Whether deliberately orchestrated or by deliberate negligence blooger, the program and product, is sinking into suck at the same accelerating pace as every effing thing else. Besides the preview-post not updating after I edit the post before publishing (happening now) the most notable farts are the increasing number of sites on the blogrolls whose feeds won't update (though blooger insists the feed is live and active) - I know the Blog Days of Summer have started (commences every year after Spring college and university commencements) and the number of people posting and reading will slow dramatically, but there are people on the blogrolls posting (Naked Capitalism, for instance) whose new posts are not reflected in real time on the blogrolls' timelines. I cleared caches on my work and personal machines and tested other PCs in the Library, it's bloogle, not me. I mention this not as a hint of my future as a blegacider but as a simple but excellent example of abundant fine fucking metaphors' abounding. The enshittification epidemic be real. Be sure to spiral
New, that, go buy this at bandcamp. I'm gonna sue myself for ten million dollars then give myself almost two million dollars to drop the suit, I said yesterday to the unsmiling visage of my friend and former polisci professor (and Christopher Lasch apostle) who has playfully teased me for three decades for being a crazy canary, crazy weathervane, crazy Cassandra, and lunatic doomsaying fool. You win, he said, the times are as crazy as you. I did *not* recommend that split OOIOO/Lightning Bolt album to him (who shares Elric's given first name, one of three I've known, and adores Mahler), but you? YES! go buy that album at bandcamp for the new OOIOO but especially buy it for the new Lightning Bolt, Lightning Bolt comes highly recommended, I can't play them in the car when L is with me! a Swans-level vouch from her!
My daughter and I saw solo Destroyer past Friday night at The Blind Pig in downtown Ann Arbor (I dig Ann Arbor). Bejar came on promptly at nine (following a truly awful opening act whose name I forget if in fact I ever registered it), finished his set at ten, played two songs for encore, off the stage by 10:10. Was acoustic, setlist included songs from across his career, and did include my single favorite Destroyer song, which because of the title I did not expect an (excellent) acoustic version, thank you fake drums
Before the show started when I was getting a beer I heard a few people next to me at the bar talking about last week's New York Times article (google it if you want the stupid, I'm not linking) naming the thirty greatest living American songwriters and the subsequent fury in general from many at what an incredibly shitty list it was and in particular the resulting fury from Billy Joel fans that he didn't make the list over others that did. We all agreed that Billy Joel, shitty as his music is, is no shittier than 9/10ths of those who made the list. At that moment Bejar walked by, zombie-like, refusing eye contact, emanating a do not talk to me, don't ask me to shake your hand dark vibe. C noticed it too and said WOAH! when I got back to our table when she saw I had seen it
I told her about the conversation at the bar about the list of 30 songwriters then added, you're Dan Bejar who's created a corpus of music boundlessly deeper, wider, better than any and all shitty songs Billy Joel has written and you're performing solo in a dive-bar in Ann Arbor Michigan before 300 people to pay your bills, all of which may have had everything, something, nothing to do with him zombie-walking through said dive bar hoping no one tries to talk to him. C remembered the Lambchop show fifteen years or more ago at Rams Head in Annapolis where after the show Kurt Wagner yapped with us for fifteen minutes while he chain-smoked four cigarettes. He wasn't on the list either, was he, she said. Hopefully I see another Lambchop show with my daughter in the near future. Bejar played this during his two song encore, the fucking lunatic
Cheapest gas in Michigan was $4.99 a gallon, funny that Democrats in unison aren't calling it Donald Trump's Iran War of Choice Tax constantly and relentlessly, yes? I saw four anti-Trump yard signs, no pro-Trump yard signs, and the house on Wooster Road that every time I've driven by on all of our trips over the years to Michigan was always festooned with pro-Trump and anti-Libtard flags but was flagless this trip (though the same fleet of pick-ups was cluttered the driveway and front yard), read into that what you will.
I have a new reflecting ball for our garden statuary collection that I bought at an estate sale Saturday in Tecumseh (pronounced to-come-SEE), I'd never been at one, my son-in-law works the circuit for his personal business and I was curious, those fuckers are locusts, they stripped the house in half-an-hour. There was one piece of pottery on a counter, an old water jug with an interesting face painted on it, I took off the lid to look at the price ($46), and when I put the lid back on and started to reach for it a woman nudged me aside, grabbed it, and ran. Happens all the time, I'm told. Speaking of people who should be listed as one of the 30 best living songwriters, there's a new Lambchop album dropping in August, the one song already released is below the grid, it's Holyfuck. I listened to the new Notwist album once a day when driving to and from the courses, the entire album is kaboom, this song is KABOOM!
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That ostracism, both political and moral, has Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things; That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into, For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated By acts of corporate vandalism every five years, Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators, The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly But on the average directed by discernible motives.To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out. But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none, For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed, Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them: Husband and wife Man and wife
The traditional BLCKDGRD Bigass Holy Day Pynchon's Birthday post, he is 89 today: I wouldn't be me without his novels, especially Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and double especially Against the Day. Here, pages 606-608 Bantam mass market 1974 edition Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's main theme:
But, if I'm riding through it, the
Real Text, right now, if this is it... or if I passed it today somewhere
in the devastation of Hamburg, breathing the ash-dust, missing it
completely... if that the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yes
the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG-built, by way
of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks - the bombing was the
exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed
exactly in space and time. each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight's wreck
into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, decoding the
holy Text.... If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The
engineers who built it never knew there were any further steps to be
taken. Their design was "finalized," and they could forget it. It means this War was never political
at all, the politics was all theater, all just to keep the people
distracted... secretly it was being dictated instead by the needs of
technology... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned,
the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning,
most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh, more more....
The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms
- it was only staged to look that way - but among the different
Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are
only understood by the ruling elite.... Yes but technology only responds (how
often this argument has been iterated, dogged and humorless as a
Gaussian reduction, among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All
very well to talk about having the tiger by the tail, but do you think
we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name
and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300
miles and blow up a block full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T
on technology. deify it if it'll make you feel less responsible - but it
puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the
harems of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human
sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they are - " We have to look for power sources
here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power
our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... we have to
find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our own
schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error,
trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable
plot? Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogeneration, synthesis were
always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission
yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling... this ruinous planet, waiting
for it Kabbalists and new alchemists to discover the Key, teach the
mysteries to others...
2018 Update: This is the year of the scheduled Against the Day reread, I didn't think it would happen, I don't think it will happen, but I can no longer say it won't happen.
2019 Update: In current rereads I am in the Casino Hermann Goering
2020 Update: Did finish 2019 reread of Gravity's Rainbow, taking this year off not because Pynchon but because me - my eyes seem able to read fiction only on a shitlord's paperwhite electronic reader, I don't want to read Pynchon on a shitlord's paperwhite electronic reader
2021 Update: I'm on voluntary vacation from rereading anything (and involuntary vacation from being able to read any novel), but when I do again voluntarily reread Pynchon again (I can't imagine there will be anything new but the dude still *is* breathing) it's Mason's and Dixon's turn
2023 Update: I am in the zone
2024 Update: post title of course from GV, I am now with the Counterforce. Ed's 2024 Pynchon bday post 2025 Update: as mentioned in the last post, I hope my novel aversion (rimshot), if it still exists in October this year, can be broken by a new Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, I'm certainly gonna try 2026 Update: I own but have not yet tried Shadow Ticket because I had started Mason & Dixon before Shadow Ticket was published and finished Mason & Dixon after acquiring Shadow Ticket and need to put distance and multiple books between the two, Shadow Ticket will be read by a year from today.
Showed up in my email box yesterday morning. The above's the email in it's entirety, when I click the PRE-SAVE UPCOMING MUSIC NOW it links to spotify and youtube and other shitty vendors I don't use, no link to bandcamp, and there's nothing at bandcamp yet though all previous studio albums plus more are there so presumably, hopefully, the UPCOMING MUSIC will be there next week *before* I drive to Michigan to see my daughter this coming Wednesday so I can listen to it on the drive there, on the drives once there to disc golf courses in the mornings, and on the drive home
The two of us see Destroyer in Ann Arbor a week from today, both Lambchop and Destroyer vacation-listening staples, I've told you this before. This will tie the score, as of today I've seen Lambchop seven times, Destroyer six. I can find no news of a US tour in support of whatever Lambchop releases next week, I would love for Lambchop to retake the lead this summer
As is now vacation policy, I have no plans to post here and I have no plans to not post here, so I may or not react to the two fake assassination attempts on Trump tentatively scheduled for next Thursday and Saturday. and may or not collect and post evidence that we are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths and may or not post photos from the Destroyer show along with youtubes of songs they played. My dam is holding but my damn is, if not ebbing, changing hue. If I play Renegade's Trail I may post a photo of the island hole but only if I birdie it
Coyote scruff in canyons off Mulholland Drive. Fragrance of sage and
rosemary, now it’s spring. At night the mockingbirds ring their warnings
of cats coming across the neighborhoods. Like castanets in the palms of
a dancer, the palm trees clack. The HOLLYWOOD sign has a white skin of
fog across it where erotic canyons hump, moisten, slide, dry up, swell,
and shift. They appear impatient—to make such powerful contact with
pleasure that they will toss back the entire cover of earth. She walks
for days around brown trails, threading sometimes under the low branches
of bay and acacia. Bitter flowers will catch her eye: pink and thin
honeysuckle, or mock orange. They coat the branches like lace in the
back of a mystical store. Other deviant men and women live at the base
of these canyons, closer to the city however. Her mouth is often dry,
her chest tight, but she is filled to the brim with excess idolatry. It
was like a flat mouse—the whole of Los Angeles she could hold in the
circle formed by her thumb and forefinger. Tires were planted to stop
the flow of mud at her feet. But she could see all the way to Long Beach
through a tunnel made in her fist. Her quest for the perfect place was
only a symptom of the same infection that was out there, a mild one, but
a symptom nonetheless.
The gnat in the eye sensation and the intense aversion to bright sunlight that drove me crazy for two weeks after the eye operation, Jeff jinxes, seems gone. The peripheral vision already lost is gone but what's left of sight sharper, and my depth perception is much improved, especially in the woods and on the disc golf course. Has not improved my putting, though throwing the Alpaca with more spin and a tiny bit more hyzer helped yesterday (in brilliant bright sunlight without my left eye wincing) at Rockburn (Hoco Parks bush-hogged out the dense nettles that ate discs and flayed legs on 13, 14, and 15!), I still missed almost all but at least was dead center high or dead center low like normal. Speaking of normal have a song then the grid of despair before the links go stale then another song and then a J.H. Prynne poem, two rest in peaces for him in the grid
"I feel like there might be some minuscule irony in the leader of a religion that dogmatically asserts that a wafer literally turns into a god fretting over "our very relationship with truth" and worrying about people in "self-referential circuits" losing "exposure to reality""
Today in I will be Catholic again before I'm ever a Democrat again
I am slowly becoming more convinced that shitlords are using Epstein as the distraction from the climate collapse that is imminent as in tomorrow not imminent as in decades from now
This is my double alma mater and workplace the last 37 years. We have a new head librarian, in my one and only interaction with her, in a bullshit meeting on *optimal teamwork,* when she was pushing AI and it was my turn to talk (I couldn't opt out) I said, so you want me to learn AI so you can eliminate my job? and in the three months since she has not talked to me once and will not make eye contact
⮨
Onwards to the Final War for the Annihilation of Western and Eastern Civilizations!
