It Was a World. What a World! What a World? What a Big World but a World to Be Drowned In. It's Just a Joke Man.

True, but not the world. New album out this September, old song here right now.

We Studied the Protocol for Astronaut Removal the Minute We Saw His Spit Hit Planet Earth on the Spaceship Window

That's new Pere Ubu. >>Standard Pere Ubu/MSADI5G noise<< Rest of monologue on USMNT/Soccer, there are some very good links below the next song, if you don't want the soccer (and the majority of you don't want the soccer) please scroll down, the links are good.

Belgium is better, has better players, it's not even close. The USMNT had a chance to win, zero-zero in stoppage, a ball on Wondolowski's foot in front of an open goal, he gacked the sitter, he will be waking up screaming in the middle of the night the rest of his life. Let me be the zillionth person to note that but for Tim Howard's spectacular goal-keeping the scone would not have been zero-zero in stoppage. Once Belgium scored their second goal in extra-time I resorted to brazen Baal-taunting: I turned off the TV to go out to dinner in order to spark one of the most remarkable extra-time comebacks in World Cup history (people can vouch this is true), and from what Tommy Smith yelled through my car radio speakers it should have happened but Dempsey gacked a sitter. I tried my best.

2016 is the Centennial Copa America, hosted by USA, the first time CONMEBOL has invited CONCACAF to the tournament.* Klinsmann was widely criticized when he said the USMNT could not win this World Cup. I think he thinks - and correctly - that a deep run in Copa 2016 is possible, certainly more probable than a deep run in this World Cup, and I think he thinks - and correctly - that WC 2014 is the beginning of the build to Copa 2016 and World Cup 2018. He learned - I'm sure he knew - that midfield is the problem. I'm not going to make Michael Bradley the scapegoat (though his suck was stunning) - the midfield as a whole was the great USMNT weakness. I am shocked that Graham Zusi performed so miserably, he's one of the five best players in MLS. Jermaine Jones is old, may make the Copa team, won't make WC 2018. Bedoya is as good as he will ever be, is decent on defense, useless on offense. In a knockout game of the World Cup Klinsmann chose a central defender to be holding midfielder (I don't know why: Beckerman had been good, someone speculated on twitter that Klinsmann wanted Beckerman, sitting on a yellow, available for the next round, and, um, fuck that). It's true I don't pay attention to MLS as much as once, but I'm not aware the next generation of American midfielders (or strikers, for that matter) is particularly flush. This may be the USMNT's plateau, and that's fine.

As for what WC 2014 means for US soccer re: fan support, American culture, the Left/Right divide in American political discourse, fuck that, quick, join me, escape with me:

• The 18th Brumaire of Samuel Alito.
• Greenwald's Fireworks Finale postponed.
• Hegelian Aesthetics and the Bronzed Turd: on retrospectives.
• We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.
• What if speech and silence aren't really opposites.
• Eternalization.
• Regeneration seeks amnesia.
• On the dishonest politics of a dust-up in Literary World.
• The Ethics of Being a Fan.
• * I have been yodeling for years that CONCACAF and CONMEBAL should merge into one giant federation, not only is there too much $$$$ to be made for the soccer mafia, it would improve the soccer of all nations involved.
• All the teams that banned sex have been eliminated.
• What you can buy me for my birthday.

THE FUTURE OF TERROR/5

Matthea Harvey

If there were gamebirds in our gables,

shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves?

Thus we went glass-faced into glory.   

We had our hearts set on staying here,

so our steps seemed more hesitation

waltz than straight-ahead tango.   

We danced the hokey pokey on holy days—

put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell

and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about,

we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati

spoke to us over the intercom via interpreters.

Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from

our wounds and itch mites in our blankets.

Ours was not a job to joke about.   

In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled

with lead looked lovely. We would live this

down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf

was getting smaller—I wrote in margins,   

through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps.   

I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before

the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined.

I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats

or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept

everyone at the pageant, even the children

from the poorhouse playing possum.

We studied the protocol for astronaut removal

the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth

on the spaceship window. But though the scandal

reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it

slide. He was up there turning somersaults

while we spun ever-so-slowly below.

Tottering and Elastic, Middle Name of Groan

• Album reissued, I downloaded it last night.
• You know, if you think there's been too much Pere Ubu/David Thomas here this month, go back and look at June 2013 where there were multiple songs all thirty days.
• Data Storms and the tyranny of manufactured forgetting: It bears repeating: reality is now shaped by the culture’s infatuation with a narrow, depoliticizing rationality, or what Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer called instrumental reason. Bruce Feiler, writing in The New York Times, argues that not only are we awash in data, but words and "unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion, and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science, and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list."[19] Historical memory and public space are indeed the first casualties in this reign of ideological tyranny, which models agency only on consumerism and value only on exchange value. The cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and fervently believes that data hold the key to our collective fate.
• Photographs that push the boundaries of photography.
• Countries still in the World Cup seen from satellites.
• I saw the first half of the USMNT v Germany, second half I was in a motherfucking _______ committee meeting, o the things I don't write about on this blog. I don't think Jozy Altidore a world class striker, his injury is not the difference between nine points out of three games and four points out of three games but it does put Clint Dempsey out of position and changes the roles of everyone in midfield to some extent. I don't know if this explains some of Michael Bradley's shocking suckitude: he was never great, but he had never been shitty like this before. USMNT had one shot on goal in first half (Zusi's 20 yarder over the goal) and from what I've read zero shots in the second half. Klinsmann has the offense running through Bradley, which makes the one shot in a game not a coincidence.
• The Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike.
• Re: the song below the poem. Please skip to 1:16, skip the ridiculous opening.
• Hey, as soon as you hear the guitar you'll know Richard Thompson was once a member of the Pedestrians!

PEDESTRIAN

Thomas Lux

Tottering and elastic, middle name of Groan,   

ramfeezled after a hard night

at the corpse-polishing plant, slope-

shouldered, a half loaf

of bread, even his hair tired, famished,   

fingering the diminished beans

in his pocket—you meet him.

On a thousand street corners you meet him,   

emerging from the subway, emerging   

from your own chest—this sight’s shrill,   

metallic vapors pass into you.

His fear is of being broken,

of becoming too dexterous in stripping   

the last few shoelaces of meat

from a chicken’s carcass, of being moved by nothing   

short of the Fall of Rome, of being stooped   

in the cranium over some loss he’s forgotten   

the anniversary of.... You meet him,   

know his defeat, though proper

and inevitable, is not yours, although yours also   

is proper and inevitable: so many defeats   

queer and insignificant (as illustration:   

the first time you lay awake all night

waiting for dawn—and were disappointed), so many   

no-hope exhaustions hidden,

their gaze dully glazed inward.—And yet we all   

fix our binoculars on the horizon’s hazy fear-heaps   

and cruise toward them, fat sails

forward.... You meet him on the corners,   

in bus stations, on the blind avenues

leading neither in

nor out of hell, you meet him

and with him you walk.

We Are Each Our Own Culture Alive With the Virus That&#39;s Waiting to Unmake Us

• 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

Self-Expression Is Evil

Another new promo for forthcoming new Pere Ubu album. Ubuprojex says Tour Dates to Be Announced Soon. I'm checking daily. Will travel within the time zone. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pere Ubu? Look, I've finally added the tag MSADI5G, though I'll not track back. Lordy, the below is one of dozens of my five favorite Pere Ubu songs ever.

Small and Stupid, Too Slow to Get Away, It Was Only a Promise I Had Made to Myself Once and Then Forgot

I'm leaving shortly for an eight-miler on the Appalachian Trail, Crampton's Gap to top of Lambs Knoll and then down again, again without Earthgirl, she thinks she's a couple of weeks away though her leg is much better. When I get back to the car after the hike, a decision will have been made. There have been changes in the permanent three spots on my Sillyass Deserted Island Game before: twelve years ago I dropped XTC from a spot into the innermost circle of bands and artists who take turns in the two rotating spots in the Sillyass game to elevate Guided by Voices into a permanent spot. (Kate Bush and Pere Ubu/David Thomas had, have, and will always have permanent spots.) Have I ever mentioned how much I love Lambchop? It's not that I love GbV any less than ever, it's that I love Lambchop more than ever. I need two rotating spots and six circles, in ascending order, of bands and artists who cycle through the rotating spots. No, I cannot make it a Sillyass Deserted Island Six Game.

• Notes on conspiricism: This is not to say that there are not operatives in our midst giving the system a nudge here and there. It’s a testimony to the extent of our indoctrination, that in light of this country’s history and a year of revelations about mass surveillance, people still roll their eyes at any suggestion of organized state deception and malfeasance. Certainly Graeber is well aware of the extensive state interference with Occupy, so presumably he is intimating only the looniness of implicating him. But there is little profit in focusing on this aspect when the end result is the same. It doesn’t truly matter what compelled Graeber to knowingly run interference for defamation and red-baiting. What matters is that he did.
• Surveillance, capture, and the endless replay.
• On the war on teachers. Full disclosure, my wife is a teacher, my parents were teachers, my favorite aunts and uncles were teachers, I have beloved who are teachers. I am ridiculously biased.
• More on the above.
• Broadsnark's things you might have missed.
• Baffler's week that was.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Main character syndrome.
• Pale notes on friendship.
• The most difficult and painful turn.
• Go west in that case.
• I have an inkling the decision has already been made.

BROKEN PROMISES

David Kirby

I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;   

I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb   

and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,   

knowing I would only let them win.   

I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,   

coming back late from the interval   

long after the others have taken their seats,   

and in deserted shopping malls late at night,   

peering at things they can never buy,   

and I have found them wandering   

in a wood where I too have wandered.   

