The 101 Most Unasked Questions of All Times

Why does the media believe that it is important for me to know that the President enjoyed a golf game yesterday?

The media will usually use the President’s golf game as a lead-in to what it wants to say about current events. However, this does not sufficiently explain why the camera or the writer’s pen or the photographer’s lens naturally finds the president swinging a four foot pole at a two inch ball relevant and a good place to start.

Two concepts may help to explain this. The “reeling-in” and the “give the public a break” Ideas.

The former uses the golf game as backdrop because it does not expect the general public to pay attention to the intricate details of the story without first having a mental pacifier handed to them.

This “reeling in” leads the viewer by the hand to la la land where the under=lying message is coyly announced, for example, that the president is calm, cool, and collected, so “don’t worry when I tell you that he is on his way to prison for fraud, etc…”

This “give the public a break” technique is a sort of buffer between the story and what it really means, a public service to us from the media.

Combined, these two tricks of the trade lead to an intriguing story whereas there was previously only the possibility of a slightly different take on the never changing and endless stream of beaureaucratic red tape run amok that the journalist must call news or else lose his job

Published in: on April 30, 2012 at 10:03 pm  Comments (1)  
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Babel

Babel.
It’s all babble.
I mean Babel. As in Tower of Babel.
We’ve built our tower and the higher up we get, the less we understand one another.
The thieves have taken up roosts in the new nesting places.
Come on in. They look just like the honest ones before them.
That new website and service. Oh, that’s Johnny’s new thing,
something he does when he gets home from elementary school.
He’s made ten bucks this month faking his way through the adult world.
Good for you, Johnny, keep up the good work.
Babel. It’s not what you say, but how you say it.
Babel. It’s hardly worth talking about because any talk at all just adds to the confusion. I’ll be the one who explains it, each writer writes.
Add the solution to the billion other solutions and we’ll see if he or she is right.
Or simply lost.
Babel

It used to be that…
Once, when I was young…
There is no time for that…
Does anything matter anymore?
Clever clever clever.
Something they don’t teach you in school is…
How come we can’t just get along?
Are others feeling the same way?
How come…
When the world ends…
Which project was the right project
and did I do it?
What knowledge is the right knowledge?
Or is the determining factor sexual attractiveness?
How come…
Where did it say that…
What is the thing that matters…
Is that growling in your brain or…
How come we need to muse on…
We are all executioners, daily, every day…
We dispatch others. We dispatch all.
Eliminate the competition. Be alone. Good enough.
We throw money over our heads. That’s just what we do.
Because we love it.

I once wrote thinking writing would be read.
When it was not I wrote more thinking it would be read.
It was not. I wrote more thinking it would be read. It was not.
I wrote more thinking it…then I died.

In death you see things that you wouldn’t see in life.
All of those arrows that I used to point people to the truth
were confusing to them, unwanted. So unread.
I can’t blame them.
I don’t want to look at other people’s arrows either.
Especially if they come with a mystic layer.
Perhaps my poetry is not sufficient.
Perhaps theirs as well. Perhaps all of our poetry is insufficient.
Or we believe that when we write such things we are preening.
So there was a huge upheaval against preening on the page.
And we all walked home, head bowed, shamed and believing rightfully so.

But there was no need for shame.
The world had logic’d itself into mayhem.
Poetry, the lost art of shameful practitioners
was the only place that really mattered anymore.
Prizes were given to people who wrote, even blandly, un-poetically.
For the words themselves, coming from the deep
mattered again, surprisingly. But not. Not in life.
But in death only.
Never in life.
So we wither upon the vine.

Published in: on April 28, 2012 at 5:54 pm  Leave a Comment  
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f-gen

Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite #1
“F-Gen”
1455 words
F-Gen

I was elated when Nirvana killed hair bands. If Nirvana hadn’t done that I would probably be wearing make-up right now. Nirvana and Pearl Jam bid us to rock from the heart. I had been unconscious, figuring that if there was a meaning to the term “unskinny bop” then they would surely tell us.
Somewhere down deep I knew that my generation had it in it to produce something soulful. I secretly believed that there were causes that should be stood up for, societal things that needed our attention that our leaders Tommy Lee and that guy from Twisted Sister weren’t telling us about.
After Nirvana, boys soon forgot about feminizing themselves to fool women into giving them sex. The grunge movement began. Guys wore old, plaid lumberjack shirts and blue jeans so that women would know they were all man, yet sensitive and caring. I’m not sure how that worked, but it did. I was very glad it did because that was all I could afford to wear anyway. The bullshit sexual dynamics of the day were then totally re-arranged so that men and women had to re-learn how to screw each other over according to completely different rules.
Generation X itself was eventually tossed to the wayside, however, as all generations must eventually be, to make room for the next batch of hep, raw potential. We figured out our alienation problems and now all we do is go to our jobs and wonder why we’re not billionaires. We’d even accept being millionaires.
Welcome Generation Y. I don’t know a single person who would proclaim themselves a member of generation Y. That is because I’ve never met a young person who knows what the Y stands for. It is obviously a false tag most likely created by an advertising firm somewhere. It’s not even original. It’s like a tire company having as their slogan “got tires?”
The first generation to get a tag was “The Lost Generation” of the 1920s. This was coined by a very famous lesbian writer named Gertrude Stein who told us truthfully that a rose is a rose is a rose. I personally think that statement was only worth about five minutes of fame, but it got her fifteen.
She was referring to writers like Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald and the poet Ezra Pound who were living in Paris at the time. I think it is because of Stein that it is expected that a generation needs to be lost, the more lost the better. It seems to give a sense of solace if you can think that you are not the only loser within your age group.
The Baby Boomers were an exception to this rule in that they were named by din of sheer numbers. They were falsely accused of being the Pepsi Generation for a while, but looking up out of their purple haze realized that it had just been a joke. While they dreamed of eggmen and walruses the competitor of Coke was working overtime to capitalize on this generation’s newfound consciousness, installing subliminal commands of future haircuts into their brains; teach the world to sing/globalization…you get the idea.
The Lost Generation arose because of a group of eclectic artists. The Baby Boomers came from a lot of people having a lot of sex all at the same time. Generation X came from a group of kids rebelling against other kids whose only sense of purpose in life had been to get laid and, of course, to compare hair spray.
Rap music started getting the little pink knees of America bopping in the eighties, but we were still just a bunch of Bon Jovi, li’l cowboys at heart. It wasn’t until the early nineties that popular music was able to convince white children that it was actually good to listen to rap. We started selling our breakfast cereals to it. You didn’t even have to be irate and carry a gun. It was that much fun to play at being angry. Heretofore the isolated sound of extremely irate black males; irate white boys were allowed in on the fun. Pretty soon we had the Beastie Boys using their screechy, Brooklyn voices rapping to us to party on, yet it sort of sounded like rock. It was anger-light.
But it wasn’t until the early to mid 90s, really, that gangsta-rap grabbed the white boys by the balls and squeezed hard. There was one great convulsive movement in America and it twisted every single baseball cap around. Our teen boys thumped their way through the streets garnering dirty looks by one and all; pink fellows aching for pigmentation or something which could make this music their own, for it was obvious that blonde hair and daddy-bought BMW does not a gangsta make.
Somehow “death metal” came to the rescue. I’m not sure how, but it did. This is the insane white boy contribution to today’s music scene; the driving, pulsing, frenzy, kill your neighbor, show your tits aspect of the bands that helped burn down Woodstock. Some of the bands, most notably, are Korn and Limp Bizkit.
Death metal has been around since I can remember. It had always just been the bastard child with an extra limb of rock and roll. It is the music that Satan uses to sing his spawn to sleep with down in Hell. This isn’t your grandfather’s heavy metal.
Now, in the year 2000, rap has totally infiltrated rock through this broken board in rock’s back yard fence. Many of these new artists turned out a few weeks ago at the Silver Bowl for X-107s Our Big Concert 3.5; Static-X, Cypress Hill, System of a Down, even the girlband Kittie.
It is the only music powerful enough to tickle the cool meter of the “wassup” kids with blonde hair. Through the energy flowing at the Silver Bowl, emitted by the testosterone-pulsing, danger-promising boys and No Fear, tit-proud grrrls, the human conundrum is exposed: Master Violence and Lord Sex feeding one off of the other in the realm of mankind’s shady other side or Let’s fight a lot with other males then find a mate, a bush, then fuck.
Here is a hungry animal tired of being told to behave, a prowling beast that wants to destroy, wants to devour, to conquer or be conquered. This concert exposed its nature; a new tribalism, modern rompings to life’s oldest libidinal impulses. If stored away too long this beast can stew and fester inside, bringing with it such things as quiet deviancy, unfulfillment, even the possibility of murder.
Without a controlled confrontation with mortality, sexuality, the killer instinct and our own fear of injury and its connection with our souls -all which this music provides- we often fail to understand why we attempt to strive through the more mundane yet necessary daily tasks of living. We become too safe. We don’t dare to eat a peach. We go inside of ourselves, surround ourselves with houses of comfort that reek of silent pain. Sometimes we need to artificially induce fear to provoke the animal out of its hole.
It was somewhere during the middle of the show that I realized I wouldn’t use Generation Y anymore. I noticed how on the radio and television everybody is using the F-Word these days. Commercials are saying it, bleeping it, but acting like they never said it. It’s boring already and now that it is getting commercialized, just plain ugly. But one thing is for sure, it is the first time that the media has allowed it to go this far. It must be something within the age itself. So, I said, okay, if that is the case, then let’s give the kiddies what they want.
Welcome, my friends, to the Fucked Generation. F-Gen. It’s a little more original than Generation Y because at least it has some meaning. The word incites, it forces issues, disputes adult arguments that kids don’t understand. With it there is no need to feign intelligence. Any F-Gener knows that everything in the adult world is “so gay” anyway. It’s what’s in the gut that matters.
But in a more real sense, it does seem to demand a listening to from those too caught up in the madness of our society. It rages at our loveless system with the tenacity of a poodle, yet with just as much fear. It balks at and rebukes bus stops at 112 degrees, status wars practiced by everybody, and the panic in the slow discovery that our world can be a monster.
It claims existence as guiltlessly as a lion devours it’s prey. Plus, you’ve got to admit, it’s even more loser-like than “lost or even “X.”
Gertrude Stein would be proud.

Published in: on April 8, 2012 at 5:37 pm  Leave a Comment  
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the first the fargo kantrowitz’z literary campsite’z advertisement

Hello, welcome to the fargo kantrowitz’z literary campsite. Get a space at the institute for very large art, coming soon to the new katherine gianaclis park for the arts. Four renters who want to do big art.

Or go hang out in large art row, where you can paint art outside against a very long and rather tall wall. Art is always best in camaraderie. Cool summer nights are on their way. Hot Artist Plunge.

Getting ready for burning man? Give Joey a call. Have we got a deal for you! Call now! Expert advice awaits!

Published in: on April 7, 2012 at 2:18 am  Leave a Comment  

Session (birth,sex,money,God)

Session 3

You are only interested in writing if you can plug into your mind as if you’re dreaming.
That’s true.
Why would you want to write if it wasn’t fun?
I wouldn’t.
But you do?
I have to.
Why do you have to?
Because I’m a writer.
Then what do you write about?
I don’t know. Stuff. I don’t know.
You don’t know. You just make it up.
Like I said, I’m a writer.
Right. Writers write.
Right.
But you don’t enjoy it?
Well…
Sometimes you enjoy it.
Yes.
When?
When it flows.
When it flows as if it were a dream. So you like to write daydreams.
Yeah, I guess so. I like to write daydreams.
But doesn’t being a daydreamer make you a shlep in the world?
Yes, unless you are published then you are a god.
I see. Tell me.
Yes, Plato…
No, let me just ask you a question. If you could do something other than write what would it be?
I don’t know. A baseball player I guess.
Then why don’t you become a baseball player?
Bad knee. Too old. Suck at the game.
What else.
An astronaut.
What else.
I was going to say fireman but you would know that I’m just goofing around.
Probably.
Let me see. What would I want to do if I wasn’t a writer which isn’t all fun and games. They asked Eliot if living the life of a poet was worth the hassle and he simply said “no.”
So you don’t want to be a writer.
No.
What would you want to be.
Something that would allow me to make a lot of money easily and move to a beach and just smoke pot.
The dream world again.
Yes.
So you want to be a writer.
It seems more significant than painting or photography. But you can’t make money at it, just like those others. You have to sell yourself out. You have to go into advertising, basically, sell shit for other people. Be a part of the problem.
So you see the way that society is as part of the problem.
Yeah, pretty much. This is what the old family and friends don’t understand. Why I don’t even attempt to enter that world, but for me entering that world is like selling out and I don’t have a lot of energy in that direction. So I say I want to write, although it is often pure pain as you write and also take into account the fact that some 19 year old Brown sophomore will be judging you and deciding your work’s fate. Perhaps that graduate hasn’t yet had the experience necessary to judge it properly. So we get an aging down of everything we read. Everything must be written to fit this fucking mold of the reader being a fucking baby.
You’re angry.
You’re damned right I’m angry.
So what do you do?
I don’t know. I deal with my anger, but my writing will never change the facts of the world.
Which are?
Well, let me think.
No, let me ask you another question.
Okay. Shoot.
How old are you?
Forty-six.
You have no loved one in your life.
No.
Why not?
I’m a writer.
Would you like one?
Yes.
I also dribble when I pee so sometimes I stink.
Oh.
You could go to the doctor.
Can’t afford it. I’m a writer.
Don’t you send your stuff out?
Rarely. Can’t afford the postage and printing costs.
So are you a writer?
Yes. I’ve written a lot.
Sounds like you might be afraid of rejection.
Not afraid. Disgusted.
And this makes you come down on yourself like you’re just a sore loser.
How did you know that?
Just a guess. That’s what you pay me for.
Ten bucks an hour on a sliding scale.
You pay me. I get paid. Trust me.
Now I’m part of the problem.
So it goes back and forth. You’re part of the problem sometimes and they’re part of the problem sometimes.
Yeah.
Which makes you ambivalent.
I never understood that word.
You don’t care.
Right. I don’t care. Like I said, I just want to go to the beach and smoke pot.
Then why don’t you?
Can’t afford it.
Just go and see what happens. You’ll find a job. Just go and smoke pot. But then you would have to quit writing and that seems important to you even though you act like it isn’t.
It may be. It may not be. I think I chose the profession as a teenager so it doesn’t really matter. A vocation of the mind isn’t really a good idea. Best to do something really technical or where you use your hands. Make sure that everybody understands it and most importantly make sure that the service is wanted. Dream professions are highly competitive. You have to be superman. I’m not superman any more.

coffee

Tell me about superman.
He flies around and wears a cape.
No, your version of superman.
He knows things. He doesn’t feel pain. He doesn’t rebel against the world and cripple himself.
You do that?
All the time.
Why?
Mad.
Anger again.
Yeah, I guess.
What happened to you?
I always look for similes and I can never find any. They told me in literature school that you should look for similes for your writing to be good. I’ve never been able to and it’s always flustered me as a writer. So I just started writing what I wanted to write. No similes or just bad ones and I accept it. I’m a bad writer.
Define a bad writer.
A bad writer is someone who doesn’t put in a lot of description or similes but just writes like he’s thinking a lot. That’s me. Nothing ever happens either. There’s no plot. Just interiority. Lots of interiority.
You’re an introvert?
Totally.
Do you like being an introvert?
Hate it.
Why?
Imagine that every thought that you think has to be thought over and over again, but not in a few seconds but over several years. It takes you years to learn something an extrovert takes for granted from the beginning. Being an introvert is like a curse.
So being an introvert is what happened to you?
No.
What happened to you?
That’s hard to say.
Why?
It seems everything has happened to me and it’s all just added up. You sort of go with it because that’s the way it is.
Name one thing.
Can’t think of any I want to go into.
Why not?
The stories are too long. I’m a writer, remember?
Pain?
I guess.
Then what.
Goes black.
What?
My will to think.
What do you do?
Lie down.
And think?
Of course.
Is this good?
I figure it’s good for my story writing possibilities.
Do you really want to cash in on your pain?
Figure maybe it will help me escape the pain to have money.
So you make a living by lying down and thinking about your pain?
No I make a living by writing about it. I figure I’m just trying to figure it out. But I don’t send anything out so I don’t make any money at all. I guess I’m just keeping hope alive that’s all.
When does it end?
When I come up for air?
What’s going to make you do that?
I don’t know. Move away.
Where would you go.
Boston.
Why Boston?
Because there are literary people there and then maybe I won’t feel so alone.
Why does everybody have to be literary?
They don’t, but otherwise they’re sexual and monetary.
Aren’t you sexual and monetary?
No, because I’m literary. We lose the sexual part without the monetary after awhile and of course we never have the monetary. It’s failure upon failure as a human being, but what are you going to do? Stay in shape and you’ll still be part of the pack for a little while anyway.
What do you mean?
What I mean is that we are animals in a pack. We have as much desire to bolster the weak in this pack as do animals in theirs. We are all going to get old so we’re all doomed to be tossed out of the pack. We may not be killed but we will be abandoned. That’s why we have families, because we know that our own offspring, at least, cannot throw us over a cliff. This is not true for people not our direct family. It’s a ruthless system really that if true and there is a God would mean that this God is a very ruthless God.
But isn’t God just the way that it is. What is is God?
I guess so. It’s seeming to be that way all the time, but you’ve got to admit that your admiration for this God has to go down the more you realize this plan.
So what do you do?
I grow old just like the rest of them. I try to put myself into a situation that will allow me freedom to move around, preferentially in nature, since that is the only way that you will be allowed to remain in the pack. People want only strength. They will do their best to destroy you if you attempt to foist philosophy or contemplation their way as strength. No, strength is in the arm and the loins and that’s it. Completely.
And in youth.
Yes, in youth. You can contemplate in youth because it adds to your aura of strength. Beauty is strength. Beauty is health. Health is strength.

Published in: on April 5, 2012 at 5:50 pm  Leave a Comment  
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The 36 (and counting) Least Asked Questions of All Times

 

Why are NRA guys so into law and order yet cops hate their guts?

 

While it is true that the right to bear arms is in our constitution, it is also true that the founding fathers had not considered the fact that thirteen-year-old psychopaths in the future could find myriad ways to exercise their right at twenty to one hundred bullets per minute. Cops are well aware of this fact and therefore believe there should be limits on the types of guns to be sold and also stricter regulations concerning the sale. The NRA guys are also aware of this situation, an awareness which, for them, points right back to the constitution in the form of desire for self-protection and law and order. Unfortunately, the NRA guys cannot see banning any weapons at all for fear  of blighting the holy words “right to bear arms.” Cops say that because of this cops die.

Unfortunately, criminals also readily admit their love of this constitutional right as well. However, criminals will most likely never attack the NRA guy, (who is ready for him, but unfortunately lives far from the criminal, on his ranch in Texas) but will instead kill small children playing on their front porches from L.A. to New York City. Ultimately, the entire debate comes down to one other question: Do children really matter?

Published in: on April 1, 2012 at 2:10 am  Leave a Comment  
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