Didn't see it. Wanted to see it but it was delayed an hour and a half by lightning and by the time it started Earthgirl was halfway through a movie she wouldn't have started if the game started on time and what, I was gonna pick a fight at 1030 to watch a game I was sure United would lose anyway? I do want to thank Barack Obama. The release of Eric Holder's announcement that no one of import will ever be prosecuted for murder and torture forever and ever (you do know this is about moving forward, not looking back, yes?) right after Crackerfest and before Obamagasm reminds me that we're so banjaxed, a word I learned a few nights ago reading the Guardian's transfer window deadline live blog. Buds in the UK said on twooter the word is "basically Irish middle-class for fucked" and "Irish for reduced to the condition of a pig's breakfast." Excellent. HEY! Today's NYT has a New Guide to the Democratic Herd! Describing four sub-tribes of Democrats, the article lists each sub-tribes' "motivating issues," guess how many sub-tribes are motivated by the protection of civil liberties and fighting the expansion of the police state and executive power and ending the atrocities of maintaining a mendacious empire and all else I yodel about daily. You're right!
- My apologies, I've yet to find a poem that uses the word banjaxed (I mean, other than in a first draft in somebody's tablet), hence its absence in this post's title.
- NYT also did a GOP herd thingee.
- Police state.
- Policing dissent.
- Roaming screeners.
- Police state.
- Voice of the new global elite.
- UPDATE! An unenthusiastic and world-weary defence of less-shittyism.
- The rise and demise of the university business model.
- Someone remarked, I can't remember who and where, that Eastwood served a valuable purpose, people are still talking about him rather than pursuing the GOP-lies meme. Not that it would have been pursued too vigorously.
- But yes, motherfucking crackers.
- Park Mrebelic once lived on Garth Terrace with one of the Morgenstern sisters, I forget which one.
- Sideshow's linkages.
- How to read his generation's greatest academic fraud (I say that admiringly).
- More on metaphor.
- Repost: Mary Ruefle.
- The Seer.
- On Roxy's 40th anniversary: Amazona was the first song on a Roxy album for which Manzanera received a credit. Because music publishing operates according to an antiquated, pre-rock conception of composition that rewards those who write the top-line melody and lyrics, most Roxy tunes are credited solely to Ferry. "It goes back to Tin Pan Alley and the 1930s," says Manzanera. "Eno's synth part on Ladytron, Andy's oboe parts – that came from them. Each member was contributing to the music and to all the arrangements. I like to think that we produced the musical context for Bryan to put his vision into. But that's not reflected in the publishing." It's all the more unfair because, according to Manzanera, from about halfway through For Your Pleasure and onwards, the band would write "the music first – all the music, including the solos. Then Bryan would listen to it and try to write a top-line tune and words. When it worked, it was absolutely brilliant. Because none of us knew what the song was going to be about until he recorded the vocal. Imagine, you've been working on Love Is the Drug for absolutely ages, with no idea that it's even going to be called Love Is the Drug. Then Bryan turns up, and he sings it, and we're like, 'bloody hell, we've got a single'."
- At the Drive-In.
KEEPING IT SIMPLE
Mary Ruefle
I take the bird on the woodpile,
separate it from its function, feather
by feather. I blow up its scale.
I make a whole life out of it:
everywhere I am, its sense of loitering
lights on my shoulder.
