gaslight autopsy

(mictlantecuhtli lord of the underworld via macabre art via alvaro olmedo on fb)

Shaneera.

glaucous witness in
cart-buffeted reveries
sorrow at the right distance

a painting of flames

Lisa Frank Zappa.

"Luis Buñuel, in his memoirs, recalls that, near the start of the Second World War, an abridged version of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was shown in New York to two great comic directors, Chaplin and René Clair. Responses were mixed. Clair was appalled, Buñuel says, but Chaplin laughed, 'once so hard that he actually fell off his chair.' " --Anthony Lane in The New Yorker

"In rock, 'progressive' doesn't mean writing about the future; it means writing about a past that never happened." --Chuck Klosterman

substitute for the substitute for the thing i used to buy

More audio.

"Over 4,400 pastors signed John MacArthur’s “Anti-Social Justice Proclamation” a few weeks ago. Over 7,000 have now added their names to that statement, making it crystal clear that they do not follow Jesus in any way, shape or form.

One of the most troubling statements they all agreed to was this:

'We emphatically deny that lectures on social issues (or activism aimed at reshaping the wider culture) are as vital to the life and health of the church as the preaching of the gospel and the exposition of Scripture.' " --keith giles at pantheos via metafilter. --Or not.

Hayabusa 2. A little robot about the size of a copy machine. You could hold one of its rovers in your hand.

Reread Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case (1961), after some 40 years; i still liked it. This black comedy, set in a leprosarium, i find hard to believe could ever have been accepted as sincere among the religious--he reserves his fiercest satire for the priests, all deluded in different ways, but really spares no one. A taint of misogyny surprised me (unsurprisingly) this time around; & i found the symbolism i considered heavy-handed, then, much more PoMo now: for the unfaithed, loveless ex-architect, pursued by unthinking hero worship even to the ends of the earth, more of an allegory for the novelist himself, who cannot quite bring himself to quit writing, nor ever persuade his followers of his oh-so entertaining, utter moral bankruptcy--though he keeps telling them he's a liar.

love in a time of collateral

(via)

Elizabeth Gargano: Villanelle — "Song of the MRI

Into the white tube, the silver coffin
I shoot. The machine rumbles and creaks
and in the floating distance, cathedral bells

clang in a city of towers where rain falls
and a clock tocks in the square, a phantom city
inside the white tube, the silver coffin.

Two-track lighting pulses and blurs,
two blind comets across my bland, plastic sky
over the floating distance of cathedral bells.

Light tangles in the brush of my eyelashes,
wind whistles through a ridge of dark trees
inside the white tube, the silver coffin,v

and high in the quaking branches, a wasp’s nest
falls. Hissing, buzzing, they swarm through
the floating distance, louder than cathedral bells,

capturing, for a still moment, the walled city
in its skull-white shell, until, with a lurch, I slide
out of the white tube, the silver coffin: lost in
the floating distance, one last cathedral bell."

(via Vox Populi)

Negramaro with Dolores O'Riordan.

it's my job to get out of the way

(via sweetspider on tumblr)

Now with audio content.

"...collapsed in
calypso of eclipses..."

--Clark Coolidge

"While Strand’s project is the first that I’m aware of to inflict the beautiful baggage of vaporwave on the Donkey Kong Country programming code, it’s by no means the first mashup in general."

weeks
slip away
i look in the mirror
no one is there
antelucan
wiry vase sculpture
not yet iridescent
birds
huddled on a wire overhead

(via)

every god is burning

Mermaids are not Seapunk.

Vaporwave, Memphis, Brutalism.

agency in the warm rain
language-mixing as Rome wanes
O muzzy cathexis
in the dragonfly labyrinth

equality dental looms
& stone styled lunar illumes
later than sooner
in the dragonfly labyrinth

weary of corrupted trades
quizzical & void's regent
jibberjabber

in the grasshopper labyrinth

"This is an album that's bigger than us, that harks back to a time before man covered the earth."

breakfast of abductees

(via)

Let's name MU69. Features on Charon.

for silverware, one TRADES silt;
Nyarlathotep's REGENT: silt

the dragonfly labyrinth
fills with fine, AGENCY silt

agency for cannot say,
silt for uttered DENTAL silt

It's the raccoon choice, not yours.
by means of thought, ENCAGE silt.

