BLCKDGRD

My Face Had Been Sliced Off and Lay There on the Ground Like a Washcloth With My Testicles and Penis Next to It

Every post is bleggalgazing about my motives for shetty blegging. I want to be deified and inconsequential. I obsess about collegiality and want to be invisible. I'm a fucking mess, but for all my addiction to pings I'll not be applying for this:

In September, The Post will introduce a new reader-driven blog for fans, by fans, focused solely on Washington sports. To fill out our roster of fan bloggers, we're looking for one of our best, most diehard D.C. United fans to weigh in on whatever's happening in the world of United. While we'll ask all bloggers to occasionally weigh in on all Washington's pro teams, we're particularly interested in having an established D.C. United voice as part of the project.

Meantime, Roger Clemons, who I bet you any number of pints believes Obama is a Muslim, will be a shiny example that the rich and gifted don't get away with lying under oath to Congress in America, right, Mr Blankfein?

• Of course Glenn Beck is an asshole - it's just as "inappropriate" for him to hold his Cracker March on August 28 at the Lincoln Memorial as it is for a Muslim community center to be built two blocks from Ground Zero - but he's well within his "rights."
• World's Shittiest Human farts, giggles.
• UPDATE! I confess I'm surprised YFWP allows Sargent to consistently call The World's Shittiest Human on his bullshit.
• Jeffrey Goldberg wants to be the next World's Shittiest Human once the World's Shittiest Human does the world a favor and fucking dies.
• Obamapologist!
• Austerity works if.....
• Not going Galt.
• Hell is other producers.
• Private property is cool if you're Amish.
• Ten shameless Right-Wing tributes to Ayn Rand.
• I'm voting Teaparty!
• Schlock and yawn.
• UPDATE! Ethan calls bullshit on pwoggly wankery (and IOZ follows up).
• unpanoramanic.
• America is..... VOTE!
• BLCKDGRD translated into Dutch.
• UPDATE! BLCKDGRD translated into German. "Kevin Fucking Payne" in German? "Kevin Fucking Payne."
• How are the ferals doing?

• Excellently, thanks.
• UPDATE! Execute the motherfuckers.
• I'm tired of being accosted by fireman every time I go to Safeway to sign their petition, though I did sign once.
• UPDATE! Mission accomplished! I actually didn't sign the petition but didn't feel like typing out why, knowing someone else would, in angry and profane detail, if baited.
• Maryland crackers angry at Ehrlich?
• Note to self: if robbing the same place twice in three days, cover up my tattoos.
• Poetry? There's an app for that.
• RIP Bernard Knox.
• Frog feels about The National the way I feel about Elbow.
• Gah! Why the fuck is Fleet Foxes on my radio? SUCK!
• The first item is incredibly bad news, the last item incredibly sad news.
• RIP Michael Been of The Call.

AMERICAN

Frederick Seidel

My face had been sliced off
And lay there on the ground like a washcloth
With my testicles and penis
Next to it.

The car had Wyoming plates.
I'd been to Colorado but not Wyoming,
Which I gather is beautiful.
The other one I hadn't seen was Utah.

Someone had carefully cut under it and lifted it off,
I suppose to obliterate the identity,
Except had left it out in the open.
It looked like a latex glove but also someone's face.

She told me she had always loved me.
I was the happy ending of a fairy tale.
She would recognize my penis anywhere,
Even on the ground.

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Hamilton, or: I Want to Thank Two Citizens from Baldwinsville NY for Giving Me Some Perspective

Hamilton's fine, bigger than Earlham, smaller than Oberlin, as pretty as Kenyon in its own different way - it's on top of hill with a dominating view of the Mohawk Valley - but meh, I'm growing bored with this.

No, it's not my wrestling with complicity (though I'm tired of that too), which I'd be pushing through regardless of these trips and my plans for my daughter's college education - I feel zero guilt for providing my child the education she wants no matter how many Afghan children Obama bombs into freedom tomorrow.

Our student tour guide today said he grew up in Gaithersburg MD.Gaithersburg MD? I blurted. Where? I grew up in Gaithersburg MD. O, wow, he shrugged. I don't live there now. When twenty minutes later another parent asked him what other schools he'd applied to, and he said he really wanted to get into Georgetown but Georgetown turned him down. I didn't blurt, Hey, I've got two degrees from Georgetown.

The admissions officer's speech - Why You Should Choose Hamilton and Why Hamilton Will Only Choose 28% of You - was delivered by someone who physically looked and had all the mannerisms of TV's Frank with none of TV's Frank sense of humor (for all he tried).

After Hamilton we stopped for the night at a hotel west of Syracuse. As I checked in I asked the desk clerk for dining options, and she said there was a list in the room, but the best in the area was just across the field behind the motel, the Quaker Steak and Lube, which now, as I type this, is filled with at least a hundred Harley-Davidson's. The house band, as you can imagine, is covering Skynyrd.

We drove to find the restaurants on the hotel brochure list, not to eat at any of them - Dinosaur BBQ, Outback Steak House, Daniella's Steak House - all in Baldwinsville NY, three miles up the road. We figured there would be something we could all agree upon, but nope - other than two more meat purveyors, there were two seedy pubs and a gruesome looking diner. Oh well.

We'd seen a Pizza Hut just off the interstate coming into town, thought, fuck, walked in, and stood for five minutes as the waitress argued with her boyfriend while wiping down tables. She finally sat us, but both Planet and I jumped up as she'd washed down the seats too. What's wrong, she said. The seats are wet, Planet said. What, you want me to dry them too, the waitress asked. No, I said, we'll just wait a minute for them to dry while we look at the menu. What, you want me to dry them too, cause I'm real busy, said the waitress. No, thanks, I said. We left. Fuck you, said the waitress.

We walked across the lot to the grocery store. It had a service deli with a big sign that said Deli/Subs. I asked the guy behind the counter, who was wiping down the sandwich-making area as if readying for closing, Are you still making subs? He said, I've only got two sub rolls left. I asked, Is that a yes or a no? I've only got two sub rolls left. So that's a no, I said, and then the  deli manager hurried over and said, Of course we're still making subs, and the guy said, But those two sub rolls are mine. I said, Thanks, that's OK, and when the manager turned her back he gave me the finger.

I don't tell this story for any point other than we're all miserable fucking bastards. The fuck-waitress and fuck-meat slicer making $9.50 an hour didn't know I'm a middle-upper-middle class elitist bastard from the boutiques of Moco on a trip to visit top-tier boutique liberal colleges - they'd have been just as shitty to anybody. Maybe we've always been miserable fucking bastards, but we're more miserable, more fucking, more bastards than at any other point in my lifetime.

Everybody I know (including and especially me) - in real life, in Blegsylvania, those who find me worthy, those who don't - are angrier, most miserable and nastier around the edges in search of petty little fits of empty triumph. What sucks about the clusterfuck isn't its apocalyptic ZOMG! but its leaching of common decency as it slowly reveals a pathetic and base commonality it pisses us off to acknowledge.

Stuff below the fold. (Updates)

Eighty-Two Today

MY EROTIC DOUBLE

John Ashbery

He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade

Behind the house, protected from street noises,   

One can go over all kinds of old feeling,

Throw some away, keep others.

                                             The wordplay

Between us gets very intense when there are   

Fewer feelings around to confuse things.

Another go-round? No, but the last things

You always find to say are charming, and rescue me   

Before the night does. We are afloat

On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,

Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight   

That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams

As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.

I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.   

Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.   

Thank you. You are too.

We Are Back in Reality Out of Cigarettes Dying Gorgeously for an Unknown Principle

LeBron said, reading off cue cards, this entire process, in which I held hostage the hopes of loyal fans in my native Cleveland for a year (even though I had no intention of playing in this shithole one minute longer than I needed to) and in which I turned an entire cable network into my personal bitch, especially that fat fucking whore fucking Michael fucking Wilbon, has been humbling.

Run with the metaphors as far as you wish. This is as much as I'll die for this unknown principle.

UPDATE!

I can't resist re: metaphors - burning LeBron shirts, burning the masters' police cars, achieving the same ends.

UPDATE!

Yes, the fuckers ESPN/Disney/ABC censored/claimed copyright (same thing) the video. Apt. Fuckers.

• Down to the last arrows.
• I hollared at Bacevich ten days ago. IOZ does yesterday.
• Next Afghanistan.
• Parsing progressive prospectives on power's abuses.
• Thought experiment.
• Thought experiment.
• Then and now.
• A vulgar rejection.
• UPDATE! The neo-con method.
• This calls for making more poor people suffer more!
• UPDATE! This was my reaction when I saw the headline too.
• The Mickle Truth rings true to this parent of a rising high school senior.
• Dear Someone. I can vouch: hearing the gruff and serious grandpa voice over "Our troops deserve better," on this - and all advocacy ads run in DC, all run on WTOP on the sevens as we wait for the eights to get traffic, piss me off.
• Quick one.
• BLCKDGRD translated into Hungarian by someone googling eformeday eoplepay.
• My future hell.
• Maryland versus pig.
• United's weakness, USMNT's weakness = holding mids. Which I've been yodeling, yo.
• UPDATE! 4-2-3-1.
• Why England's national team sucks.
• More Robben meme!
• Rock stars grow old.
• New Sun Kill Moon!
• 1971. (h/t)
• I love Tindersticks.

KEIN TRAUM

Frank O'Hara

Awakening, now, the war has broken out
everything is vicious and cruel
as it really is
we are back in reality
out of cigarettes
dying gorgeously
for an unknown principle
as persons we are abstract
and certain
the smoldering snow is falling
as it did when Liszt died
and the Austro-Hungarian empire
was initiating trouble
a lot of trouble
there was a germ of outrageous desire
it lodged in our hearts
it will never succumb it is within us
it will never die
be we shall die
and awaken from our torment
in a storm of anguish
which is just
octaves of war
pound through my willing brain
and everything is right again
we are deciduous
like a dead tree
across this vile street
an old lady in a wig is plucking her eyebrows
in the window
death

At Night, When All the Colours Die, They Hide in Pairs and Read About Themselves -- In Colour, with Their Eyelids Shut

That's Jess, our third indoor cat, dumb, jealous, and mean, which I post instead of the ten carefully argued paragraphs I've worked on the past week on reconciling my disgust with this country with my passionate rooting interest in this country's men's soccer team, because fuck that, I promised myself I wouldn't do carefully argued paragraphs at this shuuty bloog.

I asked what would the world's reaction be if USMNT won WC10, but a more important question is what would this country's reaction be, and the more pertinent question being what would my reaction be to this country's reaction if USMNT won?

Surely, motherfucking crackers, who now call soccer fans faggot liberal speed-walkers, parading their pick-up trucks up and down main streets, honking their horns, their drunken buddies in the flat-bed waving flags, chanting U-S-A, U-S-A, would ruin my relationship with the USMNT forever.

Beyond loving soccer, beyond knowing and being invested in the USMNT players, having seen many if not most play in front of my eyes (Clint Dempsey missing the PK in MLS Eastern Conference Championship at RFK six - jeebus, six - freaking years ago, Landon Donovan racing over to taunt LOUD SIDE! whenever he scores for Gax v United), rooting for an American team that isn't a World Asshole, in a sport held in disdain by America's most jingoistic assholes, is an essential aspect of my rooting for USMNT.

The USMNT winning the World Cup? I'm rooting for the end of my rooting. No one asks me anymore how I separate my soccer and my politics.

Meanwhile, here's Gray Cat, one of our ferals, with a blue jay in her mouth she killed yesterday:

She likes jumping on my lap, rolling over, sleeping as I pet her chest and belly. Click, yo.

Any WC updates during the day will be posted here, though don't expect much about USMNT v England until tomorrow.

UPDATE!

1005 EDT - I did say Argentina would either explode or implode. KABOOM!

UPDATE!

Argentina wins but doesn't score again. This was the first of the four games where I saw how fucked the ball really is: it doesn't bounce right. A half-dozen, a dozen times, for both sides, simple passes in the air bounced six inches higher than the balls used in club soccer this past year bounced.And there hasn't been a free kick from 30 yards in that any player didn't sky ten yards high.

I don't say Fuck Adidas enough.

