“Dig it, they’re not selling cars—they’re selling CDs by the hipsters whose tunes are used in the commercials! They’re subverting the system from within! And the check is in the mail and I won’t come in your mouth. The fact remains that, if you shill for enterprises that exist primarily to further enrich people who are already many times richer than you, you are a servant. And you can hold my coat.” - luc sante.
lord make me chaste in re luc sante but not yet.
forthcoming (not really) analysis:
:: comic novels about humboldt and gauss
:: mike davis
:: one-man plays starring richard nixon
something about the tower of babel. i have been fucking aroudn with the internet too much. i feel like a citizen of the global village &c but i also feel like i am being devoured by electronic mosquitoes. more later today on nike coopting a dead man to sell gourmet t-shirts.
today is fuck you wednesday brought to you by Ralph Ellison.
What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these buys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge? For they were outside, in the dark with Sambo, the dancing paper doll; taking it on the lambo with my fallen brother… running and dodging the forces of history instead of making a dominating stand.
I looked into the design of their faces, hardly a one that was unlike somone I’d known down South. Forgotten names sang through my head like forgotten scenes in dreams. I moved with the crowd, the sweat pouring off me, listening to the grinding roar of traffic, the growing sound of a record shop loudspeaker blaring a languid blues. I stopped. Was this all that would be recorded? Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words?
Could he have meant–hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. Did he mean say “yes” because he knew that the principle was greater than the men, greater than the numbers and the vicious power and the all the methods used to corrupt its name? Did he mean to affirm the principle, which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and the darkness of the feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds? Or did he man that we had to take the responsibility for all of it, for the mean as well as the principle, because we were the heirs who must use the principle because no other fitted our needs?
so Invisible Man is one of the better books I’ve read; I certainly wish I’d read it earlier in my celestial voyage to some kind of 403b pension-funded senescence. Anyway I’m not here to bury ralph ellison or to praise him. no patience for any kind of exegesis or biting incites (pace Wizznutzz).
does this count as creole literature? i’m considering changing my ethnicity to “creole” or possible the more straightforward “european born in new world.”
anyway ralph ellison never got over writing Invisible Man, and several hundred thousand cells in my skull won’t either. i’m going to wander off and check on my laundry.
for cleaning your sneakers
this is a placeholder, probably semi-permanent, for a brief biographical essay about my love of tennis shoes and how it is problematic, given the implications of tennis shoes, writ large. somehow i am going to try to relate this to the french revolution.
GUESS WHAT GUYS
i bought a chin-up bar. i’m going to soak my nervous system in a diet coke/testosterone/cioppino-type red broth. soon all of my decision making will be controlled by the lymph nodes in my upper crotch.
also Operation Grow A Beard was canned due to unsatisfactory results at multiple testing sites. Then its legislative stepchild Grow a Mustache was also tabled due to my own reflection scaring me.
this year is going to be a big year for seafood.
also, i wasn’t lying about being in NYC this weekend. who wants a hug.
fun fact: i will be in the New York metropole feb 22-25. please press 1 to enjoy coffee and dessert with the author of such blog posts as “fuck you guys” and “special condoms made out of other people’s dicks.” i have no idea how many people besides um, me read this. if you check this more than like every month, leave a comment. COME ON.
also, today is the debut of “fantasy baseball inspired folk art thursdays” on banana nutriment. fuck you guys.
this is from Black Fred McGriff, my fantasy baseball team. i freely admit i stole the “{racial identifier} {guy who is already that racial identifier but not to the fullest}” construction from mike cardarelli. the original black fred mcgriff was ryan howard. he has since been replaced by jarrod saltalamacchia.
“They wanted to know if Monica Lewinsky was beautiful, and when I replied that she was not that hot, they wanted to know how Clinton could commit such an act with her if she was not the most beautiful. I tried to explain that physical attractiveness wasn’t the only factor, but this elicited blank stares.”
—Alan Edelstein
via transition magazine, THE place for trenchant black intellectual glossolalia. i’ve always considered myself a leading black intellectual.
in other news: Livan Hernandez, welcome to the American league central. lunch is served at 12:30.
i’m buying special creme to put on my remarkably symmetrical face later today. because i am growing a beard.
today, i have become a man. soon, all my money-making schemes will come ripe and i will stalk the streets of this prairie gotham with a weird retarded confidence. also i bought expensive pants. fuck you guys, seriously.
that shit BUILT MY CAMP. bwo some kind of fucked-up italian art gallery. h/t llg.
coming soon:
:: transcriptions of the half-dozen passages from Invisible Man that broke my mandibles.
:: piercing analysis of public transportation in the midwestern ONANische metropole.
:: firsthand reportage of getting a 19th c whaling diagram tattooed on my arm.
:: new recipes
:: fuck you
