BUK (YUCK!) and BUDDHA BULL or: CLOCK-WATCHING IN A ROOM OF GENTLY-RISING FLOOD WATER

A few weeks ago I picked up Beloved Wife at the main train station. I was early, watched the clock, the minute-hand seemed frozen in the cold. Fifteen minutes took an hour.  The clock of the human face behaves in quite the opposite fashion; always in such a rush. While waiting for Beloved Wife’s train to roll in (it was 11:12 pm and very cold) a dissolute-looking, fat-lipped blonde in a frazzled (but real) fur coat approached me and gestured, by pointing at it,  that I should lift one of my headphone cups and engage with her. She could have … Continue reading BUK (YUCK!) and BUDDHA BULL or: CLOCK-WATCHING IN A ROOM OF GENTLY-RISING FLOOD WATER

TACTICAL PESSIMISM: TERMS for a POSSIBLE DISCUSSION

(originally published on February 24th–2021) new preface (March 1, 2023) Sometimes it seems as if I’m trapped in a Surreal Horror film in which Powerful Psychopaths are carelessly (at best) poisoning (in some cases killing) some of my oldest friends and only I, and a few others, are aware of this blatantly obvious fact. This, below,  came as quite a shock,  today, as I read this, as the person mentioned was my best friend for much of the 1980s: . “On April 16th, my spouse, L—–, was at the start line of a 5k run. He was skiing in Banff, … Continue reading TACTICAL PESSIMISM: TERMS for a POSSIBLE DISCUSSION

TERPSICHORE, YOU B*TCH!

1 I met a wiry Belgian musician (late ’30s)  in a recording studio 5 or 6 years ago and, as a result, I’m on his mailing list. This is an excerpt from what his business (?) sent me today: “With French composer Sylvain Chauveau, we‘re now launching an impossible label : Zero Carbon Records. “The beauty of the Zero Carbon for a label founder is that it makes recording and record manufacturing impossible. “Fortunately, our born-failure label already found a reconversion in sport and scout guitars. “We will now deliver you those impossible to record new music as 100% acustic … Continue reading TERPSICHORE, YOU B*TCH!

INTRODUCING THE KEVORKO 3000

    THE WORLD OF TOMORROW will belong to level-headed people who can separate facts from fantasy and who mature at a relatively young age, enabling them NOT to fall for shallow, ugly, decadently wasteful and narcissistic kitsch like “Burning Man,” which is a Last Gasp of the self-deluded Vampire Consumerism that inspired it. What is this BURNING MAN  ritual, in the end, but a messy montage of meaningless visuals decorating a dark hunger for New Sensations and Special Powers and Elite Significance? One of the first symptoms of Fascist Contagion is one of Scale: inhuman, post-industrial, resource-commandeering scale. Q: … Continue reading INTRODUCING THE KEVORKO 3000

PHILOSOPHOSOPHY

    So-called “Philosophy”  (the loving of wisdom, literally translated) is more accurately described as “PHILOSOPHOSOPHY”… the love of, or reverence for, Philosophers. A patriarchal cult of personality in which the latest leading figures borrow authority by citing the leading figures preceding them. There’s not a (useful) notion,  or suggested practise, in the entire canon that hasn’t already been come up with by  reasonably-intelligent 50-year-olds with plenty of Life Experience. Where material in the canon diverges from that common sense standard, it is merely trivially arcane, absurd or terribly dangerous (cf Heidegger or Fukuyama). Questing young men read volumes of … Continue reading PHILOSOPHOSOPHY

LOGICAL INTELLIGENCE THREATENS THE CRYSTAL of OBEDIENCE (BELATEDLY) AGAIN

Possible Headline: “A FLAGSHIP ANTI-CRACKER TRANSCENDS IDEOLOGICAL CONFORMITY and CEASES BEING A USEFUL IDIOT… DISCOVERING IN THE PROCESS THAT SOME  UR-CRACKERS WERE TEMPORARILY (for 2 years?)  MORE RATIONAL THAN HE WAS IN THE FACE OF AUTHORITARIAN OVERREACH: WHOA. THE OBEDIENCE CRYSTAL:  IS IT CRACKING? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN INTELLIGENT MOB, WHATEVER A MOB’S  GROUP-SYMBOLS/ LIFESTYLES MAY BE. EVEN IF YOUR CO-MOB ENJOYS THE MUSIC OF TOM WAITS, YOUR FANCY MOB BECAME A TOOL OF CLEVER FASCIST MEGA-CORPORATIONS.” End headline. (Please ignore the sesquipedalian prattle of the Fabian host, below, and focus on Robbins’ testimony) . . .. … Continue reading LOGICAL INTELLIGENCE THREATENS THE CRYSTAL of OBEDIENCE (BELATEDLY) AGAIN

(Even-Handedly Smarty-Thinky Stuff about) KANYE’S NIGHTMARE

  To be frank: how many “average” Jews could the West Formerly Known as Kanye actually know? The Jews that Kanye generally knows have a contractual relationship with him, or they know him via Jews who do, and the power dynamic, in most of these relationships, confound Kanye in a way that has confounded many Pop/ Rock/ R&B Stars before him.  Prince complained about these things and so did Michael Jackson. Talented musicians are rarely gifted negotiators. As I’ve said elsewhere: if you can’t read Postmodern Literature, you can’t read a contract. To be under contract is not the same … Continue reading (Even-Handedly Smarty-Thinky Stuff about) KANYE’S NIGHTMARE

WIFENESS: GONADAL EXEGESES IN THREE or FOUR PARTS/ Part Three: THE MYSTICAL CITADEL of UXOR

Chris Frantz, founding drummer of the defunct Talking Heads, is known for his uxoriousness. “Uxoriousness” is defined as “Overt devotion or submissiveness to one’s wife”. I’m “uxorious” to the extent of my devotion to my Wife, though I wouldn’t describe myself as “submissive” to anyone. Who knows if Chris Frantz is submissive to his wife, Tina Weymouth (former bassist of the defunct Talking Heads), but I do know that his uxoriousness is of a complicated kind, and also that it’s making a kind of charmingly gallant ass of him. “Without Tina Weymouth, Talking Heads would have been just another band,” … Continue reading WIFENESS: GONADAL EXEGESES IN THREE or FOUR PARTS/ Part Three: THE MYSTICAL CITADEL of UXOR

COME PANOPLY WITH ME or SPYING on EXES

1 We live in the most murderously colonialist and Totalitarian Empire in the history of the world and all anyone can talk about are their feelings. 2 OCTOBER 3rd (German unification Day)  2022, near the Zoo Station,  at c. 13:30, a short fat woman,  with multi-colored (pied) hair, saved my life as I was crossing the street. I was wearing headphones, listening loudly to Elvis Costello’s A BOY CALLED IF, not looking, not seeing a cop car speeding toward, and through, the red light the green side of which was cajoling me to cross blithely. Had the little fat woman … Continue reading COME PANOPLY WITH ME or SPYING on EXES

PARAPOLITICONS: ADVANCED READINGS for the CLUED-UP, FED UP, EFFED UP and RELATIVELY UNCORRUPT

1(t)READING BETWEEN THE LINES IN THE BOOK BIZ . David Marchese: Let me ask about something that’s not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out? . Don DeLillo: I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason … Continue reading PARAPOLITICONS: ADVANCED READINGS for the CLUED-UP, FED UP, EFFED UP and RELATIVELY UNCORRUPT

WE ARE FUCKSTUFF MADE OF STARJUNK

Please picture an auditorium best suited to a motivational speaker’s emotions-manipulating presentation. You are seated in this auditorium. The lighting is calming, muted. The Consort of Musicke’s 2007 issue of John Dowland’s collected works plays softly, nearly subliminally, from invisible speakers above you. The stage curtains are drawn and dark. People are filling the auditorium. The ambient chit chat, coughing, throat-clearings and occasional barks, or tinkles, of laughter,  are gradually rising in density and volume. You have arrived early to take your excellent seats. Your tickets for the evening cost you no money: you solved riddles, on a website,  for … Continue reading WE ARE FUCKSTUFF MADE OF STARJUNK

THE MORAL of the STORY: A DUET (A REVIEW of a STORY and an ERA)

    THE MORAL of the STORY: A DUET (A REVIEW of a STORY and an ERA) A few weeks ago, a short story, by Ian McEwan, appeared in the New Yorker. The short story is an excerpt from a forthcoming novel. The short story concerns a boy, Roland, in an English boarding school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Roland’s “now,” in the short story, is him at the age of 14,  as the Cuban Missile Crisis is being followed, by the papers, and read about, with exhiliration shading into terror,  by the boys in the boarding school. The Cuban … Continue reading THE MORAL of the STORY: A DUET (A REVIEW of a STORY and an ERA)

THE FOG OF WAR and Other Aphrodisiacs

EVER HAVE THE PLEASURE OF YELLING AT A SMALL CROWD (c. 30 people) of FASCISTS? I have. A few days ago. Delicious. Wife and I were on a bus. A family of five, with a baby carriage (they looked Turkish or Romanian) got on the bus. The bus driver said, over the PA, that the family should please put their masks on. On the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, it’s easier to get away with wearing no mask, though a substantial fine is threatened if an authority catches you. On the bus, it’s much harder to get away with it: some bus … Continue reading THE FOG OF WAR and Other Aphrodisiacs

LIFE IN PARLOUS WARTIME (WITH BREAKS FOR MUSIC)

  —LIFE IN WARTIME   Saturday I went through the second phase of auditioning a new guitarist (phase one was exchanging links to material): meeting him in person at my favorite meet-a-new-musician café. I’ve been using this café for that function for ten years, at least. It’s big, never crowded during the day, with very high ceilings and weird Art on the walls and the ambient music is low key enough to chat over. Anyway, the guy showed up right on time, looking like he’ll look great on stage (I’m six feet tall and he’s maybe six feet four, with … Continue reading LIFE IN PARLOUS WARTIME (WITH BREAKS FOR MUSIC)

RECORD-BREAKING BROKEN RECORDS & other POSTCARDS, FLYERS, PLACARDS, BUMPER STICKERS, FORTUNE COOKIES & MESSAGES IN A BOTTLE from the SUPPURATING RIM of my PUCKERING SOUL-HOLE

    1— 2—   3— 4— 5— 6— 7— 8— 9— 9A—   9B— 10—   11— 12— 13— 14— 15— 16— Continue reading RECORD-BREAKING BROKEN RECORDS & other POSTCARDS, FLYERS, PLACARDS, BUMPER STICKERS, FORTUNE COOKIES & MESSAGES IN A BOTTLE from the SUPPURATING RIM of my PUCKERING SOUL-HOLE

ABORTION: UP THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

1ABORTION: THE IDEOLOGY At 20 weeks the fetus is about the size of a hamster, though it’s not as developed as a hamster. At 26 weeks the fetus is teetering on the edge of being a Proto Human. Facts, common sense and nuanced thinking indicates to me that aborting an unplanned/ unwanted fetus, soon after one has discovered that one has missed one’s period (this would be the speck-to-tadpole stage) is a useful or necessary medical procedure with no moral or ethical ramifications. Aborting the “hamster” at 20 weeks would be sad or even tragic. Aborting any not-malformed, non-life-threatening fetus … Continue reading ABORTION: UP THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

a million new seeds of grief

1 everything: a distraction “I really don’t care about the Depp/Heard case. I want to see the Epstein/ Maxwell client list released.” I think the Depp/Heard trial and verdict were severe blows to the “Men Are Scum” project that gained maximum momentum with “MeToo” and went beyond fairness, logic and evidence to paint all men as Perps (guilty until proven innocent) and all women as saints and victims. If it was a distraction, I think it was an opportunistic one. I don’t think it was planned by TFIC*, though Big Media has tried to spin it in the Master Narrative’s … Continue reading a million new seeds of grief

OEDIPUSES, OPHELIAS and OPPs in the AGE of OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (notes, shorts, proclamations)

1 Once I was arguing with a crypto-conservative (who thinks of himself as a Radical Commie, despite the fact that most of his old friends and close family are Wealthy) and he riposted a statement of mine with the classic evasion, “It’s more complicated than that.” As I always do, I responded to that with: “I have time. I’m a quick learner. Explain the complexities.” Ah, but he couldn’t. I have dedicated my social life to stamping out that particular rhetorical flourish (by putting a prohibitive price on it). 2 “Commenting, or not commenting, on an injustice or an atrocity, … Continue reading OEDIPUSES, OPHELIAS and OPPs in the AGE of OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (notes, shorts, proclamations)

A FEW MORE SPURTS of LOGIC’S HOLY WATER (to Exorcise your Social Media)

1ON THE RIM of a BOG-STANDARD GALAXY It has come to my attention that there are people out there who accept (even believe in) the concept of a Bearded, Vaguely-Levantine, Anus-Free Sky Giant… …who sent His only Son (who was simultaneously He, Himself, btw) to be nailed to a cross-beam and torture-murdered in a loincloth as a representative of a negligible Bronze-Age tribe on a tiny speck of a planet in an unremarkable Solar System on the rim of a bog-standard Galaxy… in a deal to “cleanse” the Tribe (and its general Species) of its Design Flaws (called “sins“)… though … Continue reading A FEW MORE SPURTS of LOGIC’S HOLY WATER (to Exorcise your Social Media)

VIRTUAL CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WRITER EDMOND CALDWELL (NOW A GHOST)

CONVERSATIONS WITH A FELLOW WRITER I ONLY REALIZED WAS IRREPLACABLE AS A FRIEND THE DAY AFTER HE DIED (when my need to joke with him about the situation was extremely frustrated), INCLUDING THOUGHTS ON HIS UNDERGROUND MONUMENT OF A NOVEL [caveat: these exchanges bounced between email, Facebook messenger and the surface level of Facebook: only the Facebook messenger version of these particular exchanges remain] [more conversations with Edmond, and others, from the same era, here] . Edmond sent December 11, 2011 How come FB can’t design a conversation thread in which one can respond to separate comments? 1) Yes, the … Continue reading VIRTUAL CONVERSATIONS WITH THE WRITER EDMOND CALDWELL (NOW A GHOST)

MUSIC, LIFE, STUFF, THINGS

Turned 63 this week and I didn’t feel a thing. I’ve been thinking of myself as being “63” since shortly after crossing the midpoint of the gleaming bridge (which arcs so high above the pedestrian traffic of the young) called “62,” so I’m slightly surprised that I’m not “64” already, though I’ll be thinking of myself, in that way, in roughly six months. As ever: no concessions to the legend of the Withering Blue Witch of Old Age… (I mean, a lovely Witch did touch my thingy yesterday but she was youngish, loving, sexy and beautiful and though she turned … Continue reading MUSIC, LIFE, STUFF, THINGS

trivial/ not trivial

1trivial/not-trivial Like most people in this Empire, I had to wait until the next day to discover that a Black celebrity male had raped and beheaded a smaller Black celebrity male, onstage, during The Oscars. The instigating incident was a “joke” the smaller Black celebrity male made about the larger Black celebrity male’s wife’s appearance… specifically,  her hair… despite knowing that Black females are, in general,  particularly vulnerable / self-conscious about that specific aspect of their physical presentation, given the culture’s longstanding Standards of Desirability.  The larger Black celebrity male’s response to the joke was described by many as “riveting” … Continue reading trivial/ not trivial

MACRO/MICRO

1MACRO WHAT DO I SMELL? ANOTHER PIG ON THE SPIT ROAST, RIGHT NEXT TO DADDY BUSH’S  FLAMING CARCASS, IN HADES’  ALL STAR BARBECUE ROOM!  But first, a correction, of sorts. Let’s get this straight. “The Gubmint” does not “hate” The Right. TFIC* don’t “hate” Right Wingers at all, though  TFIC’s Big Media appear to demonize The Right during this tumultuous transitional moment. TFIC don’t “hate” Right Wingers, though, of course, many of their pseudo-Lefty, Useful Idiot minion-administrators do, which lends verisimilitude to The Great Pantomime . This minion layer of Useful Idiots is not in the loop. They really believe … Continue reading MACRO/MICRO

(J)WOKE  J(W)OKES  and THE BEASTS

The doctor  tells his patient “I have good news and bad news.” The patient says, “Tell me the bad news first, doc.  I can take it.” The doctor says “Well, after an exhaustive battery of expensive tests, I’m forced to conclude that I  no longer have the slightest excuse to charge you massive amounts of money for supposedly treating the terminal disease that  I previously jumped to the conclusion you may conceivably have begun to suffer from.  Without an excuse to treat you,  this also means no juicy kickbacks for needlessly exposing  you to incredibly toxic drugs that would  guarantee … Continue reading (J)WOKE  J(W)OKES  and THE BEASTS

