Holyfuck, heard that band for first time yesterday, will be on the soundtrack of the drive to Ohio and back this Friday and Saturday to retrieve Planet, you'll be (getting a slide show of Garrett County snow) hearing more. Meanwhile, as they're scurrying to shit-proof their moral basements with sump-pumps of preemptive fake obamapostasies against the punking they surely knew was imminent, a song for those professional progressives like Charles Pierce and Paul Krugman who scolded me and others as childish for our reluctance to be as slavishly less-shitty-punked as they happily were, are, will always be.
- Because Obama's post-election Job One is defusing any clamor from the left demanding payback for their support.
- Terror Tuesday Torture Tempest!
- Imperialism of the peasants.
- Paying for the crimes of the elite.
- But he cried on TV!
- Mush.
- Motherfucking Democrats.
- I have a friend who says Obama knows the House GOP will never agree to anything and he's offering these compromises aware he'll never need honor them. I emailed back, but by linking Social Security to this bogus cliff Obama has made it a chip in all future negotiations. God, I'm a cynic, I was told.
- Bailouter-in-Chief.
- Five unbelievably creepy surveillance tactics! (he types into his blog and plunges publish).
- The Death of Postmodernism? Whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.
- Hope? I suck at object/subject/subject/object, though using time as a currency seems smart to me.
- Hope. (Frances, click to his site for current post, your hometown gets a mention.)
- Beckett, for those of you who do, after that seems smart to me too.
- What is the mother of god?
- Melville.
- Buy me this for Giftmas! Krasznahorkai: I'm in the middle of Melancholy of Resistance. I hate it. I love it. I read it twenty pages entranced, twenty-first page I'm done for two weeks, rinse, start again. Something good is going on, off, on.... It's the cinder block paragraphs composed of sentences of more than forty clauses, they're claustrophobic. On purpose. My panic at lack of air, that's on me.
- I confess I had never come across Jake Adam York.
- Ladies and Gentleman, renowned music critic Tom Friedman: Pussy Riot probably is no Tupac, but the band members were iconoclasts who broke the mold, albeit in an offensive and obnoxious manner.
- Live Furs set below the poem via.
- Zombie does Giftmas songs. This is the greatest and only Giftmas song I love:
THIS ROOM
John Ashbery
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all the feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
