Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Kane's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, December 6th, 2009
6:32 pm	I thought of a wonderful motto for an artillery battery: "If you have problems, we have solutions" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
2:30 am	So I found a lounge where you can smoke. It's pretty sweet. Also, I'm probably (50-55%) going to join the Army this year. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
7:48 pm	So 2 AM last night and I heard this car roaring up the hill going east on Sunset into Echo Park. The windows on this sublet aren't amazing at insulating either temperature or sound, but they do something, and even then it sounded like the car was right outside with all the windows open. And it was dopplering somewhere around 120 miles an hour, I'd say. "That's an accident in the making", I thought. But that part of Sunset is straight and steep and protected by lights, so whatevs, but when it came up past the 7-11 and headed for flat ground with the throttle still wide open, I thought "Dang, that's a fatal accident in the making." Then there was a fatal accident. There was the screeching that only ever precedes a crash, and then the crash wasn't one blast, it went on a while, sounded like a garbage truck shaking out a bin into its grinder, with maybe a bit more of a metallic shriek. I went to look, everyone went to look. There was a hydrant spraying water and a light pole down and the car was wedged improbably between a wall and a pillar perpendicular to the road. The top was crunched in like it had spent some time upside down. Conveniently enough this happened directly outside of a fire/EMT station, and they put on the lights and sirens to pull all the trucks out of the driveway and park on the street. The emergency folks did their number. I looked up the reports this morning, and took a walk by later. It's clear from the skidmarks and the trail of destruction what happened - car was just going too fast to take the turn that close, and that curve isn't sharp at all. They cleaned up the big parts, but there was little plastic debris left in the gutters and the bushes. I poked through some of the plastic in the mud, turned it over until I found a piece of one of the side mirrors. This mirror saw, reflected, an incredibly violent, kinetic human death. That's powerful mojo. I've been planning to build a shrine to Santa Muerte for a while, now I have a relic to sanctify it with. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
10:29 pm	So I was thinking today about how all the great female rap MCs are lesbians. Missy Elliot? Lesbian. MC Lyte? Lesbian. Queen Latifah? Lesbian. Da Brat? Lesbian. Lil' Kim's just an omnisexual slut, as far as I can tell. But then I tried thinking of non-rap female poets. And really the only modern one I could think of was Adrienne Rich. (? Lesbian.) So I thought about females in the classical canon, which is pretty much Sappho. And come on: Sappho. So what's up with that? It can't be that you have to eat box to rhyme, 'cause come on: male poets. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
2:01 am	Yeah I was never satisfied with the state of things and I always thought we'd come to a crossroads and raise the X banner yaaay. Except here is, projecting from the past, the best crossroads of this 30 year cycle, and the embryonic right and left revolutions are both are arranging their ideology to be like "okay there's this class of people well-raised by the upper middle class in cities and nice suburbs, told its the best by merit and then cycled through the Ivy League and vaguely predestined libertarian economics on to the heights of media, government, and money: destroy them" Hm. Oh well I guess reaction is like a well-catered revolution. Jeunesse dorée 4eva. (and its not like i wouldn't win either revolution if you threw it) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
3:01 am	I think the generation maybe 1/2 behind us has better potential of being the important one. I could dig being an elder to them. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
11:34 pm	Hey famous guy. I did it first. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
1:26 am	So I think I have athlete's foot, for the first time in my life.* Both on the right foot and around the nails of both hands. It's obviously from karate; I don't know if it started on the hands by way of me using these increasingly sweaty and stiff and strangely oxidation-green-stained leather gloves I don't know how to wash or on the feet by way of me wrestling and opening up huge friction burns on my feet on the sweaty dojo mats. Oh on Friday I learned wrestling and grappling for the first time. Sensei, the higher belts, and the guys who'd been wrestling before all say I seem to have an affinity. It's nice because my whole life I've been trying to trip people and it hasn't worked at all; sensei was like "o do this" and it was like slide-wham, slide-wham, "oh". Also I was getting submissions from the 230 pound guys without giving one up, and sensei taught us this way to get an amazingly powerful choke using your shoulders. Also I threw the (18 year old, maybe 110 lbs) girl I had been flirting with so hard she cried for like 8 minutes, that was the less cool part of the day. Being an only child means I never learned to fight below 100%. Then later there were zombies, and I woke up at 6:30 am on like an hour and a half of sleep to bother crazy homeless people until I found the one with Brad's phone. * Which is strange, given how my skin is totally my weak point. I've been learning lately, tho, that between ammonia disinfecting and uric acid softening the keratin, most of these petty skin problems will go away with a good soak in piss. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
2:26 am	Isn't it also weird that in America, class is supplanting race as master status at the same time that Europe, the model of how this is done "right", it's going the other way? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
1:42 am	Isn't it weird that we treat Morgan Freeman as at least a B-list star when he's really a character actor who pushes his range less than Samuel L. Jackson? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
12:24 am	Bonus dork So when I was taught it was just taken as given that wages were sticky. They used that to explain other things, like THIS would go like THIS, but WAGES ARE STICKY, so instead it goes like THIS. So now it seems wages aren't sticky. That wasn't a general case, but a special case spanning horizon to horizon. So what ARE the boundaries and dynamics of wage stickiness? (Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
9:31 pm	So I've kept going to the dojo (it's going great, thanks for asking) long enough that I saw a need to get some new, really really basic sporting supplies - a gym bag, a gym towel, and new workout pants. Now it's worth noting that in each case, the "gym" or "workout" here means "kinda flimsy and unfashionable, using unprestigious fibers". And where could I find all these things with a minimum of effort? Why, in some sort of sports-oriented retail outlet, I concluded! So I went to the Glendale mall, and eventually realized that it didn't even have a sports store. "Eventually" because I was initially misled by several sporting-style-culture stores. The kind of place where you could buy team hats and jerseys and basketball shoes and even casualwear for "ballers", but not an actual basketball. As an aside, visits to a mall always either reinvigorate or completely destroy my faith in humanity, and I can't predict which in advance. This one was destroy. So I gave up, and on a recommendation went up to Burbank today to their Sports Authority, which is located in a kind of supersize strip mall where every store is a big box, and you obviously drive from one store to another. As another aside, these sort of centers - witness the very fact that I go to a category killer to find something that I couldn't in the mall - have really come up in the last two decades as the endpoint synthesis of the 20th century retail dialectic, the thesis being the department-cum-anchor store, and the antithesis being the chain boutiques that rose up to fill the space between them. Okay, Sports Authority had basketballs, and all sorts of equipment. I spied a cup and mouthguard and some surprisingly cheap punching bags I might want to get at some point in the future. It even had gym bags and pants. But the thing is where it came to these latter things, the store was a sports-style-culture store for people who actually did sports, and these things were ridiculously expensive and strongly branded. Like, $35 each for the bag and a pair of pants, more if I wanted the top-of-the-line Nike or UnderArmor models. And like I said, when I was looking for sports gear, the "sports" meant cheap and basic. The new technology advertised on the tags meant nothing to me. I had long been doing ok with a bag and pants from around 1999, which were not much different from what you could get in 1989. (Before that, I yield, synthetic fibers weren't quite up to the task.) Eventually I got everything I wanted in Target, plus a new butter dish and laundry hamper. One of the nice things about not going to school anymore is people don't demand that your stories and arguments resolve themselves by the conclusion. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
2:57 am	pluperfectionist IMG_0111 Originally uploaded by kanemacaniff As requested: In my defense, I(DID YOU KNOW that I totally believe in the western media model of beauty [I remember this one time in like I think 9th grade gifted science class Kaitlin Mallouk's dad, who was maybe a doctor or something credentialed had come in and spoke against unhealthy female body images and when Q&A came I asked if maybe this was the price we pay for a beautiful culture and he {the way smart adults often did with me where they saw my potential but thought I was a level behind them when I was in fact an odd number ahead} talked directly to me on and through the bell on how these ideals were a construct of our modern consumeristic media-driven culture and I thought duh yes, but that consumeristic, media-saturated culture is precisely the culture I was raised in and now live, and what the fuck culture did you come from?] and it's only in the last three or so months in my adult life that I've considered myself possibly attractive?)'ve lost another critical 5 or 8 pounds since then. In my offense, I left that shirt in Hawaii because I went down to the hot tub, took it off, and then got too drunk to remember it when I left. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:29 am	I've definitely seen more white girls with babies in the last 2 years than I saw white girls with pregnancy in the last 1-3rd year. How did that work? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
