2011/10/31

Best Shitty Monday Antidote Available (Now w/Bonus Antidote!)




Mazzy Star's new single, the perfect drug for a deepdown and truly shitty Monday.





Holyfuck! Have I ever mentioned since the last time and until the next time how much I love Mazzy Star?






HEY! Holyfuck! the day's turned better: new GbV!

Guided By Voices - Doughnut For A Snowman by FIRE RECORDS
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A Proxy Pain Stands in for the Larger Intangible



That's my complicit-ass torso on Metro riding home yesterday afternoon from Freedom Plaza. I was bored, playing with the settings and taking blind shots with my camera, thinking, Know what? I'm not giving up my comfort - my job, my house, my cars, my cats, my United season tickets. I am willing to give up the every payday Friday night Indian restaurant, and I still can't read anymore so why buy books, though I'm not giving up my Corporate wireless phone or my home internet connection at gunpoint - but I am going to buy some durable, no-frills blankets and take them Downtown this coming Saturday.

I punish the Indian restauranteur to assuage my guilt through paying proxies to protest my moral dispute with Corporate. See where my discretionary fund tugs my disposable money from? It's .06% less-shitty than letting my proxies freeze.










ENTERING THE OUSE

Paula Bohince

First the bad boots
give up their strength, then the toes lift
their anchors. The ankle
bones are broken,
and so on, until the bladder lets go, without
shame, and the genital
organ washes away, the ovum
and her fertile signals. A proxy pain
stands in for the larger
intangible.

Has nothing to do
with tufts of snow blown upon
the unforgiving surface,
but how I mistook the beauty of those particle
deaths, their of-the-world
stardom, as a kind of metaphysical river,
that if I looked long enough,
with enough reverence...

Let my waist, bled numb, stand in
for that miscalculation. And the severed
friendships in the current’s wake, the bloom
blown off the stricken
self. I saw formal water,
knowing my body wanted to go there.
My only child. How
I’ve betrayed you.


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2011/10/30

Field Trip










Underwhelming, overwhelming. Depressing, inspiring. More tomorrow, or not.



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It May Have Been Only Some Way of Reconciling the Two Oblivious Worlds, Which Was His Mission Anyhow





Total h/t. Guess what I'm listening to today.

Also, I'll be at Freedom Plaza noonish, guillotining Barbara, the woman who calls me from Sndy Sprng Bnk every time we're three minutes late with a monthly loan payment. Stop by before or after the beheading, say hi. I'll be in something(s) United, spattered with blood or not depending on when you show up.

Speaking of Occupy.















JOURNEY

Gerald Stern

How dumb he was to wipe the blood from his eye
where he was sucker-punched and stagger out
onto the Plaza blind. He had been waiting
all night for the acorn moon and eating pineapple
topping over his ice cream and arguing
either physics or philosophy. He thinks,
at this late date, it was the cave again
throwing a shadow, although it may have been
only some way of reconciling the two
oblivious worlds, which was his mission anyhow—
if only there was a second moon. He had a
kind of beard and though he could practically lift
the front end of a car and was already
reading Blake, he had never yet tasted honey.




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2011/10/29

Railroad Trains Drop Off the Bourgeois’ Pointy Head a Martyr Sticks a Coffeecup Out Under a Firehose Moviestars Make Hyenas Lick Their Spaceship God’s Hand Descends into a Glove Held Steady by the Police

Yesterday afternoon I started getting pinged heavily on the googled words Galvin Cibbs, who I wrote about in this post from March of this year:

For further enflaming anti-American sentiment, for making the war that wins by not winning even more un-winnable - in other words, for advancing Corporate's interests in a significant but sloppy fashion - Staff Sergeant Gibbs will likely spend the rest of his life in the brig (where I hope he's treated humanely, the motherfucker) for violating Corporate's public relations rules. We all serve Corporate on multiple-levels.

A quick google explains why the burst of interest (almost all from Europe, btw, Hungary and Netherlands especially, hardly any from US) after seven months:

10:15 AM UPDATE: Staff Sgt. Galvin Cibbs pleaded not guilty to all of the 16 criminal charges the Army filed against him. Jury selection is underway.

