hey guys, i've been sick but i'll be back soon! xoxo. for now, enjoy some ween.

lee marvin is clearly the man charles bukowski wanted to be.

Another record dropped on the stereo. "When it comes to 'Clair de Lune,'" he said, "I have to go pass water. Tinkle, is the expression. Oh, sweetheart, do you think this day will soon be o'er? I have a hangover. We had fun last night. Went up to the corner, had a few drinks, told a few lies."

From Roger Ebert's Esquire interview. Speaking of which, I finally read the Esquire Chris Jones Ebert profile-- definitely worth a look, as is Ebert's response to it.

i like a prizefight

That ain't no fix.

Everyone knows Eartha Kitt, but usually for different reasons. Most know her for "Santa Baby" and/or as Catwoman. I know her as the batshit lady in the Emperor's New Groove. Whatever it is, she's awesome.

The animators, by the way, got her to a freakin' T.

tender egos. or, gee, here's a lazy news story/music vid pairing or THE CLASH IS ALWAYS APPROPRIATE K.

HTMLGiant asks how effective is this form of dissent. Berkeley students rioted/set a Dumpster on fire/threw things at cops the other day.

It's effective in terms of what they were doing: trying to make themselves feel better. People protest as a way of assuaging their own ego or conscience, whether it's so they can tell themselves that they have done something (and hopefully are sincerely convinced they did, regardless of the reality of the situation) or so they can tell other people they were in a demonstration or a riot. If they get arrested, even better. Maybe they can write a book about it someday. They can say they went to jail omg. It's their version of owning a brand name purse.

There were hunger strikers on my campus a few years ago. They couldn't come up with anything real to be upset about so they made up a bunch of shit that didn't actually have to do with them (the community board who lived in the threatened community publicly disavowed the strikers; most students, myself included, who would have been effected by the strikers' proposed initiatives disavowed them.) They they hunger striked anyway so they can one day speak with pride about sacrifices they've made and action they've taken in the name of their ideals. How they were always authentic and passionate and authentically passionate and passionately authentic. Louis Vuitton. Coach. Prada. Rodarte. Conspicuous. (Forget people actually die while hunger striking.)

I suppose political change and action is always necessarily selfish. If it doesn't affect you directly, you are still made uncomfortable by the fact that something disagreeable to your ideas is going on somewhere.

It becomes clear--through protesters' actions--when said protesters are in denial of this; when they go for flash and bang over buck because they are more interested in the exposure and personal gain--fame or notoriety, for example-- than for effectiveness and real hard progress. Also, ""There were windows broken, there was spray painting and graffiti on the interior, there was construction equipment that was tossed around," she said." Who do they think has to clean that shit up? Not the fat cats like your mom and dad you think you're sticking it to. Oh, and this? "Officers physically pushed the crowd back so that Berkeley fire personnel could extinguish the flames." Yeah. Ok. You made it so the cops were doing something good.

Also, the Berkeley "riot" started as a dance party.

You need to be pretty smart or sliver-tongued to convince me you were actually protesting something at any point that night, besides your white or PC-liberal or middle-class or capitalist guilt, which you should go work out yourself, quietly.

You also need to explain to me why you waited to protest the UC system's carrying out the budget cuts instead of protesting back when the state government made those cuts.

Get off my lawn.

your new favorite website.

oh yes. [image of Martine Carol via starlet showcase cos ps HOW SAUCY is she?]

a bunch of your favorite singers yowling for haiti.

& it's good.

There's a lovely piece about bookshelves and book collections at The Millions by Kevin Hartnett. I want to quote the last three paragraphs (down there) because I think he hits it on the head and because I found it quite touching. I'm sure most people have had similar experiences. It also states the case for books and bookshelves as displays and catalogues of people's tastes and personalities much better than this snobby bitch does, boo snobby bitches:

if you don’t read, I don’t want to be your friend…I don’t even want you to serve me a drink at a bar. If a stranger came over to our apartment, and there weren’t books, or–oh no!–not enough books, what would that say about me and Patrick? If my copy of Handmaid’s Tale or his copy of The Power Broker weren’t on display, how would anyone understand us? Some people have a cross in their home, or a mezuzah on their doorjamb. I’ve got nine books by Vladimir Nabokov.

I got THIRTY books by Valerie Tripp, bitch. Suck it. I'm kidding. But anyway, ew, not cool. People like this make me want to put all my, like, Dragonlance books in the foyer and make 'em stand next to them at a cocktail party while I talk about how I would never be friends with someone who doesn't read, like all those kids our school system is churning out, those people with empty, empty lives. Minorities, too, mostly the brown ones, though. African orphans. Blind people. "They're not really reading, you know? They're turning a purely intellectually pursuit into a physical activity. Another PBR, you down to earth American original, you?"

I'm also quoting a big chunk of it because I'm becoming an old lady who views all this new technology with deep suspicion and says things like "the rise of the machines" and "corporate creation of instant gratification addiction, just like they gave crack to the ghetto" and "kids on my lawn." Okay, here's the quote. Emph mine.

Of the bookshelves I’ve inspected in my life, two stand out as particularly consequential. The first was my mother’s, which was built into the wall of the bedroom where she grew up. When I would visit my grandparents in the summer I would spend hours inspecting that bookshelf. The books were yellowed and jammed tightly together, as though my mother had known it was time to leave home once she no longer had any room left on her shelves. In the 1960s novels, the Victorian classics, and the freshman year sociology textbooks fossilized on the bookshelf, I got the clearest glimpse I ever had of my mother as a person who existed before me and apart from me, and whose inner life was as bottomless as I knew my own to be.

And then there was my wife, whose bookshelves I first inspected in a humid DC summer, while her parents were away at work. The shelves were stuffed full of novels—Little House on the Prairie, The Andromeda Strain, One Hundred Years of Solitude—that described an arc of discovery I had followed too. At the time we met, her books still quivered from recent use and still radiated traces of the adolescent wonder they’d prompted. In the years since, on visits home for the holidays and to celebrate engagements and births, I’ve watched her bookshelves dim and settle. Lately they’ve begun to resemble a type of monument I recognize from my mother’s room. They sit there waiting for the day when our son will be old enough to spend his own afternoons puzzling out a picture of his mother in the books she left behind.

It remains to be seen how many more generations will have the adventure of getting to know their parents in just this way. One for sure, and maybe two, but not much beyond that I wouldn’t think. To the extent that bookshelves persist, it will be in self-conscious form, as display cases filled with only the books we valued enough to acquire and preserve in hard copy. The more interesting story, however, the open-ended, undirected progression of a life defined by books will surely be lost to a digital world in which there is no such thing as time at all.

This also might explain it. We have 3 more similar shelves in a very small apartment. I like touching books. My parents' house has about a bazillion more. I used to find books that I later had to read at school, the same school by father went to. It was cool.

i don't really have a problem with reggaeton now that i don't live across the street from havana central, but

yeah fuck your reggaeton

i can't imagine that tom waits hasn't read gwendolyn brooks.

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Read more of Gwendolyn Brooks' poems here. I also really like "A Penitent Considers Another Coming of Mary." Hear her read it at Poets.org, via. She explains how the poem had been banned because it contained the word "Jazz." hahaha, those old timey people.

ok ok ok stop everything you're doing.

there is an entire site dedicated to space westerns.

Yeah like that.

Prohibition was crazier than we thought.

"During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified." Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. "Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?" asked Nebraska's Omaha Bee."

Read a TIME article from 1927 about the poisoning of alcohol.

young indiana jones was awesome ok?

lazy history sunday!

Before World War II, the war was also known as The Great War, The World War, The War to End All Wars, The Kaiser's War, The War of the Nations and The War in Europe. In France and Belgium it was sometimes referred to as La Guerre du Droit (the War for Justice) or La Guerre Pour la Civilisation / de Oorlog tot de Beschaving (the War to Preserve Civilisation), especially on medals and commemorative monuments [. . .]

The earliest known use of the term First World War appeared during the war. German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel wrote shortly after the start of the war:

There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European War' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.[214]
—Indianapolis Star, 20 September 1914

The term was used again near the end of the war. English journalist Charles A. Repington wrote:

I saw Major Johnstone, the Harvard Professor who is here to lay the bases of an American History. We discussed the right name of the war. I said that we called it now The War, but that this could not last. The Napoleonic War was The Great War. To call it The German War was too much flattery for the Boche. I suggested The World War as a shade better title, and finally we mutually agreed to call it The First World War in order to prevent the millennium folk from forgetting that the history of the world was the history of war.[215]
—The First World War, 1914-1918 (1920), Volume I, Page 391.

The above was directly excerpted from the wikipedia page "World War I," where you can see links to the citations. It's always interesting to see where history sees itself with that kind of awareness before it's actually history.

this was stuck in my head when i woke up.

oh honey you better cut that out

thursday afternoon hijinkery.

I love Jules Verne. So these? There are awesome. Possibly the most awesome senior thesis ever. If you browse his blog you can see the lead-ups to the final product and also some other sweet stuff. This guy has a fantastic eye for design and is worth checking out. [via the millions]

happy lent chickadees.

i'm givin up rollerblading. cos father dick is SO not winning the giving things up contest.