Hur­ry. It’s not a chimera; he’s a ghost. [via Pound for Pound]

From Dave Kehr’s New York Times review:

Is “Mr. Arkadin” a bril­liant piece of pre­post­mod­ernist “appro­pri­a­tion,” recy­cling past achieve­ments into a Welle­sian meta-movie? Or is it just a mess, reflect­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty Welles was expe­ri­enc­ing as he tried to restart his failed Amer­i­can career in Europe?

Isn’t the word for pre­post­mod­ernist just mod­ernist?

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In case you did­n’t know, I’ve been select­ed for Philebri­ty Fit Club thus can­celling my mem­ber­ship to The Seden­tary Life Affil­i­ates, a fra­ter­ni­ty to which I’d clung lo these six years, trans­fer­ring mem­ber­ship from New York to Pennsport.

So as not to bog down Black­mail Is My Life with a dai­ly account­ing of food­stuffs, run­ning, sundry aches and the phar­ma­col­o­gy that keeps it all togeth­er, I’ve launched with a great mea­sure of Pennsport Pride This Sport­ing Life at Myspace. Vis­it there if you’d like to keep tabs, but I’ll prob­a­bly include a week­ly link every Sat­ur­day through June 17th, accom­pa­nied by a pic­ture of these new sneak­ers as they endure more wear and tear.

From New York Times:

“I thought he han­dled his assign­ment with class, integri­ty,” the pres­i­dent said. “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott, but nev­er­the­less he made the deci­sion and I accept­ed it. One of these days, he and I are going to be rock­ing in chairs in Texas and talk­ing about the good old days.”

Ari Berman com­ments. Some­where, Calvin Coolidge chuckles.

The Flam­ing Lips — At War with the Mystics

The Flam­ing Lips’ At War with the Mys­tics tells a pes­simistic polit­i­cal sto­ry. Begin­ning with the unfor­tu­nate­ly titled “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, they ques­tion human nature and assume the worst: that baser ele­ments win out in the sec­u­lar cos­mol­o­gy and that our impuls­es are inher­ent­ly self-inter­est­ed, a cease­less cho­rus of annoy­ing yeahs seems to sig­nal acqui­es­cence. If that’s true, it’s a damn­ing indict­ment com­ing from a band hereto­fore so pre­oc­cu­pied with hal­lu­cino­gens that pol­i­tics seemed but a pass­ing con­cern. So has Wayne Coyne’s pro­tec­tive bub­ble sud­den­ly burst and let in the awful world, the one where the oth­er half lives?

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