do not fret the bus will get you there yet


jenny holzer, in a dream

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"3. Bill Frist

"We noted recently (see Idiots 215) that Bill Frist was in a spot of bother over a dubious stock sale - he dumped shares in his family's medical corporation just before a disappointing earnings report. Bill says he did nothing wrong - and anyway, those stocks were in a 'blind trust' so he could avoid a conflict of interest.

"Well consider that conflict of interest, um, unavoided. New documents released last week reveal that the trust managers 'routinely informed Frist whenever shares of Hospital Corp. of America Inc. were added to his portfolio,' according to the Denver Post. The Post continued, 'If Martha Stewart can be jailed for lying about a quarter-of-a-million episode of insider trading, Frist may be sweating.'

"True, but that also opens up the the exciting possibility of 'The Apprentice: Bill Frist,' which, let's face it, would be awesome. When he ditches a contestant at the end of every episode his catchphrase could be, 'You're in a vegetative state.' Or, 'Step into my laboratory, Mr. Frisky.'

"Incidentally, Bill Frist also said last week that the Senate won't be investigating the CIA leak case. Now there's a shocking surprise."

-- related: clusterfuck nation. excerpt:

"If the American public could stand the truth, we would stop calling it the Iraq War and rename it the War to Save Suburbia. Of all the things that Bush and Cheney have said over the last six years, the one thing the Democratic opposition has not challenged is the statement that 'the American way of life is not negotiable.' They're just as invested in it as everybody else. The Democrats complain about the dark efforts by Bush and Cheney to cook up a rationale for the war. Guess what? The Democrats desperately need something to oppose besides the truth. If they would shut up about WMDs for five minutes and just take a good look around, they'd know exactly why this war started.

"When the American people, Democrat and Republican both, decided to build a drive-in utopia based on incessant easy motoring and massive oil dependency, who lied to them? When tens of millions of Americans bought McHouses thirty-four miles away from their jobs in Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Dallas, who lied to them? When American public officials adopted the madness of single-use zoning and turned the terrain of this land into a tragic crapscape of strip malls on six-lane highways, who lied to them? When American school officials decided to consolidate all the kids in gigantic centralized facilities serviced by fleets of yellow buses that ran an average of 150,000 miles per year per school, who lied to them? When Americans trashed their public transit and railroad system, who lied to them? When Americans let WalMart gut Main Street, who lied to them?"

-- also related: this guy is bad news.

* MSNBC talks with david berman. excerpt:

"'My advice is this,' Berman said, 'If you believe in fate, and if life has brought you here, to the edge of this sentence, on this Web page among billions, then maybe you should think about possibly buying the CD. As for the rest of you, please exercise your free will and buy Tanglewood Numbers today!'"

* Happy Birthday to bob pollard.

that first ice cold twist of the wind


Carl Andre, Lament for the Children 1976-1996, Concrete blocks (100 units), photograph shows original installation in 1976 at P.S.1., Long Island City


two by klipschutz, in expectation:

The Farce of Evil

Frist it was Rove
then DeLay then 
Scooter Segway’d
his way into
the shot
             Get Abram-
off my back is 
sore from carrying 
out ordures 
                  All the 
ooze that hardens sits
from plea to briny plea 
can’t keep the Humpties
straight 
            Frist it was 
Jeff Gannon (knee 
James Guckert) lob-
bing softballs Ari-ward
or was it Scott not
Helen Thomas that 
old Arab (said Ann 
Coulter) such a nasty 
piece of work 
                      Frist in the 
arse of his countryclub 
mum’s the word Turd 
Blossom Judy Judy 
Judy 
       (where’s a Cary 
Grant imperson hell 
does anyone remember 
even Gannon’s prob 
a bridge-of-memory
too far) 
            singing like
like like a Judybird
Coop Cooper flew the coop 
Scoop Novak put a mojo 
on us all and who
the muck is Scooter  
anyway you slice it 
rotten names fall out  
my mouth
                Frist Rove 
(ram, bling) swift-
boats Joe Wilson 
then Novak names 
the Plame—champagne!
then the cork goes
orbital then fingers
point then Nobodaddy 
takes the blame
(thou silent & invisible
from every searching 
eye)
       Enter Robo-Cheney
Ralph is that you Reed 
in water hot a person 
friend of Upstairs Man
can’t keep the Humpties
straight
            The Bush 
I’ve had my fill of  
can’t we go back to
before can’t we all  
just get fucked 
over and over 
and over again 
my friennnnd
                      and 
you don’t believe 
we’re on the All Hallows 
Eve of self-destruction

Pendulum's Progress
      
       the indictment edition

It used to be a scandal
Until it was a flap

First it was a mystery
Then it became history

Which is to say forgotten

Of a sudden it was back—
With a vendetta

Loose words on high 
In old familiar places

The cast includes 
-   a ferreter 
-   a flak

And the one we’d castrate if we could
-   a lying Cheshire sack

For now who skates from under it
(He built his conscience from a kit)
 

  --written in honor of Valerie Plame Wilson

feed her some hungry reggae she'll love you twice


Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1967

* Indictments expected friday. the washington note is reporting that fitzgerald has just leased additional office space at 1400 New York Avenue, nw, wdc, a block and a half from the white house.

-- related: Miers withdraws.

* The Morning News interviews George Saunders. excerpt:

"RB: Was that your experience when you came here [Syracuse]?

"GS: Yeah, I studied with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger and at that time it was only a two-year program and there was lot of teaching, what I consider teaching beneath the teaching. For example, for me, I had a very Kerouackian view of writing: you had to be a fucking nut.

"RB: You had to write on rolls of toilet paper?

"GS: [chuckles] You had to be crazy. Drunk or something. Messed up. And I didn’t really feel like I was that messed up in an overt way. I was worried. To see Toby working, with a family that he dearly loved, working industriously, beyond industriously, beautifully every day, turning out these masterpieces, and he was a nice person. A loving and loved person. That was a big thing to say that was OK. We are working at a higher level than personal quirkiness—we are talking about the work itself. What you do in your life is not—doesn’t matter."
...
"GS: It makes it scarier when you don’t have the crutch of flamboyance. We don’t care what kind of person they are. What do the words say? That’s scary in a way. It’s easier to wear the cravat and—

"RB: And be a poseur.

GS: This goes back to what we said earlier. There is a story that I tell too much but I love it. Tolstoy and Gorky are in Moscow and Tolstoy sees these Hussars coming towards them, Russian Green Berets, and he says, 'Ah, that’s everything that’s wrong with Russia. The preening and the self, the narcissism and the aggression—it’s going to be the end of Russia.' And Gorky is really impressed and convinced. So they walk by, and Tolstoy turns on his heel and says, 'On the other hand, what magnificent specimens.' And he goes on and on in the other direction. That’s the thing about art that’s so powerful. A person’s depressed. OK. Good thing or bad thing? Both, and if a person can describe a “depressed” state, through both the lens of what it feels like, how it feels when you are clear of it, a holographic three-dimensional—"

* Filmstrip on gluesniffing and pills.

* the rude pundit. excerpt:

"You wanna tell us how that is like an investigation into who outed a CIA agent's identity as a way of discrediting someone who questioned the reasoning that got us into a goddamn war? You wanna tell us how Rove and Libby lying under oath about how they disseminated that information and where they got it from is in any way similar to lyin' about who you fucked? You wanna tell us how Patrick Fitzgerald's possible opening of his investigation into the rationale for going to an ongoing war is in any way as irrelevant as veering a financial dealings investigation into a lie about blow jobs and hand jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not Bill Clinton got a little financial benefit from a shitty savings and loan bank that went under?

"Is there a clamor to look into George Bush's sexual habits to see a pattern of exaggerating what's real? Is anyone asking what George Bush's dick looks like? 'Cause at this point, it oughta be shrivelled like a scared turtle, to the point where he has to dig into his body cavity to pull it out to take a piss.

"So, yeah, the Rude Pundit finds himself as 'repulsed' as Kristof. But his repulsion is at the manipulation of the media and the public by an administration that cravenly, cretinously desired a war; his repulsion is at the inability of the Bush administration to admit error on the path to destruction. Instead, it just sends its lackeys, attack dogs, and others to do its bidding. Sure, there's a lot of disgusting shit out there. Slamming Scooter and Karl (and maybe others) into the dirt and making them eat rocks ain't part of it."

* 'Video' for grandaddy's jed's other poem created and programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. [ via]

in the end we must be who we are


Walter Sickert, Lazarus Breaks His Fast: Self-Portrait, 1927

* Indictments on the way. excerpt:

"Indictments in the CIA leak investigation case are expected to be handed down by a grand jury on Wednesday, bringing to a head a criminal inquiry that threatens to disrupt seriously President George W. Bush's second term.

"On Tuesday night, news reports, supported by a source close to the lawyers involved in the case, said that target letters to those facing indictment were being issued, with sealed indictments to be filed on Wednesday and released by the end of the week.
...
"However, Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and strategist. said: 'If [Fitzgerald] indicts, they [the White House] will have no choice but to attempt to demonise him. I think that is going to be really, really tough.'"

* There's a lot of pot in Kentucky.

"While Kentucky is the 'Bluegrass' state, authorities are finding plenty of another kind of grass, the illegal variety.

"State police say they've confiscated more than $1 billion worth of marijuana this year. Kentucky traditionally ranks among the top five states in illegal marijuana production. Troopers say they would have found even more pot farms but for Hurricane Katrina. National Guard helicopters used to search Kentucky hills for pot were sent to the Gulf Coast for hurricane relief.

"One official says there's so much pot grown in Kentucky that if every Kentuckian were to smoke a joint an hour, they couldn't use it all."

* Helena Frith Powell picks the best French erotica. excerpt:

"3. The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Possibly the maddest book ever written, but the title alone makes the book worthy of inclusion on this list. Voyeurism, lesbian leanings, broken hearts and adultery: what more could you ask for?

"4. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
The sound of cicadas and the smell of suntan oil jumps off the pages. Is there a sexier location in the world than the south of France? Not only are the teenagers getting down and dirty, the grownups are too. As the young narrator says, "Fidelity is arbitrary and sterile." - a mantra her father lives by. This sexy, poignant, moving and brief book is a must. If you read only one book on this list, this should be it."

* "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- bertrand russell

* Plums, best band in DC without a website, are playing tonight at DC9. 10pm. get there.

listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox


allen ginsberg, reading at royal albert hall, 1965

* Looks like Cheney is in more trouble than previously thought. excerpt:

"I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, first learned about the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the leak investigation in a conversation with Mr. Cheney weeks before her identity became public in 2003, lawyers involved in the case said Monday.

"Notes of the previously undisclosed conversation between Mr. Libby and Mr. Cheney on June 12, 2003, appear to differ from Mr. Libby's testimony to a federal grand jury that he initially learned about the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, from journalists, the lawyers said.

"The notes, taken by Mr. Libby during the conversation, for the first time place Mr. Cheney in the middle of an effort by the White House to learn about Ms. Wilson's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was questioning the administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program to justify the war."

* "Man created god, the inverse remains to be proven." Serge Gainsbourg: The Obscurity of Fame. [via] excerpt:

"Gainsbourg mastered the art of scandal better than anyone, including Malcolm Mclaren, because it was written into his DNA -- Born To Raise Hell; he just couldn't help it. 'For me provocation is oxygen.' He once said. He enjoyed his notoriety but still managed to seduce people with his humanity. With his cig-dangling-from-lips, lecherous persona, his poignant lyrics, and nihilism he was able to speak the unspeakable, once even proclaiming, 'I wanna fuck you,' to Whitney Houston on live TV. He walked that jittery tightrope between outcast and pop star -- marginal yet marketable; every indie rocker's dream -- or scheme.

"Gainsbourg was the kind of culture hero that seldom exists in America. His death of a heart attack on March 2, 1991, for instance, warranted something of a national day of mourning in France. But Gainsbourg remains almost totally invisible in America, a misunderstood rumor at best despite the recent efforts by Luna, Luscious Jackson, and Mick Harvey (also of Bad Seeds fame) whose English versions of Gainsbourg songs on his Intoxicated Man reminds us how little we know about him.

"'The idea to make this record began from a combination of personal curiosity about Gainsbourg's material (particularly his lyrics) and a growing bewilderment that his work is virtually unknown outside French speaking countries,' Mick Harvey explains in his liner notes. "

* from Harper's:

-- Number of journalists killed in Vietnam during the twenty years of war there: 63

-- Number killed in Iraq since March 2003: 71

-- Average number of new blogs created each second: 1

-- Amount Americans spent last year on fantasy football: $2,079,000,000

-- Number of consecutive years that the U.S. median income has failed to increase: 5

-- Number of consecutive years that the percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased: 4

men of good fortune, very often can't do a thing


beautiful vicious and deadly roses painting, damien hirst

* top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"2. The White House Cabal

"Adding to George W. Bush's political woes, last Thursday Colin Powell's former chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson made a devastating attack on the administration, and talked of his time inside the White House:

"'What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

"'If you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in the bureaucracy as they carry out your decisions, you are courting disaster. And I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran.

"Wilkerson also placed the blame for Abu Ghraib squarely on the shoulders of the administration, called Condoleezza Rice 'part of the problem' (sorry, Dick Morris), said that the military is overstretched and demoralized, and made a painful comparison between George Bush 41 and George Bush 43, calling the former 'one of the finest presidents we have ever had,' while the latter is 'not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either.''

"Wow. With friends like these..."

* Oral history of the making of The Warriors. excerpt:

"Van Valkenburgh (played mercy): You think about the intensity of what is being filmed today, our stuff was balletic and abstract and there is only one bit of blood in the entire movie. It’s more like the Three Stooges than anything else.

"Hill (director): Everybody always talks about the fights - and it’s very stylized, it’s not brutally realistic - and my intention was to get laughs. I saw it with a big audience a lot of times and it got a lot of laughs, and the right kind of laughs. But that’s rarely commented on. The unfortunate things that happened after the release of the movie darkened the image, so the idea that there is a lot of humor in the movie got forgotten then. In one sense I think it remains forgotten, but not with its fans, so what the hell.

"Beck (played swan of the warriors): I remember hearing that in Paris it was playing like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. People were lining up for midnight showing as characters. This was within four or five years of it’s initial release. At that point I knew that this picture has got a different kind of thing going on now.

"Kelly (played Luther of the rogues): Adam Sandler told me a story about Eddie Vedder having the “Warriors, come out to play” chant on his answering machine for years."

* fm, by the mountain goats

* more than you'd probably want to know about your favorite major leaguers.

I pawned my Smith Corona and I went to meet my man


the bongos, hoboken, nj, early 1980s

American football (A Meditation on the Gulf War)
-- by harold pinter

Hallelullah! It works.
We blew the shit out of them. We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works. We blew the shit out of them. They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelullah. Praise the Lord for all good things. We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it. Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust. We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

My Heart
-- by Frank O'Hara

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open

Learning How to Make Love
-- by denise duhamel

This couple couldn't figure it out.
The man licked his wife's genitals while she stared straight ahead.
The woman poked her husband's testicles with her nose.
The man put his toe in the folds of the woman's vulva.
The woman took the man's penis under her armpit.
Neither one of them wanted to be the first to admit
something was off. So it went on-
the man put his finger in his wife's navel.
The woman batted her eyelashes against the arch of her husband's foot.
They pinched each other's earlobes. They bit each other's rear ends.
To perpetrate the lie, they ended each encounter with a deep sigh.
Then one day while the husband was hunting,
a man stopped by the igloo and said to the wife:
I hear you have been having trouble.
I can show you how to make love.
He took her to bed and left before the husband came home.
Then the wife showed her husband,
careful to make it seem like the idea sprang
from both. After all these years of rubbing one's face against the other's belly
or stroking a male elbow behind a female knee,
this couple had a lot of catching up to do. They couldn't stop to eat or sleep
and grew so skinny they died. No one found them for a long time.
And by then, their two skeletons were fused into one.

And I think about that, and I sorta black out


A Few of My Favorite Things as in Bach and Other, 2003, Raymond Saunders

* Wolcott:

"If it looks as if Cheney has to resign and Bush himself enters the Nixon danger zone, we'll hear the same frets and cries from the pundit shows about the country being torn apart and Americans losing faith in their government. But it isn't the country that will be torn apart by Plamegate any more than the country was torn apart during Watergate (which provided daily thrilling news entertainment value that bound citizens together); it's the Washington establishment that will be torn apart. And it should be torn apart. It's failed the country, and it's played by its own rules for too long, and 'criminalizing politics' is exactly what should be done when political criminals deceive a nation into a war with Judith Miller serving as the Angie Dickinson to their Rat Pack and Richard Cohen auditioning for the part of Joey Bishop."

* the cunning realist:

"To me, Bush's public statements on this are paramount. Yes, what he said to the prosecutors is legally crucial---and as reported in this piece by Murray Waas, Bush stated to prosecutors in June 2004 that Rove had assured him he was not involved with the Plame leak. If both DeFrank's and Waas' reports are true, this president could be in extremely serious trouble. But here's what I really want to know: did this president stare into a camera and lie about this to the American public?"

* Joe Pernice provides a third installment in his cribs series, this time discussing his various modes of transportation. [via]

* "High Art has a communicability far superior in scope and strength to any other form of human endeavour." -- frank o'hara

* Lots of Joos reviews.

* In DC? Don't forget that next Tuesday is the annual High Heel race on 17th between P and R streets. get there early if you want to be able to see anything. race starts at 9 sharp.

chain smoke rings like a vapor snake kiss


gerhard richter, abstraktes bild

words
--by franz wright

I don't know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don't know why: or I'll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking--
they don't often come when I need them
when I need them most terribly,
never

Bild, 1959
-- by franz wright

as the bourbon's level
descended in the bottle
his voice would grow
lower and more
indistinct, like a candle flame
under a glass

sunlight in the basement room

so he reads to me
disappearing
when he is gone

I go over
and secretly taste his drink

mushroom cloud of sunset

vespers
-- by denis johnson

the towels rot and disgust me on this damp
peninsula where they invented mist
and drug abuse and taught the light to fade,
where my top-=quality and rock-bottom heart
cries because I'll never get to kiss
your famous knees again in a room made
vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp.
things get pretty radical in the dark:
the sailboats on the inlet sail away;
the provinces of actuality
crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly
ministers to the fallen parking lots--
the sunset instantaneous on the fenders,
memory and peace...the grip of chaos...

war is bad
--by john "broken hand" morton

War is Bad for Children and ME!!
fuck bush, fuck george bush
ignorant asshole supreme
fuck him up his ass.
my dick in his sneering gob
a mean dumb mother fucker

baby take this magnet put my picture back on the fridge


katrina sunset, by silver juice?

* Listen: Silver Jews K-Hole. Tanglewood Numbers is out. Get your copy today.

Also, word is Drag City will soon be posting to its website, the video for How Can I Love You (If You Won't Lie Down).

* The New Yorker profiles Sarah Silverman. excerpt:

"Silverman crosses boundaries that it would not occur to most people even to have. The more innocent and oblivious her delivery, the more outrageous her commentary becomes. Lenny Bruce’s 'Jews killed Christ' joke ('I did it. My family. . . . Not only did we kill Christ, we’re going to kill him when he comes back') is reprised with a harder edge. 'Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ,' Silverman says. 'And then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.'"

"She skewers hypocrisy and self-righteousness, but there are times when her narrative ingredients—rape, dead grandmothers—threaten to overwhelm the delicate balance of a joke (rape being one of the last remaining taboos in today’s sexual politics; grandmothers being what they are). In a catchy song she sings about porn actresses—'Do you ever take drugs / so that you can have sex without crying?/Yeah yeah'—the bald sermonizing, over an upbeat pop melody, is dissonant and odd but somehow not really funny. Who doesn’t feel sorry for porn actresses?"

* A "senior government official" is cooperating with Fitzgerald; indictments could come as early as tomorrow.

* Former Police Chief wants drugs legalized. excerpt:

"I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

"But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

"Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.

"I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.

"Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter."
...
"The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one's sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.

"They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war."

tomorrow, you're only a day away


interpretation of tanglewood numbers cover, steve keene, september 2005

TANGLEWOOD NUMBERS OUT TOMORROW!!!

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"9. Ann Coulter

"Ann Coulter revealed the full extent of her integrity last week on Sean Hannity's radio show and you'll be unsurprised to learn that, yes, Ann Coulter has no integrity.

"During a conversation with Hannity and Brent Bozell, Coulter remarked that the administration is not telling the truth about the Harriet Miers nomination. 'They're treating us like liberals lying to us,' she said. 'When they lie to conservatives, we have a problem.'

"So there you have it - Ann Coulter admits that the administration is a bunch of liars, it's just that when she thought they were only lying to liberals it was perfectly acceptable. Now they're lying to conservatives, it's a big problem.

"I hate to tell you this Ann, but if you think that the administration hasn't been lying to conservatives for the last four years about everything from ending abortion to banning gay marriage to reducing the size of government to spreading glorious freedom across the Middle East, then you're dumber than I thought.

"Which is saying something."

* Study shows what we've been saying for years: marijuana is good for your brain! excerpt:

"While other studies have shown that periodic use of marijuana can cause memory loss and impair learning and a host of other health problems down the road, new research suggests the drug could have some benefits when administered regularly in a highly potent form."
...
"The scientists also noticed that cannabinoids curbed depression and anxiety, which Dr. Zhang says, suggests a correlation between neurogenesis and mood swings. (Or, it at least partly explains the feelings of relaxation and euphoria of a pot-induced high.)"
...
"Cannabinoids, such as marijuana and hashish, have been used to address pain, nausea, vomiting, seizures caused by epilepsy, ischemic stroke, cerebral trauma, tumours, multiple sclerosis and a host of other maladies."
...
"When asked whether his findings explain why some swear by pot as a way to avoid the queasy feeling of a hangover, Dr. Sharkey paused and replied: 'It does not explain the effects of smoked or inhaled or ingested substances.'"

* Quicktime files of a recent Haruki Murakami reading.

* Indictments on the way? Cheney May Be Entangled in CIA Leak Investigation. excerpt:

"A special counsel is focusing on whether Vice President Dick Cheney played a role in leaking a covert CIA agent's name, according to people familiar with the probe that already threatens top White House aides Karl Rove and Lewis Libby."
...
"While there have been virtually no leaks out of Fitzgerald's office, and even the subjects of his investigation are unsure about his intentions, White House officials and Bush supporters are fearful that recent developments spell legal jeopardy for Rove, the central strategist behind Bush's political campaigns and much of his presidency, and Libby, a key architect of the Iraq war strategy."
...
"In an interview yesterday, Wilson said that once the criminal questions are settled, he and his wife may file a civil lawsuit against Bush, Cheney and others seeking damages for the alleged harm done to Plame's career.

"If they do so, the current state of the law makes it likely that the suit will be allowed to proceed -- and Bush and Cheney will face questioning under oath -- while they are in office. The reason for that is a unanimous 1997 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against then-President Bill Clinton could go forward immediately, a decision that was hailed by conservatives at the time."

* cokemachineglow jumps on the Berman interview bandwagon.

find some respite in the whiskey-induced holy unending night


Frank Stella, untitled, 1964

From Disaster
-- by George Oppen

Ultimately the air
Is bare sunlight where must be found
The lyric valuables. From disaster.

Shipwreck, whole families crawled
To the tenements, and there

Survivied by what morality
Of hope

Which for the sons
Ends its metaphysic
In small lawns of home.

A Theological Definition
-- by George Oppen

A small room, the varnished floor
Making an L around the bed,

What is or is true as
Happiness

Windows opening on the sea,
The green painted railings of the balcony
Against the rock the bushes and the sea running

the trash can
-- by charles bukowski

this is great, I just wrote two
poems I didn't like.

there is a trash can on this
computer.
I just moved the poems
over
and dropped them into
the trash can.

they're gone forever, no
paper, no sound, no
fury, no placenta
and then
just a clean screen
awaits you.

it's always better
to reject yourself before
the editors do.

especially on a rainy
night like this with
bad music on the radio.

and now--
I know what you're
thinking:
maybe he should have
trashed this
misbegotten one
also.

ha, ha, ha,
ha.

Self
-- by Dan Chiasson

Found not founded. Attacking only
from the back
like the Bengal tiger; afraid

of the face. Sweet-talking like the addict
coveting
another addict's stash. Fished from

my own trash like the feared
letter I heard later
held a birthday check.

Watched like the tiger from
a great height,
hollered out. Two-faced, masked

like the villager tricking
the tiger. Tricked
like the tiger. Founded on owned ground.

We are the other people


Press conference 1968

* Why the War on Drugs Cannot be Won, by James P. Gray. excerpt:

"Based on my experience as a federal prosecutor with the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, as a criminal defence attorney for the U.S. Navy JAG Corps, and as a trial judge in Orange County, Calif. since 1983, I've concluded that the U.S. government policy of drug prohibition has not only failed, but that it is hopeless.

"The problem is not that our law enforcement officers aren't doing a good job. In truth is they have a dangerous and difficult task, and are doing better than we have a right to expect. They are no more to blame for the failure of drug prohibition than was Elliott Ness for the failure of alcohol prohibition. The problem, rather, is that our prohibitionist laws make the trafficking in illegal drugs so obscenely profitable that we will never exhaust the supply to criminals willing to take the risk of imprisonment in order to produce and sell them.

"In fact, our present system is giving us the worst of all worlds. As a direct result of our policy of drug prohibition, crime, violence, corruption, taxes and -- in many cases -- even drug usage have increased, while the health and civil liberties of citizens have suffered. America's "prison-industrial complex" has gotten so fat and powerful from the money our governments have budgeted for the War on Drugs that it has become politically dangerous for elected officials to speak out against the current policy. Under these circumstances, it is up to ordinary people -- as citizens, taxpayers and voters -- to call a halt to these failed policies."
...
"why do our policies not take into account the problems caused by the War on Drugs itself? For example, I have never heard anyone say that it is a good thing to be a heroin addict. But if some people become heroin addicts, why should they also get AIDS from dirty needles? That is a separate problem that is caused by prohibiting the distribution and possession of hypodermic needles and syringes, as well as turning the drug-addicted people into criminals, thus pushing them farther away from medical facilities where they can get help. Moreover, why should the people of Colombia see their military, police, judiciary, safety and way of life corrupted by our drug money? The people of Colombia do not have a drug problem: No one is dying from coca plants. What they have is a devastating drug money problem."

* "the president, he's got his war/folks don't know just what it's for/no one gives ya rhyme or reason/have one doubt they call it treason" -- Roberta Fleck from 1969's "compared to what" [via nick]

* Saturday at 6pm the caribbean will be playing a set from their recently released full-length Plastic Explosives at Revolution Records in Van Ness.

* "If it all seems too much, just remember that Kant never got laid. Ever." –Andrew Butler

I won't need someone to let me be


we back them up, by david salle

Poems by lewis macadams jr.

humidity

you sit in a school room under a revolving fan.
I am alone with the fiasco of my dreams
hot evening, shades up
thunderstorms piling
up in the West anything for volume
all of my art seems overflow, the
music of my self-pity. barbara has left
john, the weather is changing
history
builds in your mind, in my mind
writing this poem
means a hope of ecstacy. nothing is drawn
out outside, no news of the balanced world
here comes the rain

elegance
infuses my writings, your writings
are the heavy distance in between

drainage

I'm entangled by you
by this damn menu
can you order for me?
in Italian? get me
something steaming hot, something dramatic.
outside, the city goes slack
under the sloppy weight of the tar roofs.
when I write a poem
on a day like this
it must snow all night
and be clear very cold
by the following noon

I see you jump over the slush by the curb
my hands hurt, are in my pockets
you are wearing a beautiful parka
the hat-check girl aura
restaurant filling up
a quick round of drinks
I sense we are in the movies
we never talk like this, usually
I'll bet you're hungry. I know
my boots are wet too
we have a perfect life, today
right? let's order then, and see what it is we both want.

kora for march 5th

williams died two years ago yesterday
tomorrow
snow expected
in the low 30s

I've got to drive the lady home to
take her pills
"crutches for us all"
he sd. when the world is
"organized"

sub terra flower
and the Spring song, Persephone
and me
in wet fear
walking to the parking lot
gray lines of
soaked cars

war years

the doughnut man sounds crazy too
I have thrown away my party signs
"I'm dreaming in beer"

outside the window
"arrangements" he said and steamed the window
will you please
make room
for me
in your casket?

