Guns, Books, Etc.

Painfully honest and epic mobile home commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-RLqLx1iYI&

“To punctuate the reading, Vollmann would point the gun at the ceiling and fire. Blanks, but in a black room rapidly filling with smoke and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, who can be sure? By the third shot, anxiety made it impossible to concentrate on the story Vollmann was reading. (For the record, it was about the Iroquois, and it contained several graphic descriptions of torture.)”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/11/vollmanns-pistolpacking-past.html

Two librarians vs. Alan Moore.

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/11/09/alan-moore-destroyer-of-librarians/

“And I need never go on another TV or radio show and find that, however the discussion was described beforehand, what we’re really meant to talk about is how poetry is dead, or the novel is rubbish, or the short story is irrelevant. Fuck that, quite frankly. Really. Fuck that with vigour and from a strange direction. It truly leaves me more than annoyed.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/03/al-kennedy-fiction-writing

The truth about Germans.

http://artlinks.cabinodd.com/

“But I think what makes this Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre, he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherent, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff.”

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/tarantino_is_an_inglourious_basterd/

Dairy Queen and Barbed Wire: The New Reality of US Occupation.

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/234068970/dairy-queen-and-barbed-wire

“Normally, I don’t mind the idiocies of Hollywood. Let them blow things up and make computer-animated green blobs happy, then sad, then happy again. I can tolerate and even enjoy it. But when they begin to pollute our cultural treasure – and their nemesis – I get angry. It is an act of war of one cultural medium on another.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/10/tanya-gold-bright-star-keats

Firearm manuals. All of them.

http://stevespages.com/page7b.htm

• Painfully honest and epic mobile home commercial.
• “To punctuate the reading, Vollmann would point the gun at the ceiling and fire. Blanks, but in a black room rapidly filling with smoke and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, who can be sure? By the third shot, anxiety made it impossible to concentrate on the story Vollmann was reading. (For the record, it was about the Iroquois, and it contained several graphic descriptions of torture.)”
• Two librarians vs. Alan Moore.
• “And I need never go on another TV or radio show and find that, however the discussion was described beforehand, what we’re really meant to talk about is how poetry is dead, or the novel is rubbish, or the short story is irrelevant. Fuck that, quite frankly. Really. Fuck that with vigour and from a strange direction. It truly leaves me more than annoyed.”
• The truth about Germans.
• “But I think what makes this Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre, he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherent, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff.”
• Dairy Queen and Barbed Wire: The New Reality of US Occupation.
• “Normally, I don’t mind the idiocies of Hollywood. Let them blow things up and make computer-animated green blobs happy, then sad, then happy again. I can tolerate and even enjoy it. But when they begin to pollute our cultural treasure – and their nemesis – I get angry. It is an act of war of one cultural medium on another.”
• Firearm manuals. All of them.