This morning I caught one;   

small and stupid, too slow to get away,   

it was only a promise I had made to myself once   

and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me   

and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach   

in their long, sad faces.

When I drew near them, they scurried away,   

even though they will sleep in my yard tonight.   

I hate them for their ingratitude,   

I who have kept countless promises,   

as dead now as Shakespeare’s children.   

“You bastards,” I scream,   

“you have to love me—I gave you life!”

Sixty-One Today

That is easily one of the five most posted songs on this blog. David Thomas is 61 today. Pere Ubu (all editions) in particular and all Thomas projects in general have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Game. Today is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, there are only two holier, one equal. Click the Pere Ubu tab in post footer for lots more songs - some of them the same songs over and over, I love them.







Thanks to David and Alfrey for Kind words and requests.

*

   
*

   
*

   
*

  

*

Here, the full album - note its cover has been this blog's avatar for the music blogroll since day one - that changed my ears in 1978.

I Got A Vacuum Cleaner in My Head

Tomorrow is a High Egoslavian Holy Day, the song above this blog's Theme Song Two since day one, guess whose birthday. Requests - Pere Ubu, Two Pale Boys, Rocket from the Tomb, any Thomas project  - for tomorrow's deluge welcome.

Ladies and Gentlemen, It Gives Me a Pleasure

Pere Ubu fixes things.

Henry Cow? More here (bonus: w/great William Carlos Williams poem).







No I didn't forget, Chuck Barris is 85 today this year, he was 89 last year, I hope it's him that keeps fucking with his wikipedia page.

Awful, Dull, Brutally Inconsequential

• NEW PERE UBU! Best opening monologue ever since the last until the next. See previous post for this blog's required Pere Ubu chorus. Yes, the song at the very bottom is certainly one of the five most posted songs on this shitty blog.
  
• Voting is magic! Electoral representation in the post-ideological age has far more in common with apotropy than politics. Very few people vote to choose their leaders; instead they vote to prevent the other guy from winning. The genealogy of voting follows a very different path from that of democracy. In classical Athens, which is to a greater or lesser extent to blame for both practices, governmental positions were usually determined by lots, to counteract the advantages enjoyed by rich citizens and great orators. If, as a fifth-century Athenian citizen, you were actually voting for a politician, chances are you were casting an ostrakon: voting for them to be exiled from the city and its civic life. Voting is an apotropaic act. Little has changed. In this week’s European elections, millions of people will vote for the individuals they want to be torn from their homes and families and sent away to the godforsaken marshy swamplands of Brussels.
• The Dark Flows of Capital: Capital is that lack, it infiltrates the dead body-without-organs, the hollow body like a dark god animating it with illusionary desires, producing that which entices us, allures us toward our enslavement. “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim  to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the productions of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.”
• Catipal.
• Compete to win a free copy of Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life! 
• Actually, today's monologue and bleggalgaze in post title.
• Without Compunction: Herein lies the Pun-Off’s ontological dilemma. In real life, the best puns tend to be spontaneous: many are funny in the moment but fail to rise to the higher standard to which we hold jokes that are given time to grow and improve in the course of being committed to paper. And yet the sustained, absolute spontaneity that comes of scraping out pun after pun onstage quickly pulls every contestant down to the bottom of the barrel—a low stratum I think of as “[blank]er, I barely know her” territory. People who know me can vouch for the punishment I've inflicted.
• A self-referential reading of self-reference.
• Robert Creeley was born eighty-eight years ago today (lots of Creeley here):

SELF-PORTRAIT

Robert Creeley

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

nor to be ever nice

to anyone. Just mean,

and final in his brutal,

his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,   

the gentle, the “oh,

let’s hold hands together”

and it was awful,

dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on

his own dwindling legs.   

His arms, his skin,   

shrink daily. And

he loves, but hates equally.

This is the best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things exactly right right now and these are the right people doing the right things and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right places and these are the right people doing the right things to the right things at the right places and these are the people that are exactly right and these exactly right people are doing their thing which is right and this is the right thing to do at the right time which is right now and right now everything is exactly right now where it is.

Any excuse to post Pere Ubu. Wanna hear three demos of new songs for a new album, Carnival of Souls, coming this September? Maybe there will be a tour, like last September. the above video, shot by me, this shitty blog's Theme Song Two (it always has been since day one, look directly left when this post is at the top), at Rock and Roll Hotel on H Street, Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard were there! They opened with a kickass

• Holyfuck - and those of you who know this chorus can sing along - Did you know Pere Ubu/David Thomas projects have one of three permanent seats in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game?
• Privacy v Surveillance: a Debate.
• In ten years we will have zero privacy?
• European Democracy is roadkill?
• Has Capitalism seen its day?
• Five Liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy?
• Everything is broken?
• Photography is not a crime.
• I haven't seen his name or thought about Mencius Moldbug in ages.
• Lordy, Moldbug's acolytes and imitators.

• The secret language of dog play.
• Purple Line! Chevy Chase millionaires will be damned - DAMNED! - if they'll give up property value to ease the east-west MOCO transportation nightmares of their minimum wage maids and gardeners!
• Purple Line! Chevy Chase millionaires will be damned - DAMNED! - if they'll give up property value to ease the east-west MOCO transportation nightmares of their minimum wage maids and gardeners!
• Verily, Ajay Bhatt: Asshole. They are all assholes, but Ajay Bhatt is King.
• Reed shredding.
• I disagree with the premise - many of these bands had more than one hit - but here, 80 one hit bands from the 80s.
• Last night on his show, during the first mic-break after a set that included new Swans, Dan Bodah talked about the rave reviews coming in for the new album from unlikely corners, that the band might finally make it big. Of all the bands I never thought I'd have to fight the my favorite band was great until they made it big and now they suck, I liked them before it was cool to like them, Swans is up there with Pere Ubu. I actually don't have to worry about either, even if they make it big.
• Bevis Frond reissued.
• Some Bevis Frond songs.

RIGHT POEM

Lisa Jarnot

This is the best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things. This is the very best way to do things exactly right right now and these are the right people doing the right things and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time and these are the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right places and these are the right people doing the right things to the right things at the right places and these are the people that are exactly right and these exactly right people are doing their thing which is right and this is the right thing to do at the right time which is right now and right now everything is exactly right now where it is.

The Dog Who Moaned, Hearing the Violins in Concert

After I re-posted a few days ago the Pere Ubu video of this blog's Theme Song Two from last September's Pere Ubu concert at Rock and Roll Hotel on H St I went to look at upcoming shows at Rock and Roll Hotel. I'm not aching to go to a show, I like going to shows, but mostly I hate hearing afterward of shows I would have gone to had I known. The only band on Rock and Roll Hotel's current calendar that piqued my interest was Shearwater, a band I don't think I've played here - I'll fix that soon, though not today - and I recognized a few bands including Xiu Xiu, a band I've one of those odd relationships: I know of, I don't know about; I like them when I hear them, could hear a song but not know it's them. Two morning's ago Mr Alarum asked me if I'd heard the new Xiu Xiu, it's streaming live, said it's good, it's dark and goth like he likes his Xiu Xiu dark and goth. I said, they're coming to town.







Mr Alarum bought his tickets Wednesday, I bought me and Earthgirl and Planet (who'll be home on Spring Break the night of the show) tickets yesterday. Mr Alarum provided all the songs here but the above, Xiu Xiu's excellent cover of one of probably my most dozen air guitar songs ever. I don't know - I suspect not - that Xiu Xiu/Jamie Stewart will reach the third innermost circle of bands that rotate for one of two open spots on My Sillyass Deserted Island Game, but they are certainly going to get a fair hearing over the next month.

Show's at Rock & Roll Hotel on H between 13th and 14th NE on Friday March 14, dinner and beverages before, location suspected though details TBD. Any Mocomofos, Bawlmers, DCers, and Novas welcome to join us, tickets are General Admission, just buy one, and bring a loved one! if you want. And, please, I welcome suggestions of Xiu Xiu/Jamie Stewart songs, albums, you think worth hearing.

• Bob Crow descends on London: Every new building project in London now comes with its own cutesy nickname. The Gherkin, the Shard of Glass, the Cheesegrater, the Helter-Skelter. The point isn’t just to endear the new ziggurats of finance capital to the city’s population: all these fanciful geometries exist to hammer in the point that London isn’t really a city any more. It’s a playground. London has more multi-millionaires than any other city on the planet, with well over four thousand individuals worth over $30m. London property is increasingly being used as a global reserve currency; more value is accrued by the average residence than by the average resident. London is an enormous concierge service for the super-rich. There are those that serve the oligarchs directly: the construction workers that raise their speculative investments, the service workers that bring them their meals, the sex workers that soothe their anxieties at the end of the day. There are those workers that help reproduce the labour of these first-order servants from behind the tills at fast food outlets and behind the desks of tube stations. There are cops that keep the streets clear and technicians that keep the water flowing. As it spreads out from the centre of the city its operation becomes ever more abstracted, but the rule is the same: everywhere the fruits of your labour must flow upwards.
• Geographers and maps: a relationship in trouble.
• Above found at ::wood s lot:: who's back from his bleggal break (and who you should bookmark and check-in daily).
• A reminder to please consider throwing the coins in your pocket at Arthur Silber. 
• A gorgeously happy nine-line Wallace Stevens poem.
• In defense of unnecessary words. 
• Richard Power's Orfeo reviewed: Throughout his three decade career, with a rare courage and relentlessness, Powers has searched for the right form to tell his characters’ stories while dramatizing the forces of history pressing against them, striving to incorporate essay-like commentary without breaking the fictional dream. While there seems to be near universal acclaim for Powers’s genius, his talent for writing emotionally palpable characters is often questioned: a recent New York Times review even gives a name to his alleged Achilles’s heel, “The Powers’s Problem.” Justified or not, this rap has caused Powers to be pigeonholed as too cerebral, as if his fiction is too smart for its own good. Yes, that's the standard complaint, now a cliche.
• Koch's Bel Canto.
• untouchable: you want to read books without this gruesome stuff. books where you don't have to split yourself in the appreciating intellect that abstractly acknowledges the verbal outcome, the so-called artistic achievement and the rest of you that is just plain horrified by the pervasive gruesomeness of it all; a horrifyingness that is aggravated by having to alienate yourself from your feelings in order to be accepted as a thinking person or, the reverse, to acknowledge your feelings and in addition experience apprehension in pointing those things out and also the expectation/fear of some kind of social repercussion because to insist on your right to your very own interpretation against a certain status quo has as consequence social exclusion. this is very clear, your blogular history is full of examples of this [although not recent ones, it seemed to have become somewhat easier to say those sort of things, but is still feels very uncomfortable for you to point out (you feel you can't ignore it either) this stuff and maybe is uncomfortable for readers as well].

DOGS ARE SHAKESPEAREAN, CHILDREN ARE STRANGERS

Delmore Schwartz

Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers.

Let Freud and Wordsworth discuss the child,

Angels and Platonists shall judge the dog,

The running dog, who paused, distending nostrils,

Then barked and wailed; the boy who pinched his sister,   

The little girl who sang the song from Twelfth Night,   

As if she understood the wind and rain,

The dog who moaned, hearing the violins in concert.   

—O I am sad when I see dogs or children!

For they are strangers, they are Shakespearean.

Tell us, Freud, can it be that lovely children   

Have merely ugly dreams of natural functions?   

And you, too, Wordsworth, are children truly   

Clouded with glory, learned in dark Nature?   

The dog in humble inquiry along the ground,   

The child who credits dreams and fears the dark,   

Know more and less than you: they know full well   

Nor dream nor childhood answer questions well:   

You too are strangers, children are Shakespearean.

Regard the child, regard the animal,   

Welcome strangers, but study daily things,   

Knowing that heaven and hell surround us,   

But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,   

This which we live behind our unseen faces,   

Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither   

Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,   

For we are incomplete and know no future,   

And we are howling or dancing out our souls   

In beating syllables before the curtain:   

We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.

The Song Sparrow Puts All His Saying into One Repeated Song

Relinking to Richard's review of his Music 2013 not only because I added it late to yesterday's post and not only because it is full of great music suggestions but mostly because he mentioned the Pere Ubu show at Rock and Roll Hotel we attended last September and I was reminded that I recorded the above, a live version of this shitty blog's long-time Theme Song Two, it's over to the left, has been for years.

• I did not know that. See Theme Song Three.
• Chomsky as moral compass?
• On Chomsky in the role of moral compass and his fans.
• Good friend Jay Paleo Old Arra Dirty 101 Bama and I emailed last night, this post's title came to mind when I wrote this: As always it comes down to each individual's level of moral pragmatism. Give that Chomsky serves power in ways he's either unaware of (which, being Chomsky, I find highly improbable) or is aware of his situation and decides that there IS no alternative to Capital's power, there's only ways of mitigating its rapacious drive. Um, less-shittyism, let's call it. I'm always reminded of George Carlin's definition of the difference between a jerk and and asshole: a jerk is someone who drives slower than you, an asshole someone who drives faster. 
• Brutality and complexity in the global economy.
• Slap-single switch-hitter batting helmet as brand for Corporate mendacity. 
• He, for one, welcomes his new insect overlords.  
• Anne Carson's Glass Essay.
• Philip Glass turned 77 yesterday. Here's Metamorphosis, here's:

GLASS

A.R. Ammons

The song

sparrow puts all his

saying

into one

repeated song:

what
  

variations, subtleties

he manages,

to encompass denser

meanings, I’m

too coarse

to catch: it’s
  

one song, an over-reach

from which

all possibilities,

like filaments,

depend:

killing,
  

nesting, dying,

sun or cloud,

figure up

and become

song—simple, hard:

removed.

Standing, Waiting, at the Overpass Edge

John Martyn, whose music I loved for the long slow wonderful crash of trips and still love for reminding me of the long slow wonderful crash of trips I don't take anymore, was born 65 years ago yesterday, I looked him up on Wikipedia. Not only did I miss Richard Younges Tuesday night to see Pere Ubu I would have missed a USMNT-Mexico WCQ to see Richard Younges if Pere Ubu had been another night. I mention this not to bemoan a soccer tribalism I say I want to shake but can't/won't/don't but to acknowledge that nowhere am I more tribally loyal than music and musicians, a point driven home to me in David Thomas' monologue where he said (paraphrasing as I best remember) Here's when I'm supposed to thank you, say how glad I am to be in Washington, tell you that you're my friend. Well you're not before launching into Musicians Are Scum. This is true too: I love hating my musical hates - The Fucking Doors, for instance, people can vouch this has been a lifetime of hating The Fucking Doors - almost as much as I love loving my musical loves, because there is no tribalism without hate.





Link-farming has resumed - I should have no trouble talking Earthgirl into a weekend trip to New York to see this and other stuff, for instance, and Silliman's generous litlinks for another - but I've no more interest, at this moment, in bookkeeping motherfucking Obama's daily motherfuckery on whichever dance floor he's motherfuckering, employing motherfucking Obama, in this instance, as a metonym for general Empire clusterfuckerery. I'm aware an (almost certainly short) implementation of this program will severely curtail the use of motherfucker and clusterfuck and their derivative verbs, adjectives. and adverbs, which will please more than not but will infuriate a few. So: Faulkner and Beckett, for those of you who do; Hurt Hawks; on bad arguments and bad manners; on not reading Bleeding Edge (which I'll start after finishing the two novels I'm in); a sense of homecoming; visiting Rhinog and Snowdonia; does anyone know how I can transfer this domain name to here, because I really like the way it looks and I'm really tired now of the claustrophobic dark green here but I can't change it. I wrote yesterday the Pere Ubu show was exactly what I needed and then descended into a bad mood (work-sparked plus next-day-aches for an old man who doesn't stand for two hours straight whether at a soccer stadium or in a mosh-pit of other old men too). So don't worry, I need love Pere Ubu more than ever, and The Fucking Doors will always be the clustermotherfuckfuckingestly shitty band ever because if I'm not motherfucking the clusterfuck that is the metonym Obama I need hate The Fucking Doors more than ever.






MILTON'S GOD

Nate Klug

Where i-95 meets the Pike,

a ponderous thunderhead flowered;

stewed a minute, then flipped

like a flash card, tattered

edges crinkling in, linings so dark

with excessive bright

that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,

the onlooker couldn’t decide

until the end, or even then,

what was revealed and what had been hidden.

Darlin&#39;, I&#39;m Not Tongue-Tied

Pere Ubu played this blog's Theme Song Two, look over to the left blogroll, it's been this shitty blog's Theme Song Two since Day One, only one of many highlights (for instance, they opened with)







Love love love. Tight. Holyfuck, I needed that. One of my favorite nights ever, not since the last or until the next, ever. Thanks to Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard for joining me. This was one of the encores:

The Semi-Lust of Intentional Indifference

There was a time when every post on this blog had a Fleabus photo. Here's an article about Maryland Tea Partiers wanting western Maryland to secede from Maryland. I can think of six primary and dozens of secondary snarkassholistic responses (including, wearily, this one) to bump the story, but fuck that. As Mr Abonilox told me last night as we discussed our respective cases of damnlessness, the "new zeitgeist is mental exhaustion resulting in passive acceptance of the fucked-uppedness of everything." And yes, as Jim noted yesterday in comments, "This doesn't feel like the standard aarglebaargle©®. Feels like something's afoot: change?" Here? Yes, no, I don't know. Earthgirl and Planet and me are fine, and these are the hardest weeks of work of the year and they always beat the fuck out of my mood, but here, and by extension the urge to wear colors and waive flags and participate in rituals like the indoctrinated bee I am? Yes, no, I don't know. I know I'm trying to write about it, so far twenty or so rejected first drafts. I tried link-farming last night - it's the links that drive the traffic here, the angrier and clusterfuckier the links the greater the traffic - but that sucked so I decided to write about why greater traffic here means something to me though suddenly, surprisingly, not so much, decided fuck that too, read 150 pages of Coover's Origin of the Brunists which I'm rereading in anticipation of the release of the sequel, best, most focused novel-reading in what seems like years. I put the book down when my eyes insisted, thought about writing about reading well, thought fuck that too. Strange days. More later, or not. Will I write about things tonight? Nope! tonight with Earthgirl and Hamster and Mr Alarum and Richard I'm seeing Pere Ubu, and while I'm not as excited as once I would have been I still have a pulse so at least I know my case of damnlessness isn't thoroughly comprehensive.






THE RAIN

Robert Creeley

All night the sound had   

come back again,

and again falls

this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself

that must be remembered,   

insisted upon

so often? Is it

that never the ease,   

even the hardness,   

of rain falling

will have for me

something other than this,   

something not so insistent—

am I to be locked in this

final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,   

lie next to me.

Be for me, like rain,   

the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-

lust of intentional indifference.

Be wet

with a decent happiness.

I&#39;m Selling by Selling I&#39;m

A twitter discussion last night between Richard and me on humans, their organizational drive and lack of organizational skills, the wonder we don't kill each other and the sad acknowledgment that this has been, is, and will be as good as humans get at any moment in our species' existence led to a discussion of our date a week from Tuesday in DC to see Pere Ubu. Earthgirl and Mr Alarum and Hamster are going too! Richard lives in Bawlmer Merlyn, asked if there was an opening act, starting to think about logistics, then discovered there is:




*



*





*


I'm curious. I can't wait. Who's the closing act?

Until the Bracts Have Mauved Up

PRESS RELEASE:

Ubu Projex, the art and business directorate of the American band Pere Ubu, can confirm that notice has been received this weekend from the United States Customs & Immigration Service (USCIS) rejecting the visa petition for British band members Keith Moliné and Graham Dowdall (aka Gagarin).

The sole grounds for rejection is the band’s refusal to seek approval from the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).

“The AFM are the antagonists in this affair,” band leader David Thomas said. “They have no business telling me who can and who cannot be in the band.”

Details can be found in previous press releases, www.ubuprojex.net/press/ubuvisa.pdf.

Cleveland guitarist Dave Cintron will join the band for the September US tour and provisions are in place for Moliné and Dowdall to link remotely for one of the songs in the set.

There has been much disbelief and incredulity about this not-uncommon example of the obstacles international bands now face when seeking to tour the US.

“The whole process has been going on since May, with several delays and absurd complexities,” Thomas said. “The Cintron version will be magnificent, I have no doubt. If I cannot put a band together without government interference and without a pat on the head from the AFM, like a grateful dog, then so be it. I have no interest in frittering my life away with campaigning.

“We will proceed with our music. Nothing will be announced from the stage. We won’t be writing ‘protest’ songs or haranguing audiences.

“There are visions and ideas to pursue. There’s too little time to waste it on fighting stupidity. In the words of the MGM lion, ‘Ars longa, vita brevis.’” [Yes, we know it was Hippocrates.]

• Seeing Pere Ubu two weeks from tomorrow. I've mentioned this before: there were a few weeks when Thomas threatened to cancel the US tour because of visa issues with two band members. They remain in Europe; Thomas has hired a new guitarist he's never met and who's never played Ubu songs. I expect amazement. I don't expect any new protest songs. I expect to hear lots of Lady from Shanghai. You know what you can expect.
• The war on leaks and journalism v journalism, or: access whores find leakers distasteful.
• What the surveillance state is trying to do to journalism.
• Trying to stay sane in an insane world, part three.
• Frederick's biggest asshole bows out of governor's race.
• Saw him in front of Leo's.
• On a new semester of the same fucking thing.
• The coming fight over DC United new stadium. First, the fuck-me-jig still exists - I don't believe there will be a stadium - but second, I give less of a fuck day-by-day about United. I can't imagine I'll buy season tickets for RFK next year much less by tickets for an endzone seat so I can stand at a new stadium.
• Vemodelen.
• Rim of fire.
• Adorno and Beckett.
• Another riff on Pynchon's Against the Day.
• Silliman's litlinks.
• Fragments of a broken poetics.
• Debaser (Acapella) by IsolatedVocals
• So yes, like I need an excuse to play Pere Ubu.

RETRO

John Ashbery

 It’s really quite a thrill
when the moon rises above the hill
and you’ve gotten over someone
salty and mercurial, the only person you ever loved.

Walks in the park are enjoyed.
Going to Jerusalem now
I walked into a hotel room.
I didn’t need any name or anything.
I went to Bellevue Hospital,
got a piece of the guy.
As I say, it’s really quite a thrill.

Quite a thrill too to bend objects
that always return to their appointed grooves—
will it be always thus? Or will auto parts
get to have their day in the sun?

Got to drone now.
Princess Ida plans to overwork us four days a week
until the bracts have mauved up.
Then it’s a tailgate party—
how would you like your burger done?

A little tea with that?

I saw her wailing for some animals.
That doesn’t mean a thing doesn’t happen
or only goes away, or gets worse.
What’s the worst that could happen?

The midnight forest drags you along, thousands of peach hectares. Told him I wouldn’t do it if I was him. Nothing to halt the chatter of locusts until they’re put away for the night. He edges closer to your locker. Why did I leave it open? I’ve forgotten the combination. But it seems he’s not interested in the locker, maybe my shoe—something unlike anything he’s ever known. Sensing the tension he broke the ice with a quip about the weather somewhere, or maybe—maybe an observation on time, how it moves vastly in different channels, always keeping up with itself, until the day—I’m going to drive back to the office, a fellowship of miles, collect some of last year’s ammunition. Then I’m definitely going to the country, he laughs.

