Calyptic Babel profile picture

Calyptic Babel

You have the bedside manner of an autistic vulture. -- QC

About Me

Introspection is easy, until it breaks into verse:

there is no such thing as salvation.
there is no god and no safety net;
we are meat and bone,
blood and gristle. we sometimes have
the chance to commune with each other,
little mad moths flit
about the flame of a dark star --
each hoping for an orchid,
or at least
a predatory glance.
..

My Interests

books, stars, cast-iron skillets, non-moldy potatoes, bumper stickers, reading, drawing, bookshelves, typewriters, coffee, learning, poetry, THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER, seeing new places, film, photography, smoking, drinking, good paper, typography, puzzles, stealing library books, food, David Lynch, language, Akira Kurosawa, piracy, Stanley Kubrick, terrible Sean Connery impressions, acting smart, playing dumb, taping corners on books, melting plastic, bowling, writing, Balderdash, Risk, unique video games, staying out of the loony bin, Scrabble, thinking, turning good dreams into reality, correcting peoples' mistakes, science, and fiction.

I'd like to meet:

Charlie Chaplin, Margaret Atwood, Dostoevsky, Sammy Beckett, James Spader, James Woods, The Gyllenhaals, myself from the future, other intelligent people,

Music:

Radiohead, Bright Eyes, The Juliana Theory, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Neko Case, Feist, Johnny Cash, The Ataris, Mindless Self Indulgence, Weezer, Tom Waits, Tori Amos, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Fiona Apple, The Raconteurs, The Dresden Dolls, Mr. Rogers, Nightwish, Killswitch Engage, Five For Fighting, Soul Coughing, Prodigy, John Lennon, Henri Mancini, Sex Pistols, Tangerine Dream, Switchblade Symphony, David Sylvian, Audioslave, The Mars Volta, Pink Floyd, Cake, Bjork, Beastie Boys, Dream Theater, Aphex Twin, Amon Tobin, Massive Attack, Modest Mouse, David Bowie, The Red Paintings, Hierosonic, Miles Davis, The Pixies, Infected Mushroom,

Movies:

Lost Highway, Akira, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ghost in the Shell, Eraserhead, Brazil, The Seven Samurai, The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, Secretary, Pitch Black, Pi, Following, Memento, The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness, Night of the Living Dead, Bladerunner (both versions), Alien, Aliens, Run Lola Run, Rashomon, Ninja Scroll, The Game, Hellsing, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, Taxi Driver, Bound, Vertigo, Mirrormask, The Gift, Enemy Mine, Solaris, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Apocalypse Now, Dune (Lynch version, not the crappy TV redo), The Fifth Element, Ghostbusters, I [heart] Huckabees, A Beautiful Mind, Iris, The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Lucky Number Slevin, Das Boot, The Empire Strikes Back, Cemetery Man, Grave of the Fireflies, V for Vendetta,

Television:

The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Lost Room, Law & Order: SVU, Nova, Heroes, Mythbusters,

Books:

The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, The Complete Rimbaud, Memoirs of a Geisha, Catch 22, Gravity's Rainbow, A Derrida Reader [Between the Blinds], Pascal's Pensees, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I Am Legend, House of Leaves, The Stranger, The Brothers Karamazov, Antonin Artaud Selected Writings, The Infernal Machine, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Dark is Rising series, The Little Prince, The Portable Blake, The Portable Hannah Arendt, Foucault's Pendulum, The Plague, Sixty Stories, Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism, Borges' Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, Selected Writings of E. A. Poe, Mephisto, Neuromancer, Dead Girls, The Fact of a Doorway, Samuel Beckett: A Reader, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Complete Stories of Kafka,

Heroes:

Friedrich Nietzche, Woody Allen, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, David Lynch, Adrienne Rich, Giordino Bruno, Mr. T, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Macgyver, James Bond, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Jules Verne, M.C. Escher, Rothko, Albert Camus, Antonin Artaud, Paul Klee,

My Blog

From Simone de Beauvoirs Ethics of Ambiguity

  At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation.  But their attempt to lie to us is in vain.&n...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Fri, 07 Sep 2007 10:38:00 PST

Short

Pardon the stupid.  Happens sometimes.  I'm not deleting.  I can take things too seriously.
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:22:00 PST

And now for something completely different

Not really.  It's tangental, so the difference isn't complete.  This started from another song that I didn't find on project playlist.  It led me, almost, to posting the lyrics.  I...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:21:00 PST

A note on Edwin Starrs question

  I know that he answers the question in his song, but that's what happens when you pick the title first.  The thought is: war creates the new frontier.  Governments are able to test th...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:15:00 PST

A note on the opinion of labor unions

  It strikes me as odd that many people seem to have an extremely negative view of labor unions.  More specifically, the opinion is of the typical union worker: more likely to be observing w...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:52:00 PST

Passages

Looking through old photos:moments unawarethat time is passing,that they will be robbedof their broad-smiling legacy.Reminded how Ihave sloughed off these skins of happiness,how dare I mourn?...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:51:00 PST

The slow crawl of time

I walk these halls,let fall empty words,stupefy with music.Keeping the ugly silencebayed behind braying noisetakes poise and posture.None get noticeas another surface encounterdrains past the plug.Ano...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:01:00 PST

Oddity

  I woke from the dream after the maggots started dropping from above.  They started falling after someone yelled "The trash cans should be brought inside in case the neighbors..."  As ...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:03:00 PST

Someone once said to me...

Someone once said to me that the thing that I most fear is boredom.At the time I laughed it off, as one canbefore the weight of experiencecrushes in against wordsand makes them into wisdom..Those desp...
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:45:00 PST

This lighthouse glass is dark

The ocean's rush of soundwill not fill the spacesbetween the starson a lonely night.
Posted by Calyptic Babel on Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:40:00 PST