Washington, Washington!
I know I’ve posted this before, but I figured now would be a good time to do it again.
had a pocket full of horses! fucked the shit outta bears!
ate opponents brains and invented cocaine
i’d say this is probably the #1 most quoted Thing among my group of friends
“…Had a pocket full of horses,
Fucked the shit out of bears,
Threw a knife into Heaven
And could kill with a stare…”
…Happy 4th, Amerikaner.
luminol: Ian Francis, An Ingénue is Lost in the Woods (Policeman, Policeman, Come Quickly)

At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy.
They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction.
I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.
Robert Longo, ‘Balcony’ (charcoal on mounted paper, 2008) (via supersaturated)

(via wonderlandcode831)
“…O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell’d
Whatever can to sight or thought be formd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defac’t, deflourd, and now to Death devote?
Rather how hast thou yeelded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred Fruit forbidd’n! som cursed fraud
Of Enemie hath beguil’d thee, yet unknown,
And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?”
— Milton, Paradise Lost (book IV)
Augmented reality coming soon!
“Layar combines GPS, camera, and compass to identify your surroundings and overlay information on screen, in real time. It is available for Android now and it will be available for iPhone soon, but exclusively for the 3GS.”
Read more on Gizmodo. (jakelodwick)
Seidel at the Samovar, Part Two (via FSGVideos)
Ta-Nehisi Coates reads from Frederick Seidel’s POEMS 1959-2009: “Boys,” and “October.” Filmed April 14 at the Russian Samovar by Gregory King.
…Coates is one of my favorite bloggers and Seidel is, probably, my favorite living poet. Coates really is the perfect person to be reading Seidel’s “Boys.” He actully chose that particular poem, from the collection. He explains:
Anyway, there was something transgressive about this entire exercise. The first poem is about a son who’s father exhibits a kind of paternal racism toward his black servants, and how the implicit brutality of it all thrills the son. The second poem ends with Seidel admiring the woman’s “blond hair at dawn”—among other things. Readers of this blog will know how distant I am from both paternal racism, and any woman’s “blond hair at dawn.” OK, being from Baltimore where the black girls dye their hair all sorts of colors, I confess to knowing a little about “blond hair at dawn.”
But my point is that reading these pieces was like living in someone else’s skin for a moment. And yet, in some deep sense, finding myself there at the bone. It is human to revel in brutality—race is irrelevant to this fact. It is human to revel in beauty—-race is irrelevant to this fact.
And this is a stanza of Seidel’s poem:
When I was a little boy,
My father had beautiful manners,
A perfect haughty gentleman.
Impeccable with everyone.
In labor relations with the various unions,
For example, he apparently had no peer.
It was not so much that he was generous,
I gather, but rather that he was fair.
So it was a jolt, a jolt of joy,
To hear him cut the shit
And call a black man Boy.
The white-haired old negro was a shoeshine boy.
One of the sovereign experiences of my life was my joy
Hearing my father in a fury call the man boy.
…Watch the end-stopped lines. Watch the enjambment. Seidel is someone who, if nothing else, has really examined his privilege, who has spent years and books upon books examining it, though we as readers may not (often, don’t) like where he takes such thoughts. Read the whole poem (if you search, the whole thing is available on google books) if you can, it’s worth it. Seidel is masterful and certainly the most (really, one of the only) truly subversive people writing today.
Johnny Depp reading out loud the letters he received from Hunter S. Thompson during his work on the Fear and Loathing Movie.
…Sometimes, I forget to be charatable and empathetic and settle into my fantasy that HST was no mere human but some sort of absurd, anthropomorphic personification…of what, representing what group I haven’t the slightest idea. There was something utterly alien about him sometimes that I wish desperately I could replicate. I’m not alone in this regard, I know. I know just as well that I and all my fellow travelers in this regard, fail miserably every time we try to find the formula that made the man so great. I’m not up to the task. I occasionally like to flatter myself and think that no regular human is. You must become, as Zizek once called himself and HST did regularly, “a monster,” something distinctly “other,” before you can access eldritch and arcane powers like those possesed by HST. Fuck, I miss him. We need him now more than ever.