Daniel Coffeen

Let’s talk about alarm clocks. I understand the need for them. But to have to wake up five mornings a week to the shrill scream of an alarm is downright tortuous. I mean, if we need to set alarms every morning in order to wake up in time to get to work, then aren’t we doing something wrong? Doesn’t this seem obvious?

Let me be clear.  I am not talking about pleasure.  Capitalism offers all sorts of pleasure.  That is its promise: the pleasure of the hamburger, new shoes, leather interiors, better handling, a larger screen, the Big Gulp, sharper focus, pill induced sleep, the weekend, arugula.  This is the genius of capitalism — it creates the desire and the gratification.

To me, it was like everyone around me suddenly went totally nuts.  Here were all these people going to absurd jobs for 50, 60, 70 hours a week — just to make their rent.  Nobody looked very happy.  But they did look, well, possesed.  I mean here, in San Francisco, everybody went from being a psychedelic artist slacker to all of a sudden talking about brand engagement, apps and back ends, driving traffic and conversion rates; everyone had a goddamn business plan and a crackberry.

The federal government should have its own news voice — a newspaper, blog, TV and radio show.  They can relate all the so-called news.  This will put an end to the press conference and the news industry will have to actually find news, actually do some investigating, some thinking, some reporting.

But Craisglist is so Web 1.0. It’s the Web 2.0 of online sex shopping that gets interesting. There are sites — MyRedbook and The Erotic Review are two of the better known ones — where not only do women advertise their services in templated format that lays out age, race, breast size, and status of pubic hair but where customers review said women in exacting detail.

And soon you have 20 browser windows open, each with its own promise, each satisfying this or that component of your manifold desire — a man being penetrated with a strap-on by a lovely co-ed; a Japanese AV star performing a nuru massage, a seaweed based lotion she covers the man in before licking every, and I mean every, part of his body; a homemade clip of a college couple enjoying oral copulation…

I have the same jealousy of fetishists. They know exactly what they want, exactly what will sate them. Me, I am overwhelmed by the choices, the vast selection. I see women on the street and I can imagine myself, more or less, with all of them. And this stymies me, leaves me immobilized and wanting. Meanwhile, the guy who digs smoking chicks with tiny boobs knows just what his night will entail.

For the spirit I sing of is a life giver, a life affirmer. Unlike all other booze, tequila is a natural upper: it makes you high, not sloppy down. With tequila, you don’t feel drunk; you feel, yes, high. Really. So be careful. A long time bourbon drinker, I began to find the weight of whisky too much for my increasingly fatigued frame. And so I reached for a lighter elixir and found it in the strange, heady brew of the agave…

The ads for True Blood play on this: “Thou shalt not crave they neighbor.” But of course we do crave each other –– for love, sex, money, nurturing, healing, playing. The dictum of the ad is ambivalent, a supersession of the known moral code. Yes, it tells us, there is an ethics. But they are not certain or fixed because human relations are contractual and complicated.

The Wire performs what television can formally be, what it formally wants to be, how it wants to go. Television is not suited for the climax and dénouement that Hollywood loves so much. We watch television after work, in our pajamas, in our most intimate settings; it is intertwined with our lives. Television is not up there; it’s right here, in our living rooms.

The problem is not with how we treat the Earth. It’s with how we treat ourselves. We work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. And thanks to microcomputing, we work all the time. All the time. There is no leisure, there is no pleasure.

Listen, I am attracted to Obama just as I’m attracted to the fine produce of Whole Foods. But I am not so insane as to believe that voting for that guy or shopping at some goofy supermarket changes anything.

Inglorious Bastereds is a fuck you to the totalitarian cinema of any sort.