No. Really. It’s not.

Via BLDGBLOG (which you already read, don’t you?), we get to McSweeny’s, in which Walter Murch (maybe even this Walter Murch) submits this unretouched photograph of a clear cut:

I’m on a fast from news, in particular politics. So if anything extra important happens, please let me know. Also, if I start posting politcs in the next week, chastise me.

She’s walking in the sand, footfalls marked by prints, erased by tide. Not new, today. Not new at all. She’s been here about a thousand times, and each time is different, but not new.

She dips her hand in a wave as it covers her feet, and takes a tiny sip of the ocean, just to remember the taste.

Shivering cold now, but not enough to change course. Gulls cry, maybe a warning. She smiles at them and waves, just to see what they’ll do, and of course it doesn’t matter. She nears the rocks and sits, clear of the tide, feeling the salt in her eyes, her hair tangled and stuck to the corner of her mouth, despite attempts at tidying.

A bottle of wine. Some cheese. Crackers. As if she were on a date, but maybe she is. We don’t know. We’re making this up as we go along. She’s sitting there with a picnic and maybe someone, some man of ideal build and feature, comes and says, “I notice that you’re drinking alone. Can I join you?” Or perhaps her date didn’t show, and here she is. Or perhaps she’s simply treating herself to something she never gets; perhaps this is a highest moment for her, a moment which defines her greatest respect for her greatest self. Or maybe she’s going to smash the bottle and slit her wrists with the glass.

We can’t know these things. The details imply too much. She has to do the thing before we can describe it.

She remembers to offer oblations, pouring a bit from the bottle. Then she toasts herself, hoisting the bottle into the air and taking a swig. A swig of wine. A hunk of cheese on a cracker. Does this make her happy? Is she being sarcastic in her group of one?

The sun sets, the moon already in the sky, the full moon, the moon that guides the tides, the moon that governs her. The moon that changes her, and gives her perspective. The moon that lets her know. She’ll wake tomorrow having been alive.

I rented some movies tonight.

First was ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ which I think will really only appeal to people from a certain subculture. The animation is beautiful and hallucinogenic. The rest of it is a big mess, which is completely forgivable… If you’re one of those people to whom it will appeal. If you’re at the point of watching it, you’re probably going to like it. The story has to do with an undercover drug cop who is assigned to bust himself. There are the sort of plot twists and strangenesses that would come from a Philip K. Dick novel, along with the people-sitting-around-chatting vibe from Linklater, who adapted it for the screen and directed. Ultimately everyone’s right to be paranoid, but maybe not for the reason they thought they should be. Identities are fractured and reformed. You know, kid stuff.

The other movie was ‘Idiotocracy.’ And it’s a damn shame this movie never really made it into theaters. It’s my kind of satire. I’m a total sucker for dystopian stories about the end of the world, but in this one, the world is about to end because stupid people have been out-breeding smart people. Enter Luke Wilson’s character who was part of a military cryogenics program that was forgotten for 500 years. He wakes up in a world full of stupid people, where the most popular show on TV is ‘Ow! My Balls!,’ and where people call him a fag for using big words.

So it’s a satire on our times, obviously. It’s inventive and strikes at all the right targets. Find it on DVD and get it and hold on to it.

Well, apparently, the cultural left is responsible for causing 9/11.

The first link is a new book by Dinesh D’Souza called ‘The Enemy At Home,’ the second verifies quotes by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell 5 years ago. Of course, you’d think that a marginalized, radical right-wing (and incredibly stupid) idea such as this would have died a horrible death in the intervening 5 years especially given the source. But, nevertheless, we are NOT ABLE to use the fact that this idea is STILL AROUND as any kind of indication WHATSOEVER about ‘where we are’ as a nation. So don’t even start thinking it lest your hair fall out!

Because, as we all know, the left is the ‘enemy at home,’ and no one need concern themselves with pointing out how dangerous and stupid a thought that really is.

ENEMY AT HOME. Are you getting this?

Update: Dinesh D’Souza on ‘The Colbert Report,’ properly described as a trainwreck. For D’Souza anyway. Notice that Colbert gets him to admit that he agrees with the criticisms leveled by Osama Bin Laden in Part 2.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The Bush administration has fired at least seven US Attorneys.

This is the ‘purge’ to go along with the ‘surge.’

Looks like *someone’s* trying to avoid potential criminal charges…

Update: digby with more details and just the right note of outrage. Josh Marshall with info about the replacements.

More Update: Arlen Spector introduced the amendment to USAPATRIOT which gives the President the power to appoint US Attorneys without Congressional oversight. The question still remains, however: Why did he do it? Was it because he thought US Attorneys might be terrorist plants? Or did he do it so that Bush could appoint political operatives into positions with subpoena power? You be the judge.

But of course, none of this could possibly happen, could it? After all, the far-reaching power both given to and taken by the President couldn’t possibly be used for anything other than the protection of the American people from terrorism.

Whoa, universe. Slow down. Whoa…..

No sooner do I start acting nostalgic for the ’90s than I run across two bits of news.

1) Robert Anton Wilson has died. No, for real this time. I read a lot of RAW in the ’90s, and there was a hoaxed report of his death in, I believe 1997.

2) SciFi Channel will be making a miniseries out of ‘The Diamond Age,’ story adapted by the novel’s author Neal Stephenson. The novel was first published in 1995, and is near and dear to my heart.

And where did I read all this?

3) BoingBoing, itself an outgrowth of the ‘zine movement of the ’90s.

As far as ‘The Diamond Age’ is concerned, I hope it’s good. I mean, it better be good. Like, for real. Seriously. It can’t be bad. If it’s bad then I’ll have to write the screenplay for it that I always meant to write, but no one will buy it because the miniseries was such a tanker.

I’ve been nostalgic for the nineties lately. For me, the nineties were the decade when anything could happen, and it was going to be good. It was all going to start getting better. The world was changing, there was less and less cold war, there was a new age movement, I was meeting people who were daring to hope, people who believed that things can change.

And they did, a bit. For a little while. I was soaking in neopaganism, and then Buddhism. I saw the Dalai Lama once, in fact, at a public appearance. I met people who wore black but weren’t goths (ahem, Mr. Noir Clad Man…) I learned to dance my mind away at Crash Worship shows. I hung around with newagey people who read a lot of books on spirituality. I moved to the west coast, for a better quality of vision, and though I ended up without one, I met some interesting characters.

I’ve passed by on a lot of opportunities to create something that would last, at least for a while, because I was too busy thinking about these things, as if they mattered. But I don’t regret it, and I don’t devalue it. At least I haven’t been the prototypical ‘ugly American’ spiritual tourist (for lack of a better metaphor); I’ve been a little more reserved about it.

Right now, though, I want to reconnect with those days. I want to rewind the clock and wander around the landscape. There was Buddhism, and there was chaos magick, and there was Alex Grey and William Burroughs. And there was Bill Laswell and Crash Worship and Tchkung! and Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN). And a radicalism in the air. A spiritual radicalism that was based in the heart, trying desperately not to channel itself through anger.

So. Amidst all this stuff crammed into my frame of reference, there was a constant voice that I could refer back to. One given to me by the Noir Clad Man referenced above. And that constant was World Entertainment War’s CD ‘Televisionary.’ Straight-ahead accessible rock and roll, except with songs about spiritual opening. The new age version of Christian rock. Only not nearly as lame as that sounds. I have to say that Rob Brezsny, lead singer and lyricist (and author of a weekly astrology column) opened it up for me in the way that only a repeated-listen rock song can. He wrote a book not long ago called ‘Pronoia,’ which is the opposite of paranoia. He says that the universe is conspiring to do good things for you. And that’s what informs World Entertainment War: That things might very well suck, but so fucking what? Let’s throw a better party.

And with that in mind, I now present the bassline of the day, from World Entertainment War’s Daniel Lews: ‘Pagan Jake’s Dream Girl.’

Click on through. Breszny has put all the WEW songs up on his web site as MP3s.

Relax. Be brave. Take back the airwaves.

Pardon me while I puke.

I’m going to spend some shekels on this, because the event description contains this sentence:

You will discover how true spiritual practice is an engagement with life that goes against the norms of our confused society and is therefore an act of rebellion.

Noah Levine reels in another one.

Plus there’s the side benefit of a trip to Breitenbush.

Who’s with me? Jan 26-28.