The Antisocial Socialist

Last day of school today, which is actually going to involve a lot of work for me and possibly a sugar high.

Then it's off to Pennsylvania first thing tomorrow to kill zombies and spread Communism.

I think a "YAY!" is in order.

Personally, I would never assign my students 15 pages of homework and then tell them: "By the way, there's a test tomorrow on everything we've done so far."

In the meantime, have some links:

I was going to debunk all of the stupid in this article on the "economy of sex" but I don't have time, so maybe you guys can have at it. I'll say only that I'm pretty certain that the people writing this sort of article are actually getting less sex than I am.

You can chase that with a neat article on Chicago Afro-Futurism.

Here is another reason why high-stakes standardized testing is stupid. Teachers and principals will cheat.

For corwin77, in hopes that it will bring a much-needed smile to your face: zombie bikinis.

Finally, via pwrdfblog, "I want to be an aid worker":

Apparently the way you keep a 7-year-old child amused while his parents get ready is to show him the GORIEST ZOMBIE PICTURES YOU CAN FIND.

Heh.

+ Went to see Death in Venice at the COC with chickenfeet2003 and lemur_catta. It was a gorgeous production, with impressive singing. It was also very true to the novella, which means that it was curiously detached and stylized. (You are supposed to want to punch Aschenbach in the face, right?)

- Still sick. Less than I was last night, where I—this is very rare for me—passed up going for a drink afterward in favour of crashing out at home. I slept a great deal and feel better, but I still might not even need makeup to look like a zombie today.

+ Zombie Walk today! I think I am wearing the absolute worst clothing ensemble ever put together by a human being with working vision.

- My internets are being very, very flaky. If you are trying to reach me and I don't answer, be advised that it is not because I am a rude and nasty person, but because I am connecting to the outside world via two tin cans and a piece of string. To top it off, Yahoo! has decided to reroute all of my LJ-based e-mail into the spam filter, which I only discovered yesterday.

You're at the mall when the zombies attack.

You get:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting from the speakers
3. One famous person to fight beside you

Okay, okay. I claim:

1. An armed mecha panda.
2. "I Can't Decide," by the Scissor Sisters.
3. Up until last night I'd say John Nada, as portrayed by Roddy Piper in the 1988 classic They Live!, but after last night, I'm going to have to go with Dennis Kucinich. Because dude, how awesome was that guy?

Here's how it works, theoretically. One person says something awesome, and then the next person adds something to it to make it more awesome, repeat ad nauseum. Then I make a cartoon of it in my copious free time.

I'll get you started (based on the results of a Stitch n' Bitch conversation):

Fighting zombies ____________

Fighting zombies from a zeppelin _______________

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to fill in the blank with something that makes fighting zombies from a zeppelin even more awesome.

...Go!

P.S. You're supposed to respond to each other, not just to me.

On the news, they're refusing to call it a global epidemic and they're refusing to use the word "zombie."

Tony Snow spoke to the Washington press this afternoon, claiming that "we've turned a corner and the situation is improving."

Harper called for "MORE BRAAAINZ."

Me, I'm hopeful, as always. Things are looking up! Our leaders have everything under control.

God. What a shite morning. I live on a third-floor apartment (which has its advantages—zombies, like Daleks, fail at stairs) but I still had to dispatch my landlady, her kids, and several repair-zombies with a shovel before I even got out of the house today. And you try doing that after only one cup of coffee.

My neighbourhood was eerily silent, making the occasional groan of distant undead hordes even creepier. The park across the street was empty. A few unfortunates tried to barricade the church, but that only works against vampires, so it looked like they were pretty much screwed. I tried not to think about it much.

College St., though, was packed. College St. is always packed, whether it's a beautiful summer evening or the dawn of the global zombie uprising. Yuppie mothers pushing strollers devoured their children's brains. Hordes spilled out of Café Diplomatico, shambling over patio tables and umbrellas. Reanimated corpses attacked iPod-wearing joggers and business jerks yammering into their cellphones.

I couldn't tell if the epidemic had spread to the Starbucks at the corner. Customers and baristas alike growled at each other, slack-jawed and vacant, just like any other morning.

The streetcar, as usual, was late. It came roaring around the corner with rabid fury, the windshield and bumper splattered with remains, plowing through zombies too slow to get out of the way. It stopped; a zombie SUV ignored the flashing lights and drove right through anyway. Fucking SUV drivers. I guess I was lucky to get a streetcar at all, given the lack of adequate funds for public transit.

What's that you ask? Why was I taking the TTC to work in the midst of a zombie apocalypse? I suppose it's the insidious nature of capitalism: I'm out of sick days, and there's a pile of work to do, and taking yet another day off is just going to make my boss want to eat my brains more.

So how was your morning?

So I'm almost certainly going on the Toronto Zombiewalk 2006. I have just been to Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up zombie-making supplies (a.k.a. cheap Halloween makeup and my Xanax prescription). Only one thing remains to be decided: What kind of zombie should I be?

As you know, many people, from all walks of life, join the ranks of the walking dead every day. But my choice of costumes is limited by the clothing I actually own. So, under the cut, are some options that I've been considering. Feel free to come up with your own.

( Poll, with helpful visual aids )

By the way, is anyone else planning to go?

1. Andy Warhol / Supernova
Guest-curated by David Cronenberg


My attempt at depicting the crowd. It was actually less lively than this, and they were all holding cell phones.

I managed to catch the second-last day of the Andy Warhol / Supernova show at the AGO, courtesy of Starbucks (long story). That was Saturday; I've since been mulling over what I should write about it.

One phrase springs instantly to mind: highly appropriate. It's small (three rooms!), shocking, and it's clearly the AGO's attempt to raise as much money to fund their extension of the building while expending as little effort as possible. Andy would have been proud. You can do it in 15 minutes. In fact, you should do it in 15 minutes.

All cynicism aside, it features some of Warhol's better work—more porn, less pop; more murder, less Monroe. Cronenberg is a twisted fuck, and I can dig that. But it's a spectacle of a spectacle, an exhibit of an OMGfamous! artist curated by an OMGfamous! film director. And it's designed, in a brilliant twist, to alienate and isolate the spectator.

As you walk in, you're handed a complementary audio guide, featuring Cronenberg's narration. You resist listening to it, because seriously, does anyone like audio guides? But inside, the gallery is dead silent. Everyone else is using audio guides. So you listen to Cronenberg wanking on about meanings that Warhol may or may not have intended to put in his pieces. (Who knows? Best Warhol quote ever: "I think everybody should like everybody.")

So you're viewing art at Cronenberg's pace, not your own, and instead of forming your own relationship to the work, or understanding it through dialogue with your fellow gallery-goers, the experience becomes instructional, the expert telling you what to think. The audience is standardized, mechanical, and once I turned off my own audio guide, becomes a far more fascinating installation piece than the art itself.

In essence, it was a very meta swindle. I can't help but be impressed.

2. They Came Back (Les Revenants)
Robin Campillo



I'm not sure how I managed to miss this one (it came out in 2004). This is a rare thing—a zombie movie that managed to disturb me. A lot. Just not in the usual way.

The premise, for those of you who also missed it: 70 million people unexpectedly return from the grave. In one small French town, 13,000 people, mostly elderly, shuffle out of a graveyard. They don't seem to want to eat anyone's brains, but they're also not the people they were before they died. They're mentally slower, their body temperature is five degrees lower than normal, and they don't sleep. At first, the government treats them as refugees, setting up a holding centre for them while trying to locate their relatives, and eventually helping to reintegrate them into society. But things get progressively creepier from there, as it has to do with language and memory and what it means to lose both, and that's a hell of a lot scarier than the possibility of getting eaten.

It's a quiet, subtle, bleak little movie that manages to be unsettling without resorting to a single zombie cliché. Like any good zombie movie, it's a metaphor, but ultimately, not the one that you're expecting.

3. Day By Day
Chris Muir/Photoshop

Is even more surreal than usual lately. How is it that Sadly, No! isn't all over this?