Couldn't have said it better

So I will just re-post what IvyTodd posted on Daily Kos.

Springsteen + Wal-Mart= Oh No!
by IvyTodd

Sat Dec 27, 2008 at 08:50:46 PM PST

Bruce Springsteen released his Born to Run album six weeks after I was born, but there is hardly a musical artist I love, respect and seen more in concert. Its a coin flip between him and my hometown boys, Pearl Jam for my favorite artist. I even talked my wife into having Thunder Road as our first dance song at our wedding reception.

IvyTodd's diary :: ::

Part of what makes Springsteen what he is, besides being perhaps the greatest songwriter of his generation (performer too? though I know I missed his prime by far), is he has never fallen far from his blue collar roots. Its evidenced in his songs (most of the Born to Run and Born In The USA albums...you know the lyrics "And boy these jobs ain't comin back") as he writes often about the working man. The acoustic Ghost of Tom Joad album is filled with songs about the working class. Joad was inspired by the book "Journey to Nowhere, the Saga of the New Underclass." What song other than "Youngstown" better symbolizes than what's happening in the Rust Belt:

Seven hundred tons of metal a day
Now sir you tell me the world's changed
Once I made you rich enough
Rich enough to forget my name

Lately Springsteen hasn't been at all shy about pushing his political agenda after he publicly stumped for John Kerry in 2004 and often for Barack Obama this year. Springsteen discussed the importance of "truth, transparency and integrity in government, the right of every American to have a job, a living wage, to be educated in a decent school, and a life filled with the dignity of work, the promise and the sanctity of home...But today those freedoms have been damaged and curtailed by eight years of a thoughtless, reckless and morally-adrift administration."

So imagine my shock, my horror, my dismay, my utter disbelief when I read that Springsteen's new greatest hits CD would be available only at...Wal-Mart?

It had to be a typo. But no there it is on backstreets.com and other blogs.

I won't dare link to the Wal-Mart page, but trust me its there. You can pre-order it now.

Why Bruce why? A career singing about and standing up for the working man, and now you give Wal-Mart a monopoly? Please tell me it isn't so. Everybody with any heart and any gray matter between their ears knows that Wal-Mart is all that is unholy. Wal-Mart is the reason so many people have lost their family wage jobs. Wal-Mart is the reason so many Youngstowns are spread across America.

My hope was that some record executive cut a deal and Springsteen found out about this when we did. That like the backwardness that the record business is, the artist has no say in his own music. I hope, I hope.

But maybe the first stanza of Badlands says it best...

Lights out tonight trouble in the heartland
Got a head-on collision smashin' in my guts man
I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand
But there's one thing I know for sure girl I don't give a damn
For the same old played out scenes baby I don't give a damn
For just the in-betweens honey I want the heart I want the soul
I want control right now you better listen to me baby
Talk about a dream, try to make it real
You wake up in the night with a fear so real
You spend your life waiting for a moment that just don't come
Well don't waste your time waiting

Augmented reality, indeed

Using a combination of google sketchup, which is free, and an augmented reality plugin (free trial version), and your webcam, you can placc 3d models in the real world. You can even move them around. check out this video.

Fear, a popular 4-letter word

Fear is a weird topic for Christmas, but it's been on my mind a lot. In the past two weeks, I made two decisions based on fear, conscious of what I was doing, and taking the easy road anyway. This is not typical for me - I usually just feel the fear and go ahead and do the thing anyway.

So I'm wondering, what is it about fear that makes us live our life in safe little cages? Why do we bypass opportunities, or flat out not do the right thing b/c it may lead to something bad? I've had more failures in my life than most, which I attribute to trying more things than most, a statistical thing; my chance-taking has rarely had horrible repercussions, just mostly annoying or almost horrible ones, like the time I went parasailing on an almost deserted beach in Zihuatenejo and was almost choked on the line while airborne.

I went parasailing again, a few times, in fact. But lately, if I have a horrible or almost horrible experience after taking a risk, I tend not to try anything again for awhile. Obviously, this tosses good experiences out with the bad.

One of my long-time friends is taking a huge chance to improve her life - she is risking way more than I ever have, and she is being brave about it and remains philosophical even when pretty down in the dumps. Compared to what she is facing, I feel ashamed about my fear-based decisions this month. And I went to see Yes man the other day, which is just a light-hearted Jim Carey flick, but its message is sound - you have to be open to things to have things happen, bad or good. It's easy to shut down, to say no, to say, uh oh, and to stay in your routine and your safety zone. But will that make us look back with satisfaction on our lives? I think not.

So I am going to set one of the decisions right, and consider the other one before it is too late.

Merry Christmas to the brave and the not-so brave. Remember to have compassion for those that operate from fear; their old age may be filled with regrets.

Love the Questions

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms
and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then graduallly, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Tragedy up North

Flying Bitchslap

Yikes

Crazy weather in Seattle!

At Twit's End

Cara Scissoria makes fabulous cards - holiday and otherwise. Check out the site by clicking on the title link.

Big 3 Bailout

Don't forget to read the fine print!

(RED)Wire

An extension of Bono's program, RED, (RED)Wire is an online music magazine delivered weekly to your email, which automatically places songs into your iTunes. At $5 a month, half your fee goes to buy medicine keeping people living with HIV in Africa alive.

You get two free issues for signing up. Every week you get:

EXCLUSIVE — An exclusive song from a major artist.

SHOWCASE — A song by an artist we want everyone to hear.

EXTRA — A fun or inspiring piece that's not music – a short video of someone telling a story, a slideshow of great photography, someone reading something they love.

IMPACT — Frequent updates from Africa – a window into the culture of the people receiving the medicine.

All the music is in unprotected digital files. Play them on your iPod, burn them to a CD and enjoy.

Click the link above to join.

Songza

This site is great - type in the song you're looking for, and it serves up multiple versions, including rare recordings, which you can listen to immediately - it starts streaming as soon as you hit Play.

How do they do it? I have no idea.

You can build playlists too.

If you can't think of anything to search for, you can peruse the Top list, which, amazingly enough, featured Snow
Patrol and Kings of Leon songs. So the Brits must use it a lot. The Featured list is sponsored by Songza, and has both new and slightly esoteric choices as well as standbys.

Rate the songs, send them to friends, or create a playlist just by clicking on a song. Super simple site to use, dynamic functionality.

Colbert Defines Bailout

In honor of President-Elect Obama's anticipated announcements of Timothy Geithner for treasury secretary and Bill Richardson for commerce secretary, here are some guidelines to help you better understand the bailout, courtesy of Dr. Stephen Colbert.

Bailout (financial plan)
1. (verb) a prudent and necessary act which governments take to save innocent corporations that somehow fell victim to over regulation.
2. (noun) a special type of stock that tax payers (or their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.) can purchase to get the feel of what it's like to be a stock broker.

FAQ

What Causes A Bailout?
Minorities

Who Calls For A Bailout?
Hard working salt of the earth capitalists whose stock brokers have told them they're about to lose everything.

How do Bailouts Work?
Real Americans don't ask that.

How Do You Know When The Bailout Is Finished?
When the Republican party says so.

How Much Do Bailouts Cost?
Nothing. You get a tax cut, and the $700,000,000,000 is borrowed from China.

Prayer Of Laissez-faire Capitalists!

by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert

Hear me O children of capitalism!
Thou shalt not abandon the One True God for the false idols of Socialism!
That way lies Eternal Damnation
We must believe even harder!
Our god demands sacrifice!
I do not mean regulation, but human flesh!
Lo, for the true believers hath already thrown Lehman Brothers, AIG, WaMu, Wachovia into the mouth of the beast
it hath devoured Wall Street firm by firm!
Yet it still hungers!
Let it also now feed upon Main Street!
True believers would rather lose their lives to the market than admit government should have any role.

Weirdest moments in the week

I'm not ashamed to say I get most of my news from Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. It's the Mary Poppins method of news ingestion: just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But this week, I needed to follow up on the Cheney-Gonzales indictment Stewart announced b/c I just needed more details. I wasn't sure if he was joking about Cheney having business interests related to Guantanamo.

So I hop over to CNN.com, where not only is there no news on the front page, I do a search and there is no information anywhere. I had to do a general web search - it is there today, as I type, but it was not on the 20th. Apparently this was not news worthy, but it is good to find out that a zoo in Ohio just introduced 3 baby cheetahs. Sometimes, cheetahs do prosper. But I digress.

As many other news sources tell me, not only does the indictment allege that Cheney/Gonzales neglected prisoners and are responsible for assaults (read: torture), it also accuses Cheney as having a conflict of interest because of his influence over the county's federal immigrant detention center and his substantial holdings in the Vanguard Group, which invests in private prison companies.

Hello! This may be common news, but I did not know it. 58 days till CHANGE.

And in other, just general ick and weird happenings, I had to attend a meeting at the company for which I'm writing 5 courses, and it was cut short by the person who scheduled it so he could go to happy hour. That is not the ick part, I am totally down with that, and followed suit to my own. It seems he and his co-workers were celebrating the offers and bonuses they got from the company they are merging with. Still not the ick part. While they leaving to go to happy hour, and this was early in the afternoon, even for a Friday, the company laid off many, many, many people, who had just found out the same day, and were packing up and leaving the offices two floors down. The celebrants, WHO GOT BONUSES, did you get that.. were passing the redundants out the front door. STILL not the ickiest part though. One of the top dudes got a 20 mil golden parachute deal.

Will wait and see if they ask for bailout money. Still struggling with being an enabler to the ick.

What else can an instructional designer/writer do for a living? How can one completely leave corporate America without starving? Need suggestions.

Real or scene from Weeds?

Inside the Transition: Energy & Environment Policy Team

Help Us, Obi Won, You're Our Only Hope

Don DeLillo on the Election

Blogging for the Onion

All The Electric Premonition That Rides The Sky Being A Drama Of Human Devising

In the morning, Electorate, he passes people trooping away from home with their newspapers, bearers of a weight that goes beyond pounds and ounces. They headed up an avenue still blistered with the flotsam of campaign advisers, of newspapermen. Men and women, almost in single file, leaning into wind, faces steeled against complaint, obligated to carry this load. They are standard-bearers, foot-soldiers, walk-on spear-carriers with tiny but necessary roles, of an idea first given a name by ancient Greeks. No one can say for sure yet if it really works.

Countless pairs of little white wires, framing people's faces in the flat fluorescent light, denoting: iPods.

Marketing men in sharp, crisp ties gaze impotently from their offices at spectacular Midtown Views. There is nothing at this point left for them to do. The Day has come. This is the Day itself.

Feet set, purposeful and resolute, on the lime-green tiles. In the toneless acoustics of the school gymnasiums and school cafeterias and dual-use school gymnasium/cafeterias the low steady roar of raw electoral mass forms a background of white noise. Mathematics steadily accumulate around them.

The emotional tone. Let it express itself.

Technology from what appears to be pre-WWII (the Second Great War)-level manufacturing stands at the ready, waiting for the numbers. In poorer parts, plastic card racks with push pins attached to countertops with the same little chains affixed to pens at banks. In still other neighborhoods, eerily blinking computerized interfaces no one is sure can be trusted.

No one is sure they can be trusted.

From the crowd, more snatches of unattributed dialogue, nonsensical yet queerly resonant:

"Days like this. Pull a lever, and a potential, a mathematical possibility, shoots up. Sensitivities. Attunements. Things are ready to happen that normally never do."

"My name's not important. What's important is the news organization I'm polling for. I'm here to poll the area and make sure the area is polled as you conduct your undisclosed business. I am not here to interfere or influence or affect you or the person you may or may not be supporting in any way. You are but one mere node in a vast aggregate of polling data which is at this time our primary concern. We have procedures we've developed over long periods of time."

"Paper. Legal size. White with blue lines."

"What do you mean a Blockbuster Video membership card does not constitute a legal I.D.? This is America! What's wrong with you people?"

"Do you have a working telephone?"

He stands in the doorway to the junior high school gymnasium and stares blinking into the loud murmuring bustle of unedited, unmediated humanity massed before him. Waiting with grim expressions in interminable lines. Glancing back and forth at petty annoyances as the hours draw out. Swarming into lines, paperwork in hand, forms filled, addresses verified.

Far from here, massive telecommunications infrastructures are employed to frantic ends. Media professionals dart from room to room, dash onto camera and off again as slips of paper are handed this way and that by grim-faced white-knuckled interns. Encrypted data fills the rooms around them with crucial up-to-the-minute updates.

It is flat, on flatscreens, two-dimensional.

But the real story is not in these waves of electromagnetic signals being beamed via satellite and fiber-optic cable onto cathode rays and plasma the nation over. The real story today is here, in this ugly room.

The New Yorkers, the Wisconsinites, the Chicagoans, waiting in line. Some have come out of a sense of patriotic duty, some in hopes of a quick fix, some out of vague, barely comprehensible last-minute anxieties about redistribution of hardworking plumbers' wealth.

A primary motivator these last eight years, the pundits have explained—on cable, and on basic cable, and on radio, and even, still in this day and age, newsprint—not fear, not terror, but a new thing: fear of terror. Yet today the faces of the grandmothers and the hippies and the Joe Six Packs and the pained, exasperated office workers in painful, pastel shoes do not seem, to his searching eyes, to be afraid.

Miles from here, in the White House, a nervous cluster of Ivy League graduates attend to the needs of one man imparting terror to the dreams of the Republic. He is thinking about his ranch. His staff prepares to pack his things.

Meetup

Happy Halloween Indeed

Detente!

Leaking anew

The best thing about being on the Wallace-l is the generosity of the listers. That's also the worst thing. I could have avoided the whole Rolling Stone article, maybe just read the excerpt online (thanks, Claud) but of course, one of the generous members copied the whole thing, made a PDF of it - around 25 mb, and put it on her website.

So now, thanks to a writer who had access to DFW's family and friends, including the famous, we have his entire personal history, the blueprint for suicide, according to a lister - the early depression years, the mid-depression years, and a chronical of his insecurities, from high school through last summer. Of course, many artists/writers will recognize and relate to the insecurities, the worry that the ability or the impulse to create will dry up, that the one thing that keeps you relatively level will disappear and not leave a forwarding address.

It's a weird sort of comfort to know that this great talent was burdened with the same basement sale humanity that the rest of us root around in, separate from any clinical depression.

It's not at all a comfort to re-realize that for all its glory and expense, modern medicine can fall so incredibly short.

RIP, DFW.
"He was like a comet flying by at ground level."
Editor

Debate this, my friends...

I planned to watch the last debate, mostly so that when I watch the commentary on Rachel Maddow's show, or the Saturday Night Live parodies, that I get every nuance... yeah, that's my level of commitment. Debate that, "my friends."

And I thought I made it through an hour, seemed like an hour, but it was only 25 minutes. I was trying to stay in the moment and actually listen to what they said, but I was too distracted by McCain with his red, anime eyes, his bumbling and angry statements, and that gigantic Sharpie he was using to take notes. How big was that thing? Now, I am a huge fan of the Sharpie, my friends, and have every size - but the McCain size is what I use if I'm making a Help sign on a deserted island.

And then I'm trying to think of a one word that would describe McCain. Evil is already reserved for Bush, and it isn't really descriptive enough, and is also kind of a cop out, actually. For McCain, the word for the short-term is smarmy, my friends. The dude is smarmy. Smarmy, bumbling, and angry. Presidential? Nope.

And not just smarmy because of this campaign, which of course, would be reason enough. But he's already feeling guilty about statements he made, what, 3 days ago? In one of his ads, all of which are completely negative and not about issues... That's reassuring, my friends. But commentators suggest that voters don't want to hear about the past, about Obama's relationship with Ayers, about McCain's being one of the Keating 5. (Because THAT comparison, my friends, is apples to apples no?)

McCain was involved in a debacle in a local savings and loan that is like a thumbnail sketch of what is happening nationwide now. I'm going to copy and paste a bit from Wikipedia cuz I'm lazy: "The Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government. Some 23,000 Lincoln bondholders were defrauded and many elderly investors lost their life savings."

Now, all-told, it was a nationwide-wide savings and loan debacle, but here in Arizona, McCain and his compadres went to bat for Keating, the Chairman of that ill-fated S and L, against regulators after they received mondo bucks from Keating. Keating bilked the oldsters out of their dough by buying junk bonds with money made off real estate development projects. Eventually their holdings were worth nothing. Obviously it was more complicated than that, but that's the gist.

The most arresting visual image I have from that particular debacle was watching, on Tv, a senior citizen throw a pie in Keating's face while he was being led to jail. Wouldn't we all like to have a giant, Sharpie-sized pie right now for the folks responsible for the current economic apocalypse?

I did a stint as a temp for the Resolution Trust Corporation in the early 90s, the agency created to liquidate the assets, mostly real estate (read - FAILED LOANS) of that savings and loan debacle, and saw close-up the process, and how much waste was generated by having a government agency run that kind of show. The kind of waste that makes you question every cent of your tax-paying life.

Americans' memories being what they are, McCain went on to re-election and years later, here we are. Not that many years later, either! But voters don't want to hear about all that stuff, that's history, my friends, and has nothing to do with character, or ability. And acting like it never happened, and promising the world regarding balancing the budget and fixing somehow this current debacle, which should feel super familiar to him and give him a Presidential-level case of the willies, well only a smarmy dude could get away with that, and still think he deserved the voters' trust.

Ode to Istockphoto.com

I remember when we had to go
To Corbis, to Getty, to I don’t know
What was it, photos.com?

And suddenly, like manna from heaven
If you believe in heaven, and you like manna that is,
Istock appeared on the internets

And lo, it was good, and low, as in cheap
Its contents juicy, the artists, many,
And the lightboxes, divine

Searching is wiggy but soon you learn
That white background means color
and ethnicity too

For a dollar - photo credit,
Which you can use outright
Or edit!

It’s bad for the artists, but good for us
They’re screwed, yet no one makes a fuss
“I’ll make it up in volume!” their tortured cry.
Istock, great photos we can afford to buy.

Living with David Foster Wallace

The Blammos have recorded a tasty little tribute to DFW...

give it a listen

And but so...

'...'

Palin cartoon

Or should it be, "Palin, cartoon."

Favorite flicks in September

The Fall
Burn After Reading
Son of Rambow


Bad!
Cassandra's Dream

I'm ill too!

"I'll try to find ya some and I'll bring 'em to YA!"

A slightly more comic version...

Posey

I got a new kitty today. Kevin's feral cat had kittens who mostly lived in the bathroom, going in and out of the cupboard. Posey's last moment of happiness was running out to greet Kevin and prancing around the room before he put her in the cat carrier and spirited her out to the car.

She has her own bedroom here until we see how King Deighv reacts. Bella has been standing guard outside the door and can't figure out why she can't go in and see the kitty.

Posey is hiding in the closet next to some luggage. She alternates between crying and hissing at me. I hope it doesn't take long for her to adjust, it's making me feel like a terrible person, wrenching her away from her brothers and 24/7 fun.

I'll take some pics as soon as she is relaxed.

This isn't her.

The Dude Abides: Zenlightenment

The 10th Anniversary of The Big Lebowski is here and I have nothing to wear!

Not to worry, it's just a DVD. Back in all their glory - John Turturro as Jesus, Sam Elliott as The Stranger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the assistant, Steve Buscemi as Donny... poor Donny. Not to mention Aimee Mann, Tara Reid, Julianne Moore, Ben Gazzara, David Thewlis - everyone was in this movie, even Carlos Leon, Madonna's baby daddy. Flea, taking a real stretch in his role as a nihilist: "We believe in nothink!"

But Jeff Bridges stood out from the crowd like Elvis Costello stood out from disco. The Dude, the Dudester, or Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. What's it like to live in the moment? Ask the Dude. No one gets him - he is written off as a slacker, a stoner, a thief, etc. But he is steadfast, he is himself, he is always the essence of Dude. He is the moral compass in a whacked out morality tale, the better Jeffrey Lebowski. Not for him your easy cash, your 9-5, or even your beer with bowling. He just liked that rug - it really tied the room together.

In keeping with the Coen Bros pattern - slouching towards a line-up of awards and critical drooling, and then pulling back and flipping the bird with an absurd, surreal adventure, they're following No Country for Old Men with Burn After Reading. See Blood Simple into Raising Arizona, and Fargo into Big Lebowski. And it's probably no coincidence that the Lebowski anniversary DVD release coincides with the release of Burn After Reading.

But hey - is there ever too much Coen Brothers? Not in this house, Dude.

The Big Lebowski - Gutterballs
Uploaded by thenelaware

This is water, this is water.

OK, time to move on.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails and phoned and especially thanks to Kevin, who gets me. The Wallace Listserv rocks beyond all belief.

Here's to all the other brilliant, depressed people out there who manage not to kill themselves on purpose or by over-self medicating.

I was going to delete the blog but Kevin's right, it can be an homage and the pain of seeing the title every day will lessen in time.

So here are some words from Himself to remind us to make the most of right now, from the Kenyon commencement speech:

"The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

From Mark Leyner

Fellow post modernist:

"What we're losing is someone who saw a
kind of profundity in almost everything as a human being and as a
citizen and as an artist. ... He's irreplaceable and at a moment in
the culture when he's desperately needed, he's gone."

From the Onion

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death

LOUDON, NH—Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
In deference to the memory of Wallace, whose writing on alienation, sadness, and corporate sponsorship made him the author of the century in stock car racing circles and whom NASCAR chairman Brian France called "perhaps the greatest American writer to emerge in recent memory, and definitely our most human," officials would not comment on how points, and therefore this year's championship, would be determined.
At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup.
"All race long on Sunday, I was dealing with the unreality presented me by his absence," said #16 3M Ford Fusion driver Greg Biffle, who won Sunday's Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the first race in the Chase For The Cup, and would therefore have had the lead in the championship. "I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It's no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective."
"I'm flooded with feelings of—for lack of a better concept—incongruity," said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace's novels to his fans. "David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony."
"And now he's gone," Johnson added. "He's taken himself away. We can't possibly race now."
David Foster Wallace's work came to stock car racing in the mid-1990s, just as the sport began experiencing almost geometric yearly growth. But the literary atmosphere of the sport was moribund, mired in the once-flamboyant but decidedly aging mid-1960s stylings of Tom Wolfe, whose bombastic essays—notably "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!"—served as the romantic, quasi-elegiac be-all and end-all for NASCAR fans and series participants alike. Racing was ready for new ideas, and when a new generation of young drivers like Jeff Gordon arrived on the scene, sporting new sponsorship deals on their fireproof coveralls and dog-eared copied of Broom Of The System under their arms, an intellectual seed crystal was dropped into the supersaturated solution of American motorsports.
"Suddenly DFW was everywhere," said #88 Amp Energy Chevrolet driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose enthusiasm for Wallace is apparent in both his deep solemnity and the Infinite Jest-inspired Great Concavity tattoo on his left shoulder. "My Dad was against him, actually, in part because he was a contrarian and in part because he was a Pynchon fan from way back. But that was okay. It got people reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, and hell, nothing wrong with that. But now, to think we'll never see another novel from Wallace...I can't get my mind around it."
"David himself said that what he knew about racing you could write with a dry Sharpie marker on the lip of a Coke bottle," said NASCAR president Mike Helton, who announced the season cancellation late Monday after prompting from drivers and team owners in a statement that also tentatively suggested naming the 2009 Sprint series the Racing Season Of The Depends Adult Undergarment in referential and reverential tribute to Wallace's work, a proposal currently being considered by Depends manufacturer Kimberly-Clark. "But that doesn't matter to us as readers, as human beings."
"Racing and literature are both huge parts of American life, and I don't think David Foster Wallace would want me to make too much of that, or to pretend that it's any sort of equitable balance," Helton added. "That would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever cultural deity, entity, energy, or random social flux produced stock car racing also produced the works of David Foster Wallace. And just look them. Look at that."

Is this Really Happening?

Trying to escape into entertainment; yes, that was the ploy, despite the layers of irony surrounding the action, it is what we do; well, what I do anyway. Then only to come face to face with a noose, on a new episode of Weeds. Someone actually making a noose and putting their head in it.

There is no escape from it. It is really happening.

Then watching the movie The Fall, the ominous soundtrack a loop of Beethoven's 7th, themes of lost dreams and a suicide. A monkey named Wallace, dies, but his death is explained as a happy one, one that is in the natural order of things.

There is no escape from it. It has really happened.

Remembrance: David Foster Wallace

I'm going to post some remembrances over the next few days that I'm collecting from other places. Please feel free to post your own as well. Then I'm going to discontinue the site. At best, the title is too ironic; at worst, it's too depressing.


He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things.1 The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: "No, look ... you don't need anything more than high school math, that's all I really have." He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I'll always miss him.

1 And let's say them grammatically.

—Zadie Smith

We first contacted David Foster Wallace while we were putting out Might magazine back in 1996. We had read Broom of the System and so asked him if he would send us something—an essay, a story, a note on a napkin. He sent an essay, about sex in the age of AIDS, that was easily the best thing we ever published. I remember it came in flawless, without any errors or punctuation mistakes at all; it was not really editable. But one of our editors dug right in and began red-lining it like it was something by a first-timer. We all came to our senses just in time and realized the man knew more about writing than we did or could.

It was a year or two later that I first met him in person. I was living in New York and working at Esquire; he had just written a short story in the magazine. Adrienne Miller (then the magazine's fiction editor) and I took him out to a diner around the corner. I was relieved that he seemed to know as little about food as I did, or care as little as I did. The diner was a relief to us both. We talked about how he'd grown up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and how I'd gone to college there, how his father taught there, about the pleasures and quirks of east-central Illinois.

There's something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world—and who seems exactly like someone who would have come from your part of the world. He was funny, decent to a fault, and thoroughly unpretentious. He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books. You knew it within two or three minutes with him. He was an actual human, far more colloquial and normal than you could imagine, given what he engineered on the page.

During dinner he kept a cup right below the table, semi-out-of-view, into which he spit his tobacco juice. Until that time I had no idea he was a dipper. It was hilarious, because it's such a strange habit, and so problematic for any life lived indoors. For a cowboy or baseball player, there's always the dirt to spit on, but for anyone else you always have to carry around a cup full of brown spit. Which is what he had below the table all during dinner. I had to stop looking at it.

A few months later, Dave was the first person we asked to contribute to McSweeney's, thinking we could not start the journal without him. Thankfully, he sent a piece immediately, and then we knew we could begin. We honestly needed his endorsement, his go-ahead, because we were seeking, at the start at least, to focus on experimental fiction, and he was so far ahead of everyone else in that arena that without him the enterprise would seem ridiculous.

Along with his first piece, he also sent a check, for $250. That was the craziest thing: he sent a donation with his contribution. Thus he was the first donor to the journal, though he insisted that his donation remain anonymous in that first issue. I had such a problem cashing that check; I wanted to keep it, frame it, stare at it.

The note he wrote was printed in 8-point type, with a serif font, and was cut so that no paper was wasted. This was before he e-mailed; he was a very late adopter to that method. Until that point, he would send envelopes from Bloomington, Illinois, with one single piece of paper inside, cut so that only the paper that had been used for the note was included. He cut the rest away, or used it for other notes. So you would get a four-inch-high-by-eight-and-a-half-inch-wide note in your envelope. And again, never a word out of place.

These letters in the mail became the main way I personally communicated with Dave. Though I admired him as a man and a writer more than I could ever express to him, we remained professional friends. I asked him to send us any work he could, and we published whatever he sent.

My in-person anecdotes, though few and not deeply evocative, will be posted as the week goes on. But part of the reason we so badly want to hear from those who knew him is that we didn't know him as well as we wished we had. I certainly did not. But even reading the contributions so far has been, however painful, so enlightening and healing and warming, and in an absolutely necessary way. Let's continue.

—Dave Eggers

DFW's words on Kafka

"[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self
whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our
endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. ...
[E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly
hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing
it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total
desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally,
the door opens...and it opens _outward_ -- we've been inside what we
wanted all along. Das ist komisch."

David Foster Wallace is dead

Sad, sad, sad.

Apparently David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. It's not on any of the news sites except the LA Times, which confirmed it with the Claremont Police Department.

He has been my favorite author for years, since I read Infinite Jest in 1997. This blog is named for a concept in Infinite Jest, his most famous book.

I don't know what to say.

Hold for... the Apocalypse

You've probably heard about the incredible storm that went through the valley on Thursday night. I was just beginning to understand the enormity of it when I called Kevin around 10 p.m. to tell him it was hailing by my house, but he was already four zones in to freakytown, because his response was not, "Hello"... it was, "CAN'T TALK LONG - GOTTA SAVE BATTERY - IT'S THE APOCALYPSE!!!"

To which I just muttered, "hail," before we hung up. I guess you gotta save the phone battery in case the 4 Horsemen call.

At about that point, the sky lit up in about 90 different directions, like the gods were having a 70s style party with a bunch of strobe lights, and oversized speakers with the bass turned up. "Oh, You need the Base!" Hail drummed at the windows, sounding like someone wanted to come in, NOW.

The sky went from white to yellow to black, and back. I was thinking, "Who needs cable?" when the power went out. Rats! I need cable!

But it was not to be. The power did not come back on. All I could hear was thunder, and then sirens.

The rain stopped after a couple of hours, and the temperature dropped to the mid-70s, unheard of in August. Turned out it was a record low for August for all time. I opened up all the doors and slept til morning.

It was cool until about 10 (well, moderately cool - around 85) so I painted and did some other things that didn't require electricity. Then I walked the dog, and all the neighbors we passed reported their stories. Donnie saw the manhole covers on the street tilting back and forth from the force of the water passing below. Telephone poles were swaying 3 feet. Trees were split in half.

But the scary part was that one called APS and they said the power would be out for 2 days. I went home and packed up, and headed to Tempe where some friends were already holed up in a cheap hotel room, hoping to beat out the masses who would soon realize their holiday weekend was gonna be about slumming.

Next chapter tomorrow.

Fonts are People Too

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Funny of the Day

Red Hot Chili Pepper

Red Hot Chili Pepper
Originally uploaded by cynthia85014

My neighbor gave me this chili pepper - it is almost 5' long, concrete over polystyrene. I have been eyeing it at his house (next door) for years. I finally just asked for it.

Finished the Garden Tower

More images on Flickr- click the Flickr box to go there.

Interesting Fact of the Day

The board game, Clue, is distributed around the world, but it originated in England. As you probably know, Clue is about finding "clues" for a murder that may have happened in the library, with a knife, etc... The characters in Clue include a Miss Scarlet, a Colonel Mustard, a Mrs. Peacock, etc. The characters are all named the same in the various versions of Clue except for a character known as Reverend Green, who became Mr. Green in the U.S. version.

Apparently, U.S. citizens would not tolerate a Reverend as a possible suspect in a board game murder mystery.

Brought to you by Richard Dawkins, author.

Why I'm Not Patriotic

Why I’m Not Patriotic
By Matthew Rothschild
(In memory of George Carlin.)

04/07/08 "The Progressive" -- It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don’t play that martial music, white boy.

And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.

The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism’s bayonet point.

World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions-notes left by the killer after the fact.

The millions of victims of Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot have on their death certificates a dual diagnosis: yes communism, but also that other ism, nationalism.

The whole world almost got destroyed because of nationalism during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The bloody battles in Serbia and Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s fed off the injured pride of competing patriotisms and all their nourished grievances.

In the last five years in Iraq, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because the United States, the patriarch of patriotism, saw fit to impose itself, without just cause, on another country. But the excuse was patriotism, wrapped in Bush’s brand of messianic militarism: that we, the great Americans, have a duty to deliver “God’s gift of freedom” to every corner of the world.

And the Congress swallowed it, and much of the American public swallowed it, because they’ve been fed a steady diet of this swill.

What is patriotism but “the narcissism of petty differences”? That’s Freud’s term, describing the disorder that compels one group to feel superior to another.

Then there’s a little multiplication problem: Can every country be the greatest country in the world?

This belief system magically transforms an accident of birth into some kind of blue ribbon.

“It’s a great country,” said the old Quaker essayist Milton Mayer. “They’re all great countries.”

At times, the appeal to patriotism may be necessary, as when harnessing the group to protect against a larger threat (Hitler) or to overthrow an oppressor (as in the anti-colonial struggles in the Third World).

But it is always a dangerous toxin to play with, and it ought to be shelved with cross and bones on the label except in these most extreme circumstances.

In an article called “Patriot Games” in the current issue of Time magazine (July 7), Peter Beinart, late of The New Republic, inspects his navel for seven pages and then throws the lint all around.

“Conservatives are right,” he says. “To some degree, patriotism must mean loving your country for the same reason you love your family: simply because it is yours.”

And then he criticizes, incoherently, the conservative love-it-or-leave-it types.

The moral folly of his argument he himself exposes: “If liberals love America purely because it embodies ideals like liberty, justice, and equality, why shouldn’t they love Canada-which from a liberal perspective often goes further toward realizing those principles-even more? And what do liberals do,” he asks, “when those universal ideals collide with America’s self-interest? Giving away the federal budget to Africa would probably increase the net sum of justice and equality on the planet, after all. But it would harm Americans and thus be unpatriotic.”

This is a straw man if I ever I saw one, but if the United States gave a lot more of its budget to eradicating poverty and disease in Africa and other parts of the developing world, it might actually make us all safer.

At bottom, note how readily Beinart disposes of “liberty, justice, and equality.”

He has stripped patriotism to its vacuous essence: Love your country because it’s yours.

If we stopped that arm from reflexively saluting and concerned ourselves more with “universal ideals” than with parochial ones, we’d be a lot better off.

We wouldn’t be in Iraq, we wouldn’t have besmirched ourselves at Guantanamo, we wouldn’t be acting like some Argentinean junta that wages illegal wars and tortures people and disappears them into secret dungeons.

Love of country is a form of idolatry.

Listen, if you would, to the wisdom of Milton Mayer, writing back in 1962 a rebuke to JFK for his much-celebrated line: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

Mayer would have none of it. “When Mr. Kennedy spoke those words at his inaugural, I knew that I was at odds with a society which did not immediately rebel against them,” he wrote. “They are the words of totalitarianism pure; no Jefferson could have spoken them, and no Khrushchev could have spoken them better. Could a man say what Mr. Kennedy said and also say that the difference between us and them is that they believe that man exists for the State and we believe that the State exists for man? He couldn’t, but he did. And in doing so, he read me out of society.”

When Americans retort that this is still the greatest country in the world, I have to ask why.

Are we the greatest country because we have 10,000 nuclear weapons?

No, that just makes us enormously powerful, with the capacity to destroy the Earth itself.

Are we the greatest country because we have soldiers stationed in more than 120 countries?

No, that just makes us an empire, like the empires of old, only more so.

Are we the greatest country because we are one-twentieth of the world’s population but we consume one-quarter of its resources?

No, that just must makes us a greedy and wasteful nation.

Are we the greatest country because the top 1 percent of Americans hoards 34 percent of the nation’s wealth, more than everyone in the bottom 90 percent combined?

No, that just makes us a vastly unequal nation.

Are we the greatest country because corporations are treated as real, live human beings with rights?

No, that just enshrines a plutocracy in this country.

Are we the greatest country because we take the best care of our people’s basic needs?

No, actually we don’t. We’re far down the list on health care and infant mortality and parental leave and sick leave and quality of life.

So what exactly are we talking about here?

To the extent that we’re a great (not the greatest, mind you: that’s a fool’s game) country, we’re less of a great country today.

Because those things that truly made us great-the system of checks and balances, the enshrinement of our individual rights and liberties-have all been systematically assaulted by Bush and Cheney.

From the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act to the new FISA Act, and all the signing statements in between, we are less great today.

From Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base and Guantanamo, we are less great today.

From National Security Presidential Directive 51 (giving the Executive responsibility for ensuring constitutional government in an emergency) to National Security Presidential Directive 59 (expanding the collection of our biometric data), we are less great today.

From the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to InfraGard and the Terrorist Liaison Officers, we are less great today.

Admit it. We don’t have a lot to brag about today.

It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex.

It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf-out of the reach of children and madmen.

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.

People are Strange

PEOPLE ARE STRANGE (REMI GAILLARD)
Uploaded by nqtv

Garden Tower progress

Tomorrow, grout! Then, concrete...

Photos of the Week

Favorite flicks in May and June

I saw a lot of really bad movies in May and June. So bad I was almost afraid to go back to the theater, but we won't talk about the Happening right now b/c it's just too upsetting. So bad that in comparison, not even Zohan made the worst list.

But then I went to see When Was the Last Time... and all is forgiven. Not a perfect film, but I'm not afraid to go any more.

And a word about I'm Not There - Todd Haynes has made some excellent films, like Safe and Far From Heaven. This one is truly brilliant.

Best
I'm Not There
Ratatouille
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days
When Was the Last Time You Saw Your Father

Worst
Youth Without Youth
The Happening
The Golden Compass

Bad but not on the Worst list
Too many to mention, have work to do ;-)

Work in progress

I'm calling this a garden tower. It's concrete and mosaic over polystyrene, about 1/3 finished.

George W. Bush Sewage Plant

An Honor That Bush Is Unlikely to Embrace


By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: June 25, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — Reagan has his highways. Lincoln has his memorial. Washington has the capital (and a state, too). But President Bush may soon be the sole president to have a memorial named after him that you can contribute to from the bathroom.

From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.

The plan, naturally hatched in a bar, would place a vote on the November ballot to provide “an appropriate honor for a truly unique president.”

Supporters say that they have plenty of signatures to qualify the initiative and that the renaming would fit in a long and proud American tradition of poking political figures in the eye.

“Most politicians tend to be narcissistic and egomaniacs,” said Brian McConnell, an organizer who regularly suits up as Uncle Sam to solicit signatures. “So it is important for satirists to help define their history rather than letting them define their own history.”

Not surprisingly, those Republicans in a city that voted 83 percent Democratic in 2004 are not thrilled with the idea. Howard Epstein, chairman of the ever-outnumbered San Francisco Republican Party, called the initiative “an abuse of process.”

“You got a bunch of guys drunk who came up with an idea,” Mr. Epstein said, “and want to put on the ballot as a big joke without regard to the city’s governance or cost.”

The renaming would take effect on Jan. 20, when the new president is sworn in. And regardless of the measure’s outcome, supporters plan to commemorate the inaugural with a synchronized flush of hundreds of thousands of San Francisco toilets, an action that would send a flood of water toward the plant, now called the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant.

“It’s a way of doing something physical that’s mentally freeing,” said Stacey Reineccius, 45, a software consultant and entrepreneur who supports the plan. “It’s a weird thing, but it’s true.”

Tim Russert tribute

Garden Goddess

This is a reverse totem in that the symbols are carved in rather than out.
It is meant to draw these creatures to one's garden: lizards, hummingbirds, butterflies, dragonflies, ladybugs.

DFW Poster Entry

Wish me luck!

David Foster Wallace Motivational Poster Contest

Nick over at The Howling Fantods, a DFW news site, is sponsoring a DFW Motivational Poster contest. For those of you who don't already know, Entertainment Cartridges is a reference to the Foster Wallace book, Infinite Jest.

Oh yes, I WILL be entering. Probably a little DeMotivational Poster...

Here's Nick's:

Photo of the Week

A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn

narrated by Viggo Mortensen

Something's Fishy

Excellent fish by Sophie Druin.

The Real McCain

Politicians have always double-talked and it's a lot easier now to catch them in the act, cobble together a video and show all their self-contradictions - Jon Stewart does it every night, and with certain other candidates as well. But seriously, this guy would not be able to do the job and may be even more dim-witted and unethical than W.

New Thinking on the Climate Crisis - Al Gore

Pod Evolution

Quote of the Day

The reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself.
- Rita Mae Brown

Keith Olbermann on Bush - "Giving up Golf"

Photo of the Week

Weaver's Needle viewed from Peralta Trail at the Superstitions
Ryan Malone
click for larger view

I Want to Believe

The only better news than a new X Files movie coming out in July is that Billy Connolly is in it, and he plays, get this, a psychic ex-priest! "It's heeaahh Ah knoooww dat it iz..." A welcome relief from all the German and British accents from the series. Let's hope he's not a chain smoker, although with that wild Einstein hair he more than a little resembles the late Cancer Man, minutes before he was blown up by an IED somewhere in New Mexico. (Even TYPING that line feels unreal.)

You can watch the official trailer by clicking on the post title, but it's pretty lame.

Does anyone know if the Lone Gunmen are in it - they are not listed on IMDB but there is a very short list of characters... Or Ratboy... now, that would be great news as well. Perhaps a lovers triangle - a Tri-shipper, as it were.

There are tons of fake movie trailers on You Tube - several are posted on the right. Most of them are infinitely better than the real trailer. It's amazing that fans wanted a new film so badly they signed petitions and presented them to Chris Carter, and spent time making fake trailers. Time that could have easily been spent watching the series' DVDs over and over and ...

("lots and lots and lots of files")

New pods

Needs some refinement, am working on a new mosaics thing - pods. Greg S inspired these with his tiny pods made of Fimo. I hope to do different sizes, for weird things in one's garden.

They are styrofoam block, carved, then covered with weather-proof mesh and mortar, then a special polymer blend concrete. This one is topped with glass and tile shards.

Next one, smaller, thinner, green.

Favorite Flicks in April

Walk Hard - the Dewey Cox Story
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Things We Lost in the Fire
Europa Europa
The Double Life of Veronique

Worst Movie By Far -
Atonement

Postal

The Post Office has selling more than 30 million "Forever Stamps" per day for the past several weeks, as we get closer to the next rate increase, which is only 1 cent.

I don't get it though - if everyone buys the Forever Stamps, and they keep buying them, won't the Post Office go out of business, (or whatever government entities do that really aren't businesses) in a couple of decades, if not sooner?

If they're saying they can't operate at the rate that the current postage provides them, then how can they say they will be able to continue to operate at that rate forever?

Will someone explain that to me?

Photo of the Week

Weird Desert Flower

Car off the road inside Sedona state park.
I saw it from on top of a hill and hiked down to it to take pictures; sprained my ankle right after I took this. I don't think it was worth it... luckily, my car was close by and I was able to hobble over to it...

Finished the mural

I am very tired, but happy that it's finished.

Snake Week

Four days hiking, 3 days snakes.

But it's so green and beautiful, it's hard to resist.