Where Have All the Mailers Gone? | The New York Observer. Alas: The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs that are all [...]

Swedish Christmas straw goat burns again: STOCKHOLM – A giant straw goat was burned down yet again early Wednesday in a Swedish city where torching it has become a Christmas tradition, to the dismay of local leaders. Every year I see this article, it brings joy to my heart. Why can’t the city just understand [...]

Good Novels Don’t Have To Be Hard Work But let’s look back for a second at where the Modernists came from, and what exactly they did with the novel. They drew a tough hand, historically speaking. All the bad news of the modern era had just arrived more or less at the same time: mass [...]

Why are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers: 6. There is an even grimmer side to all this: because the studios have discovered how to take the risk out of moviemaking, they don’t want to make any movies that they can’t protect themselves on. Production and advertising costs have gone so high that there is [...]

Audiotool is pretty sick. It’s retardedly simple to produce some pretty amazing electronic music, and you can record/save your beats. Very cool stuff.

I never bothered to point out that Discharge 5 started up some time ago. Really good stuff from these cats. I was kind of sad to see the end of Discharge 4 (except, you know, I never really did like much of cocainejesus’ art. just sayin’). I will be getting the chapbook if I can [...]

… For and Acted Upon Through Diversions might be the most singularly relaxing album I’ve listened to in quite some time. Venice Is Drowning’s Azar comes close (although it does have vocals). Both are complex and not entirely “soft” (although neither goes batshit punk-rock hard either). I’ve also been jamming out to Black Moth Super [...]

Some of these make me think of the face-hugger from Alien. Which means that some women just have crazy looking vaginas. Some are just average looking. And only a few have really honest-to-goodness aesthetically pleasing cooters. A few girls I’ve known have been bashful of their naughty bits, although this might make them realize how [...]

Is exactly what it sounds like. Only the Spaniards would have the balls to pull something like this off and call it art. This qualifies as worthwhile to my personal aesthetics. Too bad I live in a country where this is called pornography.

Apparently (news to me!) poet laureate Billy Collins will be participating in my University’s annual writer’s conference. He’ll be doing a reading in the PAC at a time conveniently scheduled at the same time as my Humanities class, where I’ll be learning about… something. Damn. Word is he’s also scheduled to give a workshop to [...]