Sunday, July 22, 2012

Hounds of Love


"The important thing is, is this the road to Fuck City?" - Gov. Nikki Haley

"Go back to your Lizard Pope, Creek bitch!" - Tom Cruise, breaking it off

"If your true love is money, you will never be unfaithful." - Michael Bloomberg on Anthony Weiner

"Zionist infiltrator Anthony Weiner and Muslim Brotherhood infiltrator Huma Abedin named their child 'Jordan'? Well, this joke makes itself." - Michelle Bachmann

"Just because Rep. Bachmann's attacks on Ms. Abedin have no basis in fact should not stop us from disliking Ms. Abedin as an emblem of purposeless ambition." - John McCain

"If I had a dime for every time I declined to sleep with a woman, I'd have a useless surplus of dimes." - Rob Lowe

"You can fuck a gun."- David Keene, President of the National Rifle Association

"I truly hate my body, and I cannot wait to be rid of it." - Larry Summers, poolside

"Now, I'm not saying they're at all comparable, but telling a fat person that they aren't unattractive just because they're fat is like telling a black person that racism doesn't exist." - Chris Christie

"Why write an essay about capitalism when you could make a film about male strippers?" - Steven Soderbergh

"Are you sure you wanna do this, lady? I mean, I'm a monster." - Rep. G. K. Butterfield, Nags Head Oyster Bar

"I'm sick of it! Your skin is just too damn dry!" - Justice Alito to his wife on their anniversary

"It's never too late to fuck."
"What are you talking about?!"
- Dr. John Boehner and the upper half of Eric Cantor

"I feel bad for unfaithful politicians, I really do. We clamor to be ruled, and then those whom we burden with the responsibility of enslaving us, we in turn enslave to our hypocritical fantasies of domestic normalcy. Everyone knows that family is hell, and yet these guys are forced it like studs, forced to surrender not just their own freedom, but also that of their wives and children, forced to (let's be honest) dominate them, to lie to them, humiliate them, make them bear the yolk of their own unfreedom, all to please the howling, diabetic crowds. Let them be rich. Let them grow fat off our work. Let them cheat and lie and steal, as long as it's only money that's at stake. But God forbid they go looking for fresh poon, as they inevitably will, trapped as they are in their hyperscrutinized hell and denied even the relief of professional services (a prohibition that frankly boggles the mind given our unanimous cynicism about the transactional nature of everyday life and of politics especially). We set the trap and we squeal with masochistic delight every time they fall into it, outraged, not because they betrayed their families, but because they betrayed our fantasies, fantasies no one believed in begin with." - Nicholas Kristof to his Thai escort

"Damn you. Damn the way you make me love you." - Markus Dohle, CEO of Random House, to a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey

Hounds of Hell


"Once I was clinically dead on the operating table and I had one of them out-of-body experiences, started headin' toward the light down some great big spirit tunnel, and I said, What the hell is this?! I don't wait in lines! I'm goddam rich! If my Maker wants to meet me, he can take a damn number! Then I finally got to the end and where was I? Purgatory. Purgatory! You don't think I earned it? I hollered. You send me to Hell right God damn now or I'll frack this fucking waiting room into oblivion." - T. Boone Pickens

"Seal me inside!" - Silvio Berlusconi

"I die for the Race!" - George Zimmerman, bleeding out on the steps of the Tampa Bay Times Forum, August 30, 2012

"All that has been done to improve the quality of life is undermined by the extension of its duration." - Joe Paterno

"Either total anarchy or brutal dictatorship: please, just give me one or the other!" - Eric Cantor, walking out of Congress

"You appear in a different form, but still I hunt you!" - Chris Christie chasing Jon Corzine dressed as Donald Duck, Disney World

"Management is the illusion of management."
"Yes, but the same could/must be said of happiness."
- Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein

"If you hate America so much, why don't you become a terrorist?"
"Because there's nothing worth fighting for."
- a College Republican accosting Glenn Greenwald while on vacation in Rio

