What Do We Want? EVERYTHING! When Do We Want It? FASTER!
Today’s corporate malfeasance update comes from two good friends.
1) Matthew Simmons forwarded me this link to an article on The Slog about the ongoing protests at the faux-local Starbucks in Seattle. Good job guys!
2) Stephen Elliott sent me a link to this piece about The Rumpus’s Continuing War on Amazon.com . The latest issue (not to suggest the other issues went anywhere) is Amazon’s staunch opposition to states’ attempts to collect sales tax from it. Now, I admit, my first reaction was “why would the Rumpus be supporting the option that will result in me having to spend more money to buy books?” But the case they sketch–it’s a brief article, so please read it–makes the prescient point that by allowing Amazon to not charge sales tax, they’re given a substantial competitive advantage over locally-owned, bricks and mortar bookstores. I’m not telling you whether to join the Amazon boycott or not, but I think this article is worth considering, and the links in it are all worth clicking. And of course, when the really-existing bookstore in your neighborhood can’t produce Gershom Scholem’s 1000 page biography of Sabbatai Sevi that you stupidly got yourself a hard-on for, (and the only one at Powell’s seems to cost fifty bucks) there’s always Abebooks.
Madlib
With apologies to Madlib, for Mister Simmons’s previous (though the DOOM remix is quite nice): anyone in the arts could learn something from this man: his ethic, his ingenuity, his drive, his many hands, his flavor, … … … this dude is something else.
And Madlib messes w/ a beat:
Which Kind of Bitch Are You? Wise Blood or Child of God
Inspired today by Lincoln Michel’s tweet: ‘Kryptonite or Stay Fly?,’ over which I’ve been conflicted all day (and all night), another question for ya’lls, perhaps the first in a series of ‘WKoBaY’ heads up battles:
OR 
?
Stealing From Justin: The Books I’m Bringing (and something I found in my office)
This image popped up when I googled stealing. "Bigfoot stealing" it would be.
I’m leaving at 4:30 am tomorrow for the Dominican Republic. I’ll be gone for two weeks and although I will not be reading much while climbing Pico Duarte, I will be spending some of that time sitting around and reading. Here is a list of the books I am contemplating bringing:
Friday “Fuck Books, Let’s Dance”: The Truth
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WokfJUK0nAk
Anne Boyer on a Provisional Avant Garde
THE PROVISIONAL AVANT GARDE
by Anne Boyer (originally at Odali$qued). I liked this essay so much when I originally read it that I asked Anne’s permission to re-post it here, and she graciously agreed.
1. It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”
2. It will share with the historic avant-garde that art will often be made in groups, but it will seek or find the artistic and literary expressions that mimic something other than war or machines or violent manly death, something like “human touch” and “animal touch” and “comforting noises made when another is ill” and “maternal protection” and “friendly ritual” and “a little daub of secretion” or “just like playing cards with my aunts and uncles” or “the soft feeling of an arm” or “game for which the rules are never directly stated but which everyone knows how to play.”
Wednesday Morning Political Interlude: FOX News says Only Osama Bin Laden Can Save Us Now
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auQJVhNH99c
This isn’t really literary at all, I just thought people would be interested to know that Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer are on TV praying for all of us to be terrorized and hurt. Just something to, uh, think about when you’re searching for “inspiration.” (via Gawker)
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Famous Blue Raincoat
Wait, I thought Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat was a letter of concession that Cohen wrote to a mutual friend who successfully courted his wife, encouraging him to treat her well. Damn, that was romantic. Too bad I’ll never think of that song the same way again.