Like the People Who Came Back from Provence (When It Was Provence) and Said It Was Pretty but the Food Was Greasy

Bleg eons ago I was invited to group-blog at Best of the Blogs (which is down as I type this for server maintenance, its Kind owner Jerry, who I still occasionally e-yap with, just told me). I left either a year and a half or two and a half years ago - I didn't want to bleg there what I bleg here and I didn't want to bleg two ways. To be thoroughly fair to Jerry, he never told me I couldn't bleg there like I bleg here, but I was moving away from the readership and thought it time for me to leave.

Serendipitously, two reminders in a week of my time there:

First, yesterday's huge story on Top Secret America in the (to its credit) Washington Post is written by Dana Priest and William Arkin. I'll let Greenwald summarize; I'm sure it will come up again. The BoB connection is that sometime back in 2006, BoB created an award called the Kruggie, given to the reporter who demonstrated journalistic bravery and integrity in the Bush Continuum. It was awarded once, to Priest for her stories on CIA black sites. Since I was the only BoB-guy in DC, I had the honor of contacting her and hand-delivering a very nice, not-cheesy, crystal plaque of a sort. She met me in the lobby of the Washington Post's 15th Street monolith, took me upstairs to her cubicle, and yapped with me for a good hour. Completely nice, completely together.

BoB story two: Jerry, when I started posting music on BoB, asked me to contribute Indie rock reviews to his contemporary classical music blog Sequenza21, which is how I met On an Overgrown Path, a blog you need make mandatory daily reading (and listening, yo), and its extraordinarily Kind and generous and brilliant proprietor Pliable, but I only thought I wanted to grow up like Bob Shingleton.

I sucked as Indie music blogger. I was good for about six months - one post on Pere Ubu got a very excellent comment from Alex Ross, and Bob said very Kind things about the blog at OaOP - but I was writing for professional musicians and music academics - some of my cobloggers wrote symphonies - and I'm not a professional musician or academic; sheeyit, I don't like doing research now in what I am credentialed in. I started posting songs - just songs, songs I liked, songs from new albums - and pinging slowed up then disappeared as I posted less and less, and I was leaving BoB, Jerry was upgrading both sites.... and no sad.

Which makes three bleggalgazings not only in the month of July but within a week. I lied when I said I limit myself to twelve a year.

• Blog Theory.
• Destroying history, one pixel at a time.
• Feminism cannot address sexism?
• Remembering why you are a feminist.
• Ismism.
• UPDATE! The imperialism of market "reason."
• Killing fields of multinational corporations.
• The United States of British Petroleum.
• Get ready for these types of stories.
• Portrait of things to come.
• Excellent linkages.
• More Jensen.
• UPDATE! On the fuss at scienceblogs.
• Demonstration of the rules of surveillance.
• All restaurants are now Taco Bell.
• UPDATE! In case you had any doubts that Obama is a pussy.
• UPDATE! I'm sure I'm not the first to use Vilsack of shit.
• It's pretty fucking remarkable Priest's and Arkin's piece is in Your Fucking Washington Post. It will be fascinating if predictable to watch Fred Hiatt's op-ed page fight back.
• Et viola, Michael Mukasey.
• YFWP.
• ROFL.
• ICYBTD?
• Why you shouldn't read the Daily Beast.
• How the fur trade shaped America?

• Midcounty Highway extension?
• Metro seat hogs!
• This year's EPL homekits. Arsenal's is gorgeous.
• When ugly kits battle.
• Brazilian football fields.
• Sal Zizzo? Zizzo, who represented the U.S. at both U-20 and U-23 levels, saw his contract with Bundesliga side Hannover 96 expire, clearing the way for him to sign in the MLS. His latest destination could be determined as soon as this Wednesday, when he'll be placed in a weighted lottery. The same source indicated that D.C. United and the Kansas City Wizards will have the best chance of landing the former UCLA standout.
• UPDATE! I couldn't give a flying fuck about the hockey team and care even less about the the basketball team, but I wish Ted Leonsis owned my soccer team.
• Bromark sends this:

• Vollmann's Kissing the Mask. I'm waiting for the paperback.
• Mrs Feller's 4th grade Washington Grove class 1969.
• A professor/friend has been urging me to try Olson again.
• I confess, Sandover turned me off Merrill. Ouija board, yo.
• (Ouija is Element 47.) Bless serendipity.
• UPDATE! Serendipity abounds.
• Discovering Seidel.
• Szomorú vasárnap.
• Fables of the Reconstruction is 25. You're old. REM hasn't aged as well for me as I would have guessed 25 years ago.
• Occupational hazards.
• The Depreciation Guild has listened to Cocteau Twins.
• UPDATE! Gordon Fucking Sumners, that cunt. (Thnx, RC!)
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight.
• Wis[s]e Words Metal Mondays.
• UPDATE! Candy! Fey or twee?
• Catching the butterfly.
• Me and the devil.

FAILING AND FLYING

Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars 
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say 
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

I can't stop listening to the new Chemical Brothers: