No Food

How is it I can spend $30 on food and still have no food?

Oh right. The depression.

Uh

Ok, I know this is not philosophy related, but. I just went out to get a few art supplies [my next project is brewing, it's gonna be awesome] and dinner [some salmon]. At the check out I asked the cashier for one of those 99c enviro-bags. She proceeded to stuff it into a plastic bag and hand it to me.

I have named her Missing The Point Girl.

Philosophy Friends

I started floating philosophy trial balloons with this guy in class that I felt drawn to. I learned a while ago to discuss anarchistic ideas with individuals and not groups, because it’s such a contentious topic, if one person in a group disagrees the rest will side with them and dog-pile on you, and then it just becomes an excercise in  self flagellation. Despite the fact he is christian [I think] this guy seemed very receptive, so I would push things further and further.

We were having a discussion today about the Baby Bonus [in my country the government will pay you something like $15,000 to have a baby] and I pointed out that if the government didn’t STEAL half of the mother’s income, they wouldn’t NEED a baby bonus. He emphatically agreed, and I was wondering if I’d found someone I could discuss philosophy with, until a few minutes later he told me that when Obama was elected, he was so happy that he cried. I didn’t know what to say, so I kind of half-assedly said “I dunno, all politicians are the same” and we ended up talking about music or something.

When I got home, I felt pretty sad about it. I felt drawn to this guy and it was easy to talk to him and we agreed on a lot of things, but I actually felt hurt when said what he said about Obama, like he was shutting me down or something. Maybe I’m taking it too personally, i don’t know.

Who Is Jack Mackenna?

I was never allowed to have an identity as a child. My role was to act as a bucket for everyone else’s emotional problems so they wouldn’t have to face them themselves. I carried the burden of everyone else’s negative feelings so they wouldn’t have to feel them themselves.

Being the emotional bucket for so long has completely divorced me from my self. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I feel.

Until recently I would seek out people I could leech an identity from, unfortuneatly leeching all their emotional problems as well. Now that I have distanced myself from those people I feel… lost…I feel compelled to construct a false identity.

Who am I, really? How do I find myself?

What Now?

I am at an impasse.

Posts

I haven’t deleted anything, but I’ve made all my posts private while I reconsider how much of my personal life I want online.

Considering what I plan to do with my life, I think I need to do that.

I also want to reconsider the quality of my posts, I don’t think I am a spectacular writer, but I still want to write only to the best of my ability.

Also, I will probably not be talking about prior relationships anymore… I will talk about my parents, surely, because they are criminals who deserve to be publically exposed, but I don’t think my ex girlfriends deserve to be exposed like I have talked about them in the past.. even if I have nothing to do with them anymore..

that’s all… please visit freedomainradio.com

My Calling

What do I want to do with my life? There are two things I feel more passionate about than anything on earth. One is art, the other is saving children.

I think that after what I and what the children I grew up with have been through [severe abuse, psych wards, state "care"] it would be criminal not to use the artistic skill that I have to speak about it.

Up until now, I think my goofy animal drawings have been a distraction. It’s not that I hate them or would never draw that stuff again. It just doesn’t mean anything.

I want my art to be powerful and meangingful. Not for notoriety. For the children without a voice.

Yayoi Kusama and Empathy

There’s a Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the MCA, and I plagued my art teachers to take us there for weeks. We finally got to see it yesterday!

I’ve been utterly fascinated by Yayoi Kusama for years. Well, I’m fascinated by what other people find fascinating about her. I wanted to figure out what has made her such a successful artist for all these decades. So I was really, really excited to be able to finally see her work in person – and oh my god. You really do need to see it in person. It’s an experience.

Her artwork consists mainly of patterns made of circles of various sizes drawn on large canvases and sculptures, and these can be visually pleasing, but at first sight, nothing all that special.

To understand what she MEANS, though, you have to be submerged into it. That is, you have to enter one of her installations. These consist of rooms where the door is shut behind you. It’s dark. You stand on a thin platform. there are mirrors on the ceiling, on the floor, and on the walls, giving you that kind of mirror feedback where it looks like there are infinite ‘yous’. That’s not all though – tiny colored lights also hang from the ceiling and are reflected a million times in the mirrors. Here is an example – although it cannot possibly compare to actually being inside.

It was intensely uncomfortable for me and I left the room quickly – The effect is  like sensory deprivation and self obliteration. You feel that you are infinite, and at the same time that you don’t exist. This, I imagine, is Yayoi’s experience of her life – having been raised in a severely violent  home, and spending the majority of her life living in a mental institution [where I think she still is]. To really understand what it was like to be on Yayoi’s head was a powerful experience.. but I don’t really want to do it again.

If you had a room and could use it to put other people inside your head, what would you put in the room?

xposted to http://omgjessen.com/

The Reality of Porn

This post is graphic and upsetting. I had an extremely difficult time writing it – I’ve had the idea in my head for weeks, but I was not able to write until I started feeling angry about it and I HAD to write. It’s important that these stories are heard.

I was inspired to write this after reading an article in an old magazine on Linda Lovelace, star of the most famous porno of all time, “Deep Throat”. I had always found porn to be distasteful, but I was not aware of how truly horrific the industry is behind the scenes until reading this article, and doing more research. Linda was often beaten, raped, and even forced at gunpoint to perform unspeakable sexual acts by her boyfriend. Apparently – I have not seen this for myself and I don’t wish to – heavy bruises were apparent on her thighs in the movie “Deep Throat” from her boyfriends’ bashing.

This is NOT uncommon AT ALL in the porn industry. Women in the porn industry are NOT sexually empowered and often do not have free choices. Many of the tanned blondes you might see in a porno film probably started in their mid-teens, after suffering horrific sexual abuse and violence their entire lives. Most of them are probably high on hard drugs in order not to proccess what is occuring to them while they are being filmed. They may be being raped right in front of you.

All the survivors I read about had very similar lives. They were all raised christian, most admitted to being sexually abused as children, and many had served in the military or had boyfriends or pimps who served/had served in the military. They usually engaged in illegal prostitution first before moving on to do porno films. These two industries are highly interconnected, in fact I would say they are one and the same. As one porn actress said herself, “Pornography IS prostitution, the only difference is that pornography is filmed.”

I do not want the porn industry to be made illegal – I just want it exposed for what it really is, an industry that perpetuates the exploitation and degredation of women who were raped or molested as children. “They have free choice” and “They like doing it” are not arguments here. A 15 year old wandering the streets after being kicked out of home by their dysfunctional family has no way of protecting themselves from sexual predators who would lure or threaten them into the industry, and NO woman enjoys having sex ALL day, every day, with strange men – this is not physically or psychologically possible.

Porn Industry Survivors

I gleaned some of these stories from thepinkcross.org.

Kristenye Riddick

Kristenye Riddick’s parents were alcoholics. She was molested at 12, gang raped by teenage boys at 13, and was a stripper and hard drug user by the age of 16. At 17, she started performing in pornographic movies. Soon after, she was forced into prostitution. She was raped repeatedly and forced to take drugs by clients.

Erin Moore

Erin Moore became a porn actress at 19, and was often abused on set – choked, slapped, and forced to continue by male actors even after she had said no. Porn industry agents lied to her by telling her she would be shooting a scene, when in reality she would be sent to perform an act of prostitution.

Becca Brat

Becca Brat became a prostitute and a porn actress at the age of 19. She would be hospitalized over and over again from the beatings she recieved.

Shelley Lubben

Shelley Lubben was kicked out of home at age 18, and stripped and prostituted to survive. She was threatened at gunpoint to perform sexual acts and was almost murdered many times.

An Article by Shelley Lubben

The Truth Behind Porn

“…none of us freshly-dyed blondes like doing porn. In fact, we hate it……Some women hate it so much they can be heard vomiting in the bathroom between scenes….the porn industry wants YOU to think we porn actresses love sex……The truth, porn actresses have showed up on the set not knowing about certain requirements and were told by porn producers to do it or leave without being paid. Work or never work again…..we were manipulated and coerced and even threatened. Some of us caught HIV as a result of that coercion. I personally caught Herpes, a non-curable sexually transmitted disease. Another porn actress went home after a long night of numbing her pain and put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger…..”

Quotes

“I say stop. Okay- if you say stop or ouch in a scene the director must cut! It eventually led to me crying saying out loud “stop, ouch, director stop the scene” the director did not stop the scene. And the man would not get off me and stop throwing me around like a doll.”

“I’ve been forced to work when I am bleeding from injury. I’ve been locked in a room and not allowed to leave until I finished my scene.”

“I remember one of the worst times I had sex for money, I had a customer that wanted me to have anal sex and he forced me into it. He raped me. I went to the police and the hospital but they didn’t help me because I was a prostitute.”

“On-site prostitution was allowed and encouraged, during working hours, in which the bouncers, having knowledge of the practice, would guard the booth for extra money and in case police were to arrive.”

Links:

http://prostitutionresearch.com/

An interview with a young porn star [extremely disturbing, graphic descriptions of sex acts]

Jenna Jameson: 25 reasons not to be a porn star

Strip Clubs according to strippers: 1 2 3

Thepinkcross.org a religious website, but they have some good research.

Pornography Statistics

All this horror is but a mere symptom of the true evil – the sexual exploitation of  and violence against children. Net Nanny and anti-porn legislation don’t prevent children from being molested and beaten.

Samurai Jack Analysis: Jack and the Haunted House

This episode made me cry. I watched it again immediately after the first time, I was just stunned.. How did they manage to pack so much powerful imagery and wonderful metaphors into a 20 minute animation? I would love to know how conscious the writers are of these elements in the work.

I spoil the whole episode:

Jack comes across a girl crying in the woods. He starts to walk toward her but as he does she becomes frightened and runs away, leaving behind a teddy bear. Jack picks up the bear and follows the girl so he can return it to her.

The girl enters a creepy house in the woods and Jack follows. While in the house, Jack starts having disorientating visions of a family with terrified expressions, being attacked by something he can’t see. He finds the little girl, and tells her they need to get out of the house because there is something very wrong with it. However, all the doors and windows have disappeared and they can’t get out. Jack decides they should sleep and try to figure it out in the morning.

When he awakes, Jack enters a kitchen where the little girl is sitting at a table, eating breakfast with her family, who seem happy. Confused, Jack accusses them of being an illusion. When he does this, the little girl shoots worried glances at her father. the father insists that everything is as it should be and is perfectly fine, however he does not sound sincere. Jack keeps asking questions about the house, and why the kitchen is impeccable while the rest of the house is run down and filthy. The mother says there was a storm, which doesn’t explain anything at all.

The son’s eyes start to roll back into his head and he convulses. Sweating, but smiling, the father asks “Why don’t you tell our guest about what you study?” but the son can’t speak. The same starts happing to his mother, and the father says they must not be feeling well. The little girl looks at Jack with sad eyes and apologises. Then the father starts convulsing as well. Everything flickers, and the illusion of the impeccable kitchen disappears – it is as dark and dirty as the rest of the house. The girl is the only member of the family not convulsing and she runs and hides as black shadows start emerging from the rest of the family.

The family members dissappear when the shadows have fully emerged and combined to form one big shadow. Jack has a vision of the shadow forming a dragon shape and engulfing the family members one by one, starting with the father. The shadow then sucks him into a silent, black and white world. Inside this place he is bound by an invisible force and can’t move. He sees the family members are bound also but they are smiling, seemingly not aware of that fact that they are paralyzed and in a bizzare dimension.

The dragon appears and tries to attack Jack, but recoils at the mere sight of his sword[truth!]. Noticing this, Jack frees the sword with his mind, and cuts the invisible ropes with it. He then tries to attack the dragon with his sword, but it only seems to get bigger. Jack realises that this world doesn’t follow physical laws. He can do anything he can think about. The dragon forms a ball of fire out of thin air and throws it at him, but he catches it and throws it back, destroying the dragon. The black and white world vanishes in an instant and Jack is back inside the house, which starts to cave in. Sunlight pours in through the gaps in the ceiling, upon the family who are now free of posession/entrapment by the dragon shadow and embrace each other.

The episode is a perfect allegory for a dysfunctional family. Doors and windows disappearing is a common theme in all kinds of media – when you’re in an abusive family, doors and windows are meaningless. You can’t leave even if you want to. They may as well not exist.

The youngest, the little girl, is terrified all the time, but not old enough yet to be possessed by the shadows. She apologises to Jack, as if she had done something wrong, but she is a powerless child.

The dynamics of an abusive power structure are all very apparent – the parents rushing in with excuses that don’t make sense like “there was a storm”, and sweating with the fear of their illusion being broken when the other family members are clearly in trouble, instead of actually helping them.

The stark black and white world represents the extreme black and white thinking of dysfunctional people; it is a psychological construct, thats why, of course, Jack can’t defeat the monster with physical force.

Sadly, in real life people can not be saved by an outside hero. They have to break their own invisible chains, and they so rarely do.

Screenshots: