Ford had his one week check-up today and everything is healing nicely, the doctor says. Apparently “healing nicely” is board-certified plastic surgeon code for “freaking gruesome.” I’ve included pictures after the jump, but don’t you go running off to click through, because I have a little ranting to do before we get there. That’s right, I’m still in the P part of the MS, and right now, P stands for pissy.

I will spare you the work whine, but you know the worst thing second worst thing about breaking up with someone? It’s the loss of the shared joke. Suddenly, the one you used to spend all day instant messaging with is off limits, and when something happens—something tectonically loopy, something sublimely awful—you no longer have the person with whom you most want to share. I could tell you guys, I suppose, but that would mean snarking on a public stage. Word could get back. And I want my schadenfreude without fear; I just want to crack wise, not make people cry.

Oh, but it’s so good bad delicious. And I am just really sad apocalyptically crabby that I have no one to  tell. (more…)

It’s also where MJ should have stopped messing with his face. His nose is thinner, but he’s just all kinds of ferocious-pretty here:

I can identify this song in one slink-thud, it’s that much a part of my pelvis.

From the “Motown 25″ show, 1983.

h/t

For a person with average taste in music, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Throbbing Gristle. I had a nest of friends in earlier days who had every album, every video, every possible psychick cross tattoo or necklace. And they played that shit all the time. Me? I was the hippie-looking chick twitching in the corner to “Black Angel’s Death Song” or firing up Marianne Faithfull and Leonard Cohen on my record player.

But whether or not it was exactly my thing, cut-up industrial noise-smog has been a frequent soundtrack to my hanging out. Not an easy listen, but bracingly seminal. I knew even then that it was good medicine for stiffening the spine and toughening the ears, and all those hours spent listening to the static meanderings and threatening thumps stood me in good stead in the heady underground days of survival research San Francisco, where I am one of the only people I know who escaped without genital piercings or tribal tattoos or polyamorous habits. (That noise you just heard? My mother exhaling in loud relief.)

I’ve always been drawn to/repelled by—which I think is a curious phenomenon and needs its own word, complete with that faint tang of the ookily, spookily erotic; suggestions welcome in the comments—Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV mainstay Genesis P-Orridge, who, it was rumored, lived up in Marin while I was SF. He’d make the papers occasionally, and I fantasized about running into him while walking dogs in the Open Spaces parkland near my best friend’s house.

But mostly I didn’t think about him. Not for years. So I was riveted by my first look at the latest incarnation. (more…)