reforming the security council makes me want to dance to cumbia.
good thing this is popping off on friday since saturday i have a college-y birthday party reunion kinda thing that will, disappointingly, prevent me from being here.
every promise is a threat, every loss a discovery. courage is born of fear, certainty of doubt. dreams announce the possibility of another reality, and out of delirium emerges another kind of reason. what it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.
— eduardo galeano, celebration of contradictions/2
in detroit, 7 of the 9 incoming city council members boast permits to carry concealed weapons.
Sartre: … when we decided to experiment with drugs, I ended up having a nervous breakdown.
Gerassi: You mean the crabs?
Sartre: Yeah, after I took the mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang… . The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them… .
I would have liked my crabs to come back. The crabs were mine. I had gotten used to them. They kept reminding me that my life was absurd, yes, nauseating, but without challenging my immortality. Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what? You have to realize that my psychosis was literature… . My crabs had considered me important, or else why bother me? De Gaulle, the ridiculousness of the Cold War, America’s drive to conquer and control, all that made me realize that I was not and would never be significant.
Gerassi: From the end of the war until de Gaulle’s coup d’état in 1958, you were haunted by neither crabs nor depression?
Sartre: We keep calling them crabs because of my play The Condemned of Altona, but they were really lobsters.
Gerassi: Anyway, they were gone then?
Sartre: Oh, yes, they left me during the war. You know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them — when I’m lonely, or rather when I’m alone. When I go to a movie that ends up boring, or not very gripping, and I remember how they used to sit there on my leg. Of course I always knew that they weren’t there, that they didn’t exist, but they served an important purpose. They were a warning that I wasn’t thinking correctly or focusing on what was important, or that I was heading up the wrong track, all the while telling me that my life was not right, not what it should be. Well, no one tells me that anymore.
um, i guess hallucinogenic talking crabs (that are really lobsters) more or less define an existential crisis.
last night i had two weird, and memorable, dreams.
in the first i was getting mauled by a tiger in a post-apocalyptic urban environment.
in the second i was eating this crack-marinated street cart lamb.
hopefully one, and not the other, can come to fruition this afternoon.
An Afghan boy raises his clothes for U.S. Marines, from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, so that he can be checked before passing by a military position near the town of Garmser in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, Thursday, May 1, 2008. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)
big city, big tings a gwan. tracks that intertwine and never end, connecting and separating at the very same time. marathons and halloweens and world series championships and fall-to-winter-bluster and purchased mayoral elections and goldstone report votes (44 abstentions?) and speeches upon speeches to be drafted and friends getting laid off and friends getting swine flu and art exhibitions and parties and fascinating new people and miserable old enemies and madness and musica and friday morning hangovers and life-and-death top of the table futbol matches that are both watched from a distance on flatscreen televisions at a dingy old pub in the early mornings and also physically played out on sundays alongside a new club boasting a 50-year history rooted in the community that represents a small subsection of ethnic new york city on grassy and muddy fields throughout the outer boroughs against other jarringly talented squads reppin’ different new-immigrant enclaves of the city.
and all of this happens in a week’s time sandwiched by the gastronomical excitement of new restaurant openings in the ‘hood and a manna-from-heaven tamale lady and, just then, a gaggle of attractive blonde romanian women walk by on the frigid above-ground platform clad in leather boots over their tight jeans as some freckly irish construction workers visibly look them up and down while two lovestruck latin american teenagers on their way to school naively embrace and share a set of cheapo treble-y earbuds listen to some cheesy r&b track with the volume too high annoying the korean woman standing next to them texting texts in korean text as a train whizzes past them all but fails to stop because it’s filled to the brim with other commuters seemingly oblivious to the sensitivities of the disgruntled crowd on the platform that lets out a collective sigh of disbelief and colorful under-the-breath curses in gobs of languages and begins to fill up even more as more people make their way up the rusty steps with their breath exposed by the early november morning chill just as a red-illuminated express train hisses and shrieks past the station over the dreaded third rail towards the city on the middle track, its last car lurching around the bend into complete obscurity, moving past the gleaming reflections on the sun-soaked empty office buildings and variegated graffiti-bombed walls in long island city that are now a living time-stamp of the economic collapse and development boom that never quite materialized, taking those hundreds of faceless people into hundreds of faceless directions in a place with millions of possibilities for millions of different people.
just not the weak…
the last rays of the sun filtered through a shredded lacework of clouds.
— sembene ousmane
dj/rupture and matt shadetek - solar life raft
the mantles - the mantles
royce da 5’9” - street hop
sonido martines - nueva cumbia argentina
phaseone - white collar crime
john frusciante - inside of emptiness
culture and don carlos - roots and culture
sadly, these speeches don’t write themselves…
Driving through the streets of Detroit in recent days, it’s been hard to tell an election of such importance was approaching. There are few campaign signs. Few ordinary Detroiters talk about what’s at stake in this election. Maybe it’s because so many are consumed with the realities of surviving in a city that has an unemployment rate of nearly 30%.
30% just think about that. let’s compare…
recessionary nyc - 10.3%
detroit, michigan - 28.9%
gaza, occupied palestine - 44%
perhaps they were carried away by the lateness of the hour, or by a time that was getting more and more confused— the grey, intoxicating time outside space, which upsets the clocks of the memory and seems to set words free.
-jean genet
so, i’m not voting for bloomberg tomorrow b/c he’s a pompous fuck who thinks he can arbitrarily decree himself dear leader with a regal third term.
he’s largely succeeded in fashioning the city into a nuevo bordello for the developers and real estate mavens who have pushed the cost of living up while construction is stalled as far as the eyes can see.
racial profiling: still a daily occurrence. sean bell.
he’s giuliani lite, if you will.
and don’t even get me started on his war-crime fetishist gaza comments from last year.
it’s baffling to me that a fairly large number of my relatively informed and progressive friends have no answer to the simple question “why are you voting for someone who skirts term limits?”
these same folks are outraged when chavez does it or elections are stolen in iran or bought in other spots, but it’s cool here?
thompson* is about as exciting as being forced to watch a 0-0 hull-stoke league cup match with a hangover and while mayor fiefdom is prob going to win anyway, let’s look at some of his other, lesser known opponents, one of which i’m prob going to vote for.
billy talen aka the reverend billy
the good rev has been a fixture in the nyc anti-consumerism and anti-hyper corporate development activism in the city. he heckled bloomberg over term limits, and enjoys exorcising cash registers prior to getting arrested at starbucks.
jimmy mcmillan
jimmy has, perhaps, the greatest website of any mayoral candidate, ever. he is the founder and candidate from the ‘rent is too damn high’ party. sounds logical to me. and this is surely the greatest answer ever to be published in the nyc voter guide…
3. What makes you the best candidate for this office?
Rent Is Too Damn High.
word.
daniel, the venerable candidate from the socialist workers party, is probably really pissed that bloomberg is effectively buying another term with his never-ending reservoirs of imperialist capital. he really likes cuba, detests the “capitalist class and its twin parties — democrats and republicans,” and strives for “immediate, unconditional legalization of all undocumented workers; and lifetime medical care and retirement pensions for all.” fair enough, comrade.
she thinks cuny should be free, reps the party for socialism and liberation, and thinks every new yorker should be guaranteed a union job with good wages. i especially like this paragraph in her bio…
Ever since she came to New York from the Dominican Republic when she was 3 years old, Frances has faced the challenges of growing up poor in the richest city in the world. She grew up watching the NYPD arrest her friends for the crime of being poor and Black or Latino. Like millions of New Yorkers, she struggles every month to pay her rent, buy groceries, help her kids with homework, and go to school.
monty needs no introduction. he’s against third terms and has one of the best comprehensive platforms of any of the mayoral candidates, including this gem…
The Burns Administration will put a zero-tolerance anti-hipster policy at the center of its agenda.
Charles Montgomery Burns understands that New Yorkers live under constant intimidation from this public nuisance. Hipsters threaten the cultural fabric of our great city with indiscriminate cynicism and irony. They are apathetic and use their bottomless trust funds to drive up rent for real New Yorkers.
it’s going to be a tough call when i get to that booth tomorrow morning, i have some major decisions to make. i think all of the above candidates could make a good mayor. however, i may just opt for the write-in option at the last minute.
*admittedly, since my life is consumed by international relations and soccer, i have not been paying as much attention to the local race as many others have and maybe thompson really is a great guy, but from what i’ve seen of him he’s quite boring and reminds me of a 0-0 hull-stoke draw. zzzzz. plus i know a few teachers who said he destroyed the public schools or something. whatever, just don’t vote for bloomberg.
offrenda for ruby…
done by my super-talented artist mom in the d.
in memory of our recently departed cute and feisty old cat and prominently featuring her favorite cat treats, whiska lickins’.
feliz dia de los muertos!
