really really pretty

Regret and Remorse

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Regret and Remorse

Regret is a thicket

of leafy vine. Ivy knitted

across a red brick house,

regret makes recall a little sweeter.

Proper chances missed,

nervy risks mistook.

Badly spent nights

each in our cages, regret

hooks in the meat

of sadness, too.

Fond thoughts

on my lover’s smallish nose, or hip bone

ferment, regrettably, to cheap red wine.

If only remorse,

a long goodbye; a violent tongue,

could be so falsely fine.

Dave Hickey on Las Vegas, Attention

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 01:48:00 +0000

Dave Hickey‘s essay collection Air Guitar arrived in the mail yesterday and I read the first few pages today, at just the right time.

“America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.

What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place that Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home.

The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize–and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social difference rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.”

Class Wars Round-up

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:09:00 +0000

“Is Goldman Sachs Evil? Or Just Too Good?”

“This doesn’t sit right with some. “Much of their recent profits seemed to be derived from ‘trading,’ which typically means gambling—not lending,” says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who teaches at Columbia University. ‘It is lending which is required if our economy is to be revived; it was gambling that got our financial system into trouble.’”

Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a

giant “fuck you” to the rest of the country.

“The Great American Bubble Machine“

“From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they’re about to do it again.”

Sen. Sanders Letter to Ben Bernanke on Capping Goldman, AIG Executive Bonuses

“Executives at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions should not be allowed to reward huge bonuses and compensation packages, like the financial crisis never happened. They should be fired.

“Simply put, these firms don’t need to be retaining the same individulas responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

“The real price of Goldman’s giganto-profits”

“Now, ask yourself: exactly how big would Goldman’s profits be this year, if they had to fill a still-extant $13 billion or even a $20 billion hole on its balance sheet from AIG’s collapse? You think it would still be $3.44 billion? What if Hank Paulson had elected to save Lehman instead of saving AIG/Goldman, how big would Goldman’s profits be then? Is anyone even asking this question?”

“Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs Story Is A Joke”

“We’ll say, however, that the story is really not meant for an audience interested in a discussion of financial markets, as evidenced by his rhetorical style (almost everyone is simply an “asshole”), and his ridiculous leaps in logic (e.g. Goldman lowering its IPO underwriting standards created the .com bubble… and that explains how Nortel had a peak valuation of over $300 billion, how?).”

Good Stuff Round-Up

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Picture: Hank Williams III

Poem: “Advice to a Pregnant Daughter-in-Law”

Dress: Alexander McQueen @ Shrimpton Couture

Welcome to the circus: Why I <3 My Mentor

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:56:00 +0000

Suck it, SCOTUS. You’ll never see action like this.

“Ringmaster: No clowning at this circus”
Dallas Morning News
June 23, 2009

Everybody who showed up for Day One of the highly anticipated Dallas City Hall corruption trial quickly found out about the ringmaster: the no-nonsense woman in the robe.

The revelation occurred before folks could fall asleep waiting, you know, for something B-I-G to happen during the first day of jury selection.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn got this three-ring circus of a trial off the ground by cracking her legal whip at those who dared to defy a gag order she threw down 10 days ago.
“The court regards this as a very serious matter,” Lynn sternly admonished high-profile defendant Don Hill, a former council member who once had ambitious designs on the mayor’s office.

“I won’t prejudge whether it is criminal contempt,” said Lynn, who set a Nov. 2 hearing on whether Hill and his attorney, Ray Jackson, should be held in contempt of court for gabbing with reporters last week.

To be clear, Lynn told Hill that if he didn’t put a sock in it and stop hamming it up with reporters, she’d sock it to him next time.

“If you do [speak to the media about this case], you will immediately be taken into custody,” Lynn said.

P.T. Barnum would pay to see that exchange.

Alas, Hill, who spent much of the morning standing around with his hands in his pinstriped suit pockets talking to Jackson or other defendants, including his wife, Sheila Farrington, shrugged and uttered few words.

“I can’t say anything,” he told me when I asked during a break if he could comment on how things were going. “I can say hello, and that’s pretty much it. I’m not even sure we can talk about sports.”

Hill and other defendants who’ve pleaded not guilty apparently were thrown a knuckleball when Brian Potashnik, the housing developer at the center of the corruption scandal, didn’t show for the first day of trial on the 15th floor of the Earle Cabell Federal Building.

Potashnik and his wife, Cheryl, who also didn’t show, are accused of bribing Hill and others to benefit the Potashniks’ low-income housing projects.

When two featured acts fail to come under the tent, that can only lead to endless chatter in the peanut gallery, with most speculating the Potashniks had willingly climbed in the cage with federal prosecutors.

“In this situation, it’s fair to speculate that there may be a plea agreement in place,” said John Ratcliffe, a former U.S. attorney, now in private practice, who is monitoring the trial and was ambushed by reporters who were kicked out of the standing-room-only courtroom when jury selection began. “If there is a plea, that would be a very significant development.”
If the Potashniks rolled over, that may very well enable jurors to get back to their families before summer’s end.

“It makes the government’s work easier,” Ratcliffe said.

At one point, about 25 minutes after the judge had returned to the courtroom, a defense attorney handed a folded note to a prosecutor, who smiled and showed it to others on his team.
I thought something was about to break. Nothing happened.

The prosecution team looked eager and intimidating, with several spiraled, three-ring notebooks stacked neatly in front of them. I suspect they were trying to send a clear message to prospective jurors that they were loaded for bear.

Which is why I got a kick out of seeing Jackson, Hill’s attorney, stand up, lift his chair over his head and carry it to the other side of the defense table, where he then sat and calmly adjusted his red tie.

Too bad the sketch artists, the real stars of the first day’s action, didn’t capture that move. They had other concerns.

Gregory Conlin, commissioned by three TV stations to capture courtroom images, found out how tough Lynn is.

“I hope she’s not too mad at me,” Conlin said as he finished a drawing of the judge while sitting just outside her court on a bench. “I apparently didn’t get out of the room fast enough when she said it the first time. I was too busy drawing.

Conlin, 58, said he was packing up “as quickly as I could” when Lynn chided him. “She stopped me on the way out and said, ‘Excuse me, did you not hear me the first time?’ I hope she lets me back in. I need the work.”

She did, only to ask him and others to leave again once jury selection began.

“You talk about adverse conditions,” Conlin said, packing up his gear once again.

Welcome to the circus.

HuffPo: Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won)

reallyreallypretty — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:03:00 +0000

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_213176.html

Vintage and Designer on Etsy.com: Austin

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:21:00 +0000

Creepy baby @ 47th St. Supply Co.

Spanish dancer lithograph @ 47th St. Supply co.

Sweet tooth/angry tooth @ Niku

Plague of locusts cardigan, $35 @ artloaf

These purple suede boots are made for Maxine.

Boots @ 11eggs only $39!

Simple black dress with pretty + casual draping. $25 @ 11 eggs.

West Texas

reallyreallypretty — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:33:00 +0000

This I Believe

reallyreallypretty — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:21:00 +0000

1. When it comes to love, men who put more stock in logic than in lust should not be trusted.

Unrelatedly, Matthew Day Jackson is cute.

Kafka + Salinger

reallyreallypretty — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:38:00 +0000

“The actors by their presence always convince me, to my horror, that most of what I’ve written about them until now is false. It is false because I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this, too, becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.”

Franz Kafka, in J.D. Salinger (1963): “Seymore: An Introduction”