cheese it, the cops!

i do love the fact that the american political process comes down to single words, like "change" and "experience." only those particular words don't really move me. how about "mulatto"? "bitch"? "polygamy"? anyway, i am endorsing duncan hunter as the polygamous mulatto bitch of this amazing campaign.

well i have moved out to a new house (marion and i having separated), sobered up, and now i'm ready to blog, bitches! ok i have solved the deep mystery of benazir bhutto's death: she died of natural causes, at the exact moment that someone shot her in the head and blew her the fuck up.
and i want to say that i am a change agent, a changent, as it were. what this country needs is change: completely random, unpredictable change involving absolutely everything simultaneously. now that will be an experience! and in this election, i am the experienced changent: the jimi hendrix of politics. the nihilist party is back.

ok here is the best thing ever. shoutouts to the lovely lisa simeone.

i got to say i'm looking way forward to walk hard: the dewey cox story. why? well i think "walk the line" and "ray" sucked elephant schlongs. i'm never gonna forgive the singing in walk the line, e.g. but they were incredibly too-big, utterly inert, completely dispiriting. plus i have downloaded one of the wonderful dylan parodies from walk hard: "royal jelly." someone finally figured out that dylan was deeply fullofshit from the getgo. "royal jelly" is from dewey's "political period" and consists of incomprehensible pseudo-surrealist claptrap, switching on the chorus to "so let me touch you": the sixties in a nutshell. ":

here's a snatch of "subterranean homesick blues

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try "No Doz"
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

that this was welcomed ecstatically as the great poetry of the age is just one of those things, like the rise of mike huckabee. who knows how or why?
here's the entirety of "all along the watchtower":

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.


this could have been written by carl jung, had carl jung been a blithering idiot (or: even more of a blithering idiot than he actually was).

i think it's cool that mike huckabee is celebrating the birth of baby jesus. but what i object to is the fact that he can't use prepositions properly; he talks like a middle school student who's "good with his hands."

"Are you about worn out of all the television commercials you've been seeing lately?" dude. i ain't worn out of shit, whatever in the world that could mean. "At this time of year it's hard to pull aside from all that." indeed it's hard to pull aside at all, though one might pull out or over. but those are not the sorts of thing one would be doing with television commercials, i think.

whatever you do, don't tell david addington about this. he uses these guys as role models.

watcha readin profcrispy?

astrid lindgren, ronia the robber's daughter
having raised five kids, i have read many many children's books aloud. this might be my alltime favorite: i'd say ages five to infinity. it's amazing on nature, on crime, on boys and girls, on love, on death. the robber involved, matt, is a character for the ages: all his emotions are just huge. anyway i just read through it for the third time with jane; emma got it several times too, if i recall.

howard risatti, a theory of craft
for i guess what must be decades now, i've been arguing that there is no defensible distinction between art and craft. this was in its way an attempt to exalt craft and bring art down a few pegs from its absurd superhuman heights. this book fundamentally changed my thinking by coming at the thing from the other direction: by starting with the concept of craft rather than art, and defending the integrity and distinctiveness of craft as opposed to, say, museum-type paintings. the prose in this book is kind of stiff and repetitive. but the ideas are absolutely fundamental: risatti essentially invents a discipline: philosophy of craft. he does a remarkable job with taxonomies of the crafts, a remarkable job with the phenomenology of a crafter's experience. i do think that the concept of fine art that he deploys here is too narrow and that there is more overlap than risatti indicates. but it's surprising that this book has  someone whose basic positions in aesthetics were worked out twenty years ago and have hardly altered since rethinking the whole terrain.

albert speer, inside the third reich
obviously a classic autobiography, absorbing for its portraits of hitler and the other principals. speer is amazingly self-critical and reflective. first he was hitler's architect, then minister of armaments. together, he and hitler tried to redesign the cities of germany as they developed the aesthetic of national socialism (and national socialism is probably best conceived as an aesthetic system). one thing you see: hitler cared about nothing as much as art, indeed almost cared about nothing except art. indeed he conceived the final solution in aesthetic terms as the creation of a pure form.

ben franklin, the autobiography
franklin, obviously, is one of the great characters this planet has ever produced. he managed to study everything from statecraft to electricity to the tides to astronomy to spelling to manners to god to how to seduce a woman. and as a writer he is unparalleled: hilarious at his own expense, plain-spoken and profound. talking about his relationship to a store owner with whom he was in business, franklin says: "when i had just pass'd my 21st year, we both were taken ill. my distemper was a pleurisy, which very nearly carried me off: - i suffered a good deal, gave up the point in my own mind, & was rather disappointed when i found myself recovering; regretting in some degree that i must now sometime or other have all that disagreeable work to do over again."

i don't know whether you remember the firesign theater, the psychedelic comedy troupe the seventies. my brothers and i used to recite whole sketches to each other. in fact, me and jim were doing that right up to his death last summer. but anyway i want to point out to you that the firesign theater are prophets for our time, and for every time. in 1974 they put out an album (not their best, true) called the tale of the giant rat of sumatra, a sherlock holmes parody. but it turns out that there really are giant rats in sumatra. well at least in papua new guinea. here are the best:

ok i am going to have a crack at oprah/obama. what oprah is selling is redemption: easy, instantaneous redemption, redemption that is sold as a product line. every issue of oprah mag has five redemptions at 1500 wds each. that's why oprah loved frey: it's a story of redemption, and the fictional material, by jacking up the degradation, jacked up the redemption. my soontobeexwife marion (under a pseudonym) wrote the tale of my struggles with alcohol for oprah last year. i think it's fair to say, first, that it was fundamentally distorted. but it featured a superficial redemption that fit it nicely into the mechanical oprah narrative. well, this is exactly what obama offers: a redemption that comes in the form of a few words, hope, change etc. they are a good matchup in this regard. i guess what i don't understand about oprah is that you'd think after the thirtiesth diet doesn't work or after frey heads back to skid row, she'd get a little worried about whether she can churn out seventeen more inspiring redemptions this week, or whether they actually mean or accomplish anything, other than making you feel sort of good for a few minutes.

man i just watched oprah and barack. i just want to say: it reached into my chest like a giant claw, literally tearing out my heart and offering it to the moon in blood sacrifice. i felt...like myself, and yet like so much more, like all of us, together, forging a single ecstatic organism of love.