reading butler to get into this hagigoprahy of brandon teena peice, and was amused by finding this decimation, mostly b/c shes fucking impossbile slogging (not as hard as derrida, harder then lacan)

Consenting adults can decide on what information they wish to absorb and which information they chose to set aside, even if that information is pornographic. overly conserative christians , presurring a president who is too stupid to realize what is information and what is propghanda, will ruin freedom of speech for the rest of us.

(my recalcuation of the implications of pornography is still occuring)

do good liberals ignore atrocities if it means tolerance is no longer given or utopia falls (ie stalin or ani christian violence in sudan)

do good conseartives forget that the foundation of their power is genocide and hatred ? (sioux come to mind)

herethey changed my line "a mini eu of ennui driven fuck ups" to "an international mixture of apathetic, young screw-ups", and narrowed/made less complex a review in general. Its a total rewrite, and i do not remember most of the words i wrote.

thats newspapers.

Foam Carveable Pumpkins, our obessions with hygenie, our refusal to deal with our authentic vegetable natures, our cute prepackaged culture and our desire to avoid anything that could harm. (knives and fire)

memepool

FBI reports gay hate crimes at highest levels ever is this more hatred towards queer folks or is this a question of reportage and are the cops/fbi really our friends (remember the fbi did not allow out homosexuals as agents until very recently, nominally to prevent black mail)

queer day, as is the westminister story

Teacher makes racist joke, compares african american student to Gorilla

The Queer Sitution among anglicans in New Westminister is resulting in a church court and church charges, but not against the man who is queer. The charges are being layed against

This is not a christian and loving way of dealing with this situtaion, but a beurocratic mess. Church Courts ususally don't work well in the history of christendom anyways (Christ, Galleio, Jeanne d'Arc)

Huge sight site of goregous photos of mostly european modernist and post modernist architechture, the old favourites (Lloyds Building London) and some new ambiguties (Tim Noble and Sue Websters new studios in Southhark)

mefi

Free press has been destroyed in Zimbawbae(sp) again, with their only free paper being shut down. all africa has the story

The Primate of the Southern Cone is calling for schism (the southern cone is an anglican primate that covers most of South America. )

queer day

I'm not sure if the Chapman Bros are impt provoectours who discuss taboo issues of sex and death as a sort of post freudian cleansing or just dirty boys who like to shock.

Tim Hopkins has an entry on brown wedge (click on nyplm and follow the links), concerning the nature of shock, and its effectiveness and moralism.

Also the turner is out, while most of it is dull, i find chapmans work confusing in its intentions and complex enough to intruige. More impt, i find Anya Gallaccio's because i could not stop temporal, beautiful and haunting--a bronze tree is hung with "real" apples, they rot and fall off, decaying and staining gallery floors, the trunks stay permanatly forever. (she also pressed red gerberas, those innocous flowers of weddings and births, into the wall with plexiglass, so they also rot, making the walls stain red)

artnet/bw/art news daily/gaurdian

The bodies caused by the holocaust are just below the surface in western europe, 50 years is nothing in history. When we are in the midst of remembering certain kinds of irony come forth, maybe irony is the wrong word, what do you call it when a company who made its first fortune on Zyklon B is now constructing Memorials for its victims ?

making light

Long article about the Left Behind series and it's relations to Dubyas theology by Joan Didion Not alot of editoralizing, but the facts are frightening enough.

making light

thot about boys dont cry.

when they rape brandon and then take her into the car, call her good buddy, say they are friends, drive her to their apartment and clean up, is it a conflation of the boy who stole the girl and the girl who had ideas above his station, in addition to the transphobia.

(He said he had a sexual id crisis, but i didnt see that, i saw everyone else have one, and be unable to figure out how to verbally abuse him best, faggotand dyke occured in equal measure)

Transgendered are the last folk who the clinical cure is considered the most approite, pre op/post op--there seems to be a rise of no op, and i like that.

(a continuing series, as i have an essay to write on the film)

I have been struggling with the ethics and aesthics of sexual repsentation, the disneyfying of porn, the lack of art, of beauty, of desire and of tenderness in our depections of sex, of viewing hardcore as another kind of entertainment (cf Jenna Jameson in this weeks ew), and thats abutting my love of freedom, my love of sex, my love of the intricacies of human desire.

and the fact that when i masterbate, i often do it to pornography.



naomi klein works through a bunch of the same issues that i have been working thru

minnestoa has decided to union bust by bribery instead of force, and demands standarized testing as a resualt--which special needs kids cant do, which are culutarlly biased, which means that reading texts and becoming engaged with the world begins and ends with one right answer.

Homophobic Art Censorship in Alabama. Apparently GI Joe cannot hold his buddies hand.

19th Century Mandala from Western Rajasthan.
meant to indicate passages into and out of the world, also works with cartographic signifiers.
making light

Stories are coming out from all sorts of places, including Cali, New York, Indiana and Georgia have leaked out about the ease of fraud and inconstiences with the new Diebold voting machines, whose creator has both a copyright and connections to the Bush family information here

making light

If the famine, border wars, fascism, schisms and astronomic AIDS rates were not enough, they are facing one of largest Malaria epdemics in history with up to 15m people affected.

(side note, every one i know who was in africa has had malaria, including iain in burkino faso and thomas, in he same region)

Bagdhad has more explosions, the second time in as many days, this is beyond vietnam, this is the biggest fucking boondoggle in creation, and i fear that this is the beginning of islamic holy war.

jihad meet crusade,
crusade meet jihad.

These Swimsuits come from Mormons, because God wants you to hate sex and fear his creation.

i went to saint johns with bryan today, an event that required two stops at mcds, a bag of brownies and a prayer to Catherine Tekawitha to get through.

I went with bryan, so that he would know the context in which i grew up, so he would know why i feel so broken, so he would know why i hate/am confused and confounded by breeder boys.

I went to take pictures, with hope that my memories would return.

what do i remember? :
being spanked (they no longer do this)
gang showers (they no longer do this)
25 km snow shoe runs (5 runs 2,5,10,15,15) (they no longer do this)
The smell of the Grade 7 dorms, of sweat, longing, of stale hormones, of dirt and industrial cleaners (it no longer smells like this)
Cows (they have none)
Duty Runs (these do not happen)
Lacrosse, Soccer, Football, Baseball in the lower fields (they have a new 3m gym donated by the Hole Family)
Compline (the chapel has not changed)

(it taught me to be aware, to be used to being hated, taught me that jesus loved me but that didnt matter if everyone else was hostile, it taught me that i have a steel core that no motherfucker could pentetrate, taught me that i was not my history, it taught me by accident all of those big city street smart lessons that i was avoiding.)

The library was the same, but they d idnt have the poetry book that gave me howl, the infiramry where i spent two weeks post sucide attempt didnt change (why did my parents drive me back there after i had drank rubbing achol from a shot glass)

The duty masters room where paul shepered (hes in kuwait) molested me was gone, replaced with dorms and a new entrance to the new gym.

I saw Jay Berg (the year above me) there who used to be an RA and now is doing weekend wotk , who was upbeat, who loved the school and was taken care of b/c of that love--he told us of who he knew, of the connections that he had so he could pull a new games room, the connections that he had with people who had money, his dads new bmw. He was infused with a casual sadism, a hey fellow well met brutality.

Even If I had Stayed, I would not be an Old Boy.
I dont need their club, ive started my own (and it includes women)

Why did I go ?
Because I needed that chapter to be locked.

The Ascension of Jesus is the reigning symbol in the Christian West of the triumph over the temporal, a victory of the spirit over the doomed flesh, a resurrection of life in the face of death. The conflation of martyrdom, redemption, and eternal life in Christianity most certainly provided the powerful element of the messianic in the colonial impulse.

mark alice durant

1 in 6 prisoners are mentally ill The Prison system is no longer merciful, all of the strictures americans have had about reduced capacity, cruel and unusual punishment, the nesscity of rehabillition and plain old mercy.

Why does this not make people more angry.

Thomas Pynchon will be on the simpsons wearing a paper bag.

Whats the Difference between an english cop and an american cop ?

In England they say Paki instead of Nigger.

The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.



NY Times October 22, 2003

and on that note another minister says gay sex brings his victims closer to god

I do not want to s upport the whole idea of hate comes from repression, as i think it is bad freud and I belive in innocent before guilt, but Brother Stephen, who yelled about God hating fags, blacks, and other non white straight males has been accused of offering a 14 yr old boy 20 dollars for a blow job, after asking him where the the local adult theater is.

Lightening Strikes the Reshoots of the Passion, spec. Carzivel on the cross I could make any number of jokes about this but i won't

BBC states the obvious about the war in iraq and the state dept's realtionship w. iraq.

Ned Raggett Reads the Almanac, what you need to know is that Ned has a certain voice that goes 10k/km an hour. is resonant, melifous, and deeply beautfiul. It sounds like a joke or preformance art (bryan claims that there is no difference b/w the two--he is a poxy ph00L)

here's a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand gray to the sun,
Singing: -- "Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer's done."

Mark Sinker posted some really lovely verse on this ilx thread about poetry and the nature of poetics. Its Kipling. He didnt authour it, so i wouldn't pick it apart the minute i saw the last name.

daze reader

> god eats when we're hungry
>
> walking to my friends house, i enter into the
> mohawk, in the corner of the store i see one of
> those red lacquer shrines glowing orange with
> electric candles, a bit of food, and a statue of a
> bhodvitta, the usual oranges, but also a pink
> snowball and a golden twinkie
>
> at night when i walk out, i see it float over the
> sky, st basil's golden dome made blue by halogen
> spot lights. even with all the stained glass it
> looks modern made of brick, concrete and glass
>
> my roommate and i bought sourdough bread and a
> bottle of cabernet as a snack, as i poured wine into
> plastic beer cups and served bread torn from the
> loaf, he looked at me strangely and bowed his head.
> i didn't know wether to bless him or laugh.
>
> Working now for a month, and always over or under on
> cash-- balancing the cash at 4 am, i pray for
> matthew's help, because tax collectors deal with
> money. the float works out.
>
> my room has three rosaries and a saint's card of
> kateri tekakwitha, she's there because of cohens
> novel., the rosaries, pink or cheap plastic or glow
> in the dark, hang as reminders of prayers spoken and
> unspoken.

ase

a few things:

I thot that Kreeft was deeply conserative, and his views on ecumenicism did not conflate with my general understanding, but then talking to Josh who belives in the supermacy of Xtianity, and belives that all religions are evil, i realize that Kreeft is moderate. I do not want to get into islam here, for my general ignorance is profound, but i am reminding that christianity began at the delta of two rivers, and that region is deeply fertile.

the classes about homosexuality in catholic sex and marriage will kill me yet, they are there own special torture of ignorance, hate, banality, and exhaustian. i hate having to explain grad school queer theory to kindergarden kids, but then maybe im not so smart after all, i almost failed the midterm (50)

having issues with ivory tower vs vox populi, and the nature of writing.

feeling stupider then i have in a while-barely helped andrew with his quesions about synder, and barely helped jeff with his questions about lacan, the emperor has no clothes and the wizard is small behind the curtain.

the black dog has come back...

Hughes was a brooding Yorkshireman, who by all accounts possessed extraordinary sexual magnetism, and he too was burning with literary ambition. He and Plath spotted each other right away and, following some shared, unspoken script, proceeded to behave like characters right out of D. H. Lawrence. The movie actually underplays the strangeness and ferocity of what happened: he kissed her hard; she kissed back and then bit him on the cheek, drawing blood and leaving, as he later wrote, "a swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks"; he yanked off her hairband, snatched her silver earrings and, pocketing them like trophies, stalked away. Four months later they were married.


from
Charles McGrath's review of the new plath movie with paltrow.

Ludcirously bad poetry, crammed into fake stanzas like a drag queens foot into a stilleto, featuring the sort of post confessinal emotional bleating that is just silly, and a taste for random puncation, carol muske duke is national book award material.

(carolyn hasker once applied for a job teaching english at columbia, and when asked for her salary expectations, she gave an anwer close to the top of the pay scale, the interviewer told her that s he would have had to won a nba for that kind of dough, she replied i have)

Ernie finds love

email from mr parkes.

400 page post colonial decimation of theresa.

i think it is symbolic of my view of theresa that i think excorcism is mostly absurd and silly, esp. on eldery and sick nuns.

good photo blog

baslhum swing

large collection of time lapse videos of plants.

mefi

large cyber exhibit on the nature of persian painting , the images can be zoomed in on, all have annotations, and the writing is excellent. The work has a natural moralism that avoids the didaticism found in simialr europ[eanm works, that and the colour, sense of place, compsotion and lightness are deeply moving.

the images of the man having sex with a camel are done in context of a larger commuinty, and are explained by the painting as a sin of lonliness and isolation, not of perversion, though it should be punished it could also be understood.

(do not fuck camels, they do not like it)

uffish or making light

74 pages of qouates on lingsutics, found by accident by google.

pdf

Its odd, i have taken myself out of the nature/nurture queer debates, allowed myself to think that sexuality (everyones, everywheres) is constructed according to normative social lines, you would think then that an article like this about genetic tendencies towards homsexuality would cause that view to change, it hasn't for a couple of reasons.

it seems to be the early 21st century's raisn d'etre(sp) to blame everything on genetics, or to accept genetics as the reason for it all--so this would contiune that social normaztion.

homsexuailty, the word, and the naming of the concept, came from a clinclical context in the late 19th century, this is the logical conclusion of that clincicazation. (sp)

same gendered attraction is so compicated, so fucked up (scratch that-repalce with human desire) that it cannot be explained away by one way or the other.

if we allow this to be viewed as apporite, homophobia will change from FUCK YOU to isnt it sad, and i prefer the first.

im over at andrews, and he is having trouble with his blog.

100 best novels of all time

gaurdian

mormonism the gathering

making light

Evangical Christan spends millions to bank roll the fight against queer priests in the anglican synod, among other things. , including anti evoultio, and articles that call for stoning of gay.

Sucides count for 1/10th of non combative deaths in iraq. i wonder how common this is ? Would like more information, as the source qouted is biased

talk left

The IMF and the world bank have asked Bolivia to ship oil to Chile, the peasent classes have told the leader of the country to fuck off and die.

Is there any difference b/w what the imf was doing, and Belgium getting rich from the congo and England getting rich from India ?

body and soul

Bin Laden is still alive Wasn't Afghanistan and Iraq supposed to solve that problem ?

1. Anthony, it is a well-known fact that you like some freakishly weird art, ranging from paintings to buildings. What would you say is the most freakishly weird thing you find aesthetically pleasing that doesn't include a graphic depiction of genitalia?

Weird for me or weird for the rest of the world ? Thanks to Dave Hickey I am reconsidering Norman Rockwell paintings as art, as good solid poltically concious art. Maybe its Damien Hirst Dot Paintings, b/c they are so abstractly heart rendeningly beautiful and this is from the man who decasects sheep. then there is the really weird shit, andy feenans tatooed pigs, >the machine that shits or art made from feilds >esp. corn


2. How have the recent scandals in the American arm of the Roman Church affected your relationship with it?
i was sexually abused at 14 in an anglican school by anglican teachers, the residental schools here have done in catholics, united and anglicans, kindergarden teachers and boy scout leaders fuck kids more then priests do, treatment is more christlike then punishment. we're good at rationalizing.

practically it has prevented me from being a priest and has increased homophobia, but thats me.

i never thot that priests were infalliable, its difficult to imagine them as evil.

3. If you could have a third hand growing anywhere out of your body, where would it be?

stomach.

4. You seem to have changed a lot since we first started talking. What do you think is the most important/edifying thing you've learned in the past 2 years?

that all discourse is imprisoned by ideological constructs, and that mine are as strong or stronger, in that i didnt belive that they existed in the first place.

5. Cage match: Foucault vs Derrida. Each one is allowed one melee weapon of choice. Who do you think would win and why?

bare knuckle brawling it would be foccualt, he was more of a scrapper.
any kind of melee weapen it would be derrida, hes wiler.

Did Rowan back enough off or was it a demographics game.

Prince knocks on doors to convert Jews to JWism. Did so on Yom Kippur.

winner of vapid story of the year, rich girls spend on television

And in other news, Oklahama City schools have expelled an 11 yr old girl for wearing an Hajib , b/c it violated the dress code against head gear.

The Geneva Convention prevents soilders from destroying fields that are intended to produce food crops, since the americans acted as usual and never ratified the fucking treaty, they can do things like this and not feel they have to actually live by these rules. Even worse, they had the chutzhpah to play jazz, that came up from slave feilds, as background.

my friends watch films like sluts, like people in the first four days in borges library, in every way consuming it fast, qucik and completely.

it doesnt seem to matter of genre, or history or even point.

posted this on the gateway blog comment section, about Kill Bill, i am still deeply confused by how i felt about it.


I did see Pulp Fiction in the theater and have seen it on video several times--the violence in it is very rarely seen on the screen itself, even the sodomizing samuari sword done by Z or the results of the killing that Wolfgang cleaned up . (thinking about it, this may apply to Dogs as well, the ear being cut off done off stage.)

Another thought, in the films up to this point, the violence in his films resulted in natural consquences. Samuel L Jackson found Jesus and Bruce Willis had to flee. A followed B, which followed C and if it did not follow-it was discussed (the foot rub) This did not occur with Kill Bill.

On another tack, I have said this before and I do not think it is my idea, but KB is the work of a man who knows his films so well that they enter his guts before his brain. In this work he is a collegist or turn tablist, each installment being a brief but intense film study lecture on genre.
Is the aesthicazation (sp) of violence and the anthologizing of genre enough to make this any better or worse then an academic excercise ? Do you need to know Sweetbaack or Seven Samuari or The Legend of The Drunken Master or Argento or The Good, The Bad or The Ugly or Ghost in the Shell to fully get this film, and if you do is that ok ? (ie Go Go being the lead in Battle Royale)

(some last thoughts--i didnt see misogyny in these films and considering where he came from that was deeply refreshing, but this film, with the good ol' boy rape and the dead bride, and the girl on girl phallic fights being a tendency to capitualte to the traditions of violence against women in the source films. That and i wonder if QT is the first video store auter, the ones that are not forced into a very specific kind of narrative or cannon formation, and one that choses films for emotional or aesthic or exotic reasons, and not to correspond to a certain kind of theory--can you imagine him reading Adorno ?)

Bryan has a long post on contempary politics using the margiont line as an example, and i wrote a long email to pat about his politics.

bryan says that i have decided to perpare for the war that is coming by joining the french resistence and saving every peice of art i can see (metaphor). i dont know, its been 35 yrs since 68, and that did nothing.

i keep thinking of barcleona that worked as anarachist paradise until the facists come, that paris and debord was supposed to do something and now politics is described there as fascism interupted by strikes, where the propostion that made homosexuality illegal in the weimar was passed in 1927, and ten years later Hitler sent fags to camps on box cars.

progress ?

i owe you a personal entry, im not sure what to say.

talked to dana , who came home for thanksgiving, anda he told me about trinity western, of the no swearing, smoking, fucking, dope, homosexual activties (we joked about reading uncle michel at the college, they have the three vol. history of, and wether that counted) contract he was expected to sign and his encroaching "hersey", throw him on the pile of unsatisfied.

glenys loves christie, is in the same room instead of the same house, has visted her family and vice versa. we talked for the first time in three weeks and i dont know its like shes coupling up, no need for me anymore (previous behavious found in tara and james, erin and garrett, thomas and melinda)

classes are a bust, i havent caught up on my reading in c lit and i cannot avoid being the annoying fuck you in catholic sex and marriage- had the usual panic attack related to the same silly kind of test with rote memoraztion and silly lists. Chris the boy i wanted to fuck, but didnt tell, and then wanted to be friendly with hates me.

Orphans dinner at Lydia, and there was all this same kind of net activity, this all enveloping miasma of evanglical, charasmatic catholicism that i really didnt want to deal with, the same kind of miasma that invades newman-the next speaker is a pro life bitch, and we think her entire message is "ki lling babies is wrong, yr going to hell if you kill babies, you dont want to go to hell do you ?" What does it say that CCC is less conserative then most other Christian orgs on campus ?

Andrew is home safe, i hope that i got the catalog and had a great weekene with Christian and felt safe.

Tried to explain Lacan to Jeff, deconstructing pudding thick primary texts on three hours of sleep makes anthony feel like an intellectual sluggard.

peice on Angelyne that was one of the better I have written was rejected for being too obtuse by adam, but he was remarkable empathic, and we joked about the practaclities of maoist re eduaction camps. (note to adam: there is a comment box below this post, use it ;) ) I should say this to his face, but then im not good with the emotion thing


Dr HIbbard is gone for a month, miami and then somewhere else. Kiesler asked if i had a therpaist when i saw her for banal reassurance this morning, admitted to being humialted by the church....

adorable boy, rolly polly
lovely boy, screaming creaming
white ghost boy, cuddly crushing boy,
pompus romping up and down boy
left boy right boy north boy south boy
ocean motion cosmic chaos boy. no ideas boy
black night phosphrcenet glued on stars blown through
dead leaf brown woods and no bread crumb boys
flim flam romance, movie star street corner preacher,
loose hips, sinking ships, st vitus dance and oh, such a prance boy.

automatica

edited once :

rolly polly
screaming creaming
cuddly crushing,
pompus romping
ocean motion
cosmic chaos
flim flam romance,
loose hips, sinking ships,
st vitus dance and oh, such a prancer boy.

My Brother, the Rock Star

1.
My brother is a rock star
He’s big in Japan

The sound of his guitar
Is so lonely and lonely

2.
He lives in Las Vegas
Without state income tax

He pins notes to his corkboard
With multicolored tacks

3.
Red is for URGENT
Green is FOREGO

Yellow is APPOINTMENTS
Blue is for LONELY

4.
Dear me, I am lonely
Although the Japanese know me

Although the Japanese know me
They don’t even know me

5.
I live in Las Vegas
I’m thirty-five years old

Where is my high school metal band?
How did this happen?

