[The following horoscope was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Kozmic Kev. He can be reached at kozmickev@sunset.net.]

Aries: Make it good and make it work. The moon aligns with Mars in your seventh house. Do your part to help make peace. The planets and stars support this decision. Work towards having better relationships. Whether it involves work or romance, do what it takes. Moneymaking opportunities may present themselves.
Taurus: Love and service come together for you this week. Get beyond guilt and move into action. When it comes to kids, know that it’s work. Drop any expectations that go beyond love and truth. As far as creative projects are concerned, go with things that require commitment and take a long time. Pace yourself.
Gemini: In many ways you are benefiting from your father’s side of the family during this cycle. Think in terms of what makes a home. You’ve got the creative juice to move mountains. Now is a time when children or band mates are likely to call on you. The real question is what is in your heart, and how do you respond to it?
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[Synthesis blog once again brings you the philosophy of Synthesis Weekly columnist Mad Bob. With no further adieu, we present to you Immaculate Infection.]

In My Hour of Darkness

I am suffering through a crisis of confidence.

More after the jump. (more…)

[The following article was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Julia Murphy. She can be reached at ninjatreehugger@gmail.com. She likes it when you ride a bike.]

Land Of The Gun

A gun is a tool, a tool of extraction. It is made to extract life from the body. Whether or not you use it for this purpose, this is what it has been engineered for. There are other tools of similar purpose, simpler and less remote, with a reliance on the inherent physical strength of the tool’s user. However, none of these other tools inspire the same cult or cultural worship that the gun does.
The ability to kill something, a very specific something, from a great distance is a manifestation of power. It also allows the luxury of ignorance. If you choose, you can cap something from 500 yards (theoretically, if you’re an ace shooter) and ignore it completely. “That’s good enough for me,” you might say. “I don’t need to walk up on that shit and see the whole Faces of Death routine.”
I sort of like guns, but it’s not an amicable friendship; it’s unwholesome. I don’t want to kill shit, I surely don’t. But I have to say, I’d love to be able to stop something that was about to eat or otherwise harm me.
However, this is sort of where it falls apart. I’ve made it through 38 years without packin’. Shit happens. If you have guns — if you carry and use and love the shit out of guns — how does that change how you act? Does it make you just a little more cocky knowing you get to play, in the words of PC Danny Butterman, “Judge Judy and executioner”? Does it make you a little less willing to negotiate?

Recently an article on Yahoo Green featured interviews with some folks who are lucky enough to have homes to homestead about their preparations for what they see as the societal effects of peak oil. The article cites stockpiling weapons as one of the actions these folks are taking “to defend their supplies against desperate crowds of people who didn’t prepare.”
We’re used to thinking in scarcity and fear. It’s what our society requires in order for us to keep our heads down and keep working. The option, as presented by the Man: “Anarchy, which would mean chaos and mob rules,” when the anarchists I know are some of the most responsible and respectful people I’ve ever met. Interestingly, Ammon Hennacy, anarchist homeboy of the late great Utah Phillips, had a jailhouse conversion with the Jeebus and, follow the logic: True Christianity means pacifism, and governments constantly make war, so to be a real Christian you have to be an anarchist. Interesting.

More leftist rhetoric after the jump. (more…)

[The following was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Emilie Clark. She can be reached at emilie@synthesis.net.]

Little Things: A Memoir in Slices
By Jeffrey Brown
Touchstone

So I’ll just come right out and say it: This is not a great book. People who are coming to Jeffrey Brown’s work for the first time should avoid this book entirely (try Clumsy and I Am Going to Be Small instead). But any book by Brown is better than a book by many other people, so let’s not disregard it entirely.
Brown started his career in comics tentatively, forced to publish his first books on his own. But now he’s become a household name — at least if you live in the kind of house where you discuss indie comics. He is famous for his realistic, heartbreaking dissections of the intimacies and distances in relationships. Little Things is his longest book to date, and, rather than being one autobiographical narrative he presents the events of two years of his life in smaller, unstructured narratives. As you might imagine the stories focus on the little, and often more mundane moments in life. Brown’s large-headed, stubble-heavy caricature of himself spends a lot of time having boring conversations with his friends, gets a cat, and goes on a lot of trips to visit friends. Even the more exciting parts of the narrative — including two hospitalizations and a car accident — are reduced to the smaller, quieter moments.

…more after the jump… (more…)

[The following entry was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Emilie Clark. She can be reached at emilie@synthesis.net ]

I Was Told There’d Be Cake
By Sloane Crosley
Riverhead

I, like everyone else interested in book publishing, journalism, music or theater, have always fantasized about moving to New York City. That’s where it all happens, you know, and I heard if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. I discarded that pipe dream a while back, but NYC still interests me. Which is why I read Gawker on occasion and keep up on the New York literary world though the Internet. I guess it’s inevitable to know a lot about the city and its inhabitants since most media spawns from within its confines. This is a long-winded way of saying that I had some definite preconceptions about New York publicist Sloane Crosley’s debut book.
According to The New York Observer, Sloane Crosley’s path to writing started with a mass e-mail to some friends describing a story that would later become an essay in the book. The story is about how when moving from one apartment to another (three blocks away) she locked herself out of both apartments. It’s a funny story in the book and I’m sure it was a funny e-mail, but that’s not important. What’s important is that one of her friends — and therefore e-mail recipient — was the editor at The Village Voice and offered to publish a polished-up version of the story. This is essentially how Crosley became famous. And it’s also why I’m having a hard time liking her. I can’t help but wonder how different my life and writing career would be if I were friends with the editor of The Village Voice. But I guess my envy is really neither here nor there.

Now that we’ve whetted your interest, the actual review can be found after the jump… (more…)

[The following was written by Synthesis Weekly columnist Emilie Clark. She can be reached at emilie@synthesis.net]

Helping Me Help Myself
By Beth Lisick
William Morrow

So graduation is upon us. My main advice to graduates would be to rethink the whole idea and stay in college forever, but it’s probably too late for most of you so you’ll have to go ahead and graduate. Too bad.
Many of you probably think graduation will be the start of your “real life.” You know, the one where you get a job, stop spending so much of your money on beer and start to become your parents. But with the economy the way it is, don’t count on it. In fact, you might end up like Beth Lisick, who makes a substantial chunk of her income from donning a banana suit and passing out fruit to passersby. It is at this point that you, like Lisick, may decide that you need a bit of help — self-help to be exact.

Helping Me Help Myself is the memoir of a year spent devoted to living the advice contained in self-help books. Every month she picks a different facet of her life that could be improved and sets about improving it. Lisick tries all the greats: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus; The Artist’s Way; Suze Orman and even Richard Simmons. As you might suspect she comes at this task from a highly cynical point of view. Lisick is a slam poet/author/banana suit wearer living in Berkeley — not you your typical self-helper. But as cynical as she is, she’s also fair and does her best to quell her gag reflex in order to let the self-help really sink in. And along the way the reader can’t help but pick up some good tips, too.
The book is very funny, which is pretty much my only criteria for a good review, and you do come away with a sense that Lisick learned something in her quest. But I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that by December no major revelation had been reached. The only things that seem to change in her life are smaller, practical things, and the big questions she starts out with are never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps that’s to be expected when you devote your intellectual activity to books you can purchase at the grocery store, but I still felt unsatisfied when it was over. Thankfully though, Lisick’s personality and sense of humor make the memoir still worth the cover price and the few days it took to read.

More after the jump. (more…)