Darker Desires

The Joy of Tar

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28 February 2011

The Joy of Tar
by Vesperae

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - March - April 2011

There is a very brief scene in 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth installment of the original five feature film franchise, where an unidentified woman is shown seated at a table in an outdoor plaza talking to a companion while smoking a cigarette.  Set in the distant future on the cusp of the ape uprising and revolution, and intended to show one little example of how corrupt and decadent humanity had become, she complains in reference to her presumably "harm eliminated" futuristic cigarettes:  "Funny, now that I know these things won't kill me, I don't enjoy them."

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Whatever You Do, Don't Push the Beautiful, Shiny, Jolly, Candy–Like Button

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31 December 2010

Whatever You Do, Don't Push the Beautiful, Shiny, Jolly, Candy–Like Button
by Vesperae

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - January - February 2011

Two decades ago, Canadian animator John Kricfalusi dreamed up the brilliantly funny, but all too short lived The Ren & Stimpy Show. While originally picked up by the American children's network Nickelodeon, it became quickly clear that the various and sundry misadventures of the title characters were much too dark and sophisticated beneath the slapstick for young audiences, although it quickly found a diehard cult following among adults with an offbeat sense of humor on MTV and countless home-grown VHS compilation tapes, and I was most definitely one of them.

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A Collection of Random Fleeting Moments

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01 November 2010

A Collection of Random Fleeting Moments
by Vesperae

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - November- December 2010

As I've said before, I believe that a Fetish is essentially a Personal Mythology that gives special meaning and narrative and value to that which is Fetishized. Once we begin to gain a persistent focus on the objects of our desires, a Fetish becomes a lens and a screen for every subsequent encounter with them, and each of these encounters serves to further fine tune our reactions to them, and to deepen our feelings and responses to them.

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My First Decade at The Orgy

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31 August 2010

My First Decade at The Orgy
by Vesperae

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - September- October 2010

In the Summer of 2000, UC Santa Cruz released its first working map of the Human Genome Project online. The world had somehow managed to survive the Y2K bug and widespread anxieties anticipating technological armageddon. Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator. Microsoft was putting together an appeals strategy after being declared a monopoly in U.S. District Court. The massively over inflated dot–com market speculation bubble had unceremoniously burst and collapsed. Napster forced people to consider the meaning of copyright and intellectual property in the digital age for the first time. Survivor and the first U.S. version of Big Brother pushed the collective acceptance of our voyeuristic tendencies to new extremes of "reality." American Beauty was the Academy Award winner for best picture. DVDs and DVD players were becoming affordable for the mass market, and Netflix was in its first full year of business. Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Twitter hadn't been imagined yet, and very few people had ever heard of hanging chads, Al–Qaeda, or Haliburton.

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Like Starting to Smoke All Over Again

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23 July 2010

Like Starting to Smoke All Over Again
by Vesperae

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - March-April 2010

It can seem so strange how we process and integrate traumatic events and change in our lives. It's been only a little more than three months since I was confronted with FSCs and the personal loss of commercially produced cigarettes, but it actually feels like years have passed for me in this short span of time.When we lose anything that is a substantial long term part of our everyday experience - a relationship, a job, a loved one - our lives change so fundamentally that we need to adjust to the newness of the absence in seemingly everything. That which was familiar becomes suddenly a little different, because we're suddenly a little different now. And in those moments of feeling slightly out of phase with our worlds, we can sometimes gain insights and a new perspective on the familiar. We can sometimes see little things that we had forgotten or didn't see before, feel things that we had forgotten or didn't feel before, and think about things that we had forgotten or didn't think about before. And since we're relearning our worlds in thousands of little ways, time dilates.

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