- The front fell off.
- Soldier meets puddle. I laugh.
- “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
- If you knew a suspect was guilty, what would you do?
- No offence, Mr. Martin, but if I were you I wouldn’t be about calling anyone a misshapen dwarf. You look like the kind of shrunken, greasy, middle-aged midget one usually spots smuggling a bottle of Thunderbird into a peep show down East Colfax. Jesus Christ, m’man, you’re a walking reminder that the Creator’s not above working drunk. The first time I saw you and your cheaply-suited, obese cohort El Presidente enter a room, I wondered if you weren’t something he’d squatted down and shat out after one too many barbecue wings.
- Fashion crime spectacle reminds white trash to hate Arabs.
- Yeah, and by that reasoning, Reinhard Heydrich’s assassins were anti-Semites. Niall Ferguson, you’re a fucking idiot.
- The story of the people’s gun.
- Designer gasmasks.
- “But, Cusset observes, ‘Americans do not take kindly to things being impossible,’ and even though the ‘very logic of French theoretical texts prohibits certain uses of them,’ they have not refrained from ‘taking a criticism of all methods of putting texts to work and trying to put them to work.’ The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.”
- Some transgressive visual art. (Thanks, Yalie.)
- “Clinton talks a lot about having visited ‘over eighty countries’ —but then, Chelsea was with her on a lot of those trips, and I doubt folks are rushing to hand her the red phone. In case anyone has forgotten what exactly first lady Hillary Clinton really did all those years, here is a press account of a 1997 trip that she made to Senegal with her daughter: ‘Her first stop in Senegal was at Goree Island, where she peered through the ‘Door of No Return,’ through which slaves passed on their way to the dreaded Middle Passage of the Slave Trade. When she arrived in Dakar, the first lady was greeted by Senegalese who danced and serenaded her with lyrics written especially for the occasion.’ Shit, I feel better about that 3 a.m. phone call already!”
- Isn’t God a shit?
- “Why bother creating a larger-than-life parody of Norman Mailer when Mailer was doing such a bang-up job with that gig himself? Mailer toiled diligently to create the impression that he wrote with a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand, a half-empty sawed-off shotgun in the other, and a dead hooker at his feet. Acolytes could be forgiven for imagining that he had gasoline and bourbon running through his veins instead of the blood of mere mortals.”
- How to explain your plastic surgery to your children. Also proof-positive that you have too much fucking money and should be rolled off the roof your McMansion.
- “Control techniques become more creative and sadistic. The prisoners are forced to repeat their numbers over and over at roll call, and to sing them. They are woken repeatedly in the night. Their blankets are rolled in dirt and they are ordered painstakingly to pick them clean of burrs. They are harangued and pitted against one another, forced to humiliate each other, pulled in and out of solitary confinement.”
- “Charlton Heston’s Gun Taken From His Cold, Dead Hand.”
- Seems, according to Fred, that I’ve been getting exorcised. I’m not sure of what exactly, the ghost of Evan Williams? (One could be unkind, of course, and point out the humor inherent to a barely literate screed decrying plagiarism that hinges on a pilfered metaphor — a metaphor pilfered from the Ballerina masthead no less — but pointing out humor to the Ballerinas is a little like trying to lead the proverbial whore to culture, so why the fuck bother?)
- “Lame Deer, a Cheyenne community not very far from the battlefield, is filled with people who aren’t guiding any Wasichus (whites) anywhere. The Cheyenne fought Custer, and were punished for it. Lame Deer and Hardin are towns that might as well be on opposite sides of the moon. Explaining how all this works out today is part of what Elliott’s book is about. In 2003 the federal government dedicated the Little Bighorn Indian Memorial, an earthwork that leads to a stone wall with maps and a text. A slogan on the wall says: ‘The Indian Wars Are Not Over.’”
- “The Four Horses’ Asses of the Necropolis.”
- “As they continue to bomb all these ‘bad guys,’ they continue to kill more innocents, including more Iraqi children and their families, which then incites more fury, which then causes more ‘bad guys’ to join the insurgency. Those additional “bad guys” are then used as the excuse to continue the occupation of Iraq, an occupation that for obvious reasons will go on indefinitely.”
