I'd like to meet:
Dirty Mike is a man both wise and foolish...
...whose exploits are seldom as fierce as his detractors would have you believe. Rather, an exploratory temperament colors his deeds and thoughts, a temperament which, no doubt, enriches all the world. The world would be a sorry place indeed, were it not for his vigilance and acumen. He is a keeper of what must be kept, destroyer of the weak, and ennobler of the just, right, true. It is for this reason that his blog is the only blog guaranteed to enrich and strengthen your understanding of the world. You will find yourself a wiser, stronger individual if you carefully consider his words.
Photoboothism:
Meeting people is easy:
And, since you seem of pleasing build,
a certain boldness is your due.
Thus, with self-confidence fulfilled,
you'll find that folk have confidence in you.
Learn how to handle women, that make sure,
since all the aches and sighs that come to vex
the tender sex
the doctor knows one little place to cure.
A bedside manner sets their hearts at ease,
and then they're yours for treatment as you please.
A string of letters following your name
assures them that you far surpass your peers,
and so you handle favors as fair game
that other men would have to stalk for years.
Learn the sweet touches to the pulse applied,
and then, with looks discreet but fiery eyed,
you lay your hands about her little waist
to ascertain how tightly she is laced.
More Photoboothism:
A note on the spirit of science:
A certain cult of conviction pervades every aspect of American society. We idealize the man of action but conflate his image with moral certainty and unflinching resolve. As a result, we accept the banal, the misguided and thoughtless as righteous, justified and heroic. We err in judgment. What good can come of our decision making if we accept as given that we act in the right? How can we hope to advance our understanding if we hold fast to the premise that we must not abandon any mission? When we fail to question the very foundations of our decisions, when we act on a conviction of moral superiority, when we hold perseverance as sacred, above and beyond our capacity for judgment, we destroy any hope of progress. For this reason, nothing should be taken for granted. Men of action need not embody the spirit of conviction. They can ground themselves in something far nobler: the spirit of science.
But what is the spirit of science? Many argue that science does not stand in opposition to conviction. They understand science as the pursuit of conviction, as an enterprise to establish the very facts on which to found our convictions. They are right to recognize science as a pursuit, but they misunderstand the significance of this pursuit. The science they have studied is a body of accepted knowledge, and the experiments they may have conducted as part of their schooling are largely conceived as harmless exercises to illustrate known truths. While they are busy citing what others have discovered by doubting, criticizing, and examining, they fail to recognize that only this doubting, criticizing, and examining can be called science. Science, the pursuit of understanding, is a methodology, not a body of knowledge, and certainly not a field that harbors conviction.
Conviction is the belief that regarding a particular point of contention, one's own opinion is true. The man of conviction can be likened to the scientific dilettante. He may know and understand all sorts of established facts about the nature of things, but he lacks the skepticism that marks the mind of the true scientist. He is likely to grab hold of any idea either conceived or encountered and become its champion, parading his conviction through the streets, shouting it from the rooftops. In this way he becomes the enemy of science, the enemy of understanding, and the very opposite of what he claims and believes himself to be.
Music:
Music
MUSICAL CHOICE
Much ado is made of musical choice. Are you that hungry for religion?
If I had to choose a favorite Lambchop album, I would choose Is a Woman. If I had to choose a favorite Will Oldham album, I would choose Master and Everyone.
I took this photo at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. It’s my favorite of the bunch…late 2002. It was a solo set, just Will and his guitar. It ranks right up there with the Elliot Smith show at the Sanctuary in Vegas. Any of you who were there know what I’m talking about. The intimacy, the energy and the collective enthusiasm were undeniable, overwhelming.
Will Oldham is among the finest songwriters. His songs exemplify the way that popular music can explore the subtle nuances of what it means to be human, of what it means to love, despair or to dive into the deepest wells that motivate us.
POETRY
Poetry is dead. This is not to say that good poetry can no longer be written, only that the art form, which once was held in high esteem and devoured by the masses, can no longer lay claim to an important place in the world of literature. Contemporary music has gradually subsumed its role in the popular imagination. It’s not difficult to see why. The advent of recording and reproduction has commodified music, enabling it to be digested and repeatedly enjoyed in much the same way that people once enjoyed their favorite collections of poetry. As folk, jazz and blues have commingled over and over again, they have spawned a wide variety of musical forms. So too have lyrical forms multiplied, absorbing much that the written word has to offer, then offering it up again in a new, powerful voice. Poetry is dead. Were Walter Benjamin alive, he would marvel at what the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has wrought.
DYLAN
I could have been dressed in uniform, walking that shiny tiled hallway in pressed deep-grey polyester pants, a generic navy blazer over a starched white shirt, tie tightened and new shoes worn down as I left Mr. Harrington's English class bound for a lesser classroom with lesser prospects. You might have looked my way in your snobbish way and your brow may have furrowed, but that was because language was little more to you than a fishhook you cast in shallow waters to reel in anyone not slippery enough to flop free. Then again, you might have looked my way in your wide-eyed way and your lips might have parted, but that was because you saw in me a champion and feared your loneliness as you would a sleeping tiger, never daring to make a sound lest you wake it, fearing most of all how dreadful the death if you should run. I saw things you didn't. I knew things you wouldn't.
I could have been dressed in torn jeans, a white t-shirt, crossing desert lots at night under clear western skies, the bright alien glow of my home town laughing as it swallowed stars without permission, winking as if I were a bawling infant, impotent to challenge the ruse. I may have laughed. I may have looked to the sky and winked back, just as I winked at you that day in the hall. The precision of these events matters little, for at that moment, everything was clear. I was a child of fourteen, walking. My steps tapped a rhythm. One foot displaced the other, propelling me forward, and it seemed that tiny eddies of earth rose in their wake, escaping the shackles of gravity. My voice sounded a song. One word followed another, pushing me deeper, and it seemed that an ethereal lattice of deep red, icy green and electric blue fireflies flowed from my mouth... You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last... All the wisdom of beauty, becoming and dying flickered with them. I owned the song, I still own the song, though it was a gift.
Lyrics
Of The
Day
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
I ache in the places where I used to play
And I'm crazy for love, but I'm not coming on
I'm just paying my rent every day
In the Tower of Song
I said to Hank Williams, “how lonely does it get?â€
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song
I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the great beyond
They tied me to this table right here
In the Tower of Song
So you can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll
I'm very sorry, baby, doesn't look like me at all
I'm standing by the window where the light is strong
They don't let a woman kill you
Not in the Tower of Song
Now you can say that I've grown bitter, but of this you may be
sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
You hear these funny voices
In the Tower of Song
I see you standing on the other side
I don't know how the river got so wide
I loved you baby, way back when
All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We'll never have to lose it again
Now I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song
Books:
Amy And Lindsay
Casper, Wyoming. Home in the background. Thats Amy holding Lindsay. Lindsay is upset because shes deaf. I still wear those shorts.
MY SISTERS ARE PRICELESS
Amy needs to come out and drink with us more,
because Lord knows we aint gonna stop.
(Either sister is available with two day advance notice.
$100/hr payment up front. Double up and save)
Books
Leaves of Grass, Untimely Meditations, Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche, Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas, some Derrida, Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, Puddnhead Wilson, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, David Sedaris, Jon Krakauer, Michel de Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Melville's The Confidence Man, Moby Dick, The Shock of Recognition, The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester, Invisible Republic, Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, Leviathan, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Hume's Treatise, Beaudrillard's America, Democracy in America, Ulysses, Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, The Man Without Qualities, Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann, Master and Margarita, From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun's essays, some of Kant's later essays, especially "On the proverb: That may be true in theory, but is of no practical use," the Marx-Engels Reader, Emerson, Consolations of Philosophy, To the Finland Station, Rousseau's On the Social Contract, The Federalist Papers, Kafka's The Castle, The Biographical Dictionary of Film, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Bill Vollmann, Truman Capote, The Dada Almanac, Barns and Outbuildings and How to Build them, Dearest Pet, oh... and Bruno Schulz rules
Reread your favorite books. Let them run like so many threads through your death shroud.
Heroes:
Heroes
In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience - why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. But men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them.
-Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator
OR, ALTERNATELY,
...we speak of something carried and something carrying, of something led and something leading, of something seen and something seeing, and you understand that these things are all different from one another and how they differ?
-Plato, Euthyphro
