This Is Yr Day

2010-06-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

"'you return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?'"

2010-06-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

ECSTATIC TRUTH

2010-05-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

2010-05-30T12:43:00.001-07:00

THE BOTS

2010-05-21T12:52:00.001-07:00

2010-05-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

2010-05-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

We bandy about this

faded aquarium. The

winter park. Ice thick

like layer cake. Uniform

tattered at the seams.

We trample like

paper on a mission we

shred the missing

persons pages, talk

jargon, finally, launch

a sleepwalker’s pilgrimage

to rename the continents.

2010-05-10T11:35:00.000-07:00

Do not put off your sailing lessons any longer.

Pack your duffle bags.

Vista footfalls, no complaints desk –

you can get pregnant in the tent.

Pilgrims! Start your engines, waiting

for the light in last night’s empty

parking lot. Waiting on loose change.

The bullhorn on the pickup cries

political slogans en espanol and

the posters hardly look real.

To my fellow wanderers

(stuttering like vending machines):

We will quit our whining.

Enough with the pull tabs and plastic wrap.

We will walk from this humid,

disintegrating strip mall.

We will walk like abandoned machinery

into the pale, collapsing dawn.

People For Black Metal

2010-05-08T15:11:00.000-07:00

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/489619181/cascadian-black-metal

The Museum of Eterna's Novel

2010-05-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Museum of Eterna's Novel (The First Good Novel) is the very definition of a novel written ahead of its time. Macedonio (known to everyone by his unusual first name) worked on this novel in the 1930s and early '40s, during the heyday of Argentine literary culture, and around the same time that At Swim-Two-Birds was published, a novel that has quite a bit in common with Macedonio's masterpiece.

In many ways, Museum is an "anti-novel." It opens with more than fifty prologues—including ones addressed "To My Authorial Persona," "To the Critics," and "To Readers Who Will Perish If They Don’t Know What the Novel Is About"—that are by turns philosophical, outrageous, ponderous, and cryptic. These pieces cover a range of topics from how the upcoming novel will be received to how to thwart "skip-around readers" (by writing a book that’s defies linearity!).

The second half of the book is the novel itself, a novel about a group of characters (some borrowed from other texts) who live on an estancia called "la novella" . . .

A hilarious and often quite moving book, The Museum of Eterna's Novel redefined the limits of the genre, and has had a lasting impact on Latin American literature. Authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Ricardo Piglia have all fallen under its charm and high-concepts, and, at long last, English-speaking readers can experience the book that helped build the reputation of Borges's mentor.

Ecstatic Truth

2010-05-08T15:06:00.001-07:00

coming soon

Notes On Brutality And Cultural Relativism, Or: What's On The Drinks Menu?

2009-02-25T10:29:00.000-08:00

Yubaker plays Nepali heavy metal music on his mobile phone as we bump along in a van through the dull, blue-grey dawn. It sounds like a low-fi Iron Maiden with the lead singer wailing in Nepali over whining guitars. Past the morning bustle of the Kalimati vegetable market, past an oddly anachronistic Playboy Whiskey sign. Up through the hills and trees – a soft and hazy approximation of the Santa Monica Mountains but with temples. Dammit, cold shower this morning cuz the generator wasn’t on yet when we got up at 430am and now winding and wending to a Hindu temple, we three vegetarians apprehensively expect that we just might witness the sacrifice of a goat. Go, Cultural Relativism, Go! That’s an abandoned cement factory, bombed-out and in a state of remorseless decay, and I can’t help but think again and again that this is not our past but our future. Blade Runner after the BOMB. (Note to self: Buddhist science fiction film). The buses and water trucks are decorated with righteous iconography and poems – poems writ large on a tanker truck! The impetus to write poetry on automobiles denotes a decidedly Un-Western perspective and in the villages women in saris shower in the open air and men in trousers and sweater vests brush their teeth at the side of the road. We drink sweet tea in a dirty parking lot. We breathe cold air that smells like campfire and sunbeams. We walk past the beggars and the vendors along the path to the hollowed ground. But Jesus Effing Christ the temple is wild and brutal! Barefoot on cold damp tiles and tika powder and – no joke – blood, yes BLOOD running across the ground and only the smell of burning incense, everywhere burning incense that bleats out the odor of so much death, and all the while Yubaker texting on his mobile. The music is nice when it whirls but… Where are the Buddhists? Or the Jains? Gimme my people cuz I can’t handle the liquid and the violence, I think I’m going to be sick, yet even in the face of redlined ritual, home is still a distant simulation. What’s the idea, here? I do feel sick. And then I feel sleepy. And we all wash our feet and maybe try not to think about it. Finally, today’s big lesson comes at dinner: NO POWER. NO BLENDER. NO COCKTAILS.

Travel Notes On Time Expansion

2009-02-23T09:42:00.000-08:00

Keep moving, keep moving. Dramatically, intentionally. Unintentionally. Somewhere it’s tomorrow already. Might as well be here. Taipei to Bangkok. Hot hot weather. This is the Children Of Men for LA. Yes, Bangkok, the Los Angeles of the future. Reclining Buddha smiles sweetly for our cameras but security is none too pleased. The three Americans disappear. Quickly. No harm, no foul. Priceless boat ride on the river at sunset, who cares? with the wind in your hair and the low rent apartments on stilts and the kids swimming under a burning sky and amulets that can protect against everything and anything for just 50 baht. And then the night markets. What’s “pussy ping pong” anyway? If you don’t know, please don’t ask, just move on to Hong Kong and fog and hills and neon and 3am 7-11 missions complete with disposable underwear. What’s next? Kathmandu, which must be the noisiest Zen destination on the planet. Yes, Shangri-La is endless honking taxis. Dust. Exhaust. Passing bananas. A sparkle ahead is a Coca-Cola billboard. Eff it anyway, Disneyland hasn’t colonized just yet. Beautiful Hair Now – Life Can’t Wait says the next sign, though beautiful hair is the last thing on your mind. Scarves, face masks, loose clothes, and the Government Ministries building is ornate and white but stained like old dentures. The traffic circle must have been invented here, or at least reached its pinnacle in the haze of the Kathmandu Valley. This city feels like a chain of linked, chaotic, traffic circles. Did I mention there are no lanes, no stop lights? It’s the festival of Shiva, by the way, en route you pass the Terminal Café, which sounds like the name of a William Gibson novel, and maybe this place is more like a William Gibson novel than an antiquarian travelogue when DVDs occupy market stalls beside prayer flags and someone takes a digital picture of us from the back of a rickshaw. Chaos chaos chaos. Several hundred thousand people all festive, yeah, bearded, stoned, glassy-eyed, hollow-faced men smoking ganja, and pyres, yes burning bodies transcending this world, or whatever. Oh and time expansion, right? This is day four and I feel like we have been together for a month at least. How much raw, unmitigated, disparate, contradictory, visceral, vital and uncompromising life can you pack into a day? The more you experience the longer you live, innit? It’s not just the difference. Really really, it’s hardly the difference, babe, it’s the experience. And time slows, and time slows, and time slows, as we keep moving, keep moving, ever Westward. And if we feel everything then we are bound to something, eh? tied and true, or maybe tried and blue, and if we never stop we can outrun the pangs of the Modern World, I know it I just know it, walking awhile side by side by side at the far end of the map, just past the near future where time matters or doesn’t, yeah, just beyond the International Date Line.

Khao San Blue Shoes

2009-02-22T19:37:00.000-08:00

BANGKOK

2009-02-22T02:11:00.001-08:00

1. Please declare your insects at customs.

2. Job's Tears

3. Apathy Delk

4. Three Americans (almost get arrested at the Wat Pho Temple)

5. Khao San Sandals

6. Riverboat at sunset.

7. Protective amulets

Living It For The Moment At The Taipei Intl Airport

2009-02-19T15:30:00.001-08:00

2009-02-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

1. Brutal accounting. Tragically bad movie.

2. Back rooms of Chinese restaurants. Anonymous hotels. Reagan-omics. Flash forwards to my past.

3. Sweet and sleepy hold-up.

4. Book tour roll-in. Murderous toys. The blue's too blue and the green's too green.

5. Hint at the past but never show it. Well, maybe show it a little.

6. Studying for CIA personality tests.

Fan Letter

2009-01-18T21:17:00.000-08:00

So here it is. Please don’t call this a fan letter. Although, I guess that’s probably the best description. Lawrence Durrell wrote to Henry Miller, so writing to you seemed…okay. First off, your book is vivid, brutal, economical, touched, wild, flailing, uncompromising, renegade, true, and – correct me if I’m wrong – very much alive. At the end of Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen merges literature and bubblegum pop, infinity and the comic strip. Who else? Dean Young. But you too.
   Leonard Cohen, Gary Snyder, Kenneth Koch, Joseph Brodsky, Dean Young, and now this. And that’s just the poetry. Not that I am trying to imply any lineage for your work. Just a lineage for my inspiration. Joseph Brodsky writes like water (and as David Berman tells us, “all water is classic water,”) – like water in a glass, in a stream, in the ocean, not to mention mist and rain and evaporating steam, and ice, Brodsky definitely writes ice. But if Brodsky’s words are water, yours are a whiskey and cola with a menthol cough drop dissolved in there – it may not cure everything, but it’s an effing elixir!
   I can fall in love with a girl with nothing more than a phone call. And a book can be the same. A page! Just one page can do it! And then, obsession. Or maybe not so much obsession as doting. I dote on books. Try to read them from different directions, get them to love me back. Sometimes I read them backwards, reading a page and then reading the previous page and so on. Is this insane? How many sit-ups must I do, how many books must I read to make her love me?
   What is that line about questions in a letter? Not that I expect you to have the answers anyway. Or maybe you do. Your work certainly implies a vast knowledge of these types of things. Page 136 for example – ah but that’s solitude, isn’t it? I’m trying. I’m really trying.
   I went to Uganda and I couldn’t write a word. This was almost a year ago. I wrote so many more words about having my tooth pulled – which was bloody and visceral – then I wrote about all my time in Uganda. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be there and write about it, as if these were two separate existences that cancelled each other out. And then, just last week, I could. I wrote about it in the past, but the past as if it was the future. Maybe it will be the future. I wrote simultaneously about what had happened and what might happen. Wrote about myself there with entirely different people and entirely different experiences. This means something, I am sure. About writing or about love, I know not. Maybe writing is about the dissolution of the perception of linear time. Or maybe that’s what love is. Or maybe love just makes us rewrite our experiences with our fantasies. Do you know? Can someone write a book so good and not know?
   I went to Berlin, I went to Amsterdam, I had a toothache. I wrote these words once: “you know how you can see the breeze in a photo? / It’s kinda like the feelings in a letter.” Do you understand what I mean? I wish I was writing to a girl.
   I used to think a poem was all you needed to make someone fall in love with you. Has it ever worked for you? I don’t think it’s ever worked for me. Although maybe a poem is not the best thing to found a relationship on anyway. What’s next? I had a horrible, horrible dream last night. But I woke up feeling so invigorated.
   I’m not going to sit here and analyze your poetry to you. What a waste of time. The combinations of words in my analysis could never begin to say a tiny bit of what the combinations of words in your poems say. But I’m trying to tell you, at the very least, that it means a lot to me, this book with your words. It was Andre Velter who reduced his biography to one single word: traveler. I like this. I read his poem Frontiers translated into English from the French by a publisher in New Delhi, India. This seems fitting. What I’m saying is that geographical expanses conflagrate my heart. But your writing does something altogether different – like positioning the epic at the meeting point of my foot and a dented soda pop can. This blows my mind.
   What else? I dunno. I guess my task is complete if I’ve communicated in any real way the meaning of your book to me, how grateful I am for you writing it. Put on some tea, turn on the teevee and call it a night. Good job.

2009-01-06T02:27:00.001-08:00

a forgotten turn of phrase: one shot of circumstantial poetry

2009-01-04T21:22:00.001-08:00

1. Back from Holiday hiatus.

2. "Walking along the Champs-Elysees I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say 'health' I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I'm a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. 'I have only to talk about a meal,' he say, 'and you're radiant!' It's a fact. The mere thought of a meal - another meal - rejuvenates me. A meal!" -Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Grove Press: 1961. Pg. 49

3. Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 77

4. Jacques Prevert

5. Writer's conferences and gunfighters. Directors. Forgotten names. Industry. Robbery and sympathy. Literature for airports and technology.

6. Tell a lot of story, fast.

2008-12-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-12-08T19:04:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-04T17:55:00.001-08:00

1. Amsterdam is storybook.

2. Listening to Bjork.

3. Reading about Knut Hamsun.

2008-12-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-04T02:14:00.001-08:00

"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

2008-12-04T01:33:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-12-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Snow falling on Berlin.

2008-12-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

I thought this was a family Weihnachtsfestival!

2008-12-02T03:17:00.000-08:00

East Berlin from Lux 11

2008-12-02T03:09:00.000-08:00

Arrived in Berlin last night.

2008-11-29T14:19:00.000-08:00

1. The Ebony Hillbillies

2008-11-29T14:17:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-11-28T20:25:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-27T11:39:00.000-08:00

"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

2008-11-26T08:38:00.001-08:00

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."

2008-11-26T08:34:00.000-08:00

Hiatus complete. Leaving for Berlin on Sunday.

2008-11-17T19:14:00.000-08:00

2008-11-13T20:12:00.000-08:00

"'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

2008-11-09T14:54:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-04T00:08:00.001-08:00

2008-10-31T13:50:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-31T10:32:00.000-07:00

2008-10-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T12:42:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

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

Purging The Voters

2008-10-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

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

TGIF

2008-10-24T16:54:00.002-07:00

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

2008-10-24T16:54:00.001-07:00

And Done

Palin Endorses Out of the Closet

2008-10-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times notes the irony.

Check Out This Nutjob Ad

2008-10-24T15:17:00.001-07:00

Here

McCain Blasts Bush

2008-10-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

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

More Conservatives For Barack

2008-10-23T15:49:00.001-07:00

Former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan endorses Obama

Fun With Elections

2008-10-23T10:48:00.001-07:00

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

Conservatives For Obama

2008-10-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Right Here Right Now

Jeffrey Wright and Now This

2008-10-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

Colin Powell endorses Barack

Obama and Me

2008-10-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/SPV-UVcHe8A">
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350">

Workin' For the City

2008-10-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-18T02:32:00.000-07:00

This Is Yr Life

2008-10-18T02:12:00.000-07:00

"[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

2008-10-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

Meghan McCain and Marxism

2008-10-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

This Midwest Life

2008-10-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T23:47:00.000-07:00

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

Grit Yr Teeth

2008-10-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-13T16:13:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-10-12T13:12:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-10-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Nice post from Lex Dexter at Organizing Grievances

This Is Yr Saturday

2008-10-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Mistaken identity: The Thomas A. Minor Society

Another Tip For Happy Living

2008-10-11T12:53:00.001-07:00

"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

2008-10-10T09:22:00.001-07:00

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

2008-10-10T09:07:00.000-07:00

"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?

2008-10-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

None other than the Alaskan Independence Party

This Is Yr Los Angeles

2008-10-09T23:11:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-10-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

This American Life on the economy and credit default swaps

Taibbi Highlights RE: Rove & the Maverick

2008-10-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

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."