o Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner lets you see which organizations’ employees are editing Wikipedia entries.
o TV Links: full movies, TV shows, etc.., organized fairly immaculately. Like YouTube, if the Man never noticed it.
o Nobelcom.com provides international calling card codes at cut rates waaay better than the bodega.
o TubeTV allows the user save videos from YouTube and other embedded sources.
o Like Robert DeNiro’s renegade plumber in BrazilNYC iPod Doctor does out-of-service/unauthorized iPod repairs on street corners — and now, apparently, via the mails. We’re all in this together.
The soundtrack to “Architecture” — composed by Tom Vuozzo (aka Tom Perry) — is wiggy, electronic, and great… but I also couldn’t resist posting some math-rock to accompany it. Start at any point in “Atlas” & it should do just fine. Thanks to YouTube user sawing14s for putting it up.
1. “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror” – Jeffrey and Jack Lewis (from City and Eastern Songs)
2. “Windfall” – Son Volt (from Trace)
3. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
4. “Christopher Columbus” – Kamikaze Ground Crew (from Postcards From the Highwire)
5. “Black River Song” – Angels Of Light (from We Are Him)
6. “It Seems Like Nothing’s Gonna Come My Way Today” – The Outsiders (from CQ)
7. “Happy Together” – The Turtles (from Solid Zinc)
8. “Peacebone” – Animal Collective (from Strawberry Jam)
9. “Mexican Radio” – Wall of Voodoo
10. “Are You Hung Up?” – Frank Zappa
11. “Who Need the Peace Corps?” – Frank Zappa
12. “Concentration Moon” – Frank Zappa
13. “Mom and Dad” – Frank Zappa
14. “Telephone Conversation” – Frank Zappa
15. “Bow Tie Daddy” – Frank Zappa
16. “Harry, You’re A Beast” – Frank Zappa
17. “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” – Frank Zappa (from We’re Only In It For the Money)
18. “Porpoise Song” – The Monkees (from Head OST)
19. “Cirque de Soleil” – Patton Oswalt (from Werewolves and Lollipops)
The only reference I have ever seen to the village of Jarnow, Austria comes via an account in the New York Times‘ “condensed cablegrams” section published on 7 February 1892 wherein it was reported that an unnamed doctor was killed by two unnamed comrades of an argumentative (and unnamed) Captain.
Since then, events in Jarnow, Austria ceased to be documented by the New York Times — if it could ever be said that they were documented at all. Indeed, for the remainder of its years, the village of Jarnow managed to elude nearly every piece of written documentation since digitized, as well as the memories of at least three generations taking its name for their own.
“I don’t know what it is,” Darla told me, after we had sex in the living room during the afternoon. “It’s like he stole my blind spot,” she said. The mauve cross-stitching pressed into my back as I cradled her. “You know how your brain makes up that little bit between your eyes? Just there can be something there? But I can’t explain it to him, not like that.” I couldn’t explain it to Morgan, either. We’d almost stopped talking ourselves. And when I saw her car come around the corner in slow motion like that, my own blind spot filled with unaccountable rage, the space of not knowing, of the space of knowing something that you have no need to tell anyone else, and ran for the spaceship. [END]
I slipped from the bottom hatch and kicked off as the pod filled with water and sank. Swimming towards the light, I wondered if Darla had heard yet. I rose, as if lifted by color and taste and sound. Were there really boats above me? My wallet was still in my pocket, so I could go to a hotel, if I could get ashore. The surface got closer and closer and I burst through, finally, laughing: probably the first man in the history of the planet to launch himself into outer space for not wanting to have sex. I had phrased our departure as a hypothetical to Morgan. I knew she wouldn’t tell her husband. We were in the corner of the shed then, the warm skin above her breasts pressing into my arm as she kissed my neck. “Then I’d just have to give you a special goodbye,” she said, drawling.
It was never part of the plan for me to get in the spaceship. It was only to gather a bag and go. Darla didn’t want a postmark that would hint at our destination or direction, so I would mail it before I left. Thinking I had at least a day, the letter made it across town that afternoon. Probably 20 minutes or so ago, I thought, as my ears popped and I sank through the Gulf. The color in the windows turned a peaceful blue. I saw no fish. Darla had hopefully made it to El Paso, listening to her Jerry Lee Lewis tape over and over. The sealing held, thankfully, and I thought of Darla, with her window open, smoking Winstons. I could tell the pod was reaching the nadir of its descent and, if I didn’t disengage the plug, would shoot upwards at any moment, back into the naked daylight, Coast Guard boats circling.
There was the morning Darla couldn’t talk, just woke up with a look on her face like she was receding into the distance. She kissed me and got out of bed. We ate cereal across the table like most mornings, and I talked to her, joked about the weather, traffic at the Astrodome. She smiled, unaware anything was amiss. I went back to my corn flakes. When I looked up, there was a look of horror on her face, one I understood entirely when it was time to abandon the pod under the water. That night, after the silent day, by the moonlight, I showed her the ship. She exhaled and cried quietly into me, her body coming against mine as we stood in the shed. For a second, there, every part of her was right again. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” she whispered. “Tomorrow’s going to be like today.”
The spaceship neared completion in the golden late summer, its dirty silver podform taking shape in the midst of backyards aglow with barbecues. We had Morgan and Strommler — Erik, his name was — over for one, in fact. He drank a pop and leaned on the oak, the oak I would see incinerated below me as I launched a few weeks later. “Hell’s bells!” he said, describing an approaching ice cream truck and I laughed. He did, too. His hair always seemed to shoot in different directions, as if it was growing towards the sun. He wasn’t a bad guy, not at all, though his laugh reminded me of my aunt in Shreveport. We had little to talk about, but got along well, even then, when I knew he was destroying Darla, and I was fooling around with his wife. But by Labor Day, I felt dizzy with grace, because Darla and I had it all worked out, what we were going to do.
The first alien wildlife I saw was a sunflower. Perhaps five years old, maybe six, at a county fair. The stem was thick as my wrist. There was a small, one-track maze of them. My mother was ahead, with my younger brother, around a turn. Without her in view, I felt transported elsewhere, someplace far. I grabbed one in front of me and peeled at its skin. When I was finally able to pierce it, I found its Martian insides wet and furry. I recoiled at the coolness. As Morgan increased her affections with me in the days after she helped me with the parachute, her hands running from my hips and up my chest, it was a severed sunflower she wore behind her ear. And then the spaceship slammed into the water, sunflowers and imagined interplanetary terrains and Morgan’s mouth collapsed by the sudden pressure.
