Maybe, but mostly maybe not.
“Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.”
- Miranda July
Penny Arcade Not Feeling It
The guys from Penny Arcade had a horrible experience with Jesse Thorn recently, going so far as to call him a “serial killer waiting to happen.”
I looked him up online, in an attempt to figure out what his deal was exactly, because actually being around him did nothing to illuminate his character. I stumbled upon a manifesto entitled The New Sincerity, and if you’re wondering what that could possibly mean, let me tell you. The New Sincerity is simply The Old Irony, with better PR.
From The Comments
You gotta beget while the begetting is good.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
FOR THE RECORD:
In some editions of Sunday’s Section A, an article about Sarah Palin’s speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying, “How’s that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?” She said, “How’s that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?”
Quote out of context, “Obama is the iPad” edition
“…the iPad is a lot like Barack Obama: Everyone was able to project their own fantasies and aspirations on a product with which they were mostly unfamiliar, only to sour on it once they realized that it did not live up to their impossible expectations.”
Dear clusterflock
“The meek shall inherit the earth.”
Quote out of context
“Poteet (TX) was a small, mean town that God never heard of and the devil found uncomfortably hot.”
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
What Cindy Just Said
Well fuck my rubber anus under the fold.
Perforation Problems
Handwritten wisdom and a heart full of soul from Iggy Pop, circa 1995.
it’s been a long road since then, but pressure never ends in this life. ‘perforation problems’ by the way means to me also the holes that will always exist in any story we try to make of our lives. so hang on, my love, and grow big and strong and take your hits and keep going.
all my love to a really beautiful girl. that’s you laurence.
iggy pop
(Thanks to Kate Theimer of ArchivesNext for pointing to this by way of Facebook.)
quote out of context (addressed to me)
“You look like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver.”
I hate real boats
Donald Sutherland on Fellini in I’m a Born Liar:
I love sets. I love plastic oceans. I hate locations. I hate real boats. It was perfect for me. And — to be a mannequin. To be a puppet. To be a — and my heart also is a mannequin. My mind. My brain. My voice. Is a mannequin. It isn’t — it becomes a cut out piece of cloth. It becomes something quite magical. And it is Fellini that is the catalyst for that. And in that sense he’s the medium.
“in the luminous gloom we whispered jokes”
From Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2 | Episode One (Ivor Cutler), a reading of which you can listen to here.
"in the luminous gloom we whispered jokes"
Although it had a pattern, crumbs on the carpet weren’t wanted. We were obliged to kneel and eat cream crackers with butter and Gouda with a white plate with our heads inside the sideboard. This was a treat because there was room for four, and in the luminous gloom we whispered jokes, so that when laughter rose, showers of buttery, spitty crumbs flew out our mouths like starlings and lodged against the aromatic mahogany, second-magnitude stars. If somebody choked, you got quite big bits.
Harvest recording released 1978. Recorded at 3rd Eye Centre, Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, 7 July 1977–9 July 1977. Rev-Ola CD issued 2002.
Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2 first published in 1984 by Methuen with illustrations by Martin Honeysett.
The gritty
This is not my favorite setting to talk in. I think it would be much more rewarding for all of us if we could sit around and have a little taste and, in a very informal way, get down to the “nitty.” Then maybe later on, we could get down to the “gritty.” That’s the only way to talk about things, about life, about people. I don’t know who devised in the institutions of learning that we should have straight-back chairs, or have architecture that is very rigid and very formal. Whoever devised this system (and I suspect it’s mostly western Europeans) had no great compassion for the art of learning. You can’t learn anything under these conditions. They’re not conducive to learning. The greatest institutions I’ve attended have been somebody’s house, or sometimes in a kitchen, when a few people get around the table and start yakking. Sometimes it’s being out at the corner on some street. Sometimes it’s been in a bar. These are the kinds of atmospheres that people normally sit around and exchange ideas in.
—Charles White, lecture at Columbia University, February 10, 1975
(From the book I’m editing.)
I immediately thought of this.
quote out of context
I’m sure he will get a much fairer hearing than those 13 Americans who were brutally gunned down the other day.
Michael Hurley
From his masterpiece “Portland Water”:
“There’s a stream runnin through the meadow / Why don’t you stop and throw a rock in the water? / I can tell by your eyes that you wanna…”
And I’m sure to the marrow in my bones that Monsieur Hurley will never record a holiday album for the kiddies.
speaking of the devil
“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream – a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought – a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
Tweetle Dumb
I live in the city of stupid.
This Living Hand
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
("This Living Hand". John Keats.)
. . . traces of the cad about the boy . . .
You know you’re headed somewhere when you commence to quoting yourself.
And while we’re on the subject . . .
Although The Magic Christian is by and large a very annoying film (not least on account of its many breezy ‘fag jokes’ circa 1969), there is a certain train-wreck fascination to the “Mad About the Boy” sequence featuring Yul Brynner and Roman Polanski.
quote out of context
Now heaping praise on the “black, African, Kenyan” President of the United States.
Amy said
Where can I get a bacon-filled doughnut in this town?
Meleagris gallopavo silvestris
Wild turkeys. Galena Territory. Jo Daviess County (Illinois). USA.
Benjamin Franklin to his daughter (1784):
For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.
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Two quotes from HBO’s Big Love
Mother, may I take you into my confidence?
Would you like me to lay a blessing on you?