Thursday, April 29, 2010

The Fall of Rome

Pretty Pretty Box!


One must never be caught stealing the snuff box of the Sultan. It's great to think different, but when you've got billions of dollars and lots of plastic you don't expect the serfs to cross you, and when they do you REACT.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The Greatest Game of Guitar Hero Ever Played


In honor of the Stones re-releasing Exile on Main Street in full Apple-esque sheen (bonus tracks! slave mentality!). It's time to take a trip back to 1986 when Evil Band du jour, Pussy Galore, did a full cassette cover of Exile on Main Street from what sounds like a flooded basement. Enjoy this take-down/homage in all its badly recorded and lazy glory.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The Soviet Mind Game


"To write a book that would inspire others (and only others) to violence: this is the dream of every intellectual." - Leo Strauss

"Economics is 'science'." - Joseph Schumpeter

"Similar minds think alike." - Solath Sar

"The Revolution was never the same for me after CCR broke up." -Fidel Castro

"Bill Gates is the Leopold II of our time." - Thomas Penfield Jackson

"In LA you can make a living but never catch a break; in New York you can catch a break but never make a living." - Stephen Baldwin

"I'm going to leverage this syphilis into something really crazy!" - Nietzsche

"Carla is perfect for Nicolas: she is to French music what he is to French politics: the triumph of America." - Villepin

"What Ségolène has going for her over Aubry is that she's a sort of a traditional French woman, by which I mean, she's gorgeous, really just terribly attractive." - Nicolas Sarkozy

"I have nothing left to give you except what you would ask of me." - Carla Bruni

"Finding some one who will love you more than you will ever have to love them: that is true love." - Michelle Obama

"This is the best class project ever!" - Lady Gaga

"Mod summer of '66 forever!" - Richard Branson

"Swallow the razor and all your dreams will come true!"
- unnamed Goldman Sachs executive

"Prepare the battle wheel chair."
"Sir it hasn't been tested."
"Damn you, Einstein, I am ready!"
- from the archives of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"I welcome their hatred." - Obama

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Six Monsters in Search of a Destroyer


"I will avenge the sans-culottes!" - George Soros

"Mr. Céline, how do you feel about the fact that your three anti-semitic novels haven't been translated into English?"
"Horrible!"

"O Rambo, what is the guiding wisdom of our days?"
"Everything is permissible!"

"Sr. Bolaño, why are you crying?"
"I haven't drunk one of these since '73."

"What about the drugs, Anita?"
"That's just how it went down, Bryant!"
-Anita O'day, Today Show, 1991

"Tanigaki sang like a bird!" - Yukio Hatoyama, covered in blood

"Katherine Heigl: is that what young women want to be today? Is that what men want? I don't get it." - Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg

"How beautifully the men grieve in this country, weeping openly and without shame!" - Wen Jiabao

"I will fight the panther in the Octagon!" - Barack Obama

"If our form of government carries with it a certain inequality of fortune, this is justifiable in order that as a rule the administration of public affairs may be entrusted to those who are most able to give them their whole time, but not, as some maintain, in order that the rich may always be put first. On the contrary, it is of importance that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the people that the deserts of men offer claims to pre-eminence more important than those of riches." - Arisman Pongruanrong

"I applaud Arisman's leadership of the People, but I have always had a certain distaste for his art. Why, in his music videos, all these women being yanked about by the elbow? So many of his songs are about wanting to save his love, but who is he to be their savior? There is something paternalistic in his sense of Romance, pathos subtended by inequality. I would never treat my Lydia like that."
- Thaksin Shinawatra

"You don't know what it costs to look this cheap." - Warren Buffet

The Bourgeois Blues

Daddy was a doctor
And Mamma, she was one too
Pay ‘em rent for your body
Don’t know what you gonna do

As you going to the country
Yes you going to the country
You is going to the country
Right down Poverty Road

Move in from out of town
And buy up all the land
Push them little brown people
Out to the desert sands

They is going to the country
Yes they going to the country
Going to the country
Right down Poverty Road

Nigger in the White House
Black as a dollar bill
Can’t give the people no peace
Until I had my fill

They is going to the country
Yes they going to the country
Going to the country
Right down Poverty Road
(A man can’t get enough peace)

Man, I am just myself
My skin ain’t got no color
So why’s it so hard for me
To be every man’s brother?

As they going to the country
Yes they is going to the country
Going to the country
Right down Poverty Mile

Gandaddy was a banker
Said “Boy I’ll give it all to you”
Ain’t got no worldly problems
So I sing this blues for you

Cause you is going to the country
You is going to the country
You going to the country
Right down Poverty Road

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Analects on Harmonious Society

"I'd rape you just to establish my dominance, if only you weren't so fucking ugly."
- US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg

"I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity." - Ken Salazar

"James Brown is the only proper noun." - James Brown

"Although many single mothers do an absolutely wonderful job in raising their children, common sense and most academic findings suggest that having a father present during the raising of children generally has a positive effect on the development of non-cognitive traits of children. These include a general respect for authority and reduced rebelliousness in school, the avoidance of gangs and other criminal activities, and, most importantly, their potential to become wealthy." - Gary Becker

"White masculinity, as I understand it, can be summed up in three films: Get Carter, Five Easy Pieces, and Le cercle rouge.
- James Baldwin

"Eldridge Cleaver, what a hick and a coward." - Chelsea Clinton

"The day everything changed for me is when I realized that when I flushed the toilet all that stuff went somewhere." - Paul Krugman

"That's the essence of Friedman, isn't it?: a mall in Hawaii."
- Michael Polanyi

"We need nationalist distraction!" - Jackie Chan

"Lawyerin sure can be evil!" - Jack Warden

"Girls can't do math." - Lawrence Summers

"Philip K Dick was right, we're all fucked." - Steve Jobs

"The lawless murder of Afrikaaner farmers, which has so alarmingly increased in the past five years, goes against everything I suffered and fought for as president of this Republic, as leader of the anti-apartheid movement, as a prisoner in jail for four decades, and, yes, even as a freedom fighter who used terrorist tactics to bring an end to inequality. But Eugène Terre'Blanche? You want me to feel sorry for him?" - Nelson Mandela

"Floods wash away villages in myanmar
on venice's grand canal in a kayak
31 places to go this summer: a list of great summer
vacations that don't require euros. cult of cluster
bombing a 24 karat olympic machine--
'I'm not the guy you kill, i'm the one you buy'"
- from Thomas Friedman's diary of daily poetry

"I'll never be a real man until I've read all of Chandler, Hammett, and Cain." - from the prison diaries of Roberto Bolaño

"I mean what would it come to? If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something... how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?"
- from the diary of Milton Friedman

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

To achieve intended effect, select a random part of video #2, and watch all three simultaneously. Replay as needed.


Saturday, April 10, 2010

The reason Five Easy Pieces remains relevant

The following is not fabricated:
"Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word "capitalism," the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary - could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like "economy"? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - even of social scientists."

Brown Sugar


click to read.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Writing of Disaster


"KYRGYZSTAN IS MY ARABIA, AND I AM ITS LAWRENCE!"
- Ewan McGregor

"Look, I'm a Communist, I am a Communist--I'm the kind of guy who looks at history and says 'Lenin was a good guy'--and I am telling you: Barack Obama is not a Communist."
- the last words of Paul Newman

"To hate like this is to be happy forever!" - Roger Clemens

"Watching the 2010 World Cup on the tele is the moral equivalent of slowing your car to get a better glimpse at the braided tendrils of meat and upturned steel in the wreckage of a highway accident."
- Nobel Peace Prize Laureate F. W. de Klerk

"I am both whore and goddess!" - Norman Mailer

"No, I love coloreds." - Michael Bay

"I'll ride with Bedford Forest!" - Gov. Bob McDonnell

"You can't deny what you can't stop loving."
- Orenthal James "The Juice" Simpson

"The strong forget. The weak merely have the memories beaten out of them." - Mustafa Barghouti

"Not shooting parachutists before they land--I love it, it's really the most Romantic part of the Geneva Convention." - John Yoo

"Q: Sunny day.
A: Storm the palace."
- Felix Wu, Vermont-NEA Scholar's Bowl
State Championship Semifinal rapid fire round

“I’ll have the number two, with cheese.” - Kurmanbek Bakiyev

“If you will it, it is no dream.”
- Don L. Blankenship, President, Massy Energy Co.

"I wish I was capable of pregnancy so I could abort."
- Joseph Ratzinger

"You know, pleasure is the most efficient form of energy."
sez Bruce Ratner

"The Spirit is willing but the Flesh is weak." - Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, Citizens United vs. Federal Electoral Commission dissent

"One day a man will awaken and find that his ears have been dissolved in a vat of acid. Gentleman I propose we build said vat of human bones." - Chief Justice John Roberts

"Where we failed on health care was our inability to exploit religion. There was no angle for that kind of legitimate irrationality, and we lacked the resolve to fabricate one. Against the Democrat’s incontrovertibly rational arguments for reform, all we were left with was the illegitimate irrationality of the Tea Partiers." - Sarah Palin

"I was never in Vietnam." - Senator John McCain R-Arizona

Monday, April 5, 2010

The Mandrake

“CALLIMACO. God— I know—that's absolutely right. But what can I do, then? What plan can I pursue? I mean, where can I turn? I mean— God! —don't you see— I've got to have a plan, I've got to do something—even if its something insane, or dangerous, or even ruthless of evil! Because I would much rather die than go on living like this! If I could sleep at night, I mean if I could eat, if I could talk, if I could enjoy myself in any way at all, I'd be more patient, I could wait— I could wait for a more favorable moment; but there's no escape for me; there's no relief anywhere; and if I can't find immediately some plan to hang on to, I will certainly die in convulsions and frenzy; and when I realize that this may be the moment of my death, then I lose all my fears and hesitations, and I just can't wait to throw myself totally into the most bestial course of action! Yes, bestial! Bestial, cruel, and degraded! I'm ready— I'm ready—
LIGURIO. Please— Don’t say such things— Can’t you try to control your impetuosity?
CALLIMACO. You can see very well that precisely in order to control it I’m allowing my mind to range freely over all these various thoughts. In this way, you can see, I’m not doing any harm. But I mean it, I’ve got to have some hope to chew on —I don’t care if it’s even a false hope!— just anything to take this pressure off my brain—

- Machiavelli, The Mandrake, trans. Wallace Shawn"

- undated entry from the winter 2006/7 diary of junior United States Senator from Illinois Barack Hussein Obama II

Friday, April 2, 2010

The Strong Forget

"19 June 2009

peaches > lady gaga; art > sex > money; madonna > m.i.a.; greece > germany; france > britain; sweden > denmark > norway > finland; israel = iran; gamorra > the godfather; argento > bava > fulci; italian fascism > german fascism; marinetti > goebbels; gabriele d'annunzio > marcus garvey > mussolini > hitler > franco > chiang kai shek; hate > fear; excess > salvation; novels > newspapers; martin luther king jr > malcolm x; class > race; politics > aesthetics > ethics; main street > wall street; nationalization > subsidization; independent regulation > self-regulation; democracy > benevolent technocracy; isabelle huppert > juliet binoche; stones > beatles; roland kirk > chet baker; gary cooper > charlie chaplin; rip torn > marlon brando; legs > tits; the onion > stuff white people like; society > family > self > god; scotch > bourbon; good doctors > lawyers > doctors; firemen > policemen; deep impact > armageddon; blur > oasis; system that can be exploited > system of exploitation; results > efficiency; isolation > social media; ranciere > badiou; morales > chavez; harper’s > the new republic; democracy of ends > democracy of means; direct popular election of the president > the electoral college; simple majority > supermajority ; no presidential term limits > term limits ; public financing of federal elections > special interest financing; jean-pierre melville > scorcese; zero 7 > lovage; community > stockholm syndrome; forgetting > forgiving."

-- from the diary of 44th President of the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama II