Poll Results

Friends, you don't even know what you're in for! the exciting results from the first ever www.itwaslost.org Poll! As there were so many requests for definitions, I have done some late-night research to include with the tally. Full disclaimer, I had no idea what these words meant when I created the survey, & neither did you when voting, but now you do!

What's your favorite 2007 new word in the Oxford English Dictionary?

cotch (0%) "Verb versitile [sic] word, can describe any part of the human body, the vagueness of said word is the highlite [sic] of its existance [sic]". Brilliant definition from the Urban Dictionary. Any urban dictionary of urban words, I have often argued, deserves urban definitions. I should note here that, due to its extreme expensiveness, I cannot check the oed.com to see what or which meaning of these new words they have just added. Another definition for "cotch" is "to hang or chill with people", for which they offer the quote: "wanna come & cotch at my house tonight blad?" I'm glad the English-speaking masses have supplied a term for this somehow ineffable concept, the absence of which has created so many awkward phone conversations when trying to arrange play dates with my friends.

Godzone (28%) The same as "God's own", and, according to MSN, "often used ironically." Not often enough, MSN.

whippit (0%) "...are small metallic containers of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) intended for home use in whipped cream charging bottles. However, using a 'cracker' & a large balloon, the user can open the whippit & release the gas into the balloon. The user then inhales the contents of the balloon for an amazingly intense, immediate, but albeit short-term body & mind high. Typically referred to as 'hippie crack'. Sold in boxes of 12 or 24 in most headshops. Have fun!" An unbiased definition again from the Urban Dictionary. Their quote: "Dude, this party is dead. You got any of those whippits left? I gotta cracker & some balloons in my car." For the parties I throw at the Webb Block, which are never "dead", we tend to use proper laughing gas dispensers.

breathability (14%) Web searches attempting to define this word have proven vain.

Zoque-mixe (14%) I think this is an obscure language in Mexico. My only discoveries of it used in a sentence are from an article in the Journal of Linguistics:

In this section, I consider the process of morphological palatalization in Zoque (Zoque-Mixe of southern Mexico). Zoque palatalization contrasts with Chaha labialization (section 3) in some crucial senses. First, while Chaha labialization illustrates a case of long distance realization of an affix, Zoque palatalization illustrates local realization; i.e. the affix must be realized at the edge, just as Nuer mutation (section 4). However, unlike Nuer mutation, palatalization is always realized in Zoque. I derive both of these effects from constraint ranking (or re-ranking), as predicted by Optimality theory. However Zoque differs substantively from both Chaha and Nuer in the sense that the featural affix is a prefix as opposed to a suffix. This difference is formally captured by the difference in edge alignment.

cholent (28%) Not to be confused with the Ashkenazi food which, according to the Urban Dictionary, "looks like mush ... strongly resembles feces, but it tastes heavenly." The new meaning of those seven letters in that order, I believe, is this: "a cholent is a small confused mammal, which is put up the anus during the practice of homosexual sex. This is achieved by forcing a hollow plastic tube thru the rectal muscle above the anus, in order to allow a free passage thru which the mammal can penetrate the lower abdomen. The tube is then pulled out quickly so as not to allow the creature to escape. This engrossment is known as Cholentation." Oh, & it continues. I love how nonchalantly the dictionarist refers to this as "during the practice of homosexual sex", as if it is a common part of (only gay) foreplay. Please, someone, send me the OED definition! If you were wondering how this might be used in a sentence, here's the explicative quote provided: "'Ohh!!! I feel that cholent that you put up my ass Stephen!' said Cloughy." Where's Rick Santorum when you need him?

fembot (42%) Elizabeth Hurley. And, the winner of our FIRST EVER ITWASLOST.ORG survey. Thank you all for participating, all seven of you, two of which were me. Stay tuned, 2008 will be an exciting year on this weblog, with more & more quality bloggers, naked nude photos of celebrities xxx (to help you find it on Google, & bring more potential survey takers). Happy New Year!

Live Blogging from the Pomegranate Raspberry Mulled Wine & Whiskey 2007 Sendoff Festivus Eritrean Party

Welcome to the Live Blogging of the Glühwein Party, for all of you poor cold losers who decided to settle in other parts of the world. It's 5:30 P.M. Pacific Time, 40 degrees in Berkeley, somewhat ugly weather here. Life is short, but the Webb Block has been polished & dusted, roses are on the table. A dvd of a fireplace burns on the tv set.

5:15. I am alone & I wash my hands, & make my delicious Puffed Millet Cookies.
5:30. Liam calls from the recycled paper office & tells me he is on his way, bringing friends.
5:40. Six bottles of Two Buck Chuck Shiraz are opened & emptied into a large cauldron.
6:40. Liam & friends have come & gone back to the store for more cheese & more bread. The past hour has been spent slowly warming up the wine & adding many many delicious ingredients. The third movement of Gorecki's Third Symphony, coming on randomly, made the de-seeding of the pomegranate much more emotional than it might otherwise have been.
8:30. Ten people are here eating cookies, Stolen, pineapples, & drinking Liam's amazing Raspberry Whiskey (which has been fermenting for two months), & my mulled wine. Cheeks are beginning to look a bit flushed.
9:00. A brief interlude to watch Leopard Slug sex.
10:15. Virtue's hit the rum.
10:30. The roses on the table have been replaced by a Trivial Pursuit board.
11:00. Liam creepily correctly answers "Fifty-four" to the question "What was the number of Gunther Toody's patrol car?"
11:30. Sixty-six-point-six percent of the party up-&-runs out the door towards the penultimate BART train.
12:00 A.M. My upstairs neighbor makes an appearance with her husband, erroneously thinking they have interrupted something between me & the remaining guest. They drink a glass of Glühwein & borrow The Princess Bride.
12:45. I am alone with a few glasses of mulled wine to go. A few hours ago I rejuvenated it with dark rum, sugar, & limes. It's sticking to my teeth, but I'm determined to see the sun rise, so, Merry Festivus to all, & to all a googily opulent yarblat.

Bring Your Mug To-night

Several of the attendees who have R.S.V.P.'d to my invite for tonight's party are fictional, but it should be a smashing party. Bring a mug! I rather strained my back yesterday carrying a case of Charles Shaw Shiraz on the BART from the new Trader Joe's on College Avenue. In preparation for this epic mulled wine, I have had pomegranates & raspberries soaking in Jim Beam whiskey for two weeks in the window. In addition to the wine & whiskey, the following things will be added to the simmering Glühwein:

-The juice & zest from six large organic oranges.
-The juice squeezed from a dozen key limes
-Raspberries
-Red currants
-The seeds from a large pomegranate
-Many cinnamon sticks
-Nutmeg
-Cardamom
-Cloves
-Brown &/or unrefined white sugar, to taste
-More rum & more whiskey & more wine.

It's important, of course, not to let the cauldron ever come to a boil (which will decrease the alcohol content). Proselytes of the Mimosa's Witnesses will notice that Glühwein in an evening, festivus-time cousin to the Mimosa, replete with all the ingredients for secular transubstantiation. Check back to this website later, there may be Live Blogging. Here is from the original invite:

You can come earlier if you desire, & help me mull the wine, & there may be food.

The following costumes are discouraged:

-Keebler Elf
-Condoleeza Rice Elf
-Aphid or other Sternorrhyncha
-Disney Princess
-Sen. Arlen Spekter (R-Penn.)
-Cole Porter
-Luna Lovegood
-Amos or any other minor Old Testament Prophet

While these would be allowed, of course, some creative variation would be appreciated this year.
Bringing a mug would assist in transporting the mulled wine from the large steaming pot to your mouth.
My apartment is conveniently located across from the Ashby BART station:

This is a picture of a Barack Obama butter sculpture, by Duffy Lyon, the famous "Butter Cow Lady" from Iowa fairs. She has endorsed the candidate.

Shout Out: The Day After The Day After Christmas

This film by Mike Dobler, about today, features music by a man who, sometime in the crazy 1980s, sprang forth from the same womb from whence I also sprang.

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

Brom-Iliad Bromance III.

And now, this week's installment of my nonsense epic, but stay tuned. On a train from Davis, returning from a Christmas surrounded by nieces, drinking a famous beer made from rice, barley, hops, yeast, water, & aged over beechwood, I was working on this poem without a pencil, having to send messages on my phone to Grâce "Rat-Arse" Marlier, like all true modern poets. This is continued from here: Part I, Part II. I expect next week to be drowned in blood & jealousy & redemption & astronauts.

III.

Happy Holidays, he said to me, slipping me a holiday bonus,
Have faith in our future, he preached, & began lighting the evening's votives.

A spectacular lake of rum awaits me when I turn eighty:
We couldn't see our reflection in the Mirror of the Laity.

By this time, he had amassed a considerable congregation in aboriginal Australia.
They were useful in defeating our formidable enemy: Delila Falalia.

Thereon, dark clouds would begin to block me from his life,
He still considered my memos, but he got most of his new-agey wisdom from his first wife.

I chopped the remains of the Parker Street Thane up in my bathtub,
A clever mix of chemicals purchased at WalMart will decompose any fop.

Opacity, untraceable text messages, a giant winged seraphic paratrooper,
No heavy dose of smelling salts could stir my companion's companion from her stupor.

You lean upon the pillars of romance, evil will infect our alive forevers,
The tiniest dose of arsenic in eighteen consecutive dinners.

We understand the reasons for Delila's defeat, they have never been clearer:
The furor for her party last Friday & the missent invite to her resurrected Fuehrer.

I was speechless after my foxpetal gene mutated off its dyspraxial axial.
Those two homicides remained mysterious until my memoirs were stolen from my cell at the Dublin jail.

Hear me, cherrybombs afire! If the green fairy can't save our friendship, nothing can!
The man who might emancipate our music is a distant descendant of Robert Todd Lincoln.

It behooves us to investigate the known facts of the story up to this date...
Passion, betrayal, murder, some irrelevant horseshit, well will the sun's planets spin at any rate.

Enter, so I thought, his veiled second wife, let the angels fall hard,
For the next two years I would receive no more than a Christmas card from their secret meditation retreat at Svalbard.

More Quotes: War on Christmas 2007 & some gauzy gleaming that the next generation is being nurtured by better literature

First, there's a new character in Doonesbury whom I'm particularly excited about, introduced today - (click on it to read it, & you can always read today's strip here.)

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

-New York Times, 21 December 2007, "Huckabee, Back in Iowa, Brings Christmas Message" by Paul Vitello. What's with Republicans & children's books? Bush claimed his favorite book was the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar, which came out when he was a teenager. And speaking of morality:

In Pullman's world, hope simply does not exist, because there is no salvation but only personal, individualistic capacity to control the situation and dominate events.

-from the official Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano, calling the film version of Pullman's The Golden Compass "the most anti-Christmas film possible."

Oh my God yes, they are protesting. They are pamphleting. The Catholic League and Focus on the Family and evangelical/fundamentalist Christian blogs from here to Colorado Springs, they are calling on their trembling armies to boycott the film because they believe that Pullman's brilliant books — which, by the way, if I had the power, I would place in the eager and lovely hands of every youngish human on the planet right now, but especially the girls — are not only aggressively anti-Christian, they ultimately describe, as their grand finale, nothing less than the death of God. This is what they say.

And here is the terrific thing: They are absolutely right.

-Mark Morford, "Jesus Loves His Dark Materials," 30 November 2007, San Francisco Chronicle.
At least this time, the Teletubby actually is gay.

If that's the case and Sweeney Todd works, there may be more. There's already talk of Mendes making a film of Sondheim's 1970 show Follies with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Meanwhile, in Hollywood to promote the movie, the composer found himself in conversation with Steven Spielberg. The director talked about wanting to film a musical himself. Sondheim's immediate response? 'Write one - don't take one from the stage.'

-David Benedict, "The singalong-a-slasher", The Gaurdian, 23 December 2007.
From the master himself: don't adapt, write your own.

Movie Review: Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!

I was able to see this movie on Friday morning (December 21st, four days before it comes out nationwide) by biking to a mall in Emeryville, for only six dollars (their holiday morning fare!), the price of which also bought me snuck-over admittance to The Golden Compass. The sources of both films I am thoroughly familiar with. And both movies, I here report for the blogosphere & posterity to consider, exceeded my expectations. For both was it hard for me to pretend I didn't know every plot detail & nuance of adaptation; but, in this day & age, it's all about having fun in malls by yourself at eleven a.m., isn't it?

Ah, Sweeney! Ah, humanity! A little after the blood in act two starts flowing, Mrs Lovett sings a dreamy song wishing she & Mr Todd could retire to the seaside after the revenge is complete & some money has been made. I chose this moment to urinate, & a large gay man also ran out of the theater with me. "You're right," said he. "I couldn't bear to sit there & hear her slaughter that song." I'm sure many of the enthusiastic Sondheim lovers who, like myself, biked far thru the cold to see the earliest possible showing of this long-anticipated movie, were constantly let down by the lack of force behind the lead actors' vocalizations. The only operatic vibrato to be heard in the entire movie is in the princess-in-a-tower's annoying "Green Finch" song. This is probably a wise decision on the filmmakers' parts, translating the singing styles for the "Highschool Music" generation. Johnny Depp sounds like a cross between a British punk rocker & Sanjaya Malakar, but he pulls off a complex but characterized musical titular nasty with the perfect amount of camp, which is a lot. His Sweeney is shyer & more introspective than it is usually done, but that works for Mr Depp & for the intimacy of cinema. The most powerful moments of Sweeney's craziness (i.e. "At last, my arm is complete!" & "My Lucy lies in ashes...") are quite powerful, even without shaking the theater like Len Cariou. Mr Depp & Helena Bonham Carter look amazing, even iconographic, in this movie, and they pull it off with their charismatic acting.

I thought of A Clockwork Orange, which manages to follow the plot of its original scene by scene, while making it entirely Kubrik's own vision. It would be hard to gut a Sondheim musical, with so many interlocking parts & motifs, without destroying its logic. Tim Burton kept most of the songs there in the right order, and used his favorite actors & stylized amoral universe, essentially fitting it to his brand. Johnny Depp holding up razors in a dusty attic with a sideways ceiling, it's obviously a connection to Edward Scissorhands. And that reference gives us things to say about Burton's world & human potential. What about Edward & Sweeney, both artists with blades who are isolated from the society around them? Edward is seen as a pariah, yet he longs for beauty. When he is co-opted by the suburbs as a barber, he is a little too weird for the roll. His true calling, topiary, is functionless & creepy in some lights, but it definitely improves the world he is thrown into. Sweeney is a much-wronged murderer who is able to hide in society as one of its necessary units, a barber, & he is co-opted by the practical & capitalistic Mrs Lovett. Like all throughout the 20th Century, business is never better but when the creative minds use their artistry for evil. Sweeney Todd would use his "negative art" (like Lady Macbeth - who, as a negative mother, takes people out of the world instead of bringing people into it) for the sake of itself, but Mrs Lovett is able to adopt it to nourish the community & make big money.

So what are we watching? Twenty-first century audiences have trouble with movies where people sing at each other. This movie is filmed on a set, everything is deliberately & beautifully artificial-looking, the plot is melodramatic & the acting is stylized. Basically, it's a postmodern glorification of a dozen outdated theatrical ideas. Some of the best movies of the past decade have had artificiality as a cinematic theme: The Life Aquatic & Ghost Dog are good examples. As for musicals, it seems like all of a sudden rather a lot are getting made, appealing especially to teenagers, gay men, & middle-aged ladies. Perhaps Sweeney Todd is bloody enough & ironic enough to get my demographic, the much-coveted twenty-somethings, to delve deeper into Sondheim's genius & begin to accept people singing at each other in movies again.

Illuminations: Whirling Gee-Whiz Prayer

Happy Christmas! Or, if you are on the other side of the War on Christmas, happy that! Either way, you're sure to enjoy these illuminated poems, done this fall on Harold Avenue in San Francisco, in collaboration with Liam Joseph Olaf Worland Mary Golden & Virtue. This is the sixth of seven prayers in a small book. The frontispiece from the Seven Prayers may be seen here; the original text from the "Whirling Gee-Whiz Prayer" may be read or googlied here. Click on the image to see it huge on your monitor.

Barack Obama Caucus Carol mp3: Listen to it right here at www.itwaslost.org!

The lyrics are here. If you wish to download it, you should be able to do so at this myspace: ssandrigon.

Quotes: December 2007 & Beyond the Infinite

..seize this window of opportunity.

-Mixed metaphor from a coalition of British corporations responding to climate change

Steve Martin, in his memoir of his early career as a stand-up comedian, writes that he used to get a laugh by claiming that in Bananaland it's true both that all chairs are green & that no chairs are green ("In the Bird Cage," October 29th). "I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was a contradiction," he writes. Actually, those claims are not contradictory: if there are no chairs, both claims are true. (The negation of "All chairs are green" is, rather, "There is at least one chair that is not green.") I would like to think that his audience included some logicians who cracked up at the thought of a chairless Bananaland.

-Alexander George, Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College, Mass.
The New Yorker's The Mail, December 24th, 2007.

1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste
2) No modern poetry is free from affectation
3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles
THEREFORE: All your poems are uninteresting.

-The famous Lewis Carroll syllogism, which Martin quotes as being an inspiration for some of his early absurdist stand-up comedy.

Ever hear the Urban Legend about the lady who puts her poodle in the microwave to dry it off? Here's a folklorist matter-of-factly discussing the physics of it:

Around 1976 I began to hear the microwave-over variants, & I inserted the following summary example from Utah into the second edition (1978) of my text-book The Study of American Folklore: "[a] child ... accidentally sprinkles the cat with a hose & puts it into a microwave to dry out, whereupon the cat explodes (p. 111)." The phrase in the Arizona text, of the animal being "cooked from the inside out," more accurately describes the molecule-jiggling effect of microwaves than the account of the pet exploding in my text (the only way I have heard it). I am told, however, that eyes might possibly pop when bombarded with microwaves, just as eggs or potatoes are said to do if inserted into an oven whole. People's notions about what would happen to a living creature caught in a microwave oven are doubtless colored by a vague fear of the new devises and intensified by such things as the warning signs posted on public-access microwave ovens and the news stories about microwaves beamed by the Soviets into our foreign embassy. Whatever those mysterious invisible waves may do to a person - or to a pacemaker, as the posted warnings imply - they certainly would not be healthy for the family pet. The animal would surely cook & die in the oven, so the fear is quite realistic.

-Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (1981), pg. 63.
This is a tall tale which Myth Busters, for liability reasons, will never be able to debunk.

If you do not own a copy of John Hodgman's "Almanac of Complete World Knowlege", The Areas of My Expertise, may I suggest it as a Christmas Present to yourself, or as a gift to someone who lives in the same house as you. In the section on "How to write a book", he offers this advice:

When writing, please avoid these failed palindromes:

Slow speed: deep owls
Drat That Tard
Two Owls Hoot Who Owls Hoot Too (Owt)
Sour candy and Dan C.
Roused Desire still lisps: Arise! D.
A man, a plan, a kind of man-made river, planned.
Hobos! So!
Eh, S'occurs to Me to Succor She
Tow a What? Thaw!

Barack Obama Caucus Christmas Carol

Last night at the Starry Plough Open Mic I premiered this ditty on my blue mountain ukulele, & it went over quite well, I must say. Here's the first three verses, & you can probably come hear it as a duet when Steffy Sue plays the featured act at the Starry Plough on January First. (She, dressed as an elf in all red, has a whole Christmas Album, including dirty versions like "Blue Ball Christmas".) Come! Then, who knows, maybe we'll hop the Obama bus to the Nevada Caucus on January 19th, & try to get on national television.

The Little Drummer Boy, which I had previously ranked as Most Annoying Christmas Song, here takes on a somber reflective tone, sweetly chanting the name of our favorite black gay secretly-Muslim Presidential candidate:

Come, he calls me,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
A new democracy,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
He was born in Hawai'i,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
He's gonna beat Hillary**,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!

Dreams from Kenya,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Schooled at Columbia,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Endorsed by Oprah!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Audacious Hope-Ba-a-
-Rack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!

He's no white zombie clone!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
He'll bring the troops home!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Gay muslim, I beg your pardon?
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
He knew since Kindergarten,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!

**Have you noticed that transcripts of Obama's speeches always spell it "gonna" instead of "going to"? Is this a new phenomenon, is this now acceptable in print?
And, as for this line, it can easily be updated to "Giuliani", "Huckabee", or "Romney."

Update: You can download an mp3 of me singing this song into a microphone HERE!
And you can hear it here or here.
Download it! Add it to your Christmas Mixes!

18 January Update: You can now watch it on Youtube!

19 January Update: There's a fourth verse sung on Youtube, namely:

Stay off the firing range!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Pray for peace & pray for rain!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Vote for love & vote for change!
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Vote for the funny name,
Ba-rack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!
Barack O-ba-ma!

Brom-Iliad Bromance II.

This is the second part of the nonsense epic: perhaps it will continue to be serialized. You'll check back for the continuation of the saga, replete as promised with lust, intrigue, riddles, cowboys, pirates, & robots.

II.
At first I was his retainer. I was too broke to work:
The Thane of Parker Street was jealous of me, the withered irksome jerk.

How did he play those guitar riffs on those meaty fingers?
The chthonic von Richthofen fades in our memories, but the shrapnel lingers.

In May I was promoted to cartographer, but I hated the frontier.
There was never wine or salt for our meat. I grew weary of buffalo & deer.

There is a key around my pinkie, rewrapped like an aged tradition:
My official ambition was to chart the fractal mountains, singin' "hexagon craw-fishin'".

Our underground drill battle framed the campaign,
Retold as legends of boyfriends swinging from a tree in the rain.

Take the Fremont Line to Carson City and genuflect,
What's spoken of the flower shall be heard in the light of the intellect.

But there are wild-card secrets: two years into our venture, I contracted typhoid,
But you should have seen the other guy, choking on the cyborg eggplants she deployed.

Holy Cars! Long essays about winter, armorbearer stenciling a sword,
My health insurance covered the hysterectomy, so long as I redefined the word.

No genocide is complete without its hummable tunes.
The summation of our endeavors is buried beneath Columbia's ruins.

This wisdom of true mates is earthly & sensual & devilish,
And whirling, reckoning on relishing strife, malice, & her kill wish.

My love is like a water-gathering leaf structure,
Assay the treasure-mound & poke the monster where he is most cocksure.

How do I describe my companion in arm-removal & starlight parody?
Chant louder above the rhetoric, we implode these tranced flashes of clarity.

this continues next week!

List: Famous Cottagers thru History

-Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho): famous for "toe-tapping."

-Sir Laurence Olivier (actor): arrested for cottaging in 1953.

-George Michael (pop star): not to be confused for the character on Fox's Arrested Development played by Michael Cera.

-Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkley, actor, drummer): never actually arrested for cruising in lavatories, but what list would be complete without him?

-Socrates (bare-footed hippie): listed here as a synecdoche for the entire culture of public toilets & gymnasiums.

-Alan Jones (Australian radio personality): fell afoul of Westminster by-laws in a WC in London's West End, 1988.

-Mike Huckabee (Former Governor of Arkansas): Can you believe it!? Spread the word to all your Republican-voting friends & relatives!

-Christopher Aitken (Swedish Pop star): Disorderly conduct is actually permitted in Sweden, but is discouraged (for obvious reasons) by vocal professions.

-Barbara Walters (revolutionary female reporter): accidentally arrested in the wrong bathroom for lewd behavior, was actually just rehearsing her tap-dancing routine.

-Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, the Baron Corvo (19th Century English novelist & 'eccentric'): Most of his names would stay home & carouse with the boys at his estate whilst Lewis or Mary would parole the tea-rooms.

-Alexander (Emperor): conquered the known world in search of beats.

-Rev. Ted Haggard (defrocked President of the National Association of Evangelicals): Who needs bathrooms when you have the entire infrastructure of mega-churches? but the reverend liked to dabble in everything he condemned.

-Most members of the Minneapolis Police Department: looking for crime in all the right places.

Quotes: The Death of Stockhausen & the End of Twentieth Century Music (Seven Years Late)

I'm sick as a sick dog, eating mock chick soup, drinking yogi teas, trying to polish off my essays for grad school application before I go see Beowulf in 3D IMAX. The Guardian has posted a collection of surprisingly moving recollections of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the humongous intergalactic composer who died last Wednesday at 79. The last two are my favorite:

'He thought himself superior'
Richard Steinitz, director of Huddersfield contemporary music festival during one of Stockhausen's visits in 1988

He was an enormous person, not only very tall - more than 6ft 6in - but massively built. He radiated a presence. I think he thought himself superior to just about everyone else, so I can't say I felt personal warmth from him when I went out to see him in 1998. He thought of himself as having arrived from the outer cosmos, a disseminator of important spiritual truths. We sat at the table discussing possibilities as he dispensed tea and cakes in a rather grand manner.

He could be warm and human, however. When he came to Huddersfield, we had very pleasant conversations, particularly over dinner. You were rather in awe of him. Kathinka and Suzanne came over twice, so I got to know them. It was amazing that they collaborated so agreeably. There was a sense of a Stockhausen entourage, and we were careful to give him the best accommodation in town - a suite at the George hotel, with connecting doors between the bedrooms.

Once Stockhausen was happy one was doing one's best to meet the challenges of his music, he was pleasant to work with, appreciative, and inspirational with students. He went on sending me little signed greetings for a long time afterwards.

'It was like a harem in his room'
Graham Sheffield, artistic director at the Barbican and organiser of a Stockhausen season

Going to interview Stockhausen was like going to interview God. I think he did think he was God, although he was quite rational in conversation. I remember sitting in his room. It was like his harem with the sleeping arrangements, his wife and mistress hovering in the background - although they were strong-willed women, not wispy things. I was amazed somebody could live in that way.

Stockhausen was immensely popular. When we did a Barbican series on him, it sold incredibly well. In my early years at the Southbank, we tried to do his helicopter quartet, but it was so completely bonkers it would have used up the Royal Festival Hall's entire budget for the year in one afternoon. That was the way he worked - on a grand scale. In a way, his death marks the end of 20th-century music.

That's an interesting thought, & Alex Ross elaborates on it: "the twentieth century, the epoch of vastly ambitious, at times megalomaniac musical conceptions, which really began with the late works of Wagner, is indeed over. But its echoes reverberate all around us. What next?"

Here's from his girlfriends' press release:

Stockhausen always said that GOD gave birth to him and calls him home.

****

…for love is stronger than death.

IN FRIENDSHIP and gratitude for everything that he has given to us personally and to humanity through his love and his music, we bid FAREWELL to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who lived to bring celestial music to humans, and human music to the celestial beings, so that Man may listen to GOD and GOD may hear His children. On December 5th he ascended with JOY through HEAVEN’S DOOR, in order to continue to compose in PARADISE with COSMIC PULSES in eternal HARMONY, as he had always hoped to do: You, who summon me to Heaven, Eva, Mikael and Maria, let me eternally compose music for Heaven’s Father-Mother, GOD creator of Cosmic Music. May Saint Michael, together with Heaven’s musicians in ANGEL PROCESSIONS and INVISIBLE CHOIRS welcome him with a fitting musical GREETING. On behalf of him and following his example, we will endeavor to continue to protect the music.

And on the subject of the hugely ambitious & otherworldly 20th Century musicians, don't miss Brian Wilson's lost rap song, Smart Girls.

Illuminations: Ex-Girlfriend Prayer

Sneeze, croak, blow, blow, more tea please. This is from our illuminated poetry book, Seven Prayers, the frontispiece is here. The original text for the Ex-Girlfriend Prayer was posted here. The splashy colors you see in Plate 10 below are local organic pomegranate & persimmon gunk. You should be able to see it larger if you click on the image. The symbolism in the illustration is not meant to have any relation to the works of Dan Brown (as was pointed out to me offensively by Miss Sarah Cudgeous), nor are the twelve kneeling phallus-like objects meant to be the apostles.

Roshambo, Exquisite Roshambo

This is a photograph of Andrea Farina (left), one of my new heroes, the first female & the first American to win the World Rock Paper Scissors Society World Championship, in 2007 in Toronto, Canada. Women's intuition, indeed.

I have been hoping to get into some good online Rock, Paper, Scissors games on Facebook, & have challenged people all over the world, but no one is biting. Playing it online has a curious deliberating effect of adding tension & consideration, like playing chess thru the mail with an inmate.

The Wikipedia entry on RPS talks briefly about the mating strategies of the Common Side-blotched lizard:

Biologist Barry Sinervo from the University of California, Santa Cruz has discovered a RPS evolutionary strategy in the mating behaviour of the side-blotched lizard species Uta stansburiana. Males have either orange, blue or yellow throats and each type follows a fixed, heritable mating strategy:[11]

* Orange-throated males are strongest and do not form strong pair bonds; instead, they fight blue-throated males for their females. Yellow-throated males, however, manage to snatch females away from them for mating.
* Blue-throated males are middle-sized and form strong pair bonds. While they are outcompeted by orange-throated males, they can defend against yellow-throated ones.
* Yellow-throated males are smallest, and their coloration mimics females. Under this disguise, they can approach orange-throated males but not the stronger-bonding blue-throated specimens and mate while the orange-throats are engaged in fights.

This can be summarized as "orange beats blue, blue beats yellow, and yellow beats orange", which is similar to the rules of rock, paper, scissors.

The proportion of each male type in a population is similar in the long run, but fluctuates widely in the short term. For periods of 4-5 years, one strategy predominates, after which it declines in frequency as the strategy that manages to exploit its weakness increases. This corresponds to the stable pattern of the game in the replicator dynamics where the dynamical system follows closed orbits around the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium[citation needed] (Sinervo & Lively, 1996; Sinervo, 2001; Alonzo & Sinervo, 2001; Sinervo & Clobert, 2003; Sinervo & Zamudio, 2001).

Mr Golden, Miss Ball, & some other friends of mine were refining a game called, tentatively, Exquisite Roshambo (applying the surrealist principles of Exquisite Corpse to rock, paper, scissors), at a cabin in Sonoma County a few months back. Basically, the idea is that anything can be played, & an odd number of judges discuss & vote on the winner. (Hence, you need five or seven or more players, &, preferably, a bottle of Jim Beam.) Then, one of the judges challenges the reigning champion, et cetera. I seem to remember a heated round where "socks" somehow beat a "sperm whale". And "candle" beat "atom bomb", to my immortal frustration. (Our judges had a penchant for the metaphorical victories.) Concepts (like "compassion" or "heat death"), proper names (like "Arthur Schlesinger, Jr." or "Kennebunkport, Maine") & pretty much anything is fair game. The night's champion is the player who is undefeated the longest. Don't skip out on the hand representations! That evening, Miss Ball was more or less undefeatable.

Dewayne Slightweight a hero for the new millenium

Brom-Iliad Bromance

This poem is not finished, & I'm not sure what form the next part will take. But, oh, fret not, there will be violence, rapiers & rape, & a filthy little bit about sea mammals.

I.
Sing, Pineapple, of your cousin with the spiky red flower,
He spent a disproportionate amount of time washing his privates in the shower.

Now it's finished, we are done with stage two, fighting like huge male impala,
My magical pied piper tune is de Falla's Requiem, but I'm too lame to follow.

Drinking only coffee has burned a hole inside my stomach:
Inspired emotion repressed inside of me like an echoless quack.

If the archdiocese cracked down on the problem, there'd be no priests left.
So I bang my heart on the table, for all the earth like Nikita Khrushchev.

How do I describe my companion? He found water in the wilderness,
Without him I am empty, obfuscated, in transition like a dead dentist.

Oh, ratio of beauty to brawn, true balance making justice jealous,
Drink with white-collar criminals, explain Neoplatonism to the corner fellows.

He is the pilot of the planet's energy, he is sand-blasted
The checkered frontier, indifferent to the meanings of the seven languages he mastered.

His mother put me on her knee, spoon-fed me kilos of plankton,
She saw our fates written on our chests, departing with the sinking sun.

The companion, he spoke in poetry, even the way he touched me rhymed,
Our last adventure was not our grandest, but the passage back was stymied.

Burning orphanages, mountaintop removal, ugly women wanting to cuddle,
Your cochineal robes have left stains around your butthole.

Bear the iniquity, his superego eclipsed the Minister of the Environment,
Change the cat-litter, tip twenty-five percent to the Lord's servant.

Myopic & blindfolded in the presence of the angels' lambency,
The world does not know that it did not know it's stoutest sentry.

...continued here.

broken jesus on a truck in south boston

the cape


it keeps dragging off your shoulders
you can walk away from it until the train is pinned in a too-familiar hemisphere
and a thread got caught on an equatoral steeple.
you're soaking up the seas
with your tangle of fuzz
your cape over wildlife and pistachio green town squares.
taut in a place from that particular town square where
children stand on your hem
and stroke the muddy mohair
with one hand, the other resting
on pikes
the cape doesn't look like a cape
from there it's just a curiosity,
loosely knit and nice,
and it's replaced the sky.

List of DVDs played on the Shuttle from Pasadena to San Francisco

-Firewall (2006, dir. Richard Loncraine). In this movie, clean-shaven people looks likes he's saying a lot of tough things, & the weather is beautiful on the desert surrounding the 99 North. Occasionally, loud horns signal tension, & Harrison Ford is hitting people in the head with coffee makers & fire extinguishers: he'd do frickin' anything to save his wife & kids. Like in Roman Polanski's Frantic, Mr Ford rushes around with a cute younger woman while his wife is tied up. "Change of plans, asshole: You get the money when I get my family!"

-Planet Earth (2006, produced by Alastair Fothergill, narr. David Attenborough). It's misty & beginning to rain in Central California. According to the driver, "Now you watch something more... intellectually... stimulating!" I've already seen these first two episodes twice, so I attempt to read in the fading light about how Muslims use the internet space as "a trajectory rather than an area".

-Rumor Has It (2005, dir. Rob Reiner). It's raining hell-buckets on the 5 North. Shirley MacLaine plays the woman who might be the real Mrs. Robinson, thirty years after the events that inspired the book The Graduate, as her granddaughter (Jennifer Aniston) tries to piece together what happened... & if her biological father could actually be, gasp, the man who inspired Benjamin Braddock (& slept with both her mother & her grandmother). Just to be sure, she shags him. "Life is short, but marriage is long... so drink up, and it will make it go a hell of a lot faster."

Please go listen to this organist play the end of The Messiah: http://www.btinternet.com/~tim.johnson77/rambler/Messiahorganistoncrack.mp3

Unrelated Early December Notes

Sunday: I was biking downtown when a woman screamed from her SUV, "you're a fucking piece of shit, bicycle rider!" or "you're a fucking piece of shit bicycle rider!" I was impressed by her ability to express such a complete thought as she sped by me, but unsure if she was calling me a "piece of shit" bicycle rider or just a "piece of shit" and "bicycle rider" was just so I knew that she was talking to me.

Monday: When I asked Alexandra, the nine-year-old Ukrainian girl whom I tutor in English, if she knew what the word "silly" meant, she replied, "yes, silly is like I have big muscles and I punch you in the face." I nodded, entirely unsure whether or not she did, in fact, know what the word "silly" means.

Tuesday: The man who delivers bacon to my place of employment has been remiss in his duties lately. When we called him on it, he replied, "well, I own these three modeling companies and the other night I met up with my girls and they gave me some pills and then I woke up and couldn't find my cell phone."

Music Review: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Randall Woolf

My old friend, Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith, is in a touring performing quartet, Tales & Scales, which performs “Musictelling” for children, in schools & concert halls, all over the country, homing in Evansville, Indiana, on the beautiful O-Hi-O. They have a half dozen different shows, telling stories with their instruments (flute/piccolo, oboe/sax, bass trombone/euphonium, percussion) & dance. I decided I couldn’t miss the California première of The Pied Piper, for which they commissioned hip downtown composer Randall Woolf to write the music, so I rode South on Thursday with a Coast Guard chief recruiter I found on Craigslist rideshare. I ended up seeing three of the six performances during their stay at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. It’s the first time T&S has gone electronic, with a laptop onstage (on a pillar with wheels, doubling, like all their instruments, as a prop & an abstract dance/set piece). Most of their music & story (which is the 1842 poem version by Robert Browning) is accompanied by beats, moog-ish whirls, & scary Twin Peaks-y music coming out of the laptop. Mrs Smith also has next to her vibraphone, in her mobile artillery of auxiliary percussion, a nifty little turntable – on which, among other things, she scratches the sounds of kids laughing. In short, Mr Browning’s creaky poem has been turned into a hip-hopera for kids.

The fact that they perform this piece for children around the country in Elementary Schools, concert halls, & arts centers, & that the music is weird & modern - as a post-minimalist Bang-on-a-Can derivative, & both in a Stravinsky-esque way & in a hip-hop crossover way – shows that younger audiences can easily accept some of the avant-guard stuff many adults have trouble with. Quirky dissonances & electronic whizzes are nothing head-turning to a viewer of television cartoons; they can be a necessity for a lot of 21st century storytelling; but to adults-with-opinions these noises can be disorienting. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a fairly messy piece of music & theater, with thick sounds & the musicians running all over the stage, reciting into wireless microphones lines like “And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered / You heard as if an army muttered.” But a cluttered telling of a dark tale, no obstacle, most kids’ faces were glued to the stage.

Mr Woolf’s music grew on me by the third show. There’s an especially beautiful moment, right after the Pied Piper has successfully exterminated the rats, when the one surviving rat reflects on what he heard that led him to the water. The action stops, & in a threepenny moment, the narrator announces: “his commentary"; the computer plays a strumming guitar. None other than Cory Dargel’s voice comes thru the loud speakers, singing:

At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press's gripe: […]
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, 'Oh rats, rejoice!’

I likened this moment to a part of the movie “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007, dir. Wes Anderson). It’s also a cluttered, always-in-motion piece of art, telling a complex story, & at one point the action stops & an out-of-place guitar accompanies an extremely slow-motion shot of the three brothers, in all white on their way to a funeral, walking thru an Indian village, past old men who sit as still as statues, looking for all the world like a Renaissance painting. The Kinks’ song “Strangers”, & the now reflective pace, releases an ocean of emotion:

Where are you going, I don’t mind,
I’ve killed my world & I’ve killed my time, &c…

Similarly, putting the perspective on its side, understanding what the rats heard as they followed their messiah to their annihilation, somehow needed the commentary of a strumming guitar.

In this version, also, the children do not return to Hamelin, but are led mysteriously into a cave, &, in the end, it is rumored that there is a strange tribe in Transylvania that dresses differently. It’s a sad ending for the corrupt elders of Hamelin, but the recruited kids from the audience who followed the piper conclude the play in party mode, dancing jubilantly on stage. It’s actually a common theme in a lot of children’s art: Let’s get out of here, go some place cooler, & never come back. Mrs Smith told me that one venue in Florida canceled the show when they heard that the children don’t return to Hamelin. I wouldn’t either, with its euphonium-playing mayor. I’d rather be inside the song the rats heard.

Saturday night, I went with Tales & Scales to hear the Pacific Symphony play Michael Daugherty's Fire & Blood Violin Concerto, with Ida Kavafian, in that performing arts center's beautiful new hall. The orchestra was pretty good, & there was a lot of energy from the podium. I love that second movement from the concerto, where mariachi trumpets, harps, & two marimbas evoke Frida Kahlo's longing for Mexico, while she waits for two years in Michigan for Diego Rivera to finish the "Detroit Industry" mural. After the symphony, we went back across the street to the hotel, & lo, there was the composer playing the Frida theme on the piano in the lobby, with a rollicking hotel bar in the background. Not bad lounge music.

Illuminations: Genius Prayer

Good morning! Where are you this morning! Continuing, with more pages from my latest illuminated poetry book, Seven Prayers. Click on the image to see it larger. The original text for "Genius Prayer" was posted here. The frontispiece for the Seven Prayers is posted here.

Offline Instant Messages

liam (5:28:23 PM):[Offline IM sent 12d and 21h ago] habibe
liam (1:59:07 PM):[Offline IM sent 52m ago] james!

liam (1:59:17 PM):[Offline IM sent 52m ago] how I have yearned for your IMS

liam (1:59:34 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] waft the fumes of my nard

liam (1:59:44 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] i am blemished by fate

liam (1:59:53 PM):[Offline IM sent 51m ago] forgotten by fortune

liam (2:00:59 PM):[Offline IM sent 50m ago] the fire of my loins is now a pile of coals cackling in divine mockery

liam (2:01:26 PM):[Offline IM sent 49m ago] i will contribute to your blog

liam (2:05:12 PM):[Offline IM sent 46m ago] may I converge with your deep blue battleborn depths, in an operatic kind of way

liam (2:05:22 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] or like a great operation shown on public television

liam (2:05:27 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like a public execution

liam (2:05:37 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like a camus essay on morality

liam (2:05:53 PM):[Offline IM sent 45m ago] like working at a recycled soul company

Quotes: Beowulf

This poet is so superbly in command that he can risk threadbare, throwaway, matter-of-fact phrases like 'of no small importance' or 'the best part of a day'. He has a casual way with the alliterative pattern of the original, which helps to strip its craft of portentous self-consciousness and frees up its syntax to move more nimbly. Lines like "He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain, limping and looped with it", which the young Heaney might well have written in earnest, are really an ironic postmodern quotation, a self-parodic hint of the racket the whole poem might make if you bound yourself too grimly to its form.

-Terry Eagleton, The Gaurdian's review of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, 3 November, 1999

You don’t need to wait for Angelina Jolie to rise from the vaporous depths naked and dripping liquid gold to know that this “Beowulf” isn’t your high school teacher’s Old English epic poem. You don’t even have to wait for the flying spears and airborne bodies that — if you watch the movie in one of the hundreds of theaters equipped with 3-D projection — will look as if they’re hurtling directly at your head. You could poke your eye out with one of those things! Which is precisely what I thought when I first saw Ms. Jolie’s jutting breasts too.

-Manohla Darghis, New York Times review of Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

The bloodshot water wallowed & surged,
there were loathsome upthrows & overturnings
of waves & gore & wound-slurry.

-Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, pg. 57

...We are retainers
from Hygelac's band. Beowulf is my name.
If your lord & master, the most renowned
son of Halfdane, will hear me out
and graciously allow me to greet him in person,
I am ready & willing to report my errand.

-Beowulf announces himself in Heaney's translation, pg. 25

I am Ripper... Tearer... Slasher... Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength... & Lust... & Power! I AM BEOWULF!

-Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf