Monday, November 20, 2006

gradually approaching,

slowly sense the terrible entrance
into the True Sphere of Sagittarius
staring into the lunatic deep

centaurs understand.

**

Monday, November 13, 2006

Political record and platforms

This line appeared on the Wikipedia entry for Nancy Pelosi sometime on November 13th. It did not exist 5 days earlier:

Pelosi is generally considered to be a far leftliberal in American politics.[5]

Notice the lack of space-age between "left" and "liberal." Wikipedia has quarantined the article on the count of what it calls "weasel words."

My theory is that alcohol and perhaps a dose of rage were possibly involved. I love Wikipedia, because it completely changes every single month.

**

Sunday, November 12, 2006

On The Metamorphosis

In the past, I've felt more or less indifferent towards "vampire chronicler" Anne Rice. I was impressed, however, when I read her foreword (it's in the Schocken Books edition) to Kafka's wonderfully painful short story:
I was sure that before the end, the story would veer back toward the commonplace. Gregor would turn out to be "dreaming." The rules of realism would ultimately prevail.

Oh, I had a lot to learn about Franz Kafka. With a courage unparalleled in my experience, Kafka forced us to follow Gregor Samsa day to day, in the family home, in his loathsome insect body. The conventional pacing made it all the more harrowing. The solid context in which Gregor expires from contempt, petty cruelty, and finally indifference made it unendurable, yet crucial. Here was a story that defied logic completely and with complete conviction and it meant something.

Well, well... I think Rice might have hit a bull'seye with that one.

*

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Stupidity can be forgiven

But it must be corrected, right-the-fuck-now. Even the Dalai Lama believes that.

***

Monday, November 06, 2006

and she slowly realized

the many subtle ways that this Age of Visual Culture
forces upon us its terrible, kaleidoscopic reality.

the only acceptable

and live-able form of life must be
something like a continuous
and sustained act
of colorful, ever-flowing
Butterfly-
Godzilla-
Stomp
.

(Butterfly-Godzilla-Stomp is the name of a dancestep I will create in 2007. It will kill horses, yuppies, and entire platoons of skeleton-ninja shocktroopers.)

**

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Please Vote for God'ssake !

they say politics comes from polis which meant something like "your fucking city, right now."

***
What is the secret hidden beneath the Harlequin's smile?

It must be the ancient mystery of eternal servitude and mastery.


*( listen to track number 2 on Silent Shout -- from the Clairmont Lounge to Capital City Country Club, I hear the city cry out the perpetual enslavement of humankind. ethnic-and-otherwise. )

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

I refuse to go see Spiderman 3

nor will I go see any other Marvel comics movie in the near future, because Marvel comics is cancelling Nextwave. Nextwave is an extremely smart, good-looking, and funny (really funny) series by writer Warren Ellis. One might say it is a highly stylish parody of every other Marvel comic. Furthermore, it is a timely parody that openly pokes fun at our all-too-familiar "war on terror."

Danse macabre

A quote from Frederic Jameson related to the "dance of death." It's all a little over my head, but I find it quite entertaining:
The thought gives new and exemplary meaning to a haunting moment in Renoir's La Regle du jeu, when, at the climax of the costume ball in the chateau, now infiltrated by skeletons waving their lamps and celebrating mortality to the tune of Sain-Saens's Danse macabre, the fat lady pianist, hands in her lap, can be glimpsed staring with rapt melancholia at the skeletal autonomy of the keyboard itself, behind which the piano rolls have taken charge with a vengeance. It is a fable of the work of art at that particular stage of its mechanical reproducibility, gazing at its own alienated power with morbid fascination.

I'm no film expert, but I do at least know that the English title of the movie is The Rules of the Game. It's a black-and-white picture about this extravagant party on some over-sized estate that goes terribly wrong. And then people die.

Friday, October 27, 2006

The Harlequin

(Just some notes. Nothing serious.)

I dreamed of the Harlequin. She came to reset the wheels of history.

Spanish rhythms fuel her Dionysiac stampede. High-fructose Indian corn scattered like eulogy-garlands. Sugarcane-laced manufactories sacrificed to the tropical night. Her carousers embody an eclectic psychomachia, one at once agrarian and cosmopolitan. The city groans and delightfully clatters into a heap, laying down its cruelty-arms for the day. Aquarius painted everywhere in a hauntingly familiar teal-and-maroon Latin glow.

And yet the cigar smoke lingers on the plantation balcony.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Skeletons are way more awesome than Ninjas. Seriously.

I was discussing Halloween costumes with my buddy, Jon Carll, and a certain revelation occurred to me:

“Skeletons are way awesome-er than Ninjas.”

Yes, I think I see quite clearly now. I must deliver this delicious skeleton-Gospel to the good people of this planet. Before it is too late.

Monday, October 02, 2006

I have been hired

to write "light" legislation, starting December 16th. I will wear a tie, and I will commute to the capitol building down next to Georgia State. I will be a cog. A well-paid cog, but a cog nonetheless.

It's a funny job - I will basically take over a lot of bulk-paperwork that technically falls beneath the qualifications of your average attorney. Here's a paraphrased example:

Commending Prophetess Michelle Johansson; and for other purposes.

WHEREAS, Prophetess Dr. Michelle Johansson is an internationally acclaimed Bible teacher, prophet, psalmist, and media personality; and

WHEREAS, she is the best selling author of Why the Universe Loves Me, selling more than 600,00 copies in less than a year, From Capricorn to Solomon, and several other ground breaking books . . .

(names have been changed for legality reasons. otherwise, this is real. yep.)

Monday, September 04, 2006

New to Me: Warren Ellis

Though I realize the book started back in '97, Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan struck me as some of some of the best writing I have seen - comics, novels, anything. The prose is aggressive: seething, violent, and dirty with occasional moments of radiant lucidity. Additionally, the book is intensely political. Art does not have to be socially disengaged.

A passage from trade paperback volume 5:
Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything- depends-on-it first-week- of- being- madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere wile DAddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there ... Time was this place didn't make sense and I would live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

There's all the good things on this ticket and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Wooster Collective


















Word, check it.

Wooster Collective is a little hotspot community for street artists and street art enthusiasts. This piece was assembled entirely out of rubik's cubes. Tons of excellent images.

Friday, September 01, 2006

New to Me: James Joyce

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Though I am sure the book is required reading for most English major types, I was thoroughly impressed by the description of Stephen Dedalus' artistic epiphany - some devastatingly life-transforming satori:
- Stephaneforos!
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhod, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!