crude futures

congratulations backpack winners

cf IRONSWATCH! (for charlie cook)

righteous return of the OMGx3 refrain! those lads below look capable of a fair-to-middling kickabout, no?

...but don't they look like they could use a SHOCKINGLY AWSUMM ARGENTINIAN INFUSION!!!

welp, a big ole BENVENIDOS A LONDON DEL ESTE to mmmmmmmmmmmascherano!

y carrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrlitos tevez! WTF!!!

Out-the-Gate Issue!

Early this morning, multiple copies of the 8-page, Village Voice-sized first issue of BROOKLYNVILLE landed on every stoop between my house and Prospect Park.



According to BROOKLYNVILLE's website, "The BrooklynVille is published every two weeks, with distribution consisting of 40,000 door to door and bulk drops at key locations."

Small, graphic-inclusive ads on the inside back cover — they're calling these ads "Adssifieds" — cost just $12. This is a great price! We at Crude Futures are going to advertise with BROOKLYNVILLE, in the Adssifieds section. (We're also going to advertise with the Torah Times. Also, eventually, Bully.)

Here is BROOKLYNVILLE's launch-issue cover story:

sporty restraint

hullo [gurgle gurgle gurgle], hi sorry.

spanish soccer season has beGUN. and, uh-huh, that means 1st soundings of the season from Sid Lowe, one pretty sharp dude. it seems as if the beloved Guardian has moved his column over to a bloggish format? hmmm, neat!

somehow Nate Ihavenevermethim Davis' dreamy 01/06 self-described 'turn-of-the-seventies psych-prog-folk mix' has invaded my life, after gestating in my HD for 8 or so months. i think i remember a forgotten friend mentioning longAgo that it had rocked him/her? now surely t'has (rocked) me! i've a broken crucial audio cable and have yet to replace it, so i've been listening to it thru my laptop speakers, woah ho! i bet Nathaniel Davis would never have a longish term faulty audio cable problem, as i've had "recently".

ok, ok, ok, at least i have been going to the movies a healthy amount recently. Last Movie [already said that one!]...um, i went and saw Saint Jack—on location in Singapore, Ben Gazzara walking around a bunch [neat. neatt!]. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—clean-shaven Kris Kristofferson, super stilted New Morning-era Dylan acting, array of grimey saloon owners, multiple scenes of idly caresssed of WHORES' NIPPLES, etc. [friends pass along links, gremlins have pictures, etc]. anywaze, i forgot how amusing i find the vision of myself as a creepy solo moviegoer...oh yea, it's also a v. frightening vision! maybe i will keep up the momentum and go see Swamp Water for no reason. making a Prince of Persia-style rhetoric leap, i'm also gonna say here/now/once/for all that MoMA is pussies for not including Myra Breckenridge in this Huston Family retrospective!!! g'nite.

My Own Private Clan of the Cave Bear

I finished reading this stuff I have been sweating for months and drank two high-octane Beligian Beers alone at the bar where "everybody" (the owner/bartender) knows my name. I barely read the paper today. Claire Messud/Jonathan Franzen/Woe is You/Kalinkita dotblogs pot. So there's nothing to say. They were having a Doyle Lawson ("more like Doyle AWESOME") singalong. I was at the bar alone, launching tepid text messages to loved ones. Tomorrow I'll make a tofu scramble and eat it.

In fifteen years Kangol will produce a cap model/style called "Asdf" that will be websavvy. Good beer: I'm a lightweight/
heavyweight/bantamweight/milkweight

godchaux era

OMG OMG OMG !!!

thank you for having me back. Andrew is still a NYT-reading Assistant Prof of Creative Writin' @ Wayne State University. McMü remains a pun-luvvin' graphic designer with a strong love of family. me? i'm, ummmmm—it's gonna take a long time for me to defrost.

one thing that is different about me since the last time i did a post is that i now eat several spoonfuls of chyawanprash daily. it's an easy and delicious way to take an incredibly tiny babystep towards personal betterment. before you seek to remove corporate influence from US culture, help construct a well in a well-starved SE asian community, or suicide bomb a crucial-yet-little-known office where globe-strangling decisions are made MAYBE you should try daily spoon'ums of chyawanprash first to see if that solves things?

it's pukily obvious from my, uh, tepid prose and, errr, cisternly demi-meanor that i don't read or think as much as some of the other crudefutures wayfarers. what do i do? my (already unfashionable) Authorial Voice is all catsup-smeared and motheaten!!! i am alarmingly devoid of any internet hot potatoes to excitingly toss into y'all's laps. why not start with this myspaceblog post by a random chap who added me: a groovey Montreal-er, with a love for RW fassbinder.

on wednesday, i went to go see The Last Movie. it was rollicking and funn2watch...lotsa/some: waterfall sex, icono-ironic early 70s hipster cowboy fashion, "Bobby McGhee" carrying/splashing narrative water, high-hemline horseback-riding w. thigh-highs, an ear-piercing scene!!! (i couldn't think of another one...ANYONE?) anyway.

this evening, i hope to taste Staten Island pizza for the 1st thyme. despite the sometimes-audible "hype", i feel too cagey to try Denino's. some possibly lame internet blurbage described it as "a neighborhood place, just not your neighborhood."

