September 28, 2006

Secular Poem

She writes the filthiest poetry we've ever come across.

Her poetry is written in not only the crudest of languages,

And marching naked in its metaphors the vilest of acts,

And rife with taboo fetishes, & backwards on the pages,

And topplings of moral structures, & perversions of facts,

And secret things in public kitchens drenched in secret sauce;


Not only is her poetry obscene, in words unknown, what

Unthought-of misconducts, in sliding racial-ethnic scales,

And body parts unheard-of, never even in textbooks shown; but

Offensive parodies of mystic insight & sacred details.


The ancient lyrics of the divine are trivialized in her verses,

And acts of saints are rendered bawdy, the thoughts of noble kings

Are mocked as profiteering off of endless wars of curses,

And truth is born from fornication of the foulest things.


Yet if we would condemn this poet to a life of silence,

O the riots we would cause, O the streets would tear with violence!

September 27, 2006

Letter to the Editor at the New Yorker

Dear editor:


Tell Woody Allen that I think his story “Pinchuck's Law” in the Oct. 2nd issue was one of his cleverest. It was also some of the funniest writing in the postmodern-noir genre, along with his debt to it in Match Point & his last movie. However, I think that genre finally ended when Jim Jarmusch mourned its expiration at the end of Broken Flowers. Maybe it's time to move on.


James Welsch

Berkeley, CA.

September 26, 2006

Quotes: More from the Archpope of Transubstantiation

Another flask, Kate. Thou knowest how fishy I am in my liquid delights. Dryness is akin to barrenness, & of barrenness comes nakedness & bareness, & these are melancholy, being the parables of human extremity, & of the uttermost of death & a pig's tail: therefore, good Kate, 'tis the duty of a wise man to thirst & the part of a good woman to wet his lips.


-Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-book (1829), II.i.1-7



The ruffians

Of whom I spoke, turned towards the cedar forest,

And, as they went in, there rushed forth a lion

And tore their captain down. Long live the lion!

We'll drink his tawny health: he gave us wine.

For, while the Moors in their black fear were flying,

I crept up to the fallen wretch, & borrowed

His flask of rubious liquor. May the prophet

Forgive him, as I do, for carrying it!

This for to-day: to-morrow hath gods too,

Who'll ripen us fresh berries, & uncage

Another lion on another foe.


-ibid., I.ii.31-42



Therefore wine, hostess, ale & brandy. My legs hate walking on this stupid dead earth. I'm born to roll thru life, & if the world won't under me tumble & toss, why, I must e'en suck up a sort of marine motion out of the can.


-ibis., II.i.45-49



Contacts with this being [the divine] can be strengthened & the inspiration multiplied,

either thru interior withdrawel & fasting,

or thru ecstasy & intoxication.


-Klaus Koch, The Prophets I: The Assyrian Period (1978), pg. 9



The wife of my bosom, alas! she did die;
For sweet consolation to church I did fly;
I found that old Solomon proved it fair,
That a morning mimosa's a cure for all care.

I once was persuaded a venture to make;
A letter inform'd me that all was to wreck;
But the pursy old landlord just waddl'd up stairs
With a glorious mimosa that ended my cares.

-two verses from the Official Theme song for the Mimosa's Witnesses,
adapted from Robert Burns.





Do you know any famous poets who can write us epic Mimosa odes?
Doesn't the poet laureate live in New Hampshire?
Do you know him? You should start your canvassing at his house.

Posted by the Mimosa's Witnesses on the message wall of Don Tomaso's MySpace page.
(What follows is a private message on MySpace from Don Tomaso,
followed by a public bulletin posted by the Mimosa's Witnesses.)



From:
Don Tomaso

Date: Sep 23 2006 12:04 PM
Subject: Mimosas.
Body:

-J-

I may or may not go door-to-door tomorrow. If not then I expect I will on the first.

The poet laureate (Donald Hall) is from New Hampshire and I've met him many many times. He used to frequent the little independent bookstore I worked at for five years. As to whether he'd write something for us...he does like his liquor. However, without working at the bookstore and with his busy schedule now, I'm not sure how I'd make it happen. I suppose there's nothing to be lost by trying. Maybe one of our first stops in the coming weeks will be his house.

-M-

From: Mimosa's Witnesses

Date: Sep 25, 2006 12:33 PM
Subject Mimosa's Wake
Body:

Attention! Proselytes!

I am proud to announce the success of the first Mimosa's Witnesses "Service". Three starry-eyed converts - Mark, Jamie, & Galin - feasted for hours on fresh organic fruit, fresh bread & fine cheeses, gourmet quiche with heirloom tomatoes, &, of course, bottle after bottle of champaigne. The conversation ranged from fine films to "John Denver's legacy", veered dangerously into politics (luckily, there was a general liberal consensus), we discussed the un-Christlike nature of modern Christians, & I attempted to promote a philiosphy of using infinitely recyclable plastics instead of tree-products. (Are you aware that the male English hedge sparrow will pick a rival's semon out of his mate's you-know-what? I had no idea!) There was no evangelical canvassing, but we did hit the flea market with our newly bubbly percepts.

However, this was only a trial run in microcosm. All are invited next Sunday Morning, the First Of October, say 10:30ish, for a feast of a larger scale. No-regrets only! No regrets, you lazy fiends of the bedchamber! The dress should be between business-casual to ironic-elegant. Please bring a bottle of cheap-ass champaigne &/or something like a muffin or strawberries, to add to our booty-horde. Please do not arrive by car! It's the end of the age of fossil-fuels, destructive bellicose-Saracens! (Unless you're coming from Tahoe, or the like). So, with a BART-price of $6 & a bottle of bubbly around $4, I'm inviting you to a gallant party with a minimal impact on the pockets.

Peace,
The Archpope of Transubstantiation


September 25, 2006

Song of the Theater

Why don't the soldiers speak in poetry,

And politicians squabble for a space upon the stage?

Where are the earls who drown, then reappear

As Third Citizen, second from the left?

Where are the labyrinths of logic, where the bottomless wells of rage?

Where is the theater with no commercials?


Revenge shall be my final secret earthquake.

Assassination always is a tool your foe's friends can utilize.

Revenge shall be the spaces between my words,

And be the grin behind my grinning mask:

No martyrdom a garb the tyrant wears as his disguise!

No, my revenge will undermine his smirk.


And when the hippies take the street with banners

The powers will point their cameras toward the dirtiest of the haters,

But my revenge will not be televised.

My soliloquy only the audience will hear.

The powers will spin their cameras on the clouds & under the craters,

But my revenge is written in the void.


The Jack Cade of the Revolution howls,

The powers deploy their mirrors & holograms to tax his peace,

But I will write a silent five act play,

I will sustain by eating locally.

The powers will evoke historical dichotomies,

I rhyme with sacred words they have forgotten.


When did the understudy lose his place?

How could the scenery fall down when all the ruins looked real?

When did the tongue of rhetoric trip up?

Or was the director drunk when his wife slept?

And what immoral prankster changed the cardboard sword for steel?

Who turned the tinted water into wine?

September 17, 2006

Cartoon Review: Doonesbury strips, first week of September 2006

(click on the strip if it's too small to read)




The series of Doonesbury strips from Monday, September 4th thru Saturday, September 9th offer a nice commentary on Twenty-First Century battle. Ray, a soldier stationed in Iraq, is stressed that he is late to spend the night on the computer with his wife at home, May. She gives him matronly hell, as if he was just home late from the bar (“You think I like throwing up?”), but of course with added gravitas because his absence could have meant so much worse. As the strips progress, he is caught up in domestic dramas, which are distractions from or as demanding as warfare (“No, clockwise, idiot! You'll break the damn lint filter!”)


It's an unusual approach to discussing Iraq, in our country torn by opinions & false dichotomies. Trudeau can wrap up so many ideas in a format which has to be four frames long, some sort of punchline in the fourth, & dispensed in the slowest serialization any national epic has ever seen. (I was obsessed in college about the issue of America's “National Epic”... In a country with so much great literature, what was our Imperial Equivalent to Homer? How do Salinger or Twain, bards with an American voice, fit into a democratic materialistic American epic mold? A national epic has to be written sometime around the origin of the empire, contain integrated discussions of all the artistic & political issues the empire will face, be written in a poetry to equal no other, & yet be above itself with an aware irony. After college, of course, I read Moby Dick, & that settled the matter. But then what of Doonesbury? Can the American epic really be in novel form, when we would sing to the muses mostly in multimedia? Doonesbury chronicles America during the crucial era, commenting in depth & subtlety on American culture & politics in short daily installments from the sixties thru today, with dozens & dozens of main characters who have grown & continue to evolve. It could also be argued that the past forty years have shaped our empire more than the mid-1800s did... I could conclude that if Melville is our Virgil, than Trudeau is our Ovid.)



Doonesbury, with its “liberal bias”, manages to entertain & touch most Americans with the employment of several central techniques. First, its famous “love of the soldier / hate the war” attitude. Second, is it's remorseless critique of any politician, not just the Bushes. How followers in all demographics of America interpreted the first week of September's comics reveals the complexity of his vision. Larry Beasley from Milwaukee wrote to Trudeau:


Ray's email strips point something out (at least to me). It seems we as a nation are not taking this war seriously. I'm not old enough to remember the WW II rationing system or the mandatory recycling, and the draft ended during my last year in high school. Shame on me for not getting more involved. Considering the hardships soldiering brings with it (some of our troops have to pay for their own armor -- shouldn't it be standard issue for all combat/hazardous duty personnel?), shame on us all. Whatever victory may still be achieved, it will require more than cheerleading and empty expressions of support. God save the Republic.


He interpreted May's attitude as a stark contrast to how we idealize World War Two's civilian dedication & sacrifice. A woman from Temecula, CA, Stacy Swenck, meditated on the historical implications of e-mail versus letters:


Last week's series of strips has caught my attention like no other. I lost my dad, Robert Swenck, to Vietnam in 1971. I was only twelve when my dad died, and a few years ago I finally read the letters (about 100) he sent to my mom before he was killed. I only got to know my dad through those letters since my mom rarely mentioned him after he was killed. I worry that the families of today's soldiers are communicating through ephemeral means, and that there will not be letters left over for the kids to read when they grow up.


And a mother from Tuscan, AZ, Heather Deaver, compared it to her own paranoid experience, which of course can be viewed in contrast to pre-internet wars:


I just wanted to thank you for the recent strip on soldiers emailing from Iraq. My son is a 23-year-old Lance Corporal in the Marine Reserves. He began his first tour last week, when your strip was running. I had to laugh because I was also freaking out if I didn't get an email every day. My son very patiently explained that there are only so many computers, they have to sign up to use them, and they only get 20 minutes and he has a lot of email! Thanks for making me feel not so silly.


Alternately, it contains various thoughts on marital relations, which span peacetime, wartime, & whatever sort of high-tech conflict we're in now. Comic strip authors of the stupid variety often gear their strips to hit a simple chord, like “ha ha, my husband always has the same shit luck when he golfs, too – I'll cut this out & put it on my fridge.” There's really no comparison to what Gary Trudeau is doing.


September 15, 2006

Editorial: Amy Goodman & an analysis of Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit": The Truth vs. The Noise

Last night, we went & heard Amy Goodman speak at the First Congregational Church in Oakland. She's celebrating the tenth year of her revolutionary radio show Democracy Now! & plugging her new book, at the beginning of a long, long tour. The book is number 18 on the Times Bests Sellers List, & she urged her crowd to buy two or three copies so that the Times had to put the title on their printed list: Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, & the People Who Fight Back. The New York Times, she claims, has refused to review this or her last book, possibly because there was a chapter in Exception to the Rulers called “Lies of the Times.”


Goodman spoke eloquently. She has a daunting memory for names of people & dates, & strings ideas together in an inspiring way. Seemingly spontaneously, she rattled off a long list of other times terrorist-related events have happened on September 11ths on U.S. soil, all easily accessible to her quick brain. Unfortunately, she lumped all of the questions from the crowd into one multi-answer at the end. One of the questions written down for her was “are we the choir you're preaching to, is anyone else listening?” She didn't really answer that question, but she had previously referred to the waxing of her show's popularity, which she assumes is in response to a growing awareness that “mainstream” news must be leaving important things out. She mentioned that some of the largest crowds they've drawn were at supposedly un-“liberal” cities such as Fresno & Salt Lake City, where fire marshals complained of an audience sitting in the aisles & on stage. Also, although independent radio is always fighting hard to remain alive, this old medium is fatally linked to another out-of-date medium, cars. And, unlike television, where it is almost impossible to insert an alternative opinion, & there is no channel between 4 & 5, radio still uses a dial, a show like Democracy Now! can be found by scanning between NPR & a Christian station.



Learning to play Dylan songs is a decades-old practice of songwriters & amateur musicians around the world, & it is almost always educational to the individual even when the result is un-listenable. Even among singers who have recorded their versions – take one of your favorite Dylan songs & type the name into iTunes. There'll be twenty versions & half of them are probably pretty disappointing (it lets you listen to thirty seconds of each song without purchasing it). I just did this with a Dylan song that I've been writing a new accompaniment for, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, a song from his golden era which is thematically related to a set of “comparative love songs” I sing (“My love is like a red, red rose.”) There is the range of a subtle actor in Bob's interpretations of his own lyrics, but Judy Collins, for example, just sings every line prettily. There is also a version in German by Wolfgang Ambros. How can you translate Dylan? Not only is his language as specific as Pushkin's or Shakespeare's (so, technically, untranslatable), but so much hinges on rhyme, meter, puns, irony, allusion, & the deviation from rhyme & meter, as to make the task discouraging.


But learning songs invites a close analysis of the poetry which few modern Americans embark on. Memorization of famous national poetry is too common in other cultures, but not so much here. And then there's Bob Dylan. Tens of thousands of people know various of his lyrics by heart. And, it doesn't need to be said, his language is rife for interpretation & fecund with shifting meanings.


Then there are the lines in his songs which at first seem like filler, or like the controlled nonsense popularized by Lewis Carroll; or, as the New Yorker critic Louis Menand called it, “lines that are truly lame.” Ironically, the example he gives is a verse from “Ballad of a Thin Man”, the one about the midget shouting the word “NOW!” This I know to be my friend James Eliot Quill's favorite verse, & I take his opinions on Dylan more seriously than Menand's. So can we agree that everyone thinks Dylan uses some nonsense-filler, but no two people agree on which lines are & which aren't? No. Yes. It doesn't matter.


So take for instance “Love Minus Zero”, a song I got to thinking about after singing it fifteen times yesterday. (The lyrics are here.) The song is based on a fundamental juxtaposition, that of “my love” - who exhibits a kind of purity, almost mystic – versus everything else the song mentions, usually superficial in an ambiguous way. In the first two verses, the only thing we really find out about her is that she's quiet. Listen: “she speaks like silence ... she doesn't have to say ... she laughs like the flowers ... she speaks softly.” But poetically, of course, it's a wisdom in comparison to the noisy world. The other half of her personality is what she knows, but, presumably, isn't preaching with much volume. The second two verses are full of the above mentioned “nonsense-filler”. But it's always there in contrast to “my love”, and there is drama in how it unfolds over time. In the third verse, she is still detached & too wise for this world. But in the fourth, it is now night & the weather is less hospitable. There's still the noise of the country doctor's rambling & the hammering wind, & the superficiality of the bankers' nieces waiting for the magi, but this time “my love” is hurt by it. Dylan creates these “mixed-up” worlds in many of his songs, & the “narrator” is often the one who is troubled by the mangled procession of perceptions – think of “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” or “Desolation Row.” This song is much shorter, & the narrator's role is to idealize the girl who stands in relation to the mixed-up world, & at the end, he is haven when it breaks her.

September 12, 2006

Quotes: Departing like Pushkin

What in name to you my?
It will die, like sound sad
Of wave, having crashed on shore distant,
Like sound night in forest deaf.

It on commemorative sheet
Leaves mortal track, resembling
Pattern of inscription on-coffin
In unknown language.

What in it? Forgotten long ago
In disturbances new and mutinous,
To your soul won’t give it
Memories clean, soft.

But in day of sadness, in silence,
Pronounce it melancholying;
Say: is memory of me,
Is in world heart, where live I…

-Pushkin, trans. Iakov Eliovich


Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn't even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to speak of it. It used to be quite hilarious: They would be sitting at the table; at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end - his son. One wouldn't know where to look.

-Kharms, Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin


First operand of . is NULL, so cannot access member Find. (2,236)

At DERIVED_RESUME.RESUME_NEXT_BTM.FieldChange PCPC:1703 Statement:22

The first operand of the dot operator is the NULL value, indicating the lack of any object value. As a consequence, the given method of property cannot be used.

-Error message which prevents me from applying to a job thru the U.C. Berkeley network using the Mozilla Firefox internet browser.


Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals & soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

-William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle (2002), pg. 16


I have smitten you with blasting & mildew:
when your gardens & your vineyards & your fig trees increased,
the palmerworm devoured them
.

-Amos 4:9


In my womb I carried my avenger!

-Angelina Jolie's character in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004)


As we know, Pushkin's beard never grew. Pushkin was very distressed about this and he always envied Zakharin who, on the contrary, grew a perfectly respectable beard. 'His grows, but mine doesn't' - Pushkin would often say, pointing at Zakharin with his fingernails. And every time he was right.

-Kharms, Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin


Belinsky. It was she who killed him [Pushkin], in a way.
Stanevich. That's what I think! She was the wrong woman for him. The duel was between knowledge & denial, the dialectic dramatized, it's all there in Hegel.
Belinsky. Hegel? She was a flirt!
Stanevich. Well, I have to agree. But on a higher, Hegelian level, dueling with rapiers represents -
Belinsky. He was shot.
Stanevich. What?
Belinsky. He was shot.
Stanevich. Who was?
Belinsky. Pushkin.
Stanevich. I'm talking about Hamlet.
Belinsky. Hamlet?

-Tom Stoppard, from Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Part I, Act 2


Ye golden lamps of heav'n, farewell,
With all your feeble light;
Farewell, thou ever changing moon,
Pale empress of the night.

And thou refulgent orb of day,
In brighter flames array'd;
My soul which springs beyond thy sphere,
No more demands thy aid.

-112 The Last Words of Copernicus. C.M. (Philip Doddridge 1755), from the Sacred Harp


September 11, 2006

Essay on Distance


After college, many of my friends settled in Brooklyn, the only place in America I have no interest in living. I went away to one boarding school for four years & one college for four years (including one year abroad in England). Relationships are, of course, measured in both time & space. During my eight years of education, I developed many close friendships, all of which were displaced every spring. Few people, when they are deciding where to go after school, would take into much consideration where their friends will be moving. Ambitions, art scenes, employment opportunities, desire for travel, love – these preside over keeping “the gang” together. Drinking companions are best found around the corner, anyway, & are easily replaced. Still, some friendships are more mystical, inspiring, collaborative.


Look what happens to the average “long-distance relationship.” Either the couple is together, then moves to separate locations, & there is a gradual idealization & growing apart, resulting in catastrophe; or, they move apart, & then move back together after a time, & the gradual idealization & growing apart results in an awkward period of disillusionment. This is an extremely generalized over-simplification: some long-distance relationships have ended in the happiest marriages. What about friendships in the age of e-mail, cellphones, & MySpace? Perhaps, because there is no pressure for ceaseless love & daily communication, one can make these connections in college, for instance, & continue to receive the mystical collaborative elements thru e-mail, whilst receiving his drinking-companion needs around the corner (if around the corner offers no conversations about Bartók or Thomas de Quincey.)


My high school & college friends have settled in a startling plethora of locals – New York, London, Liverpool, India, Hainan, Alabama, Massachusetts, L.A., Brazil, & even Texas. I was saddened that few of my close friends visited me when I was living in Tahoe, a place I wanted to show off, but who can blame them with travel so inefficient & expensive. I've moved to the bay area to increase the feeling of community, & already surprising people have visited & plan to visit. I'm not having much luck establishing regular drinking companions, tho, but that comes with patience & employment.


The book I am reading is by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, a chemist & an architect who propose redesigning how things are made. Valuable technical materials & chemicals are regularly mixed with natural materials, & disposed in land fills where both are useless. They suggest that everything can be made to be infinitely recyclable or immediately biodegradable, separating the biosphere from the “technosphere”. Newspapers, for instance, are made from recycling things things that were not meant to be recycled, & are printed on with toxic inks, & bleached with more chemicals, & are useless after one or two cycles – everything is always “downcycled.” This book, Cradle to Cradle, is not made out of a tree, but of high quality plastics & safe inks. It is extremely durable & waterproof; but when it is thrown “away”, it can be washed & melted to create another equally high quality book. They suggest that current methods of recycling are merely “less bad”, & often placate the liberal masses with righteousness; however, it is possible to a create a system that is “good.” Slowing down the current destructive industrial system could actually be worse in the long run; & preaching “efficiency” & being conservative with resources just pisses off capitalists obsessed with growth. It pits environmentalists against industry. In nature however, growth is good. (Their example is of a cherry tree, whose excess blossoms & fruit are not “waste” but nourishing & beautiful.)


I just got to a part where they suggest that all sustainability is local. Diversity, adaptability, culture, dialect: these are successful reactions to location for both nature & human society. And this Earth offers an almost infinite variety of locations, all of which life has adapted to inhabit. Sustainable local systems nourish your community, & add up to a fully nourished macrocosm. Liberals often point out that Super-Walmarts in sprawled suburban areas hurt every aspect of society: “Main Street” culture, the local economy, the quality of your neighbor's jobs, lack of support for local agriculture, the quality & ethics of distant agriculture, the amount of fossil fuels burned to transport the products, all the unnecessary packaging waste, and the list goes on. I would never imply that long distance friendships are the Walmarts of Modern America. But, your average white post-college American liberal tends to be semi-nomadic, befriending people everywhere, & settling in a baffling array of places. I would like to see a statistic for how many settled where they grew up. Conservative Midwesterners, as a stereotype, are much more family & hometown oriented.


Plato often evokes love for God by discussing love between humans, & mystics use the language of the natural world to describe the subtle heavens. Human connections – a web of nourishment, waste, & sustainability – can perhaps be understood with a model of community, agriculture, energy flows, and Walmarts. Or, more likely, they are a synecdoche (an inclusive metaphor, a metaphor which is included in what it stands for.) Friendship & love are as much a part of a balanced, healthy society as the politics, food cycles, architecture, & everything else. Indeed, this spiritual interconnection can be seen as the soul to a town's body. The Electoral College in a huge county deprives local communities of an actual democracy (in California, for instance, I know we'll get the democratic presidential vote, so there's no reason to campaign or canvass or even argue with my neighbor.) Could the combination of cheap travel, easy relocation, the Internet, and sprawl add up to a modern civilization where friendships are like the disposable diapers that fill up our landfills?

September 06, 2006

Two Prophetic Poems, & two ideas

The Poet for J.K.

His genius is sired of misery or magic;
he dwells between disaster & the dream.
He might have been sedate; but only tragic
ecstasy is musical to him.
In every chaos he will wish a cure;
in life, a higher mystery of sorrow;
in death, the last existence that is pure.
Curoisity betrays him to tomorrow.
Necromantic passion, final terror
is his bequest: The wound was all he had
to multiply. Balancing the rope of error,
he shall fall to doom. He shall be mad,
sadly, deceived, he shall live, and he shall die
a master of all mummery.

-Allen Ginsberg

This poem was published in the September 4th issue of The New Yorker. Because of the title, I invite the blogosphere to read it not as a poem written in 1949 to Kerouac, but as a prophecy to J.K. Rowling. Indeed, there are certain undeniable "coincidences;" as Hermione pointed out, now that we know some real prophecies do exist. The poem alludes directly to Harry's "hero complex", a sort of artistic necessity for "tragic ecstacy" instead of a "sedate" life. And, of course, his attraction to situations that lead to death and sorrow - the Rowling books conclude that one is fated only because one chooses to be fated. Dumbledore has always preached trust, love, and friendship; and we await Book Seven to know if we can believe in that morality. Harry, like Hamlet, is trapped between two revenge tools: love/friendship or individualism/violence. He begins life an orphan with only a scar - "The wound was all he had to multiply" could mean opting for the bad timing of Hamlet, resulting in his own untimely end. He is "the boy who lived", but Ginsberg tells us what to expect: "He shall be mad, sadly, deceived, he shall live, and he shall die a master of all mummery." And even Rowling has been setting us up for a tragic ending (she recently said in an interview: "I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks: 'Well, I'm going to kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels … so it will end with me, and after I'm dead and gone they won't be able to bring back the character.'") However, like Christ & Kerouac, she is a master at setting up great surprises. What does it mean to "die a master of all mummery"?

____________________________________________________________________

On the first floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there is a 1951 oil on canvas by Robert Rauschenberg called "White Painting (Three Panel)". It is a triptych of evenly spaced, pure white paint on large white fabric. Yesterday, looking for my lost friends, I waited in the room with this painting for several minutes, & was entertained by the various reactions. Two artsy teenage girls acted like it was the most inspiring thing they had ever seen, but walked away after barely looking at it. Then, an elderly British couple enterd the room. She rolled her eyes & pointed at it sarcastically. He droned "ohh dear..." laconically, hilariously. I'm not suggesting that there is a proper response to this painting. But the "ohh dear" is interesting, as the painting is fifty-five years old, & should hardly be a cause of concern. Rauschenberg, of course, had a long, varied career, brimming with talent & creativity; so the painting can not be accused of being a fraud by a hack. He invited, in the notes, the viewer to look at his own shadows. The advantage of Cage's 4'33", a composition of silence, is that it mandates a duration. All manner of auxilary noises fill up the empty space (especially in New York, where both Cage & Rauschenberg worked.) What is it about empty canvasses that so offend audiences, especially when the emptiness they perceive can never exist?

____________________________________________________________________


Prophecy for an antepenultimate doom.

My friend, take heed lest any one deceive all,
There shall be wars & rumors of corruption,
But these are not the ultimate destruction,
Nor are these evils unredeemable.

When all from Earth are obliterated & erased,
There shall be none to speak of it or hear it,
And no responsibility & none to bear it,
The legacies of ants will be effaced.

Woe to them who go down to Brazil for help!
You better free your mind instead, you should
Learn the famines of the land where your ancestors stood,
And you should listen to the yelps of every bitch's whelp.

So go & set a watchman for the fallout,
And design a better Industrial Revolution,
Go study the natural cycles for a solution,
And leave the praying to the more devout.

September 03, 2006

E-mail to Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Golden

Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 10:34:32 -0700 (PDT)
From:"James Welsch" <_________@yahoo.com>
Subject: Emily Dickson
To:"liam golden"

He writes her, a sentence -

house? - juxtaposing parties -
drinking a mimosa the fall of man
And Liam a painter a drunk asswhore -
drink, asswhore, drink - return to the fatherland -
And the virtue was impregnated with another man's retard,
And the drunk asswhore - we have the keys
to your parents' house - and the songwriter & Lisa
And the rainforest monkeys fondled -
home? - he's become a technocrat!
He's sold his ass-soul to tutor morality's idiot child!
He foreclosed on his morgage & turned to Portuegese Literature!
Motherland? Sudetenland? Sudan? - sweep up, poor asswhore.

September 02, 2006

Letter to Zelda Bronstein (Berkeley Mayoral Candidate)

Dear Zelda,

I assume you don't take "the kid" Christian Pecaut's mayoral race seriously, but he does have one great idea. In his flyer on my windshield, he hand-drew a map of Telegraph Avenue as a "Pedestrian Promenade". How great would that be? In a green-minded city like Berkeley, there are no districts or streets where cars are entirely banned. Even on the fabulous "bicycle boulevards", I feel like I'm always getting out of the way of an automobile, and inert ones are always lining every street. The peace of carless-ness shouldn't be an exclusive right of residential neighborhoods or college campuses. We could open up the middle of Telegraph to commercial carts, street performers, & much more - kicking cars off would be instant culture! & I'm sure more and & people are feeling this way.

Good luck,
James