- Motherfuckers: The Aushwitz of Oz.
- “Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency — the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy.”
- “You play an Islamic insurgent, running through a desert curiously plastered with images of Bush, Tony Blair, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and Hassan Nasrallah, in hopes of stumbling upon Bush so you can shoot him.”
- Find out if you’re a racist pig.
- “Edmund Wilson said he once inflicted a hangover on T.S. Eliot. ‘I gave him bootleg gin,’ Wilson told a friend about an evening he spent with the poet. ‘He is so shy that you have to drink with him to talk to him—and we both got into bad condition. The next morning he had an awful hangover and said his joints creaked, and I felt as if I had wantonly broken some rare and exquisite vase. I have felt guilty about it ever since.’”
- The Feminist Porn Awards.
- Blast door art.
- “The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.”
- Bet Jim Paine’s got one of these.
- Neoliberalism, RIP.
- “’I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,’” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “’He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.’”
- The Western city most vulnerable to terrorism? . . . ready? . . . wait for it . . . Boise.
- A new tool for your government to keep tabs on you. Because that’s what governments are supposed to do, you servile little shit.
- “But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had ‘lost his wife to the world of spirits’. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.”
- How to customs-proof your laptop. Make it hard on the motherfuckers, if nothing else.
- Yeah, I’ve got a cure, too: a bullet.
- Hide-outs and sneaky guns.
- “Hammett’s digression is soon over and the plot of The Maltese Falcon resumes. But the Flitcraft parable hangs over the rest of the novel. The idea that anything can happen, that even stable family men can switch at any moment, makes for a disturbing, distrustful atmosphere. This is not a digression in the usual sense; it is not additional information or an interesting side-issue. The Flitcraft parable is a beam falling onto the centre of the novel and, it turns out, the key to its aesthetic: that everything you know and trust can be gone ‘like a fist when you open your hand’.”
- Measuring the candidates by the death factor.
- Concept artist link collection. Have fun.
- “For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.” That’s us, the land of the free. As long as you don’t apply any actual standard of freedom, that is.
- “The American dream of happiness might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins. Our passion for felicity hints at an ominous hatred for all that grows and thrives and then dies. I’d hate for us to awaken one morning and regret what we’ve done in the name of untroubled enjoyment. I’d hate for us to crawl out of our beds and walk out into a country denuded of gorgeous lonely roads and the grandeur of desolate hotels, of half-cracked geniuses and their frantic poems. I’d hate for us to come to consciousness when it’s too late to live.”
- “Built Green? Nope black!”
- Cathead Hamlet.
- “The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.”
- The Atlantic is now free. If you can fucking stand to read it.
- “To my mind, the lesson of the Donner party is not so much about what they did or did not consume as it is about our appetite for such dramas.”
- How many five-year-olds could you take out in a fight?
- “With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” (Or a state.)
- “That is an iron rule: an insurgency supported by the public is bound to win, irrespective of the tactics adopted by the occupation regime.”
- Hell, yes, I’ve thought of doing it. You gonna say you haven’t?
- Rambo and Rimbaud: soul brothers.
- Lolita beds for girls.
- “While ^ban^ and his pals stand squarely in this tradition, they also stand for something new: the rise of organized griefing, grounded in online message-board communities and thick with in-jokes, code words, taboos, and an increasingly articulate sense of purpose. No longer just an isolated pathology, griefing has developed a full-fledged culture.”
- Club littlegun.
- Every word the warmongering chimp says is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.
- “I am challenged at the Iowa caucuses to endorse gay marriage as a sacred institution. Of course I believe it, but how can they make me say so when they know the political cost it will exact? Hot tears of rage stream down my scarlet face.”
- Drink Up playing cards.
- “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete arseholes.”
- “Chess on its highest levels, as Bobby Fischer said many years back, is a form of psychic murder.”
- “Corb Lund is obsessed with horses. I’m not sure if every song on this album mentions them, but even ‘Student Visas,’ a haunting song about a US soldier’s experience as a CIA aide to the Nicaraguan Contras, calls upon the soldier’s family heritage in the cavalry, connecting his injury in a shot-down helicopter to the helicopter’s replacement of the horse in some US Army cavalry units.”
