A PILLAR OF WIND

I spend a couple weeks preoccupied and this place is a morgue. COME ON FOLKS.

So I happen to work in an office. It's an easy "go-to" when I need something to castigate myself over, that I'm a white-collar wage lackey. Anyway my office is in a building with a really powerful elevator, and when I ascend the elevator to work and there aren't other people I like to close my eyes and experience the WHOOOSH as the elevator yanks me skywards. It's astonishing when you consider it... there's this giant WELL and you step into a brass bucket and WHOOSH it sucks you up through space at however many miles per hour.

There are probably all kinds of interesting effects in the elevator shaft itself created by having something rocketing through at such a high speed. The elevator is fancy but you can hear whistling air if you press your face to one of the seams in the side panels and thus get a sense of just how crazy the physics of it is. So even though it demoralizes me to have a job and not a trust fund I must say it's cool that at least 2 or three times every shift I have the experience of being rushed heavenwards on a pillar of wind.

WHAT, YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S REMARKABLE OR INTERESTING? YOU THINK THAT'S OPPRESSIVELY MUNDANE? Well fuck you, if you were trapped 10,000,000 miles below ground and you felt like you were constantly exhausting yourself in the fight to get up to Zero, the level from which most people start their days, if you felt like you were buried so far below any kind of real life that even breaking through the surface of Zero for an occasional gulp of air and a glimpse of daylight was an accomplishment to be savored, then you might get a kick out of zooming around in an elevator too. God, my pretty little turns of phrase are clearly wasted on you! Can't you allow me my small pleasures, you philistine? Fuck it that tears it I'm going to go get drunk.

JAKES ON THE BLOCKS WE OUT-CLEVER

Here is a video showing a pair of pigs skulking along in a St. Paul poor people march. Keen eyes may spot other items of interest as well, and by 'items,' I mean awesome ion-beam sweethearts, and by awesome ion-beam sweethearts I don't really mean much at all because I'm too burned out to formulate a properly tedious and convoluted inside joke.

FRAUD RADTKE

What is this nonsense? Some dupes are claiming Fred Radtke painted over Dr. Bob's Bywater sign? BULLSHIT. I know my boy's handiwork. I know his technique, and I know his approach. I know the brushstrokes-- rollerstrokes-- that make a Radtke a Radtke; I see them in my dreams.

This hasty, half-assed hackwork, this sloppy, slipshod slapdashery is NOT an authentic Radtke. I say it, and I will pin my reputation as a Radtkologist upon it. The photos tell the story, and examination in person certainly confirms it beyond all doubt, or certainly would if I was to ever venture somewhere as déclassé as the Bywater. Pay nothing for this piece, and reprove its provenance, 'cuz it's straight-up a FORGERY!

Whatever one thinks of the gesture-- the effacing of beloved, cheerful public art with magisterial grey-- this gesture was not carried out by the maestro, but by some imitative Other. The incomplete coverage, the awkward mélange of horizontal and vertical strokes... dead giveaways.

What then does it mean? What motivated this copycadtke? ...can it be? Can this be the time long foretold by Mayan calendars, convicts' knucklebones, and Jackson Square tarot readings? It is! The hour is finally upon us when other painters admit defeat and each take up the mighty grey torch, spreading it to a grey conflagration. Let remaining taggers, sign-painters and muralists tremble! This is the great crisis, the birthing of the future! Secure all tray tables in the upright and locked position: we are in final approach to a glorious Grauenacht!

OR

maybe this is someone's attempt to make Radtke look bad. If that's the case, while I generally avoid passing any sort of judgement, it does seem to me that you have in this case achieved an un-victory. Of course you have outraged those whose whole lifestyle and worldview is founded upon their own outrage-- but that's no accomplishment. Those people are professional shriekers; Radtke is just one dark deity in their teeming personal pantheons of put-uponness. Career complainants, eternally victimized by the less enlightened. Oh how dare he! I bet he won't vote for Obama, either! Radtke, blasting Pop Country from a Humvee... there, I just made them all quit reading, 'cuz they fainted.

