{fire breather}

Heroes

2007-12-31T00:39:00.000-06:00

Everyone I look up to is better than me.

Late Night Quotations: Capitalism

2007-12-23T00:48:00.000-06:00

"I never knew a girl- I mean a woman- who believed in the capitalist system who was any kind of a good fuck."

- Robert Anton Wilson via George Dorn from "the Eye in the Pyramid"

Breath

2007-12-16T22:31:00.000-06:00

My breath is not my breath, but air.
My shit is not my shit, but food.
My body is not my body, but atoms, cells, and instructions.
My thoughts are not my thoughts, but time.
My movements are not my movements, but heat, electricity, and friction.
My life is not my life, but life.

I am not nothing, I am everything. As is everything.

Late Night Quotations: Lovecraft

2007-12-11T00:03:00.000-06:00

"If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night."

-H.P. Lovecraft
from: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.

Well Hello Brazil

2007-12-08T21:23:00.000-06:00

Wow! I just got a comment! The first one in months! Oh gee, the internet is swell huh? People coming together, sharing their experiences; becoming more human through technology! Well what does this nice person have to say?

Oi, achei seu blog pelo google está bem interessante gostei desse post. Gostaria de falar sobre o CrXXXXXet. O CrXXXXXet é um provedor de internet discada que remunera seus usuários pelo tempo conectado. Exatamente isso que você leu, estão pagando para você conectar. O provedor paga 20 centavos por hora de conexão discada com ligação local para mais de 2100 cidades do Brasil. O CrXXXXXet tem um acelerador de conexão, que deixa sua conexão até 10 vezes mais rápida. Quem utiliza banda larga pode lucrar também, basta se cadastrar no CresceNet e quando for dormir conectar por discada, é possível pagar a ADSL só com o dinheiro da discada. Nos horários de minuto único o gasto com telefone é mínimo e a remuneração do CrXXXXXet generosa. Se você quiser linkar o Cresce.Net(www.proXXXXXXscenet.com) no seu blog eu ficaria agradecido, até mais e sucesso. If is possible add the CrXXXXet(www.proXXXXXXscenet.com) in your blogroll, I thank. Good bye friend.

Wow I guess someone in Brazil is interested in my idle musings. Too bad I don't speak Portuguese. But wait! The internet does. Let's take a look at the translated version.

Oi, I found its blog for google is well interesting I liked this post. It would like to speak on the CrXXXXXet. The CrXXXXXet is a dialed supplier of InterNet that remunerates its users for the hardwired time. Accurately this that you read, is paying you to connect. The paid supplier 20 cents for the moment of connection dialed with local linking for more than 2100 cities of Brazil. The CrXXXXXet has a connection accelerator, that leaves its faster connection up to 10 times. Who uses broad band can also profit, is enough to register in cadastre itself in the CrXXXXXet and when it will be to sleep to connect for dialed, it is possible to pay the ADSL alone with the money of the dialed one. In the schedules of only minute the expense with telephone is minimum and the remuneration of the generous CrXXXXXet. If you I to want to linkar CrXXXXXet(www.provXXXXXXXXenet.com) in its blog I would be been thankful, until more and success. If is possible add the CresceNet(www.proXXXXXXXXet.com) in your blogroll, I thank. Good bye friend.

Well great! I'm being fucking solicited! Thanks a bunch internet for getting me connected. This offer is just too good to be true, so I'm going to have to pass. But for the rest of you who just can't wait to copy and paste a message to me to coax me into buying something, don't bother waiting, I love it! Check back in a few weeks when my new site ePanHandler (www.epanhands.com) should be up and running. Until then, shop till you drop. Good bye Friend.

NOTE: I obviously butchered the links to this too good to be true site, because it is just way, WAY too good to be true and I wouldn't want anyone to stumble willy-nilly into the best deal ever!

Size + Numbers

2007-11-27T23:31:00.000-06:00

The problem is really just one of size and number. Who is to say that a car (even a hummer) is not as amazing, as awe inspiring, as a birds nest? In fact most human technology elicits disdain these days. But we just make to much. We have to much, and we are to large a species for it to go uncapped. Eliminate the poles of want and need and we shall find our situation fast improving.

Shit Talking the World Behind its Back: Truism Vs. Cholak Vs. Gauck

2007-11-09T14:09:00.000-06:00

A documented chat between myself and two of my closest friends. This is from nearly a year ago. Many of the frustrations are the same, many of the points still valid, many of the false assumptions still present. This is a far cry from the truth. It’s a far cry from coherent. What it is is an audio snapshot of a time in our lives when nothing is certain, and everything is oppositional. Right before you accept the fact that you can’t burn this Earth down.

the Heartbeat of Human History

2007-11-07T00:14:00.000-06:00

"It is history what makes a human; not a heartbeat."

To the best of my knowledge, this is a quote from myself, from earlier this evening.

In a Wolf's Eye

2007-11-05T19:48:00.000-06:00

Wolf Eyes Part 1

Wolf Eyes Part 2

This interview with the band Wolf Eyes is all the way back from last November, but I never really put it up. It was my opinion that nothing terribly interesting came of it, but I guess some people might be interested in this stuff. Noise rock is still kind of the hot ticket around town, although fun and dance is making a comeback. I'm personally not very enthusiastic about either iteration of self-indulgence, but hey, whatever makes you sweat right?

The band was fun to chat with though, and the Article was eventually published in last year's December issue of Thirsty. They have some video up to go along with the article.

Here's what I had to say at the time:

In the future all anyone will listen to is extreme noise music. This is, of course, if the future ends up anything like Neal Stephenson's book "Snow Crash."

Until the other night I would have found a future filled with personal nuclear devices, deliverators, metaverses, and extreme noise pop the work of mere fantasy, but thanks to Second Life and Wolf Eyes, Snow Crash might not be so far off the mark after all. We're still a far cry from 13 year olds sof the future helving their equivalent Justin Timberlakes and Maria Carreys , but the disenchanted twenty somethings have found their new fix.

It's strange to catch such a clear glimpse. Wolf Eyes finished up their latest US Tour with Sub Pop Records last month at the Empty Bottle. The usual band of black enshrouded youths came out to see the show, but the people who turn out to Wolf Eyes are different than you might expect.

How can you do better than one type of music that apparently satiates all urges simultaneously? I have never seen so many reactions to music (you know, dancing) in one place, and I was at the 1993 Indianapolis Culture Fest baby! There was: headbanging, moshing, booty-shaking, struttin, the new-wave shake, pogoing, convulsions, you name it, it was happening to the tune of squeeling feedback, pounding bass, and hemorrhaging screams.

Talk to Wolf Eyes about it and they will just tell you they do what they do. Maybe that is what it will take to propel us into the future; everyone just doing what they do, and pouring their guts into it.

I still feel pretty much the same way about it. So you know, that past has been revised slightly. If you care, it's your own problem. The re-re-re-released Blade Runner didn't they?

Public Sex

2007-11-04T22:09:00.000-06:00

So I've come to terms with something. This isn't about anything. This isn't the truth, and this isn't life. I'm just making public an ongoing argument I'm having with myself. An argument that will never be over, because I will never win, and I will never know what I'm talking about. I am look forward to knowing less though. Tune in or out at your leisure. I'll be around cursing myself to the high heavens; trying to milk the necessary inspiration from the cracks of the Earth so I can go on living. The only advice I will ever give is this: find out what makes you want to live. That is all. If you never find it, well then you'll be dead soon anyway, and you can stop fretting. Good night.

Our Little Efforts

2007-11-01T13:09:00.000-06:00

It's funny to me, the little attempts us "bloggers" make to keep our sites going. To keep getting "pinged", and keep accumulating those page hits. We're just junkies for recognition. Some of us/ them/ whatever have a real voice, but the rest of us are busy expending our energy on something that doesn't amount to any more than hanging around a big fucking water cooler. For some of us, the pay off is even less direct than that, because some of us (like me) can go for years and not hear a single damn thing from a single damn soul. The fact is that most of us are just floating around in the dark; clueless as to how to approach honesty, or truth, or accurately convey even our own desires. Is this for anyone, or just for us? Does it help us sleep at night, or it is just another manifestation of one of humanities most pronounced manias: to be connected. There is also the compulsive element of tracking the page hits as they come in. The sense of accomplishment we feel when 6 people in one day stumbled through our URL; which says nothing to the extent that they actually read, or thought about anything we had to say. They were just here. Customers walking into your store (as many as 5 in a day) but none of them buying a damn thing. It's like self-validating by bumping into people on the street. I say all of this now because I look back at my own little corner of the increasingly broad, complex, and angular internet, and I just see an attempt to milk relevance. The last month has been filler. Plain and simple. I'm a cad. I'm a coward. Or maybe I have been thinking, but I haven't felt that any other part of existence need have anything to do with me. That's how it is, right? We're all in this alone, and no blog, no zine, no book, no record, will pull us out of our own voids. I don't know what I am doing, or why at this point, but energy is flaking off of me daily, and sometimes it might take the form of words. WORDS...

Crispin Glover is Fine, Everything is Fine!

2007-11-01T09:22:00.000-06:00

Second Interview I’ve conducted with Crispin Glover. This one following the viewing of the second film of his “It Trilogy, “It is Fine, Everything is Fine!”

The screenplay was written, and the film stars the late Steven C. Stewart, who was afflicted with cerebral palsy. He wrote himself into somewhat of a fantasy where he indulges a hair fetish, graphic sex, and murder. An incredibly challenging film to watch, but one that is very rewarding because it presupposes that the audience is capable of dealing with complex issues and emotions.

An even more thorough report can be found at Thirsty Media.

Link to older interview with Crispin about his first film, "What is It?"

Late Night Quotations: Poetry

2007-11-01T00:23:00.000-06:00

"A poem must be a debacle of the intellect. It cannot be anything but."

-Andre' Breton

Rings

2007-10-14T22:19:00.000-06:00

I can tell 'cause you look confused. (place ad here)

Late Night Quotations: Film

2007-10-11T23:30:00.000-06:00

“Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life.”

“For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.”

-Werner Herzog

The Worst

2007-10-04T13:33:00.000-06:00

The worst fate that can presently befall us is the opening of those silos, and the launching of those bombs. But wont that be exciting?

Late Night Quotations: Fear

2007-10-01T21:25:00.000-06:00

"I, a stranger and afraid in a world I never made."
-A.E. Housman

In celebration of October, see my post on Rotovator on the Best Horror Stories I've Read. Good Night.

Late Night Quotations: Pere Ubu

2007-09-28T00:53:00.000-06:00

"Pere Ubu is not now nor has it ever been a viable commercial venture. We won't sleep on floors, we won't tour endlessly and we're embarrassed by self-promotion. Add to that a laissez-faire attitude to the mechanics of career advancement and a demanding artistic agenda and you've got a recipe for real failure. That has been our one significant success to this date: we are the longest-lasting, most disastrous commercial outfit to ever appear in rock 'n' roll. No one can come close to matching our loss to longevity ratio."

–David Thomas of Pere Ubu.
(because I just saw them live and they were great.)

Late Night Quotations: DaDA

2007-09-26T23:26:00.002-06:00

"Each page ought to explode, either from deep and weighty seriousness, a whirlwind, dizziness, the new, or the eternal, from its crushing humor, the enthusiasm, of principles, or its typographical appearance. Here is a tottering world fleeing, future spouse of the bells of the infernal scale, and here on the other side: new men. Harsh, leaping, riders of hiccups. Hare are the mutilated wold and the literary medicine men with a passion for improvement."

-Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto.

Construction Worker

2007-09-26T23:26:00.001-06:00

Apologies dear reader. The ass I have been putting into this as of late is half at best. Amazing how quickly we have become so ensnared by the internet. (An hour later) I wasn't even two sentences into this when was swept away by the current. I've just now resurfaced after watching an hour of John Stewart videos. The point is, I have dozens and dozens of books at my fingertips. I have dozens of projects sitting on my desk and in my head that I haven't done. It was a beautiful day outside today, and I have a lot of good friends that live in the same apartment or next door to me. We're so afraid of not having enough time to do everything that we do nothing. Remember our imaginations? Weren't those great? Remember when we could think up, and then execute things because we didn't care. There were no consequences. And most of the things I want to do right now at this very moment have no consequences. They don't cost anything, and they would be very good things to have done. I resent the fact that my brain has changed. I resent that it isn't as plastic as it used to be. I resent the fact that real learning takes effort. I resent the fact that unless I really watch myself, I can fall effortlessly into an hour of fluff. I resent that I spend days with nothing to show or remember from them. Not that we don't need to work at things, and practice skills, and get smarter, and better, but I don't think I even accomplish that most days. What do I remember today? I remember that I got some groceries. I remember I spent a bunch of time trying to track down some old Fela Kuti records. I watched a video of an emotive robot begging not to be shut off. But so fucking what!?! It was interesting, but what the hell can I do with that? There are two things we can do with information. We can use it to make different, more complex information, or when can use it to give us an idea of how to use that information.Bricks and blueprints. I want to be a construction worker. I want to build things with my mind. So I should probably get off my fucking computer and do some of those things. See you.

Late Night Quotations: Meaningless

2007-09-20T23:36:00.000-06:00

"Even a meaningless universe has meaning. Accept that and everything makes a new kind of sense."

-JG Ballard

Midday Quotations: Poetry

2007-09-16T15:30:00.001-06:00

"If you've lived this long, it's because you've squashed any poetry you had in you."

-Celine. Journey to the End of the Night.

Late Night Quotations: Laziness

2007-09-12T10:38:00.001-06:00

"Laziness is almost as compelling as life."

-Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

Our God Our Ad

2007-09-10T16:49:00.000-06:00

So we're a generation of lazy kids, with bad jobs, who are all moving back in to our parents basements. We value little above being momentarily entertained. We can't focus for long enough to finish a book let alone a three minute song. We can't do any one thing without at least three others blinking, tinking, and whirring away in the background.

Was there any thought given to the environment we were raised in? Has our parent generation considered the fact that they let the foxes into the hen house, and we are the result of a generation raised by advertisements. We have spent the entirety of our lives being bombarded with images, all promising happiness through consumption. A culture where the best that we can aspire to be is an entertainer or, better yet, entertained. A substance free zone where the content of everything amounts to it's dollar value, and the viability of an idea rests on it's ratings.

We are not victims, we are products. This is what happens when you've taken in more visuals by your twenty first birthday than your grandparents did in their entire lifetime. Advertising is our religion. It feeds us all. Clothes us. Surrounds us. Newspapers, magazines, BLOGS, run on advertising money. Everything we know, we know because of advertising. Our truth is sold to us. Our reality is motivated by profit.

So where does that leave ideas? Was Hitler just wrong because he fought a war for ideals, and US right because we now fight a war for profit. The current Iraq War is the most privatized war in the history of warfare. A lot of people are making a lot of money off this stuff. It's not a conspiracy, it's business. There is no agenda beyond profit. There is no truth but the ad.

And we've been conditioned our whole lives to believe in the ad. We bought it when Optimus Prime told us to, and we bought it when Bush did. We had better whip up some awareness and analysis fast before we buy our own destruction.

a billion

2007-09-05T09:17:00.000-06:00

A billion blades of grass and all it ever occurs to me to do is lie in it, sit on it, and whistle. Well that just won't cut it anymore. If you're too scared to call yourself an artist, it's probably because you aren't one! You're a human being. And human beings can be all sorts of things can't they? A billion human beings and all it ever occurs to me to do is be an artist.

Tune out...

2007-08-28T09:02:00.001-06:00

I haven't been around the internet as of late, and thank god! I am of a generation addicted to cheap information, and menial entertainment. We can't go a couple hours without tuning in. Our idea of human interaction is to get a group of our smart, intelligent, creative friends together in a dark room, and then sit silently while a movie of no real consequence plays on an illuminated screen. After the credits roll, well, the evening is over, unless of course, some of you would like to hang around and get drunk to further assist your slide out. I am just as plagued by this virus as the rest of us, and I know I want to change. TV, the internet, movies, theses are all way harder to kick than heroin. I'm not urging asceticism. No. By all means, we are a culture of commodity. Tap into that, react to that. Mix it up, hurl it around, break it, play it, rip it, share it, just don't revere it like we have been. Our entire generation is the result of a marketing campaign. We have been programmed since the beginning to value fun above all else, but if we're just watching somebody else's' version of fun (no matter how clever, or involving) we're just being entertained.

Humanity is at our fingertips. We have more connectedness than at any other point in history. Use it. Walk outside. Get your friends together who all know and respect each other, and put on a play. Not to take to the stage, but for your fucking selves. Stop playing music to be recorded and put up on myspace. Play music for yourselves! Write notes to send through the mail that don't make any sense. Invent new languages. Go climb a goddamned tree (they won't be around much longer). Ask personal questions of people you know (or don't know). Anything, just don't watch a movie for a while. Puproseless, unquantifiable, unprofitable human experience, they'll hate it. And once you tune yourself out of their barrage, because everything you do is EXACTLY what you're supposed to, you will be unreachable, and they're wont be a damn thing those bastards up in marketing will be able to do to get you back. Just forget.

We have a programmed fear of "missing out on life" if we don't turn on the TV every so often, or watch X number of movies a week, or listen to X number of songs. This stuff is our culture and our joy, not our responsibility; not our compulsions, or addictions, or fetishes. Have an armpit fetish, don't waste something that personal on the tubes. So tune out. Tune out. Tune out. Tune out. Sign off.

Biological Myths Debunked!

2007-08-21T09:58:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on I'm So Smart Now

Alright, so this isn't news to me (because I'm so smart, duh!) but apparently there are alot of you out there who still believe stuff like this. ...A LOT! Could have something to do with that fact that we came in 33 out of 34 surveyed countries in terms of our acceptance of EVOLUTION! So anyway, you don't have to stop believing in God or Leprechauns yet, but let's at least put two big myths about us humans in the ground.

First up, the assumption (ASSUMPTION! This CAN and IS proven every day) that men have two fewer ribs than women, since God had to take a pair from Adam to make Eve. But dig this, that's not true. Men and women BOTH have 12 pairs of ribs. Period. There is no argument to be made here, just the calm acceptance of the fact that you have spent you life under a false assumption. Link if you still don't believe me.

Secondly, lets address the less biblical belief that oxygenated blood is blue. It is not. It is certainly a deeper, more purple tinged color, but a far cry from blue. It is our veins that look blue through our skin, it is not a result of the royal blue blood that floweth through all of our veins.

Longer, redder wavelengths, though, can penetrate more deeply into the skin than shorter, bluer wavelengths before reflecting out. A vein looks blue because red light travels far enough into the skin to be absorbed by the blood in the vein. If the blood vessel is far enough below the skin, however, blue light--which would normally also be absorbed by the vein--reflects out of the skin before reaching the vein. So the light reflecting from tissue over the vein contains less red light than blue, giving the vein a bluish cast.

