Look out honey, ’cause I’m using technology

[ I.P. & the Stooges ]

Into the ear of every anarchist
that sleeps but doesn’t dream
we must sing
we must sing
we must sing

[ Bright Eyes ]

There is a mean poem about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will not read it, because we are going to Happyville.

By Bob Shea

[ taken from McSweeney's newsletter. ]

“Not butter? Then what the hell did I just eat?” Spread.

“I still say it’s butter” Spread.

“After all the damage you’ve done to this family with your habitual lying and deceit, you have the nerve to sit there with a straight face and tell me that this isn’t butter?” Spread.

“I’m pretty sure that was butter” Spread.

“I’m comfortable calling this butter” Spread.

“This challenges everything I’ve come to believe about butter” Spread.

“I’m not Entirely Sure it’s Edible” Spread.

“I’m willing to suspend disbelief about this being butter for about as long as it takes me to eat this toast” Spread.

“In the absence of actual butter, sure, I’ll play along” Spread.

“I guess you could call it butter. If you don’t put any in your mouth” Spread.

“From a distance, you’d swear it’s butter!” Spread.

“I can’t believe it’s so flammable” Spread.

“I have no reason to believe this isn’t butter” Spread.

“Am I wrong about God too?” Spread.

Who was that, going by just then – who was the slender boy who flickered across her path, so blond, so white he was nearly invisible in the hot haze that had come to settle over Zwölfkinder? Did she see him, and did she know him for her second shadow? She was conceived because her father saw a movie called Alpdrücken one night and got a hardon. Pökler in his horny staring had missed the Director’s clever Gnostic symbolism in the lighting scheme of the two shadows, Cain’s and Abel’s. But Ilse, some Ilse, has persisted beyond her cinema mother, beyond film’s end, and so have the shadows of shadows. In the Zone, all will be moving under the Old Dispensation, inside the Cainists’ light and space: not out of any precious Göllerei, but because the Double Light was always there, outside all film, and that shucking and jiving moviemaker was the only one around at the time who happened not to notice it and use it, although in deep ignorance, then and now, of what he was showing the nation of starers…. So that summer Ilse passed herself by, too fixed at some shadowless interior noon to mark the intersection, or care.

The model currently being fired was the A3, christenend not with champagne, but with flasks of liquid oxygen by the playful technicians. Emphasis had begun to shift from propulsion to guidance. Telemetry on the flight tests was still primitive. Thermometers and barometers were sealed in a watertight compartment with a movie camera. During flights the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. After the flight the film was recovered, and the data played back. Engineers sat around looking at movies of dials. Meantime Heinkels were dropping iron models of the Rocket from 20,000 feet. The fall was photographed by Askania cinetheodolite rigs on the ground. In the daily rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the model broke through the speed of sound. There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries – since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pökler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been extended past images on film, to human lives.

Death to everyone
is gonna come
and it makes hosing
much more fun

…cultural studies today when prof would not tell the lecture hall full of hipster girls what the difference is between structuralism & poststructuralism vis-a-vis early/late Foucault, but just gave us that datum as “something to drop into conversations at cocktail parties, which is all your humanities degree is going to be good for”, but otherwise, otherwise things are nice, and the Mountain Goats songs I get stuck in my head are the tender and happy ones…

And the power’s out
in the heart of man

My film is not a movie.
My film is not about Vietnam.
It is Vietnam.
It’s what it was really like.
It was crazy.
And the way we made it was very much like the Americans were in Vietnam.
We were in the Jungle.
There were too many of us.
We had access to too much money,
too much equipment.
And litte by litte, we went insane.

[ Francis Ford Coppola, Cannes 1979 ]

let’s live
in the
sub
urbs

These domestic disasters are dynastic.

[ Ibid. ]

The point is that you shouldn’t think that you miraculously have to become a beatnik or a bohemian or a hippie to elude the trammels of convention. Successfully doing so doesn’t require exaggerations of conduct or oddities of dress that are alien to your temperament and your upbringing. Not at all.

[ Philip Roth: The Dying Animal ]

My milk shake brings all the boys to the yard
And their life is better than yours

are probably the two smartest lines of pop lyrics that I’ve been listening to lately.

For their own amusement, they had recently removed one letter from the firm’s and had made business cards with A.S.S. on them. They were chucklers, they were assholes. They called me The Turtle.
Then Turtle-Man.
Then Yertle.
Then Yentl. Then Lentil.
Finally they went back to Turtle.

[ Dave Eggers: How We Are Hungry ]

Well some people try to pick up girls
And get called assholes
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and
So Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole

Well the girls would turn the color
Of the avacado when he would drive
Down their street in his El Dorado
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not like you
Alright

Well he was only 5′3″
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not in New York

Oh well be not schmuck, be not abnoxious,
Be not bellbottom bummer or asshole
Remember the story of Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole
Alright this is it

Some people try to pick up girls
And they get called an asshole
This never happened to Pablo Picasso
He could walk down your street
And girls could not resist his stare and so
Pablo Picasso was never called…

[ The Modern Lovers ]

Death to me and death to you
Tell me what else can we do die do
Death to all and death to each
Our own god-bottle s’within reach

[ Bonnie 'Prince' Billy ]

Oh, and by the way: use Firefox.

Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre

so picture yourself at the white horse
picture yourself among the beautiful
and picture yourself alive

[ Erase Errata ]

What the hell am I
doing drinking in [name of city]
at twenty-six?

sums it up pretty well.

How characterless they looked: Shuley without his deep unbuttoned collar, Ennis without his scarlet belt with the snaky clasp, and Conolly without his Norfolk coat with the flapless sidepockets! It was a pain to see them, and a swordlike pain to see the signs of adolescence that made repellent their pitiable nakedness. Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body.

Click, went Teflon’s Leica.

[ via exdirk ]

Baby Genius
look how you’ve grown
where do you go from here?
Didn’t we have some good times
after all that’s said and done?

small body and small mind
big head and big headaches
my back is broken
Baby Genius
find a new ride

[ Eels ]

Mercy.

We
Await
Silent
Trystero’s
Empire