Wrenched from the clutches of Envelope Filter, who has it coming for tagging me with the five things or three eateries or thinking random or eight blogger meme, I can’t remember which it is. But one or more of them, surely.
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In the fine tradition of sulz’s postcard project, we present the New York Post’s Postcard for Paris. Download it from them here, for printing and mailing fun! Up to you which still from One Night in Paris you use for the reverse.
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T. Paul is a legend in Vancouver, and the city is smaller, damper, darker, and far less colour-saturated without him.
Last year, when he had an aneurysm, the Shebeen Club hosted a benefit for him which raised the altogether life-altering sum of $100, but he just said thanks, it’ll buy groceries, it’s the thought that counts. He was a true gentleman and lowlife of the finest kind, and I cannot do better to honour his memory than to steal the words of his friend Napalm Dragon from T. Paul‘s own website:
On Thursday, May 31st, the Iconic T. Paul Ste Marie passed away at the age of 41.
He leaves behind a legendary struggle to make the most of life, while embracing and fostering the creative spirit of anyone who dared take themselves seriously. He was a friend to the emergent Artist, and a mentor to many. He opened doors, and he will be missed.
If you knew of him, you liked him.
If you knew him personally, it was a rare glimpse into a Man who persevered though monumental struggles, to find his place and create his own success. “I Can’t” did not exist in his vocabulary.
T. Paul Ste Marie, was best known for many things.
Among them:
• Opening the doors for many emerging and eccentric musicians and
performers
• Pioneering the contemporary Slam Poetry Scene
• Managing and Promoting some of our most beloved performers of the
Vancouver Underground and Sub-Cultural Community
• Being a slick hipster and Cigar Box Artist
• and taken anyone who dared take themselves seriously… Serious.
• He was a mentor to many.
• He gave Vancouver spice and Savoir Faire.
• and for those of us who LOVE burlesque, he was there in the
renaissance.
He lived his life on stage, struggling in private.
He will be gravely missed and remembered by anyone that met him, and
all of us he fostered.
We owe much credit to him, he lived the life of legends and made the
most of what he had.
——-
The next drink is in his name.
For those of us that want to say our peace, and share in remembering
him, there will be a tribute. (and what a party that will be)
Good bye T. Paul,
Safe journeys (where ever that is).To you I tip my hat in honor of your fine and Passionate Invocation….
INVOCATION
We need
PASSION
to put words into context
to formulate a pretext worthy
of our cut-and -paste verbalaching to be heard
thunderclap blurred
quake-shake that thundering word herd
to
play those changes
that rearrange us
rain down rhythmic rhyme-time
jazz-jazz-jazzy clime
axe teases
in the licks chaotic
brrrrap-bap-bap-0-matic
PASSION
bring on the axiomatic
round sound midnight drumroll fury-
ocity
velocity
squeeze beat angel wings
’til they sing sweet
drink the bebop sax
the wing drip wax
of them that flew too close to the sun
fillin’ holy souls and tongues
with the ever changin’
always in the now
manic minds eye milkmaid
leading the tongue tied
to the teat that paid the fare
with their jailtime press
and their pain was not in vain
they were paving the wagon train ruts with gluts
of tarry thick ideas
fresh with bloodsweat extract
doin’ that literal literary lowstick limbo
into the next generation
of word play sensation-
alists
like us
thinkin’ ’bout
what to say
and how to say it
that beat in rhyme
and time to play it
We need
PASSION
to bask in extremes
to set our wet absurdist dreams
in flight
through tarpaper night satellite kite crowded skies
where our white noise pen toys
spin spiderweb thin
sinewy monkey limbs
limberly groping at new poetical chins
our fingers licks spittle
thick with ripe hype glory
pricks the juice-blown words
tasting flying syllables
invisible chords tying them
to howling celestial forms
storm voices that are
politic / lunatic / heretic
our kinetic kites collide
in starry night skies
with leaky loud electric pens
ur ecclectic process begins
where it never left off
sound richness
rhythmic hitches
content stitches
together
pop-pop-poppinn’ a hole
in the whole of time
art serving purpose
continues expansion
in the Universe of Rhyme
We need
PASSION
to invoke the everyday
everyman
tin pan alley trashcan huckster scam
slam sing-song banter
that is simple
sinful
with those blam blam blam gunshot phrases
that glazed ham
canned heat
edge of your seat
repartee
because we learned from those who told it
who origami folded visions
selling passers by
wordy purple fishes
from their oceans of sand
We’ve got to
EXPAND
on this vocabulary
form a mental constabulary
arresting ignorance at hand
because knowledge
IS
power
the sting bee in the flower
that pollinates and seeds
with concepts overgrowing
the weeds of conformity
building bridges of wisdom
over the dull beige schism
torn by sitcom mentally
and wisdom culminates awaiting cultivation
by our visual cortex
spiritual vortex whirling
helix twirling out
the answers to our prayers
and the spoken word blares
from invocation
to creation
occurring within
the process
of lookin’ for words to say.
AND SOME DAYS THEY SPLIT ATOMS
AND SOME DAYS THEY KICK STONES
today they find our voice.
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Have you been to Digg lately? Yes? Then you’re probably an apolitical male in the lower levels of technology as a career and lifestyle. Everyone else has largely been chased out of there; the intellectual gene pool is self-selecting for inbreeding as a function of the way the system has been set up and the way the system has been gamed. It rewards people who form reward-based gangs to muscle the conversation in various directions, and it works very efficiently at this. It works this way in every social bookmarking network, as far as I can see.
The half-life of a useful community seems to be shrinking as well, as the gamers catch on that the games themselves are tranferable and they can simply take the exact same plan to wherever pops up next.
Reddit, for which I once had some hope, is quickly becoming a ghetto populated by amusing pictures of questionable provenance and American politics, period, which is a shame. With a wider base to begin with, and less scope for self-serving blather, there was every possibility that it could have become a general interest site with enormous reach, but that, obviously, didn’t happen. Part of the reason was the inability to categorize your submissions, so that everything was simply thrown into a huge pool (there are Sub-reddits for uh, for uh, for two things that apparently don’t interest me enough to remember them at all) and thus the single most popular conversation quickly becomes the only functioning one at all, as all other conversations are marginalized off the radar screen. And its functions facilitate vendetta: you can view everything posted by an individual, and just click through the whole list, downvoting things without reading them; as I type this, I’m losing points at reddit as someone does this very thing to my profile.
Truemors is very new, and entirely unfocused, but as yet it’s not reached a critical mass. A site based on rumours needs a certain minimum number of people who are both informed of interesting facts and of mixed enough loyalty to share them with strangers rather than keeping them to themselves. Guy Kawasaki‘s base does not consist of those people, let’s just say that, and there are times when it feels like I’m the only person who is NOT a marketer who’s posting to that site or even reading it. What it becomes will depend entirely on who it reaches; if he’s planning for the long term (which he probably is not) he should make it work as a Facebook add-on and recruit students, because in a couple of years they’ll be exactly who and what he needs for this site. As for right now, trolling Consumerist or some of the political sites might be more useful, because that’s where you find the vast disgruntled.
In each case, it looks like the way to keep the conversations meaningful is to keep the conversations separate. Fark has its niche and it rules it well, because it knows this lesson and it is edited by a dictator, yet another useful tip. If the techies want to talk tech, give them a tech forum for that or they’ll gang up and steal your site. If the politicos want to release media statements every fifteen minutes and flood the front page, give them a place to talk to the politically minded or rant into dead space as the case may be, so they don’t hijack more than their NVIP section. If you want to host one global metaconversation, the only way to prevent the hijacking seems to be to make distinct sandboxes and pull the most popular stories from each, which should be done by a dictator with a heart of stone and backbone of molybdenum steel. Ongoing antigaming action should be a given, but it’s not. If you build it and it functions, that does not necessarily mean it’s functioning as you intended it to; just ask a guy who builds guns for a living and who gets shot.
Now, us literati and other dwellers in the virtual Montparnasse get our own sandbox to play in, as Gawker reports. While we have an entirely too well-documented tendency to become addicted to gambling (and what are futures, if not gambling, eh?) Media Predict will, in all probability, be co-opted by some smart criminal who realizes that the methods of taking over a site like this are well established, widely available, and free to implement. Offer payouts in real money, have your army of runners collect the cash, skew the odds, and rake in the dollars from people who dare not turn you in lest they implicate themselves.
Oh. Wait. I need money. brb.
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No, seriously, you are not going to believe this one. A note-for-note perfect rendition of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” redone as a white bible thumper anthem.
Baby Got Book
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raincoaster 