auf wiedersehen

The Department of Unscientific Research and I have had a good run. We have grown together, we have laughed together but most importantly we have alerted cyber space to the rape antics of dolphins, the prejudices against both Sultana's and left handers and the shit fest which are the published works of Jodi Picoult.

Department, we have had a good run. 20,987 views to be exact. But for now, it is over. The Department has taught me a lot and yet it has taught me nothing. I have come so far, yet I haven't and for this reason we are parting ways, indefinitely. I may be back next week; I may never be back (cue distressed string ensemble). I suppose the point it I am not desiring to allow my words to be caressed by your formatting anymore.  At the end of the day readers (or should I say friends) it's not you it's me. I have nothing left to give you. If you find yourself craving me, needing me I can be found....
here
http://kobiblakecraig.tumblr.com/
and here
http://radmenmag.wordpress.com/

If you take anything from the glorious year we have had together, remember these...final words...
FUCK JODI PICOULT>>> SHE MAKE ME WANT TO DAUBE A WEDDING DRESS IN FECAL MATTER >>>JODI, YOU ARE MY HELL.

I am now lying on the floor, listening to Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now awaiting the launch of Rad Men. Issue 1, May 1. You should do the same.

What Is It To Be Human? The Beatles

This week I was asked to write an article for a very local and very unread magazine. The article was suppose to act as a collaborative written portrait of The Beatles. Each writer was asked to write 300 words in response to "What is your favourite Beatles song?" I couldn't do it. How do you label one Beatles song a favourite? How after listening to every one of their Studio Albums do you sit down and select one song, a window of perhaps 4 minutes and say "this is exactly why I like the Beatles". I just couldn't do it. It felt exactly like my hopes to be Pope; impossible. Only this time it was impossible for reasons beyond my gender.

 

A friend once said "I just don't understand how The Beatles are relevant anymore". It is safe it say that we are no longer friends. The Beatles were (and still are) the most unprecedented musicians known to humanity. No one before, and no one after has impacted music like they did. I recently watched a bit of a rockumentary on The Beatles. It covered their first US Tour; the ultimate uprise of the Beatle-mania epidemic. It is so easy to forget how many people the music of The Beatles has effected. Because each time I listen, they seem to be talking directly to me. It is almost as if no one can touch our conversation.  

 

But perhaps instead of "What is your favourite Beatles song" the editors of the very local and very unread magazine should have posed the question "What is it to be human?" I don't know music. But I do know, a little about emotion. Music is such a precise carving of emotional expression; it is instant and extraordinary beauty. Perhaps, what I like most about the Beatles is that through the evolution of their sound... so many emotions are tapped into. The Beatles drag you to the core of humanity; there is a song that exists for everything.

 

 The Beatles endure me. And that is what I like about them. I like that my favourite Beatles song in January 2004 is different to my favourite Beatles song March 2013. My current favourite Beatles song is In My Life.  But that will probably change by next Friday because I have a whole palette of emotion to dip my brush in between now and then.

I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant; Some Unedited Discourse For Sunday Night Consumption

I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant is possibly the best thing to happen to reality television since Fear Factor. It has all the medical sass of Embarrassing Bodies, yet more drama than Big Brother. How this program slipped under my procrastinating radar for so long is beyond me.

 

If you are unfortunate enough not to have made contact with this Jesus of reality television, prepare to have any lucid thought totally blown.  Every episode reenacts the "real life" story of women who either think they have intense menstrual cramps or a mother fucker of a bowel movement. Like the title suggests, these women suddenly give birth, the catch... they don't even know they were pregnant. As I write this I feel as though I make it sound repetitive and boring, and for the most part it is. But there is something almost compelling in which the miracle of life commence in a toilet bowl or (my personal favourite) "sweat pants".

 

 

I honestly don't know what I find so intriguing about this show. Perhaps it is just the face the actors pull when someone tells them they are in labour, or crowning. They often look more surprised than I did when I saw the images of Tony Abbott in speedos. Perhaps it is just the general concept that 99% of these women think that labour pain is just them taking a massive shit. To be honest, I don't really want to know why I am attracted to this show. The more I think about it, the more I realize the inappropriate nature of my attachment. Do me a favour and get half as addicted as I am.

 

 

WARNING: Viewers may contract the quite real fear that they will give birth at any given time.

Morrissey Is My Man

Something about cemeteries has always fascinated me. They reek of the transience of life in a perpetually beautiful way. Cemetery Gates, The Smiths With loves, and hates and passions just like mine. They were born and then they lived and then they died. These words make me internally quiver every time. Every time I hear them, I just want to shout every fucking word into the face of ignorant humanity.  Life is simplistic. It starts and ends in a monotonous manner and suddenly, we are irrelevant. We are dead.

Earlier in the year I traveled to my paternal homeland, New Zealand. Opposite one hotel in Auckland was Symonds Street Cemetery. I spent enough time there to dig a grave. I would sit amongst decaying leaves, surrounded by names and dates and faded tomb stones. The tomb stones meant nothing, yet they were everything. To me they were a symbol of time; a beacon simplicity and the recipe of life.

Today I lost a friend. All I could think of were the decaying leaves which littered the floor of Symonds Street Cemetery. His life seemed as equally as ephemeral. We complicate things with time, we take time for granted. Life is simple; at least Morrissey can speak my language .With loves, and hates and passions just like mine. They were born and then they lived and then they died. 

 

Valentines Day Sentiments

I hate Valentines Day. The only reason behind the burning pit of hatred I fuel is that it is a day which demonstrates absolutely every single thing I loathe about humans as a species. If I wrote a dictionary of conventionally observed days the entry for Valentines Day would read...

Valentines Day: mindless shit

I don't want to end up ranting about the over-commercialization, but I probably will anyway.  Why is it that a relationship status suddenly becomes relevant on one day of the year? Why does singledom become so horrendous that one must slowly shit it into my Facebook newsfeed, updating me with their non-ironic sorrow. Unless you were part of some freakish multiple birth, you were hauled out of your mother's vagina and into this big wide world on your lonesome. You ventured for (I pray) at least a decade of your life being satisfied with parental love. If you cannot continue to exist as an individual you need to revalue your priorities in life and not talk to me (I don't have time for people like you).  And for those with partners in tow, if you don't take time to acknowledge the presence of your significant other any other day of the year...what the fuck is the point?

 

Obviously this guy took it to the extreme...
 but Jesus had a way with words.
I hear he was a pretty moral guy.

The thing that shits me off the most is that there is literally no reason for the day, historically speaking.  Valentines Day commenced as a liturgical celebration of the early Christian saint, Valentinus. He was associated with performing illegal weddings for soldiers and ministering Christians who were persecuted under the Roman Empire. That is it. As the Germans would say "Kaput" (although that is not really used in the right context, it sounds right). There is no actual reason for Valentines day.  There are more founded reasons to celebrate the birth of your family's pet fish. Our society breeds into us from a young age that our lives are about discovering love. That our lives don't truly commence until romantic love is found. What is love? There are some that even argue love is a mere humanistic construct. 

 

If we must have a day to symbolize love should we not commit to it in a more dutiful and logical manner. Rather than pumping our hard earned dollars into the consumerist temptations of Valentines Day  and wallowing in our own self pity, we should perhaps at least momentarily consider the fact that 925 million people are hungry in the world. IDK IT'S JUST A THOUGHT. At risk of sounding like Jesus, if every person donated the money they would usual shred on gifts to a  to a total and utter stranger who needed money, wouldn't that be a display of pure and simple love for one's neighbor.  Isn't generosity and compassion true love?  Or if you can't manage a financial contribution why don't you just shed a smile at someone. Particularly if they work in retail (I'm sorry I didn't realise that being a total and utter shit on the human race had become a standard form of greeting).

 

If you purchase flowers for Valentines day, or subject your 'love life' to un-normal practices in the name of the 14th of February...we can't be friends. If you go out of your way to observe this over-commercialised, over-dramatized and pointless shit of a day we can't be friends. The irony is that in many ways I have just conformed to Valentines Day is by acknowledging its existence and rambling about the ways it affects my life. Anyway, lets continue loving each other (or at the very least love hating each other) as much as we would any other day of the year . Minx out.

shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots shots everybody.

 The song "Shots" could be compared to aggressively slamming your face into brick wall for 4.14 minutes. The song doesn't need versus, all people want is to let the fuck go at the chorus.  Surrounded by the right people and the right amount of alcohol this song makes for some ironic fun. Apart from the song should have no place in our lives/humanity/the universe. Yet yesterday, I found myself discovering the melody of Shots in the spray painting of some dude in Queen Street. At which point, I realised I had two choices....

a) keep on going with my life. Perhaps try and become more socially acceptable.

b) Or go and blog

Obviously I chose the latter. And here I am sitting on Youtube watching (what I would describe) as the genre that is Shots covers. I may as well place my life into a shredder and then burn the remnants.

This particular version actually injects wholesome rainbows into a song which literally is about getting "fucked up". There  is something that I am struggling to eloquently articulate about the use of harmonica/saxophone/tambourine.

To sum up...my name is Kobi, I literally have no life.  Shots?

ZINE TIME.