Looking up and down the blogrolls, I see no one else notes the trial, and I wouldn't have remembered Galvin Cibbs, the crimes he's alleged to have committed, my outrage seven months ago, or his trial beginning but for my vain picking through the scat of my stat-counters for seeds for evidence people are reading, so as with every post, proof of my complicity. As for the trial of Galvin Cibbs, though not addressing the case in any particulars, this blog post title captures multiple meanings.












WELTENDE VARIATION #1

Bill Knott

The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards
A blade snaps in two during an autopsy
The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms
Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick

Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head
A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose
Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship
God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police

At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other
A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer
A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone
The peace night makes according to the world comes


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2011/10/28

Song Set for Friday 10/27/11 2:50PM EDT













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Done Rubbing the Dead End of Thinking Like a Spent Torch Against the Cave's Painted Walls to Make It Burn Better

One thing Occupy (among many other things in this life and real life) challenges me to do in my self-indulgent world during the strangest days of my life is to risk meeting some of my imaginary friends from Blegsylvania in the flesh, form a quick and shallow but indelible first analog impression of you (and you me) to go with my quick and shallow but indelible first digital impression of you (and you me). I don't know which day yet or how long I'll be there, but I'll be the guy in a black United hat with a blue camera at Freedom Plaza McPherson Square, if you see me say hi, shake hands (if you're in one of the Becauses, you get moved to the honored Me and Mine).












BY NIGHT WITH TORCH AND SPEAR

Timothy Donnelly

That fire at the mouth of the flare stack rising
     more than three-hundred feet above the refinery
contorts as it feeds on the invisible current
      of methane produced by the oil's distillation

process like a monster, the nonstop spasm of it
     lumbering upwards into the dark Newark
night like a sack made of orange parachute fabric
     an awkward number of gorillas get it on in.

I would worship it. The motion, the heat, the unapologetic
     knack of the element to yank the appliance
plug from its outlet, filling the big blue business-
     suite of my head with nothing but its own

wordlessness and light. Not now, not knowing
     what I can't unknow, but back on the grasslands
before we ever came to harness it I would bow
     down among the seething life of that primitive

interior and worship the fire taking one bright
     liberty after another. Done listening to fellow
passengers tweaking the fine points. Done rubbing
     the dead end of thinking like a spent torch

against the cave's painted walls to make it burn
     better. As the train slows down as the track
curves around the body of water the fire reflects in,
     it is a form of worship. What is it in me that

hasn't yet been killed with reason, habit, through
     long atrophy or copied so beyond its master
it parses like the last will and testament of a moth-
     eaten cardigan? It dumps its nice adrenaline

into my system nights I hear the crisp steps of deer
     on fallen leaves and stop or when looking up
beneath baroque snow or when I lean over the
     banister along the border of a strong waterfall.

All good and well. But the endless hyperactive
     plumage exploding from this toxic aviary, this sun
of industry descended from the lightning strike,
     obscures its diabolism with a Vegas brightness

so that what there is to fear in it instead excites
     me up a biochemical peak from the far side of which
my own voice, grizzled with a wisdom unknown
     to me in waking life, reminds me of the conjuror

who grew distraught because he sensed the forces
     he had stirred up with his art would not be
mastered by it. It rattles tomorrow's paperwork
     where it hangs from the branches of the ancient

timber trees. It messes with my reception, whereas
     I do not wish my reception to be messed with.     
It tells me to be careful with my worship—that if this,
     too, is a resource, then they have ways to tap it.


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2011/10/27

For He Will Not Do Destruction If He Is Well-Fed, Neither Will He Spit without Provocation



I read p2 of Goff's post-season interview with Kevin Payne - the part where Payne says what he always says when asked the same questions about United's future:

“It’s a struggle for us here at RFK. We have the highest expenses and lowest revenue.”

“We’re talking to EventsDC [which manages the stadium]. We’ve always had a good relationship with them. I think they recognize our situation. We’re hopeful we can reach an agreement that makes more sense and allows us to remain here. It’s about the amount we pay and the amount we make here. Compared to the average team in our league, the combination of expenses and revenue, we’re about $2.85 million worse per year: about $1 million more in expenses than the average MLS team and about $1.85 million less in revenue. It’s a lot of money.”

“We’re not hiding anything. We are trying to work through some issues with the District and we are having conversations about how to get something in the District, but we’re having those same conversations with Baltimore. I’m not sure I want to categorize it, but the state of Maryland, Maryland Stadium Authority and city of Baltimore know how to do this. They’ve done it successfully. They have a process. It’s a pretty straight-forward process.”

“I don’t think (United owner Will Chang) is very happy about what this is costing him. When I say things like ‘the current deal at RFK is unsustainable as a business,’ at the end of the business is a person who is writing big checks. There is a point at which he’s not going to write those checks.”

Fuck-me-jig, there will never be a stadium in DC, so why is Steve Goff, after Kevin Payne's annual double-whack at the District government, subsequently speculating about Byrd Stadium as a temporary home while a new stadium is built?




  • Oh. It's also a sign that these are the strangest days of my life that, while I still love United and will attend every home game I'm able until forever (even after they move LOUD SIDE! to an endzone if they ever got a new stadium, which they won't), I'm beginning to imagine life without United, and the prospect doesn't strike me with existential angst like it once did.
  • The imperial boardroom strikes back.
  • Occupy first, demand later! says this generation's greatest academic fraud (I say this admiringly). 
  • (More shooting Zizek.)
  • Four questions.
  • Occupy as primarying Obama?
  • Against American-style authoritarianism.
  • Oakland.
  • Beta-testing?
  • How much connection?
  • Strange bedfellows?
  • Meet the .01%.
  • Police terror. Please remember it is always going to be cheaper for Corporate to buy hungry crackers at subsistence wages and give them a badge and tell them to beat up fucking hippies than retrain hungry crackers to build nothing that can't be built without them.
  • Beyond Wall Street. 
  • Tricky journalism.
  • Heh.
  • Three questions regarding my complicity: (1) Google reader is going away? (2) Are people Kindly moving my feed from google reader to whatever the fucking Borg demand the reason for the freakish cascades of pings the past three days? (3) If I want the feeds I get via reader, what do I have to do?
  • Pigfight!
  • Know what. I'm gonna see how long I can hold my blogbreath starting now, see if I can make it until Monday before posting again (comments here or elsewhere don't count), meaning place your predictions in comments (I don't think I can go until Monday either, I predict 7:54 Friday morning), you can buy me a pint or me you somewhere near McPherson Square this weekend, I'll be the guy in the black United baseball hat, shake my hand, say hi. 







JUBILATE AGNO, FRAGMENT B [FOR I WILL CONSIDER MY CAT JEOFFRY

Christopher Smart

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having considered God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary. 
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel 
            from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defense is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. 
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. 
For he is of the Lord's poor, and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry!
            poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better. 
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection. 
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Icneumon rat, very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the electrical fire is the spiritual substance which God sends from heaven to sustain the 
            bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.


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2011/10/26

As a Kid I Believed in Democracy





DREAM SONG 105

John Berryman
As a kid I believed in democracy: I
'saw no alternative' - teaching at The Big Place I ah
put it in practice:
we'd time for one long novel: to a vote -
Gone with the Wind they voted: I crunched 'No'
and we sat down with War & Peace.

As a man I believed in democracy (nobody
ever learns anything): only one lazy day
my assistant, called James Dow,
& I were chatting, in a failure of meeting of minds,
and I said curious 'What are your real politics?'
'Oh, I'm a monarchist.'

Finishing his dissertation, in Political Science.
I resign. The universal contempt for Mr Nixon,
whom never I liked but who
alert & gutsy served us years under a dope,
since dynasty K swarmed in. Let's have a King
maybe, before a few mindless votes.



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Swerve with Personal Radar, Crisisless, Kid

Hey, did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?




It's true! and fuck me, it's all the energy, soul, heart, and oomph* I have to write about today, and, serendipitously, the Post's Steve Goff sat down with Kevin Payne for the first half of their post-season interview (today on-field, tomorrow off-field, as in United's future, or lack thereof, in DC). Not surprisingly, Payne's autopsy/obituary/outlook sounds like pretty much every other I've seen, including mine, though, of note, there's positive GM-yadda about Boskovic returning amidst the standard GM-yadda blaming the players for not being the players the GM thought he'd signed.

Tomorrow, the Sadder Yadda, or: I will never need gladly Fuck-Me-Jig.











DREAM SONG 63

John Berryman

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and, in general, bats have it made.
Henry for joining the human race is bats,
known to be so, by few them who think,
out of the cave.

Instead of the cave! ah lovely-chilly, dark,
ur-moist his cousins hang in hundreds or swerve
with personal radar,
crisisless, kid. Instead of the cave? I serve,
inside, my blind term. Filthy four-foot lights
reflect on the whites of our eyes.

He then salutes for sixty years of it
just now a one of valor and insights,
a theatrical man,
O scholar & Legionnaire who as quickly might
have killed as cast you. Olč. Stormed with years
he tranquil commands and appears.



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2011/10/25

Mission Accomplished, Pal. My Molten Yellow & Moonless Bag, Drained, Hangs at Rest

Blogfriend Brad proposes a December reading group for William Gass' Omensetter's Luck, and while I can promise to try to play I can't commit to playing, not because I reread Omensetter last winter but because I can't commit to reading anything right now. I've been toying with ordering Murakami's 1Q84, out today, on kindle, to spark my reading slump's end, but no, I've never found Murakami wondrous, and I wonder if even something new from an author I find wondrous would help.

What's different about this desperate reading slump is that it isn't desperate (even if Berryman broke it, for today at least, the way he thinks in blocks like I think helping), what's different is that not only am I not frantic I'm not desperate, I'm fascinated I'm not desperate. CWCF, strangest days of my life, the first time in my life when novels don't speak to me, seem obsolete and closed. Now, on the other hand:





DREAM SONG 25

Henry, edged, decidedly, made up stories
lighting the past of Henry, of his glorious
present, and his hoaries,
all the bight heals he tamped— —Euphoria,
Mr Bones, euphoria. Fate clobber all.
—Hand me back my crawl,

condign Heaven. Tighten into a ball
elongate & valved Henry. Tuck him peace.
Render him sightless,
or ruin at high rate his crampon focus,
wipe out his need. Reduce him to the rest of us.
—But, Bones, you is that.

—I cannot remember. I am going away.
There was something in my dream about a Cat,
which fought and sang.
Something about a lyre, an island. Unstrung.
Linked to the land at low tide. Cables fray.
Thank you for everything.











DREAM SONG 16

Henry's pelt was put on sundry walls
where it did much resemble Henry and
them persons was delighted.
Especially his long & glowing tail
by all them was admired, and visitors.
They whistled: This is it!

Golden, whilst your frozen daiquiris
whir at midnight, gleams on you his fur
& silky & black.
Mission accomplished, pal.
My molten yellow & moonless bag,
drained, hangs at rest.

Collect in the cold depths barracuda. Ay,
in Sealdah Station some possessionless
children survive to die.
The Chinese communes hum. Two daiquiris
withdrew into a corner of the gorgeous room
and one told the other a lie.


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Born Ninety-Seven Years Ago Today

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2011/10/24

Born Ninety-Seven Years Ago Tomorrow




Because I am so desperate to break out of my deepest, most severe reading slump of the past five years since the last until the next (I'm stuck on page 737 of Gaddis' The Recognitions, I can't get past page ten of Crawford's The Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine, I stuck on page 201 of Elkin's George Mills, page 114 of Harvey's Enigma of Capitalism, page 309 of Grossman's Life and Fate, page 175 of Eliot's Mill on the Floss, and past the fifteenth Devotion in Bruce Smith's new book of poems), so much do I want to break out of this reading slump that when I remembered tomorrow is John Berryman's birthday I grabbed the Dream Songs from my cubicle's shelf and found my favorite and, searching to find it on the web to c/p, found the above youtube, and shazam, it probably won't break the slump (but waiting until tomorrow won't either), so here it is now. More, maybe on the slump if I honor the what the fuck (though this might do), tomorrow, certainly more Berryman.

UPDATE! Here to the rescue!
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All Ardent and Catastrophic and Counter



Occupy DC. My confession, my complicity: yesterday we went on one of our favorite hikes to cliffs over the Potomac instead of going Downtown, and even worse, it wasn't until I was three miles into the hike that I remembered I wanted to think about going Downtown yesterday instead of hiking in the woods.




Though it's still vital to remember: Fuck NPR and anyone who gives them a motherfucking penny:

NPR will no longer distribute the member station-produced program "World of Opera" to about 60 stations across the country because the show host helped organize an ongoing Washington protest, a network official said Friday evening.

NPR spokeswoman Dana Davis Rehm said the network disagrees with the station on the role of program hosts but respects its position.

"Our view is it's a potential conflict of interest for any journalist or any individual who plays a public role on behalf of NPR to take an active part in a political movement or advocacy campaign," she told The Associated Press. "Doing so has the potential to compromise our reputation as an organization that strives to be impartial and unbiased."

Dana Rehm? Really? As in nepotism? I don't know, I'm asking.




Also, it is vital to remember: Fuck Man Utd, and fine fucking metaphors abound:

The Glazers found little to cheer their spirits at Wembley. Private helicopters swept the Manchester United owners away from Old Trafford in the wake of Sunday's derby defeat and down to London in time to see their other team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, lose to the Chicago Bears 24-18 in the latest instalment of the NFL's International Series. This defeat may not have been quite so emphatic but when your regular season is only 16 games long, every loss is that little bit more significant.

I watched City demolish United on Fox Soccer yesterday morning (and Mario Balotelli can be the next great football player if he decides he wants to be, holyfuck - and holyfuck is Carlos Tevez a moron, but that's another story) and the British announcer and color commented on the traffic jam caused by the Glazers shutting down parking spaces for their private helicopters, the American fuckers, fucking with Man Utd true local supporters.





  • Is Occupy changing the discourse?
  • The image that marks the end?
  • Occupy is not difficult to understand.
  • Occupy Prague. 
  • Occupy everything, but you make it so hard.
  • Crackers: The self-hating 99%.
  • Job-killers.
  • Why Credit Unions?
  • The epileptic economy. 
  • Liberal bias of American media?
  • When bad presidents happen to good Democrats.
  • It is vital to remember: Fuck Chelsea.
  • A thoughtful afternoon.
  • My future hell.
  • Hilltop v DC. Hilltop should have bought Mt Vernon College when it had the chance.
  • Defending MFAs. Fuckers.
  • I remember loving Norman Rush's Mating when it came out, but so much had my tastes changed I don't think I gave Mortals a fair chance.
  • Speaking of reading, I'm not, not because I don't want to.
  • Could this break the slump?
  • Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
  • Woke up with this in my head, one of dozens of my five favorite Guided by Voices songs, even if runs forever by GbV clocks (and Universal Truths and Cycles is way underrated):






    DEVOTION: THE BURNT-OVER DISTRICT

    Bruce Smith

    Late fall in the villages of Pompey, Preble, Oran, Delphi Falls,   
          churched
    river and woods. In Homer and Ovid, the localities   
          and principalities
    of central New York, the hollows and corners of the   
          burnt-over districts
    visited by angels in the 1800's who led us to greatness: awakenings,
    gold, portents and lies, heaven, women's suffrage, and bundling
    with the other in the love beds while we waited for the lamb,   
    the dove, the velvet of the ten-point buck grunting through   
          the underbrush
    to rut. We learned in divine time a year's a day.   
          We learned obedience
    and had charismatic children. And now the boy's an angelic
    eighteen days or six thousand years, as he leaves to serve.
    He did what we told him: blocked for punts—no one likes to   
          block for punts—
    and when his friends crashed the truck in a ditch, he waited   
          for the cops
    and took the rap, nice kid, because he did the act of deliverance   
          one does
    in central New York and made the vows, pledged, testified,   
          and swore
    and participated in the sport greater than the coming of the dead,
    and escorted the exaggerated girl to the prom where he   
          was befuddled
    with organza and tulle and he did not forget the corsage, an orchid
    in a box he stared into: the white outer whorl and the inner whorl
    and pouted purple lip. He butterflied the pollen with the lashes   
          of his eyes.
    The flower was his terror. He was not meant to be the   
          indwelling beauty
    of things and surely he was not meant to be the wind in Iraq   
          with three others
    in his division and become the abstract shape of a god formed from a blood clot.
    I've seen the pictures, the vague shapes that ripple in the heat
    until I was terrified. It looked like he still moved. Remember fall
    in Delphi? All ardent and catastrophic and counter, elbows flailing,
    he ran in the flat places scraped from the gold hills and valleys.


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2011/10/23

Postworthy News

UPDATE! I was very politely asked by someone I'm almost certain didn't bother to send me a crank email to please take down the New GbV! and I said OK.


Also, I've been and am being unusually botted since Friday. Googlebots as always, but new, never seen before bots. A friend tells me it's probably good with a small but decent chance it's bad. Bad as in some asshole's trying to spam the site down? I asked. Well, yes, I suppose that too, she said. In any case, one of the not-googlebots is scrolling all your comments the past year! Yay you!
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United 0, Kansas City 1







End of Charlie Davies in DC. I didn't think he was special before the accident, he's nothing special now. Also probably the end of Clyde Simms, who, after justly being criticized for not giving up his body versus Chicago when the game mattered, gave up his face in a game that meant nothing.






Excellent time. Deposits already down for next season. Five long months. Autopsy and obit maybe later this week, though it was probably yesterday.



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2011/10/22

It ends badly, this glass of wine, before you drink it you have to drink a prior glass, before you sip you gulp, before you chug the bottle you pour it down your throat, before we lie together naked, we divorce, before we rest we grow old, it ends in chaos, but it is delicious, when we wake it is the past, we are the faces staring from the high lit window, the unmet lovers, the rivals who do not exist, united in a radiance that will not fade at dawn

Hey! Do yourself a Kind and do Kind for others.

Hey! Did you know Washington DC has a professional soccer team?




It's true! and tonight is the last game until next Spring at RFK, and while I'll wait until next week to write this year's autopsy and obit (or not, or not at all), it will read sort of like this United autopsy and obit. It was a boatload less miserable than last season. I think they could have survived either Jakovic or Pontius' injuries to make the playoffs but not both (and been a dangerous team if neither had got hurt), and more good was gained this season than bad. Next year I want to see Boskovic in attacking mid playing off DeRossario in withdrawn with Pontius and Najar on the wings and anybody but Josh Wolff or Joseph Ngwenya or Charlie Davies up top.

As for Kasper Payne, he fell in the love with Nodax, which was stupid, but fell out of love and traded Nodax for DeRossario, which was smart. If fucking Stevie Nicol hadn't ordered Boskovic crippled in a USOC qualifier in Germantown that trade probably would never have been made. I went to England three months after United's season opener and got home four months ago today. Time is elastic, and sometimes it's enough that my team no longer has Nodax to consider the season successful.





  • Also: The conference was illuminating and provocative, though there were parts that were challenging and even a bit dense. That is the nature of the beast. Unfortunately, too often the major questions on how to realize a radically new society resides with the intelligentsia, especially those in academia. In this, some work harder than others to make difficult stuff popular. That said to even try is commendable -- an expression of a certain commitment toward breaking through. In that respect a story Zizek -- the Slovenia philosopher who is among the most important thinkers around today -- told of how the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn once gave a talk to a group of workers. In a self-deprecating style he said, "I'm not hear to lecture, I'm here to learn from you." Zizek noted their response. "Fuck off, you are making fun of us -- you have the duty to tell us what you know!" There is a need for such intellectual work.
  • OWS: The Commercial.
  • Occupy and the poetry of now-time.
  • What is communalism?
  • Occupy the mortgage lenders.
  • John McCain has a sad.
  • Was going to comment on this, now I don't have to.
  • It's so unfair. Say what you will about motherfucking Democrats holding up their end of my .06% less-shitty problem, the Republicans are having no problem honoring their end of my .06% less-shitty problem.
  • That's no moon. 
  • Liszt was born 200 years ago today.
  • What you can buy me for Giftmas.
  • Jack-O-Lantern.
  • In the Whippoorwill's Sad Orchard.
  • Hyacinth Girls.
  • Azure Dome.
  • Garden of Your Past.
  • Too late! I just bought it. I've a fortune of worthless cassettes.
  • You can buy me this for Giftmas, though.
  • Though I woke up with this in my head:








THE RAIN-STREAKED AVENUES OF CENTRAL QUEENS

D. Nurkse

It ends badly, this glass of wine,
before you drink it
you have to drink a prior glass,
before you sip you gulp,
before you chug the bottle
you pour it down your throat,
before we lie together
naked, we divorce, before we rest
we grow old, it ends in chaos,
               but it is delicious,
when we wake it is the past,
we are the faces staring
from the high lit window,
the unmet lovers, the rivals
who do not exist,
united in a radiance
that will not fade at dawn.



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2011/10/21

On a Single Night Not Even Near to Freezing





Of course NPR will deny responsibility, whether they did it or not, but she didn't work for NPR, I said to L at Thursday Night Pints, she was a free-lancer at a sub-contractor, though the broader legal implication is that she was not legally bound to NPR's contractual gag-orders for employees, which means NPR employees are gagged, however selectively enforced. K asked, if she'd attended, organized, a Tea Party gathering, would you have wanted her fired? Mara Eliason attends Tea Party gatherings every Sunday morning on Fox, said L. What's fascinating, I said, is that for however much I'm convinced that Occupy is nothing I've no memory of any time since the last time until the next time Corporate seems genuinely concerned about what some off-script, temporarily uncontrolled people-gathering represents. Shit, said Dennis, if Mara Eliason was spokesperson at a Tea-Party I'd.... once... and walked off to get me and him a pint, K and L a ridiculously priced scotch.


















THE CONSENT

Howard Nemerov

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.
What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time.
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.




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2011/10/20

Was He Free? Was He Happy? The Question is Absurd: Had Anything Been Wrong, We Should Certainly Have Heard

UPDATE! According to this, WDAV has decided not to fire Lisa.

Wasn't going to post again until tomorrow, but news that a friend of this blog, Lisa Simeone, has been fired from her NPR gig for participating in October 2011 merits immediate attention:

National Public Radio on Wednesday discovered that a woman named Lisa Simeone who produced hosted a show about opera called "World of Opera" had been participating in a nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., organized by October2011.org.  That same day, NPR persuaded a company for which Simeone worked to fire her, cutting her income in half and purging from the so-called public airwaves a voice that had never mentioned politics on NPR....

Simeone told me: "I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life.  I'm not an NPR employee.  I'm a freelancer.  NPR doesn't pay me.  I'm also not a news reporter.  I don't cover politics.  I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera.  What is NPR afraid I'll do -- insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly? "This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses.  Does NPR also send out 'Communications Alerts' about their activities?"

I need decide whether I need to digest this more than saying fuck NPR and fuck anyone who gives it another motherfucking penny, but in the meantime: Fuck NPR and anyone who gives it another motherfucking penny.

UPDATE! Lisa wasn't fired from NPR but from the company that produced her show. NPR probably asked/threatened that company to fire her, so the Fuck NPR and anyone who gives it another motherfucking penny stand.










THE UNKNOWN CITIZEN

W.H. Auden

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
   saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content 
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
   generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
   education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.


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