I say don’t worry. If there is a
hell below, we are all going to go
-Curtis Mayfield
Rural Indiana Sheriff buys a tank.
Historians in the future, in my
opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our
jazz.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Peru approves genocide for
uncontacted tribes
“We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a
revolution.”
-Subcomandante Marcos, 1994
Indian Army mistook Planets for “spy drones”
China builds Stonehenge and Eiffel Tower in ‘Copycat towns’
The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living
-Karl Marx
Citizens strike back: Tiny, low-cost drones may one day
assassinate corrupt politicians, corporate CEOS and street criminals
2 dead and three injured after woman drops cell phone in a
toilet.
Politics is the art of preventing
people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them
-Paul Valery
Xochitl observed the Lifter moving into position over the
north side of the city through her field glasses. She and her squad were
camouflaged on the hill. Should they reveal themselves to plunge a dagger into
the belly of this beast? Large swathes of the city were on fire. She saw one of
the public dirigible transports they had set up fall into the bay like a
fizzled firework. If she revealed her position they would probably be shelled
in minutes, most her troop dead minutes after. What decision to make? It was
good shot though. She gestured with her hand.
They are all we have to fight off
illness and death.
-Leslie Marmon Silko
A call came through. Probably the last call out of the city.
You were the last on my list but you answered
Yes.
The city has fallen. Bombs are landing. You are probably
hearing my voice from the land of the dead.
I will get there.
Don’t come, just
listen this last time.
I will listen. But you can’t stop me from coming.
You are probably coming to the land of the dead.
Dexter Filkin’s excellent book of reporting on the war of
terror (or the 9/11 Wars some have called them) The Forever War has an early
chapter describing the 9/11 attacks. He names this chapter “Third World” and I
find it a beautiful touch. The empire that America has hesitantly created in
post wars years, this Pax Americana has been built by the power of money but it
has also been created by “death from above”. Our air superiority has enforced
our position in Libya, Panama, Korea, Sudan, Iraq, Japan, Germany, and
continued on in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. This sudden bolt
from the sky that turns a mental and physical landscape to a world of rubble,
smoke, and disappeared lives. We experienced “death from above” and it
fractured our mind. The burning, bombing and destruction exited the foreign
news section and appeared on an American landscape. For some American the idea
of “third world” was already part of their lives, those of Detroit, Flint,
south side Chicago, the Bronx, Compton and Watts, Pine Ridge reservation, coal
country of West Virginia and Kentucky, Camden, Youngstown, tomato fields of
Florida, and many others had lives controlled by corrupt politicos, men with
guns, decaying social structures, poverty, and arbitrary violence. But for most,
this idea had never even been pondered. Untouchable America had been a reality
all their lives. To quote from Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock
The discontinuity
generated by the 9/11attacks should not be underestimated. While I was writing
this very chapter, I met with a recent college graduate who was developing a
nonprofit company and website to help create relationships between
“millennials” of her generation and more aged mentors of my own. She explained
that her generation was idealistic enough to want to help fix the world, but
they had been “traumatized by 9/11 and now we’re incapable of accessing the
greater human projects.” Somehow, she felt the tragedy had disconnected her
generation from a sense of history and purpose, and that they “needed to
connect with people from before that break in the story in order to get back on
track.”
Was it severing, a realization, the end of a narrative, the
waking from a dream, or an event that smelled convincing enough of history to
shock us, or a rebirth? What was that day? What world did it create in its
sacrifice?
Ikea know way too much about your
sex and pooping habits
Harvard says library includes book
bound in human skin
A place without gurus monarchs
leaders cops tax collectors jails matriarchs patriarchs and all the other
galoots who in cahoots have made the earth a pile of human bones under the feet
of wolves
-Ishmael Reed
The Oued El-Had and Mezoura massacres were perpetrated by
“strange guerillas” with shaved heads and eyebrows and flags that said “angry
at god”.
“This is a revolution!”
I’m alright when I’m awake but
sleeping I hurt my face. What do you guys do about drug itch?
Benedryl
My dick is begging me not to itch
it again
Benedryl
It feels like fiberglass in my
veins
Benedryl
Opiyum is your screen name?
Benedryl
On someone’s list you are already
a casualty
-The Minutemen
Could this boob baring councilor
be Labour’s answer to winning the election?
“This is a revolution”
Neil Young’s twitter hacked and
filled with porn.
I’m going to show you how to get a
slurpy with an ak-47
Mexican Kim Kardashian takes over
drug cartel hit squad. Uses personalized pink ak-47. Nicknamed Emperatriz de
los antrax. Check out these hot selfies from her twitter feed
A secret is what no one knows
-Moondog
We can neither confirm nor deny
this is our first tweet
Wars and panics on the stock
exchange,
Machine gun fire and arson,
Bankruptcies, warloans,
Starvation, lice, cholera and
typhus:
Good growing weather for the House
of Morgan
-John Dos Passos
Toussaint L'ouverture said burn
the cities and retreat into the hills. Napoleon sending twenty thousand
soldiers to reclaim Haiti for French revolution and slavery.
