Several conversations and experiences with friends along the lines of “I’m not where I grew up” have led to these thoughts. I didn’t spend much time on this.
Home loam
My lungs and brain compress when in my hometown. Every block drizzled with treacle and sour gravy. Enough! Defy as it saps your bigness down to slavery Until a forgotten tether tugs and summons you. Red brown sleeping mouth draws in the box with corded tongues. Ground fluffed stuffs it shut, you step away with others to quibble over funds. Cede it all care for nothing, Eager to get yourself away. Eat as a guest with caution, deny the soil and stores that Nourished you. Strive to not let the location of Death define you. Vainly Evade that someone’s home loam will compost you.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman as “Dusty” in ‘Twister’, a gloriously stupid movie I’ve seen a dozen times.
I like how the air pressure drops in the center of the poem. Tornadoes make me think of Kansas and the movie “Twister” and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty in that movie. And of how Nature neither cares about us, or wished us malice. It is simply amoral.
The Tornado By Norman H. Russell
just when he said the tornado is now located at and moving at miles per hour the television set went black black as the sky black as death black as the hell outside black as the closet we groped into falling all down with blankets and dresses clutching each other our hearts pounding loud as the pounding of the wind on the windows gasping for breath holding our breath like the wind outside roaring and pausing then the great chunking of the short thunder imprisoned in the small black animal of a cloud rushing among the oak trees went on east we heard it go we heard it talking to the people in the eastern houses and we sat still holding each other still a long time yet in the black closet slow to come back from the black from the death in the teeth of the tornado.
I am a born & bred heathen, raised by a former Protestant and a former Catholic who vowed to never raise their kids with superstitions. While I thank them for, among many things, all the free Sundays over the course of my life, I have always found the emotionally-charged religious-themed poetry of John Donne compelling.
I think it’s the mix of hard-hitting phrases and anguished emotions that hardly seem to do with religious devotion at all, but the basic striving for something external, something beyond the self, and the roiling erotic urges blended in. Okay, maybe that’s hugely what religious urges are based on.
That a supposed monotheistic religion like Christianity ends up as a polytheism (father, son, spirit, Mother/Virgin Mary, angels, saints all available for supernatural help) is amusing. The centuries spent and volumes written by scholars trying to rectify the “mystery” of the Trinity is stupefying. But the desire to gain holy attention and succor from a variety of family & lover roles (including getting “married” to the Church or the Lord) ties into semi-conscious or unconscious needs we all have.
Batter my heart, three person’d God
by John Donne
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betrothed unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
The Nemean Lion with an invulnerable hide. OH MY FUCKING GODS, HERCULES, LOOK OUT!
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is awesome. He always elevates whatever material he’s given. Brett Ratner is a mediocre director and a dimwit. Despite Ratner, I will probably go see “Hercules”. Why? Four big reasons:
2.) I had no interest in the OTHER Hercules movie that came out. Its trailer didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Hercules myths at all.
Hercules wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion, which apparently shrinks in the wash.
3.) In contrast, while this looks, at best, dorky – I was pleased to see the trailer showed ACTUAL ELEMENTS from Hercules’ myths including Cerebus, the Hydra, The Erymanthian Boar and Nemean Lion. (“Ah! Good!” I said aloud as these things showed up in the trailer.) Will this Hercules also clean the shit of thousands of animals that fill the Augean Stables by changing the course of a river? I HOPE SO!
4.) Way back in elementary school, I scripted out a film strip rendition of Hercules’ story that I didn’t complete in gifted mutant class (we called it PACE back then, later it was TAG. I don’t know what PACE stood for.) so I have a desire to read/tell his story to this day. He has a reputation as a brute, but actually his saga is more about the wit and might of man overcoming the chthonic amorality of nature. And kicking ass.
Detail of “Ugoilno and Archbishop Ruggieri” by Gustave Doré (yes, I have this book).
Two recent dreams the same night. I hope they were separate dreams.
1.) Two men laying on the ground, caked in blood, one gnawing off the ear of the other person who lies passive and closes his eyes every few seconds yielding or savoring getting devoured. Reminiscent of (I had the visual but had to look this up) Ugolino perpetually gnawing on the skull of his nemesis Archbishop Ruggieri in Dante’s Inferno (XXXII, 128-9).
2.) I duck out of a music show in a dignified theater with my dream-logic friend Taylor Swift. We get to the lobby, after a quick commiseration how BORING that show is, Swift starts peppering me with questions about how the public employee pension system works in California. I explain California is not my state, but I can send some info along. We decide a direct message via Twitter will be the best way to convey those links so she’ll see them.
Snort if you want, as if YOU have never had a dream about perpetual cannibalism and chatting economics with Taylor Swift.
(Left) Ugolino snacking on Archbiship Ruggieri, illustration by Barry Moser. (Right) Taylor Swift.
I watched a recent BBC production of Macbeth (2010, Patrick Stewart, Stalin-themed, bunkered horror movie). The character of Macduff received word his family has been killed by Macbeth (boo! hiss!). A character suggests he takes revenge on Macbeth, and asks if Macbeth has children. Macduff, still in shock, answers:
We have KNIVES for spreading the icing on the cupcakes, Macbeth. You don’t have to use your hands. JEEZ! Sink is over there.
He ha’s no Children. All my pretty ones? Did you say All? Oh Hell-Kite! All? What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Damme At one fell swoope?
“AHA!” I started laughing (glad to be on my couch and not in a theater with high-society hens and roosters clucking at me in disapproval). “All My Pretty Ones” is the name of an Anne Sexton poem (read it here) about packing away the mementos of her recently-deceased father, especially photos of when he was younger than her. I never picked up on the Macbeth connection, even though the poem has the phrase “hurly-burly”. Basically, it was pleasing to “get” a poem written 53 years ago.
The teaser for the BBC Macbeth with Patrick Stewart (watch the whole thing here). Kate Fleetwood’s performance as Lady Macbeth is eerie:
Anne Sexton reading her poem “All My Pretty Ones”. I don’t know where the piano accompaniment comes from. It’s not on the MP3 I have. It may be from her band (ya, I know) Anne Sexton and Her Kind.
YouTube served this up as a bonus: Ian McKellen in 1979 talking in an acting class about Shakespeare, brief moments of sublimity in art, and reading Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy:
I re-read Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde for the first time since the late 1980s. It was Oxford professor (though born in the USA!) Ellmann’s last book and inspiring and depressing to read then. It had the same effect on me now. It is well-researched and won a Pulitzer prize in 1989 for biography, though not as beloved as Ellmann’s biography James Joyce. It ends shortly after Wilde’s head oozes with a syphilitic pop.
Wilde did a lot of inspiring work, was a master of epigram and paradoxes, wrote a severe, perfect play with a hard, gem-like flame (The Importance of Being Earnest), a pretty good novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), a heart-rending work from jail (De Profundis), many enjoyable essays (The Soul of Man Under Socialism is a favorite).
Oscar Wilde (left) and Lord Alfred Douglas “Bosie”.
But knowing Wilde’s fall from grace was coming, that it would come somewhat from his inescapable love with a petulant dolt (Lord Alfred Douglas aka “Bosie”), made even the happy parts laden with dread. Times were unfair. Wilde was put in jail for sodomy and served two years hard labor. His imagination and reputation broken, he could never write as well again. The social esteem and artistic crowd he relied on so much shunned him. Life was less stimulating, and left him destitute in many phases, though admittedly he had extravagant habits.
Some highlights from the book. Wilde’s curtain speech after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892:
“Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.”
A former lover of Wilde’s and a devoted lifelong friend (and dutiful friend after Wilde’s death), Robbie Ross, asked Wilde in 1895 about people finding fault with his curtain speeches. Wilde replied:
“Yes, the old-fashioned idea was that the dramatist should appear and merely thank his kind friends for their patronage and presence. I am glad to say I have altered all that. The artist cannot be degraded into the servant of the public. While I have always recognised the cultural appreciation that actors and audience have shown for my work, I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and privilege of the artist.”
Despite this posture held regarding art, Wilde was a compassionate man. His aristos (Greek for “best”) attitude about art and beauty did not hold in concerns for fellow people. And he found beauty often in common things. But it’s thrilling to read from Wilde such heightened and astringent regard for art and others when he sustains it.
Degeneration by Max Nordau ( Entartung in the original German, Fin de siècle in French). Looks like a charmer, right?
In 1892, Max Nordau wrote Degeneration, a book bewailing the declining status of society and morality. Wilde, playwright Henrik Ibsen, composer Richard Wagner, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were all examined closely as emblems of madness and humanity’s ruin. I’ve not read the book, but it must have been a howler. I like all of those figures and it’s fun to ponder how much thought and angst was put into wanting to prophesy humanity’s downfall over 100 years ago. Of course, ruination DID arrive in the form of Miley Cyrus’ clumsy attempts at twerking in 2013. But let us cluck delightedly at the foolishness of our ancestors before scrambling once more for provisions to return back to our post-Cyrusian shelters.
Degeneration treated all men of genius as mad. True, at least, in Nietzsche’s case. Wilde’s comment: “I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.”
As 1900 came to a close (Wilde was not to live to 1901), in his death room, body revolting against itself, possibly from symptoms related to syphilis which he contracted in his 20s, Wilde said to a visitor: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Wilde died and his bodily integrity gave out and possibly granted that both his body and the room’s wallpaper would need to be removed. Ellmann describes:
At 5:30 a.m., to the consternation of Ross and Turner, a loud, strong death rattle began, like the turning of a crank. Foam and blood came from his mouth during the morning, and at ten minutes to two in the afternoon Wilde died. (The death certificate says the time was 2:00 p.m. on 30 November.) He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from the ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices. The debris was appalling.
Oscar Wilde photographed by Napoleon Sarony, a series of photos worth seeking out.
Gross, right? And having that image for more than 20 years after reading it meant that throughout re-reading Oscar Wilde I would imagine in a quiet moment Wilde’s body gurgling corrosively, building and sometimes trembling with ooze, waiting for Wilde to give up. Yet he held on, deflated after his trial and imprisonment, but not entirely crushed and a husk until surrendering a few years afterward. A few years with many more rounds of spats with Lord Alfred Douglas and estrangements and reconciliations and money wasted and sourced and wasted again.
Richard Ellmann near the end of the Epilogue of Oscar Wilde writes:
Even more than the hopeless loves of Yeats or Dowson or A. E. Housman, Wilde’s love affair provides an example of berserk passion, of Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée. It could have occurred only in a world of partial disclosures, blackmail, and libel suits.
I only know a few oddball phrases in French (a mish-mash of French lessons, Cyrano de Bergerac, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and movie quotes) and definitely do not specialize in 17th century French poetry. So I had to look up Ellmann’s allusion en français. It’s from Jean Racine’s play Phèdre (1677):
Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée: C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée. It is no longer a passion hidden in my heart: It is Venus herself fastened to her prey.
Art needs an agon, a struggle to achieve its identity. Had Wilde lived in a time when homosexuality was not regarded almost as severe a crime as murder, I wonder if his art would have been as good. He most likely would have lived longer.
I buy Kanye West albums and enjoy them. I have seen clips of the porno Kim Kardashian made with Ray J. Didn’t think we’d be mashing up Kanye music videos with the pneumatic Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, but here we are, United States of America.
The motorcycle has more personality than Kardashian. To give the video more depth, take it as a story about West loving his bike, but a woman keeps intruding AND RUINING IT:
What this video needs, what keeps it from being genius instead of studiously obnoxious, is a cut scene of Kardashian & West riding through the forest moon of Endor on the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. Imagine how awesome it would be to have Kim pressing her bubbies against West as they pass by Luke & Leia evading Storm Troopers! Play the song while watching the video below:
Since West’s Late Registration (2005), an album I’ve listened to a lot, I haven’t listened more than a few times to each album that followed. Since the media labeled him an egomaniac, and a lot of his songs afterward have been his ownership of being an egomaniac, the songs don’t stick with me as much. Meaning, as a fellow egomaniac, I hear Kanye West songs and the thoughts don’t seem to be that much different than my usual waking, self-aggrandizing thoughts. His music does not provide me a significantly different human experience. People go: “Wow, Kanye West is an over-the-top and daring asshole.” I go: “Uh, this is pretty much me strutting in the grocery store and glancing over magazine covers.”
I have never watched an episode of any of the Kardashian shows. I do see clips of them mocked on The Soup. Kim Kardashian seems vapid. I’m a little mystified by West & Kardashian as a couple. Like the rest of the world, I try contemplating them while NOT evoking West’s song “Gold digger”. I do have an admiration for Kardashian shaping her porn-driven notoriety into a huge industry over her toddling around in outfits while doing nothing at all of artistic or cultural consequence. She is a lucrative success with a longevity greater than Paris Hilton, who took the same path to less effect. West and Kardashian both have ambition, like the Macbeths, and impressive media savvy. Is that enough to sustain their relationship & parenthood? I won’t pay money for magazines or go beyond my usual trash culture grazing for updates. But when the zeitgeist membrane flicks along a milestone update, I will probably nod and go “Ah!”
As a palate-cleanser, here’s Seth Rogen and James Franco paying homage to Kanye & Kim in their video “Broken 3”:
This is the fifth and final year of Trek in the Park, an annual live re-enactment of an episode of the original Star Trek show put on by Atomic Arts. It started out small with a few people having a good time over a lark. It has become massive, moving from a cramped corner of a small park to a vaster space in a larger park, but STILL packing ’em in. Attendance is easily in the thousands now.
Panoramic shot of “The Trouble With Tribbles” in Portland’s Cathedral Park. (click for close-up)
The comedy climax, Kirk piled on with Tribbles. As on the original show,
throughout Kirk’s dialog he gets bonked by descending Tribbles.Vulcan ear sets aside an area for those wanting an easy view of the provided American Sign Language interpreters.
While there are wry laughs to be had, it’s a communal vibe with a great fondness for the material by both audience and crew. Over the last five years, the audience has palpable warmth toward the developing and ambitious Atomic Arts group.
Trek in the Park is worth checking out in clips on YouTube. It’s across the internet and has been featured in a Portlandia skit. At the end of this year, Adam Rosko (who plays Kirk and started Trek in the Park with his sister) said that Atomic Arts would be performing on its own original work. He emphasized the importance of ending things on a high note, and while they were still fun and within control. Atomic Arts has done that. Keeping eyes open for their next project will be worthwhile.
The Robin Thicke song-of-the-summer “Blurred Lines” asked, with practiced super-produced fake-spontaneous laugh, “What rhymes with ‘hug me’?”. Let’s give it a whirl…
#Thicke. Get it? It’s a boast, and HIS NAME! Lol.
To start, here’s the clothed video to the song. I’ve linked to the “unrated” version in another post, but don’t want to shock people unfamiliar with the concept that we higher primates are attracted to attractive, naked members of our same species. The key lines at 1:33: “I feel so lucky. / You wanna hug me? / What rhymes with ‘hug me’? / Hey-ey-ey-ey.”
Going straight through the alphabet with single-letter replacements we get:
You wanna bug me. You wanna dug me. You wanna fug me. (“fug”, adjective, a stuffy or malodorous emanation) You wanna jug me. You wanna lug me. You wanna mug me. You wanna pug me. You wanna rug me. You wanna sug me. (“sug”, verb, to Sell Under the Guise of conducting market research) You wanna tug me. You wanna vug me. (“vug”, noun, a cavity in rock with mineral crystals) You wanna zug me. (“Zug”, noun, a German-speaking canton in Switzerland)
Some of these clearly won’t work and/or are bad grammar. Some work marvelously. Other possible choices, especially if sung at a quickened pace to stay within the measure:
You wanna chug-a-lug me. Bella Abzug and me. It’s ‘A Bug’s Life’ we’ll see. This tastes nougat-y.
I’ve got to go catch up on some recorded television, but your suggestions are heartily welcome here!
More ideas:
You wanna thug me. You wanna shrug me. Let’s do The Frug, G. You look like Pugsly. C’mon butt plug me. Butt butt butt butt me.