Your body
is too much to transmit
icons, futile, like a blue duck

I can't plant anything
in my solid versions of lust, dana
I am crossing myself twice
and taking baths, as ordered
Nothing is working. I'm
dropping out of history, I'm
Mephistopheles annexed, I'm a pie being throwed.

the river's future

how filthy this room is! it's
a year ago
a crescent of cigarette smoke
and obscure bumming tactics

my surroundings are bestial and cave-like
I stick my neck out for the sake of art!
and my toes are habitually tinguely
I'm sober as usual but the room is
tilting

how melancholy to slide out the window!

he's touched your perfect body with his mind

* Is an Ipod Nano worth a golden shower? some think so. excerpt:

"Liza Schubert says her parties 'are always out of control,' often featuring plenty of debauchery. So for her birthday party’s dare contest, she wanted a prize that would make her party guests reconsider their bounds of personal decency. The 23-year-old Glover Park resident originally thought about purchasing a bottle of pricey vodka. But, she says, 'Alcohol this year wasn’t enough.'

"Party host Will Gordon, 22, suggested something more coveted. The get-together fell just after the release of Apple’s hot new iPod Nano, and Gordon knew the tiny gizmo would excite his guests.

"'I liked the hype, so I decided on the Nano,' Schubert says. The day before the shindig, she purchased a brand-new MP3 player at Best Buy in Crystal City, for $211, including tax."
...
"Nzibo got the ball rolling, when he dared a heterosexual male contender to give one of his gay peers a lap dance. The man refused. He was out, banished to the losers’ lounge.

"The dares escalated. Straight men made out with each other. Feet were licked. Toes were sucked. Someone got a penis in the nose. One gay contestant stuck his face in a woman’s vulva."
...
"Four hours later, the 16 contestants had been whittled to the final four. The remaining competitors all stripped naked and streaked across Wisconsin Avenue NW at around 1 a.m. Gordon says one 'might have even streaked onto [National] Cathedral property.'"

"The victor, 21-year-old Glover Park resident Jeff Schneidman, shaved his head and endured one most-humiliating act: a golden shower.

"After the contest ended, Schneidman opened the iPod package and passed it around to the other contestants. The choice of prize, Schubert says, was a success: “People were pretty desperate. There were things I didn’t expect.”

"Contacted after the party, Schneidman says he doesn’t like talking about the contest. But he adds, “It was worth it.”

"'Jeff was a champ,' says Daniel Lubrano, 22, the contestant who urinated on Schneidman’s chest and face. 'He really earned it.'"

* Bono, apparently more fucked up than we previously realized, reportedly will play at a fundraiser for Rick Santorum. The $10,000 a seat concert will take place October 16 at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia in support of Santorum’s re-election.

-- UPDATE (3:50pm): Bono is NOT doing a fundraiser for Santorum. According to his Jamie Drummond, Executive Director of DATA:

"Throughout the U2 tour, politicians from both sides have been organizing fundraisers at the venues or around specific shows. Neither DATA or Bono are involved in these and they cannot be controlled. The U2 concerts are categorically not fundraisers for any politician - they are rock concerts for U2 fans." Further, Santorum's fundrasier "is a private luxury box at the arena and not an exclusive concert in the entire Wachovia Center in Philadelphia."

* "Democracy is the Free World’s whore, willing to dress up, dress down, willing to satisfy a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will." -- Arundhati Roy

like a rabbit freezing on a star


Painting, 1954-5, by Ad Reinhardt

from the introduction to "City Money" by lewis macadams jr.

"the best books, the most alive and fresh books, don't come out of the publishing houses, they are published by the poets themselves, or by friends of the poets. Shakespeare got 'published' that way, and so did Pound, and Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery and me and the poet down the street whose book I'll find tomorrow at Ed Sanders' Peace Eye or City Lights Book Store or somewhere. It's a lovely idea, this kind of publishing, it's friendly and it's refreshingly arrogant too." -- ted berrigan 10 april 1966

poems from "City Money"

Your Ass

I study a deep, green painting
and dream of 'your ass'
I am sitting in this sidewalk cafe
trying to master
the lost music of Hank Johnson

Anything arbitrary is tough to choke down
a brown tin ashtray, black coffee
empty Greek cigarette pack

someone is here
he must have come down alone
wanting a drink of water

it is dangerous, he hoped
to write the new language
it is like a stringy westerner
from down the line
singing alone

the music of the country
doesn't "flare"
it sidles up like need
bow-legged
and coughing

it's as if there were a cow pony
behind me
he cries and is saying
the only word
he knows in my language
"your ass"
and it was taught
by Hank Johnson

Even that
saving grace
is now gone
wandering through the crowded room
bowing, awarding
the correct change
so being swallowed
like the old west itself
and the obscenities and cold water
of Hank Johnson

report

traffic is backed up in my head
a houseboat, a trailer with linoleum floors
flung down on the turnpike.
we are all weatherbound
and the eastbound lane
has grown over with your old friends

our exit is the Avenue of the Lord
(that was the city
and we didn't like it or care)
right there, on the streets
is calamity. face it.
you are in your own car
you call it freedom
my opaque car is battling.
spells are being set on it from above.

american express

no, none
of your friends
"fascinate" me

do you want to settle down?
not have a "house"
but snore, like flares
echoing through the grand canyon
"splendide" comes over the radio
it's the music of France

and about time,
it is pleasant to run
and then stop. although
betting on the outcome is too sure a trap
you're slow
and I always win.

We can call ourselves "maurice"
after the god of boutonnieres
who does that slow kitchen shuffle
we, because of this
will never have "impressions"
we'll be on our heads

mouth full
and salt pouring somewhere
the outcome. sure, as predictable as eggs
the heat will end. will get mean, kill bugs
wait for the mail for the first time
but the letters will be plain

we can never understand the words
or what they intend for us to do

mock june

this fuzzy afternoon
the edge off the street corners, spring
wandering
in and out of Thompson Square

the bus hustles around the corner
shaking up air it is only March 27
chilly store windows
a garbage can chunked with cabbage
and cold bonnets, beer cans
when I see you you make me
believe it's warm out open the window

I'm righteous now marching
down 8th street, the pretty girls coats
turned up tightly walking by like delicate mansions

poem

new york in restaurant, it's
rainy late October afternoon
tumbler cracking with ice & warm bourbon
everyone mumbles, their fur hats

I am smothered with sympathy
I must bat your head
fly out at the multitudes
(great dreams)
and take all your money

this is my simple two-part mind cracking
talking, out at me from earth outside, soaked
and turning in business. Berlin, the populace hums our song

I've still got dreams that keep me from worrying about my age

Photo removed as photographer did not want his work to be seen

* Cornell student studies moonshine whiskey. excerpt:

"It’s hard to quantify the state of euphoria that the arrival of the moonshine put me in. All of the ignorant assumptions I had made about southern culture were actually coming true! The entirety of southern life apparently did only consist of drunken tailgate rallies, shady hustlers with cryptic names, bathtub breweries and illegal goods delivered in Santa hats. The fact that delivering anything wrapped in a Santa hat would immediately draw suspicion to it didn’t even dawn on me — nor did the fact that what I was about to drink could very well be chlorox and lye colored red with food dye. I knew that such an opportunity for enlightenment may never present itself me again, and I refused to let it slip by.

"Of course, I expected something drastic to happen upon consumption. Judging by the stories my cousin had told Alex and I, the average college party in Florida consisted of people lighting their chests on fire and trying to fight squads of police officers. And these kids didn’t even have moonshine! It seemed to me that drunken abandon and the South went hand in hand, so naturally I assumed that moonshine, the very touchstone of southern drinking culture, would immediately send me into a state of permanent, violent psychosis. I was very excited.

"Well, unsurprisingly, both of us were disappointed. All of my mythologizing and base assumptions about the drink, born no doubt from my solipsistic northern elitism, proved to have no justification whatsoever. I won’t deny that moonshine tastes like shit — it does. Imagine taking a half-filled bottle of Wild Turkey and filling the rest with Robitussin and you might have some idea of what it tasted like. Actually, what we drank may very well have been a jar of whiskey and cough syrup — we’ll never know. The ambiguity of moonshine is both thrilling and terrifying."

* the jazz / thomas pynchon connection. excerpt:

"Pynchon's first novel V (1961) includes a minor character named McClintic Sphere. Pynchon introduces him in a remarkable section with a whole series of links, allusions, echoes, and satirical reflections of the late 1950's and Ornette Coleman's legendary Five Spot appearance in Greenwich Village.

"The section starts with several of the New York cast arriving at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the V-Note:

"1. V for the title of the novel and an elusive woman, object of a novel-long search by one of the characters.

"2. V as in the Roman Numeral for Five = Five Spot. This famous club featured Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane (1957) in a legendary engagement; it was the nightclub where Ornette Coleman first opened in November 1959 (and where he played a number of times over the following years)

"3. V-Note. The Note = Half Note. Another Greenwich Village club, and another venue at which Coleman played during the period McClintic Sphere is playing onstage when the group enters. Sphere is Thelonious Monk's middle name (Monk was a frequent performer in the village at the time and as noted is closely associated with the Five Spot).

"McClintic may be an echo of Coleman's unusual first name. (The only jazz musician with a somewhat similar first name would be Kenny Dorham, whose given first name was McKinley. He performed regularly in New York during that period and may be associated with groups that played the Five Spot)."

* "We have reached the paralytic stage of Bush spin, where a large percentage of the population are ready to forget the horrors they’ve just seen and felt, in return for comforting lies -- lies they can live with. A large proportion of people are willing to place major responsibility for the recent bloodbath on the Gulf Coast on media-targeted scapegoats -- both local officials and the victims themselves -- in exchange for the ability to deny the most threatening portion of the Bush response: the active intervention of the federal government to prevent outside help from getting in. This was not neglect, incompetence, or failure. This was what Rummy calls a 'catastrophic success.'(...)We have to figure out a way to help disaster victims -- and all the victims of globalization -- without unintentionally feeding the circling vultures." -- Patricia Goldsmith [via]

* the shit's about to hit the fan: Fitzgerald indictments to shake up white house.

* Indie rock's favorite drinks. [via]

no more absolutes


-- by Yakeiban Shukusha

the place on the corner
-- by william matthews

no mirror behind the bar: tiers of garish
fish drift back and forth. they too have routines.
the tv's on but not the sound. dion
and the belmonts ("I'm a wanderer") gush
from the box. none here thinks a pink slip
("you're fired," with boilerplate apologies)
is underwear. none here says "lingerie"
or "as it were." we speak Demonic
because we're disguised as ordinary
folks. A shared culture offers camouflage
behind which we cantend to covert fires
to say, our burled, unspoken, common language --
the only one, and we are many.

used book store
-- by charles simic

lovers hold hands in never-opened novels.
the page with a recipe for cucumber soup is missing.
a dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm,
of riding in a balloon over lake erie.

a sudden draft shuts his book in my hand.
while a philosopher asks how is it possible
to maintain the theologically orthodox doctrine
of eternal punishment of the damned?

let's see. there may be sand among the pages
of a travel guide to Egypt of even a dead flea
that once bit the ass of the mysterious Abigail
who scribbled her name teasingly with an eye pencil.

after a fight
-- by jeff walt

we sit at opposite ends of the living
room while anger prowls the house quietly,
filling his dark sack with our antique
laughter, our precious mornings in bed, the silver
evenings in the hammock. nothing left
but the sharp words we keep locked
in our mouths and the hard, unforgiving
chairs where we pretend to read.
when I look up, you look up, and we know
something is missing. we stay that way
for a moment, like two people who have heard a strange
noise outside late at night; our eyes bright
with fear, but ready to kill if we have to.

* Interview of david berman circa the release of The Natural Bridge. excerpt:

"M.E.: Speaking of work, I was reading the lyrics to The Natural Bridge on the clock yesterday, when a woman I work with snatched it and began reading it, after about thirty seconds she said, "Gosh, they sure do use the word Cum a lot don't they?".

"DCB: Cum shows up three times on the record. When I was a kid people always used to say "cumbucket". It made a picture in my mind, cum slopped over the edges. I forgot about the word for years until forming this album it came up again and kept sneaking into songs. Cum is a very private issue. The Natural Bridge has a lot of privacy issues going on inside."

* Dusted's interview of berman is much more current. excerpt:

Q: Four long years since the last album; what have you been listening to/reading since?

DCB:I hardly read fiction anymore. Likewise, I don't watch movies. I've been less comfortable taking leave of the world. I read a couple of newspapers every day. I listen to the music on WSM 650 AM when I listen to music. I read the Torah every day. For most of my adulthood I'd been the governor of an inward state, and that just seems morally reprehensible at this particular roadside taco stand in history.
...
Q: You and your wife Cassie sing, together, "let's not kid ourselves, it gets really, really bad," but life, you sing unaccompanied, is "sweeter than Jewish wine." What gives?

DCB:The statements aren't in opposition to each other. In fact sweetness and badness are definitively interdependent.

bury me in my shades


fall swirls around us, by glueslabs

* david byrne on intelligent design. excerpt:

"It's not a question of reason vs. faith either, in my opinion. I believe one can have a belief, a sense of a higher force, without taking virgin births, Adam and Eve, Noah and a man who make a sea part literally. You can believe in Mystery — in something beyond us that we don't understand, without necessarily believing that the stories that point and support that belief are also all literally true.

"Over and over it has been shown that these tales that make up the Torah and the Bible were cobbled together from pre-existing mythologies and assembled to form these new groups, giving a new emphasis. Twice it happened — in the Torah and later by the Christians. That doesn't denigrate the mythology described in these books in any way, or deny its metaphorical power. A metaphor as powerful as these has the power to guide lives, to inspire, to order societies and to back up moralities. And they can be beautiful and poetic at the same time. That's a tall order.

"But to say that it also literally happened is, well, to miss the point. It is to mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon, as the Buddha once said. The myths point towards a way of living, they give social and moral foundations and provide a backbone for daily behavior — but they themselves are not those foundations and backbone. They are signposts, not the thing itself.

"Intelligent design strikes me as the latest convoluted attempt to allow something patently unbelievable to remain standing. If, for example, one confronts a person who insists that the first few pages of Genesis are to be taken literally with the evidence of the world around them, they have no choice but to admit that it probably didn't happen quite that way. Pause. Ummm, so, ahh, wait a minute! How about this? God didn't actually MAKE everything, but he set it in motion! How about that?"

* Stylus picks the top 50 Movies of 2000 to 2005. Listing 50-31 today. at 50, a dust congress favorite:

50. George Washington

With George Washington, David Gordon Green earned numerous comparisons to Terrence Malick. The connection wasn’t unfounded as both directors shared a knack for meditative voice-over narrations and an eye for beautiful landscapes, but Green, opting for greater realism, litters his film with spacious dialogue that doesn’t merely propel the narrative along, but adds depth to its moments. Green paints such a convincing portrait of poor southern youth that one might mistake it for a documentary. Indeed, the best moments arrive when the narrative hesitates, lingering on meandering conversations that lesser films might disregard. Not that Green avoids adding touches of heightened poetry, but he balances them successfully against grittier elements, making it as insightful as it is tragic. Green focused this technique on later films, fashioning a slightly more conventional approach, but it was this film that would secure him a place as the greatest of our generation’s maverick directors. [Dave Micevic]

* "Perhaps this is why it is man alone who laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter." -- nietzsche

* "the world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started." -- john updike

inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial


1966

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"6. Karen Hughes

"I don't know what Karen Hughes did to piss Bush off. Maybe she was too slow fetching his milk and cookies. Or perhaps she accidentally threw out his favorite Mad Magazine. Whatever it was, she surely couldn't have deserved the position she's in now: her new job as undersecretary of state is to try to repair American's tarnished image in the Middle East. Hmm. Good luck with that one.

"Hughes has certainly gotten off to a rocky start. Last week she was lambasted twice in two days - first in Saudi Arabia, then in Turkey - by women's groups who were opposed to America's Middle East policies. 'Angry,' 'ashamed,' 'wounded,' and 'insulted' were just a few of the choice words the women used to express their feelings. Hughes did her best to cheer them up, but I don't think saying that her 'friend President Bush' did all he could to avoid a war in Iraq was particularly succesful, as lines of bullshit go.

"Hughes also demonstrated her extensive knowledge of American history by informing an Egyptian opposition leader that 'our constitution cites 'one nation under God.'' Um, I'm not sure which constitution she's referring to because it certainly doesn't say that in the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps the Bushies have written a new one without telling us. What's that? They have? Oh.

"Of course it's possible that Karen Hughes was just following the Cavuto Doctrine. After all, I'm sure it's not possible to be a good American and a good undersecretary of state."

* Things found in books: ms. bookish finds a postcard written by hanif kureishi in a collection of his short stories she was reading. [via]

* does religion cause damage to societies? excerpt:

"Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

"According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

"The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

"It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

"Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills."

-- related

"Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery." --Robert Ingersoll

* two mountain goats songs were featured in last night's episode of weeds.