CLASSLESS TALES of CLASS and AGE:  FUGUE & GIGUE

There is a holy stupidity to youth, the necessary lack of wisdom,  which makes copious Experience possible.  I’m grateful for the memories of the things I’ve done and seen,  when young,  which I am now far too experienced to do or see again, precisely because I have done and seen them. The knowledge I derived from these metaphorical pratfalls stayed with me. The first hominid to ever not know that it shouldn’t be able to walk upright was probably a teen. **** “Is that a chick or a dude?” was a popular, mildly satirical,  question in 1969.  In the 2020s … Continue reading CLASSLESS TALES of CLASS and AGE:  FUGUE & GIGUE

NOBODADDY NOETICS in your NOOSPHERE (plus sundry Blasphememes in a randomized hierarchy of possible offence)

1GLARE The male gaze vs the blue-haired gender-studies graduate’s glare: which can take rightful credit for your Existence on Earth? 2PHOTOSHOP Audio Photoshop is what I am most comfortable calling Modern Pop. Narrative  Photoshop is probably the best term for “the news”. What do you call the Photoshop of your Conscience? 3HOLOSISM HOLOSISM: conceptualizing The Whole as being the Universe from side to side, top to bottom, beginning to end, The Whole can therefore be construed as an omniscient Intelligence that “knows” everything by containing everything: to that extent,  predestination describes the condition and path of every constituent element of … Continue reading NOBODADDY NOETICS in your NOOSPHERE (plus sundry Blasphememes in a randomized hierarchy of possible offence)

STORY WITH CONTEXT

STORY WITH CONTEXT  (written in the Autumn of 2021) 1. No slavery, no rock ‘n roll. How much Good has come from Bad? Lots. 2. HG Wells posited, allegorically, in his novel  The Time Machine, that the future belongs to either Progress or Devolution. Wells did so without realizing (from his naive vantage) that Progress actually becomes Devolution when the technical ability of  Humanity overtakes its Spiritual Evolution. And I don’t mean “spiritual” in terms of any fantastical metaphysical narrative; I mean “spiritual” in the sense of a capacity to love Life/ Earth/ and Humanity itself in an ongoing project … Continue reading STORY WITH CONTEXT

ONE EXHIBITION IN A SIDE-ROOM OF THE GRAND MUSEUM OF ALL THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT NEVER QUITE HAPPENED

The World is more stuffed with the ghosts of things that could, or should, have happened than it is filled with real objects. That’s an eternal matter: the daydreams are willing but the focus is weak. In the specific case of the subject of this sermon, the Devil, my Nemesis, is Pop. Pop is just another mask for Power, and Power is a seductive trickster. Pop’s prophet on Earth, when I was a young adult, was MTV. It was soon after the debut of that Loki-like manifestation, with its bootlegged Beatleisms,  that great bands became harder and harder to find … Continue reading ONE EXHIBITION IN A SIDE-ROOM OF THE GRAND MUSEUM OF ALL THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS THAT NEVER QUITE HAPPENED

TURDUCKENS ALL THE WAY DOWN

ITEM #1-THE CARBONIST: A SHORT STORY “There is an unfortunate and spreading subliminal misapprehension that the technical conformity,  required in engineering a functional technology,  is a parallel to, and justification of, conformity to the social theories advocated by the groups  the technologies are owned by at a given moment. The inflexible objectivities of science and engineering cannot, should not, be a model for the organization of the subjectivities at the heart of social experience. Technocrats will always make this category error and must always, therefore, be balanced, in power, by Advocates of the exclusively Human. Technology must always be the … Continue reading TURDUCKENS ALL THE WAY DOWN

NIGHTWALKING and the PROUSTIAN NOSE-DIET

It was drizzly and cold last Thursday but not too windy, so I slapped the headphones on and got another brisk walk out of the King Crimson album (Radical Action to Unseat the Hold of Monkey Mind) I acquired recently, released in 2016; the version in my possession is two hours and forty minutes of live workouts of some of my favorite King Crimson tracks. The album’s length allows me to shop at a grocery store that’s an hour and ten minutes away, by foot, bypassing all of the stores that are only a few blocks distant and not enough … Continue reading NIGHTWALKING and the PROUSTIAN NOSE-DIET

AUGUSTINE’S VERSION OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL: THE SCREENPLAY

Xmas meant dazzling presents, to me, as a kid, in the 1960s, just as it meant snow and ancient (and not-so ancient) music and pretty lights and the annual return of cartoons I couldn’t otherwise watch. It also meant, for the last couple of weeks of December, movies at the Cinema,  designed to snare the Xmas audience. This screenplay (written in 2002 after I had already sold the option on another script, but right before the funding-system for indie films, in Germany, sort of collapsed in the wake of 9/11) is my idea of the kind of film I think … Continue reading AUGUSTINE’S VERSION OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL: THE SCREENPLAY

ASYMPTOMATICALLY DEAD:  THE YEAR IN ANECDOTAL REVIEW (A GIBBERINGLY FUGUE-ISH MONOLOGUE)

—2021: What a year… … the year I learned my biological  (in contrast to my legal, presumed, American) grandfather was Bengali;  yes, in the summer of this year I learned that my apparently pious and extremely literary grandmother  (who had review copies of Tropic of Cancer and Women in Love strewn about the bookcase when I was a kid)  was a sexy young adulterer for roughly fifteen years, starting in the 1930s with the conception of my mother a year before Sam Cooke’s birth.  The illicit lust without which I would not exist. She had short stories published in the … Continue reading ASYMPTOMATICALLY DEAD:  THE YEAR IN ANECDOTAL REVIEW (A GIBBERINGLY FUGUE-ISH MONOLOGUE)

PORTRAITS OF THE LEFTY-RIGHT and RIGHTY-RIGHT and WHATEVER’S LEFT: A REPRINT

(A reader was looking through this essay, today, and I remembered how much I liked it… so I’ve decided to bring it back) There are actually people out there who think that everything they do or feel is interesting and a little more correct and even, in a way, Saintly. They are convinced of the no-brainerness of their Goodness. They crave attention, they demand validation, they post images of their breakfasts for us to praise. They have unshakable faith in the concept of the given that their Belief Systems/ Political Party/ and Personal Roster of Icons are all tops and … Continue reading PORTRAITS OF THE LEFTY-RIGHT and RIGHTY-RIGHT and WHATEVER’S LEFT: A REPRINT

VINTAGE RE-POST FROM MARCH 18, 2020: PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL PT 2

  1 The thing about a Plague Spring is that Life goes on and problems/ jokes/ boons/ non-sequiturial minutiae and various challenges keep coming that have nothing to do with the so-called Plague. You may stub a toe, find a diamond ring on a finger in the bushes (don’t forget to boil it first, kids!), sight a UFO on a cloudy Sunday night or lick your mate’s armpit and taste licorice, even, and all in defiance of the (supposed) Plague’s efforts to dominate your thoughts and experiences. This Plague Spring Journal is not, therefore,  plague-centric.  For example…  (puffs contemplatively on … Continue reading VINTAGE RE-POST FROM MARCH 18, 2020: PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL PT 2

OWNING IT: POSSESSION IS NINE-TENTHS of the JOY

I was watching an old episode of Joe Rogan chatting with Bill Maher*  when the topic of monogamy bobbed up and Maher (who will probably die in a hooker’s disgusted arms) offered the classical anti-monogamy argument that chimps, our nearest primate cousins, don’t do monogamy (Hey, Bill, they don’t play piano, either) and that all that “territorial ownership bullshit” (I’m paraphrasing) is a mess. Which is the familiar line that we of the post-Bebop (Aquarian) Generation, were fed.  The dawn of the so-called Aquarian Age** coincided with the dawn of the Techno-Media Age, luckily, which meant that we late Boomers … Continue reading OWNING IT: POSSESSION IS NINE-TENTHS of the JOY

COLORFUL SCENES ALONG THE DIRTY ROAD TO SOMEWHERE TRUTH-ISH –or—THE SECRETS OF MULATTONATION

A: WHERE THE NAKED BODIES ARE BURIED Coded messages whizz through the aether, over and under and through our heads, and the invisible trajectories of these secret signals form the flexible lattice-work of which Consciousness is merely a corner. Most of these signals are “natural” (ie, from before or beyond the work of humans) but many are (wo)man-made.  The more of these signals you equip yourself to perceive, the richer your experience of Life; the better, in some cases, you will be situated to navigate those aspects of  Life that resemble an Easter Egg hunt, Chess game, Kafkaesque labyrinth or … Continue reading COLORFUL SCENES ALONG THE DIRTY ROAD TO SOMEWHERE TRUTH-ISH –or—THE SECRETS OF MULATTONATION