- Vandalize Israel’s land-grab apartheid wall from afar. Well worth your money.
- “J G Ballard has ‘been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer’. As a result, and in the teeth of his personal extinction, he has written an autobiography, although part of me thinks: hasn’t he already done that, in a parallel circuit of soldered and aligned multiple fictions? But it will be a sad day when his cancer (which I understand to be shaped exactly like Richard Nixon) finally claims him.”
- “Seven shades of mis — drink, drugs, eating-disorders, dead parents, nasty parents, nice parents, growing up plain/pretty/dumb/smart; the steady drip-drip-drip of confessionals by the type of person who would, curiously, look down their snobby noses at Springer rednecks or strangers who show you their holiday snaps. And while most of us would agree that a good working definition of a raging bore is someone who tells people they don’t know their problems, for some reason these jokers seem to believe they’re pretty damn fascinating. Above all, they seem to believe that they’re in some way “brave”. But what’s so brave about not being able to hold your drink and/or drugs and then whining about it?”
- Give him the evil little fucker hell, Mr. Lane.
- “Is it just me, or is there something subtly racist about gunning down mobs of angry Africans.”
- Finally, a Colorado politician I can get behind.
- “The bloodshed was epic. Orgimmar’s guards automatically waded into the crowd and slashed left and right. Poisonous snakes slithered from crevices and sank their fangs into libertarians. Ron Paul opponents charged and struck a blow for the status quo. ‘I died twice,’ says Lettuce B-Free. ‘There was so much chaos. It was a mass battle.’ But Paul’s supporters won the day, as characters breached the gates and stormed the city. The Constitution, it seems, was triumphant.”
- When I relax I feel guilty.
- Holy shit! Clint Talbott almost took a stand! Millionaires shouldn’t be able to arbitrarily steal other millionaires land! (Yeah, I still don’t give a shit, except to note that Clint Talbott’s a fucking ethical moron.)
- There goes the economy. Good riddance.
- Oh, Christ, I might not have the heart to fuck with Mr. Martin for awhile. I mean, there ain’t nothing wrong with watching Lost, but good God, couldn’t any of you Ballerinas spare the man a plate at your table? Laurie? Mr. Paine? Did you need to shun him so that he felt compelled to share his loathsome and lonesome little existence with the rest of the world?
- “Santa died for your MasterCard.”
- Ugly gun Sunday.
- Christopher Hitchens: “His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts. One is too few. Three is too many. Two seems somehow superbly right.”
- And, with that in mind: “What one realizes about Hitchens is that he is essentially a two martini queer. He came up with what he imagined was a Wildesque dictum, by saying that martinis are like breasts — one is not enough while three is too many. Mr. Moderation all the sudden. And this former Marxist just loves his bourgeois drinks. On the ‘Negroni,’ he writes adoringly, ‘a favorite tipple of mine either on sunny days or in Mediterranean countries (it won’t work in cold or gray conditions).’”
- And speaking of Mr. Hitchens, looks like he’s confirmed his first kill.
- You call it vandalism, I call it Art Sabotage.
- The fucking idiots at BCC Radio 1 have removed the words “faggot” and “slut” from Shane MacGowan’s “Fairytale of New York” this Christmas season. Thus defiling one of the greatest songs ever written and pissing on one of the few reasons to even bother pretending to care about holiday feeling.
- Speaking of holiday feeling: season’s greetings, piggies.
- Impeach the motherfuckers. Okay, just Cheney in this case. But still, let’s get his fucking boss too. And let’s start working on petitions to impeach Hillary right now. Why wait? (Thanks to Nixon.)
- Inside the CIA’s black sites. Y’know, disappearances, secret prisons, torture rooms. They Hate Us for Our Freedom.
- Ziggie’s Saloon has new ownership, and they have a new website, including some music. That’s a heartbreaker of sorts. I used to live in the joint, it being the only place in Denver where you could hear non-yuppified blues music. In fact, back then you could catch Denver’s best bluesmen, Derrick Terrabull and Johnny Vaughan, for a three-dollar cover charge, three nights a week. The owner, as I recall, was a wonderful woman named Chucky, who was always kind enough to bring me a sampler of her pickled green beans to enjoy with my beer. I haven’t been out to the bars much in the last four or five years, but I’ll have to check out the new feel.