Could pooping in a box save the
developing world?
The rocks made hollow sounds
ricocheting off the rocket’s fins. The crowd had worked itself up to this
action. Faedra wondered the source of their anger. She couldn’t place it. The
cult had been unusual filled with deranged and wild ideas and dangerous to
those in its orbit, but these were the actions of a long oppressed group of
people not the neighbors of some weirdoes. She thought of her fellows now as just
that, weirdoes. The rocket was missing its magnificent cone, and it looked sad
and forgotten as the villager’s stones began to dent its golden sides.
Couches, pianos and other items
were being pulled out of the mansion. She remembered the chants in those halls.
Solid black paint on every surface, Red swastikas placed throughout the
interior. She remembered the chanting and singing in the master’s language. She
remembered it all and felt very little for the person she was who had participated
The master’s cats flitting between
legs of the looters. They had made a greater claim to the house than any of its
former inhabitants. Their kingdom was now being thrust upside down by the
greedy ravagers. Some of the cats flood out into the yard and vanish into the
bushes. Two men are trying to pull a piano through a door. Unmusical clatter comes
from its interior as it was struggled over. A drum set is being tossed over
those men’s heads.
Here the master had gathered them.
In this hall they wore black clothes and bandied gold medallions. He told them
of the return. A human would return from the stars. He was sent out so many
years ago that the technology that sent him and even the civilization was lost
to epochs of dust and forgetting. We would not ignore his message of disasters
coming and the knowledge that we could use to escape it. The master had heard
radio transmission from the man, and he knew everything that could be expected.
We must gather funds to build the rocket.
The answer stands as kingdoms
fall. There is no answer. None at all. None at all.
- Moondog
Art imitates Life: Replica of Van
Gogh’s Ear created From Live Cells.
Gwyneth Paltrow makes people mad.
Christianity has never been
worldly nor has it ever looked with favor on good food and wine, and it is more
than doubtful whether the introduction of jazz into the cult would be a
particular asset.
-Carl Jung
Bagged booze coffins straining the cart. She felt her
muscles twitch with each journey. The trash sorter was growling and complaining
to her. “Modest why so much of the same thing. Offer me something new.” Twenty
years working with this machine and now it learns to complain.
Lying on the furniture at awkward angles, lurching around with
menace, rambling incoherently, and lobbing abuse at journalists streaming on
glimmering screens, and in general drunkenness and sorrow, are the men and
woman who govern. The booze has become their meaning, their real purpose has
been misplaced a couple cocktails ago. Paralysis and drunken sorrow curdling to
rage. Something out in the world hurtled away at a frightening speed leaving
these ghosts drunk at the wheel.
She was alone and ignored as usual in these corridor of
power. In the shadows was the bear. All the staff had rumors of it and
encounters spoken in hushed tones. She had never seen it, and never heard it.
But, at the end of the corridor hauling another cart overflowing with empties
she glimpsed its shadow. The bear was the shadows and she worried what it meant
to be one who has witnessed it. Modest felt that sweet strain of muscles as she
pushed the cart into the elevator.
I do not know if all cops are
poets, but I know all cops carry guns with triggers
-Ralph Ellison
Grisly discovery inside Giant
Alligator
An estimated ten thousand never
returned to claim their shoes at the entrance to Darbar Sahib.
I see ten thousand chariots and
they coming with no horses. The riders they cover their face
-Bob Marley
A man stretched out on torn sheets. His form a river through
degraded fabric.
Adobe town filled with
flower sellers. Rumors of decapitation. Four rotting corpses trapped in a continually
circling car. Windows covered with flies. Red grips the windshield in the
morning.
He was sick of seeing
his brother walking through the flower stalls, peeking through the window in
the door. Touching his hand as he walked to the car, he can’t see why his
brother won’t stay dead. His sister’s voice on the intercom. The failing wires
cutting into her words. Fragments pour out. He couldn’t leave the bed. Feedback
squealing.
One of the common symptoms of
depression is the inability to make day to day decisions.
“It’s like all the love is gone.
So you see why comics have demons. You’re trying to fill that void until the
next stage time you get where you’ll find your love.”
-Thea Vidale
This slideshow shows 20 cities
running out of water.
He felt pressure
relieve as the song slowly was pulled into his web. Web of constant data. Data
that represented music, music so rare it barely been heard beyond the people
who recorded it. He felt he should own this music, let people know of its
golden aura. But, then he would have to listen to it, he realized even though
he was young the possibility of ever hearing every moment of music he captured
would be impossible. It was data not music, it had no emotional resonance.
Every song discovered, every artist read about, was a moment ripped away from
him, a moment he couldn’t fill with another activity. Time was the enemy and
space on his hard drive. Fat around the middle, seated, chewing junk food,
bongs unloaded, rare soul funk track that hints at the future of hip hop found
and squirrelled away. Some kind of sore forming on his elbow, black spot on his
toe, elastic failing in his underwear. Job was becoming an illusion, a series
of dream images of people telling to wake up, what did they keep wanting?
Spittle rolled down
his chin as he shouted give me evenings and weekends, get me out of this
contract, I know no one of us have clean hands anymore, I have woken up to that
years ago.
I ain’t got no one I can depend on
Ain’t got no one tengo a nadie
-Santana
Tim waked to the claw caressed across his cheek. The pram was
moving through branches dripped in fog like ugly snakes. The clockwork hand
moved away. Papier-mâché owls hooted in the tree branches. The
moon’s light bulb faded in the moist air.
They bumped a tree and it folded over.
Don’t worry little one we made the night for you. We can
bring you anything in it. Penguins and icebergs are over the hill and a little
blizzard. Then a nice desert oasis.
There were other figures walking with them. They ticked
liked broken clocks as they walked. One
of the figure’s head fell off but it never slowed down. They continued to walk
in the forest. Flurries of snow began to flutter by.
As a child he remembered peeking
through curtains and from under covers. The blue of the TV light was lingering
there in the hall. It moved around the house at its own accord. That blue light
flickering through bushes in the yards as he walked to his friend’s house. He
could see it there out of the corner of his eyes as they played board games.
Cookies and milk were brought by the mother. He thought of those offerings as
the flakes of the fake blizzard floated by the pram.
Oh the sea we forgot about the
sea.
They walked down a stretch of
white sand. One of the figure’s legs fell off. It made the motion to walk
forward and then fell face forward into the beach sand.
We should introduce you to your
new family.
This pram must be specially built
to fit a twelve year old, thought Tim.
You are Tim’s new family. What
became of the old one?
Tim is a name we won’t be using
any more so you should forget that name.
This is Luna of the birds.
They had circled around the pram.
Five of them. A possibly feminine figure moved forward with a pale bird mask
covering her features.
Panda Bough
Panda mask outfit of leaves
Film.
Faces in cinema light moved in
constant motion across the form that moved forward.
Cephalopod.
Drenched in rotten tentacles.
Dripping water.
Behemoth
White face mask stained with black
tears, red smears around the mouth.
I am Carrion.
Vulture mask covered in rotten
feathers.
We will not name those we lost on
the journey. They are abandoned like your name will be.
Carrion came forward with white
paint covering his glove. He streaked a smear of the paint on each of Tim’s
cheeks.
You are reborn with these marks.
Rejoice in it, soon you will learn your new name.
The blue tiger will smash the world
Another land, without evil, without death, will be borne
from the destruction of this one. This land wants it. It asks to die, asks to
be born, this old and offended land. It is weary and blind from so much weeping
behind closed eyelids. On the point of death it strides the days, garbage heap
of time, and at night it inspires pity from the stars. Soon the First Father
will hear the world’s supplications, land wanting to be another, and then the
blue tiger who sleeps beneath the hammock will jump.
-Eduardo Galeano
Ariadne the threadbearer awoke alone in her house. She is
American. America had become geology not reality. She thought of America and
dreams as her oatmeal grew cold. America had beached itself on the chaos of the
wild dreams it birthed. It was proposed
long ago that market forces produced happier lives then state centered
societies. That American life let everyone freely traffic in dreams. Everyone’s
dreams got shared and advertised and became museum pieces, got squirrelled away
by rich collectors, disappeared in dust, watered down and sold in mass, or were
met with a hail of bullets. The voodoo dances of Congo Square dreamed up jazz,
electrocuted elephants helped dream endless loops of men and women frozen in
immortal youth and love staring at the light, people dreaming on rafts crossing
shark drunk seas warm as wine, churches dreamed up apocalypses of storms of
light and souls plucked into the sky,
people crossing deserts singing and dreaming not fearing rape, pre-dug
graves, and secret prison to slice tomatoes, take out garbage and stick
together plastic junk for the dreamers, some dreamed of dignity and freedom
from rat infested apartments, open air drug markets, feudal systems that said
you could not drink water from this faucet, others dream of communities were
they never saw a face different from their own, the sidewalks never cracked and
the storefronts were always full, men with guns dreamed of false flags, black
helicopters and fertilizer bombs, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews dreamed of their own gods in this nation
under god as others dreamed up religions and gods new to this world, some
dreamed only of money, art, or that they could capture it all in a book, reach
the stars, or of men with tights that could perform miracles, or of cities
placed on floodplains, rifts in the tectonics, or in a desert, of computers
reordering nature, some dreamed that we had lost Eden right here on these
shores, dreamed that America would give back the land it stole and removed the
strip malls from the mass graves, but all these dreams meant nothing to the
dominant dream. The dominant dream was one that sold, one that moved units. All
the nations of the earth began to dream this dream. This dream created a
library of wonders where each of us could create their own dream. With so many
dreams about, no bothered much with the dreams of others anymore. The earth
moved, melted, warped and groaned under the weight of the dream. Nations and
memories faded, technology followed its own logic, the weather got weird, the
seas angry, so now Ariadne the threadbearer thought, now here we are, forever
in these moments. Moments were you awake to house stuffed with clothing and
furniture of someone else, where the box you get your cereal from is not even
yours. Moments where the cereal curdles in your gut and it is impossible to
breathe.
The only sin is the sin of being born
-Samuel Beckett
