fun city

Somebody just found out about the free Photoshop iPhone app. Prepared to be underwhelmed with my on-the-go photo editing techniques! I really would like to unhinge my blogging habit from the computer but so far, I've seen no easy way to combine Flickr + YouTube + Rhapsody links + basic text editing on a mobile device alone for Blogger (and by extension, whatever blogging platform one uses) and maybe that is an opportunity. 

Brad Lubman & Ensemble Resonanz, Julia Wolfe: Cruel Sister
Brad Lubman & New Millennium Ensemble, Morton Feldman: For Frank O'Hara, etc.


Beacause, truthfully, YouTube swtched how they do embeded videos (iframes rather than embeded controls, which distributes the actual control and puts the traffic more squarely in their world, which makes sense, for as much sense as the continued free existence of YouTube makes)  doesn't act right with the Blogger rich-text editor, which either means nothing to you and you've wandered over somewhere to watch handsome shirtless men play basketball , or if you are tech-leaning and this implies an embarassing primitivity to my blogging methods. So, yeah, I'm thinking. But for now, iPhone-toshopping is fun city.


Like this, I have to go into HTML mode to just make the image posting happen in a satifactory manner. What a world in which I dwell and what problems that world suffers! I like how the filament in the solar yard light resbembles two people considering an embrace. Oh and Goodreads! I almost forgot about Goodreads! It's another pain in the ass!

Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reviewed at my blog



Speaking of suffering worlds, I finished Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas last night dimly lit on the couch by the dull glow of iBooklight, which is even necessary in the daytime, for the content (endless wandering through a catastrophized town) and artifact (black text on faux water-stained pages; cover emulating a destroyed library book) of Scorch Atlas' drowned, mud-caked, pustulent endgame world is so unrelenting, it absorbs all light you have for it. It bears the same adolescent Apocalypse fantasies that all sci-fi writers do in fiction and Tea Party adherents do in real life: it creates a world where no one will help you, literal helplessness, where the poor bastards that do not succumb to disaster by drowning and architectural collapse -it takes a degree of separating oneself from the recent catastrophe in Japan, and memories of Katrina to take fiction of this sort in - are worse off to live in a world of literal and metaphoric shit.

The easy comparison is The Road, but Scorch Atlas is not about keeping the flame, nor does it possess that book's grace. It is more like Flan, an absurd escatalogical novel by Stephen Tunney (aka Dogbowl of King Missile fame) except that there is almost no apprent humor in Butler's damnation of mankind. Which, turns out, is good; the humor in Flan kinda isn't funny - it becomes an endurance test, an uncomfortable purgatory of watching Pee Wee's Playhouse on repeat until you can see the cruel, animal fear in Chairy's saucer-like eyes. Scorch Atlas is instead a meditation on suffering, the perceived mutation of just being a young person being projected onto a universe ill-equipped to manifest that kind of self-loathing. Critics will call it pretentious and precious, which it is, but just like that mealy, jittery runaway crouched at the bus stop, it is those predicatble things and yet still unpredictably dangerous. Fun stuff!
View all my reviews


Here is a dude burning his copy as part of some sort of web contest on Bulter's part, and in response to the book itself.

I read a little bit of Beckett's Molloy last night after, just to keep the human degradation party train going and came across this little illuminating passage:

Constipation is a sign of good health in pomeranians.

See? Now, that's funny! And easy to post.