From the MadSci Network. Try this experiment if you still don't believe anyone.

So sleep soundly with a slightly better understanding of yourself tonight. Know your own body if nothing else. Maybe next week we'll get on to the widely held bullshit that there is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. Yeah...we'll get on to that for sure.

Best Minds of My Generation

2007-08-19T17:34:00.001-06:00

I've seen the best minds of my generation roll over. I've seen the best minds of my generation turn soft, and give up before so much as raising a finger. I've seen the best minds of my generation decide not to reproduce. I've watched as they've spent more energy writing off than writing. Shallow complaints and bitter self-defeatism is the legacy of my generation. The belief that we can't win anyway so we might as well cash in on our cut. The belief that the armor of this giant is impenetrable, and that our own minds are unreachable. I've seen the best minds of my generation ignore the rest of the minds. Preemptive defeat. Take marketing and advertising jobs, forget and ignore art, write off culture, scoff at change, debase content, and laud creativity. There's no movement because there's no movements. We are alone, inside our rooms, or in our clothes. We are too busy being cool, or too entertained to stay mad for more that 2 and a half minutes, which is not enough time to make it to Washington on a bus, car, or bike, and physically depose the regime which all of us admittedly despise. Our parents have left us for dead, and our children will be brought up in ghost towns. Our culture is absent. We are a barcode culture, a dollar culture, a sale culture, and a spent culture. I've seen the best minds of my generation bought and sold, because they were the best, but all we got is this lousy t-shirt.

Late Night Quotations: Eggs

2007-07-30T22:35:00.000-06:00

"Instead of asking which came first, the chicken of the egg, it suddenly seemed that a chicken was an egg's idea for getting more eggs."

-Marshall McLuhan

Bush on the Constitution

2007-07-22T18:46:00.000-06:00

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!"
-President George W. Bush

from Political Cortex

What's Left?

2007-07-21T00:59:00.001-06:00

I am so goddamned fucking sick of the state of everything these days! Our government is a sham of illegitimate murderous authority. Our cultural output amounts to nothing more than price tags and barcodes. All means of expression have been effectively snatched up and sold back to us for a price; DRM'ed to all hell, and with restricted access. It's a sad goddamned state of affairs when you can walk around a whole city like Chicago and not find a single fucking thing to even remotely draw you in. There is no analysis, there is no intelligence, there is no thought left in this damn world. Our cultural artifacts are nick nacks. We've sold out our history, our identity. Who the fuck are we? What do we stand for? What do we enjoy? Do we support war? murder? Torture? Do we feel that Public Broadcasting should be dismantled? Do we believe that education and health care are unimportant? Do we believe we live under a representative government? Do we believe crying "bullshit" is doing something? I don't. That's why I feel I'm at the end of my fucking rope. What's left? I love reading. I love music. I love movies. I enjoy my friends, and I like riding my bike. What the hell can I do, if I can't enjoy these things? How can I enjoy these things when everything is so out of whack? I can't just drop out and chase my own personal enjoyment around while people go around murdering in the name of a nation I was born into. When greed reduces the possibility for survival on this planet every single day! When music means nothing, and self-expression is nothing more than credibility for commercials. What's left? Where are we going? Why are we going? At least nuclear war promises a quick death.

By executive order of the assumed President

2007-07-19T23:30:00.000-06:00

No commentary. Decide for yourself if you think our government is still serving the people. I'm done.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

Section 1. (a) Except to the extent provided in section 203(b)(1), (3), and (4) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(1), (3), and (4)), or in regulations, orders, directives, or licenses that may be issued pursuant to this order, and notwithstanding any contract entered into or any license or permit granted prior to the date of this order, all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;

(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or

(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.

(b) The prohibitions in subsection (a) of this section include, but are not limited to, (i) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order, and (ii) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

Sec. 2. (a) Any transaction by a United States person or within the United States that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.

Sec. 3. For purposes of this order:

(a) the term "person" means an individual or entity;

(b) the term "entity" means a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization; and

(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States.

Sec. 4. I hereby determine that the making of donations of the type specified in section 203(b)(2) of IEEPA (50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)) by, to, or for the benefit of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order would seriously impair my ability to deal with the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, and I hereby prohibit such donations as provided by section 1 of this order.

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.

Sec. 6. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, is hereby authorized to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, and to employ all powers granted to the President by IEEPA as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of this order. The Secretary of the Treasury may redelegate any of these functions to other officers and agencies of the United States Government, consistent with applicable law. All agencies of the United States Government are hereby directed to take all appropriate measures within their authority to carry out the provisions of this order and, where appropriate, to advise the Secretary of the Treasury in a timely manner of the measures taken.

Sec. 7. Nothing in this order is intended to affect the continued effectiveness of any rules, regulations, orders, licenses, or other forms of administrative action issued, taken, or continued in effect heretofore or hereafter under 31 C.F.R. chapter V, except as expressly terminated, modified, or suspended by or pursuant to this order.

Sec. 8. This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE WHITE HOUSE,

July 17, 2007.

from Whitehouse.gov

Terminal Simpsons

2007-07-18T23:37:00.001-06:00

I'm sick of putting on a smile and playing nice for untalented idiots offering minimum wage to work on some bullshit project that they just expect people to roll over and ejaculate money all over. Whatever garbage idea they've coughed out of their dwarf minds and hired some gutless slob to piss together for them. The shit part of the deal is that they're probably half right. People will do almost anything to not have to spend their money on something worthwhile. Why not capitalize on that by selling idiots poison?

Prostitution of the body I can deal with, but I refuse to whore out my mind to these chimps. And you, stop paying for your own slow death! Read a goddamn book, or have sex or an actual conversation with a human being. Not over the phone line that fucking AT & T owns. Not over the internet which is the same. Walk outside, down your block. Throw something at someone and run away. Do any and everything genuine to keep YOUR money from going to support causes of such profound fuckery that you not only cause damage to yourself, but succeed in slowing progress by supporting their shit. I'm talking about TV. I'm talking about the Transformers Movie. I'm talking about (yes this too) the Simpsons Movie, I'm talking about the new White Stripes album, and the new Smashing Pumpkins tour. I'm saying fuck all because what has any of it ever done for you? And goddamnit stop going because "you know it's going to suck anyway." Your irony doesn't negate your 10 dollar movie tickets. If you know something blows, DON'T SEE IT! They don't fucking care where their million dollars comes from. You could write "fuck you George Lucas" on every single one of those goddamned bills, and he'd still have a million fucking dollars, and you'd still be wasting your time. So STOP! By all means STOP! ...unless of course you liked the Transformers Movie, the Star Wars prequels, you think the White Stripes are every bit as valid as Zeppelin, and the Simpsons, well you grew up with them., so...

Late Night Quotations: Commercials

2007-07-17T23:38:00.000-06:00

"Everything's a commercial."
-Jerry Cassale

Animals

2007-07-16T23:55:00.000-06:00

How dare we consider ourselves civilized! Just go to a monkey house at any zoo and take in the stark contrast. Kids running around screaming, climbing displays, parents yelling, babies crying, adults shouting, and slack jawed morons loudly disapproving of the "animals" relieving themselves inside a box of clear glass. The apes, by comparison, are well practiced stoics; calmly pondering the sad state that have been reduced to; meanwhile their next of kin contentedly chew on rubber footballs. They rape, and shit, and kill, and bellow, and fight too, of course, but they never made a bomb. They still haven't made Shakespeare either, but none of us read anymore, so the only advantage we have is being on the outside of the glass.

Late Night Quotations: Celine

2007-07-13T01:23:00.000-06:00

"There won't be any love to spare in this world as long as there's five francs!"
-Celine "Journey to the End of the Night

Play Age

2007-07-11T21:31:00.000-06:00

To return to the unfettered freedom of the age when all creativity was play. Before we got scared, and got talented, and got skilled. Before there was pressure, and deadlines (besides bedtime), and style. To build with blocks as if nothing mattered. To scribble effortlessly until a satisfactory result was produced. The projects whose barrels we stare down today have more in the execution certainly, but should we fear them so much more? To be incapacitated to the point of never starting. To be paralyzed by self standards to the point of automatic and preemptive failure? A critic with nothing to offer. Isn't that thought more frightening than mere play with unsatisfactory results? So build for the sake of building, create for the sake of creating. Create for the moment, create to have it destroyed. Put blocks together and tear them apart when they are required for new constructions. If we fail at doing we get better; if we fail to do we simply fail. Play with everything for the sake of fun and invention in the universe. Play with everything for the sake of fun and inventions in thee universe. Playe withee eeveryting fur thee faun and envention inn the unoverse.

Video Bizarre

2007-07-11T08:37:00.001-06:00

Attention video junkies, psychotic maniacs, gore freaks, exploitation mavens, and cult covetists: come check out and join, and contribute to this great new community over at Video Bizarre. Destined to be a haven for the aforementioned characters. You know, people like me give or take. Regardless, it's an exciting little pocket of the internet I have recently found, and I'm just doing my part to fill it out. See you there.

Renunciation

2007-07-09T07:36:00.000-06:00

I've grown stupid and obsessed chasing this mythic thing called art. It doesn't exist! There is no art! There is no genuine. There is no valid. There only is. The rest can be accounted for by taste. The time has come to stop taking "non-art" as an affront to my existence. Nothing I do is art. Nothing I enjoy is art. What then am I chasing? Happiness? Everyone I despise has already found that in the things that I hate. Meaning? When there clearly is none? I'd given up on meaning before the candles were out on my eleventh birthday. There is nothing, just alternate periods of fucking and getting fucked for no good reason in particular. Where is it genius? I haven't done anything because of "it." Sat for years in my room and on the couch paralyzed because it might be out there somewhere and I hadn't found it. It has made me hate everything real because I have become obsessed with this thing. Why have you forsaken me? I grew up believing in you. Believing you were possible; within reach. Turns out you're just a bedtime story for dreamers. I wish I had never heard of you. You've ruined my life, stolen my joy, stifled my creativity, smashed my images; you paralyze me with what you purportedly do. I renounce you art. Nothing is art. Everything is nothing. Experience, now there's a god worth praying to.

Late Night (Early Morning) Quotations No.22: Literacy

2007-07-08T10:59:00.000-06:00

"The only function of literacy is to attract illiterate girls."
-Jacob Cholak

Late Night Quotations No.21: Custom

2007-07-06T00:42:00.000-06:00

"Custom is the law of fools"
-Vanbrugh

Come on People Now

2007-07-04T11:58:00.000-06:00

Here's an excellent but of inspiration via Cinema Blend via BoingBoing. I saw Sicko in the comfort of my own living and it inspired similar sentiment, to (proportionally) the same amount of people. I devoted the night to action. I have been temporarily thwarted by technological and financial constraints, but hope to overcome soon. In the meantime, we need more stuff like this. DIRECT ACTION. Everybody get together. Let's change this thing. The Health Care giants want us to believe that our society will crumble and fall in their absence, but they are not the foundation of this society, WE ARE. We can change this right now! Let's do it. Look like Texas has a head start. Everyone watch this movie, and everyone do something. You'd better believe something will give.

From Cinema Blend:

When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.

I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos. The entire Sicko audience had somehow formed an impromptu town hall meeting in front of the ladies room. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is Texas goddammit, not France or some liberal college campus. But here these people were, complete strangers from every walk of life talking excitedly about the movie. It was as if they simply couldn’t go home without doing something drastic about what they’d just seen. My redneck compadre and his new friend found their wives at the center of the group, while I lingered in the background waiting for my spouse to emerge.

The talk gradually centered around a core of 10 or 12 strangers in a cluster while the rest of us stood around them listening intently to this thing that seemed to be happening out of nowhere. The black gentleman engaged by my redneck in the restroom shouted for everyone’s attention. The conversation stopped instantly as all eyes in this group of 30 or 40 people were now on him. “If we just see this and do nothing about it,” he said, “then what’s the point? Something has to change.” There was silence, then the redneck’s wife started calling for email addresses. Suddenly everyone was scribbling down everyone else’s email, promising to get together and do something… though no one seemed to know quite what.

Torrent Links. I don't know which ones are good or not, and I hear the Weinsteins have some fake sites out there that grab your info, so be careful, but watch this movie anyway you can.

Virtual Tax

2007-07-02T08:45:00.000-06:00

I just heard today the China is going to begin taxing real world transactions in environments like Second Life and Worlds of Warcraft. What strikes me as particularly irksome about this is that those "virtual communities" are actually "real" communities. They are autonomous worlds complete with their own rules, customs, laws, and economies. I'm not trying to say that Worlds of Warcraft be declared an independent nations, but Second Life, maybe. If we fall under the control of our governments in realms beyond their boundaries, then all opportunities for autonomy are truly closed. They forget that we can mount our own armies in these worlds. Second life could easily attack a government mainframe. Digital warriors bringing the computers of the strongest nations on Earth to their knees. Of course, all they have to destroy would be the servers hosting that world. We'd have to take down the whole country. But regardless, worlds like Second Life allow us to transcend the boundaries of our own nations. They allow us the freedom to be whatever we want and create whatever we want, to be a true member of a global community not an American, or Chinese, but whatever you CHOOSE. Keep taxes out of our virtual existence.

In Defense of Myself

2007-07-02T08:04:00.000-06:00

There's been a lot of muck being hurled about lately harshly criticizing the explosion of user created web content, blogging, self-publishing, and the like. Admittedly many of the content on the web is mediocre, middle of the road, unimaginative, and unoriginal; perhaps well intended but poorly executed. But isn't that the majority of us human beings? We're trying our best, doing what can and saying what we feel. Not everyone can be on top, and not everyone can be on top all the time. Case in point, the major media networks. Take a moment to think what type of interest they might have in slamming bloggers, and hurranging Web2.0. They're threatened. And thank god! People are turning to blogs not because people are idiots, but because the networks are doing an inadequate job. Media was established as the fourth branch of government, but they have put down their arms and made comfy homes in the pockets of Washington. Say what you will about blogs, but they give Politicians and Networks reason to keep on their toes. Poorly written, reactionary, biased, or false, some blog somewhere will catch you. It will get out and you will hear about it. The blogosphere is dynamic, it is flexible. You know what you're getting into with a blog, and everything is peer reviewed constantly. They attack Wikipedia for being the product of amateurs, that "real" encyclopedias should be the be the one true authority. But on what grounds? Some anonymous group of people unelected and unverified telling us what we should accept as truth? Much better that we know who's hand it is that moves the pen, and are free to update, correct, reference, cite, and edit the entries at will. Collective expertise. And besides, it's probably not some high-school student from Muncie updating the Wiki for the USS Indiana, but it could be. He could have found some bit of information that no one else had put up. And he doesn't have to be told that he's too young, or too black, or has too many visible piercings, or not accomplished enough to know that. The point is, it's not disinterested unstudied people doing any of this on the web. They may have leagues to go in writing style, they may have years to go in research, but the people creating content on the web, shaking things up for all those who have sat in their nice seats of power for the last 100 years care about what they are doing, and most of them aren't getting a cent for it. Which is a way better indicator of expertise to me than any of the big checks being handed out to reporters and politicians these days.

(For clarification, I know very well that I am not above any of the loving criticisms I have hurled at the web in the preceding diatribe.)

Late Night Quotations No.20: Reality

2007-06-26T00:12:00.000-06:00

"Any representation of reality is an agreement that reality is a certain way."
-Paige Schilt

"Film: Here we are (in reality) creating a virtual reality we hope explains reality."
-JBS Haldane

"How can you be certain you know what reality is!"
-Montag

My Future Self and Me.

2007-06-20T21:40:00.000-06:00

We spend our lives chasing after who we want to be in the future. And today is never tomorrow so we are never who we think we are.

Late Night Quotations. No.19

2007-06-19T23:05:00.000-06:00

"The only way the lord has ever disciplined us is through fear. Kill a man and you impress a few people who already believe anyway. Kill a multitude and you can convince a nation."

-Larry Cohen's God Told Me To

Quotations No. 18

2007-06-18T11:54:00.001-06:00

"Art tells beautiful lies that come true."

"We demand decadence without sickness and health without boredom."

-Hakim Bey T.A.Z.

Late Night (Early Morning) Quotations No.17

2007-06-15T06:51:00.000-06:00

"The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground , took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

-Rousseau

A.S.P.

2007-06-14T07:01:00.001-06:00

I am hereby calling for the creation of an Anarchist Space Program (ASP for short). All opportunities for autonomy having been extinguished on the planet Earth, it is now necessary to take to the stars, literally. Groups and teams of tinkerers and pirates should plunder and invent their way into orbit. They should continue their trials until it becomes possible to sustain, and eventually generate life beyond the gravity of Earth. The Space Anarchists should not strive to colonize other planets or stars, for if they can make the journey there, it is only a matter of time before the real-estate agents touch down. They should drift freely through space creating art and music unique among the whole of the cosmos; not merely to survive uninhibited, but to create. To generate culture in the vacuum; completely free of all the controls but necessity. If they should be considered outlaws and ordered to stop (or worse, pay) under the laws that rule the Earth, then war should be declared on the Earth and the astro-anarchists should fight until dead or free. If humans attempt to extend their control into the vastness of space, then we truly deserve whichever fate befalls us. Be it death by disease, starvation, nuclear war, or the complete destruction of the planet's ecology; most likely a combination of all the above factors. Our only future lies in space, but our only hope will have to come from Earth.

Stacking

2007-06-12T22:37:00.001-06:00

You can spend your time walking or reading, but it wont stack up to nothing.

Stopping

2007-06-04T09:38:00.000-06:00

Life for me is a constant effort to remind myself that I need not stop learning.

As They Are.

2007-06-01T08:37:00.000-06:00

If we refuse to be employed and are unmotivated to work for ourselves, what is left for us but food, death, and entertainment?

We must find the things in life that drive us to perfection. Work at those things until they run out; then either die or admire the scenery.

In Defense of Information

2007-05-31T10:38:00.000-06:00

Do we value information more or humans less? Why do we keep secrets, hoard information, put prerequisites on it, and exclude and omit facts. Are we protecting the information from the inevitable tainting and watering down in the sea of intellects (or lack thereof). Or are we taking elitist stand, excluding the undesirable and unworthy. Insuring or wealth of knowledge by keeping the ignorant poor. Are we supreme in this world, or is information a more powerful organism than us? Are we the slaves of knowledge?

History is an Atom bomb

2007-05-31T10:32:00.000-06:00

We humans are the apocalypse. We are the plague. We are the scourge. Destruction is assured with the crystallization of our assumption of entitlement. We are the murderers of nature. We impose will on chaos with catastrophic results. A smoldering extinct planet will be the legacy of humanity. History is an atom bomb.

