Category: WE ACTUALLY DON’T HATE THIS AT ALL

WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

IDIOVIDEO

Steven Augustine

Still so little Time, right now,  to write detailed essays regarding the Imperial Absurdities we all live with,  and through,  with our tight little grins (but I must say I love how the Greta Thunberg charm offensive is falling apart:  you see? They aren’t infallible… They often fuck up,  They arrogantly miscalculate and Their social engineering schemes fall temporarily to pieces; sometimes the fuck ups are so huge even Duh Masses balk). I’m not only focused on finishing up this three-year album project; I’m bringing a couple of novels toward their finish lines, too. It’s the blogging that I cut … Continue reading IDIOVIDEO

RESISTANCE-IN-JOY, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALL4 Comments

THE UTILITY of CANON-CROSSING, NON-LOCAL, ANTI-ETHNOCENTRIC INFLUENCES

Steven Augustine

Recent generations of would-be artists and writers appear, almost without deviation, to seek reassurance and confirmation in the super-familiar (as though they’re all peering into the same tiny mirror at the same time)…  whereas perhaps an unlimited taste for the unknown, unexpected and uncanny might provide more interesting results…?   Continue reading THE UTILITY of CANON-CROSSING, NON-LOCAL, ANTI-ETHNOCENTRIC INFLUENCES

PASTOR PRIME, REQUIRED READING, THINKING TO THE NTH ON THE TOPIC, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALL4 Comments

IDIOT’S GUIDE TO GLEEFULLY-and-FEARLESSLY FLIPPING-THE-SKY-GOD-OFF @ 60

Steven Augustine

  Got in from the far-distant recording studio a bit later than usual,  last night (sank into bed, finally, at 2am), then woke at about 5:30am, let Beloved Wife sleep late, made Offsprung’s breakfast, accompanied Offsprung across town on public transpo to school (as ever) and was home again shortly before 9am, at which point Beloved Wife playfully blocked me from entering the kitchen. Meaning, I surmised in an instant, that despite the fact that I’m not into the folk ritual of tracking and highlighting the commonest mortal milestone, she had a little store-bought cake waiting in there for me, … Continue reading IDIOT’S GUIDE TO GLEEFULLY-and-FEARLESSLY FLIPPING-THE-SKY-GOD-OFF @ 60

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GO ‘N GIT YER BETTEREST HAIDPHONES

Steven Augustine

  Finally got around to listening to this Giles Martin remix of The Beatles’ Ninth. I was nine the first time this double-album came out. Hearing this is like staring at the cover art (inside joke) for the first time all over again. It also reminds me of one of the awful realities of being a musician: writing the music is just the first step in a terribly long chain of ultimately disappointing partnerships and processes between the song’s creation and any audience hearing it. So much can and does go wrong!  Even when the process is error-free (as if) … Continue reading GO ‘N GIT YER BETTEREST HAIDPHONES

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AMONG THE RAINDROPS FROM MODERNISM’S CLOUD

Steven Augustine

Scofield Thayer was one of those cloudy, ambiguously gendered, stinking-rich people floating around in modernism’s primordial soup in the early 20th century. Thayer was a conservative who published the ultra-peculiar Dial, dumped cash on James Joyce despite loathing Ulysses and hating the very idea of Finnegans Wake and he said snide things about ee cummings in private while publicly loaning cummings his pretty wife. I’m not going to go into any of that here (but: open your mind, as I always hope you will, to the idea that things are never what they seem and that “history” is a record … Continue reading AMONG THE RAINDROPS FROM MODERNISM’S CLOUD

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

ATTACK of the PHALLIC FOREHEADS (in HD, 1955)

Steven Augustine

At seven or eight years old I’d run home from grammar school (the front of which, with its flagpole, a block distant, could be seen from our kitchen window) to watch The Early Show, on channel 2, a showcase for Sci Fi flicks of the 1950s. By 1963 these flicks were still roughly valid but shading rapidly toward the culturally camp and obsolete; when Modism, and then Psychedelia, began to take over, starting in ’66, cinematic Sci Fi became  a sack of silly relics until Fantastic Voyage, Planet of the Apes and (obviously) 2001: A Space Odyssey re-dignified the genre. … Continue reading ATTACK of the PHALLIC FOREHEADS (in HD, 1955)

AUGBooks, FICTITIOUS FICTIONS, SPECIAL REPORT FROM THE AUGUSTINIAN ARCHIVES, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

FIRE PAPER GUNS THE INTERNET and ALL WHO FOLLOWED AFTER: an excerpt

Steven Augustine

  The previous text I posted, a day or two back, came with a warning about its difficulty. This one… FIRE PAPER GUNS THE INTERNET and ALL WHO FOLLOWED AFTER (an excerpt)… makes that look like a book by John Irving or Erica Jong in comparison. It’s Sumo Class stuff in the hierarchy of obscure narratives. Chapter One: SUMMER OF NONE The splendors of existence are so near. Smell them, taste them, they are yours, right there, in thick liquids or crunchy solids or blown twinkling on your face in a highway mist through the passenger-side window of a secondhand … Continue reading FIRE PAPER GUNS THE INTERNET and ALL WHO FOLLOWED AFTER: an excerpt

GENUINE ART AS HEROISM, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

PLEASE SHOW ME A REAL ARTIST

Steven Augustine

  “Please: show me a Real Artist. An Artist who paints in cold blood and hot shit and black fire…  an Artist who makes poems with home-made  hammers and stolen daggers… on new cars and i-pods and department-store crèches… an Artist who won’t kneel to kiss The Dollar’s ring or queue up to glue on a shit-eating grin at The Border or stand at attention to take one up the ass for ‘our troops’ or  ‘the children’ or any other  Trojan horse of Stalinist sentimentality designed to promote the Devil’s favorite charities. Show me a Real Artist and I’ll return … Continue reading PLEASE SHOW ME A REAL ARTIST

AND YOU POST-MODERNISTS THINK YOU'RE HOT, SUPERIOR LIT, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

THE GRAND DELILLO

Steven Augustine

  Don DeLillo is branded (and is a Brand) as the Elder Statesman of America’s paranoiacs… despite an obvious tonal aversion to atrocity. This is ridiculous. If Norman Mailer hailed the work of Paul Bowles as heralding the death of the Square, the Square is here to inform Mailer (the way God informed Nietzsche) that news of said death was greatly exaggerated… and, also, that that Don DeLillo guy is a way-out proposition, man. Don DeLillo is no Paul Bowles, as far as that goes: he’s as safe as warm milk before bed in the 1950s. He’s no square-killer. He’s … Continue reading THE GRAND DELILLO

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COOL WORDS (we are only using the blandest 10% of the vocabulary)

Steven Augustine

[editor’s note: I wish I could properly credit the delightful obsessive behind this compilation but I copied this years ago and haven’t a clue] A ACAROPHILIA: Affinity for itching ACHLUOPHILIA: Love of darkness ACMEGENESIS: Orgasm ACOMOCLITIC: Preference for hairless genitals ACOUSTICOPHILIA: Arousal from sounds ACROPHILIA: Arousal from heights or high altitudes ACROTOMOPHILIA: Arousal from amputees ACTIRASTY: To become aroused from exposure to sun’s rays ACUCULLOPHALIA: Circumcision ACYESIS: Female sterility ADAMITISM: Going naked for God ADOLESCENTILISM: Cross-dressing or playing the role of an adolescent AELUROPHILIA: Deriving gratification from cats AGALMATOPHILIA: Attractions to statues or mannequins AGAMIC: Asexual; parthenogenic AGENOBIOSIS: Married couple … Continue reading COOL WORDS (we are only using the blandest 10% of the vocabulary)

BITS and BLOBS, THE OCCASIONAL FRIPPERY, WE ACTUALLY DON'T HATE THIS AT ALLLeave a comment

NET FIRSTS #2: VLADIMIR NABOKOV INVENTS THE SMILEY EMOTICON

Steven Augustine

“I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile-some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”- April 19, 1969 The Nabokov “Smiley Face” invention (as cited above) was a response to this question, posed to him by Alden Whitman in an interview that was published in The New York Times: “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?” Continue reading NET FIRSTS #2: VLADIMIR NABOKOV INVENTS THE SMILEY EMOTICON