So I can’t sleep
It’s probably because of a variety of internal and external stimuli, but I suspect one of the larger factors might be the dude who is always yelling at a Bobby I’ve never met. This neighbor has the strange habit of screaming “fuck you you you you you you you you” around two in the morning. This repetition somehow finds the nexus of hypnotic, tragic, hilarious, and enraging.
Related news: I now have the Kansas City Police phone number in my favorites on my iPhone.
headline of the day
Los Altos Woman Wore Bubble Wrap Under Jumpsuit When She Attacked Husband
Three for Today (Day Two)
Troy Davis died yesterday by the hand of justice. Many factions fought both sides. When does truth lie?
Parallel universes In which Netflix becoming Qwikster makes sense
Internet friend and minecraft comrade, Sarah Pavis, over at The Idler:
Doing Two Things Is Confusing
The year is 2000, Amazon, the burgoning internet book seller, splits off their new music department into a website called Nile.com. By 2011 every river has a .com address and is a commerce portal operated by Amazon.com. Over the next 10 years the internet is entirely dominated by single-serving sites. Subdomains don’t exist and more than 8 characters after the .com is considered obscene. As Netflix’s streaming catalog threatens to overshadow its classic DVD by mail program a bewildered public and confused stock market force Netflix to spin off its flagship productline into a new company for clarity’s sake.
“cause that’s how science works”
via, of all people, Justin Timberlake
everything you thought about creative thinking is wrong?
Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.
The larger picture is more nuanced, and slightly more subtle, but you better get over there and fucking read it if you want to do well on your next project, slack ass.
For 24 hours…
our internet connection, at the house, has been off. It just came back on 20 minutes ago. I’m FULL of shit to share. (Well, sort of full.) I feel like I lost the feeling in both my arms and got it back.
Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983)
Meantime is a 1983 film directed by Mike Leigh, produced by Central Television for Channel 4. It was shown at the London Film Festival in 1983 and on Channel 4 a few weeks later, on 1 December. According to the critic Michael Coveney: “The sapping, debilitating and demeaning state of unemployment, the futile sense of waste, has not been more poignantly, or poetically, expressed in any other film of the period.”
How do I feel about this damage to my car?
Pissed off.
I know it’s nothing that I did. I’m curious, though. Any ideas as to how?
“I want you to hold it between your knees” (Pa’ Cindita) [For Cindy]
“Yeah, well, I didn’t get it, did I?”
That’s the part people tend to forget.
don’t park in bike lanes in Lithuania
The mayor (above) finds it irksome.
headline of the day
Fast-food manager accused of punching mom with service dog
Don’t Forget the Motor City Lawndale
I was looking at pictures of Detroit (from my Flickr friend Jan Normandale and from the archives of the Reuther Library at Wayne State University), and now I have to stop looking for a while.
I’ve visited Detroit a couple of times, and in truth there’s a lot I like about it, but I can’t think about it anymore. This afternoon I’m recollecting a blisteringly hot afternoon in Chicago, late July, when I thought to avoid the expressway and take a parallel route down Roosevelt Road to where I was going.
Read more
Keep Fuck Alive
Just now I told Cindy of my desire to post something about how angry I get when I watch a film on cable and find that its language has been sanitized–and of course she instantly gave me this title.
Isn’t it nice when a favorite film appears on cable and you can just watch it, even though you have it on a DVD? I like it when this happens, but the moment I see that the language has been changed so Betty can read her bible while watching–I turn it off and put the original in. For instance, we were watching Kill Bill the other evening, and they not only changed the language, they changed images as well: “I’m Buck and I like to Fuck” was changed to “I’m Buck and I like to…party,” and the keys to the “Pussywagon” read “Partywagon.” Let me spare no time in telling you of my contempt for people who will seize upon proprieties of “bad words” while caring not a jot about films featuring the patriotic bombing of grass hut villages.
I seriously think I want to become more active in initiating a backlash against the easy moral high ground claimed by people who don’t typically look closely at the grounds for anything other than their own gross appetites and spiritual cliches. People who tend to object to nothing but “bad words” are the people who will go see an art film and shit themselves with peeve because their limits were not consulted before creation and distribution.
I see students often now who trot out a practiced grimace when a literary work contains the word “damn” or “hell.” How long before the word “Pregnant” again becomes “in the family way”? I have had students object to the word “slavery.” But they balk when I ask whose interests are most served by not mentioning slavery–those who were victims of it or those who would just as soon have nobody reminded of the fact that it was ever present in America?
Language cleaners would do well to note that complete success, on their parts, would simply result in a new set of forbidden words. Humans need the opportunity to transgress, and they will find it. And an age-old inspiration for this is the feigned blush of the righteous.
Dear Clusterflock
86-ed?
from the comments
Elvish anger has been mounting for centuries. By the late nineteenth century, it had risen to a fair pitch. Those twee illustrations in all of those books kept under glass on shelves in the parlor. And it just got worse and worse. By the middle of the twentieth century they had Disney and Golden Books to contend with, so the only real mystery is how they were able to keep a lid on their fury till now.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
from Sheila’s email
A peaceful Saturday morning on Portland’s tree-lined downtown Park Blocks, the sound of a shrill female voice at an angry volume:
“I’M FIFTY-TWO YEARS OLD! THEY CAN’T PUT A WOMAN LIKE ME IN SHOES LIKE THIS!”
. . . repeated ad infinitum.
The sporadic campaigns of “Girl Power” aren’t really getting the job done
Feminist vlogger NineteenPercent posted this response to Beyonce’s “Run The World” video, challenging some of the singer’s overly positive views on women’s empowerment:
Peter Falk || Gena Rowlands || “A Woman Under the Influence” || (1974) || d. John Cassavetes
There is a Criterion version available.
Vegan Black Metal Chef
The Tree of Life
At the end of two and a quarter hours of people fucking their mouths with popcorn, during one of the most visually poetic movies I have seen, a third of the audience laughed. If you would like to know what I said to them, we can talk about it in comments. I’m pretty sure it will be a long time before I see a movie I care about in public again.
headline of the day
‘Sovereign Citizen’ Opens Fire On Store Because It Ran Out Of Crawfish
Three words that I do not like
Simpatico
Copacetic
Segue
Was I Bored?
“No, I wasn’t fuckin’ bored. I’m never bored. That’s the trouble with everybody–you’re all so bored. You’ve had nature explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the living body explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the universe explained to you and you’re bored with it, so now you just want cheap thrills and, like, plenty of them, and it doesn’t matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it’s new as long as it’s new as long as it flashes and fuckin’ bleeps in forty fuckin’ different colors. So whatever else you can say about me, I’m not fuckin’ bored.”
Nothing meant to nobody round here. Seriously. Just a clip from a favorite film.
