Tabs, Episode 1

This is the particular vibe of current self-empowerment pop. Everyone can be a firework, flaring independent of the world that keeps them back. But everyone else in that world is also a firework. Liberation is individual and universal at once. How to square that circle?

(http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7933-poptimist-36/)

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is:

Why wasn't I consulted?
(http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html)

There was a long ago and far, far away time — I think it was the early nineties — when a character in a film saying "I have a bad feeling about this," or "That's no moon, that's a space station," was an adorable grace note. Today, entire episodes of TV and whole feature films are devoted to Star Wars references. Even the most high-minded and hard-edged ten o'clock procedurals manage to get in a winkety-wink-wink. Worse yet, the franchise's own prequels, sequels and equals — all the attendant films, books, TV shows and graphic novels — are equally full of inside jokes and callbacks to the original. The Hutt isn't just eating its own tail, it's serving it to itself on a silver platter with drawn butter and a finger bowl. ... Terry Gilliam once said of America that it robs people of their dreams and replaces them with its own. I now wonder if the same isn't true about the entertainment industry's relationship to Star Wars. ... In too many cases, the structure has become the content. Star Wars may have taught the Hero's Journey to entire generations, but it is our responsibility to use the paradigm and to forge something with its own emotional integrity. ... All creators imitate, emulate and steal. All maturing artists engage in a dialogue with what came before... but I can't think of a single instance in history when so many of us are so actively engaged in paying homage to a single work of art. Bluntly: we are all cribbing our best moves from the same two-hour movie and it has to stop. There just isn't enough meat on the carcass.
(http://io9.com/#!5720677/my-year-without-star-wars)

I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes. ... It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get...
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson)



I wanna go to Japan, man.
(http://slamjohnson.blogspot.com/2011/02/tabs.html)