Affleck

It's nice to see a star who has fallen so far out of the good graces of the critics and his public start to regain a foothold. I especially appreciate Brad Pitt's participation in this, and the ironic dedication.

Rach Out!

Me and my homies

Thank God we kept our noses clean (although somebuddy's got awfully hirsute sinus cavities). That's Tex, on the right.



Here I'm presenting Buddy, in my ersatz Vanna White impersonation, at our local watering hole.



This one's of me, triumphing over evil, and not in some odd, compromised sexual mischief (I don't swing that way, anyway). Actually, it's my sweet erstwhile roommate, Rachel P., on her birthday, and that naughty bug, Levi. She thought it would be fun to rent sumo suits and have a wrassling contest in Griffith Park. It was fun, especially rolling her down the hill in that big balloon she's wearing. I don't know what Levi thought of it, but he was glad to be running around and sneaking treats.



Here's Rachel's man and Tex, about to square off.



Tex and me at a friend's costumed birthday party last month. The theme was 1978. Tex wore his '07 Halloween costume, Brian Fantana. It was a good opportunity for me to wear my vintage cotton dress from that period, the one that looks like Rainbow Brite vomited up the Crayola box. I confess the last time I wore that was also on Halloween (c. 04, I believe), when I met this man. Apparently, he liked the dress.



Here's my very dear friend, JMT (you might recognize him from the tube), at the same party, with his old friend RH (and my newer one) in the white cap. They're just a couple of dumbass hicks from Georgia. JMT describes RH as, "delightfully unhinged." That describes a lot of people I know.

Hell Just Froze Over

Litigate, You Will, Jodee Warrior!

Sometimes old news is still good news, and this one is also true.

Though long ignored by most of the press, Yoda had a few things to say about the incident -

Interviewer: What do you think about Jodee's efforts to win the beer selling contest?

Yoda: Do or do not... there is no try.

Interviwer: Well, she did "win," after all, on both counts.

Yoda: Jodee's strength flows from the Force.

Interviewer: Which is why she ultimately got her Toyota?

Yoda: Always in motion is the future.

Interviewer: Jodee left her place of work following her disappointment. What is your feeling about Hooters?

Yoda: Size matters not, ... Look at me. Judge me by size, do you?

Interviwer: Do you find the Toy Yoda to be a flattering likeness?

Yoda: When 900 years you reach, look as good, you will not.

Interviewer: Any final thoughts?

Yoda: May the Farce be with you.

I am like those birds

come to rest awhile before the next leg -
dislocated, confused by the static wake
of the lover who leaves.

Seeking refuge among humans is a desperate act
at best
one more break and you wonder
if you've ever been in love at all.



I hear the utterances
a coo
a caw
the hum of something they’ll eat later.
These simple words scrawl,
finger-waves across the lake
the curls and spines on an unsteady page.
I can read,
I can form these sound.
I don't know what they mean anymore.

When they go the should-be silence
is shattered in complaint
of what is left behind
a jeer
a cavil
a cry
the shrike cleaving the black and blue calm of night
as she climbs, as she dives
What will answer?

The opposite of love is nothing.



(photo: Hiroji Kobuta, China 1979)

Chivalry

“There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded desireable, that calls for art or for character.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

For the best mythic example of this I know, look at the story of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle.

This is the tits!

When the Spirit of the Lord moves you... More evidence that the profane really is sacred AND super funny.

(thanks to Dooce for posting this.

“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there.

