Everyone Is Entitled to Everything

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, copyright © 1973 by Wendell Berry

Right before the demise of yet another Chicago magazine, Venuszine had me backstage filming some thirty interviews including Passion Pit, Of Montreal, Peter Bjorn and John, Gang Gang Dance and Blind Pilot.

Out of all of the interviews, Carebears on Fire took the cake. They might have been the most well spoken and articulate of the bands, and for 13 year olds, you cant fake that kind of enthusiasm. See them all here.

Cheers to dHerve and Jumpshot for heading the project up.

The images from Phil and Kristen’s wedding are now online. Feel free to right click download any of them.

I received the following text message from Google Voice after Mr. T Doty left me a voicemail earlier today.

yeah what’s up so my plane get done tomorrow or and i was planning to take the train to go to chris is but he said he’s gonna be at rehearsal dinner at that time so i think that trent you think i’m trying to because the they said they were all gonna go out for a peter or something actually get down the personal dinner and i guess would be best for me to meet up with you to go with you from there so call me back and so i can get your address and i can figure out what to take the train to find you if that works if it’s if it’s alright call me back bye

I m not sure whats better: not having to listen to the recording anymore or the process of deciphering the “transcription”

Dostoevsky taught me that not by arguing, but by creating—creating characters who demonstrated the dehumanized desiccation of an unGodded life and, in contrast and comparison, the terrible beauty of a pursuit after God. —”God and Passion” by Eugene Peterson (pdf)

My bones are under assault. Dostoevsky is at it again, and this time its Crime and Punishment. While some folks might argue that Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot and Demons are less than blood-curdling thrillers, it would be hard to say that C+P falls short of spellbinding. But like the rest of his oeuvre, even the minor events are spectacles, and much is to be said of the discontinuous, sudden and unexpected, disharmonious and undignified. In a word, terrible—but all the while broadcasting a comical carnival of disruptive and unsettling truths spoken by holy fools. Its an upside-down religious experience of weirdness and wonder, one that reckons a new sense of righteousness coming at us despite our best intentions to avoid it.

A reading from Mr David Dark’s latest Questioning Everything with a revelatory word on Dostoevsky’s “surefire drama of people going crazy” (4min).

If hope is

……the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
—Emily Dickinson

Then what is resentment?