Fear and Loathing in Sentence Diagramming

Paul is Barefoot

If there is a time when I can declare myself the biggest The Beatles fan, it happens during this song. If there is a piece of short animation that inspires me to want to learn how to use Flash!, it is seen here . If there is a singular experience so suave and agreeable that it makes you feel a’ight, it would be in your best interest to jump in head first. Good stuff, man. Good stuff.

I'm a (unaware) Copycat

Exhibit A:
ManCalledSun's (under the current moniker of "Doctor Jones") July '09 Mixtape Cover


Exhibit B:
Melt Banana's Teeny Shiny album cover


Whoops.
I thought the mixtape cover looked vaguely familiar... *shrugging emoticon*

Laughing at Laughing

I thought this was hilarious 20 years ago, and still do today. Quality stuff.

Notes from Contemporary Non-Fiction workshop

- Personal essays don't have to be about personal experience
- Free from objective parameters of academic writing
- Seizing opportunities to describe stuff
- Themes that are inherent in the situation
- Walking up to the door and then doing an about-face
- Explore something by looking at something else
- Stick to the personal experience to negotiate the politics of the essay
- The painter stops smelling fumes after a while
- It could easily be crap
- Entertainment-to-truth spectrum
- A piece heightened by the literal gravity
- The unbalance between whats offered and what could be offered
- ... so that the reader knows that you'll meet him in the middle somewhere
- The application of all things
- Less 'taking care of it' and more of 'existing within it'
- Blunt Fashion
- It's a big step, but not in her world
- A TV interviewee looking into the wrong camera
- Modulated imagery
- Understanding the merit of an experience
- David Foster Wallace-ise it

As the London Lamps Do - March 2011 BRR Mixtape Brigade

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=11DY31CS

But first let me gaze at this solitary figure, who come hitherward with a tin lantern, which throws a circular pattern of its punched holes on the ground about him. He passes fearlessly into the unknown gloom, whither I will not follow him... He fears not the dreary path before him, because his lantern, which was kindled at the fireside of his home, will light him back to that same fire again. And thus we, night-wanderers through a stormy and dismal world, if we bear the lamp of Faith, enkindled at a celestial fire, it will surely lead us home to that Heaven whence its radiance was borrowed.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

This video has ruined my life

...and I blame Kevin. A week ago, he posted this on Facebook and I watched it, and my life has been upside down ever since. I am not in control of myself, as if I have been possessed. It is hell. I blame Kevin.

So, there I was, 3AM, humming an Acid King riff to my newborn - successfully lulling her to sweet, precious sleep - when, out of nowhere I break out and start singing the pizza song at the appropriate pitch. She woke up.

There I was, reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, rejoicing in his civic accomplishments and feeling inspired to strive to be a better American, when all of a sudden the momentum was broken by the hankering to order a pizza topped with fish sticks and whipped cream.

There I was, in the CMA auditorium, enshrouded in the exotic voice of Yasmin Levy, being whisked away on the tides of Spanish Jewry and riding back through hundreds of years of beautiful Mediterranean tradition… Only to have my journey interrupted by the mental image of five young girls bopping around in slow motion, spelling P-I-Z-Z-A.

There I was, immersed in learning the skill of sentence diagramming, struggling with determining whether this or that noun phrase is adjectival or the object compliment, only finding it terribly difficult to concentrate because I kept hearing voices – oh, the drowsy voices! – singing about pushing the limits of pizza creation.