My true home is here in Simancas where Pyrenees joy bursts into air like wind carries Spain's oceanic light. In this place the moon wolf cries at nightfall in a voice of hunger. The sky moves like weeping blankets of folding white snow. Rain falls in silver thread and feeds our valley of farmland and silent homes with smile. Here is where the conquistador spirit is born, set free from the edge of shore, and like a woman's sunlit beauty, is captured and carried away by the warm ebb and flow of fragrant word.
Death's a fierce meadowlark but to die having made Something more equal to centuries Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness. The mountains are dead stone, the people Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness, The mountains are not softened or troubled And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper.
Today's hate list: Billy Collins' poetry, hype and attention mongers, pop culture zealots, aluminum school desks, 24-hour days, the first three minutes in the movie theatre, the last three hours of bowling, incomprehensible blueprints and instructions, teenyboppers and egofreak poseurs, moonlight wonders caught beneath nests of black word and branches, the calloused smile of long-forgotten children....
This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore...and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge...and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all...after all, we're all alike.
Mentor 1986
Torrent: Joan Baez Any Day Now-Diamonds @320_2nd NEW Tagline: "The unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond, you strayed into my arms and there you stayed temporarily lost at sea."
Tetris was originally designed as a training tool for late Soviet-era transport interests. The idea was to reduce shipping costs by training load masters to improve the density of packing freight cars, container ships, and trucks.
This is all covered in my book, Shit I Made Up About The Russian Software Industry.
rev_sanchez, Slashdot, comment posted on Feb 26 2008
Let me tell you why I’m no fan of the middle class. Nothing middle is all that great. Middle class, Middle Ages, Middle East...they’re trouble, all of them. Upper class, lower class, pick a side! You get in the middle...crushed like grapes! (Colbert 2008).
Life should be made as difficult as possible...so that the victims might develop more character (Thompson ca. 1968-1976).
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many (Lang 1927).
I have a natural and baffling attraction to other people...who hate other people. It's just that loners aren't the typical egofreaks you'd usually meet, wasting your time, helplessly clamoring for attention (Ruiha 2003).
The only other important thing to be said about Fear & Loathing at this time is that it was fun to write, and that's rare—for me, at least, because I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.
Nothing is fun when you have to do it—over & over, again & again—or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old. So it's a rare goddamn trip for a locked-in, rent-paying writer to get into a gig like that, even in retrospect, was a kinghell, highlife fuckaround from start to finish...and then to actually get paid for writing this kind of manic gibberish seems genuinely weird; like getting paid for kicking Agnew in the balls.
. . . .
In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile—and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep...but we owe it especially to our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long-term consequences.
Thompson 1979
It is not so much singing as sermonizing; His tragedy perhaps is that the audience is preoccupied with song. So the bearded boys and the lank head girls, all eye shadow and undertaker makeup, applaud the song and miss perhaps the sermons. They are there; They are with it. . . . "The times, they are a-changing", sings Dylan. They are when a poet and not a pop singer fills a hall (Pennebaker 1967).
If you think I am pining for your approval of my abilities—or lack thereof, you are sadly mistaken; for the audience I perform to is feeble-minded, the stage and name I perform upon is small and will quickly disappear long before the standing ovation (Valter 1985).
Now I only talk about my own vision of it, really, because it's not the sort of thing that you normally talk about with most hipsters. I think that the particular God we can conceive of is a god whose relationship to the universe we cannot divine; that is, how enormous. He is in the scheme of the universe we can't begin to say. But almost certainly, He is not all-powerful; He exists as a warring element in a divided universe, and we are a part of - perhaps the most important part of—His great expression. His enormous destiny; perhaps He is trying to impose upon the universe his conception of being against other conceptions of being very much opposed to His. Maybe we are in a sense the seed, the seed-carriers, the voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment of that embattled vision; maybe we are engaged in a heroic activity, and not a mean one (Mailer 1982).
To cherish love and friendship not only means to coddle, sweeten, or resuscitate old memories, but it also means to appreciate and later recapture the memories we can create for one another....That our mortal lives can't be wasted glamorizing this new hostility and separation between one another....That the present will always provide more than the past could possibly offer. And it is in our best interest as individuals, friends, brothers and sisters, to embrace these new moments of present and the beautiful memories that will manifest therefrom (Tenskwatawa 1957).
Torrent: Beirut [5CD] Tagline: "Like an ancient day and I'm on trial. Let them seize the way, this once was an island."
A victorious person in this life is not a superman but one who, while knowing which conditions are the causes of failure, also knows which conditions are the causes of success (Toshisada 2003).
There are very few people who have a clear understanding of the mind. Even if they understand it, it is even more difficult to put the understanding into action. The ability to explain what the mind is does not mean one has clearly probed its depths. An explanation of water does not moisten the mouth. Even a thorough explanation of fire does not make the mouth hot. A real understanding only comes after you have actually touched water and fire. An empty stomach is never filled by words, no matter how eloquent. Skill with words does not indicate real knowledge, and you cannot achieve an understanding through the explanations of one who thinks he can explain (Soho 2003).
Torrent: Liars - Liars [Mp3-320-2007] Tagline: "Fights were once appealing but without the thrill of healing we've been forced to sit in dreaming of us climbing up the hill."
The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth (Fitzgerald 1925).
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece , all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin.
Even death, in its ability to torment, cannot sway the discovery of self and the freedom that proceeds it (Mircea 1942).
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.
Time without exposure is the enemy of language acquistion and retention (Voelz 2004).
The elf tiptoes his way through the door of my summer cottage and with a bizarre smile, he asks me why humans fall in love. I cleverly deflect his question by asking him why elves fall in love. He then shares a vividly breath-taking story about penguin-sliding across icy fields and magical, autumn strolls through Mermaid Island.
He asks me again, why humans fall in love. So for the remainder of the night I read him a story about a woman who misplaced her heart and the unfortunate man who spent a lifetime in search for it. In the end, his trouble availed to nothing as their love was no place to be found.
The elf's ears twitch and a puzzled look wraps across his face. He takes a minute to think, and then reminds me that the story didn't quite satisfy his question. I take a deep breath and quickly glance away from him, saying "Honestly...shit. I really don't know."
Nagendra 2007
Torrent: Heima - A Film By Sigur Ros Tagline: "Smiling, spinning in circles, holding hands, the world is a blur, except when you're standing."
So we pushed it as far as we could, and we survived—which means something, I guess, but not much beyond a good story...and now, having done it, written it, and humping a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and went so brutally sour, I don't see much choice but to lash down the screws and get on with what has to be done. Either that or do nothing at all—fall back on the Good German, Panicked Sheep syndrome, and I don't think I'm ready for that. At least not right now (Thompson 2003).
Said of the eugenicist's self-congratulatory findings . . . Clarence Darrow further cautioned "amongst the schemes for remolding society this [eugenics] is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race" (Reddy 2007).
It was then that all the sky cast a dry grain of spells. There were clusters of sirens howling, thirty seconds of houses dressed all in a blaze of Christmas lights. There was a soft gradient of stars, a brilliant shade of voices all galloping across the bed of streets. There, music rained strands of moonlight on city-night, and the song of word set tree-still hearts alight. And the silent howls of restless hearts escaped the city quiet, all breathing life into this firestorm sleeping (Plamen, 1918).
Those afraid will not understand the mystery in that around them, because it is only when you are willing to uncover your own heart and eyes that life will itself surrender its most profound secrets (Akiyama 1494).
The scent of human history—a composite of sweat, urine, shit, blood, flesh, and semen, as well as joy, sorrow, jealousy, rage, vengeance, fear, love, hope and a whole lot more.
There were reams and reams of it. Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all.
Each fragment completely covered with creeps of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed, legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid, torn, stained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated passages of god knows what—sense?
