The Next Terminator Movie. . .

The next Terminator movie should be all in slow motion.

Hip Hop Ancient Egypt

Ok, so I kinda stole this idea from a friend, but it’s such a good one it warrants posting: make a crazily over-produced movie about ancient Egypt featuring current rap and hip hop stars. Rihanna as Cleopatra, Jay-Z as a warrior, Diddy as Pharaoh, Lil Bwow as King Tut, Beyonce as Nefertiti. Of course, there would be musical numbers aplenty.

Astronaut helmet for Austronaut hits.

What I want is a big glass sphere with an open bottom and a bowl on top, essentially a gravity bong that you can swim up under and stick your head in and get uber baked astronaut-style. Nice.

Socialized Healthcare

Wouldn’t it be awesome if poor people could get treated at a hospital as if they were real people? Like, not just sit in the ER waiting room for several hours until they just give up and go die in the parking lot. That would be crazy, yo.

Those bookstores will be the death of me.  Also, there is a cafe every single block for seemingly  miles.  And these are street blocks, folks!

I like the lonely anticipation of moving to a new city.  I walk the streets and think, which of these places will I frequent?, which of these faces will become familiar?  I’m a little nervous about school, but like an orchestra tuning up there is that building tension in my brain that makes me think like a writer. It’s mostly a matter of walking around & how you look at the world.

I only like music these days that is made by people I know.  The only stuff I’ve been listening to is Werewolves, Natureboy, and Heiress.  Also, this song by Yoni Wolf.  But I feel like I know him anyway.  Actually, I listen to natureboy constantly.  I feel a generalized sense of loss, that I can no longer watch them play shows, or wander around brooklyn at strange hours of the night for hours without getting bored.  It’s so startling, how someone you know, onstage, suddenly becomes something powerful, pleasing professional banter, toe-curling emotion and all, a voice that breaks the heart.

I’m living with my friend Reece, who found me a room in a wonderful rent-controlled flat in the middle of the mission, across from a nice bar and a block from that McSweeney’s store.

Walking around the city at an unnaturally early hour this morning, I think: god, SF is hilly.  I miss the post-industrial-apocalyptic feel of Brooklyn.  I don’t feel quite right without feeling the world has reached its techno(logical) ultimatum and crumbled into beautiful deserted wasted streets, bombed-out factories looming overhead, late-night drunken hipsters like zombies, fallout survivors whose brains have rotted.

I don’t think I’ve ever missed a place before; it’s always been the people.  But in this case I think it’s both.

I’ll take some pictures soon.

love

-k

something in the way i sit here, i suppose, broadcasts on some deeply-buried bandwidth in the human psyche a compulsion for disgustingly happy couples to sit across from me and collaborate on some project they feel is kind of important, frequently leaning over to affirm their love for each other or fucking slobber all over each other’s fucking slobbery lips, all during a squeezing of shoulders and back-rubbings, all while being endlessly fucking amused by little  private jokes and sometimes looking over me in silent judgement, my eyes bleary, my posture strange, my hair uncombed, my fingernails dirty, my mouth muttering sub-audible curses because i am on deadline or trying to get dreamweaver to jump through strange hoops or wrestling my way through incomprehensible class registration form confirmations or or. ugh.

why why why

aubrey ryan

Some morning in the clean, pale house
we woke to find oranges still in the bag
by the bed. I sat cross-legged in sheets
and liked the rind against my breast; I smiled
for your shutter. We were together
seven years and when I left I felt I’d heaved
a whole ocean overboard. My breasts
are mine—they fit my hands and I
peel oranges in one long swoop. Let all
that water raise the bed and float me out
into the streets, fruit bobbing behind
like ducklings and the rest a roil
of undertow: you and your lens, grey city,
broken bike spokes and our sheets—
pale and heavy like any drowned thing.

i have a lot of stuff in my apartment.  in the proces sof living with this stuff, using it, spilling shit on it, regarding it, modifying it, and arranging it in relation with other stuff, i feel i can claim all those things as objets d’art.  in accordance, i will be selling signed things from my apartment on a generous pay scale.  get them before they’re snatched up by saatchi.  i also have useful things if you live in brooklyn and want them.

love from the front lines,

kenton

summer is rooftops and cool breezes, cold drinks after long days, small pools, laughter, relaxation, and behind, over the river, spread out like a lit snowglobe the vibrating center of it all.