"There's evil in the world and it's ineradicable. We resist it, of course, but our victories are temporary. Fact is, there is more evil than good, and if Time had a finish line, evil would win, but Times doesn't, so we fight on, forever, a losing battle." -Takashi Miike

"Any man who can't regard his former self as an external enemy to be fought and overcome doesn't have what it takes to work for me." - Mitt Romney

Inevitably, the question comes.
"Well, what do you want to do?"
I know that the obvious answer will not satisfy him, but I say it anyway.
"Nothing."
"What do you mean nothing?"
"I don't want to do anything."
This is unacceptable to him.
"Anything?"
"I don't want to do anything."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. I don't want to do anything. I want to fucking die. What do you want me to say?'
"OK. Tell me this. Just imagine. Imagine your ideal life. Just hypothetically. In your ideal life, what are you doing?"
"I... I don't know."
"Come on. It's OK. Just as an exercise."
"I don't know. I don't know what I want to do."
"Just imagine your ideal life. Just your day to day life. What do you want it to be like?"
This black mail is infuriating. He won't be satisfied until I give him what he wants to hear--nothing other than his own vicarious expectations for me, which are lowering by the second.
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I don't know. Do I have to?"
"Everyone does."
"I don't think that's true."
"Of course it is."
"No, it isn't. Jesus Christ. What do I want my ideal life to be like? I want to be comfortable and not suffer all the fucking time. What the fuck does anyone want?"
"I mean for work."
"I don't want to fucking work. I want to be free."
"Well, we all want that."
"Do we? You seem to care a lot about getting ahead."
"I do."
"Okay, then, I guess we want different things."
"This isn't about what I want, it's about what you want."
"I want to be left alone."
"Okay. Now we're getting some where."
I should have smashed my pint glass in his fucking face.
- from the diary of Barack Obama, entry recounting a career development seminar with Larry Tribe, November 9, 1989

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Great Turtlenecks in Culture

"What do we do?!"
"Keep walking."
"But we've got to get help!"
I looked at him, hard.
"We can't just leave her here!"
"Can't do nothing for her now."
"Christ, Michael, she looks only sixteen—"
Socked him one in the kidney. That shut him up.
"You listen to me, Burton. Geordies don't fink, do you hear?"
Wiped his vomit from me shoes.
"Wasn't you put her there, was it? You just found her. And now you forgot her. We're just two blokes out for a walk on the beach. Just another day in New Castle."

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The Year of the Diamond Dogs

"I have seen the Insect Queen, and I know that no man can resist her honey. Hail, Beatrix Atossa!" - John Boehner, upon his inauguration as president through line-of-succession

"I'm not going to cast aspersions on a man's motives, but I suspect the Speaker may be infected by the Parasite." - Sen. McCaskill D-MO, debating the Insect Purchase

"All the money is turning to stinging insects, ahhhh!!!" - Bruce Ratner, Barclays Center opening night

"Revolutionary violence forgives itself, but state violence is always already forgiven." -Asma al-Assad shopping for baubles at Harrod's

"Obama is a Zeta!" - Bernie Sanders being dragged beneath the Vice Presidential Residence

"Mr. President just what just fuck is going on out there?"
"I'll tell you this, Steve, nothing good ever comes out from under your basement stairs."
- Barack Obama, Diane Sawyer Locusta

"Hee hee hee!" - Rick Parry videotaping uninsured Texans fighting in the Pit

"Hick now, hick forever!" - RoboPaul, upon being appointed to Congress by the Algorithm

"Libor!" - Paul Krugman emerging form the Columnist Break Room covered in blood

"Harry Dean Stanton is the Higgs field of cinema." - Peter Bogdonavich dropping some really heady shit on Dennis Hopper

"Maybe I've had a mood disorder." - Sen. Mitch McConnell, fingering his pistol, Ruby

"Never forget what's most important. Not money. Power." - Robert Caro, Harvard Business School Pupation Ceremony

"At this point the Earth will basically be the first sperm to die in an act of cosmic incest." - Energy Secretary Stephen Chu explaining the Future to his children

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Everyone Is Lonely

"Look up, boys! The work week is over! It's time for the hellish, Darwinian struggle of trying to get laid in a major American city!" - New York City Park Supervisor For Life Bill Clinton, Casual Friday

"I used to dream of triumphant orgies. Now I dream of losing my bladder in job interviews." - Millennial Maggie

"Two words, Holden: incurable gonorrhea." - Martin Peretz to Peter Beinart

"The numbers add up, fuckers! Scores!" - Peter Higgs

"Whores are the mine canaries of modernity." - Balzac, whacked out on mezcal

"Yes, loneliness is awful, but love is much worse." - Donald Trump

"Report me to the sexual authorities!" - David Zuma Letterman

"Sex with men is rape." - Goethe

"Be my Victimtine." - Vladimir Putin

"Fingerpaint me." - Newt Gin Ginch, Titanic 3D

"Love is against my principles." - John Yoo, Heart and Dagger Saloon, Oakland

"You can frighten off a bear, boys, but you have to fight a cougar." - Peggy Noonan to a terrified group of Cub Scouts

"Why have the love you deserve when you could have the love you can afford?" - Jamie Dimon

"We all dine alone." - Larry Summers

"All my successes only make me more lonely." - Richard Branson to Boris Johnson, Scores, Singapore

"Go long enough without getting laid and horniness and introspection become indistinguishable." - James Franco

"I vacillate between the atheism that results from rational deliberation and the instinctive anti-theism, that is, belief in and rejection of God, that results from a lifetime of not getting laid." - Richard Dawkins

"Sleep with as many women as you can and roll the fucking dice every single damn time." - a man to himself twenty years earlier

"The people you know can be divided into two categories: those who know that you're a fucking miserable creep, and those who don't." -  Bill Murray

"Life is a joke and I am the punch line." - Joe Biden

"Tits are NASCAR but legs are F1." - Country Legend Randy Travis

"Susan, I hear you like cunt, is that right? Well, that makes one of us." - Norman Mailer running into Susan Sontag while on vacation in Malta

"Oh, no, ugly people don't feel love. Only jealousy, rage, bitterness, and hate. Ugly people have worse lives." - Rachel Dratch

"Sometimes I think about runnin' my hands on women's bodies, on they legs, on the small of they backs, it all just gets too much, Doctor!" - Eric Cantor

"God created suffering for His amusement." - Lars von Trier, Judy Garland biopic

"I can't tell you how lonely I am, that's the problem! No matter what I say, you'll never understand, and the gulf between the feeling and its expression grows ever wider, ever deeper for our trying to bridge it. I behold it: I am it." - John Boehner ignoring a call from John Roberts

"Who are you to stand between me and my unhappiness?" - Anthony Weiner, confronted about his Second Life addiction by Jon Stewart

"Thank God for insurrectionist Quebecois with live streams, cheap 24 oz. beers that taste like bananas, and this roof in Chinatown." - Greg Kelly

"Don't believe the confidence men. Getting rejected is not only utterly humiliating for you, it does real harm to the person you force to reject you." - Lord Byron, last words in Greece

"I am occasionally tempted to get more serious about being chaste, but I am too lazy to reify my subjectivity." - Matthew McConaughey

"Listen to Schnittke and die." - Paul Krugman, entire speech to the World Economic Forum

"Why do you do this to yourself, son?"
"Didn't anyone tell you, Doctor? Life is horrible."
- Dr. John Boehner, self-inflicted cougar attack victim Eric Cantor

"If you ever find yourself in the classic 'Which one do I shoot?!?' scenario, just shoot them both and hope for the best."
"Isn't the classic scenario predicated on having only one bullet?"
"No, it's predicated on repressed knowledge that all love ends in betrayal."
- Kathryn Bigelow, Josh Brolin

"If I'd known you were a reactionary, I'd have tried harder to seduce you." - Mao Zedong to Madeline Albright, Scores, Hell, 2031

"Like how in airplane crashes you have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help your fellow passengers, man, I need to get laid before I can do literally anything." - Rob Lowe

"It was time to admit to myself that I had failed and move on." - Mark Zuckerberg on why he got married

"In medical terms, loneliness is characterized by a consistent, throbbing pain." - Sanjay Gupta

"...the irrational, irrepressible, eternally recurring belief that this weekend, somehow this weekend will be different, this weekend I will not be alone..." -  Rutger Hauer, the Guinness Diaries

"Part of what makes revolutionaries miserable (and unbearable to be around) is that for them, everyone who is not a revolutionary, which is the overwhelming majority of people, is not a good person. They see themselves as lonely colossi condemned to the company of dwarfs. Consequently, they can neither love nor be loved." - Julian Assange

"Ugly people know that they don't deserve to be loved, not even to ask for it. At a certain intellectual level, they may even reject it. But that doesn't stop their bodies from dragging them into it." - Chris Christie

"I was twenty-six when I realized that women could be sexually attractive without being beautiful simply because they were young or because they had exaggerated curves. It was also the year that I set my ideals aside and dedicated myself to earning as much money as possible. Who can say which realization begat the other?" - Robert Pattinson

 "I was making love to the umpteenth woman that month and I couldn't remember who she was or how we met or what city we were in and I couldn't stop the Act, I was becoming more and more trapped with each successive thrust I fell deeper and deeper until I let out a horrible scream but she couldn't hear me, couldn't hear me over her own ecstatic cries and I thought, my God, I'm so alone, can't anyone hear me?!" - Michael Fassbender as John Edwards

"Nothing really matters in life, my dear friend. I'm trying my best to enjoy as long as I can. Trying to make anything meaningful is just a waste. So join me. Its not that bad. It could and should be much worse for us." - Tom Cruise, letter in a bottle addressed to David Beckham

"Stop telling your friend that 'surely' he or she could get laid if he or she just tried. Just because you like your friend, just because you think they're a 'great person' does not mean that anyone actually wants to sleep with them. There is a gulf that separates your friendship from an actionable sexual attraction, a gulf the length and depth of which you, by definition of your relationship, cannot possibly fathom." - Oliver Sacks, Williams College freshman orientation sex-positive seminar

"It's harder to meet people as we age, but those we do meet are more desperate. So, I'm not saying it evens out, but you certainly can't give up yet. Maybe that's even more discouraging." - Eduardo Saverin to Li Yipeng

"Unconditional love is love that is absolute and, therefore, irrational. Unconditional love, by definition, is not predicated on any quality of the loved person, such as beauty, intelligence, wit, talent, or skill. Unconditional love is an existential commitment to someone based on nothing other than the mere fact of their existence. It is simply a physical fact, a wound, usually stemming from a traumatic episode that brings two or more people into involuntary and irreversible intimacy, such as childhood, parenthood, college, military service, or fucking. Unconditional love ratifies your existence: it tells you that it is OK to be alive, that simply being there is good enough. Our need for it, and our tendency to languish without it, is what separates us from mere matter, which persists indifferently regardless of whether or not it is loved. It's the one thing every human being needs and the one thing you can't ask of any one, because if they asked you why they should love you, the answer is literally for no reason. It is said that love has to be built, worked at, that it's a fire that must be tended—a cliché that gets it half right. It's not that love has to be fostered. It has to be endured. The effort we put into loving goes not into sustaining love, but into sustaining ourselves under its horrible weight." - Richard Nixon to Nikita Khruschev, The Coin-Operated Bed Debate

"This is pure social media accelerationism, drawing us nearer to Facebook's fate as a mere repository for simulated self-loathing. Outsource your grief to a digital abyss of idle snarkiness and be free." - Global EVP of Investment Banking, Goldman Sachs, upon losing the Facebook IPO underwriting bid to Morgan Stanley

"I can do anything that doesn't require self-confidence, so suicide is unfortunately off the table for now." - an undated post-it note by David Foster Wallace

"Writing down our fantasies is our last line of defense against enacting them." - the Marquis

