Hooray For Our Chains (29)

Triple Abracadabra Blessing Silent as the Pines

"I'm not starving for pleasure," the Mayakovsky Tree said, "nor for the free love of an exquisite caprice. Your ardor is exhausting."

Rise above him? If John Yoo makes a savage so good, he has well served his purpose. John Yoo, squirrel and rover and ravener, manslayer and thief, is in his house of mohair the kindest host and most generous of men. Every new mischance makes us forget these strange coincidences.

What if my saliva blossoms on the jasmine? I can flee the quidnunc on the window sill across the street but not the torturing curiosity of the orange tree.

A truce now to ambiguities. Things will revert to their previous state of rot before you mow the thistle-fields. John Yoo, the baleful squirrel in the bole, borrows from the Mayakovsky Tree what the deeper and higher mind of the Mayakovsky Tree no longer believes. He welters in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate.

Even Samuel Alito can be longwinded and shortsighted on occasions. Mrs. Alito cried when she got up to leave the table -- I wish it were in my power to add an inch of Mayakovsky limb to hers!

A shade of heliotrope, a pink and straw surface, a play between devotion and diabolism, a caterwauling, a votary, a tang of lubricity. An allusion to March-cats. Mrs. Alito then takes some gold pieces in her hand. Tomorrow she is coming to see my empty wicker newspaper basket bed, and to cook for me a dish of Mojadderah.

Ah, the old days, asleep under the ottoman! I ask her what she is going to do with all this money.

"A policeman in a shabby uniform imagines the worst," Mrs. Alito says. "He is as oleaginous as a dust-coat in summer." A mouse inside the radiator stirs the nostrils of a whole city but brings me not a single olive. I cheer those who crown her on a dung-hill with wreaths of stable straw.

Gold Dust, Dust-Deep, That is to Say Impure

I talk to them through holy men and the Mayakovsky Tree.

Old books and pamphlets. In the corner, the usual straw mat, a cushion, and a sort of stool on which are ink and paper. The brass must soak in the water can.

Debord cannot tolerate the noise of water. In order to become even more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony, the free space of the commodity is constantly modified and reconstructed.

If you can neither read, nor write, nor sleep, why, then, place yourself beneath the bathtub spigot and wait.

He opens the door and the window to let out the smoke. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy.

Whiskey and debauch in a plant for the manufacture of arms on the shore of the Euphrates.

Debord lights another cigarette and sits down. Capital is no longer the invisible center. Its accumulation spreads it all the way to the periphery in he form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.

After he scrawled and scribbled for ten minutes, the sheet was filled with circles and arabesques.

John Yoo Puts On a Few Extra Robes and In Time, Becoming Threadbare, Sheds Them Off as the Serpent Its Skin

The telegraph wires on the following day were kept busy. Here, the good John Yoo washes the blood from his face. Your field of poppies and daises, Professor Yoo, is miraculously transformed into a pit of furious gray specters and howling red spirits. The mule becomes kickish and resty.

From the plagues I have named, Sarah Palin wheedles and truckles after the first contact and the vibrations of enthusiasm and flattery that follow -- the brass band, the electric tramway between two rows of bookshops.

I have a premonition that things are not going to end well. What talk have we wasted. At this hour of the day they treat me like a schoolgirl -- the servile spouters in the land are as plenty as summer flies. Hence, the plasters of conservative homeopathists, the operations suggested by political leeches, the radical cures of social quacks.

Hooray For Our Chains (28)

John Yoo Carries His Punks on His Back and Goes A-Begging

In two months, John Yoo could imitate in voice and gesture whatever he saw.

The Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is tired of wings that are really nothing but horns, misshaped and misplaced. He remembers seeing once a lithographic print representing a Christmas legend of the Middle Ages, in which a detachment of the Heavenly Host -- big, ugly, wild-looking angels -- are pursuing, with sword and pike, a group of terror-stricken enemy combatants.

"I saw the Order with these very eyes," said the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant, almost poking his two forefingers into them when I rubbed against him with my face. "John Yoo showed it to me."

The telegraph wires are vibrating with inquiries about him, with orders for his arrest. The old prejudices against him were aroused, the old enemies were astirring.

"Not whenever the child cries," said Pravda body-language expert Janine Driver. "But only at stated times does John Yoo carry his punks on his back and go a-begging."

So the doctor is called to the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant's grave-sized cell in Syria. John Yoo is rising and lighting up the dark and distant continents even when setting. John Yoo is but a scrub oak in this forest of giants.

And now, were we really romancing, we should here dilate the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to the undisclosed Berkeley classroom where John Yoo secretly teaches law classes. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, and our poor Wastebasket Enemy Combatant is suffering from his wounds.

Hold Your Phone Up!

As part of the Baltimore Contemporary Museum's PROJECT 20 series, celebrating its 20th Anniversary, Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) will host a coast-to-coast audio-project for broadcast.

In homage to sound pioneer Maryanne Amacher, who died in October, NPR will re-imagine her landmark radio-locative sound project CITY LINKS (1967) as a community remix project to be aired locally in Baltimore and streamed online.

Broadcasts will occur every Sunday night at 9 p.m. (EST).