January 2012
4 posts
“Upon further examination, everything crumbled.”
– Garin Williams
“Turns out the real reason for growing up
was to learn what to do with...”
– Tony Hoagland, from his poem Powers
December 2011
9 posts
Music Nite
Playing The Green Lantern (3rd and Jefferson in Lexington, KY) tonight with the good ‘uns in Small Batch. We go on first, The Swells headline. Promise there’ll be goooood songs and 3-part harmony. Some o’ the sweeties from The Swells will be joining us, also. Doors are at 9pm, but we pro’ly won’t hit ‘til 10pm or later…
(come out.)
Christmas, Last Night
Once, a long time ago (honestly, I can’t remember when), I sat too-late at a bar up in Boston (Atwood’s Tavern, I’m sure) after a show (pretty sure I was sidemanning it with Christian McNeil) and Duke Levine (a stellar guitarist) told how on Christmas Day, he and his sister (because they’re Jewish and didn’t celebrate that holiday) would go down the street to watch...
Christopher Hitchens, dead at 62 →
I disagreed with a lot of what he wrote, disliked tremendously the spirit in which he wrote it—the smugness, the certainty—and still, I cried when I learned that his light had gone out. So much of who we are depends on the joyful plurality of the voices willing to speak up, and Hitchens’s voice within that plurality was mighty. He will be missed even by those who wish he’d...
WatchIf you despair of American political discourse, this Bad Lip Reading ditty will lift it for a few minutes. I’m not one to poke fun (especially not of Ron Paul, whom I tend to admire for his stick-to-it-iveness even though I don’t agree with many of his ideas), but it’s funny, man, and it makes about as much sense as our current political climate.
“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles...”
– David Foster Wallace
“I think there’s a God; I just don’t know if we invented him or not.”
– Arlyce, in full laughter
Paging Senator McCarthy
I hate to be a downer (although, it does seem to be one of my main skill sets), but sh*t just got a lot more Orwellian here in the good ol’ U.S.A.
Our sweetie-pies in the United States Senate just voted against a provision that would have kept our military from arresting and detaining U.S. citizens on American soil indefinitely and without charge so long as they are suspected of...
November 2011
9 posts
Salvage
The wreck
is a fact.
The worst
has happened.
The salvage trucks
back in and
the salvage men
begin to sort
and stack,
whistling as
they work.
Thanks be
to god—again
for extractable elements
which are not
carriers of pain,
for this periodic
table at which
the self-taught
salvagers disassemble
the unthinkable
to the unthought.
by Kay Ryan
Pepper-Spray Cop Gets Hisself Art Memed →
“The warmth of human contact with a manly whiff of violence.”
– Homer Simpson, on why he likes the fist bump.
Still Life On A Matchbox Lid
The heart is colder then the eye is. The watchers, the holy ones, know this, no shortcut to the sky, A single dog hair can split the wind. If you want great tranquility, it’s hard work and a long walk. Don’t brood on the past. The world is without appendages, no message, no name.
by Charles Wright
“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no...”
– Haruki Murakami
October 2011
5 posts
Bedtime Story The generator hums like a distant ding an sich. It’s early evening, and time, like the dog it is, is hungry for food, And will be fed, don’t doubt it, will be fed, my small one. The forest begins to gather its silences in. The meadow regroups and hunkers down ...
When Time Don't Fly
“To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with “American Pie.”
The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at...
“Forgetting. Yes. I will forget it all. One after the other. The roads I crossed. The roads I did not. Everything that happened. And everything that did not.”
from Vahan Tekeyan’s “Forgetting” (quoted by Carolyn Forche in the May, 2011 edition of Poetry)
3 tags
Big Day.
I’m gonna be on the radio at the one and only WRFL, all the way to the left at 88.1 FM (internet listeners, go here) from 6pm-8pm during Jack Cofer’s slot with Catherine Edgerton of Harvey Sue. She and I are then hustling over to that North Lime Wonderland known as Al’s Bar. Show starts at 10pm. $3. 18+.
Me (Reva) + drums (Dave) + bass (Scott) + Catherine’s real...
September 2011
10 posts
“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out for longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest...
Finally.
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is officially over today.
Now, if we could just end all these wars…
Richard Buckner--Our Blood →
This review by Andy Whitman (who is a great listener and elucidator of music) is true. It’s a really good record. Buckner’s not for the tidy-hearted, but are there any of those left anymore anyway?
Kentucky Super Bowl Ad →
Wanna see it? Donate here.
Hard Rain by Tony Hoagland
After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall played softly by an accordion quartet through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall, I understood there’s nothing we can’t pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt. Even serenity can become something horrible if you make a commercial about it using smiling,...
WatchOuch. Sigh.
The Daily Show remembers September 13, 2001.
“The ego is the dualist in us. It is the habit we have of seeing ourselves over...”
– James P. Carse
“Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.”
– Homer Simpson
I’ve been reading a lot, again, as I often do when I have projects galore, deadlines looming and backwork calling my name.* While it may appear to be so, this retreat into others’ work is not really a mode of procrastination or distraction. It is an escape pod for when I cannot handle the demands I place on myself; intubation when I feel suffocatingly small and incapable; a message in...
August 2011
10 posts
Getting Away With Torture
“The reason Cheney keeps saying that torture is ‘legal’ is because he has a clutch of worthless legal memoranda saying so. Cheney gets away with saying torture is ‘legal’ even though it isn’t because if it were truly illegal, he and those who devised the torture regime would have faced legal consequences—somewhere, somehow.”
Dahlia Lithwick on Dick...
Lady Gaga as Jo(e) Calderone at the VMAs →
omigod. how do you spell the sound we make when surprise meets satisfaction? insert that spelling here.
5 tags
2 tags
3 tags
3 tags
THE MADE SHOP: ingenious mimesis →
“If what has always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan...
“The conservative position that all spending is evil obliterates any distinction...”
– Jacob Weisberg, writing for Slate in Lessons of the Crisis, a total bummer of a look at the total bummer of American Politics meets the Debt Deal.
July 2011
10 posts
The Vanishings
One day it will vanish, how you felt when you were overwhelmed by her, soaping each other in the shower, or when you heard the news of his death, there in the T-Bone diner on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious. One day one thing and then a dear other will blur and though they won’t be lost they won’t mean as much, that motorcycle...
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon...”
– Audre Lorde
