Monday, November 24, 2014

hello kitty birthday lollipop whistle recall


(image by Shinichiro Kobayashi via kobayashi-shinichiro dot com)

Sunset at the End of the World.

"Fingerprints look like ripples
because time keeps dropping
another stone into our palm."

--Bill Knott

Twine and porpentine. (I'm thinking of making a game "you are born in 2014": you graduate in 2036 with a million dollar student debt, but a hyper-hurricane levels your city in 2050 & you don't have to pay it back...)

"We will need writers who can remember freedom." -Ursula LeGuin at the National Book Awards

"Our poems, then, become a thing like that $2 houseplant my parents waged their small war over." (via @NeinQuarterly)

".......................Who
was greater, Furtwängler? Or do you think von Karajan?
A Brahms by the latter someone once
described―̵all the timpani ablaze―̵as witnessing
a person being kicked to death."

--John Matthias

"When the gods specs a man moste lysten but they specs as in the raedels of a gleoman [bard] or the song of a fugol [bird]." --Kingsnorth


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Thursday, November 20, 2014

redshifts in love

"...there is nothing more exciting for the writer, or richer in unexploited expressive possibilities, than the failure to express."

"I keep trying to remind people that Pabst hasn't won a Blue Ribbon since 1904, but they never listen to me." --comment by surazal on Metafilter

Solastalgia.

"By broken altars, blackened shrines
I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes."

--Robert Service

Depthhub.

"I think that most of the excellent names that weed-related stuff has is because they're stuff people come up with while stoned. Perhaps stoners should move onto naming other things, like the apparatuses of government or branches of modern philosophy." --NoraReed commenting on Metafilter

"Now of course it was probably inevitable in a consumer society like ours that even the downfall of industrial civilization would be turned promptly into yet another reason to go shopping."

Found myself entering in a search engine: "killing jesus for kids"...

The long rains.

We can't even liberate ourselves from four-four time.


(via wunderground dot com)

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Thursday, November 13, 2014

Veteran's Day, 2014


where are they gone
they have fled to Agilkia
from Arlington's lawn
where are they gone

to eloign the great con
black comet not milkier
where are they gone
they have fled to Agilkia

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

the singing comet


(story: Baboons Roam Benghazi...)

      "Now, thin fruit flies like thunderstorms
      And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
      And tax firm men like fat tax forms--
      But time flies like an arrow.
      When tax forms tax all firm men’s souls,
      While farm girls slim their boyfriends’ flanks;
      That’s when the murd’rous thunder rolls--
      And thins the fruit flies ranks.
      Like tossed bananas in the skies,
      The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
      Then’s the time to time the time flies--
      Like the time flies like an arrow."

            —Edison B. Schroeder, 1966

(via)

"Ergodic literature is, by its very nature, non-trivial in its construction..."

"Was it David Cross who said that if someone sends a kindergarten class into a burning building, we have to be allowed more choices than calling them tiny heroes and 'not supporting kindergartners'?" --DirtyOldTown on Metafilter

"The Age of the Blog is surely dead, after all, as lost to us as the Silurian and trilobites."

"It grieves me to say it, but the fact is the man is too decent for this line of work. His tragic flaw is that he truly believes in a glorious America of patriots, of decent men and women motivated by the noblest principles reaching across the aisle for the greater good.

This lovely place has never actually existed, outside our dreams and some inspiring old black-and-white movies, but Mr. Obama honestly believes in it. It's been a breathtaking failure of imagination on his part.

Meanwhile, the only thing keeping me going today is the fact that I know the country has always been a work in progress, always teetering just inches from a collapse into raw fascism. The fight is never finished. America is the land of the unkept promise and the invented past. Anybody who thinks we're worse now, in the era of Charles and David Koch and Mitch McConnell, than we ever have been before, needs to read up on just about any decade you care to choose, from 1776 forward.

Blood, brutality, racism, corruption, abuse of power, murder, betrayal, hate--it's all there. The Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the Dawes Act, battered union organizers and dispossessed sharecroppers and murdered civil rights workers, brutal cops,soulless capitalists, starvation and misery in the midst of plenty--that's our history. The Kochs and McConnell didn't invent it, they're just the latest iteration.

If Mr. Obama had understood all this going in, he might have had a fighting chance to be one of our truly great presidents. Instead, he truly believed in the fundamental goodness of the nation and its people. He was Jimmy Stewart when what we needed was, God help us, Kevin Spacey. My heart breaks for the man." --Deborah Weiss on Esquire dot com

"The object does not yet have a formal name; it is called '1110113Y' on the Hubble website and 'PT1' within the New Horizons team."


Stelios Faitakis.

"Music of the future, of the inhuman future. Music from after the Anthropocene, of the thanatopocene." --Nietzsche and the Burbs

The Singing Comet.

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Friday, November 07, 2014

elf-stroke


(via)

"Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two,
And those that labor—will you let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven

before you become forest again, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re worthy of you and real.

I want only seven days, seven
on which no one has ever written himself–-
seven pages of solitude."

    Rilke's Book of Hours
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    translations by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (via wood_s lot)

"The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites."

"Encountering a particularly huge regurgitation of literature, I glance up at the windows of the house from which it originated, wondering what happened inside to bring on this vast discharge. But the rooms are always still and dark. Always!" --George Prochnik (via wood_s lot)

"There are Japanese soldiers who, not knowing World War II had ended, lived for decades in the jungle, taking every measure to avoid detection, erasing their footprints in the undergrowth, and living on rats and toads, refusing to surrender.

They must be our example, he says. Thought has ended. Philosophy has ended. And we must live on in logic, refusing to surrender." --Pico Iyer

"The Berlin Wall was a 'rampart against fascism,' he recalls. 'When it went up on the 13th of August, 1961, I cheered.' "


(via arika okrent on twitter)

"We need to start to move beyond the idea of borders in language as we’re slowly moving beyond the concept of national borders."

"If the Democrats had a spine, they'd be painting the Republicans as soft on disease and in favor of sickness." --Slap*Happy on Metafilter


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eyeless in garland


(via via @markgurwell via @leebillings)

"I visited the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, rebuilt in 1955 after a mad monk burned it to the ground (Mishima wrote a novel about this), and the Temple of the Silver Pavilion, weirder and more mysterious because it is not actually covered in silver but was only intended to be."

"just him, dim in the midst
of a larger dimness."

    --Thomas Disch

"Prior to Soviet conquest, Uzbek was written in Arabic script, although most Uzbek speakers were illiterate. In 1928, the script was changed to Cyrillic...In 1995, Karimov announced that Uzbek would no longer be written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but would switch to the Latin script...Today Uzbek citizens are required to master two alphabets." --Sarah Kendzior on Common Reader blog

Love is the Plan.

"Another beautiful day to change color. Fall to the ground. And own your decay." --@NeinQuarterly

"The imagery comes before the action, because the action’s actually unimportant." (via @KameronHurley)


(via)

Agilkia. (Talk about drifting signifiers!)

"Another beautiful day to remember that, yes, there is a reason for the way things are. But no, it's not a very good one." --Nein


("Iconostasis of Capitalism" by Aleksandar Todorović, via)

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Monday, November 03, 2014

diary of avro lancaster


"Andrew Leman of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society was working on the props for The Call of Cthulhu, and ()he was looking at NYT headlines to do a mock page describing the earthquake that starts the story off, and he turned to the date used in the story, and the headline said (')Earthquake Rocks New England' or some such. Leman claims that his first reaction was shock and creeping dread and his second was that they could advertise the film as 'based on a true story.....' --GenjiandProust on Metafilter

"You can't imagine how exciting that was, even though I had a bun and was holding a clipboard in a white lab coat."

"He envisions instead an new emergent order of rebels, a global gathering of new media artists, remix musicians, pirate gamers, AI graffiti artists, anonymous witnesses, and code rebels, an emerging order of figural aesthetics revealing a new order, a brilliantly hallucinatory order, based on an art of impossible questions and a perceptual language as precise as it is evocative. Here, the aesthetic imagination dwells solely on questions of incommensurability : What is the vision of the clone? What is the affect of the code? What is the hauntology of the avatar? What is most excluded, prohibited, by the android? What is the perception of the drone? What are the aesthetics of the fold? What, in short, is the meaning of aesthetics in the age of drift culture?" --S. C. Hickman on Exits to the Posthuman Future, via wood_s lot

"Soon we’ll all need interpreters, if only to understand ourselves."


(fastcodesign dot com via prentiss riddle on facebook)

"...Folding the vegetation
Into instructions
Forgetting how to snow
And forgetting
How to name well
And if they will go soon
No one knows." --Purdey Lord Kreiden

"As we waited in a stinky, dark alley to go on, I saw rats, used needles & people not so far removed from zombies living amongst it. So sad." --Gary Numan on twitter

The Enigmatic Em Dash.

"For all the joys that touch my heart
Are joys that I have left behind."

--Sheridan LeFanu

Kawaii Mormon dubstep.

"We ourselves have never truly confronted this in the ways that I believe our African sister has given us. Because we don't wonder what happens to Patsey after the film ends. We know. There was no escape for her." --Evil Tongue blog

Wake and awaken. (via languagehat)


(statue of Jimi Hendrix on Seattle's Capitol Hill via)

"The hipster obsession with transgressive scenes can be seen as a kind of cultural tourism that registers on several levels; there’s the sheer ironic enjoyment of the ridiculousness of it, but also the opportunity for rebelling against the PC strictures fostered in the American underground in the late ’80s and early ’90s that have long since guided a sense of respectful propriety."

Meanwhile, there's Germany’s first Nazi vegan cooking show...

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