Archive for the 'Ms. Ah-Ha' Category

I Send Greetings

Published March 23, 2013 Ala , Capital Crime , Cineman , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat 5 Comments

Science Men, they are always wanting to Know.

Which is a worthy pursuit.

Mostly.

Times are tough, these days, for Science Men. Because a lot of what a lot of Science Men want these days to Know, involves stuff the Science Men cannot see, or otherwise sense or easily detect. And/or that is, additionally, remote in space and/or time.

And so, they operate, most often, in the land of Guesstimate.

This can, and does, result in a lot of flipbook-rapid changing of opinions. As the Science Men seek to squint, ever finely, through a glass darkly. It also can, and does, result in bouts of belligerent bickering with one another.

This last is currently on display in the ongoing controversy over whether the Voyager 1 landingspacecraft has or has not left the local solar system. Some Science Men say it has; some Science Men say it hasn’t. But none of them really Know. Because Voyager 1 is out there some 123 AU from Earth. Where no Science Man has ever boldly gone before. Out there some 123 AU from Earth, Voyager either is or is not in the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a thing the Science Men think exists. Though they don’t really Know. Because they have never been there. And the boundaries of this heliosphere, these they don’t really Know, either.

But they sure have a lot of opinions.

To those of us who closely follow Science, the Science Men quarreling over the present position of Voyager 1 is amusing, in a “fighting in the captain’s tower” sort of way. To wit:

ezra pound and t. s. eliot
fighting in the captain’s tower
while calypso singers laugh at them
and fishermen hold flowers

This is because we, we wizened Science-followers, Know that the interstellar mission of the twin Voyager probes, has already been accomplished.

So it don’t really matter, now, wherever the things might be.

You see, each of these Voyager craft were touchingly dispatched with a “golden record” aboard, one that space bridgescontained pictures and sounds of Earth and its beings, and also directions on how to Get Here. It was hoped, by the humans, that some spacefaring strangers would happen upon one or more of these craft, spin the disc, and then come to visit.

It was so embarrassing. What was, and was not, included, on the “golden record.”

Because hide-your-head-in-shame knuckledragging ur-human retroverts succeeded in erasing from the disc accurate illustrations of the male and female human being.

They objected, these swamp-coolers, to the depiction of the reproductive organs, of male and female.

And so, these were eliminated.

The “golden record” thus went into the great wide open, showing only human “silhouettes.”

All the “naughty parts,” airbrushed out.

Leading any passing extraterrestrials to wonder: how the fuck do these humanoids reproduce? Since they lack the parts to fuck?

Fortunately, past the hang-your-head-in-shame knuckledragging ur-human retroverts, passed a recording, successfully placed on the “golden record,” of the Rolling Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

That that alone, was sent out there into space, means the species shall survive.

For: ah—upon hearing this, would understand any passing extraterrestrial—I get it. One of those planets.

This, in fact, occurred. The interception of a Voyager. By an extraterrestrial race.

As set forth in the 1984 documentary film Starman.

There we learn that extraterrestrials scooped up Voyager 2, grooved to the pictures, words, and tunes contained therein, and then sent an ambassador to Earth . . . a being who, as soon as s/he entered the planet’s atmosphere, was promptly shot out of the sky by the yeehaws of ekpyrosis.

But extraterrestrials are not so easily extinguished.

The ambassador, abandoning the crippled craft, found nearby some stray human DNA, and so fashioned a temporary corporeal container. Of the young Jeff Bridges.

Not a bad choice.

The news clip below depicts the encounter of the newly incarnated Space Bridges with his first human, a female monikered Jenny Hayden.

Who, upon hearing the naked, and decidedly strange, Space Bridges, recite lines from the Voyager 2 “golden record,” loses consciousness.

Things get better.

Jenny Hayden assists the Space Bridges in traveling cross-country to the Barringer Crater in Arizona. This, it develops, is the traditional landing pad for the Space Bridges form of extraterrestrial (said pad, spacecraft descending, may be viewed in the image that inaugurates this here True Science story). There, at the Crater, the Space Bridges can hitch a ride back home.

The beings of the Space Bridges, we learn, have, over the millennia, monitored humans, from time to time.

They are hardly the only race of extraterrestrials to so indulge. As the documentary film 2001: A Space Odyssey amply demonstrates.

Of course, in order for Jenny Hayden and the Space Bridges to reach the Crater, they must many times evade the yeehaws of ekpyrosis. Who desperately want to lay hands on the Space Bridges. So they can avidly yeehawkill and joyfully dissect him.

Because the yeehaws of ekpyrosis can never be happy, so long as they are not avidly killing, and joyfully dissecting, any and all people, places, and things.

Which is why extraterrestrial beings like the Space Bridges do not straight-forward contact the whole of humanity.

Before the Space Bridges goes home, he and Jenny Hayden engage in tender and loving, Real, sexual congress. Which, in the course of things, results in a child, representative of both species.

Such a thing is not all that uncommon. In fact, as we speak, the Huffington Post, also known as the Weekly World News of the intertubes, is canvassing for people willing to tell all about engaging in sexual relations with extraterrestrials. So far, it is said, there have been 15 respondents.

But all these people lie. Because humans, and extraterrestrials, who join in Desire, do not kiss and tell.

Those who Know the true-life documentary film Starman are aware that the Space Bridges arrives on this planet equipped with a number of silver balls, what it iswhat humans would consider more or less magical and/or transformational objects, which he may deploy, from the palm of his hand, if needful—and the need several times arises—to protect him, and his, or project him, and his, from the extreme and unnatural Danger and Weirdness that is this Earth.

I don’t suppose that it will come as a surprise, to anyone who has long been on this blog, and in anywise Aware, that I am not unfamiliar with these balls.

And that, as shown in the photo there above, I, from time to time, come to hold one, in the palm of my hand.

Love Is My Badge

Published February 27, 2013 Ala , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 2 Comments

And They, Can See Ours

Published February 25, 2013 Ala , Cineman , Into The Light , Ms. Ah-Ha , Wyrds Leave a Comment

Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture: 1968.

Of course, the Academy bestowed but two of these awards.

But so what? They’re all Real.

Who I Am

Published December 22, 2012 Animal Matters , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Oddbins , Outer Limits , Peasant Palate , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 1 Comment

I Give You Always

Published November 16, 2012 Ala , Into The Light , Ms. Ah-Ha , Wyrds 1 Comment

Wednesday night I had to drive down to the town for a file-switch with the lawyer.

On my way back up the hill, I stopped at the cheap gas station for some fumes for the truck. While there, I thought I’d also pick up a pack of smokes.

I asked the guy for some GPCs, and he crouched down to rummage around under the counter. He began emitting muffled language, but I couldn’t understand it: he hails from the Middle East, and I do not, so there was something of a communication problem.

When his head reappeared, I was able to understand that he was offering that if I bought two packs, I could get them for ten dollars. Which is something of a deal around here. So I said yes: he sold me.

I asked him if the place always offered GPCs that cheap, and he pointed to a hand-lettered sign inlaid on the counter, offering, for a time, Marlboros and Camels, at two packs for ten bucks. He let me understand that he thought he’d pass the same deal on to me with GPCs.

I thanked him, and turned to go.

“Come back,” he said. “I give you always.”

Now, I know that he meant that if I kept coming by the store, he would recurrently sell me the smokes two packs for ten dollars. This he expressed in “incorrect” English. But I was so charmed with what he said. So much finer than “real” English.

“I give you always.” What a wonderful thought.

I Am Complete

Published July 22, 2012 Ala , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 6 Comments

Twitch And Smoke And Rotate Endlessly

Published July 19, 2012 Ala , Asia , Capital Crime , Caribbean , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , War On Terra , Wyrds 4 Comments

(Around about the 4th of July Meteor Blades put up “Thoughts Ahead Of Independence Day,” over on the Orange Place.

(That was a good Diary. It reminded me somewhat of something I’d penned myself, back in the 1990s. Not nearly as polished and precise, mine, as Meteor’s work; but then, after all, he is he, and I am me.

(Then, later that very same day—because sometimes that’s the way these things happen—I actually ran across the thing that I’d long-ago written. And I thought maybe I’d put it up for July 4th.

(But then that seemed like so much work. To retype it for the tubes.

(So I abandoned that idea: because, basically, these days, I’m fat and happy and lazy, and pretty consistently vote “no” on anything that seems like work.

(But then, for reasons that best remain obscured, I was galvanized to enter the thing—changed some, naturally, because the intertubes allows one to do that—after all.

(A day or 18 late, of course. And several hundred thousand dollars short.

(What’s interesting to me now, about this piece, is how angry I was then. Because I’m just not that angry anymore.

(But that’s a different Diary.)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it.

—Kenneth Patchen

“They’ve gone crazy.”

High above Second Street, in his nook in his cranny in the Chico News & Review editorial sukkah, journalissimo Jason Ross stood erect in full naked fulmination.

“They’re acting like it’s VJ Day, for chrissake,” he fumed. “And all they’re doing is putting up a flag. Ads all over the radio, live television coverage, Bruce Sessions beating the drum hourly—these people have lost all control.

“Look,” he demanded, freeing paper pinned to his wall. “Look at this.” Thrusts forth a Calvin Klein image, pleading to peddle Obsession for Men, flashing a giant b&w naked male torso: above, the head peers downward; below, a hand stretches open, and taut, the front of a pair of briefs.

“That’s what they’re doing, with all this flag bullshit,” Ross declaims. “Looking at their cocks. That’s all it is.”

Though Ross is a direct descendant of the dowdy dowager who sewed the first stars and stripes, in a fetching but ultimately futile attempt to seduce George Washington, he was not at all impressed with the day’s flag-waving affair.

For this day, out in the asphalt lot afront Ron and Nancy’s, the Park Avenue steak & scotch joint where cigarette smoke goes to die, a zealous swarm of north valley idolworshippers planned to raise a massive banner in honor of some nonsense known as “America.”

Karma—and, more urgently, the need for money—had called on Billy Buck Naked and I to cover the erection. We’d stopped by the office on the way to the event to grab a camera, and to receive last-minute instructions from the international communist cabal that controls the CN&R.

“If there are going to be dicks on display I guess we better forget the pictures,” Naked now mourned. “Speer’ll never print them. I used to work here; I know.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “These are Republicans; it’s against their religion to get naked. A lot of these characters aren’t really attired like you and I anyway. Bernie Richter, Wally Herger, Ted Hubert—those people don’t change clothes; they shed.”

“Then let’s get going,” Naked urged. “I don’t want to miss the blessing of the tanks.”

furthur=>

The Green Light

Published July 19, 2012 Ala , Cineman , Destry , Eros , First Peoples , Into The Light , Johnny Law , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Rutting For Office , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds 2 Comments

The very most interesting thing about the United States is that it died even as it was born.

As expressed in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which must serve as the “great American novel,” for there shall never be another:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away. Until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

furthur=>

All Out Beyond Horizon

Published June 6, 2012 Ala , Eternal Recurrence , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Oddbins , Rutting For Office 3 Comments

My daddy was a union man. Represented by CWA. Communication Workers of America.

We’re talking mid- to late ’60s. Feisty, the union, then.

Every two years or so, almost like clockwork, a strike.

During which we, in this here family, didn’t eat too good. Always Ma Bell would push the CWA to a place where the people of its workers didn’t eat too good. Where the union reserves had run out. Where my daddy was repairing, for money to feed us, the tennis courts and the swimming pools of the father of my best friend; my best friend, Steve. Steve’s father a doctor, a professional, undisturbed by union roilings.

It was in these days, that I learned about class. Where my daddy, sweating buckets, so that we might eat, labored at the bottom of a hole, so that I might eat boiled peas, brought up from the bottom of a pool, excavated for pleasure, for my best friend.

Understanding, here, class—even before I was precluded, several years later, from dating the young women, grown from young girls, that I had known all my life. Because the place I had come from, was from the wrong side of the tracks. Can’t be with those, can’t date those women. No-no-no.

It has always been fashionable, to dis Leon Trotsky.

Not, though, with me.

To this day, I still burn to the man, a candle.

Even as in these days he is especially maligned, because American nincompoops who once identified themselves as people of Trotsky, have in the past 20-30 years or so mutated into “neo-conservatives.”

I have never understood how people made such a transition. For what Trotsky stood for, was this: revolution, everywhere.

It was his understanding, his belief, that no one, anywhere, would get much of anywhere, unless everybody else, did, too.

And then, out of nowhere, the truth of Trotsky, suddenly and amusingly reborn, as Tuesday night the inevitable results rolled in from Wisconsin.

With the gobbledy-geek Scott Walker prevailing, because public employees, protected by unions, had been successfully disaffected from the mass of the people.

Once upon a time, in this country, it was “when once big union day.”

Unionization began in the private sector. With sweat and toil and blood. Only later, did unions envelop public-sector employees.

These days, the pirates of capital have long since succeeded in sucking all life-blood from unions in the private sector. There, they barely exist.

Unions hang on, these days, in this country, in public-sector unions. And these unions just didn’t do much, over the past 30-odd years, as private-sector unions all around them, ended.

Come June 5, and everybody expecting “one big union day.” No. So many Wisconsin people long before succubussed into resentment of unions, much less “one big union day.”

All that started dying more than 30 years ago. GOoPers saw that. Dems didn’t. As unions retreated to their enclaves and hidey-holes and declivities and ghettos. No more “one big union day.” Little tiny timid tuck-holes, instead.

Leon Trotsky, icepick embedded in his brain or no, remains right. Either everybody, everywhere, free. Or it’s all no good at all.

What if the world has moved post-union, as it has moved post-national, post-christian, and post-terran? What, in work-space, should be proposed then?

and i will hang my head hang my head low
and i will hang my head hang my head low
and i will hang my head hang my head low
and i will hang my head hang my head low
and i will hang my head hang my head low
and i will hang my head hang my head low

I Had A Dream I Stood Beneath An Orange Sky

Published May 30, 2012 Ala , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds Leave a Comment

(Last year’s Memorial Day piece. This year’s, too.

(for and from ala)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Please do not forget anything that you take with you.

                                                              —automated announcement, Beijing taxicab

One of the key indicators that I do indeed too often dwell in what William Burroughs identified as “an annex of Hell” is the local radio newsperson. He labors out here in the sticks, in the near-invisible bush leagues, but he is in his heart a Fox person—his station a Fox affiliate. I suppose his way of feeling as One with those far-off Fox mandarins who don’t even know he is alive is to endeavor ebulliently al-ways to out-Fox Fox. Thus, there is nothing too mental to come out of this man’s mouth. Nothing.

This man was on the air the morning that President Obama convened his extraordinary and unprecedented press conference to Stop The Madness. Obama deploying his long-form birth certificate as a sort of seawall, to break the tsunami of maniacal jabberers roiling with Knowledge that Obama is a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.

This man’s radio station aired Obama’s “Yes, I Am Not A Not-Person” statement, in its entirety, live. The man himself then returned to the microphone to declaim that Obama had just said things that he had not, in fact, said. Words were put into Obama’s mouth; words were taken out of his mouth. And the sense of all these omissions and commissions was that Questions Still Remained as to whether Obama might not truly be a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.

It was a jaw-dropping performance. I mean, mere moments had passed since we’d heard the words from the president himself. All had been recorded; the thing itself was even then available for playback to anyone with access to an intertube. Other tubes already bore transcripts of Obama’s words. Yet this “news”man was boldly, methodically laying a track along which chugged an alternative reality.

furthur=>

I Like Birds

Published May 23, 2012 Ala , Animal Matters , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 1 Comment

Silver Apples Of The Moon

Published May 10, 2012 Ala , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds 4 Comments

There is a piano now, here in the Manor. It arrived this morning. A little Baldwin spinet, birthed in the 1960s. It is a sturdy and game little being. We are learning each other.

There is a great poem by Lew Welch, called “He Thanks His Woodpile.” It goes like this:

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poet to stove to woodpile to stove to
typewriter.      woodpile.        stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening up the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are

            Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

          (which is not, at last, estrangement)

That’s what it’s like here now, with this piano.

Many Mansions

Published April 8, 2012 Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits 3 Comments

(There was a request for this one. Since its first nascent appearance in 2009, it hasn’t been able to decide whether it’s more a Christmas, or an Easter, piece. So let it be both. And neither. For what it really is, is “Left Behind.”)

* * *

In my Father’s house are many mansions.

—John 14:2

Christmastime again is here, and so be Santa, and so be Jesus.

A couple years ago, in contemplating Santa and Jesus, the two began to get confused in my mind. Santa Claus, for reasons that have never really been explained, devotes each year to overseeing minute laborers who fashion gifts which he annually delivers, in a single night, to all deserving children the world over. Jesus Christ, for reasons that have been variously explained, roamed for a short time across a relatively minute plot of land, uttering gnomic wisdoms, then was seized and subjected to excruciating suffering, so that all, deserving and undeserving alike, might be gifted with salvation.

When a sprout, I was taught that while Santa’s labors never end—a yearly, year-long grind—Jesus’ was a one-shot gig. Wander around Palestine, ascend the cross, into the tomb, three days later out again, brief appearances before various friends and lovers, then up to heaven for a well-deserved eternal rest.

I no longer believe that. I believe that, as is set forth here, “Jesus Christ suffers from now until the end. On the cross. He goes on suffering. Until the death of the last human being.” That is the mystic meaning of his tale: he suffers with all beings suffering in the exile of existence. And we are called upon to do the same—to grow to empathy, so that thy neighbor truly is thyself, and suffering everywhere, for everyone, may be eased. With this meaning there is no need for the resurrection. All of us are him, doing the same work; our work, his work, never ends.

For those who are wedded to the resurrection, the advances in science and philosophy in my lifetime, in the understanding of the multiple dimensions and multiple worlds about us, too mean that his work never ends. For the planets, it is now known, are innumerable, and so are the dimensional variations of this one. And if salvation is indeed his calling, he will forever be busy as twelve bastards, for there are those who need saving, inhabiting every one.

furthur=>

Like Babies At Birth

Published April 7, 2012 Cineman , Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Ms. Ah-Ha , Outer Limits , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good Leave a Comment

I have no name
I am but two days old—
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name—
Sweet joy befall thee!

—William Blake

Space is changing humans. And that is a good thing.

A while back I wrote about Ron Garen, spacehuman who takes marvelous photographs, and compiles wondrous videos, while up and out, in the great wide open.

Garen is responsible for, among other things, the video below, which always makes me happy, in the best, because the most vulnerable, of ways. It documents the final hours of Garen and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station; then, their return to the planet.

I realize there still exist supremely silly larvals, like Captain Underpants, who, in presuming to speak for the transitory artificial construct known as the United States, recently bellowed that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”

But all that is so over. Russians and Americans: they are the same human. Space helps people to understand that. For: as above; so below. Garen and his fellows, Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko, they get that. So should we. Space, it has shaped these humans’ sense and sensibility. Having gone up, they more clearly apprehend and appreciate what is down to the ground. So should we.

Now comes this spaced-human. Who has fallen in love, up there on the International Space Station. In love with space itself. And so, as all true lovers will, he has written his beloved a poem. Titled “Space Is My Mistress.”

This would never have happened, if he’d never gone out there.

But space has made him more, of who he really is.

we stroll outside together 
enveloped by naked cosmos 
filled with desire to be one 

Yes indeedy.

This sort of thing has been happening to humans ever since they began venturing into space. Most recently, in machines. As we not long ago passed the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s first trip into the great wide open, let us recall, beyond the “furthur,” what happened to Mr. Glenn, in his up and out.

furthur=>

When I Worked

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