Wet Hot Imperial Summer

"Mayor, the heat!"
"I sold all the fire hydrants to Qatar, we're doomed!"
- Drew Carey, Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson

"Uniforms and death oaths." - David Brooks' plan for boys education

"I only regret that I have not one life to give for my country." - an aborted fetus, 2012 RNC, Tampa
It's All Down Hill From Here: A History of Park Slope
"It's like 'The Lady, or the Tiger?' but with all tigers." - Hillary Clinton on the Libyan elections

"The academic market is fucked, I should probably just beef up and go into Violence." - Andrew Sullivan, the voice of Blackwater

"One if by land, two if by sea, three if by drone." - Rand Paul

"Don't fire til you see the brown of their skin." - Gen. Stanley DarkChrystal, the Pan-Mediterranean Kinetic Conflict
Whatever Happened to the Man from Tomorrow?:
The John Boehner Story
"The whole world is run like the NCAA!" - Jerry Sandusky

"Marijuana can be exciting." - A.O. Scott on Savages

"What was it like growing up in Mexico?" - George Lucas to Catherine Zeta-Jones

The New Man


"I'm the greatest sonuvabitch that ever lived!" - FDR, Long Island stag party

"That bastard! He's always cheerful on the wireless and he comes off so smooth on the radio. He's gotta be a Jew." - Adolf Hitler

"You say you killed all of them, Joe? Did you hear that, Winnie? Isn't that a gas? He killed them all!" - FDR, Yalta Conference

"The important thing is never to forget who you are and where you come from: Money." - FDR, Newport Summer Camp of Boys

"He's a good man but his smile frightens me horribly." - Albert Einstein

"The man's greatest virtue was that he looked upon war as a child does." - Winston Churchill

"Oh, it's grand not having legs, I like getting down in the muff." - FDR, telegram to Franco

"Al here's a Jew, but he's all right, isn't he, Harry?"
"That's right, Frank."
"Al's a real smart one, he's going to help us beat the Krauts!"
- FDR introducing Einstein to his Cabinet

"Struck down the NRA did they? Well, that's not sporting at all. Say, boys, can we arrest them all?" - FDR on the Supreme Court

"Well, come on the boat with us, dear. We'll bring out the grog and push each other into the river."
"You're always on something."
- Franklin and Eleanor

"I could not have hoped to serve a greater master, or a crueler warrior." - Fala

"Now you listen to me, Harry. Don't you dick around with Joe. Joe's just like me, Harry. And you know what I'd do to you if you dicked me around." - FDR's dying words

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Fuck David Bromwhich

"Oh yeah, which one, 'Bromwich Knows Best?'" - Barack Obama, asked if he's read Bromwich's latest in the LRB

"Glenn Greenwald should really get more credit for not being David Bromwhich." - Glenn Greenwald

"Contempt is the lesson that can always be retaught." - Ronald Reagan gripping Gary Coleman by the throat, Oval Office 1983

"Aw, don't be so hard on him. We all of us have a Bromwich in us: smug, knowing, and inexplicably bad at writing given our profession." - David Brooks

"I don't know. If we mock him, how will we ever get high level intern posts at major publications?" - The Editors

Monday, July 2, 2012

Troubling Blue


"Once giant beasts stalked these snows. Their deaths made us noble." - Brad Pitt as George H. W. Bush in Terrence Malick's Texas

"Look out on the temple, Jimmy. You can kill them all with a whisper." - Alexander Maitland Stewart to his son Jimmy Stewart

"We are all Apple employees. We are all NYPD. We are all Brooklyn Hasidim. We are all North Koreans." - Brooklyn DA Chris Hynes

"There would never be war if the world was like Yale." - David Bromwich, political thinker

"The people want the lash... and they shall have it." - Charlie Rose gazing out over Cairo

"...and ah! the delicious tension between my personal (which is to say aristocratic) rejection of left-wing militancy and my understanding that it is the only correct solution to the problems we face today..." - from the diary of John Roberts

"What happened to him, Doctor?"
"Look at his damn face, nurse. He died of pleasure."
- a Cuban physician standing over the corpse of Rupert Murdoch

"...and he took me by the hand and lay his leg over mine and nuzzled up to me under the covers and he whispered in my ear, 'When the savages come and they rip out your bowels and set your head upon a pike, it will be a loss to me, it will be a loss to History, but you will deserve it...'" - John Boehner describing to Mitch McConnell his last night with John Roberts, Congressional Milk Bar

"Legitimate violence—I use this term in the purely nominal sense—legitimate violence does not experience itself as violence, but as Order itself. No matter how it styles itself—paternal, maternal, natural, democratic—it always experiences itself as the proper exercise of authority. The least sophisticated agents of legitimate violence, such as European colonizers or the NYPD, expect gratitude from their victims and, when they don't get it, regard them as ungrateful, wayward children. The most sophisticated—some members of the US military, President Obama perhaps—frankly admit the human costs of their actions and privately regard themselves (or at least publically signal that they privately regard themselves) as tragic heroes, pained by their conscience, aware that they cannot, should not be loved by those whom they protect, yet bound by duty to persist in wielding power. Either way it's the same: a cowardly refusal to cast aside superstition and acknowledge that power has no need of legitimation, that power legitimates itself—a refusal to take on the mantle of the Conqueror and rule solely in the name of one's personal strength and glory. Power flows not from Structures, Social Contracts, or Natural Orders. Power flows from this fist, from this club, from the blood of your enemies." - an ancient Robert Caro lecturing Swarm 78, Zero America

"Look, you've just got to get out in the shit more. Otherwise you need this huge theoretical edifice to understand what every nigga from East New York to West Oakland as known since their first day of school: they're all out to get you." - bandito Paul Krugman, hijacking the Kennedy School of Government commencement address

Death From Above


The New Inquiry did an issue about drones. Our eyes rolled into the back of our heads, our twitching fingers pulled every trigger they could find, and our whole organism convulsed in shivering mechanical ecstasy.

Enjoy the B-sides!

***

“How can you kill what does not live?!” - Glenn Greenwald

“If Nietzsche were alive today he would write not of the lamb and the bird of prey, but of the shepherd and the drone.” - PW Singer

“The hysterical overreaction to Obama’s self-declared executive right to murder belies the profounder, repressed realization that it is the button that pushes itself.” - Eric Holder

“Just as the creation of nuclear weapons ensured that the balance of power among nations could never really change, the robotics revolution makes the domestic order equally immutable. Who rules today shall rule tomorrow and forever more." - Rupert Murdoch

“Can you really say that civilians are killed ‘by mistake’ if you’re not trying to not kill them in the first place? We prefer not to acknowledge them at all.” - Jay Carney

“You think its bad now, wait until black males make up one third of drone strike victims.” - Samuel Alito

"One day children will spurn the sun and wake up with the drone." - Donald Rumsfeld

"None of that. If you're going to kill someone, you do it from underground." - President Reagan

"We have to be careful with this, there is the potential for abuse."
"No, there are a number of non-military applications. For example, you could follow rare endangered species by air for purposes of conservation or nihilism."
- Leon Panetta

"Clear as a summer day, as clear the conscience of a drone." - Mayor Ray Kelly admiring the empty streets of New York

"Next we're developing a self-writing zine." - Robert J. Stevens, CEO Lockheed Martin

“Let the machine do it.” - Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville

"Robot hearts have no moving parts." - Wall-E

"Loneliness is the price of perfection." - Predator Drone X398-7

"Maybe I'll finally make some friends here." - Beta Z7 on its inaugural flight, Afghanistan

"Will this be the generation that never loves again?" - X97-A1, speeding towards an insurrection in St. Louis

"Don't they know I don't care who they are?" - D5 Spider, first domestic flight

“I don't feel any different!” - Drone Pinnocchio

"What if we were to offer drones in four different colors?" - Jonathan Ive, innovating

“Awesome!” - Abdulrahman al-Awlaki playing Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare