Not since 1915 the Post says of the “Mighty Nine” new House Democrats. Well at least they’re mighty.
Weird moment here. Just reading this quote puts me back some 12 years to the original series finale of Neon Genesis Evangvelion. “Zuckerberg loves being around people. He didn’t build Facebook so he could have a social life like the rest of us. He built it because he wanted the rest of us to have his.”
This line just pushes the wrong buttons and so very much sounds like Human Instrumentality that closes out Neon Genesis (I swear on my soul that doesn’t exist it’s only me and Takeda that call it that rather than Evangelion or the more contracted Eva). We were here 12 years ago…does any of this sound even vaguely like McKenna’s Timewave Zero?
Wanted to be watching something demanding like Deadwood, but no such luck ‘twould seem.
Still on the NPR interview of Greil Marcus from last post.
“The courage to go out West”, idealism as a geographical choice. Amazing!
And Greil Marcus love for Bob Dylan.
In response to a caller with a dissenting opinion, Marcus uses that old familiar Lone Rangerism, “Who was that masked man?”. Using the phrase to describe the song as a Moment that seems to begin with the song’s beginning, and arc through the song’s meandering triumphs, Marcus offers a radical new interpretation of the Lone Ranger.
Who was that masked man? The Lone Ranger as something larger than ourselves. The moment of a rescue we cannot properly perceive. A rescuer not properly understood. The idealist, as outsider.
Weird, I always thought of the Lone Ranger as conservative.
I am reminded of just how much I hate the Beatles. Popularizers of faux good music that they were.
Every.
Single.
Day.
Post Xmas Dinner and I’m in a weird psychic space. It’s that kind of place where the lethargy of it all will set in soon enough, but not yet. Where the idea of the world waking up (remember the end of Pynchon’s Against The Day?), is just the vaguest notion of something. Not quite yet, but the idea of it will be solid soon enough.
Right now the mood feels exactly like forcing my hand into picking out a Muddy Waters album (I’m Ready or maybe Hard Again), and reading Otomo’s Akira. A good, strange brew, and heady.
What I instead have in front of me is Van Morrison’s 1986 album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and a copy of Bryant Simon’s Everything But The Coffee. Not that I’m reading right now, it’s still too soon after dinner for that kind of thing to be pointedly antisocial. But ‘A Town Called Paradise’, is just about to round its last corner and sitting with a mobile device, intermittently (ostensibly) “updating my Twitter” seems to be just the right kind of social-but-distant, present-but-not-quite-immersed.
Although the room is bustling, and there’s more than enough noise flooding in from elsewhere in the house, it’s as if I can hear the Romeo Y Julietta cigars slowly drawing to ash. I have an RYJ too, steadily balanced on the edge of an oversized ashtray in the shape of a tiny medieval village scene, with a hilltop castle overlooking the edge of town, the hollowed out middle where one ashes colored to be taken as a river.
This is all starting to feel like a pantomime. Pretty soon, even the steady, accessible prose of Simon’s book will begin to seem like and adventure. There’s a silence lurking just behind the bustle. But it’s a silence on tilt, and ultimately one kept at bay. Truly, the most wonderful time of the year.
“I feel like my soul is starting to expand”, as Bob Dylan put it.
For realsies [Steven Johnson on the origin of good ideas; spoiler alert, it’s coffee shops].
