How do you die?

You will sink in a mire. You like to think you're normal, but deep down you really just want to strip off your clothes and roll around in chicken fat.
Take this quiz!

James Cameron finds Jesus....

Literally...

"One of the caskets even bears the title, 'Judah, son of Jesus,' which Cameron claims as evidence that Jesus may have had a son. Another coffin was said to hold the bones of Mary Magdalene, also known as Mariamne.

Cameron unveiled two of the small limestone caskets at a press conference in New York, but the director could offer little proof to support his claims, other than the mathematical probability of a tomb containing a set of ossuaries with names linked to Jesus.

Of the ten ossuaries found, six were inscribed with the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Mary Magdalene, as well as Judah, Son of Jesus, and a Matthew, of which there were many in Mary's family, according to Luke 3:23.

Apparently surprised at the hostility over his 'discovery', the director who famously claimed to be 'the king of the world' when he won an Oscar for Titanic, insisted it was not a publicity stunt and said his critics should wait and see the film.

I'm not a theologist. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a documentary filmmaker," [Cameron] said." [ThisisLondon]

This kind of information comes as a shock to me; while most people assumed that Cameron's "Aliens" was some sort of "Science fiction adventure" I now have the evidence to prove that the military of the distant future will stop at nothing to secure a live Alien specimen to study and turn into the ultimate war machine; Lt. Ellen Ripley, if you're out there, somewhere - high five girl, hive five. You're the true savior of mankind.

Tee Hee, Brutus.

Came across this listing of 6th grade history test answers... they may or may not be legit as they seem more likely to be history test answers from half the people i went to high school with; not to mention this list has probably been in circulation since Arpanet but whatever, enjoy.

1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

2. The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked, "Am I my brother's son?"

3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

4. Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.

5. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.

6. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

7. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

8. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

9. Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.

10. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out:"Tee hee, Brutus."

11. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

12. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw.

13. Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

14. In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.

15. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.

16. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted "hurrah." |The Rest|

When the routine bites hard and ambitions are low
And the resentment rides high but emotions won't grow
And we're changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tear us apart again

SY @ HG

Sonic Youth

I have to say i wasn't expecting much; i hadn't seen them before, and i've only ever been a casual SY fan, more appreciative of what they did for music, and how long they've been doing it, than the actual contents of their songs. Which is not to say i don't acknowledge their awesomeness, i do... they're awesome. I know it's blasphemous to say, and i'll probably have my No New York record taken away from me; but their albums (dirty and day dream nation withstanding) never really held my interest until their last 3, and i wasn't exactly blown away by their latest...

All that being said; they fucking rocked my cock off. I havn't heard a tighter live show in as long as i can remember; their energy was excellent, ripping into song after song just shy of with ferocity, and segwaying into quieter numbers like the well oiled (and aged) machine they are. kim bopped around and looked like she was enjoying herself a bit; thursten fucked around w/ his guitars and made some righteous feedback. - There was noise when they wanted noise, and otherwise, they just rocked. Later i wondered to myself, if their 20+ years of blowing minds and amps has left them almost too good at what they do - If i have one complaint its that I was in no danger; while i'm not an expert on SY nor was any more than 9 years old in the 80's i am aware of what was happening in New York, and how destructive their sound was... But last night there were no melt downs, no broken guitars, no destroyed amps, bashed electronics, or crowd alienating feedback onslaughts, - it was Controlled Chaos, though at it's finest to be certain.
-------(continued today at work.)--------

All that being said last night - it was a great show; the crowd had fun - i had fun, even Jenny who's usual sonic diet consists of Donovan, Joan Biaz, and Dilan, had fun. I got a chance to see a bunch of faces i hadn't seen in while thanks to old man winter; Casey and Brooke, lovely as ever, Nick (who was listening to something labeled DJ Tanner on Ipod when i picked up my tickets, leaving me wondering how he got his hands on it...) Josh "European shag" LaClair, Luke and for the first time, the very sexy, very friendly Jay... what a piece of beefcake that guy is huh? ladies, are you with me!?

JDK did some sort of a promotional thing w/ thank you cards for sonic youth; you can view the whole thing here.

