“My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.”
- David Mamet, December 20, 2007
Happy 64th birthday to David Mamet - playwright, screenwriter, director, poet, essayist, novelist and lover of CPL - from your “alma mater!”
November 2011
94 posts
But you can still slaughter millions of Miss Piggies every year →
chicagotribune.com
“If a [horse slaughterhouse] plant open up in Oklahoma or Nebraska, you’ll see controversy, litigation, legislative action and basically a very inhospitable environment to operate,” predicted Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of The Humane Society of the United States. “Local opposition will emerge and you’ll have tremendous controversy over slaughtering Trigger and Mr. Ed.”
“Like many Indians before and after him, Black Hawk defended his homeland with an argument that made no sense to American ears: ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.’”
—Quoted in William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Richard Cory
Simon & Garfunkel/Paul Simon
Simon and Garfunkel - Richard Cory
The message here might not make sense to many born in 2011.
Post-apocalyptic films from the future
Shame (Stop Fucking Aliens) - A leering sex addict can’t stop fucking aliens on a post-apocalyptic Arizona State University campus. All fucked aliens are presented in a pre-Giuliani yet post-apocalyptic Ninth Avenue light.
The Road - Splendid Homeric meaning is imparted in tremendously compressed paragraphs in this post-apocalyptic tale of a hamlet where forty people have always done things differently, until now.
Scenes from the Paramus Park Mall - Giamattiesque tragicomedy strikes a humble post-apocalyptic New Jersey town when a skateboard owed by the son of a tollbooth operator not only gains magical powers, but can be trademarked.
Rudy - Everyone who’s anyone who’s against the 1% boycotts professional and collegiate sports in this major post-apocalyptic fantasy.
A Brook for Joseph Smith - Mitt Romney secludes himself on a verdant bank in this post-apocalyptic sequel to Description of Clairvaux.
Larry Johnson, Going Forward - In this traumatological post-apocalyptic sequel to The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, Larry Johnson breeds with the last chicken standing. And that’s weird because white meat is good for you.
Sara Lee can point to Hillshire Farms on a map →
chicagobusiness.com
Sara Lee intends to partner up with or even buy a small network of hog farms to reinforce its aspiration toward sustainable farming. “While we don’t expect to ever source 100% of our animals from Hillshire Farms, we do aspire to drive the conversation and approach to sustainable farming,” the company says in the document.
“When the TV version of Annie came on, I was drawn to it. It was the struggle of this poor kid in this environment and how her life changed. It immediately resonated.”
—Jay-Z
Said the gramophone
The compact disc. It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as though you’d never used it. So it’s as though you didn’t exist. If things don’t get old any more, then that’s because it’s you who are dead.
When it reaches perfection, music technology becomes a dark room, musical delight becomes posthumous delight.
In time, they will no doubt reintroduce acoustic interference and viruses, to provide an illusion of life and wear.
Jean Baudrillard, from Cool Memories II (1987-1990)
Rights
“Rights. Of all the words in the dictionary, this word is the most disgraceful, and the word with the most unpleasant connotations. This word is always involved in tales about tragic figures, unfortunate events, gloomy places, and cruel history. It’s a filthy word that should never be mentioned again. The unfortunate thing is, for a very long time in the future, we will continue to hear this most familiar of dirty words coming from completely unfamiliar places.”
Ai Weiwei, blog post of 20 August 2006 (translation: Lee Ambrozy) [via]
Represent your victims as if they were taking pleasure, or at least accepting the rationality of their own annihilation.
In the mid 19th century the lives and deaths of animals would pass mostly unobserved by the majority of the European population, and the new meatpacking industry would embrace a lesson that classical art had long imparted to its audience: represent your victims as if they were taking pleasure, or at least accepting the rationality of their own annihilation. Laughing cows and dancing pigs have ever since decorated signs outside butcher shops and BBQ joints. Meat packages similarly depict the joy of carnage.
Quoted in The Abu Ghraib Effect, Stephen Eisenman
Shadow of a Doubt
“The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands. Drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge. Playing all day and all night. Smelling of money. Proud of their jewelry but of nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women… Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?”
AIG's Greenberg sues U.S. for $25 billion →
chicagotribune.com
Today’s a good day to teach your friends the word chutzpah.
