- I was going to repost the Ubu post from last night that I couldn't wait until today to post and add links, but fuck that. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pere Ubu?
- Besides, I found my Chapterhouse stash last weekend, been listening.
- Magical thinking: I still believe if I post a post that means more to me than most posts, even if I post it at nine in the evening, it meaning more to me will generate more than normal hits for a post posted at nine in the evening, as in very very few, by dint that the post means more to me than most posts, that dint radiating out into Dead Blegsylvania. The reminder is always needed.
- The central paradox of the 21st century? Ever since the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago, we have learned that from the sweat of our brow we will earn our daily bread. This deep-seated truth is now out of date. Capitalism and technology have in large part solved the problem of supply. We need to solve the problem of demand. The first step is to realize we live in a post scarcity economy, that austerity is not the answer. The second stem is to recognize we need to divorce work from consumption. Otherwise, technological progress will impoverish us rather than enrich us and that would be tragic, ironic, and absurd.
- Haunted by magical thinking.
- The broken thread of culture.
- Challenging misconceptions, with Hobsbawm.
- The mark of an agent.
- The bite.
- Food links.
- In defense of football's flaws: What if football, like a peak predator, is already perfectly adapted to its environment? Or, if not perfectly adapted, at least evolving at a rate congruent with its enormous audience’s needs? So: no. Let’s not rid the game of its vital strengths: the sense that anything is possible, the joy in getting away with an unlikely victory, the perverse joy in having been robbed (the intensity of a loser’s feelings, an intensity that, as in life, convinces you that you lost through no fault of your own, that you lost because arbitrary forces were involved). Few native speakers of this game would wish to lose the organic narrative that emerges out of its randomness, the way a good novel might gather seemingly unrelated facts and incidents into an emotional peak. If football’s “flaws” were as intolerable as American writers would have us believe, it would neither be the world’s biggest sport nor one of its biggest forms of cultural expression.
- I have a motherfucking website committee meeting scheduled precisely to make me miss the second half of today's USMNT v Germany game. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
- Ramshackle, with William Carlos Williams' poem.
- Lost Time, with Proust, Josipovici, others.
- Beckett, for those of you who do.
- Residents, Tuxedomoon, others.
- Live Marissa Nadler set! Planet, Air, Earthgirl, and I are seeing her with Mr Alarum in July!
THE YEAR OF WHAT NOW
Brian Russell
I ask your doctor
of infectious disease if she's
read Williams he cured
sick babies I tell her and
begin describing spring
and all she's looking at the wall
now the floor now your chart
now the door never
heard of him she says
but I can't stop explaining
how important this is
I need to know your doctor
believes in the tenacity of nature
to endure I'm past his heart
attack his strokes and now as if
etching the tombstone myself I find
I can't remember the date
he died or even
the year of what now
are we the pure products and what
does that even mean pure isn't it
obvious we are each our own culture
alive with the virus that's waiting
to unmake us