2:01 am	E=mc^2. Maybe we were once supposed to understand it. As recently as the mid-'90s we were expected to recognize it. I just realized I haven't encountered it in a decade. Am I just not in classrooms anymore, or did we lose it? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 14th, 2009
9:18 pm	So I saw Inglourious Basterds a while ago. I wasn't sure what I thought of it, and I still don't have a singular judgement, but I think it's actually the first movie I want to see twice for critical purposes. (The first movie I wanted to see twice for the hell of it was Waterworld, which I prefer to the Mad Max movies, which were all '70s-brooding and slow.) Principally, I find the inversions intriguing. The way how, counter to the typical WWII movie in which the Germans are all indistinguishable and the Americans are a collection of distinct (arche)types, this one gives us a variety of Germans (with recognizably different accents! to each other, at least) and a squad entirely composed of streetwise Brooklyn kids. Or how none of the Germans are shown to have any particular malice towards Jews as Jews, but all the Jews hate Germans as Germans. Ultimately it makes you realize... isn't it a little weird that we've commemorated the Nazis by designating them as caricatured vermin that can be killed at will and en masse without compunction, so as to better serve our own culture's narratives? (Or alternately, isn't that perfectly normal and isn't it weird how we pretend to treat that "never again" sentiment as some sort of universalism against all genocides rather than a promise to make sure our team never loses theirs?) (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
1:01 am	I am Gaius Baltar 'strue. One by one by two by eks. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
12:42 pm	Weakness < strength < skill < tactics < strategy < logistics < politics. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 17th, 2009
11:15 am	A martial arts, um, dojo, I guess is the word, opened up in a storefront on Sunset in the middle of Echo Park and I've started going. American Kenpo, with boxing and brazilan jiujitsu touches. It's run on a yoga schedule: a class every day, you can pay per class, or per week or greater time unit for unlimited classes. It exhausts me, which is kind of the point. Hourlong, the first half of the class is just solid exercise - major muscle groups to the point of exhaustion, and your recovery time is spent exhausting another one. I've been getting to the point where I can do 10 push-ups in one set, if it's the only exercise I've done that day. The sensei has us doing 3 or 4 sets of 25 in the course of 15 minutes. I'm not keeping up, but I'm pushing, and the sensei's good at tracking a bunch of people and inspiring/challenging to their limit, which is the whole thing about physical training. By pushing you to the point of exhaustion and not just unpleasantness, having a guide makes you do more reps per set or whatever, for an exponential increase in effectiveness (as the more you do the more you'll be able to do next time). Then some techniques, some of which have official and kinda purple titles, but tend to get presented more as "here's a way to hurt a guy who's grabbing you", or "here's a way to block and counter an overhand knife slash", or "here's a way to block a kick and open up a throw". Then, after we're totally exhausted, we put on gloves and do 5 or so rounds of sparring. This is fun, and I'm definitely doing better in the few sessions I've been going - I'm putting in good showings with the other white belts and some of the yellows, though even the ones my age I tend to have reach on. The higher belts could absolutely wreck me, but I learn stuff from them - at first they were just kinda teaching me to block, and now they're teaching me how that's not enough, how they can do attacks where my blocks just open me up worse. So I'm focusing more on how to not just keep blows from landing, but do it in a way that throws off their balance or rhythm, and keeping constantly conscious of the position of my body and limbs relative to their body and limbs. So: fun times. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
12:25 am	So one interesting thing about all the Michael Jackson retrospectives is that all the old pictures bring to mind that he used to have an afro. He iconically had an afro, even. Which, I mean, yeah obviously, but just try imagining him with that hair in his '80s-'90s period. No, seriously, go ahead and try it! (!!!) (1 Comment |Comment on this)