It is recorded that the Emperor classified the creatures of his kingdom in the following manner: a.) animals of 6 limbs or more, b.) animals of green coat, c.) nighttime creatures, d.) animals who scream like humans when killed, e.) luminescent beings, f.) parasites of the intestine, g.) parasites of the brain, h.) animals capable of space travel (of which only one has been found, recorded in the widely-discredited journal of M. z____harper on the evening he, inflamed by spirit, broke into the town observatory to project and image of himself on the stars -ed.), i.) animals of delicate constitution, j.) animals that move comfortably under the fingers, k.) leafy plants, l.) creatures whose ancestors breathed underwater, m.) foxes, n.) red-coated foxes.

II.

In the Emperor’s garden are collected the entities in his territories which are not animals, which are plants.  These include (in particular order): shovels, red-headed girls, turnips, worms, beetles, tulips, daffodils, aspen oaks, igneous rock, limestone, full toenails, and nail clippings.

It is planting season, and the daughter of the Emperor’s wife has died.  The earth against his hands is cool and dry, and against the spring sun he buries bulbs, mud, unlit cigarettes, grandmothers, houndstooth jackets and teeth, as if digging hundreds of tiny graves.

III.

There is a map, in an upper room of the palace, on a massive table, under torchlight and candlelight, of  the territories under the Emperor’s control and of the territories not under his control.  When a day is over, and the birds have roosted, the bids for power revealed and crushed, disputes settled, the Empress dutifully made love to, the Emperor lies on the table, spreading himself out onto all his land.  He contorts his limbs so nothing rests on what does not belong to him.  He dreams someday of spreading himself out, from end to end.

so they did it:
the same
who, drunk on the enlightening
distillation of logic
drew reason’s coils around the gods,
suffocating them

who found it was not faeries
but rather condensation
that gives us dew
on shining green grassblade mornings, when you and i
were still learning the outlines of each other

who drew close the universe
for us to see no longer
swans or serpents or compasses,
but rather gigantic nuclear explosions –

(though, to be fair, the poets have rallied
and found that even physics, at its edges
has a weakness for beauty
and the stars, connected
like dots
are treeshadows on a green spring afternooon).

they have taken beauty’s mysteries
and read to us, loudly, the last page
(it was the butler, it always is),
strapped her to the examining table and undressed her,
delineated her curves and graphed them,
and found her proportions (golden! glorious!) to have a demonstrable ratio

and now the most enduring symbol
of qualities we cannot quite define
has been broken into
four simple quantities.

and maybe there isn’t any wonder left in the world
as you say,
because they have dissected it,
and now it is dead,
but
maybe the only reason we find meaning
in our mortality
is because there is nothing else to do with that:
the unyielding wall at the end of our search for fact
which has no concern for
aesthetic
or
romance.

and every time someone says
there’d be no meaning to life
without death,
I think, no;
there’d just be a different one.

and every time somebody says
that the world is ending,
i think, no;
just this one is.

one spring night,
the air liquid-warm and soft
with the memory of dusk
I was driving home a friend
of a friend
and suddenly
he gestured out the window,
almost without decision,
like a marionette pulled violently
and without will
and he said,
“i’ve been seeing that car over and over for three years,
those bumper stickers,
that license plate,
and I need to know who they are –
we have to follow them!
and so we did, for several miles,
before we lost it in the dark
and the stretched knots of taillights
but just as it was swallowed into the night’s dark womb,
he leaned precariously from my window,
screaming to know who they were, and why.
and as their silhouette faded into the road
and the deep sky,
i understood what you meant.

Still, scientists will probably never know what made her feel the way she did.