Thank you those of you who do read these aarghless, linkless posts, especially on holiday weekends. When we woke up Saturday morning in Waynesburg it was late November, 40 degrees and pouring rain and wind that evoked this Fall's first thought of chill factor, rained through Pennsylvania the the West Virginia panhandle until the green metal bridge over the Ohio River when SHAZAM! (all construction up the hill on 470 was completed since last Tuesday) damn if the rain didn't stop. It was a gorgeous Fall day by the time we passed through Cambridge. Saw Planet (and her studio) for a couple of hours (more wood and paint for cow needed bought) then left Planet so she could work on her cow, took a long backroads drive, visited Granville on advice, went back to pick up Planet and visited Granville for dinner. Typing this in Zanesville after saying goodbye in Bamgier. Driving home this morning, regular programming (or at least poems) resumes tomorrow if I know me. Here's three more photos and two songs from yesterday.
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Kensington to Frederick to Hagerstown to Hancock to Cumberland to Morgantown to Waynesburg
I'm delighted to announce I get to again post posts that nobody reads, aarghless, linkless. That's 70 heading west near Clear Springs Maryland, photos by Earthgirl. Left after work, going to spend Saturday with Planet, stopped for the night in Waynesburg Pennsylvania, dinner a Sheetz sub. Below: two songs from the trip's soundtrack plus two more photos.
Friday, October 5, 2012
The Slice of American Cheese on the Drive-Thru-Window Is Also Gold, Bathetically Gold, and I Go Where My Hunger Dictates
Apologies but not full apologies for my spontaneous and surprisingly delighted but obnoxiously snarky burst of joy at Obamabomb. I don't apologize for my delight at one more obamapostasy: even when I was a loyal Democrat I credited Obama's success on his game-player's skills not his progressive credentials: I knew he'd suck in governance but I simply couldn't conceive how much he'd suck at gameplaying. And odds are good Wednesday's debate was a once-off performance of extraordinary circumstances, Obama's autobiography released in 2018 to coordinate with the Obama Presidential Library will reveal Obama's appendectomy only two hours before the debate. Maybe he was rope-a-doping knowing there are two debates still plus countless news cycles, maybe he was afraid that a coordinated Team Republican plan to release crackers Tuesday and a lying-filthy Romney Wednesday was meant to goad him into Angry Black Man, maybe Obama does say fuck this shit, I want to golf in Hawaii, maybe Corporate has decided fuck this Democratic sapper shit, go get the money that doesn't exist now before the money that doesn't exist doesn't exist more than it already doesn't exist, but Obama's game-playing? Sucked unto conspiracies. Well jeebusfuck people, you have an appendectomy two hours before a presidential debate - at altitude! - and you respond sharply, decisively, crisply, definitively, with concision and rapier wit, with a forceful and passionate defense of and advocacy for a visionary progressive argument to righteously counter the cardboard liar's 1% cardboard lies. In any case, I'm still obnoxiously and snarkily happy Team Democrat's political Kommisars are freaking out.
- Above via Greyhoos.
- It's not performance, it's structure.
- Motherfucking Obama.
- Krugman's obamapostasy will never be ready.
- Second term agenda.
- The illusion of choice.
- It's over?
- Villager Court Jester lectures Obama.
- Nothing to do with privilege.
- Battlespace.
- Things you might have missed.
- Hey! you know those posts I like to write that nobody wants to read? Heading back to Bamgier after work today!
- Tysons dropping the Corner. Wankers.
- Shoot me.
- Pre-Nobel buzz. Fart noise.
- Fack blaager, fack me.
- The sorrows of David Foster Wallace.
- Throbbing Gristle.
PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE INTERIORS OF DICTATORS' HOUSES
Albert Goldbarth
It's as if every demon from hell with aspirations
toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately
spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down
into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets.
A chandelier the size of a planetarium dome
is gold, and the commodes. The handrails
heading to the wine cellar and the shelving for the DVDs
and the base for the five stuffed tigers posed in a fighting
phalanx:
gold, as is the samovar and the overripe harp
and the framework for the crocodile-hide ottoman and settee.
The full-size cinema theater accommodating an audience
of hundreds for the screening of home (or possibly
high-end fuck flick) videos: starred in gold
from vaulted ceiling to clawfoot legs on the seating.
Of course the scepter is gold, but the horns
on the mounted stag heads: do they need to be gilded?
Yes. And the olive fork and the French maid's row of dainty
buttons
and the smokestack on the miniature train
that delivers golden trays of dessert from the kitchen
to a dining hall about the size of a zip code,
and the snooker table's sheathing, and the hat rack,
and those hooziewhatsit things in which you slip your feet
on the water skis, and the secret lever
that opens the door to the secret emergency bunker.
Smug and snarky as we are, in our sophisticated
and subtler, non-tyrannical tastes, it's still
unsettling to realize these photographs are also full
of the childrens' pictures set on a desk,
the wife's diploma proudly on a wall, the common
plastic container of aspirin, and the bassinette
with the scroll of linen shade at the ready
in case the sun is too powerful: reminders of how
a graduated continuum connects these überoperatically
fat interior lives to our own. We all desire
"more" and "better," Melville adds that
final "e"
to the family name, and Faulkner adds the "u," in
quest
of a signified gentility. My friend Damien
(fake name) won A Certain Literary Award, and
at the stellar after-ceremony party, in the swank hotel's
swank atrium, he found a leggy literary groupie
noshing caviar under a swankily lush mimosa,
and in under an hour his own swank room could boast
the golden statuette, the evening's loveliest woman, and
the silver serving platter of five-star caviar,
and if you think this story's moral lesson is
that satiation is ever attained, you don't understand
the protoknowledge we're born with, coded into our cells:
soon soon soon enough we die. Even before we've seen
the breast, we're crying to the world that we want;
and the world doles out its milkiness in doses. We
want, we want, we want, and if we don't then
that's what we
want; abstemiousness is only
hunger translated into another language. Yes
there's pain and heartsore rue and suffering, but
there's no such thing as "anti-pleasure": it's
pleasure
that the anchorite takes in his bleak cave
and Thoreau in his bean rows and cabin. For Thoreau,
the Zen is: wanting less is wanting more.
Of less. At 3 a.m. Marlene (fake name) and Damien
drunkenly sauntered into and out of the atrium,
then back to his room: he wanted the mimosa too,
and there it stood until checkout at noon, a treenapped
testimony
to the notion that we will if we can, as evidenced in even
my normally modest, self-effacing friend. If we can,
the archeological record tells us, we'll continue wanting
opulently even in the afterlife: the grave goods
of pharaohs are just as gold as the headrests
and quivers and necklace pendants they used every day
on this side of the divide, the food containers
of Chinese emperors are ready for heavenly meals
that the carved obsidian dragons on the great jade lids
will faithfully guard forever. My own
innate definition of "gratification" is right
there
in its modifier "immediate," and once or twice
I've hurt somebody in filling my maw. I've walked
—the normally modest, self-effacing me—below a sky
of stars I lusted after as surely as any despot
contemplating his treasury. The slice of American cheese
on the drive-thru-window burger is also gold,
bathetically gold,
Labels:
Aargocalyptic,
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Books,
Mocomofo,
Music,
My Complicity,
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Thursday, October 4, 2012
If I Were the Type Who Made Promises I'd Probably Begin by Saying: America, Relax!
Wrote that in a hotel room in Mt Vernon Ohio Tuesday night, didn't watch the debate of course, did I get it right? I hear Obamalame wussied, missed a chance to articulate progressive positions contra Romney's Conservative assholosity, Obamalame constantly remarking as much on the two's similarities as their differences. This: The reason Obama did poorly is simple. He is bad at governing America. He hasn’t solved the foreclosure crisis, the jobs crisis, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, the financial crisis, the debt crisis, the health care crisis, or really, anything. He can’t point to very much that Americans broadly like, except killing Bin Laden and the auto bailout. His second term agenda is to cut Social Security, Medicare, frack, cut corporate taxes, bust more teachers unions and pass more neoliberal trade agreements. He is proud of this record. So are his people. But he knows he can’t run on it because it’s unpopular, so instead, he presented himself as a nice likeable guy. Heh, I hear that Romney shifted hard left and lied through his teeth. To put it charitably, the complaint I'm hearing is that Obamalame didn't shift hard left and lie through his teeth (see Pierce quote below about Obamalame's naivete), that he represented himself honestly as the moderately conservative Republican he is. Vote Obamalame, the more honorable moderately conservative Republican. Holyfuck, fine ironies, fine metaphors abound. I am determined to enjoy the next five weeks as much as I'm capable.
- Hahahahaha: What you saw, I think, anyway, was the end product of the president's consuming naivete as regards the American political process, as well as the end product of thirty years of a Democratic Party that has slid so far to the center-right that a Democratic president found himself arguing with a "severely conservative" Republican candidate over the issues of how much the Democratic president had cut out of the budget, how many regulations he'd trimmed, how much more devoted to the middle-class-kick-in-the-balls Simpson-Bowles "plan" he is, and how he would "reform" Social Security and Medicare — and, frankly, a Democratic president losing some of those arguments to his left. A Democratic president got through an entire debate and didn't mention unions at all, even though the fact that our teachers are unionized here in Massachusetts is a big part of the reason why Romney got to brag on how good our education system is.
- UPDATE! He runs for president as a populist, soaking up all the liberal energy for change in the country. Once in power, he surrounds himself with failed conservative advisers, and squanders most of his mandate. Then, just as it looks as if he will still be able to defeat his clueless Republican opponent, he turns in the worst performance any presidential candidate has ever given in a general-election debate, tanking the race and turning the country over to a party of fanatical Ayn Rand acolytes and warmongers... Obama signaled that he wants out. His diehard supporters are already trying to wave away this weirdly awful, unengaged performance as just his latest turn of Zen mastery, but that dog won’t hunt. They should steel themselves for more shocking displays of indifference over the next month on the part of this strangely diffident individual. It’s quite possible that he means what he says, and he really can’t wait to become an ex-president.
- Hahahahaha.
- Hahahahaha.
- Heh! Krugman inches towards obamapostasy for all the wrong reasons.
- Death of a salesman.
- Oddly more artificial than Romney?
- What the election will be for.
- Wait, is it true that Obamalame picked John Kerry as his debate coach? Hahahahaha.
- Of course they both suck. Why did you watch?
- Of course they both suck. Why did you watch?
- Never enough preparation.
- I purposely stayed away from twitter from nine o'clock on. Were people freaking out over Obamalame?
- If you thought Liberal Party Kommisars were assholes when Obama was cruising, wait for the noise they'll start making now.
- Chill, Liberal Party Komissars - Obamalame's gonna win.
- It's not just drones and war and panopticon that pisses me off about Obama.
- Or Democrats.
- The unbearable lightness of Zizek's communism.
- On Frances' newspaper in Missouri and the need for alternative news sources.
- Ten Mile Creek! Of course, where we partied (where Willy Bayne ran down the cat is his Dodge Dart) is underwater now anyway.
- Wallace Stevens as moderately conservative Republican.
- Silliman's always awesome lit-links.
- My novel, their culture.
- Not quite a manifesto.
- How Gass wanted The Tunnel published.
- Mining the digital motherlode.
- I love The Mats. While I don't like reunions generally, this is for a good cause.
- Prunella's latest playlist. Reminder - do a playlist at your place, I'll link to it. Send me a playlist, I'll post it.
- Stockhausen.
EXQUISITE CANDIDATE
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton
I can promise you this: food in the White House
will change! No more granola, only fried eggs
flipped the way we like them. And ham ham ham!
Americans need ham! Nothing airy like debate for me!
Pigs will become the new symbol of glee,
displacing smiley faces and "Have A Nice Day."
Car bumpers are my billboards, billboards my movie screens.
Nothing I can say can be used against me.
My life flashes in front of my face daily.
Here's a snapshot of me as a baby. Then
marrying. My kids drink all their milk which helps the dairy
industry.
A vote for me is not only a pat on the back for America!
A vote for me, my fellow Americans, is a vote for everyone
like me!
If I were the type who made promises
I'd probably begin by saying: America,
relax! Buy big cars and tease your hair
as high as the Empire State Building.
Inch by inch, we're buying the world's sorrow.
Yeah, the world's sorrow, that's it!
The other side will have a lot to say about pork
but don't believe it! Their graphs are sloppy coloring
books.
We're just fine—look at the way
everyone wants to speak English and live here!
Whatever you think of borders,
I am the only candidate to canoe over Niagara Falls
and live to photograph the Canadian side.
I'm the only Julliard graduate—
I will exhale beauty all across this great land
of pork rinds and gas stations and scientists working for
cures,
of satellite dishes over Sparky's Bar & Grill, the ease
of breakfast in the mornings, quiet peace of
sleep at night.
Labels:
Aargocalyptic,
Autoblogography,
Books,
Gass,
Mocomofo,
Music,
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