Late Night Quotations No.16

2007-05-29T23:44:00.000-06:00

"Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious."
-John Milton

In rememberance of things ahead

2007-05-28T23:03:00.000-06:00

It is hard sometimes to remember that life need not take a particular shape; that it is ope, variable, and analog. Life is an infinite spectrum, and the way we chose to live it is open and subject to change, and tinkering. Evolve history, invent existences, and tinker with possibility. Reject limitations and possibilities. We need not like a certain kind of music, we need not even like music. We don't have to watch movies, we don't have to wear shoes. We need not live in houses were four walls surround us. We need not make friends and stay in touch with families. We need not learn how to read, writing is purely optional, as is walking, eating, and speaking. We need not use computers, or tools. Art is not necessary, and civility is not mandatory. The law should certainly not stand in the way. The only barrier is that all of this is so easy to forget.

Accomplishments

2007-05-28T22:58:00.001-06:00

Perhaps all those times when I said that I didn't want to do any one thing I actually meant that I didn't want to do anything. Intelligence does not override laziness, nor is it adequate protection against failure. Creativity and intellect amount to nothing if you do nothing with them. They are tools as everything else is. They must be used to have any function whatsoever. My tools are gather rust. My tools are becoming dull. If being a smart loser was any sort of merit, I would go easier on myself. It is not however, so I still hope to overcome my fear of dedication.

Thinking is no accomplishment. Reading is no accomplishment. Living is no accomplishment. Understanding is no feat. There is only creation and failure.

Cultural Eugenics

2007-05-25T08:47:00.000-06:00

We are starved for adequate images and language. Over saturation and the breakdown of culture has resulted in a total war on the genuine. Are we evolving into one great monoculture; robust and efficient, but lacking in variation. Culturally we may evolve into somthing like a squirrel: prolific, pervasive, and mostly lacking in anything but slight genetic variation. Cultures, like organisms require isolation to grow unique. Pull these out into the open and they will lose their form like a bubble out of water. Do we need more Hollywoods? Do we need more Bennigans? Or Louvres? Or Hong Kongs?

I don't see any way of stopping this spread of cultural infection. I can only imagine what will be lost when it has reached every end of the Earth. By our cultures we will all become the same, and lose some of the magic that it is to be human.

Late Night Quotations No.15

2007-05-25T00:54:00.000-06:00

"The poet must not avert his eyes."
-Werner Herzog

Burning Down

2007-05-24T11:55:00.000-06:00

I'll be the first to admit it: I have lost some of that fire. I used to want to burn down the world. The result is wasted days that run into wasted nights. Weeks and months with nothing to say except that they say nothing. Missed opportunities for "new." Unstated experiments and unfinished projects. Laziness? What cause this. Responsibility? Why have I settled for letting the world happen when I used to want to fight it kicking and screaming? Relationships? Friends? Money? My parents might say maturity. I might saw cowardice. It's easy to sit under a tree in college and dream of changing the world. It's another thing entirely to try and shake the same Earth you are just trying to keep your balance on. How do we fight this watering down of our creativity? I know what could happen, but faced with a whole day, we stay indoors. We Google for hours, reading all about what everybody else has done today. If you're reading this right now, then you must be afflicted with the same disease I describe. Part of my answer to these self-inflicted questions must be to reject human limitations. Fail until you die, but don't fail from not trying. Try and fail. Over and over again. The fire burns on trial and error.

Severance

2007-05-21T23:26:00.000-06:00

I was fired from an insane and inane job today. An imposed return to the sea of Craigslist ads, and unanswered e-mails. What the hell are we to do with this life? Waste it doing other people's work? How much can we cast off so that we are unbound by the money and motivations inflicted upon us? I would love to have a job that pays me in food. Another that provides me with a place to live. I could do away with money and be happy, and what I could do with money would amount to very little. We are all prostitutes. I'm just on vacation at the moment.

"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."
-Aristotle

{free} radicals

2007-05-15T15:34:00.000-06:00

It's been a while since an original thought has cast a shadow o'er my mind. Hence all the void filling quotations. But damnit I grabbed a thought this morning, and have all but shaken it to death by now. We are allowing ourselves to float down the rive of progress. Technology at this point has provided us with the means for REAL AUTONOMOUS MEDIA! Free content and information abounds, and unprecedented levels of freedom to do what we will with it. Despite all the copyfighting though, this shit is being handed to us. IF we don't bite this hand feeding us, the internet will be radio and television all over again. A closed format with closed content that wer thank them for giving to us with our money. We can't just roll over again and let them steal our own creativity from us. Check out the BoingBoing post on YouTube's new maneuvering. We need to always stay on top of things like this. If some service treating us like we're lucky to have it, we should fucking switch. Go to a new one that does the same thing better. Make our own. Be our own communities. Make our own networks. Share the net. Make free networks in your own neighborhoods. Don't wait around jerking off until our cities, our government, or worse, the telecoms hand it to us. The internet has as much potential to be ours right now as it ever will. We need to take the necessary steps to ensure it stays that way. Otherwise we'd better be willing to roll over and pay for handouts from the divine rulers of the Earth.

Late Night Quotations No.14

2007-05-03T23:00:00.000-06:00

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error: it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

-Former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

Give Habeas Corpus a Fair Trial

2007-05-03T14:32:00.000-06:00

Things such as Habeas Corpus should be untouchable, but things like the Military Commissions Act and threaten our basic rights like Habeas Corpus and the First Amendment. The ACLU has started a petition to send to Washington on June 26th. I proudly expressed my dissenting opinion only moments ago. If you feel strongly about this issue, I urge you to do the same.

To My Members of Congress:

The Constitution and due process are in danger in America, as the Bush administration continues to run roughshod over our most fundamental constitutional rights.

We can no longer stand on the sidelines while the president extinguishes the light of American values, our civil liberties, and respect for law.

HERE is how you can help.

Tumbling down

2007-05-03T13:07:00.000-06:00

The future is a boulder tumbling down a hill. It is a force of nature guided by gravity. It will invariably collide with objects along it's terminal voyage, but will ultimately, invariably come to rest at the bottom of the slope. Along the way there are people shouting at the boulder to change course. Some helpfully suggesting that it follow a different path, some demanding that it violate basic laws of the universe and travel back up the mountain. Obviously this has no effect on history. There are others hurling things, sticks and stones at the boulder, but also to no avail, for the physical configuration of the hill and the pull of gravity alone will dictate the path of the rock. The only possibility then for altering the course of history is to re-arrange the rock, atom by atom from the inside out, so that when it comes to rest at the bottom (the end of time) as it will still inevitable do, it may be a different rock altogether (although still made of the same components). This is equally implausible, but not wholly against the rules. How shall we arrive then at the bottom?

REAL Threat

2007-05-01T15:20:00.000-06:00

I am fully aware that my little blog does not pull a lot of weight. I get maybe five of you passing through here a day, but I still feel that it is my duty as a citizen to pass along the sentiment and impress upon you the need for you to act upon the REAL ID act that they are trying to shit out into law at this point. In addition to this post, here is my miniscule contribution to the cause, posted on Regulations.gov:

DHS-2006-0030-0001

Comment code:
802330ad

From my position of little influence, I urge those who would make decisions to exercise caution before charging wildly into untested areas, particularly on issues concerning private citizens personal information. One of my many fears, and that of many citizens is that the REAL ID act makes us less secure against not only potentially corrupt governmental monitors, but criminals as well. It is my belief that, regardless of laws or regulations, the more information that is available, the less we can control it. Please consider the possible repercussions before hastily requiring all citizens to compromise their own security.

I urge all five of you to voice your opinions on this subject. HERE is a link to the Privacy Coalition which will help you to donate your two cents. But you must act before May 8th, because the doors will be sliding shut, and we will have even less say over where the dust settles.

For more sentiment on issues like this see:
Stopping Points
and Future War both previously published on this blog.

And if audio and video is more your thing, see:
REAL ID
Stop the Big Brother State
and the excellent documentary Suspect Nation from my brother site Firebreather {tv}.

A moment's hesitation

2007-04-30T22:21:00.000-06:00

We (I) should abandon all fear. With youth the flow of creativity is unhindered; the only barrier being skill, but with the increase in skill comes a decrease in the flow. You become afraid of creation. More care must be exercised, and more effort must be supplied. Eventually we become so afraid of doing something new that we just stop completely.

We waste our time being afraid of not creating anything, which results in even less than creating crap. I'm going to try my damndest to try and treat the world like a box of legos, a pad of paper and some crayons, or some building blocks. We have more to gain than we do to lose. Crap is better than nothing as evidenced by this post. Nevermind, it's probably nothing.

Late Night Quotations No.13

2007-04-27T00:31:00.000-06:00

"Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence."
-Bertrand Russell

"Who wishes to be creative must first destroy and smash accepted values."
-Nietzche

Tick

2007-04-24T21:28:00.000-06:00

Do you ever worry that you'll spend your whole life trying to figure out what to do with it? Knowing that the second you start building one thing with it, you start losing the ability to build everything else. I do. It doesn't keep me up at night, but I do.

Z'EV 4.19.07

2007-04-22T18:52:00.000-06:00

This is the full audio from an interview I conducted with the legendary industrial pioneer Z'EV at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 4.19.07. His first appearance in the city in 21 years. We discussed many things including the artistry of the "break core" culture and the house movements, as well as the avant-garde in general and where those sentiments lie in the current creative landscape. A full article with the interview will soon be appearing in the May issue of Thirsty Media. :UPDATE: It did not appear in that issue, and I don't know if it ever will for reasons made unclear to me. Have the fun.

