Reminded

Randal's comment reminded me to remind long-timers (and to inform all new readers - and thank you much) that all Fleabus photos are by my daughter, Planet.

Please give me credit only for being smart enough to post them.

Theme Song November 2010

Sixty-Five Today

The new album is great, but over the past couple of years I keep finding Young's post-Rust albums in my CD player, playing on my media player. In that sillyass desert island game, Young wouldn't make the top five (XTC would), might not make the top ten, but top twenty? I wouldn't have said so ten years ago. Now?



Yup.

Clearly Life Is a Drag, by Which I Mean a Net That Keeps Pulling the Most Unsavory and Useful Boots We Either Put on Lamenting, or Eat with the Hooks of Some Big Idea Gripping the Sides of Our Mouths and Yanking Them Upward in a Conceptual Grimace

Please understand the following cuts:

1. Raises the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare to 69.
2. Cuts Social Security benefits.
3. Ends the mortgage tax deduction.
4. Ends the tax deduction for workers' health benefits.
5. Freezes salaries for federal workers for 3 years.
6. Establishes co-pays for veterans at VA health services.
7. Raises fees to visit the national parks and the Smithsonian.
8. Merges the Small Business Administration into an agency (Commerce) that has always prioritized helping bigger businesses, and cuts their budget.
9. Eliminates the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

are not being proposed in spite of there being a sitting Democratic president but because there's a sitting Democratic president.

Fuck it, I don't have the will or energy to rework the fuckarrgh again today beyond noting Veterans' Day is an awesome day to promote cutting veterans' benefits (and if I was Corporate preparing for nastier, hopefully - if desperately - more profitable resource wars, I'd start lowering the labor costs too and I'd start making quality of life shittier in just those demographics most cannon fodder is already recruited from).

Besides, Friday is Neil Young's sixty-fifth birthday:

O! the new album works just fine for me:

• Obama, nailed: His eloquence finds its natural key not in explanations but in statements of purpose. Obama wants credit for the highest intentions even when conceding that he lacks the will to fulfil them. The trouble is that a politician who says what he would like to do and then fails to do it leaves himself open to attack on both counts. You disappoint your supporters and at the same time give notice to your enemies that the thing they stopped you from doing was the thing you would have liked to do.
• On austerity.
• Reagan Revolution, Obama version.
• It's on.
• Exactly.
• It's a shame Froomkin writes for HuffPo since I generally don't link to HuffPo (because I'm asked not to for very valid reasons, and if he wants to reiterate why for newer readers - and thank you - in comments, he's welcome), but this post on the Bowles-Simpson is worth reading.
• Daily obamapostasy.
• Daily obamapostasy.
• When you've lost David Sirota..... 
• Veteran's Day: fuck that shit.
• Honoring veterans. See opening of post re: veterans.
• Crawl of duty.
• Betting 2012.  

• Saved.
• Owen in Shanghai.
• We mean it man.
• Early decision.
• Penny foolish.
• Crisis in Montgomery Village!
• How's that shithouse of an Eastern Shore?
• Go vote for United, which is the best uniform in town.
• Oops, I learned at 7:53 EST Thursday that blooger's feed doesn't allow for the oops when you accidentally hit publish instead of save draft. I'm metapretending I did it on metapurpose.
• Newness. 
• Laid.
• Love fade.
• He would have laughed.
• Classical music and the mass market fallacy.
• Pomegranates. Start with Skull Cakin'.
• Crystal Castles w/Robert Smith.
• Russian Futurists.
• America's boy.

 
LITTLE VOICE

Matthew Zapruder

I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice
saying this life, it was good while it lasted, but I just
can't take it any longer. I'm going to stop shaving
my teeth and chew my face. I'm going to finish inventing
that way to turn my blood into thread and knit
a sweater the shape of a giant machete and chop
my head right off. The leaves had a green
aspect, all their faces turned down towards earth.
This is exactly how I wanted to act, but I didn't
know where the little voice had hidden, and anyway
who talks like that? What a loss, another tiny
brilliant mind switched off by that same big boring finger.
Clearly life is a drag, by which I mean a net that keeps
pulling the most unsavory and useful boots we
either put on lamenting, or eat with the hooks of some
big idea gripping the sides of our mouths and yanking them
upward in a conceptual grimace. Said the little voice,
that is. I was just half listening, one quarter wondering
what the little park the window looked onto was named,
and one quarter thanking the war I knew was somewhere
busy returning all those limbs to their phantoms.

Born Fifty-Seven Years Ago Today

 

 

 

UPDATE! Someone else remembered.

The World at Night Was Twitching and Flapping Out from My Congress, and I Gathered It in and Dreamt to My Outnumberment

Since this seems needing to be addressed, here's me on Corporate:

Corporate (I'd change the metonym to Triskelions if I thought enough people got the allusion) doesn't want more or less gov't, it wants gov't to do what the fuck Corporate wants gov't to do which is to enact regulations that protect private property from Democracy and to dismantle regulation that impedes their amassing capital at such a greedy pace the machine would crash of itself and/or spark a revolution. Call the first the GOP, the second the Democratic Party, in either case the motives are the same.

It's not coordinated - the economy may collapse yet, resource wars are sure to erupt between competing triskelions - but Corporate enforces orthodoxy and orthodoxy says power always wins.

I obviously think America is on the road to Serbia, so smart, organized, devious is Corporate. Here's what Corporate guarantees: the ratio of Corporate's power to my power remains constant when it's not growing larger no matter how shitty the state of Corporate becomes - and it's going to get shittier - no matter how much brutal incompetence Corporate employs to enforce it.

Mind, I'm voluntarily barcoded. Corporate is the violence used on Others that makes my fatuous and complicit ass sillier when I complain about filling out a fucking form for five dollar prescriptions, when I sulk when the Bass Ale vendor's kegs go dry at RFK, I am that fucking outraged. I'm not fighting against Corporate, I'm fighting within Corporate rules for the highest level of compromise I can negotiate, just like you and you and you. And who the hell uses sillyass Star Trek allusions anyway?

• UPDATE! Serendipitously, Lenin's Tomb published Hayekian Progress two hours ago I type this. A corollary of progress being unpredictable, is that it is unplannable. One cannot really master the forces which produce progress, bend them to any design or end goal, only come to understand them a little bit better in order to maximise their potential. It is not incidental that Hayek has used the example of scientific progress to make his case. Hayek's concern with the problems of knowledge is central to his outlook. In arguing against economic planning (see 'The Uses of Knowledge in Society', The American Economic Review, September 1945), he maintained that a "rational economic order" could not be brought about by any single intelligence, because knowledge of the circumstances of which those who would construct such an order must make use is not concentrated but distributed in "bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge" among "separate individuals". For this reason, the best system is one in which individuals act on their own self-interest, disregarding traditional morality, civic responsibility and so on, responding only to price signals. In doing so, by blindly obeying artificial rules and paying no attention to any greater end, they assure progress. There's a reason Hayek is one of Corporate's gods.
• NYT lead editorial: Johns Bolton and Yoo argue not to cut nukes.
• Progressives for state-sanctioned corporate monopolies.
• UPDATE! Capital: a review.
• A response to the above.
• What in the fuck has Obama done so far? 
• UPDATE! Today's obamapostasy will not surprise you one bit.
• Assume the ostrich stance. 
• On being overly-optimistic.
• Heh.
• What is a party?
• Part(isan). 
• Is our village learning?

• The deathmask of Dana Perino. And who the fuck on the Left is for stoning women, cause stop it, man. 
• Crisis in Kensington!
• Baltimore County leans Democrat? 
• Number one! 
• Hard times in Frederick.
• Crisis in Chevy Chase!
• On bleggal boundaries.
• Handmaid's Tale is 25.
• GbV!
• Corin Tucker interview (w/MP3 of new band).
• UPDATE! Someone besides me posts a Richard Thompson song!
• Good news for at least one of you I know: Jayhawks reunite.

I WAS AT CONGRESS WITH MYSELF

Catherine Wagner

I was at congress with myself to conclude

          should I tax myself, to strengthen my

               reserves and strictly exercise

               myself, so I'll haul myself back up

               if I fall down

          or should I ratchet down the tax, release the lever

               and run outside and see what's there to do

               and give myself a job, or blow it

               on one bamboozle eve extravaganza

the world at night was twitching and flapping out

     from my congress, and I gathered it in and dreamt

to my outnumberment

They Refuse to Be Blessed, Throat, Eye and Knucklebone

Politico's big two, Mike Allen and Jim VanderHei, jubilantly jig on the beaten body of Obama's presidency:

President Obama has performed his act of contrition. Now comes the hard part, according to Democrats around the country: reckoning with the simple fact that he’s isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics.

Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday. Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel maligned by his holier-than-thou take on their profession. His own Cabinet — with only a few exceptions — has been marginalized.

His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse. Obama has suggested it’s a PR problem, but several Democratic officials said CEOs friendly with the president walk away feeling he’s indifferent at best to their concerns. Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the media and, most important, most voters, and it’s easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to POLITICO that it wants Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach.

Think, whom didn't Obama piss off except for his loyalest advocates? It's a remarkable achievement. Maybe he's playing this Clinton 1994, and lordy knows the GOP House is going to over-cracker hysterically, but I don't remember the Left being as angry at Clinton in 1994 as at Obama in 2010. Might work. Bet a pint it does.

Play with me: what if Obama genuinely believed he could expand the mythological American moderate base with seepage into both Left and Right, acted on that belief, and managed to piss-off everyone but his loyalest advocates? What if Corporate believed it, or at least green-lighted a pilot-program w/a WTF shrug?

(?revoc rof srekcarc eht desu dna yrt ot detnaw reven amabo ro rekcarc ot si yrtnuoc eht tub yrt ot detnaw amabo fi rettam ti seoD)

Overwhelming odds say Obama's fucking inept at following orders and a dick when confronted on it. But play with me: what if Obama honestly believed in and earnestly strove for compromise and bipartisanship and America consciously told him to fuck off? It's hard to believe that was Obama's plan; it's easy to believe that would have been America's reaction had it been.

• Heh, revolution from the Left. 
• GOP pushback begins. 
• Now, a word from your sponsor.
• Phantom jobs.
• On the above.
• Targeted killings.
• Defensive boredom.
• Hot potato.
• Stupid outrage. 
• Western Maryland is beautiful, motherfucking Kentucky.
• How much is Politics and Prose really worth? 
• James Wright trashes Allen Ginsberg. 
• I have read exactly zero of the novels on this best of list. Of the five books of poetry, I have read the Zapruder. It's good.
• Márquez writing new novel.
• Anne Sexton was born eighty-two years ago today.
• Heliocentric.

THE TRUTH THE DEAD KNOW

Anne Sexton

Gone, I say and walk from church,   

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,   

letting the dead tide alone in the hearse.   

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,   

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch   

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes   

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse   

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Unlike a Man It Rose Again Rolling with the Wind Over and Over to Be as It Was Before

An ad I keep hearing on the radio for Head and Shoulders shampoo guarantees cleaner and fuller hair after a week of daily washing versus not washing your hair for a week. When you're a bald man, that's doubly nonsensical.

Well sure, and Obama claims he's an admirer of Gandhi, I snort derisively. When you're a fully-vested poodle, snorting at irony is triply nonsensical.

Anyway, finished a moleskin, started a new one along with a new noxzema bottle blue virtual one. When you both want attention and the pleasure of being ignored it's quadruply nonsensical to call attention to both.

• Aesthetics.
• Self-absorption.
• Tear jerk.
• Growth industry.
• Corrupter v corruptee.
• Krugman still doesn't get it. 
• Electoral dissonance: The result is a kind of political cognitive dissonance. Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.
  
• Recipe for fascism: American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism. 
• Outrage, misguided: The U.S. midterm elections register a level of anger, fear and disillusionment in the country like nothing I can recall in my lifetime. Since the Democrats are in power, they bear the brunt of the revulsion over our current socioeconomic and political situation. 
• Mush! 
• Brooks and Balzac?
• Straight problem.
• O'Malley's next four years.
• NaNoWrMo. I tried three years ago, long after I knew I wasn't a novelist, see no reason to reconfirm. I have one friend trying this year, she says she thinks she might make it. Go Jill.
• Impossible music.
• GbV.
• Husker Du.
• Enter to win new re-release of All Things Must Pass.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Spin Yo La Tengo's wheel! Anyone want to go to the 930 show in January?
• Shade and honey.

THE TERM

W.C. Williams

A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length

and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the

wind slowly over
and over in
the street as

a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to

the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling

with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.

dragging his hinger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth

I haven't written about my reading lately. I get these massive reading slumps, always have, long before I began yodeling about them online. I'll read a novel, be absorbed by the novel, it won't release me for weeks. I can't read anything else for weeks. I'll start novel after novel, read ten pages, be thinking about the novel that won't release me. I haven't had a reading slump in months. Holyfuck, I miss those reading slumps.

I'm three-quarters through Beckett's Molloy. It's the first time I've read it, feels like the fifth, feels exactly like rereading Moby Dick for the fifth time did last Fall, the love, the fuck you, the laughs, the fuck you. Being dicked willingly by an author who wants you to know you being dicked is an awesome and sore joy. I haven't laughed out loud more at a novel since the last time I did until the next time I do. I've not said Fuck this novel then compulsively picked it up again since rereading Moby Dick for the fifth time which pitched me into a colossal reading slump. Holyfuck, I've high and unreasonable hopes for a colossal reading slump after Beckett's trilogy.

Yesterday's hike:

• Redefine happiness.
• A fluffer, a nutter! And I begrudge it. 
• I wonder why. David Fucking Broder rules our world. 
• And Tom Motherfucking Friedman too, who today farts to remind you to remain scared.
• Obama and Gandhi.
• Our big, fat, invisible wars.
• Kangaroo courts.
• Healers lose, parasites win. 
• They're both right, they're both wrong.
• Fears of a carnal-minded society. 
• Homosexual-menace comix!
• Christers aren't Christians, the motherfuckers.
• Like I said yesterday, looking for the rational explanation in NBC's rationale in the Olbermann suspension is a rube's game.
• Head-butting.
• Reason to rename blog BLCKCTRD.
• Debating the canon is always fun.
• Albums for Autumn, part one, part two.
• Autumn songs.
• Ten classical tear-jerkers.
• Joni Mitchell is sixty-seven today.

THE VULTURE

Samuel Beckett

dragging his hinger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

strooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal