Contact me:
william.ball@gmail.com
Theme: Black Tie
Author: Heather Rivers
Variables:
Beautiful and Depraved
Beneath the City
Bloggasm
Bookkake
DailyKos
Gibson Blog
Indie Nudes
Information Aesthetics
Lost in the Frame
Nightmare Brunette
Open Left
Tomorrow Museum
Warren Ellis
wrd.wthn.wrd.wthn.wrd
Following:
Ekstasis
Mike Doughty - Fort Hood
…My vote’s a bed and a football pool
Five on the red, six on the blue
Wake up, fool, there’s no time for a shouting match
I smell blood and there’s no blood around
Blanked-out eyes and the blanked-out sound
I see them coming back motionless in an airport lounge
Let the sunshine in
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine in
You should be getting stoned with a prom-dress girl
You should still believe in an endless world
You should blast Young Jeezy with your friends in a parking lot
Let the sunshine in
Let the sunshine in
The sunshine in…
…From his blog, 03/02/08:
“…I wrote the song basically out of two experiences; I went to Walter Reed last year, met some guys who had lost limbs, and came out scared and grateful. And I grew up an Army brat in the 70s, when many of the adult males around me were in Vietnam, and there was lots of strange behavior that I now recognize as PTSD.
Fort Hood is the base in Texas that’s lost the most people in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Play count: 15
William Carlos Williams
“…Cities are full of light, fine clothes
delicacies for the table, variety,
novelty—fashion: all spent for this.
Never to be like that again—
the frame that was. It tickled his
imagination. But it passed in a rising calm
Tan dar a dei! Tan dar a dei!
He was singing. Two miserable peasants
very lazy and foolish
seemed to have walked out from his own
feet and were walking away
with wooden rakes
under the six nearly bare poplars, up the hill…”
— WCW, “The Descent of Winter”
Stripperwrecks: on questionable naked aesthetics
thestripperhatesyou & Kat have turned around this topic quite a bit, but I want to boil it down to the essential meme-able portion. So. I propose an investigation into Stripperwrecks: the most questionable aesthetic choices of naked dancing for money (and related erotic industries).
The subject for this round: GET ME AWAY FROM HERE I’M DYING, or, the most questionable choices of stripper soundtracks. We can blame outdated jukeboxes, or iTunes shuffle, or dj’s with boners and axes to grind, but the common thread here is: we actually took our clothes off, to this.
I’m starting. Fall 2004. San Francisco. The Lusty Lady. A skinny beardo boy is jacking off in the booth in front of me when this comes on. Of course. I’m test-driving a fancy blonde hairpiece passed on by a co-worker who wore it once as part of her Nelson costume for Halloween. It’s enormous, bump-it-y high and makes my eyes look even bigger and my body obscenely, little-girl-ishly, out of proportion.
Luna, who’s all mall-gothed out for the stage show though she never dresses like that usually, in a torn fishnet shirt made from pantyhose and Hot Topic boots in stinky PVC, is working the window next to me, and beardo keeps stealing glances at her. I take this as a challenge, shimmy even nearer to the glass so he can’t crane his barely-hairy neck to take in the girl who, next to blonde Barbie me, looks way more like she brings herself off at the end of the night, alone in her bed under a shrine made from old NME covers, naked but for a well-worn cardigan and her own tears.
He’s crestfallen at the possibility that he’s going to have an orgasm in front of such an obviously uncool girl, unaware that I’m paid to prop up a certain common denominator of male fantasy, and today, not just his. And neither is Luna perfect, but given the choices, she’s less humiliating to his carefully-put-on sensibilities.
So “Ohhhh,” I say, blocking his view and flipping my “hair” towards him, mouthing along, just for fun. “Yeah, this is good. So you have the ‘Legal Man’ 7 inch at home, too?”
Laugh
Laugh until the marketing shills have to change their tack. Laugh until all billboards are just polite requests. “Please investigate our new product online if you have a moment. We’re really quite proud of it. Thank you ever so much.”
We didn’t have a TV for most of my childhood, and it’s scary to look back and notice its efficiency, before and after. Its introduction brought neediness; I found my young self distressed that I did not have all the toys and clothes I wanted. After I learned what an Eddie Bauer edition car was (precisely what we didn’t have—tinted power windows, premium sound system, leather everywhere), I used to play a game in my head: each time I saw a car I fancied, I’d say/think “I want that in Eddie Bauer.” Eventually it was just shortened to “That,” and, although inaudible, it didn’t count unless I formed the word with my mouth. I spent a few years touching my tongue to the back of my front teeth, quietly coveting a dozen or dozens of cars each day. “That. That. That. That. That. That. That. That.”
A young boy consciously cataloging all the things he’d never have—how depressing.
But it was precisely the desired outcome.
Now days I can’t watch television for more than a couple minutes without becoming apoplectic. Hernia-inducing levels of rage. “How dare they insult our intelligence like that? Cleansing micro-beads? Really!?” and on and on.
So I try to laugh instead. I laugh to drive away the knowledge that marketing ‘wisdom’ still works on a great many people. I laugh in hopes of looking like less of a cynic. I laugh to try and broadcast the insanity of it all.
Team overshare is against bad photoshop.
Written on a Cougar Town ad at the westbound Chicago and State bus stop.
Soul Coughing - True Dreams of Wichita
…And you can stand on the arms of the Williamsburg Bridge
Crying, “Hey man, well this is Babylon…”
And you can fire out on a bus to the outside world
Down to Louisiana, you can take her with you
I’ve seen the rains of the real world come forward on the plain
I’ve seen the Kansas of your sweet little myth
You’ve never seen it, no,
I’m half sick on the drinks you mixed…
Play count: 15
“There’s something powerfully weird about this beautiful photoset by Marta Lamovsek, not least in this image, where the model really does look like an alien landed in eastern Europe.”
“Who the fuck is this? Pagin’ me at 5:46/
— Biggie Smalls
in the mornin’, crack of dawn an’/
now I’m yawnin’”
The importance of stupidity in scientific research »
I call it “not-knowing.”
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
…This is a lesson I’m trying to learn.
