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Thursday, January 29, 2009
IF YOU PUT BLAGO'S HAIR ON A POOL TABLE, WITH JOHN BOLTON'S MUSTACHE...
posted
10:35 PM
After a lot of high-pitched whining and snarling, they'd mate.

I'VE ALWAYS SUSPECTED THE MARQUIS DE SADE OF A CERTAIN CRUELTY
posted
9:28 AM
The La Fura video I linked to yesterday, I've since discovered, was their adaptation of his 1795 runaway bestseller, Philosophy of the Bedroom. Perhaps a 2003 performance in London. Mixed reviews, though of course the tabloids had a heyday.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009
XXX
posted
4:41 PM
La Fura dels Baus

[Possibly NSFW content. If you work in a church, say.]

It was my priviledge to hang out a little, as we used to say, with La Fura dels Baus, in Barcelona, somewhat over a decade ago. They were, and no doubt are, an impressive outfit. Something like Survival Research Labs, but doing it mostly with their own bodies (though often as not those bodies were being brutalized by SRL-style robotic constructs). The ideal outfit for a La Fura performance would have been a Matrix-length rubber raincoat, gumboots with good soles for running, and a shower cap. They set off explosions, serious ones, in wooden crates of fresh (or not so fresh?) fish, slung high above the heads of the audience, in the old Mercat des Flores (prior to its regooding). I mean they literally blew them up, apart, or rather down, on the audience. Fish-guts, silver scales, splinters of shattered crate. And we screamed. And ran. As a German friend of mine said today, of seeing them perform, the desire to run from them, as intense as it was, was equalled by the desire to run with them. An edge of genuine panic, in the oldest sense of the word.

They, and SRL, are more like some of the characters I've written about than anyone else I've met.

Monday, January 26, 2009
TIME TRAVEL
posted
7:51 AM
"Colour On The Thames" (1935)

Saturday, January 24, 2009
HOLD THE COPROPHAGIA
posted
7:52 PM
They’d run with that tallness, employing a white, custom-printed wallpaper, decorated with ornate cartouches in glossy black. These were comprised, if you looked more closely, of enlarged bits of anatomical drawings of bugs. Scimitar mandibles, spiky elongated limbs, the delicate wings (she imagined) of mayflies. The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely with slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, somehow ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling. The cage was stacked with books, and fitted, inside, with minimalist Swiss halogen fixtures, each tiny bulb focused on one or another of Number Four’s many artifacts. And not just prop books, Inchmale had proudly pointed out. Fiction or non, they all seemed to be about England, and so far she had read parts of Dame Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics and most of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male.

She took off her coat, hung it on a stuffed, satin-covered hanger in the wardrobe, and sat on the edge of the bed to remove her shoes. The Piblokto Madness Bed, Inchmale called it. “Intense hysteria," she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivy to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,’ she added.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009
THE AMERICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM
posted
8:23 PM
Sung by Mr. Marvyn Gaye .

'Night, all.

Monday, January 19, 2009
I DISCOVERED SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES IN THIS GREYHOUND STATION
posted
9:38 PM


Or rather, in 1961, I discovered that science fiction magazines were still being published. I'd found a moldering stack of 1950s Galaxy a year or so earlier, but had assumed that this was a dead platform, an extinct form of publishing. At Puckett's Greyhound Cafeteria I discovered Amazing Stories, and Fantastic, both still quite wonderfully alive. At that time, there were separate toilets for blacks ("colored people") in this bus station. Later, there weren't, and the colored men's toilet, a room I'd never entered, had its door and its fixtures removed, and became an alcove for a somewhat expanded selection of magazines and paperbacks.

How strange. That door I walked past, so many times, and never entered. That whole world of aparthied that I, a white kid in the south, had so little idea of, because it *was* the world, then, there. Though already not entirely the world of science fiction, or anyway not the world of the science fiction I was starting to be able to recognize as the science fiction I needed. Signals from outside. O sweet subversion. Thank you, Fritz Leiber, Samuel R Delany, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock. Thank you for many things, but tonight thank you most for having, in your different ways, helped clue me in to the meaning of that room that became the magazine alcove. Given my situation then, the culture around me, I can't imagine where else I could have gotten that.

Tomorrow (it's not yet midnight, here) will be one of most significant days in the history of the United States. And I, to my own amazement, have had no idea of the relief my heart would feel.

The fineness, the fittingness, the finally.

A fine day to you all.

TRUEST HISTORY OF THE BUSH YEARS
posted
11:01 AM
As assembled for you in hyperlinks by Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden .

Sunday, January 18, 2009
GHOST PROTECTOR OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
posted
4:33 PM
Rare enough to stumble across such fine short fiction on a blog, but rarer still to stumble across it on a blog devoted to "All 500-plus Manhattan landmarks on the National Register of Historic Places" .

Friday, January 16, 2009
DIRIGIBLE CONTENT
posted
11:56 AM
I like how this vaguely resembles one of those new-fangled Middle Eastern luxury hotels.

Thursday, January 15, 2009
CRONENBERGIAN ETHNIC FOOD ALERT
posted
11:51 AM
Like wingsuit base jumping, I'll leave this to the terminally daring.

'Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed, diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping into their eyes. Those who do not wish to eat live maggots place the cheese in a sealed paper bag. The maggots, starved for oxygen, writhe and jump in the bag, creating a "pitter-patter" sound. When the sounds subside, the maggots are dead and the cheese can be eaten.'

PERFECT MASTER OF SMALL STONES
posted
8:12 AM
His awesomeness .

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
WINGSUIT BASE JUMPING
posted
2:52 PM
I saw this on YouTube last year, but this Vimeo version is longer, and so much clearer. Offhand I can't think of any film or video of human beings doing anything simultaneously as amazing and technologically simple.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009
IT ALL LOOKS LIKE RAN OUT THE SCI-FI BOOK PAGES
posted
6:10 PM
"Special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses ."

Tuesday, January 06, 2009
GIGAPANOGRAPHY
posted
11:22 AM
Many more like this , please!

Saturday, January 03, 2009
THE ADDED DIMENSION OF GRIP
posted
12:27 PM
"To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it."
--Charles Bukowski

SPRAWL fight shorts

Nothing to do with me, but I do hear they're also excellent for the pool.

Thursday, January 01, 2009
PARTYING LIKE IT'S 2009
posted
11:51 AM
Wir Tanzen Im 4-Eck by Total Stereo

CABINET (HAPPY NEW YEAR)
posted
12:09 AM
Inchmale’s club, in Portman Square, was called Cabinet. It was a peculiarly narrow place, apparently occupying half of the vertical volume of a townhouse whose expensively forgettable façade reminded her of a sleeping face. It shared a richly but soberly paneled foyer with whatever occupied the other, left, half of the building, and she had formed the vague opinion that this might be a foundation of some kind, perhaps philanthropic in nature, or something dedicated to the advent of peace in the Middle East. Something hushed, she imagined, and faintly dusty.

In any case there was nothing on the façade or in the foyer to indicate what that might be, no more than there was anything, really, to indicate that Cabinet was a club. There was an ornate desk, she supposed Victorian, at which sat one or another of the club’s quietly attentive employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles.