P1070294 [Paris]: photo by Pierre Wayser, 14 October 2007
Tokyo Scene 23 | Dream of spring: photo by Lucky Bird, 21 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 23 | Dream of spring: photo by Lucky Bird, 21 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 23 | Dream of spring: photo by Lucky Bird, 21 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 20 | Loser's tear of Kendo tournament. Kendo is the Japanese martial art of fencing.: photo by Lucky Bird, 4 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 22 | Old friends: photo by Lucky Bird, 19 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 22 | Old friends: photo by Lucky Bird, 19 April 2018
Tokyo Scene 22 | Old friends: photo by Lucky Bird, 19 April 2018
Something to die is beautiful.: photo by Lucky Bird, 28 February 2018
Something to die is beautiful.: photo by Lucky Bird, 28 February 2018
Something to die is beautiful.: photo by Lucky Bird, 28 February 2018
Tokyo - Shibuya: photo by Bananocrate, 7 February 2017
Kentucky State Fair: photo by Joey Harrison, August 2017
Goldenrod (Solidago graminifolia): photo by Adamantios, 2007
William Carlos Williams: To Elsie
Goldenrod (Solidago graminifolia): photo by Adamantios, 2007
The pure products of America
go crazy --
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure --
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum --
which they cannot express --
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent --
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs --
some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us --
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): To Elsie ("The pure products of America"), from Spring and All (1923)
go crazy --
mountain folk from Kentucky
or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and
valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure --
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum --
which they cannot express --
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood
will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder
that she'll be rescued by an
agent --
reared by the state and
sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs --
some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken
brain the truth about us --
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts
addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): To Elsie ("The pure products of America"), from Spring and All (1923)
Ionia Free Fair, 1974 [Ionia, Michigan]: photo by Joey Harrison, August 1974
Ionia Free Fair, 1974 [Ionia, Michigan]: photo by Joey Harrison, August 1974
SDIM5002 [Paris]: photo by Pierre Wayser, 1 June 2008
Untitled: photo by noppadol maitreechit, 13 April 2018
Untitled: photo by noppadol maitreechit, 13 April 2018
Untitled: photo by noppadol maitreechit, 13 April 2018
Negative imagination
I've developed this terrible condition that might be called negative imagination.
When I'm told something has happened somewhere I immediately begin to doubt whether it has actually happened.
And soon enough I find myself working to erase from my mind all traces of having been told whatever it was, and in turn, willy nilly as one might say, to erase from the universe every detail of what has reportedly happened, insofar as these details are known to me, and annoying to me, which is more or less the same thing.
Aloha
I need to apologize, I did something totally inappropriate. I told Anne Waldman you said hi and that you were sorry you couldn’t come see the show. I’m sorry. I had night of the permission nor the authority to express such a message although at the time it felt very innocent.
Not only did she soften her facial expression immediately and express her heartfelt greeting she asked about your health and how both of you were doing. I didn’t think that that was any of her business so I said things were pretty much the same but that you were OK.
Aram Saroyan Was standing next to her and wanted me to say hello to the both of you as well; characterizing himself as a friend from the old days.
So I’m sorry for meddling socially and I hope these greetings or a pleasure to receive. To be honest, most of the evening I was mad at myself for not buying you both tickets and dragging you out to the show but I’m not sure if you would’ve enjoyed that. Maybe next time.
I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz studying with Meredith Monk. As a result I am fairly inspired to set some poetry to music. Maybe we can get together in the next couple of weeks and look at some of your recent poems on the blog.
Jaap was surprisingly brilliant and in particular his lecture and master class were very enjoyable and enlightening.
Clarck Coolidge did a set with Alvin Curran and it was breathtaking. I made a recording of that. And Waldman was also on point. I made a little video I can share with you when I see you next.
Michael McClure was delightful. I had never seen him read life before.
There were four other poets over the course of the week but their work was really terrible so I won’t trash them by name.
When I'm told something has happened somewhere I immediately begin to doubt whether it has actually happened.
And soon enough I find myself working to erase from my mind all traces of having been told whatever it was, and in turn, willy nilly as one might say, to erase from the universe every detail of what has reportedly happened, insofar as these details are known to me, and annoying to me, which is more or less the same thing.
Aloha
I need to apologize, I did something totally inappropriate. I told Anne Waldman you said hi and that you were sorry you couldn’t come see the show. I’m sorry. I had night of the permission nor the authority to express such a message although at the time it felt very innocent.
Not only did she soften her facial expression immediately and express her heartfelt greeting she asked about your health and how both of you were doing. I didn’t think that that was any of her business so I said things were pretty much the same but that you were OK.
Aram Saroyan Was standing next to her and wanted me to say hello to the both of you as well; characterizing himself as a friend from the old days.
So I’m sorry for meddling socially and I hope these greetings or a pleasure to receive. To be honest, most of the evening I was mad at myself for not buying you both tickets and dragging you out to the show but I’m not sure if you would’ve enjoyed that. Maybe next time.
I spent the weekend in Santa Cruz studying with Meredith Monk. As a result I am fairly inspired to set some poetry to music. Maybe we can get together in the next couple of weeks and look at some of your recent poems on the blog.
Jaap was surprisingly brilliant and in particular his lecture and master class were very enjoyable and enlightening.
Clarck Coolidge did a set with Alvin Curran and it was breathtaking. I made a recording of that. And Waldman was also on point. I made a little video I can share with you when I see you next.
Michael McClure was delightful. I had never seen him read life before.
There were four other poets over the course of the week but their work was really terrible so I won’t trash them by name.
Helsinki was ok. The ducks were cool. The geese were mean and annoying. Had to disappear them. (I've developed this terrible condition that might be called negative imagination.)
Angry Arab News Service: Monday, April 23, 2018
This is a regular feature: images of dumb Mossad agents spread minutes after their terrorist crimes
These are the pictures of the dumb Mossad terrorists who killed a
Palestinian academic in Malaysia. (Notice that images of dumb Mossad
agents now are circulated minutes after their crimes). (Circulate
widely).: image via As'ad AbuKhalil / Angry Arab News Service, 23 April 2017
These are the pictures of the dumb Mossad terrorists who killed a
Palestinian academic in Malaysia. (Notice that images of dumb Mossad
agents now are circulated minutes after their crimes).: image via As'ad AbuKhalil @asadabukhalil 23 April 2017
Relatives of killed Palestinian Fadi al-Batsh walk out of a hospital's
morgue in Selayang, Malaysia, Monday, April 23, 2018. Malaysian police
said Sunday that an investigation was underway into the gunning down of
the 34-year-old Palestinian al-Batsh a day earlier and gave assurances
that security was being beefed up in the country following recent
high-profile assassinations.: photo by Sadiq Asyraf/AP, 23 April 2018
Enaas al-Batsh, right, wife of killed Palestinian Fadi al-Batsh, walks out of a hospital's morgue in Selayang, Malaysia, Monday, April 23, 2018. Malaysian police said Sunday that an investigation was underway into the gunning down of the 34-year-old Palestinian al-Batsh a day earlier and gave assurances that security was being beefed up in the country following recent high-profile assassinations.: photo by Sadiq Asyraf/AP, 23 April 2018
Enaas al-Batsh, right, wife of killed Palestinian Fadi al-Batsh, walks out of a hospital's morgue in Selayang, Malaysia, Monday, April 23, 2018. Malaysian police said Sunday that an investigation was underway into the gunning down of the 34-year-old Palestinian al-Batsh a day earlier and gave assurances that security was being beefed up in the country following recent high-profile assassinations.: photo by Sadiq Asyraf/AP, 23 April 2018
A
composite image of a suspect of killing of a Palestinian man is shown
by Malaysian national police during a press conference in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, Monday, April 23, 2018. Malaysian police released Monday
composite images of two suspects who gunned down 34-year-old Palestinian
engineer Fadi al-Batsh and are stepping up efforts to track them.
Gaza's ruling Hamas militant group accused Israel of being behind
Saturday’s killing of al-Batsh, an important member of Hamas.: photo by AP, 23 April 2018
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysian police on Monday released images of two suspects in the killing of a Palestinian engineer and said they appeared to be European or Middle Eastern, fueling suspicion that the slaying was an Israeli assassination.
Gaza's
ruling Hamas militant group has accused Israel of being behind
Saturday's shooting of Fadi al-Batsh, an important member of Hamas.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.
Malaysian
national police chief Mohamad Fuzi Harun said the composite images were
based on eyewitness descriptions. He said the suspects, clad in black
jackets, were fair-skinned, well-built and had beards, and were likely
European or Middle Eastern.
Fuzi said the images have been displayed at all exit points in the country but said it was unclear if the men had fled Malaysia.
Police
said al-Batsh, 34, was hit with 14 bullets by the two assailants, who
shot from a motorbike as he was heading to a mosque for dawn prayers in a
suburb near Kuala Lumpur. Police said security video showed the
suspects had waited for him for almost 20 minutes.
Hamas
initially stopped short of blaming Israel, saying only that he had been
"assassinated by the hand of treachery." But later its top leader
accused Israel's Mossad intelligence agency of killing al-Batsh and
threatened retaliation.
A
string of Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied whether
Israel had a hand in the death. Several noted, however, that Israel is
routinely blamed for such assassinations even when it is not involved.
Several
Israeli Cabinet ministers welcomed the killing, regardless of who was
responsible. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested in radio
interviews Sunday that al-Batsh may have been killed as part of a
rivalry between Palestinian militants.
Israel
has a long history of being accused of targeting wanted Palestinian
militants in daring overseas operations and has been linked to other
assassinations as well, though it has rarely publicly acknowledged them.
Al-Batsh
was believed to have been working on Hamas' unmanned aerial vehicle
program and was working on improving the accuracy of its rockets.
His brother, Rami, told Malaysian media in Kuala Lumpur that he hopes to take the body back on Tuesday.
Police
say al-Batsh had lived in Malaysia for more than seven years and had
permanent residency status. He had a degree in electrical engineering
and lectured at a local university, but police couldn't confirm reports
that he was an expert in rocket making.
Al-Batsh
traveled locally and abroad to speak on Palestinian issues and was
scheduled to fly to Turkey for a conference when he was killed, police
said.
#Malaysia: Students
of Dr. Fadi Albatsh crying after seeing remains of their lecturer at
Malaysian hospital. Dr. Fadi was killed by unidentified assassins
shooting last Saturday early morning.: image via mohammed mosleh @MohammedMusle18, 23 April 2018AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
#Malaysia: Students of Dr. Fadi Albatsh crying after seeing remains of their lecturer at Malaysian hospital. Dr. Fadi was killed by unidentified assassins shooting last Saturday early morning.: image via mohammed mosleh @MohammedMusle18, 23 April 2018AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
#Malaysia: Students of Dr. Fadi Albatsh crying after seeing remains of their lecturer at Malaysian hospital. Dr. Fadi was killed by unidentified assassins shooting last Saturday early morning.: image via mohammed mosleh @MohammedMusle18, 23 April 2018AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
#Malaysia: Students
of Dr. Fadi Albatsh crying after seeing remains of their lecturer at
Malaysian hospital. Dr. Fadi was killed by unidentified assassins
shooting last Saturday early morning.: image via mohammed mosleh @MohammedMusle18, 23 April 2018AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
feeling maybe a little bit off after those spinach waffles
A Cold War poison resurfaces in a quiet English town: image via AP Images @AP_Images, 23 April 2018
#NIC Shop keepers get ready to defend from looters amid Nicaragua's turmoil @AFPphoto by Rodrigo Arangua: image via AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
#NIC rioting students vow to keep up street protests until President Ortega is ousted. @AFPphoto by @intiocon: image via AFP Photo @AFPphoto, 23 April 2018
Police tape blocks off the Waffle House restaurant Sunday in Nashville, Tennessee.: photo by Mark Humphrey/AP, 22 April 2018
Oswald Spengler: Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), first edition cover: C.H. Beck Verlag, München, 1922: image by Perceval, 2005
There is such a thing as the ruling class.: image via asad abukhalil @asadAbukhalil, 22 April 2018
Snipers ordered to shoot children, Israeli general confirms: image via Electronic Intifada @intifada, 22 April 2018
GAZA STRIP - Palestinian dies of wounds, bringing Gaza toll to 40 Photo @saidkhatib #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 23 April 2018
Snipers ordered to shoot children, Israeli general confirms: image via Electronic Intifada @intifada, 22 April 2018
GAZA STRIP - Palestinian dies of wounds, bringing Gaza toll to 40 Photo @saidkhatib #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 23 April 2018
Re: CAPTION for the presidential photo: "Hard to be the odd man out from this group!"
ReplyDeleteDame on the far right w leopard skin bag going, "Awww! So precious."
ReplyDeleteThinking This Is History, and I'm Part Of It.
All of us "tricked out [...] with gauds".
ReplyDeleteI wish you hadn't pointed out the woman with the leopard skin bags. I feel an ickle bit sick now.
Worse still, and after a number of squinty glimpses w magnifier still not certain on this, but it does appear woman on right is holding TWO matching leopard skin print bags... unless it's just the one large bag w two sets of handles.
ReplyDeleteSo let's say not just one but maybe SEVERAL, even MANY (or "moldable", as the murkin euphemism now has it), large beautiful robust living creatures may have had to die or pretend to die right there in the clothing factory simply for our viewing and the woman's whatever other kind of pleasure. What kind exactly? Certainly not the KIND or KIN kind surely?
Wait though, does not every natcheral born MURKIN, e'en the humblest, have KIN, necessarily. A hard syllable to easily slink out from under, merely on convenience.
And though the circumstances might be thought unconducive (that kind of day), attention was diverted, and for good reason, more than once, by Skipper's original question.
First round of votes from the team (strictly democratic), had either O'B or Bush Elder in the OMO spot.
Thing is though, Michele the Humongous.
Not to mention the mascot in the middle, the one wearing the scribble sack.
Now how many scribbles had to die to fabricate that particular mini-enormity.
However as the day and its small ordeals went along and the inevitable enormities of additional evidence incoming (as though we didn't already know all this, chapter #49827) required more of those minor adjustments in the cranial noodleroni that result in or accrue unto the continually revised updated body of august opinion - and mind you this has involved the day's fresh accumulation (book promotion = "news" anymore) of significant almost-revelations - Killary's "fuck-laced fusillade", her potty-mouthed serial volcanic heads-must-roll eruptions of high-decibel "OMG #%**@+_x# Brooklyn hates me WHY WHY WHY?!" annoyance against Robby the Mook... to this day we remain certain Killary has never grokked Mean Streets, for local knowledge on what a Mook is, or isn't - after all there are no mean streets in the safe space whites-only suburb where she learned her little arts and crafts, unless it's the street Harrison Ford lived on, in his early years of studying how to fly small aircraft into the flight path of bigger ones, and on the runway yet, and not just once but four times, with impunity, the way all rich people do everything all the time... and let's remember HF did not (O No Repeat Not, being HER) have even a tiny tweaking-finger in the 90s black-specific drug-crime legislation bossed thru by the Hill n Bill Kill Squad that if carried through to logical conclusion would have entirely depopulated whole cities of non whites (uh yes we have those) while concurrently creating a prison population larger than the present population of umm, let's say Poland, not that we'd want every Pole emprisoned... and indeed that would not be possible, for all the Poles are owned by PG & E, thus private property, and cannot be emprisoned w/o good cause. Due process after all.
ReplyDeleteFunny (??) thing though, despite her having ruin'd the only perceptible resemblance to an opposition party (not that a political campaign based on a relatively small and in her case all but unnoticeable anatomical feature wasn't a terrific idea), the same overdesperated blovatimedia which so richly enjoys the always lucrative unit-moving sport of reporting on her foaming fuck faced fusillades (not to mention the brilliant fillip that R the Mook was right there behind her back laughing At Her Not With Her every minute) is now running back to her for fresh quotes on her fascinating theme, Trump's Awful Therefore I Should Have Won Meanwhile I Am Permanently Rich Yet I Hate You World So Let Me and My Scribble Sack Into That #4%77*+*&!! photo Right Now or Else... uh, or Else...
In short, having employed the term "robust" above, I'm tempted now to remember that as always in looking at photos, my ancient unglittering eye is magnetically drawn to my opposites, the hale, the robust, and in that photo, the robustness all seems to gather on the upper right, automatically making everybody else in the photo into the vast unselected category of Generalized Mook.
So I'm afraid we're back to Go. Which is ok. For some of us. Maybe. Unless it's not. Me, I'm all about mediation and compromise. Just say open minded.
Mean Streets - What's a Mook?
ReplyDeleteMESSAGE TO KILLARY
ReplyDeleteK Dilkington
11 months ago
If you look around the room and you can't identify the mook, you're the mook!
Hillary Clinton unleashed foul-mouthed tirade in Trump debate prep session
ReplyDeleteChasing Hillary, new book by Amy Chozick, details two campaigns
Frustrated candidate labelled Trump ‘disgusting’ in off-record blast
Tom McCarthy in New York
The Guardian Tue 24 Apr 2018 00.01 EDT
Hillary Clinton unleashed a “fuck-laced fusillade” on aides in a 2016 debate prep session, according to a new book about the presidential campaign by New York Times journalist Amy Chozick.
The candidate was squirming with frustration over lingering concerns about her “authenticity” and racked with loathing for Donald Trump she was determined not to vent in public.
“Aides understood that in order to keep it all together onstage, Hillary sometimes needed to unleash on them in private,” Chozick writes in Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns and One Intact Glass Ceiling. “‘You want authentic, here it is!’ she’d yelled in one prep session, followed by a fuck-laced fusillade about what a ‘disgusting’ human being Trump was and how he didn’t deserve to even be in the arena.”
**
Chozick captures the reaction in the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters to what they saw as [FBI director James] Comey’s reckless and misguided behavior.
“Brooklyn is freaking the fuck out,” Chozick recalls telling an editor.
The struggle inside the Clinton campaign for message clarity is starkly illustrated by Chozick with a three-page section listing 84 possible slogans the campaign considered but discarded. Rejects included “You’ve earned a fair chance”, “A new bargain we can count on” and the succinct “No quit”.
Apart from issues with authenticity and messaging, the campaign struggled with an internal generation gap that spawned disagreements on everything from basic strategy to the question of how to handle Trump’s attack over sexual assault allegations against Bill Clinton, Chozick reports.
Campaign manager Robby Mook, who was 36 years old on election night, “always listened patiently, respectfully” to the two-term president talk about campaign strategy, Chozick writes. “But [Mook] mostly saw in the former president a relic, a brilliant tactician of a bygone era.
“Behind his back, Robby did a Bill impersonation (‘And let me tell you another thing about the white working class …’) waving a finger in a Clintonian motion.”
Hillary Clinton reportedly “erupted” when Chozick reported in January 2016 that the actress and writer Lena Dunham, a prominent supporter and 29 at the time, told a Manhattan dinner party “she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies discredited women” who had accused Bill Clinton of misconduct.
The former president, meanwhile, was painfully aware of Trump’s potential appeal in territory he thought of as his own, Chozick reports.
“By late February,” she writes, “Bill went red in the face on almost daily conference calls trying to warn Brooklyn that Trump had a shrewd understanding of the angst that so many voters – his voters, the white working class whom Clinton brought back to the Democratic party in 1992 – were feeling.”
But Hillary Clinton failed to collect many of those voters, skipping their states as she made campaign stops and alienating some with her grouping of certain Trump supporters in a “basket of deplorables”, a line Chozick reports the candidate liked and deployed at big-ticket fundraisers from New York to Los Angeles.
“In the Hamptons, Hillary felt loved,” Chozick writes. Clinton, however, grew weary of hearing pollsters report on her lagging favorability.
“Oh what’s the point? They’re never going to like me,” she told a friend at one point, according to Chozick.
In the end, nearly 3 million more voters liked Clinton’s message – the slogan the campaign went with was Stronger Together – than Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again. But it wasn’t enough to win.