Yep, it snowed!

The bustle in Jenny's hedgerow...

All the crazy high snow banks and life threateningly deep drifts shot me backwards to when i was just a kid, and the idea that if i take the wrong step, i may hit a sinkhole and wind-up suffocating in snow like that guy in "Alive" - it felt nice to be in awe of ol' ma nature again;
Those of us up here in New England don't get to regularly bare witness to the big lady and her mood swings like those lucky buggers in Florida and New Orleans.

That's the back end of my truck sticking out there...

Tried to bribe this kid to dig me out, but he wasn't having any of it. I guess a wurther's original and pocket lint don't have the same effect on kids now adays...

Fuck it, i walk to work anyway...

Forgetting something?

Perhaps, the letter L?

oh yeah...

I don't really know what to say

except maybe "Why didn't I think of that?"

Wind-up Bird and Sun Circle

Another wonderful experience at the Greendoor, much thanks to Greg and Co. All three sets were unique and tapped into various places in my head - Wind up bird took it to outer space; and i couldn't help think of Isaac Asmov, Sagan (both music and man.) and most recently, "The Fountain" it was really excellent sine-wave space fuckage, bookended w/ minimalist resonance vibrations and throat singing.... I had been drinking whiskey, Briener had been drinking more of it though... (started out with me offering him a drink, him bad mouthing my choice inebriate, then proceeding to enjoy a healthy third of the pint; thats fine by me Breiner, you're welcome to my booze anytime!) and either itwas that, or that my left asscheek down to my knee had fallen asleep - but my head was all buzzy and i was having alot of fun listening.
After that, was Sun cirle - that being greg and zack. - I have to say, the last few shows of greg have seen me enjoying his set more and more - i don't know if i could explain it properly, and in all likely hood it could just be my mood matching up more w/ his musical direction at those times, but reguardless, i feel like Greg's getting a little darker in his composition... The Sun circle set was one long heavy fucking earthen drone, the chord whatever it was, felt unresolved and the chanting that the two did over it felt on occasion pained, or at least, longing. Is this what Winter does to us? On top of all that, there was an occasional "ymrappp!" of feedback, that only added to the effect, giving it a close to overloading feeling of danger; i was impressed. Afterwords i commented to a friend that for some reason that felt like listening to Doom. (metal.) and he agreed he was thinking the same thing... so yeah, fuck yeah Greg, nice one!

The Last set was the Gong bath where all three of em coralled us into one room of the studio and surounded us on three sides w/ gongs, and basically blew our fucking minds out our cosmic anus's. ('s? or es? i don't know...maybe just anus. i like to think we all share the cosmic anus.) I had to plug my good ear at a couple points, sweet.

Great job guys!

(The doom level may also have been increased by the gi-fucking-gantic sculpture of that dude from mad max that had the little dude in his backpack.)

What really happened

Ok, so Anna Nicole died - and somehow, the world kept on turning... but i started to think yesterday, that something didn't seem quite right about all of this... What i figure is Anna, after finding out that the paternity of her most recent child is actually her recently deceased son (why do you think he killed himself?), kills herself... far fetched... i don't think so. A waste of time to even concider? You bet. Happy friday.

Friday Fun Pictures
or, Crap in my temp folder i needed to delete.

Mick

“I'd rather be dead than singing "Satisfaction" when I'm forty-five.”

or....

“People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.”

I'm a posh spaz. I'm a work shy freeloader.

Everyone's favorite British odd couple are popping up in the latest round of "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC", Sadly you can only see them on British Television, instead we're stuck with that insipid hipster "Mac".
Thankfully fox failed to port over Peep Show for an American audience; though i would have liked to see how "David" (Darlene's effeminate better half) faired as Mark. Feast your eyes on this promotional picture... good lord.

Thanks to Herb for nerding this one out for me.

