Running on Sat the 3rd

I’ll be running my first 5k bright and early. Today A, J, and I ran to Ping Tom park (pictured above) in the rain. Good times!

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The New New-Wave

I just quickly want to mention that M83’s new album Saturdays = Youth is really great. Sweet-sad synth textures to the tune of lost youth in progress. If LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver is about waking up in your 30s, Saturdays is about the dream just prior.

It’s the kind of album that helps you to feel happily pained to still be alive. Affect of The Verve’s bittersweet symphony, but more experimental. Midnight Souls Still Remain, for example, manages to compellingly alternate between two tones for 11 minutes. And yet a pop sensibility animates the album as a whole. Witness Graveyard Girl, the first single:

Greenwash Guerrillas Pie Thomas Friedman on Earth Day

Info at youtube:

Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.” Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a suprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating:

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Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face…

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of “green” – the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

* for his pure arrogance.
On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.

Dissertation, The Movie

Planet B-boy: France

Experiments

This week filmclub traveled to the remarkable land of Maya Deren’s experimental short films. Bodies were placed and timed at the beach, dancing in space, and performing a rendition of what seemed to be a variation on the yellow wallpaper theme: crawling sisters amidst male violence.

The knife was a key;
both exit bodily.

Deren’s camera flows to new experiential planes. The tide is made to recede by coming in. Rearing forward from bourgeois chess to tidal pool, a meandering rook takes the lyric route out. And we follow. We the camera.

It can be sexy. Or existential:  the strangeness of body, molar-lunar, the just arrived of not trying to be somewhere.

I dig it.

McCAIN Skrull–Variant Cover

Strange Hours

One of the pleasures of blogging is the way that the content of one’s posts always manages to reflect the author, of course, but also changes over time as one tries to figure out what it is one is trying to say in the blog. For myself it’s usually less that I want to record a thought, or happening, than that I’ve stumbled upon something interesting to share with the friends who stop by to check out what’s going on with me.

The new look of the blog has me not only thinking about who I write for, what it means to be using this space to communicate, but also what it is that I’m trying to get across. And in part the new look has its own message for readers, another layer of content. It’s softer. The colors are almost pastel; the hard stuff of dates has been relegated to the end of posts; the rigid right angles of the box banners have been curved. This is what I want my blog to reflect, a space that feels comfy and where all the hard stuff can be jettisoned. Where I can recline in those curves and indulge with friends about whatever comes to mind.

In the recent past that has mostly entailed clips from youtube. These may still occasionally show up, but I want to write more now. I hope to use this space more like a diary (albeit with all the benefits of Web 2.0) and in a way that manages to be engaging for people who don’t spend the majority of their time between my ears. Here’s your ticket, all aboard!

So the blog is a train. Lots of cars with different linked things. We can go back and look at the early entries on naturalism, the endless posts on the democratic field, the shame files, occasional film notes, and those posts, like this one, written after I’d managed to wake up at 2 in the afternoon and felt the most urgent business of the day was to get to my blog. It’s not narcissism to love this space. I don’t drown in it, and my therapist would tell you I’m plenty aware of my short comings, many of which are here on display.

So there’s the therapy angle, too. But it occurs to me that what i most want my blog to be is nothing more nor less than an extended love letter to shared space, with friends, and some strangers, at a particular moment of time. It’s quite something to blog.

The Hard and Painful Truth.

My friends, the evidence is overwhelming. From his about face on commemorating Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday (he voted against it in ‘83), to his transition from principled opponent of torture to apologist for the Bush veto to preserve “enhanced interrogation techniques”, from being against the Bush tax cuts for the rich to making permanent said tax cuts, from maverick McCain to corporate shill, the love-lamb of lobbyists and a fool on the hill: John McCain is a Skrull.

It’s quite true that this would be warmonger xenophobe-in-chief generally blends in with fellow republicans. At a time when the grand old party is rent with rifts between social, fiscal, and restroom conservatives, when bigots and bigwigs wag what remains of their talking point tails, salvation could only come from above. In the form of a Skrull invasion. And who better to shoulder the party of white mens’ burden than John McCain’s skrull? My friends, the answer is no one.

And so the Skrull Talk Express comes to town. Only earth’s mightiest democrats can save us. Unless they too have something to hide?

Special thanks to agent Raccoon for recovering the above photo from RNC headquarters in Roswell, NM.

Yeah, What’s Going On?

Crack knuckles…

Okay, well, I’ve been away from the blog for a bit and found myself missing the missives. So back in action with some self-indulgence.

1.) Filmclub has been enjoying a few surreal films recently: Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, and HPLHS Motion Pictures less surreal Call of Cthulhu.

2.) The hobbyist part of my personality (the parts are mostly integrated, but I preserve a modicum of distance for the more pungent bits) is engrossed by comics lately. I’m a regular reader of Fall of Cthulhu (notice a trend?), Black Panther, Uncanny X-Men, Hellboy and BPRD, and pleased to note that Vertigo just started putting out Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor. The first issue of the latter includes an interlude in Chicago at the famed Margie’s Candies on Western. Mmmmm, grandpa’s turtle sunday, mmmmmm. It deserves a separate post, but those familiar with the Marvel universe may be aware that a Secret Invasion is under way. In the coming days I hope to provide incontrovertible evidence that John McCain is in fact a skrull. For starters consider his recent flip-flopping on whether “extreme interrogation,” i.e. torture, is permissible. I’d love any of my graphically capable readers to send me a picture of the McCain skrull.

3.) I blow off steam in the World of Warcraft, and steam about the ears when I have to reinstall the software (as in last night). I have a blood elf warlock named Dospassos and a Tauren druid named, ahm, Selinsgrove. They are levels 6 and 9 respectively.

4.) I’m still hammering out the Jack London chapter of the dissertation. Serious writing planned for this afternoon after a run and some lunch.

5.) I’ve got a stack of papers to grade on Zola’s Germinal. Students interested in extra credit were directed to the Drinking Den.

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