dear clusterflock
Words that sound like they have meaning but don’t.
From streetbonersandtvcarnage.com
A reflection on #Occupywallstreet by a twenty-something hipster-ish business owner:
To make ends meet while my business grows, I work at a wine shop and that nets me a whopping $12.50 an hour. As a bonus for my ears, I am privy to humoring whatever bat-shit crazy political stance my customers offer up as they wait for me to ring up their booze. Lately, I’ve been getting customers buying hooch on their way to Occupy Wall Street. Funny, because I don’t recall seeing any of the Little Rock Nine being armed with flasks of Evan Williams. Anyhoo, today this British girl with legs that nearly scraped the ceiling strutted into the shop wearing a see-thru dress. She was particularly amped because she was on her way to the protest and asked if I would like to go. I said no thanks. Without skipping a beat she asks, “Why not? Don’t you hate the banks?”
And there my friends lies the problem with Occupy Wall Street. There is a considerable lack of education on what caused the economic crises and therefore we are playing the blame game. To make matters worse, there seems to be no clear resolution being offered by the protest’s organizers. And if you are reading this and saying, “Well, the giant corporations could just give us the money,” then you sir are a jackass. That mode of thought is reserved for friends of successful rappers who thought that they’d be getting a free ride out of the hood.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be angry, but this feels more like a mood than a movement.
Adriene Hughes, Said Alone
“Said Alone” is an experimental ballet sequence shot with TTV Kodak Duaflex (through the viewfinder) and a canon 5d mark II.
I first saw a video of hers after reading about her on The Fox is Black.
Mullet the Amish Barber, or more Amish mugshots
Sam Mullet said he didn’t order the hair-cutting but didn’t stop two of his sons and another man from carrying it out last week on a 74-year-old man in his home in rural eastern Ohio.
Previously, on clusterflock.
from the spam
Even off your faux pas and pretend you are licking a palatable ice cream cone.
Wonderin’
If you could imagine a TV show you’d want to watch what would it be like?
We’re potentially in the market for a wooden toy
quotes out of context
“There are so many trails we leave through the world,” Wegener says. “I wanted to make them interesting to you again.”
Although spending $200 on iodide pills for an almost nonexistent threat seems ridiculous (and could even be harmful—side effects include skin rashes, nausea, and possible allergic reactions), 40 years of research into the way people perceive risk shows that it is par for the course.
It was like they were saying, ‘Yes, I may make my living as a public fornicator, but I still remember Pythagoras’s Theorem.’”
Update:
‘It would be quite something if you could say that you owned Fonzie’s motorbike.’
headline of the day, II
Giant prehistoric krakens may have sculpted self-portraits using ichthyosaur bones
most active posts of the week
headline of the day
President: “I do not believe in the Divinity of Christ.”
Barry Stone, Darkside of the Rainbow
Darkside of the Rainbow, Barry Stone’s first solo show at Art Palace, takes its title from the common practice of playing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon (1973) album synchronously. Just as the superimposition of film and album suggests new associations emerging from the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous elements, so too do Stone’s groupings of photographs, drawings, collage and paintings.
Very impressive, Mr. Stone.
You can see more of Barry’s work here. See also, Pastelegram.
kill comic sans
I
a dull yet cathartic first-person shooter for the casual type geek
headline of the day
Man Assaults Wife for Not “Liking” His Facebook Update
writing prompts
Deron asked if I’d be willing to do a weekly update highlighting some of the stuff from the other places I post things. I said yes, especially because it sounded like a few others might be doing the same thing, which I know I would really enjoy. So, here goes. I’ll show you mine if… you know.
The main thing I’ve been throwing internet time at is a Tumblr where I post writing prompts.
The Van Dyke Parks Department
Van Dyke Parks’s Arrangements, Volume 1, released this past week, highlights 1960s and 1970s collaborations with Arlo Guthrie, Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt. And: Dean Martin’s son Dino. And: Beau Brummels/Stoneground frontman Sal Valentino. And: other wonders. I love it.
I also love it that in recent years Van Dyle Parks’s collaborators have included Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom, and Skrillex.
“I notice that so many of my peers, aging ingénues, rock stars, are moving along in life into their wrinkles with an adoring audience that’s aging as well, and the plain truth is that I wasn’t condemned by that because I’ve never had to be somebody to do something,” says Parks. “I don’t have a five year-plan. I just hope the phone will ring and it will bring an opportunity to dominate my life.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for hipping me to Michael Slenske’s Interview interview with Parks.)
Elmore Leonard
has a sharp ear for dialogue and no mistake, but one of my favorite Leonard characters never utters a word.
The alligator, a ten-foot female weighing about five hundred pounds, opened her eyes and, after several minutes, moved her head from side to side, drowsy, disoriented, not knowing where she was, not catching the scent of anything familiar other than grass and dry soil. No water close by. She raised her head and hissed in the night, in the sound of insects. The wind rose and with it came a scent she recognized as something she liked that she had smelled before sometime in her life and had eaten. After several more minutes she began to move in a sluggish sort of way as though half asleep, not entirely upright on her legs, brushing the grass with her tail. The scent she liked became stronger as she moved and kept moving until her snout touched something she had never smelled before. She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked. Now she pushed and whatever it was in front of her bent against her weight until it gave way and the alligator walked through it and felt the ground cold now, smooth and hard. The scent she liked was here, though not enough in one place that it would become the thing itself she could fasten her jaws on and tear or take into her mouth whole. She settled on the cool ground, feeling it become warm beneath her as she went to sleep.
Elmore Leonard. Maximum Bob. 1991.
after farting…
S’cuse me, I have a touch of assburpers.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
Government logic
Josh recommended that I post this here.
Penny // Wil Freeborn
Is this not lovely?
I’m putting a couple of drawings into this year’s Paisley Arts drawing competition. You’re allowed to enter two pictures so I thought I’d go with one more finished and the other more gestural. This has been the first time in a while that I’ve tried to work on a life drawing much further than I’m used to.
horsemaning: the new planking
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Slate Magazine is discussing the question, citing several experiments during the 50′s and 60′s that seem to point to LSD as a catalyst for innovation and creative thinking:
Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…
Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.
Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.
This cuts to the bone
John Doe and Cindy Wasserman performing Never Enough. Sound Fix. NYC. 09.07.11.
dear clusterflock
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