"Unlike the ordinary fellow, he will throw everything to the winds when the urge seizes him. Moreover, if he is an artist, he will be compelled to make sacrifices which worldly people find absurd and unnecessary. In following the inner light he will inevitably choose for his boon companion poverty. And, if he has in him the making of a great artist, he may renounce everything, even his art. This, to the average citizen, particularly the good citizen, is preposterous and unthinkable." -Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Travel Notes On Europe, Written On the Plane Home

     Europe by train. Germany, Holland. Taxis, endless taxis, and the snow, and then the warm winter wind off the Waddenzee. Up all night in Amsterdam. Sun rise on the harbor out the hotel window. Never mind, you can sleep on the plane. You sail over the clouds – clouds casting shadows on clouds that are endless snowfields floating on a rolling ocean. Fast little jets cut our flight path, vapor trails like chalk vectors so you can see not only where they’ve been but extrapolate where they are going, and the idea of extrapolation is as understandable as a passing moment when you glean the future in a girl’s eyes, in a reflection, like particles of light, like spun gold flaking to the floor, lost in the blare and alcohol of the party – just as the vapor vectors dissipate into diamond droplets of water and without so much as a humbled sigh join the collective life of ether.
    I am restless but determined, I have my warm coat on. I sing into the night from atop my bicycle. We rewrite our dreams in preparation for publication. I whisper see you next time over the din, in a hush, in a snarl – the poetry of bubblegum wrappers. Rally for the cause. Start a gang. The noise fades out as if in a movie and only the whisper is left, until it evaporates leaving nothing but an image of a face, which isn’t even light, but just the idea of light.
     How did it get to be December? Stopover in Switzerland, the Black Forest, a silver river snakes like a thin chain on the girl’s neckline. Travel mementos in your pocket, a few crumpled-up euros, a sweet dull ache behind your sunglasses not to mention under your passport that is tucked in your left breast pocket. I begin collecting dust memories like a picaresque story tracing the journey of a grain of sand in your hem. My heart gathers moss; it is wood and no longer breaks, but crumbles. This may appear as decay and yet it’s also verdant and alive. How unforgiving is a vector? Do you prefer to think of us on roads? On paths? We wander in the fields and brambles and the things we do are places on a map; old roadside structures that can turn to ruins but never be erased, just as experiences can’t be undone, the way a bullet can’t be unfired once the trigger is pulled.
    Over the Atlantic, the idea of being nowhere, of being between lives, of transcending timezones and timetables becomes translucent and distantly resolved – this Declaration of Airports, this luminous dreamlife of mathematical formulas, of the arc of a curve between points A and B, is only significant in as much as points A and B represent our meeting places – under a moon, under a streetlight, in a crowd, in a corner, in an unwritten apartment – and that, sometimes, we are lucky enough to move together between those anonymously named coordinates.
    We walk with many traveling companions, many partners hand in hand on the soil and stone pathways, and some days we walk on water and some days through quicksand and my wayfaring partners, whether for a day or a decade, make the perception of my experiences palpable, crystalline, unremitting, visceral, and, ultimately, all that is meaningful. I’m heading home, I’m racing the sun – when was the last time you saw the sunset for six hours? My friends, we disperse at the airport bound for taxis and dinners and television shows under rust colored bands in the peaceful and stagnant Los Angeles sky. It’s good to be home, but the lights are a bit dimmer, eh? And my relationship with my world is interminably ecstatic.

-8 December 2008, Somewhere over Europe, over Switzerland, over the Ocean, over Iceland, over Greenland, over America

1. Amsterdam is storybook.

2. Listening to Bjork.

3. Reading about Knut Hamsun.

Found In the Margins is a great page with interviews about books.

"It is not my aim to bluff. I have decided to tell man that he has lost his free creativity, his proper individuality, his responsibility towards the universe and his trust in his personal, god-like possibilities and that he must regain all this if his life is to have any meaning. Only then would man again rise to be equal to the variety of events, his thoughts and acts would again be as manifold as flowers, or trees, or the incredible stucture on leaves or on the back of his own hand." -Friedensreich Hundertwasser, writing to Viennese critic Jorg Lampe, 29 January 1953

Spent the day yesterday walking the city and filming in the snow. Climbed to the top of a tower in the park. Stood in the wind and looked out over East Berlin and the President's house...West Berlin shrouded in fog and snow. Hiro and I stumbled into an art book store to change a lens. Went back later to flip through photo, illustration and artist's books.

Snow falling on Berlin.

I thought this was a family Weihnachtsfestival!

East Berlin from Lux 11

Arrived in Berlin last night.

1. The Ebony Hillbillies

"Thomas Wolfe couldn’t go home and William Faulkner couldn’t seem to leave very successfully and Ernest Hemingway seemed to be looking for some lost idea of it everywhere and T.S. Eliot apparently found it about five minutes after arriving in England, becoming even paler and more prunish and speaking with an accent, and then you’ve got Annie Proulx who seems to feel so right at home just about anywhere she is that she can’t get a pen in her hand fast enough to suit her, and there’s Eudora Welty who says home is where everything begins, really, in whatever little place, to which someone like James Baldwin might say, Yeah, right, it does, and isn’t that a bitch, and then F. Scott Fitzgerald comes along and trumps them all by pointing out how home is not just a place, but a place in time, how we’re all borne (born?) ceaselessly into the past." -Keith Lee Morris

1. Never mind what you're selling, it's what you're buying.

2. "Here's a prediction:

when you have stories to tell,

you will tell them." -David Grubbs, "Kentucky Karaoke"

3. Focus on the experience of life and not materiality.

"Mason proposed to avoid attacking Pequot warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy's will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective." -Francis Jennings, writing about Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot village on the Mystic River in 1636, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, 1974

1. Flail wildly on the precipice.

2. Skeleton Blues by Simon Joyner. After years of paying attention to Joyner, how did I miss his best album when it came out?

3. Cycling today turns from light drizzle ride to 43 mile slog through some serious rain. I wind along the coast in a downpour. The sea looks like silver. Blotches of rain on the water are like undefined birth marks. Oil tankers dot the horizon. Catalina is a ghost ship in the low storm clouds. It's all quite thrilling until my right foot becomes completely submerged in my shoe. Then my left. My socks turn grey. I literally climb out of the rain to the sun on Palos Verdes East. I have to pay close attention to dodge all the snails crawling across the road. Their world is too slow for them to realize that humans and bicycles and cars are things that can be avoided - to them it's just more force majeure. One of the switchbacks is covered with foamy soap that looks like snow. On the descent, I think of Merckx and Ocana dragging their shoes on the pavement to slow down in a hail storm. Miraculously, on the way back, I can see one of the Channel Islands. By the time I get home, I am cold, wet, somehow - muddy, and the sun is out. True Autumn road riding.

4. "I'd like to see you --

I had a funny dream

and you were wearing funny shoes,

you were going to a dance,

you were dressed like a punk

but you were too young to remember."

Hiatus complete. Leaving for Berlin on Sunday.

"'Don't be reconciled. Turn off your television sets,' Peterson said, 'cash in your life insurance, indulge in a mindless optimism. Visit girls at dusk. Play the guitar. How can you be alienated without first having been connected? Think back and remember how it was.'"         -Donald Barthelme, A Shower Of Gold, from Sixty Stories, 1981

1. "We ride together, we die together, Bad Boys for life."

2. "The rituals are unimportant. What matters is what's inside." -Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, The People vs. Larry Flynt

3. "Thank God it's only a movie." -Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

4. Califone

5. You know how you can see the breeze in a photo? 

It's kinda like the feelings in a letter.

6. Ballast

1. All my vows are wishes.

2. "In order to perform this work she made use of a marvellous jewelled spinning wheel or distaff, which at night shone brightly in the sky as a constellation, known in the North as Frigga's Spinning Wheel, while the inhabitants of the South called the same stars Orion's Girdle." -H.A. Guerber, Myths Of the Norsemen

3. "You were there." -Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions

Michael Goldfarb Is a Hateful Despicable Person

He can't even answer Rick Sanchez' pointed, fair, simple questions. He spins fables out of lies and mistruths, attempts to incite hatred in the hearts of the people of the United States of America. I am so disgusted by Mike Goldfarb, I find his smug, condescending air both vile and contemptuous of well-meaning citizens in our great nation.

Watch CNN's Rick Sanchez interview Mike Goldfarb here.

Friday

1. "One left with uncertain maps where all was possible. Deserts and shelters. / Ambushes and steppes. Altitudes and thirst. Vertigo and the plains. / Zones without guards or shackles, the right of way given to pilgrims, to / travelers, to the rebellious, // terrains so hazy that they almost touched dreams and the sky. / In the margin were projected all the ardent impulses of the heart" -Andre Veltier, "Frontiers"

2. "I took it as my unmistakable cue to leave, experiencing on my way out into the rain that distracting, unsettling jolt a person feels when there isn't, after all, another step at the bottom." -Denise Shekerjian, writing about Joseph Brodsky, Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born

3. Marcopoulos

4. "Capitalism does not consolidate itself solely by consolidating its hold on the land, or solely by incorporating history's precapitalist formations. It also makes use of all the available abstractions, all available forms, and even the juridical and legal fiction of ownership of things apparently inaccessible to privative appropriation (private property): nature, the earth, life energies, desires and needs." -Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishing edition, 1991, Pg. 350

5. "I was walkin’ down a road
I was movin’ down a road
Walkin’ down a road, movin’ down a road
And saw you comin’ by
I was walkin’ down a road
I was movin’ down a road
Walkin’ down a road, movin’ down a road
And saw you comin’ by
Walkin’ down a road, movin’ down a road
And saw you comin’ by
I was walkin’ down a road
Movin’ down a road
You were comin’ down a road
I saw you comin’ down a road
I turned around you turned around
And now we’re walkin’ down a road
Now we’re movin’ down a road
I see you movin’ down a road
I see you walkin’ down a road
You see me walkin’ down a road
You see me movin’ down a road"

-Jandek, "Just Whisper", Later On, Corwood 0741, 1981

(does it seem horribly wrong that Jandek has a myspace page???)

Joe the Farce

Even Fox News must think that "Joe the Plumber" stumping on foreign policy is a total joke. Here's Shep Smith grilling Joe. By the way, Joe isn't a licensed plumber and he owes back taxes to the state, facts that news sources will point out, became relevant when he made himself a public figure by stumping for McCain. By his own admision, Joe knows enough about foreign policy "to be dangerous."

What could possibly go wrong on election day?

TIME's Michael Scherer wrote a great piece, 7 Things That Could Go Wrong On Election Day

Purging The Voters

The Brennan Center For Justice has a pamphlet on Voter Purges. Here are current incidents in Colorado which have lead to potentially 14,000 - 30,000 eligible voters being purged. Here's a related CBS News Report.

Focus On the Family Demons Run Amok

Focus On the Family has sent out a "what-if" letter, spinning dark, ludicrous, deceptive and hateful tales of an Obama presidency. Read about it here.

Obama For Israel

Dad found this short film documenting support for Obama in Israel...which Isaac edited...small world and I am out of the loop I guess...

Truth and Hope

Check out the Truth and Hope campaign... and the controversy they have caused.

TGIF

1. Finished. The Kingsley Turk Experience screenplay. Cheers.

2. And then the rewriting.

3. The Beach Boys Beach Boys' Party

4. Ted Leo. Yeah, there's a new Ted Leo EP. Buy it online.

5. Bedheads - or, more accurately The New Year. Shamble on dirty diamond, swell heart my wonder.

Done

And Done

Palin Endorses Out of the Closet

Los Angeles Times notes the irony.

Check Out This Nutjob Ad

Here

McCain Blasts Bush

Lately seems like McCain is running against W. instead of Barack. Desperate? Yes. Check out the Washington Times interview.

More Conservatives For Barack

Former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan endorses Obama

Fun With Elections

Check out Yahoo's electoral projections review. For endless entertainment, make your own electoral map!

Conservatives For Obama

Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004, has declined to endorse either candidate, but he's had some sharp things to say about the McCain campaign as of late. Read about it at:

The Washington Monthly

The Huffington Post

New Ryan Adams

Right Here Right Now

Jeffrey Wright and Now This

Colin Powell endorses Barack

Obama and Me

Workin' For the City

1. The Band Music From the Big Pink

Feels like end of summer, coming fall, motorcycles, and watermelons, and typewriters, Upstate New York, actually missing the East Coast, trees and flying back to LA in the morning. Freedom from all this day-in, day-out polish and hustle. Green grass on the back lawn and woods stretching to the hills.

2. Whispertown Swim

Doing their video in a week. Dance and spin and facepaint and march march march.

3. I'm Not There

4. Blue canvas cowboy hat

5. Writing writing writing

Maundering

This Is Yr Life

"[T]he men who were most in life, who were molding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State. They were interested in truth and in truth alone. They recognized only one kind of activity - creation. Nobody could command their services because they had of their own pledged themselves to give all. They gave gratuitously, because that is the only way to give. This was the way of life which appealed to me: it made sound sense. It was life - not the simulacrum which those about me worshipped." - Henry Miller, Sexus, Grove Press 1987 Edition, Chapter 9, 206-207

Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

CSNW makes the nightly news! Please watch and check out the CSNW site

Meghan McCain and Marxism

Johan found this curious article on Meghan McCain's use of the decidedly Marxist outfit Stereolab on her daily campaign blog.

This Midwest Life

Today I am listening strictly to Boy's Life. How come everyone forgets they were the best un-emo band to truck on out of the Midwest ever?

Poemetry

These folks are publishing me in January. Winter comes and goes but literary journals are forever.

Grit Yr Teeth

I've become really fascinated with William T. Vollman's writing again. He's got a quality, as this interview proves.

Yr Guide To Easy Living

"Dinosaur cards are fun to make for birthdays or Christmas. If you are sending out party invitations, these could have a dinosaur theme, too. There could either be a drawing on one sheet of paper with the message underneath; or you can make a folded card with a picture on the front and a written message inside. Make sure you have envelopes of the right size before you begin. 

You could even make your own comics with different dinosaur characters that have all sorts of adventures which your friends would enjoy reading. Give the comic a name like Dinosaur Weekly or Dinosaur Fun, for instance." - Sue Pinkus, Let's Draw Dinosaurs, Pterodactyls and Other Prehistoric Creatures

Livin' It For the Moment On Sunday

"Try these systems. Their worth can not be ascertained by simply observing them objectively; you must get involved with them for their value to be known. The systems are meant to be enjoyed, for they delightfully reveal the full meaning of life's events." - David and Lucy Pond, The Metaphysical Handbook

Politicos of the World

Nice post from Lex Dexter at Organizing Grievances

This Is Yr Saturday

1. Patsy Cline "She's Got You"

2. My favorite sweater, sailor's bracelet, and moccasins

3. Justin Townes Earle The Good Life

4. CNN happy fridge buzz

5. Gary Snyder performing Mountains and Rivers Without End on little plastic disc: "Well, man, I just don't feel right without something on my back..." though I could do without the bass lines.

6. bonny billy master and everyone vinyl

7. Salad lunch

8. Doc Watson Self Titled

9. Cycling up the coast

This Ain't No Bluegrass

Mistaken identity: The Thomas A. Minor Society

Another Tip For Happy Living

"For your safety, do not enter mine shafts." - California Trail Users Coalition, Angeles National Forest and El Mirage Areas Map, 2nd Edition, October 2006

This Is Yr Great Day

1. 9:50am: It's 57 degrees and clear blue skies at the beach on this Friday, the 10th of October 2008

2. Graham Nash, Songs For Beginners

3. Reading Richard Brautigan and Henry Miller

4. T-minus one week and counting until W.

5. New pair of Levis

6. "My fellow prisoners..." - John McCain... caught this live on CNN the other day. very surreal.

7. Barry Levinson on McCain's shooting style

8. Thomas A. Minor and the Pick'in Line 

Lifeboat Earth

"For easy navigation, this book is in sections. The Tools chapters are the ones you'll thumb through time and again. The Practical section covers basic travel situations like catching transport and finding a bed. The Social section gives you conversational phrases, pick-up lines, the ability to express opinions - so you can get to know people. Food has a section all of its own: gourmets and vegetarians are covered and local dishes feature. Safe Travel equips you with health and police phrases, just in case. Remember the colours of each section and you'll find everything easily." - Lonely Planet French Phrasebook, 2nd Edition, April 2003

Who Is Palin Palling Around With?

None other than the Alaskan Independence Party

This Is Yr Los Angeles

"Southern California experienced a decisive climatic change at the end of the Pleistocene Age about 11,500 years ago... The selective processes resulted in man being forced to move out of a less productive desert environment into a new area." - Milt McAuley, Hiking Trails of the Santa Monica Mountains

This American Economy

This American Life on the economy and credit default swaps

Taibbi Highlights RE: Rove & the Maverick

1. "[McCain] actually went out and hired Tucker Eskew, one of the architects of Rove's smear campaign in South Carolina back in 2000, a man who McCain once said had a 'special place in hell' awaiting him in the next world."

2. "[T]he McCain camp can now create controversies out of thin air by arguing with itself on national television, turning premeditated, planted comments by the 'independent journalist' Karl Rove into 'attacks' from the 'angry left.'"

3. "Rove is not a genius, or even very clever: He's totally and completely immoral. It doesn't take genius to claim, as Rove ludicrously did last fall, that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed the Iraq War resolution in 2002. It doesn't take brains to compare a triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden; you just have to be a mean, rotten cocksucker."

4. "[T]his generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can't bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers."