Archive for the 'What’s Good' Category
The River
Published May 18, 2013 Animal Matters , Caribbean , Into The Light , La Musica , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good Leave a CommentAnother World
Published May 10, 2013 Animal Matters , Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , La Musica , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 16 Comments
And We Walked All The Way
Published April 28, 2013 Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , La Musica , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , What's Good Leave a CommentLike The Wild Geese In The West
Published April 21, 2013 Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , Outer Limits , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 2 CommentsSongs Of Innocence And Experience
Published March 30, 2013 Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , Sunday Services , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good , Wyrds Leave a Comment“When I listen to him,” Zina said on the second side, “I hear 
a first boyfriend. Men are like malicious children, but he is like a first boyfriend, the sweet one. Maybe he is a merman, a child of the sea. In a rough sea, on a big boat, I hold on to the rail. Down below, on his small deck, he stands with perfect balance, riding the waves.
“I listen to his innocent voice over and over again. It would be a dream, he says.”
—Martin Cruz Smith, Polar Star
Some Thoughts On The Common Toad
Published March 18, 2013 Animal Matters , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 6 Comments(Okay. Time to put things in perspective, with a reprint of George Orwell’s “Some Thoughts On The Common Toad.” 
This piece appeared first in Tribune on April 12, 1946, a time when things seemed just as fraught as they do now.)
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.
I used to read the news headlines for fodder, though not anymore. Politics and commerce—mostly the same thing—are easy 
subjects in that I have plenty to say about what’s going on. When I write about easy targets, though, I end up thinking about them as targets, and I no longer think constant attack is helpful to me or the things I care about. Janice was never comfortable with my political writing, and I’ve come to understand why. In desperation I can fall into my old habits and whip out a rant that’ll fill my box on the back page, but when I do, although I can make me laugh—which is always satisfying—it feels like cheating and a waste of time.
—Anthony Peyton Porter
Haint Misbehavin’
Published March 7, 2013 Into The Light , La Musica , What's Good , Wyrds 2 CommentsIt occurs to me that I should link here from time to time to the writs of a couple of fellows who weekly pour forth words round this dirt patch.
The first is Dan Cohen. His legend begins with the fact that he invented punk music, way back in 1961, down (naturally) in Los Angeles. Fronting a band called Charleston Grotto. 
Which quickly found itself banned from area venues, for offering songs like “Kill The Teacher.”
Though, truth be told, Cohen’s music is less like punk, than the Bernard Herrmann score to Vertigo . . . if Bernard had felt compelled to aurally illustrate “the true story of a visit to Hell after the subject loses his virginity to a gorgeous Laurel Canyon witch.” With a lyrical sensibility upbubbling lines like “iridescent rectums that resemble marine life.”
In recent years Cohen has released five more-or-less “solo” albums, some of which are even available at places like Amazon and iTunes. If one must have a comparison to a personage a sizable number of folks have actually heard of, try long-time Cohen companero Tom Waits.
Cohen also produces words without discernible sound, writing weekly for a little arts paper called the Synthesis. I hired him for this gig, back at the setting of the last millennium; I hope he gets paid these days more than I was able to offer him then. Though, things being what they are, I doubt it. Cohen’s most recent effort is fully representative of his oeuvre: he is, for No Sane Reason, stalked by an elderly woman, determinedly pursuing him from within a walker, a being Cohen fears may be a “haint” of his recently deceased mother.
Anthony Peyton Porter I did not hire, though I did help found the paper he today labors for. While he is by far the finest scribe in what we used to call “the treesheet,” his work unaccountably appears weekly in the very back of the paper, 
beyond even the legal notices and the ads for the Potemkin “medical-marijuana” dives and hormonally charged “gentleman’s clubs.”
We will here resist exploring the symbolism of the seating of this black man at the very back of the paper bus.
Like Cohen, Porter is multimedia: he first came to local attention with commentaries aired over the community radio station, KZFR. While immured in the land of snow, he had previously engaged in, as he puts it, “muttering on KFAI, Twin Cities Public Television, and Minnesota Public Radio.”
Porter has an enviable gift for delivering, in 400 words or so, insights that require others to wail away for 400,000. As in this exploration of the same-as-it-ever-was twinning ancient Rome and today.
And, like Cohen, Porter fearlessly plumbs the personal. As here. Wherein—another of his gifts—open to whatever the universe may present, he finds, amid great grief, telepathy.
Read these guys. Send them some love. And money.
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 CommentsIt’s Too Late To Stop Now
Published February 24, 2013 Ala , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , La Musica , Outer Limits , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 19 CommentsWho 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 CommentReindeer For Rent, v2.0
Published December 13, 2012 Animal Matters , Eternal Recurrence , Into The Light , Oddbins , What's Good Leave a CommentLast holiday season I offered the young’un cat to Santa Claus as a possible new or additional reindeer. This year I renew the offer, though it must be said that now his rates have gone up.
As can be seen in the photo below, the young’un cat’s eyes remain 
extremely googly; they put out plenty of light, and are not bound by space or time. Paired with Rudolph, there at the head of the team pulling the sleigh, the young’un cat would guarantee that Santa would never get lost, no matter how much fog or liquor he might encounter.
It is apparent, at least to me, that the jello-bellied gift-spewer Needs the young’un cat.
Last year I additionally opined that employment would be good for the young’un cat, to absorb his excess energies; among the excess, then, was his intensive involvement in a sleep-deprivation experiment, with myself as the subject.
This is what he was then doing to me:
No matter when I try to sleep, he eventually turns against it. And then works diligently, until it cannot be. He has decided, for example, that whatever portions of my body are covered with hair, he may assault, as I sleep, with his claws. My scalp is now so routinely excavated that I am thinking of hiring him out as a miner.
Because his excavating is always accompanied by operatic wails, I think I may hire him out as a musical miner. I have not heard miners emit sounds with this volume and intensity since those Welshmen in How Green Was My Valley.
I have also begun referring to the young’un cat as The Dream Crusher. This is because of late I have been gifted with extraordinary dreams; while there is a method I use to pull dreams into the waking state, most often these days that process is derailed, when the young’un cat decrees that my skull should be employed as his dartboard, or elects to eagerly ride his tricycle across my forehead.
Fortunately, over the ensuing year we have come to an accommodation. He now understands what is a Sane hour to arise, and does not assault me with either claws or operas unless I attempt to slumber past said hour.
He has also gained much, in work experience. The Manor, as I believe I have previously referenced (I haven’t?), has become a vortex of four-legged welfare recipients, waves of deer flowing through each day to stare at me with those doe eyes that claim they will drop immediately dead unless I shovel vast quantities of feed their way. They all have names, on their little welfare-recipient name-tags: Yearling Pet, Mom, Cutie, The Other Fawn, Dark Doe, Big Buck, Billy Buck Naked, White Head, Mr. Spindly Horns, Mr. Broken Horn, No You Can’t Get Through The Hole In The Fence With Those Antlers You Big Oaf, etc.
Anyway, the young’un cat goes out every morning to attempt to bring order to the horde. He has been fully accepted by these deer as The Ruler, or at least as 
something that should not be run off.
Through the day, he further observes their maneuvers, this time from inside the house. At times he is compelled to ruck rugs and shred curtains, in apparent attempts to communicate to them Vital Messages.
I find this carnage objectionable, but understand that there is nothing to be done: I will simply have to wait until he moves beyond it, as with the sleep-deprivation Horror.
The point is, the young’un cat now has much daily experience with deer. And reindeer are just deer with some rein in front of them. So he is highly qualified to rangle Santa’s people. And is willing to do so. So long as the frigid fat man forks over sufficient Money. Said funds are, after all, Needed, round this place. To replace that which the young’un cat, in his youthful zeal, Runs Amok.
Into The Light
Published December 9, 2012 Into The Light , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good Leave a CommentThe French, they can differ from other humans.
They are for instance known, in the immortal, if crude, words of National Lampoon, as folks who “fight with their feet and fuck with their faces.”
Now it seems they have determined that a proper way to 
honor Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth, is to light up a building like a pinball machine, and then play it.
For many centuries, the people of Lyon have in early December paid homage to Mary, in gratitude to the goddess-woman for interceding with the Mean Man to spare the place from the plague, back in 1643.
In them Olden Times, said homage involved a procession culminating at the Basilica of Fourviere, where candles were lit and offerings presented.
In 1852, the sculptor Joseph Hugues Fabisch erected a Mary statue next to the Basilica. The people of Lyon in that year planned for December 8 a mammoth Mary party. Here is what happened:
Leading up to the inauguration, everything was in place for the festivities: the statue was lit up with flares, fireworks were readied for launching from the top of Fourvière Hill and marching bands were set to play in the streets. The prominent Catholics of the time suggested lighting up the facades of their homes as was traditionally done for major events such as royal processions and military victories.
However, on the morning of the big day, a storm struck Lyon. The master of ceremonies hastily decided to cancel everything and to push back the celebrations to the following Sunday. In the end the skies cleared and the people of Lyon, who had been eagerly anticipating the event, spontaneously lit up their windows, descended into the streets and lit flares to illuminate the new statue and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, later superseded by the Basilica. The people sang songs and cried “Vive Marie!” until late in the night.
In years since, Lyon humans have each December 8 placed Mary-devoted lit-candles on their windowsills. The place is each year alive with light. Meanwhile, in the center of town, various assorted performances and such have built upon one another until these days they draw up to 4 million tourists, to what has become a four-day event.
As it is necessary on this planet that things mutate to survive, the Mary-fest now features some very clever humans, from the French lighting company CT Light Concept, who project with colored lights an assortment of pinball bumpers and flippers onto the side of the Celestine Theater. The display fully playable, as can be seen in the video below.
Pretty cool.
Frisky and alive.
The French: good with light. Knowing Mary as the one and only. And thereby sailing into the great wide open.
Code Unknown
Published November 10, 2012 Capital Crime , Cineman , Eros , Eternal Recurrence , First Peoples , Into The Light , La Musica , Liberte Egalite Fraternite , Outer Limits , War On Terra , What's Good , Wyrds 7 CommentsThree weeks or so ago the spirit vacated the corporeal container known as “Russell Means.”
This is what his Kossack companero, cacamp, had to say about Means:
Russ was my brother-in-arms He and I were both AIM leaders and led our people together in many fights and struggles. We stood shoulder
to shoulder all across our great land, we had many hard times but also the most wonderful times of our lives. Russ was an independent man who walked his own path and often surprised even his comrades like me. But he always put his people first and did what he thought was right. Russ was also a brave man who was always willing to put his life and freedom on the line for a just cause. He was a warrior who inspired us all and a beloved figure in our community. Today Indian Country is in mourning even though we knew this was coming. Russ will be missed by his family, Oglala Tribe, AIM and all who knew him.
In 1980, Means delivered what I consider to be the most important “political” speech of my lifetime. Find it beyond the furthur.
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 CommentsThe 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 CommentsThe 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.
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.
Gonna Lift Me Up To That Drinkin’ Fountain
Published May 26, 2012 Eros , Into The Light , La Musica , What's Good Leave a CommentI 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 CommentSilver 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 CommentsThere 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 areAncient 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.
Feets Don’t Fail Me Now
Published April 8, 2012 Ala , Into The Light , Variations In B-Flat , What's Good 2 CommentsA lot of people don’t like English ivy.
A lot of times these people have been my landlord. Or landlady. Who will bellow: “It will tear the house down!”
At which time they commence to put on the Hitler moustache, and start goose-stepping furiously around the property, decreeing that no English ivy vill they permit mein to das grow.
Well . . . sure, ivy’ll tear a house down.
But there’s no malice in it. That’s just the way they be.
Now, finally, at long last, here in the 
Manor, I am Free. For this here rental agreement says that I am “solely responsible” for all “landscaping.”
And the property-manager ladies have explicitly said “you can grow whatever you want.”
Meanwhile, they will pay for all the water.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
There is English ivy here—a lot of it—and I fully intend to permit it to get completely out of control.
I am Free; so is they. I shall not allow these ivy people to actually rip the walls off, but close to that: okay.
This ivy is absolutely beautiful, and pulses with pure life-force.
It’s just rained and rained and rained here all late winter, early spring, which has kept everybody else all sullen and underground, but the ivy has sent out these pure raw youngblood lime-green shoots, that are avidly crawling all over all and everywhere.
It’s alive: therefore, so I am.
I might not appreciate it so, if I had smilax here, but I don’t; smilax was my pal, for many a year, ringing green and clear and lovely, every February, when everybody else was all still head under the hoodie.
But smilax is a couple abodes behind, and now I hear you can’t even buy it in California anymore. Supposedly it’s a “weed.”
Yeah. Right. Like it’s a “weed,” worse than “politics.”
Anyway, English ivy has like these most marvelous feet. That’s how it grabs hold of things, and causes landlords and landladies to screech that it’s a menace, about ripping houses down.
In the photo above, hopefully, you can see its little wee feet, in nascence, before they’ve grabbed hold of things.
Once they do, of course, the feets get all dry and brittle and clingy . . . like anybody or anything else that grabs too tight ahold of things.
Anyway, it’s a gas, right now, watching this sweet yearning alleged menace climbing up over my front-porch wall. At any time, I can trim it back. But not yet. Not yet.
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 CommentI 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.
Recent Comments