from the comments
There’s more character in my freezer than in my fridge.
Corona Jackass Clawhammer. Clawhammer.
Courtesy of Brian Beatty. Says this kid is his new hero. I say yes. We need new heroes.
Achillea millefolium
“Common yarrow [Achillea millefolium] is frequently found in the mildly disturbed soil of grasslands and open forests.”
I snipped my yarrow at midnight by the light of the moon, standing in grasses up to my chin.
Other names for yarrow are devil’s nettle, sanguinary, milfoil, and soldier’s woundwort.
I especially like sanguinary, as one traditional use of yarrow is the stanching of wounds. When I got my yarrow indoors under lamplight, I noticed that one of the blossom clusters was tinged with something that looked like a blood clot.
Which makes the odd splotch on my chin in this mobile phone photo all the more interesting to me.
Why not now?
My Dallas friend Steve tipped me to a photo of a Dubuque ghost sign, a faded advertisement for Uneeda Biscuits that I’m certain I’ve seen (though I may be confusing it with another, a sign promoting Bull Durham tobacco).
And I remembered my favorite ghost sign ever. It was in Chicago. Maybe it still is, but it’s no longer visible, perhaps obscured by recent construction. I saw it every morning as I rode the El to work downtown at the Harold Washington Library. The hand painted sign read:
Why not now?
That is all.
Why not now?
Once I stumbled upon a possible clue to the slogan’s significance, but I can no longer recall what nor where. It may have been connected with a long-gone bar or tavern.
But I’m not sure whether I really want to solve the mystery.
nearly translucent larval eels
This is a short video of an eel in the larval stage. Pretty stunning how beautiful, and almost invisible, they are.
Over the 20th century, biologists searched for the at-sea breeding grounds of various eel species, which migrate thousands of miles from inland waters to specific open-ocean locales. The journey is made in reverse by their offspring, with the translucent larvae becoming literally more substantial as they swim towards an adult home.
Click through to get an understanding of how misunderstood eels have been as a species.
Summer Pudding
As many of y’all know, I am one of those Americans who loves England and Englishers. Sometimes people even think I may have lived there, I am so steeped in English ways.
But I’m still conflibberated by the concepts of Pudding and Dessert. I mean, I know what I consider pudding, and generally speaking, I’d place pudding within the larger category of dessert. Except for the Yorkshire pudding my English grandmother made. It is the idea that any dessert might be considered pudding that baffles me, and in any event I think I have got the idea wrong. I don’t know the rules.
So I give up. And dream of the perfect summer pudding, whatever that might be.
Seagull Steals a Camera
Garrett and I think it’s fake, but it’s certainly a lovely fake.
Peter Falk || Gena Rowlands || “A Woman Under the Influence” || (1974) || d. John Cassavetes
There is a Criterion version available.
Spoiler
The announcement is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”.
The Flaming Lips play Hollywood Forever Cemetery
I just got back from seeing the Flaming Lips play at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I didn’t have a ticket, but I went and patiently waited and eventually after the show started a sneaky security guard said he’d let me in for the face value of the tickets. I handed him the money and walked through the gate as everyone looked the other way. I felt like reporting him for malfeasance, and I felt terrible about it, but I also wanted to see the band play. Ah, ethics.
Because it was so late, everyone else was at the far side of the enormous cemetery, and I could hear the far off music and began to walk towards it among the towering mausoleums and tombs, graves and headstones. Psychedelic colors from the stage-show filtered through the fog and I started to feel a little panicky, walking quicker and quicker, but I thought to myself “Even if this is all I saw, it was worth the money.” (And then, if I’m being more honest, because it is a constant thought these days; “Aww, this’d be great in a movie.”) How often are you alone in a foggy graveyard with one of the most explosive and visually exhausting spectacles beckoning you on? Well, maybe you live a more exciting life than I do.
Large balloons filled with confetti and money exploded in the crowd, cannons with sparkling flecks of paper burst out, lasers and all manner of neon insanity occurred. They played the entirety of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, several Wizard of Oz songs, some other Flaming Lips hits like Vaseline and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and finished the night up with Do You Realize? I wanted to cry as he sang:
Do you realize? That everyone you know someday will die?
And instead of saying all of your goodbyes,
let them know you realize that life goes fast,
it’s hard to make the good things last.
but then, I always want to cry when he sings that.
coming soon to a theater bookstore near you
I guess today is Errol Morris day on clusterflock, but he announced this morning that his book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography will be available at the end of the summer.
Elaine Morgan, my new favorite octagenarian
Watch her. She’s intoxicating. I like her theory, I also like hearing her explain it.
Goreyesque, or
Nick Cave reissues courtesy of Mute
Oftimes Nick grates on my nerves, but he sure does have some flat-out transplendent tunes. Mute has reissued four worthy titles: Let Love In, Murder Ballads, The Boatman’s Call, and No More Shall We Part.
(Thanks to Ju Ju for the tip.)
Hardly an offbeat choice for a dearly beloved, but damn. Nobody’s Baby Now. From Let Love In (1994).
A Favorite Book of Stories by Lydia Davis
I have been reading the brief stories of Lydia Davis with pleasure for years, and one of her books I keep coming back to is Samuel Johnson Is Indignant. Here is one of the stories in it that I have read often enough to hold now in memory:
Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
I hesitate to spoil things by speaking of what I love about this piece–but since when have I been able to keep quiet about such matters? I love the way the question is never answered–but is. The question evolves in the way that all stories do, given that connections between readers is what makes them live. We write about what matters to us; but who is the author of that? Even in the making of stories we are walking through the lives of others and finding our own words there. We are made of stories. And sometimes a very brief story can open upon the largest understanding we may hope to hold.
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
“I just don’t understand”
Robert Fitzpatrick, retired transit worker, apocalypse evangelist, author of The Doomsday Code: God Is Warning Us Through the Bible, riding back home to Staten Island yesterday evening.
Not all remakes are bad, but . . .
what were they thinking?
This remake of The Thin Man?
Honestly, I don’t believe that remakes are by definition bad. I’ll take the 1954 “A Star Is Born” over the 1937 original. (We won’t even speak of the 1976 version.)
But William Powell? And Myrna Loy? Asta? You just know the champagne will be flat this time around.
I hate to be an old spoilsport, but it feels like bad aesthetic judgment to me.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
from the spam
Skeptics wonder: Was Uncle Ben the real owner of the rice organization, was Betty Croker the real owner or just a face for any brand?
Cindy’s Easter Art from Pinky Diablo
My Old Clutch Plate
That one spring looks kinda bent, doesn’t it?
spam name
Celesta Dorla.
The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly
There is nothing to fear from truth.
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion.
The pursuit of billions of dollars through aphorisms and “radical transparency.”
(via the browser)
Serendipity (For Rick)
In her response to my recent “dear clusterflock” query, Carole mentioned shaking loose the serendipity.
I’m not sure this is the kind of serendipity she meant, and I know it’s not the kind I want, but here goes, just for the hell of it.
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