I felt that this was sufficiently impressive to warrant its own entry

"Rebel Without A Cause" with zombies.

drworm drew it and it's awesome.

you've had enough of two-hand touch

Yesterday, we watched this movie in Anthro class about the behavioral similarities between primates and humans. I was particularly interested in a segment involving an aye-aye, in which the aye-aye used its long middle finger for just about everything, including as a radio transmitter. Wouldn't it be great if we had evolved from aye-ayes? But we didn't. We didn't really even evolve from chimps, we just have a very close common ancestor. We're like nth cousins, evolutionarily speaking. The point of showing the aye-aye was that aye-ayes have long middle fingers and have no need for tools, like chimps do, which is why chimps are so cool. Which is not to say that aye-ayes aren't cool, because they are very cool, but when was the last time you saw an aye-aye paint something that a very rich monkey enthusiast would pay $114,000 for? I ask you.

There was also a segment on macaques, and a troop of macaques in a Japanese tourist exhibit whose troop had gone from the usual number of about 40 to over 1,000 macaques because of overfeeding. It was sad. Normally, macaques in a troop all know each other, but that's impossible with 1,000 macaques, so the macaques had to learn to not make eye contact with any other macaques, only trust their family and a few close friends, gobble their food in a big muddy field and not share it, and be careful in case they got mugged and none of the other macaques would step up to help (and they don't). It's so sad. It's like the advice you get from people in small towns when you go to big cities, except that the lighter macaques aren't told to be especially wary of darker macaques. Maybe in a few thousand years.

Stuff chimps do: The chimp with the most friends, not the strongest chimp, will almost invariably be the troop leader. Chimps will spend years sharing the meat of lesser monkeys with their friends so that one day, when the troop leader dies, the other chimps will all go into a smoke-filled back room (crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and emerge with a little crown (also crudely made out of leaves and dirt) and put it on their friend's head. And then the younger, stronger chimp, who's fucking pissed that he didn't get that little monkey crown, will screech and jump up and down and rustle trees around so that he looks bigger, and will beat the shit out of everyone that crosses his path to parade his dominance.

Also, chimps that are not alpha chimps will learn this early in life, and will cultivate very close friendships with young female chimps, grooming them, sharing their food, playing with them, and then when the female chimps go into estrus, the friend-chimps will be around to mate with them before the alpha male catches wind of this. The teacher helpfully pointed out that human females don't go into estrus, and because they are vaguely sexually available all the time, they can damn well make up their own minds about whether they want to mate with the alpha chimp or the friend-chimp or the alpha female bonobo down the next ridge. The twenty girls in the class giggled. The three boys did not.

The teacher also laid upon us some fairly juicy gossip about Louis Leakey and Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. (Not telling.) But I love sordid gossip about famous academics and historical figures, it is so weird. I could give a shit about the sex lives of anyone in "People" magazine, but if you've contributed important ideas to the intellectual life of mankind and also had a threesome with a Nobel prize winner and a Modern poet? I am so there.

where pixelated men eat pixel food

Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar.
How cool is that? How cool is that? I'm so fucking shallow. Simulations is blowing my fucking mind. Jean Baudrillard is so crazy and so classy and so totally right about shit. I don't have my copy with me right now or I'd bombard you with quotes. I need to get more books by this person. I need the Futurist's Manifesto too. I need to get this stuff from Amazon for cheap because I have a really bad habit of not returning books to the library ever.
My copy of Simulations is from a publishing company called Semiotext(e) and it is from the "Foreign Agents" series. FOREIGN AGENTS. There's a repeating clip of an Interpol document about naturalized citizens on the front cover. It makes me think of Naked Lunch. All agents defect sooner or later. Agents becoming their cover stories, and their "true" natures are...not true. Or were never true. Or are just as true as the "false" ones. Or the "false" ones are just as true as the true ones. ILLUSION.

ANYWAY SO THE POINT IS Baudrillard talks about three levels of simulacra, which I want to talk about now because I just figured out what he means by "precession."

LEVEL ONE: Counterfeits. This is basically simulacra for beginners, where you just need to start getting your head around the idea of "copying." A counterfeit depends upon the existence of the original for its existence. Counterfeit $20s only work because everyone knows what a real $20 looks like; realism in art only works because everyone knows what a real apple looks like, and a still life looks like an apple (with a banana and some flowers and maybe a dead bird or something). This is where you need to figure out that there are things that don't want to be things in themselves, that are deliberately trying to be like other things. It's so sad. Poor copy-things. If they were people, they would have low self-esteem.

Here is an example of a counterfeit:


LEVEL TWO: Industrial simulacra. Once you've gotten your head around the concept of a copy, it's time to make things that are copies of each other. These were invented by Henry Ford and made cool by Andy Warhol. Industrial simulacra are not copies of anything that already exists. They are only real because they are exact copies of each other--anything that deviates from the mold may be an object, but it's not a real copy, it's a deviation, a typo, an irregular. Like a Coke can that is blue and green instead of red and white. (Which may have gotten Warhol serious bank, but is less okay if it's being rejected from the factory for being overly colorized. Or if you're paying $1.25 for the privilege of drinking it and it turns out to taste like toothpaste because it doesn't follow the Coke recipe.) This is why off-brand things are sort of weird and why people get seriously upset if their Burger King burger is square and little kids throw fits if their Halloween costumes are not officially licensed--they want real copies.

Here is an example of an industrial simulacra:


LEVEL THREE: Simulation. First, you need to have recognized that Level 2 simulacra are real because they can be replicated. Good? Good. Now, check this: Reality itself can be replicated. This is where people get tripped up and start making references to the types of movies which think they are clever because they put their protagonists in a world which is actually just virtual reality. Yes, we know we're living in a world which is completely created by computers. That is not the point. The point is that we believe that that world, being a level 3 simulacra, is no more real or no less real than the "real" world. That an exact replica of, say, Stonehenge or the Grand Canyon or even a person is exactly equivalent to the "real thing." Is it? Maybe. I don't know. How can you even tell? Does it really matter? Who's keeping track? What feels more real? Which one has the brighter colors, the tastier food, the bouncier music?

Here is an example of a simulation:

Simulations, being less "real", have to try harder; to this end, they overcompensate and create hyperreality, in which they become more "real" than what is actually real. (My teacher liked to use the example of watermelon-flavored bubble gum for this: It's an imitation of watermelon flavor, and it tastes nothing like real watermelon, but the fake flavor when you finally bite into a piece of real watermelon after eating nothing but watermelon-flavored bubble gum, the real thing is kind of disappointing.) And that is where we are today.

Baudrillard points out that we are essentially living in a huge simulation--this is not because we are literally living inside of a computer program, but that society alters so much and bombards us with so many signs and signifiers and copies of things that we are incapable of confronting reality as reality, of being able to discern the difference between what is real and what is a simulacra. Things like movies and video games and Disneyland, which are deliberately presented to us as unreal copies of reality, are there mainly to help us pretend that there is anything left that is real, just as scandals like Watergate or the Lewinsky thing are presented to us as deviations from the norm so that we can pretend that there is a norm to deviate from. Which is why, as he put it, "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce."