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February 06
February 28, 2006
Don’t ask me how I ended up at the KKK’s website today. Just know that those fearless Knights O’ Bigotry have adopted a weird new tactic: talking about how diversity is a good thing.
Below the “Satan’s Rainbow” depicted above is the legend: He wants only one Race - One Culture - Race Mixing is Satanic - It is WRONG! Don’t destroy the Rainbow!
It’s the new gay-friendly KKK! Don’t destroy the rainbow, indeed.
Posted by: Aaron Retka in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 28, 2006
This is the second post in our series of guest blogs from the editors of The Cipher, a magzine produced at Colorado College. Inviting them to post here is a part of The Toilet Paper’s larger effort to reach around to the community!
Misconceptions about CC students
- We live in a bubble. It is not a physical bubble, which is to say that it is easily penetrated by outside bodies. You can walk onto the CC campus without encountering some sort of invisible force-field, come into our library, use our computers and read our magazines. We have the latest issue of Cosmo. We ourselves frequently exit the bubble to go skiing.
-We are all rich and overly privileged. Many of us rely on financial aid and work-study jobs to support our elite cocaine habits.
-We like to act like we are poor. Sometimes we buy our clothing at the ARC on non-sale days, since they ended student discount Fridays.
-We do not interact with the Colorado Springs community. We frequently join the community in a feeling of solidarity while singing Irish drinking songs at Jack Quinn’s.
-We do not know how to bake. We all, at some point, considered attending pastry school in France, and while we were discouraged from our dreams by our parents and mainstream society, being told “Sugar is not acareer choice,” we continue to indulge our passion in our communal dormkitchens, whipping up the most delicious ten-layer Death By Chocolate cake you’ve ever tasted.
–Lindsay Patterson
Posted by: darksandal in Guest Bloggers | Permalink 4 Comments
February 28, 2006
-Skorman resigns, leaving the city council to Gayor Lion-O Rivera and Dumblicans et. al. If the council had any actual power, I’d be quaking in my civic boots. Then again, if they had any actual power, we’d probably have some council members who knew how to exercise it. And thank Uncle Remus they don’t since we’d all be living in Brucieland.
-The Underground and Avenue Cafe were bought by ??? and will likely be a new gay bar that may or may not have anything to do with Club Q.
-The Wayfarer also apparently sold, and though we’ve heard who it is, we haven’t been able to conifrm it and won’t tattle.
(send all COSsip tips to editor@toiletpaperonline.com)
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 28, 2006
When I first heard that Bush’s approval ratings had plummeted to 34 percent and that Cheney’s numbers were even lower, I did the obvious: raced to the Department of Homeland Security site to check out the newest alert level, which I assumed would be ratcheted up at least burnt sienna, maybe even vermilion.
Sadly, it seems the administration is aware that most Americas are clued-in to the scandal-alert connection. Damn! What fun is blogging about this stuff if they’re not assuming that every citizen is a complete moron?
Posted by: Aaron Retka in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 27, 2006
Only Blabbing Mike could find the one woman at Mardi Gras in Manitou to flash her tits and issue a diss to the Gazette for missing it:
In today’s edition of the Gaz there is an article, written by Bill Hethcock about the Manitou Springs Carnivale parade held yesterday on the streets of that city. In that article Hethcock says, ” Twenty-three-year-old Jack Gardner of Colorado Springs, wearing a jester’s hat and a “Vote for Pedro” T-shirt, came armed with his camcorder, hoping for some New Orleans-style moments. But to his chagrin, it was not a “Girls Gone Wild” kind of day. So he settled for the next best thing — belly dancers, most of whom had plenty to jiggle. “Holy cow,” he said as the women jounced by.
..”
Well it was obvious that neither Mr. Hethcock nor Mr. Gardner were anywhere near the Barker House, otherwise the Gaz article would have been written as a comic strip on page 1 of the LIFE section. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you didn’t see last week’s Life section.)
At the Barker House on Manitou Ave things were a little more “heated”. Mr. Hethcock much to your chagrin, IT WAS a “Girls Gone Wild” kind of day. Well, at least “A GIRL” gone wild kind of day. And she was collecting strings of beads from more than just me…
See for yourself… if you dare! Check out all my Manitou Springs Carnivale Mardi Gras 2006 pictures at the link below.
http://www.newsblab.com/manitouspringsmardigras2006/
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink 2 Comments
February 27, 2006
The Cipher is an excellent little student-run monthly magazine at Colorado College. (you can pick it up on campus). The staff invited me to talk to them last week and, in turn, I invited them to guest blog here at the TP. The first submission is from is an interview with CC Prof Carl Reed about the aesthetics of public energy by Ryan Vaillancourt, one of the editors:
I recently wrote a piece about wealthy New England homeowners who oppose what would be the first off shore wind farm in the US because the farm would ruin their views. It’s ugly,” they say, or, “it will ruin the natural landscape.” Robert F. Kennedy, environmental lawyer and longtime summer resident of Nantucket, has been an unlikely opponent of the farm. The New York Times published an opinion piece by Kennedy, which warned of the farm’s potential to ruin the views of 16 historic sites on Nantucket. Following is a conversation I had with Carl Reed, a local sculptor and professor of art at CC, regarding public aesthetics and the terribly misguided people who have the power to make important decisions about such things.
Ryan Vaillancourt: In the political discussion, those advocating wind farms don’t bring aesthetics into the conversation. It seems that those that oppose wind turbines have ownership over that part of the argument because they’ve come out and said how they’re ugly and ruin the landscape, and now the environmentalists don’t touch this part of the issue. Do you think it would be useful and worthwhile to start talking about wind turbines as a potential symbol and beautiful structure?
Carl Reed: I think it’s absolutely necessary in order to have a healthy society that different members of society who could bring their talents to bear on something like this should be involved, so you shouldn’t separate aesthetics out. What I always say about that with regard to public things is that, and I’ll use a local example, the reason Armstrong Hall is so ugly is because it doesn’t function well
and the reason it doesn’t function well is because its so ugly. And so my view of aesthetics, it’s not something that’s just purely visual. It has direct bearing on the function and so an elegant way of getting from point A to point B in a building or to a building, it can be convenient, it can be efficient, it can also be an aesthetic experience at a very high level and whenever these things are separated out,
you’re asking for trouble. But then in our culture, it’s not that people aren’t interested in visual things, but art is considered an isolated separate subject, often the object of ridicule. And there remains in this country a hangover from the puritanical aversion to artistic expression, emotion, color, and a suspiscion of that for a variety of reasons. It’s often ridiculed or isolated or marginalized
which is unfortunate.
RV:I think that speaks a lot to the case in Nantucket in which the “Not in my back yard” people represent the one side talking about aesthetics and how the wind farm is going to “ruin the natural landscape.” And environmentalists are not willing to engage in a dialogue about aesthetics.
CR:Well I think it boils down usually to a situation, and I’m sure this is true in Cape Cod, where the people who are there and have property, have a stake in the place as a result of that property. They want to maintain those property values and when they bought the place there were roads and power lines and fast food places, but they don’t want anything to go past that. Now with the Kennedys of course they go back a ways and you could say that the Kennedy compound may or not be an attractive piece of architecture, but it’s completely inappropriate to that natural landscape. There’s no reason for a house that big or a compound to be placed along the beach except they’ve got the money and they did it. But it’s not good planning. It definitely compromises the natural landscape in a fundamental way. But they’ve got it and they want to maintain its value, both monetary but probably more importantly, culturally or spiritually in their minds. But it’s a charade, it’s a fraud because it’s so compromised. It has been for so many years.
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink 1 Comment
February 27, 2006
A quaint little house in the heart of American Quaintdom, i.e. Western Massachusetts.
No Garden Gnomes. No Pink Flamingos. No other other staples of American lawn kitsch.
Just this…
Sign.
Posted by: johndicker in Uncategorized | Permalink Comments
February 26, 2006
I barely read anything that isn’t on the web anymore unless it’s the Bible, and when I do it’s usually magazines, comics, zines and chapbooks of poetry people send me. Here are a few worth your afternoon:
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. I read a thing about graphic novels by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker recently where he gave the usual blow jobs to Dan Clowes, Chris Ware et. al. as though no one before them existed, and they were the first “masters” of the medium. Bullshit. V for Vendetta is just one example of the Alan Moore’s many great creations. Read it now before the movie comes out (you’ve got a week). It’s well worth it.
Death Race VSOP (Red Ant Press) collaborations by Will Yackulic, Cedar Sigo and Micah Ballard. Move your head around your head around the screen a little bit and you might catch a glimpse of the lovely embossing. A touching goth nod to Roger Corman. The poems read like Edna St. Vincent Millay in a K-hole.
