Life's Bone

Opening paragraphs
(Because I wish only to share the writing of this remarkable person with other readers, I consider the printing of this excerpt as "for personal use only". dan)
To read In Bluebeard's Castle in it's entirety , click link in sidebar. There are four chapters. 1. The great Ennui (opening paragraphs shown below), 2. A Season in Hell, 3. In a Post-Culture and, 4. Tomorrow





George Steiner:
In Bluebeard's Castle. Somes Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1)
0-300-01791-3 Yale University Press © George Steiner 1971
Reproduction interdite sauf pour usage personnel - No reproduction except for personal use only
We are very grateful to Professor George Steiner for allowing us to make this text available here.
1. The Great Ennui

Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture: my subtitle is, of course, intended in memoration of Eliot's Notes of 1948. Not an attractive book. One that is gray with the shock of recent barbarism, but a barbarism whose actual sources and forms the argument leaves fastidiously vague. Yet the Notes towards the Definition of Culture remain of interest. They are, so obviously, the product of a mind of exceptional acuteness. Throughout my essay, I will be returning to issues posed in Eliot's plea for order.



It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past. The echoes by which a society seeks to determine the reach, the logic and authority of its own voice, come from the rear. Evidently, the mechanisms at work are complex and rooted in diffuse but vital needs of continuity. A society requires antecedents. Where these are not naturally at hand, where a community is new or reassembled after a long interval of dispersal or subjection, a necessary past tense to the grammar of being is created by intellectual and emotional fiat. The "history" of the American Negro and of modern Israel are cases in point. But the ultimate motive may be metaphysical. Most history seems to carry on its back vestiges of paradise. At some point in more or less remote times things were better, almost golden. A deep concordance lay between man and the natural setting. The myth of the Fall runs stronger than any particular religion. There is hardly a civilization, perhaps hardly an individual consciousness, that does not carry inwardly an answer to intimations of a sense of distant catastrophe. Somewhere a wrong turn was taken in that "dark and sacred wood," after which man has had to labor, socially, psychologically, against the natural grain of being.

In current Western culture or "post-culture," that squandered utopia is intensely important. But it has taken on a near and secular form. Our present feeling of disarray, of a regress into violence, into moral obtuseness; our ready impression of a central failure of values in the arts, in the comeliness of personal and social modes; our fears of a new "dark age" in which civilization itself, as we have known it, may disappear or be confined to small islands of archaic conservation -- these fears, so graphic and widely advertised as to be a dominant cliché of the contemporary mood -- derive their force, their seeming self-evidence, from comparison. Behind today's posture of doubt and self-castigation stands the presence, so pervasive as to pass largely unexamined, of a particular past, of a specific "golden time." Our experience of the present, the judgments, so often negative, that we make of our place in history, play continually against what I want to call the "myth of the nineteenth century" or the "imagined garden of liberal culture."

Our sensibility locates that garden in England and western Europe between ca. the 1820s and 1915. The initial date has a conventional indistinction, but the end of the long summer is apocalyptically exact. The main features of the landscape are unmistakable. A high and gaining literacy. The rule of law. A doubtless imperfect yet actively spreading use of representative forms of government. Privacy at home and an ever-increasing measure of safety in the streets. An unforced recognition of the focal economic and civilizing role of the arts, the sciences, and technology. The achievement, occasionally marred but steadily pursued, of peaceful coexistence between nation states (as, in fact obtained, with sporadic exceptions, from Waterloo to the Somme). A dynamic, humanely regulated interplay between social mobility and stable lines of force and custom in the community. A norm of dominance, albeit tempered by conventional insurgence between generations, between fathers and sons. Sexual enlightenment, yet a strong, subtle pivot of agreed restraint. I could go on. The list can be easily extended and detailed. My point is that it makes for a rich and controlling image, for a symbolic structure that presses, with the insistence of active mythology, on our current condition of feeling.

Depending on our interests, we carry with us different bits and pieces of this complex whole. The parent "knows" of a bygone age in which manners were strict and children domesticated. The sociologist "knows" of an urban culture largely immune to anarchic challenge and sudden gusts of violence. The religious man and the moralist "know" of a lost epoch of agreed values. Each of us can summon up appropriate vignettes: of the well-ordered household, with its privacies and domestics; of the Sunday parks, leisured and safe; of Latin in the schoolroom and apostolic finesse in the college quad; of real bookstores and literate parliamentary debate. Bookmen "know," in a special, symbolically structured sense of the word, of a time in which serious literary and scholarly production, marketed at low cost, found a wide or critically responsive echo. There are still a good many alive today for whom that famous cloudless summer of 1914 extends backward, a long way, into a world more civil, more confident, more humanely articulate than any we have known since. It is against their remembrance of that great summer, and our own symbolic knowledge of it, that we test the present cold.

If we pause to examine the sources of that knowledge, we shall see that they are often purely literary or pictorial, that our inner nineteenth century is the creation of Dickens or Renoir. If we listen to the historian, particularly on the radical wing, we learn quickly that the "imagined garden" is, in crucial respects, a mere fiction. We are given to understand that the crust of high civility covered deep fissures of social exploitation; that bourgeois sexual ethics were a veneer, masking a great area of turbulent hypocrisy; that the criteria of genuine literacy were applicable only to a few; that hatred between generations and classes ran deep, if often silent; that the safety of the faubourg and of the park was based squarely on the licensed but quarantined menace of the slum. Anyone who takes the trouble to find out will come to realize what a day's work was like in a Victorian factory, what infant mortality amounted to in the mining country of northern France in the 1870s and 80s. The recognition is inescapable that the intellectual wealth and stability of middle- and upper-middle-class life during the long liberal summer depended, directly, on economic and, ultimately military, dominion over vast portions of what is now known as the underdeveloped or third world. All this is manifest. We know it in our rational moments. Yet it is a kind of intermittent knowledge, less immediate to our pulse of feeling than is the mythology, the crystallized metaphor, at once generalized and compact, of a great garden of civility now ravaged.

"Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow."

from Mr Tambourine Man, by Bob Dylan

Keep on the funny side. Always on the funny side. Keep on the funny side of life. It will help you everyday. It will brighten all your way. If you keep on the funny side of life.
As a young boy in the early 50's we got our first tv. Before that it was the radio that I tuned each night to hear stories told. Radio was so different then. I could listen to episodes of "The Shadow". And there were other such story-telling stations. Mostly mysteries...with great sound effects of footsteps, creaking doors, and shrieks of horror. And I had a crystal radio too. It was a kit my dad and I built together that amounted to a cardboard tube (like when you run out of toilet paper...) wrapped meticulously with copper wire and mounted on a small piece of wood. Somehow a crystal was involved. I will have to research that. But it was probably a quartz crystal. And then there was a knob to turn back and forth and with head phones on you could pick up radio signals. That was the magic of my childhood to play with that dial.
And then the tv arrived. All of early tv was live. A lot of early tv was not preserved since the demand was so great and the medium still evolving. Shows were erased in order to re-use the tape. But to put this into the funny perspective, the early comedic shows were the best. I couldn't get enough of Sid Caesar. Here is a clip of Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray. (circa 1953-4) And amazingly it still speaks to aspects of relationship today. One can only imagine, seeing them here as adults, what their own early influences were. I would think, silent film, and vaudeville.

Argument to Beethoven's 5th.


Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca

A video clip from "I'm Your Man", a documentary tribute to Leonard Cohen. A powerful and passionate performance of Leonard Cohen's song, by Antony

Last night I fell asleep.
And in this sleep
I dreamed I fell asleep.
And in that sleep
I didn't dream at all.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that cable television, or satellite television sucks? It is like some episode of "The Fleecing of America". No matter what service provider you go with, you will be offered packages or bundles of stations. Each one has it's price. And so, you choose one that seems to cater to your interests...it may be sports...it may be movies.... whatever...but whatever package you choose, it comes with dozens of channels that are of little or no interest. So I pick a package. Am I to be impressed that I have 120 channels at my disposal? I think not. Let's see, there are about 10 shopping network kinds of channels, sport's channels of all kinds, two dozen channels that turn out to be pay-per-view, and so on. It is so primitive for a reason. Money of course.

The technology to individually tailor one's viewing experience is there. But why bother to do such a thing when people are willing to pay lots of bucks for these inane packages? In the information society, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer paying for such stupidities. I am not running for office this year, but if I was you would only pay for what you watch. It would be like an electric bill, or any other utility. You want to burn a lot of lights, keep your house however hot or cold cushy? Pay for it. But only it and nothing more! If I watched television for three hours last week, that's all I want to pay for.
Ok, I try not to bitch about stuff on my blogs, but really, the capitalist agenda of late is getting on my nerves!!!

as sung by Rumel Fuentes; from the wonderful documentary "Chulas Fronteras" filmed by Les Blank and Chris Strachwitz

"Each person, withdrawn unto himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitutes for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society"

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 - June 22, 2008.

I rented a two story building in San Antonio, Texas back in 1979, to use as a studio. And as I walked about the rooms of this abandoned building with a friend, we found a pile of neon letters that must have been from signage used in the earlier history of the building. We layed them out on the floor and played with them until we had formed a message. And we found a transformer too, so we were able to hook up the letters and make them light up. It was magical. We didn't do much more with the piece than to shoot some photos of it. But it so expresses the idea of outsider art. To act differently. To act out creatively. It's what we were in the moment.

This morning, I received a a text message on my cell phone that I assume was a wrong number. The message was:

keep it in gangsta
keep it in gangsta

Of course, I don't consider myself a gangsta, but I did go look outside to see if there was something out there I ought to bring in. I found a colorful leaf. So I took a photograph of it and then degraded or abstracted it by taking a picture of the picture, and wound up with this:



So thank you, outlaw guy, or my main gangsta, or whoever you are. But no more messages please....unless you notice something else I should be keeping inside.

"We are all created equal, but some more equal than others."

(Click on any of my photo images to enlarge)

We watched for the ice truck to come down this New York City street. And when we saw it, we waved our hands frantically, as though, if we did not have some ice we would die. The door on the back of the truck would swing open. And there was a glimpse of a burly man swinging out a block of ice with his big iron tongs. And the block of ice would shatter into shards that skidded to the curb. It was July in Manhattan. We were hot and sweaty kids sitting on the curb sucking pieces of ice. It was a big world, but we didn't know it yet. We couldn't see the forest for the trees. The Ice Man ruled. And we went to bed not worrying. We knew he would be back tomorrow.

Once I was walking down the old road that followed the river - the river I loved to skate in the winter. Skate and never stop skating, bend after bend , each one yielding the alluring next one. But it was Spring on this occasion. And it was warmly breezy. And one gust in particular seemed to pick me up. Seemed to literally sweep me off my feet. Of course, it hadn't really. Because I could look down and see myself there, still standing with my hair blowing around. It was only my mind that had gone. To an old green canvas awning, half-eaten and seemingly burned in places, and tearing easily in my hands and sending up a musty grain that circled my face and then vanished. To a dull car with no tires and a seat of dark stains and stiff places and a hole in the rotting fabric where I tore at the straw within as though crazy and then hung my head out the glassless window. The back of my legs itching and flushed, kneeling there bent to the wheel, idly bouncing up some kind of history that whooshed up cool between my legs and cool upon my belly, and it too, hovered in front of my face , until I sneezed it off, a black stringy mucous. To a bottle somebody pitched, skipping it empty to a patch of weed, where the rain had played its label loose and slid it fading and chewed and half off the glass as a half-hanging shroud for a half-popped bachelor's button leaning out looking for sun. Where I tipped the bottle and dribbled out greenish last drops onto my hand, and it wouldn't wipe off but left my fingers stinky and bitter tasting. Across the field my feet trailed a broken grass and milkweed line snaking diagonal to the next block. To a rabbit I chased there with my first fashioned weapon. A long and confident club from a hickory sapling that could beat against fur with a thud and the sound of bones breaking wet shiny and red for coloring the chips I carved into the handle. Whacking through the bushes out west of Chicago. Still, this one got away, hopping madly through industrial obscenities of tortured wires and broken bottles and crumbling skeletal shells of tin cans over time. And shattered shards of plastic as dull as stupor and cracking down the middle. Something dropped and broken in a numb city moment accidentally, something thrown crying at a wall and reduced to multi-colored triangles the earth could not absorb. Things broken and abandoned. And all of them catching my attention and bashed into smaller vulgar fantasies and sifting through the grass to disappear. Bashed once for the rabbit that got away, and twice for the next one that dared to appear. To the grinning idiot in me sporting dark glasses to best conceal smarting in the face of a woman, or questions of love, or answers to dying that never appeared to negate suicide notions, or give insight out beyond indecision and all that crying. To a woman who happened, whose tongue crossed mine over and over and stranger with a spit I sucked in like a soldier who, dying, still yearns for water. Whose smell left me smelling myself into dreams alone of her floating around inside me, and clutching the first pulse of entry as a relic of what had then vanished and a way of saying goodbye. To a rabbit that had been mowed down and her nest of babies by the park workers. And I buried the several pieces I found, my hands bloody, sticky, half-drying pasted with small clumps of matted fur. And later, picking a small mat of stained fur from beneath my fingernail, and licking at a dark clot that had dried into blood crumbs between my fingers, stretched wide and clubless and hiding my mouth and my eyes. After that I returned to the old river road. The wind had stopped. It was eerily still. I finished my walk and went home.

My dad taught me knots. He had been in the Coast Guard and had quite a few knot tricks. He could take a piece of clothesline in one hand, toss it in the air and throw a loop into it and bring that loop down on the fore-finger of his other hand in a half-hitch. He could do this repeatedly, and in a matter of seconds, have his finger tied in four half-hitches. In the nautical world it was a kind of lashing. For me it was magical. And I soon learned to do it. And then there was the square knot, the double half-hitch, bowline, figure-8, sheepshank and so on. And in junior high I learned the Windsor and the half-Windsor. I never liked the Windsor. It was too fat. The half-Windsor was better for the skinny neckties I preferred. Dad made knot art. He worked knots completely around a picture frame. I still have a knot belt he made. And I can still loop half-hitches on my finger, although I have forgotten most of the other knots. But there was one knot I didn't learn until many years later. The Prusik Knot.



I was on the top of Devil's Tower in Wyoming toasting wine with friends after completing a near vertical climb of 1000 or more feet. It had taken most of the day. A very exposed, vertical, and beautiful climb. But it was late in the day and a very dark sky was moving toward us in the form of snow. So we scrambled to descend. I was on the second pitch down rappelling to ledges I hoped were there when, as I pushed away from the rock with my feet and let the rope slide through my hands, I came to an abrupt halt mid-air. It was a predicament I hadn't been in before. I carried a lot of gear on me, A length of coiled rope, carribiners snapped onto a perlon rope on my waist, hexagonal jam-nuts of various lengths for sticking into cracks in the rock wall and hook into. Several loops of rope, a bag of powdered chalk to keep my hands dry, and a piton hammer tied to my waist with a length of rope attached to it so it couldn't fall away from me. We didn't use pitons on the climb since they defaced the rock. But we carried the hammers to knock out pitons other climbers had left behind. The idea was to remove these so as to leave the wall clean.

It just so happened that in rappeling the second pitch, I did knock my hammer loose from it's sling and the rope attached to it rapidly entangled with my descending rope at my waist where it messed up the double carribiner arrangement of the rappel set-up on my waist. So I came to an abrupt halt dangling some 800 feet in the air. And now it was snowing on us and night was falling too. This is what you call, in climber's terms, a "Fucked up situation". Nobody could move 'til I could move. And I had no idea. The tangled knot at my waist was tight with all of my weight.. How do you un-do that?! There was a voice in the dark. Mark. He said grab a loop. Wrap it around the rope above you. Loop it through itself. Do that again. Push the knot up the rope. It slid easily. Put your foot through the other end of the loop. Stand on it. When I did that, it took all the weight off my belt. I was able to untangle the nasty knot in my belt and descend. It was only the beginning of our problems trying to get down from Devil's Tower. Night had fallen. We were in a snow cloud that saturated our gear with iciness. We got hung up several times. But we made it to the bottom. A rescue crew had already formed. They had hot coffee and blankets. Here's the knot that saved my ass!

It is amazing how many years you have to train to execute a performance like this. And it is about 30 seconds long. Paul Hamm took home the gold in the 2004 Olympics. Report is that he broke his hand a month or two ago and won't compete in the Olympic qualifying trials. If he heals up ok, he will probably petition later to make the team. It will likely be granted, since he is currently the undisputed best all around gymnast in the world. I am keeping my fingers crossed. Here he is on high bar, after a really bad performance on the vault. He won the all-around gold in 2004 anyway.

I can't remember where I read this joke, but I thought it was funny.

Holmes and Watson decided to get away from the pressures of solving crimes. So, they packed up all their camping gear and trekked out into the woods. They made camp and sat by the fire smoking pipes and swapping fanciful tales. Eventually they turned in for the night. Holmes wakes up in the middle of the night and stares up at the starry sky. He nudges Watson with his elbow. "Watson, wake up." Watson sits up and says" What is it Sherlock?" Holmes says, "Look straight up Watson, and tell me what you deduce?" Watson looks up at the night panorama. He says, "Well, I see stars, countless stars....and beyond those, even more stars. A seemingly infinite number of stars. And there must be millions of planets circling the zillions of stars. And given the enormity of the numbers, I would deduce, that there is likely intelligent life in distant places." Holmes sits up abruptly and looks at Watson. "No, you fool! Someone has stolen our tent!"

Lynch Interview



David Lynch reads, Au Revoir Simone plays.



Au Revoir Simone, "Stay Golden"



David Lynch, "Imaginary Girl"

I was 12, I think when I first heard Elvis. Hound Dog was the first tune I remember. Then came a slew of others...I can't recall the order, Teddy Bear, Heartbreak Hotel, That's Alright Mama, and All Shook Up, and so on. My dad was a big Hank Williams fan. And now Elvis had thrown down the gauntlet. Rockabilly. And of course, I ate it up! Soon I saw photos of him and then some tv appearances. From then on, I was in front of the mirror trying to get my pompadour just right. This could take minutes of combing and greasing of the hair. ( " Brylcreem..a little dab will do ya") You had to get the "fenders" just right...combing your hair back on each side, so as to form a "ducktail" at the back. And that done, the coup de gras of course was to take the end of the comb, and pull the hair at the top of the forehead forward just so. And just-so is easier said than done. You had to do it 3 or 4 times to get the Elvis look. After that, it was time to put on a 45rpm of Elvis and stand in front of the mirror, lip-synching and moving that pelvis! I stuck with Elvis in those early years. Then he started making cheezy movies, went on to Vegas, got fat, and died. For me Elvis was crowned in the early years. After that, I was only interested in girls.

sung by Elis Regina; written by Tom Jobim and translated into English (subtitled) .

I cannot speak of him in any definitive way, since I am not that much of a scholar. He was born I think in Berlin. (!1893) And he died in Chicago....early 70's? I think it was he who first coined the term "Gestalt Psychology". "Gestalt" is a word that translated from the German might suggest, getting the whole or larger picture. The idea that, in looking around at the odd or deviant behavior of individuals, they can only be understood by examining the context around them. In the 60's he got popularized and even posterized. with this quote:

"I do my thing, and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I.
And , if by chance we find each other,
It is beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped."

Fritz Perls

I know it's old school, but, I came from the old school. So I am posting this to easily remember. This way when I come to my blogsite, I can pause and listen and get re-inspired.

David Bowie

I had a one room apartment in Terre Haute, Indiana. It was above an all-night laundromat. The shower was a metal box next to the kitchen stove. I found I could take a shower and stick my arm out to flip my fried egg. If my timing was off, I was still wet eating breakfast. But after awhile, I had it down.

It was a sweltering heat of a summer in the south. And I had spent the day getting up hay. And I was hot and itchy. And then a thunder cloud formed and the sky broke loose with a dense rain. I wandered through the pasture in my underwear and laid down in it and did somersaults down the slope. I still remember the feel of that watery grass scrubbing my body.

I was hitchhiking down a highway and it was starting to rain. It was late at night. A girl picked me up. And we drove on and the rain got heavier. We pulled off into an empty mall parking lot. It was an amazing sight. Blackness but for orderly placed tall light posts that sent down cones of light to the asphalt surface and illuminated the sheets of rain in a way we could not resist. We stopped the car beneath one of these. It was our stage. We got out and danced on it. I never knew her name. She dropped me off shivering at an all-night cafe. I had a coffee and went on home.

by Thomas Easaw

You can count, name by name, the young men and women who died in Vietnam, if you go to that long wall of engravings. But the list of the almost dead is hidden. In fact, try to find statistics on those who limped home from any war...the numbers of those minus limbs, minus faces, minus cognitive faculties, or minus their very sanity. Show me that wall...that memorial.
The fact is any war-based government would rather you simply remember the dead. The one's who paid the "ultimate price". For in so doing, we can be exhorted to not let their lives be in vain, and we can "support our troops" as we send them out again and again. To die for one's country is heroic. To be maimed for the cause is to be sequestered and closeted and certainly not to be looked at up close. Let us just collectively call them something simple...like "casualties". But let's not get too specific, it would be counter-productive - the last thing our economy needs is peace. War. What is it good for? Absolutely something. Come on people, Think! It's not called war capitalism for nothing! The very military/industrial foundation of our great country is at risk. I am appointing a special investigative sub-committee and expect a report on my desk by the end of the week. If we are going to keep our country strong, a lot more people need to die. I want names!

The willingness to participate in the desirable, and logically necessary, activities that most enable an unbounded membership - even given that such activities are often unenforceable.

"It's a many a mean and a dreadful sorrow that's crossed the evil line today. How can you ask about tomorrow, when we ain't got one word to say?" John Prine (Speed of the Sound of Loneliness)

COULD I HAVE A "DO OVER"?

by John Prine...seen here with Nanci Griffith

Julian Jaynes published a book in 1977. It was entitled The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. That's a weighty title! But it remains one of my favorite books. And it is actually fairly reader-friendly. Here is his opening paragraph in the Introduction to the text:

The Problem of Consciousness

Oh, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness, that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all - what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?

Now you see it, now you don't. In the old days you dug a hole. And you built a shack around it for privacy. The Out-House was once the state of the art. It had it's flaws. If you went into the out-house and dared to look down the dark hole, you knew where the shit was piling up. And if you were too squeamish for that, your nose informed you. And then came the sewers and the modern toilet. You take a shit and it magically disappears. Out of sight...out of scent...out of mind. And most of modern waste management is this way. But it piles up somewhere. Even discarded toilets pile up somewhere.

Well actually it was Saturday bloody Saturday....one of those Domino Theory kind of days! First of all, in sweltering heat, my truck broke a leg ( a locked up caliper on the front brakes...) fortunately I was only a few miles from home. Unfortunately, when I got home, I discovered I had closed the bathroom door and it had locked behind me. Fortunately a piece of baling wire was all it took to pick it open. Unfortunately, my toilet flushed and wouldn't stop running. Fortunately I had a tank replacement kit already stashed away for the occasion. Unfortunately it didn't match up with the old feed line from the cut-off valve. Fortunately, I didn't need to take a shit last night. Unfortunately I did have to take a shit this morning. Fortunately, I had a 5 gallon bucket and a gallon of water to squat on. Unfortunately, I had to drive 15 miles to find a Lowe's to get the feed line I needed at 7 in the morning. Unfortunately, they didn't open 'til 8. Fortunately I had bought a coffee- to- go to sip on while waiting for the doors to open. Unfortunately, it gave me time to ponder why the hell all of this was happening now? Fortunately, I figured out it's probably because I deserve it. Unfortunately, my truck won't be ready for the road 'til tomorrow. Fortunately, that's ok with me, I don't want to go anywhere today anyway!

photo by Katja Chausheva

Holed up in the Navarro Hotel in a heatwave. It's not easy. There is a thermometer on the wall to remind me of how uncomfortable I am. This is south Texas in a heatwave and I have a lazy ceiling fan over my bed. I run the tub full of water. I lie in it, and then lie on my bed dripping wet. The door to my room is louvered and shadowy people come and go on my wall drawn out in slats. People with stripes. One mumbles as he goes by. He paces. I ran into him in the lobby. There was a place to sit there and watch tv. His name was John. His fingertips were brown with nicotine and his lips had oozing blisters that were difficult to look at. He told me he was in Hitler's Youth Corps. And that Hitler had executed him personally. That Hitler himself had made him kneel and then put a bullet in his brain. He produced a drawing pad to show me. Every page was a drawing of Jesus. He gave me one.

Montage of top contenders 2008 Olympics. Gymnastics. Pommel Horse.

I was in Waxtrax on the North side of town picking through vinyl. Got a nice copy of James Chance and The Contortions. I liked No-Wave, after watching Punk get co-opted by New Wave. I had seen this before in the 60's and 70's, how capitalism can convert extremism or invention of any kind into a commodity. I lived through the peace sign as a stop- the- war symbol converted into belt buckles, candles, and posters that even the mainstream stores carried. So when Punk came along, sure enough, New Wave followed with all the typical commodification and thus all the vitality of the roots is lost once again to fashion. It is an American love story. A movement emerges. Capture it's symbols, commodify (neutralize) them, sell them back to the mainstream.,and we are almost back where we started. No-Wave was a New York City moment of rebellion against New Wave having co-opted Punk.
And this is how I stumbled onto"impLOG". It was a 12'' 45 rpm, and it turns out that Don Christensen and Jody Harris of the Contortions were the ones who created it. It came with a warning that it could damage the "tweeters" on your sound system. So, of course, I had to get that! Anything that could blow my stereo away has got to be a friend of mine!

I wandered the city of Chicago a lot more than my parents could have imagined. I saw my first strip show. A burlesque show in the classic sense. It was in an old movie theater.. And the stage was complete with crimson velvet drapes that opened and closed on a succession of women casting off clothing to music. The music was canned, but the drummer was live and off to one side to give special emphasis to bumps and grinds. And I remember going up into the balcony and laying low and being scared someone would kick me out. There was an MC who would introduce the schedule of acts which consisted of risque comic gag routines, interspersed with the more serious business of women taking off their clothes. And it was amazing how much clothing they had on. Agonizing minutes could go by while they artfully removed one elbow-length black satin glove. And the stockings could take forever. There was no completely nude conclusion. When the curtains closed you were always wanting more. So, the next comic act would begin to relieve the tension in the audience. And there were sailors in the audience. ( Navy Pier was actually a port of call in those days.) And they would start tossing their hats on stage. And the women would pick these up and rub them on their bodies and toss them back. It was like some Fellini movie I hadn't seen yet. Later, I would hop a commuter train and go home. I would lie in my bed and listen to my short-wave radio with my headphones on. I would scan the dial until I was sleepy. I remember catching a river boat captain going down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. I fell asleep wishing I was on that boat too.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands.
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter...bitter, he answered.
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

I had a thought about making something. And the more I thought about it, I saw the tools I would need. And the material. And so I began to work. And so I sawed and cut, and shaped and pieced. And then stood back to consider. I turned away to get perspective. It was then I saw the pile of discarded materials. And the way they seemed bound together by the course of my process in a singular way. And I knew, in a glance, this was what I had been looking for, and pushed aside my best intention. "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive." Walt Whitman

Joy Division was a short-lived, but emotionally powerful, post-punk band. ('78-'80) Their music is haunting and perhaps dark. Vocalist Ian Curtis was a despondent, even depressed young man. He was afflicted with epilepsy and on occasion had seizures in the middle of live performances. Fans initially viewed these as part of the "act". But they were real and this, along with an on-going marital problem, led to increasing depression. Ian committed suicide at the age of 23. The surviving band members later re-formed as New Order. The video below is from Anton Corbijn's film 'Control', about the short life of Ian Curtis. Sam Riley plays the part of Ian.

Wu took a gold medal at the Paris International Dance Competition, 2000 for this performance. (This video as well as any other I post from Youtube, can be viewed directly on Youtube by clicking on the image. The advantage in so doing, is that you can then enlarge the video to full screen. And that is the best way to watch most things, I think...especially this beautiful and startling performance.)

The way this site is arranged, the archive is monthly. So now it is June. I am posting. To see the previous month's posts, click on May to get titles for that month. I recommend you just scroll and pause where you feel so inclined.

My beautiful rose blossomed three days ago. I awoke each day to see it. And then it died. I gathered the petals and ate them.