The Whiskey Rebellion

From crack to whiskey and from whiskey to crack
From the poor shall everything be
Taken, even the little that they have
From crack to whiskey and from whiskey to crack

 
 

Sunset in Watts-Compton

 
 

Fireworks in Disney Town, December 23, 2012

 
 

Refugees at the Getty Museum

 


 
 

Not Fade Away

"Bobby Keys: I first met Keith Richards physically in San Antonio Texas.
They recorded a song, "Not Fade Away," by a guy named Buddy Holly, born in
Lubbock, Texas, same as me. I said, "Hey, that was Buddy's song. Who are
these pasty-faced, funny-talking, skinny-legged guys to come over here
and cash in on Buddy's song? I'll kick their asses!"

"We were all staying at the same hotel in San Antonio, and they were out
on the balcony, Brian and Keith, and I think Mick. I went out and listened
to them, and there was some actual rock and roll going on there, in my humble
opinion, and they did "Not Fade Away" actually better than Buddy ever did it.
I never said that to them or anybody else."

"And then I ran into them again in L.A. when they were doing the T.A.M.I. show.
I discovered that Keith and I had the same birthday, both born 12/18/43. He told me,
"Bobby, you know what that means? We're half man and half horse, and we got a license
to shit in the streets."

"There was something about Keith that immediately reminded me of Buddy Holly. They're
about the same size; Buddy was a skinny guy, had bad teeth. Keith was a mess. But some
folks, they just got a look in their eye, and he looked dangerous, and that's the truth."

-Keith Richards, Life


 
 

Blue Days in Paris

We were living in Paris like a regular 19th Century couple.
I'm a brat with a tuba and you're my
phantasmal masseuse!

Blue days in Paris!

Brutal runts and homuncular runes on the Champs-Élysées!
Cellophane opalescence of the cigarette-cafés and the
sauce-pan sarcasm of American super-moms!

I'm your euphonic copycat!
You're my astral recluse!

Bop-nabobs in the Metro and bombs in the suburbs!
Monumental ennui and the blood of unicorns!

Blue days in Paris!
 
 

Magdalena Frackowiak

Gonzo fashion-blogger Isaac Hindin-Miller sneaked into Chanel during Fashion Week in Paris,
stuck his head out a window at exactly the right moment, and captured this image of Magdalena
Frackowiak on his Blackberry.
 
 

Killers

 
 

Rainy Sunday in Griffith Park

 
 

The Burning Ship

Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?
 
 

Shadow

Santa Monica - December 11, 2012
 
 

Olya Snagoshenko

One of the only remaining relics of my brief "career" as a fashion
photographer is the occasional bulletin from some hard-scrabble
model agency in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, the
Ukraine, Georgia, or the Czech Republic, and if I weren't already
sad enough about the miserable prospects of almost every human being
on our miserable little planet, now I have to contemplate two or
three hundred really beautiful girls almost none of whom have even
the ghost of a chance at the kind of contract that buys you a visa
from there to here.

So I'm always ecstatic whenever the real thing shows up,
this time in the form of Olya Snagoshenko, and if she weren't
quite so beautiful, if she weren't so incredibly, eerily, amazingly
beautiful, with an unearthly, fall-down-and-die-for-her
beauty, she wouldn't have any chance at all.
 
 

Translation

Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop and says "Make me one with everything."

What this story needs is Jimmy Carter's Japanese translator.

"President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh."
 
 

Anaheim

 
 

Long Beach City College, December 7, 2012

 
 

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

 
 

The Wisdom of My Folk

Most of the legends of my folk involve animals that eat stuff. For example...

Once a parrot was eating a banana, and a coyote got after him, but the parrot
said "Watch out, a bear that eats stuff is coming," and the coyote ran away.

The next day the parrot was eating another banana, and the coyote got after him
again, but the parrot said "Watch out, a bear that eats stuff is coming," and
the coyote ran away.

The next day the same parrot was eating yet another banana, and the coyote got
after him again, but when the parrot said "Watch out, a bear that eats stuff is
coming," the coyote didn't run away, and a bear that eats stuff ate him.

The wisdom that my folk learned from this legend is...

Always eat a parrot the second time you get a chance.
 
 

Blogger

 
 

Victor Brauner - Two Paintings

 


Pour Nicole - 1960



Pochoir - 1951
 
 

Retarded Poet

I held her throat all night.
    No bruises.

Stars were singing all night
    in a violet ring
        with a little pink microphone.

There was bad news from Mars
    roses freezing in carbon dioxide
Bad news under my brain
    bare nerves reaching for anything
        like a lizard's fingers
at the top of her spine
    where a lizard was thinking.
 
 

Donkeys

 
 

Rose-Atropine

Chicken running around in the yard
with its head cut off
    nightmare running around
in another nightmare
    head still rolling its eyes
pinhole stars on the back of my eyelids

It's a very small world
    farmyard full of bright stars
        lilac iris rose-atropine

Rainbow-fountains converge
     behind the constellations.
 
 

Tonga in Afghanistan

After more than 12 years of occupation, 104,900 foreign soldiers
remain in Afghanistan, including 68,000 from the USA, along with
many, many other contingents from such faraway places as Tonga,
Iceland, Mongolia, and El Salvador.

55 Royal Tongan Marines in Helmand Province!

Mongolian infantry at Kabul International Airport!

25 Salvadoran commandos at an undisclosed location, somewhere
in Afghanistan, November 23, 2012.
 
 

Fuck-World

Have you heard the good news, mother-fuckers?
I heard it from an oven-bird!

Have you heard the good news, mother-fuckers?
I read it on the moon!

Have you heard the good news, mother-fuckers?
It's a fire that eats everything!

Every word is a curse!
Every word is a curse!
Every word is a curse, mother-fuckers!

Every word is a curse in your fuck-world!

I heard it from an oven-bird!
I wrote it on the sun!
 
 

Game of Images

 
 

Flea Market

Long Beach - November 18, 2012
 
 

Blue Haiti - Maggie Steber

http://www.audacityofbeauty.com/index.php
 
 

Shanghai Is Bigger and Brighter Than New York!

Surprise, Walmart Nation! Shanghai is much, much bigger and brighter than New York!


Ground Zero, more than ten years after 9/11.
 
 

Kristen Stewart Tickles Kirsten Dunst in Cannes!

 
 

Exotic Animals

Have you ever killed a cat?
Don't act like you couldn't do it!
I loved my gnu and you ate its aorta!

Have you ever killed a cat?

Your mommy is a nematode!
You're old and ugly!
All you really want to do is
diddle your ungodly gonads!

Have you ever killed a cat?
 
 

Boffo

Boffo - William Hawkins
 
 

Princess

Anorexic
princess
undresses
at Hollywood and Vine
and so what if sardines eat her wallet?

She and I are alone in the nacreous twilight!
 
 
 

NO PASARAN!

"Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why
I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama
in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the
oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

"If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate."
 
 

Same Old Story: Three Photos by Joan Colom 1958-1964

 
 

Your species is fat and stupid!

 
 

In the Age of Dinosaurs

Way back then everything was a lot less heavy,
and a real brontosaurus could bounce around as lightly
as my son's inflatable brontosaurus in the bathtub.

Sometimes I climb down
to the bottom of the toy-box and eat
dinosaur meat in the age of dinosaurs

It's exactly like eating a cloud.
 
 

Politics?

 
 

'Military Humanitarianism' in the Twilight of Empire

"Military humanitarianism" is a phrase coined by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the Guardian to describe the rationale behind the US invasion of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Under this doctrine, military intervention is dressed up as humanitarian salvation, justified according to depoliticised, universal human rights, so that anyone who opposes it is not only taking the enemy's side in an armed conflict but betraying the international community of civilized nations.

The United States is happy to reserve the privilege of "humanitarian war" for itself and Israel, preserving "universal human rights" against the threat of terrorism, but now that Turkey is claiming the same privilege to defend itself against Kurdish terrorists, "the community of civilized nations" has undergone a strange contraction.

For American neo-conservatives, Israel and the United States have always been the only "civilized nations," like a strangely disconnected Dual Empire surrounded by barbarian wilderness, and other nations could only attain a status of semi-civilization by slavishly endorsing every military adventure generated by the exigencies of American and Israeli politics. Tony Blair was the paradigm of a "good barbarian," and Zizek's homeland of Slovenia also enrolled itself under the banner of the "Coalition of the Willing."

Now the "Coalition of the Willing" is just a tattered memory, oil is selling for $96 per barrel, Turkey is about to invade Iraq for a much better reason than the United States ever had, and Russia has aligned itself with Iran against an American attack. The United States has long since run out of money to buy oil from the almost uniformly hostile oil-producing regions of the world, every aspect of the American economy depends on foreign credit, and every trinket in the national treasury has already been pawned to Chinese banks.

Professor Zizek feels the current of history flowing east, and in his role as a good Slovene he is preaching a radical realignment away from the twilight Empire of the United States, Israel, and even the American dependencies in "old Europe."

Only by means of a "sectarian split" from the standard European legacy, by cutting ourselves off the decaying corpse of old Europe, can we keep the renewed European legacy alive.

As the real power of the United States declines, national pride can only be assuaged by inflated rhetoric and exaggerated symbolic displays. In the glory days of American supremacy, General George Marshall wore three rows of decorations, but General David Petraeus is adorned with nine rows of meaningless hash, none of it commemorating anything like valor. Likewise George W. Bush embellishes his pitiful blunders with grander and grander pretentions, "military humanitarianism" rampant on a field of gold, and the stupefied electorate is only dimly aware of how far its Empire has already fallen.

(Re-posted from EuroTribune November 3, 2007)

2012

 
 

The National Pants

Obama is like these pants. Mitt Romney is like
even worse pants. We're a nation of poop-flingin'
monkeys!

In the Nineties I thought that "enlightened self-interest"
was the appropriate attitude for political activism in the USA.

Around 2003 that turned into "raging obscenity."

Now it's more like "retarded absurdism."

GOO-GOO-GAH-JOOB!
 
 

Stations of the Cross

Is your soul in detox?
Is your dongle beeping?

Bingo!
Bingo!
Bingo!

Everybody is a star!

We own the arcade, and all of us are
face to face and crazy to crazy
on the blazing stages.
 
 

Little Black Sambo and The Poky Little Puppy

Little Black Sambo is the sort of boutique "issue" that
middle-class liberals love to obsess about, while they
sell out the unions, the environment, black America,
and even themselves, but there's nothing racist about
the book itself, although not every illustrator of one
or another of the many, many editions created a masterpiece
like Gustaf Tenngren's illustrations for Little Golden Books,
and likewise with The Poky Little Puppy. It's the all-time
best-selling children's book in the USA!



Gustaf Tenggren's early work betrays the influence of Arthur
Rackham and similar fairy-tale illustrators of the pre-WWI
British book trade, but in Little Black Sambo and The Poky
Little Puppy, he was probably closer to the magical perspective
of Susanna and the Elders.


 
 

Smiling Faces of Iran!

Smiling Faces of Iran! Down with USA! Down with Israel!
Obama Has Big Ears! Ayatollah Looks Like Santa Claus!
From New York to Tehran, we're all puppets on a string!
 
 

Earthquake

Head-bone connected to the hip-bone!
Hip-bone connected to the moon!

Is this a hoax?
Am I your taxi?
Is it time to die?

Do re mi fa so la ti do!
Why is everything singing?
Why is everything singing everything?
 
 

Frankenstorm Re-Elects Obama

Obama can spend the next week looking ultra-Presidential
as he cleans up debris from the Frankenstorm, while Mitt
bitch-bitch-bitches at his pitiful campaign events. Fortune favors
the fortunate, I guess, and Obama wins again on the basis of
nothing, or not much.
 
 

Drone

You fuck like a drone!
Thank you!

I fuck with everything!
Nothing fucks with me!
I fuck like a drone.

Thrill-kill all of your hillbilly women-folk, Abdullah!
Yodel-ay-hee yodel-ay-hee yodel-oo!
Thrill-kill all of your hillbilly women-folk, Abdullah!
Yodel-oo-hoo yodel-oo-hoo yodel-ay!

I fuck like a drone.
 
 

Sunset in East L.A.

Did Obama Kill the Flying Nun?

1. Google returned all the other images in this array as
"visually similar" to the two off-duty super-models at top-left.

2. Drone pilots in Colorado use a similar algorithm to identify
"high-value targets" in Afghanistan.

3. The gear-heads at Google are much, much smarter
than the gear-heads at the Pentagon.

Therefore...

The next time Obama claims one of his drones killed
a bunch of jihadis on some God-forsaken mountain in Afghanistan...

It's just as likely that he killed Bob Marley, Franz Kafka,
Willie Nelson, Frederick Douglas, and the Flying Nun.
 
 

René Burri - Soldiers and Prostitutes - South Korea - 1961

 
 

All Flesh Aspires to the Perfection of Plastic

Abbey Lee Kershaw
 
 

Data

Who
stole
my
soda?

Who stole my oats?

Who stole the sky and
my blue data?
 
 

Russell Means

photo-credit: Joshua Lott

"I've told people after I die, I'm coming back as lightning," he said.
"When it zaps the White House, they'll know it's me."

Russell Means, November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012
 
 

Mom

 
 

Voices

Are you dead?
Are you listening?
Are you dead?
Are you listening?
Are you dead?

Are we there yet?

Is the past
really
irredeemable?

Shoot to kill!
Do not resuscitate!

I immediately remember everything you forget.
Everything you remember I immediately forget.
 
 

Sunset Boulevard - 9 PM - ISO 12800

 
 

Two Photographs - Miriam Homem de Mello

Untitled
 


Casa

http://miriamhmello.com/
 
 

Devo

Shall we loot or retool?
Pop or poop?

I pollute the intuited tulip!
You devolve to a root.

They don't understand us.
That's their weakness!

They don't understand us.
That's their strength!

Our invisible dreamer undreams us!
Are you peeping at me in my sleep?
 
 

Little Russia

5 PM - October 12, 2012 - Santa Monica Boulevard - West Hollywood CA
 
 

Igloo

What's this thing we call "artness?"
Is it art?
Aristotle says it isn't.
My igloo is alive.

Our cosmos wheezes and alliterates.
My groove is trivialized.
Alfred North Whitehead ate my love-muscle.
My igloo is alive.

I'm a bit that wants to be, my sweet angel!
I'm a bit that wants to be!
 
 

Chinatown

Chinatown - 11 PM - ISO 6400