maybe the alarm can no longer be turned off, like the ringing in my ears. maybe we'll get used to it, just the way it is.

pain is like music, it can't be otherwise

conveyed.

 what ground is unconsecrated? where is not garden? what body cannot be moved?

 

And If You’re A Man

And if you’re a man and if you’re a factory
and if you’re a blonde modern city

You are for me the tired night
an engine cut
a voice on the brink of collapse

My earthen jar, you are, for a summer

— Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou
(translation: Eva H.D.)

Looking is never neutral. To look, or to look away, is to take a position.

 Worldwide smackdown. Trump's just begging for it. Whatever happens after we leave this place, hon, we can say we lived in interesting times. Amen to that, hon. God bless our love.

 Whatever happens to us after this, I love you, man. We met in this strange place. We fell in love, it seems, but it was only under the strange spell of this strange place. It is not ours to know what will happen outside of this strange maze.

 The oligarchs love their walls. They love a fortress of walls. Walls control the movement of the people. The oligarchs love towers. They like to watch the people far below them, moving through the elaborate design of swirling walls like water.

 the fire alarm was on all night long. apparently fortunately there is no fire, else the alarm would likely be off. the century after the making of americans first appeared, it reappears. gertrude stein said i wrote it for me and strangers. i'll be in the thick of it for two weeks. 

 donald trump is bored with the war on iran. he wants to move on.

 looking south i gasp. i really want to read the making of americans but i'm still in the intro and sitting in the sun sleepy. the u.s. israel regime bombed abbas kiarostami's house today. everybody needs a house, even ghosts. everybody needs to sleep and everybody needs to read. i gasp sometimes when i want to breathe.

 I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words.

Gertrude Stein

 Someone commented on a previous post implying that I was too aesthetically unsophisticated to properly appreciate the merits of the Obamachron, saying some people just can't comprehend great architecture, mentioning for example, the Guggenheim. I was going to say, don't drop that specious stuff on my site—get your own, but I blocked him instead. 

 I got The Making of Americans at the library, oh lord, 1022 pages. I said how am I gonna read this in 3 weeks, and they said Maybe there's no one else in line. It's funny to think of Obama's short text You Are America alongside Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. More on this developing story.

 There's no exit ramp for the final trump.

U are America, what does that even mean? U are a country? You are an empire? What does Obama mean? What does America mean?

mothers walk barefoot for peace in rome streets. all the mothers are crying.

 

 The Usreal regime finally met an enemy who can fight back, amen.

  It's the centennial of Vista Homes and the Chicago Commission on Race Relations on the impact of the 1919 race riots, and of Route 66, where blacks had to find a place to stop in the green book or keep on driving. There was road race in 1895 starting at the women's circle garden which was destroyed for this fortress. This is what we got today: hope and change. Folks still like to race around here, behind the museum and doing burnout donuts in the intersection by the Obamachron. 

 I was thinking it was a mausoleum/museum, or a fort, or a fortress. What's the difference. I looked it up. A fortress is a very large fort. I had a fort in the woods of Argonne Labs when I ditched 31 days of elementary school. It wasn't really a fort, it had no military advantage. It was a clubhouse, a hideout, with white elk wandering silently among the trees. Maybe this is a giant clubhouse for the oligarchs.

 It could be a monument to late stage neoliberal capitalism. It could be a fortress at the end of the world.

 i dream i have a black hippo-like creature i take for a walk in the neighborhood. it starts out nice and calm though i may be a little nervous, and then the hippo starts running and crashing through hedges and a dog barks in a yard and the hippo disappears and i see a japanese musician i knew walking a little dog and he says how are you and i say good and then he walks up his stoop and i stand there a minute and wake up.

 We may be in a global depression. Yeah, maybe.  

a ghostly worker in a ghastly tower.

Hey Claude, What is the ghost of Epstein up to now? 

 , founded on the religion of itself.

 The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion.

-Chris Hedges

 

state of collapse.

 What about Gaza. 

 i want to talk about what is lost.

his hope and his change.

 The No Kings protest refuses to speak about the Gaza genocide and the empire war on Iran. 

 day 902. the torture and the genocide continues.

(what if) the matrix is a diorama!

 

 Some folks still believe the tower of spin is a library. Exactly, that's what we intended them to think.

 i hear your black snake moan. it's not mine, it's just the song of the day.

 everything has a reason, even if we don't know what it is. you can ask all you want, but who are you going to ask? so you admit, there is no reason.

 Are you ok? Not really. 

 It seems the progress of the oligarchs puts the rest of us in a scary limbo.

 Because. That's why. What is your question? Why do you ask?

Why is this happening? Because.

 

 They say they're putting the finishing touches on the Obamachron. It feels frantic down there. From up here it feels I'm like floating on my folding chair in a 100 year window above a live action landscape crime. The project feels vertiginous. It feels like they're stealing more than land. It feels like they're stealing time.