Dear diary, give blood give blood, give blood give blood...

(Rain Machine - Give Blood - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.)

Dear diary, woof woof woof, January's going out like it came in, all action packed.  Joseph Arthur and Bobby Bare Jr. and Antipop Consortium and Kyp Malone's Rain Machine.  (I'd been singing Monk at the Disco in my head from the wee hours of Saturday morning until Mr. Malone blew it out of there last evening.)

Yes, Rain Machine blew my mind, but can we talk about something even more important?  At about 5 PM this evening I'll be going down to our cellar and pulling four half duck breasts (half breasts, not half duck) out from the case of salt I buried them in yesterday.  I'm going to wash them off, pat them dry, dust them all over with ground white pepper, wrap them in cheesecloth and tie them off.  Then I'm going to walk them to a secret place the mice don't know about that's cool and humid and I'm going to hang them there for a week.  During the week the duck breasts are hanging, I'll probably think about knives.  I'll think: do  I have the a knife that's really just right for what happens next?  I'll decide, No, I don't have a knife that's really just right for what happens next.  But what will I do about that?  I don't know.  I just don't know.  I'm not sure that listening to Give Blood or Smiling Black Faces over and over again will help me decide, but I'm probably gonna find out.

Yes, I find this titillating in every way

The dorkiness of the image, madam's zeppelin breasts, the water gushing so lustily from Sir's pail, the decorous arm reaching into the room with more water, and everything and everyone so hot hot hot.

Leonato, Much Ado About Nothing, Scene 1:

...O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

To say nothing of Señor!  Another fabu image from the digital collection at NYPL.

But good news tonight, Roger B. Tawney is off the hook.

Juju sent a pointer to this Keith Olbermann commentary re the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. A sad event as seen from our window.  Lori's film, This Land is Your Land has a great section on corporate personhood (gack) and corporate free speech issues (gack gack).

Dear diary, let's lay it on the line about me and Dante

Uh, Clem.

Having worked with Dante Oblimov now for just about ever, I really do look at him and think, Gee, as I'm getting older I'm coming to look more and more like Dante.

Truth is, Dante hasn't had much of a life since editthispage.com folded and took the entire archive of Cabinet with it, and then weblogger.com sunk in on itself and took the environy archive with it.  No more Charlie Rose interviewing D.O., no more D.O. clothing lines, no more D.O. freeing the mermaid slaves.  Like so many heroes, Dante Oblimov is now just pretty much an image.  Or maybe D.O. is out there doing all the things he used to do, but he and I just aren't in touch the way we used to be.

In any case, reading Jaron Lanier's book is continuing to make me be just a wee bit more questioning about what I am participating in here - with or without Dante -  and just how detached or glib I might be being, and whether I ought to participate in rehashing other people's things or just scaling back to concentrate on my own things.  And can I accept just doing my own things and not posting about them?  So I'm futzing around on a couple of sites away from view, one that's only pictures, and it struck me there: How would it change my approach to MNIDOAILY if my own face was on it?

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes...

These are two etchings by Charles Emile Jacque (1813-1894), now in the New York Public Library’s digital collection, acquired from the collection of Samuel Putman Avrery (1822-1904).  The images are digitized and on line at NYPL – digital IDs 1220758 and 1220759.  Officially “sujet libre”, but browsable under “sex”.

The 25th anniversary edition of Little Big, by John Crowley

Ron Drummand and (as) Incunabula has put together a web site (interviews, essays) celebrating the 25th anniversary of John Crowley's Little Big.

Dan Levy, who I haven't seen more than once or twice in a long time, is the person who recommended Little Big to me.   (He recommended I read Ægypt first, but I didn't. Faraway Hills is in Ægypt, and farawayhills is, sort of, where I live.  Now I'm really digressing, but there's a spur of land in the Hudson just north of Cold Spring on the east bank of the river, 41.425841,-73.969586, which I always make believe is the site of some of the parties in Ægypt.  I don't typically mention this to anyone, because, aside from Dan, I don't know anyone else who's read Ægypt: maybe I just need to ask more people if they have.)  Dan's been many web people, pretty fancy, but at the time we're talking he was Levity.) My jaw stayed dropped the entire time I read Little Big. I laughed, I cried. I mean I really wept at one point when I realized how much I identified with one of the characters and that character was now, no kidding, just dead.

You know, when I finish reading what I'm reading now, I'm going to go back and reread Little Big. Or maybe wait for the 25th anniversary printing in April.  Thank you, Incunabula.

[Well, I'm in a groove.  Let me say a little more.  David Kassel introduced me to Dan Levy, lo those many years ago, and David is the other half of a few of web projects I posted about earlier this week.  We saw D last week for the first time in a long time, and I told him then that I had a dream - a pretty horrific dream about Dan L.  OK: here's how old friends differ.  DK immediately launched the question What does that mean about you (me, Stumpy)?, whereas I was telling DK because my next question was Is everything OK with DL?

I think I'm done now.]

Tuli Kupferberg benefit at St. Ann's Warehouse this Friday evening

Help the man who helped bring you so much joyful insanity (as opposed to the other kind).  From the article at Broadwayworld:

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Lou Reed will join a host of others in the January 22nd concert to benefit Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg is an American singer songwriter and found of the band The Fugs who suffered a series of strokes in April and September 2009, leaving him blind and in need of full time nursing care. The concert will take place at St. Ann's Warehouse, Friday, January 22 at 7:30 P.M.

The full lineup will include The Fugs, John Kruth and an All Star Band, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Pete Stampfel, John Zorn. More performers have yet to be announced.

Fugs homepage.  A 1965 photo of the Fugs (meet the Fugs) by David Gahr: wow.

Dear diary, juxtapositions

Jeez, I already felt bad about the juxtaposition of the sausage post and the MLK video, and now Ted Kennedy's seat has been frittered away and my saying so right here is the top slice of bread on this sandwich of embarrassing abutments.  Oy !

I have two personal Kennedy nearnesses. One I mentioned a while back, the other is that I shook Ted's hand after a talk he gave a few years ago and really felt here is the old lion.

Can't make myself go read all of the news analysis (gack) on this, so instead I'm going through email, and there's a piece in yesterday's Secrecy News about the DoD "clarifying" it's doctrine on psychological operations.

It endorses a new, negative definition of the term “propaganda,” which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to “Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.” From now on, propaganda will refer only to what the enemy does:  “Any form of adversary communication, especially of a biased or misleading nature, designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

Bummer that the military has joined the (rest of the country) (the Senate) (your noun here) on this. 

Boy's first sausage

Mmmmm.  Chicken thigh meat, pork back fat, roasted red peppers, basil, garlic, salt, black pepper, red wine, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

About 2 and a half pounds of it.  Just enough to get initiated.  I was working alone, so no pics of the grinding, etc...

And, because man does not live be sausage alone...

MLK, I Have a Dream

Scientific amusements

Chest of Books, Scientific American Supplement, The Dance of The Electrified Puppets, and Silhouette Portrats.  It's a warm day, but it's still winter, folks, and these amusements can come in handy.  I love silhouettes.  And I love Chest of Books.  Pretty gummed up with Google ads, but pretty great.  (Amazing how many old illustrations Dante's image pops up in.)

Hear Hear !

that in response to Esteban's post which you should read after passing this one by (da trute: ju ju be tryin' his paw at f-bk, full disclosure).
(HI to everybuddy by the way, methinks this be Ju Ju's first post here since the new year showed up...)
CLUSTERFLOCK CLUSTERFLOCK CLUSTERFLOCK
meaning that there be lots of good stuff to peruse over there, me including linky bit below just becuz me got one hella crush on Sheila Ryan...
Hadj M´hamed el Anka | Chaabi algerien

The proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook.  Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their design, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.

Instead of people being treated like the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

The quote's on pp. 16.  I'm guessing that if you're a youngster you might say, What's this weird old dreadlocked dude talking about? Or, if you're an older fart, maybe in particular you are this older fart, typing this entry, who once concentrated on projects of proud extroversion in an earlier wave of web culture, you think, What am I doing?

Long ago, and far away, in a land before the blog...

And while I'm here...

 

 

 

Golden Lips, Golden Fest, be there right now (we are)

Hitler Learns Leno Is Moving Back To Late Night

Visuwords

Simple, for example.  Woah!

Secret encoded message: There are no google results for "tony hoostine"

(Until this one.)  Good work, dude.  Unc.S.

Watch thy neighbor watch

Nice NYTimes interactive graphics piece showing neighborhoods in large US cities, broken out by zip codes, and the Netflix rentals in each.  Full disclosure: no, we're not a Netflix family (but Netflix does rent movies that one of us makes.  Shouldn't you be renting more documentary films from Netflix?!).

Got feelings and dang proud of it

Cuz Kev is pointing to this Daniel Johnston session at Daytrotter: Got Feelings And Dang Proud Of It.

I'll take the long road

One thing led to another, we ran into a good friend, and after the Unusual Creatures show last night we took in Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens.  What! (have you done, have you done).  And now, me no wanna go to work today!

Doh! Worlds collide!

Ron English, Morgan Spurlock, Homer Simpson...

worlds collide!

NYT article, pointed to by Juju, Ah, Homer, It Seems Just Like Yesterday

Rudy G forgot why he wanted to postpone his leaving office and what made him America's Mayor in his own mind. I guess.

Macinwi point to this:  Rudy Giuliani: 'We Had No Domestic Attacks Under Bush; We've Had One Under Obama'.

Songs for Unusual Creatures

Songs For Unusual Creatures - The Robot Show from Michael Hearst on Vimeo.
Hey, clear your calendar for Monday night.  We're all going to Joe's Pub to see out neighbor Michael Hearst perform Songs for Unusual Creatures.  Descrip:

Michael Hearst (One Ring Zero, Songs For Ice Cream Trucks) celebrates some of the lesser-known creatures that roam the planet. From the Australian Bilby, to the deep-sea Magnopinna Squid, the songs are brought to life by a gaggle of bizarre sounds and instruments including theremin, claviola, stylophone, and musical instrument robots.

Song for Unusual Creatures is featuring Michael Hearst (theremin, claviola, stylophone), Ben Holmes (trumpet), Allyssa Lamb (piano), Ron Caswell (tuba), Kristin Meuller (drums), and gaggle of musical instrument robots provided by LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.

Be there or be square.  Or be there and be square, but very, very happy. 7:00 PM - January 11.

She never saw it coming

Right here in the Slope, kids.  Brooklyn Paper: OyPhone! Thieves are picking Apples right out of people’s hands!  Takes fairly good bike skills and well oiled gear.

"I prefer..." survey closed

Van Johnson's socks 6
Bono's sunglasses 0

America's daily data consumption

Neatorama and elsewhere.

100 games cupcake game

Yup.  100 games cupcake game.  Via Make.

Seymour Topping

Yeah, well, right, you probably don't have an hour to watch this.  But dip in and out.  Seymour Topping was at amazing places at amazing times.  (And he's our friend's dad!) This is a 2005 interview, shortly after the publication of his book, Fatal Crossroads, A Novel of Vietnam 1945.

Topping articles at the NYTimes.

More Bill Cunningham: Nyawker - Man on the Street

Lota just sent me a link to this New Yorker profile of Mr. Cunningham, from March 16, 2009.  Man On The Street: Bill Cunningham Takes Manhattan by Lauren Collins.  Danka u, sweapea.

To our friends on the compound in Boise:

Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

Globalfest

Hey, kids, we're going to Globalfest NY this year @ Webster Hall, no fail.  Couldn't make it the last couple.  Coming with us?  Lineup includes:

- Alif Naaba, West African acoustic song (Burkina Faso)
- Cara Dillon, striking Celtic vocalist (Ireland)
- Caravan Palace, swingin’ electro manouche jazz (France)
- Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole, Creole Zydeco heir from Louisiana (USA)
- Federico Aubele, bolero and cumbia meets electro downtempo (Argentina/USA)
- François Ladrezo & Alka Omeka, Gwo-ka master (Guadalupe)
- La Cumbiamba eNeYé, music from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Colombia (Colombia/USA)
- La Excelencia, old-school salsa dura revivalists (USA)
- Meta and the Cornerstones, African roots reggae export (Senegal/USA)
- Namgar, Siberian shaman rock from the Central Asian steppes (Russia)
- Nguyên Lê’s Saiyuki, acclaimed French-Vietnamese guitarist leads a Pan-Asian jazz trio
(Vietnam/Japan/India/France)
- Nightlosers, Transylvanian blues-rock/Gypsy chameleons (Romania)

Bill Cunningham, my guilty pleasure

Yes, I admit it.  I am addicted to Bill Cunningham.  When I look at the Times on line, if there's an On The Street  photo essay by Bill, it's the first thing I go to.  (Then maybe Mark Bittman, then onto all the news that fits and makes one ill.)

In 2002 Bill wrote this piece for the Times, Bill on Bill (archived without the photos, damn).  When you read this little bio, you think the same thing that you think when you listen to him narrate his photo essays: What a nice man!

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

RS has sent a New Year's note, and I don't think he'll mind if I post it here.  Old people might remember RS as the Ralph Nader look-alike back in Stumpy's blogs of '01.

I've seen him around the neighborhood for years with his street weary boxes of candies and his wind burnished face, enduring.  On occasion I have put coins in his can, more often I give him a passing glance and brush on. This morning out walking into the fatigue and guarded elation of a new year I pass him sitting in front of starbucks in his big rolling chair, quiet with his candy, seemingly as dazed and determined as me about this new day. Ten yards past, I stop, turn back and approach him.

He looks down, roots around his crumpled box and extracts a tattered bag of candy and hands it to me in exchange. I stand still, he tilts his head up and croaks ... happy ... new .... year. 

Then he extends his fist slowly over his chair's arm seeking my fist. 

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

from a tejano of our acquaintance...

comes this linkybit to share with thee, sort of a welcome to twenteeten as many folk be calling it. Esteban has met and shared a table with the esteemed C J, who oncet upon a time blogged regularly at BookNotes, now busy as one of the wizards behind the curtain of BookLab, out there deep in the heart of texas hillcountry with the fella responsible for sharing the link below, el ultimo dudo laid-backo, G. (for gimme gravy widdem grits...) McLerran. Un Feliz Ano Nuevo a ustedes, tejanos estimados!

y andale pues, chiquitos y chiquititas!, vamos a jugar con morecowbell.dj

btw, there's a picture of both G & C.J. from '06 via the post you'll find here

Dear 2010, so far you totally rock

It's true.  We're in love with you.   We even love your name.

Let's see, how did it begin?  Oh, yeah, just a couple of hours after a gaggle of friends left our place we were up @ Provini when Midnight opened the door and you came in, all whoopee and kissing.  Then we slid down the hill to Bar Toto and there was more whoopee and kissing.   Then we went sideways to Gingers for a while where it was orange light and thumpa thumpa thumpa.  Then we went deep to Sunny's and wasn't that fun!  What a crush!  Not sure how we made it home - must have bought a vowel or two along the way.

Then, a little cruelly maybe, it was up pretty early so we could clear our heads, find our orange invites, and make our way to the inauguration! Mayor Mike, our man and Public Advocate Bill De Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu.  That was glorious, sitting out there in the crowd in front of City Hall, the mix of folks who'd invested their time or money in pushing their ideas and wants through the political process. Racially & economically mixed, with the common thread of having opted in rather than having opted out. And hey, it was a little folksy - students from the newcomer's high school in Queens introduced the speakers & office holders & told jokes.  Small town New York.   (And this is the twin school that our neighbor Brooke Hauser wrote about in the Times.  Remember? This Thing Called Prom.)  Yada yada.  It was great fun, but cold and when it was over thousands of people who had been holding their pee suddenly needed a place to go, totally overwhelming the local coffee shops.

Then home, dear Twentyten, where we did up a couple of sausages and had them on the last of the home made batards of ratty old 2009.   Jeez, that old year looks dreary already, doesn't it?  Dinner was with pesto Laurita put up during the summer on what was probably the best smelling day of Oh Nine. Then we hauled out a fresh ham we'd been hoarding, already slathered with the adobo sauce we'd mixed up earlier in the day, and got that into the oven. Couldn't go to sleep until it was out, and then almost couldn't sleep when it was out 'cause the air was so thick with pork.  But we managed, dear Twentyten, we managed.