Uncle Walt

It has been a week of transcendent joys here at Combat! blog, and one of the things we transcended was collecting links for Friday. You know I’ve been having fun for the last several days because my Evernote has not steadily filled up with internet articles, which initially presented a problem. Fortunately, joy—by which term I mean weirdo shit—is all around us. Today’s links are short, poorly articulated and striking in ways that thwart comprehension. They’re what the European Romantics called sublime, and the arbitrary unification of the sublime is what the American Romantics called transcendence. Around here, we just call it Friday. Drop your socks and grab your unkempt beards, because the transcendent brilliance of the internet is about to blow your face off. Believe it or not, it starts with Rick Santorum after the jump.

Skip to 1:19 of this video for what the pros call a gaffe. For those of you who hate moving images, Republican presidential candidate and career bigot Rick Santorum concluded his remarks on Iran in last night’s Fox debate with, “If Rick Santorum—and when Rick Santorum—is President, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon, because the world as we know it will be no more.” In my opinion, it’s the bell that makes it. Earlier in the same line of questioning, he also criticized the government of Iran for mistreating gays. Et tu, man who compared homosexual marriage to bestiality?

Sometimes, you get so caught up in saying something that you don’t think about, um, what you’re saying. That was probably the cause of this headline, since corrected in the CNN version but preserved for eternity on some janky adsite. Obviously, a woman being murdered in the grocery store is not funny. And yet there are so many funny/awful/awfully funny readings of that headline, as Carolyn Jacobson pointed out. You know that feeling that’s like guilt and amusement and shame and the desire to show other people all at the same time? Neither do I—sublime, suckahs!

In my search for a show report on Jeff Mangum’s performance in Montreal Wednesday night, I found this perceptive/extraordinarily pretentious blog post. First, that’s a cool ideogrammatic poem in which every syllable is pronounced “shi,” dude. Second, Mangum does not have a “cranberry voice,” and to say that “every time I make a metaphor with flowers—blooms, buds, curls—it is a tribute to him” is not to offer much of a tribute. In the diction objective “startling and true,” the important part is “true.” But I agree with Sean that it was a little unclear what Mangum was after in his set of beloved thirteen year-old songs performed after a ten-year absence. If he just wanted to feel the love, he felt it—from me and from the remarkably attentive crowd. If he wants to return to making music, though, his comeback felt a little like a go-back. I personally wanted to go back, and it was a thrilling performance that I am very, very glad I saw. But I want to go forward with Jeff Mangum, too.

A less equivocal joy can be found in this video capturing the condition of being a cat:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpl5mOAXNl4

Props to Lauren “Joey” Adams for the link. My personal favorite is the brief, sad observation that the cute cat doesn’t even know it’s going to die. It’s the drop of black that sharpens the picture, and I submit it’s what makes the cat cute in life. That kitty is probably all grown up now, yet the state of kittenhood transcends. So too the weekend will come upon us and then pass, and so too will immanence pass into transcendence again and again, this process itself transcending any iteration. I will leave New York tomorrow and return to life in Missoula, where radness will continue in a different form. It is the missing that makes the future, and the future that will be missed. At least Santorum will live forever.

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