Henry Miller hated America. So he moved to Paris and then, eventually, moved back to the U.S. In this 1969 television interview, he says he thinks the end is near for America. He was right. Bush ended it in 2000. We just don’t realize it yet. We’ve elected an insurance salesman to the presidency and we think he’s going to change the world. He won’t. The experiment in democracy came to a horrifying grinding failure with the criminal organization of Bush. And some tepid fake hipster bloggers aren’t going to do a damn thing about it either. We need more creeps like Henry Miller who hate America. You can’t fix it if you love it. You’ve got to hate it.
Author Archives: Editor
Weird Tales: Atilano’s Blues
By Bill Ectric
Atilano’s Blues
a short story
I steered the car into the unpaved parking area. A cold, quenching soft drink would hit the spot, I thought. Dust floated up around my car when I stopped a few feet from the entrance.
A little bell jingled over the door when I walked in.
Planisphere: New Book of Poems by John Ashbery
Poet John Ashbery has published a new book of poems called Planisphere. Boy, I hated this guy’s poems a few years ago. But I kept reading them because of some instinct for self-inflicted mental damage. And I kept reading him. Not understanding him at all. But I liked the words as they passed me by. They sort of slide on by you. Smooth, but switching and becoming something totally unexpected, unrelated to what just happened before. His poems sort of shimmer and seem a bit brittle, like glass. When you read this guy you certainly know that you are not reading someone else. He’s in his eighties, but his work seems like a young man’s. He has a gently rebellious foolishness that I greatly admire.
His publisher, Harper Collins, has a preview of his new book that offers quite a few of the poems.
So does this sound like the writing of an eighty-year-old?
I dream of married couples having sex, shopping, everything,
and often get the giggles, staying here,
expecting something new to come along every five seconds.
That’s new to me, I expect others will have heard about it.
B—’s Mysterious Greeting
And here’s the guy:
Blurry Animation: The Passenger
Chris Jones made this CG animation about a terrifying bus ride and an old-fashioned tape player. I’m on the fish’s side. Totally. I will criticize and say that the YouTube video is of inexcusably poor quality considering it’s a recent upload. I’m over animators uploading trailers or compressed versions of their films as lures to purchase their DVDs. You’re going to sell exactly enough DVDs to buy a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. Show us your film properly or don’t. It’s very nice work, but really I’m just posting this to make my nasty YouTube point.
Animation: The TV Show
Sugimoto Kousuke animated this to the music of Takayuki Manabe. It is one of those free-moving explosions of anime that revel in media, electricity, gadgets, techno, and odd angles. It’s a riot of scenes that I can’t really fit together in any meaningful way, but it sure is a blast to watch.
Via Drawn
Stan Brakhage Film: Water For Maya
Stan Brakhage was one the most important experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. He used many techniques to make his films, one of them being direct painting on the film itself. This is one of his pieces from 2000. It is very beautiful and goes through several distinct movements during its short length. I am going to post some more examples of his films because I think they capture an essential quality of an artist’s happiness that must be very rare.