writing

I'm starting a new weekly column at the Anti-Advertising Agency. I'll be ferreting out advertising's presence and impact on culture, and presenting resistance strategies. I'll be posting on Fridays.

My first column went up yesterday, with exciting news! The Great Facebook Ad Debate of November 2007's been resolved! Lookery, the company behind the legal sticky-wicket, racked up its billionth impression weeks early. It seems they've failed to monetize social networks after all. But that doesn't mean they ain't still breakin' the law . . .

Read it here: www.antiadvertisingagency.com and bookmark the column here: http://antiadvertisingagency.com/author/anne.

Hello folks,

Just thought that Punk Planet's readers might like to know that Verbicide is trying to help plug a small part of the giant hole left by PP's demise: beginning with issue 23, which is at the printer right now, Larry Livermore's column will now appear in Verbicide Magazine.

Oh the places that you'll go to find someone that you know;

First off, I am preparing to embark on what could be a landmark for me. On Thursday after work, I'm planning to go check out my friends The New Dress, along with Attica Attica (ex-Marathon), Jena Berlin, and Polar Bear Club. It'll be my 6th time seeing The New Dress.

Before them, the most time I've seen any band was 3, 4 at the most. However, I have discovered my mission in life, and it is to see this blatant-but-proud Billy Bragg-copying duo as much as humanly possible and pimp them out whenever possible, to whatever chump will listen. Are you a chump? If so, look up and listen to The New Dress. They're not a loose collective of art-school dropouts who all sleep with each other and make "music" with some salvaged Fisher-Price keyboards, but nor are they muscle-bound 80's washouts who were down with someone who was down with a cousin of the original bassist for Born Against.

So, I'm kind of a pretentious git and have created a myspace to promote my various projects. It doesn't have a whole lot of stuff on there yet, but more things will be continually added. At this point there are a couple of event announcements, recordings of me reading poems, many pictures, and an adorable illustration (not mine) of a cat with a tampon.

If you're interested:

http://www.myspace.com/mirandabastardpoetry

Remember how that overrated hippy Kerouac somehow glamorized running on fumes as a writer and suddenly every Suicide Girl's boyfriend wants to waste themselves down to nothing writing meaningless drivel* while swigging Snapple they keep in a bottle of Jack since they aren't old enough to buy alcohol yet????

Yeah, me neither. Working all day and then coming home and working on other stuff until 2 or 3 am and then getting up to repeat the whole thing in the morning all over again isn't really that fun.

The plus side to this?

Alcohol tastes so much sweeter when I do manage to get out to a bar.

Writing, for me, is an excruciatingly painful process. It can take me hours to get through a simple paragraph--days sometimes to write an entire page. It's not that I'm constantly re-writing, but simply that when I sit down to write, everything stops.

It's not that I don't have the ideas; ideas are constantly churning through my head. It's that the act of writing is very unintuitive to me. It feels false--arranging for a time and space to annotate what's in your head--and, as a result, when I sit down to do it, my head aches and my fingers twitch.

I wish there were a simpler way of getting things down--I could be one of those assholes always speaking into a tape recorder, but then I'd have to sit down and type that up, and that can't possibly feel any more natural.

Hello again!

Thanks to everyone who has stopped in to say hi! I just wanted to point out that the content on SOP is kind of one sided right now because I've only got one series going, the Citizen Reports. I will continue this series, but I intend to do much more in depth articles as well.

But the real reason for this post is to let everyone know that we accept writing from external authors. Stop in at SOP today and if you have something to say, send it along. We just might publish it!

Thanks!

Justin M. Kolenc
a.k.a. the Mad Squid
http://www.stateofpunk.com/