however, considering the implications, that which none of us say

Screw Strunk and White. Or rather, Strunk and White should be screwed.

tuesday still stuck behind a white door

One book binge later and I own a 995 page tome of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Here’s a ditty that crawled into my head, curled and went to sleep there:

Walking Around
Pablo Neruda

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool,
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily.
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bone fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell of vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulfur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels, and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

(Translated by Robert Bly)

pirates are still cool(ish)

A quote from the 18th century pirate Samuel “Black Sam” Bellamy: “They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?”

Check out the rest of this insightful article. Even after watching the tearful reunions of captured crews on TV, and realizing how many more ships are currently under pirate control, there is still the sense of a global hesitation when it comes to dealing directly with piracy. Of course, this doesn’t mean that our glorious international trade routes will devolve back into 17th century chaos – the US of A is too US of A for that – but while piracy exists, it will continue to elicit a fundamentally ambiguous response.

I remember reading Stevenson “Treasure Island” as a kid. The character that stuck with me wasn’t the protagonist, Jim, but rather the morally complex and parrot-shouldered Long John Silver. Pirates, like a troublesome itch at the back of our humanitarian minds, will continue to be cool.

always new

The moment you realize you are alone is the moment you are granted your freedom. Something like a feverish tropical light parts the dense morass of your mind and you realize what an idiot you were for not bringing a compass with you when you entered the bloody swamp in the first place, all those years ago. Nothing but your muggy brain, your wet skin, and your heavy hands to drag you out of the steaming green mess, the mosquitoes that bang at you in stupid thirst, the crawling lianas that twist themselves around your waist with quiet offers of soothing companionship. Not even a machete to slice with. No, but here, at this moment, you are free. I am free. I can look you in your flawed eye and spill out like a bakery at dusk, ejecting its customers. The last of the sweetbreads, the french loaves, the braided ryes are all cool and slipped into wax paper and cardboard boxes for the vagrants that roam the marketplace. I can look you in the eye and say the warm thing that I cannot say to anyone else. That thing I have folded and braided and baked so carefully, spotted with bits of raisins and places I cannot name, kneaded and punched into neat submission, into a compact bloody mess that I can stuff into a metal tin. I can tell you this and not fear the repercussions. I can tell you this and hold that warm tin inside of me, that quiet conviction. The swamp is large, but I have come out of it softly, like a leopard with painted spots. I have left the others to the trees.

old truths

Life stripped and accounted for in 33 lines:

“To be or not to be – that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep -
No more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to – ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep -
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of unrequited love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might settle his account
With a bare dagger? Who would burdens bare,
To sweat and grunt under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bare those ills we have
Than fly to others we know not of?
Thus knowledge does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.”

whoever develops early, lives in anticipation

Brian Joseph Davis is a Toronto based multimedia deconstructivist who seems to enjoy screwing around in the liminal borders of popular culture, avant-garde poetics, and incisive cultural criticism. The first set of songs is from a work called “Minima Moralis” (2004), which the artist describes aptly enough:

“It’s just a bad idea, and it began when I was mentioning to a friend about how funny it is that all those old anti capitalist punk albums with the “PAY NO MORE THAN $3″ warnings can now be Ebay-ed for a $100. For some reason, we then both thought of Greil Marcus’s book Lipstick Traces. How he made a glib aside about Marxist theorist Theodore Adorno and his exhiled-in-1940s-America memoir, Minima Moralia. With its bleaker-than-black humour and dismantling of modern life, Marcus said it would have made an excellent punk album. Why not take this pop wish and make it come true?”

BTW, you can read Adorno’s Minima Moralia right here. But why read when you can listen to it screamed out by a Riot Grrrl-esque punk band wailing feverishly on electric guitars? Adorno’s never sounded this good.

1. They, The People

2. This Side of the Pleasure Principle

3. Johnny-Head-In-The-Air

4. Every Work of Art is an Uncommitted Crime

Davis has also created what is probably the most appropriate appropriation of our times. What is now known as EULA, or the End User License Agreement, was developed by Sony BMG back in 2005 to act as a template for Digital Rights Management, and to fight the pesky menace of mp3s and P2P software. Most of the contract obligations were pretty draconian (like the fact that you have to delete all your music if you happen to go bankrupt), and along with that, Sony also included what essentially amounted to a rootkit virus with all their CDs. In any case, here’s a full women’s choir singing that notorious and well known EULA:

Davis_Brian_Joseph_Eula_Eula_2007.mp3

wake-up call

Do yourself a favor and watch this short but spectacular documentary on “Pakistan’s Taliban Generation”. Pakistani journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy explores the very heart of the Taliban in what is fast becoming the next hot-bed of violence, internal displacement and hard-line Islamic fundamentalism. She slowly travels from the outer reigons of the country towards the tribal lands, interviewing and exposing some astonishing individuals and view-points. But what is perhaps most compelling about this doc is that she builds an almost bullet-proof case against the efficacy of a military offensive against terrorism. When she goes into the mudrassas and starts talking to Taliban recruiters one realizes that if there has to be any war with these people, it will have to be with their hearts and minds, not their blood.

more about “Ninjavideo.net – Dispatches – Pakista…“, posted with vodpod