Jim > Recent Status Updates

Sidewalk cities. Hophead Hoovervilles. Crackheads camped out in cardboard-box billets. Loonies looped on Listerine. Wiggling wineheads and jake-legged juicers made mad by Muscatel.

Bulletin-board brouhaha. Diversity classes: malevolent and mandatory. Pernicious postings: the Federal Consent Decree/stiff strictures/Radically Reform Your Wicked White Man's Ways. Civilian lawsuit updates: ultimatums for shyster lawyers/clevrly cloxked class-action shit. Call it cold: baton-bopping back-alley justice, adios. Viva malignant multiculturalism and enforced cooncensus.

An inferno. Incontinent inebriates installed within. Howling hopheads. Wetbacks and wienie waggers. Misanthropic misdemeanants crammed in a crap-infested crawl space. Sixty sunken-faced sub-felons sunk in a subterranean shit chute.

I viewed LA as a native. I never saw it as a strange land chronicld by outside writers. I grew up there. I sifted data and transfigured it kid-style. It was diverse shit. The connecting threads were corruption and obsession. Kiddie noi was my metier. I lived in the film noir epicenter during the film noir era.

Why had Emperor Alexius failed to attack, given the Greeks' apparent superiority in numbers, at least? In part, it seems that the emperor was a man of little innate aggression or military experience. He had hoped that the Byzantines' display of strength would be enough to break crusader morale, causing them to concede and retreat.

The limitations on papal authority are clearly revealed. Innocent [III] had the power to call a crusade and direct its preaching and aspects of its fundraising. In spite of having legates to represent him, however, he could not exert direct control over them if they exercised their own judgement.

There was one further element introduced into the planning of the expedition—a secret agreement that the crusade would originally sail to Egypt, rather than to the Holy Land.

Angels, as you know, never die. But when bronze and iron, diamond point
or flaming sword tear their ethereal substance, the pain they feel is
more acute than men may suffer, for their flesh is more exquisitely
delicate; and should some essential organ be destroyed, they fall inert
and, slowly decomposing, are resolved into clouds and during long aeons
float insensible in the cold ether.

He used to visit the rebel angels whom Prince
Istar pointed out to him, and usually met with a
good reception, but as soon as he began to speak of
conquering Heaven, they did not conceal the em-
barrassment and displeasure he caused them. Arcade
perceived that they had no desire to be disturbed
in their tastes, their affairs, and their habits.

How could I have foreseen when I was carried by the waves to your island and beheld you with a spear in your hand and the sun shining like a halo behind your head, that our path would take us to a gloomy house in England and a season of empty waiting?

The pamphleteers do not wish to understand the complex economic and social forces that create the modern world. Analysis is too difficult, it is easier and more dramatic to pick on scapegoats.... The same scapegoat may be used over and over again. Foreigners, Freemasons, Jews and capitalists are all fair game. Why hen should Céline not blame the Jew for the coming war?

The sense of evil marks Celine's lonely place in modern writing. His awareness of death as a crushing force and his view of man as eternally guilty and malicious, inspire his work with a pessimism unique among his contemporaries.

Later I revisited that same intoxication every time I broke off all ties with someone. I was never really myself when I wasn't running away. My only happy memories are memories of flight and escape.

JOANNA: Madmen often speak the truth, Werner.
WERNER: Really? Which truth?
JOANNA: There's only one: the horror of living.... I prefer to lie to myself. If you love me, save me. That lid is crushing me. Take me to some town where everyone is the same, where they all lie to themselves.

The earth's just a roulette wheel!...good...bad numbers!...Everything's out of joint!...those born cooked!...those born lucky! At first it's all the same!...All the lice in the same bunch! but go fuck yourself! And not at all!...Day and night!...In the worst classes if poverty a world's spinning round! The best and the worst!

I watched the movie. They were down on skid row. The men and women looked fairly well-dressed for skid row. They didn't really look like bums. They looked like people who worked in Hollywood films, they looked like tv actors.

ON SURFING: Women have to lie on their backs and bleed and scream to come up with something to tempt the gods to show themselves. Men, on the other hand, do not have to lie on their backs and bleed and scream to brush and inhale the fragrance of heaven -- all men have to do is thrust themselves into huge sheets of monstrous green amoral dreams and keep on their feet.

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country.

The remarkable impact of the Holy Lance has long been held up as a fundamental proof of their overwhelming religious devotion. Historians have argued that it was only the inspirational power of the crusaders' faith—their unshakeable conviction that they were acting with divine sanction—that stirred them from anxious slumber.

Two forces seem to have been at work stimulated by the crusading message that Urban had shaped. Characterising Muslims, the expedition's projected enemies, as a sub-human species the pope harnessed society's inclination to define itself in contrast to an alien 'other'. By tapping into this innate well-pool of discrimination and prejudice was akin to opening Pandora's Box. A torrent of racial intolerance was unleashed

Yesterday our new house girl couldn't come and I was having Pauline and Terry over for supper when they drove up from Kampala. No big deal, right? Wrong! I started at ten in the morning dusting and sweeping the house, beating and brushing the chair cushions and rugs. By noon I was dripping sweat and hacking up the chickens for supper.

"A copper found you crawling on all fours up the middle of Colman Street at three in the morning leaving a trail of blood behind you."/"I think of funny things to do," Ned Beaumont said.

It seemed to me that this was the whole point of traveling—to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, i9n the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis where typically people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and did not instantly think of me as money on two legs.

ften on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreignness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

The October before, he had rediscovered his childhood sweetheart, Rose, though it must be said Rose had never offered a single gesture of affection in their youth, and she wasn't overly forthcoming in the present. To think of her as a sweetheart at all would be called a far reach, in sailing terms. She was born mean, captious, sullen, with occasional small dirty windows of charm.

I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meagre harvest which gives the illusion of real living.

It happens that in dreams we find ourselves suddenly transported to the border of a countryside at once strange and familiar, agonizing as a precipice. Nothing in it resembles what we have known in real life and yet we feel something stir in our memory, we have the near certainty of having been that way before, perhaps of having lived there in a previous dream or in a former life.

A good example of the cultural blending that defines the Quito School is the Last Supper in th Cathedral Church painted by Manuel Samaniego y Jaramillo (1767-1824). Instead of a Passover lamb on the table there's a roast cuy [guinea pig], and the disciples are drinking chicha and eating humitas.

Where do Panama hats come from? One might sooner ask who was buried in Grant's tomb, except that the answer is not so obvious. Panama hats are made in Ecuador.

Behing the moustache [of Captain Hardcastle] lived an inflamed and savage face with a deeply corrugated brow that indicated a very limited intelligence. 'Life is a puzzlement,' the corrugated brow seemed to be saying, 'and the world is a dangerous place. All men are enemies and small boys are insects that will turn and bite you if you don't get them first and squash them hard.'