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"the happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following." a girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past granny lin down the street. she tries to catch up with the girl, but the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. granny lin puts the duffelbag on the ground and catches her breath, still hanging on to her stainless-steel lunch pail with her other hand. all the people on the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. she wonders when she stopped being one of them.
- yiyun lee, "extra," new yorker december 22, 2003
"i'll have to just tell her, i guess," he said. "just up and say it, get it over with: baby, they ain't no christmas. and don’t give me no lip about it."
he wiped his face top to bottom, the saddest gesture i'd ever seen.
then he walked off into the side-blowing snow.
i was sad yet happy. i was drunk. i was deeply, deeply glad i wasn't him.
- george saunders, "chicago christmas, 1984," new yorker december 22, 2003
my grandmother walked into the room as i was listening to this cd. she's all like, "disco is over, fag." so i try to explain: "no, nana, this is a new band. they're all about referencing house music and, uh, kraftwerk and stuff." then she lost her shit and backhands me. "it's fucking disco! it's fake music for douchebags! grow some balls!" after i finished crying, i decided she had a point.
- artie philie, review of vhs or beta's "solid gold remixes," vice january 2004
just because my sleeve has a fractal twig diagram on it and my record sounds like chlorophyll bubbling in a wok, that doesn't give you the right to pen a review saying that "electronic music put in the hands of a woman becomes a more sensual and poetic medium." fuck you! one minute you're telling us we're ethereal, the next you're trying to grab our ass.
jasmine cone, "leaf beats," vice january 2004
how many times have you been with someone who, due to a total ignorance of how simple it is to beat off a dude, starts wrapping and winding her hand around your knob like a spastic ballerina on E trying to drive a stick shift?
- james sewall, "threesomes blow," vice january 2004
to prove his mental unfitness for duty in vietnam, frank zappa squeezed peanut butter up his ass prior to the draft physical. during the exam, he casually put a finger up his bum and then sucked off the brownness.
- absinthenyc, "the vice guide to shit," vice january 2004
(the passiondex© is derived by dividing a film's total points by the number of its voters and then multiplying this average by the percentage of those voters who ranked it first.) measuring the intensity with which critics championed a particular film, the passiondex© distinguishes between those movies that have real partisans and those that are consensus choices typically filling out the lower slots in a critic's list.
- j. hoberman, "lost in america: bill murray's star vehicle, gus van sant's double comeback, and the year of the documentary," village voice december 24, 2003
instead of only following institutions founded generations ago, we'd be watching what newcomers are doing, including newcomers who may speak languages other than english.
- "taking the tweed out of the arts journalism wardrobe," poynter december 20, 2003
if you are, in the vernacular, a "twelve-beer queer," consider yourself 100% straight. if, however, you are a "two-beer queer," you may as well drop the "two-beer" pretense.
- bryan quinn, "the straight man’s guide to enjoying gay sex," sit and spin, december 2003
i have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multiply awkward social situations ("a total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("a 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol—on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). i don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.
an important note for 2004: stop trying to build an internet without malefactors, parasites, freeriders and inefficiency. there is no such thing as a parasite-free complex ecology (thank you kathryn myronuk for this formulation). some organisms lamented the existence of mitochondria. others adapted to exploit them and integrate them. some lament the existence of spammers. spammers will always exist: stamping your foot and demanding their nonexistence won't change that: adapt or die.
- cory doctorow, "statements for 2004," dph zerofour december 22, 2003
in his slim 28-page pamphlet, [edward] tufte claimed that microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. for example, the low resolution of a powerpoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. powerpoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together.
... powerpoint still has fans in the highest corridors of power: colin powell used a slideware presentation in february when he made his case to the united nations that iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe tufte is onto something.
- clive thompson, "powerpoint makes you dumb," new york times december 14, 2003
-----original message-----
from: afro-punk crew
sent: monday, december 15, 2003 8:39 pm
to: dante woo
subject: help afro-punk get on the road
afro-punk is going on the road and you can help!
california: i will be northern california from the 20th - 24th. i will be in so cal from 26th - march 1st.
i am interested in all kinds of screenings but i would really like to focus on getting it to people of color so if that means after school programs or community centers that is cool. i would also be down for doing some punk type screenings too so don't be discouraged if that is more your strong suit.
any suggestions are encouraged.
thanks a lot.
james spooner
ps. if you would like to be part of the street team let me know.
photos by jose ivey (www.urbanvoyeur.com)
i saw a couple of kids ... big, black raver pants with metal hoops on the side ... a woman with the bottom of a witch dress sticking out from under her coat. i knew we'd arrived.
i talked briefly to alonye, who mostly just wanted to go dance.
"it's a lifestyle that people don't wanna understand," he tells me.
like who?
"our parents," he mumbles. "it's better for our race, cuz we get to understand ourselves even more."
- jennifer blowdryer, "up all night: harlem," new york press december 10, 2003
it's hard not to admire [norman mailer's] ambitions for the art form of the novel, his dream that someone might some day write a great tolstoyan novel about america, connecting the social and the personal, the public and the private. it's a dream that has been defeated so far, he suggests in the final and most substantial entry in this book, by the sheer multiplicity and clangor of american society, where "the accelerated rate, the awful rate, of growth and anomaly" overwhelms all efforts to lasso it.
novelists like himself, he admits, have also failed out of laziness and self-absorption. "writers aren't taken seriously anymore, and a large part of the blame must go to the writers of my generation, most certainly including myself. we haven't written the books that should have been written. we've spent too much time exploring ourselves. we haven't done the imaginative work that could have helped define america, and as a result, our average citizen does not grow in self-understanding. we just expand all over the place, and this spread is about as attractive as collapsed and flabby dough on a stainless steel table."
michiko kakutani, "quoting himself on his lofty dream: norman mailer's the spooky art: some thoughts on writing," new york times january 22, 2003
you're a big jerk!
my work is very accessible.
and mocking grad students has been 'so over' since the publication of 'the hipster handbook.'
- "judith butler," reader's comments to patience highbottom's "on doing nothing," maisonneuve december 2003, linked from cinetrix, "madame parker et le cercle vicieu," pullquote (how's that for a citation?)
she is to sex what the komodo dragon is to a deer carcass: an insatiable glutton that won't stop until she has gorged on every last morsel. she pukes, she distends, she pees, she goes into a vicious stupor, and she comes out of it all smiling. i know it's a cliché to say, "she is genuinely into it," but when you see her eyes roll back into her head and pre-puke drool fall out of her mouth after gagging on a penis you can’t help but think you are watching a girl who just got out of prison and has been junk sick for cock since the day she was born.
- miss tasty, "mexican hardcore: catalina knows no borders," vice december 2003
now for a moment's mischief. if president bush wins re-election, hillary would likely gain the democratic nomination in 2008, and would run as the favorite against, say, republican bill frist or jeb bush. but if howard dean wins nomination and election in 2004, he would surely be the democratic candidate again in 2008, and by the time 2012 rolls around, hillary would be a wizened, doddering medicare recipient facing a tide of voter resentment after eight years of dean's executive-privilege arrogance in power (i exaggerate for effect).
- william safire, "hillary, congenital hawk," new york times december 8, 2003
rick moody's "why the talking heads matter" essay is one big unreadable run-on sentence. an excerpt: "it's the 70s—new year's eve 1978—and we're making for the show at the beacon, there's a bunch of us, dressed like we don't know how to tuck anything in, and no one has slept with anyone else yet, because we aren't smart enough to do that, we don't even know if we have endocrines yet, doesn't matter..." i'm not going to finish the sentence because i'm not sure there's enough space on the internet to continue to the end.
- elizabeth spiers, "rick moody is the worst music reviewer of his generation," the kicker december 4, 2003
her nose was fat and fruitlike, a nose for pratfalls and slapstick, not jetés and pirouettes and pliés and whatnot. but her lips were lovely, the color of cold meat, and her eyes, sunk deep in their sockets, were clear blue. when you looked into them, you half expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones.
i started keeping a journal almost two years ago. i used to write only when i was happy. then i realized that i’d look back and think that my whole life was happy, so i started only writing when i was depressed. and i realized that i wasn't always depressed, so i started to write every day. now i calculate i'm fifty per cent happy and fifty per cent depressed so i don't see the point of writing at all anymore . . . (10:07) . . . it hurts.
- charles d'ambrosio, "screenwriter," december 8, 2003
walsh makes compelling observations about gallery installations, signage, lighting, and design. and when it comes to the public trust, he should have the last word: "some curators are apt to complain that seats spoil the look of an installation," he notes, "but what is the installation for, anyway? if we are serious about extending the attention span of our visitors, seats are the simplest, cheapest means to do it. that, and coffee. and toilets."
- john walsh, director emeritus of the j. paul getty museum, quoted by robin cembalest, "a matter of trust," artnews december 2003
"overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it," wrote federal ninth circuit court of appeals judge alex kozinski in a recent copyright ruling. "culture is impossible without a rich public domain. nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture."
- fiona morgan, "copywrong: copyright laws are stifling art, but the public domain can save us," independent weekly december 3, 2003
they used meth instead of ecstasy. i make that mistake all the time.
it turned out that the $1.3 million study, led by dr. george a. ricaurte of johns hopkins university, had not used ecstasy at all. his 10 squirrel monkeys and baboons had instead been injected with overdoses of methamphetamine, and two of them had died. the labels on two vials he bought in 2000, he said, were somehow switched.
a burning mattress is no joke. it burns slow.
- toni schlesinger, "shelter: burning house," village voice december 1, 2003
richard meyer, a scholar who has written on the censorship of homosexual imagery in american art ... suggests the complexity of the strange dance that artists and their detractors do, and the strange way in which censorship shifts attention away from the content of art and onto the artist and his or her politics.
censorship is one of the most effective ways to make artists famous.
it draws attention not only to their work, but often to relatively minor details in their work (the naughty bits). once censored, an artist's work is no longer just art, but "censored art," which is its own category.
alex donis, a west coast artist, found his exhibition of paintings pulled from the watts towers arts center, in los angeles, when it was deemed too explosive. donis's show, called "war," showed cops dancing with gang members ... they are potentially seen as homoerotic, and that may have been the real reason for the curators to yank the show. it was replaced with a simple sign that shows the complexity of the humor and irony animating some of the best gay artists today: "war is canceled."
- philip kennicott, "'gay' art: dolled up and still dressed down," washington post november 30, 2003