Life is a ride, it’s one of those shitty carnival rides that a bunch of drunk idiots put together wrong and it’s all creeky and broken and keeps jerking people around and nobody knows how to make it stop. Life is like a box of chocolates that is full of that Halloween candy that your parents warned you about. Life is a master of disguise, and the good parts happen when it puts in the effort to trick you. If you live with the constant feeling of impending doom, then life gave up on trying to fool you. Congratulations! Welcome to my pity party! You now have free reign to be vulgar & offensive. You can piss people off with purpose and nonchalance, and then blame them for getting upset. The best part of being miserable is making the people around you miserable! You think that’s bad? This is my life, and it does suck, but shit, bro! What the fuck are you doing with your life? Reading this. Looking in the mirror. Allow me to let you hate yourself. That’s what I do. I make you angry and then ask you what your problem is, but HEY! LIFE IS CRAZY, right?
Life is a ride, it’s one of those shitty carnival rides that a bunch of drunk idiots put together wrong and it’s all creeky and broken and keeps jerking people around and nobody knows how to make it stop. Life is like a box of chocolates that is full of that Halloween candy that your parents warned you about. Life is a master of disguise, and the good parts happen when it puts in the effort to trick you. If you live with the constant feeling of impending doom, then life gave up on trying to fool you. Congratulations! Welcome to my pity party! You now have free reign to be vulgar & offensive. You can piss people off with purpose and nonchalance, and then blame them for getting upset. The best part of being miserable is making the people around you miserable! You think that’s bad? This is my life, and it does suck, but shit, bro! What the fuck are you doing with your life? Reading this. Looking in the mirror. Allow me to let you hate yourself. That’s what I do. I make you angry and then ask you what your problem is, but HEY! LIFE IS CRAZY, right?
Fill yourself with love…
– Naruto anime series, episode 247
I was just being myself. fuck his shit…
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
– Paul Sweeney (via lattices)
(Source: alphabetical-, via lattices)
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man’s opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he’s talking about.
– H. P. Lovecraft (via cozmoxandre)
Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence
I tore through this. Lethem’s original 2007 Harper’s essay was a huge influence on Steal Like An Artist and probably a bunch of other people. (Heck, David Shields took the method of the essay and turned it into a whole book, although I’m guessing from Lethem’s acknowledgements, their influence on each other is a two-way street.) I had fun in the book version of the essay, highlighting and annotating the passages from other sources, showing the unmarked passages that Lethem wrote as the glue between them.
It’s such a big book (over 400 pages) that it’s impossible to share all my underlines, but this passage from the intro says a lot:
[I pit myself] compulsively against bogus valorizing notions of originality, authenticity, or naturalism in the arts….For if we consent that what appears natural in art is actually constructed from series of hidden postures, decisions, and influences, etc., we make ourselves eligible to weight the notion that what’s taken as natural in our experience of everyday life could actually be a construction as well.
Other than his writing on other writers and influence, I really loved his pieces about musicians. His piece on Rick James, his profile of James Brown, and interview (!) with Bob Dylan are all very much worth reading.
Again, it’s a huge book, not as tight or as focused as The Disappointment Artist, but not meant to be either.
“Hello citizens of the Internet. We are Anonymous.”—Anonymous, 2011
“Six months after being labeled ‘the Internet hate machine,’ Anonymous had legions of followers in the real world—not just geeks and hackers hammering at their keyboards—who were seizing on the group’s name, on its ethic of anonymity and concomitant iconography. That evening, men in Guy Fawkes masks and black suits with signs announcing ‘We Are the Internet’ could be seen on cable-news shows around the world.”—Gabriella Coleman, from “Our Weirdness is Free“ published in Issue 15 of Triple Canopy. Coleman tackles the logic of Anonymous—online army, agent of chaos, seeker of justice—and explains the ways of the mask.