The User Interface Has the Following Format

• New Robert Pollard. Yes, there's always new Robert Pollard.
• David Thomas interview.
• Pere Ubu US tour is on despite visa problems.
• Listened to the new Pollard on way to and from hiking on Sugarloaf w/Earthgirl today, just saw the Thomas/Ubu links now, I'd gathered the links below over coffee this morning, was going to save them for tomorrow, but two of three of the permanent members in My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game in my head, I'll not be able to listen to anything else today less I post this now.
• Sometime in my early 20s Park Mrebelic and Willy Bayne and I were drinking pitchers and shooting pool in a bar on Wilkins off Parklawn when a boatload of bikers rolled in. We were told the table was theirs, don't bother finishing our game. OK, finished our pitcher at the bar, poured quarters into the juke box, punched Linda Ronstadt's Blue Bayou thirty-two times, left. Nonetheless, wouldn't wish Parkinsons on anyone.
• You'll have to go find them since I've used up my free views in August for both the NYT and WP and fuck if I'll give them money, but both have articles today in which the ledes I can see suggest liberals are asking her to leave SCOTUS now because they fear (a) a Republican will win the White House in 2016 and (b) then she'll die.
• Tarzie's interrogation of The Guardian continues.
• Vanity and venality.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The best vegetarian restaurants in DC area. (h/t SeatSix for these two)
• The seven best vegan restaurants in DC area.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• Borges, for those of you who do.
• Borges, politics, and the postcolonial. 
• Debord, for those of you who do.
• Lovecraft, for those of you who do. I confess, I never did, though I know some of you do.
• Melville, for those of you who do. 

DODGING 1985

Philip Nikolayev

The user interface has the following format. Upon accessing the URL,
the user sees a welcome message with some explanation of the service
provided. The user is prompted to enter his or her name, date of birth,
When everything else fails, try something new. and email address,
For instance, try the central mental hospital, then to left click on the
sit back and mumble enjoying the belle vue submit button. Based on
until the nurse has counted you all. this information, the CGI script
Our group files in fresh from the courtyard walk, generates “on the
a pageant of male flesh in ugly dress. fly” an appropriate horoscope
There’s bundles of excitement but little talk. reading for the end user,
The chess-players are breaking out their chess. or displays the logs
No one to mention the Afghan War. The state, and user Statistics if
crumbling, buys me my sparse and forkless lunch. the current user is
This latest novel fails to kill my worries, the site admin. Parse CGI
The Plexiglas window withstands a teenage a punch. variables (or
God, I must prove completely nuts, by fate lookup logged record) to
unfit for active military service. obtain user’s birthday. Parse user’s
stats, verify and save to log file. Compute user’s Zodiac sign based on
birth date. Print personalized greeting. Generate a horoscope reading and
send it to user’s browser} else if (user   ==   administrator)  {compute stats.

pumpkins made of gelatin width of a screw plastic modeled novelties and knickknack ropes sandwiched looseleaf

Serendipitous to this post re: content and above sillyass Star Trek allusion, Mr Alarum sent me this tweet last night. Blogger won't let me manipulate the template so the green is permanent and the layout (as in the columns) is permanent and the width is permanent, but I can add content and rearrange content within the columns, so thus. I've condensed Me and Mine only to blogs of mine and friends who I've actually met in the flesh. I've removed the theme songs which no longer work because some fucker claimed copyright and moved the Theme Songs that still work to the right column and set them up to watch directly. Please let me know if there are any problems - when I looked at the blog in Chrome (I made the changes in Firefox) I had to ctrl-(minus) the screen down to size, for instance. But once a month or so the inability to change the template drives me to fuck around with what I can change, and the dead theme songs needed weeding, so here, a Sunday post in Blogust, the last couple weeks of the Blog Days of Summer.

• Is that an anti-capitalism anthem?
• On Manning's "apology."
• Phony tradeoff.
• An entire generation traumatized by what hasn't happened yet.
• Against hope.
• American journalism.
• Hell on earth.
• More proof the Overlords think Democrats are better for advancing the Overlords' interest. This is the +.06% principle at work.
• probably final considerations about the transgressive-aggressive (sex) memoir. 
• New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• I watched United lose again last night, this time in Montreal. Heard numerous St Benny f-bombs, was impressed with both Silva and Doyle, have lost patience for everyone on the backline, and saw someone name Iacopasomething in a United uniform, I have no idea who the fuck he is.
• Speaking of Star Trek. 
• Earthquake update from Stately Riddled Manor.
• Kertész, for those of you who do.
• Caberet Voltaire.
• Stockhausen.
• New Superchunk! I've posted a couple already, here's the whole album.
• Woke up with this in my head:

SOLIDITY

Clark Coolidge

O great gleaming golden green at naptime
such that the crimes of us battlers
extend the velveteen balloon narrow as breath
the seat or tree      the values of this lumpy lawn
a landscape whose whistle ran down as all
those animals on the run or hunt we'll see
fish come true in alleys locally puddle or no
we felt like a sort of guest sauce around there
pumpkins made of gelatin width of a screw
plastic modeled novelties and knickknack ropes
sandwiched looseleaf where the offspring molt
keep their truck      cork thoughts
a pity the trench so long in filling
the thing came out of the night in training