Come, Armageddon! Come!

The sky over the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College, among other things.

Richard Buckner, The Hill
End of the World: Joshua Cohen and Gary Shteyngart in discussion on Tablet
Morrissey, "Every Day is Like Sunday" (banjo version from The Late, Late Show, 2004) 
Keith Fullerton, Live Generators

Come, Armageddon! Come! 

In our building this morning, I ran the sound and video for a live webinar (that's web + seminar) targeted to high school science teachers. Shortly before broadcast time, a landscape crew set up a massive woodchipper, into which they loudly fed the decimation of two towering pine trees, right outside the window. The blackest part of my heart was all aflutter - this nice lady trying to tell a bunch of other nice ladies who'd either shown up and navigated the university's obscure parking procedure or were tuning in at home during the last vestiges of their summer, important but ultimately not-that-interesting information via the Internet Wonder was to vie for  attention with the oldest, most rickety woodchipper in the university's no doubt vast collection of rickety woodchippers. The rusted beast lurched to silence at one point and I peered out the window to see a guy half-hanging out the woodchipper's intake trough, banging on something inside to get it to work again. How do you not dare secretly wish for the worst to happen in a situation like that? Where would you point your camera in that situation? I felt a little sick with portent for what I thought I might have wished into happening. Then the roar or progress and the machine had been coaxed into running. Fortunately for all, no maintenance worker was eaten by machines that morning and the trees were stripped down to naked poles just in time for the webinar to commence and proceed without a hitch.

It's weird how it's vie and then vying. What about viing?

Check out that Morrissey video posted on my friends' site the Sound of Indie.  Then this. May God have mercy on our wretched souls.


Richard Buckner, live track from The Hill with Eric Heywood on lap steel. I saw them on this tour and it was devastating.