convince people to think outside of that box because there’s too may sheep. What you can do…

H: (sly grin) Put them in a better box?

G: Manipulate their surroundings enough so that your manipulation is better than the rest of the manipulation they have to deal with, which is why it’s a losing battle. You’ll never win against them. They have more money. Corporations have way more money, they have all of those television stations. They’ve got them in their pocket. That’s what they do. They have to cater to the advertisers. To be able to create a revolution is to create a better way of life. The only way to be able to do it is to have enough money to be able to manipulate the populous. To steer them. To be the lead sheep. To be the sheep dog that puts them into the pen. A pen that says be kind to each other, don’t step on other people’s toes to better improve yourself. That’s not a good way to live. A good way to live is to be polite. You know? To…uh…I have my own way of thinking about it and…I don’t know…every major religion has talked about it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to change the way people think. You have to actually show them a better way to live in a way that is more powerful than the way they’re taught and shown every single day of their life.

H: Well…

G: Cause it’s a pretty arduous task.

H: This is a question that I…We’re getting into the territory of talking about changing the world.

G: Yeah.

H: And you hear a lot of…obviously, in this day and age, particularly in the age of Youtube, you get a lot of people self-righteous kind of pseudo hippies who are sitting there about how they want to incite revolution and change the world. Overthrow the government, you know? They think that they’re going to accomplish this by going to the G8 summit, and protesting, which is a meaningful gesture, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.

G: It’s good to do, but…

H: It doesn’t accomplish anything.

G: It’s all flashy bells and whistles.

H: It’s exactly the same thing as like throwing a flaming piece of shit through a Starbuck’s window. It’s a really great message, but it doesn’t accomplish anything.

G: Exactly.

H: I’ve always figured there’s only two ways to affect change, or ways that change is meaningfully affected, anyway. Either there’s a societal change, and people generally understand that something is different or something is wrong. We shouldn’t wipe out of the Indians. We shouldn’t…

G: But that would only come from a dramatic social occurence.

H: I think in that case, it’s a gradual…

G: Yeah, it builds up until the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

H: I see it as two different options. It’s either slow change for the better, or things hit so rock bottom that they have to change. If you paralell that into a government, you need to have the government overthrown and a period of anarchy, before…

G: A revolution.

H: Yeah, before you instill a better government.

G: There was a French revolution, they stormed a prison.

H: The storming of the bastille.

G: Yes, that’s the one. The people were hungry and they needed food, so they stormed a prison, because the prison inmates got more food than the public did.

H: And that’s true even today, but some people don’t realize it. There are people starving to death on the street, while prisoners cost many thousands of dollars to keep in jail.

G: They’re all a product of the system in the sense that voters aren’t so much individuals, but people that live somewhere. People that have an address are voters. If you don’t have an address, you’re not part of the census. That doesn’t make any goddamn sense. There’s millions of people living on the streets, and the only thing that they can afford to do is find food and scrounge up enough leftovers from our horrible society to survive the next day, and nobody listens to them because they’re crazies. That’s all a product of our society. You’re crazy if you don’t want a pair of Nike shoes, you’re crazy if you don’t want a nice car. If you don’t want a house.

H: That same thought, you’re crazy if you don’t follow the norms. I had a screaming match, an absolute screaming match with my mom, because I didn’t give a shit, and I wasn’t outraged, at Janet Jackson’s nipple at the Superbowl. I said “It’s a nipple. It’s a piece of the body that I have, that you have, that everyone has…

G: Everyone on the face of the earth.

H: Who the hell cares?” But there’s this societal thing that we should all be ashamed of our bodies. I’ve always thought that it came from the Bible, that it was some kind of Christian thing. But if you actually read the Bible, in the Garden of Eden, they only started to feel bad about their bodies after they were cast out. So one would infer that the logical thing would be not to be embarrased by that, and if people wanted to be more like they should be, they wouldn’t be. They’re taking the message completely backwards.

G: They’re misinterpeting it. A lot of people do that. A lot of people that are put in power, that are put into a place where people have access to what they’re saying, mininterpet everything. So everyone who listens to them, believes them, because they’re sheep. And it’s not their fault that they’re sheep.

H: I’m going to admit something to you. I love the Bible.

G: I think it’s great.

H: It’s a fantastic work of fiction.

G: (doubtful, noise as if he’s about to object)

H: It’s better than Lord of the Rings. It’s better than fucking…you know…what do I have for an example here…It’s better than all the Tom Robbins novels. It’s so imaginative and vivid, but in no way should it be taken literally.

G: It shouldn’t be taken literally, I agree. My mother’s always pushing me to read the Bible, but I’ve been through so many Bible Studies, and so many youth groups and so many Sunday school classes learning about all the different stories of the Bible. And every thing that I’ve taken from it, that everyone else seems to…it seems to escape them that each and everyone of those stories that you hear about in the Bible are about love. And if you love somebody, and you follow the golden rule, which is in the majority of the religions out there, then you’ll lead a full and rich life. If you can actually master the art of forgiveness, then you’ll lead a really full life.

I don’t have one ex-girlfriend who I’m not friends with. There’s not one thing that I can hold against somebody. If I meet somebody and their initial impression leaves me thinking of them as a useless piece of trash, I’m not going to hold it against them if they later redeem themselves. Everyone on this planet has some sort of redeeming characteristic. Even if you don’t have any friends, you still have a redeeming characteristic, but you can’t live on this earth and have a friend without having a redeeming characteristics. It’s either your charisma, or your tenacity, your gumption, your get-go, everything that it could be, every individual has some sort of redeeming characteristic to them.

The Bible, to me, is nothing more than a collection of stories about love, and to truly love, you must be able to forgive. Anyone that has been married…well, it’s kind of hard to talk about that in this day and age. The classic way. My parents are still married. The majority of the people on my floor in residence had parents who were still together, which was bizarre when the modern family is a family that’s split. My kids are growing up in a modern family. I wouldn’t say that it’s all my doing, but I don’t know how much about what my counterpart thought about it, or thinks about it. But there’s no way that she’s not going to be a good friend and a great mother to my kids. Some people aren’t. They’re spiteful. They would lead a lot healthier life if they were more forgiving of people. If they realized that every single human being on this planet makes stupid, dumb mistakes, but at the time, you can’t tell. It’s so hard to tell at the time, but we all live a certain number of years.

We can look at life and say, “wow, a lot changed.” But on a day-to-day basis, not a lot changes. How can you say that in a year, a lot changes? There’s so much that goes on in an individual’s existence, so much on their side of things, everything that they’ve ever come across in their entire existence determines what’s going to happen next. How they deal with it. What they do in this particular instance. You can’t hold it against them, so forgive them for this mistake. Forgive them for misinterpteting a particular instance because of whatever they’ve dealt with before. You know that you wouldn’t like somebody to hate you forever for something you did. So don’t hate people forever for something that they did. That’s what the Bible is to me. It might be a work of fiction, but to me, that’s neither here nor there.

H: The point I was making was that it should be seen on the same level as, like Aesop’s Fables. They’re there to teach a moral. You don’t read Aesop’s Fables and think “I hope I find a lion so I can take a thorn out of their paw.” You shouldn’t read the bible and think “I should hate gay people.” It’s funny, we’re coming to the same conclusion, but taking vastly different ways to get there. I come to it from a vastly different angle. I’m very into the idea of the cosmic joke. The idea that most people, their entire life is just a struggling, grasping effort for meaning. They want to mean something, they want to have a meaningful existence. But nobody’s life is meaningful. You might make an impact on the Earth for, at most, a couple of hundred or thousand years, but then you’re forgotten. And who the hell cares? Anything that anyone has ever fought for, or loved…

G: It fades into obscurity.

H: Anything that anyone has ever fought for, or died for, or lived for, or loved for has all been totally meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Once you come to the idea of that, then you think “Jesus, if nothing is meaningful, if nothing is important, than what is important?” What’s important is that you, and the people around you that you care about, are happy.

G: That’s exactly it.

H: And there’s nothing more to it than that.

Next week: More on the lost art of forgiveness, and cartoons in the modern era.

