Hello, Beautiful.

From Retronaut: http://www.retronaut.co/2012/04/ford-mustang-brochure-1969/

Thank you to the kind somebody who submitted my screenshot to screenshots of despair. You’ve turned my “ennui…” to “oui!”

screenshotsofdespair:

via dmknopf

My newest piece in The New Inquiry re: the desert, Foucault, heterotopia, LSD, Art Bell, Vegas, music, cars, everything.

thenewinquiry:

In a grindhouse-grainy cinematic version of my life, I have both the money and know-how to restore muscle cars. I picture myself hopping in a cherry-red Charger, Firebird, or Camaro and sending it rocketing through suburban streets as Heart’s “Barracuda” plays on the stereo. Heedless of the expense or environmental impact of driving such a gas guzzler, I head for the desert, leaving lawns and inflatable pools behind — along with my responsibilities and notions of taste and decency. Among the sagebrush and spiny creatures the lusty wails of Ann Wilson give way to the great sun-glare and silence of desolate nature. I contemplate its vastness, feel it perch me teeteringly on the tip of some existential fulcrum.

I wonder if Michel Foucault felt a similar impulse in the spring of 1975, when during a visit to California he agreed to drive out to Death Valley for one life-changing evening. There he would be “suspended among the forms hoping for nothing but the wind,” his American host promised. Initially skeptical, Foucault eventually came around to the idea. He perhaps wished also to pirouette upon that fulcrum, in the desolate and unendingly beautiful “Valley of Death,” as he, in his franglais, called it. His phrasing it in the genitive somehow captures the essence of the place: Death oversees the valley, is so clearly master.

“Lonely Highways in the Land of Jail,” by Dawn Marie Knopf. | Read More.

Spotify playlist

todaysdocument:

The full citation has some great details on this family:

Roseville, Placer County, California. On the Freights. Five o’clock in the morning in Roseville switch yards for freight going over the Sierra. A family of Mexican agricultural workers heading for Utah to top sugar beets. The mother is twenty, the father twenty-one, the child three, and the other man is the brother of the father. They had slept out overnight in the grass without bedclothing; the child’s overalls are wet with dew and he wears galoshes. A veteran migrant, he has been traveling by freight ever since he was four months old. His family follow a circuit of beets and cotton through Utah, Texas, and California.

usnatarchives:

Just 11 days until the release of the 1940 census!

Enumerators (census takers) attempted to count as many people as possible. About 120,000 enumerators went out into the city and the countryside with instructions to count every house, building, tent, cabin, hut or other place where people might be living.

This photograph’s original caption reads: “Roseville, Placer County, California. On the Freights. Five o’clock in the morning in Roseville switch yards for freight going over the Sierra, 04/19/1940”

Looking at this image, you wonder if the enumerators manage to count this family on this move? And where was this family going?

Margaret Bourke-White. Women making flags at a factory in Brooklyn, New York July 24, 1940.

If you need me, I’ll just be in this Charles Olson word nest for the rest of my time here.

“…hell now / is not exterior, is not to be got out of, is / the coat of your own self, the beasts / emblazoned on you”

Dye project (Taken with instagram)

Directions: “Mix garments, 1/2 bottle rit dye, and 2 gal. boiling water. Stir for the length of a Destroyer album.”

superseventies:

Stevie Nicks

From the Mojave Transportation Museum’s archives

Telegrams require the same terseness as the tweet look you see the same run-ons in status updates merry christmas