A MARTIAN SENDS A POSTCARD HOME

Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properites of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Sorry, no links today: haven't had time to read, and besides, we be solidly in the Blog Days of Summer: there isn't much being posted anywhere anyway. Meanwhile:

The Goat and I Walked On. It Was Getting Dark and We Were Beginning to Wonder Where We Would Spend the Night

There's an ad that's been running for about three weeks on local radio: the voice-over is in concerned emergency tone over a plaintive piano, he says, "The first time you realized clowns are kind of creepy, the first time you saw what your favorite DJ looks like, the first time you printer ran out of ink."

I heard it last evening: "The first time you saw your father try to shoot a basketball, the first time you saw what your favorite DJ looks like, the first time your printer ran out of ink."

It doesn't surprise you I notice and dwell on things like this. I turned to Earthgirl the first time I heard the original and said, That's pretty edgy for WTOP, clowns, creepy, and she said, What, I wasn't listening, so I have no witnesses.

Still, think why and how corporate let the first ad go out; daydream wistfully of the bloodletting as corporate assigned guilt and punishment; but consider mostly why corporate, to fix the fuck-up, chose to ridicule fathers rather than clowns.

O! The recital:

Planet was fine. Here's the thing:

I like D, Planet's teacher. More importantly, she loves Planet, Planet loves her.

In the late-middle of the recital, just before the older, better, pianists performed, D scheduled some nine-year old who strapped-on a harmonica and sat down at the piano and sang the single-worst song in motherfucking pop history not written by Elton Fucking John, Billy Fucking Joel's Piano Fucking Man, and the motherfucking parents, after this little turd finishes, they give this little turd a motherfucking standing ovation. Whoop! Bravo! Camera's whirling, clicking, as he bows!

Molly's next, a painfully shy and awkward fourteen-year-old, bangs out some Bach badly, rushing, trying not to cry, wanting to be anyplace else, wanting to be dead. The parents clap dutifully when she finishes.

It doesn't surprise you I said nothing to D, and won't unless she asks me, which she won't.

• When was the last time Obama had a presser?
• Things that....
• Capitalism.
• On Anarchism.
• Conceptual maps and the organization of power.
• Liberatarianism and its discontents.
• The end of the world as we know it...
• Well, these crackers are dead, but if taken alive, how many elected officials would have called for them to be stripped of their citizenship.
• What Obama said at West Point.
• Monday Morning Calumnies.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Food Movement, rising....
• Greatest hits.
• Miscellany.

• MOCO: Consequences of budget.
• UPDATE! THREE! Beltways! There will never be a bridge between the Legion and Point of Rocks. !wOOt!
• One motherfucking ambitious Virginia pig.
• A Hilltop tradition: 

• The university places a giant dumpster in the library parking lot near the adjacent dormitories, and students dump their junk, then poor Hispanics come and sift through the junk for salvage.
• Milan will be just as motivated as Juve.

• UPDATE! Delicious linkages.
• The rejection of closure.
• I'm just starting to read Chiasson.
• John Water's reading list.
• David Mitchell interview. I'm neither a zealot or a hater. I'll read the new one.
• Another Sunday NYTBR with nothing I want to read.
• Hobsbawn's days as a jazz critic.
• Scared song.
• Army dreamers.
• Barra barra.
• Waking the witch.
• The morning fog.
• John Cale covers LCD Soundsystem.

IT HAPPENS LIKE THIS

James Tate

I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory
smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me.
It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish
brown here and there. When I started to walk away,
it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered
what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's
a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People
smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat,"
I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking
my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat,"
one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon,"
I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat
stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked
up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew
everything essential about me. We walked on. A police-
man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty
fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire.
"It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back
three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning."
The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped
and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked.
"Touching this goat will change your life," I said.
"It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute,
and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's
called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery 
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you,
Officer," I said. "And we understand why you, more than
anybody, should never touch the Prince." The goat and
I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning
to wonder where we would spend the night.

Have I Mentioned That the Other Fact of Human Nature Is That Human Beings Will Do Almost Anything They See Someone Else Do and Someone Will Do Almost Anything?

Good friend Paleo Jay Dirty Old Arra 101 Bama sends news of gross lack of justice in Vermont. Think on this: one of the most honest to principles progressives I know is pissed a person is unjustly denied the opportunity to go fight in a war the progressive detests.

I know how he feels. I once rode in the backseat of a hurtling jeep doing 85 up 495 along the Delaware River while the driver, a pragmatic progressive, turned his head 180 degrees from traffic to scream at me for worrying about Tea Partiers' civil liberties.

This, brothers and sisters, is the motherfucking root and motherfucking dead-end and motherfucking gift of our motherfucking rubity.

• What everyone's talking about today.
• Asshole: The Biography.
• UPDATE! BP and the Little Eichmanns.
• Israel bans Chomsky visit.
• UPDATE! Capitalism.
• No gutter too low.
• No asshole so gaping.
• Another day in America.
• UPDATE! Secede, Alabama pigfuckers.
• Derrida fix?
• UPDATE! Fuck. Stanley. Fish.
• Hey, Ten Percent has moved, so adjust your bookmark, yo.

• At least three people who read this shetty bleg know exactly what that is and exactly where it's at.
• Lakeforest Mall!
• The second most dangerous road in MOCO.
• Wheaton!
• Fred Felton, dead.
• How about, tax the motherfucking mcmansionists.
• It won't surprise at least three of you I know exactly where this is, or to note there are two bridges on Reichs Ford Road over Bush Creek, but this article doesn't specify which one.
• UPDATE! A seriously ugly-ass kit.

• UPDATE! Thanks for the kind words, G, but the simple answer is: because this bleg sucks.
• Shields once, twice, at The Millions.
• I confess, Schuyler never moved me. I assume all responsibility.
• Dan on Biespiel's call for whatever Biespiel is calling for in poetry.
• I remember when people read Walker Percy (and Peter Taylor and William Humphrey and....)
• Six artistic takes on Blood Meridian. (h/t)
• UPDATE! Rebecca.
• Should I read Dhalgren? Why?
• UPDATE! Jigsaw feeling.
• We made a special trip two, three years ago to see this, and it's worth it.
• UPDATE! A friend reminds me Ian Curtis died 30 years ago today.

• UPDATE!

• UPDATE!

• UPDATE!

• UPDATE!

I AM YOUR WAITER TONIGHT AND MY NAME IS DMITRI

Robert Hass

I'm not going to go all classical on you, but between Planet's big recital this coming weekend when she's playing fucking Mozart and I need get fucking Mozart out of my head, plus my general mood, here, have one more:

Engendering Our Only Weather

Turning 50 beats the fuck out of me. All the reasons I've been whining about, true, and call the fucking waambulance, humans haven't evolved into better humans since my birth.

Father T, who disagreed with me on almost every political position but held humans in the same disdain as I do as justification for his positions, died, at 89, this past New Year's Eve; I only got those bookmarks on Thursday.

We weren't friends, we never had lunch, we were compelled to argue like magnets, plus-minusing the begrudged respect of those fearful they're dueling their double.

We fulfilled a function. Why Pennsylvania is still called Pennsylvania, why the eternal problems are regenerative.

• The questions.
• UPDATE! You and your bleg versus him.
• Maybe he is the best Black politician in the GOP.
• Not in your wildest wet Obama stained dreams.
• UPDATE! If it was God's plan for Palin to bump Joe Lieberman off John McCain's ticket, bully for God.
• The sublede on the front of the NYT at 8:37am Saturday 1/9/10 to the lastest Blogginhead feature is: Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast and Jonah Goldberg of National Review debate Al Qaeda’s sophistication. Shoot me.
• Nation of Spoiled Children.
• Nation of Soiled Children.
• Slapping George Will.
• The Greatest Expletive Ever?
• Takedown of the takedown of Instafuckwit.
• When reading about the Future of Crackerism, it's important to note that Mitch McConnell feels about Rubio's supporters what Harry Reid feels about you and me.

• That's on my desk (or, at time of photo, on the carpet by my desk). At least I've learned to use library books rather than buy books whose entrails I don't want to eat, just nibble at the tasty bits.
• UPDATE! Nina Power interviewed.
• The Lie of Law.
• This is the way the Chicago School ends. I know diddly academic economics, but I do know some Chicago school economists, and almost to a one, assholes as humans.
• UPDATE! Lying pussies too.
• The English are as stupid when it snows as Mocomofos, yo.
• Rush Limbaugh, The Musical!
• Five reasons pigs are more awesome than you.
• RIP Mary Daly, whom I read in two classes at Hilltop, one Feminist Theology, the other Theory and Culture.

• Purple Line.
• Guy caught who robbed the Baithersgurgle Goodwill?
• Unsuck DC Metro.
• Emilio's gone.

• Was worth the money, then he wasn't. Happens.
• When Earthgirl and me lived in Deale, we'd occasionally eat at this restaurant where people were just stabbed.
• UPDATE! Bromark just sent me this link with new DCU kits.

• Snore. That sure as fuck doesn't deserve its own post.

• Bleggalgazing!
• Blegangst!
• UPDATE! I'm told some might not be clued into the above brilliantly executed parody, which is a riff on this.
• The object in esthetic experience.
• 1930s-1940s in color (h/t).
• Lazy Bastardism.
• Spoon article in NYT. I'm neither a lover or hater, though some - not all, but some - Spoon lovers are compellingly smackable - the lamest (by far the lamest) DJ at KEXP always plays two Spoon songs back-to-back then says something cutesy like "because one Spoon song is never enough. Gag Gag Gag Gag Gag.
• Dave Rawlings Band.
• Dance.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Death Metal Rooster.

 

THREE SONNETS

James Galvin

Where I live      distance is the primal fact

The world is mostly      far away and small

Drifting along through cause and effect      like sleep

As when the distance      unlikeliest of stems

Bears the unlikely      blossom of the wind

Engendering our only weather      dry

Except in winter      pine trees live on snow

So greedy      pulling down these drifts that bury

The fences snap      the trunks of smaller trees

If the forest wants      to go somewhere it spreads

Like a prophecy      its snow before it

Technology      a distant windy cause

There is no philosophy      of death where I live

Only philosophies      of suffering

Another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever.

Volitionless, from Different Heights, and in the One Direction

I busted my head open Monday night. Tuesday is trash day, so I went to drag the trash cans from the backyard to the curb, and after the first trip, walking back, I slipped on an ice patch at the fence gate, my head taking full brunt of the fall, slammed flush into our cast iron fence.

Sitting on the sofa afterwards, telling a frantic Planet I didn't need to go the hospital while wincing as Earthgirl cleaned and dressed the wound, while pressing a bag of frozen corn against my head to try and stop the swelling, I was flipping the channels of the TV and saw Cowbell Girl and wondered, maybe I do have a concussion, then in the morning vividly remembered her but imagined I'd dreamed her in the weird sleep of the night.

I'm fine. I literally have a hard head. Gonna suck for a few days - the rest of my body is insisting it's hurt too; I'm looking at rainbow bruises - but I'm fine.

People are mocking Cowbell Girl, people who've never been in a marching band, who'd never snuck off from JT's band of Trojans to get as stoned and drunk as possible before a halftime performance at a Washington Dip's game at one of the Woodson High Schools in NOVA, you don't know what it's like to want to get into the pants of that Cowbell Girl after she made that face.

Of course you do. Everything is high school. Coercion is ticket and passport, sex appeal freighted on frequencies of defiant irony and compliant damn.

• Who knew blegfriend Montag was Mike Shanahan's agent?  ESPN's Adam Schefter is reporting now that the two sides have begun to discuss contract details. Schefter has as close a relationship with Mike Shanahan as anyone in the media, dating back to Schefter's time covering Shanahan's teams in Denver. Schefter, in fact, wrote Shanahan's 2000 book, "Think Like A Champion." Schefter tweeted this afternoon: "Talks went well enough last night that Mike Shanahan summoned his agent, Sandy Montag, to Washington to negotiate his contract." And though I understand why he never mentioned it, who knew Montag's first name was Sandy?
• BTW, your Washington Redskins? Now coached by a man whose agent is a business partner of Ari Fleischer and whose new general manager is brother of George Macaca Allen.
• Blowback, 2020.
• Cheney, Politico, yadda.
• Pastor Sanctimonious, who appears weekly courtesy of Your Fucking Washington Post, is a fucking pussy.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post.
• Your Fucking Washington Post zeroes in on Obama's problems.
• pRonstachery!
• Cocksucker of the Year! More evidence.
• The pictures of war you're not supposed to see.
• On sillyass libertarians.

• On sillyass Star Trek allusions:

• Things you might have missed.
• Shop at Whole Foods?
• The Church of the Consumer.
• Work.
• Gnome Chomsky.
• He named his bong Lurch! Bleggalgazingest congrats!

• Restoring Catoctin Aqueduct.
• My Future Hell.
• My Future Hell.
• My Future Hell.
• Maryland's Great Country Club Tax Break.
• Peebles? No, not one of those two, though the younger one did try to friend me on Facebook about three months ago.
• Dead deer in your yard, Mocomofo? Compost!
• Bromark sent word new United kits debut January 14.
• Here's Onalfo at his official unveiling today with a United scarf:

• Checkerboard? Sign of things to come, kit-wise?
• United news from Goff! The first noteworthy item: The heat wasn't working in the VW Lounge. Gotta love RFK. New stadium soon? Don't hold your breath. "Things are pretty much the same," club president Kevin Payne said. "We remain interested in D.C., but we are having conversations with Maryland and a jurisdiction in Virginia."
• This is good news, though.
• UPDATE! STOKES! (And Cruz Azul wants Nicolas Addlery?)
• O! BTW? Strike.
• Strike. Or lockout.
• UPDATE! Courtesy of Bromark, this link re: MLS labor crisis.
• Man Utd in terminal decline?

• Most Anticipated Books of 2010. Books I won't be reading include new novels from McEwan, Carey, Doyle, Amis, Ellis, Smiley, Roth, and Franzen. I don't want to read the new DeLillo but probably will out of some sillyass sense of obligation to know what everyone else is yammering about. 
• This, however, will be read as soon as I get my hands on it: An excerpt of this new novel by “pioneering postmodernist” Coover was published a while back in Vice. It is introduced thusly: “Noir is a short novel starring you as Philip M. Noir, Private Investigator. It began as a story about a dockside detective in pursuit of something—like truth or beauty, the ineffable—and became over the course of its writing a kind of companion piece to Ghost Town, which played with the western genre and mythology the way this one plays with the hard-boiled/noir genre and urban myth.
• Of the 14 books on this list of neglected books of the past decade, I can honestly say I hadn't heard of 13 of them, and the one I knew about is by a guy in my above list of people whose new book I'm not going to read next year.
• New Campbell McGrath poem!
• Embarrassments need not apply.
• Fuck poetry.
• More on Ashbery's Planisphere.
  
• KEXP Albums of Decade Listener Poll. I accept I just don't get Arcade Fire, and it's no surprise two Radiohead's in top five, and I've no aargh to argue about Wilco, but fucking Death Cab for Cutie at #6? Fucking Band of Horses at #9? Fucking Fleet Foxes at #10?
  
• Birthday Party.
• When was the last time this jangled in your head?
• How about this?
• Or this?
• Or this?
• Or this?
• UPDATE! Have I mentioned I like Archers of Loaf before?
• I'm ambivalent about Vampire Weekend, who's at the top of this post which I post because it has a link to a Charlotte Gainsbourg video and MP3s to other good stuff including Kurt Vile and especially Fucked Up.
• Today's Listening Assignment.
• Another posting of one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever, just put in my head seconds ago.
• UPDATE! Jim's comment about black ice made me think of this, another one of dozens of my favorite five songs ever. XTC has about two dozen of them.
• UPDATE! Maybe I did take a harder knock than I'm allowing, because this is the song I meant to post.

PORCELAIN

Carl Phillips

As when a long forgetfulness lifts suddenly, and what
we'd forgotten—as we look at it squarely, then again
refuse to look—is our own
                                                 inconsequence, yes, it was
mostly like that, sex as both an act of defacement and—
as if the two were the same thing—votive offering,
insofar as the leaves
                                     also were a kind of offering, or could
at least be said to be, as they kept falling the way leaves
do: volitionless, from different heights, and in the one direction.

