Song of the Monad

Come in here, Dear boy, have a cigar.
You're gonna go far,
You're gonna fly high,
You're never gonna die,
You're gonna make it, if you try;
They're gonna love you.
Well I've always had a deep respect,
And I mean that most tensely.
The band is just fantastic,
that is really what I think.
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.

We're just knocked out.
We heard about the sell-out.
You gotta get an album out.
You owe it to the people.
We're so happy we can hardly count.
Everybody else is just green,
Have you seen the chart?
It's a hell of a start,
It could be made into a monster
If we all pull together as a team.

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
We call it Riding the Gravy Train.

tastefully framed subliminal painting in a private karaoke room

what Tennyson once called the “Parliament of Man, the federation of the world.”

"Did any of the world religions, in some of their sects, recommend the perfection of ambivalence as a spiritual course whereby the novice ensures that he'll never be completely disappointed even as he also disqualifies himself from any true satisfaction? I wondered this."
—Benjamin Kunkel, Indecision

not another generalization

“From being inside the center of the storm, I’ve learned not just about the structure of government, not just about how power flows in many countries around the world that we’ve dealt with, but rather how history is shaped and distorted by the media,” Julian Assange

amalgamation

Blockbouster Video on Quinpool Road

"For the 1889 Paris Exposition, Jules Bourdais, a prominent French architect, proposed to erect a tower 360 metres (1200 feet) high in the centre of Paris, near the Pont-Neuf, with arc-lights strong enough to illuminate the whole city. By this means the street lighting of Paris, which at the time consisted of thousands of gas-lamps, was to be transformed into city lighting. This proposal by the builder of the Trocadéro was the subject of a detailed discussion, along with another vision involving a tower, that of the bridge builder Gustave Eiffel. Eventually, however, the committee preparing the exposition decided to accept Eiffel's project. No one doubted that it was technically possible to illuminate the whole of Paris from one source of light. In the end, Eiffel's tower was built, not because it was considered less far-fetched than Bourdais'—on the contrary, contemporaries feared being blinded by such a centralized light source."
—Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night

did you RSVP? did you cause a scene?

Hotel by Guillaume Apollinaire
My bedroom is shaped like a cage
The sun puts its arm through the window
As for me I want to smoke to make a mirage
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don't want to work I want to smoke

"For example, if viewed as an "artist", David Bowie makes no sense at all. He seems to be little more than a perpetually spooked moth in slip-ons, sputtering, in a series of self-shaming leaps towards imagined relevance, from one swiftly guttering fad to another – grunge metal, drum and bass and having a skellington face. But imagine Bowie instead as a cunning lichen, an adaptive tuber or a semi-sentient mould, endlessly reshaping himself in search of the moisture of acclaim, and it is easy to understand him."

- Stewart Lee

Effigy of the State

“If contemporary art, marginal and minute as its influence is, doesn’t get it together and offer new models for a future some of us still hope to have, chances are at this point nobody will, and that’s more than a shame.” Holland Cotter, “Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together,” The New York Times, January 19, 2003