More

Abandoned but not Forgotten

I've always had a thing for forgotten buildings and places - across the field behind my family business, there was an old train station, actually, it wasn't a station, for passengers anyway - but i think a weigh station or a ticket station... it was small, not much more than 30 x 30 with a peaked and shingled roof w/ a storage loft that had collapsed by the time i came around to exploring it. Most of the wooden structure had rotted away to black, and had been made a home by plenty of animals, and from what i was told as a kid, dangerous hobos. Still didn't keep us from wandering over the train tracks and poking around in the summer; even though it hadn't been in use for going on 50 years, there were still plenty of treasures to be found there, rusty nails, old bookkeeping ledgers, more nails... and since i (like most bored and silly country kids) lived in my own little fantasy world i wasn't surprised that day i found a real ancient sword hiding up above in what was left of the loft, judging by the curve in the blade, I knew this was a scimitar...
I knew something as magnificent as this must belong to someone, and they'd be wanting it back - so i made to sure to get it out of there and quickly. I had another secret hideout, deep underground beneath the floorboards of the family business, underneath the oldest part of the store, where there was no basement, but rather a 4.5 foot crawl space with a dirt floor. I had setup shop, w/ a small set of shelves to keep important treasures, a table and chairs made out of milk crates, and a flashlight hanging from a string tied to a floor beam as a lamp. In the summer it was always cool and quiet, and the only way in was shared by me and my friend Adrian; into the grainery, down the ladder, into the storage garage, behind the sheet metal, and steel pipes, all the way back, and the to the left, there was a hole in what was the wall of the orginal store. We never stayed down there too long. Very rarely did i go in there alone; it was fairly creepy, and though i knew the the McCuin ghost exclusively haunted the giant pine forest that my great grandfather planted one hundred years ago, and that the werewolf was in fact buried for good under that pile of concrete rubble in the "little" woods behind the store; i was never quite certain i was alone under those floorboards. Mostly though i didn't like spiders, and there were some serious spiders under there.
Reguardless, i knew the Scimitar had to be hidden, and that it's owner could be anywhere - i had two options, well, 3 if you count my hideout in the forest off of the westcott shore road in Franklin, in an ideal world that would have been the best choice, the summer previous i had installed a fullproof alarm system utilizing a rather brilliant array of eye hooks, fishing line, stones, weighty sticks and a bell - and a camoflage "panic room" made of old tree limbs and pine bows but as it would be another 5 years before i could drive, i knew it would have to be the underground hideout, or the old dead maple tree that made up part of the boundary between my families property and the methodist church next door. Lightning had struck the tree years and years ago, and now it was a giant hollow hiding place for all things important and secret.

I decided the safest place would be the underground, and after bundling up the scimitar in an old t shirt and a mesh bag i ran back across the field behind my cousins house, through the little woods, and after making sure the coast was clear, ducked down inside my hidding spot. For the rest of the summer i made constant checks to make sure that no one had broken in and stolen the sword, i kept my ears open for talk of a disappeared relic; and my eyes peeled for any suspicious folk lurking around.... on a few occasions, when i felt like the location may have been getting a little hot; i would smuggle the sword out, and hide it in the tree; when that got hot, i'd go back to the underground; sometimes it'd just take it out to the little woods, and look at it, studying its markings, attempting to discern it's origins...

On afternoon towards the end of summer, i went to the underground to check on things, only to discover it was gone - someone had gotten in, someone had found me out; the underground had been compromised, and the sword was lost again... where it went i never found out; who got into my hideout i'll never know, but they had to have been resourceful, and flexible... in the end i deduced that the original owner had reclaimed his prize, and while having a sword is a very valuable thing for a 9 year old, i knew whoever crafted such a blade had done so for a good reason, and who was i to keep it from them...

A few years later some older kids lit the old train station on fire and it burned down, i remember standing on the back porch of my cousin's house watching the fire department contain the blaze, and i thinking about all the treasures that would surely be lost. Days later when I inspected the burned and leveled mess, i found nothing but a few old nails, and some charred wood and iron.
Since then, I've kept my eyes open for the abandoned and lost; those places are like sealed jars of time. when you open them, you can see, and taste, and touch a whole other place and time. I remember a few years ago finding an old artist's cabin way up in the woods in central Vermont, i was with Todd, Sarah and Laura - it was severely over grown, with an old collapsed chicken coop out back - a few windows were broken, but inside under layers of dust there were paintings covering every wall and stacked five deep on the floor, on the arm of a chair was a half full glass of wine. Outside, past an old rock garden, under a weedy old trellis, we found an ax buried into a stump, we left not long after that.

Abandoned But Not Forgotten

Ok so,

this is a prime example of Russians and their Blogs... one of many "what the fuck" pictures that I find with the fuzzysquid (speaking of tenticles...) Then i when click through to the blog, i get no explaination, nothing, maybe a couple of smiley faces.

The title of this guys entry is: БЫД-ЛАН-СТВО!!!=))))))))))

which i translate to - "check out my new matching leather gloves / wang pouch!!!=))))))))"

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and on another note, hello to my family members and O.C. McCuin and Son's employees who have aparently found out about this here "internet journal".

More thoughts on Sebald

"On that first day of November in 1980, preoccupied as i was with my notes and the ever widening and contracting circles of my thoughts, I became enveloped by a sense of utter emptinesses and never once left my room. It seemed to me then that one could well end one's life simply through thinking and retreating into one's mind, for, although I had closed the windows and the room was warm, my limbs were growing progressively colder and stiffer with my lack of movement, so that when at length the waiter arrived with the red wine and sandwiches i had ordered, i felt as if i had already been interred or laid out for burial, silently grateful for the proffered libation, but no longer capable of consuming it." [Vertigo]

I happened to read this page out loud to Jenny the other night while i was laying in bed and she was putting away laundry and organizing some of her things. Afterwards i had to go back a read it a few more times, to myself, in my head and out loud to my self alone; and it was even more enjoyable to transcribe it here. For about 3 years now I've been slowly making my way through Sebald's pseudo prose-fiction, and a book of his poetry is in the mail right now... These are not books that lend themselves to a quick read, they move slow and need to be taken in doses and washed down with contemplation; nothing is offered up with ease - It's hard for me to put my finger on just what it is about his writing that nonetheless grips me, when his books are almost completely without a grip; rather they just float detached, over terrible things and beautiful forgotten places, memories and vague emotions. Though these stories leave me aching to my core afterwards and i often go back just to read some beautifully written phrase or paragraph.

Most of Sebald's work as you can find out just about anywhere, revolved around the concepts of memory, history, fact and fiction, and it would seem the inevitable annihilation of all these things and their creators... He goes from place to place, sometimes as himself, other times as perhaps Kafka, or an unnamed narrator. With German precision he recollects the exacting details of once bustling british seaside resort towns, or of some provincial Italian train station; or does he? was he ever there - have they ever existed? Chances are, they did - he has pictures of them that he puts in his books, pictures he finds, pictures he takes - but the locations, the names are in question or perhaps the type of wood used to make a clock was not english oak, like he explicitly pointed out... these are after all, some kind of dream, or subjective recollection of a past spilled over with fantasy and emotion...

------------------------

excerpt from a Guardian interview:

Maya Jaggi: Jacques Austerlitz [from the book "Austerlitz"] recovers memories in his 50s of having arrived in Britain from Prague on the Kindertransport. Much of your work is about memory: its unreliability, its shattering return after being repressed. Does literature have a special role to play in remembrance?

WG Sebald: The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn't be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered - not from yesterday but from a long time ago. |the rest|

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Regardless, these stories resonate w/ me - more so in mid winter; but all year round i find them thought provoking or good company for a thoughtful mood. For me, the biggest pull would have to be his take on the passage of time, how it obscures and inevitably obliterates.
His novel "The Rings of Saturn" remains his most effecting work on this subject, and probably one of the heaviest peices of writing i've ever read, (again and again... )

That he died suddenly in a car accident 6 years ago seems to hammer home his themes of memory and destruction. At any rate, it makes me sit and think, when i should be writing code and fixing other peoples mistakes. (Which i should add, i'm no good at - i got my hands full w/ my own.)

I took some photos at The Shelburne Inn last summer while staying the weekend with Eva and paired them with excerpts from "Rings" and "The Emigrants" for a post a while back, you can see them here

Some Selected Information

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Guardian Unlimited: |obituary| + |interview|
New Direction Publishing: |Publisher's Notes|
California Literary Review: |Life without Max|