- Nation in frenzy about little wizard boy and all his little wizard friends.
- Chechen self-made weapons. (Thanks to David Codrea, who runs the best gun blog out there. And who is a conservative whom, as far as I can tell, acts like it. Meaning, I like him a lot.)
- The schoolmarm attacks! “Ben is a sick little bastard and that’s why he enjoys the writings of alcoholic, drug addicted, violence fixated losers. He adores Hemingway’s corn-cob rape scenario, which says it all.” Well, yeah. But on the bright side, I can tell the difference between Hemingway and Faulkner. Do these pinheads read anything besides blogs?
- I’ve lived in Cincinnati. It’s a terrifyingly corrupt little rustbelt burg, with a brutally violent and racist police force that has gone absolutely unchecked by the local mainstream media. So, I’ll only say this: good riddance. (Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the city overall. Stunted, drug-infested, violent, run-down, and always on the verge of race war — it was exactly my kind of town. And at least it wasn’t the hellishly homogenized Disneyland shithole that my beloved Denver has become. But, still, fuck the local media.)
- “Then — so Greene thought — Catholics, particularly Latin American Catholics, were more torturable than Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that distinction, victims of a globalized network of offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by Washington and knitted together by secret flights, concentration camps, and black-site detention centers. The CIA’s deployment of Orwellian ‘Special Removal Units’ to kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the Middle East, and elsewhere and the whisking of these ‘ghost prisoners’ off to Third World countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term ‘extraordinary rendition,’ a hauntingly apt phrase.”
- Since I’m handing out headline awards: how’s about this one from the New York Post? Classless, yeah. But too fucking funny to resist.
- “Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled ‘criminal.’ Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling. Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers. A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes. Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries. Allegations of ‘significant tax evasion.’ The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces ‘murderers.’ With a new scandal breaking practically every day, one would think Blackwater security would be on the ropes, facing a corporate meltdown or even a total wipeout. But it seems that business for the company has never been better, as it continues to pull in major federal contracts. And its public demeanor grows bolder and cockier by the day.”
- DNA bigot is less intelligent than he thought. Y’know, because he’s black. Ouch.
- “Life knows us not and we do not know life — we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.”
- So what is an assault rifle?
- “Forged from Irish church bells, consecrated metals and crucifixes, Hellboy’s Samaritan is the most sacred sidearm in comics. And it’s got monster-specific bullets including garlic and holy water just to make sure the job’s done right.”
- See, this is the sort of thing that inspires atheism. Or at least the kind of visceral contempt usually reserved for a drunken excursion through the greeting card aisle of Wal-Mart.
- X-mas is fast approaching, and if you still haven’t bought me anything . . .
- A belated well-wishing, but none the less heartfelt.
- “A hectic, frenzied pinpoint in desolation: booming, bleak, and dark with the horror of loneliness and reluctant solitude. Patchouli and cardamom with bright mandarin, labdanum, muguet, red sandalwood, angelica and gardenia.”
- South Park meets the Aristocrats.
- Y’know, I’ve thought about doing this ever since I read The Crying of Lot 49. But there always seemed better purposes to vandalism.
- “Whatever our intent, such rhetoric promulgates the dangerous myth of the ‘universal sisterhood’ of third and first world females. The myth of the ‘universal sisterhood’ of all females is based on bourgeois reactionary essentialist views of gender. First world females are enemies of the third world generally, including third world females.”
- “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.”
- I support the troops who oppose the war.
- Stop supporting the troops. The troops demand it.
- Cigarette butts only. I have no truck with gum-chewers. I leave that to Messrs. Paine and Martin.
- “My books are about killing God.” Which is exactly why I love them. And why I’ve been buying copies for every child of reading age I know.
- Oh, horseshit. You’ve got miles to go before you’ll reach even the least slackjawed counties here in Colorado. We’ve got you out-slackjawed by fucking leagues. (See above.)
- “In less than two years, the lease on the largest and most important US military base in Latin America will run out. The base is in Manta, Ecuador, and Rafael Correa, the country’s leftist president, has pronounced that he will renew the lease ‘on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami–an Ecuadorean base. If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.’”
- Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones.
- “I lived under tyranny and lived under his freedom. I don’t see any difference. I think Bush’s freedom and Saddam’s are alike. We were harassed under Saddam as students, and today’s students are harassed under the new ‘free’ rule.”
- The Rocky has a new look! Content still sucks!
- Christopher Hitchens groped by publisher. Not metaphorically.
- Doesn’t anybody edit Clint Talbott? I mean, “purity’s being vanquished by villainy”? Christ, somebody beat the baroque out of him. That’s the sort of purple prose that could get one drummed out of an eighth grade creative writing workshop. (I get his underlying point, though. I mean, millionaire Boulderites conspire to steal land from another pair of millionaires, and I should care? You could carpet bomb the whole yuppie paradise, and I doubt I’d shed a tear.)
- “Take the entire text of the Bible and copy it into Microsoft Word. Then do a Find/Replace command where you find all instances of the word “God” and replace them with something like “Phil”. Now give that text to any four-year-old and ask them who the bad guy is.”
- Paul Campos is so so so so so much smarter than you. A note to Mr. Campos: you have a weekly column in a newspaper read by
hundreds of, tens of, okay, thousands. If the only subject you can come up with is how much smarter you are than, like, everyone else, I submit you’ve just provided irrefutable evidence to the contrary of your claim.
- “Being extremely intelligent is rather like fucking sheep — once you’ve got a reputation for either, it’s extremely difficult to get rid of it.” (Methinks, Paul Campos was once thusly labeled. And the rest of us have been paying penance ever since.)
- Hank Willis Thomas. Make sure you check out the “Branded” section, especially the Columbus card. (Thanks to Dustin.)
- Cooking with Norman Mailer. (Which I stole from the same place I stole “Cooking with Flannery O’Connor” in the last one of these. I’m really bad at this whole proper attribution thing. But, y’know, it’s a blog.)
- Remembering Baudrillard.
- “Messages From Our Troops To The Families They Can Barely Remember.”
- “Ward Churchill: On Perpetual War, State Sponsored Terrorism, and the Limits of Academic Dissent.”
- “A shoe-donation program inflicts Crocs on already-suffering Dominican children.”
- “Let’s waterboard Michael Mukasey.“
- “I’m Troubled About My Soul.”
- Cooking with Flannery O’Connor.
- Ernesto Vigil has challenged me to a duel. Or something.
- Oprah needs to hire a consultant. She needs to hire me. Every one of her missteps could’ve been easily avoided. There were reviews calling out James Frey as full of shit a good year before the news broke on her show, and the Education of Little Tree’s been outed as hoax for more than a decade. (And I certainly could’ve warned her that even her much sought plug couldn’t get housewives to wade through Faulkner.) I could save her from herself. I could spare her the yearly roasting from the literary community. All I ask is that she make me filthy rich. And choose Feast of Snakes for her next bookclub pick.
- “But if you go looking for the man’s true spirit, an epitaph to cap off a frustrating but at times brilliant career, you need only turn to Jim Thompson’s final days. Bedridden in his tiny apartment above Hollywood Boulevard, wracked by a series of devastating strokes that debilitated both his motor and oral skills, Thompson knew he could no longer write or even spit out the words in his head. And so, whispering to his wife that a life without words was no life at all, Thompson simply stopped eating. Until he passed away.”
- Star Trek just won’t die. Fuck.
- Ain’t there a Mumbai Al Qaeda chapter that could deal with this?
- “How can Naomi Klein top No Logo, the most influential political polemic of the past 20 years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and ‘export processing zones’ on to our cheap designer lives - and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right — that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history — and shown that it is, simply, a lie.”
- Blue Ash killer cop video. For those of you who don’t know, Blue Ash is one of the more posh suburbs of Cincinnati, a city known worldwide for its killer cops.
- Wasn’t there a William S. Burrough story about a guy with an asshole implanted in his forehead? Well, now it’s actually possible. Possibilities abound. Picture, if you will, Dan Caplis with a pair of testicles hanging between his eyes.
- See 3:10 to Yuma. Best Western I’ve seen since The Proposition. And that’s a mouthful.
- The Denver Post: finding a whole new level of irrelevance.
