Driving a Train through your Media Brain

This is beautiful. I didn’t think anything could usurp the reviews of Gaming in the Clinton Years, and yet here we are. I love Xoxak and his drawl. What an insane, beautiful person. That people like this exist continually re-affirms my happiness for the world.

Direct from the video description:

“As soon as I got home, I favorited the vid, watched the segment over and over 5-6 times. My butt was up over my head on the second attempt, LOL!

Practice got cut short when Laurie called for dinner, but I got the pose up twice for a second or two. Now I’m stuffed and I can’t practice because she made biscuits and honey and I had four of them and a beer, too!”

See Poledancefans oeuvre here.

I can’t resist. These are just too good. Excerpts from his Youtube User Description:

“A Two Inch Pole (50MM) is Coming Soon! I Starting the New Project Today December 6th 2008 –Joel.”

“2. Can Pole Dancing as a sport exist side by side with its big “sister”, the erotic pole dance and stripping? In male sports, “ultimate fighting” co-exists with its more regulated form, boxing. Why isn’t pole afforded the same privilege?”

“5. Could you ever envision Pole as an Olympic sport? How would it be judged? Would there be mandatory “figures”–as in ice skating? A freestyle event? Would music be permitted? What about floorwork?–given that many competition routines involve vaults and set-ups from floor poses. Would pumps/thrusts/slides be banned?”

“Interests and Hobbies: Bike Riding Music Reggae Rock Country… Anything Really Bicycling Panera’s Restaurant”

“Movies and Shows: Eagerly awaiting next season of Battlestar.”

Written by Grant Morrison ::: Art by Frank Quitely

Donald Barthelme (pictured above with his two Cherokee familiars) is one of my manly heroes, residing in the same sparsely-inhabited astro-echelon as Tom Waits and Goethe. Composing his oeuvre between 1961 and 1989, the work is a shifting, loping vivacity, full of entangled unnameables and punctuated discharge – a sporting acuity that playfully bats about the expectations the come with form and the freedoms that come without.

If you’re horrified by the steaming pile of pedantry I just shoveled in your eye-holes, let me assure you that, before any of that bullshit even starts to bubble out of a college degree, his stuff is funny as all hell (nowhere near the monocle-snobbery of Salman Rushdie. ba-BAM!) From “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable,” he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.

An online collection of his works can be found here. If you like what you scan, be sure to pick up “Sixty Stories,” followed shortly thereafter by “Forty Stories.” He also has a pretty adventurous reading list; I’ve gotten through one sixth of the books, and they are fucking insane.