This entry originally appeared on June 12, 2010 at 11:14 a.m.
Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy
Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea I know
That I have sinned & that my Emanations are become harlots
I am already distracted at their deeds & if I look
Upon them more Despair will bring self murder on my soul
O Enion thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful
to draw me to destruction
(William Blake, excerpt from “Part I: Enmion and Tharmas,” in Vala, or, The Four Zoas: the torments of Love and Jealousy in the death and judgment of Albion the Ancient Man.)
All photos are screencaps from a collaborative short film put out by Lulamagazine and the ubiquitous UK-and-now-THE-WORLD clothing store Topshop. Here is a linky to the video, which is unusual and beautiful and freaky, but as you are watching this artistic short film remember it is designed to sell faux-Bohemian low-quality overpriced clothes that will be out of style in six months to impressionable and likely self-loathing young women with eating disorders and disposable income. The fashion industry is so cruel with its kindness that I go back and forth on appreciation and hate.
I’m sorry, I went to the mall earlier to pick up some comfortable summer shoes with my grandmother and now I’m in a low mood. Nothing puts me out of sorts like that snake nest. Like, everyone is slithering over the top of each other and accidentally biting their own tails and dropping money on shit they don’t need, finances they have gained from the jobs they keep specifically to make a weekend trip to a goddamned mall and drape shiny fabrics over the viper shitpit of the system so it looks all pretty and coordinated while they sip complacently from some kind of frapped coffee bullshit drink packed with sugar and empty calories that they store in the cupholder of their child’s stroller. Their kids are with them, of course, because children must be taught to want made-up food like chicken nuggets and aspire to own over three pair of shoes. Seriously, I want to watch it burn, burn, burn.
I know that my Emanations are become harlots.
I think I’m going to go take ten and paint with the kidlet or something.
“Keep Moving From This Mountain.” Sermon at Temple Israel, Hollywood, California. February 25, 1965.
Each of us lives in two realms, the within and the without. The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our lives, the bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live.
Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.
We must move on to that mountain which says in substance, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the end: the soul?”
You are not your job. You are not your possessions.
To impose one’s A.B.C. is only natural — and therefore regrettable. Everyone does it in the form of a crystalbluff-madonna, or a monetary system, or pharmaceutical preparations, a naked leg being the invitation to an ardent and sterile Spring.
The love of novelty is a pleasant sort of cross, it’s evidence of a naive don’t-give-a-damn attitude, a passing, positive, sign without rhyme or reason. But this need is out of date, too. By giving art the impetus of supreme simplicity — novelty — we are being human and true in relation to innocent pleasures; impulsive and vibrant in order to crucify boredom.
Is a drawing from a comic printed on underwear anti-art enough to be Dadaist? Oh, but how angry the capitalist product tie-ins might make them. Best not to ask.
You recoil back upon me in the blood
of the Lamb slain in his Children
Two bleeding Contraries, equally true,
are his Witnesses against me
We reared mighty Stones!
we danced naked around them:
“Hysteric Fireworks,” Ryan McGinley.
Thinking to bring Love into light of day,
to Jerusalem’s shame:
Displaying our Giant limbs
to all the winds of heaven! Sudden
Shame siezed us:
we could not look on one another for abhorrence.
“Fire Flip,” Ryan McGinley.
O what is Life & what is Man,
O what is Death? Wherefore
Are you my Children, natives in the Grave to where I go
“Hanna in wheatfield in American flag chair,” Nicole Lesser. 2009.
Or are you born
to feed the hungry ravenings of Destruction
To be the sport of Accident!
to waste in Wrath & Love, a weary
Life, in brooding cares & anxious labours,
that prove but chaff.
(William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.)
I do believe Mr. Blake is urging you to tune in, turn on, and drop out.
Paved paradise to etc.
Are you born “…to be the sport of accident and waste in wrath and love a weary life, in brooding cares and anxious labours, that prove but chaff”? No. I have said it before as a personal manifesto and I say again now despite my despondency this month and my dwelling over death and famine, that in the final analysis I do not believe we are born to feed the hungry ravenings of destruction, I cannot take the fatalistic, world-weary view that the average man is born cannon fodder in a long war between obscure forces richer and wider-reaching than we are.
Girl welder, 12, for the Australian Air Force, 1943. National Library of Congress collection on the flickr.
I can’t believe that is God’s plan for any single individual on this earth, no one can have been born for darkness and live only to push a wheel belowdecks to power someone else’s ship. I agree with this poem — shame and fear lead us to these empty lives of capitulation and lonely servitude to ideas forged by whatever money-hungry captain of industry’s self-serving philosophies are en vogue aided by the corrupt leaders of what could be beautiful religions. That is not the intent of our creation, I feel like that cannot be so, and if it keeps getting spread around that it is so, surely enough people are going to snap from their television-enhanced fast food comas and facebook opium haze and start a serious counterargument with words and deeds. I mean, they have to. If they don’t, then, my god, what is the point of existence even.
Oh, bother. It appears between this chain of thought and yesterday’s rants about Nazi propaganda that it is shaping up to be quite a week of Opinions. “I’m just a little black raiiinclouuuud …”
Batman’s big love scene — with a goat. Wtmfh? So many more questions than answers. I’ll admit, that would discredit Batman. That would discredit just about anybody, even people who make their living in legit adult entertainment and are recognized for it. Like, I dunno, Tera Patrick, even. I mean — a goat? Shit. That’s bad juju. Madison Ivy all calls Tera Patrick to cancel coffee dates; Ron Jeremy turns and quickly walks away from Tera Patrick at the Van Nuys opening of some low-rent Ed Hardy boutique; Sasha Grey sees Tera Patrick waving in the security camera at the gates of her complex and pretends she is sick with laryngitis.* Puzzled and unwanted, a lonely Tera Patrick walks forlornly down Rodeo Drive, scuffing her clear lucite heels as she trudges to the picked over remains of a sidewalk sale at the Bebe. Poor Tera Patrick.
Oh, holy heck! Piss up a penny whistle, it is CLEARLY time for me to hit the hay! You stay classy, The Internet. I am exhausted as heck.
*A maledictory fiction for humor’s sake: the real Sasha Grey would NEVER do that. (And needless to say, neither would Ms. Patrick be guilty of hurting an animal even for the sake of film.)
“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile, and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together; not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.”
(Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Summit Books, 1979.)
Doorway to “Values.” Get it.
“‘Happy,’ I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood.
Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony.
I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest of a fool to use them with any confidence.”
(Hunter S. Thompson. The Rum Diary. London: Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1998.)
Set in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary is a semi-autobiographical but mainly fiction novel which the good doc wrote in the 60’s but did not publish until 1998, soon to be a major motion picture starring his good friend and somewhat of a mentee, Johnny Depp, who is probably excited as shit to get to do a project he believes in and not play Captain Jack Sparrow again. (Disney slipped a clause into his contract where they get to cut off his wife’s fingers if he doesn’t appear in their convoluted bullshit. Did You Know?)
Speaking of rum, I’m’a finish some housework, then grab a case of Diet Coke and scootch on down to C-town for some mandatory spirit-lifting, this-is-deep-shit, soul-plunging chitty chat time with Paolo and Miss D and this guy Sailor Jerry.
Last night we had pizza and busted out the Scrabble diamond anniversary edition I’d got Paolo for his birthday and I only beat him by ten points in the very last part of the game. This is completely unacceptable because I need to crush him and use his bones for jelly on a piece of toast I’ve made of bread baked from the dust of his finely-ground flesh.
We’re a little competitive.
It’s a rivalry that began in 1986, which makes it a needless game of oneupmanship old enough to vote, buy alcohol, and be in the second year of a postgraduate degree. Shit, maybe it's time to bury the hatchet. I'm sure it would make Miss D happy, although she says she has gotten used to our bickering. She just shakes her head at us, the poor girl.
We'll see. Don't take any wooden nickels, have a super-duper-neato Saturday, and I'll catch you guys on the flip!
I was taking a break from yardwork to make lunch and my daughter was dancing around me swinging something little and slappy on a stick at me. This exchange followed:
Me: Dude! Quit hitting me with that.
Kidlet: (continues trying to hit me)
Me: What even is that?
Kidlet: (stills long enough for me to see it is a miniature U.S. flag on a thin wooden dowel)
Me: Oh, no. That is not — (starts hitting me again) — Hey! Not okay! The flag is NOT a weapon!
Kidlet: The flag IS a weapon! (holds up the dowel end and mimicks stabbing the air Psycho-style)
“American Headache” via the awesome broken spectre on the tumblr.
Tomorrow is Flag Day here in the United States and while I am wary of overdoing it in an oppressive way such as our founding fathers would not have favored and accidentally sewing the seeds of jingoism, I do expect informed respect for patriotic symbols, especially the flag. (See my vitriolic Memorial Day entry for expansion on the issue of this inner conflict and dislike of corporate co-optioning of patriotism) Guess I’ll use it as a jumping-off point to explain to her about flags and traditions, etc.
Steve McQueen.
I did a good, short unit on the National Anthem with the Scamps. Maybe I’ll dig that out of my current tutoree’s textbook when I see her this week, since her mom muscled the school library in to letting her take all her books home for the summer (I’ve said it before but the woman is literally a bulldozer in pumps; it is all I can do not to submissively pee when she enters a room). I remember some of it.
via hellobaltimore Did You Know? The giant flag about which Francis Scott Key wrote seeing wave over Fort McHenry at the end of the Battle of Baltimore was made in just about six weeks by Mary Young Pickersgill, with the aid of her mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Caroline, along with her nieces and two freed African-American houesmaids. They were commissioned by Major George Armistead to make the largest flag ever to be flown over a fort up until that time — the apocryphal story goes that he told the women he wanted to make sure the British could see it. The flag is presently going through a restoration to the tune of 18 million dollars right now in preparation for its centrality to the new, redesigned Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
A widow with a spine of steel, Mrs. Pickersgill was one of the first independent female business owners in America. She successfully negotiated contracts for her flagmaking business with the United States Army and the Navy. She was also a passionate humanitarian, being notable in town for “color-blind” hiring in her sewing shop, with a special bent for women’s issues: she founded the Impartial Female Humane Society, which provided school vouchers for young girl children of any race or religion to be educated, along with the provision of networking and employment to their single mothers.
The More You Know.
Flag kicks from Converse. Chux are cool, yes, but please remember they are owned by Nike. I’m just sayin’.
Guess I should have saved all these flag facts for tomorrow, but I figured I had better strike while the iron of my interest was hot — I know what a fickle creature I am, and by tomorrow the flame of my curiosity about flags, Mrs. Pickersgill, and the history of the women’s movement would have died down to embers at best.
Why wilt thou Examine every little fibre of my soul
Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry
The infant joy is beautiful but its anatomy
Horrible Ghast & Deadly. Nought shalt thou find in it
But Death Despair & Everlasting brooding Melancholy
Thou wilt go mad with horror if thou dost Examine thus
Every moment of my secret hours. Yea I know
That I have sinned & that my Emanations are become harlots
I am already distracted at their deeds & if I look
Upon them more Despair will bring self murder on my soul
O Enion thou art thyself a root growing in hell
Tho thus heavenly beautiful
to draw me to destruction
(William Blake, excerpt from “Part I: Enmion and Tharmas,” in Vala, or, The Four Zoas: the torments of Love and Jealousy in the death and judgment of Albion the Ancient Man.)
All photos are screencaps from a collaborative short film put out by Lulamagazine and the ubiquitous UK-and-now-THE-WORLD clothing store Topshop. Here is a linky to the video, which is unusual and beautiful and freaky, but as you are watching this artistic short film remember it is designed to sell faux-Bohemian low-quality overpriced clothes that will be out of style in six months to impressionable and likely self-loathing young women with eating disorders and disposable income. The fashion industry is so cruel with its kindness that I go back and forth on appreciation and hate.
I’m sorry, I went to the mall earlier to pick up some comfortable summer shoes with my grandmother and now I’m in a low mood. Nothing puts me out of sorts like that snake nest. Like, everyone is slithering over the top of each other and accidentally biting their own tails and dropping money on shit they don’t need, finances they have gained from the jobs they keep specifically to make a weekend trip to a goddamned mall and drape shiny fabrics over the viper shitpit of the system so it looks all pretty and coordinated while they sip complacently from some kind of frapped coffee bullshit drink packed with sugar and empty calories that they store in the cupholder of their child’s stroller. Their kids are with them, of course, because children must be taught to want made-up food like chicken nuggets and aspire to own over three pair of shoes. Seriously, I want to watch it burn, burn, burn.
I know that my Emanations are become harlots.
I think I’m going to go take ten and paint with the kidlet or something.
Rebekah Del Rio – Llorando (“Crying” cover, Mulholland Drive)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001). This track is a haunting, a capella, Spanish language cover by Rebekah Del Rio of the Roy Orbison song “Crying” (Orbison, Melson 1961). Some screencaps are from here, some are from here, and some are from TK on the lj. Some I took myself from the sneaksters who have managed to put a bit of this up on the youtube. Thanks to all sources.
Yo estaba bien
por un tiempo
volviendo a sonreír
I was all right
for a while
I could smile for awhile
Luego anoche te vi;
tu mano me tocó
y el saludo de tu voz
But I saw you last night,
you held my hand so tight
as you stopped to say hello
Y hablé muy bien
y tú sin saber
que he estado
Llorando por tu amor,
llorando por tu amor
Oh, you wished me well
You couldn’t tell
that I’ve been
Crying over you,
crying over you
Luego de tu adiós
sentí todo mi dolor
Sola y
llorando, llorando, llorando.
You said, “So long,”
left me standing all alone
Alone and
crying, crying, crying.
No es fácil de entender
que al verte otra vez
yo esté llorando.
It’s hard to understand
but the touch of your hand
Can start me crying.
Yo que pensé
que te olvidé
pero es verdad,
es la verdad
que te quiero aun más
mucho más que ayer
Dime tú que puedo hacer.
I thought that I
was over you,
but it’s true,
oh, so true
I love you even more
than I did before.
But darling, what can I do?
¿No me quieres ya?
Y siempre estaré
Llorando por tu amor
llorando por tu amor
For you don’t love me,
and I’ll always be
Crying over you
crying over you
Tu amor se llevó
todo mi corazón
Y quedo llorando, llorando, llorando
Llorando por tu amor
Yes, now you’re gone,
and from this moment on
I’ll be crying, crying, crying,
Crying over you
Purchase Mulholland Drive, a StudioCanal film, from amazon online or in person at some big, dreadful electronics discount store where they make their employees dress all alike and discourage self-expression while simultaneously crushing their professional ambitions and private dreams, or even someplace mind-numbingly similar but with a wider range of products to assuage your human misery at the altar of merciless soul-raping capitalism, Walmart or Target; whatever, I don’t care. I am just encouraging you to do this consumer bullshit so I don’t get sued. If it were up to me, David Lynch movies would be showing at most theaters everywhere always, so it’s tough for me to recommend virtually profitless small screen shenanigans. And by tough I mean I am going to go chew light bulbs now.
This movie will come up again, these are a really small handful of caps compared to the rest. I’ve just been blue and listening to this song a lot lately.
“Keep Moving From This Mountain.” Sermon at Temple Israel, Hollywood, California. February 25, 1965.
Each of us lives in two realms, the within and the without. The within of our lives is somehow found in the realm of ends, the without in the realm of means. The within of our lives, the bottom — that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion for which at best we live. The without of our lives is that realm of instrumentalities, techniques, mechanisms by which we live.
Now the great temptation of life and the great tragedy of life is that so often we allow the without of our lives to absorb the within of our lives. The great tragedy of life is that too often we allow the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.
We must move on to that mountain which says in substance, “What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world of means — airplanes, televisions, electric lights — and lose the end: the soul?”
You are not your job. You are not your possessions.
Playboy’s Miss November 1986, the lovely and talented Donna Edmondson, was named the Playmate of the Year in 1987, fitting given that her high school yearbook predicted she was “Most Likely to Become a Bunny.” (What the hell kind of high school yearbook adviser approves that as a category?!) However, her more lasting claim to fame has been her reknown as The Virgin Playmate.
Photographed by Arny Freytag and Stephen Wayda
She had at least gotten to first base; that was her position on her softball team in high school (rimshot!). Actually, it was, in all seriousness — she played first base for her high school in Greensboro, North Carolina. But back to the more interesting issue. Quite the controversy was sparked by the 20-year-old real estate agent’s vow of virginity, which she discussed in her Playmate interview.
“Men are wonderful, but I haven’t really let one close enough to me that I can talk about sex the way some girls can. Virginity isn’t something you discuss. I’m not ashamed of still having mine, mind you. It’s just not something I really want to talk about — except, of course, with the man who takes it away from me.” (“Sold on Donna,” Playboy, November 1986)
I thought about that when I posed for my layout — imagining the kind of sex I’ll one day have. I don’t know when or where it will happen. But I do know it’ll be with somebody I know and love.”
That’s pretty much all she said, but some fits were pitched and fell back in because of where America was, pornography-wise at this time. Let me bend your ear a tick on this topic, if it is news to you. What Ms. Edmondson accidentally stepped her pretty feet in was a total quagmire of hypocrisy and legal issues which had not much to do with her but plenty to do with the Meese Commission and how entertainment dealt with and tacitly sold the lifestyle of the modern single, the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution including the devastating consequences of HIV, and general assumptions of viewer maturity made by media distribution outlets vis-a-vis sexual morals at that particular juncture. What you had was a total flood of the market with new porn and ever-developing potential technologies for its procurement. So you had morality cops panicking bigtime.
Think about it. There was an explosion of private media possibilities in the 1980’s, and they were readily affordable to Joe Vaseline, which means, no matter where the man of the house stashed them, the chance lurked that Junior, too, would have access. Suddenly you could get porn in a pack of spank-sock’s worth of new forms, an embarassment of riches: direct-to-VHS format, dedicated adult cable channels, and even at the good ol’ liquor store from the more and more competing –and niche– skin magazines all making porn less controlled and more widely sold than ever before. Oh, the heyday! But of course, religion and politics intervened.
Sitcom stars, rock musicians, magazine publishers, freaking everyone was caught by Tipper Gore and Edwin Meese with their dicks in their hands on Capitol Hill, and the religious right was burning Blondie records for moral turpitude. Like, Jesus Jumped-Up Christ-Bananas! That is some ticklish shit to accidentally have come your way! And you’d think they would have all been proud of her …
I will let Ms. Edmondson’s official Playboy biography tell the rest of this interesting story.
The text to my original pictorial announced my virginity — and that created quite a stir. Also at this time, the anti-pornography report of the Meese Commission had prompted all 7-Elevens to pull the magazine from their shelves. I was thrown right in the middle of the scandal! All the talk shows immediately wanted to book the virgin PMOY from the Bible Belt. Joan Rivers made a huge deal out of my virginity on her show, but I just explained that you don’t have to have sex to be sexy.
On Larry King’s show, one caller accused me of not being religious because I let men see my body. But I don’t think that posing in Playboy has anything to do with whether I’m a good person. I knew I wasn’t hurting anyone. I defended myself by saying that God made us nude. We were born that way!
But I don’t regret a single moment. I thought the pictures were beautiful and tasteful, and all the Playboy people treated me very well. It was a great experience that I will never forget.
So how did the story work out for Ms. Edmondson? Seems it worked out smashingly, so in the haters’ faces. Once again, her words:
I took a job as a tax accountant, and on my first day of work I met the man who would become my husband. It was his last day of work; our eyes met, and I just knew he was the one. So I asked HIM out, we had lunch together the next week and we were together from then on.
As for my former claim to fame — as the virgin PMOY — all I can say is: Not anymore! Lots of love to you!
Dig the cover: ironically, Joan Rivers, who gave Ms. Edmondson such “holy hell,” so to speak, over the next several months after this issue was published, was herself profiled in the magazine the very same month. So it’s okay to be interviewed but not to pose? Or is it just for young women, or ones who you perceive as less bright than yourself, that the you-cannot-be-a-role-model-and-be-in-Playboy’s-pages applies? Is it that if a woman wants to be sexy she must want to be sexual? Do you enjoy pointing out hypocrisy only when it is not you, yourself, who is being a hypocrite? Where are the lines in the sand for you, Joanie? Is it not merely the case that you want attention at any cost and have made a career of glomming on to hot button people and topics in order to clutch every possible shred of spotlight in your cruel, manicured claws? Booyakasha!
Sorry, I do not normally take such personal issue with anyone who has appeared on camera with a Muppet, but Joan Rivers literally makes her living by being a mean hag, so screw her. Her career could have been great, she could have been an important special woman in the history of females on television, and she pissed it away to keep the level of fame she was accustomed to, with no integrity. Fuck Joan Rivers.
The Thought Experiment 