Halo halo

you’d miss layups, too, if you were dead

1.  second death of Brandon Knight, Pistons @ Celtics, 3 Apr 2013
2.  first death of Brandon Knight, Pistons @ Clippers, 10 Mar 2013

flu symptoms

The fact of the matter, make no mistake, is that I am on the side of the perplexed and mystified. Most comics today are visually unintelligible except to a few.

It could well be that you are one of the few, that you feel that comics publishers should not be pandering to the general public and that comic books are just how you like them, with their forty plus years of stylistic inbreeding and complicated continuity. Perhaps you are a kid and, like me, you think kids owe it to themselves to keep loads of stuff secret from their parents, and the secret language of comics is a part of that. Great. Comic book publishers love you. However, with the shrinkage of the market for comics, these same publishers are trying hard to get back that general readership they lost a long time ago.

— Eddie Campbell, “Campbell’s Rules of Comprehension”, The Comics Journal, 20 Feb 2013

PHOTOGRAPHS:  New Orleans Arena, 20 March 2013

A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink.  There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go.  Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting.  I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work.  We are a society that is weary with it all.  We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history.  We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom.

— Eddie Campbell

The mountains that have been destroyed still exist in the mind of God …  I said that as a way of addressing my own grief about what we have lost.  Perhaps the most disheartening thing in this struggle against mountaintop removal is not the power of the coal industry.  It is that if President Obama should issue a proclamation this very afternoon saying that mountaintop removal would no longer be allowed, we would still have lost five hundred mountains that aren’t coming back.  And yet.  And yet I said that years ago, and I repeat it today.  Those mountains still exist in the mind of God.

— Denise Giardina, memorial service for Judy Bonds, excerpted from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

photographs:  Moss Beach, CA, 4 March 2013

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

too busy putting on sunscreen to use the Internet

photographs by Yunfun Tan

(Source: msce)

the vulgar gets co-opted by the twee

“Trapped in the knob” is when a show that jumped the shark many episodes ago — but that people still watch because they care about and are addicted to learning what happens to the characters — takes it to the next level of idiotic and won’t stop giving viewers what they don’t want:  subplots involving the least popular characters.  It’s too late.  You can’t change the channel, hit eject, or stop the stream.  You’re trapped in the knob

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

— Wendell Berry

(drawings:  Lisa Hanawalt, Eleanor Davis)