THE FINAL KLANGS SHOW

Friday May 2nd

7:00 p.m.

8 bucks

Crosstown Station

w/ the Khrusty Brothers

This is your last time to see me dance fighting in a unitard!!!

There is also a secret special effects masterpiece in the works that you will not want to miss.

So if there is one thing I hate it is poor city planning. This is the worst example of excess, and suburban sameness that I have seen in a long, long time. Just off I-35 south of Kansas City in the suburb of Merriam, KS there is an abandoned strip mall. It makes me kind of sad.

Just before the economy went to hell, Merriam decided it didn't have enough ugly, land wasting, consumption inducing, retail space. This new waste of space is right across the street from another enormous collection of generic buildings in a straight line with excessive parking. That project was built on land that was obtained 7 years ago through the evil government practice of perverting Eminent Domain to create strip malls.



At first, I assumed this project was also stolen from the people for the benefit of corporations. As it turns out, this time Merriam paid home owners full (pre-housing bubble) price, before they converted their homes into parking lots. 

Don't worry about Corporate America though, they won't be paying taxes for this TIF land for a long, long time.



The way I understand it TIF areas should be blighted. You tell me what is more of a blight, a neighborhood full of 1940's ranch style houses and a used car dealership, or a barren landscape surrounded by a useless wall begging to be graffitied.

The ironic twist, as you may have deduced, is that Circuit City was set to be the flagship store. But with all of their poor treatment of workers and bankruptcy, they don't really need a Merriam location anymore.

If you live in Kansas City, take a second to drive up there and look at this wasteland. It is eerie. It makes me more sad than anything to see the community betrayed like this. Let this be a cautionary tale to all city planners. Don't build stuff we don't need with tax payer money, anticipating sales tax revenue that may never exist. Or keep doing it, because it seems like not very many people care.

Great Graffiti in Kansas City!!!

Notice this Property is monitored by video surveillance?

Haiku Captions

proud and angular;
reflective, industrial
she reaches toward sky.

I like my friend Drew. He is a photographer that takes pretty sweet photographs all the time. I just put a link to his picture blog. Ignore the ones of weddings or babies and only look at the random shots.

I've been wanting to write poems inspired by his stuff for a while. I decided to do Haiku Captions because I think this form fits his style. Not that he's Asian, because he isn't.


Check out his Flicker

Or if you need pictures of your weddings and babies and random stuff go to his business website Van Horn Visuals

Colbert Talks Poetry

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

I freaking love this man!!!

I read an essay by Bruce Ellis Benson today at one of my favorite sites The Matthew's House Project. The piece is titled How Not to be an Artistic Whore. It is a basic discussion of how one's philosophy of art interacts with faith. I haven't spent much time with this question since college. I used to spend hours fashioning my ideas about myself, my God and my art. I used to be quite opinonated on such ideas as "Christian Art" versus "Art which happened to made by people who are Christians."

I find very little of this semantic nonsense useful in my current life as an educational whore. But these ideas still fascinate me. Benson breaks down a character from Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev. Asher Lev is a Hasidic Jew who a young age shows himself to be a gifted artist. Art is forbidden by his community and is seen as creating false idols. The book is a story of that tension. I put this book on my reading list and look forward to wrestling with these bygone ideas.

Recklessly innocent; He stayed, fearless
Eternity embodied in Immaturity
A boy with business
Pulled into the presence of priesthood
Melchizedek in miniature.

Three days later.
Three worrisome wisdom filled days.
Three timeless tomb-less questioning days after.

Caught in the act of defiant worship
Can a mother reprimand her Savior?
Where else would he be?
Being Human fully at the feet of forever.

Then He obeyed.

I came across a poet that I find totally awesome today while pretentiously reading The New Yorker online. He is perfectly weird: exquisitely eccentric and intelligently silly. And apparently he happens to teach at Columbia College Chicago. If you like it check out 5 more of his poems.

Alien vs. Predator

by Michael Robbins January 12, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys
for a living, you’d pray to me, too.
I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,
but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?
I fight the comets, lick the moon,
pave its lonely streets.
The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.

I go by many names: Buju Banton,
Camel Light, the New York Times.
Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.
I have few legs. I sleep on meat.
I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

I freaking love the line "I translate the Bible into velociraptor." Man I wish I could have taken some poetry while I was wasting all that money on a theater degree.

This is the full episode of FOTC Season 2. I love that they put it online!!!

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

This is the greatest show on Television. I'm glad my friend Anni has HBO so I can catch all of the goodness.

Since I am too busy to write as of late I give you poems of a different, far more talented poet named Billy



Billy Collins is awesome!!!