Hot Chicks With Douche Bags

Friday Haiku

She thinks that he’s hot

Because Nitrous Oxide is

A hell of a drug.

His mission was to

make that denim vest look cool

Mission Status: Fail

— Charles Nelson Douchely

Plate glass clouds the view.

If you really want relief,

Try opaque glass next.

— Franklyn DealorNo Doucheifelt

This Boy Band reject

Still mourning what could have been

In 1990

— DoucheyWallnuts

“Off to the rave, Mom”

“Wait! I’ll help you get dressed up”

“You’re the coolest, Mom”

— Vin Douchal

'Bag/Nottabag: Hackeysack Dave

What say you, reader?

Is Hackeysack Dave a ‘bag?

Evidence of ‘bag:

1.  Neckglasses. In reverse neck ‘bag position.

2.  Obnoxious retro surfer t-shirt

3.  Silly shorts

4.  Backwards baseball cap like it’s 1992.

5.  Creepy mutant Metaluna toe

Evidence of Nottabag:

1. No douche attitude or hand gestures when cuddling with Innocent College Hott Cathy

2. No doucheface

3. Easygoing, laid back, friendly demeanor

4. Respectful cuddle

What say you?

Eurasian Kim Offers Kyoto Eye of Carnality

Ok, thanks for indulging my Rolling Stone rant. Now back to the ‘mock.

Even Evil Yellow Sunball cannot portend resistance to Kyoto Eye of Carnality.

American Born Phil may partially shave his head, but it doesn’t interfere with his engineering degree. So his parents make due.

Framing Cain

What is an image? Is it simply a photographic capture? An event frozen in a moment in time?

No.

An image is filled with flickering, flowing movements across the mind’s eye. Underneath the eyelid. In between each blink. A ziggy zaggy bobbing weaving jumpy confluence of images from past and present moving in and out of frame. Over and under. From image to image. From viewer to viewed. Like a darting dotted line. From you to your family. To your friends.

Then back again.

A wibbley wobbley timey wimey river dance of meaning cutting across multiple fields of understanding. Over to your smartphone jumps our little running meaning blob. Onto your Twitter feed. Over to the blogs you read. And then back again.

And wait! What’s happened! The image has changed!

Oh sure, it’s the same image that you saw before. But suddenly you see it differently. It holds different meaning. It has taken on the forms and shapes of a dancing, jumping, hypertext latticework that you never noticed before.

Fields of Foucauldian power play out not only in the text or the visual cues, but across the margins. Fights break out. Conceptual swordfighters do battle. First left handed. Then right. Like Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black, ideologies are contested even as meanings change. Debates over sexuality. Gender roles. What defines the stereotypes of race. How we understand class.

Those who think things are always certain, always fixed, well, they end up dead from Iocane powder.

Think of Trayvon Martin’s hoodie. A substitute for black skin employed by an aging, terrified, white power structure caught in the whirlwinds of a changing world that they no longer understand. Erectile dysfunction and fading libidos seek out revenge on the potency of black youth by demanding that the image of the hoodie-wearing teenager be recontextualized as reasonable threat. George Zimmerman’s profiling now socially justified by a jury of clueless buffoons who never looked inward to contest the biases they’ve been fed after two decades of fear mongering in mass media “news” entertainment.

And that’s how images are contested. Medium is context, as Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes taught us in the 1960s. Images travel achronologically back and forward through time. They move across mediums and circle in and out of texts past and present. They transverse a shmorgasboard car wash of cultural framings, debates, discussions, and interactions informed by every piece of stimuli you acquire on your daily journey through our pastoral digital paradise.

The image is always alive.

As one who has long written a blog dedicated to the reclaiming, and contestation of the meaning of images that circulate in the public sphere, I have a thing or two to say about this controversy over Rolling Stone’s cover story on the Boston bomber this week.

Over the past seven years, I have efforted to highlight the absurdity of spectacle in contemporary pop culture. I do this by framing the inherent douchey ridiculousness of an increasingly adderal-stimulated generation raised on hyperlink digital social networking. When sexual competition is heightened by increasing wireless connection speeds and rapidly morphing and mutating social spheres of influence in the digital realm, the result is digital people. Douchebags.

Douchebags are simply the peacocking body spectacle of male display competing the only way it can in the age of vine, instagram, and facebook. By turning the body into a corporeal hyperlink. A repository of meaning brought by the spectator. Ideally, for our douchebag, the target spectator is both the hot chick and the surrounding spectatorial lens.

Tattoos are written on skin just like any accompanying text brought to bear on an image. The contextualization of douche spectacle.

But, whether douchebag or photograph, an image is never just an image. An image is a contested landscape. It is a mirror. A repository. A link in a chain.

For what is the real threat to the social paradigm that this Rolling Stone cover represents? The unconstrained image. The image that resists easy categorization.

Those upset that Rolling Stone dared to present a bomber as a good looking teenager fail to understand the complexity of the critique. Those outraged at a cover image of a terrorist presented as everyday kid are overcome by the need to frame, to justify, to wish away the bomber terrorist as simply an alien that can never be comprehended.

But this is a form of cowardice.

The image that upsets the grand narrative taking place in the hive mind, that forces the individual to challenge base assumptions, can only be perceived as a threat. But the threat is not what the image depicts. It is what the image represents in challenging the larger protective cocoon of mass media reassurance.

An incongruous image such as the one seen here ruptures the latticework of good/evil that so many prefer to reside in. It punctures the safety of visual clarity. It reveals the intertextual structures of meaning imposed on each of us daily in our saturated world of smartphones and smart TVs, digital car screens and flashing electric billboards telling us, in the immortal words of John Carpenter’s They Live, to sleep.

This is why Rolling Stone’s cover image is so revolutionary. And so necessary. In one simple image of a young man, the power of imagery itself to resist easy answers and simplified paradigms is revealed. The Wizard behind the curtain reveals the emdedded biases at work in how we hope to reduce the complexity of the real world to an easy cartoon narrative.

But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is not Wile E. Coyote. He is real. But for us to comprehend that complexity requires a conceptual awakening. An awakening that makes so many so uneasy. Not because of what it tells them about Dzhohkhar Tsarnaev. But because of what it tells them about themselves.

For a life without the easy answer of the constrained image is not an easy life to live.

One image, re-contextualized in a forum where so many have been celebrated for artistic achievements (Rolling Stone’s cover) destabilizes the very human desire to turn a human being who commits heinous acts into an inhuman monster. Here is Dzhohkar as a young adult, and not the spawn of satan. So the people are outraged. How dare a murderer be shown as anything other than a monster?

This is the power, and the threat, of the truth revealed. When Dzhohkar appears as folky pop singer, the bobbleheads lose the power of clear demarcation between the normative and the deviant. Instead of the Satanic overlord of hate rendered inhuman and monstrous, the us/them binary is shattered by Dzhohkar the Human Teenager. This challenges simplified understandings of the events of the Boston bombing and reminds us of the uncontrollable and unpredictable threat of a world unconstrained.

Without frame there is only the savagery of nature. This challenge, in the form of the Dzhokhar innocent/evil paradox, is delivered in context with larger constructions of false consciousness. How do we conceive of celebrity, youth, beauty, and the public sphere itself? Through easy, mass produced imagery that tell us that this over here is “good” and this over here is “evil.”

The controlled image is the tool by which reassurance is sold.

And that knowledge of the artificiality of the media industry to sell easy narratives is what’s really threatening to so many about the Rolling Stone cover.

Judging by the hysteria, this knowledge of the graphic power of imagery cannot be allowed to exist because it cannot be constrained into soothing narratives of pictorial reassurance. It is far easier to picture Hitler like this then it is to accept that Hitler played with babies, had a girlfriend and loved his dog.

To accept the complexity of those who do evil acts is to accept the possibility of evil acts within all of us.

To accept that Dzhokhar could look happy, healthy, youthful and beautiful is to humanize that which does not deserve an act of humanization. For evil must be monstrous and alien to the normal hierarchy of celebrity in which Rolling Stone usually traffics.

But is precisely for these reasons that the cover is so important. So critical to reminding us of the power of evil to transform the mundane, everyday college boy into a terrorist.

And that, of course, is the point.

Cassie Finds a Somnambulant Carrot

If you plant it, Cassie, it’ll grow into a somnambulant carrot tree!!

That smells like bodyspray and sauteed liver.

Douche Signs and Tongue, by Dr. Seuss

Do you like

Sam-A-Fung.

Got nuthin’. Need a coffee.

True Confessionals With Jacques Doucheteau

HCwDB’s own Hall of Mock enshrinee Jacques Doucheteau unleashes some cold, hard truth in Saturday’s Walnuts After Dark thread. Well worth a read:

———–

I saw my first boobies whilst getting baptized.

Yes, I do. Lord be praised, yes!

————–

Sophie Disappoints Me

Oh Sophie.

Last night you had me at “hello.” And by hello, I mean “Woooooo!! Letssss doooo shotttssss!!”

But now I see that you cohabit with the worst of beachdouche detritus.

And so I am crestfallen.

Not enough to stop staring.

But enough to stop overstaring. And by overstaring I mean burning your cleavite with the heat of Hebraic lust.

Boobs.

Rusty Stares into the Hott Sun

Come Monday morning, Rusty will tell his coworker bros at Initech all about his glorious Saturday Night. With minor embellishments.

Involving tree frogs, WD-40, and candle wax.

Joe Shmuckers Scores Way Out Of His League With Giggle Corrie

With a name like Shmuckers, he has to be a douche.

Giggle Corrie inspires cherubic lute playing cupids to dance around an ethereal bonfire and then hump nearby tree stumps like cracked-up gila monsters.