"I've Heard That You'll Try Anything Twice"

This morning while eating breakfast, I read the new Sirenia Digest and then watched a bunch of Morrissey videos on YouTube. I think I spent about an hour and a half eating breakfast, which is really too long since I'm supposed to go to my parents' house to-day for some kind of Super Bowl party.

It was a good Sirenia Digest, a little more of a spirit of fun in it than usual. It featured two stories paying homage to Edgar Allen Poe, whose birthday was last week, and made me think on how underappreciated Poe's humour is. Though I think I might call Caitlin's humour leaning more towards something I might call "humour of the sadistic" while Poe's is more like "humour of the masochistic". The first of Caitlin's two stories, "THE THOUSAND-AND-THIRD TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE", strikes its humour iron when the dominant in a sort of preternatural dom/sub relationship remarks on the stupidity of the king in One Thousand and One Nights for being manipulated by Scheherazade into staying her execution simply by wanted to hear Scheherazade tell stories. Like many people who subscribe to very literal ideas of master and slave dynamics, the dom in Caitlin's story is herself as easily manipulated as she fails to grasp quieter and more fundamental strengths.

The second story, "THE BELATED BURIAL", moves from black humour to sensual horror nicely.

So then I watched Morrissey videos, and noticed all the ones with songs still owned by Warner Brothers have had their audio disabled, which seemed a strange alternative to Warners simply removing the videos. Amanda Palmer was complaining in her blog about Warners' antics lately with her own videos. Once again, the traditional mechanisms of proliferation of art run contrary to the value of art and the impulses of the artist. It's not hard to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money, as Bernstein said in Citizen Kane. If you want to do something else at the same time, you're generally fucked.

I can't remember ever looking forward to the release of a studio album as much as I'm looking forward to the release of Morrissey's new one next month. It kills me he's not coming further west than Texas. I could watch him daily. I love how he's turned into some kind of gloomy rat packer, too.