"I can't breathe in here."
"Are you choking?"
"No."
"Are you suffocating?"
"No. I'm just having trouble breathing in here. It's musty, and dusty - and dirty."
"And dark too."
"Yeah, it's real dark in here."

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

Last night I had a dream that I was robbed again. 4x4s made a wooden frame and canvas was stretched across it. I painted the ocean on it. I received a $15 gift certificate from the burglar as a consolation.

When I woke up, I looked out the window. A small, gray, green-eyed cat was staring at me. Staring directly at me. Its icy blue eyes burned through me.

I just heard a guy drive by screaming, "Are you serious? Are you kidding me?" He was screaming, "Fuck! Goddammit! No!" He pulled into the parking lot next door. I observed him. He got out of his car and I saw that he was a police officer. There was a new police chief appointed today. Art. Bring it on.

My heart is beating vigorously. My mind is pulsing. I was hallucinating wildly.

I have rats above my head. They're burrowing. Above the building. Building. Burrowing above me. Rats, cats, squirrels with fleas - girls with needs. Guys with bad knees. There's a basketball game tonight. A championship game. Two sides. I know who's going to win.

My feet are sweaty and dirty.

from the SOURCE

cock
a-doodle-doo
poodle paw
mutt bag
butt crack.
brickwall
cinderblock.
sweat.

bury my face in a cave with fat lips
sex with/in a suitcase
unlatched
the case claps closed around me
parts of me
around my body
there's someone in there.

pornographic sextapes with neighbors
polygamous undertones
slip into a cul-de-sac
with a sex-crazed-sixteen-year-old
pizza
2 peanut-packed cookies
and no satisfaction.

green heart
yellow mud
blood candy
moon beat
drum pulse
passion fruit
snail boil
oil shell
hell stick
twig laceration
candy mud
dirt blood
blue penis brain
head pain
insane door
window flower
vagina hello goodbye
paul mccartney

from the SOURCE

deep see diving
in neural reef.

molten monkey brains
beneath the sheets.

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the CIRCUIT

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

Put me on a pedestal
and marvel at my magnificence.

Carry me up to a cloud in the sky
and caress my body with cherub kisses.

Unfurl my wings and fan humanity
with the collective cool air of my compassion.

Pour me like crystalline healing water
over all your wounds and weaknesses.

Let me loose like a bird from a cage.
Set me free and see me soar
into the fiery horizon of our precious passions.

Extract my elements out of earth.
Farm me and sickle the stalks of my harvest.
Plant me and suckle the juice of my fruit.

Ingest me into your bloodstream
and let me swim alongside your white blood cells.

Breathe in the oxygen of my omniscience.
Exhale me as carbon dioxide from your lungs
and let me photosynthesize the sugars of our seedlings.

Pucker my pollen on your lips.
Taste my pedals on your tongue.
Suck my nectar down your throat.
I will blossom in your body.

Put me in a barbwire box
and drop a ton of bricks on top of me.

Bury me in a hole in the ground
and set scorpions loose on my torso.

Tie me up in a bag
with mosquitoes swarming inside
and let them feast on my tender flesh.

Drill me into somebody's head
and let me infest their encephalon
like a worm in an apple.

Tie me up and gag me
and hang me from a flaming flagpole.

Grind me up and crush my bones,
and use me as powdered milk in your morning coffee.

Chew me up and spit my skin out on a plate
because it's both fattening
and disgusting.

Load me into a shotgun
and spray my blood like bullets on a clean white sheet,
like a silly spit-take,
except nothing is funny.
Not this time.

Eat my essence and digest me.
I will give you diarrhea.

from the SOURCE

God is a dog that I want to kick.
Put him in the back yard chained to a post,
and let him starve to death.

God is a dog that I want to beat the fleas off of.
Put him in the back yard locked in a cage,
and piss in his drinking dish.

I want to punt that pup up to the pearly gates,
and watch him fall back down the ground.

I want to put that pup in a burlap sack,
and beat him to death with the jagged stick of my solemnity.

God is a dog that I don't want to care for anymore.
Take him to the pound and put him to sleep.
Take him to the kennel and kill him crudely.
Put it out of it's misery.

God is a mangy mutt that no one wants.
I want to grab him by his tail and give him to someone else.
Someone meaner than me.

God is a dog that I don't want to deal with anymore.
I want to put him in a cardboard box on the side of the road,
precariously close to the side of the road,
and drive by in an all-terrain SUV.

I don't hear his bark anymore.
I don't feel his bite anymore.
He never came when I called his name.
I don't even know his name anymore.

I want to punt that pup up to the pearly gates,
and watch him fall down the ground again.

I want to put that pup in a burlap sack,
and drown him in a shallow puddle of my salty tears.

God is a dog that I want to kick the shit out of.

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

I have about as much faith in American "democracy" as I do that Jerry Falwell will rise from the dead and return to Earth as the Second Coming of Christ. As someone who has never voted, an embittered apolitico who leans towards expatriation over participation, you may be surprised to hear that I actually have something slightly positive to say about some of the presidential candidates in the race for the 2008 election.

I've been watching the debates that have taken place over the course of the last couple weeks, and I must say, I'm incredibly impressed with a few of the candidates; in particular, former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel (D), Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich (D), and Texas Representative Ron Paul (R). I watched the first two debates in their entirety, but have only caught clips of the most recent Republican debate. So I thought I'd break down some of the "bluster and bombast" for you, and share some of the more interesting moments from these debates.

First Democratic Debate: April 26th, 2007

In my opinion, and you can hear it from the mouths of the politicians themselves, the Internet is the reason that we're able to hear such voices of dissent, and it's the reason that these guys are even being allowed to participate in the national debate. You can be certain that, if the mainstream media and frontrunning candidates had anything to say about it, politicians like Gravel, Kucinich and Paul would gagged and bound and left in a dark corner somewhere in the White House's basement. See for yourself by checking out the following petitions:

You can already see that there are powerful forces trying to shut these guys up. I just think it's amazing to see how the Web 2.0 phenomenon is affecting the political process and possibly (but not probably) democracy. To me, it seems to be unprecedented, at least in recent history, that a presidential debate actually has candidates speaking their minds on important issues, as opposed to simply speaking the party rhetoric.

Support these guys in any way you can - and spread the word!

Mike Gravel's website
Mike Gravel on MySpace

Dennis Kucinich's website
Dennis Kucinich on MySpace

Ron Paul's website
Ron Paul on MySpace

from the SOCKET

Yeah, so sometime between Thursday @ 3pm and Friday @ 3pm, my place got robbed. My computer set up got so jacked, it's not even funny. Lost all my Ning Bulb stuff, my MIDI keyboard, all the connectors for my camera, etc. I lost a Nikon N55 camera and my dead uncle's Fender Stratocaster.

It sucks. If I could only get my hands on those bastards...

So I think I'm going to be out of commission for a little while, at least when it comes to noggin' bloggin'. It's going to be awhile before I can upload any pictures, before I can upload any videos, before I can make any music.

I'm going to try not to let this get me down, though this hit hurts pretty hard. If you guys could keep an eye out for my stuff, on Craigslist, or any pawn shops you happen to run into, I'd appreciate it.

Here's the inventory:

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

A beach house with tall, square white rooms.
And dark halls.
Multiple murder suspects.
Men lurking.
A room I can never return to.

A slimy, wet hose.
A dirty shovel digging earth.

A father with a tool box.
A foe in the fog.

A plumber ripping pipes apart.
A plotter whose face I cannot recall.

A school bus full of angry adults.
A cafeteria full of maddened monkeys.
A room I can never return to.

A grocery store, deep like a shopping mall.
A shopping mall, clean like a government building.
Tall, long white rooms.
A room I cannot ever return to.

Tall steel walls.
Shaky steel ladders.
Succubi, loosely draped in white.
Milky thighs caress a wet portal.
Lust lurking.
A dark chamber.
A room I can never return to.

A beach made of bloody newspapers.
A pulpy fist falls off the hand.
A world where friends are enemies,
and enemies are friends.
A world I can never return to.

from the CIRCUIT

from the SOURCE

"Creativity comes from awakening and directing men's higher natures, which originate in the primal depths of the universe and are appointed by Heaven."

-from the I Ching

Cartesian Dualism

"And, firstly, because I know that all which I clearly and distinctly conceive can be produced by God exactly as I conceive it, it is sufficient that I am able clearly and distinctly to conceive one thing apart from another, in order to be certain that the one is different from the other, seeing they may at least be made to exist separately, by the omnipotence of God; and it matters not by what power this separation is made, in order to be compelled to judge them different; and, therefore, merely because I know with certitude that I exist, and because, in the meantime, I do not observe that aught necessarily belongs to my nature or essence beyond my being a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists only in my being a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is merely thinking]. And although I may, or rather, as I will shortly say, although I certainly do possess a body with which I am very closely conjoined; nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I, [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am], is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it."

-from Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy: Sixth Meditation

Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian forces

"What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian, both conceived as forms of intoxication, which I introduced into aesthetics? Apollonian intoxication alerts above all the eye, so that it acquires power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of the metamorphosis, the incapacity not to react (--in a similar way to certain types of hysteric, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation). It is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself."

-from Twilight of the Idols

Carl Jung's Self and Shadow

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time.

-from Collected Works: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified Shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his Shadow can live together.

-from Collected Works: Psychology and Religion

from the SOURCE

from the SOURCE

from the CIRCUIT

from the SOCKET

from the SOURCE

Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut grades his own works:

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat's Cradle: A+
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

Kurt Vonnegut in the Rodney Dangerfield flick, Back to School:

Click here for a list of more K.V. quotes.

pakistan
amsterdam
mosques and smoke-filled coffeeshops

bearded fists
and cyclists
the man inside the wheel is dead

vanity
pumpkin seeds
sweaty socks, tube-tops, rain drops

cattle feed
caucophony
wires wrapped 'round your neck and head

ventricular
testicular
bloody beats and salty meat

circus freaks
baby beaks
i can't remember what it said

lemur malice
panic palace
an idol swinging from a tree

oven mits
filaments
the yolk inside the egg is dead

...stuck in a shit slurp-n-spray machine.

That's right, I said it. And no, I'm not a misogynist. I'm just the kind of guy that values the free exchange of information, the kind that we've been seeing as a result of this whole Web 2.0 thing-a-ma-jig. The types of websites that have been springing up, like Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and Digg, to name a few, have revolutionized the web as we know it, and, personally, I'm all about it.

But the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) want to cry like a bunch of bitches, take their media and go home.

Exaggerate much? I've been known to from time to time, but I'm not really that far off the mark here. Maybe you've heard about the many frivolous lawsuits that the RIAA has brought forth, suing the pants off of everyday Americans for file-sharing and other copyright "violations."

Take the example of Brittney Chan, a 15 year old file-sharer. The RIAA sued her parents, unsuccessfully at that, and then turned around and sued her. The fact of the matter is, that these trials are costly, and ineffective, but the RIAA uses these lawsuits as a way to strong-arm the accused into settling out of court. There are hundreds (probably even thousands) of examples of the RIAA suing innocent people, people who have actually purchased the mp3s on their computer, as well as dead people, and, ludicrously enough, people who don't even own a computer. Check out this article at arstechnica about it: here.

Here's another example. The RIAA has instituted what they call a "clean slate" program, a website where you can go and admit your guilt of file-sharing under the false-guise of forgiveness. Anyone who would actually go and do this it out of their fucking mind. It's actually just another way for the RIAA to try and pressure you to settling out of court, to get you to pay out the ass for the egregious crime you've committed: sharing a couple of mp3s. There's an article on p2pnet about it: here.

What about the MPAA? You might have seen a story that broke yesterday about the MPAA implementing the use of DVD-sniffing dogs in Asia to combat copyright infringement and illegal film distribution. These guys actually have trained canines to sniff out optical discs at airports. Insane. Check it out: here.

The MPAA, as well as the RIAA, are huge advocates of and lobbyists for DRM, or Digital Rights Management. This is the technology that keeps you from burning an mp3 that you paid for more than a couple of times. If you pay for it, shouldn't you own it? The RIAA and the MPAA don't think so. Not only this, but these two agencies are also lobbying for a complete and utter reform of the internet. They'd like to slap a copyright on anything they can get their hands on, which would pretty much destroy the progress of the social networking sites that we've seen thus far, and outlaw most the content we see on video-sharing sites and blogs. Here's another article on arstechnica about it.

The RIAA and the MPAA have waged war on their clientele, and I hope that their organizations go down in flames for it. Understandably, people are pretty pissed off about it, including myself. Gizmodo, the popular tech site, ain't none too happy about it either. So much so, that they've declared the month of March, "Boycott the RIAA month." You can check out an article about it: here.

If you haven't heard about this story, which broke yesterday, it's the beginning of something big. Viacom is suing Google for 1 billion bucks for copyright infringement on sites like YouTube and Google Video. Check it out. Things are only getting worse for file-sharers, information-sharers, and social networkers. Copyright law as we know it will most certainly need to be redefined, and who knows who is going to benefit from this surely imminent legislation.

Honestly, I don't think that these industries, no matter how powerful they are, will be able to completely halt the progress that has been made so far in the Web 2.0 world. E-Industries like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and other big sites, have some lobbying money to throw around as well. They certainly won't just sit around and let these power-players fundamentally change the internet as we know it. But still, they've got their work cut out for them. We're at a critical juncture in this fight for the freedom of information.

The social networking phenomenon that characterizes Web 2.0 has fundamentally altered the ways that several industries have traditionally done business. It's a simple fact. When technological advances like these occur, it's tough, but you've got to adapt. The RIAA and the MPAA have no interest in doing so - they've opted to attack their clients and strive for the demolition of the web as we know it. I'm sure there are some of you out there, hopefully not more than a few, that would argue that file-sharing, and other copyright infringing practices are wrong, and that they've got a right to do this. I'll restate that I believe that there are ways that these media conglomerates can adjust healthily to these industry changes, without being a bunch of fucking douche-bags about it.

If you haven't heard about "scambaiting," it's a relatively recent phenomenon involving fighting back against the people who send you scam emails. Say, for example, you receive an email from an African emissary, who just so happens to have encountered a large sum of money - and he needs your personal contact info, or some of your money, in order to acquire this wealth. That's the scam. Any day of the week, you'd normally just delete this message.

But there are those out there that are taking this to another level. Instead of dropping this email in the junk folder, they're responding, doing everything they can to waste these spammers' time, energy and resources.

The most popular of the scambaiters is Mike Berry. His website is 419eater.com. He recently tricked two Nigerian scammers into reenacting the "dead parrot" sketch from Monty Python, which you can check out here.

You can check out this story on NPR about Mike Berry and scambaiting: here

I've recently been involved in some scambaiting myself. A week or two ago, I received an email from a terminally ill woman in Ghana. She needed my help in acquiring funds from her late husband, who had been assassinated by political radicals. So instead of deleting it, I continued to email back and forth with "Doris" - over 8 emails exchanged. I told "her" that I was in the Peace Corps, and that I was actually going to be in Cameroon (just about 1,000 miles away from where they were in Ghana), and that I would be willing to meet them halfway to exchange my personal info, which is what they were after. I was trying to trick them into driving 500+ miles to meet me, though I eventually came to a stalemate in my scambaiting. All they wanted me to do was to send them a copy of my drivers license and passport via email, which, obviously, I didn't do - so I think that they lost interest. The point being, I at least wasted an hour or two of their time, and I'm still going to try to trick them into meeting me at a later date.

Here's a video of Nigerian police busting an Internet cafe, where spam scammers were basing their local operations. Take a whiff.

Why not give this a try yourself? That is, if you've got the time. Just be careful who you're fucking with. You shouldn't use your personal name or email, or next thing you know, you might have a small army of pissed off Nigerians on your doorstep.

sid scatman's seven sick faces

by mbartnett | 28 February 2007 6:31pm | culture | permalink | 0 comments

tackling climate change in the us

I read a news-bit in the Chronicle this morning about a report that was recently released by the American Solar Energy Society. This document is the result of a massive collaboration by many of the nation's foremost scholars and scientists, detailing a multitude of practical measures to combat climate change.

For those of you out there that "believe in" global warming, and that concentrations of carbon dioxide produced by humans are adversely affecting the environment, you can view the report on ASES's website: here

For those of you stupid enough to buy into the "doubt" campaigns initiated by corporate interests and proliferated by the media, I hope you hit a displaced polar bear on the way to work (in your luxury SUV, no less), and die.

by mbartnett | 22 February 2007 10:32am | news | permalink | 2 comments

what bush really means when comparing war in iraq to our war for independence

Bush said, "Today, we're fighting a new war to defend our liberty and our people and our way of life. And as we work to advance the cause of freedom around the world, we remember that the father of our country believed that the freedoms we secured in our revolution were not meant for Americans alone."

"He once wrote, 'My best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever in any country I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom,'" Bush said.

Link to Reuters article: here

by mbartnett | 20 February 2007 12:31pm | news | permalink | 0 comments

ideas set in motion

I am single black dot on the top of a domino.
The bottom is blank, a slick shiny canvas.
My fingerbrush begins of the rush of a disabused domino-chain
called, "ideas set in motion."

by mbartnett | 19 February 2007 7:02pm | culture | permalink | 0 comments