Panglossnotes

Jan 9

I'm trying to remember last time I saw a phone booth phantom or not

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon.

Oct 24

laphamsquarterly:

Juggs, a monthly magazine of ideas and mammoth breasts founded by Lewis H. Lapham in 1981 following his editorship of Harper’s Magazine. Started as a passion project to explore Lapham’s deep interest in postmodern aesthetics, enormous double D-tits, and literary culture, Juggs is today regarded as one of the finest and most astute knocker-themed perotdiclas and sources of commentary in the country.

Lapham left Juggs in 2006 to assume editorship of the small-press literary journal Finally Legal.

from The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

I’d wondered what Lewis had been up to prior to 2006.

Sep 30

“Tikkun”

Los Angeles Review of Books - Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, The Young-Girl And The Imperialism Of The Trivial

Why be drawn into reading yet another interesting essay on the stunning LARB site? In the opening paragraph they mentioned Tikkun a magazine I buy at the Elgin Street store in YOW called Mags & Fags. I don’t subscript but should but also like an excuse to rustle in the other interesting things I don’t read and don’t see on the web they have usually.

I like Rabbi Lerner and what and how he says it. Suspect we need more of him and less of those favoured by ………. .

Ha, a link to Tikkum the magazine not I think provided by the LARBs and to its blog . Here is for those not afraid of listening to Rabbi Lerner a link to him chit chatting with Phillip Adams, from down-under, on the real ABC.

Sep 29

Dennis Perrin: All Crowds Left

UPDATING my confusion:

Seems I’m confused alright, just checked after Dennis tweeted me, Vanity Fair always shows the current date at the top of blog posts and not the date it was made available online.

I’m a bit confused as Dennis says he was at the remembering for Alex Cockburn in his September 27th note but James Wolcott, who Dennis notes was there and one of a few he rode back to Manhattan with in a car, seems to be just contemplating going to the remembering today September 29th:

The reason I have been left behind to fend for myself like the Boy Scout I once was while Laura and the cats head for the little house on the Jersey shore (which, incidentally, is the title of my first Young Adult novel, which will be full of reverie, awkwardness, and haunted emotion, just like adolescence) is that I have a double feature in Brooklyn this weekend: a memorial service for Alexander Cockburn today and tomorrow on “Creative Life in NYC in the 70s, 80s and Beyond” at the Brooklyn BookFestival with legendary producer Niles Rodgers (Le Freak), Cynthia Carr (Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz), and moderated by Will Hermes (Love Goes to a Building on Fire).

Sep 10

penamerican:

Staff from the British Library map collections displaying a page from the 1.75 metres tall Klencke Atlas which was made in 1660

Can you image the size of the shelf.

(via publicradiointernational)

Sep 3

A State of Wonder: Stuck on a Truck @ Toad Suck

a-state-of-wonder:

Last weekend, twenty-five men and women in Conway, Arkansas, put their hands on the red, waxed body of a Ford F-150 truck—four days later, only one person was left standing. The winner drove the prize home.

The Stuck on a Truck competition, as the event is known, started in 2001 as part of the…

I can’t figure out what’s weirder the competition or the audience watching the competition.

Sep 1

Forbrydelsen

I’m watching Forbrydelsen, en anglais the killing. I’ll maybe watch the AMC copy of the original later or maybe I won’t. I’m usually very disappointed in knock-offs made mainly for the 2 upper parts of North America.

Aug 31

Before I ran off to sea, in the early 60’s, Rowdy Yates and Wishbone were two of my favourite characters on TV. Rowdy, of course, morphed into Clint Eastwood and a varied and storied set of accomplishments on the BIG screen; my favourite of which is The Unforgiven; I know this ‘cause I watch it regularly and, yes, I’m examining myself because I’m also wondering why it’s my favourite.

Clint seems to maybe have had a good theatrical idea for his speech last night at the GOP blowout - posing questions to a person, Obama, not present and thus the uncomfortable looking chair acting as his standin - but also he seems to have had no rehearsals before the performance thus the incoherence of the delivery at times; and, worst of all, no good, script writer or director - like himself in the latter case - to help deliver the idea thus the “what the fuck was that” wonderings, as people, of a certain age, thought of a version of Michael Cimino’s film Heaven’s Gate in which you could actually hear what was being said, by the actors and actresses on screen, and still wanted your money back out front at the box office.

I remember my pre-Navy life as a happy time to mask some of it’s awfulness and Rowdy and Wishbone helped me do that but I knew the actors I saw on a BIG or small screen were not as individual human beings the same thing. I knew that with rare exceptions the people I saw and liked were really stand-ins for the writers who wrote what was said and those writers words were what effected me emotionally and intellectually.

If you really want to know when this struck me - actors only spout others thoughts - forcibly it was before I went to sea and I was watching an interview with the actor E.G. Marshall. He was popular for a time, and I very much liked the TV series I watched him in which was called The Defenders. In the series, he played both a clever legal counsellor and wise human being. In the interview he sounded to me like the rest of us; a generally dull uninteresting run-of-the-mill schmuck with no great insights and with all the prejudices and uncontrolled worries of John Doe during the “cold war”. He was, of course speaking for himself and without a well crafted script.

laphamsquarterly:

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580B

Aug 18

newyorker:

The New Yorker’s Swimsuit Issue wouldn’t be complete without a swimsuit-cartoon slideshow. Click-through to see more: http://nyr.kr/OrXqdk

As I’m about to eat a medium sized steak [considered length and width wise as it’s close to 2 inches thick] with bake potato and broccoli - no sour cream for the baked spud just my garlic flavoured/infused olive oil - I think this is funny.

Aug 15

Geoff Hughes

Jesus H Christ I love cities - specially really big ones. I was in love with NYC before I first arrived at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1960’s and NYC - f Bloomberg - still seems to survive even authoritarian shmucks like him and have charmers everywhere.