January 2012
2 posts
December 2011
5 posts
“TERRY: Because I think what is killing us is the level of comfort, this of...”
– Interview: Tim DeChristopher and Terry Tempest Williams | Terry Tempest Williams | Orion Magazine
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2012: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy As the Human... →
So I wrote my year-end piece for Wonkette, and it’s basically a very long Mayan Apocalypse/2012 rant that ends up yelling at Radiohead for being frauds, because they wouldn’t go play their guitars for 10 minutes at Occupy Wall Street.
November 2011
12 posts
Worth another, slow read: @Xeni's Q&A with #OWS... →
Mark Read on Boing Boing:
“It’s the beginning of the beginning.” I loved that one. So frequently, things happen in the world that make it feel like we’re at the beginning of the end. But—”the beginning of the beginning,” what a radically optimistic statement that is.
The scale of the environmental and economic crisis we are facing, it’s ...
“That’s pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline...”
– Hahaha, I think I’ll print out this Noam Chomsky quote and staple it to my first-grader’s next Behavior Report. (You know, because he gets bored sitting there after the work is done, and wants to draw or talk or hear a story.) — Via cultureofresistance.
Matt Langer: Here's a thought! →
langer:
It’s novel, I know, but seriously: If you, in your professional capacity as a reporter, run a story based on what “policemen say,” when what “policemen say” has been clearly and thoroughly contradicted beyond any and all reasonable doubt by who knows how many thousands of firsthand…
Congressional Support Grows For Bill To Shut Down... →
Here’s a post I just typed up for Wonkette, about the delightful new “Great Firewall” law the “Bipartisan Congress” is cooking up for Obama to sign. And, I guess, this will be all blocked out by Tumblr for the CENSORED stunt, which is good?
Long ago I lived in a moldy Victorian in the Lower... →
Here is Tony Pierce writing about it.
“Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies,...”
– I almost always agree with Chris Hedges, and have long admired him for dumping the NYT for becoming a Prophet. But his writing isn’t always so awesome. This column is awesome: http://www.truth-out.org/what-revolution-looks/1321384587 )
When Badass Environmental Groups Fight Back... →
cultureofresistance:
John Sauven, Executive Director of Greenpeace, attacked Sea Shepherd today in a Huffington Post story accusing us of being counter productive to the campaign of saving whales. “We have to say each to their own tactics. We think strategically to fight our battles and we feel that we are winning the battle against whaling by talking to the Japanese themselves,” he stated. “Sea...
4 tags
6 tags
October 2011
6 posts
2 tags
Recession Officially Over, U.S. Incomes Kept... →
The recession is over! Oh wait ….
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“We intend to march on the police everywhere …. The precise programming of...”
– William S. Burroughs, from the June 1969 Evergreen Review, quoted in V. Vale’s most recent “weekly column” on the RE/Search blog, July 24, 2011, “We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems.”
September 2011
6 posts
5 tags
“Joblessness continues to rise, particularly among the youth, who typically...”
– Riots: Violent unrest has swept Europe and the Middle East. Is America next? - By Sudhir Venkatesh (via paulmdavis)
“If you want your government to stop killing everybody, at home and abroad, you...”
– Sun Tzu, Tumblr
Here's an interview I did with The Nevada Review. →
August 2011
8 posts
“The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to...”
– Congress Giving Millions of Foreclosed Homes To Wall Street Slumlords
This should be kind of big news on the outrage front, shouldn’t it?
Angry, frustrated and scared, thousands of... →
They expected maybe a thousand to show up. At least twice that many jobless L.A. people turned out, “hurting, frustrated and angry.” One day soon, they’ll figure out that not even Maxine Waters is going to change the basic system of boom/bust with the poor and the black always taking the pain.
“We desire to be redeemed from the grossness of our consumption, the sham of our...”
– Postmodernism is dead | Prospect Magazine
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“The Obama administration is examining ways to pull foreclosed properties off the...”
– Government Considering Renting Foreclosed Homes - WSJ.com
“In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved...”
– (via Penny Red re: the London riots)
Everything that’s wrong with our media in one exchange.
(via anthonyking)
Submitted without comment.
(via laughterkey)
Ken Layne's Modest Utopia | Commentary | SoCal... →
July 2011
6 posts
6 tags
Here's a weird thing to find the day after...
Similar small underground labyrinths have been found across Europe, from Hungary to Spain, but no one knows why they were built. At least 700 of these chambers have been found in Bavaria alone, along with about 500 in Austria. In the local vernacular, they have fanciful names such as “Schrazelloch” (“goblin hole”) or “Alraunenhöhle” (“mandrake...
Here's the latest chapter of my California... →
Sunset magazine and genocide in a single web article.
The first real review: 'Populist Fatalism - The...
Caleb Cage, editor of The Nevada Review, has written the first full review of Dignity, for The Rumpus.
Very pleased with this. Cage got right into the guts of the thing: the invented religious rituals, the intentional collapse of the state that brings on the crisis, and the weird housing stock that westerners have accepted as part of the damaged-yet-grand landscape. And he treats the book as a...
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'Freegans On the Run'
I did not know (until just now) that Rebecca Schoenkopf’s review/feature about Dignity was in Las Vegas CityLife last week.
And for those who asked, my annual camping/hiking trip to Tuolumne Meadows was nothing like this.
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Imperial outposts, architecture schools, death...
This new novel I’m writing takes place, sort of, in the old Spanish missions of Southern California. For research purposes, I went to three missions and one sub-mission, all by train and trolley.
And because I’m now doing this “re-imagining spaces” column for FourStory.org, I wrote about the missions going from Imperial conversion churches/fortresses to stop the Russian/British territorial ...
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Case #117: Recurring dream of a place (Prague)...
Many Czech emigres in Toronto say they had the same recurring dream in the 1980s as this Canadian writer, Paul Wilson. He describes walking the dark winding streets of Prague and meeting his old friends there, but always in fear of being found by the police.
He describes the semi-nightmares as intense, “hyper-realistic” nocturnal voyages through Prague, with a “powerful erotic...
June 2011
13 posts
My new column about re-using America's unwanted...
In this strange new post-growth era, America has a vast oversupply of unwanted suburban houses and retail space. We can do interesting things with these charmless buildings. That’s what my new twice-monthly column is about, over at the sustainable housing website FourStory.org.
In the first installment, I write about a stunning new nature center/community building created from a dreary...
Another reason not to have cable/satellite...
“Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.”— New York Times
“Wonkette editor Ken Layne has just published a novel. Related: Wonkette editor...”
– Thanks, Hamilton Nolan, for writing this a week or two ago. (One thing about not being on the Internet is you don’t see things on the Internet.) Gawker.com
“Written in an epistolary style that references other such texts, such as the...”
– “What is the ideal community” | Central Coast Foodie
