"Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka"

To Jack London country.
He wrote some terrific books.
There's one about an Indian who's a big liar, but really big!
He's such a liar that the villagers, fed up, say:
''Go. Come back when you stop lying.''
They send him off in a canoe and he travels for two years.
He comes home and everybody asks how his trip was.
He says: ''Great, I saw these huge machines rolling along going...
There were others that flew like this...
And there were these great big houses.''

They all look at him and say: ''As big a liar as ever!''
So they send him off in a canoe again, this time for good.

My Life

"My Life"
after Henri Michaux


Somehow it got into my room.
I found it, and it was, naturally, trapped.
It was nothing more than a frightened animal.
Since than I raised it up.
I kept it for myself, kept it in my room,
kept it for its own good.
I named the animal, My Life.
I found food for it and fed it with my bare hands.
I let it into my bed, let it breathe in my sleep.
And the animal, in my love, my constant care,
grew up to be strong, and capable of many clever tricks.
One day, quite recently,
I was running my hand over the animal's side
and I came to understand
that it could very easily kill me.
I realized, further, that it would kill me.
This is why it exists, why I raised it.
Since then I have not known what to do.
I stopped feeding it,
only to find that its growth
has nothing to do with food.
I stopped cleaning it
and found that it cleans itself.
I stopped singing it to sleep
and found that it falls asleep faster without my song.
I don't know what to do.
I no longer make My Life do tricks.
I leave the animal alone
and, for now, it leaves me alone, too.
I have nothing to say, nothing to do.
Between My Life and me,
a silence is coming.
Together, we will not get through this.


Joe Wenderoth

Here's an interview
--> "Poetic speech is born of a kind of luscious violence. As Stevens says, "it is an animal" inside the man playing the blue guitar—the tune is plucked by the animal's claws. I think this means it comes from pre-self emotion."
--> "There's a point when certain grave emotions are rendered preposterous by their surrounding circumstances. I think the impetus for the Letters was, in part, my fondness for the grandiosity of certain 19th-century poets and philosophers—it seems like that kind of grandiosity is no longer possible, like some great wave of Triviality has made it painfully apparent that all such grandiose Efforts at Truth are ridiculous in the extreme."

And this is his "post-poetic novel" (all scare quotes necessary) -- Letters to Wendy a collection of impressionistic mind-tuck comments trailing the thoughts left on unsent wendy's comment cards

LA Times Article on Bootleg Sharing

Pretty decent article from back in November of 04 about the proliferation of bootleg accessible shows and the trading culture. Wish I had a little more to go on and a better understanding of fucking bittorrent but archive.org still blows my mind.


Setting the live music free

Websites enable the exchange of concert recordings, a practice that has thrived around the Grateful Dead and doesn't bother the music industry.

By Steve Hochman, Special to The Times


A decade after Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack while at a drug rehabilitation facility on Aug. 9, 1995, the legacy he and the Grateful Dead left is stronger than ever.

That's not so much a comment about the young fans who follow such Dead-influenced "jam" bands as the String Cheese Incident. Nor is the band's spirit to be found in its full flower at Bonnaroo or other festivals furthering the scene the Dead anchored in its heyday.

If you really want to find the legacy of the Dead and its legion of Deadheads today, go online.

In recent months there's been an explosion on the Internet of what used to be called tape trading. This is not the illegal copying of commercially available music that is being fought by the major record companies. This is the free, generally legal exchange of fan-made concert tapes, radio broadcasts and material that was never officially released — by the Dead and just about anybody else.

It's a world that is growing daily at an exponential rate — and has its foundation in the community of tapers and traders that initially coalesced around and was nurtured by Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

"The Dead was the real forerunner," says Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of Internet Archive (www.archive.org), which features a Live Music Archive section for concert recordings. "The idea was you sell some things, you give some things away, and that balance really personified the Grateful Dead. They started a model."

The Live Music Archive's catalog of recordings just passed 25,000, up from 20,000 in February and half that figure in March 2004. About a tenth of those are of Grateful Dead shows, and the bulk of the rest are from bands that share the loose jam aesthetic but not all. The list of performers represented runs to more than 1,000 and ranges from aggressive Texas rock outfit And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead to Billy Corgan's short-lived Zwan.

Such other sites as Dimeadozen and the Traders' Den offer a full spectrum of selections. There's everything from obscure jazz dates from the '50s to major rock concerts that happened just a couple of days ago. Want to download Cream's Royal Albert Hall reunion shows from May? A vintage 1969 concert by the same band? They're there. Bruce Springsteen from the '70s? Easy. Arcade Fire at Lollapalooza last month? Yours for the taking. This isn't limited to rock bands with cult followings either. You'll find Mariah Carey and Ashlee Simpson concerts, and videos as well as audio recordings.

These aren't the sites where you might find the new Mike Jones album or other commercial releases without paying. These are the places for people coveting music that can't be bought.

Nothing illustrates the phenomenon more clearly, though, than the fact that when the White Stripes played the San Diego Street Scene on July 29, a recording of the show was posted on a download site before midnight — before many people who saw the show even got home.

"That's great," says White Stripes manager Ian Montone, himself a Grateful Dead fan. "I love it when people come in and tape and the shows take on an additional life when fans trade like that, when it's talked about and people can study the nuances of the shows. It adds to the lore and history."

In fact, Montone says that the band has fan taping to thank for preserving at least one special part of the band's history — when Jack White joined Bob Dylan for an encore at the latter's 2004 show in Detroit.

"Thank goodness someone taped that, because otherwise we wouldn't have it," he says.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America, the music industry's lobbying organization that staunchly opposes illegal downloading, piracy and the sale of bootleg recordings, says that it supports this kind of music trading as long as the artists approve.

Dan Healy, longtime concert and studio producer for the Dead, was one of the strongest advocates within the Dead organization not just to allow taping but to encourage it — resulting in their concerts being known for the seas of microphones on poles in a special section right in front of the sound board. Fans would then keep in touch through mailing lists and newsletters, exchanging tapes of the various concerts. The current cyberspace explosion is a fulfillment of the kind of community spirit Garcia stood for, he says.

"The more lines that are open, the more people will talk," says Healy. "That's a figure of speech, but what it means is the more readily transmutable the stuff is, the more people that always wanted to swap and trade will do it. The more conversations, the more swapping of music the better. If anything it makes it more special. It's like love — the more you use it, the stronger it gets"

And it is a community, or perhaps many interlocking communities, each with its own set of rules and ethics. Policies vary greatly from site to site. Some are anything-goes, but the ones that adhere most to the spirit of the Dead have strict regulations prohibiting anything commercially available or from artists who have not authorized such trading. The Traders' Den is among the latter.

"Nothing that is available commercially is allowed in any way, period," says one of the Traders' Den's administrators, who asked that he be identified only by his screen name, bill_kate. "There are a few bands that have expressed certain restrictions on how and what can be traded. We respect these wishes."

Brian Wilson is among the several dozen performers whose name appears on a "banned" list used by many sites' administrators. His views, though, were shaped not by circulation of concert tapes but of unauthorized releases that pieced together unfinished elements of his long-delayed "Smile" project, which he finally completed and released himself last year.

" 'Smile' was one of the most-bootlegged albums for many years," says Jean Sievers, Wilson's co-manager. "It wasn't a finished work and it wasn't what he wanted, and he was upset that people were taking those tapes and spreading his unfinished work over the globe."

Other rules that are widely followed, at least on the sites most in line with the Dead-spurred taping community, include asking users to put music files in forms with the highest possible audio fidelity, using "lossless" formats such as FLAC or SHNN rather than compressing the data to lower-fidelity MP3 files. Posters are also asked to provide as much information as possible about the sources of the recording and, if known, equipment used to record in the first place.

But one rule is most adamantly stated by administrators and users alike: The music is not to be sold.

"There is no money changing hands," says Kahle. "This was the ethos back in the day — you couldn't even charge for the cassette you dubbed music onto. People really stuck to that. What was interesting to me was the level of labor and love put in by everyone involved."

Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars (a band whose spirited blues-rooted shows are common in trading circles) says that, over the years, bootlegs — whether bought in stores or traded — played an important role in his music education.

"There's a bootleg film of the Allman Brothers," says the guitarist. "Something else I collected over the years is Bob Marley live stuff. That moves me more than even his regular records. And Jimi Hendrix, of course! Live Hendrix!"

Dickinson himself has not experienced the Internet side of this — he doesn't own a computer. But fans have routinely given him tapes and CDs they've made of his band's concerts.

"I have a collection of tapes people have given me, and to me that makes the 21 hours of the day that's spent off stage worthwhile," he says. "People care and have documented what we do and it makes it worthwhile."

In a twist, although the easy connections have increased availability of unofficial releases, they have pretty much killed the profiteering that long went on in that world, a form of piracy that has long been fought by the music business.

ICE magazine, a monthly that targets collectors, has long chronicled the "gray area" of bootlegging and says that the boom time for Internet sharing has brought sad times for that black market's profit-minded members — and a much harder hit than that anything the "real" music business is suffering because of bootlegging.

"There's no question that the wind has been taken out of the financial sails of the bootleg world by this free exchange," editor Pete Howard says. "Bootleg CDs used to be pressed in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, for each title. Now, though it's funny and ironic to hear the manufacturers moan and groan, no more than 500 copies is usual."

Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead continues to balance commerce and freedom. Despite so many recordings readily available on the Internet, the official releases of live albums continue at a steady pace, with the "Dick's Picks" series now standing at three dozen titles alone, complemented by other live releases, as well as a newer program of Garcia solo concert recordings. Many make the argument that one feeds the other.

"We've really hit on something with this community," says Internet Archive's Kahle. "And yeah, it all came from the Grateful Dead, and it will give them a long life. They're still selling stuff, and there are young kids involved. It is relevant."

terror chic

Astrid Proll and the Prada Meinhof gang

'I haven't put it behind me, it will keep coming up - but it's not me who finds it difficult to forget, it's other people,' she says. 'Of course, I have fond memories, or I couldn't exist. But they're unrecountable. That's not where I'm at because - thank God - life goes on.'

Not for Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carle Raspe, who are all dead. Many more of Proll's former comrades committed suicide or are still in prison. But others on the periphery of those tumultuous times - the lawyers who defended them and those who contributed to the cause as street fighters, including the Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - sit in the German cabinet, while other so-called 68ers form the backbone of the judicial system and the media.

Which leaves Proll, 55, feeling isolated. Despite repeatedly insisting she escaped from the Baader-Meinhof Gang 'before it got really cruel', she has never been allowed to forget her past, or what she calls the 'hole I got myself into'.

The group she belonged to and for whom she drove the getaway car - be it an Alfa-Romeo or a Mercedes, all part of the group's fashion appeal - killed no fewer than 90 people, many of them former Nazi officials. Proll describes the RAF as 'the knife-edge of the general reaction of the young', who were furious at their parents for unquestioningly supporting Hitler.

'Of course it wasn't healthy,' she says. 'The RAF wasn't healthy for anybody - neither the participants, nor their children, nor the State, but it happened and you have to deal with it. But you have also to remember that it was a group of no more than 30 people, yet it did something unheard -of - it took up a concept and followed it through in a very German-determined way.' She remarks that this is not dissimilar to the 11 September terrorists, though insists she does not mean to take the comparison any further.




------------------------------------------------------

Stuart Christie interviewed by the legendary 3am press people




"All I can say is that we couldn't know then what we could only know today. Things that appeared possible 30 years ago -- and the way to achieve those ends -- wouldn't work today. Times change, as do tactics and strategies. The currency of that particular form of gestural protest has been debased since the mid-1970s with the murderous campaigns targeting innocent bystanders run by the IRA and ETA, culminating in the crusade-like slaughters of 11 September and the recent Madrid train-bombings. The philosophy and attitude of these guys is exactly the same as Franco's old Foreign Legion commander, General Millan Astray whose constant watchword was 'Viva la muerte!'"




Angry Brigade = British RAF
which Tom Vague know well

This is a nice history of said organisation

One of the best things on music I've read in a long long while...

from STYLUS

Soulseeking


Part of me has been wondering, for a while now, whether I simply don’t care anymore.



I should contextualise that. In autumn 2003 I got broadband. I also separated from my girlfriend (we’re very happily back together now, just so you know). Alone and lonely too, I started an accidental crusade (because I had nothing better to do, probably) to hear everything I possibly could. So I downloaded. I searched. I queued. I browsed the files of strangers. I looked for and tried to listen to everything any other writer at Stylus recommended. I hung around I Love Music far more than is healthy, making mental checks of every name, past and present, that seemed to have any degree of significance or interest attached to it. I was a music journalist, of a sort, and I needed to have an opinion, and that opinion needed to cover anything and everything, because otherwise… I tried to crowbar my mind as wide open as it would go, and then some, and cram everything in there. And I mean everything. Wire, grime, Cabaret Voltaire, Colleen, the Warp catalogue, Britney Spears, Timbaland, those old Can albums I hadn’t bought and couldn’t be bothered to pay for until they were remastered, Ludacris, Dave Douglas, Bubba Sparxxx (‘no, I need to download the American version because it’s more postmodern when he segues into “Cry Me A River”, don’t you understand?’), old dance tunes I remember from being a kid at the disco, rare stuff by groups like Orbital where I own every album and most of the singles anyway but needed that never-released remix of the Equinox theme, Disco Inferno’s EPs (just try finding them on eBay), The Zombies, 13th Floor Elevators, Mountain Goats, The Zephyrs, Jay-Z, Cannibal Ox, Madlib, Sugababes, Guns N Roses, Basement Jaxx, dozens and hundreds of others that I forget… (I even thought about downloading some Metallica, just to piss Lars off, but didn’t.)

[Of course this compulsive flurry of searching, queuing and acquiring led me to spend even more money on physical music than I had been doing before—being the audio snob that I am, anything I loved, or even just quite liked, I had to own properly assuming I could get it on CD (and remastered if it was more than about 12 years old). I researched copyright laws, never uploaded much music, and practised saying “for research and review purposes.” I still felt more of an attachment listening to an actual CD, or even MP3s ripped from a CD to an iPod, than streaming downloaded MP3s through my PC, just… because… there was an actual thing onto which I could focus attention, perhaps.]

I tried to get every album and individual song that I “wanted” at 160kbps if I could, as I reasoned that this was the optimum point between convenience and quality. MP3s at 160kbps work out at just over a megabyte a minute, generally. Inside a couple of weeks, maybe a month, I had a gigabyte. Two gigabytes. Ten gigabytes. Twenty by Christmas. A gigabyte is a thousand megabytes, right? Just over a megabyte a minute at 160kbps. Do the maths. Twenty gigabytes, that’s twenty thousand megabytes. Now let’s say that this makes fifteen thousand minutes of music. That’s 250 hours. Only I was lying when I said I had twenty gigs of the stuff. It was more like 40. That’s 500 hours. Ten hours a week for a year, with two weeks off for good behaviour. Consider that I also own a lot of CDs and records, work full-time, and play football a couple of times a week. And write occasionally. And do have some friends. And that, really, you need to listen to a song or an album several times in order to get a handle on it, to learn its contours, to appreciate it. Consider that, in some cases, you might really like something, and want to listen to it lots more anyway. 500 hours is a lot of music. Too much music. But I didn’t care.

Had I continued downloading music at the same rate as I did, or even at a half or a quarter of the rate, I would, simply, never have been able to physically catch up with listening to it all. I didn’t catch up with listening to it all. Even now there are albums on my hard drive, and dozens of songs on my iPod, that I have never listened to, and probably will never listen to. There is a small but steady stream of unsolicited promotional CDs through the letterbox, the vast majority unlistened to, and I feel almost the same way about them as I do the stockpile of unused, unloved, and arguably useless MP3s on my hard drive. How do I feel about them? A vague sense of disgust mixed with guilt.

I haven’t downloaded anything via P2P networks in over a year now. Apart from the fact that they keep crashing mid-download, apart from the fact that 9 year old girls are getting taken to court for downloading the theme tune to their favourite cartoon (unavailable in shops, kids!), apart from the fact that I realised my health was suffering, got back with my girlfriend, and didn’t have the time to spend three hours or more every night queuing and organising MP3s, apart from all of these reasons and more, I think I realised that what I was doing was a desperately, insanely futile pursuit. So why did I do it, aside from the boredom and the loneliness?

There is a compulsion to consume, and it’s getting worse. So eager are we to sample everything, quickly and in quantity, that we take no time to taste what it is that we’re consuming, never let our stomachs feel full or our palettes be sated. And so we stuff ourselves indiscriminately with everything we come across and end up bloated, sluggish, and tired. British supermarkets are full of aesthetically beautiful fruit that have the vitamins waxed out of them, prepared salads stored in plastic bags pumped full of preservative gases that cause the lettuce leaves to go brown and limp inside twelve hours once exposed to real air, “healthy” drinks for kids that contain more sugar than cola does, factory-farmed chickens that grow so fast their bones, when slaughtered, are soft and spongy and full of blood because they haven’t had time to develop properly. I’d draw comparisons with the music industry, but… More records were released in the first two years of this decade than in the whole of the 60s, if I recall correctly. I’m not massively keen on 60s music.

Anyone, almost, can release an album now. Recording equipment, a studio, is not a necessary to make a record—all you need is a computer, some software, half an idea and someone willing to publish your record. This super-democratic, punk-like ethos is wonderful in many ways, not least because it allows anyone to create, to express themselves. But it also allows almost unlimited amounts of unmitigated shite to be pumped into the already swollen arena of popular music and culture. Capitalism and the free market may give us the right to choose, but it waters down and obfuscates our options with reams of self-perpetuating, low-quality product. Who said cable TV was a good idea? 10,000 channels and there’s nothing on, or so it seems.

What drives the need to consume everything, why was I happy as a teenager to dismiss whole swathes of stuff that I now feel compelled to try and understand? There’s an inverted music snobbery which demands that I, the gifted, erudite and trained listener, can get things out of listening to Yes or The Crazy Frog that other, less erudite listeners simply pass over on point of principal, a relativism which decrees that everything has some value, no matter how base or hidden, and that, if you only listened the right way, you too would see what that value is. There is also the demand, a perception heightened and perhaps solely manufactured by the proliferation of easily-available music and music criticism on the internet, that we all be infinite dilettantes, that simply because we have the opportunity to sample everything at the click of a mouse that we necessarily should. But if you’re a dilettante then you are a dilettante.

dilettante
adj : showing frivolous or superficial interest; amateurish; "his dilettantish efforts at painting" [syn: dilettantish, dilettanteish, sciolistic] n : an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge [syn: dabbler, sciolist]

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but how satisfying can it be to know nothing about everything, to value vague, instant opinions over deep understandings and appreciations, to have heard a hundred records but to have loved none of them? When I was 11 I would listen constantly to Misplaced Childhood by Marillion and I adored it, when I was 15 it was The Stone Roses, when I was 20 it was XTRMNTR; at 24 I listened to more records than I either care to or am able to remember, and I recall barely anything of any of them. When I had a dozen CDs I loved them all and that was enough until the next one arrived. When I had a thousand… I wanted more. I am now 26 and I have had enough. Almost.

Part of it, I’m sure, comes down to wanting to recapture that moment when I first listened to In Sides or Paul’s Boutique and sat with my eyes and mouth wide open in surprise, or that time when I dozed off during “Don’t Stop” and woke up during “I Am The Resurrection” and felt in another place, or when I first heard “Retread” or “Eye Know” or when I danced to “That Lady” in Brixton at 1am, but how did trying to recapture a moment of magic end up as such a greedy, frenetic hunter-gatherer rush to acquire? Why did I end up wanting to have listened to things rather than actually be listening to them? It’s not even like I relate favourite songs back to events in my life when they were significant, because I’ve never used music as an emotional battery like that; I’ve always loved it in and of itself primarily, a song or an album as a beautiful thing on its own that is perfect and that I can love and immerse myself in or use to paint my daily life with colour. It’s about the point of contact. I’ve said that before, I’m sure. I don’t want to know everything about 50s rock n roll or the key movers in postpunk, I can’t relate to grime when I live with the moors behind me and the sea in front, I don’t want to write articles on Miami bass or crunk or nu-folk or whatever the hell is being revived or invented this week. As nice as it would be, the practicalities of owning and knowing intimately, as LCD Soundsystem put it, every good record, ever, make it a ridiculous ambition

I wonder if perhaps it started with Astral Weeks, a record I stumbled across mention of in a bookshop while reading about The Verve in The Rough Guide To Rock or something similar as a 16 year old, and which, on further reading, I felt compelled to own, to understand, to consume and to have an opinion on. I bought it shortly afterwards, maybe even the same day, and listened to it. Ten years on I have maybe listened to Van Morrison’s opus a dozen times, probably less, and I have never fallen in love with it or felt it deeply move me. Is this because it’s a bad record? Because I’m a bad listener? It’s a critic’s job to find clever ways of explaining, in absolute, pseudo-objective terms, why he or she doesn’t like something, to say and then to prove that something is bad, rather than admit that they simply don’t like it. But to not explain is to sell your readers, and yourself, short, so explain one must.

Of course if you listen to anything enough times then its contours become ingrained in your mind, but is being able to predict a song’s twists and turns the same as enjoying them? I listened to jazz repeatedly and read criticism about it until I knew how to listen, what to listen for, until I started to enjoy it, although I am far from knowledgeable about it. Given time and inclination you can make yourself “enjoy” almost anything, perhaps. Whether there is any point or not is the question.

I’ve been worried that I may have overdosed on music over the last couple of years, that my capacity for being overwhelmed by music, for being astounded and for falling in love with it, had been replaced by quiet appreciation, admiration, and understanding. I don’t want to understand music and what it does to me, in many ways. Skim back up to where I mention listening to those Orbital and Beastie Boys albums for the first time—the joy then was about surprise, not predictability. You can play spot-the-influence or posit-the-theory as much as you like but that’s not why you would listen to one song over and over and over again as a fifteen year old. I fell in love with music in my teens but by my mid-20s we were on the verge of being estranged. How to go about getting that surprise back, getting that love back, is the question that’s most pressingly on my mind now. I’m not the only one.

Soulseeking will, with luck, be a regular column on Stylus from now on, written often by myself but also contributed to by the rest of the staff here, and, who knows, maybe some guest writers too. The nature of the column? To do a bit of what the title suggests, only within ourselves rather than the endless reaches of cyberspace, in order to better understand what it is we fell in love with, and, if needs be, go a little way towards getting that feeling back.



By: Nick Southall
2005-09-19

How to Disappear in America Without a Trace an anonymous guide puts to mind the old Loompanics catalog (now on sale at the International Spy Museum) - full of interviews with desert hermits and ruminations on riding the rails, told in the tone and tenor of a kneejerk militiaman/survivalist narrator, this anti-hoffman "guide" just adds to the weirdness of the webs (wonder if the site manager tracks who accesses the site =) - linked via kottke

The history of the avant garde mirrors that of religious cults, spiritual movements and secret societies. The whole attitude of the Situationists was a kind of secular Protestantism. Greil Marcus says that is Neoism is complete garbage - which is of course true - but Marcus is, as usual, missing the point.

An Allegory: Two girls wearing silver overalls and Monty Cantsin-look alike masks visited Monty Cantsin. The first girl said: "I bet this is an allegory." The second said: "You have won." The first said: "But only allegorically." The second said: "No, in reality. In allegory, you have lost."

Neoism is like porn movies: The subject has no importance, logic is unneccessary, there is an accumulation of well-known things, the focus is always on the same explicit facts, repetition and boredom rule. One is tempted to believe that Neoism once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it. By its own standards, Neoism is irrefutable, perhaps the only perfection in mankind that has superseded nature. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since it is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of. It lurks by turns in the stairways, the lobbies, the entrance halls. Often it can't been seen for years; then it has presumably moved elsewhere. It always comes faithfully back to your place again. By differentiating a little bit, one can get the true intention of what Neoism tries to accomplish. Neoism is sound where there is sound. It really wants to help people and at last we owe it great respect for that.

tEnTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE homepage for cinematic soraticisms

Some mottos: "Anything is Anything"; "No More Punching-Bag Clowns!"; "Neoism Now! & Then!"; "Kill Normality Before It Kills You!"; "The Revenge of the Impotent is to Try to Neuter the Fertile."; "Before You Decide Against Biting the Hand That Feeds You, Ask Why It Has So Much Food in the First Place."; "When MONEY is GOD, the POOR are HUMAN SACRIFICES."; "WE are all UNEQUAL under the LAW & THAT is its PURPOSE!"; "Work Will Make You Free Trade."

A Mere Outline for One Aspect of a Book on Mystery Catalysts, Guerilla Playfare, neoism, booed usic, Mad Scientist Didactions, Acts of As-Beenism, So-Called Whatevers, Psychopathfindiing, Ucerts, Air Dressing, Practicing Promotextuality, Imp Actiuvism, etc. - searching out post-neoist shamans in the mid-atlantic region

More things to track and follow - future plans to be dealt with through the neoist impulse (the drive towards hermeticism):
+ John Berndt - post-neoist musician and physical space manipulator
+ Berndt interview - quote it up
+ The Red Room - amazing collective used book and record shop out of bmore
+ Henry Flynth - amazing avant-bardist philosopher and founder of conceptual art

Some music links to chase after this vanishing event horizon
+ Recorded - home of henry flynt et al
+ Widemouth Records - pittsburgh home of tENTaCON and other post-neoist fusions

Leonard Cohen is broke


"So you're the kind of vegetarian/ Who only eats roses/ Is that what you mean't/ with your beautiful losers?"
Beautiful Loser

Famous Blue Raincoat...
It's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.
I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well I see Jane's awake --

She sends her regards.

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I'm glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear --