Cupcake Tits

I dreamt last night I caught a sparrow without a beak. Instead it had small, floppy lips it couldn't close. A seagull flew at it, shrunk, and dived into the mouth looking for fish, I think. The sparrow spat the agitated seagull out after a moment.

Apparently music videos are still being made--when I saw a headline on Yahoo! to-day about how a studio that owns The Beach Boys' "California Girls" wants royalties from Katy Perry for her "California Gurls", I immediately went to YouTube to find the video thinking it might actually be more of a rip off of The Dresden Dolls' "Shores of California" music video;



Which is itself a parody of the video for David Lee Roth's cover of The Beach Boys song.

However, the Katy Perry video looks like this:



and features Snoop Dogg. One thing I noticed is that it doesn't appear to be related to The Beach Boys song at all, any more than The Cure's "Lullaby", about a nightmarish spider man is related to Marvel Comics' Spider-Man. I'd say the studio who owns The Beach Boys song has, to borrow Katy Perry's metaphor, about a popsicle's chance in a vagina of receiving royalties from this new song.*

I also noticed that the song is, of course, not as subversive as The Dresden Dolls' song, the same going for the contrast between the songs' respective videos. I was struck by how pathetic Perry looks holding whipped cream cans on her tits. I think what I'm seeing is the popular culture perverse humour comfort level, or at least what's perceived as the comfort level. I have this weird feeling that sexually titillating media has gotten to be a kind of polite fiction. Everyone grinning and winking a little too enthusiastically while dead from boredom inside.

To-day I also read "THE YELLOW ALPHABET" in the new Sirenia Digest to-day, and some of the segments of that story are, to me, some of the Digest's best writing. Caitlin has taken various words, in alphabetical order, and used each one as a prompt for a few paragraphs that at times are related to the word in strikingly poetical ways. I particularly liked the one for "Blister", which used the subject of blisters to accent the nature of environment and character nicely.

I read this while eating breakfast, after which I went out for the day to shop for my sister's birthday present. A woman at the gas station greeting me with a "good morning" and it kind of freaked me out. I'm having a slight identity crisis here--but I think I can do this. I think I can take back daylight hours. If I can just stop feeling like such a loser going to bed at 1am.

*Incidentally, Japan is ahead of us on the phallic confection metaphor with the chocolate covered banana on a stick;