BEST ENDING TO A MOVIE. EVER.

Seneca on the Lesson to be Drawn from the Burning of Lyon by Benjamin Paloff

The world is full of things far darker than my bad ideas.
And who isn't a sports fan when lives are at stake?
In my neurodegenerative order, I always cross the street
without looking. It's only a matter of time before I'm hit
by a victory parade carrying an automaton plundered from the island
where every second person is an automaton. In this way, Rhodes
is not a store of wonders free for the vanquisher, but a nightmare
you will yourself into in order to sail yourself home.
When I count the constellations against the gears
of my Antikythera mechanism, all it augurs me is a career
playing terrorists in made-for-TV movies. I don't know
what else I expected, but I never expected to be
the kind of man who mourns his friends.

Supernature: Cerrone

Last night, I was listening to disco and yacht rock records w/ my friend in Cleveland, and he recommended the below video by Cerrone. Apparently, he's still huge in Europe, as well with those who are knee-deep in the disco niche. Unfortunately, only part of the video is avaiable for streaming, but you'll get the picture. I find it ironically amazing, but, from what I understand, his fans find this video sincerely amazing. Amazing:

The Chinese Checker Players by Richard Brautigan

When I was six years old
I played Chinese checkers
with a woman
who was ninety-three years old.
She lived by herself
in an apartment down the hall
from ours.
We played Chinese checkers
every Monday and Thursday nights.
While we played she usually talked
about her husband
who had been dead for seventy years,
and we drank tea and ate cookies

and cheated.

Hero Hour--Diogenes the Cynic

The precepts by which he lived: that personal happiness is satisfied by meeting one's natural needs and that what is natural cannot be shameful or indecent. His life, therefore, was lived with extreme simplicity, inured to want, and without shame. It was this determination to follow his own dictates and not adhere to the conventions of society that he was given the epithet "dog," from which the name "cynic" is derived. (Kynos is the Greek word for dog.)

Alexander the Great was reported to have said, "Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes." Once, while Diogenes was sunning himself, Alexander came up to him and offered to grant him any request. "Stand out of my light," he replied.

Seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and remarked, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."



“I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.”

I don't put on airs.

When you find yourself in a crack-den of a hotel room in Terre Haute, IN, alone and drinking, its best to just acknowledge the circumstances you've ended up in and not purchase bottled beer like some kind of aristocratic asshole. Instead, pick up some 24oz. cans of an American macro-brew and do what you need to do.

NO WORDS II

I Like Street Photography

The project Street Photographers aims to reflect how the art of street photography is used to document life on the street nowadays. As a project it also aims to bring this art to an even wider audience through public exhibitions, workshops and publications that can illustrate the diversity of styles found by their talented and widespread authors.

For us, street photography means: interesting imagery, from a public and everyday surrounding, in a decisive moment, and containing people or something related to people.

http://www.street-photographers.com/

The Best Street Photographer You've Never Heard Of

She never exhibited her work. Indeed, from what Maloof can gather, she didn't share her photos with anyone, except some of the children in her care. My friend Tony Fitzpatrick—a Chicago artist whose collages, like Maier's images, capture the contradictions in this city—revels in the fact that she saw no need to show off her work. "It tells you the most important thing about her," he says. "She made them for all the right reasons. She made them to hold on to her place in the world. She made them because to not make them was impossible. She had no choice."

http://motherjones.com/media/2011/04/vivian-maier-john-maloof

NO WORDS

Pop Culture Extravaganza

Recently, I became homeless. Before I was homeless, I lived at 234 South 26th Street in Lincoln, NE. Before I live at 234 South 26th Street in Lincoln, NE, Adam Peterson lived at 234 South 26th Street in Lincoln, NE. Recently, Adam Peterson wrote some humorous and interesting pieces of flash fiction that were published over at PANK. Read them.

ALL-THINGS CAVE!

There is a new Grinderman video uploaded to Pitchfork today called "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man"; both the song and the video are awesome and make me want to have intercourse with a red-head with a gigantic, fiery bush. Unfortunately, there is no embed option for the video; in lieu of posting that song, here is another fantastic Nick Cave tune:

DEAR NAVIGATOR #3

The new issue of Dear Navigator, titled "The Pitch," recently went live and there is, as with the previous two issues, some fantastic and interesting writing therein. The most recent installment contains new work from Amina Cain, Julie Carr, Paul Chan, Danielle Dutton, Douglas Kerr, Janice Lee, Elizabeth Robinson, Zachary Schomburg, Damion Searls, Joshua Ware, and Uljana Wolf. If you haven't already, check out their archive, which contains spectacular material from previous issues. In my slightly biased opinion, this is one of the better (and newer) online literary journals out there, focusing on cross-genre and multi-media works.

The Truth Game

Research Into Sexuality


Eluard: How do you reconcile your love of women and your taste for sodomy?


Tanguy: Sodomy is not homosexual. It interests me only when performed with a woman, not for any other reason.


Breton: The question of reconciliation does not arise. I prefer sodomy for moral reasons and above all through considerations of non-conformity. No chance of a child with a woman one does not love, and that a woman one does love can so abandon herself seems to me infinitely arousing.


Eluard: Why?


Breton: From the materialist point of view, in the case of a woman I love, it is infinitely more pessimistic (shit's law) and therefore more poetic.


Eluard: But why, for example, does not the idea of conception through coitus appear more pessimistic to you than shit?


Breton: Because it is in conformity with growth which is mingled in my mind with the idea of well-being.


Eluard: For me, two beings at the moment of coitus, represent an end in themselves and reproduction is an evil.


Breton: That is a completely Christian idea of the problem.

GOOD MUZAK

DIAMOND DEMON

There's really just too much to say about this video; I mean, I'm no expert, but I think "Johnny" and those like him will probably lose the ability to have children sooner than later:

HOMAGE TO HOMAGE TO HOMAGE TO CREELEY

My first full-length collection Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and is now available for purchase on the Furniture Press website; soon, it will also be available on SPD. Support the independent arts and literature: buy a copy. You can find excerpts from the collection online at diode and SpringGun, and in the forthcoming issues of Dear Navigator and [out of nothing].

GONE WITH THE WIND

I watched Gone With the Wind in its entirety last night for the first time; it was epic. Rhett Butler's (Clark Gable) treatment of women is pretty hysterical and, in-and-of-itself, a reason to watch this movie. I LOL'd several times:

New

Finally got the new Panda Bear, which Jorsh made me buy. It comes with free access to a digital version of the album, which also includes a live set from Governer's Island. The voice is terrible, live. This makes me sad.

Your Moment of Zen

Yes, that is Miley Cyrus; yes, she's singing a cover of Nirvana's "Smell Like Teen Spirirt"; yes, your life has reached completion.

Important Quotes to Live By

Dennis Rodman (a.k.a. The Worm) once claimed that "Fifty percent of life in the N.B.A. is sex. The other fifty percent is money." This makes wish I was a little bit and that I was a baller

French author and general swell chap Jules Verne once said that "I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through." He wouldn't be exactly incorrect in his assessment.

Frenchman and Marxist Guy Debord believed that "Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea." So, you know, go out there an steal shit; and by "shit," I mean words.

The Artful Nihilist

Mark Twain said that if you wrote well enough your work would last “forever—and by forever I mean thirty years.”

Trud and Jerf

Because this blog is losing steam and no one really posts on it anymore, especially not Trud, and this stack of student essays isn't gonna grade itself: