At which show one may enjoy five-dollar all-thee-can-imbibe sangria and beer.

This event will be all ~10 kinds of fun (+/- 1 standard margin of error of fun), not to mention the first Heavy Jamal show in a year, featuring songs never before heard by the public.

Sangria Dance Party ft. the Mangoose and Heavy Jamal
Friday, April 24 at 8:30 p.m.
293 Monroe St. #3, Brooklyn

PS - the HJ show starts after the Pomp & Circumstance party, if you are going to that (as I am).

PS2 - The penguins are coming to destroy us. Be warned.

From “Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species” in the New York Times:

The more closely knit an animal society is, and the more interdependent its members, the higher the rate of taxation. Among bell miner birds of Australia, for example, pairs of breeding adults are assisted at the nest by several youthful helpers, usually male. The helpers provision the couple’s fledglings with a steady supply of lerp, sugary casings secreted by plant-sucking insects.

Let me pause here to appreciate not only lerp itself—a most vivid and terrifying substance, “secreted by plant-sucking insects,” as opposed to, say, plant-tickling or plant-massaging insects—but also the men and women of Noblest Science who venture forth to learn of the lerp, to love the lerp.

Our article continues:

And though some scientists had wondered whether lerp wasn’t basically a junk food, offered up to the young bell miners as much for show as for substance, researchers report in the March issue of Animal Behaviour that lerp is, in fact, as important to the fledglings’ growth as is the meatier arthropod prey supplied by their parents. By all evidence, the helper birds are honestly “paying to stay,” trading a valuable currency for the right to remain within the aggressively guarded precincts of a bell miner breeding colony, with the hope of better times and personal propagation opportunities ahead.

The only response I have upon reading of colonies of lerpers is:

FUCK yeah, cilantro. You know how humans do.

We may or may not pay taxes because our ancestors shared the mammalian equivalent of lerp, but we definitely share salsa now (in part) because of you, cilantro. You and your leafy green cool refreshing mintacular steez.

Today, friends, is a glorious day, because despite all the petty and noble terrors of the earth, there is the internet, and it yields forth so many fructifants, some mango-like (lusty, wet), some pomegranate (jeweled, secret), some fig (sweet, gritty, leathern), others jerky (turkeyfied) or ape-brain (clay-y, monosodium glutamate-ish).

Here I have tallied only a small portion of the multiple lode:

• Vin Diesel loves Dungeons & Dragons. (Thanks to Julianne Smolinski, writer and professional genius, for the heads-up.)
• Billy Bob Thronton hates both Canada and acting. And isn’t all that into music, either. Which is strange when you think about the guy’s life, spent acting, playing music, and (at times) touring Canada. (Why do we do the things we loathe? Baudelaire couldn’t help us there; I’m not even going to try, je regrette.)
• My sometimes hero/sometimes nemesis Nicholas Kristof is bored by words, which I long suspected.
• Finally, I now know the joys of RSS (”really simple syndication”/”rich site summary”/”read sexy snippets”), thanks to (who else) Google. I feel like all the previous RSS readers were working too hard to promote themselves and not hard enough to show me the multiple Infinities of web content.

Of course, speaking of infinity, it’s gotta be nice to be Google: Like Dan Flavin, John Cage, Sam Beckett, you’ve got your discourse’s version of Minimalism on lock. You never have to do more work than [white page, Logo], as long as you back up said Minimal steez with un-fuckable-with functionality.

And with the help of said functionality, what day is not full of wondrous charm, here in the internet?

I write “in the internet” but can just as well write “through, via, by way of, thanks to, courtesy, all over, throughout the internet,” or any prepositional phrase that does not imply “through the internet,” since there is no mystic Other Side, no transcendent meaning, no final answer, no wizard behind the curtain (unless Vin Diesel is hanging out behind a curtain; that dude loves spellcasting).

The internet, without center, without king or tyrannical convention of democrats, may be the first true rhizome, the first deterritorializing machine, that which consumes and strips of transcendent meaning, applying all meanings to all surfaces to produce (more) all meanings (again, different). (And I am far from the first to suggest as much.)

The other night my brother G and I caught up with some ex-coworkers whom we hadn’t seen in a long time. One, M, is a development officer at a major theater. Her husband, J, is a lawyer. M and J could ask about my job—”How is your writing going? Are you writing?”—but I found it impossible to ask the reverse without resorting to instant jargon: “How is your developmenting? Are you still lawyering?”

True, M could be said to be “developing” something, but that’s not really what a development officer does, I think. She probably raises money, markets theater, supervises benefits, mails donors, &c. Likewise, a lawyer might teach law, practice law, write law, argue law—but he doesn’t just law, nakedly. He don’t be “lawing around,” like some knucklehead.

It strikes me as strange that we English-speakers face a paucity of verbs for what we do, despite our cultural preoccupation with trade and class. At least, for all its loneliness, eye-strain, and half-mad symbolizing, “writing” is a straightforward, verby sort of thing to do. (”Signing” and “texting” are fun as well.)

I guess the only other verbing I’d put on the same plane as writing (which needs neither adverb—”singing clearly“—nor object—”drinking wine“) is an ur-simple, ubiquitous jargon-artifact of the early, Wild West days of online gaming:

“How’s your pwning been recently?”

(”Oh, same old. Many newbs 2 pwn, never enuff thyme.”)

Actually, I didn’t meant to fool anyone, but I had Personal Crises going on last Wednesday which prevented me from reading with Mac “The Man” Wellman and others. I have apologized profusely to the Turnstyle coordinator and hope to still be allowed into the CUNY Graduate Center on occasion.

Reasons I highly respect the CUNY GC:

• Survived a mind-blowing Ph.D. history class there on the rise of Arab nationalism after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Now all I read are history books.
• Bought some wonderful outdated travel guides to the Middle East at a GC Library booksale.
• Saw Francisco Goldman and Junot Diaz interview each other in the GC theater. Hilarious, inspiring, death-defying, etc. Ran out and read all their books.
• Spartan website.
• Tried McDonald’s coffee once near the GC; could not endure said coffee; pondered long/hard about how coffee could possibly taste that much like burning tire. Found out the GC has pretty decent coffee.

&c.