THE ELEPHANT IN THE RABBIT HOLE and OTHER DITTIES

When I was four or five years old I was standing in the back yard of my maternal grandparents’ house, watching my grandmother as she knelt in a flower bed. The property around this house was an intense and admirable micro-biome that my grandparents had worked for more than thirty years before I was conceived (far away, on the West Coast) and it produced enough fruit, vegetables, rhubarb, chicken eggs and peppery fryers, every year, to justify calling my grandparents self-sufficient. From two kinds of grapes, to tomatoes and sweet corn, and the peach, apple and cherry pies my grandmother … Continue reading THE ELEPHANT IN THE RABBIT HOLE and OTHER DITTIES

THE NUMBERS

    ” ‘PASCAL: Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad wouldamount to another form of madness.’ And Dostoievsky, in his DIARYOF A WRITER: “It is not by confining one’s neighbor that one isconvinced of one’s own sanity.” We have yet to write the history of that other form ofmadness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confinetheir neighbors, and communicate and recognize eachother through the merciless language of non-madness… ”           —Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization “Bullshit.“— Montaigne “‘Bullshit’ how?”—Michel Foucault .   Perhaps a decade ago I was walking with … Continue reading THE NUMBERS

NOTES FROM A SPOT EXTERNAL TO ANY PARTICULAR GODDAMN HIVE MIND

  The information below (on what percentage of the population is highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion) dovetails very neatly with my sense that only a “militant” minority of the population is actually falling for any of the blatant nonsense of the past 18 months or so. Hat tip to Charlotte Brown for putting me on to the explanatory power of Hypnosis regarding all this. I’ve been working with the concept of “brainwashing” for so long that I forgot that the parent-process of Brainwashing is, in fact, Hypnosis. Mass Hypnosis to be specific. Can any correlations be drawn between the susceptibility … Continue reading NOTES FROM A SPOT EXTERNAL TO ANY PARTICULAR GODDAMN HIVE MIND

THE PRACTICAL POLITICAL WITCHCRAFT OF THE CONSCIOUS REFUSAL of NEOMANIA and NOSTALGIA: A GENTLE REBUTTAL of TWO ESTEEMED COMMENTATORS

“I’ve long felt that the greatest handicap the American public has is their inability to correlate information.” -Preston Guillory, Arresting Officer of Charles Manson . “There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius’s topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral.” —Jean Baudrillard . “There are no longer bonus points, anywhere in the civilized world,  for citing Baudrillard.” —Napoleon Fanon . PART ONE: NOSTALGIA There often comes a point, when reading intellectually radical … Continue reading THE PRACTICAL POLITICAL WITCHCRAFT OF THE CONSCIOUS REFUSAL of NEOMANIA and NOSTALGIA: A GENTLE REBUTTAL of TWO ESTEEMED COMMENTATORS

REALITIVITY

A) GULLIVER’S TRAVELS by JONATHAN SWIFT, THE MISSING CHAPTER: “THE PROBLEM OF MY TOILET” . B) Realitivity Post-It Sticker on my Fridge: Much apparent-stupidity is both strategic and unwittingly genuine. . . C)  . D) Realitivistic Diss of a formerly-interesting rag (Barney Rosset RIP): “Evergreen Review, a rumor of the echo of the ghost of its former self, now good for nothing more than recycling insultingly-talentless Propaganda. “QAnon”? Really? We’re still talking about *that* preposterous nonsense? The walking cadaver of a rapey gaffe-machine is in the Whitehouse NOW and you’re still beating the dead-horse under the rotting rodeo-clown who was … Continue reading REALITIVITY

BLOOMSDAY SLAVES

Another Bloomsday (if you know, you know) and the weather is “great” (they’ve been spraying every morning to keep the clouds dispersed so we feel warm enough for this time of year, presumably: the sky at 7am is like a net or abstract Plexiglas checkerboard)… we’re spending lots of time outside, doing the long walks, walks that couldn’t be any better in Dublin. My Wife has been my strength/ sanity/ asylum these past 15 months of Jawdropping Global Foolishness and though poor Jimmy himself (if you know you know) had less cause to celebrate his own asylum, every year I … Continue reading BLOOMSDAY SLAVES

THANKLESS THOUGHTY THINKLETS: HOURS or MINUTES of FUN FUN FUN

XXX A dream in which I minted this aphorism in the presence of a woman: “There are more who masturbate extremely well than there are who don’t at all.” It rolled off my tongue like a Wildean paradox in the dream and I woke up feeling momentarily proud of it. XXX What year was it decided that if one is to appear in a photograph one is to grin like a fucking idiot? What are all these people smiling at in all these photos? The hilarious photographer? The “birdie”? The thought of lunch, dinner, oral sex or the painful death … Continue reading THANKLESS THOUGHTY THINKLETS: HOURS or MINUTES of FUN FUN FUN

WHEN WARTIME MAKES C*NTS of your HEROES

Famous post-Punk Power to the People “Remember the 5th of November” comedian Stewart Lee has been transformed by the media-virus into a gullible bourgeois cunt, positioning himself on the Totalitarian side of history by drinking the Government’s middle-class-targeting propaganda and finding it delicious. He has posted the following thing, in his newsletter, in which his core-political-conscience appears to struggle with his gullible bourgeois overlay, as evidenced in the queer infelicities of spelling and style the following text reveals: ***6) TO VAC OR NOT TO VAC The gvt may not impose vaccine passporting, as their will be questions about who is … Continue reading WHEN WARTIME MAKES C*NTS of your HEROES

WRINKLES the VENGEFUL CLOWN and Other Epistles

1 CAN YOUR LAUGHTER I was visiting an old friend (German recording engineer) and he played some video of a vintage German New Wave ’80s act that made an appearance for some recent special event, or other, all these years later… all the members in their fifties… and the front man was all over the stage, not dancing but doing what looked like an Attention Deficit Disorder Aerobics Workout routine. And the old friend said, admiringly, “What a front man!” The guy couldn’t sing or dance but he looked good in a blazer and he covered about 5 kilometers during … Continue reading WRINKLES the VENGEFUL CLOWN and Other Epistles

SAME OLD TRAP, BRAND NEW LEGS TO GNAW OFF

Celebrity Hero worship is a cornerstone of Modern Propaganda; your bedazzlement in the reflected light of media-elevated figures lowers the gate on your critical intelligence and that’s when all the Day-Glow Bullshit waltzes in. Here (video linked below) we see Russell and Eddie advising you not to believe anything too alarming about our Owners. We can characterize our Owners as Soulless Bureaucrats or even Greedy Bastards but never should you allow yourself to think of them as Murderously Psychopathic Aristocrats with delusions of Godliness; never should you think of them as well-organized recreational Peddies, with a vested interest in targeted … Continue reading SAME OLD TRAP, BRAND NEW LEGS TO GNAW OFF

THEY* STARTED A JOKE: RECENT LETTERS WITH ET

1–From: Steven Augustine  Sent: 09 April 2021 21:29To: ETSubject: Re: I Couldn’t Resist ET! Two things…  First, I present an absurdity that is absurd, most of all, because it is REAL (I traced the online Flyer back to the actual Medical Authority it issued from; this is no spoof); the Bee Gees reference is the cherry on the flatline… And then, this, to commemorate today’s Royal milestone (posted this on Facebook)  (and I really do recall it as though it were yesterday; how absolutely in a rage I was):   In the Summer of 1990, in London, that amazing break-beat year of … Continue reading THEY* STARTED A JOKE: RECENT LETTERS WITH ET

NONPOP/ RE: POP

This is a video for a slightly Avant Art Song I did. The video is about a cool Nigerian-British musician who is rejected by a stunning Kenyan model and is sent therefore on an odyssey of metaphorical sex with women of various backgrounds! All is fair in Love and Poetry! The song itself works ironically against the video in that it’s about The Bad Old Days of Violent Racial Sexual Segregation. I always like to layer my artifacts. The arrangement is extremely non-standard in that I turn the second half of the song into an instrumental but those saxes A) … Continue reading NONPOP/ RE: POP

OBSCENE IT ALL

I have written elsewhere that  “Raising a child is like a game of golf in which the first eighteen holes are played with an egg instead of a golf ball”  but let’s extend that metaphor. Having hit 40 long ago and living well beyond that cut-off point (the tweaker-mechanism of Evolution only concerning itself with what one was capable of up until, and in order to achieve, the DNA-perpetuating goal of mating; most mating, for Human History, occurring between hominids in their early-teens) means we are all, all of us, the late Boomers, wandering the weird terrain of a foggy … Continue reading OBSCENE IT ALL

CHOCOLATE AND BACON: A DANCE and a RANT (A REPRINT)

[originally published Nov 16, 2019 ] The New York Times, with glistening basset eyes, says, of Lydia Davis (the sensible one in the otherwise airheaded subliminal ménage of Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt and Davis): “The story “Collaboration With Fly” consists of a single sentence: “I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.” Another, “I’m Pretty Comfortable, but I Could Be a Little More Comfortable,” comprises seven pages of minor irritations — a loud clock, a dry orange. In 2009, her landmark “Collected Stories” was published; 30 years of her writing life (minus her novel, “The End … Continue reading CHOCOLATE AND BACON: A DANCE and a RANT (A REPRINT)

TOTALITARIUM

When I was being raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the ambient cultural value I absorbed from books, music and films was anti-business/ anti-square/ pro-Creative/ pro-Sex/ marginal materialism. By the time I hit college in 1977 I was wearing these presets like a behavioral badge and the people I befriended and hung out with seemed to radiate these attitudes as well, attitudes I embodied to such a degree that I drew quite a bit of attention. I was so confident in my espousal of these embodied beliefs that I became a sort of militant philosopher, spreading the word.  This militancy … Continue reading TOTALITARIUM

EUTAUPEA

There’s a credible argument to be made that 1973 was the peak of civilization, the high point of three thousand years of Human progress, and the evidence can be perused in the charts from that year. Some of the radio miracles, for me, of ’73, were as follows: “Killing Me Softly with His Song”… “Let’s Get It On” … “My Love” … “You’re So Vain” … “Brother Louie” …”Frankenstein” … “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” … “Half-Breed” … “That Lady” … “We’re an American Band” … “Right Place Wrong Time” … “Superstition” … “Loves Me Like a Rock” … Continue reading EUTAUPEA

THE AWFULSOME TRUTH

So many of my old friends share in the grotesque symptoms of a massive delusion that I’m tempted to test the village well for traces of Ergot. Their minds simply no longer function as anything other than receivers for nonsensical instructions from the Sinister Screens in their “lives”. In the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s we were treated to a rich array of high-camp allegories like Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Day of the Triffids, et al, the problem being that all such films work just as well for POVs on either of the opposite … Continue reading THE AWFULSOME TRUTH

SUPERFICTION

I try not to think of Lit in terms of storytelling because no writer of Lit has been at the forefront of storytelling for at least a century, or much longer than that,  if one wants to go into detail about it. The Reality I was birthed into was shaped by stories the Government told about itself, and about its affects on the world, by way of the apparatus of various US GOV-controlled media (including the educational system). Nothing by HG Wells  or Thomas Mann or Flannery O’Connor shaped the world I was born into like the Super Fiction of … Continue reading SUPERFICTION

DEPT. of OVERWROUGHT UNDERSTATEMENTS

  A POME for the NEO-VICHY unpardonably dumb in your vanity you believed the world- Witch you helped bargain for children  winking he’d never  come for yours     LETTERS WITH ET 1 (a college friend of mine posted an appeal on FB for people to vote for his wife’s one-woman zoom-streaming play; I thought the clip I saw of this one-woman (dis)play was extraordinarily needy-bossy in an awfully familiar, and very mediocre,  Liberal-Reactionary way; in order to put on this (dis)play they built a “black box theater” in their living room:  sending ET a link to this (dis)play kicked … Continue reading DEPT. of OVERWROUGHT UNDERSTATEMENTS

AMERICA: A ONE-ACT PLAGUE

1-A COAT OF PAINT It’s as though a Realtor sold you on a house infested with termites but because the Realtor was handsome and smooth, you bought it anyway, ignoring the obvious Red Flags. The problem worsened over the years to the extent that anytime you chose to finally face the problem, you’d be facing an Absolute Nightmare. So you chose to ignore it, and pretend the house was structurally sound, and much-improved, every time you put a new coat of paint on it. But you know, deep down, the problem is still there, and getting worse by the minute. … Continue reading AMERICA: A ONE-ACT PLAGUE

NIGHT WATCHMEN of OBLIVION

When Beloved Wife was pregnant with Offsprung a shocking fifteen years ago, I was worried that my writing days might be over for a long interval, and decided to get as much writing done as I could in nine months. I did this by working in the strange hours, roughly 11pm until about 3am, while Beloved Wife was sleeping. I got a lot done that way, it became a habit, and the habit was only altered a little when the responsibilities of parenthood had me up, often, at the crack of dawn. I continued to write at night, subsisting often … Continue reading NIGHT WATCHMEN of OBLIVION

KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 4:THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

DOWNLOAD “KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 4:  LIFE IS WASTED ON THE LIVING” FEATURING ZOë LUND,  DENNIS POTTER, HARVEY KEITEL,  JOANNE WHALLEY, CHERYL TIEGS, LYNDON B. JOHNSON, VINCENT GALLO, FRANKIE THORN, MICHAEL GAMBON, ALISON STEADMAN, CHRIS MARKER  and INTRODUCING CHLOë SEVIGNY as GHOST MERRY NEW-THANX-O–WEENMAS (downloadable until Tues, Dec 29, 2020) *The Opinions, Attitudes, Life-Style Choices and Manias represented in the curated artworks presented are the sole responsibilities of the creators of said works and not to be construed as reflecting the worldview, dreams or kinks of the Curator. SOME MATERIAL MAY BE R-RATED. LINK TO BEST ALL-AROUND FREE, OPEN SOURCE MEDIA PLAYER Continue reading KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 4:THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 3: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

DOWNLOAD “KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 3:  THE SPIRIT IS CHILLING,” FEATURING VANESSA REDGRAVE,  ALDOUS HUXLEY, JOHN LYDON, RADLEY METZGER, MICHAEL GAMBON,  LYNN LOWRY,  MARSHA HUNT, CARL PARKER, JOHN CALE,  DENNIS POTTER, JOANNE WHALLEY, LESLIE PARRISH  and INTRODUCING MICHAEL FOREST as APOLLO MERRY NEW–THANX–O–WEENMAS (downloadable until Tuesday, Dec 29 2020) *The Opinions, Attitudes, Life-Style Choices and Manias represented in the curated artworks presented are the sole responsibilities of the creators of said works and not to be construed as reflecting the worldview, dreams or kinks of the Curator. SOME MATERIAL MAY BE R-RATED. LINK TO BEST ALL-AROUND FREE, OPEN SOURCE MEDIA PLAYER Continue reading KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 3: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

Being intensely aware of current conditions (as jaw-dropping as they are) is not a cracker-boy thing, despite the propaganda designed to seduce our inner snob into believing exactly that. Listen to this incredibly effective Activist lay it all out: this is the most lucid and relatable aggregation of this information (including a “Unified Field Theory” of TFIC motives) I’ve yet to find. (Re: Predatory Philanthropy @7:55) AND ADDENDUM: Continue reading WE INTERRUPT YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 2: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

  DOWNLOAD “KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 2: CURIOSER AND FURIOSER,”  FEATURING  CATHERINE JOURDAN, NICHELLE NICHOLS, ROBERT FRIPP, MRS MILES DAVIS, WILLIAM SHATNER, MICHAEL GAMBON, MORTON SUBOTNICK,  ROMAN POLANSKI, JANET SUZMAN, THE THREE STOOGES, KRISTINE DE BELL and INTRODUCING RAOUL SERVAIS* MERRY NEW–THANX–O–WEENMAS (downloadable until Sunday, Sept. 29 2019) *The Opinions, Attitudes, Life-Style Choices and Manias represented in the curated artworks presented are the sole responsibilities of the creators of said works and not to be construed as reflecting the worldview, dreams or kinks of the Curator. SOME MATERIAL MAY BE R-RATED. LINK TO BEST ALL-AROUND FREE, OPEN SOURCE MEDIA PLAYER Continue reading KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 2: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 1: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

DOWNLOAD “KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 1: THE GOLDEN ROAD TO DEPRIVATION’S EXCESS,” FEATURING TUESDAY WELD, MICHAEL GAMBON, DENNIS POTTER, REBECCA BROOKE,  LEONARD NIMOY,  JOANNE WHALLEY, DUSTY SPRINGFIELD, JOHN LURIE, MILTON BERLE, MAE BRUSSELL, RADLEY METZGER and INTRODUCING MARILYN ROBERTS* MERRY NEW–THANX–O–WEENMAS (downloadable until Sunday, Dec. 27 2020) *The Opinions, Attitudes, Life-Style Choices and Manias represented in the curated artworks presented are the sole responsibilities of the creators of said works and not to be construed as reflecting the worldview, dreams or kinks of the Curator. SOME MATERIAL MAY BE R-RATED. LINK TO BEST ALL-AROUND FREE, OPEN SOURCE MEDIA PLAYER Continue reading KULTURAL KARE PACKAGE 1: THE XMAS RE-ISSUE

OUR THEME is WOUNDS

1. TALES FROM THE WAYS WE LIVED I can remember the ritual of Friday nights, Friday nights in the kitchen of my grandparents’ house in a quasi-suburban neighborhood of Chicago, an area called Morgan Park, a place with trees, parks, houses, front yards and rope-swings. My grandparents’ corner of Morgan Park was Black, no Whites to be seen except occasionally in cars just passing through in the direction of the segregated driving range (five blocks East?) or in the direction of Beverly (ten or twelve blocks West?) on 115th street. My grandmother and grandfather’s house was on a half acre … Continue reading OUR THEME is WOUNDS

INVITATION to the CONTEMPLATION of our SHADOW-TWIN

The mysteries of psychopathy: the history of our shadow-twin? Homo sapiens evolved out of the food chain (no longer having to worry about being hairless cheetah-snacks) just about the time that the political utility of being a psychopath (a mutation preserved by in-breeding, a la the “royal” bloodlines?) began to manifest. If you were ruthlessly lacking in empathy, effortlessly capable of lying and had no qualms regarding opportunistic murder, you were ready to “lead” any tribe that had become politically sophisticated enough to be governed by any factor more refined than brute force. And therein lies the fundamental problem occupying … Continue reading INVITATION to the CONTEMPLATION of our SHADOW-TWIN

A BAD NOVEL WITHIN THE BAD NOVEL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: A REVIEW and WARNING

Art-Making is a compulsion, when it is pure, and maybe that’s regrettable, but who are we to complain when the results can do so much to amplify the pleasures of existence? It’s my theory that you can judge the purity (the genuineness) of Art-Making according to the extent to which it’s accompanied by the parallel (perhaps also regrettable) compulsion of Truth-Telling. Great Art is an aestheticized Truth-Telling and Lie-Telling “Art” (a lá Disney) is not really Art at all but high craft at its best. So much of the greatness is in the capital-T “Truth”. But there’s the problem: Lie-Telling … Continue reading A BAD NOVEL WITHIN THE BAD NOVEL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR: A REVIEW and WARNING

SUNDRY COMBUSTIBLE ERUCTATIONS

1-BREAKING: 47-YEAR-OLD ACTRESS HAS NEVER HEARD OF MENOPAUSE 2-BRIAN WILSON WAS A GENIUS “The Doctor Who theme music is a piece of music written by Australian composer Ron Grainer and realised by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Created in 1963, it was one of the first electronic music signature tunes for television.” “Good Vibrations” is a song by the American rock band The Beach Boys that was composed by Brian Wilson  with lyrics by Mike Love . Released as a single on October 10, 1966, it was an immediate critical and commercial hit, topping record charts in several countries including the US and UK. Characterized by its complex soundscapes, episodic structure … Continue reading SUNDRY COMBUSTIBLE ERUCTATIONS

AN INFORMAL DEBATE on the DOMESTICATED AESTHETIC of the LITERARY MIDDLEBROW

Posting my reasoned critiques of Imperial Plague Propaganda (which is designed to move the psychological cattle, from point A to point Q, in record time), these six or seven months, has been like opening up a series of exquisite 19th century Japanese umbrellas in a howling catshit hurricane. The size of the lying megaphone wind-machines (and coordinated catshit cannons), in this metaphor, renders “free speech” a moot point. I’m going to recharge my batteries by focusing on Lit, Music, Cinema and (as ever) Fucking My Beautiful Wife (take that, Puritans… have you noticed how puritanical our porn-based Mootopia is becoming … Continue reading AN INFORMAL DEBATE on the DOMESTICATED AESTHETIC of the LITERARY MIDDLEBROW

THE MAGNIFICENT AGONY of the ARTIST TWO KILOMETERS UP the SHEER ROCK FACE of YOUR SERENE INDIFFERENCE

1 SUGGESTIVE APHORISM of the WEEK Perhaps if we paid the police directly, instead of giving the money to GOV, who then gives it to the police, there’d be less confusion regarding who they’re paid to serve…? 2 BECAUSE IT’S BEEN TOO LONG SINCE WE’VE TALKED ABOUT DELILLO There are people who can’t see the trees for the toothpicks: among the lovers of book-loving there are those who think Plot is King or that Moral Instruction is Queen or that a downscale, gritty, near-illiterate lack of “pretension” is Duh Winna. None of these approaches are what a literate Hippie would … Continue reading THE MAGNIFICENT AGONY of the ARTIST TWO KILOMETERS UP the SHEER ROCK FACE of YOUR SERENE INDIFFERENCE

PARABLE

The Farmer walks by one day holding a large hammer. “Aha!” say the Cattle, “He’s a Hammerist!” Two days later, however, the Farmer is seen by the Cattle to be toting a saw. “Nope,” reconsider some of the Cattle,  sagely, “He’s a Sawist.”  Some of the Cattle snort in response to that proclamation. “He only wants you to think he’s a Sawist because we caught him being a Hammerist. He’s definitely a Hammerist.” Likewise, and later that same day, a select few of the Cattle happen to see the Farmer behind the cow shed,  worrying a plank, with what they … Continue reading PARABLE

WE, the SMUPID

1. Everybody’s individual consciousness is a governing committee of shiftingly dominant and subordinate minds of unstable size and strength,  25-60% of which may be titanically stupid at any given moment. 2. “Everything good is torn straight down;  everything shit is crowned:  by which sick imperative behind whose clown?” 3. The minute after you are born you are not so much adding one human body to a pre-existing collection of  billions of human bodies as you are adding one minute of experience to civilization’s pre-existing accumulation of c. 15,000 years: to what extent is this mathematical  imbalance rectified by the time … Continue reading WE, the SMUPID

THE MOST TERRIFYING PREDATORS ARE ONLY VISIBLE IN HINDSIGHT

“Stubbornness is stupidity for smart people.” —-Pastor Prime 1 INWARD The irony of nearly all prophylactic meditations on Fascism  is that almost every meditation of that type will miss what is most  urgently fascist in the culture, of the text’s author, at the time she/he is writing it. This peril-specific blindness is an inevitable feature in the rise (and rise and rise)  of Fascism and functions very much like an evolutionary adaptation in the animal kingdom:  the parasite inoculates the host against the host’s ability to properly identify the parasite, as though the torso of a bather, who is mildly … Continue reading THE MOST TERRIFYING PREDATORS ARE ONLY VISIBLE IN HINDSIGHT

An Endless Collision of Myths

  1-SNOW WHITE et al   “Anything can be a murder weapon if you put your mind to it.” —Daughter (14) , August 20, 2020 20:20     2- HOVERBOARDS As I always tell our Daughter: the Internet is a tool… make sure you use it and not vice versa… but, further, in order to get the most out of this particular (bundle of) tool(s), you must use it “incorrectly”. That is, use The Internet to your benefit as opposed to the benefit of The Internet’s owners, who use it primarily to A) inflict propaganda B) extend surveillance. I use … Continue reading An Endless Collision of Myths

THE GLITTER PILL CHRONICLES

“Fuck the red pill, fuck the blue and fuck the black, too: my color of choice, in worldview-altering pills,  is ‘glitter’ !”—Pastor Prime 1POWER TO DA PEEP-HOLES The old white men running the world have managed a long, effective and cynically-ironic campaign to demonize Logic and Facts as “white” and “male” and to privilege raw emotions as cardinal, female and virtuously  “of color”. Because one thing the old white men running the world hate is how Logic and Facts, if granted enough credibility,  can undermine Propaganda. For Propaganda (the most powerful organs of which are owned by the old white … Continue reading THE GLITTER PILL CHRONICLES

THE EMOTIONAL EQUIVALENT of FUCK-YOU-MONEY

Walking around the eerily silent, and acrid-smelling,  dystopiascape of a post-Plague Berlin, where former sites of congregation are boarded up by emergency decree,  or marked off by skull-and-crossbones-filigreed biohazard tape, and blackened patches on the sidewalk indicate where bodies were burned, as a precaution, where they fell… Laugh. Just kidding. Everything in Berlin is quite standard (if intermittently rather chilly) for July.  People are working, meeting, strolling, shopping and flowing in and out of public buildings and tooling around on bikes or e-scooters, doing what they usually do. No corpses stacked at the curbs nor post-Apocalyptic Sanitizer Cults to torch … Continue reading THE EMOTIONAL EQUIVALENT of FUCK-YOU-MONEY

NOTA BENE: RESPONSIBLE CT

  As I just commented elsewhere, on my posting of another video, “Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm. As much as I am loath to reference Weinstein (who is both crypto-supremacist and the wearer of outrageous toupees), it’s useful, in the conversation about the simulated financier Epstein, to follow Weinstein’s lead and ask some common sense questions about the case…” Here’s the thing about Weinstein’s following presentation: you will have to pay very close attention in order to get anything out of it. Whatever Weinstein’s other flaws are, he is not a stupid man… and … Continue reading NOTA BENE: RESPONSIBLE CT

MISSIVE 2 AMERIKA, #1

1. TRUMPMANIA   Friends, seriously: please listen: they’re all Evil Shits. . Both sides of the pseudo-divide between Republicrat and Demoblican: shitty with corruption, shitty with contempt for “The People”: both sides are out to gorge on wealth and power at the expense of a naive and numbed-out citizenry. The distraction of Trumpmania (those who hate him and those who love him are partners in the same pointless business) is there to hide the REAL divide, which is between the Autocratic Psychopaths running the show (THEM) and the Serfs in the audience (US). The figurehead in the POTUS chair is … Continue reading MISSIVE 2 AMERIKA, #1

IN THE NAME of WIFE & DAUGHTER & GRANDDAUGHTER (& a few billion others)

Remember how European males “discovered” “America,” despite the fact that it was already populated, and they took the place over, making the continent “theirs”? Well, it’s happening again, only this time what they’re invading is the definition of the genetically-determined gender called “female,” aka (in humans) WOMAN. Genetically-determined males: do whatever you prefer, to decorate or transform your own bodies: this is your right! I support you! But, please: come up with a new word/ concept/ label for what it is that you would like to become, with the help of drugs and surgery (or just make-up, or attitude), because the … Continue reading IN THE NAME of WIFE & DAUGHTER & GRANDDAUGHTER (& a few billion others)

BLOOMSDAY in the PLAGUE

Well, JJ was a filthy old fucker but I love him, for some reason, and not necessarily because he battled and belittled priests (uniformed customer service representatives of Bizlam) and despite the fact that he relished dirty knickers.  I suppose my long-running esteem of the man can be traced to his militancy as a talent, his unwavering fealty to the Art, his cussed embrace of the alligator of his rhetorical vision, even as this vision pulled him down under into the twilit bayou of Finnegans Wake,  for 17 years, a text I will not pretend to love or hack my … Continue reading BLOOMSDAY in the PLAGUE

about that time i was detained on suspicion of bank-robbing in minneapolis

So Wife and I were tooling around, yesterday, wallowing in Existence, relishing primitive pleasures, getting some shopping done and so forth. Popped into the Apotheke to fill a plant-based, quasi-Hippie anti-allergy prescription for Wife and also to order more spermicide. You have to order the tubes of this precious stuff days in advance because, for whatever reason (everyone else is Gay, on the Pill or celibate?) they don’t stock these tubes on the Apotheke shelves and I have never loved Wife more, this week, than at the moment she asked the Apotheke’s clerk if it was possible to order an … Continue reading about that time i was detained on suspicion of bank-robbing in minneapolis

RACE TRICK, VIRUS TRICK, SCIENCE TRICK: WHOOSH

PREAMBLE First you must learn the things which The State appears to want to teach you. Then you must learn (under your own guidance)  what The State is and why.  Bearing in mind that additional information,  you eventually learn what it really is that The State has taught you,  and why,  and what you have become as a result, and only then are you in a position to begin to learn, really,  what The State actually is: the Aggregation of every possible variant of You working against Yourself on behalf of a parasitical “elite”. Never forget the tautological aspect to … Continue reading RACE TRICK, VIRUS TRICK, SCIENCE TRICK: WHOOSH

THE STRANGE CASE of the CUDDLIEST REVOLUTIONARY (A TIMELY REPRINT): UPDATED

(first published in May of 2019) This is a follow up to a recent post called Gimlet-Eyed Rune Reading, at the end of which I tacked what should be a revelatory riff about the absurdly transparent implausibility of the “Bay of Pigs” pseudo-invasion of ’63. You are forgiven for not already knowing all the details of that “historical” (dramaturgical) event, but once you know them, I think, you may feel a bit dizzy. The most importantly dizzy-making detail being Fidel Castro himself. I don’t know a single Lefty-type who has not at some point revered Fidel Castro, but, like lots … Continue reading THE STRANGE CASE of the CUDDLIEST REVOLUTIONARY (A TIMELY REPRINT): UPDATED

SMERSH, SPECTRE, KAOS, WHO

PREAMBLE: A BEDTIME PARABLE FOR CLEVER LITTLE TWATLETS   You have two old friends, Ollie and Zeke. . Ollie appears to be rather well off (fancy car and clothes) but he has swindled you many times in the past. Being an amiable sort, you largely forget these swindles soon after each one happens  (call these past swindles “WMD,” “Ebola,” “Sars,” “Gulf of Tonkin,” “Red Scare,” “Mad Cow,” “Bird Flu,””Heterosexual HIV,” “9/11,” “Libya,”  “Central Park Wildings,” “Lone Gunmen of Various Vintages,” “Peak Oil,” “Ozone Holes,” “Zika,” “Soon to be Submerged Coastal Cities,” “FBI sting-operations against Improbable Jihadis,” et al). Zeke, on … Continue reading SMERSH, SPECTRE, KAOS, WHO

THE NIGHTINGALE: A MEDITATION

Went for a walk with Wife in the crisp light under the blaze-blue lid on the sky,  a walk in a different direction,  toward a sweetly second-rate park where we stopped in the shade of a cluster of slim-trunked trees and bushes blossoming in blossoms identical to the bone-white trefoil buttons of my grandmother’s last new coat. There we became attentive to the song of a bird which Wife informed me was a nightingale, performing for us at 11am. Wife and I spent quite a while trying to spot this nightingale and our shared sensation became,  increasingly,  that of a … Continue reading THE NIGHTINGALE: A MEDITATION

STRONGER THAN…

… your goddamn sappy Netflix-narcotix. It’s probably almost impossible to believe but this man (in the clip below) was one of my heroes when I was 13 (living in one of the most famously toxic neighborhoods in America). In 1972, I read an excerpt from one of Ionesco’s plays in either the Saturday Review (I had a subscription) or Evergreen Magazine. The excerpt from his work of the “Theater Absurd” took over my imagination and I tried to write something similar, although I didn’t quite have enough Life-experience to put my unusual vocabulary to good use until much later. . … Continue reading STRONGER THAN…

THOUGHTS ON NOT-THINKING

  1 Note to Writers: no one who writes optimistically gets to be lauded as “prescient” a generation or two later.   2  We’ve had widespread access to cellphone technology for almost 30 years, now. Why are 10-20% of us still shouting into our phones? What are some of us trying to say to the strangers in the immediate vicinity while ostensibly enjoying the high-tech miracle of communicating with people,  whom we actually know,  who are miles away?   3 Harried radicals worried that governments around the world seem increasingly noncommittal, at best, regarding the protection of Free Speech (as … Continue reading THOUGHTS ON NOT-THINKING

FLATTENING ALL CURVES ON THE IRONY BOARD or ALL HAIL THE NEW FEAR

Just skimmed, within a nausea-inducing vortex of hyper-vigilant irony, the tepid new George Saunders ditty in The New Yorker. The story is a dull contraption designed to give its readers the fantods about a post-Trumpian near-future in which one’s emails are routinely read by sinister forces (much like the experience of actual citizens of the past 20 years, and Now, then) and so forth. But reading Saunders’ bit of unintentional black humor, the dystopia didn’t feel like a post-Trumpian nightmare of one or two administrations hence… it felt like Life in a “liberal democracy” under CoronaVid next week. I could … Continue reading FLATTENING ALL CURVES ON THE IRONY BOARD or ALL HAIL THE NEW FEAR

QUARANZINE: THE APRIL LOOMS EDITION

  ***FLASH FICTION OF THE QUARANTINE 1the gold doughnut Dirk B. got wind of the underground Cough-In raves from a friend of a friend of a friend who pushed an ironically-wrapped (old sandwich bag including crumbs) note through the slit in his door at an obscene hour like ten in the morning or something.  The slit in Dirk’s door had a hinged aluminum guard over it so whenever bills or proliferating pizza-delivery flyers slipped through it woke Dirk up with a clank. When the note about the underground Cough-In rave slipped through, Dirk was dreaming of gold, doughnut-sized doughnuts glazed … Continue reading QUARANZINE: THE APRIL LOOMS EDITION

PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL PT 3

____1 Berlin, day and night, now,  looks like a De Chirico painting. One very nearly has the trains and buses to oneself. I popped into a supermarket for an emergency supply of one blue can of smoked almonds and could picture myself on the security camera’s abandoned screens,  monitored with timestamped machine boredom from very high and forgotten angles, up and down each empty aisle, stopping here and there to peer more closely, without touching,  at a bottle or a bag, youthful spring in my step and an imperceptible temptation to sing an unselfconscious aria as I eventually reached for … Continue reading PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL PT 3

PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL

  1 A former acquaintance (“academic activist”) posted this, recently, on Twitter, and I marveled at his *apparent* naïveté  regarding A) Bernie B) The System. “how is it that in the whole country there is only one @BernieSanders who dares to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy like this? Of all the ivy league-educated establishment with all their smart critical acumen, no-one dares to speak truth to power, though the people long for it.” Because credible (uncompromised) speakers of Truth-to-Power are never allowed unfiltered access to national platforms; anyone with constant access to such platforms is, logically, suspect. Pinning hopes for change … Continue reading PLAGUE SPRING JOURNAL

END OF AN ERROR: THE WELCOME DEATH of the SO-CALLED “LIT BLOG”

Lit Blogs are being shuttered (or abandoned, lights still on, uneaten breakfast on the table) left and right. The shutterings are sometimes accompanied by grandiose valedictory statements at which I can’t help snorting: another stuffy, tin-eared, humor-free pedant with five, or ten,  or fifteen years’ worth of preeningly-curated reading lists  (of obscure and bleak German, South American, Turkish or Scandinavian novels in translation)  is calling it the End of an Era? Ha! Most of these Lit Blogs were actually second rate Undergrad Philosophy seminars run by pantomime Dons in the pipe-smoking, cape-wearing, fantasy tradition. They would not, could not, tell … Continue reading END OF AN ERROR: THE WELCOME DEATH of the SO-CALLED “LIT BLOG”

THE RISE of the PURPLE STATE & OTHER ODDITIES

1 THE PURPLE STATE A little more than a week ago, while attempting to log into Wife’s Facebook (it’s a commercial account; I handle her soc med), I accidentally logged into my own account, the one I deactivated in 2015, and it was like walking back through Time into a disco-era dorm room and fingering the quaint paperbacks, and baubles, on that other era’s desk. It was fun to see my metaphorical Pink Floyd poster and to finger my metaphorical pet rock again while also feeling grateful that I had managed to skip Facebook 2016’s promise to force me to … Continue reading THE RISE of the PURPLE STATE & OTHER ODDITIES

COLLECTED APHORISMS and OBSERVATIONS of PASTOR PRIME: A NOTEBOOK

1. “Anger with your father IS your father.”  2. “It is notoriously difficult to convince people living in a modern police state that they’re living in a police state… especially when the police state provides cheap doughnuts and free porn.” 3. “The sensitive, the creative, are under prolonged assault from the materialist superculture of the workaday world; Art is a virtual refuge where the at-risk sensibility is protected, validated and rewarded with pleasure. Art is the little cathedral in the big abattoir. I have elected to live there.” 4 .”There is nothing to fear in Life but humiliation, theft, assault, insanity, rejection, … Continue reading COLLECTED APHORISMS and OBSERVATIONS of PASTOR PRIME: A NOTEBOOK

COZY DYSTOPIAS: A COMPARATIVE REVIEW IN 2 DISTINCT INSTALLMENTS

(This is the first of two related reviews, one negative, one positive… guess which is which… about Elvia Wilk’s “Oval” and then about Candia McWilliam’s “What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness”… the review of the latter available hereabouts, most probably,  by Sunday or shortly thereafter.) I’m not sure if I’m entirely comfortable with the trend of characters from Dystopian narratives writing and publishing the very narratives from which they appear to spring. Regarding which these Author/Characters would probably say: “Get used to it.” Perhaps it’s revealingly old fashioned, my expectation of maintaining the luxury of at … Continue reading COZY DYSTOPIAS: A COMPARATIVE REVIEW IN 2 DISTINCT INSTALLMENTS

CONFESSIONS OF AN IMMATERIALIST (more SMATTERING)

  I recently had the opportunity to post the following comment in response to a pointless article by the HR Puffinstuff of pseudo-Lefties (what’s her name again? The Australian? Caitlin something…?);  I wrote: “Trump this, Trump that. It’s like shaking your fist at the figurehead/ hood ornament on the 18-wheel death barge that ran over your granny. Surely you know that the clown you’re hating on is a figurehead who does the bidding of the same Plutocrats who told BHO, and The Clintons, what to declare, and when, and why, and how, while various injuriously felonious global US GOV moves … Continue reading CONFESSIONS OF AN IMMATERIALIST (more SMATTERING)

TOWARD A PLAUSIBLE, DYSTOPIA-SURVIVING CANON

Walk the long halls of any canon and you’ll find clunkers, oddities and impostors on its spot-lighted walls. The more discriminating you are, the more of these jarring entries you’ll find and, as time goes on, Time itself, you will see, loosens many of the fraudulent entries from where they’re mounted. In the Lit Canon, for example: Saul Bellow? Heavy in smarts and chutzpah and light on Literary Genius, Bellow was the not-entirely-unwitting beneficiary of the historic conditions (the postWar ascendancy of semi-assimilated Jewish writers,  and publishers,  within a traditionally WASPist practise; that and, later,  Israel’s PR offensive in the … Continue reading TOWARD A PLAUSIBLE, DYSTOPIA-SURVIVING CANON

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DERANGED VEGAN BIRKENSTOCK-WEARING MANCHURIAN SOCCER MOM OPTION?

  1. Because do we really think They (TFIC*) don’t have decades of filthy, disgusting, illegal, immoral and High Definition beyond-the-pale material of T-Rump on VHS, 16mm film, infrared video, Nagra audio plus aisles of notarized documents with which to get him yanked out of office (and fitted with a ball-gag in Guantanamo) before Xmas… if They wanted? Do we really think there aren’t videos of T-Rump frolicking naked with Thai adolescents? Are we really believing there’s no room full of foot-thick dossiers of evidence, in all of T-Rump’s financial records, of tax evasion, blackmail, extortion, bribery, insider-trading, outright theft … Continue reading BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DERANGED VEGAN BIRKENSTOCK-WEARING MANCHURIAN SOCCER MOM OPTION?

LABREXIT

I’ve read a few hoarse-voiced postmortems regarding the Grendelian routing of Labour (UK Elections) but haven’t seen anyone mention the obvious. Beyond the thin wedge of “informed” voters who voted “issues,” and beyond the wider wedge of the voters who were quite earnestly involved in judging a personality contest, there was a broader swathe of passionately-uneducated people who have internet connections and watch daytime talkshows and read the Daily Mail (et al)…  who decisively and predictably cast their votes against (including but not restricted to)  Greta Thunberg, Extreme and Frightening Scandinavian PC Practices, “knife-crime,” Stormzy, gender reassignment treatments for 6-year-olds, … Continue reading LABREXIT

CRANKY NIGGLES

1. article: A Language All Its Own: The Fiction of Gary Lutz http://epiphanyzine.com/features/2019/11/6/a-language-all-its-own-the-fiction-of-gary-lutz “In his introduction to The Complete Gary Lutz, Brian Evenson recounts his experience “with a gathering of French translators and editors” during which the group concludes that translating Gary Lutz is “impossible.” “I know what you’re thinking: hyperbole. There’s no way writing can be “impossible” to translate. Perhaps a translation doesn’t quite capture the essence of the writing in its original tongue, but any translator will tell you that very few translations succeed in doing so. Hyperbole it is not, I assure you. Gary Lutz’s writing is … Continue reading CRANKY NIGGLES