Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Broken pinball machine

I figure the best metaphor for this blog at the moment is this photo I took this morning near the local supermarket in Umbria. Game over.

If you’re reading this

If you’re reading this I have managed to get into the dashboard of my blog but still cannot view the blog itself or any of the posts. This is insane.

Poetry of the cosmos (2)

I found it! Via In the Dark. And I’m not even attempting to copy/paste any actual verses because WordPress – that means you – can’t handle poetry without making typographical mincemeat of it. So here’s an image of the Andromeda Galaxy instead. Now go write some poetry about how that makes you feel.

Sonic Youth: “Brother James”

I dug up an old tape this morning of SY’s “Hold that Tiger”, a live show (bootleg?) from Japan in the late 80s. The vinyl copy is still in my mother’s basement with about four-hundred other choice albums from my collector days. The tape is scratchy, the sound quality sucks, but there is a song on it called “Brother James” which has always appealed to me. I don’t think they ever put it on any studio album.

It was something of a live favorite of theirs since 1985 or so, way before I or anyone really cared or knew who they were. The first time I heard them – thanks, Joe! – I thought it was utter crap. I was still into the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1989-90. Then something clicked and I fell geekishly in love with this band. Their music was the soundtrack for my first year in college. Since “Brother James” is ostensibly about a trip to hell, I figure it captures perfectly the mood of those few years.

*I didn’t bother uploading one of SY’s 80’s performances of this song because the quality is normally awful. This version, at the height of their “selling-out” period, captures the particular dynamic of this song well. It’s all about Steve Shelley’s primal drumming and Kim Gordon’s indecipherable yowling anyway. The rest, as they say, is noise.

The poetry of the cosmos

Someone should – if it hasn’t been done yet – edit an anthology of poetry of the cosmos. Maybe they could make sure to sprinkle Hubble images all throughout it, just to make us cosmonuts happy and get our rocks off doing two things we love at the same time: reading poetry and pondering the stars. Via Miranda Celeste Hale.

The first Arab novel about the Holocaust

That’s what the newly refurbished cover of The German Mujahid tells us.* My guess is they tacked that phrase on due to Paul Berman’s lengthy discussion of is in his recent FOTI. Anyway, that’s how I first heard about it.

*I know this because I’ve actually held the book in my hand, though I haven’t read it.

Blood on the tracks

I was late to work this morning because some guy decided to lie down on the tracks and get himself killed by an oncoming train. In Rome. I remember when there was a flurry of “pushers” in New York around ten years ago.

I asked my colleague, “Do you think he may have been pushed?”

He replied, “I wish he’d just shot himself in the fucking mouth in the privacy of his own home.”

Suicide can be so inconvenient.

Nostaligia and bile

Read this eloquent piece in the Stranger on Gallagher 2.0. Ever wonder, as I have, what ever became of the craaaaaazy watermelon-smashing mainstay of Showtime, circa 1984? I am shocked – but, alas, unsurprised- that Gallagher circa 2010 is a “paranoid, right-wing maniac.” That just kind of fits perfectly with has-been, don’t you think?

And did I mention watermelon-smashing?

Stop smoking

I believe from time to time I get to be a bit of a pedant on my own blog. It’s the price my readers pay – especially those searching for Hubble images, a strangely growing phalanx – for all the diamonds and gold I’ve selflessly unearthed for them from my own mind.

So here is my pedantic trip for the day: Stop smoking. No caps, no boldface, no fancy fonts and no colored letters. I’m not dressing this up like a placebo with a bowtie. It’s dead serious and so am I. Stop smoking.

You know why. You’ve thought it through a million times yourself. Now I’m reiterating it for you. I want you to think of me next time you light a cigarette or buy a pack. Bogart wasn’t cool; he died a shitty cancer-ridden death. Sure, he looked cool in black-and-white. You, on the other hand, look like a fool. Because you know so much more than Bogart knew about what smoking is doing to you.

I want to be a pain in your ass about this.