Truly Horrible?

?

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Movies in the public Domain available as Bit Torrents

Public Domain Torrents dot com.

BitTorrent.

In Addition to Eno's Oblique Strategies, Now We Have:

The definitive collection of idea generation methods.

Sunday Morning Catches Me Up: Dig Desolation Jones

Listening to a little NPR "On the Media" via podcast.

As for new comics:

Got hold of the first issue of Desolation Jones this week, along with the most recent one, issue #3. Ellis's own commentary on issue #1 can be found here. This is easily one of the most visually captivating tracks on which I've ever set the eye-train running, which it does at bullet speeds. Ish one really put the whole story in place, correcting me on a few misconceptions regarding the plot. Set in some version of the present, not the near future as I had originally thought, L.A. is a sort of open prison for disbarred and out-of-favor members of the world's intelligence community. Jones is former M16, victim and sole survivor of an experiment the depths of the horrors of which have only been partially insinuated called the desolation test. In L.A. he works as a private investigator for this stray dog intelligence community. His existence is hallucinogenic, he is beset by visions and distortions of reality he can't keep at bay- he is the perfect hard-boiled supermodern private dick, a translation of noir into transient modernity. He lives in a world not unlike that encountered in the pages of Algren's New Orleans in A Walk on the Wild Side, a world peopled by the shells of the shells of people, the remainders of those mechanisms that once fulfilled a professional obsession or obligation with all traces of the social dug out of them; these are people who have become forks and who've had a few tines broken off who are then forced to fly back to the world of hugs and brunch. Ellis's theme of hyper-mediation is thoughtfully entertained and expanded in this book. Transmetropolitan explored, in the few compilations I had the good fortune to stumble across a few years ago, what I do not mean to seem derogatory in characterizing as a more superficial exploration of the effects of media on people. In that series, we see the hero, Spider Jerusalem, throwing his hands up in the air as he uses the press to try to get people in the hyper-mediated future to police their humanity and its loss. This book, in the first three issues, seems to be leading us to focus not on identifying with a voice of reason pointing out the decay of people victimised by their own eagerness to be mediated as in Transmetropolitan, but instead on a world without that antebellum voice of reason. This is a world of people ruined by their specializations, people who have tuned in to the million gallons of thought pouring down from the wire and lost vast tracts of themselves because they don't have enough channels in their perception to do something with all information at once. There are no other characters of any other stripe in this book. Though Spider Jerusalem's jaunts were set in the future, the present-day world Michael Jones inhabits is the bleaker, more far-flung.
Pay particular attention to Jones' musing on supermodernism, the mediation of space as a message: You are just passing through, you don't belong here. The characters in this book are a testament to the arrival of our plight in our mediated present- YOU don't belong here. YOU don't belong anywhere. If any part of YOU wants to get through to tomorrow, YOU had best make friends with a profession. And all professions simply use their human mediums to transfer information from one place to another.

Too much good stuff

DMX Krew just released a new cd on Rephlex with very little press. 2xCD entitled "Wave:CD".

Some sounds and interesting stuff (New Boards of Canada...)

New Boards of Canada Track, via Scissorkick.
If you haven't already, you should get hold of the BOC remix of Broken Drum on the latest Beck cd.

Sound wonderfulness from a device called THE INSANIUM.

Spectrasonic releases drum loop collection to benefit victims of Katrina. Page seems to be down, though- maybe bandwidth problems? Here's a story linking to it.

Via Getlofi:
Sounds from hacked Yamaha FM chips here.

Feeling Shit Getting Multiple with MOOG

Yesterday I Watched MOOG, a recent documentary focusing on the spiritual side of Robert Moog, the man the movie would have you believe invented the whole world's ability to digest the idea of a synthesizer. That would be beautiful if it were true. I wonder if it is. The good people at the Keio Organ Company, also known as KORG, might have something to say about that. At least it never comes out and asserts that he actually invented the synthesizer, an insane proposition that almost everyone is fond of getting behind. Some early synthesizers were actually developed in conjunction with the technology for reproducing the human voice over telephone wires. You think that stuff just happens? That is synthesis, pink one. That's like a vocoder whose distortion we have been taught is simply a signifier of the real, technical anamnesis of the authentic human voice. It's synthesis we've been taught to ignore.
In any event, the movie was good. It focuses on Moog's thoughts on energy and the interconnectedness of all things. He describes his work with the design of synthesizers as a communion between a timeless realm of pure energy and human memory. It is his ingenuity and patience that puts MOOG-branded, oscillator-equipped hash marks on reality, inserts him into the flow of history, into everyone else's history. In naming these machines, as he puts it, it was not his wish to insinuate that the music they made was "synthetic," but that the music was real, that it exists, that it is whole and continuous- every bit as much as the music from conventional instruments. The music was not synthetic, but synthesized- made, irrefutable.
A short conversation excerpted in the movie between Bob Moog and European University professor DJ Spooky explores this same theme of the humanity of synthesized music, the compassion and emotion and the natural flavor it embodies. The Subliminal Kid spoke about his notions on sampling, on the idea that you can take sounds that exists in your memory and as a physical artifact recorded or encoded in something, a sound that remains forever in the time it was recorded (1922, 1950, 2003) and splice all these parts together into a new composition. Memory loses its time-locked sequence, its imprisonment in the past and in its context, its servitude to the limited multi-tasking opportunities provided by THE MOMENT. Notions and concepts remain whole but excerpted, recombined, real and whole and new in a whole new context. Bob saw his own act of bearing witness to the link between concept, URGE, and creation, a process that produced the synthesizers he built and thus enabled musicians to expand their performative capabilities, as a sign of the continuousness of the mental, conceptual realm and the world of the works of hands and days. DJ Spooky saw this same continousness played out in a perceptually adjusted vector, not in the audible expression of the simplest waveforms, but in the recombination through sampling of concepts and energy across time, across format, across the borders between life and death.

ADHD

A rundown of a million unrelated things:
Linux for the ipod.

I saw Scarlet Johannsen at Croxley eating 10 cent wings.

Yesterday I got Safety Scissors' Tainted Lunch.

Brian Eno and Cluster's 1977 collaboration, Cluster and Eno has been re-released, so two years after I start looking for it (three?) it is suddenly available to everyone. Hooray.

I am in possession of issue no. 2 of The Winter Men (Зимние Мужчины) and issue no. 3 of Desolation Jones. I read them last night.
There will certainly be more said regarding these.

Can someone please tell me how I can get hold of a copy of Good Sound by Mr. Schmuck's Farm (AKA Schneider TM and a collaborator)? This shit is hard to get hold of if you are me and do not want to order from abroad.

For the time being, that will be all.

Water and Cheese

A quiet evening in a living room, in the apartment where I now reside. Won't find me painting more tonight, I'll let the latex dry another day before I affix the masking tape to the beautful orange walls.

A Tinier World

Blink, Blink:
Your eyes drop twice like ice cubes
and we drop into a tinier world
And you and I and the others simplify
and I'm a martini and you're a gin and tonic and we're all just drinking each from the other
with the customary greeting:
Drink from me, I runneth over.

a quick list of appropriate protest music

I've been meaning to write this post for about a week, but the new job, the moving, the painting, have all been getting in the way. I am suffering withdrawal from alcohol as I type this, but I am here eating and taking a break from painting for the moment, giving me the opportunity to post. Albums appropriate to the current state of government:
Trans Am: Liberation
Skinny Puppy's single "Tin Omen," done with the help of Alain Jourgenson, auteur of-
Ministry: Twitch, The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste (and all the other ones pre-filthpig, too, I guess)
Megadebt: Misadventures in Global Desecration
Food For Animals: Scavengers
Ted Leo "The High Party," "Ballad of the Sin-eater"
Free new protest track by TV on the Radio available here.
Short list, but, you know, these things are amendable.

Alarmism

With the deluge come so many new ways for the world to end. Take heart in a new possibility to be right, finally, sexily, with no threat of revisionists hijacking your last words.

Tiny visions of summer

Summer is pulling shut, we've sent the love home and the chlorophyll is seeping away from the surface of things, peeling away as a veneer from the murder beneath. In the soggy south the poor are at each other's throats.


I go to the bar, but I'm tired I will drink water and coke. this weekend I will not drink at all.nor will I smoke.

The Big Easy is underwater. New Orleans has sunk.
Current TV blog coverage here.
Watch your donations, article here.

Excellent interview with Matt Taibbi, formerly of the eXile and, more recently, the New York Press here. Elucidation on the swing right of that free weekly and the disgusting plight of reason under the merciless wheels of ideologically violent christian culture cultists.

I watch the degraded plight of the poor left behind in New Orleans, and a line from the National's "City Middle" keeps running through my head.
"Take me to the nearest major city middle where they hang the lights/where it's random and it's common versus common..."

It is clear and cool in New York City. I am tired and uneasy. Chaos right here in the States is peeling the paint off the illusion of safety, and the poor are left to float downstream.

Ted Leo at South Street Seaport

Some things I've been thinking myself

The Burning Man festival has always seemed to me to be the ultimate celebration of self-centered behavior, chock full of personal revelations that don't lead to anything. Feelings of being closer to god leading to... nothing! No change, just a return to the grind. God no longer omnipotent but, instead, omnimpotent. I don't get this faux hippie bullshit, revelations not leading you to new heights of understanding of the interconnectivity of all things, just a really far-out way to be into yourself and whatever dramatic, amazing thing you're experiencing... for yourself.
(photo found via Warren Ellis' blog)

Mr. Brian Jonestown

Last night on my way to a 2-4-1 happy hour at 151 Rivington we walked past Iggy's, and who should be standing outside broodingly smoking a cigarette in a peasant shirt but the guy from Brian Jonestown Massacre. I proceeded from there to see an entirely shitty apartment in Williamsburg.

Fotki

Son Volt at the South Street Seaport. Hope to have some Ted Leo pics for the free show there this Friday.

People don't mind the floor on the n train. Interesting. Someone has a knack for this.

I'm reading The Winter Men

I wandered into Forbidden Planet yesterday to see if the riot of color, fetishized representations of sexy authority and authority confused with sex, and retarded people buying Green Lantern T-Shirts (and not even the old-school, Golden age Green Lantern in a yellow circle on a red background, insignia, either) would overstimulate me into a coma like it's done for the past year or so. It didn't! I ended up picking up two books that jumped out at me, both on Wildstorm. One was Desolation Jones #2, the new series from writer Warren Ellis, and the other a book about the whereabouts of secret Soviet supermen in the present day- The Winter Men. Highly enjoyable, extremely dense. Looking forward to collecting this one.

North Korean Browbeatings!

You psychopathological traitor, such a provocation will be regarded as a declaration of war!

The CHUD Menace

Download a free CD's worth of Stereo Total Rarities

Do it.

Podkasting ist rad

For kicks, check out the podcast at Splendid . Also, all entries from 8/12 till this one should be read from bottom to top.

encroachment of chaos into the visible standards of a sloth bureaucracy fastidiously opposed to deviation from routine?

blue that in the Russian would contain the accusation of homosexuality. A clever, nearly inaudible defacing of federal property? The

There is a mailbox of nonstandard hue on the eastern corner of 4th and cooper square. It is a buoyant tint of electrical sky, a hopped up baby

File under phenomena solely of interest to me: I saw Richard Hell on the street Friday night.

These people are trying to kill me.

Trying to kill me." They, of course, are. It is again very hot in New York City. I have to find a place. I have to remember to pay my fines.

Heard exclamations during apartment searches, as a matter of trivia, is the same as that consuming task of finding servitude: "these people are

Shelter. One of the tests of conspicuous consumption posed generally sometime before "will you sleep with me" is "where do you live?" One of the

Rooms to let, tempting one to focus all one's powers on the ephemeral, passing, but all too near to the bone material and social need for

Ransom. There is tomorrow's excursion into wage servitude and the grappling with the choosy, spelling-challenged internet enthusiasts with

It is August,and August gets on. There is the matter of library fines unpaid and the hostage titles of learned attainment for which they're

A magazine cover reads "how to wear navy and black." instruct us on our military/mourning options, o giants of print!

At breakfast we chastise the valkyrie

Having someone else's dreams
drinking someone else's drinks

stuck with your own laundry.

Portishead was rumored to be back in the studio, making dark and fuzzy. Everything in our past is reapproaching; once announced, permanent.

Where is my swiss miss pouring me rivers of warm, fragrant, deep brown coffee from her gravid, gibbous, hell-white cleaves? My parchment-white, hundred-weight serving titaness who shines the light of the world when she turns and bends to pick up my fork.
The breakfast ritual ends in Valhalla with the tipping of maidens and history lessons, shouts of
"Present your singularity!" We begin burned by coffee and we end with our end in the beginning of all things.

Recent Music

Röyksopp: The Understanding
Daddy like. Big, atmospheric sound you can get inside, deep bass, pretty electronics with full, round tones, nice filter sweeps from bwoom to bwaaaaw. Disco exuberance.


Easy Star All-Stars: Dub Side of the Moon
I know this is old. I just heard it a few months ago for the first time, and I really needed to hear it again this week. Hot shit. It is exactly what it sounds like it would be.

La Dusseldorf: La Dusseldorf

I haven't listened to this all the way through yet, but, you know, krauty mechanical sounding stuff from the seventies. "Silver Cloud" tweets happy. "Time" goes on for as long as that expanse goes on, or seems to, burying you in afternoon light. Hooray.

summer

Everything around me is was and will be drunk for the forseeable future.
I'll tell you anything and forget it just to hear you quote it back to me brand new, like it fell from the perfect slobbering bullhorn lips of the single archetypal orator.


Your thigh landed like a hammer when it brushed against my knee.

I dreamed my back was covered in fur and I spoke in tongues all night last night as I dreamed of your arrival. You are still arriving, arriving two weeks gone, you are scheming for a moment when again you can shiver and rush south like a hot wind of lead. It's not my plan, but still, it is joyous, even if I am disgusted at my own weakness. My hands swim south through you like scorpions, all skeleton, racing like sperm to find you and fix you with the sharpest, hollowest parts of themselves. You arrive banging like a washing machine jumping against the wall, madly humping, love held out over your heart, pointed down your tit like a knife. That's how you get off the bus. That's how you unpack your bags. That's how you insist on reading the story straight, always to the equator, always to the end, the pages tearing where the bones and brads have tacked them, supposedly permanent. Your love becomes a long, singing cleavage as I, the dumb wolf, paw and slobber, the things I've heard men say drooling off my teeth and blackening the pages we have abandoned ourselves to removing, to putting behind us as though we were discarding the shells of aeroplanes.

This isn't our story. This isn't our house. We've been borrowed and told how it's going to end. However many times we run there, however many pages we fix and turn, tearing, we will hit the end aglow like the embers of tuning forks to lie as flat as starfish.

Son Volt Encores with Cortez the Killer

The ears are still ringing from seeing Son Volt's free outdoor set last night at the South Street Seaport. Being an outdoor show, I had no idea it was going to be so fucking loud. But it was. On the upshot, I can now say I've seen Son Volt, I can say that the new material off Okemah and the Melody of Riot is fantastic (including the psychedelic jammy jam "medication"), and I saw a blistering rendition of "Drown" that made the hair on my arms stand up. They came out for a single-song encore, Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer." They had barely gotten back onstage before Jay Farrar was tearing out the amazing, continuous guitar solo that makes up that song, only occasionally punctuated by haunting lyrics. (He came dancing cross the water...). The new album is a dualdisc, new music on one side, documentary film on the other.
I love seeing truly great musicianship. You couldn't get much tighter than these guys if you were the cooper son of Ra.

Found by way of this blog, who found it elsewhere.

cables

Giving Birth to Monsters/The Indomitable Nature of Touch

There is a Beulah song, entitled "Calm Go the Wild Seas," that contains the lyric "My prints are unique/you've been touched time and time again."
I like to think that we all function this way, that the events that we are a part of, the actions we take to enable certain things to happen, these stick with us and change us, they shuttle us from then to now. Without them, we wouldn't be anywhen.
These thoughts come back to me in the midst of this prosaic shit and my playing out the part of the downtrodden, when no news is good news. The mail has delivered to me an envelope from Malta containing a postcard advertising the MA Art Exhibition at University of Brighton, the school where my friend Heidi was completing her MA in Fine Arts. The exhibition was entitled "Giving Birth to Monsters." It wasn't a piece of bad news. It wasn't a demand for money. It was a tendril of myself returning home to remind me of who I am and to how many people from out there in the faceless world.

Tender tendrils return to me
touching me
marking trails of toeholds
and fingertips
out in the cold
where in the world
I laid my hands
and left traces indelible
left dents and fingerprints
in my fellow man
that remain
and refuse to be lifted

Thanks for the postcard.

This way to the Hall of Douchebags

Via Musicthing... link to "An alarming archive of awful band photos."

"Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?"-Joyce, The Dead

Things that work

Here's an interesting article about a fuel cell run car.

Of $100 Laptops and the Decline of Emor.

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab is in negotiations with Brazil to provide the country with $100 Linux-based laptops, offering the largely staggeringly poor nation the opportunity to distribute know-how and information to people regardless of social caste, while modern caste-based theocracies like Emor are busy consolidating the power of the state and industry over it and thwarting plans for public-works wi-fi networks (see recent pyrrhic victory of heading off a PBS funding cut only to have a former RNC honcho installed at its head, see freepress for details on the ongoing consolidation of media under fewer and fewer corporate banners). In Emor it isn't enough that you are a human being. It's really quite a handicap. You have to be at the top of the heap and willing to devour as much human flesh as it takes to get there and stay there, either by actively doing or by simply acknowledging that you get ahead while others starve, or you ride the greased ladder to penury and charity before anyone has anything to do with you, before you get that country's hollow hags to look at you. In Brasilia they're giving information, access, know-how to the people, taking them off the gold standard once and for all, closing those cash flow gaps so long convenient to the caste system by ignoring them and moving on to a new currency, one that, even though its adoption was spurred by the need to scrape by and get ahead, is more human. Each person can learn to use the machine, each person's ideas can take form and reshuffle the deck. Access! A country that does not offer its people simply frightened and narrow careerism, cash analogs to human relationships, cash analogs to poetry, cash instead of romance! Cash and the means to get it or nothing at all! A country that does not simply offer protectionist, group-enforced mediocrity! An enormous country.
Would that Emor would recognize the potential of its people with such openness, instead of with restraining, exclusionary fear and in-group schadenfreude. Would that Emor would see its people for people and do a little thing now and then to let the playing field level just a bit.

Fireworks

I wish I had gotten batteries for my digital camera. Fireworks were awesome.
This is really funny. Thanks, Manny.

Doing the cool at MOMA. Ps1. Send beer if you have any decency..

The Weather from David Lynch

I saw this on BoingBoing.

An incredibly hot photographic document of an anti-cruelty demonstration outside a Bennetton Store in Moscow.

Zaftig (Russian?) girls with causes with paint on their birthday suits.

Senate Approves Repeal of PUHCA

Articles regarding this here and also here. From what the Truthout article leads us to believe, rampant deregulation of the power industry and it's mismanagement by speculators, pyramid schemers, and other types of intestinal paramecia was one of the factors involved in the construction of the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Also influenced were great chroniclers of American life/broken dreams Frank L. Baum, Nelson Algren, and John Steinbeck.

Dead literary hunk, Nelson Algren.

Tall building, the Foshay Tower.

BBC Article On British Author's Book Makes Racist Allusions Connecting Rap Music and Neanderthals ::or:: "I Can See Them Rapping in My Mind"

I especially like the caption under the picture of the rapping guy that says "Have we come very far in the last 50,000 years?".
Booyakasha.
Article is here.

Highlights include:
"Neanderthals would have sounded rather "nasal" in their singing because of their larger noses, Prof Mithen said."

"The Neanderthals would have enjoyed it. They weren't particularly creative people but they would have passed on little songs down the generations."

"It is thought that language, separate from music, developed with modern man's immediate African forebears.

But, according to Prof Mithen, words are not necessary, as long as the tune is good."

"I think they would have particularly liked rap music. It has the sort of effect Neanderthals would have enjoyed."

"I can see them rapping in my mind."

Giving the kids something to do

Bip-Hop, an electronic label out of France, has a nice webzine you can read, among other things.

People are generally useless, and that's as it should be

I am a media theorist. I'm also a loafer. A guy. A talker. A writer. An electronic musician. A lover.
These things have come about gradually. I'm not actually or intrinsically any of these things out of context.
I also find that, recently, I'm a temporary employee working as an administrative assistant.
On my way to work in the morning I pass all the other people who are probably split pretty evenly between people who are doing a job that is strange to them and outside their area of expertise and those who are doing their job, goddamnit, according to THE PLAN which, goddamnit, exists and doesn't demand contemplation, by GOD. The thing that binds these two groups of people together is the tacit agreement on the idea that people need to serve some kind of purpose in relation to other people. People need a job that assigns them some kind of station.
I don't really get it. Wishful thinking says (and not the morally-degraded notion of wishful thinking that first comes to mind when the term is brought up, the one that is pre-judged as useless because because as things are they can't come to fruition, but just that- thinking that contains an earnest wish) that we should recognize that people are people and they just want to do. As such, those folks who have been specialized out of demand for their talents or those people whose skills set is simply societally redundant to the point that there aren't jobs left for them- these folks should be let to chill on the social dime. A laid-back, non-commercial, non-competitive kibbutz is what the world should be. The truth of the matter is that most people are useless to other people. And they should be. People aren't for other people. So why should a dude such as myself get corralled into fake jobs such as the one I'm doing now just to scrape by when there are so many quality things he is capable of? What the hell am I doing? Overeducated and underqualified and chained to debt. I have to keep looking for better jobs, but the feeling nags at me that there's something in my "me"ness that just isn't commercially viable right now. Can't Uncle Sam send me to the Riviera till something comes up? What does wasting away in an office have to do with the general project of self-improvement? How about a system that apologizes to the individual with perks for not having a use for him or her instead of the individual always scraping to the system- man, that'd be too humane.
I'd really much rather be sunbathing. Or throwing a frisbee. Why can't I get anyone to throw a frisbee this summer?

This just in: at the bank its this guy's money, and can you fucking believe these schmucks? Also, next!

Recounting some things, finally just talking about boobs.

I went and saw Elyse play at Lit Lounge last night. Highly enjoyable. She was backed up by Your New Best Friend, a really good band in their own right. I bought a few beers downstairs from the bartender there. They have an interesting system wherein one must pay and order from a dude sitting at the bar and not the barkeep, said barkeep being a warm saccharine plastic tart, white as bone and as thrilling and clean on the eyes as a stick of mentholated gum on the tongue. Her shirt said boy beater. The bouncer-looking fellow received my cash politely and even repeated the order to the girl behind the bar though she was in earshot, though she had been the one I actually addressed with my dipsomaniacal fancies to begin with. What does it mean? I paid the man for the services of a very fine lady.
My enthusiasm got the better of me and I woke up stuttering dumb and probably reeking of alcohol, 3 days of beard growth to corroborate the unblinking cherry tomato eyes I brought to work with me. Not glamorous. The song I'm working on remains unfinished, but closer.
Bearclaw, I learned, is going to be playing at Lit on the 17th, hot on the heels of their recent show with Shellac in Milwaukee.
I have redoubled my job hunting efforts. Idealist.org is pretty cool, as good as a pair of firm space-race rocket cone breasts (the kind that get a slight ski jump bend in the end when they're bare), but not as easy on the eyes. Hell, I guess the only thing this website has in common with a great couple of breasts is that I like both of them.
A friend I met last night at Elyse's show, she of the lovely legs and the catching up over whiskey, confided to me that she met Regina Spektor last night and Regina Spektor has beautiful, otherworldly, astonishing, surprisingly large breasts that no one can take their eyes off of.
Finally, I've decided to become an indian. I figure if it's true that I'm 1/16 native I can probably get membership in a tribe, provided I can determine which tribe it is. If anyone has any resources that would come in handy please help me out by directing me to them. I would also be open to hearing any dirty Kachina doll jokes.

The Musical Baton!

Manny at Sugardisaster hit me this woke-up-late-but-slept-really-great morn with a little thing called a musical baton. The musical baton is this: a set of questions regarding your taste in and current involvement with musique, la musica, ongaku, music. It operates a bit like a chain letter, so you fill it in and pass it on. We are all well socialized in the operation of this sort of conceptual machine. We are so well-oiled. These, for better or for worse, are the ties that bind us to one another.
I give you: The musical baton.

*Total volume of music files on my computer
At this point I have no idea.

*Last CD I bought

BIG YOUTH "Ride Like Lightning: The Best of Big Youth 1972-1976"
Ride like lightning and you'll crash like thunder. Hunnnnnnnnh!


*Song playing right now
I'm at work and I'm a little overstimulated these past couple of days, so I haven't been listening to much music. The last song I really listened to- Sunday, I think- was "Discreet Music" by Brian Eno.
That's a lie. I just remembered that yesterday I got on the train to meet Joe for some Joe at Bread and Chocolate (only to find it closed for construction, its normally open and inviting confines obstructed by the detritus of transformational accoutrements, it's atypically shadowy dining area dancing to the strobe of an acetylene torch) and needed to listen to "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)("I feel numb/born with a weak heart/but I guess I must be having fun")," followed by "The Nice People Argument" by Ted Leo ("And brother, they just won't listen/so you've got to choose your side/all your talk is just so much pissing/if you're just along for the ride"). In fact I just put that on my ipod for another listen. I guess that's what I'm listening to, but I wasn't when I began this. Digitally mediated narration means the end of linear self-description if you're honest.



*Five songs (albums) I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me.
Ok.
Ok.

"1. BRIAN ENO "Another Green World

2. SHELLAC "At Action Park", "Terraform"

3. ERLEND OYE "Unrest"

4. NEW ORDER "Power, Corruption, and Lies"

This is getting difficult. Acts of inclusion are always acts of exclusion. Ask me at any other day and time and my amoebic mind may have encompassed a wholly otherwise distinguished version of the canon. Caveat in place, know that I am cheating as I continue with...

5. ...A Four-way toss-up between TED LEO "Tej(?) Leo/Rx Pharmacists"

HARMONIA "Deluxe"

LES SAVY FAV "Go Forth"

and THE REPLACEMENTS "Tim"

Now that I've done that I know that I've left something out.
Shit.

* Three people to whom I'm passing the baton
Ok. whitehothouse, nightscenestealers, and pyani.

Manny also saw fit to add a question to compensate for the fact the last question was not really a question. The question he put to me was:
* If you could eat any meal of the day with any 3 artists (alive or dead), what meal, what kind of food, and which artists?

1. Dostoevsky, breakfast, Strong black tea, sproti on buttered bread, breakfast at a cafe on a canal in St. Petersburg
2. Henry Miller, Late lunch, cabbage soup followed by several bottles of wine with a view on a park or a plaza or a river or a teeming profligance of life and furtive, living stupidity.
3. Me, Lunch or early dinner, Ramen or some kind of cold -men out of doors. Beer.

That's what I got.

Do not wait for halcyon days

Manny has his hitching pics up, a hello from one of the most beautiful places on earth. A friendly reminder to not let grass grow under your feet.

A small oasis of sanity

New York passes bill to allow the "morning after" pill without prescription.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=873882&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Get Perpendicular On this Fucking Dance Floor

Technology is cool, but not this cool.
Watch hard drives and little magnetic bits break it down here.
I really don't know what to say about this. There's a guy working for Hitachi who was paid to write the line "we need expanded membership, but that would make us flip, causing an end that's too abrupt, because our data is corrupt.

"Hey, is that actuator man?"

"Neither the Heavens are Humane, nor is life above or below - or within me."

- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

"The bull of the days is skewbald
the cart of the years is slow
Our god is speed
the heart is our drum"
- V. Mayakovsky, Our March

Long-suffering Slavs
and Slavophiles
overwhelmed by the menageries
of of shit and divinity
understand very well
rapports as pipelines-
the agency of he who suffers
and his mistress,
the chemical become his mind;
understand very well
that so many angels dancing
on the head of a pin
is dazzling,
but the single angel perched on the needle's tip,
in her rarefied state of companionship,
is an edifying object of study.
She does not dizzy, but appears to illuminate.
He who aspires to intelligence
knows this single angel
better than the passage of years
that has flung him through
his life in hyper-stimulation,
and the scent given off
by the angel's arm on a warm day
comes clearly, and appears true
to one of such heart
who feels so daily confused
and between his positions.

the dumb scorch of a distant and very constant sun

My silence has been professionally necessary, as I can now say that all the pieces are in place for the next phase. Suffice it to say that I reel from the dumb scorch of a very distant and constant sun (that speechless gaze), that all mysteries assure us they will only tie their secret knots fast, more tightly and more impossibly to confound the Chinese, and those to my flesh. Sometimes you wake up next to a French girl, and you watch the girl quietly dress and try to sneak out at 5:30 in the morning. You begin to wonder, and the wonder is a signal and you know that the plan is in place and working perfectly. What unknowable ritual is this? Why, when the Americans are content to lie about all morning in hopes something more will be on offer when the world has been warmed and its evening silence is civilized with the madness of motion and conversation (the STUTTERING and the SCREAMING and the constance of emergencies being carted from one locale to another more appropriate in red boxes!)?
I see eyes. Great, blue eyes with the lines of preternatural age that go to water as I feel myself and my questions slacken. It was unnecessary to take the ergot HQ provided, the holistic approach has found the intended visions presenting themselves printed out of air into my thinning arms. She could be a quiet French au pair on a holiday reprieve from her Allentown place of work, she could be a 16-year-old Polish girl from Brooklyn who speaks excellent French and wants to lie to someone.
Send cigarettes. Send money. Send sunscreen. These bottles here have nothing but butts and ashes in them. Send me a diversion, because as she left she left her ring, and I know she'll come back for it. I'll never be told if it was an accident or if she meant it. These questions, as I was warned, are torture. I go to take the coffee cure.
The glamour of my penury, as my job search continues, is hysterical.

Wearied by the ferocious depth of my rest

I awoke to find that all signs point to "yes"
I awoke with hair on my chest and blood in my stool
A vicious coif and morning breath

I also awoke to find that the number of artists in my itunes has reached "1337." I fear to add more. This is a sign of some kind.

My Fever Dream

When I sleep in pain
I dream I am in love
with the unlikliest people
and, dangerously, I awake believing
it's all possible

I Just Want to Ride My Motorcycle

Recently been cracking up over these.

I have done it

I finished my thesis yesterday. Throw yourselves upon me, all ye virgins and hot babies or I will make the volcano erupt.

Make Bereev

Go ahead. Make believe you don't think this is the best Weezer since Pinkerton. Rivers is Hollering and belting shit out again. This shit is in earnest.

In the Juvescence of the year came Christ the Tiger

Watched Derrida today. A passage that was quoted in the narrator's voiceover as Derrida toured the prison in South Africa where Mandela was held prisoner reminded me of Eliot's Gerontion. The passage was regarding the origin and the consequence of the self- that the self is the origin of violence, that it perpetuates violence always in its demarcation of itself from the other from whom it must defend. And Eliot popped into my head with his "In the juvescence of the year came Christ the Tiger," a line that's hung with me but has never found a meaning for me. Here something seemed to connect, though, with the idea that Christ, (I regard Christianity and its stories the same as I regard the myths of the Greeks or the sutras of the Buddha or any other stories popularly regarded as digestible repositories of complex thought alone, I am not a Christian of any stripe) in his role as the perpetual and familiar foe of Christians, entrenched the self by being the spectacular foe of so many. As a spectacular Other, the tortured death he endures in the story is the crowd's affirmation of itself as opposed to its otherness. The torture they inflict on him is a violence necessitated by the reaffirmation of the Separate othernesses of the crowd and of Christ. In a funny turn, the incomprehensible axiom "Christ died for our sins" takes on a new meaning, signifying that his execution allowed the perpetuation of sin, allowed the perpetuation of selves, and thereby allowed and necessitated the perpetuation of violence. This simultaneously gives a nod to the fact that the self was allowed in this single symbolic act (among many such acts perpetrated daily) to continue with no end in sight and that in the act, with such perpetual life of the self guaranteed, guaranteeing constant devouring and destruction of the Other. Hence Christ the tiger.
That was the connection I made.