Here's the piece I wrote up to go along with the interview:

Age of Steel

I guess I should be thankful for things like mid-life crises. It seemed like a stupid enough period of your life. You buy the proverbial red sports car, run off with the proverbial blond secretary, and leave the proverbial safe family. If you never got to the point of the safe family, then you have to resort to alternatives like kicking junk, or robbing blood banks. And if you were preoccupied the first half of your life with doing really interesting and creative things, it seems that the mid-life can serve as a chance to get back to your roots. Such is the case for all of the many bands I had the misfortune to grow up after, and the complete surprise and excitement when presented with an opportunity to catch em on the second (or fifth) go-round. Everybody is back together these days. And for an out of place anachronism like me, it couldn't have come at a better time. Naked Raygun, the Effigies, X, Bauhaus, Mission of Burma, fucking Big Black played a show, the Stooges are freaking back together with a new album out, as are the New York Dolls, Goddamn Question Mark and the Mysterians just played here, even Throbbing Gristle got back together. There are parts of me that don't know how to feel about the zombie uprising, but then again, was it fair to have even declared these bands dead in the first place?

Case in point: I got to see Z'EV the other night at the Empty Bottle. Now Z'EV was filed away in the back of my mind in the same place I keep dimitridons, and gladiatorial combat. I'd read about them in books and they sounded cool, but the thought of seeing the real thing in real life is just not a thought you'd ever have. But there he was. I shook his hand. We spoke. There's not only audio, but visual proof that he's still out there. Like finding one more Tasmanian tiger decades after they were supposed to be extinct, there's Z'EV up there, and he's doing stuff that I've still never seen or heard before. The tones that have been hiding inside the shards and fragments of the metal and junk around us are breathtaking. Z'EV has this uncanny ability to bring them out into our world. Just tones and patterns pouring out of this otherwise inert matter that you could probably find in a scrapyard. But these are finely tuned instruments. You really get an impression of the deliberateness of his performance seeing it all live. He sat crouched on his knees, and brought a different song out of each object he had on stage. I've never been so amazed with all the variation of the spectrum of sound as I was the other night.

When we spoke, we spent a lot of time discussing the electronic communities, and the house scenes in which Z'EV was instrumental while living in Europe. What you lose with electronics, however, is real sound. Digital sounds will always remain simulation no matter how far technology progresses. There is something magic in pure sound, and Z'EV is one of the most potent shaman that I am aware of. I am personally glad he's back to doing what he does. After a 21 year absence from Chicago, and nearly as long a time spent away from music and art in general, you need only see him now as evidence that art need not age at all.

Late Night Quotations No.12

2007-04-17T23:58:00.000-06:00

"Kings, aristocrats, and tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves in rebellion against the sovereign of the Earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe which is nature."

-Robespierre

Late Quotations No.11: Famous Last Words

2007-04-12T23:14:00.000-06:00

"Shoot you cowards, you'll only kill a man."
-Che Guevara

When told to renounce Satan and accept Christ on his deathbed:
"Now is not the time to be making enemies."
-Voltaire

"So it goes."
-Kurt Vonnegut
(not actually his final words, but fitting.)

Late Night Quotations No. 10

2007-04-08T00:53:00.000-06:00

"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error: it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

- Former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

Big Time Questions No.7

2007-04-07T09:19:00.000-06:00

Can you tell me about an extremely memorable moment in your career?

My favorite moments are thinking up ideas. After that it's all downhill. The actual execution is generally more boring than the idea. Not to say that the end result or the execution are expendable, but you never match that level of excitement as when you get that initial spark. Thinking up pretty much everything we did as YTM resulted in me on the floor of our kitchen or wherever sobbing and crying because I had been laughing so hard. The guinea pig and the banana video especially. Sometimes great stuff can come in the end though. I love that I have those stories to tell now, and I love that I have those pictures to show off. I still crack up every time I think about one of those activities. And it's just chasing feelings like that. Trying to outdo the last one. Humor is one of the biggest motivators for me. I have a fear of taking anything too seriously, so if I can find a way to make anything into a big joke, I usually do. Funny that fear and horror are my two big motivators. I find they're actually quite similar. They are both linked to surprise and being caught off guard. I could happily catch people off guard for the rest of my life. It will always be fun weather they're laughing or crying.

But that's cheating, you asked a specific question and I gave a general answer. Probably one of my favorite moments was "climbing" the "mountain" (or crawling on the ground, if you want to be literal). There was supposed to be a bunch of people for that. It was supposed to be a kind of big thing. And this is a case of the execution being way better than the idea. So it was supposed to be a lot of people climbing this ...grass. But it was a cold and drizzly day, and my friend Matt and I were the only two people who came out at all. We had on these stupid fake beards, and had some frozen Icee Pops up at "base camp" with a little flag that said "Human Beings." And we just decided, "what the hell" and went for it; started our ascent. We got really into it, and we're in character and yelling at each other in these crappy accents and stuff. People were walking by, and had no idea what to make of it, they thought we were out of our minds. Meanwhile we're cracking up and soaking wet, and bloody and muddy, and just gross, and frankly, stupid. We got about halfway "up" and this kid runs up to us and kind of cocks his head inquisitively. I just yelled at him "Kid what the hell are you doing standing on the side of the mountain like that!!" He just goes "oh." and instantly drops to the ground and starts climbing with us. Then a bunch of his friends (all like 5- 10year olds) come running over and start climbing up with us. It was just fantastic. The kids were totally into it. Way more so than we even were at that point. It took us a goddamn hour and 15 minutes to get across that field on our stomachs. We cracked open the box of Icee Pops and handed them out to the kids (who wanted to do it again) which I was totally opposed to. It's amazing how sore you get not climbing a mountain. Anyway, because of the kids, all these other people got really into it, and came up and were joking around and having a bunch of fun with us at the end. Asking us how long we'd been climbing and stuff like that. But it was great. Kids don't have any (or at least a whole lot less) barriers. They can just let go and have fun, or be amazed by something. And they got everyone else to let down their defenses too. I love that we were able to disarm so many people, and trick them into having a really good time by nothing but our own stupidity. That's probably one of my favorite days period. It was a shitty day too, but by just saying "fuck it" and just going through with something, and letting go of everything like image, and comfort, and warmth, and security, and safety (because one of us could have fallen and been seriously injured) I had this great experience. And now it's a great story, and a great memory. If it's art or not I don't really care.It's something that happened, and I was there.

Late NIght Quotations No.9

2007-04-06T00:06:00.000-06:00

In honor of the punk I have been steadily re-ingesting in the last few days (Sid and Nancy, the Great Rock n' Roll Swindle, and Repo Man, not to mention various old records) I've got a line up of punk related quotes tonight.

"You've taken my thinking, my means of survival. You thrust in my hand your gun and your Bible. You told me to kill for the Lord up above. You taught me to hate when I know there is LOVE."

- Crass

"Having been there in the 70's in L.A. isn't it amazing that the only ones that mattered are all dead- everyone else is in an imitatative state of a dying animal."

- Darby Crash 1980

"Maybe I'm a prehistoric monster by being an individual. It's highly likely. All I offer to others is their own individuality. Grab it!"

- John Lydon

"I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing."

- Mike Watt

Big Time Questions No.6

2007-04-05T10:47:00.000-06:00

Are you able to work solely on your art or must you have another non-art related job to supplement your income?

Well I had a job packing boxes at a warehouse. I quit because I was losing my mind, and months of my life in that place. Now I'm trying to do freelance web design (a skill I've picked up from just playing around over the years) and doing ok with that, but freelance isn't very steady, and I'm really sick of Ramen and grilled cheese so I think a part-time job is in my future. But I like having free time. Free time is more important than anything else to me. I always have projects I'm working on. I have no head for business, so I rarely make any money on anything, but that's because I don't even know how to think about my projects on a monetary basis. I wouldn't know how to begin selling stuff that I cared about. I think life is a far more important skill to practice than art. When it comes down to it, I don't care if I made cool, or interesting works of art, or wrote great stories, or did whatever, I just hope to have had an interesting life. All the other stuff is just stuff you leave in your wake. Evidence or fossil remains maybe. Bits of you with better shots at immortality than your physical body.

Like I mentioned earlier, I also work at a printing studio with a real-life Artist, who is a great guy. I actually have very little interest in kissing ass up the ladder of the art world either, but I would love to infiltrate it because I feel it's a very rigid community, and there is so much more to push against and play with within uptight frameworks like that. So I have a bunch of projects that I would love to execute in an "Art" context, but I don't know if I will ever be in a good position to execute them.

Big Time Questions No.5

2007-04-04T08:20:00.000-06:00

You said that you "managed to fall into the age old position of obscurity do to refusal to participate in the "industry" that art has become". How so? What do you hate most about the "industry"?

Yes, I'm afraid it's true. I'm still trying to rise above the position of "starving artist," I hate to fall into such a well-worn rut. I think it's especially hard right now because real expression is kind of up against a wall. There is more information in a day now than anyone could effectively process in an entire lifetime. That does a lot to the collective consciousness. We don't have time for anything in particular, because there is so much else to do and see. Content doesn't seem to matter as much as it just being SOMETHING! Anything and it'd better be now, or else someone else will have already done it. Take the state of Hollywood as an example. Remake after remake. They're even re-making sequels now! But how do we know if it's a re-make of a sequel or a sequel of a re-make? There's no time to think up anything new or exciting, because everything has this immediacy about it. That all feeds into the "art industry" thing. Art IS industry now. The aesthetic of the cutting edge in art have been successfully nabbed by the business interests, and now we get our cool, not just images like it used to be, but VISUALS from industry. REALLY creative kids are working 70-80 hours a week on Coke and Dockers commercials. And there's this belief that advertising is really coming into it's own; that it IS art now, but I don't believe that you can make art when the end result is the sale of a product or a brand. I just don't. It's not anti-mundane, it IS mundane. Cool is so standardized now, that even new cool is expected, necessary even. So business has brought over all the artists, and real art wallows in obscurity. I'm trying damn hard not to sound to cynical about all of this. It's not a "corporations lie to us" type deal. It's just the way I see the modern landscape, and I for one, find it hard to do anything genuine anymore without completely dropping out. The problem probably lies somewhere in me for even wanting to do something genuine in this day and age. Basically, I think it has to be taken back. Art has to move into areas that business won't dare touch with a ten foot pole! And there are plenty of those little cracks in the sidewalk, believe me. But business is fast. I mean they have whole ad firms devoted solely to creating YouTube videos that pass as real viral content, and don't even have an overt ad anywhere in the thing. It's like subliminal culture! Is THAT art? The fact that we don't even know we're watching ad's anymore? Lonleygirl 13 or whatever, she was a campaign. Not a hoax, a campaign! A scam depending on your mood. I don't think art should be about money. I think it should be about information. Conveying ideas or experiences in some way shape or form. Lonleygirl and all those cool motion graphics commercials on TV and the Internet convey a product. The coolness factor is just a means to the end. Art has become just a means to the end.

Tattoo You

2007-04-03T22:57:00.000-06:00

I was pondering tattoos yesterday, specifically mine. The images of all the tattoos I never got began to dance through my mind and I realized that everyone has it all wrong. Everyone always talks of the permanence of tattoos, the scars of ink, but that aspect is insignificant. Everything that you accumulate in life you carry with you till the end, these just happen to be physical. But the real intrigue is what you don't have on you. All of those lines that will never cover my skin. Everything that would have been there had I had more money in my pocket on certain days, or had a better idea. The falls I didn't take, the more meaningful symbols which will never occupy spaces already taken up by impulse. The tattoos I wear are mine. Aesthetics are irrelevant. They represent my body in time and space. The ink has taken on meaning as my skin has taken on the ink. And not to wax to philisophical about tattoos, just to marvel at the negative space, and at the opportunities I have had, and will have to be a different person.

Late Night Quotations No. 8

2007-04-03T22:54:00.000-06:00

"The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it."

-Richard Powers
Galatea 2.2

Big Time Questions No.4

2007-04-02T10:27:00.000-06:00

Your Young Team Management stuff looks like more crazy fun rather than art. How would you classify it?

I would classify that as crazy fun. Unfortunately that project seems to be pretty much deceased. It was the product of a very specific trio of friends and a very specific environment. The spirit is still there, but it's hard to maintain separately. On the other hand, the "activities" we did (i.e. the bird bridge, the guinea pig, the raft, etc...) I would classify as art. My idea of art is anything that transcends the "everyday" art is (or should be) the anti-mundane. So in that sense, I felt that all of that stuff that we were doing was very much in that spirit. There was a huge argument in one of my art history classes at school about Duchamp's "Fountain" and as to weather or not it was art. It was surprising to me how many people were insisting that it wasn't. I pointed out that it already is, weather they like it or not, because it was being discussed a thousand miles away a hundred years later. No one argues or even talks about any old urinal, but "fountain," now that's something! Weather you think it is stupid or not is irrelevant, even though it's a mundane object, it has been made grand by Duchamp, and there's no fighting it.

Two of my favorite "art" pieces, I don't even know who preformed them, but they are magnificent enough to have been propagated to me and from me on, so they must be pretty good. The first one: This guy set up on top of a dividing wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling in a museum . He had some basic provision and maybe a pillow. He couldn't see anyone down on the floor and no one could see him, but he stayed up there for like 36 hours or something. Now many people would argue that because he had not effect on his environment, he didn't actually do anything, but that's the point. Regardless of his effects, he WAS part of that environment for that amount of time. His presence is inseparable from that particular museum for that particular amount of time. There is no way we can know if he had no effect. There is no way we can say that it's not art. It's something. Which made me remember an important designation for my definition, art is something deliberate. It can be arbitrary past a point, but there must be deliberate intent at some point in the process. A leaf that looks like Jesus (or someone else with a beard and long hair) is not art. But if you cut a leaf to look like Jesus, or you find one and sign it, or place it somewhere, I would argue that it has now, officially strayed into the realm of "art".

My other favorite piece of art is this: A man apparently went out to a particular field every day for months and months dressed in a black and white striped shirt. He would blow a whistle and throw out a bunch of bread and feed the pigeons, which would grow in number each day he did this. The months passed and it came around to the first day of football season, a man in a black and white stripped shirt walked out into the middle of the field and blew a whistle, hundreds of pigeons swarmed the field, and had to be shooed away before play can begin. I love imagining one guy sitting in the stands doubled-over laughing, and being the only person there who knew what the hell was going on. I love that he spent all that time operantly conditioning the birds to respond to the striped shirt and whistle. I think that is one of the most perfect pranks in history. Now here's another interesting angle to this story. I only heard it third hand. Who knows at this point what the actual details are, or even if it actually happened at all? And does it even really matter at this point because the story is still going, and has a life of it's own now. Now what's the difference between art and urban legend. This is the realm I like to traffic in with the "activities" we do/ did with YTM.

Late Night Quotations No.7

2007-03-31T00:26:00.000-06:00

"Learn to dream when thou dost wake.
Learn to wake when thou dost sleep."

-Francis Thompson

"Work is everything. Work is the entire thing."

-Andy Warhol

Big Time Questions No.3

2007-03-30T09:06:00.000-06:00

What made you decide to go to Savannah College of Art and Design?

Ah the Savannah decision is an interesting one. Honestly I was lured in by that idea of the "art industry." I had always planned on going to the big state school where I'm from (IU, Indiana), to do what, I have no idea, but just assumed I would go there. One day a pamphlet from SCAD showed up in my mail and that was that. Their facilities looked amazing. At the time I didn't even know you could go to school for stuff like animation, and illustration. I didn't even really think much of art in high-school. I drew all the time when I was bored in class, and did very well in my art classes, but I thought character design for movies, or video games or something was where it was at. You know, I wanted to do something "cool". So I shipped off to Savannah (thankfully! everyone else I knew ended up at IU, and I have Savannah to thank for getting me the hell out of Indiana if nothing else). I wanted to pursue illustration, via animation, and do concept art. I did quite well, but my entire idea about what I wanted to do with myself, and what I felt art was changed about halfway through school. I hate to give any one thing this much credit, but I think a lot of it has to do with reading this book called Pranks by this publishing company called RE/Search (who I went out and worked for for a summer in San Francisco) at this particular time in my life. It's this incredible book that is just a collection of interviews with all these amazing artists, musicians, and creative people, that express their ideas through creative pranksterism. People like: Joey Skaggs, Joe Coleman, Boyd Rice, Jeffrey Vallance, Mark Pauline, Paul Krassner, Mal Sharpe, Abbie Hoffman, Jello Biafra. You know, mostly people no normal person has ever heard of. It completely blew open my eyes to this whole other way of doing things. I had actually had the book for years. My older cousin had gotten it for me in the throes of my hardcore punk youth. I read the Biafra and Rollins interviews, and that was pretty much that. I really think that certain things work at certain times of your life. That book worked when I read it. I don't think I had any frame of experience to put it into when I was younger. It's like when you hear certain bands for the first time and you just don't get it. And then you hear them again years down the road, and those sounds have been bouncing around and multiplying in your head for those years and they suddenly sound like the most brilliant music you've ever heard; like the kind of sounds you've been waiting your whole life for. It's the same reason that if you don't read Catcher in the Rye when you're a teenager, I don't think you can really read it. It stops working past a certain point. I read Pranks at the right time, and I lost all sight of everything I had wanted to do previously. I broke up with my girlfriend who I had been with for a year and a half at that point, and the world seemed like a different place. I stuck it through school because I knew that they weren't teaching anything that I wanted to learn in any school, and it was too late to really switch majors ( to Art History), so I just stuck with animation. They didn't really know what to make of me, so we kind of left each other alone. I did all these weird projects that the professors shrugged off, and was left pretty much to my own devices. Somehow I actually graduated cum laude despite the fact that for the last two years school was only taking up about 10-15% of my energy.

Late Night Quotations No.6

2007-03-29T23:05:00.000-06:00

"Nothing can satisfy but what confounds
Nothing but what astonishes is true."

-Edward Young

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

-Neitzche

Big Time Questions No.2

2007-03-29T09:17:00.000-06:00

I really enjoy your gallery work. I am assuming it is all computer graphic work? What is your favorite program and where do you find insirpation for your unique style?

You are correct, most of my visual work in the past has been done on the computer (mostly Photoshop, which is a very accessible and open-ended program), but I frankly enjoy doing collage with tape and scissors most of all. I would work in traditional means more frequently if A.) I could afford to, and B.) if I had more of a space to work. That is the other good thing about computers, you can construct a HUGE file/ image in the corner of your tiny cluttered room. With collage, or painting, or what have you, you really need a decent space to spread out in and work. I like the limitations of collage though. I like how you only have so much that you can pull from and you have to make it work. The computer is very wide-open, and seems more arbitrary. Although these days I feel most visual art is rather arbitrary. I work in a print studio one day a week with an actual Artist (whose big in the Chicago Pop Art scene), who collages large silk screen images, like Warhol, but with more images piled up on top of one another. In fact the whole set-up is very similar to "the Factory." Myself and a few others pick out a lot of the screens and compositions for these pieces of Art that will sell in New York for thousands of dollars. There is some direction and intent there, but by and large it's a very serendipitous process. Generally the results are exciting and pleasing, and whichever one you like better is all up to personal taste. And this is like "ART" art, which seems like nothing more than an excuse for people that have more money than they should to give it away.

As far as my style is concerned, I think it comes out of number of areas. I've always liked harsher imagery, and been attracted to harsher sounds. Much of my progression through art in general (this includes film, music, and books as well) has been an ongoing search for extremes. It's like I've always been looking for stuff that would upset me. I have a very high threshold for the startling and grotesque. I don't know why either. I was a very shy and nervous little kid, but was always fascinated with monsters and "darker" stuff. I was brought up on movies like "Young Frankenstein" and "Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman" until I could stomach actual "scary" movies. Maybe because of that I don't really scare anymore, which is a shame, because, damn I've tried. I've read practically every short ghost story I could get my hands on, expired the whole list of horror movies, and never found anything. But I still love all that stuff. It's just fun to me. As soon as anything scary happens I think, "this is great!" So a lot of my "art" has to do with that. Horrors. Not, obviously, in the sense that I draw monsters and stuff, but in the sense that I am trying to pursue some sort of really viscerally startling imagery, more for myself I think than anyone else. I don't think I've really succeeded yet, so in the meantime, I just make harsh stuff that I think, at least, looks interesting.

Late Night Quotations No.5

2007-03-28T23:23:00.000-06:00

"Progress is merely an enormous pretension on our part."

-Marcel Duchamp

"I just think any picture you take is a good picture."

-Andy Warhol

"That which is falling should also be pushed; that which is crawling should also be crushed."

-Boyd Rice

Big Time Question 1

2007-03-26T14:57:00.000-06:00

To highlight the fact that I am a big well-know artist who was one of the interview subjects for some college students report on artists, which came about by my ability to respond to a craigslist post, and resulted (will result) in me receiving a 12 pack of Coke, I have decided to make available the questions and responses covered in the interview so that my message can reach past the walls of this girls classroom.

Without further ado:

It looks from your website you are chained to the computer. I see you have many different outlets for your art. Which one is your favorite outlet?

It's true that I do have many outlets, and a great deal of those require that I am in front of my computer a fair amount of time. On the computer end of things, I primarily use the computer because the only limitation in the digital realm is time. You can do everything on a computer for next to nothing cost-wise, but you can produce work that is indistinguishable from "professional material." The Internet is a great equalizer (which poses it's own set of problems) but anyone can have a great looking site. Some 13 year old kid in Kentucky can make a better looking site than some multi-million dollar company (and they do!). The problem with this is that, weather or not that kid has anything interesting to stay is still completely up in the air. I am still working on that aspect of it. Trying to back up the presentation with content. That is the reason for having so many different outlets (getting back on track). I strongly feel that each project should be focused, and exist on it's own right. That's why I have so many different websites. I don't want to be just another person putting up any and every thing that I find in a day. There's no focus, and therefore lacking in impact. I would much rather just have another project that slips through one of the many gaps in the web than just have another "stuff I think is cool" page. If you do that it seems like your whole life is slipping through those holes rather than just a single idea you had.

To be continued...

Late Night Quotations No. 4

2007-03-24T01:19:00.000-06:00

"Anything that cannot or will not gain acceptance if presented seriously will ALWAYS be accepted if properly presented as a joke."

-Anton LaVey, The Compleat Witch

"The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes."

-Paul Feyerabend, Against Method

PodThreat

2007-03-22T19:27:00.000-06:00

My new radio show which is part of the PodThreat Network. "Getting good music to good people by any means necessary." Subverting copyright by not caring about it whatsoever. Really, how is it harmful to share music and information that is A.) Already available, and B.) Important to you. We need to come out from under the rocks of fear and just share things with each other. This is what I have to share: music that I have grown up listening to and loving. No artists were hurt in the making of this podcast.
Link

Late Night Quotations No.3

2007-03-19T23:29:00.000-06:00

"If rape or arson, poison or the knife,
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life-
It is because we are not bold enough!"

-Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil

Shockwave Cannon Plug

2007-03-19T16:53:00.000-06:00

This is merely a plug for the video of me and two of my good friends getting blasted by Mark Pauline of SRL's "shockwave cannon" from a segment on the History Channel's Weird Weapons of WWII. Link.

The Afternoon Drawing

2007-03-19T16:26:00.000-06:00

I have absolutely no desire to return to an earlier point in my life or time. I do, however, wish that I could return to earlier states of mind. I find that, above all else, the mind changes. The world stays the same, but you are always different. I miss some of the past versions of myself despite the feeling that I am on the whole an improved being.

I wish that I could spend the afternoon drawing still. I wish that I could still envision scenes in my head, and I wish that transcribing them was not hindered by the skill that I have accumulated and calcified in my lifetime thus far. I wish that I had not seen as many movies as I have, and I wish that I had not heard as many sounds. I wish that I had read more books, but I want to know less. I wish that I could still be scared, and I wish that I cared as much as I once did. I'm happy to be rid of the horrors of socialization, and I'm happy to be who I am and where I am, but I still wish I could spend the afternoon drawing.

Maybe one of me will get to be all of these things again.

Late Night Quotations No.2

2007-03-16T00:46:00.000-06:00

"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom"
- J.G. Ballard

"Every year is an adventure."
- Will Durant

Late Night Quotations

2007-03-13T00:08:00.000-06:00

"I replace melancholy with courage, doubt with certainty, despair with hope, wickidness with good, complaints with duty, skepticism with faith, sophisms with indifference of calm, and arrogance with modesty."

- Opening to Poesies by Comte de Lautreamont author of Maldoror. Died at age 24.

It's fucking nice in Chiacgo

2007-03-12T12:34:00.000-06:00

...therefore, I have not been thinking much. Sorry.

Expertise

2007-03-09T18:00:00.000-06:00

Due to the hyper-availability of information, generality must be practiced. The benefits of expertise, although easily reaped, are hardly economical. The primary product of specialization is waste. It may, in that sense be beneficial to strive to be an expert in vaguery; understanding the principles and practices of specialization, but unbound by precisions high demands. Understanding the "why" then becomes more valuable then the "what". This is a debate to be fought by engineers and philosophers. I am not about to try and suggest that specialization is wholly unnecessary, quite the contrary, merely that, having missed the boat myself on expertise, I must instead strive to understand.

Reading, writing

2007-03-08T16:09:00.000-06:00

It's all a matter of chance. Creative forms require a lifetime to ingest these days, if you miss the boat, you've got no other choice. We have to be choosy how we spend our lives, or we have to leave it all up to chance. Let arbitrary movement determine our interests and the paths our lives take. Life is not a collection of stories, each lifetime is a story. A story that is reciprocally footnoted and cross referenced by all parallel stories around it. We can edit our stories, and add appendices, and start new ones, but they all end up chapters recorded in the central story. You don't have time to live other stories, you've got your own to write. That's probably why no one bothers to read this stuff. You've got your own stuff to do, right? Well so do I. I'm gonna go read.

Imagineer It! *sic

2007-03-06T12:31:00.000-06:00

The mind is our only frontier of absolute freedom. We may have limited control of the bodies those minds occupy, but those bodies are subject to invasion by harmful viruses, they may break down, they may be riddled with genetic disease, and they will eventually, if given the chance, become old. But the mind is made of the same stuff. The mind just as susceptible to damager, disease, and wear as the rest of the body. Maybe even more so. But not the physical make-up of the mind, and certainly not anything as airy as the "soul". No, our horizons lay at the boundaries of our imaginations. We can create the worlds we inhabit in our minds. This must be practiced with care, for this is considered a mark of insanity, but where else have we to turn if we want something other than the world outside? What other options have we? We can't travel to a distant planet. We can't live under the sea. We can't simply vanish. But we can and do everyday. Daydream, and play in your mind while the world isn't doing much of interest. Travel wherever you want. Punch your boss in the face. Make love to that beautiful woman you saw on the street last week. I imagine this is a pretty trite exercise I have undertaken here, but my enjoyment of my imagination does not hing on its originality; merely on it's existence.

Small Questions

2007-03-05T12:11:00.000-06:00

If a thought isn't recorded, is it gone forever? Can you count on someone else to pick it up? Should we concern ourselves more with the occurrence of ideas, or the ownership of them. Would you rather they find a cure for cancer or you find the cure for cancer? Would you rather have written this thought down? Could you have? How about all those thoughts that dance through my head before I fall asleep; too tired (or lazy?) to reach for the pen again and jot down the phrase to access the information in the morning. They are like dreams. If you can't remember your dreams, they might as well have never happened. They are non. Ideas, I think, are the same way. If you don't remember them, you might as well have never had them. What was I talking about?

Me an' My Buddy Matt: Crappy Readings Series No.1

2007-03-02T18:23:00.000-06:00

powered by ODEO
This is the first installment of a new "Crappy Readings Series, which I don't know if will be hosted as part of {firebreather} or will necessitate it's own home, but either way, we are putting way to much effort into sub-bad fiction.

This particular story was written by 28 year old Patrick Finnigan of New Pallantine Indiana. He's dead so you can't write to him and complain.

UPDATE: It actually has necessitated it's own site: Idiot Fiction so, check it out and don't blame me.