2024 IN REVIEW What a year — I bounced all around, from the base of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming to a village in the Andes to Houston, Texas to consort with falconers, Trumpists, Ecuadorian farmers, pilots, poets, and cowboys. January set the tone. As I set off for Wyoming, I watched an arc flash…
Tag: night
Weekend Links: Harmonic & Permanent; Joy as Armor; the Distant Hellish Hum of a Leaf Blower
Field Notes: “I saw Depression’s physical form. She whom the Greeks called Oizys and the Romans Miseria, Misery. At the time I had no idea The Ancients had such a goddess and I had never thought to personify my distress and yet…There she was. Black as her mother Night. When I saw her I wanted to kill…
weekend links: winter solstice, holograms, furnace of the desert sun
Everything Everywhere All At Once: “In the seventh century in what is now Scotland but at the time was known as Northumbria, there lived a man named Cuthbert. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. He was a bishop, a hermit, and a monk, back in the time before clerical careerism when one person could indeed be all of…
Terra Damnata
What follows is a list of stray words and quotes that I highlighted for my own reasons while reading Blood Meridian a couple years ago. I’m sharing them because their aesthetic value is inherently high but also because, in aggregate their strangeness and desolate aesthetics are enhanced. They also act like luminol on my brain…
Rest in Peace, Mark Lanegan (1964-2022)
Nick Cave has a nice tribute to Mark Lanegan at the Red Hand Files: As a frontman, I move around a lot on stage, I can’t help it, it is a habitual nervous thing, a kind of neurotic compensation for a voice I have never felt that comfortable with. But watch Mark, watch how he…
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Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…
Baudrillard: “America”
Taking inventory of my summer reading. Here are some favorite passages from Jean Baudrillard‘s “America.” (Emphases mine.) Driving This sort of travel creates its own peculiar type of even and innervation, so it also has its own special form of fatigue. Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by…