Male-Valence

A friend confided to me recently that he believed that life was not simply illusory, but was deceptive, dishonest, mendacious, malevolent. Not simply constructed and confusing in a nearly zen buddhist sort of way, but actively obsfuscative. I don't know if I can agree with him. There is a strong binary construct at the heart of the argument- the construct of victim versus villain, life versus the individual. There is a veil separating the two, creating a relationship that necessitates strife and confusion to reproduce itself. As agent of thought, as one who gestates thought, who carries ideas, is spoken by language, is expressed by opportunity to react, the individual is married to this multi-valent approach. When he expresses it he gives life to it. He reinforces it, or the possibility that it is true, by being its agent and by not being that which oppresses him. It is a malevolent multi-valence- a male-valence. It is a tautological stance that guarantees its own outcome. Certainly life can be unfortunate, but malevolence requires interpretation and anthropomorphic qualities. If you are unable to find happiness within an interrelationship of various positve/negative binaries with the outcome being a positive or negative reading termed happy/unhappy, perhaps one should adjust or abandon one of those dualities, or abandon the happy/unhappy duality altogether.
Where does one begin to draw the line between a self that is distant enough from the total reaction to that self's actions or for whom the totality of other reactions originated by the selves of others is a completely overwhelming force to such an extent that it appears that there is an outside pressing inside? Is it even possible to take possession of actions or reaction within a milieu that existed presumably prior to your participation- after all you are the result of a coupling, which was the result of other couplings and other social arrangements before that. And, at such a point, does not the interpretation of such an invasion (though invasion already be charged with a value) constitute a new action that demands its progeny? It would seem that the very act of possessing a point of view can function to make true almost anything at all at the basic level of reality.
As such, the point of view purports to construct in abstract permanence in the memory of its holder an absolute notion of any given moment. This memory is never again accessible to the possessor of the point of view, nor is it ever accessible to any others- the self changes and interpretations change and, after all, we are never fully here and now but always becoming and living in some other fragments of improved memories. Our memories are never free from interpretation and the shortfalls of recall. They are always a shorthand that leaves out the totality of an experience for the sake of easy recall, so that it is not necessary to live the whole moment again, so one does not have a map of the united states the size of the united states.
As the possessor of a point of view, however, one has the certain confidence that, though these memories are never again accessible to the possessor in perfection, nor are the experiences ever in any form communicable to another, for the concrete self certain things happened in history, that there is somewhere a real and permanent mark of action that took place and a continuity within which the self is functioning. This space is narrative, private, and historical. That all have access to such a space that is their own, or rather is there in relative mimesis of others' histories and narrative conventions functioning to place the self historically yet sealed off from the apparently common histories of others means that there is a conceptual location within which one can say, "Life is deceptive" or "Life is honest." This space is only a notion, marked only by the confidence that it is there and that it contains a story. It is never written, nor is it ever visible to anyone, including the self that is its proprietor, for the events on which it is predicated can never be revisited and can never be seen except from the point of view of one's own eyes or the point of view of how one imagines the eyes of others would see.
Inside this space, or by referring to this space one can say, "I am put upon." One can say "I am blessed." "I am happy." "I am unhappy."
Outside of this space there is a breakdown, there is no narrative and one can merely pose the question. "Am I happy?" "Am I unhappy?" It becomes impossible to value one's experience.
No one exists purely in one of these spaces or another- that is, the experiential and the narrative, rather there is a constant interchange and inter-referentiality to experience, a reinforcement of experience and action that creates continuity and the apparent existence of succession or descendance from one thing to another, as there is the perception of some form of repetition of what has come before in every moment.
So, in the end, I cannot agree that life is dishonest. To do so I would have to agree that there is an answer or an outcome to the question or story of what life is answering in an attempt to become finite- I would have to agree that there is a true end to all things. I would have to believe in finite and universal answers- products of subscription to a system of authority that do not require understanding. Answers are clerical. To rely on a foregone conclusion, a clerical technicality, is only to plug a hole in the story of one's understanding of, in this instance, the motivations of the abstracted life. Since all narratives occur in a private space, one eventually has to admit that one is providing oneself with the premise. Consequently, if one is to provide oneself with that premise and not admit to it, one fulfills the premise- one is dishonest and one lives that way.
I cannot agree that life is dishonest because I am incapable of knowing if that is true.

bump

23:30 or so, wave of profound self-doubt.

Are you in New York? Can you drink? So can I! I'll show you!

Check out the link in the sidebar and buy Igor a drink, mateys. He could use one!
-the management.

A Night that Does Not Bear Repeating Repeated in the Image

This night was stunning visually, apparently. I was unable to rouse for the entirety of the following day, poisoned by the high living, the hail of punches and the search for Koreatown Jenny. Koreatown Jenny we did not find. Repentence paid a somber visit to our bedsides. I lay in frightened repose at the courtesy.


That's The Tim making upset and me making my Jonah Hex face.

Plasma Clear

Rhyming practice now.

Dropping words like turds in fourths and thirds
and all this time you thought it was going to be easy

Did you have time to blink? A spot to think?
Been watching novels fly by my mind's eye and gypsies wobble by the payphones by a conversion van that just died. They wobble vicious drunk and answer cell phones and sip from thin brown bags and drip spit foam.
Been turning music into digits and then back again.
I've been wobbling myself and craving oxygen. Craving a catalyst, reading Craigslist. I've been contrived at being trite and being sincere. I've been desperate and affable as a willing ear. I've been laughing off the end of the year.
I've been going thin with projects that I run from to other talents and I've been spitting out the butt-ends of half finished comments. I've made headlong slips into merriment and I've been deliberate. I've done the hokey pokey and put only one foot in it.

and all this time you thought it was going to be easy.

I have a few friends and I've had a few beers and all the same, caught in a leer, it's never easy, not even when it's plasma clear.

Want to see someone get past the end of world nights if that's even what she's having, talking herself down until she finds a place worth landing.

Had a meeting with black beetle written glyphs on his back just under skin
we go we light small fire, we meet them there we make small thunder
we play at going louder we dress up like gunpowder with a swagger and a shatter or a hairline fracture on the champagne flute at the party where they let us in
we make strong magic we wobble on legs of aspic and put the strong smile big teeth up in front
to take the heat
Like Dr. John, we walk on gilded splinter
full of shit, sir
indeed.
We hope, we try, to grow on you like a weed.

Tim's new friend

Tim has a great job. Yesterday he got to make friends with veteran smart guy Cornel West.
Check the pictorial evidence.
(After you've gone through all his other great pics, it's at the bottom left of the page)

Hush Money

It was a compromise, and I hate compromises, but that's America for you. "Next time you will be able to do as you please" - That's the song. It's a dastardly lie, but to palliate it you are given hush money.

Henry Miller, p. 15 The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

green power

Electronic Trinket

Last night I went overboard and now my insides are like a chimney coated with fat and creosote. It's a muddy tinderbox inside my heart!
I won an iPod shuffle in a raffle at the NYU computer store.
The e-mail I sent out to my department at school follows:

Electronic trinket for sale- 1 unopened 512 MB Apple iPod Shuffle (C), 99
USD retail value

Features include:
-Learn to accept those things you cannot change and master your stress!
Surrender to chaotic forces unleashed by ruthlessly minimal and highly
significant Apple design by way of absolute uncertainty as to what song
will play next. Song 1 or song 125? Don't these songs have names? The
Shuffle (C) cares not! You and your nostalgia are insignificant!

-You will have the opportunity to smell the iPod Shuffle (C) at any time
it is in your possession.

-This thing can be worn about the neck if you hang it there. Other
hanging possibilities include:
hanging from a doorknob, hanging from a lamp, hanging from a hat-rack,
hanging from a hook, all made possible by 17th century lanyard (TM) naval
technology and gravity.

-Obstruct the passage of visible spectrum light, hide things that are
smaller than the iPod Shuffle (C) from view!

-Place it anywhere

-Can be lost in seconds

-Learn what "near cd quality" means to Apple and condition yourself not to
mind it!

-Maintain the appearance of minimum necessary consumption levels, cash in
on heightened social capital

-Provides hours of valuable gadget operation experience

-lack of display lets you learn what it's like to listen to music in the
dark

I came to own this thing by entering a raffle at the NYU Computer Store.
If you would like to own it, you are welcome to contact me and arrange to
give me 80 of your United States Dollars, transforming them into my United
States Dollars and transforming my iPod Shuffle (C) into your iPod Shuffle
(C). If you would like, I can give it a much fancier name, thereby
increasing its value and rarity. In such an event you may give me 100
United States Dollars to claim ownership of it. This will probably never
happen to you again.

Prof A. raised 2 very good points:
1) is it unethical to profit from raffle winnings?
2) Can I live with the guilt of being the arbiter of a greater likelihood of victimization by thieves an iPod conveys to its possessor?

1) I think I can profit from raffle winnings as long as I do not seek to make more than the item is worth and people know that I came by the item(s) free. This places the buyer in an empowered position to make a decision without coercion and aids in validating the sale contract.

2)iPod is strong magic- People should know this. Caveat Emptor! Other things that one should hesitate to buy are:
monkey's paw, gift of magi, radium, diamond bridgework, unholy reliquary collections, controlled substances, spear of destiny, Brooklyn Bridge, old sushi
It is only with such a caveat attached that I sell this item.

The Backbone of this Country is Independent Trucking

Oh- Oh yes.

The National: Alligator, Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

The National: Alligator

The impulse when you come across something new is to try to hear something you've heard before. Your brain tries to put the pieces it finds into some understandable order. This recording is no exception. What do I want to compare this sound to? To the understatement and rhythm of Joy Division, to the repetitive prettiness of early Crooked Fingers. But there's a new complexity, there are epic, open spaces in the music where shit just goes nuts- pianos, guitars, background singers mixing with the lead. There are instances of delicate guitar work that eschew the whole Joy Division esthetic. Vocals like Neil Diamond, Ian Curtis, and Elvis packed together with lyrics which are the chronicle of a weird normality, a quotidian gothic. It's a recording that pulls you in to a new place, refracts you through a neglected facet of reality and makes you listen to accounts of things that simply refuse to rely on stock phraseology. Familiar words abut, and though the words are common enough, something in the arrangement requires all the power of your attention, like you've just walked in to a room where your best friend in the 4th grade is sitting there, unaging, in conversation with your grown children. Both are intimately familiar, but why HERE, why LIKE THIS?
What fury, what beauty. It's good.

Vamplifier: Long Silent Longing

I've been humming a lot of these songs and singing them to myself for the past couple of years. Now, finally, the cd is out and other people can get ahold of this great album and get hooked on these songs of obsession and love noir. Bluesy, garagey, pained, exalted. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a great nod to both the femme fatale and Gary Numan. She Used to Be my Baby is frenzied in its remembrance of one who got away and took a chunk with her. Every time I hear the words "She used to be my baby, she loved me maybe", I don't know whether to smile in the solidarity of shared experience or sit back and wonder one more time what the hell that one WAS thinking, really. Stripped. Filthy. Tight. Smokey. Just listen to this record.

Some CL ads I recently authored

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/clt/69707630.html

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69490174.html

http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/69478070.html

Who fucking knew?

Fountains of Wayne do a cover of These Days. It's good. I'm not sure if anyone did it before her, but I know it as a Nico tune off of Chelsea Girls. Who knew?

My Dutch Wife!

Wild Anniemals Need Vodka, Are Very Polite

I just put on Magazine's "Permafrost," and as soon as the chorus line "I will drug you and fuck you on the permafrost" came up, I remembered I ought to write about my vanilla-mediated run-in with that cruel arctic clime last Thursday.
Saw the American debut of Norway's Annie at the glamorously packed Tribeca Grand Hotel by way of a free invite from a friend of a friend. Annie is a dancey, Kylie Minogue-y, Discoteque debutante with songs and moves endearingly clumsy and, as such, weirdly sexy. Imagine being Tom Hanks with Darrel Hannah nude as Venus standing in your living room making little girl noises and weird overtures to sex that you're not sure she- or you- understands. What is happening? You ask yourself. Then the mermaid pulls out a giant bottle of vodka and proceeds to drink half of it during her 5 or 6 song set. It's finally happening! the Tom Hanks you is forced to conclude. What do you do next? You scream "Play Heartbeat!" and attempt to dance ass to hip with the other early adopters, industry insiders and other types of sweating bodies while holding a messenger bag that you should have dropped off before going anywhere that night. Had a great time. Annie and her band do a good mix of European Giorgio Moroder disco revival replete with vocoders, Kylie Minogue coquetteishness, innocently direct overtures for sex and silly metaphors for aforementioned having lots of sex (see "Bubblegum"). Many thanks to my companion that evening, whose veteran scenester pushiness and unameliorated excitement at the prospect of seeing live music despite many unmoving bodies standing between her and the stage has imbued her with superpowers that turn her finely-lathed frame into some kind of mass surgical instrument/crowd drilling tool. Without her I would surely have pussed out and stood way back in the bar looking uncomfortable.
Annie was very polite.

A short note on personal responsibility

I just read that when John Lennon heard of Elvis's death, he was quoted as saying "Elvis died the day he went into the army."

We each have a responsibility to pax in perpetuity, do we not?

We each have a responsibility to our art.

why there are no guilty pleasures

Guilt is social. Pleasure isn't. Nothing is intrinsically guilt-inducing. Guilt is the internalization of external standards of moral trespass. Pleasure is automatic and can happen in absolute solitude, internally. A guilty pleasure is a combination of the internal self and external, social self, and it requires a decision, conscious or unconscious, to bring the detriment of guilt upon yourself. Guilt is the acceptance of a constructed social burden.
Guilt also differs from regret, because there are no overtly moral "should" or "should not" overtones, only "it would have been better" or "it would not have been better" given the particular context of reflection.

The Ease of Summer

Sam Prekop/Who's Your New Professor

Thrilljockey
Sam Prekop drives a big Mack truck of skill and arcane science through the leaden latent summer air like a faith healer through flesh. The summer. Remember those days of short pants, breasts, and near-naked spontaneity that taught you to ride a bike, that taught you to count your near friends and your free times dear, that taught you to throw a frisbee amid transplanted city girls on the Great Lawn at Central Park? Remember the simple slide into evening viewed through a slice of cooling humidity in the air? Remember easy living?
Deep in your heart, you know life isn't that simple, but if you take it fast enough and with enough gusto, if you take it all of an experiential piece, you can play along with yourself, pretend all those eighth-notes and off-beats, the algorithmic thrumming of your soul, the train under the street, the millions of obligations forgiven and enforced all around you really are simple and wonderful of themselves. With Who's Your Professor, Prekop brings all that to you at one more remove, stylizing it with his desperate-yet-unfettered aspirated vocals and refining it invisibly for you to take in the ludicrous gestalt of life refined as an essence for the ear, eighth-notes, off-beats, and high-energy jazz-hinting flourishes all. The very muted electronics and the unmistakable production give you at one and the same time the impression that it's a work of staggering simplicity and subtle, tweaked genius. And the guitar solo that reserved the long banquet hall for a couple of hours at the end of Dot Eye lacadaisically shoots a long snort of beatific lightning into your lobes. Imagine a "She's Not There" Carlos Santana working an electric guitar alseep inside a Picasso hanging on a wall inside the dream inside Garcia-Marquez's Eyes of a Blue Dog.
And I haven't even figured out what he's singing yet. This album is getting played all spring, all summer, all "all night," to invoke the poetic time/space the Breeders sing about on Last Splash. This is one for the record books.

caramel Krunch!

If none of you have tried this, you simply must.

Desperation is my alarm clock

If I say I'm getting up at 7:00, I'll be up at five with the lowing of curses from the payphones outside. The guy on the other end is gonna screw his bro' and they're caught, they're caught. The one on the street says he should never have opened his big mouth.

Kind of an old one about living in Uptown in Minneapolis

Been busy. Haven't been able to post, really. Thought I'd air this one out.



Breathing bits and pieces of heat
Stunned daily
In recovery from and awaiting
Deeply religious experience.
Slack-jawed and vapid
Clawing at walking
And failing
Clawing at drinking
And failing well
Falling well short of expectations
Making do as though it’s the vogue

Clawing at running downhill
Desperate even in gravity’s good company
Failing miserably
And wondering at it

Uptown, you’re a suspect bitch

On Hennepin a spaghetti of veins and ink of
Skinny punk rock pasta
Dimming bulbs

Green as anything
As the people in it
Wet behind the ears
In uptown fallacious
Slumming it
Like a rock star

Here with my membership card
Me and lifestyle, boy
Hand in hand we’ll rock the party
In punch-drunk
Hungover
Uptown
We’re hanging up our watches
And stopping the clocks

weird cold dream update

Last night I dreamt about reanimated animals made to run around and play just as though they were alive through some revolutionary form of taxidermy. Temporary process and, as no one knew what energy source they were drawing on, no one knew how temporary.

Somehow associated with this was my going to some remote mountain town and tracking down my high school girlfriend, who had a shoebox full of my things and letters she had penned but never sent to me. And a reanimated kitten that, it made sense to think at the time, was reanimated so it could be posed more realistically dressed as a cowboy and riding another animal. It got away and started chasing something. I said, "It's so energetic." She said, "It's not energetic. It's dead."
There were some other things to do with a central-park type place at night, but can't remember them.

松本のどこか

ありがとう奈美。

the dipshic say the luv won't stop

The folks outside on First Ave
Screaming into the payphones
making their demands
clear as knives
in the name of love
for the love of god
in the name of love
they perpetrate a great deal of need and hate
they won't walk away, each from the other
they're screaming
I'm here
I'm here
you dirty motherfucker
now come pick me up

if you find that you're unstoppable...

If a blonde girl from Texas
Can wash under my lips
There is only some small piece of future
Before the whole branded world
Falls beneath the total acceptance of my embrace

Whipping Through It

Get Used

BoingBoing has pointed this out:
Cory Doctorow: Many readers have written to point out that AOL's new Terms of Service for AIM "include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.'"

Wonder what service I'll start using. So much of this depends on a network of friends who actually use the same tech you do. i.e. why cell phones here still suck.

Here's the link.

Universal Pussy

If I might-
Chicks on Speed made a really great song, but, if I might, with Universal Pussy, on 99 cents, they show that they maybe didn't know how they came about all their other great songs before that 2003 album.
It's a great song. It's a great in-your-face thing. The production tells me, as a home electro entrepreneur, that the chix are re-learning their whole schtick. It's good and it's heartening.

Hooray for chicx.

Lktrk

A neon cross with an erection
let this be my reflection
a representation of the divinity of my hard-on for you.
Number 1!

Why Nabokov Means Bad News

David Byrne showed some Powerpoint slides created as satires of the information-expressing capabilities of Powerpoint that were expressing the plots and nuances of great works of literature and culture in Powerpoint's unrefined, low-resolution style. They were funny. One of the works he picked to flash up on the screen before us before moving on was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It was nearly incomprehensible.

Before I go any further, Nabokov is pronounced Na-BOE-kuv, with the second vowel stressed and long.

I mentioned that I thought the slide was incomprehensible in my consumer culture class on Thursday, prompting the question from the prof as to whether I had ever read the book. I said that no, I hadn't, that I'd read a part of it, but for the most part I have a special aversion to Nabokov. But I wasn't able to say this before a certain female in the room spoke up with her ringing endorsement of the text as a wonderful piece of lit.

My aversion to Nabokov is not a direct result of his work in and of itself. It is more to do with the type of women he seems to appeal to and therefore tends to remind me of. What type of woman is this, you ask? It is the woman who knows exactly what she is doing. She lives for power in any situation and eschews all sincere contact. She lives for attention and the manipulation of any situation for maximum long-term attention and the reception of maximum personal benefit by means of that long-term lavishing of attention. They are the women who want to be Lolita, who, above all else, though they don't know it themselves, though they simply have an overpowering sexual appetite for him, want to destroy Nabokov, the man who sees through them and thus is the only man with power over them. Men like these are the only ones that such women will actively pursue.

I'm going to go have a beer. Ciao.

David Byrne- I ♥ Powerpoint

Tonight I went to see David Byrne give a presentation on the medium of Powerpoint. His stance was that as long as the powerpoint was just a background, that it wasn't being allowed to dictate the thought that was being presented or overly condense it, that it could be a freeing medium in that it could contain so many products of other forms of software presented, within its low-res limits, in unconventional ways potentially.

There were some pricks who stood up and asked a few untoward and hostile questions, but I think he took them with aplomb. Standing outside with friends before heading to a pub to eat, he came out, walked over to his bike, locked to a signpost, unlocked his bike, and walked with a group of self-important hoity-toits to some reception. I heard myself say "Thank you, Mr. Byrne." He looked over and said, "Thank you."

A few minutes later I realized I had 1) spoken to David Byrne as he was unlocking his ten-speed and 2) called him "Mr. Byrne." It sounded funny, but I wanted to show the guy respect.

Spider-Man's Greatest Bible Stories

This must be read.