No, if you're trying to make Radtke look bad, I deem it an un-victory because the quality of your work stands in such stark, unflattering contrast to Radtke's. It's a travesty that anyone could mistake your work for his! Many think what Radtke does is easy, in part because he executes an individual work relatively quickly, but first of all, any given Radtke is just a piece of the larger Ur-Radtke, and second of all, his technique, honed over more than a decade, is explicated in the parable of the zen ceramicist:

"Master, how can you sell that pot for eighty dollars? It took you only ten minutes to create it on your potting wheel."
"Grasshopper, creating this pot took me my entire life, and ten minutes."

That's where Radtke's at. Second or third- or whwhatever... fuck these are strong ... of all, when you use Radtke's language, the grey language of obliteration, you are totally in his power, even moreso than the reactive, semi-satirical school of "Radtke-critical" art that has sprung up in supposed opposition to him (a school of art ferociously excoriated at the tragically American-spelling-of-grey-employing therealgrayghost.blogspot.com). By trying to make a point about Grey with grey, you are playing poker with his chips, so when the chips are down, they're always gonna be his chips. It's trying to tear down the Grey Master's house with the Grey Master's tools, y'erdme?

BUT

If you're just some dipshit who thought it would be funny to stir the pot by Greying a giant, prominent Dr. Bob piece, then baby, let's get drunk and screw, because you're my kind of reckless, socially irresponsible adolescent nihilist!

In conclusion : not a real Radtke : portends a new era in Radtkism I am too fucked-up at present to figure out : author needs a disco nap.

--the mighty respiratory-infection-riddled d-block

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN

CHOCOLATE CHIP LABELING

REVENGE OF BRIDE OF RETURN OF LABELING PARTY

Do you know how sometimes something feels so good that you just can't stop doing it? That's where we are with the labeling parties. Oh dear. The labeling, the alphabetizing - where do we start? Where do we stop? Slowly, the dream that was the labeling party has become our day-to-day, and the rest of our lives... the hours empty of labeling... have faded to the texture of dream. Only labeling is real. Did you know that piracy goes in class war/labor studies? I did. Plus, we chucked out a bunch of Maoist stuff, so if you want hardline polemics to inspire your shrill, hectoring newspapers which no-one reads, you'll have to go elswhere. Seriously, 'communism' is now 6 books thick - it's original texts only - direct action/protest has been EXPANDED. Christianity is the next to go - tomorrow. Each book in the section will be marched up the steps to the guillotine, summarily judged, and sentenced to the free pile.

My co-author is being kind. We're burning books at the iron rail. No way, that's not even funny. Yes, it is. We aren't, though. Because YOU, gentle reader, will come be a voice of reason in this purging, by contributing your time and talents to the labeling and cataloguing process. It's spelled cataloging!!! However it's SPELT, there will be a lot of it tomorrow, and it will be exhilirating, like a fox. Like the hot orange blur of a fox, and the henhouse is our overstuffed shelves full of insufficiently revolutionary books. He totally stole 'like a fox' from me, btw. Like the internet for dummies, and "A pseudo marxist critique of freudian lesbianism from the 1950s". No just kidding.

We're thinking it will kick off around 1:30 PM, and we'd love you to intervene and save us from ourselves. We're going to hopefully provide chocolate chip cookies. Sunday, July 6th. COME GIVE US A HAND WE'RE WICKED SWEET. (That is true).

-- SARAH -&- the mighty d-block

JOB OPPORTUNITY: Infiltrate Vegan Potlucks for the FBI

Some at the Iron Rail tend to follow a more continental diet-- black coffee, unfiltered cigarettes, discarded shrimp heads, and whatever middle-aged married businessmen buy for us at bars-- but if you're willing to leave the Clamato out of your beer for a meal or two, Uncle Sam wants YOU to rat out your skinnier, less diabetic fellow-citizens in the run-up to the RNC:

http://articles.citypages.com/2008-05-21/news/moles-wanted/

"What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at 'vegan potlucks' throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,"

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

--the d-block