what I read in bed last night

So I got a Kindle for Consumermass last year, and though I still don't dig reading actual books on it (because they don't seem "actual"), Kindle plus Instapaper has been a wonderful thing. I get those long ass articles in my reader feed online, and instead of reading them bitches online where I'm distracted by large-breasted Russian girls looking for boyfriends or animated gifs featuring goats, I can read them on my Kindle, laying in the bed naked, just as our learned elders once did. So what I figured I'd do sporadically (meaning maybe never again) is just share the interesting things I read with you here, although who the fuck is you? Who the fuck am I talking to? Man, the internet is fucked up because it makes us think we have an audience and we have to present shit. Fuck that. Scratch that whole first part because that sounds like asshole talk.
I got a Kindle, and I use it with Instapaper and that shit is tight. Here's some shit I read last night...

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF CHICAGO from New York Times

The on-the-surface subject of this article is about activists reclaiming foreclosed homes for homeless families. But very obviously it brings to mind for me a lot of shit about how capitalism is a failed model of freedom, because these free market motherfuckers fail to point out that shit that has no value gets ignored. That's why these alleged free market motherfuckers act like people getting food stamps or having a place to live is considered an "entitlement" as if that's a bad thing. Look, I would like to think if America is half as fuckin' great as it acts like it is, that just by being born an American, you are entitled to eat a fuckin' meal and sleep in some sort of structure that mostly shelters you from natural disasters and inclement weather. And the descriptions of Rahm Emanuel in this article jibes with that pretty well. It's kind of important to realize that endless production of wealth assumes we have endless amounts of materials, which is not exactly a sustainable philosophy. And when you factor in that mostly this endless production is not done so we all have a bunch of really useful shit that will last us our lifetime but a bunch of crap that will break and is mostly unfixable so that we have to buy another, all so a corporate kleptocracy can accumulate abstract wealth at the expense of everyone else and the condition of the fuckin' PLANET WE ARE TRAPPED ON CURRENTLY, it seems even more fucked up.
On top of this, for whatever reason, Cabrini Greens in Chicago has always fascinated me. There was some 48 Hours program when I was a kid about it, and good lord, it was so shocking and somehow exciting to realize that was America too. I don't mean exciting like "Yo, I wish I lived in big shitty projects in Chicago," but the human experience is fucking weird. Many of us (like most) are born into really fucked up circumstances, which we have no choice in, and we have to struggle physically to do something with ourselves, and more often than not struggle mentally (aka psychologically but more actually neurologically) to make things okay. This of course means shit gets hooey in our brains, just because we can't handle the sensory input being put in.
The thing is, and what I take away from this article and this J.R. cat, is we can control that shit ourselves. Government doesn't give a fuck. Like I said, it's a corporate kleptocracy. We're not changing that. We're not. Most of the infrastructure and laws and all that shit is built for enabling creation of wealth, not creation of providing for people. And though the free market motherfuckers are like, "But hey, the creation of more wealth means we provide for more people," there's nothing that backs that up with hard data. There's no science to that shit; it's just a quote from the Bible you're supposed to believe or else you gonna get sent to the Hell of Hating Freedom boy.
I don't know man. I used to give a fuck about thinking things should improve and people should be taken care of by whatever government infrastructure is in place, but the older I get, the more anarchist I get. And not flash anarchism where you smash a window, but life anarchism where you just don't give a fuck about laws unless they make sense. There will be more of that. We've been domesticated pretty hard, and had our human goods milk production increased and increased and increased in America. They tell us Americans are lazier and won't do the jobs for the wages that illegals will do or other countries will do. They don't tell you America is the only country where there is no legal minimum for days off in a year. They don't tell you a bunch of shit that shows how fucked it is. Make more stuff, make more money. If you have creative ways about you, figure out a way to make money off it. Are you really good at something? Make money off it. Everything goes to money. Fuck money. I just want to live my life.

HECTOR CAMACHO'S MACHO VIDA from Men's Journal

Hector "Macho" Camacho was a world champion boxer from the '80s, who turned into kind of a showy freak (a forebearer to Money Mayweather to some extent). He died last year in standard boxer fashion - getting murdered with a blood stream full of coke. But this article sort of encapsulates his life, and just how crazy it all was. I mean fucking crazy. It's hard to feel bad for a guy who got to experience the craziness he got to experience. I mean, sure, you might read this article with an empathetic heart and be like, "How sad," but I can't do it. Like I mentioned in the above article, many are born fucked. And considering how fucked Macho Camacho was born, he lived a life full of hilarious stories. I'm sure it was full of hollow sadness too, which he filled with the obvious ways of human self-medication - sex with sluts and lots of drugs. And sure, we could hope that humanity could expand and be something more, but shit man, look around you, the infrastructure for human progress is not in place at all. It's about wealth progress, and for all those millions Camacho frittered away, I bet there's ten times as much tucked away by groups that made money off him. So if you get all sad and are like, "We could be so much more," go talk to those motherfuckers, not me. Camacho lived a bold life, and it's crazy to read about.

THE DARK ARTS: HOW TO APPROACH BLACK METAL from The New Yorker

My friend KS hipped me to it, and he is a great dude and a fan of both The New Yorker and metal music, like even that weird synthy metal stuff that kinda freaks me out because it makes no sense to the molecular parts of me that sat on milk crates getting half-high on dirtweed in the woods behind the grocery store listening to Slayer. Still though, the most important takeaway from this article is "Death to False Metal". I don't even listen to metal all that much, but still think that constantly, mostly because of the hipster metal factor in our world now. I was paying my Best Buy bill the other week and there were fucking Ride the Lightning t-shirts there. I thought to myself, "Oh, so that's why there's so many promotional photos of bands now where some chick is wearing a Ride the Lightning t-shirt." But this also got me to thinking on what I said above about what you were born into. Why do I hate what I deem as false metal, or poseurs? They can't help they were born sheltered inside the walls of privilege? Don't they have a human right to explore whatever is there for them, including shitty metal music?
Here's the thing though, and where the resentment comes from. Certain things get built around the notion, "We are the fucked and forgotten, and nobody gives a fuck about us, so this is our thing." And that's what metal was when I was 13-years-old, getting high with my best friend metalhead back then (whose born again now, by the way), listening to Slayer. And it actually relates to the first article because it's gentrification of art. It's taking this thing that has zero value to anybody, and these go-nowhere born-nothings make something of it that is fucking wonderful and nice, and then it gains value. Once it gains value, once a neighborhood has been cleaned up and a retail development can afford to invest in building two blocks away, or once an art form has been built and nurtured by a little sub-culture of freaks and losers to where a label can invest in pushing a few acts from that genre, then outsiders start coming in. You can't really blame them, because it looks awesome and is cheaper (housing) or neater (art) than whatever they're used to. So they start joining it. And eventually they become the old heads of these things, like the gay couple that first moved into an overly gentrified neighborhood who complain about how there's no Puerto Ricans around any more, or the metalhead who was into metal in the late '80s after And Justice For All came out. You really can't blame these people.
But the problem is, then it prices out the go-nowhere born-nothings, who are still going nowhere and born to be nothing, who no longer can afford either the property taxes on the neighborhood they re-built, or can't afford the ticket price to the 3-day music festival built on their music, or even if they can afford either of those, maybe they just can't stomach the new neighbors. Maybe the new neighbors fucking suck, and aren't familiar enough with the ways and methods of the old neighborhood or scene. And yeah, that's weird and shitty, because fuck scenes, but it's the truth. So that's why when I see some cutesy chick in a indie folk rock band wearing a Ride the Lightning shirt, I am like, "what the fuck?" And that's why I understand the whole Death to False Metal concept, because fuck man, death to all false metal, whether it be metal or hip hop or seedy neighborhoods suddenly having high end "consignment" thrift stores or fracking boomtowns in North Dakota or taking jobs in North Dakota or fucking whatever man thinking you are changing the fucking world by voting for a kleptocratic corporate motherfucker... all of that shit. Death to all these false metals.