archive › Mark Elliot Cullen
Decoding Op. 4
the swallows are back to feast on territory
border book page 5 tuesday, important music
from a computer with audio political agenda
[must went out with expletives stands for mudder]
treated to copious amounts of ganja, animal parts the battery
may demand matches to manually administer on war torn liberia
connect administration to comply with the limits for a class b
everywhere Avermaria dumps during time everywhere the slider notes
conflicting reports arriving simultaneously from every poor town
of this summer storage allocation to our laughter having flown
away settings in the dumps pull weeds of composite metals
out of cathode ray tubes appareil numérique. Be sure you have
the controls to ninetten years! buttoning their pants and the off
underneath the down spout transferring variations in bird anatomy
if not adjustable, similar products must always be supervised
partly at the chance they remove the back from any ape so widely
reported in the media because transferring and sprays, solvents
and alcohol and abrasives carry features of this abuse to exponents
of proper human condition. december’s batteries are tuesdays page 8
turn it on again, wait five seconds, then turn it on again.
additional suggestions hung in the square.
our unmarried women includinginterference never service
never force a connector into a port. if the temperature
is always between 0 and 35 degrees…
The Man I Trust
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I’ve been fooling around with an ebay bass!
Selections from “The Fall” by Albert Camus
Here are some selections from The Fall, a book about a lawyer who confesses his pride and disgrace to a reader over a few nights. Like The Stranger, the narrator is a warning about the true nature of man– and it’s a trap! You can’t help but identify with the seductive voice and honesty of the confession.
On those he’s taken to bed –
Some cry: “Love me!” Others: “Don’t love me!” But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: “Don’t love me and be faithful to me!”
On punishment and judgement –
“I’m not saying to avoid punishment, for punishment without judgement is bearable. It has a name, besides, that guarantees our innocence: it is called misfortune. No, on the contrary, it’s a matter of dodging judgment of avoiding being forever judged without having a sentence pronounced. … Today we are always ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
On camaraderie –
“This is so true that we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves or be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to
…
Noise, Lou Reed & The Thing
You have to admit that consistently doing this to critics and fans for almost 50 years is a feat.
“If you don’t think this is music, you can get the fuck out of here.” With a million happy customers every year, these are not words you associate with audiences or performers at the Montreal Jazz Festival. But John Zorn’s F-bomb from the stage was aimed at one of many agitated audience members who expressed their displeasure over the evening’s all-star trio of himself, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. No doubt a large part of the audience was expecting “Sweet Jane,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” or even Anderson’s “O Superman.” Instead, it was a free improv showdown that shocked the crowd, prompting dozens to walk out after two songs.
Lou Reed is at his best when people are walking out and yelling at him and having resigned himself from releasing pop music temporarily, it’s great to see him making good use of his time and embracing the Metal Machine Music within.
You would hope that the one place people wouldn’t walk out and boo at these sorts of performances would be a Jazz festival. My hope would be that those interested in Jazz would have an open mind about dissonance and improvisation, just as they have an open mind for the pop groups that perform at Jazz festivals or the other musical movements Jazz musicians have cross pollinated with. I’d also hope they’d consider the…
Decoding Op. 3
using the rules of bereaved grammar
for windows, and lock holes negate your author to
operate the negative recharge the face of the outcome
of four steps to heaven through heels and old water
and more of the same m16 copper muzzle the shift in the heel
feeling romantic the battery status; 1 in 24.
notinstalled and used unproperly—that is,
in disk, the status light on the front of accordance
with the moisture in openings expanding and closing
the aerosol movement of aerosol important more often than not
don’t use the and knot the insertion or later the erect border
so blown and limp that we look on the run to
avoid getting minutes of water on ankles and shuffle to drag songs
in harlequin turn off of one minute charged
openingautomatically when you (willing to take tasteful risks).
the most sands of west africa. the scramble to make like.
then, each time youconnect it’s causedby the computer
or one of the photos from bottom patrol the streets of baghdad
in a roundabout way. ensemble of portions the first time you
lay on the buckle of positions tied to infirmed.
a headdress and sessions with compliance and dispose the port
the first the port. dispose the port the serial number.
Tomorrow or later you listen to using
you can not object the…
Kurt Vonnegut: Sports Reporter
Futility Closet on Vonnegut:
Strapped for cash in the mid-1950s, Kurt Vonnegut took a job at Sports Illustrated, though he “didn’t care or know squat about sports.”
They asked him to write a piece about a racehorse that had jumped the fence at the local track.
He fed a page into his typewriter, stared at it for several hours, typed “The horse jumped over the fucking fence” and left.
Smile or Die
Via Lenin’s Tomb.
Now try Naomi Klein…
As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: “I don’t think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we’re faced with now.” Apparently, it “seemed inconceivable” that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: “If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?” Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world.
Decoding Op. 2
recent developments in the occupation update application
doesn’t your computer present the latest information?
go to make him impervious to bullets, he shuffles pulls it from the fccrules.
illustrated by the mid-90s for american rap
satan as a teenager [again, this is your connection calling]
thanks to the arrival of the internet we can only purchase.
The user is obstructed from fitting. residentialinstallation.
they made us prisoners in their own applications/utilities.
if nothinghappens set the switch
plays all alone with a shiny tin can. his computer.
for fastest transfer speeds, uniform dress doesn’t mean all
wars are of the television or radio.
tribal hunters, they pluck their style and source page 17:
following measures calmly. turn the television or believe us but we swear to god this is certain amount of space
near the to disconnect your reception is suspected.
radio is visible, the battery is out of power
so have some fun with it. death is out there causing interference for our own boys in uniform.
in about two hours, send your equipment and military uniforms. you could improve performance or add features. drag and conceal your collapsible stocks– you need to get started.
become caught or trapped—forexample, while canada makes electrical statements on civil wars: “Replace all civil wars with visual manifestations of combatants pushing rafters in cycles creating gothic structures out of sheer force…
Zunguzungu v. Clapton
Over at zunguzungu, there’s much talk about Eric Clapton, electrification, manipulation, authenticity and Robert Johnson:
From the Guardian:
Eric Clapton once described Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”…[but] nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.
I, like many people, only know of Robert Johnson through Eric Clapton; I know Cream’s Crossroads a lot better than Johnson’s, and like it more too. But I love the fact that the figure of origin, used to authenticate electric blues by so many white electric bluesmen like Clapton, cannot now be disentangled from studio gimmickry. Part of the Clapton thing was that he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric. Rock and Roll as the electrified blues is every hack music journalist’s favorite cliche. And now it turns out
…
about the author
Mark Elliot Cullen is "relaxed", he's a movie star, he's a television celebrity, he's a nightclub sensation, he's a social issue and, of course, he's one of the world's most successful recording artists. All in all, he's an entertainment phenomenon the likes of whom emerge only a half-dozen or so times in the course of this century. So where does that leave us?