It should come as no surprise that I am writing to say that I have had enough of people usurping my day because it is happening way too frequently. Not one, but two slimy little weasels (actually one weasel and one beaton) decided that yesterday would be a good day to post a lame cartoon with a well-drawn car and cause massive upheaval in the Daily Blitz community by resigning, respectively. I have to admit I have come to expect this kind of behavior from that porn-mustachioed, DQ deep-throating lesbo-outer who claims to be our leader, but from the kick-ass-cartoon-drawing, hilarious-comment-making, undisputed queen of Fridays??? For shame.

That said, here’s this:

Also if you guys were not aware I am a blogger by profession for Autoblog Latino. Normally this would be none of your concern since it is in Spanish and unless you are really into cars (which I am not) it is pretty boring. In any case I came across an article the other day by a Canadian blogger, Clever Shark. Basically the point is the US Dollar has lost a lot of value recently, and is now almost dead even with the Canadian Dollar (which is apparently called a “Loonie.” I have to admit I was unaware.) The funny thing is(If you live in the U.S.), that cars are like 20-30% more expensive in Canada. It has gotten so ridiculous that people are crossing the border to buy a car for $10,000 less and then importing it.

That’s funny to me, but I wonder… for a guy who thinks he’s so clever, it’s amazing that it never occurred to him that maybe the Canadian cars aren’t overpriced so much as the American ones are under priced. If the American dollar has lost value, but the car prices remain the same, that just means we are paying less for our cars. You aren’t suddenly paying more. On the other hand I guess Canadian car dealerships are losing business over the border and your economy will eventually suffer, so it depends how you want to look at it.

Hi everyone!

I suppose it comes as no surprise that I am writing to say this is my last post since I have not actually written anything for some time now. There are a couple of reasons for this, so I’ll rhyme them off for you.

1- I have just finished making a website of my very own! It is exciting even though it isn’t very impressive yet, and it will probably take me a while to get used to it.

2- I am leaving Victoria. For family reasons, but also because I am going to apply for a Masters, and to do this, I need money. So I am soon joining my sister and friend Lindsay back in Fort McMurray, where I’m not sure yet what is going to happen, but I’m sure it will suck very much. Not for as long as last time, but school starts in the fall and I’ve had debt already, and well, no thanks.

But I would like to thank everyone here, I have met some wonderful people and enjoyed being a part of this site very much. Please continue to bring people in and make it better and better.

Sincerely,
-Katie

edit:

I stole Iright’s day! :(

I am rude

I’m fairly certain I posted this comic once, long ago, but I can’t seem to find it in our archives so I’ll put it up again! Haha!

This one was drawn quite a while ago; BEHOLD:

Also this is my first time doing a half decent job drawing a car. I even did a custom license plate and hood ornament!

Fall is here! And I’m back to making soups…I guess. If people want me to stop again, just let me know.

Anyways - photo of the soup of the day

Sorry about the blurriness, but the camera was almost out of batteries and didn’t want to focus.

A creamy swiss soup with lots of big chunks of mushrooms, as well as other veggies cooked together. Topped with cilantro especially for randomgirl.

So…WOULD YOU EAT THIS?

Let’s go back a few years, shall we? I’m not sure the exact year, but somewhere between 1999 and 2002 I went to Doc Dylan’s boozery in Moncton with a co-conspirator and a couple of girls, if I recall correctly. As the girls concerned themselves with discussing matters girly, my friend and I proceeded to have a conversation that could best be summed up as “How the world would be better if we ran things.”

There were a lot of good ideas there. We had dissections of the public space and ideas for legislation. We would legalize prostitution, set up government funded whorehouses with health-inspections all over the place, tax the shit out of it, and put the money back into education. We had many other ideas but they have been lost to time. Joe, if you can remember any others, let me know.

We eventually decided our ideas would make a fantastic book. We would call it the Paperback Reverie, and it would be the moral compass for our people and our age.

So filled with drunken confidence were we, that we that we decided we needed to get a bunch of blank paper, some pens, a bottle of Southern Comfort, and we would knock the book out of the park in a few hours.

It almost goes without saying that we got about three pages in and chucked the book, drank the rest of the booze and played guitar and video games until Conan O’Brien came on.

The trouble, I realized later, was that we tried to capture the energy of the conversation in the long process of writing. A difficult task under most circumstances. An impossible task while in any state of intoxication.

Flash forward to about three weeks ago. My good friend Gordie came over to my place, somewhat unexpectedly. Gord is an artist by trade, his medium being spraypaint, grafitti, urban art or whatever the perferred nomenclature is. Recently, he has also become a trucker, which was why his visit was a surprise: I had thought he’d already left for Georgia.

We were going to have a conversation/interview about urban art that I was going to record for an upcoming project. As we did this, we enjoyed hearty quantities of wine and beer.

As we got talking, we kept going on more and more tangents, and I got the same feeling as I did in Doc Dylan’s, but this time, the tape was rolling. I figured a transcript might do this justice.

So, over the next few weeks, I present you an un-edited interview on grafitti art that slowly evolved into a discussion about mass media brainwashing, conspiracy theories, religion, and possibly back to art again.

Please keep in mind that these are the ramblings of two drunk, self-righteous assholes and not a serious treatise on the state of the world. I’m sure in the sober light of day that we’re well aware of any lapses in logic, historical or factual innaccuracies or just general codshit that we spewed out.

We’ll join in progress as we start to leave the topic of grafitti-

Gord: All you see is grey anymore. The only color you see is in advertisement. People that would rather see nothing but a clean city, no writing on it whatsoever…the only colors you would see would be from fucking advertisements. Seriously? Do you want that to be the only thing your mind takes in? Because they wouldn’t take in the grey after a while.

Hawkeye: I always thought that was one of things that lead to the explosion of urban art in the 70’s was because that was when the urban expansion started to take hold in a lot of places. I’ve always thought grafitti was a sort of a reaction to that.

G: I believe it is. I’d like to think it is. Other people might argue. I’m big on personal opinions. Whatever you feel about it is whatever you feel about it, but if you don’t think it’s art and you don’t like it, then I don’t like you. We have an argument on our hands and I like to argue, so that’s the way it goes.

H: I wouldn’t necessarily say that it being a reaction to something excludes it from being viable art though. Art is often a reaction to things.

G: That’s definetly true. A lot of what urban art is, recently, is that there’s a lot more acceptance of it. There’s a lot more anti-war stuff that goes up. Art has always been a deviation from the current culture that had existed. There’s a magazine Adbusters. A couple of years ago, they wanted to put a commercial on public television. They went to a bunch of networks and none of these networks would air this commercial. Adbusters is an anti-capitalist magazine. Every single television station that you watch on TV is corporate based. They make their money by their commercials. If they put an anti-capitalist, anti-corporate commercial on there, they could lose advertising, money. So they won’t do it, which means the public, the people that walk around and go to work every single day, do not have a free voice. A free, uncorrupted voice. It’s always corrupted by money in some way. That’s the great thing about urban art, it’s free. It’s free colors. You don’t have to go to a museum to pay for it. It’s all sorts of crazy colors, designs. There’s so many writers out there, it’s ridiculous. In every corner of the globe you will find people writing on things. It goes back as far as the Roman empire, probably further back than that. People have always written on walls. That’s free expression.

H: Cave drawings.

G: Exactly.

H: This is a bit off-topic, but you were talking about the corporate aspect of television. I’ve always really enjoyed Noam Chomsky’s theories that he’s put forth about television and studying the medium. That people assume that they’re purchasing television and that they’re being shown products that are being advertised to them, but what’s really happening is that the TV shows themselves are selling the audience to the advertisers.

G: Oh yeah

H: And the people watching are the product.

G: I got to see him at St. FX.

H: Did you?

G: Yeah, it wasn’t that great.

H: Really?

G: It was all stuff I’d already read. It was all about post 9/11 bullshit.

H: I’ve got a good book of his over there, Hegemony or Survival.

G: Cool. I’m not going to pass up a chance to go hear Noam Chomsky speak. But that’s definetly true that. Goddamn.

H: It’s one of those moments when I’m proud not to have cable.

G: When I lived with Saje (note: not a typo, he actually spells it that way), we didn’t have TV, and we didn’t have a phone. My parents, I grew up in my first few years, we had cable and we got rid of it because we couldn’t afford it for years and years afterwards. When they got cable back, it was maybe four years ago and I put up the biggest fight I’ve ever put up with my parents about it. They’re strict Christians (pauses, smiles) I can feel this wine, my face is warm.

H: (laughs) It’s not bad, eh?

G: I really like it. I put up a big fight about it because I grew up without it. When you grow up with a free mind, without TV, you grow up with a longer attention span and a freer mind. Being devout Christians, my mom has always taught me that you surround yourself by certain things, you will become influenced by them. That was my argument against getting cable. I’m already a free-thinking person, which is more than anyone else can say, but they wouldn’t be able to say it because they’ve always been surrounded by TV, they don’t understand. They don’t know the difference between no-TV and TV. It was just ridiculous, the bizzare bullshit that I had to go through and now they watch CNN and all the other bullshit. It’s just spin, the whole thing is spin. It’s all selling story spun a certain way for TV. For people to watch it. For people to buy things. Terrorism is nothing more than a capitalist venture to sell more product. It’s just ridiculous. Fear mongering.

H: It’s all fear-mongering. I’ve been thinking a lot about China lately. There’s been all the recalls lately.

G: You know what the recalls are? It sounds to me like North America and everybody who buys from China dug themselves a little hole, and now they’re trying to get out of it, and that’s the only way to get themselves out is to recall everything.

H: There’s a couple of different ideas. My theory? You remember when bird-flu first came out? They said it originated in China. The thing is that just a couple of weeks before the bird-flu first came out, what was the news? The news was that China was overtaking the United States as an economic power. To me, it all seems connected to that. It’s an effort to reign China’s economic abilities in so they can’t compete with the mighty US dollar.

G: All China has to do is say “we’re not accepting the greenback as a form of currency, sorry” and the US is absolutely fucked. The new warfare isn’t guns and ammo and firepower. Economic warfare is what came after the Cold War.

H: There was economic warfare long before the Cold War.

G: There’s still a Cold War, it’s still going on, but…

H: The enemy is less distinct.

G: The enemy is in dollars, which is evident in that the majority of politicians are economists, which is ridiculous. Everytime someone comes into power, it’s someone who knows how to make money.

H: It’s not even specifically economists, but businessmen.

G: Yeah, sorry, not economists whatsoever.

H: Economists are like the back room guys who are coming up with the ideas.

G: No, they’re spinsters.

H: They probably used to be economists. On the other end of the spectrum though, look at Rodney MacDonald. The premier of this province is a former school teacher and fiddle instructor. Say what you want to talk about economists or businessmen being politicians, but does being a school teacher and fiddle instructor teach you how to govern any better than those?

G: You could learn it.

H: You can learn some of it. How to interact with people, to control roustabouts.

G: If you can cater to the people’s needs. Unfortunately, everyone has been led to believe that the people’s needs are all monatary. It’s not the way, godammit.

Next week: Brainwashing, weak minds, religion and the right and wrong of cartoons these days.

Obviously, since I didn’t post on my normal day yesterday I have absolutely nothing original or interesting to say this week. However, I do have some opinions about the creative work of others that I will share with you (all):

Superbad: I don’t know if any of you have seen this yet but it is in fact super good. As well as super dirty. Probably at least half of the extremely vulgar, graphic sexual slang was completely made up for the movie. The homo eroticism gets laid on pretty thick at times and the two main characters can be a bit ace-and-gary-ish at times but all in all I would say it’s not a bad flick. The McLovin’ (Fogle) character’s subplot was the highlight, although I laughed out loud throughout.

Fracture: Anthony Hopkins is creepy as hell as usual, this time as a husband who kills his wife and tries to get away with it by defending himself in court. Ryan Gosling plays the hot shot prosecutor who is also a douche. It kind of reminded me of Primal Fear not only in the badass plot, but especially in its bullshit courtroom interaction loaded with leading questions and witness badgering.

For Your Consideration: This is an older one, a Netflick, if you will. Not nearly as funny as Best in Show or even A Mighty Wind. Mediocrity has a new poster child.

P.S. I just found out from that Wiki article that the voices for The Ambiguously Gay Duo were done by none other than Steven Colbert (Ace) and Steve Carrell (Gary)! I’ll be damned. I did not know that. They sure have come a long way, huh?