My friend Zen's post that mentioned merry-go-round in the post's title made me immediately flash to Victoria Williams' song Merry Go Round off Happy Come Home, one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever. Fuck me, it's been at least two years since I thought of Victoria Williams. All I have is cassettes. All I had is cassettes, downloaded Happy Come Home and Loose and Musings of a Creek Dipper last night, spent the night with them, love again, will fill out the discography next paycheck cycle. Holyfuck, brought out of MSADI5G's attic and back into inner circles. And bless Serendipity as always - the day after buying a ticket to see Lambchop in December I remember Victoria Williams' music cause Lambchop wouldn't sound like Lambchop had Victoria Williams not sounded like Victoria Williams first. That's a compliment all around, yo.
I did find a couple of McGarrigle Sisters CDs, so you know what's coming in the coming days.
- Once more unto humanitarian intervention.
- When the sky grew a warlike eye.
- Zizek on disposable life: For Zizek, the issue of ‘disposable lives’ in the contemporary period does not simply relate to some small or invisible minority. According to the new logics of global capitalism, the vast majority of the worlds citizens (including almost entire Nations) are deemed to be worthless and superfluous to its productive needs. Not only does this point to new forms of apartheid as the global cartography for power seeks to police hierarchies of disposability, it further points to a nihilistic future wherein the aspirations of many are already being sacrificed.
- Yes, I've long dropped the long-running greatest academic fraud of his generation gag re: Zizek. Not only has his celebrity and influence waned, it is unfair to all the other great academic frauds of this generation.
- Everyone is a fraud. I realize I grossly self-exaggerate my fraudulence, but I like to think I'm as good a fraud as any.
- Violence is mine: In a number of contemporary artists whose works deal with the digital — the so-called post-internet artists — a marked, almost frightening feature is their tendency towards violence. The figure, which had been largely absent from contemporary art for the past few decades, has returned, but only to be pulled apart, dissected or made to disappear — not with any visible bloodshed or abjection, but clinically, echoing in style the unreality associated with the digital. This return to the body as a subject of hostility suggests that the proximity on the internet to representations of extreme violence is a kind of imbrication — an unresolved culpability from those watching toward what’s seen.
- Campo dei Fiori.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- Reminder: please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber.
- A bleggal birthday with flashback to bleggalgaze.
- Bukowski, for those of you who do.
- Robert Kelly, for those of you who do.
- Already thinking about what to get me for Giftmas?
- Beckett's Embers.
- Carnivorous.
THE RING TOSS LADY BREAKS A FIVE
Mark Kraushaar
It’s all of it rigged, she says,
Bust-one-wins, Hi-striker, even the Dozer.
It’s like you think you’ll score that giant panda
for the wife except you can’t, or not
without you drop another twenty
and then—what?—then you win
a thumb-sized monkey or a little comb.
She hands me five ones and then stands.
She’s worked the whole of the midway,
she says, funnel cake to corn-dogs.
She’s worked every game
plus half the rides, Krazy Koaster,
Avalanche, Wing-Ding, Tilt-a-Whirl
and if there’s somebody sick she’ll do
a kiddy ride too, Li’l Choo-choo, maybe
the Tea Cup.
There’s a collapsing soft sigh
and she sits, opens the paper, turns a page
and as if she were the one assigned to face forwards,
as if it were her job to intuit the world
and interpret the news,
Anymore, she says, it’s out of our hands,
it’s all we can do—it’s not up to you.
You see that bald bronco tearing
tickets at the carousel?
We worked the Bottle-drop
and now he’s mine: he’s no genius
but he loves me and he’s mine.
Things happen, she says, you
can’t take them back.
I like that Mark Kraushaar poem.
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