Monday, March 24, 2014

As Soon as I Speak, I Speaks





Apparently Major League Soccer's subscription livestream service auto-renews because I was able to watch United lose another game in precisely the manner they've lost countless games since the dumb-luck run to the Eastern Conference final in 2012 without having to submit a credit card number. United losing: True, it's only two games and true, Toronto seems a much improved team, though when I say Toronto went out and signed Jermaine Defoe from the starting line-up of Spurs and Michael Bradley off the bench of Roma and United signed three defenders in wheelchairs cut by their teams and a striker everyone expects to be a major malcontent by July this is not to criticize United's front office and ownership. Or wait, yes it is.

>>Deleted additional bitching about United's front office and ownership<< I'll leave it as this: short-sighted cheap-ass motherfuckers across all levels from product on the field to treatment of season ticket holders. Instead of details have a weekend's worth of links.






  • A prediction of intentionally-spawned scandal for Rand Paul.
  • New David Harvey: But what is so striking about crises is not so much the wholesale reconfiguration of physical landscapes, but dramatic changes in ways of thought and understanding, of institutions and dominant ideologies, of political allegiances and processes, of political subjectivities, of technologies and organisational forms, of social relations, of the cultural customs and tastes that inform daily life. Crises shake our mental conceptions of the world and of our place in it to the very core. And we, as restless participants and inhabitants of this new emerging world, have to adapt, through coercion of consent, to the new state of things, even as we, by virtue of what we do and how we think and behave, add our two cents’ worth to the messy qualities of this world.
  • Some motherfuckers, etc: Now, I do like this - all this death and destruction is your fault because your government, wholly independently of your opinion on the matter, refuses to drop high explosives on Damascus. There's something bracingly bullshitty about entirely accepting that "there is no appetite for putting military pressure on Assad" in the UK or the US, and then laying the blame for this on "kneejerk peaceniks" who have, as has been repeatedly and graphically demonstrated, no influence whatsoever on foreign policy. Whether the Brit stole this from Ghoul Kristol or Ghoul Kristol just gave the American version, who cares.





  • Rat's Alley: The "Global War on Terror" may have been semantically erased by the propagandists of the Obama Administration, but on the ground, it is still going on -- and still spawning a multititude of malevolent consequences, as Patrick Cockburn details in a powerful series of articles. Cockburn's look at the historical record doesn't begin with 9/11, of course; the fatal alliance between Washington and the most retrograde and repressive forms of Islam -- which gave rise to the Terror War and its present reality -- go back several decades. [The first three parts of the series are here, here and here.]
  • In defense of Fred Phelps.
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • New Inquiry's Sunday links.
  • The Dream's Navel.
  • Yes, at least a dozen dozen times.
  • My guarantee to you: blog a post named after a Guided by Voices song and post that song and I will link to it.
  • The Creeley poem below put this Laurie Anderson song in my head. This is true: I really didn't know she was married to Lou Reed. I confess it still creeps me out.
  • Guess what I was listening to last night (after enduring DS9 Season 1, Episode 11, featuring an aged Ferenghi's cackling orgasms - yo, this show sucks; friends keep telling me it's going to get better - Mr Alarum just reminded me that seasons 1 & 2 of Next Gen sucked too - but....).







THE PATTERN

Robert Creeley

As soon as   
I speak, I   
speaks. It

wants to   
be free but   
impassive lies

in the direction   
of its
words. Let

x equal x, x   
also
equals x. I

speak to   
hear myself   
speak? I

had not thought   
that some-
thing had such

undone. It   
was an idea   
of mine.



2 comments:

  1. let x equal x, x also equals x. - from a Big Bang Theory episode rebroadcast last night: "If ma = mg, what does that tell us?"

    -----------

    One thing that’s rarely talked about is how time-consuming book groups are. (One group I heard about, discouraged by the time commitment of big novels, has taken to reading poetry.) Mine has a penchant for plump Victorian novels like “Nicholas Nickleby” that were serialized. Everyone in 19th-century London read these novels. “Great Expectations” was their “House of Cards.” Really? You’re Not in a Book Club? By JAMES ATLAS Published: March 22, 2014, NYTimes

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  2. And we, as restless participants and inhabitants of this new emerging world, have to adapt, through coercion of consent, to the new state of things... David Harvey

    The restless consumer flies
    Around the world each day
    With such an appetite for taste and grace
    Neil Young

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf5nVk5MU70&feature=kp

    ReplyDelete