Any disaster that you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”


-Joseph Campbell

Task to Be Who I Am

I'm ordered out to a big hump of stone as if I were an aristocratic corpse from the iron age.
The rest are still back in the tent sleeping
stretched out like spokes in a wheel.
In the tent the stove is boss,
The big snake that swallows a ball of fire and hisses.
It is silent out here in the spring night amongst the stones waiting for the dawn.
In the cold I start to fly like a shaman to her body, some places pale from her swimming suit
the sun shone right on us, the moss was hot
I brush along the side of warm moments
But I can't stay here long
I am whistled back through space;
I crawl among the stones
Back to here and now.
Task: to be where I am.
Even when I am in this solemn and absurd role
I am still the place where creation does a little work on itself.
Dawn comes, the sparse tree trunks take on color now
The frost-bitten forest flowers form a silent search party after something that
has disappeared in the dark
But to be where I am and to wait.
I am full of anxiety, obstinate, confused
Things not yet happened are here and now
I feel that—they're just out there—
A murmuring mass outside the barrier
They can only slip in one by one.
They want to slip in.
Why?
They do one by one.
I am the turnstile.


Tomas Tranströmer (b. 1931)

Monkey!

I'm going to go ahead and say that they are actually better at this than I am...

Season of Gimme

(...us every one!)

For Huck - Keep Fighting the Good Fight (which really means, PLAY!)

RESPECT

: (ri-'spekt; Latin) 
" From respicere -- the act of looking back,
regard, the act of giving particular attention,
consideration, esteem."
                          • Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Respect is not fear and awe; 
it denotes, in accordance with 
the root of the word (respicere), 
the ability to see a person as (they are), to be aware of (their) unique individuality. 
                  • Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

And your first born child...

and any sense of autonomy and free choice you might have imagined you actually had.

Since the elections seem more and more a sham, Why don't we just let Simon, Randy and Paula Abdul decide the outcome of this upcoming one, folks?

Would-Be Michelangelo

At the bar on Friday, I point out to my friend, Joe K., that the esteemed sculptor of David was gay, a notion he fights a bit. I tell him my first such inclination was when I saw how he rendered women - as muscle-bound burly men - and the idea was supported by allusions to his "infatuations" with pretty youths in historical accounts. Don't know that Vasari touched on that aspect, but the proof's in the work, People, if you're asking me.

In any case, he is impressed by the sculpture, and rightly so. Though I had little care for the decor of The Vatican when I saw it in 2001, The Pieta was positively stunning, and one of the few pieces of art that has provoked tears from me (Guernica's another, funny as I've never seen the original and I don't particularly care for Picasso). For that matter, I'm not really fond of Christian art generally, but the power of the gesture in the mother holding her dead child is something to see.



Joe, who is some kind of quirky artist, turns to me and says, how do you go about making something like that? "Well Joe, you get yourself a big hunk of marble, some tools, and about a decade of apprenticeship to a master..."

Joe interjects, "Naw, I'm goin' right in there!"

Ironic Film Review

This analysis of Beowulf from one of "the people":

"The film was great, but not epic."

The Epistle of Adam, v. 1

I'm quite sure I've told you about him, the lank boy from Santa Cruz who wore a fly-fisherman's hat and oversized oxford cloth shirts, as he slothed about campus. Wooden, implacable, sensual, withholding, and impossibly bright, he would positively hate that I am reprinting any of his words here. If I didn't trespass against him, this would never see the light of day. Maybe that would be better.

Here's a letter, written when Adam was maybe less than twenty:


I'm sure I never told you about my one attempt to speak to Robert Kim. Perhaps you remember Robert -- Korean, moon-faced, obscure--but you may not know that he was my near neighbor for several years. I never saw him at home, and never spoke to him at school, but we both knew of our proximity. During my sophomore year, before you and I met, I suffered periods of despair and panic; I lost my reason and my calm. During these attacks I would cast round wildly for relief, believing at times that remedy lay in drugs, sleep, exercise, meditation, study, art, or philosophy. Once, while afflicted, I was sure that Robert Kim was a sage of sorts, wise in the Oriental tradition, and that he could ease my turmoil and teach me the way to peace. I do not exaggerate. I remember imagining his vast greasy face with an expression of composed bliss, one finger raised as he spoke: "The key to happiness is organization." That maxim was all I could hear in my reveries, but he delivered it as an earnest of more to come, if I would only hearken. I have said that my reason, and my shame, deserted me at those times, so I saw no absurdity in the idea: I was to find Robert Kim and beg his tutelage. That organization was the key to happiness made sense, and I knew that his room would be organized. I walked down the street to his door and knocked, without preparing myself for an introduction or rehearsing any explanation for my sudden visit. His mother answered the door, and I asked for Robert. He was not at home, so I left, and gave up the whole business immediately as rank folly and idiocy. What if he had been there? What if I had gone to his room--I imagined it as upstairs--and tried to tell him why I had come? What if a classmate whom you did not know came to your door, told you he was abject and hopeless, and asked for your teachings? I was quite addled in those days, and many knew it. For example, I had two acquaitances (sic), John and Bobby, whose surnames I can't remember. You would recognize them: John used to stride across the front lawns at lunchtime wearing headphones, and Bobby rode a large motorcycle to school. They didn't look much alike, except for their short hair, but one day I confused them and called John Bobby, and thereafter I could never get it right. If one approached I would get giddy, and loudly hail him with the wrong name, and laugh foolishly. There was no malice behind it, and I was red-faced each time, but I couldn't help myself. For a while they corrected me glumly, then they stopped acknowledging me. And I was friendly with a girl named Cayenne, who had a small yurt dome in her back yard where she held parties. One night, after a party, I was walking home up the Laurent hill when the sky turned white and I watched a fiery meteor fall into the bay. I may have mentioned that before now.
I have never told the Robert Kim story, and I can't decide whether my condition today owes more to the meteor or to Robert. I have told almost everybody I know about the meteor, though no one really believes it. I have never told anyone about Robert, and Robert himself probably doesn't know.
Thank you for sending the list of lines from songs. The first eight were easy, but then I began to falter, and ended having named only forty percent of the songs. The Cyndi Lauper quote reminded me of of one more event, perhaps significant. You might have shared a class in our freshman year with a girl named Beth Z. She was small and blonde, very pretty, and remote, well outside our orbit. On hot days she wore bathing suits to her classes. One Saturday morning my stepfather and I drove to the Long's Drugstore at the corner of, what, River and Soquel. Does Soquel Avenue keep its name as it approaches Pacific? You know the place, next to what is now a Zanotto's market. Is it still a Zanotto's market? I will never be an historian. We parked far from the drugstore, near Erik's Cafe, and the car stops, the radio is playing the Lauper song, "Girls Just Wanna, etc." I looked across the wide parking lot to the opposite side, where the river runs and the park begins. A dyke, or a raised bank, follows the roadway there, and I saw a figure walking atop it. You might say, because of the great distance, that I "barely descried" a figure: a blur, a flash, a mote--that sort of sight. In an instant, however, the facts flooded me, and the scene resolved itself as if seen through powerful magnification lenses. The figure was Beth Z., she was returning home from a night spent at a guy's house where she had been ravaged, and her stride was in the song's time, and all of it stung me like a just reproof. Whoa, was I indolent and slothful and halt. Girls just wanna, even Beth Z., especially Beth Z., and the years ahead would be full of dark hours and rent garments and bloodied noses, and shouting and glaring lights and beer. Quite an epiphany, in a moment.

Clownin'

Usually I am strictly repulsed by clowns (I know this is a banal claim, yet they truly unnerve me), but this is hilarious and absurdist enough to smooth down the usual piloerection, er, horripilation (you know, the jimjams, the willies), that clowns normally give. That's not to say it isn't a bit scary -

Happy All Saints Day!

And Happy Woulda Been Seventy-Fifth Birthday, to my Pa!

Still Sick! Didn't stop me from distributing germs as well as candy to all those kiddies, and then going out last night. David Thewlis stopped by with tots in tow. That was almost as cool as meeting Julian Sands on my porch two years ago. Yum. Ok. back to bed.