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Oil, by Atomic Chestertom

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  Oil By Atomic Chesterton Originally published in Softcartel     N___ was unsure if this was a dream or a video game.  There were surefire ways to tell, but he had forgotten them.  It’s all about targets, navigation, safe exits.   Something about grounding should tell you.     All he knew was that he was evidently in a shitty neighborhood in Chicago, and with a feeling of disgust cloaking him, as if he was soiled with something that would never come off.  The houses here were old townhouses, many boarded up.  There was a feeling of sharpness in the air--not just from the cold, but a certain old-country lilt.  It felt like an easter mural in an Orthodox church--bright primary colors and ethereal song, lurking behind the drab exterior reality.       But things would dissolve and rework periodically, into other scenes, only the refrain of breathing remaining constant.       I know I’m in danger.  She told me what he did to her.  He probably knows I know, he probably beat it out of her.  

Thelonious Monk, desiring-machines, and cultural production

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  Thelonious Monk, Desiring-Machines, and Cultural Production “Alas, I am a mere textual-production machine.”--Quote attributed to Gilles Deleuze--apparently the last words he uttered before throwing his body (and, presumably, his body without organs) out of the window of his flat in Paris. Thelonious Monk has long been considered an enigma--an outsider in the history of modern jazz--to the point of his supposed mental illness being considered as an explanation for his unique musical style and vocabulary.  More attention has been paid to his eccentricities than to the logic and cohesion that pervades his composition and improvisation. If we use the theories of the French post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze and his colleague Felix Guattari, we have a lens through which to view Monk’s cultural production and its relation to “mental illness,” capitalist production, desire, and flows.  Thelonious Monk is a great disjunction or rupture in the flow of modern jazz and the “mainstreaming” thereo

Why we should end the "war on fire"--for ecological reasons and for human health

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    Why We Should End the War on Fire This is a favorite pet issue for me, my primary political concerns are ecological, but as mike davis pointed out in [The Case for Letting  Malibu Burn]( https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/ ), the class aspects are not totally separable from the ecology.  I'm mostly not going to focus on the Mike Davis essay and the class analysis, bc trueanon already did that, and I think that some of the details about the science and wonk stuff from a different piece are worth shining a light on.  But mike Davis' essay is great for tracing some of the bizarre history, geography, and ecology of fire suppression.  It addresses how extremely wealthy homeowners in Malibu have basically gotten protected by the government and in some cases private fire fighting contractors.  the most bizarre part to me was how many homeowners in Malibu actually preemptively spray their shrubs with the commercially used fire retardant foam (the red