Kara Jean

dailycube: Cube#190 - 2013

We began posting this Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs and Gus Van Sant back in 2006, and a lot of things have changed since then. We cannot possibly hope to match the grim depths of the 2010 / 2011 iterations of the prayer, so we know better than to even make the attempt. But this year, we definitely have a face to go with Burroughs’ line about “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”

It is traditional for the head of the household — except in Oklahoma, of course — to lead the reading of this prayer before the family feasts upon the fruits of the harvest, or at least whatever canned items their Walmart coworkers have chipped in to give them. And then, it’s either time to risk the death gauntlet at the big-box store, or to see if your employer (hah!) has any money-saving tips for you, like going on ebay and selling off a few Christmas presents for dessert.

So Happy Thanksgiving, America. May all your Hoverrounds come equipped with TruckNutz. May you return safely from your holiday travels without having actually punched any wingnut relatives in the nose. May your attempts to recite “Alice’s Restaurant” from memory be at least 30% successful. May you see everything twice. Or maybe there are some things you don’t even want to see once. May you get a pony. May you take heart that in many places in our land, families really will be starting the new year with health insurance for the first time. May you have plenty of reminders that not everything is terrible.

And remember to Buy (almost) Nothing tomorrow!

[YouTube / "Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986"]

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

Drawings by Alberto del Pozo of the deities of Afro-Cuban Santería “Each of the illustrations in The Oricha Collection depicts the principal gods and goddesses that comprise the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería. The Afro-Cuban orishas can be traced to the 19th Century slave trade, when thousands of men, women, and children were taken from their Yoruba homes in Nigeria to be sold as slaves in the new world. In Cuba, the slaves were introduced to Catholic teachings, resulting in a blending of Yoruba and Christian beliefs over time. Due to structural similarities between the two religions, the Yoruba gods were identified with Catholic saints, and as a result, many generations of slaves continued to practice their religion under the guise of Christian liturgy. This union gave rise to a new system of beliefs known as Lucumí or Santería, the ‘way of the saints.’’ Via the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries Thanks to luminousinsect Folkert

Aggressors of Dark Kombat (ADK - Neo Geo - 1994)

bison2winquote:

- Kisarah Westfield losequote against Sheen Genus,

Here's a photo-tour of Girard "Jerry" B. Henderson luxurious Las Vegas fallout shelter, built in 1978 and now on sale (along with the house above it) for $1.7M, following a bank foreclosure on the property's most recent owner. It was built by Kenneth and Jay Swayze for $10M in 1979, when a million was a million (Swayze was an authority on subterranean living, and wrote the now out-of-print Underground gardens & homes: The best of two worlds, above and below).

The subterranean paradise at 3970 Spencer St. in Las Vegas was built 26 feet underground. At ground level a 2-bedroom caretaker house sits on the property. In the backyard, ventilation and air-conditioning units jut up from the dirt. Rocks conceal stairways and an elevator that lead down to the AstroTurf-covered front yard of the home below.

With its own generator and fuel tank, the home could sustain life for a year with a fully-stocked pantry in the event of a nuclear attack.

Henderson’s underground retreat includes a pool, two jacuzzis, a sauna, an outdoor BBQ grill inside a large fake rock, a dance floor, a putting green in the garden, adjustable light settings to match various times of the day and a hand-painting 360-degree mural of locations familiar to Henderson. A one-bedroom guest cabana is located beside the pool.

A tunnel once connected the house to the office building next door where Henderson worked, but that property was sold separately after Henderson’s death and the tunnel was filled in.

Cold War Home Built 26 Feet Underground [Charlie Hintz/Cult of Weird]

When November 11 rolls around, this quote from Breakfast of Champions gets dragged out of storage and put on display for the occasion of Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday and Armistice/Veterans’ Day. God knows we’ve done it ourselves, too. But that’s what remembrance and ceremony are for, after all, as mile markers on our half-blind flatcar ride through time. And since it remains an awesome quote, and since Vonnegut never feared flirting with cliché, neither will we. Let’s have another nice rummage through the mental attic with Uncle Kurt:

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

– Breakfast of Champions (1973)

It’s just such a wonderfully Vonnegut-y quote, for all the terrific reasons there are to love and maybe be a little embarrassed by Vonnegut: The short, clipped sentences. The backwards time travel. The affectation of spelling out the year. The “men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind” — Jesus, what a lovely line! The definitive declarations that sound like pure Truth, but on reflection are, OK, kind of simplistic. The self-aware nostalgia and sentimentality, even as he cautions against nostalgia and sentimentality. And Romeo and Juliet, for chrissakes? Not King Lear, at least? In some ways, loving Vonnegut is such an adolescent thing to do, and sometimes it feels like Vonnegut is a writer that you ought to have grown out of. It’s a problem that Vonnegut was himself quite aware of, of course, as he noted in his interview with Playboy, also from 1973:

I deal with sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled. I talk about what is God like, what could He want, is there a heaven, and, if there is, what would it be like? This is what college sophomores are into; these are the questions they enjoy having discussed. And more mature people find these subjects very tiresome, as though they’re settled.

By the time you’re in grad school, you know better than to talk about Vonnegut as if he were quite as deep as you were sure he was at seventeen. Grownup Serious Lit Students are allowed to quote Vonnegut as much as they want, as long as they treat him as an affectionate artifact they’ve outgrown, like model airplanes hanging from the ceiling or stuffed animals on a dorm bed. And then after you’re comfortably past the one-upmanship of a graduate seminar, you can go back to just enjoying Kurt Vonnegut all over again, even if you no longer zoom a plastic B-25 Mitchell bomber around your room (though maybe that’s more of a Joseph Heller thing, anyway).

The other Vonnegut quote about Armistice Day turning into Veteran’s Day comes from Mother Night (1961), and doesn’t get quoted nearly as often, but we like it for its explicit grumping about the motivation for the holiday’s metamorphosis:

“Oh, it’s just so damn cheap, so damn typical.” I said, “This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn’t keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it’s torn to shreds and thrown to the mob.”

We’ll agree that the quote from Breakfast of Champions, as worked out over a decade later, is a grander, more quotable passage, but there’s something awfully nice about the raw bitchiness of the earlier version. It’s sort of surprising to us that we haven’t seen any online pairings of the two, either — after all, yet another of the fun things about reading Vonnegut is seeing him turn over ideas again and again in his novels, taking them through their permutations like a Tralfamadorian looking through time.

And so we’ll go on quoting Kurt Vonnegut as much as we damn well please. We’re also rather happy that two summers ago, we bought Kid Zoom his own copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, which we were relieved to learn he loved.

There are some things it might be a mistake to grow out of.

So happy Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday, and a peaceful Armistice / Veterans Day. Since there’s few things more fun than quoting Uncle Kurt, here are a couple of collections of Vonnegut quotes. Let’s add one for Armistice Day 2013 that wasn’t in this column last year:

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.”

– Cat’s Cradle

And since the man liked music, here’s a song for Armistice-Remembrance-Veterans Day, Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”:

And may you spend the day, like Howard W. Campbell Jr. on VJ Day, walking around with a Purple Heart on.

OK, that quote is totally guy-centric; need something for the Ladeez, also from Breakfast of Champions:

Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You’re sixteen
And ready for high school.

What, one more video? OK, if you insist.

Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut reads. War backwards. from LloydRizla on Vimeo.

[Breakfast of Champions / Mother Night / Cat's Cradle / Slaughterhouse-Five]

"Do you want this octopust to have fewer legs?" Spotted in Oakland. (via mikaeladupomp)