On Hubris

Ancient civilizations did not conceive of man as a being without boundaries. They conceived of him as embedded within an order.

For the Greeks, this experience was expressed in the idea of moderation. Man was not called upon to expand indefinitely, but to recognize his own place in the cosmos. To exceed that measure did not mean to grow: it meant to disrupt a balance. Tragedy called hubris precisely this rupture. 

Ismaele

I was in the dog yard with an Obamite. They tried to get tickets to the Obamachron grandiose opening and failed so they have to go to the overflow on the midway with the ticks. I can talk Trump with them but it's low hanging fruit, and boring. I say I'm not just anti-Obama, I'm anti-oligarch, anti-fascist, anti-genocide, anti-forced displacement, anti-empire. That kind of ends the conversation and I get us hence to visit the little library where I find Jenny Uglow's Nature's Engraver and I make a pickle toasted cheese and listen to the Electronic Intifada for my sanity.

 don't stop talking about gaza. 

 

post-america.

 Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won. 

-Paul Celan

 Privatization of the public parks, data centers, quantum computing. They're taking land for corporate profit and replacing workers with AI. That's what they mean by bringing change home. This is the dystopian future, now.

 Pidge. How did that get up there?

    

I’m not doing any relief, we’re not offering anything.

-Trumpinyahu 

 Oh god we pray for the defeat of the genocide regime.

-Dogs for Peace.

 The propaganda machine is humongous but dumb, and the empire can't suppress the truth while the oligarchs grow more desperate every day. 

 we're gonna see how undemocratic we can be.

 the zionists spent 7600 per person in kentucky to defeat massie. they put a zionist zombie in power. 

 it's world bee day. trump wants to bomb cuba. obama celebrates obama. aipac buys elections. israhell first.

 

They've got your attention, the fat and the furious
And your atrophied legs can't run
They've got your attention, the juvenile jilted
Derailing all discourse for fun
They've got your attention, the slapstick insurgents
With giggles and shits and grenades
They've got your attention, deluders and doxxers
Self-righteous self-styled renegades
They've got your attention, the groomers and grifters
And they've all done their own research
They've got your attention, antagonized fanboys
While Nazis and rapists sell merch

All this skillful stimuli, oppression and opprobrium
You'd think I'd riot? You'd think I'd cry?
Instead I sit here, fucking numb
The village hall's on fire all day
And nobody knows anyone
I play to win, I came to slay
So come ahead then, one on one

I want to suck on a stone
Taste the salt from the sea
Rest my head in the arms of a tree
I want to swim in a brook
Push my toes in the mud
And forage from berries and buds
I want to graze on some goosegrass
Chew on chickweed, lie down in Norfolk Reed
I want to strip by a stream
Feel my balls on the breeze
Slide my hand in your jeans and squeeze

But they've got my attention at the paperless pulpit
And I hungrily swallow their bait
They've got my attention
With tridents and truthbombs and sidebars and shockdrops and hate

They've got your attention
And they're not giving it back
They've got our attention
And they really, really hate Disney
They've got my attention
And I think I love it

Arab Strap

Allatonceness

 Even after all this time. Years. Still trying to get a community benefits agreement.

 Yeah. Forget about bringing democracy to the world. Try bringing democracy to the Zionist U.S.A.

 A box for the Obamas.

 the freedom flotilla was attacked, 400 sailors abducted, the ships left drifting. ten ships kept sailing, then one, like a ghost ship, sails torn, no one on deck. 

 I've been watching this thing since before the old trees were cut down and it was a hole in the ground, and it was a long grief to see it grow, day after day, but now it's finished I feel the sadness of the trees laying down in the silence of the birds after the giant saws, and the sadness of the hole in the ground now filled with pipes and concrete and styrofoam, and all the tiny people obliviously wandering around. 

 There are times when a man loses even his will to work. 

Primo Levi

The Monkey's Wrench

 I prefer to consider Bending the Arc as Bending the Arc of Resistance Towards Justice. I'm starting to like that thing.

I don't love crowds, and I'm trying quell my anxiety about the OPC. The Obamachron community representative warned/advised us we might want to flee for the weekend. Nothing doing: we won't be chased away from our home. It feels most definitely like the neighborhood has been seized (and gentrified) by the virus. The 15,000 crowd on the Midway on Juneteenth freaks me. And that's just the overflow of superfans who can't get into the Obamachron proper. They predict something like 700,000 tourists per annum. With the escalating U.S. Zionist wars maybe tourism will dwindle, though i'm not hoping on that.

 Support your local bees.

i didn't do it. 

do what? 

whatever you think i did.

i was just looking at you.

don't gaslight me. i know that look. 

cruel optimism versus audacious hope. 

 looks like the arc of justice is in trouble.

 You know how I hate to complain, right? and I told R. I would cease and desist for a minute, but Ray just told me they had a meeting and the reason was the Obamachchrontons want to have a Juneteenth party on the Midway for the land grab grand opening with 15,000 folks and a 50 foot screen. 

 Wow! Kneecap is really good!

 but how will the library survive?

 Record of the Day, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music 

 surely you will find it here.

 Word of the day, objurgate. 

 The next day following the last day. A.H. titled a piece The Next Day. I think he capitalized it. It seemed to bear no relation to anything outside the frame.

 too much not enuf.

it's all made up. it's too much already. 

stop posting scree about it pleas.

cats for peace.

 Dude, it's all a proxy war.

there will be invisible connections. like rooms of the past that return in thoughtful moments. don't worry if you feel crazy. follow yourself like an invisible friend. there will be poems that find their way to pictures. 

I live near you and I am a dancer—
I live on berries to keep slim.
Surely you will have seen it, my mulberry tree,
so tall
, which I climb at night to gaze at the stars.
For I nurture a childlike passion for astronomy;
I know so much about it that it leaves astronomers speechless
when they hear me speak of light-years…
after the show, as soon as the lights go out in the theater.
The stars, however, that have vanished from the sky,
I have gathered in a magic box,
which I keep hidden from the astronomers,
which I keep for you,
because you are a dancer, like me.
You will come to my house and we will eat berries,
and delicate hands will weave together forever in tulle.
You will come to dance your dark dance for me,
and the stars in the open box will live for you.

Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou

(thanks to eva h.d.)

 listen to that wind. it's an animal. it wants in.

 goodnight world.

 bread, peace and land.

I get it. Folks are proud of him. He's the symbol of black enfranchisement and financial success and of the struggle for civil rights, though he didn't do the struggle himself, he's the symbol of the struggle, the inheritor of the civil rights leaders work. Though he's a symbol of something entirely different to me, I get it.  

 So, the Chicago Public Library only has two delivery drivers for the whole city? I went down to our building library, which is rather moribund and dwindling and I got a book I put down there before, The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi, after reading about his translation of Kafka which depressed him so that he jumped off the spiral staircase in the building he grew up in. Anyway, I hope the library doesn't get erased in this dangerous and dark time, because the absence of books would be far more depressing than Kafka, though I know for Levi it was more the concentration camp that sent him over. But I wonder if there would be outrage in America. There's hardly any outrage for the ICE concentration camps or the ongoing genocides, and I read that few people actually read anymore, anyway.

 Martin Puryear (Bending the Arc) peeks through the screen at the Obamas. I wish I had a more powerful lens. The title is ironic to me given that Obama privatized the park and did a bait and switch on the library and gentrified the neighborhood. His promise of hope and change and bending the arc of justice is as hollow as his Selma speech fabricated in giant letters on his tower in our park. It's a bad look for Puryear I reckon, but I suppose a real good commission.