I live in Oakland and I'm as embarassed as you are.
bwdiederich.com
don’t read the comments on news articles
don’t read the comments on blog posts
don’t read the comments on anything
This print was inspired by friends @bwdiederich & @mrgid and every single comment I’ve ever read on nytimes.com (sigh)
1-color print, measures 5” x 7”
On Crane Lettra paper
Printed on a Vandercook cylinder press using a polymer platefor sale on etsy
!!!!!!!
THIS IS THE MOST USEFUL THING and my internet curmudgeoning helped inspire it!
you are all ghosts,
all of you, each and every one
in your indefinable being,
and I have wronged half of you
and half of you have wronged me
and there is no way to make this right,
and there is no way
so i am left without a sense,
without sense, he says,
and I can try and try for
days and weeks, and I can say
certain words, charms and incantations
from no tradition,
because I have lost all faith,
so there is no sense that this will work,
tell me,
please,
will this work?
-06/14/2013
I have struggled since the beginning to drive my thought out into the landscape of science and fact where other people converse logically and exchange judgments—but I go blind out there. So writing involves some dashing back and forth between that darkening landscape where facticity is strewn and a windowless room cleared of everything I do not know. It is the clearing that takes time. It is the clearing that is a mystery.
—Anne Carson, from Economy of the Unlost
taking my breath away, perpetually, this one
Deafheaven
Echoplex
Los Angeles, CA
May 24, 2013
Audio Source: DPA 4061s > SP-PASM-2 > Edirol R-09HR
Setlist: [47:33]
1. intro
2. Dream House
3. Violet
4. Unrequited
5. Sunbather
there are times when this band feels perfect
in 24 hours I will be on a plane to stay in a room in park slope and listen to weird noises and drink coffee with dear friends and meet new friends and then ride a train and write poetry with the rhythm and sway of amtrak to Providence, where I will drink beer and cook potluck dinners and remember that life is beautiful, and remember that life is terrible for lots of other people, and I will write and write and attempt to explode the world, but I will fail,
I will see you in Oakland, 3 pm Sunday, the Public School, 2141 Broadway, okay?
I could normally walk to this, and would do so, but I will be in NYC and that is a damn shame, but I helped make the summit happen and everyone else should go and enjoy what I cannot. Lots of lovely people reading amazing things.
I faxed it to you, thinking nostalgia
Might help break the news in a way that
Wasn’t so hurtful,
But I didn’t count on the slow arrival, each line of ink forming
Each letter, your eyes guessing at each new
Line
And the message was simple, clear, direct, like you taught me,
And it was that there is nothing left to say.
- 05/21/2013
remembering how to write, remembering how to not get lost in the weeds,
The Church has become close to me in its distrust of man, and my distrust of form, my urgent desire to withdraw from it, to claim ‘that that is not yet I,’ which accompanies my every thought and feeling, coincides with the intentions of its doctrine. The Church is afraid of man and I am afraid of man. The Church does not trust man and I do not trust man. The Church, in opposing temporality to eternity, heaven to earth, tries to provide man with the distance [from] his own nature that I find indispensable. And nowhere does this affiliation mark itself more strongly than in our approach to Beauty. Both the Church and I fear beauty in this vale of tears, we both strive to defuse it, we want to defend ourselves against its excessive allure. The important thing for me is that it and I both insist on the division of man: the Church into the divine and the human component, I into life and consciousness. After the period in which art, philosophy, and politics looked for the integral, uniform, concrete, and literal man, the need for an elusive man who is a play of contradictions, a fountain of gushing antinomies and a system of infinite compensation, is growing. He who calls this “escapism” is unwise…
The irreligious Witold Gombrowicz articulating some of the reasons why even the incredulous might find credulity closer to their principles than many popular forms of unexamined, incoherently reductive materialism. (via mills)
YES
A quick editorial cartoon about the intersection of self-pity, entitlement, rape, territoriality, misogyny and fear of women. You see it all over the place online in the form of Men’s Rights Activists (of whom there are a few reasonable non-misogynists), Men Going Their Own Way, Pick Up Artists, and dudes touting the “Red Pill”, because The Matrix is a good movie. Look any of these up if you have the stomach for it. These are extreme examples, but watered-down forms of these ideas are everywhere.
In lurking their blogs and youtube channels for a while, I’ve noticed that beyond the standard patriarchal chauvinism there is this deep fear of women - what they will do to me, how they will reject me, how they will use me, how they are changing society in a way that does not favor me, how they are making men into something I don’t like, how they are making themselves into something I don’t like, that they won’t give me what I want, and that they won’t give me what I think is rightfully mine. This goes beyond fear of feminism- this is fear of women at its purest. And that, to quote a puppet, leads to anger and hate. It’s sad.
I am a feminist. I think there’s enough ice cream to go around, but it does mean those of us with 3 scoops might have to give one or two up. Also, The Matrix is a fun movie but probably not anything you should be basing a philosophy on.
My new zine, Secret Bully, is done! This first issue is about New York, the home I left for Philadelphia at almost 30 years old. It has four short essays and each cover was drawn by me and individually screenprinted by my favorite human being, Jeff Bolt over at Stupid Bag Records.
You can get a zine over at my Etsy shop, that also has my other zines, too!
Buy this buy this buy this please everyone. It is bowl-over good so far. Cynthia is a brilliant shining light.
There is so much bad of late in the world, and you can face it, but some days it’s better to just retreat and stare at a face you feel probably absurdly close to while he sings sweet, wise songs and miss old friends and people you’d like to think of as old friends.
Kitty at Cafe du Nord during her last song tonight with a random girl wearing Kitty’s boyfriend’s face on her tshirt.
I feel a bit bad for being a 31 year old stick in the mud leaning against the bar the whole time but hopefully my ridiculous smile made its way to her eyes so she knew I was having a hell of a time.
She killed a tiny room, charming a bunch of nerds and calling a kid’s haircut ‘very youth crew’ like five times, to my delight. Also, Main Attrakionz behind her all night.
I happily sat for 3 hours today watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock, an excerpt of which is above. This is around the noon mark I believe.
I got to SFMOMA around 11 am, was seated by 11:10 or so, and a few minutes after 2 my friend and I got up to leave, both marveling at how quickly those three hours had passed.
There are these things about Hollywood movies and television, these tropes and tricks, and they are all present in the footage, so you get the feel of tension building, a run up to a climax of some sort, but it rarely comes. Characters and actresses and scenes you know will appear and disappear, and while there is no narrative as such, you get the sense of narrative, the sense of a flow, of things making sense. But it doesn’t, not really.
The only thing that really drives this forward is time, and it does it beautifully, and sneakily. I’ll be going back before it’s gone to catch other sections.
“Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject. We are the subject matter of poetry, not vice versa.”
—John Ashbery (pictured here with Frank O’Hara)
sup cool dudes