Graywyvern hunts vertigo
on a carousel STYLED silt

"Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse."

black car with black glass

Vaporwave and Simone Weil's Void.

cephalaphore mimosa
sealed car with retro soundtrack
Old Shepherd Park · we will play chalga
under bleak cerulean lift
we will know the bugonia
in the caput mortuum

"...what is thought to be the first use of the term vaporwave, in a blogpost from October 2011..."

count anteoni's confession

A bevy of businessmen on scooters. I steer around them with trepidation, lest one tumble in my path.

Bugonia.

"To manifests itself...in human actions as moral excellence and spontaneity, in other words, in de...The Klingon translator decided to translate this word as ghob, a noun which--like English 'virtue'--denotes conformity of one's conduct to moral principles but--unlike the English word--seems to lack associations with such notions as chastity or virginity. The fact that it is homophonous with the verb ghob, which means 'to fight, battle, do battle, wage war.' seems to lend it the aura of forcefulness." --Solska, ibid

Hauntology lives...in China.

Fortress Plano has
circled its wagons & raised
an invisible

pyramid over ev'ry
stupor, gloze & muttering.

Scardanelli songs
mix with rumble of the road,
unexpected thwarts

that you better not be lost
in a dream when they happen.

Savsannah has it
known this flooding? i am far
& without contacts.

Thinking, on my part, of things
i could buy as my pay drops.

Caravan into
phthisis · constantly watching
scissors, rock, CLAXU

crossing Mockingbird · a call
not this, not that, but many

frost Plimsoll shadow
boundary · it is this kraal
wiry mumchucks fling

& unforgot forms, bruja
or calcspar still loom i pass

miss point i should turn
& all this plan go marplot
play as if vital

sound zooms back to origin
Oak Cliff my first big hill climb

ouniq & Colorado

epicenter of unorthodox bicycles

Boing Boing revisits Lynch's Rabbits.

i know too much about hospitals.
      i want to see those
congeries of secret-lidded eyes
      again rendered blank
& a place i might go on light feet.

The Golden Shovel.

Believing we are giants when we are dwarves--is this not a paradox worthy of invoking depths? No: it is simply a lie, when acknowledging the truth of abjection is what would save us.

"When Smithson built the sculpture, the water level at the lake was at an historic low and in the years since it has only been occasionally visible. Visits to the remote location are possible and have attracted a special kind of adventurous art tourist."

with the angry waters

(via)

Chalga.

"A rare 267-page (ebook version in PDF) long treatise of Sufi knowledge written in Affelian, using Akarni alphabet. It includes original translation of obscure paragraphs in the Ethiopian version of the Book of Enoch.

The typeset book has a length of 534 pages, each of which is printed in a 6,02 x 9,62 inches sheet of handcrafted wornout folio. The book is reproduced using propietary Akarni typography, rendring two volumes which are contained in our standard package."

We have found the root languages of the most common language on the site. Ned: Nordic, Eskimo, Dravidic.

(pic by lanny quarles on fb)

Dead mall series. (via seanbar on wrongplanet)

"But now, according to Rave News, vaporwave was mysteriously attracting fascists."

li ciso fe'a li sore

(pic by geof huth on fb)

Valenberg wallpapers.

Clouds taut with entasis
Make steps tend toward nasties,
As if upon seitans—
Or a dank sestina.
Still, good for the tansies
And plenty brisk tisanes…

Stronger brews than tisanes
Risk hwyl or entasis,
Orchid-gauds not tansies’,
Jibes by critic-nasties.
Plebeian sestina
Rather beef than seitans.

Before there were seitans
I remember tisanes
Of sage, some sestina
That purged my entasis
Bad case of the nasties
Let a thousand tansies

The entrée, then tansies
Gluten-free or seitans
Alike seem now nasties
& all those sad tisanes:
Temple sans entasis,
Doggerel sestina.

Obsession’s sestina
Riots in the tansies;
I’ve done that entasis,
On to other seitans.
Era of dark tisanes,
Populous with nasties…

Who are the real nasties
If not strict sestina?
Zany our new tisanes
With GMO tansies
And scifi-great seitans,
Cycle-turn entasis.

To make a Newman Sestina.

With the grotesque, there is no abjection, or rather, it is valorized by the act of elaborating.

"In an interview with Bandcamp, she 'half-jokes' that Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto invented the genre 30 years prior ..."

the queen's remembrancer

(susan sontag via luc fierens on fb)

The Truelist.

"All these years I’ve languished here in Salem
haven’t meant anything; I couldn’t find the words
for all the pain I’ve been feeling, there’s been no secret code
for all these hidden vices, addictions, multiple
diagnoses; I’ve juggled all of them at once, their tentacles
strangling me slowly, their hellish heat radiating.

And when I sleep now you tell me I radiate
heat like a furnace, hot dreams like Jerusalem’s
desert stretched out, sun beams like golden tentacles
burning the skin of my back. In the morning I have no words,
I can’t keep track of things, I check multiple
calendars, alarms, mark reminders on my arms like code.

If you examined my skin you could read, in code,
a map of my life, this sort of sequence that radiates
across my bruised body, a main line, a train line with multiple
stops along the way: Boston, LA, ending in Salem,
and all these markings (since, what good are words?),
these razor wire scars around my thighs like tentacles

and lyrics to songs, and numbers. No octopus tentacles
or phoenixes or koi fish, each scale a color code,
their dead eyes unseeing and mouths gaping silent words,
all these marks in permanent ink radiating
my life story onto my body. Like the stone markers in Salem,
each a name, a hanging body, a chest caved in by boulders (multiple).

And how many times have I told you—multiple?—
that your love is creeping up my spine like tentacles
of some horrible thing, that the chill of Salem
has frozen all that was good in me? I tried to arrange the snow in code
but you couldn’t hold onto it, the heat radiated
from your palms, and you melted all my words.

So listen: All I have left are these words.
Burn me in a fire and you’ll see, you can arrange the multiple
letters that will fall from my skin, my mouth, burnt radiation
black—my soul. Reaching out, long tentacles
of smoke that stain your skin and spell out code.
Hang me from the highest branch in Salem

and I will join the multiple ghosts of Salem
and all my ever- words will be your code;
at night, my soul will radiate, my hair will choke your throat like tentacles."

--Kolleen Carney (in answer to a challenge word-set)

My largesse went to Starbucks, not a homeless person. Yet i somehow feel i have contributed.

The Spiritual Gift of Madness.

all the gray same cars

Meanwhile, on tumblr...

castle built of the lies parroted
Stockholm-style, by stooges of the predator

all our exiles prorated,
our despairs pro-trade

one teardrop
occults another teardrop

they said our world's demise would be prorated;
these walls, so pro-trade

parroted
scratchings & groans of the predator

i was, too, a predator
though other goblins i parroted

each teardrop
would be prorated

& you ask me if i'm really not pro-trade
as if ev'ryone must be pro-trade

escaping in a teardrop,
the route parroted

Predator,
your impact on the land cannot be prorated,

prorated,
like a slow bomb, like pro-trade

agreements, ah, predator to predator;
rain is what they see, not this teardrop,

woods unparroted

Ewoks comic book.

six figure earning potential

the shroud of turing
chestnut checkmate
clouds here so innocent
the fountain's drone
enfolds no belief · we leapt
purely out of hunger
hunger tower
drone & the weeds of emptiness

Dali's Aliyah.

la osa menor

Anagrammatic sestina.

feel the promise of autumn with its changes
settled despair yet cannot but be struck by;
old commutes have acquired a weird patina,
   routines more thoughtful

even starting to plan seems now not reckless
after days when disaster chased each folly;
what if world & its creatures could hold parley:
   expiry even?

Agrippa thread.

"The key term of the book, the word Tao (dao), is often described s untranslatable and indeed in numerous translations, including my own, it is left untranslated. Though in its basic, everyday sense the word simply means a 'way, path, road,' as a philosophical concept it refers to the underlying pattern of the universe, the way things are. The klingon word mIw'a', chosen by K'puq, indicates a way understood as a 'procedure, process' (mIw), yet one that is bigger, more important or powerful than any other process, which is implied by the augmentative suffix -'a'." --Agnieszka Solska, Tao Te Ching: A Klingon Translation (2008)

needles in the dark

(from Johnny Cool)

Climate correction.

But what is all my will
if i have not consent?
a fetish of the narwhal
a deficit

then as i hurl my strength
without assessing first
a pilgrimage death sufficed
or so say the Sith

HVRF Central Command.

hunger stones

Michelangelo's fortifications.

leather distressed, spine cracked, edges wavy
already has endured two hundred years
these engravings, grown inscrutable,
yet might tempt a young barbarian's fancy
so i retrieve, out of a dumpster load,
one the rain's small fingers won't be at, tonight.

Trouble for Valancourt.

car like everyone's

"It’s too late to save, but we might repurpose."

my music is not of this time, & it is;
this is not our weather, & it is.

the rest of my life
this vote decides: & it is.

my heart breaks
for the things it isn't & it is.

yet we uphold the pattern
for when we are no longer here & it is.

Graywyvern wills it
& it is.

Book of Kells online.

boxlessness

Birth. Movies. Death.

a gift
from the sky's iron sneer
& its rainbows of agate
a gift
of which we have no glut
this time coughs the snare
a gift
from the sky's iron sneer

"It takes a while to realize that Emre has gotten you hooked under arguably false pretenses, but what she finally pulls off is so inventive and beguiling you can hardly begrudge her for it."

chypreparkour

so many times now
have the towers fallen, has
the burning cloud charged:

we are not assuaged, nor made
humble enough to follow

Trouble in Mind.

octopolis scutoids

"...Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be."

--Waller

The Mighty.

sesqui-sasquatch siliqua
lodestar of empty phenomena

wasp in the dark
drive straight on into morning

the first 50 billion zeta zeroes

"To Vesper, for a taper silver-clear" --Keats

Zebra Mystery Puzzlers.

   the Goblins' Bible dissolves
at once, after you have read it;
   days without sun, & we crowd
into coffeehouses, each one
completely unlike the others;
      choose up sides that way

vampire refund

shoes no bar to wet
too long delayed replacing
what with other woes

a well intentioned rescue
& stern to hold mutiny

Cassini's final images.

"After reading The Gold Bug Variations, i took up again a CD boxed set of Glenn Gould piano music i had & listened to his early Goldbergs a number of times. i confess i can't hear everything he ascribes to those separate pieces (almost all of which are as brief as a TV commercial), but after half a dozen repetitions i can appreciate how much "english" (in a billiards sense) he has applied to some awfully geometrical compositions...

potemkin village idiot

waters of normalcy close back over
a phylum's forge vantage

aisance in the Nine Worlds
icecap on the West Pole

tienta for spook-kulned dogcow
crowd of one in a fiery theater

Video game tourism thread.

(Edith Piaf reading the palm of Django Reinhardt, via In Search of Pagan Hollywood on Fb)

return to ophite mountain

(from "Johnny Cool" [1963])

    "OCTOBER

I remember how I would say, 'I will gather
These pieces together,
Any minute now I will make
A knife out of a cloud.'
Even then the days
Went leaving their wounds behind them,
But, 'Monument,' I kept saying to the grave,
'I am still your legend.'

There was another time
When our hands met and the clocks struck
And we lived on the point of a needle, like angels.

I have seen the spider's triumph
In the palm of my hand. Above
My grave, that thoroughfare,
There are words now that can bring
My eyes to my feet, tamed.
Beyond the trees wearing names that are not their own
The paths are growing like smoke.

The promises have gone,
Gone, gone, and they were here just now.
There is the sky where they laid their fish.
Soon it will be evening.

--W S Merwin (1963)

"Petition to rename all geological epochs after the best animal alive during them" --@DrKateMarvel

Penny Slinger rediscovered.

altered jingle

" 'There is an anomaly about the Earth people,' Frank said. 'Though incapable of intelligence, they operate with frightening instinct. They are not able to think, but they are well able to act; and that is the danger to us. They have the unity and communication of the hive.

'They remind me of the fireflies on Mercator. You remember how the millions of those pseudoinsects would cluster on hillocks and trees and all pulsate with their light together? Those on one hill would answer the beacon flashes of those on another hill, and yet they were creatures so small that fifty of them could be heaped on the end of your finger--and blind. Ah, they spelled out derisive words with their pulsing light on the hillsides, but the individuals of them were ignorant of words and of concepts and of all else.

"The people of Earth are like that, which is why it is called the Haunted Planet. The Hive Ghost hovers over them invisible, and they feel it from one end of their communities to the other. We can handle Earth individuals s though they were furniture or stones, but we cannot handle the Hive Ghost that hangs over them...' "

--R A Lafferty, The Reefs of Earth (1968; 2017)

Ecpyrosis.

"Think not light poetry my life's chief care;
The Muse's mansion is at best but air;
But if more solid works my meaning forms,
Th' unfinish'd structures fall by Fortune's storms."

--Richard Savage

(via retro rockets on fb)

amulet of no protection

" "The Knowledge, they call it,' he says to Littlewood.
'What?'
'What cabdrivers have to learn before they can get their license. The streets of london. They call it the Knowledge.' "

--David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk, 2007

"The huntsman has ridden too far on the chase,
And eldrich, and eerie, and strange is the place!"

--Lucile

So the people who object to "black lives matter" as a message, are saying "no, bosses' orders matter"...how's that for an inspiring meme? Yup.

Council of war.

stars of paradise

a map of necessities
opaque cerulean

not a fever
though it could well be

depopulated starbucks
almost like nuclear jitters

this perfect weather

Pulp Dylan. (via Joe Ahearn on Fb)

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."

--Herman Melville

all we are is water in the shopvac

(from Miami Nights 1984 "Accelerated" on Youtube)

"When I come across instances of this folk understanding of autism, I am reminded of Edward Said’s 1978 description of the orientalist gaze, in which the exoticised subjects endure a kind of fascinated scrutiny, and are then rendered ‘without depth, in swollen detail’. Never allowed to speak for themselves, their behaviours are itemised, but not actually understood. The observer, meanwhile, is assumed to be neutral, authoritative and wise. This creates a simulacrum of the Orient, packaged for the consumption of the West."

the strongest ice at last
succumbs to the world's brute warming.
cracks race across a plain,
cliffs splinter & collapse.

not quite the last of winter,
but end of so many things.
all creatures on the run.
even the plants. even the plants.

& humans, who should know
before their very eyes
the fruits of their incessant
tampering, remain

encased in the strongest ice.

supervarsajo

with three hundred years
the typeface, the binding,
the meaning of the words

each some small shift
has suffered

not always tracked
blurry in the distance
or with softening light of dusk

under the near-solid curtain
of August cicalatide cry

"Once you realized that just at face value 'contamination' acknowledges a world that is much more invisibly volatile and teeming with life than most fiction is able to portray, it is only logical to move on to ways of removing the distance between 'person' and 'environment' and even narrowing the perhaps too-wide gap between Nature and Culture."