Signifying nothing

If hell had a theme song it would be Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Tipola to the Urban Spelunker at the SLTurbulant . Go to This day in Music enter your 18th birthhday and find the "Theme song of your life." Mine is (I curse you gods!) "Man Down Under" by the never-talented Men At Work. Middlebrow's was a crime to music, however: Chicago's "Look Away." Poor Mid-B. Poor me. What horrific theme songs for our lives. What's yours?

Stepping out Originally uploaded by Theorris . Assertively Unhip, Hightouch Megastore, and Middlebrow out on the town! Chicago will never recover.

Sleepy E's Way of the Puck got a nice write-up in the Houston Chronicle : "These people welcomed me into their lives and trusted that I would not mock them and make them look like air-hockey versions of Trekkies." ( Air-hockey champ gives a crushing blow ) The film (which I had the honor to seen an advance copy of) will be at the Houston International Film Festival next month (or is it World Fest?). Excellent work, E!

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders Carl Sandburg, "Chicago" So I'm off to Chicago for the rest of the week. I haven't been to Chicago for hmm over five years now. Chicago to me is one of those cities that just seems to welcome you like a German grandmother: all hugs and bratwursts. "Wilkommen! Haben Sie gegessen?" she seems to say (although I doubt your German grandmother is going to use the formal case as I think I have done here.) I've never felt anxious or threatened in Chicago--not like say New York or San Francisco where I always feel that slight edge that some punk is going to step out of an alleyway and take a bat to me for my money. Of course my feelings are not borne out by the city's overall history, in that historically it has been quite a rough-and-tumble town only surpassed by, perhaps, Kansas City f...

Quiet desperation Originally uploaded by Theorris .

1 Shoud shave He thought when he awoke But that would take minutes And he only had hours So he swung out of bed Pulled on his clothes Not seeing the sun in patches Dancing across the floor 2. The slow kid was out Counting time again On the train platform "This one's two minutes, That one's four" he repeated Gesturing wildly to no one First north, then south "Two minutes four!" He gave the people starring At him a desperate look Staggering from one end Of the platform to the other "This one's two minutes, That one's four! This one's two! That one's four!" 3. The wake and bake twins On the train this morning Talk bitches and hos and shit, Guns pointed at their heads (Regularly) And how baked they Got the night before And how one or the Other's mom sucks And how freaking Boring all this shit is But that's no big deal You know, since it is Better to be alive and Bored than dead You're treated like shit You know, but what T...

I was goofing off today downtown having paid a visit to the Salt Lake Art Center to see the Motherwell exhibit that is current showing (more on that later, I should think) and wandered over to Sam Weller's afterwards ostensibly just to get a coffee and see if they had any new used Gallway Kinnell (thanks Hightouch for reminding me that I enjoy Gallway Kinnell) and ended up finding the latest McSweeney's (The McSweeney's Store --for those of you who refuse to leave the house). The latest edition is much less fanciful than the previous edition (which was brilliantly packaged as asorted mail you might receive in your very own mailbox, q.v., including an advertisement for something like "togetherness clothes" and various official looking letters which were, in fact, short stories). The latest McSweeney's , however, came bundled with a DVD Wholphin which is a collection of short films and other video oddities such as a Turkish sitcom with subtitles rewritten by...

Poetry quiets an Audience faster than a Four-fifty-seven

They scream as their car Slides helplessly into mine. What terrible drivers.

Shakespeare and I go out drinking one night. It is cold, so I offer Shakespeare my Long coat to brave the cold and snowy gloom. (He is wearing those fancy pantaloons With long gartered stockings--so inappro- Priate.) But we end up only at the Corner Tesoro to buy some cheap beer. "Firke!" Shakespeare exclaims, "Wherefore art we here!" "Well you're the one with the coin," I say punch- Ing his arm. "I am but a poor fool, lack- Ing that which would profer us more profit- Able imbibment." "Heave over," he cries, And calls a cab, so we wander into The dark night, seeking Queen Mab, or good beer.

You can't write a real poem on a computer, Just like you can't draw a proper picture Without whooping the daylights out of paper. Look at this kid drawing: Thortable Originally uploaded by Stebbi . See? Your whole body has to be into the action, You have to get your feet up against that wall And push with your whole might to write it Right (If you want it right, that is) You have to move the arm so You have to cut the paper with the pen You have to get the best of it Wrestling with the words Pinning them to the table It has got to be messy, my friend You've got to bleed ink on your fingers You've got to get a paper cut Or two It's the way it is, Yes it is Heart pounding Head sweating Biting your lip as the paper crumples The whole lot You have to feel the poem under your hands Until it surrenders Calls uncle Then, breathless, laughs with you At the childlike absurdity of the Brawl "Thortable" used by permission. © 2006 by Steffan Kjartansson. Ava...

This is the cause of that thought 1. The crew Clifford Ross: Do you think [the crew in Moby Dick] had the same feeling--that things were going faster and faster and leading nowhere? Is whaling just a chase without end? Laurie Anderson: It's a job. It's a workingman's book, staring guys who are working. It's not Goethe, where a hero goes out, is challenged ande learns things. These men work hard, and they sail, and they drown. And it's not just that they're going to drown, it's that they're being led by a madman who they don't understand and they follow him because he has has unbelievable charisma. He knows what he's looking for. How do you drive men to action? You get some really good bait and dangle it in front of their eyes. Ahab did not have great respect for his crew; he thought they'd only respond to money. Now that is the great American story. CR: The only explanation that I found in the book for why they kept going was th...

All right out of a need to be contradictory (oh you could say hypocritical, but hypocrit is such an ugly word) with my rambling post from earlier today, here is my top 10 list of CDs that came out last year that I purchased: 1) Beck--Guero 2) The (International) Noise Consipiracy--Armed Love 3) Eels--Blinking Lights and Other Revelations 4) The Dandy Warhols--Odditorium or the War Lords of Mars 5) Stephen Malkmus--Face The Truth 6) Iron & Wine--Woman King 7) The Kills--Now Wow 8) Frank Black--Honeycomb 9) Sigur Ros--Takk 10) Rotten Musicians--Make a Face Damn that was hard. No wonder I hate ordering things into lists. Most of those could easily interchange. #10, as well, is a local band to good old SLC. Look them up. They rock hard. They rock Pippi Longstocking-style. I think this little excercise in list-making has changed my perspective on such things--slightly. The world feels like a more orderly place now that I've decided which CD is better than the rest.

I've been meaning to write about "best of" lists and how much I dislike them. The top ten vogue to me is just utter silliness in that I can't imagine having a "favorite" anything let alone a ranking of top ten of them. This behavior, of course, is just a big mask for my surprising lack of taste. Don't get me wrong, there are things that I dislike in this world--things that bug the hell out of me or things that just turn me right off, but on the whole I can find value in most things. What crap. I am probably the most biased person I know when it comes to things cultural. Hmm. Which is it then? I guess that's the whole problem: I'm of two minds on most issues. I guess that is because when it comes to something like music, for example, I don't really think about it musically or performance-wise, but more in a functional sense: what can I do with that? What bizzare project does it stir up in my brain. For example with the aforementione...

I don't care what anyone says, Pippi Longstocking rocked. Made you laugh, didn't I?

Spring has suddenly gotten the best of me, I think. I've been harboring fantasies of travel. I catch myself thinking about high speed trips across the flats of Wyoming to some unknown destination in the East, or about getting lost on a long hike in the San Rafael swell here in Good Old Utah. All that sounds quite reasonable in that I might just wander out one of these weekends now that it is warmer and do that very thing with all my camping gear in tow, but it is more than that: I've come under the affliction of a desire to speed travel again. "Speed travel? What is that?" I hear you ask. Read on. The other day I found myself staring at a copy of National Geographic wondering how much a flight was to Venice for a weekend a month or so from now. Of course I immediately went and check it out ($1098 round trip), and felt extra-foolish since I know I would never be able to see anything in Venice in the mere 6 to 12 hours I would have there. Then again, I think I w...

Lamp post Originally uploaded by Theorris .