Song of Malta
Before me,
the colonial lifeNow if you
won’t tell me
what styleI will fuck you up
among a sea of britches.
Shit Eatin’ Grin #4 is a great train hopping zine that my friend Ryan passed on to me. I have absolutely no interest in hopping trains personally, so I didn’t take the scolding “don’t try this at home” warning at the intro as an affront. Train hopping is perfect straight narrative material all twinged with the real adrenaline that comes when limbs are on the line and bulls are in the yard. There’s also a great gay junkie story. All wonderfully readable shit. Someone should put together an anthology of these hoboing gems.
On The Low by Kevin Opstedal (Gallery Books). If poetry is the Atlantis of the arts, then Kevin Opstedal can breathe under water, and each poem is a pair of shades for a beach blanket apocalypse.
The tide came in with
bandaged wings
and chrome-plated resolve
like an excerpt from
Lao Tzu’s lost thesis
on oceanography ….
There are only 200 copies, and you can get one from Gallery Books, 173B Drake Ave, Monterey, CA 93940.
The Acme Novelty Library #16 by Chris Ware.
I’m getting tired of Chris Ware’s smug brilliance, but not tired enough that I don’t still enjoy looking at his paeans to futility.
Schizo #4 by Ivan Brunetti.
I love Brunetti’s biographical comix because they’re obviously projected autobiography, but his autobiographical comix fall into the easy trap of painful overshare.
Quitter by Harvey Pekar is comic autobiography at its best: straight-forward, unsentimental and well-drawn.
Posted by: darksandal in Books | Permalink 1 Comment
February 25, 2006
Just a little note to let Coloradans for Marriage, who apparently own ColoradansforMarriage.com and ColoradansforMarriage.org (though the domains seem to be parked right now), know that The Toilet Paper owns ColoradoansforMarriage.com and ColoradoansforMarriage.org..
Happy hating!
Posted by: darksandal in Uncategorized | Permalink 2 Comments
February 25, 2006
The March Harper’s has a piece by the creator of Flash Mobs, Bill Wasik, one of the senior editors at Harper’s. What’s interesting is that he created them as a kind of latter-day authority experiment in the tradition of Stanley Milgram to, uh, uh … prove that hipsters are subject to “deindividuation”, i.e. mob mentality???? Say it isn’t so! You mean (gasp) that uber-individualist hipsters are just as prone to mob-think as your average SUV mom?
Have so many self-alleged aesthetes ever been more (in the formulation of Festinger et al.) “submerged in the group”? The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes.
The fact that Wasik would even stage these cheeky events as situtationist hipster booby traps makes him both clever AND the consumate meta-hipster snob — one who so despises the culture he is complicit in creating that he must cannibalize it to prove his hipster cred. Smug as Fug on a drug.
Wasik seems to be equally willing to leave out the problem of context — at least until the very end of the piece when he acknowledges that it’s more of an “anti-authority” experiment (or a theatrical revolution) than an expose on hipster fascism (you’ll have to go buy a copy to read the whole thing). Proving that a bunch of bored urbanites are willing to show up to a mildly transgressive public get-together in the spirit of fun hardly seems to justify the level of condescension it took for Wasik to equate them with the subjects in Milgram’s electro-shock experiments, which he never really gets around to anyway.
If, on the other hand, he’s merely exposing the hyprocrisy of a culture of supposed individuality that happens to have its own insidious norms, well … I’ll be a witches britches.
Anyhow, all this caught my attention because of the Wal-Mart Dance Party we did this past November. I had never heard of flash mobs, and I certainly don’t remember believing we were going to do anything more than have a lark in a Wal-Mart on the busiest shopping weekend of the year. What was most surprising, aside from the bounce the video got on the web (we got some 50,000 visits in a week), were the many absurdly impassioned debates people were having in our comments section about the ethical ramifications of our tard party — everything from “you’re just fucking with the poor slobs who work there” to “this is a new, truly radical form of protest.” Several people mentioned that what we had done was a flash mob. Given that we’re in Colorado Springs, I was hardly surprised that my hipster gaydar had missed the zeitgeist by a country mile. And so what? Despite Wasik’s most condescending intentions, there’s still something about these Kabuki revolutions that hits a nerve.
But next time I’ll be sure to stay home and read Festinger.
Posted by: darksandal in Pranks | Permalink 2 Comments
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