Nashville ain't jus' country

Here are two music videos done by Team Genius. I wish I was this creative. The first involves the best use of drawings on sticks to convey emotion I've seen since, well, third grade. The second is just emo puppets; thus, brilliant.



And RIP Omar.

Howl

"Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus." -Christopher Hitchens

The phenomenon of Oprah's book club has been bothering me of late. For every Love in the Time of Cholera there is a The Secret or A New Earth. Such books as the latter two sow such unfounded hope. They take the grain of truth about the beauty of life and our innate ability to control our fate, for lack of a better word, and twist it into a marketing gimmick. And yet is it so bad to give hope, even false hope, to those who want it? And who am I to decide what is right for one to read and one not to read?

These books do not traffic in pure truth or logic. They deal the drug of wish fulfillment. They tell someone, without specifics, that the universe is created for them and that it is only their weakness that stops them. The Secret, for example, when taken to its logical conclusion states that genocide victims were at the wrong end of a machete or gas chamber, not because of their circumstances, but because they wished themselves unconciously to be in that position. This is a monsterous proposal, yet is accepted without criticism.

A New Earth proposes a wishy-washy, half ass interpretation of Daoism, ignoring the hard choices of balance and acceptance of cycle, instead focusing on how one can become better by, bare with me now, simplifying their existence.
Maybe it's the few beers I've ingested, but I find it hard to tell the difference between actively selling such books for profit, when I feel they can only bring destructive memes to an individual, with when I helped build weapons for the military. Death by shrapnel, or death by faulty, hollow words.

Today Show Parody by the Onion

Expert On Anteaters Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

http://www.indianajones.com/site/index.html
Indiana Jones defined my childhood. Enjoy the trailer. And yes, I can quote all the movies verbatim. "You were named after the dog?!"

The Somnambulist by Joseph Barnes

What ties 19th century London under-society, sleepwalking giants, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's American utopia? Apparently, Edward Moon, the protagonist of Joseph Barnes' The Somnambulist.

A illusionist and former detective, Edward Moon longs for the day for a case that interests him beyond the mundane crimes and petty thefts of Victorian London. Moon spends his evenings performing rote magic at his theatre for a diminishing audience; the pinnacle of his act a performance with his friend the Somnambulist, a pale, bald giant of a man who drinks milk by the gallon and cannot be harmed by sword or bullet. After a hack actor falls to his death in exotic circumstances in a seedy part of the city, Moon is enlisted by the police to find the killer. Where this leads Edward Moon is the very destruction of what he holds good.

I read the first 200p in one sitting and I still cannot convey what made me. The sentences were tight, the language strict, but the sheer audacity of the characters made me want for more. An example is a man, I won't spoil who he actually is, who Moon meets at a society dinner who claims to know the future. Not that he's from the future, but that he lives backwards in time. His yesterday is your future and vice versa. The Somnambulist, a gentle mute who communicates only through his chalk and portable blackboard, is loyal, immune to harm, and causes fear only in those who pose a threat. A pair of assassins who dress in school-boy clothing hold no fear nor mercy, the most evil of characters, end up saving London. From what? A zombie Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I kid you not.

For those that like their fantasy seeped in reality, savagery and all, I recommend this book. It reads like a bottle of Neil Gaiman, Jim Butcher, and Susanna Clarke all jumbled together and poured into a shot glass. Itself a satire of fantasy and also a homage, The Somnambulist balances on the odd edge of not taking itself too serious, yet the characters all matter during its reading. Only because I know not everyone will get it do I recommend this as a Borrow from Library, but it is engrossing enough to be a buy. Really, you miss half of it on a single reading anyway.

Caturday

Old Poetry

I published this in Bittersweet back in 2003, an old favorite of mine.

By the Baseball Bat
for Mark Doty

I believe in the wolves of memory,
how they force us,
like gold diggers far in the Yukon woods,
to build a ring of fire around our sleeping bags
to keep the wolves away from our dreams
and soft, smelly flesh.

I believe you can love someone
even more in their death;
the mind's tendency to domesticate
these wolves
makes it safe to love again,
safe to watch in the arena the dogfights
between our memories and our mutt desires
(a muzzle and switch kept hidden in our hearts,
just in case).

I believe in the naivety of age
and that a wolf-dog can be trained
to sleep at your feet, by the baseball bat,
and to never question your dominance
over the past.

Random Quote

"Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about... Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs, but in the affairs of the state as well... We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all... Others are brave out of ignorance, and, when they begin to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come."

-Pericles of Athens, general and statesman (c. 495-429 b.c.)