Hollywood Garbage: The Mechanization of Desire

I might be in the minority on this, but so many movies these days feel like they should at least be mindless fun, but instead they're just mindless.

Pacific Rim, Superman, Transformers part who-gives-a-fuck, Teenage Mutant Ninja Whatever, etc. It's a little depressing that we're all hailing Guardians of the Galaxy as the artistic and spiritual apex of humanity because it wasn't just a 3 hour long lens flare, though it does serve as a terrific case-in-point for how the vacuity of recent Blockbusters is not in the concept. Even a talking Raccoon can be relate-able if handled right.

This is where "long form" (what else can we call TV shows that often aren't aired on TV?) has been stepping up to the plate. True Detective, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, etc. have been capitalizing on the desire for stories that are, well, stories. Something more than a Pavlovian repetition of set up, conflict, resolve over and over again.

That is all most pornography aspires to, and that's what makes the new normal tent-pole movies pornographic. Clearly it's not nudity or cum shots. No, it's the reduction of desire to a machine like repetition. The mechanization of desire is its own annihilation. The same metric that is being used to gamify all human behavior creates the deep structure of Hollywood screenplays. There's a reason, after all, that all these movies begin to feel the same, despite the fact that the concepts are different on paper. The underlying structure is fundamentally the same, with increasingly minor variations.

Of course we can expect this, with the amount of financial risk that is presented by movie production. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to reduce that risk, by falling back on predictions we can make from our own hard-wired responses? This basic idea is of course nothing new, it goes back to Aristotle, possibly before. And there is, thankfully, a great deal of uncertainty about the big picture in terms of those hard-wired responses. What, after all, is "human nature"? That's a surprisingly complicated question in the macro-scale abstract, but it's fairly straight-forward and easy to test on a micro- scale.

Adorno was skeptical about the implications of myth and propaganda, as all of us ought to be. And yet when you search for analysis of gamification, script writing, and game design, you will mostly find Utopian visions of gamification as method of "hacking our own nervous system." Yet, restrictive as it may be, we may want to look to Adorno's analysis of television and ideology, critical models, myth and the Dialectic of Enlightenment before we proclaim our ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in such a way. (There is nevertheless some irony in the "long form" being one of the most open and creative entertainment mediums at the moment, considering stereotypes of television that existed, and which were more or less accurate, as recently as a decade ago.)

Flipping this on its head, we might wonder about literal pornography. If it is the application of mechanical commodity that makes pornography, rather than the presence of sexual content, then we have a handy shorthand for the much sought after dividing line between erotica and pornography. It is not the presence of sexual content, it is not whether ones desire is engaged, but rather whether that desire is an end in itself, and whether that end, ultimately, has been mechanized as the root commodity of the media-as-product. There's some difficulty in discussing erotica, let alone producing it, without some patina of pretension, and yet there it is: erotica exists as something more than just its own ends. Perhaps what that is will remain as nebulous as the distinction between self, soul, and brain matter. But if we ignore it, then there is nothing in this world to keep us from nihilism, and nothing that might keep us from the horror of the simulacra, the anonymous self-less repetition, every one of us nothing more than a mask strapped atop a void.

Also, it's pretty hard to argue with a good pair of tits. Even the most craven pornography has that on the average PG-rated Hollywood Blockbuster.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Doll-house Narratives

gordie grant

The recent "Married To A Doll" piece on the Atlantic highlights a story that has been going around for years, about "iDollators," those that take on dolls as love partners.
Rather than do the usual gawking and commenting about how "weird" it all is, I'd rather comment on something that occurred to me as I was reading the interview: when the other person is removed from a relationship, and their shell remains, you get a clear view of just how much projection is involved in all so-called "normal" relationships. So many of us are taught to make a possession of our lovers or mates, to evaluate ourselves, even our value, based on their perceived value.

This is something less than hyperbole. A December 2013 "Psychology Today" article asks, "Is Your Partner Good Enough?", going on to explain,

In the book Passions Within Reason, Robert Frank writes about a woman who asked her friend the following questions: Why do I fall in love with people that are not interested in me? And why don't I care about those that fall in love with me? Her collegue replied, "you're an 8 chasing after 10's and being chased by 6's." How could this woman know she is an 8 and not a 7 or 9? And should she stop dreaming about 10's?

Once you evaluate your partner is inferior to you, you are faced with making a romantic compromise. The concession here does not refer to whether the person loves you or is a suitable partner but whether -- in your opinion -- he or she is above, below, or equal to you or to the other partners available to you.

We act as if this behavior is somehow normal, and Davecat's is abnormal, but both of them show the exact same kind of thinking. He has merely applied those needs and the narratives that feed them to a synthetic proxy. And moreover, as dolls don't have agency, what he is doing isn't reducing a person to the status of possession in the process.

The narratives that we tell ourselves about our partners are in many ways realer to us than they are. What if they are so satisfying that we in fact live within a relationship to those narratives, rather than to the people themselves?

Both Sidore and Elena have two backstories. One in which Sidore is the daughter of a Japanese father and an English mother, and was born in Japan and raised in Manchester, England. Elena's is similar; she grew up in Vladivostok, Russia. The other backstory they have is that they're Dolls. Self-aware Dolls, but Dolls nonetheless. In one backstory they have favorite foods; in the other, they don't eat, becaus they don't have digestive tracts... because they're Dolls. You get the idea.
I've had that dichotomy for as long as I've had Shi-chan and Lenka, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. As I write their characters, they each express themselves through the Internet; they both have their own Twitterfeeds, and Shi-chan has a Tumblr. Playing up the Doll aspect allows me to get comedy from the situation, such as when Sidore wonders why I don't just remove my sinuses when my allergies flare up, but writing detailed histories for them exercises my creative writing skills, and makes them more 'human'. Like I said, the dichotomy probably won't be solved any time soon.

Isn't the goal of a relationship to take, accept and love them as they are? Certainly not to evaluate their value as a commodity... except of course that the entire history of marriage is based on property and ownership. Perhaps it is little surprise that we should still be carrying around that cultural baggage.

To let a relation be what it is, enrich and challenge our lives, and pass on when it is their time. These are a few the assumptions that let me to polyamory, because I noticed a trend in myself when I was in monogamous relationships that I tried to change the people I was with, tried to make them "the one," because, after all, if you only have one partner they had best satisfy those needs. But other people don't exist to satisfy our needs.

Dolls, perhaps, can do that. But not human beings.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Huffington Post Polyamory

Wed night, 11pm.

Co-wrote an article for Huffington Post UK: 

All of a sudden, polyamory is everywhere.
Articles flood the internet, many of them opinion pieces written by people who (so far) identify as monogamous. One of the reasons this is happening is to keep the news cycle churning now that gay marriage seems to be approaching normalcy. The clue is in the name; news is characterized by an obsession with the "new".
But in the process of giving polyamory a make-over that everyone can identify with, the only truly radical thing about the ideology is completely lost. To sugar-coat an unspoken truth: polyamory seeks to upend a many thousand-year-old narrative about ownership. We don't own our daughter's virginity. Husbands don't own their wives. Wives don't own their husbands. We may seek to avoid hurting those we love -- any healthy person (poly or otherwise) with a conscience does - but we do not own one another, and at the end of the day, our decisions, and our lives, are our own.
The prevalent made-over polyamory picture for the mainstream is of a hetero-normative couple that likes to swing on the weekends as shown in US Showtime series "Polyamory: Married and Dating". This is arguably one version of poly depending on your definition of 'love'. But so are many other versions. So much so that there is no true picture of polyamory because every instance is as unique as we are, and unique as our most intimate relations can be. We are no longer mere commodities.
In recognizing that we cannot own others, we give up our claim on other's bodies, but at the same time gain a new claim on our own freedom. The radical potential of polyamory is actually that might shift our entire societal structure. 

Full article. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Sex and the Lustful Animal

Following up on yesterday's post, here's another you may want to look over,

Most of us are convinced that we excel at being clearheaded, humane thinkers when it comes to sex. We appeal, and admirably so, to notions such as harm and consent. But since most of us aren’t anthropologists, we W.E.I.R.D. people (the anthropologist Joe Henrich’s apt acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”) often assume a false obviousness along these lines of harm and consent that, interestingly enough, simply isn’t there. Scientists have found that since we would be harmed by a certain sex act,we presume others would be harmed as well. 

In fact, cultural relativism is the most glaring sign that the lion’s share of our sexual ethics is arbitrary, given that our intuitive feeling of what’s “normal” and “deviant” hinges largely on our cultural indoctrination. In the past, for instance, a proper Crow gentleman wasn’t expected to simply woo the object of his desire over a slice of homemade juneberry pie. Instead, the tradition for a man so smitten involved his crawling up to the woman’s tent in the middle of the night and fishing around with his hand under the flaps for her body. And female Crow informants explained to the anthropologists inquiring about the tradition that this manual search in the dark for her orifices was an especially romantic first move. “If he is successful,” wrote the researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach, “a man may by this device persuade the woman to have intercourse with him later on.” If he were successful in our society, he’d be signing his name to the sex offender registry before dawn, if he still had a hand. But in the cultural context of these Native Americans, most women, presumably, favored this custom. (Scientific American.)

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Subjectivity and Sadism

There's a paragraph in what is an otherwise mostly remedial article on the subject that I think bears inspection, as it's a sentiment that needs to be repeated more often,

Sadism isn’t the only paraphilic category for which the question of harm can get murky for psychiatrists as well as for anyone who has ever contemplated another person’s unusual sex life. As the lovely Kate Upton reminded us earlier, a universally objective reality simply doesn’t exist in the present domain; what’s harmful to me isn’t necessarily harmful to you, and vice versa. It will change as soon as I put this comma right here, but as of this very moment there are exactly 7,088,343,858 people on the planet. If all but one of these individuals were to experience harm in exactly the same way from a certain sex act, that solitary person is nevertheless just as right (or just as wrong) as all the others combined. This is because there’s no “correct” way to experience a sex act, only individual differences in subjective realities. It may be a moot point, since it’s not logic that guides culture but instead sheer social mass shouldering into it with brute force, but nonetheless 7,088,343,857 shared subjective realities do not add up to a single objective fact. What was harmful to them was not harmful to him, and that, as they say, is that. Or to rephrase: one person’s horror story is another’s erotica. And I’m quite sure our vorarephile Bernd Jürgen Brandes would tell you so too, if only he were still around.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Disability, ability, and bow-chicka-wow-wow.

As I have come to accept my (relatively mild) disability as a permanent part of who I am, it has nevertheless forced me to look differently at myself as well as the world around me.

It is possible that it will not be healthy for me again to work a "normal" 9-5 job, at least one that follows mainstream American norms, and it makes me wonder if that work is in fact ever healthy for anyone.

I am still more than competent at what I'm good at, but our society puts expectations on allowing us to work that demand we be in every way able-bodied. It makes sense that if you have a chronic back injury and chronic pain, you can't work a stocking job -- but why shouldn't we be allowed to adapt to our own strengths and limitations rather than not be allowed to be productive members of a workplace at all?

Even if we are allowed the "right" to enter the workplace, the disabled are likely going to be subject to teasing or outright abuse. I know because for the years that as I tried to fit myself in, at the behest of family, peers, and necessity, I accumulated more trauma from workplace abuse than anything else. And it is likely far worse for those with more immediately apparent challenges.

Never again.

Similarly, it is possible that our concept of individualism makes it difficult for most people to conceive of being in any way disabled, and being a sexual commodity.

Moving beyond my direct experience, I'd like you to consider some of these: 

"Artificial limbs are usually designed to be as inconspicuous as possible. Yet here was an amputee proudly stretching her bejeweled leg before a stadium of flashing cameras and millions of TV viewers across the world.
"Generally the whole technology is moving towards trying to recapture a lifelike limb that looks realistic and also acts realistic in motion," said de Oliveira.
"In this instance I'm doing the complete opposite and I think it does capture that whole childlike imagination -- it's like being a superhero with super powers." http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/24/world/europe/alternative-limb-project/

... 

"How we judge ourselves is inextricably linked to how we think others perceive us. This is a problem because – and this isn’t much of a secret – disability isn’t sexy.
Open almost any magazine and you’ll find an article about what makes for an attractive partner. We all value different qualities – whether it’s intelligence, sense of humour, looks, or financial security. No one ever says disability. Whatever – who wants their disability to be a sexual commodity? The problem is, we never talk about disability and sexuality in the same sentence. And the result is that people often fear their disability is an active turn-off." http://buff.ly/11vSuf8

The fact is that even if you are in the prime of health, this is a temporary condition. You will with absolute certainty come to face either injury, chronic illness, or death. Age will reduce some capacities, in this culture that idolizes youth and ignores the benefits of wisdom. How much thought have you given to cultural ideas of ability, injury, and sex? What about your personal perspective?

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Sex and Books

I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one with a "hot babysitter reading bedtime stories" fetish. This project is interesting, in addition to the obvious, for pushing ever so slightly at the boundaries of what is considered sexual media. In Philadelphia there is an ongoing project involving attractive women reading stories naked, but I find this project far more interesting, as they are clothed and the texts are chosen by the reader as some of their favorites, rather than being erotica as in the first instance.

Now we just need to figure out how to wire our brains to have orgasms from reading alone, and us authors will have a much easier time selling books!

It’s a beyond sexy project called Hysterical Literature, and the idea is as simple as it is brilliant: gorgeous, gorgeous girls are sitting down at a table, filmed in black and white by one fixed camera, fully clothed in nice outfits. They are reading a passage from one of their favorite books. Under the table, however, something else is happening.
“I’ve been told to dress as I would for a date with a man, not a boy”, remembers Stoya.

Full article. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

7 Unrules of Polyamory

There have been several posts on this site about polyamory that have pulled a significant amount of traffic (about 10,000 and 8,000 and 6,000 hits respectively.) 

Previous posts:

• Polyamory and postmodernagamy
• Polyamory Time enough for Love
• Polyamory Goddess Cult

This is a friend of mine, I think she looks cute as hell
(though that's beside the point) and hope that in leaving her
un-named she won't rip my balls off.
Because isn't the juxtaposition just fucking precious?

All of them dealt with different elements of the topic, and all in a rather tongue-in-cheek way. I would like to clear up a few issues about this topic in what I hope is a more straight-forward way. I am doing this because I have been approached by many strangers that seem confused about some rather simple elements of this issue.

So, here are 7 un-rules of Polyamory. Enjoy them, and remember that they are un-rules, and can only at best be understood as guidelines. I hope they spawn some discussion that doesn't come down to argument over labels. The curse of polyamory is labels and laws and rules and taxonomy. Drives me nuts, and honestly, it's not necessary unless if it's a fetish of yours. If it is, enjoy your fetish, but it's not a fetish of mine, so please, let me have mine and you can have yours.

Enjoy!

Full Metal Orgasm and SEXPUNK

NATEFER

One of many possible outcroppings of both cyber-punk cyber-erotica and cyber--...(tenatacles?) is the indie-produced Full-Metal Orgasm. I wanted to point your direction that way, while opening up the stage to more varied discussion of genres and sub-genres around this area. I of course have no had my coffee, nor any FUCKING coffee at all because of this FUCKING holiday, and my dependence on the local indie cafes around here... so we can expect more typical write ups on here as per our usual... oh who the fuck am I kidding. Here's a bit about Full Metal Orgasm.

Full-Metal Orgasm is a sexy and intelligent adult fiction eMagazine for the digital age. Inspired by a multitude of media and figures such as Heavy Metal magazine, Shirow Masamune, ReiQ, Penthouse Comix, Jun Tsukasa, Demitys, Toshio Maeda, Jin-roh, Pop Chaser and Robot Sex Life, it encapsulates the best of otherworldly sex. From stories featuring gynoids to tentacles, transhumans and aliens alike, FMO calls upon new and veteran writers, artists and other creatives to spawn new worlds and sexual fantasies without boundaries -- all downloadable to your favorite device in DRM-free PDF and mobi formats. Available on the Kindle, and for direct sale from the publisher. More information at http://sexpunk.tumblr.com or search online for Full-Metal Orgasm.

"The nature of modern life is obsession..."

Here are a few more if that does it for you:

• heaven4d.com TERACE Heaven 4D
• 
• Heavy Metal
• 2000 AD Online
• :::::::: REIQ Digital Artist :::::::::

How does this relate to mythology? I refer you to our mission statement. Thanks for all the fish.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Postmodernogamy, Polyamory, and the Marriage Narrative

By James Curcio
Postmodernogamy is a "playful perversion of language," a "facetious neologism" that I've been using for several years. (I'll explain the quotation in a second.)

I mostly used it because I've often gotten into pointless arguments with strangers on polyamory forums for reasons passing my understanding, perhaps having to do with not kowtowing to some kind of imaginary party line, or because my sense of humor is very easily taken the wrong way by strangers that are, in my opinion, clearly over sensitive about being politically correct, whatever the hell that means. (Who knew that the term "tarded" isn't acceptable? I mean, fuck!)

I've also employed it because I'm just a patently absurd being, and the term "Postmodernogamy" is patently absurd. That's not unlike Kierkegaard's ultimate justification for Christianity. (If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.) We are meant for each other, like two soul-mates. Or something.

Let me explain it to you in my usual round-about way.

A conversation sparked up on a friend's Facebook, off of his use of the term Postmonogamy, a different term altogether though I was only half awake when I read it so I somehow assumed that he had said "postmodernogamy." And a conversation ensued which went somewhere both insightful and absurd, doubly so now that I realize it was all based on a misreading on my part. I in fact have very little to contribute to the idea of postmonogamy. I think it's unnecessary, and I'm sure we'll have a faux debate about that any day now.

But in the meantime I'd like to share my thoughts with you on the transition of relationships from the archiac to modern to postmodern age. Hopefully I needn't spell the general narrative of that obvious mythically implied linearity. It was the stuff of most of our education, formal and otherwise. De Sade foretold the death of the social convention of marriage, a "slap in the face to the Apollonian man." De Sade was, arguably, shaking his cage bars and fighting the formality of his age in the only ways he knew how. But there does seem to be a hysteria evident throughout much of the populace today, evidenced by the conflicts over gay marriage, and the forecoming arguments about progressive group marriage (as opposed to the regressive forms as seen in Mormonism) that are only beginning to hit the News.

The argument goes that marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman, and should this be contested, should it be sufficiently compromised, the entire fabric of society will collapse. We will revert to man-apes. Jesus will rise from the dead (again?!) and unleash his zombie hoards. Horrific stuff. Unless if you like zombies, which apparently some people do.

If our society hangs from such a fragile thread, if we're dangling so precipitously from the edge of the cliff, then it seems inevitable that we will slide to the bottom. I say we do it champagne glasses in hand. But let's back up a moment. Isn't it plainly apparent that marriage has nothing to do with biology? My wife and I kissed (and did other things) with several wonderful ladies at our wedding after-party, and I've yet to see a single zombie. (Though we should really get married more often, it seems to produce excellent parties, not to mention apparently getting women riled up. Even though that was unlikely the cause, it's still fun to attribute wildly.)

The restrictions applied to marriage, or applied through marriage, are representative of culturally normalizing forces within the society itself. They do not represent some kind of natural, let alone categorical, imperative. Though, of course, the pair bonding of mammals for the purpose of procreation does represent a biological imperative and I'll get to that in a moment.

This is EXACTLY what being polyamorous is like.
ALL THE TIME. Right, Charlie Sheen?

I don't say this as some kind of opponent of monogamy. My contention is with the de facto expectation that it is enforced as the norm in all cases, and I have a reservation about the heirarchy that is formed in modern life: rampant promiscuity when "dating" and "free" to either an ongoing string of serial monogamous relationships, or "settling down" which also implies "shutting out." I've lost more friends, at least practically speaking, to marriage than cancer or any other disease. I would not like to confine myself to this strict narrative.

What are the alternatives, and what the hell does this have to do with postmodernism? Often the accusation leveled at bisexuality and polyamory alike, when other options are expended, is that it is selfish. This accusation is meant to immediately carry a negative connotation, I imagine, thanks to Abrahamic morality. (Which so often uses piety to mask various forms of selfishness, but that's another thing.)

Though any relationship that endures can't be based entirely on selfishness, I still have to question the underlying logic being employed here. What does it mean to be selfish in these cases?

There was a speech given by a Canadian author and playwright whose name is eluding me at the moment called "The Virtue of Selfishness." It was directed at the graduating class of a specialized school -- they were all going into social work. And he asked, in a nutshell, "how can you help others if you cannot help yourself?" (Ayn Rand also had some things to say about the virtues of selfishness but I don't like her politics so I'm biased.)

If we shut ourselves down or make ourselves in the image of what our partner wants us to be, strictly, then we can't be of any service to them. I have often seen a pattern in the most claustrophobic relationships that partners fall for something in someone, and then suffocate it and find themselves dissatisfied with the person they helped engineer. I'm not talking about compromise here, that is an essential part of any relationship. As always it is easy to paint abstract pictures in absolutes when reality tends to fall somewhere in-between.

There isn't, on the flip side, an inherent virtue in selfishness, either. Without any regard for anyone else, the only alliances we can forge are along the axis of very temporary mutual best interests. However, in less extreme cases, if we're being honest, it is the maintenance of mutual best interest that any relationship is maintained. Without that it coasts on inertia only until such a time that a stronger gravitational force, so to speak, pulls it to a new course.

Finally, I can get to my actual point: 

Based on the ideology of those that oppose gay as well as open marriage, the ends towards which marriage are directed are progeny and the maintenance of a certain social order. This is the biological imperative I spoke of conjoined with a set of social rules and expectations which, though they vary by place and time in some ways -- for instance arranged marriages are no longer the norm in the Western world -- they tend towards a fairly similar pattern, with the exception of cultural outliers. (Such as matriarchal Native American tribes, etc.)

This is the archaic and modernist marriage, which implies teleology as the establishment of progeny as successors is a movement towards an end, one's own end, and in terms of time as well a stratification of life is implied.

Let's look at the pattern. birth, childhood and play, young adulthood -- experimentation and social training, college and breaking off from parents, the period of dating which is a code word in many cases for casual sex and genetic sorting (finding a suitable mate), marriage, and a shift of emphasis then on creating a platform for the life that is to come. Then, the long period of toil until the "golden" period when the young have left the nest and the now elderly can reflect before death. This pattern changes slightly by society but it is ingrained by various mythologies and seems mostly constant world-wide. It is re-enforced by the myths, by the laws, and by the possible presecution of the rest of society, should anyone contest these "God given" rules. Women are still stoned to death for adultery in some places of in the world, hard as it is to believe.

The "end of history" that harkens postmodernism is easily reflected in a skeptical attitude towards these patterns; hierarchical methods of time and behavior categorization are replaced with more fluid nonlinear approaches. The jumble can remain a jumble, chaos is striated through its own self organizing principles, and our task becomes simply being wherever we are, recognizing, responding, seeking to be aware-- sometimes to suffer and fail miserably but, we hope, fearlessly -- rather than trying to organize the process of our lives through an imposed order that comes from without. Life is a series of flows. There are heirarchies and orders, but they are self-structuring, and tend to collapse and reform on their own whims. To put it far less abstractly, we aren't the ones in control. We never were, we never will be. The conscious mind is a little air bubble in a giant block of jello, and yes. I know this post has nothing to do with squirrels that are also whiskey bottles. But look at them. They're fucking awesome. What do you want from me?

This is what defines the post-modern condition, as well as skepticism towards meta-narratives, one of which could well be called the "sanctity of marriage." Yet, I don't contest its sanctity, in fact I'd like to see more of the sacred in all of our lives. Instead, let's say that it is a skepticism towards the teleology of our existence as birthing machines, of beings that must always follow the same narrative, the same progression; that our futures must self-organize to the whims and dictates that come from without rather than within.

Now that I think of it, I hate the term post-modernism, too. Damn. Well, some day I'll find a categorization I can live with.

Nah. Probably not. ... Look, schoolgirl maids!

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth now.

Inside Scoop On The Outside Culture

Last year, I and the editorial team ran over 500 articles on Alterati on topics as far reaching as sexuality and culture, underground art, event reports, black metal, ... teletubbies. A year of digging off the beaten path, and I must say, the best job I've had to date. 

I just wanted to highlight some of the ones I wrote that I thought might be most entertaining, since it is quite likely you missed at least some of them. (Unless, of course, if you're one of the people who signed up to the RSS feed and read religiously.) 

Sex/Culture/Etc.

A Crime Against Self: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=495 

Excuse Me, Who Are You? Perfect Blue Review: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1489 

Deep Puddle Dynamics: Alex Grey's CoSM: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=118 

Redefining The Real: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1206 

Hacking At The Roots: (tales from the forest) http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=830 

Wake Up Neo: There Is No Counterculture, You Twit: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=25

The Dark Side Of A Culture: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1761 

Why I Pay For Showtime: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1550

Interviews:

Drawing Outside The Lines: Interview With David Mack: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1295 

Alchemical Wedding: Interview with David Aronson: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=803 

Keys To Success: Interview with Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1629 

Broken Saint: Interview with Brooke Burgess of Broken Saints: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=99 

Sex & Fashion: Interview with Jeff Cohn: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=81 

First Fridays (art scene):

First Fridays: Phoenix: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=226 

First Fridays: The Ghosts of the Ellen Powell Tiberino Museum: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=438 

First Fridays: Say Something: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1330 

Post-Genre Blues (music):

Post-Genre Blues: Back To The Folk http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1338 

Post-Genre Blues: The Death Of A Scene: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=957 

Post-Genre Blues: The Fragile Army: http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=799 

Post-Genre Blues: Fusion http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=603 

Because the video linking process changed, unfortunately many of the old embedded videos no longer work (you have to hunt through altertube for them.) 

I'd like to fix that at some point, updating the code in the articles, but I seriously doubt I'll have the time... I still occasionally run articles on Alterati but I've kind of moved on, at least for the time being, to other endeavors when it comes to the bulk of my time and energy. Wes has taken the helm. Nevertheless, there is a lot of content hiding in Alterati from the past year. 

SHITTY ADVICE WITH TOM BYRON

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