Friday, January 17, 2025

I See, Said the Blind Man, As He Puts Down His Hammer and Saw

My left eye




Populated with you-can-guess which assholes, genocidaires, psycho&sociopaths, shitlords, hunt and peck at your (dis)pleasure. My right eye




I can't speak to RIP David Lynch beyond noting I recognize his significance by how friends analog and digital are mourning his loss and praising his art. I don't watch things, never did much, don't at all now, I listen to music, read, make things, it's not a moral stance, I wish I could, it's a weakness not a strength, not a point of pride but a point of embarrassment. I try, I just can't, so here's Ed to speak to David Lynch
I saw Eraserhead decades ago and haven't felt compelled to ever watch again and I watched the first episode of Twin Peaks, but I'm old and going blind and can't read like when young, I'm willing to try anew, what Lynch first?
O, violence to not-human animals is a non-starter, the only Joy Williams' novel I haven't read, *Breaking and Entering,* I won't read because I saw in a review thirty years ago people saw-off live pelicans' beaks and no, fuck no. No. Never. Fucking humans, the shittiest species. I'd prefer to not see human-on-human violence but can deal with it if necessary, ditto books
REST IN PEACE, BOB UECKERI haven't watched a baseball game in thirty years, I listen to local play-by-play all season long, every season, L & C can vouch
13 SentinelsThere is not one book in this list of 2025 releases that delights me it's being published
There's a new Legendary Pink Dots album!
REM has essentially disappeared from American culture
A GUIDE TO NURSE WITH WOUND





I SEE, SAID THE BLIND MAN, AS HE PUT DOWN HIS HAMMER AND SAW

John Ashbery

There is some charm in that old music
He’d fall for when the night wind released it:
Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back;
The hill of gloom in place over the roar
Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch
Of red in a bunch of laundry. But will the car
Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d
Got the mission between the ladder
And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over
Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket
Perhaps, probably standing there.

Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses?
And in the wind neighbors and such agree
It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way?
So that the curtains contribute what charm they can
To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool
Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes,
And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one
Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge
Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens
Will we all be alone together? The armor
Of these thoughts laughs at itself
Yet the distances are always growing
With everything between, in between
The tall hedges that seem to know what life is:
An offering that stands to one side. And we dream.

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake

Even if I agreed that if in fact Democrats work in the best faith they can given complete Shitlord control of all narratives why does that oblige me to support them, I said to a departing colleague who after years of me kablamming motherfucking Democrats still thinks I'm one with shitlibs. I genuinely like and will miss her, she's a terrier, a cat lady terrier hence our connection, terriers don't like most people, they're my favorite breed. I started that sentence last night and the gag appeared before I'd typed the second *terrier,* this getting old shit in every possible meaning. She didn't listen to what I said enough to answer my question; it was a nice summational goodbye. Here's one side of L's birthday present


An irony: I accuse Shitlords of planning for then executing deliberate chaos which is exactly how I paint, bad hand skills so chaos with intent. How many people have you worked with, lived with, been forced to love, who create crises constantly as a means of power and control, who with glee chronically make everything edgy and complicated and competitive and ultimately and inevitably terminally fucked up? I'm saying I understand their strategy in the mediums they use, though I like my end result better than shitlords', ymmv. Here's the other side of L's birthday present



We're one fucked up animal. A week from when I type this sentence Donald Trump will have been president six and a half hours. Biden had two months to try and secure and tighten some of the programs and policies they told us Trump will kill and Biden pardoned a judge who sold kids into for-profit prisons and the Biden bragged about being a great-grandfather when asked about the LA fires. He gave Liz Cheney one kind of fake medal and Bono a more prestigious fake medal. In an exit interview he asserted that he would have beat Trump but stepped aside to save party unity which regarding him is a lie but is ironically delicious as that is the heartbeat of professional Democrat omerta: party before country. This motherfucking vain motherfucking banal evil piece of shit motherfucker. I did not say this to my departing friend, if she knows about this blog (Hi Sam) she'd the first in library that I know of who knows about this blog since the exodus of the few who know (or more likely knew and forgot - when you walk out of the building the last time it's like you never worked here, never existed and still don't, and visa versa you who stayed to the departed, poof) just before, during, and after the plague.





Morton Feldman's 99th birthday was Sunday past, same as L's, why did I never think of his music as eligible for My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game when I was obsessed with My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game, I've always listened to it as much as the two permanent members and certainly listen to it more now since I (love listening to Feldman when making chaos and trying to control it) rarely listen to the two permanent members and then only when it comes into my ears without my making the selection and my best guess viz Feldman and My Sillyass Deserted Island Five game is I can't air guitar Feldman which suggests deeply horrible things about me but an absolutely true reason is it's too large and quiet to listen to in a car because of road noise. I no longer tend any of my deserted island five games. Fine metaphors abound




Crime of the Century: CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide
"Gaza Ceasefire Proves Biden Wanted Genocide"
Police ignore standards after facial recognition matchesWhich is, after all, the intent
American nutshellTrump Changes Nothing
The nihilism of Antony Blinken
"so many bloviating free-speech warriors in this country, so much cowardly silence over the worst cancel culture/ repression of free speech in my lifetime"
"These are our heroes? These are our role models?"
"If globalization has allowed elites to remove themselves from democratic accountability and regulation, is there any path toward a just economy?No
Billionaires dangle free speech like a bauble
Oligarch farmers and the fires in Los Angeles
The pistachio billionaires who guzzle more water than all of fire-ravaged Los Angeles
Wall Street Watchdog Warns “Clock Is Ticking on a Coming Catastrophic Financial Crash
"The unilateral moment has ended. Russia, India and China have become too rich and too powerful to be looted. U.S. vassals are now by far the easier target"
"When the empire gets bratty, the vassals get trampled"
Both my parents were public school teachers, my aunts and uncles were public school teachers, my wife and daughter are public school teachers, did you hear ONE FUCKING DEMOCRAT SAY ONE FUCKING WORK ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION AND ITS COMING COMPLETE GUTTING in run-up to election? Today In Rhetorical Questions
Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools
SMUG PARTY"Harris ran the campaign that party leaders wanted. It flattered moderate pundits and centrist online commentators, aimed at conservatives and took left support for granted. After this strategy cost them another winnable election, Democrats are faced with a familiar simple question: Should we try to figure out what went wrong, change things and face the next election cycle with an invigorated party? Or should we stay the course, blame benighted voters and take perverse joy in their misery? No prize for guessing the answer"
From Gaza to California: the flames that connect us all
"So the State Dept narrative managers at 60 Minutes held this footage for 8 months, publishing it just hours before the end of the Biden era, to ensure no massacres were interfered with and no US officials felt the heat"
The mysterious ways of Donald J. Trump
"The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system"
Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
"It will be months before a complete voter file is available to offer a full and detailed picture of what went wrong, but what is clear from exit polls and county-level data is that, in 2024, Democrats lost ground everywhere. Their support eroded even in the party’s ­typical strongholds — urban centers, college towns, and majority-Black counties — an indication that the party fundamentally failed to understand its own base’s chief concerns, to say nothing of the broader electorate. The party failed to offer solutions or ­communicate the solutions it was offering; relied on data to guide advertising choices, muddling the narrative; and aligned itself with unpersuasive surrogates. Democrats forgot, essentially, how to talk to American voters — while failing, comically at times, to reach potentially persuadable voters who were actively tuned out from politics"
Maggie'sWhy Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
"All appeals to cultural purity and tradition have to be regarded with suspicion, whether from the left or the right, politically"
Big Other Anthology 2024
The Hypnotic Churr of the Nightjar
An Uncomfortable Moment at the Thirteenth Annual Delmore Schwartz Memorial Picnic{ feuilleton }
"and practice is a regular highlight of my week. i get to see my bros and make stuff with them. music is about communication, it is inherently prosocial. all the good things about music and making music aren’t monetizable which is why these assholes have these dry joyless opinions"
Alexis WrightMidafternoon thoughts
myself (not me, I promise), w Alice Notley poem
One year from two days ago will be Morton Feldman's centenary


 
BLADE

Franz Wright

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake