LUDIC LOG

Hey, Ludic Log fans! Don't forget to e-mail me and tell me why I am better than Jesus Christ for my birthday. On August 7th, I turn 34, which means I've outlived the J-man...but that can't be the only advantage I have over him, right?

***

"Hey, Leonard."

"Hey, Shoulder Devil!"

"What's up?"

"Oh, you know. Just updating the log. Where's, uh..."

"Who?"

"Your pal. The guy with the wings who you usually hang around with."

"Dunno. Haven't seen him in weeks."

"Huh."

"What's that you're eating?"

"Cereal."

"At 9:30 at night?"

"Eh. The body doesn't know it's dinnertime."

"Boy, for a materialist you sure believe a lot of nonsense. What kind of cereal is it?"

"Tony's Cinnamon Krunchers. It's a sort of hybrid between Frosted Flakes and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It's not bad."

"I see. Would you like to use the occasion of your eating it to make some fatuous nostalgic pronouncement?"

"Sure. Cereal today has no personality."

"Not like when you were a kid."

"It was a special time to eat sugary grains."

"I see. Any thoughts on the Chicago White Sox, about whom none of your readers, if there were such people, care?"

"Rick White sure does like to give up runs."

"I don't know if I'd say he likes it."

"Well, he sure does it a lot."

"Stephen Hawking sits in a wheelchair a lot, but I wouldn't say he likes being a quadraplegic."

"It seems to have gotten him a lot of chicks."

"Hmmm. Okay. Anything you'd like to mention that makes your whole relativist metaphysic into a total shambles?"

"The Minutemen are objectively the greatest band that ever existed."

"Are you serious?"

"No, not really, but I have been thinking about punk lately, and I have a few pompous comments about that."

"Don't let me stop you."

"Okay, if you think of punk as a particular aesthetic style, like the suburban kids with liberty spikes and U.K. Subs t-shirts who beg for change outside the Dunkin Donuts on Belmont do, then it has virtually no interest to me whatsoever."

"All right."

"Even if you look at it as a particular musical genre -- the loud-fast-rules stuff of, say, '77 to '83, it's really of minimal historical value, and is only of interest to fans of that specific sound."

"Go on. This is pointless."

"But if you look at it as an attitude, as an aesthetic approach rather than an aesthetic style -- which is clearly what its best practitioners intended -- then there's really no reason that it can't be conservative, or, indeed, reactionary. In fact, as the summation of a provocational, d.i.y. critique, it not only doesn't have to be 'politically correct', it could actually be quite politically regressive. Taken at face value, there's no reason why a band of white supremacists, a group consisting of neo-conservatives, or a doo-wop group couldn't be as punk as fuck today."

"Interesting. And do you have a conclusion that subverts your whole analysis?"

"Yes, I do. Fuck Fred Durst, fuck Jackass, and fuck a whole bunch of P.O.D."

"So while you're cognizant of the fact that punk's aesthetic imperative makes it infinitely malleable, you've chosen to arbitrarily privilege the manifestations of it which happen to conform to your particular artistic and political values."

"That's right. Fuck Avril Levigne three times sideways."

"Fair enough. Hey, what's that down there at the bottom of the page?"

"It's the Quote of the Day."

"Anything special about it?"

"Yep. It's the last quote of the day."

"What?"

"I'm all played out, man. I got nothing left. All my quotebooks are so dogeared I can't even fit them on the shelf anymore. And I don't really feel like going and getting more, and sitting around reading through the pithy remains of people smarter than me."

"I would imagine that's far too close to a metaphor for your own life."

"Ha ha. Anyway, I've been dredging up these 300-year-old Frenchmen I've never heard of, and if I never see another George Bernard Shaw quote it'll be too soon."

"So what's gonna go down there from now on?"

"I dunno. Simpsons quotes. Stuff I'm reading. Song lyrics. Random jokes. Vulgarities. Maybe nothing."

"And they call me the devil."