waka waka waka

Feeling tired? Listless? Maybe all you need is some concentrated water. Just add water.

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It is fashionable in some circles to regard Mankind as nothing more than a global despoiler, a pernicious infestation that the poor Planet would be far better off without. For those who feel themselves drawn toward this curious normative vortex, there is now an organization dedicated to the gradual and permanent eradication, by attrition, of the entire human race. Apparently we’ll like the place much better when we’re not around.

Have a look here.

Our friend Kevin Kim has recently begun and ended a storm-tossed relationship with a fellow by the name of Zach Shatz, who has written a slim book in which he attempts to explain Ultimate Reality through the prism of, well, prisms. Kevin did an interview with Shatz about the book (which, judging by this interview, is nothing more than foaming New Age poppycock), in which the author came up far short of impressing me with the coherence of his thinking, or the profundity of his insights.

Kevin has lots of readers, and one of them wrote him a witheringly scornful email about the interview, which Kevin promptly posted. Finally, Kevin, having had an increasingly frustrating behind-the-scenes email exchange with Shatz, has lost all patience with the man, and has posted the whole correspondence online.

Lesson to be learned: don’t expect Kevin Kim to help you disseminate your bullshit.

You can follow the whole exchange as linked below:

The interview.

The letter from Kevin’s reader.

Kevin applies the final smackdown.

Well, enough already, for now at least, with the religious stuff. I’m sure that readers are running for the hills after all that swooning about “numinous beauty and harmony”, etc. I had to make what I think is an important point, and I will return to it, I’m sure, before long, but for now, back to shallow-minded drivel, and lowbrow japery.

It’s Fashion Week here in Gotham, and every morning on the way to the midtown skyscraper where I arrange ones and zeroes for pennies a day, I pass by the big white tents in Bryant Park. West 40th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is a buzzing hive of activity: news trucks, electrical equipment, reporters, caterers, fashion groupies, menials in various dusky shades, and of course the models, who are easy to spot: they’re the ones whose tuberculosis is apparently so advanced that they’ve been unable to eat for weeks.

Anyway, each morning as I pass by I gaze in wonderment at these elaborate temporary structures, which for a few magical days turn our charming little park into the Olympus of couture, knowing that within this temple of style — a venue that, for a homely schlub like me, is as inaccessible as the seraglio of Suleiman the Magnificent — the Illuminati are gathered to give the sacred codex of Fashion its equinoctical update.

As I trudge past this glittering palace to spend another day shackled to my oar, my heart is aflutter with curiosity. What will be on the runway today? What delicious flights of fancy are taking wing, to the delighted gasps of the fortunate few?

And the most important question of all: what will I be wearing this fall?

Well, wait no longer, friends. Have a look.

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Here.

Jean Baudrillard, that obfuscator extraordinaire of Continental theorymongers, died recently, his passing unmarked in these pages. (Words failed me.) His work lives on, however — which fact is itself aptly incomprehensible — in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. It surprises me not at all that the one and only Deogulwulf has commented upon this august publication amongst his observations of the passing scene; in this item he shares with us the musings of an Australian associate-professor of art upon the subtleties of relativistic astrophysics.

My friend Jon Mandell has sent along a link to an amusing, if slightly stressful, little diversion that he says is popular with Navy pilots. You can try it here. Feel free to post a comment with your best time. Or not.

Here in New York City the Sanitation Department will pick up pretty much anything you leave out for them. Unwanted furniture, old stoves, Christmas trees, paint cans, wooden planks, TV sets, you name it - just leave it at curbside and it’s gone the next day, gobbled up by the big white truck’s insatiable hydraulic maw. But a while back I managed to find the one thing that you can’t throw out.

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