Seventeen Questions About KING KONG, Jane Cooper

The most amazing thing I know about Jane Cooper is that she's the niece of King Kong.—James Wright

Is it a myth? And if so, what does it tell us about ourselves?

Is Kong a giant ape, or is he an African, beating his chest like a responsive gong?

Fay Wray lies in the hand of Kong as in the hand of God the Destroyer. She gives the famous scream. Is the final conflict (as Merian C. Cooper maintained) really between man and the forces of nature, or is it a struggle for the soul and body of the white woman?

Who was more afraid of the dark, Uncle Merian or his older sister?

She was always ready to venture downstairs whenever he heard a burglar.

When he was six his Confederate uncle gave him EXPLORATIONS AND ADVENTURES IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA by Paul du Chaillu, 1861.

Does that island of prehistoric life forms still rise somewhere off the coast of the Dark Continent, or is it lost in preconscious memory?

Is fear of the dark the same as fear of sexuality? Mary Coldwell his mother would have destroyed herself had she not been bound by a thread to the wrist of her wakeful nurse. What nights theirs must have been!

Why was I too first called after Mary (or Merian) Coldwell, till my mother, on the morning of the christening, decided it was a hard-luck name?

How does our rising terror at so much violence, as Kong drops the sailors one by one into the void or rips them with his fangs, resolve itself into shame at Kong's betrayal?

Is Kong's violence finally justified, because he was in chains?

Is King Kong our Christ?

Watch him overturn the el-train, rampage through the streets! But why is New York, the technological marvel, so distrusted, when technologically the film was unsurpassed for its time?

Must the anthropologist always dream animal dreams? Must we?

Kong clings to the thread of the Empire State Building. He wavers. Why did Uncle Merian and his partner Schoedsack choose to play the airmen who over and over exult to shoot Kong down?

He said: Why did I ever leave Africa?—and then as if someone had just passed a washcloth over his face: But I've had a very good marriage.

Her dress is the perfect length for autumn.

How maybe it's the second week of fall, when the leaves on the sidewalks have just barely begun to turn, and how you're walking down the street, and there is the most beautiful woman in the world, with the most beautiful blond curls and the most beautiful neck craning in curiosity, and she is gathering a bouquet of the season's last flowers from a street vendor.

Surprisingly, peppermint schnapps is a fine replacement for mouthwash.

Heat, Denis Johnson

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

Let's talk Jesuits.

I am fascinated by Jesuits because they're a clerical order, which means they attempt to apply their beliefs in a manner which has positive social, cultural, and economic effects upon the world.

I'm an atheist, but you'll hardly ever find me identifying myself as one, because it simply is not that important to me.

A personal belief system makes no difference to me except insofar as it influences your personal life on a day to day level. So while I don't believe in God, and I find the push towards teaching creationism in schools troubling, I also don't point out the ridiculousness of someone's faith, because that just seems really petty and juvenile, you know? And I don't deride an entire religious tradition for a history of brutality, given the spotty pasts of pretty much every tradition, religious or otherwise.

I was raised by scientists who taught me the complexity of natural systems, and by old-fashioned secular humanist Minnesota liberal farmers interested less in the basis of ideology than in the effectiveness of ideas, people who go to church because it's a way to connect with your neighbors, not because they're worried about their souls.

I also spent a lot of time around extremely religious relatives. And that was trying, particularly because I spent most of it as an argumentative teenager with nothing to do except pick fights with my cousins at the summer lodge about the existence or lack of existence of the basis of their entire moral code.

One thing about spending time around people whom you profoundly disagree with is that it gets really tiring focusing on things you disagree on. There's no point arguing against someone who's basing his entire argument on a heartfelt desire for you not to go to Hell. Almost by necessity, you're forced into finding something positive or useful or otherwise appealing about their way of life. It's too enervating. You have to find something useful, or at the very least some common ground.

So I kind of feel like I'm level enough to know good advice where I find it.

As you read the following, I encourage you to reflect on the idea that once a religious practice of any kind is mature enough, perhaps you can remove the element of faith or belief from it and be left with a pretty good description of how to live your life in an emotionally and socially positive way that is also unbeholden to any deity.

A Jesuit Sacred Heart

Jesuit Mission

Ours is a service of faith, and of the radical implications of faith, in a world in which it is becoming easier to settle for something less than faith and something less than justice. We recognize, along with many of our contemporaries, that without faith, without the eye of love, the human world seems too evil to allow for the existence of a God who is good. But faith recognizes that God is acting, through Christ's love and the power of the Holy Spirit, to destroy the structures of sin which afflict the bodies and souls of his children. Our Jesuit mission touches something fundamental in the human heart: the desire to find God in a world scarred by sin, and then to live by his Gospel in all its implications.

The mission of Jesuits is directed to the ways in which Christ makes his presence felt in the diversity of human cultures, in order that we may present the Gospel as Christ's explicitly liberating presence. Ours must be a dialogue, born of respect for people, especially the poor, in which we appreciate and share the values of their culture and offer our own treasures, in order to build up a communion of peoples instructed by God's Word and enlivened by the Holy Spirit.

Jesuit Practices
Ignatius recommends the twice-daily examen (examination). This is a guided method of prayerfully reviewing the events of the day, to awaken one's inner sensitivity to one's own actions, desires, and spiritual state, through each moment reviewed. The goals are to see where God is challenging the person to change and to growth, where God is calling the person to deeper reflection (especially apt when discerning if one has a jesuit vocation in life), to where sinful or imperfect attitudes or blind spots are found. The general examen, often at the end of the day, is, as the name implies, a general review. The particular examen, often in the middle of the day, focuses on a particular fault — identified by the person — to be worked upon in the course of some days or weeks.

Seal of a Jesuit High School

Finding God in All Things

The vision that Ignatius places at the beginning of the Exercises keeps sight of both the Creator and the creature, the One and the other swept along in the same movement of love. In it, God offers himself to humankind in an absolute way through the Son, and humankind responds in an absolute way by a total self-donation. There is no longer sacred or profane, natural or supernatural, mortification or prayer - because it is one and the same Spirit who brings it about that the Christian will "love God in all things - and all things in God." Hence, Jesuits have always been active in the graphic and dramatic arts, literature and the sciences.

Effective love

The founder of the Society of Jesus put effective love (love shown in deeds) above affective love (love based on nice feelings). He usually ended his most important letters with "I implore God to grant us all the grace to know His holy will and to accomplish it perfectly." True and perfect love demands sacrifice, the abandonment of tastes and personal preferences, and the perfect renunciation of self. This can be taken together with the prayer for generosity, which asks for teaching to be generous, to serve God as God deserves without counting any cost or seeking any reward except knowing that one is doing God's will.

St. Francis Xavier

Detachment

Where Francis of Assisi's concept of poverty emphasized the spiritual benefits of simplicity and dependency, Ignatius emphasized detachment, or "indifference." For Ignatius, whether one was rich or poor, healthy or sick, in an assignment one enjoyed or one didn't, was comfortable in a culture or not, etc., should be a matter of spiritual indifference—a modern phrasing might put it as serene acceptance. Hence, a Jesuit (or one following Ignatian spirituality), placed in a comfortable, wealthy neighborhood should continue to live the Gospel life without anxiety or possessiveness, and if plucked instantly from that situation to be placed in a poor area and subjected to hardships should simply cheerfully accept that as well, without a sense of loss or being deprived.

I like Jesuits because they like to name their colleges after me.

Alanis Morissette on Alanis Morissette

For me the sweetest moment came in New York when a woman came up to me in a record store and said, "So all those things in 'Ironic' aren’t ironic."

And then she said, "And that’s the irony."

I said, "Yup."

-Alanis Morissette

Levels of Meta-Irony

Levels of Meta-Irony
The Alanis Morissette song "Ironic" finally achieved the twenty third level of recursive meta-irony this week when local grad student Josh Greenberg purchased the song after a discussion with his thesis advisor. While Greenberg's decision to purchase the single in spite of his hatred for it only achieved the 22nd level of irony--a level first reached by a Wisconsin machinist in June 2000--the fact that he did so even while understanding that his purchase was ironic reached a new level of irony. "It's ironic that his quest for irony led him to purchase the single," Kimberly Diaz, a noted expert on irony, explains, "because that song is still a pretty crappy song."

Though the 23rd meta extension of irony was undertaken in a bid for a doctoral thesis topic in the field of Cognitive Science, Greenberg was disappointed when his efforts were found to be fruitless. "I thought it would be a good topic, joining the ideas of Chomsky and Searle in a purely post-modern constructivist framework. What I got was a bubble-gum-pop jingle about life's little disappointments," Greenberg said. "It's kind of funny how I expended all this effort on buying this song and all it did was impede my thesis topic search," Greenberg sighed and then added, "I'm never going to find a thesis topic in the area of irony, which is what I research."

The 25th and final new level of irony was reached when a writer thought that Greenberg's story would be comical and interesting to readers at large.

Vocabulary Lesson

alanic \aLONik\ adjective

1 : ironic but only in the Morissette sense.

2 : poetically unfortunate

3 : having qualities of coincidence and misfortune without quite achieving traditional irony

4 : you'll know it when you see it

"A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

25/25 Kaki King - Tuning + Universe Known as DUNE

I don't think I have to tell you how totally smitten I am with Kaki King right now.

Pho is not soup.

Soup is soup. Stew is soup.

Pho is some sort of weird substance upon which humans feed in order to mutate into something greater. Pho is royal jelly. But pho is not soup!

I am eating a thick turkey and wild rice soup for lunch. This is the first bowl of soup I have eaten since winter. The temperature is in the mid fifties. There is no fog on the ground but no one has seen the sun all day.

What I'm saying is that today is the first day of fall.

I'm done with the apocalypse.

A teenage girl in central India killed herself on Wednesday after being traumatised by media reports that a "Big Bang" experiment in Europe could bring about the end of the world, her father said.

The 16-year old girl from the state of Madhya Pradesh drank pesticide and was rushed to the hospital but later died, police said.

Her father, identified on local television as Biharilal, said that his daughter, Chayya, killed herself after watching doomsday predictions made on Indian news programmes.

"In the past two days, Chayya had asked me and other relatives about the world coming to an end on Sept. 10," Biharilal was quoted as saying. "We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail."

For the past two days, many Indian news channels held discussions airing doomsday predictions over a huge particle-smashing machine buried under the Swiss-French border.

-News.com.au, Sept. 10, 2008

G. K. Chesterton called suicide "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal
to take an interest in existence". He argued that a person who killed himself,
as far as they were concerned, destroyed the entire world.

I'm done with the apocalypse. I am done with apocalypticism and post-apocalypticism. I've mined the territory, internalized the ideas, and have no use for the current cultural trends regarding or encompassing apocalypticism or postapocalypticism.

This is a fantasy of the world.

This is not an aesthetic, cultural, or conscious choice. The fact that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is "in" gives me the existential willies.


This is an idea of the self made real.

When I was truly obsessed with apocalypticism I’d take the freeway to work and imagine the city in steaming, dying rubble, day after day after day. This scared me. The notion of others finding joy in that emotional state (or letting themselves be influenced by the same thing that put me into that emotional state), this idea worries me immensely.


This is an idea we can choose to not impose upon the world.

I am convinced that, on some level, the apocalypse is just a stand-in for suicide (perhaps it’s subconscious, perhaps it’s conscious, maybe it’s universal, and maybe it’s just me).

The death of society is the death of the individual.

The catharsis of destruction.

The false “peace” that ruins the lives of the survivors.

Total obliteration as the answer to Every. Single. One. Of. Your. Problems.

Here is an argument that I reject: Because the protagonist or narrator of most post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic fiction is usually a driven survivor (as opposed to an omniscient third person or a participant or victim), that apocalyptic stories are really about continued enduring existence.

This is an idea we can choose not to impose upon the self.

But part of the reason why it's enjoyable and relieving to fantasize about suicide – and my lord am I simplifying- relates to how unhappy everyone will be once you're gone. There’s a part of you that wants it all to end, but part of you kind-of/also/maybe enjoys the idea of watching your loved ones cry. I think that's a direct corollary to the way the narrator of apocalyptic fiction is often one of the only ones left: She alone has the perceptive power to see how miserable the world is after whatever hugely destructive event. She alone sees the pain and can convey it. And in stories where the narrator is trying to warn the rest of the world that something bad is going to happen, that's so close to the behavior of a suicidal person dropping subtextual or direct cues that, well, something bad is going to happen.


This doesn’t have to be a sky on fire. It can just be sky.

I don’t care if you don’t agree with me. But I am going to try something different. There's too much at stake.

A portion of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term…
…If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

- David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

William Carlos Williams

This is just to say.

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast.

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold.

this is the kernel of buddhism

One truly is the protector of oneself, who else could the protector be? With oneself fully controlled one gains a mastery which is hard to gain.

By oneself is evil done, by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone, by oneself is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself--no one can purify another.

What are we going to do without him?

What are we going to do without him?


That's the phrase I see repeated in the tributes and eulogies and shocked paragraphs regarding Wallace's suicide and I totally understand the question. It sucks being sad about someone you've never met, and it sucks when someone kills themselves, and it sucks when a writer dies before completing what his audience thinks of as a "full body of work."

It really sucks when someone irreplaceable dies. And I truly believe Wallace was irreplaceable.

To say that Wallace had a profound influence on my thinking would be to reiterate a point made by many, but I'm going to make it anyway. Most of the writers who are important to me I discovered as a teenager - maybe it's because teens are impressionable, or because I was in need of inspiration, or because books were so new to me. The reasons don't matter, the point is that after about 18 or 19 very few authors really impressed me. They entertained and influenced, but very few had a lasting impression. I first read Wallace at 28, and his work was the first I'd read in a decade that recaptured that awe and wonder and joy I felt as a teenager reader. He rewired my brain at a time when the wiring was old and sluggish indeed. The perception and exuberance he brought to the page pulled me from someplace deep and dark and ugly and reminded me that I still had things to think about, things to write, and work to do. His work got through the haze of adulthood and snapped up that part of me that was still curious and in need of direction. I will miss him greatly for I know of no one else living who inspires me on such a profound level.

So what the hell are we going to do without him?

I'll tell you what I'm going to do:
I'm going to learn from the lessons he put down. I'm going to try to follow the path he mapped, in the process of mapping his own anxieties and obsessions, on how to navigate life in the 21st century without going mad. I'm going to study those Charlie Rose appearances with constant curiosity and to reread his essays on the porn industry and cruise ships and tennis with the same rapt and intense wonder and delight I felt when I first read them. I'm going to treasure his work and what he was able to give us, because it can still make me feel energized and delighted and hopeful and useful and curious.

David Foster Wallace hanged himself this weekend.

I will miss him greatly. Wallace was a writer who made being perceptive and smart look easy. I cannot think of another writer who could meld the perceiving and theorizing of academia and the acting and experiencing of popular culture in such an amazing and new and genuine way.

He was the only writer I know of who made tennis sound wonderful, and I learned much from his nonfiction. His writing was fearless and inspirational and new and old at the same time and he could explain new and strange things in ways that altered your perception of the subject completely. He was formidably intelligent but his writing was never intimidating and that my friends is an incredible quality.

His writing was genuine: despite his postmodernism there is no irony in his work. From E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction:

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."

Jesus/Judas

Why don't we talk about how Judas turning Jesus in to his certain death at the hands of the Romans followed by hanging himself is a murder/suicide?

It doesn't matter if the victim is destined to die for the sins of man, it's still murder.

What other historical/mythological/classical murder/suicides am I missing?

Metal bands have the market on ridiculosity cornered.

Click here to discover the band name/album title most likely to induce hilarious visuals.

Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008

At the risk of sounding the provocateur, I encourage you to forget, because the United States is more than New York City, because the world is greater than the United States, because living deep in the shadow of tragedy is no way to approach the future. The ideals of this country can be defined by something more human and infinitely more hopeful than the fall of two buildings.

Large Hadron Collider

The first circuit of the Large Hadron Collider was completed last night.

I would direct your attention to the fact that you are still alive, meaning, in all likelihood, that no miniature black holes were created, no strangelets brought into existence, nor any other sinister particles brought to quantum-physics-Frankenstein life.

The earth still exists, Switzerland maintains physical parity, the human species abides.

awards and demerits

Hats off to the Swedish band Meshuggah for naming thir second album Destroy, Erase, Improve, because that is a fucking rad album title.

But hats back on to Meshuggah for naming themselves Meshuggah because that is an awful, awful band name.

Civil Warland in Bad Decline

The primary subgenres of heavy metal include:

Avant-garde metal
Black metal
Death metal
Doom metal
Glam metal
Gothic metal
Groove metal
Power metal
Progressive metal
Speed metal
Stoner metal
Symphonic metal
Thrash metal
Traditional heavy metal
Viking metal
Alternative metal
Christian metal
Crust punk
Drone metal
Folk metal
Funk metal
Grindcore
Grunge
Industrial metal
Metalcore
Neo-classical metal
Nu-metal
Post-metal
Rap metal
Sludge


Out of all these genres not a single band focuses on singing about the Civil War?


Come. On.

Salesman

Salesman is a documentary about door-to-door bible salesmen. This is one of my favorite frames. It's blink and you miss it: the mother gives her daughter a look that says you're not actually going to buy this bible, are ya? and the daughter shoots back with a I don't want to but I'm helpless.

I am not a psychopath.

Despite the fact that I have spent the last half hour using Photoshop to crop the heads off photographs of old girlfriends, I am in fact quite well-adjusted and content with my life.

This is art.

Oh how I wish it were this elegant, this simple.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

-Laurence Durrell

wikipedia entries as blank verse

The Hen with Sapphire Pendant egg is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1886,
For Alexander III of Russia,
Who presented it to his wife,
The Empress Maria Feodorovna,
It is one of eight eggs that are currently lost.

The Necessaire egg is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1888,
For Alexander III of Russia,
Who presented it to his wife,
The Empress Maria Feodorovna,
It is one of eight eggs which are currently lost,
The egg contained a thirteen piece manicure set.

The Cherub with Chariot egg,
or Angel with Egg in Chariot,
Is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1888,
For Alexander III of Russia,
Who presented it to his wife,
The Empress Maria Feodorovna,
It is one of eight eggs that are currently lost,
It was possibly sold in the 1930's to Armand Hammer.

The Necessaire egg is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1888,
For Alexander III of Russia,
Who presented it to his wife,
The Empress Maria Feodorovna,
It is one of eight eggs which are currently lost,
The egg contained a thirteen piece manicure set.

The Alexander III Portraits egg is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1896,
For Nicholas II of Russia,
It was presented by Nicholas II to his mother,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna.
It is one of four eggs commemorating Alexander III,
The other three are,
The missing Empire Nephrite, 1902,
And Alexander III Commemorative, 1909 egg,
And the Alexander III Equestrian egg, 1910,
It is one of eight eggs that are currently lost,
The egg is believed to have contained miniature portraits of Alexander III.

The Mauve egg is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1898,
For Nicholas II of Russia,
Who presented it to his mother,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna on April 18, 1897,
One of eight eggs which are currently lost,
Fabergé billed Nicholas II for the egg,
Described as a "mauve enamel egg, with 3 miniatures" on May 17, 1897,
For 3,250 rubles.

The Empire Nephrite egg,
Also known as the Alexander III Medallion egg,
Is a jeweled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1902,
For Nicholas II of Russia,
Who presented it to his mother,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna,
The name of the egg refers to the fact that it was made in the Empire Style,
From nephrite,
It is thought to have had a golden base,
And was decorated with diamonds and a medallion portrait of Alexander III of Russia,
It is one of eight eggs that are currently lost.

The Royal Danish egg,
Also known as the Danish Jubilee egg,
Is a jeweled enameled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1903,
For Nicholas II of Russia,
Who presented the egg to his mother,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna,
One of eight Fabergé eggs that are currently lost,
It is one of two eggs whose existence is known only from a single photograph,
The other being 1909's Alexander III Commemorative egg.

The Alexander III Commemorative egg is a jeweled enameled Easter egg,
Made under the supervision of the Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé in 1909,
For Nicholas II of Russia,
Who presented it to his mother,
The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna,
The egg commemorates Alexander III of Russia,
Who had died fifteen years previously,
The egg is one of four to commemorate Alexander,
Along with the Alexander III Portraits,
Alexander III Equestrian,
And Empire Nephrite egg,
The surprise was a miniature gold bust of Alexander,
The Alexander III Commemorative egg is one of the eight Fabergé eggs that are currently missing;
And one of only two lost eggs for which a photograph exists,
The other being 1903's Royal Danish egg.

China Syndrome; A Post-Apocalyptic Love Story

Read this.

I was in a caravan headed north of Lost Angels when I met him, walking slowly through the last remains of some tumultuous dust storm. The glittering white sand made threads of color in the dregs of day, prismatic remains of skyscrapers and bones and radioactive dust scattering the light. His sunglasses, the simple fact of their luxury, the city fatigues with a red cross as fiery as the dying sun. These are the things I remember as I sat, disillusioned and ostracized at the end of the line with my own rat-tailed horse.

quiet sad things happened this week

Bill Melendez died. Melendez was the animator of the Peanuts cartoons, which, for me, were the best reflection of the uncertainty, reticence, and absurd and premature fear of failure I felt as a boy.

PBS stopped showing reruns of Mr. Rogers. Rogers was more than a TV personality. For me, he personified a shabby and quiet affection, a curious blend of acceptance and curiosity that was reassuring and inspiring and essential to me when I was small.

When sad things happen they remind you of the good things, too.

Metronomy - You Could Easily Have Me

I've watched this over a dozen times and I really don't know what to think anymore.

WE WILL KILL YOU, originally uploaded by ernest.borg9.

songs ohia

I will be here, in bed, with cracker filth all over and cigarette butts in my hair, listening to Songs: Ohia over and over until tomorrow if you need me.

true, but in a different way than before

Tension is strength.

blocks

I am a collection of poorly milled wooden blocks. The blocks don't fit together very well. But place leather straps around the blocks and tighten them, and the blocks form together into something cohesive. Let the straps loose, and the blocks fall over.