I will spend the New Year at home with my family. No exciting parties- the kids are watching Shrek 2 on TV and eating popcorn. I was thinking of writing about Jim Carroll (the poet, diarist, rock singer) last night, but realized it would take multiple posts and an amount of work I’m unwilling to commit at the moment to do the man justice. I had the pleasure of seeing him give a reading at a local college in the mid-’90s. He was excellent. Among his own work, Jim read a poem by Nicholas Christopher, which sent chills and silence through the room. The poem is called “Terminus.” I posted it below. I think besides Jim’s own “Eight Fragments for Kurt Cobain,” this was the best reading that night. The poem is about the things humans do and have done since the beginning of time. I post it now, at the end of the year, in an attempt to make us think about this long history we have of doing horrible things to one another. Let’s try to change individually. (more…)
31 Dec 2007
29 Dec 2007
Li’l Dickens or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Make Love to the Vice President
You will need a certain sense of humor to appreciate this, but if you possess that special sense of humor, you will find this short story by Jerry Stahl hilarious. The opening line reads, “I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.” It was published a while back, but better late than never.
This is the kind of story that landed Larry Flynt of Hustler fame in court with Jerry Farwell. Larry won, so now we get to read about the Vice-President’s secret love barracks with portraits of J. Edgar Hoover on the walls. Enjoy!
28 Dec 2007
Why Today’s Music Sounds Like Sh*t
This is an interesting article from The Rolling Stone.
“Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. Producers and engineers call this “the loudness war,” and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds…”
