babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby

The Proclamation of Baghdad, issued by Major-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, March 17 1916, a week after the city’s occupation by the British. (via Harpers, seven years ago)

To the People of Baghdad Vilayet:

In the name of my King, and in the name of the peoples over whom he rules, I address you as follows:-

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but

our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms, yet do not the ruins and wastes of today testify the vanity of those promises?

H-hello. Hello? Is this thing on?

Then the malestrom spit Odysseus out, clinging to what was little more than a splinter, what was left of his boat. Persephone, it was revealed, had eaten several seeds of Hades’ pomegranate. Psyche opened the box but did not find the beauty she expected. Orpheus looked back.

Thanks for reading.

Our hero in the hour of the erotic arrow, Amor.

Popular lore about these guys is that Moriaki, the original bassist, hijacked a plane with the Red Army and got stranded in North Korea—but whatever, this thing has been blowing my mind for more than two years. They could all just be serious gardeners and it wouldn’t make a difference. I think everything being so dark on stage and in the video is especially cool because it makes you wonder, What’s he doing to that guitar? Or maybe that’s not his guitar but a flamethrower. You think you would see the light from that but I don’t know, maybe it’s somewhere far off stage. It sounds dumb to say out loud but I’ve always kind of thought it’s a flamethrower that’s screaming like that

Head’s up—it only really gets going around the 40 second mark

Scenes from Bloodsport (A Love Story)

The dark of night. A uterus begins to itch.

—

A Brooklyn bar, the one with the wood. GUY #1 is visiting from San Francisco for the holidays, out with his old, local friend GUY #2.

GUY #1: This bar, whoa the wood, blah blah blah sex. Everyone in San Francisco thinks everyone in Brooklyn is getting laid all the time.

GUY #2: Everyone in Brooklyn IS getting laid all the time because everyone in Brooklyn’s wife wants a baby.

—

Mid-morning, the Temescal Oakland farmer’s market, the outskirts of the line for coffee. GUY #17 is monologizing at GUY #18.

GUY #17: …so I told her, I said, it’s cool we can have kids but I am not getting married. I do not breed in captivity….
—

Bar area of [fashionable Oakland club], ROWENA and HER FRIENDS are out to celebrate Rowena’s thirtieth birthday .

GIRL#I SAY 14 BUT IT’S ACTUALLY A BIT HIGHER: Did you go to Rowena’s birthday brunch this morning?

GUY #62: Naw—you know when I turned thirty, couple years ago, it was the summer I was sleeping with Rowena, she got me a cupcake. So for this I was like, I am going to [raises an illustrative index] ONE event.

CUT to the hands of DIAGETIC DJ, who has until now only been seen in the distance over GUY #62′s shoulder. DIAGETIC DJ drops the needle on Shocking Blue’s Love Machine. CLOSE on the spinning record. SLOW FADE to a spinning ovum, shining white and recently fertilized. It is being turned by the surrounding unsuccessful sperm (played by GUYS #1-61, excluding #2) all working-wiggling in concert. WIDE to reveal this is happening on the dance floor of [fashionable Oakland club]. GUY #62 approaches from the bar, takes a place among the sperm, puts his shoulder to the ovum. FADE to black.

Wishing you the best in Brooklyn with weather and stuff like that

A Man Named Me never makes it to as many shows as he’d like to (agoraphobia, vitamin addiction, decent bath tub), and Weasel Walter‘s various bands/projects/acts of terror have been no exception. You may know him from the Flying Luttenbachers or XBXRX or Burmese or several deranged free-jazz #tets and ensembles with his name in there like its a law firm (eg Smith, Myers, Wesson, and Walter). Anyway he’s definitely one who’s been out there working to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed and A Man Named Me likes this town that much less knowing he’s no longer down the street operating

(video via spockmorgue)

“How well I would write,” wrote Calvino, “were I not here.”

The previous post originally had “But there are of course other KINDS OF SPEECH in which the speaker is reluctant to be present.” What followed, however, did not name kinds of speech, it named kinds of reluctance–that is, speakers’ motives. An unanticipated shift was made from the impersonal to the personal.

The previous post addresses a sort of abdication. A backing out of, or dispossesion. The verbal opposite of what one might call ownership. An attempt to abstract beyond oneself, an attempt to take an impersonal position. Not just an abdication then, also a sort of presumption. The concomitant so-called objective tone brings to mind so-called scientific writing. But there are of course other cases in which the speaker is reluctant to be present. Speakers who are at odds with their own objectification, for instance. The especially self-conscious. Speakers reluctant to assume a certain kind of authority–that is, the authorial kind.