Part 5 BY BLAZE ARCHER I am sitting up on my bed. The light from outside has gone and been replaced by bright white lights and darkness. When I slit my eyes, the white lights look like bright halos of finely spun glass—stardust. We are all made of stardust. In me is the nebula of faraway galaxies. The farther I look into the stars, the more I am aware of the past. Light years away, they look as they did thousands of years ago. A time-capsule. But in this room the only stars are electric light. The night outside […]
SUICIDE BY ATF: The Death Of LaVoy Finicum
FBI: This is the complete video footage of a joint FBI and Oregon State Police traffic stop and OSP officer-involved shooting of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. This footage, which has only been edited to blur out aircraft information, was taken by the FBI on 01/26/2016 and released by the FBI on 01/28/2016. Note regarding date/time stamp in the left corner of video: Pilots use Zulu Time, also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), when they fly. Zulu time is eight hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time (PST). Therefore, although this footage was taken on January […]
SERIAL FICTION: The Perpetual Lent Of Leif Cole
Part 4 BY BLAZE ARCHER Leif is talking to the woman psychiatrist, who chased me out. There’s something about growing up poor that makes anything like that seem like you’re the hired help having to flee the room. She was a small woman. There was something bludgeoning in the way she put up her hair. Her hair was coarse and black, and so were her eyebrows. Dropping my cigarette, I crushed it with my sneaker and walked toward the door to prepare for work. I was going to check in on Leif before I put on my scrubs. Something […]
JOHN CALE: Close Watch
M:FANS, a radical new reworking of one of John Cale’s most unique and lauded solo records, the 1982 masterpiece Music For A New Society, released last week on Double Six / Domino as M:FANS/Music For A Future Society, and it is fucking brilliant. The video features Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman and is directed by Abby Portner.
SERIAL FICTION: The Perpetual Lent Of Leif Cole
Part 3 BY BLAZE ARCHER I wake up. I am lying on the floor. The carpet is a soft white yet it feels rough on my cheek. I try to sit up, but my limbs are weights and I fall back down again. I lie still and breathe in the recently shampooed carpet. The chemicals make me feel like my head is full of clouds. Even though I am on the floor, I feel like I am plummeting to Earth like a stone. Getting to my knees, I crawl toward my coat and pull out my cell phone before […]
SANDERS & GARFUNKEL: America
See? It doesn’t have to be like this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you on behalf of money or fear.
SERIAL FICTION: The Perpetual Lent Of Leif Cole
Part 2 BY BLAZE ARCHER On Dauphin Street there is a man with one gold tooth who lives in an old house that was once beautiful. He sits on the porch and yells at the neighbor’s children as they play in the front yard of their house. I’m told he has a shotgun, though I have never seen it, and he will come after me with it if I stiff him. I get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. When I enter the house, I am always greeted with a strong scent of marijuana. The man will […]
SERIAL FICTION: The Perpetual Lent Of Leif Cole
Part 1 BY BLAZE ARCHER Leif Cole was a physician. He lived in a modern apartment off of Rittenhouse Square. In this apartment was a refrigerator. On top of this refrigerator was a box in which Leif Cole kept his syringes. When guests entered his apartment, they never noticed this box, and were always quick to comment on the penetrating painting of a white woman’s genitalia which took up most of the living room wall. The clitoris was especially striking, as were the palpated labia, which were as moving to the eye as the flying buttresses of Le Mont-Saint-Michel. Something […]
THIS MACHINE KILLS COMBOVERS: Woody Guthrie HATED His Racist Landlord, Trump’s Dad
GAWKER: Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire. Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the racially charged proclamations of Donald Trump, who last year announced, “My legacy has its roots […]
Michigan Gov To Flint Families: Let Them Eat Lead
NEW YORK TIMES: A top aide to Michigan’s governor referred to people raising questions about the quality of Flint’s water as an “anti-everything group.” Other critics were accused of turning complaints about water into a “political football.” And worrisome findings about lead by a concerned pediatrician were dismissed as “data,” in quotes. That view of how the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder initially dealt with the water crisis in the poverty-stricken, black-majority city of Flint emerged from 274 pages of emails, made public by the governor on Wednesday.The correspondence records mounting complaints by the public and elected officials, as well […]
Portrait Of The Angel Of Death As A Young Man
NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Cruz, the most ardent death penalty advocate of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s clerks in the 1996 term, became known at the court for his signature writing style. Nearly two decades later, his colleagues recall how Mr. Cruz, who frequently spoke of how his mentor’s father had been killed by a carjacker, often dwelled on the lurid details of murders that other clerks tended to summarize before quickly moving to the legal merits of the case. “That, I think, was a special interest of his,” said Renée Lerner, then a clerk for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, […]
3-MINUTE DOCUMENTARY: David Lynch Explains Why The Horror Of Philadelphia In The Late ’60s Remains His Primary Source Of Artistic Inspiration
EDITOR’S NOTE: David Lynch turns 70 today. On September 10th, 2014, David Lynch gave a press conference at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to promote DAVID LYNCH: The Unified Field, the first major retrospective of his paintings in an American art museum. The retrospective is something of a homecoming for Lynch who studied painting at PAFA from 1966-1967, back when the City of Brotherly Love was a desolate hellscape of decay and despair after years of white flight, industrial collapse and seething racial animus. From 1965-1970, Lynch lived in a section of the city that has come to be […]