June 2011
6 posts
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Final post on this Tumblr
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!
I’m not...
On rock songs accommodating to a female...
Carl Wilson makes me want to read that Ellen Willis book people keep talking about:
But while there was sociology in Willis’s take, it was also self-reflexive and personal – her sense of what she was asking of Janis Joplin and what Janis Joplin reciprocally needed from her, or how she could appropriate the virile aggression of Mick Jagger as a fan and take on that erotic energy as subject rather...
Ken Layne on the deadness of Internet life
Wonkette owner/editor Ken Layne gchatted about quitting Wonkette and quitting the Internet:
We have a remarkable ability to know exactly what things we’re doing are harmful to us … and then we keep doing those things, until we decide to stop.
For anyone who feels this Internet emptiness chewing at them, I would say, do a little test. Go outside and take a 15-minute walk — around the block,...
May 2011
18 posts
1 tag
Lambchop, “A Day Without Glasses”
The...
Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me...
Lessons from Tumblr
When you write about cultural producers and use their names, they typically find it very quickly! People really actually Google Alert themselves.
1 tag
Cleverness as metonym
“I think that past the age of thirty there is no obligation to be clever at all. Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.”
- Garrison Keillor
"Emily Dickinson to the Rescue" by Michael Dickman
Standing in her house today all I could think of was whether she took a shit every morning
or ever fucked anybody
or ever fucked
herself
God’s poet
singing herself to sleep
You want these sorts of things for people
Bodies and
the earth
and
the earth inside
Instead of white
nightgowns and terrifying
letters
*
Here she comes
her hands out in front of her
like a child...
OK, this afternoon I submitted the last of my Master’s work and don’t ever want to talk about social ethics, organizing, or “what love looks like in public” ever again, need to find a good trade school now, I will wear coveralls and get good with my hands, The End
Atmosphere
Playing the Bonnie Raitt Pandora station to make my apartment more like a Starbucks, but it’s not working because it doesn’t play six Bonnie Raitt songs in a row, and none by k.d. lang at all
Short one-act play
THE EMOTIONALLY GENEROUS BARISTA
Barista: Let us know if you have trouble deciding; we’re here to help you.
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Sister says,
“Mom sent me a text that said, ‘Osama bin Laden is dead. Love, Mom’—like she did it.”
April 2011
16 posts
1 tag
TV, beauty pageants, other ways of getting love
Judd Apatow says in some interview that “The Larry Sanders Show” is about people going to desperate lengths to be loved. Like seeing the arrow in the FedEx logo, once you watch the show that way, you can never watch it another way. Poor Larry, poor Artie, poor Hank.
I am working in a coffee shop on the final paper of my grad program. In front of me is a table of teenage girls ranging...
Plausibility structures
When I was 18, Althea convinced me that it is okay to cross the street whenever you feel like it because “it’s not like they’re going to hit you,” but news that several months ago a friend of a friend was killed crossing the street in lower Manhattan has prompted me to recalculate some probabilities.
1 tag
Bill on styles converging in a loving way
well, the record is about American music as much as it is about American anything else. That rich period in the ’70s when all the styles were converging in a loving way. The styles are converging in the present day, also, but in a more clinical or unloving way. The current music is mostly like a doctor’s visit. Where you check off the questionnaire about the past and hope they don’t stick a...
Barth on standing with the poor
Harper’s posted this passage today; I don’t know if it was motivated by Easter or a political reason. But then Barth is finding some political in Easter.
For this reason also the human justice which God demands and which is crafted in obedience to him—the justice which according to Amos 5:24 is to pour down like an endless stream—necessarily takes the form of giving justice to the...
Professor and student
The student laughs and laughs at things the professor says, and the professor just holds his eye contact and watches him laugh, and then she starts laughing, too. Both are in their 60s. Nothing appears flirtatious here. There is an intense delight in being found funny.
1 tag
WatchEndless heavy hits. Kingdragon for president.
kingdragon:
HEAVY HITS FROM MY BAND.
Boys keep swinging.
gntlhnds:
Ch-ch-check it out! A brand new track for you!
A little tune we call “For John B.”
Come down and see us sometime — maybe like WEDNESDAY!
3 tags
One of our program requirements is attending a two-day, 18-hour “Negotiating Boundaries” workshop about sexual misconduct. Don’t touch people who trust you, etc.
I’m going this afternoon but fear that it’s all a ruse—what if it’s not a workshop but an intervention?
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Bill Callahan, “America!”
Yes,...
March 2011
19 posts
4 tags
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Blue Lines Revisited: Deuteronomy →
vindicatrix:
”I was reading Deuteronomy last night, and some of the notes by Rabbi Hertz, who is the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. Deuteronomy goes back to pre-literate days among the Jews; it actually was formulated before they had a written language. I thought, My God, the injunction in the Torah — in Deuteronomy — about caring for the needy, caring for the sick, caring for the...
3 tags
Bill Callahan/Smog Animal Concordance, 2011...
Ant: Held Bat: Fruite bats Bear: A man needs a woman or a man to be a man, When you walk Bee: Rococo zephyr, Short drive, Strayed, Universal applicant, The wheel Bird: All thoughts are prey to some beast, Blood red bird, From the rivers to the ocean, The hard road, King’s tongue, A man needs a woman or a man to be a man, No dancing, Palimpsest, Too many birds - Chicken: Running the loping...
2 tags
The last post reminded me that in college, when I wanted to send someone mail but didn’t have anything to say, I would clip wedding announcements out of the newspaper, attach them to index cards, and write predictions of the couple’s future. That was funny. I wonder who I sent them to.
3 tags
The personal utility of Facebook
Getting back on Facebook and having a friend of an old girlfriend pop up, and you click to the friend’s profile and see that she’s single now, and you say, “Of course that relationship wasn’t going to last,” and you remember how insistent your old girlfriend was that her friend’s relationship was “the real thing,” and you knew then that you should...
3 tags
“Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around...”
– The Whore of Mensa by Woody Allen (via schmauren, frenchtwist)
Reading this as a 13-y-o can really do a number on you.
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Which is worse:
leaving Paris a day before Bill Callahan played there last year, or finding out today that Lydia Davis did a reading on my campus last month? She was a mile away from my house while I sat in the dark eating beans out of a can.
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