Tag: jesus

FEELS

A Posthumous Kick in the Crotch

X. Jupiter Hart

My grandfather was one of those angry Baptists. You probably know the type. The kind whose dogmas were concocted long ago in a cauldron of accumulated rage, secreted by a people bitterly resentful over the fact that they lost the war and can no longer legally own Black people as slaves. A brain seemingly composed of Chick Tract papier-mâché. With the characteristic (and obligatory) personal shitlist longer than the King James Bible, and a Jesus of unsullied Germanic European descent who spoke with rural Tennessee drawl and carried a Glock in one hand and a Chick-fil-A sandwich in the other.

In other words, he was one of these.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I learned that his former home and property on Vancouver Island had recently been purchased by some Catholic religious order, to be repurposed as a monastery. Catholics were not número uno on Grandpa’s shitlist (it doesn’t take much imagination to correctly guess who was), but they were definitely in the top ten somewhere. I found something instantly gratifying about the fact that a demographic he denounced as the Spawn of Satan are soon going to living at his old house and praying there. Serves him right for his lifetime of shameless over-the-top bigotry. The only thing that would top that was if the building was going to be converted to a Turkish bathhouse, or if the Catholic order that purchased it was this one…

SOUNDS

Frank Zappa Gave Great Quote

X. Jupiter Hart

A picture I took a while back with an old-timey digital camera, of a street tribute to one of the great philosophers of the late twentieth century. Who just happened to play a mean guitar and would compose some of the most mind-blowingly complex music ever committed to vinyl.

Incidentally, this is the only known object in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood that doesn’t smack of white bread culture.

The man’s been dead for almost three full decades, yet these words still resonate today. Perhaps even more so than they did when he first said them. I see their toxic fruits strewn everywhere (like piles of antivaxxer horseshit and that ridiculous QAnonsense), and realize everything Zappa ever said about the so-called Religious Right (or as I like to call them, Vanilla ISIS) has been spot on. Their sermons and rallies just look like this to me…

Before it became common knowledge that televangelists are evil clowns who obtain their nourishment by drinking childhood fears, Zappa instinctively knew it to be true.
The Soundtrack of SILVER BROWN

“Oh God, not you again…”

X. Jupiter Hart

There’s a lingering part of me that still wants to despise the holidays. It’s not the feasting and the merrymaking and whatnot. I definitely don’t have anything against that. The custom of having some kind of celebratory orgy to commemorate the winter solstice is one that has been observed by multiple societies throughout history; it’s a tradition almost as old as civilization itself. So it’s not that. It’s more the sanctimonious Trumpist types who throw temper tantrums in Aisle 4 whenever somebody uses a religiously neutral phrase like “Season’s Greetings” or when their Starbucks coffee cup does not prominently feature an image of Jesus Christ. Yeah, it’s more that. Those people annoy the fuck out of me. If any such MAGAloids are reading this, axial tilt has been scientifically proven to be the true reason for the season, and your Jesus is little more than a bumper sticker that you rudely stuck on the back of the Saturnalia party wagon without bothering to ask if it was okay with the charioteer. So kindly shut the fuck up.

Then there’s the music. Oh, God. The music! Mariah Carey was hitting them impossible high notes long before Autotune became a thing, so I guess I can respect her as a musician just for that, even though her personality (according to the tabloid press) is like one of those eldritch abominations straight out of Lovecraft that would turn you into a pillar of coal if you looked directly at it. That doesn’t mean I want to listen to Ms. Carey’s interpretations of holiday standards for a whole freaking month. Can whoever is in charge of choosing the music we hear in the malls play something more like this…?