Xark!

They Walk Among Us

Sent along today by beloved novelist Patricia Anthony:

I was at the checkout of a Kmart. The clerk rang up $46.64 charge. I gave her a fifty dollar bill. She gave me back $46.64.

I gave it back to her and told her that she had made a mistake in MY favor and gave her the money back. She became indignant and informed me she was educated and knew what she was doing and returned the money again. I gave her the money back again... same scenario! I departed the store with the $46.64.

This happened in Austin, Texas, at the Corner of MoPac Blvd and Parmer Lane .

They Walk Among Us and Many Work Retail.

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I walked into a Mickey D's with a buy-one-get-one-free coupon For a sandwich. I handed it to the girl and she looked over at a little Chalkboard that said "buy one-get one free." "They're already buy-one-get-one-free", she said, "so I guess they're both free" She handed me my free sandwiches and I walked out the door.

They Walk Among Us and Many Work Retail.

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One day I was walking down the beach with some friends when one Of them shouted, "Look at that dead bird!" Someone looked up at the Sky and said, "Where?"

They Walk Among Us!

MORE SHOCKING EVIDENCE AFTER THE JUMP!!!

Karl Rove: It's the hookers, stupid

'On The Road' at 50

On The Road, Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, is turning 50. The exact date is apparently squishy, as I can't find it in any of the news reports I've searched, but apparently September is the month the anniversary will be observed, because Viking has new goodies for us to buy (a hint: They're already out).  And yes, I will buy them. First up: 

...not just "On the Road" itself but the hitherto-unpublished "scroll manuscript," a 1951 draft that Kerouac typed without a paragraph break on thin drawing paper (not Teletype paper) taped together in a single 120-foot roll, powered by coffee (not by Benzedrine). Kerouac was then a writer with a forgotten first novel ("The Town and the City") who wanted a nonstop, unpaginated flow appropriate both to his convictions about spontaneous composition and to the narrative itself...

The scroll has the real names—Jack, Neal, Allen Ginsberg—and scenes later cut for fear of obscenity charges or libel suits. In an introductory essay, English novelist Howard Cunnell calls the scroll "a markedly darker, edgier, and more uninhibited text than the finished book." In particular, the official version dances around the subject of homosexuality: Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac all hooked up. And it bowdlerizes the encounter with a gay man who gives them a ride: "Neal proceeded to handle [him] like a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare from my corner." In the published novel, this becomes: "Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom."

Good. I'm over my adolescent need to deny the truth about Kerouac's sexuality. The Scroll is the book I've always wondered about, the one we all wondered about, a mythic artifact untainted by The Establishment. We'd approached it, I thought, with Visions of Cody, supposedly a novel of outtakes. And yes, The Scroll could be just as awful. But The Scroll intrigues me.

Dragnet: Larry Craig

Organic Process goes live

Over the past few weeks I've been helping out some friends of ours with a website they've been remaking, and I've waited to write about their project until the site went live.  But this is not about their site (which is a perfectly nice site, designed by the fine folks at Fuzzco): This is about creative people who are redrawing the lines between art and journalism and activism and commerce.

Her name is Farrah Hoffmire. His name is Mitchell Davis. They both grew up in Summerville, both graduated from C of C. She started off to be a mental health counselor but became an artist. He started off as a musician but became one of the founders of BookSurge.com, one of those magnificent little software-commerce marriages that's just so smart it practically squeaks when you rub up against it. When BookSurge sold to Amazon a couple years ago, Farrah and Mitchell moved to Seattle to help integrate their company into the mega-bookseller's operations. And while they were out there, Farrah decided to learn to make films. That was the spring and early summer of 2005.

In late August of that year, Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and swamped New Orleans. A few weeks later, Farrah packed up her camcorder and headed to the Delta, where she began recording her own personal history of the aftermath of the storm.

More maps is gooder

I feel kinda bad about giving this little girl a hard time, but then again, she's wearing my adopted state on her sash...

Found at Bellascribe: Joni Mitchell & Charleston

From a post by the often-missed Peg Alford:

I learned Joni Mitchell played and temporarily stayed in Charleston, this after one of those synchronicities of three: (1) out in Big Sur, seeing again some of those well-known photos of Joni, and Graham Nash, at Esalen, and I think maybe the Monterey Pop Festival (here’s one of them of Robert Altman’s); (2) seeing a vinyl copy of (the excellent) Hejira for sale at Mole’s Record Exchange; (3) watching, DVD, Copying Beethoven — it was okay, bordering on not — which made me think of Joni Mitchell’s song for Beethoven “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” (Not unsurprisingly, there’s a YouTube video for the song here.) After these events, I re-watched the PBS American Masters DVD, Woman of Heart and Soul, and was struck anew by the fact of her going on her own, solely, as a young woman around the country playing at these unknown places, which she’d also booked herself. I liked how she talked about a “tempering by fire.” How she was an only child but had “chosen many brothers along the way.” How she called music she wrote later out in Laurel Canyon “kitchen songs.” Her reply to young aspirants who ask for advice, “Do you want to be a star or an artist?”

Always an important, if under-valued, question.

Ryan Sholin on news video

If YouTube has taught us anything, it’s that video users could care less about what you’re ‘Featuring’ or pushing on your home page. Just get me to the page with 50 thumbnails and headlines on it, and I’ll browse around for quite awhile. Show me one big video and little else, and you’ve lost me.
-- Ryan Sholin, Invisble Inkling, Aug. 19, 2007

Thank you, Mitchell.

Shower epiphany

It occurred to me this morning that I don't just have elements of my personality that conflict with other elements of my personality. Rather, I have personality traits that probably ought to be mutually exclusive, negating, impossible.   

Here's how I think it works: We look all these parts of ourselves that simply can't logically all be true, and the mess farbles and shames us. So we pick sides: Hard-working. Easy-going. Morally upright. Ethically flexible. Whatever. We pick sides and we tell ourselves and the world that this is our true identity... and then spend the rest of our days trying to cope with the incompleteness of our declaration.

Which is why life doesn't really start to get interesting until we decide to try living at the intersection of our contradictions.

Must have been the flax seed oil

(Thanks to old Army buddy Michael Allen)