heathen child

pretty awesome new video from Cave, Ellis, et al.

interesting graffix

via, oddly enough, turbotax:
Free Tax Filing, Efile Taxes, Income Tax Returns – TurboTax.com

epistemological closure

Interesting article about David Berman's recent talk at the Open City Summer Writing Workshop over at HTMLGIANT. Go here.


I really fucking hate the word 'closure' due to it's over-/mis-use in recent years. I blame daytime talk-show hosts like Dr Phil et al. for ruining an otherwise perfectly good word.

So that you are on the same page as Berman regarding the 'closure' he refers to, go here.

Fiat justitia--ruat caelum

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.

- Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens

let there be no running from non-existent destroyers of morals

let there be honest understanding:

hats off to al franken

a true public servant and one of the few current senators worth a damn.



if i had my druthers, there'd be a franken/grayson ticket in 2012

dopest photo

Explanation: On May 29, looking southward from a vantage point about 350 kilometers above the southern Indian Ocean, astronauts onboard the International Space Station watched this enormous, green ribbon shimmering below. Known as aurora australis or southern lights, the shifting, luminous bands are commonly seen at high northern latitudes as well, there known as the aurora borealis or northern lights. North or south their cause is the same though, as energetic charged particles from the magnetosphere pile into the atmosphere near the Earth's poles. To produce the characteristic greenish glow, the energetic particles excite oxygen atoms at altitudes of 100 kilometers or more. Aurora on May 29 were likely triggered by the interaction of the magnetosphere with a coronal mass ejection erupting from the Sun on May 24.

via APOD

dogon:nogod

killer version of one of my all time favorite songs.

Space Prophet Dogon - Richard & Alan Bishop from the Brothers Unconnected tour:

invisible hand of the free market man

via the ever brilliant Tom Tomorrow

one from Robert Kelly

Ritual Dances

1.
Turn it so ON is on top
before you plug it in
then the message will come out right—

your character, accurate as ever
and neat as a muscle,
will be like a tight ship in one
of those eighteenth-century metaphors
about states and statesmen and
(this is what’s important)
you will sleep now. Sleep Arizona sunset,
wake up Vermont,
everybody is a mountain walking past your bed:

show me. Show me
with your body how it’s done.

2.
The place where men plant peas.
What exactly is sorghum anyway
and could I tell you if I knew?
I am generous with my information—
it’s the mud I swine around in,

here’s some for you: the privilege
of the hypotenuse is equal
to some of the fugues on the other nine themes
but which?
Lead me to your thalamus at last
where all the silly conjugations lead
and leave a lady
asleep in her suppose.
I always leave the answer
so plainly writ you think it was the question.

3.
o you and me, you and me
what a sexy game of raid the larder—
a Sufi person on the top shelf lodges,
I hear the click of amber beads the hum of zikr
sometimes in the wallboard from the other side

where what I thought was me was sleeping.
But my sleep was only a dream.

No, you say, it is a ship yourself
under full sail, on a wild sea
beating through the straits of semaphore—
o there’s no such place, no sea,
go back to sleep,
knowing there is no such sign.

4.
Work your way into the sweater put it on
how many yards of yarn to knit one
degree of early winter morn away
so you can know the day?

Lover, she tells me,
it is Sunday—numbers are much too holy
to use for counting things or reckoning—

numbers are for worship—kneel
before the sanctity of sevenness
and I will be your deaconess and you be glad.

5.
Then the church was empty.
The hanged man had
been dragged (or dragged
himself) over the hill
and left in the deep leaves
for vultures and foxes
as he instructed.
His books were carried off
and catalogued by nearby scholarship,
the spilled wine and lamb fat wiped up,
his thin rope unwrapped from the transom.
And all of a sudden it was just
as if he had been dead all the time,
or else a tall mirror in a furrier’s salon
waiting for the skin to speak again.

6.
It’s all right things keep starting—
can you feel the politics on its way,
the smell of it on my hands?

The brave policeman walks the lonely moon,
governments are bliss-inhibitors, that’s all,

yet those who trim our pleasures get
no pleasure from their cut.

There is a caste of men who think they’re born
to tell other people what to do
and there’s another caste to make them do it.

Without them the rest of us could stroll around
finding things and giving things to each other
all the livelong day and sleep deep
without the prattle of dismal instructors

and when we woke we’d have new dreams to share.

7.
All music is about Russia
Every river is the space between your own legs—

You think I don’t understand the dance
Just because I stand
Motionless against the wall
Counting the bricks with my shoulder blades

My poor lost wings
I fly back through the wall
I fly backwards through every solid thing,
All music is trying to describe Russia
The trees and factories of it, the bleak of season,
Torrid wheat fields and the shadows
Of hawks swoop down on alders by the stream

And every river flows inside your skin
And finds a way and finds a way

The dance leaps up into the air
sometimes the dancer follows.

8.
What it would have been to be a dancer
or to have danced what it could have been

and not alone but not either together
because a dance is one whoever does it

and one dancer is all by the self who
or who thinks to dance = an idea

the body has of itself
to move
regardless of anything but here

the dancer leaps from an idea of the ground
to an idea of the rock—feet

remember earth and collarbone
remembers sky how is there any room

for an idea of you let alone actual you

9.
but the dance is not something to see
it is illicit and imperial, it hides in daylight

it dares anyone to watch,
the best dancer hates to be seen

dances alone a dark closet

10.
all the room the dancer needs is in the dancer’s body
its moves are what space is made of

space comes after
space happens to the dance

place is what is left when the dance is done.

grinderman!

Man, Harvey Keitel is just killing it on bass:

my daughter's a libertarian, too!

from the always brilliant Toothpaste For Dinner

Ayn Rand's Adventure's in Wonderland

The second installment of Benjamin Frisch’s serial comic is up at Wonkette today. Check it.

latest dispatch from Lessig

"On June 1st I testified before the Rhode Island Legislature in support of a resolution calling a federal Constitutional Convention.

You're one of thousands of people who signed our petition in favor of this resolution. I'm grateful for your support, and I wanted to make sure you saw this video of the hearing. Take a few minutes to watch and learn what else you can do to help pass this resolution:

http://callaconvention.org/RItestimony

You can also read my latest Huffington Post piece about my testimony by clicking here.

After I finished my testimony last Tuesday, you won't believe who took the microphone to speak out against the resolution: the director of the Rhode Island ACLU.

The ACLU of course supported the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, but that wasn't the amazing part of the testimony. The extraordinary part, at least to my ears, was their dissing of democracy. To the suggestion that it might make sense for Americans to deliberate about whether a constitutional right to unlimited corporate spending in elections makes sense, Steve Brown of the ACLU said:

I'm not sure it's in the best interest of this country to be spending hours, days, weeks, and months discussing some of the most controversial issues in this country as to whether they should be part of our constitution. Regardless of whether it is a red state or a blue state... this is not how legislatures in the 50 states should be debating very controversial issues.

Now, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and I respect their decades of work defending liberty in America. But who, in the ACLU's view, is supposed to be "discussing some of the most controversial issues in this country"? Judges alone? Or judges advised by ACLU lawyers? If indeed the ACLU's idea of democracy means only judges and lawyers can have a say about what our Constitution means, then it might be time to think again about carrying that card.

Our Constitution was not made for lawyers. It was not to be trusted exclusively to judges. Yet somehow we have allowed a professional class of "civil libertarians" and judges to claim to themselves alone the right to say what our fundamental law should be. This is not just contrary to American traditions. It is destructive of democracy.

Our Constitution says nothing about the liberty of corporations to engage in politics. What it does say, though, is that the government should be accountable to "We, the People" through elected officials who represent our views and interests.

But now the corrupting influence of special interest money has denied us our say in Congress's decisions. It's time for us to stand up and take it back.

Watch the video of my testimony and then help spread the word about our effort:

http://callaconvention.org/RItestimony

Thanks again for your support."

-- Lawrence Lessig

formidable opponent

Mr Colbert, you rock!

Ballsiest thing I've seen on tv in a long time.

amoebic eyesores barnacled seizures

Whatever the setting, Alec K Redfearn will kill it. Here’s a fine example:



Here’s a 2005 interview w/ Alec for Splendid.

Also, The Baker St. Kollective, of which Redfearn is a part, has a page up at the ever dope Free Music Archive.

self-gratification is not a philosopy

Funny bit about pseudo-philosopher Rand from the new guy at Wonkette. Check out his other work here.






-- more Rand dissing over at Alternet

via APOD

crap. this is just the kind of stuff we don't need:

The Guardian reports on what could be the spark that starts WWIII:

Gaza blockade: Iran offers escort to next aid convoy


Anyone see any Blue Turbans up in there?

for a lazy sunday morn

The Homeless Wonderer - Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Gebrou
from vol 21 of the always impressive Ethiopiques series:


". . . the sound and feel is so dense with memory and imagery, musical but somehow quite visual, warm and woozy, a fuzzy, sepia toned old timey feel, due in no small part to the recording, which is quite reminiscent of old 78's, the soundtrack to movie Crumb, that sort of thing, dark rumbling low notes underpin sweet swirls and delicate flurries of minor key melody, sweet and lowdown for sure, warm evenings, back porches, big beautifully appointed parlors, huge empty fields, grass waving in the breeze, long late night wanders, moonlight strolls, so completely dreamy and lovely." - AQUARIUS RECORDS



Tsegue Maryam Gebrou has a pretty amazing biography you should check out.

If you dig what you hear, consider picking up the CD through a donation to the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation, an organization promoting musical/cultural exchange between Africa and the US.

die, autotune, die

Lee Moses


All that bullshit they label as soul these days can take it’s collagen stuffed lips away from the vocoder for 4 ½ glorious minutes and suck it because Lee Moses is here to show you how it’s done, bitches**.

Here’s Moses churning out a raw deep soul cover of the California Dreaming.

**Sharon Jones, Bettye Lavette, Andre Williams and anything Ian Svenonius is involved in are excused.

behind the flotilla curtain

talking points memo is live blogging the Freedom Flotilla where Israel has committed straight-up murder.

dailykos breaks it down here.

electric jebus

Pure awesome:

John C Reily and Crispin Glover as Tesla and Edison for Drunk History.

Twain & Tesla

tonight in Fairview

Anchorage Press has this to say

superparamagnetic

the somewhat creepy ferrofluid art of Sachiko Kodama:




wiki on ferrofluids

Oh, Comely

Hell of a song to break the silence with:

Yeni - The Ex w/ Afework Nigussie

So dope:

Proto-Beck

Frighteningly prophetic.

they just don't get it

Brilliant: Herzog reads Madeline

funding corporate free speech

being in the world

from the ever brilliant Simpsons

A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illus

from Ralph Nader's Attention Deficit Democracy

this has the potential to be really great:

"Science and Nature have ended their historic battle for the world’s best basic science articles, agreeing to cease their respective publications and co-launch an open-access, online-only journal with an innovative democratic peer-review system, sources at both journals revealed this morning."

via

the results of Palin's common-sense consevatism leave AK with debts totalling 70% of our GDP

via NYT

Sinead rips another pope

This time in the Washington Post.

as if metal didn't already have enough ridiculous sub-genres

Children's Dinosaur Metal

Hevisaurus

cowards

AK Democratic Headquarters gets a visit from Palin's reloaded minions.