Daily Miltonian

You will be at Halleluwah: A Festival of Enthused Music, at the Holocene, every day from Friday to Sunday. 

Featuring, of course, Damo Suzuki from Can, who made the song Halleluwah. Also appearing are a verified mess of your avant- and proto- and post- and psycho- and psyche- and PARTY-ON heavy-hitters such as Califone, the Blow, Tara Jane O’Neil, Panther, Yellow Swans, Bowerbirds, the Joggers, White Rainbow, Valet, Dark Meat, and They Shoot Horses Don’t They?

And even more. Wow.

Wait wait–say it with me: WOW. Fun to say, isn’t it?

In the In Case You’re Wondering Dept.: Halleluwah, as a word,  is a Germanized way to be excited, which is also a pretty apt description of what most avant-type music tends to be. Well… that or Nipponized, but seriously: Kim Gordon and Momus–like the rest of us, I hope–have long ago agreed that the Germans and Japanese are pretty much the same thing.

See what I mean? Same.

WHAT YOU ARE ALSO DOING AND GOING TO, ALSO

Reading Frenzy, one of our finest comic/zine/printed-word stores, turns 13 this Saturday. You should come. They have promised (and I believe them) deep, ridiculous book discounts, and treats, and prizes. I love prizes, and so do you. I love treats, and so does everybody.

You’d want people to come, too, if you were turning 13. That’s mitzvah year, people. It’s epic. You go crazy turning 13. Take a wife, or a husband, build a life, grow hair, learn algebra, learn the meaning of sin, smoke cigarettes behind the bleachers, shoplift, steal kisses, drink beer and pretend to like it, dive off the St. John’s Bridge, dive off the high dive in Oregon City, swear off hard candy, throw a party, dear God SOMETHING.

And what a nice weekend, people. It’s sunny. Barbecue something important this Labor Day, breathe deeply, punch a friend in the shoulder, and think about the Unions. Think about the America that still matters.

Just when you thought the Epic Series was ending (Summer: This Summer’s Smash Hit), here comes the Latest Chapter…Summer Four: Endless Summer. Some things to keep in mind, re: S4. One: we truly believe that summer will never end. Two: when it’s warm, we swim. And three: high scores.

King of Kong is currently playing at Cinema 21, conveniently located just down the street from our NW/NW offices. This is the trailer for the film:

So, in the spirit of S4 End-of-Summer Competition, we are sending out a request to you, our dear Daily readers, for your high scores. It’s a fact, this town is chock-full of vintage arcade consoles, often to be found in the dardnest of places (There’s a Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker at Pizza Schmizza, for chrissakes!). So it doesn’t matter where you find the machine…although, obviously Ground Kontrol is your source for the most machines in one easy-to-manage space. Just play the machine. And by play we mean play to win.

Cameraphone, digital photo, Polaroid, don’t matter. Get as high of a score as possible and snap a pic of the high-score screen with your initials on there. Because you are our friend and we know you are honest, we will believe the initials are yours. Send the fruits of your labor to our BRAND NEW/WAY SHINY email address, dailymiltonian@gmail.com!

Ladies? Gentlemen? Grab your quarters and go to town. We’ll be right here, waiting for your results.

That’s right! All you have to do to get your name and your picture up in lights is put some bubble bath in a Portland fountain. Repeat after me, celebrity hopefuls: “I was tryin’ to bathe the homeless! You fascists!”

The Portland Water Bureau’s blog (yes, it’s true) will then provide you with a free publicity headshot and description of your crimes, thus ensuring mad props for weeks, slightly more frequent sex, and probable unemployability.

Here’s Nolan Cunningham!

Nolan put some detergent–not bubble bath, unfortunately–in the Ira Keller Fountain, which is basically a Portland Mecca for kids who like to yell a lot and slip on rocks.

God, life is pretty sometimes. Isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to bathe here, as do Indians in the Ganges, or Romans in the filth of their swine?

Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Future celebrities: there are some other Portland fountains we would like to bathe in. Fort Saint Davids needs cleansing. Some examples below:

Lovejoy Fountain:

Salmon Street Springs:

Peninsula Park:

We’ve got a vigilante Water Bureau–a proud one–and the cleanest drinking water outside of New York City. So you’ve got a lot of work to do.

Jack “The King” Kirby would have been ninety today. Comics Reporter, a blog that we feel gets grumpier pretty much every day, still remains the place that delivers when it comes to mini-galleries like this one: just some images, random images, GREAT images, of artwork by Jack Kirby. Whether you like comics or not, please — do yourself a favor and take a look at this. The energy of his linework simply crackles with mad genius and crazy fun, and if you haven’t had your afternoon coffee today, save yourself the cash and look at this stuff instead. It’s got the juice.

Long live the King!

WHERE YOU WILL GO AND WHAT YOU WILL DO, TONIGHT IN PORTLAND:

Pretty much a no-brainer, you will go see folk-legend Bert Jansch tonight. Philly favorite Meg Baird is the opener. Bert was in Pentangle. Meg is in Espers. That’s old freakfolk you love and new freakfolk you love. Meaning: you will love this show. We’ll see you there!

Lola’s Room at the Crystal, tonight!

Writers, they told me in Communist youth camp, are the engineers of the human soul. So it’s small wonder that MTV wouldn’t sit idly by while laureate Charles Simic single-handedly rebuilds our spirit for the Good Ol’ U.S. of A: making the Real World shimmer, or the Road Rules lose their sway. We now have a dueling poet laureate—kind of like the Avignon pope—fighting for MTV and the youth.

Now, Brock-Broido could have intimidated, Jorie Graham menaced, Carl Phillips thrown their collective desk out a window, but John Ashbery? Holy crud. He’s the last living giant of the former world, a monster from beyond it.

Well, we’ve decided that this absolutely isn’t the same thing as William Burroughs, all rumpled skin and knobby bone, out there on the blacktop shilling for Nike. (How sad was that?)

No, somehow old John is too slippery, actually being stumped for by the network, pushed as the next icon of the new, fifty years after the fact. Because, to the young, everything old is new.

And somewhere instantaneity becomes a little less plausible.

So here’s a little sumthin’ sumthin’ from Mr. Ashbery, whom we here, we Miltonians, we FSD, regard quite highly after all:

From “The New Spirit”:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

      clean-washed sea

                                            The flowers were.

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will, something comes to stand in their place. Not the truth, perhaps, but – yourself. If is you who made this, therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on to divide all.

Good luck, John. You get out there and fight.

Chances are, if you’ve been down to the Miltonian offices, you’ve already experienced firsthand that we will pretty much try to inflate just about anything that’ll hold still long enough for us to get a nozzle on it.

So you can imagine our excitement when we find out that somebody’s been doing the same thing with the good ol’ aeroplane. Neither blimp nor plane, it merely is, sits majestic in its isness, a standing insult to quiddity.

That’s a very large plane blimp aeromoballoonabile, needless to say.

It takes off like a helicopter, straight up, and goes pretty fast and uses half the fuel of a normal jetliner because they pumped it so full of helium it’s just like every birthday party you’ve ever had, and they’re showing me hypothetical interiors that look like Logan’s Run, and they’ve promised me on-flight massages and wetbars and mile-high ping pong and lifelong sexual fulfillment and 30 bonus IQ points with each and every flight.

This, my friends, is what the future looks like. It looks bright. We are building a world in the sky, and we want you to join us there.

Dear readers, we are going gladly to live in the future of the past.

SWAMP! is the tentative title for a tentative project for FSD’s tentative new imprint: FSD. Swamp! will be an anthology of stories, artworks, and comix about monsters that live in swamps. If interested in contributing to such a project, do write us. The final product will most likely be executed on the smallest budget possible, probably in the form of a crude zine. But it will be a product that you can hold, which is good, because everyone should have a portable compedium of stories and illustrations that feature gruesome swamp creatures living in swamps. Get caught reading this one on the bus.

Related: have you ever been to a swamp? Do you think about swamps often? Are there swamps near where you live? Do you live inside an actual swamp? These are important questions, to us, on this particular afternoon.

FSD/NW/PDX/Adventureclub/Sodaquest: boat leaves tomorrow, heading into Vancouver, WA, for sodas. Check frequently for future locations/destinations/activities/stuffs. Sodas.

We’re currently excited about this prospect, the prospect of crossing the state line, heading north, to drink soda. We’re thirsty right now, and only soda can save us. Soda! The quest for soda.

A hole almost a billion light-years across has been discovered in the universe, devoid of stars, gas, matter, and dark matter.

Illustration of the effect of matter on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). On the right, the CMB is released shortly after the Big Bang, with tiny ripples in temperature due to fluctuations in the early universe. As the radiation traverses the universe, it experiences slight perturbations. In the direction of the giant newly-discovered void, the WMAP satellite (top left) sees a cold spot, while the VLA (bottom left) sees fewer radio-emitting galaxies. CREDIT: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF, NASA
Caption courtesy Space.com

The hole (not to be confused with a black hole, because instead of containing densely packed matter with an immeasurably powerful magnetic pull, this area contains literally nothing, having no effect on the area surrounding it) was found in the constellation Eridanus. It’s size is the real factor causing such a stir in the scientific community. Little speculation has been made as to why it is there in the professional community, but amongst armchair astronomers, theories are abounding: a somewhat metaphysical interpretation of reality, “Plasma Cosmology,” allows for the phenomenon whereas it is difficult to reconcile with the Big Bang.

Much as every scandal becomes true once you append a -gate to it (Watergate, Whitewatergate, Blackwatergate, China Gate [below]), every trendlet stirring the waters has at its edge a -core, whether it be hard-, emo-, metal-, post-, or, at the moment, Mumblecore, as gamely humored in the New York Times.

Mumblecore is a bunch of low-budget movies made by, for and about the American zeitgeist’s current salt of the earth: young, upper-middle-class-to-rich, overeducated white kids, nervous about sex, who talk a lot and look sort of dateable. You know, Noah Baumbach types, but soft-talky.

It would be easy to hate on this, but it’s official: We here at the Daily Miltonian hereby salute every movement with a name on it, especially if you stick your hands in your pockets and shuffle around nervously when people ask you about it.

Here’s an unofficial Mumblecore Diagram. Go crazy, you crazy kids:

Neutria + Terror Class, tonight, at the Know, 2026 NE Alberta.  Come for the loud, stay for the loud.  This is the FSD Weekend Pick, so it can’t be bad.  In fact: it’s good.