6.
Every several months
He visits Japan

To play music before
His adoring fans

7.
To witness first-hand
Those superfast trains

Watch triangles of cranes
Above Tokyo!

8.
He sings, I’m so lonely
So lonely and lonely

Is this what I dreamt of
This only and only?

9.
My brother is a rock star
He lives in Las Vegas

He calls me at night
To say, It’s this only

Eugene Ostashevsky


found here, a great series of poems

Deeply depressing and not v ery useful for those suffering, the world famine guide is an academic attempt to perserve common and old knowledge.

Sexual Ethics will be what splits the churches in two. Its happening with queers and the anglicans here and the Catholics and birth control.

I was reading somewhere last week (it might have been the g and m) that High Modernism was a snobbish reaction to popular literacy, found in the broadsheets and educationary social reforms of the mid to late 19th century. While this may have been true, Wyndham Lewis's anthology The Stuffed Owl, that collects the worst poetry of that time, proves that even if the works "instruct and delight", doesnt make them any good. (new edition released, article on it here )

lime tree

kama sutra rings

The more i hear from Rowan Williams, the more I am convinced
he is good for england.

When I was in High School, I didnt have anyone to commit suicide with. Maybe constant reminders like this will remind people that for most, HS was a disaster, a lord of the flies class war with fists, knives and maybe guns, an excuse to drink and fuck the pain away and really not much learning went on at all. (those who did not fight, drink or fuck had violence imposed on them.)

obscure store

four indian presidental gaurds have been accused of rape. IT seems to have brought protest against activities which were once seen as boys being boys. story here

bbc

Mbeki's AIDS policies have always been a confusing mish mash of genuine fear concerning American colonial attitudes in Africa, conspiracy theories, anger at Captalists prices and a desire to retain power. Only recently has he been convinced His recent claims of knowing no one who died of AIDS personally is indictaive of t he deep shame that comes from having this disease, one that is thot of as a result of the decadent west. He has recently claimed that newspapers have misqouted him, usually the childish fuck you of people who are simple and evil. This time I think he is right. and his context perhaps cannot be understand.

The old FBI made enemies lists, bugged according to politcal ideology, killed people who disagreed with them. The new FBI is kind, friendly and efficent in its war against domestic terrorism. Apparently one of those terrorists is the maor of Philly, a democrat who may win a particuarly nasty election. He just found bugs planted in his office, and oh yeah, hes african american

talk left

a feature on social workers, that roughly translates to people are starving and no one is paying attention.

not surprsing, deeply depressing.

photoblog of tagged trucks

uffish

Anglo fuck you and explanation of David Blaines tricks, he doesnt spend the night in the box after all.

More Information on Lethal Injections, in which they have proved that the drugs that they thought ended the pain for the prisoners does in fact nothing at all. Which means that the method t hat the state assumed to be cold, efficent and mechanchial (sp) is as messy and cruel as anything else. Hanging is more humane.

talk left

brief rundown of the uses and abuses of the patriot act, including some pretty nasty censorship. (when a writer cannot tell his editor things, its like a catholic not being allowed to tell his priest, except with an addition frustration of job security.

Octopus Hard Ons and Pervert Ducks

uffish

Sitting down to write, I notice audience and intent—who is reading this and why are they bothering. What does it mean to have my testimony spread for all of you ? Do you want basic information, do you want scandal or entertainment, do you want my earnest pronouncements about god. Do you want me to make it easier or harder ? Do you want to know that you are not alone in the universe, that Christ will make your life happy or do you want someone who is more of a sinner then you are ? Do you want tto assume that when I found the grace of God, I was no longer blind but my vision was restored ? do you want me to start at the beginning and end at the end ? Which beginning do you want, my grandmothers realtions, those hard Scots presybertarians, my mother the good mormon who taught me all about Christian Ethics or my father, the atheist, who tried to teach me a moral life.
I’m a queer catholic with socialist leanings. I get so angry that I lose control and throw things. I am profane. I argue against the church and rally against God. I hate myself. I question everything. I am not a good Christian if one belives that, although there is the old American slogan that rebellion to tyrants is obedeince to god, and sometimes in the heirachy of Gods Church I see a petty tryanny. I am more of a follower of Michel Foccualt then I am of Jesus Christ. I think that Christ would be a post modernist if he was given the oppurtunity.
It makes me nervous when the Bible talks about the Kingdom of Heaven, when Christ heals demons or walks on water or makes fish into loaves or makes Lazrus rise again, because I cannot place it on the spectrum of the real. It makes me nervous when people talk in tounges or belive that Christ is their best pal. I think that God is profoundly disappointed in humanity and its inherent sinfulness. These are my hang ups, People do not become Christans with out them, there is a needienss, that comes from hunger, and a hunger that seems to be filled by religon.
Is this a good testimony, will it fill your heart with love for God, will a new reader scan this and think “That sounds like something I want”. Is that the point of these 500 words. Here are some basics then: I belive in Jesus Christ, who was crucifed, and rose again, for a myriad of reasons, including my sins. I belive that he was born of Mary and Raised by Joesph. I belive his ministry was a call to radical inclusion. I think that God is so unknowable that we needed an intercessor in Human Form. I believe that his message is painful and difficult. I belive that Francis of Assisi got Stigmata, Joan of Arc heard voice, Luther heard visions and Paul was knocked off his horse. I am saddened that my palms have not bleed, that Michael has not uttered in my ear as I sleep, that Michael has not given me a message and that although it feels like I have spent 22 years on the road to Damsascus, I am still on my horse.

first draft of testimony for ccc

amusing peice of muck raking bout arnies visits with Kenneth Lay on March 17 2001

(they were talking about a lot of money)

dean may sponsor the nra

this was done as ammuntion in a stump speech, more details will follow.

corranation street features first gay kiss

queer culture co opted for spectacle, etc etc
(but the dark one is fucking hot)

swaziland run from toyko by telephone.

what can i say.

Instead, he (Said) called for a single, "bi-national" state based on a constitution (something neither Israel nor the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority currently has), with "the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence."

found here

via moorish girl

So, sucide bombers kill 19 in Haifa, The Next day Israel uses their fighter jets to kill a couple hundred palestines in Syria.

Someone want to point out who's more evil here, cause i cant tell.

blog about maps.

Yom Kippur is tonight, the new year, which is used as a somber recollection of the year past.

i thought i wanted to be a priest to serve god, but maybe i want to be a priest to avoid the real world, to drown in solipism, as a way to isolate myself from the major discourses because i am so exhausted by then and maybe i signed on knowing they would reject me, and in that way i could play the martyr

Also bad timing is an orgy of 500 hostess and 280 Japanese salary men in china on the anniversary of the invasion of manchuria, though the passing of the buck is legendary

daze reader

doing a cheer team recreation of the second world war is stupid.
having a student run across the field with a swatiska is stupider.
playinf duetschalnd uber alles is not advisable.
deciding to do it on Rosh Hashana could only happen in texas

metafilter

Nao Busamante (note the last name) is a notrious preformance and burlesque artist who does magical things with burritos It's a really clever peice, mocking white liberal guilt. white sexual tourism, corprate hegenomy, and the cliches of femminist and preformance art (cf ono's cut peice and finley's yams)

3 women have come forward to suggest arnie doesnt know when it is appropite to touch women.

I am sure that his postions on womens rights will be so progressive.

Not only can Arnie afford to buy a fucking jet, he doesn't have enough balls to pay the 800 000 dollars in taxes, and his minons are claiming its a positive thing b/c hes good with money.

via body and soul

A 12 year old girl was arrested in washington and put in jail for hours after being caught snacking on a french fry, according to the judge, it was unwise but not unconstitional.

idiots

Austrian Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn has said that "the last days and months of the pontifs reign are behind him", which adds to Ratzinger and speculation that this pope will die v. soon.

black man killed by police in tottenham Its reassuring to know that this is not only an american phenomonenen (sp)

gaurdian

a long history on mickey and the air pirates, which intended as a fuck you to disneys labour policies done by a bunch of disgruntled disney artists, a good case study on copywright.

two crackers in philly told the hospital that they didnt want anybody but white drs and nurses to deliver their perfect ayran child, and violting their own policies, no african americans entered that room.

have a home birth if you dont want anyone but yr ignorant realtions to see yr precious.

via romenskos

For a man who is supposed to be dying, the pope sure has a bunch of work hes doing. This meeting was not supposed to be substantive, and i think mostly a warning concerning the nature of sexuality, an indication that it will be a rather large issue in the coming years

the thing is that i havent read coetze, so he might have deserved it--but then i read naipual and think hes awful.

Coeteze won the nobel prize, which surprised me, b/c he is a white south african and they gave it to gordimer in 1991 and he is a novelist, and they have given it to novelists for the last 6 or 7 yrs. Shocked that it wasnt someone from Canada or Asia, in fact i put money on maggie atwood, whose new book has been shortlisted for everything yet again. (booker, giller, orange)

Oh What A Mortal Man Am I:
Futility and Suffering as Moral Lessons in the Book of Job.
Anthony Easton
1064203
Dr. B Churchill
Comp. Lit. 201

The Summnation of all things is not God, it is mans limited perception of God.
Ron Ajanard.

Job was an honest and noble man who loves his wife and children, attended to the proper religious functions and loved the Lord with all of his might. Because he saw life with a divine series of contracts, he attempted to keep his end of the bargain, thus seeing his prosperity as a result of Divine. This was the way things were supposed to be and the way it was in the first few verses of the work that bears his name.
However, in the seventh verse, the Lord stops with his promises, breaks the covenant he has with his faithful servant and goes into league with Satan, his supposed worst enemy. The agreement with Satan is to destroy Job's wealth and see if he is still loyal to God, after his wealth is destroyed but his love for YHWH is not the contract is renegotiated to include his health and later his family. This kind of bet has a capricious sadism that appears almost unexplainable, and it has become the ur-tale for the ethical hand wringing that surrounds the question "why do bad things happen to good people" Job does not deserve the pain he recieves and it is not merciful of a loving God to inflict that kind of pain on him.
There are at least two major problems with that suppostion, the first is assuming that the father figure of the Hebrew Scripture is a loving God. It is hard to imagine the atrocities committed in these texts as acts of affection/ Ie laying waste to cities with sulphur, destroying legions of enemies by warfare or baptizing the world in a catclysmic flood loving acts ?
Why does Job then follow Jehovah, aside from tribal allegiances or familial expections ? There must be a reason why he thinks that the destruction of his land, weatlth, family and friends is worth it. At first, there is an assumption that all of this occurs because Job was a sinner and when that does not suss out, a reader would be wont to fall back onto the comforting cliches of God's mysterious ways.
But a more intriguing argument could be made that the entire purpose of the book of Job is to teach lessons that are best encapsulated in the four laws of the Buddha, not to suggest that Job knew these laws, or they were common in his context, but that they are a useful lens to bring into focus how Job processes pain and by extension what we can learn from these processings.
These four laws: That nothing is permenat, that suffering comes from coveting, that the only way to end suffering is to annihlate attachments which might mean annihalting oneself, and finally having a sense of moderatio, all apply to Job and can give us a greater view of how to process pain that seems unjust and divoriced from a system of legalistic reward.
Job thinks that all he has comes from Heaven, and that the material sucess comes from a series of devotions (Job 1:5; KJV) but he does not do these sacrifices because of his sins, but "it mmay have been ny sons that sinned and cursed God in their own hearts." When the material goods disappear from his life and he begins to understand that the purpose of existience is change, he still views it as a punishment for his general lack of piety.
Even when Job begins to understand that his attachments will only cause suffering, and as his friends encourage more piety he belives this is a soltioun. But when this piety comes it is not a quiet awareness of the illusinoary nature of the earthy world it is showy and dramatic. The sack cloth and ashes that are expected of mourners in that time and place were a warning against sin, best exmpelifed in the works of the minor prophets, especially Nahum and the Lametnations of Jerimah. In this text the suffering is not about a larger community, the way that he parades his grief is avoiding being truly aware of how temperary life is and how imbued it is with suffering. This narrasitic self pity, and complete lack of humility is found in the endless litanies, especailly found in Job 3, when he loses the attachments of the material world; he wishes that he has never connected to it.
Job continues in this viewn, always obsessing about how pure he is, how virtuous his family is, how cruel God is. He goes too far away from humbleness and his screaming at the heavens is as immoderate as never thinking about what he has done wrong or how obligatory his work for the lord had been up to this point. His friend Eliphaz tells him how to gain status with God in Chapter 5:17, he says "Behold, happy is the an whom God doth correcteth; therefore despise not the chaseting of the almightyy" This can be viewed then, as a call to subsume himself under the Divine WIll--not to be the best man he could be, but to be best servent.
Then what are the lessons does Job tell us about working through pain or suffering. To stop assuming everything is about your goals' to kill ego and then through that killing subsuming ot the divine will, to recognize that suffering exists regardless of wealth or statiton and to recognize that wealth and station themselves never stays. Job teachess its readers to be servants to a larger and more complec ideal. The suffering of Job is the suffering of humanity in a indifferent world, t is our suffering which can be shouldered but not elimanted.