30 Photos of a Chinese Sex Toy Factory
All that’s left here are the remnants of what was
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of the documentary Jesus Camp, produced a short video at The New York Times about the dismantling of Detroit.
One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.
Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.
Last night I dreamed
that a long-time amour was a barn owl.
Dream name
Esther Blunderstruck.
Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)
I am posting this post
because to now I have posted 1964 posts. So this will be 1965. And that was a beautiful year. I was just old enough to know that I wanted to be a grown-up woman. In 1965.
At least one of those grown-up women in the movies. Or to have a hit record.
from the moderated comments (spam?)
I stumbled across this website when i saw the title “Neglected Pet Dreams”. I just wanted to say what a relief it is to know that other people suffer from this weird syndrome? as well. I have horrific nightmares about my cats (still alive) and a rabbit that died over 15 yrs ago!! Why is this haunting me?? Does anybody have a clue!
dream name
The young man, the photographer hired by the insurance company, said his name was Keith. Keith Carradine. I thought that was a pretty odd choice on the part of his parents, even by dream logic.
On waking, I recalled that our neighbors the next street over from Dutton Drive had named their daughters after movie stars. Lana. And Rita. But their last names were not Turner. Nor Hayworth.
then I yelled at my dad
“It’s amazing to think all the water on this bus when during a lifetime each star makes a single ounce.”
Transit
Don’t eat so much. You don’t have to keep going until everything is gone. The Clean Plate Club is not looking for new members. You are already full, so why do you continue eating? You taste nothing.
Review your hardware-store shopping list. Arrange the items in two categories: things that must be fixed before they break something else, and parts for projects you will never start. Stop choosing tools based on whether you think they will outlast your span of years. Do not synthesize memories and likely scenarios as you did last time.
from the comments
Have I mentioned a man I knew who, years ago, worked in what was then styled the multimedia division of a university and who, before that, had studied at the Institute of Design . . . who, instead of counting sheep at bedtime, imagined a grid and methodically filled it in?
Mrs. Fisher dreamed of Heaven.
And in Mrs. Fisher’s Heaven, Mr. Peanut was God, and his Son was a Spud. And the Son of God wore a bellboy’s cap upon His head, and He so loved the little children that He wrenched their arms from out the sockets and extended his sprouts unto them, and they danced in a ring. And the Son of God was merry, and the Son of God was ashamed.
from the comments
But the part where they put my head under the blanket with the map pattern: that was bad.
tweet of the day
tweet of the day
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
from the comments
I’m pretty sure the Sears Catalog harkens to outhouses and the page you can do without. One would never wipe with a page that held your dream on it.
dream name
Elver Headlight.
Scream
I woke up screaming this week. A bad dream, said the Iowan. Eventually I went back to sleep, but the rest of the night was uneasy. The next night at dinner, he asked me about it, but I said I could not remember what was going on with me. Sleep walking and talking is not unusual in my family. Mr. B. will “speak in tongues” in the night, the Iowan says. But I quieted down long ago. And had not screamed in my sleep in decades.
Until just after midnight on June 29, 2011. The truth is I did have a vague notion about it all day. I didn’t really want to talk about it. Until I did. “Maybe it was because this was the day daddy died, 20 years ago.” I was born on Father’s Day. I had his black, curly hair. His laugh. His way of never meeting a stranger.
And on June 29, 1991, he shook hands with a friend after a session at the coffee shop, then ran straight into the path of a car. Did not walk. He ran.
Distressing thoughts, emotions, shock, these things can be tidied up and put away, but only for so long. The old mantle clock’s single peal at a quarter after midnight was all it took to crack open the mind’s thin colluding door. And out it came, a long, ear-splitting, scream. I imagine it sounded like loss.
Finally.
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
Message in a Dream
A neighbor asked me over last week to look at his American elm seeds. He is trying to grow new trees from a large healthy one that somehow has managed to escape Dutch elm disease. This is part of an effort to grow new American elms in our county in Virginia. But the neighbor has sprouted only a few seeds from dozens of attempts. And they don’t look so good.
My yard was very conservative when I moved in last summer. Within weeks it was bright and beautiful with exotic flowers that bloomed until December, then burst into life again a couple of months later. This earned me a bit of a witchy reputation. But my experience is limited to flowers, fruits and vegetables. I am not a tree person. But I told the neighbor I would see what I could find out. I started researching online. I found some information, but it was confusing. I was frustrated. Later in the week, I had a dream. I was walking with my father in the woods. He was the kind of person who could go straight to a stand of trees that had been declared extinct, or nearly. No big deal. It was like he could smell them out.
In the dream, my father bent down and started digging with his hands in the forest soil, pulling away the organic matter on top. He pushed deep into the packed earth and pulled that up in his fists. He held out the rich soil to me. I woke up thinking about the elms.
Yesterday, I told the neighbor I wanted some of the seeds. I mentioned the soil in the woods where I often roam near the trail near here (the Iowan sits on the bench and waits for me to get my fill). I did not mention the dead father and dream. But, I said, “I’m in.”
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
X-Muppets
Something about me loves my childhood meeting my teenage nerdery. If only it were real.
Masks and Time
I found a wonderful little book at the used books place yesterday: Mexican Art: From the Beginnings to the Olmecs, Bernard Noel, Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1968. It has many fine plates that I find somehow more pleasing because they are presented in black and white. The one above is a Guerrero mask. The text is wonderful too. Here’s a bit I read to Cindy yesterday as one of those things that confirms aspects of her fine knowledge of Mexican time:
The pre-Classic period began with the expansion of agriculture; it was a formative period during which societies organized themselves and invented a religion, which became more and more complex. This religion was fundamentally a worship of time. All agricultural societies have more or less deified time, but the Mexicans refined infinitely on this conception. It was not an abstract entity for them; it was bound to space and with it formed a unique substance which went through an endless cycle of birth, growth, decline and rebirth according to the pulsation of a rhythm that man maintained but did not control. Without man, time would have perished, so man had both to understand and foster it.
Bright Lights. Big City.
Windom, Texas. April 30, 2011.
