Friends. If yr in the New York/North Jersey area, you should really come to this show.
THE MINOR ARCANA (my band) is headlining right in the backyard of my other band’s (The World/Inferno Friendship Society) stomping grounds. We’re also sharing the bill with my guitarist, Ross Bellenoit and his band, tiny toys and instruments, & The Shivering Brigade.
This is one of my favorite songs ever. It’s also one of the saddest. And the lyrics are fucking brilliant.
I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel I was staring in my empty coffee cup I was thinking that the gypsy wasn’t lyin’ All the salty margaritas in Los Angeles I’m gonna drink ‘em up
And if California slides into the ocean Like the mystics and statistics say it will I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves Don’t you feel like Desperados under the eaves Heaven help the one who leaves
Still waking up in the mornings with shaking hands And I’m trying to find a girl who understands me But except in dreams you’re never really free Don’t the sun look angry at me
I was sitting in the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel I was listening to the air conditioner hum It went mmm… Look away (Look away down Gower Avenue, look away)
This is the Buckley Family. The children’s names were Susan and John. As a Halloween joke, all the kids in the neighborhood were going to get a dummy and pretend to chop its head off. The Buckley children thought it would be hilarious to actually murder their mother, so when the kids walked up the the door, they got an axe and slaughtered her. Once everyone figured out what they had really done, they called the police, but the kids were long gone by then. The only picture of them was this photo, taken by a trick or treater. The mothers body was later found half eaten.
Hi you guys! Joe Biden and the rest of the gang here! :) We’re looking for some awesome people to help us Kickstart our dream project of having a functioning federal government! That’s where you come in: all we’re asking for is a little help. And twenty trillion dollars.
As you may know, we (the United States government) are a little strapped for cash. Salvage a first-world government’s economy? In
Seriously. Friends. Romans. Countrymen. Inferno fans. I, yr trusty keyboard do other things besides ensure that you have properly dancey/rebellious music to get drunk and make out too. I write intense, depressing songs for you to get get drunk and be angry/depressed to as well!
An interesting and controversial essay by philosopher-celebrity Peter Sloterdijk. This guy is a bit of a crackpot, and I can’t decide whether he is a weird, crypto fascist mystic, a Nietzsche type figure rife with contradictions and a carefully calculated artifice of tricksterism, or a brilliantly esoteric critical theorist. Having some minimal understanding of Heidegger, especially the aforementioned Letter on Humanism, but it’s not necessary in order to grasp the full effect, the controversial nature, & potential for both oppression & liberation contained in this lecture. Below you’ll find the abstract:
Rules for the Human Zoo, also known as the Elmauer Rede, originally appeared in 1999 in the newspaper Die Zeit and was subsequently published by Suhrkamp in 2001. In this response to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, Sloterdijk poses the basic question about the purpose of politics, governance, and civic solidarity. On the one hand, since Plato, politics has been conceived in part as concerned with the necessity of `taming’ humans into being good citizens. Sloterdijk thus follows Nietzsche and Heidegger in portraying humanism as one side in a “constant battle…between bestializing and taming tendencies”. It is in the Hobbesian state of nature that humans are `wolves’ to each other; but who turns the wolves into friendly, loyal dogs? Humanism has claimed, according to Sloterdijk, that it is “reading the right books” which “calms the inner beast”. It is the great books, the “thick letters” from one great thinker to another, that provide the “model presented by the wise”, which enables “the care of man by man”. At the present, Sloterdijk argues, we appear to have been abandoned by the wise. It is no longer the humanist but the archivist who bothers to look up the old, thick letters. Humanism thus gives way to archivism.
I have a soft spot for Chomsky, but people need to remember—the man is a linguist, not a political scientist nor an economist. He’s probably right, those manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back. But the idea that “America no longer makes things” is sort of the problem with Chomsky’s syndicalism. Economies and job markets aren’t about MAKING anymore, it’s about innovating. The biggest problem with most anarchists is their desire for a reversion to some sort of anteDiluvian, pre-globalization—indeed, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, quasi-hunter-gatherer—social system that simply cannot be obtained unless, like Derek Jensen argues, you completely dismantle civilization. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. The job market isn’t struggling because manufacturing jobs are gone, never to return, it’s struggling because the US population is unwilling to invest in scientific innovation and education, because of this anti-Keynesian hysteria which has turned people into deficit hawks. It’s because white, middle aged, middle class men and women are the loudest and most selfish voting block in the country and are obsessed with lowering their tax burden so that they can cling to their pie in the sky dream of becoming a billionaire at the age of 60 with a high school diploma and an associates degree so they can maximize their wealth as much as possible in the 15 years they have of it before they die and never mind that their grandchildren live in a country that ranks 17th amongst industrialized nations in math & science; a country that guts funding for the humanities & the arts ensuring that in an economy driven by innovation and creativity their grandkids will have no shot at comprehending, articulating, or recognizing either; a country where—in a poll taken last year—42% of US citizens polled did NOT KNOW WE DECLARED INDEPENDENCE FROM BRITAIN IN 1776 & 38% of 1,000 native born Americans failed a US citizenship test last year; a country that thinks US foreign aid should be cut from 27% of the budget to just 13% of the budget and never mind the fact that foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the budget; a country in which 71% of voters favor smaller government and at the same time oppose cuts to Medicare (81%), Social Security (78%), or Medicaid (70%). So, yeah, sorry Noam…the job market isn’t going to remain stunted because America no longer fits in the mold of prelapsarian unionism & manufacturing, it’s going to stay stunted because Americans are short-sighted, selfish, & stupid.
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