Welcome to an experiment: Trump-Free Thursday, a place where All Trump All The Time yields to better and truer things.
Need a space to breathe? Today I suggest Gwarlingo, one of the truest windows I've yet found for art, poems, wild ideas, and all else creative: recent poetry by staggering channeler Nickole Brown, shockingly sublime postcard art by John Stezaker, the twisted fairy mirror of Grimm's tales, and way, way, more, courtesy of site founder Michelle Aldredge and a zillion contributors. (Full disclosure: I was one. But that was years ago.) Just go.
You don't. I don't. Religions sure as hell don't. But we Western industrial types are especially confounded because we are completely and categorically out of touch with the continuity of energy. That mystery – death – is the edge of our flat world. And our ignorance fuels our obsession with the razor edge of that moment.
is that it is tribal. It has clans. Members have codes and taboos that cannot be bared in public. And they take on street names drawn from a more natural and gutturally symbolic world than tags like "Michael" and "Jerome" -- say, for example, "Big Tuna" and "Joe Bananas," both of whom were real-life mob figures. Or my all-time favorite, which actually comes from a film: "Jimmy the Cheese Man" from The Pope of Greenwich Village.
Youth gangs, similarly, dig into symbolism for identities that mean something beyond the often-disposable sound-gaming of American naming. Kids caught in a void of violent nihilism take on vividly personal handles for themselves and others: "Teeth," "Big Eye," "Snapper," "Sleepy." Names that say something about the bearer. The way that, say, some West African names do.
I think one of the most eloquent movie scenes ever is from the film Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis's fugitive boxer character tells a cab driver who remarks on his name, "I'm an American. My name doesn't mean shit."
Part of what mobs and gangs do is fill this selfhood void -- but with reactionary, racist, misogynist, fake "outlaw" outlets for American males, especially angry young males, for whom the vanilla concoction of shrink-wrapped American male identity means exactly nothing. Patriarchal capitalism has succeeded in alienating them from essence. Their substitute version of rawness, a kind of kamikaze fraternity, is their attempt at medicine for their ailment. It's a sick manifestation of a real desire.
None of that is the least bit funny. Still, there is something about the following rendition of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert doing the classic Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro desert scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino that paints a perfect, hilariously absurd picture of this kind of cartoon barbarity:
(The trolls at YouTube have blocked direct embedding, but when "watch on YouTube" pops up, click it and you can watch it.)
when they are not willing or able to talk? You call them. They see your name. They pick up and say, "Hey." You get a sentence or two out and then they interrupt and say, "I'm in line at the supermarket. Can I call you back a little later?" So why'd they answer at all? Me, I'd much rather get their honest voicemail and leave them a message than get a sentence-and-a-half cutoff. Sure, there are times when they might think your call is urgent and they want to see what you want. But I think for the most part it's a case of people simply feeling a compulsion to answer the phone no matter what.
Anybody I know who is reading this: If you can't talk, let it roll to voicemail. OK?
or this absurd. Just when you think you've seen bizarre things, along comes The Nietzsche Family Circus, a site that uses random Nietzsche quotes as captions for random "Family Circus" cartoons. The laff riot starts here. (Thanks to a Facebook friend for pointing to the site.)
of a restaurant where I was eating to take a phone call (I hate it when people yammer on cells at restaurant tables; it's an insult to the wolves who others will say raised them), and this guy walking by stopped and turned and looked right in my face and he made a long, loud "bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" sound that was a dead ringer for a vibrating cell phone. I mean it was so realistic it was shocking. And then he walked away. He looked totally nuts. Bonkers. But I also think he was saying in a loony-truth way, "You people and your damned cell talk that you think is so important but means nothing." And I wanted to chase him and get in his face and say, "Hey! I left that restaurant to talk outside so I wouldn't be a jerk. And that call was from my sister telling me that my aunt just died. [Which is true.] Satisfied?" But I didn't.
