The Blank Engine

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, in forest. Representative passage:

The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not ‘made’ but grow themselves into whatever they become. . . . the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree.

Some very nice words about the DO NOT SCREEN / Tribeca Film Festival by Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, here.

Next year, May 2013, will mark the twentieth anniversary of the 5-part television mini-series Wild Palms, which was conceived by Bruce Wagner and which ran on ABC. The show was made possible and overshadowed by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (which also aired on ABC in 1990 and 1991), and in some ways it was a more radically disjunctive series, a truly sunny and nightmarish postmodern nightmare, with references and allusions to everything from David Cronenberg’s films to Wallace Stevens to Philip K. Dick to Walt Whitman. Episode 3, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, has perhaps the strangest mix of pacing and image as anything ever shown on television.

In an era of super-polished, aesthetically tyrannical, ruthlessly flawless shows like Mad Men, it’s nice to look back on Wild Palms, which dared not to ask to be loved. Here are two images, as well as a clip.

Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 dust jacket on Charles Burns’s graphic novel Black Hole.

Staying humble, for me, is always just a click away: the Amazon page where my book A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is for sale for 24.99. It’s not just any old copy, however: it’s an inscribed copy I gave to someone, probably when the book was published in 2009.


And if I still think the old ego needs to be taken down a peg or two, I can remind myself that the inscribed book has been listed there for over two years! A real “Collectible” gem. And the product description reads “appears unread.” Great! As to who I gave the book to as an inscribed gift, my guesses would be just shots in the dark. And in truth, I don’t want to know. Although the thought does creep into my mind on occasion to buy the copy myself, and then send it to the inscribee yet again, with yet another inscription that contains the phrase “you bum, you.”

So if you see some guy in black and white walking down the street covering his face in shame with a record, it’s probably me.

10/40/70 of The Fury at Press Play.

The Blue Velvet Project, #98. And this was nice.

Julia Kristeva and Nitnit, from Charles Burns’s X’ed Out, sharing an abject gaze.