Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

– Miranda July, The Shared Patio

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

– Frank O’Hara, To The Harbormaster

There will be minor style changes to the site in the coming days; just sort of working on some color + typography + line design stuff to make it a bit more aesthetically pleasing. The devil is in the details. So hit “Refresh” on your browser if shit looks wonky.

By Michel Gondry, 2004.

I’ve had a series of strange interactions all incredibly juxtaposed in time so close to which I have yet to be able to really meditate on any of them. But in the end all I wonder is if this machine were real, what it would cost and would I take advantage of it.

Though I no longer have a cell phone plan, I still keep my old iPhone around for Instagramming. Follow me @bringnobombs.

A few from the past couple days.

By Andrew Haigh, 2011.

This is the kind of movie that if you have a heart, and it is open, it will break. It’s also interesting, as someone who is straight, to recognize similar character traits in people on both sides of the relationship portrayed, as with most movies regarding heavy romance one generally identifies with one side or the other. Regardless, knife in gut level work here, the performances are beyond outstanding.

I will say that the last five minutes of the State of the Union, where President Obama was able to go uninterrupted in a rather stirring metaphor of the SEAL Team 6 that killed Osama Bin Laden and the current course of American politics, was probably the greatest political speech we’ve seen him deliver since aspects of “A More Perfect Union.”

But Obama has never been a bad politician; in fact, he’s a much better politician than a president, and his speech goes to show just that. The center of his speech around fairness and wealth distribution is the central theme of Occupy Wall Street. He’s capitalizing on the massively populist idea of fairness and a broken system.

And it’s right on time.

Right on time for Mitt Romney to disclose tax records, and for Newt Gingrich to be sounding like even more of a hypocritical asshole than ever. Obama now sounds of fair judgment and equality for all, the only sane mind left in a sea of insanity and disarray. Which, to an extent, seems true when measuring him up against his current competition; men who seem to believe “freedom” means “capitalism” and not “liberty.”

But where was he months ago during the Occupy protests? Global protests were the biggest movement of 2011 — regardless of who you ask — and he was completely silent while kids were beaten, broken and otherwise kicked by what was rumored to be a nationalized idea of police force. And it’s not like none of us noticed.

So it’s political language partially influenced by mass populism and a possibly clinically insane opposition, all to kick off a campaign. It’s not actually following the idea of the OWS movement, because if Obama really wanted populism he would have said, “All you motherfuckers should lose your jobs because you sat and watched while everyone else in America did.”

But beggars can’t be choosers, and having an insincere moderate for a president is probably better than a sincere nutjob.

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

Holy fuck this is awesome.