Empty Jar

He stared at the tiger — “They’re just such beautiful animals,” he says — and then the shots rang out. Blake watched a patch of fur, like a leaf of paper caught in the wind, blow clean off the tiger’s back. One moment that patch of fur was there, thick and orange, and then it was gone, grabbed by the coming storm and scattered across the grass like seeds. Now his headlights caught a flash of the tiger’s disrobed spine instead, a thick column of white stripped down to its core. Blake saw the architecture of a tiger in the instant before it collapsed. “I just never seen anything like it in my life,” he says.

Even the smartest and most active of Russia’s current twentysomethings matured into a world of total political apathy, where any kind of enthusiasm for the business of governance was seen as either extremely naïve or cynical. Many sublimated whatever civic urges they had into the so-called theory of small deeds.

There’s a direct co-relation between bearded singers and awesomeness: Iron & Wine, Elbow, Band of Horses, TV on the Radio… Beautiful.

Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.