Today's gem.

"Procrastination is how I stick it to the man."

Letter to Lord Chandos

To me, then, it is as though my body consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to everything; or as if we could enter into a new and hopeful relationship with the whole of existence if only we begin to think with the heart. As soon, however, as this strange enchantment falls from me, I find myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending me and the entire world consisted, and how it made itself known to me, I could present in sensible words as little as I could say anything precise about the inner movements of my intestines or a congestion of my blood.

Philip Larkin

Those long thin steeds
And natural downs
So near at hand,
We cannot see,
Nor that tiny
Excitement share
In the delicate stand:
We cannot be

Elsewhere than here -
And yet, just so
May others stare
On our casual scene,
And cry for pleasure
At the out-of-reach
Enchantment there
Where we have been.

Forgotten Gods

Angerona

Verethraghna

Tyche

Misoponia

Tryphe

Zalmoxis

Momus

Ssan-do

Darriah

Hubal

Ziqiqu

Soviet - Marbleyezed (1st version)

Soviet's electro classic Marbleyezed, a.k.a. Marbleyzed. The original version from C, not the remixed one from We Are Eyes. Stellar but rarely heard for some reason.

Punk

Almost twenty years ago, when I was in the navy, I came into the possession of a catalog from a company called Dr. Strange Records. The catalog advertised punk vinyl, including many rare and expensive items, but what interested me were four compilations on cassette tape of the company founder's favorite punk singles. They were much cheaper than the vinyl, and I needed something to play on my tape player - record players being unfeasible on a ship.

I sent off for them and duly received them FPO. They were fantastic. Four collections of crucial classic punk singles. They were like a crash course in punk roots. If someone wanted to know what punk was about, these tapes would be all they needed. I listened to them over and over again on the ship.

Time passed and the tapes went where the woodbine twineth, but the tunes from them stayed in my head and heart. The net came to be, and from time to time I searched around, hoping to find the cassettes again, maybe in digital. No luck. Dr Strange still exists, and still sells a lot of great vinyl, but the tapes have vanished - there's not a mention of them anywhere on the site. I wrote to the company asking for any information, even just a tracklisting, and the original owner wrote back saying they were long gone and forgotten.

So in this post I will try to reconstruct the tracklists of the tapes as best I can from memory. If you, dear reader, remember more, or have copies of the tapes, please pass on your information.

There were four tapes altogether: the first one contained only American bands, the second only U.K., while the third and fourth had Americans on side A and U.K. on side B. All bands were represented by two songs each.

My memory of the first tape is the clearest, but I am not completely certain which songs were on which tape or what order they were in.


DR STRANGE PUNK CLASSICS TAPES


Americans:

GERMS - Lexicon Devil/No God
BAGS - Survive/Babylonian Gorgon
BAD RELIGION - Bad Religion/Slaves
CH3 - Mannequin/Manzanar
CONTROLLERS - Jezebel/Another Day
AVENGERS - Car Crash/We Are The One
BAD BRAINS - Pay To Cum/???
FEAR - I Love Living in the City [single version, natch]/Now Your Dead
GANG GREEN - Sold Out/Terrorize
MIA - I Hate Hippies/Gas Crisis
MISFITS - Last Caress/Who Killed Marilyn
ADOLESCENTS - Welcome to Reality/Losing Battle
YOUTH BRIGADE - Fight to Unite/Violence
GG ALLIN - You Hate Me & I Hate You/Don't Talk to Me
AGENT ORANGE - Secret Agent Man/Shakin All Over
NECROS - Search For Fame/Police Brutality (? not sure)
TOXIC REASONS - War Hero/Somebody Help Me
WASTED YOUTH - Fuck Authority/You're a Jerk
X - Los Angeles/Adult Books
DOA - The Prisoner/Fuck You (DOA were actually Canadian)
CHEIFS - Riot Squad/No Justice
SOCIAL UNREST - Making Room for Youth/Rush Hour
RIK L. RIK - I Got Power/???
TSOL - Superficial Love/???
LOST CAUSE - Born Dead/Senior Citizen
ALLEY CATS - Nothing Means Nothing Anymore/Give Me A Little Pain
MAD PARADE - Hollywood Vampires/???
SOCIAL DISTORTION - Mainliner/Playpen
DILS - You're Not Blank/I Hate the Rich


British:

STIFF LITTLE FINGERS - Suspect Device [single version]
SHAM 69 - Borstal Breakout
COCK SPARRER - Running Riot
ABRASIVE WHEELS - Burn Em Down
BLITZ - Razors in the Night/Someone's Gonna Die
SPIZZENERGI - Where's Captain Kirk?
BUZZCOCKS - Whatever Happened To?
X-RAY SPEX - Identity/Oh Bondage Up Yours
UK SUBS - Stranglehold
VIOLATORS - Summer of 81/Government Stinks
999 - Hi-Energy Plan/Homicide
REZILLOS - Top of the Pops/(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures
PETER & THE TEST TUBE BABIES - Banned From the Pubs/Maniac
PARTISANS - Police Story
EXPLOITED - Crashed Out/Hitler's In The Charts Again
LAST RESORT - Violence In Our Minds/King of the Jungle/Working Class Kids
4-SKINS - Evil/One Law For Them
BUSINESS - Suburban Rebels/Harry May
INFA RIOT - Each Dawn I Die/Kids of the 80s
GONADS - Tuckers Ruckers Ain't No Suckers
RED ALERT - SPG
EJECTED - What Am I Gonna Do
MENACE - I'm Civilised
BLOOD - Megalomaniac
BOYS - I Don't Care

singularity

Am I the only man in the world who lives at a Chinese monastery and reads the internet all day?

yes it's me

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AujrSASLDgCh_myTQEOkNjXty6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100213062806AA0V8pl&show=7#profile-info-FvalV4qYaa

Two of each kind.

frog toad

turtle tortoise

alligator crocodile

buffalo bison

dolphin porpoise

oyster clam

seal sea lion

lion tiger

camel dromedary

mammoth mastodon

cricket locust

Real life.

What am I actually doing? Listening to Camera Obscura and playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Two Jewels

welcoming party

Two deer from the entrance to my house. It is glumly raining.

yes!

"You're a six-note genius."

Also, there are bouncy castles in Babylon.

silver dust

degged on slate

Fresh ghosts on the lake.

Still rubbing the dry sticks love and fear

Together in your mind. May again,

Maybe this time I'll...

Above, the tipped gold cup floods across

Blue cloth. Navy swallows stitch the west

Of the bowl of the world. Weddings come.

2010

alexander you have failed me again.

damn you boy! again and again this failure, this crawling indifference.

with his arm he swept a jug off the table. it crashed to pieces in front of the children.

he drew his broad leather belt. how many times…?

sonia and anna wept. father, please, have mercy!

at that moment was heard a distant rumbling, as of storm or battle. sonia and anna pricked up their ears. the thunder grew.

outside on the main street of the village the imperial army was marching past, the guards cavalry, resplendent in silver. spurs. vermilion tunics, navy leggings. a thousand brilliant bayonets. iron cannons drawn on oaken wheels. tassels, shakoes, epaulets. stars and suns of steel and gold. the thunderous hooves.

Dio castiga quelli, chi non conoscono l'amore.

tuol sleng teng

Relating

from Joel Anselm Dietz

http://joeldietz.com/post/324863016/relating

Inertia is delightful, I have discovered, via “new experiences” including my first real attempt at dating, in which doing what one likes replaces duty, fidelity. All values are private. This was the major point of contention, as we attempted democratic means to “resolve” differences, that I somehow thought that my values (admittedly unactualized) might be “better” and thus require dissemination. Whereas, the value of honesty, which she also professes, can be held privately — while the public square is yielded to those of the lowest common denominator.

No surprise, as there is no challenge, and I woke up this morning to join a conversation on Sex and the City, the wonderful pleasures of guilt-free hookups and libations to the images of ourselves glorified, reflecting that in some part I have joined this dance via my lethargy forever increasing, or in the redirection of energies to “things I like.”

Relationships, like other objects in the neo-capitalist dispensation, are like collectibles, shiny objects to be accumulated and then dispensed with when no longer needed. There is attachment, but no love.

There is no fall for those who do not recognize heights, or who believe in the potential of heights but not the necessity of climbing, and yet I sense my twisted limbs at the bottom of some cliff, staring upwards at some peak from which I once chanced to see a great distance, and the many hands and moans which encourage me to stay forever at the bottom.

Freedom is slavery, intone the voices, and “free love” is the answer, just as capital should be freely distributed to all who cast the proper votes for this freedom, while those of us at the top continue forever, inert.

The Ancient Path

The way the English have of treating everything incredibly seriously and at the same time as all an enormous joke is the only correct way to regard life.

dig into the sun

Fwd: for you

Two plump questing doves
Hover over the river
Of gold and your mouth
Is a chalice of gold

The nervous moon's shudders
And cherries and silence
Mean drinking the wine of
Your breath is an axiom

conflict simulation

Life is a war without enemies.

Magda by the window

Przy okniem, w szarym swiatłem,
Gołąbek diamentowy opiekuje młodek.
Serce teraz wie, co to jest zalew.

Duet brzmi. Skrzypce ciepłe
Trzymać to przywilej króla muzycznego.



Gołąbek diamentowy = diamond dove.

double meanings

hail
well

I feel...

...pretty good.

For use when you need to get some god damn work done for a change.

I must not have fun. 
Fun is the time-killer. 
Fun is for inferiors, servants and the help. 
I will ignore fun. 
I will work through it. 
And when the fun is gone only I will remain--I, and my will to win. 

Damn, I'm good.
  
--The Litany Against Fun, from DOON

I'll try to put a little something here more frequently, for the practise if nothing else.

Sunny and warm outside. Happy Bicycle Day.

The punctuation all gone to hell.

"Recently I've been appalled at the low levels of articles in learned journals and literary weeklies. The punctuation gone to hell, full of non-sequiturs, an obvious lack of background knowledge, and so on. I went to a newspaper and looked up the equivalent articles from the 1930's. A great change has taken place. Forty years ago there were two kinds of articles: very, very good and terribly bad. There seemed nothing in-between. Now everything is slapdash and mediocre. Why are so many famous persons in hallowed institutions now so mediocre?"

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sufi/sufi-shah.html

14 July. Bastille day. Many morning dreams: "The parts are turned into
a board. The board is turned into an angel in hell."

hand tooled by the angel gabriel

Rabbits, true, do much seduction
On spring-sown meadows green and sunny,
Prompting jokes on reproduction -
But I don't find them very bunny.

each single day is a rich empire
she is sad as a sword is sad
uniform unicorn
"strive to deserve what you long for"
Ah! I am speared by your damascene logic.

Wittgenstein, in a letter to a friend

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important ... you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends. You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty, 'probability', 'perception', etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important."

cut a castle out of paper
pin a diamond to it

Norman Malcolm, on Wittgenstein

"Human kindness, human concern, was for him a far more important attribute in a person than intellectual power or cultivated taste. He related with pleasure an incident that happened to him in Wales. He had taken lodgings in the home of a preacher. The first time that Wittgenstein presented himself at this house the lady of the house had inquired of Wittgenstein whether he would like some tea, and whether he would also like this and that other thing. Her husband called to her from another room: 'Do not ask; give!' Wittgenstein was most favourably impressed by this exclamation. A characteristic remark that Wittgenstein would make when referring to someone who was notably generous or kind or honest was 'He is a human being!'--thus implying that most people fail even to be human."

Graham Greene, an excerpt from his Indochina journal in Ways of Escape

February 9, 1954, Saigon

After dinner at the Arc-en-Ciel, to the fumerie [opium den] opposite the Casino above the school. I had only five pipes, but that night was very dopey. First I had a nightmare, then I was haunted by squares--architectural squares which reminded me of Angkor, equal distances, etc., and then mathematical squares--people's income, etc., square after square after square which seemed to go on all night. At last I woke and when I slept again I had a strange complete dream such I have experienced only after opium. I was coming down the steps of a club in St. James's Street and on the steps I met the Devil who was wearing a tweed motoring coat and a deerstalker cap. He had long black Edwardian moustaches. In the street a girl, with whom I was apparently living, was waiting for me in a car. The Devil stopped me and asked whether I would like to have a year to live again or to skip a year and see what would be happening to me two years from now. I told him I had no wish to live over any year again and I would like to have a glimpse of two years ahead. Immediately the Devil vanished and I was holding in my hands a letter. I opened the letter--it was from some girl whom I knew only slightly. It was a very tender letter, and a letter of farewell. Obviously during that missing year we had reached a relationship which she was now ending. Looking down at the woman in the car I thought, "I must not show her the letter, for how absurd it would be if she were to be jealous of a girl I don't yet know." I went into my room (I was no longer in the club) and tore the letter into small pieces, but at the bottom of the envelope were some beads which must have had sentimental significance. I was unwilling to destroy these and opening a drawer put them in and locked the drawer. As I did so it suddenly occurred to me, "In two years' time I shall be doing just this, opening a drawer, putting away the beads, and finding the beads are already in the drawer." Then I woke.

Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

"Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.

Graham Greene, talking about his early prose style in Ways of Escape

Here are examples of my style in those days and my terrible misuse of simile and metaphor. Even the good can corrupt and perhaps I had been corrupted by much reading of the metaphysical poets. "A revolver drooped like a parched flower to the pavement." (I like to reverse this simile--"A parched flower drooped like a revolver to the pavement.") "The sound of far voices sprinkled over him like the seeds of a poppy bringing rest." And here's a piece of pomposity which I had learned from Conrad at his worst: "A clock relinquished its load of hours."

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come through as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Kingsley Amis, The Green Man

To the endemic unreality of all fiction, the author had added contributions of his own: an inability to leave even the most utilitarian sentence unadorned by some verbal frill or knob or curlicue, recalling those savage cultures whose sacred objects and buildings are decorated in every square inch; a rooted habit of proceeding by way of violent and perfunctory transitions from one slackly observed scene to the next; and an unvaried method of characterization whereby, having portrayed a person as one sort of cliche, he presently revealed him as a predictable different sort of cliche. Oh well, what had I expected? The thing was a novel.

Graham Greene, Our Man In Havana

Drawing a cheque is not nearly so simple an operation in an American bank as in an English one. American bankers believe in the personal touch; the teller conveys a sense that he happens to be there accidentally and he is overjoyed at the lucky chance of the encounter. 'Well,' he seems to express in the sunny warmth of his smile, 'who would have believed that I'd meet you here, you of all people, in a bank of all places?' After exchanging with him news of your health and of his health, and after finding common interest in the fineness of the winter weather, you shyly, apologetically, slide the cheque towards him (how tiresome and incidental all such business is), but he barely has time to glance at it when the telephone rings at his elbow. 'Why, Henry,' he exclaims in astonishment over the telephone, as though Henry too were the last person he expected to speak to on such a day, 'what's the news of you?' The news takes a long time to absorb; the teller smiles whimsically at you: business is business.

E. M. Cioran, from The Trouble with Being Born

"What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do."

silver ejection scar

Joy Stones

The first couple seconds of Love Will Tear Us Apart resemble the first couple seconds of Jumpin Jack Flash.

Meanness regarding Omaha.

I've thought some more about this habit of making fun of Omaha and I have to admit that it is shallow and false. In truth I do not think poorly of Nebraska; rather I value greatly you homespun people of the Middle, with your cornbread wisdom and your reknowned, authentic "culture of the pie". Those of us who live in sophisticated bustling coastal metropolises, with our too many sexual partners, our overpriced narcotics, and our distressingly wide choice of entertainment options, look to you "folk" in the doughy center to in a sense keep it real for us. It's up to you to hold our national keel planted firmly in the rich black soil of the prairie, and to guide this country by the twinkling star of homemade values in her times of trouble.

This really happened.

At the beginning of a formal religious service the thought suddenly occurred to me: I've never seen a picture of Gandalf going to the toilet.

required writing

The first thought that came to mind was the time you went to unload supplies to...a middle eastern country (is that right?). When you told me about this i wondered about the faces of the men you worked with...the details.

That slight of a moment when your feelings change towards something, someone...the adjustments of perspective.


The daily routine of your work in Austria. (I have this wrong as well, don't I? the chalet you worked at...)

London in the winter, then the spring.

A can of spotted dick.

A character that flew in and is staying for a while...a snippy nose and unbearable sadness.

An account of all the rooms you've slept in.

Those boots you wear.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space.

Danusiu! Danusiu!
Córeczka radosna moja!
Dokąd leciesz? Gdzie śpisz?

"Conradi himself quotes a French Catholic priest who in his nineties was asked what, if anything, he had learned about the human heart after continuous exposure to its darkest secrets. Nothing at all, the priest first replied. Then, after some reflection, he said that he had understood one thing: that there are fundamentally no grown-ups."

"Excuse me, sir! Sir..."

"...you have fascist testicles."

First post: the past.

A sister insisted I do this. I resisted for philological reasons I will explain in the future.

My firm intention is to cultivate an atmosphere of cheerful mean-spiritedness.

Indiscriminate use of italics is also on the cards.