Beef Blanket Email Subject

William Hazlitt has just posted a scathing critique of my blog-writing-style on his blog. My feelings were hurt, mostly because I think he has a point. So I'll try to be more straightforward and less Fustian from now on. I am pouring my evening down the sink. I should be teaching a lamb how to avoid eating or whatever instead of this.

[hours pass....]

I just read the phrase "stress related" in tiny font and it reminded me of the phrase "andrew leland". To the point where I thought that's what it actually said. Sometimes I'll misread phrases and not realize my error until later, when I think, "could I have really just seen a billboard that read GOATS DO WHISTLE, AND GOATS DO ROAM, BUT O BEBE GILLETTE RAZORS? That's impossible. I must be mistaken." And then when I see it again it says something feasible and benign. One day, however, I won't be mistaken, and that is the day we all will burn, my friends. Hazlitt aflame!

I have been listening to Classical Music (KUSC) lately. I still ROCK-casionally associate it with cartoons and bad filmic melodrama. A collage of frames from every fictional film (1950-1970)'s underwater submarine scene randomly spliced together and projected on a beige blanket, once drenched in beer, now all dried out. With drugs scotch-taped to the other side. (What ever happened to that artist who used REAL DRUGS, LIKE ACTUAL LSD in his paintings? I saw him on CBS Sunday morning once.)

Last night I was trying to remember which recent novel contained a scene where a woman made jewelry in a manhattan storefront window, and then a guy thought she was beautiful and came in and wanted to buy one of her pieces, but the store's owner who had also fallen in love with the woman didn't want to sell it, and the man and the woman had sex, much more involved than that but that's the gist. It was all told as an aside in whatever novel it's in, told as a hypothetical story, maybe even a story that a writer-character in the novel was writing. Was it Wake Up, Sir!? Can anyone help meeee

A.R.S.A.G.

A riotous song about girls
pretending to be a novel
a poem
by Hardt Crane
who has not slept in ninety hours
by Shower Feelings

part one: the briarlogue

Oh, you teenage girls
with crushes on boys
conducting internet image searches ten times a month
for the boys
hoping for a search result
in the form of a photo of
the boy you're crushing on so hard.
Horses.

Ancient Methods of Remembering the News

I think about the same stuff every time. I snowboard down the same magnified Gillette magazine advertisement every summer. Even though the war in Lebanon is over, its effects linger. An Israeli soldier visible in the distance unsettles mourners at a funeral. Israeli soldiers remain until the international forces show up. 70 of the 200 expected French soldiers arrived.

A bunch of hydrologists and other scientists say that unless we figure out how to grow more food with less water, water is going to be a scarce thing in the coming years, and violence'll be the result. President of Sudan refuses to let UN troops into Darfur to keep the peace. He insists the African Union can do it, but they say their 7,000 troops are maxed out as it is; they run out of money next month.

Bush joked that he was the first president to fail to carry the state he was born in, but a snide and bad NYT article reminds us that his dad, born in MA, lost it twice. [boring, stressed-out personal deletions]

I wrote a fan email to Irwin at WFMU this morning. Coworker birthday glass of champagne and cake have softened my brain for the rest of the day [4:46 p.m.]. What-all more will I get done? We'll see. New Orleans slowly rebuilding. California gonna raise the minimum wage. Will Smith writing a movie for India. Sports reporter doesn't have a thin skin, he has no skin. Bernanke, aka The Fed, acknowledges uncertainty. Pedophiles go nuts online. Colorado dude in Thailand who sort of confessed to JonBenet murder is back in CA. Violence in Congo on eve of election returns. Germans coming around to closed-circuit surveillence of public places after recent UK->US terrorism plane scare. Train crash in....um... can't remember. Pakistan. Oakland adopting this program where they bring known rabblerousers in without arresting them and warn them, scare them. Gov. Jerry Brown compared reforming a police dept. to turning an ocean liner around: you do it slowly. Something new happened with Jose Padilla. He got a haircut? A haircut of his was thrown out of court as inadmissable? Uhh

In other news, my personal life just kidding

Meryl Streep is pretty good on broadway in a Brecht play. C. L. wrote a H. W. with a good line linking Pluto and Gunter Grass. I AM DRUNK AND NOT CONSULTING MY SOURCES. But yeah, Pluto will now be known as a dwarf-planet.

Slightly overweight babyboomers die sooner. Harry Crews publishes a small novel with a small publisher. Marisha Pessl or whatever is pretty and smart and everyone knows it. She will not reveal what she is working on. Her husband is rich. What else

Welfare reform worked! But moms still struggle. But the number of cases dropped and the number of employed moms rose. But moms still struggle. A dude is running against Hilary for Senate but he's got a ways to go to be LaMont style (sheesh who is reading this I am going to start a splinter blog called "my hard drive" where I am the only reader. Click here to continue)

Some fucking chefs left some fucking restaurants. There is a mountain biking mecca in the badlands of North Dakota. American aid groups aren't allowed to go through terrorists organizations, the US considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but it's nigh-impossible to distribute goods etc in Southern Lebanon and avoid Hezbollah completely.

Iran defiantly moves forward with Uranium Enrichment plans; US/(UN?) sanctions are motherfucking imminent. Snakes on a Plane was an internet sensation but tepid in the box-office. Some Almódovar knockoff just came out called "Princess Tiny Town" or something. Spike Lee's Katrina doc pretty good. Grave woman on CNN tonight.

Pensions.... ah, pensions

Equity

Researchers would love to use all this data that AOL released, but they can't bring themselves to do it because it is an invasion of privacy. All this data that researchers would love to use is only accessible to a few megafucks in mid-level corporations. Foo Fighters exist. New OutKast album is just OK (the movie is better?)

A Russian helped prove the Poincaré [theorem?] and would have won the Nobel of math, called the Leland Prize, but then he totally disappeared. The Poincaré Theorem states that if a rabbit has no asshole, you cannot shove a donut up its ass. Or if you lasso a mound of play-dough, the play-dough will never be shaped like a donut... which will never be eaten by a orificeless bunny. IN THREE-DEE WITH CHECKERBOARDS COVERING EVERY SURFACE. game over

Gosford Park

I wrote this on Friday.

I stuffed your face back in the closet.
you are a toy
made by businessmen
for businessmen
to buy
for their children
at christmas.

The face is yours alone. Poems about jazz are BORING! Bloody Marys made by white women with tattoos are BORING! I HATE THE WORD BORING. I want to get a tattoo that says STAY HUNGRY in R. Crumb title-lettering. I want Cecil Taylor's brain in my closet. When it starts to emerge, I'm going to shove it back in. I shoulda typed that last in all caps. SHOVE IT BACK IN. Sometimes when I pipe down I realize how smart everyone is, and it makes me chagrined to have been talking. I think to myself, "Wow, Jacobo (or whoever) is really smart. And just yesterday I told him to -- yes, I think my exact words were, 'Shut the fuck up, Jacobo.' Then I dug in to my stir-fry. How could I? Look at him now, making the subtlest jokes imaginable, cloth draped adverbially over his forearms. What a fool I am!"

"It's Friday." Who cares? Is it Friday for the little guy? For the dancing midgets on truepanther.com? Why am I rudest to the men and women who least deserve my rudeness? What would it mean for someone to deserve rudeness, anyway? No one deserves my rudeness. THESE ARE THE MOST BORING RHETORICAL QUESTIONS YOU'VE READ ON THIS COMPUTER. [sometimes I hate strangers on the street, then stop myself. "May all sentient beings be free from suffering." What if I saw a dude punch a pregnant woman? Would I strike the dude down... with love? I feel foolish. I FEEL KENTISH] But on that other, older computer, you once read a bunch of rhetorical questions way more boring than these. Questions like

• Don't you hate questions like these?

Shame on you, frozen chameleon! Yea, your colors do not change, will not change, until you thaw. And when will that be? Now that the blizzard swirls indefinitely over Bel Air? You're frozen to the pool-adjacent railing. You'll be purple another month, I'll wager! blah blah blah, sweet chameleon. I think I'll call you "hiphop"

Hey, have you heard about this guy?

You claim to have filled a bowl with uncooked brown rice, but look again. Is that really what you've done?

Fort Greene park bursts into verdant pseudoflame, redolent of peat. Just kidding!

A man and a woman share an appetizer. Ninety dudes suffer in mines. A guy turns off his X-Box. A girl introduces an error into a magazine article just before it goes to press. Yelena Yemchuck directs the video for the Smashing Pumpkins song "Zero."

Spike Lee watches you while you type. Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina airs on HBO. You do not go to see Snakes on a Plane. You do not drink another beer. You do not have a good Saturday. You do not edit for content, only for style. You do not do your exercises. Your education does not come in handy. Your body is NOT A VESSEL FOR CANDY

This is like reading the e-diary of a literate idiot who thinks literate rhymes with idiot. Or, who wants them to rhyme, and if confronted with the fact that they don't, blusteringly announces that he doesn't care anyway. It doesn't matter. That's been the plan this whole time.