 

I bet a pint the new Beach House will be one of my favorites of 2010, and this is already another one of dozens of my five favorite songs ever:

Poetry Ends Like a Rope

So true it's trite: 

Indeed, sadly, we have both the government and the news industry we deserve. Tens of millions of people now form their dogged (unfounded, hysterical, self-defeating, etc.) opinions about politics (and law and governance and history and science) based upon the sly words and dramatic performances of modern-day carnival barkers, false prophets and snake-oil salesmen like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace...

Intellectual honesty and rigor, or reasoned, dispassionate analysis, is for wimps, public television and the occasional unscripted moment on the Sunday shows. This paradigm wouldn't have been tolerated by news executives even ten years ago.

Ten year's ago? Tell that to the Clintons sixteen years ago.

Jackson Lear, from the preface to his new Rebirth of America: 1877-1920:

The laizzez-faire culture of market exchange played on ancient carnival traditions but detached them from constraints of time, place, and local authority. In an expanding capitalist economy, the representatives of the market were mobile and marginal. Often they were itinerant peddlers of exotic goods - perfumes, jewelry, magic elixirs. Patent medicines in particular became the focus for fantasies of regeneration through purchase. The promise of magical self-transformation through market exchange animated the endless renewal of consumer desire.

We've always been a country of con-men and grifters and eager rubes, peddling faith and stealing faith and buying faith to regenerate our failed selves. One of the standard scams is to bemoan the scamming. Witness BLCKDGRD!

Shit amasses; bullshit tastes the same.

• American World of War.
• Ideal of the post-democratic multitude.
• Obamapologist tells you to grow up.
• Living on Food Stamps.
• Bono is a moron, though the NYT puts him (and his stoopid-ass glasses) on their op-ed page.
• A last note on Health Care.
• Hume schooling.
• The Morgan Freeman Chain-of-Command.
• UPDATE! Morgan Freeman steals dead Walter Cronkite's job.
• Fat fuck-faced face-mullet gloats.
• Jesus fucking Christ.
• Shoot me.

• O'Malley's potential opponents.
• Maryland 2010 political preview.
• MOCO's 2009 top stories.
• MOCO decade reviewed. Snipers are what I'll remember.
• ICC!

• Bleggalgazing!
• Speaking of Bleggalgazing! this past weekend I actually started to make changes to the blegrell - I want to sort out the newer links in New Toys - like the guy I linked to above - from older New Toys which really aren't New Toys anymore, but fucking Typepad's typelist function is fucked and I can't add a new list. Meaning, there are some New New Toys mixed up with Old New Toys if you're curious to look. I was also going to build the cemetery for the dead, those in comas, those on permanent hiatus, but see two sentences above for news on fucking Typepad's typelist function being fucked. (And speaking of Fuck Typepad: you've no idea of how much Typepad fucked with the fonts in the top segment. Fuck Typepad.)
• Bleggalgazing!
• It's one word, pronounced  blakDAHGred, since someone asked.
• He's a Whore! or: Bleggalgazing!
• Bleggalgazing! of a sort.
• Bleggalgazing!
• Meh, or Bleggalgazing! And you know I've stored that Charles Nelson Reilly image, oh yes you do.

• Well, I finally watched The Big Lebowski, and !SNORT! and while there are funnier scenes, this happened to me twice, though not in a taxi. Two of you can guess whose car.
• Serendipitously.
• Before you ask, I just don't watch movies, not out of any principle, not because I don't enjoy watching movies, it just doesn't occur to me, when I have free time, to watch movies - I grab a book. This does not make me better than anyone.
• RE: Grifters - 2010 resolution: not just Moby Dick (a chapter a day, mofos, a chapter a day), and not just Confidence Man, but Pierre too.
• Sex and the American Male Novelist. Click, yo.

• UPDATE! Male writers go limp.
• I may have posted this before, but looking for something else I found a review of Jack Spicer by Cal Bedient.
• New Literary History of America reviewed.
• I don't get it, but a friend I trust tells me Sondheim's a genius.
• Megabeats and Megabytes.
• A 4:20 summation of the passing decade.
• Darkblack's Sunday Overnight includes..... Bleggalgazing!
• This is a great album, as is this.
• Post-Delgados.
• Vic Chestnutt.

 

A BOOK OF MUSIC

Jack Spicer

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves' boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.