this is not a rant about fashion, rather its a rant about music.

when the cost of shipping dropped to epic lows, the fashion industry realized they could do better for them selves by having garments made in economically distressed zones and sold in economically boisterous ones. the fact that as the costs of production and distribution approached zero, there was no way to differentiate ones self and maintain profits, lead the move to "branding". Branding had been around for a long time already, but now became the central role of many corporations. what made a Nike t-shirt worth 25$ when a 3 pack of Hanes was selling for 6$? Branding. corporations hollowed out, focusing on building "mind share" to gain market share. advertisement started taking on a near holy role. Nike turns huge profits despite the fact that they now produce almost nothing but commercials. All actual goods being contracted out for production. Most companies that failed to do this were wiped out.

But this is not a rant about fashion, rather its a rant about music.

With advent of P2P file sharing and the internet, the media industries costs of distribution was entirely taken over by the end user. The costs and concerns of storage, shipping and production racing toward zero. The media companies rather than adapt opted to sue the very people removing their costs. they rely on rationalized concepts of ownership and arguments attempting moralistic parallels. Is there a difference between an mp3 gained by file sharing and one gained through official downloading? Not to the end user. The media producers have failed to even attempt to differentiate the 2.

when i listen to a classic album i don't concern my self with the payment structure of the orchestra or compensation paid to those who wired the studio for sound, or any of the other of hundreds of people who were involved in the creation of the sound. i just pay attention to the sounds.

Some companies have sprung up realizing profit can be made. many web sites sell advertising on pages that do nothing but facilitate file sharers. Its the media producers who are failing to realize that users are willing to pay for the hardware to store the media and the bandwidth to transmit it. Ether adapt or diminish. As Netflicks is now streaming content directly to X-boxes and Playstions, Blockbuster is desperately struggling to avoid bankruptcy. a result of failing to understand how to maximize the new realities of the economy.

the i-zombi Deceleration of Corporatist War.

ok so i have countless times explained that paying below the low income cut off line is basically saying that an employee must take a vow of poverty for the company. This is wrong in my mind. all my ranting and raving will not change it.

Instead its economic warfare.

i cant wage war like Google or General Electric. I simply don't have the resources. (because i'm paid poverty wages).

But i can wage a guerrilla campaign!

In order to blend in i give nice customer service. they say customer service is key to business. But i royally piss off one person each shift. to the point that if they return, they are quite appeased. I damage at least one package as well. depending on my managers actual treatment of me i may or may not damage inventory. (manager deals with returns).

It is the customer that makes the business.

it is the customer that tis with in my direct reach. i am both figuratively and literally nearer them than the CEO's who dictate this poverty on us.

The customer that shops at a minimum wage labor camp is not only consenting by default to the overlords treatment of us, but also the necessary enabler.

any guilt i feel for my annoyance in their day is more than eclipsed by the shame i feel each month as i beg for money to cover the rent.

for those that say " if you didnt damage the product the company could afford to pay you more", they know nothing of economics or human behavior. action arises out of incentive. if the corporation has no incentive to pay better then they will not chose to. I can not plead with the CEO's humanity to raise the pay wage, as any office drone who put forth that action with out showing an end "gain" would be fired and forced to live on the front lines with me.

The only way to bring about this change is to spread the word to all povertywagers. and when we are the "victim" of our own type of "attacks", we simply inform the solder in front of us that we too are in the war and they must fill there daily anti-service quota with some one else!

listen to your heart?

it seems odd to me when ever some one tells me to listen to my heart, or conscience or "that small voice". you see at one point in time i had auditory hallucinations. now don't worry it only said nice things, but obeying them would prove disastrous. theres a world of difference between thinking , thats a nice bum i should slap it, and doing it... to a stranger... on a bus.. full of paraplegics...

I jest, but seriously could you possibly live in a world where the "id" ruled? or even living in a world where my id ruled me...every time some one tells me to just be myself or listen to my heart I want to get mad at them, i know they don't want me to go to prison, but thats what there advice amounts to. maybe there are people out there who's little voice says "do the dishes", and "stay home tonight and study", maybe. but my voice says "toss the plates out a 3rd floor window and see if you can create an impromptu mosaic" or " stay home tonight and doodle naked people instead of studying".

I'm just saying, please don't tell me to listen to my heart unless you really think i should obey the little genital shaking voice in that situation.

thanks

(hip wagging)

later you guys!

mess

emotionally i must have finally reached puberty. It seems today i am no longer content ( or what passes for me being content) with labeling the mess i make of life as art. I now crave another mess maker. I want to corroborate with someone on a project. maybe an epic display of life as mess, or mess as life, or ... well i'm open to other themes. its not the medium or the message, its the art, artist, experience, and collaboration.

i zombie (too)

the little box screams and my eyes open. in a flash the world transitions from meaningful, to real. the world forces me to crave brains, decisions have to be made. my feet hurt when i wake up from spewnding hours standing on tiled floor. just part of some cosmic penance i must pay for. I must have been a natzi or worse in a past life, and now i work retail to atone for those sins. I hobble to the washroom and feel the cold tile on my shoulder as i lean. the wall creaks under my weight , but it holds. it has to hold, as i drain my self of the work my kidneys have done through the night. What must have they been in a past life? the mind recoils against chaos theory. its easer to believe i was a natzi marching thousands in to bleach showers; to believe that i could choose to be so evil, and that this life is my cosmic jail term. instinctively i reject that this life just happens. cause and effect, my scientific brain pleads for a reason. "no rest for the wicked" i murmur to the emptiness. I'm quoting a kit-cat commercial.

the showers never warm, but at least today theres water pressure, some days it just fades away. as if the pluming in my building has gone on dialysis. those days you stand under the trickle of watter using the sides of your hand like a squeegee trying to pull the shampoo away from your self. whats left of the personality still feels shame when it realizes that its failed in this squeegee task. it still manages embarrassment, when some customer with rotting tooth breath pauses from berating me for the pricing decisions he feels i have control over, pauses and breathes the rotting tooth smell heavily at me, looks in disgust at the soap residue left lingering on my collar. the personality still manages shame. i wince slightly as the gum i'm chewing to make sure that same decaying bone smell doesn't waft into another's face, the gum finds its way in to one of my own missing fillings, maybe i kicked puppies in my last life as well.

i look to the stupid with a mixture of envy and rage. i want to bash there head in and gnaw on the gray matter inside. it makes sense to them that a part time employee sets the price, is at fault. what wonderful deeds must they have done in there last lives to have earned the blissfulness of being stupid.

theres a sign by the punch in clock that reminds me to smile, because to the customer , i am the company. i wounder what the brains of the moron who devised that sign would taste like, would it taste better if i had fallen on him as he submitted his little slogan to his superior, begging for approval like a dog thats fetched the wrong stick?

mmmm brains BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINSSSSSSSSSSSSS for the love of god please some one show you have brains!

i zombie (part one)

this isn't life. like ok, i'm not dead, my mom doesn't have to grieve and no one has to deal with remains, but i'm far from alive. any time i fill out profiles on singles sites, i post camping as one of my interests. but how the fuck would i know. i haven't gone in over 3 years. its been months since i've seen a family member. I had originally thought that when i moved i could web cam in for special family occasions, but it seems that after the first attempt that went bad because no one thought to tell me the day, that it has become to much of a hassle. My own grandmother sent me a letter informing me that it would be to much of a hassle to take a free flight out to see me. this isnt a pity party, i'm just pointing out that what i'm doing isn't living. my social interactions have eroded to the 2 or 3 people who click like on facebook statuses. I check that shit hourly in the vain hope that some how my life is still connected to this world.

I'm surviving off a part time job at minimum wage. cant go home because i have to pay for the hovel i live in. land lords dont give a shit if youre a student, you have to sign a year lease you know. Fuck tards any way. so i cant afford rent in 2 places.

ya part time work is awesome for the time off, if you enjoy sitting around broke all day waiting fro your shit evening hours where you spend a quarter of your shifts pay on microwave rice that you have to down in 15 minuets, less if you count the 2 minuets it takes to walk to the lunch room; and two minuets back.

i have some friends, but the problem with new friends is it costs money to do stuff. we don't know each other well enough to be ok with killing a day playing vids, or window shopping or even just heading to the park.

this isnt pity , its just the realization that nothing i do has any resemblance to having a life. Impoverished student is closer to being dead than alive, except you know the others having to go through the grieving thing. Im not offering the world happiness, all my existence is gaining for the planet is to stave off a negative emotion. preventing a negative is hardly a life.

if i could get some hours at work, just enough to get the bills covered and let me book a week off, id go hitchhiking, it doesn't cost any thing except the lost work time. and it would have to be more interesting than this living death. in the movies when some thing is dead but still walking around, we call them zombies, and they shoot em in the head.

ya thanx grannie your letter made me feel much better

cellar door

My status as an Aboriginal has always been for the purpose of exclusion. I have been considered white or Native depending entirely what would serve the other persons ends, never my own. Once in grade 9 on a late Friday night I was walking home from a friend’s house. A truck with the cab and box full of drunken high school “”jocks” roared past me. They yelled “Fu-ing Indian” as they slammed on their brakes, piled out of the truck, and chased me down. I took a few hits and kicks before I was able to escape and jumped over a few fences, running through people’s yards. I made my way home by going through fields and parks trying to avoid road ways. I emerged from the last field a block from my house. As I passed the ally, a Blackfoot man named Darcy came out. He called me a “fu-ing whitey” and punched me a few times. As I was already sore, I ran. This night is just the most extreme case of a pattern that has followed my entire life. I was excluded from Whites along with the other Indians; and excluded from the Indians for being white. My high school friend, (name removed), finally told me she couldn’t be seen with me anymore because her other friends were accusing her of becoming an apple like me. An apple was someone who was red on the outside but white on the inside. The connotation was someone who had turned their back on their culture. Even as I was saddened, it was the first time I had felt included. At least they were able to see I was red.

I don’t feel white on the inside. I was just raised outside my culture. The only story I have to connect me is one my grandmother tells. She was adopted by a white couple and raised on the prairies. 70 Years ago the Indians would still occasionally go past with their travois. She tells me of how her mother would hide her in the cellar or a closet for fear that they would try to steal her back. Afterwards her mother would tell her about how they were bad people. And point to the fact they never took care of their horses properly. When she grew up she started trying to discover who her birth parents were. After years of looking, she hasn’t been able to find the truth. She’s been told the microfilm that the adoption records were put on to in the 60’s or 70’s have a thumb print distorting the area containing her information. She’s scoured old newspapers, taking clippings and trying to compare information. There are theories and speculation, but she remains a woman with no history.

On school records and government forms, they ask if you want to be recognised as an aboriginal. The next box asks for a status number. If you leave it blank, either your application disappears or you receive a phone call asking you for proof. The nice lady eventually offers to just “whiteout your mistake” and check the other box. You say “thank you”. And spend the rest of the day avoiding road ways, looking apprehensively at alleys.

They can’t steal you back, But your still locked in the cellar.

veiled revolutionaries

The burka ban fails S.15 of the charter of rights and freedoms.(the one we pushed through without Quebec, which then spawned the Bloc).When the supreme court tells them they have to remove their law, the separatist are going to rile everyone up about "Anglo-phones pushing them around" (how dare we deny their right to be bigoted racists?). This will cause them to try to vote for separation. Which, the supreme court ("member them?) Have already ruled Quebec can't have.

Cue movie-commercial voice, " When they had no legal recourse left, they grabbed their guns, ... This time its Constitutional!"

NDP = Tory?

in two steps, Nova Scotia is raising minimum wage by 1.2%. Also in one step and sooner, they are raising the HST by 2%. This means that the NDP have decided that before any inflation is counted in, the poorest people in the province will have there standard of life reduced by .8%. This was decided because it was thought that changing income tax (which the poor are reimbursed for), would put too much of a burden on management and the business class. since when did NDP mean Tory?

Obviously as businesses are going to have to raise prices to help cover the HST increase they pay, So i know Inflation is going to happen from this as well. I'm Fucking glad that as a student I can be the one to take the brunt of the rising infrastructure costs.

flow chart

when faced with serious decisions, i follow this pattern. If I can poop on it, I poop on it. If i can't poop on it because its not close enough to poop on it, then i poop on something like it. if I can't poop on it cause its not something you can poop on then it doesn't exist and therefore not a problem. -lessons learned from a puppy.

i may be evil and an ass and all the things you hate... but sometimes i realize we will win and mostly this is hella alot of fun.......

A quote from the Dalai Lama in 1996:

"Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes-that is the majority---as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. . . I think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist".

Why everything (culture, music, fashion, people) sucks.

Anything that appeals to you on a unique and individual way, won’t appeal to others in that same special way.in fact because people vary, someone will hate it. And those like you who do like it will feel slightly different to it. If X is truly a special just for you thing, fits your tastes perfectly. It is unlikely to be mass produced. And because the world is large and full of people, and you don’t see or talk to most people in it, you are likely to never find it.

It is unlikely to be mass produced because companies take any idea, with all its uniqueness and individuality, and round off the sharp edges that some will find annoying in an attempt to make it more marketable to more people. Because companies have the size and resources to mass market, what you are likely to come in to contact with are these safer more homogenised items.

At the risk of offending and therefore turning an ambivalent but potential, Y (consumer, customer, fan, friend), in to an avid and potentially dangerous obstacle to our success, we all try to “soften” our presentations. University has taught me more about being less inflammatory than any concrete knowledge I ever had before I arrived here.

So I say if it’s all safe, and ok, but nothing is perfect and just for me, then fuck it all. I shit on your world, plant bombs in your malls, and most of all delete your shitty MP3’s.

Thank-you, come-again!

more Brillo moments

a friend of mine has listed "making the world a better place" as an interest on Facebook. this causes me to have questions.

how do we measure whether we are making the world a better place? are we to gauge it by over all happiness? for instance if we add one more laugh have we succeeded? what if we have to add a hundred cries to get the one more laugh? it hardly sounds like progress to have 20 born to poverty to get one born to luxury and count that as progress.

what if we count happiness divided by people?

forget the obvious torturing Paris Hilton, makes many happy. 1persons increase of pain disappears in the math when its counted in to the millions who would would be more happy. But the real implications of this is simply killing unhappy people also makes the ratio better. we cant count just raising the living standard of someone. because for every person who lives a "standard" north amarican lifestyle we need several in poverty and sweatshops. if we get rid of the sweatshops then we reduce the living standard of us all. i'm being poor to make the world a better place? this sounds wrong as well.

also do we have to adjust this math over time? what if we all have a kick-ass world party tonight. every one has a good time. but tomorrow we are all hung over and in debt and cant afford shoes or medications. (shoes may not sound like such a big deal to you, but its january in canada as i write this, and i aint walking to school barefoot, i just aint!).

what i'm saying is i have questions. will some one please give me the actual data set of what i am to count to make the world a better place? ( and then get the hell out of my way while i commit the atrocious acts required to do that). or will every one just admit that "making the world a better place" is entirely subjective. and if it is just subjective,please tell me how come me making myself happy doesn't count?

Brillo Bombs

a little self loathing in my self love. think of it as masturbating with Brillo. this trying to be like others bull shit is wearing me down. it takes a lot of energy to try and second guess myself, try to give a shit what others are thinking or feeling at all moments. after all how am i supposed to reconcile the notion of "be yourself and dont care if others judge you" with the notion that i have to "think first about how others will feel"? feelings and thoughts are part and parcel of the same thing.

And you cant control others, not really anyway.

what i'm saying is i may be alone with my mind. (aren't we all?) But i feel that its not worth being like you to be with you. any of you, all of you.

You wont be like me, i understand. just understand the feelings mutual. and accepting that fact, i refuse to continue to pretend that we are the same, or want to be.

i'll entertain my self thanx.

blowing shit up makes me happy, if shrapnel doesn't please you, might i suggest you GET THE HELL AWAY FROM THE BLASTING CAPS!

a pulse drumming in my ears

this one time at band camp,...

i sacrificed a stray to the rock gods,

when the camp counsolers came in to my bloud staind cabin, one asked me what i was doing... so i tossed him the skull from inside the pentagram, he said i was sick, i asked why he was the one pukeing... it took years to convince the doctors that i didn't need need them to have a sound mind... My mind Is filled with sound!